Electrify the Bones

ELECTRIFY THE BONES

by Ren Iwamoto

There’s this girl—one of Karenin’s trainees. She’s been watching me a while now. I feel her gaze like a feverish hand on the back of my neck, and imagine myself as a pillbug, recoiling inward. I am a speck, blending into the hangar’s concrete floor, caught on a stale huff of recycled air and blown into a shadowy corner. I rub a bit of grit out of my eye.

I’m only here to outfit the junior trainees (babies! I can’t stand how young they are) with their first test run in the Humanoid Light Fighters, so they’re appropriately disinterested in me. Karenin has their full attention. They listen raptly as he breaks down the next few hours with his usual charm and good humour. He is mobile, expressive, the kind of good-looking you could smash your heart against. I, however, am immune to him. Maybe that’s why we get along; he has no power over me. 

We have eighteen HLFs on base, and two are at our disposal today: Judas and Sleipnir. They’re older models, less human and more unwieldy. They’ll soon be retired. Maybe that’s the point—to turn this training session into a test. A test that isn’t a test. I don’t know. It seems unfair to test someone who doesn’t know it’s coming, but for every trainee that fails, there’s three who will succeed. The body in the machine is replicable, replaceable. We play a numbers game here. 

I watch but don’t listen as Karenin wraps up his pep talk. He extends his arm towards me. His mouth makes the shape of my name, and the trainees form a loose line before me. One by one I hook them up to spinal conduits and vital monitors. Most don’t say a word to me as I prod them, and I don’t mind. I don’t have anything to say to them, either.  I’m interested only in their heart rates, blood pressure, muscle tone—all the little ways their bodies may or may not fail under the stress of piloting hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of miraculous, multi-billion-dollar engineering.

“Next,” I call, and the girl comes to stand in front of me. She’s tall, slim as a willow branch. In her skin-tight pilot’s uniform, I can see the shadows cast by her ribs, reaching through the thin sheath of her skin. The shape of her skull is exquisite, perfectly crushable. I avoid eye contact with her while I attach electrodes and wires, touching her as little as possible. 

“Is it hard?”  

I don’t immediately realize she’s spoken to me: her words melt into the electric hum of the machinery around me. She repeats herself, more loudly this time, and I blink at her.

“Is what hard?” I ask.

She smiles, her mouth full and pink, shiny with gloss. She has one crooked bicuspid; an endearing imperfection. I look quickly away. “Piloting the HLFs. Major Karenin says it’s much more difficult than it looks.” 

“I don’t know. Not really. Judas needs to warm up before it does any real work. Sleipnir’s the opposite. It will fight you if it’s bored.”

“You make it sound like they’re alive.” Her smile turns conspiratorial, as if we’re sharing a joke. 

What can I say? The HLFs are alive in the capacity that they are not dead. If they’re ornery, it’s in the same way a vintage car is ornery: a projection of the owner onto a beloved object. My secret beliefs about them—about their sentience, about how when I work alone late at night I see them move out of the corner of my eye—should remain exactly that: secret. 

The silence between us stretches thin and taught. Colour creeps up the girl’s neck and paints her ears. Her chin dips. 

“You’re good to go,” I say. I try to sound professional, detached, but it comes out grossly gentle. 

“Let’s,” she blurts, then stops. She touches the place where her jaw meets her ear. Clears her throat. I watch her fight herself for another long second. Then: “Let’s get coffee sometime. Off base.”

I open my mouth to tell her no. To tell her thank you, I’m flattered, but it’s really not appropriate. But she’s already dashed off, and the next trainee has taken her place. 

I didn’t see it myself. The streak of fire, cutting through the night sky like God’s own white-hot knife. I didn’t see the crash-land. The impact caused earthquakes up and down the Pacific Rim. But I saw the aftermath, the island of coral and bone and petrified flesh, rising up like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear strike thirty kilometres off the coast of Vancouver Island. And, inside, suspended in foreign amnion, were the skeletons: Titans with vast rib cages and long, spindly limbs. They were in hibernation, their brainwaves long and slow. Nothing we did could rouse them. 

For the best, maybe. So long as they sleep, they are beautiful, pliable objects. To wake them would be to confront something I don’t think we’re ready for. 

I haul myself halfway out of the cockpit, emerging between the skeleton’s fourth and fifth thoracic vertebrae, and lay my cheek upon the smooth flesh of its back. It’s soft, tender, warm. Alive enough. I can feel its slow, thundering pulse. The skeletons have red blood, like us, precisely as saline as the sea. I think about that sometimes. 

This one has only just begun the process of becoming an HLF; for now it’s a mess of cabling and electrodes, unaffixed nuclear batteries and cerebral adaptors. Only the cockpit’s been installed, jammed up between its billowing lungs, behind its heart. Soon enough it’ll be armoured up, electrified. Made a weapon and a warning. I can already picture it: matte black, the seams between the armour illuminated blue. Or maybe red. 

The brass want to call it Odin, for its lone eye, and I think that’s perfect.

“Sleeping on the job?” 

I lift my head. Karenin stands at the skeleton’s feet, one hand shielding his eyes from the harsh fluorescent lights. He’s handsome in a way that makes me want to stomp on his head until it’s soup.

“Even if I was,” I call back, “I’d still be doing more work than you.”

He presents me with a choice finger, then gestures for me to come down. I clip onto the nearest belay and slip down the skeleton’s body, landing hard enough to feel it in my teeth. Karenin surveys me up and down, a crease between his brows. I wonder how I look. Probably not good. I don’t know. I rarely look in the mirror. I meet Karenin’s gaze and his expression clears. 

“One of my trainees asked about you,” he says. His brows arch indicatively. “Onigahara. You remember her? Looks like a runway model.”

I frown. I remember. 

“Come on.” He nudges me. “You haven’t seen anyone since Xiao, and that was ages ago.”

“Xiao was an adult.” Is an adult. My bad habit. Gone is not gone.

"Onigahara’s nineteen. She’s nubile.”

“You’re disgusting.” 

I don’t say that I’m merely a mockery of a human being, just like the skeletons. I don’t say that, even if Onigahara and I were peers, she’d leave me for the same reason Xiao did. 

Karenin sighs mightily. “There goes my lesbian porn fantasy,” he says. “In trouble again, Private? I hope you’re ready for your punishment.” 

I drop my hand onto his shoulder and pinch the nerve there until his laughter turns to shrieks.

It’s ugly, I think, to love machines more than people. It exposes something flawed within oneself. An inability, perhaps, to reach out, connect, understand.

Karenin is under the impression I don’t like people; I overheard him talking to Onigahara about me in the mess. 

“Sorry, kiddo,” he’d said. “Preobrazhensky’s just – she likes to be alone.” He’d smiled a little sadly, then, and clapped her on the shoulder. I’d left before I could hear Onigahara’s reply. 

Karenin was wrong, anyway. I hate to be alone. I’d be with people if I could. But people are fickle. They change. They decide you love giant robotic super-weapons more than you love them. Often they leave. Sometimes they die.

An HLF will only change if I, its engineer, allow it. An HLF will always come back to me for maintenance, repairs, upgrades. I resurrect them with every reboot. In my dreams, they cradle me in their vast palms, and with voices like whalesong tell me everything I want to hear:

I’m not alone, and I never will be.

I have no one to talk to, and no one to love, but I’m not alone. 

I’m not alone.