Delusion by Cris Aboobaker

Sam has been working too much, and suffers an unsettling delusion.

Image generated with OpenAI

One night, as he worked late in the office, Sam was astonished to see the shadow of lettering embedded in the bony knob of his right elbow. As he bent his arm toward the men's room mirror, he could make out the word. Androm, it said, and as he brought his face closer, he could see the stylized, cursive "A." It looked like a corporate logo, as if designed by a creative agency. Like BB&D, the agency he worked for.

He pulled on his arm but could not twist it enough to see. The lettering was in his blind spot; he could only see it in the mirror. But, in his thirty-five years of life, he had surely seen his elbow in the mirror many thousands of times and never noticed this feature. Nor had any friend, lover or family member ever pointed it out to him.

He had come to the men's room to relieve the full bladder that had been tormenting him for the past hour, distracting him from building PowerPoint charts for George's presentation. Desperate to complete the slides, battling the clock as it flew, to six o'clock, then seven, suddenly nine with more work ahead, he could no longer ignore his body's plaintive cries.

Padding down the dimly lit hallway, he peered into the empty offices. There was now no need to avert his eyes from the closet-like space where sexy Lauren usually sat, her blouse open at the top, showing off her well-crafted endowments. Or the larger office from which big John might spring, like a saber tooth tiger from his cave, asking for help with his projects, as if Sam didn't have enough work of his own. They had all left, including George, the boss, with a stern reminder, "Sam, I'll need that presentation on my desk in the morning," as he flung his Brooks Brothers blazer over his shoulders for a march to the elevators.

Sam hated working late, dining on snacks from vending machines, getting home in time to drop into bed for a few hours before heading to work again. But he loved the liberating feel of being alone in the office. At this point, even the cleaning staff had made their rounds and gone. He was free, if the spirit moved him, to prance naked, whooping and hollering through the halls, shaking his willie in Lauren's direction while giving John the moon. But Sam did not act on these impulses; he even restrained himself from unzipping his fly in a public area, despite so eagerly anticipating his upcoming encounter with the urinal. Instead, he waited, with full office hours decorum, to pull his zipper down until after he had pushed through the men's room doors.

With a long sigh and wondrous release, he turned to the sinks, washing his hands and splashing water on his face. Raising his arms in the neon lights above the mirror, as they flickered between brightness and shadow, he saw the letters on his elbow.

Androm.

He tried twisting his right elbow so fiercely toward his eyes that he feared he might hurt himself. He brought his face closer to the mirror. When the neon flickered bright, the lettering disappeared; he had normal human elbows. But, in the dim light, the word spelled out, in bumps and shadows.

Sam turned away and looked back, shut his eyes and opened them, but the letters were still there. Had they been chiseled into his body without his knowledge or consent? Or they had always been there, though he had never been aware of them before?

At that moment, the men's room door slammed open and shut with the violence of a big man in a terrible hurry.

"What's up boss," said Luis, as he pounded past Sam and into a stall.

"I'm alright," said Sam, hearing his own voice, strained and weak.

"Ah," said Luis, and let go in ways that sent Sam scurrying out of the men's room and back down the hall to his office.

Though obsessed with the mystery of his elbow, Sam noted another oddity. What could Luis, a maintenance worker, usually seen moving furniture, changing light bulbs and adding toner to printers, be doing in the office at nearly ten o'clock? As if in answer, Luis loomed in his doorway, the top of his shaved brown head fading into the darkness of the hall.

"You ok boss?" Luis' head hung solemn. "You look a little pale."

"I'm ok," said Sam, the chill inside him turning warm at the sound of Luis' voice.

"Look," said Sam, on sudden impulse, turning his elbows toward Luis, as if a child showing a booboo to his father. "Do you see something on my elbow? The right one?" He could not control the tremor in his speech.

Luis stepped into Sam's office with the pensive air of a physician approaching a patient's bedside. He looked around the room, at the piles of paper on the desk and floor, the crumpled data printout in front of the computer screen. He rubbed a hand over his smooth skull.

"There's nothing wrong with your elbows. They're perfectly fine-looking elbows."

Sam noticed that Luis had dropped the "boss."

"But you need to go home and get some rest."

"I'm doing this for George. He needs it in the morning," said Sam, a little frantic.

"Don't you worry about George. He wouldn't want you to burn out, or something."

Sam shrugged and nodded.

"And get a real meal on the way home. The diner on the corner is good."

Sam sighed. What would he tell George? That Luis, the maintenance man, said it was ok to leave the work unfinished? But he reached behind the door for his jacket, shut his lights, and headed for the elevators.

As Luis raised his arm to wave goodnight, Sam thought he saw, emblazoned on the sleeve of the light blue jacket that maintenance guys wore around the office, a stylized, cursive "A." The same "A" as the lettering on his elbow. He had never noticed it before.

The waitress at the corner diner was good to Sam. Sweetie, she called him, as she came to take his order; he blushed, smiled and asked for meatloaf, mashed potatoes and string beans. With lentil soup. The same order every time.

On evenings when he had the time, he looked forward to stopping here on his way to the subway. He would take a booth for himself, for it was never crowded at dinnertime, sink his butt into the soft fake leather of the seat and let the thick, sticky dinner food congeal inside him. He might take a break from reading work reports to scan news headlines and watch her legs. Her name was Sally, he had learned, as her name was called by other waitresses and the cooks. She was no beauty, older than Sam, and who knows what sort of life she led? But he basked in the sight of her kind, womanly flesh as it jiggled down the aisles.

"Oh sweetie, aren't you late tonight." Sally's eyes were tired. It was a twenty-four-hour diner, when did her shift end?

Sam nodded. Smiled. He was shy with women, though he knew, at some level, that his wavy brown hair and the symmetry of his face appealed to them. To some of them at least, to the mother in them.

Luis was right to tell him to stop by the diner. For a single man, like Sam, who lived alone in a tiny Manhattan apartment and worked long hours, these spaces were like his family room. As his bowl and plate were placed in front of him, "Be careful dear, they're hot," she said, the memory of what he had seen on his elbow receded. Strange shadows in the bathroom mirror. His imagination perhaps?

But alone again, in the silence of his apartment, his distress came back in force. He knew what he had seen. He tried to lie in bed and close his eyes, but kept jumping up to go to the bathroom, looking at his right elbow in the mirror, turning the light from bright to dim, rotating his arm to every angle. He could not see the letters now. But they had been there. And the childlike dependence he felt toward Luis, his reflexive obedience when Luis commanded him, the stylized "A" on the maintenance man's jacket. What could it mean?

Suddenly excited, he turned on his bedroom light and opened his laptop. He had not followed up on his one clue. What was "Androm?"

The browser went blank for a moment while Sam drew breath. Then it popped up, the first entry. Androm, a military contractor. What did they do? Classified artificial intelligence projects for the Pentagon. The wording was cloaked and sly. But Sam saw a connection. The company he worked for, BB&D, did branding, marketing and, some around the office whispered, propaganda work for the military.

Searching more deeply through the night, Sam found a series of videos by a man named Ron Duchamp. Grainy, homemade footage, with Ron's face too close to the camera, his thinning ginger hair, scraggly beard, ragged, discolored teeth and baseball cap filling and sometimes falling out of frame. Sam could almost smell him, his bad breath and body odor.

Ron was a veteran, as he proclaimed loudly in each video. And during his time in the service, he had stumbled across a secret. Androids. The military, he shouted, was way ahead of anything reported in the mainstream news. Human cloning and mechanical parts were being used in tandem, as in the old science fiction stories, to create artificial humans

It is not the future, Duchamp proclaimed, it is now! "These androids are being licensed to private industry, they are among us, they are replacing us because they're are easier to manage and control. The worst part is, these poor fuckers don't even know. They have what looks like human functions and are implanted with human memories and life stories." With a hollow laugh. "They think they're just like us."

This man is insane, thought Sam. But he kept watching.

"Now here's how you can tell," said Duchamp, leaning into the camera to share a revelation. It was past 2am; Sam had been watching these screeds for hours. "Some parts, including bones and connective tissue, have been imprinted with brand names of the contractors. When the androids function normally, the branding is hidden under their cloned flesh. But when they are under pressure, or aroused, when their functions are burning hot, you can see it, a pattern of bumps on the bones. Bright lights obscure it; it is most visible in the shadows."

Sam gasped, turned off the laptop and slammed it shut.

A voice inside him shouted. This is absurd! I was a child once. I had parents; I have a brother. I urinate, defecate, eat and sleep. I have sexual feeling; I have made love. I am a person, he argued. He put his face in his hands and sobbed. I want to be a person.

But Duchamp's videos had convinced him. There was no point living a lie.

I am an android, assigned to the data analytics department of BB&D. BB&D most likely designed the Androm logo, which I wear on my elbow and perhaps other places on my body, if you can call it a body. Sam shivered, though his bedroom was not cold. Perhaps it was the chill of metallic parts inside him? There was no longer reason for tears. They were probably not real tears but squirted lubricant as a programmed response, like windshield wiper fluid.

Morning came after a sleepless night. But did he really need to sleep at all, or was it part of the android cover story? He made his way to the office early, turned on his lights before anyone else in his department was around, then took an elevator down, below the lobby to the sub-basement, where the motors that ran the building hummed and the maintenance crew had their offices. Looking for Luis.

"Good to see you, boss," said Luis, as he sat with a couple of other guys in a cavernous room. The space was filled with rejected office furniture in various states of disrepair, bookcases with shelves missing, desks standing crookedly on one leg, plush executive chairs grounded without their casters. Luis sat in the center, like the king of the basement realm, on a high-backed chair that might have once belonged to a C-level executive but with the leather torn and frayed.

"Did you get a meal and some sleep?" he asked Sam.

"Yes," Sam nodded, smiled, "Some food but not much sleep." He hardened his face, reminding himself that he was not here to be friendly.

"It's time for you to tell me the truth," he said to Luis.

"What truth is that?"

"That I'm an android dammit!" said Sam. "You maintain me like an office machine!"

One of the men broke into a loud guffaw. Another chortled behind his hand. Luis stared them down, they went silent, and he rose to his full height.

"Poor boy," he said to Sam. "I was afraid something like this would happen." He held Sam's arm. "Where did you get such an idea?"

"I saw the branding on my elbow that matches the branding on your jacket." He raised his hand to point to the "A" on Luis' sleeve, but his hand hung in the air. The "A" was no longer there. "There are videos on the internet," Sam said, losing steam, looking at the floor.

"Do you have any idea how crazy you sound? You can find internet videos that say every insane thing; Martians, androids, zombies."

Luis put his arm around Sam and spoke gently, in his ear. "You're just a kid who works too goddamn hard. Now you go upstairs and make them give you some time off, because you need it. And don't you take shit from anybody."

Tears started from Sam's eyes. They did not seem like windshield wiper fluid now. He nodded and turned back to the elevators. As he left, Luis glared around the room at his mates, as if daring them to laugh again. No one did. Then he picked up the phone.

Jennifer, George's executive assistant, was standing by Sam's office door. "They're all waiting for you in his office, bring your slides," she said, in her usual peremptory tone.

"Who all?" he asked.

"The team, John and Lauren," she snapped, as if he must be stupid not to know.

He printed four copies of last night's slides and hurried to George's office. George was in his usual pose, fingertips touched together and leaning back in his chair, as if bolts of wisdom were about to strike him from the ceiling. John was there, long legs stuck out in front of him and grinning at something George had said and Lauren was laughing, her frilly blouse buttoned right up to the top today but offset by a short black skirt, her sculpted legs tightly crossed.

The laughter stopped as Sam entered the room.

He handed out the presentation, cleared his throat and began, awkwardly at first, but gaining strength. His work, he knew, was elegant; each element of the marketing program under review parsed and assessed so the agency would know what was effective and what was not. Until Sam stopped speaking, in mid-sentence, as if a button had been pushed.

"That was all I could do." His words echoed in the silence. "I can't do any more."

John and Lauren leaned toward him, eyes wide. But George tilted back in his chair, as if he knew this crisis was coming.

"That's ok," said George. "Let's thank Sam for all his great work." He pantomimed clapping his hands. "John and Lauren will take this project from here," as he shooed them out of the room. "Give me a minute with Sam."

"Am I going to get fired?" Sam whispered across George's broad, polished desk.

"Of course not, Sam, your skills are valuable to us. As your manager, I am as responsible as you are for the stress that has caused these... emotional difficulties."

Sam nodded. That's what it was. An emotional breakdown.

"We're giving you time off, full pay, no worries. Call this person, she does employee counseling for the company." He handed Sam a card. "She'll have you back in no time, firing on all cylinders." George smiled, then dropped his head, as if regretting the choice of words.

"You can leave right now. Be off! Have fun, come back all better!"

Sam rose, legs shaking. He scanned the room as he turned to leave.

The credenza behind George was, as always, festooned with photos of George, an ever-changing panorama of Georges standing next to, or with his arms around other BB&D executives. Like a stock market ticker, you could tell which executives in George's world were on the political ascent or descent by their proximity to him and the placement of the photos. As Sam's eyes whipped across today's landscape, he noticed, standing forward and in the center, a photo of George with his arm on the back of the maintenance man, Luis.

Sam wandered out of the office, shellshocked but free, warmed by the foreign sun of a weekday afternoon. Squinting, he decided to forgo the subway, ducked into a drugstore to pick up sunglasses and a baseball cap and began the long walk uptown to his apartment.

The spring day was cool enough for his office uniform of blazer over button-down shirt and khaki slacks to be comfortable. After walking far enough to leave the rush of midtown behind, he ambled slowly, sitting on a park bench to eat a chicken salad sandwich he had picked up at a deli along the way. With every step, as the sun warmed and the breeze ruffled his skin, he felt the android delusion dissolve and his humanity return.

After all, what did he see? Some bumps on his elbow bone when he was exhausted, late at night. He couldn't see them now. The "A" on Luis' jacket? He must have imagined it; it was no longer there. He was suffering emotional burnout from overwork, leading to a wild delusion, reinforced by crazy stories from a madman on the internet.

The only troubling thought, like a pebble in his shoe, was the photo of Luis on George's credenza. How important, and powerful, was Luis, really? But even before starting therapy, Sam knew this was the type of thinking he must banish from his mind.

Eva Cohen, the therapist, had an office in Greenwich Village, a rattling subway ride for Sam on the downtown A express. He came up the stairs into a gentle corner of the city. Bars, restaurants and clubs, some no larger than cubbyholes but each with its own character, lined the thoroughfares. Aged brick buildings lay their shadows across tree-lined side streets. Eva was in one of those buildings, up an elevator that shook and wheezed its way up a few floors; and Eva herself was seamless with the neighborhood, a middle-aged-woman in a loose blue dress, her silver-colored necklace matching her undyed gray hair. Sam warmed to her immediately.

His delusional disorder, he understood after a few sessions with Eva, was caused by a combination of genetic predisposition, his introverted personality and the stress he was under at work. Some people with his problem were given psychiatric medications, but Eva did not think they were necessary in his case and might be counter-productive. "You have so much going for you, Sam," she said.

Every session was spent breaking down his thinking. "It is within the realm of possibility," she said, "That you are an android. But what is the probability of that, really?" He learned to counter that thought with others, using the palpable functions of his body as ongoing proof that he was biological, and real.

He also role-played with Eva the times he must say no to work demands. "They can't fire you, Sam, just because you won't work all night. And what is the worst that could happen? You would get another job," she said.

But his most important homework was to build a social network. There has to be more to life than work, because, as Eva said, "If you live your life as though you are robot, it is easy to fall into the delusion that you are one."

With Eva's encouragement, he plucked up the courage to call his brother. Ben had moved to the West Coast after college and they had gradually lost touch. There was no specific reason for estrangement, no breaking point, but after both their parents were gone, they talked less often and finally not at all. Sam grew accustomed to the long silence, thinking Ben was busy with his own life and might not want to be bothered. Another assumption to be challenged.

Coincidentally, as Sam was looking up Ben's number on his phone, it startled him by ringing and it was Ben. They exchanged an awkward, "How you doing; alright, alright," followed by silence, then rapid-fire exchanges, about Ben's job at a Palo Alto software company and Sam's marketing analytics. Ben's wife, Sara, broke up the shop talk by grabbing the phone and asking Sam about his love life.

"You seeing someone Sam? Some sweet girl to take care of you?

"Nah, too busy at work," said Sam. He didn't tell them about his breakdown.

Ben took back the phone and the conversation took a different tack. He told stories about old times. "Remember when we went down to the lake and you sank up to your ankles in the mud." Sam was two years younger, and tried to follow Ben everywhere, leading to these disasters. "I remember you standing there, unable to move forward or back till Mom stood on a patch of grass and lifted you up, mud dripping from your shoes," Ben laughed. "Oh, she was so furious." This happened on a family vacation to a resort in the Catskills when Ben was ten and Sam eight; it rained the whole time and they all came home with red rashes on their butts from something on the hotel toilet seats.

"It was all real, wasn't it Ben?" asked Sam, in a small voice.

There was a pause. "What do you mean Sammy? Of course it was real."

After the call, Sam riffled through a dresser drawer and found photos he remembered stashing under a pile of underwear. Pictures of the four of them, Mom and Dad, Ben and himself, including a snapshot from that vacation.

It was possible that everything, the call with Ben, Sara's interruption, the photographs in his drawer, was staged to reinforce false memories programmed into android circuitry. He might have been manufactured only a short time ago and brought to life with his life story pre-loaded, like a device pre-loaded with apps. But wasn't the reality of a human past the saner, more logical conclusion?

Six weeks had gone by, with Sam on this sabbatical, when George sent an email invitation for him to join the group for drinks at a bar across the street from the office, a popular after-hours place for BB&D employees. This is it; I am being reintegrated into the team. I am ready, too. The night he saw the letters on his elbow was now a distant nightmare; he had awakened to pull the shades and let the morning light stream in.

The bar was packed with people from the agency, not just the analytics group but account executives, media and creative types; each could be identified by their look, dress and the pattern of buzzwords tripping from their tongues. Sam leaned against the counter next to George and John who both clapped him on the shoulder. George bought him a drink.

Not far from the counter was a long table where many revelers sat. In the center was Lauren. The swirl of bodies in her vicinity, of men and even women jostling to be near her, was like a cluster of bees hovering around an open flower. She was on glorious display, with just enough but not too much cleavage showing and, as she stood, a perfect flash of thigh. Her face was, if anything, more erotic than her body; olive skin framed by dark hair and dark eyes shining over cheekbones so high they seemed almost painful. As if someone had studied an ancient image of Cleopatra and decided to bring her to life.

"What's the matter Sam, can't say hello? she said.

In his musing admiration, he had stepped closer to the table; she looked up and caught his eye. He stumbled forward, trying to think of friendly words, knowing, at times, his shyness could be mistaken for aloofness or even rudeness. Just then, the man lucky enough to be sitting next to Lauren got up, apparently unable to contain his bladder any longer; she patted the open seat and Sam was now beside her.

"It's great to have you back," she said, and put her hand on his arm.

"Yes, I feel much better," said Sam, embarrassed by memories of the day he left.

"You know," she said, coming close to talk to him through the noise of the bar. "I keep all the reports of yours I can get my hands and put them in a file. My Sam file. So I can look back and study the brilliant work you do."

The evening got better from there, drifting into a longer conversation than he had ever had with Lauren, until it seemed like just the two of them in the bar, the milling crowd fading into the background. Then she took his hand led him outside. In a shadow beyond reach of the streetlight she leaned against a wall, their wet mouths met, she pulled him close and stood on one leg while raising up the other. Then they were in an Uber, and then in her bedroom as she lay spectacularly naked on the bed while he frantically pulled off his clothes to join her, his erection popped out; he couldn't help but give it a stroke as he pranced up to her.

She laughed and clapped her hands. "Now stop that, you pretty boy, and come over here to me," she said. Much pleasure ensued, for both of them.

Panting in each other's arms, glowing in the dim light leaking through the shades, she turned from him and he gazed at her, admiring the smooth rising globes of her bottom, half uncovered by the sheets. What a marvelous thing it was to be alive and human!

Then, in the shadows, among the bumps and grooves of her lower back, along with her slight dew of perspiration, he thought he saw, no, he did see, a stylized, cursive "A." Then the other letters. Androm.

He rolled onto his back and covered his face with his hands. It was true, after all. Duchamp was right. Not only was he an android but so was this beautiful female. He turned to her again, as if pulled by a magnet despite the branding above her butt, in what a fully biological human might call the beginnings of love.

He uncovered his face. He was not chilled inside, or horrified, as he had been when he first saw the letters on his elbow. Why did it matter? The wonder of a good meal, of sun and breeze touching his skin, of warm, intimate conversations, of laying his body in pleasure next to another, was all he wanted, android or no. For biological humans also have mechanical parts that may work, or fail. And programming from which they struggle to be free.

Lauren turned to nuzzle him. He put his arm around her and drew her close. He needed to hold her while he told her the truth, about himself, about her, and how their love could survive no matter who or what they were.

Then she reached to open the plate on his right elbow, and switched him off.

Later that day, she spoke to Luis. "This unit performs very well," she said, "But we need to do some tweaking of its personality, to make it less shy and improve social integration. And there's the problem of it becoming aware of its own nature."

"Well, we certainly can't have that," said Luis.