Two meaty hands squeezed Kai’s shoulders from behind, guiding her every step. Fingers dug into the base of her neck, pressing with such a heavy force, she wondered if she might pass out. She didn’t have to be told not to try anything stupid. She wouldn’t anyway. She never thought she’d think it, but she wanted to get back to MechaConn, so she could eventually just go home. Get back to Lilly before she started speaking full-blown sentences, before she could be there to witness it firsthand.
“Step up.” The deep voice from above the back of Kai’s head startled her. They’d been walking in silence for–what? Ten, fifteen minutes? It was hard to tell. Her head buzzed in that fuzzy, dark way that happens in a silent space where you can’t see. Kai squeezed her eyes shut tight and opened them a few times, seeing no difference. Fuzzy neon patterns flickered and faded against black.
She stumbled on a small, ribbed step and heard the footsteps in front of her abruptly stop before her nose collided with rough canvas–someone’s backpack. Someone had time to pack? Kai felt a pang of fury. She’d been in her room, resting on her top bunk after the fall when the man barged in and told her to come with him. She didn’t get to bring a thing.
“Three steps up.” This time, she heard the instruction coming from another guard behind her. Whoever had this guard was lucky–he was much more descriptive in his instructions. “You’re getting on a bus now,” the same voice said.
Kai took tiny steps, inching down the aisle of the bus, feeling the discomfort of a body so close behind her, she could feel each slow, warm exhale on her neck. She saw reddish-black through her blindfold every time she approached light. Seeing a new color was a slight consolation.
Somewhere ahead of her–maybe toward the back of the bus by now, she hoped–a young guy’s voice groaned, “This is some stupid fuck-shit.” Some whispers followed, hissing down the line of them like steady rain, then ceased the instant the bus’s P.A. system kicked on with tingly vinyl crackles. A soft, monotonous female voice blurted out of the speakers so loudly, Kai felt the floor vibrate through her sneakers.
“Now boarding for Watch Rehabilitation Center three-eleven. Guards, stand by pupils and take a moment to adjust blindfolds if necessary.”
The message repeated and Kai’s guard removed his hands from her shoulders just long enough to tug on her blindfold, breaking strands of hair off in quick stabbing pains along with it. Her blindfold now dug into her face so tightly, tiny rolls of flesh puffed out at her cheeks.
The message played four more times until Kai’s guard said, “To your left,” and guided her into a seat. They were coach seats. At least there was that, Kai thought. She hadn’t sat in a such a cushy seat in years. Her bed wasn’t even this soft.
The recording repeated itself again and again until the engine started, sending rumbles that vibrated Kai’s feet in low, bumpy waves. Everything felt so visceral without her vision, like everything wanted to hurt her. Recently, after years of feeling okay with her job and her role at MechaConn, she wondered if everything at her job did want to hurt her.
“How long is the ride?” The sound of her own voice startled her for a second. How long had it been since she last spoke? She tried to remember. Probably when she asked where and why when the guard came to her room.
Everything was fuzzy after the fall, but she vividly remembered the sudden rush of bodies on the floor. The stampede of red scrubs–probationary employees–that almost knocked her to the floor at her station. She watched them sprint toward those giant windows that can only be propped open a couple inches. Some of them chanted, and some of them just screamed, but most of them ran in silence with straight faces, like they were trying to concentrate. The ones that chanted yelled, “Death before Watch. Death before Watch,” over and over again as they started lifting some of the smaller machines over their heads and smashing them into the windows until they finally shattered.
Watching them leap through the holes in the windows, some of them stumbling over jagged shards of glass on their way, Kai found herself stepping toward the windows–slowly at first, but gradually, she worked up to a jog and then into an all-out run with the rest of them. The next thing she felt was that awful falling feeling, that terrifying rush of plummeting down. The bounce-back when her body hit the net, her stomach jolting inside of her, the thuds of flesh and bone colliding against each other, like potatoes getting dropped and tossed into a mesh bag.
“How long is the ride?” she asked again.
“Confidential,” the guard finally said.
She tried not to be disappointed. Of course he wouldn’t say. Kai kicked herself. What a stupid question.
Somewhere from in front of her, maybe two seats, maybe ten, someone started crying. It was soft at first, just small, girlish weeping sounds that eventually escalated to near hysterics. She thought she was hallucinating when she heard the second set of sobs. She knew she wasn’t when, within a few minutes, she could make out at least six different people crying, some loud and shrill, some deep and guttural, and some soft cooing sounds, like a sloppy, miserable choir.
Kai let her head drop forward, hanging toward her lap. She listened to the cries. Somehow, maybe just so she wouldn’t have to hear the crying anymore, it helped her sleep.
*
“You’re not on trial here. Just tell the truth.” Doctor’s hard, gray eyes narrowed into small slits on either side of his narrow, brittle-looking nose. Looking at it made Kai wonder how easily she could break it with her fist, which caught her off guard. She didn’t normally fantasize about engaging in any sort of violence, but something about Doctor made her want to fight. She hated that small, pointy face. That long, bony frame. That stiff white collared shirt buttoned to the very top, blending into milky skin.
Doctor had this thing–a tick, Kai wondered?–where he kept licking his pencil thin lips. The skin above his lip was always glossed over in this nasty, slug-like way. Kai couldn’t help staring at it, but after several seconds, she tore her eyes away and hung her head down. She tried to unwind by focusing on a sliver of skin that poked out on the side of her middle finger. Instead of answering again, she pinched it with her nails and pulled, feeling relief as the slow-burning pain crescendoed to a sting. It was nice to feel a palpable pain that she could explain.
“Come on, Kai, you can tell me.” When she looked up at him, his salt-and-pepper eyebrows were scrunched downward like she was a faraway sentence he could hardly read. His eyes looked like an octopus’s. “Why’d you jump?”
She quit picking at her finger then and slapped her hands into her lap. “I already told you. I don’t remember jumping.”
“You have to understand why that doesn’t make sense, Kai.”
Kai fought the urge to roll her eyes. She was done with MechaConn, and Orchard. So done. Such bullshit. Although she didn’t know there’d be a net to save her–no one knew–Kai was glad she jumped. For the first time, she could see. If they cared, why didn’t she even know where she was? Why couldn’t she call anyone?
“It’s like I said, Doctor.” Kai pronounced each syllable slowly and clearly, so there wouldn’t be any confusion. “I was at my station. I heard the people yelling. The next thing I knew, I was in the stampede of them. I had to keep moving with them or else I’d be trampled. The next thing I knew, we were all falling.”
For a second, she got lost in the memory of it. Deciding to give up on ever making it out of MechaConn with anything to show for it. Bouncing on that net. Colliding with all those people. Her arms, chest, and legs were still covered with bruises. She shuddered.
“I want to go to bed,” she said, softer this time. “I’m tired. It was a long trip.”
Doctor ignored her. “Your work station,” he hummed, seemingly to himself. “Tell me, what do you do at MechaConn?”
Kai paused, reluctant to answer, but decided there was no harm in relaying information Doctor could easily look up himself.
“I was a brander for four years. I stamped Orchard logos on all the tablets and laptops and phones. Last year, I got promoted and now I work in Human Resources.”
Doctor beamed, revealing two rows of slightly pointed teeth. “A promotion! Great! I hear Human Resources treats you guys great. What do you do for them?”
Kai shrugged. “Fifteen cent raise. I do the eyes.”
It was okay work compared to the branding. More hands-on. Orchard’s HR department had expanded massively that year to accommodate all the employee deaths. It wasn’t very green to be dumping all the bodies, they decided. Orchard wanted to be carbon neutral within the next hundred years. She could still remember the training video they had to watch of Jeff Cashing, the CEO of Orchard, talking about it for thirty whole minutes. It was a waste to just dump the corpses somewhere, he’d said, so instead, the bodies would be repurposed. Hair, skin, teeth, blood, organs, and eyes would be removed and donated. Orchard would do its part to make the world #GreenAgain™.
Doctor’s pupils looked like they expanded, nearly blackening his entire eyes. “Oh, the eyes. That’s important work, Kai. Difficult, too.”
Kai shrugged. “I don’t know, the skin is probably the hardest. All that stretching they do, and all the flesh-scraping afterward looks so tedious. The eyes aren’t so bad. Two quick scoops, two quick snips to the medial rectuses.”
Doctor’s tongue circled around his lips a couple times before stretching them into a wide smile. “Very good. Very nice. You even know the medical jargon.”
Kai squinted her eyes at him. “It’s my job to know.”
Doctor just kept beaming, nodding. He paused, then said, “I sense you’re frustrated. Tell me why.”
“This is stupid. This is bullshit. I want to go back to work. And if you guys don’t want me to go back to work, I’d rather just go home.”
Doctor’s expression flickered into one of surprise. “Oh, no, no. No, Kai, we need you here. You’re a valuable team member at MechaConn. You do the eyes.”
Kai looked down again and started cracking her knuckles one by one. “Lots of people can do the eyes.”
She heard Doctor’s creaky folding chair drag across the floor. When she peered up, Doctor was putting his clipboard on the small counter behind him. “Follow me,” he said. “Let’s try something else.”
Outside Doctor’s office, the building resumed the stark white walls blurring into each other like a bad dream. It made Kai want to close her eyes if not just so she wouldn’t have to see it anymore, so that she could get some rest. She hadn’t seen a window since she’d gotten to the Watch facility, but it had to be early morning by now. The sun had to be up outside of those snow-white walls, but she couldn’t know it for sure.
He led her down a hallway oddly similar to, and even longer than the MechaConn dormitory halls. All the way at the end, on the left-hand side, he took a key ring from his pocket and unlocked the door that was labeled: AGGRAVATION OUTLET ROOM.
Kai gasped when he swung open the door, hands flying to her mouth as if to muffle her own screams.
“My God! Are they–?” She paused to swallow a trickle of bile that had shot up, souring her whole tongue. She fought the urge to vomit all over the chalky white tiles. “What happened here?”
Five men faced Kai and Doctor’s side of the room, suspended a foot or so off the ground, eyes wide open. Kai stared, finding that they weren’t blinking, or even moving at all.
Doctor chuckled. “CadaverShams. Patent pending.”
Kai looked at him, waiting for more of an explanation. She suddenly felt her eyes welling up with tears. She cycled through three urges to cry, pass out, and pound on Doctor, punching him until his jaw snapped off.
“They’re hyper-realistic dummies. They look like people, feel like people, bleed like people, understand English, and even smell like people. They have all the bodily functions of real people, too. The only thing they don’t do is fight back.” Doctor beamed into the room, practically gushing with adoration for the things.
“Fight back?” Kai asked. When she went to speak, she found her mouth still gaped open in astonishment.
“Yes,” Doctor said, as if she was slow to catch on. “One of my patients made Jeff Cashing wet himself from wailing on him so hard. It’s a great way to get your anger out in a healthy, unharmful way.”
Kai continued to stare at him, so shocked she couldn’t even think of anything else to ask. Jeff Cashing? Jeff Cashing was here?
Her eyes scanned over the CadaverShams until she saw Jeff Cashing, hovering second from the right. She almost didn’t recognize him, hovering there in robot-form, but she knew that awful face anywhere, and his terrible blond hair—kept too long in the back for a billionaire CEO. “They’re punching bags,” Doctor explained, “for getting your anger out. So you don’t feel like you have to jump out of windows when you get back to work at MechaConn.”
The two stood in silence for a moment, staring at the CadaverShams. Doctor’s eyes twinkled like he was watching his daughter get married. This made Kai feel even sicker.
“Well, let’s get started,” he finally said. He moved back toward the door and unlocked a small gray box drilled to the wall.
Kai shook her head, stringy black hair whipping across her face. “No. I can’t.”
“It’s part of your recovery,” Doctor said, cold eyes snapping toward Kai like a threat. When he opened the box, Kai saw a single white button glowing softly.
Doctor pushed it with a slap of his palm and the moment he did, half of the fluorescent lights flickered off, casting slight shadows and spotlights on the floor, evenly spaced so that the room almost resembled a stage. At the same time, all five men fell cleanly to their feet and raised their hands up in a don’t shoot gesture.
“Nice ambiance, huh?” Doctor said.
“So, they can feel pain?” Kai asked.
Doctor smiled. “That depends on your own interpretation. Do you want them to feel pain?”
At first Kai thought, no. But now, she looked at all of their faces. She only recognized three of them. Jeff Cashing, Richard Soo, the owner of MechaConn, and Beau, one of her managers.
The longer she studied the Beau CadaverSham, the less she could talk herself out of it. All of the details were there: the dark buzzed hair like a soldier’s, the crescent-shaped scar by his left eye, the stout, always-cracked lips. Kai saw those lips and heard him saying it all over again. You’re working Sunday. No, you can’t visit home. No, I won’t make an exception. Lots of employees have daughters. Lots of them have more daughters than you.
She circled around it. Everything about it looked so real.
“Can you understand me?” she asked.
The Beau CadaverSham nodded.
“Talk,” she said.
The Beau CadaverSham shook its head.
“They can’t talk,” Doctor said from the doorway. “They can understand you, but they can’t speak. Maybe the 2.0 will be able to talk.”
Kai stared at those acne-scarred cheeks and nasty, cracked lips and shook her head. How did they get every detail?
She stood directly behind it, leaned closer to its ear, then took a step back and looked at Doctor. He was taking a new clipboard off the wall and clicking a pen. “What are you writing?”
“Standard observations,” said Doctor without looking up. He made a go on motion with his hand.
She moved back in, lips almost touching its ear. “You’re taking my life away from me,” she whispered. “Do you understand that?”
It nodded. Kai drew in a deep breath, stepped back, and kicked it hard with the flat of her shoe in the middle of its back. It fell fast and laid against the tiles belly-side down. Even its fingers looked real, fanned out on the tiles all long, pale, and clammy. She shoved her foot under its belly and forced it onto its back. Its middle felt very human-like, too. It was as heavy as a real man.
She climbed on top of it, straddling it so that her knees pushed into the hard tiles.
Doctor gasped. “This might be a first,” he said softly.
Kai didn’t even look at Doctor. Instead, she tried to imagine the agony of falling on this floor over and over again as a human. Doctor was right. What a healthy anger outlet. She started slugging it then, feeling the hardness of its cheek bones and jaws, like it was stuffed with flesh and bone instead of plastic.
She punched and punched, feeling the flesh mold like clay with her fists. When she stopped to catch her breath and tuck a piece of greasy hair behind her ear, she noticed she was crying. She didn’t know why.
Beau’s CadaverSham lay still, chest heaving so that Kai raised and fell with each breath it inhaled and exhaled.
She turned to Doctor. “They breathe?”
Doctor looked surprised, then laughed in three sharp ha, ha’s. “Of course. CadaverShams need oxygen, too, Kai.”
Kai turned back to the Beau CadaverSham and looked into its eyes. They could really twinkle for fake, manufactured objects. They somehow had depth to them, like they were really looking at her and seeing her. Kai drew her fist up behind her head and brought it down again, hard, this time into its nose, and felt a hard snap, heard what sounded like a human yelp.
Kai leapt off the thing, jumping onto all fours and crawling away from it as fast as she could. She looked up at Doctor. “What the hell was that?”
Doctor was grinning, occasionally running his tongue over pointy teeth. He looked excited, like he struggled to contain himself. “What? The sound? Many patients experience auditory hallucinations when they first begin CadaverSham therapy. It’s such a hyper-realistic experience to begin with. Totally normal.”
Kai waited to catch her breath and swiped her arm over her forehead, smearing sweat across her skin. Then, she crawled to the thing, stood, and brought her foot down onto its face. She heard a man’s scream from underneath her shoe when she felt fragments of shattered bone and cartilage blend into soft flesh.
She ran backwards against the wall that faced Doctor’s side like she’d been thrown against it. It was too real be a hallucination. Maybe it was an effect used to heighten patient pleasure? An effect that Doctor didn’t tell her about? But what if it really could feel pain? Why would it groan if it couldn’t feel pain?
But Beau’s CadaverSham was silent and still again, kind of like it had been when Kai first entered, besides all the blood. Kai took small, slow steps toward it, terrified of it moving on its own. She reached the CadaverSham, and saw only that its chest rose and fall with rapid, uneven breaths.
She knelt next to it, and that’s when she saw something weird. Its mouth was open, and she could see part of its teeth: a lot yellower than Beau’s. Kai extended her hand toward its face and gently lifted its upper lip, nauseated by the warmth of it. Kai’s face screwed inward with horror when she saw them. Why were his teeth so crooked? Why so yellow? Beau had the straightest, whitest teeth. And why was Doctor laughing so hysterically, holding onto the open box on the wall like he’d fall down without it?
She looked back down at the Beau CadaverSham and suddenly couldn’t help herself. She threw herself over it and cried, heaving sobs into its shirt.
When she looked up to find Doctor again, he was gone–but watching through the window in the door. “Who is this?” Kai tried to shout, but her voice just trembled through her lips. She felt fluid rise up her throat until she couldn’t hold it anymore. She craned her neck off to the side and dry heaved until dribbles of bile forced up and out of her mouth.
Why did Doctor just keep cackling when she saw the makeup on her knuckles and sprinted to the door? Why did he just stand there, wiping tears from his eyes as she yanked on the locked handle, pulling on it with her whole body? Why did he start walking away as she started slapping her hands against the door? Why did he stop to double over with laughter in the hallway, like something funny was going on?
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