The Cello
Chapter 13

The world was an entirely different place.

But no, A9 corrected herself, it was she who was different. All her life her mind had been an endless hallway with grey walls and no sky, and then suddenly it was as if the walls had crumbled down around her, and she had discovered a whole world of places her mind could go. She had spent the last two days letting it wander the endless hills of possibilities -- and all to one end. To see E7 again.

She hadn’t gone back to the cactus fields once, and she was pretty sure that choice was the best she’d ever made for herself. She did, however, force herself to return to her unit at night, if only to avoid being hunted down and arrested like he had been. Her heart still cringed at the memory of him being dragged away.

The girl crouched with her shoulder against the metallic wall around the corner from a secluded back entrance to the mothership. Perhaps it would better be called an exit, for it seemed that a lot of people came out this way and never went back in. As it was, she could see -- and smell -- the pit full of people-shaped black bags a few feet away from her.

She wasn’t deluded. She knew that her kind were deactivated when they had aged beyond their usefulness, or when they were damaged too badly. In all her watching and waiting in the last few days, she had discovered that this was where their bodies were dumped -- and had slowly formed a plan.

The very fact that her mind could work they way it had been was marvelous, and a little beyond her. She was determined, however, to use every faculty she had if only to see him one more time. Every time a shipmaid pushed a metal cart out of those doors, she imagined that it was him in the black bag -- her hero -- lost to her forever. She had to set her jaw and remind herself to be resolute. She couldn’t cry again. Not now. She must believe he was alive, and that she would replace him. She would replace him and bring him his singing wooden relic.

A9 checked her internal clock again. Every evening from 7:00 to 7:15, there was a break in the hustle that was usually coming in and out of those doors. It was 3 minutes to 7:00.

She glanced at the instrument which lay in the tall grass next to her. Her plan, as proud as she was of it, only went as far as getting herself and that thing into the mothership. With it, she hoped E7 would know how to get them both out again. It had never made sense to her how exactly that wooden thing had brought her to life and silenced Nine’s voice in her head. All that she understood was that it gave E7 the ability to do inexplicable things -- and he would need to do something wildly inexplicable to get himself and her out of this once they were in it. Therefore, she had concluded, all she needed to do was get it to him, and somehow all would be made right.

The girl checked the entrance again to be sure no one was coming, and then slipped out of her dirty white frock and into the black dress she had taken from one of the shipmaid units yesterday. The maid’s dress was fitted all through one sleeve and down to her waist, below which, it flared outward and hung loosely around her knees. Her flesh arm was covered to the wrist, while her mechanical one was left bare. She zipped it up the back with only a little trouble, and then traded her moccasins for a pair of stiff, black shoes. In her mind, the shipmaids were practically a different race altogether with how well they were dressed and how pristine their units were kept. She’d never considered being envious of them before, but now that her mind was so changed, she found their lifestyle tempting in a strange way.

With another scan of the road to be sure it was clear, she steeled herself, and then hurried toward the pit. Covering her nose, A9 slipped down the shallow bank, and over to one of the bags. She had just seen this one dropped, and was pretty sure it wouldn’t have rotted yet. She crouched down over the bag, found the head of the zipper, and then hesitated.

‘The music’ E7 had called it. It played nervously in her head as she considered what she might replace in that bag. She felt the strings in her chest tighten at the thought of replaceing a face she had seen before. She couldn’t decide which would be worse; replaceing a familiar face- perfectly serene and peaceful, or a body so marred and bloody it was unrecognizable and inhuman.

It took her a moment to shake the haunting feeling, but she finally forced herself to pull down on the zipper. To her relief she found that the poor soul’s face had been wrapped in an opaque plastic bag, but the body, still clothed in the poor smock of a field worker, looked terrifyingly incomplete with it’s metallic limbs removed. The empty sockets were grizzled and ugly. With a shiver, she rolled the bag over so that the body was face down, and peeled the bag off of him. Bunching up the bag, she checked the time again as she leapt back up the bank of the pit.

7:05.

As carefully as she could, she picked up the singing wooden box and placed it inside the body bag. She studied her creation critically for a moment. The ‘body’ was missing a head and a leg - an arm was less important. Her movements were quick as she rolled her old tunic into a long loose roll and placed it beneath the relic. Now for anything that would look like a head.

Her searching eyes paused on a small cactus growing beside the wall. That would have to do. With her mechanic hand she pulled a large bulb from the plant and placed it beside the wooden relic’s long neck. As an added measure, she shoved her moccasins into the bottom of the bag, and then zipped it up. It looked enough like a person if you weren’t studying it too closely. She picked up the precarious bag, and carried it over nearer to the entrance. Then, setting it in the grass where it was still mostly hidden, A9 squared her shoulders and walked out into the open. She positioned herself just beside the entrance, and then waited.

The time was 7:12.

Precisely on schedule, the doors slid open, and a young ship maid emerged pushing a double layered cart with two bodies in black bags lying one above the other. A9 cleared her throat, trying to internally reassure herself.

“Excuse me,” She said. The girl stopped and looked up at her, doubtless confused by the disruption in the schedule. She would have been too, she realized, if it had been a few days earlier.

“I have been instructed to take over your duties, and to direct you to the medic-repair unit,” A9 said.

“Instructed by whom?” The girl answered, her features placid and empty.

“The mother link.” A9 responded, careful to mimic the matter-of-factness the girl was displaying.

“I haven’t received any notice from them,” The girl said.

“They say your link is malfunctioning, and needs to be repaired.”

The girl hesitated for a split second, but then promptly left her cart and walked off toward the units.

“I’ll also need to confiscate your proximity key,” A9 called, stopping her.

The maid turned, pulled a small round device from it’s place on her mechanic arm, and dropped it in A9’s outstretched hand.

“It’ll be returned to you once your link is repaired.” She said nodding to the younger girl. Without more than a mimicked nod of compliance, the maid then turned and left. There was a twinge of sadness in A9’s chest as she watched her go. The girl was hardly different from what she had been. Yet, she had searched the creature’s eyes and found nothing human. The life which could have been had been stolen from her. And to think -- right there in the grass lay the thing which could give back what had been taken. If only her fingers could work the beautiful magic that his could.

With a sigh, A9 made an effort to refocus herself as she slipped the prox key into her own mechanics. It was quick work to dispose of the body on the lower shelf of the cart and replace it with her special creation. She didn’t bother taking the one it’d replaced all the way to the pit -- she knew there wouldn’t be time. She just left it before the door, and turned the cart back toward the entrance.

With a wheeze of hydraulics, the doors slid open for her, having scanned her for the prox key and deemed her worthy of entry on its account. The laser fields buzzed warily as she pushed the cart through the entrance. She got the keen sense that she had stepped into a different world entirely, with it’s strange air, and alien sense of cleanliness. The short hallway intersected a long one that extended circularly in both directions. As she paused in indecision about which way to go, two maids appeared around the corner to her left, walking silently side by side. They took no notice of her until they were forced to step around her cart.

“Is your locator malfunctioning?” The taller of the two asked.

“Ah, yes, it seems so,” A9 replied, dipping her head.

“The central unit of the M wing is down the hall and up the elevator.” The other maid said, glancing momentarily down at the cart, and then pointing back the way they had come.

“Thank you,” A9 replied and started down the hall. She hadn’t any idea how she was going to replace E7 in this maze. Once upon a time she might have asked Nine for help-- and almost did out of habit -- but he had gone totally silent; something she was very glad of in every situation besides this particular one. Going toward the center sounded like the right direction, though, so she was happy to comply and remain as inconspicuous as possible.The cart was heavy, and she had to be careful not to bump it too much or the hollow sounds of the wooden box would give her away.

She made it all the way to and up the elevator without coming upon anyone else. When the elevator doors opened she was met with a view of a huge cylindrical room. The hall she was looking down was sloped upward and curved with the circular shape of the vast hangar. It wound upward for several stories like a spring inside a casing. As she pushed her cart up the gradual slope, she couldn’t help but gawk at the massive configuration of mechanic and computer systems that occupied the center of the huge cylinder. It made constant whirring sounds. Lights -- big and small -- flashed rhythmically across it’s surface in red and blue and green.

As she walked, she passed rooms and small hallways on her left, some dark and some lit up with bright florescent lights. Another maid emerged from a hallway, and passed her, barely affording her a glance.

“Guards?” She heard someone’s muffled voice say as she passed a room full of more whirring mainframes, “Since when have we needed guards? The humans are nothing but brainless apes!”

“No, Martenot, it is you that is an ape.” Another voiced growled, “You just confessed that one of them broke his own override system! You expect me to sit back and wait for more to break? Do you even remember how many we lost in those first few years on this gods-forsaken planet?!”

There was silence from the room for a moment as A9 wheeled slowly past it -- a wheel of her cart squeaking irreverently.

“I’ll update the boy after the reboot tonight, Theremin,” The other voice said, “and the rest of the humans as soon as is possible afterward. Will that satisfy you?”

The boy -- they must mean E7, she thought, her mind racing.

“I want guards!” The second voice yelled.

A tall figure with bluish skin and a strange suit blew out of the doorway just in front of her. She ducked her head just as he nearly ran into her cart and then sidestepped in an exaggerated gesture of disgust before grunting and sweeping past her.

She had never seen one of them without their helmets on, and it was more than a little unsettling. As was usual, however, her thoughts quickly gravitated back to E7’s fate. It was January 26th. She had forgotten that the annual reboot was tonight. In fact, she had forgotten what day it was entirely, and hadn’t cared to check in two days. How strange her old mind would have considered that.

She took a slow breath.

At the very least, she was now quite sure he was still alive.

She only had to replace him.