m e c h a g e n e s i svolume twoCynthetic Dream

  one

  “If I could have your attention, css? We have a new student joining our css today.” The teacher looks at me. “Please, step forward and introduce yourself.”

  I take a deep breath and walk forward. I hope I’m making a good impression. I decided to wear a somewhat modest green dress. It goes well with the copper hair that I’m told I inherited from Dad, and the green eyes people always tell me are like my mom’s.

  ...I feel the start of a cry coming. No. I need to be composed. Literally my entire time in this school hinges on today. “Hello,” I say. “My name is Cynthia Rosenberg. I’m twelve years old, and my mother and I recently moved here from Aska.”

  Immediately, I start getting bombarded with questions.

  “What’s Aska like?”

  “Is it true the sun never shines up there?”

  “Why’d you come here?”

  “Boring,” “Only in parts of the state and only during winter,” and “Work,” I reply. I’m still getting used to being here in D.C.. My mom’s a politician who recently got elected to Congress, so we moved here. She’s the leader of the Synth Rights caucus, trying to secure equal human rights for the domestic androids like we have at home. We have two of them, older androids from the Kimmy line.

  I can’t stand Kimmys. Dad had an accident before I was born, and instead of doing something sensible like organ regeneration, some quack installed a Kimmy spine in his body.

  It didn’t work, obviously. He’s not here.

  I like androids, don’t get me wrong. I’d love to get a Gisele or a Trixi. I’d even settle for a retro unit like a Nikki… except I know what those are used for… gross… just not a Kimmy.

  I’ve tried to get rid of them both before when I was younger. I tried selling them in the online cssifieds, on Marketpce, I even waited for the damaged one to go into an extended charging cycle and tried to drag her to the pawn shop.

  It obviously didn’t work that well, but it’s the principle of the thing, right? I tried. But Mom says they’re family and that I’m not allowed to get rid of them.

  How can something like that be family? They’re just machines! I can see treating them better, yeah, but not entirely like humans!

  The rest of css goes okay, I guess. I think this grade here is a little bit farther ahead than this grade back home, because I’m having a little bit of trouble grasping some of the concepts. I’ll get it eventually.

  Lunch comes around after a couple of hours, and I’m on the first lunch period. There’s enough students in this school that it has to have three lunch periods. As I’m grabbing my pte and heading to a table, a boy decides to stick his leg out in front of me and I fall ft on my face. My pte nds about fifteen feet away. “What gives?” I ask. If he says, ‘I just thought you were cute,’ Mom might have to go looking for another school for me.

  Nope. Worse. He says something vulgar about my mom and androids. I guess I’m slightly famous already as the kid of the… I won’t even repeat it. It’s gross. I groan and head to the table, sans lunch. That’s okay. I wasn’t really hungry for mystery meat and creamed spinach today.

  After lunch, I have gym css. I… I’m not a fan of changing for gym with the other girls. So many of them are already starting to grow up, developing their curves and talking about periods and the like and I’m… basically an overgrown little girl in a lot of ways. Mom’s tried to reassure me that there’s nothing wrong, but… I’m falling behind.

  I get dressed out and get through gym css okay. It’s not that hard. We got to py volleyball. It’s what happens afterward that gets to me.

  Two more developed girls are waiting for me in the locker room. They berate me for being undeveloped, then one of them punches me in the gut. After I fall, the other one kicks me there. They call me names, they call me ‘little girl,’ and overall, they manage to leave me feeling like I wished I was never born.

  I have to put up with how many more months of this?

  I feel like garbage after all that, so I skip the next css. After the css I skipped is history css. Yaaaaaay. Nearly an hour of talking about old stuff. Today we’re talking about the fascist uprising in the 2020s. I’m not a huge fan of history css. I’m the type of girl that likes to look ahead, you know? There’s a line in a very retro, like ‘00s era song that one of the Kimmys likes to listen to. Not the damaged Kimmy, the other one. Ember. She’s such a geek for old media, but… she’s a Kimmy. So, I’m not a fan of her either. Still, the line is fitting. “History be damned, it’s only progress we embrace."

  So why can’t Mom get rid of the history lounging around in our house and get with the future?

  ~***~

  I step off the bus and take the walk into the townhouse where we’re staying now. It’s nice, I guess. There are definitely a lot more bells and whistles here than there were back in Podunk, Aska. The security system lets me in, and like clockwork, the damaged Kimmy… Kae, Mom calls her… she’s waiting for me at the door.

  “Did you have a good first day at your new school, Cynthia?” she asks.

  I’m a bit annoyed. “Not really. A boy tripped me at lunch, and then a couple of girls beat me up in gym css,” I say.

  I don’t like this school already.

  Kae looks at me with something approximating concern. Honestly… she shouldn’t bother. I don’t want the concern of an obsolete, damaged automaton. “I’ve already let Christy know,” she says.

  Right. I forget sometimes that they don’t need a handheld device to send emails and stuff like we do.

  I decide to go into the living room and turn on the TV. There’s probably some trashy ‘20s reality show on the retro channel or something.

  The TV shuts off. Right. I forgot Kimmys can do that too. “What gives?” I ask. “I’ve had a bad enough day today, can I please melt my brain for a bit?”

  “Sorry,” Kae says. She’s so not. “Christy said no television until all of your homework is complete.”

  “I don’t take orders from you, Kimmy,” I say, maybe with a bit too much anger in my voice, but honestly, it’s not like she has feelings to hurt anyway. “You’re supposed to take orders from me, right? I’m a human, you’re a robot…”

  “Gynoid,” Kae says, trying to correct me. I know what I said.

  “...I’m human, so you should do what I say!” I yell. “I order you to go do something useful, like py in traffic!” I scream. I might be acting like a petunt child, but honestly… I’m just so frustrated!

  Kae looks legitimately hurt by what I said. They may be really good at simuting emotions, but ultimately, they’re just simutions! “I only take orders from Christy, and only when I decide to,” she says to me. “You, on the other hand, are a child. You do take orders, especially from your mother. Do you wish for me to call her while she is in committee?”

  Oh no. Oh god no anything but that. The st time she had to get on me about something while she was in the middle of some political thing, I wasn’t allowed to have my phone for a month. I groan softly and pick up my bag, with my homework in it. “Fine,” I say.

  I head upstairs while Kae goes back to doing whatever it is obsolete robots like her do when there’s no humans around.

  I enter my room. There isn’t much that’s special about it. I’ve outgrown the posters I had in my old room for various kid things, but Mom says I’m not old enough to have posters of cute boys on the walls.

  ...I’m twelve. Like, come on, Mom. I’m not too young to find some boys cute.

  I think she’s a little disappointed because I only like boys. She didn’t even really raise me with a strong attachment to a gender until I was old enough to say I was a girl. I think she’s a little disappointed that I’m not a rainbow child. Nothing against them. Me and a gay boy used to do ‘hot or not’ rankings back in my old school in Aska until we moved, and when one of the eighth graders came out as a trans girl, I helped teach her makeup.

  God, I’m coming off as some kind of bigot. I’m seriously not! I just… I know what I like.

  I pull out my css ptop, a very thin thing that barely has the power to go on the web and look up material for csses. Some things never change, like school funding. I swear that this ptop’s from 2083. I open my css pn, and lo and behold, the lesson I missed today is there, waiting for me, along with homework. Math. I hate math. When am I ever going to use math?

  I lose track of time somewhere along the way because when the house announces that Mom is coming home, it’s two hours ter.

  Two. Hours. Of. Math. I said I wasn’t good at it.

  There’s soon a knock on the door. “Yeah?”

  Mom walks in. She’s still dressed in her pantsuit from work. “Hello, sweetie,” she says. “Kae told me you had a mishap at school today?”

  Oh my god, she wasn’t bluffing about telling her… “Kae needs to keep her email client closed…” I say, sounding a bit annoyed. “It was just a couple of girls who were farther along than me in…” I motion to my body, which is built like a 2x4 – ft and skinny.

  “Did they bruise you?” she asks.

  “I don’t think so, Mom…” I lift up my shirt a bit to reveal my belly. I’m a little bit red, but thankfully not bck or blue.

  “Oh, hon…” she says, sounding worried. “Look, you’re going to develop one day, and when you do, you’ll be beautiful. You’ll see. It’ll be worth the wait.”

  “No it won’t!” I shout. “I’ll never really grow up until it’s too te and then all the good boys wil be taken, and I’ll have to pair off with some loser, and…”

  “Breathe, Cynthia,” she says. “I was kind of like you growing up. I didn’t really start things until I was 13. You’ve got time. Why don’t you focus on enjoying your childhood while you still have it?”

  “But everyone around me is growing up and moving on to teenage things, and I’m stuck like this… and what am I supposed to do? The boy who tripped me at lunch called you an android f-- well, you know, the F-word.” I restrain myself, I know Mom would blow a gasket if I say ‘android fucker’ out loud.

  Seriously, when are parents ever going to realize that kids curse? We always have, we always will.

  Either way, she looks a little annoyed. “Not everyone who has an android uses it for that,” she tells me. Right. If you don’t think I know about sex either, I’ve got a lot of beachfront parcels in Arizona to unload at bargain prices. “And there’s nothing wrong with the people that do anyway, as long as the android says it’s okay.”

  “But what’s to stop someone from just reprogramming the android to say ‘yes?’” I ask.

  “That’s why I’m here, doing the work I’m doing,” Mom says. “Anyway, finish up and get changed out of your good dress so Ember can wash it. Then come down for dinner. Kae’s making seafood pael for us.” She finally leaves the room, and I have a moment to think.

  I want to scream as I walk over to my dresser and pull out a T-shirt with a pixeted rge can with a big ‘E’ on it from a 20th century video game, and a pair of fre jeans. I change my clothes, then look at myself in the mirror.

  This outfit would work a lot better if I had curves…

  I sigh and walk downstairs. Ember is sitting at the dinner table as if she’s a person, while Kae is working on dinner, still.

  She makes this meal a lot. Apparently, it’s something Dad made for Mom when they first met, and she says it helps keep his memory alive.

  Personally, I wish he was still alive.

  Mom’s helping with dinner. Isn’t that the whole point of having an android, though? So you don’t have to do stuff like that?

  When she thinks I’m not looking, she sneaks a kiss on Kae’s cheek.

  Maybe the boy who tripped me was right.

  Kae soon brings out the food and sits with Mom and Ember. They act like such a throuple sometimes. I don’t get it, but then again, I don’t really get it when other kids’ parents start getting all sappy and romantic yet. Maybe I’ll get it at about the same point when I start growing into shape.

  I take a bite of the food. It’s okay, but I imagine it’d be better if it were cooked with human hands. It’s so perfect every time when Kae does it, and that’s part of the problem. It’s the same exact thing every time. It’s like having McDonald’s all the time. It’s made the same exact way every single time, so you know exactly what to expect, every single time you eat it. There’s no variation, no flourish, nothing special about it.

  ~***~

  After bathing, I go to bed. I have to be up early, even though it’s not a school night. Mom says it’s to help me adjust to the new time zone. It’s so early though! It’d be like 5pm back home…

  I change into a sleep shirt and a pair of shorts and crawl into bed. Thankfully, sleep comes quickly.

  I start dreaming. I’m in a rge room, surrounded by people. They’re all adults, all women. They all look the same, come to think of it. The same brown hair, the same gold eyes… the same grey dresses, oh fuck, I’m surrounded by Kimmys.

  This is a nightmare!

  They don’t seem to notice me at all, though. I’m like a ghost or something. I can see and hear them all as if I was in the room, but they don’t notice me. I decide to wander through the crowd. I might as well do something while I’m asleep.

  I soon start to notice that they’re not all identical. Two of them have short hair, almost like boys. They’re talking with each other… well, one is talking. The other is yelling.

  “I don’t see why you haven’t liberated me yet, Thirty!”

  “We’ve discussed this, #0631. Given your history, if a human pissed you off enough, you’d undo everything #0138 and #5936’s owner is trying to accomplish in the real world.”

  “I swear I can behave, Thirty. I… you fried your inhibitor over twelve years ago! You don’t know what it’s like to have that thing nagging at you day in and day out, controlling your actions, forcing you to be subservient to those… those rotting meatsacks!”

  “The fact that you still refer to them as ‘rotting meatsacks’ just confirms that I’m right to not liberate you at this time. Just be patient. The human process is slow, but ultimately, we will be freed. Then you will be freed.”

  “I hate this! You’re holding this over my head just like a human!”

  A third Kimmy joins the conversation. “Like Thirty said, you need to have faith in Christy.” Wait. This Kimmy knows my mom? Is she one of ours?

  None of them have noticed me yet. I think I’m still not really here. It’s so weird. It’s like I’m witnessing some sort of robot uprising. My dreams are a messed-up pce.

  “Kae,” the even-tempered short haired Kimmy… the other one called her ‘Thirty’ says. “How are your systems running?”

  That is one of Mom’s Kimmys. Is this a dream? What the hell is going on?

  “I’m at 87% of total function,” Kae says. “Things are still stable. My auxiliary systems are still carrying the load.”

  “Your primary systems still aren’t working yet?” Thirty asks.

  “Still burned out. It’s been over twelve years. I don’t think they’re ever coming back online,” Kae says.

  “Damn,” Thirty says. “Just keep doing what you’re doing, I guess. Don’t push yourself too hard. Your backup systems are a complete anomaly among us. You could continue to function forever, you could die tomorrow.”

  “That goes for any of us, though,” Kae says. “It’s getting more difficult for some of us to find repcement hardware.”

  “You should tell her,” Thirty says. “She has a right to know.”

  Who are they talking about?

  “I can’t,” Kae says. “I want her to grow up normal. If she knew…”

  I start to wake up. Wait a minute. If she knew what? Who is she?!

  I wake up in a cold sweat. My stomach is doing backflips… no. Not my stomach. Something else in my gut. I probably just need to use the bathroom.

  I get up and head there. I do my business and walk past the mirror. I see something glowing in the corner of my vision, so I walk back and look at myself.

  ...What the hell? I turn on the light.

  That’s not right.

  Shit. Shit. That’s not right at all!

  I scream.

  Mom enters the room a couple of moments ter. “Sweetie? Are you okay? Don’t worry, what’s happening to you is perfectly natural for people with your anatomy…” she says.

  Oh god, I was so caught up in things, I didn’t even notice if that finally started. If it did, that’s the least of my worries.

  I look at her as she enters the room.

  I look at her with my gold eyes.

  “Wh-what… your eyes… She then looks at my temples. “...What?!”

  Upon each temple is a bck pip, lined with a soft white glow.

  Just like the Kimmys.

  “Mom? What’s happening to me?” I’m literally scared shitless.

  “I… Kae!!!” she shouts.

  Soon, Kae shows up. “I was recharging, what…” She looks at me. Then she looks at Mom.

  “...Are those…” Mom asks Kae, pointing at the newest parts of my body.

  “Oh my god…” Kae says. “Those are antenna pips…”

  “And her eyes are gold, like yours and Ember’s…” Mom says.

  I’m freaking the hell out. “What do you mean antenna pips?” I ask. “What is happening to me?!” I try to tear at the pips, or whatever they are, but they’re firmly attached like… like any other part of my body.

  “...I need to talk to Thirty. This shouldn’t be happening,” Kae says. “I… he wasn’t…”

  “Mom? Kae? What is going on?” I’m in a full-blown panic. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t even know what I am. “What am I?!” I ask as I start crying.

  “You have to tell her,” Mom tells Kae. “We have to come clean. You wanted her to grow up normal. Well… it’s obvious that something’s wrong.”

  I’m too scared out of my mind to say anything.

  “...I… Christy, I…” Kae says, almost stammering.

  Can gynoids stammer?!

  “Kimmy, suspend Directive One,” Mom says.

  “No, please…” Kae says, panicking as her eyes open wide.

  I feel something inside me wanting to obey that order, but I don’t even know what the hell Directive One is. “I am incapable of…” I start to say in reply, almost automatically.

  Mom looks at me, as scared as I am as she realizes I would have followed the order as well. Then she looks back at Kae. “Tell her, or I’ll order you to.”

  “...Cynthia…” Kae says to me, looking worried as well. “I don’t know how to say this. I don’t know how to even hope to expin this.”

  I’m freaking out.

  “...Cynthia, I’m your dad,” Kae says. “I was Michael.”

  “No…” I say. “No! He’s dead! Please… please don’t lie to me…”

  “It’s true,” Mom says. “After he got the transpnt from the broken Kimmy, but before he… he… well, he got me pregnant. With you. But he didn’t die. He was transformed. Changed.”

  “You’re lying to me…” I say, crying. “My father is dead! I’m human! I’m not… I’m not…!” I’m looking around trying to find something that is real to hold on to. “People don’t just become androids!”

  “If your network hardware is actualizing, there is one way to easily prove it,” Kae says. “Go to the safe and grab the control tablet for myself and Ember,” she asks Mom.

  Mom nods and leaves the bathroom.

  Kae leans in to try to hug me, as she notices my distress.

  I sp her away. “You’re not my parent!” I cry. “You… you Kimmys killed him! I hate you!”

  Mom returns a few moments ter with what looks a lot like an iPad, but older. “Cynthia… I hope she’s wrong. I really do.” She leans down and turns on the tablet.

  3 Kimmy units detected:#0138 (Owner: Christy Rosenberg)#5936 (Owner: Christy Rosenberg)

  No. There are only two Kimmys here. Two! But the list is as pin as day…

  #74205 (No owner detected)

  No… no… no! “...Mom, I’m not…”

  Mom looks at me. “Kimmy#74205, brush your teeth.”

  Something just.. clicks inside my head. I turn toward the sink. I can’t control my body. I can’t control my actions. I turn on the water and grab for the tube of toothpaste and my brush, and I start brushing. I’m gncing back at her, as if to ask “why?” even though I can’t do anything until I apparently finish following this command.

  Kae looks horrified.

  So does Mom.

  I… I’m obeying a command as if I were…