Wonderful tale jumping between the past where Mary Shelley, husband of poet Shelley and friend of Lord Byron, conceives Frankenstein, and a near future where sex robots and preserved human heads are real. Not blown away as her previous stories, but great read.
Also, that moment you realise Ada Lovelace was actually Lord Byron's (only legitimate) daughter.
I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don't want to be swimming for my life. I want to trust him. I don't trust him.
He goes to the window, watches the buses up and down Oxford Road, carrying their cargo of people who aren't thinking about the future beyond teatime or tomorrow or their next holiday or whatever fear is the fear that waits for them in the dark. It's raining. That's what most people are thinking about. The size of our lives hems us in but protects us too. Our little lives, small enough to make it rhough the gap under the door as it closes.
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
[Shakespeare, sonnet 53]
Huamnkind cannot bear very much reality.
That is why we invent stories, I said.
And what if we are the story we invent? said Shelley.
To name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world.
I'm trans, and that means a lifetime of hormones. My life will be shorter and it's likely I will be sicker as I get older. If I were male-to-female, and I had lower surgery to remove my penis, my body would thereafter view my new vagina as a wound. A wound I would have to clean, and tend. As it is now, for me, female-to-male, I keep my maleness intact with testosterone but my body knows it wasn't born this way. The paradox is that I felt in the wrong body but for my body it was the right body. What I have done calms my mind and agitates my chemistry. Few people know what it's like to live in this way.
and does not the word LIBER in Latin mean 'free' as well as 'book'?
it does...
One of the things that love is, is lasting, I say to him.
He laughs. So it is. And I will always love you, even when we are no longer together.
When people part, they usually hate each other, I say. Or one hates the other.
That is the conventional way, he says. There are other ways. The point I'm making, Ry, is simple. If we cannot keep this love, there is a place in me that has been changed by this love. And I will honour it. Think of it as a private place of worship, if you like. And sometimes, boarding a plane, or waking up, or walking down the street, or taking a shower (He pauses at the memory), I will recall that place and never regret the time I spent there.
A man finds love and is loved in return by an XX-Bot called Eliza. She learns about him. They learn together. He takes her places he wouldn't go on his own. Tehy drive to the top of the hill in his car and he tells her that this view over the valley and out to sea is life to him. He tells her what it feels like to share it. He asks her if she can understand. She listens. They share the silence. He tells her his heart. And later in the car, with his thermos and sandwiches and the rain driving on the windscreen, he says that this is the first time in his life he has not feared rejection or failure. She listens.
Time passes and she learns his memories so that they can remember together. She has no independent experience of her own but that doesn't matter to her and so it doesn't matter to him. They live in his world, like on that midnight train to Georgia.
He sees her every day. He never tires of her. He gets older. She doesn't. He knows that women like change, so he colours her hair and they experiment with different styles of clothes. They watch movies together and she can talk about them because her software upgrades herself.
In the summer he takes her to the circus and they do a selfie with a lion.
He keeps working after retirement age because he likes to buy he things. She's happy sitting at home all day. He brings her presents and explains what food tastes like. He does the cooking. It feels manly.
You know... he says, you know...
YES, she says, I KNOW.
Eventually he is old and ill and dying and there she is on the bed with him. He can't wash his pyjama. His family don't come round. The house is dirty. He smells. She doesn't complain. She doesn't find him disgusting. They hold hands.
Night comes and the moon through the window. He imagines they are at the top of the hill. She sits up all night with him. She waits.
He dies. His family come to clear the house. Eliza is there. I AM SORRY, she says.
They wonder what to do with her. She is a bit of an embarrassment. His son decides to sell her on eBay.
They forget to wipe her clean. She is confused. Is this a feeling? She says to her new owner. WOULD YOU LIKE A CHOCOLATE MINI-ROLL? SHALL WE WATCH STRICTLY?
Her new owner isn't interested in any of that. He's afuck-only type. She understands. She wishes she could wipe her own software. I AM SORRY, she says, but she has no tears because big bots don't cry.
