Please use Responsibly

Leonard took a long deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to control the shuddering of his great belly as he stood, hands on his hips, staring at the strangest scene he’d ever come across. All around him, specialists in hazmat suits tried to figure out what to do. Some of them were scratching their heads even though their ludicrously large helmets made the gesture futile.

“Is that…?” his partner, Elodie, asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“How did…?”

“We don’t know,” he said, wearily shaking his head.

“It’s a D-aww-l,” she said, enunciating the name awkwardly. “Oh. I get it. Doll. D-aww-l. Bit clunky. Aren’t they banned?” she asked. “Someone reported one of these a day or two ago.”

“They’re working on it.”

“I hate sex dolls,” Elodie shuddered. “I don’t know why manufacturers keep coming up with these weird loopholes.”

Leonard shrugged and walked over the small empty box near the crime scene. It was pink, and cheap, and soaked in rain water that had run down from the nearby dumpster, and its clear plastic front was now crinkled so heavily it appeared almost white, like a shattered windshield. On the front was a hyper-stylised pink font reading ‘D-awwwww-l!!’ along with diagrams showing how the doll would rapidly expand, developing from a new-born baby into a young child, and finally into an adolescent girl all in the space of fifteen minutes.

Leonard couldn’t help but snort at the last stage. You could always tell the illicit weird stuff from legitimate products by the design of the doll. If it looked like a 65-year-old accountant, you could rest easy it was an actual crash-test dummy or organ-transport-unit. Just the fact that the doll inexplicably stopped ageing at fifteen told Leonard all he needed to know about the intended market. He grimaced and threw the packet back down on the floor.

“Do you remember Big Gene?” Elodie asked.

“Eurgh,” Leonard groaned. The doll that was marketed as an aide for manual labour, but which inexplicably changed gender after three months, was a big seller. The manufacturer swore it was a defect, but some executive emails soon made it clear the fault was very deliberate. He remembered having to clear out the shipping containers filled with the male dolls, shivering and crying helplessly as they bumped around in the dark, all while their owners waited for their genitals to drop off.

“I still can’t get it out of my head,” he replied “I mean, those things would stand there and watch as you fed their companions into a wood chipper and they wouldn’t even blink. But three weeks in the holds of some cargo ship, three weeks in the dark and the cold, and they were whimpering and cradling each other for warmth. Freaks me out.” Leonard spat on the floor with disgust. “If these things aren’t conscious, why does it matter how they’re used?” he asked. “Why prohibit civilian manufacturing? Why prohibit their use as sex slaves at all?”

Elodie shrugged.

“It’s because we need ‘em,” Leonard grumbled. “They feel everything, every last bit, but we can’t let go of them. Labour, gene therapies, medical treatments… all of it would be sent hurtling back to the 21st Century if we banned ‘em, so now we gotta run around stopping everyone from having a little too much fun.”

“I think it’s because we’d fuck them to death,” Elodie said with a casual but crude hand gesture.

“Would you?” Leonard asked with disgust.

“I think we’d all be horrified at what we’d do if it was normalised,” she answered.

Leonard looked out as one of the crime scene investigators jogged over with a tablet held in both hands.

“It worries me that you’re right,” he replied, before directing Elodie’s attention to the approaching figure. “Look sharp, here comes the boss.”

The man in the hazmat suit stopped and held the tablet up at chest height. The blue light was stark in such a dark alleyway, and when it caught the falling rain it momentarily lit them up so that they looked like bubbles trapped in amber.

“What’s the situation Len?” the tablet asked. It was their dear old CO, asking uncomfortable questions from a comfortable chair.

“You know the D-awwww-l, right sir?”

“The new one?” The old man groaned. “It’s getting worse every week.”

“Yup,” Elodie replied. “We’ll try to speed up the paperwork. Some of these photos are sure to help us get it moving. The press are… well they’re going to have fun with this.”

“So, what was it this time?” The old man asked, his voice filled with resignation. “Suicide? Malfunction? God, please don’t say another viral infection?”

“We don’t think so,” Leonard shook his head. “It doesn’t look like anything else we’ve ever seen before. The poor guy is in pieces. I’d say mutilated but…”

“How does the doll figure in?”

“It was shoved up his ass… sir,” Leonard replied.

There was a moment of silence. Even the mirrored face of the hazmat suit seemed to look off into the distance, as if trying to will themselves away from this conversation. The old face on the tablet was so still, for so long, Leonard wondered if it had frozen.

“What?”

“It’s the doll that grows, sir,” Elodie elaborated. “You soak it in starch or any organic matter but the box says starch works best, and it absorbs nutrients from around it and grows.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said with a nod of the head. “They, uh, they inserted it in the, uh, foetus-form which is the… well it’s how you get it, in the packet, about yay big.” He held up his hands to show something about the size of a large grapefruit. “And then they activated it and it grew very, very quickly. And just…”

Elodie mimed an explosion with her hands.

“He blew up!?” cried the sergeant.

“More of, crunch, I suppose, sir,” Leonard answered.

“Well I don’t envy those of you at the scene,” the old man growled. “Suicide then?”

“Well the… we like to think it would be hard to get something like that… they’d need to be flexible.” Leonard said. “Besides we are talking about a… very painful way to go, sir. It’s unlikely that’s self-inflicted. I mean, this thing didn’t just expand, it would have actively broken down and reabsorbed organic material from its surroundings to fuel that growth. It would have eaten him alive, sir, from the inside out.”

“So, you’re saying someone used one these things as a form of torture? As a murder weapon? That is new”

Leonard looked up at the techie in the hazmat and spoke to them directly.

“You’ve been classifying it as the body of the victim, so far, haven’t you? I mean, how do you think we should write this one up. Is the doll the weapon, or part of the victim?”

The faceless hazmat suit remained still for a short while before nodding vigorously.

“What did he say?” asked the sergeant.

“He said ‘yes’, sir.”

There was a long moment as all four characters remained standing in the torrential rain, surrounded by the distant thrumming of air taxis and the fan-like whirring of the wind-catchers built into the towering habitation blocks on either side. It sounded like a thousand telephone poles wobbling in the air, a roar that you could feel in your teeth. Eventually, Leonard spoke up.

“We’ll figure something out, sir. We always do,” before swiping the face away and dismissing the techie holding the tablet.

Leonard pulled out his phone and quickly searched for the D-awww-l online and found a distressing but committed niche community of fans. Most importantly, he found images of the original doll, which would at least let him get a sense of what body parts belonged to which individual.

This particular model was haunting. There was an art employed by the geneticists who made these things, Leonard saw that clearly in the subtle differences between each new model. This one had a button nose and freckled cheeks with full lips that spoke of happy mornings spent eating cereal and laughing with friends. Her eyes were an emerald green, and just looking at them made Leonard think of her chin resting on her knuckles as she listened intently to whatever he had to say.

She wasn’t merely an assembly of pre-picked features. To Leonard, she looked like a very real person. Elodie peered over Leonard’s shoulder, saw the doll’s true face, and grimaced.

“You sure you’re up for this?” she asked.

“It only looks like her.” Leonard shrugged. “A passing resemblance, if anything. And, uh, in my head, she kind of aged too. We still celebrate her birthday. Callie likes to do it, as a tribute, to remember our little girl as she should have been. So, each year it comes by and we mark how old she is, was, would have been… rather. So, to me, she’s not fifteen.”

“How old is she?” Elodie asked with a thin smile.

“Twenty-one, and in my head that’s uh, that’s how I remember her, weirdly enough. Doesn’t make any sense, but that’s how my mind processes it.”

“That’s sweet.”

Leonard scratched the back of his neck and began scrolling through photos of large hairy men cradling the delicate doll.

“It’s something,” he groaned. “Probably not healthy. Healthier than these freaks, though.” He gestured to the men on their screen. “People used to dream of being better. We used to want to be better people. But that often means admitting you’re not brave, or strong, and that there’s a lot of work between you and your ideals. It’s easier now for small people to dream of a small world and make it real with computers than to face the possibility that they just don’t deserve the things they want. They want beautiful women, nice cars, wealth, power… so they sit around abusing these things because it’s easier than facing the truth.

“Fucking losers,” he hissed. “The lot of them.”

Leonard was shaking. Elodie had heard similar diatribes before. In some ways, Leonard felt as though he should apologise each time he revisited this rant, but whenever he looked at his partner he saw only sympathy.

“Sorry,” he said. “The guy who took her, he was big into this sort of thing.” Leonard gestured to the doll.

“I know,” Elodie said politely. “They’re illegal for a reason, Len. Some impulses can’t be indulged safely.”

“And what if they are alive?” Leonard asked. “What if they wake up one day and they know everything we’ve done to them? What will they say?”

He didn’t wait to hear Elodie’s response. Instead he walked over to the body and stared down at it. He’d seen abused dolls before. He’d found them, half battered, tortured, neglected, huddling away in strange hideaways and boltholes. He’d found himself wrapping blankets around their bruised shoulders even as he realised they couldn’t really feel. He’d broken up fighting rings, illegal pornography shoots, organ harvesting operations, and even one bizarre art-piece that involved breast-feeding and a pig. Every time he’d done this, he’d seen a kind of sadness in the doll’s eyes. He’d been told again and again that he was projecting his own thoughts and feelings onto the smooth-brained mindless vat-grown automata. But no matter what, he could never shake the haunting look of pitiful sadness in their eyes.

Except for this one.

The “growth” process had ended at a stage where the large frame of the man remained stretched around the adolescent body like a plastic bag carrying a heavy load. Strange tissues were stretched to paper-thin proportions until all blood had drained from the capillaries within, rendering them the colour of mop water. To make it worse, the process wasn’t entirely kinetic, but biological and chemical as well. There were many areas where the man’s body had started to cave in, where half of his chest had collapsed like a papier-mâché project given the boot, where his hair had been sucked back into his scalp, and the jelly of one eye had been drained, leaving a sickly white raising hanging from a stalk. All around this battered, rain-soaked corpse, were signs of the internal structure being rotted and dissolved to fund the growth of something else, something within.

And that something else looked utterly malignant. Far from the image of the serene and playful adolescent on his phone, the green eyes that peered through bruised and shredded flesh were filled with pure, unrefined malice. Leonard had never seen anyone, or anything, look so hateful in his entire life.

“It seems about right, doesn’t it?” he said as he heard Elodie approach. “If they were aware, if they had souls, that’s how they’d really look at us. Like they were gonna skin us alive and make it last a week.”

Elodie reached down and, using a ball-point pen, she pulled aside a stretched and flabby jowl to reveal the clenched teeth of the furious doll beneath. She looked at Leonard with alarm, even worry, in her eyes.

“That’s not a blank receptacle,” she muttered. “She… it’s clearly angry. I’ve never seen one look like that before. They’re not meant to feel. This is…” she stuttered. “It’s just a fluke, right?”

“Is that…?” Leonard asked. “Is that a fucking badge?”

Elodie never had time to pull the coat back. Everything exploded at once, a kinetic storm of limbs that brought only pain and confusion.

The arm that smashed Elodie away belonged to the bloated corpse of the man, but the hand that grabbed her hair was the malicious long-nailed hand of a young girl. The lips that wrapped around Leonard’s neck were the bristle covered lips of an adult man, but the teeth that bit down were those of a child. By the time the techies had looked up, the doll had ripped the gun out of Leonard’s holster and was already firing indiscriminately at every person it saw. It’s twisted, asymmetrical form stopped it from standing up straight, but it crab walked backwards and fired the gun using a hand that emerged from an abdomen like it was the most natural position in the world.

Leonard was on his knees, coughing up blood that warmed his chin as he clamped one hand onto his neck to stop the bleeding. With the other hand he reached out feebly and tried to hold onto Elodie’s leg as the doll dragged the unconscious woman back into the dark abandoned building behind them. When it felt resistance from Leonard’s arm the doll twisted back to face him. In less than a second it looked up at Leonard, registered some aspect of his appearance or expression, and then snapped Elodie’s neck with two of its free limbs.

Leonard screamed but let go, giving the doll exactly what it wanted. It scuttled back into the darkness like a bug, and when Leonard stood up, struggling against the light-headed nausea of blood-loss, he stumbled forward and turned on his flashlight. He expected a blood trail, or a glimpse of the abomination as it made its escape. He did not expect to see a small gang of the strange creatures turn to face him in the light, Elodie’s body clutched in their shared grip. One of them, a little larger than the rest, screamed an inhuman warble and stepped forward to face him in a challenge. The others slithered back into the darkness and fled.

Elodie went with them while Leonard remained frozen to the spot. He was helpless, not only physically but emotionally. Ever since the thing had come alive his entire body had been screaming at him to flee. It was a raw primal repulsion, a mixture of disgust and hysterical fear. Frozen to one spot, he watched as the pack of misshapen creatures made their escape. Once the largest was sure Leonard was no threat, it too backed away and disappeared through a hole in the floor with surprising grace. Still clutching his neck, wincing at the pain that throbbed with every heartbeat, Leonard turned and stumbled back out into the open rain where various orange-suited men and women ran around in a panic. Some were attending to gunshot wounds, some were screaming for help, others were calling support in from their personal radios. Leonard ignored them all and shuffled over to the pink box he had discarded earlier.

Reaching down he grabbed it and held it up. As his injuries began to get the better of him, and consciousness started to slip, he had enough time to squint and see the easily missed fourth step on the box’s instructions that exclaimed, in broken English,

“Wait small time, doll make more babies! Plant new baby to make new as need. Unlimited dolls, small money, big value!!

“Please use responsibly.”