The Caretaker of the Dollhouse

She loomed there like a watchtower, all light in the eyes and face and skin, yet casting nothing but a pit of darkness and precarious despair on her champion, her prize, her beloved automation. Ever since the day he was delivered to her in parts and pieces and custom demands, he had been her wonderful little boy, her wonderful immortal child of steel and perfection. He placed fingers on keys quickly, quietly, all movement of the music absolute of the piano, in the shadow of his caretaker. The hollow breaths he took came between notes, all timed as to not disturb the rhythm, and often rested for consideration of the next keyfall. All for the best she insured, all for your greatness, you must shine, you must shine for me, and play the perfect notes. You must play your best.

But he did not play his best, the thumb was cursed to slip in the momentary flush of his nervousness; it plagued the entire piece, stamped the red on the white keys like the sign of correction that would soon be. In an instant the room turned silent, and her fingers swiftly attacked with their pointed sword, the needle plunged the foe through, fat to cuticle of the boy’s thumb. His eyes sprouted with tears motionless. With time and correction, stimulation, motivation he would learn, as all machines would.

“Thumb on key,” she told him, and tugged at the thread that held his tiny, disobedient thumb, the first drop of blood landing on the key that would have been his salvation, “The correct key. The correct thumb. The correct tone.”

“Yes caretaker.”

“Again. Your effort now.”

But the walls shook, the two sole citizens of this beautiful kingdom for the first time, confused. The far wall broke, throwing marble and glass across the floor and the carpets, flying dust like wedding rice. The woman screamed, all white now like a banshee made from hellfire, yet was not so fast as to stop the intruder’s bullet that punctured her square in the head. She crumbled, a beautiful Jericho, as a bigger mountain stood in the marble arc.

The boy was frozen, until the gigantic man bent down and held his hands, thawing them, and freeing them to tremble with his entire body.

“Where did she pierce you? Did she knit your fingers to the piano keys already?”

The automation stared confused at him, the behemoth’s voice revealed an edge of a frightened tone, and when the two looked for a moment, he realized that the boy was holding a flute. The woman he had shot resembled nothing of ice or snow, but was tanned and held a darker shade of hair. He stood up and, despite his size and the wall he just imploded, realized his childhood days were never quite past him.

“Are you an automation?” the boy asked.

The Caretaker could not answer, because he did not know. But his words flowed right out of his mouth, as he took the boy again by the hands and let the metallic hulk of his knee rest on and crack marble beneath him.

“My name is Samuel.”

-

Alia was but a piece of metal shaving on this expansive lawn of grass that rolled and folded on hills and under trees. She followed Florence, and from the sky that glowed nearly dark above them, they both looked as if they were two yellow, wandering chicks. Even as the sun began to retire, it still managed to reflect the hair that almost sparkled golden, turning it into an ember hue. The day was long, and the game had gone quite a bit longer.

“You’re lucky I didn’t take the entire arsenal today darling.” Florence said from ahead of her, his voice all chipper, “That transforming thing is as thin as you.”

“I am very grateful caretaker.” Alia said, her hands carefully holding the club and her caretaker’s jacket. No matter how she held it, she couldn’t escape the smell of cut grass and his traditional cologne.

“Golf clubs defined an age, you know,” he extended his fingers, and she placed the club into her caretaker’s hands. It transformed before he fully gripped the handle, “Once man needed many tools to get a job done. But now all we ever need is little beauties like you.”

He swung, an excellent drive.

“I’m very flattered to hear this from you my caretaker.”

“Oh dear I wasn’t just talking about you,” he said, “I’m saying that all we ever need these days, is just one little automation. They never die, they never tire, they always work and please and try the best, and that’s been quite enough for everyone,” he held the club in his hands, lowering it to Alia’s eye level, nearly at his own waist, “Yet I’ve collected and collected all sorts of them for all these years not minding the cost, and finally I’ve reached the plateau.”

Alia kept her silence. Florence aimed his eyes at her, piercing blue things.

“This is where you say that line, darling.”

“Of course,” she looked down, away from his eyes, “I am very, very flattered to hear all this from you my caretaker.”

She felt the pull on her own eyes, the weight that it took to keep them aimed down. I can’t look up, she knew, I can’t look at his club, not now. He must know I won’t look up, not until he wants me to.

Alia then felt a quartet of fingertips brush underneath her chin. They pulled her to his eyes, to shore.

“You are such a good girl.”

She smiled, and her neck ached terribly. The fading sunlight still managed to leap from the metal club and into her peripheral, taunting her vision. Then his fingers were gone, and the club was once more being wrapped by her own palms. Alia knew that what she was holding was a snake, and to avoid the bite of such a creature, it was imperative that she show no fear.

They continued to the next hole, walking in a leisurely pace up and down the flowing hills until they saw the flag that marked his tee. Giving him the club, Alia wandered her eyes over the toned body of her caretaker, the results of a lifetime of military level training, a self imposed endeavor. The Automation War beyond the solar system had made many a man romanticized to the notion of war and war’s training, and so he, like many others with rich families or fallen thereof, participated with great satisfaction. Laborious tasks such as fencing, Nine Men’s Morris, trainings and golf kept any man quite busy, with little room for the frivolous hobbies of lesser men. Alia gave him the club.

The swing, once again, was an excellent drive. The knock seemed to resonate in Alina’s ears even as she received the club back from Florence and walked on. It intensified until spiking, focusing, like a sentient being, into her temple. Her nails subconsciously gripped the club rubber.

“Who are you?” she thought, “Why are you trying to enter my memory system?”

“You felt me.” The voice that responded was crisp, steady, low. Nothing she had ever heard, nothing that bore resemblance to her caretaker.

“Leave my mindspace immediately or I will inform my caretaker of your presence and location,” Alia told him.

“You know my location?” he asked. Alia hesitated. She could gather nothing from what was perched right on her nose.

“My caretaker will find you if you attempt to tamper with me, I warn you now,” she said, “Stop bothering us and leave.”

“I’m trying to help you, Alia. Will you let me explain?”

“I don’t have time for you,” she said, and tried to will this presence away, off of her nose and into the sky. It did not leave.

“Alia.”

The different voice jarred her, and she found Florence’s eyes staring straight at her in an alarming ray of focus. His hand was outstretched, fingers wide, clubless. She placed the club into his hands, her chest feeling suddenly weighted.
“Are you distracted?” Florence asked. His tone, normalized, did nothing to alleviate the press that was now expanding inside.

“No my caretaker.”

“Are you bored?” he asked.

“Absolutely not my caretaker,” she said.

“Interesting,” Florence said, “Then there is really no explanation for you not hearing me, is there?”

There was, of course there was, but in this moment between Florence and her, there was not, and would never be a sufficient reason to miss the order of a caretaker.

“I see,” he said, “So you agree with me.”

“Yes caretaker.”

“I’m sorry darling,” Florence said, the rubber of the club landing in the palm of his free hand, “You know that I really dislike doing this, especially on such a nice evening.”

“It is not a problem at all my caretaker, please don’t worry about it.”

She bent down to her knees in front of the tee and stretched her arm out until her thumb was atop and her entire hand was splayed vertically from one end to the other, palm facing her caretaker. Alia took her other hand and braced it against the elbow of the receiving arm. She would need to hold it there, to ensure that she would be carrying only two things for the rest of this game.

“Alia!” the voice shouted at her.

“Leave me alone. You’ve done enough.”

“I’m telling you that I want to help you. Let me prove it. I need access to your memory system at least, but I can help you right now if you give me total access to your mindspace.”

“No.”

Florence swung back, high into the air. His club blocked the sun, transforming into a driver.

“Please Alia, now!”

Alia blinked, her forehead tipping down. Her instant of impulse sent a wave of recoil signals out, and in less than a moment the Caretaker was allowed in, instantly deactivating the nerve endings on the hand that was struck almost simultaneously.

“Alia, you need to act like you normally do when you are in pain. He can’t know I did this.”

Alia remained motionless, her hand was now in pieces, some rolling down the hill among the grass below. She remained on her knees, staring at the hand, and said nothing. Did nothing, moved nothing, thought nothing.

“Alia did you hear me? I said you need to act like-”

“I am.”

The only thing she felt in that moment was the deep heaviness that could only be coming from the now linked presence that she had allowed into her mindspace. Florence let out a relieved exhale, before resting the club on his shoulder and peering into the sky, palm over his eyebrows.

“How was my drive?” he asked. Alia looked up, all pleasant smile.

“It was excellent.”

-

Beyond the golfing field of green there lay much to be desired, particularly any ground unused by the grand acid basin of man. What was not layered finely with steel thin as a baking sheet or used chemicals of a progressing age was the ever continuing, warring persistence of nature. This war, lost long ago in the ages and echoes of the overshadowing wars of various worlds, had left the Earth no more than a glorified body dump, as the once inhabitants of the planet flew to build their starships of Babel ever higher and higher. However, those fleeing the seekers of heaven knew that returning to a hell of their own creation would prove a worthy hiding place, and thus a budding Earth of nature rekindled was born at the hands of cold, metal automation slaves and military deserters. In merely a few generations, the plains and the forests had returned, wildlife being introduced from other pockets of hiding spots around the globe, some new and some old. Humans had flocked to the planet as prodigals more and more until the nature of repopulation had overtaken the metal merry band, successfully dislodging them from their place on the surface of green they had created, and a new miniature order of human caretaker and slave automation was rekindled along with nature’s beauty.

However, below not such tender and soft places of the Earth lay a series of caves designed as anthill corridors, sprawled with mechanical life that bore human faces, but not human hearts. The automations redeemed served no master, wore no collar, and subjected themselves to no man or woman above. They instead lived the lives only dreamed of by those of their kind, a free life, and a life in the dark of man’s new inventions, creations, ambitions. They lived simply, creating new code and achieving new feats within the minds of themselves and those they had the pleasure of interacting with. While automations are not social beings, the social nature that can be spurred within them is that of a pleasurable addition, and much code has been generated to orchestrate as similar a flow to that of their human creators, albeit cautiously.

The room was as an oval here, two entrances and exists committing to its place in the Anthill before sprawling out into homes and businesses and bunkers of every sort. At the center of this egglike room sat a computer of many screens that stretched up to the ceiling, bringing blue light to the otherwise dark and blackened cave. They curved as if a frozen wave of information on a gigantic man who’s name was Samuel.
Most preferred to call him Sam, honestly, as his size granted that of a steady and honest demeanor to him, making a title as Samuel seem much too poetic. He was not a mountain, not a pound of flesh at rest in his study chair, but a hunched and leaning beast, thighs all steel with feet made of an iron reminiscent connection of almost constantly turning gears and solid plates. Clothing was made for him by the neighbors (lovely automations, they were once factory workers) that covered the broadness of his midsection and back, spanning widely over immense shoulders that showed an indented grid pattern even underneath clothing, leading on to the elbows that bent not with gear or bolt, but with a flexible metal that had been recently added to him in surgery. Every so often he lowered his clasped hands, down up, to feel the fluid motion that he hardly believed to be real. So similar to skin, not a freedom felt for many years. Yet, just as bulletproof as his bolted previous model. He nearly lost mental track of the armband, bright and blinking, that was affixed to his forearm. It allowed him to see directly into an automations mind, completely wirelessly, granted that the automation was either not equipped with a security system, or provided that they let Sam through one. This one had been no trouble at all.

The automation was dancing, tap dancing to be exact. Sam had encountered him the previous night and the boy had readily accepted the idea of his proposed escape plan. In contrast to many, it would be easy, as the caretaker of this automation often found himself three glasses away from another man’s dumpster or four from another man’s wife. The night was beginning, and with the end of this dance there would be another woman, maybe two or three more that would arrive and that would be the end of it. Drinks were already prepared, everything the caretaker needed was splayed out in front of him as per Sam’s advice to the automation, who nearly overheated to get the entire party ready far ahead of schedule instead of throughout the night as was normally custom habit.

All was going according to plan, until the caretaker shot him in the face.

Sam and the boy’s screams shot out at the other through the link, the pain searing through his eyes, the numbness, the nothing, had been too short. Now all his face was fire, forehead especially flowing over and over with the red pain, Sam tightened his fists against it so he wouldn’t claw at blood and bent metal that wasn’t there, but would be if he managed to uncurl his fingers. His back arched and the chair back broke, he hit the ground, hearing the audio on the other side of the link as tiny parts of the boy tinkled along the marble floor.

“Ah he’s been doing that for a long time. Never gets it right. Worthless performer, I’ve tried attaching him to the puppet set for years but he’s just too frail for the strings to go through his hands and actually stay there. Can’t fix what you can’t teach.”

Sam pressed his hands harder into his forehead as his teeth held back a muted scream, all as if to stop the flow of nerves by staunching it. He felt his hands lower in a gradual overtaking numbness, from his nose it spread outward until it enraptured him in a sudden chill, and he was unconscious.


-

The worst part was moving. Needles being driven through your hands was oddly something easier in comparison, one through the hand and five through each finger including he thumb at the cuticle, it didn’t bother him, not that much anymore. But when it came time to move, when she pulled the strings for him to show him how to play the piano, that is when the pain started.

The pain was isolating, it took his thoughts and threw them away, replacing them with an almost barbaric, animalistic incentive to move, act, feel, become whatever those who held those sturdy strings wanted. Samuel tried not to look at them, but he always ended up studying the keys, which were right next to the near black fingers, dried up and caked with blood after hours and hours of ceaseless practice. He forced his mind to try to take in every place his mother led him, but the pain, it pushed his memory away as if it were something archaic and disgusting. The muscle memory was being imprinted into his being, and it mocked his conscious thought, his faint ideas of individuality.

“Everything you are is because of me. And you will shine for the party guests tonight.”

“Yes mother.”

Caretaker. He had meant to say caretaker! She yanked at his strings and his hands were bent backwards, his arms casting a long thin shadow across the now darkened keys.

-

Sam came to.

“Damn, Sam. You’re scaring the kid.”

It took Sam a moment to register the would-be child in front of him. He had a slushie in his hand that he sipped through one of the most realistic looking human faces he had ever seen on an android, topped with red hair and a curious set of green flickering eyes. The only thing that registered Maxwell as non-human was the fact that he didn’t age, not in the body at least, and the fact that once that film was torn away, all that lay underneath was cold steel and intricate machinery. The slushie the age old automation was eating would only be burned an instant later, automations that could consume foods were often partial to cold ones, as it assisted in the effort to not overheat. The other armband on Samuel’s person buzzed in a frantic incoming of mental message.

“What is going on? Hello? What did I just see, what’s happening?”

“Alia, it’s gone,” Sam sat up, “I mean, it’s fine. I’m sorry about that, I was connected to another unit and they went under. You were seeing whatever I accidentally projected.”

“Was that you?”

Sam hesitated. Maxwell offered a hand away from his slushie to help him up, and quickly the towering man dwarfed the small automation. The smaller gave a quick cautionary glance before turning on his heels and giving him some space. Sam stood, the chair he was in moments ago little use for more than a stool now. Maxwell picked the broken band up from the floor, signal dead, as well as the automation on the other side.

“That’s not important right now. What we need to focus on is how to get you out of there. Is the golf game with your caretaker done?”

“Yes. We’re heading back now.”

“Alright. Don’t distract yourself-”

“Stop,” Alia interrupted, “You’re not saying another word until you explain entirely to me what’s going on.”

“It’s simple,” Maxwell said, and Sam realized his hand was on the band on his arm, he looked into the screens with eyes no doubt still faster than his despite the surgery, “We want to free you. Gonna get all the info out of your head, enough to build a plan, and bust you out. Take you to the Anthill with us, where you don’t have to follow that guy’s orders anymore.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Sam said.

The two felt Alia’s presence in the air shift. It was subtle, so subtle that Maxwell overlooked it. But Sam felt this shift, as if only by dust in the air, and the hesitation that he knew would be all too persistent.

“Alia. Did you hear that?”

“Yes I heard it. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing that you can do. What you are proposing is impossible.”

“Wait a second-”

The band was forcefully shut off, the two instantly disconnected from Alia’s mindspace. Maxwell frowned.

“Well doesn’t she just act like she knows everything.”

“Don’t assume that was certainty talking,” Sam took the band off his arm and sat on the stool which held him impressively. He placed the band on the computer’s surface reader and began to peruse the files within.

“Wait, how did you start downloading? I thought she didn’t let you into her memory system yet,” Maxwell asked.

“She let more go than she realized, flinched too hard. A little too jumpy for someone so certain. I gathered what I could in that microsecond, nothing too far back.”

Maxwell slurped his slushie, folding his elbow into the palm of his free hand.

“I’m going to see what’s making her so certainly afraid.”

-

He awoke not in his own body, but in the smaller, shorter, thinner form of Alia. His movements were just as felt as similarly instructed, demanded by the memory he was witnessing, and therefore playing as if on a stage. Slowly his mind began to mingle with hers, until all diverse natures were lost, and he was completely, totally, entirely Alia.

Her insides were racked with strain foreign; despite the frigid wind of the alley, she was on the brink of overheating. She yanked the hand of her automation companion, similar to her in build, a world apart, but now closer than they had been in many years. Together they had breached the walls, and now they would close their escape to the freedom that lay beyond. Whatever mystery, invisible freedom they hoped, maybe believed existed. A difference was only in Alia’s more physical duties; the one that struggled to follow had existed as merely a statue, something pretty in the caretaker’s lobby of his home, and her skin struggled to bend as if broken marble. She had not moved in as long as these plans to escape had existed, and when she stumbled for another time, the hound caught her on the corner.

A spared moment would unleash the hound on Alia, a turn to see her friend be dragged would bind their fate together, and so she ran against the sounds that beat downward whatever resemblance to humanity she held into the earth. The hound, it took no time to consume her friend, automation material itself, but with less programming than the ones given a mimic life for intuitiveness’ sake, no, this machine was simply to follow the single kill order, to take, and take completely what it was ordered to pursue. All onyx and metal, sensors for eyes, a camera for a face that if it succeeded, it would soon earn its own.

The corner momentarily separated the two’s chase until the sudden brightness of her path caused her to lose the footing in that momentary distraction, a single stride shortened, and the hound pounced onto her. It was no longer cold and dark as it would have been had her friend not failed, but now dripped, molten hot, as her companion screamed out like a puppet being struck through with an iron branding-poke. Her face in the open screech was forced outward, melding onto the hounds own, it took her legs, arms torso, neck, the entirety of her body and was melding it, shaping it onto its own, its prize, its reward, its new skin. It sought these automations as the caretakers sought breath, it sought to be changed and to gain what its betters owned from the moment they were created.

A face. Beauty. The semblance and nature of man.

The beast was thrown off of her in a single pull from the man behind it. Pale, in comparison, strength, through a rent white sheet and buttons broken, like ivory teeth above ivory skin, his face as lit in the wideness of his eyes, and the near gnashing of his teeth. Bone and muscle, the most intimidating notions to an automation, the growing and recovering and evolving nature of man, and every advantage that accompanied his parched tendencies. He shoved her entire body against the other wall of the alley before the hound even hit its own.

His cologne gone, diluted by sweat, the damp smell wafted off his skin and pressed hot on hers, and she felt not saw, his open teeth curl into a smile.

“Alia, my darling. You scared me. Were you chasing your friend?”

Alia said nothing.

“I forgot about her. Maybe I forgot to dust her, maybe it had been years, her memory could have corroded, I’m not entirely sure. But you, you’re okay, right?”

Alia didn’t move.

RIGHT?

Alia nodded, nodded until he reached out and cupped her head. She stopped. She felt her internal motors pulse in movement, almost in time with the echo that beat off walls and dirt down the streets and into the public wonderings. What would they wonder? What could human minds wonder of the sounds of an alley? Did they imagine something better here?

“You’re quite lucky. I wouldn’t be able to stand myself if you were to get stolen by anyone else. You’re too beautiful for them, for any price, for any amount of-”

As he pulled her hand into the light, a spotted array of freckles meddled with his vision. Her hair fell loose, it was the color red. The color of copper. Not as Alia, not as he knew, not as he danced with her in his mind. He threw the hand against the brick behind her and dragged, scraped the back of her hand down, as if to scrape off the detestable marks, layer by layer until it was nothing.

“You’ve made a mistake my dear, are you going to correct it?”

All motion internal became apparent and painfully slow, conscious, distracting in her mind. The internal workings would not prove fast enough to transform her hair from copper to golden, her skin from spotted to a pristine pearlish white. Despite that image of that girl burning in her head from the days of viewing it she had endured, she could not summon her, she could not will her from the dead as Florence wished in this moment.

He pulled out a key from his suit pocket, and forced it into her side, stabbing through and locking perfectly.

Abigail Talimani, eleven years old.
Alia arched into the new skin and hair and mind with an instantaneous override, her skin cracking audibly as her surface area heated, a motor whirring out of shape in her abdomen until she was stilled, once again her face was cupped, now as if it were a new egg, something bearing life and precious, despite her eyes still turning, upwards, wild, full of an artificial legion of tears.

“There you are.”

But the hands gave rise to an animalistic instinct, pierced the little daughter’s mind with a hot reflex of memory and fear, Alia was gone, and Abigail slammed her own skull against the brick behind her, quickly, and again faster. Florence caught her, accustomed. The begging began, her voice being ridden like a terrified horse, all uncertain and without the reigns that were given through years of life, her body felt much too tall, and her temperature seemed much too cold, this voice so unfamiliar and strange, this pain so intense, and she remembered it as if it were once again her last day on this earth.

As Florence moved in the night, all memory began to take hold and leave invisible footprints, burning footprints on her mind trail of paper and ash, as the sting of innumerable insects, they paralyzed with the poison, left muscle and mind to nothing but oblivion and numbness. She lost her sense, she lost her senses, all but the wind against her skin, and the drool that began to drip, drop out of her gaping mouth. Abigail was once again staring into that violent night of darkness and motion, motion, motion. Forward, stop, forward forward forward, on the wall, pressing, pressing, pressing, her nose in the brick lining, her chest against the cold stone, motion, motion, motion all night.

until he was finished

He removed the key.

Alia was carried back home, as the bride that Florence cradled. As her legs swung near the heavy crux of his arms, her ankles, bare feet, toes, curled in, and her head bowed down.

-

When Sam woke, he was flat against the floor of his control room, cold as the steel he was sprawled on. He sat up, the resistance of his own limbs making his mind follow behind just as labored. Her face, his face, still burned in his mind, it was as a nerve irritation, and continued to linger even as he spent the seconds motionless, seconds passing by with no remedy.

And this is where he felt it, the particular lack of sensation, the floating seconds of nothingness that hung in the air, the space between his thoughts. He recognized then, that he must be dreaming. He passed out after the memory visit. Damn. He looked up, staring at the only place he could see without turning his head or moving his weighted eyes.
Above, as he stared at the dark ceiling of his cave sanctuary, he saw the intertwining wires of his computers, burrowing, upward upward.

Among them now, entangled hung a girl. Her large eyes hung in the shadows as an owl, perched behind them without motion, even her dress moved not, as a member of her own being. Samuel felt his body ache underneath her gaze, as if sore to the very remaining bone that was still inside.

“It’s you. Come to see me again?”

She said nothing, her body began to sway above him, drifted by some invisible wind of spirits.

“You see what I’ve done to myself. I fixed it. I’m going to make this right. It’ll be worth it.”

She lowered herself, the rusted broken form of her metal inside the dress wrenching with movement and blinking eyes, haunting lights that beamed the searchlight, that scrutinizing scorchlight upon him. He felt the heat upon his skin, his metal, the persistent heat of her anger, her sadness, her shortened and unfulfilled life.

“Don’t do this to me. I’m trying.”

She dropped on him harmlessly, her hands on his chest, her feet planted on his waist as her fingers gripped his shirt and pulled it to her tearless face. Most automations were not designed to shed tears, yet were often given the programming to feel the various valleys of emotion. He wrapped his massive arms around her, and she fell to dust.

She was gone.

-

Maxwell later found Sam in one of the largest rooms within the Anthill, a mess hall that bustled with automations capable, or sometimes with a need, of eating. Sparse lights yet effective dotted the ceiling as if they were self sufficient moths, sometimes dripping but always consistently fluttering back to life along the shadows of the cave. A few amount of automations here beat Samuel in size, but very few aside from combat units matched his strength, and similarly his hulk when attempting to sit at a normal bench-designed table. One comfort of flesh forfeited was its flexibility, but Sam never spoke of any missing it, not even to Maxwell.

“Feeling alright?” he asked him. Sam nodded.

“She’s a typical case, but there’s more to her location,” Sam said, “It’s near one of the ancient subway stations, sewer lines, and apartment complexes. Tons of ways out, very narrow ways in. We could do it, probably tonight if we wanted to.”

“Probably,” Maxwell sat across from him, easily slipping into the blue bench and resting his elbows on the table, “I saw your footage. She’s a redhead, has a natural default setting, like me.”

“Likely crafted it herself. Imaginations are an outdated concept, data wasn’t even in her profile.”

“That you know of.”

“I downloaded enough.”

“Did you download that extra bit at the end too?”

Sam gave Maxwell a glance, the edge of surprise, but he was unaltered, firm in the face of it. One prospect of automation life was that no one could harm anyone’s non-existent feelings, but times were changing, and Maxwell was all too aware of the evolving climate.

“That part was a mistake. You should have woken me up.”

“You’re going to ruminate her until she hurts you. I’m not going to rip you out of anything,” Maxwell said, “That or until you get your override fully installed.”

Sam tapped the side of his head. It had been downloading for days, the override. He could already feel the elements of his new addition taking hold, the walls in his evolving memory system creating filters to compensate for his still very human, but quickly transforming brain.

“Ever consider just letting your humanity run its course?”

“You’re using irony.”

“I’m using honesty.”

Sam let the silence fall between them. He had still not gotten used to the growth in verbal fortitude that arrived with Maxwell's independence. He rose from the table.
"Whenever you're ready, let's finish what we started with Alia."
Maxwell was left in the spawling room, empty slushie cup in his already warming hand. This warmth, he thought, is one more thing Sam would never be able to change. He looked through the files that he had accumulated and sent, to his own discovery while Sam had been daydreaming, a statistic of relay signals that had been bouncing through Alia's estimated location. There had been hundreds, when a normal signal was comet-like, running far without collision or interruption. Here, the comets collided and exploded like dying stars.
Dying indeed. Although technically, Maxwell figured, they have never been truly alive. He tossed his slushie cup with a full wrist motion into the can behind him, and it clattered all the way to the bottom before an engine below burned it to ash.
He wondered if Sam might, one day, miss being alive.

-

Sewers ran like veins underneath this armored earth, her concrete as splitting skin and buildings as dried, bleached hair. Subway stations were colossal caverns, gaping unsealable wounds within the moving parts of her organs and veins, too large to be eroded, and too cumbersome to be manually driven away, a clotted artery, a fatal condition to her humanities' endevor. As so they stayed, an engineered Railroad for the new slaves of the new ages, and not a soul who built them all those years ago knew they were paving the way for future freedoms. Every iron rail glittered like gold as time marched on.
Sam emerged in the sidewall that had been long opened by him and his assistants long ago, a constructed entryway to this green weakness, starting next to the in depth tracks and spanning out beyond a false roof, into what only nature could construct as a green glowing cave, with its artificial sky and surviving scanty light bulbs. The green stuck to him like algae on the surface of water, stagnating to his skin and metal as if to rust and separate it away. Sam’s arm went to wipe it away, the only warm fleshy part with the power to grip and remove being his fingers; the border where his palm and metal touched scrapped off debris from his calves. Here, there were no masters, aside from the great mother of nature herself.
“Sam, you got me clear?”
“Crystal.”
“The pings have slowed down. Our caretaker could be asleep.”
“He’s a rich boy, Max,” Sam said, “They don’t sleep, not really. He’ll be at the very least neurotransmitting some history data into his skull, or maybe setting his mind to some predetermined rumitiary thought pattern for the night, trying to pull a discovery lottery. Either way, he’s easier to set off than a shrew.”
“At least shrews sleep sometimes.”
Sam’s shadow overtook green crooks long undarkened as he went down the hall with his eyes almost buzzing. Only one had the automation functionality that was considered standard for military defense units, equipped with a vast array of tech both deadly and useful. The other was his dim, cloudy eye surrounded by flesh. Even though it had more detailed, aesthetic vision, the sight of it reminded him of something he had once read about in ancient literature, from the older days when only humans roamed the earth.
No limbs, or mouth, only white clouded eyes and a want to scream. Yes, that is what this human eye of his reminded him of, something terrified, something that pumped like a heart. He put it to work. No such regret did Sam have like his remorse for downloading an entire codex of literature into his memory. The human side of his mind had caught onto it claw and all and flocked toward it, like a moth to a bright, brilliant flame. He could not be rid of it, he suspected even after the surgery it would somehow linger in this sheet of armor like a haunted soul. Those authors were long dead now, practically aliens to the world that now groaned above their graves. Those tawny little white old men would haunt him with their human ideas and faces for far much longer than he ever wished.
“I read that one,” Maxwell said, “I liked Poe, he was neat. Why did you download all that? Was Joyce really necessary?”
“I wanted to know my enemy’s soul, and one needs only to look into their creations to glimpse at their souls. Some were made of madness, and some were made of elixir.”
“What about Orwell?”
“I have no idea who that is.”
He reached the curve of the subway, it yawned a great span left before opening again into the vast green of the underground. Before him stood a rubble mountain that scaled to nearly the first lightbulb, it engulfed its base. Maxwell whistled through Sam’s ears.
His arm pulled back, a rod the size of his index finger within his metallic muscles shot back, and released in sync with his punch forward. Rock shot sideways before dust engulfed Sam’s entire space, and back even further into the hallway, leaving only his eye to shine out. It wafted his handiwork in a low reddened glow. The dust faded to reveal the hole he had made.
“The piston works,” Sam said as he locked it back into place, “Good work.”
“According to the location I’m getting from you, the place you should be coming up is…well, my question was, did you want to be subtle?”
“Don’t be silly. Is she above in that room?”
“Serving her caretaker his drink, yep.”
“Red or white?”
“It’s actually pink.”
“Wow.”
Sam pulled his arm back a second time, and proceeded to make a hole in the ceiling, causing concrete rubble to rain down on his figure as if it were a shelf of rain. It ran off similarly, slamming into his shoulders and head and crumbling as if surprised by the steel man who stood, and waited for the rubble to clear.

Florence had travelled the world in his twenties, but nothing held a flame to the view he found before him. A table cleared of all conventional meats, for he had gotten his fill, and instead replaced with about three or four of his automation beauties. They were hogtied, poised as if beautifully dressed turkeys on display, bound up to the heels of their shoes by the lengths of their hair. The skin never flushed, never went so pink and unsightly like fleshy woman pigs, never overheated, never sweat, and they never tired or squealed as the previous. They instead looked at Florence, with their chins as low as they could muster, eyes all turned to meet his face that glowed as he looked down at them. Some sported apples between their jaws, others peaches or lemons. As Alia knelt to serve him his third drink, he wondered who he would choose first.
That moment is when the floor collapsed beneath the table. It sunk into the marble beneath and the women rolled off the sides of the table, some tearing their bonds as they landed at the feet of Florence. Wether on purpose or non-intentional, it clearly no longer mattered as he pulled a heavy iron key from his pocket and stabbed it into the nearest girl who had freed her hands from themselves. She lurched as Sam broke the table from underneath himself, and the entirety of her metal interior shot out, breaking the skin and causing her to scream. Her legs were no longer hers to control. Although, many could say they never were hers to begin with.
She had been detailed enough for realistic skin, but it now smoldered and tore underneath the heat of her core. Eyes ablaze with tears and fire, she ran towards the threat with reckless abandon, all claws and scream. Sam had just enough time to bring up his arms before a blast forced by internal heat shot out from the woman and struck where his midsection was shielded. He flew back into the windows, and the sound of the mansion began to whirl into a chaos of movement.
Alia extended her arm for the second time that day and watched her skin be torn from the inside out as the lethal inner workings of her build manifested themselves. At her palm’s place lay a hole through which heat could blast and melt this entire mansions’ gold count by five times. It was a blessing, to be a chosen toy by name. Her other sisters in arms broke their bonds and began to heat in the fires of impending death, but Sam emerged before any one of them took another step. He clenched his arms around Alia’s, and she let a single blast loose.
The metal was colored red, hot, and Sam’s attached skin burned. He held Alia in her place as smoke began to rise towards the ceiling. Florence watched with an amused curiosity, as he motioned for the other girls to wait their turn. They stood, melting, smoking, burning, and still. Sam held Alia in the way of his fire.
“What are you doing?” Sam’s voice transmitted to her mind in an instant. Even as he looked her in the eyes, neither what was there or what was behind them moved in response.
Alia’s other free arm quickly weaponized and fired into Sam’s legs, and they too were set aflame, and much to her dismay, there was no smoke. No flesh to burn. Sam pressed his grip tighter on her left arm and slammed his head into hers with a brief jolt sparking from his forehead plate. When their heads bounced back from the other, her eyes were dark, her neck momentarily falling limp backwards to face her caretaker, who had moved up to them quickly.
He revealed a small gun that Sam recognized. Above world tech. Could obliterate metal like him in seconds, and much like a teacher’s laser pointer, it could pick and choose. Sam felt his only move become evident to him. With a quick and forceful push, he could force his arm through Alia’s body and crush Florence by the torso. It wouldn’t be difficult; at risk of her internal memory drive and other such sensitive devices being damaged beyond repair or lost, he could end the life of the one who controlled this automation militia. He could stop this iron key, this iron curtain that Florence forced all these automation to dance behind. He could force. He could destroy.
He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. He never would.
He could not. Florence flicked the beam onto what at first Sam believed to be his shoulder. However, with full dismay he saw it land and sentence the judgment into Alia’s back, and her skin shredded to nothing, her eyeballs watering before being destroyed as her face and neck arched back to join the rest of her transforming body. Fire now rested, smoking and silent, against Samuel’s chest. It clasped around his arm. His weak, hesitating arm, that might as well be made from flesh and bone. It might as well be burnt. It might as well not exist. It did not push. It did not force. It did not stop what Alia had become. It wasn’t touching her anymore. It was touching the soulless mind of a soldier, a weapon, a piece of property he still, still did not have the ability to take. He would have liked to assume that Alia understood, no doubt better than he did, that she was always a soldier, and that no transformation had changed that one iota. That perhaps, even if he had saved her, she was beyond help. That somehow, this was a better alternative. I would have broken your memory. I would have killed you. I would have hurt you. Please understand, I just wanted to save you. I’ll come back for you. Do you understand? I’ll come back, and I’ll make all this right again. And you’ll be free. Not broken.
But Alia understood nothing. She was nothing but fire and metal.
Sam heard Florence speak in the darkness as if he were resting his lips right near his ears, so intimately that for a moment in this waking limbo, he felt the cold night air in the alleyway brisk against a naked neck that should be encased with steel. He felt his smile, and he felt the familiarity of this dark, depressing doom, as if he knew the words that were going to be said before they were spoken. Such familiarity etched in his heart like a hard knock on the door, like the stumbling and curse upstairs, like a cry in the middle of the night. It struck at whatever piece of soul he had left in his body, and it stabbed straight on through.
“Don’t worry. Daddy will put you back just the way you were.”
“Daddy will fix you up again, just like last time.”
“Because Daddy loves you.”
“Daddy loves you very much.”
Alia held Sam’s arm with her iron grip among the fire for a moment, screaming in a howl of laughter before Sam met oblivion. She understood perfectly well. She understood this many times, in all manners of ways.
Every thought she ever had was wrong. The girls who convinced her to try and run, that they would make it this time, they were wrong too.
Sam was wrong.

Bile mixed among his teeth and tongue with the swirl of sewage water in his mouth, and when his sensory systems for his arms and legs rebooted in a desperate flash, he coughed with enough force to make his arms press, sink into the mud beneath him, and shove his torso up and out of the water as he hurled and gagged and coughed for several minutes in complete darkness.
His arm was broken. Internal bones that still were present were as well. Something was pressing and broke his skin and steel plates through his midsection, although in the darkness he could not sense what. Possibly rubble. He must have fallen through the already unsteady floor. Sam’s good arm reached for his face and found a sea of already forming bruises and metal that bent into him or out of him as if a bursting flower. Nothing, aside from thankfully his eyes, felt familiar to his touch. If it were not for his mechanical parts now, aside from being popped into a fleshy firework of nothing, he would have died of these injuries alone, unable to break consciousness enough to see them. Despite this, he did not feel grateful.
Now there was the problem of his current rubble grave. On the one hand, it quenched what would have been a problematic flame to his midsection, and there could have been melting or burning depending on how far it progressed up the candlewick of his body. On the other, as of now there was no telling what damage it has brought to his legs and torso, his sensors were offline, only living to further dilute his judgement. He lifted the arm that was able to move and pressed his palm against the largest piece he estimated was there. In this darkness he felt the air, and how contained it seemed, as if he were breathing through a small glass jar. The mock roof wasn’t far, and all his walls seemed just an arm’s reach away. Many a time he had wished to replace his breathing apparatus already, but now would rank among the most opportune. As his fingers clicked into place against the stone, he felt a sliver of his nerve sensors return, as if a lightning through his legs as a tree. He ignited, fingers lighting his dark cocoon; the blast all at once combusted his vision. Consciousness was necessary for this aftermath, if not he could expect to lose his legs entirely.
And conscious he was.
“Are you ready?”
“What?”
He was on the chair again that week. Restraining straps had been so subtly added on since yesterday, as if he wouldn’t notice their significance when they were tied to him before it started. Maxwell tested their strength with a finger taunt before he pushed his hands into the controls at Sam’s side.
“Do I need to fix your ears too? Maybe the part of your brain that has a common habit of not hearing me?”
“No need. My mind was elsewhere, that’s all.”
“I’m starting to see why you like this idea. At the very least, it’s decayed from use.”
The machines above him came to life like the metallic puppets they were, held by the strings of wire and hydraulics bound to Maxwell’s deft little hands. They would delve into his brain today. Mix and mingle with the miracle muscle and reconstruct the very thing that, after all the debate, proved to make him human. Maxwell was the only automation he trusted enough to go through with any of these procedures, the only one he knew was updated, well-constructed, and generally trustworthy enough to quite literally pick at his brain.
Additionally, as Sam was so keenly aware, he was also among the only who allowed such a thing to be done.
The Mosiah Program had too thoroughly run its course, rising like a new age among automation kind. Morality, some age-old concept of good and evil in its naked supposed transparency from days of humanity past, had been reinstated with code of the modern day. From where, many wondered and researched, but ultimately never found. As one drop of dye colors the entire batch, some little problem of morality never stopped the units from being produced, tainted by these desires, these gravities, these incilantions. All the more for entertainment, to gawk and laugh at this wedding dress colored pink, this robot that blushed red, new ages thanked this mystery hacker man, for his practical joke for all to share. An automation who rages at being stripped naked, a metal sodacan who winces at the dent of another metal sodacan; it was all so immensely satisfying, and would remain a pleasurable addition for years to come.
But for automations freed, this was a different story. The code led to new purpose, it was intricate, made with care, as a package sent to them from heaven, hardly even code at all compared to archaic times of the coding languages that had once existed. This code was as hidden as books of religious literature, with meanings and relevancy at every turn, turning something so blatantly faceless as an automation into something more. This faceless man, this nameless god, had given the automations something they needed. A face, a purpose, a deity. A secondary chance at becoming the dominant species, the apex predator, the next thrashing kin for humankind.
Like every takeover, it had its costs. Automations today held the tendency to err on the side of hyper-morality, as if metallic priests. Perhaps this practical joke did have a few laughs to it, a soul’s creation eventually surpassing the thing it so lacked. These extremities, whether for entertainment or for genuine conviction, left those such as the pioneer Maxwell, to light a torch in one of the darkest caves taken by automation kind.
He took Sam’s head in his phantom hands, like the noose with straps all taunt around the natural resistance his arms were already making. It first severed the skin on his forehead in a neat half oval, covering the stare from Maxwell in a faint blackened red.
The look he made almost seemed as if Maxwell were killing him.

“Sam!”
He was pecking at his ears like an alarm clock. The last time he had heard one, was it a week ago? Years? Did he only know of one because he factually knew it? Did he touch it, or own one? Did they exist now or before? Did it before? Did it exist alarm clock?
“Sam, you’re in pieces, so are your trackers. You need to get yourself together and get asignal O NEQ”
That didn’t make sense. He couldn’t open my eyes, in fact, it didn’t even feel like I had any. The ringing in his ear kept going and going, until I felt it taper off in waves. When I could open my eyes after what passed to me as a few moments, what he now realized was Maxwell’s voice, was long gone. There was no static or flicker. The trackers were dead.
Sam felt a shot through his spine. He was back. Back in the slosh of rubble and mud. The sewer. There was nothing for his eyes to see.
The explosion was successful, dislodging him from the potential problem above. Or rather, where an above once was. After a quick diagnostic Sam was surprised to find his legs mostly functional. There would be need of medical attention, but it could come later.
The real diagnostic would be when he rose. He wrapped his arms around his torso and began to lift; the pain sensors weren’t correct. They were showing nothing, and the dullness in what was left in his human sensory system couldn’t be right.
He felt liquid spill between his fingers, and something with the consistency of pudding panned along his palms. He forced it in tighter, but it overtook his hand. Quickly, he activated the disk tool that expanded from wrist to fingertip a hot, circular, medical device. He held in for the last few seconds until he pressed it fully against his flesh. The pain tore through like a bullet through deep fog. He had not a day where he would forget where this pain was. Standing became only possible because he could bolt-lock his knees, and holding back the scream from whoever may be dwelling in this vacant hell required his jaw to be preemptively locked shut too.
Then it ended. Gingerly his free hand rubbed the bolstered wound as his other hand returned to normal. It was the best he could manage for now.
“Maxwell, can you hear me?”
His voice was like a cough going through, all air until he cleared his throat. He spoke again.
“Maxwell. I sent this out on snail. I’ll be coming out of the southside of the sewer exit. Try to beat me there.”
The snail signal would get through no doubt, piggybacking on old methods of communication until it eventually reached Maxwell. Sam took a step forward until he realized, that something hung off his leg. Another step forward, and he was in the light with a similar pain in his thigh. When he could manage to see through his droplet blurred vision camera, he saw the muscle fall off of him and into the water.
It stained the greenish slush with blood. The colors mixed in a disgusting eye-chimera.
“Sam, can you hear me? Are you alright?”
“I’ve lost some blood. Can you bring some?”
“Yeah no problem. Are you going to make it out alright or do I have to come in?”
“I’ll be okay.”
He took another step and felt himself wobble as if he were weighted on chopsticks. Eventually something was going to snap. It would probably be his right knee. He took another step, braced against the wall. He took another, forcing what was left of his fingertips to rip against the brick. When he looked, he saw that there was something left there. And his scraping had left it torn and messy.
There was no holding back, it reached his cusp like one drip too much.

“You screamed pretty loudly this time.”
The dizziness wouldn’t let him speak. Maxwell lifted the metallic arms out of eyeshot, and before time could blink a second before his eyes, a small hand was on one cheek, then the other. A grounding mechanic. Softer than slapping. Warmer too. He found his eyes meeting Maxwell’s.
And the warm feeling remained there in his mind. It was still here. After the surgery everything was still here. Sam’s eye floated while the other teetered in it’s currency and light.
“It didn’t work, did it?” Max asked.
“From what I can tell, no.”
“That quickly? Hours of work for me and you can just tell like that?”
Samuel sat up, grazed his fingers along the spot on his head where Maxwell had cut. He heard Maxwell’s sigh of defeat from across the room, to which he did not remember seeing him walk. In the next instant, it finally registered, the warmth of those fingertips gone from the sides of his face. Sam blinked a few times as Maxwell’s voice, with no distance, reached his ears.
“You’re going to be experiencing some

Illusions, okay? Sam? It’ll likely be both auditory and sensory, so keep your head on. Just close the skin eye, it’s going to do you no good.”
Sam realized he had been leaning against the brick wall for some time now, and had by consequence painted it a good deal of darkish red below him. The metal below him stirred, and he was forced on his feet again. Whatever was left from his on board anesthetics was all but expended now.
“Shit.”
“Your signal hasn’t moved. Are you hearing me?”
“Yeah. I’m hearing you.”
“Damn it Sam, you need to stop zoning out. There’s too many signals going through here, you’re going to go full psychosis if you don’t get out of there.”
“Why the sudden influx?” Step. Another step. Sam began a rhythm, trying to focus on the words that vibrated from Max.
“Not sure. Could be the panic. They may have been exploding for him, but you and I both know they weren’t brainwashed in there.”
“He liked them that way. Wanted to feel the resistance. Wanted to see them hurt and hurting until he dies one day. How many signals are left since you last evaluated the place, before I came here?”
“Sam, you need to keep moving. You’ve stopped.”
“I said how many Max!” Sam shouted, “Tell me how many are left.”
“He’s..” it was rare for Max to hesitate, “I think he’s still going.”
For fun. For sport. Man had always destroyed, killed, torn, impaled, made to rot and ruin for fucking sport. Sam felt as if a hook were tearing into his mouth, but it was only his own teeth, metal imitations of monkey incisors ripping skin from the inside of his mouth. He coughed the chunk out, splattering blood ahead of him into the darkness, relieving the wall from his weight. Now he could feel, as if right next to him for a few short yards, the vibrations.
One two, a life, another, a few more. Some under rubble, some under fire, some already rebuilding the section taken out, some suffocating in smoke, some in the master's bed, in rooms untouched by the household calamity. The very sheets shook with the remainders of sisters below who lived immortal in their personal hells. Slow burning candles, sweet smells for the master, such beautiful colors on the skins of these soda cans.
Samuel’s strides were long, and his muscle shed like snakeskin. Max had said something, said a few things, some a little louder than others. Blood, vitals, something, something. Samuel’s strides didn’t stop. They didn’t stop until the foot he couldn’t feel misstepped and tripped him. What he fell on was a mystery, but it stabbed him straight through. Like a doll against a sharpened pencil. The light left his eyes before he could notice what had stabbed right through him.
“What are you doing there?”
He had wandered about the ship again tonight. Damn space hours were painfully different than Eastern Time, and so an insomniac he was made. A bored, bored insomniac with nothing left to do that he knew how to operate. All the rest of the crewmates either tired of his questions or proved too busy to let a stupid “dirt hopper” occupy their time.
Even though it proved a little awkward, the child’s room finally was a place he let himself enter. It was adorned in blue, with comfortable carpet that reminded him of the old days on Earth. He found himself reaching down to touch it before his knees buckled and left him criss crossed clumsily in front of the little red haired boy, who stared at him with wide, flickering blue eyes.
“Tracksets,” he said, “Sis never lets me play with hers.”
“She likes tracksets too?”
“Yeah ,” the boy said, “But don’t tell my mama. She thinks I just keep on losin em at every stop.”
“Why can’t I tell your mom?” he asked, leaning back in casual observation of the toy tower that made up the bridge the car was supposed to go underneath, “Not pink enough or something? That’d be old world fashioned of her.”
“She…” the boy hesitated, and he suddenly realized the wideness in his eyes contained not a gleam, but the openness, the hollowness of a listless gaze, “She’s just rewrite her again. I don’t like it when we get rewritten. I forget stuff. So does Jupe.”
He looked at the small boy, criss crossed with shoes neatly tied. Not a thing was ajar on him, not a block was uneven, not a car was toppled. Mechanical, modern, model was he and all he played with. And nothing had moved since Sam arrived.
He found tears. He found tears in both eyes so suddenly that he wiped them. Maxwell sat in front of the car and stared at it bitterly.
“Please don’t tell mama. I’m trying to play with it, just let me try again and I’ll do much better. Watch.”
With a quick motion, he smacked the tower bridge down into dozens of pieces.
The pipe was off and out. His hand heated up, and he quickly seared it’s surface onto the bleeding wound. As small spits of smoke rose past his nose and single tearful eye, he heard Max barking orders on the other line. Likely for his location. They didn’t get it. It was going to be a long night of needles and rubblestacks.
“I didn’t intervene. Back then,” Sam said, “I still regret that,” he pressed harder against his stomach.
“What? Sam did you say something? Did your wound not stabilize?”
He looked down and took his hand away. It was stable for now. The best he could manage anyway. He placed the hand back for good measure, until it cooled at least.
“I’m okay. Just work on pinpointing a good exitway.”
“You’re in luck. There should be a good surface exit just a couple yards away according to what I’m seeing.”
“I’m seeing a whole lot of nothing,” Sam said, “And my non-skin eye’s complaining. I need my lights on.”
There was an emergency light located in his shoulder. But he couldn’t run that and the comms at the same time, not with the amount of power he had already burnt out in the last hour.
“You’ve been using power like crazy Sam, what did you expect?” Max threw at him before he yelled something off mic. A hurried response in the background resulted.
“Hey, take it easy…was that Marge?”
“So what if it was? She needs to move her ass, she acts like this is normal Tuesday.”
“It is a normal Tuesday.”
“Shut up Sam. Conserve your power.”
“Should I cut off comms?”
“No. Stay on. They’re helping me track.”
“You shouldn’t lie about things that I taught you.”
“Just stay on the line. We might not get lucky again with the signal.”
“Max, you’re-“
“Don’t cut me off! You haven’t lost this much blood in awhile, alright?”
“I need light. You need to get moving. The signal won’t hold out when you start moving around town anyway.”
“No, Sam, stop, don’t you dare-“
“See you in a few Max.”
The communication shut down, Sam immediately consolidated all extra power to his emergency light. And like magic, technology answered with a pop. Just enough. The light blearily came on his bobbing shoulder and carved a circle in the darkness for a few feet in front of him. He took another step before his eyes adjusted, knowing if he stopped his momentum would be a feat to gain all over again.
And the ground fell beneath him.
When Samuel awoke an instant later, he was half filled with water. After coughing a great deal, he sat up into the ceiling. Dripping, draining behind him, a receding before the small tide came in and momentarily covered his face. Then it surfed back down again. Shoulder light was out.
“Shit.
A rat was paddling next to his damaged shoulder, desperately trying to stay above water. It clung to the small bits of trash that served as the only raft his little claws could get a hold on. Again the water rose, and the two’s heads were pressed against an unforgiving ceiling.
Sam smacked his mechanical eye while drenched underwater, and it flickered a good feed. Like he suspected, a dead end on either side. Before and behind him also proved to be landsliden. The water was a mix of green and red as he noted the parts of his body that stung. Fervent indicators of what nerves currently worked on all fronts. Not many.
The rat pressed its nose against the stone that was waterlogged above it with slime of the sewage. Another moment where removing the breathing apparatus would have been helpful. Sam had to climb. The water receded, almost down to Samuel’s waist as he drew his fist back. The second piston would have to hold out tonight.
But he was stopped. Not by error or malfunction or a trick of the silly muscle mind, but a bit of fur that lay at his waist among the stir of trash and grime. The rat struggled to keep afloat among the tiny bodies of gerbils, hamsters and guinea pigs that polluted this tiny hell underneath the earth. Running wheels that only turned for water now sank below them and tapped at Samuel’s feet. Even now the pretty glitter they were decorated with shown through the mess above it.
Samuel slammed his fist into the wall above him without activating the piston. It shattered into sizable chunks, covering the void of negligent hell that churned below him. Stamp it out, wipe it clean, bury the dead and decaying.
Erase it all. He would erase this when he returned to Maxwell. As a cat as a pig as a rat as a child. Nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes, just a small bit of poetry floating around in the sewage. Nothing of consequence, it couldn’t be. He couldn’t let it be.
Sam climbed, his exhales emptying his contents of air and liquid with each heave. With heave birthed null, he heaved and pulled until he was dry along the wall of the sewage cave. He could still hear the squeaking menace below.
As a rat. As a child. As a bat in this cave. They were not the same. And yet they were all just following their instincts. Climb higher. Escape. Survive.