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Kaufman
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The Future is the Motherfucking Future
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Her handler brings her, a leather couch, and a thousand brochures to the convention hall. A stack of glossy paper with her headshot on the front. Her dimensions and capacities on the back like a resume. Her handler sits her, spread eagle, on the black leather couch in the middle of four and a half acres of hard, institutional carpet and fluorescent light.The doors to the hall open and thousands wash among the booths, badges on lanyards, shopping bags bulging with swag. Every hour, on the hour, he does a demo.
Men gather to watch her handler tweak her nipples, slip a finger in her pussy.
Listen! She moans. She has seven distinct erogenous sensors.
Touch one and she moans.
Look! Her head turns, her eyes follow you. She can recognize the human face.
Fuck the foreplay, stick it in. She moans. Two-hundred and fifty distinct, pre-recorded moans.
As if you could simply wash your seed away.
*
Next, and there’s the most important word, next everything will recognize your face. The freckles that hint on your cheeks, where someone’s fingers have grazed. The line of your jaw, I know someone’s fingers have traced the line of your jaw. Those fingers learned your face, and next so will your cell phone. So will your hotel, your car. So will the cameras that jut from walls, peek down alleys, and watch you shop.
And your daughter, should you have one someday, a girl who wears the hint your freckles and the line of someone else’s jaw, the camera will know your daughter first, know the line, the hint. Only after the knowing camera fixes her will there be fingers. And here is the sadness.
The sadness is a limit – shoreline – cliff – door of the liminal sort – not the ordinary hinged and wooden border of a home – the limit of what is human. Because next will be human, and it will next be human to have the line of your jaw lovingly traced by an algorithm years before some fleshed human fingers come to feel, discover, tap softly where the freckles hint.
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