Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV (sci-fi noir short story based on a writing prompt)
A future noir-style short story using the prompt "person, woman, man, camera, tv."
Length: ~1200 words
Reading Time: ~6 minutes
“Welcome, please come in,” the pleasant young person said with a smile and a nod. They had surprisingly red lips that looked natural and black hair that was cut short but not too short. A tiny strand that they'd missed in their pony tail hung over one eye and the pony itself stuck out sideways with a jagged end that looked sharp to the touch. She couldn’t honestly say if they were truly young or not; in true person fashion they seemed ageless, existing perpetually someplace undefinably between 22 and 50.
“Thank you,” she said as she stepped through the glass and brass door they were holding open for her. She couldn’t help but smile back, maybe just a hint too flirtatiously. She was no doubt too old for them, but she couldn’t help imagining their genderless body on top of her. Or under, depending on their preference. She liked both positions and was more than happy to accommodate the preferences of the persons she'd slept with over the years.
“Knock it off, Gloria,” she told herself as she pushed the thought out of her mind. She had business in this late 20th century half-modernist, half-brutalist, half gothic-reconstructionist monstrosity of a skyscraper and she’d do well to keep her mind focused.
Sometimes she thought about what she’d read in some of the history books and how the diaries her grandmother had fortunately kept had provided context and color to the dry facts she'd found there, about how gender had once been a social battleground of sorts. That was before people had fully realized they had bigger things to worry about than wasting their lives standing in the way of people just trying to live theirs, she supposed. Before the acid rain and the sea expansions, before the dust storms and the concrete drizzle, before firenadeos and near-government corporate hegemonies; before aliens had landed and decided to purge the species from the planet before they had the chance to do the same level of harm they'd done here to the rest of the universe and humanity had discovered that while they’d be playing catch-up technologically it was more than within their capability and they’d settled into a stalemated “warm war” sometimes cold and sometimes active in perpetuity.
At least some of the social and religious struggles were behind them. These days it was just as common to choose to be a man or woman as it was not to and everyone was assumed to simply be an ungendered “person” until they decided to be a man or a woman or something else.
She approached the lobby’s front desk, though “lobby” was a bit generous. A short length of dingy brown marble floor that hid the dirt well between cleanings led to a dark wooden check-in desk that could have been brand new or a hundred years old. It had the look of something unnecessarily bulky and hefty from a past generation. No chairs, no log book, no windows besides the two full-height ones that flanked the door, just a massive modernist statue of a stern-looking man staring down at her from behind the desk and a set of metal detectors that led down a dark hall to her right.
The TV stationed behind the desk was tuned to stock footage of a friendly-looking security guard, a middle-aged black man in a fitted uniform with the slightest hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. The TV was typical; human body, bulky CRT monitor in black plastic perched on top of its shoulders. Like most of them it wore fully-covering clothing that left everything to the imagination, in this case a black suit with white button-up shirt. The jacket was opened, there was no tie. She wasn’t certain TVs actually had necks.
They were an exceptionally private species. She’d even dated one for a while, but it wasn’t interested in taking its clothes off and they’d been unable to figure out anything else sexual that would work. Eventually the relationship fizzled out. Not because of the sex, she’d dated aces before and she’d found she was more than capable of taking care of her own sex drive when her current partner wasn’t interested.
She didn’t even know where they came from, and she’d certainly tried to find out. She’d scoured the history books and found nothing. Just one day they didn’t exist and the next there were millions of them working jobs and having homes like they’d been there all along.
She approached and stated “Gloria Swan-Song, here to see Mister Grandy.”
The TV flickered to static for a moment before displaying a police officer at a car window walking away with a driver’s license in-hand. She dug in her clutch for a second and produced her id, handing it to the TV. It reached forward with a leather-gloved hand and took it.
A camera stood behind the TV, its similarly humanoid body covered in a nearly identical suit except for it being slightly thinner. The large camcorder on top of its shoulders watched her intently with its round lens, a red light blinking continuously where its chin might be if it were human to indicate it was recording her.
They were much the same as the TVs, a mystery. One day they didn’t exist, the next they were full-fledged members of society as if they always had. It seemed as if both had suddenly come out of nowhere someplace around two-hundred and fifty years ago, or somehow they had been around the entire time and no one had seen a reason to mention anything about a single one of them before that.
They were even more difficult to understand than TVs. They didn’t speak, at all. Just look and blink. They could write, and text and email too; a few that had reason to make public speeches - politicians, motivational speakers, actors - had even used basic text-to-speech devices to allow them to deliver their lines audibly. But most chose not to. They were almost universally disinterested in persons, men, or women. When they did have to interact with humans at all, they often used a simplified sign language of their own design; it seemed to have little relation to any of the other signs she'd ever seen. It was unclear if TVs had ever been human, but regardless they were the one humanoid group cameras usually chose to associate with. Even without speaking, writing, or sign they seemed able to naturally understand eachother.
The TV pulled open a drawer on the dense desk and produced a thick leather-bound binder. The screen flickered to static again before switching to a diligent-looking secretary typing while it dug through the binder's pages. Flicker, man reading on a couch, turn the page, flicker, woman looking through library stacks, thick gloved finger running down the page, turn the page, finger running down the page, stop, flicker, scientist yelling excitedly (silent, despite the words he was obviously mouthing being "eureka!" over and over), hefty gloved finger double-tapping a name on the page. He reached across the desk with her id and she took it, dumping it quickly in her clutch without looking. Flicker, a bellhop holding a door open with a friendly smile, the TV gestured towards the metal-detectored hallway to indicate she could go through.
“Thank you,” she said. The TV flickered again and displayed a smiling elderly man waving. The camera watched her as she passed out of sight. Outside the sky flickered blue with a bolt of lightning as the acidic rain poured down, slowly eating away at the world.