The Rover

“Lewis. Lewis.” The sound cuts out.

The metal around you smolders as you dig through the wreckage for Clarke. You don’t remember much. Panicked voices over the comm. Your seat ejecting. Clarke’s seat not. You want to scream his name, but you can’t, and it’s not like he could hear you, anyway. Finally, among some of the burning chrome, you see his legs poking out, skin torn but not bleeding, copper wire meshed with muscle.

Piece by piece, you swipe aside chunks of smoldering rubber and steel. It burns you when you get too close. Teeth gritted, you drag Clarke from the wreck of the Sacagawea, across the reddish sands until you reckon the burning metal can’t hurt you anymore.

Clarke isn’t breathing. You’re worried that he can’t seem to move. He lies there on his side and you lie right there with him. His legs twitch from time to time, but his spine’s been obliterated. You see in his eyes, he’s in pain, desperately begging for an end that he can’t rationalize. Somehow, you still see life in his eyes, despite the fact that they were replaced with glassy, wiry photoreceptors long ago, same as yours.

So you wait with him. Companionship is all you can offer.

His eyes bat close, and the electric hum inside him—the pumps, the mechanisms that keep him alive—dies down. You press your ear to him to make sure he’s gone. You pick up the faint buzz of the radio static in his earpiece. “Clarke, you’re such a good boy. You’re such a good boy, Clarke,” it calls out. And then, with the death of its power source, it, too, quiets down.

The world around you feels corroded, and as you raise your snout to the sky to mourn, you realize once again that you have no lungs. Your eyes lock with a pale blue speck dancing up above with the Sun, and maybe it’s instinct, but you realize, that’s home. Not here.

-

Most of the time, you were kept in a cage with Clarke. But then they would lead you out the door. Big white things in big white billowing coats that smelled like sweat under a mechanical musk of purity.

Every so often you would find yourself on the great metal slab where they would drug you and cut you open. They thought you couldn’t feel a thing, but you did. The cold sting of metal as they cut you right down the middle and peeled you apart. Their hands inside you, picking through your insides, taking things out, putting things back in. When you were young, it bothered you, until you realized it made you better. One time, you went in, and you realized you were stronger and faster. Another, they tore out your eyes, put in new ones, and the world became much more vivid. You hardly minded when they took away your stomach; you never felt empty again. The big white things in big white coats wanted to make you better. They were your friends.

Clarke would scratch and growl and bark. He hated the big white things in big white coats. He hated when they sliced him open, and when they put him under, he would come right back up howling. You could hear him—your brother—in pain, from your cage. And then he would come back to the cage and sulk in a corner for a while. When they tore out his eyes and gave him new ones, they put a cone around his neck so he would stop trying to claw them out. Then one day, they took away your lungs, and his soon after. Clarke never made so much as a peep after that.

-

As night falls, you realize the air is alive with humanity, but you can’t see much of anything, even with your eyes the way they are. So you lie beside Clarke and lose hope as the world gets colder and colder. The wind nips at your skin, and you fall asleep to the rush of the air, the electric hum inside your body, and the radio static in your ear. Your ear implant was broken during the wreck—probably smashed to pieces inside your ear when your head knocked into the ground during your descent—leaving all you can feel of it a strand of copper wire that pokes the inside of your ear canal. You hate it, but what can you do?

Your insides won’t let you freeze to death, and the hum inside you kicks to new life. Your bones defrost. Your skin emanates warmth against the bitter cold of this rusted planet. But something inside you doesn’t feel right. This is not normal. The warmth inside you should not be. The hum would have annoyed the shit out of your ancestors centuries ago.

Your eyes flutter shut, and you want to cry.

-

You remember the one time you were let outside. It just felt like a bigger cage, one you couldn’t see the edges of. The ground felt softer than you could ever imagine. It fractured when you put your weight on it, turned to grains that tickled your feet. It did not feel good to lick.

Marley untethered you and Clarke from her hand, and just like that, Clarke was off like a rocket, yipping hymns to the immeasurable eternity before him. You miss when he had his lungs. You were slower at the outset, preferring to take your time. You felt the air alive with novelty: bugs and birds and shrubs and lizards. You didn’t want to chase anything. You just wanted to be there.

Marley knelt down beside you and stroked your neck, and you couldn’t help but be jealous about how useful her paws are for stroking things. Her fingers were longer than yours. She could clasp and unclasp things. You could only do that with your mouth, and then you’d have to taste whatever it was you were grabbing.

You stayed by Marley’s side, watching her watch you and Clarke with a smile across her tan face. It looked so wet. You realized you were hot, too, and sat down. Boy, she must have had it so easy without all the fur you had. She could feel the air on her all the time. The air had to fight to get to you.

It took Clarke an hour to come back to Marley. She called and called, but Clarke was too busy being alive.

Night was quick to fall, and the ceiling of the world sparkled to life, but the air grew colder and colder. Marley had you and Clarke tethered to a post beside her, and while Clarke opted to strain and strain against it, you were content to sit and watch the sky unfold before you. Not five feet away sat Marley, wrapped in a half-dozen blankets, shivering with a clipboard, but your inner machinations kept you warm in the frigid desert night.

She looked your way, smiled, and jotted down a couple of notes. You could see her breath.

You trotted on over and nestled yourself into her torso, and she just laughed and stroked your back. She smelled like lavender, as she always did, and it made you feel bright. You both stared at the skies. You were warm, but she was warmth.

“That’s where you’ll be soon,” she said, pointing to a little dot among many little dots. You didn’t know which dot she meant, and honestly, you didn’t care. You just liked staring at the lights. They were much nicer than the fluorescents in your cage.

You didn’t sleep at all that night.

You’re awakened by the static in your ear.

“Lewis,” it says. Lewi—” It cuts out, but you recognize it as Marley, so you spring to life and try to bark before remembering you can’t do that. You wait for a moment, hoping that something else rings in your ear. You get nothing. Just that wire poking you. The skies are still dark: speckled, not streaked, with light, and you hate it.

The hum inside you is a little weaker, you notice, and when the Sun goes up, it regains its momentum. You catch a spark of human on the airwaves. Nothing much. A faint notion. It’s the best you’ve got. Your paws feel naked against the rusted sand, but your soles are steel under skin, so it doesn’t matter much. You carry out your mission—whatever that may be—the best you feel you can, but with every step, your brother gets further away, and the thought of leaving him wears stronger against you than the sand on your feet.

Every step, the glimmer gets stronger. Your mouth is dry, but it’s always been dry. You’re always short of breath because you can’t breathe. You soldier on. Your inner machinations recycle everything about you: nutrients, oxygen, blood. There is no waste. You are a living battery, a wind-up toy moving forward because that’s all you’re made to do. But maybe there’s more, and you can once again hear Marley’s voice someday.

You were in a vat. That’s the earliest thing you remember. You and Clarke were in a great big vat, under lights that stung, suspended in fluid. When you finally left that fluid, you felt heavy. That was the first time you ever saw Marley, standing outside the glass, hair up in a pristine ponytail, smiling at you. The first couple years, all you ever wanted was to go back into that vat, where there was no weight: only you and your brother. And Marley.

The Sun looks like a great big hole in the sky, and you traverse over one more hill. By now the air is electric with familiarity, and you can’t quite pin what’s familiar about it. But when you reach the top of that hill and stare down at the source of it, you don’t see Marley standing there, or any of the big white things in big white coats. You see a machine coated in dust.

You go to it in leaps and bounds. That is not a person, you think, but maybe a person is behind it. Someone could be behind it.

No one is behind it.

You paw at its fractured arm. You clamber up on its panel, and you become hyperaware of the solar panels on your own back. Then you lay yourself down atop it and sleep in something that smells like Marley, but not quite. There is sweat. There is no lavender.

You stay there for several days, watching the sky grow dark and bright again, feeling the hum get louder and quieter. You step off the panels and look underneath at the wheels. There’s a crawlspace there.

The static roars in your ear at that moment. You paw and paw at your head, but your skull is steel, and you were de-clawed long ago. The static envelops you, and you want to scream—not howl—scream like you heard the people do. You roll. You writhe. You wish it would stop, but you don’t know how because for all your instinct, your brain has no blueprints for an end.

“Lewi—wreck—Oppor—ity.” You pick up fractured words.

Opportunity.

You crawl underneath your predecessor, away from the great big hole in the sky. That night, your body hums with warmth. The next, it’s weaker. You’re in pain, and you wonder if this is what Clarke felt. How lucky he must have been to have died so suddenly, to have his pain so briefly before not feeling anything at all.

The next day, the hum in you is gone completely. Your machine freezes over. Your air pump frosts. Your water pack turns to ice. The air is alive, and it hurts like hell. In your last moments, you listen intently to the static in your ear, and finally when met with nothing but more static, you let yourself hate. You hate the big white things in the big white coats, for peeling you open, for taking you apart piece by piece and making you wander a dead world for what reason? Nothing. You hate Marley, for letting them do this to you. And you hate Clarke, because at least, in Clarke’s dying moments, he had you. He had Marley’s voice ringing in his ear. What do you have? Static. That goddamn static. It feels like gravity, and when it stops finally, you are, for a few seconds before your eyes flutter shut, weightless.

Everything goes dark.

I wrote this story back in 2021, after the "death" of the Opportunity Mars Rover. It's fascinating going back and noticing how much I've grown as an author in those last few years. I wonder why this short story never found a permanent home, though.