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The bazaar is alive in a way it can only be in the underbelly district of Hyukog after their civil war amendments. A civil war more taxing in blood and flesh than some argued had been worth it – a whole dwarf planet’s worth almost, on both sides of the conflict – but it gifted the galactic neighbourhood one of the most progressive societies in it’s wake. Not one species had to worry about their rights suddenly being revoked as a lower-sentience life form, not one specimen had to keep an eye over their shoulders for radicals sneaking to slap them in chains and cart them off for being a coveted rarity.
As a human, solidly in the middle of the arbitrary sentience ranking some Guthorp scientist had devised, Chan never had to manage his concerns either way. Easily assumed as having enough conscience to elicit fair treatment and respect, and not uncommon enough that his presence was a surprise. The Hyukog civil war had been before even his parents’ time but he’d nevertheless witnessed the direct influence of its progress in his adventures galivanting around various galaxy systems in his area.
Getting your parents up and murdered at the ripe age of twelve doesn’t leave with a lot of stellar job prospects, funny enough. Or future prospects for that matter. He never blamed them for it but with the amount of debt his grandparents had racked up that they hadn’t managed to pay even a smidgeon of before they kicked the bucket, and loan sharks breathing down his neck with threats of severe maiming and death within months of the fact, he had no choice but to turn to unsavoury methods to bring the money back.
On a crew for some senior bounty hunters for a few years, doing the dirty work of maintaining the ship and running errands, whilst covertly studying the ins and outs of the business – and then fucking off on his own, stealing a ship and working his way up the bounty hunter reputation board for another few years and he made the money back but it was too late too dip out by then. He formed too many enemies to return to a normal life. To the life he dreamed of, settling down planet side in a job that didn’t risk death, in a house that could witness the tumult of the weather come rain or shine.
Instead he’s here in the bazaar of Hyukog – and really it’s a wonderful place, he’s sorry his cynicism blinds him – on a half a day pit stop from the ship, the longest he’s ever allowed himself to take. It’s a shame. Some of the terrestrial hotels look magnificent and he has more than enough units to pay for a stay but he’d rather not risk being followed and being the cause of a floor blown to bits. He’s had enough near misses with his ship to learn caution.
But he can spare himself a day. Take in the musk of non-artificial air, of an actual breeze. Savour the scent of petrichor that people usually begrudge a good day ruined. You hate terrestrial life until you leave it. Then, it becomes the only thing you can think of.
Chan doesn’t really have a goal for the bazaar today. Usually when he lets himself get reprieve from the urgency of matters about his solo crew on the ship, he never frees of the compulsion to do something else productive. Get parts for repair. If not repair, then maintenance. New intel, scouting out new informants where old ones got chased out of towns and scouring for new jobs.
Today…
Today he’s just a bit tired.
He had a goal, maybe, when he’d woken up still warping through hyperspace. He thought about tracking down info on that cyborg enforcer who’s been on his back since he bust into their complex with his old crew. For some reason she’d had a particular grudge with him, though all he remembers doing that day was lasering through the bars of the holding cells. It was his boss and colleagues that had done the really damage to her force.
He gave up on that aim almost as soon as it sparked across his brain. Cement in his bones leaked into his bones and dragged him back into the sheets; more fatigue than he thinks he’s experienced in all the laborious twenty four years of his life. Looking at the date for the first in a month when he landed the ship in Hyukog’s harbour, he realised he missed the anniversary of his parents death by almost a week.
Tired.
The bazaar makes up gratuitously for his lack of energy.
A Kotrohiri lady was deep-frying batches of the native fish in a stand to his side with her iron-hot palms. An Aerilian elder was getting heated up bartering for some local fruit, all trussed up in ornaments and gift wrapped to perfection. Two Bigarvis teenagers were selling the service of their artistry, peddling of real-time portraits and caricatures, completed in triple speed on account of their three sets of equally dextrous limbs.
He doles out a few hundred units to a Hyukog deep-frying what seems to be… leaves? It looks good enough to buy, and tastes good enough once he actually bites into it, so he snacks on it as he looks around.
In the corner of the large enclosed market area, where the goods are the most intriguing and where morals go to die – or at least take the back seat to profit – Chan sees a glimpse of a broad Eliuq man sitting by an expansive array of wears. There’s an assortment of gadgets and trinkets and parts scattered across his desk, all procured by questionable methods no doubt, but the cage behind him is what catches Chan’s interest.
Half-hidden by the bulky edge of the table, Chan can still see it’s peculiar height. Just smaller than that of a human, which would have been truly terrifying, but too big to house any random pet or domestic chimera. Not nearly wide enough to be an animal that required space or movement.
Like investigating the crumbling vestiges of a crashed spacecraft knowing you’re going to find the remains of a crew mangled or dead, Chan rounds the table with morbid curiosity riveting down his spine.
It’s an android.
But it looks like a child. The only tell is the skin layer peeling off at his joints like bad plaster or old sticky tape, revealing strips of mechanical rotary connectors and bundles of thinning wires and muddied biofuel jogging through his system. Apart from it, his hair looks shaggy and knotted, falling haphazardly against his face in harsh locks, shorn carelessly in other places. His eyes are bruised and baggy like any human’s would be after a long period without sleep. The faux baby fat puffing out its cheek is most horrifying of it all because despite it being artificial, it has somehow lost its pallor.
The wounds and lacerations burst open with blue scars instead of red but Chan’s heart sinks all the same.
This Eliuq has a boy in a cage.
An android boy, the only species to not be recognised under the new Hyukog administration, but a boy nevertheless. One who looks like he gets beaten bloody and deprived of sustenance and neglected. Chan doesn’t claim to be an expert on androids but you don’t need to be to know that technology has come a long way since the isolated state of the planets; as soon as the systems gained knowledge of each other and sentient life, collaboration radicalised technological progress in the mere two hundred years. Nowadays, there is little to differentiate androids from humans beyond their mechanical parts. They sense pain, feel emotion. Laws aren’t willing to accept it yet but the whole of the Jangya Sect knows it.
The way the boy’s eyes only half open, the LED’s in them flickering in and out, and the unnatural twist of his limbs, hanging on by the last ditch attempts of the wires on the verge of giving, don’t paint a good picture of his maintenance. Chan imagines his own bones that way, joints barely held on by tearing sinews of muscle, epidermal protection scraped from them, his blood so contaminated it hardly bleeds red anymore. Despite the threat of death he faces on the daily in his job, he feels lucky.
The Eliuq watches Chan intently as he surveys the boy, as if there’s a legitimate risk of him stealing the boy when the padlock on the cage is bigger than his face. The two guards lingering around the stall who are somehow of an even broader build tense at as he leans in to survey him.
They haven’t even given him proper clothes. All he has are his boxers. It’s not a particularly chilly day – perhaps Chan just thinks that because he’s wearing a jacket and cape – but the boy is positively shivering, with a force that seems like it aches, his old parts creaking with the motions. It’s the only movement he allows himself.
At a sharp glare from the Eliuq, he bars himself even that, locking up his limbs so they don’t rattle.
Returning his attention to Chan, the Eliuq says, “It’ll do anything you say – it’s an all-purpose model, the first of its kind. S’got chips for all the different functions. And I mean anything. Real top-of-the-line stuff.”
Chan raises an eyebrow, deliberately looking the owner up and down. “So how’d he come to be in your hands?”
The guards take a purposeful step closer, probably intending to be intimidating. Chan rests assured in the knowledge that the blaster sitting comfortably in his handy belt could disintegrate the entire lane if he wanted it to.
“I ain’t steal it, if that’s what yer asking,” the Eliuq snorts. “It was a gift.”
Chan hums in fake understanding. Surely you’d give a gift more respect than… this.
The boy doesn’t look at him. He doesn’t look at anyone. Leaned against the back corner of the cage, knees drawn up and arms looped loosely around them, even the artificial enhancers in his eyes can’t make up for the fact that he’s lost all the light in them.
“Why are you selling him then?” Chan shoots back, but he keeps his tone tempered. “And why is he in that state?”
He can see the Eliuq’s face twist as he tries to frame it in a way that will maintain his sale prospects. Losses have to be cut somewhere.
“’M not lying that it’s quality shit, if that’s what you’re saying. But I’ve had it for quite a while and you know how your tools get banged up after a couple years. It’s like that. Couldn’t find its parts around and couldn’t be bothered to track ‘em down. But that’s because I live planet-side these days. You? Now you look like someone who travels around a lot, amiright?” Chan gives a cursory nod. “Thought so. Could tell by the space boots on’ya. If I give you the seller’s name – they’re on Bigarvis – you’d make an easy trade.” He casts a weary glance before leaning in conspiratorially. “Or you could raid them. Between you and me, their defences are weak. You’d be in and out in a second.”
“I see,” Chan says. He glances at the boy again, who gives no sign of acknowledgement of Chan’s interest; either he believes no one will buy him, likely since the Eliuq man seems to have had him for a long time, or that nothing will change even if they do. Chan swallows against the rising lump in his throat, against the headache that pounds in his head and the tears that press down on his eyes. Turning back, he’s startled by how close the Eliuq man has decided to station himself. “Just out of curiosity, what has he been able to endure? Physically.”
“Physically? Oh, you mean the broken parts. No matter about that, fella – it feels pain but it won’t make a racket out of it. Repaired it a few times after I lost control and it was good as new.”
Lost control.
Chan’s breath wavers in his lungs as he fights to keep a straight face.
“And you said… you said he could do anything- did you mean?”
A sleazy grin splits the Eliuq’s face, his three eyes all narrowing in thinly veiled pride. “That’s exactly what I mean. It might put up a fight the first time but takes it well every time after, even those big guys there got a shot – had to be fair to my employees after all. Biggest benefit of the model, I’d say.”
It takes everything to not punch him in the face. It takes everything not to cry for the boy sitting in the cage.
“So what’dya say chap? You’ll buy it?”
There was never another choice.
“How much is he?”
He had cost more than half of Chan’s reserve savings, the mass he’d built up in hopes of one day bribing enough people to live a peaceful life back on Earth, somewhere far removed from the hubbub of the intergalactic harbours and risky deals. But that dream paled in contrast to the boy that needed to be saved, here and now. Not someday in the future. He can make the money back anyway.
He would’ve killed the men, stolen the keys to the cage and escaped with the boy but for all of its dubious laws, Hyukog is stubbornly strict about those involving trade. Chan understands why it has to be, sometimes, given they are the site of almost fifty percent of intergalactic economic activity but the rigidity of their laws leaves much to be desired for not-so-moral fellows like himself.
Chan doesn’t have much confidence in his ship at the best of times, with no one else around, but now with a new set of eyes roving over all of it, and inevitably the mess that inhabits it, he feels a new wave of self-consciousness roll over him.
The Eliuq, Teche he’d introduced himself as, had insisted upon transporting the boy to Chan’s ship himself, calling out one of the guard to man the stall as he delivered the cage. That was another thing he insisted on: keeping the boy in the cage until Chan could prove he had a room aboard his ship to lock him into. Which he did, but he unlocked it as soon as Teche handed over the Ownership Certificate and dismounted the ship.
The boy doesn’t move.
At all.
Not a single flinch of artificial muscle, not even a minor twitch of his lips or eyelids. He doesn’t even make to crawl out of the unlocked cage, despite Chan deliberately backing away out of the room and into the other chambers of the ship.
The boy’s hesitance throws every plan Chan had devised for the evening. Tidying up the ship while leaving him to his own devices to get settled doesn’t sound like the best idea anymore.
Wary of announcing every step, yet not wanting to be so loud as to startle him, Chan re-enters the spare room to see it exactly how he left it an hour ago.
The boy in the cage. A simple desk pushed up against the wall. A digital hyper-space and time-warp sensitive clock silently counting the hours. The military-esque guest bed that is as pristine as the day he bought the ship. A floor littered with parcels and bounty from raids and disguised stacks of money, sorted by currency. Of which there were an obscene amount.
A boy in a cage.
Teche had dropped the cage in between the desk and the bed, an empty space that it slotted into perfectly, right before unlocking the gate. He’d dropped the thick key into Chan’s hand with an absurd sort of responsibility, like he was handing over the mantle to a chest of gold rather than giving him the right to lock a boy up again. As soon as the boy got out, Chan would be blasting the cage and the key into the deepest recess of space or melting it in an incinerator until it didn’t exist anymore.
He hasn’t gone anywhere near the cage in the hours since, hasn’t even been in the room, silently packing away the junk in the atrium and cockpit and anticipating the sound of footsteps pattering out to join him. Nothing.
But maybe that was naïve of him. How could he be so sure that the boy felt that he was allowed to do anything he wasn’t instructed to do?
When Chan was ten, and had none of the worries he now did, he had a dog. Her name was Berry, and his parents had adopted her when she was already quite old, trying to give her a home to live out the last few years of her life. It was a twisted sort of luck that Berry had died before his parents because he thinks that if he had to look after her on top of himself in the months following that he would’ve either burnt himself to the ground or made some horrible mistake to get Berry killed himself, which would have eaten him alive.
But the point is, while his parents ultimately decided to get Berry, a dog, there was an equal chance of them adopting a cat by the name of Soonie in the same shelter. Excitable kid that he was, in anticipation of welcoming Soonie into the family had done hours upon hours of reading on how to integrate a cat into his home, watching videos of people undergoing the same process. Through his extensive research he had learned that cats tended to hide away for a day, then went on a rampage of exploring every nook and cranny, and then finally settled in.
It might be a similar thing. Maybe androids were just more similar to cats than dogs.
He still wants to make sure the boys knows he can move, is allowed to move. And then maybe get his name, since there seems to be no record of it, official or otherwise. Teche had just referred to him as it and all the Ownership Certificate has is the product code #1.
He settles himself at the doorway to the room, cross-legged, comfortable on the floor and a sizeable distance from the cage, and tries to keep an open posture.
For a second he just looks at how tired the boy seems, the parts mangled and immobile, how he barely lifts his gaze from the floor. He’s still but since Chan sat down, he could hear the low rattling of the boy shivering.
It confirms Chan’s previous suspicions that it was fear and not the cold back at the stall, and it drives home that he needs to make several things clear if he wants to make anything better him.
“Hello,” Chan whispers, too cautious to make his voice any louder. The android abruptly forces his body into silence. “Do you speak ūniversālis?”
He probably speaks every language known to any species ever, but it doesn’t hurt to check.
The boy dips his head, the most movement he’s made in Chan’s entire time seeing him, and Chan interprets it as a nod.
“That’s great, thank you for telling me,” he says, smiling widely, stupidly. “My name is Chan.” He points to himself. “Chan,” he repeats, as if he’s talking to a child.
He points at the boy.
“What’s your name?”
Gears creaks as the boy pulls his limbs closer in to himself, hiding half his face behind his knees.
“No name,” he says and he sounds like a boy too. Just an ordinary, little boy.
“You don’t have a name?”
The boy nods.
“You don’t- why?” Chan breathes, mostly to himself. He doesn’t expect an answer.
“Master says objects do not need names.”
Chan swallows against the rapidly returning lump in his throat. “Do you want one?”
The boy pulls his head out of his knees, at a speed that concerns Chan given his broken parts.
“You will give me a name?”
“Yes, if you want.” He aches to reach out and hug him. “Do you want?”
The boy pauses. For a moment that stretches out like taffy, he looks at Chan wide-eyed, and at himself in wonder, and then at Chan against, as if trying to calculate what kind of punishment this is, or how it could be a punishment in the future.
Ultimately he must decide that he wants it anyway, even if it may be used for a punishment in the future.
“Yes,” he says reverently. “Yes, I want.”
Chan smiles, just to show him it wasn’t a trick. “Then I’ll give you one.” I’ll give you anything.
The code on his Ownership Certificate comes to mind, the #1 and for just a second he lets the name Han flit through his mind, but he doesn’t want the boy to be bound to that anymore. If he’s going to get a name, here and now, Chan is going to make sure he gets something new, and something full of love.
He thinks about the names he’d brainstormed in his days off, hopefully, foolishly thinking of a day where he’d return to earth, have a mundane romance and raise kids he would pour all his heart into – a dream that has been dead as soon as it started. He thinks about the boy in front of him, who deserves all that love and more.
“How about… Jisung?”