Reset
by Katherine Westermann
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Vishal startled awake and laughed at us, calling us schoolgirls. We were all friends then. And even though she stopped coming to bed over twenty years ago and often gritted her teeth in frustration at my simple nature, I trusted her. She told me that all three of us would run away together and, foolish machine that I am, I believed her.
The incinerator roared with the methodical motions of two immense propellers. We stood on a metal platform between two rivers of garbage, and despite the terror in my chest, I looked down into the frothing fire. A fire designed to turn obsolete machines like me into ash. Even 200 feet above it, the heat hurt my skin, and made me fear for the babies growing inside me.
They had told me not to ask questions that night. Told me to trust them. But I was afraid. The glow from the incinerator lit Vishal’s tired, sagging features and his brow cast such heavy shadows that and I could not see his eyes. I could not read his heart, as I usually could. But Gina’s eyes, dark and cold as obsidian, reflected the fire. She burned with purpose, and her purpose terrified me.
“Why are we here?” I asked them, trying not to cry. My hugely pregnant belly ached, and I was sick with confusion.
“I am close to death...” He trailed off looking into the fire. “This is the only way they won’t reconstitute me,” he said. “I cannot face being cloned again.” He peered down into the glowing core.
They lied to me. Gina had told me we would run away, just the three of us, and live together in harmony with our planet. Gina, a cunning G3, knew what I wanted to hear. As a model A, how was I supposed to see through her lies?
“You won’t feel that way when you’re new,” I begged. “Throw away the diaries if you want to forget. Throw away that pain. Live again, with me. A blank slate.” I took his hand, gnarled with age, and kissed his fingertips.
Vishal was so happy when he was new. He was the mildest, happiest child, always laughing and making mischief. But he can’t remember his youth as I can, unclouded by grief and too much study.
I thought a G3, with her intelligence and versatility might bring him joy. But she made it worse. Gina can change her face, grow wings, program other machines, and understand all of Vishal’s sweeping plans, but she does not love as I love.
“Four lifetimes are enough,” said Vishal, kissing my forehead. “You have been my wife, my mother, my companion. I am threadbare. I can give you nothing more.”
“Time is imaginary. These plans you talk of... imaginary.”
Vishal looked away. Even in his darkest moment, he hated to see me sad. “I’m sorry, love,” he said, his voice barely audible above the roar of the fire below.
“There is more at play here than our feelings,” said Gina, grabbing my arm and drawing me away from him. She wore her skin pale, her hair dark and her body tall and lean. She folded and unfolded her huge bat wings. Wings that had flown us into the incinerator. Wings that could have flown us far away to safety.
“But why can’t he come with us? There is no reason... no reason for him to die.” I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell them that the children deserved a father, tell them that I could not survive without his hands and his voice to guide me, but tears choked out my words.
“All humans must die. Vishal does not want to live this journey with us. Besides how would we reconstitute him where we are going? How do you propose we take him with us? Shall we take him against his will? Besides, if they know he’s gone, destroyed beyond repair, they won’t come looking. We machines are far less valuable than a Council Member.”
As Gina spoke the light from the fire danced golden across her sharp features. Fierce and inscrutable, she was a machine who I would never understand.
Vishal stepped between us and took both my hands in his. He kissed my knuckles then turned my hands over and kissed my palms, whispering the name he gave me so many years ago.
“Eva, my Eva...” His white hair glowed in the light from the incinerator. The skin sagged around his amber eyes, his spine was bent, and his shoulders slumped in defeat. “I am done.”
And in that moment, I wished I could age, as he aged, wished I could feel the lessening, the crumbling apart of passion and slowly sate desire, as humans do. But I still yearned for him like a child. For me, every kiss was still a blessing, every word a revelation. “I am sorry to hurt you.”
“Then don’t,” I begged. “Stay alive.” He hesitated a moment, inspecting my soft white hands, fine and delicate in his grasp; hands he helped design, hands he was abandoning for the first time. “Stay,” I said again.
He opened his mouth to speak, but then the shadow of her wings fell across his face, and he pulled away from me.
“You know she cannot understand,” she said, her voice low and serious.
I grabbed Gina by the forearms. Had I not been so heavily pregnant I would have gone to my knees before her. “I need him. These children need him. Just, have him come with us. Just—”
“His soul cannot rest until this clone — this body — is burned away never to be cloned again. God—” she started.
But I cut her off. “God is love,” I yelled. “I’ve heard you say it!”
She sighed and shook her head at me, as if explaining to a child. “God is human love. Do you think what you feel for him is love?”
“What else?”
She held up a hand for silence, her eyes flashing yellow in anger. “You have no choice but to idolize this clone of Vishal. He is centralized in your neural net, you basically imprinted on him like a baby bird.”
I gripped her forearms and began to say something in my defense, to show her my feelings were real.
But she went on talking, ignoring me. “You cannot love. Love belongs to man.”
“Vishal is a man and, if he loves me, then... then... that’s divine.” I felt stupid trying, but I had to argue with her.
“No,” she said, clearly thinking she held all the answers. “If he loves you, it is idolatry. Idolatry of a machine he made. Humans were not meant to live in isolation, cloning themselves and sodomizing machines.”
Vishal put a hand on her shoulder quieting her. Looking me in the eye he said, “My soul needs rest.”
In two quick paces he was at the guard rail. He climbed the metal gingerly, his joints creaking, but his jaw was set, and he did not wince. I moved to follow him, but Gina grabbed me around the middle, her arms tight across my swollen belly.
“Would you kill those babies?” she asked me.
Vishal climbed to top of the rail and stood for a moment with his body stiff as a board, his arms outstretched.
“Look into the camera, make sure they recognize you,” called Gina.
And as he gazed up into the camera, he lost balance, and fear flashed across his features. His eyes bulged, reflecting the light from the incinerator, and his mouth fell open in an unuttered scream. In that moment, he did not want to die.
“Vishal,” I screamed, straining against Gina’s arms, but she held me fast, her bony arms digging into my womb. “Let me go, let me go!” I wailed, as he twisted on the rail, his arms flapping in circles. For a moment, I thought he would fall backwards onto the platform, where I could scoop him up, run my fingers through his soft white hair, and talk him out of this nonsense. But then his knees buckled, and he pitched forward. Writhing and screaming as he fell, he disappeared into the flames.
Aching, animal noise erupted from me, and I went slack in Gina’s arms. She caught me, and swept me up into her arms, as though I were a bride to be carried across the threshold.
“He didn’t need to die,” I wailed over and over, my face wet with tears.
Gina spread her immense, leathery wings, and we rose in a swirl of hot, dry air.
We flew up and up, out of a hatch in the top of the incinerator and into the cool spring night. She spread her wings and glided easily over the dark abandoned industrial park. Squat concrete buildings looked blurry in my vision. I closed my eyes, feeling the tears drip off my chin and pool on my milk-swollen breasts.
“He didn’t need to die.”
“This,” she said, touching my stomach, “this is how humans are supposed to achieve immortality.”
* * *
The babies. Gina cared for nothing but the babies. Ever since that evening three years ago when Vishal came home trembling and grinning with excitement and told us that he had cured the virus in a population of infected rats, Gina had spoken of nothing but repopulation.
G3s were deemed too clever for their own good, so the council forbade teaching the G series anything besides usable skills. But Vishal wanted someone to talk to, someone to scheme with. He let her read history, philosophy, even religious texts. They were same things he taught me, but for Gina the knowledge went deep into her circuitry. The words of dead humans became her mantra, and the beliefs of dead humans, her only purpose.
After reading the ancient books, she wore only her basic face, plain pale features, and straight black hair, for vanity was a weakness and she cared nothing of closeness or friendship. Rather than resting beside us at night, she stayed awake reading, researching, only powering down once a month for maintenance.
She grew reckless in her obsession with Vishal’s cure, which she called humanity’s one hope for redemption. She snuck through the city during all hours of the night, going places she didn’t belong, even listening in on council meetings.
“This is a moment in history even you may appreciate,” she told me, only weeks before Vishal’s death. “Come here.” She was crouched outside the forbidden room, the place where Vishal met with the illustrious 60, and she had cracked opened the control panel to reveal a mass of red, blue, and green wires, that appeared even more complex than my insides.
She had changed her body to its smallest size, about the proportions of a 12-year-old child, with androgynous features and short brown hair. “Humans,” she said rolling her eyes. “They think their security so advanced.” She reached into the mess of wires and clipped a green one in half. Pinching one of the severed ends between her thumb and forefinger, she bade me take her hand.
“Now grab the other end of the wire,” she whispered. The moment my fingers closed on the exposed wire, my vision flickered like a faulty florescent light, my stomach lurched, there was whirring in my ears, and then I was there, crouched next to Vishal’s imposing leather chair, still clutching Gina’s tiny impish hand with all my strength.
We appeared to be in an immense grey assembly room. Sixty chairs were arranged in a perfect circle, but the people sitting in them were slightly blurred. I could make out an impression of their features, and I saw them shifting and moving in their seats, but I couldn’t seem to focus my gaze on any one of them. The harder I looked at them, the more uncertain I became of their appearance.
Vishal’s voice rang out through the hazy assembly room, and I looked up to see his worn tired face, clear and beautiful as ever. “I have even had success in curing a primate.” He spoke slowly and deliberately, his voice ringing through the misty, grey silence. “I believe the next step is human trials.”
Copyright © 2022 by Katherine Westermann
