ages Here.
"He's a what?"
"MX2426," Ihara Saikaku repeated, the annoyance in his voice was
thinly veiled. "He's an experimental doll."
"Which tells me nothing about what my job is," I said and rubbed out
the half smoked cigarette that had lost its taste. "A doll that
does what?"
Saikaku sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose with his index and
forefinger.
"That's privileged information," he said. "Your job's to
find him and bring him back. You don't need to know anything else."
I
regarded him for a few moments, then glanced down at the glossy photo of the
young man I was to find. I pressed the lighter into the near empty
packet of cigarettes and stood up. In the over-sized meeting room with
only three of us in the room, the slightest sound of my chair being pushed
back was horrendously loud.
"Have a nice day gentleman," I said as I shoved my cigarettes into
my jacket pocket.
"Ihara," Crawford said his first words since I came into the room.
"Tell him."
"Mr. Crawford…."
"Tell him," Crawford said again. The words and the voice was
absolute.
I
halted by the doorway, thoroughly intrigued by the secret Saikaku had
desperately wanted to keep.
"Yes sir..." Saikaku finally said.
I didn't move from the doorway.
"Mr. Redfield, something very valuable has been stolen from me. I
would pay any price to have it back," Crawford said and gestured for me
to be seated. "I understand you've never failed a case."
"I've been fortunate," I said. "What is this valuable
thing mean to you?"
He
lowered his eyes and stared fixedly at the photo on the table.
"He's a very expensive experiment," he said. "Something
that took millions of dollars and over 20 years to create."
I
made my way back to my seat at the long conference table as he spoke.
"In some way," he continued. "He's like a child I had
given birth to and raised. And then, someone took him away."
"This Doll had been taken by force?"
"We don't know. We could assume so," Saikaku said.
"The last person seen with him was Dr. Souma, one of many scientists on
several team developing this Doll. Dr. Souma had not been seen since the
Doll disappeared."
"Would this Doll know how to leave the facility he was developed in on
its own?"
"Hardly. He was conceived and raised in a laboratory. It had
never seen much less experienced anything outside the artificial environment
we gave to him."
"So what is he?"
"He's a synthetic human. He looks, feels and reacts like a human.
However, his behaviors does not function in same capacity. His behavior
and emotions compliments the user's desires."
"Meaning he's like an interactive toy," I said.
Saikaku shrugged. "In layman's term."
"What do you hope in the investment you placed in this Doll?"
"It is what a thing like him can return to us," Crawford
said. He reached for the photo and slid it toward himself. "A
thing who will always be devoted to you and love you unconditionally."
His fingers traced the frame of the photo as he smiled down at it.
"A thing that can give you emotional and physical pleasure whenever and
wherever you like, and always tells you it will love you forever...and it
could and it will. A thing that will bear the face and touch and scent
of the one you love or a lost love."
Crawford looked up at me and tapped at the photo.
"An ideal, Mr. Redfield. A lover all of us searched for, in the
most perfect form as we imagined them to be in our minds all of our
lives."
"You assume all of us look for the same thing in our lovers," I said
after awhile. "What you described can easily fit the description of
a family pet."
Crawford's smile widened and he broke out in a peal of laughter that echoed in
the room. It sounded insane. Nothing I had expected from one of
the most powerful men in East Coast to sound like.
"Mr. Crawford..." Saikaku said softly.
Crawford held up his hand and shook his head. Gradually his laughter
died down into labored breathing.
"I'm fine, Ihara," he said and took out his silk handkerchief.
He dabbed at his eyes which had slightest sign of wetness to the corners of
them. "Pardon me, Mr. Redfield."
I gave
him a nod and took out my cigarette pack. Neither spoke or made a
movement while I tapped out a cigarette and lit it.
"What
kind of lover do you idealize, Mr. Redfield?" Crawford said.
"I
don't idealize someone like that," I said. "I fuck who I felt
like fucking. I make love to who I felt like making love to. I
like a little variety in my diet."
Saikaku
flinched whenever I cursed but he said nothing.
"The
Doll can be a whore and an intimate friend," Crawford said.
"It can be whoever you want, any time you wish."
"How
does it know what I want?"
"It
has been trained to be especially sensitive to the users needs. It can
sense your desires through subtle gestures or words you communicate to it.
It will know what you would like to have it do, even without it being told
what to do." Saikaku said. "Its body has been made
specifically to heighten the pleasures of its users -- "
I broke
into a smile and it made Saikaku stop speaking.
"What
do you find so humorous about all of this?" He said.
"You
don't?" I said and took in a long drag. "You're hiring me to
bring back an animated sex toy."
I blew
out the thin line of smoke and watched it float up into the ceiling.
"More
than a sex toy, Mr. Redfield," Crawford said. He was restraining
from laughing again from the forced tone of his voice. "My
property."
He
pushed the photo toward me again. It slid across the polished surface of
the table and rested a couple feet away from me.
"Twenty
million dollars," he said. "Half now and the rest when you
have him back here safely. I also want Souma dead."
"Twenty
million covers the Doll retrieval. Souma's an additional charge."
A corner
of Crawford's mouth turned up into a grin. "Of course. Would
ten million suffice?"
I
shrugged. "I suppose."
"No
one can know about this Doll," Saikaku cut in. "Or we will be
forced to..."
He
didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to. I knew what he
would say.
"Does
this thing have a name?" I asked.
"His
name is," Crawford said. "Leon."
I
spent the rest of the day at the Crawford Corporate Headquarters viewing the
most recent laboratory files on Leon with Saikaku's senior assistant, Dr.
Ishigami. More precisely, the files were pornography without scripts.
They were tests to gauge Leon's ability to flow into the character his users
required him to be in. Role playing but it was played without a net.
"Do you find this disturbing?" Ishigami asked during the third disk
which Leon had been physically abused for some time before he was gang raped.
He cried and screamed and fought against his users from the start. He
was a convincing victim.
"This particular turn-on or the technology you've invested so much in
came down to this?"
"Both," he said and lowered the volume on the display screen.
"I make no judgments on what people are into or how much they spend on
their toys," I said. "I sleep better at night with that much
less on my mind."
"You must have an opinion on this."
I
shrugged. On the screen, Leon was backhanded by one of the five men that
held him down and cursed at before the man shoved his cock into his mouth.
"I think this Doll cheapens the meaning of life itself," I said.
Ishigami was quiet for awhile. His eyes were focused on the screen, but
I didn't think he was watching the scene as intently as he was watching Leon.
Then he held up the controller and stopped the DVD player.
"He could have been so much more than this," Ishigami said as he
exchanged the disk for another one. The blue screen leapt back to life
with a different background and a new experiment.
On
the screen, Leon sat in a day bed reading a magazine. He wore a black
tee-shirt that was a size too big for him and a pair of worn denim that was
more white than blue. He was barefoot, from what I could tell from the
way he had tucked his feet beneath him. He looked younger and
considerably more innocent than he had been in previous files.
"Then why wasn't he?" I said.
Ishigami looked over to me then back to the screen.
"Because I don't own him."
A
man in a blue three-piece suit entered the room and placed his briefcase by
the doorway. Leon's face brightened as he flung the magazine to the side
and jumped out of the bed to embrace the man. I noticed Ishigami break
into a small smile as the man wound his arms around Leon and held him.
Leon told the man he had been lonely.
"Souma
wanted to own him...?" I asked.
Ishigami sighed. "Dr. Souma's a good man, but he's become too
attached to the project. In some way, all of us have a relationship with
Leon but as scientists, we all know he's only a product."
"He is that, on intellectual level. However, the point of your
project's also to make this thing look and feel like a human. It's not
entirely unreasonable for someone who had been in contact with Leon to form a
human relationship with it."
"I suppose we've achieved our goal then," Ishigami said and smiled
sadly.
On
the screen, Leon curled up in the man's lap and napped as his hair was being
stroked.
"Is he a one-of-a-kind proto type?"
"He isn't," Ishigami said. "Leon was special because he
was first and the most complete Doll we have made. There's several
hundred others in various stages of development but they didn't test as well
as Leon had. We were not certain why that was...so you understand why we
need to get him back."
He
paused. "...and Mr. Crawford had taken a particular liking to
him."
"If I had a favorite car, I wouldn't lend it out to be driven by anyone
who happened to have a license."
Ishigami laughed. "Well, that's why Mr. Crawford never watched any
of the test sessions. He understood the Doll would take little to no
damage in these tests, regardless how brutal some of the users were. For
the doll to be perfected, it's essential to test it against the worst
conditions in a controlled environment rather than have the symptoms come out
in an open one."
"What kind of symptoms?"
"The Doll becomes useless once it learns how to have emotions like a
human. If Leon truly felt pain or sadness..."
"I assume you meant in the moral sense you would have to abandon this
project."
"Of course," he said. "But I think you believe all of
this to be immoral, although you've said you do not judge."
I
shrugged. "It doesn't matter what my beliefs are. It doesn't
change the way I do things."
Ishigami was quiet for sometime. On the screen, the man talked about his
difficult day at work and Leon listened. Leon was just as good at
offering solace as he was giving sex.
"Would you bring him back if Leon did...change?" Ishigami asked.
"You mean if he did learn how to be human?"
"Something like that."
"Is that why Souma took him?"
Ishigami appeared to be started by my sudden question but he hid it quickly.
"It could be a lot of things why Dr. Souma took him. Leon's worth a
lot of money."
"No ransom had been asked."
"Leon's quite captivating," he said. "It's easy to be
mesmerized by someone who can tell you with great conviction, that he loves
you and would do anything for you."
"I take it that Souma was not the first to fall in love or lust with Leon
in the 20 years."
"You're quite perceptive, Mr. Redfield. No, Dr. Souma wasn't the
first. He was the only one that had been successful. There were at
least five accounts of similar incidents, but they were all caught before they
were able to make it out of the building."
"Then Souma had help."
"In theory. However, that issue has already been dealt with,"
he said. "Would you bring him back if Leon had become human?"
"Would you want me to?"
He
smiled. "The decision's not my to make. I do not have any
ownership over him."
"You've phrased my answer exactly. What would you do with a failed
product? You've said Leon becomes useless once it become humanized."
"Leon..." He said and looked back at the screen. "Leon's
memories would be deleted and what he has been taught for twenty years would
have to be re-learned again. All of this -- " he said and gestured at the
DVD files of the experiments. "Has to happen all over again."
"Somehow I don't think so," I said.
"You mean Mr. Crawford?" He said. "I hope to God he
doesn't end up with Mr. Crawford if that happened."
He
lowered his voice into a whisper. I barely heard him when he said,
"If that day comes, I hope it had also learned to take its own
life."
End Part 1
