Alita

by Pat Cadigan

  But the last time he’d seen the bracelet she was wearing, it had been on his mother’s arm. It had been a gift from his father, and his mother had worn it constantly, waking and sleeping, until the day she died.

  * * *

  Gifts had been few and far between at Hugo’s house. His father had done his best, but being a drone on a Factory assembly line didn’t pay a fortune, and money had to stretch even further when Hugo had suddenly come along. He’d been a surprise to his middle-aged parents, who had thought any diapers in their future would be on their grandchildren.

  Hugo had never doubted his parents loved him. His father called him “an unexpected pleasure”, and his big brother was overjoyed to have a little brother to look out for. It was a happy home, and like all kids from happy homes, Hugo hadn’t known they were poor. Only later on had he realised that sometimes his parents and even his brother had skipped dinner to make sure he never had to go to bed hungry.

  His mother had talked about getting a job when Hugo started school but his father begged her not to. Then you’ll get enhancements too. One of us has to stay completely human for our boys, querida.

  His mother told him he was the most human person she knew, no matter how much of his body got replaced, but she honoured his wishes. She’d tried to pick up extra money by taking in laundry or doing housework, but most people gave their business to those who were enhanced with special devices and attachments rather than someone who only had two natural hands. Once in a while, though, those cyborgs got all booked up and they’d throw some work her way.

  The infrequent gifts were most often useful, necessary things, not some extravagant nonessential like jewellery. Jewellery’s only purpose was to use up money better spent on groceries. But one night Hugo’s father had come home and put a small drawstring bag made of dark-green velvet on the kitchen table in front of his mother. Hugo and his brother had been jumping up and down, yelling Open it! Open it! while she stared at it like she thought it might bite her.

  The expression on her face when she saw the bracelet was one Hugo had rarely seen. Big Bro told him later she was like a line in a poem he had read once: “surprised by joy”. The bracelet was the last thing she’d expected to get, something she hadn’t even known she’d wanted until that moment.

  She held the two-inch band of hammered copper in her hands and examined it closely. There was a dark-green gem set into the middle of the band—the same dark green as the little velvet bag, which Hugo thought was a very cool thing. He asked if it were an emerald and everyone burst out laughing.

  Hugo waited for his mother to say his father had to take it back because they couldn’t squander money on useless things. But she hadn’t. Instead, she put it on and never took it off.

  Big Bro told her she shouldn’t do that, because someone might mug her for it; she should put it away in a safe place. She had refused. Jewellery is meant to be worn, not hidden, she said. Hugo had worried—he hadn’t been too young to know Iron City was a dangerous place. But nothing bad ever happened. His mother called it her lucky charm, and Hugo wondered if maybe that little bit of copper with the pretty piece of glass really had some kind of power to ward off evil.

  If so, it hadn’t extended to his father. It didn’t stop him from replacing more and more of his body until there was hardly any organic flesh and blood left.

  The first time his father had come home with a cyber-limb, Hugo had run away from him crying. His father had been baffled at Hugo’s reaction—he’d thought Hugo would find his machine arm fascinating, especially when he saw how it could unfold, extend and rotate, and how the telescoping fingers could bend in every direction.

  His mother and brother had told him he’d hurt his father’s feelings. Big Bro spent a lot of time trying to talk him around. People lose their arms and legs in accidents, or they get cancer in their bones and have to have something amputated. You really think they shouldn’t be allowed to replace them?

  Hugo hadn’t known how to explain that his father hadn’t lost his arm, he’d traded it for something that didn’t even look human. He did apologise to his father—but from under his bed, where he couldn’t see the metal thing attached to his father’s body.

  His father had not taken offence or been angry. He said he’d keep the arm covered up at home to give Hugo time to get used to it. Later on, Hugo overheard him telling his mother and Big Bro that you never knew what might scare a little kid or why; the world looked a lot different at that angle. It wouldn’t do any good to say he shouldn’t be afraid of something; instead, they had to show him they still loved him and not everything that looked scary was something to be afraid of. Hugo had loved his father so much for that. This was the father he knew and loved and trusted; he just didn’t understand how that same father could want a machine arm. It wasn’t only that it looked scary; it ruined hugs too.

  In any case, his father did cover the arm at home and Hugo tried hard to act like he was okay about it. In truth, the thing was scarier when he couldn’t see it. What was it doing when his father put a blanket or a sweater over it? He had nightmares about it detaching itself from his father after everyone was asleep, crawling into his room and trapping Hugo in his bed so it could saw off his arm and replace it with a machine exactly like itself.

  After a while the nightmares tapered off—though not as soon as Hugo let everyone believe. He was no longer afraid of the machine sticking out of his father’s shoulder, but he didn’t like it. The best he could do was tolerate its presence.

  No one told Hugo when his father had replaced his legs; he wouldn’t have known at all except one morning his father had forgotten to lock the bathroom door. Hugo was too old by then to run away and hide under the bed. The legs were more humanlike, but Hugo couldn’t help thinking about his nightmare. Now he imagined the machine arm had replaced his father’s legs while he slept, although he was too old to believe things like that could really happen.

  But he was not too old for nightmares. In the new ones, his father was telling him to get up; they were going to be late for work at the Factory. Hugo rolled over to find his father was all metal, with four machine arms and two heads. Then he threw back the covers and saw his own body was also all metal. Sometimes he had eight legs like a spider, other times a single wheel like a gyro. Occasionally his father would start falling apart, and when Hugo tried to get out of bed to help him, he did too.

  In retrospect Hugo realised his father had already replaced his legs when he’d given his mother the bracelet; it was around the time he’d noticed his father was walking differently. The Factory must have given him a bonus for becoming more of a machine. That was what they had in the Factory after all—lots of metal machines.

  Only machines weren’t supposed to die.

  Wasn’t that why his father replaced his entire body, so he could go on working at the Factory forever with the rest of the machines? When a Factory drone keeled over on the job, shouldn’t they have just called tech support or maintenance and had them fix whatever was wrong? When a machine malfunctioned, you just replaced the faulty part or whatever, and it went back to work. Factory reps didn’t come to the house and tell the machine’s family he was dead.

  His brother had had to barricade him in his room so his mother could talk with the reps without Hugo’s calling them liars and trying to punch them. After the reps left Hugo sat out on the front step stubbornly waiting for his father to come home so he could tell him about the lying Factory scumbags who had come to the house claiming he was dead.

  Hugo didn’t remember much about the weeks after that. Big Bro and his girlfriend Nana got married; Nana spent a lot of time with Hugo and his mother while Big Bro was at work—at the Factory, of course, but his job was better than their dad’s. Hugo begged him not to swap any parts of his body for machines. His brother had promised he wouldn’t and didn’t mind when Hugo insisted on checking.

  Two and a half months later their mother died in her sleep. When Hugo found her, she’d stil
l been wearing the bracelet. Some good luck charm—it had failed his mother when she’d really needed it. He’d never expected to see it again, hadn’t even thought about it in years.

  And now here it was, on the arm of some stranger who had no idea what she was wearing.

  Hugo finished his falafel, tossed the bunched-up napkin in a nearby trashcan and got ready to start the gyro. Without thinking about what he was doing, he walked the gyro forward, through the no-parking area in front of the café, until he was parallel with the woman just as she ordered another cappuccino. He waited until the waitress went inside before he started the engine. Then he reached over, swiped the bracelet off the woman’s forearm and took off.

  Sorry, lady, he thought without looking back. But frankly, it didn’t go with your outfit.

  * * *

  Hugo knew no one would chase him. The woman wasn’t hurt and a cheap metal bracelet wasn’t worth the effort. But just to be sure, he took a lot of back alleys and side streets, even walking the gyro along a few passages that were too narrow to ride through.

  Half an hour later, he fetched up on the southeast edge of the trash pile. It wasn’t an area he’d spent much time in; apparently no one else did either. Normally that would have been reason enough to head for someplace more populated, where a person was less likely to get mugged. Although that hadn’t helped the lady at the café—she was out one bracelet.

  Well, tough stuff. At least she hadn’t been roughed up. The bracelet was just some piece of costume jewellery to her; she’d forget all about it as soon as she got another. And maybe if he told himself that enough times, Hugo thought, he’d forget that he’d sworn he’d never steal from all-natural people or those with only a few cyborg parts. Only Total Replacement cyborgs were fair game.

  TRs were just talking heads riding around in metal bodies. Jacking TRs was okay; they could take it. All you had to do was give them a few shocks with a paralyser to take them down, then disconnect the cyber-core. After that, you tipped off the Factory Prefects anonymously; they’d pick the core up wherever you left it and put it on life-support. Meanwhile, you chopped the body and shopped the parts, unless someone wanted the whole thing, no assembly required.

  Losing a body was nothing for a TR because they’d already lost their body—they’d traded it for hardware. They could always get another and, with any luck, they wouldn’t get jacked again too soon. But so what if they did? It was still all just hardware. It wasn’t a real body.

  Hugo put his feet up on the gyro’s handlebars and leaned back a little, turning the copper band over and over in his hands.

  After his mother died he’d assumed his brother had given the bracelet to Nana and she’d just put it away and never worn it. She and Big Bro took him in and became his mother and father, which was sort of weird. But only a little—they were his family after all, and they were all he had left.

  He kept waiting for Big Bro and Nana to have kids so he could be like their big brother. But it never happened. He wondered if they were going to do what his parents did: wait till he was all grown up and then have an “unexpected pleasure”.

  Not even close as it turned out.

  Big Bro kept his promise and never got even one enhancement; he never needed to. The Factory had trained him as an all-purpose engineer. Which meant any time they wanted to do something, Big Bro said, they asked him to show them how to do it. It certainly paid better than their father’s old job, and Big Bro didn’t have to work as hard. Sometimes the Factory called him in when there was a problem with something, but they always paid him extra for it. That didn’t happen a lot though. Big Bro got to spend more time with him than their father ever had.

  Nana called them “her guys”. She never minded when they went off for hours on long walks. Sometimes they went trash-picking together, looking for really weird things Zalem had thrown away and making up crazy stories about what they were and why they’d been thrown out. Other times, they’d find a good spot where they could get a glimpse of the buildings on the edge of Zalem’s five-mile-wide disk and try to imagine what the people in them were doing, whether they were looking down and wondering what people on the ground did every day.

  Those had been happy times. Hugo hadn’t even known how happy; children seldom do. He hadn’t imagined things would ever be any different, even after he grew up and got a job. Sometimes he thought maybe he could be an engineer like Big Bro and tell everyone how to do things. But he seldom looked that far ahead. Mostly he was just glad his brother shared his fascination for Zalem; Big Bro was so smart, so imaginative, so much fun.

  The thing was, though, Big Bro was an engineer. Just dreaming and making up stories wasn’t enough, he told Hugo one day. He didn’t just want to imagine what Zalem was like, he wanted to find out for real, so he’d been thinking very hard about how to do that. He took Hugo up to his workshop in the attic and showed him what he had come up with. That was the beginning of the end.

  In truth, the end had begun earlier when Big Bro had decided to build the flying machine, before he let Hugo in on it. Hugo knew it was seriously illegal. Heavier-than-air flight was a challenge to Zalem—just being caught with one of those machines was a capital offence. Even if the thing couldn’t actually fly, a Hunter-Warrior could take your head without there even being a marker out on you and collect a sizeable bounty.

  If by some crazy turn of events, you did get the machine off the ground, Centurians would shoot it out of the sky. And if there were friends or family or anybody else with you or even just standing nearby—well, too bad for them, better luck next lifetime.

  No one had tried anything so foolish in years. Even birds gave Iron City a wide berth, as Zalem defences didn’t differentiate between living creatures and machines. As a result, the only place people could see uncaged birds was way out in the Badlands—way, way out—which meant plenty of Iron City residents lived and died without ever seeing an actual bird in flight.

  In any case, Big Bro wasn’t just some Iron City fool. He was capable of building a machine with a video camera to transmit whatever it saw. Big Bro’s only problem was noise. Once he fixed that, he told Hugo, he’d fly it on a night when there was no moon in the sky. The video camera was built into the thing’s actual framework, which was mostly cardboard. What little metal there was wouldn’t show up on any sensors. It would fly all the way up to Zalem and then they’d finally see what was really going on up there. In the meantime, Big Bro told him, they had to keep this between the two of them. No one else could know, not even Nana. Not yet, anyway. They could tell Nana later, when they were ready to launch.

  That made Hugo feel a little funny. How could Big Bro keep a secret from his wife? He was pretty sure the only secret his father had ever kept from his mother was saving up for the bracelet, and that wasn’t the same thing at all. The time that Big Bro and his parents hadn’t told him his father had replaced his legs—that was closer. Except it hadn’t been illegal.

  Well, Big Bro wasn’t his real father, and Nana wasn’t even a blood relative. But she was as much family to him as anyone could be. It felt wrong to keep something so big from her.

  But he respected Big Bro’s wishes and didn’t say anything, although he thought sometimes he was going to burst. His brother kept working and he got the motor a little bit quieter, but it was still louder than he wanted. The materials available in Iron City just weren’t good enough.

  And then one rainy night, his brother came up with the answer: he’d waterproof the flyer and send it out in the rain, which would mask the motor noise. The machine would fly up to Zalem with a night-vision camera and they could pick up the transmission by tuning into the right wavelength.

  When the batteries started to get low, the flyer would go straight up, as high as possible; the higher-altitude winds would blow it far away from Iron City, getting rid of the evidence. They’d be the only people who knew anything about Zalem. Maybe someday they’d be able to use what they knew to their advantage, or maybe they’
d never be able to tell anyone else till the day they died. Either way, they’d still know the biggest secret in the world.

  Hugo thought the big night would never come, but finally Big Bro said conditions would be right. The weather forecast said it was going to rain all night, and it just happened to be the new moon so the overcast sky would be nice and dark. And, to Hugo’s enormous relief, Big Bro said they could finally let Nana in on their secret.

  But when his brother told Nana about the flyer she wasn’t happy at all. She thought it was the worst idea anyone had ever had. She said she didn’t want to know things about Zalem that no one else in the world—or at least Iron City—knew, and she didn’t understand why anyone would when it was against the law.

  Her reaction made Hugo feel weird, even kind of scared, like maybe they shouldn’t do this. But when he talked to Big Bro about it, his brother told him it was just because Nana wasn’t an engineer. She was artistic—she wove beaded jewellery a friend sold for her in the market, and she wrote poetry and fairy tales about talking animals and robot elves. Nana’s head was full of impossible things she could only wish were real, Big Bro said. She couldn’t get her mind around the fact that not all forbidden things were impossible. Hugo thought Big Bro was seriously underestimating Nana’s intelligence, but he could talk to him about that later, after they saw the video of Zalem.

  The day seemed to last forever. Finally, late in the afternoon, when the clouds were starting to build up, Nana suddenly handed Hugo a shopping list full of things he could only get at one of the markets on the other side of town. He tried to talk her into waiting until tomorrow but she pleaded with him, saying she’d been putting off getting these things for too long and it would mean so much if he’d do it for her. She’d do something really nice to reward him for helping her out.