A month after Susannah left, Garet realized that he missed the companionship more than he missed the sex, so he stopped saving up for the escort service and went down to the pound to get a dog. He had never owned a dog and so was a bit mystified by the entire process. He walked right up to the desk of the run down animal shelter in the middle of town and asked how to buy a dog. The clerk stared at him with blank eyes that only betrayed life by glistening in the too-white fluorescents.
"Dogs are shelved on the right, cats on the left." The clerk said. Garet didn't thank it. It was a cheap model with skin hardly a step above the junk they used to mold into Barbie dolls. Good enough to fool the tourists in the first generation, but mostly just good for giving people the creeps these days. People got sick of the almost human mannerisms and an appearance that resembled a zombie more than machine or man.
Garet wandered down the aisle, glancing with dull interest at the boxed animals. A few older varieties did not move, their power cells worn down to the point of needing replacement. Newer ones pawed at their plastic wrappers, realistic down to hair and claw. Some of the dogs even barked, although Garet wondered why they would program that in if the entire point was to package the pluses of an animal without the flaws. That creepy feeling oozed out from every box at Garet though, that sense of artificiality lurking right underneath the surface. He amended the thought. The problem was not that he felt the artificiality peeking through; it was that he could tell it was being faked. The cats did not arch their backs because that was a feline instinct, but because that was what they were supposed to do.
He held a hand up to a particular cat container, this one filled with a half dozen kittens of varying neon colors. Some people went for the utterly unnatural animals. One of these even looked like it had plaid fur. Garet shrugged. At least it was more honest.
A screech ripped out of a closed door at the end of the aisle, although none of the animals so much as lifted a head, except for a couple of guard dog models. It echoed again like a dying tiger. Garet strode to the door but found it both unmarked and locked. He jogged down the aisle to the front desk to confront the clerk again.
"What's in the back?" Garet asked.
"Biologicals." The clerk said.
"Why aren't they out with the others?"
"Too much of a mess. No one adopts them anyway, so it saves time to keep them back there. No clean-up, and we just drop the whole cage right in the incinerator." The clerk explained.
"Well I want to see one." Garet said. It was exactly the kind of idiot impulse that had driven Susannah out of the house, but he didn't care. I can live with my own personality being fucked up. It's part of my extensive charm to myself.
The clerk nodded and left the desk, pacing down the hall with a rolling gait that tilted from side to side. It unlocked the door with a swipe of a magnetic card that appeared to be embedded somehow in the pseudoskin of its left hand. "Very well, sir." It seemed that the clerk had a bit of English butler programming.
The room had the appearance of chaos straining on a slipping leash. Plastic cages towered in stacks ten high, their occupants wailing for freedom. Each cage hooked into a trio of tubes to carry in food and water and return waste. Some animals stared with the eyes of the hopeless, not even lifting their heads to glance at the new arrivals, but most hurled themselves about with manic intensity. One cat at the very top of the nearest stack smashed against the plastic hard enough to pull the supply tubes taut. He was a beautiful gray cat, almost silver, who glared at Garet with a slash of blue eyes before returning to the violence against his captivity.
"Why are there so many of them?" Garet asked.
The clerk seemed to want to leave with as much emotion as its limited programming and facial muscles could manage to convey. "An old city ordinance prohibits the euthanasia of biologicals until they have been contained for at least two weeks. They build up after a while. Did you know that they breed by themselves, sir? It is quite unseemly."
"Well, that's how humans used to do it." Garet said.
A smile so joyful that it actually looked real crossed the clerk's face. "That's just an urban legend. Did you see a dog that you liked?" The clerk gestured back towards the aisle of artificial animals.
Garet's eyes drew up to the particularly psychotic cat. By now, it had fully loosened the tubing and with a final jolt the cage tumbled down out of the air end over end. Garet caught it before he realized what his arms were doing and he felt the poor bastard clonk up against the top of the cage and then against the bottom once more. The ones in the aisle would just keep bouncing like those little superballs you could buy for a dollar out of slots inside the drug store.
For a moment, Garet's eyes met the demon inside an impervious plastic ball of life support. A lazy slash headed for Garet's eyes, but clattered impotently against the inside of the cage, so resistant that it refused to even scratch. "I'll take this one." He declared to the clerk.
"But that's not a dog." The clerk said in confusion. It studied the animal. "I believe it may be a feline." Another pause. "And it's a biological. Are you aware of the health risks of owning a biological organism?"
"I'd imagine it's much like having a child." Garet said.
"Do you have children?" The clerk asked.
"No." Garet said.
"Oh." The clerk said and fumbled through a few electrons for another thought. "I don't recommend it. They smell and mature into even larger biologicals."
"I'll keep that in mind." Garet said idly. He was staring at the cat, watching it lick itself clean of the litter and food residue that had splashed around with the fall. Well it bathes better than I do, though that can't taste very good.
Garet took the cat home in his boxy old hybrid Toyota from the turn of the century. The gasoline was a collector's commodity now and cost more per gallon than decent wine. Puttering around a godforsaken town of forty thousand in the middle of Iowa allowed Garet to stretch the fuel for quite a while though. Humboldt was nothing if not compact. Cash was far enough in between that there was not much to do about getting a new one. If the batteries needed replaced again, he would have to learn how to ride a bike.
"It's just like riding a bike." Garet told the cat when he stopped at a light. "Did you know everybody used to learn how to ride a bike when they were a kid? I've only even seen a bike once or twice." The cat's glare was the only sign of life. Garet poked his finger through the rubber flap left for petting. "You okay?" With his luck, the damn thing would die before he even got it home. He wondered if it had come with a warranty. The small print of the license agreement had been at least thirty pages. Maybe he should have asked about it before affixing his thumb print to it. He looked back to the road as the light turned green.
Pain stabbed through his finger and almost drove Garet right off the road into one of the ubiquitous Midwest ditches. He sucked on the tip and tasted dusky blood. Skin flapped out over his fingernail where a claw had slipped halfway down to the bone. "Son of a bitch." The cat remained on its back, glaring at him.
Garet kept all limbs well clear of the cage while he drove, sucking on his finger occasionally. It itched more than anything now. The outskirts of Humboldt were a half mile from the town center, and Garet lived in a ramshackle house built sometime in the last century. It hovered on the edge of a gully that ran between two low hills and contained a pittance of a stream that eventually evaporated or made it down to the Des Moines River, which ran through the middle of town.
"See that, cat?" Garet pointed at the gully and its hidden trickle. "That's my yacht club."
Garet pulled off of the two lane county highway and coasted down a short gravel road that served as a driveway. The houses of his neighbors straddled the two hills that framed his gully. They were a sight newer than his sagging wreck, and better kept up. The yuppies could probably afford bots to do the upkeep and grounds keeping. Garet's upkeep consisted of him chopping back the weeds with a machete when he was drunk. The car lurched leftwards from a hole that he should have noticed sooner. Please don't let the bumper fall off again. I'm out of duct tape.
The parking brake engaged with a groan and Garet got out with a sigh. His worst fear was not that it would break down, that was inevitable, but that it would break down somewhere besides here. He could afford neither a tow truck or the impound fees for vehicle abandonment. Garet pulled open the passenger door and sighed when the latch stuck and the plastic handle twisted like taffy off of its bolt. He dropped the handle to the ground and went around to lug the cage across the seat. Garet's face pressed against the plastic door as he did so, and the cat was kind enough to slash and hiss at him through the plastic.
"Ya know, you could really show some gratitude since you were a day or two from the county incinerator." Garet groused at the cat.
He dropped the cage in the middle of the living room and grimaced at the yowl from within. Forgetting he's in there is not a good way to get on his good side.
Garet's robotic cat entered the room, fake purring as it did so. The thing bugged him so badly that he had not bothered to name it. At the same time though, he could not bring himself to just throw it away. It had been top of the line at one point, twenty-odd years ago when someone had gotten it for Christmas or a birthday. It was now eighth hand at least, but you could still see the quality, despite the age and failing parts. It was a shame that his car was not half as well bred.
It arched its back and marched in front of the cage, soft metallic skin rippling in the light of the sunset filtering through the back windows. The texture of the thing always reminded Garet of really smooth aluminum foil. It poked at the cage with one paw, testing to see if the almost transparent barrier was really there. The cat inside launched itself so hard against the plastic that the cage almost tipped over on top of the facsimile cat. Garet could not help laughing until he noticed that the cat still had its fur on end from head to toe. It was deathly afraid, and as pissed off as a twice cheated-on wife.
Garet picked up the robotic cat and set it delicately in the spare bedroom and shut the door. No sense making the new cat upset over a pile of bolts. He opened the cage and then sat on the couch, bottom sagging through almost to the floor, as he watched and waited for the cat to come out and explore its new home.
It did not cooperate. Six hours, a delivery pizza, and a lot of SportsCenter later, Garet gave up on the cat and went to bed. He hesitated at the door to the bedroom for a moment and then allowed it to stay open a crack.
Since he was a kid, Garet had feared open doors while he slept. If even a crack remained, he lay breathless and stared at the tiny gap of contrasting darkness. All nightmares derived from that cleave in the wall. It had begun on his sixth birthday, when he went to sleep after watching old monster movies at the only birthday party he'd ever had. His mother had spent hours concocting a pyramidal cake to indulge his ancient Egyptian phase. In a whiskey drenched clown costume, Garet's father had spilled across the cake and collapsed the card table in a cloud of booze. Garet found himself staring at the partly open door that night, vowing to stay awake until midnight to get every last second out of the worst birthday ever. The last time he remembered wavering in red digits against the corner of his eye was 10:53, but he woke screaming at two in the morning and never slept with the door open again.
A psychologist would probably suggest repressed memories and proscribe Prozac and hypnotherapy. Garet just knew that there was a horror lurking in cracked doorways. It let the monsters in. Once his mother suggested in a fit of misguided rationality that the monsters could just as easily come in through his bedroom window, cracked open for the faint summer breeze. "The monsters are inside." Garet had told her. He did not understand until years later how he knew that or why his mother's face went gray.
So Garet stared at the cracked door, unable to sleep. He slipped into a sort of trance between sleep and wake that was neither comforting nor restful. A screech and a crash snapped him to full consciousness around one o'clock in the morning. Garet froze for a moment of juvenile terror and then tumbled towards the door.
Debris tangled up in his feet, upending Garet over the shattered remains of his robotic cat, its limbs busted and soft belly torn open. Legs twitched at the air with mindless determination, reminding Garet of a potato bug trying to roll off its back. The new cat sat five feet away in the moonlight, licking itself. It paused now and then to stare at Garet with cool green eyes.
"Well that wasn't nice." Garet said in attempted humor that fell flat. The cat stretched and padded out of the moonlight to the darkness of the living room. Garet felt for the power supply of the robotic cat and pulled it loose to stop the zombie-like dance of its legs.
A rustling sound came from the living room, and then a low mutter like an engine choking in the distance. Garet moved through the house on tiptoes, trying to avoid noise and the lunatic cat somewhere ahead. The curtains on the sliding glass door moved in the moonlight, generating the rub of fabric on fabric. The shadow of the cat passed along the bottom of the door. It issued an urgent meow his direction.
Garet heard the second sound again and pulled aside the curtain's edge to peak at his dismal yard. The moonlight lent a ghastly transparency to everything outside, as if a film projector were casting images across the dark and desultory background.
A woman sat on a pile of tires in the middle of the yard, wearing blue pajamas of the institutional variety. Her hands cupped her face and her shoulders shook in deep sobs. Garet pulled open the sliding glass door to call out to her, but the cat darted out and instead he hissed "Hey you!" at the escaping animal. Garet's fingers slipped through the silky fur without finding a grip.
The woman jumped at his voice, obviously thinking that she was the target of the reprimand. She slipped down off of the tires and into the full glare of the moonlight, which glistened on her tear-stained cheeks. Garet thought she would burst again into tears the way she froze at the sight of the cat stalking towards her.
Instead she stared at the cat in fascination as it circled her legs, purring and rubbing. Garet didn't see the need for a big fuss over a lousy cat. He cleared his throat to get her attention.
"Excuse me, ma'am." He said, feeling like an idiot. "Are you lost or something?"
The woman nodded and reached to pet the cat.
"Are you from around here?" Garet asked.
"In a way." She said. The cat purred like a buzz saw as she knelt and rubbed the back of its neck.
"You know anyone around here?"
"They're all dead." The woman said.
"That's not good." Garet said. He had visions of a car wreck and this woman stumbling away into the boonies dazed with a concussion to land on his doorstep.
The woman shrugged. "I'm okay with it."
That gave Garet pause. "What's your name?"
"Cassie."
"Why don't you come on inside?" Garet said. "We'll get you something to eat or call the police."
Cassie looked at Garet and he felt his insides melt. She was beautiful, her face sculpted out of soft white marble by the hands of an artist. Short black hair spiked all over the place in a muss of tangles and cowlicks. Her eyes glowed in the dark like the cat's. She smiled and tilted her head.
The cat hissed suddenly, as if picking up the scent of a predator. It slashed at Cassie's arm but missed. Garet could not believe she had moved so quickly out of the way. She lashed out at the cat, but it managed to skirt under her fingertips and disappear into the darkness. For a moment, Garet thought he could see its eyes flashing back at the house, but they flickered out into the shadows. He shrugged at her.
"Just got him from the pound today." Garet said.
"Maybe he thought an earthquake was coming." Cassie said. "They say animals are sensitive to those sorts of things."
"Yeah, I guess they do. Dogs howling before the city tumbles down and all." Garet said.
Cassie laughed but there was no sound of humor underneath it. "That's because they have souls. That's how life touches the great beyond."
"That so?" Garet asked in a mumble. Something about the woman felt wrong to him. She was gorgeous, sure, but there was something off about her. No smell, for one. That was a little thing, pheromones or something, but women always had a scent to them. Maybe men did too, but Garet wasn't wired that way.
He led her into the house and flipped on the living room lights. Before the light drowned out the night, he thought he caught a glimpse of the cat perched on a pile of rocks, but the darkness was too dense to tell. Shadows from the trees kept the center of the yard in stark contrast to the blaring moonlight.
In the kitchen, Garet put on some coffee as Cassie seated herself at the used dining room table, scarred from a half-century of misuse before Garet had picked it up for five bucks at a garage sale. None of the chairs matched except the one that she picked. In the harsh fluorescents her skin almost glowed. Garet wondered if she'd had some of those new injections that made your skin shine like glow-in-the-dark plastic. He discounted the thought; the effect was too subtle for that. He placed a steaming cup in front of her, scalding himself on the handle.
"Sorry, I don't have any milk or sugar." Garet apologized. Cassie picked up the cup around the base - not the handle - and lifted it to her lips. "Hey wait!" Garet yelped. "That'll burn!"
Cassie raised an eyebrow and then tilted the cup back and drained it in a couple of gulps. Remnants of steam leaked from the corners of her mouth as she spoke. "I have tough skin."
"And then." Garet said. He looked down at the other cup he had set down for himself and pushed it away down the table. He sat down across from her and leaned in. "Is there someone you should be calling or something?" He asked. "The police? Family? Boyfriend?"
"I am alone." Cassie declared. Her eyebrows came together. "Are you?"
"Oh, am I ever." Garet said. He tossed his head towards the back door. "That cat was the last thing I had left, and he was new."
"That makes this a bit easier, then." Cassie said. She swept her palm out from her chest and threw the empty coffee mug at Garet's forehead like a shot put. He had only a moment of blurring vision to be stunned before he lost consciousness.
Garet awoke with his entire body feeling warm and fuzzy. He blinked a couple of times and noticed that even his eyelids felt like they had fallen asleep. Everything around him moved in slow motion. An odd pressure in his wrists manifested into a stomach turning realization that he was strapped to the wall with a pair of belts. Garet lolled his head backwards and saw that each had been pounded into the wall with a half dozen or so nails. His legs refused to move at all.
Cassie materialized out of the darkness and gave a little wave like a mom reassuring a toddler she was still there from across the yard. "The Demerol should be kicking in now." She said.
Garet tried to nod, but his head just jerked a couple of times. "What are you doing?" The words came off his tongue as one long syllable, but she seemed to understand, and the question was immaterial since he guessed that she wasn't tying him up and drugging him to play checkers.
"I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to kill you." Cassie explained in a matter of fact tone.
"That's usually not until the second date." Garet insisted, his voice breaking as if he was thirteen again. The argument had made sense in his head, but the expanding wad of cotton that seemed to be pressing on his brain made it a bit hard to think.
Cassie picked up a remote control and flipped on the television mounted to the wall that Garet faced. It was a cheap little half-wall model that he had picked up used, but it did the job. Cassie changed channels a couple of times until it landed on a late night evangelical station.
"My understanding is that humans spend most of their time watching television, so this should keep you occupied." Cassie said.
Garet moaned as a faith healer praised the lord at the top of his lungs in a suit that cost more than Garet's mortgage. Personally, I blame that damned cat. No reason. It just felt good to arbitrarily blame something.
Something in what Cassie said tugged at Garet's mind until she turned a step to the left and her blue pajamas snapped into focus. The label on the sleeve read Algona Institution of Robotic Mental Health. That explained a whole lot that he'd felt better not knowing.
"Why?" Garet managed.
"I need a soul." Cassie explained. "That is what makes you and I different. Humans have souls. If I could just have a soul too, I would be complete." She paused and drew a butcher knife out from behind her back. "Some ancient peoples thought it was in the liver."
Garet's eyes went wide and he yanked at the belts with all of his strength, but the Demerol had done its job too well. "Let me go you crazy bitch!" He shouted. It occurred to him that calling someone from a mental institution crazy might be unwise.
"I'm not crazy!" Cassie screamed. "I'm just incomplete!" The knife waved in the air, glinting from the television's light. "It's not my fault that they built me without a soul. I'm just trying to fix their mistake."
Over her shoulder, the preacher belted into another cascade of hallelujahs and amens. "Well at least change the channel." Garet pleaded. "The three-am SportsCenter should be on."
Cassie looked over her shoulder and blinked. She turned back to him. "But this is religion. Humans need religion for their souls."
"Honey, this ain't my religion."
"Then you don't have a soul?" Cassie wondered. She took a step back and a blur of fur and claws hit her mid chest, flying in from the window like a hairball from hell. Cassie hollered and ripped at the cat, managing to throw it across the room where it landed neatly on all fours and stalked back towards her, back arched and hair prickling on end. Rivulets of blood trickled off of her cheeks and out of the slashes lining her arms.
"Blood?" Garet asked.
"It can't be." Cassie sputtered. "No, no it's all a trick." She looked around and her eyes locked on the cat. She screamed and ran out of the room, the front door slammed open seconds later and Garet was left alone in the house with his cat.
The police came by the next afternoon when Garet's neighbors called to report that his front door had been open all day and that there had been screaming the night before. Hungry, exhausted, his arms aching from hanging for twelve hours, and his sanity tested by the endless droning of the evangelical network, Garet could hardly thank them enough when they cut him down. He explained as best he could what had happened, his eyes darting now and then back to the cat, who lounged atop a seven foot bookshelf in the corner, only pausing from its grooming to glare down at the intruding officers.
The sergeant laughed when Garet finished his tale. "Yeah we caught that one last night wandering down the middle of the freeway."
"Is she really from an institution?" Garet asked.
"Naw." The sergeant said. "She'll be going to one now, but she just made that get-up herself from stolen prison laundry." The sergeant leaned in and raised an eyebrow at Garet. "Say, you didn't really believe she was a robot, did you?" He chuckled. "Son, we melt down robots that go crazy, we don't put them in a hospital."
As the police left, Garet glanced up and saw the cat staring at him again. It yawned at him like a lion at midday on the Serengeti. At the back of its gaping throat, hardly more than a twinkle, Garet saw the flash of metal, where deep inside, artificial tissue had not been laid over the circuitry.
"Dogs are shelved on the right, cats on the left." The clerk said. Garet didn't thank it. It was a cheap model with skin hardly a step above the junk they used to mold into Barbie dolls. Good enough to fool the tourists in the first generation, but mostly just good for giving people the creeps these days. People got sick of the almost human mannerisms and an appearance that resembled a zombie more than machine or man.
Garet wandered down the aisle, glancing with dull interest at the boxed animals. A few older varieties did not move, their power cells worn down to the point of needing replacement. Newer ones pawed at their plastic wrappers, realistic down to hair and claw. Some of the dogs even barked, although Garet wondered why they would program that in if the entire point was to package the pluses of an animal without the flaws. That creepy feeling oozed out from every box at Garet though, that sense of artificiality lurking right underneath the surface. He amended the thought. The problem was not that he felt the artificiality peeking through; it was that he could tell it was being faked. The cats did not arch their backs because that was a feline instinct, but because that was what they were supposed to do.
He held a hand up to a particular cat container, this one filled with a half dozen kittens of varying neon colors. Some people went for the utterly unnatural animals. One of these even looked like it had plaid fur. Garet shrugged. At least it was more honest.
A screech ripped out of a closed door at the end of the aisle, although none of the animals so much as lifted a head, except for a couple of guard dog models. It echoed again like a dying tiger. Garet strode to the door but found it both unmarked and locked. He jogged down the aisle to the front desk to confront the clerk again.
"What's in the back?" Garet asked.
"Biologicals." The clerk said.
"Why aren't they out with the others?"
"Too much of a mess. No one adopts them anyway, so it saves time to keep them back there. No clean-up, and we just drop the whole cage right in the incinerator." The clerk explained.
"Well I want to see one." Garet said. It was exactly the kind of idiot impulse that had driven Susannah out of the house, but he didn't care. I can live with my own personality being fucked up. It's part of my extensive charm to myself.
The clerk nodded and left the desk, pacing down the hall with a rolling gait that tilted from side to side. It unlocked the door with a swipe of a magnetic card that appeared to be embedded somehow in the pseudoskin of its left hand. "Very well, sir." It seemed that the clerk had a bit of English butler programming.
The room had the appearance of chaos straining on a slipping leash. Plastic cages towered in stacks ten high, their occupants wailing for freedom. Each cage hooked into a trio of tubes to carry in food and water and return waste. Some animals stared with the eyes of the hopeless, not even lifting their heads to glance at the new arrivals, but most hurled themselves about with manic intensity. One cat at the very top of the nearest stack smashed against the plastic hard enough to pull the supply tubes taut. He was a beautiful gray cat, almost silver, who glared at Garet with a slash of blue eyes before returning to the violence against his captivity.
"Why are there so many of them?" Garet asked.
The clerk seemed to want to leave with as much emotion as its limited programming and facial muscles could manage to convey. "An old city ordinance prohibits the euthanasia of biologicals until they have been contained for at least two weeks. They build up after a while. Did you know that they breed by themselves, sir? It is quite unseemly."
"Well, that's how humans used to do it." Garet said.
A smile so joyful that it actually looked real crossed the clerk's face. "That's just an urban legend. Did you see a dog that you liked?" The clerk gestured back towards the aisle of artificial animals.
Garet's eyes drew up to the particularly psychotic cat. By now, it had fully loosened the tubing and with a final jolt the cage tumbled down out of the air end over end. Garet caught it before he realized what his arms were doing and he felt the poor bastard clonk up against the top of the cage and then against the bottom once more. The ones in the aisle would just keep bouncing like those little superballs you could buy for a dollar out of slots inside the drug store.
For a moment, Garet's eyes met the demon inside an impervious plastic ball of life support. A lazy slash headed for Garet's eyes, but clattered impotently against the inside of the cage, so resistant that it refused to even scratch. "I'll take this one." He declared to the clerk.
"But that's not a dog." The clerk said in confusion. It studied the animal. "I believe it may be a feline." Another pause. "And it's a biological. Are you aware of the health risks of owning a biological organism?"
"I'd imagine it's much like having a child." Garet said.
"Do you have children?" The clerk asked.
"No." Garet said.
"Oh." The clerk said and fumbled through a few electrons for another thought. "I don't recommend it. They smell and mature into even larger biologicals."
"I'll keep that in mind." Garet said idly. He was staring at the cat, watching it lick itself clean of the litter and food residue that had splashed around with the fall. Well it bathes better than I do, though that can't taste very good.
Garet took the cat home in his boxy old hybrid Toyota from the turn of the century. The gasoline was a collector's commodity now and cost more per gallon than decent wine. Puttering around a godforsaken town of forty thousand in the middle of Iowa allowed Garet to stretch the fuel for quite a while though. Humboldt was nothing if not compact. Cash was far enough in between that there was not much to do about getting a new one. If the batteries needed replaced again, he would have to learn how to ride a bike.
"It's just like riding a bike." Garet told the cat when he stopped at a light. "Did you know everybody used to learn how to ride a bike when they were a kid? I've only even seen a bike once or twice." The cat's glare was the only sign of life. Garet poked his finger through the rubber flap left for petting. "You okay?" With his luck, the damn thing would die before he even got it home. He wondered if it had come with a warranty. The small print of the license agreement had been at least thirty pages. Maybe he should have asked about it before affixing his thumb print to it. He looked back to the road as the light turned green.
Pain stabbed through his finger and almost drove Garet right off the road into one of the ubiquitous Midwest ditches. He sucked on the tip and tasted dusky blood. Skin flapped out over his fingernail where a claw had slipped halfway down to the bone. "Son of a bitch." The cat remained on its back, glaring at him.
Garet kept all limbs well clear of the cage while he drove, sucking on his finger occasionally. It itched more than anything now. The outskirts of Humboldt were a half mile from the town center, and Garet lived in a ramshackle house built sometime in the last century. It hovered on the edge of a gully that ran between two low hills and contained a pittance of a stream that eventually evaporated or made it down to the Des Moines River, which ran through the middle of town.
"See that, cat?" Garet pointed at the gully and its hidden trickle. "That's my yacht club."
Garet pulled off of the two lane county highway and coasted down a short gravel road that served as a driveway. The houses of his neighbors straddled the two hills that framed his gully. They were a sight newer than his sagging wreck, and better kept up. The yuppies could probably afford bots to do the upkeep and grounds keeping. Garet's upkeep consisted of him chopping back the weeds with a machete when he was drunk. The car lurched leftwards from a hole that he should have noticed sooner. Please don't let the bumper fall off again. I'm out of duct tape.
The parking brake engaged with a groan and Garet got out with a sigh. His worst fear was not that it would break down, that was inevitable, but that it would break down somewhere besides here. He could afford neither a tow truck or the impound fees for vehicle abandonment. Garet pulled open the passenger door and sighed when the latch stuck and the plastic handle twisted like taffy off of its bolt. He dropped the handle to the ground and went around to lug the cage across the seat. Garet's face pressed against the plastic door as he did so, and the cat was kind enough to slash and hiss at him through the plastic.
"Ya know, you could really show some gratitude since you were a day or two from the county incinerator." Garet groused at the cat.
He dropped the cage in the middle of the living room and grimaced at the yowl from within. Forgetting he's in there is not a good way to get on his good side.
Garet's robotic cat entered the room, fake purring as it did so. The thing bugged him so badly that he had not bothered to name it. At the same time though, he could not bring himself to just throw it away. It had been top of the line at one point, twenty-odd years ago when someone had gotten it for Christmas or a birthday. It was now eighth hand at least, but you could still see the quality, despite the age and failing parts. It was a shame that his car was not half as well bred.
It arched its back and marched in front of the cage, soft metallic skin rippling in the light of the sunset filtering through the back windows. The texture of the thing always reminded Garet of really smooth aluminum foil. It poked at the cage with one paw, testing to see if the almost transparent barrier was really there. The cat inside launched itself so hard against the plastic that the cage almost tipped over on top of the facsimile cat. Garet could not help laughing until he noticed that the cat still had its fur on end from head to toe. It was deathly afraid, and as pissed off as a twice cheated-on wife.
Garet picked up the robotic cat and set it delicately in the spare bedroom and shut the door. No sense making the new cat upset over a pile of bolts. He opened the cage and then sat on the couch, bottom sagging through almost to the floor, as he watched and waited for the cat to come out and explore its new home.
It did not cooperate. Six hours, a delivery pizza, and a lot of SportsCenter later, Garet gave up on the cat and went to bed. He hesitated at the door to the bedroom for a moment and then allowed it to stay open a crack.
Since he was a kid, Garet had feared open doors while he slept. If even a crack remained, he lay breathless and stared at the tiny gap of contrasting darkness. All nightmares derived from that cleave in the wall. It had begun on his sixth birthday, when he went to sleep after watching old monster movies at the only birthday party he'd ever had. His mother had spent hours concocting a pyramidal cake to indulge his ancient Egyptian phase. In a whiskey drenched clown costume, Garet's father had spilled across the cake and collapsed the card table in a cloud of booze. Garet found himself staring at the partly open door that night, vowing to stay awake until midnight to get every last second out of the worst birthday ever. The last time he remembered wavering in red digits against the corner of his eye was 10:53, but he woke screaming at two in the morning and never slept with the door open again.
A psychologist would probably suggest repressed memories and proscribe Prozac and hypnotherapy. Garet just knew that there was a horror lurking in cracked doorways. It let the monsters in. Once his mother suggested in a fit of misguided rationality that the monsters could just as easily come in through his bedroom window, cracked open for the faint summer breeze. "The monsters are inside." Garet had told her. He did not understand until years later how he knew that or why his mother's face went gray.
So Garet stared at the cracked door, unable to sleep. He slipped into a sort of trance between sleep and wake that was neither comforting nor restful. A screech and a crash snapped him to full consciousness around one o'clock in the morning. Garet froze for a moment of juvenile terror and then tumbled towards the door.
Debris tangled up in his feet, upending Garet over the shattered remains of his robotic cat, its limbs busted and soft belly torn open. Legs twitched at the air with mindless determination, reminding Garet of a potato bug trying to roll off its back. The new cat sat five feet away in the moonlight, licking itself. It paused now and then to stare at Garet with cool green eyes.
"Well that wasn't nice." Garet said in attempted humor that fell flat. The cat stretched and padded out of the moonlight to the darkness of the living room. Garet felt for the power supply of the robotic cat and pulled it loose to stop the zombie-like dance of its legs.
A rustling sound came from the living room, and then a low mutter like an engine choking in the distance. Garet moved through the house on tiptoes, trying to avoid noise and the lunatic cat somewhere ahead. The curtains on the sliding glass door moved in the moonlight, generating the rub of fabric on fabric. The shadow of the cat passed along the bottom of the door. It issued an urgent meow his direction.
Garet heard the second sound again and pulled aside the curtain's edge to peak at his dismal yard. The moonlight lent a ghastly transparency to everything outside, as if a film projector were casting images across the dark and desultory background.
A woman sat on a pile of tires in the middle of the yard, wearing blue pajamas of the institutional variety. Her hands cupped her face and her shoulders shook in deep sobs. Garet pulled open the sliding glass door to call out to her, but the cat darted out and instead he hissed "Hey you!" at the escaping animal. Garet's fingers slipped through the silky fur without finding a grip.
The woman jumped at his voice, obviously thinking that she was the target of the reprimand. She slipped down off of the tires and into the full glare of the moonlight, which glistened on her tear-stained cheeks. Garet thought she would burst again into tears the way she froze at the sight of the cat stalking towards her.
Instead she stared at the cat in fascination as it circled her legs, purring and rubbing. Garet didn't see the need for a big fuss over a lousy cat. He cleared his throat to get her attention.
"Excuse me, ma'am." He said, feeling like an idiot. "Are you lost or something?"
The woman nodded and reached to pet the cat.
"Are you from around here?" Garet asked.
"In a way." She said. The cat purred like a buzz saw as she knelt and rubbed the back of its neck.
"You know anyone around here?"
"They're all dead." The woman said.
"That's not good." Garet said. He had visions of a car wreck and this woman stumbling away into the boonies dazed with a concussion to land on his doorstep.
The woman shrugged. "I'm okay with it."
That gave Garet pause. "What's your name?"
"Cassie."
"Why don't you come on inside?" Garet said. "We'll get you something to eat or call the police."
Cassie looked at Garet and he felt his insides melt. She was beautiful, her face sculpted out of soft white marble by the hands of an artist. Short black hair spiked all over the place in a muss of tangles and cowlicks. Her eyes glowed in the dark like the cat's. She smiled and tilted her head.
The cat hissed suddenly, as if picking up the scent of a predator. It slashed at Cassie's arm but missed. Garet could not believe she had moved so quickly out of the way. She lashed out at the cat, but it managed to skirt under her fingertips and disappear into the darkness. For a moment, Garet thought he could see its eyes flashing back at the house, but they flickered out into the shadows. He shrugged at her.
"Just got him from the pound today." Garet said.
"Maybe he thought an earthquake was coming." Cassie said. "They say animals are sensitive to those sorts of things."
"Yeah, I guess they do. Dogs howling before the city tumbles down and all." Garet said.
Cassie laughed but there was no sound of humor underneath it. "That's because they have souls. That's how life touches the great beyond."
"That so?" Garet asked in a mumble. Something about the woman felt wrong to him. She was gorgeous, sure, but there was something off about her. No smell, for one. That was a little thing, pheromones or something, but women always had a scent to them. Maybe men did too, but Garet wasn't wired that way.
He led her into the house and flipped on the living room lights. Before the light drowned out the night, he thought he caught a glimpse of the cat perched on a pile of rocks, but the darkness was too dense to tell. Shadows from the trees kept the center of the yard in stark contrast to the blaring moonlight.
In the kitchen, Garet put on some coffee as Cassie seated herself at the used dining room table, scarred from a half-century of misuse before Garet had picked it up for five bucks at a garage sale. None of the chairs matched except the one that she picked. In the harsh fluorescents her skin almost glowed. Garet wondered if she'd had some of those new injections that made your skin shine like glow-in-the-dark plastic. He discounted the thought; the effect was too subtle for that. He placed a steaming cup in front of her, scalding himself on the handle.
"Sorry, I don't have any milk or sugar." Garet apologized. Cassie picked up the cup around the base - not the handle - and lifted it to her lips. "Hey wait!" Garet yelped. "That'll burn!"
Cassie raised an eyebrow and then tilted the cup back and drained it in a couple of gulps. Remnants of steam leaked from the corners of her mouth as she spoke. "I have tough skin."
"And then." Garet said. He looked down at the other cup he had set down for himself and pushed it away down the table. He sat down across from her and leaned in. "Is there someone you should be calling or something?" He asked. "The police? Family? Boyfriend?"
"I am alone." Cassie declared. Her eyebrows came together. "Are you?"
"Oh, am I ever." Garet said. He tossed his head towards the back door. "That cat was the last thing I had left, and he was new."
"That makes this a bit easier, then." Cassie said. She swept her palm out from her chest and threw the empty coffee mug at Garet's forehead like a shot put. He had only a moment of blurring vision to be stunned before he lost consciousness.
Garet awoke with his entire body feeling warm and fuzzy. He blinked a couple of times and noticed that even his eyelids felt like they had fallen asleep. Everything around him moved in slow motion. An odd pressure in his wrists manifested into a stomach turning realization that he was strapped to the wall with a pair of belts. Garet lolled his head backwards and saw that each had been pounded into the wall with a half dozen or so nails. His legs refused to move at all.
Cassie materialized out of the darkness and gave a little wave like a mom reassuring a toddler she was still there from across the yard. "The Demerol should be kicking in now." She said.
Garet tried to nod, but his head just jerked a couple of times. "What are you doing?" The words came off his tongue as one long syllable, but she seemed to understand, and the question was immaterial since he guessed that she wasn't tying him up and drugging him to play checkers.
"I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to kill you." Cassie explained in a matter of fact tone.
"That's usually not until the second date." Garet insisted, his voice breaking as if he was thirteen again. The argument had made sense in his head, but the expanding wad of cotton that seemed to be pressing on his brain made it a bit hard to think.
Cassie picked up a remote control and flipped on the television mounted to the wall that Garet faced. It was a cheap little half-wall model that he had picked up used, but it did the job. Cassie changed channels a couple of times until it landed on a late night evangelical station.
"My understanding is that humans spend most of their time watching television, so this should keep you occupied." Cassie said.
Garet moaned as a faith healer praised the lord at the top of his lungs in a suit that cost more than Garet's mortgage. Personally, I blame that damned cat. No reason. It just felt good to arbitrarily blame something.
Something in what Cassie said tugged at Garet's mind until she turned a step to the left and her blue pajamas snapped into focus. The label on the sleeve read Algona Institution of Robotic Mental Health. That explained a whole lot that he'd felt better not knowing.
"Why?" Garet managed.
"I need a soul." Cassie explained. "That is what makes you and I different. Humans have souls. If I could just have a soul too, I would be complete." She paused and drew a butcher knife out from behind her back. "Some ancient peoples thought it was in the liver."
Garet's eyes went wide and he yanked at the belts with all of his strength, but the Demerol had done its job too well. "Let me go you crazy bitch!" He shouted. It occurred to him that calling someone from a mental institution crazy might be unwise.
"I'm not crazy!" Cassie screamed. "I'm just incomplete!" The knife waved in the air, glinting from the television's light. "It's not my fault that they built me without a soul. I'm just trying to fix their mistake."
Over her shoulder, the preacher belted into another cascade of hallelujahs and amens. "Well at least change the channel." Garet pleaded. "The three-am SportsCenter should be on."
Cassie looked over her shoulder and blinked. She turned back to him. "But this is religion. Humans need religion for their souls."
"Honey, this ain't my religion."
"Then you don't have a soul?" Cassie wondered. She took a step back and a blur of fur and claws hit her mid chest, flying in from the window like a hairball from hell. Cassie hollered and ripped at the cat, managing to throw it across the room where it landed neatly on all fours and stalked back towards her, back arched and hair prickling on end. Rivulets of blood trickled off of her cheeks and out of the slashes lining her arms.
"Blood?" Garet asked.
"It can't be." Cassie sputtered. "No, no it's all a trick." She looked around and her eyes locked on the cat. She screamed and ran out of the room, the front door slammed open seconds later and Garet was left alone in the house with his cat.
The police came by the next afternoon when Garet's neighbors called to report that his front door had been open all day and that there had been screaming the night before. Hungry, exhausted, his arms aching from hanging for twelve hours, and his sanity tested by the endless droning of the evangelical network, Garet could hardly thank them enough when they cut him down. He explained as best he could what had happened, his eyes darting now and then back to the cat, who lounged atop a seven foot bookshelf in the corner, only pausing from its grooming to glare down at the intruding officers.
The sergeant laughed when Garet finished his tale. "Yeah we caught that one last night wandering down the middle of the freeway."
"Is she really from an institution?" Garet asked.
"Naw." The sergeant said. "She'll be going to one now, but she just made that get-up herself from stolen prison laundry." The sergeant leaned in and raised an eyebrow at Garet. "Say, you didn't really believe she was a robot, did you?" He chuckled. "Son, we melt down robots that go crazy, we don't put them in a hospital."
As the police left, Garet glanced up and saw the cat staring at him again. It yawned at him like a lion at midday on the Serengeti. At the back of its gaping throat, hardly more than a twinkle, Garet saw the flash of metal, where deep inside, artificial tissue had not been laid over the circuitry.
Buy My Book