by Elinor Bonifant
The mice are quiet tonight. Their glass bead eyes follow me as I wend through the lab, stopping at each cage to shake hard pellets through the wire bars. I squat beside the final cage. The mouse has burrowed beneath his substrate, but he surfaces when I drop in a handful of pellets. He scans my open lab coat, probably judging the cheap dress I bought for a cousin’s christening underneath. I won’t have time to change before my Candidate evaluation, so I’ve had to come in costume. The mouse tilts his head like a puppy. I raise a hand to the cage and poke a finger through the bars. I have a vague childhood memory of my mom telling me not to do this with my guinea pig, but the mouse doesn’t seem inclined to bite. Instead, he brings his shiny pink nose to my fingertip. It is wet to the touch. The mouse sniffs, and I feel his whiskers dance along my skin. For a moment, I am tempted to stroke the soft patch between his eyes.
I wrench my hand back, and the mouse disappears inside its plastic igloo. I know better than this. If I become the sort of person who thinks of dancing whiskers every time I take a scalpel to a mouse, I might as well scrap this whole project. I know exactly how much I will have to cleave from it in order to retrieve the cartilage structure growing on its back. This mouse will be dead after the first incision.
I turn my attention to the bioprinters. This, at least, is less complicated. The machine pumps layer after layer of pallid Bioink onto its build plate. Right now, the skin looks like a fat slab of scoby. It jiggles with each adjustment of the machine. In another few hours, all seven layers will have printed, and I can get to work on planting hair follicles. After that, it’s a simple matter of slow-freezing the skin in liquid nitrogen until it’s time to graft it to the body’s muscular system. The muscles have been coming in nicely over the skeletal scaffolding. Barring any major setback, they should be ready in under a week.
I’ve been thinking that once the skin is grafted, I’ll get some tightlipped tattoo apprentice in here to spruce it up. Most of the Candidates with high-ranking physical scores have had tattoos. Even terrible stick-and-pokes have their charm. Plus, they would help the body look lived in, especially once they blow out a little. That kind of authenticity can really only help me if anyone starts asking too many questions.
I glance at the back wall where I’ve pinned hundreds of Candidate photos. This is what I imagine the offices of those organizations that put kids on milk cartons must look like. Most of the photos are taken from dating apps and social profiles. The 452 Candidates are categorized by age, physical score, and viability. I personally assessed each over dinner or coffee or a sweaty evening in the back of my Subaru Impreza. On my computer behind a smokescreen of bank passwords and porn, there is a monstrous spreadsheet of their numerical scores broken down by category. None were perfect, but a few came close. Their images are scattered across my desk, crosshatched with measurements and half-legible notes.
How to build a boy? It’s pretty simple, actually. Start in childhood by being heavy and strange and enjoying Warrior Cats books a little too much. You’ll be bullied mercilessly. This should give you some pretty terrible self-esteem. Spend your teen years alone (you won’t have much of a choice). Read horror. Read medical journals. Sate your loneliness with romcoms and Modern Love essays. Let all of these influence you equally. Graduate magna cum laude from undergrad with a degree in biology. Land a scholarship at an Ivy League and pursue your Doctorate in biopharmaceutical engineering. Apply for grants. Apply for grants again. Brush off the Doctor Frankenstein jokes. Declare a thesis on the viability of synthetic tissue in cosmetic surgery. Get a lab. Get some mice. Get to work.
He’s almost done now. All that’s left is the problem of the brain. Initially, I planned on growing one, but the expensive process yielded only cups of loose gray matter. I could have tried another process but then there was the question of what to do with a fresh brain once I had one. It would have been easy to become tangled in the metaphysical implications of my project. How would the brain become a person? Could I engineer a soul? Did souls exist? Instead of spiraling into an existential crisis or indulging in manic delusions of becoming God, I pivoted to AI.
I planned to wire a microcomputer into the body that could communicate with its nervous system. I tested this on rabbits. The ethics were questionable, I know, but after I started with the mice, it wasn’t like I was going to win any PETA awards. A few well-placed jolts later, I had a computer program piloting the rabbits around the lab like furry drones. For the AI’s speech patterns, I uploaded numerous classic romcoms, a few Emily Henry books, and a curated catalog of celebrity heartthrob interviews. I also input a mortifying backlog of my text conversations and social media posts. I did this not because I wanted the AI to think like me, but because I wanted it to understand how I think. A partner who anticipates your needs with machine accuracy? Revolutionary.
I tested the AI one night over Trader Joe’s ravioli and a cheap bottle of wine. I loaded it onto my laptop and opened a chatbox. The setup reminded me of long nights chatting with perverts on Omegle when I was 13. Except, unlike the Omegle men, the AI was charming. He pulled from science journals and offbeat listicles to string together a conversation that stretched into the following morning. I laughed, I swooned, I downed an entire bottle of wine. It was the best date I’d ever had. But something was off. It took me a day to put my finger on it, but the answer was obvious enough. The AI was like an extremely expensive vibrator – it would get the job done, but it was only a simulation of the real thing. The AI hadn’t lived a life. It had no history. There would be no stories of nightmarish college roommates or delightful grandmothers. Everything the AI knew, every story it could tell me, I could learn on my own.
So, I’m back to assessing Candidates. I’m meeting the 453rd tonight. He’s taking me to a themed restaurant in San Francisco (I don’t have high hopes for his viability). I thought this process ended with the completion of the body design, but science can be frustratingly cyclical sometimes. My new plan is to use AI to replicate an existing man. Once I meet a Candidate who matches my criteria (as determined through a test that is one part enneagram and one part J-14 quiz), I will collect as much data on him as possible to feed the AI. It’s easy enough to get into our university’s email server, and social media passwords are a joke. If that isn’t enough, I’ll steal his phone and keep him in a room for a while answering Buzzfeed quizzes. If I get really desperate, I can always fire up a bone saw and secure a brain straight from the source.
Something thumps, and a mouse squeals. I follow the sound to one of the cages across the lab. This mouse is growing the cartilage for a right ear on its back. It’s trying to exit its plastic igloo, but the rim of the ear catches above the mouth of the tunnel. Outside, the food pellets remain undisturbed. The mouse squirms, but the stranger on its back repels it from the entrance again and again. I unlatch the cage and remove the igloo. Instead of scampering for the food, the mouse cowers. It retreats from my hand, crawling until its back comes up against the cage. This stings in a way I can’t quite understand. The mouse is just following its instincts. What’s more natural than fear? I replace the igloo beside the mouse and relatch the bars.
I’ve been wondering what to do with the mice. I’m supposed to cull them, but that doesn’t feel right. They’re a part of the body. I wonder what they’ll be to him. Like siblings? Like parents? I consider keeping them for him. But then there’s the question of evidence. Destroying the mice will leave one fewer clue to what I’ve done here. I know that my project isn’t right, exactly, but I also don’t think it’s so wrong. If old men can pay young women to simulate lust, then I can build a lover. I think anyone would do the same if they were smart enough to figure out how. Though, I’m not eager to test whether a judge would agree with me.
The wall clock ticks steadily toward 7:00. I pull my phone from my pocket. The Candidate has texted me, but I don’t bother to read it. Unless he’s canceling, there’s nothing he needs to tell me before we meet. I make a mental note to dock a point from his viability score for neediness. I swipe right across the screen to open the camera. I threw on some mascara and a lick of eyeliner before I left for the lab, but this has grown hazy around the edges. Flakes of mascara emphasize the sizable shadows beneath my eyes. I lick my thumb and drag it under each eye. I still look exhausted, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t need the Candidates to like me. In fact, it’s probably best if they don’t remember me at all. That is typically how these encounters play out. Real boys are all too eager to disappear.
I close my phone and shoulder my purse. Feeding the mice has taken longer than expected. Considering the traffic at this time of night, I’ll be lucky if I’m only five minutes late. After a final survey of the lab, I hang my lab coat by the door and head for the car. I call up the Candidate’s profile on my phone to remind myself who I’ll need to spot in the restaurant. Staring down at his sitcom expression, I feel nothing.
I understand how this story is supposed to go. In my quest for simulated love, I am supposed to find the real thing. I’m supposed to fall for a Candidate and abandon this whole, insane project. And I won’t pretend that I didn’t hope for that at the start. But if I know anything for certain, it’s that the story doesn’t go like that for me. I can find the perfect man with the perfect body, but I can’t make him love me. I can’t make myself love him. I’ve tried, but there is something fundamentally strange in me, and men are not eager to make an effort to understand weird women. In my experience, they aren’t eager to understand any women at all.
So yes, I could meet 452 more Candidates and hope that one of them will fit just right when none have before. I could waste time loving mice with dancing whiskers who will just escape, or die, or bite me when I get too close.
Or, I can engineer a solution myself.
Elinor Bonifant is a speculative fiction writer and illustrator living in Los Angeles. She was raised on the ghost stories of North Carolina, and she’s never been able to get them out from under her skin. Elinor is best known for her audio drama, The Haunted Hour. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys roller derby, indie comics, and pinball tournaments. You can find more of her work at www.elinorbonifant.com. She is on twitter @nosebleededdie & IG @zindipity
