Bless Your Mechanical Heart Read online

  “How far is home?”

  “438.1 kilometers by road.”

  Trevor knew he had a choice. He could follow Pam or he could shut her down. But if he shut her down, there would be no bringing her back. Clearly, this was something that she felt she had to do and he had no ability to overwrite that section of her programming. The only other option was to return her to the recycling facility. Trevor turned around and ran to get his car so he could follow along.

  They traveled for several days. Each night Trevor powered Pam down so that he could find a place to sleep and recharge her battery. Every day he asked her how far it was until their destination. On the last day, he parked once they got close to their final destination. He ran to catch up with Pam. He wanted to be on foot when she went home.

  They turned off the main street and walked up a small pathway leading to a museum. Trevor recognized it immediately. It was the historical home of Samuel and Pamela Forth. Samuel Forth was the most revolutionary scientist of his time in the field of robotics. All androids depended on several of his patents. After his death, his home was turned into a museum that served as a tribute to and learning center for the work he loved.

  Several visitors gawked at the early model android as it pushed its way through. Many commented that they thought it must be part of an exhibit. Trevor tried to follow as closely as he could, but found himself held back by the crowd as he tried to be more civil in his pursuit.

  Pam walked through the rooms with the same speed and single-minded purpose that she had shown since her first step. She walked into the garden room at the back of the house. This room had a small crowd gathered in front of a large glass wall. On the other side was the small shrine Samuel built for his wife when she died. It was a stone sculpture of an angel with outspread hands, looking up at the sky. Every year he was alive, Samuel planted Moonflowers at the angel’s feet.

  Pam walked through the crowd, the light up display warning about alarms, and even the glass wall with a crash. The alarms went off and drowned out most of the sound in the room. People crowded even tighter around the display to see what was going on. Trevor tried to scramble through the press, attempting to reach Pam before she could cause any more damage.

  When he did manage to stumble through, he tripped forward and had to drop to one knee to keep from falling into Pam. She was kneeling in front of the angel with her head bowed as she hummed a song and dug into the earth. There was a hiss as a hidden door in her chest opened. She pulled out a seed and planted it in the dirt, patting the small mound after covering it back up. The next words she spoke were a man’s recorded message, not her normal monotone.

  “I promised you’d have these every year, my love.”

  THE IMPERIAL COMPANION

  Lillian Cohen-Moore

  He dreamed.

  It was memories; the most recent were first, as always. Dmitry, his sword at the ready, with his other arm around Astra, her guard to the front and the rest of them at the ready, prepared to defend them from the rear. His brain was attempting to accumulate a better understanding of the night’s events. But there was a hole in them. He tried to follow it down; the sounds of swords striking against swords fading, the smell of summer flowers dying and then memories…

  Inside himself, things flattened. Stilled. His body did what it could for him, quietly disengaging his senses from active use. One by one, his internal systems shut off, leaving him in dreamless sleep. There was nothing to be accumulated or understood now. It was his duty to preserve as much of his energy as possible. Without it, he might not ever be able to remember what came before the dark well, or what he must do once escaping it.

  “Catherine?”

  “Mm?”

  “I’ve got a crate I think you need to look at.”

  Voices. His body had ignored the sounds of movement in the building around him, but there were footsteps and voices now. So near him. His eyelids twitched, still caught in twilight slumber. He could hear a woman moving, and a man. The woman’s hands tapped his box, then stilled.

  Lawrence watched Catherine rise from a crouch beside a truly ugly painting, using her lucent to guide her towards him. It took everything not to try and make a sarcastic remark, but he held his tongue. Best for her to see it herself. Lawrence stepped away from the crate when she entered the aisle, giving her the space required to take a knee as she examined it. He watched her hand falter, ceasing in the unconscious tapping she performed on every box to cross her path. The Novan script on the side of the crate was done in a long-unused scrollwork font, and much of the original markings had been the victim of time. Only the words “IMPERIAL PROPERTY” remained.

  “We should open it here.” She was brought to her feet by the man who had circled the box with her, their footsteps the soft scuffs of one assisting another.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Well, it could be anything, and ‘could be anything’ isn’t something I want to take back to the capital. For all we know it’s a crate of Novan wine seized at some outpost. Or uniforms. Or grain turned to dust.”

  “Or munitions.”

  “Yes, munitions are certainly a possibility. And since I would like to avoid blowing up a museum storage site, I’d like to open it here. It’s not like we’re not going to open every box headed out of here before it’s sent to the capital. We’re just doing our jobs.”

  Things were moving above him. The tell-tale tingle of awakening began in long-unused limbs, minute twitches traveling through his body. The darkness that encased him glowed faintly, as fingers probed above him. Flesh brushing wood.

  “You’ll need to get the crowbar from the trunk. The one in my bag is too small for these nails.” The man’s footsteps moved away, leaving the edge of his senses. His darkness ceased to glow, and the sounds of fingertips brushing across wood began again. When the man returned, the soft glow invaded the darkness again. They pried away wood and nails, allowing more light to devour the darkness.

  “It would be a shame for me to open it myself.” He sounded out of breath, but Catherine smiled.

  “I suppose it would be, wouldn’t it?”

  The darkness was gone, as they slid the last of it away, exposing his body. Light was on his face, his hands, and his systems ceased their dormancy. The light raised an answering glimmer in his pale flesh and blond hair. Before the man or woman could speak, he opened his violet eyes, eerie in their over-saturation. Light falling upon his irises provoked additional neural activity, the unstable wash of memories threatening to drown his senses in the present moment.

  Above him were two humans he could now see, who stared down into his face with shock. He shared their shock. Long dormant systems struggled to return to full power, and he stared up into the two faces hanging over him. A man. A woman. Neither recognizable, their mode of dress unheard of. Shocked, the three of them stayed speechless. Such simple silence was one he had enjoyed, once, but not now. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, and Dmitry was not here.

  He must have failed him. He started screaming before he could think, or stop himself, fear and heartbreak elongating the sounds coming from his throat. The man dropped his light, cursing as it fell from his grasp. The woman tucked hers under her chin, reaching out to yank the crate’s top off, fully exposing him from within the crate.

  She was trying to free him.

  He stopped screaming. If she had lost her composure, or tried to silence him, he would have fought her.

  But she was trying to free him. She reached her hand out to him, speaking to him slowly.

  “My name is Catherine Dooley. You are safe.” She was hard pressed to meet his eyes, but she tried valiantly to keep looking squarely at his eyes. Her own were a muddy brown, her pupils threatening to overwhelm them—a single outward sign of her carefully controlled fear. “Would you like out of that crate now?”

  He continued to look up into her face. She breathed slowly, and kept her hand extended. He lifted his hand to grasp hers; the movement slow, de
liberate. His skin was cold, an ice-like cold he had never experienced, his sensors murmured numbers in his head. He had never felt such cold. His skin—an aged plastic-based skin analogue—was something she briefly looked at, her mouth parting in a barely present, then gone, “o” of some form of understanding. She smiled at him. When she closed her fingers around his hand, warm, firm, he only held her hand lightly in return, unsure if he could control his own strength in his present state.

  “I’d like to take you outside this room, and run some diagnostics where I can get signal. Would you be all right with that?”

  He tilted his head, considering her posture, the tone of her voice. Her face. She was no one he recognized, and he could not clearly understand the meaning of her words. It was, perhaps, some dialect of Cordatan he was unaccustomed to, but her bearing and clothing seemed strange, her voice colored by some strange, unknown inflection.

  Understanding anything would only come with effort, and time. He tugged gently on her hand; with her help, he was freed from the crate within moments. The man stayed back a few steps from the crate, clearly torn between feeling protective and some sort of uncertainty.

  “Lawrence, I’m going to take him to upper basement where there’s signal, Fortune willing. Think you can look around while I’m gone?” Her glance toward the crate was brief, but both men followed her eyes’ path. Her companion was the more obvious about it.

  “Yes. I’ll come up and let you know if I find anything pressing.”

  Catherine led the him out of the subterranean vault, stopping outside the doors long enough to pick up her briefcase. He kept pace beside her on the stairs, one hand hovering near her elbow when she stumbled near the top. Safety. It was ingrained in him—not a program, but a sense of purpose. Safety around him, of Dmitry, of those in the household. She watched him hesitate when they emerged into the back hallway, and his memories flickered. The colors were wrong, but the bend of shadow and molding provoked a fleeting tree of branching thoughts, as he attempted to place what felt… familiar.

  “We’re fine. This is a house in the country, outside the capital.” She sat her briefcase down on one of the decorative hall tables, scooping up the vase from on top of it and depositing it under the table, out of sight beneath the tablecloth. She nodded to the bench across the hall. “You should sit while I see what I can do for a diagnostic. You’ve been down there for awhile, so waking up may take a bit.” He lingered near her, still looking around them, as she unloaded things from her briefcase. He was uncertain of the devices she had extracted; a thin, gleaming black thing, like a children’s slate, and odd silver round dots that clung to an odd black ribbon. She watched him carefully, scrutinizing his appearance like Dmitry would examine a horse. “Now where would your interface panels be…?”

  He watched her, conscious of his own dubious expression, while she visibly brightened. “Maybe panto will help.” She cradled the bundle of dots on top of her foreign slate, motioning with one near her heart. “I need to make sure you’re operating correctly. Can you put this somewhere that will help me scan you?”

  Still not entirely comfortable, he weighed the risks of whatever her request could be. Though he didn’t understand her words, her intent seemed to be one free of ill will. He took the dots as she began to hand them to him, placing them at her prompting on the front of his tunic, the side of his face, neck, and on each wrist. Catherine took a seat beside him on the bench, explaining the function of the diagnostics as she scanned his body, words he continued to be unable to understand.

  The odd dots were sending tiny pulses of energy into his body, reading his surface energy and stray bits of data. He could feel the pulses, and relaxed, however minutely. He was familiar with examination, though her tools were alien. Perhaps she was one of the technomancers the Novan Navy had brought back tales of, capable of great feats with little to no technology within their hands. He watched her reading her slate, absorbed in whatever information the glyphs flashing across its surface meant to her. Here and there, he was able to recognize fragments of root words.

  His body struggled to respond to the energy pinging him, but internal error codes were slowly compiling. Her technology was not fully compatible with Novan. Nor was it handling him and his interface with ease. Seemingly satisfied by his sluggish bodily responses, she gave him a cheerful smile. Catherine pulled upon the unfamiliar data on her screen, and handed the pad over to him. He still hadn’t spoken, unsure of how he would feel if she were unable to understand him. He paged through the data at leisure, intuiting the fingertip controls quickly. He departed from the data to the rest of the device, opening and closing programs, spinning data across the screen. When he was able to open the wireless connection, not entirely sure of what he’d accessed, he hesitated.

  “You don’t have a wireless capacitor. You can’t connect conventionally. If you have a hard line somewhere…” Catherine made a face, thinking, before she stood up, going back to her briefcase. “We might be able to jury rig something up with a few adapters, depending on what your hard line is.” She pulled a box of snarled plugs and cords out of her bag. It took them time—and a brief indignant moment after misreading of her motivation as a sexual advance—to partly unbutton his tunic and open the panel in his chest. She had to hold the largest adapter she had in place against his chest port, but they were able to thread a connector to the data pad, allowing him to link with an Imperial dataweb that hadn’t even existed when he was built.

  She helped him take over holding the plug in place, stepping backward as he continued to search the dataweb. It took time, but he found what he was looking for when he located the Cordatan Language Library, and began to download files. His head slowly sunk toward his chest as the downloads initiated, and his eyes closed. He could feel her in his periphery, dimly registering that she had excused herself without a word. She had hesitated before leaving, and had begun to move away from the outskirts of his sleep-dulled senses.

  The capacity for language acquisition was one of his strongest talents. Imperial Companions had to help those they were assigned to navigate to foreign worlds, with all the linguistic, social and cultural barriers that could possibly be present. His Empyrean Cordatan was archived, stored away where he could retrieve it, as he replaced it over and over again with iterations of the language. There were enough to worry him, but he blanked out his worry by pulling in more data. He would ignore how so much evolution indicated about the passage of time.

  The last things he could remember ran in tandem to his language searches; his own name now… old-fashioned. The words for Astra’s diadem, vanished from common tongues. The poems Dmitry would recite were now timeworn, gone from language, gone, the words that had made his world were gone. The last of their sighs were with him, ghosts of memories as the dark well of data opened again at the thought of them, of that last memory and the vibration in his hands, as his sword met his opponent’s and he was surrounded on the path, on all sides, and they were closing—he did not fall into the dark well again, but stopped short. He pulled against its orbit, and instead emerged with his own name.

  Aleksei opened his eyes, unsure of how much more time had passed. He pressed his shaking hands down against the gleaming bench space to each side of his legs. The hallway had no windows, but the data pad in his lap continued to stream information into his system, where it was catalogued and integrated as quickly as the long-slumbering hardware could keep pace with it. The Cordatan words that were nearly finished filling his mind were largely unfamiliar, as if spoken underwater by children. Modern Cordatan grammar was less… formal.

  He struggled to reach into his memory for something more than fractures of faces and laughter, anything but the swords, and winced as the red-blue sense of error filled his head. His hardware still wasn’t fully up to the task. Was this what someone who had awakened from a coma felt like? That their memories were like a slow incoming tide, a gradual wetness and not a deluge of sensation?

  Memories, long q
uiescent, were queuing up slowly. Cordatan language had evolved, like it or not, he had to face that considerable time must have passed. Cordatans. Why was he still here? Surely he would have been recovered with Dmitry, he would never be willingly separated—Aleksei stopped mid-thought. Dmitry. There had been… an assassination attempt? He had sent Dmitry with Astra and her guard, while he and Nicolai had set up on the path to cover their retreat. But he was here, now; unarmed, and alone.

  How long had he been asleep? What had happened to the Grand Prince? What had happened to Astra?

  Or Nicolai?

  The port was still open, though the adapter had begun to inch its way out of his chest. He removed the adapter and cord, slowly restoring order to his appearance, and the technological innovations to the woman’s bag. He was able to find his way back down to the vault, each step a marvel, aware of a sense of missing memory, and strange emotion. It had only been last night, hadn’t it, that they had defended Dmitry and Astra, but surely more time had passed. His internal chronometer still wasn’t functioning. Aleksei hesitated outside the vault door, consumed with his uncertainty. Did he want to know how long it had been, or what had transpired? Could he live with such knowledge? Leaning against the wall, he listened to the voices that belonged to the people that had awoken him. Aleksei could hear them through the door, and was content to rest there for a moment, acclimating to his newfound knowledge of their strangely rendered Cordatan. Hers, in particular, carried odd accentuation. A foreigner, then. Fluent, but still not native.

  “You think it was really all right, to leave it up there?”

  “He. You are looking for the word he, not it.”

  “This isn’t Arna Central, you know.” The man sounded… resigned? Aleksei shook his head. He knew of no such place, but the sky was far more vast than any man would credit—organic or synthetic.