A/N: Again, Gorillaz-fic. Little bit of 2-D/Android, if you squint. Enjoy!
Debridement
She's a ghostly imprint something that once lived; like a pressed flower or a photograph.
He wonders what would happen if he cut her.
She wouldn't bleed red, she'd bleed black, bleed horrible flesh-eating battery acid, or maybe not even bleed at all. He'd burnt the inside of his mouth raw as a kid after biting into a broken battery; he still remembers the thrill of running his tongue against hot, bloody muscle.
His Mum would sing nursery rhymes to him as a kid. She did when he burnt his mouth, he remembers that. Curled up in the comfortable pocket of warmth in her lap, he sat listening to the rhythms of her body (the sound of the metrical muscle in her chest beating, the sound of air vibrating through meat and lungs) and her awful, squeaky singing voice. She sang Itsy Bitsy Spider and Jack and Jill and What Are Little Girls Made Of? that day.
Sugar and spice and all that's nice, he thinks, and he wants to laugh.
See, he doesn't know a lot about human biology, but he knows that it doesn't apply to her. He's seen what happens. She can be taken apart like a telly remote and then patched up and charged up, like some fucking weird kind of talking Nintendo DS that looks like Noodle.
He hates her for that. Noodle is made of blood, bones, organs, muscle. Why do they call her Noodle?
She isn't Noodle, he tells himself. But he can never be sure of that; medication and loneliness clouds up his head. It's all too confusing. After all, she looks like Noodle and she sounds like Noodle and she remembers the time they stayed up watching Night of The Comet high on diet Coke, eating rich tea biscuits.
"Can you eat?" he asks her suddenly. "Like, food an' that?"
She seems to have eyes, but they don't look anywhere. Deep inside them is a little light, a tiny red light, like the red lights on electric kettles or computer screens – one that is always awake and never fading or flickering. Unnaturally alive.
They are no lights on in the room and night is setting in, the smell of soggy sun and rotten plastic and rotten people hangs in the air as it always does. She's been told to 'watch him'. She does.
He knows she looks at him then, because the red lights, glowing out of the darkness, move across his face.
"I do not need to eat," she says in Noodle's voice.
"Yeah, but say y'wanted to eat somethin'."
"Food evokes no emotional response in me," she tells him, "Whatsoever. Therefore, I highly doubt I'll ever want to eat anything."
So, even if they do make friends and start watching films together, they'll never share biscuits again.
"In answer to your question, however, no, I could not. I lack the ability to chew and swallow."
"Why's that?"
"I have no oesophagus, no stomach. My teeth are not strong enough to cut food, and I do not produce saliva, and so cannot break down any starch or fat in food to molecular level. Hence, it is impossible."
"Right," he says, shuffling on his bed, thinking he understands. She uses big words and talks quickly like Noodle, but when she looks at him, she has none of Noodle's kind patience in her silicone face. "So, like, 'ow come Murdoc di'n give you a stomach?"
She says simply, "I have a Musketoon Carbine firing arm in the biological position of the stomach. It would be silly to put a stomach in another place – and Mr. Murdoc believed that buying organs was immoral."
"Oh."
He brings his knees up to his chin, rubbing his head: a slow, hot throbbing is growing behind his eyelids. "That's like somethin' a Batman baddie would 'ave," he adds.
She doesn't smile. Noodle would have smiled.
He tries again. He needs someone to talk to; after all, if he closes his eyes, he can't see a metal girl, he can just hear Noodle, and that's good enough, that's something.
"Does anythin' give you an – an emotional response?"
"Oh," she says. It's a very girlish, feminine sound, a cross between 'oh' and 'ooh', a noise Noodle made quite often when surprised. His eyes burst open in shock. He doesn't understand how it can make that noise. "Yes."
She steps forward then, her joints snapping like a plastic doll.
"I've yet to experience every emotion, but I've currently identified a few, via my database."
He twitches.
(She pauses then, frowning at him curled up like a baby. He is very odd. It takes her a long time to decipher his reactions; 2.003 seconds on average.)
"Happiness, for instance, I have related with my first successful assassination." She says, "Jealously, as another example, upon hearing rumours of Mr. Robert Pattinson's romantic relationship with a colleague."
"So, Noodle's memories and that. You learn off them, do'n you?"
"Partially," she responds, and then her face takes on a completely new expression; one he's never seen before. She tilts her head downwards and runs her tongue across her lower lip at him, brow furrowing. It's like she's thinking – or like she's hungry. "I don't 'learn' emotion by operant means – rather, I recognise emotion by classically conditioning my database."
He rubs his fingers across his temples absently, and then mutters, "What's 'at mean?"
"Classical conditioning is, in simple terms, learning by association. I identify emotions I experience by measuring hormone levels, body temperature and pulse rate, and then comparing results with those associated with certain emotional dispositions."
He understands. She's basically a recycling machine; finding things Noodle has felt and replaying them on her face.
"Right," he nods.
"However, I learn expression by observation. I do not know how to react in a 'socially acceptable' way to many emotions. You and Mr. Murdoc provide education."
"So, you copy us?"
"Somewhat," she agrees.
Basically, they've gone back eight or nine years in reverse. They have a new Noodle now, one that doesn't know a lot, one that will watch them and listen to them and imitate them, learn from them –just as real Noodle had.
But it will be different this time. This time, she will be taller, she'll be capable of killing him within three seconds, and she'll have tits, and she won't fall asleep in his lap or smack his forehead with a noisy kiss when he has a migraine. She'll just sit and stare and store things in her microchip brain.
He doesn't like that. It was bad enough the first time; after spending an afternoon in Murdoc's company, Noodle had called him 'fuckface' for three weeks. He knows a robot will take things even more seriously. It's like, everything is a command. He's frightened of what will happen to him if she continues to listen to Murdoc talk.
Then he asks, thinking of it suddenly, "Do y'get frightened of anyfin?"
"I have yet to experience Fight or Flight response," she shrugs.
"What if you was goin' to die?"
She actually smiled then, great big pull of pink silicone from white plastic. Noodle's huge carved-pumpkin smile is on her face, defiant and lovely as always. He feels sick and content at the sight of it, as if an enormous, painful red balloon has just burst within his chest.
"I cannot die," she says confidently.
He swallows down the gut-stuff rising in his throat. He replies, "Everyfin' dies."
He was going to say all good things must come to an end, but he still didn't know if he completely considered her a good thing.
"No," she insists, "I can be repaired."
"An' I can be repaired with operations n'that. I'll still die."
She raises her eyebrows, crossing her arms. "We are very, very different. You have one chance at survival when wounded, and I have several. You are a far more complex organism."
He imagines her heart ticking away like a little pocket watch. Does she have a heart? She mentioned something about organs before. Maybe she had donated ones. Cloning on the NHS sounds like a wonderful, horrific thing that will more than likely happen in a few years.
"In fact, I think I would enjoy seeing someone attempt to kill me," she says finally. "They would fail, you understand?"
He sits up then, hands balling into fists, pulling up the thin duvet in his fingers. A migraine is fast approaching now; the steady, heady pulsation behind his eyes and in his temples grows and grows to carefully concentrated pinpoints of pain.
Murdoc has granted him one kindness – two bottles full of tiny white capsules, on the table by the door. Over the past week he has been taking so many that his belly churns and his face goes white. Noodle's presence is the only thing that stops him from doing it again.
He staggers towards her, and then hurriedly pops open the lid, dry swallowing two little pills. She watches this, calculation in her face. The way Noodle would look while tuning her guitar.
"This is correct, isn't it?"
He turns to her, a salty lump in his throat. "What is?"
"This. My reactions."
"I – I don't – Nah, I don't get you."
"The way I respond," she explains, and then steps closer to him slowly, the heel of her shoe skittering against the wood of the floor. She looks into his face. "Mr. Murdoc insists I must demonstrate strength and valour in order to be – be –"
He knows the answer. He asks dryly, "Be like Noodle?"
There is a pause. She doesn't reply.
"Well, you ain't like Noodle," he scoffs.
He crosses the room again and sits atop the bed, squeezing his eyes shut against the swollen globs of colour dancing before his face. He hopes that the pills work soon. Then he can sleep.
But he could never sleep with her in the room, he thinks, because she has a Muskrat firing arm in her belly, or whatever it is. She could shoot him. Would. Shoot him right in the dented little head and not feel a thing.
And so he asks her, opening his eyes a slit, "You could kill me now if y'wanted to, couldn' you?"
"Yes."
"Will you?"
"No."
"Why?"
She does not look at him when she speaks, but she pouts slightly. Like Noodle. He watches this with more terror than awe, the gritty medicine residue thick and clotted in his throat. "Affection is another emotion I have identified," is what she says, and he gulps.
"'Sat mean you like me?"
"Yes."
"You, or Noodle?"
She does not answer him, and he knows why. There isn't an answer.
Those lines are blurred.