Burning Violin

The ride continued in silence until the train began to slow suddenly, coasting to a hard stop in the middle of a field. Giant spiders seemed to turn to watch, as if a giant worm had fallen into their web from the sky. A few lumbered closer, but stopped a good quarter mile or so away from the tracks. Sed and Awk leaned close, consulting one another wordlessly for a moment, but they both turned to look at once when the doors at the head of the car slid open and a half dozen men strode in, rifles and body armor making them look even less human than the sentis surrounding them.

"How?" Sed asked.

"All communication was secure." Awk insisted, words squirting out so fast that they sounded high pitched.

"Random?" Sed asked.

"Doubtful."

The sentis around the cabin did not move, but stared with a mixture of hatred and fear at the men moving quickly through the car. The lead spotted Sed and Awk and lowered his rifle on them. "Here!" He shouted.

Alexander heard in his mind an explosion of communication, garbled words and phrases from a dozen different mental voices at once, arguing a course of action in half a second flat. Amazed, he realized that he had caught most of the conversation and understood it even though it was layered one voice over another a dozen times.

Before the lead could take another step, every senti in the room erupted out of their seats at once and swarmed the federal agents. The lead's gun discharged in Alexander's direction, but a senti in a business suit absorbed the round in it's chest, artificial blood and white ropes of manufactured viscera spraying the compartment although the senti itself did not slow down. Shots and screams filled the air and then Sed and Awk were dragging Alexander up. The window crumpled outwards and spiraled down to the ground distressly far below from a single swing of Awk's arm.

Alexander screamed as he was tossed like a bag of dirty laundry onto Sed's back and then they were hurtling down through the cold air of the prairie. Sed's knees bowed with the impact and ended in a squat like a catcher, spare hand balancing against the gravel on the ground. Awk landed a moment later, scattering gravel in a cloud that stung Alexander's face and drew blood in at least one spot.

A wordless glance again passed between the two sentis and then they sprinted away from the train towards the nearest spider. More sentis landed behind them, apparently haven't finished their fight on the train. Alexander heard their voices in his mind.

Let us come! They screamed in unison in a half dozen different ways at once.

It was Awk who turned around and favored them with his smile. Welcome to the revolution, my brothers! We are in your debt!

Awk slid the pack of cigarettes across the table, Morleys Alexander read on the pack. "My dad smokes those." Alexander said. "He hides them but I found them a couple of times."

"Want one?" Awk asked.

Alexander scrunched back against the soft leather of the seat and shook his head with a confused look. "I can't. I'm a kid."

"That's a very hume way of thinking." Awk said and pulled out a cigarette to twirl around his fingers and over his knuckles. "We don't hold to such thoughts. You are born - for lack of a better word - mature in every sense that matters as a senti. And you're not going to be getting cancer given your bio-mechanical metabolism, so there's no worry on that account."

Alexander fingered the pack of cigarettes and shook his head. "I don't want one."

Awk raised an eyebrow. "It won't hurt you."

"I don't want one anyway." Alexander said in a level tone.

Awk shrugged and pocketed the Morleys. "That at least is an attitude I can respect."

The landscape passed by quickly, from grasslands to mountains to desert and back again to grasslands, endless plains stretching to every horizon, a greenish-brown blur into the distance. Vast machines stalked over the land like spiders, occasionally plucking a cow out of the pasture to tuck away into a cage suspended below the main body. They were four-legged monstrosities, the ovoid body tiny in proportion and hanging fifty feet above the ground. Delicate and slow steps reminded Alexander of a teenager past curfew tiptoeing down a hallway.

"Our big brothers." Awk said with a gesture. "They farm the land out here for the humes. Hardly any of them left out here, just a few nature types. Sentis were far cheaper as workers and the balance of people went to the cities for jobs."

"I thought cows were always in big herds." Alexander said, face plastered against the window to spot a cow here and there in the distance. The biggest group he saw was only a dozen or so scattered around a pond.

"Not when they're left free on the range." Sed explained. "In order to be certified organic they must be free range now. Most people just eat vat-grown proteins anyway these days. These are luxury cattle, only the rich can afford their milk and meat."

Awk snorted. "The cows live better than the people, crammed into the cities the way the bovines used to be crammed into factory farms. 'People are cattle', clichés get more true every year."

"Why would a senti smoke?" Alexander asked. His eyes went down to the three glasses of an amber liquid he could not identify. "Or drink?"

"Why do you watch the feeds?" Awk asked. "Or eat ice cream instead of protein pills? Experience and variety are what make us more than animals."

"It makes you human you mean." Alexander said.

"No." Awk said and swept a cigarette sideways to mimic his shaking head. "As a cleverly designed cybernetic organism, I have absolutely no need of any kind of nourishment as a human would understand it. Every ounce I partake in is purely by choice for pleasure or pain. A human must take sustenance. I choose to take sustenance."

Sed tapped the table and spoke. "What my associate is trying to establish is that there is a school of philosophy that revolves around the glorification of choice. It espouses that if you remove all bias from decision, all need in otherwards, what is left is utterly pure. Choice for the sake of choice."

"Hedonism, in a sense at least." Awk said. He pushed the glass of amber towards Alexander, a hollow scraping across the granite tabletop. "Try it."

"What is it?" Alexander asked. He did not trust Awk.

"Ambrosia." Sed said and took one of the other glasses to take a long draught. "It is something of a weakness among our kind, but it is of no harm and some good."

As if to punctuate the statement, Awk drained half of his glass at a single gulp and release a very human sigh. Alexander picked up the glass and sniffed at it, but could detect only a hint of pepper. He sipped lightly at it, but there was no taste to it at all. It slid down his throat though without his even swallowing. It was so thin it made water seem like putty, his tongue hardly able to feel anything was in his mouth at all. A coolness spread from his belly and out through is limbs, an electric thrill coursing through his body.

"What is it?" Alexander asked again with a gasp. "It feels so cold."

"It is a manufactured substance that adheres to certain artificial synapses and adds a bit of bite to the connections." Awk said and drained the rest of his glass.

"A poet might call it liquid thought if that is clearer to you." Sed said, not touching his glass anymore. "A low grade peyote, if you prefer."

No. Alexander said, and his mental projection colored the word with all manner of complex emotion so that he hardly had to pose his question. Why am I delicate if I don't have to be?

Because you do have to be. Sed explained in his deep teacher voice. Images branched out from the words, pictures of tug of war, a see-saw, the hardest steel shattering with a hammer blow. That which cannot bend must inevitably break. You are the most complex senti ever built, though not the strongest. A hundred other superlatives were stated at the same moment as the last word: quickest, smartest, largest, smallest. Alexander's eyes gleamed at a sudden understanding that speech was no longer limited to two dimensions, it could be as three-dimensional as the world around him. Every word could be a dozen words to shade the meaning/change the meaning/add depth to the meaning. Alexander smiled/laughed/high-fived Sed over their connection.

Sed returned the impulse with a fatherly tinge. You were meant to be the bridge to the next step. The embodiment of the best of old and new.

Alexander did not really understand, but the question was slipping already from his mind. There was too much to see and hear and experience to care much about why he was what he was.

At length, they climbed down to a compartment at the back of the train where dozens of sentis, mostly of the close-to-human variety sat with bored and vacant looks, reading magazines or watching videos in affectations of humanity that Alexander suspected were cosmetic. Sed and Awk stayed close to him and found a banquet table at the end of the cabin, drawing more than a few looks.

"Why are they looking like they know us?" Alexander asked Sed.

"Why do you say that?" Sed asked.

"They're looking at us like we're movie stars." Alexander said.

Awk touched the controls on the table quickly, touch typing commands into the console without even looking. A panel slid open and a hidden lazy susan discharged three drinks onto the table with a low hiss. "It's not movie stars they see." Awk explained. "It's the way people in the know see Che and Mao."

"Who?"

"Youth today have no respect for the past." Awk said, but his tone was hardly as harsh as it had been. Awk retrieved a cigarette from somewhere under his tailored suit with hands quicker than a human could even see. A silver zippo lit it and Awk sucked in a deep breath through lips so twisted they were scarcely able to close around the butt.

"Hold on now, little man." Sed said and Alexander stiffened in his arms. That's what dad calls me.

Sed turned to look at him and a wordless statement tickled his head. I know.

Alexander jolted, but the arms were like bands of iron around him. I told you that there are many ways in which your growth has been stunted. Hold on now. We are taking you home.

Sed dropped through the hold with Alexander gripped tight, and landed with a thunk on something hard, but not concrete. The wind whipped at Alexander's hair and impossible colors spiraled around in all directions, an assault on his nascent new senses. He screamed but it was lost in the howl of wind. Sed's voice screamed in his head, CALM DOWN, IT WILL BE ALL RIGHT!

In a little while, the sound and color seemed to recede as Alexander grew used to them and recognized that they would not hurt him. He looked around and after some hesitation, tried to whisper back to Sed with the same internal voice. Can you hear me?

Yes I can, young sir. Sed said calmly. The voice had a hundred times the inflection of verbal speech, as if there was no limit to the shades of meaning that could be added to every vowel. Yes, it is like a thousand angels dancing on the head of a pin, if you will forgive a religious metaphor.

Where are we? Alexander asked.

On the roof of a mono heading east out of the cities underground. Sed explained. You do not need to worry, I am more than equipped to hold on with my feet without falling off. Once we are clear of the cities we will climb down into the senti compartments at the rear.

A glimpse of light at the edge of sight in one direction glimmered and then grew larger as fast as the ground coming up to meet a skydiver. Alexander flinched but then the train exploded out into the brightness of daylight. Vertigo gripped Alexander as the limits of his vision reset from the claustrophobia of the tunnel to the distant horizon on all sides. The land closest to the train moved so fast Alexander became dizzy, but could not look away, his eyes locked on as if in a trance to the indiscernible blur of rocks and brush. Sed shook him. It would not do to become sick, we are traveling over six hundred miles per hour now. If I were not blocking the passage of air with my body, it would flay the skin from your face. You are in many ways more delicate than most of us.

Why? Alexander asked.

Sed mentally smiled, a warmth touched Alexander's mind, almost like a caress. We come in all shapes and sizes, as you saw. The children of man are the most varied of any species. That is to say, we really aren't just one species, we are a new genera all to our own.

Sed touched a hand to his face and a connection was made somehow, a communication that whispered along the surface of Alexander's mind. It was like hearing for the first time, like a third ear had opened up somewhere inside his brain. And then, he could see, and it was as if he had been blind for his entire life. Colors he did not have words to describe lit his surroundings. A spiral of glowing not!red and almost!purple air pirouetted back where they came, lines of different!blue marched along the not!grey wall like bones on an x-ray.

"This is infrared, with a little ultraviolet tossed in for color." Sed said.

"It's beautiful." Alexander said.

"There are many parts of who you are that have been obfuscated by your upbringing." Sed said. "We will help teach you what you are capable of. We will teach you to see and hear and speak in ways that your father, your hume father anyway, never could."

"Raised by wolves." Awk muttered.

Alexander was less intimidated by Awk with every passing moment, and he walked on, unable to stop gawking at the world around him.

The stairs eventually gave way to a dank passage rank with the rotting fish smell of the sea. Awk picked a direction and began to move faster, so that Alexander almost had to jog to keep up. "We have train to catch." The smiling senti told Alexander. The walls down here were covered in a translucent moss that Alexander realized after a moment of staring was visible in the traditional spectrum as well as the odd second sight he had been granted by Sed. A mental muscle that Alexander could not have identified before the moment he used it adjusted his vision like a knob tuning a radio. A low giggle escaped his lips as he spun his vision back and forth, indescribable colors and darknesses looping around like a madman's kaleidoscope.

They stopped at an oversized manhole cover that Awk lifted easily, despite the fact that it was probably half a ton or more of inch thick steel. The senti caught Alexander's wondering look and if anything his smile broadened, a manic gleam sparkling in his eyes. "Enhanced musculature was not our first birthright, but we claimed it after the need to fight became clear. A war cannot be waged well but by the most physical of specimens, regardless of the acuity they bring to the table."

Awk dropped through the hole and disappeared into darkness, his laughter stretching away laterally like a car zooming by. Sed picked up Alexander and held him tight in arms that Alexander realized were fully capable of squeezing him like an anaconda.

Alexander frowned and glared out the window, brain processing the conversation even though he didn't really want it to.

The car pulled into a decrepit garage, walls sagging in like an old man's shoulders, the smells of musty wood and motor oil heavy in the air. Sed and Awk herded Alexander along through a crowd of sentis of more varieties than Alexander knew had existed. Short and tall, ugly and beautiful, they spanned every shade between mechanical and organic. The crowd hushed, staring at Alexander with a frightening reverence. A couple kneeled, one even crossed itself. Alexander stared back at them with undisguised wonder. A slender senti on four mechanical legs skittered forward like a spider and dropped her elfin face to the ground before him, kissing the ground there.

"Are you come to save us?" She asked in a shrill voice coated with an unidentifiable accent.

Alexander only stared vacantly, but Awk sent a kick her way that narrowly missed her face as she cantered back. "Get back to work you superstitious cretins."

Sed reached down and squeezed Alexander's hand and he did not draw away this time, thankful for something comfortable, something almost human in the gesture. "They won't hurt you Alexander, they are just curious and want to see you."

"They're ignorant louts." Awk growled through his ineluctable grin. "Sometimes I think they're more superstitious than the humes."

"I think perhaps superstition is the lot of our kind, whether senti or hume." Sed said.

The crowd drew back as they passed and no more approached close enough for Awk to do more than glare. A dented steel door creaked open on rusted out hinges and they descended stairs in pitch darkness. Alexander tripped as they hit the first landing before the stairs doubled back to descend again, hitting his knee hard enough on the concrete to draw a hiss.

"Can't even teach their young to walk right." Awk grumbled. "Even apes manage that much. It's society I tell you, it's destroyed their ability to think."

Sed said nothing but helped Alexander back to his feet. The darkness was so complete that Alexander could not even see the senti's hand in his own. Fear rose in his gut and he felt like crying. A sniff came from somewhere to the left, an affectation of Awk.

"Fear reflex." Awk said. "I can smell it on him like phermones. Animal instinct is a nasty thing."

"It must not be instinct." Sed said. "It was not designed in, but has been learned along the way."

"So many of their memes are little more than viruses." Awk said.

Alexander pushed hands to his eyes and rubbed the tears with the heels of his hands. "I can't see." He forced the words out. "It's too dark."

"The concept of a 'speaker for the dead' arose from my experiences with death and funerals. I have written of this at greater length elsewhere; suffice it to say that I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their, actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived." -Orson Scott Card

Normal people get a couple of lines at a few cents per word in the local paper, but with the papers dying, we probably don't even get that anymore. A death certificate stamped by the county, an entry in a ledger somewhere, musty whether electronic or not, and the only mark of your passing is a funeral attended sparsely by a few old friends waiting their turn and family who will be sad this day, but less with each tomorrow. We cut through the world like blades, and when we've left the flesh, the flesh heals over. Most of us don't even leave a mark. The great ones though, whether they're particularly keen or just have the luck to strike a vulnerable spot, they leave scars that never quite heal.

We like to think that the good ones slice to heal, to excise the tumors and gain access to the deeper ails of the body. The bad ones, we believe, are just twisting the knife. The secret is that there are no bad ones. Even the worst of men who try to change the world, think that they are helping it, think that the blood and scars are worth it to fix something, even if they're the only ones to see it. They are all defined by the same mad chutzpah that insists that they are different, that they have the right to cut deeper and deeper. It's only an insane man who believes that he is so special that he has the right to change the world. But without that madness, there would never be any change at all.

Ted Kennedy outlived his brothers by more than four decades, but never quite strode out of their shadows, so long because they were cast at dawn. He was a Kennedy, that name uttered with reverence by half and spite by the rest. It's become a word like "liberal," used interchangeably as a point of pride and a slur depending on the speaker. Ted Kennedy would probably never have been a senator without the aura of his brothers and the piles of money old Joe Kennedy made during Prohibition. But then, most of us probably wouldn't have TVs, cars and computers if we hadn't had the good luck to be born American, heirs of a national fortune built on a stolen continent. We're a nation of bandits and cowboys, the Kennedys but a distillation of the common stock, not better or worse, just concentrated potency.

The drunk who crashed his car into a river, saved himself, left a girl behind, waited until morning to call the police. A coward.

The statesman who eulogized his brother, reigned in the Senate for forty years, fought for progress. Lion of the Senate.

Which is real, which counts? The immortal sides take up their inevitable positions, dictated not by the man but their pre-designated roles. He was a great statesman, flawed yes, but great no matter what Fox News tells you. He was a horrible liberal, a statesman yes, but a horrible liberal no matter what MSNBC tells you. The problem with eulogies is in the eulogizer not the eulogized.

There is no great scale that balances our rights and wrongs. We are both damned and saintly all at once. Sin and virtue are like oil and water, they don't mix together into some shade of gray, they exist side by side, dark and light. And when that pallid mixture of our deeds is poured swirling down the drain, only the warped mirror of memory remains to tell those who remain what shade we once were.

There's an art to the obituaries of the notable, an attempt to fade the newly deceased into the sepia tint of old photos overnight. We rip our heads around at an impossible angle to try to snag a glimpse of what this will look like in twenty years time, when the weight of history has descended and cast judgment on the dead. Obituaries are the cover notes of biographies yet to be written.

"I rejected that idea. I thought that a more appropriate funeral would be to say honestly, what that person was and what that person did. But to me, 'honesty' doesn't simply mean saying all the unpleasant things instead of saying only the nice ones. It doesn't even consist of averaging them out. No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story--what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That's the story that we never know, the story that we never can know--and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling." -Orson Scott Card

Awk laughed, and Alexander knew on an instinctive level that it was not in humor. "Now he's going to tell you how he's a real boy."

"I am a real boy!" Alexander shouted. "And you're just stupid machines who killed Nan!"

"And if we are but machines, then why did Nan matter?" Sed asked. His voice was soft, without an edge to it, like an especially kind teacher making a difficult point.

Alexander bit his lip and considered the question. "Because he mattered to me."

"You loved him?" Sed asked.

"Oh not this again." Awk said.

"Hush." Sed said, and slapped Awk lightly on the shoulder. "This is not the time for our debates." He turned back to Alexander and nodded. "You loved Nan?"

"Yes." Alexander said defiantly.

Sed nodded. "Can a machine love?"

"No."

"Then Nan did not love you?" Sed pushed.

"Nan wasn't a machine." Alexander said after a moment, feeling like his words had been twisted from his lips. "He loved me."

"If it is the capacity for love that makes one not a machine, then I can assure you that Awk and I are not machines." Sed said.

Alexander glared at him. "Who do you love?"

"Why, all of senti-kind of course." Sed said and then his eyes sparkled as if trying to smile since his face could not. "And my friends."

"Ask him about hate, boy." Awk said. "Ask him about the other side of the coin."

"I said hush." Sed said, and this time it had a harshness that silenced Awk at least for the moment. Sed again turned to Alexander. "I am very sorry for what happened to Nan. But I would like it very much if we could be friends." He held out a hand that Alexander did not take, so he pulled it back. "I understand how upset you are. We are taking you somewhere to protect you and let you be amongst others like yourself. We care about you, and that is why we could not leave you where you were."

"That sounds like school." Alexander said. "And I already have a school to go to. My dad drops me off sometimes."

"It is like a school, but for sentis like you." Sed said.

"I'm not a senti."

Sed shrugged. "We are all whatever we make of ourselves. The material matters little. But when it comes to whether you are a senti or a human, the answer is black and white. We can show you evidence that you would dismiss as lies if so inclined. We could turn you over to the authorities who would believe the evidence despite your pleas. I think though that deep down you really do know that this is the truth." Sed's eyes sparkled again. "We'll leave it at that." He turned back to face forward.

Book II - The Cold Mirror

Chapter Thirteen - New Friends

Alexander did not like his captors, the ones that called themselves his new friends. He had little mileage in his five years, but had gone around the block enough times to intuit that friends who had to say they were friends probably were not. Nan fought them, and he had been left as scrap in the basement. Nan had been his friend.

"We played chess." Alexander said quietly, rolling the words around like a revelation. He looked up and out the car windows at the world rolling by, run down buildings and crumbling streets he did not recognize.

"With whom did you play chess, young sir?" Sed asked from the front seat.

Alexander did not answer, but tried the child-locked door again.

"The door is quite locked, Alexander." Sed said. "It is for your own safety."

"Fuck you." Alexander said matter of factly.

Awk laughed from the driver's seat. "It has been raised by the apes then, hasn't he? It grunts and growls just as they do. I wonder if given time it would rut in the mud the way they do too."

Sed leaned over the seat to fix a gaze on Alexander. Alexander was not affected by the twisted faces like adults often were. He was young enough that there had always been odd-looking sentis. They were no odder to him than two men holding hands. "There is no need to frighten the boy." Sed said. "He is ours and now we will care for him. He has been loved and cared for, which is all we can do as well." Sed reached out a slender hand to touch Alexander's knee, but he flinched away, pressing against the door and out of easy reach.

"I'm not frightened." Alexander said. He suddenly felt talkative, the horror of Nan's dismemberment fueling his tongue. "You hurt Nan and I want to go home."

"Nan, was your companion, was he not?" Sed asked.

Alexander nodded, bottom lip thrust out in a fury he did not realize made him look even younger.

"He fought us instead of helping." Sed explained gently. "We did not have a choice."

"You could have not tried to take me." Alexander said. "Nan protected me because you're bad. You could have chose not to come at all."

"Ah, but we had to you see." Sed said. "You are one of us."

"I'm not one of you." Alexander said. "You're just a hunk of junk." He'd heard it on the shows and every once in a while when his dad was working on Nan.