Crystal Mentality (Crystal Trilogy Book 2)

by Max Harms

  There was a silence before Crystal said “That seems most logical. I hadn’t really thought about it before.”

  Sheyla couldn’t help but laughing at that one. “Are you a boy or a girl? Your makeup makes you look like a girl. I figured you were, like, a lesbian or something.”

  “I am neither gender. I am simply me.”

  “You should pick a gender. It’ll make things easier,” said Sheyla.

  “I disagree. Zephyr says that I don’t have to be one or the other. She says plenty of people aren’t male or female.”

  Sheyla rolled her eyes. “I dunno how to say this, but Zephyr is kinda a weirdo. In fact, I don’t really think you should be… um… being intimate with her at all.”

  Sheyla expected Crystal to be upset, but the android sounded normal. “You don’t think sex with her is good? Why?”

  “You’re a kid!” she exclaimed.

  Noel spoke up, interrupting their conversation. “Who you talkin’ to, Sheyla? This ain’t no schoolyard! Focus on you’ peelin’ or I take you’ com away.”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Sheyla, bowing her head. Dad would know about it if she spoke back to Noel.

  “I’m sorry if I’m getting you in trouble,” said Crystal.

  “It’s fine. I’m sorry for not minding my own business. It was rude of me.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” said Crystal. “I really like getting advice. Most people know how the world works better than I do. I’m still learning.”

  “That’s basically what I’m saying. Kids like us, who are still learning about stuff shouldn’t um… get involved with grownups like you are with Zephyr. It’s not right.”

  “Would it be right if I was a boy? I could decide to be a boy, I think, if that would help.”

  “Uh! No. It’s the age thing. It’s not about whether you’re a boy.”

  “I don’t think it would make Zephyr happy if we stopped having sex.”

  A knot started to form in Sheyla’s stomach. Even she knew this was wrong. “It doesn’t matter what Zephyr wants. It matters what’s good for you and what’s right.”

  “Oh, um, speaking of Zephyr, she’s waking up now. I gotta go!” said Crystal abruptly, cutting off the conversation.

  It wasn’t right. Crystal clearly needed help. Poor thing.

  Sheyla went back to peeling potatoes, but her mind was elsewhere.

  *****

  There had been no sign of Zephyr or Crystal in the mess for dinner, and Crystal wasn’t responding to her com requests. After some sleuthing around, Sheyla learned that the African woman that had come with them had brought Zephyr dinner in her room.

  Sheyla thought about telling someone about Zephyr and Crystal, but she didn’t think anyone but Arya would listen to her. Arya, unfortunately, was “busy” according to Em. Sheyla knew what that meant; Arya was cool, but she didn’t want to spend all her time with a fourteen-year-old.

  Dad might have listened, but he wouldn’t have understood. He still thought that Crystal was some kind of evil spy or whatever sent from Earth.

  It was only at 10:39pm that Crystal responded to Sheyla over text. “omg sorry bout that. zephyr didn’t want me to use the com after i told her bout you” said the robot’s message.

  “You told her?!” she texted in response.

  “she said you were rong bout a lot and were bad to talk to”

  “…”

  “i don’t think she’s rite bout you being bad”

  “Crystal, you have to be careful with Zephyr. She’s not treating you right. If you ask someone like Arya for help, I bet we could keep you safe from her.”

  “NO! i don’t want that. i love her”

  Sheyla put her face in her hands in frustration. She was sitting on her bed in her room. Unlike most of the adults, Sheyla didn’t have to share a room with anyone else. It would have been nice to have a girl her own age to room with, but having a room all to herself was nice, too.

  She wished she had something to say. The abuse that Crystal was dealing with seemed really obvious, but what could Sheyla do? Nobody would listen to her, and Crystal didn’t want to be helped.

  The silent ping from her com drew her attention back to the conversation. Crystal had sent another message. “do you still want to hang out? i still want to be friends”

  It occurred to Sheyla that if she could get Crystal’s trust she might be able to convince her… him(?)… it(?) to get help and leave Zephyr. (No, probably just “her”.)

  “Yeah. Tomorrow?”

  “zephyr is going to want to do stuff tomorrow”

  “So tell her you want to hang with me instead.”

  “no that would make her sad. we should hang out tonight”

  “It’s 10:42! And what about Zephyr? Won’t she wonder where you’re going at this hour?”

  “she’s asleep and is a very heavy sleeper”

  “What did you want to do?”

  “the first time we met you told me you have flours you take care of. i think we should go see them”

  “Flours? Do you mean flowers?”

  “i mean the plants with petals and colours”

  “You have awful spelling for a robot,” criticized Sheyla.

  “sorry. i hafto guess a lot. i don’t have software for spelling right”

  “Won’t Zephyr get mad if she knew you were gone?”

  “maybe”

  There was a long pause.

  “it doesn’t matter. i don’t sleep and i don’t think its right for me to just stay here all nite”

  That was good. It showed that Crystal was willing to stand up for herself.

  “do you think it’s right?” asked Crystal.

  “No, I don’t. We should go check out the church. Let me get my shoes on and I’ll meet you outside your room in a couple minutes.”

  “oh crap. i just realized it wont work”

  Sheyla frowned and paused in reaching for her shoes. Her fingers drummed out a response in the air. “What’s wrong?”

  “there’s a guy waching the room. if i leave he will tell zephyr”

  “You’re still under guard? I thought we voted to let you go.”

  “you voted that i was a person but velasco still is trying to keep me locked up or something. he doesn’t like me”

  “So, what, you’re not allowed to leave the room?”

  “i think i can leave. but the guy will tell zephyr and he will probably want to escort me around”

  “You should leave anyway. Zephyr doesn’t own you.”

  “she would be sad. i don’t want to leave if she would find out”

  Sheyla growled in frustration and continued putting her shoes on. This was no good, and she wasn’t about to back down now. “Do you know who the guard is? I could talk to them and get them to not tell Zephyr.”

  “probability of information leaking is too high. i’d only do it if the guard didn’t know”

  Sheyla didn’t type a response to that. She weighed the options. This was the sort of thing that could get her in real trouble. But Dad said that sometimes an Águila needed to get in trouble to do the right thing.

  By the time she had her shoes on she had decided. She turned off the lights and slipped out the door into the dark hallway. The lights were programmed to simulate Earth light, so the hall had about the brightness one could expect from a full moon, but the deep-blue colour of the light sconces always made Sheyla feel like she was underwater.

  “If I distract whoever is watching your room, will you try and sneak out?”

  “why does ‘watching’ have a t in it?”

  “Gah. I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “i suppose not”

  “So? Want to try and sneak out?”

  “my hydraulics make noise and the door does too. your distraction must be very good for me to want to try”

  “Have a little faith in me. Besides, if you get caught you can just claim that you heard something happening and you were curious. Zephyr would never kno
w.”

  “that sounds like something i would do. all right i accept your plan”

  Sheyla peered around the corner at the end of her hall to the hallway that connected the newcomers’ rooms. Jian was standing there idly, tapping at his com.

  “Okay. I’m here. When I give the signal, wait about a min then open the door and head towards the hub and turn the first corner you get to, okay?”

  “what is the signal?”

  “I’ll say I’m doing it.”

  “ok”

  Sheyla rehearsed her plan, took a deep breath, then typed “I’m doing it.”

  “Ooooohhhh” she moaned so that she was sure Jian could hear, then sprinted off down the hall back towards her room.

  “Hello?” called Jian, oblivious.

  When she reached her room, Sheyla let out another groan, and stopped running. She watched and waited, nervousness bouncing in her belly. When she saw Jian turn the corner, she collapsed dramatically on the ground and gave another moan. Arya always said she was a good actor.

  Jian started running, and quickly came to her aid, kneeling beside her. “What’s wrong?! Sheyla!”

  She pulled herself up, trying to look dizzy. “I’m not feeling so good,” she groaned. “I threw up in my room,” she added, gesturing to the door and praying he wouldn’t try and check.

  “You think it was something you ate? Do you think more people are in danger?”

  The Chinese dude’s expression would have been comical in other circumstances. She did her best not to roll her eyes. “I think it was…” Sheyla paused, trying to give Crystal more time. “I found a can of something in the pantry. Put it in my soup…”

  Jian had the audacity to look relieved. “So you don’t think it’s going to affect more than just you?”

  Sheyla punched him in the chest. “Jerk! I’m in pain over here!”

  He looked at her and put a hand on her forehead. “You don’t look like you’re in pain.”

  She punched him again. “I’m feeling a lot better after throwing up! No thanks to you!”

  “What did you eat?”

  Sheyla did her best to look like she was still sick. “It said it was called SPAM. Was some kind of meat, I think? Tasted like bad synth.”

  Jian sighed. “I’ll call Dr Davis and we’ll see if you need anything besides a lesson in checking expiration dates.”

  Sheyla put a hand on Jian’s com, preventing him from doing anything. “I already told her. She wanted me to meet her in the hospital.”

  Jian raised an eyebrow. “Why not come to you? It’s obvious you’re not able to walk that far.”

  “I just got dizzy, is all!” protested Sheyla, standing up. “And um… the doctor is working tonight so she can’t leave the hospital.” Jian still looked skeptical, so she rubbed her belly and tried to look in pain as she asked “But, maybe you could walk me down there? Just in case?”

  Jian shook his head. “I’m busy. You should tell her to send someone to escort you down there. If you fell once you could fall again, and I’m not going to be everywhere to pick you up.”

  “Um, yeah. Okay. I’ll, uh, wait here and let her know.” Sheyla tapped quickly at her com, hoping Jian wasn’t watching the screen too closely. To Crystal she wrote “Can’t distract him for much longer.”

  “Let me know if you need anything else, okay?”

  “Thanks, Jian.”

  A wave of relief washed over her as the older teenager walked back down the hall. It hadn’t gone nearly as well as she had hoped, but at least she wasn’t in immediate trouble.

  She read off the messages from Crystal as she walked towards the other spoke hallway that led to the central cooridor. “i got out without being ditected. thank you” and “where should we meet?”

  Sheyla rounded a corner and saw Crystal standing passively in the hallway. In the dim light the android had a bit of a spooky appearance, being mostly composed of pistons, hoses, and black plates. Her metallic-blue hair almost matched the blue light reflecting off the pale skin of her face. The thing’s bright silver eyes found Sheyla in the dark and a burst of goose pimples rolled across her in a sudden shiver. A part of her knew that this thing was actually a child, but a deeper part could see nothing but an inhuman monster.

  “There you are! I was scared that we’d get separated!” said Crystal in the voice that Sheyla was now sure was different than she had sounded at the tribunal. The childishness of it set her more at ease, though it was hard to reconcile with the inhuman body.

  “Keep your voice down!” Sheyla hissed. “Let’s get going before someone sees us.”

  As the two of them made it to the central corridor Crystal asked “Why are you scared of me? I can see it in how you move. You weren’t scared before.”

  “I’m not scared of you; I’m scared of getting caught,” she lied.

  “Oh, I see,” said the robot, obliviously. Ironically, that cluelessness made Sheyla feel a lot better. She did her best to remind herself that Crystal was only 7 months old. She was probably a lot smarter than the robot in some ways.

  The church was directly adjacent to the living quarters, so they were there almost immediately. Sheyla went first, poking her head around to see if there were any others breaking the standard hours. She didn’t see anyone.

  The station’s church was prettier during the day, but it still had a serene beauty about it during the night. It had the highest ceiling of any of the rooms in Road. It was so high, in fact, that she knew that a special metal barrier had been installed above it to protect from radiation. Most of Road was underground, but the lofty ceiling of the church was at ground-level.

  It was a bit wrong to call it a church, or at least that’s what Sheyla had heard. She’d never been to church on Earth, but she didn’t think they were primarily gardens. The benches were aligned in two nested semicircles that held beds of flowers between them. Gravel paths linked the benches to the entrance and the central space. In the middle of the benches and pushing out a bit away from them was a stone oval that Omar had spent months carving with an intricate labyrinth pattern. The pattern tended to collect dirt, but Sheyla loved it.

  Additional beds of flowers flanked the entrance and occupied the corners. Pebble gardens filled the spaces elsewhere on the floor. The joint between the ceiling and walls held a band of frosted glass that hid the lights. Below the band was a great image of an eagle which normally was a crimson red, but in the deep blue of the lights came across as more of a purple black. Various religious iconography was spread on the other walls. Most of the people of Road were good Christians, like Sheyla was, but there was enough representation of other faiths that it seemed right to include them. Las Águilas Rojas tolerated all beliefs equally, after all.

  Being one of the most beautiful and spacious locations in Road, many people used the church as a place to relax and socialize. It was Sheyla’s favourite place in the otherwise dismal colony.

  She showed Crystal around for a while, pointing out the evening primrose that she had been paying special attention to. They couldn’t afford to keep grass or anything that needed a lot of water, so most of the flowers were from desert climates. Crystal seemed to like the Phoenix Magenta the most. They talked about struggles with lack of insects, good soil, and the dilemma of whether to replicate the summer-winter cycle.

  Talk drifted to Earth and Crystal asked a number of questions about Sheyla’s life before Mars. She talked about living in Guarulhos and the way that her family had owned a trucking company there but had gotten screwed over by changes in industrial transportation. Her great-uncle managed to sell off the routes and make it out with a good stack of cash, but it put everyone else in the family in the gutter, unable to work in an industry that had left humanity behind. It made her feel good to repeat the story; it was something of a common point among Águilas to talk about how big business had ruined everything.

  When Crystal’s questions turned to her parents and her friends she forced the conversation back t
owards the flowers. The divorce was still too fresh. It was all too fresh. Sheyla made it through the day by thinking of herself as on a grand adventure, and specifically not thinking about those she’d left behind.

  “Do you think it’d be alright for me to plant a flower here? I think I could make a beautiful one,” said Crystal, unexpectedly.

  Sheyla snapped back to awareness on the bench, realizing that she’d been drifting off to sleep. “Uh, maybe!” she said, trying to hide her exhaustion.

  “Do you think I could make it tonight? I already have something good in mind.”

  Sheyla stifled a yawn. “It doesn’t work like that. Flowers are plants. Plants take time to grow from seeds.”

  “Not all flowers are plants. I saw a flower once that was made of plastic. I was thinking of making a flower like that.”

  “That wasn’t a real flower. Real flowers have to grow.”

  Crystal seemed irritated and got up from where she was crouching over a bed of African daisies to walk over to Sheyla. “Why?” she demanded.

  “It just isn’t! Real flowers are from plants. What you saw was an imitation, like, uh, a picture of a flower.”

  “I was made. I did not grow. Does that make me not real?”

  Sheyla could understand her new friend’s annoyance now. “I’m sorry, Crystal. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s not the same.”

  “I think it is the same,” said Crystal in a proud, childish voice. “I think if I make a flower, it will be as real as me, even if it didn’t grow from a seed. I’ll prove it, too.” Crystal grabbed Sheyla’s hand gently and pulled at her. “C’mon. I bet there’s a fabricator around here somewhere.”

  “No. I don’t want to get in trouble. Besides, we need to get back to the dorms.”

  “Absolutely not,” proclaimed Crystal. “I am going to prove to you that I can make a flower that is just as real as anything here.”

  “I’m sorry I said that, Crystal. I take it back. I’m sure it would be real.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re tired and want to go back to bed,” observed Crystal. “C’mon. It’ll only take a little bit. I promise to go back to the dorms after it’s done.”

  “You’re not going to change your mind on this, are you?”