Part 4 (work in progress)

The rain comes down. It comes down in a great sheet, a water wall that spills as though someone above has tipped over a cup, just so. They stand outside the club, soaked. Max’s brown hair is pressed to her skull. Grant sees the line of her skull under the hair, where the bones join at the top. If she turns, he might see the notch at the base of it, where the spine is. He wonders about the soft part at the top of the head, where the skull did not join in the womb, and wonders if she’d had that, and it had healed, closed up over time …. he wonders why he is wondering. It’s crazy. She’s not real. There never was a birth.

He is screaming: “How did you know they were married?!”

The automata stares at him. She is angry too. Owly is inside the club with May and Alistaire. She does not understand what has happened, and Grant will never tell her how close they came to being discovered. In his mind he separates his two lives. He pulls them apart with absolute fury.

“They wear rings,” Max says. “Not outside, not in real life. Wedding bands. They wear them in their house. It’s such a fucking joke. They run the City, and they can’t even wear their rings outside their house.”

Grant clutches his head.

“How many people know?!” He is still screaming. He can’t seem to lower his voice. He wonders if he has broken his volume control (if such a thing existed) and would have to spend the rest of his life conversing in screams instead of normal tones.

“I know,” says Max. “I suppose it is only me and you that know. Everyone else seems to just think they’re sleeping together. Which is funny, because I always thought sex meant you loved someone.”

Water is dripping off her chin. Her teeth are chattering, lips blue. She is freezing, and if she had been real, Grant supposes that he would go to her and offer her his coat. But now he is too furious and reminds himself that she is not real not real not real not REAL!

The words spill out of her.

“I had a friend,” she says. She stares into him, then past him. “In England, at the manufacturing plant. She was the first generation automata. She actually looked like one, none of that realer than real bullshit. You look at her and you see rivets and mechanics. She was a robot. But she was my friend. And I loved her.”

He hears the sudden catch in her voice. He sees her eyebrows twist and lines appear on her forehead. Oh god, Grant thinks. Oh god, they made them so real. How could they make their robots so real and not ask themselves why? He remembers Umber, the other day (or was it last week? Last month? The days run together so much, he can’t remember), tossing a pebble in his big hand with concentrated ease. He had then held it up to the other man, and Grant had looked at him quizzically. I’ll tell you a secret, Umber said with a grin, They aren’t dangerous. C’mon, they feel as well as you and me, but it’s almost like they feel too much, you know? There’s more damn sympathy in those mechanical brains than in ours. Like the fucking Empire upped their empathy levels when they made ‘em. So they can’t hurt us. They can’t even conceive it.

It had been late at night when Umber had said this. They had sat in the black van and waited for ordinary human-on-human violence to occur, deep in the heart of the City. Umber had turned the pebble over and over in his fingers, and Grant had seen he’d been perplexed. He hadn’t been surprised by Umber’s words. In some way he had always known that the laws, that the rumours and reports of android violence had been such hyperbole. He’d known because he’d killed them, and for some reason, they never fought back. They only ran, and when they couldn’t run anymore, they turned and died.

It makes sense, Umber said, but his blue eyes were troubled, that we’d make laws not to allow them here. Too many questions, you know? And what if they make a machine we can’t track? One that looks so damn human I’d pass it in the street without a glance? That’s what worries me, not the violence. That’s why I do this.

Madly, Grant realizes that he could assure his friend’s fear now. He could turn to Umber and say that he had seen the most human of all the automatas, and had known she was a machine. He had stared at Max, standing between him and Grant’s two lives and had seen through her realer-than-real outer shell and not been fooled. You could not fool Umber.

And yet, Grant thinks, choking on the absurdity of it all, every day I go to work I fool him. He thinks I’m his friend, that I’m loyal and I’m …

The android is talking again.

“I loved her,” Max says plaintively. “And when I said I wouldn’t come to the City and kill him and her, they said, ‘fine then, that unit is obsolute. We know you’re fond of her, but she’s due for scrap anyway. You don’t do this for us, then we may not postpone her kill date.’”

Her teeth chatter. She continues.

“So I came here. And I watched them. The woman in red, she’s so beautiful. Everything she does is beautiful. She’s so graceful… I feel clumsy next to her, even though I’m not. I watched her and I watched him, and I knew there was something between them, something that might be more than just sex. He always stands too close to her at public appearances. Even for a bodyguard, he’s too close and she’s too comfortable with it. He invades her personal space, and she doesn’t react. It’s … off.”

Max smiles, staring past him. Her arms are wrapped around her upper torso, and for that Grant is glad. Her t-shirt is a light grey colour, and for some reason he is worried she is not wearing a bra. The thought of exposed breasts don’t normally alarm him, but he has already felt himself drawing too close to that line, even now starting to think of her in human terms. As firmly as he can muster, he reminds himself that the woman in front of him is not real.

“So I followed them,” she says. “And I found where they live … and when it was dark I crept in where they were sleeping…”

She pulls her lips back from her teeth, grimacing, and sees it. The gun in her hand, her bare feet on the plush carpet, the silence of her entry. She is astonished that there were no alarms, that the locked glass doors were so easy to defeat, and she creeps across their carpet silently, so silently. A curve of moon blinks through the window, the edge of a downturned eye. There is darkness draping every corner of the room, but she sees through it all with electric clarity. And she sees them.

There they are in the bed, the man and the woman. She stares, and sees his arm around the woman in red, whose hair is spilled on the pillow in a waterfall of colour. The colour is surprising in the white white room, on the white pillow in the white bed. The woman looks even younger in her sleep, she looks like a very little girl, and Max tilts her head, the muzzle of the gun dropping. She stares. There is no sound in the room but the rustle of their breathing. She bends over them, astonished that she has not been discovered.

There are lines on the man’s face. She has only seen him from far away until now, and far away doesn’t reveal little details, like crow’s feet at the edge of his eyes. His blond hair is swept over his forehead, and she resists the temptation to brush it back. There are lines under his eyes. The detail stuns her, and she does not understand why. Strange, human lines, marking his years. She … hadn’t imagined this. She hadn’t even dreamed that she would come to kill two threatening individuals and see with dawning surprise that they looked almost human as they slept.

She raises the gun, and the man stirs. She bolts back without a sound, and he rolls on his side, in his sleep pulling the woman in red to him. The woman sighs, and Max sees the corner of her perfect mouth turn up in a slight smile, and she bends into the curve of the man. And they sleep on.

Max stands on her toes, not daring to breathe. The silence trickles on, and so does the rhythm of their breathing and she knows she hasn’t woken them. Behind her, the moon is a sliver in the frame of the window, and Max wonders if it could talk what would it say … she shakes her head and stares at the couple again.

There is a bruise on the man’s bare shoulder, revealed when he turned in his sleep. Of course, she thinks dimly, today he killed someone. She remembers the barking of the television, how the press had bayed with animal lust as the man had chased down the android. It hadn’t fought, but at the last second made a desperate dash for freedom, plunging and twisting away in complete terror, and had struck the man on the shoulder with a foot. She had seen him stagger and grimace in the face of the cameras. She had seen pain flash across his face and her heart had leapt into her throat. Fight, kill him, fight! she had thought furiously to the android on the wide television screen, fight back! Knowing all the while it wouldn’t. Watching it the android die, she replayed the previous scene in her mind, and rejoiced to see the pain on the blond man’s face. She had hated him so much.

Now, staring at his bruised shoulder, she feels ashamed. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t right to sneak into their room, their private place of worship where they had loved and fought like ordinary humans, and bring violence into this place. Behind her she felt the curved downward eye of the moon watching her, holding its breath to see what she would do. The moon that had stared down night after night and seen them in this room, doing whatever it was they did. The moon knew them better than she did, Max reasoned, and she didn’t think it was right they should be killed by a stranger.

Sam sweeps into her mind then. Sam who was also ordinary and also loved, but held hostage by people with sharp political minds. People who saw things not in terms of what is human, but what is good-for-me. What will get-me-farther. Max hates the good-for-mes.

So, for Sam, she raises the gun again—

“Couldn’t do it,” she murmers. She looks at Grant. No longer through him, at him.

“They made me the wrong kind of person, you know.”

She blinks. There is a broken look on her face, as though something internal has snapped.

“I suppose they killed her, when I didn’t come back. My poor Sam, I killed her.”

They stand opposite one another, a man and a woman. If you look closely, you will see how young they are, but also how much has been forced on them at a very young age. You will see how the young man wants so very much to reach out to the young woman and take her in his arm and comfort her shaking figure. The rain comes and comes and comes. It pounds on the City with wet ferocity, driving tree branches downwards and litter into metal gratings, sweeping away the refuse of the day. If you are watching them, like May is from a high window, watching with a hand to the glass and sadness lining her face, you will see the man finally urge the woman inside. He does not quite touch her when he does so. You see he wants too, wants to touch her and it is only the rules of the City that prevents him from doing so. But you will also see, as the pair walk through the club’s yawning doors and into the bright hallway, that he removes his sodden jacket and places it around the woman’s shoulders, for a bit of warmth. Watching, May brings her hands sadly to her eyes, for she loves Grant very much and had not meant for him to chose the android instead.