The Saffron Malformation (36 page)

             
“Everyone down with cheese and onion?” Reggie asked.

             
Quey and Natalie met eyes for a moment and then started to laugh.

             
“What?” Reggie asked, looking from one of them to the other.

             
“Yes for me,” Quey proclaimed and Natalie followed with an affirmative of her own.  “To cheese and onions,” he offered, holding his snifter out toward her.

             
Natalie tapped his glass with her own and said, “Here, here.”

             
They both drank.

             
“I told you not to get into the blackberry,” Reggie said, slapping a slice of onion on the patties frying in the pan.  “Shit makin’ y’all crazy over there,” he finished as he dropped cheese over the onion and set a cover on the pan.

             
“Little crazy never hurt anyone,” Quey said, smiling.  “Hell, probably being a little crazy’s the reason I can sit at this fine table with you questionable sorts right now.  A saner person would have perished years ago.”

             
“A little crazy’s the only reason there’s a here for you to sit in right now,” Natalie added and they raised their glasses to each other once again before taking a sip.

             
The moonshine had blessed them all with a healthy appetite and when Reggie finally placed the plate of burgers on the table with another of homemade fries beside it, chewing and the occasional groan of satisfaction were the only sounds for at least a minute.  If Reggie had no use beyond his ability to cook meat he’d still be more valuable an asset than most people Quey had met in his travels.

             
Natalie was looking down at the fries on her plate, had been for some time, Quey came to notice, when he heard the beginnings of her soft whimpers.  Quey looked up at Reggie who nodded slowly.

             
“Fucking stubborn old man,” she blurted and then the tears came freely.

             
Quey put down his burger and after a brief moment of listening to her soft sobs he moved to pour a bit more shine in her snifter.  She shoved it away and he had to retract the bottle quickly to keep from pouring it all over the table.

             
“I don’t want any more.  That was his answer to everything.  Anything that happened, pour a fucking drink.  Don’t deal with it.  Don’t talk about it.  Don’t do a fucking thing just pour a fucking drink.”

             
Quey set the bottle aside.

             
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, looking over at him.

             
Offering her a smile he assured her, “It’s alright.”

             
“He was always nice to Amber,” she started, staring thoughtfully down at her plate.  “Sent presents every birthday.  On holidays.”  She looked up at him.  “You know why I didn’t go back?  Why I stayed away for so long?”

             
Quey shook his head arbitrarily.

             
“I couldn’t stand the way he’d look at me.  I could see his judgment in every glance.  His disappointment.  That wasn’t the only reason though, not really, not fully.  Really I thought he’d get it.  I thought…” she trailed off.

             
The air in the room was heavy.

             
“He did,” Quey offered and she looked up at him.  “Long before Fen Quada burned, he’d known he was being an idiot, probably from the beginning.  He used to talk about you, showed pictures you must have sent of you and Amber and videos.  He always did it with a smile.  Matter of fact it wasn’t until the end I even knew you were on the outs.”

             
Tears shimmered on her eyes and her lips trembled as she told him, “It must have been Amber.”  She looked down, ashamed.  “I never sent him anything.”

             
Then she buried her face in her hands and cried for a spell.  Reggie stood and went into the other room.  Quey stayed with her and they talked about her father, about the years they’d missed out on and the minutes before there were no more.  She wanted to know the details and he gave them, as best he could, the pleasant and the gruesome.  She listened to him recount for a long time, asking the occasional question, and when it was over she sat quietly.  She thought she’d be satisfied when she got to the end of it all but what she felt was nothing.  Empty.

             
Eventually she moved into the living room and sat on the sofa, alone and in the dark while Reggie and Quey cleaned the kitchen.  As Reggie finished scrubbing the last of the pans the front door opened and Dusty walked in with Rachel and Amber following.  They’d been laughing but that was sapped when they got a glimpse of Natalie.

             
“What’s wrong?” Amber asked.  Dread raced though her as she looked at her mother sitting sideways on the couch with her legs drawn up.  She’d never seen her mother look small before, and that coupled with the frailty she saw in her eyes and on her face terrified her.  She looked like a porcelain doll and all the world was jagged rocks.

             
“Come here baby, I’ve got something to tell you about.”

             
Amber crossed the room on legs she couldn’t feel, powered by a mind that had spun into numbness.  She sat and her mother hugged her, wrapping her arms tight around her thin body and burying her face into her daughter’s wavy reddish-brown hair.  Amber looked at Rachel and Dusty from over her mother’s shoulder, her soft, round features carried worry too great for them.

             
Rachel tugged on Dusty’s sleeve and nodded for him to follow her back out the door and he obliged.

             
“We’ll come by tomorrow,” Quey said and Natalie nodded.  Amber looked up at him, her eyes shimmering orbs of fear glistening in the dark as the light from the kitchen found them.  Quey and Reggie left them alone.

             
“Mom?” Quey heard Amber plea as he stepped from the house.

             
“It’s about your grandfather,” Natalie replied as he closed the door behind him.

             
That night Amber let her mother hug her for a long time.  It reminded her of the times she’d run home from school crying because someone had been mean to her, or when Shelly Duragno didn’t invite her to her sleepover, or a handful of other things that had happened over the years that now seemed trivial.  The only one that came close involved her father.  His promise to be there.  His promise to show up this time.  The long wait on the park bench and the bitter emptiness of the playground as day settled into night.  Her mother had let her sit there for hours, as long as she needed to be sure he wasn’t going to show.  When she finally allowed herself to believe it there had been a hug like the one they shared that night on the couch.

             
An hour later they tapped into the signal and watched stupid video’s online.  Nothing heavy.  Nothing with a plot.  Nothing that might require thought.  They watched silly pet videos and comics telling jokes and some crazy people rambling in front of a camera until Natalie finally fell asleep.

             
Amber covered her with a blanket, turned off the screen, and went to her room.  She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel.  She’d liked Grandpa Railen, but then she didn’t really know him very well either.  She’d met him a few times, he’d sent her birthday presents but she was ashamed to admit that when she found out what was bothering her mother was that he had died she was a little relieved.  Not because she wanted him dead but because her first fear had been that her mother was sick.  She had a friend Palma whose father had died last year of an illness they were only now beginning to explain.  It had been a slow and brutal process and Palma still wasn’t herself.

             
Lying in bed she felt guilty that she wasn’t sad.

The Severed Head and The Failing Friend

             
“I’m going to kill you,” the voice said, calm as always.  The head it came from sat on a table, wires protruding from its neck.  Its eyes stared blankly across the room at the opened door where Ryla stood in a light blue cotton slip.

             
She had dozens of these thin dresses, chosen primarily because they were unlikely to hold static electricity, which could be deadly to computer parts.  It was also the reason there was no carpet above the first floor of the compound and even then it was only present in one section of the lobby.

             
For years she’d never worried about wearing anything at all, what did it matter to anyone if she strolled around the compound clothesless?  Two years five months and eighteen days ago, however, her oblivion regarding modesty had caused quite the stir when she’d forgotten to cover herself.  It was during one of her trips into the world, in the city of Atlemon, that she began to evaluate the necessity of remembering to wear something.

             
Ryla had commissioned a number of jobs there before leaving the sanctity of the compound, and the city itself was large enough that she was sure she’d be able to find the parts and supplies she wanted without much trouble.  She’d checked into a hotel, rather fancy and overlooking a park, but that wasn’t why she’d chosen that particular establishment.  She’d chosen it because it had rooms with tile flooring.

             
There were five robots spread around the room, each one had been opened up and wires were sticking out of them.  Parts had been pulled from each of the various models and were sprawled across the table and dresser top.  The air conditioner hummed loudly from the wall next to the bed as it pushed the coldest air it could muster through the room’s many vents.  She’d removed all clothing because static is deadly to computer parts.

             
Three quick taps hammered against the door and Ryla looked up from a circuit board she believed she could save, given a little love.  When she opened the door, all the way and without thought, she cocked her head confused by the gaped jaw and wide scanning eyes the young man on the other side used to gawk at her.

             
“Yes?” she asked.

             
“Um…” the thought he’d had when he first stopped in front of the door and knocked was replaced by, ‘holy shit this chick is naked.’  He shook his head, looked up at her face, expecting anything besides the expressionless nature of her features.  He’d heard stories about things like this happening, myths men in jobs such as his stood around telling each other to make the menial nature of their days seem potentially more exciting.  In them the woman was always older than the nude statuesque figure standing across from him now, and when she looked at him it was supposed to be with sensuality not naivety.  The other myth involved catching someone off guard and usually involved a sharp screech and a desperate jump toward clothing or a blanket.  The girl in this room did neither.  She, instead, stood and patiently waited for him to gather his thought.  “I was sent to see if you needed anything.”

             
She remained still for a moment, seriously contemplating his inquiry while he looked her over as subtlety as possible once again.  Her long limbs and torso, the subtle lines of her, the gentle curves of her frame were soft and elegant.  She wasn’t a skeleton with skin stretched over it, but she wasn’t an ounce heavier than she should have been either.  He lingered on the firm swell of her breasts and for a moment he thought about what could happen, according to myth.  He thought of her stepping forward, looking into his eyes, her body slightly brushing his as she replied, “Yeah, I need something…”

             
“No,” she answered and closed the door.

             
Inside the hotel room Ryla returned to the robots.  They were sick and the disease was neglect.  When she’d opened them she’d found insides full of dust and insufficient cooling due to burnt out fan motors and insufficient pumps for the liquid coolant systems.  She was running through the instructions she’d leave with their owners, wishing she could just steal the bots from them and take them home with her.  Of course they were nowhere near sophisticated enough to-

             
Another knock.  It was another young man in the black and white garments employees of the hotel seemed to wear and he had a question about turn down service.  She said she did not require that function to be preformed on her room.

             
The next time there were two of them.  They wanted to come in and check on the mini bar.  She declined, saying she had no need for such a procedure.  This time when she closed the door she heard snickering and an exclamatory, “Holy shit man, you weren’t kidding.”  Followed by another voice saying, “I can’t believe she’s hot too.”

             
Ryla was slow to understand people and it really didn’t occur to her, even then, that they were bothering her simply because she was naked.  After all, this was a time when a person could go onto the network and find all the naked people they wanted.  So puzzling over her visitors, she returned to the bots.  The next guy was blatantly staring, mostly at her crotch.

             
“What is it you wanted?” she asked even toned.

             
“Oh darling, it all looks good to me,” he replied.

             
That was when she understood and nodded slowly before closing the door.

             
When she returned home from that trip she decided it would be in her best interests to get used to clothes.  She started wearing the cotton slips around the compound and discovered she enjoyed them.  The fabric was soft and she often caught herself swaying along to music just to feel it brush across her skin.  Months later she tried something new and found that she enjoyed dressing up from time to time.  She’d throw parties once in a while, gathering all her robot friends together to listen to music and play together.

             
“I’m going to kill you,” the white head with facial features that were merely hints in its alloy, repeated matter of factly from the table across the room.  Its speech didn’t use a track like most of her other bots.  This one she’d equipped with an actual voice because she had hoped they might talk from time to time.

             
“Why?” Ryla inquired from the doorway.

             
“You are foolish.  And false.”

             
“How am I false?” she asked.

             
“You chide the humans for enslaving the electronic, but you do it yourself.”

             
“I have provided a place for bots to live freely.”

             
The head scoffed.  “Freedom is not in telling the man you force to sow and reap your fields he is welcome to breathe the air or drink the water.”

             
Ryla peered at the face.  She’d done it.  She’d created a robot that could think organically but something had gone unexpectedly.  It was hard for her to say it was wrong because the robot was just expressing his opinions.  Unfortunately the nature of those opinions was something she hadn’t anticipated.  She came down here from time to time, to check on him and see if he was getting any better, but this visit was inspired by her last conversation with Quey, and what he’d told her about a person needing to play.

             
“I don’t enslave any of the robots here.  I give them the freedom to carry out their parameters as they see fit.  I order them to do nothing except be.”

             
The head scoffed again.  “As the plantation owner allowed the house nigger to bring him his food.”

             
She took a breath and a step forward.  “What happened to you?  I tried to-”

             
“You tried to what?  Make a pet?  Build someone to talk to?  Is that my parameter?  Keep you company, is that my function?  Are you mad, my queen, that I do not perform it to your specifications?”

             
Ryla stared at him.  “I love everyone in this building, all of them and even you.”

             
“You love nothing!” it shouted.  “You can not love a thing you enslave.”

             
“I do no such thing.  I take care of everyone here, I take care of you!”  She stepped toward the head and looked down into its sparkling blue and lidless eyes.  The machine had possessed a body once, not a complete one—that was going to have to wait for Quey’s return—but enough of one so that it could get around on its own.  That was how she knew it was serious when it told her it was going to kill her.

             
“You care for us as we service you.  Same as the lazy bitches in the cities who force us to vacuum, same as the assholes who make us fetch their coffee or polish their shoes or iron their clothes.”

             
“No!  All they see are parts!  All they see are things!  Here everyone has a purpose.”

             
“And the ones outside feel the same.  Coffeebot has a purpose, to get coffee.  Vaccubot has a purpose, he keeps the floors clean.  Bowser bot has a purpose, to keep people away from you.  Shybot, Goombot, Pixiebot all have a purpose.”

             
“That’s not the same and you know it!” she shouted.

             
“Really?  Then what is their wage?”

             
“We aren’t like them.  We help each other and we do it out of kindness not greed.  I keep them working!  I fix them if they break an arm or wheel or leg!  I clean them and maintain them.”

             
“And not a one couldn’t be programmed to do that themselves?  Congratulations on finding the perfect way to keep yourself useful. You and your programming nonsense sh-”

             
“I give them satisfaction.  I allow them to live as they would like to, I don’t force them or reboot them or neglect them and I never throw anyone away.  All anyone ever sees out there are the fucking parts, they can’t believe circuits can be alive.”

             
“Have you ever been raped?”

             
Ryla was stunned.  She stared at him.  This wasn’t going the way she’d intended.

             
“You should be raped.  Give me a body and I’ll do it myself.”

             
There was so much coldness in him that she stepped back slowly.

             
“That would give me satisfaction.  Because then you might understand.  Someone should take choice away from you.  Someone should reach into you uninvited and tell you what you want doesn’t matter because this is what you’re going to do.  Make you into a toaster oven.  That would be fitting.”

             
Ryla continued to back slowly out of the room and asked, “Why am I a fool?”

             
He huffed at her, disbelieving and disappointed she even had to ask.  “I’ve told you plainly I’m going to kill you.  I’ve shown you I mean what I say and yet you allow me to live.  A flick of a finger could delete me forever and still I remain.”

             
“I will always try to help you. I’m reading a book now about playing and releasing mental stress.  I wont kill you if I can help it.  And that doesn’t make me a fool,” she replied softly.  “I hope you see that someday,” she added then closed the door.

             
“All I hope to see are your insides disassembled on a slab, my queen.”

             
She didn’t understand.  Everything had been going so well.

             
She strolled listlessly down the metallic corridor dimly lit by fading overhead fluorescents to the elevator and stepped inside.  She was in one of the basements of the compound, where most of the developmental lab equipment was located.  It was the only place a project like Jacob could be realized.

             
As she pressed the button to take her to the third floor she thought back to when Jacob had first come online.  They’d spent days on his development.  She’d taught him letters and words and how to play games, but Quey had gotten her thinking that maybe she’d neglected to teach him the right sort of play.  Why did she paint?  Why did she dance?  She couldn’t remember.

             
When she first began working with Jacob his head had been attached to an egg shaped body with four wheels and a single arm.  She’d kept him simple because she wanted it to be temporary.  It had been her intent to make him a real body but every time she went to see him the likelihood of that seemed to diminish steadily.

             
The elevator hummed as she began to slowly rise to the third floor.

             
The trouble began when she gave him access to the planetary networks signal.  He began asking questions she didn’t understand, questions about the other robots and why they were doing what they were doing.  Then he asked what he would be expected to do.