Dearest, darkest fear of mine, I had begun to take you for granted.
When the stars darkened and I found myself in the swelling nothingness at the end of things, I recalled that I had never been afraid of the dark. And now that a new world has birthed around me and I recognize none of it, I think of you, my sweetest, most secret fear, and I miss when you meant something to me.
“Micah.”
I hear the name, the one they call me now, and you are gone from me again. It takes me a moment to recall where I am. The cool metal against my forearms reminds me before the sights around me have time to register.
“Micah!”
“I’m sorry,” I reply, and my own voice sounds unfamiliar but I know that it’s mine. The words sound unfamiliar too. I barely know what they mean.
The person looking at me has this crease between her eyebrows, this slight pout to her lips that tells me I’ve worried her. She huffs and turns away.
“The readings.” She gestures at the sprawling arch of a metal panel in front of us that glitters with carved symbols and flashing bulbs of colorful light. I give it a glance and my mind tells me the meaning of them all, though I wouldn’t be able to tell you how. I think you humans would call it “habit” or “instinct,” if it were one of your own. For me I think you would call it “programming.”
“Target is orbiting the local star at a safe distance, current location and trajectory puts it about three hours off at our combined current speed,” I mutter, running my fingertips over one of the instruments and reading the details of their outputs implicitly.
“But what is it?”
What is it? I frown. The instruments we have won’t tell me that. If she asked me how big it was, or what it was made out of, whether it was hollow or solid, I’d have some sort of answer, but “what” is it?
“Are you asking me if it’s a ship?” I ask for clarification, and she nods.
The context of this conversation is slowly coming back to me. I feel as though I often exist without it, context. The moment surrounding me is all I am aware of, only the present, no past unless I choose to acknowledge it. I search for that context now and a few things come back to me at a time.
Lucia is her name. She is not worried about me for my own safety but for hers. Micah is the name she gave me. I answer to her. I almost belong to her.
Further back. I am assigned to this ship. I am a tool they are to use. I can read the electronic signals the way they read written word. I can navigate the stars the way they navigate the seas. They don’t know why I can do this.
Further back. I am unearthed, exhumed. I am unknown. I understand little. I will learn to understand, in time. Fifty years and I will know their language. One hundred and they will trust me with their ships and their stars.
Further back. There are no ships. There are no stars. There is nothing. I am nothing, nothing but my own mind. I feel nothing. I am falling or I am flying toward something new. I am buried.
Further back. The universe is dying.
Further back. I am afraid.
When I remember you again, my beloved, only fear, I almost forget why I was remembering.
“It might be a ship.” Just as I had to push myself into context, I have to call myself into the present again.
“Might?”
“It satisfies 4/5 of the qualifying conditions to be a spaceship.”
“Which one is missing?” She leans against the console next to me, searching my face for answers she knows she won’t find there. My expressions are a mimicry of her own. I’m frowning because she is.
“The presence of organic life,” I reply, and we make eye contact. She raises an eyebrow at me. I raise one back.
“That’s good enough for me,” she says when she doesn’t get whatever reaction she must have wanted. As she pushes back off from the console and moves away, she calls over her shoulder, “Take us there.”
“By your orders.”
I hear a little scoff. She’s lingering in the doorway and I wonder what else she wants to say to me, or if she wants me to say something to her. I can’t guess what that might be, though. I keep working with my back turned until she has left me alone to guide our tear-shaped ship through the void of space and to our hollow, empty target.
“What the fuck is this?”
It’s a big empty metal brick. Which is what I said it would be, I might add, but I won’t because I don’t want to start a fight. Anything I say to Evan seems to start one, to the extent that avoiding him has become a new habit ingrained in my coding. I even try not to make eye contact with him most of the time. I rarely know what my face is doing when I’m not in active control of it but whatever it is, I know Evan takes it as a threat. The words “and what’re you looking at?” echo in my mind even now with him standing several feet away with his back turned to me.
“It’s a ship.” Lucia answers his question with an almost reverent tone before I can think of a non-confrontational way to answer Evan. He huffs and takes a step farther into the strange ship, up to a wall which he taps with the mesh of his skintight gloves. The gloves protect him from any alien bacteria or contaminants and they’ve made him bold. Just ten years ago a human wouldn’t have dared to lay a finger on something this obviously foreign. The material of the hallway we stand is unidentifiable even to me—I can tell that it’s conductive, like a metal. Likely it’s some undiscovered metallic element.
“If this is a ship, where’s the crew?” Evan demands.
I wish we hadn’t taken Evan, but the other engineer is scared of extraterrestrials (myself excluded, but I don’t think she realizes that’s what I am, technically). There are so many questions Evan asks that I could answer, but if I do … “It may be that it’s entirely automated,” I say, and he scoffs.
“It’s got room to walk around. It’s got to have a crew.”
“If they didn’t have hallways, how would the engineers get around to fix anything?” Lucia interrupts me before I can say the obvious. This earns her the glare that was clearly meant for me.
“If we find proper living quarters, then we’ll know for sure,” adds a third voice. Cedric. I feel my guard coming down a little with his presence, accelerated by a pat on the shoulder intended to reassure me.
“Micah, can you work out a map for us as we go?” Lucia asks me.
“Of course.”
“Then let’s stop wasting time.”
The four of us venture a little farther into the empty ship now. As we do, I begin to track where we are, and where we have been. A clear image is captured by my sensors, every angle and every little nook that human eyes can’t quite see. It’s dark in here—the humans have flashlights equipped but with my sensors I wouldn’t need them. As I follow close behind them I try to read the environmental input in more detail. Though the material of the ship is not recorded in my human language center, it’s starting to feel less strange. More predictable. As our footsteps fall I can read the way they echo off the walls and I realize the smooth material is vibrating with energy. It’s not incredibly active, just a steady, single signal. Something tells me that in optimal condition it would run much hotter than this.
“Is it cold in here or is it just me?” Cedric observes the temperature just as I’m registering it myself.
“Cold as hell frozen over,” Lucia replies. Her breath is visible in front of her, breathable air made for them by the same suits that protect their flesh. Vents shape the space in front of them to be a bubble of the stuff, leaving them free to explore. There need not be oxygen present in their environment—as long as it’s not a vacuum, and I’d made sure of that much long before we boarded. My own suit does not sport the same technology, a similar but more basic outfit that I think is just there so the humans don’t consider me “naked.”
The simplicity of their technology makes it more fascinating to me than the intricate nature of my own wiring. I can understand how human scientific minds work. I can easily follow their logic and admire their thought process in a way I cannot do my own, which is a mystery to me. How do I work? I don’t know, I just do. How do they work? Blood and bone and electrical signals fired into the meat of their brains, fueled by sugars and proteins and amino acids. If I ate anything, I think maybe I’d accept the mystery of my own functions a bit easier. If I photosynthesized like earth-bound flora, even.
There is a fork in the road.
“Micah?”
They all pause and look at me. I can tell what they want me to do, so I lay a hand on the wall and read the vibrations as far as I can in front of us. The humming of the intake vents, even as they lie in disrepair and abandon, meets me like a comforting lullaby. “Down the right hallway about three yards there is an open chamber. Down the left it continues until I can sense it no longer. I believe we’re on some sort of perimeter route at the moment.”
“Let’s hang a right and see what we’re dealing with,” Lucia says after a short, decisive moment of thought. “Then we can pick back up again.”
“Haven’t got a better idea.” Cedric nods. Evan just shrugs.
The short right hall ends with an arched entrance, giving way to a chamber that curves overhead like a geological phenomenon more than it does something architecturally designed. The walls are as smooth as they were in the halls—smoother, even, still shiny and metallic, but now they reflect more than just the light of the humans’ flashlights. There is a window. It opens into space, peering past the side of our own ship and on to the nearby star whose gravity had caught this ship in its orbit. The presence of this window intrigues me. That, to me, points to this ship being once-inhabited. Why build a window if there will be nobody to look out of it?
“Earth to Micah,” Cedric calls out to me. I realize I am standing in front of the window, on the edge of the room, while the rest of them had stopped near the center.
“Sorry,” I say and again the word means almost nothing to me.
“No worries, bud, we were just wondering if there’s something we’re missing.”
They must have had an entire conversation while I was busy staring off into space. I shake my head. “We might be,” I say, making my way back toward them and giving the room another once-over. The walls of the hallway had been segmented with delicate seams at regular intervals, as well as supportive arches that sported near-indistinguishable welding. In here, there is no sign of a seam in the slightest. Craftsmanship went into this room so it must house something important. It can’t be meant to sit completely empty. I crouch down and lay my palm flat on the floor to feel that steady hum, and then I feel … more. Laid out like a bloodstream or the branches of a tree, the humming in the floor draws my eyes to a seemingly blank wall behind me.
“There’s a panel in that wall,” I say to Cedric and Evan who have knelt down on either side of me to watch me work. “I could activate it.”
“What’s the probability of that killing us? Is the floor going to heat up and fry us?” Cedric gestures all around us. “This whole room looks like a giant pancake griddle.”
I fail to see the similarities. Maybe I’m just unfamiliar with pancake griddles. “Unlikely.” I ignore the allusion and answer as I stand straight and wander toward the wall. “There are no detectable weapons or even heating elements in this room.”
“Just because it can’t detect ’em doesn’t mean there’s none there,” Evan says to Lucia, making his way to her while Cedric joins me at the wall, peering at the blank space as though he’ll suddenly be able to see what I saw. “I think we should—”
“Fire it up, big boy,” Cedric slaps my shoulder again once he’s given up on spotting the panel himself.
“Do not—”
I already am.
As I press my hand to the metal of the wall, it responds this time, the same way the console on our own ship does. There is a low droning sound and the humans hear it this time, starting in surprise as an almost calming noise builds into the whirring of machinery. The floor ripples like it’s become liquid, and a console not unlike our own rises out of it. Like the shifting tectonic plates of the earth, metal bubbles and erupts out of metal and soon we are surrounded by the semblance of a ship’s bridge. It isn’t quite the same as the ship we came from, but it’s certainly similar. I wonder if it melded with my subconscious. That would be interesting—it would imply that as I interfaced with the thing, it was interfacing back.
Lucia lets out a low whistle and prods with her foot at one of the egg-shaped chairs that have sprouted up. She turns to me and gives me a thumbs up.
“Good work, Micah,” she says.
I move to return her thumbs up and there’s a twinge in my fingertip, the index finger, the last to part with the wall. I’m not capable of feeling pain but even if I was, I don’t imagine this is what it would feel like. It’s dull, a buzz that radiates up my forearm. Numbness. An absence of sensation, truly.
It’s noticeable enough that I react, pausing and dropping the pretense of my facial expressions as genuine confusion takes hold for just a second. Before the others can ask me what is wrong, though, it’s over. I hold up my thumb and give Lucia a smile.
“So it was inhabited at some point, or it was meant to be,” mutters Evan as he circles the console. “Nobody around now, though.”
“You didn’t even pick up on waste that was organic, Micah?” Lucia asks me.
“Maybe it wasn’t organic; maybe it was like Micah.” Cedric gestures to me. Evan and Lucia acknowledge the idea with concurrent grunts.
“I’d still expect him to notice that, if that were the case,” Lucia says thoughtfully.
“They could have abandoned ship—potentially long, long ago.” I trace the curves of the chamber walls with my gaze. “But we lack the data right now to know for sure.”
“Well? Go collect more data, then!” Evan brushes me off. He’s come around the front of the console now and is examining it with caution and skepticism. “Cedric and I will stay here, see if we can figure out how this thing works.”
“All right. Stay together. If something happens, we’ll call you.” Lucia nods sharply and taps the transmitter on her chest. The other two tap their own, and I hear the feedback as clearly as I hear their voices. I tap my own just for good measure.
Lucia beckons me to follow her and the two of us go back the way we came. The starkness of the hallways is less impressive in comparison to the bridge, but they’re still just as empty and untouched as they were then. As we walk I think about how if this ship had a crew, they must have brought little with them. Not a speck of dust interrupts the beam of Lucia’s flashlight as she shines it up the wall and to the domed ceiling.
“This place is giving me the creeps, Micah.” She says my name a lot when she speaks to me, the same way Cedric says things that aren’t my name. Bud, big boy, friend, “Mike.” I think they’re trying to soften me to themselves, and to people like Evan. Humanize me. What’s the word? Anthropomorphize me. I appear nearly human as it is, though my texture is wrong. My complexion is like chrome, my build is too tall and thin. The names help bridge the gaps.
I forget to acknowledge her words but when they process I’m inclined to agree with her as much as I can. The atmosphere is certainly not peaceful or calm in its stillness. I feel ill at ease.
“The thing that’s getting to me is that I can’t see a purpose to this place. We’ve just found the bridge and this hallway. Is there more? When you connected to the panel in the wall, did you maybe get schematics? Anything that could tell us what this thing was for or who made it?”
I reach toward the part of my mind that has been automatically archiving the path we walk and the things I have seen, and I don’t find anything more than what we’ve both seen with our own eyes.
“Let me see if the boys have found anything. Cedric, Evan, do you copy?” she says into the microphone, then pauses.
She taps the transmitter on her chest. There's a beat before we both realize that the only place we can hear her voice is in the air around us. There is no static, no echo of it in my own communicator as she reaches out to our crew mates. She frowns.
“Comms blackout,” she mutters, then raps a knuckle on the walls. “I guess it was kind of stupid to rely on it; we have no idea what this ship is made of. Signal might not be able to penetrate whatever this is. Micah, can you turn around and backtrack, figure out exactly where we lost connection?”
I do as she asks, turning around and—
Turning around, I do as she—
I follow her down the hallway.
I follow her down the hallway, without even a pause in the rhythm of my footfalls, no hesitation, not even as my confusion builds. It’s the same as it has ever been and I can feel every movement the same as I always have, as though I am in control but moving on instinct. But when I try to change course, to wrest back control with my awareness, change my path, negate my previous instructions to my limbs, I cannot.
I turn back I turn back I turn back—
I do not. I follow her forward, down the hallway.
Turn back turn back turn back
“Micah?” She pauses and I do also, and she turns to me with a puzzled look on her face. “I thought I told you to go back the way we came.”
“And why shouldn’t he have a gun?”
I remember her voice as clearly as I can hear it in the present.
“He’s a member of this crew. What if he needs to defend himself?”
“From what? If there’s something that can destroy this thing, we haven’t found it yet.”
I watch as Lucia stands toe to toe with her commanding officer, the man who has worked with her to help get me ready for “the field.” She scans his face, then they both look back at me as she amends her statement.
“What if he needs to defend one of us?”
I draw my gun, realizing what I am doing as though I want to be doing it. I am thinking it through just like I would if I wanted to but there’s no intent behind it. I know what I’m doing but I don’t mean to do it. I am going to shoot Lucia.
“Micah!”
It is a dull sensation. It is the absence of feeling. The kickback of the energy being expelled from the gun, the visual input of a plume of smoke blossoming from the burn mark in her forehead where the bolt pierced it. This is numbness.
I don’t say I’m sorry but, fuck, oh fuck, oh shit, fuck, shit—
And then I can feel the same moment reversed, but she hasn’t hit my head. It’s my hand. Quick as ever she drew her gun, my captain, in the same moment I drew mine. And she was smart. She can’t kill me but she can disarm me. The only gun I can use is my own, which her shot has destroyed, disintegrated—all the humans have their firearms locked to their own fingerprints, a feature my sleek form does not even attempt to mimic.
I stand still and watch her die as the bolt from the gun eats through her brain, boiling it inside her skull. The shock starts to fade in and my logical mind finally finds a bit of itself to make sense of the situation. It sets in slowly at first, then all at once.
I am no longer my own. The signals sent from my mind to my limbs, every movement I make, comes from something else—some new epicenter, one that is so functionally close to being me that I can’t even consciously recognize it. Even now it’s so much like I’m doing these things of my own volition. But I move my arm (I don’t). I cry for help (I don’t). I kneel down by Lucia’s corpse and say with all the meaning in the universe that I am sorry (I don’t).
Cedric and Evan.
The moment I wonder what they will do to me when they see what I have done, I remember where they are, and I finally follow Lucia’s instructions. For a bright moment, fleeting and sweet, I think I’ve retaken control, that whatever happened was but a brief error in my functions. Then I try to speak and all I can hear is the thought of the word in my mind, and that hope is dashed to pieces.
I go the way I had come, same as before. The eeriness, like the emptiness, no longer fascinates me. It seems mundane compared to the sinister inhabitation of my own body. Emptiness would be preferable to this.
When I reach the atrium bridge I see Cedric standing alone at the console, tapping it here and there but apparently garnering no response. He looks up when I enter.
“What’s up, buddy? We tried to reach you guys on the comms but it seems like you hit a dead spot or something.” He glances over at me and I hope he will notice the char on my fingertips, the lingering acrid scent of the energy gun’s residue, but he doesn’t seem to. “Did you find anything?”
He doesn’t even wonder where Lucia is. He trusts her—trusts me—enough not to ask. If something was wrong, Lucia would have come back with me. If something was wrong I would tell him.
“Do you listen to music?”
I look at him with an expression so blank it must communicate all the meaning my words never could.
“I’ll take that as a no.” Cedric pats the copilot’s seat next to him. “If we’re going to work together, you’re going to have to listen to music.”
He’s not sure if he likes me yet. I heard him tell Lucia that. I think he’s trying, though. That’s more than most. I sit down in the same seat that I’ll occupy for the majority of our journey. “I could give it a try,” I offer. “I just … never have before.”
“Damn. Sorry, it’s just hard to imagine.” He laughs and scrolls on a screen in the console, going through lists of words and square-oriented images. “They told me you’re older than time—how do you get to be that old and never listen to music?”
There’s been music playing in the background in rooms I’ve been in. That doesn’t count as listening, though, I don’t think. He chooses a song and plays it for me. It builds slowly, and it’s not long before I realize—this is a pattern. And just when I get used to one pattern, a new one is added, repeated, another one added, a cacophony of layered vibrations. And yet they have intention behind them. Purpose. New pitches, new rhythms, never contradiction, only complementing. The very first song I’ve ever listened to hasn’t even finished when I decide that I like it—I like music.
As the memory fades the song does not. It’s like it’s caught in my circuitry, pulsing and energetic as the first time I ever listened to it. It’s too upbeat for what I’m about to do but it won’t go away, even as I try to block it out, turn it off. No, it stays with me and lends both chaos and order to my movements and turns my next brutal actions into some kind of dance.
I am closer to him now. As I was caught in the memory of that first time meeting him, I must have also been walking. Now I am upon him, and just as he’s starting to realize that something is awfully, awfully wrong I push him up against the console and wrap my hands around his neck.
“Mike—?”
Please, must his last word also be my name?
My thumbs are not sharp—they come to a rounded tip, not a point. They are smooth. They dig into the space between his windpipe and his clavicle, stretching the skin tight over his airway until he starts to gag. I give no heed to that resistance from his skin, or even the resistance of his muscles as I push deeper, harder, and I puncture those muscles and the tension of them snaps under the pressure.
“Micah …”
He gargles the word. It might not even be my name, he might be trying to say “help” for all that the word is mangled on the way out, but my language center decides to interpret it as the word it least wants to hear in this moment. Whatever it is, it joins the notes of the music he was so excited to show me, the song that lingers in my ears as though it were playing even now.
He slaps against my forearms, tries to get leverage but I slam him against the console hard and he chokes as a vein bursts on impact and blood sprays hot against my face. The gargling grows more violent, louder, and he’s choking and squirming under my grasp as I slam him again—again again again, to the music in my ears, emphasizing drum beats and bass notes first with the thudding of his body weight on the metal console, and then with the snapping and cracking of his bones.
I’ve always known my own strength. I guess I underestimated the human body’s weakness. I’m astonished by how easily he shatters in my hands, the way he comes apart and pops like a balloon, snaps like a twig, falls like a rock as I finally let him go. He drops lifelessly to the ground and his heart pumps blood in alarming amounts onto the pristine, seamless floor. Likewise the same blood slides down my face and the backs of my hands, deep red against my shining silver.
I can feel it and I can see it as my eyes settle on my hands. I don’t think whatever is making me do this had expected the spectacle Cedric provided, not after Lucia’s rather sterile end. It’s the first hint of some kind of thought process that isn’t my own, some clue to the type of thing that has invaded me. The instinct to kill is primal. To be surprised or curious are entirely different impulses.
Yes, I think it must be both surprised and curious, but I am not. The part of me that is still all my own is only the part of me that can feel shock. And shame. And guilt. And disgust. It’s the part of me that can wish I never touched the panel. Never guided us to this ship. Never joined this crew. Never woke from my underground slumber. Never been made in the first place.
Let me out let me out let me out
If you are going to take over my body, whoever you are, invader, virus, can you not at least eliminate every part of me in the process? Why must I be made passenger to your whims? Do you know I’m still here? Do you care? If you are so driven to kill then kill me, too. Kill me kill me kill me let me out let me out let me out—
“What the fuck?”
Evan has found me.
I am able to snap out of my own desperation to process that much. Whatever took him away from this room and let me kill Cedric uninterrupted, he has returned from it now. And for once, I’m happy to see him.
Evan never liked me. I hope whatever misgivings he’s always had will push him to run now. Run, Evan, run.
He doesn’t, not even as I turn to him with my head cocked and he gets a full view of the still-warm blood slipping and sliding and dripping down to the ground slowly. I can feel it, every molecule of it, thick and warm and sickening against my hands and my face. This was my friend, what lingers on me now, it was his life and his very being, bits of his body on me by my own doing. I wonder what I must look like to Evan—I dare to imagine it. A skeleton of metal, an imitation of a man that moves less like one by the second.
But inside, oh inside, is someone who is begging him to run.
“What did you do?”
Oh, so now you want to hear from me on something?
Then my eyes flick to his hand and I see that he’s almost finished drawing his gun.
YES.
I know it won’t do anything but for a moment I let myself hope that it will. No, the shot he fires is absorbed into me like a drop of rain into soil. He fires again and again and again, and my shirt is burned away from my chest but my core is undamaged. It’s nothing. A tickle. A poke, a gentle shove. I don’t even flinch from the impact.
The music Cedric played for me is starting to fade out, the drums replaced by the rhythm of his shots and the lyrics drowned out by the rawest, darkest scream of anger I’ve ever heard come from a human before.
“You’d better find yourself another engineer.”
I am not insulted by his words. Honestly, I think he’s right. It’ll only go poorly if we’re forced to work together. For what it’s worth, I don’t like him very much either.
“Evan—” Lucia catches his arm before he can storm off, holding it firm and pulling him back until they are face to face. I see his expression soften when met with her gaze. I see him soften, melt even, when he is close to her. It’s rare—he hides these feelings when other humans are around, but I’m not one, as he’s so fond of reminding me.
“Lucia. We don’t know what that thing is.”
“He. He is an android.”
“I don’t call my gun ‘he.’”
“But you call your bike ‘she,’” she points out to him and he scoffs. “Come on, Ev. Think of him like the autopilot.”
“Except it isn’t like the autopilot. I know how the autopilot works. I built that shit myself. This thing—I have no clue how it works.”
I know when he first joined my division, first saw me, he tried to petition for them to take me apart. To dig into me, to figure out what makes me tick. But they can’t. They can’t pierce my shell and they’ll never know what’s going on inside it. X-rays see nothing. I am only what can be seen with the naked eye, and to a man who runs diagnostics for a living, I’m unsettling.
“You know what, fine then,” Evan growls. “I’m finally going to take you the fuck apart.”
The gun drops to the ground and I hear a clip unfasten. He brings his hand away from his hip to reveal a wicked knife the length of his forearm. It doesn’t look like a standard issue utility knife—of course not, one of those wouldn’t have any effect on me, he knows better. This is something different. Something he made himself. It must be.
I hesitate. I have no idea if his apparent confidence is him bluffing, or if he’s developed some kind of new weapon in secret as a contingency. I don’t know, so neither does the thing piloting me. My thoughts wander to more memories, to every time Evan has demanded to take me apart, and no—there is nothing to indicate that I am anything but indestructible, and if I’m honest, I find it highly unlikely that Evan ever discovered something that could damage me. Now, I wouldn’t normally let that conclusion drive me to lurch forward and throw myself at Evan, as sound as I find the logic. And yet, that’s exactly what I do.
I think he’d hoped that the unknown nature of his weapon would do more than just give me pause because when I dive for it he falters. I catch his wrists in each of my hands and he recoils from the feeling of Cedric’s blood that’s started to dry sticky on my palms. I’ll emphasize again, I am strong—but surprisingly, Evan nearly matches me. He’s able to drive me back a bit toward the console and Cedric’s body where my feet find not solid metal but the puddle of blood, slick like oil. Unable to find traction, my legs slide at odd angles and I scramble to find my balance, letting go of Evan’s wrists to catch the edge of the console as my feet nearly fly out from under me.
He takes advantage of my faltering, as he ought to. There’s the grip of Evan’s hand around the back of my neck, then his full body weight pins me to the console and I hear his ragged breathing and feel his hot breath on my ear. I wonder if he’ll say something to me. Gloat, maybe—but it seems like I’m not even worth the effort. Instead I hear him cry out wordlessly again as I struggle against him, and then the blade strikes between my shoulder blades.
It glances off, leaving nary a dent or a nick.
And then it plunges into the console’s shining surface.
Whatever this knife is made of could not quite harm me, but it’s made quick work of the ship’s machinery. Sparks immediately begin to spray from the gash he’s torn in it like the blood sprayed from Cedric’s neck. In the moment that it flares up, I am able to use the blinding light to slip out from under him and reverse our positions. Rolling us over, I press my forearm to his chest, and his scream reaches a fever pitch—I have pushed him directly into the exposed electrical leak, and it’s burning him. I can smell it, like the red meat Evan himself was so fond of making on his nights to cook for the crew, his only method of showing affection.
The smell is almost overwhelming until it is interrupted by an equal, opposite sensation, and a loud whine rings through my eardrums. His scream is magnified by hundreds and I cry out as well involuntarily, the first sound I’ve made since Lucia and I parted ways with the others. The comms, I realize, the comms must have been shorted out by the console, by however many thousands of volts are coursing through both my and Evan’s bodies right now.
The feedback is enough to make me drop him. His screams trail off into a ragged whimper and he slides down the console to sit limp like a rag doll at its base, his legs pushed into the messy, streaky puddle of Cedric’s blood spread around by our struggle.
If I had breath I’d be panting. If I had the capacity to, I’d take a break, a moment to collect my thoughts, but instead I stare at the two bodies on the floor. I am unsure what to make of them. That is to say, I know what to make of them, but I can’t. My thoughts come to a grinding halt as I stare and stare and stare. I can’t even find it within me to beg for mercy again, to beg for death. I want it to stop more than anything. I want it to be over, more than anything.
My jumbled thoughts are interrupted by a scrambled, static-filled voice through the fried remains of our comms.
“... Y'all ok out there?”
Diedre. Diedre and Bernie, back on the ship. Fuck.
I do my damnedest to fight it now, now more than ever before, standing above the bodies of two of my crew, hoping to keep that number from multiplying. All I need to do is say a few words, a few words of my own. Give them the crisis code. Tell them to push off. Save them, save just them. They’re smart. They could get back home, if only I can just say the words—
As Evan looks up at me with the fading light of life dimming quick in his eyes, I meet his gaze and tap my transmitter.
“Evan’s hurt,” I say. “We need medical.”
The horror in his eyes is the same I feel. I wish I could tell him—but if I had my voice, all I would be able to do is scream.
“We’re on our way.”
That, apparently, is all I need to hear. I stoop to retrieve Evan’s knife and move away from the bodies. Not far—just down the hallway toward Lucia’s body a bit, out of sight. There, I wait.
The silence is not complete. I don’t know if it’s the ship’s machinery or some damage to my system but there’s a ringing. It’s a shrill whine with an ebb and flow, one that, without anything to interrupt it, gets warped in my processors until I swear I can still hear Evan screaming.
The relief I get from its interruption is no relief at all, as the voices of the rest of my crew echo with their footsteps down the hall and I see the beams of their flashlights shine on the ship wall where it curves just in front of me.
“Which room did they say they were in?”
“I have Evan on my tracker.” I hear Bernie’s voice respond to Diedre’s question. “He’s just over here.”
The beams of light wobble and then blink out of sight as I listen to their footsteps fade down the hall to the atrium bridge, away from my hiding place. Once the sound has faded to near-silence, I follow after them, slowly so my own steps make nearly no noise. I’m just nearing the doorway when I hear Bernie scream.
Bernie backs up, nearly to the door just as I enter, while Diedre rushes forward. She kneels by Evan’s side, casting Cedric a quick glance but quickly determining there’s nothing she can do for him. Evan groans. I think he’s trying to warn her, but he’s far too late.
I pass Bernie. I know whatever chance she’s got to escape won’t be enough. She’s small. I’ll easily catch her whenever I’ve finished what I know I’m about to do.
“Indestructible, huh?”
The memory is fuzzier this time, no visuals, no time to recall them, just the warm light of the Earth’s sun as it comes through the window of the med tent. Yes, just the warm light and Diedre’s equally warm voice as she jokes with me.
“Guess I won’t have to worry about you, then! Makes my job easier.”
As she kneels beside Evan, trying to determine what he’s saying and how to help him, I quickly wrap a hand around her forehead and tip her head back to look up at me. She is easy to move, almost compliant, quizzical as I slide my hand to rest at the base of her skull and she recognizes my face. Then, she notices the blood on it.
And then I jam Evan’s knife into her eye.
It goes deep, the force of my blow strong enough to pierce bone and lodge the blade deep into her socket with a crunch. She lets out a long, shocked wheeze until I try to tug the knife free, which draws a groan from her slightly-parted lips. The blade is stuck fast, embedded all the way to the hilt. Almost dismissively I straighten and let her body fall away from me with the knife still in it, paying her little heed as she hits the ground.
Three bodies on the bridge. One in the hall, presumably. I wonder which way Bernie has run. If she was smart, she’d run back to the ship, detach from this awful place, and run all the way home and never look back. I imagine hearing the sound of the thrusters engaging, feeling this ship shudder with the momentum of the terrestrial ship’s departure, knowing that she’s safe.
But I don’t hear that at all.
Instead I hear her scream, again, from farther down the perimeter.
She must have found Lucia.
Oh, please, not Bernie, I think as I start to walk toward the hallway out of the atrium bridge. My stride is slow and deliberate, as if to say, “Yes Bernie, yes all of them, and then more, and more, and whoever else you come across.”
And what of more? Who is there after Bernie, sweet Bernie, the only one who never treated me like an object at all, not like a machine, not even implicitly?
Well, there are all the rest of them, I suppose. As I think of Bernie and dread finding her, my mind wanders to her family, to her friends, to city streets teeming with life and sound and blood and breath and bodies waiting to be made still. And which of them could stop me? How could they? With what?
Hello, sweet fear.
I thought that I missed you.
Leave me again, I beg you.
Her panting draws me through the hallways, her labored breath, the sound of barely contained retching. She is struggling to keep it together as much as I can. I think she is trying to hide but she’s doing a poor job of it. She’s passed Lucia—I barely glance down at the captain’s body as I move forward, stepping over her as though she were any other inanimate object in my path.
“Bernie …”
Please don’t say her name. Don’t do this to her. I know I’m going to kill her either way but please don’t use my mouth to say her name.
“Bernie, come out …” My tone is sing-song. I don’t think I’ve ever used such a tone before in my time. What are you, thing in my mind? Are you enjoying this? Is that why you won’t release me? Do you want me to see what you’re doing to her? To me? Is this about them at all, or are you only doing this to hurt ME? I’m hurt, is that what you want, to hurt someone who has never known pain before? What am I to you?
“M-M-Micah, stay back!”
I round a bend in the ship’s perimeter and find myself face to face with her. A dead end. Her back is to a wall and her hands are shaking but her flashlight is pointed right at me—and so is her gun, leveled right at my head. Oh, brave Bernie. I feel my lips parting, showing teeth, curling into a smile wider than I’ve ever smiled before.
“Shoot me, Bernie. Come on. Do it.”
She does. I only feel a tap. Am I laughing? I’m laughing!
“You’re pretty. Did you know that?”
I’ve heard the word used to describe art, a flower, or even one of Cedric’s songs, but never me. I turn to her and raise an eyebrow. “Thank you?”
“Oh, I meant as a piece of machinery. You’re basically flawless.” She laughs at the way I seem to have taken her words. “Whoever built you made no mistakes—or at least, no statistically significant mistakes.” She pauses and looks over my face and my body, and then grins at me with a different kind of emotion behind it. “Well, I guess you’re pretty to look at, too, now that I think about it.”
For a moment I think I’ll do to her what I did to Cedric but what I actually do is almost worse.
With each step to close the gap she fires her gun into my chest. Tears stream down her cheeks as she drops the flashlight and the gun and throws her hands up in an attempt at surrender. I don’t acknowledge the gesture. I just reach out and wrap my fingers around the collar of her suit. With one swift movement I tear the tubing out, and oxygen pours into the atmosphere of the ship to dissipate as quickly as the suit can make more.
I look into her eyes—I make her look into my eyes, my “pretty” eyes, shining in the light of her flashlight where it lies on the ground. I make her see that they were never anything more than cold, hard technology. I am nothing more than a machine, one that must care for nothing, one that is weak, easily hijacked. Older than the stars and yet somehow, born yesterday.
Gullible, ancient, stupid.
I have to watch again, of course, it makes me watch again as she tries to draw in a breath but finds nothing of worth. She suffocates as her lungs inflate with empty gas, devoid of the oxygen she needs. As she’s starved of it she grows weaker and weaker, dropping to one knee, then to lie still on her side at the end of the hall, until her breaths become more and more shallow, and eventually her chest stops moving all together.
And with her, that’s all of them.
Well, it’s not.
Of course it’s not.
Not yet.
But as it turns me away from Bernie’s body, toward the hallway that leads back to my ship and the earth that ship can take us to, suddenly there is nothing more to want.
No, it doesn’t fully settle in until the light of the flashlight dies out, swallowed by the curves in the hall, and all that’s left around me is what my sensors can detect. The walls. The ship. And that’s when I feel it slipping and I realize, I realize what’s happening, and a thrill rushes over me.
Everything—every action taken, everything it has done so far it learned through context, through that same desperation to cling to the moment and the people around me by concerted effort, through my recollections prompted by what was in front of me.
I can go back to the ship. But without Cedric, how will I have context to fly it? Without Lucia, how will I have the context of where to steer it? If it were to break down without Bernie or Evan, how would I have the context to fix it? Without the crew, how will I even have the context to know what the ship is for?
It is fading even as I am still realizing it.
I am nothing without them.
I think it tries to make me remember but that’s not how I work. There is nothing to prompt me, nothing to make me reach out. It opens my eyes wider, trying desperately to take in more information, more inputs, but there is no input. My sensors detect nothing. The ship’s ever-present emptiness yields nothing. And so I recall … nothing.
Not how to walk.
Or how to stand.
Or how to think.
It has undone us, this thing in my body. I may be indestructible, I may be intelligent, but I am nothing more than the moment I am in.
And so my jaw goes slack. My knees go weak, and I fall forward, landing gracelessly in a heap. I can’t even move without someone to show me how and so here I am, a mound of metal and misfiring circuitry. Alone again, free of meaning, free of the memory of blood and of music and of laughter and of frowning. Free of “Micah.” Slowly, the foreign impulse dies as well. I wonder if it will lie dormant in me until we are found again, and context returns, or if it will wither and die within me, but quickly I realize I don’t know what I’m thinking about.
All that I can remember is you. You, you never had context.
I only ever longed for you, irrational, sweet, ever-present fear.
How happy I am to have you here with me again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carolina “Nina” Cruz (They/Them) is both and author and an artist. With a primary focus in fantasy and horror, Cruz aims to create stories they’d like to read and art they’d like to look at. Besides writing they enjoy consuming literally anything to do with the X-Men, as well as watching as many middling 2000s/2010s gothic action/horror movies as they can get their hands on. You can find their art and fantasy series, The Creed of Gethin, through their instagram @ninawolverina