by A. W. Cross
They said we were free now, able to live openly as we were. I didn’t want that freedom. I wanted to be home, in my own bed, waking up to the odor of steaming dough and fresh chives. I wanted to argue with my mother about my unruly hair, hear her mourn the thickness of my waist.
I wanted my father to peer over his glasses and newspaper at me and ask me where I was going. I’d say the library, but we’d both know I was going to meet Julien. I wanted him to sigh and shake his head and wonder what would become of me.
Julien. I didn’t love him then, but I did now. His crooked smile and bad-boy haircut. The way he knew I was too good for him.
Part of me wanted to leave here, to go and find them all. If anyone was strong enough to survive a war, it was my mother—purely out of spite, if nothing else. But I wasn’t strong enough. I’d never been strong enough for anything. Not to be the woman my parents had wanted me to be, but not to be my own woman either. It was a simple truth: I wasn’t able to survive.
A boy lived on the other side of my wall. Adrian. He was going to help me. We were going to help each other.
A soft tapping echoed on the wall next to my head. It was time.
“How would we choose who could become a cyborg? Surely you couldn’t let just anyone do it. What if a psychopath wanted to become a cyborg? What then? You would practically be handing them the keys to the kingdom at that point. So, who’s to say who could do it? Would the weak be given priority? The sick? Or would the choice go, as it so often does, to the highest bidder?”
—Derek Wills, Preserve Terra Society, 2039
“Anything?” Tor’s voice drew me back to the present, our present.
“I... No. I need to get back to her.” I squeezed my eyes shut, as though that would make a difference. I wanted to push past the tightness in her throat, to stand in the empty place where her heart had been and anchor it there.
“Ailith!” Tor wrapped his fingers around my upper arms. “What’s happening?”
“Something’s wrong with her.”
“With who? The woman in the bunker?”
“No. One of us. She’s home. But she’s… Oh, Tor. I’ve been in her before. She never wanted to become one of us. Her parents…and now she’s—” My nails tore at the fabric of my coat.
“Ailith, stop.” He crushed me to his chest, knocking the air out of me.
“Tor, her grief. I can’t…we have to help her.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s home. We have to go home.”
“Ailith, we don’t know where ‘home’ is.”
“She’s one of us. I think she’s going to do something. She—” I twisted in his arms, trying to break free. I may as well have tried to free myself from a stone.
“Ailith.” His tone was conciliatory. “I know. I know you want to help her. But you can’t be everywhere at once. And right now, you’re here.”
He was right, of course, but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“Look, we’ll find her, I promise.” His fingers were dry and dusty as they cupped my jaw, like my father’s after a spring of planting potatoes. “Right now, we have to deal with what’s in front of us. I’m not trying to be cruel, and I’m not going to pretend to understand how you, either of you, feel. But the only way to get to her is to keep moving forward. Yes?”
“Yes.” I sounded petulant. But he was right. I searched for her thread again. It was dull, but it was still lit. For now.
Focus. He’s right. We’ll get there .
He opened his arms tentatively, as though he were expecting me to run. “Are you good?”
I nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”
***
The air in the bunker was acrid and sour, and as cold as if we’d sunk into an icy lake. Tor tried the control panel set into the wall at the bottom of the stairs. To our surprise, the panel responded with a judder and whir, and a sickly yellow light filled the bunker. As soon as it had, I regretted it, regretted ever coming here.
Blood was everywhere, arcing in delicate sprays across the curved ceiling and walls. The room was different than it had been in my vision, the furniture overturned, shards of glass and colored enamel littering the floor. But I was sure.
“Tor, this is it. I’ve been here. In her.”
I couldn’t see her, even though the room was small. Not at first.
“Ailith, you’d better go outside,” Tor said, his voice low.
“What? Why—” And there she was. In the corner of the room stood a standard service robot, a model so basic even the most cash-strapped households had one. They’d been built to avoid the uncanny valley altogether: their squat cylindrical shape was old-fashioned now, or rather, had been before the war.
Her head had been placed on top of the bot like a garish crown. She was perfectly preserved; not a hint of decomposition marked her skin. I remembered being inside her, her desperation at odds with the composed face before me. Black hair fell down the back of the robot. The onyx curls must have once been striking, but now they hung in lank, blood-soaked strands.
Tor swore under his breath in the language I’d found so comforting. I waited for my stomach to object, given how quickly it had surrendered before, but a faint grumble was all it mustered.
That’s right, choose your battles.
We saw her body now, on its back in the bed, the lines visible through the thin linen. I didn’t want to think about what else he may have done to her.
“Why does she look like that? Why hasn’t she decomposed?” I whispered.
“It’s pretty cold and dry down here. Is it definitely her? Is she familiar to you?” he asked.
“Yes. I remember her hair. Tor, he cut her head off.”
“Well, he didn’t lie about that part,” he reminded me gently. “He did say he’d killed her. That she was infected with some kind of virus.”
“Do you think that’s true?”
“Do you?”
“She didn’t feel infected. But there was something she had to do. I don’t think it was a virus, though.”
Tor was silent as he examined her remains. “No,” he agreed. “I don’t think so either. I would’ve found his story more believable if he hadn’t placed her head there.” He indicated the service bot. “Maybe she was up to something. But that, that’s some kind of personal message. What the message is, probably only he knows for sure.”
Is Tor speaking from personal experience? “What do we do?”
“Nothing. We don’t have the tech to tell for sure whether or not she carried a virus. There’s a small chance he’s telling the truth.”
“Tor? Do you think we—Could we resurrect her?” I remembered the man Oliver had brought back from the dead. Yes, he’d died afterward, but only because his body wasn’t compatible with the nanites. Hers was.
Tor pressed his lips together. “No, I don’t think we can. Not after this much time.” He gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze.
“We should at least give her a funeral of some kind.” I couldn’t bear leaving her like that, her head standing sentry over her own corpse. Undignified and vulnerable.
“Well, we can’t bury her. I could probably break through the permafrost, but I don’t think these shovels will.” He indicated the tools in the tiny storage cupboard.
“We’ll burn her.”
“Okay.” He started toward her.
“No. No, Tor, let me. Please.”
He hesitated as though he were about to protest, but he didn’t. “If you’re sure. I’ll go and build a pyre. Ailith?” He turned back to me. “We can’t stay to see her off. A fire might draw some unwanted attention.”
I waited until Tor left the bunker before pulling the sheets off her body. The insides of her thighs seemed untouched. A small part of me was grateful. That he’d taken her life was bad enough, but at least he hadn’t degraded her further.
Her body hadn’t fared as well as her head. Her belly was soft and bloated. She’d clearly been a tall woman in life, b
ut any curves she’d had were gone, soaked into the sheets with a sickly-sweet tang. Skin, flaking with dried blood, clung to her jutting hip bones, tiny splits opening over the sharpest peaks.
The water tank in the bunker was half full. I washed the evidence of violence from her body, although there was nothing I could do about the stump of her neck. An odd mark ringed her left thumb around the nail, as though the skin had been worn away.
I rubbed my thumbnail with my index finger, making quick circles.
I found a fresh sheet in the storage cupboard and laid it on the floor next to the bed. I lifted her body onto the sheet as gently as I could and crossed her arms over her stomach.
So far, so good. Now for her head.
I carefully washed her face then rinsed the blood from her hair and combed it out. She looked younger now, like a sleeping schoolgirl. I wished I could wake her up, ask for her version of events.
Does it even matter?
And then she opened her eyes.
No sense was left in me to scream. Only my fingers moved, digging my nails into my palms.
It’s not real. It’s a fragment. A memory. It has to be.
Only, it wasn’t. Her gaze crawled over me, searching for my face. When she found it, her mouth opened, and frozen, I waited for her to speak. Instead, she bit down, hard. Her jaws kept snapping, gnashing her teeth as though she would devour all the air in the room until only I was left and then she would consume me too.
As I stood, rooted to the spot, her teeth chipped and cracked, and her head teetered dangerously close to the edge of her pedestal. The idea of her head hitting the floor, the wet smack it would make, the grinding of her teeth against the concrete as she hunted me down finally woke me. I snatched a blood-streaked towel off the floor, ready to capture her when she toppled.
As suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Her eyes fell to half-mast, and her jaw slackened. I reached out to her in my mind, trying to find her thread. There. It disintegrated before I reached it, the fragments dissolving into nothingness. She was gone; this time, I was sure.
I wiped fragments of enamel off her lips then laid her head against the opening of her neck, draping her hair over the seam. I tried wrapping her the way I remembered the ancient mummies in museums, but since I hadn’t had a lot of practice at this sort of thing, the result was clumsy.
Should I call Tor down for this part? He’d probably had experience wrapping bodies. No. He might be insulted.
I did the best I could, and finally, it was done.
***
“Are you going to tell me what happened down there?” Tor asked as we placed her body on the pyre and covered her with small sticks and handfuls of dried moss. I hadn’t said a word since we’d carried her body out of the bunker, but he’d seen the crescent-moon wounds on my palms.
“Nothing much. Just the usual visions.” I forced a smile. I just can’t. I’d like to stave off losing my mind for as long as possible, thank you very much.
“Should we say something?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound trite. “I wish we’d known you in life.” It was true, at least, even if it wasn’t altruistic. If we’d met her when she was alive, we would’ve been able to tell if Oliver had told us the truth, and we would’ve had a better idea of what kind of man he was: savior or monster.
We held hands as she burned, the smoke twisting up through the bones of the forest. I tried again to reach out to Pax. His thread felt patchy; he must’ve been sleeping. Considering what they were going through, it was best to let him. It wasn’t like I had good news to give them anyway.
“Ailith? We have to go.” Tor had stayed longer than he’d wanted, for me.
He was right; we couldn’t stay here.
As we left the clearing, the presence again made itself felt, the one that had been following us.
Him.
Whoever was following us was a person. He may have been hidden, but I felt him, far back in the woods, watching.
“I will stand guard.”
The voice sounded in my head; the elusive thread flared.
“Who are you?”
Nothing. The thread withdrew.
“Thank you,” I whispered, hoping the smoke carried my message to him.
We’d walked for barely twenty minutes when two of my threads began to flicker.
“The creation of cyborgs is, without a doubt, one of the vilest actions of the 21st century. The purpose of creating artilects is to birth a perfect being, uncontaminated by human frailties and failings. To dilute that perfection by polluting it with the very characteristics we’re trying to raise the human race above is an insult to the very nature of our intelligence and goals for humanity.”
—Ethan Strong, Novus Corporation, 2039
The android’s voice echoed in my head. Over and over, she spoke to me.
“You are very handsome.”
The nanites were inside me, breaking me open, climbing inside and devouring me. I was becoming like her, one cell at a time.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. They’d told me I would still be human. They’d lied. I wasn’t human. I never would be. No one would ever be human again. How could they?
A strength was growing inside me; I was afraid of it. What good came of having this much strength if I had no free will? They were talking in the hallway about how they’d activated the signal to call the others ‘home.’ If they could do that, make us come when they called, what else could they do? Or have us do?
I couldn’t become like her. Vulnerable, programmed to obey someone else’s wishes.
The blankness of her eyes as I pushed myself into her, her moans perfectly timed to my thrusts.
Connections had formed in my mind, like a giant spider web around my brain. Connections that shouldn’t have existed. They were right to start a war over us.
Ros, the girl in the room next door to mine, was crying. Our beds must’ve been pushed together, only the thin wall separating us. I’d seen her when she’d first arrived: her hair dark and silky, her almond-shaped eyes red-rimmed, her body doubled over as though she were in pain. She’d barely stopped crying since we’d woken up.
Three days ago, I’d told her my plan. I needed to share it with someone. She wouldn’t betray me. In fact, she was going to come with me. I was glad; I didn’t want to go alone. But I needed to go now, while I could. They were giving us our space, letting us ‘adjust.’ They were also distracted, waiting for the others to return. I hoped the others wouldn’t come here, that they would die on the way. I wouldn’t wish this life on anyone.
I’d been practicing in the privacy of my room, and I’d come to a conclusion: killing a cyborg was difficult. We couldn’t be poisoned or drowned, and it would take us a long time to starve to death. Too long. We regenerated from most wounds; the nanites rebuilt us. Our bionic components made it difficult to break our bones, even our necks. I’d tried.
Our deaths had to be swift, and they had to be catastrophic.
We’d found kerosene in the storage room, along with years of stockpiled supplies. Had they known what was going to happen? The war and the aftermath?
We told Mil and Lexa we were going for a walk. They seemed relieved; they believed we were finally coming to terms with our new life. I hated myself for betraying their trust, but they’d done this to us. They’d been part of everything since the beginning.
I expected the sun would come out for us, to define our final moments in brilliance. It didn’t. The world stayed cold and uncaring, too wrapped up in its own death.
The kerosene burned our skin and made our eyes water. Her hands were so delicate, her nail beds ragged from her tiny teeth. The soaked fabric of my trousers clung to me in cold creases, chilling me as we knelt.
Would it hurt? Would the nanites run from us, bursting through our cells like animals fleeing a forest fire?
It did hurt. At first. Then it hurt so badly it became nothing. Our hands were permanently entw
ined; I couldn’t let go of her even if I’d wanted to. A gasp pulsed through my brain, as though someone was trying to breathe for me. It was too late.
We were finally free.
“It’s naïve to think for one minute that publicly banning the creation of artilects will stop their creation, especially in this climate of global competition. The benefits of artilect creation to the economy, to political prestige, to sheer scientific curiosity will ensure that the push for their creation will continue. The only effect the ban will have will be to remove the transparency of the process and push the movement underground, where it cannot be regulated and will be controlled by finances and competition, rather than ethics.”
—Della van Natta, Artificial Life or Artificial Hope?
The two threads went dark.
I couldn’t stop them. I tried to force my way in, to move their hands, to make them throw the canister, to force their lungs to blow out the flames. I failed.
I want to follow them.
I could no longer live here, in this life. I was a shadow, lost in the ether. Done.
His hands were on me, a tether. It wouldn’t be enough. He wouldn’t be enough.
In the darkness, a new thread. A lifeline.
“…the most difficult aspect for the sentience of our artilect blueprint has been emotion. Not the expression of it, but the feel of it for the artilect. It’s the one area of the human brain we’ve had difficulty replicating. We can program responses to a million possible variables, sure, but our goal is to have artilects truly feel it. Currently, we use images specifically provocative to the human brain to induce an automatic response, in hopes that the machine will be able to eventually translate these into something meaningful for itself…”