REC017: Subject update
Right, are we recording? You can see the body cam footage? You say that, but yesterday it kept cutting out. Because it’s a problem for the data.
Ok, so, you can see I’m outside, just left the research centre, approaching the participants. Four of them, been here for, uhm, five days now? Sorry, eight. Whatever. Some number of days. I’m hungry.
I’ll start with Elio.
Good morning, Elio. How are you doing? Elio, can you answer me?
“You hear about the ship that withered?”
I nodded. Ever since we’d reached port the day before, I’d overheard nothing but variations on the same rumor while I did my rounds, becoming slighter and weaker as water sloughed from my hands onto the ship-plants. Even if my work hadn’t needed doing so often, as a Source I was the only member of crew who wasn’t allowed to leave the ship.
I forgot how bright the sun could be. I was blinded, like exiting a movie theater. As my eyes watered, I did something I hadn’t done in years. I laughed. I laughed until my stomach was sore.
Ouma and Oupa dragged me away when we arrived. I hadn’t seen them for two years, figured they’d tell me how tall and ‘handsome’ I’d grown. I never believed this stuff, but it was caring at least. They said these things, but it was perfunctory. Something bigger was on their minds. It was my birthday. my first in a foreign country. But South Africa was no foreign country to me: it was another home. They say that things can skip a generation, and I don't know much about that, but my parents seemed less thrilled about being there than I always did.
Neon signs bracket the rainy Tokyo night, a thousand kanji refracted through the window of the corner noodle shop where I sit, waiting. A blue-plated bowl cools beneath my palm, the final twist of udon circling my chopstick like the ticking hand of a clock.
It’s past midnight; the last trains out of Shinjuku, long departed. Unobtrusive pop music plays in the background. The place smells of stale tempura. A lone businessman nods off in a corner. I sling my laptop out of its bag, onto the counter, and watch as the screen flickers to life.
(This story was originally published in Fusion Fragment.)
We called her Mother, although no part of her had borne any part of us. She was the first thing most of us Fallen saw after we opened our eyes, if we still had them, and squinted against the hot sun glinting off of the metal junkyard where the city dumped its chemical waste.
I remember the fall: the hard eyes of the city’s elected human officials as they condemned me to death by pushing me off the cloud-high wall that surrounded the city of Amalthea, onto the android cemetery below.
This story originally appeared in Allegory magazine in November 2021
“Welcome, Sleeper.”
Kora takes the blackberry water offered by the floating tray and shudders as she looks out the glass wall to the thirty-story drop.
Silver buildings crowd the crosshatch of streets, huddling against one another for warmth. The river crawls between, lazy and black, a sheen of ice sweating on the surface. Above it, a train winds past, clinging to the tracks like a frostbitten tongue. An endless winter, a long and sunless scream, encapsules the city of Chicago.
“Gentlemen, I think we accomplished a lot for the morning session and I’m sure we’re all about ready for a bio-break.”
Nods of ascent went around the boardroom but before anyone could rise, the moderator held up a firm palm.
“But, before we do, Dr. Marjorie Allen from the research division has asked to say a few words. Dr. Allen?”
Wagner is sick to his stomach. His cheek is pressed up against a cold, corrugated metal floor, and everywhere around him there are others, moaning and clutching their stomachs. The entire room is pitching and heaving in great swells, over and over. He decides that he must be in the hold of a ship, a very large ship. He smells steel and powder and canvas and vomit, especially vomit. He retches, but nothing comes out except spittle. It feels like his throat will turn inside out and spill out of his mouth onto the deck.