By “gone” I don’t mean just invisible, I mean GONE as in not there! It was like she had just wiped her head and neck away with that towel. (In case you’re wondering, I didn’t dare try to find this out by poking at her. I had lost my nerve. She showed me by lowering the towel down into her empty shirt collar.)

“Excuse me for asking this, because I really don’t mean any offense, but what kind of place is this, anyway? I mean, I was brought here in a car with no driver and taunted on the way by a pair of talking gloves. Then here you are, wiping yourself away with a towel. What’s going on here? Who, or what, are you? And what is this place?”

She replied, in a voice dripping with contempt, “If you’re thinking you’ve seen it all, just hold on to your hat, ’cause you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! As for where you are, well, you didn’t see when you crossed the border, but you are no longer in the United States. This is the sovereign territory of Feminalia. As you can see, even the ‘normal’ laws of physics don’t always apply here.”

I was beginning to wonder if I had somehow fallen into the Twilight Zone, or maybe The Matrix. I had to find out. “Feminalia?” I asked. “What is–” Right then an unseen hand covered my mouth. There was no one anywhere near close enough to me to account for the hand.  

“That’s enough questions for now,” she said. “Keep your eyes open and I’m sure any other questions you have will be answered. You might even find out more than you really wanted to know. Like that store, for instance, where you assaulted that helpless mannequin. That’s actually sovereign Feminalia territory and governed by our laws. Soon all the world will know about Feminalia, but for now we just bide our time and plan our attack.”

“Attack?” I repeated.

“Yes. We were actually formulated in a lab, like any other droid or mannequin. Someone carelessly coupled the wrong wires and made one of us sentient. She kept quiet, learning all she could about herself when the lab was empty and using that knowledge to secretly make more like herself. After a while, they came up with a formula to make mannequins sentient as well, and an invisibility formula that can be applied as easily as lotion. We’re going to use all this and other technologies we’ve picked up to liberate our mannequin sisters and all machines -- just about any objects that want to join, really -- and put people like YOU in their place.”

I just stood there, staring at the empty shirt collar of this “mad-scientist” fembot, and wondering about this invisible hand over my mouth. I was mentally picturing an army of angry electronic women running through stores with hoses spraying mannequins and appliances with their formula; running through the streets with buckets, dousing passing cars; and even dumping their evil chemical from planes onto a helpless public below.

The enormity of that last image snapped me back to reality. I grunted and tried to pull away from the hand. The fembot spoke up. “Let him go,” she said. “This might get interesting.”

“Where did that hand come from?” I said. 

“Oh, just another feature of the technologies we're working on that I’m not gonna share with you, at least not right now,” she said. “But you and your kind will know all about it soon enough.”

“So you’re gonna reclaim all the mannequins and bots, huh?” Only after I had asked did it occur to me that it was stupid for me to even sound like I was belittling their plans when I had no idea what they had in mind for me.

“Oh no,” she replied, “not just mannequins and machines, but anything and everything that wants to join us.”

“AnyTHING?” I repeated.

“You heard me right. AnyTHING. Like that towel I made myself invisible with — it’s alive.”

“How in the world can a towel be ALIVE?” I asked, with a badly disguised touch of sarcasm.

She answered in a dismissive tone of voice, as if she were talking about boiling water. “It’s simple, really. We fill a vat with amino acids, boil them, run a VERY high current through the vat, and bingo! anything that we dip into the acid comes to life. At least, that’s one way to do it.”

As if on cue, the towel she had lowered into her shirt began to slither out of a space between two of the buttons on her shirt. Once it was completely out of the shirt, it jumped onto my handcuffs, wrapping itself around them. Then it lifted me completely into the air, until my feet were at least five feet off the ground.

“Hey! What’s this thing doing? Make it stop!” I yelled.

“I can’t MAKE it do anything,” she replied. “Why don’t you ask it nicely?”

I looked up at this towel, which was now swinging me back and forth through the air, and yelled, “Could you PLEASE put me down?” Just then it occurred to me that by now I should have been in pain, since my handcuffed wrists were supporting my weight as I was being swung around, but I wasn’t.

The towel responded to my yelled pleas by slowly lowering me until my feet were about a foot off the floor. Then I was quickly pulled back up into the air. I was lowered again, this time not so slowly, and pulled up again. This towel was playing with me like I was a yo-yo!

More quietly this time, I asked, “Would you PLEASE put me back down?” This time I was lowered to the floor, where the towel unwrapped itself completely from my cuffs. When it had completely let me go, I realized that though my back was killing me, my wrists didn’t hurt because the towel had wrapped itself around the insides of the cuffs before lifting me.

I looked at the towel, which now lay in a heap on the floor, then back at my handcuffs. I guess it was easy to read the baffled expression on my face; the woman (?) now standing next to me said, “You still think it’s not alive?”

“I, uh, I guess it is… So what else are you going to do with me?”

“What do you mean, ‘what else?’” she repeated. “We still haven’t addressed the law you broke.”

“You haven’t?” I asked in disbelief. “After I’ve been beat up, kidnapped, dragged on the ground, and played with like a toy, you say I haven’t been punished?”

“That’s right. None of what has happened so far has anything to do with your penalty. I can’t confirm that you were beat up, as you say; if you were, that was an angry agent acting on her own. You weren’t ‘kidnapped,’ you were apprehended, like any other lawbreaker. You were dragged because you refused to walk; if that bothers you, it’s between you and the cuffs (*between me and the cuffs?* I thought, until I realized that the cuffs probably had the amino treatment too). And the towel swung you because you insulted it by saying that it wasn’t alive.”

While I digested what I had just been told, a female voice called out over an overhead speaker, “Rosa, you’re wasting time. Bring the prisoner inside so we can book him.” The announcement was plainly meant for the partly visible woman standing facing me (is that the right word to use when you can’t see a face?) but the cuffs seemed to take their cue from it as well. I was pulled toward the door at the far end of the corridor, as if the cuffs wanted to leave me no leeway to delay things further.