Archive of Our Own

Kyo untangled himself from a dream. His body was melted in the endless white waves of his sheets. He blinked, trying to make sense of the blank ceiling. 

When he was neurolinked to VAL, its five cameras provided 360-degree vision in a way that shouldn’t be possible for the human brain to conceive. Flashes of sensory readings lined the top of his vision; thermal, temperature, air flow data that he would interpret in a fraction of a second. Its blinking target could hone in on a component of the factory and seamlessly run diagnostic information. He could even switch from an infrared map, to a satellite or topographic one, to a sonic map, if he needed to. Not that he needed a sonic map because sound waves couldn’t travel in space. It was just thrilling to have endless options at his fingertips; to be constantly stimulated and engaged. It felt realer than reality itself.

And when he wasn’t neurolinked, he still missed waking up to the sharp pleather smell of the seat in VAL’s cockpit. He was a small person. If he curled up all his limbs, tight enough to match the density of a black hole and collapse, he could make it work through the whole night. 

He remembered the first time someone caught him sleeping there. It just had to be his Captain, of all people. For a moment, they stared at each other in terse, fragile silence. His secret was out–he had become one of those pilots. The cold, dimmed lights of the mech bay did little to illuminate Kaoru’s expression. Yet, Kaoru had simply given him a pass-over and moved on. He didn’t even note anything in his ever-present tablet, even as Kyo’s eyes followed him across the hangar floor. He let out a breath of relief. His captain may not have understood, none of them really did, but he trusted Kyo enough to leave him the fuck alone. That was over a decade ago. So when he was placed on (involuntary) Reconciliation, he knew that it wasn’t Kaoru’s doing.

He sighed, pulling his liquid self into defined borders. The curve of his short leg under the bedspread, his knobby fingers. He slowly sat up to look out the window. 

White fog poured into the air around his neighborhood. The roofs faded in and out as the mist wrapped around them. Rain pattered outside of his window. One by one, feelings of fuzzy vacancy alternated in his chest, as quickly as the drops came down. The shadows of the water passed through him.

He saw a couple march to the other side of the block. Their colorful coats and patterned umbrellas reminded him of sunnier afternoons. On those days, children bounced up and down the block after school. He could imagine the movement of their backpacks and ponytails, jostling, thumping, competing for space on that narrow sidewalk. He imagined them because he never actually saw them. Their voices simply rose upward as he lay in bed and stared at the wall, as he often did during Recon. 

It was all just so fucking pointless.

Still, he promised to come to Yuchi’s show tonight, so unfortunately, laying in bed was not an option. He got ready for the day and started working on a brand new model mech. 

His hand clamped around his nippers, which he was going to use to cut the pieces from the sheets, but his fingers refused to curl around it properly. He nearly dropped the tool. He frowned, counted to three, and tried again, successful this time. Then he used an X-ACTO knife to smooth out the nubs. 

He had picked up this childhood habit to stay sharp during Recon. When he was a child, it was much more difficult. In his enthusiasm, he used too much glue to hold all the pieces together. He remembered running a finger over the build, feeling the sharp ridges and smooth, flat plates. His small forehead creased when his fingertip met uneven globs, where the glue had bled out into the model. Pretend-tumors over pretend-machinery. Then, he used too little and the sections fell apart mid-build. It took twice as long to put together.

Just as he was getting the hang of how much glue he should use, companies started releasing kits where all the pieces simply snapped in place. Now, it was standard practice. If he could be bothered to get his hands on some of those vintage models, he had no doubt that he could do it correctly. But for now, he had this one.

He moved slowly at first, still feeling like his fingers were sausages compared to how refined and precise VAL’s infinite toolbox was. His fucking fingernail obscured the miniature parts. He twisted his hand over his ear to zoom in and take a closer look. Then he blinked.

Right.

He allowed himself a small noise of frustration and then got back to work. Snaps filled the room as he got into a steady rhythm, cutting, cleaning, clicking together. He heard cars rushing by and the sound was like blurred applause, but he didn't know what they were celebrating. They always drove too fast. 

He paused. Something was wrong. He picked up the model to examine his work. He had built the mech’s torso and was working on the legs now. Everything seemed correct. Then, he noticed a scarlet smear across the chest plate. He frowned and looked down. A cut had bloomed over his finger, and blood was running down the side of it. He stared at it for a second, dully registering the pain, as if it belonged to someone else.

He should probably take care of that. He made swift work of the bandage and chanced a glance at himself in the bathroom mirror. His face looked like the result of someone asked to draw a human in as few strokes as possible. Two beady dots for eyes. A thin line pressed into a suggestion of a mouth. A small curve for his nose. His tattoos were so intricate and engulfed so much of his skin that, in the right light, he almost seemed like a shadow walking. Before he got them, his only point of pride, he remembered being surprised at seeing anything in the mirror at all.

He pinched his cheek, like his mother used to do when she was upset with him. The sensation of the soft, gathered skin in his fingers felt realer than the cut. It was one born of intention. He squeezed harder, feeling the zing of pain and the subsequent burn on his face when he let go. Any tighter and it would have left a mark that would be a pain to cover tonight.

He returned to the build, dabbing the tip of a wet washcloth to wipe his blood away. It came off easily and he finished the model with no other incidents. He even found it in himself to weather it.

He had done an impeccable job, as always, but it still was no VAL. He hadn’t brought himself to purchase its base model. At least, not yet. Not when it was still out there, living, thrumming, waiting for him to return on a distant star. Waiting for him to return to itself.

Kyo’s body was insured. That meant he was not allowed to drive.

He could more than afford to take a taxi to the venue, but decided against it. He needed to walk anyway, in lieu of being too damn tired to go to the gym. 

He nearly stumbled the moment he stepped outside. His mouth twisted at the new weight distribution. In space, there was a satisfying lurch when the electromagnets made contact with the truss or the solar arrays, or whatever module needed fixing that day. Each magnetic node dispersed across his suit could only be activated when in contact with another company-patented electromagnetic node on the factory, assuring his security. The unanchored parts of him were weightless, liberated in the emptiness of zero-gravity, as much as his mind was in the suit.

On earth, his visual field tilted on the axis of his uncertainty. He paused for a moment to adjust to his own subjective interpretation. 

The sweltering summer heat had broken in the wake of last night’s storm. This morning’s rain was just a whisper of how tremendous that force of nature was. Fat-bellied clouds lingered, casting his neighborhood in a dusky, strange pallor. When he started walking, his carry-on rolled thunder on the strip of sidewalk, alerting the world to his presence. It was not the seismic, anchored thump of VAL’s foot in the airlock, signaling the beginning or end of a spacewalk. Most people he passed were coming back from the office and into the arms of someone who loved them. He was headed in the opposite direction.

The venue was downtown, so it was going to take a good chunk of time to get there. His apartment was in the western outskirts of Tokyo, in some no-name suburb that was a compromise between fucking all the way off and his friends begging him to stay “close” to the city. 

One of the challenges of city living was its lack of privacy. It meant having few places to unload the burden of being seen. He was, after all, forever condemned to this variation of a person. In that sense, he understood the appeal of the car, as a place to hide. It was the closest thing a civilian could get to their own mech. Then again, he had been a civilian for a long time now.

He had tried to drive once, just to see what it was like. This was several years ago. The plan was to rent a car, but there was too much legal paperwork involved, and he couldn’t guarantee that his company wouldn’t get wind of it all. He asked Miya if he could use his car instead–an ordinary, mid-sized sedan with slight cosmetic damage. It was a purely utilitarian machine. 

He borrowed it around midnight, when Miya had no use for it. At that time of night, there would be no one on the freeway to endanger if he messed up. Not that he would, considering how laughably straightforward this machine was. Once again, he had been placed on involuntary Recon. By the time he fell into the leather seat, his heart was thumping erratically and his vision swam with useless, ugly tears. He didn’t need to be here. He didn’t need to “reconcile” himself with his “home” and “body” and “life.” He explained this countless times to the higher-ups, but no one would listen. He trashed their prescription, something stupid that started with a Z, and pretended to be happy so they wouldn’t can him too.

When he splayed in the seat and finally broke into sobs, the metal frame swung too. When he got into the road and wanted to scream, he turned the volume up and his voice, which he sublimated through other, better singers, blasted in all directions. He sped up, so that his form matched the intensity of his feelings, so that he could generate enough thrust to break out of Earth’s gravity and meet his mech. The engine roared as it strained to catch up to his desire. 

There was another reason he had asked to drive at night. It was here, dancing on the knife’s edge between this life and the next, that he could pretend the murky blackness was space. The road lines below and the street lamps above rapidly streaked past him, and if he squinted, he could imagine that they were stars. The world bled away, but it wasn’t enough. He gripped the steering wheel, so clunky and primitive in his hands. This engine was too loud, too horizontal, too fucking slow. He could chase VAL forever, but he could never reach it. His true, metal body rejected the soft, flabby, vulnerable flesh existing outside of his control. He was so gentle on the pedal then, coaxing the acceleration into a build-up of spectacular, shattering violence. 

Around the 140-150 KPH mark, the tension in his head broke into clarity, as singular and sharp as a snapped wine stem. He let out a small gasp, drawing oxygen up into his head; a shower of white sparks. This was not VAL. This was not even his car. He slowed down and took the nearest exit out. 

He mentally shook his head at the memory and paused to catch his breath. His limbs felt dull and heavy, hanging off of his torso like dead branches. His breath mingled with the urban smog and just like that, it was forgotten again.

He continued walking until he finally reached the bus stop. The ground felt cottony beneath his trainers. He lit a cigarette while he waited, watching the house in front of him. The tobacco added weight to his blood and his thoughts as it coursed under his skin. Steady. Smooth. He exhaled.

The smoke wreathed around the window, faint and silky. Through the gap in the curtains, he could see a couple curled around each other. Every once in a while, the woman flicked the pages of her magazine. There was a TV on, but he couldn’t see it. The two were awash in blue and white, like rings of moonlight across a lake’s surface. He imagined himself reaching out to touch it, and the image rippled and broke apart under his fingertips.

The rumble of the bus pulled him back into focus. He stamped out the cigarette before hauling the suitcase inside. It thunked up ungracefully. He ignored the stares that shot his way, as he always did whenever he left the apartment. Then they were pulling away, merging into traffic, going, gone.

His phone pinged. There was a single text from Shinya, wishing him good luck tonight. He sent a thumbs-up reaction and swiped in the air to switch apps. He let the teeth of the algorithm sink into his brain. There was nothing of note. The same asinine comments, the same cy-droid celebrities, the same crypto griftfluencers. The same tired gossip, the same scuzzy offers to be Uploaded, the same plasticky meals. He pocketed his phone, thinking it was a wonder no one had invented an alternative to food yet.

When he looked up, he saw a baby smiling in his direction, its gums twinkling in the fluorescent light. It had been a very, very long time since he had seen one. The first thing he noticed was that it was bald, like him. Unlike him, this baby’s scalp was all flesh and unnervingly soft, like his finger would just sink if he pushed. His own scalp was inked to the bone, crowned in two-dimensional barbed wire and flames.

But this baby still smiled at him.

He knew it was irrational. This baby had no idea what the fuck was going on. And yet, the stiff muscles in his face contorted anyway. He felt light around his eyes and the corner of his mouth curled upward. 

He was smiling back.

On the bullet train, he watched the natural currents of public transportation at work. The waterfall of humanity crested over the platform at every stop. Every passenger looked away or scrolled on their phones, but they all just ended up surveying each other. Eventually, the doors opened with a hiss and a click. The dam released its hold. And nameless, faceless people set out with the same grim determination. It was lined in their eyes like a secret pocket on the inside of a jacket. 

He stared out the window, fiddling with a silver ring on his thumb. The world dropped a note of light for every kilometer that the train put behind it. The buildings bunched closer and grew taller as they sped along, until they completely crowded out his precious sky.

His heart rate slowed when he thought about the train, so he followed his attention below the car. Its enormous power was far closer to VAL than anything he had encountered so far. When he watched it pass on the street, he always felt a sense of wonder, even though he knew exactly where it would go. The train’s path had not deviated since its creation. When he rode it, the machine melted away and ceased to exist. He had the destination already fixed in his mind, so it felt like he was staying still even when he knew, abstractly, that he was moving. The crucial difference was that he was not the one in control.

He let the silent vibration of the train’s levitation mechanism lull him under. The Shinkansen EMS Maglev was one of the most sophisticated and fastest in the world. The electromagnetic arms of the vehicle curled around the ferromagnetic steel track. The coils at the end of the electromagnet hummed with awesome force, producing separation between the two parts–precious suspension. It was completely frictionless. Elegant.

Throughout the process, an AI corrected instabilities generated by the minute differences between rail and car. Without the lightning calculations reproducing that stable, consistent distance, the whole thing would collapse. The distance between magnetic forces–that doomed, eternal repulsion and attraction–was absolutely necessary. It brought people, services, and capital together. 

Something flickered in the corner of his eye–a rotating, virtual ad banner unfurling itself across the length of the car. The adspace blocked non-essential internet traffic to guarantee its own consumption. Passengers looked up in a daze, ready to eat, whether they wanted to or not.

The first ad was for some second-rate university offering students the chance to study cybersecurity in Washington. An image of a famous, gleaming monument accompanied it; phallus penetrating the blue sky. 

“My brother did that program,” said the girl across from him.

“Oh, really? How was it? Kenta is considering a second degree.” The girl’s friend clutched a half-eaten bag of chips in one hand and a water bottle in the other. It crinkled as she gripped it tighter.

“Well, you know men,” she said, shrugging. She shifted her bag into her lap and flipped the top shut with a decisive snap. “Won’t say shit about shit, except that they didn’t actually send him to Washington. They sent him to a place called Arlington.”

“Where the hell is that?”

Kyo tuned out, immediately bored. The image swept itself clean. The ad changed.

The second one solicited recruitment for the Japanese Defense Force. It read “PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.” The tagline read “Securing Earth, space, and beyond” over a world with a mysteriously clean atmosphere. He had seen Earth from beyond enough times to know the planet was choked with generations of dead satellites. A stern, soldiered young woman foregrounded the ad. Still no gun on her hip, after all these years. He stared at the word “peace” for a long time.

The final ad was for his own company–Free-Will. It simply read “The Trusted Disruptor,” along with the company’s logo and an image of the neuro-processing chip that they were famous for. The chip started off allowing people the ability to think commands to their machines and then, almost overnight, revolutionized genAI VR. Governments would theatrically prosecute Free-Will for labor and environmental violations, forcing production into space. The same governments would contract them to manufacture for implantation in “certain populations,” known only to them. 

How efficient, he thought, letting his eyes cloud over. How disruptive. How lucky he was.

And then he didn’t think of anything at all, until the announcer’s voice slithered into the haze of his mind. They had finally reached his stop. 

He was walking to the bar, not much longer now, when it happened. 

A truck cut him off in the middle of the crosswalk; a blaring horn trailed in its wake. His heart beat its way out of his chest, alongside a sudden, sickening fear. Indignant heat prickled in his cheeks. That truck would have crumpled against a single one of VAL’s legs. But VAL wasn’t here right now. For a moment, he imagined himself enmeshed in its grill. He saw pieces of his body squished between the metal bars, dripping slowly into the asphalt. Pink and brown and red. The colors of his heart. 

He started walking again. A chill knocked on his chest and asked to come inside. He hadn’t had a door there before and was startled at such a polite request. Before there was a door, the cold just rushed through, swept through the rooms, and trailed its fingers over all the things inside. It left a silvery pallor over his house, spiderwebs connecting disparate pieces together. He looked through the peephole and considered its shape, meek and shifting. 

He hovered on the threshold for a long time to decide what to do. His body stopped to consider a colorful shop display to stave off the darkness. He crossed the road to avoid an old man and his dog. The mass wavered when he lowered himself into the world.

He rounded the final corner and cracked open the door of his heart. The chill plunged inside, erupting into a canyon. This searing, frozen heat held him in its crosshairs in the middle of the sidewalk, paralyzed. Heaving. He was hammered open by the words that he wasn’t really here, that he was galaxies away. It felt newly penetrative but somehow, already at home inside of him. He vaguely acknowledged onlookers swelling around him, past him, cutting into him with dirty looks. But he wasn’t here. 

He had enough presence of mind to duck into an alley. His heart was beating too fast and too alien to catch now. He held this feeling in his teeth for so long because he didn’t want to acknowledge the embarrassing melodrama of it all. But his nausea was stronger than his resolve. He stifled a hand against his mouth as he vomited this laughter, jagged and sharp around his lips. His smile carved into the night. Incredulous. Biting. False. He wasn’t actually here. He looked up into the branches of a tree that splintered the sky. The shards of the heavens reflected himself–nothing. 

“Hey!” 

The voice struck his thoughts against the wall. An officer was gesturing in his direction from the other side of the street. The wavering edges of himself stilled.

“Yeah, you. Get over here. We want to talk to you.”

His body moved of its own accord. As he drew closer, he realized that there were two officers. The one that called him, the older one, wrested his carry-on from his loose grip and started unzipping it. He watched himself face them, as if he was still standing in that dim alley. 

The younger officer fixed him with a calculating stare, but Kyo knew that he wasn’t really seeing him. If he made eye contact, he wondered if he could see the flicker of the officer’s military-grade contact lenses as it scanned his face for recognition. Wondered if he could see his pupils flicker green and white when he accessed the federal government’s Citizen Registry Access Portal.

“Nishimura.”

The older officer drew out an elaborate dress sheathed in dry cleaning plastic. The plastic warped the neon lights above and threw sickly blotches of color over the black fabric. He shoved the dress back and pulled out another plastic wrapper, this time containing intricate, layered rows of pearls. 

“Yeah,” he puffed. Something cold and corrosive dripped into his chest at the sound of that name, eating away at his resolve. He stared at the asphalt, knowing it was stupid to avoid the officer’s gaze. He knew it made him look shifty and suspicious, but he had tried direct eye contact with them before, and that had earned him a gleaming wad of saliva on his shoes.

“Nishimura Hironori!” the officer barked.

He must have been speaking too quietly for the officer to have repeated that name again. He tilted his head upwards so that he could stare at a spot past the officer’s shoulder, while keeping his face in his periphery. There was just no winning with the police.

“Yes, sir,” he said. His voice came out raspy after days of disuse, but he tried to keep it steady, even as his hands started to shake. He clamped his fingers around them. He probably should have eaten more than chocolate and cold fries earlier.

“You’ve been stopped approximately a dozen times in the last five years. Do you know why that is?”

The older officer pulled out a large makeup box, rifling his grubby fingers inside. The inside mirror sliced a cut of light onto his face. He heard the products click and clack together. The officer pulled out a tube of lipstick; blush pink. 

His self finally snapped back into place, taut and tightening with every passing second. He set his jaw. A man with full-body tattoos existed in the middle of downtown Tokyo. The officers never recovered anything when they stopped and searched him. That much should have been obvious in the C.R.A.P., but, as he learned quickly as a child, people were less concerned with truth than they claimed.

He assessed the officer’s face. Fresh, almost cherubic. When he took too long to respond, he could see a crease form between his eyebrows. He blinked and saw that nasty scowl scarred into the young man’s face twenty, thirty years into the future. Cruel tattoos that he and time would choose together.

“No, sir.”

The officer did not humor him with an answer. He wasn’t legally required to. “Hometown: Kyoto. What are you doing all the way out here?”

“Going to see my… sister.” He gritted his teeth even though he had repeated this spiel for strangers before. He wondered if saying these words was ever going to come easier. “She asked me to bring those things to her.”

The officer grunted. “Occupation?”

Kyo bit his tongue to stop it from lashing out. Something to the tune of how is it any of your goddamn business you son of a wh

“Mech pilot. Nothing fancy, just a general technician.” Kyo dealt this information out sparingly, trying to strike a balance between humble, yet impressive enough to be left alone.

It worked. The officer whistled appreciatively and his voice softened. “How’d someone like you land that job?” He wished he could grind that smug face into the concrete.

Kyo glided over the insult as best as he could. “My mandatory enlistment period started right at the end of the second galactic war.” He was just out of high school and wanted to escape his parents, plus a bad, embarrassing breakup, but he didn’t say that. “I was in the right place at the right time, I guess. I took the job no one wanted… at a remote outpost in Andromeda. Just a grunt boy for the Kuroyume.” He paused for a moment, remembering that that meant nothing to nobody. “The team fixing the comms rigs out there.”

The officer nodded. “The propaganda rigs. Strong enough to secure the empire.”

He shuffled his feet. He didn’t confirm the officer’s assertion because he didn’t need to. It was self-evident. Instead, he thought it might be okay to look down again, so he did. “At the start of the new era, my supervisor referred me out to his contractor friend. Picked up things here and there… It was easier than I thought and I got good at it.” Good enough to be a pilot with no real schooling. “I’ve been private ever since.” 

The officer’s lips pressed into a thin line. “We lost so many of our brightest in that war. I’m glad to be born in the new era. In fact, I’ve lived most of my life in the third Pax Americana.” 

Kyo nodded. He swallowed around a scratchy throat. The well of things to say had long run dry. He heard the sound of the other officer zipping the suitcase back up. He shoved the carry-on back in Kyo’s direction and it rolled to a stop in front of his feet.

“Well, Nishimura. Thank you for your service.”

“Thank you,” he repeated numbly. For the first time all day, his limbs burned and screamed to make themselves known, to run away with all his might. 

Fat chance. Not unless he wanted to mark himself as more of a cocksucker terrorist than the state already did. Instead, he marched on while his thoughts flatlined. His heart raced so fast that it ground to nothing against the asphalt. A pink stain on the tarmac.

The queens practically took over the small bar as they prepared for the night ahead. This time, he was getting ready alongside Toshiya. Kyo played catch-up with him while he waited for the water in his steamer to boil. Toshiya’s long limbs negotiated space perfectly with his smaller frame–one less thing for Kyo to worry about. The other man’s body heat radiated in waves and Kyo found himself inching closer, as he would with a newly turned-off driver in the chill of the space station. He couldn’t remember the last time he stood this close with someone else.

“Did you bring the skeleton?” Kyo asked.

“Of course,” Toshiya said, not looking up from his eyeliner application.

Kyo thanked him. The bubbling water demanded his attention and he got to work steaming out the wrinkles in his dress. The model skeleton used to be his, until the demands of his job forced him away. He had given it to Toshiya to use in his act. After all, it couldn’t fit in his carry-on and he didn’t perform often enough to justify owning one. Now, his skeleton lived in someone else’s closet. 

They lapsed into a comfortable silence once Kyo was finished steaming. Next, he examined the pearl necklace and bra set, which did not fare as well as the dress. His mouth twisted. There was no way he could detangle that in time. Luckily, he brought the dress’ original top just for cases like this. He didn’t have to worry about the shoes–matte black with a thick heel.

His eyes slid over to the makeup box, sitting innocently in all its inky velvet. He knew he would have to confront it eventually, so he pulled it closer with trembling fingers. 

It was just as he feared. The box was ransacked. Lipsticks over blushes over face paints over eyeliners over foundations. He grit his teeth and set his shoulders, stifling the urge to redo everything this very second. Instead, he dumped it all out, separating what he needed and what he didn’t into little piles. Things were going okay until he got to the highlight. His particular rose-colored highlighter was nowhere to be found. 

Well. That wasn’t ideal, but it was fine. He could just use eyeshadow for the same effect. But when he looked for his pink and rouge palettes, he came up short again. 

The chill threatened to crawl up his spine. Although he already knew, he foolishly looked for his lipsticks in the same color. His fingers could have passed through sand, for all the good that did. His head buzzed. He stared off into his reflection, shirtless. His eyes ran over the flat planes of his chest and he saw his own fingers trace up the tough musculature of his abs, dipping into the hollow of his neck. No matter how much he worked out, they would never match steel plates. Never. 

Never.

“Kyo?”

He whipped around to face Toshiya, startled.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, just. All my pink is gone, I think,” he mumbled. 

Toshiya stared at him with an unreadable expression. “I don’t really use pinks in my routine, but I think Yuchi has some–”

“It’s okay,” he said, with slightly more strength this time. Toshiya still looked unconvinced. It didn’t matter. The germ of an idea was already starting to take root. The tendrils spread to his veins and ignited his blood, made it feel close to boiling over. Mistakes were good. He was going to look like the most interesting goddamn mistake that the police could have made.

An hour and a half later, he examined himself in the mirror. He whited out his face, as he had planned to do in the original look. He was going to use the pinks to frame his face in a dreamy, springtime glow, dust his nose, and bloom over his cheeks. Instead, he chose a brown contour so deep that it hollowed him out; emaciated. He painted thick, black branches to cradle the side of his head and added a pair of eyes in the gap between branches, resting just above his own. He ringed the pupils in a brilliant, steel-white iris. Finally, he glued a silver stud in the space between the eyes, and used that as the pupil for the fifth, and final, vertical eye. 

He closed his eyes. His real ones. The false pupils remained as they were. There he stood, locked between the ephemeral gaze and the eternal one, waiting to become alive.

The truth was, VAL was hardly the same machine that it was when they first matched. In the years since then, the mechanics replaced nearly every part, save for the neurolink components.

VAL started off as a matte-black mech that perfectly mirrored his face when he stared into one of the leg plates. At the turn of the century, there were still rebel parties interested in direct action against the factories. He thought it might be in his best interest to be a little less conspicuous. A little more armed. His favorite was RAZR: the blood-red beam saber that he could withdraw from his chest.

In the new decade, they updated the exterior plating and allowed Kyo to customize the alloy so that it was glossy white, with blossom-pink accents over the linkages between limb actuators, encasing the indicator lights, and ringing the cockpit. They removed the last of the weapons loadouts so that VAL was lighter and sleeker. The other workers gave him a wide berth when he stomped past them, anxiously chewing on his thumb, in those weeks between the plans and the installation.

When they presented it to him, Kyo stared at his warped face in the leg plate and felt nothing at all. No customary tension. No ever-present worthlessness. No sadness. Just nothing. He smiled.

“It’s beautiful.”

Shinya tightened the last of the safety restraints. The velcro straps scratched at Kyo’s bare ankles and wrists. Shinya squeezed a finger in to make sure things weren’t too tight.

“All good?” he asked. 

“Uh huh.”

“Great,” Shinya replied, dropping from Kyo’s line of sight. When he returned, he held a control panel in one hand and the chip in the other. One end of the chip was attached to thick link cables that trailed off into the unknown mech below him. 

“Just remember to breathe through your nose. And we’ll stop if you choke on it.”

Kyo eked out a half-smile to his neurolink manager. “So precious, so serious. Do I even get to have a safe word?” 

Shinya stared at him with a completely deadpan expression. Who needed restraints when the silence was cold enough to make hell freeze over?

“Guess not,” Kyo murmured, obediently opening his mouth. Shinya placed the chip below Kyo’s tongue and tapped his chin so Kyo could close it. 

“Are you

ready for the show? Our next queen is a veerrryy special guest all the way from Star G-304! This alien is visiting the cooch of mother earth for one night only, so lube up and strap in! We’re going to let her introduce herself!”

Kyo nearly rolled his eyes at Die’s very awful opening. He had told him to drop the space gimmick, which he had clearly forgotten, and that he wanted to introduce herself, which luckily, he did not forget. Well, a broken clock was right twice a day. 

She walked to the front of the bar with no backing music. She let her ass bounce and her dress sway behind her. Her heels clicked heavily with every step, skewering the audience’s attention. When she got to the front, she caressed the microphone in her spidery, delicate fingers.

She looked at all the severed heads in the audience, burning with their own impressions, meanderings, and retreats into unrelated thoughts. Their hair was of all colors and textures, growing wilder as the night wore on. Their faces were tense in anticipation.

She wondered whether the audience believed Die when he said she was from another star. They were silent.

“My name is…”

She hissed the words, injecting as much rot, fear, abrasion, loathing as possible. She deliberately spoke in English, letting the clunky syllables fall out of her mouth with a thud. 

She raised her hands slowly and they laid to rest atop her heart. Her bare, left hand crossed over her bandaged, inked one. She cradled her name to her breast for a moment, as carefully as she would her own baby. But she knew with a sinking feeling, what she must do, as any good mother would, or anyone cursed with the tragedy of creation. Her voice took on a soft, reverent lilt. 

She let go. 

“A Valentine.”

The lights shut off all at once and plunged them into darkness. A lone spotlight shone on her form. She jerked around to the staccato beat, limbs flailing along with the menacing rhythm. When the vocalist sang about hammering, she stabbed at her chest with the microphone, and her pain, sonic and endless, echoed in the dark. 

She opened and closed her mouth grotesquely as she mouthed along to the lyrics. She swung around, making sure everyone could see the crooked, uneven teeth nestled in the plush shine of her lips. When the beat dropped, she did too. Her wet tongue lolled and she nosed the microphone stand as she pulled herself back up. She hiked up her flared skirt to reveal inky, swirling patterns on a muscled thigh.

The warm, conspiratorial piano rang out in the small bar. She collapsed in the middle of the bar, in the middle of the audience, that had parted just for her. She opened her mouth and pressed a finger inside; dragging rough calluses over a soft tongue again and again. She pushed down and added a second finger. After a few strokes, she started to bob her head; her fingers and head in sync with the time of the drum. The audience cheered and she cried in reply, pretty and broken around her hand, eyes shut tight. Her insides were hot, burning. She was vaguely aware of a sliver of drool running down her chin. She knew she was fucking up her lipstick–smeared mauve against the stark pale of her face. It only made her feel more alive–to perform within the cage of their gazes. To lose control of her limbs

under the restraint. The algorithm had started to crawl through his biometric information. scanning the strength of his synapses (outstanding), the length of his telomeres (acceptable), the things that made him tick. After what seemed like hours, but was probably just minutes, the twitching stilled into a buzz under his skin, leaving him warm and heady.

The chip shuddered under his tongue. The twitching returned, this time, localized to specific limbs. Thousands of electric needles traveled across his body, pricking slowly, as if in worship, starting from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. He saw a bolt of white light snap behind his eyelids as they reached his optic nerve. Then the current probed at each vertebrae in his spine, sharp and unrelenting. He felt the electric stab across each rib. He saw the veins in the back of his hand expand, his fingers violently twitching around the current. He stifled a moan when they reached his

non-uterus, which threatened to swell. A hazy, animalistic want coiled inside her belly. Just as she was on the verge of giving in, she pulled off and raised her hands. A triumph. She spread her fingers apart in the spotlight. The viscous fluid gleamed and winked in their faces. 

She made her way down the aisle of the bar, ignoring the small-value yen that they threw at her. A tall, lanky boy caught her attention, completely enraptured. His pupils were blown out with desire, even as monstrous as she was. Perhaps all the more for it. She caressed his face with her spit-slicked fingers and he shivered under her touch. She patted his cheek with a wink and danced back to the front of the bar. Her arms swayed to the bassline while her feet danced to the drum beat. When she looked back at him, his hand cupped the cheek she had mauled.

The outro of the track foregrounded a vocal loop of a woman’s cries over a distorted electric guitar. Her voice enveloped the space, haunting and impossibly breathless. Her expression went slack, her mouth parted, and her 

body went limp. He had the feeling of slowly being lowered into the ocean. It was hard to grasp at words, but he still wondered, in a vague sort of way, whether the ocean always tasted of iron and salt, maybe something else unknowably ancient. The rest of his thoughts drowned under the enormous pressure building inside of him. It increased with each second. Each muscle felt like it was getting both deeply massaged from within and wrung inside-out. It was an exhausting test of endurance that, if he had the energy to do so, would have made him scream from the depths of hell. Sisyhpus after a thousand years. 

He was about to collapse when the pressure changed pitch. It did not lessen, so much as fade away, along with every other sensation. The curve of the chair, the chip in his mouth. The last thing he registered was a shadow pulling something over his head—and then his vision went completely dark.

He took a step in the loose, floating space that his consciousness had become, but nothing happened. He was no longer aware of those limbs existing at all. He tried to turn his head or move his hand and was met with the same absence of feeling. He wanted to breathe out, but there were no more lungs to draw air into.

What replaced sensation were lines of text, filling the blackness from top to bottom before looping around to begin again. He reached into the furthest recesses of his mind and pulled out a memory from his training–that these were the calculations necessary to determine full compatibility. He was in the later stages of neurolink acclimation. But that could not be all. He saw, buried between strings of code, his thoughts and fears and desires from the past returning to the surface.

“Ah,” he thought, before. “I want

a womb,” the vocalist sang.

She folded her hands into a triangle, with the tip pointed down. She brought the hands up to each shoulder, to her chest, and finally, down to the nexus connecting her legs and torso. Then she squeezed and let them burst apart. Her body swung around to the rest of the outro, her hands circling the air behind her, eyes half-lidded, slave to the orbit of her own star.

Finally, the next and final song began. She started dancing around the bar again, wiggling her fingers and shimmying against the patrons. She reached out for them with a twirl of her fingers, and then she raised them up to the spotlight. The light glittered, fractured, spinning in her hands. An impossible ideal. An unreachable love. Her fist closed around nothing.

The instruments fell away as the song transitioned into the hook, replaced by a crying violin. She walked to the front of the bar, to the body that lay under the dark blue tarp. She stepped forward slowly, beat by beat. When the vocalist sang, full of yearning, she raised the body’s gloved hand. She pressed the stiff fingers into her cheek, tender.

The conspiratorial guitar returned. She hopped on the folding table and started grinding against the body. In one fluid motion, she ripped the tarp away and howled, open-mouthed, at the skeleton of her lover. When the vocalist screamed and growled, her body convulsed as if possessed. The spotlight flickered rapidly, throwing her body into a tumultuous mess of limbs and screams. She pawed and scratched at her face in agony, pain lighting up her chest. She was drunk on it–the ability to feel something. Anything at all. Eventually, the lines

petered out and then stopped. A thread of light began to trace the outline of the mech below him. As it did, he felt a new awareness seeping into his body–one that he had never felt before. The first thought he had was that he was big. A size that could dwarf most things he would ever lay eyes on. The point of light reached its beginning and flashed green. Neurolink established. 

When the light illuminated each module of the mech outline, he felt that part blinking to life inside of him. First was the distinct thrum of the fuel cells in his core, distributing crackling electricity through kilometers of wires. Next was the push and pull of the radiators as they regulated heat throughout the suit. He nudged his torso and was rewarded with a light whirring noise as several tons of steel twisted with him, humming with awesome torque. He curled and flexed his fingers, feeling the joints lengthen with precision in a way they never could before. 

As each component came online for the first time, a list of indicators ran down the side, performing final checks. He didn’t bother reading them at this point. He didn’t need to, to know that he was exactly as he—it should be. It still couldn’t see anything, but it relished the unbelievable power coursing inside. 

It was not a cyborg. Mech acclimation was no marriage of muscle and metal, of synapses and signals. The unnamed mech simply eclipsed the entirety of him. It was like the mech had

gingerly raised the body and wrapped her arms around the big back. She threaded her fingers through the ribs of her skeleton. Her heart blossomed with gratitude over these tired bones. Warm. Reverent. She pressed a tender kiss to its mouth and slid her tongue in, like she could taste the ghost of someone she loved.

She linked her tattooed hand with the skeleton's ungloved one, and started leading them into a waltz-like dance. The tempo slowed. The strings swelled, enveloping the space with so much mourning that she couldn’t help but feel full of it. Her dress whirled as she spun her sorrows, unfurling like cut flowers at a funeral, turning to the sun for the last time. She was as graceful as she was fleeting; a brilliant super

“NOVA-703…” This final line of text, spelling out his callsign, wiped away the image of the mech. The cursor blinked curiously, like it was gazing at him beneath fluttering eyelashes. The first meeting. The first contact. The first love.

“Do you accept VALENTINA as your acclimation?”

“Val,” she whispered into the skeleton’s collarbones. “My Val.”

Yes, he thought. I do.
 
Her view of the audience wavered and melted away. The bar melted away. She was melted too, inside everything and everyone. Dazzling and ephemeral. 

Alive.

Kyo did not stick around to watch the queens shed their skins. He pressed Yuchi a kiss goodbye on the cheek and briskly packed up; no backwards glances. The queens’ laughter trailed behind him, but he never really understood the joke. The back door shut with a decisive clunk, sealing that world away.

He saw the clouds against the indigo night. They were large, unbroken masses; more grey than blue, and vaguely flat, as if they were painted onto the sky. True blackness was forever out of reach. Every step away from the show felt like an exorcism, maybe a false liberation towards something he did not yet know. This is what he did know: today, he was forced to be vertical instead of horizontal. He was forced into the city instead of the stars.

As long as he was here, this was all pointless. He wanted to believe that with all his heart. Still, there was a stubborn, wriggling part of him that refused this point of reconciliation. It clung onto this cheap wish; this perverse, necrotic love–that life might be worth living after all. 

Tomorrow would be a finer day.