There’s no warm waft of breath coming from his nose and, though it’s not quite cold, his skin isn’t warm either. He usually emanates such incredible heat. If she snuggles close, she can feel it seeping into her, warming her inside and out. Alarm fires in her circuits like an overload. She scoops Alex into her arms and off the floor, holding him close to her chest, to the whir and pulse of her bio-heart mass. Usually she doesn’t make use of her strength, but he’s asleep and he won’t wake up and she doesn’t have time for the illusion of fragility right now.
Frantic, she runs back to the bedroom and lays him gently on the bed. Then she doesn’t know what to do. He’d go crazy if she called for medical assistance. The only time they went out in public is etched as firmly into her body as the work of the careless owners she had before Alex. She looks at the arm he replaced, remembering the press of the crowd and the shock their anger sparked in her circuits. She doesn’t like this arm. He was lucky to find a replacement, but it’s from an Amma Housekeeper model; the wrong colour, slightly too large and a little out of sync, like a disability.
But he needs help. Does it matter if he’d say no? Surely this is her choice and, if he gets help, then she’s OK with being damaged, even if she has to bear another ill-fitting part, even if no replacement parts can be found. Even if she’s damaged beyond repair. She rushes to the wall comm, pressing the button, her eyes glued to Alex. There’s no click. No buzz. No voice at the other end. She looks at the comm and her finger freezes on the button. It’s been disengaged.
There’s a note taped to the front: Genne, hon, don’t. Please. They can’t help me, but they can and will hurt you. Alex x
She blinks. Her thoughts, momentarily interrupted, whir back to manic life and she races out of the bedroom to the apartment door. It’s been fried shut, the circuits a lump of curdled wires, unresponsive to shoving or the bashing of fists. Alex knows her too well. She can’t call for help, and she can’t get out to fetch it. She’s only a Genne, she can fix her own parts but she can’t fix this.
Genne returns to the bedroom. That energy inside her snaps like hungry teeth. There’s so much she wants to say to him. She wants to shout at him. To rage. Rail at him for doing this. But she can’t. There’s a flood of fury longing to get out but programming says no anger, and though she fights hard, it won’t allow her to speak. She’s trapped again, caged inside her limitations.
She stands there instead with her hands covering her mouth, staring at him over the tips of her fingers. He’s so still, his chest unmoving, none of that miraculous rise and fall that fascinates her so much. When he first bought her, she’d lay awake all night, watching it, unable to believe she was his. Unable to believe he was hers. Alex had always told her he’s her companion, too, here for her just as much as she’s here for him.
He’d wanted a Genne since he was a boy. Not to own, like some other boys he’d known. Alex wanted a companion, a wife. To him, Genne represented some perfection of womanhood, some romantic ideal. He’d rescued her from a dump almost a decade ago, having seen her from the stripline on his way back from Trade. Thirty units. The price of a pastry. That’s how much he paid for her. She heard him begging for her and saw the credit change hands. She wouldn’t believe him when he said that, unlike the dumpster man, he wasn’t interested in using her.
Using is what she was made for.
It took her many months, over a year’s worth, to understand what he wanted of her and by then she was already lost in him. Now he’s lost to her, because she can’t sense him in that cold weight of flesh. It’s like his body is empty. She wants to reach inside and find him in there, wherever he’s gone. Return him to her.
‘I want you back,’ she says into her hands, unwilling to release it to the air. She’s Genne. Wanting things is not for her. Only real things get to want.
But either he doesn’t hear her, or he can’t, because he doesn’t come back. He just lies there, staring at the ceiling. So still. So cold. And not Alex anymore, but a body that looks like him, as if she’d gone back in time and bought a custom copy at a Symbiol factory. An Alex model, not yet switched on.
Of all the things that have been done to her, thoughtlessly, arrogantly done in the conviction that, as a Symbiol, she’s not human enough to warrant kindness, this is by far the cruellest. And the man she learned to trust did it to her. Aching as if her parts are failing, Genne turns from him and walks to the window. She raises her hand to lift the opacity from the glass rising from floor to ceiling and flinches as her processors flood with sunlight, bleaching the view to shades as pale as their bathroom walls.
Beyond her feet, and a mere inch of glass, the world falls away. Dizzying. Alien. All but unknown to her. An endless stretch of windows in grey plascrete, rising up from cloud, as if they all float here, suspended in the sky. This glass is reinforced, soundproofed, and steals the mindless buzz of traffic, reducing it to a silent dance. Sleek, windowless cars, powered by drones, flit and weave between the towers and the blameless blue of sky, drawing white lines of vapour and making a puzzle of sky and tower.
She lifts a hand to the glass, tracing the white lines with a slow finger. If those puzzle pieces could be plucked apart, perhaps she could remake the world with Alex in it. But the world is not as simple as she is, just a collection of parts made to resemble something real; she’s not real enough to change it.
A car skims across the window like a bird mistaking reflection for sky or hunting bugs on the sun-heated glass. Genne frowns again, recalling her nudity. She’s swamped with another feeling, connected to a look on Alex’s face when she’d accidentally lifted the opacity naked once before. She closes her eyes, waiting for Alex to wake up and say something. But he doesn’t and she opens her eyes to watch the car speed away, a glittering grey speck between towers.
‘Even you can’t bring him back to me,’ she whispers. There’s something heavy inside of her, as though some alien part, too large and unwieldy for her body, has been unceremoniously forced inside.
‘It’s like you’ve been switched off,’ she says to Alex, who can’t hear her.
Genne slowly turns to look at him, going strangely stiff on the bed. He’s paler now, and on the underside of his naked body, clear against the white coverlet, is an odd, spreading blush of colour. Her circuitry feels like it’s unravelling, coming apart, all order descending to chaos. She runs to the bed and falls to her knees beside him, resting her hands flat on the cool plane of his chest.
‘Come back.’ She curls her fingers in, as though she can hook him out of his flesh. ‘Come back to me.’
She remains there, her hands curled into his chest, her face pressed into the soft material of the coverlet, until the brightness of the sun fades to watery echoes and cold steals through the room, much as it’s stolen Alex’s beautiful warmth from his flesh. He’s like a piece of stone beneath her palms. Unyielding. Cold emanates from him much as warmth once did and that temperature replicates within her, freezing her from the inside.
As the last light leaches from the room and the solar bulb in the ceiling pops on in automatic response, Genne finally raises her head to look at him. He’s changing. The upper part of his body is a waxy, yellowish white and beneath, where he rests into the coverlet it’s become a startling, almost vulgar shade of purple. These things tell her what she’s already guessed too clearly to bear; Alex isn’t coming back.
‘No.’ The word doesn’t feel final. It feels meaningless. And what she’s lost hits her so hard that, if she could breathe, she’d be unable to draw breath.
Genne wraps her arms about her waist, blinking hard. Her eyes burn. She has no tear ducts, dolls don’t need to cry, but still they burn with unshed tears. Alex is all she had. All she’s ever had that was freely given to her. She’s a used model, four careless owners including the dumpster man. She’s not real, and she knows it, but she’s too close for comfort. All Symbiols are.
When Symbiols were first created, humans thought they were machines. Self-a
wareness could not, they assumed, be attributed to something made of metals and PolyMerNano-skin, filled with bio-circuitry instead of soft flesh imbued with strange electrical impulses. Then, finally, they understood. The Symbiol’s biological content made them soft. Unlike other machines, they were far too inclined to experience sensations that slid uneasily close to what humans call feelings.
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.
&n
bsp; 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 over 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.
Tales of Eve Page 11
