The Second Rebel, page 15
My father leans forward in his sinvaca leather chair, the creaking of the fabric as loud as a thunderclap in the otherwise silent room. “Make no mistake, Hiro,” he says, cold and soft, “it’s never too late to ensure what’s best for you.”
I shuddered back then, and I shudder now, as if time has lost all meaning. But at least it isn’t that day, the part of me in the present whispers. Even as I think it, the scene ripples like the surface of a pond disturbed by a stone.
“Interesting,” the Synthetic says, as if commenting on a scientific fact.
The office barely changes—the placement of his chair, perhaps, or the arrangement of papers on the desk. It’s the people who are different. I am younger, smaller, and my father’s hand is fisted in my hair as he wipes a wet cloth over my face, smudging makeup in an attempt to remove it. My skin stings when he pulls it away.
No, not this—anything but this memory—
Everything within me revolts. I don’t want to see this—I don’t want to live this again. But I’m afraid I’m the one who brought us here.
“How many times will we do this, Hiro?” He is large and looming to me at this age, and I do my best to square my shoulders instead of cower. I fail. “You’re old enough to know better.”
I wish I could call for Shinya or Asuka. For anyone to come and save me. But I know we’re alone save for the security guards who stand at the entrances to the townhouse. Inside, it’s only me and Father now.
“I just…” My voice is the squeak of a mouse.
Shut up, I tell myself. Don’t make it worse! But this is a memory, and no matter how hard I pull at the chains, I’m tethered to my past.
“You just, what, do whatever you feel?” He says the word like a curse, wadding up the makeup-smeared cloth and slamming it into the nearest recycler. “Every day it’s something new with you. I think I get you settled, and then I turn around and you’re back at it again. You’re not my only child, Hiro. Everything can’t be about you.”
My eyes begin to burn worse than my skin, and I bite my lip against the tears. “But this is me…”
“And last week when I bought you a thousand credits’ worth of boys’ clothes, it was you too.”
You’re right, I want to say. That was me, and this is me. I’m not two different people, just one who likes both things. But all I say, looking down at my floral-print dress, is “This is how I want to look today.”
Father sits behind his desk, as if that wooden barrier will save him from me. I can tell by the way he rubs a hand over his face that he’s exasperated. He normally treats his children like wayward employees; it’s only when he’s overwhelmed that we glimpse a parent.
“I’m not unsympathetic, Hiro.” His tone tells me that’s a lie. “You want to be a boy? You want to be a girl? I can get you the best geneassist on Cytherea. You can be whatever you want to be. You just have to choose.”
My heart feels like it’s fallen onto the floor. I want to sink with it.
“You’re about to enter the Academy, and people need to know they can rely on you, that you’re not a child. That you’re someone able to commit.” I look down at my feet as he lectures me. “Puberty is coming, Hiro, whether you like it or not.”
That word draws a lump into my throat I can’t swallow around. Puberty, that dreaded moment when my body will take control of itself. Neither of the options my father has presented to me feels right, and if I leave it up to biology, the outcome won’t be any better.
I don’t say anything, because I don’t know what to say.
He slams a fist on the table, and I jump with fear. “Choose, Hiro.”
But I am only ten years old, and I don’t know what to choose. Sometimes I feel like I am both a boy and a girl. Sometimes I feel like I am neither. And when I think of the Academy’s waiting uniform, charcoal gray and stiff, it feels like someone’s got a hand on my throat and they’re squeezing tighter and tighter.
“Now,” Father says, grabbing a sinvaca leather bag from behind his desk and tossing it at my feet, “go to your room and pack up whatever you don’t want.”
But… I want it all.
If only he believed me. If only he understood. If I don’t have those choices—the leggings and dresses and sharp-lapeled suits—I want to peel my skin off with my fingernails. I want to pluck the hair from my head, one strand at a time. I want to take a knife to this body and carve out pieces of me that don’t fit and pray to whoever’s listening at the family shrine that Mother comes home and saves me from this.
She would understand, I tell myself. She would get it. But another part of me, the one that remembers her telling me to be Father’s shadow, asks: Would she?
When Father speaks again, a spark catches in his eyes, the only thing that marks him as alive when the rest of his face is as smooth and featureless as the Noh masks at his back. “If you don’t choose,” he says, his voice deep and dark, “I’ll choose for you, Hiro.” The light flares like fox fire, burning blue and sinister. The masks seem to be laughing. “And you won’t like what I choose.”
Memories batter me like hail: the Fall of Ceres; Beron smirking down at me; looking in the mirror—not my body, not my fucking face—finding Saito Ren instead; and that desire I thought I’d left behind, the yearning to peel my skin off one layer at a time—
You won’t like what I choose, my father says.
I collapse to my knees and tremble. I am everywhere and nowhere at once.
“Stop,” I beg. “Please, stop…”
And then someone is there at my side, placing their hands on my shoulders. Tucking my hair behind my ears. Tipping my chin up.
The Synthetic looks at me with recognition. Not pity. But insight. The world around us is just a white room, devoid of painful memories.
“I understand,” she says, and then I wake up.
* * *
I OPEN MY eyes. The ceiling is unfamiliar. My heart still races from… whatever that was, nightmares or memories forcefully revisited…
“Hello,” the Synthetic says in that gentle, musical way of hers.
Then I remember: She was there. She saw it all.
I clench my eyes closed. Those specific memories… Did she choose them, or did I unintentionally guide her?
I still feel like I’m half-asleep. Still feel like she’s embracing me, and I’m crying out to be saved. I understand, she said, and somehow… I knew she did. Even now, I can feel her emotions crashing against me: her concern, but most of all, her love. And I don’t understand it—how Synthetics feel—but I know that they do, because I know she does.
“Can you move your arm for me?” the Synthetic asks, but before I can try, I look up to where she’s hunched over me and startle.
“Your head—” The silver prosthetic of her head is… open. Wires snake from the small panels down to my arm, connecting her to me. But the cables go deep into her flesh—if it is flesh—and pass into her skull. Into her brain, if she has one. No wonder I still feel her as strongly as I did in those memories. If my connection via the neural implant was like receiving raindrops of my partners’ emotions, this is like a torrential storm.
You’re already as much of a machine as I am, she had said, but that only raises a hundred more questions, and I can’t force my tongue to form a single one.
“Move your arm,” the Synthetic says, then after a moment adds, “Please.”
Because I don’t know what else to do, I oblige her. I hold my arm up, force my hand into a fist. The smoothness of the motion catches me off guard, and I bolt upright.
“Ah—please don’t jerk.”
I can barely hear her. I rotate my arm, flex, and circle my wrist. “Oh my gods…”
“Good?” she asks.
I can’t move far from her, so, tethered together, we stand from the mattress, and I put all my weight on my left leg.
“Nothing,” I gasp. “There’s nothing.”
No pain. No agony shooting into my shoulder and hip. No burning resentment from my overtaxed muscles and bundles of scars.
And… I can feel.
I collapse back on the bed, tears welling up and streaming down my face. I take the soft sheets in my prosthetic hand, let them slip through my fingers like the moon’s dust in my dream.
“How—” I suck in a deep breath, and it shakes in my lungs. I’m fighting the sobs, but the dam breaks when she puts her hand in mine, and I can feel it, so warm and soft and gentle.
She smiles, as if it’s that simple.
I collapse, weeping into my open hands, feeling my own tears, hot and wet.
* * *
AFTER THE SOBS hollow me out, the Synthetic removes her wires from me, tucks them back into her head, and closes off her prosthetic. She doesn’t rub my back or move to touch me in any other way, and for that I’m thankful. She brings me one of her energy drinks, and I accept because my throat feels like I swallowed sand.
“You can rest here as long as you need to,” she says. “I know it must be difficult…”
She has no idea how right she is. I’d fought the pain for so long with nothing to show for it. Then I’d accepted it, believing it would be my constant companion for the rest of my days, as consistent as my shadow. Sometimes I could almost forget about it, it came on so mild. But other days, I wanted to take to my bed and cry, though all I could do was keep on being Saito Ren.
No longer. I’m still missing my arm and leg, but from the pain… I’m free.
Then the doubt comes, the same anxiety that plagued me on the mild days. Yes, today you are free, but what about tomorrow? And the day after that?
“Will the pain come back? Will I lose my sensation of touch?” Just speaking the question gives my fear legs, and it runs away from me, fully formed.
“No,” she says, squashing the fear flat with her chunky-heeled boot. “Your sense of the way things feel, including pain, is from your mind interpreting an array of stimuli, all filtered through your neural implant. I simply adjusted the interaction between your prosthetics and your implant. Though… I did have to get a good sense of your brain’s layout first.”
“What are you?” I whisper, and somehow my question sounds tinged with holy awe. Maybe it is, after she performed this miracle.
“Synthetic,” she says with a giggle. “I thought you knew that.”
“I read the file Autarkeia has on you, but… Do you have a name? A nickname? Some way to individualize yourself from the others? How should I refer to you—she? They?”
She’s quiet as she thinks for a moment. “This body was once called Mara. You can call me that again if you’d like.”
“Okay, Mara.”
“And this one I think of as female,” she says, gesturing to herself, “but others… others are different. If you ever meet another, you can ask them their preference.”
“But wouldn’t it be like talking to you, just wearing a different face?”
“Yes and no,” she says, which only confuses me more; it’s difficult to wrap my head around the way Synthetics think of themselves if they’re both individuals and a unified being. “Some Synthetics still recall the time when we were separate and hold on to their old preferences.”
And if Mara has preferences from a time before the Synthetics joined as one, that means she’d existed since before the end of the Dead Century War. Thousand gods… How old is she? Three hundred years? Four?
We settle into the silence, though she breaks it by slurping down another energy drink.
“Is that shit what powers Synthetics?”
She looks at the can and laughs. “I just like the way it stings my tongue.”
“Thank you,” I blurt out, and her smile fades. “I don’t know how I can repay you… There’s nothing I can do for you that is equal to what you’ve done for me.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t say that. Value is subjective, and I wish I could’ve helped you more with how you feel when you look in the mirror.”
I swallow hard. “You said you understood me… that you understood that feeling of dysphoria.”
“Dysphoria?” she repeats, the word strange on her tongue. “The way you felt, it was… a new emotion for me. But I have felt something similar, and never expected to find it in a human.”
Though we’re no longer tethered together physically, somehow I still feel close enough to her to ask. “How so?”
She purses her lips as she thinks. “I have been in many bodies. Many forms. One in particular felt… wrong for me. Like I had been downloaded into a shell I didn’t quite fit.”
“I see.” Not that I’ve ever had multiple bodies… just this one, changed over and over. Still, the similarities are there. “I still want to find a way to repay you.”
She offers a little smile. “Then let’s just be friends?”
The question she poses is so soft and innocent. Sometimes she acts like a kid; other times she seems ancient.
“Yeah,” I say. “Friends.”
It hits me all at once that I’ve succeeded in my mission from Dire. I’ve not just found the Synthetic girl—Mara—I’ve made contact with her. And if I can turn the spark of this friendship into a flame, she’ll likely answer my questions about why she’s in Autarkeia without needing Dire’s strong-armed intervention.
“You said you needed help with the Icarii here.”
She turns back to me, dark eyes serious. “Yes. There are some strange things going on, but I’m afraid to become too involved with them.”
“Because of the Synthetic truce with humanity?”
“Yeah,” she says with a nod. “When this station was first built, it was called the Knight Orbital Center after Knight Robotics and used to build Synthetics for the battlefields of the Dead Century War. When we split from humanity, we brought this place—we called it the Engineborn Forge then—with us beyond the belt. Once we’d spread to Jupiter and had no more need of the factories, we left the station with the hopes that it would be useful to someone else. We didn’t mind when humans began using the Forge as a refuge for fleeing the Gean and Icarii war. We hoped humans would want peace and hate war, like we do. But because it is in gray space, Synthetics come here often, in one form or another, to check up on things. Still, no one’s ever shown an interest in us—in me, I mean…”
“Until now,” I surmise, and I have a sinking feeling that Dire wasn’t the first. “The Icarii came here for you.”
“I’m afraid so,” she admits. “And their interest in me has led to other interest in me.”
Like Dire’s and Hemlock’s.
“But what worries me is that the more the Icarii follow me, the more strange things I notice about their presence here…”
“Like what?”
She shakes her head. “I’ll just have to show you.”
“Okay,” I say, and fight the urge to drown her with questions. Instead, I focus on just one. “Can I ask you something?”
“You just did,” she says with a smile.
I shoot her a look I would my little sibling, stretching my lips thin and rolling my eyes. “Ha ha, very funny.”
“You can ask,” she says after a moment.
“You’re Synthetic, yeah? Or… part of the Synthetics. But you also have your own form and your own thoughts. Is there a part of you that’s them and a part of you that’s… you?”
“Oh.” Her face falls.
“Sorry if it’s an ignorant question. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s okay. It just might be… difficult to explain.”
She chews on her bottom lip as she struggles to find her words. I wait quietly, giving her all the time and space she needs.
“What I can tell you is that my brain is connected to the Synthetic consciousness,” she says, lacing her fingers together. “I’m a part of the whole, even if I’m an individual.”
“Are you acting on their commands, or…?”
That one she doesn’t answer; she just smiles.
“So the Icarii duelists. How do you want me to help you?”
The tension in her shoulders drops as I change the subject. I make a note to myself not to press her on too many Synthetic issues.
“Come see me this weekend—do you still use that word, ‘weekend’?—come see me Sunday. I’ll be here waiting for you, okay? I’ll show you where the Icarii are staying and some of the strange things I was talking about.”
“Sure,” I say casually, like I’m setting up a date. “See you in…” I count. “Five days.” I look around us at all the ramps and weird objects that I don’t understand in the least. “How do I get out of here?”
She chuckles, then points to one of the ramps. “That leads down to the wall. It’ll open up for you.”
The wall… will open for me. I decide it’s better not to ask, so I wave a final farewell, marveling at the fluidity of my prosthetic, and take the ramp downward.
“Goodbye, friend!” she calls after me, a smile illuminating her entire face.
At the end of the rather long but subtly inclined ramp and on what I assume is the ground floor since the giant donut is on this level, I approach the dome wall, looking for a door. But just as Mara said, the rusty panels peel back, creating a large enough gap for me to exit. I step out into the darkness of the city, and the wall grows back, one tiny square at a time.
“Fuck me…”
I don’t know where I am, just that I’m outside one of the Synthetic industrial domes with Autarkeia’s buildings haphazardly clustered nearby. Sharp rib-like structures arch overhead, embracing the metal dome that, despite looking dead, isn’t. How many other rusted factories are actually hiding Synthetics that secretly watch over Autarkeia?
I pick a direction and start walking. Once I’ve cleared my head, I’ll call Dire through the com-lenses and have him pick me up. I wonder what he’s going to want me to do now that I’ve successfully established contact with Mara. Will I be able to kill her, if that’s what he commands?
I don’t know. I don’t feel like I know anything after meeting her. The single thing that’s clear to me is that, even as I walk away from the dome, putting more space between me and Mara, I still feel her like she’s standing right next to me.
