Turn Your Back on Me
Part 1
I was strumming your sinew. Flesh pinged over steel vertebrae as my finger sketched over stretched skin. A penguin, I was drawing. The feet first, to be cryptic. But you already knew it was a bird at least. As soon as my index had started its outline, you had shouted it out.
“Yes it’s a penguin, Schim. Gave you an easy one, didn’t I.”
“To be fair, you were quite far off. I’m sure penguins aren’t that fat,” said your digital voice, over your shoulder.
“Well I ain’t seen one before, have I, Mister Database. ‘Nother round.”
I held his hatch open for the next try. A door to the person inside that metal husk.
I could touch his skin when we played this game. If only he wasn’t so stupidly good
at it. What could I draw next? What’s abstract? What’s obscure?
I exhaled to start my line. Strands of muscle, pulled taut over wires, rippled, reacting to warm breath. Each inch my finger drew, tendons undulated and parted, gathering their data. This embarrassed Schim when we were kids. I would reach for the latch in queue at school: his synthetic hands would slap mine away. He wanted to open up, to be seen for more than his Carapace. Opening up meant showing himself pink and raw. As we got closer, I was let in. He gave me the maintenance chip. I keep it around my neck.
After playing this game for years, your muscles writhe without shyness. Still, I know you would blush if you could.
“The Fifth Tower of Synch-L!”
“Yeah, got it again mate. Impressive one, haha.”
Nine lines in, and you’ve guessed it: some concrete polylith from across the Terminale. There’s nothing I can draw without you guessing it. Yet I’ll never stop playing.
“Swap.”
“Alright Schim. Hope you’re prepared for my unparalleled intellect.”
I lifted up my top: heat-shielding rubber lined with coolant. I had printed on it a four-footed bird, the logo of my favourite band, to stand out from the rest of the scuttlers. I unclipped my bra and tucked the straps under my arms. Tan-lined, stretch-marked skin became Schim’s canvas. We didn’t care how this might look to engine-runners scurrying past, it’s our tradition.
A haptic plastic fingertip settled between my shoulder blades. Cold. It moved down. One. It moved Right. Two. It curved over my spine. Three. It zig-zagged over ridges on my ribs. Four. Five. Six. “A cactus!!!”
“No…”
Your tracing continued, several lines more. The finger steered to where it started, and lifted off my skin. A digitised sigh signalled defeat.
“Kait, look at your top.”
“Oh. Shit. Four feet.”
You could blame my incompetence, but I know you blamed your hands. Their lack of humanity. A teenager manufactured into a perfect work appliance. Gratitude is expected. For fusing kids into branded Carapaces. A walking advertisement for the industrialists that put him there.
Part 2
I was thrumming your thews. “Never look at me again” I wrote. “They have my face,” I wrote.
I couldn’t let my feelings show in how I sifted through your fibres. I never found out if you could tell.
It started with me getting scuttlers involved, vetting them, setting my roots in every division in our battery. They got others on board, and our operation germinated. You know, Schim, without us The Terminale would crumple.
And I couldn’t wait to tell you
About the mother of four who could swivel every joint in her body 360 degrees.
About the bright yellow bloke in a black trench coat.
About the boys whose carapaces came with a lifetime supply of energy drinks.
That they all feel the same way as us.
The rug pull must be coordinated, so they can’t regain footing. The whole region’s workforce is too vast to be topped up with more bottom wage mercenaries. We are a cyclical network of employment, thousands working in a battery of fictitious capital.
We’ve said our goodbyes several times. To the point we’re not surprised my face, my voice, my eyes, are in your recognition matrix.
But I miss our races, and the games we play in the time we make up between grafts. When we joke about my weak human knees. And the repairs we do on robot bodies that look like yours.
In the end, after it was done, I came to your place with a letter:
“Look the other way.”
Writing on your raw back became the only way we could talk.
I opened your door, I opened your maintenance hatch, I opened up.
Part 3
I was caught up in this gig, sorry.
Getting around has been a problem, but our contact assured us safe passage. Weather was nice half a kilometre above sea level. The reception to his tower was made entirely of repurposed plastic, but all I got to see was the back entrance. We cut through the cloud in a lift, a ride I could’ve taken twenty times.
I took my security guard, after a fresh wrap to cover his yellow. He has human eyes. Eyes that have seen behind the scenes.
Carapaces have become fashionable in the Synch-L district. They love the aesthetic. The plastic, full-body overhauls. The freedom of abandoning one’s humanity. Some wish they were one of the worker kids themselves.
This side of The Terminale, they’re branded face to foot in designer motifs and family crests. By choice. The forms I saw grew less and less humanoid. Until I met the man with the glass skin. His carapace was different. Root systems of capillaries sprawled across clean muscle. Red and healthy. The membrane glinted as it caught blue light, a reminder that this man was bulletproof.
And bald. The price to pay.
Girded holes in his suit showed his organs. His heart ba-dum, ba-dum, badummed as I shook his hand – no change in pace. A deflated bladder sat beneath underworked abs. The fitted viewport suit exaggerated this cavity in his posture, mounding and caving with every word:
“Take the original, untampered with, human form.
Then, you get these form-mimicking carapaces…
The carapaces are remarketed to diverge from their original form.
And this necessitates a final form, lacking all correlation to the original. A pure simulacra.”
That’s what the glass-skin man was warning me about. A point where empathy is no longer our weapon. Where the moneyed have abandoned all relation to us.
The modern mystic. A prophet of profit. I had to bear his privileged teachings before we turned to endorsements. His allyship is purely transactional, wearing us down with metaphor. The man with glass skin has another agenda.
This deal is to help our cause, and we’ve reached a plateau with purely bargaining power. Our next move will have to be drastic. Keep your eyes on the news.
If my body dies, he offered to sponsor my rebuilding. Part of the pension plan. I never stopped thinking of you, Schim, and I know you wouldn’t want to see me fused too. Until I have to make that decision, I’m a wanted woman. The second we meet eyes, they know where I am.
So I urge you again, turn your back on me.
Sam Palin is a writer and game developer whose fiction work unites body horror and architecture, blurring the lines between human and construct. Perpetually on the hunt for obscure indie games, Sam strives to bring underrepresented narrative forms to a wider audience. Graduating in Creative Writing, their freelance writing has been supplemented by working as a model – the ideal conditions to draw inspiration from bizarre contexts and conversations. Their writing is urban, abject, and vehemently political.