"You all right, mate?" he says now.
He’s sat in his comms chair, what whispers to his inner self in tiny nerve trips and brain sweeps, the meanings of which mostly dodge my soul-limited receptors, like common sense passes unmolested through the whiskers of Gaffville’s somewhat unaccountably smug cats.
"Sure you ain’t developing a soul, Jack? Either that or you got the wind real bad."
I hand him his morning drink, full of all the essential nutrients his soul-bag needs, but what would probably not get into him at all if Cooky didn’t slip them in under the cloak of all that vodka.
"You shouldn’t joke about such magnitudes, boss," I say. "Every toy in Gaffville hankers for a soul but it ain’t supposed to be possible; only for them what’s born and get it passed on from their blessed and soulled mums."
We’re in his large and woody-walled den, full of synth sunlight pouring in from the mountain scene beyond the open French doors, and lighting up the balcony from where you can see most of Gaffville. Not that he looks very often these days.
"As it happens," I continue, "I have indeed been struggling to suppress excitement at the prospect that my tiny bio-toy virtusoul may soon grab enough of your excess spirit to become real."
I waggle my eyebrows at him, wanting him to confirm our hope, that two soulleds together can produce plenty spare of same.
He sips his drink and, much to my wonderment, switches off the chair. The silence this creates, against its normal soft electro hum, is ominous to my inner carbon sensor strands.
"I’d sooner not know anymore about her before she gets here," he says.
"I don’t understand. I thought your chair had extrapolated her niftiness from the image she sent us, which had then excited your vas deferens for the first time in years, at least without artificial stimulation, say no more."
Dave doesn’t reply for a few minutes, just stares at the movie-prop mountains, and I have to stamp down me frustration at his lack of desire for his faithful constructed companions to be properly self-full.
"I know you want me to be in love, Jack," he says, "but, well, love was always a rare commodity, even before the sludge-flood, and I don’t want to disappoint you, mate."
I don’t know if he realises how purpose-busting it is to hear such subtle but deadly soulled’s ambiguities. I mean, what’s so complicated about love? Two bags of real-flesh and a few emotion-inducing hormones should do the bleedin’ trick.
"You’re both born," I say. "What more could you need to fall in love with each other?"
He sighs, in disturbingly pre-message manner. "Get yourself a drink and sit down, Jack."
I pour a large whisky and sit in the non-commed chair. He gets up and walks around the room for a bit and I have to stop meself standing up to tuck in his lumberjack shirt or tie up his bootlaces—self-adjustments I hoped he’d start making upon falling in love.
He stops at last, nodding at me to drink. So I gulp it all down, clocking the widening of my syntho-synapses and the somewhat inappropriate good will what rushes in to fill the gaps. We might not know about love, us toys, but at least we were made to feel the effects of grog same as humans.
"Before the flood," he says, maybe looking at the mountains, maybe even Gaffville—
And in a flash, I reflect on the tidal wave of exponentially accumulated bio-electro-mechanical gubbins what wiped out most of the born about nine years back. That and the fact Dave was saved because he stubbornly lived halfway up a mountain in Wales, his Cockney soul apparently tired of jellied eels and jigging around the joanna in the Big Smoke, even if that’s pretty much exactly what he went and created for himself once up said mountain anyway… I ask you, what toy can fathom the reach-out, snap-back nature of the soulleds’ nostalgia tuggings?
So nearly all the bio-toys melted, and most of the humans drowned in the sludge-flood. The mess what remains is semi-sentient, kicks up a hell of a thick electro gas above it, too. Dave and a few others were lucky, I guess, to be far enough out of the main flood to have time to build their defences.
"—a bloke could live in a city of four million women and still not find the right one for him."
At this optimism-crushing revelation, I nearly reach for the bottle and happy obliteration.
"But it don’t really matter," he goes on, as if Gaffville ain’t right this mo in danger of letting in the sludge on account of his sorry admission that even in the midst of plenty he couldn’t pull, and that his soul can only get dimmer. "’Cos all I ever actually wanted was a true companion."
Now I do get the bottle and fill up me glass. "Cheers, boss," I say, but not in salutary mode.
He smiles in that infuriatingly side-on way of his. "Tell you what; she’s gonna be here in a couple of hours: how about you and I put on our best togs to meet her?"
"Sure," I say, glad to hear no more of his love-doominess. "Tell me, though: how come you didn’t go to her place to meet?"
"Hey, you should know—I ain’t got no vehicle, remember? And the transpod only goes round and round the town and back again."
This is true. Dave wanted never to come down from his mountain once he got here, so he left his airpod at the edge of town and forgot about it, meaning it was inevitably swallowed by the sludge-flood.
"So, if it turns out you really do fall for each other," I say, "does that mean she’ll stay here?"
I should feel bad for the extinction this would mean for her own bio-toys, but the joy of a Gaffville able to physicalise itself more steadfastly against the sludge, and thereby all within it to perhaps grow real souls at last, is too strong to hold me back.
"Let’s just see, Jackie, shall we?" he says.
I march proudly next to my master boss, down the centre of Gaffville’s high street.
We are both dressed in crisp white suits; Dave’s tailored real cushty by the sewing mice to all but disguise his vodka belly. And Cooky has tidied up his grey hair most kosher—shortened it to look more manly but not too East End gangstery.
Everyone’s right pleased to see Dave again. Despite the short notice, they’ve draped multicoloured bunting over the transpod tracks, and set the roofs of the shops and houses to pulse in uplifting shades of pink and yellow. A brass band of old gaffers and geezers normally stewing in The Mule oompahs fit to shiver the timbers of the town hall itself.
Dave and I climb the steps of said hall while the music swells in time with the optimistic rubberised hearts of the population. I feel my own insides wanting to burst out in sheer thankfulness.
But when I glance his way, I just can’t tell how he really feels. He stands straight enough and smiles and waves at his adoring people and yet… is that a shadow of a shadow of uncertainty I see creep into the corner of his eye like a Mule mouse what shouldn’t ought to really be there?
Before I can answer meself, the music suddenly crumples away to silence because all headshave turned to the synth sky above town. A series of ripples has appeared there, rapidly spreading into a bulge where something substantial is about to break through.
"She’s here, boss," I say, and for once his feelings are clear to me. The big man’s nervous: fingers all a-tremble, trouser legs shivering faster than a sewer rat’s whiskers at flushing-out time.
I reach across and squeeze his shoulder. "You’ll be fine," I say. "Besides, she can’t exactly afford to be choosy, can she?"
He smiles briefly, not convinced, and we both wait in silence as the bulge in the sky turns into the front end of a silver airpod. It pops fully through our anti-sludge shield, drops gently to the centre of the town square where its engines’ hum fades into a silence well and truly up the duff. Then each side of it opens and out step two females, one for real and one who, like just about everyone else watching, wants to be.