Spirited (29 page)

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Thanks to Karl Gee for creating this 3-D experience.

~*~*~

In the blockhouse office, the camera on the X3 monitor switched from a wide shot of space, dark as diesel and spattered with lights, like the blinking bugs people wrongly called fireflies, to inside the ship readying to burn the space bridge.

I stumbled back from the counter at the sight of the Shipper in his dimly lit metal cradle. More machine than man, he was wired into his ship—chained like a dog through a cable at the base of his brain. My parents said that once he was a rock star, but they didn’t mean he made music.

Once, he had it all.

Women, wine…
whatever
.

That was before the Luddites.

And the Camps.

The camera zoomed in on his scarred face, indigo light flickered across his features, painting an image straight from Hell. No spirit ghosted behind his eyes. The best pilot we had, and he might as well be dead.

A whirring noise broke my concentration. I blinked at a Shipper standing on the other side of the counter. Nearly as bad as the one on the screen, almost half metal. I forced my gaze beyond it and to the X3. “Light it up,” I urged the ship. “Burn, baby, burn…”

Beside me Jared groused over the counter, “I can’t give a key to
you
. Shippers can’t carry keys. It’s in the regs.” He pointed at the book of laws that guides camps and all interactions with the Shippers.

The hum of mechanical parts increased. The Shipper leaned in. “I need the key.”

“Then you
need
an escort.” Jared elbowed me. “Take a key to Blockhouse 7.”

“Now? But—” I pointed to the screen.

He thrust the iron key into my hand. “Magnetizing,” he warned, waving an electronic wand over the key. “It’s like you have a job, man.”

I shoved the door open, and the Shipper’s metal shoulder scraped the frame.

Lights blinked, the monitor screen fuzzed with static, and behind me the blockhouse filled with cursing.

“I’m missing the burning of Bridge Four-Two-Two, thanks to you,” I told it—well,
her
, if face and boobs were any indication. She clumped along behind me, her human foot booted and soft-sounding compared to the hiss and drag of her mechanical one.

I wished we’d let them keep their full skins. I didn’t need to see so much of them.

“If they kept them, how would we tell them from
us
?” Mother once asked, repressing a shiver.

Blockhouse 7 wasn’t far. I might still have the satisfaction of seeing the bridge burn and know my parents’ stocks were rising because an Einstein-Rosen bridge to a resource-rich system had been burned out. The burning, the last possible trip across the bridge, forced Shippers to use another space bridge—the one my parents’ claims sat on the far side of. This was huge for my family. “Speed up.”

A group of Shippers sputtered past, jerky and awkward, dust grinding in their gears. They didn’t acknowledge me, or even her, in their zombie-like progress. Soulless. Without a spark of life.

“Apologies.” The fiber-optic filaments, like short hair shrouding half her head, shimmered, running from white to purple as she pushed to keep up.

“Hurry, poppet.”

Her head snapped up, her eyes glittering. Correction. Her
eye
glittering. The replacement fixture that took up most of one side of her face couldn’t be considered an eye, could it? A spinning scope mounted in a mess of metal and mech, it glittered too, but in that creepy alien way Shippers had.

Although Shippers were anything
but
alien.

Still—creepy. This officially was my weirdest summer job yet. Three days in and it was sucking hard.

“It’s important you see how Shippers live,” Mother had said.

“Learn what makes them tick,” Father snapped. “Know their flaws.”

“And how dangerous they are,” Mother agreed.

I understood the danger. I was ten when the Mechs rose up and the Shippers came to their aid.

“Poppet?” she asked. Her pace slowed. “Poppet means
puppet
, correct? A mindless doll controlled by the manipulations of another.”

I shrugged. “It’s what the guards call your kind. What’s it matter? You’re a Shipper.”

“
Just
a Shipper, you mean.”

They got so hung up on semantics.

Her neck clicked as she cocked her head. “How lucky that you are perfect. What do they call
you
?”

“Asa. You need to do this
now
?” I looked at the sky, watching for the bridge to flash into sight.
Don’t pop
, I thought.
Not yet.

“Apologies,” she whispered amid the humming of gears and gadgets making up most of her right side. “The procedure is—necessary. My condition—”

“Whatever.” I waved her to silence.

But flawed as she was, she kept talking. “—it is an anomaly.”

She sounded—frightened? She was nearly as much metal as meat. Metal didn’t get scared. Mechs feared nothing. Metal didn’t feel.

Pop!

A flash like magnesium riding lightning set the heavens on fire with a blinding white.

“No! I missed it!”

“A-a-apologies,” she stuttered.

“No, no,
no
!”

Something tumbled from the gray-green sky, a blur of feathers. At the Shipper’s feet a bird lay dead, wings wide and eyes going dull.

Stooping, she swept it into her hands.

“I wouldn’t…” The surviving birds were rumored to carry all sorts of diseases—what wouldn’t after spending so much time in Earth’s poisoned atmosphere?

She held it in her hands, her face lit like the statue of Mary standing guard at each Jubilation Centre’s Pulpit.

Gears ground in her right elbow, and she closed her eye. Something snapped along her wrist joint, and electricity jumped from her to the bird. Stunned, it staggered to its feet and cocked its head in a nearly mechanical mimicry of her expression before leaping to the air with a cry of joy.

“I never… You gave it life.”

She shrugged.

“You could have—”

“Let it die? That is not my way. Someday I will be like that bird. Someday I will fly. I will burn bridges from here to both ends of existence.”

I stared at her a moment before inserting the key in Blockhouse 7. The door dilated.

“Hell’s bells, poppet,” the mechanic said from where he’d waited for the delivery of the key.

Startled, the Shipper stumbled, metal fingers clinking on the door’s edge. Every light in the blockhouse flickered off and screamed back on so hot that bulbs burst. Sparks spun like fireworks.

“Quit touching things before you blow the entire camp,” he said. “You and your mangled mech…”

Her hands tight against her body, she hung her head and shuffled inside to slump in a chair.

The mechanic, Silas (according to the badge hanging on one pocket), pushed past me. “Leave the key and go,” he commanded, tugging on thick rubber gloves. He reached into a heap of tools on a nearby table. Some glowed—polished—and others were crusted with rust. Examining something with a cruel point under one of the few remaining bulbs, he grinned.

The Shipper looked away, yellow-green seeping like sickness into her fiber-optics.

My heart raced. “I want to watch the procedure.”

“Go
now
,” Silas growled.

“Whatever.”

The Shipper raised her head, peering at me. “Asa,” she said. “I am Helvetica Gibson. I thank you for your sacrifice.”

“
Out
,” Silas pointed.

I obeyed, and the door clanged shut behind me.

Inside the room, metal clinked against metal. I slipped around the side of the blockhouse. I’d watch if I wanted to.

“Your kind doesn’t rank last names—what’s this Gibson crap?” Silas asked.

At the far end of the building was a window. And there…a crate… I dragged it over and climbed up. Too short. I turned it on its side, grabbing the windowsill when the crate wobbled beneath me.

Through the grime coating the glass, I saw Silas wielding a tool like a weapon, while she—
Helvetica
—cowered in the chair.

Tweaking a Shipper is like pulling the wings off a fly
, they said. It didn’t hurt anyone. Shippers were metal and meat. We were perfection, they were aberrations. The line between us was clear as our distinctive destinies. It was the truth I’d been taught, passed down from the Pulpit.

But when she screamed, her head tossing, her eyes locking with mine, pain etched into her face, I realized even metal could give way and leave meat trembling.

I fell, and the entire camp tripped like one gigantic circuit had blown. Darkness descended as heavy as a blanket.

~*~*~

The generators roared on, sound and light blaring, and I staggered to my feet. The door to the blockhouse hung open like a jaw gaping in a stupor. Inside I found Helvetica was every bit the poppet, limp, lifeless, awaiting reanimation. My hand trembling, I felt her neck for a pulse. It raced beneath fevered skin.

Silas lay crumpled on the floor, the fingers of his rubber gloves melted, his face blackened by a blast. Breathing raggedly, he cursed like profanity was his first language as he dragged himself to his feet.

“The Mechs were easier…” he muttered. “No Geneva Protocol crap…” He glared. “Scrapping the Mechs was a no-brainer. But these…” Wincing, he closed his burned fingers into a fist and shook it at the unconscious Shipper. “Human DNA. Blood and bone beside circuits and servos. Every bleeding heart liberal thinks if there’s a bit of humanity to them they deserve human rights.”

He clutched a hammer, his brow knitting in pain. His eyebrows and lashes were gone as was the hair on his sooty arms. “Ask yourself—how much humanity makes you human and how much metal makes you just another murdering Mech?”

“Who has she murdered?” I asked.

“Give her time. She’s soulless. No conscience.”

“How do you know? Where’s the soul found that she doesn’t have one?”

“Not in
them
,” he assured. “No soul, no spirit, no spark of the Divine.” He hefted the hammer. “Step aside and I’ll deactivate it.”

“
Deactivate
?” I stayed between them. “Whoa. No deactivating.”

“What?”

“It’s… not cost-effective to”—I swallowed hard—”
deactivate
a Shipper. Bridges burn faster than ever. We need Shippers to pilot an Aegis where we can’t.” I snorted. “Do
you
want to barrel across a bridge? Look what it’s cost them. Almost every Shipper is born deformed. They require augmentation.”

“The curse of the God for their arrogance,” he agreed.

“Let them pay the price for human progress while we reap the benefits. Besides, they don’t need souls to fly, just skills. Don’t deactivate…
it
.”