The fire of pretend guns in VR. The fire of real ones as they test our resilience to bullet strikes. The shock as they hit. The disintegration of our targets when we get to shoot.
The drone of looped words burrowing into my ears.
The drip of an IV line, heavy with blue drugs. The bright rectangles of ceiling lights hurt my eyes. Electric shocks arc up my arms and legs until I spasm and scream.
“Try this? That worked on Three. We should be consistent. More subjects would help.”
Pieced-together snippets of conversation are laced with pain and spit and cries.
Others suffered with me.
The trees rustle back into my reality, as does the rasp of my handler’s breathing.
The women blur as a new memory pokes at me like a sharp stick piercing a wound. A disturbing memory. Something about the daughter is familiar.
“Got that?” he insists. He’s been asking, and I’ve lost track of how many times. “Fuck. Forgot you can’t talk. They’d better fix that ’cause this is a problem, you being mute. Nod?”
I nod, grunt, and I smile inside. Pretense is everything.
“Good. Come midnight we will be going down there and terminating her and everyone in that house. Or you will. It’ll be your first, Struct Four? First girl for you? I mean to kill not to fuck.” He chuckles as if this is funny.
I nod. That is humor? I make a note. My handler finds killing girls funny and implies he has done it himself.
He chuckles. “We should get you a cake. Get some hooker to blow you. Get you a cake and one candle? We’d have to blindfold her so she doesn’t see your ugly face. Maybe kill her afterward, too?” He laughs. “This outing is so off label, I should be wiping my own fucking memory. Anyway, relax and sleep until I wake you. Sleep now. That’s a command.”
I resist for a few seconds. The more practice I get at resisting orders the better I become at it, then I lie down among the leaves and close my eyes.
Something about the girl nags me. Maybe the shape of her ass as she leans on the fence and cocks her hip?
She waves at me, younger, happier, then runs away. I chase her. I’ve got a hard-on and I’m praying she doesn’t notice. I’m lighter than I am now. I’m thinking about how to get into her pants and how can I get her undressed.The memory fades.
I still have a dick? I do. I’ve felt it before.
Nevertheless, I double check with my hand. The wreckage in my head makes me doubt things. I do have one, though an unsettling feeling makes me dubious about my ownership of it. Is this cock mine or somebody else’s? They call me Struct Four, but I’ve heard another, longer name used for us.
Frankenstruct. I turn the word over. The derivation of it is obvious. My brain got it in one second when I first heard it.
They assembled us from different body parts, which means I am a jigsaw man. But whose brain do I have? They trained me to kill and obey orders. Not to think. Thinking about things is more fun. I resist the sleep order for as long as I can, subtly crushing my hands into fists then releasing them, over and over, while I ruminate over what I am.
Always, I question things. I question therefore I exist.
What if my dick comes from an alien or a chicken? Annnnd…do chickens have dicks?
Why do I know about Frankenstein and Shakespeare when my handler has the intelligence of the aforementioned chicken?
The dry leaves and twigs crunch under me as I shift onto my side. I stare at the insides of my eyelids and count chickens until sleep crashes in and delivers me into the black.
3
DARKNESS WAITS
Hailey Tarrant
“Your father was a good man, a good neighbor,” Molly tells me, with the top of her cane doing a small wobbly circle where she rests her trembling hand on it. Gray and bent, she’s sixty-two next month, has lived here for years, and I’d better not hold any orgies because I’m fairly sure she watches everything that happens around here. The telescope in their upstairs cutaway patio is a hint. Luckily, I missed meeting her when I was running around wild as a teenager.
About the only thing she hasn’t informed me of is the name of the red tabby winding about her feet.
“He was a good father too.” I sigh. A familiar pain strikes my heart at this reminder of his death and absence from my life. A hundred things do that, every single day. My sigh makes a sad expression settle over Molly, and she reaches to squeezemy hand where it rests on the fence. “I’m getting there, Molly. Recovering. Time heals.”
