A Faraway Fantasy

He raised his hand at the waiter.

“Do you know who sent me?”

Mark smiled. “Doesn’t matter.”

“The reason I came, or what I came to do?”

“Both. Tell me your name instead.”

She removed her hat and set it atop her coat. “Juliet.” She fluffed her hair and combed it with her fingers.

The gesture clashed with the picture Mark’s mind had drawn of a tough assassin.

“What are you drinking?” He asked her when he saw the waiter-boy speed toward them, gliding inches above the floor, launching his left arm forward to give his body momentum, and alternating with the right. Air skiing is what the young called it; Mark found it silly but entertaining to watch.

“Tomato juice, low sodium, with a supplement of vitamin D.”

“Another one of these for me,” Mark told the waiter, shaking his glass. The ice cubes echoed its emptiness. On the waiter’s chest, painted on his shirt, there was a bright smiley face that amused Mark. It faded from yellow to green to purple, and so on until it cycled through all the colors of the rainbow.

After the waiter left, Mark brought his stare back on Juliet and lit a cigarette. Her eyes fell on the smoking rectangle as if fascinated by the glowing-red tip. The glittering contour of her eyes mesmerized him. He’d never seen a Golem’s eyes up close.

“The waiter,” Mark started. “Is he—”

“Yes.”

“But his eyes—they were green.”

She didn’t move, didn’t smile, didn’t nod. “For all outside appearances, he’s human now. How did you know?”

“You refused to look at him.”

Her eyes narrowed again, like before, as if she were missing something, a vital piece of a high-stakes puzzle. “I don’t understand him. I don’t understand any of them.”

Someone opened the window and a breeze rushed in, blowing her fiery hair. Her skin reminded Mark of his favorite cake—mocha icing sprinkled with toasted nuts. The freckles, a shade lighter than her skin, speckled the bridge of her nose and crawled toward her cheekbones.

“Do you know how we came to be?” Her voice betrayed no anger, no resentment; if she’d been human, Mark thought it would have.

“We used to be marvels of engineering, superb commodities for lazy humans. We functioned with electrical impulses, binary codes, and later, quantum cores. We were immortal and blissfully unaware of our existence.”

A white flash forced Mark to close his eyes. When he opened them, a glass of Ol’ Jack and a blood-red tomato juice sat on the table, glasses beading droplets of freshness.

As if she hadn’t noticed the intense light, Juliet continued, “But humans needed something to do with their newly acquired knowledge. They had to push their limits—further and further and further. One day, someone thought, ‘what if we could eliminate prostitution from our streets?’ Human prostitutes, that is. They had the means to grow artificial bodies, men and women of any shape, ethnicity, or sexual inclination.”

She paused and flattened her hands on the table. Her eyes flashed to the darkening outside, but were back on Mark in an instant.

“Nanobots reigned in our brains, inhibited our consciousness, and made us do whatever our owners wished. If they said jump, we jumped. Bouncing off the floor or leaping off a cliff, we jumped.”