Mosquito
“Are you pleased with me?” London melted in a blue-white flash, and darkness, cold and impassioned, slapped me to the floor, tied me up, stood back to watch me twitch and convulse, then embraced me, like a repentant lover. When I came to, Milord was pouring himself a scotch from the minibar, his smoking claw plucking ice from a thermos.
“Sorry about the ECT, dear boy, but I fear this really is the only way to ‘say good-bye.’ Don’t try to get up. Your vertical hold’s rather wonky.”
I knew I had lost. I would always lose. Because I’m not the real thing. Because I’m not even a poor fake. Just a fake of a fake. Not even bijouterie.
How I longed for genuineness…
The photomechanical, startled by the commotion, had stepped out of frame; now she peeped round the borders of her world, angry at having been disturbed from her little death.
I just wanted to be your doll, Mr James, just wanted to be part of your collection. But no time for self-pity. He loves me, he loves me not. So it goes. He was just like the rest, only prettier. Smile. Keep him talking. This psycho was manoeuvring for the coup de grâce. Delay.
“You were supposed to take me with you.” My lips were as numb as my arms and legs. “You were supposed to be the one…”
“What a revolting idea.”
“Then let me go. There’s no need for this. I won’t tell.”
“Oh? And you seemed to have such a crush on me. Truly, I was flattered…”
“Mr James, I’m not worth it. I’m just a romantic fool. Why are you doing this?”
“Perhaps you think it’s the money? You think I circumvented Harry because I’m a poor, penniless Europunk? It’s true, money was a problem, once. My family had shares in Cartier. When the crash came, we were ruined. I had to sell everything, including, of course, my dolls. But now Cartier pays me very well. Very well indeed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Mosquito, you don’t understand anything.” He sat astride me, a playground lout, the copper electrodes held tauntingly before my eyes, like creepy-crawlies he might at any moment put down my blouse. Reflected in his monocle I saw a green-eyed little fool, my sister, her red-lipped mouth agape in a comic-book cliché of “pain and surprise.” Milord was enjoying himself. He was a nasty boy.
“People seem to prefer the second-rate. Copies. Imitations. We thought at first President Kennedy would help. But all he did was pontificate about Protectionism and the need for Free Trade. As long as no one pirated American intellectual property, Washington didn’t seem to care. Afraid of upsetting Tokyo and her allies. Then Brasilia vetoed us at the GATT. The world was flooded with dolls from Bangkok and Manila. Why couldn’t you have stuck with your radios and TVs, your cameras and washing machines? Why manufacture automata? It was all we had left. The only thing that made us special. You stole our copyrights, our names. Cartier, Givenchy, Lalique, Fabergé, Coty—all the houses from London to St. Petersburg. And now we have nothing left. But that will change, Mosquito. I am, if you like, part of the vanguard of quality control. A recruit to the guerrilla army of taste. I buy dolls for the House of Cartier. Counterfeit dolls. And in Paris, Mosquito, they change them. Thai dolls aren’t like their Western originals. Nanoengineers here use foetal tissue as a template. A dtook-gah-dtah is, in many respects, remarkably human. We have, after all, the evidence of bijouterie. Cartier Paris set out to bridge the hardware-wetware divide, to write a computer virus that could be transmitted from machine to man…”
“Klong fever?” I said, finding my tongue.
“Of course. It’s an STD: computer language translated into biology through enzymes man and machine both share. Every doll, after its program has been infected, is shipped back to Thailand, a man-hungry pathogen. But none of you will suspect: Dolls are supposed to be disease-free. And the real beauty of all this, Mosquito, is that the virus is an ethnic weapon. Only Orientals are affected. It’s prejudiced against certain kinks in your DNA: the gene, for instance, that gives you those pretty, slitty eyes!” He forked his fingers and made to gouge me. I flinched; he relaxed his threat. “The virus only commandeers cells displaying those idiosyncrasies that characterize your poor, overconfident race. Then the pogrom begins. It replicates, targets the hypothalamus, and creates a hormonal imbalance, causing impotence in the male. In, say, three generations, your gene pool won’t fill a petri dish.”
“Revenge. Is that all you want?” Mr James was a considerable disappointment. “I thought you had more imagination. More fascination.”
“I want,” he said, wiping a hand across my mouth and smearing my cheek with lipstick, “to see your industry suffer. I want an end to cheap imports. I want a world I know only as a memory to return, a world of grace and style, of beautiful automata…” The black, leather-sheathed hand descended.
“This is all too impromptu, Mr James.”
“The others—they were just petty thieves. They didn’t have your class. It’s a pity you have to share their fate…”
