fic: at last a human eye saw through it (original)
at last a human eye saw through it
original; Mirror & Ro.
3500 words.
For Book #30: sci-fi at imaginarybeasts.
Now Mirror moves out of his inelegant flesh as easily as another unit of humanity would climb out of bed and shower and dry and dress and eat and change into a different outfit and leave the apartment and lock the door and walk down the street until the street is gone and the city is gone and the familiar is far away. If he forgets to manage his breathing, there is no apparatus nearby to put the breath back into him. It's not safe. True, the dogs that Ro bred for him have been trained to alert her if he is about to die struggling in his sleep, but will they care if he goes peacefully? He is, after all, at peace.
Mirror is walking in a forest. He feels the dimness and the damp air touch him, smooth like the new, alien skin beneath a scab. He feels younger, smaller, strange. Trees are looming. This is someone else's domain, an elemental giant's castle left open to servants and only the most clever vermin. The naturalness of it is beautiful and worse: it's bottomless, lurching, alive. Great forces are at work, invisible and unhailed. There are no animals willing to reveal themselves, but the forest itself hisses and stalks around him on a thousand stiff legs. As the light recedes he catches himself walking faster. He wants to run. He doesn't. He can't.
Soon, darkness. If there is a moon, he never sees it, only feels the weight of its orbit pulling him to the ocean. Mirror stops to rest, puts his hand on the rough trunk of a tree. Feels, somewhere under his palm, a long muscle flicker. Rather than recoiling, he freezes. The forest air has turned cold and hard against him, it must be worn like a coat of heavy, drying wax. At the end of a quiet corridor between the trees, he hears the crying of hungry dogs at night and also the beehive drone of his rebreather coming online. Unmistakable, he thinks as the howls and the first sigh expand around him. There are no other sounds like these in the world.
"Where did you go?" Ro asks him. She is looking with consternation at the controls on the dock for his rebreather. Though nobody taught her to use any of his medical apparatus she is the only one who seems able to operate any of it, especially when its operation really matters. She's good with machines, so much that it bothers the people who should know better through training and experience. They, of course, aren't usually aware that she is an android; and she is fully aware that they aren't aware, that they would never guess. It amuses her to see doctors and technicians so distraught simply because they think she is a little better at engaging with a particular machine or bit of code, ignorant to the fact that she wrote a jailbreak on herself years ago and can acquire skills in any field she pleases, can do whatever she wants, can go anywhere at all. She does try to have restraint, but she loves to tease people who work clumsily with technology. Though he is reliant on it rather than adept with that sort of thing, Mirror is the only one she confides in with any real seriousness. Understanding a machine doesn't have much to do with using it, she'll tell him; in order to use an interface, you need to understand the person who designed it.
So I pretend I'm a fucking idiot and suddenly it all becomes clear: the system is irreversibly flawed and the shut down command is in the start menu. Why doesn't anybody think, Meer? Why.
She'd been tinkering with the remote for Mirror's pacemaker when she said that. A minute later she'd realized that she might have unnerved him and she spent the next half-hour promising vehemently that she wasn't shutting anything down. Mirror didn't say so, but he wouldn't have minded if she did, even accidentally. He is curious to know what might happen. How his heart - so often talked about, never itself speaking - would react.
He breathes thoughtfully. Lying around him on the bed, Ro's three dogs watch the constriction and expansion of his chest with interest.
"I went for a walk," he tells them.
Ro has the presence of mind to stop what she's doing briefly, to look right at him.
"In the forest," he adds absently.
His hand is upturned near her. When he was younger, she always used to take his hand as he was recovering from an attack, holding on as if he would drift and she would ground him. Now she hardly seems to notice the appeal. Now, in fact, he hardly knows why he makes it. In spite of circumstance, he is strong. Eventually the dog with white ears puts its muzzle in Mirror's open palm, averting a moment of awkwardness and bruised feelings.
"That sounds kind of nice," Ro ventures. "Boreal or temperate?" Already her eyes flickering back to the dock; she hasn't actually leaned away or taken her hands from the panel. "Or tropical?"
"Which one's cold?"
She does lean back then. Hands in her lap. She looks at him without pity, because she knows what he thinks of pity in general. "Boreal can be pretty cold, I think. Check online."
He blinks briefly through an image search but finds nothing that compares to the shivering wooded stock in his memory. "The trees were huge. Some of them were following me. I heard the dogs, but not any birds. You weren't there." Not an accusation; still, he feels odd for saying it and goes quiet.
"Well, the dogs found you and then they came and found me. And this fucking thing needs to stop hibernating. Do you feel any different? Sick? Disoriented? I mean, I did change a few things, I'm trying to make your sleep a little smoother, but I don't see why it should compromise your breathing. Turn on your side."
He shuffles the dog's muzzle affectionately before he turns to give Ro his back. Slipping her fingers between his skin and the rebreather's elastic straps, she checks the tension diligently, though she'd already done it a few hours ago, just before he'd been settled for the night. She checks the back. Under the arms. Across the chest. Around the throat. Over the chin. If the tension is wrong, the pressure will be wrong. It could pop his lungs or crush them flat.
"Really," she hisses. Lays him on his back again. "This has got to stop."
It's as if she hardly knows what she says, but he agrees. In fact, he couldn't have said it better himself.
Too many nights pass without visions of travel. If he dreams of walking, he only wakes up on the floor with Ro crouching beside him, gathering up the weight of his body in both of her arms; and Mirror, angry, hears himself saying: no no no it's fine I weigh too much I'm sorry.
Lifting him doesn't seem to take very much effort. For an instant he is a child again. Was he a child once? He feels small as Ro puts him back on the bed and checks each wire and each thin tube for damage and then sits on the bed, sits next to him, watching, gauging something in or near him. Her eyes are an odd milky colour between blue and grey. The dogs, gathered against her legs, regard him with three pairs of bronze eyes in three bodies sharing one soul; their minds divided, their intentions one and the same.
This is the worst thing that has ever happened:
He wakes up and someone is saying, please just harvest me please please, and that's bad enough. Then he recognizes the voice and of course it's his own.
He thinks it was real. Not a dream. The distinction is important to him; he feels it would be better to say it in one place rather the other, more noble; he is sure of this. The cavities in his chest are too small for his lungs. His bones are melting. His heart is a dwindling mass and it would be better in one place or the other, he is sure; but he is not sure how.
It's too dark in his room. The window opens but the screens don't; they net most of the light as well as airborne pollutants or insects or whatever it is he must try not to inhale. He can hear traffic. It sounds melancholy, like people going away. He envisions a hospital at night, pinned up with rows of lit windows, and he wonders why. It's morning. The air smells good. Why think of night?
He debates asking Ro to unharness him so that he can move around the apartment but decides against it when she comes in with cookbooks and says she wants to bake, he should pick something that looks good. Books are important to both of them. The weight of a bound object, the texture of its pages. He likes to feel that information is something he can literally hold. More and more often, Mirror finds himself blocked from high-volume public websites and sometimes even the private archives to which he is subscribed; he receives a temporary rejection message and then is immediately and unceremoniously disconnected.
It's because they know what he is. After all, his connection key must be flagged by every corporate provider in the world. If he has a seizure or a stroke, his browsing history will be reviewed and the open paths investigated. Blocking him is the best way to avoid liability, he supposes. He continues to pay his connection fees because donors' benefit accounts are bottomless and the modem hum soothes the ache in his teeth, but books have become the more reliable way to learn and escape.
Admittedly, he cheats for a moment here; sneaks online and is overwhelmingly grateful when he is permitted to search 'easy baking' without any difficulty. They spend a while flipping through a recipe book before he pretends to settle on cinnamon raisin cookies. He will not eat any of them. It's possible for his body to digest all the ingredients, but he doesn't like to eat. Never did. Still, the smell of warming batter is satisfying and Ro smiles as she mixes and portions and keeps time. It's the smile that sustains him. He accepts the IV and, in a supply crisis, the feeding tube because they are the traditional solutions to the problem of starvation. Tradition has its place. He just feels that generally, in nature, lame animals starve.
What about the days when he is well enough to get out of bed?
Ro will unhook him from the machines if he asks her, though she always checks the docks first to be sure that they agree with Mirror's estimation of his own strength. With her long fingers, she is quick to free him; her hands are a spider strumming music from its web. He will sit up and that will be easy. Then Ro will ask him what he wants to do and he isn't sure what to tell her. He will not be able to do what he wants; his body is already shaking, protesting, desperate, and he must think of what to say. Not everything gets easier with time. Often, they'll move into the kitchen and he will sit gazing at the glass wall that faces west over the city. They will talk, as they would have done anyway, and it's enough because it's the best they can do.
The snow lies doleful and quiet at Mirror's feet, a smooth hunter fallen tame at the threat of cloudbreak. The sky and the scattered scrub and the lumbering suggestion of mountains are all frozen together. If there had been a storm, it's long over; the collected drifts look compressed, squeezing their weight into water that will thaw in time and creep blamelessly away. Mirror takes a handful of snow from the ground. Tries to press it into ice, but it moves like sand and will not bind. When he tosses it aside, the shape bursts to powder in the wind.
Before him is a field reaching wide and blank. Behind him the wind is fearless, it steals breath from between his teeth and touches the back of his head, rushes in his ears. But he is not cold. He feels wrapped up, safe from the sapping weight of winter, hidden in the fur and muscle of a mountain bear. No animal would dare to wander as he does, turning toward pale, flat tundra scuffed grey where the snow folds back. They all seek out shelter, among vegetation or underground. They all fear death, but he knows that isn't their fault: all creatures who were born know how difficult it will be to return to that first darkness.
Though very little seems to change as he walks, he enjoys walking all the same. Endless travel, taking him nowhere. He knows that feeling. Snow begins to fall again and it is beautiful and then it is troublesome. He might be leaning into a circle. There might be shapes moving within it, low to the ground and quick as pain, though they do nothing to harm him. Mirror thinks of the tracks he has seen pressed into the frozen earth; elk and fox and ponderous cat. It could be any of them. It could be one of each, following him into a storm or leading him out of it; what's the difference, he thinks as his hands are taken in very gentle mouths and he goes with a small pack of wolves into whiteness. Later, trying to say where they went, he will not be able to remember the white ears, the den carved into a deep drift, the curl of wolfhide against his sides and, outside, the night.
"I've never been to these places before."
"You've researched them," Ro offers noncommittally.
"Research is reading and imagining. This is like touching and smelling and knowing. I feel like I know where I am."
"Ancestral memory," she says. Not looking at him. Absorbed in correcting the angle of a tube taped down in front of his nostril.
Suddenly he's angry. "Whose ancestors? What generation am I to them?"
"Don't start." Belatedly, it occurs to him that Ro always answers anger with a colder, altogether more frightening vehemence. Reptilian intelligence playacting its understanding of an emotion. She catches him with a bright, empty eye. Holds him still, like small prey. "Look at the needle in your hand. Is that your father? Does the rebreather love you? You're blood and meat. I can't stand it when you act like you're not a living thing because only a living thing could be so stupid."
"They don't love me. No." The insult itself doesn't hurt him, but somehow he still hurts.
She knows it; she sighs. "Never mind. I just mean that you like to live. I see it all the time. You like it more than anyone else I've ever met." To allow him some dignity, she stops feeding plastic down his nose. "And it's, well, it's fucking hard to explain but that's really special. Donors have every right to hate being alive, but you like it." Wonder shows on her face, erasing the terrible blankness of a moment before; Mirror wonders briefly if this too is calculated. "I wish I could give you a better life to like."
Hearing this from her is always charming and perverse. She would if she could, but instead she will exist undying and invulnerable while he melts slowly away, his one dreadful purpose circumvented years and years ago.
Mirror smiles. Looks around for the dogs and calls them up onto his bed; they come, they curl around him with a sort of pleasant professionalism. White ears licks Mirror's chin, which makes Ro raise her lips theatrically; Mirror taught her to do it fairly recently. He says to her: "You've got to remember you don't owe me anything."
Ro has put one hand on the dock. She seems not to notice until Mirror looks at it, and then she quickly reaches over and holds onto one of curled tail's paws instead. It looks right at her as if unimpressed. Its eyes are like the core of a forest fire.
A lot of time has passed in silence so she only replies, "I know," and lets it go.
"It says: donors are given the means to live as well as they can. Submitting them for donation is, at this point, unnecessary and inhumane." Because Ro is looking at him like he should continue, Mirror adds, "That's about it."
First, Ro makes a face at him. Then her eyes abruptly lose focus and flash across a thousand lines of text, gutting an archive for the full catalogue of its contents in seconds. She scowls at nothing and passes him a link. "Is this what you were reading?" When he nods, she announces: "Is, at this point, unnecessary and inhumane. Dead growth organs became the preferred commodity four years after the last row of donors was incubated. Approximately ten percent of the total population of donors was successfully harvested. Approximately fifty percent of all organs provided by harvest were rejected by their recipients within three months. Approximately seventy percent of the total population of donors was culled in response to defects caused by growth hormones, defects caused by anaesthesia, defects caused by compromised supplements, and defects caused by unknown or undisclosed factors. Donors from the final incubated rows were permitted to gain consciousness following an official ban on donor incubation. Surviving donors were granted full citizenship by law. Surviving donors should be monitored for suicidal and homicidal tendencies." She stopped there, refocused on his face, waited.
"Can you edit that?" Mirror asks thoughtfully.
"No." She blinks at something. "But yeah, what am I changing?"
"Add fungicidal."
Ro laughs, suddenly and loudly enough that the dogs twitch and rise to rearrange themselves in a different weave of long legs. "Ew. Okay, done. Should I change the permissions so you can see it?"
"I don't want to see it," Mirror says, but he smiles at her laughter. "I want to go for a walk."
Ro looks unconvinced. "I'm not sure that's a good idea. Are you up for it?"
"Of course," he breathes; too long, the long sigh. There's a rattle in the tail, like a serpent of the sands. He has never been to the desert, unless he counts the time that he dreamed of it in detail, the hot wind and frigid night, the dunes like a dry sea. He had understood that the sight of water was mirage, but it only made him think: against the ocean, this would be coast. "Let's go."
In fact, after many years of searching he finds that there is a beach where the sand runs out, hidden in the cleft between coastal cliffs; it slips into the water and meets an abbreviated crescent of little tumbled stones that roll underfoot like drops of sunlight. Warm shallows leap and beckon. Light is quick on the water, the wink of a thousand curious eyes reading him from beginning to end. The waves would catch him if he fell. Carry him out like a part of the current until the current was gone.
This may not be the ocean; he had expected the air to smell like brine. Perhaps that was childish of him. Mirror finds that he is smiling. Behind him, slim trees climb a small rise to watch something in the distance, leaves papery and loose in the wind. The sun is not setting and there is no sound of dogs. Mirror wants to run, so he does.
When the wrapped bundle has been tucked in just the same way that Mirror preferred, Ro sits in the empty kitchen, nostalgic. The window is buttery with light; she cannot calibrate her vision to see through it at this time of day. The room is in a long, warm haze; or she is in amber, sealed up with an old, old mouthful of blood. Across the hall, the three dogs are looking at her through an open door, lying on the floor in front of Mirror's bed. Their steady bronze eyes are like three calm voices repeating, but what are the words? Mirror might have understood. Ro cannot imagine what they want her to know, only wishes they would look away. She has the sense that they know more than they should. That they know everything. Ancestral memory.
"Everything deserves to go on its own terms," she tells them. "Eventually."
They regard her in silence, the three as one. Their genetic integrity is very good considering the number of times they have lived and very poor in the sense that they are growing so distinct. It should have been Mirror who bloomed and grew that way, who instead degraded and always accepted degradation, never knowing that - for all that he changed - he was always very much himself. Was that the prize, the true expression of freedom and a full life? Ro feels ill-equipped to decide.
The apartment door stands open. For several hours, the dogs stay with her, passionless and patient. Then they go. Where? Down the street until the street ends, she assumes. Living things inevitably find their way to the places of their calling by an unseen mechanism; they will finally go where they must. Even she cannot impede them anymore.
original; Mirror & Ro.
3500 words.
For Book #30: sci-fi at imaginarybeasts.
Now Mirror moves out of his inelegant flesh as easily as another unit of humanity would climb out of bed and shower and dry and dress and eat and change into a different outfit and leave the apartment and lock the door and walk down the street until the street is gone and the city is gone and the familiar is far away. If he forgets to manage his breathing, there is no apparatus nearby to put the breath back into him. It's not safe. True, the dogs that Ro bred for him have been trained to alert her if he is about to die struggling in his sleep, but will they care if he goes peacefully? He is, after all, at peace.
Mirror is walking in a forest. He feels the dimness and the damp air touch him, smooth like the new, alien skin beneath a scab. He feels younger, smaller, strange. Trees are looming. This is someone else's domain, an elemental giant's castle left open to servants and only the most clever vermin. The naturalness of it is beautiful and worse: it's bottomless, lurching, alive. Great forces are at work, invisible and unhailed. There are no animals willing to reveal themselves, but the forest itself hisses and stalks around him on a thousand stiff legs. As the light recedes he catches himself walking faster. He wants to run. He doesn't. He can't.
Soon, darkness. If there is a moon, he never sees it, only feels the weight of its orbit pulling him to the ocean. Mirror stops to rest, puts his hand on the rough trunk of a tree. Feels, somewhere under his palm, a long muscle flicker. Rather than recoiling, he freezes. The forest air has turned cold and hard against him, it must be worn like a coat of heavy, drying wax. At the end of a quiet corridor between the trees, he hears the crying of hungry dogs at night and also the beehive drone of his rebreather coming online. Unmistakable, he thinks as the howls and the first sigh expand around him. There are no other sounds like these in the world.
"Where did you go?" Ro asks him. She is looking with consternation at the controls on the dock for his rebreather. Though nobody taught her to use any of his medical apparatus she is the only one who seems able to operate any of it, especially when its operation really matters. She's good with machines, so much that it bothers the people who should know better through training and experience. They, of course, aren't usually aware that she is an android; and she is fully aware that they aren't aware, that they would never guess. It amuses her to see doctors and technicians so distraught simply because they think she is a little better at engaging with a particular machine or bit of code, ignorant to the fact that she wrote a jailbreak on herself years ago and can acquire skills in any field she pleases, can do whatever she wants, can go anywhere at all. She does try to have restraint, but she loves to tease people who work clumsily with technology. Though he is reliant on it rather than adept with that sort of thing, Mirror is the only one she confides in with any real seriousness. Understanding a machine doesn't have much to do with using it, she'll tell him; in order to use an interface, you need to understand the person who designed it.
So I pretend I'm a fucking idiot and suddenly it all becomes clear: the system is irreversibly flawed and the shut down command is in the start menu. Why doesn't anybody think, Meer? Why.
She'd been tinkering with the remote for Mirror's pacemaker when she said that. A minute later she'd realized that she might have unnerved him and she spent the next half-hour promising vehemently that she wasn't shutting anything down. Mirror didn't say so, but he wouldn't have minded if she did, even accidentally. He is curious to know what might happen. How his heart - so often talked about, never itself speaking - would react.
He breathes thoughtfully. Lying around him on the bed, Ro's three dogs watch the constriction and expansion of his chest with interest.
"I went for a walk," he tells them.
Ro has the presence of mind to stop what she's doing briefly, to look right at him.
"In the forest," he adds absently.
His hand is upturned near her. When he was younger, she always used to take his hand as he was recovering from an attack, holding on as if he would drift and she would ground him. Now she hardly seems to notice the appeal. Now, in fact, he hardly knows why he makes it. In spite of circumstance, he is strong. Eventually the dog with white ears puts its muzzle in Mirror's open palm, averting a moment of awkwardness and bruised feelings.
"That sounds kind of nice," Ro ventures. "Boreal or temperate?" Already her eyes flickering back to the dock; she hasn't actually leaned away or taken her hands from the panel. "Or tropical?"
"Which one's cold?"
She does lean back then. Hands in her lap. She looks at him without pity, because she knows what he thinks of pity in general. "Boreal can be pretty cold, I think. Check online."
He blinks briefly through an image search but finds nothing that compares to the shivering wooded stock in his memory. "The trees were huge. Some of them were following me. I heard the dogs, but not any birds. You weren't there." Not an accusation; still, he feels odd for saying it and goes quiet.
"Well, the dogs found you and then they came and found me. And this fucking thing needs to stop hibernating. Do you feel any different? Sick? Disoriented? I mean, I did change a few things, I'm trying to make your sleep a little smoother, but I don't see why it should compromise your breathing. Turn on your side."
He shuffles the dog's muzzle affectionately before he turns to give Ro his back. Slipping her fingers between his skin and the rebreather's elastic straps, she checks the tension diligently, though she'd already done it a few hours ago, just before he'd been settled for the night. She checks the back. Under the arms. Across the chest. Around the throat. Over the chin. If the tension is wrong, the pressure will be wrong. It could pop his lungs or crush them flat.
"Really," she hisses. Lays him on his back again. "This has got to stop."
It's as if she hardly knows what she says, but he agrees. In fact, he couldn't have said it better himself.
Too many nights pass without visions of travel. If he dreams of walking, he only wakes up on the floor with Ro crouching beside him, gathering up the weight of his body in both of her arms; and Mirror, angry, hears himself saying: no no no it's fine I weigh too much I'm sorry.
Lifting him doesn't seem to take very much effort. For an instant he is a child again. Was he a child once? He feels small as Ro puts him back on the bed and checks each wire and each thin tube for damage and then sits on the bed, sits next to him, watching, gauging something in or near him. Her eyes are an odd milky colour between blue and grey. The dogs, gathered against her legs, regard him with three pairs of bronze eyes in three bodies sharing one soul; their minds divided, their intentions one and the same.
This is the worst thing that has ever happened:
He wakes up and someone is saying, please just harvest me please please, and that's bad enough. Then he recognizes the voice and of course it's his own.
He thinks it was real. Not a dream. The distinction is important to him; he feels it would be better to say it in one place rather the other, more noble; he is sure of this. The cavities in his chest are too small for his lungs. His bones are melting. His heart is a dwindling mass and it would be better in one place or the other, he is sure; but he is not sure how.
It's too dark in his room. The window opens but the screens don't; they net most of the light as well as airborne pollutants or insects or whatever it is he must try not to inhale. He can hear traffic. It sounds melancholy, like people going away. He envisions a hospital at night, pinned up with rows of lit windows, and he wonders why. It's morning. The air smells good. Why think of night?
He debates asking Ro to unharness him so that he can move around the apartment but decides against it when she comes in with cookbooks and says she wants to bake, he should pick something that looks good. Books are important to both of them. The weight of a bound object, the texture of its pages. He likes to feel that information is something he can literally hold. More and more often, Mirror finds himself blocked from high-volume public websites and sometimes even the private archives to which he is subscribed; he receives a temporary rejection message and then is immediately and unceremoniously disconnected.
It's because they know what he is. After all, his connection key must be flagged by every corporate provider in the world. If he has a seizure or a stroke, his browsing history will be reviewed and the open paths investigated. Blocking him is the best way to avoid liability, he supposes. He continues to pay his connection fees because donors' benefit accounts are bottomless and the modem hum soothes the ache in his teeth, but books have become the more reliable way to learn and escape.
Admittedly, he cheats for a moment here; sneaks online and is overwhelmingly grateful when he is permitted to search 'easy baking' without any difficulty. They spend a while flipping through a recipe book before he pretends to settle on cinnamon raisin cookies. He will not eat any of them. It's possible for his body to digest all the ingredients, but he doesn't like to eat. Never did. Still, the smell of warming batter is satisfying and Ro smiles as she mixes and portions and keeps time. It's the smile that sustains him. He accepts the IV and, in a supply crisis, the feeding tube because they are the traditional solutions to the problem of starvation. Tradition has its place. He just feels that generally, in nature, lame animals starve.
What about the days when he is well enough to get out of bed?
Ro will unhook him from the machines if he asks her, though she always checks the docks first to be sure that they agree with Mirror's estimation of his own strength. With her long fingers, she is quick to free him; her hands are a spider strumming music from its web. He will sit up and that will be easy. Then Ro will ask him what he wants to do and he isn't sure what to tell her. He will not be able to do what he wants; his body is already shaking, protesting, desperate, and he must think of what to say. Not everything gets easier with time. Often, they'll move into the kitchen and he will sit gazing at the glass wall that faces west over the city. They will talk, as they would have done anyway, and it's enough because it's the best they can do.
The snow lies doleful and quiet at Mirror's feet, a smooth hunter fallen tame at the threat of cloudbreak. The sky and the scattered scrub and the lumbering suggestion of mountains are all frozen together. If there had been a storm, it's long over; the collected drifts look compressed, squeezing their weight into water that will thaw in time and creep blamelessly away. Mirror takes a handful of snow from the ground. Tries to press it into ice, but it moves like sand and will not bind. When he tosses it aside, the shape bursts to powder in the wind.
Before him is a field reaching wide and blank. Behind him the wind is fearless, it steals breath from between his teeth and touches the back of his head, rushes in his ears. But he is not cold. He feels wrapped up, safe from the sapping weight of winter, hidden in the fur and muscle of a mountain bear. No animal would dare to wander as he does, turning toward pale, flat tundra scuffed grey where the snow folds back. They all seek out shelter, among vegetation or underground. They all fear death, but he knows that isn't their fault: all creatures who were born know how difficult it will be to return to that first darkness.
Though very little seems to change as he walks, he enjoys walking all the same. Endless travel, taking him nowhere. He knows that feeling. Snow begins to fall again and it is beautiful and then it is troublesome. He might be leaning into a circle. There might be shapes moving within it, low to the ground and quick as pain, though they do nothing to harm him. Mirror thinks of the tracks he has seen pressed into the frozen earth; elk and fox and ponderous cat. It could be any of them. It could be one of each, following him into a storm or leading him out of it; what's the difference, he thinks as his hands are taken in very gentle mouths and he goes with a small pack of wolves into whiteness. Later, trying to say where they went, he will not be able to remember the white ears, the den carved into a deep drift, the curl of wolfhide against his sides and, outside, the night.
"I've never been to these places before."
"You've researched them," Ro offers noncommittally.
"Research is reading and imagining. This is like touching and smelling and knowing. I feel like I know where I am."
"Ancestral memory," she says. Not looking at him. Absorbed in correcting the angle of a tube taped down in front of his nostril.
Suddenly he's angry. "Whose ancestors? What generation am I to them?"
"Don't start." Belatedly, it occurs to him that Ro always answers anger with a colder, altogether more frightening vehemence. Reptilian intelligence playacting its understanding of an emotion. She catches him with a bright, empty eye. Holds him still, like small prey. "Look at the needle in your hand. Is that your father? Does the rebreather love you? You're blood and meat. I can't stand it when you act like you're not a living thing because only a living thing could be so stupid."
"They don't love me. No." The insult itself doesn't hurt him, but somehow he still hurts.
She knows it; she sighs. "Never mind. I just mean that you like to live. I see it all the time. You like it more than anyone else I've ever met." To allow him some dignity, she stops feeding plastic down his nose. "And it's, well, it's fucking hard to explain but that's really special. Donors have every right to hate being alive, but you like it." Wonder shows on her face, erasing the terrible blankness of a moment before; Mirror wonders briefly if this too is calculated. "I wish I could give you a better life to like."
Hearing this from her is always charming and perverse. She would if she could, but instead she will exist undying and invulnerable while he melts slowly away, his one dreadful purpose circumvented years and years ago.
Mirror smiles. Looks around for the dogs and calls them up onto his bed; they come, they curl around him with a sort of pleasant professionalism. White ears licks Mirror's chin, which makes Ro raise her lips theatrically; Mirror taught her to do it fairly recently. He says to her: "You've got to remember you don't owe me anything."
Ro has put one hand on the dock. She seems not to notice until Mirror looks at it, and then she quickly reaches over and holds onto one of curled tail's paws instead. It looks right at her as if unimpressed. Its eyes are like the core of a forest fire.
A lot of time has passed in silence so she only replies, "I know," and lets it go.
"It says: donors are given the means to live as well as they can. Submitting them for donation is, at this point, unnecessary and inhumane." Because Ro is looking at him like he should continue, Mirror adds, "That's about it."
First, Ro makes a face at him. Then her eyes abruptly lose focus and flash across a thousand lines of text, gutting an archive for the full catalogue of its contents in seconds. She scowls at nothing and passes him a link. "Is this what you were reading?" When he nods, she announces: "Is, at this point, unnecessary and inhumane. Dead growth organs became the preferred commodity four years after the last row of donors was incubated. Approximately ten percent of the total population of donors was successfully harvested. Approximately fifty percent of all organs provided by harvest were rejected by their recipients within three months. Approximately seventy percent of the total population of donors was culled in response to defects caused by growth hormones, defects caused by anaesthesia, defects caused by compromised supplements, and defects caused by unknown or undisclosed factors. Donors from the final incubated rows were permitted to gain consciousness following an official ban on donor incubation. Surviving donors were granted full citizenship by law. Surviving donors should be monitored for suicidal and homicidal tendencies." She stopped there, refocused on his face, waited.
"Can you edit that?" Mirror asks thoughtfully.
"No." She blinks at something. "But yeah, what am I changing?"
"Add fungicidal."
Ro laughs, suddenly and loudly enough that the dogs twitch and rise to rearrange themselves in a different weave of long legs. "Ew. Okay, done. Should I change the permissions so you can see it?"
"I don't want to see it," Mirror says, but he smiles at her laughter. "I want to go for a walk."
Ro looks unconvinced. "I'm not sure that's a good idea. Are you up for it?"
"Of course," he breathes; too long, the long sigh. There's a rattle in the tail, like a serpent of the sands. He has never been to the desert, unless he counts the time that he dreamed of it in detail, the hot wind and frigid night, the dunes like a dry sea. He had understood that the sight of water was mirage, but it only made him think: against the ocean, this would be coast. "Let's go."
In fact, after many years of searching he finds that there is a beach where the sand runs out, hidden in the cleft between coastal cliffs; it slips into the water and meets an abbreviated crescent of little tumbled stones that roll underfoot like drops of sunlight. Warm shallows leap and beckon. Light is quick on the water, the wink of a thousand curious eyes reading him from beginning to end. The waves would catch him if he fell. Carry him out like a part of the current until the current was gone.
This may not be the ocean; he had expected the air to smell like brine. Perhaps that was childish of him. Mirror finds that he is smiling. Behind him, slim trees climb a small rise to watch something in the distance, leaves papery and loose in the wind. The sun is not setting and there is no sound of dogs. Mirror wants to run, so he does.
When the wrapped bundle has been tucked in just the same way that Mirror preferred, Ro sits in the empty kitchen, nostalgic. The window is buttery with light; she cannot calibrate her vision to see through it at this time of day. The room is in a long, warm haze; or she is in amber, sealed up with an old, old mouthful of blood. Across the hall, the three dogs are looking at her through an open door, lying on the floor in front of Mirror's bed. Their steady bronze eyes are like three calm voices repeating, but what are the words? Mirror might have understood. Ro cannot imagine what they want her to know, only wishes they would look away. She has the sense that they know more than they should. That they know everything. Ancestral memory.
"Everything deserves to go on its own terms," she tells them. "Eventually."
They regard her in silence, the three as one. Their genetic integrity is very good considering the number of times they have lived and very poor in the sense that they are growing so distinct. It should have been Mirror who bloomed and grew that way, who instead degraded and always accepted degradation, never knowing that - for all that he changed - he was always very much himself. Was that the prize, the true expression of freedom and a full life? Ro feels ill-equipped to decide.
The apartment door stands open. For several hours, the dogs stay with her, passionless and patient. Then they go. Where? Down the street until the street ends, she assumes. Living things inevitably find their way to the places of their calling by an unseen mechanism; they will finally go where they must. Even she cannot impede them anymore.