“No,” replied Io, placing the mug on the counter. “It’s the only one in my storage. The network is down, so I can’t access online libraries. If I had another music storage device to connect to, I’d know much more.”
Nell blinked. Yes. Yes, online libraries. Networks. He was talking about the Internet. He didn’t seem to question where it was; rather he simply understood that it wasn’t available. Would it hurt him if she told him it was long gone? That it hadn’t existed in a hundred years? What would he have been capable of if there had been an Internet, or if she had a stor—
“Would you know a music storage device if you saw one? Do you think? Would you?” The words were bubbles in her throat and on her tongue. Her chest beat out a thrilled syncopation.
Io turned back to his coral reef of soap and dishes. “Yes, I’d be able to recognize one, and my infared data system would be able to connect to it. But devices like that, Nell, I—I know they’re all gone. It is fine. I am sure you can manually teach me your songs, and I will be able to record and repeat them.”
He didn’t notice her slipping out of the room, or if he did, he didn’t mind. Nell’s excitement carried her up the stairs to the chaos of her bedroom. She rooted about in her aprons, her clothing: there in the cotton, a hard silver box. Yes. Nell wasn’t at all used to smiling, the sensation of wonder emanating from her face was new. She laughed aloud as she scampered back down the stairs, a ripple of sheer delight.
She burst into the kitchen, the tiny computer in her fist. It was worth a try, surely?
“Does this look like a device you could read?” she asked, her smile and excitement too big for her face.
Io turned around, startled.
“You are happy,” he observed.
Nell chuckled. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Let’s see if this makes any sense to you.”
Io diligently wiped his gloves on a dishcloth and removed them one by one. Nell passed him the device, trembling. He plucked a dry fork from the draining board and took it to the table. Nell pulled out the chair at the head of the table, and he sat down; she sat beside him.
Io took a prong of the fork between his forefinger and thumb and twisted it, ever so slightly.
“Would you like some tools?” she whispered.
“No, no,” he replied. “I’m just going to turn it on, not open it up.”
Nell blinked. “Isn’t it, you know, dead?”
“No machine is ever truly dead. Death is for humans,” Io muttered, slotting the prong of steel into one of the tiny sockets in the silvery box. “There’s impermeable memory, data, code that can be read. Information is immortal.”
Nell was rapt as he tinkered, thinking aloud to himself. She ticked heavy, heavier than usual. For a moment she was back on the roof of the Gonne Hospital, rushed with potential, weight in her chest.
Suddenly and quietly there it was without any prelude or fanfare: a single spark. The screen on the small box went darker, then lighter, then white. It was on. Tiny text scrolled past on its screen, digital letters in motion. Io tilted his head. Nell’s mouth dropped open.
What she hadn’t been able to manage with tools and batteries and cables, Io had figured out in a matter of seconds. How much does he know? His memory was different.
Io turned the box over in his hands, as calmly as he had with the dishes. It caught the morning light as it turned, its screen almost humming with text too small for Nell to read. This tiny thing, full of secrets and stories and songs.
“Can you read it?” she breathed, barely able to conjure her voice at all.
“Yes,” he replied, his thumb gently gliding across the screen. It moved under his touch, and he navigated the tiny infinity with shocking ease. He tapped lightly and frowned, concerned for a moment, then closed his eyes. From the cavern of his kettle skull, a soft whirring, his sentience strip receiving ancient information. After a long moment it stopped, and Io chirped softly, a melodious beep.
“Data transfer complete,” he said flatly. He opened his mouth wide then, and an electric symphony poured out like shining water, like golden light, like the beginning of everything.
Nell shot up from her chair, screaming, unbridled. This sound! In her kitchen! Coming from the mouth of her—her creation. A kaleidoscope of possibilities unfolded before her in this new sound, this ancient, ancient sound: trills of faraway violinists and electric guitar and drums and a ghost woman’s thunderous voice. Nell leaped around the tiles, unable to keep herself from dancing.
She spun in time with the tune, moving her hips and shoulders, throwing her arms above her head, joining the refrain, rolling in the deep.
Before she knew it, Io was up out of his chair, too, the glowing box in one hand, the other pointing at some faraway delightful thing, music blaring from him. This clumsy dance floor was suddenly a private, gleaming ballroom full of soap and sunlight. Nell grabbed Io’s free hand. He placed the box in his apron pocket and took her other hand as well. Joined, they spun an uncoordinated tempest. The pages of Nell’s imagination, the plot she had wound out for herself, the first hand she had held, sprang to life around her, no longer ink and dreams and the sparse, grim ticking of her chest. Now orchestra, now drumbeat, now Io.
This was unlike the whirlwind that Nell had danced in the Lighthouse, a hopeful lone body in the dark. Being connected to Io at the hands, moving with him like this, Nell was suddenly not lonely. Her eyes filled with tears. She could get used to this, barely able to contain her laughter, her hands full of breathing steel.
“How many songs do you know?” she asked, spinning away, then back toward him.
“A hundred thousand and then some,” he replied, grabbing her hand and twirling her with ease, and Nell imagined that the stillness of his kettle face was smiling down at her.
Nell felt unstoppable, fevered. If he could read her long-dead music box with such ease, he could surely read other computers. He could unearth so much, could be the key to rebuilding their society, could be their link to the rest of the world. And the Lighthouse, their quest for a conduit. She’d created one; she couldn’t wait to show them, couldn’t wait for Io to join their dance.
“Put on another!” she trilled greedily, picking up the cards from their stack and throwing them in the air, confetti in red and black and queens and kings. In less than a beat, the music changed to a steady, low rhythm, all bass, all prowling. The last ace fluttered to the ground.
Nell pulled Io closer, not really knowing what she was doing, only that the slight change in, well, mood, she supposed, called for it. Could it even be called mood? Given that one of them was—did Io even have moods?
Nell’s ability to pretend had never been great. Her reality was impossible to ignore; every time her chest ticked she was confronted with a harsh truth: Tick, my mother is dead, tick, tick, my mother is dead, tick, everyone knows what I am made of. Pretending had come naturally to her only once; fantasy had washed up at her feet on the shoreline, and she had held it in her hand. She was still holding it now.
Her fantasy had grown and grown and now danced, finally with her, moved hips that she had built along with hers. The soapy kitchen air was hot, and the rain smattered lazily against the window in a gentle sun shower. A woman’s voice, different from the last, ragged, spun out declarations of something that sounded like anger, or sex, or maybe something else that Nell didn’t know much about; she’d never heard music like this, how fury could become tender.
This was the last thing Nell felt before it happened.
CHAPTER 5
You aren’t sure why you trust this moment. The air is soapy, and the shock of the music is still changing the texture of the world around you, deepening it with new ridges and valleys of emotion. You are suddenly aware of your mouth, as if you’d never had a mouth before now.
He is a grand thing before you, moving easily. Your eyes connect with his again, and you are grateful for him. He’s brought you so much in such a short time: a hundred thousand anthems! Each son
g a bauble, a star. He’s brought you these gifts, these passwords to the world before. People must have danced like this all the time. How did they ever stop dancing?
You glide around him, barely touching at the fingertips, lightly connecting every beat or two. He’s confident in his movement. He’s a good dancer. That must come in his code. You, though, you are teaching yourself as each key change arrives, as each line rises and tips into the next, as the woman singing from long ago wills you to. You learn her words easily, almost start to sing along.
Just beneath the skin of you there is a warmth, a possibility, and something like the opposite of fear: courage.
You built him to be handsome and strong. He hasn’t a face yet, not like how you drew him on the page, but if you soften your eyes, you can see it. Here he is, far from line and paper; you feel a pull toward him. This is not a coincidence. He is good at this, and you are not; but you don’t care. He’s not going to sneer or laugh or roll his eyes; he can’t, and he wouldn’t. He thinks you are amazing: you made him.
You trust him, and what a golden climb that truth is building through your ankles and knees and gut and your chest, and before you are quite sure of it, you crescendo into him, high on your toes. You built this kiss. This belongs to you.
His head leans forward to meet yours, and he places his hands around your waist. His mouth is not a mouth. He is cold.
All the gold drains out of your body, and you are in the arms of a machine; you are between pincers of steel.
The kiss feels like nothing. This is not a kiss at all.
You stay with it, and you think of Oliver Kelly: of the feel of his skin against your selfish hands in the hospital, of his obvious desire for you, the smell of formaldehyde and cologne and his body in the back of your throat. He did not want you then, but at least he knew what he wanted; at least he wanted; at least he chose.
You built Io with your own hands. Was he capable of choosing? Were you choosing this for him?
Is this why they took the machines away? Is this what they punished a whole nation for? They came too close to the uncanny, lost themselves to the unreal, and paid, and here you are, tangled up in a steel tower with electric lights for eyes. How is it Oliver is in your throat now? How is it that he would feel more real than this, this that you have drawn up from nothing, this that you made? It is not Oliver that you find yourself wishing for; it is just—just a human, not a machine.
This floods you as you break contact and Io turns his head, says, “You kissed me.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t—” Your stupid mouth won’t work now and you back away from him and he says your name and you are afraid. He is so full; he is so real: how much does he know? Before you realize it, you have turned on your heel and you are moving away, fast; you are leaving. You need the air. You need out of this house.
CHAPTER 6
When Nell passed Ruby at the garden gate, she barely noticed the girl, let alone expected Ruby to cycle after her, eye lit up like a bright bulb of concern. But Ruby turned and followed. Even after Nell had ridden out of the parklands and swerved west, bypassing the way into the estates, the town.
As Nell moved, she listened to her body, her thrumming pulse, her chest; her ticking shifted tone, started to clang. Something was happening. She didn’t stop.
The two girls flew on their bicycles against the warm rain. Nell led them out past the rush of Heuston Falls and down the increasingly barren road westward. The road became less even, as the ruins began to loom against the humid gray of the falling afternoon.
The ancient flats and high-rise blocks like rotten teeth lined the blackened old tongue of the road that led out to the mystery of the rest of the island. This was where the scars of the epidemic were the most gnarled, between the Pale and the Pasture, the places that the sparse population hadn’t even tried to mend yet. Hadn’t they enough to do in their small communities, rather than waste time on the ragged edges, the rotten hemline of their tiny civilization?
Nell slowed a little. Putting miles between her and the house, Io’s arms. It was supposed to be helping, but she was feeling sicker now than she was in the kitchen.
Ruby caught up and pedaled beside her.
They didn’t say anything to each other, not for some time. They just cycled on, past small gray shells of houses and wide, scorched fields. Night suggested itself over the horizon; the sky began to move neon.
This far out the air began to reek. Yellowed and tangled meadows stretched out on either side of the decrepit motorway west. They soaked up the warm rain greedily, drunk after so long dry. Close up Nell could smell how foul and how sick it was, but the girls stayed in the center of the tar road as though the slight distance from the wild pasture would grant them more safety.
“My chest hurts,” Nell said suddenly, breaking the silence so sharply that Ruby almost lost control of her bike.
“Do you need to stop?” offered Ruby, her voice hopeful. “Are you ready to go back?”
Nell did not answer; she only kept pedaling.
Ruby moved closer to Nell on the road, barely an arm’s length from her. This was the farthest west the girls had ever been. Nell’s breaths were great gulps of panic. “Ruby, my chest hurts.” She still looked straight ahead into the electric sunset. “It sounds—”
“It sounds bad, Nell; it sounds different,” ventured Ruby.
Tears rolled down Nell’s face, her lips were chapped; but she was still somehow cycling. Still moving forward, still moving away.
“Nell, maybe you should stop?”
Nell said nothing, her face crumpled in something that married physical pain and immense sorrow. She slowed down a little. Ruby reached out, but Nell swerved, lost her grip on the wet filthy road, and toppled gracelessly over on her side. Her chest whirred, clanked. The hull of a sinking ship, long after the iceberg. The creaks of a burning house coming down around itself: a terrible, terrible noise. Her palms were scraped from the road, and her throbbing, exhausted legs still tangled in her bicycle. She heaved, but there was nothing in her.
Ruby leaped down to Nell’s side, her bicycle clattering to the road. Rain slid down the tip of her nose, her clothing plastered to her form. Nell shuddered and gasped.
“Can you move? We need to get back!” Ruby was crying now, totally powerless in the rain, on the road. “I’m not going to be able to carry you!”
“Will you,” Nell managed weakly, “you please get my—my da?”
The sheer effort of this breathy request pulled Nell’s precarious consciousness out from under her. Her eyes flickered shut, her breathing labored, but her chest kept grinding, metallic and heaving and strange. Ruby shook her once or twice, but Nell couldn’t feel it; she was lost to the blackness of the asphalt.
Ruby picked herself up, sobbing, and pulled away from her friend. She clumsily mounted her bicycle, the streamers from the handlebars pathetic, childish in the storm. Ruby began to speed back the way they had come. Night had fallen hard, and she left Nell alone in the dark.
CHAPTER 7
I am walking toward you, but I cannot see you yet. The rain is heavy. Your father came out of his laboratory; he heard the door slam. He asked me why you left, and I told him that you got a fright. He looked at me long and hard, and I almost told him that you kissed me; but I did not think that was the right thing. Your father is very secretive. He placed long black gloves over my hands and arms and boots on my feet and a long rubber coat over my body. The hat, he said, would keep the water from connecting with my eyes and damaging them. He told me that between these garments and the umbrella, I would be hard pressed to get wet at all. He said not to move too quickly. He said not to burn you, not to burn his girl. He said he was not worried about you because he trusts me.
Nell. I am not sure what that means; but I did not have time to ask. I am not sure he should trust me. I have not yet seen another person. This world outside the house, I am sure, in daylight is very beautiful.
The city is very large and v
ery gray, and the stone woman on the horizon is very tall. I like her and hope you will bring me close to her. Can we explore this city together? It does not look like the map that I have stored in my code. The network is silent, and there are no updates. I know this waterfall from somewhere, but I would still very much like you to tell me about it when I find you, if you are not still frightened, or angry.
I wish you had location tracking. I wish you were a blue dot on a white map that I could go to.
Your chest was making different noises in the kitchen, but I am not sure you could hear them. I did not tell you when I heard the frequency change, but I should have. Dancing with you was very easy. I want to find you, but perhaps you do not want to be found. I am sorry. I should not keep walking in case I walk in the wrong direction.
When Ruby barrels toward me on her bright bicycle, for a moment I think she is going to attack me. I brace myself for collision, but she skids to a halt and is shrill; her voice is not her voice. If you were frightened in the kitchen, then Ruby is terrified now. But not of me. Of something else.
Her words spill out of her. She tells me she left you by the side of the road. “Nell is broken, go west, go to the motorway, you’ll find her after the city ends, she’s far out, run, run, run.” She inhales and exhales in great gulps of night air. Maybe if I were a human, I would embrace her, but I do not think she would like that.
I do what she tells me and begin to run, holding my umbrella over my head. I am fast in the rain. I am learning about time, because time changes pace depending on what happens. I experience time differently from how you experience it, Nell. I do not feel it slow because I am bored or fly because I am happy, but tonight I run for a hundred years.
Each footfall is an hour, a day. I have learned this feeling from you; surely it was you showing me how to feel these things. Each second is another winter, Nell. When I find you, this terrible slowness, this human dread will stop. Things like me should not feel time like this.
Spare and Found Parts Page 19
