It was him.
“Nell, are you in there?”
For a moment Nell didn’t say anything. There was a quiet movement; then a key clanked angrily into the lock, and the mechanism gave way—but not the bolts. Julian swore and banged the door again.
“Nell, come out of there.”
She picked herself up and walked over to the barred entryway. She stood so close to the door that her nose touched its surface.
“No,” she said calmly.
“Nell”—her father’s voice was tinged with a shade of anger and two shades of fear—“Oliver Kelly told me about your—your project. Just—just don’t touch anything in there.” The door shuddered against his weight.
“Too late,” his daughter replied.
“He told me you stole a set of prosthetics out of his chop shop. That you were going to build a creature.”
“Yes,” Nell said.
“You should have told me.”
“I couldn’t. I wanted to do this by myself.”
“Nobody creates miracles alone, Nell.”
There was a thick silence, and Nell placed her hand against the door.
“I found Ma.” The words almost broke in her throat.
“I’d guessed as much.”
“I put her in the lake.”
A sigh so deep fell from her father’s body that Nell could hear and feel its sorrow and shame through the door. He was quiet for a moment; then his cracking voice lifted again.
“You understand why I did it, don’t you?”
The words caught as they came out of his mouth, something like shame, something like regret. Nell studied the wood between them. How could she answer this terrible question? She understood, and that realization crept through her like a heavy chill. She completely understood.
How alone must Julian have felt all this time? Cora must have given him such peace and companionship. Love. Who had Julian been before Cora? Nell had never asked any of these questions. Perhaps that was what had led them here. This huge door between them. As always.
“We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?” Her father’s voice softened. A beat of too comfortable silence passed.
“I can’t let you in here.” Nell burst then. “The creature, the thing—it’s terrible. I don’t know how to bring it to life. It’s not going to work at all. I don’t want you to see it.”
“Do you have any idea”—Julian actually laughed—“Nell, do you have any idea what my first project looked like? It was two steel rods, a clamp, and a couple of energy transmitters stapled to the flesh on my shoulder. I couldn’t even talk, it hurt so much. It only kind of worked. It was a solid year before I could show my face at the Assembly again, everyone was so horrified.”
Nell didn’t trust his cheer. She could hear him trying, but it felt like nothing. She hugged her knees to her chest, completely full of her own ticking.
“But it worked. It worked even though it was ugly. And you had Ma to help.”
You had Ma. You had Ma in here all this time. You kept her. You kept her here.
“And you did this alone. Let me see it, Nell. I can help you. Nobody will ever need to know.” How could he sound so kind, so human?
The offer hung in the air like a plump red apple from a sturdy branch. It swayed in the storm, either sweet or toxic, and Nell didn’t say anything. Julian’s voice rose in urgency. “Nobody ever needs to know. Just let me help you. There are things in that lab that can galvanize your creation, if we can wire it right, if we can hit the right voltage.”
“Galvanize it?” Nell repeated.
“Bring it to life. Is it organic? Or all mechanical?”
“Mechanical.”
“All of it? This is very important, Nell, is any part of it made of flesh, or bone? We could fry it if it is, we have to be careful. Does it have any human components? Hair, teeth—”
“No, no.” Nell began to get up. “It’s all steel and tin and glass and wires and kinetic fabrics. It’s almost all your robotics.”
“Oh.” Her father suddenly made sense of it. “It’s an android. That’s easy.”
“Easy?” Nell shouted, slamming her fist against the door, furious. How dare he? Of course this was easy for him! Easy! How easy it would be for this to be his project. He wanted to remind her how little she knew.
“Just go to the bottom drawer of my desk. The left-hand side. There’s a key under the green lamp. There’s something in there that will help you. You’ll need a battery, too, unless you already have some. I should have one large enough to support four limbs at least in the cupboard under the glass case with the live specimens. Get them both; then come back to me. We can argue, or we can make this happen. It’s up to you.” Julian was guiding himself blindly through the room. He knew it so well, all its categories and drawers and bell jars laid out in his mind.
Despite herself, Nell stormed over to her father’s desk, moved the lamp’s base, grabbed a slim key, and knelt down to open the innocuous-looking drawer. The keyhole was little more than a tiny missing slice in the wood.
Thunder rolled and lightning cracked again outside. Nell yelped with surprise: the power of it.
“Shush now, don’t be worrying about that. The lightning rod up on the roof is particularly sophisticated; it’ll absorb everything. You can’t even feel it down here when it strikes. The air gets a bit weird, but that’s the most of it. You’ll be fine.”
He was comforting her, and she let him. She looked into the drawer. There was so much strange clutter in there. Little boxes, white wires. A fat bound file full of papers. Disks that shone. Disks that didn’t. Like flat little planets.
“What is it, the thing?” she called, carefully combing through.
“A long white box. It’s slim; it’s the only one like it in there. Should be down the bottom.” Julian sounded as though he were asking her to get some milk from the refrigerator or to pass him a cup of tea. She found the box, just as he’d described it, slim and only slightly longer than her hand.
She dashed to the cupboard below the shelf with the jars. Her father’s voice rang dully through the lab. “If you look at the jars, Nell, you can see that they’re hooked up to batteries. Small ones. All life needs really is a spark.” So the things inside really were alive. Or as alive as they could be; she tried not to think about it.
Something red and small and fat pulsed in the jar in front of Nell’s eyes, and something in her gut said, “That’s a heart.” Then something else said, “That’s your heart; he kept your heart,” but she squinted her eyes shut and made a serious choice not to gawk, not to acknowledge it further. Instead, she turned to what could have been a frog’s leg in a slim jar, twitching in a gelatinous fluid. A tiny wire was linked up to it, threaded through the lid of the container. A flat gray battery, Nell discovered after shifting it a little, was affixed to the base of the jar. She wrinkled her nose.
She knelt down and checked the cupboard; it was full of little boxes of batteries. Small ones the size of a thumbnail, all the way up to a couple the size of building bricks.
“Take a battery that’s around the size of a brick, Nell,” Julian called. “Then come here, and I’ll explain what to do next. Hurry.”
Nell pulled one from the shelf; it weighed a lot.
“In that box, the long box, is the most important surviving relic from before the epidemic.” He was speaking quickly. “It’s a band, a single band made of an incredible, flexible steel. It’s a computer, Nell. The whole thing. It has artificial intelligence. That’s what triggered the Turn, why it happened, all of it.”
“Excuse me?”
Nell was breathless with shock as she opened the box with a soft click. A strip of unassuming gray lay there inside. It looked like an ugly bracelet or a watch without a face.
“That was the last straw. It’s why they sent the shocks. They were developed to give fresh sentience to things. It was brilliant really. Risky, but brilliant. People loved them, stopped listening to the people in ch
arge, started to turn to these things for answers instead. Back then every answer to every question was right there, in one of those strips. The network is down now, but it’ll still be able to process, to learn and emulate.”
Nell turned it over in her hands. This was what had turned her country upside down? This simple, small thing.
“Nell, go to your project, affix the battery to a safe place, and hook it up to the wires that link the limbs together. I’m presuming you did link the limbs together already, Nell. I’m giving you credit here. I’m giving you a lot. When the battery is fully charged, you can switch it on. It’ll be galvanized.”
Nell felt very small as she began to get up again. “Do you have a battery? In your arm?”
“No. Not anymore. My arms and all the other bioprosthetics run on the organic electricity we produce as humans. It’s kinetic; it feels the pulse of us and responds in kind. Life galvanizes us; it moves us, keeps us moving. We don’t need anything else. Life is electric. Think about it like that. Conceal it inside the project’s head or somewhere where it won’t be obvious, for now. What were you using for . . . intelligence . . . before?”
“The small box from my room, the one you gave me.”
“Good try. Is it wired to anything?”
“Yes, it’s like . . . the center . . . for the wires. They all lead to it, each moving limb. I—I hadn’t even tried to turn it on yet.”
“All right, all right. Just take it out and keep it; it won’t work here.” Julian’s voice dropped, and it sounded as though he were speaking through the keyhole. “Conceal the strip there instead. They’re completely different pieces of technology; just because something is a computer doesn’t mean it’s a computer that can think or talk. The strip is smaller, but it’s got a much bigger purpose. There’s a small flat button, a switch like, on the inside. As long as it’s contacting the steel of whatever it’s charging with intelligence, well, it should work. Press the button after you’ve secured it; then go to the generator and flip the switch. Go, go.”
“But—” Nell lingered, her ear to the door, her face wet with tears. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“Then we’ll try something else. Another time. This isn’t the end, Nell. Go.”
Nell ran across the room toward her creation, heavy battery in one hand, slim white box of terror in the other. How had her father gotten hold of this? How long had he had it?
And who was he? Who had he been all this time? This was too much, too quick. Nell folded up the enormity of that question—Who has my father been all this time?—and tried to pack it away in one of the rooms in her head and focus on the task at hand. She clumsily set the battery at the center of her creation’s chest.
This wire, that wire. She wound some loose silk around the cylinder to keep it in place. It would hang if the creation were to stand up. He looked awful. It looked awful.
Defiant, Nell opened the back of the creation’s head, the kettle’s old lid. She slipped out the old gray music box, slid it into her pocket. She snapped the steel band into place. She examined the band closely, and yes, there was a tiny panel. She pressed down on it with her thumb. Nothing changed but for a tiny pinprick of green light appearing like a gemstone on its surface. It stirred something in Nell.
Green like a frog. Green like Go.
Nell closed the head back up and stood over her almost unchanged mechanical boy. She slowly walked to the tall generator with the pulsing line of lights and placed her hand on the switch.
When she flipped it, she didn’t think of anything at all. Nothing would be the same now, and maybe that was important. The noise the generator made was a dark purr with frequencies so high running over the top of the growl that they hurt Nell’s ears. She expected an explosion. Sparks at least. Maybe fire. But life sometimes happens in the softest ways. The air changed; the atmosphere shifted with electricity.
When the charge died down, nothing in the room was different but for the soft flex of mechanical knuckles. She reached out and entwined her fingers in the creature’s, with the hand from the sea. The static shock was tiny but great.
So great.
A soft glow radiated from its eyes. His eyes.
“Hello,” whispered Nell.
“Hello.”
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ALIVE
CHAPTER 1
The air is warm. This is the first thing I know for sure. Awareness pools at the base of my . . . neck? The rest of my anatomy assembles behind what are most definitely my eyes. I have been given a body or something like one. My clock says a second has passed. My first second.
In the second second, I take stock of this body.
I have two hands. Two palms, two thumbs, eight digits. In them I feel everything they have ever touched before me. Their electricity holds an imprint so deep there are reams of history in them. I feel heartache, struggle. I feel smoke cloying at my fingertips. I feel the dying fire beneath me.
When the third second dawns, my eyes open, both at once, and I know almost everything they have seen, from the tongs of the glassblower to the clavicle of the last man they loved. Love: there it is in every fiber of me. Light fills the cavity of my head. I see the room where I have been born. Love. There is the ceiling above me. My first blink. Love.
I suddenly know so much and so little all at once. Before the fifth second splinters open, there you are. There. Standing above me. You look frightened and tired, and I know you already; but I do not know you at all.
You must be the one who switched me on. You must be the one who placed these parts together, gathered them, and sculpted them. You must have drawn me from your own mind. You, all fear now, all exhilaration. Your eyes lock with mine. I see all of you, more horror and hurt and raw fight than anything these glass and wire eyes have met in either of their lives before.
&n
bsp; You are a marvel, your mouth hanging open. Outside this room is the roar of a storm and someone else’s panic, but you are so still. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Then you speak. Your voice is a whisper, but with a bright streak of pride. You say hello.
Language emerges from my numbers. I am all alphabet now, all punctuation, all permutations of twenty-six letters and the sounds that match them. I want to sing all the letters at once and hear what my voice sounds like, if I have one. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
You say hello. Five letters. English. Hotel Echo Lima Lima Oscar. Eta Epsilon Lambda Lambda Omicron. 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111.
I say hello.
Shocked by my voice, you raise your hand to your mouth. Your hand, one of two: flesh. You used them to make me. You have small knuckles and wear bright rings. Your breathing is papery, and now there are tears all down your cheeks. I want to say, “Please do not cry,” but I am not here to tell you what to do.
You have not told me yet why I am here. You have only said hello. Hello!
I do not know what you are called, by birth or by others. Are there others? What became of them? I know what these eyes last saw, what these hands last touched. The things I do not know herald the end of my first minute, an icy wave. The weight of “I do not know.” My first question blooms fat in me like a ripe flower, and it is out of my mouth before I can stop it.
“Are you my mother?”
You gasp, then wait for your breath to settle. You are frightened, and you have won.
“No,” you say. “No.”
How vast these two letters are. How suddenly they arrive into the world, the end of every story. But you speak again. This time the terror flashes to fire in your human throat. “I am your maker,” you say. I open my eyes again and . . . love. Yes, this is love. Your hand is wrapped around mine. This is what it is to be alive.
CHAPTER 2
The door opened, and Julian scrambled to stand, pushing his glasses from their perch on his head down over his eyes. Nell had always perceived her father as a lean giant, a great tree in winter, but this thing she made towered above him. She took in her father whole, his miraculous arm lifting, his robotic hand going over his mouth.
Spare and Found Parts Page 17