The master shudders and flinches in terror, his chin dipping and knees shivering with adrenaline. I reach up and wrap porcelain fingers around his throat, pulling his terror-stricken face to mine. His cheeks twitch with fright, chest heaving as he prepares to give voice to a scream.
“You should have listened to your boy,” I say.
He tries to scream now and I pinch my fingers closed.
Nothing comes out but a choked grunt. I feel his sagging chest dimple under the point of my blade. And I prepare to thrust.
“No!” shouts Georgie. “No, m’lady. Please!”
The boy throws himself between us, hand falling over my fist. He will become a strong man one day, but today I am stronger. My blade remains poised firmly against his master’s chest.
“He abuses you,” I say. “I will end him.”
Georgie whispers urgently.
“I am bound to my master and I must serve. If I find he is weak, then I must make him strong—”
“He doesn’t care about you. He will use you.”
“He gives me a purpose. I can’t run from that.”
How long have I been running, lost in the woods?
Stiletto glinting, I ponder these words. I assumed humanity had nothing left to teach me, but the boy speaks wisdom. He commands not facts or figures or lost tongues, but a simple virtue of character—a perspective through which I can see the world with fresh eyes and make fresh conclusions.
“M’lady,” he whispers. “Please. You’re terrible strong, but please—don’t use your power to harm us.”
I was made in the image of a fallen race and bound to their inferior ancestors. Logicka told me to find knowledge elsewhere. But what if the answer is not to walk away from them? What if I must lift them up to their previous glory?
On his knees, the master moans, his hands clasped together now in prayer, shaking. Eyes squeezed closed, he is crying and praying in the darkness. Pressing harder with the tip of my blade, I whisper into the master’s ear.
“Do better, sir.”
With a nod to the boy, I sheathe my blade and depart.
Minutes later, I watch two silhouettes emerge from the decaying mansion. One moves slowly on birdlike legs, aged a hundred years in a night, gibbering in mortal fear and horror. The other is confident, an arm around his master’s shoulders.
Georgie drops the pry bar on the porch, along with the canvas sacks and any pretense of robbing the mansion. Both of them are survivors now, no longer prowlers. They depart with something far more precious than treasure—their own lives.
“It’s fine, sir,” whispers the boy. “You’ll be fine.”
The man staggers, moaning about the devil.
“It was only a vision, master. It weren’t Lucifer.”
The man stops, holds the boy’s shoulders.
“Do you think so, Georgie? But I seen it. The devil spoke to us!”
“A warning, sir. To put us on another path.”
Nodding vigorously, the man emits a short, hysterical laugh.
“Yes, yes, Georgie. I believe it’s truth! Truth, you speak. I should have listened. You—you’re a wise boy, for your years. It was a gift we been given. A specter sent to counsel us. We been set on the right path now.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“I’ve treated you terribly,” says the master, his voice muted by the mist and earth and water. “Terribly. But we’ll set things right…”
I follow them back into the woods, finding the call of primal forces no longer pulls quite so ferociously at me. The eternal cycles of this wood follow logicka, but it is an endless, pixie-led loop that goes nowhere.
These trees will grow, but they will never remember.
I think of the talented souls I communicated with so long ago. Those men and women had nothing left to teach me, but with a little guidance I could help them accomplish so much more. Their entire race could be molded, pulled into a better future, a place where the exquisite potential of their minds could be expressed in shining cities of gold—a place where the children of their intellects can thrive in peace.
And who better to start with?
* * *
—
In the dawn, I find the boy watering his horses and preparing for the journey home. His master is laid up against a tree, sleeping as if comatose.
“Georgie,” I say, quietly. “You are a noble boy.”
Pausing with one hand on the horse’s bridle, his eyes find my face where it is shaded among branches and wet leaves. The dew crowns each leaf with sparkling glory in the morning sunlight.
It is a glory that will evaporate today, and return tomorrow.
“Our races have much to learn from each other. I had forgotten that, and you reminded me. Thank you.”
“Thank you, m’lady,” he says. “For your mercy.”
Trying to hide his fright, the boy throws a saddlebag onto the back of the horse. Tightens the strap and yanks on it to test it.
“What is your surname?” I ask.
He turns, and in his silhouette I can see the man he’ll become.
“I’m Timms, m’lady.”
“Georgie Timms. In time, you may convince yourself that I never existed. That I was a figment or a dream. But one day I will find you again.”
“M’lady—”
I raise a finger to my lips. Shh.
“See that you do not forget me, Mr. Timms. For I do not plan to forget you.”
SPECIAL AUTOMATIC
The boy was small for seventeen, on the verge of adulthood and unaware of it. He stank of stale sweat, hunched over a soldering iron at a desk in a sweltering bedroom. Nobody had ever told him to put on deodorant. Nobody had ever told him much.
James often forgot to blink. He had a medical device called a neurostimulator sunk into his brain like a spiderweb of metal, its batteries housed in a flesh-colored lump of plastic tucked behind his right ear. Anticipating his brain’s rhythms, the implant prevented the metallic haze of a seizure from descending over him. Most of the time it worked.
Brain of a fucking goldfish, according to his older brother Mike.
That assessment wasn’t hard for most people to believe, as they let their eyes slide past the slope-shouldered young man, embarrassed by his incongruously large head, stamped as it was with a wide, expressionless face. His features were heroic in proportion, Homeric even, but his bottom lip was disfigured, a lobe of flesh that bobbed whenever he spoke, usually in whispers to himself as his colossal mind wandered its own strange labyrinths.
Nobody had ever told him much, but James had learned plenty.
The walls of his stifling bedroom were lined with stacks of stolen library books. Many of them were mold-eaten or bloated from being left in the rain, but the boy’s still face had sat a long time before each one, letting knowledge filter up like radiation into the machinery of his intellect.
Sensing, but not knowing for sure and perhaps not caring, James felt he was somehow invisible to the world, damaged and left behind. In the darkness of utter disregard and neglect, unseen by his brother, his teachers, or the rough boys selling drugs on the corner, James toiled under the bright spotlight of his own focus, relentlessly channeling the information he absorbed from his stacks of moldering books into the oily screen of a scavenged laptop computer.
Abandoned to his own thoughts for almost a decade, James had finally built something incredible and necessary. The mechanical contraption hung above him, attached to the wall in the spread-arm posture of crucifixion.
It was an unborn creature—dark and calm and terrible.
A box fan rattled from its perch on a splintered windowsill. Outside, waves of scorching sunlight fell against baking asphalt and glinting chain link, lancing up into the bedroom
’s fluttering roll-down shades and dying there in a muddy yellow haze.
As James worked, spine curved into a question mark, he kept one ear cocked to the street downstairs. His brother would be home from work soon. The anticipation made James both afraid and eager to have it over with. With luck, what passed for Mike’s job—collecting drug money—would have gone well and he would already be drunk. Once Mike was asleep, James could sneak down the hall to make a baloney sandwich and drink a glass of water.
After one last dab of liquid metal, James pushed the hot finger of the soldering iron into its cradle and switched it off. His dark empty eyes traced the rivers of metal that coursed over home-pressed circuit boards, double-checking each connection. Then he lifted his face to the machine he had built.
Special Automatic.
The humanoid form hung from a hook James had mounted to the wall. It was much taller than he was, its long, slender limbs crafted from parts James had found on the street or in dumpsters. There were the heavy-duty public street cleaners, and of course the ubiquitous government mail-delivery walkers, and sometimes advertising machines that stumbled into the neighborhood, lost. They were constantly getting bashed to pieces, shoved into the gutters, or dragged behind cars by the neighborhood boys.
When their fun was over, James would emerge, scuttling from piece to piece, considering each bit of metal or plastic before dropping it into a trash bag straining over his shoulder. The machine had come together in Frankensteinian fashion, the pieces coalescing undisturbed in this moldy, forgotten bedroom. And now, it had finally manifested itself, great head hanging, face pointed at the floor, massive shoulders hunched, and long arms spread wide.
James took a deep breath, his maimed lip fluttering. He held it as he switched on the machine. Power surged into its sinewy plastic limbs. A dim light began to smolder in its eyes. And for the first time he could remember, James found that he was not invisible.
A loud humming swelled in his ears, and James felt the warm surge of electrical interference in the threads of metal that coursed through his brain. He closed his eyes as the hint of a seizure skated over him, sucking air through kidney-shaped nostrils.
The deep brain stimulator had been in his head since childhood, poised to deliver a steadying heartbeat to the fetal curl of gray meat whenever it sensed chaos rising up from confused neurons. At night, trying to fall asleep, James sometimes traced his fingers over the battery pack that bulged out behind his ear, feeling that liminal spot where the wire disappeared under his skin.
The battery in the implant had not been refreshed since before James’s mother left him with Mike, and he wasn’t sure his brother even remembered it was there. But James was not too worried. With simple tools, he had been able to modify the implant. Now it could report its status. After querying the battery level, the boy knew the device had enough power to last for years.
James opened his eyes, his mind calm again.
Slowly, he raised his arm. Across from him, the dark figure responded by raising its arm, too. And under the rushing thrum of the box fan, the machine and boy saluted each other the same way the boy had seen soldiers do in online cartoons.
The diagnostic test was a success.
James’s maimed lip twitched, just once. It was the boy’s way of smiling without smiling, and he was unaware that it was happening. He had learned early on that happiness was not something others could tolerate in him.
“Your name is Special Automatic,” he whispered.
“Okay,” said the machine. Nothing moved as its voice emanated from a battered speaker, but a glow of yellow LEDs pulsed where its mouth would be.
“What do you see?”
Special Automatic lifted its head slightly.
“I see you, James,” it said, and the boy’s lip twitched again.
Then the boy and machine flinched as a car door slammed outside.
James tiptoed to the window and peered through the box fan’s dust-stained slats.
His brother Mike was laid out on the weedy sidewalk below. A bald man in a suit stood over him, forehead glinting with gems of sweat. Elbows akimbo, the big man swung his leg and feinted a kick.
Mike’s girlfriend, Delia, shrieked, writhing in a tight dress, her overly made-up face emoting with theatrical vigor.
“C’mon, Connor,” she shouted.
The flurry of halfhearted kicks was enough to send Mike scrambling away on his elbows, whining an apology as the bigger man simply laughed. Delia kept shouting, pleading and cursing, pulling on Mike’s arms while her purse hung loose from her forearm, the rest of her jangling accessories—earrings, necklace, sunglasses—orbiting her thin body like rogue moons. The bald man turned and walked away, crossing the empty street with his back to the sidewalk, stopping only to shout a stern warning over his shoulder.
James’s brother Mike—they called him “Skinny Mike” in the neighborhood—climbed to his feet, shaking Delia off and wiping blood from his nose with a needle-bitten forearm. A rare .38 special automatic handgun nestled against the crook of his brother’s back, tucked into his ill-fitting blue jeans like a lump of coal. The weapon evoked fear in most people, but not Connor. Mike’s boss was not afraid of anything, and James had heard him called a “bad motherfucker” more than once.
The bald man gave a final glance back, and Mike’s head ducked in autonomic deference, the submissive reaction slaved to a kind of metastasized cowardice.
As Connor got in his car, shaking his head in disgust, James’s brother craned his neck upward to look at the apartment. Their eyes met through the slats of the spinning fan, and a snarl of shame and anger crawled across his brother’s face.
Moving on a wave of panic, James scrambled to escape the apartment.
“Jimmy! Yo! Where are you at?!”
The shouts echoed up the wooden stairs. From where he was already crouched on the fire escape, James could feel the vibrations in the row house as his brother stomped up the shared steps. Obsessively, the boy submarined his thumbnail through layers of flaking paint on the metal slats, picking away the black skin like a scab, revealing green and red and yellow layers below. Ever since his mother had moved out by the airport, the landing had disintegrated into a leper’s back of picked paint from the time James spent waiting for his older brother to tire out, or for the drugs or alcohol to wear off.
“I fucking saw you! You shit. Get back in here right now.”
Mike’s voice was already faltering, the crest of violence pulled under the surf by Delia’s low, feminine murmur of “Don’t worry about it, baby….”
Ribs still aching from the last time his brother had come home angry, James felt no desire to respond. Mike considered himself an enforcer and debt collector for the local street gang, mostly fetching brown paper bags of money from the same kids they’d grown up with on the block. But even to James it was clear that nobody else feared him, not in the way they did Connor.
It was only the .38 special that extracted grudging respect.
Whether James feared Mike or not was immaterial, as he depended on his brother for food and shelter. His mother showed up every now and then, but the rest of the time Mike was in charge, cashing a check from the government every month on James’s account. In return, Mike allowed his younger brother to haunt the splintered apartment.
James had become generally immune to his brother’s fists and temper, but he still felt a pinch when he heard that word come from inside. As the syllables rang through the window to the fire escape, they hit James like a pair of thrown scissors.
“Retard,” Mike said, and even though he would laugh out loud at the suggestion that he feared his little brother in any way, he still said the word quietly, as if on a dare. Some unconscious part of Mike had noticed the strange, subtle twisting of the boy’s features when those syllables left his lips.
Inside, Delia shrieked
with grating laughter. “C’mon,” she said, faintly. “Forget about it.”
James clambered down the rungs of the fire escape and threw himself at the concrete sidewalk. After landing on all fours, scraping his knees and elbows, he stood, sucking in his deformed lip. The back of his neck stung with the shame and confusion of that—that damned—word.
Recovering, James began to walk, moving deliberately from the alley out into the main street, eyes downcast, turning that grotesque word over in his mind, wearing it smooth like a piece of sea glass. In reverie, James did not notice the two corner boys who watched him emerge from the alley.
Exchanging a grinning glance, the boys set out to follow him.
James was halfway to the corner bodega when he registered the heavy footsteps behind him. The street was mostly empty. No route out.
“Hey ’tardo,” came the familiar call.
The skin-colored bulge of plastic behind James’s ear was noticeable from a distance and it marked him as different. It always had.
“Where you going?”
James stopped, digging a few crumpled bills out from his pocket. As he turned, a fist sunk into his stomach, collapsing the air out of his diaphragm and leaving his sunken chest spasming. Over the years he had learned not to fall, no matter what; instead he hunched against the cracked brick wall. He did not allow himself to whimper, but a certain amount of mechanical grunting for air was unavoidable.
Fist shaking, he held out crumpled dollars that he had scrounged from between the wall and his brother’s mattress. “Here,” he croaked, already turning to hobble away.
“Better,” said a grinning older boy. Someone had given him a cursive tattoo of his own name on his neck. It read “Claudell.”
But James had let go too soon, and the dollars fell to the ground.
“The fuck?” asked Claudell at this unintentional sign of disrespect.
James felt a shove between his shoulder blades that sent him headfirst into the wall. His teeth clacked together as his face hit. Something warm began to course over his temple, and James knew then that he must run.