Fearless Genre Warriors

by Steve Lockley

  This felt like no story though.

  The tokoloshe was smart enough to lurch back to the pot, poking the air in front of him, nose tilted to sniff the breeze. His nails were clawed and sharp.

  With a shiver, Thandiwe paced quietly around to the far side of the pot, finding she was just tall enough on tip toes in Bata Toughee school shoes to peer inside.

  At last…

  The huge potjie was empty. The Rainbow poured in, disappearing into black nothingness. She rocked back onto her heels with crushed disappointment.

  A tall robed person with wings and a glowing head stood there, looking at her.

  The tokoloshe was gone.

  ‘What is wrong, Thandiwe?’

  ‘There’s nothing in there,’ she said, spitting the stone into her hand.

  ‘Nothing?’ said the glowing person, ‘But within you, you have gained courage worth more than any gold.’

  ‘Can I sell it or eat it?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ the winged person said, looking puzzled.

  ‘Hamba bhebha, then!’

  They looked even more puzzled.

  She tutted; it was obviously a White winged-person, so she gave the direct English translation.

  ‘Fuck off!’

  They vanished.

  She certainly didn’t need anyone else to tell her she was good inside.

  Thandiwe looked at the slippery stone in her palm. It could perhaps make a neat paper-weight for Mamma’s hospital notes, perhaps?

  She looked up.

  There was no Rainbow, nor any pot.

  The lion was standing in front of her, stretching its paws and offering her his back.

  Thandiwe looked into his eyes, knowing he was a dumb but dangerous beast. ‘I get it,’ she said, ‘Be careful whom you trust. You hambha bheba too, then.’

  The lion did not even bother to run, turning on its paws and disappearing in a puff of disbelief.

  Thandiwe braced herself for a long walk.

  She could feel changes in her body and knew with peculiar certainty she was no longer a child.

  Sighing, she clutched the warm stone in her right palm and began her walk across a field littered with burnt out tyres, bags and bottles.

  It no longer mattered if she would be late; only that she got home at all.

  Come to think of it, the stone could always be a weapon too, if necessary.

  Big school no longer felt so big.

  Thandiwe walked home, step by step, pants torn and with burning shins.

  It was night time when she finally got home, the darkness heavy on her shoulders.

  Gogo waited for her on the other side of their sagging fence, holding Mandla in her arms.

  He was still sleeping.

  ‘Where’s Mamma, Gogo?’ Thandiwe asked; cold in her sweat from the long walk.

  ‘Gone to the shades, child.’

  Thandiwe clambered over the fence and her grandmother handed her the baby. Thandiwe could see her Gogo’s old and craggy face, fuzzy and vague in death; she was careful not to touch hands as she took Mandla.

  ‘You remember the ceremonies needed; my special intombi?’

  Thandiwe nodded; holding back the burn in her eyes. Mandla was mielie-sack heavy and opened his mouth to scream. Thandiwe loosened her clutch and his screaming wail dropped to a whimper.

  She gave her Gogo a stiff smile and went inside.

  Mamma’s body lay at a rigid and crooked angle on the couch, legs hanging onto the floor. Thandiwe could not look any more, so she draped Mandla’s check blanket over Mamma as much as she could. She was panting with the baby under her arm; he was starting to whimper loudly, threatening to scream.

  Thandiwe stepped over her mother’s calloused feet sticking out from under the blanket, trying not to look directly through her blurred and burning eyes. She opened the door slowly, suspecting even more was wrong.

  The shadows outside were full of menace and she heard a throaty chuckle, catching a glint of green slitted eyes.

  The tokoloshe was waiting for her.

  Why had he followed her all this way, so far from water?

  Mandla began to cry, so Thandiwe stepped with him into the night shadows, hissing: ‘Hamba bhebha!’

  The shadows were empty as she knocked on their neighbour’s door, holding her now screaming brother as gently as she could on her hip.

  Mrs Motlala held Thandiwe close and pulled them both into the warm light of the living room.

  Outside, there was only wind.

  Unravel

  Ren Warom

  From: Tales of Eve

  It’s the silence that tells her something’s wrong. Genne’s woken up from her sleep cycle at the usual time on an RR day, 8am. On Alex’s Trade days they match alarms to wake together at 6am, but on RR days he likes to wake before her, so he can make her breakfast. On these mornings, she’ll wake and lie in bed as he expects her to, listening to him singing in the kitchen. He thinks she can’t hear, because he often forgets she’s not real. It’s sweet.

  But this morning there’s not only no singing, there’s no sound at all. No gentle pat of his bare feet on kitchen tiling, no jangle of utensils, not even the bubble of the coffee maker. Nothing. Such a deep, dense silence, it’s almost thick enough to touch. Genne rises slowly at the waist, leaning forward to listen carefully; something she’s picked up from watching Alex. She doesn’t need to do it, but she does it nonetheless.

  ‘Alex?’ Her voice, programmed to lull, to soothe, to cajole, possesses an edge. Genne notes it curiously, in passing. She didn’t know she could possess edges.

  She rises to her knees when he doesn’t respond. There’s an unusual stillness to the room she’s only just noticed. It feels like her chest when she has to remove her heart cortex for servicing. Hollow. On those days, sat with her heart in her hands, she’ll stare at the bio-meld lump meant to resemble a human heart and this unwelcome sensation will pervade her. Not a feeling, more of a physical experience.

  It’s like holding a small, hard lump in her mouth, cold as an ice cube. The lump will sit there for hours, immovable and foreign. She blames it on her softer parts and tries to imagine it as more echo than emotion, but there’s no denying that, on those days, she’s inclined to be too quiet. Less content in her routine. Sometimes, when he comes home from Trade, the lump will still be there. Alex always notices and asks what’s wrong. The mere fact that he notices makes the lump dissolve. The mere fact that he notices her makes her real.

  But things have been a little different for the past month or so. Alex has been unlike himself. Though as solicitous as ever, he’s been pale, tired and listless. He’s described stressful circumstances at Trade, but she’s not fooled. As a Genne she’s programmed to notice minute fluctuations in her owner, to cater to even unconscious needs. She and Alex are nothing like Genne and owner, they’re more husband and wife, and as a result her sensitivity to him is acute. Something’s very wrong with Alex, and now she’s woken to abnormal silence. Her cortex floods red. Danger.

  Genne slides from the bed, the sheets unravelling behind her, and makes her way across the carpet, naked. The door flowers open and she steps into the small, white corridor and straight across to the living room, peering in as the door opens. This room has no windows; the light is door activated and softer than sunlight. She’s always liked that. The sun is often too bright, forcing her to adjust her ocular processors. There’s no need in here and she can see already that it’s empty.

  She steps back and the door murmurs shut. To her left is the bathroom, snug between bedroom and living room, a dead-end room, cutting off the corridor. To her right is the kitchen and diner. Genne activates the bathroom door. It’s a cell of a room, ascetic and dressed in bland cream shades. A damp hair towel hangs over the rail and there’s a residue of steam on the mirror. Evidence he was
here.

  Bright light flowers in her chest, like a door opening, both wonderful and painful. It’s too much like sunlight on her eyes, an unpleasant sensation she instantly dislikes. Genne presses a palm beneath her breasts to push it away. It won’t go and her circuitry fires up with too much energy. She whirls about, putting those small signs of him out of her sight, and strides to the kitchen in large, angry movements. She’s not programmed to anger, but she can mimic it, and it makes her feel more in control of this over-abundance of energy snapping back and forth beneath her skin.

  Entering the kitchen in a rush, she trips, falling head long to the ground and lands across a soft, solid object that shouldn’t be there. Falling sends her circuitry into automatic self-check mode. The process steals her away from herself, freezing her limbs and functions until they’re passed as undamaged. She waits inside, buzzing with frustration, feeling as she always does at these times, caged, reduced. When she’s functional, Genne rises to her elbows and looks at what she’s lying on.

  Alex.

  Genne frowns. She frowns hard enough to hurt her face structures. It’s not an expression she’s had to make before, not one she’s designed to make, and she’s not sure she’s doing it right, but it’s the only face she wants at the moment. She crawls around, bracing her body across his chest, her knees either side of him, her hands on his cheeks. He’s cool, very pale, too still and too silent, and she can’t hear his breathing, or the beat of his heart.

  She pats his cheek. ‘Alex?’

  He looks so peaceful, the same as he does when sleeping. Genne doesn’t really need sleep, she sleeps because Alex does, to make what they have feel as real as he needs it to be, as real as she’s come to need it to be. If he’s sleeping, why won’t he wake up? She pats his cheek harder, but her hand leaves no mark. It’s like hitting her own bloodless, PolyMerNano-skin. She leans in close, pressing her face against his.

  There’s no warm waft of breath coming from his nose and, though it’s not quite cold, his skin isn’t warm either. He usually emanates such incredible heat. If she snuggles close, she can feel it seeping into her, warming her inside and out. Alarm fires in her circuits like an overload. She scoops Alex into her arms and off the floor, holding him close to her chest, to the whir and pulse of her bio-heart mass. Usually she doesn’t make use of her strength, but he’s asleep and he won’t wake up and she doesn’t have time for the illusion of fragility right now.

  Frantic, she runs back to the bedroom and lays him gently on the bed. Then she doesn’t know what to do. He’d go crazy if she called for medical assistance. The only time they went out in public is etched as firmly into her body as the work of the careless owners she had before Alex. She looks at the arm he replaced, remembering the press of the crowd and the shock their anger sparked in her circuits. She doesn’t like this arm. He was lucky to find a replacement, but it’s from an Amma Housekeeper model; the wrong colour, slightly too large and a little out of sync, like a disability.

  But he needs help. Does it matter if he’d say no? Surely this is her choice and, if he gets help, then she’s OK with being damaged, even if she has to bear another ill-fitting part, even if no replacement parts can be found. Even if she’s damaged beyond repair. She rushes to the wall comm, pressing the button, her eyes glued to Alex. There’s no click. No buzz. No voice at the other end. She looks at the comm and her finger freezes on the button. It’s been disengaged.

  There’s a note taped to the front: Genne, hon, don’t. Please. They can’t help me, but they can and will hurt you. Alex x

  She blinks. Her thoughts, momentarily interrupted, whir back to manic life and she races out of the bedroom to the apartment door. It’s been fried shut, the circuits a lump of curdled wires, unresponsive to shoving or the bashing of fists. Alex knows her too well. She can’t call for help, and she can’t get out to fetch it. She’s only a Genne, she can fix her own parts but she can’t fix this.

  Genne returns to the bedroom. That energy inside her snaps like hungry teeth. There’s so much she wants to say to him. She wants to shout at him. To rage. Rail at him for doing this. But she can’t. There’s a flood of fury longing to get out but programming says no anger, and though she fights hard, it won’t allow her to speak. She’s trapped again, caged inside her limitations.

  She stands there instead with her hands covering her mouth, staring at him over the tips of her fingers. He’s so still, his chest unmoving, none of that miraculous rise and fall that fascinates her so much. When he first bought her, she’d lay awake all night, watching it, unable to believe she was his. Unable to believe he was hers. Alex had always told her he’s her companion, too, here for her just as much as she’s here for him.

  He’d wanted a Genne since he was a boy. Not to own, like some other boys he’d known. Alex wanted a companion, a wife. To him, Genne represented some perfection of womanhood, some romantic ideal. He’d rescued her from a dump almost a decade ago, having seen her from the stripline on his way back from Trade. Thirty units. The price of a pastry. That’s how much he paid for her. She heard him begging for her and saw the credit change hands. She wouldn’t believe him when he said that, unlike the dumpster man, he wasn’t interested in using her.

  Using is what she was made for.

  It took her many months, over a year’s worth, to understand what he wanted of her and by then she was already lost in him. Now he’s lost to her, because she can’t sense him in that cold weight of flesh. It’s like his body is empty. She wants to reach inside and find him in there, wherever he’s gone. Return him to her.

  ‘I want you back,’ she says into her hands, unwilling to release it to the air. She’s Genne. Wanting things is not for her. Only real things get to want.

  But either he doesn’t hear her, or he can’t, because he doesn’t come back. He just lies there, staring at the ceiling. So still. So cold. And not Alex anymore, but a body that looks like him, as if she’d gone back in time and bought a custom copy at a Symbiol factory. An Alex model, not yet switched on.

  Of all the things that have been done to her, thoughtlessly, arrogantly done in the conviction that, as a Symbiol, she’s not human enough to warrant kindness, this is by far the cruellest. And the man she learned to trust did it to her. Aching as if her parts are failing, Genne turns from him and walks to the window. She raises her hand to lift the opacity from the glass rising from floor to ceiling and flinches as her processors flood with sunlight, bleaching the view to shades as pale as their bathroom walls.

  Beyond her feet, and a mere inch of glass, the world falls away. Dizzying. Alien. All but unknown to her. An endless stretch of windows in grey plascrete, rising up from cloud, as if they all float here, suspended in the sky. This glass is reinforced, soundproofed, and steals the mindless buzz of traffic, reducing it to a silent dance. Sleek, windowless cars, powered by drones, flit and weave between the towers and the blameless blue of sky, drawing white lines of vapour and making a puzzle of sky and tower.

  She lifts a hand to the glass, tracing the white lines with a slow finger. If those puzzle pieces could be plucked apart, perhaps she could remake the world with Alex in it. But the world is not as simple as she is, just a collection of parts made to resemble something real; she’s not real enough to change it.

  A car skims across the window like a bird mistaking reflection for sky or hunting bugs on the sun-heated glass. Genne frowns again, recalling her nudity. She’s swamped with another feeling, connected to a look on Alex’s face when she’d accidentally lifted the opacity naked once before. She closes her eyes, waiting for Alex to wake up and say something. But he doesn’t and she opens her eyes to watch the car speed away, a glittering grey speck between towers.

  ‘Even you can’t bring him back to me,’ she whispers.

  There’s something heavy inside of her, as though some alien part, too large and unwieldy for her body, has been unceremoniously forced inside.
r />   ‘It’s like you’ve been switched off,’ she says to Alex, who can’t hear her.

  Genne slowly turns to look at him, going strangely stiff on the bed. He’s paler now, and on the underside of his naked body, clear against the white coverlet, is an odd, spreading blush of colour. Her circuitry feels like it’s unravelling, coming apart, all order descending to chaos. She runs to the bed and falls to her knees beside him, resting her hands flat on the cool plane of his chest.

  ‘Come back.’ She curls her fingers in, as though she can hook him out of his flesh. ‘Come back to me.’

  She remains there, her hands curled into his chest, her face pressed into the soft material of the coverlet, until the brightness of the sun fades to watery echoes and cold steals through the room, much as it’s stolen Alex’s beautiful warmth from his flesh. He’s like a piece of stone beneath her palms. Unyielding. Cold emanates from him much as warmth once did and that temperature replicates within her, freezing her from the inside.

  As the last light leaches from the room and the solar bulb in the ceiling pops on in automatic response, Genne finally raises her head to look at him. He’s changing. The upper part of his body is a waxy, yellowish white and beneath, where he rests into the coverlet it’s become a startling, almost vulgar shade of purple. These things tell her what she’s already guessed too clearly to bear; Alex isn’t coming back.

  ‘No.’ The word doesn’t feel final. It feels meaningless. And what she’s lost hits her so hard that, if she could breathe, she’d be unable to draw breath.

  Genne wraps her arms about her waist, blinking hard. Her eyes burn. She has no tear ducts, dolls don’t need to cry, but still they burn with unshed tears. Alex is all she had. All she’s ever had that was freely given to her. She’s a used model, four careless owners including the dumpster man. She’s not real, and she knows it, but she’s too close for comfort. All Symbiols are.

  When Symbiols were first created, humans thought they were machines. Self-awareness could not, they assumed, be attributed to something made of metals and PolyMerNanoskin, filled with bio-circuitry instead of soft flesh imbued with strange electrical impulses. Then, finally, they understood. The Symbiol’s biological content made them soft. Unlike other machines, they were far too inclined to experience sensations that slid uneasily close to what humans call feelings.