by A. W. Cross
Someone lit me on fire. My body bent, my bones cracked. I wanted to laugh, to show them my strength, but I forgot where my mouth was. Skin tore underneath my fingernails, bunching in ribbons and falling to the floor.
This had better be worth it. I’d better get what they’ve promised me. All my life I’d wanted to be one of them. But only now, in the eleventh hour, were they desperate enough to use me. But they would see my worth. I’d make them. And they’d give me what was owed.
I had debased myself for them, for us all. Together, we would level the playing field. I would give them their future, and they would give me what I deserved. They couldn’t refuse me after this. No. They would celebrate me almost as much as what was to come.
This was my last chance, but it was also theirs.
I was their savior, and if they tried to crucify me this time, I would end them.
“Who are they to tell us what we can and cannot do with our own bodies? It’s not just about becoming faster, stronger, or smarter. For the chronically ill, it’s about having a reasonable quality of life. And for the terminally ill, it’s literally a matter of life and death. Complete cyberization would give us the ability to transcend the prisons of our damaged and dying bodies. Who are the Terrans and the Cosmists to tell me I cannot, while they themselves not only get to live the way they choose, but to live?
—Dolan Smythe, advocate; Cyborgs for Life, 2040
I hadn’t meant to follow that thread. It was a reflex, an escape. One I regretted. My fingers itched, desperate to claw at my eyes. Now I was aware again, although I was no longer sure what was real. Was Tor a vision? No. His hands were around my neck, the empty air beneath my feet.
We both panted: me gasping for air, him from rage and fear. He held me pinned against the wall, his knee between my legs. Bloody tracks raked his face, and something sticky covered my fingernails.
Within the expanding brown and gold pleats of his irises, I saw them. The nanites, millions of tiny machines propelled by gilded filaments toward the black pinprick of his pupil. As they converged in the center, his iris overflowed, and the nanites streamed down his face in veins of precious metal.
I’m hallucinating.
Even when he was trying to kill me, he was beautiful. Especially when. I had the sudden wild urge to kiss him, to touch the lips that were pulled back from his teeth, and run my fingers over the cut stone of his face. Hysteria tried to force its way out of my throat and managed only a pathetic gurgle.
His eyes were clear. He saw me, every inch of me, and in that moment, I understood that I didn’t know him at all. Darkness frayed the edges of my vision. I wanted to fight back, but I had nothing left. Whatever gifts my transformation had given me, the physical strength to rival his wasn’t one of them.
He pulled me forward then slammed me back again, smashing my spine against the hard plaster. The third time, something gave way.
I traced my finger down the tattoo on his lower lip. His skin was firm and smooth, marred only by a faint scar through the left side of his mouth.
Do I have enough strength for one last attack?
Air, tasting of smoke and blood, rushed into my lungs.
I was still pinned to the wall, but he’d dropped his hands from my throat to my shoulders. He held them gently, although his breath was still coming fast. He leaned his forehead against mine as he fought for control.
I didn’t want to move too quickly for fear of reigniting him. I crept my fingers up the side of his face again, and he broke, dropping to his knees. Without the support, I slid to the ground. My legs were unfeeling, unmoving, and I suspected he’d broken something in my back.
He tightened his fingers on my shoulders, and I winced, afraid we were going to start all over again. He yanked his hands from me, and clenched them uncertainly before pressing them against the floor.
“Ailith.” He spoke with something deeper than regret. “Ailith, I’m sorry, I—”
I couldn’t stop touching his face. I needed to feel him. That damned voice whispered in my ear, “Always.” If I’d been able to lean forward, I would’ve kissed him. I’ve finally lost my mind.
“Tor?”
“What are you?” he asked again, softly this time.
“I-I’m not sure what you mean.”
He searched my face. Whatever he saw knocked the air out of him, but saved me. “That vision you had, the last one. It was me.”
“What do you mean, it was you?”
“I mean, it was me. That happened to me. What you…saw. It was real. She was real. That was my life…before.”
My stomach went cold, the white kind of chill that had filled it when the doctors told me that, despite all their technology, there was nothing else they could do for me. The iciness was a spike, trying to pierce its way beyond my stomach and out through my mouth.
I recalled the hollowness of being inside him, the emptiness. I couldn’t reconcile that with the Tor I knew, but now, with his wildness unbound, I caught a glimpse of that former man, and my heart hurt for him.
He released my shoulders, and I slumped onto the floor. The solid hardness of the wood was soothing, although from that angle, I noticed some dust balls I’d missed under the couch.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“It’s okay.” I was shocked at my own calmness, although I flinched when he raised a hand toward me.
His face blanched. “Ailith, please. Let’s get off this floor. We need to talk.”
“I can’t. I think you cracked something.” I was still trying to swallow around the thickness in my throat.
The color drained from his face, his tattoos standing out in vivid detail. “I— Oh, Ailith.”
“Tor, it’s okay. It won’t last. Give me a few minutes.” The nanites tingled inside me, at work repairing the damage. “Look.” I wiggled my toes to show him. Only, they didn’t actually move. “Okay, I might need more than a few minutes. I don’t think it’s actually broken, just a bit cracked.”
“Does it hurt?” His voice caught. “I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did. You did mean it. Maybe not to hurt me this badly, but you wanted to hurt me. But I get it. I probably would’ve reacted the same. Not that I’d do too much damage to you with this body.” I hoped my smile was convincing.
“I believe your body could do me a lot of damage,” he muttered under his breath.
“What?”
He rocked onto his heels and stood. “I’ll be right back.”
He returned a few minutes later with a pillow and some blankets. After he’d tucked the blankets around me, he placed the pillow on his lap and gently eased my head on to it. The prickling of so many nanites at work made me want to throw up. Did all of them come running in an emergency like this? It felt like it. I needed some distraction.
“What did you mean, it was your life, before?”
He stiffened. “Before the war, I was an enforcer for a syndicate.”
“Who was she? That girl, the one you…”
He took a deep breath. “No one.”
“She didn’t seem like no one.” His teeth were grinding against each other. Should I let it go?
He didn’t answer for a long time. When he did, his words were a mix of resentment and sadness. “She was my boss’s daughter. The reason I got involved with the syndicate in the first place. We met in high school. When we began dating, he offered me the position working for him.”
I remembered his loathing and anger. “You loved her?”
“Yes, very much. At first. But then… Eventually, I ended up hating her as much as I loved her. As I’m sure you felt.” His voice was tight, and I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want someone to be able to see into my head either. I wanted to ask him more about her because I wanted to hate her too, but I had the feeling that line of questioning would shut him down.
“Your tattoos?”
“Yes. I got them from the syndicate. They’re how people identified me. The first time they saw me
was a warning. The second… I’ve done terrible things.” In his voice were a thousand disturbing memories.
“Is that why you became a cyborg?” My throat was better now. I sounded almost human.
“Yes. I believed it would be my way out. They planned to still use me against their enemies, but I was going to take my mother and run. Then, the war happened.”
“And we were taken to the bunker?”
“Yes.”
“How…how do you know that your mother is dead?” I was hoping he’d only made an educated guess. If he wasn’t sure, there was a chance my father was still alive.
“I went to find her. She lived near the harbor in Vancouver. Parts of it were still burning when I arrived. Can you believe that?”
I caught a flicker in my mind: asphalt like lava; mountains of twisted metal and glass. Ash. Unbearable heat. Nothing was where it was supposed to be, not even the bones.
“You left me alone to go find her? On the coast? That would’ve taken you weeks! And you left me…” I pictured myself, asleep and vulnerable. Then, I was ashamed. “Sorry, I—”
He raised his hand, his fingers spread. “Five days, to be exact. Geographically, we were closer than we are now, somewhere near Aelshore. Since vehicles stopped working when the satellites went down, I had to walk nearly eighteen hours a day. Good thing we’re faster now. I didn’t know you. I didn’t… Well, anyway, I made sure the entrance was invisible. The bunker was built to be a secret.” He changed the subject. “Where was your father when…everything happened?”
“I assume he was at home on the farm, near Goldnesse. Did you… I mean, was Goldnesse still there?”
His lips made a thin line. “Not most of it. And that was a long time ago.”
My stomach twisted. “I—We weren’t on speaking terms. He didn’t approve of the Pantheon Modern program. Staunch Terran, my father. He was able to pretend he was fine about it up until the night before I went in. Then he let me know how he really felt.” I tried to smile, but it came out a grimace.
“But weren’t you going to die without it?”
“Yes, but—”
“But what? He wanted you to die?” His voice was raised, his lip curled in disgust.
“No, of course not!” Although I wasn’t sure that was the truth, I needed to defend him. No matter what may have happened toward the end, he was still my father. Or had been. “It’s complicated.”
“Doesn’t sound complicated.”
“Well, it was.” My back felt healed now, if a bit weak. I was fairly certain I could sit up, but despite the uncomfortable conversation, I was more at ease than I’d been since I woke. I found being near him soothing, touching him, more so.
I gave my toes an experimental wiggle. Good as new. Propping myself up, I regarded him. “How long did it take you to get used to that? To the healing?”
“Only a few weeks. They showed me when I came out of the procedure, so I knew what to expect. Kind of. I did think it would be even faster, instantaneous, like you used to see on TV. But still, it’s pretty useful.”
“I’ll say. Lucky for you or you’d have to carry me around with you forever.”
“Ailith—” He reached out and cupped my cheek, running his thumb over my cheekbone.
The other voice inside me arched its back and purred.
“Sorry, it was a joke,” I blurted. Shut up, Ailith.
He dropped his hand. “I’d better go see to the fire.”
Dammit.
He helped me stand, but as he stepped away, my legs gave out. Thanks to that inhuman speed, he managed to scoop me up before I hit the floor. As he carried me to the couch, the pulse in his neck beat rapidly against my temple, giving him away. He laid me down so gently I wanted to cry.
I finally asked the question I was sure had also been on his mind. “Tor, if what I saw was one of your memories, then what about the others? What if they’re also memories? What if it’s another cyborg super-power, like the strength and the healing?”
Comprehension dawned on his face.
“And if they are memories, whose memories are they?”
“If you are, on one hand, augmenting humans with mechanical components at the cellular level, and on the other, augmenting robots with biological components at their cellular level, where does the separation exist? At what point does one become human or machine? If they are created in the same way, are they not then, at every level, the same?”
—Della van Natta, Artificial Life or Artificial Hope?
Cindra kept apologizing to me. She was sorry she’d gotten us into our current situation; it was her fault the Terrans had captured us. I should’ve told her it wasn’t—it was mine—but I didn’t want her to be mad at me. Not right now, anyway. There would be time for that later. If she knew I’d let it happen, she would be angry.
It was kind of her fault anyway. She was the one who’d wanted to stop and help them. But I’d known they would discover what we were. I’d known they would take us. I should’ve taken better care to keep us hidden. But once they’d seen us, there was only one way to stay on the path we needed to take. It was our best hope for the future.
I would explain everything to her soon, when we were safe. She would forgive me. She would be happy because we’d have found Ailith. They would love each other like sisters, so she couldn’t be mad.
It was going to hurt. I’d tried to convince them that the nanites only worked on us, that if they tried to use them, they would die. Cindra should never have told them what we were. It wasn’t her fault, though. They’d tricked her. She’d only wanted to help them. She’d assumed that, after everything that had happened, our differences wouldn’t matter anymore.
They’d known right away that we were different. Our skin was smooth, free of the damage they themselves had suffered—and, man, had they suffered.
And, of course, there was my eyes.
The whites had been jet-black ever since I’d become a cyborg, and they’d given us away.
Would they have treated us better if we’d appeared less human? Or at the very least, less perfectly human? Maybe if we’d been wearing coats. They should’ve left us coats in the bunker, even if it had been the middle of summer.
Cindra had been very upset when the Terrans told her about the war. Five years was a long time. Especially when you woke up and everyone was gone. I didn’t mind as much.
I’d wanted us to follow the signal, the one triggered after we’d left the bunker, right on time. Cindra had wanted to go in another direction, to another home, but I’d convinced her we needed to follow what was pulling at us. It was a homing signal. We were being assembled. I was sure of it. We needed to find the source so things could begin. Otherwise, everything that had happened would have been for nothing. We needed to stay on this path to achieve the best possible outcome.
The Terrans were going to take our nanites; I’d heard them talking. They would start today, when they’d decided how to keep them working. They didn’t believe me when I’d told them they would die. I didn’t want the Terrans to die because then they would kill us. We needed to stay alive. We had a purpose.
Cindra was crying again, about someone called Asche. I wanted to comfort her, so I stroked her hair. My mother had liked it when I stroked her hair. It made Cindra cry harder, but she didn’t want me to stop. I sang to her; my mother had liked that too.
They told me to stop singing because it was making some of the children cry. They must’ve been born after the war. What did they think of us? Did they know about the sun? I had never thought much about it until it was gone.
They cut my arm and watched the blood closely as it dripped into the basin, trying to see the nanites. When I laughed, it made them angry. They saw the cut slowly close and assumed the nanites would heal them the same way.
The women stared at Cindra, touching their own faces and hair. They were jealous of her exotic tawny skin, her firmness, her muscles that were from health, rather than utility. I could tell t
hey wanted to cut off her long, silky hair so the men wouldn’t like her more than them. One of them spat at her. They pretended it was because she was a cyborg.
The men weren’t jealous of me. They believed I was weak, and I had to let them think they were right. They’d decided that cuts were one thing to fix, broken bones another. They wondered just how much we could heal. I had to let them. Now was not the time to be who we were.
I—
Hello, Ailith. I’ve been waiting for you. I’m Pax. Have you been there, inside me, for long?
Please, ignore me if I scream.
“When you begin to combine man with machine, surely that is tantamount to you handing them a slice of ambrosia and saying, “here, now you are as God?”
— Sarah Weiland, President of the Preserve Terra Society, 2039
Please, ignore me if I scream.
“Tor!” I shouldn’t have been yelling. Someone could’ve heard me and come looking for us, but I didn’t know what else to do. He’d gone off hunting by himself. We’d been awkward around each other all morning, avoiding eye contact and answering with only single words. Part of it was the tension that had lain thickly between us since yesterday, and part was the desire to leave. Well, my desire anyway.
Though Tor felt the pull as keenly as I did, he was suspicious of it. I wanted to follow it. Tor suspected it was a trap, and I didn’t blame him. In fact, a small part of me agreed. But what if it wasn’t? I wouldn’t admit it to him, but another part of me wondered if my father was at the end of it, that it was his way of trying to find me. And if not that, what if others like us were there? In a safe place? It was getting harder for me to ignore.
“Tor!” Where was he? He wouldn’t have gone far. He wouldn’t have left me. Would he? “Tor!” My throat was beginning to ache in the cold.