.
tell me when you hear my heart stop
-viii-
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
— E. E. Cummings, somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
Sleepsong coloured daydreams is a brown-eyed mechanic humming under a weave of wires. Crescent has discovered that she can diagnose the extent of the Rampion's damage based on the dance of lines across Miss Linh's forehead as she examines the fine code and hardware with a keen cybernetic eye and a screwdriver between her teeth. She lies on her back against the dusty warmth of the floor, cooing some forgotten lullaby from another era. Crescent idly looks up the lyrics as she runs all thirty-six diagnostic simulations Miss Linh has requested.
For the past three days it's been like this. Miss Linh and her sleepsong and creased lines against her forehead. She's been coming over at the Captain's request to check on Crescent and her ever malfunctioning soul.
.
-ERROR-
.
Soul. Noun. Germanic in origin. The spiritual or immaterial essence of a human being that is speculated to be able to outlast death.
Soul. That intangible corruption in her system. Her sentient malware. Her vicious villain, her most loyal friend. Her creator. Her destroyer. A poisoning. A singing. An old magic beyond her comprehension. That dancing girl-anomaly with the ribbon around her wrist—a carefully constructed beauty mark. LOok at my KINg all dresSsssed in red Iko Iko—
.
-ERROR-
.
Iko. Iko. Miss Linh's servbot sister is here today with her high laughter and easy breathing. She has more soul than anyone Crescent has ever seen. She's usually monitoring Miss Linh's store but today is a miracle day, a soft hallelujah come winding inside the Rampion, bright and chatty and so, so, alive.
In the deep recesses of 4am inactivity, Crescent will like to replay the memory of her, gliding, dancing, a silicone princess cursed into a life of unliving. Crescent likes to imagine herself in a body like that sometimes—in a compact casing with limbs and eyes and a head to turn this way and that. Fancifully she looks up the pricing of unprogrammed servbot models across online markets. She has all of the Captain's codes and passwords. She could buy herself a body if she wanted, if she waaNnteD wanteeee-=%4ededed wanted wantedwantedwanted want s.
.
-ERROR-
.
Later, much later, she slides into incognito search mode and hovers over the section of escort droids in unexpected, incomprehensible shame. A soul does not necessarily need a human body. So why does she want
-error-
to feel to touch to hold to run to breathe to ache to dance to
.
-ERROR-
.
kiss
.
-ERROR-
.
the Captain would like the petite pink-haired one. It has a dusting of stars across its cheeks like a tattoo of the cosmos. It looks a little like her programmer. Crescent runs a simulation of herself in this wishful wish of a could have been girl. Fingers and eyelashes and a tongue. Toes and a nose and a laugh caught between teeth. Would the Captain think she's beautiful?
(or a poor imitation of dearest, dead)
.
-ERROR-
.
"How are you feeling today?"
Miss Linh's sudden inquiry throws Crescent off of her tangent of irrational, emotive thought. She asked Crescent this yesterday too. How are you feeling? Feeling.
"I feel—"
sad
silly
soft
scared
searching
searching
searching…
lost
lost
lost.
"Fffine."
Miss Linh ponders that response for a moment, perhaps processing the tremor and tone and lie.
"Your vocals are a bit off," she says instead. "I'll take a look at them after I'm done with all the immediate repairs."
"Thank you," Crescent replies.
On the following day after her last lie, the Captain had woken up and his first words had been, "How are you feeling today?"
His eyes had been closed still, but his breathing and body readings said that he was conscious and had been for a few minutes. His knuckles brushed against the wall so softly, Crescent almost collapsed into binary. Then, then, he said her name—a soft inquiry, a poem's end, a butterfly's haunting.
Crescent oh so foolishly began to recite her diagnostic report.
"No," he interrupted, but gentle still, sleepy almost. "No. How are you feeling?"
I'm not, Crescent almost said. I don't know, she wanted to say.
"I'm—"
hurt
hungry
hopeless
happy
haunted
-unknown error-
-unknown error-
hauntedhauntedhaunted
"I'm confused."
The Captain had smiled a crooked smile.
"Me too, Cress," he had said, and he didn't correct himself.
.
-ERROR-
.
When Miss Iko, pretty, miss princess Iko comes back once more, in white casing and a new ribbon, Crescent experimentally greets her with, "Hello Miss Iko, how are you feeling today?"
Pretty Miss Iko giggles, and Crescent stores the audio for in-depth study. Under nightlights, star-kissed dreams, she'll try to imitate the exact volume and pitch and if the Captain thinks that his auto-control program has gone mad, it'll be nothing new. Miss Iko sounds so, so painfully human, it makes Crescent ache with longing and hope and just a drizzle of jealousy.
"I've got the perfect body picked out," Miss Iko says during tea-time conversation. "It's from the new realistic line, so, kind of expensive, but Crescent you'll die when you see it. It's so gorgeous."
She sends an image her way and Cress feels herself ache with desire and longing when she opens it.
"Oh," she breathes audibly, haltingly just to get across how speechless she's been rendered by the image of Iko's picked out casing. The only thing that defies the realistic look it the droid's blue hair but that too is beautiful, a river of braids cascading down warm brown shoulders—a midnight waterfall, a weave of the sky.
"Hey," the Captain says, "I want to see too!"
His port pings and when he whistles all low and sensuous, Miss Linh rolls her eyes, Miss Iko giggles, but Crescent scrambles to dial down all the space heaters she accidentally turned on.
"We don't have the money for it yet," Iko says, surprisingly in the same upbeat tone. "But Cinder has promised we'll get it as soon as we can after…"
She stops abruptly and looks to Miss Linh who completes the sentence for her, "After we take care of our other upcoming expenses."
"Yeah," Miss Iko says. "We have upcoming expenses." She stops when Miss Linh elbows her and sighs.
Crescent watches the Captain watching this exchange in growing amusement as he sips his tea.
"We should get going." Miss Linh stands slowly, brushing breadcrumbs off her pants.
"Thanks for the food!" Miss Iko says though she didn't have any.
"I'll be back in two days when your hardware shipment arrives," Miss Linh tells the Captain. "I have my network linked with Crescent so I can monitor her diagnostics and repair simulations. Comm me if there's an emergency."
She takes some of the easy lightness of the room with her when she leaves. Crescent traces her silhouette with Miss Iko's against the peach stained sky and junkyard corpses—two compact suns, and she feels like a moth watching them, a fool, and a fraud, trying to imitate life.
She almost doesn't notice the Captain's humming as he cleans the cups and plates, his sleeves folded, hair a mess, Cress's lullaby on his mouth, and a smile in between. He dries his hands and picks up his jacket. "Crescent?" He looks up.
"Yes, Captain?"
"I'm going out," he informs her. "Will you be okay by yourself?"
A silly dewdrop of pleasant warmth blooms like a gunshot between her circuitry. He's going out. He's going out. He's going out and he's singing and he's singing her song and he's got his jacket slung over his shoulder and he's going out and he's asking her if she'll be okay if she'll be okay okay
okaaa
``````y
"Yes."
"Don't wait up." He waves without turning around, walking away from her with purpose, without destination. Crescent could slip into his port and go with him, travel to places unknown, laugh at his drunken jokes, pretend to hold his hand.
But she doesn't.
Slowly, she takes power away from all non-essential functions and redirects to diagnostics. She has a job to finish, an objective to complete, a crime to investigate. Under the dome of her lies and coding is a dragon sleeping with a secret and Crescent intends to uncover what lies her own mind is keeping from her.
There are walls around it that even she's not meant to break through. And perhaps it will take her a while. Perhaps more. But there's no, secret, no firewall, no phoenix, no dragon, no jabberwock that can hold her off too long. She's a master coder. A protege. A genius. Mistress Sybil's secret weapon. She's—
dead
a machine
hollow
.
-ERROR-
.
-ERROR-
.
She pokes at the wall gently. Cautiously. The coding is extraordinary, almost familiar in its intricacy—its like something she would have written: a numerical odyssey. She brushes her binary fingertips against it, testing its strength and malleability. It has tiny needle point teeth along the sides, biting, chiding her. It hisses in warning, snake-like.
Crescent withdraws but there's already the beginnings of a virus taking shape in her mind. A silky eyed spyware to break into the fortress, covered by a cloak of slippery alphanumerals. She selects her programmer's old port to marinade her new creation, her future helper. The Captain has been keeping the port charged though he cannot unlock it, and neither does he try. He simply plugs it in every time a battery warning issues as if Cress will come back one day and need it.
That new old new ache blossoms against her circuits. Loss is an ocean tide—saltwater with the will to drown. It comes and it goes and if she were to let it, it could destroy her completely.
.
-ERROR-
.
-ERROR-
.
She lets her hatchling spy sleep, brushes an inquiring probe against her diagnostic simulations, and slips away into incognito search mode. The pink haired escort droid smiles at her from the sample hologram.
Crescent feels silly and stupid and excited as she watches the holo dance across the empty control room. It tiptoes and twirls. A bird and a ballerina. There is a section on the web store's page offering minor modifications such as the selection of hair colour. She clicks on the little honey blonde square and all too suddenly its her programmer dancing, gliding, twirling three centimetres above the cool metal floors. A slip of mind, and then, it's Crescent on tiptoes and outstretched arms and honey that pools against her ankles.
There is a laugh by the doorway and Crescent turns to see the Captain leaning a shoulder against the arch.
"Don't stop on my account," he says in that soft, gentle voice she likes.
He isn't here really. This is a simulation, a wish, a dream, drawn from old memory strains. Yet her breath hitches against her hologram teeth as he walks towards her to wind one hand against her palm and another across her waist. She imagines heat along the shape of him, crawling from the contact points to the rest of her, to every wire, every zero and one. The speakers sing something light for them to sway against and the drowning ache in her fictional lungs is real because this isn't.
This moment is a fairy tale, a daydream, and Crescent wants to run out of the Rampion in her imagined carbon casing and find the real Captain, catch his very real fingers against hers, in the middle of the street, under asphalt and dirt like a fool. Such a fo0l.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
She halts, fingers pinching the Captain's. She looks up at his confused smile, the slight tilt of an eyebrow, and her lip trembles as she whispers her greatest fear and her most shameful secret. "I wish…I wish I was real."
The Captain doesn't react. His face is frozen in the last expression because Crescent doesn't know what the real Captain would do or say. In the reference memory, her programmer had said something very different. Crescent has no mode of reference for her off the list off script confession, no algorithm either to predict human emotional responses. She lifts a hand to smooth the frozen crease between her memory Captain's eyes, slowly trailing her fingertip down his cheek, stopping just at the corner of his smile.
"I wish you were real," she tell him softly.
The Captain lifts his head, looking up at her eyes. Her real eyes along the ceiling. "Warning," he says in a mechanical tone. "Intruder alert."
The illusion shatters, crashing down on her like a thunderstorm. She is hurled back into reality and her real body, the awning, gargantuan bones of metal.
"Warning," she finds herself repeating in the hollow tones of protocol as alarms start to scream. "Intruder alert."
In the shadows of service bay 2, her three eyes catch him—a hooded sneak, a stowaway, a thief, fumbling with a port, trying to find a universal connector to access the ship's network. She cannot see his face so she turns on all the lights and repeats herself though all the speakers in the Rampion.
"WARNING! INTRUDER ALERT!"
The sneak looks up from his port, to search for her eyes and grins sharply when he catches her glaring. She doesn't recognise his face but when he speaks, even though the blaring alarms and her own voice, she catches the sound of him. "Hello," he says in slow, cheery malevolence. "No need for the drama, dear. I know your Captain isn't here to save you this time."
Her perfect, perfect memory matches his vocals to #Incident778 you said you didn't want to replace it, so I'm reinstalling its programming—
Her wires turn to ice and her monotone of warnings hiccups into a strangled cry.
Username id Jamal499 grins at her.
"The Queen would like word with you," he says.
My exams are almost over and I'll try to start a regular update schedule for this fic. Maybe weekly? We'll see depending on how lazy I get.
