The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  “Let’s just get through this and get back to South Rim where there is a life waiting,” he said, entwining his fingers in mine. “A life broken but not beyond fixing, and made for us.”

  “When will that be?” I said. “In ten years or more, you’ll be stuck. You’ll be a hard-drinking social worker in some Upper Slant prison.”

  He nodded, deadpan. “With debts and an incriminating dating app profile to stop me from going into politics.”

  “You’d be a terrible politician, Marvin.”

  He dropped my hand. “Maybe. Stay in the blind spot. Out of trouble. And if it doesn’t kill us, we may just get home again.”

  The rain grew heavier. Maybe that was one time I should have kept my mouth shut, but Kai always said I could never read a room.

  “Do you know why the Father had to have a robot to insert the almost invisible neural mesh laced with his code into our embryonic brains?” I asked, trying and failing to keep the urgency out of my voice.

  “Rhetorical question?”

  “The human brain pulses with the beat of the heart, Marvin. Badoom. Badoom. All those blood vessels pumping blood through the brain make the neurons jump around like tree branches in the wind.” I paused to tighten the scarf around my neck like a noose. “Before the bot, the Father’s most skilled human surgeons couldn’t track the movements of our brains sufficiently to prevent bleeding on insertion of electrodes less than 350 nanometers in diameter—that’s the diameter of the wavelength of visible light, Marvin. Insertion killed us at the gate. Or later in utero, when our brains would hemorrhage and we’d die, killing the surrogates along with. Or even later, the nurseries filled with brain-dead babies, no use to anyone. The Father all but bankrupted, was never getting back to Paradise, not without that robot.”

  Marvin was smiling sweetly, too broadly. Tears glistened on his cheeks.

  I kept going, long past my best-before: “You . . . you talk about the power of blind spots, Marvin, of betting a piece of our soul on some kind of running game. But how can we find room to run in the blind spot of the world when it is never in the one place?” I felt my cheeks grow hot with tears, too. Stupid baby tears. “When every time we think we have found a place to insert ourselves, to replicate and thrive, we find ourselves drowning in the tears of the brain?”

  He shoved his hands deeper into his coat pockets. “A, tears aren’t in the actual brain, and B, I don’t have your courage, Dorothy.”

  I shook my head and stamped my foot at the same time and he lifted one corner of his mouth in mock surprise.

  “It’s the opposite of courage, Marvin. It comes from the same place as the broken word on my Redress Form. Fear. Isn’t that why I’m here?”

  * * *

  The machinery from the military base is quiet. The launch pads look like gaunt giants with their arms raised to the purple sky. A bat swoops, chasing food. I run all the way back to the Temple, flanked by the awakened ravens. I take the shortcut across the edge of the old town near the school instead of around it—and the ravens shriek their disapproval. It’s a ghost town, an artificial place made for a purpose and abandoned when that purpose no longer mattered. I regret going so close to the town, this close to the weapons facility where we are forbidden to go, especially after what Kai did to the Assistant’s man-thing. The Father is worried that word will get out and it will be bad for business. My heart races and sweat runs into my eyes. The devil’s horns butt against my insides like a goat. The dead janitor lurches out of the doors of the abandoned pub, the top of his head missing.

  He looks right through me.

  When I finally get back to the Middles Bunk, Matron emerges from her office to make a mark against my name for breaking curfew, but I tell her the “witch” made me wait. No one makes a mark against the name of the witch—because that’s what the Father needs to believe she is. I get that even the Father needs someone to believe in, except what he mostly believes in is himself. It is his own power he worships, his place at the center of things—alone in the Paradise of his own skull—where calling Narn a “witch” is just his way of erasing her.

  And her way of letting him think that he has.

  Matron doesn’t question my story, because she believes that we are made without the capacity to lie. Matron doesn’t know that I bear the mark of the beast deep in my belly—which I confirm to my shame, by lying to her by omission.

  Maybe I am learning. Already Narn’s potions, her words, are making me into something else. Or maybe it’s because I bleed.

  She goes back into the office to make a quick call and when she hangs up, she tells me that the Father is waiting for his delivery, and I must take it to him before I’m allowed to see Kai in the infirmary. But first I have to clean myself up. She points at the bird shit on one shoulder and the feathers in my hair. “You’re a disgrace,” she says.

  If she only knew.

  She sends me to the showers and on the way, I duck into the bunkroom. It is empty—everyone is at dinner. I quickly shake some of Narn’s powder into my mouth, skipping the dissolving-in-water part. It burns going down. My eyes water. Matron has left a cup of tea on a shelf and I quickly swallow the dregs. She’s left her matches and cigs there too. I swipe both. She’ll never suspect any of us—noncompliance unthinkable in a Made. She’ll just think she misplaced them somewhere.

  It’s amazing what you can get away with in the blind spot of the world.

  In order to slide my vial of powder up into the metal tubing of my bunk I need to lift the whole thing, which is not as hard as I think it is going to be. Mades are born weak, but I’m no ordinary Made. I quickly lift one corner, tuck the glass vial up into the hollow frame and it’s done. In the shower, I wash myself and change the plug. There is nowhere to bury anything away from the gaze of the ravens, and I can’t risk having the evidence on me, so I hold the used plug under the hand drier until it dries enough to burn, at least until it is nothing but a charred pile of goop, and I flush that down the toilet. I light the cigarette and wave it around to cover the smell—one of Matron’s underlings will get in trouble for smoking in the shower room, which is strictly forbidden—passive smoke plays havoc with our delicate respiratory systems.

  I am now ready to see the Father—as ready as I’ll ever be.

  The Father spends Wednesdays in the library. It is accessible only via an overpass between the science and the art block. No one is allowed through unless they have business with him, and Kai has been back and forth many times. Letting my connection with her guide me, I climb the stairs and make my way through the empty art rooms, their wide windows boarded over or shattered. Paint spatters the floor. Clay figures crumbled beside a kiln now home to rats. I start at a naked man at the edge of my eye. A ghost. I bite my tongue. But it is only a plastic life-size skeleton with “Yorrick is a cock,” written across its forehead.

  The overpass is at the top of a landing where I should have emerged if I’d taken the stairs I was supposed to take. I am already out of breath. I hesitate at the opening, my hand sweaty on the handles of the cooler. It is in almost total darkness. Stars flicker dimly through begrimed high windows along the length of the walkway. I take my first step across the threshold. I want to move quickly but I am mesmerized by the walls—scrawled with so much graffiti that they look three-dimensional, as if some of the images, finding no room on the surface, have had to float above it. There are names everywhere—Emily and Nadia and Lou and Cam and Ollie and Angus—in hearts in circles in thought balloons. Messages about love and hate and homework and parents and priests and cats. There are curses: Eat Shit and Die, Emily. Rot in Hell. C U in my dreams. There are luminous floating faces, and breasts and skulls and giant eyes and man-things. By the light of the stars, I make out the word, Help! and another that says, Eternity. The floor below my sneakers is covered with debris. A transparent numbat minces past as if I wasn’t there. Am I? I watch the numbat wi
th the feeling of being slowly blown apart. Cigarette butts and glass pipes, and bottles and condoms, a number of decaying backpacks, water bottles, paperbacks, a stroller and a toilet bowl filled with the dried black corpses of kittens. I am in a sweat by the time I get to the other side, my belly knifing. Maybe my blood will overflow and the devil will smell it and I’ll never get back to save my sister like I promised.

  I push through double doors that say LIBRARY. They open into a large circular room with a high reception desk painted across the front with LI AR. A gum-chewing Assistant moves out from behind the desk and reaches his hand out for the pharmaceuticals. I want nothing more than to shove the bag at him and run, but Narn told me not to give it to any of the little bosses. So I shake my head, and this must be something he’s used to because he blows a limp bubble and tells me to follow him.

  I have heard about the library and I glance behind me but all the shelves are empty. There are piles of books tumbled on the floor, their pages crushed and spines broken. The Assistant takes me through a door behind the reception desk and leads me up some stairs, then stops at a landing. He points at another flight leading up.

  “Roof,” he says, moving his gum wad across his open mouth. I begin to climb, feeling his eyes on my bottom.

  I step through a bright light and onto the roof. It’s a hot summer night, and Crux is stark in the sky, white nails on a starry cross. The smell of guano bites at my throat, and I smell cologne too. My eyes adjust to what is unmistakably before me. A vast cage as big as the bunkroom crowded with ravens. One of them lazily stretches out long ragged wings, giving me a glimpse of crimson.

  “Corvus,” says a squishy voice and when I turn, it is the Father. Oh my Father. I squint against the blue glow of his T-shirt, his big white teeth. I hold out the medical bag, but he doesn’t take it. My heart is beating like a train. I might faint.

  “Corvus being the crow genus, and coronoides meaning crowned or corolla-ed, referring to the neck ruffle that sets apart the species.”

  He steps into the rectangle of light from the door. He is very tall, over two and a half meters, with ruddy skin and dun-colored braids that he nourishes with Narn’s rosemary and henna solution. He isn’t smiling, although with his rugged bush clothes and the Akubra he holds in broad hands, he looks like he should be.

  “Until now Corvus coronoides—the Rim Raven—was the smartest bird on the planet. But what you see here is a new breed I created—Corvus chimaeralis—a passerine-AI hybrid, genetically engineered using an Augmented Reproductive Technology similar to what we use on you lot. Implanted with neural mesh much less complex of course, a fraction of the electrodes, and controlled using sensor technology—couldn’t have sentience in an unmanned aerial vehicle now, could we?”

  I shake my head. Feathers rustle.

  “Still, there are some pivotal differences with standard UAV capabilities that I’m rather proud of. For a start they allow for discrete, like pretty much silent monitoring—no motor on these birdies. Secondly, they’re capable of extra-long flight times—no batteries required either. Three: easy to train, because, well, they’re so fucking smart. Four: real-time monitoring and coordination due to the hermetically sealed motherboard that enables a direct data transfer to me here.” He points to a screen on his watch. “Five: tough in any weather, well you’d think that of course. And six: payload flexibility, which is the kicker because we can strap any kind of ordinance or what have you, onto the birdy, so to speak, and they wouldn’t miss a beat.”

  My mind flies back to Narn putting a whole flock of ravens to sleep with a click of her tongue. What did that look like, I wonder, on the Father’s watch? Did it go all staticky while I was running around in the dark, with telltale blood down my legs? Did Narn replace that image with another? Maybe some fake footage from a musical or a bible cartoon like we’re allowed to watch sometimes on Sunday afternoons after the sermon.

  But no, probably not a cartoon.

  What I get is that the Father thinks of the birds as an extension of him. His eyes and ears, and even his brain. And maybe even more than that. His soul. His seed. One thing is clear to me, even at twelve years old: without the ravens the Father would be utterly alone. Without the birds, his kingdom would be like a terminal lake, sloshing in his skull with no way in or out.

  Narn loves the ravens like a mother. The Father needs them more than God. That’s the difference.

  “Pound for point, these lovelies pack more neurons in their tiny brains than primates.” He turns to the cage, puts his hand through the bars and a huge ruffled raven—looking more like a chimp than a bird—lands on his furry arm and turns her head so that she can regard me from one eye, and so that I can admire the light-eating curve of her beak.

  “This is Dani,” the Father says. “My best girl. Aren’t you, Dan? She has a brain structure that’s analogous to the mammalian neocortex, the part we use for higher order functioning like conscious thought, sensory perception, spatial reasoning and language. In the wild she can not only spot a carcass from half a klick, but also communicate its location to the flock. And that’s without the implant.”

  Dani fluffs her wings, angles her head at me. A breeze blows a big black feather into my hair. I pluck it out, tuck it in my pocket. The Father absently frowns.

  “There’s some rufescence in their feathers that we can’t account for, and that we can’t seem to breed out, bit of a shame about that. Something unnatural about magenta, pink, what have you? Something a little womanly.”

  I desperately jiggle the bag so that the vials and bottles jangle in their pouches. The huge bird starts, ducks her head and plunges her beak into the Father’s arm.

  He screams, pulls his arm out of the cage. “Holy fuck!”

  She floats onto a dislocated tree limb in the giant cage. “Ah-ahhh,” she cries. “Aah-aah.”

  “You scared her!” he says, turning on me. A squiggle of bright blood writes something illegible across his forearm.

  My lips quiver in reply.

  “Speak, Made!”

  “I have your delivery, Father,” I say, hearing my voice crack below the rustling of feathers.

  He looks down in surprised recognition at the bag of meds in my hand. “You’re the one they sent instead of the Unmade? She’s taking a hell of a time to expel her bits—knew she would, unruly little bitch too big for her boots. I brought you cunts in. I can take you out. And that’s a promise.”

  He gestures to the table for me to put the delivery down and then he turns away as if I don’t exist and never have.

  * * *

  The Corso was freezing. “What’s the notebook really for?” I said, trying to change the subject. “The cover feels gross. Like skin.”

  “It’s vellum,” Marvin said. “Calfskin. Fake of course, but you’d never know.”

  “Even grosser.” My teeth chattered.

  “Did you notice the markings on the pages themselves?” He moved closer to me, sharing his warmth.

  “The indentations, you mean? From your stories? I can’t make them out.”

  “You can’t,” he said, almost in my ear. “But your brain can. At least the digital layer can. And they’re not words, Meera. It’s code. Maybe it’ll form some kind of firewall around the part of you that’s human. That’s the plan anyway.”

  “Protection?”

  “Where you’re going you’ll need all you can get.”

  I wanted to thank him. And I wanted to hit him. Marvin’s kindness confused me and I didn’t know how to take it. The drovers and shearers I had led upstairs at the Five-Legged Nag back in Norman—that was mainly about friction. I had no experience with boyfriends, or with friends, period, unless you counted the thylacine.

  The Father’s chip in our brain was a world unto itself. Converting his coded constraints to action potentials, spikes that sent messages to our cortex, a different message depend
ing on the shape of the neuron for which the code had on-chip detection. The organic film substrate made of a substance exactly like tears. We knew what we were—but it was a knowledge that gave us the opposite of power, whatever that was.

  “After I read my story, Pagan said something like if I had lived something, then everyone should be able to listen to it. But what if it was all a lie, not because I hadn’t lived it, but because I couldn’t remember it?”

  “Or didn’t want to? You don’t have to, Meera. None of us do.”

  “I have to try,” I said. “For my sister’s sake.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders. “What happened in the Blood Temple stays in the Blood Temple.”

  I could smell the wool of his sweater. I had to crane my neck to meet his pussy-willow eyes.

  “You know that’s not true. We both know that.”

  “Good night, Meera.”

  He bent to kiss me on the forehead, like someone twice his age, an uncle or the big brother he’d never be, but I moved my face at the wrong moment, so the kiss landed on my mouth. It was an awkward moment between us. I waited until I was inside before I wiped it off.

  CHAPTER 9

  REAL DEAL

  At two on Monday morning a text came in from an unknown number. I looked across at my sleeping roommates, fearful that the notification had woken them. The rule was that all phones had to be on silent in the rooms, but I had gotten so few texts and none at night, so I hadn’t bothered to switch modes.

  The text said: Hi this is Pagan, from class. *Loved* your story. Meet me in the Quad tomorrow at noon?

  I stared at it, disbelieving.

  It wasn’t a question. So what was it? Pagan had no reason to question my compliance. I was a Made after all. What did she care that I would have to ditch a meeting in the library with my geography group about some presentation I was already behind in? I got up for some water and high on the wall, a blue square of projected light from the bridge grew bright and then dimmed. Lara snored and Trudy lay flung out on her bed as if she’d been dropped there, her eyes open and watching me. The room reeked of booze and for once, I was as responsible for the stink as they were.