“What’s the development? Did the police find out who took him?”
She raised an eyebrow, but shook her head slightly. We both knew they’d never find out who took Kyle. He was such a proud advocate for the cyborg community that it had to have been anti-robot activists. Who else would have risked going after one of the most prominently outspoken members of MAR?
“What is it, then?”
“They’ve said it was hooligans,” she whispered, and I closed my eyes for just a moment. Hooligans? Truly? Is this the best anyone could come up with? Yoralil pretended there was harmony in the community, but there wasn’t. They would never admit it had been someone who disliked robots and cyborgs because if they did, they would be forced to admit there was a problem greater than them.
They would be forced to admit there was an issue they were unprepared to deal with.
“Hooligans?” I repeated, and Laura nodded. I could tell by the look on her face she didn’t believe it, either. Not for a minute.
“They won’t keep looking for him,” she said. “They suspect he’s dead.”
He was.
He was definitely dead.
No one was going to steal a person and keep them alive. If you were going to go through the trouble of kidnapping someone, you weren’t going to wait around for them to escape. You’d get the information you needed, and then you’d kill them. End of story.
Kyle hadn’t exactly been a nobody in the MAR. The Movement for the Advancement of Robotics was widespread throughout Yoralil. I didn’t know if the organization had grown to other cities. Traveling between cities was so difficult at this point that it was nearly impossible, even if you were human. You had to have a job, and a lot of money, and a willingness to leave your former life behind because weekend visits weren’t going to happen.
Still, Kyle had essentially been the face of it. His late father had been a senator, and everyone knew Kyle and Laura. Kyle especially was prominent because he’d managed his father’s campaign, once upon a time.
Kyle had learned how to speak in public and hadn’t been afraid to tell people how it was. He’d been brave and bold. He hadn’t stepped down or backed off when people had given him a hard time. He’d believed in himself, and he’d believed in his cause.
And now he was gone.
I shook my head, still not quite believing it. The idea of him passing away was too tricky, too difficult. The idea of him being stolen away, of him being tortured or hurt, was practically unbearable.
I couldn’t imagine how Laura was feeling.
This was her brother, after all.
He was more than just some punk she’d grown up with. He was her very best friend. Laura would never tell Gertrude how she was truly feeling. That wasn’t her style. Gertrude could guess, however, that having Kyle vanish was getting to Laura in the very worst way. It was probably breaking her slowly, one moment at a time.
It was probably making her question everything she knew.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” I finally said. It seemed like all I was doing was apologizing to people for things that were out of my control, like “I’m sorry the world is a terrible place. I’m sorry things are dark. I’m sorry so much of the world is nasty.”
This was the way the world worked.
Laura and I stood smoking, pipes in hand, and stared quietly at the world around us. The rush of technology was everywhere, it seemed, and there was a thin haze of pollution that coated us and the things around us. The robots were here to stay, I thought, watching as one walked down the road across from us.
The robot looked toward us with its calculating gaze. How much of what we did was it recording? How much of what we did was it analyzing? How much of our world was completely under the influence of this creature, this being?
How much did the robot know, and how much was it going to impact us?
“I don’t like the robots,” I said quietly. It was the first time I’d said it out loud.
“I know,” Laura agreed.
“How?” Laura had a way of knowing things I’d never understand, but I wanted to know why she thought I disliked the metal men. How did she know I disliked them? Hated them, even?
How had she figured that I preferred a world where humans were humans?
“Why do you think I told Jack to hire you?” She shook her head, breathing out. A puff of smoke escaped her lips and she smiled. “I thought it would be a good chance for you to get to know one.”
“What?” I didn’t understand. “What are you talking about?”
Laura’s eyes narrowed. “He hasn’t told you?”
“Told me what?”
She shook her head and puffed on her pipe.
“Laura?”
She was silent, smoking, and staring off at the world.
“When I met you, I saw so much of myself in you,” she said finally. “You’re young, and you were full of hope. I think some of that hope is gone now,” she looked me up and down, and I nodded slowly. I didn’t want to admit this to her, but she was correct.
“Things aren’t what I expected.”
“Of course they aren’t. They never are.”
“I thought Yoralil would be a fresh start.”
“It was a fresh start, Gertrude. It just wasn’t the one you wanted.”
“What do you mean?”
“You had this idea that all of your problems would disappear if you could just get away from the place where your father died. If you could just get away from the place where your mother didn’t want you, then everything would be okay, but that’s not the way the world works, love. That’s not how this thing goes.”
She was right.
Again.
I had run away from my problems, but they had followed me. I wasn’t sure how, but the things I thought I would be able to escape had somehow captured me even more, digging their tentacles into the iciness of my heart.
“So I sent you to Jack because I thought maybe he could show you that Yoralil isn’t so bad. It has its problems, but not all cyborgs are evil, honey. Haven’t you learned that yet?”
And then it hit me.
Suddenly, I understood what Laura was saying.
Suddenly, everything made sense.
Jack wasn’t human at all.
He was a cyborg, and I’d started to fall in love with him.
I put out my pipe.
Somehow, I didn’t feel like smoking anymore.
Eight
When I arrived at his house that night, Jack opened the door with a grin. His smile faded as soon as he saw the look on my face, as soon as I reached for his arm. I pushed up his sleeve, and he didn’t resist as I looked at his mark.
“Were you going to tell me?” I asked quietly.
“Let’s get you out of the rain,” he said.
I allowed him to guide me into the house and to help me out of my wet things. My overcoat, my hat, and my bag were all soaked. I had walked slowly in the rain, completely caught up in my feelings and emotions.
Jack was a cyborg.
I never would have known.
Somehow, this fact alone was what bothered me. I disliked that he had deceived me, that he hadn’t revealed who – or what – he was. The fact that I couldn’t tell the difference between a human and a robot, though?
That was far worse.
I should have been able to tell he wasn’t a normal man. I should have known he wasn’t an ordinary man. I stood silently with tears streaming down my cheeks as Jack carefully unbuttoned my overcoat. He laid it over the sofa in front of the fire, and then he returned to take off my hat. He set that, along with my bag, in front of the fire, and then he came back to me.
He stood there, looking at me, and he took my hands in his.
His hands weren’t cold.
I always supposed a cyborg’s body would be cold, incapable of warmth or pleasure, but that wasn’t the case. Jack’s hands were warm. They were…normal.
“Were you going to tell me?
” I repeated my question, this time more quietly.
“No.”
The word hung in the air between us. The tension was so thick I could barely move. He wasn’t going to tell me. He was going to keep this from me. This huge, terrible secret was something he didn’t want me to know. He didn’t want me to know that he wasn’t a normal human. He wanted to keep that secret for himself.
Could I blame him?
Jack knew I didn’t like cyborgs. They were responsible for my father’s death, after all. They were the reason I didn’t have a dad anymore. They were the reason I didn’t have a place in Eliksburg.
After my father died, Mom changed.
Everything I thought I had known was different.
She was different.
I was different.
People were different.
The world no longer felt safe, and I was alone.
And then Jack happened.
He whirled into my life like a hurricane. He was handsome and smart and interesting, and he needed me. He depended on me. We spent hours talking about different things, and we spent so much time exploring the books I was working on for him.
But then Laura told me the truth about him, and everything changed.
“Why weren’t you going to tell me?” I asked. I wanted to know. Needed. I needed to know why he didn’t want to share this information with me. Was he trying to protect me? Was he trying to protect himself?
“Gertrude,” he said quietly. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s always complicated,” I whispered. “Everything about the entire world is complicated. We’re on the verge of war, Jack.”
Saying it out loud made my heart drop, but we both knew it was true. It had come to this, but I already knew how it would end. When it came down to it, humans were no match for machines. We couldn’t be.
We were weak, and small, and fragile.
“The way I feel about you isn’t complicated,” Jack said, and I stilled. We hadn’t talked like this before. I hadn’t admitted to him that the past few weeks had been the best of my life. I hadn’t told him that he was the most incredible man I’d ever met. I hadn’t told him the only time I ever felt safe was when I was with him, in his house, sitting across from him.
He made me feel like everything was going to be okay.
He protected me, and that was something I’d never had before.
Jack wrapped his arms around me, and I began to cry on his shoulder. It wasn’t fair. The entire world wasn’t fair. The way this was happening wasn’t fair.
“I love you, Gertrude Morgan,” he whispered. He pulled me closer to himself. “And no matter what you decide, I will always love you.”
“How could this ever work between us?” I asked him the question because I didn’t want to admit to myself that I felt the same way. Jack was like a star shining in the darkness of my heart. He was like warm sunshine in the middle of winter. He was everything to me, and it didn’t matter that his heart beat differently than mine.
“We’ll find a way, Gertrude. We’ll find a way.”
He held me for a long time, and I wondered if he was right. I wondered if there truly was a way we could figure this thing out. More people had gone missing. It wasn’t just Kyle anymore. There had been almost one disappearance per day since Kyle was taken, and the world felt small and tight.
Everything was constrictive, and sometimes it seemed like I couldn’t breathe, but maybe it was time to take a chance. Maybe it was time to start thinking about a world greater than myself.
I had come to Yoralil for a fresh start, and maybe that’s what I was getting. It wasn’t the way I thought it was going to be, but nothing ever was. The idea of a predictable life was a pipe dream. It was something that no one ever really got. No matter how much I wanted to pretend that my life here was supposed to be perfect, the reality was that life was hard anywhere.
No matter where you lived, no matter who you were, life was hard.
And it just got a whole lot harder for Jack.
“I’m scared,” I told him.
“About the resistance?”
“I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“It won’t.”
He sounded confident. Obviously, this wasn’t his first time thinking about the future. It wasn’t his first day being a cyborg. He knew his life held risks other people didn’t experience. He was prepared for that. He was ready.
I was not.
The idea of war loomed ahead, and it was something I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. I didn’t like the idea that something bad could happen. I hated the thought that I had just started to understand life in Yoralil, and it was going to change again.
I hated the idea that something might happen to Jack when we had just found each other.
I pulled him closer.
He wasn’t what I thought. I should have tried harder to stay mad at him, to be upset, but somehow, I couldn’t. Jack was Jack. Cyborg or human, he was Jack. I had judged the cyborgs too quickly, assumed they were all like the one who killed my father. I had misjudged them, and I had lost valuable time.
I should have joined MAR when I first arrived in Yoralil. I should have tried harder to make the cyborgs feel accepted. I should have done all of these things, but I hadn’t. I had met Jack, and I had assumed he was human. I had assumed he was normal. I had assumed he was just like me, but he wasn’t.
I had pushed away his kind for so long because of what happened to my father, but the reality was that humans didn’t exactly have the best track record, either.
We all made mistakes.
We were all broken.
I just hoped it wasn’t too late for us.
Nine
Jack held Gertrude for a long time. He had known she would find out eventually that he wasn’t human, but he had hoped they would have more time before she discovered his secret. He knew she would be upset with him. He knew she would be angry, that she would feel deceived.
He had been right. She had felt tricked, to a certain extent, but there was nothing he could do about that now. All he could do was hope things would be okay. All he could do was trust that fate was on their side.
Eventually, the sun began to set and the house was cast into darkness.
“We should turn on some lights,” she whispered, looking up at him, but he shook his head.
“The electricity has been shut down to this part of the city,” he told her. Gertrude had been at work all day in the dusty basement with Laura. She hadn’t known that in this part of the city, there had been fights earlier in the day. The police had shut off the power and water in order to flush out the resistance. It was the first step, but there would be more.
Soon there would be rioting, if there wasn’t already.
Soon there would be war.
“Gertrude,” he said slowly, but she shook her head.
“If you’re going to tell me to get out while I can,” she whispered, “I won’t.”
“You should think about your future.”
“You are my future.”
His little brass heart had never felt the way it did when she whispered those words to him. Jack was filled with an emotion he could only describe as joy, as pure happiness. He was filled with something that made him instantly calm.
He had never known the joy that came from being loved by another. Oh, his father had loved him. Brandon had been an incredible person: brave and bold and smart. He had been wise, and he had been kind, but he had loved Jack in the way someone might love a chair they crafted.
Jack had been Brandon’s creation: his first cyborg.
He had been his son, but he was still a creation.
He was still something formulated.
He was still something that had been built, that had been made.
Gertrude hadn’t made Jack. She hadn’t poured over him as a labor of love. She hadn’t welded him together in the early hours of the morning. No, their connection was different. She had found
him when he needed someone, when he needed her, and she had accepted him.
Oh, she thought he was human. Brandon had done good work on Jack. Jack looked almost entirely ordinary. He was a man, through-and-through, at least in every way that mattered.
His heart was different, though.
He didn’t pump blood.
He was still, at his core, made of metal.
Gertrude hadn’t liked the cyborgs when he’d first met her. Laura had warned him about that. Oh, Gertrude had never told Laura she disliked the robots, but it had been obvious. She had always been uncomfortable around the metalheads. She had always felt ill at ease, and her discomfort had been obvious.
Around Jack, though, she had warmed. She had calmed down, and she had opened up to him in ways he could never have imagined.
He had fallen in love with her over the past few weeks. Jack had dared to dream of peace in the world, and he had dared to dream of safety for the cyborgs, but he had never once, in all of his days, dared to dream about falling in love.
Gertrude had surprised him.
She had made each day worth living.
Ten
I didn’t leave Jack’s house that night, or the next. Eventually, I would have to wander back to Candle Avenue and retrieve my meager possessions, but for awhile, I wanted to stay with him. There was a safety at his place, a certain comfort that couldn’t be replicated in any other way.
On the third night, the riots started, and Jack and I moved to one of the upstairs rooms. I hated the idea that someone might break in and destroy the books and all of the hard work I’d put into cataloguing and preserving them, but there was nothing we could do.
As we hid together, Jack explained the history of the house. It had been his father’s house, as he’d told me, but now I knew his father was the man who created him. The books had been his father’s favorite possession, but Jack could no longer bear to look at them.
He wanted to sell them, wanted to send them out in the world.
Ideas should be shared.
Only now, the ideas being shared were ones of hate, of horror, of fear. The time for leaving Yoralil came and went. I could have run away. I could have left before the rioting grew beyond stopping. I could have left the city and watched it burn, but I couldn’t leave Jack.
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