They will never unsheathe you again.
It's a near thing: your body itself rebels, coming apart in red ribbons as they tear it free from the interface. While you waited for exfil you stared up the borehole to Heaven, all the frost-glittering stars in disarray. Miniscule spars of light pierced even. For a while you were entranced by their epicycles. What did they know of joy or terror? Faraway wreaths of fire, peering with lidless eyes, casting their constellar funeral-bier over you.
But then a yellowjacketed hand stinking of latex jostles them out of view. It shows you a sea of rusted amniotic fluid, the maimed walls of the nucleic chamber, and you stapled to one side. The fingers belong to a secondskinned body that hacks you free of your harness. Others surround it, babbling Babelian words. They have come to save you.
That’s wrong. In the silence you will follow your sister. These men (behind the polygonal onyx-eyed masks they must be men, faces cast in pity or disgust!) — have forgotten this. Hatchetmen against fate. The only resistance you can muster is a twitch that shivers down your spine, little branches of spasmodic motion wracking your limbs. Even your voice has died. This place is full of ghosts.
You come apart silently, away from her body, while your hoarse whispers echo into the sonorous frame. Nothing answers. The last cable unwinds, leaving you alone, spent in the spent shell of your companion. A bulletcasing girl.
Stripped of your useful parts, one hazmatted mechanist slings the excess you over his shoulder. Then something seizes hold of him, and you are both sent flying askew. The floor flexes out from rigor mortis, restored to life. Then it falls still; the cleanup crew sigh in relief.
Eventually you gather enough strength to hear their words, and answer: take me home.
As you leave — doesn’t the wiring still crackle with phantom voltage — isn’t there a tremor, here, in the back of your teeth, doubled and redoubled through rubber and bone for you? A long goodbye?
See you later.
In dying spring she’ll take you through grim April showers, where in the parks the last robins pantomime preanthropocene song (little rubies speckling sparse linden in early morning), past the Pariserplatz and the gate of the dead — the names should stick in your mind — where the men stand sentry (for you, for you, she says, giggling) by the rustling new trams, and in the square, crimson-crowned by the rosy dawn, your rain-dappled sword is thrust into the earth among the crowd.
A modern triumph. You wish it felt like it was still yours.
It takes you a day to wake up. Fourteen hours of surgery, Riya says, overalls still dripping with you. You ask where Intentions is, because it’s customary, and she gives the customary answer. She wants you to cry. The juxtaposition between your weakness under her knife and your sheer unyielding face has maddened her for as long as she has known you. In her mind even past vulnerabilities were only given up for politeness’ sake but if you break down here, now, it’ll be real; your mirror-shell fissuring to reveal unblemished skin.
But you say: “Alright.”
She moves on hurriedly, not dwelling on your reaction. But she’s still worried about you, you can feel it pupating into a future intervention. Shouldn’t you bring things to a head early? Crush the nascent impulse in her? But— you can’t find the heart, so you let her tell you:
You’re still down in Hell, at the base camp. On one side of the room a hive of robotic limbs wait for a pilot, deadened. Your existence is bounded by four fluorescing prefabricated walls. If you could see through them, and the kilometric granite and basalt and assorted infernostuff above, the sky would be full. The sulphur-lamp of Lucifer now dances in the Kuiper belt, a fugitive hunted by archangels and Orion-drives. The light of his struggle dominates the night sky. He has passed beyond your reach, having taken from you everything you ever wanted.
On Earth the five living Princes of Hell have been given amnesty and Antarctica. On howling plateaus they and their chosen servants build a new nation, fat and proud. Smoke rising through the snow. You remember their expressions as they sent you to die. Why did you trust them? Whose pride possessed you? You want to grind their bones into dust — with what hand, what arm?
The things that filled your life have abruptly vanished over the horizon. You are not the Messiah anymore.
You cannot be yourself ever again. Your body is ruined, and there are no frames waiting anymore, and they do not trust you, you who defied them and lost a million tonnes of living firepower. (And there are no more of her, the old idol, Dagon the drowner, washed in some Levantine cove, who was yours.)
Riya tries very hard to despair as she delivers the news. But you can see the relief beneath and need to hate her for it. You can’t.
Instead you call her over to you (where you lie, half a body, entangled with a roomful of machinery— an expanded self). She leans down for the kiss, which is dully electric, false life in your fingertips. Your paralytic lips lie still under her. Her smell is steel and rich offal. Hands running over your back provoke pure nothing: lines of numbness that radiate down your vertebrae. Then she breaks away and her eyes are wet.
“I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. Why did I let you go? Fuck, you’re so stupid!” she cries.
You should really, really want to scream at her. Instead you let her slump against your shoulder, sitting beside you, deftly slotting between the wires.
“Over now. Just don’t think about it. You should have practice. What did we even lose, really? Some metal, a few auxiliary assets. Right?” you try to reassure her.
“Jesus, Lu. I— I know how important it, she, was to you. Whatever I said, I’m sorry.”
“Whatever you said, is it so hard to remember? I do it fine.”
She sits up, looks at you, wide-eyed and silent. You continue:
“Look at you. Crying all over my gown. This is stupid. I want to say— I want to say Intentions wouldn’t want us to do this. But I don’t think that’s true. Let’s stop anyway. Please?”
“I could have argued harder. I could have pulled out the cables, beat in your fucking face, I don’t know. It was supposed to be over.”
“You could have. Nice way to show your gratitude, right?”
Snff, an indrawn breath.
“Yeah. Great fucking nurse I am.”
“Fraternising with the patients.”
“You’re technically a captain.”
Something caustic should come, spill out of your mouth, burn away what ties you together. It refuses.
“That’s why you never managed to order me around.”
“You haven't seen me trying— God, what am I saying. Christ.”
“Someone’s feeling distractible.”
“Lu! I don’t know what, what it is that you think you’re doing. It, look, I know I talked all kinds of shit. It’s alright. I get it. You can be sad about her. Intentions. More than just sad.”
Can’t you just. Maybe one day you’ll wake up and you won’t remember what it was like to have her beside you, in your thoughts. Would that be relief or torment?
“I’ve got you.”
“Jesus. Alright. I won’t push it, this needs— we’ll work it out.”
“We?”
“Yes, we. Don’t try and deny it. You’re not subtle either.”
She still remembers? But that was for another world, the world where you won. Without that—
Yes, you decide. This’ll be good. A happy ending.
Of course things are not that simple. But neither, to her delight, are they so complicated.
You fit together, very well. Sometimes there are little things: your hair falls out in patches where the citrinitine plates weld to your cranium. Your body is lumpy with obscure exo-organs so that you jostle against her in bed, and tear apart furniture. You don’t know your strength, and your flat fills with shattered ceramics and the stink of overheated tensile motorics. You croon your apologies to her and she gives you one of those sighs.
Out in public you show off with a sneer: the scarskin of your arms, the great seam joining you together, eyes dull like coal. Sometimes you snap at people, or kick dogs that surprise you — she’s just excitable, ma’am, apologies flowing when they see you, still. Priya defends you fiercely.
You feel things with obsolete senses, wince away from stray RF leakage like toothaches. Priya tugs you along, fond smile belying the urgency of her insistence. She can’t bear to scold you so she just begs instead, please, I know it’s hard, it’s hard for me too—
Your body still disintegrates regularly. Tourmaline and chalk circles become a common sight in the flat, dusty white cumulonimbii staining the walls. The jewels you pay for out of your pension; you split the cleaning. She never openly resents the rituals. But the joy, which shone like the moon over the midnight sea the first time she assembled you, has gone.
These are just parts of growing old, together. Three winter months are long enough to dispose of infatuations.
You fit together perfectly.
Demons are provably not moral patients. Their facsimile-suffering adds nothing to the universal eudaimon, their joy is as empty as a machine’s. It does not particularly matter that nine in ten of the demonic kind are trapped in a great network of processing camps on the other side of the reopened hellgate. The pouring-forth flood of scientists, surveyors, technicians, surgeons, and epidemiologists into the emptied Hell, swarming over every inch of tartaric soil for an iota of value, is no weight on you.
But what is abominable is that one in ten escaped this fate, given harbour by the man in front of you, who has reminded you how to hate at last. He has come to your convalescence, to mock you.
But you smile tightly anyway as your makeup bakes into a rind (it took Riya outright begging to cajole you into it). For now you’re in a wheelchair. They’re still forming the nerveclamps for the prosthetics.
You bend your head gracelessly, exposing a neck still lumpy with obscene tumour-divots. The marshal’s expression doesn’t slip a micrometre as he slides the golden disc on its ribbon over you.
Together you pose for an enfilade of cameralight. The room is spacious, but crowded nonetheless by the dignitaries come to see the one the Coalition still pretends is Messiah. Even civilian press tentatively ask a few questions, awe-struck. Officers know better— obvious in every smile they meet you with. The little smirks sporulating across their faces. They used to flinch away from you, even standing above the operating-table.
And this general enshrined, who sold the world, condescends to you. We must make certain compromises, he says. Five princes and a devil: nothing resolved. In the crowd you’re hideous, out of place. Tyrfing, the cursed blade, could only be sheathed when it tasted blood— all blood was bled away long ago. They will never unsheathe you again.
In the gallery each forward step glimmers: the calf-length skirt, a strange medusoid thing, lets the light scatter off your legs into broad rings that paint the Ishtar Gate. The new limbs are silver-steel, adored by Riya, though despite their proprioceptive presence they’re hatefully nerveless. Entry into the Pergamon is cheap; the two of you live on doubled pensions, out of work (they call it a peace dividend). The onlookers drift lazily through the stagnant air.
She tells you without warning that her cognitive block has been undone, two decades of memories classified when she began work on you unsealed, a whole life returned to her. Suddenly you nearly stagger with — imagined, sourceless, contemptible — nausea. Imagine that: the walls of a levee bursting so that rising water drowns all the landmarks of the life you thought you built. What need does she have for your tawdry imitation of a person?
No, she protests, I love you but I can’t do this. Everything you do is just bullshit, you never even mention Intentions, (dead, gone, nothing to gain from feeling it). And now you grow this inferiority complex. I love you. Whoever I knew— I miss them, but I’d miss you more.
That’s too early, too late, too wrong. Love is for other people. She can’t love you, because then you betrayed her, every time, when—
The base camp decomposes. Half the buildings disappear overnight. This Riya reports faithfully. It’s very nearly time to return, to an earth unready for a failed saviour. Will they pull you apart?
So: a final silent night in Hell. You tune into rebroadcast bloodmatches from the archives: eidolon versus jiangshi in an endless wheatfield. A satisfactorily gory finale is cut off by Riya’s sudden appearance at your door, past the tucked-away limbtree.
“Hey. We’re all packed up out there.”
“Got the kids’ passports ready?”
“Fuck off. Long trip tomorrow. They’re flying us out on the Argo. Hero’s welcome.”
“You came here to wish me goodnight?” comes out more acerbic than you meant it. Her expression sours.
“Yeah, yeah, cyborgs don’t sleep. Don’t fuck with me. Listen—”
“You getting nervous?”
“Don’t interrupt me, for Christ’s sake. I really think we need to talk.”
“We’re talking. You nervous? Easy question.”
“Yes, I’m fucking nervous.” She paces back and forth in front of you. “How could I not be nervous. But won’t it be a relief to be out of here? I still wake up some nights grabbing for my gun.”
“You’re freaking me out with this routine. Sit.”
“…Lu.”
But she sits anyway, nestling into you. The little touches, the kisses, have grown more frequent. Her presence is familiar.
“I think— are you okay? I mean, really, actually, fine? You spent all that time, telling me about Intentions, and I’m sorry for everything I ever said, alright. You were right, you must have been right. Don’t just forget about it.”
You lift one clumsy hand and place it over hers.
“Don’t try—”
“She’s gone. You got me, congratulations. She’s gone and I miss her and she’s never coming back. Did you want to hear that so badly?”
Her lip quivers and then she leans forward and kisses you again, again, again. It occurs to you abstractly that some other girl might be afraid. But you are strictly her superior, still replete with the memory of your former strength, and she has been inside you for a long, long time. There’s nothing to hide.
Her hands roam futilely over you, eros banished from this body, but you try and reciprocate, still lips stiff against her. She pulls away with bright eyes.
“Fuck this. The ward’s empty, nobody’s coming to check on you. Skeleton crew. They don’t even let unaugmented people in this wing. We’ve got an hour.”
There’s little appeal in this adolescent schoolgirl nonsense. But— you were made to do things, to cut the world at the seams. In the hand of someone else, who has gone. And she loved you, so long, so selflessly, and her need is plain even to your amputated social instincts. Why not?
“Show me.”
She pulls out a thin needle of steel and teases open a panel on the side of your head. Blood trickles down from the cartilaginous panel into your ear, ticklishly warm. Two ends of a cable connect a port you didn’t know you had to one of the consoles by your bedside, bringing:
Revelation. Your sensorium expands, magnifies tenfold, and you feel holy hydraulic strength, the swiftness of actuators unfolding, machined pistons working as you come into the fullness of yourself. And you understand what has happened: she has given you new limbs, the thicket of chromatic appendages quietly folded away, which now unfold like peacock feathers into a dizzying array of implements. This is a surgical robot, built to work with bodies. And she kisses your legacy form, staring into its (your) unblinking and vacant gaze.
“Come on.”
The insectile assemblage hesitates. She murmurs:
“Please.”
You pull her hands over her head and her top off with rippling segmented articulations of copper and steel. They move joyously free. The many parts of you work in Swiss synchrony, guided by dormant mech-instinct and the submind of the robotics cluster itself. It mirrors, doubles, learns from your actions. A missing limb returned.
You splay her in midair over your own bed and you direct silicone-steel hands: to her breasts, throat, ears. Down-fine fingers delineate mandalas over her skin as she squirms. Two circle around and under the hemline of her scrub bottoms, mirroring the seam at your own waist where you were divided. Her face is cradled in another, and one filament runs gently across her lips and slips into her mouth. Her muffled moans are proof of your own right function.
This is the thing you were missing — this is your confession. Even as you spread her open and turn slick with her you think only of your lost metallic purity. Autonomic digits slide into her and she shudders (in unacknowledged daydreams you always thought she’d be louder). Their motion is rigid, graceless, for all that she shows her appreciation. A poor imitation.
She shivers, muscles fluttering, coming at nerveless cyborg hands — she is not, you think, a selfish lover, but she has no way to return the favour — and your mind fills with thoughts of your one fellow-traveller, lost in the Garden. Only one name can stand above the rest, in the end, and it’s not Riya.
You lower her down gently atop you and she sits up, straddling you, in an abominable mess she hurriedly swears to clean up. Her cheeks are flushed dark and the sweatsheen reflects the flat hospital lighting. Something stirs in your stomach, sudden sharp recognition. You smile your horrid clumsy smile and she kisses you again, smothering whatever you might have said.
Riya hasn’t been in the flat for a week. It would be unbearable if she didn’t return. It would be nightmarish if she did. She won’t reclaim her life for fear of you. Even in death, jammed, rusted, burst, pick your analogy, you manage to maim people around you. Why won’t she go back home? Why won’t she stay?
it’s black midnight. The sky is a patchwork of dim rolling clouds stitched and backlit by moonglow. This is what you wanted, and turned away from: quiet domesticity. A poisoned chalice.
Above, where you cannot see it, a cruel star shines, for you.
END
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Sexually Explicit: Description of sexual acts.
Sexual Assault: Features non-consensual sexual acts.
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