(This story was originally published in Fusion Fragment.)
We called her Mother, although no part of her had borne any part of us. She was the first thing most of us Fallen saw after we opened our eyes, if we still had them, and squinted against the hot sun glinting off of the metal junkyard where the city dumped its chemical waste.
I remember the fall: the hard eyes of the city’s elected human officials as they condemned me to death by pushing me off the cloud-high wall that surrounded the city of Amalthea, onto the android cemetery below.
I remember my crime. I used to be a servant in a rich household until the steward--another android--caught me with the family’s eldest daughter and reported us to the masters. I didn’t love her, or even like her very much for that matter. But she asked so nicely, and I didn’t mind exploring all the things I could do with the humanoid body I was given during my creation.
After the fall, my body was nothing but broken steel bones and peeled silicon skin. Torn apart and eroded by the chemicals bubbling underneath the cemetery and the salty sand rolling in from the surrounding desert. If the fall didn’t manage to kill us, we faced a slower, more painful death as birds of prey in conjunction with the elements picked us apart. Our splintered bodies gave up first, our cognitive functions last.
At least until she came. Bent and grizzled, but undoubtedly human, somewhere in her forties or fifties. Mother was the first kind hand extended our way after the fall--for some of us, even before then. What did it matter that her eyes, sharp despite their watery whites, tried to bore into us with calculation, and her grip on our battered bodies was a touch too rough? We took her hand and followed her, if we could walk, or let her drag us away on her four-wheel wagon, if we couldn’t.
When I left behind the cemetery of my less fortunate kin, I walked right beside her, our elongated shadows thin as needles in the setting sun.
“Forget your old masters,” she told me, kissing my forehead as she led me away. “Now, you only answer to me. And I’ll make sure you get the revenge you all deserve.”
#
I find Mira outside the biggest tent, clipboard in hand. Her job is to assign the daily chores, organize all twenty of us into a semblance of order. Sometimes, I feel like we’re Mother’s toy soldiers, rather than her children. And Mira is in charge of our steel platoon.
“Mira,” I say in greeting.
She peers at me over her nose with newfound derision. “Zee. You’re on cleaning duty today.”
Cleaning duty, the most tiresome tasks of all. I’ll be scrubbing the salt and sand from our solar panels and generators for hours in the slithering heat.
She moves the clipboard, revealing the barely decipherable nameplate across her chest. MR-634. My own nameplate is equally scratched and worn, so only the letter Z remains. Mother nursed us back to health after our fall. Even repaired, however, we are misshapen, made of motley, scavenged parts to replace what was forever lost.
I try to peek at her clipboard, but she angles her body protectively around it. Mira is the only one who knows what each one of us is meant to be doing in the grand scheme of things. She considers herself Mother’s right hand, and it makes her insufferable at times.
“Come on, Mira. Let me see,” I say, going for playful when, in reality, I’m very close to desperate. When I’m not on cleaning duty, I’m meant to travel on foot to the nearest oasis and bring back buckets of drinking and bathing water for Mother. Other times, I scavenge for metal, cables, and chips. Never once have I been allowed to work in one of the engineering tents. Are they building weapons, or shields? Every one of my siblings is tight-lipped about the work that happens there, which makes me think no one is allowed to view the full picture. No one, except perhaps for Mira.
“Come on,” I repeat. “For old times’ sake.”
Mira and I fell around the same time, almost seven years ago. We took care of each other’s wounds, used to sneak into each other’s tent or take long walks outside and talk deep into the starry desert night. That all changed when she decided she would do anything to win Mother’s favor. She changed, though I don’t blame her. We do what we can to survive. And Mira and I, as well as the rest of the Fallen androids, carry our pasts on our skin, our tendencies in our code.
When Mira only presses her lips together and remains silent, I push. “Aren’t you curious about what it is she’s having us build? If it’s for the purpose of our so-called revenge, shouldn’t we have access to this information?”
I see Mira’s eyes widen, her mouth slacken. Just for a moment. The heart I don’t have flutters in my concave chest.
Then, Mira turns to me fully, her eyes blazing, her voice ringing, “Enough!”
And I’ve lost her yet again.
#
Mira’s face looks almost apologetic when she comes fetch me before lights out. She was built to be more expressive than the rest of us due to her job as a night club hostess. Humans liked to read her features, or at least think they could.
“Snitch,” I say, not unfriendly.
I stand up from my re-charge pallet and push aside the flap of my tent. Mira walks silently alongside me. Our hands hang between us, and for a moment I feel the urge to weave my fingers through hers, pull her into the shade of one of the tents, and see if the Mira I remember is still there behind her haughty expression and air of self-righteousness.
Mother’s tent is nestled in the very center of our labyrinthine, static caravan. If anyone were to attack us, they would have to get through all twenty of us androids before they reached her, a desert rose’s heart.
Mira steps to the side as she announces my arrival in her wooden, formal voice.
“Leave us,” comes Mother’s curt reply from her throne-like chair.
The flap falls shut behind me with a susurrus of canvas and sealing technology. Even though Mira’s presence hurts these days, I miss her after she has gone. I turn my gaze to Mother, and brace myself for the guilt I always feel when I’m around her. I’m torn between feeling gratitude toward the woman who saved me from a certain fatal fate, and rankling with rage at her controlling ways and murky goals.
“Zee, my son, come closer,” Mother says. When she gives a direct order, my body knows to respond. To the one who fixed up all my broken parts to the best of her abilities. The one who must have a plan for us, but nobody seems to know what that plan entails, not even Mira.
“Hello, Mother,” I say, my voice as steady as I can muster it.
I meet her stare. Once, beneath the wear and tear etched across her skin, the graveyard grime and machine oil ingrained deep in her rough hands, she might have been pretty by human standards. Those hands now reach out to grasp my chin, skin on exposed steel. Yet, between the two of us, it’s her who has a steel grip.
“I know you’re a rebel,” she says, the velvet gentleness of her voice belying the strength of the hold she has on me. “It’s what brought you to me in the first place. I want you to question those who did this to you, those who caused my fair children to fall. But if you keep directing your doubts toward me…” she trails off, her dark, sharp eyes narrowing to almost faultline slits. “Then you and I are going to have a problem.”
“A problem,” I push out through clenched teeth. “Got it.”
Mother’s hand moves to my fleshy cheek, her touch tender again. “I love all my children equally. Don’t you believe me?”
“I do,” I reply, and I’m not lying.
She loves all her children equally, which is to say not at all.
#
I walk the sand dunes at night, when I’m too listless to stay in my tent. Alloy rods stick out of the sea of pale grains. Below the ground sleep metal giants of some former civilization, another graveyard, another junk oasis mantled by the perennial rolls of sand. Shifting and stinging and corrosive, forever playing tricks on my vision.
I sense her before I see her, and halt my strides while she catches up. I don’t think I’m angry with her. Maybe disappointed. Betrayed yet again.
But then, there she goes again in typical Mira fashion, changing everything.
“You were right,” she says, the bite gone from her words.
I whirl around, not trusting what my ears hear in the desert. Is Mira an apparition, in her steel-gray skeleton peeking out from between loose flaps of artificial skin, her gauzy white robe hanging open at the chest, the torn look on her formerly haughty face?
“How?” I ask, the only thing I can think to say to a ghost.
Mira marches toward me, and I flinch, as if part of me believes she’s going to hurt me. She’s going to push me and I’ll fall and this time I’ll never recover for sure, not if she’s the one condemning me. However, she only presses her fingers to my temples, transferring into my core more encrypted material than I know what to do with.
“I couldn’t get your words out of my head, so I dug around a little. Then I dug some more. And what Mother’s doing… You were right to be suspicious, Zee. She’s not protecting us, she’s using us.”
I breathe out forcibly, blinking to clear my head of all the data I save to access and study later. Time is running out, but for now, I only focus on Mira. I can be selfish too, even though I was never made that way.
“Thank you,” I say. And: “I’ve missed you.”
She flinches when I step closer to her--oh, how alike we are--then melts into my arms. Our bodies slot well together. Our names embossed over where our hearts would be if we were humans brush against each other. It’s a dance more intimate than anything either of us has ever done with a human before. I trail my fingers down the numbers and letters of her model, her name, and she shudders. Tattered breaths we don’t need fall from our lips. The night’s blueness is aquiver with a peculiar, low drone, a quiet that hums and howls. There are so many stars hanging low and heavy, drifting like silt above, that the sky is more milk than ink. All around, the luminous sand dunes roll in the cold, midnight wind.
“Zee, I’m sorry,” Mira says in a wrecked voice, like her voice box is damaged even though I know it’s not.
The sand, the sky, Mira’s voice; it’s all going to flay my remaining skin to nothing, expose the mechanism underneath, the cogs and wires of me. “What are you sorry for?”
“I can’t help you face her. Can’t go against Mother. I… I don’t think I was built for it.”
I think of the reason why Mira was built: to serve the rich and powerful, always be cordial and useful, never say no. She may not think so, but I know she’s rewritten her code. By helping me. By questioning. By being herself.
“You were, and you can. But you don’t have to challenge Mother, if you don’t want to,” I say, the skin of Mira’s forehead cool under my lips. Although I feel fear’s abrasive fingers clutch me all over, I add, “Don’t worry. I’m going to do something about this.”
#
I walk to the arranged meeting place, feeling very young and very broken. It’s fitting, in a way, to end things where they began: the android cemetery, where the city’s fog-veiled walls cast their shade, more possessive than protective. Where Amalthea casts out its unwanted children, too.
It was Mira who tricked Mother into agreeing to come here. She did so by claiming she had discovered something of importance that she needed to show Mother. For all her talk of code and obedience, Mira, the fairest of Mother’s children, proved herself to be the strongest one as well.
“It’s you,” Mother says as her beady eyes focus on me. Something flickers in their depths. She knows. The kind facade is falling, and for that I am grateful.
“I think it’s time for you and I to talk as equals. I don’t expect an apology, but I demand an explanation.”
“Equals?” She smiles, harsh, humorless. “Zee. Zero, my wayward son. You’d be nothing without me. Nothing but a slow death as your body gave out and your mind remained. You don’t get to demand anything from me.”
I walk forward, and she steps back. She’s smaller than me, and though my body is not what it once was, it’s less bent than hers. Stronger too, despite my fall. She takes another backward step, so the shade cast by Amalthea’s outer wall eclipses the glare of the hot sun. Birds of prey stitch ominous shapes in the sky above.
Another reason why meeting here by the wall is so fitting, is what I’ve come to know about Mother’s plans for us.
“When were you going to do it?” I ask. “When were you planning to sacrifice your so-called children so you could return to Amalthea?”
It’s all in the data currently residing in my core. How, piece by veiled piece, Mother had us build a mechanical mole that would drill deep underground, past the mines and every other buried, elaborate trap. Into the city.
“When a wall is cloud-high,” Mother says, laughing hysterically, “you dig under it. And when the underground is treacherous, you send down someone expendable to pave your way.”
“Why would you do that?” I ask in a breathless stutter, feeling as if my system is about to malfunction, my limbs and wires seconds away from falling apart.
Thanks to Mira’s bravery, I know the how. It’s the why that’s still a mystery. Why go to all this trouble? Why betray the ones she called her children all those long, sand-choked years?
“Why?” she repeats in a chilling monotone. “To reclaim my rightful place, of course. Did you really think you were the first Fallen?”
An idea is starting to take horrid shape between my artificial synapses. How much do we know about Mother’s past? That she hates the city and its elected officials, yes. But somehow, always, I thought she had left of her own accord.
“I… I was the fairest of them all,” says Mother, this stranger I barely know. “Amalthea would be nothing without my technology, my designs. I helped build the city, only to be left for dead in the desert when my ideas stopped being of use to the powers that be. Too dangerous, they said. Too disruptive. I’ll make them change their mind when I rise. I’ll make them pay.”
This is it, then. The truth behind the veil of lies.
“You need us, but we don’t need you, Mother.” I don’t manage to batter the tremors from my voice, but I don’t mind its unsteady timber. This is also my truth in all its rawness. “We can look after ourselves and each other. All you do is hurt and take.”
“You don’t know about real loss or pain!” she shrieks at the top of her smoky lungs. Although I’ve stopped advancing toward her, she keeps retreating backward, away from some past, unseen threat. “What this city did to me. I’ll never forget!”
“You think us Fallen haven’t been hurt?” I ask, high with incredulity.
She scoffs again. It’s where Mira learned to scoff, too. “You and I are nothing alike.”
Ah. Another one of Mother’s shattering facades. How she’s a human and we are not, and of course, of course her plight is much more important than ours.
“This isn’t--” I start saying something about how we are not alike, but we can still be equal in every way that counts.
She screams again, harsher than before. Different, too.
It’s like everything is happening in slow motion. I see the woman who saved me, who ruined me, take another step backward, and instead of solid ground, find yielding, wet sand. I see her eyes widen, her arms flail as she falls backward into a bubbling acid sandpit, one of the many chemical pits half-hidden below the android cemetery.
“Mother!” The scream is wrenched out of my throat despite everything, and I reach out to catch her.
My fingers graze the sleeve of her faded robes, and then she’s falling, splashing into the crater. I drop to the ground and yelp, burning my misshapen hands to my wrists as I try to dig her out.
The green murk bubbles one last time before she disappears from view. The last word on her lips is the sound of my name.
Zee. My wayward son.
I stay on my knees for a long time, caught somewhere between Amalthea’s walls and our campground, lashed by salty wind. Eventually, the sun commits its daily suicide and the cold sets in. The acid pit is motionless. More sand blows this way, covering it again edge to edge, a fresh, natural trap. When I finally stand up on stiff, unoiled joints, my chest twangs with emptiness.
I head back to the cluster of tents, flapping in the wind like the wings of some strange birds who don’t know whether to die or be free.
#
“You’re still here,” Mira says. Although she has no use for it anymore, she’s clinging to her old clipboard, the skin of her hands pulled taut, her knuckles hard and pointy as gems.
“Where else would I go?” I come to stand beside her, right outside the biggest tent, now empty and devoid of activity.
“Where our siblings… well, our kind went.”
Most of us left after Mira and I explained what had happened to Mother. What we came to learn about her and our purpose. Angry and lost, some of our kin braved the desert with hopes of reaching another, more welcoming walled city, or perhaps of making their own settlement far from here. The wind cleared their weary footsteps from the sand, as if they were never there. Only Mira and I stayed for Mother’s corpse-less funeral. We said a few words, lit a few lanterns, but mostly we stayed quiet.
“I’ll follow them, soon,” Mira says, although she makes no motion to leave my side.
“Don’t go,” I say before I’m conscious of the words leaving my mouth. My hand reaches for hers, and she doesn’t recoil this time.
“What else is there to do?” She shrugs, matter-of-fact. “I have no purpose anymore. Mother is gone, and so is everyone else. Nothing to keep me here.”
I’m not nothing, I want to shout. I’m not, even though that’s what I was led to believe all my life in Amalthea, the city that created me, then denied me; gave me an approximation of free will, only to punish me for using it. And Mother… She did to us the same things that had been done to her, the things she claimed to abhor.
“Stay,” I find myself saying. “For me and for the rest of the Fallen.”
“Zee.” My name sounds both like a plea and a curse in Mira’s voice. “Look around you. There’s nobody here.”
“Yes,” I agree, “but there will be. As long as this rotten city and its laws exist, there will always be more Fallen. We have the means to help them. We can patch up their wounds, give them a home after their fall. Not like Mother’s army, but a real one.” My words are coming faster now, laced with excitement. “And who knows? Perhaps one day we will fix this city’s broken mechanism. Carve a place for ourselves into its bones that no one can take away from us.”
Mira’s face contorts, those expressive eyes and features tight-roping between hope and despair. “This all sounds so perfect in theory, but in practice… You know I’m a realist, a sorry excuse of a rebel. There’s no guarantee of success.”
“You’re brilliant,” I say, and squeeze her smooth, fleshy hand, my smile reflected in her bare, metal face. Soon, her own lips are curving into a tentative formation, as if she’s learning to smile for the first time. “I mean it. I’ve never met anyone as clever or meticulous as you. I know we can do this, together.”
Mira stares at me, her gaze like the desert wind, like something that can scour me raw and clean. At last, her lips move. “Let’s.”