by Adelaide Song on 2021-07-01.
Tags: novella
(CW: surgical gore, awkward robotfucking, existential dread)
(For: you know who you are.)
You scrape me off the bottom of a cliff in Chelyabinsk. My ex-employers threw me off hours ago, and if the fall hadn’t destroyed my arm and leg, the snow would’ve finished them off. The life monitors they implanted helpfully inform me I have an estimated two hours to live; I wish with all my heart it was two minutes. If I bleed out it’d save me the trouble of spending my last moments watching my murderers leave low Earth orbit.
But over the hammering of my heart in my ears I can hear your chassis, piledriver feet leaping over what’s left of Russia at transonic speed. You’re a half-tonne weight getting closer at six klicks a second and I think they sent you to finish me off. A strider like you wouldn’t be the most expensive weapon I’ve been on the wrong end of. Not even in the top ten. Not even close.
Through snowblindness I see your silhouette turning the sun into its corona and part of me thinks you’re an angel—angel of what, though, there’s the question, death or something prettier?
I get an answer of sorts when you drop me over your shoulder. Three of your auxiliary arms lock the crucial parts into place, neck-lumbar-half severed-leg, and you’re back to accelerating over the irradiated steppe. My eyes slip shut one last time as you break the sound barrier. All I hear is the rhythm of your weight against the rock.
If I focus, I can recall flashes of you reassembling me. In the delirium haze of cranial bleeding, the full-body high of rejuvenation inverts, dissociates the phonic loop from the meat it lives in. My internal monologue sits and sulks at a spot about two inches in front of my eyes; everything else becomes suddenly conscious that it’s tied to bloody, squirming flesh and starts thrashing on the operating table.
You have to knock me out six more times when you reattach my leg. Your surgery suite is a repurposed CNC machine, for God’s sake—not an assuring thing to see under the best of circumstances, even less so when you’ve just been abducted by a robot the size and weight of a semi-trailer. I nearly manage to take one of the arms off before the lumbar tap kicks in.
Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. A dolphin in the current of the dream.
Up and down. Up and down.
And then, I’m through.
I come to in a little dingy room tucked somewhere in the corner of your facility. I’m lying in bloodstained sheets on a mattress the thickness of a toothpick, and a bedframe built like a torture rack. If this is heaven then God has seriously let himself go.
Judging by the wrenched-apart bars that form the room’s facade, this used to be a jail cell. Maybe you are trying to kill me after all—but if you are, I can think of better ways to do it than with a dinky little monitor droid, spray-bombed safety yellow and scuttling through the entrance on shaved-down legs.
It hops up onto the bed beside me, then onto my shoulder. If I still thought of myself as an assassin I would’ve thrown this thing through the bars and off the railing of the catwalk outside; right now, though, I still think I’m a ghost. Might as well let it do whatever it wants to. Can’t be worse than what just happened to me.
“What are you?” I say to nothing. “Freakshit virus? Rampant pretech?”
“I’m a prosecutor,” you say, and it’s like I’m hearing you through my brainstem instead of my ears. “And you’re this planet’s defense.”
“You must understand: the value of any astronomical body as raw computing substrate is unquantifiable. Physically, I mean. There simply aren’t enough atoms to write the numbers down. But we recognise that there are other uncomputable quantities to consider, too; namely, the sentimental value a planet holds for its native peoples.
“So to adjudicate this discussion, we send a representative to interact with native inhabitants, using socialisation and mindstate download to construct a hierarchy of values—in turn, this hierarchy is used to evaluate their attachment to their home. Depending on the outcome, they may get to retain it intact, be simulated as compensation, or simply be discorporated along with it.”
I can’t hold the scale of what you’re saying in my head, not really. I might as well be staring at the sun for all the good it does. “Why me? Of all the fucking things still on this planet—”
“Our selection process is impartial and unbiased,” you say. “All that matters now is that you perform to the standards of the outcome you desire.”
“And that means?”
“Convince me you’re capable of caring.”
Your assessment of the human psyche starts with a first date.
A maitre-frame hauls me to what passes for a dining room here. In reality, it’s just an atrium high enough that none of your bodies scrapes itself on the roof, with a table and chair sat right beneath the skylight. It’s hard for me not to feel a little ridiculous sitting opposite a robot three times my size; doubly so when its torso opens and barfs up a steaming MRE tray, some cutlery and a lit candle.
Every compartment in the EGG/BACON/OATS tray looks alike. I go for what I think is oats, come up with egg. “If you can read my mind, why isn’t that enough for you?”
The maitre grinds its head back and forth. “Lack of access to local computing resources. I had to be compressed seven hundred times over to run on this facility’s processors, let alone simulate chaotic relationship dynamics. Doing that while keeping your mind-state infraconscious, managing the nuclear reactor and operating several hundred bodies at once? Beyond impossible. I would sooner turn the peninsula into a blast crater.”
I mull the thought over as I gnaw on the fork, teeth scraping against what scraps of egg are stuck to its tines.
“So let’s try this again,” you intone. “Tell me about yourself.”
Call it Stockholm syndrome; call it relief. Either way, you might be holding me and the planet hostage, but you’re much more pleasant conversation than any of my past captors.
We watch movies together. I have to sit on your shoulders; there isn’t enough horizontal space in front of the one working TV in the facility. We dance and you nearly snap my leg off again when you dip a little too low for comfort. I start to understand the rhythm of your cognition, the way you probe the dynamic; start to see the thinnest slice of the iceberg peeking above the water.
If I’m going to keep myself alive—and sure, the Earth too, just on the principle—I’m not going to get anywhere by refusing to play nice with you. So co-operation it is. Be the best test subject you can, and the planet cracks some other day.
At least, that’s what I tell myself. I hope you’re doing the same.
It takes me months to work up the courage to ask if you want to try kissing. You don’t really respond—not that you really do that much, anymore—but a moment later one of your puppets comes around the corner. It’s at least approximately human, which is better and worse: better because I don’t feel as weird about giving it tongue; worse because I have no excuse for sloppy technique.
And is it ever sloppy. My tongue keeps flinching away from the unfamiliar cold of your mouth-alike, your head’s too heavy for me to pull close. It’s the kind of amateur that could be charming or excruciating, and try as I might, I can’t tell which when you say “That’s enough.”
I pull away like you burn me. Twitch forward a little as self-consciousness sets in. Wipe away your taste from my lips—rust and moly-oil and chrome—and venture, “Did you like that?”
Long silence. Hold on that. You’re picking the back of my brain again. I picture you wearing all my exes like boots not yet broken in. Tasting the words in their mouths, finding the ones you like.
Eventually, you say, “It was good for me too,” and I hope you sampled the hesitation in your voice.
Only in my dreams do I hear the song of your thoughts.
When I’ve given you some idea that’s tough to chew, the floor will shudder just so, auxiliary turbines spooling up to accommodate bolstered cognition. But when I’m asleep the entire facility comes to life with warmth and heat and noise. The pipes hum and ring, fluorescent tubes above me buzz, my bedframe flexes a little under my back.
For lack of a less anthropocentric term, it’s like you’re singing. Never when I’m awake, though. Never then.
Of course I’m sad there’s a side of you I’m not allowed to see. That’s straightforward enough. What’s confusing is the flavor of sadness. At first I figured it was like you were cheating on me, then like I was spying on you.
Nowadays, though, I don’t feel anger or guilt. It’s just the confusion a dog feels when her master isn’t paying attention into her. The inconceivable prospect that there are just better things to do than entertain an animal.
We kiss on-and-off for the next couple of weeks. That seems like a good sign. It’s always the same frame, too, which I take as a sign of affection. I start learning what works with your body plan and what doesn’t, where and when it feels right to put my hands on the serial-studded pauldrons that serve your shoulders.
I guess you’re learning, too. Once, when you give the sign to pull away, I catch you glancing back at me for the briefest moment. Then your head pivots round hard enough the servo shrieks and locks, and that’s enough to snap something in my own internal machinery. Before I know it I’m bent double with laughter, and after a quick check with my memory, you’re keeling over too, internal vox barking in approximate echo.
It’s the first time since you found me that I’m not thinking about the hammer hanging low over the Earth’s head. I might as well be sharing a beer with any one of the names and faces from my history, a little horny and a lot shitfaced.
You know them better than I do, at this point, so no surprise you also know what comes after. If I’m being absurdly generous to myself, you’ve been thinking about this too; if I’m being realistic, you’re just curious to see if I could possibly be that disappointing. Don’t you worry, sweetheart, I was this clumsy with lovers that didn’t weigh four hundred kilograms.
As I’m peeling the jumpsuit off, I’m thinking, this what you wanted from me? Is this the best argument I could offer for Earth’s existence: ragged breath, scrabbling fingers, wet and slick sticking to the insides of your joints?
All I know is it’s the one you want. And if the months we’ve spent together are any indication, that’s all I’ll ever know.
Tonight I’m burning up again. Sleeping, waking, all of it melts together in the fire behind my eyes. The facility doesn’t sing anymore, it howls, it sobs, it screams. Its lights are sepsis-dark and the walls peel back to reveal the twitching pink of tendons and pus boiling over to drown me—
Pure, sharp cold cutting through the delirium. The shrieking reharmonises, coalesces back into chorus. Snow-chilled plasteel holds me tight, its bulk heavy enough the bed buckles to the side.
You’re here.
My eyelids flutter shut again—
You’re here.
Bumping against your frame—
You’re here.
Cold again, all-consuming this time, an embrace that grabs hold and can’t let go—
You’re—
Of course, deep down, I knew I was going to fail.
The moment you picked me as Earth’s ambassador the planet was as good as gone. If you wanted someone to make its case, you should’ve picked one of the sparrows—they probably would’ve been a better lay, too.
But could you blame me for denying the inevitable? Our time together started with you bringing me back from the dead. Surely one impossibility demanded another; surely you came to see something in me that meant, “This place is worth preserving.” So I went to bed last night, thinking the day ahead would be the same as the hundred behind—
—and woke up beneath the same cliff you found me under.
It’s morning, now, and I can still see your burn trails in the sky. The tips of your body—the real one, all six point one thousand tonnes of it—trailing, burning, disintegrating as you hit orbit, off to hand in your final report.
So much for coffee in the morning.
The birds can hear your grim work, even if I can’t.
They wheel and shriek and howl from tree to tree to tree, never stopping, never settling. Even gravity’s different now. The rocks my feet kick up take a little longer to fall each day.
In my mind’s eye I can see what you’re doing this very moment. You had the decency to tell me, after all. Somewhere at the antipode, teraliters of von Neumann swarms are bolting in from ultralight; the saliva of a great interstellar maw, slicing the planet into baby food for the kugelblitz that used to be your star.
It’s hard not to think that starting on the other side of the planet from me is your idea of a parting gift. If I managed to teach you mercy, as small as this one is.
I wonder if I’ll be alive to see them cresting the horizon, the rapture bearing down like a wave upon a sandcastle. I hope you have any say in what’ll happen. I pray you’ll make something beautiful out of the atoms I used to be.
Originally published in YONQ #6: Yonqpunk.