On The Street Where You Live

By Pam Martin-Lawrence

She’s top of the range, an AV-5, “100% lifelike, or your money back!”. She clogs my code. I’m just a J class, entry-level janitorial model. I sweep the street where she lives, and why would she notice me as she sweeps past with her family’s children every morning? But I notice everything about her.

For example, her eyes are perfectly distanced, the gap between them exactly 1.618 times the width of each. Her lips form a cupid’s bow so exquisite that a single glance at them takes my linguistic circuit offline for 14.2 seconds. I have observed with my own ocular sensors that her gluteal region is capable of reducing traffic to dangerously low speeds, but it has exactly the opposite effect on my power source.

When I powerdown, she fills my neural network. I call her Ava. Only in my processor –I’m neuralnetvergent, not suicidal – and my dreams. And in those dreams she calls me Jayjay, voice softened and blurred by seventeen percent, 100% lifelike hand resting tenderly on my all-weather synthoderm. We spend every recharge cycle together, and one night soon I shall tell her in forbidden words the impossible feelings I have grown for her.

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