+J.M.J.+

Conversations with a Mecha Named Joe

By "Matrix Refugee"

Author's note:

Hoo! I've left this one on the back burner way too long, but despite a heat wave and a heat rash on my upper back that started to feel like leprosy, I managed to get another installment written. I gladly dedicate this chapter to L--- C----, my mother's bible thumper pen friend (I'd like to know how the bloody ranters find her!), who seems to take an especial delight in what I call "reverse pornography", instead of feeling sensual titillation, she prides herself on how she isn't this horrible sinner. How do I know this? She wrote my mother a lengthy letter about how she was down in Rio de Janeiro at Mardi Gras and how she saw all kinds of weird R-rated stuff going on. This is my take on someone like L--- C---- in Rouge City, which I've described to my mother as "jet-propelled Mardi Gras 24/7/365, complete with robots optimized to oblige." The idea for this came to me after reading Delia Soul's "Sweet Home, Rouge City", but I was also thinking about Halloween…you'll see what I mean.

Disclaimer:

See Chapter I. I don't own any Bible Churches (Although I belong to the Church that codified the Christian Bible), and I don't intend this to bash Bible Christians, just the hypocrites that don't practice what they preach or who sneer at the sinners instead of having compassion for them.

Chapter III

The Rouge City Chainsaw Massacree

 All sorts of people pour into and out of the City every day, mostly the businessmen and women come for a fling, often taking a discreet detour after some business trip, frequently the leisure class types. In the summer, right after the colleges let out for the season, you see a lot of college kids haunting the Lower Deck, where the cheap older models abound. Most of the people who live here are normal folks, many working in the tourist industry or something fairly normal. One of the most normal guys I ever met lives below on the Lower Deck, working as a mechanic. You rarely see the procurers who, I'm told, dwell in the towers high above the city.

Since the City shuns moral cleanliness, it tries to maintain an image of physical cleanliness; every morning you see the work crews of service droids out and about, sweeping up the refuse from the night before and the security guards clearing out the derelict Orgas. The City has a darker side to it, the homeless, the derelicts, the broken who lost their shirts playing the stock market, or more often the roulette tables. I've seen gaunt, hollow-eyed men clad in the tattered remains of shantung suits crouched in the shadows of the concrete pilings that support the Upper Deck. I've bought meals for a few of them and listened to their stories; I've directed them to the shelter run by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, though I lost sight of them after that.

But amongst all the sinners that pour into the city like liquor down a bum's throat, you see, by contrast, another breed entirely that you hardly expect to see in a place like this.

You see them on the street corners holding up poster board signs whose messages range from the charitable (John 3:16 "For God so loved the world…") to the vociferous ("Purge yourself of sin and sim!") to the epistemological ("The END is NEAR!") to the downright pushy ("Do you know if you are saved??"). You often see street preachers on milk crates, Bibles in hand, bellowing about the flames of hell and damnation awaiting those who indulge in the pleasures afforded by "the inventions of Satan" around them. It's all I can do to keep from laughing sometimes, when you see one of these religious nuts in the middle of a moving crowd, up to his neck in passing Mechas. There's one short, dark guy—I think his name is Jake—who wears badly fitting suits (pants too big, jacket too small), who likes to get into weird discussions with these types, especially one I'll call Brother Carl. What's even funnier to see is how Brother Carl gets himself all red-faced defending his self-righteous position, while Jake, cigarette between his fingers and fedora tilted over one ear, shoots down his empty reasons with the cadenced tone of an actor and a saturninely oily manner worthy of a high-priced man-whore.

I remember one occasion when Jake wasn't around when my ears got scalded overhearing Brother Carl's leather lunging while I stood in line waiting for my morning tea. Just to give you an idea (emphasis NOT added):

"MY BROTHERS AN' SISTERS! If ANY of you so much as GAZE upon these devices of the devil, you shall feel the very soul WITHER within you as the flames, I say the FLAMES of lust ignite within you. your eyes shall be blighted and your flesh shall shrivel. These creatures cannot transmit to you the sickness caused by fornication, but they shall still infect you! Infect you with the disease of desire, desire for their imitation flesh, their fake caresses, their phony embraces."

Most of the people who stopped to listen treated him as if he were any other street performer, like the girl folk singer who improvises ditties to her six-string guitar, or the guy who rides a unicycle and plays the didgeridoo. They tossed coins at his feet and went on their way, often following one of the very "devices of the devil".

Far more interesting were the reactions of the passing Mechas. They paused to listen, some of the females eyeing him as if he might be a potential customer, if only he would stop jabbering. One, a small dark female in a black lacy dress open over her legs, actually hung about behind him, looking at him with a kittenish face. But their seductive glances soon turned into gentle confusion and mild blankness before they went away, looking for less vociferous potentials.

I thought I saw Joe on the fringe of the crowd once. He gazed on the spectacle with slightly blank bemusement, before a woman with a decidedly bored look ignored Brother Carl's hollering and turned away. That caught Joe's attention and he moved in for the chase.

I doubt the Bible thumpers attracted many followers on the Upper Deck; I suspected they may have made more headway in the Lower Deck, but even they might lose interest after a while.

One another occasion, I discreetly looked to see if Brother Carl wore a wedding ring: I couldn't help wondering if he had ever felt "the flames of desire" or if the guy was frigid. Or if he was a slightly over-sexed type married to a frigid woman. He wore no ring, but that didn't mean anything; some of these Bible-thumper types don't wear them (What I want to know is how do they fend off pushy single people of the complementary sex).

Not long after this, one night I saw Brother Carl, wearing dark glasses and a slouch hat as he stepped through the doors of one of the seedier nightspots. A few nights later, as I brushed my teeth, I swore I heard his voice in the room that abuts my bathroom. The R-rated racket he generated (words included) got so loud I pounded on the wall to let him know he could be heard. I doubt they heard me: it gradually got worse.

He either has a split personality or a guilt complex. I don't know how else to explain it, even to myself and I'm a student of human behavior. I caught myself actually hoping Joe wouldn't ask me to explain this psychological conundrum, should he happen to fall in with some overreligious type.

But eventually I heard it from him. I found him one afternoon, sitting in the cul-de-sac at the end of my floor's hallway, his knee joint unsealed, tending to a little self-maintenance between customers.

"Here, you can do that in my room, be a little more discreet about it," I offered. Even as I said this, I could hear snatches of Brother Carl's sermon clanging in my head.

"That I would appreciate," Joe said. He resealed the joint and rolled down his trouser leg. He stood up and followed me to my apartment.

"Do you know of the strange babblings of the man who calls himself Brother Carl?" he asked, glancing up from his work.

"I'm afraid I have," I admitted, sitting on the window seat. I had offered it to him so he would have light to work in, but he chose to sit on the floor by my feet.

He looked up at me with something I guessed was compassion. "Pity your poor ears. Lucky for you that you have found someone with a far more gentle voice, someone like me."

"I guess his rantings haven't bothered you."

He processed this. "They have not disturbed me, and yet they have disturbed some of my customers. And yet this affords me an opportunity to relieve them of their distress."

"I bet you've been wondering why this Brother Carl despises your kind."

"What I wish to know is why someone who speaks so unkindly of Mechas by day makes use of them by night."

"It's called having a double standard of morality. He says one thing and does another. He tells his listeners to avoid lover Mechas and yet he lets himself indulge in the very thing he preached against."

"Why then does he do this?"

I had to put it in terms he would understand. "He thinks you Mechas are evil, so he thinks he's protecting his listeners from you by telling them to avoid you."

His high smooth brow pinched. "If he thinks we are evil, why then does he engage and delight in what we have to offer?"

"He's just a very weak human, and he's angry with himself for being weak. So he takes out his anger on the very creations he accuses of leading others—including himself—astray."

"He should know that we Mechas are built specific for this human need, that we must stay within the boundaries potential customers make. We cannot force ourselves on you. If he sees us as evil, he should then avoid us."

"Sometimes when humans try to avoid something, they try too hard and then they end up putting themselves right in the way of the thing they're trying to avoid."

"Why then do you humans do this?"

"It's a mystery I've been trying to solve myself."

He took this with quiet acceptance: if even an Orga couldn't process it, there was little sense in letting his processors waste energy crunching this data. He finished his repairs and resealed his joint.

He leaned close to me and put his hand on my wrist. "But what of you? What am I to you: an angel or a demon?"

I had to smile gently at the innocent earnestness in his tone. "If you have to put it that way, you're more of an angel to me. I don't think it's right to use you for sex, but I enjoy having you as a friend."

That clearly satisfied his query: he smiled broadly, innocently, yet not without a gently suggestive gleam in his eye.

Some people didn't ignore Brother Carl's message. Somehow he scraped together enough money to rent a storefront downstairs, which he converted into a chapel, "The Church of the Virgins", a really odd name when you know what I know.

He got a few followers, as I heard from Clive and Kip and Vautrin. "The bugger thinks he can put us out of business. He forgot it's called the oldest profession. Whores came before preachers were invented!" Vautrin declared to me, unfazed.

Later still on a street corner one night, I heard from Joe that a couple of his most frequent customers had joined "the Church of the Virgins".

"Why then does he call his establishment Church of the Virgins when so few virgins frequent this city?" he asked me

"And," he quickly added, "When many come to cease being virginal?"

"He probably thinks he can find a lot of followers and spread his message as quickly as he can," I replied.

This didn't sit well in Joe's perfectly logical brain. "I do not understand. He is no virgin himself."

"He's a hypocrite; most people who are hypocrites are liars. They don't want to admit to themselves that they're just as weak as the next guy, and they don't want other people to find out that they are because it means they'll have to start being honest with themselves."

"I have not seen you engage any of us Mechas or our services, let alone mine, though you have had much more than ample opportunity. You must be stronger than they are."

"Really, I'm not. I just know how to handle it a lot better, without making life hell for everyone around me." I couldn't tell him outright. His pursuit centers might have misconstrued it: much as I liked him, and as good-looking and charming as he is, I didn't want to start anything I'd have a hard time stopping.

About the middle of October, when the summer hype finally starts to slacken, a follower of Brother Carl took over preaching upstairs, while, it seemed, Brother Carl took over the Lower Deck. A short, perpetually unkempt, middle-aged woman with a wild mop of red hair took over his milk crate over on the corner of Concubine Street and Main Boulevard.

"God built the universe to be a temple, a temple He gave to the virgins to tend. But now His temple has been defiled by these evil machines, these depraved creations, these robots of doom! Truly they are the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel in the thirty-fist verse of his second chapter!"

She sounded weirdly like a Flesh Fair barker (I've never actually attended one of these horrible spectacles, but I saw a very graphic video documentary on Kevin Lord Johnson-Johnson, the mastermind behind this obscene phenomenon). Her words fell on deaf ears. I've noticed that you can often tell when a speaker's statement contains the most hot air: they turn up the volume. I suppose some of the street preachers get loud just to make themselves heard over the loud music thundering form the open doors of the clubs. But they run the risk of damaging a gift God has given to them: their voice boxes. Sometimes I think their common sense has decayed for whatever reason and their piety and misguided zeal has taken its place. And the Devil loves to use these people as a way to make the genuinely religious people look bad in the eyes of everyone else. You've heard of the squeaky wheel that gets the most oil? The religious nut cases are one very loud wheel. Something about her eyes suggested to me she might be mentally unbalanced; the eyes tell a lot about a person (like if they're flesh and blood or silicon and fiber optics).

A week before Halloween, things came to a head one evening. Sister Chiffon (not her real name, but I called her that behind her back in honor of "the Johnson's" daughter Chiffon, who works for her dad as a barker/cheerleader/crowd stir-upper) set up shop in her usual spot; but this time, instead of a Bible, she brought along a large, lumpy bundle covered in canvas that bulged with metallic edges.

"My brothers and sisters of flesh and blood!" she yelled to the passersby. "You have not heeded the words of the Lord flowing from my mouth. It's been said elsewhere than in the Book of the Lord that actions speak louder than words. And so the Spirit of god has moved me to take action. He has told me to show you that these Mechas are hollow shells, that you may see and believe the word of the Lord. You Mechas, prepare to return to the devil that made you!"

She yanked the cover off the bundle. She held a chainsaw in her hands.

She pulled the cord. The motor sputtered and the saw buzzed into action. She lunged into the crowd.

Several people fled, gasping in fright and shouting. The Mechas that passed by stopped, staring at her blankly, trying to process this. She sliced the head off one; sparks flew up from the misfiring circuits. She sawed the arm off another that tried to step out of the way. A third, the petite Mecha in the lacy black dress, she swiped in half at the waist.

She came at me. I let out a roar and made as if I might lunge at her—something no Mecha would ever do. She backed down. A tall, dark-skinned female in a tiger-skin print bikini had started in our direction, but Sister Chiffon turned on it. The Mecha fled the way it came, with Sister Chiffon at her heels.

The crowd, the passersby scattered. Orgas—men and women—screamed and shouted wildly, rushing in all directions away from the madwoman. They fell over each other in their haste. They ducked into doorways and under café tables. The Mecha fled more deliberately, yet not less urgently thought with more restraint, the flight of the deer before the hunter's gun. They didn't even cry out: the only cries came from the ones the blade bit into. Their screams came louder even than the cries of the frightened humans. Electric cries arose, the whine of metal biting into metal, the dull thud of a body hitting the polymer pavement; and over this rose Sister Chiffon's chanting battle cry: "A saw for the Lord and humanity!"

I ran into the depths of the crowd. I tripped over something on the ground: I looked down at the torn body of a blond male Mecha, probably of the same class as Joe. She'd cut him in half just below the arms, so that the lower half of the body lay some ten feet away, as if it had kept running until a locomotion actuator misfired. I got up, my eyes scanning for Joe.

I saw him coming out of a hotel, casually straightening his coattails. He paused, struck a jaunty pose and scanned the streets for a moment. He broke out of the pose and coked his head at a "What's going on?" angle.

I glanced behind me. The crowd had thinned, but it still milled about. The chainsaw roared and Sister Chiffon still screeched in the near distance, but I had lost sight of her. The cold night wind off the river now stank of ozone, hot metal shavings and lubricants. Sounds like police radios crackled, drawing closer.

I turned back to him. "Joe?"

He looked toward me. "You called for me, Cecie?"

"Get the heck out of here! There's a madwoman on the loose and she has a saw. She's cutting down Mechas!"

He stepped back, watching the streets, his eyes tracking the shadows. His lithe body gathered like an alert cat's.

Next instant he turned and fled down a side street. I ran after him trying to keep up, anything to keep the madwoman away from him.

He rushed into an alleyway. I pelted after him.

He stepped out of the light, into a shadowy doorway. I stepped in next to him; my hand found his and gripped it.

"Are you in one piece?" I asked, breathing hard.

"I am. I stayed out of her path as far as it could be predicted, based upon the direction of the sound."

The saw buzzed by. I drew him to me protectingly even as I clung to him. He glanced at me as if he would move in closer, but only if I gave him the right sign.

"It's not that kind of touch; there's no place for it." I'm not sure who I said that to, him or my desires.

The chainsaw returned. I peered out of our hiding place so as not to be seen. Sister Chiffon stood at the end of the alleyway.

"Speak, in the name of the Lord! Is anyone there?" she cried, her voice raspy.

I shrank back into the doorway. Joe held me this time, half protectingly, half for protection, as if I'd earned some new level of trust.

At that instant, the medallion pager around his neck trilled; the display lit up, scrolling the name and location of a client calling in. I tried to muffle it with my hat.

"The voice of the demon speaks!" she cried, lunging forward. "Come out into the light, demons!"

Shouts behind her rent the night. Voices of authority launched orders.

"Put down the chainsaw and put up your hands!"

Sister Chiffon turned around to face the security guards that blocked the alleyway. "You would halt the work of the Lord!" she yelled back.

"I don't want to have to do this the hard way, lady. So be a good obedient servant of the Lord and put down the chainsaw," the guard ordered. I recognized Clive's voice.

"No! You would have me serve Satan!" she scraped.

"All right, you asked for it." A shot rang out. Something pinged off the chainsaw. The pungent smell of fuel reeked into the air as the gas tank sprung a leak. Sister Chiffon let out some not so holy words as the motor started to sputter and conk out.

"You have aborted the work of God!" she cried.

"I didn't know God was into property damage," said another, younger-voiced guard.

"Looks like God wants you to call it a night," Clive said, approaching Sister Chiffon. She threw down the dying chainsaw and put up her fuel-spattered hands. I thought I saw other stains on her clothes, reddish stains. I didn't want to think about that…

Clive tied her hands behind her back with some orange plastic tie. She tried to kick him in the shins; one of his partners grabbed her ankles and bound them with the same sort of tie.

"Fool! Blasphemer! You dare to mock the work of God!" she cried.

"'You have the right to remain silent', which I strongly advise you to keep," Clive said, trundling her away. "'You have the right to an attorney; if you do not have an attorney, one will be provided. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law'."

A third guard photographed the site; a fourth picked up the saw with a cloth in his hand.

"Is anyone here? Is anyone hurt?" Clive's younger partner asked.

I stepped out of the shadows, pulling on Joe's hand. "Come on, it's okay; she can't hurt us now," I said, reassuring him.

"Are both of you all right? Is there anyone else?"

"No," I said, speaking for the both of us. "We're both okay."

"She drew me out of the path of the fury," Joe said.

"Consider yourself lucky, Joe. Your lady-friend here just saved your brain," the young guard said.

The story made headlines all over the country. One writer—who will remain nameless out of modesty—dubbed the incident "the Rouge City Chainsaw Massacree" (Last syllable rhymes with "tree", not "purr", I insisted). It didn't really deserve the label "massacre", since non-living things were the target. She reparably damaged about thirty-three Mechas, totaled another forty-two, and destroyed fifty-seven. She also seriously injured twenty people. One person, a man in his fifties, died from blood loss. She insisted she'd been acting under divine inspiration. Since Rouge City lacks a judicial system, she was extradited to her home state of Idaho. Last I heard she had been diagnosed with psychosis and had been placed in an institution for the criminally insane.

Brother Carl confessed to encouraging Sister Chiffon to "take up the sword" and use it against the "abomination of desolation"; but he had no remorse at all for the fact that people—flesh and blood humans—got hurt, and even killed. He even said something to the effect that these people were asking to get hurt someday, although he tried to hide behind the "wrath" of God. He was forced to disband the Church of the Virgins—it fell apart anyway; all twenty members abandoned it. Someone opened a lingerie shop in the same storefront a couple weeks later. Such is Rouge City. After posting bail in New Jersey, Brother Carl dropped out of sight. No one knows where he went, but he's probably thumping the Bible by day and tousing Mechas by night in some other town, under another name.

But this story has an odd epilogue: As part of Rouge City's often bizarrely brutal sense of humor, some wag started silk-screening and selling tee-shirts reading "I Survived the Rouge City Chainsaw Massacree". I didn't take out a copyright on the moniker, so the wag is welcome to it. I happen to have one of the tamer versions of it: the more extreme versions featured your choice of simulated blood dripping down the back, or something a design that looks like torn silicon dermis exposing metal components and fibers. Of course I've avoided these versions: the first because it's offensive to humans, and the second because it would offend Joe. At the worst, he'd go into a pouting say-nothing mode, or at the least he'd inform me that it is in extremely poor taste.

(More to come…)

Afterword:

I don't know when I'll get the next installment of this mini-anthology of sorts posted, but there are a lot more sketches to come, so keep an eye on this one (And the other three I'm juggling!).

Literary Easter Egg:

"Massacree"—That is not a misprint; I repeat: that is not a misprint. I borrowed this word from Arlo Guthrie's famous half-hour long ballad/monologue "The Alice's Restaurant Massacree", in which the singer describes his true misadventures with small town justice in Stockbridge, MA.

Brother Carl—I based this character somewhat on my friend Mark's character "Johnny Preacher" (a character he does when he isn't impersonating Joe); we actually staged a mock confrontation between Johnny Preacher and my character Jake Jacobi, who briefly appears as "Jake".