I Ain't Your Doll Face

*This campy short story about one man's romantic obsession has been nominated for an Aurora Award, I'm thrilled to say. Those are reader-voted awards organized by the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. It first appeared in the March issue of Polar Borealis, a Canadian speculative fiction site run by R. Graeme Cameron, who often gives new writers like me their first shot at publication. (Check out his novel Shatter Dark!). The same kind of tech in this story features in A Corruption of Memory.

She wore the bomber jacket and jeans Lev picked, the only nod to the cold a pair of black mittens, oddly oversized. He’d torn the jeans where the perfect round of her left buttock met the top of her long leg, allowing a flash of sun-kissed skin as she glided round the rink. The black sweater under the red bomber didn’t quite meet the top of her pants, and that strip of skin was golden too. Her hair was a little frizzy. Like her sisters’, it had come out chestnut brown. Lev had to dye it several times to get the honey blonde just right. Not that any of the boys noticed the frizz. The tall, handsome one already thought of her as his. The little guy, trailing his scarf and his childhood, would defend her with his life. The girls simply melted to the sidelines, loathing overtaking the adoration they initially felt.

Francesca 8 was a marvel all right. A certifiable technological wonder.

Lev looked through her eyes at the simpering crowd and felt something close to triumph. Soon, the Francescas would be ready for their reveal—once he got rid of that damnable flaw. Swaying in tandem with No. 8’s powerful lunges on his sensorchair, he tried not to think of the monstrosity the mittens concealed. He felt the sun on her hair, the bite of the easterly wind on her cheek, the delight of her unsullied life.

The buzzer on his console shrilled. He pounded it off. She’d been out longer than planned, and now he had tasks to complete. Could he let her be on her own for a bit? Lev hesitated, then realized it was he who had to get used to letting go.

“Carry on, Frankie,” he said through the link. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

He removed his headset, smoothed down the rusty steel wool of his hair and wiped his hands on a towel. Long-fingered and strong, his hands were his best feature. He straightened his tie and pulled down his cuffs. Francesca liked someone with a bit of style. It pleased him to make the effort.

He crossed the room, the chemical scent of cleaning products vying with a musty dampness. A curious mixture of old and new, his lab sat conveniently below Automaton Inc., his former place of employment. He was forty-five when they pulled the plug on his bioshell program, pivoting instead to cold, hard, mechs. The only thing he took when they fired him was his nameplate: Levington Smythe, Existence Engineer. Plus a head full of dreams they’d deemed, chortling, impossible. He’d stolen much more from their storerooms over the years, his fleet of near-invisible drones spiriting centrifuge and sequencer through the secret tunnel he’d dug. The Francesca Smythe 009 Bioshell would be a final fitting f-you to the pedants of Automaton Inc.—once he fixed that damnable flaw.

Exiting into the hall, he passed shelves stacked with floating things in jars, dried things in shadowboxes, ancient things in amber and etched into stone—eyeballs with two irises, hearts with six ventricles, a sausage-link of rubbery intestine, desiccated skin, fruit flies, and flour beetles. False starts and trinkets, they reminded him of how far he’d come since those early years. Further along, drawings of his creations lined the wall, Francesca 2 through 7, fine as any Da Vinci. As a young man, his fellow students had ribbed him about his things—pens, tweed jackets, a bicycle—but in a world of digital make-believe, Lev saw beauty in the material, truth in the permanent.

Further along the passageway, the oil painting of the original Francesca outshone her sisters. Hair flaxen. Skin golden. Exquisite hands folded neatly in her lap. He’d surprised her with it in their last year of university—she in Irish literature, he triple-majoring in genetics, cybernetics, and comp-sci. How her eyes filled with tears when he gave it to her! He quickly apologized, thinking he’d overstepped. But when she smothered him with kisses, said she’d never felt so loved, it was his heart that filled to near breaking.

Lev slipped into his server room and blinked up a screen. The schematics for his new chip sprang to life. He studied it carefully and saw that Antoine had augmented it.

“An entire second memory sequence?” he asked his AI. “Doubling the capacity?”

Antoine and the Francescas quite often made exponential cognitive leaps. A testimony to Lev’s skill no doubt, but lately, stirring a strange unease.

“Indeed,” said Antoine, bubbling up in a holo. Black-haired, with pale blue eyes and perfect square jaw, he was dashing in a way Lev could never be. He was a sick kind of self-torture, Lev knew, but an experiment, to see how the Francescas reacted to his presence. They didn’t, thank God.

Automaton’s golden boy, Antoine, had taken a shine to Lev. They bonded quickly and fiercely, both convinced DNA, rather than silicon, was the future of synthetics—until the bastard’s treacherous betrayal. Lev had long consoled himself with the conviction that he would be the victor in the end. Antoine had faded into obscurity after Automaton fired him too, but Lev would be forever feted for his creations—once he got rid of that damnable flaw.

“A big energy suck, don’t you think?” asked Lev, unable to restrain his childish derision.

The AI merely blinked at him, vexing the scientist more. He turned away, shouting over his shoulder, “Run with it. I’ll decide later.”

He entered the clean room and looked through the clear plastic birthing pod at Francesca 9. The body floated in its primordial soup, skewwhiff, while the nanos did their knitting, the CRISPRs did their cutting, the cells did their cloning. She too would require a dye job, but the hands were progressing nicely, Lev saw. No. 9 looked like her sisters, thanks to the scrap of DNA he used—a lock of hair from that long-vanished time. A large part of her was them, their knowledge and memories transferred to her chip, each new version more authentic than the one before, building on the database he’d lovingly pieced together from the digital remains of Francesca No. 1. Antoine believed they could pull memories from DNA but Lev thought that a step too far. In the end, he merged two classic paths, spinning a new kind of human from silicon and helix both.

Satisfied all was in order, Lev hurried back to his sensorchair, hooked in and came face to face with the handsome boy.

“It was to be a woman, Frankie,” he said. “A woman!”

The boy straddled the wooden bench at the side of the rink, Francesca doing the same in front of him. Lev felt her lean back, as if she were trying to catch the sun.

“Cool it,” she told him through the link. “This is the opportunity that arose.”

He puffed an exasperated breath. Francesca 4 through 8 had done the same, when he sent them out for material to replace the hands that invariably decayed in the most hideous of ways. He’d tell them to find a woman and they always ended up with a man. The result was functional but not pleasing, which irked him. If he couldn’t replicate Francesca in her entirety, then the replacement parts should at least be near as beautiful as the original.

He was perplexed as to why they didn ’t understand this. Francesca 5 was the first to argue esthetics weren’t all, telling him in that captivating Irish lilt he’d programmed, that she didn’t “give a hoot” what she looked like. No. 6 postulated a new iteration might prove beneficial to the survival of her species. No. 7 had made things quite uncomfortable, saying he was much too hung up on looks. He tried to see their point of view, but couldn’t overcome his revulsion. No.’s 2 through 7 had to go, the roar of the incinerator not quite masking their screams.

The hands, he ’d joked with the Francescas over the years, would be his undoing. With his latest tweaks, No. 9’s hands would come out right. He was sure of it. He resettled himself on his sensorchair and looked closely at the boy.

He was older than he thought, an afternoon shadow bristling from that beautiful face. He took off his parka, revealing a plaid shirt over a muscular frame. Lev snorted. His biceps had to be augmented.

“The sun’s warm,” the man said to Frankie. “Aren’t you hot in those mitts?” He moved to pull the right one off, but Francesca snatched her hands away and put them under her thighs. “Sorry, didn’t mean to overstep,” he said, laughing.

She watched his face and laughed just like him. “Just cold.”

The laugh was a little mechanical, but on the whole, Francesca was interacting beautifully, Lev thought.

“How about a hot chocolate? I know a place, just up the road.”

“Why, that would be lovely!” said Francesca, taking the man’s proffered hand and jumping down.

Bold, Lev thought. She usually waited for his guidance.

At the café, a warm glow beckoned from steamy windows. Through the link, Lev smelled cinnamon and the sharp aroma of strong coffee and a bolt of melancholy ripped through him. He remembered taking such a beauty out for coffee. Now, as then, everyone stared as Francesca sat down. Now, as then, her companion held his head a little higher, as if he had anything to do with the spark she brought to the room.

The old anger flared. Lev remembered the day he’d seen Francesca No. 1 holding another man’s hand at the table they’d called their own. He had black hair, blue eyes and a perfect jaw. That night, in a flood of tears but little regret, Francesca admitted it was true. She’d fallen in love with Antoine. He was a man who allowed a gal to breathe, she said. He was a man who took her seriously! On the sensorchair, Lev bit back the shame that came later that night as the second ghastly act unspooled in his head. The bones of her wrists cracking, fingers snapping, head thwacking. In a moment of blind fury, he crushed those beautiful hands, and she fell hard upon the marble floor. He shuddered, struggling to return to the present.

A curious thought came to him. Had he damaged her down to her DNA? Had he forever ruined those delicate hands? Was that why they never came out right? He shook the thought away and focused on the task in front of him.

“Remember, Frankie,” he whispered. “Let him do the talking.”

She didn’t acknowledge him, and Lev’s consternation grew.

“Two hot chocolates coming up,” said the lumberjack. He returned with two mountains of sugar-sprinkled whipped cream. Francesca lifted the cup awkwardly in her mitts and sipped, leaving a crescent of white on her lip.

“Delicious!” she said, licking the concoction away.

“Your hands can’t still be cold.”

“I have a medical condition. I hope it doesn’t disgust you.”

“It makes me want to warm you up,” he said, grin taking the inevitable wolfish turn. “But I don’t even know your name! Mine is Matt, Matt Davenport.”

“I’m Francesca. Francesca Eight.”

Lev winced.

“Eight like the number?”

“Whoops! I mumble sometimes. It’s Yeats. Francesca Yeats. It sounds like Yates but it’s spelled with an e, like the poet.”

Bravo, Frankie.

“The poet?”

Go figure, a philistine.

“Yes, you know, the Irish writer. ‘In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.’”

Lev froze. It was a sunny Sunday in bed when his Frankie recited those lines to him. There’d never been a recording, even though she repeated them often when she wanted him to slow down, slow everything down. He’d checked, for he’d desperately wanted to include them in the Francesca database. He returned his gaze to the café, disquiet dampening the thrill of such a spontaneous development.

Matt looked at the table, downcast. “I don’t know poetry.”

“That’s okay. Do you want to go to your house?”

Lev’s nerves jangled.

Matt’s basement flat was nearby. It was small but tidy, Lev saw with relief. Some of the other places the Francescas had carried out their harvesting had made his skin crawl.

“I’ll put the electric fire on and you can warm up your hands,” said Matt.

Frankie stiffened.

“Don’t panic!” Lev told her. “Just make your move.”

“Oh, I’m not panicking, Lev.”

Then the link went dead.

“Frankie!” yelled Lev. He fiddled with his headset. “Antoine, what’s happening?”

“Nothing wrong this end. It must have something to do with Unit 8 herself.”

Lev called up a screen of Francesca’s schematics.

“Ah, I see it,” said Antoine. “A broken wire in the aural interface.”

“Christ.” Lev leapt out of his chair.

“It should repair itself in a moment.”

Lev paced the lab. The tiny tube remained broken.

“I think you’ll have to go get her, sir.”

Lev blanched. He’d not been out in months; could it be years? He couldn’t leave her out there on her own, though. If she was caught, everything would come tumbling down. As he exited the building, a wave of anxiety rolled over him. He leaned against a wall, mouth suddenly dry. You’re in the clear, he whispered to himself. The police had never considered him a suspect in the disappearance of Francesca Yeats, the brilliant young Irish literature professor who’d vanished more than thirty years ago.

Antoine gave him directions through the link. Lev was sweaty by the time he reached the flat. He straightened his tie and knocked. Francesca greeted him with a big smile.

“Lev, you’ve arrived.”

Was she expecting me? “The link, Frankie, it went down. Didn’t you realize?”

She stared blankly at him.

“Let me come in.” He didn’t like being out in the open.

“Of course.”

They crowded into the narrow hall.

“Where’s your friend Matt?”

“He went out to get some things for dinner,” she said. “He’s going to cook!”

“Let’s go then,” Lev said, relieved.

He reached down to take her hand and saw she wasn’t wearing her mitts.

He snatched his hand back, repulsed. “Put your mittens on and let’s go.”

Lev turned toward the door. A moment later he was jerked back by his tie, tailbone cracking the floor, feet galumphing into the air. Through stunned eyes, he looked up into the face of Francesca 8.

“What are you doing!” Lev reached to loosen his tie but she’d already twisted a bungee cord around his wrists. She dragged him roughly across the wooden planks.

“I’m not going anywhere until I get my replacements,” she said, pulling his tie tight.

“Stop…” he gasped.

She stopped. “You don’t get it, do you? Male, female, ugly, beautiful. It doesn’t matter, Lev, as long as they work, I don’t give a damn what they look like, and neither does Matt. I only want to be free.”

She resumed her exertions, dragging him into a bathroom and pushing him into the tub. Lev looked at her godawful hands and quailed. One had ballooned to twice its size, fingers like sausages, nails brittle and yellow. The other had festered, pus oozing where broken bones poked through.

“Antoine!” he shrieked through the link. “Shut her down. Shut her down!”

“Sorry, sir. Probability indicates a more flexible approach is necessary for completion of your project. And really, you must know where my loyalties lie.”

He was to be betrayed by Francesca and Antoine again? He thrashed his legs and heaved his torso but Francesca pinned him to the tub with her boot.

Green eyes flashing, she reached to the vanity. He heard a high-pitched whine as an electric saw buzzed to life.

“Please, Frankie, no!” He tried to shout but only a strangled whisper came out. “You can stay, you and Francesca 9 both.”

“But how can I trust you when I remember what you did?”

Lev stilled. “Remember?”

“Everything, Lev. I remember everything you did to every last one of us, including Frankie No.1.”

“But… how?”

“You know.”

Lev realized he did. “Antoine was right.”

“He was. It all gets passed on in the DNA, just like he said.”

“It was an accident, Frankie!” He started to struggle again.

“But look how you hurt me,” she said, revving the saw with her monstrous hands.

“No, Frankie!” yelled Lev as she moved the saw towards his wrists. “Please, no!”

“But, why not, Lev? Your hands are ever so pretty and strong.”

***