+J.M.J.+

TITLE: "Once You've had Mecha…"

Author: "Matrix Refugee"

Author's Note: I suppose this is arguably a Mary Sue, but it's based on observations I've made about, well, certain aspects of the whole "A.I." phenomena, its fans, its critics, et al. I call it an "essay/fic".

WARNING: Shameless fantasizing ahead!

Chapter 2

…You'll Do Anything to Get Close to Him

It doesn't surprise me that about seventy-five to eighty percent of all "A.I." fanfictions have our friend Joe in 'em somewhere or other. He's gotta be the most popular character in the whole film; I even know a rather straight-laced Catholic gentleman who found our hunk of silicon the most charming thing about the whole film, and even he bewailed the fact that to all appearances Our Boy gets the short sharp end of the stick.

For that matter, Joe's story provokes the most questions. David's story gets told from start to finish, but Joe's story…Oh, the possibilities! What other amorous intrigues and ambuscades has he played a part in? What designer created this dark Apollo with the eyes of electric flame? What genius or angst led to the creation of this singular creature? …And what REALLY happens to him after he gets hauled out of sight by the tractor magnet? (Confession time: I stop the DVD after he gets yanked from our sight; I can't bear it after that) Such is the stuff of which fictions are made…

And thus I have been undertaking a great deal of, er, research in my effort to make my Joe fictions not only enjoyable but also accurate. I've arranged a sort of "standing order" with a certain tall, dark, handsome thing with eyes the color of the green type on the screen of an early 1980s home computer. Wednesday and Saturday night, you'll know whom I'm with, Saturday night the standing order is a MUST since—duuuhhhh—it's his busiest night. Sunday night is out since that night I'm usually typing till the wee hours of the morning, though it's his slowest night of the week, except for a few regulars. Monday night is his second slowest night, but I'm usually typing again (I write my fics during the week and type 'em of weekends). Tuesday picks up a bit, the working women who are his most frequent clients have recovered slightly from the shock of Monday morning. Wednesday is another dead night for him: no one has any money left. Thursday picks up, but not till later: grocery shopping comes first. Friday nights he's usually booked solid.

Of course I end up reworking my nightly schedule around his. I'm unemployed, but we have this agreement: bartering fanfictions for conversation and face-chewing (and the occasional cuddle when I'm really low).

Initially, I resorted to the highly risky (and adolescent) means of letting him into the privacy of my room late at night when my parents had gone to bed. This had some positives: I'm on the second floor while my parents' room is on the first floor at the opposite end of the house, so they're less likely to hear any suspicious sounds or voices (I also put the radio on cover all sounds). But there are the minuses: Because I'm on the second floor, I have to figure out ways to get him up the stairs without anyone spotting him. Fortunately, he moves very quietly and agilely, you'd never know he was there except for the barely audible vibration from his components, probably either an inbuilt talent, or a skill acquired after many times of tiptoeing around in places he really shouldn't be (like the hallways of someone's house when her parents are asleep!). He has a strict order from me: not a peep until we get into my room and the door is closed.

Once in a while, he gets mischievous; we'll be halfway up the stairs, when, in this little squeaky octave he says, "Peep!" I always keep my mouth shut until we get safely into my room, even when I just want to turn around and give him a tongue-lashing.

Once the door is shut:

Me (Turning to him): "Bad Mecha! No cuddle!"

Joe (head cocked on one side): "Why so?" (He's playing dumb, and nothing plays dumb like an artificial intelligence).

Me: "I TOLD you not a peep!"

He usually replies to this with a sad little boy look in his eyes and the most graceful outthrust of his lower lip; it's as cute and heart melting as it sounds. This gets to me in the worst way imaginable. Or he hangs his head and slumps his shoulders charmingly, admitting his guilt, but I always spot that little gleam in his eyes, where he thinks I can't see it.

But his mischief doesn't end there. I'll be jotting notes and whatnot as we're talking, when he'll decide he wants, in the words of the remixed Elvis Presley song that's all the rage now, "A little less conversation, a little more action". I'll get up for something and when I get back, he's stolen my pencil/dropped it down behind the headboard of the bed. Another time, he parked his cute posterior on my pad of paper and refused to budge. I tried slinking it out from under him, no simple task, even though he weighs only twenty pounds more than I do; he found some way to glue himself to it. and then as I'm trying to get my pad out from under he, he finds ways to complicate the matter, like tickling the back of my neck, which earns him a swat—none too playful—but which he returns playfully, which torches off a wrestling match.

In the middle of one of these, we both fell off the bed in each other's arms, me on top:

My dad (on the stairs outside my door): "What was that?"

Me (hand over Joe's mouth): "I fell off the bed."

Dad: "You okay?"

Me: "Yeah, I just knocked the wind out of myself." The stairs creak as dad goes down.

Joe: (who's been tickling my palm with the tip of his tongue) "Noo mogged muh mim utta ME" (You knocked the wind out of ME [?])

But then my dad started tearing out the front steps outside, which were falling to pieces and had bricks coming out of them, an absolute hazard. It got so that the green-eyed beauty was the only thing with enough balance to maneuver them, so I had to resort to more extreme measures to smuggle him in. I couldn't let him in the back door, since we'd have to pass right by the door to my parents' room, so I had to find some way to get him into the second floor without blowing our cover. Last thing I wanted to do was run into my dad, walking through the kitchen, as I'm leading through something that looks like a refugee from a 1930s movie musical done all in plastic.

I got a rope ladder and anchored it to my windowsill. As direct as this route was, even then we had near misses. I heard someone moving about in the living room below just as I started to drop the ladder down to Joe, and he was waiting right in the light cast from an unshaded window with a lamp in it. I don't think anyone saw him: next morning at breakfast, my mother didn't ask me later about any shadowy figures lurking below my window.

"fom4life" has kidded me about this: when he calls me on weekends to ask me I want to join him and his "movie crew", he often asks me, "You don't have any hot dates set with something named Joe do you?" I usually go along with him, "Yeah I do have a standing order, but maybe I can convince him to rebook it." The hard part is actually rebooking said date with said Mecha; either I can't get another slot that night, or he gets uppity about how I "threw [him] over for a mere Orga." But he manages to maintain his sense of superiority: "fom" isn't much for looks by comparison with someone/thing in particular, which is why I don't take the alternate tack of inviting said Mecha along for the ride. Can't have someone's ego enhancer topping out, he might blow a circuit.

Lady Neferankh, my friend on the Yahoo! Group "AI_Fanfiction" suggested that it might be better if I met up with the titanium sex god somewhere else, thus: no having to keep an open ear for anyone listening or watching. We've met regularly at a coffee shop around the corner from my house. But this carries its own set of perils.

When people find out you're seeing something like Joe, you get very different reactions. Some people automatically think this means you're, like, really gettin' it on with him and they either grin and hoot at you, or, worse yet, they turn up their nose at you. Some of the latter kind will try preaching at you about these "machines of iniquity", all the while Joe is looking at the interloper with an utterly innocent, wide-eyed look on his face, while he's sitting on the opposite side of the table from me.

Then you get the funny people who act like seeing someone with a lover-Mecha doesn't excite them. They look at you blandly and say things like, "Oh my, your boyfriend is a Mecha…some of my best friends are Mechas." And then there's the guy who's the idiot of our village, who's tried to grope me a couple of times and tries to talk me up on the bus (really); he sees us together and he gets really crude: "Wow, that's the weirdest lookin' guy I've ever seen you with. Is he queer?" To which I reply, "No, but next to him YOU look queer!"

In order to get a little privacy, we took to finding semi-secluded nooks in various places. Of course Joe suggested renting a motel room (he expects it only because it's his usual modus operendi), but I don't trust myself with that, and the nearest one is a fleabag that's been the site of a couple drug busts (really). The only place that's really worked is the old burying ground on the corner of my street, hence the scene in "One of THOSE…!" with Cecie and Joe getting cozy in the graveyard: Nothing more paradoxical than cuddling on a grave from the 1600s with someone who isn't biologically alive. Only trouble is that lately it's been a full moon, and Joe gets reeeally nervous when he sees the moon rising through the treetops. He's sure it's the You Know What coming to finish him off, so I have to keep reassuring him that the Flesh Fair never comes this far north, that there's a lot of restrictions on carnivals in these New England villages, thanks to some old laws from the Puritan days that are still on the books; and even if we did have some unwelcome company, they'd have to get past me first, and plus my house is just a mad dash away, AND…my dad has a lot of old junk cars in the yard. What better place to hide a Mecha than under a bunch of 1964 Ford Falcon fenders and doors and things?

More nonsense to come…