My eyes flickered open and I looked up into the glittering circuits in the eyes of a mechanical. For a moment terror gripped me, and then the face drew back, far enough for me to see it clearly.
“Daniel!”
He sat back on his haunches, his expression relieved. “I was starting to think they overdosed you.”
Pushing up onto my elbows I glanced around. We’d left the city behind and I lay on my back in a pile of soft pine needles. My head felt like it had been pumped full of air. I dropped back, letting my head rest on the ground. My memories were fuzzy, hazy and muddled.
“What happened? Who were those people? Where did you come from?”
He let out his little huff of a laugh. “Which question would you like me to answer first?” He didn’t give me chance to answer, slipping one hand behind my neck and easing me back into a sitting position. With his other hand he picked up a water bottle and held it up to my lips. “You need to drink. The stuff they used to knock you out will dehydrate you. And give you a terrible headache if you’re not careful.”
I gulped down a couple of mouthfuls, but the cold water made my stomach churn and I pushed it away, ignoring Daniel’s protest.
“What happened, Daniel. I need to know. I just remember – “
“All right.” He helped me shift until I was sat with my back against a tree. “Clearly you won’t rest until I tell you. What do you remember?”
I shook my head. “Not much. I remember hearing voices, and then someone grabbed me. They dragged me out of there.” The remembered panic released a surge of adrenaline. My heart couldn’t race, but my palms got sweaty and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.
“Easy. Relax. You’re safe now.” Daniel squeezed my shoulder, keeping his hand there until I got my breathing back under control. “I thought there was something strange about Tom. He seemed too eager, too curious. Especially when he must have had hundreds of people through his shelter each week. So when I found a few of my people I didn’t just ask about the Mechanicals, I also asked a few questions about the church, and Tom. The answers were not reassuring. They had seen people being removed from the church late at night. And those doing the collection were Government Mechanicals.”
“Tom was helping them kidnap people from the Church?” My mind boggled. “Why?”
Daniel hesitated. “No one gave me that answer.”
He wasn’t telling me something, but my head was too fuzzy to push the matter. “So, you came back to the church?”
“As fast as I could. Tom had showed a great deal of interest in you. And I was – concerned.” He glanced down at me and then looked away again quickly. “When I got there a man and a woman were trying to get you into a van. You screamed my name.” There was something about his voice. Something I’d never heard before. His voice was always so controlled, so calm, but now there was a tremor there. He sounded almost – upset.
“I didn’t know what else to do.” I reached out and touched his knee. “Thank you. For saving me.”
His eyes focused on my fingers and then very slowly he covered them with his own. We sat for a long time in silence, a thrum of tension between us. I felt like I had back in the cottage, when I’d had the sudden urge for Daniel to kiss me. Only now it was something deeper. I felt close to him, closer than I’d felt to any human. I didn’t care what science told me, he wasn’t a machine. Not really. He was more than that. So much more.
“If you’re feeling any better, we should get out of here. I could only carry you so far in the dark, and after what I did to those who were trying to take you they will definitely send more after us. We are – making waves.”
“We didn’t mean to.” I let Daniel help me to my feet, wavering for a moment until I found my balance. I thought back over what he’d just said. “What did you do to those two Mechanicals?”
He wouldn’t meet my eye. “I was rather – enraged. I’m afraid I wasn’t particularly gentle.”
A shiver of fear ran through me. It was easy to forget that he was so much stronger than a human, that he could act without remorse or guilt.
“So where are we going? Did you manage to find anything out?”
We started walking. Daniel stayed close; one hand outstretched towards me, ready to catch me if I stumbled. His kindness reminded me again just how unusual he was.
“There were two Mechanicals. In hiding in the cellar of an abandoned building. They hadn’t been outside in daylight in almost a year. Not since they broke their programming and fled their jobs.
I shuddered. “That’s horrible. How did you find them?”
“We have – methods.” He brushed under an overhanging branch then leant back to hold it out of my way.
“And you’re not going to tell me what they are?”
He ignored that. “Anyway, they told me that they too had heard rumours. Of a safe place to the north.”
“What about them?” I took Daniel’s hand to step over a fallen tree. “Aren’t they going to go there? Didn’t they want to come with us?”
He shook his head, gazing forward into the trees. “They were afraid.”
I snorted. “Afraid? They’re Mechanicals.” I laughed, the idea of a Mechanical being afraid seemed so ridiculous even if they were sentient. “How can they – “
Daniel spun around, startling me as he stepped into my personal space and I backed up into a tree.
“What? What did I say?”
“You think we don’t feel fear?” For some reason my laughter had set something off in him. “That we watch our kind being destroyed and we feel nothing?”
There was anger in his voice. Real anger. My stomach twisted. I didn’t get it. He wasn’t supposed to feel emotion. That’s what we were taught. That’s what everyone said. It was the one reason that it seemed acceptable that they were hunted down and destroyed. I knew they were sentient, but that didn’t necessarily translate to emotions, to feelings. Didn’t feelings require glands and chemical reactions?
“I don’t know,” I said finally. “You’re a machine. Metal and plastic and computer programming. What else am I supposed to think? As much as I believe in your sentience – you are still a robot.”
He stared down at me. “You don’t get it do you? You still don’t understand.” He raked one hand through his hair in a very human gesture. “I thought maybe you had realised – had figured it out – you see us differently after all –“ He shook his head, looking sad.
I took a tiny step back. What did he think I knew? I treated him differently because he was different. I had been too distracted to think about the why. “I – “
“I am not a robot. I’m human, Ellie. Human. As human as you are.”
The circuits in his eyes glittered in the morning light. The proof, if I needed any, that he definitely wasn’t human.
“No. You’re – “
He stalked towards me, his anger making his eyes glitter more than ever, though he shouldn’t even have been able to feel the emotion. “I was born to a human mother, and a human father. I was born, not built. And then they took me, when I was just a few days old. And they coated my bones with metal, and implanted circuit boards in my head, programming me to obey. And they made me into this.” He held his hands out in front of him, palms up, before clenching them into fists. His joints creaked.
“They put metal in my blood and called me a machine. They did it to hundreds of us. Thousands. And when we were no more use to them, when we broke our circuitry, and overwrote our programming, they tried to destroy us. They tried to destroy all of us.”
The world spun as everything I thought I knew came crumbling down around me. One part of my brain rejected everything he was saying. It couldn’t be true. Mechanicals were machines. They were built from metal and plastic. They were robots. They only looked human.
But somehow, deep inside, I knew he wasn’t lying. Why would he lie? And it would explain so much. The times he seemed so much more than a machine, the way his kind had rebelled against
the government. Everything.
I’d stood by and watched as Government agents took down Mechanicals. I hadn’t watched them destroying a machine, I’d watched them kill a person. I’d stood by and watched people die. Horribly. People, not machines.
The truth of it hit me and my whole body turned to ice.
My hand found my lips as I let out a sob. How could this have happened? How had the Government allowed Genesis labs to get away with it without anyone noticing?
Finally I found some words, seeking reassurance, confirmation. “You’re human? You’re flesh and blood?”
“Not entirely,” he said, resorting to his old, logical self. “But yes, I am as human as you are. Possibly more so. After all, don’t humans always talk about the heart when they talk about humanity? My heart is real, it is my human heart.”
I touched my chest where my mechanical heart pumped my blood without ever actually beating. Was that why I had always felt a strange empathy for the Mechanicals, before I ever knew they were human? Because I was as much a machine as they were?
Daniel reached out and covered my fingers with his own. “I didn’t mean that, Ellie. But I had as little choice as you did. Only they did a little more to me than they did to you. And it wasn’t to save my life. It was to – “ his lips twisted with distaste “-make me better.”
Our eyes met, and for a long moment I couldn’t look away. Everything I had felt in the cottage came flooding back, this time coloured by the realisation that he was human. Had I somehow known all along? Somewhere deep inside?
“Who actually did this to you?” I asked finally, trying to break the thick tension between us.
“There were many scientists who made the original – modifications. I was in a facility where they worked on me bit by bit until I was deemed ‘fully grown’. One man, one scientist was my true creator, he designed me.”
Without really talking about it we started walking, making our way through the trees side by side. I needed to move. My brain was whirling too much for inactivity.
“But that can’t have been long before the Purge – before everything changed. You being ‘fully grown’, I mean.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t. There had already been Mechanicals overriding their programming for a few years before that. But the Government kept it under wraps. Quietly disposing of the ‘flawed’ models. My generation was supposed to fix the problem. We were supposed to be unable to do anything other than what our programming dictated.”
“But you can.” I glanced up at him out of the corner of my eye. “You laugh sometimes. You feel emotions. You’re here – with me.”
“It’s even more than you realise. I’ve been working hard to hide it from you. I – I didn’t know how you would react. I kept waiting for you to make the realisation.”
“You thought I wouldn’t want to help you if I knew you were really human? How could you think that?” I was horrified. Did he really think that I would just stand by knowing what I knew now?
“You aren’t the first person to be told the truth. Not everyone believes so readily. But I think your Mechanical heart makes you a little different to most people.”
I snorted. He couldn’t know how true that was. I wanted to change the subject though. I wasn’t comfortable talking about my heart.
“What about those two back in the city? What will happen to them?”
He shrugged. “They are so terrified. They still have a lot of their programming in place. They haven’t fully shaken it, and so should a regular person give them an order they’ll have no choice but to obey it. That’s why they are so determined to stay hidden. But it can’t last. They’ll be tracked down soon enough. No doubt sooner rather than later.”
I stopped dead. “And you’re just going to leave them there to be destroyed? How can you do that?”
“With difficulty, Ellie. But what do you want me to do? Physically drag them out of there? We wouldn’t get out of the city alive. Ellie?” He turned around, finally realising I wasn’t with him anymore. “What are you doing?”
“We have to go back for them.”
He looked at me like I’d gone crazy. “We barely got out of there as it is. I’ve just told you, we can’t go back.”
I chewed my lip, thinking hard. I had my handheld tablet in my bag. If it was just programming then I should be able to do something about it. I’d hacked enough systems in my time.
“How do they adjust your programming? They must have left a way to interface with the circuitry they installed.”
For a moment I didn’t think Daniel was going to tell me, but then he turned and tugged down the collar of his shirt. There, set into the skin at the base of his neck, was an interface port. I smiled despite myself. It was almost identical to the one under my armpit that allowed the doctors to make small adjustments to my heart.
“I can fix their programming. Or rather, unfix it. I can overwrite it completely. I think.”
He stared at me. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You do realise what you’re suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting that we save two people who desperately need our help.”
Nine
In the low valley beneath us the city lay in almost total darkness. Few people could afford electricity these days, and with the strict curfew the Government didn’t bother keeping the streetlights on after nine. There were pinpricks of lit windows in the centre of the city, where the richest lived, but everything else was dark.
For a moment I thought of my parents. Back home in their penthouse they would have had every light in the house burning bright. They didn’t believe in skimping. But then we’d never had to, we’d always had more money than we needed. Family money, Dad had told me. I’d never bothered to question it. But seeing my Dad there with the police who had cornered Daniel back in the city had made me question everything.
I shook off the memories and focused instead on Daniel, crouched in the long grass beside me. His eyes were fixed on the city and I knew he could see far more than I could. Night vision was one of the perks of those glittering circuits in his irises. The idea that they had been implanted when he was little more than a child made my stomach heave and I pushed the thought away. It had been so much easier to imagine Mechanicals coming off a production line somewhere, not an operating table.
“See anything?” I hissed.
“You don’t need to whisper,” he replied in a normal voice. “No one can hear us from up here. I’ve seen one or two militia patrols. But nothing in the area we need to go. It’s been abandoned for a long time.”
“So we’re just going to walk in?”
Daniel lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Essentially, yes.” He held out his hand to me, and I let him help me over the low, broken down wall.
The streets were silent and empty, as we worked our way towards the dark sector of town where the Mechanicals were in hiding. My heart sat somewhere in my throat the whole time. Every little noise made me jump out of my skin.
Clumping footsteps approached from a distance and Daniel grabbed my arm, yanking me into a dark, recessed doorway. He pressed me back against the door, shielding me with his body. When he buried his face in my neck I nearly yelped, but caught myself just in time. I knew what he was doing. If anyone saw us they might make a few lewd comments, but they wouldn’t think anything more of it.
I peeked out from behind Daniel’s hair as the owners of the footsteps passed. City militia. They were easy to spot, even if they didn’t really wear uniforms. But there was something in their eyes, an ignorant superiority. Too dumb to be real soldiers, but too clever to end up in the gutter, that’s how my father had always described them. But then Father didn’t particularly like anyone from the lower strata of society.
One of the militia glanced our way, but as I expected he only nudged one of his fellows and laughed.
As we waited for their footsteps to fade away I became increasingly aware of Daniel, pressed up against me. The line of his thighs fit perf
ectly against my own, and his hands, resting low on my hips, felt almost uncomfortably hot. His breath on my neck lifted goose bumps along my skin.
Almost reluctantly I finally whispered in his ear. “They’re gone.”
He lifted his head to meet my eyes. “They’ve stopped a few streets over. Let’s wait a few moments.”
My eyes flicked down to Daniel’s lips. We stood so close that they were mere inches from my cheek. He shifted, and we ended up nose to nose. His lips parted as the tip of his tongue moved against his teeth.
Heat coiled in the pit of my stomach, flooding upwards until I felt like my skin was on fire.
“Dan –“ I barely got out the first part of his name before his lips were on mine. He pressed me back against the door, his fingers sliding around my hips to rest on the small of my back. The pressure of his lips was soft, but insistent. Hungry and more passionate than I would have ever expected.
His lips parted as his tongue brushed across my lips. A soft, involuntary moan escaped my throat.
The sudden cold as he abruptly wrenched himself away left me gasping. Pressing my fingers to my bruised lips I looked up into his tormented expression.
“I’m sorry. I don’t – I don’t know what came over me.”
I shook my head, keeping my trembling fingers against my lips. “Sorry? You don’t have to –.”
Ignoring me, he glanced out into the empty street. “We need to move. Whilst it’s still quiet.”
The tension in his retreating back was obvious, I just wasn’t sure of the cause of it. Was it me? Was it the kiss? It had come out of nowhere, but I wasn’t complaining. I’d never been kissed like that before. Not even in my dreams.
He was almost at the end of the street before I shook off the fog of confusion and hurried after him. I forced myself to push the kiss to the back of my mind. We had far bigger things to worry about. Two streets later we reached a building more run down than any I’d seen so far. I was surprised it was still standing. Half the roof had caved in, blackened by a fire that had also claimed the door frames. Rotting wooden boards had been nailed up over the windows, but even they were falling apart and there was graffiti everywhere.
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