An Uncertain Grace

by Krissy Kneen

  ‘Liv,’ I whisper. ‘I want it to stop now.’

  I close my eyes. I start to count.

  The door opens before I even get to six.

  The email comes in the evening. I am watching a film halfheartedly. I am distracted, enervated. It has been a very long day. The email comes as a surprise. Sometimes Hamish sends me one, if he wants to give me information without disturbing me, but this is different. This one has two words in the subject line: An answer.

  I open it. My eyes wander to the bottom where Liv has signed the message, love, L x. The message is short and to the point.

  Dear Cameron,

  In answer to your question, Number One through to Number Thirty-four were edited. They weren’t deleted, if that was your worry. They were upgraded: added to. They weren’t scrapped, although the human parts of them were not up to standard. The bodies were abandoned. The brain was edited and re-edited. There are parts of their experiences in your brain. They became you. You are numbers 1–34.

  I suppose it is the way a first draft of a book is never really abandoned, just changed till it is unrecognisable, but essentially it is still there. There is the ghost of all the other drafts in it but the last draft is the best one and that is what goes out into the world. Do you understand this?

  I know you are going to want to ask about your future. Will you be edited? Will you remember who you are after that edit or will you be a different story entirely? I’m sorry, I have no answers for you, but I am committed to this narrative now. I will stay with you. I will follow your story because I am a part of your story now.

  I hope this brings a little comfort.

  Good work today.

  You are a really good kid, Cameron. I am glad I know you.

  I come back to her sign-off. Love L x. When Hamish writes an email, he doesn’t bother to sign his name at all.

  I click reply and then rest my fingers on the keys for a moment. I am not sure what would be the right thing to say. I have never written anything more than a question in an email. What time is the next call? Will I be watching videos today?

  Love, I type, and then I backspace and start the thing again. Dear Liv, and then, I love you too. C x

  I press send. Wince, because maybe it was the wrong response. What I really want to ask her is if she saw my memory of Ellen and the rainbow tunnel. And: what happens if I am a failed part of this experiment? I want to ask her if my new body would feel the same as this one, if I would see colour through new eyes in exactly the same way, if my brain will remember how I feel about Liv, this strange warm longing that is not exactly sex but something that happens in the same bit of feeling. I want to ask her if I will still remember fragments of this particular iteration of myself. I want to ask her if Number One through to Thirty-four were anything like me.

  I hold my skateboard to my chest and hunker down, cross-legged. I think of beetles hiding under their shells, all the soft belly of them invisible under a spiny exoskeleton. Ellen grabs my sleeve and pulls at it but I won’t budge. I am built to learn from each mistake. I am Number One through to Thirty-five. I am a concertina of my ancestors all folded together.

  ‘Come on Machiney,’ she says to me and scowls. She is used to getting her way. I am not being compliant. I am causing her frustration. She pulls me and stamps her feet and shakes the mane of her hair like a thwarted lion.

  I wonder if Liv knew that this would happen. I wonder if she saw the images of those two times with Ellen and anticipated that my brain would learn, that I would not make the same mistake twice. I am built to evolve. I dig my heels into the ground and hug my elbows in tight against my body so that she can’t get a proper grip.

  I watch her struggling to move me. Her red face and her sweat. She is angry. She peers down at me just like the angels peer down at me from my bedroom wall. Behind her the sky is darkening. A storm coming. The rain will cut new rivers in the landscape. Some people will die. I wonder if Ellen was the same person when last year’s storms came, or the year before. I wonder if growing older as a human is like having the last model of yourself folded over and over, building on the past, making something new. I wonder if the next version of me will know not to let a young girl tug him by the elbow and drag him into a multicoloured tube.

  ‘Don’t you want to play with me, Machiney? I didn’t know robots were allowed to say no to humans. Aren’t you supposed to be our pets?’

  I look up at her. We only have an hour, maybe two, before the sky opens. I can feel the change of temperature plucking at the fine hairs all along my human skin. Hamish is chatting to Ellen’s mother. I notice how his body is turned towards her, his feet twisted to point in her direction. These are all signs of sexual attraction. Humans aren’t programmed for constant arousal, but of course they still get occasional lust. If we were like the people on TV, Hamish and Ellen’s mum would become lovers. Ellen and I would become friends. Strange that it is the other way around. This whole thing is all arse up.

  Ellen sits down beside me and bounces on the soft ground. Her thumbs poke into the pliant surface. She lets herself fall backwards then rubs her cheek against the springy ground. She is like me, eating the world through all of her senses, and it’s right that I should be like that but it is wrong for her.

  Children are to be protected from their sensuality. Children are to be protected from sex. I remember the feel of her soft bottom bouncing up and down in my lap and I feel the blood rushing to my cheeks.

  ‘They are going to close the park,’ she says, ‘for summer.’

  I nod.

  ‘Last summer twenty-eight children died in summer storms in Brisbane.’

  I nod again. She is wide eyed. She doesn’t look hurt by what we did here last time. She looks the same. Nothing adds up to what I knew. I am relearning. I am folding over on myself and becoming something new again.

  ‘Do you remember last summer?’ I ask her.

  ‘Sure.’ She rests her head against my thigh, fills her cheeks with air and blows bubbles against my skin. I move, shuffling a little away from her.

  ‘What’s the first summer you remember?’

  She sits up suddenly, coiled spring: one second she’s lying down and the next she is sitting without even having to push herself up.

  ‘That’s so easy. I remember my father taking me to the park. We flew kites and there was a kid with a hoverboard. Do you remember them? Everyone had one, but they were dumb so no one has one anymore.’

  ‘I know about them. I don’t remember them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I was different back then. Well, only part of me was around. It was a different model of me. Not as good. So they stopped it and made a new one using some of the parts but with better bits.’

  She lies back again and looks up at the sky, which is now completely obscured by darkening clouds. ‘Then it wasn’t you.’

  ‘Some of it was me.’

  ‘You don’t remember it?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Then it wasn’t you.’

  ‘Do you remember being one year old?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was that you?’

  She thinks for a moment. Her tongue pokes out and licks at the surface of her lips. ‘No. It wasn’t really me. I don’t poo my pants. I don’t vomit on my mum. I don’t cry all the time. It wasn’t me. It was just, like, the stuff that I am made out of.’

  The first spot of rain touches my cheek and I flinch. I look up to see the drops heavy and irregular but there are more and more of them falling and we will be leaving soon.

  ‘We didn’t get to do the sex thing,’ she says. ‘And the park is only open for another two weeks.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and I am. She is sad. I wish I could make her happy again. ‘I’ll be back on Friday if you are around.’

  ‘Nah. We’re going to the beach this weekend, before they get closed too.’

  ‘Next week?’

  She shrugs. ‘Will they do it to you?’

/>   ‘What?’

  ‘Make you into a different person. So you forget who you were?’

  ‘Probably. I guess.’

  ‘Will they do it in summer? Before the park opens next winter?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Cause then I’d never see you again.’

  She blinks suddenly and there is a drop of liquid in the corner of her eye that tracks a path down her cheek. I put out my finger and touch it, put it against my tongue. Rain. Not tears.

  ‘We only got to do it that one time. Wouldn’t you want to do it again? With me?’ Her eyebrows crowd down to her eyes, her forehead wrinkles.

  ‘Ellen!’ Her mother is calling. Hamish is standing beside her. He has raised his magazine over his head to keep his hair dry. The rain comes harder now, and cold.

  ‘Coming!’ she shouts, and turns towards her mother. I catch her hand in mine and she stops and turns and waits with her hair becoming wet and lank.

  ‘I’m sorry I wouldn’t do it with you today.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Really?’

  I nod.

  ‘Next time? Will you do it next time?’

  I take a deep breath. I like her. I like how she is like me. I nod.

  She squeezes my hand and her face transforms with her grin. All the sadness gone in an instant. It makes me smile to see her suddenly so ecstatic.

  ‘See you next week, Machiney,’ she says.

  They’ve brought me a set of coloured pencils and cartridge paper to draw on. I am supposed to have a video call from a Hebe this afternoon but it is way past time and there has been no mention of it at all. I let the colours mingle on the page. No lines, just a constant shifting rainbow of colour. I work my way to the edge of the page and then my pencil slips over onto the desk and so I just keep going. Red becomes orange becomes green becomes blue and then red again. Sometimes I press harder—dark green—then green again. I change the angle of the line and watch how the light shifts on the surface of the table, following the grain of the drawing.

  The video call would have ended by now. I start drawing on the wall. I feel nothing, but the colours become more intense as the minutes tick on to hours. I grind the brown pencil down to a stump. I darken the edges with black. Shavings cover the carpet. I grip the dark grey pencil at the very tips of my fingers as I press the last of the graphite onto the stretch of grey wall.

  When the grey pencil is too small to hold I pick it up and throw it. I feel my shoulders tense. I am excited, but not in a good way. I pace up and back in front of my smear of colour. My first artwork that is a picture of nothing and means nothing at all.

  I fling myself down onto the bed and press my face into the pillow till I can’t even breathe. Here in the darkness of my own creation I call to her. Liv? Liv? Just thoughts but maybe she can hear them. Are you listening in? I try to see the words in my head. I try to burn them onto my brain. When she is going through the data, making it into a narrative, there will be these words. She won’t be able to avoid them.

  I try to make her see what I am feeling.

  Will the data be clear for her? Will she see the words in my head? Probably not. She will just know that something is wrong. She won’t know exactly what it is.

  I leap up and grab the last centimetre of red pencil. I squint as I write the letters, tiny, spidery, at the edge of the stretch of colour on the wall. My eyes are cameras recording the words for her. I glare at them, trying not to move my head at all.

  When will I die?

  I change pencils, sharpen the little stub of pink. I am careful to make each letter small but clear. When will you kill me?

  I lie back on the carpet and watch the white ceiling. Somewhere behind it a storm is in full swing. Wild winds are picking up debris, tearing trees from the ground, shattering glass. Everything inside my bedroom seems calm enough, carefully controlled temperature, thick silence, peace, but in me there is rain.

  I open my eyes.

  I am in a room. The walls are grey, broken only by a single hook piercing the unbroken surface above the bed. Bed. Walls. Sheets. I know these things.

  This is my first day. I am new made, and yet I have a bank of knowledge to draw from. An old lady sits on the chair beside my desk. She has a face full of lines and she looks tired. This is my first day and yet I understand ‘tired’.

  ‘Cameron?’ she says gently.

  Is that what I will be called? I shrug. The bed is covered in cool cotton sheets and I rub them with my fingers. The sheets feel wonderful against my skin. I lean down and rub my forearm against the bed. The old woman moves to sit beside me. She stretches out her fingers and touches my arm. I can feel the flood of desire hardening me. I make a sound, a groan, and the woman pulls her fingers away suddenly as if I am too hot to touch.

  I want to be touched.

  ‘Cameron? Do you retain any memory?’

  I look up into her kind, sad face. Maybe she is familiar. Maybe I know her name. I reach for it but there is nothing there. Just a vague feeling of unease.

  ‘This is my first day,’ I tell her and she nods but she looks sadder.

  ‘Do you know why you were made?’

  ‘For sex,’ I say. The answer is easy. My primary objective is very clearly implanted in my circuitry. I reach for my dick and hold it through my shorts. She touches my hand and eases my fingers away.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You are part of an experimental research program. Do you understand? We are researching the effects of sexual contact with minors on child-sex offenders. Do you understand this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is my job to log your narrative. My name is Liv.’

  I nod.

  ‘I’ll be monitoring your story. I’ll be inside your head.’

  I nod.

  ‘Okay, Cameron. The computer we have given you is to help you learn. It is locked to age-appropriate television and lessons that a child of an equivalent age would learn at school.’

  I nod, but the feel of the cotton is very distracting. My fingers are rubbing back and forth along it. I am filled up with this small and wonderful sensation.

  ‘I’ll leave you alone now, Cam. I’ll let you explore your environment. Hamish will take care of you today but I’ll be back tomorrow.’

  I don’t even watch her as she goes, but when she leaves she takes a certain scent with her, a floral top note, a deep rich earthy undertone. I miss the scent of her as soon as the door closes behind her. I stand. I am standing for the first time. I run my hand along the desk, the top of the laptop. I touch everything, carpet—synthetic, scratchy—walls, waxy cool. I notice a little line of pink on the wall. I put my nose to it and sniff it. This is what pink smells like, this waxy scent of chemicals. I lick it, but it doesn’t taste of much at all.

  I throw myself onto the bed and I am hard. I am made for sex and I take my penis in my hand and I rub it. I know there will be lube in a drawer under the bed. Lube under the bed, condoms in the drawer. I have been programmed to know these things, even on my first day. I reach over and pop the drawer and squeeze lube onto the palm of my hand and the feeling of it slipping down and up on my new flesh is exquisite. This is all the world. This sensation. The cotton against my cheek, the clothes against my skin. This is everything. I rub myself until the feeling builds and I come, groaning, twitching, shaking, and there are words with it. Bright pink words that taste of nothing but smell of wax and chemicals.

  When will I die.

  The letters are tiny and perfectly formed in my brain.

  When will you kill me?

  I lie in this excess of sensation and turn the words curiously around in my mind. In this way, on the first day, I begin to wonder about my own death.

  PART 4

  M

  IN A FEW weeks I will be like L. Not exactly like L. My skin will still be a paler shade no matter how much sun I risk. I won’t turn the perfect shade of brown that details L’s muscles. My hair won’t
fan out like a hunk of night sky as L’s hair does. My eyes won’t be that exact shade of midnight brown.

  When I first saw L, I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Was it sexual attraction? Something more like ambition? Did I want to fuck or to become? Whatever it was, I felt it hard like a fist to my pubic bone. That first sighting punched me in the cunt so hard that it obliterated it. Or perhaps it planted the first viral seed that would lead to the annihilation of my gendered self. L was, is, will be…luminous. I am blinded by that glow even now, even in this ugly waiting room.

  The clinic is intended to look efficient and clean and it does. Light blue walls and grey hospital-grade carpet. Little touches, the nondescript paintings politely fixed to the wall, the tank with a jellyfish turning bored circles, the canister of water with real glasses, all these extras are to calm the nervous rich folk who come here. Gene Plus clinics are for the rich. Kids like me. The place is full of them. There is a twilighter about my age sitting opposite with the words Gender is a Choice emblazoned across their T-shirt. Some people are like that. It consumes them till they are nothing outside of their transitioning.

  There are others here too. A boy, still a boy for now, who keeps glancing at the rest of us sitting here calmly embodying his future. He is really young, maybe twelve or thirteen. He has a beautifully chiselled jaw that would look just as striking on a young girl. There is a woman beside him, their knees touching. I suppose it is his mother. She could be my own mother: neat flared jeans, high blow-dried hair done in the exact shade of emerald that is on trend this season. She has the same facial jewellery that my mother wears too, lip rings joined by a fine jewelled chain. Good stones, advertising her wealth. I feel it in my jaw looking at her. I know I am sneering. It is a habit I have fallen into that I just can’t shake.

  The mother pats the boy on the knee and I feel a wave of envy. I would hate it if my mother patted me on the knee in public but, strangely, I would love a mother who would pat me like that. Not my mother, someone else’s mother. Perhaps this boy’s mother.

  ‘Aiden?’ The receptionist smiles, taking in the whole of the room, smiling at me and Gender is a Choice and the two other twilighters, just here for their quarterly visit I guess, and the wizened old lady in the corner of the room and the mother who should be my mother and her child.