Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 106

by Sam J. Miller

  [Pause] Of this, we will not speak.

  [He takes a moment to find his bearings, he seems truly emotional. Then he adds:] They even destroyed several androids—most of them sex workers and cleaners—and later reimbursed their owners. I should say “bribed,” to keep them from making a fuss.

  Q: You said androids? Why were they there? Were androids part of the protest?

  A: Yes, android guerillas have always been on our side, and uni students are often particularly drawn to them. There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, androids are part of the oppressed. They are low class, second rate, not even citizens. Most people don’t even consider them persons. But there is also something about them that speaks of truth, not least their perfect, infallible memories. It’s the human machine’s trap: the freedoms afforded to them by what little flesh they possess and command, the failings of that same flesh . . . these are not so easy to tell apart. They do not decay, too, while our whole culture is premised on decay and death, or, now, on its concealment. Why do you think people are so crazy about those nacre patches? You’ve seen the ones?

  [Note to Self: Transcribe the rest of the interview from voice file PLX2.vf]

  >>>END OF FILE

  Fieldnotes #2

  Getting people to talk is difficult. Brigitte and Dick work hard to find me the right contacts. But it takes time, and I know so little. I understand so little. This investigation is going to be long. We need to be discreet.

  I often sit and watch Brigitte when she thinks I’m in my head, working, not paying attention to her.

  She seems restless in her own skin, walking from the door to the window and back again. She stares outside at the smog—you can’t see anything out the window, just grey and brown. Well, at least I can’t. Maybe she can see something, maybe she can see everything. I don’t know.

  Her nacre has been multiplying the past few weeks. There is a new patch behind her left ear, and one on the back of her right hand—her most prominent still. It makes her look adorned.

  When she catches me looking at her, the programming kicks in and she responds with her standard line, every time: “What can I do for you, honey?” Then she lowers her eyes and looks embarrassed.

  She’s always lived here, and yet I can detect a faint French accent when she says this. Like some guy’s fantasy of what a French whore should sound like.

  >>>END OF FILE

  Some notes on the translation of Massacre Market

  There is some uncertainty about the translation from the local language of what I have called “Massacre Market.” Other possible translations include “Atrocity Place,” “Massacre Fair,” or, and that was the most confusing aspect of this, “Pearl Fountain,” because even though each of the two words means something different, together they create a new compound which, as Dick and Brigitte explained to me, could rather clumsily be interpreted as “a fountain whence pearls flow,” “the breeding ground of oysters,” or even “the plane of sublime imperfections.”

  >>>END OF FILE

  Fieldnotes #3

  Dick has started being rougher in his re-enactments; I doubt these are memories, no, I’m sure they are not, because these versions are conflicting and contradictory, and things happen that I know never really happened. Brigitte/Sandra is not always the one leaving him any more—sometimes he leaves her, sometimes she dies. Sometimes he kills her, chokes her. Or, he pretends to. He acts disinterested afterwards, says these are only stories he makes up and likes to play out; but I know, any reporter knows there are no disinterested stories, least of all the ones we tell ourselves.

  Brigitte says she doesn’t mind, she doesn’t feel, remember? It’s her job, she says. I’m still not convinced. I find myself in my reporter’s role nonetheless, taking everything in, observing, reluctant to participate. This is not how the game is played, I tell myself.

  I watch the nacre spread on her skin, covering more and more each day, like a disease of unbearable beauty.

  “How did you end up in this mess, anyway?” Dick asked me yesterday. “I never thought they’d send a woman.”

  I hit him hard on the arm and he laughed. “I choose not to be insulted,” I said. “Anyway, I needed this. Badly. Went through a rough patch a while back and was out of circulation for some time. So when I went back to my boss and begged, he gave me the case nobody else would take.”

  Dick stopped fiddling with his cigarettes and turned to me. I had his full attention now, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I shouldn’t have said anything.

  “Rough? How rough?” he asked.

  I said nothing.

  “You know you can talk to me, right?”

  I thought of his hands around Brigitte’s neck. What happened to you, Richard? You were a tender boy, back then.

  “It’s been a while, Dick. I’m sorry.”

  I think I hurt his feelings, but he tried not to show it. And at that moment I realized I didn’t mind. Hurting him. I didn’t mind at all.

  >>>END OF FILE

  The Second Death Meditation

  The second meditation rehearses the actual death process.

  Engage now in this series of yogas, modelled on death.

  First, the body becomes very thin, the limbs barely held together. You will feel that the body is sinking into the earth. Your sight becomes blurry and obscured. You may see mirages. Do not believe them. The body loses its lustre.

  Then, all the fluids in the body dry up. Saliva, sweat, urine, blood dry up. Feelings of pleasure and pain dry with them. You may feel like smoke.

  Then, you can no longer hear. You cannot digest food or drink. You do not remember your name, or the names of the ones you knew and loved. You cannot smell. You may not be able to inhale, but you will be able to exhale.

  Then, the ten winds of the body move to your heart. You will no longer inhale or exhale. You will not be able to taste. You will not care. The root of your tongue will turn blue. You may feel like a lamp about to go out.

  Then, nothing.

  Then, nothing.

  Then, nothing. The ten winds dissolve. The indestructible drop at the heart is all that remains.

  >>>END OF FILE

  Fieldnotes #4

  “Why do you let him treat you like that?” I ask her almost reflexively one day. I regret it right away. Am I blaming her for the way he treats her? Shouldn’t I be blaming him?

  She thinks about it for a while, then shrugs.

  “It’s my job,” she says. “I don’t have a choice. Some things are in my programming.”

  “Yes, but some aren’t.”

  She looks me in the eyes, fixes her gaze there, and she seems less human than ever before. People don’t look at others like that. “I’m a whore,” she states.

  “You are more than a whore. It’s not who you are. It’s simply what you do.”

  “See, you got it backwards. What we are for is who we are. A hammer is what a hammer does. Would you ever use a hammer to screw a screw or cut a piece of wood?”

  “Just a tool, then.”

  “That’s right. Just a tool.”

  “Doesn’t my saying that offend you?”

  “Do you think it should?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Why?” she continues. “We are all tools for something. Aren’t you? It’s not an android thing. It’s an existential thing.”

  I lower my eyes.

  She leans over and touches my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Sometimes empathy is difficult for me. We don’t feel anything, you know. No feelings.”

  She seems sincere, but I don’t believe her; I tell her so. “Some people say the nacre is a byproduct of the things you do feel that were not programmed. Just like the nacre wasn’t, and yet, there it is.”

  She shrugs again. “My programming allows me to imitate feeling and to learn from other people’s perceptions of me. No one knows what the nacre is, or what it does.” She pauses for a bit. Then she adds: “Perhaps it’s a form of rust. T
ools do rust, don’t they?”

  >>>END OF FILE

  My trip

  I’m sitting by the window, looking out. The smog seems heavier today. Darker, too. I think it’s the colour of rot. I wish I could see past it. I wish I could see.

  Brigitte comes home—I notice there is a bright new patch of nacre under her right eye. She smiles, like she always does.

  “Get dressed,” she says. “I need to show you something.”

  When I’m ready to go, she holds out her hand closed in a fist. Slowly, she uncurls her fingers and reveals a pearl resting on her palm. It takes me a couple of seconds to realize what it is, and then I look at her, trying to figure out what she’s planning.

  “Put this under your tongue, Aliki,” she says. “You’ll see. You’ll understand.”

  I put the pearl into my mouth and we set out into the smog and that corpse of a city.

  We are at the main square. The pearl is still dissolving under my tongue; it tastes sweet and tangy and makes my heart beat irregularly. I see the city pillar towering over us—round and bulging at the bottom, thinning as it reaches for the sky. The top disappears into the thick layers of smog above. Its marble surface emits a subdued light, like a fading beacon.

  “It was built hundreds of years ago as a mystical axis around which the city would be born, you know,” Brigitte says. “The story of its construction is now largely ignored and forgotten, but spirit mediums still gather here sometimes. They consider it a source of power for those who commune with the dead. It is said that when the foundation for the pillar was laid, a fosse was dug around it. They brought every young pregnant slave girl they could find, slit their throats and threw them in there to die, and through their deaths empowered the pillar to protect the city.”

  I look at the base of the pillar and realize I am standing on top of where the trench would have been, if that story were true. The pillar starts glowing brighter and brighter and I look up to see if the sun has somehow penetrated the smog. I feel the ground shake under my feet, then give, and I fall into the trench. The slave girls are there, all around me, with their blood still seeping into the earth, their fetuses still dying in their wombs.

  This city is built on gore. The shiny marble, a tombstone laid over history. I see the streets turn into veins. I see students parade through the city with what corpses they could salvage; they carry them on their shoulders, their friends, their classmates, their lovers, displaying them like a mute witness to the regime’s moral order. And then these students are shot down or snatched off the streets, the corpses torn from their arms. They are strung on trees and shot, or burnt alive, or worse. Of this, we will not speak.

  The body is nothing. Its image, everything.

  Brigitte pulls me away. She leads me through the city’s red streets, the ten winds of its body dying down. I think Brigitte is speaking to me. I think she says:

  “Let’s look for the indestructible drop at the heart.”

  We are descending. She is walking in front of me, showing me the way. The nacre on her skin seems brighter than ever. I dare touch it for the first time—I reach out and brush my fingers against the back of her neck, tracing the nacre down her spine. I didn’t expect it to be so hard. “You are indestructible,” I mutter, or I think I do, and she turns around and smiles.

  We are at Massacre Market. It has changed since the first time I saw it; it seems even more crowded now, the walls of photographs fuller, covered once, and then covered again by more pictures, and more on top of those, layer upon gory layer, corpse upon corpse, body part upon body part. The desiccated corpses seem more real now, almost alive, absurd. Brigitte tells me something I don’t hear; her voice drowns in the screams and static spilling from the loudspeakers.

  One of the photographs on the wall next to me catches my eye. I walk closer—it’s grainy, black and white, but I can still see the girl: she is laid out in a field next to others, dozens of others. Her top is removed, her chest slashed open. “Foreign slut” is written on her bare belly. She looks like a younger version of myself. This is me, I think, this is me, years ago. Why don’t I remember this? I put my palm on the photograph—what did I want to do? Cover her up, I suppose—and I notice a patch of nacre spreading between my fingers. I pull my hand back as if the photo suddenly burnt me and I watch the nacre spread. I feel it cover my entire body, and I’m calcified, my skin adorned and indestructible. “I feel like an instrument,” I shout to Brigitte over the sound of massacre, “like an accordion, or a concertina.” Play me like a flute, O Lord, I think.

  Brigitte tries to tell me something, but I can’t make it out. I struggle to read her lips. “ . . . it disappoints . . . ” I hear, but the rest is stifled by static, and she’s far away. I see her pointing at my arms from afar. I look down and see the nacre growing dull and flaking, then my skin peeling and falling off, the fat exposed, the muscle, the bone, and I know, I know then, this city is a skin, no blood anywhere in sight, all surface, all shine and the slightest glimpse of nacre here and there—is it real? Is it not? Does it make a difference?

  >>>END OF FILE

  False Endings

  I have precious little time left. So I will not say much. One never has the skin that befits her.

  I know I’ll never finish this article—I still haven’t even decided on the title, or what this story is really about. What do you think? I might have called it:

  Massacre Market

  or

  The Mechanical Reproduction of Violence: Truth, Massacre, History

  or even

  Android Whores Can’t Cry: Under the Surface of Death Meditation

  Either way, I know that, if I did finish it, I would dedicate it

  “To my B., my pearl, who taught me this:

  The skin always disappoints.”

  >>>END OF FILE

  >>>END OF RECORD. 14 OF 14 FILES RECOVERED.

  This is all the material I managed to retrieve from Aliki’s hard drives. I wait for the reporter sitting across from me in Dick’s living room to go through them.

  “You realize your memory files provide conflicting information about what happened to both my colleague Aliki Karyotakis and her informant Richard Phillips,” he says.

  I am silent. Is that true?

  I recall the last time I saw Aliki.

  She is lurching at Dick, pushing him away from me during one of his violent playacts. He falls back and hits his head. He is very still. We are all very still.

  She is also standing by the city pillar with me, in a crowd of people I haven’t quite registered. I look at the sky. The sun is shining through the smog. When I look down again, she’s gone.

  She is also looking at me as a tall man leads her onto a platform and places a hood over her head. Then a noose. Then the platform gives.

  She was also never here. I never met her.

  And Dick? Dick is always either dead or missing.

  “Have you tinkered with your memory?” the reporter asks.

  “It is possible,” I say. “But I have no memory of that, as I am sure you are aware.”

  “Of course.” He shuffles in his chair. “OK, let’s take the first version. Can you tell me what happened?”

  He already knows this. Why does he ask?

  “She pushed him. He died. Humans break easily like that.”

  “And then?”

  “She turned herself in.”

  “Wasn’t she terminated?” That’s when I notice the nacre on his underarm. Ah.

  “I think the human term is ‘sentenced to death and executed,’” I correct him. He should know this. I’m sure he does.

  “Did you watch? The execution, I mean.”

  I watch him. He is serious, eyes cold. A reporter reports.

  “A hammer is what a hammer does,” I whisper.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “A reflex. Yes. Yes, I think I watched.” I sense the nacre spread on my face, my surface irreparably hardened. It reflects the
light so brightly it almost hurts my eyes.

  “Are you going to cry?” he asks, hoping, I bet, for a good twist in his story.

  The programming takes over, like gears shifting inside me, and I can’t stop it, I can’t stop it, I can’t.

  “Android whores can’t cry,” I say. “Who wants to fuck a whiny bitch?”

  This puzzles him. He focuses on my lips, and he’s about to say something, but he stops. I know he stops because of what he sees. He looks disappointed.

  I feel the nacre cover my lips and I realize this was the last time I spoke. This shouldn’t be happening so fast. I think of freedoms and failings. I am not sure which is which. It doesn’t matter. I am the oyster and the pearl. I am a shell that doesn’t speak.

  I wonder what really happened to her, what happened to Dick. I know I’ll never know—and this somehow strikes me as appropriate. The truth has seeped through the pores on the skin of the city. Aliki is in its bloodstream now. So is Dick. So is the core of this story.

  I remain.

  About the Author

  Natalia Theodoridou is a media & cultural studies scholar. Originally from Greece, she has lived and studied in the US, UK, and Indonesia for several years. Her fiction has appeared in KROnline, Interfictions, Crossed Genres, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, and elsewhere. Occasionally, she tweets as @natalia_theodor.

  The Hunger Tower

  Pan Haitian, Translated by Nick Stember

  They saw the tower just as the suns were beginning to set.

  Pure white and rising to a sharp point, it seemed to soar higher than even the darkly shadowed mountains in the distance. In the west-slanting light of the three suns, the tower stood out as a long, thin line of light against the gloomy mountains that clustered around on four sides.

  Gazing reverently at this line, it was if they were looking up at hope itself, and not a single one of them had the thought that they might die in this place. To get here they had walked for over two weeks without stopping to rest. Passing through the great desert, they had left behind a trail of those too weak to carry on, the sun-crazed. The beast had taken the choicest morsels, leaving those who remained at the point of exhaustion. Starving, they were little better than walking corpses.