Blue Hearts of Mars

by Grotepas, Nicole

  “Look,” she said, pointing beyond the threshold. The sleeve of the blue janitor coat hung on her arm like the cloak of Death dangling on a skeletal wrist.

  From where I stood, I could see a room full of creepy bioengineering equipment. I would have promised that I could see giant vats of blood. But I wouldn’t be able to say for sure without going in.

  I sighed heavily, my shoulders shrinking slightly, and motioned for her to go in first.

  She squealed a tiny bit, pumping her fist triumphantly, and hurried in. I followed.

  *****

  I’ve seen the old Frankenstein holo-films, but I mean, who could think, “Yeah that might happen”?

  I mean, there’s something way disturbing about that show and I’ve personally never thought it’d be a good idea to dig up dead bodies to fit them together to create life. But if you’re trying to figure out where the soul begins, I guess that’s one method of determining it.

  I wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing. Well, beyond the obvious, which was that there were actual giant, clear-glass vats of blood in there, with a million tubes leaving them and going elsewhere. For all I knew, it was synthetic blood. We were, after all, in the Synlife building.

  I prayed, yes prayed, to myself, or Buddha or whoever, that it was synthetic blood. If it was real? Well, that would just be disturbing. Nightmarish. Blood belongs in veins and arteries and hearts. Not in an enormous pool, as though waiting for someone to take a dip in it.

  Along one wall there were cold-storage capsules where they kept the androids they were currently building. To some of these capsules ran the tubes of blood. Mei and I crept slowly toward them, the space lit by the soft, blue glow of machinery. The android faces beneath the glass of the capsules were half-finished, macabre grimacing masks, lined with thousands of cables of red muscle and white eyeballs with no eyelids or skin. And then I saw a face that was complete. It was in a capsule at the end of the row. It was a man’s face. The eyes were closed in repose. The nose was sharp. It was balanced by two deep-set eyes and a small, thin mouth. The whole thing was handsome, though not nearly as perfect as Hemingway’s face. Whoever had constructed this face, I could imagine them fashioning each feature slowly, lovingly, like a mother, or a lover.

  Suddenly the mouth moved as though he was speaking in a dream. I jumped. My heart responded in kind, ready to bolt. I spun around, looking for Mei. I couldn’t help but imagine the android reaching a hand out and grabbing my shoulder with an iron grip. But no. Of course that wouldn’t happen. He was trapped in the capsule. It was all so irrational, but I was ready to run.

  I looked for Mei. She had been right by my side, or so I thought. We’d been silently exploring the floor together. The machinery was loud. Talking in normal voices was difficult, so we’d been investigating quietly.

  My eyes scanned the room, but she was nowhere in sight.

  I returned the way I’d come. Past the other cold-storage capsules. To the blood-vats.

  There. She was bent over a glass chamber, the kind for robotic arms to do extremely precise work. The robotic arms were still, balanced over a lump of something. I couldn’t tell what it was from so far away. I hurried to her side to urge her to leave with me.

  That’s when I saw what she was staring at.

  It was a heart. A kind of ugly, but perfect, heart. There were tubes of blood running to it from the giant vats.

  And it was red.

  12: Black Marker

  You think you know something, and then you see a red heart where you should see a blue one.

  That’s when you wonder, well, how different are we, then?

  My mind was blown as we ran from the Synlife building, toward home. Mei came with. She slept over, on the floor of my bedroom on a colonists’ bedroll. Neither of us said anything for a long time. We’d gotten ready for bed in relative, mutual silence, contemplating what we’d just done. And seen.

  Staring up at the dark ceiling, catching the moons out my window from the corner of my eye, those two celestial bodies locked in that eternal dance, everything became clear. I cleared my throat and spoke quietly, “So.”

  “Yeah,” Mei answered.

  “Do you think they all have red hearts?”

  “Hard to say, cowgirl. It’s—you know, gross.”

  I sat up. “Why?” I could feel indignation rising in the space between my ribs.

  “Just, you know, if they have hearts that look like ours, what does that say about us? About them? So what separates us from them? They’re like, animals, you know?”

  “Mei, if they have hearts that look like ours, how does that change us? It doesn’t. It just means that we’ve been treating them as less than human for too long.” I plopped back down on my bed. It was frustrating trying to get someone to look at something differently from how they’d always viewed it. And Mei was my best friend. I hated to think of trying to change an entire society.

  “What about the other stuff?” I asked quietly. I heard her shift on the bedroll. It was soft, but the material rubbed together and made shuffling noises.

  “Which stuff? There was a lot.”

  “The new colony part.”

  “Yeah, that. Sucks. But at least they’re sending androids first and not us, right?”

  Mei was frustrating in her coolness. She was sweet in some ways, although more often than not, she wore her rough edges like a hip new jacket. And sometimes she aggravated the living daylights out me. Like right then. “So you’ll be glad if they send Hemingway off?”

  “Well, he’s gorgeous. So in that way, I’ll miss him. But he’s an android. So it’s fake, you know? It’s like those girls in the rough, saloon section of the city. They might as well be androids with how altered their bodies are. Right? Men go stare at them all day and who knows what else, but everyone knows deep down that they’re not real. At least, not real like you and me.”

  I could seriously have punched her right then. Mei always reacted that way, slapping you or punching you, or pinching your earlobe real hard when you bothered her or surprised her. For once I wanted to react that way to her.

  I lay there in silence, too pissed to say another word, wishing that she’d just gone home, since her commentary and opinions weren’t helping me sort out the complicated things I was feeling. She was only solidifying my ideas. I could feel them turning hard against the wind of her cruel opinions.

  Soon the grating buzz of snores rose from the dark lump on the floor of my room. I lay awake for a long time, examining the multiple, strange aches in my chest, knowing more than I wanted to about what the future might hold and uncertain of how to proceed.

  *****

  “What's going on?” I asked, running the rest of the way through the hallway at school the following Monday to stop at the door of Dr. Craspo’s classroom. In black-marker letters across the metal of the door, beneath the small window, were the words “Machine! Machine! How many women have you raped to get this classroom, Machine?” I ripped off my RedSand jacket and tried rubbing the marker away.

  Mei came up behind me. “What’re you doing?”

  I paused, pulling my jacket away so she could read it. I watched her smooth, olive-skinned brow go from complacent to furrowed. Her chin jutted forward. “Who did this? Who did this?” she screamed, turning back to the streaming hallway of bodies. Several of our classmates were approaching. They jumped back in shock at Mei’s fury.

  Honestly, I was surprised it got such a reaction from her, especially after our unsatisfying conversation on Friday night. She had left quickly Saturday morning, saying she had to go do something at the Buddhist temple—mass or something. I didn’t listen very well. I’d been half asleep still, exhausted, having only slept an hour or two, and I went back to sleep. When I woke up fully, she was gone. I’d spent Saturday and Sunday compiling everything I’d learned so far and tried to figure out how soon they’d send the androids away for the new colony. I still had no answers.

  A crowd had gathered around the
doorway, leaving a half-circle of space around Mei and myself. The entire hallway began to rumble as a bottleneck of students formed.

  Soon, Dr. Craspo appeared on the other side of the door. He stepped out. My scrubbing had proved futile, and I let my jacket hang from my hand dejectedly.

  Craspo came through into the hallway. “What’s going on here?” he demanded sternly.

  I motioned weakly toward the door. Craspo turned back, then, realizing I meant something other than “look, it’s your classroom” he closed the door. His face went from pure white to red, to a stormy black, like a thunderhead. Although, I’d only ever seen thunderheads on the holos from Earth—his face looked like a weather system, the kind that spawned tornadoes and hurricanes.

  Evidently, whoever had written the horrible accusations had done it while Craspo was inside the room. I felt bad being the one who showed it to him.

  He regained his composure, somewhat, and turned around. He opened his mouth a few times, no sound escaping, and then finally, he found his voice. “Move along. You, all of you, get into class. The rest of you, get on your way. Class begins soon.” He motioned with his hands, making shooing and herding gestures respectively.

  Mei was still fuming as she put her arm through mine and marched into class with me. Her chin was tilted up and she wore a haughty look on her face. If anyone said the wrong thing to her, they’d get a punch in the face. I’d seen that expression on Mei before.

  Agatha came up behind me as we strode into the room and whispered, “I bet it was Hans.” I turned sharply and glared at her. She simpered at me but said nothing more.

  Agatha was always finding a way to make trouble. She nodded a couple times as though to impress upon me the high probability that her accusation was correct, her huge, affected curls bouncing, their rainbow infused glaze glittering in the classroom lights. The girl honestly spent thousands on looking good. She passed us and went to her seat. Mei and I exchanged a glance before going to our own chairs.

  Craspo went to the front of the room as the class finished filling up. He rummaged through a desk drawer and found a doorstop, with which he propped the door open. Back at his desk, he made a quick call to someone using the freestanding Gate on his desk, and soon a crew was outside, working on removing the black-marker words. Class officially began, but he just stood there, staring at us. Hans came in late and sat down behind me, smirking as he passed by. I returned his smirk with a glare, then caught Craspo studying Hans.

  “Something keeping you from being on time, Hans?” Craspo asked, finally. I held my breath. Teachers usually didn’t challenge the upper classes, especially not Hans, whose father ran the Vantaa—he was the Prime Minister at the moment. The colony government was a parliamentary system. Each district had its representative. Hans’ father came from the richest district and the Parliament elected him to be the head. I didn’t know much about him except that my dad didn’t like him. He didn’t like much about the government of New Helsinki, period, but he said you just kept your head down, did your part and hopefully it would keep you out of trouble, because you can’t change anything, least of all government.

  Craspo must have been feeling particularly pissed to say anything to Hans, who came late to class ninety percent of the time, to be honest.

  If Hans was responsible for the words, he wouldn’t have showed up on time, and especially not early, because that would cast suspicion on him. And if he did it, he did it as much for me as for Craspo—to get back at me for blowing up at him in class that one day. I could feel my ears burning in rage as I put it all together, anger and shame coursing through me for having been partially responsible for starting this little escapade.

  I turned in my seat to see how Hans took it. Today his blond hair was spiked into a thousand tiny needles like an old-school cartoon character. Honestly, the kid probably had a stylist living in their huge mansion with them. Every day it was something new. His eyes were outlined in black liner and he was wearing a set of retro-headphones, the big kind that hailed back to Earth rappers. His irises were a fluorescent green and he’d powdered his face into an almost deathly white. I scoffed inwardly as I studied him.

  He gave Craspo a totally innocent look. “I was on an errand for my father.” Zounds. To invoke his father like that. I mean, wow. He obviously thought if he referenced the old man, Craspo would back down.

  “Bring a holo-note with a signature. Have it on Wednesday,” Craspo said evenly, before glancing down at something on his Gate. I looked back at Hans.

  His cheeks flared to a red that managed to be visible even with the white powder. His eyes flickered in my direction. I smiled and winked, then turned around in my seat.

  You can’t fake a holo-note.

  The rest of class was rough. Craspo kept stopping without warning while he stared into space absently. He’d shake his head a bit, then start going again. A few times he seemed to forget what he was saying and just kind of finished his sentence in a nonsensical mutter, with a kind of, “And that’s what I always knew it to be.” Which made no sense at all. It was like he was having a conversation with a voice in his brain, or someone who wasn’t there.

  I wanted to go up and hug him and say, “Listen, dammit, even if you are an android, I know your heart is red. Don’t let anyone take away your sense of worth. You’re beautiful. More beautiful than any human could hope to be.” And he was. I mean, he wasn’t nearly as handsome as Hemingway. But he had these really green eyes and kind of luscious lips, if you thought about it. Sitting there, I blushed when it occurred to me. I normally hadn’t noticed because he’s my teacher. I shifted in my seat and sank lower, into it. Craspo looked young, too. Which may be what started the rumors in the first place. Many of the teachers were like Dr. Anika. They were older and they looked old. Loads of them used to be part of the scientists like my dad. When some of the positions they filled became obsolete, they decided to start the high school. Dr. Anika was the founder.

  Anyway, Craspo was one of the more handsome and young-looking teachers. He had this narrow face and a thin, kind of pointy nose. His mouth was expressive and he smiled a lot when he was teaching. Sometimes I heard the girls muttering between themselves that they’d totally do him. Like they even knew what that meant. Ok, so maybe some of them did. And some of them probably would do anyone. And had. The thing is, I’d never thought of Craspo like that.

  Class finally ended. The last few minutes felt like an entire month. Despite that, I hung back, sitting at my desk as everyone else filed out. Hans passed me and clipped my arm on purpose with his hip. He’s lucky I didn’t see him coming, otherwise I would have pushed my elbow ever-so-slightly out so that it got him in the crotch. Mei waited for me, but I motioned to her that I’d meet her in the cafeteria. She left in a huff, with her arms crossed irritably over her chest.

  Everyone was gone. It was just Craspo and me in the room. He was at his desk, staring at the ground. You could have heard an ant whisper. I cleared my throat. He looked up, his eyes zeroing in on me.

  “Class is over, Retta.” His voice sounded tired.

  I got up and approached his desk. “I didn’t do it,” I said. Not that he suspected me. I just wanted to say it.

  “I know,” he said. It took him a few seconds, but he finally met my gaze. “I never suspected you for a moment.”

  There was something in his eyes, like respect or something. I’d never seen it before. Adults didn’t look at me like that.

  I lingered there, in front of his desk, waiting, I guess, for him to say something else. “Do you think it was Hans?” I asked at last.

  He lifted his chin a bit. “It wouldn’t do for me to discuss my suspicions with one of my students.”

  I tried not to feel offended by that. He was right, after all. “Everyone knows it’s not true, I mean, I’m around them, you know. The other students. I hear what people think.”

  “And what do you think, Retta?” His eyes narrowed. He was really curious, I could tell, and not just
being pretentious.

  “You know what I think, Dr. Craspo. I blew up at Hans, remember?”

  He nodded and rested his elbows on his desk. Rubbing the corner of his eyes with his thumbs, he sighed. “Of course. I’ll never forget that.”

  “It’s completely unfair, you know, how people are treating androids. How they have been treating androids, for so long. And I don’t care who knows I think that way, even though Dr. Anika told me to keep quiet about it. They can do what they want to me, for believing in equal rights. I look at androids and see myself in them. We’re the same.” It all came spilling out rapidly, before I could stop myself. I would have gone on longer, I think, if Craspo’s expression hadn’t stopped me. He was staring at me intently, listening like no other adult besides my dad ever listened. His green eyes seemed to glitter with appreciation. I almost thought I saw his bottom lip tremble slightly. There was a long silence. My heart suddenly began to race as though it knew before I even knew what I was about to say next. I whispered, “The rumors are true, aren’t they?”

  Craspo ripped his gaze from mine and began studying his fingertips. The nails were smooth, pinkish and perfect, like Hemingway’s. He nodded slowly.

  I leaned close to him so he’d look up at me. “Dr. Craspo, the hearts of androids are red, aren’t they? The blue thing, that’s just a lie to make humans continue to feel superior, to quell their fears.”

  His green eyes studied mine. He opened his mouth to speak and that’s when I saw his tell. The flat tops of his bottom molars were black and they swirled with tiny pinpricks of light. “Of course it’s true, of course. I’ve been hiding from it for years. Moving from settlement to settlement. I’ve only been in New Helsinki for ten years. Already it’s too much. Already the rumors have begun. To continue hiding, I’ll need to leave soon. Or else let the truth come out.”