“Neither one of us was getting enough sleep, and if his monitor went off we’d practically kill ourselves getting to his bedroom. And he hated going to the dentist, but some of the meds were pretty hard on his teeth, so he had to go more than most kids—he couldn’t afford an infection. And he’d get mad, and yell at us, and even though we shouldn’t have, sometimes we yelled back.
“His blue spells were the worst, when he couldn’t get enough air, and he’d start grunting, and we were both convinced that would be it, he was going to die on us right there.
“And at our lowest, I’m ashamed to say, we’d blame each other—things in our families, our genetics, things she might have taken during the pregnancy, early signs we might have missed—and the marriage deteriorated. Once she said we should have divorced before he was born, and at that moment I thought she was right—we never should have had him.”
“But a child, any child, is a gift. He wasn’t—you can’t look at your son as if he’s a broken toy.”
Daniel tried to keep the flash of anger to himself. “Of course not. Haven’t you ever weakened? Especially in a moment of great pain? You have to understand, I grieved for my son for years—for his pain and for what I knew would be our eventual loss of him—while he was still alive and it felt like more than I could take. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like when he was actually gone.
“But I became worse than that. My imagination, sometimes it could be such a hateful, evil thing. I’d see other people’s children, and I’d hear them playing, their voices joyful and excited, and-I don’t know, I’d imagine a car running them down, or I’d imagine them falling out of a tree, and it wasn’t a fearful image for me, it was an image of justice being done, because why should we go through this and not they? I imagined that if my boy was taken, someone else’s child needed to be taken as well, otherwise the world wasn’t right.”
“Daniel!”
“I know. I’m not proud of it. In fact I became so ashamed of myself I decided I shouldn’t be near my son or my wife anymore. They deserved better. The day the roaches took me I was sitting in an airport with a plane ticket that would take me to the other side of the country. I hadn’t boarded yet, but I think I probably was going to. I just needed to think about it some more. So I sat there while the others boarded, and they were calling my name, and I was thinking about whether I should stand up or not, when suddenly I was gone, and then in some giant insect’s horrible embrace, and on my way here.”
“Maybe you would have stayed. In fact, Daniel, I have great faith that you wouldn’t have gotten on that plane.”
“What difference does it make? My wife and son will never understand. As far as they know I just ran away like a coward. They will never know what happened to me.”
The lights flickered. An electrified twitter travelled through the residents. A great rumbling sound filled the space and more pieces of the ceiling fell. Then the lights went out with a rapidly descending whine. Residents began to scream. It sounded unnatural. It sounded like a screeching of metal.
After the initial shock Daniel knew he could not be seeing them as they actually were. It was a scene from the end of the Second World War, and the concentration camps had been liberated. Several men were being helped out of a building, impossibly emaciated, skin stretched across the sharp edges of skeletons, the eyes looking huge in near-fleshless sockets, and on each broad bony pelvis where the narrow legs dangled, genitalia displayed as if stuck on as an afterthought. Many of the survivors would die within weeks from disease and malnutrition.
Then his vision cleared and the skin vanished from the skeletons, leaving metal armature arms, articulated rod hands, and cages of metal ribs, pivot joints and wheels, cables, tubing, metal pan skulls with artificial blinking eyes, snapping jaws with teeth attached. Lengths of gray human skin and pale muscle had been fastened to the frameworks in seemingly random arrangements.
The metal and flesh automations charged around the room in a panic, grabbing at each other, chattering and screaming in eerily human voices, their mechanical eyeballs jerking spastically as they acquired new glimpses of their changed realities.
“Daniel, Daniel, what is this?” The metal skull with the disturbingly alive eyeballs yapped in front of him, the mouth with all the wires and plastic and metal pieces used to articulate it.
It was Lenin’s voice. Daniel reached out and touched the Leninbot, felt the metal bits, the tubes, and the squishy bits he assumed to be flesh, but he was too squeamish to look at what he touched. “Charles? Is that you?” He noticed an alpha-numeric label on the metal piece which emulated a clavicle, and other such labels—maybe the same label?—on the upper left arm, and on one of the flat metal ribs. “What’s happened to you?”
“You, too, Daniel. Daniel, look at yourself.”
Daniel lifted his arm. The rods that made up the various phalanges, the hinge joints, the larger metal lengths where the radius and ulna should have been, responded minutely to commands he wasn’t aware of issuing. The arm turned, the fingers wiggled at him. Packed inside the arm’s framework were tubes, wires, heavier cable, junctions. And, etched onto the radius piece, the characters A-7713.
16
THEY WERE ALL men of metal and plastic now, all cyborgs now, automata, automations, androids, machines, robots, bots—none of the terms seemed all that right or acceptable or even possible. He considered whether it might be a trick—just another test, another experiment—but it didn’t have the feel of a trick. Nor did it feel as if it had just happened, that they had suddenly transformed as if by magic.
It might be a hallucination, but he suspected not. It had the ring of truth. It felt like a confirmation of the peculiar incompleteness he’d felt ever since he’d come here. They’d ruined him. They’d devastated him. He wasn’t even properly Daniel anymore. They’d taken his flesh, and now he was Danielbot, apparently only his brain left alive, but it probably wasn’t even his brain, was it? Perhaps they’d only stolen his thoughts.
He didn’t care that he was falling. He made a metallic sound as he hit the tile. A hollow thud and a rattle. He managed to sit up, metal arms holding onto metal legs, metal knees up. He leaned back against the wall and looked out.
The mechanical men he once knew but now could not recognize without their flesh continued to paw at each other in some sort of desperate attempt at recognition. They appeared to be both seeking familiar contact and trying to get away from these frightening, strange constructions. He recognized Lenin’s voice in the crowd but couldn’t determine which bot the voice was coming from. There were a few other vaguely familiar voices, but without a recognizable face to associate them to he wasn’t sure what they’d actually looked like.
Suddenly several humans in skin-tight, dark blue uniforms rushed out of the observation room. They were slight in build, tired-eyed, with pale complexions, and carried longish, rifle-looking devices. They should have been mechanical men as well—it was only fair.
One of the bots approached these men, reaching out a gleaming, jittery arm and hand. Clearly he meant no harm—he radiated confusion, desperation.
One of the men spun around, shouted, and fumbled at a protruding tab on his rifle. A bluish white bolt flashed between the two and the bot fell. The air smelled like a lightning strike and burnt electrical components.