Mar

By the time I was seventeen, I'd seen approximately five dead bodies. Nothing ever quite prepared me for the shock of the experience. Sometimes the bodies were floppy and other times unthinkably stiff. And the smell. I always thought I knew the dismally sweet smell and somehow it continued to be a surprise each time we came into contact. Rotten things were different; rotten celery doesn't smell the same as a human corpse. Animals had a very distinct smell of decomposing. It was not just degradation of flesh but decay of breath, of vitality and life. The thing that set us apart from rocks and metal which never broke down in the same manner we did.

I found the dead raccoon in the back of the car, stiff and smelly. Its abdomen was bloated and his limbs were obscurely rigid. Even the whipping winds couldn't carry away the scent fast enough. While I rolled down the ancient windows and prepared to deal with the disposal of the body, I reflected on those five bodies. Only two of them had names to me.

The first was when I was very young, still at the orphanage. I didn't really remember much from the time before Hatsui bought me, but I remembered the child. Its body was blue and stagnant in the trashcan in the alley behind the orphanage. It was my chore to take out the garbage, which was when I discovered the small boy. His limp arms wrapped around himself and he just starting to smell sweet with decay. I had nightmares about dead boys in trash cans for weeks.

The second body was an old man that used to be a mechanic with us, decades older than Magda. I had only known him for a few weeks before I saw him as a dead body. He laid in his bunk motionless and pale. He died in his sleep, Magda would later tell me. His death led to Karl's acquisition. We were easily replaced.

The third was a racer. It was at Dead World's opening ceremonies. Usually it had a fairly tame beginning, an all cement path concerned with speed and getting away from the other racers. The third body flipped his car within the first mile and managed to crawl out of the burning frame. Flames swallowed his back and head. He screamed as he burned and I watched helplessly, just as helpless as the other mechanics. His screams cut themselves into my memory. The image of his blackened body on the cement, choking on flames as his life left him was unforgettable. What was it about death that makes such a lasting etch in human memory?

Wind roared against the thin metal of the car, singing through the gears and twists of wires. Even with the darkness of nightfall, the wind was poisoned with the unfortunate lingering heat from the day. The car had become a sweltering oven. I remained patient in my perch, my body spread against the smelly interior carpet of the faded red SUV. Bony fingers tinkered away with wires under the dash. An unfortunate amount of sweat collected under my eyes and on my lip. I kept wiping it away with the ratty scarf used to keep my face hidden, smearing a bit of motor oil and dust on my skin each time. The sweat made things difficult. I missed the bitterness of a desert winter, where things were frigid but dry.

My eyes flicked over to the tiny dashboard clock and saw it illuminated five minutes past midnight. I sighed.

The push to keep working smoldered in my bones, but the lights were starting to buzz and my eyes became sticky with exhaustion. The looming presence of an early wake up call also pressed against me. Just one more hour and then I'd go to bed, I promised myself. The time to work on a vehicle I had pored years into fixing up was precious, so I could push through the exhaustion.

A few minutes after my resolve to keep working, I heard a noise over the whipping wind. I stopped my movement, closed my eyes and focused on the sounds around me. Past the wind I could hear the rhythmic flapping sound of small blades. A security drone.

I had two options:

1. Stay perfectly still and pray that the drone didn't have a heat signature feature.

2. Make a run for it and hope to beat the machine.

Hastily, I threw my tools into my small pack and tucked it under my clothes, pressing it against the skin of my stomach. I pulled the hood of my windbreaker tight against my throat and wound my scarf around my whole head, save for my eyes.

I checked the skies for the drone, finding the culprit on the other side of the junkyard nosing around a pile of scrap metal. There was a family of raccoons that lived just next to the pile, meaning the drone must be equipped with heat-seeking technology if it was trying to pursue them.

Great.

I slipped out the busted window and onto the sandy dirt. My bare feet made only soft thuds as I weaved through the cars in the junkyard. It was a practiced dance, where to put my foot, how to press my toes into the dirt just right to propel myself over hoods and under twisted metal. I looked over my shoulder to see the surveillance drone lazily analyzing the junkyard, it's singular eye shooting out a menacing beam of light over everything that moved. What a jumpy piece of junk, I thought.

I came to the fence that separated Hatsui's junkyard from his dilapidated work race track. I removed the pack from my waist and threw it over the fence. I flattened my body against the ground and moved in fragmented shimmies under the metal, careful not to scrape my back against the sharp spindles of jagged wire. As soon as I was clear, I placed the pack back under my clothes and took off in a full sprint across the cracked asphalt.

Every few strides, I'd look back to track the drone. But once I made it the yellowed grass in the middle of the track, the drone was gone. I stopped sprinting immediately and crumbled to the ground defensively. I paused, listening. The identifying flap of its propeller blades sounded on the east side of the track, just to my right. It moved quicker now, the bright beam from its eye flashing in rapid movements across the asphalt. It made a path right toward me.

I ran. I pushed my body off the ground and bolted left toward the west side of the track, making an arc back to the windows of the workshop. I hoisted my body up the cement wall, my fingers digging into the ledge of the window and pulling my body through as the drone continued whizzed by the window aggressively. I pulled my feet through hastily and closed the window behind me. I stood on my workbench, my heart hammering in my chest, lungs hungrily pulling air in. Though I was safe, adrenaline still coursed through me, making my stomach tight with worry. A close call, but neither the first nor last.

I slumped down to my knees and crawled off the table.

I looked around to the sleeping bodies on the bunks, undisturbed by my quick entrance. Alfred was hard of hearing. It would take a herd of elephants mixed with a marching band to wake him. Similarly, as Magda crept deeper into her 70's, she had a harder time hearing things as well. As for Karl who was a measly three years younger than me, he was just a deep sleeper. A couple years ago, I had fallen through the window and flipped my workbench, screwdrivers and wrenches went flying, yet Karl slept through it all. I broke three fingers in the incident and woke Magda, who stared with startled eyes from her bunk.

"I thought we were being robbed," she joked when she saw me on the ground. When I didn't respond with a joke of my own, she rose from her bed and helped tape up my fingers.

This time, I carefully climbed off my workbench and tiptoed across the workshop to hang up my windbreaker on a hook fashioned from gears. I placed the scarf on top of the jacket and headed to bed. The bunks were constructed from old shelving units, put together by craftiness and sheer desperation in an attempt for some semblance of sleeping comfort. My bunk was under Karl's and next to Magda, who slept peacefully curled into herself under heaps of quilts despite the heat. Above her, Alfred snored lightly, his shoulders vibrating the thin blanket with every noisy inhale. The room was heavy with sleep and heat.

I settled into bed, pulling a thin cotton sheet over myself. My mattress was lumpy beneath me as I tried to find a comfortable position. Finally, I settled and listened to Karl's even breathing. His limbs were strewn across the bed and his hand hung over the edge, dangling near me. I envied his ease of sleeping.

Per usual, no one had awoken to greet my middle-of-the-night-reentry to ask where I'd been. They were all aware of my project in the junkyard, of the progress I had made on it, but neither Alfred nor Magda made any effort to encourage or discourage me. The vehicle was more than a hobby, it was a life preserver in the sinking ship of this city.

As I tried to fall asleep, I lingered on a story. During one of our schooling lessons, Magda recounted the history I always wanted to know more of: the history of before. She started the story with war.

"Most human stories begin with war and this one is no exception." She said, clucking her tongue and shaking her head. We were both on our backs under a car, her hands grease-covered as she tinkered with the muffler. I held it in place for so long my arms were past the point of numb, they were dead and only my locked elbows provided any support.

"It's a constant of humanity, violence is. It seems to be in our DNA, a remnant of our monkey brains most likely. It's what led us to where we are, to the war that destroyed nearly half the population," Magda said in her knowing voice. I absorbed her words like gospel. "I think that's when we started to change, when we realized what we had done not just to ourselves but our planet, to entire droves of extinct species. And when the war ended, no one really sure what it was ever about. Oil maybe? Perhaps a rigged election? It didn't really matter, in the end. What mattered was the missing population and with it came an opportunity."

"The androids were meant to fill spaces. They originally got their start in the army as human shields since they were programmed with a single unbreakable rule when it came to their ability to harm humans. All androids were explicitly restricted from bringing any direct harm to human beings. But, they found ways around those rules." Magda said. I always wanted to ask her about those exceptions, but it wasn't really the point of the story. Details seldom are.

"After the war, instead of decommissioning these machines, they reinvented them to account for the missing population. Suddenly, husbands and wives were returning from the dead in the form of these synthetic beings. They took positions in the workforce and picked up the slack left from an obliterated group."

Magda was just a kid when the androids had started to assimilate into human populations and she was an adult when they took over entirely.

"It was to be expected, I think, that it ended like this," she said, her posture was firm, her tone decided. These days, many of the other humans I encountered at the market and elsewhere in the city were either angry or terrified. But Magda was neither, she was almost understanding. "How ignorant we were, the way we expected them to provide for us without any reward, without basic decencies. We made them fill humiliating roles: sexual companions, customer service, even children. We put them into vulnerable positions and expected them to follow orders blindly. They anticipated resistance, humans are very familiar with rebellion. But nobody expected sentience."

"We doomed ourselves," she said with finality, ending the story. I had no questions because the story wasn't one that could be changed or remedied. Eventually the muffler was fixed and the story of before was over as Magda found herself bristled with unnecessary anger and desired to change the topic to something more cheery: reciting poetry.

I fell asleep with Magda's final words on my lips, trying them out. They fit, but they didn't still feel like a real end.