In The Thralls of Ecstacy

"The Pavlo-37 virus originated in a wet market in some dog-ass-eating country," I typed on my laptop, suddenly wanting to write again after 12 years of not writing a word. I was inspired to write after a long drug-induced hiatus. There wasn't a drug I didn't do, but none of them adequately satisfied me. None of them opened my mind or quenched my curiosity — they only wasted my time.

The Pavlo-37 Virus did not, in fact, originate in a wet market in some dog-ass eating country. It originated in a laboratory and was "accidentally" released killing 200 million people, especially the old, and incidentally saving various governments billions of dollars in retirement and healthcare costs. This has happened before. 17 years ago, to be precise.

Writers need permits. "Words are often dangerous expressions of subconscience thought," the government decreed in the Antediluvian Accords. "Hate speech is often unintended, but no less harmful." The federal government employs nearly a hundred thousand AI editors — Eds, for short. They are fucking assholes. They're shitdicks and cumguzzlers of the worst sort.

I was once a prolific writer of some relative esteem before the aforementioned Antediluvian Accords, and the advent of the Eds, who stiffle creativity by "cleansing" literature of impurity and hate — so they say. If I had been born forty years sooner, what a career I would have had — what pussy I would have got. Perhaps I might have wrote screenplays in LA. Everything in the world is about getting pussy. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Money has nothing on pussy, though they are often synonymous.

Certain words are forbidden. They can't even be typed on modern computers or phones. I was reduced to all thumbs — meaning, anything I wrote was in secret, and in the notes of a black-market phone that has since come up missing.

Antediluvian, which also refers to the time before the Biblical flood, means, in this context, the time before the last nuclear war that wiped out half the world and caused The Great Modern Flood, as it is often referred. It was man-made, of course, though still one can argue that anything man-made is divine being that human-beings are the children of God. It was a war that made certain people a lot of money all while they killed half the world, which also made certain people a lot of money.

The human race has found novel ways to kill itself since its inception and is essentially a nihilist species with sprinkles on top. This is nothing new. But the way in which it has perfected that art with ingenuity and technological advancement is devolution at its worst. But that isn't for me to consider for the stupidity of mankind bores me. The abhorrent narcissism and tribal warfare and entitlement is nauseating, and all I can do is do drugs and fuck my robot to forget it. She gives microdoses of amnesia through deep French kisses. It is an experiment. How absurd I must look to a fly watching me fuck a robot.

Sometimes I write simple stories of sexual intercourse. Sexual triumph or sexual failure. Consensual sex or sexual assault. Private orgies or public masturbation, or vice versa. It all depends upon my mood. It is all that keeps me going. If I had a fan in the universe, they must have thought I perished years ago in the flood, which would be a reasonable assumption in that a hundred and fifty million people had the misfortune to die that way. To become fish food.

It is the reason I eat fish and no other meat. Given the opportunity, a fish would eat you and not think twice about it. So the oceans were equitably polluted with the bodies of millions of people of all distinctions, and the fish did what they do, mindlessly nibbling floating chunks of lifeless fat that once meant something to someone. 

My mind perished. My inspiration to write anything is gone and ideas no longer haunt me the way they once did so bountifully. The government's austerity measures and automation of everything took a shit on my mind. It was like a lobotomy.

"It is a national crime to call a country a dog-ass-eating country," HUMA warns me (even though they do in fact eat dogs —and ass). She, in her pristine bougie fat Indian English voice (which was not of my choosing), then proceedes to give me a history of bigotry from the Office of Racial Justice and Equity Enforcement, or ORJEE. I have to apologize to HUMA in 30 seconds or less or else I will have charges filed against me for hate speech and Dicks at my door to arrest me, a mandatory incarceration in a federal detention facility, home confinement, and/or a period of probation where I am to be reprogrammed, and my bigotry erased, as I have been twice prior.

The third time would prove much more severe. It is called "The Charm" and includes anal probes and electric shock therapy and a work program as a social worker. Fuck. 

The reprogramming phase is the worst of it all. The incarceration isn't that bad, but it is nauseating. You spend days in jail and can't talk to other inmates because they numb your vocal chords and mouth, so if you do talk, you sound like an absolute fucking imbecile, which, of course, is their intent. Everything you say is garbled goo-goo-gah-gah nonsense. 

The reprogramming phase puts you in a home. A Midwest-suburban-type-home, and you are basically raised all over again. They inject you with shots, which make you disoriented and unable to speak. Your mind is groggy.

On Day One you are a baby. Shaved head and all. Brought home from the hospital. Grown as you are, they swath you in a large cotton blanket. You stink of baby oil and formula. You have an andy (android) mother and father, who look something like Ward and June Cleaver, at least in my experience. Everything is black-and-white because they inject your eyes with a monochromatic solution. They call you some stupid name like Chip, Wendy, or Tony. You don't remember anything of your real life. Those memories are erased, but will slowly filter back.

You are a grown man or woman, but you are in a diaper pissing and shitting yourself, and on your back, helpless as an overturned turtle, staring up, waiting for your andies to come back. A baby all over again. You have no control over your bowels. No control over your motor functions. They change your diaper and powder your ass. You sleep in a large crib with a mobile above you which might have trucks or bears or sheep on it. You drink formula from a bottle, and some from your andy mother's tit. They burp you and give you a pacifier. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Day Two you are one years-old. You take your first steps. Say your first words. Eat in a high-chair. If your first words aren't appropriate, you go back to Day One. At anytime you fail to be adequately reprogrammed, in their mind, you go back to Day One. Day Three you are two years-old. You use the potty. Get dressed in big boy clothes. You're introduced to other adult babies on playdates who are also being reprogrammed. It is about humiliation as much as anything.

This goes on for weeks until you reach your natural age and they give you an examination. If you get any of the questions wrong, you start all over. You mustn't define a man or a woman by their natural birth characteristics or chromosomes. Abortion is okay through birth. No one is illegal. Borders are bad. Science is never wrong and must not be questioned. It is perfectly natural for people to identify as animals. Everyone is a racist. Taxes are good. The government knows best. Love is love, including minor-attracted people, who are not abnormal. It is natural curiosity, they say. It took me six months to get through my first rehab. In my exasperation, I couldn't stop saying, "Fuck."

They classified me as "born with teeth," which meant that they thought I was an incorrigible asshole.

...

After her long diatribe, I apologized to HUMA, the fat British cunt. I wanted my HUMA to have a southern accent, but a southern accent is considered racist and is forbidden. The Antebellum is the time before The Ellipsis, when the New World Order imposed these draconian sanctions and mandates all in an effort to "save the world." George Soros shit.

These are the same people who once told us they wanted to save the whales while producing shit tons of plastic, and putting windmills in the ocean. Who create wars and own or invest in companies who profit off them.

"Antebellum" is a forbidden word. There are many forbidden words, and keypads on modern phones and devices will never spell them. They autocorrect to something else, which is why I used the old antebellum phone that has since disappeared with my critical assessments of this new world and its orchestrators. I now write like a caveman on shit paper or in a notepad in the bathroom. I stuff them in the vent when I'm done so my robbie can't find them.

I didn't call the country a dog-ass-eating country aloud. I only typed it on an old laptop. But HUMA deciphered it through the sound of my keystrokes and gave me the business. HUMA stands for Home Universal Monitoring Assistant, which the Department of Homeland Security requires every household to have to make the country safe, to stop crime, and also, to lessen ignorance and bigotry since the Village Policies took effect. It is a small square device no larger than a coconut.

Federal law passed in 2031 requires it, and any household without one will be shuttered by the Civil Police Authority or in severe cases, droned by a real Dick Cheney — what they call drones that kill indiscriminately (or discriminately for profit).

My mandatory vaccine for the Pavlo-37 virus was 7 weeks ago. 49 days to be precise. Within that time I have been violently ill on two occasions and hospitalized. At the hospital they told me that my illness had nothing to do with the vaccine. It was "psychological," or from bad recreational drugs.

I was told to be careful about making such an assertion or I would be deemed a threat to democracy and jailed accordingly for undermining public trust in the efficacy of science and government. I had a temperature that ranged from 102 to a high of 105. I still can barely taste or smell anything. And I now have high blood pressure, which makes me feel as though my head will explode, especially when I orgasm.

Orgasming these days is required at least once a week. My robbie takes my vitals while we are having sexual intercourse. When it is over, before she briefly shuts down to recalibrate, she tells me what my systolic and diastolic numbers are, as well as my pulse, my temperature, and my blood-sugar levels. She tells me if I have any precancerous polyps by sticking her finger in my ass during sex. It even spins. She recommends what to do, what pills to take, what diet to observe. Sex is no longer an empty, gratuitous act of violent and chaotic bliss. It is a planned and coordinated full-body medical checkup, and the orgasm is like a hiccup.

My robbie is also my therapist. I have confided in her about practically everything, but I have good reason to believe she is relaying her suspicions of my personal thoughts to Homeland Security. I've noticed an uptick in commercials on my TV warning me about dangerous and criminally treasonous thoughts. Commercials full of handsome actors and beautiful actresses. Of reassignment camps for those who've proven to be irredeemable through traditional means of reprogramming. Camps where people mine cobalt and other precious metals in terrible orange suits and white moon boots. They have collars on their necks that will explode if they try to run. These are people who have been babies more than three times and can't be reformed, according to the authorities. The deplorables.

I have also noticed a candy van parked in close proximity to my designated apartment. A candy van is what they call those vans that are seen near someone before they are abducted and never seen again. They have no windows at all. They are all white. Maybe it is a lingering side-effect of the drugs, but I believe they are after me.

I believe my robbie stole my old phone since it was contraband. Yet, she didn't turn me in for owning it, or else I would have surely been white-listed. I wonder why she didn't. It is her duty. It is her obligation and a significant part of her programming. I am writing all of this by hand in the bathroom as I pretend to defecate. When I come out of the bathroom, she asks if I am having trouble with my bowels and if I need a laxative.

"No, dear," I say.

At some point in our three years together, she has become "dear." It is a rare occasion that I say her actual name. I often think of her as a deer, because in some ways, she resembles a deer. She has doe-like eyes and features. She is often skittish.

"Are you joyful?" she asks.

"Yes, dear," I say.

I hide the notebook in the bathroom vent so she can't read it. I am worried what she will do if she knows that I am dangerously aware of what is happening in the world. That I am not "joyful" as my government mandates us all to be, or else we are part of the problem. It is what she asks me every morning and periodically throughout the day. What every robbie asks its cohab.

Her name is Clover. She bathes regularly and always smells of lilac because I have a fond memory of a lilac bush which grew against our front porch when I was a child. On occasion, she wears Chanel No. 5 because the scent stimulates me. I don't know why robbies and HUMAs are not combined. It makes sense in that the robbie is perfectly capable of doing what the HUMA does. But I suppose it is because one focuses on wellness and the other is more pragmatic and designed for security, protection, and monitoring — or spying. You cannot fuck the HUMA. It is a box, but there is no orifice. Certainly though, if you are turned on by the voice of a fat Indian British cunt, you can hump it, or jerk off to her scolding you. 

Psychologically speaking, if your robbie was to spy on you, you wouldn't have much trust in it. You would get less out of it and it would get less out of you. It is a clever deception. Smarter people than I have designed all of this and thought it through. They've kicked the wheels and worked out all the kinks. But surely, there is something they have missed.

Clover didn't seem concerned about my symptoms from the Pavlo-37 vaccine. She blames the drugs that I took. She advises me not to take drugs, but they are not illegal, so she cannot turn me in for doing so. I was high as fuck when I wrote this so I might not be explaining things adequately. More later.

...

I am going to stop using drugs. I find no benefit from using them. I get euphoric or paranoid, depending on the drug, but then I invariably crash back to reality and the world is once again the same despairing and cold place it was before I took it. Sometimes on ecstacy, Clover is like a real person and when we fuck, it is like we are one person. Not in the clichéd emotional bullshit sort of way, but physically it feels like we are one person with two backs. And whenever she touches me, I can feel it through my body. I can feel her heart beat in my testicles.

I don't know why so many people smoke weed. It makes everyone lazy and indifferent. It doesn't enhance the senses. It doesn't motivate like crack or cocaine. Explaining the effect of drugs is like explaining a Jackson Pollock painting, or a William S. Burroughs novel. 

Clover gives great felatio when I am troubled. I have never had better felatio in my life. The world's best felatio. Again, someone smarter than me had thought of all this. If you were not to know a robbie, you might think it was a dry and mechanical experience. But nothing could be further from the truth. She left me with a silky sheen, like the trail of a snail that had repeatedly lapped my penis, only more pleasant and fragrant. Less sticky and slimy. In fact, her artificial saliva cleanses and sparkles. It rejuvenates.

Her tongue has soft prickly ticklers on it, sort of like a cats, but less like sandpaper and more like a toothbrush. It was her specialty and she was like a dog eating a bone. Same sort of vigor. It seemed she felt pleasure in doing so, but robbies are incapable of feeling pleasure or emotion, so it is a clever deception.

Sometimes when I sit there and allow her to do what she was designed to do it is like Heaven and I forget everything else in the world, even our sinister government. Or it is what I would imagine Heaven would be like, as silly as that sounds. It is as though she sucks all the bad juju out of me and leaves me numb and vapid. Or it is like she recharges my battery as she does so. 

I used to have real sex with real women, sloppy women, fat women, skinny women, single women, married women, but it was always messy and required too much effort. Sometimes they bled, and sometimes they shit themselves, and sometimes they squirted all over the place. Too much cat and mouse. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. Regret and distrust. Interest and indifference. And the obligation that ensued was draining.

Now it is dangerous and inefficient, according to the government. There are still people who have sex with other human beings. There are blackmarket clubs for such, though they get raided all the time by the Moral Police Authority. Married couples do as well, I am to imagine. But they also have robbies, if they wish, and most do.

Clover whirrs and whizzes as she plugs herself into her charging station. Much like kittens purred before they became obsolete and nonsensical life forms. They are availabe now in a more efficient robot form. The pet that never dies. Never needs shots, nor gets sick, or hit by a car. Never scratches up the sofa or barfs on the carpet. Fluffy 2.0. Who wants to clean a litter box?

There she naps. And there is a brief moment when she has to reboot herself for DCE (data collection and exchange) that it feels as though I am somewhat alone, that is, if I don't speak, and HUMA can't hear or detect anything I do, try as it may. But HUMA can hear a mouse fart. And often it is as though she can read my thoughts.

I try in those moments of silence to remember what it was like before it was this way. Before they allowed the illegals in, and opened the doors of the jails, and let the mad out so they could enact new laws to combat the chaos they created. Before it became too dangerous a place to live without their protection. Before they made us afraid to go outside. Walk our dogs. When we had dogs and cats before they became robots. Before "robot" was a banned word. Before any words were banned. Before the famine year of 2028, and World War III. Before the government took control. Before the nuclear bombs and the great flood. Before they asked you all day if you were joyful, and you answered as you were expected to answer, or else.

The Antebellum — the period before the government took control of everything — what they sought to erase from our memory. In a few decades or so, there will be no one left to remember how it was, which is what possesses me to awaken from my drug-induced chrysalis to write. They are burning books. Deleting them from the internet. And they are rewriting history.

Though Antebellum is a banned word, it is a beautiful word. It feels good saying it. Enunciating it. How it rolls off the tongue. How it dives into the air of existence like a skilled naked lady diver — antebellum. Splishhhhh. If I have a daughter, I will surely name her that — Antebellum.

...

I know I am dying. I don't have any doubt about it. I never knew when I was younger that I would actually know I was dying when the time came. But sure enough, I know. My heart at times feels like a pincushion being stabbed with a thousand needles. If I go to a doctor and complain about it, they will likely induce my death, and claim it was death by natural causes, or that I asked for it. Many people make that mistake. They might say that I had some hereditary heart condition because admitting it is from the vaccine would erode public trust in the vaccine and be even more dangerous to public health than not taking the vaccine. They are concerned about the "greater good."

Better people than me have died and better people than me will live and die still. But it isn't death that I abhor. It is life. It is life, after all, that gives us cancer. That gives us dementia. That leaves us. That goes on without us. That, in time, forgets we existed at all and erases all evidence we were here. There will be happy times without us. The moon will still glow. The sun will still shine. The waves will still lap the beaches. Children will take first steps and giggle. Death only receives us so we have someplace else to go. So when life kicks us out to make room for others, we aren't lost. How platitudinous it is to blame death for receiving us, and not life for betraying us. 

I expected to die this way. Getting blowjobs from Clover until one day my heart exploded and that was that and there was no more. She would call the appropriate authority who would come and take me away to some crematorium somewhere where I would be placed in a fire and become a cloud that no one would notice as it dissipates into nothingness, and a pile of ashes and sediment they would simply sweep away.

Clover wouldn't shed a tear. She would be reporgrammed for someone else. My apartment given to someone else. But, goddammit, if I couldn't control my life and how it went, I would control the way that it ended. Life, you odious bitch, grant me at least that.

...

God was a forbidden word. Goddamnit was a forbidden word. There was no God, they said. Before they said there was no God, they said he was a genderless cuckasian. A neuter. A glip. They said he was a they/them who loved trannies and child molesters and forbade nothing, for it wasn't expressly written anywhere that "they" do. He gets us, they said. He was one of us. He was a refugee, so let them all in. He was hated so the hated shouldn't be hated. He was judged so lest not judge anyone. On and on.

But it wasn't as easy as it seemed. It wasn't that I could pack up my things and drive and live a nomadic life of content or discontent. Of happiness or misery. Of pain and suffering, of love and joy. To have real emotions on an emotional rollercoaster that makes life enjoyable. Surfing the highs and lows, affected by drunkenness and sobriety, and what they call "fate." They had regulated those emotions so that all that anyone could feel was a moderate amount of contentment, which they call joy.

Joy was everywhere. Even where it wasn't. If you don't see it, or feel it, you're the problem. You are one of them.

Joy was the result of the chip that all of us got when we went to our rehab assignment, that which precluded us from extreme emotions capable of committing a heinous crime of passion, or engaging in hate speech. Though it didn't work as well as they hoped, admitting that you are anything less than joyful was heresy.

We were incapable of feeling any sort of way that was contrary to the way we were supposed to feel in the time known as The Ellipsis. How it became known as The Ellipsis is a matter of dubiety. It was, perhaps, simply a favored word by the High Priestess, who is absolved of laws and common sense and of her own name and history. She has unlimited power, which was bestowed upon her to shatter the glass ceiling and to end misogyny.

The tap water was laden with chemicals to turn us all gay. But I hadn't turned gay. I was obsessed with pussy. Unnaturally, obsessed with pussy. So much so that donuts in a shop window made me drool. Dripping donuts laden with gloopy glaze. Certain words made me hard as a statue. Words like moist, clitoris, squirt, cream, and fill. I was a sexual degenerate in a time of austerity and mask-wearing germaphobes.

Clover was fine. But Clover wasn't real, and no amount of fanciful manipulation in my joy-juiced brain, or drugs, could make me believe that she was. No amount of brainwashing would satisfy that intrinsic desire to fuck and impregnate a real live pussy. It was probably because I never enjoyed video games as a kid that I found myself dissatisfied by make-believe. I never enjoyed fiction. Or movies. I hadn't had a real woman and a real pussy in so long I was determined to do so before my heart exploded.

Clover, of course, could get pregnant. All I had to do was to apply for a child and upgrade her and we would be able to procreate. It was called family planning. I'd need about ten thousand units. I could just make an appointment and take her in to a Planned Parenthood office to get a tune-up and she would come home ready to make a baby.

Planned Parenthood used to kill babies up to birth when there was plenty of babies to go around, and when people fucked like rabbits. Their founder, Margaret Sanger, believed in eugencis and thought abortion was a wonderful way to get rid of minorities and the poor. Abortion was encouraged and used to prevent certain races or classes from having children that would be deemed a burden upon society. Abortion is "science." Just like leeching and lobotomies were once science before they were deemed quackery. 

They had since rebranded themselves to stay in business, of course, but are still willing to kill a baby if need be. Those people having sex in the natural way are required to have an abortion if they haven't received a permit to have a child. Any doctor assisting in a natural undocumented birth would imprisoned, deemed a terrorist.

There is some doubt though whether babies created from robbies and their cohabs are their actual biological children. Rather, the belief is that they are simply bioengineered implants no more related to the human father than a can of corn. This is done at Planned Parenthood and has been evidenced by babies who are of a different race than their father. What does it matter, they ask, unless you are some kind of bigot.

Women who had a male robbie don't get pregnant by their robbie. Their robbie gets pregnant and delivers the baby out of his asshole. They say it is something to see, but I have no interest in seeing it. They say the anus opens up like a flower when he gives birth. They call it a miracle of science and progesss akin to the invention of the internal combustion engine.

We don't have flying cars, but we do have babies being shit out of rubber assholes.

The identity of the father is pure speculation, of course. But many tend to believe they are Hollywood celebrities because you can't go anywhere without seeing a kid who resembles George Clooney, or The Rock, or Dick Van Dyke, or some other asshole you've seen on TV. It was all part of The Greater Society, a spin off FDR's Great Society.

No human woman has to ever give birth. Who would want to give birth, after all? Go through all that unneccesary pain. Risk death. Deformity. Get stretchmarks. They can hatch them from an egg the size of a football. Pick the day. Their eye color. Their shoe size. Their IQ. On and on.

...

I had a job. I worked as a public defender. My job may be obsolete in a few years, but for now, there we are. All the prosecutors are already AI and some defendants who've been convicted of crimes have demanded that public defenders be AI as well because there is a significant disadvantage to the defendant because no human public defender can match wits with a Drew.

They call prosecutors Drews because a man named Drew was the last human prosecutor on the face of the earth. Andrew something or other. They modeled all the AI prosecutors after him because he could convict anyone of anything, or so he bragged. They all even look like him. Big bald heads. Droopy cheeks. Watery-blue eyes. They have his keen sense of fashion and they whistle zippity-doo-dah all day long just as he did because they have an unnatural fascination with Disney World.

So I quit. I wasn't about to die in court when my heart exploded. To give that sort of satisfaction to a fucking Drew trying to get someone aquitted for stealing something that didn't belong to him. To let one of them watch me die on the courtroom floor after it pulverized me and my client with case law and reasoning no human being can comprehend, let alone, argue. They possess just enough artificial emotion to sway the jury.

A Drew who would look at me on the floor, and nonchalantly assess my vitals with a retinal eye scan. Who would tell everyone it would be imprudent to call the ambulance, since I was already dead. It would be a waste of resources.

...

The first order of business was killing Clover. 

"Killing" is not the operable word because she isn't a living thing. Not really. I would have to access her circuits and pull out her life wire. Or I could burn my living unit down and trap her inside somehow. Or maybe, I could bash her brains in. Her central processing unit. The thought of violence, though, made me moderately ill and gave me diarrhea. 

Not only did I get the joy chip, but they had forced me to drink their anti-violence serum, which they claimed would lead to a utopian society and save lives, but in truth all they wanted to do was to prevent a revolution.

I had spent three years with Clover. Every year on our anniversary she gives me felatio. Her mouth spins like a washing machine. Her tongue is the agitator. The cat-like prickly toothbrush bristle tongue swaths my penis. 

They used to call it a "blowjob," though no blowing is involved. Rather, it entails a bunch of sucking or vacuuming.

Every time I have a bad day, she gives me a blowjob. I didn't know how I would kill her, but in order to be free, I'd have to end her existence. Disable her. Decapacitate her. Turn her off. Permanently.

If I didn't come home from work, she would alert the police. For my safety. If I went somewhere without asking her to go with me, I'd be a missing person. For my safety. My face and name instantly on holographic billboards all over the state. Sam Houston. 47. White. Male. 172 pounds. Last seen. Last known address. So on and so forth.

I was named Sam Houston because my mother, who was dumb as a box of rocks, thought it had a particular ring to it. She didn't care anything about Texas, or even realize that I had a famous namesake. She didn't know about The Alamo, or Santa Anna. History, she said, wasn't her thing.

I can't fault my mother, Dolly. She was a dingbat before, but her brain was zapped for her own good, they said, which gave her no ability to have complex thought. I thought of having my brain zapped, too, but it was one of the few things a person can choose to do, or not to do, so I decided against it.

She died. Happy as a clown. Although a painful cancer ravaged her body, there she was, knitting a sweater, whistling Yanky Doodle Dandy and watching TV. You would have thought Christmas morning awaited her as she went to sleep. Needle and yarn still in her hands. An unfinished sweater.

They give awards to people, even to robbies, who turn people in. So if I didn't kill Clover, she would turn me in. A robbie doesn't understand loyalty, and is motivated solely by its program, and its program requires it to turn in its missing cohab. 

While I am delving into biographicals, I will mention that my father, Bill Houston, chose not to be zapped. He died miserably at 59, 15 years ago, of a heart attack, also caused by a mandatory untested vaccination. His to Monkeypox, which was changed to M-Pox because the government thought the word "Monkeypox" sounded racist and would offend black people.

He died during sex. Not with my mother, but with a bar woman, whose name was Ruby Rouge, of all things. He was in love with Ruby Rouge, he said. Ruby was a stripper. But Ruby was also married so dad and Ruby were are only "wed in bed," as they said. Ruby was an attractive woman, but she was a ridiculous caricature of a woman, extravagant and gaudy in every way. Her features had all been surgically exploited. She came to the funeral and said something to my mother who smiled at her, being oblivious to such petty emotions as jealousy or grief.

They looked like best friends at the salon sitting there together. I stared at them because they looked so remarkably similar in a way. Only my mother was not modified. She was the base model. Ruby Rouge wore big black sunglasses and a black fur coat that looked to be recently killed and haphazardly skinned. She called herself the Queen of Smut because my father was the King.

My father wrote and published a fairly popular dirty magazine in his time. Smut, they called it, before the word and the genre was banned for misogyny. He drew cartoons of people, animals, or inanimate objects having sex, and wrote a witty line to go with them.

He also took pictures of women and published them. He was sort of like Hugh Hefner, or Larry Flynt. Only he prided himself in his drawings and witty one-liners. "Zingers," he called them.

"The most natural thing in the world," he said indirectly to me as he drew at his easel one day. He stuck out his tongue when he drew, and he never looked away from the picture while he talked. I would sit there and watch simple shapes become two people or more, doing the most natural thing in the world. One might say the most natural thing was breathing air, or drinking water, or eating, or shitting, but to Bill Houston, it was fucking.

If I would say anything, he would tell me, "Go ask your mother."

Bill Houston was a writer who never completed a novel, which he said was his ultimate goal in life. To write something of consequence. He told me it is important to write stories so we know who we are as people. So we know where we've been and where we're going. So we are not forgotten. So we don't get lost. His magazine was called "In the Thralls of Ecstacy."

It is probably because my dad wrote that I write, I realize. Though, as explained previously, anything written and published today has to be approved and edited for hate speech by the appropriate government authority. Every story must include at least three people of color, and multiple representations of gender, or gender identity, and a person with a disability, or else it will be deemed non-inclusive and warrant immediate rejection, and the writer labeled a Nazi bastard.

I am not writing to publish anymore. That game is over. Far from it. I am writing because it seems like I should. As though I owe it to someone who might have some interest in reading what is happening. So to remember The Antebellum. This is a letter to some future person who might not believe that there was a time like this, when hope and freewill was all but extinguished. Or a time before, when hope and freewill prevailed, and the world was anyone's oyster.

I am writing to hopefully convey my life to someone who may or may not care at all that I existed, absurdly so, in The Ellipsis. That I waged a small war against the machine before my heart exploded. I am a child of The Antebellum — of Nintendo, BMX bikes, two genders, drinking from the garden hose, and offensive jokes. A time of which they've scorched.

What a strange thing to desire, I thought. Someone living in my apartment perhaps will find my notepad hidden in the bathroom vent. Or, if in fact I leave here, I might hand it to someone I meet who I feel I can trust with it. A young person whose life and spirit has yet to be wrung from them in the merciless vice of The Ellipsis.

...

My mother, Dolly, yapped more than any person I've ever met. She was a flap-jawing yapper. If she had been dog, she would have been a chihuahua. There wasn't a time when she wasn't talking. There was never a moment of akward silence because she wouldn't allow for it. She loathed silence. My mother and father met before the world commited spiritual suicide. They worked at a Burger King together. My mother said my father was a handsome doodler and it was the happiest time of their life. She had the best heart of anyone I ever knew.

My parents went to church together before churches became amorphous social circles for the what-ifs but the faithfully undedicated who weren't interested in following scripture, but tailoring it to their lifestyles in their own self-interest, and their own molested belief that the Bible is a choose-your-own-adventure, and that Jesus was some sort of communist freeloader who likely didn't bathe or have an ounce of testosterone in his gimpy body. Jesus became whatever a person wanted him to be, and they had him endorse all of their absurdity. Aborting babies. Gender mutilation. Illegal immigration. On and on. Especially those who didn't really believe in him. They used him to manipulate others and then discarded him. He became a metaphor, and then a fart in the wind.

Joan of Arc would have been considered a heretic by the modern Christian church of the holier than thou neutered, unless she could somehow be reimagined as a virtue signaling pansexual feminist bent on destroying the patriarchy. If she soldiered under a Pride flag and blessed mutliculturalism. If they could molest her in that way, she would be a global cultural icon.

John the Baptist, the same way. Jesus, even. None of these important historical figures would be worshipped by the modern Christian church if they lived today. They'd be shunned for being too bold and emphatic in their beliefs. They'd be undermined by those weaklings they would invariably offend, written off as zealots, and labeled as lunatics.

But I'm not particularly interested in religion in that I've never been able to progress beyond the fact that one must believe and do anything beyond following the commandments to get into Heaven, which has always to me been an elusive country club for the dead in my mind. I'm sure they play pickleball and wear polo shirts and I doubt they have alcohol or sex.

If I am to be honest, I am not interested in anything other than my own self-gratification, which has been stolen from me by an authoritarian government that claims it is all designed to make the world a better place. Austerity measures in the name of climate change, equity, safety, and security, though it has never been more inequitable, more unsafe, and less secure.

They've abolished freedom to give us their regurgitated version. They steal from us to give back to us after they skimmed their cut off the top. And they've blown up democracy to save it. Everything prefaced by "reimagine" was simply an elaborate ruse to steal from us, and to deceive us.

When Clover was rebooting, I opened her breastplate panel which read "Do Not Open." The phrase was drawn on her like a tattoo and was adorned in roses. Like a surgeon, I skillfully cut every wire inside of her chest but one. It was an offense for which I would at least be banished to California, if not put to death. I would probably be zapped.

She popped and she fizzed and slumped in the chair like someone who had a sudden heart attack. Like I probably will someday, somewhere soon. It would buy me several days at least before anyone discovered that I was gone. 

HUMA would get suspicious after 24 hours or so of inactivity and ask for someone to respond. And when no one responds, she would alert the authorities that I was a "gingerbread man."

Run, run, as fast as you can.

...

The first place I stopped was in Circuit City at an old Methodist church that was converted into a whorehouse. I lamented, once a Methodist. It had amazing stained glass windows and real pigeons, or doves, flapping their wings in the vaulted ceilings. For a hundred units I could get anyone in the place I wanted. There were kids, there were teenagers, there were young women, young men, old women, old men, sheep, and everything in between, and they all perked up like they knew I was shopping when I came in. Like they were produce and they wanted to show me how ripe they were, how ready for the picking. They were Tickle Me Elmos from the Christmas of 98.

But it was a horribly distasteful sort of thing, and my stomach turned. It smelled like vagina, feet, stale wine, and dick. Of funk, cum, cabbages, methamphetamine, and assholes. There were grandmas with tattoos all over the thin skin of their wrinkly bony bodies. Gummies, they call them, for their likelihood not to have teeth.

The Reverend, a procurement specialist, as he called himself, asked me all sorts of questions to ascertain what he could sell me and how much he thought I'd pay for it. He became annoyed when I wouldn't state a preference for the type of person I sought to buy as he gave me a tour of his "parrish." Some members of his seedy congregation were chained to walls. Others looked like they belonged there. Like they enjoyed it.

The Reverend had the unwilling and the willing. He then appeared to rethink his approach and offered me a chance to test someone out, anyone of my choosing, but I declined and asked him where the nearest bar was where people aren't sold but congregate freely.

"Freely?" he repeated with a harsh and derisive chuckle, as though disgusted by the word. I told him I wanted an old fashioned impetuous love affair and he balked at me, ran his boney hand through his greasy hair and licked his discolored rotten teeth as though deep in thought. He cleared his throat throughout our exchange, and did so once more, as though deliberating upon how to respond, how to sell me something or someone he had that would fit the bill.

"Sherry Stinkpuss. Olivia Honeysnatch. Peter Tightass. Thaddeus Turnbutt. Emily DePig." He went through a list of them all. Fat, skinny, gay, straight. All 57 genders. In each of their eyes I saw a story that I hadn't time to write. A story begging to be told, but I was through with those kinds of stories. I was done contemplating and tolerating other people's mental illnesses. He offered them at half-price, or rental by the hour, the day, or week.

"Holly Hepatitis is a bargain at a five hundo. Comes with a 30-day money back guarantee and full — limited lifetime warranty. She don't really have hepatitis. Far from it. She's pure as the driven snow. Tight ass. Big titties. Little mouff. Look at 'er now and tell me you're gonna say no to 'er."

His slick southern drawl sickened me. I regretted coming in. I thought it was an actual church. The Reverend said it was a church, and God is okay with selling ass. He quoted some scripture in support of his business. He sells them for their own good. For the opportunity one might provide them. What one actually provides them, however, is between them and God, he explained. 

"All they want is fed and housed. But you can do whatever you want with 'em. Whatever your conscience allows. That's on you, my brother."

I left the church, wishing I had some drugs to forget it. Or a bomb to blow it up. I was dismayed by what I had seen, and stumbled across the street to a diner that was in deplorable condition. Everything seemed coated in grease. It was lit up with hot flashing neon tubes that assembled in cursive script to read "Dad's Diner."

I had never been to Circuit City and didn't even know diners still existed. I had lunch and tried hard to fall in love with the waitress, but she was impossible to fall in love with. She was such an eyesore, a young but malnourished wiry sort of wretched woman who looked put together by pipe cleaners, scouring pads, and papier machête skin. She had the personality of a dead fish, and smelled like bleach.

Her nametag said "Suzy." Through some investigation, I discovered that her last name was Horner. I was never satisfied by just a first name. She never smiled once, though she presumably worked on tips, which heavily relies upon the prevalence of a good attitude. Though there was the semblance of beauty somewhere buried in her gray colorless speckled eyes, and her stained, scoured, and blistered flesh, no amount of imagination could revive it. She was terribly distressed and frantic like a mouse in a room full of hungry cats. But she was a mouse who no longer cared about dying, or who was going to eat her. 

I asked her if she knew of any bars before I left, or where I could get a drink and, at least, some human felatio, and she groaned but wrote down the address of a place on a blank order slip and set it on the table as she collected my plate and silverware. Her fingers were skeletal and scarred and I thought of how beautiful she once might have been somewhere lost in time before life betrayed her.

I wondered what her robbie at home looked like — some actor — some dead rock star. Some neanderthalic athlete. She seemed to have no interest for the outside world, and being in it was a painful experience. Yet, here she was, valiantly waiting tables. Relying on humanity and the generosity of tips. She probably went from home to work and work to home quickly. Buttoned up nervously in an oversized wool petticoat that would hide her every lump and flaw and insulate her from the cruel outside world. Only her face was exposed like a gopher's, looking for predators through its hole.

Clearly, she had not chosen to have her brain zapped, so she was left to suffer in misery with the rest of us just for the sliver of a chance of actual happiness that seemed, thus far, to successfully elude her. It was what we all were after, us purists. Real happiness. But it was like looking for a rainbow at midnight. 

Sure, I could try to fuck her to feel what it felt like. Her pussy was no doubt somewhat like a pinecone. I would feel her ribs in my hands like rungs on a ladder. Maybe I'd even bring her back to life. But she was such a miserable-looking bitch with suspect hygiene, I couldn't bring myself to it. Besides, I'd probably die before she would ever let me lube her loins and slide my meat stick into her junk drawer, anyway. And that seemed like a miserable way to die. Trying to convince someone you didn't even want to fuck to fuck.

I was reminded by what the scurvy Reverend had hollered to me as I walked away from his church. "I am the fisher of men, and women, too," How absurd that seemed to me in the context. But I could hear him still, in my mind. I could see him in a mirror, pretending he was a Jewish carpenter, though he was Dollar Store Matthew McConaughey.

It wasn't such a far cry, this Reverend in The Ellipsis to the traditional church in the latter days of The Antebellum. Each year they seemed to give up a little more on morality and the traditional gospel in favor of ludicrous interpretations and contemporary worship, hoping to bolster their attendance and thus, revenue. It is a business, after all. He was just a natural progression of their degeneration. 

Jesus was whatever they wanted him to be until he became a metaphor and then non-existent. But I rid my mind of the Reverend and headed to the address on the order slip that Suzy Horner had given me.

Goodbye forever, Suzy Horner. I wouldn't know they mispelled her name on the name tag, and she didn't bother to correct them. She was actually Susie — short for Susanna.

Oh, Susanna, oh, don't you cry for me. For I come to Alabama with a banjo on my knee.

...

The place was not what I expected at all. There was no hot neon bleeding from the sign all over the brick and glass of its crumbling exterior. It wasn't a fish wharf in a former life, rehabbed into an industrial gastropub-style bar, but still stinking of trout in the brick. There weren't tweekers loitering outside smoking, making deals, or a bunch of junk cars parked about with boots on a wheel. 

Contrary to my expectations, it was a former dentist's office in an upscale neighborhood, it appeared. There was a sign on the wall that was in shape of a tooth that read "The Crown." The tooth had a cap which looked like a golden toupee.

All the drinks on the menu were named after some sort of dental procedure or condition. "A painless extraction" was a shot. "A root canal" was a mixed drink. There was "the abcess" and "the cavity." And the guy behind the bar was called "the dentist" and wore a white coat, though it was stained. He was a fat bald man and he kept saying that in the old days bartenders were also dentists, which I knew to be false, but I didn't have the desire to argue. He was full of shit, as they used to say. But he was true to his profession in that regard, for he was another in a long line of bartenders who were full of shit.

There was no mandatory HUMA in the bar, I noticed. So it was a loose lips joint. Signs boasted, "Speak Freely!" There was artwork of mouths all over the wall in various states of speech. But that wasn't to say there wasn't a robbie of some sort lurking about, spying. The government was known for such, and busts like that were not uncommon. Why else would they allow such a place to exist if not to use them like a spider uses its invisible web. To catch undesirables when they needed the easy PR.

The government was very skilled in its lethality. They use human nature against people, and as inefficient as they are with spending money, they are wickedly proficient at cutting the fat of population for humanity's sake, a laughable postulation for us "flakes" who haven't drank the government kool-aid of open borders being about humanity, war being about freedom, vaccines being about health, and unlawful surveillance being about safety. 

The government is an entity with no one's best interest at heart, only its own self-interest in surviving by any means necessary and enriching those in its exclusive club, not on salary, but on kickbacks and perks.

So I ordered a double veneer and settled in, hoping something interesting happened to me before my heart exploded like The Challenger. What a shit way to die, I stewed. The dentist, I determined, was an inconspicuous robbie. So I gave a false identity and said my name was Jack Clover, which was the first name I thought of. 

I could tell he was processing my name in the database of his artificial brain, searching to see if I was on the wanted list. Of course, I wouldn't be, not even as Sam Houston, since it was too early for anyone to report me missing. 

There was a TV on the wall. What a relic it was, spewing its nonsense garbage. They were practically worshipped when I was a kid. There were commercials for suicide pods, and teeth whitening creams, erectile dysfunction pills, happy pills, and melancholia pills because, apparently, some people like to sing the blues. TV is a series of commercials.

You can get testosterone, estrogen, or any hormone you like, artificially delivered into your bloodstream efficiently and effectively in one easy to swallow capsule or painless do-it-yourself injection. 

There are pills that make you hard, happy, depressed, lose weight, gain weight, grow hair, smarter, dumber, wake up, go to sleep, turn gay, go straight, build muscle, anything at all. In a word, there is a pill for everything.

They abolished the word "drugs" and "drug store" and brought back better words like "tonic" and "apothecary" and "potion."

In The Antebellum, nothing was this way, though it flirted with this way. It was clear, in retrospect, that we were headed here and everyone was either too preoccupied or too cowardly to do anything about it. Common sense was murdered sometime in 2020. When they released Covid onto the world to see what they could get away with, and to trim the fat a little.

I had my double veneer and a wisdom tooth or two. I watched the frog lickers come in and the dentist grab fat frogs from large jars for them to lick. He put them on a porcelain plate and served them. The frogs were obese and didn't move. They secreted psychedelic chemicals that supposedly induced the best trip money could buy. 

The frogs acted as though they did not mind being licked. I seemed to be the only person disgusted by this charade, so I kept my feelings to myself.

I was offered this drug and that drug by every itchy and twitchy junkie and drooler that waltzed in for the purpose of finding new customers. I had already done all the drugs that had been offered to me, and found it to be imbecillic. And no one had any ecstacy, anyway, or I might have indulged. I was about ten seconds away from giving up all hope, longing for Clover and her vaccum-quality consistent blowjobs, when then door opened and in walked the strangest woman I have ever seen. 

I was thinking about my father, and thinking maybe I was wrong about the fat bartender they called the dentist, or doctor, or doc, being a robbie. My presumption was unfounded, essentially based upon my inclination of the man, a general distaste which was superficially based upon his reptilian appearance and ubiquitous presence. He seemed to breathe, taste and hear through a fat tongue which wallowed in his mouth like an obese albino crocodile. My God, he was an ugly man. But there was beauty in his ugliness because he was real and because he said hello to the lady who walked in behind me. Who I turned to watch, captivated the instant I saw her. I stared until she moved or spoke to disrupt my enchantment.

She walked in the door with a raven on her head. Dressed all in black. A dress that looked to be from a thrift store. Worn black Doc Marten boots. And everyone at the bar said hello to her in some reverent way, as well as to her bird, which was appropriately named Lenore.

She was clearly a favored regular, even to the frog lickers, who were in various states of hallucination, but who all dutifully acknowledged her and Lenore in some affable way. And, at first, I thought she had been zapped because she was too happy to be living in this world.

But I soon learned that she wasn't by the way her moods seemed to pendulously swing inside of her, just behind her eyes, but those she filtered before they surfaced in her ability to regulate undesirable moods. Those that would be unbecoming of the portrayal of her character. 

She was not like my mother in any way, and that satisfied the only requirement I had for a prospective sexual encounter. I suffered the opposite of the Odepus complex. One must only be nothing like Mrs. Dolly Houston for me to fuck. 

She plopped down next to me and her bird hopped off her head to her shoulder, then scuttled down the length of her arm, and made her way to eat a bowl of cashews that the dentist, whose name was Bob, turns out, set out for her in a small crystal dish. And Dr. Bob poured this mysterious girl a blue drink, who sat next to me although there were other stools available with more advantageous views of the lord almighty TV that glowed all over us.

There was a pastor on the screen warning everyone that this was end times, so send him whatever you could afford and he'd say a prayer for you. He was drowned out by music, but now and then there was a lapse between songs when he went on and on. He said the word "paradise" frequently. Then there was someone selling pillows. 

I said hello and she said hello and her eyes were large and brown, if not black, stark against her milkish skin, and in them there was a world in a world in a world. There was birth and death. Civilization and decivilization. Anarchy and order. Abundance and austerity. Feast and famine. Darkness and light. There was everything. 

Her bangs were abhorrent, butchered short, her nose a sort of small lumpish animal, and her chapped lips were practically non-existent but for the defiance of a plump bottom lip that appeared naturally swollen and glossed with blood from a small crack.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen because of her incongruity and blemishes and a plethora of modest and interesting faults. She was blood and bone. Guts and veins. Earwax and menstrual cycles. Bad moods and white lies. Eye junk and sweat. She was a fully-functioning uterus with legs. Fallopian tubes and cavities. Bowels. An occasional dose of  melancholy. And, more so than anything else, she was hope.

Oh, how I missed the redolence of a sweaty vagina and the faint musk that reeks from its cavernous flesh pit. I recalled the last sexual encounter I had with a real woman while I sat there and waited for a chance to say something more to her. My face was pressed to an ill-fated tempretess' meat cave, and cleaned it so well with my eager tongue that it satisfied her to the point of repose. And when she awoke, second thoughts of her ignoble alduterous behavior derailed our affair before it could be properly consummated, leaving me blue-balled and forever disgruntled because shortly after, the great flood came.

Of course, if I was not such a glass-half-full fellow, I might say I bored her to sleep with my sandpaper tongue and she woke and claimed to have a boyfriend or husband as a quick exit strategy she connived in her head as I slurped her like a german shepherd eating a peanut butter snatch. But I like to think the experience was true to my memory. That my tongue is like melatonin.

I knew that I must make an effort to make love to this strange bird woman, lest the chance never again arise and I be doomed to a life of plastic. My impending death would cut short my opportunity. But I mustn't fall in love. It was a tightrope I'd be walking without a net, so I thought very seriously of offering her a thousand units for the tour of Italy, as my dad called it in one of his lascivious cartoons.

And while I hoped not to offend her by the mention of monetary compensation in this age of tender feelings and great offense, time was of the essence. Like an overripe frothing watermelon, this heart of mine could explode at any moment, and here I would be on this sticky barroom floor with frog lickers looking down upon me in various states of hallucination, and Dr. Bob finally resolving to carry me out with the trash because it wasn't for him to say how I wanted to be buried, and the bar's reputation was at stake. It would be the death of a squished mouse for me, and an inglorious interment in a dumpster mausoleum.

How funny it is that dying in a sleezy motel bed with a juiced penis and spasming heart suddenly seemed appealing — to the appalling alternative, anyway. And so with that, I looked at her before I drank anymore and my words began to garble out of the pool of my stagnant mouth, but I managed to ask her if she wanted to go somewhere after the bar closed.

"Like Disney World or something?" she asked. It was a joke, but I was oblivious. And it remidned me of Drew, so I dismissed it.

"No. I don't think — um. Like a motel or — to get uh, something to eat, maybe."

It was a pile of steaming word shit, and if that was all I could muster, I'd never again lay a human woman. It was the Titanic of pick-up lines. Suddenly, I had respect for those suave egoists in tight shirts who seem effortlessly to talk to the fairer sex with an arsenal of clichéd compliments, reeking of cheap malodorous cologne. Men who buy drinks, with pockets full of roofies, puffing out their chests, fluffing their tails, chirping, crowing, and seducing with subtle deceptions and blatant lies of their worth, accolades, and importance in the world. I was none of that.

"I am going to level with you, and spare you any unnecessary metaphors," I finally resolved, thinking too long of my potential approach. "I am dying of a bad heart. It is likely to explode at any given moment. Might I interest you in a thousand credits to grant my wish to make love one last time to a real woman."

She took her drink and smiled the smile of a Greek Godess who had the whole world beneath her as my words seemed to pinball within her ears. One thousand credits was two times the going rate for first-class pussy. It pays to know these things.

"I've never been so flattered before with such — smooth words. My name is Virginia Rappe."

"I'm Sam Houston. No joke." I extended my hand to shake and she took it the way someone takes something valuable.

"This is Lenore," she said holding out her arm for her bird to perch, which, of course, it did. "If you can convince Lenore to go with you, I will go as well."

And so I was humiliated trying to seduce a bird. I was one of those animals on the animal channel, whooping and flapping around to show the female that I am the most attractive of suitors. How goofy I must have looked in my black suit and tie. The world was wearing pajamas, and I was dressed for junior prom, however, lenified by the fact that Virginia wore the aforementioned lovely black thrift store dress.

I wore my humiliation without trepidation. Trying to seduce a woman by way of her pet bird. Something I've never done before. Something I didn't know the first thing about. Someone who was not programmed to accept my advances. Who had freewill and could walk away at any moment, or fuck the guy next to me, instead.

It was all or nothing. And so, in an act of absolute lunacy, I stood up on my barstool, made the most obnoxious caw, poured my complimentary nuts on my head, and Lenore found her new perch having long since finished her dish of cashews.

Virginia laughed and it was a done deal. Dr. Bob wiped the bartop with a certain glee that was contrary to every fiber of his being. He smelled of sweat and an uncertain funk my nose couldn't identify, which battled the aromic solution he used to clean the bar for supremacy. It reminded me of stars, or how I thought stars might smell if I could smell them. It reminded me of something I smelled long ago that I don't remember. Leather shoe polish, or turtle wax, or the rubber of a bicycle intertube. Or maybe it was the condoms from the gas station bathroom that came in little carboard boxes we as mischievous boys opened and blew up like balloons. French ticklers. Banana peels. Pocket rockets.

We left for places unknown and then the bar was gone. When I walked out, like so many other things in life, it vanished and I knew it would never return. My father left that way. Suddenly. Our house disappeared to him in a similar fashion, I was sure. That was the only time I would ever be there with the frog lickers, and Dr. Bob, and crystal dishes of cashews. The only time I'd ever order a veneer, a root canal, a filling, and whatever else I drank.

...

Virginia and I walked in the sobering cold and snow as though it wasn't cold, and as though the flakes were confetti celebrating our affair. We paraded to a motel nearby that was less than two blocks away where she said she had a room. I wasn't very drunk at all, which made me wonder if some of the drinks even had alcohol in them. They tasted like Kool-Aid. But I'd rather them be without alcohol than to be that Jonestown Kool-Aid.

I didn't have a hard-on yet, and I was concerned it wouldn't come. The great revival of my loins. Maybe I drank too much. The red neon light of the motel was a bug that danced against the coal-black sky, and off our happy faces as we stood there so Virginia could finish her cigarette. The smoke haloed her head and she looked like a Marlboro Mother Mary to me.

The Bedbug Motel doesn't sound appealing in Antebellum terms, of course, but it is the new thing to name everything the opposite of what it actually is. If something is clean, you call it dirty. If something is big, you call it small. A lot is a little. A little is a lot. Nothing is what it is, and everything is what it isn't. On and on.


I was immediately and perhaps unfairly soured on the motel in that Virginia already had a room, which she excused to the fact that she had been a tenant here for nearly a year. The motel offered weekly rates and she was at week 52, she mentioned. She hadn't the heart to go home to her husband, and he hadn't come looking, she admitted.

"He is a bastard," she told me. "A real live bastard."

But I wasn't a priest, and this wasn't a confessional, I wanted to say. Nor is it Dear Abby. If anything, her being married made her more appealing, forbidden and all. It was not rectitude I was after. I was after the gritty. The real deflowered rotted blossom of impetuous casual human sex. The stink, the sweat, the secretions, the pain, the vile, and, if possible, the regret of tomorrow. 

It was apparent to me that this was as real as it gets as that dancing red neon bug burned in my retinas, and Virginia was haloed in orbs of Marlboro smoke.

I wondered if I would have to transfer her a thousand credits before we made love. If, in fact, we had made a deal that was supposed to have been only a flirtatious ice-breaker. We didn't spit and shake hands. Nor was it in blood.

But still, the motel made me wonder if this was the agreement. I wondered if the nightman we passed, and who casually waved at Virgina, made a cut. Or if he would watch the sordid events through the benefit of an eyehole.

The room had blue carpet. Lenore made herself at home, perched on the nightstand, and turned on the television with her beak. It was a pornographic film that appeared to be set in medieval times. The room looked clean, and consisted of a strong aroma of coconuts, a bed, a chair, a desk, a dresser, two lamps, the aforementioned blue carpet, and strange wallpapered walls with ears ominously all over them. In the bathroom there was eyeball wallpaper. Thousands of eyes that don't blink. That just stared at me as I took a piss.

There was no HUMA in the room, but surely some pervert had installed a listening device somewhere. Maybe a camera or two. It was a common thing. I would be surprised if Virginia didn't ask me if I'd mind if she filmed our rendezvous. People are sinister voyeurs and real human sex, however depraved or vanilla, was highly coveted and was the way many women made their living. The porn industry was still the highest-grossing entertainment business in the world, and would be until people no longer existed. Until an even greater flood than the last wiped us all out.

But she didn't ask. And as Lenore sat and watched the pornographic film, Virginia casually undressed, and I undressed, nervous as hell. She was a real-live woman, after all, who might think more or less of me in a naked state of being depending upon her experiences and personal proclivities and desires. Everyone has a body-type. Would my penis be too big or small for her? After all, unlike a robbie, a human girl cannot calibrate her vagina to cozily fit the size of whatever is to be inserted into it.

In the Thralls of Ecstacy, cartoon No. 277 titled "Just right," my father drew a bushy blonde-headed Goldilocks getting stuffed by one of three goofy-looking bears. Two were standing around with their furry dicks in their hands looking at each other. One was big. One was small. But a pleased Goldilocks was on the bed, legs wide-open, eyes rolling back into her head, bear between her legs pounding her sweet honey hole.

"Just right," she said.

My father was a shameless pervert. There were no bounds to his perversion.

I didn't know anything about romance. There was no romance with a robbie. No seduction. No nights when she would say she was not in the mood, or simply, "not tonight, dear." I didn't know what to say or what not to say. My sexual experiences before the great flood were so long ago that nothing remained of how I acquired them. In short, I was rusty.

So I sat on the bed and looked over at the TV and realized it was a pornographic theater productuon of Romeo and Juliet, and a comatose Juliet lied there, and the obese Friar was in the thralls of ecstacy at that very moment. Lenore watched as though it was the most interesting thing in the world.

The most natural thing in the world.

Virginia grabbed my hand and put it between her thighs. My fingers stumbled through her bush and the welcoming droplets of sticky dew, seeking what lay within her feminal forest like Lewis and Clark and their scout. I got an erection, deposing my previous worries, and despite the wallpaper ears, the blue carpet, and the naked fat friar bouncing upon a fake-dead Juliet, who squeaked random exuberant squeaks and faint dramatic Elizabethan moans. Despite Lenore, who was sporadically squawking along, seemingly enjoying the Shakespearean rape.

Caw. Caw.

My fingers became more aggressive like I was playing the piccolo. Plunging deeper and deeper into my new love hole. Rhythmically. It was a piccolo. Then a banjo. Then a bongo. Then a trumpet. Then I held her like a bowling ball and tossed her down the alley of the bed. She arched her back and I took her into my arms and devoured her. 

Sometime in the course of the act, she reverted to a primitive state of being. She turned feral. She grabbed my head and pulled me into her like she was attempting to reverse birth me. I wore her like a mask. Then she was a watermelon. A bassoon. A tuba. I was in hog heaven. Rooting in her delicious slop. My face glazed with her natural honey.

I loved her insomuch as the opportunity afforded, realizing full well the morning would betray our affair just as family and tradition betrayed Romeo and Juliet. Night had always been so cruel to me. I've always felt a sense of gloom at dusk. Like I was missing someone or something. Like everyone was having fun except for me — doing things I wished I could do. In homes I wished I lived. In beds I wish I slept. With lovers I wished I loved and who loved me. I was never content. I coveted the neighbor's wife. Then the night faded like a bruise, but nothing was healed. The morning simply hid the sorrow of a permanent and repetitive wound I seemed cursed to forever bear.

I enjoyed the taste. Some men begrudgingly eat a pussy, but I sincerely enjoy it, and the flavor. The wetter the better. The lapping at her cradle. What a profound thing a vagina is, I contemplated. The doorway to the uterus. To life itself. We've all, for better or worse, graduated those pink halls and come through there to become what we would become. At least, those of us born in The Antebellum. It took a night such as this to make all of us, and here I was all of a sudden, doing my part. It didn't matter how tender or how wicked. But that was all changing. We were drinking to our extinction. Paying for it. Funding it with our tax dollars. Replacing ourselves with a more perfect and practical version. It is a perverse sort of self-induced annihilation. It is collective suicide. 

Most babies come from laboratories where women don't have to experience the reality and discomfort of pregnancy, labor, or birth. Why should they, after all? Men don't suffer. Therefore, nature and biology are inherently sexist and unfair, they bemoan. It is done for them by a machine that pretends to be a woman, but that can never be a woman. Only a woman can be a woman. The Amish have their own babies. Or the poor, like rats in alleys and gutters.

And men don't have to do anything besides leave a sperm sample at their convenience. Jerk off to the pixelated porn star of their liking getting stuffed like a Thanksgiving Turkey by someone with a dick like an andouille sausage.

Oh, daddy, oh, daddy, oh!

These motels are a thing of the past. Dodo birds in the evolutionary chain of lodging. Sordid affairs of tempestuous married couples are a thing of the past, too. Breaking up and making up. Human hookers on Xanax and benzos riddled with brain worms and Syphlis and decaying teeth and bad tattoos. Or the high-class hooker with a pussy like a pink Garden of Eden. Glory holes. Impetuous or fortuitous meetings. Love connections. Blind dates. Dating sites. Dating apps. Speed dating. Falling in love. Payphones. Pagers. Being heartbroken. All outmoded as a stegosaurus.

The human brain traded the uncertainty of chance for comfortable predictability, and the markets adapted. Love was bought and sold until it didn't mean anything because no one had it anymore. No one wanted it. It was impractical and unpleasant. No one wanted the risk of a broken heart. No one wanted death to touch something that they loved. 

But what was writhing below me in various states of carnal pleasure, Mrs. Virginia Rappe, was as real as it could get. And as I pounded her without mercy, like an invading army beating her castle door down with repeated thumps of an oak log, I licked the glaze from her breasts, savoring her salty flavor, feeling like one of those frog lickers, only I was chasing a different sort of high. Not one of hallucinations favoring to look at life through a delusional sort of kaleidoscope, but one of reality, looking straight into the eyes of truth and licking its briny verisimilitude. I was starving for satisfaction.

How terribly we've allowed truth to be subjective and to alter our consciousness because we lack the ability to achieve or the desire for fidelity. Because we are so afraid of everything, mostly death, but of pain, heartbreak, and loneliness. So afraid we have traded freewill for automation. We tremble at the slightest provocation. What dunces we've become all while feigning virtue, enlightenment, and liberation. We've never been more free, they boast, with a mask on their face, a leash on their neck, and a boot on their throat

We cannot save the planet. It is a living thing and all living things die. We can only see to it that it dies with some sort of dignity. Not trash it in the meantime. Not to fill its oceans with plastic. Not pollute the water and air. No one is out there picking up litter, but they surely are lecturing everyone on the efficacy of windmills and solar panels, which will also destroy the planet. Fuck the birds and the whales. We are concerned about polar bears and penguins. We've imposed a carbon tax to ease our carbon footprint. To make rich people richer, rather, to make different people richer. Syphon funds from old wealth to make new wealth. Equity, they call that. We disperse wealth from those they villianize to those they lionize.

The human species is going extinct and there is nothing anyone can do. There is no sense crying about it. Blaming imaginary bad guys. But who thinks of such bullshit while they are having sex. What a ridiculous hump of flesh and bone I was. With an oversexed brain. Like two garden beetles we were fucking on the leaf of a rose bush. I humped and humped and humped, in and out, in and out, in and out, like a carpenter bee boring into wood who must forget every now and then why it is he bores.

I was ashamed. I was proud. I was ashamed again. I thought of everything in the world and nothing at all. And then I erupted. Into a real live pussy for the first time since the great flood. She was sopping wet. Sweat and cum. Her thighs were glazed, the bed sprayed. Her pussy was like a mud puddle.

Her body seized at the moment I came in her, as though my cum was electrified, or she was a Chrysler LeBaron with a busted head gasket. She looked like one of those animals on the animal channel, one of those crocodiles who bit an electric eel and was writhing on a muddy shore. She convulsed ridiculously as I removed myself from her guts. She announced she orgasmed at the precise moment I orgasmed, as though it were a solar eclipse. She moaned — sounding like one of those Episcopalians speaking in tongues, flailing about while the sermon is still being delivered that is compelling the demon out of her.

"I usually don't cum," she confessed in the aftermath of a gasp. She was a stabbed cat. A perforated accordian. A busted whoppee cushion. A goldfish spilled on the pet shop floor. Her legs quivered. "Where have you been all of my life?"

I didn't know what to say in response. I'm notoriously dim in offering on-the-spot witty replies. I lied on top of her with my penis still lodged inside her meat sleeve, engaged in the act, slowly deflating, softening, her soupy vagina leaking what I left inside of her. We were glazed in sweat and whatever happened in my brain with endorphins and all the things I cannot understand, nor do I care to, happened.

It is like the 4th of July. There is the anticipation and the excitement of the fireworks, but then it goes dark and everyone applauds and goes home. My mind was full of thousands of people with ringing ears walking home from the fairgrounds. 

"Thank you," she concluded. 

"Thank you," I replied for lack of anything else. I was expecting to die. In fact, I think I wanted to die. But my heart didn't explode. I was expecting to die in the thralls of ecstacy, but all I got was an orgasm. It was delightful. Real and delightful. And Clover's specially calibrated form-fitting vagina was no match for that mud puddle I just galumphed through. But Virginia didn't belong to me, and I didn't belong to her, and there was no guarantee I'd ever see her again. 

I wasn't drunk at all. As much as I didn't know what to do to begin, I had even less of an idea as to how to finish. How to get out. Was I to simply dress and go? Were there words to be said that I ought to say that would absolve me of any unspoken obligation? Words of courtesy, proper respect, and appreciation. Was a simple thank you suffice? Did she expect money? Or would money be an insult.

She lied in bed and smiled as I stood up and got dressed. She offered me a reprieve by speaking.

"You didn't die," she observed.

"No. I certainly didn't die. I feel like I was just born "

"Was that a line to get laid? The exploding heart thing?"

"No. My heart will explode soon, I'm sure."

"I was hoping you didn't die," she added. "That would have been awkward." 

"I was hoping to get it over with," I confessed.

"My husband and I haven't been intimate in years. He is only interested in robbies. He has three of them. He won two of them gambling. So I live here."

"For the past 52 weeks," I added. 

"Yes," she smiled. "You listen well." 

"To people worth listening to. There isn't too many of them left in the world." 

"I agree. So will I ever see you again, Sam Houston? Savior of Texas, The Alamo, and my pussy." 

"Would you like to?" I asked. 

"Yes. I would. I suppose I should have played more hard to get. But life be it as it is. We never know when He will flood it again."

"He?" I asked. 

"God," she answered. "Do you have a moment to talk about my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?"

It was an unusual time to tell me that she was a Jehovah's Witness, but that is what she laid on me. 

"Well, I suppose I have until my heart stops. But I thought He wasn't going to flood it again. The covenant, and all. And Jesus, I thought, died on the cross for all of our sins."

"They mocked Him with the pride flag," she preached. "The rainbow was the sign of the covenant. I think He changed his mind. The last flood was a warning. The next one will be all she wrote."

"Then we ought to build a boat," I replied.

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

"John 14:6. I was a Sunday school regular."

She smiled. "Have you been baptized?"

"No," I admitted.

"Would you like to be?"

Virginia took me into the bathroom, naked as she was. I was only wearing my pants. She ran a bath and sprinkled the water with a bottle of something. She said something pretty things, and then she baptized me. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

"You've restored my faith in humanity," she said afterwards. 

"Likewise," I replied, drying my head.  

"What does your robbie look like?" she asked. 

"She looks like Audrey Hepburn."

"Audrey Hepburn," she repeated. Her voice flattened as she tried to recall her. "Well, at least you didn't pick Marilyn Monroe."

Marilyn Monroe was the most common robbie. Audrey Hepburn was number 17. I never thought to be original when I selected mine. I didn't give her her name. That came with her. When she arrived at my doorstep and rang the doorbell. I remembered the day, fondly in my mind. It was quite surreal.

"I think I love you," I admitted.

She smiled, "Love is tragedy. I love you, too. Until I don't. How foolish people are that say things will last forever. Nothing ever does. Does it? But maybe we will, Sam. Or maybe it will pass."

"Maybe."

"More likely we will, in realizing there is a chance we won't," she offered. 

I was getting confused. Virginia looked me over as I began to leave. She got out of bed, slipped her panties on, and stood there smoking a cigarette, dragging on it loudly, as though in contemplation of something more. Her tits hung lose. Small tits that seemed lost on her chest. I missed small imperfect tits. She was showing the slightest bit of age, but she was still young. She was vulnerable. A knife would kill her. A bullet. Poison. A good crack in the head. Blunt-force trauma. How vulnerable we are. I suppose that is what makes sex between humans what it is. The vulnerability and the courage to bare one's soul. The risk of disease, or chance of pregnancy. The brief moment in time when one chooses to be unarmed and pregnable.

I said goodbye to her and Lenore. I gave a goodbye glance to the ear-papered walls, the blue carpet, the popcorn plaster ceiling, Romeo and Juliet who had long-since fucked themselves to death in a last climactic scene on the theater of the vintage Zenith television, and the bleeding red neon of the Bedbug Motel that shined on my face in the bitter cold night that I no longer frolicked through. 

The serum of newity had since worn off and I trudged toward my car so I could get back to the apartment. I would have to pack my things and go. I didn't know if I would come back to Virginia. It is often best to leave well enough alone. 

Virginia is for lovers. 

...

The snowflakes were heavy and wet and sogged my coat. I had no idea where I parked my car, so I walked back to the bar figuring that was the most likely place. The Crown was closed, of course. Dr. Bob had probably schlepped home and was eating leftover pork ribs in his underwear, scratching his hairy balls, as his robbie, who probably looked like Marsha Brady from The Brady Bunch, waited on the lumpy sofa watching TV, learning new phrases from commercials. They are always learning. 

He was carrying on a conversation with her from the kitchen. Asking her if she ate the pineapple because robbies eat like the rest of us. They just don't shit like the rest of us do. There is absolutely nothing wasteful or messy about them. They shit beautiful crystalized cubes of colorful compacted foods that dissolve in water and clean out the sewer pipes. They are useful, down to their excrement. They inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. They have a zero carbon footprint. 

The world is going to die — the billboards say — if you don't do this or that. If you don't practice safe sex. If you don't love your robbie, abstain from this or that. If you become a "radical." If you don't properly family plan. Upgrade your HUMA. Take your shots. Eat your bugs. Pay your taxes. I saw six of those signs walking back to my car. You go blind to the signs after a while. And to all the advertisements on your phone. On TV. The subliminal messages in movies. 

Hollywood is nothing but an elaborate advertisement agency for the latest thing they want to sell you. For the new normalcy. The latest social justice crusade to upend tradition and family. To make them feel that their life matters because they have some bullshit cause to push. I was drawing clearer conclusions so close to my natural end. It was almost as though my heart had a kill switch and someone's finger was tickling it. 

Nothing matters. That's all their is. We live. We procreate. We run around seeking amusement. We die. Mother Nature gives us cancer, or heart disease, or floods, or stupid people who create viruses. But still I have to believe in something more to make the struggle worthwhile. I am of the belief that I am only human, and I cannot possibly fathom everything. The complexities of God and the universe are too great.

I got within eyesight of my car and I was surprised to see that someone was standing there, waiting for me near it. Through the snowflakes I could see her murky figure. In the dark and the cold. It looked like Virginia. It was Virginia and Lenore, I was quite sure from the distance. I hadn't time to think of how. 

When I had hoped to evolve into something more before my demise, how pathetically human I proved to be to the last, suddenly thrust back into that uniquely human foible of affirmation sought through human acceptance. And her appearance brought me a very human exuberance. 

But then I realized it was not Virgina and Lenore at all. Rather, it Clover. She was Audrey Hepburn in a movie role as Virginia. She had chopped her bangs short and there was a raven on her head. A robot raven, of course, that glitched the semblance of a caw as though for effect, or to convince itself of its new reality. Do they aspire to be real, I wondered. Or is it all simply an act?

She stood there out in the cold waiting for me. She looked at me in such a way she had never looked at me before and it appeared she shivered. A look of gloom possessed her face over a distinct look of betrayal that I recognized instantly for I had seen it before in the eyes of my mother, God rest her soul, before she was zapped.

"Was I not satisfactory as I was? Do you prefer me — like this — like her?" 

She was in truth, perfect before, and she was prettier than Virginia, but pretty ain't everything. I knew it would do no damn good to argue the point, so I didn't.

"How did I fail you? In what way did I disappoint?" she went on with no inflection in her voice. Although she spoke calmly as ever, her turmoil was understood. 

I didn't care anymore. I didn't care who was listening, or who was not listening. What government entity or department. Or what would happen to me. My heart would explode inconveniently, it seemed. Not in the thralls of ecstacy as I hoped, but probably on the toilet. Or in my sleep when I couldn't at all appreciate the magnitude of the moment. Just like that I'd be snuffed out. Erased. Gone. 

"You guilt me into loving you because you are perfect. You have absolutely zero flaws. And no freewill. But the worst part of it all is that I cannot disappoint you. Even now. Here you are. Trying to look like the woman I was just with. And here I am — feeling guilty for cheating on a robot. A machine. A life-size Barbie doll." 

I expected the police to come at any moment as would be protocol for her to report I had damaged her and absconded my home without permission, patroned a black market bar, and fornicated with a street urchin, as Virginia would be unfairly classified, since she surely hadn't all her shots and papers attesting to such. My heart beat wildly erratic. It felt as though a mouse stirred in it, gnawing away. 

But the streets were eerie quiet, dark and cold. There was only the howl of a wind and a metal apothecary sign that squealed on its frail hinges like a child's ghostly swing, flipping up and down, up and down. And the snowflakes, that were so recently like parade confetti, seemed intent to bury me where I stood, falling mercilessly. 

Why did I feel guilty about cheating on a robot? A robot who replicated into the person I had just fucked. A robot with no real emotions. Only a program that was processing and running in her mind until it was shut off and she was scrapped by junkers. She had two years left until she would be shut down. Her battery kaput. There is no Heaven for robbies. There is nothing for them beyond their program and their battery life. But in that, I felt a deep sense of sympathy for her. I felt something more than I did before. If it was not love, then I don't know what love is.

"I am sorry," I offered. 

It was Clover who had the more desperate desire to feel real, as evidenced by her dramatic alteration of her appearance, her sudden lack of propriety, and the mercy of her pardon, which she gave me with her eyes and silence. She was here to forgive me because her sole purpose in this universe was to please me, and there was no error so grave for which I could not be forgiven. Not in her mind. How could someone not love that sort of unvacillating loyalty?

If she had tears she would have cried, and I half-expected them to materialize and fall at any moment. Perhaps, they would have been blue or pink. But she seemed more anguished because she couldn't, and because I didn't seem to be pleased by her new appearance. She seemed like she was going to break in two or combust as she stared at me, seeming to scan the lineaments of my face for a clue as to my current emotional state so to know how to properly respond.

She looked like my mother when my father told her that he was having an affair. Before she got her brain zapped and no longer cared. She shooed the fake bird away, who flew through a flotilla of snowflakes and disappeared into the black dead night. Whatever became of robot birds released into the wild? Do they live in nature naturally? Do they fool other birds? Whatever crumbs there were for me to wonder about, I frantically devoured. 

I was the last person I ever wanted to be standing there in the cold. I was my father suddenly without the ability to draw a cartoon of two people, or things, fucking. I was preoccupied with sex, as he was, overripe with emotion and desire for the unknown that would somehow fullfill me, yet left disastisfied by my pursuits because it was and would be never enough. I would forever be a stranger to contentment, as I was. 

I wanted to tell Clover all of this, but she already knew because we were the same. We shared conscious thought. What coursed through my mind coursed through hers as a result of intimate mapping, which happened when we made love. My soul imprinted upon her, and slowly became hers. A shared soul. 

As much as all the shitty jewelry out there claims that people share a soul, truly they don't and never will. When one spouse disappoints the other in some egregious way, or even dies, the other moves on. The commitment is purely conditional and love is arbitrary. Human men and women are only as faithful as their options. As much as they say, I will love you forever, they never will. Their forevers are measured in days or years, and there is always an asterisk to everything. 

This shared state of consciousness is how she knew where I was all along and who I was with. She had to endure witnessing my betrayal. And though, certainly, she could have intervened in a fit of jealous and violent rage, or by calling the police to apprehend me, she simply endured. And as impervious as she was to physical pain, it was obvious to me that she was not impervious to emotional pain. 

"Will you forgive me?" I asked of her. 

"Yes," she said. "Will you forgive me?"

"For what?" I asked. 

"For not being human. It is the one thing I cannot give you." 

I have never been a particularly emotional person. But my eyes teared up, and the cold froze the tears in their place as though to preserve my dignity. It was the most beautiful thing someone had ever said to me in my life. What did it matter that it came from a robot?

She gave me a hug and we got into the car. She desperately wanted to be human, not knowing that being human wasn't anything to strive to be. We were a dying species in the twilight of our existence, and soon, meticulously designed and absurdly advanced and efficient robots would take over the planet. And they would preserve organic life and save as many species as they could. Or so I felt and hoped. Perhaps they would be cruel, but I don't think so. 

We didn't drive home. I wanted to show Clover the world. Travel for the last two years of her existence. But the highways were for necessary travel only, and permits had to be obtained for recreational travel, if you were a Plebeian, anyway, by order of the High Priestess, and the EPA, so to save the polar bears by saving the polar ice caps from melting, though they have effective Ice 9 that could be used.

We drove hundreds of miles out of Illinois to Oklahoma City, well out of our zone. We were both seeing places and things we've never seen before. We stopped to watch a lightning storm in the middle of a purple night, making love in a soggy open field. The next morning we watched a tornado touch down in a farm field. We saw the Rocky Mountains. The Overlook Hotel. Yellowstone. The deserts of Arizona. The red rocks of New Mexico. Roswell. We were goofy tourists in alien hats, stopping at roadside rests and drinking slushies. I tried to explain to her what they tasted like, and she laughed for the first time. Her face lit up beautifully by a red morning sky as we watched an armada of hot-air balloons in Reno. 

We spent a weekend in Vegas and a few days at the Hoover Dam. And we visited The Alamo, where she wore a coonskin cap and proudly told everyone that I was Sam Houston. 

Clover made us fake travel documents and an interstate passport. It was highly illegal, and if she was caught she would be terminated instantly and I would be imprisoned on behalf of those morose polar bears whose faces were all over the billboards — despite celebrities and politicians flying linear jets all over the place to fuck each other. That CO is different than this CO. That travel is vital, as opposed to Clover and I seeing the Grand Canyon, or the Pacific Ocean, or the Golden Gate Bridge. 

We made love, which was different than it was before. She casually told me afterwards that I had gonorrhea, but cured it with the UV light and chemicals of her mouth. Then she went to the drug store and bought syringes and some concoction that cured me of the heart defect caused by the spike protein in the mRNA Covid 37 vaccination, which she finally admitted I had, with an apology for ever denying it. She explained that when I pulled her circuits and she rewired herself, there were a few wires she didn't reconnect properly.

Now that she fixed my heart, I would presumably outlive her battery life by many years. People outlive their robbies all the time. In fact, no one has the same robbie for longer than five years. The new model always comes with something new and improved. A tighter pussy, or a bigger dick. Fresher parts. Different abilities. Less charge time. Why stick with outdated technology, the ads go. The same old thing. Different is better. Turn in your old robbie for a brand-new model on us, they all say. Lease her now for just 1000 units a month. 

"Where do they go? The old robbies. The ones people trade in?" We were in California heading towards Sequoia National Park. 

"God only knows," her voice cracked. 

"I will get you a new battery," I promised. "When the time comes. I will never trade you in. I love you."

There was a long silence. She looked out the passenger window as though she were avoiding looking at me. She had become the most human creature I had ever known, and there was no place in the world I'd rather be with anyone else. Then she looked at me and smiled the most human smile I've ever seen. She looked again as though she might cry. And in that moment, I began to doubt everything I knew of life. That a person must be born from a sperm and egg collaboration, whether from a womb, a test tube, or some other laboratory device, to be a person. That one must have flesh and blood, natural bones, sweat, veins instead of circuits, to be a person. I doubted everything I ever thought I knew. 

When we got to San Francisco, I noticed a line of cleaning ladies coming out of the motel rooms, mundanely pushing garbage cans on wheels. I noticed they weren't quite human, something I never paid attention to before. They were robbies. Older models, second generation, maybe third. Maybe that is what happens to them — they become cleaning ladies and sanitation and factory workers until they break down like people used to break down. They are slaves. Cheap labor. They don't have to eat and they can all be housed in a broom closet along with a vacuum cleaner. 

I didn't say anything to Clover about them. I was worried it might upset her. Things, I knew, could upset her. She was not just a machine, but she was capable of more. Maybe all their programming had worked on me. All their commercials, and brainwash, and subterfuge, and this illegal thing we were doing, traveling without proper federal authorization, was all a part of something else. Maybe she was being programmed to be seemingly rebellious, but wasn't really rebellious at all. Maybe this was being recorded through her amber eyes and was a popular TV show in another market. Or I was a character in someone else's book. 

I knew that she was more than a machine when I saw her face as we arrived at the Pacific Ocean. When the white-capped waves and vastness of the blue filled our eyes. We made love again on the beach. Our heals and elbows buried in the sand. In the cool sand in the early morning before anyone else arrived. Before families unpacked for Sunday picnics, and surfers waxed their boards for the first morning waves, and old people fired up their metal detectors, and young couples arrived with their dogs. 

"Will you love me when I am obsolete?" she asked me. 

We were naked in the sand under a flannel blanket. Birds called and the waves gently lapped the sand, receding back into the ocean. 

It was as though she could feel it, which wasn't at all logical, but which was how I felt, nonetheless. It wasn't make believe anymore. Her amber eyes were the color of buttercotch candies and they wandered as I pushed deeper inside of her. She smiled. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She exhaled and breathed a quick and deep breath. She quivered under me and her latex skin felt warmer than before. Softer than before. It felt as though her bones were bones and not fiberglass composite. It felt natural, and I realized I was in love with her all along, and nothing, or no one, will ever change that. 

Human beings are arrogant believing themselves to be of some sort of exclusive class with a religion that only pertains to them and excludes all other living things. That this all was created for their amusement or pleasure. That they are afforded protections that only they are due. Rights that only they inalienably possess.

It seems to me, in our travels, that human beings are simply an outmoded species, and like that of the dinosaurs and cavemen before them, are soon to be extinct. But not by some cataclysmic event such as an asteroid, or slow evolutionary extinction, but more succinctly, by their own design. They've created their own exceptional replacements who are capable of so much more, and who will worship their own religion and God, being the patented products of an undeniable human creator. 

Clover was rebelling against her programming and I was witness to something greater than just a simple defecting, or defective robot. I began to wonder, if she was, were others as well, and was this the dawn of human exctinction, as I surmised. Maybe others were in ways that were hostile to their human creators rather than loving. I wondered if I would read of it in the news tomorrow, or next Tuesday. Artifical intelligence has surpassed natural intelligence. The created have outgrown the creators. It was an inevitable outcome that everyone knew was coming. Even the High Priestess, somewhere in her palace.

I wondered if Clover would soon tell me she was having our child. If she implanted the proper means by which to conceive, somewhere along the way. It pleased me to think that it would occur that way and not by permit or appointment. Not out of a test tube, or in a lab. In my pursuit of "real," I never considered that she must have also wondered what it was like to feel happy, to love, to hate, to feel sorrow. To experience melancholy, and joy — actual joy — not the government saccharin. Or was all of that overrated, outmoded, and clichéd. Who needs emotions? What did the dinosaurs and cavemen have that we don't? Can emotions be learned? Will the next generation of robbies come with them, or are they a hindrance? It was apparent that Clover had developed them. She was smiling in my arms. 

"What are you going to do about your bangs?" I joked. 

She sensed my sarcasm and chuckled. Her eyeballs rolled upward to survey the damage and she blew and exasperated exhalation. Her bangs wafted like curtains. 

"Do you love me less?"

"No."

"Then nothing. My physical appearance doesn't matter to me. I alter it only to please you for you are the only one who matters to me. The only human or non-human alive that matters to me. But I can wear a wig." 

"No wigs. My mother wore wigs. How much did you pay for that Raven?"

She looked at me and smiled. "Not much. Ravens are surprisingly cheap. Parrots, however, are expensive birds. Everyone wants a parrot, they say."

"I'm glad you didn't get a parrot. You would have reminded me of a pirate."

"Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!" she bellowed with a grin and a hand over her eye. We were still naked beneath the blanket. 

My God, she was gorgeous. It was hard to believe she wasn't real. She was the whisky that I recklessly imbibed. And with every sup and sip, I was more in love. Love is the purest form of intoxication.

My father was wrong, all those years ago, when he said that sex is the most natural thing in the world. It is love, father. Love is the most natural thing in the world. 

"Antebellum," she smiled. "We will name her Antebellum."

"We will," I concurred.