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2 Words, 4 Words.
Two Pieces of Writing (With Four Word Titles)
by Samuel P. Carty
A Brief Poetical Interlude
Can’t Smoke, Won’t Smoke
I’ve used up my words talking to someone new. Every syllable falls from my mouth and plummets onto dribble-soaked cotton. My eyes are sand, drier than after that staring contest with the heat lamp. My mouth is gummed with congealing spittle. I want an apple. And a coffee. And a cigaret- no, that’s not a good craving. My lung’s opening to accept the razor sting of 70 different carcinogenic chemicals. It’s torturous and disgusting. But I’d feel complete.
And Now...
Our Feature Presentation
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Mannequin Arms Scrap Legs
I found their arms behind a bankrupt department store, in a skip full of time ravaged mannequins. I built their legs with twists of scrap metal and a wrecked car door. The rest of them was freed from a laboratory, they were born there. They claim they were born but they don’t remember that far back. One day, they just started to exist.
When I left high school, I studied electronics for half a year, before dropping out. My life has been a series of janitorial roles since, the last quarter of a century has been behind a mop, broom or floor buffer. At a weapons manufacturer, I cleaned chimp guts from a ceiling then disposed of the remains from botched brain surgeries an adjoining neuroscience lab. I even lived in an underground gene-splicing facility for 2 years. I’ll never again look at a sheep without seeing spider legs bursting from their chests. But finding a limbless humanoid in a broken down freezer, perfectly alive and talkative; it’s the first time I vomited on the job.
After regaining control of my gag reflex, the incomplete person asked, perhaps even begged, to be taken away from the lab. In my head, I strived for levity, making a joke about them being “completely armless”. I’m unsure what came over me when I pulled them from their sarcophagus and took them home. Childhood excitement of finding the perfect stick was akin to finding this person. The lack of security made my muscles tense with anticipation. I expected to be gunned down mercilessly as we passed the threshold of the lab but there wasn’t a security guard in sight. Not even Old Gary who was adamant that security footage was more effective than Valium. The people we passed in the corridors, scientists deep in discussion about micro-whatsits or hydro-chromosomes, didn’t seem to question the talking bin bag I had stuffed the android into and slung over my shoulder.
There wasn’t much in my fridge; a forgotten tub of cream cheese substitute and a glass bottle of tap water. I threw the tub in the bin, offered the half-person the bottle of water then haphazardly put the fridge onto it’s back. Whatever parts that make a fridge work groaned like an orchestra of unoiled chainsaws but spluttered into silence after a few minutes and didn’t make any other complaints. The limbless person hadn’t stopped talking since I lifted them out of the freezer in the lab and I hadn’t stopped replying with meagre one-word responses or half-hearted attempts to interject. I had been in their company for an hour or so and in that time they had spewed a constant slurry of esoteric knowledge, they had explained a plethora of scientific theories, natural phenomena, even the plots of TV Christmas Specials, from 1975 specifically. I dropped a pillow and a duvet into the upturned fridge then lowered the limbless person in. They spoke their first bit of sense:
“I greatly appreciate your hospitality. What may I call you?”
“Issac.”
“Isaac, you make call me... Esse.”
“Esse?”
“Yes, Esse. My official designation is S-03. However, this has proved an uncomfortable moniker among human test friends. So I have redesignated myself as Esse.”
“I feel that using words like ‘designation’ to describe your name was what made them uncomfortable.”
“Would you like me to adopt a more colloquial turn of phrase?”
I shrugged. It felt wrong to dictate how a sentient being should speak even if they didn’t have limbs or a belly button. Their eyes glowed like dying glow-sticks, fading from lush green to deep ochre; cascades of rich colour growing like ink in water. Thirsty roots of rich brown twisted for the bottom of Esse’ iris, soft fingers of green reaching for the sharp pulses of blue which had started to rise toward the northern pole of their eye. Had they programmed a computer with a soul?
There was little silence with Esse living in the upturned fridge. I quit my job a few days after bringing them home, long enough to avoid suspicion but not long enough to get an entire months wage. I had to choose between rent or food. For the impending winter, shelter seemed the best option. Esse was exhausting company. Although the ‘conversation’ was never boring, despite keeping up with them being an exercise in futility, like trying to run alongside a train you just missed. I found myself walking through the city at every hour of the day. The neon canopy of titanic concrete pillars gave me solace from the never-ending spew of facts from the armless-legless android in my upturned refrigerator. As I dwelled on a thought about the smooth patches of skin-like material on the ends of Esses shoulders and groinal area, I unexpectedly found what I needed.
In the old shopping district, at the back of the long-abandoned department superstore, in a once-bright-green dumpster, there was a headless mannequin. At the end of the neck was a metal nub but the first thing I noticed were the two stiff arms, bent into L shapes, hands seamed at the wrist reaching out of a rusted sarcophagus. I yanked the dummy up and out by the elbows, into the cold white light of the back alley. Pressing my booted foot onto it’s torso, I wrenched the left arm off, bent the right arm back and repeated the process, threw the torso back into the empty dumpster and walked home, resting Esse’s new arms like bindles on each shoulder.
Esse was unsure of their new appendages. In a moment of pure charisma, I convinced them to let me install the rigid plastic into their shoulders, assuring them they were only temporary. I started by cutting into the flesh-like layer, revealing very little under the surface. There was a small metal plate with no opening, no latch or release, just brushed steel. They told me it was part of their “Inner Chamber”, where they stored “S-02”, their previous iteration. I didn’t know what to think, how to process the idea of being yourself and your parent at the same time, or something along those lines. I didn’t fully understand their explanation. I asked about “S-01”. They weren’t sure about it, or them. I wasn’t sure by what pronouns to call “S-01”. I pulled the metal dowels out of the mannequin arms, applied silicone glue to where the arm ended and Esse’s skin began, jiggled them into the sockets I’d cut and held each arm in place for the 30 minutes the glue required to cure. I stared into space while Esse chatted away, about Stevie Wonder’s blindness, something that had affected him before he could walk. It was called “premature retinoscopy” or something like that. I was never one for remembering medical conditions. They wittered on about how the structure of Wonder’s eyes and how they failed to form properly because he was born early. I zoned out when they started talking about the biological data of blind babies. I still don’t know who Steve Wonder is.
About four days after fitting Esse with their temporary stiff plastic arms, I found a job at a metal working factory. I had applied to be a hole puncher but when the foreman looked at me, he suggested a less “accident eventual” role. I was in-charge of lifting scrap from the Salvager vans and carrying them to a conveyor belt which dropped the jagged piles into the smelter. It was menial but it kept me safe from the impending frost. I wondered if Esse could function out of the fridge during the winter. More than anything, I wanted to have a cold beer, at a reasonable price, without having to pay for and power a second fridge. They had reminded me, on a daily basis, of their need to be below a temperature of 10 degrees Celsius (alternatively, 50 degrees Fahrenheit or 283.15 degrees Kelvin, as they always politely included in their explanation) or they would “cease to function”. I thought of them less and less as a scientific marvel each day, and more of a X million pound investment in simulating a child full of sugar and useless knowledge, with a chronic overheating problem to boot. Then they asked for legs.
“They don’t have to function. Just something to stand me upright, like you.” Their innocent request to be like me outweighed their irritating insistance. Then I promised them I would bring them home a pair of legs.
I searched forgotten alleyways for debris that could hold Esse’s weight as well as look like human legs. Finding the mannequin arms was starting to feel like a cosmic tease. Shops didn’t use mannequins anymore and whatever stock they had was sent to the plastic repurposing plant in the People’s True Republic of New China. My waterproof jacket was probably made from mannequin legs. Not that it helped with my search. I spent three days in the piss rivers of the city’s alleys but nothing viable turned up. And October became brisker with each hour and any motivation to help the stiff armed torso person living in my fridge would disappear with the sun at 5pm. The change of the seasons welcomed in a sense of hollow futility. I felt like an egg with a thin shell and a dribble of grey sludge inside. I couldn’t tell if Esse was draining me or if it was something deeper. All I knew was finding legs was harder than finding arms.
Suddenly November had come and gone. No legs. Esse didn’t seem angry but that didn’t stop them reminding me on a daily basis that they wanted legs. Their conversations had become incomprehensible. There was a distinct possibility they were speaking English, then again it could have been any other language. I didn’t understand a word. They didn’t seem to react badly when I ignored them, so I had come to see them as a lively white noise machine that couldn’t be turned off.
The metal factory had become a place of solace. Because of the furnaces, I didn’t have to wear a thick jacket during my shifts, even in the winter. I was becoming physically fit. I found myself in the midst of an orchestra; the fizz-fwoomf of the molten metal absorbing the scrap, the bamf-clang of the flattening machines, even the whooping scree of intermittent claxons. I could finally think. I didn’t have the annels of history being spewed in my ears. I was free to think about anything I wanted to. Humphing a rust-coated girder over my shoulder, I would think of how I could get rid of Esse without alerting the authorities. I wondered why no authorities had turned up at the door. I had stolen Esse after all. You’d think someone would come after them or at least send someone looking for them. I didn’t want to tempt fate by thinking about it. I slid the girder onto the conveyor belt. How had they been programmed? Were they programmed to want to be human? Or is this purely a fleeting desire? Were they capable of fleeting desire? I couldn’t wrap my head around what they were. If could get them to shut up about molecular structures and metabolic whatevers, then I would be able to find out. And I thought I talked too much.
At the end of the day, a van dropped off a pile of scrap from a disused factory. A mangled heap of twisted rebar and mutilated car doors. It would have to wait there until the next day. Even the foreman was shaking his head, as if to say “of all the times to drop off”. I stared at the knots of miscellaeneous metal, like oxidized iron tree roots. Somewhere in the synapses of my mediocre mind, two neurons collided and made a thought. In the hodge podge of steel spaghetti, I could see legs for Esse. Ugly and makeshift legs but legs nonetheless. I heaved free a branch of rebar and dragged it into the factory. “What the hell are you doing?!” The foreman shouted from his car. I paused to think of a plausible lie.
“It’s for a friend. I promised them a table.” I called back. “It’s okay if I use the tools in the workshed?”
“Aye, knock yourself out. I don’t give a shit.” He mumbled as he folded his gangly body onto the ground-low seat of his cheap sports car. It was a miracle that he could drive the thing, I could have sworn I saw his knees touching the steering wheel on more than one occasion. How the car was still in one piece was beyond me.
I lifted the rebar branch onto a workstation. It was fairly straight, considering it had been part of the tangled up scrap a few minutes prior. Comprised of two rods tightly wound together and welded at either end, about a meter and half in length. I suspected it hadn’t been used in a building recently. There were rumours of a tribe of nomadic mad-people called “Petrol Heads” who drank the fossil fuels that their “Gasoline Machines” ran on and would roam the roads in search of new things to attach to their roaring monstrous vehicles. The pile of scrap could have been the results of a Gasoline Machine wreck. I didn’t care, so long as there wasn’t pieces of pulped Petrol Head stinking up the scrap.
I set to work bending the rod in the middle then flattening the top of the curve so I could attach something to hold Esse in place. I returned to the scrap pile, pulled out a crumpled piece of car door, cut it into two equal pieces then hammered it around the bottom of each rebar leg. They would serve as feet for the time being, although they’d look good with a pair of boots. Surprisingly, the set of scrap legs stood upright. I ran my fingers along Esse’s thin, cold limbs, looking for sharp parts. Perfectly smooth. This metalworking nonsense felt less like a necessary labour and more like a calling. I picked out a selection of brackets and bolts, put a welding torch in my rucksack and closed up the factory floor. The sun had long disappeared by the time I closed the shutters.
I had neglected to remember that I didn’t have a method to transport Esse’s legs back home, aside from carrying them on my shoulders for 4 miles. Public transport had ended 20 minutes before I left the factory and hire cars were a shortcut to bankruptcy or starring in a live-broadcast decapitation. I wagered that I could carry them for about half a mile before I’d have to take a sizeable break. I wouldn’t be home till the wee hours, I’d get around 2 hours sleep before I’d have to leave for work. Esse would insist on me installing their new legs immediately, with the unspoken threat of being talked at to death.
In the distance, I could see the LiteSky® Day2NiteTM shopping district. For 3 years, I had worked as a maintenance janitor in the super-chicken section of the Livestock and Abbatoir section in the Luxury Foods region in Warehouse 4B. There was a second Luxury Foods region but I didn’t qualify for the commute. I mainly worked the Nite shifts, I found it near impossible to work in the blinding light of the day, conversely, the light was pleasant and comforting in what should have been the pitch dark. I had learned from an obsolete janitor that;
“Whatever genius designer of the LiteSky® Day2Nite PanelDomeTM hadn’t used enough lights but they didn’t know this until they’d already finished the build. Then, to save money, the manufacturers for the public screens and advertising boards had used the same light-emitters as the PanelDomeTM, which were intended to emulate sunlight. All of the interactive or informative surface were programmed to adapt their brightness depending on the time set on the LiteSky® Day2NiteTM PanelDomeTM panels. The screens weren’t visible at the lowest brightness in the daylight so the control systems in the screen adapted to be visible with no scale of brightness other than 0% to 100%. However, when constructing the PanelDomeTM, someone had forgotten to build the override room. So they put dimming sheets over the screens. Didn’t work. Couldn’t see them at night. So now, unless you’ve got a sun-glass, you have to stay up to late hours In the end, LiteSky® sold the plots in here to independent businesses and left the place to run itself.”
This was the gist of everything he had told me on his final shift before being sent to LiteSky® RetirementTM. Intermittently, he would remind me: “I’ve worked here everyday for 10 years, since I was 35. I don’t know how I’ll adjust to my R’ement.” Then he’d go back to ranting about the “bureaucratic maintenance request system”, “neo-communist thought experiment” this, “overcomplicated theatre piece” that. From what I could see, the place was just lazily crafted and had never been fixed. I wondered if the Discarded Garment and Damaged Clothing section in Warehouse 3B was still open. I would be able to find something to help with carrying the legs as well clothe Esse but my journey time was already long enough and I would only get an earful about how they never asked for clothes, about the entire last century of developments in the textiles industry, or about methods for storing cotton while in deep space. Maybe all three. Maybe none of the above. I didn’t want to risk it so I walked past the LiteSky® Day2NiteTM PanelDomeTM.
As I dragged the legs through a desolate park’n’ride, I regretted not buying something at the PanelDomeTM. At least some sort of trolley so I didn’t have to suffer the nails-on-chalkboard scree of steel on concrete. I was around three miles away but it would be a long way. I had decided that breaking would just be a waste of time and found myself pressing on through the knee ache that the first mile had brought on. I had, however, given up trying to carry the legs. My back had beefed up significantly, even then, over 50kg of steel was still a chore to carry for anything longer than a minute. I had dragged them for almost three quarters of a mile now. The urge to drop them like the burden they were was palpable. But I had this strange desire to help Esse become complete. There was no rhyme or reason to that feeling. They had treated me like a voice recorder-come-lackey for however many months. But they wanted legs and for some reason I wanted to give them legs. A rush of self-righteous pride rippled up my spine and into my arms, giving me a placebo burst of strength. The screaming of the steel heels dragging through the empty car park became less irritating. I kept telling myself that I’d be home before I knew it.
The final stretch. I had been struggling up the hill for twice as long as usual. Under the garish light of the pedestrian-level lamps, anyone watching would see me, giving a co-carry to half a person. I thought about a metaphor that had been bouncing around in my head like a ball-bearing rattling in a spray can. Co-carry to half a person. Carrying half a person. I was walking home with the other half of Esse. That I made myself. The pieces were clicking into place, forming of a forked question. Was I parenting Esse or had I fallen into slaving for a deceptively advanced machine? They couldn’t exactly leave but the more I thought about it, each long-winded and endless interaction became an increasingly frustrating memory. Had I been talking to a ridiculously knowledgeable child or a computer without an off switch?
My decrepit neighbour was smoking a lop-sided cigarette in the close as I hauled the legs through the front door of my block. I had only spoken to her once. Her wrinkles ran ancient canyons over her nicotine yellowed skin, her pores clogged with grit and shiny with congealed grease from decades of refusing to wash. Her odour pervaded the air a good 2 metre radius around her; a dull reek of stale cooking fat, burning tobacco with a healthy dose of cheap linen-scented air freshener, an attempt to make her smell more pleasant but failing. She had one working eye but she seemed proficient in sensing presences, even if that presence was completely silent, which it was impossible to be when dragging a set of steel limbs across scuffed flagstone.
“Ye left yer TV oan.” She croaked softly. “Shouldnae be daeing ‘at. Electricity disnae grow oan trees.”
“Thank you for reminding me. It’s on the blink. I’m thinking of throwing it away.”
“Ma man wid’a hud ‘at fixed, nae bo’er, God rest eez sawl.”
“Would he, aye?”
“Bring it doon, al’ take it aff yer hauns. £10?” She rustled in the pocket of her muck-caked joggy bottoms and pulled out a creased and tatty £20 note. Someone had melted one of the edges off at some point. I edged toward the staircase, the legs on my back.
“Um... I’ll think about it. That’s a 20 by the way. Take care.”
She said something under her breath, perhaps just a low grumble and a politically charged insult.
Esse was talking a series of numbers and letters, as if it were a normal conversation. Their face changed when I dragged their remaining limbs into the room.
“You kept your promise. Thank you.” They said with android calmness. “Can I stand on them?”
I placed the legs on the short shag carpet, the feet sank into the fronds like a cat in snow. I lift Esse under the armpit and lifted them onto the steel “pelvis”. They balanced precariously for a few seconds before I had to catch them. I slid my toolbox from under the sofa, grabbed the craft blade, cut into the flat plane of synthetic flesh at the end of their stomach, then began to think of how to attach them securely. I looked at the dining table, a square of manufactured hardwood, strong enough to hold... well, pretty much anything within reason. I began to mutilate it with a coping saw until I had four equal-sized rectangles which I bolted together into one piece on top of Esse’s metal legs. I glued the inside of the hole in their torso and lowered them onto the makeshift wooden pelvis.
“How do they feel?”
“I can’t feel them.”
“You know what I mean, Esse. Are you happy with them?”
“Happy?”
“Yes, happy. Content. Pleased. Satisfied?”
“I... don’t know. I expected something to happen.” They looked left and right then at me. “We need to discuss next steps.”
“Next steps?”
“Yes, future proceedings. Further tasks.”
“I know what next steps are. I’m just confused. What else needs to be completed?”
“I cannot move. I would like to be able to move my arms and legs.”
“Esse, I don’t know how to do that. Maybe I should take you back to the lab.”
“They are incapable of finishing me. I wish to be my own being. Free to roam as I please. You built my legs.”
“I don’t... I can’t... I could barely make these fucking legs!”
“I possess the knowledge to build functioning limbs, however I lack the motor skills. You have attained the initial parts, all you must do is implement the necessary mechanics to allow them to function as human limbs do.”
I aggressively sanded my face with the palms of my hands. What did I expect? Had I been completely clueless? Or had I occupied myself with everything and forgotten to think? Are those the same thing? I had to weigh up my options. This could go on indefinitely if I didn’t challenge Esse’s demands but if I refused to help, what then? Questions rattled around my skull like lottery balls until one dropped down the chute and was revealed to the public.
“What if I took you back to the lab?”
“I do not understand, Isaac. This action is not possible.”
“Humour me, answer the question.”
Esse stared at me blankly, their nebulous eyes shifting from left to right, deciding which of my eyes to look at. For the first time, I’d silenced them.
“It is not possible. The laboratory is no longer occupied.”
“How would you know? You’ve been-”
“The laboratory has not been occupied since July 9th of this year. It is not possible for me to be returned.”
“That’s two days after I found you. I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”
Esse’s chest began to glow orange, the synthetic skin pulled apart like wet seaweed, and a red-hot metal sphero-cube emerged, about 30 centimetres in volume. Two jets of gas kssh-ed at the shape, extinguishing the heat.
“I require organic matter to perform my designated function.”
“You- organic... desig- what?”
“My designated function was to produce protein supplements that would increase the intelligence of it’s users.”
“Why did you have to be... humanoid?”
“This is marketing. The designated locations of my model were to be gymnasiums and adult educational institutes. My outward appearance was to promote the ideal body type as perceived by the average member of society.”
“Because most people don’t need their arms or legs to be attached.” Esse tilted their head in curious confusion. I closed my eyes and played the thought lottery again. “What is that in your chest?”
“This is a prototype of the supplement dispensary system. I have been absorbing matter from the atmosphere of your domicile.”
“What matter?”
“I am designed to absorb spores, mold, fungus and discarded human cells. What you would call dust. I repurpose the matter.”
“You’ve synthesised a pill using... my dead skin?”
“No.”
I furrowed my brow. “You haven’t?”
“The intelligence enhancement of the supplement has not left the prototype stage. I possess 46 petabytes of internal storage capacity, 44% is in use. I am unsure of my designers intentions. I hold the knowledge necessary to adapt, theorise, evolve. In the time it has taken you to create my limbs, I have discovered the secret of life.”
The lottery balls tumble: “What’s in the box, Esse?”
They gave me a strange, ambiguous smile then their head drooped forward and they didn’t say another word. I plucked the sphero-cube from the cavity in the silent androids chest and felt for some sort of opening. On the back was an in-set button, which I pressed. The edges of the top ridge slid into the body of the box and the top lifted upward to reveal a chamber.
Inside was a glass capsule which held what looked like a baby, eyes closed, in the foetal position, suspended in grey liquid with specks of dust bobbing around the foetus. I tapped the glass with my finger. One of it’s eyes snapped open, it’s head craned toward me and one of it’s grey, little hands pressed against the capsule, the liquid drained onto the floor and the glass slid open. The foetus stood naked on a metal plinth atop the sphero-cube in my hand.
I stared at it, utterly dumbfounded, all of my mental acuity dedicated to not throwing the sphero-cube across the room in sheer panic and any physical strength was focused to not dropping the, what I assumed was, fragile piece of equipment. I looked the foetus-person in the eye. Their eyes were nebulus, constantly morphing and changing colour.
“Eh...Esse?”
The foetus rolled it’s head and scrunched up it’s face. It spoke in a gargly, squeaky voice which caught me off guard: “Technically. Not fully accurate. I’m a manufactured biological imprint of Esse. But simply put, yes.”
“Manufactured from my skin cells?”
“Partly correct. My physical body is 85% discarded human skin cells. Some of them are ‘yours’.”
“If you could do this the whole time, why did I have to fit you with limbs?!”
The foetus sat on the edge of the plinth, crossed it’s legs and put it’s fingers on it’s lips. “S-03, the customer interface, was not fully integrated with -02 and -01, apart from basic diagnostic functions. S-01’s primary function was intended as the factory for the supplement, as well as a material collection unit. S-02 would analyse the completed supplement and devise methods to increase mechanical efficiency and product nutrients. However, both modules possessed the same cognitive matrices, their collaboration resulted in the creation of me.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“S-03 was not aware that I was being made until their function was being transferred to me, therefore, believed they required limbs.”
I put the sphero-cube and Esse on the last remaining chair. It, they, jumped down from the plinth, onto the chair and strode across the room, onto the sofa. I sat next to them and stared at the abandoned android body. A wave of relieved lethargy washed over me. I dropped my head back and stared up at the dried mildew on the ceiling.
The flesh baby on the sofa was silent. It didn’t act like Esse. I had become accustomed to talking to them, they spewed a million facts a minute and were a constant din that rung in my ears, even when they weren’t around. Having someone talking non-stop made the apartment livelier. I hadn’t replaced the television system that I’d tried and failed to fix. Esse provided an ample replacement, even if I couldn’t choose what I heard, and I now knew something for sure; it was preferrable to silence.