Forcing the thoughts to the back on my mind I looked back up at Daniel.
“Nothing’s wrong. I just – you’re good at that.”
I gestured at the rabbit he was preparing. He’d skinned it perfectly, using a sharp-edged stone, and was now carefully butchering it, barely even looking at what his hands were doing.
“We do everything perfectly,” he said by way of explanation, looking back down at his bloody hands. “That is why you hate us.”
“I don’t – I don’t hate anyone,” I protested. I ran one finger through the dirt, not able to meet his eyes. It was true though. I’d never hated the Mechanicals. Not like others did. I’d pitied them once. And now – now I feared them. Feared what they were capable of. “There is a fine line between hate and fear.”
In the next breath he was beside me, lifting my fingers from the ground and forcing me to look up at him. Now that he was closer I could see the pattern in his eyes, the fine lattice of the circuit boards, each wire glittering like gold. No human had eyes like that.
“Do you fear me?”
The word yes seemed stuck behind my teeth. I wanted to say it, because I thought it would make him back away and leave me be. But I couldn’t. Because as much as I wanted to be afraid of him, I wasn’t. Instead I found myself drawn to him, to the sadness behind his eyes, eyes that shouldn’t have been able to show emotion of any kind. He was a mystery. A puzzle I wanted to solve. A beautiful contradiction.
“No.”
A tiny, almost human smirk curved his lips. He leant close, invading my personal space. “You do remember that I could snap you like a twig?”
I nodded. “But you won’t.” For some reason I was very sure of that.
He sat back on his heels and let out a little huff of air. If I hadn’t known Mechanicals couldn’t, I might have thought it was a laugh. “No, I won’t. Even though I probably should. I could move much faster without you.”
“Then just leave me here to starve. What do you care? You’re – “
“I do not wish for you to die.”
I looked up at him sharply and he must have read something in my expression because he spoke again quickly.
“Don’t misunderstand, or assign me emotions I am not capable of feeling. I do not care if you live or die, but I see no purpose in your death. And you helped me, even if not entirely willingly. I – owe you.”
For a long moment I found myself held by his inhuman eyes, and then he stepped back to the fire.
The night felt suddenly colder, and I shivered. Maybe he did scare me after all.
Five
When I woke the next morning the fire had gone cold, reduced to a pile of smoking grey ash. Overhead the sky was a clear, cold blue. It was early enough that the birds were in full voice; a sound I’d never heard in the city. Other than the birds the forest was silent and I wondered if Daniel had changed his mind and left me after all. I sat up. The clearing was empty, just a patch of scuffed dirt where Daniel had sat late into the night, staring into the darkness even as I’d drifted off to sleep.
“Daniel?” His name came out as a whisper. I wasn’t sure if I was hoping he’d left me or not. “Dan – “
Fingers closed over my mouth, silencing me. I struggled fruitlessly, but the arms around me only tightened their grasp.
“Be still.” Daniel’s lips were an inch from my ear, his voice nothing but a breath. “And be silent.”
I twisted my head enough to make out the side of his face, one high, defined cheekbone and a jaw like chiselled marble, his glittering eyes focused on the trees around us.
“We need to move,” he hissed, letting me go and grabbing my hand instead. “Now. Quickly.”
We stumbled out of the clearing and into the surrounding trees. Daniel moved silently, but I stumbled and staggered along behind him. I didn’t know what he was afraid of, if that word could even be applied to a Mechanical, but surely I would bring it straight to us. I made enough noise for ten people.
Daniel seemed to realise the same thing and he stopped so abruptly that I almost ran into the back of him.
He crouched slightly. “Get up.”
“What?” I stared at him blankly.
“Climb on my back. It’s the only way we’re getting out of here alive.”
Still I hesitated. I wasn’t even sure what we were running from.
“You either climb on my back, or I throw you over my shoulder again. Your choice.”
Damn him. I took two steps and let him lift me onto his back in a piggyback. Even with my extra weight he showed me then just how much I had been slowing him down. The forest flashed past as he ran, his feet falling silently somehow amongst the undergrowth.
This was part of why humans were so afraid of Mechanicals. Because they were so much faster, so much stronger, and so much smarter than us. They were the biggest threat to our species since the environmental threats of the 21st century. Because they could replace us. In fact, they had already replaced us. In far too many places.
I tried to shake those thoughts from my mind, focusing instead on not losing my grip on Daniel’s shoulders. If I fell at the speeds he was travelling, he’d be a quarter mile away before he realised I was gone.
Tightening my grip around his shoulders I brought my mouth close to his ear.
“What are we running from?”
He didn’t answer.
“How far are we going to run?”
“As far as we have to. Just hold on.”
If I didn’t know he didn’t have emotions I would have thought there was a tremor of fear in his voice. What could a Mechanical be afraid of? They were practically invulnerable. Then it clicked.
“You’re being hunted?”
“Of course. You thought we would have shaken them off our trail that quickly?”
We plunged down the side of the hill into a narrow gully and finally Daniel stopped. I slid from his back, landing on legs like jelly.
“Well, yes,” I said, once I felt like I wasn’t about to collapse, continuing our conversation. “You grabbed me, used me as a human shield I might add, and we escaped into the forest. You barely leave a trail. How could anyone have tracked us?”
He stepped away from me, gazing up into the overhanging trees. He went perfectly still and I knew he was listening. After a long moment he gave a tiny nod and finally turned to look at me.
“You don’t really think it is humans tracking me, do you?”
I frowned, for a moment utterly confused. “Hang on. Do you mean Mechanicals? But – “
He let out that little huff of air that might have been a laugh. “Humans can be so gullible. The government tells you something and you just believe it without question. They tell you that they are hunting and destroying all Mechanicals – but you never think to question how they are doing that when we are so much faster, smarter and stronger than even your strongest soldier.”
“The Government are using Mechanicals to hunt the rest of you?” I knew that was what he was implying, but I wanted clarification. If it was true then it meant the government knew far more about the ‘programming failure’ than they were letting on. If they were trusting some Mechanicals and not others.
“Of course. They’d be foolish to completely destroy such a powerful weapon. And in the hands of the Government, we are weapons. But these ones are – different.”
“Different how?”
He turned away from me, and I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer to that question. “All right. Fine. So they’re Mechanicals. How do we get away from them?”
He looked back at me, the circuits in his irises glittering. “I don’t know.”
The main answer to that question seemed to be to keep moving.
Daniel didn’t carry me again, but we also didn’t stop as the day wore on. He strode ahead, pausing every now and then to let me catch up, but never resting.
The hunted, anxious look never left his eyes.
I found myself wondering what was goin
g through his mind. How did the sentience work? Had he become self-aware slowly? Or had it been a sudden thing? One minute nothing more than a machine following programmed protocol, and the next awake and aware? Able to think for himself?
I had been obsessed with robotics and artificial intelligence all my life. I’d read all the studies, and all the science fiction, but the reality of a machine achieving sentience, becoming self-aware was beyond my comprehension.
My thoughts distracted me enough that I didn’t notice the approaching storm until it was almost on top of us. It was moving rapidly, the temperature plummeting almost unnaturally fast as the clouds rolled in.
It wasn’t that unusual. The weather patterns of the world had been screwed up for a long time. Seasons didn’t have the same meaning any more. Predictable weather was a thing of the past. But it was technically autumn, so a winter storm wasn’t too far out of the range of normality.
“We need to find shelter,” I shouted at Daniel over the wind in the trees. “It’s going to be a big one.”
Daniel was ahead of me, but he stopped to let me catch up. He glanced up at the sky and then glanced around the forest. The canopy overhead was thick, but it wouldn’t offer us any real protection in a big storm.
The winds gusted, bringing a blast of bitterly cold air. It wasn’t a rain storm coming, it was snow, and that would be a lot worse.
“This way.” Daniel grabbed my hand, pulling me through the forest until we hit an actual road.
It shocked me. I’d thought we were further away from civilization than that. But Daniel wasn’t surprised. Built in GPS was a very handy thing to have.
We followed the road until it turned into a sloping gravel drive, and then Daniel pushed me into the trees.
“Wait.”
I thought about protesting, but Daniel disappeared into the trees, heading towards the cottage peeking through the trunks. Moments later he reappeared at my side on soundless feet.
“It is empty. Come on.”
I followed his gracefully loping figure through the trees until quite suddenly they opened up into a wide clearing. The cottage was grey stone, tucked so neatly into the trees that I would never have spotted it, so I could only assume Daniel had already known it was there.
In the green of the forest the cottage looked idyllic, almost fairy tale like. Though there were plenty of signs it had been long abandoned. The steps to the door were sagging, and there was growth on the roof; some kind of ivy was rapidly taking over. Half of the windows were broken, and those still intact were opaque with dirt. But with the wind of the storm whipping up around us, it looked more inviting than my own home.
“Careful.” Daniel said as we walked up the steps, avoiding the spots where the wood had rotted through completely.
The lock on the front door hung in pieces, but that looked more recent, and I looked up at Daniel. He lifted his shoulders in an approximation of a human shrug and gestured me through the door.
Inside there were further signs of the cottage’s abandonment. A drift of leaves covered the floor by the broken windows, crackling underfoot as we edged into the room. Cobwebs clustered thickly in every corner, and an inch of dust lay on all the furniture.
The cottage itself was open plan, a scrubbed wooden kitchen leading straight down one step to a squashy leather couch and armchair tucked around a stone fireplace. A circular staircase led up to a second level that was little more than a balcony with an ancient looking bed.
The best word that came to mind was ‘rustic’ though it wasn’t a word I’d ever had a chance to use before. In my home everything was clean lines and chrome finishes. But here there were antlers on the wall, and what looked like whole stuffed fish. They must have been old. Nothing edible survived in the polluted rivers and lakes anymore.
“This will do.” Daniel said, after doing a quick inspection.
I glanced out of the broken window at the gathering storm. “It’s going to get cold, when that weather hits.”
“Help me with this.”
I turned to see Daniel carrying a load of wooden boards down the stairs. He dumped them by the broken window and rummaged around in the kitchen until he found a tool box tucked under the sink. It was rusted shut but he forced it open with his bare hands.
“Are you just going to stand and watch me?”
I shook myself and hurried forward. I held the boards whilst he nailed them in place, blocking the worst of the broken window. The wind that still managed to whistle through the cracks was bitter, stinging cold.
“That should keep the worst of the weather out.” He glanced round at the fireplace and then at an axe propped in the corner.
When he grabbed it I found myself stepping back instinctively. He looked at me blankly for a moment and then down at the axe in his hand, realisation dawning. The look he gave me then was as close to disgust as a Mechanical could some to showing.
“We need firewood. Look in the kitchen. There might be something tinned that will still be all right for you to eat. I assume you need to eat by now.”
I nodded. Of course I did, the last time I’d eaten had been the previous night. My stomach felt empty and hollow. It wasn’t a feeling I was accustomed to.
Daniel headed back upstairs with the axe and I listened for a moment to the sounds of him taking the bed apart for firewood. My stomach growled and I started searching through the kitchen cupboards.
It had been years since anyone had been there; anything perishable was long gone, but in one cupboard I found a dented tin of halved peaches and a tin of sliced mushrooms. It wasn’t exactly a feast, but I’d have eaten anything right then. Even cold, slimy mushrooms.
I found a can opener and was just tipping the tins into two hastily wiped out bowls when Daniel came back down the stairs with an armful of chopped up bedframe. I carried the food over to the armchair and sat down, eating with my fingers as I watched him carefully build up the fire.
“Do you want any of this?” I asked, proffering the bowl.
He glanced over at me as he sunk onto the couch. “No.”
“Oh, no. I suppose you don’t eat.” I put the bowl back in my lap.
“That isn’t strictly true.”
“Oh?” I glanced up with half a peach dangling from my fingers.
He gazed into the fire for a moment and then shifted his penetrating eyes to meet mine. The firelight reflected oddly off the circuits behind his eyes, making them glow even more than usual. “I must fuel myself. Just as you do. But apparently far more efficiently than you. We are supplied with a – supplement – that sees to all our nutritional needs. Do you really have to eat every day?”
I smirked. “Most people eat three times a day. If they can get it.”
“And can you often get it?”
My smile vanished and I tried not to meet his eyes. The truth was there had been a lot of shortages recently. Before the Purge we had come to rely quite heavily on the Mechanicals. They were found in almost every aspect of manual labour, doing the work of twenty men. People were having to relearn a lot of long forgotten skills. And then of course, there were the still damaged protein factories in the north. The Government still hadn’t done anything to get them operational again. The artificial protein was a big part of most people’s diet.
“I’m sorry.”
I looked up to find Daniel watching me. “What?”
“I said, I’m sorry. I know that you are not responsible for what is happening to my kind. And I know that many humans are suffering too.”
“So, we go a little hungry. It’s hardly the same thing.” And it was true. Most people saw them as nothing more than machines. It would be like caring what happened to a car. But somehow, sitting there in that tiny cottage with Daniel it was hard to think of him as just a machine. Knowing that he felt some kinship to other Mechs. Knowing that he could think, could reason.
He looked so human. In the light of the fire his skin glowed golden, and when he didn’t look straight at the fl
ames it was easy to forget about the circuitry behind his eyes. Though, truth be told, he was too perfect to be human. He was like an artist’s impression of what humans should look like. He could have passed for a Greek god with his dark wavy hair, chiselled jaw and lean but muscled frame.
But despite his perfection, he did look human. And sometimes he acted more human than a Mechanical should. They were no longer inanimate objects, fit to be destroyed as we saw fit. Not if they were sentient, self-aware. We had played god, but we had no right now to destroy our creation.
“No, it isn’t the same thing.” Daniel spoke finally, releasing me from his piercing gaze. “You’re an unusual human. Most of you don’t seem to think like that.”
I let out a tiny laugh. “And you’re a normal Mechanical, are you?”
He copied my laugh. “We learn, and adapt. It’s part of our programming.” Programming or sentience? I wondered if he even realised the difference himself.
Suddenly buoyed by a strange sense of courage I shifted seats, joining him on the couch. He went very still, his eyes fixed on me as I edged closer.
“Can I – do you mind?” I reached for his hand. He didn’t speak, letting me pick it up.
I’d expected his skin to be cold, rubbery or somehow inhuman. Instead it felt real, disturbingly so. They had done an incredible job of making it as life-like as possible, even going so far as the tiny, soft hairs and a couple of tiny freckles.
He kept his eyes locked on my face as I explored his long, slender fingers. I couldn’t help marvelling at the craftsmanship, the perfection. I turned his hand over and ran my fingers over his palm and up his wrist.
With a tiny shiver he withdrew his hand.
I looked up. “You can feel that?”
He nodded. “We feel all physical sensation. It prevents us from – damaging ourselves.”
Metal in the Blood (The Mechanicals Book 1) Page 5