A Boy and His Droid

[CN: apocalypse, starvation, mentions of violence and cannibalism]

Recently my friend Michael Nam posted this drawing he’d made in Other Worlds: A SF/F Community, a group we’re both in, as a writing prompt. After just a brief look at it, a story wrote itself in my head. Here it is.

A drawing of a boy with a large gorilla-shaped robot.

I was alone, completely alone, in the wasteland. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a human being, but it must’ve been months ago. In the few years since the world fell apart, I had only met a few other people. Most had either tried to kill me for my body and my food, or they had been too weak and close to death to attempt it.

I didn’t have to fight them, though. Atlas, my droid bodyguard, took care of that for me. Atlas was built like the gorillas I had seen in my school texts–big, powerful animals that had lived long ago. He usually walked on his arms and legs, but could raise himself up to swing his massive arms at anyone who tried to hurt me or take my things. Yet his gaze, when he turned it towards me, was gentle and kind. His peaceful presence protected my spirit just as his strength and willingness to use it protected my body.

Before, anyone who could afford it had had a bodyguard like mine. It was the only way to stay alive and whole as our society had teetered, jerking and thrashing, towards its inevitable collapse.

Even though our homes were sealed and protected, hackers always found ways through our security systems. Children were kidnapped and ransomed, adults were more often robbed and killed outright. The smarter hackers figured out how to disable people’s bodyguards. The ones who weren’t so smart tried to fight and destroy them.

Sometimes, though, they succeeded. Desperation is what leads a frail, starving person to attack a 700-pound mass of steel programmed to defend its charge. It can also be what leads them to win.

I wasn’t much interested in other people back then. When I wasn’t attending my virtual classes or doing my homework, I was usually immersed in some game or novel on my headset. In those games I was always a loner, too, exploring a nuclear desert or fighting aliens on a spaceship with no crew. As bad as the world outside of virtual reality got, I never thought it would become so much like my games.

Besides reading and gaming, I spent a lot of time back then tinkering with Atlas. That’s probably what saved my life more than anything. I learned his code, made him smarter and more perceptive. I tried to teach him to think more like a human and less like a machine, to make choices that made rational sense rather than logical sense. I also gave him solar panels, which is how he gets his power now. That’s why he’s the only droid bodyguard left. The rest ran out of juice long ago. He scavenges their parts, now.

Most other children in our community didn’t care much about their bodyguards. They treated the droids as objects that were just there, like any other security system, like a locked door or a set of armor. I don’t think any of them ever learned how to program them. They all called the droids “it,” never gave them names.

The children in my virtual classes ridiculed me constantly for referring to Atlas as “they” rather than “it.” I didn’t understand what was so funny. “They” was the standard pronoun we used for someone who hadn’t told us their gender, and Atlas hadn’t told me his yet. So how else would I refer to him?

Later, one day not long after the collapse, I asked Atlas if he had preferred pronouns. It was evening. Like many evenings, we were spending it sitting quietly in the remains of a building we’d found, trying to conserve our limited and precious energy. Despite the darkness, it was warm. I didn’t know what season it was supposed to be, but it’s always warm now. Atlas and I sat face to face, me with legs crossed and him with legs folded underneath him so he could leap to his feet and defend us at a moment’s notice.

I said, “Do you have pronouns that you like to use for yourself?”

“I have never really thought about that,” he said in the calm, gentle voice he uses when addressing me.

“But aren’t you thinking about it now?”

“Yes, I am now.”

I paused, even though I know that he thinks faster than any human being and had probably finished thinking about it before I’d even asked the second question.

“I will use the pronoun he,” he said after a moment.

And so he became he, to me.

Before the collapse he was a benevolent protector that I valued; after the collapse he became a companion. Once I no longer had the option of talking to other people, I started to want to, desperately. I spoke to Atlas for hours on end about the books I’d read, about the classmates I’d envied, about my parents that I’d respected and feared but never really loved, and now missed wretchedly.

Atlas rarely responded, but he listened. He always looked at me when I spoke to him, his bright blue eyes deeper and more soulful than a piece of machinery should ever be. Although I knew his code well, I understood then that knowing how words translate from one language into another isn’t the same as truly knowing that other language. I couldn’t know what was actually going on inside his processor, what his experience was like, how he felt. I felt silly for even thinking of it in those terms, but I had little else to think about besides my own survival. It took my mind off of things.

The most fundamental piece of a droid bodyguard’s programming is that they will protect their charge and their charge’s belongings. A droid bodyguard will seek to protect the person they’ve been assigned to while causing minimal harm to others, but they will injure, maim, and kill when necessary. A droid bodyguard treats their charge’s belongings as an extension of their charge’s body; they would no more allow someone to take their charge’s belongings than they would allow them to amputate and steal a part of their charge’s body.

If that sounds like an odd analogy, believe me, these things have happened.

They were programmed that way because, as food and water became scarce, defending what belonged to you became equivalent to defending your own life. It’s even more true now than it was before the collapse. If Atlas allowed someone to steal even part of my food, that could make the difference between surviving long enough to find more food, or not.

That’s the part of his programming I’ve never been able to alter, not that I would want to. Humans are not like droids that way. I have seen humans abandon all of their beliefs, all of their most sacred values, when the situation called for it.

Atlas and I spent most of our time walking or resting. There was no sense in staying in the same place once we’d found all the preserved food we were going to find. Sometimes we hunted and killed whatever small rodents managed to survive on whatever limp grass still grew.

I knew that some survivors had scavenged human bodies. I had not done that, not yet. Not because I was disgusted at the thought; I’ve been hungry enough that my disgust had dried up like the last stuttering streams and rivers. I was afraid of the possibility of dying in agony of whatever had killed them.

But with the passing years we were finding less and less food. There wasn’t much to begin with, and what was still left after the collapse had probably been found and consumed by people who were long dead of the diseases and poisons–natural and humanmade–that had consumed them in turn.

I held on, though, and Atlas was still able to get some sunlight despite the smogs. It was always a tradeoff: save energy but go hungry, or spend energy and risk wasting it on a fruitless search.

Despite everything, I kept tinkering with Atlas. It helped me feel like I could still leave my mark on this broken world. Atlas would endure far longer than I would. He didn’t need food, he was immune to sickness, and he could repair himself most of the time. Maybe one day there would be people again, and maybe Atlas would be alive to teach them about us and our mistakes.

Would he miss me?

Over time, Atlas started to speak more, sometimes without my prompting. He often pointed out what he saw as beauty in the world: a surviving dragonfly, a jagged cliff, a pink and purple sunset. Before I had treated the landscape around me as my enemy, as something that I had to defeat anew each day in order to survive. Atlas taught me to see it differently.

He started to tell me stories, too–stories of his time in the factory before he came to me, stories of other droids he had known. I wondered how much of these stories and the emotions in them was something he invented for my benefit; I’d put the code in him, after all. Or maybe he had always held these thoughts, but had been unable to speak them until I gave him the language to do it. I couldn’t know.

But the day I truly knew he had changed into something different was the day we found the person.

It was hot, so hot, although that barely registered anymore. That day there were almost no smogs, and the sun beat down on us as we crossed a wide expanse of dry, dusty earth with the faltering hopes that we’d find something on the other side. We were almost out of food. I hadn’t eaten in three days.

The only reason I believed I might live was because we had found a small pond the day before, and gathered water in plastic bags that we sealed and carried with us now. With water, we might yet make it.

Then I saw something dark a few hundred feet before us. I might have written it off as a log, had there been any trees anywhere near. There weren’t.

I walked faster, Atlas matching my pace with little effort. For me it was excruciating, but I had to see.

As I approached, the shape resolved itself into a small person, no bigger than me, lying on their side on the cracked earth. They were probably about my age, 12 or 13, with dark skin. Their short hair and tattered clothing were dark, too, though the clothes had clearly once been another color. They lay still, but I could see them breathing slowly.

For so long I had dreamed of seeing another person, but now I felt rooted to the ground like a dead tree, unsure of what to do. Should I wake them? Were they sick? Could I help? Would they attack?

I wasn’t sure I could bear the sight of Atlas killing yet another person.

But then Atlas did something I will never forget, not for as long as I live–short as that may be. He reached into my backpack and took out a can of chicken noodle soup, one of our last. He peeled the top off of the can. He slowly extended the can to the crumpled form in front of us, nudging the person gently with the can.

The person on the ground shifted and groaned. They raised themselves up on their arms and looked up. Finally noticing the can, they moved with a speed I hadn’t known they had, snatching the can from Atlas and drinking the soup until it was gone.

I glanced at Atlas. He looked back at me, blue eyes searching, questioning. Did I do the right thing? he seemed to be asking, although he did not speak. How had he done it? How had he taken from me to give to another?

The person on the ground was sitting with the empty can, staring at the two of us. They slowly brought themselves to their feet and closed the small distance between us. They took my hands in theirs and looked down on them as if to reassure themselves that my hands are real, that I am real.

They finally spoke: “I can’t believe I found you. I’ve been looking for you for so long.”

I understood what they meant. I felt such a warmth, then; such relief, such love. I withdrew my hands from the person’s grasp to throw them around their neck in embrace. They wrapped their arms around my waist and we held each other.

How long we stood that way, I could not tell you. But the sun started to fade and fall, and we needed to find shelter from the windstorms that would come. And so we set off together, Atlas’ lumbering form shielding us from the back. I felt a hope that I knew could not be fully rational, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t alone anymore. I had found people.

Two of them.

A Boy and His Droid
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The City, She Loves Me

No New Year’s Eve post this year, because this time I’m too busy to write one until tomorrow. Instead, have a story–the only piece of fiction I’ve written for more years than I’ve kept track of. 

When my partner first started to disappear, it was just a little bit at a time. I barely noticed, at first.

I visited her in New York for the first time that spring. I’d been to the city before, as a child—saw a family-friendly Broadway show, took a cruise around the island, went to the Statue of Liberty, ate a lot of pizza. I remember my little brother hated it and couldn’t stop crying at the noise, the people, at everything. Even the pigeons terrified him. But I neither loved it nor hated it; it was a place like any other.

When I came to visit her it was different. She showed me the city like I’d never seen it before. It was late April and everything was blooming, and I never knew a city could have so many flowers. They lit up the trees that split the avenues in half. They spilled out of window boxes and pots hanging from the lamp posts. They popped up in the strangest of places, like the sunflowers growing in abandoned lots in Brooklyn, where we went to visit her friends. They peered out at me from behind rusty chain-link fences, little suns adrift in the city.

That week was the first time it happened, only I didn’t know it was happening. We were in Washington Square Park, looking at the Arch and the flowers and the performers. It was a Wednesday afternoon, too late for the lunch rush. We were watching a dance troupe perform near the fountain, and I was holding her hand.

Suddenly I felt her let go. When I looked over she was gone. Just gone. A little crowd had gathered to watch the dancers, but there weren’t so many people that I could just lose her like that. I spun around in circles trying to find her, unsure whether or not to trust my own perception. But not ten seconds later I felt her hand in mine again. I turned around and there she was.

Startled, I said, too loudly, “Where were you?”

She just looked at me, gold flecks dancing in her green eyes, and said, “Exploring!”

And her mouth curled into that mischievous smile I loved, and I thought I must’ve been imagining things.

~~~

Unlike me, she had always loved the city, from her first trip there at one year old. Her parents went almost yearly to visit relatives, of whom she must’ve had dozens in the city. By the time we met in Chicago, both recent college grads, she already knew she was going to move. It was only a matter of time.

The first job she was able to find in New York, she took. It wasn’t the best of jobs, as we both knew. She’d be reporting on local news—crime, subway disasters, things like that—rather than the more serious political stuff she wanted to cover. But everyone has to start somewhere, I suppose.

At the time we were living in Lakeview. Too far from the lake to actually view it, but close enough to walk to the beach in the summers. We’d been together for about three years. Since I always knew she was going to escape to New York at the earliest opportunity, it was neither a surprise nor a disappointment when  I came home from work one day to find her beaming, phone still in her hand, telling me she got the job. I was a little sad for me, but very, very happy for her.

Besides, my job paid well and would only pay better and better, so I knew I’d be able to go see her a lot. In those weeks as she scrambled to find a spare room at one of her numerous relatives’ apartments, to decide what to take and what to leave, to say her goodbyes to her family and all the friends she’d made in Chicago, we talked a lot about how it would be. How we would be.

My friends were less optimistic than I was. “Look, I hate to tell you, but she’ll find someone else,” they would say. In fact, that possibility didn’t worry me too much. Although it’d been years since either of us dated anyone else, I figured she might meet someone, someone she could see anytime she wanted. Sure, maybe it wasn’t the most pleasant thought, but I knew that she loved me and felt confident that we would make it through whatever came next.

They said other things, too. “Watch out,” a friend joked to her at her going-away party. “That city will consume you if you’re not careful.”

I had always thought that was just a figure of speech.

Continue reading “The City, She Loves Me”

The City, She Loves Me

Depression Personified

This is a work of fiction. Trigger warning for depression and abuse.

And again.

Everything starts to swirl in my mind again, tears pool in my eyes. Everything about me is shit–my writing, my activism, my appearance, my personality. I cry everywhere–in the office, in the bathroom, on the train, in bed.

Just yesterday I had been able to see clearly. Now that haze is back and everything turns to grey because of it.

He has me by the wrist now, his long nails digging into my skin and leaving red half-moons, just like I used to do.

He jerks my hand towards him, makes me caress his face with it. His eyes seem as black as his hair in that moment. They pop against the smooth porcelain of his skin, cold under my unwilling fingers.

His thin lips twist into an ironic smile.

“You thought we were done,” he says in a low, throaty voice.

I don’t deny it.

“You told all your friends how happy you were to be through with me.”

Can’t deny that either.

He grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me in, putting both hands on my face and tilting it towards his. If you ignore my facial expression it would probably look romantic. But don’t be fooled.

When I’m with him I feel as black as his eyes. I see myself reflected in them. Looking into them is like looking into a cave or an abyss–you don’t know where they end.

I could probably wriggle out of his grip if I tried hard enough. He’s not even holding me that tightly. But I can’t find the will, and he knows.

His eyes narrow and I know he’s not done.

“Here’s the thing.”

I let out a sigh and try to look away, but he’s still holding my face in his hands, stronger than I thought.

“I decide when we’re through. Not you. Because I own you.”

I can never quite believe that someone so beautiful could be so cruel.

“I can come back for you whenever I want. I’ve been choosing not to because I thought you needed a little break. So let this be your reminder.”

He runs one hand through my hair, gathering it up into his fist. He tugs on it, not enough to hurt, but enough to keep me still. We stare each other down–him with his calmly brutal black eyes, me with my terrified, wet hazel ones.

Then suddenly he pulls me into an embrace that feels almost real, if not for its coldness. I’m taken aback. It’s one of the only times he’s shown me anything resembling care. Or love.

I keep shivering long after he’s gone, but gradually the fire relights in my heart.

Some people have real problems.

Depression Personified