They were everywhere. They were always everywhere, inescapable, like vermin. They came in all shapes and sizes, and in a variety of colours; white, black, brown, yellow, red and pink and squealing. They got in the parks, both out in the open and back lurking behind the trees, small murderers waiting to pounce. They infested the swimming pools, the trains, the supermarkets, the buses, the airports. They were full of demands, impossible demands; ice-creams, lollies, Teletubbies, Eminem action dolls. They wanted monkeys and lions and bears. They were a need that could never be satisfied, a hole that could never be filled. Their mouths gaped open to reveal an empty sea of wanting, an unquenchable thirst, a hunger that made her recoil in fear of its intensity. She blanked them out as best she could; hummed to herself, made mental lists of tasks she had to do the next day, rewrote old song lyrics in her head, twisting and turning the words and their meaning. But no matter how she tried they were always there. Snotty noses. Pissed-in pants.


Speaking of things that were always there. She turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door to see him on the sofa, (surprise! he was always on the damned sofa), Ruthie cradled in his lap, an enormous spliff in his right hand, the remote beside him and an open can of beer upon the coffee table. On this, as on many other occasions, she found the words Don't you have a home to go to? forming, almost involuntarily in her mind, before remembering that this was his home. He had nowhere else to go. They continued to go through the motions, though the emotion had long since departed.

He looked up at her, pouting.

“You're late,” he said.

She shrugged, waiting for the Spanish inquisition. Where have you been, who have you been with, what were you doing, each second of your life accountable, marked down, the columns tallied up like debits and credits. Do you balance? Today he chose a different tack; he decided to play on her guilt.

“Ruthie needs feeding.”

“Well feed her then,” she snapped, dumping down her handbag and heading into the kitchen for a glass of white wine.

Placing the joint in the ashtray, he switched off the telly and followed on her heels, holding Ruth up over his shoulder, face downwards, in a perfect position to puke all down his back. He stood in the doorway as she uncorked the wine and sighed, a deep, long sigh, like a man put upon, as if she was the one making demands on him. As soon as her wine was poured (but before she'd had a chance to drink any of it) he pushed the small package (head, torso, limbs) into her arms, where it lay as still as a dead thing. He began the preparation of heating the milk, putting it into the bottle, testing it ever so carefully on his wrist, pausing every now and then to look at her beseechingly. She felt like kicking him. Instead, she simply opened her arms and let Ruth fall to the ground, where she landed on the hard tiled floor of the kitchen with a thud. Then she picked her glass of wine took a long swig and stomped up the stairs to the bedroom, oblivious to his cries of horror.

In the corner of the bedroom sat a stack of small nappies, all neatly folded, ready to be wrapped and pinned upon Ruthie's tiny bottom. She kicked this pile over and plonked down upon the futon, spilling white wine over herself as she did so, cursing as she kicked off her shoes. She picked up the stereo remote and cranked the volume up to eight. The soothing tones of the Flaming Lips rang around the room.

Unit three thousand twenty one is warming …

She heard his foot upon the stair, and turned up the volume still further, as if she could simply drown him out. The ashtray on top of the stereo started to rattle and shake. He stood reproachfully in the doorway.

When its circuits duplicate emotion…

Sometimes she felt that she could predict his every move, his every word, his every breath. Flicking through the catalogue of her own emotions, she found that she felt nothing; no guilt, no pity, no remorse. She wished she had a wand to vanish him, to melt him into a puddle, or to turn him into stone right where he stood.


“Well?” he said.

“Well what?”

“She's cracked,” he croaked, choking slightly on the words, before turning Ruthie over and holding her aloft in order to force her to see the damage that she'd done.

It was true. The plastic head had split open at the back and when you did as he was doing now (pushing inwards on both her ears simultaneously) the cranium split open to reveal the hollow inside.

“Well chuck her back in the study and get another one then,” she said. “She's hardly indispensable.”

He frowned, an illogical man searching for a logical argument. Then, for want of anything good to say, he muttered You're inhuman, under his breath, before turning his back on her, picking up a nappy and a safety pin and traipsing off down the stairs to go about this fictional business of 'taking care of Ruthie.' Later he'd be in wanting sex, wanting to procreate, while she lay there bored, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes she felt that he was something she'd programmed herself during a lengthy fit of masochism.

In order that she could hear what was happening on the floor below, she turned down the volume on the stereo and, when she heard the telly being switched on, she rose up off the bed and went through into the room which had once been her study but was now given over to the accommodation of Ruthies, a whole room full of them, a shipment, a gaggle, a fleet; Ruthies sucking their thumbs, Ruthies asleep, awake, sitting, crawling and standing; all the same make and model - brown hair, blue eyes. Little plastic clones that all said Mama when you pushed their middles. A hole for the mouth, to take in fluid, and a hole at the other end to piss it out.

Mamamamamama. He liked to go in there at the weekend, when he was bored and press all their tummies willy-nilly, sparking off a riot of mechanical voices, a flat demanding chorus that sounded to her ears like moremoremoremoremoremore. She surveyed the collection with disdain.

She locked the door to the study with the bolt she'd had fitted with the specific purpose of shutting him out and then shunted aside a few members of this horrid clan in order to make some room in which to test the special unit. She'd tested every function a hundred times already, but lost in the woods it can get hard to see the trees and she needed to run through everything one last time. In the beginning she'd desired perfection, but now, at the end, she had settled for functionality. She was running out of time; she needed to escape, to get back to the other place before she blew a fuse.

Beware of geeks bearing gifts, she thought to herself as she placed her marvellous toy upon the table. She logged on and ran through the basic commands; tested the response times. When to cry, when to crawl, when to sleep, when to smile - though she tested them now though keystrokes, when she was gone the two-way
transmission/reception system would ensure that voice commands could be transmitted via a cellular telephone network. Upon receiving a message, the software then executed commands that the custom built operating system converted into ones and zeroes - communication at a level the circuitry could understand. An absence and then a presence. Something and then nothing. A similar two-way system installed in the unit sent messages notifying its state back to the sender. Signals flying back and forth through space. The controller code was on their site: inaccessible except to those who were in the know. This was, in part, a preventative measure against untimely self-expiration. No matter what became of her, they would know what to do. She was part of a larger plan. There was a clock in its chest to simulate heartbeat.

It was well within her intellectual means to develop the software and the operating system; the hardware had been a different question. She had done a decent job with everything except the skin and the eyes. The skin looked ok, it just didn't feel right, too rubbery, too sticky to the touch and no matter how vigilantly she powered it with talc it still smelt strange. The eyes were too glassy, too inanimate, and although they swung on pivots, giving them a good up, down and left to right range, any fool staring into those peepers for more than five seconds would be sure to understand that he looked not at a thing born, but at something made. It wouldn't matter if he knew that this thing did not live; she had ensured that he had become accustomed to automata, expected it, in fact, thought it harmless. Impossible to tell how many others would be fooled. This was a long term plan, not something that could be executed overnight. All over the city, others were doing as she was, creating simulacra; enemies disguised as friends. She would not let the side down. She would play her part; she would see it through.

The first time that she picked it up she'd had a big surprise. It had not lain still, but instead, had kicked soundlessly in her arms, legs thrashing wildly, like a possessed wind-up toy. She did not believe in demons. She'd talked logic to herself. Everything has a reason. Cause precedes effect. She'd looked around the room and discovered that she'd accidentally knocked a book onto the keyboard, inadvertently causing continuous pressing of the 'leg thrash' key combination and thereby creating the disturbance. With relief at having found the source of the animation, she had removed the book from the keyboard and, with a strange whirring sound, the unit had grown suddenly still. That single incident aside, the entire operation had run very smoothly and she could confirm that the product was now ready. It was a neat unit, tidy. Form followed function. It obeyed every command that it was sent and none that it was not.

Satisfied that all was in order and that she could proceed, she sent an email to the others, and left the study for the bedroom. He was in there, on the futon. He said nothing. When she lay down, still in the pin-striped suit she had been wearing all day, he simply took her knickers off, inserted himself like a coin into a slot machine, and started pumping away. She stared at a spider that had, for several weeks, been spinning a gossamer web in one corner of the ceiling. In a matter of minutes he had finished, rolled over and was snoring. His favourite Ruthie lay beside their futon in a small basket, her eyes pressed closed, on her side, in the recovery position, a small plastic Moses; a clone. She was far too wired to sleep. She quietly crept from the room.

And when I looked where it had gone it wasn't even there…

She took the chosen unit from the study and carried it downstairs to the lounge, where she arranged it neatly amongst the sofa cushions. A still imitation of life. Its mouth was smiling and its eyes looked kind. It stared straight ahead at his favourite household God, the television. Its benign appearance hid her murderous intent.


Christ, she was exhausted. She stripped out of her suit, wiped off her makeup with a damp tissue and some cleanser, shook out her hair and rolled her neck from side to side in an effort to unwind.

I never knew just what it was…

She peeled back her own skin, pulled some wires, disconnected.

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