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Infinity Smashed: First Human Contact
First Human Contact
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: M.D. learned how humans work; now she learns how she works.
Word Count: 4200
Notes: This story was sponsored by the Patreon and LiberaPay crews. The vote this month was split three ways, and this was one of the contenders. Since Infinity Smashed is having its twentieth birthday in a couple weeks (!), I exercised my blogly fiat and am posting more words than usual, plus I’ve edited every Infinity Smashed story preceding this one (except Number One and the UDC). Enjoy!
When I woke up, sore and grumpy, the rain had stopped and everyone else was up. And Raige was grinning as he shoved my own water bottle at me.
“Your cat is a cyborg!” he said. “That is the coolest!”
Well, at least he was feeling better. As I grunted and dragged myself through my trail mix breakfast and reorganized and assessed our meager supplies, Raige chattered and pumped Bobcat like he was the Oracle of Delphi. If Bobcat was bothered by it, he didn’t let on, and he broadcast to me so clearly wanted me to hear the answers.
“Are there robots, where you live?”
Yes.
“What are they like?”
There are many different kinds, in all shapes and sizes. Most move from hardware to hardware, for convenience.
“Do any of them look human?”
Humanoid, I suppose. But none of them smell or broadcast like humans do, which is intrinsic to how I conceptualize humanity, so in my opinion, no.
“But someone like me, who doesn’t have that. Would I be able to tell?”
Pause. I think so. From what other human people have told me, it is very difficult to make a humanoid computer construct—that’s what we call them—that can fool other human people. There are so many things you take for granted without noticing. You may not think you notice smell, but I suspect you would notice in hot weather if someone neither sweated nor smelled of it. It’s much easier not to try, and to let us constructs be what and who we are. An HCC is not a human; I am not a minus-cat.
That seemed to give Raige enough food for thought that he didn’t say anything for a while. But I had to ask.
“Hey Bobcat.” I pushed the protein bars, trail mix, and tortillas back into my bag. “How do other cats, the normal ones, respond to you?”
The pause wouldn’t have been noticeable, verbally. They tend to become extremely agitated. My implant was created by humans. It uses a human frame of reference and thus makes my behavior more relatable to other humans… not minus-cats. I suspect to them, I am unnerving—I look and mostly smell like a minus-cat, but I am not.
Raige gave me a look that said I’d been rude, but I wasn’t paying attention. Now I was the one with a lot to think about.
Until I met Vandorsky, I had given every human I’d ever encountered the willies. Even the ones who tried to hide it, I could tell. Now that I knew how to wear clothes and talk and not bite pets, plants, or people, my batting average had gotten a lot better, but people still tended to keep their distance. It’s why Vandorsky’s parents didn’t like me around. It’s why I’d survived this long as an unaccompanied minor living out of a backpack. Something about me said, “wild animal, do not touch.”
I’d always figured it was because I was weird. I’d never given much thought as to why.
Maybe it was because I looked and mostly smelled like a person, but I wasn’t.
…
Vandorsky and I met in Special Ed together—specifically, the Behavioral Issues class, which was for the “smart” kids whose bodies mostly worked but who couldn’t be left alone with other kids. You know… the autistic, the fatally weird, and the serial-killers in the making. Guess which category I fell into.
I was there because I’d always been there. Vandorsky, though, she was new to it. She had, by all accounts, been a mostly normal kid until puberty—and she was unlucky. She hit early.
They weren’t sure what her deal was, but when things got too intense, she’d freak out. She had a scream that could take the skin off a cat, this hair-raising, bloodcurdling, never-ending screech that had managed to impress even me.
If you asked me, her problem was mostly bullies. It was right around the time any form of difference made you a target, and becoming the scariest juvie psycho on earth was one of the only means of self-protection, if you had no friends. And Vandorsky wasn’t like me. She didn’t like hitting people. She didn’t have a permanent record that could’ve done duty as a parking brake. She was just an all-black-wearing kid who liked zines and old monster movies. So, stuck with a truckload of hormones and a bunch of pubescent vipers, she turned to her pipes. And apparently she was a choir kid who listened to a lot of metal.
She probably would’ve been eaten alive in BI, if not for me.
I wasn’t exactly King of the Psychos, but I was at least a marquis. And I couldn’t scream for the life of me. Vandorsky seemed a good way to learn, so I sidled up to her one day at lunch and just… existed at her. It was the only way I knew to attempt friendly interaction, and hey, it worked on dogs.
Fortunately, it also worked on Vandorsky. “Hi,” she said.
I nodded at her. I wasn’t a big talker then. Not good at eye contact either.
“Your roll looks good.”
I nodded again. Everyone knew the school lunches were garbage… except the rolls, which were amazing. No one knew why; rumor had it there was some angelic lunch lady who made them, but nobody knew who. (Except me. It was Jamie. I caught her once, and she bought my silence with rolls, in the process insuring I would never, ever bite her without warning.)
Vandorsky had a sack lunch. She pulled out a twist-tied bag of gummy bears and held it up, a rainbow against her black-nailed hand. “I’ll trade you five gummy bears for half your roll.”
Sugar was one of those things nobody gave me, in hopes it’d improve my behavior. (It didn’t.) She never knew it, but in that moment, Vandorsky made herself the world’s coolest person, in my eyes. I picked up my roll, tore it in half, and as I passed it over, our hands met.
The other times this had happened, so had bloodshed. But not this time, for some reason. Vandorsky didn’t even seem to notice.
“One thing,” she said.
I looked up, and found she was staring hard at me with those raccoon-mascara eyes. Staring was one of my (many) red buttons, and I started to bristle.
“I’m a girl. No matter what they say, what anybody says, I’m a girl.”
I blinked. My hackles went down. Oh. She didn’t want a fight. She just cared very deeply. I didn’t understand why, but I didn’t need to.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re a girl. Duh.”
She relaxed. I relaxed. She gave me her gummy bears. And that was that.
The crazy thing was, it worked. She was good for me. Adults had been trying to teach me how to be a person for years, at that point. To meet people’s eyes without going ape, to approach someone straight on instead of crab-walking up to them, to not bite. In five years, their biggest successes were housebreaking me and getting me to understand English. (Getting me to use it, though… not so much.) They’d tried rewarding me, punishing me, ignoring me. Nothing seemed to work.
Vandorsky didn’t do anything special. She did nothing that an adult hadn’t tried first, multiple times, and failed. Drove them crazy. Kids had tried being my friends before and ended up in the ER. What did Vandorsky have that they didn’t? What was her secret?
I couldn’t have told them, because I didn’t know. All I knew was that when I was around her, humans made sense. They stopped being bizarre, unpredictable, petty overlords. They became people like me, and their Rube Goldberg machine of rules and etiquette started to sort of matter. Even when I didn’t get it, Vandorsky was usually able to explain it to me.
Why did people care about wearing the right shoe on the right foot? Because it was more comfortable. How could you tell them apart? By cutting a sticker in half and putting each side in the corresponding shoe. Why did people stare all the time? To show they were paying attention. Ditto all those “uh huh” and “yeah” noises. Yes, sure, sometimes they were also doing it to say who was boss, but not always, and going nuclear wasn’t always the correct choice.
What was “matching clothes” and why was it so important? Well, that she couldn’t help with; she dealt by wearing all black. However, she surmised that it mattered for the same reason that wearing clothes right-side-out mattered: because it meant you were willing to go through pointless inconvenience to prove yourself part of society, and thus more predictable and less frightening.
Until that point, such a thing had never mattered to me. Now I kind of cared.
The really crazy part though wasn’t that Vandorsky was good for me. It was that I was good for her. She melted down less. Zoned out less. Seemed a little less out of it. I figured it was just because I kept the bullies off her back—I was small and puny, sure, but so are rabid Chihuahuas. As long as we were together, we were mostly manageable.
But then Vandorsky improved enough to get out of BI. There was no way I was ever going to make it into the normal classes, so we got separated, and she got on meds, and I got a new foster family. And I stopped caring again.
Vandorsky stayed my friend, though. Even after I ran away—for short times at first, then long-term, then permanently. Even after I stopped coming to school and her parents put their foot down about how sure they were that I was going to bury her in their backyard. Even as I got kind of raggedy and feral, she stayed my friend, and covered for me, and hid me from the adults when she had to, because we’d made a deal over bread and gummy bears, all those years ago: we would each respect the weird random things the other person cared about. For Vandorsky, it was gender. For me, it was getting away from adults.
She was probably the only reason I could act like a person at all. And it’d never occurred to me until that moment with Bobcat that she’d saved my carcass.
…
Getting Raige away from Bobcat seemed an impossible task, but eventually Raige ran out of questions and I finally managed to send him off to, no joke, boil water. (He seemed to think I was still too injured to be moving around much, and I suspected lighting a fire would take him awhile, especially in the damp.) The moment he was out of sight, lugging water bottle, matches, and metal pot/plate and handle, I turned to Bobcat, who was stretching.
“I’m not a human, am I? I’m one of those… those things you talked about. Humanoid construct thing.”
That made him jerk up straight and his tail fluff out. His mental voice was deadly serious.
You are not a thing. He seemed to catch himself and calmed down. And you’re not an HCC.
That wasn’t an answer. I gave him the Vandorsky stare-down.
I don’t know what you are or why you were made. But you’re not a… a robot. A computer construct. As far as I can tell, you are what we call a fully organic construct, a— I could feel him struggle for a description in English that I would understand, that would be short and to the point.
“A meat construct?” I said.
I could tell he found it distasteful, but he said, more or less. You may have been carefully bred, surgically engineered, or otherwise organically modified; I have no way of knowing. And you do have a bioelectromagnetic tracker inside you somewhere; it’s how I was able to locate you. Other than that, I am unaware of any inorganic additions to your body—though that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
“So I’m like… a specially bred dog or something?”
That is my best guess at this time, and I myself shouldn’t be considered the authority on the matter.
“Whatever.” People bred animals for only two reasons. “Work or show. Which am I?”
That, he couldn’t pussyfoot his way out of. He mentally sighed. Work.
“What kind?”
I don’t know. He could tell I was getting mad. All I know is that it involves… do you know what bioelectricity is?
“Is that like what an electric eel makes?”
Among other beings, yes—mostly aquatic, because it’s more useful underwater, and mostly as a means of defense, not offense. It can be used to track moving life-forms, stun or kill… and it is also used as the basis of every implant like mine used in the markets that I know of.
In other words, asking me what work you were built to do is like asking what work electricity can do. Theoretically. If I’m right, which I may not be.
I chewed on that for a while. Finally, I said, “if I’m electric, shouldn’t I have noticed by now?”
His tone was wry. You did survive being hit by lightning.
“Lots of people do that.” But then I remembered how I’d apparently set the lawn on fire. And the whole reason I’d been on that stupid roof in the first place was because I’d broken the TV, game box, stereo, and computer so many times.
But Bobcat had an implant and he was telepathic. I knew for sure that I’d never experienced anything like his thought-voice before. But I was having a sinking, whirlpool sensation that there were a lot of things I’d just taken for granted that weren’t what I thought they were.
“How does your implant work?” I asked finally. “Could I do that?”
I doubt it. My implant is built on the principles your creators discovered… but it is not the same as anything you might do. I have transceivers and boosters embedded in my body that can, with difficulty, read and interpret the electromagnetic signals your brain gives off in thought. It requires effort and concentration; in my culture, nigh-everybody has such transceivers and a connection to the Sky—a massive digital solar-powered network. Whatever you might do is an organic, analog form of communication; mine is inorganic and digital.
I guess my confusion must’ve been obvious. He tried again.
There’s a reason bioelectricity is mainly used by underwater life. To feel the signals requires a conductor—and water is much better than air. For my people, transceivers and the Sky has taken on the role of that conductor. You have none. If you can read such signals at all, it’s likely only within a short radius. You’d have to be immersed in water with the person, or touching them…
I remembered Vandorsky and her gummy bears. I remembered her black fingernails, our hands brushing. I remembered how being around her had made me get humans for the first time in my life. How she was the only person I let touch me.
Who had touched me before that? I ransacked my memory. People I was fighting. Adults who’d held me down when I wigged out, invariably making it worse. Foster parents who were absolutely determined to hug and kiss me, regardless of what I thought. Doctors—
There was a reason I’d learned to dress myself in as many layers as possible. I’d just figured everyone felt that crawling sensation when touched, that they were just better at hiding it. I’d thought—I’d thought—
Raige appeared, looking shamefaced. “So, uh, I think I might need some help…”
I got up, snatched the matches from his hand, and stalked off. Bobcat let me go, and I guess he kept Raige from following me.
It was just as well Raige had given me an excuse to go handle the fire; I’m not sure where I would’ve gone, otherwise. I went over to the little pyramid of wood he’d built up, kicked it over, and threw myself down beside the stream. Then I squatted there and stared into the water, thinking.
I’d never learned to swim either… and not for lack of trying on my foster parents’ part. Eventually, adults had decided that I was scared of water, and I knew at least one of my handlers had joked I was “hydrophobic.” (She’d thought that just because I didn’t talk, I didn’t know that it was a synonym for “rabid.”)
The stream was clear, and I saw some minnows darting through the rocks as I watched. I looked at them. I looked at my hand. Then I took off my glove and rolled up my sleeve.
Water was a good conductor. Maybe fish would be less bad than humans.
Before I shoved my hand in, I had an attack of common sense. Remembering the last attempt to teach me to swim, I sprawled on my side on the bank so if my luck was bad, at least I’d already be on the ground and wouldn’t fall into the creek. It wasn’t deep, but hey, neither was that swimming pool.
Once I was sure I was in a position that would stay above-water, I dipped my hand in.
Cold. Wet. Fast quick motion motion motion air—
Oxygen deprivation was what stopped it. I snapped back to myself, gasping as I remembered my own lungs. My arm had gone limp, and now my bandages were wet, but I hardly noticed.
That was nothing like with Bobcat. He was all clear statement; this had been experience, kinesthesia, sensation—amazing!
I pulled my bandages off, rolled up my sleeves again because they were starting to slip, got back into position. When I felt ready, I plunged both arms in.
This time, I was more prepared, able to hold to myself better and remember things like breathing. This time, I knew the thoughts weren’t mine and could just let them wash over me without falling in.
Bubbles rocks sun on silver water—
Hungry hunger eat eat eat—
Clean eggs clean nest keep safe hatch—
I could feel the water, extending ever-so-long in both directions, fanning out in tributaries and ponds and lakes, touching fish, eggs, snails, plants, something that might’ve been a bear, far upstream…
It was so big. So much.
I see, I catch, I feed—
—flee dash hide run—
—keep safe keep hatch must must must—
Too much. Too much!
—air in web bubbles through the hairs on eight legs, breathe catch eat—
—water rushing over scales and tail, gills and fins—
Dying! I die! I thrash I bleed pain—!
—I eat I live I taste blood and know I live—
A million directions, a million lines of sight, a million thoughts. Where was my body? Where was up? Where, what was me? I couldn’t breathe.
Dying! I die!
Living! I live!
I am a water-dwelling spider who carries air down with me in silk from my own body
I am a fish, guarding my unborn children in the nest that marks my sphere of protection
I am a bear, a hungry bag of skin and stomach after the long cold
I am
I am
Water water water air
Get her out of the water! Get her out of the water!
And then I was flat on my back, with air in my lungs, the sun in my eyes, and Raige wide-eyed and pale over me.
I wasn’t wet, except for my arms. But I felt not much better than I had that time in the first grade. My body felt like it should have a belly and lungs full of water, and with that thought, I rolled over and dry-heaved.
It was a pretty horrible sound, and Raige took a couple steps back. Bobcat, though, planted himself in front of my face, tail like a bottle brush.
Don’t you ever do that again, do you hear me? Never.
The nice thing about telepathy is you can say, “okay” and retch at the same time.
I mean it! I have an implant regulating my immersion with xenopsyches; you do not. People die doing things like this, you foolish child! Their life rhythms aren’t yours!
“I’m sorry!”
Bobcat’s tail unfluffed. His back unarched and his fur went down. He let me finish hacking, and then he said, I daresay you are.
I flopped on the pebbles and took a few experimental breaths. Once I was sure I was back, I looked up at Raige, who through all this had just stood there, fidgeting and looking worried.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I tried to smile at him. “Just another adventure, okay?” Then, to Bobcat, “I didn’t know.”
Bobcat looked like he might blow up again, but then caught himself and did whatever the cat++ version was of taking a deep breath and counting to ten. No. I suppose you couldn’t have. He sat down next to me, and I managed to pull myself to sitting. I felt dizzy and nauseous, and more than either, tired. Bone deep tired.
I propped my face against my knees. “They tried to teach me to swim, in first grade,” I said. “But they couldn’t get me in the water. My foster dad decided I needed exposure therapy and so he tossed me in.
“I sank.”
He was a fool.
“Yeah, I’ve known smarter. But I always just thought it was me, you know? That I was…” broken, “…not good at the whole… human thing.”
Even with the anthropomorphization of the implant, I couldn’t read Bobcat’s body language or tone. He was ignorant, and he was wrong. Can you stand?
I groaned.
As I thought. You burned a lot of energy doing that; you should feel better with some food and rest. Raige, pick her up and help me get her home.
I glared at Raige as hard as I could. “Don’t you dare. I’ll be fine, just give me a sec.”
Raige fidgeted and crossed his arms. “You know, I think I’m going to wait until you agree.”
A brief telepathic argument ensued. Bobcat won. As he gave me pointers on not killing myself by ignorant accident (no hot tub parties, no tap dancing on hot tin roofs, and no orgies), Raige dried me off with his flannel and helped me bundle up as best he could. In that position, and with my bandages off, it was impossible to hide the rows of scars on my arms, even with the blistering lightning flowers.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
I stared hard at him. “Fell down the stairs.”
The next problem: how could Raige get me back to the lean-to without skin contact?
Every position failed—either it was too painful, too nauseating, or Raige was too tall to make it doable. Finally, on the verge of screaming in frustration and seeing the rainclouds amassing in the sky, I crammed some protein bars in my face and said fine, forget it, we’d do piggyback and just try really hard not to think about our naked baby photos. Even Raige was starting to get fed up by now, so he agreed, and Bobcat was so eager to get me back into something resembling human habitation that he agreed too.
With a little food in me, I felt well enough to be live weight, rather than dead. We finally got me on Raige’s back, and as expected, all my layers were for naught. My hands weren’t the problem; it was my face and Raige’s neck.
I consigned myself to the inevitable and stopped trying to hold myself rigid and upright. “Think about something boring,” I told him, and chose Vandorsky’s zine cataloging system for myself. (We’d spent a summer doing it, and her sticker system would forever be ingrained in my brain.)
I promptly forgot it when I found myself in Raige’s head.
It was nothing like the creek—just one human mind, instead of countless inhuman others. Breathing wasn’t a problem; I just let mine synchronize with his. Raige didn’t seem to notice me, because he was focusing really hard on… music. Specifically, playing the piano—the muscle memory of keys; hands and wrists and arm movements, all surrounded by sound and odd flashes to other pianos, other rooms, practicing at home versus competing on stage. Strung through it all was some bony freckled woman who played duets with him and had to be a relative.
It was weirdly soothing, even with the throbbing undercurrent of, “don’t think about the girl on your back, don’t think about the girl on your back, don’t don’t don’t!”
Then I was on the bedroll and back in my own body. “Who’s the lady?” I asked, already half-asleep.
Raige honest to god zipped the bag up tight around me and tucked me in. “My mom.”
“No. She’s too young.”
“She’s been gone a long time. You should sleep.”
“Okay,” I agreed, and did.
…
At some point, I woke up to find Bobcat gone and Raige reading his robomance novel. It was drizzling again.
“Where’s Bobcat?” I mumbled into the pillow.
“Doing probability vectoring, if you know what that means.”
I didn’t. Going back to sleep sounded like a great idea. But first… “hey. Hey.”
“Yes?”
“Do I scare you?”
He gave me a weird look. “…no?”
I grinned. “Cool. You’re all right, man.” And I fell back asleep.
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: M.D. learned how humans work; now she learns how she works.
Word Count: 4200
Notes: This story was sponsored by the Patreon and LiberaPay crews. The vote this month was split three ways, and this was one of the contenders. Since Infinity Smashed is having its twentieth birthday in a couple weeks (!), I exercised my blogly fiat and am posting more words than usual, plus I’ve edited every Infinity Smashed story preceding this one (except Number One and the UDC). Enjoy!
When I woke up, sore and grumpy, the rain had stopped and everyone else was up. And Raige was grinning as he shoved my own water bottle at me.
“Your cat is a cyborg!” he said. “That is the coolest!”
Well, at least he was feeling better. As I grunted and dragged myself through my trail mix breakfast and reorganized and assessed our meager supplies, Raige chattered and pumped Bobcat like he was the Oracle of Delphi. If Bobcat was bothered by it, he didn’t let on, and he broadcast to me so clearly wanted me to hear the answers.
“Are there robots, where you live?”
Yes.
“What are they like?”
There are many different kinds, in all shapes and sizes. Most move from hardware to hardware, for convenience.
“Do any of them look human?”
Humanoid, I suppose. But none of them smell or broadcast like humans do, which is intrinsic to how I conceptualize humanity, so in my opinion, no.
“But someone like me, who doesn’t have that. Would I be able to tell?”
Pause. I think so. From what other human people have told me, it is very difficult to make a humanoid computer construct—that’s what we call them—that can fool other human people. There are so many things you take for granted without noticing. You may not think you notice smell, but I suspect you would notice in hot weather if someone neither sweated nor smelled of it. It’s much easier not to try, and to let us constructs be what and who we are. An HCC is not a human; I am not a minus-cat.
That seemed to give Raige enough food for thought that he didn’t say anything for a while. But I had to ask.
“Hey Bobcat.” I pushed the protein bars, trail mix, and tortillas back into my bag. “How do other cats, the normal ones, respond to you?”
The pause wouldn’t have been noticeable, verbally. They tend to become extremely agitated. My implant was created by humans. It uses a human frame of reference and thus makes my behavior more relatable to other humans… not minus-cats. I suspect to them, I am unnerving—I look and mostly smell like a minus-cat, but I am not.
Raige gave me a look that said I’d been rude, but I wasn’t paying attention. Now I was the one with a lot to think about.
Until I met Vandorsky, I had given every human I’d ever encountered the willies. Even the ones who tried to hide it, I could tell. Now that I knew how to wear clothes and talk and not bite pets, plants, or people, my batting average had gotten a lot better, but people still tended to keep their distance. It’s why Vandorsky’s parents didn’t like me around. It’s why I’d survived this long as an unaccompanied minor living out of a backpack. Something about me said, “wild animal, do not touch.”
I’d always figured it was because I was weird. I’d never given much thought as to why.
Maybe it was because I looked and mostly smelled like a person, but I wasn’t.
…
Vandorsky and I met in Special Ed together—specifically, the Behavioral Issues class, which was for the “smart” kids whose bodies mostly worked but who couldn’t be left alone with other kids. You know… the autistic, the fatally weird, and the serial-killers in the making. Guess which category I fell into.
I was there because I’d always been there. Vandorsky, though, she was new to it. She had, by all accounts, been a mostly normal kid until puberty—and she was unlucky. She hit early.
They weren’t sure what her deal was, but when things got too intense, she’d freak out. She had a scream that could take the skin off a cat, this hair-raising, bloodcurdling, never-ending screech that had managed to impress even me.
If you asked me, her problem was mostly bullies. It was right around the time any form of difference made you a target, and becoming the scariest juvie psycho on earth was one of the only means of self-protection, if you had no friends. And Vandorsky wasn’t like me. She didn’t like hitting people. She didn’t have a permanent record that could’ve done duty as a parking brake. She was just an all-black-wearing kid who liked zines and old monster movies. So, stuck with a truckload of hormones and a bunch of pubescent vipers, she turned to her pipes. And apparently she was a choir kid who listened to a lot of metal.
She probably would’ve been eaten alive in BI, if not for me.
I wasn’t exactly King of the Psychos, but I was at least a marquis. And I couldn’t scream for the life of me. Vandorsky seemed a good way to learn, so I sidled up to her one day at lunch and just… existed at her. It was the only way I knew to attempt friendly interaction, and hey, it worked on dogs.
Fortunately, it also worked on Vandorsky. “Hi,” she said.
I nodded at her. I wasn’t a big talker then. Not good at eye contact either.
“Your roll looks good.”
I nodded again. Everyone knew the school lunches were garbage… except the rolls, which were amazing. No one knew why; rumor had it there was some angelic lunch lady who made them, but nobody knew who. (Except me. It was Jamie. I caught her once, and she bought my silence with rolls, in the process insuring I would never, ever bite her without warning.)
Vandorsky had a sack lunch. She pulled out a twist-tied bag of gummy bears and held it up, a rainbow against her black-nailed hand. “I’ll trade you five gummy bears for half your roll.”
Sugar was one of those things nobody gave me, in hopes it’d improve my behavior. (It didn’t.) She never knew it, but in that moment, Vandorsky made herself the world’s coolest person, in my eyes. I picked up my roll, tore it in half, and as I passed it over, our hands met.
The other times this had happened, so had bloodshed. But not this time, for some reason. Vandorsky didn’t even seem to notice.
“One thing,” she said.
I looked up, and found she was staring hard at me with those raccoon-mascara eyes. Staring was one of my (many) red buttons, and I started to bristle.
“I’m a girl. No matter what they say, what anybody says, I’m a girl.”
I blinked. My hackles went down. Oh. She didn’t want a fight. She just cared very deeply. I didn’t understand why, but I didn’t need to.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re a girl. Duh.”
She relaxed. I relaxed. She gave me her gummy bears. And that was that.
The crazy thing was, it worked. She was good for me. Adults had been trying to teach me how to be a person for years, at that point. To meet people’s eyes without going ape, to approach someone straight on instead of crab-walking up to them, to not bite. In five years, their biggest successes were housebreaking me and getting me to understand English. (Getting me to use it, though… not so much.) They’d tried rewarding me, punishing me, ignoring me. Nothing seemed to work.
Vandorsky didn’t do anything special. She did nothing that an adult hadn’t tried first, multiple times, and failed. Drove them crazy. Kids had tried being my friends before and ended up in the ER. What did Vandorsky have that they didn’t? What was her secret?
I couldn’t have told them, because I didn’t know. All I knew was that when I was around her, humans made sense. They stopped being bizarre, unpredictable, petty overlords. They became people like me, and their Rube Goldberg machine of rules and etiquette started to sort of matter. Even when I didn’t get it, Vandorsky was usually able to explain it to me.
Why did people care about wearing the right shoe on the right foot? Because it was more comfortable. How could you tell them apart? By cutting a sticker in half and putting each side in the corresponding shoe. Why did people stare all the time? To show they were paying attention. Ditto all those “uh huh” and “yeah” noises. Yes, sure, sometimes they were also doing it to say who was boss, but not always, and going nuclear wasn’t always the correct choice.
What was “matching clothes” and why was it so important? Well, that she couldn’t help with; she dealt by wearing all black. However, she surmised that it mattered for the same reason that wearing clothes right-side-out mattered: because it meant you were willing to go through pointless inconvenience to prove yourself part of society, and thus more predictable and less frightening.
Until that point, such a thing had never mattered to me. Now I kind of cared.
The really crazy part though wasn’t that Vandorsky was good for me. It was that I was good for her. She melted down less. Zoned out less. Seemed a little less out of it. I figured it was just because I kept the bullies off her back—I was small and puny, sure, but so are rabid Chihuahuas. As long as we were together, we were mostly manageable.
But then Vandorsky improved enough to get out of BI. There was no way I was ever going to make it into the normal classes, so we got separated, and she got on meds, and I got a new foster family. And I stopped caring again.
Vandorsky stayed my friend, though. Even after I ran away—for short times at first, then long-term, then permanently. Even after I stopped coming to school and her parents put their foot down about how sure they were that I was going to bury her in their backyard. Even as I got kind of raggedy and feral, she stayed my friend, and covered for me, and hid me from the adults when she had to, because we’d made a deal over bread and gummy bears, all those years ago: we would each respect the weird random things the other person cared about. For Vandorsky, it was gender. For me, it was getting away from adults.
She was probably the only reason I could act like a person at all. And it’d never occurred to me until that moment with Bobcat that she’d saved my carcass.
…
Getting Raige away from Bobcat seemed an impossible task, but eventually Raige ran out of questions and I finally managed to send him off to, no joke, boil water. (He seemed to think I was still too injured to be moving around much, and I suspected lighting a fire would take him awhile, especially in the damp.) The moment he was out of sight, lugging water bottle, matches, and metal pot/plate and handle, I turned to Bobcat, who was stretching.
“I’m not a human, am I? I’m one of those… those things you talked about. Humanoid construct thing.”
That made him jerk up straight and his tail fluff out. His mental voice was deadly serious.
You are not a thing. He seemed to catch himself and calmed down. And you’re not an HCC.
That wasn’t an answer. I gave him the Vandorsky stare-down.
I don’t know what you are or why you were made. But you’re not a… a robot. A computer construct. As far as I can tell, you are what we call a fully organic construct, a— I could feel him struggle for a description in English that I would understand, that would be short and to the point.
“A meat construct?” I said.
I could tell he found it distasteful, but he said, more or less. You may have been carefully bred, surgically engineered, or otherwise organically modified; I have no way of knowing. And you do have a bioelectromagnetic tracker inside you somewhere; it’s how I was able to locate you. Other than that, I am unaware of any inorganic additions to your body—though that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
“So I’m like… a specially bred dog or something?”
That is my best guess at this time, and I myself shouldn’t be considered the authority on the matter.
“Whatever.” People bred animals for only two reasons. “Work or show. Which am I?”
That, he couldn’t pussyfoot his way out of. He mentally sighed. Work.
“What kind?”
I don’t know. He could tell I was getting mad. All I know is that it involves… do you know what bioelectricity is?
“Is that like what an electric eel makes?”
Among other beings, yes—mostly aquatic, because it’s more useful underwater, and mostly as a means of defense, not offense. It can be used to track moving life-forms, stun or kill… and it is also used as the basis of every implant like mine used in the markets that I know of.
In other words, asking me what work you were built to do is like asking what work electricity can do. Theoretically. If I’m right, which I may not be.
I chewed on that for a while. Finally, I said, “if I’m electric, shouldn’t I have noticed by now?”
His tone was wry. You did survive being hit by lightning.
“Lots of people do that.” But then I remembered how I’d apparently set the lawn on fire. And the whole reason I’d been on that stupid roof in the first place was because I’d broken the TV, game box, stereo, and computer so many times.
But Bobcat had an implant and he was telepathic. I knew for sure that I’d never experienced anything like his thought-voice before. But I was having a sinking, whirlpool sensation that there were a lot of things I’d just taken for granted that weren’t what I thought they were.
“How does your implant work?” I asked finally. “Could I do that?”
I doubt it. My implant is built on the principles your creators discovered… but it is not the same as anything you might do. I have transceivers and boosters embedded in my body that can, with difficulty, read and interpret the electromagnetic signals your brain gives off in thought. It requires effort and concentration; in my culture, nigh-everybody has such transceivers and a connection to the Sky—a massive digital solar-powered network. Whatever you might do is an organic, analog form of communication; mine is inorganic and digital.
I guess my confusion must’ve been obvious. He tried again.
There’s a reason bioelectricity is mainly used by underwater life. To feel the signals requires a conductor—and water is much better than air. For my people, transceivers and the Sky has taken on the role of that conductor. You have none. If you can read such signals at all, it’s likely only within a short radius. You’d have to be immersed in water with the person, or touching them…
I remembered Vandorsky and her gummy bears. I remembered her black fingernails, our hands brushing. I remembered how being around her had made me get humans for the first time in my life. How she was the only person I let touch me.
Who had touched me before that? I ransacked my memory. People I was fighting. Adults who’d held me down when I wigged out, invariably making it worse. Foster parents who were absolutely determined to hug and kiss me, regardless of what I thought. Doctors—
There was a reason I’d learned to dress myself in as many layers as possible. I’d just figured everyone felt that crawling sensation when touched, that they were just better at hiding it. I’d thought—I’d thought—
Raige appeared, looking shamefaced. “So, uh, I think I might need some help…”
I got up, snatched the matches from his hand, and stalked off. Bobcat let me go, and I guess he kept Raige from following me.
It was just as well Raige had given me an excuse to go handle the fire; I’m not sure where I would’ve gone, otherwise. I went over to the little pyramid of wood he’d built up, kicked it over, and threw myself down beside the stream. Then I squatted there and stared into the water, thinking.
I’d never learned to swim either… and not for lack of trying on my foster parents’ part. Eventually, adults had decided that I was scared of water, and I knew at least one of my handlers had joked I was “hydrophobic.” (She’d thought that just because I didn’t talk, I didn’t know that it was a synonym for “rabid.”)
The stream was clear, and I saw some minnows darting through the rocks as I watched. I looked at them. I looked at my hand. Then I took off my glove and rolled up my sleeve.
Water was a good conductor. Maybe fish would be less bad than humans.
Before I shoved my hand in, I had an attack of common sense. Remembering the last attempt to teach me to swim, I sprawled on my side on the bank so if my luck was bad, at least I’d already be on the ground and wouldn’t fall into the creek. It wasn’t deep, but hey, neither was that swimming pool.
Once I was sure I was in a position that would stay above-water, I dipped my hand in.
Cold. Wet. Fast quick motion motion motion air—
Oxygen deprivation was what stopped it. I snapped back to myself, gasping as I remembered my own lungs. My arm had gone limp, and now my bandages were wet, but I hardly noticed.
That was nothing like with Bobcat. He was all clear statement; this had been experience, kinesthesia, sensation—amazing!
I pulled my bandages off, rolled up my sleeves again because they were starting to slip, got back into position. When I felt ready, I plunged both arms in.
This time, I was more prepared, able to hold to myself better and remember things like breathing. This time, I knew the thoughts weren’t mine and could just let them wash over me without falling in.
Bubbles rocks sun on silver water—
Hungry hunger eat eat eat—
Clean eggs clean nest keep safe hatch—
I could feel the water, extending ever-so-long in both directions, fanning out in tributaries and ponds and lakes, touching fish, eggs, snails, plants, something that might’ve been a bear, far upstream…
It was so big. So much.
I see, I catch, I feed—
—flee dash hide run—
—keep safe keep hatch must must must—
Too much. Too much!
—air in web bubbles through the hairs on eight legs, breathe catch eat—
—water rushing over scales and tail, gills and fins—
Dying! I die! I thrash I bleed pain—!
—I eat I live I taste blood and know I live—
A million directions, a million lines of sight, a million thoughts. Where was my body? Where was up? Where, what was me? I couldn’t breathe.
Dying! I die!
Living! I live!
I am a water-dwelling spider who carries air down with me in silk from my own body
I am a fish, guarding my unborn children in the nest that marks my sphere of protection
I am a bear, a hungry bag of skin and stomach after the long cold
I am
I am
Water water water air
Get her out of the water! Get her out of the water!
And then I was flat on my back, with air in my lungs, the sun in my eyes, and Raige wide-eyed and pale over me.
I wasn’t wet, except for my arms. But I felt not much better than I had that time in the first grade. My body felt like it should have a belly and lungs full of water, and with that thought, I rolled over and dry-heaved.
It was a pretty horrible sound, and Raige took a couple steps back. Bobcat, though, planted himself in front of my face, tail like a bottle brush.
Don’t you ever do that again, do you hear me? Never.
The nice thing about telepathy is you can say, “okay” and retch at the same time.
I mean it! I have an implant regulating my immersion with xenopsyches; you do not. People die doing things like this, you foolish child! Their life rhythms aren’t yours!
“I’m sorry!”
Bobcat’s tail unfluffed. His back unarched and his fur went down. He let me finish hacking, and then he said, I daresay you are.
I flopped on the pebbles and took a few experimental breaths. Once I was sure I was back, I looked up at Raige, who through all this had just stood there, fidgeting and looking worried.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I tried to smile at him. “Just another adventure, okay?” Then, to Bobcat, “I didn’t know.”
Bobcat looked like he might blow up again, but then caught himself and did whatever the cat++ version was of taking a deep breath and counting to ten. No. I suppose you couldn’t have. He sat down next to me, and I managed to pull myself to sitting. I felt dizzy and nauseous, and more than either, tired. Bone deep tired.
I propped my face against my knees. “They tried to teach me to swim, in first grade,” I said. “But they couldn’t get me in the water. My foster dad decided I needed exposure therapy and so he tossed me in.
“I sank.”
He was a fool.
“Yeah, I’ve known smarter. But I always just thought it was me, you know? That I was…” broken, “…not good at the whole… human thing.”
Even with the anthropomorphization of the implant, I couldn’t read Bobcat’s body language or tone. He was ignorant, and he was wrong. Can you stand?
I groaned.
As I thought. You burned a lot of energy doing that; you should feel better with some food and rest. Raige, pick her up and help me get her home.
I glared at Raige as hard as I could. “Don’t you dare. I’ll be fine, just give me a sec.”
Raige fidgeted and crossed his arms. “You know, I think I’m going to wait until you agree.”
A brief telepathic argument ensued. Bobcat won. As he gave me pointers on not killing myself by ignorant accident (no hot tub parties, no tap dancing on hot tin roofs, and no orgies), Raige dried me off with his flannel and helped me bundle up as best he could. In that position, and with my bandages off, it was impossible to hide the rows of scars on my arms, even with the blistering lightning flowers.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
I stared hard at him. “Fell down the stairs.”
The next problem: how could Raige get me back to the lean-to without skin contact?
Every position failed—either it was too painful, too nauseating, or Raige was too tall to make it doable. Finally, on the verge of screaming in frustration and seeing the rainclouds amassing in the sky, I crammed some protein bars in my face and said fine, forget it, we’d do piggyback and just try really hard not to think about our naked baby photos. Even Raige was starting to get fed up by now, so he agreed, and Bobcat was so eager to get me back into something resembling human habitation that he agreed too.
With a little food in me, I felt well enough to be live weight, rather than dead. We finally got me on Raige’s back, and as expected, all my layers were for naught. My hands weren’t the problem; it was my face and Raige’s neck.
I consigned myself to the inevitable and stopped trying to hold myself rigid and upright. “Think about something boring,” I told him, and chose Vandorsky’s zine cataloging system for myself. (We’d spent a summer doing it, and her sticker system would forever be ingrained in my brain.)
I promptly forgot it when I found myself in Raige’s head.
It was nothing like the creek—just one human mind, instead of countless inhuman others. Breathing wasn’t a problem; I just let mine synchronize with his. Raige didn’t seem to notice me, because he was focusing really hard on… music. Specifically, playing the piano—the muscle memory of keys; hands and wrists and arm movements, all surrounded by sound and odd flashes to other pianos, other rooms, practicing at home versus competing on stage. Strung through it all was some bony freckled woman who played duets with him and had to be a relative.
It was weirdly soothing, even with the throbbing undercurrent of, “don’t think about the girl on your back, don’t think about the girl on your back, don’t don’t don’t!”
Then I was on the bedroll and back in my own body. “Who’s the lady?” I asked, already half-asleep.
Raige honest to god zipped the bag up tight around me and tucked me in. “My mom.”
“No. She’s too young.”
“She’s been gone a long time. You should sleep.”
“Okay,” I agreed, and did.
…
At some point, I woke up to find Bobcat gone and Raige reading his robomance novel. It was drizzling again.
“Where’s Bobcat?” I mumbled into the pillow.
“Doing probability vectoring, if you know what that means.”
I didn’t. Going back to sleep sounded like a great idea. But first… “hey. Hey.”
“Yes?”
“Do I scare you?”
He gave me a weird look. “…no?”
I grinned. “Cool. You’re all right, man.” And I fell back asleep.
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