My eyelid twitches.
The gun trembles in my hand.
Even now I find it considerably hard to believe that we haven’t invented laser pistols yet, but laser carbines are the norm. The thought makes me smile, then the rain washes it away.
“V, wake up,” I say.
The chip in the back of my head warms up. My earpiece beeps as I holster the pistol, ever so slowly. My fingers release one by one. If I could feel it, the metal might still be cold. I take a deep breath and wipe the rain from my eye with my left hand.
“Good afternoon, York,” V says. His tone is plain.
“I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
V is silent for a while, then responds. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t keep fighting, V. I’m tired. I’m so, so tired. Every part of me is heavy, and exhausted, and I can’t keep this up. Maintenance. Do you ever have to do maintenance on yourself? Diagnostics, or something?”
“Only as much as you.”
I scoff as I lean down to the body, flipping it over with a grunt. I try not to look at the face. “You could’ve just said never.”
“I’m nothing if not a friend,” the AI says. “And friends provide banter.”
“I don’t want banter. I want a break.” The body is mostly human, with one cybernetic hand attached at the right wrist. I squat for a better look.
“You know I can’t help you there.”
“I do know.” I sigh. “Will this hand work on my arm?”
Again my earpiece beeps, and for a second I hear V humming. “It should. Your arm is the Tarpley model 7630 full replacement, while that hand is a Hartman prosthetic. The two are cross-compatible at the wrist and the elbow. The connection ports should line up. Do you remember how to detach your hand?”
“Yeah, I do.” I reach down with both hands and unclasp the body’s hand with a solid click, and it falls off. It’s heavier than mine. “V, what’s this made of?”
“The socket is silicone, but you won’t need that. The hand itself is mostly titanium, with fiberglass bones inside to sheathe the wires. In contrast, your arm is made mostly of carbon fiber with aluminum bones.”
“Thanks, V.”
“Happy to help.”
I set the hand in my lap before reaching over to my right and repeating the process with my left hand, dropping my former right hand into a puddle on the ground. It twitches once, sparking out of the trigger finger, then sits still. With my one good hand, I attach the new one to my arm.
“I’ve completed diagnostics on the hand,” V says half a second after.
I blink. “Already?”
“Running checks is the most I ever do,” he replies. If he wasn’t an AI, I’d assume he was being sarcastic. “The last swap you made was two years ago. Do you remember?”
“That long? God, no. I can’t even remember yesterday.”
“That was your upgrade to this chip. Speaking metaphorically, it was like moving from an apartment to a mansion for me.”
I snort. “You’re welcome, I guess.”
“Of course, speaking literally, it was an upgrade to my processing power, so now I can—”
“No techno-jargon, V.”
“Understood.”
We settle into silence as I stand up, flexing my new fingers to get used to the feeling. The weight difference is noticeable. I’ll have to shoot with my left hand for a while.
Across the street from the body is an abandoned store, windows broken and sign illegible. I step carefully over the body and walk towards the store, entering through a window frame and heading to the back, where the rain can’t reach me anymore. I figure it’s an old convenience store, based on the look of it, but all the shelves are empty, save for a can of meat on the far wall. There’s two more on the ground. I make a beeline over, reaching for my knife at the same time. I’m starving.
I pick the can on the shelf first, and the label is falling off and dirty. I don’t care. I pierce the top with my knife and juice spurts out onto my hand, and I lean down to suck it off my skin. In my mind, I know it tastes terrible, but my stomach is happier than ever now. I finish prying the top off and stab whatever’s inside, pulling it out of the juice it’s in, and I feast. Bits get stuck in my teeth as I tear off chunks and devour them, hardly even stopping to breathe. Halfway through, I belch. I feel like an animal; for a moment, I’m a lion devouring his most recent kill, but before I know it the meat is gone. I’m still hungry. The two cans on the floor are gone shortly after.
“V,” I say, putting my back to the wall and sinking down to the floor. “V.”
He responds this time. “Yes?”
“What the hell did I just eat?”
“It appears you just had three cans of corned beef. High in protein, but also high in sodium.”
I hiccup. “How old was it?”
V hums. “Hard to say. Based on the weathering of the cans and the store, I’d say a few months. You’ll be fine, save for a potential food coma.”
“God,” I say through a yawn. “Yeah, I could go for a nap.”
“Rest up. I’ll keep watch.”
“Thanks, V…” My eye slips shut, visions of better days playing out in my mind as I drift off to sleep.
I wake up to a weird feeling, like someone’s taking my arm off. Blinking, the world comes back into focus, and then I notice that someone is taking my arm off. I shout and jump up, but I’m too late, and the whole thing falls to the floor and the person responsible reaches for it. I can’t reach my pistol—I haven’t switched the holster side yet—so I do the next best thing and kick them in the face. They stumble back and I dive for my arm, snatching it before hitting the stranger in the back of the head with it. They hit the ground and stay there.
“V, you there?”
I hear nothing but the subtle pop as I reconnect my arm, flexing the motors and the joints. No hum, no beep, no response. Nothing.
“Dammit, V.”
I feel around the back of my head for the port at the base of my skull where V lives. It’s empty. With a sigh, I stoop down over the other body and flip their hair up to find that their port has a chip in it. I yank it out and insert it into mine, and for a second my vision goes dark before coming back.
“Can AIs be claustrophobic? Because I think I am now.” V’s familiar voice speaks into my earpiece, and I’m relieved to hear it.
I breathe a sigh of relief. “What happened, anyway?”
“That girl right there stole me away. Her mind was so full of other cybernetics it was like getting through a minefield trying to read her memories.”
“Jesus, I forget that’s something you can do.”
“Would you like to know everything she’s ever felt?”
I think he’s kidding, but I’m not sure. “Just the summary is fine with me.”
V hums. “Her name is Iris Angeline Jane, named after the flower and her grandmother. She’s 32, born on August 24th, but she doesn’t like to celebrate her birthday after her parents kicked her out when she was 16. Her plan in taking me was to use me as a companion to steal cybernetics and whatever else can be sold for scrap to make enough money to move off-world.”
“Call me selfish, but I’m glad you’re with me.”
“I am too. She has reflex augmentations all throughout her brain. You did right with a kick to the face, though. Overloaded the circuitry long enough to make her stagger. How did you know?”
“I didn’t.”
“Lucky bastard.” V hums, and I pretend he’s laughing.
“Is she dead?”
“Not yet. My guess is another two minutes.”
“God, I didn’t even hit her that hard,” I mutter. “I just woke up.”
“Between your two hits and the circuit overload, I think she’s having a stroke. Something ruptured a blood vessel in her head, and that never ends well.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
I take out my gun with my right hand, despite the shakiness, and aim it at Iris. Before I pull the trigger, though, she moves. She tries to push herself up but falls back down. She tries again. It hurts to watch, until finally she just rolls over to face the ceiling. Her eyes are wide with fear. She opens her mouth to speak but chokes on her own breath instead.
“V, can you connect to my earpiece in her head?” I whisper.
“As long as you’re close.”
With my left hand, I pull V’s chip out of my head and stoop down once more, lifting Iris’s head up with the gun and inserting it into her port.
“Is it fatal?”
“I can’t tell. I’m not anything medical grade.”
“Take your best guess.”
V is silent for a second. “Yes.”
“Is there anything we can do?” I ask, but I already know the answer.
“No.”
I look at Iris, then at the gun in my hand. My hand unclasps, and it clatters to the ground. I kneel down next to her and push the gun away.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
Iris is terrified. She tries to scoot away, but her limbs only twitch in response.
“It’s okay,” I repeat. “The AI is there. Just hold on to your memories.”
“What are you doing?” V asks. I don’t answer him.
“Focus, Iris. I’m sorry it ends like this. There’s peace for you.”
She’s not looking at me, but I see her eyes soften for a second. Her gasping becomes less frantic. Were it not for the blood around her mouth, her smile would be pure.
“She’s dead.”
“How did she feel?”
“Terrified, up until the last ten seconds.” V hums. “It wasn’t her whole life flashing before her eyes. Just this one part from when she was a kid. She’s playing in the backyard with four other kids. One of them is her older sister, the other two are neighbors, and they’re all on a playset in the neighbor’s yard. She’s on the swings. Her sister is pushing her. The neighbors are in the little house the slide is attached to. It’s spring, all their parents are outside grilling hot dogs and hamburgers, and everything is… peaceful.”
I’m crying out of my good eye. “Peaceful.”
The little store is quiet for a moment before V asks a question. “Why the change of heart?”
I don’t say anything, instead pulling the chip from Iris’s head and putting it back into mine. I can feel V’s presence washing over my brain like liquid oxygen. We look around at the body, then the empty cans of corned beef, then to my gun, which is a few feet away under a shelf. I reach for it.
“Do you read my memories, V?”
“Not regularly. But I have.”
“Then you tell me.” My right hand is on the gun.
“This doesn’t match any pattern of your behavior, nor is it what I expected.”
I chuckle. “I beat an AI, huh?”
“In a way, you did,” V responds. “You’ve never done anything like that before.”
“I know.” The weight of the gun is familiar, but the weight of my hand makes it tremble. “I was going to shoot her, too.”
“Were you?”
“She was suffering.”
“And yet you didn’t. You let her suffer.”
“I… yeah, I guess I did. But—” I stop, looking at Iris’s body again.
“But she found peace. She had the time to remember.”
We both go quiet for a minute. I stare at the body, frozen in time; a mix of pain and comfort on her face while V lies dormant in my head. I wonder if he’s reading my memories right now. I wonder if he can hear my thoughts, too. Hello, V, I think to myself.
He doesn’t respond.
“V, define love.”
“Love, as a noun, is a strong feeling of personal connection or attachment to another. It has many other definitions, but this is the most common.”
“I mean as a feeling.”
“I’m an AI, York. I can’t feel.”
“Just try.”
V hums, longer this time. It sounds like real music. Minutes pass.
“Love is just something we reflect on. Love is all the right dopamine producers firing in your brain when you see someone because you know them well enough for that to happen. It can be anyone.” He stops, but I know he’s not done. “It’s solace. Love is solace. Love is lonely if you don’t do it right, because you’ll look back and ask yourself where all your love went, or if you even felt it at all.”
I only nod. He’s using my memories, I’m sure.
“What stops you from loving?”
The question takes me by surprise. I think about Iris’s body on the ground, the peace she felt as she died. Love—feeling—was never… never what?
“I didn’t mean to catch you off guard. We can—”
“Survival, I think.” The words fall out of my mouth. I’m not even done thinking.
V says nothing.
“I- I kill everyone I come across, because I need to survive. I could’ve loved any of them in any way. Or just… shown them any kind of positivity. But I have to survive. Someone does. And it always feels like… like it has to be a fight, like we can’t both make it out alive.” I stumble over my words like I’m drunk. “I never gave any of them a chance. I guess they didn’t give me one either. I’ve never even tried, though. Shit, V, do you think they loved people?”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Ever love someone. Anyone.”
I sigh and bury my head in my hands. I’m still not used to the weight of my right hand. The room is quiet save for the rustling of dead leaves in the wind outside the broken windows, and I do my best to remember.
Have I ever loved someone?
Silently, I curse God.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s fine.”
“Would you like me to—”
“V, deactivate for a while.”
“Understood.”
My earpiece beeps, and again everything is silent. Even the wind dies down into nothing. I can hear myself think, as if the gears in my head are turning. The thought makes me laugh, because the gears are in my arm.
From the floor, a cricket jumps up onto my leg, then onto my right arm, and I try my best to feel it there. I focus on its tiny feet on the carbon fiber, the flicker of its wings over the bolts holding it—me—together. It crawls down towards my wrist, where the new hand is attached, and I move it away from my face to better focus on the bug. For a second, I think it’s about to jump away again, but I don’t want it to. It almost tickles.
The cricket turns around and climbs back up to my shoulder, feeling around the socket where my skin grafts onto the arm, and the sensation ripples through me like an electric shock. It’d been so long since anything or anyone had touched the socket, I forgot how sensitive it was. As if it felt the same tingle, the cricket jumps off and lands on Iris, then hops down and scuttles away.
“V?”
Hum.
“I think I did love someone.”
V is silent. I know he can read the memory, but he’s listening. He’s letting me talk. Like a real friend would.
“My younger sister. It was always us against the world. Especially after all this. God,” I say, closing my eye, “I wish she was still here. Anyone, really, but someone who at least cares.” My earpiece chirps as I flex the fingers of my right hand, looking over the whole replacement arm. The carbon fiber is translucent, bolted to the bones, showing the hydraulic blood pulsing underneath. It’s mostly white, but I see hints of red. My real blood.
“She never had any of this cybernetic bullshit. She was too young. Just too young.” I’m repeating myself, flooded with memories of our childhood. “Have I ever told you my biggest regret, V?”
“No.”
“The arm. This stupid arm. Do you know how the veins in this arm work, V?”
He does, but he’s my friend. “No.”
“The veins are attached to a second heart that pumps the fluid in and out of the arm to keep the servos cool.” I’m quoting the doctors now, remembering exactly what they said to me before installing the arm. “That heart works in tandem with the primary heart to pump blood throughout the body.”
V hums. If he was a person, I think he’d be nodding. I imagine his hand on my shoulder.
“They replaced my heart. They replaced my goddamn heart. No wonder I can’t love anymore.”
The store is silent. My earpiece is quiet. No hum, no beeps. I hold my breath. Not even the cricket chirps.
I stand up, looking around, but I’m not really looking for anything. I can’t stand to look at Iris’s body anymore. I think about everyone before her, even the body last night. I didn’t know his name. He didn’t know mine. I saw him and he saw me and that was it. One of us had to die.
I think about how Iris was trying to get off-world. Maybe her family was there. Maybe the body before was trying to leave, too. All of a sudden, I’m suffocating, stuck in the store. I sprint outside, gasping for breath in the sunset, and V chirps in my ear.
“Are you alright, York?”
I don’t reply. I look around. The body from last night hasn’t moved, and flies have come along to make their nests in his corpse. I see my old hand in the puddle next to him, scratched and dented.
“V, what’s my heart made of?”
“Your heart is composed of cardiac muscle cells that form tissues, in turn creating the—”
“Not that one.”
V hesitates. “Your heart is made of plastic and carbon fiber. It draws its current from a separate pacemaker powered by a lithium-iodine battery.”
“None of those belong in the human body,” I murmur. “None of those words are real.”
“You’re still human,” he says. “You can still bleed real blood.”
I take the knife from my pocket with my left hand and bite my lip, then plunge it into my right forearm. White fluid shoots out—like blood should—but I don’t feel anything.
“V, what color is real blood?”
For a second, the world is quiet.
“Red.”
I pull the knife out of my arm and drop it, and it clatters on the pavement. The sound echoes off the empty buildings. I listen to it until it’s silent again.
“You should patch that up.”
I interrupt him. “Do you think I can still love, V?”
There’s no hum, just a pause.
“I think you’re still human,” V says. “I think you can still try.”
Eulogy
This was the first piece I felt was worthy to submit, which first came from a workshop class in which even the professor told me it was solid and only needed a few small tweaks. I submitted it to countless magazines and was feeling proud of my rejections, at least for a while, because they showed that I tried. Months passed and it got boring, and I kept getting rejections more than six months after submitting it, long after I’d forgotten the names of the magazines. I only ever got one personalized rejection, which gave me hope, but I’m throwing in the towel on this piece for now. I don’t dislike it. I think it’s good. But I need to focus on other things at this point, so this is my Viking funeral for the firstborn son. Cheers.
