Scene from a Gynoid Service Station

Imagine a world that has shrunk to just this: a lone gas-station town in the middle of a desert. It's a town of bleached wood and dusty plastic, a town of rainbow-sheened metal and pumps with no gas left. No, it's not a ghost town. People live here, mechanics whose jean-and-flannel uniforms are like tradition: passed down for so long that they only hint at their functional origins, and are encrusted in ritual superfluities. These people are not superfluities, though. They have a purpose. They are the staff of a service station, and they're waiting for something to service. They wait for the machines to come, machines that arrive desperately in need. Mainly, that would be the gynoids.

The gynoids come out of the desert, where they run impossible missions and fulfill obsolete commands. (Or so the station children whisper.) Underneath the damage and wear they suffer, they are glossy-smooth. Their creator has made no attempt to imitate naturalistic humanity, but for whatever practical or aesthetic reason, the gynoids do have a loosely-revised human figure. The average gynoid has a head and throat, a slim, gently contoured torso and cantilevered waist, long arms and legs tipped with nimble hands and feet. It has human-like parts, woman-like parts. But somehow, all the parts never add up to a whole, "correct" human body. For one thing, they seem so delicate. You might even think the whole collection of parts looks too fragile to stay together. That, however, is deceptive. The gynoid form is infinitely adaptable. A gynoid body can do so, so many things. It can be disassembled and reassembled. It be opened up, modified, hacked and hotwired –by itself as well as by mechanics, when it seeks them out. And it can travel independently. It does not need to run programs, and it does not need to have will. It seems to have agency without being the agent of its own obscure motivations and actions. Just try and predict what it will do next. You'll never succeed, unless you note that there is one thing a gynoid always needs and will always return for. That thing is charge. It needs to be charged. It need power to course through its body and set it running. And that power is focalized on its body's secret sex.

Look out across the flattened, cloud-torn land. Look close: there's a gynoid approaching now. See it returning from somewhere, nobody can say where, encrusted with red clay and moving slowly, with a hitched gait like a stop-motion doll. See its hollow face turned to the dead neon sign of the charging station in need. Parse the communicative silence when it stops.

'Clean me. Fix me. Charge me. I will serve you once, grant you one wish, if you'll do this for me.'

It says this with its artificial body, all in icons, without a word.

The attendants at the low, dusty charging station wait for the gynoid with a hope that borders on cargo-cult fanaticism. This one is especially beautiful: small but perfectly formed with its springy legs and slender compact core, the expressive tilt of its head and its hands raised in supplication or blessing. It appears through the post-apocalyptic prairie haze, silver flashing against the bleached-out horizon, and it moves like a broken doll covered in red mud that speaks of water. It turns its face to an indecipherable sign and begs in silence.

'Clean me. Fix me. Charge me. I will serve and fulfill you, if you'll do this for me.'

There are always repetitions when the gynoids appear. The staff must work to keep from replaying its arrival over and over in an ecstasy of infinite first encounters if they are ever to service the creature and receive its service in return.

So concentrate, now, break the arrival loop and let it enter into the blue shadows of the port-building. Inside the crude scent of a garage bay lingers, hauntingly nostalgic in a world without oil. The top mechanicians gather around it hushed with awe as they wait for it to select the ones to service it. The gynoids often pick two or more people to do the job: mechanicians who are somehow alike and linked by the pleasing patterns of similarity, or who are completely different and create the electricity of contrast. This gynoid is a lover of contrasts. It selects to service it a mature woman with terra-cotta colouring, all rich orange-red skin and black hair, and a pale young man whose slender hands are as cold as ice. They, in tension, begin.

They clean the gynoid with the harshest solvents and the softest alpaca-wool cloths. It stands before them at bay and surrenders its body into their hands. It raises its arms when touched, goes down on its knees before them so that they can better scour the folds of its metallic eyelids, its sculpted waves of hair. It gives itself over to them, submitting completely, and yet it exerts a powerful fascination in the strength and strangeness of its form. It infuses the mechanicians with an unstable compound of respect and possessiveness. They want to worship it and own it. They want to tear it apart and see its inner workings and they want to preserve it forever. They want to love it to pieces and consume it. Most of all, they want what it wants: to see it working well again.

Even as they are torn by conflicting impulses and distracted by each other, the two mechanicians bring the gynoid to its feet for one final polishing. They rub its surface until it shimmers. The one with cold hands who stands behind it traces down its spine with polish, then reaches around under its arms to stroke its smooth throat and breasts, holding it in his arms. It leans back to let him caress it, its hips arching forward. Down there, the terra-cotta woman slowly, luxuriously runs her wool-clad fingers between its legs, where layers of clay have fallen away to reveal a subtle blankness, curved suggestively inward. There is a space to press here, a panel to open.

But before they open it, they fix it. They remove the arm that ratchets helplessly in its socket and repair the joint. They prod deep, deep into its body with pliers and soldering irons as it watches, conscious yet impassive, experiencing the intimate manipulation of its workings. Fix me, fix me, it urges. It offers itself, the places where it was broken. Panels are replaced. Hip-joints are greased. The wear that caused its mute mechanical pain is healed under their ministrations, until every assured new movement it makes speaks to its deep pleasure in assembly and disassembly. How they wish it was broken even more so that they could tear it down and rebuild it completely to make it exactly as it is now! But no, it's not broken that much, only a little, only enough to need tweaking. As they tighten its springs, it sighs compressed air and flexes its limbs with such vitality that they are afraid it will be the one to tear them apart to see how all of their viscera fit together. At least, the cold young man is afraid of that; the terra-cotta woman has less to fear, for her own reasons.

Still, they work on the gynoid with nothing less than the most professional devotion. They make sure that it is in perfect operating order before arriving at the final step. Careful not to recur now: it's so tempting at this stage to go back and touch it all over again, to start up in the motions of polishing its throat and opening its beautiful mouth to make sure there are no obstructions. Recur to the tremulous arousal he felt while slipping the greased wand into the crevices of its curved hips where they meet its thighs. Recur to the moment when she made contact with the circuit near its power source and felt the spark run through her screwdriver to her tingling fingers, her tingling lips. Recur...

But no, don't recur, break the loop and go on. Because the gynoid needs to be charged. It's like a multi-cellular phone with its tiny red lights blinking distress: 'I'm hungry, I'm dying, quick, now, please find the cord that fits perfectly into me and charge me before my screen goes black in famine.' The thing that can do anything is useless without power. The gynoid begs to be charged, to give itself over to the source of power.

They do it together, the two mechanicians: one presses the small indent between its legs and holds the panels that slide back like nictitating membranes open wide, the other uncurls the cord and seeks the opening. (Which of them holds, and which inserts? Which do you think?) Once the gynoid is opened, its body begins to quiver with the automatic impulse to shut down. It runs at its operational limits when open: it should go blank while charging. But it maintains itself aware at that limit in order to feel the charge course through it. The cable sparks, arcs of fluid electricity from body to plug, before the connector even touches it, and the gynoid spasms, the young mechanic flinches, the connection is endangered for the briefest moment until---yes! Yes, there, fast, plug it in, close the circuit and hit the power on the generator, making the gynoid curve itself into the most delicious postures of electric pleasure.

See it, look now: that almost-human body stands before the gathered staff in the middle of the dim, hangar-like garage, and between its legs trails a long slim cable, coiling and recoiling, ribboning curls across the floor to the generator which hums with life, a current it eagerly spools into the gynoid as one machine to another. The gynoid is in ecstasy, in orgasm, sustained at a peak that draws into a long, long plateau. This inhuman union joined by human hands can last and last: 48 hours of charging at a minimum, and sometimes as much as a week straight. It takes time to power something as avidly hungry as a gynoid. The whole time it's plugged in it moves in pleasure, and the gestures of its foreign body language are copied by the mechanics who will perform them over and over again in the coming months like a passion play, hoping to draw the next gynoid in. Almost all the mechanics in the garage will try to match its movements at some point. The doubled dance of the gynoid and its devotees reveals the profound intertwining of bodies organic and technological. Some say that the gift the gynoid grants the chosen ones who have worked on it doesn't matter as much as the dance of power between a charging gynoid and all the service station personnel. Some say it's the process, not the result, that really counts.

This is true, but the gift matters too. Because they also say that the charged gynoid can do more in its first few new hours than the even the ancient gods of science dreamt possible. They say it can turn back time or build worlds. So far, however, the rumours are unproven, because there's only one thing the mechanicians end up asking for.

'Make me like you. Make me a gynoid too. Clean me. Fix me. Charge me. Please.'

It only takes one kiss from the gynoid's lips to do it. Once it caresses the ones who made it, they are remade in the image of their object. They are objectified. Silver spreads through their veins as their eyes go literally glassy with elation. They arch their bodies in machinic ecstasy, scream once more in a last organic sound of death and rebirth, and then close over, sealing perfectly impassive and even conjoining so that they appear, for one moment, as a triple machine running one engine off the other, humming a potentially infinite number of queries and replies to each other before they break off into parts again. The terracotta machine, the cold machine, and the gynoid from the plains all scatter. No amount of supplication will bring them back for further servicing before they need it.

Watch them go. See their figures waver into hallucinations in the heat of this blasted landscape. See them become curve and pattern and nothing more. Now is the time to put the cables away and wait again for the next iteration.