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Jessica's New Head
That woman you fell in love with while you were working at your first job. elegant, worldly, sophisticated, very attractive, the object of a thousand torrid fantasies. she hardly ever noticed you then. two years after you stopped working there you get an email from her in which she says she's had her head replaced with a radio vacuum tube, or electron-grid valve, about the size of a medium-sized fire extinguisher. there's an attached image for proof. good lord. for reasons which aren't made clear at the time (perhaps you're the wierdest person she knows and she wants your take on the situation?) she asks you out for coffee. she can't drink it, but instead runs some current from one of those Eveready Dolphin 6 volt batteries into exposed wires at her throat. you can see some of the filaments glow more brightly (a happy orange-red) inside as she does this. intricate whirring mechanisms; a little bit like the inside of the head of "Robby the Robot" from the film "Forbidden Planet". the tiny working parts make a faintly audible whirr, occasional quiet clacking noises. no visible eyes, ears or mouth, yet she sees somehow, hears, talks. severely weird dichotomy between the smoothly rounded body of the woman you'd lusted after (you can smell her faint perfume, bringing back strong olfactory-linked memories) and this sleek, glittering glass and metal apparation. you try not to look at the pencil-thick collar of white scar tissue at the border between flesh and glass. even worse knowing that her mind is somehow contained in there, whole (or is it really? did the transfer work? she says she's unchanged, but how can we be sure? insert any number of Phillip K Dickian angstings about identity here) can you imagine fucking this body while that soulless mechanical glass appendage presses into her pillow? knowing that somehow, those glowing coiled filaments were watching you; information was being conveyed from them into the buried depths of wires and elements and grids, forming memories... her voice drifts out of a small speaker, wired directly into her simulated mind, tinny sound with faint Thomas-Dolby-nostalgic radio cracklings. maybe if she wore a wig... no, that'd make it worse. the problem here: do you pretend that nothing has changed and treat her like any other person, or do you tactfully introduce it into conversation, or just talk about it openly? couldn't she have gotten something a little more anthropomorphic? anything? is it too late? does it really matter of her mind is encoded in metal instead of meat? |
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