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Rapi wanted to hit herself.
“I want to see the lift.”
Pretty obvious lie there, genius, but Red Hood seemed to… get it. Get it? Well, she totally knew it was a lie, but Rapi needed to convince herself it wasn’t that obvious and that this bizarre stranger wasn’t about to pester her forever.
Yes, no. I want to see the lift is a perfectly logical dream to have. Who wouldn’t want that? Now that they were all pretty much underground, that modern, reverse-Tower-of-Babel situation must be what ever little girl dreamt of seeing one day. It was a legendary tale of new beginnings, a famous landmark, and, more than anything, an impossible dream.
Red Hood shrugged. “Fine, let’s go.”
…
“We won’t be able to get too close, but we’ll be able to see it from afar. If we get the chance, we can try to get closer.”
Unbelievable. That small square plot of make-shift graves behind them watched, and Rapi felt a small rush of anticipatory nerves as Red Hood looked up, plotting their location. After a few tries of lining her pointer finger up against a few stars, she looked back.
“Do you know the way?”
Rapi nodded.
“Let’s go,” she started. “We can use this time to get to know each other!”
Rapi met that joke with the same stale silence she always relied on. Red Hood shrugged her shoulders, turning north.
.
The first time Red Hood’s eyes flashed, Rapi envisioned a horrible end. Blood everywhere, and—no, parts everywhere and torn latex, and wires poking out of places they shouldn’t be, and joints bent backwards. Even her days in hospital were quaint and sterile compared, and, of course, when one is killed in a mass-shooting, one doesn’t spend much time looking at the gory aftermath of it.
But she let her imagination run wild for those few seconds. Those anonymising visors worn by every mass-produced Nikke felt, in that moment, more like a burden. Just then, she remembered carrying Seira’s decapitated head. She didn’t wonder what her face looked like underneath it all.
Did Seira remember the surface? Did Seira envision returning to a world as empty as the one she died in?
No, of course not. Seira, Rapi, and everyone else in their marred squad were born too late to experience hot summer days and cool autumn evenings. They grew up with films about ‘spring breakers’ who got to feel soft sand and ebbing shores, or ‘transplants’ who worked thankless jobs in city offices until they bumped into Mr. Right on the side of the street, and these are all woven threads into a cotton world of ‘yellow cabs’ and ‘concrete jungles,’ where everyone ‘grabs a coffee’ and ‘goes to spin.’
In the real world, in this world, life was cut and dry. You die young and tragically, your body is morphed into something beyond recognition, and then you die again fighting in this one-sided war. There’s a reason they only gave mass-produced Nikkes the guns with the long barrels, because if they started shooting themselves, there’d be no one left to fight the war. At least, that was one of the jokes one of her deceased squadmates had made only a week ago. Rapi could see the shards of her purple visor on the floor in front of her, mingling with someone’s broken heel and someone else’s worn chest-plate.
Did she remember the surface? No, she could remember this though: a cold world, where the snow was borne out of acid skeletons, and invisible particles blocked any meaningful radio communication, so once you were out, you were out. And good riddance – you were there to fight.
She dimly remembered one of the introductory tutorials she’d watched about mass-produced Nikke maintenance, wondering why it had to be so frequent, and why the very fabric of her new flesh was so easy to break. That makes sense, she thought to herself now. No mass produced Nikke could survive that long alone.
Red Hood, only a few paces ahead, and her endless aptitude dwarfed the rest of them. Rapi didn’t think she’d ever been this close to a unique, specialised Nikke in her life, let alone one who should have died thirty years ago. That’s what made her so amazing. If Rapi were to be corrupted she imagined it would be a similar fate to Rio’s. Just another pathetic blip in time, and another 5% success-rate squad wiped out at the hands of something greater than all of them put together. And what would it lead to? No better understanding of corruption gained, no better protocol for Nikkes affected, and, she knew this in the bottom of her heart, more careless gossip about her to go around the mess hall.
…
And Red Hood’s ability to do so had more to do with her status as a Goddess Squad Nikke than anything else. That’s what made her amazing. If Rapi was corrupted, it would probably be similar to Rio. At the first flash of red, they’d shoot her down and keep on going with the mission. That’s what she hoped, at least. Or that’s what would be best. Yes. They would kill her because it would be the right thing to do, and vice versa.
.
Despite her best judgement, Rapi found herself fixing the cassette player in the first mile of their jaunt.
There was a simple delight in repairing something old, and somewhere deep in her metal core, she cradled an easy warmth every time she bent the aged machinery into soft submission. On the contrary, Red Hood’s joy was palpable and bright, and Rapi felt it as she was embraced and squeezed amongst a thousand peppered thanks.
By the time evening had arrived, they’d gone through at least three different albums, each which seemed to take up the space of an entire tape and needed flipping halfway through. First Rapi would listen, then Red Hood, then Rapi again with Red Hood’s commentary.
As it turned out, Red Hood had nothing; just her gun, which Rapi commended for its upkeep, despite less-than-ideal conditions, and an admirably stupid collection of cassettes that jostled around in her cartridge bag. In her words, this ‘travellers’ collection hardly rivalled the one back home—and this boast trailed off as Red Hood’s expression turned nostalgic, almost contemplative, never silent.
They walked for another hour, Rapi following behind her senior. The infamous Lift wasn’t too far off now, but they would need to stop and rest, Red Hood announced, if only to wait out the night. The surface was cold and the ground uneven, “And I’m not gonna lie to you, even the highest-end Nikke models need time to rest.”
Rapi’s gnawing anxiety on the state of Red Hood’s corruption convinced her to forgo her flagellating impulse to keep pushing, and she poked around at her visor until she found somewhere worth camping for the night. Like this, travelling with Red Hood was akin to torturing her mind with some retrospective sense of déjà vu, wherein she imagined walking around the surface with the ghost of her sickly childhood self. A version of her so uncomplaining about her degrading health, yet so easily affected by the wind. Maybe if Red Hood had found a different unit to play godmother with, they’d be wrapping her in their emergency blanket and asking her stories about her glory days while they whittled away her precious time, or something equally as frivolous.
The clock at the corner of Rapi’s stupid visor told her it was nearing 20:00. Under the artificial sky of the Ark, this meant that the wind-down sequence of sunset would have long finished, and now the ‘stars’ would be visible.
Fiddling with the cassette player, Red Hood turned back to Rapi. “I know you said country wasn’t your thing, but there’s billions of genres out there you haven’t even heard of. Seriously, you have no idea what’s out there!”
Pretending to consider the thought for a moment, Rapi attempted a definitive reply: “I’m not a music person.”
And either Red Hood tripped on a rock or her own indignation. “That’s not true. Everyone’s a music person, even prissy snobs.”
“I’m not— “
She rolled her eyes. “If not you, then others like you. I’ve met a real handful of your types and, at the end of the day, there’s always something that gets you. Ballads or easy listening or,” she waved her hands, “Opera.”
She sought out a better excuse. “The lyrics are sad.”
Red Hood looked up, rolling her shoulder, as if to stretch the muscle. “Dunno if sad is the word. It’s more about longing.”
The mass-produced Nikke barracks didn’t have windows, and that wasn’t going to change anytime soon. It was something about saving space and responding directly to the needs of the Nikkes, not necessarily the wants. Sure, Sandy-turned-R83839 might want to look out at the projected moon every night and remember days gone past, but that would make her weak, and if she’s thinking about her dead father, she’s more likely to fuck up a mission.
“I don’t see the difference.”
“You just haven’t felt the difference,” Red Hood shot back. Rapi couldn’t even pretend that it meant anything.
.
“How do you sleep with that thing on?”
Rapi had spent the better half hour finding somewhere that fit all the recommendations for an Ark-approved ‘place to sleep in the wilderness’ and laid on her back to prepare some rudimentary bodychecks before powering down. Red Hood, without a care in the world, laid on her side next to her.
Red Hood stretched over, knocking her knuckles against Rapi’s visor. “This thing.”
“It’s good,” was the only stupid thing Rapi could think to say.
“It means you’re stuck sleeping on your back.”
“Sleeping on your back is healthy.”
“Huh?”
Rapi sighed. “It’s good for circulation.”
“You’re a Nikke,” Red Hood shot back, and Rapi didn’t need to look to imagine the expression on her face. She heard Red Hood’s over-dramatic sigh and felt her hand move away from Rapi’s face, which felt curiously warm. “Guess I can’t talk you out of it.”
She listened to Red Hood shuffling around, trying to find a comfortable position to lie in.
“Mass-produced units aren’t built with innate communication devices,” she started. “We have to be fitted with these to bridge the gap and maintain communications with the command centre for all our missions.”
“Huh, is that so?”
It sounded like an affirmative-enough response for her to keep going. “If I take it off, I have no way of understanding where I am in relation to the Ark, or accessing any other Ark-centralised information bank on geolocation or rapture data.”
“Right.” Red Hood was silent for a moment. “What good’s that gonna do you now?”
Rapi didn’t have an argument, so she just closed her eyes. The fact that the visor obscured the whole action was one she chose to ignore. She waited to hear another breath from Red Hood as she turned away, but all she heard was a drawn-out nothing, like she was being watched. Then—no, Red Hood’s jacket squeaked against itself, and Rapi turned off her mind to the sound of a cassette being rewound.
/
Sleep came easily. For Rapi, that was always the case.
One of the unspoken beauties of being a mass-produced Nikke was that, if you were to draw a line between humans and Nikke, it was somehow a state of being that was wholly severed from either. To be human is to submit to human capacity, which never quite measured up against desire and hormones. To be a specialised Nikke unit was to bypass mortal restrictions in some sort of unique, glorious way. If the average human could jump 50 centimetres, the average specialised Nikke could jump 500, and also that you live your life stuck in some sort of scary, eternal stasis.
But to be a mass-produced, run-of-the-mill Nikke meant a short life span and a carbon-copied gun. It was to forgo both the unique characteristics of specialisation, and the interpersonal struggles that come with a fleeting humanity. You are, instead, designed for perfect combat. Not to be a perfect combatant, but, rather, to function as a warm-enough body on a battlefield. The perfect mass-produced unit has no lasting memories, no fears, no needs. She is able to pull the trigger without any moral qualms about guns or violence, and to lift supplies and bring them back down to the hole-in-the-ground so affectionately named the Ark.
The unique beauty of being a mass-produced Nikke was that, when lying in the centre of a line drawn from human to Nikke, it was somehow the furthest point from both. To be human is to submit to human capabilities, hung amidst desire and hormones. To be a specialised unit was to bypass mortal restrictions in unique and glorious ways. A mass-produced Nikke is designer fodder, as the critics’ report. Others are a little more cynical; a mass-produced Nikke is a glorified human shield.
This sermonising meant a lot of things to a lot of different people, but, to Rapi, the glory of being a mass-produced Nikke was found in her ability to close her eyes, agree to sleep, and let it happen. Too many nights in hospital were spent watching the ceiling, like one day those squares would morph into triangles, or that the popcorn ceiling would fall and crush her into an early death. No theorising, no spiralling, nothing. Not even the most unique, specialised Nikkes were granted that privilege.
And all that theorising sounds very convincing, but the subconscious mind – flesh or metal – is one of those uncontrollable things.
In her sleep, she remembered Red Hood’s fingers on her lips after pushing the other half of the nutrient bar in her mouth, or the feeling of her palms on her hips while she adjusted her stance, or the beaten up sun-visor she’d balanced on her head, eyes trained on her brow-bone.
Yes, no fear. No fear and no needs, no desire. Just a killing machine that doesn’t take up more than small her lot in this pitiless life. If there wasn’t a war, the perfect mass-produced Nikke would be a faceless food-delivery unit, or, better yet, working as a window mannequin showing off the latest and tightest clothes. Or cleaning up nuclear waste. Or mining. Yes, mining. Clambering down a hole into the bottom of the earth, toiling away, and dying.
But Red Hood wouldn’t die. Red Hood couldn’t die. She had to live. For some reason, she had to live.
.
The logical endpoint for a nightmare is when one simply wakes up. There is no formal ending, nor do the monsters line up behind the curtain waiting for their final bow. Rather, one’s eyes open, and she lets the waking sunlight wash those loose memories away, and all those strange parallels become little more than shadowy oddities. All your teeth are soundly planted in your gums, and you hadn’t forgotten to study for that exam, or sent that horrible text, and you’re not naked on a stage.
For Rapi, too, this was a good thing. She could still sense the warmth of Red Hood beside her, which meant she hadn’t muttered something profoundly stupid in the throes of her unconscious dreaming, nor had her companion suddenly left this world for good, leaving nothing but empty metal. And she hadn’t become corrupted; perhaps that was the most important thing, and the fear she ought to be holding onto. At any point, Red Hood could cease to be, and next to her would be nothing but a Rapi-targeting killing machine.
But, when she opened her eyes, she was surprised. Red Hood was sat with her legs bent, looking over her knees as though she’d been awake for a while.
Nothing about Red Hood had given Rapi the impression she was an early riser, but there she was, looking out into the clear morning sky. Dawn was quiet, more so now, and Rapi could hear the avian chorus, and watched as a murmuration fluttered in front of where the silent lift rose into the sky.
Rapi imagined herself lying there in complete silence, but she must have stirred in one way or another, catching Red Hood’s bright eyes gazing over her body. She laid still for another moment.
“Crazy, huh?”
“… What is?”
Red Hood jutted her chin towards the column, now visible in the morning sun. No mist, no dust, and… a fair number of raptures, but less than a hundred. The space around it had been almost entirely destroyed at first impact, and only now could some small tuffs of grass begin to grow.
Rapi imagined a different scene when it had first landed. There must have been a city nearby, almost completely wiped out in the first few seconds of its arrival. Ten thousand raptures must have crawled out the second it started, and they can trample over anything. Flowers, pathways, roads – under metal legs, it all turns into the same earthly dust.
“It looks like an hour away.”
Red Hood didn’t reply for a moment. “Right. Are you excited?”
The raptures must have started by taking out that first city before moving on to the rest of the world. It was hard to get hold of the old reports of when it was first happening, but there were a few lying around, or that were brought back up during big memorial events. Old messages between families, or new reports reporting daily death tolls, or old coordinates from people trying to reunite. From those alone, it was hard to tell who survived and who didn’t. Just like mass-produced Nikkes, it seemed like there was a point in human history too where some were important, and the rest… were the rest. Flesh and metal. Maybe it was the same. Flesh and metal, maybe names.
“Yep,” Rapi lied, unconvincingly. Her false dream was soon to be actualised, and, at this point, she’d given up all pretence, not that Red Hood was paying attention to that.
“God, never really considered myself a professional genie. How’d you rate me so far?”
Rapi stood up, only half listening. “Fine. We should get moving.”
…
Training must have been very different thirty years ago, she thought.
As they approached the foot of the lift, Red Hood joked, “We could probably get way closer than we are now.”
Don’t tempt fate – always keep your distance, Rapi remembered. Page thirty-eight of one of the handbooks on how to gather resources in uncharted areas. She knew enough about Red Hood by now to not start reciting that to her, and maybe she was working off a different set of rules, or something like that. The more time they spent together, the more excuses she seemed to make for her behaviour, not that she had the power to reprimand anyone.
“If we did that, we’d die.”
Red Hood agreed and, looking out to all the festering Raptures that had appeared with the rising sun, started chattering to herself about the past, about her role as a genie, about Rapi. Again, about Rapi.
“So, how does it feel to have your wish granted?” she started. “Do you feel like anything within you has changed? We really could go in for a closer look…” Red Hood smiled, tapping her finger against Rapi’s cheek to direct her gaze to one of the lesser-populated clearings. “Or you don’t wanna?”
She didn’t move. A small cluster of Raptured nearby caught her eye, which seemed like an easy distraction. She was going to point them out, but Red Hood cut in.
“You made up wanting to see this place, didn’t you?” she asked. From their spot only a few hundred meters away from the Lift, they could see the Raptured festering around the base, walking in pre-programmed orders from east to west. Their shadows stretched long in the morning sun. Rapi clenched her fingers around the handle of her gun in some sort of surprised impulse.
“…You knew?”
She shrugged. “You’re not very good at lying,”
One of the Raptures must have heard them and started firing in their direction.
“Incoming fire,” Rapi found herself saying, instincts kicking in. She was almost grateful for it.
“See, even they’re mad at how long you’re taking to respond!”
“Do you think so?”
Red Hood rolled her eyes. “How would I know? Duck!”
Of course, the moment of her wish – no matter how true it was – being fulfilled, her death felt like it was soon approaching. She thought again of Rio, of the fake audition listing, of the real corruption. Maybe this was the moment Red Hood’s corruption would take over. It was her own fault really. Asking a semi-corrupted, all-powerful Nikke to take you to the nexus of the whole of Rapture-kind really was as complicated and suicidal as pointing a long barrel through your own jaw.
As they started to run, hundreds of stationed Raptures turned from their duties to approach. The ground shook under the force of their metal bodies, folded together out of a slick design of bulletproof bodies, wires, fluids, and a city’s worth of artillery. She looked over her shoulder to see how many were behind them but only caught a look of Red Hood’s smiling face. Not gleeful, but more sardonic, a little domineering. Corrupted or not, this was her terrain.
… Therefore, not her own. She was going to die – that’s what she decided.
And because the world is sick, because she was born ill and lived her short life in hospital, because the moment she got out she was shot and killed, because she’s never had any friends in her life who didn’t immediately die by her side, because she didn’t have anyone, because she wasn’t anyone, the ground shook, opened, and swallowed her whole.
—What, and the last thing she ever knew was Red Hood’s face when she made fun of her, poking holes through her lies? No one had ever cared enough to do that, not even the nurses when she told them she wasn’t hungry anymore, so… what? That was it?
At the bottom of the newly formed crevice under a thousand metric tonnes of Rapture metal, she heard the not-too-distant sound of gunfire and machinery. Her leg hurt, and the dust was already starting to crowd in her lungs. It was only one short lifetime ago that this was all flat sound from a wall-mounted TV, and she’d never even touched a gun; that other nameless, faceless Nikkes were dying on the front-lines, and she didn’t know anything about them; that other girls with no home, no family, no name were being surgically transformed into Nikkes, and dying on their first days.
“Rapi!”
That was a lifetime ago, but she could still smell the antiseptic when she closed her eyes, and the thin blankets they had in the barracks were eerily close to the summer bedding the nurses switched her bed to every spring. But the food was different. The food was definitely different. A shooting pain ran up her leg – impact from the fall, she suspected – and she thought of nothing.
“Can you hear me, Rapi?!”
At the bottom of the crevice, Rapi opens her mouth to call back, then stops herself.
Red Hood is the worst person she’s ever met. She’s annoying and pushy and boisterous, and too keen and interested in stupid things, and she’s too forceful with her passions and clearly hates the silence, and her gun is bigger than Rapi’s and she’s better at using it, and she doesn’t stand upright, nor does she follow scouting protocol. Her tapes are stupid, and she doesn’t even know about new digital music players. And she’s corrupted and she’s going to die. She’s corrupted and she’s going to die and abandon her, and Rapi is going to die stupidly at the bottom of the earth, and Raptures were going to throw down paltry scraps from Red Hood’s body as they tore her to pieces.
Red Hood made her uncomfortable and Red Hood was about to die. Red Hood’s fingers were probably coated with some sort of corruption atoms that made her skin burn every time she felt them, even through the latex. Red Hood was probably making peace with the raptures right now, and they were ushering her into her new life, with no memories, no sympathies, no music. Nothing. Everything about Red Hood was about to be wiped out of existence. No more music and no more questions, or reminiscing, or wishes. No more wishes.
And if that didn’t happen, and if Red Hood survived, Rapi didn’t want it. She didn’t have any wishes in the first place, let alone ones Red Hood could grant. Closing her eyes and covering her ears, she could still see the light, hear the crowded gunfire, and feel the shaking explosions. Corruption was incurable and Red Hood was going to die. Everyone Rapi had ever known had died, and this was just cruel fate running its course, because that was the life she was born into. This was her fate.
Rapi said nothing because God forbid she said anything. At the bottom of the crevice, like a depraved super-fan, she could only recite one prayer. I want to be like you. I want to be you. There was a thought that came after. Something that wasn’t sadness. Something worse that made her sick to think about.
The earth shook again, and she opened her eyes. Out of the small hole in the crevice, she could see movement. She didn’t have the hope to figure out who, or what, and cradled her legs against her chest under the shooting stopped, and when it did, she accepted the worst.
Red Hood was dead, and it was all over.
For her own bitter pleasure, she whispered her name one more time into the darkness.
Then – suddenly – an explosion. Light. The dust rose again, and the walls of the crevice sounded as though they were collapsing around her. She opened her eyes – Red Hood.
Red Hood, with an expression she’d never seen before. Red Hood with barely a scratch. Red Hood under the midday sun in the middle of the sky, light bouncing off her vibrant hair and her scarf billowing in the wind. Red Hood with her gun slung over her shoulder, like it was fresh out the box.
“Are you alive?”
Rapi looked up at her dumbly. God forbid she said anything.
(
“It’s impolite not to answer when someone’s talking to you.”
Rapi was clearly still a little shaken. Red Hood wondered if this was the biggest fight she’d ever been in – what do those supply chain Nikkes get up to anyway? “Red Hood.”
Well, at least she still remembered that. “Yep, that’s me. So, you’re alive. Great.”
“I have a wish.”
“Huh? Talk about strange timing.”
Still catching her breath, Red Hood wasn’t sure how she felt about looking down on Rapi like this. It was as though she could only bring herself to move her head, and the only direction she could look was up, but the look on her face… in that moment… was oddly rewarding. It’s hard to say no to that.
“I want to be like you. Tell me. What do I have to do to become like you?”
)
.
Fingers curled around the base of her gun, Rapi whispered towards Red Hood. “Two raptures. Nine o’clock.”
Somewhere between a moan and a grunt, Red Hood raised her head towards the space Rapi was gesturing to. It was a couple of raptures jumping up and down, thrusting themselves into the air and intertwining their legs together, spinning faster and faster until – meters away from the ground – they unhooked, landed, and flew up again.
“Sure are loud, huh,” she mumbled to herself.
Next to her, Rapi started shifting her body to crouch and take aim, before Red Hood’s arm laced over the neck of the gun.
“Why?”
“Why what? They’re far away. I wanna sleep.”
Trying not to let her frustration show, she could only repeat “Why? They’re— They’re raptures.”
Red Hood took a hard look at her. Rapi could see the edges of her golden eyes starting to flash red. Oh God, is it happening? Is this the part where Red Hood’s corruption takes over, and she becomes little more than a shell of her former self? Where Red Hood’s personhood is replaced by nothing but murderous lust? She could feel her throat going dry, her shoulders tightening.
“If you start shooting, it’ll attract others.”
Rapi looked at her.
“First rule of combat: know your odds.”
Red Hood slipped her arm from around Rapi’s gun and slid it in the space between where she lay and Rapi’s knees had swivelled into. A few moments passed, and Rapi heard her breathing slow, and, as quickly as she’d woken up, she was back down. The Raptures kept jumping and falling in their stupid routine, crashing down onto the floor with every thrust.
She let go of her breath, putting her gun down behind her and moving to lie on her back. The freckling stars against the early morning sky watched, adding nothing.