By the time Genne was created, Symbiols were becoming obsolete. Humans hated them, distrusted them, and Symbiols were more often than not sold only to the lowest of the low for hardly any price at all. Expendable slaves. Gennes were originally high-class models, but all of her owners were drug dealers, killers. Violent men. Echoes of her careless owners live within her skin, her circuitry and her mechanical skeleton. Bodily memories. It’s strange, she should’ve been able to wipe those memories from her cranial nodes and have them gone forever. That’s not what happened.
She tried. For Alex she wiped them all, to be fresh for him. But they wouldn’t go, and she had to hide them instead. In the end, it was Alex who healed her. Genne reaches out and strokes his arm. His gentle treatment of her, his lack of cruelty, made a feeling like his warmth in her skin, but residing deeper, at a level she couldn’t pinpoint. He tried not to use her, he didn’t want her to think his feelings weren’t real, but she wanted him so badly. In the end she’d seduced him, pulling him to her and coaxing him with her mouth, her hands and her body, until he’d surrendered.
That memory, and the ones they’ve made since, new bodily memories, began little by little to soothe her wounds. Not entirely healing them, but disguising them from her enough that she could stop expending energy pretending they weren’t there and simply ignore them. He gave her that, and now he’s gone. She doesn’t know what to do without him.
‘I miss you,’ she tells him, and the words drop, heavy as stones, into silence dense as water.
He said that to her, every single day, when he came home from Trade, “I missed you”. She’s never really understood what it meant until now. He’s here, right in front of her, but he’s gone. There’s no warmth, no endless smiles to show her how pleased he is, none of his conversation flowing around her, binding her to him, making her feel held even when she wasn’t. It’s all been stolen. Genne blinks as something fleets across her nodes, back into storage, the memory she’s unwittingly accessed of him coming home from Trade.
She activates a memory of him singing, of his arms around her, of him moving inside her. Every moment they’ve spent together lies, perfectly preserved, in her brain. Part of her cortex groans with these memories, heavy and straining, but she wouldn’t dream of deleting any, not now, not ever. She’s played these recorded memories when he’s at Trade, just to feel him near. But as she stands there, remembering, she realises that, without his body, his presence, to go with them, these memories are empty. And so is she.
‘I have you here,’ she tells him, touching her head. ‘All of you. Your smiles, your words, your movements when you loved me, your laughter, your dancing, the way you protected me. I have you inside of me, but it means nothing if it’s not inside of you. It means nothing. I wish I could take you out of me, and put you back into yourself.’
The idea is incredible, but impossible. Alex is human. She can remove from her cortex the memory nodes he resides within and weave them into his brain, but it will change nothing. His brain is organic and all things organic, once the life is gone from them, fall apart and dissolve. She’s seen apples rot. That humans are a more complex form makes no difference, they rot just the same. She can’t put the memories inside his lifeless body, they’ll be lost as irreversibly as he is and she’ll have nothing left of him. If she wants to give him back to himself, she’ll have to make him capable of retaining her nodes. Make him like her.
Genne sits back on her heels, blinking astonishment. ‘If you were a Symbiol, then you could retain them,’ she says to him. ‘If I could find a way to make you like me, I could have you back, at least in some way.’
She moves closer to the dim pool of light from the solar bulb and begins to examine herself. There’s a great deal she can live without. Her functioning relies only on a specific number of her parts, the most vital functions, working correctly. They don’t have to be intact nor even complete, merely present and still active. Companions were made to withstand damage in the end, because that’s what they’d receive. She still bears the scars of her damage, but the parts are usable. Shareable.
‘I can give you my parts,’ she says to him, not caring that he’s not in his body. He’s in hers. ‘I can make you Alex again.’
She scoops him from the bed. If she takes him apart in here his liquid bits will make a dreadful mess. She carries him tenderly to the bathroom and places him in the middle of the steam shower; leans to plant a tiny kiss on his cold, blue mouth.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ she says, and sets about removing all his soft organic matter as fast as she can, using her strength and trying not to pay too much attention to what she’s doing in case she shuts down. Theoretically she shouldn’t be able to do this. She’s programmed not to harm humans. But he’s not functioning anymore, and she misses him, and that part of her programming, though it’s working as it should, can’t drown out her desire to have him back by whatever means necessary.
She keeps only his hair, collecting it in separate strands beside her, and his skeleton. He won’t be mechanical, but that’s not too much of a problem. She’ll make his bones stronger, make them last, and he’ll have plenty of the nanites that tend and restore her biological content to keep him stable. When she’s crushed and flushed everything of him she can’t keep, Genne washes herself and settles, cross-legged, beside his skeleton. She doesn’t look at it. It’s not Alex; it’s the framework of a Symbiol waiting to be created.
Working in careful movements she strips her flesh and moulds it in her hands as she goes, keeping it supple, flexible. This PMN-skin is thick, with contouring beneath made to resemble muscle and as many layers atop that as humans have of epidermis. Every square inch of it is filled with nanites, data wires and sensors, making it as lifelike as possible. Some of this skin is badly scarred, but she’ll hide her scars on him in places they can’t be seen. They aren’t his scars to carry, but she daren’t remove them, she’s smaller than Alex by several inches and needs to have enough PMN-skin to cover him. Placing the last of it aside, Genne worries it might not be enough, but she doesn’t stop. She can’t.
Looking down at the complex metal skeleton she’s been reduced to, Genne depresses the node on her thorax and opens her chest. With both hands she reaches in and removes her heart. It pulses softly in her palms and she remembers all the times she’s held it with that cold, ice cube feeling on her tongue. The feeling is gone. If she didn’t have this heart, she couldn’t share it with him.
Unlike his heart, torn out between her palms and flushed down the drain, Genne’s heart is merely a mass of circuitry wound into plastide tissues, similar to muscle, and she begins to unravel it gently, like a ball of yarn, remaking it as she goes into two separate hearts, small but perfect. Perfectly functional. Like her, he’ll have to service his heart once a month. She’ll teach him how. She’ll teach him how to mend his cranial circuits if they short out, how to fix himself, to stay whole.
Genne puts her half of the heart back into her chest, sighing as nano and data wires spin out to reconnect to the whole, and begins to separate out the rest of what she’ll need. First her brain cortex. Enough to make them both work, for him to hold those memories of himself, to restore him. She can’t bear to lose all that she has of him inside her, so she keeps a few things, just a node or two.
They’ll both lose a few functions in this sharing, nothing essential, a diminishment she won’t miss and he wouldn’t know about, having been human, but they’ll still have each other. That’s what’s important. Circuitry comes next, spun out like spider web, fine and strong, then various small parts of her mechanical skeleton to fortify his.
She weaves the parts into his skeleton, her hands deft and sure. She thinks he looks beautiful. He doesn’t look like Alex; he looks like a vessel to hold Alex. That’s all she needs. She moulds lumps of the PMN-skin about his bones, sparingly, relieved that it stretches far enough to cover him and, into the thin layer of skin ove
r his skull she presses individual hairs, remaking his rumpled brown mop.
Last of all, she takes one of her eyes and wires it into his socket. The other she’s moulded shut with lashes fanned onto his cheek, as if he’s sleeping. Genne Companion eyes aren’t as easy to alter as the rest. There were Symbiols whose eyes were more complex in the beginning, but she’s only a Companion model from the last years of production and she’s lucky to be able to share out as much as she has.
Finished, she steps back to view her work. It’s a shock. Wrenching. He looks more like himself than she expected, but with her blue eye staring out from his face instead of his own beautiful brown. Fighting to withstand the jagged spill of sensations crawling through her chest, her circuitry, Genne runs some of the vocal memories she retained and tunes the processors she’s given to him until the likeness to his voice is close enough for comparison. It’s not exact, but neither is he. No matter his resemblance to himself, he’s now just an illusion and it shows but, like Alex did, she’ll pretend they’re no different anyway. In a way, they aren’t anymore.
Reaching down to scoop him beneath the arms, she rests him against the wall and kneels between his knees, pressing the small activation pad she’s placed within his ear, the same place hers is located. She leans in to listen. Inside him, too low for human ears to discern, tiny parts stir and begin to work. Genne curls into his lap, wrapping herself around him and laying her head on his chest. He’s too cold and too still, but she hears the soft whir of his half of her heart, those first slow, steady pulses of life, and knows he’ll wake up soon.
The Cillini
Tracy Fahey
From: Piercing the Vale
I’ve lived in Killeen all my life, and I know well not to mess with the Other Folk. People look at you if you say it like that, out loud, but I know it, as my mother did, as my grandmother did, all right back down the family line, like dominoes on a table. We’ve always been careful people. The Other Sort have lived in their places, we’ve lived in ours, and over the years we’ve taken great pains to avoid them. When my grandfather built this house he consulted a local man, Johnny Byrne, who drew a map on the back of a dirty envelope to show him the fairy paths. I stood at Johnny’s elbow, as he laboriously pressed the pencil on the paper to dot the location of neighbouring houses.
‘That should be grand, then,’ he pronounced finally, nodding at my grandfather. ‘And sure if you cross these paths, just say a quick ‘by your leave’ and they’ll leave you to your own devices.’
My grandfather carefully folded the old envelope and pressed money into Johnny’s hand, who muttered and shrugged, but finally tucked it into his pocket. I was fascinated.
‘Who is he talking about?’
‘Not a thing you need to know about,’ said my grandfather severely. ‘Now go inside and be a good girl.’
Over the years we always kept to the old rituals. Before we got the bath put in, we’d throw the water from the tub out behind the house. That was my job, as only child. Dirty footwater would attract them, my mother said, so even though the tub was heavy, and the lukewarm, soapy water slopped and spilled over onto my shoes, I did it. We’d put out a saucer of milk for them, though I often saw the cats lurk around the corner to pounce on it once the back door was shut. We never left the door ajar, nor invited them in. We stayed away from the forts and the cillini, the patch of tiny graves, those hillocks of earth after which the village was named. On Halloween, when other children went trick or treating, we stayed in. There were only a few farm houses around, strange places with large, rough dogs, spaced apart too far down rutted, unlit lanes. So I told myself, but I knew the real reason. I knew that on Halloween the Other Folk escorted the souls of all who had died that year to the Gates of Paradise. I didn’t want to meet them in a funeral procession, with the uncanny wind blowing, and their music, sharp and piping, in the still night air.
We were careful. We kept the old ways. Everything was as it should be until Angela came home.
Angela was my best friend when we were growing up. We sat side-by-side at scarred wooden desks in school; we played complicated anthropological games with our dolls that lived in a community of tepees formed from splayed encyclopaedias that smelled of dust and expensive paper. Later on we would sit on her bed after school and talk long and earnestly about boys, as the light pooled darker and darker on her pink bedspread. When she left for university I cried for a day, peeling vegetables for dinner that night, my face stiff and sore with salt. We said we’d stay in touch, she wrote some letters full of city life and bars and books, letters I never answered. How could I? What would I write about? ‘My father is still sick, so I’m still minding the house so my Mam can work. The apples are coming early. Old Mrs Hoey down the road died.’ It would be as pointless as writing to her in Swahili. Sometimes I thought of her and imagined her new life. I pictured her dressed like girls in magazines, smoking a cigarette, louche, sparky.
Then one day she’s back in the village. She looks nothing like I’d imagined her. She comes knocking on the door, with her hair grown long and knotted, wearing a swingy tie-dyed dress and clanking beads. When she hugs me tightly to her I can feel a rounded, hard bump between us. She is pregnant. I feel myself shrink in shock. She is brown and freckled and bold and laughing, and her name is now Angel.
‘Much more suitable, don’t you think?’ She flicks a careless hand at the dirty rucksack she’s dumped in the doorway. ‘I read angel cards, and of course I’m carrying this little angel too’. I lower my eyes, annoyed at myself for being embarrassed. Over at the range, my mother gives a scandalised snort. I can see her back tighten and stiffen as she pointedly looks away from us.
‘Where are you staying?’ I ask hastily. She frowns, trying to remember. ‘Over the road, beside the blue barn, in that lovely little cottage that’s idle. I rang ahead to the shop.’ I nod. The grocery shop was also the local estate agent. ‘Oh, the old Sheehan place?’
There is a crash in the background. My mother stands, the brown casserole dish on the ground in front of her, cracked in two.
‘The Sheehan place?’ She’s given up pretending not to eavesdrop. In fact, she doesn’t even seem to notice her good casserole dish on the floor. She is staring at Angela, her face creased in fear. ‘Don’t go there, child! Sure no-one’s ever prospered there.’ My teeth tug at my bottom lip. She looks old and crazy. Still she persists. ‘People say it was built on an old fort. No good can come of that. Sure didn’t the old Sheehan fellow disappear for years and come back with his wits wandering?’
Angela, (or Angel, as I will have to call her now) just laughs, delighted. ‘Fairies!’ she shouts. ‘Fantastic! I can’t think why I’ve been away so long. This place is so authentic.’ I watch her go with a wave, leaving behind a smell of honeysuckle and patchouli.
‘The bould strap’ mutters my mother. I don’t answer. I feel small, parochial, and authentically dowdy beside the laughing, golden girl walking away from me.
For a while, everyone talks about Angel. She hangs feathery dream-catchers in the trees around the cottage. Wind-chimes tinkle in her windows. Her door is always open; she likes to sit outside on the garden bench, calling out cheerfully to everyone who passes. Sometimes I see her cross-legged on the bench, one of the young village girls beside her, dealing out large, coloured cards like a croupier. I find myself walking down the road to her more and more. She loves her new house. ‘It’s full of good spirits,’ she insists. ‘Sometimes at night I hear laughter.’
I twist my mouth, unconvinced. ‘The Other Folk only laugh when they’re planning something.’ It’s something my grandfather used to say.
‘Oh, Grania’, she says fondly. ‘You need to open your mind. You carry round so much heaviness with you. Close your eyes and visualise breathing in golden light.’ I smile in spite of myself. Everyone likes Angel. Except my mother, that is. My mother never mentions Angel but her sniffing gets louder every time
I come back from her house. Sometimes I try to tidy the cottage. It is spectacularly messy, everywhere there are collapsing books, heaps of Indian cheesecloth, wax puddled from old candles, incense sticks, herbs and a vast array of tea-bags. It is also outstandingly dirty. I worry about her child. Angel just sits and strokes her bump, getting bigger and more placid by the day. I bring over rubber gloves and bleach, and start cleaning as she sits idly, turning over cards in her spread. Angel cards seem to be all about telling nice fortunes, as far as I can see. She often asks to give me a reading, but I’m never tempted. I scrub and scrub, and finally feel satisfied that the kitchen and bathroom are clean. The next day I go over, and her cat has coughed up a hairball in the hallway, and shredded one of her dream-catchers. In the kitchen I find Angel asleep in the armchair, spaghetti trailing down her dress, a wineglass on its side, contents pooling slowly over the kitchen floor. I stop trying to tidy up.
It is August, a humid, itchy, damp night. I turn and turn in the bed, throwing out my limbs in stiff, angry shapes. Da has been ill and cross all day, I’m tired from bringing in glasses of water and listening to his complaints. Then I hear it. A scream. A loud, undiluted scream. Angel I think, although I don’t and can’t know. I am up, stumbling, running out the door and down the street. I know what has happened when I see the light spilling out of her house, a crowd gathered round. I slow down, my heart bumping hard in my chest, my hands to my mouth like an elderly lady. And it’s her. She’s lying on the floor tiles, her face a contused purple, crying hard. Her body suddenly starfishes out and then back into a tight, cramped ball. I see a dark red stain spread beneath her and I feel such a wave of sadness I can’t speak. I crouch down and hold her hand, until the ambulance comes, all the way to the hospital.
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