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Being a Mechanism was hard to describe. There was nothing different about them from the average humanoid that was immediately obvious. Not a thing that one of the hopeless mortals they encountered would be able to pin down before they were utterly annihilated-- whether by a few poorly aimed bullets or a raging fire. Of course, there were some not as obvious things that distinguished them from said mortals: the parts of their bodies that were hard--dull brass or iron instead of squishy flesh--and the unfortunate immortality that came with it.
But what, besides those, what truly made them different? Not-exactly-but-maybe human? What was it about the rag-tag band of space pirates that had caused mortals to unconsciously retreat from members of the crew? Despite ignorance of their true natures, mortals on every planet parted from the Mechanisms’ path like the Red Sea. What was it that caused those mortals to avoid the crew in every market and bazaar across the stars, even before their guns started blazing?
Occasionally, their fleeing could be attributed to something small and inconsequential: the particularly harsh set of Jonny’s eyes after a fight with Nastya, or the unnatural stretch of a grin the Toy Soldier liked to sport. Perhaps the mortals on one planet had possessed sensitive ears and were put off by the soft grinding and wailing of the DrumBot’s metal joints. Small, subtle warnings, but ones mortals were able to pick up. However, the Avoidance Thing happened regardless of the varying attempts made by the crew to blend in. Most of the time, there wasn’t a reason they could puzzle out. Even Ivy, endlessly stuck in her own head, came up empty. There was nothing.
It made no sense, and so they questioned.
The question was a loaded one, but one every Mechanism knew it well. It was never voiced or discussed, and it never ventured further than the tips of their tongues. But it was there.
What were they?
Raphaella:
They must have been human, once. All of them--except Brian, who didn’t count because his second body was completely brass, and TS, who didn’t count because it had never been anything but firm, fine-grained wood--still had human bodies. So, Raphaella figured they were human in a way.
She had been lying flat on the floor of her lab when she came to that conclusion, as she was often when she had Important Thinking to do.
To be something was to embody it, embrace it. A rather poetic thought for a brutal scientist, but Raphaella La Cognizi had never met a group of people more human than her crew. Never mind that they were immortal or more often required circuits mended than cuts healed.
Although she knew the name of every muscle, bone, and system in the human body, knew how the starburst fire of neurons in the brain formed thought and emotion, Raphaella did not think the human experience could be explained through science alone. Shocking, she knew. The Mechanisms would’ve thought her opinion exceedingly uncharacteristic, but what good scientist doesn’t have a good bit of surprise up their sleeve?
Raphaella’s crew loved and fought and grieved just as fiercely as they once had when they hadn’t known they would wake up from certain demise. As far as the official Science Officer of the Aurora was concerned, the Mechanisms were human. She was human.
What else could they be?
Nastya:
In the opposite corner of the Aurora, far up in the Southwest ventilation system, Nastya had been contemplating the same question, but with a different conclusion.
How could the Mechanisms still be human? She thought some of them with less fundamental parts of their body mechanized might be--Marius, with only his right arm. Raphaella, with mechanical wings she chose. But some of them weren’t – couldn’t be. Their bodies were so greatly changed by Doctor Carmilla’s surgeries, immortality aside.
How could you look at Brian, completely mechanical except for his hidden heart, and know he had once been human? Besides the crew, she doubted anyone they encountered did more than look at Brian, think “robot,” and move on. Considering the only one of them who had actually seen his heart was banished gone, for all they knew it might not even be human in there.
It’s not as if the Doc was known for telling the truth.
Beyond Brian and his identity issues, how could she be human? Her lifeblood was not thick red coursing through her veins. It was cold--silver as a bullet--and as complicated.
Breathe in, breathe out, melt it down and siphon it into her decaying veins in order to force her heart to pump, pump, pump again.
Quicksilver, the metal for bullets and blood. How ironic.
And Jonny, with his mechanical heart. It worked well enough to pump his blood--red, normal--through his veins, but it was not a heart. She knew the chemicals that create love, oxytocin and vasopressin, are formed in the brain--something Jonny surprisingly still had.
But how can you really, truly love if you do not have a heart? And if you cannot love--do not have scarlet coursing through your veins--how can you have a claim to humanity?
Ivy:
Ashes had made a fleeting comment once, something about how if human love was dependent on chemicals in the brain, then they guessed Jonny was safe.
They had stopped halfway in the middle and stilled--Ivy in their line of sight.
Ivy’s eyes had downturned, and she had walked rather more quickly than she usually did through the Aurora’s halls to her library, ignoring Ashes’ voice calling after her.
They had momentarily forgotten about her mechanical brain and not meant what they said, she knew. It was forgivable--her brain was not as easily visible as some of the others’ mechanisms.
Yet, it weighed on Ivy. It kept her up at night. It was added to her list of unanswered questions.
Her list was extremely short and itemized in chronological order (of course), but all the things worthy of being on it bothered Ivy immensely. The new question accidentally poised became her biggest distraction, courtesy of Ivy’s brain’s inability to just stop. This was not anyone but the Doc’s fault, and Ivy knew it well. Yet, she could not help resenting how easy it was for the others to alleviate their troubles with the bang of a gun or the harsh slide of whiskey down their throat.
Her troubles stayed in the back of her mind at all times of day, wriggling like parasitic worms thanks to her cursed and never-should-have-happened second existence.
She did not know the answer to it. She always knew all the answers, and she did not know this one, no matter how much she tried to find it.
Oh, how she wished she did.
Oh, how she wished she had just died. It would’ve been a better outcome than a broken metal brain purposefully programmed to work without the chemicals needed for emotions.
That was why Ashes’ accidental jibe bothered Ivy so much. She did not have the necessities to be human--to love. Her human heart counted for nothing when her brain was metal and her skull was plated with brass. When such a fundamental part of humanity could not be found amongst the millions of artificial neurons firing along wires and cables.
Ashes:
Ashes had made many mistakes in both their lives. They could admit that. They had come that far.
Killing their old gang leader and burning down Malone in the process was definitely the biggest mistake they’d ever made, but getting rid of that horrid man and awful, awful planet was the only feasible outcome they could imagine.
They had never regretted it once, even when it resulted in the ever-hungry Doc finding them and, oh gods, mechanizing them.
Now that--that was a whole other boatload of guilt.
Once, in the quiet dead of night--the kind where words flow freely and blend together in the cool air – Nastya had softly confessed that she thought Dr. Carmilla might have given up on her mission if the Aurora had not detected Malone’s annihilation.
According to the mechanic, the Doc had apparently been rather close to surrendering, having not found anyone suitable for her picture-perfect little “family” in almost a century.
“I think,” Nastya had said haltingly, “That if she had not found another for perhaps… ten more years, she would have given up. I would have been the last.”
Her eyes had darted to the nearest vent as if she was planning her escape for when the sudden guilt dragging down Ashes’ shoulders became too much to endure.
Nastya had visibly steeled herself then, face set in an unreadable expression, and declared that at least now the Doc’s attention was spread thinner and thinner the more people “joined” the crew.
After many years, when Ashes had learned to read the small quirks of Nastya’s expressions, they would recall the memory and realize that she had been apologizing.
And gods, didn’t that make it worse?
So, if asked the Big Humanity Question, Ashes joked in a self-deprecating way--with a tight voice that made it abundantly clear that it was not actually a joke--that they were only half human.
“Human in body and brain, not soul. Nothing but fire there!” they would say, blowing air out of their nose in a patented Ashes Laugh. After their company let out a couple obligatory chuckles, they would quickly change the subject to something more favorable.
It lingered in the back of their mind, like little flickers from a fire long extinguished.
Ashes was human in blood and body, excluding the metal lungs. But in soul? No one who doomed their crewmates to the fate Ashes had deserved to walk around calling themselves human, no matter what Nastya and her meddling said.
Ashes was not human. They did not deserve to be.
Brian:
Brian did not question whether or not he was human. He knew he was not. He had no claim to humanity besides the steadily beating heart housed in his “body”.
Body. That was a funny word to describe his old brass machines clumsily molded into arms and legs and a head by a lonely amateur doctor on a family kick.
Ah, the Doc. Brian could spend days in the pilot seat staring out into the great beyond with nothing to occupy him but the tangled yarn ball of emotions and regrets every mention of her name brought up.
He was not the first, second, or even third one she mechanized, but he was different. He was the Drum Bot. Almost completely mechanical inside and out, filled to the brim with wires and circuits and motherboards instead of muscles and tissues and organs. Complete with an inbuilt morality switch for Carmilla’s own amusement.
Sometimes, it made Brian sick to so much as look at it. Every time something inside broke, and he had to go see Nastya instead of Marius to mend it, he was reminded that he was not and would never have the same humanity his crew members continued to possess.
As much as Jonny might mutter under his breath that Brian was more human than the rest of them combined, the rest of the crew was still essentially human. And Brian wasn’t. Sure, Brian--with all of his elusive kindness and near-inescapable desire to help--believed that there was more to humanity than gene sequences and bone structures.
However, he could not seem to apply the sentiment to himself. It might have had something to do with the fact that, for all he knew, he might not have been human to start out with. He had little memory of his previous body, and no memory at all of the time before he crashed on that horrid planet. So. Maybe the flesh heart buried inside of him was human. The Doc said it was.
But if it wasn’t? If the doctor lied?
Well. If that very last tiny piece of his supposed humanity was not in a glass tube in his chest as he was told, but replaced or worse--gone, then his theory was true. It became fact. Not only was he not human now, but he never had been. He was nothing except a robot who complied without complaint. He did not get the luxury of choice or control.
Tim:
Gunpowder Tim was the most human of them all.
When he had first ventured out from the Doc’s lab, death and subsequent resurrection fresh in his memory, his utter humanness was innately obvious. It separated him from the crew. He felt either too awkward or too angry or too human to fit in, with wicked metal limbs and a solid indifference towards what had once been and partially still was Tim’s greatest fear: death.
See? Human.
Mechanical eyes, the sharpest in the universe, served only to bring electric-hot pain coursing through his skull. Over the years, the Master-at-Arms had grown used to his mechanism, but he never liked it.
It sounded like a child’s remark: “I don’t like them.” The first and only time he had ever said that to the Doc, she had flown into a blind rage, almost burning her own lab down in the process. He was to be grateful and accept his immortality and whirring eyes for the gift they were.
She had shouted so loudly then that Jonny had burst into the room, guns flying. Never mind his claim that he hated Tim.
And Tim? Tim never voiced his meager complaints again. Not even Raphaella got an answer out of him when kindly inquiring if he wanted any improvements during the yearly check-up of gears and wires.
So. Tim was the most human of them all and would continue to be. There was no contradictory evidence and there never would be. Tim refused to answer anything that got a smidgen too close to personal.
To the day of his unfortunate and long-awaited death, the only member of the crew who knew anything about Tim’s mortality days was Jonny, who always noticed more during a war than should be possible as cannons boomed and men shouted.
The Aurora:
The Aurora noticed everything that happened within her walls. Every little remark between her crew members while passing, every small gesture made in the silence of the night, every expression that crossed a face before the owner was quick enough to school it. She noticed it all.
They were silly little things, her crew, taking up space with their bodies and their chatter and their feelings.
Humans, she thought to herself. They never grow tired of questioning their own existence, do they?