Tokahashi And Thormier

I

“The horrors of war, violence and aggression have consistently stunted the growth of this pleasant world. While the male role in history, and thus physical conflict, has been wildly disproportionate based on the population ratio, our thesis is that women, through no fault of their own, are at the root of it. This claim is by no means revolutionary; one must simply turn on the evening news for proof that men will murder each other over a woman. We will not go as far as some of our predecessors, most notably Roehdel and de Lucious, to say that the male sexual urge is responsible for driving all progress, social construction, technology and intellectualism, in order to impress the female, because we do not believe this idea to be correct. My partner, Professor Thormier, and I view the male capacity for non-sexual thought to be theoretically undeniable, and have proven several practical examples to within a 99.98% certainty interval. We spotlight here, the brilliant theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. As most of you know, Mr. Hawking's body has been ravaged by ALS, but, in perhaps the most truly human story in our history, the mind trapped inside his crippled body has consumed the infinite unlike all but a few of our species. How Misters Roehdel or de Lucious would explain Mr. Hawking's breakthroughs regarding black holes, quantum theory, and cosmology in terms of, and here I will use their terminology to make a point, “getting his nut,” I cannot precisely see. We feel this lone example, while an obvious outlier, is sufficient to prove the possibility of definitively non-sexual thought in males. But I digress. What we are proposing here is a potential answer to the issue of the strong connection between sexual intercourse and violence. The connection arises from both sides of the power relationship that develops whenever two or more men are presented with an attractive woman. One man will inevitably prove himself to be the most desirable mating choice. As us males remain mostly trapped by the sex-violence link we are trying to address, this successful male will almost certainly be a) the physically largest specimen, b) the most skilled warrior, or c) the owner of the most lethal weapon. The astute among you may raise the idea of wealth, but we have disregarded this as a root to true sexual satisfaction because of the clear trend of women who enter into strictly financial marriages performing acts of infidelity with men who fit into one of our three categories. So, the successful male becomes galvanized by his “conquest,” shall we say, and learns the rewards that come from his martial disposition, which he will now build upon. Meanwhile, the remainder of the spurned males must deal with their inadequacies, a frustration which many will express through some manner of violence, either to themselves or others. So violence, or at least the violent instinct, arises in all male parties in the sexual transaction, if I may call it that. We can couple the prevalence of violence among males with the disproportionately heavy male involvement in historical and present-day events, to reach the conclusion that males are generally responsible for violence, on all scales, and that women are generally at the root of male violence. This conclusion brings us to the question, which we find quite profound, that we are attempting to answer with this project: can a man, who has, or believes that he has had, sex with exactly the woman he desires, every night, with no threat of competition, remain violent?”

The audience consisting of mostly academics and venture capitalists remained quiet. Goya Tokahashi paused to order his thoughts, his manic enthusiasm dormant for a brief moment. Tokahashi was something of an academic whore, servant only to his curiosities. With frontier research experience in game theory, military history, sexual sociology, population dynamics, and macroeconomics, he was the project's visionary and theorist. His companion, Charles Thormier, was an engineer, specializing in biological technologies, especially those applicable to the brain, and the man who would design and construct the proposed device.

What they were proposing on this evening in the small lecture hall, was a simulation device, that Tokahashi had called, “the world's first peaceful weapon,” and “the most considerate attempt ever to release us from our procreative past.” The device, designed with men in mind but by no means limited to them alone, would be the most accurate and advanced sexual proxy ever invented. It was to be comprised of state of the art virtual reality software, Tokyo's finest adult robotry, neuroscanners to detect and organically develop the user's desires, fantasies and fetishes, and a psycho-chemical hormone pill, which would encode the experience in the user's brain as indistinguishable from legitimate primal mating, resulting in a subjective experience identical to real copulation.

Behind this seemingly depraved project, were pure intentions. The partners had grown weary of the constant violence and power struggle that were manifest in every society around the world, and had dreamt their machine up in a genuine and thoughtful step towards peace. Unfortunately for the pair, most of their colleagues had been unable to separate the proposed benefits of the simulator from, as they saw it, the perversion. Initially, Tokahashi had attempted to explain the device in a way that made it sound less offensive to those holding these sensibilities, but inevitably, “heathen!,” was shouted at him while his interlocutor stormed off.

Thormier had diagnosed that the root of this disapproval was the fact that many people could not handle the thought of the things that they would experiment with, given the opportunity. Centuries of the immoralization of anything sexual, especially practices involving the slightest kink, had left people trapped between their own secret desire and the threat of alienation from their peers, not to mention the ever looming possibility of eternal damnation. The guilt of this suppression had forged a species of confused sexual beings, whose innovation and wonder was rewarded in all aspects of their lives, but considered demonic in one of the most fundamental. With their simulation, each individual would be given the freedom to explore themselves in an isolated arena, without judgment, conceit, or consequence.

“Our proposed sexual simulation will be far more than a mere pleasure machine. From a few simple internal brainstorming sessions, we have identified several social ills, beyond our core issue of male on male violence, that would likely be remedied. The aspiring rapist could now handle his pent-up frustrations without the destructive consequences incurred by a human victim. Regardless of how we feel about the nature of a pedophile's desires, children could now be spared entirely. Speculating, perhaps recklessly so, on a long-term scale, similar technology could be employed to satisfy any criminal urge, even to the point of murder or torture, that arises from psychology rather than desperation. My good men and women, I know these ideas sound insane and radical, but please hear this rationale. The drive to subject our own beasthood has clearly failed. We are smart, but we will never be able to control the base instincts of our ancient brains. By satisfying these urges in a non-competitive scenario, so many of the primitive rifts that develop in a civilization can be mitigated, and community and human connection can flourish. Humans have long considered themselves distinct from the rest of nature, but for the wrong reasons. It is not because of any divine guardian or mythical human spirit that we have come to dominate this planet; it is from our ability to subject the natural world to our whims. By shifting our food production from hunting and foraging to agriculture, we were pushed from tribal bands of nomads to city-builders. Through a similar process in regards to the sexual urge, it would seem reasonable to assume the beginning of the next phase of our uniquely accelerated evolution. We have a multitude of appliances for food consumption, so here we propose the first sexual appliance.”

A young Indian woman raised her hand amid the tepid, skeptical applause. “If I understand this idea correctly, it seems that what you have created is akin to a device which relieves men of their duty not to subject women to undesired sexual acts, or worse. How can you possibly rationalize asking for this massive amount of money as opposed to simply educating our children better about the importance of empathy, consent, and personal responsibility?”

“Because our device would in no way relieve men of this duty to women. In fact, once our device becomes commercially available, we would actually advocate for measures such as exponentially stiffer penalties against those convicted of sexual crimes. Rape would become negatively correlated to our profit margin, which seems to be our main driver for collective change. As well, both Professor Thormier and I have come to believe that our gender simply can no longer be trusted with such a treasured specimen as the woman. Our track record for the majority of recorded history is to treat women as barely above the threshold of objecthood, so the faster we remove the responsibility not to rape from the hands of these vile creatures, the faster we can protect even one additional young woman, and allow her to thrive.”

The young woman stared at the Japanese eccentric, slightly shocked, but unable to rebut. Having had a few moments to reflect on the brief talk, and to delve a little deeper into the accompanying booklet, many side conversations had sprung up around the small lecture hall. This Tokahashi seemed unstable, but the ideas were novel. A troika of handsome VC's put forth additional questions.

“This machine would be quite expensive. How would you deal with issues of affordability, in order to prevent virtual perversion from becoming a rich man's game?”

“How do you propose to entirely restrict children from accessing this sort of machine? There is no limit to the psychological damage that could be caused on a child by exposure to this type of experience.”

“Will this device be destructive to romantic love and companionship? I know that my wife would absolutely divorce me if I was sleeping with some sort of VR hooker every night.”

Tokahashi began to answer these question quite systematically, clearly having considered these difficult issues carefully. Thormier even spoke for the first time in order to clarify some of the technical aspects of the affordability question. But the handsome VC's had tuned out, happy to bask in the remnants of their insights.

As the lectured filed out of the hall into the night, Tokahashi held a small deck of cheques. “Well monsieur, isn't it queer? With all the evidence that “sex sells,” it took a good strong dose of scientific humanism, in order to sell sex.”

“Sympathy for the perverts,” said Thormier.

II

“I have hit a snag with the prototype,” said Charles Thormier, sipping a glass of warm gin. Tokahashi was pouring his fourth or seventh, eyes frantic and aflame. They were sitting on a terrace, under an overcast sky, watching the people below trudge through their lives. Tokahashi had found it easier to define these strangers as simple automatons. There was plenty of superfluous superficiality surrounding each individual, and by stripping them down to a single, lusting characteristic, these mysteries faded like shadows into the night. During the fateful lecture months before, he had still held out hope that there was space to separate human behaviour and sexual desire, but this mission seemed increasingly futile. Observing people's actions purely through the lens of procreation proved fruitful, and Tokahashi could now only pity them, poor slaves in denial.

“It is in the AI programming for the development of female fantasies.” Thormier, meek considering his brilliance, was devastated to bring his inadequacies to light. Tokahashi tore through the world, an unabashed force, as Thormier would sit, tinkering and alone. Their duality permitted the audacity of their current venture, but Thormier was deeply afraid that his friend Goya would undo his creating through some supreme act of gall.

“May I guess the issue?” Tokahashi said, another gin down. “You are struggling to separate the female fantasy from themes of domesticity and submission.”

“Yes. It seems fundamentally ingrained. Each simulation I run inevitably leads to either housewifery or some type of cruel dungeon scenario. The neuronal data I have collected seems to indicate a sort of brainwashing effect on these women. Likely an evolutionary side effect, but I believe it is our duty to liberate these women from it. The male simulations I run also include some submissive elements, but spread out over a spectrum, from fully submissive to fully and horribly dominant. The female simulations are overwhelmingly tame and submissive.”

“I've seen this coming down the road. We need to decide once and for all: is it necessary, for true equality, to empower women to become every bit the violent and primitive deviant that modern men are?”

Thormier grimaced at the thought and at the gin. “There's a patriarchal feel to the fact that this decision has even ended up on our lap.”

“If we deny women the right to deviance that we take for granted, we will be able to rationalize it. Whether it is through an appeal to their 'more delicate and chaste nature,' or some other route, it will be patronizing. We must liberate them from the domestic cages we have herded them into over thousands of years, as pathetic and cowardly jailboys freeing the imprisoned queen. Luckily, their fantasies will have our simulation to unfold in, so those holding great resentments will not have their just deserts at our expense.”

“How do you propose to program this?” Thormier's pride pricked his throat while he spoke. At the Sorbonne, his technical genius had led to his being lauded by other brilliant men and women of the academic ilk. But this manic Japanese man scared him. It seemed to Thormier that Tokahashi had deciphered the code of the universe long ago, and now hung around the mortals for mere entertainment. The only connection he had had to this world was a grandmother in Kyoto, but news of her passing had spread through their circles when it had been announced exactly what the pair's mysterious project entailed. The subject had not been broached, but in the days after the news, their silences were ripe with the agony and helplessness of loss.

“Program them identically. Men seem to have an opportunity to explore and experiment with their preferences, and your AI algorithm will allow for the same kind of development within the simulation. Put the keys in their fingers, and we shall see if they follow our path.” Tokahashi watched his partner, visibly disappointed in himself, contemplate this advice. He knew that Thormier's diligence was the response to a tortured quest for some eternally elusive goal; inferiority bubbled within his small thin body, tarnished the eyes behind his modest glasses. Tokahashi imagined that past traumas had molded the fragile intellectual, leaving imprints on an adolescent brain desperate to merely be left to its curiosities. Like many among the litany of outcasts damaged by cruel children, he had withdrawn to his own world, where he could assert his value to himself, secluded, safe, and free.

“I suppose that that is fair,” said Thormier.

“Good then. I am becoming increasingly excited about the possibilities of our work here, monsieur. If we prove to be sufficiently competent to handle the challenge we have created for ourselves, a modicum of glory awaits. I am quite interested in what we will learn about love. Hopefully we will serve as a new form of matchmaker, driving apart the world's married fuckers, so that we may finally discover the fundament of Platonic love. Separating romantic companionship from mating. Novel isn't it?”

Thormier gave a childish smile, muttering, “Believe me, my marriage has quickly become a sterling study in this field.” Tokahashi slammed his gin, putting an arm around the petite Frenchman, laughing euphorically at his misfortune.

“An appearance of the reluctant jester! He has become the fool for one hallowed moment!” The engineer quickly returned to his sheepishness, as Tokahashi shook his head at his companion's joke.

III

In the shadows of The Microcosm, lost in the cacophony of melancholy sinners, Tokahashi and Thormier were celebrating. A few hundred feet away, in Tokahashi's apartment, was the prototype. Faced with his partner's vehement lust to try it, Thormier had recommended that they go to a bar for the evening. He was sick of the machine, sick of watching the perverse simulations, sick of digging through neurological data to find the brainstates of optimal arousal. He was eager for its release from his supervision forever, eager to turn the debugging over to the team of coders that their backing partners had hired for the commercialization stage of the project, eager to spend a few weeks sitting on park benches and thinking clean thoughts. This deep sickness and eagerness, combined with the accomplishment of being finished, had overwhelmed him, thus the need to decompress.

While he usually limited himself to a drink an hour, Thormier's face was glowing hot with scotch. He had lost track of how many times he had nodded at the sweet young waitress to bring another round, and that was alright. It felt nice to be drunk and think about the trials he had been through. Time had numbed the pains of the past, and the slight engineer now entertained himself with reminiscences of his struggle. The moments of vain ego, when he would not give in and ask Goya's opinion on a problem. The nights when he would return home, look into the eyes of his wife and kids, and feel that he was lost to them forever, subservient now to his sexual nightmare device.

His wife would be asleep when he got home tonight, but he would wake her and kiss her, apologize through drunken tears for succumbing to the seduction of innovation. Stroke his children's hair while they slept, their blooming minds still idolizing him as a supreme male. Reunite the family.

“I...I...I apologize, Master Thormier, but it has come time for me to murder you and reap the full reward of our effort, like any good capitalist,” said Tokahashi, lit cigarette hanging, unbeknownst to him, from his lip. “Good run we surely had, atypically so, but your presence is a redundancy. I will be a demigod with fame to myself, fuck the money, and I will permit you the role of martyr in my tale. What do you say to that?”

“As if I could steal shine from Sirius.” Tokahashi took Thormier's hand and kissed it. Thormier had a small cut on his finger, and Goya's breath burned the wound. At their apex, it seemed he was facing an ultimatum from his self-destruction. Liquor stained his shirt and tie, his long obsidian hair was wet and mottled, eyes rolling in their sockets. Thormier feared that his friend had drank himself into an empty shell, only relieved of his demons in the few moments of happiness that he was afforded. “It is so strange to be finished. What will be talk about now?”

“I'm finished with talking. All these words are so fucking hollow. Experience is the only substantial thing remaining. That's what our machine has taught me. If I had my way, we would spend the remainder of this evening staring into the eyes of beautiful women. Describe the nuances of an iris all you please; it's just noise.”

They were silent for a moment, introspective in the chaos, being met with the first symptoms of nostalgia. New chapters had to be written in their lore, but these paths remained shadowed. Some have said the narrativity of life is a delusion of the conscious mind, others that it is a consequence of the mind's being partial to patterns. Regardless, it is the links between moments that make a life dynamic, beautiful, terrifying and sad. We may never access the present, but the consequences of it are what makes the world so rich.

Two lives had run parallel for a spell, but this would now cease. Drifting apart is the easiest thing two men can do, as brotherhood is so often fleeting. Intimacy between males looms as one of the most stubborn enigmas of modern times.

“I'm going to fuck a married woman tonight. We have created an atrocity, and I won't abide by it. I shall only profit from it, like any good heretic. Give me the carnal over the virtual until my final day. May God damn us for our insubordination of the natural order.” Tokahashi squinted, eyeing prey through a drunken lens. An unsuspecting pride of women in their mid-thirties were occupying half of a table behind Thormier. They were quite also drunk, emotional and euphoric in the communal ambiance. Tokahashi began another thought, but it trailed off, unintelligible, as he approached the women.

“All alone tonight ladies? How about buying a couple of inventors a couple of drinks? We've only just concluded our masterpiece, but just you wait, these gorgeous mugs'll grace the screens of the world any day now.” 

As Tokahashi stood wobbling before the table, a group of several stocky men returned with trays of tequila shots. “Problem here?” one spouted, grunting.

“Ahh! Just who I was looking for! Men, have I an outstanding proposal for you. Please hear me out before you smash my skull with your might. I was only speaking to your companions because my friend and I are poor inventors, attempting to drink to our success without the assistance of more than a few dollars, which we unfortunately consumed hours ago. If you'll help pay the fine little tab we have accrued, I can repay you with an opportunity to pioneer the world's latest sensation!”

Thormier looked on in disgust. Prostituting their efforts like this, loathsome and beggarly. Yet, the men seemed to be softening to the drunken Goya. As he preached his sales sermon to the couples, all were intrigued by the madness, which was all too entertaining to them, and all too contemptible to Thormier.

One of the women motioned in his direction. “Why is your friend so quiet? Doesn't he enjoy company?”

“Oh, that man may be the most brilliant the world has ever seen, but when he gets drunk all he can do his mope and worry, so he's no company for the likes of the electric bunch we have proven to be!” The woman who had motioned stood up and walked over to the adjacent table, while the others rejoiced in an ephemeral toast.

“Your friend says that you are celebrating, but your attitude makes it seem as though you are mourning instead. Why don't you join us, and we can meet, and laugh, and you can take me home and we can lay naked together until the sun rises.” She smiled, sincere in her flirtation.

“That sounds lovely, but I cannot for two reasons. First, my wife severely frowns upon me staying out all night. Second, I am quite drunk, and I have just come to a harrowing realization, past which I am yet to proceed.”

“Well I'd love to hear it,” she said, placing a hand on his thigh.

He took a deep breath and thought for a few moments. “It seems crystal clear to me, even in my intoxicated state, that my mortality depends entirely on the way I reason about my existence. If I say 'I am a human. Every human dies.,' then I deduce that I too must die. So, deductively, I am mortal. However, induction leads to me down another path. If my memory serves me faithfully, I have always been alive. Since I always have been alive, I always will be alive. So, inductively, I am immortal.”

The woman nodded absently, sipping her drink and letting her hand roam.

“Maybe it is the conflict between these two paths that defines us. In it, you can see optimism and pessimism. Hope and despair. Relationships waxing and waning. Fact and belief. Birth and death. All occurring simultaneously. And can anything defined by conflict be eternal? It seems it cannot. As we are not. This, my dear, is the root of tonight's melancholy.” He finished his drink and finally took notice of the attractive face that was present before him. The irises were indeed quite pleasant. Solace in them. She did not care that she was going to die, because she was alive. She struck a real presence in the room, which he could not say about himself. He was trapped in his mind, surrounded by the constant feedback and noise of the world, slowly becoming an abstraction in his pursuit of the infinite. This was not life. He was his own thought experiment, and the experiment had surpassed his comprehension. In his midst was a potential mate, warm-blooded and passionate, irreducibly physical. Her touch was sensitive and, as the liquor in his blood turned the air into amber, he kissed her.

Tokahashi, immersed in the fraternity and sorority of strangers, watched his partner engage the woman. He held no moral misgivings regarding this infidelity. The man was a man, and with that comes the complexities of being both natural and social creature. The ecstasy of the moment seeds the guilt of transgression that would burden Thormier, but he was free to decide to bear this cross. Perhaps the drink had sapped most of his freedom, but imbibing had nonetheless been his choice. In the morning, Thormier's brilliant mind would deconstruct his behaviour, and it would cause him to loathe himself, for he would not understand why he had acted so childishly. Tokahashi knew that there was no ultimate judge, so he didn't fret these seeming indiscretions. He chose to take his happiness where he could, and would never bend his knee to the sensibilities of the jackals.

Murmurings of a change of scenery spread around the group, and some of the couples went to cover the table's tab. The mountebank had won. He engaged with one of the remaining couples, a classically beautiful pair.

“Forget a bar, you two should come back with me. Be the first civilians to try our simulation. It's truly incomparable to any experience you've ever had. We have created a phenomenon, and you shall be its first conversions.”

“Let's do it,” the man said. His wife rubbed his bicep, nodding as she stared off blankly.

“Let's do it.” Tokahashi's mania was tempered for a moment, as he led the couple out into the night, with a final glance at his preoccupied partner. He knew the absolute relief that only this intimacy could provide, and he understood that his friend needed it.

The night was damp and cool, a revitalizing breath after the dense humidity of The Microcosm. He led the way alone, the couple a few paces behind, in drunken conference. In between the chaos of the bar and the pleasant uncertainty held by the coming hours, lay serendipity. Walking and breathing made him feel wholesome, reviving the pleasure inherent in health, that so often lies disregarded. Beneath the streetlights, a few stars shone through, and Goya gazed up, staring deep into the past.

“So why'd you do this thing? Why'd you make it?” asked the man, dragging his wife along as he sped to catch up.

“I can't speak for Thormier, but my reasoning was selfish. I was sick of mediocrity. I could see the glamorous potential of my life fading away, so I capitalized. The ideas behind the project, on a visionary scale, have been with me for years, but my technical acumen wasn't up to the challenge. My value has never been in creation, so I found the most adept creator south of heaven. We knew once we secured funding that this project would be revolutionary, but its capabilities rested on its perfection. With safety and authenticity assured, we would liberate behaviour from hormones, and make billions of dollars doing so. From there, I would be free. It's shocking how little people understand the value of money. The goods that wealth affords us are too blatant to ignore, but goods are utterly devoid of meaning. The freedom of wealth is why we should be greedy, and I will never fault a miser's quest for freedom. Thormier made this a possible path for me to pursue, on one condition: I put my face and name to the project. To be seen as the mastermind of the sexual appliance seems, if you're so inclined, to be my purpose, so I have taken it with sincerity. With this purpose now fulfilled, I shall enjoy my years.”

“Sounds big time. Gotta get me on to one of your yacht parties once you get those billions brother. Can't wait to tell the fellas at work that I spent the night drinking with the sexbot guy.”

“Sexual simulation, please. You're in advertising, you understand the importance of a brand.”

“Totally man. I hear that.”

“It's this white building on the right here. Please try to be a little quiet until we're in the suite. I have had problems with the landlord about bringing strangers home for riotous orgies in the past, and I don't wish to get into a confrontation at the moment.”

The couple nodded like consenting children, as the woman gave Tokahashi a knowing wink.

In the room, the box seemed alien. The newcomers were drawn to it, to its undeniable novelty and stature. They circled in wonder, as Tokahashi went immediately to the small liquor cabinet, pouring liberal drinks in old dirty glasses. Passing them around, he dimmed the lights, and plugged in the box.

“Well who shall be first?” The words hung ominously, as a guillotine would, between the lovers. To volunteer was to acknowledge a dissatisfaction with the other. Lit softly from above, they stared at each other, eyes bursting forth from the shadows of their features. From their first chance encounter, to kissing, to sex, engagement, marriage, memories of their beloved paced their thoughts. From within his depths, an absolute excitement roared forth, and glancing away from the desperate eyes of his wife, the man uttered a simple affirmation. Tokahashi remained silent, no stranger to the complex dynamics of love and sex, as both men waited for a word of protest. It never came.

“Right this way,” said Tokahashi, hand on the small of the man's back, leading him inside.

As the men occupied themselves, the woman sat on one of the worn chairs, drinking in frequent deliberate sips. She felt strikingly ashamed at how she had behaved over the past few hours, how she had been coaxed to this madman's apartment to take part in his freak show. The reality of the room, its stained and shabby wood floors, rusty radiator, scummy windows and sad furniture, confronted her as the epitome of ugliness. The room's resident, undisputed pervert, carried out sins and seductions here. She worried for a brief moment that she was in hell. Goya emerged from the box, grinning, as he shut the door behind him.

“Have you seen ghosts or just a mere cockroach? Come drink with me madam, and let's leave your husband be. Unfortunately, our creation is not soundproof, and I feel you will be quite unsettled by his emanations.” She took his hand fatalistically, the calloused fingers brushing her ring. As she rose, he jokingly drew her close, their faces scandalously near.

“Do you dance?” he inquired. A light kiss bounced off of his lips, as she grabbed the whiskey bottle and began towards the bedroom. He followed, magnetized by desire, rubbing her waist, into the darkness of the room. With a light shove, she now lay prone on the bed, as he swept the door closed with his foot.

IV

The city was stagnant. Natural sounds abounded, but that was all. Deserted streets lay bare like ugly virgins, naked and destitute. All that was familiar to the pleasant summer evening was a pair of men, seated on a terrace above the static city, drinking their familiar warm gin. One was mousy, with a pitiful je ne sais quoi, perhaps one of the meek whom God promised the Earth. The other, head bestubbled, fired an old revolver in the air, smiling at the echo.

Were they the penultimate souls that this quaint little world possessed? Neither cared to know the answer. Had a technological humanist business venture gone awry and trapped the world's adult residents in a hedonistic virtual limbo? Seemingly so. Had the pair, out of the guilt of having debilitated the global economy and destroyed the motivation of every sexually mature citizen, entered into a suicide pact? Reluctantly. Were they currently involved in an elaborate rationalization process regarding why, despite the catastrophic outcome of their magnum opus, they deserved to spare themselves? Inevitably.

“Well monsieur, it seems that the conclusion to this damned hypothesis is that, even when a species has become intelligent enough to speak about sex, they are no freer of the constricts of biology. My God, Thormier, did we fail our people somewhere, or was this an inevitability? How has nobody been spared by our silly little contraption? Have they all passed by now? I haven't seen another in several weeks. Malnourishment must be setting in.”

“I included a saline drip in the final production model. It could provide sufficient nutrition for, let me see, at least another 390 hours for the earliest adopters. After this, we shall have to turn ourselves in as mass murderers. Only symbolically of course, for I received personal messages from several prominent judges explaining how excited they were about our commercial model being released.”

“Luckily we shall see no trial, because if we were made to testify, I see an awkward exchange that could arise, albeit to our benefit. Murder in the first requires premeditation, so we would undoubtedly be asked whether we could have expected the severe mass addiction to our device that now plagues our consciences and silences our streets. To affirm that yes, indeed we had foreseen this, is to open ourselves to a death sentence. To admit that no, we had not considered this disastrous outcome, would be to reveal ourselves as thoughtless fools, which I believe would be an unfair title, despite its seeming merit. Thankfully we need not answer these questions.”

“Were we thoughtless, Goya? I simply never imagined such madness,” said Thormier.

“Our sole manufacturing error was the external security system. Ensuring user privacy was absolutely essential though, so I am not certain as to how we could have progressed without the elaborate lock mechanisms.”

“Why can't trust and respect be our security system?”

“Because we are all a bunch of filthy voyeurs.”

“Perhaps we could have leveraged the shame of voyeurism by covering the external faces entirely with mirrors, so that you must watch yourself if you wish to spy.”

“Thormier, in my imagination, you sit in your laboratory late at night, and dream these deviousities. When you must surface and walk with the mortals, you do so with the knowledge that you understand them better than they understand themselves, and that you could bring unknown suffering at a whim.”

“Two, maybe three whims. I'm only human.” Thormier was happy with himself.

“Would you like to hear my little theory on what we have learned here? At least that way we can justify our actions in the name of education.” Thormier assented, pouring more gin for both. “As the mammalian brain developed, in the prehistory of consciousness, there must have developed an awareness of how taxing life can be. No longer reduced to utter instinct, an increased incentive was necessary to persuade mating: sexual pleasure. While brains became increasingly complex, this pleasure became increasingly nuanced and addicting. The perpetuation of more advanced species revolved around the satiating of this pleasure addiction, and slowly but surely, the pleasure and its procreative purpose began to untangle. Monkeys began to masturbate, and in time, so did we. Our diligent ancestors would have looked on in horror as we wasted our genetic material. There now existed groups that enjoyed being alive. They came to understand the intricacies of this base pleasure, how to exploit the pleasure drive in others. We were the pinnacle of this millennia-long process. The incentive necessary to perpetuate life became so overwhelmingly appealing that, evolutionarily speaking, we became snakes eating our own tails. Well, “we” in a global sense. Thankfully we have spared ourselves, but my god, do I feel like a royal bastard for what we've done.”

A murder of crows flew past the balcony, oblivious to the predicament.

Thormier coughed. “I have just realized that we are undoubtedly in the most strange existential situation of any pair in history. Think, we remain alive, guilty though we are, but what is life without others? I mean, I am grateful to still feel oxygen in my lungs, but we will now live out our days with the knowledge that we have personally doomed our brethren to extinction. As pleasant as I find your company, we have a distinct lack of womb.”

“We were doomed from the beginning. Our actions were only as irresponsible as our capacity to dream is permitted.”

“To be the only live ones, on this ghostly world, could be an excellent simulation of the purgatory we will surely reach while the powers that be ponder our absurd case.”

“Please don't talk to me about simulations, lest I have to take another life.”

It was only once the abandoned infants had ceased their crying, that Thormier and Tokahashi had been able to sleep. Hours, days, weeks of sledgehammering the walls of simulators, shooting weaponry with no regard for those inside, desperately trying to pry a single other from the hellish and devastating grips. In one of his darkest moments of introspection, Thormier reckoned that he had directly ended over eighty people in his rescue attempts. That was the night his pistol was most alluring. Never the religiously-inclined man, he had felt divine wrath through the sleepless nights, cowering and sickly. Behind every corner, and worse, behind his eyelids, lay demons, never content with his current depth of suffering. The insomnia bred delusion, vivid nightmarish hallucinations projected by his mind onto every inch of his vision and psyche. Dawn brought respite from darkness, as he would pace the dead walk to Tokahashi's home, where his host also complained of a poor night's sleep. It remained unspoken between the two, but Tokahashi's lone woe with the night was the lack of the beloved city sounds that would encapsulate his mind and fuel metropolitan dreams.

How this peace had overcome them remains murky. Acceptance of the horrible finality? Utter insanity masking as aloofness? True astonishment at their capabilities? Even the oracle of the universe remains silent here. The path to peace had led them to an old and slender bridge over the edge of the natural world, and pacifists they are, our brave pair had taken it. Who or whatever had engineered the bridge had exploited humanity's fatal flaw: its ceaselessly curious imagination. As the frail ropes gave way, the pair clung to the opposing cliff, nearest of the pack to reaching whatever it was that transcended the natural meaning of being alive. But they had exhausted themselves crossing the bridge. Weak arms clung to the rocky edge out of necessity, but no strength remained. What remained for them was to admire the view for a little longer, to reminisce on first kisses and childhood laughter. To finally admit to themselves that nature had been a superior opponent, undefeated as she remains. Each would inevitably slip from his holds, subject to the law of falling bodies. Fin.

“If nothing else, at least spring has begun. I love the adolescent spirit of the season,” said Thormier.

Tokahashi sat silently.