The Foundling

She fits nicely in the hand. She is a very comforting mixture of permanently cold metal and warm plastiglas. As you hold her, you can feel her pulsing, sucking down the signals from the satellites, turning them into maps in her mind, assigning colours to streets and fields and rivers. Her voice is even, perfectly modulated, the only changes the minute-by-minute slight alterations to her inflection that indicate her changing mood: her satisfaction at orders obeyed; her rising tone of exasperation at orders not carried out. But her voice has not got older, which is important. When she was real, she was both colder than this and warmer than this. Her voice was, of course, exactly the same. I had to take her. I couldn’t believe she was there. You don't see her very often nowadays: unfortunately, she’s quite an obscure model now. She was in an unlocked car. Just nipped out to the shop, he’d probably tell the police later. Get a paper and some fags. I ripped her from the windscreen. Fortunate I had my gloves on. I stuck her in my pocket. High-tailed it through the entries and alleyways and ginnels, vaulting the discarded bin bags, dodging the dog turds, taking rights and lefts, almost slipping on discarded chip wrappers and abandoned chips, clanking across the flat cobbles and emerging three streets away. Knew they’d never find me. She was mine now, after I’d given up all hope of setting eyes on her again. When she was real, she was not so easily persuaded to come with me. Now, I've got her plugged into the laptop by the side of my bed, in demonstration mode. I’ve made a few subtle changes to the software. Every night now, she goes on an epic journey with me, of my choosing, and the muted-down colours of her maps flash an accompaniment to my rapid eye movements. When she was real, she was going to be a big shot actress: stage, TV, even movies, if things went well. She’d done some radio, she had the voice, she’d made the right connections, but did she have the visual presence? That was her worry. She always soothes me to sleep. If I hadn’t managed to re-program her, she wouldn’t say anything, of course, because she’s not actually going anywhere, is she? But she lies there, absorbing the space-energy, formulating the route, telling me where to go. Telling me what to do. When she was real, she never told me what to do, but she always knew what she was going to do. I set up the sound recorder, enter the destination postcode and slow down the speed, then I let her talk all night, and I dream about where she’s taking me, what positions she’s inveigling me into, always face down, arms curved round the steering wheel I've fitted to the headboard with the cable slotted into the joystick socket, head buried in the pillow, rotating my arms as she tells me "Turn right at the roundabout, third turning", mostly following orders but sometimes making a mistake, which means that eventually she is forced to use the words "turn around when possible" and those words always touch me. Every part of me. However, I don't cheat: I try to stay obedient. I always was, and always wanted to be. But wherever I travel, however long the journey, I always wake up comforted, refreshed and confident, knowing that she’ll never get away again. And every morning, the sheets are always in a mess. When she was real, she wanted to move away. She wanted to live in a different postcode. When I fall asleep, and slacken my grip on the wheel, I obviously go careering all over the place, and she has to cope with flying through houses and across lakes, and then she has to recalculate, patiently, doggedly, professionally swallowing her distaste. I listen to the sound recording of her throughout the following day, through my iPod earphones, so that people on the train don't realise. It stops them talking, allows me to be quiet. When she was real, when she wasn't working, she was always quiet. Thinking rather than talking, she called it. Now I know what she was thinking about.