Spare and Found Parts

by Sarah Maria Griffin

  “Everything is wrong, Nell.”

  Nell could tell immediately that Oliver was not talking about an accident, or a death, or the Lighthouse’s getting shut down, or his trade’s getting audited by the council. He didn’t even seem angry, as if he were coming to read her the riot act for drugging him and looting his lab. No.

  Oliver was talking about his feelings.

  Nell set her jaw. Here we go.

  “You probably think I’m only after one thing with you.” Oliver’s eyes were on the floor. There was something different this time.

  “Oliver, I know you’re only after one thing. Well, two things, and if you pretend one of them isn’t my father’s trade, I will have to ask you to leave.” Nell’s light tone sank. Oliver wasn’t here for banter. They weren’t Crane and Kelly, a hermit and a barfly here. This wasn’t going to be any fun. Nell took stock and mentally put down her sword. No duel today.

  “Nell, my whole life I’ve been convinced that it would come down to you and me.” Oliver spoke softly, still not looking at her, worrying the cuff of his jacket. “And even all the times you said no, I thought it just meant you weren’t ready yet. Or that somehow you couldn’t quite see what I see. I always thought that someday something would happen that would shake up your perspective and that finally”—he exhaled deeply, these awful words—“you might see me how I see you.”

  They hung against the patter of rain on the window and the thickness of sleep in the air and the chiming in her chest, and Nell couldn’t say anything to him at all. This wasn’t just attempt nineteen for Oliver. This was something real. Something final.

  She began to say something like “Oliver, I’m sorry” or “Oliver, you know this already,” but got only as far as the end of his name before he stopped her.

  “I’m sure you think all this is just about the trade, the honor of continuing your family’s work. But you’ve had it mixed up all along. The limbs, the weekend studies with your father, I—Nell, maybe it started out being about the job, but it became about—about you. How you make me feel. That’s what’s kept me going.” He stopped, his face ruddy with vulnerability.

  Nell felt a flash of something under her rib cage. Alien and strange and bright. Oliver’s voice had a strong and lovely timbre to it that she spent most of her time ignoring, but on that last word it was a thunderclap. The brightness rose into her mouth—an awareness, a knowledge—but then it left her as quickly as it had arrived. She said nothing and looked at the white florals of her sheets.

  “I know you made Io because you find it hard to connect to the rest of us, and I want you to know that he is the most incredible thing I have ever seen in my life—may ever see in my life. When the folks at the Lighthouse see him . . . They need him down there. He could wake every single one of their old computers. He’s a conduit, Nell. You could, well, you two could change everything.”

  He spoke slowly, his voice trembling from the confession. Nell didn’t take her eyes off the blanched cotton garden around her. The shock of emotion lingered in her; maybe that was all the love and desire she’d meant to have for him over her whole life flaring up at once. But then it left, a ghost. She had nothing to give him. He’d just handed her a massive compliment, but all she could muster was a quiet “Thank you.”

  “I wonder what I could have been part of if I hadn’t said no to you that day on the steps.” His voice was bitter now.

  “You were part of it, Oliver!” Nell couldn’t snuff the pity from her voice. “I mean, you had all those parts first. You’re—you’re part of him, too.”

  Oliver looked up at her then finally. His cheeks were still pink, and his eyes were enormous, and he shook his head. “No. I’m not.”

  It wasn’t self-pity, but it was heartbreak. And it was true. Oliver had been telling himself the same love story for years and had come to believe it, and now he was ending it, on his own terms.

  “I just need you to tell me no, once more, for real,” he said, and Nell mentally drew a different blade. Their dueling days were over. This was an execution.

  She tried once more to summon that flash of lightning, but there was nothing, only the lame, hushed drizzle against the window.

  “I don’t love you at all, Oliver.”

  “But could you?”

  Her blade was in his body, but he wouldn’t fall; he wanted so desperately for this to live. She’d never stopped to think maybe he was hurting. But Nell wasn’t anyone’s happy ending. She was always a more likely executioner.

  “No. Never.”

  She wanted to offer him some consolation, but none would come. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just shook his head, absorbing the fullness and finality of no. Of never. She thumbed the Medi-Patch. Was it the gauzy medicinal filter that allowed her to maintain distance from this, or was she really so cold that she couldn’t even tell him she was sorry?

  Oliver rose to leave, his face ashen, humiliated, his breathing edging toward that awful syncopation that leads to a very particular kind of crying. She reached a hand up to him, and he took it in both of his. Oliver held it for a moment, steadied his breath, and said, “All right. My presentation is this Monday. I know you probably won’t be on your feet. But I’ll be thinking of you when I’m up there.”

  He turned away and left her room. Nell sat amid the eiderdown and paper and found, as if from nowhere, fat tears on her cheeks. Relief, she thought it must be, as she wiped them away. Just relief.

  The front door clicked shut in the distance, and she returned to her work.

  CHAPTER 13

  That evening Io led Nell down to the kitchen for a change of scenery. She sat at the table, drinking hot chicken stock from a mug, while Io fussed around, preparing a proper meal. Nell’s appetite had been voracious lately; everything she ate was fuel toward her body’s taking new steps and healing itself. The hunger was at least partially artificial from the Medi-Patch, but as the heady and dense rosemary and echo of white wine (and a suggestion of mushroom and . . . was that bay leaf?) in the stock hit her tongue, she was glad of it.

  Io played some music for her (soft, guitars, a man’s voice this time) and sliced bright vegetables into even disks. He placed them one by one into a simmering dark sauce on the hob in the fat cast-iron pan and then set about cobbling together a cake. Watching him brought Nell a very quiet peace; this soft domesticity was a relief from Oliver’s confession scene earlier in the day. She watched Io’s hands, confident and uncanny. They still unsettled her but in a way that pulled her in now, rather than drove her away. She wasn’t afraid of him.

  “I promise I know how to cook, too,” Nell said, over the lip of her mug. “Do you ever get hungry?”

  “No.” Io seamlessly cracked one egg into a bowl, then another. “But I appreciate the composition of food. I am feeling this more acutely the more I practice the recipes in my applications. The instructions are effectively equations and the cake”—he gestured to his mixing bowl—“will be the correct result. How satisfying.”

  Nell chuckled. “Yes. I agree. Cake is a fine answer to any equation. It is a shame you can’t taste it, though.”

  Io shrugged. “There were taste extensions and applications for my model, but at present the hardware needed to build me a fully functioning palate would be extremely complex and would require some hypersensitive fibers that I am unsure are still in existence.”

  “Maybe when I’m better, I can get working on that for you. I’m sure Da knows a thing or two about that. Who knows what materials he’s got stashed back there.?”

  Nell said this lightly but caught herself. The things her father kept in the laboratory weren’t for playful suggestion. She sipped her broth again, warmed by it.

  Io cradled the mixing bowl and stirred rhythmically, quiet for a moment. He was deliberating.

  “Nell, I would like to tell you something.”

  Not this again. Nell wasn’t sure she could handle anything else today after Oliver, but she said, “Oh, what is it?” ins
tead of “I am very delicate right now. Can we please go back to talking about desserts?”

  “In Dr. Crane’s laboratory I saw that he was making drawings for”—Io hesitated and looked into the mixing bowl—“for something like me.”

  The chiming began to escalate in her for the first time in days. Something like him? An android? A robot? A person? Io didn’t look up, his arm still churning the batter in the heavy enamel bowl.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He is planning to build something like me, Nell. Only not like me. I think he intends it to be a woman.”

  The sound of the wooden spoon in the mix was a dull beat in circles, and the spiral of it was something awful. Nell blinked.

  “Do you think Dr. Crane is making a friend for me?” Io asked then, earnest, turning toward the cake tin on the counter, expertly lined with brown greaseproof paper. He carefully poured the pale batter down into it, a neat transfer.

  “I don’t know. Maybe?”

  Nell did know. She saw her mother’s body under the sheet again, a flash of it, a flash of what the landscape of her father’s mind looked like. If he couldn’t have Cora’s body, would he build something like it? Of course he would. The laboratory was a cave of transfiguration, a mechanical womb for him to try and try again to claw Cora back from the dead. So he could prove to himself—or even prove to her—that he could. That he was capable of anything, regardless of death.

  Nell looked at Io. She couldn’t tell him all this when it was barely clear to her. What good would it do to pour all this into Io’s hands? What could he do with it?

  “Do you . . . want a friend?”

  Io opened the oven, and a deep breath of heat rolled into the room. He placed the cake pan inside and closed the hatch behind it. “I don’t know. I like you. But you aren’t like me. So”—Io stalled—“maybe I could find a song for this?”

  Nell shook her head. “Don’t.”

  She hadn’t built him to watch him interact with things like him; he wasn’t another exercise or a steel sprite to add to her little collection. She’d built him for herself, for her world, but she had never considered for a moment that maybe he would prefer the company of someone more like him.

  Maybe humans weren’t all that interesting after all; maybe their world, full of things he couldn’t experience, tastes he couldn’t taste, was dull to him. Maybe he needed someone to talk in code with, to learn about the human world alongside, a cipher to piece this place together with. Maybe he didn’t want a programmer or a maker condescending to him. The maybes grew taller and taller in Nell until her chime sang, “Maybe I am wrong; maybe this is all wrong.”

  Io saw her panic and came to her across the kitchen tiles, placed his hand on her shoulder. Nell swallowed hard on all the ugly questions and asked, “Would you like a friend who’s just like you? Because if you would, maybe I can make you one.”

  Her creation turned his bronze face to her. “If you want to build me a friend, I will have a friend. If Dr. Crane has a friend for me and you find this the correct way to continue, I will have a friend. But I am happy to be your friend, just yours, if that is what you wish.”

  How did reams of numbers flash light into this? Nell wondered, looking up at him. How did algorithm become emotion? The recipe of him just worked that way, she supposed. If Io believed himself to be happy, he was happy. Faith and programming might be the same thing. Maybe this was how he understood cake.

  Nell said, “Lean down.”

  The robot did, and she placed her lips very softly on the architecture of his cheek. It was metal and hard, but this time it was warm.

  “Thank you,” Io said.

  When the cake was done, 24.4 minutes later, the kitchen air was charged with sugar and that special alchemy that baking brings to a space. The dessert cooled on a rack, and Io and Nell sat at the table, playing Snap.

  Nell’s reflexes were a good match for Io’s image processing speed. A two of diamonds, an eight of spades, a jack of spades, a jack of—snap! Io gathered the stack, and they started again. A queen of clubs, a three of hearts, Cora’s body pulled into focus in Nell’s mind. Who would be on that empty table next? Was there something already there? Were parts being gathered or forged anew? Nell ran her fingers over her Medi-Patch, tempted to tear it off, to face down the dread in her belly and be her whole self again.

  The front door of the house opened, then closed.

  Io peered over his cards and didn’t draw another, but before he could ask Nell what she was thinking, Julian blustered in, the smell of fresh rain and earth rolling off him, his glasses fogging up. He wasn’t wearing a raincoat, just his worn tweed jacket, his tie too tight.

  “Nell, what did you say to Oliver Kelly?” he demanded.

  His tone was urgent, furious, and marbled with terror. He pushed his glasses up into his tangle of hair, his brow beaded with sweat.

  “Did you see him? Is he all right?” Nell asked, knowing full well that these were the wrong questions. Io held his cards still and didn’t make a sound.

  “Nell. What did you say . . . to . . . him?”

  Nell fanned her cards out and looked into the black and red and white of them, instead of over at her father’s intensity. Best to keep it frank.

  “I told him that I am not and never will be in love with him. I’m cutting him loose; it’s not fair on him anymore, Da. He’ll recover.”

  Julian stood very still for a moment. He shot a dark look at Io, then at Nell, then at Io again, speechless.

  Nell steeled herself and looked casually over her shoulder at him, keeping her fan of cards high. “Why? Is he all right?”

  “Oh, he’s going to be all right,” replied Julian, walking out of the kitchen. His voice carried through the doorway. “Us, though, we’re not.”

  His laboratory door creaked, then slammed, a tremor running sick through the whole house.

  A roar came up through Nell before the mugs on the shelf were finished rattling. “What is that supposed to even mean?” Julian dipped in and out of Nell’s orbit, a strange and troublesome comet. He’d land with real destruction someday. That day was soon, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Nell threw her cards on the floor, a scatter of black and white and red. She stormed, as best she could against the stiffness of her legs, to the door of his laboratory and hammered with her fist. “You can’t just keep hiding in there!” she shouted into the dark wood. “You’re going to have to talk to me someday!”

  The reply was simply the click of a lock, the heavy slide of a bolt, the sound of her father’s footsteps walking back into his own wretched world.

  Nell placed her head against the door for a moment and ran her fingernails slowly down its surface, the scratch against the varnish a last whisper of her fury. She made her way down the corridor back to the kitchen and breathed her chiming back to normal volume. She sat down at the table again with a heave.

  She held her face with her hands and measured her breath against the quiet, against the response she’d never get from Julian. Something was wrong, and he’d make sure she’d never see it coming. Around her, Io picked up the cards, one by one.

  Nell eventually pulled her face from the dark of her palms. “Do you think the cake has cooled?”

  The knife slid down the belly of the cake easily. It was delicious.

  CHAPTER 14

  In the morning, after an empty sleep, Nell pulled back the covers and ran her hands over her legs. She silently asked her muscles to be strong. Her fingernails were ragged. She’d get Julian to come out and talk to her today one way or another.

  Rays of early light stretched over her room from the windows. Cabin fever was edging at her. She’d ask Io to help her out to the garden today if the sun stayed out and the rain kept away. Maybe she’d go talk to her mother, pick some wildflowers and leave them at the side of the lake.

  Nell pushed the deadening patch with her fingers, hoping for a moment or two of peace, missing the thin curtain between
her anxious brain and the real world, the veil of chemical calm. She was adjusted now. There was no more relief in the high. There was no more relief at all.

  “Oliver was going to be fine,” her father had said. “Us, though. We’re not.” He’d locked his door in the face of her rage. He’d stepped away from handing her any sort of truth. Nell was confused, but more than this. There was something terribly wrong in this house. Were they in danger?

  She huddled among her pillows, and Kodak squirreled his way up the covers and nuzzled into her neck.

  “What do you know then?” she whispered to him. “What do you know?” She rubbed his head, his silky coat. The clock on the wall read an inch or so past nine, and she listened closely to the house for movement.

  Muffled laughter drifted up from directly below her. Something was happening in the kitchen. But who was there? What kind of laughter was it? Good spirited, cruel? It set her teeth on edge.

  Then a shriek of joy reverberated up the stairs: Ruby, that was Ruby’s voice. Right, at least that meant there wasn’t immediate trouble. It felt dissonant to Nell, a stark contrast with the mood of the Crane house.

  A barrel of footsteps up the stairs. Three clear knocks on the door, deliberate and formal.

  “Ruby, what, what?”

  Ruby laughed gaily and hushed her. “Shh! You’ll see! C’mon!”

  More than a little awkwardly (and far more stiffly and painfully than she let on) Nell got herself to the doorframe: then Ruby placed an arm around her waist and helped her through the door and onto the landing. It was an awkward waltz, but the first steps of the day would be the stiffest. Nell was steadier than she’d been the day before. She was almost fine, but if she fell now, she’d take both of them tumbling down at once. The top of the stairway was a precarious ledge.

  “Why don’t you sit here? It’ll give you a great view!”

  Nell held the banister and slowly sat down where the landing met the top stair. “A view?”

  “You’ll see!”