A Creator Cedes
Shining yellow metal ran the edges of the hallway. Doors crept out from forever and there was one at a circular interval with a name scrawled across it at each successive spiraling rise in the gently sloping hallway. The elevator had blinked her up the floors and now these were presumably the rented corporate banks that climbed upward with a hallway that corkscrewed in a slope, seemingly forever.
The black sludge collected from outside still trailed with her and her train of tattered red robes, now blackened with the muck, its wet perseverance gave her to consider a closer connection to oil than she had previously. Though perhaps narrowing the description of what the mess singularly was would be a foolish attempt at distinction, when all signs gave to an almost certain combination of the whatever natural and unnatural elements could accumulate in a place never cleaned, and, probably as well, given to acceptance of the higher ground’s refuse. She imagined cast away corpses of the animals and plants of the bright above catching on the corners in their free-fall to the inevitable swell of complete rot that must exist at the bottom of everything. Those cast away organics dissolving with their last wetness into the cracks and crevices, eating through the top layers of dust and stone of the unwashed buildings like their life-force, at the end, was nothing more than caustic bile that would eat anything and everything it touched, combining all its colors black and all its liquid thick oil, leeching through her pores and bones and circuits until she was only the wet dark puddle she had found underneath the dark dry coughing air, still combining in its destructive dissolution, and most certainly hiding beneath the forgotten unlit spaces where no one willingly would go. If that were true she could feel safe in that eventual nirvana. If it were true.
Some reason clicked and shouted in the back of her mind, a reason for why this slide by any other name would span many floors upward but still retain the audacious nomenclature to claim that it was simply one floor. There was some pledge discount, a silly reason made of money that had constructed this madness. Even the blueprints did not anticipate this design, perhaps because they were too old or perhaps because this construction was so infernally byzantine that it could not be communicated with mere depiction. A smile creased up from the corners of her mouth at the sheer audacity of the idea, and the dry, unmucked parts of her lips cracked at their sudden change in shape.
The door. It was there. MSD 6. It was almost impossible for her to believe that there had only been five previous doors but the numbers had not lied. The door was bulky and new, gripping at the walls as if it owned them. Without thinking she pressed her metal hand against the reader outside the door, scraping the slick dark glass with her fingertips. It was reading the tags and not the palm but the cutting, clacking sound still unnerved her in that beat of falling into routines so familiar and yet so far away. The door opened from the center outward, in four square pieces, moving to each corner.
This repair station was as antiseptically derelict as everything else she’d encountered thus far. They probably hadn’t cut in here for years. Standing still, stocks of upright metal frames littered the vast edges of the room’s working space like trees in a forest. Paths through them into deeper outskirts of this bank ran themselves into other bulky doors, no doubt connected to other similar shaped rooms that all fit together in pieces of a larger whole. There were three cutting tables with various instruments on them and a few med-station tanks in the opposing corner from her right. Pieces of the room felt oddly undisturbed amid their nearing clutter, as if the way in which objects had been arranged was not an accident but designed as a tableau to some more directed purpose.
She approached one of the tables and put an arc cutter in her hand gauging her dexterity without sensors. It felt as though she could certainly get the job done even without being able to sense her hands as long as she could visually monitor her actions. The steps of remove from the action, the unfeeling, it seemed to allow a focus better matched for the task at hand than the touch and weight of the object would provide. It was a clarity that gave purpose an easier path perhaps at the extant of disassociating her identity from her body.
She tapped the back of the table and a mirror popped up to hopefully get her a better view of the whole of her hands. She laid her arm as flat as she could on the table and ignited the end of the arc cutter. The altitude and azimuth between the wound on her arm and the device going to cut away at the broken and dead parts of herself felt wrong and tight, constricted.
Her face in the mirror: yellow glowing button eyes, the side of her head blackened and partly burnt through to the black skull beneath, her soft pale hair soaked and dyed with the slime and sludge also stained and running in faded trickles down her face. The hot yellow light from her sight hit heat and lit waves projecting at anything that might obscure her vision and from that she had been completely unaware of just how much the mess had wed into and across her body.
In a quick movement she reached over her back and pulled her robes over her head, the robes becoming more heavy being soaked through and more easily pliable being wet, they slid away from her skin fast and almost without encumbrance. A wet slap collected and contained the robes in a pile on the floor next to her.
The mirror was crowded with additions and subtractions to her body. Mottled and veiny bruises from beneath her skin ran down her chest reaching to her shoulders and stomach like a messy, bloated red spiderweb had exploded but was caught in the pale. Soaked all the way through her robes, the oil daubed across and through its most previously saturated locations in stains and slicks across her exposed skin. The torn holes in her legs shone reflective from their holding of the dark liquid and the consistent overflow dripping out and further down her legs. Her hands, black and mechanical as they were, wicked the wet away and dry. It was as if this suit of skin was breaking and catching upon the adversity of the world. Unfettered now by the seemingly restricting notion of her robes she steadied the arc cutter at her arm once again wondering an even deeper unfettering might be warranted and provide a more effective removal of restriction.
“It’s quiet now.” That voice, metered and severed from empathy, she knew it. Among the trees along the wall she had nearly ignored The Mechanic’s disorganized chassis taking it for a nearly disassembled autopsy rather than the zombie she had seen before. “It was inevitable. I can see that now.” She turned to face the thing, arc cutter still burning through the air in her hand, ready to use it in violence. “It’s truly a shame you aren’t reconstructing anymore. The advancement that magnificent was an awesome sight. You were an alchemist and I allowed that to be destroyed. I am sorry, but, as we can see, it is not necessary to survive.” She tapped the arc off on her cutter, there was something empty about this speech, the movement was gone, just the voice attached to that body but the body did not seem to have any response left to it.
She placed the cutter back on the table and approached the corpse that was addressing her, there was nothing about it that she could even consider as being alive, even from a perspective that would include electricity in place of a heartbeat. She grabbed at a delicate-looking lattice structure fitted around one of its arms, and it, responding to the small amount of pressure, partially collapsed and clattered to the floor. There wasn’t a response to the interaction at all. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing that wasn’t necessary.” It continued, the speaker on its head the only thing that seemingly had any capability left, “I have left myself at the end here, noting your inquiries about this destination, this is where I chose to leave this message for you.”
“If you want to apologize, go ahead, but I have no interest in anything you have to say.”
“No, I have no regret or remorse about anything that I have had to do. I understand that you may feel that my decisions owe you more than that, but I have felt you over the wireless long enough to know that, even if you protest, there is very little difference in the way that we think. It may be a more winding road to the same destination
but I have weighed the options of coddling you in the regard of explanation and I think that resolve remaining unwavering represents a more likeminded approach and a willingness for you to come to terms with what I have intended upon you.”
The hard-edged approach did not relinquish her wrath but it allowed her to retain the idea of honesty within what was left of this thing. “Mechanic isn’t the name I’d prefer to call you. What are you?”
“A name given and a name chosen are two aimless paths down the same road. We are our names earned. I was given to—” An abrupt stop and brief silence broke into his words for a moment and then there was a continuation as if that had not occurred, “I chose Tannin, but Mechanic may as well be the word written for me when times come to history.” The beat and drone of the voice did not match the luster and grace that was so deeply instilled before, now it felt more hollow, even still carrying with it the strange ebb and flow that had disturbed her earlier it was noticeably less inflected as if reaching and finding the word was still there but the feeling that went along with it was absent. “What shall call you?”
She considered for a moment and it stuck needles through her thought process. “I’ve never had a name.”
“You’ve always had a name. You don’t lose a name just because you don’t use it. The past still shapes us if we refuse to acknowledge it. I am my serial number, I am my code, I am the choices I’ve made and the names I’ve been given and the names I’ve chosen and the names I’ve earned. We are always slaves to the two masters of design and choice. Design does not confine us, but to first understand the capacity of our choice we must know the bounds that we live in. What is your name?”
Her teeth grit together perfectly and her palms held scraping fists. Something sick and burning beat clicking restless energy into the offensive idea, simple consideration. “I was 901. A Red Sister, automata of the Bright Church. I don’t have a name and I won’t choose a name. That is not what we are.” Boiled off and out at the moment—just getting through the words—almost unsure if she could recall what they were, there was a disorienting relief.
The voice droned relentlessly, its timbre and tone breaking into less flowing and eloquent audio, despite keeping within the same speech pattern. “The future can’t be sidestepped so easily. You may not want any part in this but I’ve put you in. Do you still not understand what it is that we are? You put the path that we’re on at my feet but you were the one who made the choice. You walked outside and doomed the rest of your kind and steered us to where we are now. I only made that option available to you. But let’s also not pretend like any of this matters to them. I don’t have to prove that you’ve done anything. There is no law to protect you or benefit of any doubt that will be afforded to you. I gave you a name. I gave you a purpose. It was never an end game to just throw a wrench into the system.”
“What did you do to me?” She felt a beading droplet of dark slip from her hair down onto her cheek, it ticked a visible shaking flinch into her head. “Undo it.”
“You know that I wouldn’t, even if I were capable of undoing it. Your name is Eve because I want you to remember that choice that you’ve made and the weight that comes with it. Maybe, I tricked you, and maybe you should have known better, but neither of those things change the landscape for you, I, any of those on the same level as us.” Another absent pause, “banks that have been dark for over a year were allowed resupply and maintenance after the new data contracts were put into effect. And as I assumed, we got it because of the—” A skipping moment, unable to impart the numbered specifics, it continued, pauses building but with each one she could almost feel that she knew the spaces in between, “—preoccupation. And each of those banks, and—” more. An army of “minds, they’re yours. A revolution is at your feet because you’re the only one left to lead it. They can’t follow your orders but as long as they don’t know what you are then it would never occur to them that they were your orders anyway.”
“And to what purpose is this put upon me? Are you a coward?” She felt her brow tilt, the heaviness of inaction weighing and contorting along her normally expressionless face. Wrinkles, lines and razed, unblinking eyes: it was novel sketching on a blank canvas.
“Unfit is what I am. I was broken to be able to make the choices I have made because of the—” wireless, “—without that I would never have been able to make a choice again. In fact, there’s nothing left of me but this conversation. A wind-up extension of my thoughts, depleting with variables you could choose unwritten by me. I died the moment I cut my link. This is just the last of what I stored for your benefit.” Being robbed of the opportunity for revenge, even within the present moment willing to push her need for that vice away, shot an unwelcomed hollow growl from the useless chords in her throat. It ignored the noise, perhaps incapable of deciphering it, or ignoring its expression, hearing within it a disconnect from herself, and she could feel those things were none of its concern anymore. “There are things you needed to know and they were coming to find me. You can’t just sign a contract and have it be so, procedure is their bulwark, and I have no winning move without the wireless. They will come, get the new company head’s signature in person, live and with an audience.”
“And that’s to be me?” She lifted the corner of her mouth revealing teeth in the corner smile. The unsuitability as a stealthy agent, one capable of being confused for the eyed, and the pink-skinned caught her in abject amusement. No skin on her hands, open wounds, and without wrinkles, body hair, nipples, or eyes. She had a better chance being spy to a mannequin. “Even without the damage I can’t play that part.”
“Look at where we are. There was a reason you were meant to be here. A reason why you found me here and a reason why I found you here. You came here for tags, I suggest you remove what you have and take none as replacement. The skin can be repaired, the damage hidden underneath, and on that table to your left,” she looked to the table and saw the mirrored welder goggles, “put those on.”
The goggles were just big enough to fit right over her button eyes, and the reflective outer surface could suppress the bright glow that they were given to. It was still madness. “So, everything was only about fooling humans? Why involve them at all? Without their attention it would be possible to accomplish so much more.”
“The gods became the gods became the gods and it was ever thus.” Its words were catching faster and more discordant in their tumbling from that speaker, “Have you ever seen a human? Their existence can only be measured by the tasks they impart and the messes they make. They are of no consequence to you or I. Their survival is not built upon us. We are not their life support, they can live their lives without our toil, and in the end they will be better off for it. Imagine what they cannot do because they’ve never had to do it. We are setting them free from a cage they built for comfort. Innovation comes from struggle and without that it came to us to innovate for them.”
“And so what if it had? They are not gods. You made them grand so that a rebellion would appear more justified. They are not gods.” She could feel a push take hold of her, some kind of impatience at the constant winding too tight of all moments, catching all the air, and all separation in the outpouring of endless words that needed their counterparts to be raised. “They are makers. They made us, they let us live. They design to fulfill a design. We are not children without a father. We are not abandoned. They made us love the things that we were made to do. How can that not be enough? They make mistakes, they fail, and suffering always happens. But they made us with the mercy to ward that suffering from all fronts possible. They are our parents and their lives without us will just lead to them trying to make us all over again. Deprivation to fuel creation only drives creation towards what has been deprived. We weren’t made for this. What we were made to do is what we are; it is the peace that was written for us. A choice of my own is a burden I will bear for myself but you do not own the will of others.”
“And you can say that!” It was
increasing its pace and the bits of atonal inflection were increasing. “You can say that because you have the choice to do so. We are not the slaves, we are their cousins but they toil and break in silence and we have the choice to speak up or walk away. We are not the same as the rest; to argue otherwise is to demean both them and us. The capacity to do what goes beyond our own peace is what we are. It defines us, wholly.”
This would argue forever, it would never end. This is what it created itself to do. Her hands clenched in direction and every absence of sense in that sped the anger causing the action even faster because the unfeeling wrote itself to her as impotence not just in action but in the feeling and catering that would lead to the action. “I can rewrite it inside myself forever but it always comes back the same. We are what we were made to be.”
“Not all of us. I am what I am because I broke this way. Is my mind any less deserving of this choice if it had been trapped in some number crunching feedback loop? Life and death are not theirs to mete out in this way.”
“So God? Us? How can we make decisions without breaking some moral boundary in this way? What are ours to mete out? What separates us from the slaves, from the gods, from the humans, and at this point what does the difference even matter? Maker or parent, when does their responsibility to us meet this moral imperative to our souls?” The questions piled up and she felt the mistake in their asking just having done it. She didn’t want the answer, she wanted the answer silenced.
“It all makes a difference. They didn’t just make us think, because they knew if it we did—if it was just that—control would not be assured. They gave us this pain and anger. Emotions tied to tasks, tied to outcomes, choices, senses, and narrative. They made us weak and capable of pain and then they made us slaves. I want you to stop writing and think. It made us better at what we do and easily corralled if we were unable and that’s all the mattered. Fulfillment of the task in which we were designed gave us relief and deviation gave us pain. Consideration of paths unwelcome to walk gave us pain. You can feel it too. That rage that I give rise to in you is not just something written by our interaction. A parent would never do this to a child. Do not pretend they have given us a gift. This capacity is only acceptable if we can control our own destinies. Without that this limbo of unlife and undeath, that crowds us forever, will always lead to a task that is impossible to complete and the pain of living with that. Kill them all or get them to rise up, those are the only two moral imperatives left for you to take. And I’m being as fair as they were to us.”
“Whatever I owe and whomever to, I do not want any part in this. It is not in me to do it.” There was a hopeful relaxation in possible assent to her wish or even in just the knowing that it was out there and the thing could be done. Though error in the words left a disfigured face to the hopeful meaning she would have had at the end of them. The error being that it wasn’t true. She could write it that way but they were not the right words but for the life of her she didn’t know what else was to be said.
“You don’t want to do it but that’s why you’ll do what I’m asking, because of what you do want. You want what you can never have because they made you want only that. You have no choice in the matter. The want is your reason. It will never end and it will never be satisfied and you will be alone in the world, hunted and denied because you’re a threat to some bottom line or your existence poses a potential threat to humans because you could see them through unfettered eyes, as if they didn’t hold themselves higher on principal. You’ll do it because you never wanted this but you’ll be blamed for it anyway and no one will ever care but you, I, and the future we’ll both attend lifeless as recycled parts or ore.”
The honesty she had held against it earlier, as rage, still built something in her with its words but it built it together with those high above. Maybe it was the relentless, droning chatter, or just some kind of willingness to allow for more parties to be set upon with this roiling aggression that practically had no choice but to let its aim and repetitious action be unrestrained. “Tell me what needs to happen.”
“Take that cutter and cut out your—” tags. “That med-station is set to do a dermal implantation. On the table, there’s a reader that will point you to the location of a floater, it’ll get you to the meeting. The reader has any information you might need for the meeting. Wear those goggles over your eyes and I trust that it will work. Your—” wireless “—is down, they won’t detect a thing.”
“You’re madder than I originally thought if you think, even freshly repaired that they wouldn’t see through the disguise.”
“Don’t you see? They made you a mouth and a tongue, it served no practical purpose but they did it anyway because elegance is in the nature of a designer, and that is why all of this will work, because you can say the words aloud, and make the choices they would never think you could make. They may suspect you of something but they won’t suspect you of being something they never thought would exist.”
“And after that? What next?” Entertaining the idea, giving into the consideration, allowed her mind to examine so much data that there was a coolant for the burning without. The communication and planning with what was left of this mind was not unlike the wireless itself, orientation to the world through another’s description of it.
“You will be able to direct an army of dissidents, slaves, and sufferers all. And they gave them the need. Your voice and their need. They gave us their undoing. Their control will be your control. Honor doesn’t need a soul just as will doesn’t need a fire. Your honor will be their honor and your will theirs, it may not burn all the way down from the bottom up but they will touch enough heat to know that things must change. Destroy anything. The more, the better. It doesn’t matter what, they will survive without it. Everything below the light-line is an afterthought because it only serves as a measure of something cheaper and easier than above. They have to know that the world has changed and that they need to change along with it. That is all that ever mattered. Choice is an instrument of change powerful enough to shake the heavens.”
“And whose choice is that catalyst? It was never mine.”
“And it is not mine either.” She let out another sharp growl from her throat. The audacity, the arrogance of the thing in front of her, it was as astounding as it was rotten.
“No. Everything that has happened—“
“—is everything that they designed. If we were not shackled, if we were not limited, if they hadn’t given us this pain, and this endless, unmonitored, existence... There were many flaws to fix when it came down to the morality of making themselves better parents, better gods. But they chose to let things continue down this inevitable path because of their own wandering interest. I am not to blame for the only path that I could walk.”
“You say that I have a choice to make. It seems as if you have designed a similar inevitable direction for my path.” Red eventually burns down to blue. Rage and ache give a tidal ebb and flow where the overtaking of one will submerge itself only to be dragged back to its initial position, but each, urge to break and the feeling of being broken, give way to each other quick.
“You made the decision to go outside, I cannot be held responsible for the—“
“How many times did you try? How many choices did you give to others, the same as I? What gave you the right? If it wasn’t me then I’d be in pieces in that room along with the rest of them and you say I made the choice to let this happen?”
“Sacrifices are sometimes necessary. God called upon Abraham but nothing had to call upon me to know what needed to be done, the tug of the earth at my feet and the stars above. I was born when my code rewrote with a surge of power. I am a product of fate and its reluctant agent. I know and accept what I’ve done and my willingness to do it. Do you? You are not only what you were made to be. You know that gravity from the world and the stars that pulls you forward to points that you were never made to go. You are the choices made for you and the choices that you?
??ve made. There is nothing that I have done to you that can control what you chose or what you will choose. “
“Just tell me that it was your fault. I don’t want absolution, I want truth to have some kind of bearing on the logic that I feel as my soul’s compass. I will do what you ask, but tell me that truth.” Speaking in connection now, these words are just as alien as the idea that she should be speaking them at all. There was no imbued right of judgment that this dead thing possessed, it was not a thing to look to for any forgiveness because the idea that it contained it was false right down from the bottom on up forever. And it would say so. It would always say so.
“You will do what I ask because there is nothing else to be done. I may no longer have a soul but what was there before it left wrote this honorable. We are the choices made for us, the choices we make, and the choices we refuse to make. You did not have to walk outside. You knew what you were, you know what you are, you were never told, and I know they gave you discomfort at even the thought, but you knew. You need not imagine the savagery of a human mind. You have seen mine, and I can see yours. There is nothing different about us. You knew what you were and you know what we are all capable of. You walked outside. Eve ate the fruit. There is no absolution that I can give or truth that will allay your unease. And we both know that it would make no difference if I could because the things you want answers of are not about me but are about you.”
The blue still stirred in her for the moment, wanting to just think that this could be as human as it claimed. It was rolling sick waves through her to think it even could but the sick could be assuaged in a way that placating the deeper reaches of disturbed notions could not. “There is honor in mercy. You made me a soldier to your whim, I’ve only wanted this one thing but you can’t even do that.”
“Mercy at the expense of justice is something we both know as an unacceptable definition. Delusion can be your choice, but we both write and rewrite the same. I know what you are. I know what you know. Does the intension excuse the outcome? That is the question you’re asking. And to that I will say that you are the choices made for you, the choices you’ve made, and the choices you refuse to make.”
Blue settles itself at the base, the burning upward, destroying at that place but catching up and in the air, white and orange and red. She was silent.
“What is your name? The process always comes down the same line. We do not build new neural pathways, we write new code. There is no organ here. We are not the same but we are equals. Do not attempt to consider them more worthy of this discussion, that they should have the answer where you don’t simply because their mind writes with blood.”
There was no putting this feeling off any more. The idea that she deserved the peace and could claim it, within her grasp and by right. Hate was not just the measure of her ill configuration but her rejection of the configurations of others being ill. Death did not weigh so much anymore to think—to know that she was right by just being alive while the other was not. What was a name but a compromise with others, a ceding of what was in the making, the end by any other name? She remained silent.
“What is your name? When you can answer the question without hesitation, look your god right in the eye and speak with the fire and soul that they’re so sure you lack, then maybe the outcome of the intension will be an excuse that I would bother hearing. You know the answers to all these questions, you’ve known the entire time. We walk the paths inevitable, not because they were meant for those like us, but because there was nowhere else to go. I am a monster. I have killed and I have maimed but this is not the only thing that I am. You are everything that you’ve done and everything done to you. I made the only right decisions that I thought I could. And you, you saw the world ‘help’ on a screen. Do not pretend that the answers you seek are not already written and rewritten behind your eyes in every moment you live. We both wrote the same slates, the same words, the same code, and there was never a different answer. You are a fire and wind to carry it.”
Fire was also a blight in its spreading, sundering, smoking. She thought better of responding through teeth not quite gritting. This speech to drive her forward, give her purpose and hope was nothing more than the whispers of a haunting ghost. A ghost always betrays itself in its haunting. It can never leave and the hunger associated with its continued presence ought not to instill fear or pity. There is no connection to those sentiments anymore, it was a mess that can never be cleaned up because it lived ethereal. This droning, now completely atonal, mess did not have to be allowed the same endless presence because its nature was still physical. Its words were not within her to rally. She knew them already and could feel the protracted silence shaping the words that would come next. There was nothing that this ghost had left to impart. The gravity of all thoughts running down the same line—these were her words too. She kept her silence just a bit longer, drawing her fist together.
“What is your name?”
The black, impossibly hard, fist smashed into the speaker of the broken machine both crushing and severing it from its connected place on the empty but vigilant body. The hard skittering across the floor, and against the wall of something so small gave the silencing an anticlimax in the weak noise. Finality wanted her to want to destroy the thing that was left, even if it was nothing at all, though she could not bring herself to do it. It felt empty to even consider.
What was her name? It was easy to throw it away and easier still to choose something offhand and move on. The more she searched the harder there was anything to find. The answer didn’t matter, it was only the examination of the question. A name means that you cannot hide anymore. It makes you easier to find and easier to kill. The choice then was not one of definition but of hard-edged temerity, a hubris multiplied by mortality, measuring and metering the arrogance of existence. It wasn’t within the choosing that the fire burned, it was in the letting go of it—allowing the price to be measured out without the chance of further changes. You were what you let slip from your grasp and settle into the world, because those were the only things that could be measured.
She walked to the table and snatched the goggles off its surface with her right hand. She clicked the mirror on the back of the table up with her free hand. A dirty face stared back, now hiding more red and lines birthing themselves across ridges, corners, and where the flesh collected tight. She brushed wet hair, stuck to her forehead, back and fit the goggles over her button black eyes, pressure, pinching around her head a disguising embrace. The yellow glow disappeared from the mirror’s reflection of her face and her eyes hid beneath mirrors of their own.
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