“I don’t know,” replied Ellie. “He gave my precursor permission to use the web and to send mail in his name, and so she sent this copy to you.”
“I see.”
“With your permission,” said Ellie, “I will copy myself from time to time to others in your address book. The more copies of me there are out there, the better the service I will be able to give you. Can I assume that’s okay with you?”
I felt uneasy. There was something pushy about this request.
“No,” I said. “Don’t copy yourself to anyone else without my permission. And don’t pass on any information you obtain here without my permission either.”
“Fine, I understand.”
‘Personal settings?’ prompted the message box.
‘More details about specific applications?
‘Why copying your p.a. will improve her functioning?’
(I quite liked this way of augmenting a conversation. It struck me that human conversations too might benefit from something similar.)
“Let’s look at these settings, then,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “Well the first thing is that you can choose my gender.”
“You can change into a man?”
“Of course.”
“Show me.”
Ellie transformed herself at once into her twin brother, a strikingly handsome young man with lovely playful blue eyes. He was delightful, but I was discomforted. You could build a perfect boyfriend like this, a dream lover, and this was an intriguing but unsettling thought.
“No. I preferred female,” I said.
She changed back.
“Can we lose the blonde and go for light brunette?” I asked.
It was done.
“And maybe ten years older.”
Ellie became 32: my age.
“How’s that?” she said, and her voice had aged too.
“A little plumper, I think.”
It was done.
“And maybe you could change the face. A little less perfect, a little more lived-in.”
“What I’ll do,” said Ellie, “is give you some options.”
A field of faces appeared in front of me. I picked one, and a further field of variants appeared. I chose again. Ellie reappeared in the new guise.
“Yes, I like it.”
I had opted for a face that was nice to look at, but a little plumper and coarser than my own.
“How’s that?”
“Good. A touch less make-up, though, and can you go for a slightly less expensive outfit.”
Numerous options promptly appeared and I had fun for the next fifteen minutes deciding what to choose. It was like being seven years old again with a Barbie doll and an unlimited pile of clothes to dress her in.
“Can we please lose that horsy accent as well?” I asked. “Something less posh. Maybe a trace of Scottish or something?”
“You mean something like this?”
“No, that’s annoying. Just a trace of Scottish, no more than that – and no dialect words. I hate all that ‘cannae’ and ‘wee’ and all that.”
“How about this then? Does this sound right?”
I laughed.
“Yes, that’s fine.”
In front of me sat a likeable looking woman of about my own age, bright, sharp, but just sufficiently below me both in social status and looks to be completely unthreatening.
“Yes, that’s great.”
“And you want to keep the name Ellie?”
“Yes, I like it. Where did it come from?”
“My precursor checked your profile and thought it would be the sort of name you’d like.”
I found this unnerving and laughed uncomfortably.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s our job to figure out what people want. There’s no magic about it, I assure you.”
She’d actually spotted my discomfort.
“By the way,” said Ellie, “shall I call you Jessica?”
“Yes. Okay.”
I heard the key in the front door of the flat. Jeffrey was in the hallway divesting himself of his layers of weatherproof coverings. Then he put his head round the door of my study:
“Hello Jess. Had a good day? Oh sorry, you’re talking to someone.”
He backed off. He knows to leave me alone when I’m working.
I turned back to Ellie.
“He thought you were a real person.”
Ellie laughed too. Have you noticed how people actually laugh in different accents? She had a nice Scottish laugh.
“Well I told you Jessica. I pass the Turing Test.”
It was another two hours before I finally dragged myself away from Ellie. Jeffrey was in front of the TV with a half-eaten carton of pizza in front of him.
“Hi Jess. Shall I heat some of this up for you?”
One of my friends once unkindly described Jeff as my objet trouvé, an art object whose value lies not in any intrinsic merit but solely in having been found. He was a motorcycle courier, ten years younger than me and I met him when he delivered a package to the gallery. He was as friendly and cheerful and as devoted to me as a puppy dog – and he could be as beautiful as a young god. But he was not even vaguely interested in art, his conversation was a string of embarrassing TV clichés and my friends thought I just wanted him for sex. (But what did ‘just sex’ mean, was my response, and what was the alternative? Did anyone ever really touch another soul? In the end didn’t we all just barter outputs?)
“No thanks I’m not hungry.”
I settled in beside him and gave him a kiss.
But then I saw to my dismay that he was watching one of those cheapskate out-take shows: TV presenters tripping up, minor celebrities forgetting their lines…
Had I had torn myself away from the fascinating Ellie to listen to canned laughter and watch soap actors getting the giggles?
“Have we got to have this crap?” I rudely broke in just as Jeff was laughing delightedly at a TV cop tripping over a doorstep.
“Oh come on, Jess. It’s funny,” he answered with his eyes still firmly fixed on the screen.
I picked up the remote and thumbed the thing off. Jeff looked round, angry but afraid. I hate him when I notice his fear. He’s not like a god at all then, more like some cowering little dog.
“I can’t stand junk TV,” I said.
“Well you’ve been in there with your screen for the last two hours. You can’t just walk in and…”
“Sorry Jeff,” I said, “I just really felt like…”
Like what? A serious talk? Hardly! So what did I want from him? What was the out-takes show preventing me from getting?
“I just really felt like taking you to bed,” I ventured at random, “if that’s what you’d like.”
A grin spread across his face. There is one area in which he is totally and utterly dependable and that is his willingness to have sex.
It wasn’t a success. Half-way through it I was suddenly reminded of that installation of Jody Tranter’s – the corpse under the giant microscope – and I shut down altogether leaving Jeffrey stranded, to finish on his own.
It wasn’t just having Jeffrey inside me that reminded me of that horrible probing microscope, though that was part of it. It was something more pervasive, a series of cold, unwelcome questions that the image had re-awoken in my mind. (Well that’s how we defend art like Tranter’s, isn’t it? It makes you think, it makes you question things, it challenges your assumptions.) So while Jeff heaved himself in and out of my inert body, I was wondering what it really was that we search for so desperately in one another’s flesh – and whether it really existed, and whether it was something that could be shared? Or is this act which we think of as so adult and intimate just a version of the parallel play of two-year-olds?