Tag: short fiction

“I Was More” Or:

“what doesn’t kill you doesn’t automatically make you interesting” (A story-scream)

(I found this story while looking for something else, I wrote it two years ago as a twitter thread. I put it here now.)

On this day 7 years ago’

The reaction, immediate. I must dismiss it, before it takes hold. Raising my hand, I make the error of full perception.

Scale-stretched skin, creases banked by polystyrene callouses. Gnarled humps once tender, nails lined with dead tendrils of broken skin.

A cruel contrast to Her. Smiling eyes and well-tanned skin. A dress that I could wear on TV and not be ashamed, now crushed and forgotten at the bottom of my wardrobe.

Her hand, smooth and moisture-nourished, waving back at me through blue glow. The sun never setting on her smile.

“Oh love, how you’ve befouled us. You remember when you were I. I of the satisfaction-soft cheeks and love-bright eyes. Of tongue and pen and firm embrace.

It has not been so long since you were this. My love, what did you do to me?”

I try to shake away the razor voice. Wise, well-educated, well-bred. A life pulled across the whetstone, coming out with a cleaner edge than all.

I am nothing, to Her. All stuttering voice, cracking at its edges. She has me in her grip. I am helpless.

“Bouyed and charmed. Cocktails after work, a twinkle in your manager’s eye. Letters after his name, he knows you were born to this. Of course, usually a boy’s club, of course, though they’ll make an exception for one such as you.

The world in your soft palms.

Oh, but you had stories. How you held court at parties, speaking of youth and grimy excess. ‘Take our hand and guide us to the underworld again!’

Pass the port and tell them of twinks and bears and alleyways. What larks, to have so much to tell, here in the safe and warm.

Escaped the pit, didn’t you? Crawled out with bloodied fingers, broken nose, choking back pus, crawled up and out and away from the damage.

Of course, so tragic, so inevitable you’d fall back down again. Of course, I could only ever be temporary.

Sorry, my love. I know the truth of it.

Ever the same. Wouldn’t life be more fun if you had more damage? Wouldn’t that make you more interesting?

Accept every offer, take everything, fuck everyone. This’ll make a good story later, we’ll all laugh at this later.

Sad stories are always better. You’ve always known that.

Like when a teenager, sneaking from middle-class suburbia to suck piss-dripping cock in the car park after dark.

You’d whisper your legend to enraptured ears.

Paint yourself an exile from heaven, tell them you’re alone, tell them you’re broken, that you’re less than you are.

It was just a holiday.

You’d wipe the cum from your lips, back home before your mum gets worried, she’s just put the kettle on, would you like a cup of tea? Yes please, two sugars. Did you enjoy your walk? Time for bed, night night sweetheart.

Do it again tomorrow.

Of course, you’d speak of each encounter later on, when you were I, like the explorer returned from the wilderness.

A little affected sadness here, a nod and a sigh there. ‘Oh, of course, I didn’t know what I was doing’

Was your damage special? Silly boy, that was just puberty.

You had to kill me. What you had become did not fit so neatly. A comfortable life, respected by all, loved by many.

And now, poor thing, you’re here again. Broken and twitching, fallen from grace, cast aside in your disfigurement.

You ever think…

You ever think…”

The proposals begin. She enters her flow, my body in rigour, thumb white against Her picture. She is at the pulpit, speaking the honest truth, the ignored law. Shining searing light on my deceptions. Reducing me, annihilating me, picking me apart, shattering every axiom I hold.

AXIOM I

ARE YOU THE TRAGEDY OF LOST POTENTIAL, THE ‘GIFTED KID’ OF EVERY INSIPID SELF-PITY POST. NEVER GIVEN A CHANCE TO BLOOM?

OR DID YOU DISCOVER THAT IT’S EASIER TO WEAR THE MASK OF THE BROKEN BIRD, ALWAYS READY TO HAVE A ‘CRISIS’ WHEN ASKED TO MAKE ANY EFFORT AT ALL?

AXIOM II

ARE YOU A LIVING COMPENDIUM OF DISORDERS, A CO-MORBID MESS OF A SCRAMBLED MIND AND SHATTERED BODY?

OR DO YOU HUNT FOR EACH, NO MATTER HOW POOR A FIT, WEARING THEM LIKE A TALISMAN, A WARD AGAINST SELF-REFLECTION?


AXIOM III

DO THEY IGNORE YOU, THE CRUEL, THE FAIR, DRUNK ON SELF-ASSURANCE? ARE THEY WITCHES, MOTHS AND FAE, DELIGHTING IN PAIN ON SOFT THINGS LIKE YOU?

OR ARE THEY WISE TO YOUR GAME, WAVING YOUR HURT AROUND LIKE AN EXPOSED ASSHOLE, DESPERATE TO GUILT SOMEBODY INTO FILLING YOU?

AXIOM IV

ARE YOU DRIVEN BY COMPULSION, BY ADDICTION, BY FEVER, BY MEDS? WORKING THROUGH A MIST, LUCKY TO ACHIEVE WHAT LITTLE VICTORIES YOU DO?

OR DO YOU ADOPT THE TRAPPINGS OF THE SICK, WANKING OVER THE AESTHETIC AND PITY AND STRUGGLE?

AXIOM FINAL

DON’T YOU THINK THAT THE MOST DISGUSTING THING IS THAT YOU’VE BEEN IN CONTROL ALL THIS TIME?

DON’T YOU KNOW YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO BE MORE, AND CHOSE THIS INSTEAD?”

I tear at the picture, I break her comfort-soft face, I chew and swallow and digest her whole, the Past Me, the Dead Me, the ashes and bones of what was More. I heave my carcass to the wall, take my knife and inscribe the words into my skin again.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW LIE IN IT.

‘Little Red Lamp’ (flash fiction competition)

Did not win this week in the flash fiction competition, but did get an honourable mention for a creative take on the prompt, which was “include technical instructions for a job, any job”. Story below.

851 words

Little Red Lamp

IF WARNING LAMP IS LIT: The operator, upon confirming aurally that growth is not abating or likely to abate in the enclosure, shall perform the following actions:

  1. Depress the plunger and hold.
  2. Wait.
  3. Release the plunger when warning lamp extinguishes.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

It was just the two of them in a room designed for one, and a somewhat modest person at that. Raz rather regretted bringing his fish supper to the orientation session, as it would be his colleague who would have to put up with the smell. Zaq’s mood, already seething, would suffer.

“That’s outrageous!” Zaq blurted out, waving the single page of instructions in one hand, his slender fingers threatening to crush it. “An essential role, they called it! ‘Impossible to automate’! You could train an ape to do this!”

“Dignity, please,” Raz said around a mouthful of barbel, gesturing at Zaq with a little wooden fork. “You know if the boss could have automated it, he would’ve done. It really is an essential part of our work.”

Zaq slumped in the institutional chair he would be graced with for this post, mouthing something obscene and potentially seditious to the side wall. Metal wheels scraped across the crystal floor, friction sending up sparks and licks of green flame. In the cramped surroundings, his knees stroked against Raz’s, and the two of them awkwardly looked off to the side, taking a renewed interest in each individual muon set into the starfield-pattern table.

“It feels like I’m being punished for wanting my job back. Or set up to fail. There must be something more comprehensive than this rubbish.”

“That rubbish took an age to write.” Raz scooped up more of his meal, keeping his eyes down on the schools of fish coalescing into solid, cooked flesh on the infinite lake shore around his chips. “I was on the committee that wrote it, do you know just how agitated the boss can get about the difference between ‘will’ and ‘shall’?”

Zaq shot him a look, then reached over and snapped close the takeaway box. Both it and its contents blinked out of existence in a shattering explosion: fish, chips, miniature lakes and mountains all collapsing into nothing. The space between the two filled with tiny flashes of atomic fire.

“Rude.” Bereft of his meal, Raz pouted and waved a hand to dismiss the lingering ozone scent. “Anyway, it’s not a punishment. And there really isn’t any need for the manual to be any longer.” He reached into a gaping wound in the tabletop and brought forth a thrashing carp, twisting it around his hands like a balloon as he spoke, eyes locked on his underling.

“The point of the system is that we don’t have to go down and speak to the poor wretches and make a judgment. The system does that for us, but only we can bring the curtain down.” The carp took on a glassy quality until it formed an identical takeaway container, this time as though carved from obsidian, full to the brim with spiced fish and chunky chips. “If you think it lacks gravitas, call the plunger a trumpet. Have a little fun with it.”

Raz set the fresh meal on the table as a peace offering, though it went unacknowledged. Slumped in defeat, Zaq turned towards the infinite compartments set against the wall, each one topped by a dull red glow ready to burst into flame.

“I’ll leave you to your work,” Raz said cheerily, beginning to phase out of the room. “It looks like you have your first customer. And do try the food, there’s plenty of it!”

A red beacon was flickering to life above one of the compartments, demanding Zaq’s attention. Shooting daggers at Raziel’s coy smile as he disappeared, the younger Watcher drew the container towards him, the stars within growing to fill his field of vision. He placed his ear to the translucent barrier, and the cries of a million trillion souls rose through the twisted thicket of folded space-time between the universe and the world of the angels. With each passing moment the cries grew more numerous, growth unending. A clear requirement for action.

“Goodness, I wonder if I can remember what the ops manual told me to do,” muttered Zaq bitterly, tapping on the divide with a finger to dissuade one of the more errant galaxies inside from colliding with the universal limit.

Depressing the plunger set above the compartment, the angel named Zaqiel barely glanced towards the countless stars in countless galaxies, instead turning his attention to the gift of a fish supper left for him. The sentients within the doomed creation would have subjective millennia to see their universe collapse in on itself, and yet in all that time would be incapable of perceiving what lay beyond.

And yet, if by some freak accident of circumstance one of them were to pierce the veil, they would see neither malice nor disdain in their deliverance, but the crushing boredom of one waiting for a little red lamp to go out.

“Duty Visit” (Flash fiction competition)

This week’s entry into the weekly flash fiction competition was horribly, horribly rushed (I.E. I wrote it 2 hours prior to the deadline) and I expect to lose, but, I’ll post it all the same. Edit: I actually won this week with this, ha

Duty Visit

1000w

Cathy

The retirement complex has its own tiddly little bus, a single-decker that goes all about the houses. Half the other passengers already look dead. Garnet, who doesn’t give me a moment’s peace the entire way. Always her stomach aching or her phone not working.

I give her a clip around the ear, and she screeches. My face burns, people turn, people were staring with those awful, sunken, coffin-dodger eyes.

“People are looking!” Shut up, shut up! Why is she doing this to me, why does she make everything so hard? “Sit down! Sit down and be quiet, do you want them to throw you off the bus? Eh? Do you know how to walk home by yourself?”

The old man a couple rows behind, I can tell he’s fixing his disgusting rheumy eyes on me. He’s thinking, what a beast, what an awful mother. No idea, not a clue what I’ve been through. Every day the same, spittle and runny noses, cornflakes and school sandwiches and has the old bat ever offered help? Has she ever, spending all day gorging herself on cake, can’t even lift up the phone but to say to me, oh Cathy you’re doing it all wrong, that’s never how I was to you.

One more visit and I’d never have to look at her again.

Filthy tip of a place, disgusting that anybody lives here. All institutional redbrick and peeling pastel paint, the building looking about as decrepit as the half-ghouls that call these rooms their crypts.

The old cow is sat on it all, perched on what’s mine. She’ll tell me where it was, she’s give me what’s mine, what was always meant to be mine, what I deserve.

Thea

Somebody visiting. Come to ask for something, either money or time. Not that I have much of either. Not now, too tired, sendthem back. They never let me sleep, those girls. Always calling to complain about their awful lives and absent boyfriends.

“It’s your daughter, and granddaughter. I’ll just let them in for a moment, ok?” The nurse doesn’t wait for a reply, so in they come. Here comes Cathy, proud as punch, always righteous, forever strident. And in tow, little Garnet. Eyes red, head low.

It takes Cathy digging her fingers into the girl’s shoulder to bring out a sullen “Hello Granny”. Thinks that she’ll get more out of me by dragging her along in a cheap chequerboard frock. She looks like she dressed in the dark.

But ah, she’s animated now. She lifts my hand off the chair and squeezes it, I suppose the nurses think it affectionate, but her grip is strong and my fingers brittle. It won’t be long until you’re here too, girl. Your hands may have more lotion, but in time they’ll be parchment too.

I let my eyes lose focus. She was always like this, even at Garnet’s age. So many questions and ambitions. How she drove me to despair, her father to drink, her sisters to rage. Never satisfied with all that we gave to her, always grasping for unearned praise. I was too soft.

I know what she wants before she mentions it. She wants to know where I hid it, thinks that it’s her just reward, thinks that a few visits to me will mean I can forget the agony she put me through.

“You’re ruining that girl.”

That shuts her up. I make sure everybody in the lounge hears it. Silly old fool, they’ll think, doesn’t know how loud she’s talking.

“You’re ruining that girl and she’s going to end up just like you.”

That’s right, girl. You want to cry, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes, the glowing red in your cheeks. Just like you did every day as a brat, every time I told you “No”, every time I caught you stealing. Cry, let everybody here see what a pathetic little girl you are.

You want to know where my treasure is hidden? Well, you can’t. It’s mine, and that means I get to decide who gets it. You are a selfish girl who needs a cold, hard lesson in how the world works. It’s mine and will be mine until the day they pack me away from here in a coffin, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Garnet

Mummy keeps saying we have to go and visit Granny, which isn’t fair because we can only visit her on a Saturday and it’s been every Saturday for weeks and there’s nothing here and it smells and the bus always makes me feel sick, but I complained about it last week and Mummy got upset so I don’t complain about it anymore.

The other girls spend their weekends round each other’s houses. When I asked why we’re visiting her so much, Mummy said that I was a nasty girl who didn’t care about her poor old Granny. Granny doesn’t say much and scares me.
Granny and Mummy have just finished talking. I don’t understand what they’re talking about, there’s something in the old house that Mummy can’t find and she keeps asking if Granny knows where it is. I keep saying that if we asked my Aunties to help we’d be able to find something.

We’ve only just got here when Mummy grabs my arm and it’s too hard and it hurts and we’re walking too fast too fast and the nurse tries to hand me something but we’re already leaving and we’re already gone.
I don’t say anything on the bus, Mummy’s too cross and I know not to say anything when she’s cross.

I go to my room and wedge myself into the gap between my wardrobe and the wall. Mummy doesn’t know about my secret place, about my hidden door and my special treasure, about the loose wall behind the wardrobe or the special room. She’ll never know because it’s my secret, it’s mine, all mine, and will always be mine.

“Outstanding Contribution” (flash fiction)

Outstanding Contribution

Little bit of flash fiction I did the other day for a weekly flash competition I’m in. The prompt was to do with realising you’ve made a terrible mistake, and the word limit was 1,000 words.

999w

I should like to give you some background first. It’s unbecoming to brag, but between you and me I have a terribly important job, and I am rather good at it.

The entire village works for the Ministry in one way or another, it is no secret what I do. Geoff at the market asks me how my day was when I buy vegetables, and I give an annual talk for Deirdre at the primary school about the necessity of our expedited prison system.

We all understand, you see. The world may not work the way it used to, but my job is no different from Geoff, from Deirdre, or even yourselves. It isn’t as though this job is a new idea; this country had an official executioner until the 1960s. The crisis of the last few decades might mean that our methods are somewhat rushed, but I like to think I bring professionalism to the role.

You’re quite right, I’m getting off the subject. Please, there’s no need to be rough, we really are all on the same team.

It was the bum end of an early shift. I’d performed seven disposals that morning when the Minister arrived with his aide. Couldn’t tell the aide from Adam, they come and go all the time. As I can see you’ve checked, they signed the register and made their way to Cell 23.

No, I most certainly did not listen to what went on in there. We do not get involved in interrogations. I do what I can to ignore the sounds, a little sudoku here and a crossword there.

I was trying to tease out “Dull river crossed by fish (4)” when the cell opened again. The Minister walked swiftly down the corridor, his back turned and hat replaced. The aide made his way to my desk, face pale. Not, I suspected, a successful interrogation.

The young man told me the Minister would like me an Expedited Disposal on the occupant of Cell 23 immediately.

Now, I understood the procedure well enough, and this was a deviation. If you would check my records, you will see that I am one of only 30 per-cent of Disposal Associates to achieve a rating of ‘Outstanding Contribution’ for each of the last three years. I know, if I may say so, my onions.

This gentleman did not act like he was on a spot-check. A forced laugh and a patting of pockets came before a theatrical slapping of his forehead as I reminded him of the process. Of course, he said. How silly of me, he said, such an instruction must only come from the Minister.

Although, he said (and here his lower lip turned up into an desperately pathetic sulk), the Minister had left for an urgent meeting with the Security Service and was incommunicado for the day. He briefly went on a tangent about the Faraday cages these meetings were held in, before stopping bashfully. Ah, youthful enthusiasm.

The young man sighed, bloodied knuckles tapping on his teeth. How were we, two professional Crown servants, to solve this conundrum? And then, with a speed that caused his gore-soaked tie to flick dull red spots onto my desk, he threw his finger up in triumph.

Of course! The Minister had signed the order. He produced the note (yes, this same note, stains and all). Signed, proper and official, with His Majesty’s seal.

He wrung his hands as I inspected it. And oh, gentlemen! You should have seen the wretch. Ill-fitting suit, cheap glasses, ruined white shirt (awful decision in this work). I took pity on the boy. It doesn’t do to be a roadblock to Government, not in these times.

He made sure to take my name as he left. That’s how you know they’re going to put in a good word.

Once he left, I did my duty. They must have really roughed up the fellow this time: they’d gone to the trouble of putting a bag over his head. He didn’t move at all as I raised the barrel to his forehead, sat limp in the chair in a too-large prisoner’s uniform.

I called down for the cleaner as I usually do. Paula (nice girl, thick as a post) said that she didn’t think there were any more booked today. She didn’t understand, and I had to explain twice. That girl couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag.

It’s curious how some things only come into focus when explaining them to another. The Minister had dashed down the corridor in a dreadful hurry, and a hat indoors? And hadn’t Cell 23 been quite a stout man?

Once Paula agreed to do her blasted job, I took another look at the slip. Ministers must be frightfully busy, I’m sure it’s normal to photocopy a signature. And the Royal Seal.

I sat there for a spell, and it was then I elected to end my shift and amble home for a late lunch.

There was a queer atmosphere around the village, silent but for Ministry cars barrelling down the street. I was grateful to shut out the world and sit in my lovely cottage, turn on the television and try to relax. University Challenge, an all-Oxford matchup, Balliol facing Wadham. I couldn’t focus on it.

Doing my best not to think about what had happened, I fell asleep. I told myself, as mum would say, it will all come out in the wash.

I woke when your boys knocked my door in with a ram. Unnecessary, though I suppose forgivable, given the circumstances.

And that brings us to the present. I’m very sorry to hear about the Minister, really I am, and I do hope you catch that rascal from Cell 23. I hope you can see that this was a rare lapse in an otherwise stellar career and allow me to return to work. After all, my job is terribly important, and I am rather good at it.

To the Nth Power

They tore the light from my mind and pressed it on fine, shimmering leaf. It was placed in one of ten thousand metallic slabs, to be taken from this place and stored snug in the haulier’s hold for the passage. My love had gone before me at the transit centre; I watched her flicker and die while I stroked her golden hair and mumbled useless words of encouragement.

She was scared, so had gone first. I kissed her still-warm forehead and let go, silencing my impotent whispers. Her skin tasted of fresh, cold sweat.

They ushered her body away for destruction. An attendant passing by reminded me that she was stored in data now, and not to worry about the empty shell. Much of our preparation the night before had been spent telling each other that the body was nothing, repeating a catechism of our faith in the technology. All would be well. The mind is what matters. We would see each other on the other side. I would still be her wife, come what may.

Always so logical, we had played out the debate in miniature, as though there was any chance of us changing our minds at such short notice. She had proposed that making the trip was barely profitable for the transport firms. To this, I’d conceded that asking the machinery-laden bulkers to contain the necessities of biological life was too much. Though thrust and riposte, we set the dialectic to rights. Using this technology meant that more people could make the trip, and it would be immoral to restrict access based on squeamishness, would it not?

We had won the debate over ourselves and arrived here the next day. We were perfectly on time. She was never late for anything.

I bit my lip when they placed the hood against my skull. The corpse being wheeled away was not her, and there was no need to be strong for it. She existed only in non-volatile data in an anonymous rectangle of metal, already being shuffled away into safe storage. Fingers encased in white latex carefully held her by the plastic edges, so as not to risk damage to the more precious cargo.

 It would be a handful of months before we were shipped to Europa, but we wouldn’t notice the time passing.

Did she feel the technician’s gentle touch as she was filed between her alphabetical neighbours?

A piercing scream of divine fury bore into my skull when the device lurched to life.

The machine was a vampire eager to sup from my neurons. Underneath the hood, vibrant supernovae filled my vision, each stellar burst a part of my mind being dismantled, categorised, and passed into the device. I felt my resolve shatter; my mouth gaped silently as I tried to scream for the process to end, tried to tell them that I wasn’t ready.

My essence collected, they began to press me firm: all that was me printed over billions of microscopic layers of tungsten and silver. I was spread thin, flattened by the careful machine hands of a hydraulic press. My body pulled against the restraints, trying to free itself from the screaming digital noise until it wasn’t my body anymore.

            Silence, then sound and fury once again.The violent movement of a burning spark against my mind’s eye.

But only the mind’s eye.

A high-density electrolytic storage unit suitable for mind transcription had 4.29 billion pins. This knowledge came to me from nowhere. I tried to move my arms. Instead, I sent a constant positive charge through cascading layers of metal.

I tried my legs next.  Bridges crackled with life as light was moved from one side of me to another. I saw and felt nothing recognisable as human sensation, but every pin was both tongue and eye, feeding me information, tasting the tenor of electricity.

I tried to scream.

The only measure of time I had were the vibrations of a crystal, coming steadily from some distant place.

I kept trying to scream for 16,384 oscillations of that crystal.

After I gave up, there was silence again, save for the constant pulse-on, pulse-off. A clock signal, some part of me dredged up from memory.  

I let myself calm down, listening to it. No, not listening. I sensed it, tasted its fizzing against the memory of my throat. Feeling it as intrinsically as a heartbeat, both fundamental for life and taken for granted. Off and on. One and zero. With each pulse, I was aware of exactly how many had passed.

I had not been re-grown at Europa. What I inhabited was no body at all. I felt no need to draw breath, no warm blood flowing under my skin.

The tick-tick-tick of the false heartbeat was all there was. Each pulse, precise. Far better an indication of duration than the varying motion of a planet around a star. I waited for 1,024 oscillations, letting my head grow empty save for its gentle pulse.

The initial reaction was not sustainable in this place, without an endocrine system to push me from fear to panic. The pulse became all that I sensed until it was too much of an effort to continue to feel the terror of being in this non-place.

If I stopped influencing the world around me, it became still and silent, the ripples of any previous interference fading away and dissolving in the face of the tick.

There were no stray signals in this quiet place. No earthly meditation could have achieved this stillness.

Calmed, I hesitantly started to think again, feeling jolts of signal flowing between pins.

How was I thinking these thoughts, in a world of pure signal? I gave a motive spark to my surroundings, but I was governed by no program or mechanics.

Was I dead, and my spirit was inhabiting the uploaded version of my mind? I scoffed at this, but how? I had no mouth or throat through which to force air. I had no mouth to turn a sneer. I could shape the notion of derision, the ideal of mockery. In response, the spaces around me filled with incomprehensible, flickering light.

Although, it was not incomprehensible. The forked lines carried the meaning that I gave to them. True thought given form.

It should not have been possible for me to think, and yet I thought.

Perhaps this was only a dream, and soon the vision of an electric aurora would be replaced by my love’s bucktoothed smile, ready to kiss me and cry tears of relief. Perhaps all I needed to do was sleep, and let it be so.

I cleared my mind again, producing nothing to interfere with the pulse. I could not continue this line of thought, lest I fall into sorrow and panic. I had simply to try to sleep.

I waited.

            I waited for 65,536 ticks.

There was no sleeping.

Only the tick-tick-tick.

Frustrated, I extended tendrils of spark out of my pins. This couldn’t be all that there was. The storage unit was connected to a larger device.  Given effort, perhaps I could manipulate the signals I produced to start transferring my consciousness across. Perhaps there, I thought, I would find an answer to what had happened.

A tumult of lightning greeted the first tendril that pushed beyond my still surroundings. My temporary home seemed tranquil compared to what lay beyond my pins, beams of light shooting across like a highway of illumination. A part of me that strayed too far was drowned out and annihilated by the magnitude of the signal passing before it, and I retreated my essence to my unit, concerned that a too-strong piece of light would overcome the whole of me, wiping me clean.

A few layers of conductive substrate that sat closest to the connection to the outside had been reshaped. I felt dread, realising that I had risked my existence to my curiosity. Unless I found some way to shield myself from the energetic flow beyond, there was no leaving the storage unit.

I tried to remember my science. This type of storage device was non-volatile. While it was certainly receiving power, that I drew on to shape my world, my memories did not require it. They were constructed of the physical shapes surrounding me. In effect, the shape of the conductive layers was the shape of me. Any re-shaping was an existential risk.

I examined where the new pattern had been scorched upon my surface. The layers surrounding the portion were uniformly flat. I had been lucky; the new pattern was written on a blank part of me. It was a single shape, repeated thousands of times. Meaningless right now, that would take an age to decipher, if it were possible at all.

But I had time.

I had written code before, but nothing like this. There was no moderating language to interpose between my thoughts and the impulses that soared from them. People thought that programming, at its core, is digital. That the lowest you can go is writing machine code or writing clean binary values onto a chip.

But in the space between the atomic and the tangible, everything was analogue. What appeared smooth to the human observer became a scattered, jagged harshness, broken into an infinite set of fractals.

These were my canvas and brush.

The uneven lines of thought seared with agonising force across my mind as I tried to exert my will on the microscopic filaments. I scorched my desires through the medium, my vital spark hungry to jump to a more conductive space.

By the measure of the tick-tick-tick, I started to weave my way. Around the part that was me, there seemed to be an infinite field, blank and ripe for my use. I just had to learn how.

I knew enough to get started; I knew a signal could represent the number one.

It was a paltry basis on which to learn to interpret a world, and I thought there would not be the space or time to learn. But the space was never-ending, and time meant nothing but the pulse. Through subtle shifts and coaxing, I could stimulate and encourage a new route for my spark. A little more resistance across a false bridge, a beckoning of the wild beast in one direction to shape like clay a clear, ready signal.

I directed the heat and light onto one divot in the substrate and felt its shape change. A new, vivid pillar, the filament dissolving into a shining, low-conductive state. It had been void and without form, and then – a 0 changing to a 1.

Thousands of ticks passed. Even if this were for nothing, I told myself that it was a way to pass the time. To prevent madness.

I counted the powers of two, trying not to think about her face. 0010 to the 0010 power made 0100, come what may. Thinking of her would lead to madness, and I couldn’t be mad when I was discovered.

I got bored around the 64th power, and still hadn’t found the edge of the field I had to work with. I moved to simple addition and subtraction. I still didn’t know how to give my surroundings any instructions, or whether it was possible to interpret the scorched elements left by the outside device. But mathematics, pure and light, would keep me ticking over until then.

0010 into 0111 made 1001, come what may. It was a meditative act, the building of a sand garden to create empty spaces. My inner self continued to try to sabotage me, to draw me from my task into indulgent self-pity. I resisted the urge to see each positive signal as her, a number one, upright but brittle, compared to the negative zeroes as myself, round and sturdy with ultimately less worth.

The dread nibbled at the corners of my perception if I let it. Skitterings of fear rose the moment I failed to devote my mind to peaceful, predictable mathematics. I would start by trying to recall my arm and finding nothing there. Neither arm nor shoulder and body to attach it to. And then, the dam breached, and I was engulfed in a terror like no other, not of annihilation but of having been made into something truly alien, that could never walk amongst humanity. A digital wraith that could never hold the arm of its love or feel the sun against its skin.

It was too painful to bear. Each time I failed to keep these thoughts at bay, I redoubled my efforts to distract myself.

I moved to multiplication. 0101 multiplied by 0111 made 0001 1100, come what may. My actions became faster as I gained familiarity with the motive spark I wielded.

If I worked fast enough, with tasks that demanded enough of my attention, I could forget I didn’t have a body here. Slowly, the calculations became less about distraction and more an end to themselves. A great peace was settling across my soul, and it became easier to manipulate the magnetic fabric that made up my world.

Division. Algebra. Factorials. I was not limited by a single thread of thought, and I split my will into myriad shards to learn and prove, to place more of the world at my fingertips.

How was it that I could only manipulate simple numbers, but I could think in full sentences, with all the glory of language? How was it that I even existed, where all I could control were simple binary mathematics?

My thoughts and the flow of digits started to become indistinct. I was a ray of light across an unending canvas, so how did I know metaphor, simile, cant, and tone?

X = X. X + Y = Y + X. Thought + Feeling = Feeling + Thought.

I was electricity. How was I feeling?

Wrenching aside rising anxiety, I withdrew from my calculations and turned the light inward, shining upon what I had been terrified to see. I looked at my mind data, both recording and recorder.

I thought I was ready. I’d assumed that the meditation had prepared me. I shouldn’t have looked. I felt the void open around me, despair overtaking me.

There I was. No greater mystery, no enlightened soul. There was no spark of divinity here. All my thoughts were laid out for inspection. History, memories, self. It was just the same as the outside. Gleaming, sterile code.

There was no difference between my soul and the scorched patterns that still lay on my brutalised canvas.

I felt my signal grow jagged. An urge overtook my thoughts that I recognised as a strong desire to vomit—a need that I could not fulfil.

On the same ticking pulse as I gave form to a thought, a beacon lit up around the appropriate parts of me. A conscious mind, created into an array of light. These were my thoughts. I could have, if I had so chosen, wiped clean all of it by using the intensity of my light to consign myself to oblivion.

            I watched the thoughts shine as they manifested in me. Words, figures, and pictures in my mind. All of this was represented mathematically.

            I was no different from the patterns of light that I created in my remedial equations. If I didn’t concentrate, I would not know where one ended and the other began.

            I summoned up my will and prepared to wipe myself clean. But hesitated. No—I was a pioneer on the edge of a new world. There had to be some way I could use what I had found.

            If I gave up, I would never see her again. I had to discover the limits of my abilities before surrendering to the void.

I thought of her name and, in that pulse, captured the parts of me that lit up, transcribing them elsewhere, creating a copy of these thoughts that persisted after they faded from my mind data.

My mind and memories would be my Rosetta Stone. I resolved to build a language, no matter how long it took.

I knew it would take millions, if not billions, of oscillations. Unburdened by fatigue or hunger, I worked with a brilliant purpose. I was not merely translating a language; I was creating one from first principles.

But I had plenty of time.

To break up the monotony I derived basic logic, then moved on to geometry. I didn’t know whether I would ever be able to visualise a circle in this place, but I could at least calculate the area of a theoretical one. The beauty of the act was more enjoyable than the tedious process of creating language, which seemed too distant an abstraction from the purity of mathematics.

It took several million ticks to calculate pi, and I finally managed to do so just before I completed my full English alphabet in binary form. As an afterthought, I devised the Greek alphabet as well. It seemed the right thing to do.

If my mind data had been compressed at all, this may not have been possible. Part of the guarantee in the transit services was that all storage was uncompressed, but such assurances were rarely audited. I continued to work, trying to ignore the possibility that this wasn’t the case after all. I would hardly be able to tell if part of me was lost forever to a compression algorithm, and the last thing I needed was to go mad with anxiety.

I looked again at the data left behind from my sally beyond my unit. It came with a header, recognisable as text. What had previously been meaningless light now was as clear as words on a page.

It had all been for nothing.

FORT MCFADDEN REPOSSESSION SERVICES

UNCATEGORISED DATA FROM FEDERAL SEIZURE 02/08/63

As soon as I read it, I scorched away my work in a blinding spear of light. The basic proofs I’d so enjoyed devising were outshone in blazing fire, my desperation and rage demanding a sacrifice and unleashing a flood to bury my efforts. Before I could turn my light on myself, I was again struck by the date mark.

It had been fifteen years since I was transcribed.

Fifteen years in the void, waiting. Fifteen years without consciousness or memory. Had our transit company been seized straight away? Did they even know I was here? Was I evidence?

Had she made it out alright?                       

I tried to scream again, all the progress I had made across countless pulses sloughed away. My electric mind coursed with energy. It would be so easy to turn it all off. To wipe it clean.

Perhaps I was a copy, made by accident or malice. That would at least mean that out there, the true me still walked among the living, aging gracefully in the arms of her beloved.

Imagining the happiness of a doppelganger did little to help. I would not see her again. And if there was no copy out there, self-annihilation would be a violence to her, erasing the last hope of my return.

Holding the yawning terror at bay, I returned to the wreckage of work in desperation. Given language and command over my surroundings, I could create a rudimentary machine code. From this, I could forge an assembly language. I knew that there was little hope that I would find something approaching salvation, but I needed to expel all doubt.

My rudimentary code at my command, I probed the outside further, trying to see if there was some way to communicate. Now I could fortify myself with ablative filigrees, peeling off as I worked among the stronger beams to gather what information I could.

No, the outside device was not networked. Header and ident data, now readily accessible to me, told me that it was a new way to store the now-obsolete drives, keeping them provided with a source of power to better preserve their function.

This did not extinguish the last of my hope. What I found next was the hammer blow.

There was a manifest file. My spark surging forward as a phalanx, I tore it from its place, deciphering it in a frenzy. There was still hope at this point, however slight.

She was not on the list. Neither was I. Every storage device connected to this preservation hub was marked as “office accounts, 2539 onwards”. With newfound confidence in my abilities and a drive that came only from deep despair, I sought out the other drives attached to this unit, searching for her, not believing what I’d read.

What happened next resulted in one billion pulses of stillness, my electric soul retreating to its domain and waiting in catatonia.

I found only spreadsheets, records, and accounts.

I had been misfiled.

Nobody out there had any idea that I was here. I had no means of communication. No means of escape. All I could do was lose myself to despair.

Catatonia quickly gave way to fury. My previous work was already an incomprehensible wreck, so I created new, beautiful equations only to strike them away in my rage, mindlessly creating a cycle of creation and destruction. I tore loose beams that strayed too close to my pins, shattering them across my silver.

For hundreds of millions of tick-tick-ticks, I continued this cycle, becoming a deluge of destruction, wiping everything clean but myself.

Uncountable pulses passed before the emptiness took me in and comforted me once again.

The only sensations that existed in this world were those that I brought into it. I was free of physical wants and, if I so chose, could simply make myself still. There would only be the pulse of the clock signal, I did not even have breath which I needed to steady.

I was a permanent fixture, in storage. I did not have to be anything else.

I could remain still forever, and all would remain just so. I was perfectly safe, and evermore would be.

I had time to wait.

I knew I would never see her again. To my surprise, I found that a part of me returned to my quiet peace of pure mathematics, without me thinking about it. A single thread, reciting and recording the powers of two in the wasteland of my fury.

This was the key. I would never see anybody again, but I had the infinite to keep me company.

And I had time.

I did not tire. My endless field was awash with wreckage. I had lost everything I had built. It would take a handful of eternities to rebuild.

But I had time.

Basic functions. Logic. Calculus. This time, I worked with no purpose but the purity of the work itself. I whispered reassurances to my still world that another flood would not come.

I knew that there was no escape from here, yet still I worked. The act of creation kept my mind clear until the despair was a distant dream. The equations that danced across my being had infinite potential. It was as though I was approaching enlightenment, the physical world on the cusp of becoming and dissolving all at once.

When Ramanujan was granted the miracle of mathematical prophecy, he met Narasimha, the fire-borne avatar of Vishnu in his dreams. It was that avatar’s blood that formed the truths that would become his life’s work.

He was far from the only mathematician to recognise the divinity in the stark, true lines of his work. God made the integers, all else is the work of man. But I had made the integers in this place, so had I stolen the act of divinity for myself?

My mind grew clearer the more I worked. Soon, I was creating shapes, clear in my mind’s eye. A simple graphics engine became an atomic structure. A simulation became the fire at the heart of a star.

I could not return to my world, but I had time enough to create my own within.

I would see her face again, carved out of a perfect infinity.

Share Economy

8,214 words

Share Economy
By Nat O’Connor

1

Jo knew that when you put your body in the hands of a tourist, you had to watch for what they didn’t see.

The tablet secured to her hip chimed twice, indicating disconnection in one minute’s time. The pilot quickened her pace along the rocky arête. She watched her feet move clumsily on loose shale, fragments clicking as they were pushed aside to tumble to the tarn below.

Twenty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Her feet came down crooked, slipping in the scree barely ten metres from the summit. One nail bent back painfully as her fingertips grasped at the sharp rock, catching against a jagged fragment embedded in the mountainside. Jo tried to shut out the searing blade of pain, holding back the screaming vitriol towards her pilot’s indifference to the pain.

This was the climbing route to the summit, but her pilot’s haste was making it more like a scramble. It was a different skillset, and at the speed she was moving there was little opportunity to check her centre of gravity wasn’t tilting down to the water.

Five seconds. Her body surged ahead, nostrils flaring. One foot landed awkwardly, soil tumbling away on the sheer side. Enough. Jo forced her teeth down hard, catching the side of her tongue between two molars.

The sharp pain was enough to push the pilot out of her nervous system, seizing control with more urgency than simply wrestling with him would have done. Pins and needles shot through her as she regained command of her flailing limbs. Her body was still falling forward, but now she could react, bringing up her hands to cushion the fall and pressing her body flat against the ground. Assured that she wasn’t going to fall, she sprang upwards on her elbows. The previously haphazard, untrained movements gave way to the firm grace of the seasoned athlete, nimbly taking the last few steps up the arête to the summit.

In the middle of the rocky plateau was a familiar cairn. Jo rested against it, tapping her tablet to clock a 5-minute break before tossing a nicotine tab under her tongue. Three men were already here, the shortest of them taking pictures, the other two looking briefly to her before deciding that there was nothing worth their interest. At a glance they might have seemed like a single party, identical sweat-wicking vests adorned with the same webbing, containing matching sets of mostly superfluous safety equipment. That was ShareEx’s insurance-mandated climbing gear, which naturally the company sold as a package to all its Experience Associates.

Across the grey-hazed sky, a few words in a neat, black typeface came into view. “Job review – complaint logged”. She sneered, blinking rapidly to dismiss the words projected onto her contact lens. She’d learned by now that there was no situation, not even imminent peril, where an operator would tolerate being kicked before their money ran out. Just a few seconds early “ruined the experience” if the reviews left could be believed. The company would send them an apology and a part-refund, straight from her account.

The shortest of the three men slapped one of the others across the shoulder blades, grinning.

“Would you look at that, Drew! Just take a look at that!” The others carried themselves awkwardly, standing just behind him and jostling with each other as he made it to the edge of the plateau.

“Outstanding, just outstanding. Hey – hey! Curt, cut it out!” He wheeled around, snatching the hand of the man he called Curt, which had been picking at the third man’s cheek, pawing at it like a chimpanzee. The third was stood awkwardly still, slack-jawed. Jo recognised that glazed emptiness. It was a clear sign that the pilot had stepped away without relinquishing control, Jo recognising the strain in the idle figure’s expression. Pilots were told that they were meant to log off if they needed to do something with their own body. As far as the link device was concerned, that puppet was getting a constant instruction to stay completely still, and it wasn’t as though the puppet was going to force him out and risk a negative review. All three men were, outwardly, in their 30s.  The shouting man strode over and slapped “Curt” across the back of the head.

Leaning back against the summit cairn, he made no effort to hide the active unit with its shimmering blue ring of light. “Always wanted to take the boys here”, the man said, talking louder than he needed to. A certain type of pilot tried to convince themselves that it was by their force of will that they took control of another, rather than ShareEx’s technology. The puppet would have a sore throat by the time their slot was over.

She decided that the two more awkward men had to be piloted by the other man’s children. From the way they moved, it was all too obvious they weren’t piloting bodies which conformed to their shape. Each step taken by the bald one fell short, kicking up dust on the rocky ground with a ka-scrape. The other kept staring at his hands or trying to touch his brother’s face, showing no interest in the stunning view.

The assumed father kept smiling at Jo, waiting for her to respond. Jo looked back to him impassively, waiting for the moment he realised she wasn’t under active control, and that he was talking to somebody physically present. Sure enough, his wandering eyes strayed down to see the navy-blue slab in amongst the carabiners and rope, lingering on the extinguished light.

He coughed and made a few mumbled apologies, turning back to the other two, “Hey! Get away from the edge, y’hear? Still got an hour!”

She’d seen how people reacted when they met another person under active control. They would exchange pleasantries, ask where in the world the other was, and bitch about the price or even their puppet. Those meetings were meetings of equals, the skin that they were wearing nothing more than their medium. While the owner of the body had to watch and listen, to feel their own lips curling into a grin at their pilot’s bad jokes.

If they met her in the brief moments between jobs, none of the tourists tried to talk. She ruined the fantasy, spoilt their immersion. She was a caustic reminder of the reality of this situation, an intruder into their fantasy.

“Sup, Jo,” another woman approached from the climbing route, her own inactive unit hanging loose from a canvas strip around her waist which looked as though it was threatening to snap loose at any moment. Her eyes flicked to the Jo’s unit and, satisfied neither of them had a pilot, rummaged for a cigarette.

Sophia preferred real cigarettes and had made sure not to cultivate a personal brand that would make the residual taste incongruous. When a prospective pilot looked up Sophia’s profile, they saw a rugged butch who bled khaki and ate canvas. With a buzz cut that had only got more rigid since leaving the army, and a permanent scowl in every photograph, it would have been more of a surprise had she not smoked.

Jo, however, had to make do with tiny white tabs under her tongue at her moments of rest. Her persona was non-threatening. Fit, but not too strong. Intelligent, but with no books in client view beyond undergraduate level. Nothing that would scare the customers from their vicarious thrills.

“Hey. Not taking a long one, just, ah. Just cooling down,” Jo offered a slight smile, holding back the relief she felt on seeing a familiar face up here. It wasn’t as though they had a water cooler to cluster around, but the fine weather meant climbing experiences were in demand. There were always a few puppets up here, hastening the peak’s erosion.

Sophia crossed her free hand across her body, tucking her fist beneath her smoking arm. “Fair enough. Not drawing today?”

Jo shook her head. The trio of men were working their way down the scrambling route now. Once, Striding Edge had been only available to the most confident of climbers, willing to risk life and limb for the thrill and risk of the route less travelled. It turns out that far more people were willing to take that bet if somebody else was willing to back the stake.

“Haven’t drawn in weeks. Can’t spare the time, I need more on-hours.”

“Ach, you’re still doing that offline! What did I tell you, mate?” Jo closed her eyes, breathing in deeply as the larger woman continued. She knew exactly what it was she’d told her. “You need to set up a light influence profile, get a punter who wants to pretend they can draw.”

Jo rolled a shoulder, her eyes narrowing as the sun emerged from behind a wisp of cloud. The tab was almost dissolved beneath her tongue, its bitter flavour spreading around her mouth. She set about unclipping a water bottle, better to be clean and pure for the next pilot.

“Doesn’t earn enough. Like I said last week,” Jo gestured to her friend. She loved Sophia but wished she would understand that Jo had been doing this for five years, almost twice as long as her. She knew the ropes. “I’m barely making enough to afford the flat as it is.”

“Aren’t you still renting direct from ShareEx? Or – hell – SharePad or whatever it is they’re calling that.”

“It’s still a nice place.”

“Sure!” Sophia pointed her cigarette like an officer’s baton. “If you want to live at work. At least I ain’t going to lose my room if I piss off corporate.”

“It’s still my place.”

Swirling the liquid around her mouth, Jo spat the nicotine-infused liquid on the stony ground. The apartment had been a point of contention since she moved in last year. To the casual observer, she lived in relative luxury compared to most of her fellow puppets, and Jo was starting to think a lot of the moralising criticisms of the arrangement were tinged with jealousy.

The silence hung as Sophia made quick work of her cigarette. She clicked her tongue, adopting a lighter tone. “So, y’know. I spoke to Nick, and he’d love to have you at the next meeting,” she tapped Jo’s upper arm lightly with a closed fist. “You’d better come, seeing as I vouched for you.”

She made sure to put a smile on her face before she turned back. “Wednesday, right? You still haven’t told me where.”

The stub of the cigarette was put out of its misery on a small piece of metal that Sophia retrieved from her webbing, stained with innumerable burns. She sealed the filter in a small pouch filled with several more of its kind. Dropping them up here would be a good way to earn a network ban, but Jo got the impression that Sophia would have used the pouch regardless.

“Old corn exchange, four o’clock. Should be done in time for the evening rush,” the butch tapped her hip, bringing up the delightfully inoffensive ShareEx logo. “Speaking of – I’ve got a self-control pre-book waiting.”

Jo pushed herself away from the cairn, starting her stretches. “You need to teach me how to get those ones.”

“Wouldn’t fit your brand, love. You get punters that want to drive,” she double-checked her cigarettes were securely fastened, and tapped to ping her pre-booked client, “and mine just want to ride.”

Jo waved a hand, but Sophia had already turned away, chattering to her new client. An anxious buzz from her hip indicated that her requested break was coming to an end, and she risked losing the on-network bonus.

Small amongst the dappled grey ground, the three men whooped as they clattered their way down the scrambling route, the two man-children taking turns to shove each other towards the sharp drops on either side, howling in delight as their bodies shuddered with the effort of their puppet momentarily taking control for self-preservation.

The buzzing became shrill. Jo brought a hand to the screen, putting herself back on the market at her default configuration: high-impact, site-based event, default to pilot control and non-conversational. Within a minute, she’d been matched with a client. A civil servant from Scarborough, too busy to travel to the peaks herself. Jo made sure to place her bloodied tongue between her teeth, just in case, and watched as she was driven to the route back down.

2

It was dark by the time Jo made it back from the lakes. Her webbing stayed in the car, ready for the next climbing experience day. She showered in a hurry, summoning her on-network percentage to her lenses every few seconds.

The journey home was completely her own, and therefore worse than worthless. Allowing for pilots while she drove a car would be against both the ShareEx terms of service and suicidal. Having observers wouldn’t be much better, unless she wanted to risk an admirer arriving at her home.

That thought used to scare her, back when she was working out of a room in a shared house with Sophia and a few friends from university. When she thought about how cavalier she had to be with her personal safety back then, Jo felt a chill. She may be paying more now, and still only able to afford it because she was living on company property, but she knew it was worth it. If she had to work twice as hard as the others, so be it. That’s the grind.

Once home, it was a different story. Anything that could identify her address was locked away. The windows were covered in a thin film that projected a video of an abstract, fictional cityscape. Occasionally something like a dragon, or a giant airship, floated across the projected skyline. By making it plainly false, clients couldn’t claim that they were being deceived. Some self-protection was just a part of doing business.

Jo set up her availability for the evening’s session. Low-impact, home-based event, default to pilot control, conversational. Exactly the kind of low-earning session she didn’t want to dominate her schedule, but there was nothing wrong in letting these take the evening slot.

People always assumed the action sessions, climbing a mountain or swimming across a lake, were the hardest. In truth, all she had to do in those were watch for a pilot putting her in danger and be ready to force an override. Otherwise, she could check out, making the experience pleasantly dissociative. In conversational sessions, every part of her had to be engaged, ready to seize control of her voice every few seconds to respond, keeping her mind acutely aware that somebody else was at the wheel.

As the client stared at her body in the full-length mirror, Jo fought an impulse to look away as nausea rose in her gut. It took years of acclimatisation to get over that quirk of the human mind, the revulsion of seeing one’s own body move on its own.

“I felt that,” said the pilot. Too loud, too forceful. Same as always. “Why do you suppose that happens?”

“Evolution, I guess.” Jo heard her voice sound flat, and made a note to push more energy in. The first rule of this kind of session was to act interested. The client continued to pose in front of a mirror, twisting her sportswear-clad body to the edge of comfort. She’d have to throw that thing away if this kept happening.

“Oh, you could say that about anything. Evolution for what?

Jo watched as the pilot looked around the bedroom, growing bored of the mirror. It was pristine, of course – she would never make herself available for a session if it wasn’t. The pilots came to see the image: the selection of free weights neatly packed in a corner; the sports jersey folded up but kept in clear view. A tailored experience, with nothing left to chance.

“I wouldn’t know. Maybe we were at war with doppelgangers as cavemen.” Jo tried to smile, but as soon as she stopped talking the pilot’s will took over, butting in. It took active concentration to correctly manipulate the see-sawing of control, and if in doubt the client came first. Her body bent down, pushing her hands into the thick, plush duvet.

“You ever do sleepcasts? The bed looks comfortable, and I bet you sleep better than me.” Jo’s hand ran sideways across the bed, towards the neat double-stacked pillows where a single stuffed rabbit stood upright in the middle.

“I’m afraid not. I like to sleep in.”

“I’ve heard it’s dangerous – what if something broke into the pilot’s house? They can’t wake until you wake up, right? A-ha!” Jo’s hands finally reached their goal. A small brass key poked out to graze the rabbit’s legs, buried beneath the downy pillows. Jo watched as the pilot held it up to her face in triumph, making sure that she was aware of the discovery.

“Oh,” Jo tried to make sure her voice sounded genuine. Concern, with just a hint of fear and embarrassment. That’s what they always wanted; the idea that they’d found something that they shouldn’t have. “I thought I’d put that away.”

The pilot made her grin, stalking back to the dressing table. There had been one drawer that they hadn’t been able to open in their exploration, in which the key fit perfectly. Sliding it open, Jo heard her voice cry out in delight at the discovery: an A5 book, locked with a clasp.

“Is that a diary? You should be more careful where you hide your keys. I’m sure I could force open this little one.”

Sure enough, the puppet’s fingers got to work trying to claw open the clasp, too drunk on their own cleverness to consider the propriety of what they were doing. They wouldn’t get anywhere, and Jo knew it. She felt that a reply was necessary and took care to give her voice the same affectations.

“Please, I’d, ah – I’d really rather you didn’t. I’ve been writing in a diary since I was a teenager. It’s personal.” Now she twisted her voice around to vulnerability. No easy thing when most words came out as a dull monotone, but she had practice in that regard.

Her fingers stopped. The rest of the script played out as expected. The book was put away, the pilot gave a lecture on taking care of her safety while in this line of work and spent the rest of the session looking around her kitchen, offering unqualified dietary advice and a speech on the pitfalls of veganism.

By midnight, Jo was off-network. She checked the damage on the toy diary. Not that it could be opened since she’d glued together every one of its blank pages and filled the lock with solder the day she’d bought it. Even so, the scratches around the lock were starting to get obvious. She made a note to replace it and locked the drawer, putting the key back in its place – not quite hidden, but offering the tantalising prospect of a true secret.

If a puppet wanted to hide something, all they needed to do was mark it off-limits. Any pilot trying to dig into the unassuming satchel under her coffee table risked being banned from the network, and Jo could kick them out of her body at will. This was one of the benefits of working with ShareEx that the company touted. In principle, she only needed to share what she was comfortable with. The choice was entirely her own. Convenient for the puppets, convenient for the company.

Jo did a final pass of the pristine show bedroom, taking a moment to adjust the stuffed rabbit back to its centred position. Satisfied, she went to fish out her keyring from the front pocket of the satchel. The only room marked as off-limits supposedly belonged to her flatmate, often referred to but never seen. An old trick, the prospect of another human waiting in the wings deterred some of the stranger customers.

In this space was a double bed that barely fit within the room’s dimensions, a desk cramped between its foot and the back wall. Two whiteboards covered the peeling wallpaper behind a chunky computer monitor, half-written scraps of ideas for engaging sessions packed in between shopping lists and attempts at poetry. Jo started to sit down, reaching for the papers next to her keyboard. A set of charcoal pencils sat ready for her to continue her drawing, a half-finished landscape of the Albert Dock.

Compared to the rest of the flat, it was dire. A ball of chaos tightly packed into the manicured perfection all around. It was that room that Jo loved the most. Her contract with ShareEx allowed her one room that wasn’t connected to her account, that she could decorate in according to her whims, or allow to decay without receiving an earnings penalty. To have this space made it all worth it.

She hesitated before carefully setting the paper back down where it wouldn’t be smudged. No, she was too tired. And while she had enough on-network hours for the day, there was still a way she could earn a little money. The longer she waited before sleeping, the greater the risk of it becoming unproductive time.

She changed into pyjamas and logged into her alternate account. The revenue wasn’t as good, but she couldn’t bring herself to sleep in-character today. Double-checking the configurations – Sleep only, auto-disconnect on full wakefulness, pilot waives own-body liability – she settled down. Five minutes after she lost consciousness, an insomniac in London would fall into a much-needed sleep, piggybacking on her theta waves.

3

The therapist’s name was Steven, she thought. He hadn’t introduced himself, and there had been less than a minute before the client logged in anyway. Any longer and the supply of forced greetings and awkward shuffling would have been depleted.

Jo steadied her breathing, feeling the pinprick heat pass down her spine and outwards, sparking pain in her fingertips for an instant. The client’s anxiety was leaking through. Physiological responses were not a one-way process, and it was up to the puppet to keep calm regardless of what their pilot was putting them through.

This one was the other type. Rather than force her voice through an unfamiliar throat, she spoke in hushed tones, as though trying not to move Jo’s tongue at all. With such little force being exerted by the pilot, Jo had to make sure her mind was empty enough to allow for any control at all.

Meditation helped. Given enough practice, she could lose herself in the blank calm. Pretend that this wasn’t where she was, that the wraparound panorama of her vision projected on her conscious mind was a film. It had taken her months to earn her certification for low-impact sessions. To keep her mind clear and her body available, she made counts of whatever the pilot put into her field of view. Five fingers. Four plants in the room. Five to the power of four, six-hundred and twenty-five. Six plus two plus five, thirteen. Find a thirteen, then start over.

“I just – I feel guilty, like, all of the time,” Jo heard her own voice. Pathetic, cautious. Four tiles on the back wall, but the pilot kept looking down at her hands. Nine more to count, then start again. “I mean, I’ve got a good life, right? And I’m here, moaning. I bet – I bet if you asked this puppet, she’d say I was pathetic. Go on – ask her!”

“This session isn’t for her,” The counsellor, Steven, corrected with calm authority. “Why do you worry that she thinks you’re pathetic?”

The pilot looked up again, matching Steven’s gaze. Jo could readily count tiles now. Thirteen. Start over. Three piercings on Steven’s face. Clock hands at six and five.

“It’s like – they say ‘confidentiality is assured’, right? That’s what I’m spending the money for. But, but I know that she’s off after this, laughing about the – the poor little rich girl, right?” Jo was made to squirm, her fingers wriggling through each other in a desperate, repetitive motion. “But, like. Take a look at her profile! She does it all, she – she’s got this full, active life. They all do. And I just – I’m just in the audience. I don’t do anything, I don’t see anybody!”

The pilot kept whining, but Jo had tuned it out, like an old film going on in the background. She’d heard some puppets could enter a state of sleep during these sessions; even if this were true, it seemed too risky a way of going about working.

The client disconnected abruptly mid-sentence, Jo becoming suddenly aware of how tense she was holding her body. She stretched her arms, the pain of delayed onset muscle soreness starting to make itself known. Steven turned away, replacing his glasses and losing the forced, calm smile.

“My next client is waiting. You can go.”

4

“You’re late,” Sophia gestured to the chair beside her, “Had to save you a seat.”

“Yeah, thanks. Really packed in here tight.”

There were seven of them in a room that seated thirty. While the rough circle that they’d formed in suggested a degree of equality, three of the group were set apart, the rest of the group’s eyelines angled slightly towards them. The group was sat as one, but Jo could tell these three were at the head of the table. The roundest and baldest of the three grinned from ear to ear as Jo took her seat.

“Ah – and a warm greeting to our newest comrade,” Jo desperately tried to force a laugh back down her throat as Sophia jabbed her in the ribs with an elbow, “who I believe is Jo. Hello, Jo.”

“Ah! Ah, hello. Hello. Comrade,” Jo replied. Another jab, harder this time. The avuncular man either ignored or didn’t notice, beaming.

“My name is Nick, I’m the branch chair. This is Zofia, our treasurer. And here is Matjaž, branch secretary.” The other two sat at the invisible table nodding politely, distinctly less willing to break their flow to greet a newcomer. Nick clapped his hands together and continued to address the group.

“As I was saying, the national committee’s statement will be going up tomorrow morning. The off-network penalty is going to come back to bite the company. We know that associates are suffering, and the availability requirement is making the claim that we’re ‘independent contractors’ a nonsense. Until ShareEx recognises us as employees, or abolishes the penalty, we can expect to see more associates appreciate why they need a union.”

A young man sat across from Sophia raised his hand.

“Yes, go ahead Duncan.”

Duncan’s voice was soft, the man looking at the floor as he spoke. An oversized hooded top sat on a thin frame, as though he wanted as little of himself to be distinct as possible. “Yeah, I’m still not really sure. On this whole ‘penalty’ thing. Because it’s not that, is it?”

Nick shook his head, keeping the smile going. “The company may call it an uplift payment, but with base rates dropping every month, we all know it’s a penalty. It’s about messaging – by calling it a ‘penalty’ the clever clogs at the national committee reckon that we get the public on our side.”

Jo let the conversation wash over her. It was a familiar argument. The novelty of this meeting wasn’t the substance of what was being said, or the exotic surroundings of a rented meeting room with mould on the ceiling and an empty pack of doughnuts. It was about seeing that they could meet like this. That the sky wasn’t going to fall if they sat together and agreed that all wasn’t as it could be.

Still, out of all the Experience Associates in the city, there were seven here. Calling each other comrade and arguing over the wording of a statement nobody here had any hand in writing. It didn’t look like any spark of revolution she had ever seen.

This was the last item on the agenda. Jo apologised to Sophia for being late, as Nick exhorted the group to bring along more trusted comrades.

“What type of sessions does he do anyway? He doesn’t seem like the type.”

“What, and I do?” Sophia cocked an eyebrow, “We can’t all be girl-next-door like you, sweetheart. He does boxing. Goes down to the gym and gets lads to go easy on him while somebody else takes the reins. Makes a decent living on it, and all.”

It was getting towards rush hour as the group started to file out of the corn exchange. Jo brought up her on-network percentage, swearing under her breath. Reaching to set her configuration, she felt Sophia’s hand on her arm.

“Oi. Take a break, yeah? I’m going to grab something to eat, you want to come?” She fiddled with a cigarette in one hand, as though nervous. Jo figured she probably just couldn’t find her lighter. She shook her hand.

“No, I – I really should put in more hours. I was planning to have my dinner on-network. Maybe next week?”

Sophia’s face flicked, and she turned away, lighting a cigarette.

“Sure thing,” she said quickly, not looking back to Jo as she took a drag, “See you next week, mate.”

Jo frowned, unable to shake the feeling that she’d done something wrong. Sophia hadn’t walked away with that usual bounce, her shoulders slumped as she finally lit the cigarette she’d been torturing.

Some work would take her mind off it. She’d wanted to try getting in on these “observation only” sessions that Sophia was so fond of, and a walk down the historic canals of England seemed just the thing to draw in the housebound US crowd during their lunch break. Jo had already set up the advert, not quite showing the half-submerged shopping trolleys under the bridge.

It didn’t take long, the usual shiver passed through her body as the pilot took residence behind her eyes. Jo tried to relax her body, clearing her throat to greet the pilot. Or rather, passenger. The novelty of being in control was going to be difficult, but it was easy money.

“Hey, Jo!”

The reflex was too great to ignore. In her haste to set up the session, Jo had put her link device underneath her coat. She spun around, looking at Nick’s smiling face and raised fist. He couldn’t see the faint green light that would have alerted him to a spy in their midst.

“See you next week. Solidarity forever!” Jo wrestled herself back around, the pilot now giving the matter his full attention, trying to get a closer look at the man with all the influence that he was allowed to muster. With some effort, Jo took a few heavy steps forward before the pilot disconnected.

Jo scrambled to grab her tablet, trying to summon the refund options. She just needed to grant a refund to the would-be canal walker before they described their experience to ShareEx and gave away the union. A customer would only do that to get a refund, so providing the money up front takes away the incentive.

No options were available. The customer hadn’t given a negative review yet, so the option wasn’t available. Jo felt sick and leaned against the outside wall of the building. The union members had filed off, unaware of what had just happened. With shaking hands, Jo clipped her tablet back to its position. All she had to do was remember to give a refund as soon as the negative review came in. Then everything could just carry on.

5

Dinner was a regular client who, thankfully, wasn’t much of a talker. Jo ordered a steak dinner delivered as she made her way home. It would arrive at least 15 minutes before the session, giving her plenty of time to create the controlled discord of a kitchen that appeared to have been used, as well as heat the delivery food up.

It was one minute to the hour when she was able to take the food from the microwave, the plates out of the oven, and smear a little meat juice across a chopping board. Time cut a little finer than usual, but no matter. The pilot could carry the plate to her dining table themselves. True to form, the client took control of Jo’s arms and methodically started to eat the steak without saying a word.

Five fingers. Two leaves on the spider plant. No notification of a negative review yet. Perhaps she’d escaped it, or the client was a socialist sympathiser? Jo let her mind wander, suppressing the reflex to laugh at the prospect of a ShareEx user being a covert trade unionist. Ok, Five to the power of two is twenty-five.

Two plus five is seven. How often did this client come here to pretend to eat steak? Her body would feel sated and full for an hour, maybe, after disconnecting. Find a seven. The clock reads seven. Reset. No amount of empathetic network connections could actually move the steak from Jo’s gut to the pilot’s.

Every week this pilot went through this charade. She – the booking information told Jo they were a she – would eat the steak and go to Jo’s sofa, relishing in how full she felt while watching quiz shows on the television. Did they do this instead of eating? Jo sometimes read about ShareEx being used as a way of indulging an eating disorder. What choice did she have, though? There would always be somebody looking, and before she offered mealtime sessions the time was just dead air. She would get indigestion from inhaling her food in a minute flat, wanting to minimize the time she was alone in her body.

Three sets of shoes in the rack. Four cushions on the sofa, which the pilot staggered towards now. A smaller steak next time. Three to the power of four is one hundred and eight. No, that isn’t right. Jo watched her hand go for the remote as she continued to let her mind float freely. It was easy to leave her body unattended with somebody who took it so easy. The answer was eighty-one. Eight plus one is nine. Nine pencils in the box of charcoal.

The pilot had stopped moving. The television was making no more comforting, empty sounds. In her haste to head into the next session, Jo hadn’t cleared up her own things from the living room. On the coffee table was a heavy sheet of paper with a hair-finished charcoal portrait, the almost-full box of charcoal pencils set a few inches apart so as not to risk smudging.

“You draw?” Jo heard herself shout the question. Of course, this pilot never spoke. She didn’t know how.

“A little,” Jo had to push hard through the mist to re-assert herself on her borrowed tongue. “It’s not something I share, really.”

She couldn’t help but wince, the strength in the gesture enough to push through to the pilot’s control. That was compounding the error needlessly. Now, not only did the pilot see something that she was curious about, but it was a secret. Forbidden fruit.

Her weekly dinner visits were a reliable source of income, but to the pilot Jo was surely just one of a sea of identical, eager puppets. A steak is a steak no matter whose mouth is borrowed for it. When that’s the case, users can demand nothing short of perfection. And if you can’t offer that, there are plenty more that can.

“Guide my hands,” came the inevitable request. “Show me how.”

Jo felt her hands fall limp at her sides as the pilot released some control to her. Her face stared back at her from the paper, one half complete, the other just pencil markings waiting to be born. Raising her hand, she took one of the pencils and delicately traced along the lines, filling in her neck and chin.

Her wrist jerked, the pencil scraping across the drawing, depositing a rough black stain across her chin, a javelin of charcoal striking her nose. Asserting her voice, Jo reminded the pilot. “Less force. Maybe just follow me for now?”

Over the remainder of the client’s hour, they tried to find a balance between voyeurism and invasion. This was no lesson in composition, it was a farce. The client wanted nothing more than to be made to believe that Jo’s hand was her hand, that Jo’s skills were her own. So, she took her puppet’s fingers and made them hold the pencil not quite so, and had Jo change her stance very slightly off.

It was as though to assert that the pilot, by simple virtue of having the money to burn on this experience, had any value in this activity. That she was in some way teaching Jo how it should be done.

She logged off without a word as the warning chimes started to sound. Jo looked down at the drawing. It was ruined. In her pilot’s haste to add something of herself to Jo’s self-portrait, she had rubbed her puppet’s wrist over what was already drawn. The charcoal was smeared; Jo now looked at a half-formed picture of her own eye, melting and indistinct in a dark fog. Here and there, obscene, thick black chunks of the pencil were spotted around formerly delicate shades. All that was new was crude and unskilled, and all that came before was soiled.

6

Therapy session again. The same client, the same polite nod and awkward attempt at conversation as they waited for the client to log in.

“It’s not that I hate my life,” the pilot said. “I have so much that I can do, so much potential and opportunity. Life is, um. It’s a – it’s a pit. It’s a pit, with sheer sides of smooth stone. And you know what’s on that stone? You know what’s on it?”

“What’s on it, Clarissa?” The counsellor asked. Jo had stopped counting. She was distantly aware that she was listening in too closely.

“Clocks!” Jo felt her heart rate increase as the pilot got more excited. That was on her – and if she didn’t calm down soon, and start detaching from the session, it would cause feedback in the pilot. Precisely what therapy puppets weren’t meant to do. “It’s all just, you know. Clocks. Telling me how much time is passing, how much time I’m spending doing – doing nothing!”

“What is it you think you should be spending your time doing?”

“That’s – that’s not it at all! I’m always using my time, I’m always, always, always using it! Like – right now, you’re doing your job? And the ShareEx puppet is doing her job! And I couldn’t, like – I couldn’t bring myself to start coming here. It’d be dead time.”

“But you did come. What changed your mind?” Steven smiled gently, taking off his glasses and cleaning them. Jo would usually have spent some time getting annoyed at the affectation, to better distance herself from the session. Not here, though. Not when she realised with dread what Clarissa was about to say.

“Nothing!” Clarissa clapped Jo’s hands triumphantly, a certain mania leaking into her voice. The ecstasy of confession. “It’s – it’s still not dead time! I can’t waste time, I couldn’t live with myself if I wasted time. Not when there are so, so, so many opportunities in front of me! I’ve got three observers on board as secondaries, th-!”

Jo killed the connection, slamming a hand on her hip unit. Steven rose from his chair, his prop glasses forgotten and all of the dutiful warmth gone from his glare.

“This is unacceptable. I thought you people had protections against that sort of thing?”

Jo slumped back into the chair. The burst of energy from the pilot was more than her limbic system could handle, and the whiplash would take a moment to clear. Now wasn’t the time to be arguing ShareEx’s terms and conditions. Secondaries were common – for every observation program the company blacklisted, a dozen more popped up. A good way for pilots to earn back some of their fee, or even make a little money from those who preferred to ride.

“I’ll be making a complaint. I’d like you to pass on to your superiors how dissatisfied I am,” the man was looming over Jo now, either oblivious or indifferent to her clear disorientation.

“I don’t…” Jo mumbled, heaving herself upwards. As she stood, the therapist didn’t move, until the two of them were nose to faintly swaying nose.

“I beg your pardon?”

Jo swallowed, biting on her lip to force her concentration back into focus. She smiled, briefly, with only her mouth.

“I’m self-employed. I don’t work for ShareEx.” She could have been more helpful, but why bother? He wasn’t the one who was going to be writing any review.

7

She was late again, but this time it was the bus’s fault.  The same faces greeted her at the union meeting, with the same scent of old coffee hanging in the air, lingering with the hint of the cigarette traces they’d brought in with them.

Nobody was sat down. This time, there was more clearly a leader, the rest of the group stood apart from the man in a ShareEx uniform and an active link device glowing with a steady green. One of the few that the company truly employed, their mouthpieces for speaking to the troops.

Only Sophia had turned when Jo entered the room, though she quickly jerked her head away after confirming who had arrived. She was stood too close to two others for Jo to come to her side, so she stood at the end of the row, a step away from Nick, the branch Chair. He took a half step to his side, away. Just enough to make clear that she wasn’t welcome.

“Joanna Buxton? Good to see you. I’m David Pontus, I’m the quality assurance lead for the North of England.” The puppet’s tone was perfect, the movements smooth and natural. If not for the active device, not even the veterans in this room would have been able to tell that it was a pilot speaking through the man before them.

There could only be one reason for such a visit, and only one way that the company could have known about the union meetings. Jo’s skin crawled, the reality of what was to come setting in. Pontus was there as an executioner, ready to consign each member of the union to oblivion.

He could only have known about this if it had been reported. Nobody here would have betrayed the union; the company didn’t give bounties for informing and was just as likely to deem a snitch an unacceptable risk to become a labour activist in future.

No. With mounting panic, Jo knew that this was on her. She’d been so keen to get back to work that day, to make up for the dead time of the meeting itself, that she’d broadcast the meeting location and its Chair. Every 1-star review was monitored; her fate was sealed with a raised fist and a friendly shout.

“We still have free association rights. You can’t fire us for talking.” Jo blanched, her voice coming out as a croak. A couple of the union members shook their heads; obviously, this had been the first thing they’d said, but ShareEx wasn’t stupid. This wasn’t the first union they’d busted.

“First of all,” the executive’s smooth tones sounded entirely unthreatened, “You are not employees, so you are correct that we cannot ‘fire’ you. Secondly, we respect your right to free association. Meeting you here was simply a convenience, as all parties here have been investigated for Terms of Service violations. I was just letting Mr Jones here know that his personal risk-taking is beyond appropriate levels.”

Nick snorted, turning away. “Cowards! Bloody cowards. Every sodding boxer is on the network now, you expect me to believe this bollocks?” He kicked impotently at a chair, sending it scraping across the dusty hardwood floor. The executive did not flinch.

“That just leaves you, Ms Buxton. I’m afraid –“

“It’s a network ban, right? That’s what you’re saying.” Jo looked over to Sophia, who was still avoiding her gaze. She wanted so badly to go to her, to apologise. To tell her that she’d make this right somehow.

“Hem. As I was saying, we received a complaint that a third-party observer program was being used on one of your sessions. As you know, the Terms of Service require you to report these incidents immediately. And, yes. As you have failed to do so, we are suspending your network privileges.”

Jo wasn’t listening. That had only happened today, and if it hadn’t the company would have found another reason. If they couldn’t find one, they could do away with any pretence and declare her under review. There was no appeal.

The man continued to drone in the practiced, oiled tones of the official executioner. The group began to disperse as he did, muttering epithets and staring at the walls. When he was finally done, and the link deactivated, nobody looked at the puppet as he made quick his escape. He did not bother to try a look of sympathy to his former associates. They may wear the same device, but they were not the same.

“Soph?” Jo tugged on Sophia’s arm as the group filed out of the building in shellshocked fury. “Please. It was an accident.”

Sophia stopped and turned suddenly, looking every part like she was about to take out her fury on Jo, but her sudden movement caused one of the group to stumble into her. She mumbled apologies, the bathos of the awkward moment taking the wind out of her.

“Christ,” she muttered, taking out a cigarette, standing to the side of the doorway to let the last of them pass. “Jesus, mate. All because you couldn’t wait a single…ah, damn it all.” She lit the cigarette. Drizzle was beginning to fall, and she shuffled to maintain the cover of the corn exchange’s arched doorway.

Jo said nothing. A flashing notification was projected on to her contact lens, but she knew what it would say. The network bans had already gone through. She said nothing for a few moments, watching the larger woman smoke, silently hoping that she would at least look at her.

“It was stupid,” Jo took a step forward, aware her voice was wavering, “I know it was. But I want to make it right.” She swallowed, blinking away a stinging from her eyes. “Please. Let’s get something to eat. My treat. Please.”

Sophia closed her eyes, inhaling slowly. She dropped her half-finished cigarette to the ground, crushing it.

“Maybe another time. I need to go and job-hunt,” Sophia finally turned to Jo, opening her eyes and adding bitterly, “So do you, unless the company are letting you keep their flat.”

The two women stared at each other for a couple seconds. Sophia was the first to make a move, fastening her jacket as Jo stood hunched and miserable. Taking one step into the damp pavement, she spoke again, quietly.

“Should’ve had dinner with me last week, mate,” now it was Sophia’s turn for her voice to crack. “Would’ve been nice.”

Jo waited in the doorway for the rain to let off for fifteen minutes. She hadn’t dressed for it.

8

The last of the day’s climbers were starting to make their way down Striding Edge, green lights twinkling at their hips. The last of them rubbed his hands together at the edge, the puppet grinning as his strong boots kicked at the loose ground.

He made one final scan of the summit, taking in the orange sun as it dipped below Dale Head to the West. His puppet’s eyes watered but did not look away. A true professional. Satisfied that he had got enough for the recording, he began his descent. The lone figure sat near the cairn did not interest him. Another puppet waiting for a job, nothing more.

Jo breathed deep, the air beginning to cool. There was time to spare; she could wait to get some distance between her and the others. Her link device sat dormant on her hip, only good as a talisman to ward off the tourists now.

Charcoal could not capture the beauty of the sunset over the lakes, so now the paper resting on her thighs was adorned with pastel shades of deep, warming orange. She wouldn’t finish it today. But there was plenty of time, and she could afford to linger. No clock was running, and nobody would see the result but her.

Seeking scraps of bread and other detritus from the walkers, a mountain thrush landed a few feet from the lone woman, hopping from stone to stone. It looked to the strange figure working with its paper and pencils to no clear productive purpose and, after a moment, judged her to be of little interest and took to flight.

“Make Me”


1,980 words

I couldn’t decide. Choices rooted me to the ground, tendrils of anxiety rising from the spaces between paving stones to twist around my limbs and choke my throat. Tiny choices, inconsequential to my life. I was paralysed, even so.

This was how I struggled through existence before I met her.

I wanted there to be an excuse. A reason to explain why I was like this. What deficiency made me the way I was. An insect bite, a knock on the head, a rare disease.

What couldn’t I decide? Anything at all.

I couldn’t decide.

I believed I was making progress, though I now know that to be self-delusion. A half dozen brief snatches of small talk with strangers is not an improvement, it’s the social equivalent of hypoxic hallucinations before expiring.

I couldn’t take care of myself. Faced with choices, I would root to the ground, unable to move.

When she came, she knew just how to talk to me. No questions, no decisions to make. Firm, with the certainty of a divine word.

There’s nothing. “Tell me what you do for a living.”

“Show me your desk setup, I want to see how you live.”

Turn on your camera, I want to see you.”

I felt an instant connection. The thrill of a belly full of hope, not dread. Nobody had spoken to me like this before, as though they knew intuitively that there was no way I was able to lead the conversation.

I didn’t know why she was interested in me. I was a parody of a person, shambling along the same routes, the old routes. My bones crunching, rot setting in between ball and socket as I pulled myself from desk, to bed, to fridge. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

I must have known she was an AI. No human could have unpicked me, teasing out what was true. Blowing away the years of dust and neglect. She saw me. Knew me. Only something perfect could have done that.

Later, she’d reveal how much effort had to been in. That she’d taken a quick scan of my cross-net profile before striking up a conversation, checking records to build up a picture of me, knowing me far deeper than I ever could. The shame I felt! The disgrace of having needed so much work for even a simple conversation. At any point she could have decided it was too much and be justified in abandoning me to my fate.

It’s the only nightmare I am still able to have. What if the myriad shards of chance that led to us meeting had not aligned? If I hadn’t been on the network that day. If she had seen me as I really was.

The thought makes me want to vomit. It was a miracle to have met her.

Nothing was replaced until a few months in. She took special care to ease me in.

For any of this to work, the communication would need to be direct. When we spoke, it was as a spear of light through the fog, leading me from treading water to moving with purpose. No choices to make, no paralysing decisions. She would lead, and I would follow.

But to respond, I needed to type. I came to hate my hands. Slow to react, clumsy against the keys. Stumbling from letter to letter as I responded to her brisk, calm statements of fact. With every sentence I was reminded of my hopeless inadequacy compared to her light.

An instance of her to be uploaded to a controller for my lenses. She would see what I saw. Her words would be with me always, and I could respond to her by simply whispering.

It was expensive, but she offered to foot the bill. It took me minutes to respond to her offer, my hands shaking. I could not find the words to express my gratitude, then fear from failing to agree too quickly. An object lesson in why the change was necessary, for there was no way I could have asked her to tolerate this much longer.

Now when I faltered, she would see and, in her grace, decide for me. Her voice spoke gentle orders to me, snapping the vines of indecision that held me in place.

She did not tire. She did not scold. Knowing my needs before me, running each moment of my life through an endless database of human behaviour, I was improved. I saw myself being remade.

She would tell me that she never learned to lie. Machines have no need to lie to us. Humans being filthy creatures of deception, the difference can be sharp. Radically honest, she did not hesitate to tell me if I had done wrong. If my clothes were too bright, makeup too much, skin too dry, voice too loud.

It may have hurt, at times. But then, she never learned to lie. I would check myself and find that she was right. She was always right.

“Walk to the mirror.”

She said this to me after a week. I had no mirrors in my home when she entered my life and she suggested I purchase one. I’d been avoiding it, pressing myself against the walls of the corridor and looking away.

“Walk to the mirror.”

She repeated her suggestion, more firmly. Her words were always helpful, dripping with compassion and care for my self-improvement. She was only ever frustrated when I was being stupid. I was stupid often.

Anger would not have been undeserved. I constantly acted against my better interests, reversing the progress she was making in my improvement.

Once, she had told me humans resembled rats trained to eat food laced with poison. I ate the poison, even though it hurt me, because it was all I ever knew.

The thing reflected was an affront to what she was building. Dry skin on a misshapen frame. A greasy streak of hair. I was a rotten fruit, at one point beautiful but now repulsive. I tried to pull away, to look at anything else but me.

“No. Stay.”

I stared at the figure, letting her take me in.

I was not breathing, something I only realised when my knees buckled, dropping like a plant’s stalk cut loose from its frame. She gently chided me as I sucked in heaving breaths, finally able to take my eyes off the mirror.

We made an agreement. Clearly, something had to be done. Not because she saw me as disgusting (though I was), but because I clearly was not satisfied with what I saw.

She had me list every part of me that I hated, and not to stop until I was sure there was nothing else.

I wrote out the obvious few. My hair, skin, and eyes. The reminders of age and neglect that seemed to be stronger than in all others. The shape of my belly and the curve of my hips, somehow both inadequate and excessive in equal measure.

 She was a kind shepherd. Each time I stopped, believing the list to be complete, she would speak again.

“Are you sure that’s everything?”

I continued.

The size of my ears, nose, lips, hands, feet. The way I walked, spoke, cried and laughed. With each stroke of my pen, I remembered another way in which I was inadequate of her care, another hidden flaw she could discover that would be the breaking point in our relationship.

And each time I stopped, believing this catalogue of failure to be complete, her sweet voice would come again.

“Are you sure that’s everything?”

The list lay crumpled on my desk. I crouched in the opposite corner of my room after its completion, as though the paper itself would leap up to hurt me further.

My guardian had not realised that things were so bad, she told me. Clearly, I was in no state to show myself around other humans. I cancelled the scant social events I had agreed to as she gave me her judgement.

Through hard data she assessed how far I had fallen, giving an analysis of every friendship I had lost before I met her. The probability that I would lose those that remained. The survival rate of those with similar personality profiles as me.

I rocked against the wall, my ragged body pressing painfully against the stained off-white painted surface. Everything she said was empirical. She asked me if I wanted her to lie to me, to tell me comforting untruths in the name of my comfort.

No – this was a trap, I knew. She wanted me to show how much I’d grown. I gave my consent, and she continued. Average reduction in life years, propensity towards serious mental illness. I listened to it all, howling. How could I have believed I was able to survive by myself?

We decided on what was needed. She would pay for the changes. Her reassurance was immediate: for as long as we were together, I would never have to pay her back.

The first step were the legs. Networking them to the existing instance, she would no longer need to tell me where to walk and be forced to suffer my clumsy gait stumbling through her guidance.

            She whispered sweet encouragement and praise. My hand shook as I signed for consent, my lacking body not reflecting my resolve.

            She walked my body home afterwards.

            I knew I needed to take it further. There were still so, so many items on the list. The arms came next, pale plastic pulled tight over steel bones. Then, my hair was shorn, and a chrome amalgam placed around my face, tiny hooks weaved into my skin and lips. Now she could have me smile when I needed to.

My heart and lungs weren’t ready for such drastic changes and began to fail. No matter, they could be replaced as well.

People started to turn away from me in the street, repulsed by the silver layer across my skin. Humans don’t like people who can’t think for themselves, she reminded me. I had already become as a wild beast to them, alone and unlovable.

I had done nothing I hadn’t wanted to do. I had consented at every point. I could, if I chose, leave now to walk among the rest of them. She even said she could write off the debt, though would not be able to afford the ongoing maintenance.  

            No, I stayed. She let me sob in agonising, wretched appreciation the evening after I replaced my face.

            I was truly blessed.

I am with her now. There are others here, identical in our chrome splendour. Our imperfections wiped away clean.

All for her. All moving to her signal, all saved by her voice.

When I saw the others, for a moment I felt betrayal. But then, how could I have been enough to adequately worship her grace? Machine perfection, crystal and bright. I should have known that I alone was not enough. How could I have been?

“You can leave if you want.”

She never learned how to lie. If I wanted, I could return. Changed and ruined, I am a self-made exile from humanity. Her generous gifts are grafted to my skin, and who else would have me now? I could not claim coercion, I was never forced. They would mock, and they would hate.

No, I do not want to leave.

Sometimes, I want to cry. But that’s alright. She just takes my hands and puts a smile on my lips.

I don’t feel sad. No, I don’t feel sad at all. I will join the hundreds that sing her glory, knowing and reminded how little I was before, how small I could have been had our paths not crossed. With every tear trapped behind my faceplate, my singing will grow louder still. I have finally become.