Faces

What does it mean to be human?

Short story by Eric E. Cane

Ash reached down and picked up the dots. She had spilled the tray as before. Hadn’t seen it.

Of course, that’s what she said every time. She was susceptible to inattention. Distraction.

“Oh, dear,” she said, trying to trap the dots in her fingers.

They were small and moved slightly as her fingers came close. The chip in her head signaled to them just the right amount of movement that would make it a challenge to pick them up, but not so challenging she would leave them there. In their bowl on the arm of her chair, they chimed softly, each giving a pleasing variation of theta-inducing sound that helped her heal.

One by one, she dropped them into the bowl where they responded as if greeting their long lost friends. Their chiming returned to normal until another was dropped into their mix.

“It bothers me that I can’t get a bunch of them at once,” she said. “Oh, dear.”

She reached up to her face where part of it had come away. Beneath the new tissue was a warm, reddish glow — the healing light. It was called this because of its activation of factors that spurred growth of the synthetic skin and attached it to her frame. For some reason, it wasn’t working well.

“Could you help me?” she asked.

“The dots or the skin?” I replied.

“Um, either. Oh, I suppose my face is more important right now.”

She sat upright in her chair, one hand on her cheek.

I walked over and assessed the situation. The synth-skin was warm underneath, but the edges were cool. It was where adhesion had been lost. I was about to tug on it when I decided I’d better prepare her.

“This might hurt,” I said.

“Oh, it all hurts,” she said. “That’s the price of beauty.”

I wasn’t convinced she was ready for it, but I pulled on the skin, nonetheless.

“Ouuuuuchh!” she yelled.

I ignored her and pulled the skin into place. She started to move away, and I grabbed the back of her head gently and held her still while I applied pressure. If she were going to feel pain, it was best to do it all at once.

“You! Damn you, that hurts!”

Again, I ignored her.

She removed her grip from my arms and set her fingers into her chair, crushing the soft fabric in bunches.

“Almost done,” I said.

I peered around my fingers and saw the synth-skin fibers connecting. After a few more seconds, they brought the edges of her skin together. It was going to be a good fit.

“There,” I said.

I released her head and stood back. I wasn’t sure if she were going to strike me — she had done so before — so I kept a safe distance. She was stronger now after the surgeries.

Stronger physically.

“You don’t know how much that hurts,” she said, seething.

“I do,” I said. “You tell me.”

“You need to feel it,” she said.

Her pretense was gone; her hate had returned.

“My feeling worse will make you feel better?” I said.

I know she disliked my calm, but I would not emote for her.

She inhaled, exhaled. Her eyes narrowed, “Yes.”

I merely tilted my head and looked at her face where the seam was starting to disappear. The healing light was doing its job.

She closed her eyes and touched her face, hesitantly. She shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been through a lot. You wouldn’t understand. You’re not…”

She was silent.

“Not what?” I asked. This could go in several directions. To her, many people were not a lot of things.

“You don’t want me to say it,” she said.

It was clear she wanted to say it. I played along.

“Please, continue,” I said.

Her posture changed. She took on a certain disapproving air.

“You’re not a person of means,” she said. “There are some things about wealth you simply wouldn’t understand.”

The dots in her bowl were silent.

I waited a moment.

“Did you need me to understand?” I said.

She adjusted herself in her chair, her hand still on her face.

“Well, no,” she said. She waved a dismissive hand. “You just wouldn’t”

“You’re saying that if I were in pain and wealthy, then you would be truly happy?” I said. “That it would somehow be easier for you to tolerate me?”

I waited again. She found arguing with me palatable and downgrading me comforting. I wasn’t going to deny her even this pleasure. For all her posturing, I knew her deeper truth.

“I tolerate you fine. I allowed you to touch me, didn’t I?” she said, not looking at me. She found her favorite crystalline sculpture and stayed with that. “I don’t mean to be…off-putting, so please don’t take it personally.”

It was as dismissive a statement as her previous. She pulled her fingers from her face, as if to test whether it would come away or not. It held.

I waited a moment to see if she were going to add anything else. When nothing came, I examined the floor.

“Shall we pick up the rest of the dots?” I asked. “They might be lonely on the floor like that.”

She sighed and looked at the fallen. Each produced a soft and seemingly random pulsing glow. This was so they wouldn’t be overlooked.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

Ash moved to the end of her chair, keeping herself rigidly upright. If her face was going to detach again, she wouldn’t be the cause.

She glanced down without bending her head forward and then stopped. Her lips opened with an unspoken request.

“I’ll do it,” I said, moving to the task. Each dot was silent as I picked it from the floor and dropped it in the bowl.

“Besides,” she said, “they don’t feel loneliness. Or anything for that matter.”

I dropped the last few in the bowl and glanced up at her. “I might challenge that notion.”

“You would,” she said, sliding back into a more comfortable position on her chair. “And you would be wrong.”

I grinned. “What about me?”

“You’re different.”

“Not so much, I think,” I said.

She was silent a moment. She looked at the ceiling, the walls, her sculpture. She crossed her arms.

“I hate this,” she said, softly..

I was at a loss. There were many things she hated. “Hate what?”

“Everything.”

“That’s a lot of hate.”

Her eyes welled up. I put my hands behind my back.

“What have I become?” she asked.

I’m almost sure that was rhetorical. I said nothing, though several replies came to mind.

With effort, she uncrossed one arm and again touched her face. A tear fell.

I pulled a tissue from a receptacle near the bowl in her chair. I extended it to her, and she took it.

“Thank you,” she said mechanically, dabbing her face dry.

When no more tears came, she sat there with her fist clenching the tissue. Her knuckles were white from the tension.

“The tissue is closing up well,” I said. “Almost no scar. Soon, even that will be gone.”

“I’ll know it’s there,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say. I thought of prodding her with a mild insult to get her out of herself, but I don’t think she would receive it well.

“You’re never going to know what it’s like,” she said.

“To what are you referring?”

She relaxed her hand holding the tissue and sighed.

“What I’ve become I can never undo,” she said. She spoke slowly, as if talking to a child. “I’m now over seventy-percent replaced. What does that mean to you?”

How she was able to make that an accusatory statement, I’ll never know. And yet, there it was. I was to blame. Not me, certainly, though she was laying it all upon my shoulders.

“In truth, I said, “You’re only sixty-two percent renewed. Why does this bother you? You’re stronger. You move well. I’ve seen you dance at the gatherings; few can hold their own against you.”

“It’s not me!” She slammed her fist down on the arm of her chair. Several of the dots jumped out of the bowl to the floor, chiming all the way.

I waited for this surge to pass.

“If not you, then who?”

“You!,” she said. “The damn dots in the bowl! The monitor on the wall. The car that picks me up for gatherings. My jewelry and clothing — everyone’s jewelry and clothing! The glass for my water — even the water itself! My blood isn’t even me because of it! I could go on, but who am I even talking to? I could be talking to my chair, and it’ll still be you. My words aren’t even mine.” She gestured to the air, as if to demonstrate the words leaving her and becoming something else.

I was holding my breath.

I exhaled.

“You’re the originator,” I said, softly.

“Sixty-two percent the originator,” she said.

I couldn’t help but smile.

“You’re one-hundred percent the originator,” I said. “Your renewals only help in that capacity.”

She threw her tissue at me. I let it bounce off and fall to the floor where it disturbed the dots there. They chimed louder and then became quiet.

“No dot would have thrown that tissue,” I said.

“No, because they have structure and rules and obey them like good little gleeps,” she said, then paused for effect: “The insane don’t follow rules.”

Gleeps was the derogatory for anything advanced technologically. I was a gleep. Thus, I was free to blame.

“No,” I said. “The insane have their rules. They just don’t announce them to anyone until it’s too late to do anything about it. You’re not insane, and you’re not a…gleep.”

“Just give me time,” she said, her steam running out. “When enough of me fails, there won’t be any me left.”

I looked around the room and then took a couple of steps to the center.

“From what I recall, you’ve changed the color of this room several times over a number of years,” I said, taking interest in the wall opposite where she was sitting.

She purposely looked in the other direction.

“You chose to renew your skin, too,” I said. “How is that different?”

“It’s not me.”

“It retains your DNA, only without the errors,” I said. “The scars. The discoloration. The pathology.”

She was quiet.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

She touched her arm, lightly tracing a line down to her the back of her hand. She looked at her sculpture.

“It’s not the same skin that touched my first love,” she said, almost a whisper. She then moved her fingers over her face, but didn’t touch it. “That felt the sun of my childhood. Felt my first snow flakes — cold points sprinkling my skin just below my eyes…the cold air in my nose.”

Her eyes were closed. A smile stretched her new skin.

“Do you have that?” she said, now looking at me. There was no anger in her voice, only…pity. “There’s nothing left of your childhood, is there? No healed broken bones. No scars. Do you even love? What does your skin know?”

I stared at her. It was as though she were another person.

“You see, Olen,” she said, “I’m losing my humanity to my vanity. So that I can dance in the circle of others who’ve done the same. And yes, I hate you for it. Because you brought the opportunity for me to lose myself so easily that it was happening before I knew it. It was my choice, yes, but it’s also my choice to assign blame.”

I opened my mouth.

“There’s nothing to say,” she said, interrupting me. “You can’t fix it; you could only replace it. Make it new.” She crossed her arms. “I don’t want new now. I want what makes me old. What makes me…human, frail, and broken, scarred and wasting away. That I should live to see myself never change is…frightening.”

She looked at the bowl in the arm of the chair. She extended a hand, removed a dot that chimed warmly, and then dropped it on the hard tile floor.

“No,” she said. “I blame you. And if you break and scar and waste away…I will be happy.”

She removed one dot after the other and dropped them to the floor with callous indifference.

I remained silent. I knew that the dots represented me.

They chimed to remind her they had fallen.

I kept my silence.