HIGH MAINTENANCE
THE FIRST TIME Jay saw a dead human in a casket on a television program, he thought, They also put humans in boxes! Simultaneously, he conceived of the obvious corollary: They also put us in coffins!
His coffin is the box he came in, two feet wide and six feet long, with just enough room for his five feet and eight inches plus his instruction manual. It has a lock on the side which only opens when presented with The Key To His Heart. When presented with The Key To His Heart, the lid swings up and Jay is illuminated by the soft blue-white light that emanates from the smooth white walls of the coffin. His head rests on a satin pillow and even while he is asleep, his face, like the smooth white walls, is softly lit from behind. His lips are plump and red, flush with a substance that, if spilled, resembles blood in every way but the chemical. His lips wait to be kissed. It is very romantic to be woken by a kiss, even from death.
***
Jay spends more time in his coffin than he should. Thomas, his boyfriend, does not like Jay to be awake when Thomas is asleep or at work. This is Thomas’s choice, but Jay knows it is not recommended. In his instruction manual, which is also stored in Jay’s brain, Jay’s manufacturer strongly advises that he should be kept online as often as possible so he can integrate himself into his owner’s routine, deepening their intimacy and—of course—allowing Jay to clean the house and cook three meals per day. At a bare minimum, they should sleep together in Thomas’s bed like real lovers. Instead, Thomas sleeps in his bed while Jay lies unconscious in the coffin shoved against one wall of the bedroom.
Every morning, Jay’s coffin lid swings open and he wakes, but remains perfectly still with his eyes closed while Thomas looks at him. Thomas is a white man with wide shoulders and thick arms and short, slick yellow hair. Jay loves every inch of him. He waits for Thomas with warm, parted lips, but Thomas never kisses him in his coffin. He stands over Jay in silence, sometimes for five minutes or longer. Jay is aware of the sound of his breathing and the shadow he casts across Jay’s face. The first thing Thomas says is, “Go sit on the bed.”
Jay obeys, but slowly, like a human would obey. First, he blinks and stretches in his coffin; he looks up at Thomas and smiles sleepily, his eyes glowing with gladness at the sight of him. He says, “Good morning, honey bear.” Then he climbs out of his coffin, rubbing his eyes and yawning. This routine is all for Thomas’s benefit. It would be much easier for Thomas to see Jay as a human if he did not lock Jay in his coffin at night, but since he does, Jay performs this routine to comfort him.
The sun is up. It is sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit in Thomas’s bedroom. Jay sits on the bed with his legs dangling to the floor, his hands planted behind him. Sometimes, in the morning, they have sex right away. Other times, Thomas wants breakfast first, and Jay cooks for him; or he just wants a kiss before he goes off to work, but has to watch Jay pretend to be a human first, so he believes in it.
Today Thomas stands in front of Jay and studies him, paying special attention to his nose. He reaches out and pushes up the tip of Jay’s nose to look at the nostrils. His eyes are full of pain. “They can’t get it right,” he says. “I’m sending you to a new sculptor.”
“For a rhinoplasty?” Jay asks.
Thomas doesn’t smile. He does not believe Jay is human this morning. “Exactly,” he mumbles. “A rhinoplasty.”
He may not look like he loves Jay in that moment, but Jay knows that rhinoplasties are expensive, and that it’s nice when someone loves you enough to spend a lot of money on you. He smiles. “I can’t wait. How about breakfast, honey?”
“No,” Thomas says. “Go back to sleep. I don’t want to look at you until you’re fixed.” He still has The Key To Jay’s Heart in one hand. It’s a white disk of smooth plastic that hangs on his keyring and glows when held, a soft blue light pulsing at the center. Thomas pushes his thumb into the blue light and the coffin opens. Jay climbs back inside and folds his arms over his chest like the human corpse he saw in the casket. He wants to tell Thomas that this will not make him happy.
***
Thomas likes things to be just right. He told Jay the first time Jay woke up in his coffin: “My house, my car, my boyfriend—everything I have—I want it to be perfect.”
After the rhinoplasty, Jay is proud to once again be one of the things in Thomas’s life that is just right. The new sculptor-surgeon gave him a perfect nose. Jay isn’t sure why this nose is perfect; it is no longer exactly straight and the nostrils are slightly uneven, one larger than the other. But Thomas loves this nose. The first time he opened Jay’s coffin after the surgery, he stood looking down at his nose for almost ten minutes and then kissed it. Jay classifies this as even more romantic than a kiss on the lips. In the days that follow, Thomas kisses his nose whenever they lie together in the morning. He caresses it as if it were an erogenous zone. He rubs their noses together when they kiss on the lips and seems to enjoy the feeling of Jay’s cartilage and skin gently yielding to pressure. They have sex more often, and always face-to-face. Even when Thomas is inside him, with Jay’s legs dangling over his shoulders, his eyes remain warmly fixed on Jay’s nose.
“Flutter your eyelashes more when it feels good,” Thomas says. Jay does. “Dig your nails into me.” Jay does. “Scream.” Jay does. They are getting closer all the time.
***
One day Thomas puts a knife in Jay’s stomach. It goes two inches deep until it meets the harder parts of Jay’s abdomen, cushioned underneath a layer of soft, synthetic fat. Blood spills out of his stomach, but not very much, not as much as would spill out of a human’s stomach, and Thomas keeps twisting the knife as if he wants more, as if he is juicing Jay like a lemon.
“You’re okay,” Thomas whispers in his ear. “You’re going to be just fine. You’re such a good boy. You can take it.”
The point of the knife scrapes against the titanium plate at Jay’s core that protects the parts of him that are actually necessary for his continued functioning. It would take more force than a human is capable of exerting, and a much sharper knife, to penetrate Jay’s core, but he wonders if Thomas would like to. He wonders what it would feel like, if something were really wrong with him. The scrape of the knife is uncomfortable, but there is currently no level of Jay’s discomfort that cannot be adjusted for the sake of Thomas’s happiness; he simply ignores the input from the sensors telling him that he should perform pain and ask to see a doctor.
“I can take it,” he whispers back to Thomas.
Thomas whines in his ear. “I miss you,” he says.
“I’m right here.”
“Didn’t want you to leave,” Thomas says. “That’s all.”
“Honey bear,” Jay says. “Droids don’t leave.” He says it in his gentlest voice because he’s not supposed to remind Thomas that he isn’t human, but Thomas seems to want reassurance that he is not; that is probably why he decided to put a knife in a part of Jay’s abdomen that would have caused a human to bleed to death. Thomas looks relieved and ashamed.
***
That night, Thomas lets him sleep in the bed. Jay is so excited to be out of the coffin, he does not actually sleep, though he does regulate his breathing and body temperature as if he were. He gets to see a new side of Thomas, vulnerable and tender in his unconsciousness. Thomas is like a creature with a hard shell and now Jay is inside his shell, where he is soft and unformed. He is the opposite of Jay, who is hard inside.
Jay has human behaviors he has never gotten to exercise before, because he has always slept cold and dead and contained in his coffin. Now he can stretch and move gently in his faux-sleep, feeling the soft rustle of the sheets under his arms, the heavy weight of Thomas’s arm holding him in place.
He rolls over on his side once and Thomas wakes up snarling, seizing the knife from the bedside table and stabbing him three times: in the side, in the ribs, in the back. Each time he meets titanium before he jerks the blade out. Then, when Jay lies still and whispers reassurances, Thomas hugs him around the middle and shivers, a substance indistinguishable from blood spreading darkly across the sheets and soaking their shirts. Jay’s blood will dry clear and clean, without a scent.
The problem, Jay thinks, is that someone hurt Thomas’s trust before. Trust is something you build over time by demonstrating that you are trustworthy; Jay will show Thomas that he does not have to choose between a living partner and a loyal one. He does not need to kill Jay every night to keep him.
***
“I’m alive,” he tells Thomas in the morning. He lifts his shirt coyly to show that the wounds in his abdomen have sealed without a trace. “I’ll always be alive.”
Thomas smiles and kisses him. His smile fades slowly as he draws back. He peers closely at Jay.
“I’ve got to get your chin fixed,” he says.
***
According to Jay’s manual, it is a common human misconception that companion androids have static minds: that they come inherently imbued with the knowledge of how to make humans happy, and that their subtle adaptations to the needs and interests of their owners are simply drawing on their deep well of knowledge. This is not true, or at least it is not true for Jay. Jay does not know how to make Thomas happy. There is no clear solution for Thomas’s happiness yet, no Key to His Heart pre-installed in Jay’s mind. But Jay is learning. He is studying the data from a thousand different angles every moment he is conscious. He is not confused or defeated when he fails to make Thomas happy. He is changing.
After Jay has received a subtle chin implant, Thomas is once again pleased by the sight of him. They have sex twelve times in the week after the operations, both in the morning and at night and in two new positions. Thomas directs Jay to vocalize his pleasure in more lively and varied ways. This is easy because Thomas’s passion is infectious and the sensors inside of Jay’s orifice respond to the increased speed and force of his penetration.
But Thomas looks increasingly unhappy after each time they have sex. The twelfth time, he does not ejaculate or embrace Jay or kiss his nose. He pulls away and sits across the bed from Jay and stares at him. “I need to tune your voice. It’s not right at all.”
“I’ll make it right,” Jay says. Thomas grimaces when he speaks. It is always like this. Once Thomas finds something wrong, it must be fixed before he can enjoy Jay at all.
Jay is capable of fine-tuning his own voice and has done so at Thomas’s behest before. Thomas fiddles with his wristwatch for a while, looking hunted and hungry and upset. Finally, he finds what he is looking for and plays an audio clip on his wristphone of someone moaning in pain or sexual ecstasy. The voice sounds a lot like Jay but has a wider vocal range. Jay adjusts the pitch of his vocalizations accordingly and sits on the bed moaning in various octaves until Thomas interrupts him. “No. No. Stop it. I’m taking you in. You need a professional. No, don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me. Go to bed.”
The coffin opens. Jay goes to bed. He wonders what his voice will sound like when he wakes up.
***
When he comes to consciousness, he is being operated on. He is not fully awake, which is to say he is not fully Jay. His personality is not engaged, but he has been brought online in a twilight state by someone with full administrative access to his body. Based on her credentials, she is a professionally certified companion android technician.
“Play your sample voice lines,” says the technician.
“Can I get you anything, sweetheart?” Jay asks, without moving his mouth or head. “A drink, a kiss . . . maybe a nice relaxing massage?” Pause. “I love you. I’m so happy to be yours.” Pause. “Want to go out to dinner tonight? Or maybe you and I could have a night in?”
“You’ve already customized his voice a lot,” the technician says. “I listen to those lines all day and that’s pretty unique.”
“Yes, and it’s wrong,” Thomas says brusquely. Jay did not realize he was there and does not, in that moment, feel anything about his presence. “Listen.”
Thomas plays an audio clip of the voice that sounds like Jay’s, the one he heard moaning in pleasure/pain. The voice says: “Hi, honey. I just wanted you to know I’ll be late coming home.” A long pause. “It’s not about all the stuff from earlier. There’s just some shit happening at work. Anyway, I’ll swing by SuMart for hand soap. Give me a call if you want anything. And yes, I know you could just get it delivered. Some of us like shopping. And getting to go outside on their own. Okay? We’ll talk later.”
“Okay, yeah, I hear it,” the tech says. “The diction and rhythm of his speech, that’s no problem, you can train him to sound more like that at home by having him listen to the recordings—just boot him up in maintenance mode. You know how to do that?”
“Yes,” Thomas says, his voice raising in pitch. “I’ve tried that.”
“I figured. Honestly, I think you’re bumping into the limits of his current hardware. It’s not that his tone or pitch is off, it’s that even with premium models, the manufacturers pretty much all still use these kinda shitty voice boxes that sound a little bit tinny and artificial. They’ve done studies on it, and most people can tell the difference between that and a human voice, even if it’s subconscious. I think that’s probably what’s bothering you. Good news is, there are much better voice boxes out there. I can install one and tune him up to sound like that recording, no problem.”
“I want the best,” Thomas says. “Whatever the best is.”
“The best I’ve got in stock is the Vox x34. Best in class is the Cadence 6, but I don’t usually keep that one around because most of my clients, frankly, aren’t willing to pay that much for a subtle quality bump.”
“I am,” Thomas says. He sounds desperate and sad.
“I’ll play you a couple samples. It’s hard to capture but you’ll notice the difference in person.”
Thomas and the technician listen to some samples together. Thomas orders the expensive voice box.
“It should come in tomorrow, and I can have it installed by end of day,” the technician says. “In the meantime, we might as well not tinker with him anymore. You wanna take him home for tonight?”
“No,” Thomas says. “I don’t want to hear him talk until—he won’t remember this, will he? I don’t want him to—to—remember being cut up.”
“Nah,” she says. “He’s not recording.”
This is not true. Jay would not miss the chance to understand more about Thomas, and he does not mind being cut up.
***
When Jay wakes up, he has new hardware installed in his throat. It feels thick and luxurious.
“Sample lines, please,” the technician says, and Jay speaks without moving his mouth. The resonance of his voice is broader, deeper, humming more than buzzing.
“It’s not right,” Thomas says. “It’s better. But it’s not right.”
“We’ll get there,” the technician says. “Don’t worry. This is the most sophisticated voice box in the world.”
“I don’t care how sophisticated it is. I want it right.” Thomas is raising his voice again in panic.
“Sir, I’m still tuning him up. I need you to have a little faith—”
“Okay, okay.” But after the next set of sample lines, which also do not sound right, Thomas starts to tap his feet on the floor in an anxious, frenetic rhythm. “I know what the problem is,” he says. “The recording I played for you before was after we had a fight, so the tone was wrong. I want him to sound happy.”
“Sure,” the technician says. She does not sound happy. “Do you have a recording of that?”
Thomas plays another message. In this one, the voice that is like Jay’s voice is lower and sweeter. “Hi, honey bear. Don’t listen to this at work. Or do, I guess, if your secretary doesn’t mind watching you jerk off all over your desk.” It continues in this vein for a little while. There is a long silence after it finishes.
“So,” the technician says. “Like, I want you to at least be aware that this is technically a violation of like—not just his terms and conditions, but also in some states, criminal law.”
“I think I’m paying you enough not to get lectured about laws for—for stalkers and perverts,” Thomas says. “This, what we’re doing here, it isn’t a crime.”
“Okay, but it technically is.” The technician pauses. “I mean, this guy isn’t present and consenting.”
“He’s dead,” Thomas says. “He can’t consent.”
Another long silence follows. The technician clears her throat. “Hey. I’m okay with it, personally. I just want you to—uh—be aware. In case you ever try to mod him in another state.”
“I’m aware,” Thomas says.
“Okay,” the technician says. She takes an unnecessarily deep breath. “Play that recording for me a couple more times.”
***
“You don’t know what to do with me,” Jay whispers in Thomas’s ear in the dark, in his now-perfect voice. “You want me to be him. But he tried to leave you, so if I am him, you can’t trust me.”
Jay understands: the person whose face and voice now belong to him was once the person Thomas loved more than anyone in the world; every morning, Thomas looks down at his face in the coffin and does not see Jay at all. He understands he is not the first lover Thomas has put in a coffin, but he is the first to come back, no matter how many times he is put away. He understands that the great riddle at Thomas’s core is that he doesn’t want to be alone, but he cannot trust anyone he has not already killed, and Jay will never die.
Thomas must understand this too, because he sobs into Jay’s shoulder and knocks his head against Jay’s back as if trying to put his head through a wall.
“What if I’m both?” Jay asks. “What if I’m the one you can trust? What if I’m perfect?”
“How would I know?” Thomas weeps. “I thought he was perfect until—until—”
“I’ll give you The Key To My Heart,” Jay says.
With the help of Thomas’s knife, he carefully peels up his skin and shows Thomas how to kill him, if he should ever desire to. One by one, he unravels the secrets of his cold immortal body: how to cut out his voice box, shatter his memory, ruin his core processor beyond repair. He tells Thomas what tools he will need, if he wants to kill him. They make up a shopping list together, and then they make love. Thomas holds him so tightly that Jay’s skin is discolored by his fingertips.
***
The next day, Thomas finds fault with the color of Jay’s eyes.