Bless Your Mechanical Heart

by Seanan McGuire

  Brother Marrow sat cross-legged beside Kela, the kids holding tight to his robes. The room around him appeared bare, the simple slat walls painted a nondescript green, a few wooden chairs, a table, and two glow lamps in the corners. However, Brother Marrow had visited Alijah and Kela a number of times and knew that wasn’t how the people here saw this house. Alijah had once convinced him to briefly pause his order’s vows and access the room’s virtual templates. He remembered the bare room rioting into deep blues and maroons and the walls running to elaborate pictures and designs mind-crafted by Alijah. For a moment he was tempted to again access the template to ease the pain surrounding him.

  As he held the kids he looked at Alijah’s body. She lay on the floor’s bare-wood planks, lines of blood showing where someone—likely Kela or his friends—had dragged her here from outside the house. Her chest was ripped open, the heart missing. Whoever—or whatever—had ripped her heart out had done so much damage the healers in Alijah’s bio-human body couldn’t repair her.

  Brother Marrow stared at the pool of blood beneath her body, which dripped through the cracks between the floor planks and pattered softly across the floodwaters below. He glanced at the kids in his arms and was relieved their neural connections accessed an altered view of the room’s reality. For the briefest of moments his interface reached out and accessed the kids’ reality. He saw their mother looking calm and peaceful, sleeping happily, surrounded by smiling angels and carefree teddy bears and colorful balloons.

  Kela continued his dirge for hours, his kids eventually crying themselves to sleep in Brother Marrow’s arms. He carried them to bed, then returned to the main room to find Kela pausing in his song. The friends who’d been here earlier had returned to their own homes, knowing Kela wasn’t alone as long as Brother Marrow remained. Kela’s connection also buzzed to people from around the world, the crowds no doubt consoling the man and visiting virtuals of this room and sharing their own memories of Alijah’s life.

  Kela stood on shaking legs as he disconnected. His eyes jumped slightly as the reality he’d been immersed in merged with the harshest possible reality. He stared down at his lifemate and shook his head. “I must clean her body,” he said. “And the room. And prepare her for the funeral.”

  “I will join you,” Brother Marrow said, pulling Kela into a hug. Kela cried and buried his face in the monk’s robes.

  “She loved another,” Kela whispered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She died loving another.”

  Kela stared at Brother Marrow’s face and opened his neural connection, desperate for the monk to understand. The monk nodded and opened his own connection, trying to remember the last time he’d broken his vows so many times in a single day. However, his order was also quite pragmatic, and in such situations, how could he not open himself to someone in need?

  Kela’s mind connected with his. For a split-moment Brother Marrow felt the stomach-dropping sensation of reality shifting before entering Kela’s mind. Except he didn’t see one of Kela’s memories. Instead, he saw through Alijah’s eyes.

  We were sharing a connection before she died, Kela whispered in Brother Marrow’s mind, explaining. I was home, watching the kids, while she created.

  The memory showed Alijah on a walkway behind the village, the floodwaters only a hand-span beneath the planks. The full moon spun the water around Alijah into a glow almost like walking through silver clouds. Alijah, creative as always, crafted this sensory input in real-time so the reality she experienced became simultaneously the water, moon, and clouds. She’d so loved the creation that she began sharing it with Kela back home.

  Alijah reached the end of the walkway and stood on the river bank, looking back with her creative eyes at the village. Suddenly, she heard a shuffling behind a nearby tree. Alijah turned as a person stepped from the tree.

  At this point the memory shifted. Due to what was obviously a hack, Brother Marrow found it difficult to comprehend what the person looked like, let alone craft a description. The person appeared to be shorter than Alijah but Brother Marrow could tell little beyond that—no professed gender, no shape or color or design to the person’s face, hair and skin.

  All he knew was that Alijah’s emotions exploded at the sight of this person. Alijah literally staggered, kneeling onto the dirt of the river bank. The person approached Alijah and laid a hand on her face.

  “I love you,” Alijah whispered. “I… truly do.”

  A soft voice said, hush. “I know you do. But there’s only one way to prove it.”

  “I understand,” Alijah said, love pulsing her mind. “Will you take my heart? Please. Take it.”

  The ghostly person nodded sadly and reached for Alijah’s chest. There was no pain as Alijah’s chest ripped open in an explosion of blood and the person yanked her heart free. Alijah fell back and stared up, still feeling the rush of love as the person raised her heart to mouth and began to eat.

  As death grabbed her, Alijah thought four simple words. Forgive me, my love.

  Brother Marrow snapped back to his own mind. Taking care to completely shut down his neural connection, he looked anew at Alijah’s torn-open body.

  “You see,” Kela gasped. “She loved another.” He fell to his knees and ran his fingers over Alijah’s cheek.

  “She was forced to love another. The memory clearly shows her neural connection was hacked. Everyone in the village felt the after-taste of the hacking.”

  Kela nodded but didn’t agree. Brother Marrow knew the Priyas had likely said the same thing when they’d examined his memory.

  Knowing Kela needed time to grieve, but also knowing how easily grief could turn to bitterness as one wallowed in the looping pains of memory, Brother Marrow thought back to his ordination. As the other monks had chanted, Marrow’s abbot had described the different forms of illusion—false sight, false hearing, false understanding—before asking Marrow to stand before her to receive proof of what life could do if one was unprepared.

  The abbot had mentally reached out, caressing Marrow’s neural connection with her own, traipsing through his memories. Suddenly Marrow had seen himself as a young man, walking hand-in-hand with his sibling-friend Kendra through the forest around their village, the moonlit night pouring milk and life to their every step. They connected their minds and experienced love through each other’s senses. They watched the river beside their village rising from the weeks of rains, but instead of being worried, all they saw were reflections of purest beauty.

  Suddenly Marrow tasted iron and sand, and the sensation that they were being observed. Kendra looked at him in puzzlement—she’d tasted the same—but they shrugged it off as a quirk of their connected love.

  They returned home and fell asleep, only to be awoken by neural alarms screaming, warning of the collapse of an ancient dam upriver. They barely had time to run for the door before the house collapsed around them. They hung on to a single remaining pillar as the rushing waters gulped around them.

  “Don’t worry,” Marrow screamed as their grip weakened. “We can’t die. We’ll heal. We’ll come back.”

  When Marrow relived that memory during his ordination, he knew he was wrong. So as Kendra lost her grip, he jumped for her—in his relived memories, not in the long-ago truth of his past—no longer trusting the healers in their bodies or the realities created day and night by their neural connections. But as Marrow leaped for Kendra the abbot released her hack. The flood disappeared and the monastery reappeared. Marrow crashed onto the floor.

  “What is reality when we are reality?” the abbot stated solemnly. “Never forget that.”

  Brother Marrow shivered at the memory—and the taste of iron and sand in his mouth—as Kela looked at him expectantly. “When I was ordained,” he whispered to Kela, having never spoken to anyone about the pain of his ordination, “my neural connection was hacked. Deliberately. It’s part of becoming a monk. To see how easily what you think of as life—what you see and hear,
taste, touch and smell—can be manipulated into something impure.”

  Kela’s face ran to horror. “I’d heard rumors the monks did that. Not that you can trust all you hear or experience while connected.”

  “It’s true. Now, my hacking was different from Alijah’s—I gave permission, she did not. Still, I was as overwhelmed as she was. I couldn’t stop the manipulation of my senses and mind just as she couldn’t stop loving the person who killed her. And that makes her resistance all the more powerful.”

  Kela looked to Brother Marrow with hope in his eyes, desperate for anything to latch onto. The monk smiled. “Your lifemate fought hard to ask your forgiveness. For Alijah to still think of you while she was being hacked… I couldn’t have done that. But she did.”

  Kela nodded, and collapsed onto Alijah’s body, sobs wracking his thin frame. Brother Marrow held the man through the rest of the night, praying that this final breaking of his vows—lying—wouldn’t be held against him.

  Because he knew the truth: No one could stop a hack as deep as the one Alijah experienced. No, Alijah hadn’t been asking Kela’s forgiveness. She’d been asking her new love to forgive her for dying.

  Brother Marrow briefly wondered what type of creature could so completely overwhelm someone’s sense of self as to be invited to kill them. He then pushed the thought from his mind as he focused on his duty to the living.

  Brother Marrow stayed in the village of Antalee for the next week. He tended to Kela and his kids, prepared Alijah’s body for the funeral, led the ceremony and ministered to fearful people who wondered if they might be the next to die.

  That last took the heaviest toll on Brother Marrow. Even though the Priyas continually patrolled the village, they’d yet to find the killer. Drones and flitters were even sent from across the land but the killer—murderer, Brother Marrow knew, refusing to accept that Alijah requesting her own death made this any less a crime—wasn’t found.

  And for once the villagers truly appreciated him being here. During his previous trips to the village he’d often been treated as a relic—as the man who refused to access the virtual. While Antalee was a poor village, the people here were proud, with many holding virtual jobs and careers around the world, and a few—like Alijah—even receiving acclaim for their work. But as Brother Marrow knew, nothing ripped away the void beneath the virtual like death. So he talked with people. Helped them with their chores. Tried his best to show that even when reality was at its worst, life went on.

  Finally, on a night exactly seven days after Alijah’s murder, Brother Marrow began the climb back to his monastery.

  He was halfway up the mountain when he spotted a young woman waiting beside the path, sitting on a moss-coated stone. The woman was thin, like Brother Marrow, and grinned as if greeting an old friend.

  And she was. The girl was long-dead Kendra, his sibling-friend washed away hundreds of years ago in that flood.

  Brother Marrow paused, and carefully checked his neural connection. It appeared inactive. He wasn’t being hacked or manipulated—or at least, not that he could detect.

  “Are you the one who murdered Alijah?” he asked softly.

  “How could I murder someone who asked me to kill them?” Kendra said, her voice sounding exactly like Kendra’s.

  Brother Marrow remembered his sibling-friend being washed away from him, and tried to calm his anger at this fraud. “You hacked Alijah,” he said, his hands shaking from wanting to punch this evil creature. He paused, took a breath, and released the emotion. “She had a family. Young kids. Do you even care what you did to them?”

  To Brother Marrow’s surprise, Kendra—and she might as well be Kendra for how he saw and reacted to her—bowed her head as if in penance. “I tried,” she said. “I always try. To not have them ask to be killed.”

  Brother Marrow looked at Kendra and, to his surprise, believed her. Still, this didn’t change his duty. He turned to descend the path back to the village.

  “Where are you going?” Kendra asked, using the same tone as Brother Marrow’s long-ago sibling-friend when she knew the answer before asking a question.

  “I will inform the Priyas that you are here. If you are truly sorry, you will allow them take you into custody.”

  “I can’t allow that. It goes against my programming.”

  Brother Marrow had worried that might be the case. While this Kendra looked bio-human, she was likely highly mechanical. That would explain the ease with which she’d changed her body to resemble Kendra, and hacked into Alijah’s mind. And if someone took the time and expense of creating such a bio-mechanical wonder, they likely wouldn’t allow her to be easily caught or destroyed.

  “I have no choice,” Kendra said. “Every few months the pressure builds in my programming and I must connect with someone. Make them fall in love with me. If you report me to the Priyas, I’ll simply vanish. And one day soon, someone else will ask me to kill them.”

  “And if I don’t tell the Priyas?”

  “I’ll stay here. And when the time comes, I’ll connect with you. You’ll then ask me to kill you, and I’ll do it.”

  Brother Marrow understood—if she killed him it meant she wouldn’t be killing some random innocent, at least this time. If he tried to turn her in he’d live. But someone’s death months later would be on his soul.

  There was no question where his duty lay.

  “The monastery is beautiful at night,” he said as he pointed up the path. “If you follow me, I’ll show you.”

  Brother Marrow gave her an empty meditation hut to sleep in then walked to his own hut, where he fell into an exhausted sleep. He dreamed that the last week was merely a fevered hack forced into his mind by his abbot. That everything he’d experienced for the last three hundred years, everything since becoming a monk, was merely an extended hack from his ordination ceremony.

  But in the morning, when he walked into the monastery’s meditation hall, there sat Kendra, meditating cross-legged on the wood-plank floor. He knew then the reality he was experiencing would never approach anything but truth.

  “Any chance you’ll turn yourself in today?” he asked as he sat beside her.

  “It’s rude to intrude on someone’s meditation.”

  “It’s beyond rude to murder someone.”

  Kendra nodded, and turned to face him. “You’re angry. Not very monkish of you.”

  “Why do you look like Kendra? My neural connection is off, so I know you’re not hacking me. But you still look like her.”

  “Perhaps I hacked you days ago and the hack is still running.”

  As Brother Marrow’s anger rose again, Kendra smiled as if joking. She ran her fingers through her shoulder-length black hair, obviously pleased by the novelty of the sensation. “Calm down, Marrow. You opened your connection to Kela during the wake for Alijah and I accessed your memories then. The rest,” she said, waving her hands up and down her Kendra body, “is a dictate of my programmed need to manipulate you.”

  This shocked Brother Marrow. Why would she have dared approach Alijah’s wake when the Priyas were searching for her?

  As if knowing Brother Marrow’s question, Kendra bowed her head. “I was mourning for Alijah. I loved her. I truly did.”

  Seeing that Brother Marrow didn’t comprehend, Kendra gestured for him to open his neural connection. When the monk hesitated, Kendra laughed. “I could force your connection open. But if you don’t want to understand…”

  Shaking his head at how easily he could be manipulated, Brother Marrow opened his neural connection. He suddenly saw Kendra’s life—and to him that was truly who she was. Kendra. Every time she assumed a new mimicry of a life she became that life, her every memory reshaping itself so she was Kendra, had always been Kendra, and ever would be Kendra.

  But she’d also been created as something else. Brother Marrow saw a famous man he dimly remembered from the days before he’d disconnected from virtual life. The man was powerful, and rich, and had obsessed on
being killed by his true love. To feel nothing but love as his heart was ripped from his body and eaten. To die knowing nothing but the passion of what he called the ultimate surrender.

  So he created Kendra, and she changed herself to a body chosen from the man’s memory and hacked his connection. He fell in perfect love with her before asking—asking ever so gently—for her to rip his heart out.

  But the man had made a mistake. Once he was dead Kendra couldn’t stop following her programming. She sought out new connections. Made each fall in absolute love with her, a love which could only be satisfied when the other person opened themselves to a perfectly loving death.

  “Do you see?” Kendra asked as Brother Marrow came back to himself. “I love each of you as intensely as I can. My creator wanted me to experience the same love I created in him. So after I killed Alijah I mourned for her and hid beneath her house in the floodwaters, desperate to still be near her. And that’s where I learned of your long-ago love for this Kendra.”

  Brother Marrow shivered, trying not to imagine how many people had been killed because of her foolish creator’s selfish desires. And that didn’t even account for the pain the man had crafted into this construct’s life through her perverse programming.

  Then Brother Marrow remembered the taste of iron and sand. “I felt someone hack my connection before I walked to the village.”

  “That was me. When I overwhelm someone’s connection, there’s feedback on all the connections in the nearby vicinity.”

  “No. That’s how the Priyas described it. But this was different. This hack took control of my connection. And I’d tasted it before…” Brother Marrow stopped, unsure how to describe the sensation he’d felt—of the angry face watching him and Kendra before she’d died.

  Kendra looked at him as if unable to respond. Not knowing what else to say, Brother Marrow stood up. “If you’re staying at the monastery, you’ll have to work. Which do you prefer—to weed the gardens or unclog the sewage recycling tank?”

  Kendra shrugged. “I’m only staying until I kill you. So you choose.”