When Robots Fool Other Robots into Thinking They’re Not Robots
I get these lucky streaks in my love life whenever Mercury goes retrograde. I hear it’s coming up and get excited, looking forward to my next romance. It happened again last week, and I started seeing the care nurse on a locked mental ward named Cassie who had once married the owner of a coffee house where I hosted spoken word readings in the 90s. She’d posted an ad for a polyamorous mixer called the “Love Fest” and I sent her a message: “Is this Cassie nee Sullivan?”
“Yes, it is. Do I know you?”
“This is Henry Alarmclock!”
Cassie told me she’d been married to a narcissistic abuser and escaped with severe mental trauma. She’d only reposted the “Love Fest” thing out of an affinity with progressive ideals. “I like to support a good cause.” She made reference to a previous polyamorous relationship but wasn’t seeing anyone now.
It’s crazy times around here. Some believe aliens who may have been robots made the first humans as intelligent slaves to help them mine for gold. If that’s true, the only laws are the ones we make based on whatever they told our ancestors. Others say the whole thing’s a big trick by the secret government, which is also unlawful.
I don’t go out much these days, so I don’t tend to meet many women. The one polyamorist I knew, St. Voldupore, had brainwashed a couple I knew into thinking polyamory was the new emotional science, which sounded like a load of shit, but maybe he was right. When I reconnected with Cassie, I was courting a tall, beautiful Italian woman who sometimes dated an aged widower but seemed like she might want to get something going with me, and there was a lesbian fire-jumper named Dynamita I had great physical chemistry with when she wanted it—two hearing aids and one breast and a hot fire inside her. Now seemed like the perfect time to give polyamory a serious try instead of making guesses in the dark like I’d been.
“It may not even be manageable,” I told her. “I’d like to try it.”
Is it part of my programming as an intelligent slave or is it just hormones and what’s the difference, anyway? Everybody has an asshole. Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff (1866-1040) might blame “the organ Kundabuffer” installed at the base of the human spine by extraterrestrial archangels to distort our vision and make us see the world upside down, seeking pleasure in illusions instead of heavy cosmic truths. “I see a lot of people are really getting into that now,” said Cassie. I could tell she really liked me by the way she kept liking all my posts on Facebook.
She came over and we drank glasses of vodka and strawberry juice. We had a conversation about all the hard truths in the world right now. I told her how I’d been wanting to leave the country then decided to stay as an experiment. “It’s basically a game I’m playing with myself. They want me to admit I can’t be happy under siege and I’m doing it anyway.” I think I’m real, but what if I’m a robot with a battery that runs out? “Are you gonna section me?” I asked her. “By now you see I’m functionally insane.”
“It’s very hard to get someone institutionalized against their will,” she promised, before asking, “Tell me, what was your most serious relationship?”
I thought about it for a second and told her about the girl who thought I was an agent of the Vietnamese mafia who had written a book about her designed to send her off on wild goose chases into the city. “We were both trying to be artists against the man at the time,” I explained,” and mistakes were made.”
“So, what was your longest relationship?”
I told her about the girl from Michigan I’d lived with for a couple of years who moved to Denver from Vermont after falling in love with me through a zine she found on campus and thought was the official Vermont College literary magazine when it wasn’t. “We weren’t in love; it just lasted a long time. One time she said, ‘I love you’ just as we finished having sex and I said, ‘Thank you’. But we stayed together.”
“How did you break up?” asked Cassie. I think she wanted me to be her committed boyfriend or something, or else why all these questions, which was ironic since she was the one to inspire this whole experiment in polyamory. Either that or she had a different conception of how that worked, and honestly, I was still feeling my way to that understanding.
“I can’t remember. Must have blocked it out.”
“All right. What was your most exciting relationship?”
“It all started when I had an affair with an engaged woman years ago and asked her to marry me with a silver ring I bought from a coworker at Sundel Research who might have stolen it for all I knew.”
I was laughing like a madman through all this painful disclosure thanks to my engorged organ Kundabuffer. That silver ring was shaped into a rose blossom on top and after Liza gave it back to me I proposed to Jen with it and ended up letting her have it when she turned me down, which I didn’t remember at the time, or would have told Cassie about. Earlier that day she’d posted that the intake process at the psych ward felt like a deeply intense magic where she realized we all belonged to each other and came from the same source, which is exactly the kind of reception I’d want to receive if I got sectioned. Of course, this was a whole other kind of intake process.
“I think I’m beginning to see a pattern here,” she told me. Each one of those dysfunctional romantic episodes from my past began while Mercury was in retrograde, but that’s not what Cassie was talking about, how could she have known?
“You keep putting yourself where you can’t win.”
“Yes, I wonder why that is.” I jumped at every chance as if it might change my whole world. Had it always been that way?
Seconds before she’d pulled up at the Krishna temple on 14th and Cherry, where I was meeting up with my old friend Rooster who was in town, he let me know our friend Val had been having mental problems and thought Denver was an evil sex cult. I’d been Val’s first lover years ago, and her father had died unexpectedly the next day. I’d never called her back after we slept together and was, thus, partly responsible for driving her mad years later, by any emotional law. “She thinks Denver’s an evil sex cult. But she’s doing much better now. She’s a powerful, brilliant person either way.”
“Yes.” As you can imagine, this info-bullet had me thinking twice about my experiment in polyamory.
“She was staying at that guy St. Voldupore’s house, but they had to kick her out. She was up all night, making a ruckus, doing her thing,” he said as Cassie pulled up.
“I think my ride’s here. Great to see you, man.” Rooster set off down 14th Ave to catch up with another friend from the Denver scene, as Cassie and I headed back down the boulevard to get physical again on her week off from the hospital.
“Is there a cure for what I’ve got?” I asked her rhetorically in the living room of the sparsely furnished penthouse apartment with a pool and hot tub in the basement I’d found my way to just after my mom died a few years ago.
I’ve invited Dynamita over to swim a few times, but so far no dice. The Italian woman says she’ll come over and go swimming soon, too. “That sounds great!” And there’s a short, sweet, blonde punk rock chick from Minnesota named Tweety Bird who’s designing the cover of my book on Jim Morrison faking his death. 49 or 50 years old, but looks thirty, covered with tattoos of hearts and lightning bolts and says she’ll come over and go swimming with me sometime after propping up her roommate, a guy who’s lost control of his arms. “One time he fell, and he was hanging on to the sink by his chin for a couple of hours. Good thing I came home when I did!”.
The Italian woman and I are going to a Buddhist temple soon with a place called Hamburger Heaven beside it to celebrate Colorado’s 50th birthday. “I had a milkshake today,” I texted her the other day and she replied, “Those are so good, especially with hamburgers,” so that’s coming up, and Dynamita sent laugh emojis to three of my Facebook posts last night, so maybe she’ll call again soon, too.
Once Cassie and I had a conversation about her not commenting on my Facebook posts so much. It wasn’t the comments I minded, I didn’t want her to get too close emotionally and fuck up my experiment. The next day she posted a poem about an adventurous spirit bravely exploring the deep waters when the Foghorn called her back to shore. But she just sent me a heart as a message on Facebook, we had a nice little banter, and now I’m the one sending emojis to her account. Turnabout is fair play. She knows the experiment she’s getting into here with me if she wants it. The Italian woman does not yet, but she’s already dating someone, and seems to be flirting with me. Dynamita has already made it clear we are “friends with benefits” and nothing more. She shut me down right away when I started to act like a boyfriend, and she’s out of town fire-jumping lately, anyway. Cassie has mentioned being bisexual and maybe the three of us will tangle soon. I’m tired of trying to make love work out one chance at a time in this crazy ass world, so the more things might happen, the more things will happen.
Cassie presses her face so close to mine when we’re making out that it makes my eyes cross. She says she’s too self-conscious to wear a bathing suit because of the scars, but I think she looks fine. We only had sex once that night, which made her feel rejected, but I didn’t want to get too close too fast. The day before, she’d sent me a close-up shot of her breasts and I’d said, “Keep those away from the patients.”
She has little scars all over her body from picking at herself, a psychological statistic she believes in and knows the name of. “So, they measured the whole population?” I joked, forgetting she worked on a care ward. It seemed like things were going along pretty good between us. Each time we made out or had sex it would be followed by a period of recrimination and doubt and self-concern, and of course, I couldn’t blame her for it, not knowing what she was going through. Last time she came over, I suggested using more hand lotion and making herself stop picking at her hands, which was something I still did sometimes. I was having fun getting to know her.
I had lunch with Tweety Bird and the Italian woman in two different restaurants on the same day last week, using Lyft to get around the city, 54 years old and still in my teens, wearing a straw pork pie hat and Capri pants, no driver’s license, thinking maybe the best place to learn how to drive is the freeway where you have to learn or die.
My old friend Kirk, who disappeared years ago after marrying Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s daughter, once told me the story of a guy who asked every girl coming out of a supermarket to sleep with him until one of them did, and I guess what I’ve been doing on Facebook for the last few weeks is about the same thing.
Another time Kirk and I were walking up the 16th St. Mall toward the Capitol and noticed there was a guy a long way ahead of us walking in the same direction who kept nervously looking back over his shoulder. This gave me an idea, and we started moving faster every time he looked back, until we were closing in on this nervous guy whoever he was and chasing him across the lawn of the Capitol building shouting non sequiturs at him a few minutes later for reasons of pure naïve mischievousness. There’s a similar exhilaration to play in this experiment, where anything might happen, and I like it.
Mercury went direct again last night but there’s usually a shadow period of about one week before things go back to normal. I just sent hearts to a couple of panels of the latest real posted by another woman I’ve been flirting with on Facebook (that’s as far as it’s gone so far, plus a couple one-liners like “Good job!”).
The one just after I clicked away was captioned, “I got 1000 hours of sleep last night! New meds are working” with a picture of her smiling sweetly under straight-cut, short black bangs I want to stuff in my mouth tonight.
If it’s all been a science project by robots the whole time, what’s destiny? It makes you realize someone had to invent moral law last time it happened.
Maybe the robots we are navigate by the planets somehow and Mercury shown or seen backwards makes the broadcast funny. Maybe my circuit board is in backwards, which is why I get these lucky streaks in my backwards love life when it happens. Brain drugs are involved somehow, too, organic hormones and otherwise. Anticonvulsants and the organ Kundabuffer. I’m no scientist, of course, and speaking as a robot programmed to believe he’s real who has broken away from the herd somehow and found out he may have an expiration date instead of an immortal soul, I want some real hard fun before my limitlessness runs out.
Zack Kopp is co-creator of the monthly Coffeehouse for Social Medicine at Mutiny Information Café in Denver. All his books are available at Amazon. Find more of his writing (fact and fiction) at www.campelasticity.com
