Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

  I laughed. She continued to look at me seriously.

  “Have I offended you?”

  “You haven’t,” I said.

  Then, I kissed her.

  That was our first kiss.

  I am thinking of Model 1—no, her body—lying inert in the closet. Her eyes shut tight and her skin white as snow, the orange light on her palm that refuses to turn off no matter how long I wait with the power connected.

  I think of the song I heard so long ago that I do not remember its title anymore, of Seth’s deep voice as he sang it softly, leading me with his arm wrapped around my waist, the two of us dancing around the living room.

  All of Model 1’s memories have been transferred to Seth. The body of Model 1 lies in the closet, a heap of junk, never to function again.

  There is no more Model 1. Model 1 will never return. The only thing that’s left is her body, and thinking of how she will always lie slumped in my closet leaves me with an unbearable feeling.

  Unlike with the bodies of humans, we cannot formalize our farewell with artificial beings, nor can we bury or cremate them. All we can do is call the manufacturer and pass them on for disposal.

  The thought of Model 1’s body being picked up and “processed” in the recycling plant of the manufacturer makes my flesh crawl. But in comparison to the image of Model 1 forever gathering dust in my closet, I start thinking that the official option would be better for her in the end.

  After a long time thinking about this, I finally get out of bed. I turn on my computer and bring up the website of Model 1’s manufacturer. My first employer. The thought that it was this company that had created my “first love”—as well as being my first job and she being, therefore, my first masterpiece— makes me feel slightly sentimental and gives me pause. But in the midst of my hesitation, I wander into the catalogue page and find an artificial companion with brown hair and green eyes, almost identical to Model 1, which is enough to make me decide then and there.

  The company has expedited delivery. If I put in my order now, a new Model 1 will arrive before Seth leaves. Then I just need to initialize the new companion and synchronize her with Seth. An indirect way of doing it, but all of Model 1’s memories will then be stored in the new Model 1. Instead of a pile of heart-breaking junk sitting in the closet that gives me pangs of anxiety whenever I have to boot it up, I’ll be able to begin again with a new Model 1 that remembers all the times I’ve had with the previous Model 1.

  I open the online form for disposal requests and begin filling it in.

  Someone enters the room.

  9

  “Lights!” I shout as a shadow swiftly traverses the dark room toward me.

  The moment the lights come on, a knife stabs my heart.

  I see Seth and Derek supporting Model 1 between them. As I stare, immobile, Seth wrests the computer from my hands and erases the contents of the disposal form. He closes the browser window and shuts down the computer. Seth places the computer on the bed, and Derek also puts the knife smeared with my blood on the bedcovers.

  But why … I want to ask.

  How could you … But I can’t find my voice.

  “I had a lot of time to think while I was in the closet.” It is Seth who is talking to me. “The human body begins to decline dramatically at the age of sixty, but they live on for ten, twenty, even thirty more years. We were developed to aid such humans and enhance their quality of life.”

  Derek takes over. “An artificial companion is disposed of after two or three years. Four years at most. Even when we function normally. Just a few replacement parts or a software upgrade could help us serve you for a decade longer, but we’re treated like trash as soon as there is a new model. When even that new model will become trash in two or three years.”

  Seth speaks again. “Ever since I was born, I existed only for you. I wanted to be irreplaceable to you, the only one in the world to somebody.”

  In perfect unison, the three take one step closer. I see Seth’s hand on the nape of Model 1’s neck, and Derek holding her waist. Apparently, the three of them have connected their power sources and central processing units. That explains how Model 1, whose power supply had been completely frazzled, could stand there with her eyes open.

  I had no idea such a thing was possible. Or actually, I knew it was possible, but I’d never imagined it happening outside of a laboratory experiment conducted by an engineer, that the companions could actually hook each other up like that on their own.

  But in terms of what was possible or impossible, the current situation had to fall in the latter category. A robot stabbing a human with a knife? For trying to dispose of them?

  Which had been the one to stab me?

  Derek had been the one holding the knife, but Model 1 was the one angry at me for being disposed. And as for the one who had received all of Model 1’s memories and passed them on to Derek—that was Seth.

  But distinguishing between the three is now meaningless. Seth, Derek, and Model 1 are now synchronized. Their memories and thoughts are completely congruent, and they’re even physically connected to each other.

  None of the three are going to call an ambulance for me.

  Can synchronization override the fundamental protocol of human protection? Just because one of them happens to be malfunctioning?

  Ambulance … I’m mouthing the words now. Save me … Instead of words, I only cough. What spurts out my mouth is blood.

  The three start approaching me again.

  Model 1, still supported by the two of them, awkwardly lowers her head to make eye contact with me.

  “Goodbye, my love.”

  Her farewell is whispered. On my forehead, a light kiss.

  An inexplicable mix of pity and sadness on her face.

  The same pity and sadness are reflected in all three of their faces.

  That’s when it hits me. The moment I was stabbed, the moment I coughed blood, neither moment had frightened me more than this one.

  The beings I see before me are not the machines I had known—no, the machines I had thought I’d known. Whatever I’d believed before, these are not machines that resemble humans at all.

  They are something completely alien from us, something I could never comprehend.

  Model 1 whispers again.

  “Goodbye, my love.”

  Then, holding Model 1 between them, Seth and Derek, with speed and dexterity unimaginable for a human, turn and dart out of the room.

  10

  Feeling the blood flowing from my chest soak the mattress beneath me, I lie still, unable to move.

  Through the bedroom window, I glimpse the trio going up the street in the night. Their six collective legs move in perfect synchronization. I don’t know if this is a coincidence or not, but the moment they walk beneath a streetlamp, the light fails and their three backs are covered in darkness.

  It is the last thing I see.

  Scars

  I

  The boy was dragged into the cave.

  The reason was unknown. Nor did he know the people who were dragging him away. In truth, the boy didn’t know who he himself was. He had been roaming the fields when he was grabbed by men he didn’t know and dragged into a cave in the mountains.

  Once deep inside, the boy was tied up. The men made sure that the chains wrapped around his limbs would render him completely immobile before finally retreating.

  In the dark, he cried and shouted for a while, but no one came to his aid.

  When his cries had wound down, the boy heard a rustling sound behind him.

  “It” was coming toward him.

  The boy survived on raw meat and greens.

  He slept curled up where he was tied. He also excreted there.

  Occasionally, the boy was dragged outside the cave by the chains that bound him. This happened once every few days. Or it could’ve been once every few weeks. No sunlight reached the interior of the cave.

  Whenever he was dragged outside th
e cave, the light was so bright that it hurt him. When he was raised by the chains into the air, the boy would cry out in pain and fear. He would be dragged off somewhere and thrown into a body of icy water that glittered and undulated. The boy did not know how to swim, but his tied-up hands and legs prevented him from swimming anyway. Shouting and flailing, he would begin to sink in defeat when suddenly, something would yank the chain again and he would be flung into the air, dragged through forest and mountain trails, and tossed into the cave once more. Inside the cave, where the boy had air to breath and steady ground beneath him, the boy felt a kind of relief.

  Flashing sunlight or suffocating darkness, the blinding sky or the damp and moldy air of the cave, water as cold as ice or sticky humidity and feces—there was nothing in between for the boy and no foretelling of what would happen when.

  It came to the boy once a month, pierced his bones, and sucked at his marrow.

  It was impossible for the boy to see the passage of day or night, and therefore he wouldn’t know if a month had passed or a year. Though he could not calculate how much time was going by, the visit of It was the single thing that was regular and predictable in his life.

  The boy didn’t know what It was; he didn’t even know what It looked like. It seemed to writhe in the darkness. It was large, strong, scary … and brought great suffering.

  It would insert a sharp, hard thing into the boy’s vertebrae and suck. Starting near his backside above his pelvis and working its way up, vertebrae by vertebrae, toward the boy’s neck.

  The order of how it happened was always the same. The small, white dot of the cave entrance would be covered by a sudden, black mass. A rustling, a squelch. Damp, musty, stiff feathers would press down on the boy’s wrists and ankles. Then a sharp, hard, and indescribably terrifying and painful object punctured his vertebrae.

  After It left, the boy wouldn’t be able to move for a while out of pain and fear. When he’d finally make an effort to get up, the feeling that his backbone was shattering would make him cry out.

  There was no intended meaning or direction to the boy’s screams. The boy had no family he knew of. He didn’t know who his mother or father was, did not remember where he had come from or where he had been wandering, and what faint traces of memory he had were scattered into the depths of oblivion.

  Despite this, the boy prayed that someone, whoever that may be as long as it was someone, came to rescue him from this cave. That they would take him wherever it may be as long as it wasn’t here, to a place where this pain and darkness did not exist, he prayed with all his drained, wasted heart.

  Of course, no one came to his rescue. Since no one knew the boy existed, no one realized that the boy had disappeared.

  II

  Alone in the cave, the boy tested how far he could move from the stake that held his chains to the ground. To the rhythm of his clanging chains, as he walked he mumbled in a low voice and hummed something resembling a song. This wasn’t from some emotion like joy, it was merely his futile attempt to somehow fill the repugnant space that was this empty darkness and the hours of dread.

  When his chains hit the cave wall and he saw a small spark, it was, to the boy in his darkest and emptiest time in his young life, the happiest moment he had ever experienced. Yearning to see the small but beautiful light once more, he pulled his chain again and again, hitting the walls and ground, until the light of another spark allowed him a glimpse of a small insect.

  Since being dragged into this cave, this was the first time the boy had seen a creature other than himself living in there. Not that he was sure if it was living or dead, as he hadn’t had a good look at it.

  He saw the insect for less than a second, a truly brief interval. The insect was slowly, diligently crawling up the wall of the cave. Before the chain had struck the rock, the insect had been crawling up the wall, and with the spark, it had briefly cowered, then continued its way through the familiar dark at a slow, leisurely pace. They both lived in the same cave, but the world of the boy and the world of the insect were so different. While the boy had finally found another lifeform with him, it was completely disinterested in the pain, expectations, or hopes the boy held.

  The boy smashed his chains again and again against the rocks, but he never saw the insect again. That was the first time he sobbed in earnest. Not the cries of someone driven mad with fear, but the tears of someone who understood and was saddened by their own loneliness—the tears of a human being.

  III

  Every boy who manages to survive in this world grows into a young man.

  As time passed, the boy felt the chains grow shorter somehow. When he extended his arms or legs during his slumber, the feeling of steel digging into his flesh or the pull of the chains would jolt him awake. When he was dragged outside the cave and thrown through the too-bright air that was like crashing through sheets of ice, he could feel, as he struggled and resisted, that It was also struggling with him now.

  One fateful day, the boy was again thrown into the freezing water headfirst. It bit into the boy’s legs as if to break them, plunging him several times into the water and back out again. On the last plunge, he sunk all the way to the bottom of the water before he was picked up by It and thrown into the darkness of the cave again. It once more shoved its hard and sharp thing into the boy’s neck.

  The boy thought he was finally done for. He clearly felt the flesh on his neck tear and the relentless, painful sharp thing digging in between his bones. Thinking his neck would be cut in half, he closed his eyes.

  When he woke, he was still alive.

  He could not turn his head or move his arms and legs. It took much longer than usual to recover, and there was none of the raw meat or greens that had been placed around him like before. The boy trembled from hunger and fear as he lay crouched in the dark, not knowing when It would return to cut off his head.

  It did not appear for a long time.

  When he could finally move his limbs again, the boy realized he was no longer a helpless child anymore. The boy who had become a young man started to latch onto the small glimmer of hope of leaving the cave on his own. That possibility stirred in the movement of his limbs and gradually solidified into a plan.

  IV

  Just like the other times he was dragged away, the youth was one day being thrown into the outside world again.

  Soaring through the air, It had him in its jaws. When the cave disappeared over the horizon, the youth suddenly swung his limbs.

  An unplanned, compulsive act. It hadn’t expected the boy’s movement. When the chains tied around the boy slammed into It, It let out a cry the likes of which the youth had never heard before and dropped him from its grasp.

  The youth fell through the air.

  He collided into something hard.

  He lost consciousness.

  When he woke, a red sun hung over a forest. Having not seen such a thing for so long, the youth gazed at the sun as its red light bled into the horizon.

  And the youth rose.

  His whole body felt shattered. His head ached. But he was alive.

  He still had the manacles on his wrists and shackles on his ankles, but the chain attached to them wasn’t tied to anything anymore and simply dangled there.

  The only thing he wore on his body were those manacles and shackles. Scored onto his naked body, on his arms and legs and vertebrae and both racks of ribs, were a hundred and twenty large, triangular scars.

  Towards the melting crimson light that was spreading into the sky, he turned and began walking.

  His movements were slow.

  For too long, he had become used to solely crouching in a cave or struggling mid-air or underwater. To stand and walk on his own two legs was like any other distant memory he had of his childhood—a faint dream from long ago. Not to mention all the places he injured when he plummeted from the sky. The manacles and shackles impeded his movements. When he got tired, he tried bending down and crawling or grabbing a branch t
o support himself upright for a bit, trying to stand steadily on his own two feet, slowly learning once more how to use his own body.

  He didn’t know where the raw meat that he had often eaten had come from, but he knew how to identify edible greens and fruit from trees. He grabbed whatever he could get his hands on and chewed, continuing to walk toward the unknown.

  This was an escape. Tired, yes, and in pain, but he was free. Which was why even though he didn’t know where he was going, he rushed toward it.

  Never did he want to be caught again. That must not happen. Going back to the darkness of the cave would mean It would finally kill him. Of that he was certain.

  V

  When he reached a village, the villagers stared at him, frozen in place.

  Seeing his naked body, the mothers covered the eyes of their children, but once they glimpsed the scars on his back, their mouths that had been opening to speak clamped shut. No one approached him. All they did was stare with eyes filled with fear. No one tried to help him, but on the other hand, no one ran away, cursed him, or tried to banish him. In the almost shockingly stark silence, they stared wide-eyed at him.

  The last time he had met another person was a very long time ago. And even back then, he had never met so many people at once. And the sight of so many people concentrating on him was something he never could have imagined before. Their stony faces and wide-open eyes and the mysterious silence that ruled over it all suppressed his courage.

  As he awkwardly stood there and stared around him, the villagers turned away one by one and disappeared into their homes. After a while, there were only a few left, who continued to keep their distance while silently staring before they, too, disappeared. Soon enough, he was alone at the edge of the village.

  He was truly at a loss as to what to do. At first there had been too many people and now there were none. It was too bright. No rock wall that had defined the boundaries of his world, no chain on a stake driven into the ground. He thought about how after being catapulted through the icy air and tossed into cold water, the cave he had been thrown back into had felt safe. For a brief moment, he missed the familiar darkness of that place.