Ever Winter

by Hackshaw, Peter

  A snow leopard stalked the deck of the ship and it wore a barbed crown upon its head. Henry’s sisters lay before it on the deck, all smiling at Henry as he beat the steel with all his strength.

  Finally, the hinges gave way and the doors blew open and were carried away on the wind.

  Henry fell back in terror as an army of plastic dolls poured from the container, thousands upon thousands of them, enough to fill the container ten times over, and they all came for Henry, their faces similar to Henry’s when he’d been a child. Henry crawled backward on the ice like a crab, and those dolls nearest to him started to grab at his feet as others climbed over them to get at the rest of him.

  Henry screamed and kicked out at the indistinguishable dolls, but no sooner had his feet connected with them, sending assailants flying into the air, than they were each replaced just as quickly by a duplicate.

  The Orfin seals watched helplessly from the circles cut into the ice and the snow leopard king mewled, whilst Henry’s sisters stroked its mane and tail.

  The doors of the other containers blew off all at once and went soaring into the sky with the wild winds, not quite reaching the rainbow that over-arched the vessel MV Greyhound. Out of those containers came more and more plastic dolls.

  Henry fell back into an ice hole and down into the waters and the dolls followed him into the depths below. The water above turned red as the dolls devoured the Orfin seals, then followed their corpses down toward Henry as he sank further and further into the abyss.

  When Henry woke again, he was moving. Though he remained horizontal on the flatbed that was part of Hepburn 8, he could feel the vibrations of motion and hear the ice and snow grumble as the robot’s metal feet smashed down upon the floor, unyielding and invariable. Henry was drenched in sweat. He listened to the robot’s tread and gathered that the speed they were traveling at was faster than Henry could run, though he couldn’t be sure from his lying-down position and without having a reference point on the terrain. A draught came in from below, but incredibly, the shelter remained around them as they moved, held in place by rods protruding from the skeleton of the medical droid.

  “Hej? What is going on?” Henry asked the robot, which appeared to blink and change its digital expression from one of concentration to one of friendliness.

  “Hello, Non-critical Condition Patient #1; Unknown Soldier. How are you feeling?” the robot replied.

  “My head. It hurts. I can’t seem to…where are we?”

  “You are recovering from a surgical procedure that has concluded successfully. I am taking you to the location where I was deployed. There is additional medical equipment there to aid your recovery and rehabilitation. There is no current human activity in that area. I am unable to detect where our nearest allied forces are and in a battle scenario I am unable to determine which humans are of any threat to you, unless we are fired upon. There was human activity in the area where I located you. I have calculated that the best course of action is to return to and secure the deployment area and await information from the War Office, or a recognized authority, member or affiliate of the battalion.”

  Henry shook his head.

  “I don’t fathom any of it,” he said, then realized something was wrapped across his left eye. He raised his hand to the gauze. “What is this? What happened to my face?”

  The robot’s expression changed once more and it stopped moving. Henry sat up.

  “I will administer some more drugs to calm you, Non-critical Condition Patient #1; Unknown Soldier.”

  “Why do you call me that? Tell me what—”

  “In the absence of your basic data, I have assigned you with this name based on your—”

  “Stop it! Just tell me what…” A memory flashed across Henry’s mind and he saw the remains of his left eye held aloft on a corkscrew. “Herregud! I remember! My eye! He took my eye!” Henry grabbed the robot’s arm. The robot looked at Henry’s hand, but did nothing.

  “Please remain calm. Your heart rate has increased, which is not helpful. The gauze can be removed. Your vision has been restored...”

  Henry threw his hands to his face and unwound the gauze. Immediately he cast his hands over his eye as his brain made sense of the images from his human eye and robotic one for the first time. The natural and the unnatural. One eye had tried to naturally focus on what was in front of him, whilst the other, the one that had been operated on, reached back and forth at speed, zooming and adjusting his focus erratically, so he felt off-balance and like he was about to throw up.

  “What have you done to me?” he screamed, feeling the edges of the lens and the bonded skin with his fingertips, finding it sickening to touch. He kept the altered eye covered, scared to reprise the experience he’d just had.

  “In the absence of the complete eye, I was able to restore your sight by using an optic lens of the same technology as that used in my own assembly. It has significantly enhanced your daylight and nighttime vision. Your brain needs to get used to this change and interpret what is seen. You have been improved. Please remain calm.”

  “Let me up. I need to get out of here. I need to see it!” Henry despaired.

  The medical droid cast aside the domed shelter and Henry fell from the gurney, holding his head as the sudden light overwhelmed him. As if presenting a parody of Henry’s wounds, the sky above was bruised by a scattering of gray clouds. The fruitless sun did nothing to the ice, but to Henry, its assault upon him was too much to cope with. It was a kaleidoscope. It was a collage. It was black and white, then every color. Everything burned, then exploded in stars until Henry shielded his eye and lens fully once more, sending him into a churning black whirl where he dwelt until his heart rate returned to normal.

  The gurney collapsed, pleated, then folded away into the robot. Hepburn 8 waited patiently for Henry to adapt to the change in him. He knelt where he’d fallen, his head bowed toward the ice beneath his feet. Scared to move. Scared to raise his face skyward. His hands still shook and his fingers probed the area around his new eye, tentatively touching the edges where skin met metal. Warmth met cold. Organic met man-made. It was grotesque, but it was already part of him. Henry was altered. It had already happened and he couldn’t do a thing about it. Henry was alive. Alive and altered.

  He allowed his other senses to return; the usual sound of the wind, mixed with the near-silent hum of things moving and processing inside Hepburn 8, the chill on the back of Henry’s neck and ears. The metallic taste of blood in his mouth.

  “Your vision will reset. Think of it like a computer, being rebooted and coming online once more.”

  “Online?”

  The robot did not answer.

  Henry explored the space immediately before him. He realized that he no longer had control of an eyelid on one side of his face; instead, he seemed to have a shield of some kind and could make it close when he willed it to blink. After trying this several times, Henry opened his hands an inch or so further and focused on the ice beneath one of the robot’s feet. His vision blurred as the focus distorted, his robotic eye zooming ahead as if he’d thrown something into the distance and was trying to follow it. His other eye was slow and saw only the surface of the ice, whereas its new counterpart delved into the ice itself, looking at the particles that formed it and calculating the thickness and depth of it. This was both frightening and astonishing. Henry tried it numerous times until he could make one rich picture from the two images and govern the apparatus. When he looked at the robot’s foot, he could see into the particles of paint, then beyond it, into the ultranium material itself and the wiring it protected within. He saw that the robot had liquid pumping around its skeleton. Not blood. Silver and dazzling. Inhuman.

  He studied the robot and felt like he could peel back the layers before him, which, in a way, he was. It was thrilling and Henry accepted it then, understanding that he was more than he had been before. Henry was unlike anyone else on the planet, more akin to the robot, which he now saw perfect
ly for the first time since he’d woken on the gurney in the dome shelter.

  Beyond the robot lay leagues of icescape with nothing to block the view. Henry reached out and let his eye zoom before him and collectively report the images back to his brain. A caribou meandered in the distance, sniffing the air. Henry saw a steam of breath come from its mouth and snout, then withdrew so he saw only the robot before him.

  When Henry looked at his feet, he found that he could perceive the depth of the ice below and saw how it varied all about him. He thought about the MV Greyhound once more, speared by a giant propeller; a half-submerged, half-frozen mausoleum. His memory was returning to him fast, led by his fears.

  Behind him was the Favela, but Henry wasn’t ready to look in that direction yet. He decided he would only return and lay sight upon that place when he was truly ready to wreak his revenge. He’d been stupid. He’d been a child, ill-prepared and naïve. He’d welcomed his death in the end. It had been assured, despite the apparent mercy upon him.

  But death had not come, and Henry felt then that everything that had unfolded before, all the great and wretched misery that had befallen him, along with his survival at the hands of the robot, had to have happened for a reason.

  “My name is Henry,” he said finally.

  “Hello, Henry. I am Nightingale Medical Droid Hepburn 8.” The robot beamed a digital smile upon its faceplate.

  “Hepburn,” Henry repeated. “Show me what I look like. I’m ready.”

  Fifteen

  Therapy?

  Henry had never been vain. There was no need for it in the modern world. Only the king had seen fit to preen and groom. Henry had not understood it, but then he wasn’t a king, or a leader of any kind.

  He realized that what the king was doing was making himself unlike the rest. Distinguishable from the citizens he had power over. It showed them that he was distinctive. Singular. It had worked with Henry. Never in a million years would he forget how the king had looked that day. The absence of hair and eyebrows and the little mustache. The man was an ogre. A tyrant. It made forgetting his ordeal all the harder, but holding onto his hate all the easier.

  In contrast, Sissel had not done anything to alter her appearance. Henry hadn’t recognized her as the head of the salvagers when he’d first entered the bay. Yet she had earned her place at the helm of the crew and Henry could only imagine the things she had done over the years to get there.

  He thought about how Sissel had been betrayed by Skindred, then Lanner and knew that her decision to help him had endangered her. He hoped that Yaxley and the others would protect her as best they could.

  Hepburn had shown Henry his reflection by buffing a sphere of satellite wreckage until it shone back at them. Henry was shocked to see the change in him. He couldn’t stop looking at the lens that filled the void where his eye had been. The skin around it had healed well, but it still looked monstrous. The weirdest thing for Henry was that there were no eyelashes on that side of his face. They’d been burned during the operation to install the new tech into his socket. He marveled at the oddity. Such a simple detail with an unheralded function. Eyelashes.

  He stared at his face for the longest time he had ever done so and studied all the details, uncertain when he’d next gaze upon his own face again. He let a few tears fall from his human eye and then he wiped them and his demeanor changed.

  “I have to get used to the mess of it,” Henry grimaced, speaking to his reflection, “I’m alive, at least. I can’t undo his work.”

  Henry wondered if his sisters would become accustomed to it and accept the way he’d altered..? Would they see past it and recognize him again as Henry, their brother? Or would they hate what he’d become?

  Henry came to the realization then that his sisters might already assume him dead. If he saw them again, there was a chance they might cast him away. A ghost. Not Henry.

  It pained him to think of Iris especially turning her back on him, or unable to look upon him without seeing only the modified remains of an eye and the act that had led to its ruin. When they looked upon Henry, would they only and always picture the king and their tormentors?

  All of it was out of Henry’s control. He couldn’t change the way he looked. It was like being born with different colored hair, or skin. Being born a hawk instead of a human.

  There were other changes in Henry’s appearance that he noted. His skin and the hair on his face weren’t as smooth as they had been; Henry had more than a hint of sideburns growing and a shadow of stubble upon his top lip and chin. How long had it been since he’d seen his own reflection?

  Even his eyebrows were thicker and threatened to meet in the middle. His hair had gotten much longer, too. It was shaggy, well past his shoulders, and flicked out in places where it wanted to curl. He tried to picture himself without it, or without eyebrows and then with a strange mustache, but it seemed absurd. Henry was far from grizzly, but he was equally as distant from being the child he remembered. Henry thought then that if his face had the potential to seed fear in his beloved sisters, then it might do the same with the king and his cohorts. He smiled into the makeshift mirror at the thought.

  Hepburn was incomparable at catching fish. It simply smashed a perfect hole in the ice, waited a few seconds, then pulled Henry’s dinner out by hand. The robot had instructed Henry that it was safer to cook fish before consuming it, so he’d gotten used to Hepburn heating their catch with a blue flame before eating it, finding it delicious and easier to chew. Henry wondered what the robot would’ve said about the canned food he’d found in the galley of the ship and thought it best not to know.

  “You have not spoken for a long period of time,” Hepburn said as they set off for their final trek before nightfall.

  “I don’t feel like it,” Henry replied, using his new ability to stare ahead, far into the distance.

  He remembered what it had been like to fish with his family.

  “It is healthy to speak to another and voice any—”

  “You’re not proper, are you?” Henry snapped. “You’re not alive and, it ain’t the same. You might be here. But I’m alone.”

  The words burst out as if they’d been building inside him for weeks, lying dormant for a moment to be released. Henry assumed they’d been there since before he’d even reached the Favela. He’d spent weeks alone in shock, hunting Lanner’s party. Conversing with no one. Only his urge for revenge gave him purpose; without it, he would’ve lost his mind completely. Grief had dragged him further and further away from the person he was; the Henry who’d whooped and yelled racing his sister across the ice. The one who had played with his sister’s hair to get her to sleep. When he’d met the Orfins, he’d been scared, but even the brash, initially hostile interaction was something. Something was better than nothing at all.

  “I am not fully sentient, because humans are not at ease with that. So, I have a logical and mathematical correlate to self-consciousness. I can hold conversations with you, Henry. I recommend that.”

  Henry stopped walking. Hepburn did the same and Henry remembered a day when he’d argued with Father whilst out from the homestead. He would’ve traded anything to be back in that moment.

  “You can wrecker-men it all you like, but you ain’t bright to fathom the things in my head. You’re just an ancient tin and I can’t hark even half of what you say. Prong.”

  “Lone, solitary without company. I am not human, but you are not companionless. Destitute of sympathetic or friendly companionship. I am not human, but I can be a sympathetic and friendly companion. Remote from places of human habitation; desolate, bleak. This factor can be worked upon in the rehabilitation modules I am programmed with. Isolation can be enjoyed. Isolation can be remedied at a later stage.”

  “You can describe loneliness, but you can’t see it, or smell it. You don’t know it unless it is happening to you. You can know the words for it. But you don’t know how I feel.”

  “In the last few days, have you felt
unhappy none of the time, some of the time, most of the time or all of the time?” Hepburn asked unexpectedly.

  “Most of the time,” Henry replied honestly, with more than a hint of spite in his voice.

  “In the last few days, have you thought about harming others?”

  “All of the time.” His answer was immediate, but not as pointed.

  “In the last few days, have you thought about ending your life?”

  “No. Yes,” Henry admitted. He felt ashamed at his admission and was surprised he’d said it. It had been such a deep thought, never voiced, not considered at length. Yet it had been there. Like a feeling, or an idea, creeping up on him in the lonely hours.

  “We do not need to talk if you do not wish it, but I will ask you these three questions again exactly one week from now.” Henry believed it. The robot did not lie, or exaggerate. The robot was only facts, logic and truth. Henry didn’t want to admit it to the robot, but saying those things out loud, letting his voice speak the words to his own ears, confessing things he never would’ve said to his siblings, was therapeutic. He looked at the robot again; it was a cunning thing. It was intelligent beyond his own imagining. It was more than an ancient tin. It was a companion. It was friendly and compassionate. In a way. It would have to do, until he could get his sisters back.

  Henry placed his hand to his human eye and shielded the lids of it for a moment. He’d been getting headaches from where his eye was trying to keep up with its synthetic counterpart. Hepburn had warned him about it, but there was little he could do until the changes in his optic nerves settled fully in his brain. “The headaches continue?”

  “Yes. Just as you said.”

  The robot raised its faceplate skyward like it sometimes did. Henry thought it was making some kind of record of it; silently updating information about him for later reference.