An engineer, not the most prolific and not the most inventive, sat on his stool screw-twirling a clock’s hands at many seconds-per-second until a bullet popped across some distance and declared the time 12:23:58 forever. It had precipitated (spontaneously, as though from an oversaturation in the surrounding air) into the engineer’s neck; it had wondered whether he bled motor oil; even now it didn’t know. At least, like me, he’d used the radio.
On this planet, the radio gave us dignity [just as the roads gave them exhaust and the plumbing gave them lead]. Though most of us didn’t know if he smelled like anything, or whether and when his skin got clammy, the engineer’s voice had its own intimate ranking in consciousness comparable to that of music and inner monologues. Monologues side by side, ours and his, resembled conversation; conversation resembled dignity. Make no mistake, the engineer could have been any of many engineers, but only the radio was the radio.
“‘D’dgya get everything you need? You said someone’s picking you up soon, and I’m pretty sure that’s them coming up from the maglev now.”
“Just gotta take it in for a sec. It’s not every percept I–ya know, this doesn’t happen every percept. Still processing some of the scene here.”
“Sure. Whatever you gotta do.”
I don’t mean to be glib. The engineer (no longer an engineer) was obviously multifaceted. His signal’s beautiful short-time pitch decomp spanned many modes at many weights. In fact, I felt humanly disgusted–if voyeuristic–at the way he had been so thoroughly compressed: he’d rippled through the radio at 13:04:07 and at 13:04:09 (his clock was wrong), but at 13:04:08, he was rare pork hanging on meat hooks, simple, there to be slashed or beaten. It made very little sense–incoherent, one might say. Perhaps I had thought that amplitude-modulating transmission precluded bodies, or vice versa.
“Still pondering there?”
“Yeah, still. And tomorrow I’ll probably have to come back with a team, cuz some of the evidence I don’t have the equipment for.”
“Well, your guy’s here. No rush.”
My guy was indeed here, behind the cased opening that led into the engineer’s subgarage. With a finger, she traced the catenary of green tape hanging there [giving the crime scene an essential border]. As she paced along the opening, I noticed that the wounds where her lips once were had healed, likely by the time the glue between her rows of teeth no longer needed regular reapplication. I packed my paltry kit and walked around the officer between us to meet the Adjunct. She held out her relief-cipher machine–a series of rotating braille tapes–and I selected the gear corresponding to my language. The tapes told me she was sorry for being late, she’d had trouble with the vaseline this morning so ended up showering without soap, and someone had jumped or fallen into the maglev track but far enough from any station that the tram’s momentum could overcome the impact anyway.
“No worries. We can still make it if we speed-walk; are we good to go?”
She was.
///
We descended from the subgarage to the street, her arm outstretched holding the cipher machine where I rested a hand. My mouth shifted as I attempted to find informationless answers to her questions about the case. Thankfully, she no longer had the curious eyes that had so slightly squinted when we first met; instead, a network of lenses was mounted above her nose and extended to the top of her forehead, allowing her to see atomic nuclei if she looked hard enough and–since the lenses didn’t come with lids–see the radio itself if she just wanted to sleep. I was envious. [She could read visual text as well, and the technology for instantaneous text display did exist, but she hadn’t paid for the cipher machine or the lenses or the vaseline, and the people who had did not have any sort of eyes.]
Her questions, of course, were all the same question. Was it a human or was it a human-made bot that had decided, or merely executed, on slaying an engineer? I wondered about it myself. Either strain of crime was possible; after all, the radiofrequencies that would have delivered a bot’s program could certainly penetrate that subgarage where the engineer had broadcast so often. Something about the hypothetical killerbot felt asymmetric and strange, a bot hand wrapped around a gun, intelligent machine interfacing with unintelligent machine, confusing because it could have been metastasis or bestiality depending on which machine was less criminal.
Various institutions lay along our path between the station tower and the primalunar precinct house (each at their own stage in a life cycle; this area was suburban, though, so nobody here knew that). I expected that the Adjunct would want to discuss her theories–instead, she wanted to discuss theory.
“So, do we think the residents are gonna set their clocks back again? It’s getting late.”
She didn’t want to speculate, but they probably would, she agreed. Changing topics, she began describing her recent battle with a device back in the lab, setting up the anecdote with a detailed explanation of the exact magnetospheric phenomenon she had been trying to measure. I only knew to smile expectantly because her collar bone shook, a laugh.
People like the Adjunct would tell you inconsequentially that our planet was not, strictly, a planet. True enough: to this day, our planet was the only known stable binary moon system with atmospheres. “Planet,” for etymological reasons. This was why, in a dynamic constellation of res-craft confined between moons (the suburb), the locals could be convinced that solar years and astroplanetary days were not the only available measures of time; the days of each moon, the non-constant period with which they orbited each other, our system’s radial oscillations, and more celestial quirks all gave them permission to classify clock coordination as a matter of pure policy. So when a monumental hull was built to fold and stretch around the suburb, and then fibers were installed between its ribs, and the suburb became the sole formal passageway between moons, so they were given new radio access and new bots to make all the novelty more manageable, all in what some observers might call rapid succession, the steadfast people of the suburb simply set their clocks back. They knew anything that happened must have always been possible, so nothing really had changed.
We heard the soft noise of a vehicle from outside collide with the Monumental Hull, and the bots that crawled the hull’s edge remixed it into ambient music. As the remix’s electronic tones shifted into an easy riff and faded, I thought I recognized the melody of something I’d improvised for the radio decemonths ago. Smiling, I remarked,
“Hear that crash? Might’ve come from me, a school recital. It all comes from us, doesn’t it?”
Her collar bone stayed still now, but she recounted a grudging pride upon hearing her work quoted almost correctly in a radio lecture dedicated to scientifically-inclined listeners, an automated response to public interest in what happened beyond the hull. She continued her first story. It seemed the device’s readings had been corrupted by waves in the slow solar wind near its antennae, and all she could hear in its output were descending slide whistles. However, she wanted me to know, that wasn’t what had spoilt her week. It was her realization that no level of precise calibration or rewiring could stop the whistles: they came from nature, so they were unfixable. She thus resorted to hitting the device with a wrench, or a pair of pliers; she didn’t remember which. Now her collar bone shook again, and she clapped her hands. I laughed.
“Does that mean we might get whistles on the radio?”
Yes, she informed, and I wouldn’t be able to tune around them for a large chunk of the frequency range. Mainly during a magnetic storm, though, she reassured me. Those were apparently common even though I’d never heard any of these theoretically guaranteed whistles.
///
A couple more vessels fried on the hull, and we arrived. A patch of cameras and microphones jutted up from where our walkway met the precinct house, itself a tree of interlinked golden rings that multiplied toward the primary moon’s face. Two microphones spoke “New?” and “Returning?” at once, and I extended an arm in the direction of “Returning?”. Two more microphones, “Membership?” and “Invited?” announced themselves, so my other arm went to “Invited?”. I clarified,
“I was invited this morning; I’m the initial analyst for case number one.” The cases were numbered by priority.
“Any guests?” inquired the microphone in front of my left hand. “Guests will be queued behind their invitee inside.”
I twisted my neck to look at the Adjunct, and for some milliseconds the part of me that was blood overtook that which brought new oxygen.
Knowing that in my current position I could not read her cipher machine, she dropped her arm and offered me a gracious shake of her head. She combed her hair theatrically with a hand that then formed scissors, all in full view of the cameras. She would have a hair appointment rather than accompany me into the precinct house. With discomfort, I wondered if she would be scalped the next time we met.
[Voltages fluctuated more rapidly in his brain than hers as though their bodies, one contorted and one relaxed, were honest portrayals. This was not usually true.
His mind diffused through a small subset of configurations and carved a rough branch, encroaching upon a fuller conception of her. He had already learned her expressions, such as they were, and thought now that leaves were turning copper on her face.
Seeing no contradiction and sensing no cliché, he undetectably wished for her to be warmed by her next solstice. He wished to see wrinkles grow into the skin around her lenses and to see her grin through mud. He wished for many things that he did not realize–perhaps he even wished that she was beautiful. But now she turned to pocket her cipher machine, and they were looking in new directions; their minds tried to find each other and ended up in very different places. A series of conspicuous vertebrae on the brown skin of his back faced but did not see the series of thick, pale striations on the browner skin of hers. Their naked bodies were clothed.
She scratched her teeth out of habit and finally took a step. He knew her hair smelled like oil and her forehead the cans of spiced tea powder from her lab shelves; he inhaled after she left as though the scent had decided to stay on its own for him. His mind strayed and settled into some timeless version of “see you tomorrow,” conflating the number of existing tomorrows and those available to them. A nearby bot, learning, incorporated her particular walk into its range of motions. He watched it walk away.]
We signaled our goodbyes, and I was allowed to enter.
///
The inside was gold, even more than the outside, maybe more than it was the last time I had come, and the air was ancient urine sheathed in chemical cleaner. I heard the thrum of a heliotron underfoot and hoped it would subside once my screening began; I remembered her saying that it was a mathematically rich system, ripe for all kinds of inquiry, but, privately,
“No, I don’t think we should. It wouldn’t help, really.”
Listening to the reactor [where her life’s work burned with high efficiency], I also remembered that a too-heavy spider tripped on gossamer and fell into the grass below to learn humility. [He almost knew that the purpose of playgrounds was to teach children how to handle a skinned knee.]
I rode a moving rubber walkway for twenty minutes through gold halls and dodged eye contact with others on their own walkways. Finally, just like everyone else, I was delivered to a private foyer. An armchair sat for me with a tray table—supporting a cardboard bowl that held jellylike chunks of bleeding raw meat, on a bed of greens ‘n’ grains with sauces selected to gesture at some culture or another—across the long chamber from a small screen. The screen sparked into static, and pixels instantly arranged themselves into pink and tan bodies, bodies as an indicator for eroticism. They wore varyingly scant clothes that I found distracting enough to forgive some usual errors: third arms, extra eyes that blinked in and out of being, disagreements between voices and expressions, fourth arms, fifth arms. Accidental bugs of simulated flesh moved with fluid invitation, coaxing blood to overtake oxygen once again. This screening felt more responsive than the last; under the penalty of my boredom, these pixels could now change without delay—I hardly even blinked. It went on until I finished what I could of the bowl, and I waited to be let into the antechamber. Before those second doors opened, I grabbed hastily at my groin in an attempt to adjust it, intelligent machine interfacing with unintelligent machine, each awkward from the other’s company.
I gave up as the doors drew apart, and the first thing I saw was a mass of swiveling heads and eyes, tinged with white, tinged with yellow, tinged with red, all of the room’s attention cohering to flash in my direction and then flash back away. The smell’s intensity doubled in equal parts urine and chemical cleaner. Some of the people faced each other while some faced the rotunda’s inner wall; from experience, I looked to stalls placed around the perimeter. Those stalls oriented the visitors into a knot of lines forced to curl toward the center of the room, hiding their length like coiled intestines. As I took my place in the back of one line, a man tardier by a split-second tensed a hand, and facial muscles pulled his skin into rage, then resignation.
“Fucker!” –not to me, but generally.
I wondered which chief would meet me today and whether he would be like the one who had officially qualified me to cut her mouth. That one had been kind; he’d permitted us to commit in the privacy of her home across the planet, where I remembered hearing an overturned roach scream but not flip while it must have wished to shed its heavy vestigial wings. [Months after, her eyes were suspended in disappointment for some decemonths.]
The bowl’s contents began to flare against my insides. My breath thinned to accommodate the muddled pain, but inhalation was already dense with traces of other breaths and the bodily substances being expelled in their respective stalls. I waited there for another thirty-three minutes while my line curved to cross into another line. The man behind me, meanwhile, had turned pale, his eyes focusing desperately on our queue’s stall as he clutched his crotch with twisted legs. A few more minutes passed, and his gaze started to flicker back and forth between our stall and that of the nearby line, which now intersected ours exactly at his place. His gaze settled on the other stall. One choking gulp, and he vomited on the floor; I reeled forward and pushed against my neighbors, creating a wave of bodies that was dampened just as quickly as the man turned to the other stall, re-orienting himself into its queue. I couldn’t blame him–he’d skipped forward about twenty places in the new order.
[To be honest, it was only disgusting in the tradition of a personal shower drain. A life cycle—again—encircled him, now complete with births in their assigned stalls and rare unassigned deaths in other stalls (he knew this, but he did not know if it had happened the last time, or if it was happening this time). He saw soft single tears making window washer paths through acne and oil on faces that were stiff, or sad, or pretty. The churn was wonderful and anthropological, yet he looked upon it and thought only of an empty unlit room, dirty on cheap wood-plank flooring, with jaundiced corners, and an ash scar on the wide white wall.]
Meanwhile: my own line wasn’t moving, wasn’t moving at all; strain and shame in my gut; a shiver picked at my spine, though my stomach was drenched, steeped–drenched in infected warmth; warmer, hot acid boiled into my throat to chip at the inside; bubbled back down, bubbled back up, bubbled further up; I looked up, above my neighbors’ heads, tried to unrealize the animal-humanity around me, tried to convince myself that I was alone. Then, I saw someone beautiful.
His bald head beaconed from the antechamber’s inner balcony. Eyes, one blue and one gray, scanned the floor and found me. He lifted a magnanimous finger to point at me, and his smile stretched her lips horizontally, barely curling up at the ends, a type of grin she had never grinned. Someone’s nostrils twitched on his face. Innovator and role model, champion and friend—my relief, my chief.
Her lips spoke with his lilting, unplaceable accent:
“Our analyst! I was just looking–who are all these folks in your way? Everyone, we’ve gotta find some basic morality for just a minute, I’m begging you guys! You know that a hero is dead, and this man, our analyst, our number one analyst, needs to get up here so we can really figure this thing out once and for all! I mean, really, don’t cheat the line. It’s not a good look, guys.” He brought another finger to the headphones clamped around his head, and the eyes looked away for a moment preoccupied with something from the radio.
The human sea parted, and someone at the front of my line kicked open that sacred stall door; some others took the underarms of the woman inside and carried her dry-heaving form to another queue. I ran in and, just as I gripped the pot’s edges, realized my nausea had subsided. I turned to look up at my chief, and weeped, “Thank you! Thank you, sir!”
///
A moment later, I had taken the elevator up into his office. He sat behind an oak desk whose sides drooped with flowing wounds, a glacial kind of wood that reminded me of frozen honey. The rest of the room looked to have been remodeled, and there he sat, and there I sat across from him, but that desk between us flaunted its age.
“A little different from how you remember it, eh?” [The last syllable was trying to be casual.] He watched me carefully.
I made a performance of being impressed by the interior design, basking in his gaze. Two walls adjacent to the entrance met in the corner where the chief sat. I smiled at the wall to my left, where a portrait hung of the chief as a young man, his face adorned with his own features in geeky glee like the boy was pleased with how far he would go. To the wall on my right, I frowned and bobbed my head as though I was listening to a complicated lecture; it was a porcelain relief depicting a gang of gods whose alabaster surfaces had degraded more in some parts than others–a nose here, a bicep there, a beard somewhere else all seemed corroded, perhaps grazed by a finger many times over the course of decemonths. Habeas Corpora, under those gods, was professionally etched into a polished aluminum plaque.
“It’s definitely pretty different. From how I remember it, you know.” He seemed satisfied. Raising an arm in stiff swagger, he pointed at the relief:
“That’s one hundred percent real marble.”
“It’s not!” It wasn’t.
“It is.”
I whistled and nodded again. Since he was silent, I continued,
“I only have preliminaries on the case right now, but I’ll be working the percept and somnolent on this one–I just put in a request for an expanded forensic team, so I’ll keep in contact with you, and we can–”
“Hey, hey, don’t worry about it! You’ve got a good heart. Completing this case is really only a matter of time, and we’ve seen enough anyway. Go ahead and do whatever you see fit; I’ll deploy some new debugging networks to help you out. So we can protect all the other good hearts out there, you know.” A choir sang from radio speakers on either side of his desk while a voiceover of pure empathy spoke the engineer’s eulogy. I exhaled and slid down a few inches in my chair.
“Sorry, sir. It’s just that I know how important it is to you. And you can wait for my report; we’re not even sure if it was a bot thing.” He waved a hand at me, as if to say it was really no trouble. Maybe he hadn’t heard me properly. I explained,
“No, I mean we can only debug the jurisdiction bots, and even if it was one of those, we don’t have the program specs, or the relevant projural code since it could’ve been a populated module or a commercial one. If it was a personal bot on an internetwork, then that’s a whole other code. Sir.” Now it was his facial muscles that pulsed with a microsecond of–was it annoyance? I was trying to be reassuring, like him. He unfurled a palm on the desk and then propped it up on its fingertips.
“There’s something else we’ve gotta talk about. What age did your beard start growing, analyst?” He stroked his own smooth cheeks.
“Fourteen, sir. It was sparse, but that’s how it always starts, I guess.”
“And that style? It has to be that way, or can you cut it shorter?”
“I trim it occasionally, sir. Do you…like it?” He shrugged, though the eyes were now full of interest. He licked her lips thoughtfully.
“You’ve always had a certain something. I think the beard is part of it. Maybe there’s some fashion sense that appeals to our most upstanding citizens, or maybe it really speaks to the clarity that decent people have. What do you think, analyst?” I blushed and knew he couldn’t see it through my beard.
“I’m very proud to be of service, sir. Are you all right? I could find a–”
“I want your beard, analyst. My cheeks are too bare; I’ve been seeing it for weeks now. Honestly, there’s that hardiness, it’s in every Good Person’s values, but it needs to be on my face, I think. That’s not important, anyway–why don’t you do me the honor and find someone who you’d like to qualify for the job.” Qualification? I stared; numbness settled into my extremities. My words came out quicker than if they were genuine,
“Well, I could just trim it all off for you; there are people out there who could glue it onto you convincingly, I’m sure! That way, you could save yourself the pain, too!” Eyebrows on his face raised themselves a fraction of a centimeter.
“No, analyst. That’s the thing–it’s rough, but I’ll need every follicle and the cheeks that come with them. You’re practical, right? I’m obviously human, after all; knowing what klutzes chiefs can be, someone might screw up trimming it one day, and then I’ll need it to grow back! We’ve gotta be smart about this, so we can fully devote ourselves to fighting the stuff from yesterday. Evil stuff.” The eyes looked at me with concern. An eyelid flinched. I didn’t want to irritate him, so I saw his point.
“I see, sir. I see. I see, I see…” I was mumbling past my own leaden lips which impeded the words as they escaped, each less meaningful than the last. “I see,” one high tone and one low, the soft “hee-haw” of a donkey out to pasture. The eulogy ended, but the choir went on.
///
I closed his door behind me, muffling the speakers. As I descended back to the walkway where she’d left me, “I see” still ricocheted inside my head. High tone, low tone, “I see.” I thought [with a humiliation he did not understand] about what I might read on her cipher machine if I asked to submit her for qualification. Maybe she would laugh, whether from awkwardness or irony I wasn’t yet sure. Which comes first, scalp-peeling or cheek-shearing? I thought more about that scene, her reaction, and my nausea returned. High tone, low tone, “I see” wouldn’t shut up, so I pulled a pair of headphones from my pocket and turned on the radio.
A man was extolling the benefits of a shaving set and its accompanying cologne (“The real deal, tried-and-tested by top pheromone scientists to make sure you finally get laid!” he shouted before a nasally voice, presumably one of the pheromone scientists, yelped, “Zounds! We’ve done it!”) when static shredded the transmission. I tapped the sides of my headphones, but just the buzz was amplified. An odor of rust steamed off the hull, and I thought of wet earth. “I see” came back and became the only sound again. “I see, I see, I…”
Thoughts blurred to noise (Hark: their tails never vanished, those streaking comets in infinite black),
my fingers froze while my eyes fixed onto some point on a sinking horizon (high tone, low tone, not the separated “hee-haw” but an uninterrupted descent),
and for the very first time, I heard them (swooping through fresh somnolent air, they felt like plunging into a silk suicide net):
A single slide whistle, then quickly more, had ruptured the static for good. High tone, low tone, and I saw–I started running back to the crime scene for the gun.
///
[His swift departure from the precinct house was, as a process, irreversible. The likeliest shape of his brain’s digraph came apart and reassembled itself while he ran, many more times than it had as he’d arrived.
One particular subcircuit which had survived for decemonths was now beginning to evolve: on his arrival, it still behaved as though his retinas glowed with her original face’s image, back when it had begun its arthritis-by-choice. Again, that was only how it behaved.
Now, he felt that his brain was trying to depict the irreversible in reverse; the subcircuit started to imagine those features softening upon eye contact, maybe enjoying him, even though he did not know if he actually recognized the new image. In it, she’d just heard a promise and responded by shrugging glossy shoulders; her old imperceptible squint was back and aimed up at him, framed by arched brows that toyed with his comfort while her lips stuck out slightly because they weren’t meant to stretch much, and they were parted in a gap-toothed parody of shock as though he’d said something outrageous, but nested in the backs of her eyes were unmistakable droplets of transfixed dew—he knew that face was gone, if he’d ever even seen it, because he also glimpsed his own hands harvesting it in two distinct memories (and four indistinguishable ones). Recalling her collar bone and her cocked head, the subcircuit attempted another image and failed.]
The officer hadn’t left. Pain in the ass.
“Weren’t you coming back tomorrow?” Crumbs specked his uniform, and he didn’t bother to rise from his incompatibly small folding chair. A pistol was crammed between his hip and a plastic armrest.
“Chief wants the gun. Something to do with a media release, I think.” I couldn’t sound too informed to him even if I was lying; I didn’t know this officer well, but I guessed he’d be happy proving that he knew best. He scoffed.
“Don’t need to worry about the gun, man. Hell, if I were here when it happened, I coulda taken out the perp before that trigger moved, finger or actuator, doesn’t matter.”
“I mean, yeah. Maybe now they’ll focus on security for once.”
“Security? Naw, half these guys are barely trained anyway. Can’t rely on security all the time. Trust me, this shit’s gonna start happening everywhere.”
“So then, what’s the answer?” I was walking toward the rifle in the back of the garage, and he was methodically spinning the pistol about his finger, eyes intense with focus and discipline.
“Fuckin’ army, man.” His voice was subdued as he concentrated on the pistol. I cradled the rifle and walked out.
///
I started running again as soon as I stepped back onto the walkway. The gun was heavy; pavement slammed against my feet sending shockwave after shockwave into my knees. I ran out of breath halfway to the precinct house and slowed to a jog, but something was hurtling back at me in the dark—something massive, something automated, basically a glinting black cube branded at the bottom of its front face slid unreasonably fast along the walk and glared hot violet from a dot of an aperture; it trained its laser on my chest. My skin began to burn, and the cube accelerated.
Trying to run backward, I plummeted to the ground rear-first. The laser moved accordingly, and I brought a hand to my chest; my hand started burning too, now smoking with charred dermis. With my other arm, I aimed the rifle and shot. Sensation pierced my sinuses and clogged my throat—I shot again. The cube vibrated with each bullet, artificially enough for me to tell it was not from the impact but instead some alert system inside. Maybe the gun could have killed a person, did kill a person, but natural law was adamant that our Monumental marvels of engineering couldn’t be harmed by anything but each other. I kept shooting, now sending shockwaves to my elbow but making no dint in the cube’s front. There we fought, many-meter by many-meter cube and that rifle, intelligent machine clashing with unintelligent machine, brought together like two clapping hands from the same entity. I sobbed, shaking my aim.
With my burnt hand, I dragged myself away from the accelerating bot while I continued emptying the rifle. Of course we collided, and in a jolt it threw me thirty yards off the walkway into the hull’s inner wall; the rifle leapt from my grip, my spine crashed first, then my head snapped back, and before I lost consciousness I saw another bot hovering above the cube, a flying drone carrying blimplike cargo. That was the final thing I saw that was visible to anyone else.
[When he died, his body had already dropped twenty feet to the hull’s gutter. That hadn’t killed him. Potentials in his brain still fluctuated when he hit the gutter’s bottom, and they pointed at the clearest image they ever had.]
It was a planet, a true planet, red and dry, small enough to be imagined and covered in monochrome dust. Empires of junk munitions spread across its surface, and a battle raged in an emergent courtyard. Two golden and silver androids equally vast in scale and complexity wrestled each other there: metal locked onto metal while gold gears turned silver gears; sensor-triggered pulleys triggered lever-triggered sensors as intelligence interfaced with intelligence. Olympians set in machinery exerted their entire hyper-resolved musculoskeletal systems, more musculo- and more skeletal than any living thing. Their confrontation was, evidently, the climax of that planet’s history. They were sophisticated and didn’t age, so the scene was infinite, always dramatic, always pivotal, and never witnessed by anyone.
[What had killed him was the drone. Mistakenly or by design, it had flown past the other bot and released its two-thousand-pound cargo, a bomb, directly onto him. One ton of mixed metals thunked against the hull’s endoskeleton without regard for the human lungs between; it crushed his torso without exploding. His face relaxed to a halt as signals dissolved to static, and anything electrical became too scattered to have a mechanical consequence. The bomb was defective, but he died anyway. After a few seconds, the hull’s song faded. After some months, unrest blossomed among lunar populations who did not know of him. After many decemonths, it spread to the suburb. After several decades, the bots learned from the people to change their forms while new engineers spoke on old radio channels, and the chiefs were different.]
///
(…)
A cosmic light gleamed upon the colorful foam mat where a toddler pretended to read. /
She narrated to a stuffed ladybug who was turned the other way, even though she knew that meant the ladybug was upset with her. /
Sweat glittered on her emerging brows while the page’s bubble letters glittered back. /
She squinted– /
she was curious. /
Her heavy eyelids fluttered over her monumental brown eyes, and /
she looked for assistance far up in the face of a woman crouched next to her. /
The woman was old; her skin was creased where her lenses began, and her teeth had gracefully yellowed, but that was barely visible to the child. /
To the child (not his child, not her child), the woman’s face was dim in front of a window, friendly eclipse to a moon outside. /
Thin perspiration laminated the woman’s nape, and she dabbed it with a palm, /
dabbed the girl’s forehead with the back of that same hand, and /
patted salt and moisture into dry nutraloaf with both sides. /
A moment passed with dew transfixed in four eyes and a loaf, and the toddler concluded that the woman enjoyed her. /
Mesmerization hiccupped into toothless beaming as though she’d just understood a joke slightly too late. /
She launched a celebrating fistful of nutraloaf into the woman’s lap and saw it delivered toward the sky into the woman’s mouth. /
Without looking, she knew the ladybug was happy again. /
She stuck out two tiny, fat arms, dropping the book to grab a strand of the woman’s gray hair because it came from the woman’s face and was long enough for her to reach. /
She tugged without force expecting to reel the face toward her like a balloon, /
requesting that the woman come down to her. /
Uplighted by ripe pupils, the woman waved her arms to parody shock for her apprentice. /
Because she wanted to see it again, the toddler tugged again. /
Her bib shook, and she clapped her hands. /
The toddler played with the woman’s hair in pure unobstructed moonlight, and her first word, whatever it was, was both music and monologue.
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