by Renan Bernardo
All that Lena remembered was that her last pizza had been a slice of margherita. Two years ago, when high school came to an abrupt end.
“Turn to me, now,” Lena said to the Unit, closing the lid on its back, which was checkered with little pizzas. It slowly pivoted to face her, its green cheeks tarnished and marked with profound dents, coal-colored eyes unnaturally swiveling in their sockets.
Lena opened the lid on the Unit’s chest and dipped her fingers in it, connecting a set of wires. Green lines of code showed up on the pad dangling by a wire from its left arm. It was a pre-world Unit still filled with unnecessary gears, tangled wires, and swollen with lines of the worst code ever imagined—clearly written by humans. It even had a humanoid shape with an iron hat and a bulky backpack attached to its back to carry pizzas. Maybe at one point it really looked like a human.
“Are you finished?” the Unit asked for the tenth time. “I have to deliver the pizza.”
Lena grunted, closing the lid. “You’re good to go, mister delivery boy. I’d love a pizza.” She smiled, but the Unit wasn’t capable of interpreting faces and understanding jokes. It was made to deliver pizzas, and even though there hadn't been any to deliver for a while, it still insisted on doing its job. Like she did. As the last person in the Tangle, Lena didn’t need a job. She didn’t need to live among Units at all; no one had forced her to stay. The Units knew she wasn’t one of them yet provided her food and jobs through their algorithms. She didn’t mind; if it was up to her, this could go on forever.
“Are you finished? I have to deliver the pizza.”
“Oh.” You’re a dumb girl, the voice of her father rattled in her skull. Her stomach churned. For a moment, she wanted to find a place to cry.
She typed a command, sighing at the Unit’s expressionless face.
“I forgot you’re not self-aware.”
“Thank you,” the Unit said, its voice coming out wheezy from mouth-speakers. She unplugged the pad. When the Unit had been fully functional, it must’ve made children laugh and parents wonder how technology was beautiful and useful and subservient.
It got up, all clumsy and clanky, opened the door and left to deliver nonexistent pizzas in a world that now belonged to its kind.
Lena looked around the old office, folding her pad and buckling it to her belt. On a dusty poster, a robot not unlike her patient shouted a warning, Don’t you dare exploit human labor, have pizza with us instead! The counter was split in half. An empty cabinet stood in front of the door. Roaches meandered in a drawer lying splintered on the floor. Lena shooed them and grabbed a few magnets advertising the pizza business for Ana’s ancient souvenirs collection. As the most nostalgic member of the Iron Squad, Ana would oh-my-gosh when she saw those pearls of the pre-world.
Lena opened the door.
The frying smell of electronics and the concoction of the Tangle noises never got old. Buildings intertwined with each other, U-shaped, T-shaped, O-shaped, spiraled, full of pillars. Rail-traveling buildings, gravity-defying penthouses hovering atop edifices. Not a few were home to driveways where wheeled Units whirred, crossing windows, doors, and holes between constructions like tiny rollercoaster cars chaotically scrambling. A waterfall poured from a tall skyscraper and the water spattered on a dome, glistening, reflecting the sunlight that pierced its way through the Tangle. Above it all, flying Units swished by, speeding up, colorful or tarnished, noisy or silent, resembling birds or nothing at all.
Lena lifted her pad and took a picture for Kevin. He loved different takes on the Tangle. And since he couldn’t walk, she always tried to catch a varied angle of the city for him. It now stretched for most of the shoreline between what used to be Rio de Janeiro and Santos. And it violently changed every day, so there would always be a different view to please her friend.
She donned her helmet, started her scooter, and drove toward the hut. For almost two years, she’d been the only human driving down that road. Her father had said she would be a unique girl. Well, she’d learned to drive at fourteen, so perhaps that was what he meant. But she shouldn’t care about the thoughts of the man who left her.
Her stomach heaved. She needed to get back to the Iron Squad, laugh with Kevin, talk about pre-world souvenirs with Ana, and exchange fun flatteries with Beto. That would keep her out of the heavy thoughts.
The pad beeped again. She rolled her eyes and patched the notification to the helmet. A map pinpointed a location in the Tangle.
Please, repair this Unit in less than 3 days.
Name: S1ng3r-Prototype
Defect: Rhyming modules broken
Observations: Thank you for your service, Lena Moreira. This will be your last job. After that, you can proceed to Checkpoint Flesh and meet all the remaining people of your kind.
She froze for a moment. The scooter took a turn toward the highway’s shoulder. She pulled it back, hands sweating.
“They’re firing me,” she whispered, the wind flapping her coat, sand brushing her knuckles on the handlebars. “No, no, no. They’re firing me!”
#
The waves washed the sand in Lena’s little patch of land, outstretching its foamy arms on the bricks of the round hut.
She parked the scooter and took a last glance at the Tangle. It was like a barrier of concrete, iron, graphene, and glass surrounding everything but the sea. Almost everything she once knew was there, buried or repurposed. Could Mr. Alien still be out there, four-wheeling through the exotic streets, blinking its green eyes? Perhaps it still existed, yipping its default bark indefinitely across the Tangle. At least, it wouldn’t bother her father anymore.
The salty breeze wafted up to her nostrils. The new world had made her lighter than before. She walked to the fridge Unit vehicle parked in front of her door and opened its hatch door. Dried chicken with raisins and olives. Not the best, but not the worst the Units could offer.
“I’m home!” she said, pressing her thumbprint to the lock. “Kevin! Ana! Beto!”
“Why am I the last name?” Beto’s voice came from inside.
“Because the cutest comes last.”
Beto chortled. “Why don’t you come here to hug me?” he said.
“I’m coming.”
“There is my sight for sore eyes,” said Beto when she left the hut’s small foyer and entered the main room. The lights of his egg-like surface flashed in green and yellow, reflecting on his rustless skin. His way of smiling. Next to him on the table was Kevin. He had one single light in his cubic body. He lit it to greet her. Ana emitted no lights but shook her branches to show awareness.
“What did you see there?” asked Kevin. “Tell us, tell us.”
“I found magnets.” She grabbed the dusty magnets from her backpack and placed some of them on Ana’s tactile branches and roots. She had orb-like leaves that functioned like 360-degree eyes. “From a pizza place!”
“Oh. My. Gosh.” Ana’s voice sounded cracked in her speakers, but identical to the way she talked two years ago in high school, that girl-trying-to-be-cool kind of voice that Lena hated at first, then learned to love. “Pizza! That’s something I miss. Not as much as sushi, you know? But a great deal anyway. Do those places still exist? Can you find a sushi bar? You’ve done tons of jobs, how come you only find a place like this now? Gosh!”
“They’re rare.”
“Did you take a picture?” asked Kevin.
“Not from the pizza venue, but I took one from the Tangle.” She unfastened the pad from her waist and lit the screen, raising it in front of Kevin’s eyes, tiny cameras on each of his vertices.
“Man! Look at that!”
At school, she’d always thought of Kevin as childish. Hanging around with silly boys, building private silly clubs on silly treehouses, and thinking his silliness was coolness. Now she thought he was funny. The funniest of them. If it wasn’t for him, her days coming and going from the Tangle would be so much duller. She could bet Ana and Beto thought the same. Did two years make that much of a difference in the pre-world? “Is that where Bangu used to be? Or is it more like Ipanema? God, wherever it is, it has changed like me.”
“You’re not changed!” Lena protested.
“I’m a cube!” Kevin laughed. “I don’t have a body.”
“You do,” said Lena, pinching her lips. The only thing she’d tweaked in their minds when she fetched them from the EverCloud Solutions servers and uploaded them to those Units was their mind-body relationship. She stifled their necessity of having a body, anticipating how desperate they would be waking up with their minds uploaded to a cube, a tree, and an egg on a table.
“We all do,” said Ana. “Would you prefer a flesh one?”
“I would,” said Beto. “Just to hug Lena.”
“I don’t miss my body.” Ana tilted her branches. “Didn’t like it anyway.”
“Well, I surely don’t miss bullies knocking me down.” Kevin guffawed.
“Don’t you miss food?” said Beto. “Kissing?” His lights blinked.
“Hey, guys.” Lena stood in front of the trio. “Shut up for a second. I have news.”
“Will you marry me?” said Beto, flicking his lights. “That would be great news.”
“I’m serious.”
“Stop talking, Beto,” said Ana. “Spill it out, Lena.”
“I got one last job.”
“Oh,” Kevin said. She expected them all to speak at the same time, protesting, exclaiming, yelling, disparate thoughts hurtling at each other about what her retirement would mean for them. But all that filled the room was the crash of the waves outside and the faint whirs of the Tangle in the distance.
“It’s something about a singing robot, I think.” Lena tried to sound casual, to avoid questions. “One of the older models, at least the name sounds like it. You know when the name’s too geeky?”
“Will you go to the Checkpoint?” said Ana, her branches pointing downward. She did that when she was dismayed.
“Do I have an option?” Lena asked herself and turned her back to the Squad, focusing on the beach outside. It wasn’t rhetorical, she really wanted them to list options. “I suppose the Units won’t deliver me any food anymore.”
“We always worry too much when you get sick,” said Kevin. It wasn’t a joke. “There must be doctors in the Checkpoint.”
“I don’t know, and—”
“You really should go,” said Ana.
“No!” Lena turned to them. “I love my job, and I—I want to be with you. I’d only go if I could take you with me.” No kind of Unit was allowed in Checkpoint Flesh.
“And your father might be there,” said Beto, as if he’d tweezed inside her brain and picked the exact sliver of thought that was troubling her. He knew her too damn well. Not the boy who had a desperate crush on her at school, but that egg Beto, what he had turned into in the last couple of years—not the flirtatious one or the pickup line maker, but the bodiless caring young man in front of her.
“He might be there, but I don’t care. He never cared about me.” But she was lying. She cared at least enough to find out what had happened to her cryptic father, the only person who had her back, the only person who called her a dumb girl and abandoned her.
“I think you should go,” said Beto. “We’ll be fine.”
“I’m fine here.”
Beto turned off his lights. “Besides, there are people like you in—”
“Like us,” Lena corrected him.
“I mean, there are people with bodies there. It’s always good to spend your time with other humans, isn’t it? How long since you last touched someone?” There was a tinge of sadness in his voice.
Lena blinked back tears, sniffing. About two years ago, she’d found out her friends’ minds had been backed up by their parents to EverCloud Solutions. By then, people were already scattering, fleeing to the sea, launching towards space, fighting, dying. Few had decided to work for the Units. It’d been months after it all began when she’d shook hands with a woman who passed by her hut, going to the sea. After that, Lena couldn’t recall having seen any other human.
A wave broke outside, so strong that drops sprinkled on the window.
“But I don’t miss people,” Lena said. “Not at all.”
“It’s hard to grasp how far it all went,” said Kevin. “And I thought high school was the worst of my problems. But then… too many robots, a lot of them starting to think for themselves, all that talk of independence, sentience, some people stuffing their minds into robots to live forever, trying to adapt to the newness. Clash, rebellions breaking out, humans accused of ditching the planet. Damn, if I wasn’t so freaked out that day I would’ve seen that driverless car coming straight at me.”
“Then it all stopped,” said Kevin. “All the confusion. Did you notice that or was it only me? The Tangle expanded like a desperate fungus, but it got calmer.”
“It got a lot calmer,” said Ana. “Something happened. I don’t know, perhaps when most of the humans got away the Units calmed down.”
“Well, look where we are now.” Kevin flashed his red light. “Alive. And school’s out. Who would have guessed?”
“We owe our afterlife to you, Lena,” said Ana.
“You owe me nothing.” Lena stood. “I have to eat and pack. I’m going to do this last job, then I’ll be back.” To sort out my future, she thought but choked the idea before it sprouted in her mind.
Silence hung in the hut. It was as if her friends were looking at each other.
“Then you’ll leave for Checkpoint Flesh?” Beto flashed purple lights on his egg-like surface.
“Never. Not without you.”
#
A gentle melody reverberated across the corridors of the ravaged office building, an intertwining of saxophone, clean guitar, and an indistinguishable voice. It had to be the S1ng3r-Prototype.
On the 12th floor, Lena crossed the office cubicles, dust ruffling into her nostrils, her shoes making a gluing noise on the floor. The lamps on the ceiling were shining rotating cylinders, casting blue novelty to the decayed place. Steel spiders crawled across tanned reams of paper, broken flat screens, and tilted chairs. No longer enemies, cockroaches accompanied them as organic remembrances of the pre-world. Not counting myself, of course.
Lena grabbed her pad and confirmed the location. Her last job would be somewhere around these cubicles. She raised the pad and took a picture for Kevin. On her way back, she might find some old pen, a keyboard, or perhaps even an ID card to oh-my-gosh Ana. Beto didn’t need souvenirs. All he wanted was her.
“…with the exudation of the working man,” a soft, brittle voice chanted. “A man’s plea is a man’s book.”
“Book?” She whispered, frowning, following the voice. “What the hell, robot?”
That prototype, whatever that was, deserved a recording. The Iron Squad would be delighted. And they’d know she would never leave them behind, that she would still bring pre-world souvenirs for them. The last job wouldn’t mean the end.
“And he’s the most benevolent,” crooned the voice. It sounded like a religious tune. “The most eloquent, magnificent, and pavement of men.”
Lena muffled a laugh. It made no sense at all. Her friends should be there. She’d never created the wheels or legs she’d devised for them. If she’d done that, perhaps they’d be walking with her, grubbing the pre-world together, laughing, singing, taking pictures.
“He is saaaaaaaaaaaaaad,” the voice screamed, stentorian. A chill tingled along her body. “But not quite maaaaaaaaaad.” The rhyme was correct. It wasn’t funny this time. Not scary, though. No Unit had ever threatened her. Still, she often felt completely extraneous in their presence. Her job was a way to contend with it, to be part of the new world. To have an important place in it.
One day you’ll be an important woman, her father told her in one of his best times.
Whatever, he had said, when she told him, weeks later, that she wanted to be a programmer like him.
And she’d insisted on it, thinking that one day it would please him, make him less mysterious about his ways.
Now she didn’t want anything to do with the man who never showed up at the science fair to see Mr. Alien, her newly built green-eyed dog. Mothers and fathers came to see their children’s flying volcanos, instant messaging drones, fighting titanium bugs, none of them as cool as Mr. Alien. Amelia’s parents were there. Justin’s aunt too. A lot of families. Beto’s, Kevin’s, Ana’s. Not her father, the only family she’d ever had. Months later, the news started to screech about singularities and broken laws and falling buildings, and the only time her father glanced at Mr. Alien was to throw him outside, blaring that no frigging machine should enter their house.
She focused on the singer, but her will to record it and replay it later to the Squad vanished. She should just finish the job and be done with it. Get back to the hut and retire, whatever that means.
A wind blew on her face.
“The nurse of Units he is,” sang the Unit, fading out, shifting to a whistling. It was in the next room, in what might have been a manager’s room, but now housed a set of destroyed servers, VR headsets, and scattered trash. A big hole stretched on the wall from side to side. Outside, glass bubbles linked by chains went up and down in an almost rhythmic fashion, carrying robots, objects, and even pre-world automobiles inside them.
The Unit stood in front of a picture frame of a man in suspenders, an artwork of the pre-world that Kevin would love to see. The singer was barely fifty inches tall. It resembled an iron barrel and had woofers, amplifiers, and speakers across its body.
Lena tiptoed in, not wanting to disturb its singing.
“Hi,” she said.
“And then she comes!” it shouted, soprano, swiveling to face her, his woofers vibrating, his foot clanging on the floor like a child fretting about a toy. “She comes!” Other voices and sounds echoed in its body, simulating backing vocals and percussion. “She comes! Oh, yes! Here she is!”
“Well, I—” It was loud. She couldn’t hear herself.
“Welcome, lady,” the Unit spoke, ceasing its song abruptly. “To what do I owe the pleasure of a Unit built like our ancestors?”
“I’m not a Unit.”
“Oh!” The singer walked toward Lena, its feet sounding like trumpets every time it stepped. “Yes, you’re not. You must be the repairwoman, the doctor.”
“Yes. I suppose you have problems in your rhyming modules.”
“No, I do not. I’m fine.”
“But, in my file it says—”
“I’m fine, fleshy lady. Let me sing.”
“No, you—”
But it sang, “There’s a fine fleshy lady, all soft and venous. She came to me, so waft and vintage table.”
“Vintage table? Look, I think there’s a—”
“Lady.” The Unit raised its sturdy little arm. Its voice came from a speaker in its palm. “You must be mistaken. The problem is with my friend here.” It pointed to the picture frame.
“Your… friend?” She gawked at the picture. In it, there was a man with a brimming black mustache and arms akimbo. A flawless sun was setting on the horizon of his world. He must’ve been a farmer from the pre-world Brazil, probably some motivational picture or family member of the person who worked in the room.
“Yes, Luke, the nurse of Units.” The singer pivoted to face the frame. “He keeps turning off. Sometimes, we’re talking and then he turns off. It’s a bug in his code, I think, but I’m not equipped with the necessary knowledge to repair him. I was built by flesh hands like yours, so I have my flaws.”
“Is this picture frame a Unit?”
“Of course it is. Does it seem like anything else to you?”
Of course it is. Anything might be a Unit. Weeks before her father had vanished without a word, she caught him in the kitchen, talking with their toaster. When she asked what he was doing, he said he was checking in case they had a Unit hiding in their house. When she’d told him it was just a toaster, he’d called her a dumb girl. That stung, though not as much as his sudden absence weeks later.
“No,” Lena said. “It’s obviously a Unit.”
Lena pulled the pad from her backpack and took a picture of the singer and the farmer. The Iron Squad would love that scene.
“Can you talk to him?” said the singer.
Lena nodded and pulled the cord of her pad. The singer pointed at a port on the side of the frame.
A singer that didn’t know how to rhyme and a picture frame with a shutdown issue. Who would have guessed that her last job would be the most interesting one?
Green lines of code rolled down on the pad’s screen as soon as Lena connected it to the frame. She started to type.
“You mentioned that he was a nurse?” Lena said.
“Yes.” The singer’s voice sounded like someone had thrummed a bass string inside him. “He brought a lot of good to a lot of us.”
“How’s he a nurse if he didn’t even move?”
“How are you a doctor if you don’t display a red cross?”
“I’m not exactly—”
“Just check his problem, okay?” It sounded like the verse of a pop song. “If you need me, I’m walking around. My name is Sinatra, like the engineer.”
“Engineer?”
“Yes. Frank Sinatra.”
Lena laughed as it walked out to the office cubicles. The tiny thing surely had a problem in some module.
She stared at the farmer Luke.
“So, it’s time to talk,” she said and typed the command to turn the Unit on.
“Oh, hi.” Luke moved his mouth. His mustache twitched, but the rest of his body remained static. Kevin would love to see that. “Who are you? I can’t see. Don’t have eyes on this frame. You don’t sound like Sinatra.”
“I’m not. It called me here to repair you.”
“Repair me?” The mustache straightened into a thin line. “That fool. Sinatra’s the one that needs to fix those rhymes. Can you believe it rhymed ostrich with love?”
“I do.” Lena giggled.
Luke didn’t speak. His lips and mustache remained inert. She checked her pad. Luke was on.
“Something wrong?” she said.
“Laugh again, please.”
“Why?”
“Nothing. Just some thoughts.”
Lena nodded but didn’t laugh. Instead, she put her pad on her lap and sat cross-legged on the floor.
“I’ll perform a checkup on you. Just some basic scan. Do you mind? It seems you’re unexpectedly turning off now and then.”
“I am not!” His mustache’s tips pointed upward. “Did Sinatra tell you that? I just turn it off when it’s saying something boring or singing its boring songs.”
“So it’s intentional?”
“Completely! There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Lena sighed. “Look. I received a job in the system. It says it’s to repair Sinatra, but the singer says it’s for you. I need to know what to do. It is… It is my last one.”
“You can pack your things and leave, I think.”
“If I don’t complete this job the system will send me to Checkpoint Flesh, and—” She closed her hands in fists. The outcome was the same. There weren’t other ways out.
“Someone very dear to me said something similar.” The farmer’s mustache came back to its usual position. “She said if she didn’t complete her task her teachers would send her to the principal’s office. It was something for a science fair. I can’t quite recall what it was.”
“A science fair?” She frowned. “Can you read minds, Luke?”
“I wish!”
“How do you know these things?” Her heart’s pace got faster, and she looked at the pad’s screen, sliding her finger to check some specific parts of Luke’s code. “You’re no Unit. You’re a mind uploaded to this frame.”
“I don’t believe in these kinds of distinctions, but it’s much debated between—”
“Who are you?” But tears already beaded on the corners of her eyes because there was only one person in the whole world who could have known how excited she was for the science fair.
“I’m Luke. And you’re Lena, aren’t you? Oh, my—”
“Why didn’t you come to the fair?” Lena clenched her teeth. Her head throbbed. “I’ve waited for you till sundown. Teacher Joana drove me home because you didn’t come. And you never told me why!”
“Didn’t I go?” The farmer’s lips contorted into sad lines. “I had no reason not to go. I wanted so much to go, my dear.”
“My dear? You don’t call me like that since I was what? Ten? Eleven? You only called me girl.”
“I’m sorry…” Outside, Sinatra’s speakers blasted a sorrowful, instrumental melody.
“And why did you leave home?” She clutched the pad in her hand. “You left me alone.”
“Did I? God, what was I?”
Sinatra’s song ceased. Tears blurred Lena’s eyes, but she typed on the pad, searching for her father’s upload date to the EverCloud servers. It was after the science fair. That man hidden behind the farmer in suspenders had missed his daughter’s project, he had screamed at her while throwing out Mr. Alien.
“I’m not dumb! You’re lying to me. I’ve seen your upload date. It was after the fair, but before you left me, so there must be thoughts about leaving me in that frigging head of yours.”
“He’s not lying.” Sinatra stood at the door, staring at Luke. “He doesn’t have the whole of his mind thanks to himself.”
Luke clucked, but his lips and mustache resumed the picture’s default state.
“We found the dying man in a sinkhole,” said Sinatra. For the first time since she arrived, it sounded serious and had its words straight. Its voice had a tinge of sadness but also respect. “We didn’t know how he ended up there, but he was about to die. He told us about a project and that he had a backup mind in the EverCloud servers. We saw that he had amazing programming skills for a flesh body.”
“Yes,” Lena said, her voice hoarse. “Dad was a programmer.”
Dad. I called that man dad.
“He said he’d devised a plan to develop an algorithm to delete all Units’ bad routines and behaviors. He installed them in all of us. Like a patch.”
“What?” She hesitated, mulling the words in her head. “Dad—My father never liked Units.”
“He never liked the aggressive-expansive stance of some of us, the fact that humans would be wiped out if greedy algorithms that only worked for profit, war, and expansion continued to function. That’s what the man told us.”
“So that’s why those conflicts stopped out of nothing and Checkpoint Flesh was created?”
Sinatra emitted a brief hum. It was a nod.
“By then, just a few humans lived in the Tangle, and even after Luke’s patch, the Units weren’t programmed to reestablish human dominion here. It’s not theirs—yours anymore.”
“But what do his memories have to do with it?” But she knew the answer, and Sinatra didn’t seem to be able to answer.
Her father was never a good person. He wasn’t entirely a bad father, but he had problems. Aunt Liana once told her that he’d spent a week drinking after she was born. He didn’t want to see the face of his child. He was afraid, she’d told her, desperate that he would have to raise a child in a world in crumbles. He wished he wasn’t there, he wished to be far away from her and her mother, and even looked for tickets to Central America.
Lena was only three when her mother died, so that brain inside the flat, immobile farmer was the family she always tried to love. That silent, secretive man, that sometimes held hands with her and sometimes pinched his lips in impatience when she asked a question.
But all that odd temper, mysterious behavior, and thoughts about leaving were gone inside the farmer picture.
“He did this for someone, I think,” said Sinatra. “He was a very closed man. He’s better this way, edited.” Sinatra approached, its feet clanking on the floor. Outside, a bubble filled with suitcases hurtled upward, chains clinking on the building. “So I’d heard about the lone worker in a hut on the outskirts of the Tangle, and I wanted him to see you before your last job. He’s a very good friend. A lovely Unit. I thought this rendezvous could bring some happiness for both of you. Like the happiness I feel when I’m singing and composing.”
Lena glared at the farmer, rubbing her eyes. Was the fragmented mind behind that man her father? She would never know exactly why he had left her. Did he leave to code the nerfing algorithm and spread it throughout the Units? Why not tell her? Why not bring her along? Did he do that for her?
“I have to go,” she said, focusing on the pad. “I’m done here.”
“I’m sorry if it upset you,” Sinatra said, wobbly, almost if it intoned an elegy’s verse.
“Won’t you stay a little longer?” Luke pleaded, moving his lips. “I still remember some good things, my dear. Like when I brought you to watch fireworks on New Year’s—”
“Stop. I can’t. I have a new family now.”
She tucked her pad into the backpack and zipped it. Before she left, she went into a cubicle and grabbed an ID card for Ana.
#
A knot curled in Lena’s belly when she parked the scooter in front of the hut. On her way back, her pad kept reminding her that she was out of jobs, the system pushing the notifications to her helmet. The fridge Unit that delivered her food was parked outside, and her last meal was pork chops with potatoes and raspberry sauce.
She held her tears all the way from the Tangle, but now that she opened the hut’s door and saw the Squad waiting for her, she wept. Not even when her father left her had that dead-end sensation sunk into her body.
“What’s wrong?” said Beto, blinking his lights in a daffy hue of white.
She tried to regain composure, snatched the ID card from her pocket, and placed it in front of Ana. This time, her friend didn’t oh-my-gosh.
“Is your last job finished?” Ana said, ignoring the souvenir.
“I think so.” She offered a mirthless smile.
Telling the Iron Squad what happened in the office building wasn’t like taking a weight off her shoulders, but putting more of it there. Somehow, it was as if she was leaving something behind, as if she’d found a way in that new world but refused to travel the path.
She repelled the thoughts before they took hold of her.
“But that’s fine,” she said. “That’s not my father.”
The Squad stood in silence.
“He doesn’t even sound like him. He’s just a bunch of edited code.”
“Talking like that, I feel bad about myself,” said Ana.
“I’m sorry.” She stretched a hand and touched Ana’s branches, squeezing their tactile feedback sensors. “I mean, he doesn’t remember the science fair, doesn’t remember all the bad he’d done to me in the past. That algorithm changed a lot about him. There’s only…”
“The good part?” said Kevin, his lonely red light radiating without flickering. He sounded like a greatly evolved version of the Kevin who built treehouse clubs and called them Private Chiefdom of Boys On Trees.
She shrugged, not wanting to delve into the truth of his words.
“Now I have to figure out how to feed myself.”
They remained in silence, all lights off. It was easy to know what they were thinking.
“I’m not going to Checkpoint Flesh,” she said. I’m not leaving you as my father left me, she thought, but a knot in her throat prevented her from speaking.
“We don’t want you here,” said Ana. A pizza magnet still hung on one of her branches. “It’s not a place for you.”
“What are you talking about?” She dropped the backpack on the couch and faced the Squad. “We’re the Iron Squad.”
“We’re the Iron Squad,” said Beto. “You’re made of flesh.”
“There will be no food, you know,” said Kevin. “And there will be no light, no heater. Nothing for flesh.” As if he was a soothsayer, the lights of the hut turned off.
“Turn it back on,” Lena said. “I’m not kidding.”
“Neither are we,” said Beto. “Please, leave.”
“You can’t be serious.” She wanted to cry, but anger coursed down her skin. The hair on the back of her neck bristled. “Do you know I can just turn you off?”
“It’s what we’re going to do,” said Ana. “We don’t want you here.”
They switched off. Beto’s and Kevin’s lights ceased. Ana’s branches moved into their standard position.
“Well, I can just turn you on!” Lena screamed, snatching her pad from the couch.
The hut’s door opened, inviting her to the chilly wind outside, to the crash of the waves.
Her pad was locked. It only displayed the route to Checkpoint Flesh.
“Why are you doing this to me?” That was what her mind looped over and over for months after her father left. But she’d never spoken that aloud at the time because she didn’t have anybody to speak to. “You don’t know how I’m feeling. You can’t know. You’re just … pieces of tin.”
All sorts of thoughts swirled through her mind, from the irony of being left behind once again, this time by the friends she had resuscitated for the very purpose of giving herself a family, to the debt they owed her. It was she who polished the pieces of metal, it was she who programmed basic movements and behaviors in the Squad, even before their minds were uploaded to the objects. Twinkling colorful lights to express Beto’s emotions, different patterns for Kevin’s only light, and all sorts of movements for Ana’s branches.
It all came in whirlpools, in a simmering violence that made her eyes blur and her face heat.
Lena yanked her still-open backpack and left.
#
Lena sped up across the Rio-Santos road, leaving behind a sign that said Boat and plane for Checkpoint Flesh - 200 kilometers. Her fists held tight to the scooter’s handlebars. Her earphones played a Unit’s radio that randomly selected songs. She only kept it on because she needed a buzz in her ears, something drilling into her brain, something to dig out the anger. The consistent swooshes of the road would break her down.
By her right, the Tangle elongated infinitely southward like a giant snake. A Unit in the shape of a winged lion fluttered above her head, carrying small orb-like drones in each of its pawns. Sunlight glinted on the domes of a glass village, protruding from the Tangle. There was nothing inside the domes. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense since the singularity. The world was just a bunch of Units evolving according to their routines, finding ways to tolerate and synchronize with each other.
Lena touched her earphone and changed the radio station.
“Fly me to the moon and let me play among the installation,” Sinatra sang. Only it wasn’t the Frank Sinatra.
“Oh, god…” she whispered. She lifted her finger to change the station but decided not to.
“In other words, hold my gum. In other words, baby, twist me.”
Behind the glass village, fireworks shot from cannons in the windows of a pyramidal building. They exploded in green, red, and yellow, drawing in the sky what looked like urchins, fishes, and sharks.
She slowed down the scooter, tears coursing down her cheeks, Sinatra singing about filling his heart with galaxies. In other words, please be you. In other words, I love you. At least he’d rhymed you with you.
She turned off the scooter and removed the helmet and the earphones.
The fireworks flared up their flashy colors and daring forms in the sky. They weren’t so beautiful that night on the lake near their house. There were fewer of them, now that she thought about it. But everything had seemed livelier.
“Your mother spent some time alone in the garage on the last New Year’s Eve before you were born,” her father had said, minutes after the clock struck midnight and the fireworks burst out, duplicated on the surface of the lake. “She said she was making a gift for you, for when you turn ten.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think it was some kind of art made with Unit hulls, but she never finished it.”
“Why ten? What was that for?”
“We’ll never know what her intention was, my dear. Some things we’ll never know, and that’s just the way it is.”
“Can I see it? I want to see it!”
He got up and brought a big cardboard box. Drones buzzed around replaying projections of the festival on the pitch surface of the lake.
“Let me see it.” She ran to the box but was somewhat disappointed. Whatever work her mother had been creating, it was far from finished. Just a metal egg, a cube with an LED hanging by a wire, and a small tree with rusty iron branches.
“It’s yours, my dear.” He hugged her, in that distant, brief manner typical of him. “In her memory, we could try to make something significant with these things one day. I love you. Happy New Year.”
We. We. Both times she’d asked him to help her build something with her mother’s gift, he’d postponed it. Never we.
Lena shook her head, dried her tears on the sleeve of her coat, and re-donned the helmet. The fireworks above the glass village ceased. She was really leaving everything behind. Nothing that she brought with her were things from the pre-world. She should’ve brought the Iron Squad hulls, at least. They were her mother’s only gift to her.
Lena started the scooter and rode on. She knew when her friends were curious, happy, sad… She knew it because it was she who programmed those behaviors into their new bodies. Ana had lowered and shuddered her branches. Kevin and Beto had flickered their lights softly, almost extinguishing them.
It’s what we’re going to do. We don’t want you here.
“God…” she whispered. “They were really scared.” Just as heartbroken as her, perhaps even afraid of their destiny.
Anger had blinded her to the facts. Back at school, the Squad was made up of her friends, but they were far from perfect. Ana had always compared them, always trying to come up as the best of them; Kevin had never allowed her in his “private businesses” in treehouses; Beto had hit on her multiple times, and sometimes when she felt uncomfortable, he wouldn’t stop easily. Their uploaded minds never did or mentioned any of that past stuff. It was as if those bad things never happened. And for them, it never did. Luke’s algorithm had disenthralled them from the bad thoughts, from hostile, unhealthy behavior. Dad’s algorithm.
You don’t know how I’m feeling, she had told the Squad. But what mattered was that she knew how she was feeling. It was something that only she knew, that could never be replicated. Dad worked on his algorithm because he desired the best of both worlds. But that wasn’t how things turned out in the end. There was only one world out there, and the Squad had realized first that it belonged to them, not to her.
She accelerated the scooter, dust rising on the road.
“I don’t want to leave you,” she whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks. “But I’m not going to leave myself.”
Perhaps there was still a world where she belonged out there, at the end of the highway, a place where reality didn’t need to be edited and reprogrammed by algorithms—where Dad could exist both as a sulking, troubled man and a lovely, well-mannered farmer. Where one world didn’t have to mean the end of the other.
On the radio, Sinatra was saying he had traveled each and every castle, and much, much more than this, he did it his way. She turned it off.
© Copyright 2024 Renan Bernardo
About the Author
Renan Bernardo is an author of science fiction and fantasy. He's a 2023 Nebula Finalist, a 2023 Ignyte Nominee, a 2022 Utopian nominee, and a Locus-recommended author. He's also a SFWA member. His work has been published in English, Portuguese, German, Japanese, and Italian. You can find his stories in several publications, including Reactor (Tor.com), Apex Magazine, Podcastle, Escape Pod, Samovar, Solarpunk Magazine, Dark Matter Magazine, Translunar Travelers Lounge, and Daily Science Fiction. His collection of Solarpunk/Climate Fiction stories, DIFFERENT KINDS OF DEFIANCE, was published in 2024 by Android Press.