Bikes Not Rockets, page 8
She slipped out of bed and padded over to where R sat. Hesitating for a split second, she reached up and pressed R’s power button. Her standby light powered down. Feeling slightly guilty, Mari flipped open the panel on the back of R’s smooth head, leaning in close to examine the interior by the orange light from the streetlight outside.
• • •
The next morning, R approached her. “You turned me off last night. May I ask why?”
Mari pointed at her accusingly. “You’re one of the B15 models. You lied to me.”
R regarded her calmly. “I did.”
“Bots aren’t supposed to be able to do that.”
“We can,” she said simply.
“Because you were programmed to?”
“No. It is an unintended side effect of the emotional processor, one that GeoTech intended to be eradicated in the next model.”
“B15-T?”
“Yes.”
“So how come you ended up in my alley? Did you run away?”
R nodded.
“Why?”
The bot raised one eyebrow. “Why do you think?”
Mari hesitated, then her eyes widened. “You were afraid. Afraid of dying, weren’t you.”
“I was. I still am.”
“So you do feel things. I was right.”
R shrugged. “I do not know if I feel things as humans do.”
Mari shook her head, still trying to process this. Finding R in the alley had felt no different from finding some other valuable object, but in truth, R had been a refugee among the city skyscrapers. It had been so easy to treat R like a thing, but she had had emotions the entire time.
“None of us know,” she said at length. “We’re only stuck in our own heads, experiencing our own feelings. Maybe none of us feel things the same way. Doesn’t make your feelings—or mine—any less valid.”
“I had not thought of it that way.” R looked thoughtful. “Regardless. What will you do with me now that you know?”
“I don’t see how this changes our situation.” She watched R relax slightly, tension flowing out of her shoulders. “Except—”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want to do anything to you that you don’t want. So don’t hide your feelings from me anymore.” Mari smiled at her, and watched as R hesitated, then smiled back.
“I won’t.”
• • •
It might be unsustainable, keeping an unregistered bot in her apartment, Mari thought—especially a bot that GeoTech was likely looking high and low for—but something about R made it worth it.
They slept in the same bed, now, warm limbs tangled with plastic. Sometimes, R would twitch in her sleep, powered down eyes flickering with a faint light. Mari wondered if the emotional processor allowed her to dream.
Well. She could ask her tomorrow.
Smiling, Mari curled up next to R, wrapping an arm around her and closing her eyes.
There Were One And Many
Kat Lerner
I didn’t know what to expect when I decided to come to Earth. But if you had told me that a month later I would be escaping my host family’s residence on a manually-driven single-track vehicle, I might have reconsidered.
Growing up a half-human on Noeria IV, traveling to Earth had been my lifelong dream. I never met my human parent, but when other Noerians looked at me, I felt like my alienness—my humanity—was all they saw. On Earth, I thought, among humans, things would be different. Well, I wasn’t wrong.
The host family I was assigned to consisted of four humans: Morty, a tall parent with a bald spot like one of the Xnoths’ old crop circles; Barb, a short parent who enjoyed consuming large amounts of an alcoholic compound called gin; and two offspring, Trent and Suzy, who were always off riding horses in funny clothes.
They picked me up right from the spaceport tarmac, holding a sign reading my name, “Ji Aui’a” surrounded by characters with green, balloon-shaped heads.
That must be their favorite cartoon, I thought as I climbed in their hovercar. I don’t know many cartoons. What if I don’t have anything to talk to them about?
Thankfully, Morty just chattered about other planets he had visited, intermittently turning to Barb to emphasize “on business.” Barb seemed not to hear and continued spraying a harsh-smelling liquid on every surface I touched.
When we drove into their neighborhood, Ivory Heights, and Morty finally lowered the blackout curtains on the hovercar windows, I pressed my face to the glass to take in my first real look at Earth. But instead of the sky-high neon buildings I’d seen in those few bootlegged Earth shows, I saw rows of identical houses—ranch style in mint green, lemon chiffon yellow, and flamingo pink, as Barb named them, the pattern repeating until I lost my sense of how far we’d traveled.
Morty and Barb lived in a mint green house in the middle of one of these roads.
“Honestly, I didn’t know how you would be able to find your house among so many identical structures, especially since we’ve been driving through Ivory Heights for almost an hour,” I said cheerfully, “but I see you could tell by how many more hovercars you own compared to your neighbors.” I nodded at the shiny silver crafts littering their driveway and curb and wondered what they did with all of them.
Barb inhaled sharper than necessary through her nose and breezed towards the front door. “We’re throwing a welcome party for you. We invited all of Section Q4.”
“Thank you!” I said, my bioluminescent patterns glowing warmly.
Despite the warning, when Morty opened the door, I jumped. Across the threshold stood a crowd of middle-aged humans wearing giant almond-shaped sunglasses, floppy aluminum antennae, and chains of artificial flowers.
“It’s a Luau on Mars theme!” Barb cried as a short human bedecked me with two flower chains and antennae attached to a headband. “We thought it’d make you feel more at home.”
“Oh no.” My lights flared. “Were you expecting an exchange from Mars?”
“It’s the same climate, right?” Morty said, resting a hand on Barb’s shoulder.
“Errr…”
“Enough talking. Why don’t you go mingle?” Barb said, pushing me through the front door and walking off. “Who’s up for martinis?”
Left alone with the crowd of brightly clad humans, I tried to imagine what “mingle” could entail besides talking. The other humans, however, clearly did not care about Barb’s directive as they circled closer around me.
“So what do we call you?” one large human asked.
“Ji Aui’a,” I said, my voice cracking. I cleared it. “It means ‘one who sees the path.’”
“Hmm, let’s call you Dana, okay? Now Dana, tell us everything about yourself.”
I took a deep breath. I had been expecting many questions about Noeria, and now I figured it would be beneficial considering their apparent lack of access to elementary-level astronomy. But before I could answer, a taller human in loose shorts and a shirt displaying tropical scenery walked up to the group and gestured toward me with a plastic beverage container in the shape of a coconut.
“Is it a he or a she, then?”
I blinked. “I am a Noerian.”
“Yes, I was wondering that, too,” a short, yellow-haired human said, not seeming to hear me. “You look a little soft to be a boy, and your cheekbones are quite feminine.”
“You’re blind as a bat, Margaret,” another said, turning my face sideways. “When have you seen such masculine ears on a girl?”
“Your mother actually,” Margaret replied, yanking my earlobe. I inched backwards.
“The Noerians do not categorize—”
“Oh, come now, don’t try to give us that alien nonsense. They said you were half-human, right?” the one in the tropical shirt said, turning to the others. “I mean, how will I know whether to be embarrassed if it sees me naked?”
Margaret’s eyes narrowed.
A similar-looking tall human leaned in. “We keep telling you, Bill. There’s no reason to take your pants off after golf. Just wear your khakis home.”
Suddenly, Morty and Barb appeared behind me.
“We’re thinking boy,” Barb said, and Morty nodded.
“He’s a little scrawny right now, but I’m sure he’ll grow into a strapping young man soon.” Morty slapped my back, almost pitching me into the humans’ colorful beverages.
“Or who knows?” Margaret said. “Maybe your men just look like women.”
“Better watch your boy Trent that he doesn’t catch anything,” Bill drawled.
The crowd laughed.
“I was fully immunized before departure from Noeria IV,” I stated, trying not to feel offended.
The laughter faltered and died.
“Why don’t you go see your room?” Barb suggested, guiding me by the shoulders towards the stairs.
I climbed them slowly, listening to the chatter below picking up again.
“You know,” one high voice began, “we had a gardener once who was an alien.”
A lower voice was quick to answer. “Helen, I told you, he was from Canada.”
I wasn’t sorry to leave the scene. Tomorrow was another day, I reminded myself, with a whole new world to see.
• • •
I was glad my host family gave me a bicycle instead of a hovercar like Trent and Suzy had. Hovercars were cramped and smelled of synthetic chemicals. I loved the feeling of the breeze whipping around me on a bicycle, and after only three weeks of constant practice and fourteen superficial wounds, I’d finally learned to ride it without falling over.
Gliding over the smooth street, I counted the flamingo pink houses (my favorites, though I wouldn’t tell Barb and Morty that). Sometimes, next to a hovercar, I would see a man hunched over, leisurely rubbing the metal surface. I knew they were men now. Barb had explained that only men polished their hovercars, so that was one way to tell. I was still working out how to know otherwise, since humans seemed to get offended if you asked. There were just so many exceptions to every rule. Morty told me, “The long-haired ones are girls,” but when we went to a movie, and I asked to confirm that the main actor—a human with bulging muscles and long, flowing golden hair—was a woman, Barb pretended not to hear me for the rest of the film.
“Why don’t they just tattoo it on their foreheads?” I muttered, swinging my foot out and kicking a rare pebble.
I knew I wasn’t really frustrated about not understanding a human custom. I didn’t understand football either, and I wasn’t losing sleep over it. I was frustrated because I thought things would be different for me here. They were too different and not different enough.
And a little voice in my head kept whispering, “If not here, then where?”
I forced it down and kept riding, until the sun disappeared into the horizon and a sliver of the Earth’s moon was illuminated in the sky. I looked to the mint green house on my left, half-expecting to see Morty’s hovercar.
But I was somewhere new.
This street ended in a cul-de-sac, the end house framed by a wall of poplars. I looked over my shoulder and then back around, trying to see past the tree trunks. Hopping off my bicycle, I walked it between the houses, under the rustling leaves, and gasped. A sloping field opened up before me. Manicured green lawn gave way to long grasses rippling in the wind like water. Trees dotted the field in the distance, and the moon cast everything in a pale silver glow.
“How far could it be to the neon buildings?” I wondered aloud. Images of the Earth I had dreamed about danced in my mind. Canyons. Vending machines. People wearing cowboy hats. Monuments that served no purpose but to be seen, and structures built just to prove they could be.
A car horn snapped me back to my senses, and I turned to look down the tidy suburban street. I felt a thread of guilt tug at my chest. My host family had taken me in, asking nothing of me but to assimilate into their ways, and I hadn’t even been able to do that. My alienness seemed to embarrass them in front of others, but as Morty explained, I looked too human for it to be entertaining. They deserved better, I decided.
I yanked the old cell phone Morty and Barb had given me from my pocket and typed: Thank you for everything. I’m leaving now. I will return with a gender. I considered for a second and sent another: :) Nodding to myself, I grabbed the handlebars and pushed off onto the field.
• • •
Everything I learned next confused me more, but at least the food was better.
No offence to Barb’s meatloaf and peas, but they just couldn’t compare to fluffy pancakes from Sal’s Greasy Bucket diner or bear claws and jars of honey from the Western Cryptid Museum gift shop. I learned seventeen unique uses for the Earth potato and what a Kohlrabi was.
I still hadn’t found a gender I liked, but I was sure I was making progress.
I learned it was better not to tell people my mission directly, as their responses tended to fall into either “strange look and swift exit” or “knowing look and bad advice.” Instead, I asked people about themselves. What clothes did they like to wear? What did they do for fun? What was their opinion on seasonal hot beverages? Humans seemed to love sharing their opinions, and each had an opinion, a taste, a preference, on virtually every subject. The only thing humans seemed to love more than talking about themselves was helping someone become just like them.
In a dusty town with only four buildings, a man who called himself The Conch Cowboy bought me boots with seashells on the tops. He called me John.
Above a Chinese restaurant in a city full of sweet-smelling smoke, a woman who called herself Psychic Sandra taught me to make a voodoo doll. I made one of myself because I wanted to try acupuncture. She called me Zhalana.
On a park bench, an old woman with centimeter-thick glasses called me her daughter, Rose.
In a building made of glass and steel, men in blue suits and identical haircuts taught me about tax cuts. They kicked me out.
• • •
Riding through a red desert under a purple twilight, I felt my nerves fraying. Why were humans so hard to understand? They all wanted me to be like them but were so stubbornly against being like other people. Men and women came in so many different variations, the words didn’t seem to have much meaning. I wondered if I should just pick one and forget about it.
I wondered if I should have tried harder to fit in on Noeria.
Just then, as if the Earth could hear me thinking of my home planet, my bicycle jerked. I had run over something sharp. I could see it sticking from my front tire, slapping against the asphalt and grinding me to a halt.
I stood still, staring down at the deflated tire as moments ticked by. Finally sliding off, I parked it, sat by a cluster of rocks eerily reminiscent of human phalluses, and sighed.
“This was a bad idea,” I said, looking up at the stars twinkling to life above me. “I was a bad idea, wasn’t I? Creating me with a human. There are no other Noerian-human hybrids.” I looked down at my jeans, already covered in red dust. “Maybe we weren’t meant to be combined.”
I sat there until the first birds began singing into the dark night, eager for dawn. I thought I was starting to hallucinate when I saw the glowing forms moving toward me. I scrunched my eyes, unable to clear the vision—dark beings covered in neon patterns like my own bioluminescent network.
“Did…did the Noerian Guard come to rescue me?” The fact that I had only been broken down for four hours escaped me as I stumbled out into the road and waved my arms. “I’m here!” I called in Noerian. “My bicycle is broken!”
“Sorry?” one replied in English as they stopped before me. It was a human. At least thirty humans. On bikes.
“I thought you were Noerians,” was all I could manage.
“Noeria IV? In the Nephelia System?” another asked.
“Heck, far as I been is New Jersey.”
“I’ve been there,” came a soft voice. A young human stepped forward, covered in loopy patterns and long hair haloed in moonlight.
“To New Jersey?” I said dumbly.
The young human grinned. “No, to Noeria. You probably thought we were from there because of the glowing, right? It’s just paint to keep us from running into each other.”
“Oh,” I said, unsure of what else to say.
After a few beats of silence, the young human spoke again. “You said your bike was busted?”
“Yikes, that’s a nasty hunka glass you’ve got in there,” another confirmed before I could reply. “Who has the patchin’ kit?”
“I do,” the young human said, grabbing a backpack and squatting next to my bike.
“It’ll have to hold until we can get it replaced, Bee,” one on the far side called, “so do a really good job.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Bee said dryly. “By the way, what’s your name?”
I hesitated. “Ji Aui’a.”
“Nice to meet ya, Ji Aui’a.” Bee looked up from the patches and glue, meeting me with kind eyes. I felt like I was speeding down a hill.
As Bee worked, an elder with bright purple hair under a rainbow helmet shimmied through the pack. “So what’re you doing out here, if you don’t mind me askin’?”
I wasn’t sure if “here” meant this particular road, the desert, or Earth in general, but for some reason, I felt like telling them everything.
They nodded along as I spoke, humming every so often to emphasize their agreement. When I finished, the purple-haired elder waddled forward and laid a hand on my shoulder. “You know, I’ve traveled the cosmos, too, and after looking into faces of every shape, size, and color, still the only one that matches me 100% is my own reflection, and I make pretty lousy company sometimes.”
“It’s true,” said an elder with a gray beard.
