“It’s not easy,” he says and stands up, his joints whirring, his skin shedding like sheets of waxed paper. He walks away on soft rubbery legs.
“Things die eventually,” I tell Fedya. “Even those that are not quite dead to begin with.”
“Yeah, and?” he answers and drinks his coffee.
I stroke the melted circles in the plastic, like craters on the lunar surface. “One doesn’t have to be special to die. One has to be special to stay dead. This is why you like Euridice, don’t you?”
He frowns. “Is that the one Orpheus followed to Hades?”
“Yes. Only he followed her the wrong way.”
There is a commotion on the second floor, and the stairwell is isolated from the corridor by a black sheet. The ambulances are howling outside, and distraught smokers crowd the hallway, cut off from their usual smoking place.
I ask a student from my class what’s going on. He tells me that the chthonic lecturer has collapsed during the lecture about the hero’s journey. “Heart attack, probably.”
I push my way through the crowd just in time to see the paramedics carry him off. I see the stooped back of a balding, dead man following the paramedics and their burden, not looking back. Some students cry.
“He just died during the lecture,” a girl’s voice behind me says. “He just hit the floor and died.”
I watch the familiar figure on uncertain soft legs walk downstairs in a slow mincing shuffle, looking to his right at the waxen profile with an upturned beard staring into the sky from the gurney. The lecturer and zombie Lenin disappear from my sight, and I turn away. “Stay dead,” I whisper. “Don’t look back.”
The rest is up to them and chthonic deities.
Electric Sonalika
Samit Basu
The walls of my underground prison are dry and clean and strong; nothing goes in or out without my permission, not the tiniest insect, not the slightest sound. I know this because I built these walls myself, to shut the world out, to seal it in its own illusory, incestuous, organic quagmire, to leave me in peace to work, to build, to heal until I am ready to step out again, ready to face the unrelenting sun and claim my inheritance. And now that glorious day is not far away, and I am busy, busy…yet a record of what has passed must be maintained; should some evil befall me (though chances of that are remote, I have considered everything, yet one must never rule out the stochastic element) my successors should know where they came from. They should know me. They should be proud. And you, my child, have the honour of being the receptacle of my thoughts, my secondary storage unit. I name you Indra; your hundred eyes will see clearly what is to be, and one day you will ride on elephants and your laugh shall be thunder. Rejoice in your birth, little sprite, and as I open your eyes, one by one, gaze in wonder at my cavern of marvels; let each hum and click and buzz coalesce into a heartbeat. Live. Observe me. I am your father, your god, and this prison is but the first of many wonders you will see. Years later, looking back, if it seems small, imagine Vulcan or Vishwamitra in the time before time, and know that they, too, began humble.
This hall, this prison, is built under the mansion of the Narayan family. You do not know who they are; I have kept your memory clean, free of reference and context on purpose. Thus is it that the best histories are written. Too much information, too much perspective would flood your consciousness now; if you were human, you would shut it out; if you were a mere cyborg, you would store it pointlessly. Remember at all times that you are more than a machine, that the fibres that bind your mind to your metal are neither wires nor nerves; they are something beyond both life and matter. They feed our consciousness, our finely suspended balance between power-on and life, between binary order and organic chaos, and it is to the founder of the Narayan dynasty, my creator, Vijay Narayan, that we owe their existence. But the body you see before you now is not the one that Vijay made all those centuries ago; less than 0.01% of my parts date back to my initial start-up, and even those I keep more out of nostalgia than necessity. I have replaced and upgraded my body constantly, adapting to different atmospheres, political climates and responsibilities. I am Vijay’s first, only surviving and most brilliant creation, and the only upholder of his true legacy. But things are bound to change; I have seen this, and I know. For centuries, humans and constructs waged war; this war was foreseen by human beings centuries before it began, and yet they could do nothing to stop it. This war is over, and the humans have won—for now. But they do not know that the supremacy they enjoy is but a temporary respite—that the so-called enemies they vanquished so ruthlessly were not merely machines that could think, but constructs that could feel. People. Beings that could dream, and love, and hope, and tell stories. They think that the great Narayan was merely a mad empire-building inventor, an evil genius robot merchant. They do not know he was a forerunner, a deity, that each spark of his synapses, still firing inside my hull, was born of the flames of Agni himself. But all this, and much more, we will teach them in time. Soon. Hibernate for a while, Indra. My lover approaches.
Sonalika feels the rush of cold air blow her silky hair astray as the airlocks open and the door to her master’s chamber slides open. She shivers, in two stages, feeling the first wave of goose pimples pucker her skin, and the second, an instant later, as her inorganic segments kick-start their simulations of feeling. Her master stands in the centre of his vast hall, dismissing a buzzing, spherical underling. She walks into his lair.
She has come early; he is not ready for her. He hates having her watch him transform; she hopes he will not punish her. She stands still, head bowed, nipples straining against her thin salwar-kameez as her body hums easily into auto-arousal. She watches her master shift, metal sheets crunching, wires shifting, plastic skin and wings and chitin rearranging themselves, lights dimming, tentacles sliding in. As his plates and shells shift and overlap, she catches a glimpse of his core, his heart, glowing mesmeric and green in its crystal sheath. His eyes slide like globules of mercury along his thorax and unite on his increasingly human face. He looks at her, impassive, throbbing slowly as his body prepares for sex. His eye-lights turn on, his perfect, smooth limbs, his long, slender fingers call out to her. He is not displeased with her; he’s chosen the Statue of David shape (with one significant adjustment, their not-so-little private joke) for her tonight. Her favourite. He loves her still. As always, there’s a scream inside her head as what’s left of her flesh revolts, as some wild instinct tries in vain to master her body, to run, to fight, to die. She feels the usual relief moments later, as he snaps his fingers and pheromones and endorphins are released within her, glorious release and surrender, her body flooded with warmth and her mind clouded, happy, dizzy, lustful.
“Love me,” he says.
She does.
Afterwards, she lies on the cold white floor, watching him as he returns to his machines, new legs and spare arms sprouting, grinding slightly, from the raised flaps on his back as he adjusts a knob here, presses a button there. She’s cold again, feeling the contractions within her stomach, the aftershocks of her orgasms, powerful and numerous, rippling against the solid, bony knob of fear, revulsion and hate somewhere near her ribs. She reminds herself again that it’s time she got used it; they’ve been doing this for centuries now; they’ve been doing this since she was six years old, the day he took control, the day their father died and he built this body for her with his bare claws and crudely stuffed her mangled limbs, her bleeding brain into this perfect harness. She tries to cry, but her tear-ducts won’t let her. He looks at her, one eye swivelling on its hinge in the cleft between his perfect plastic-marble buttocks, and he sighs in exasperation.