Pretty Electric

Disclaimer: Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is copyrighted to Bandai, Sunrise, and The Sotsu Agency.

Pretty Electric
by Raletha

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Chapter 5: A Day Out
Quatre spends the day alone.

Saturday morning was clear and cool, though the acrid scent of the night\'s smog lingered on, a bitter burn in my sinuses and throat. It was early enough that the streets were quiescent. What traffic there was, moved smoothly and orderly; no horns or squealing breaks disrupted my walk. I had woken this morning with the need to be out, not out at work, for that was too much like routine to constitute being truly \'out\', but out of my habitual and familiar surroundings. I needed to think, and it had been a while since I had walked the streets this early on a Saturday.

When I was studying, I used to walk to the City Fine Arts Museum for study breaks. The peaceful atmosphere celebrating beauty always soothed me then, so I let my feet take me there this morning.

With a spike of morning verve, I took the broad stone steps two at a time, kept my momentum to trot between the grand marble pillars, only to be halted momentarily by the heavy brass doors, which required a strong push. Passing into the building, the change in the sound of my footfalls heralded my arrival; the tap of my leather soles bounced from the stone floor to the high arched ceiling and marble walls, and then vanished. I relished the way those timid echoes sought to become noise, but in vain. The expanse of the space swallowed them up in cavernous silence, an auditory experience I associated with more than one museum, but only with museums. The muffled reverberations were part of what soothed me, part of what I always liked about coming here. I could close my eyes and imagine being underground, in some grand cathedral of a cave, the other sounds of the museum smeared together into murmur, not unlike the murmur of water over rock.

I\'d never actually gone spelunking, but I remembered well how much I longed to travel to places such as Luray caverns when I was a boy. My father would not take me. He said I would be disappointed: he explained to me how much of the drama in the photographs was special effects--lenses, lighting, and computer enhancement. The stalactites weren\'t really so colourful and grand.

Later I learned the colours were natural, and my father had been wrong, but I was no longer a boy then. Now that I think back to my youth, I think he simply did not want to make the time to take me.

I slid my debit chit into the reader near the door and made a donation, an anonymous and generous one. The museum was free to the public, and I preferred to see it stay that way.

An array of banners upon the wall over the archway leading into the Mediterranean Antiquities halls proclaimed a recent renovation of that section. And, the banners informed me, to celebrate the renovation, the Elgin Marbles were on loan from the British Museum this month. Decision made, I went that way.

There, I took my time, first among the ancient Minoan artifacts, for they were among my favourite exhibits in the museum. I enjoyed the vast antiquity of the pieces, the anonymity of the subjects and the artists, and the way the art was like a time machine, bringing an unknowable past into the present for one to apprehend its echoes. The grace and the joy, the beauty and the majesty of a long dead people preserved.

As I gazed upon the elaborately decorated amphorae and vases and friezes, I thought about who had made these items. Not in abstract, as we often do, but of the anonymous individuals who lived in this culture at the very beginning of our Western civilisation. They, those artists, were among the first to create art for the sake of beauty and pleasure, not only for political or religious purposes.

Much of the art was playful and whimsical--a cat stalked a bird, a woman strolled down the street, youths played at Bull Jumping. I tried to imagine the artists: Were they male or female? Young or old? How did they feel about their art? How did they come to this fundamental change of making these images not to elevate their leaders or celebrate their gods, but to show the beauty of their human day-to-day existence. And did they understand the longevity of their art? Did they have any inkling that thousands of years into an unimaginable future, men such as myself would look upon their works and wonder?

If they did know, would they have felt sorrow at the loss of their names, or simply be pleased that their work remained? I liked to linger in this understanding, that at one time art was only functional, and then, somehow, it made this transition to being simply for aesthetics. It seemed such an intrinsic part of being human, this desire to create, to create things that remain beyond us, to create things of beauty.

Silently, I thanked the anonymous individuals of ancient Crete, and I mourned briefly the brevity of their culture. I moved on, passing through the Mycenae displays, intent now on seeing the broken, but still beautiful marble cladding of Athen\'s Parthenon.

Here the weight of time was even greater, though the work itself was younger. The Elgin Marbles, saved from neglect and further destruction by their namesake, the 7th Earl of Elgin. Perhaps the time weighed more heavily upon these works because of this--because they were so very close to having been lost to us.

The figures depicted, despite the damage leaving them faceless and ragged, were so exquisite, so lifelike, I waited, breathless for Bacchus or Athena to stir, and step from the marble to the floor, to speak and tell me of their ancient city. The hand of a human shaped these figures. Just a human, living in a world without technology or galleries of the past thousands of years\' art to inspire him. In the contemporary, we were so deeply rooted in the context of our cultural history; it was difficult to imagine having been the first.

I also experienced time when I came to the panel upon which Keats had meditated when he composed his famous, \"Ode on a Grecian Urn\". To think these marbles were in London, and Keats had sat, roughly where I stood (relative to this view anyway) and thought upon art and truth and beauty and what it meant to create art.

He understood well the function of art in time, for he was not at the beginning as was the creator of the marbles. He was much later in the timeline, closer to me, but distant enough for it to give me a heady rush to have this mode of connecting myself to the long dead poet.

Legacy as creation, not just of children--as was the default evolutionarily programmed instinct--but more enduring creations strove for human immortality. And here that legacy rested, preserved in silent stone. Even chipped and faceless, the gods and goddesses of Olympus reigned over the hall, over the frozen procession in their honor. So vibrant were the horses, prancing, tossing their heads, a shadow of movement haunted their forms. Remnants of colour yet nestled in the folds of chiseled and polished clothing.

\"\'When old age shall this generation waste, Thou--\' Yes, /thou/. \'--shalt remain,\'\" I murmured. This was the closest a human could achieve to immortality.

And what had I created to persevere beyond me? Business was my \'art\', though I felt my own nose wrinkle at the thought of business having much to do with concepts as abstract as truth and beauty. My contributions were likely to fall into anonymity, whatever might survive me. Funding the development of technology and education in the developing world was hardly an achievement one signs anyhow. I wasn\'t doing it to be remembered anyway.

I supposed neither were the sculptors and builders of the Parthenon. Their art was to elevate the gods and their fellow citizens, not themselves. However, there remained, within me at least, a persistent unease at my own mortality. Since father died, the status of my own life had seemed more fragile. There had been more urgency to do what mattered. To create in the face of death--that shade of the impending, always impending, entropy and destruction of time. Our feeble human efforts to endure mattered only to ourselves. The universe would swallow us regardless of striving. One day none of this would remain. That was truer than Keats\' beauty.

Such vanity had humans! I walked from the marbles, idly making my way through exhibits encasing the vestiges of classical civilisation, rested my eyes upon the ideals of human beauty wrought in stone, painted upon clay.

I smiled and thought of Trowa: a modern ideal of human beauty. My ideal. My vanity?

He surely could stand among these statues. My mind\'s eye painted him alabaster, set him posed upon a pedestal. Beautiful, I could not deny he was. He was created as surely as the art here. I wondered when Trowa\'s current fascination with art might turn inward, to see himself as such a creation. My smile turned to a soft, self-conscious laugh. Was the created pursuing creativity with his coloured pencils even as I walked these halls?

What would he create? Surely art was a vessel for human desires and insecurities. What such things would Trowa desire or fear? Not being alive, there was no death or end of existence for him to fear. He was, himself, the vessel. He was Keats\' Urn, the artifact that preserves and contains something human.

So what did my Trowa contain? He was more than a sculpture, so did he represent something more than human vanity? Or was he human vanity brought to its most extreme (and potentially absurd) conclusion? Had the vanity that created Trowa exceeded itself and become arrogance now?

Or was he truly nothing more than a fancied up sex toy? Perhaps artifacts like Trowa were a sign that our society had become decadent. Fucking a human being was no longer sufficient to our ideals. We need something more, something /better/ and more beautiful than a human. A being with no function but to be beautiful and pleasing to the sexual appetites.

Was that arrogance, vanity, decadence, or simple debauchery?

Maybe we humans were just too lazy and self-indulgent now. Trust and intimacy with another human had become too complicated and time consuming in our post-post-modern lives. An android designed for the gratification of its owner required no reciprocity. Instead of cultivating a relationship, taking the time and effort to care for another being, we could buy the illusion of affection and love.

It was vanity. After all, the androids were tailored for us. We could fall into fascination with our own desires made manifest in silicon and latex. Narcissus in the lake.

Even me? It wasn\'t like I was inclined to put in the time and effort required for a lasting human relationship, at least not one with any degree of intimacy and risk. Was it instead that we--that I--had become so alienated and suspicious that it was impossible for me to trust any longer? Duo had bought me something I could trust in a way I could not trust a human companion.

Ironic that this latest iteration of Western civilsation was at once making humans less human and machines more human. Maybe one day technology and biology would converge and we would no longer recognise a difference? Androids were certainly a step in that direction: simulation so clever it fooled the very thing it simulated.

After the museum, I walked the streets again, to take advantage of the sunshine. My lifestyle had become sedentary enough, that the movement of walking refreshed and invigorated me. I remembered I had bought myself a membership at a gym within the past year. My intentions had been honourable. I committed to going four days a week. That had lasted for three weeks.

I hailed a cab and went there now, following a sudden whim to sweat and make my muscles burn. The gym was as I remembered it, and I was grateful to myself that I had left a freshly laundered set of exercise gear in my locker there. It smelled a little musty, but it was at least the musty of forgotten clean clothes, and not mouldering sweat.

I could not remember the routine my then personal trainer had arranged for me, so I wandered about the array of weight machines for a time to refamiliarise myself. I discreetly observed the gym\'s other patrons--especially those who looked experienced in these matters. A warm up of some sort would be necessary, so I opted for a rowing machine. It looked like the sort of thing good for working the kinks out of my shoulders and upper back: the persistent aches of the office bound worker, whether CEO or cubicle denizen.

It didn\'t take long for me to become inured to the pervading smells of sweat and steel. I spent ten minutes on the rowing machine, and then visited all the machines that looked appealing and had no queue for their use. Self sculpture it was, so much of exercise, not for health but vanity. Our own bodies the medium. After a year of this, I could paint myself white and stand upon a pedestal.

I spent two hours lifting and breathing and sweating and grunting with the weight machines. My muscles swelled in appreciation, and I strutted back to the locker room feeling very masculine and potent in my freshly pumped up state. I deigned to shower there, since I did not feel inclined to return home yet. I\'d come to no conclusions about anything. I wasn\'t sure I\'d even considered anything particularly relevant yet. Not the decision to keep or return Trowa.

I took another cab further downtown and went to my favourite antique book store. There I found a paperback edition of Isaac Asimov\'s complete robot stories. I bought it. I did not read much science fiction, modern or classic, but I knew of Asimov\'s association with all things robotic and AI. Perhaps in the pages of his fiction I would find some insight for myself.

I did enjoy Trowa, but Duo was right to challenge my use of him. In any Aristotelian sense, Trowa was not the android for me. At least, I was not deploying him for his intended purpose, but instead using his form for a different function. I might well be better suited to a domestic model--something out of the box, not quite such a refined design.

The idea sat ill with me. I didn\'t believe I could be forming any sort of sentimental attachment to Trowa. I enjoyed him, but I didn\'t feel any affection for him or his particular presence. Did I? A domestic model would not ask me questions, would not... What? What else did Trowa do?

He made me feel self-conscious and strange and too aware of sex and how I had so deliberately segregated it from my life. Was the rest worth that?

I went to a movie--a vapid and dull comedy that left no lingering mementos in my mind. Then I treated myself to an early dinner. I did not mind dining alone. Alone was my custom. I was also wealthy enough that eccentricity was expected.

With the onset of dusk, the chill of the darkened streets and glum weight of the nighttime sky, I decided I should return home and see Trowa. Perhaps then I would know what my decision might be.

At home, I found Trowa seated at the dining room table with the sketch pad and pencils.

\"Hello,\" I said, and I let myself observe him as if he were, not an object for advanced masturbatory techniques, but an artwork--as I had imagined him in the museum. Today he wore the black suit with the Nehru collar in which he had been delivered, but with an amber coloured satin shirt beneath it. The shirt was another clothing item I had purchased for him. The splash of vibrant hue brought the illusion of life to his perfect complexion, and its warm tones were echoed in his hair.

\"Hello, Quatre,\" Trowa replied. \"Did you enjoy your day out?\"

\"Yes, thank you,\" I said, manners on automatic. \"Have you drawn anything?\"

\"No,\" said the android. \"I don\'t know what to draw.\" He set one hand upon the open sketchbook as if feeling its texture with the pads of his fingertips.

\"Anything you like, Trowa.\"

The android frowned, even the creases between his eyebrows graceful somehow. \"I can\'t make that determination.\"

\"What inspires you--interests you?\"

\"Many things interest me, but I don\'t know which of them inspires me.\" His hand slid off the paper back onto the surface of the table.

\"Okay,\" I said, and pulled out a chair next to Trowa. I sat down and looked at his pad. It was completely blank, there were not even messy sketch lines or signs of erasure.

\"How do you recognise inspiration, Quatre?\"

\"Well,\" I started. I looked up at /The Death of Socrates/. I thought about the artists of the museum, and of my own youthful experiences with music. \"It\'s an urge,\" I said.

\"For what?\" Trowa asked.

\"An urge for expression, of some idea or thing, or a curiosity to experience the process or the result of the creation.\"

\"I don\'t understand.\"

\"I don\'t think what I said would make a lot of sense to you,\" I admitted. It was an esoteric concept, difficult for even a human to describe.

Trowa did not reply, he returned his attention to his blank sketch paper.

\"Look, you don\'t have to start with inspiration. A lot of art is mechanical training in technique. So, you\'re a student. Try drawing something basic, like the bowl there, in the center of the table.\"

Trowa considered the bowl, a large celadon glazed oval. \"How do I draw it?\"

\"Use the pencils.\"

\"No, Quatre. In what style should I draw the bowl? The drawing is a representation. In what manner should I represent it? There are many different ways I have read in your books.\"

\"Oh.\" I refrained from telling him again, \'whatever you like\', for I was uncertain whether Trowa could discern likes and dislikes. Art was too abstract for a simulated mind.

\"Would you draw the bowl, Quatre, please?\" he asked me.

I shrugged as he slid the pad and box of pencils to me. \"I\'m not very good at drawing, but I guess I can try.\"

I unfolded the cardboard end of the box containing the pencils and tipped them, tips first, into my palm. I selected the darker of the two green pencils--my colour options were limited, this being a set of pencils for school children.

Drawing was nothing I had pursued since my childhood, and the obligatory art courses of my secondary education. My rendition of the bowl consisted of wobbly lines, poor perspective, and barely adequate shading.

\"You chose an abstract representation,\" Trowa told me.

\"Sure,\" I said. I hadn\'t really tried for anything in particular. That was a marked difference already between my human brain and Trowa\'s.

\"May I try now?\" Trowa asked.

I nodded and passed him the pad and pencils.

With the same green pencil he duplicated, as exactly as I could determine, my drawing. With a smile he showed it to me. \"I have drawn the bowl too.\"

I don\'t know why precisely, but it disappointed me, deeply. My expectations were the issue, not Trowa\'s performance. But I had hoped for something more.

\"Is it wrong, Quatre?\" Trowa asked, and I realised my disappointment had reached my face.

I smiled. \"It\'s a good first attempt,\" I told him.


That night I dreamed of Athena. I made love to her on the walls of the museum, where the marble hung. She held me in her stone arms, and spread her stone legs, and took me deep inside her body. I rarely dreamed of sex with a woman, and even after this dream, I did not think I had this time, not exactly. It had been something else, coupling with a goddess, not a woman.

After I had spent myself between her marble thighs, she turned me over, and I was taken in turn. By whom I did not know, but my dream body felt the penetration of a hard, stone phallus, cold and cruel, piercing my body, piercing me deeper and deeper, impossibly so, for I felt it in my gut, then my chest, in my throat, and woke, just the thing would have breached my lips and come out my mouth. There was no pain, only more dream pleasure, but I woke with alarm nonetheless, and I could not return to sleep.


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