by Tyler Vance
Face lifting in smile, Sheikoh took the bag from Dorothi and pawed around inside of it with his damaged hand. He sifted through the multitudes of fingers and knee caps, rolls of Synthskin, tangled synaptic wire and muscle motors from the size of a pea to a baseball. He could just pop on another premade finger on within fifteen minutes. Then he groaned, realizing what he was missing.
“My tools…” he murmured under his breath.
Sheikoh had left them in his room the last time he had replaced the lining between joints that wore away after about five months. He cursed under his breath and then glanced over at Dorothi.
“What?” She asked him, her voice edged with the slightest hint of secret fear.
“Uh… By chance could I borrow your screwdriver? I’ll give it back after, I promise. Without a scratch,” The corners of his mouth lilted with a small, apologetic smile. Sheikoh knew how much Emili’s old tools meant to her little sister.
“Okay, okay.” Dorothi acquiesced, a little reluctantly.
She handed Sheikoh the shiny screwdriver by its slightly worn black leather grip. It looked brand new. Until one noticed the tool’s scratched and pitted end. Sheikoh wasn’t fooled by the screwdriver’s immaculate appearance. He knew the truth. All of Emili’s old tools had been overworked for years. They had been dull and blanketed with scratches and scars. The only reason they were shiny and new looking now was because Dorothi would set aside a few hours a week to painstakingly polish, sharpen and care for some of the few mementoes she had of her late older sister, Emili. Dorothi was careful to keep all of Emili’s old tools lovingly maintained.
Sheikoh carefully picked it up with his good hand and thanked Dorothi warmly. He knew exactly how much effort the child put into preserving her sister’s old possessions. As Sheikoh walked outside, he detoured over towards Dorothi and kissed her on the top of the head. In doing so, he slipped by Dorothi’s bag and flipped a case of silversteel polish and a few of Emili’s other tools out into his black sleeve. Dorothi didn’t notice a thing.
“I’ll be out for a while, Dodo-bird,” Sheikoh called over his shoulder. He didn’t especially want to see Dorothi’s anxiety clear with relief.
Sheikoh held the bag under one arm and pushed the door open with the other. Sheikoh waited expectantly for Dorothi’s goodbye for a moment before he turned his head to the quiet, young girl. She was silently playing with a pink Swifthooves toy without any enthusiasm.
‘Did I upset her… or maybe… Is she disgusted with my… with me?’ Sheikoh wondered. The thought pierced right through him; he felt like a shard of ice had lodged in his chest.
“You… want me to pick anything up?” Sheikoh asked with a trace of trepidation.
He wished he knew some way to talk to the unusually quiet Dorothi, to tell her that he loved like a sister some days and a daughter others and that she meant more to him than anyone else in the world.
Anyone left.
What?!
Anyone left?!
Sheikoh suddenly wanted to punch himself in the gut. The thought was as awful as it was untrue. The way he loved Emili and the way he loved Dorothi were two entirely different things. His love for the beautiful, blonde Emili was like a fire in his chest, second in strength only to his overpowering urge to protect Dorothi.
Sheikoh saw Emili’s sky-blue eyes every time he looked into Dorothi’s. Only, out of everyone in Octasia, the color didn’t feel stolen. It was just a part Dorothi. Emili was his moon, sparkling in the night. Distant, mysterious, and perfectly beautiful. And Dorothi was the opposite, Sheikoh’s sun. If he ever lost her, he couldn’t go on living.
Dorothi shook her head slowly without looking up from her toy. Sheikoh shook himself, trying to disperse the feeling that the 11-year-old would have been better off without him. Sheikoh tried to shrug the unclean feeling off of himself as he pushed open the door that led out to the sewer and steeled himself against the inevitable, disgusting malodor of the sewer. Sheikoh took a deep breath, his last taste of clean air for a while, and made to step out.
“Sheek?” Dorothi said suddenly.
Sheikoh turned around to look at her with concern. Dorothi was standing up now hugging herself and looking down at her feet. Her curly brown bangs fell over her frowning face. Sheikoh noticed that Dorothi was shaking gently and biting her lip.
“Before you do anything risky, you… you have to promise me that you won’t… die...” Dorothi whispered without looking up. “Like Emili…”
Sheikoh’s heart melted. He bent his head and let his black hair cover his eyes. His throat felt tight.
Dorothi didn’t need someone like him. He was a liar, a thief and a killer. He was bad for her. And someday, she was going to regret caring for him.
No.
Sheikoh stopped the thought. Whatever he was, he was all Dorothi had. He had to be the guardian she needed. The fact that he wasn’t worthy of the job meant that he had no excuse for screwing her up. He just had to do things as best he could.
Sheikoh rearranged his face into a cocky smile.
“Hey! Whatchyu sayin, Ladybug? You messing with me?” Sheikoh demanded teasingly.
Dorothi lifted her chin and met his eyes hopefully. The moment burned with unrequited hope and life.
“You’re the only person in the world who knows about my secret armor,” Sheikoh told her confidently, rapping his chest with a dull thump that made a different, peculiar note than a normal chest. He shook his hair out of his eyes and winked. “You know better than anyone how hard I am to hurt. I promise you that I’m not going anywhere, anytime soon. So you, little miss, are not allowed to worry.”
Sheikoh walked to the door and then stopped. He turned around.
“Also, you better have the remote fixed when I pick you up tomorrow.” Sheikoh raised an air fist bump to Dorothi who responded, wearing a small smile of fragile hope.
Sheikoh strode through the door to the sewer. He knew he was about to seriously wish he’d been able to repair himself in the safehouse. As always, the smell hit his face like a ton of bricks. He walked past lumpy, floating masses of unidentifiable refuse, stepped over rats and lizards that watched him with gleaming, speculative eyes. His breath came in soft gags, gasped solely from his mouth.
The disgusting, sludgy liquid in the canal lurched alongside him. Sheikoh kept his head determinedly forward, never letting his neck twist from forward vigil. It was hard enough to bear the disgusting smell without looking at stuff that hit him straight in his gag reflex. He pretended it was a river instead of a steaming pool of chemical-pounded crap. A dead, rotting mutant of a river.
When Sheikoh finally reached a spot that he’d convinced himself smelled relatively less horrible than the rest of noxious tunnels, he stopped. The air in his lungs felt slimy and unwholesome. He let it shudder out of his mouth.
“I’m just getting way too used to smelling pieces of shit,” he laughed and consequently choked.
Sheikoh started stripping off his clothes as fast as possible, tossing them against a concrete wall behind him. A misaligned torso and a pair of oddly animal legs slowly came into view. Covered in clothes Sheikoh didn’t look any different from anyone else, but now his abnormal proportions were immediately apparent. Even with synthetic skin stretched over his prosthetics.
The left side of Sheikoh’s pale chest and stomach was only noteworthy for their exemplary physique. His left pectoral muscle was hard and corded, boasting veins, and his abdominal muscles rippled down his stomach like stepping stones. He made sure to maintain the hard muscles that had saved his life more than a few times.
His right side, however, was different. His frame was perceptibly less curved from his armpit to hip, and a slightly misaligned pectoral ascetic bulged from his chest. Other than that, the right half of his chest was unnaturally flat. A bumpy pathway ran down from his right shoulder to his stomach and went around his waist like a belt. His groin boasted nothing other than a patch of Synthskin smooth as a mannequin’s.
&nb
sp; From Sheikoh’s right shoulder to the center of his right thigh, the seamless synth-skin was slashed through with a silver zipper, so he wouldn’t have to replace the moderately expensive Synthskin every time that he had to make some repair on his blacksteel skeleton. Sheikoh ran a finger from the top of the silver seam all the way down to the dead center of his right thigh. The skin covering his right side loosened and sagged, expanding until the hole that the zipper had revealed gaped like a dark cave. The dull blacksteel of his automaton limbs peaked out from inside a blanket of false skin.
Sheikoh’s blacksteel limbs stepped through the zipper hole. He wrapped the synthetic skin attached to the edges of his real skin around himself like a toga. He could tear it off easily and painlessly, but he didn’t want to have to reattach another layer when he’d finished. That would take almost an hour. ‘And it smells like crap in here,’ Sheikoh giggled to himself.
Then he focused on the task at hand. The sewer really did smell awful. He just wanted to get this over with. Sheikoh draped the sheet of skin over his shoulders like a macabre cloak so that it was out of his way.
In the dim light streaming overhead, Sheikoh took a long look at the metal garbled along his right side. His arm and legs were segmented, skeletally-thin limbs of metal wrapped in countless, tapeworm-esque wires that weaved through the frame discordantly. The right half of his chest was divided into nine, plaited sections that lent him flexibility while cradling his reengineered organs.
Worse, blobs of yellow-white, pus-like fluid sacs surrounded each of the motors. When he was wearing Synthskin, the blobs gave muscle-like form to his limbs, but when stepped out of his skin (Literally), they hung loose and sagging like slugs or leaches that had attached to black bones. Sheikoh looked like a half-rotted corpse that a university was dissecting. His broodingly handsome features perversely made him look even more demonic. Sheikoh sighed out the putrid air, and let his body fall against the wall that was as far away as the stinking, concrete bound river of filth as humanly possible.
“Or as cyborgicably possible? I’m not really a human, am I?” He wondered aloud, as he deftly unscrewed the unbroken wire attachments with practiced ease.
Strands of synaptic wire that had held his index finger onto his hand curled outwards upon coming undone. He left the last wire and the broken one screwed into the blacksteel. Luckily, the broken wire was still good; All Sheikoh had to do was reconnect the break. Synapses frayed and snapped all the time, it wasn’t a huge deal.
When a wire completely degraded though, that was a huge deal. Feet of the coils that wound through him had to be completely replaced. In the meantime, anything relying on the connection shut down. That wasn’t good, because some of those wires lead to his irredeemably damaged organs. If the wrong wire degraded, Sheikoh was dead. Overdriving was so dangerous because it was extraordinarily hard on the synaptic wires.
Sheikoh always kept a simple synapse repair kit handy. He dug a roll of paper tape and a lighter out of his faithful black jacket and taped the broken wires up adroitly, making sure the lines were connecting.
That in itself was a solution, but it was both impermanent and unreliable. Two words that Sheikoh never wanted to use to describe his trigger finger. He felt dizzy, imagining his trigger finger falling limp in the heat of battle. His stomach lurched uncomfortably. He could almost feel the bolt of plasma burning pain and death into his blood.
He shook the thought out of his head and lit held the flickering lighter under the tape until it had caught.
“One… Two… Three,” Sheikoh counted under his breath, staring at the candle-sized fire. He blew it out. Then he kept blowing. After about a minute he could touch the reattached connection that had been molten only moments ago. The tape had blackened into a tough coat of ash. Sometimes his little trick didn’t work, but it had this time. He could feel the tingle.
Sheikoh smiled his satisfaction and unscrewed the last two wires, before tossing the useless finger into the sewer sludge ahead.
He dug around in the blue bag until he pulled out a finger that felt passable. His cyborg parts were all homemade, so some of them were of much better quality than others. He clicked it into a hand joint and quickly wound and then screwed the already tangled wires into their individual indents with practiced efficiency. A minute sting that told him his nervous system had connected to the finger.
He admired the fingers of his finished hand for a moment, looking absurdly like a zombie inspecting its manicure. Then he wiggled his fingers till they blurred with speed, and a satisfied smile lit up his face. The smell of the disgusting tunnel he sat in was all but forgotten. He picked a few skin flakes out of his metal joints and flicked them away. He did a quick once-over before deciding that he didn’t need to do any more work on his prosthetics.
Sheikoh lifted himself up and slipped back into his Synthskin. He zipped it up with his repaired finger. The folds slowly shrunk over his metal limbs, wrapping him in a comfortable hug. He threw all his clothes on, except for his battered, midnight-black jacket. Sheikoh crumpled that into a ball and tossed it against the wall of the sewer and then let his body drop against the makeshift cushion. He sat back for a moment, searching his deep pockets for the tub of chromium polish.
As he cleaned her old tools, Sheikoh thought about Emili. She had been the mechanic who’d saved Sheikoh’s life all those years ago. She’d allowed him into hers and Dorothi’s little family when he’d had nowhere else to go. Her face had shined like the sun from where he had lain, perched on the precipice of death; he’d promised that he’d never forget everything Emili had done for him. Even after all these years, Sheikoh’s chest still gaped with a hollow ache at his and Dorothi’s loss.
Even after all of the years, the pain was still unbearable. It sent Sheikoh’s mind scrambling for some other, more comforting line of thought. He landed upon the only era of innocence in his hard life. That ancient addiction filled his body, the delusion that he fit somewhere inside of the grand scheme of things. Like a puzzle piece sliding into an ever changing landscape, Sheikoh .
Sheikoh had been so young when the parents had abandoned him on the side of the street. The only knowledge they had left him with was his name. He never would've survived those early years without the timely intervention of his ‘parents’, Daneil and Anima Namar, who had given him a respite from the cruel streets. That had been after Giz had vanished.
Nonetheless, their memory was stained with icy contempt.
He had been about 4 when they found him. After his strange tutelage under Giz, Sheikoh had wandered the cold streets, hopeless and alone, living among every harsh truth Interium didn’t want to face. The poor, the jails, the graveyards, the deformed, the criminals, and even, in some cases, the terminally ill were all locked within hellish, chain-link walls. Sheikoh had survived on trash and handouts, constantly on the lookout for danger, in the forms of fellow abandoned souls and starving Purmynxs’. He had been too young to feel pity for the creatures in his same position. Desperation had driven him from corner to bloodstained corner.
He’d had to learn to kill at the age another child might wake up for their first day of school. Sheikoh lived the life of hand to mouth, blade to throat, and constantly practiced the hard learned lessons of disappearing into shadows. At that point in time, Sheikoh had only existed to stumble through puddles of blood as gangsters looked on and laughed at the children scrambling to kill rather than be killed. The gangsters placed bets and threw scraps at the savages gleefully, treating them as if they were rabid Purmynxs rather than the human beings they were. Fear and blood had been the pattern woven into Sheikoh’s life. Up until the fateful day that had changed everything.
Sheikoh paused in his recollections, carefully setting the gleaming screwdriver to the side. He pulled Emili’s diamond-edged steelsaw over and began to polish its blade.
He had clumsily stolen a shiny and new Trinity XI from a balding man’s coat pocket. He had recently discovered that gangsters would give him m
oney, dots that he was able to trade for food, in exchange for shiny bits and pieces he found in other people’s pockets. He had been wondering how many dots he would get for the cellpad when he was roughly slammed against the wall.
“What do you think you’re doing, gutter rat?” the giant had demanded of him.
Sheikoh hadn’t understood what was happening. To him stealing was a game. Take whatever he could find in people’s pockets and then run away. He usually could make it out of the owner’s field of vision, laughing happily, before they’d realized what he’d taken. It had been fun.
He hadn't had any fun this time though. Hanging against the wall from arms as thick as he was, Sheikoh had never been more terrified. To this day, he remembered his body's violent shake. Sheikoh’s stomach had felt sick. He hadn't felt that desperate discomfort since the time that he had made a child's come dribble out.
The child had suddenly thrown up on the man, who, incredulous, had lifted the quivering infant and brought him home at arm’s length. The man’s wife had cleaned the two of them up. Then they had asked him endless questions. Sheikoh had been petrified as they had tried to coax any knowledge of his family out of him. He hadn't known anything about his family other than his name. He had stuttered it out and nothing else for a long time.
Finally, frightened and bewildered, Sheikoh had gasped out a sentence.
“My family wan’ me to go. I wish they had kept me. But Canniria said I’m an ugy’ lil’ shit and no one’ll ever love me,” he told the couple.
The strange women had started crying. She had picked him up in a tight hug. The man's eyes had been gleaming. He'd walked forward and embraced both his wife and the confused child who had tried to steal his cellphone. From then on the two bakers, Daneil and Anima had become Sheikoh’s adopted parents.
Sheikoh’d lived happily for a few years. He’d even taking the couple’s last name. It’d been one of the simpler chapters of his hard life. It hadn’t been perfect, though; Daneil and Anima had struggled to make ends meet. They had spent all hours of the days in their bakery, trying to earn the money to take care of him.