“Nini, do you really think today is the day?”
“I believe it is. I can feelit.”
“But how do you know what you feel isn’t just part of the plan? How do you know you can really feel?”
Nini lowered her eyes to the workbench. Everything she thought she could feel came from those tubes. What would it be like to have blood in her veins instead of steam? To have veins.
“Momo, what do you think faith is?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do humans—not really. But they feel it anyway. Why do you think that happens?”
“Because humans...” Momo looked through the window—it was a beautiful view over a hill, where the Douro River flowed into the Atlantic. “...are humans,” he said.
The silvery brightness seemed to dim on Nini’s face.
“Momo, humanity isn’t only flesh and bone. It is not the blood in the veins. It is not the breath. To be human is to think. It is to feel. It is to love.”
Momo’s face remained dull, as if the weight of the alloy that made him, enriched with molybdenum, was a burden. He had no faith.
“We think,” he said. “And we feel because we want things. We have dreams—or we think that’s what they are. But where is the love?”
Nini looked sad, as much as a face made of metal could show sadness. The love she felt was right before her eyes, reflected in her face.
“Sometimes we find it,” she said, “other times it finds us.”
Momo looked through the window. The Sun was sinking into the horizon. The night was always the worst part of being there. The sky would fill with stars and Momo would dream about them. Waking dreams. Momo didn’t sleep—he couldn’t even lie down. He couldn’t leave the workbench that held him by the waist to life.
“Nothing will find us,” he said, “nor will we find anything.”
The laboratory door opened with a bang of wood against wall. The Creator stepped into the laboratory looking distressed. He grabbed a few things from a workbench and accidentally knocked over several others. He stopped between Momo and Nini with an armful of tools.
“Today is the day,” he said.
The Creator scattered the tools all over Momo’s workbench and unscrewed the bolts immobilizing his metal torso. He asked Momo to lie down. With all the tubes coming from beneath the workbench,Momo looked like a wounded soldier with his guts lying all over an operating table. The Creator strapped him to the workbench with thick leather belts fastened around his torso and arms and did the same to Nini. He then pulled and pushed several levers that set mechanical gears in motion. The workbenches rose to a vertical position.
If Momo and Nini had had hearts they would have been pounding in their chests. They didn’t quite understand their Creator’s sudden rush—he had come up to the laboratory earlier than usual, before the sounding of the bell announcing the end of the shift. The foundry was still perspiring, smoke rising from the molten metal pouring from the crucibles.
The Creator pushed over two wheeled platforms, each one containing a pair of legs. He placed each one under the corresponding automaton. Then he moved away and stood between Momo and Nini, indecision present in his every shaky movement. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small lead box which he held in trembling hands.
“This will be your heart,” he said.
He put the small box down with fearful caution.
Momo and Nini had no idea how two hearts could fit inside such a small box. However, they also had no idea how the Creator had provided them with complex thought, yet they couldn’t dispute the fact that he had.
The Creator pressed a hatch on Momo’s chest and then turned it in short movements, in opposite directions, as if he were opening a combination safe. He did the same with the hatch on Nini’s chest. Then he put on a heavy, one-piece suit that covered him from the neck down. Lastly, he put on a hood with a glass visor and a pair of thick gloves and opened the small box. He used tweezers to remove a metallic tablet the size of a small coin and held it in front of the visor. He faced Momo.
“Uranium,” said the Creator.
He inserted the tablet into Momo’s chest and pressed it until he heard a click. The moment he pulled the tweezers away, the compartment containing the uranium sealed itself and filled with water. It worked. The Creator repeated the procedure on Nini’s chest, took the suit off, and left it on the floor—he had little time left to connect the automatons’ legs.
In their chests, Momo and Nini felt the power of an atomic reaction fueled by uranium—it wasn’t a heart beating, but it was pulsing. The Creator moved with precise haste. Immediately after disconnecting the tubes that connected Momo’s body to the workbench, he reconnected them to valves inside the legs. With the last connection made, he energetically pumped a lever so that the platform supporting the legs would rise to the proper position. The two body halves touched and made a perfect connection, then locked by mechanical action—a thick washer rotated on Momo’s waist and completed the process. The Creator undid the straps holding the automaton to the workbench and stepped aside.
Momo was complete. He could feel his legs—not quite as people did, but he knew he had them and that he was able to use them. He stepped down from the platform, confident in his ability to walk. On the first step he lost his balance and stumbled against a cabinet, only stopping when his shoulder hit the wall. He took a few seconds to get used to his new sense of balance. The wrecked cabinet and the hole in the wall made him aware of his weight and strength.
“No one dances when taking his very first steps,” said the Creator with a smile.
It was a brief moment of good mood. Several bangs came from downstairs and the workers’ voices rose. Gunshots. The Creator peeped through the laboratory door—everyone was rushing in a panic towards the exits. He asked Momo to move a big cabinet against the door.
Momo dragged the piece of furniture with no apparent effort.
“What is happening?” he asked.
The Creator didn’t answer. Instead, he started to connect the tubes inside Nini’s body. Before he could finish, the echo of a fist banging on the door made him tremble—a brief distraction which he promptly ignored, connecting the last tube. Now he only had to attach the two halves of her body.
The fist echoed against the door again. Outside, a man said he knew the fellow engineer was there. Whoever the man was, he stopped hitting the door. There was a silence followed by the sound of footsteps. A series of bangs spit a hailstorm of bullets through the door and the cabinet. Most of the bullets bounced off Momo’s metallic back, shattering or piercing everything in their path. One bullet came in at a more oblique trajectory, ricocheted off Momo’s body, and found its way into the only body it could wound.
The Creator pressed a hand against his neck and fell to the floor. The stray bullet had severed his carotid artery. He needed to speak—but choked on the first attempt. Through the gushing blood he said he was sorry. He hadn’t given them legs just to make their bodies whole. He was very sorry, but Momo and Nini must not be taken by the man outside the door.
“Now that they know about... they will use you. For evil. The world... the world is on the verge of great changes. The technology will... will... the wars... the greed... I can’t... They have no interest in... goodside. We cannot let them build... others...”
The Creator choked out his last words and died.
The big window shattered and men dressed in black came through it with guns at the ready. They wore hoods with a single hole to allow them to see. One man lowered his weapon and tried to push away the cabinet that was blocking the door. Only when two other men came to help could he move it. He gave the all clear for his boss to enter.
The doorknob was blown away by a shot fired from the outside. More hooded men rushed in, led by a single man who wore no hood. A diagonal scar ran down his face, from his grey hairline—through his right eye, covered by a monocle—all the way to his chin. He considered the engineer as i
f his death were a minor inconvenience.
Momo stayed as still as a metal sculpture, calculating the steps necessary to take down all the hooded men. Nini wasn’t complete yet—her internal tubes were still exposed. If any of them were hit by a bullet Momo wouldn’t know how to repair it. He faced the man with the monocle.
The hooded men instinctively pointed their weapons at him.
“Why?” asked Momo.
The man’s monocle showed a gleam of real surprise. He allowed himself a wry smile.
“You can speak!”
“It is a common trait of beings that possess complex reasoning,” said Momo.
The man smiled again.
“But you are not a being,” he said. “You are a thing. A machine.”
“We all are what we are.”
The man persisted in smiling, although its real purpose was to hide his awe before the idea that was possible to build a machine capable of showing a semblance of human intellect.
“From now on,” he said, “you will be whatever we want you to be.”
A disturbing sound of metal scraping filled the laboratory as Momo clenched his fists.
“The Creator made me what I am. No one will make me what I’m not.”
The man abandoned his smile. He raised his weapon and pointed it to the automaton’s chest.
“This gun is like you,” he said. “A wonder of human ingenuity. It is capable of shooting six bullets before there is a need to reload it. Its inventor is one of us. These are the first prototypes, sent from the other side of the Atlantic specifically for this purpose. Do you know what the Atlantic is?”
The man pointed the gun towards the window.
“I know many things,” said Momo. “No matter the number of bullets inside that gun I know none can inflict damage upon me.”
The eyebrow above the monocle rose and the man pondered that for a moment. He shot the automaton in the head.
The bullet bounced off and disappeared into one of the wooden joists supporting the roof.
“It looks like you’re really a tough son of a gun,” agreed the man. “On the outside.”
Momo followed the man’s movement as he pointed the gun at Nini. Her metal coat could handle the shots but the exposed internal tubes could not.
“Why?” insisted Momo.
“I suppose I didn’t really give you an answer, did I? Because we are human. It is in our nature to build things in order to destroy other things. Everything is built to be brought down. And now, big fellow, it is you that we have to bring down.”
“You will need a bigger gun,” said Momo.
“A machine with a sense of humor,” said the man with irony. “The world is changing indeed.”
If Momo had been human he would have trembled when the shot fired without warning. The bullet grazed Nini’s torso dangerously close to the joint where the internal tubes were still showing, but deliberately missed.
“You have nothing to gain by destroying us,” said Momo.
“My intention is far from it,” said the man. “But some damage is acceptable. I only need one of you completely functional. And you, big fellow, seem perfectly functional.”
“If she is destroyed not a single body will leave here functional,” said Momo. “Artificial or human.”
The man almost felt like giving the automaton a friendly pat on the metallic shoulder and telling him he was a real son of a gun.
“She will not be destroyed,” he said. “Ifyou cooperate. I need the schematic for your structure. Where is it?”
Momo calculated how many bullets were left inside all those guns. He wouldn’t be able to neutralize them all and at the same time to prevent a bullet from doing irreparable damage to Nini.
“Inside the safe,” said Momo. “I don’t know the combination.”
“That isn’t a problem for you, big fellow.”
Momo could feel the man’s smile reflecting in the lenses of his eyes. He turned towards the wall. Every step he took made the floorboards creak. He stopped in front of a picture depicting a copy of the Vitruvian Man. He pierced the picture with his hands and pulled the safe from the wall. He held it with one arm and dented the door with a single punch that made the floorboards quake. He stuck his fingers through a crack, ripped the door off, and threw the safe at the man’s feet. A few boards cracked.
The man squatted and retrieved the safe’s contents—a thick book and a journal. He ran through a few pages of the journal without interest—nothing but tedious reports of how wonderful it was to be a father. He threw it through the broken window. Then he flipped through a few pages of the thick book. It was all there—diagrams, formulas, and notes on procedures. The man walked around the laboratory, turning more pages.
Momo followed every step that brought the man closer to Nini.
The man closed the book and smiled. He pointed the gun to the tubes showing within Nini’s body and pulled back the hammer. Then turned to Momo.
“Will you give me any trouble, big fellow?”
Being close to the man raised the pressure within Nini.
“Lots,” she said. She broke the strap holding her left arm and reached for the gun barrel, crushing it before a bullet could pass through. She grabbed the man by his neck and lifted him off the floor like a rag doll. The hooded men surrounding Momo pointed their guns at Nini.
Momo looked Nini in the eye and she replied with a sad smile. Momo jumped up, grabbing his bent legs like a cannon ball. He hit the floorboards with a rumble of breaking wood and fell through to the floor below, taking the hooded men with him.
The laboratory was directly above one of the molding areas, and the men fell into a crucible full of molten metal, Momo falling along with them. The temperature of the metal was close to two thousand degrees Celsius—well below the melting point at which Momo’s molybdenum alloy coat would give in. He could bear the heat until Nini joined him.
The man with the monocle pulled a small gun from his sleeve and shot Nini’s exposed tubing. One of the metallic tubes whistled as pressurized steam gushed out.
Nini tossed the man over a workbench and snapped the strap holding her right arm. She crushed the damaged tube—now the steam couldn’t flow, but it wouldn’t leak out either. Her legs were already in the right position to be fitted to her torso—it wouldn’t be difficult. She broke the strap holding her waist and let the gravity do the rest. The thick washer rotated on her waist, completing the connection.
The man stood with his back against a wall to avoid falling through the hole in the floor, rubbing his sore neck.
“You can’t stop the future,” he said.
“Neither can you control it,” said Nini.
She would take the man with her. She stepped down from the platform, but her right leg failed to respond—the damaged tube. Nini lost her balance and fell through the hole in the floor, splashing molten metal as she landed in the crucible.
Momo was still enduring the heat. If he had to, he would stand on the surface of the Sun just to wait for her.
Nini smiled at him. In the end, Momo did touch the Sun—in a sense. And she could touch Momo.
They hugged within the fire. The nickel alloy coating Nini had a melting point below two thousand degrees Celsius. Her body began to melt in Momo’s arms.
Above, the man with the monocle watched them through the hole in the floor with a victorious smile. He waved the thick book in his hand.
“You can’t stop the future,” he repeated.
Momo had never felt hatred before. He thrust his feet against the bottom on the crucible and channeled all his strength into a jump. It wasn’t enough to propel him back to the laboratory, but was enough to reach the man’s leg and pull him down. Momo heard the man scream until his throat caught fire and he stopped. The book fell with them and burned as if it had never existed.
Somewhere inside the molten metal Nini’s atomic heart exploded. Momo’s heart joined it, amplifying the explosion, and the foundry became a hole in th
e ground from which a mushroom cloud lifted, lighting up the waters of Douro River and the Atlantic.
The future could wait.
Manuel Alves is regarded by many—including the Editor in Chief at ISF—as one of the best new voices in Portuguese speculative fiction. Manuel dislikes talking about himself, and as such doesn’t have a biography in the usual sense, but you can learn everything about him by reading his fiction, published mostly on smashwords.
His books include the following brief, humorous autobiographical statement: “I’m the Master of the Universe currently taking a leave of absence. I know all there is to know about small, seemingly imperceptible things. For instance, this one. See it?”
The Boy Who Cast No Shadow
Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Translated by Laura Vroomen
My name is Look. You’ve probably heard about me in the papers or on TV. I’m the boy without a shadow. You can shine spotlights at me all you like, but it won’t do you any good. Physicists say I’m an evolutionary miracle. The Americans said I was a secret weapon, by the Russians that is, because they figured Al-Qaeda would be too dumb. Christians say I’m divine. Mom calls me an angel, but of the earthly variety. But I’m not. I’m just Look. I wish I knew what that meant.
It’s something to do with my genes, they say, but they don’t know what. Molecular structures and the effects of light, blah-blah-blah. I don’t give a shit, ’cause they can’t fix it anyway. You won’t find shadow under my chin, armpits or ribs, no matter how you illuminate me. They say it makes me look two-dimensional. I don’t know what I look like because I have no reflection. My left hip bears a scar in the shape of a question mark. I got it when the midwife dropped me as she held me up in front of the mirror. Mom told me that only a floating umbilical cord was visible and that the midwife screamed, fleeing the room. The photos of the delivery showed a lot of aaaw and coochie-coochie but no baby. The only images ever captured of me are Mom’s sonograms. They use sound, not light.
International Speculative Fiction #5 Page 4