Published in Jul. 2020 (Problem 122)|5494 words
© 2014 by Tochi Onyebuchi. Initially released in Ideomancer. Reprinted by authorization of the author.
Maybe her toes curl over the edge. The view is dizzy. Perhaps her gaze is tethered to something along the horizon, so that she advance, to reach for it, and plummets. Previous experts and service technicians and worldwide arbitrators and task financiers and insurance salesperson and automated messaging systems, previous janitors and clean-bots cleaning soap suds off rectangles of glass in mechanized sweeps, and is then a million custom-made, factory-spec ‘d pieces on the ground.
” Cecile.”.
The vision turns fixed. She goes back to the present, re-sees the too-bright light shining through the workplace window, the desk at which she sits, the tablet prior to her, the skirt to her pristine nurse attendant’s uniform with the unneeded pocket over her left breast.
” We’ve another one.” Brianne turns to go, oak-colored hair bobbing where its edges curl versus her neck. She reverses and sees the tablet. Sees the newspage with the splash of the deceased android’s parts all over the walkway, cordoned off by police tape. She frowns (in sympathy?) and shakes her head, much like a nurse is expected to. “What is that, 5 now?”.
Cecile increases from her seat. The tablet goes dark.
” By doing this.”.
Cecile follows Brianne out the office and down the passage where nurses stream, back and forth, intent on one job or another. The human ones are all sweating and identified seriousness. The mechanized ones are all forward gazes and cooled deliberation.
When they get to the operating space, Tom smiles a welcoming at both of them before handing Brianne his clipboard, off which she reads as they enter.
The skin of his face has been peeled back to reveal the mechanical right eye socket. The legs, when Cecile prods them with gloved fingers, are loose. She runs her index over the point where one sharp end protrudes from the thigh.
Cecile schools her own functions to show the exact same. Cecile’s tools sit on a tray by the bed. With care, Cecile puts one hand to the guy’s opened eyes, then tucks his head forward to examination the socket at the back of his head.
” Have actually a port generated, please.”.
” Cecile?”.
” For later. In case he has continual damage to his internal organs. There may be things I missed out on throughout my initial scan. I would like quite to see if there is deeper wounding.”.
” Definitely.”.
Immediately, Cecile is alone with the corpse. She pulls a chair better and feels her face loosen, muscles unwinding from the soured expression she forgot she ‘d frozen them into for Brianne’s sake. For numerous minutes, she looks at the body. The muscles attached to the skeleton are lean and she pictures them bent. The upper body, which, when she peels the skin away, she can see in its totality, has actually gotten a flatness. But telltale depressions inform the story of blows gotten. She presses versus his side, closes her eyes, and sees the envisioned memory of flesh rippling versus the fist or blunt object that should have struck him there.
With a start, she opens her eyes and realizes where she is. Sparing him one last glance, she calls down her tools and starts to work. The legs. She evaluates the feet with the pressure of her fingers to find deficiencies, then peels away the skin along his ankle to treat what infirmities she discovers there. Her tools sizzle along the metal as she works. Smoke curls into her eyes, however she does not clean it away. She sees with perfect clearness the fusing of sinew and steel and, where one had been separated from the other, she leans closer and joins them together.
– – – -.
That fucking jab.
You know it’s all he’s got, so you try to expect it, and maybe when or twice you pin him with a counter hook and stagger him good. Just as you turn, he pings you with that jab.
You’re the better puncher by half. When you capture him slipping, that thudding link is the most satisfying sound worldwide.
It’s too peaceful. All you can hear today, outside your own breathing, is feet shuffling versus canvas. You have actually hardly ever been the bully in a fight, however you feel like one now. And already, you understand how this is gon na play out.
The early rounds, he’s waiting for you to punch yourself out, so in the center rounds when you’re slowed down, you’re simply a standing target and he can let loose. But you understand this, so you throw combos carefully, and where they miss out on, they miss, and where they land, they slow him down just a bit. Bulbs are flashing in your head and all of an abrupt there’s a movie of red over your left eye, like half a pair of old 3-D glasses, and your ear won’t stop sounding from that best hook half a round back, then it’s over. The bell rings, and you recently hear it. The other guy’s lucky the ref came between you 2, or maybe you are, ’cause now you can return to your corner, fall onto your stool and capture your breath. Of all the defective parts you needed to be made with, you got bottom lungs.
They tend to you, swab the cut over your eye and splash water on your face, force the straw of a water bottle between your teeth, and jabber in your ringing ear about watching the jab, moving your head, slipping past him. Simply one good straight.
He takes a look at you like the battle simply started.
– – – -.
Perhaps she’s barefoot, and the silt squeezes her toes.
Possibly she hears the crickets and the cicadas and is reminded of her home in the Bayou.
By now the water is up her nose. It slides up each nasal cavity and chills her brain like ice cream eaten from a waffle cone too rapidly.
Maybe she keeps strolling until she can’t feel the ground shift underneath her feet. Right foot, left foot, best foot, left foot. Until the ripples triggered by her descent have actually stilled and the crickets and cicadas and their music can no longer be heard.
– – – -.
Cecile completes scrubbing him, making sure to get the soot out from under his repaired toe nails, clearing away the ash from behind his ear. He looks like he’s sleeping or like he’s been turned off.
She steps back to much better examine him in his totality. He looks in some way less without his injuries.
She feels nothing however the emptiness of lack of exercise. The mechanic at rest.
Her online search engine alert pings, and her eyes glaze over as she checks out the newsfeed. An android’s body has actually been recovered from the bottom of a lake.
She relies on leave so the others can go to work preparing the male for his physical treatment, but movement out of the corner of her eye stops her.
– – – -.
It’s the eureka moment, that uppercut.
You slip his jab, and when he bobs, he’s not anticipating the uppercut, so the knuckles underneath your glove connect with his chin and his head snaps back, and you seem like you have actually finally turned it around. He hesitates the next time he attempts to weave and evade your shots. His jab isn’t as trip-hammery as it was a few rounds ago. It still wallops you.
He’s planting more often, happy to stand in one place and trade shots and you do not understand if he’s just tired or insane, and you search in his eyes which’s when you see it. A dullness that tells you his elevator no longer increases to the top floor. All of a sudden, despite the fact that your shots stagger him and his brain need to be telling his legs to fold, they do not and he returns. His hands have actually slowed and he doesn’t catch the hooks like he utilized to. The smack is as pleasing a sound as you’ve ever heard. He won’t be completed.
All the while, he’s got that vacancy in his eyes, one of which is swollen shut. You’re awaiting the ref to call a standing knockout, the kid can hardly see, but the ref is shaking his head, so you keep beating the kid, and when he can, he takes a look at you, and you understand he does not desire it to stop either.
It haunts you, that look. You question why you feel haunted, why you feel bad for doing this to him, and by the end of the fight when the announcer gets ready to offer the judges’ ratings and their verdict, you glimpse in the kid’s instructions and while his supporters crowd around him and praise him for lasting as long as he did, he’s smiling at something none of them can see. The battle you just won feels more like a battle you simply lost.
The video cameras flash and the lights make the ringing in your ear even worse, then the light gets to be excessive and you’re on a slab of metal looking into a bulb in a space that’s all metal and glass. You’re not wearing your trunks and a woman is dominating you and gazing at you.
She’s elsewhere, this female, all dolled up like a nurse. And you wonder if, at that point in the fight where you determined that uppercut, that kid wasn’t half-smiling nearly like this nurse is doing now.
– – – -.
When you shadowbox, your hands are a blur. You circle while you throw them, and whatever feels new, and the urge increases in you to push it even more, to go for longer, and with a start, you realize that you’re still doing it, you have not slowed down. Your bottom lungs have not gotten in the way, not this time.
The round bell buzzes, and you stand straight and realize you’re not even sweating. Something’s incorrect. It niggles the back of your brain, but you’re too jazzed by what you can do to do anything however shove the worry to a place where it can’t bother you.
The round bell buzzes once again, and you work on the heavy bag. The bag swings back and forth, arcs greater and greater, and when the bell squeals again, you hold the bag still and rest your head versus it, hardly huffing, eyes broad in marvel at this newness.
When the battles get easier and much easier, you try to find delight in other locations. It’s not the winning that matters anymore. It develops into a video game, finding out different “how’s.” You try a battle where you remain on the outside although the man throughout from you’s got a good additional inch on you in reach, and you tune him up so that his kidneys begin malfunctioning and, ultimately, his legs offer. You attempt battling from the center, waiting for the other man to come charging in like you used to, and you weave, and you make him look like a bottom with all that missing, then suddenly, a cut opens over his eye and his nose is busted, almost hanging off, and his cheekbone’s been slammed in and you have actually earned your fifth interruption.
The botfight commission reps won’t call you out on augmentations due to the fact that all your parts have a look at. The scans show absolutely nothing amiss, no prohibited chemicals in your system, simply great fucking parts. And you forget what it’s like to get hit.
When it takes place, it’s thunder behind your eyes and you wonder how he captured you. He’s not faster than you. But he’s a puncher and when he dings you once again, possibly it’s because you have actually lost an action. Your hands are down, that’s got ta be it. He slips through, right through your guard, and captures you behind your gloves, right on the temple.
The bell’s ringing is all of a sudden salvation, a chance to get your head directly and find out how the fight got so changed so rapidly. Another thought’s bubbling to the surface, another itch. This man desires a brawl.
And you get up from the stool and the ref brings you men together and you do not get out of that center; you 2 are captured in a phone booth and you just trade and you can hear the crowd going nuts, and you feel the finest you have actually felt in over a dozen fights. Since you’re lastly providing as great as you’re getting. You get up and the ref gives you a standing 8 count, but you just look at him and smile-grimace behind your mouthpiece because you desire to get back out there.
You don’t wish to win, you just want to keep combating.
The next four rounds are the happiest of your life.
And when they check out the judges’ scorecards, you don’t even remember whose name gets called or whose arm gets raised. You just want to get struck like that once again.
– – – -.
Cecile scribbles notes in slow, practiced longhand on a sheet of unlined paper: specs of the man she repaired earlier today. A brochure of his brand-new injuries, how much more substantial they were than last time, just how much closer to termination they ‘d brought him. She thinks twice when explaining the fissure in his braincase (why?), but continues over that doubt like traversing a grain of sand stuck underneath the page.
He has actually become a frequent visitor at the clinic, and they’ve taken to removing his braincase while she operates, so that they can fix it individually. Some of the information is lost at the same time, and Cecile has pertained to wonder where they have actually gone to, whether the guy grieves their loss or whether his journeys to the center are an effort to purge himself of these remnants of somebody’s previous life. Does he miss them? Does he miss out on the locations kept in them? The people?
She does not understand who or what he is, but the majority of the people around her are red-bloods and therefore secrets. They believe her cold, a couple of whisper of autism, but no one understands truly why it takes her longer to react as they believe she ought to or how quickly she learned her trade or why she does not appear to mind staining her uniform to work on this man and others like him.
She is lured, she writes, to sneak occasional fugitive looks into his braincase, to plug in and observe the data, but vigilance obstructs her course. Ought to somebody capture her, they would of course notification the outlet simply behind her left ear, the one carefully masked by the method she wears her hair. Brianne sometimes tells me, she relates in the letter, that I ought to try to wear my hair in a bun, just to spice things up, however I just smile demurely (as I ought to) and say I choose it in this manner. When Brianne wonders aloud if it gets in the way of Cecile’s work, Cecile replies with simply the proper quantity of chill in her voice that she works just fine. And Brianne does not question any longer how Cecile needs to or should not wear her hair.
– – – -.
When he wakes up on the slab, she’s washing her hands in a nearby basin. They’re pearly underneath the glisten of sink water. She flicks excess wetness away, then towels.
” Doll,” he states, and she turns.
” You’re awake.” No smile, no chastising frown. A hint of surprise at being dealt with, which’s it.
” You’re excellent.”.
“?”.
He raises a fixed arm, turns it over under the fluorescent light. Excellent as brand-new.
” It’s my task.” She doesn’t finish toweling till her hands are entirely dry, he notices. “What I’m here for.” She smiles.
He does not mind being naked, not in front of her. “However next time, mind not makin’ me so quickly?”.
” How do you suggest?”.
” My arms. My legs. They feel like they belong to someone else when I combat.”.
She frowns, but the method a child oppose a toy it hasn’t yet figured out.
” It’s not enjoyable winning all the time.”.
” You combat in competitions?”.
He smiles, and he pictures it’s lovely. Usually, it works. “Yeah. I’m a fighter.”.
Her hands rest at her sides. There’s soot and oil all over her dress, however she doesn’t appear to observe.
” Feels excellent to get hit in some cases.” He’s surprised at how seriously he implies it. “Actually, it ain’t fair to the other guys.”.
” The other men?”.
” The ones I battered.”.
She lets out a small “oh,” almost like a gasp. “All right,” she says,
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