The striviirc-na had lost people on that moon. More than a single scientist. The Plymouth lost a captain. She considered that even and pointed to the blade as it sat embedded in the landing gear. Now the warrior moved with its long-limbed grace and yanked the black blade from the transsteel, and she signaled the chief to shadow it as it strode from the hangar bay with her jets’ guns pointed at its back. She made a gesture to tell the jets to lower their weapons now, and they did, and she looked down at the dead captain and his soulless face of mild question.
She motioned to a couple of young jets to dispose of the body. “Keep going,” she told the crew so they would continue to board the dropships. The hangar bay echoed the unusual quiet of the procession. Keep going because there was no going back.
She and Markalan sat, the only two people in the ship’s lounge as it pushed through space with less than half of its original crew complement. In the time it took for a week to pass in standard time, their lives had changed and their possible future lay unrecognizable and uncharted. She held his hand, and what faced them in the great emptiness of wonder and indifference in the universe was beyond any sense of duty or adventure. She knew only that if the choice had been placed before her again she could not make any other. Even if it meant the loss of her own humanity in some way that both reinforced her humanity and all that she had sworn when she donned jet blacks for the first time. She had never been a blind follower, and duty wasn’t meant to be traded for a conscience or the intelligence to make a decision.
“Do you regret it?” she had to ask Markalan because they had not broached the thought in the midst of all the logistics required to get them on this new trajectory.
He didn’t answer immediately. Instead he placed his hand over hers so both of his held hers and he said, “Would I prefer it that we weren’t in a self-imposed exile from the worlds we know? Yeah. But I also couldn’t have fired on those striviirc-na and continued to live with myself. This way I can live with myself, even if I’m afraid of what that will entail.”
“Then we can both be afraid.”
In her sleepshift, she went walking, and she found the tattooed warrior who had killed the captain standing in the same lounge, looking out at the ceaseless black. He had no escort upon her order, for she figured if they meant to do damage to the ship or her jets they would do it like they’d done the captain, and they were all headed to the alien planet anyway, so any guard would be fruitless. She stood close enough to him that she could discern the designs on his chalk-white skin, and they were all different on the different faces, and though they barely spoke each other’s languages she knew now there were many other methods in which to communicate. From the way he met her gaze she understood that this mysterious being held some form of respect for her, as though they identified a mutual code of honor, even if perhaps their definition of the word remained oblique one to another.
“Maybe you understand this,” she said to him, “but I hope to hell we can thrive on your planet. I hope you understand what it is we sacrificed.”
He moved with a slow deliberation, and from the coils in his sleeve he slid free the black blade with which he had killed the captain, or one very like it, and he looked her in the eyes and offered it to her, hilt first. She sensed that this was some form of ceremony, as much as it was an extension of understanding for the way he stood patient and silent until she took hold of the weapon and wrapped her fingers around it, not unlike how she would grip her own combat knife.
“S’tlian,” he said.
She didn’t know that word, but he held his palm in front of her eyes and moved it down as though in the gesture she would be no more. She would no more be Enas Gray.
“First,” he said, in her language. Then he left her alone.
She looked down at the blade. It seemed to absorb all light, and it pulled her touch along the blood groove to the sharpened point, and she turned it around in her hand and tested the weight and balance of it and it sat perfectly compact and deadly in her palm. It was sharp enough to sever a human head from its neck in one throw, and the craftsmanship of it was one in which she could not imagine and could not decipher any more than she could read what seemed to be lettering along the hilt.
She had learned that it had taken the striviirc-na ten years to get to the moon from Aaian-na and now it would only take a leap and thirty-some hours, as EarthHub reckoned time, to return. She had an EarthHub expeditionary vessel on a trajectory to a planet of civilizations, none of which knew this technology, but in the ship’s files were records and schematics of more such vessels and she understood that in giving this weapon, the warrior expected an exchange. Their planet for human knowledge, and she knew no other way. The Hub was not going to forget, and the jets under her command would need to prepare, and this was the pact she made to the emptiness outside of the window, the long and unfathomable infinity in which she had cast herself until the moment when an indigo planet and a yellow sun reached out in language she had yet to fully understand, and she would know, one way or another, whether the eye of such a world would look upon her and all of her alien humanity, and decide whether she was worthy of a blessing or a curse.
Face
by Veronica Brush
You have to understand, I woke up one day, and if I’d had any sort of life before that day, I didn’t remember it.
There was a man standing over me. I didn’t know him, though he said he’d known me my whole life. He made me call him “Father.”
On that first day I can remember, I had so many questions I tried to ask him. I had awoken in that room above the factory. It was laid out with everything he thought I needed: clothes hanging on a rack, a washing machine to clean them in, and a cot. There was no window in my room, and the door only locked on the outside.
I was scared. It was the first feeling I could ever remember having. He was there, standing over me. I tried to ask him all my questions, but he shook his head and said he didn’t have time to answer them all. He said he worked in the old workshop down below and he said I should help him. That’s what I was there for. He said he would answer just one question. It didn’t seem fair, but what could I do?
So, I asked him who I was. He answered simply, “A robot.” At the confusion he must have seen on my face, he explained what a robot was and how it was different from what he was, a human.
He taught me how to help him in the factory. At night, we went upstairs. He had a room up there, too, which I was not allowed in. He would order me to lay on the cot and close my eyes. He said keeping my eyes closed for ten minutes was the signal to my body to power down, and a timer would restart me the next day.
I tried to ask him my questions over and over. I tried to be very helpful so he would want to answer me. He only grew angry with me when I asked.
I tried to learn what I could without asking questions. Usually he called me “Robot,” but one day, he called out “Alice” over and over until I found him. I thought Alice must be my real name. But the next day, when he needed my help, he called out “Polly.” That name lasted for a few days before he changed it to Jackie, then Ginger, then Tania. A name only lasted as long as he liked it, and when he couldn’t think of one he liked, he would go back to calling me Robot.
It was just the two of us, the father and me. No one ever came there. Sometimes he would leave, locking me inside. I would sit in my room and run the washing machine, even if there were no dirty clothes. I would sit beside it, sometimes put my face against it, and listen to the sounds it made inside. It was the same as me, a robot. Sometimes I whispered to it. I asked if it was scared, or lonely, or sad. I knew robots could feel those three emotions. Maybe that’s what made us different from humans: humans could have so many feelings. They could be happy, excited, hopeful, and many other things I didn’t seem to be capable of experiencing.
One day, after he had been gone a while, he came home with a pink box. He called to me, “Robot, I have something for you!” I came and I opened the box and in
side was a cake. He said it was my birthday. Exactly one year since I had opened my eyes the first time. Awakened, trapped in that room. He said on birthdays, people got presents. I asked, “What about robots? I have never seen you give a cake to the washing machine.” He said I was a special enough robot to get a present on my birthday. I told him I did not want the cake. I could see him beginning to get angry. I said what I wanted for my present was the answers to my questions.
He was silent for a moment, then he picked up the box with the cake and threw it against the wall. He left again. He came back before I finished cleaning up the cake. He sat at the table and he said he would answer one question.
I finished cleaning, so I could think carefully of which question to ask. I sat next to him at the table and asked where I had come from. He answered that I came from here, the factory. He had built me, with the help of a woman he knew who was a computer programmer. She was the reason that, when I opened my eyes, I already knew how to eat and walk and speak and so many other things. She had done her part and then left, and he had finished me himself. That was why he had me call him Father, because he had made me. That first day I opened my eyes was the day he had turned me on.
That evening, I washed the rags I had used to clean up the cake. I put a hand on the rumbling machine and told it, “You are lucky to not have a birthday.”
I waited for a whole year more to pass. I kept track of the days until that same day came around again. During breakfast I asked, “Can I have another answer for my birthday?” The father didn’t look happy, but he nodded.
I asked quickly before he could change his mind, “Why do I look like you and not like the other machines?” None of the machines in the factory had two arms or legs or a torso like I did. And, while there were no mirrors in the factory, so I had never seen it, I had felt the round head on the top of my body and knew it was like a human’s.
His answer was, “I wanted to build a robot that looked like a human. Instead of metal on the outside, I used flexible polymers that would have a similar feel to skin. I selected red and blue wires and tubes for the inside to give the impression of veins. I even found a rare and expensive paint that would give your outsides a natural skin tone.” He lowered his head and let it slowly shake back and forth as he confessed, “I couldn’t afford enough, though, and so I couldn’t paint your neck and your face. They’re still your original, unnatural color.”
When he said that, it was the first time I realized that I did not know what my face looked like. I had never seen it, not that I could remember.
Later that day, I took a piece of paper and a pencil. I pressed the paper over my face, and I tried to use the pencil to draw the outline of my eyes, nose, and mouth. I wanted to know what I looked like, but the face on the page didn’t look human at all. I wondered if that was what I really looked like.
The next day, while the father and I were working, I asked if he would take a picture of me. So I could see what my face looked like. His reply was, “I already gave you a present this year.” He was going to make me wait another year to ask for a picture of myself.
I couldn’t stand to wait that long. I searched through the whole factory, trying to find something reflective. The windows were all too yellowed with age. The metal parts of the machines and the shelves were all too rusted. I even tried to use the silverware, but they were covered in scratches that my true image hid behind.
The weather was getting colder, and the father gave me newspapers to start the fire in the old stove that helped to heat the place. I was crumpling one up when I saw the picture of a woman. My fingers dragged across her smooth face and then my own. I tore the image out and put it in my pocket. As I went through the rest of the paper, I tore out all the pictures with people’s faces. I hid them under the washing machine, trusting my friend to guard them well.
When the father would go out, I would sort through the pictures looking for features I thought looked like mine. I measured my eyes and found two eyes that had the same ratio, though half the size of mine. I found a nose and mouth that matched mine, though I had to mix two separate lips. Most of the face was black and white, but the nose and the bottom lip were in color, from the Sunday paper. I found tape and taped the pieces to a sheet of paper and then measured my head and drew the right proportions around the face. And that was a picture of me. I hung it on the wall and pretended it was a mirror and I was seeing my face. But when I put a hand to my face, the reflection didn’t follow. I ran my fingers over my face and then over the image. It looked human. If my parts looked like that, then I looked very human.
I burned the pictures I hadn’t used and hid the image of myself under the washing machine. For one year, it was the best image I had of myself.
Finally, my birthday came around again. First thing in the morning I asked, “Will you take a picture of me for my birthday?” I felt my insides collapse when he replied, “No.” He had made me wait a year, never having any intention of letting me see myself. I was so crushed, I dared to ask a second question.
“Why not?”
He tilted his head and said, “It would make you sad. Your head is not the color of the rest of your body. And I regret that I didn’t do a good job on your face. Hands and feet are detailed, but easy to sculpt. A face is simple elements—just eyes, nose, and mouth, really—but hard to make realistic. I tried very hard, but your face simply doesn’t look like a human face.”
“I want to see it, anyway,” I said. But he snapped, “I already answered your question.” And he walked away.
For the first time, perhaps because he had answered two questions when he always said he would only answer one, I started to wonder if the answers he gave me were always true.
I thought of my questions all year. If he had answered two questions, maybe I could manage to get him to answer three.
On the day, I waited until after breakfast to ask my question, as his mood was always a little better after breakfast.
Once he had finished his final sip of coffee, I asked, “If I am a robot, then why do I breathe air like you?”
He smiled. “You don’t breathe the way I do. You filter the air for me, and I simply made it appear that you were breathing the air in and out. But you don’t have lungs. You just have a chamber with filters that I change some nights when your power is off.”
“Why haven’t you ever mentioned that before?”
“Why would I? You’re never grateful for anything I do for you, anyway.” He roughly pushed his chair back from the table and left before I could ask him a third question.
Another year passed. This time I waited until lunch to start my questions.
As we sat at our table with the food I had prepared, I asked, “If I am a robot, then why do I eat food like you?”
He leaned back in his chair. “You don’t eat like me. Look at what you have. Liquid made of vegetables and grains, the same that can be burned for fuel in cars and other machines, just like you. Now look at my plate. Meat, bread with butter, just a few vegetables. If you ate this, it would harm your system. I don’t know what would even happen because you don’t have a stomach, so you can’t digest food.”
I had more questions, but without much thought, I grabbed the steak off his plate and used my teeth to tear off mouthfuls. I barely chewed, hurriedly trying to eat as much as I could before he was able to grab it back.
When he had managed to wrench it away from me, he plopped what was left of it back on his plate. His face tight, he stared at the remains of his lunch.
He stood, wiped his hands on his napkin and declared, “I hope you realize I have no intention of fixing you, if you break down now.”
He didn’t usually go out in the middle of the day, but that day he did.
It wasn’t much later that I realized there was a problem. My insides began to rumble like the washing machine. Then my body threw out the steak, undigested, just like he said.
I cleaned it up, hoping the father would never know.
I didn’t feel right. I went up to my room to try to go to sleep. I laid down for a few minutes, and then more of the meat came back out.
I don’t know when the father came in, but he held back my hair while I leaned over the edge of my cot and emptied out all the meat pieces I had tried to eat. When I laid back, he felt my forehead.
“You’re overheating. You probably gummed up your cooling system with grease. I can’t get to that without completely taking you apart. We’ll just have to try and keep you cool and hope your system is able to clear itself. If not …” He shrugged.
He laid a cool rag across my forehead and cleaned up my mess.
I didn’t want to close my eyes, wondering if it was all true and I might overheat, shut down, and never be able to restart again. Would the father try and fix me, or did he mean it when he said he wouldn’t? Was anything he said ever true?
Eventually my eyes closed on their own.
My eyes opened again the next morning. Next to my bed was a glass full of the green fuel I normally ate.
I was functioning, but I wasn’t happy.
I knew I should thank the father by diving back into work. If I acted normal, he would probably act normal, and everything could go back to the way it was. But how long would I be able to stand it?
The next year, I waited. I waited to see if he would say anything first. After all these years, all the questions he’d answered and all the ones he hadn’t, I wondered if he wouldn’t say something about it being my birthday. Of course, he didn’t.
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