Small Mercies

Mia was used to the mechanical whirl of the machines that kept her human heart beating. It was easy to sink into the rhythmic pump and gurgle from the grayish tubes suctioned to her papery skin. She was not, however, used to the itchiness that circled the contraption on her chest.

It was a small price to pay to live for just a little bit longer.

“Ma?” Her daughter’s voice floated through the hazy air. Mia lifted her head and her lashes fluttered as she focused on her only child.

“Yes, dear?” Mia rasped, a lifetime of cigarettes and three months on a ventilator making her throat scratchy and raw.

Sylvia looked nothing like her mother. Her skin was golden-brown, onyx hair thick with coils that puffed around her head like a cloud. Even her eyes were warm coffee-brown as opposed to Mia’s slate gray. But what really set her apart was the paneling on the side of her neck, polished so finely that when Sylvia bent down to kiss Mia’s cheek, she saw her sickly reflection gazing back at her.

“How are you feeling today?” Sylvia popped the metal joints in her fingers.

“Have you found her yet?” Mia asked, ignoring her question. Sylvia knew how she was feeling, she had her mother’s vitals fed right into her brain through the wireless Cloud that all of Sylvia’s kind were attached to.

Sylvia frowned, realistic wrinkles crinkling at the corners of her mouth. “Soon,” Sylvia lied.

Mia’s head flopped back against her pillows. She scratched feebly at the tube at her chest. “Please,” she pleaded. Sylvia’s cool fingers wrapped around hers and removed them from where she attempted to pull her own plug.

“It’s not natural,” Sylvia breathed.

“Then let me die,” Mia hissed through clenched teeth.

Sylvia’s lip quivered. Mia wondered for a moment if her strange robot daughter was about to cry.

“Give me three days, Ma,” Sylvia relented after a moment of tense silence.

They both knew that Mia would not kill herself before she said goodbye. This was the third time they’d had this conversation this week.

- - -

Two weeks later, the door of Mia’s room creaked open, a rapid knocking waking Mia up from her dozing. She never slept fully anymore, just drifted between half-death and reality.

“Wow, you’ve gotten old,” an achingly familiar voice said.

Mia struggled to sit up, her fingers scrambling for the remote that controlled her bed.

“Is it really you?” Mia gasped, the remote sliding out of her fingers and off the side of her bed. She hadn’t heard that voice in over seventy years.

The ice-cold touch of metal brushed against her palm as her remote was slid between her grasping fingers. Mia rapidly pressed the incline button and the bed rumbled. The gears clinked into place and lifted her into a sitting position.

Kit looked the same as she did when Mia had met her in high school.

“I didn’t think you remembered me,” Kit said, a sad smile on her beautiful face.

Mia’s chest constricted around a sob, the tube pressing uncomfortably against her skin as her shoulders shrank inward, trying to hold herself together. “How could I not?”

Now that Mia was seeing her for the first time in seventy years, she realized she’d missed crucial details when she’d made Sylvia. Kit’s chin was sharper, her cheeks rounder, her hair was more brown than black, her skin deeper than Sylvia’s.

Kit sat slowly on the edge of Mia’s bed and reached out, lacing their fingers together. Almost her entire body from the neck down was metal wrapped with synthetic skin. Her right eye was bionic, jet-black with a pupil of pure gold, swiveling and all-seeing. The skin puckered strangely around the new eye, it was still roughly patched, even after all the years of technological advances to robot-human hybrids.

“When did I last see you? ‘34?” Mia asked.

Kit’s smile dropped and she nodded. “Right before I was deployed to Eurasia.” Her real eye clouded with memory before she shook her head to clear it. The gears in her neck whirred softly under her skin, tired after many years of holding her together.

“I never stopped loving you, Kit,” Mia said, squeezing the cool fingers between hers, hoping that Kit could feel it.

Kit sighed. “I know. You modeled your daughter after me. Does anyone know?”

Mia shook her head. “Only Sylvia. Marshall,” Mia’s voice faltered. She didn’t want to talk about her long-dead husband. “Why didn’t you come find me? I tried so many times, but you always rejected my letters and notes.”

A pain Mia thought she had long buried surfaced. It was a cruel pain. It lodged in her throat and made it impossible to swallow the excess saliva brewing in her mouth. It had made its home in her heart long ago, sunken deeply into the crevices of her heart, waiting for the right moment to rise. Like a corpse waiting for the methane gas to lift it from the dark depths of a swampy pond.

“You know why, Mia,” Kit whispered. “They would’ve shut me down had they known I remained in intimate contact with a human woman.”

Mia always knew that was the answer. How many times had she cursed her father for sending Kit away in the first place? How many times had she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills just to wake up under sickly fluorescent lights her stomach bandaged tight?

Her privilege had kept her human in a dying world.

First, they’d sent Kit away because she was homosexual.

Then the world changed, and Mia could’ve lived her dream.

But Kit was no longer human.

And metal beasts could not be with their human masters.

Mia was expected to carry on a lineage of humans to rule over their robotic slaves.

“I never stopped loving you,” Mia repeated again.

Kit bit the inside of her cheek. “I know.”

“Kit, I’m dying,” Mia said, scratching at the tube with her free hand. The itching intensified.

Kit nodded. “I know.”

“Will you say something other than that, please?”

Kit sighed. “I don’t know what to say, Mia. They carved out every part of me that loved you. They made me into a warrior.” Kit clenched her other fist, the muscles of her forearm rippling. Scars crisscrossed over her synthetic skin.

“So, you don’t remember?” Mia closed her eyes. She didn’t want it to be true.

“I remembered, but it is like a dream. I can’t really remember what it was like.” Kit’s fingers slid out of Mia’s.

“But you came to see me anyway,” Mia breathed. The hopeful candle that burned whenever she thought of Kit flickered to life again. In the dampened cavern of her ribs and lungs, it had nearly extinguished.

“I did. How could I say no to someone’s dying wish?”

Mia didn’t know what to say. Kit was not the same anymore, just a shell of the vibrant girl she’d loved for so long. “Do you wish things were different?” Mia asked, even though she knew the answer would break her heart.

Kit looked at her, her bionic eye spinning before it settled on her. It was probably taking her vitals, her metrics, analyzing every part of her mortal body. “I wish I remembered in the way that you do. I wish it wasn’t like this.” Kit reached up and touched her cheek, she dragged her nails against the puckered skin until it ripped and showed the sleek chrome beneath.

“Are you tired?” Mia rasped.

Kit said nothing.

“I am. I’m tired of not living the way I want. I’m tired of being human.”

Kit smiled sadly.

“Will you lay with me? Just one last time?” Mia said.

Kit sucked in a deep breath. Instead of answering, she kicked off her boots and crawled up the bed to lay beside her. With gentle hands, she lifted Mia and cradled her fragile, small human body against her chest.

Mia buried her face in Kit’s neck. Her skin was cool, and she didn’t smell like sweet citrus or wood shavings. It was nothing like she’d wanted it to be. Her fingers reached up, clawing at the gray tube keeping her heart beating.

“I love you,” Mia whispered.

“You love seventeen-year-old Kit,” she whispered back into Mia’s thinning hair, her breath brushing against the shell of her ear.

Mia thought of that girl. She thought of passionate glances exchanged secretly. Long nights under the stars in the back of Kit’s beat-up truck. Hushed conversations about the state of the world and what would become of them.

“You said that not even death could sever our love,” Mia whispered through hiccupped sobs.

Kit’s fingers curled against her back. “Something worse than death did.”

Mia choked on the grief she’d been swallowing for seventy years and tugged the grayish tube from her chest.

The pain was a drop in the bucket.

With a muffled cry, Mia’s human heart faltered out of beat, stuttered, and tried again.

Failed.

Kit blinked.

22:04. Exact time of death. Her daughter would want to know.

Already the worm lodged in the spinal cord of synthetic neurons and wires was reporting the death of Mia Valentina Winchester. The last of the human heirs that gave birth to the metallic uprising.

Kit could not weep; she was physically incapable.

She untangled her limbs from the dead Mia and stood, staring over the body of her high school sweetheart. For a brief second, Kit considered grabbing the back of her neck and ripping out the cord that kept her alive.

Before her arm could even move, a monotone female voice droned in her ear. “Attempted suicide is an offense of the highest order. Continue and another thousand years will be added to your contract, K130.”

An electric shock ran through her like it always did when she thought too deeply of the past, of Mia. The memories hazed, blurred, grayed. She’d looked too long at them, thought too hard of her former human lover.

One of the small mercies the cruel world gave her.