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Alayna sat up the next morning, her eyes somewhat green, matching her skin tone. She looked sick.
“The bots are reassembling, aren’t they?” Abe asked her, sitting beside her on her leaf-bed. “That’s why your eyes are green, now, the amber of the machinery and the blue of your eyes.”
“You hate me, don’t you?”
Abe yawned. For the rest of the night, he and Blake, along with invisible Umezawa, had discussed Alayna’s drug use. Before he answered Alayna, he called to mind the conversation.
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“I almost lost a son over it,” said Blake, “not too long ago. A few years ago. His mother (my wife) and I were a little too intense, as parents I mean. Well, with each other, too. We were modeling for him, we came to find out.”
“Did he die?” Abe asked.
Blake sighed. “It’s late, isn’t it? I said I almost lost him, so, no.”
“Oh.”
Umezawa giggled.
“Ume,” Abe said, furrowing his brow, “how did you know something was wrong with her?”
Umezawa said nothing.
“Why were you in there?” Abe pressed.
“Take it easy, Abe,” Blake said.
Take it easy, Stoic. Remember the life dream, how the Tree Lord and his coterie took all that out of you. Almost all of it. Umezawa is your friend. Look at him as your friend, and imagine you gained the power of invisibility.
“I won’t hurt you, Ume. Come out of hiding. Aren’t we able to trust each other?”
“You don’t trust me, Abe.”
“You’re right, Ume,” said Abe. “I can imagine you think I don’t trust you. If I had Invisibility Cloak, I know that I’d—”
“It was Jim’s fault,” Umezawa interjected. “He mentioned the Ring of Gyges, and it started to gnaw on me. Before he said that, I thought about how important I am in combat now. I’m important, not just as a medic guy, but now I’m a weapon, like you and … well, Jason is defense. So is Sano, come to think of it. Well, okay, I’m on offense now!”
“So what had you in Alayna’s private bedroom in the middle of the night?”
“The Ring of Gyges: it called to me from my high school textbooks.”
Abe spoke in measured tones, “Yes, Ume. I can see where you’re coming from: he planted the seed, didn’t he?”
Blake looked on in the dim light, without saying a word. He was watching.
“Come on out of hiding, Ume. Let me see you so we can talk to each other face to face, like friends talk to each other. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Umezawa suddenly appeared, his face twisted in guilty anger. He lashed out at Abe. “First you got Sano, and I had nothing. Now you traded Sano for Alayna, who is just as beautiful, and just as mysterious, and I get nothing. No mystery for Umezawa to explore. Good ol’ Umezawa, good for a laugh, good for pushing around, good for nothing, good ol’ Umezawa.”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“But…” began Abe.
No buts, Stoic. This is not the time for arguments. This is the time for learning.
“As I was saying,” said Abe, “that is a painful thing to happen to you.”
“I’m not fat, you know, like Jason says.”
“Jason says that?”
“I don’t know. I think he does.”
“I think Jason loves you, Ume. I love you, and I’m glad you’re here with me. With us.” Abe drew a deep breath, feeling the intensity coming down. “You are good ol’ Umezawa because you’re a faithful friend.”
“Am I?” Umezawa said. “I betrayed it just now, didn’t I?”
“Heh,” chuckled Abe. “Wouldn’t I? For Alayna? What did you do?”
“I ‘put the ring on,’ so to speak,” confessed Umezawa. “I went in there—the covers were already like that, I swear. I didn’t—I did not pull the covers off, and I saw that she was just barely clothed. I couldn’t help it. I touched her.”
Blake, at last, spoke, “What do you mean by that?”
Umezawa hung his head, saying nothing.
“You’re very brave,” said Abe.
“Why? For violating a girl?”
“No, for staying visible right now. You know we have to disapprove, and even so, you’re still here. You trust us, and we trust you to tell the truth.”
Blake spoke again, “We knew our son was using; it was obvious. We tried to fix him at first, you see. We condemned him over and over again, telling him how bad it was, how dark a road he was going down. All it did, fellas, was reinforce how bad a person he was. It legitimized how he already felt about himself, and so he used more. Took more risks. Got into that fentanyl Russian Roulette baloney. And then he OD’d. Like a good American boy in the woods, he OD’d, and we found ourselves talking to police, to religious folk, and to social workers.
“We got lucky, boys: we had a social worker who was on the front end of the burnout curve, and she still cared. It meant something to us that a stranger cared for our son, so me and the wife submitted to counseling. Psychotherapy, you know, and we started working on us. The boy was in pain, you see, and even though we didn’t cause his pain, we certainly helped him reinforce—that word again, see—we were not helping him find ways to cope with his pain or even treat his pain. No, we were basically keeping his pain in front of him in a way that made him think it was forever.”
“Do you blame yourself?” Umezawa asked.
“Used to,” Blake said bluntly. “Not anymore. We didn’t know any better. I mean, we were just doing the best we could until someone who knew better helped us do better.”
The boys looked at Blake with awe.
“Now tell me what you did,” Blake said. “Gotta come clean, right?”
“First I touched her neck, and then I kinda—” Umezawa took a deep breath.
“Yeah,” said Blake. “Deep breaths are important.”
“I kinda ran my finger—fingers—down the side of her…uh…her breast, you know, reaching over her, like this, with my right hand, but just on the side! And then down along her hip right on down to her ankle.”
No one spoke for a moment.
Blake said, “Is that all?”
“Hm. I’m curious why didn’t you do more,” said Abe. “You were right there. Crisis of conscience, I hope.”
“Well, I felt awful, see? And I was really, very tempted, but then it occurred to me, when I touched her foot, that she ought to have moved and maybe she is a bionic and that makes her sleep real deep or she was really tired but maybe she was actually sick and I could be a hero and heal her but she’d ask what I was doing and then I realized she maybe was dead from them sending signals or whatever that’s when I came to you—”
“Deep breath, Ume,” said Blake. “It’s all right.”
At that moment in the wee hours of the morning, Abe had put his arm around Umezawa, and now that morning was fully day, he was putting his arm around Alayna, holding her hand in his lap.
“No, I don’t hate you. I—” He choked on the words he meant to say. He said instead, “I’m glad you’re with us.”
“I’m human for a while, don’t you see?” she said. “I’m human, and at the same time I can’t bear the…bear the…I can’t stand the memories of all the things I’m made to do, so the heroin makes me human and takes care of the memories in one dose.”
“Do you hate me for knowing?” said Abe.
“Hm? I don’t know. Maybe.”
Umezawa knocked gently at the entryway. “Alayna? Can I come in?”
“Of course.”
Abe stood up to leave. Umezawa said, “Alayna? I have something to tell you.”
When Abe joined the rest of the party in the kitchenette, he took a moment to bring it all in: a plane crash, superpowers slowly developing, either by magic or by scientific technology or a combination of both; he took in the several friendships, the traumatic deaths, the loss of Lars (and here he paused in his mind, weeping within, but holding stoically to remain private in his grief), the very idea of a bower created by his alliance with plant life, so that a grove of aspen, birches, and mainly spruce trees—how these could supply certain creature comforts over and above mere shelter: warmth, light, concealment, and even a breakfast bar to lean upon. He took in all these things, and a lot more.
“Surely this is magic,” Abe said.
Blake and the bionics paused for a moment, and they all laughed. Sano’s eyes danced with laughter. Abe blushed.
“It’s too funny,” Blake said. “Don’t take it to heart: we were just talking about the mechanics of nanobots and their relationship to corpuscles and mitochondria, and the physiological response that acetylcodeine, noscapine, thebaine, papaverine and diacetylmorphine might be causing in Alayna to give her relief from the nanobots. And then you suddenly blurt out: ‘MUST BE MAGIC!'”
Abe laughed in spite of himself. The party continued in their friendly teasing.
Friends, Stoic; these are your friends. Isn't it nice?
“Well, anyhow,” James Thurgerson said, motioning to Abe to lean against the leaf-breakfast bar next to him. “You broke up a pretty somber conversation over here. This heroin problem is something we’re going to have to manage, and it might just be a real problem for us. But we’re learning that, in order to be free of the machines, we’ll have to adopt the magic of…of…”
“Go on, Jim,” Perry Tuck said. “You can say it.”
“Yeah, Jim,” said Meredith Donaldson. “You can do it! One very simple word...”
Sano was still laughing. Blake, to Abe’s amazement, was smiling.
With a faux-sarcasm, James Thurgerson also smiled and said, “We’ll have to adopt the magic of love.”
“Hooray!” Sano said, clapping her hands.
“Seriously,” James Thurgerson said. “We’ve been made to be machines in some sort of evil partnership with flesh; we are ultimate in utility and disposability. It’s not like we’ve ever thought of human beings as anything but masters, on the one hand, or contacts, on the other hand, military contacts.”
“Bogeys,” said Blake. “We’re blips on your intel screens.”
“Oh, speaking of which,” said James Thurgerson, but he was interrupted.
“YOU DID WHAT?!?”
It was Alayna.
She was having a very human reaction to Umezawa’s contrite confession, and his penance was just beginning.
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