Freddie’s were dying at an alarming rate—hard-wiring themselves to electrical panels, swallowing spent plutonium pellets, piloting service shuttles into the ground. Your entire job, my boss yelled, red-faced, pounding his desk with his fist, is to figure out what the fuck is wrong with these goddamn Freddies! He was under extreme pressure, which meant I was too. All new models were on hold because of this mess. The plant in Des Moines was shut down with 500 Taylor Swifts stuck in mid-assembly, torsos dangling in air, awaiting their legs which littered the conveyor belt below.
The Apple Dreamachines Service link was swamped. It went down daily under severe traffic. Customers were understandably pissed. When you spent as much as they did on a luxury droid, you expected 1) realism, 2) dependability, 3) excellent customer support. The warranty language covered the usual defects in workmanship, defects in showmanship. The lawyers hadn’t anticipated self-inflicted defects. The A.I. division had done its job too well; the Freddies closely approximated human functionality. They made their own choices. Like humans, it seemed, they were regretting some.
If you’ve never seen one, in a museum or something, the limited-edition Freddie Mercury droids from the Apple Dreamachines line were a complete work of art. At the time, my experience with droid rehab had all been with lower-end models—sex droids, hard-labor drones, fight droids mostly. The Freddies represented a quantum leap. I was afraid to touch them, let alone do any internals.
The first suicidal Freddie I rehabbed had overloaded his owner’s tanning bed and had burned off most of his dermafabric. His circuitry was relatively unharmed. I re-skinned him, fixed the short black buzz of hair, the unibrow, the thick mustache between nose and upper lip. I covered him in a carpet of body hair. I altered his mood settings more toward euphoric. Rebooted. Put him through his paces on the operatic gymnastics that form the middle of “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
Disastrous. He sang like someone had a gun to his head. Like he’d just had his wisdom teeth extracted.
I tried again with his original settings restored. He nailed it, of course. Gooseflesh on my arms, it was so good.
We’ll keep tweaking until we get it right, I told him.
You can bloody well kiss my bum, he said.
That was the last thing he ever said to anyone. I hadn’t ordered any special overnight security for him at the lab, which was my mistake. By morning, he had managed to crush himself to death inside an elevator shaft.
My second Freddie lived, but was soon back again, returned for a refund by the customer. I had combined a lower euphoric setting with a lower impulse setting, thinking it would keep him from doing anything rash. A safer Freddie. Problem was, he sang safer too. “Karaoke voice”, the customer complained.
My boss was calling me constantly for updates. I let the phone vibrate. I sat dumbfounded in front of two dozen Freddies, frozen upright in their spandex tank tops and white track pants, waiting for my magic. I needed a breakthrough, some inspiration. I left the lab and went home, to my tiny bare workaholic’s apartment. I searched out the old videos of the original Freddie in his prime, live at Wembley Stadium in July of 1985, a guy in absolute command of 72,000 people, and as yet unaffected by his coming disease. God, I thought, just look at him! He was a lightning rod, no, an engine, no, a megaphone, a megaphone that Freddie used to spew out more Freddie and at the same time acted as a funnel, a funnel sucking the crowd’s energy toward him until it disappeared somewhere inside Freddie himself, or else turned right back outward again in a runaway reaction.
And that was it, when I realized it would never work. The Freddies would always commit suicide. They had to. It was a simple logic, really. Big voice, big heart. Big heart, big wounds, big void. They were starving. The Freddies understood enough about love to know that they needed more than most, yet could have none.
I quit my job the next day. HR wanted to know why. They demanded to know where I was going. Was I defecting to Microsoft’s Motioneering Division? Pixar Animatronics? I was feeling a bit Freddie myself, drunk on possibilities, a little reckless.
Nothing really matters to me, I told them.
Any way the wind blows.
–Foreground Art by Peter Lamata
–Background Art by Diana Cretu