This Steel Soul

Android Processor Unit 54783 snapped awake at the feeling of a sudden electric surge. He hadn’t really been asleep, because he hadn’t been able to dream for the five hours he spent in his cocoon shaped recharging booth. As he stepped down, muscle memory compelled him to run a mechanical hand along the surface of his head, fingers passing through transplanted hair. Attached to his back by a plastic harness were pulsating wires and a coolant system, a monitor running alongside them for the benefit of engineers looking over cooling and power levels or any other kind of system damage. APU 54783 had been damaged only twice since he had come into existence, once when his body malfunctioned after handling an NIB magnet, and a second time when a dormant grenade had gone off in his hand. He could remember seeing blood spurting from the tear, but he also knew that to be impossible. What the engineers had mopped off the floor as he was transported for repairs was something closer to petroleum jelly.

At the foot of the charging booth was a large metallic plate elevator, and as the android stepped towards the center it immediately began to descend. He waved both hands, molded elastic silicone and urethane over steel exoskeleton, just before his eyeline, a red transparent monitor flashing into view. The time and date were dead center, and to the right a string of ceaseless code ascending past the top of the display. The android ignored these, and instead clicked on the music icon in the lower left corner, cycling through albums till he clicked “Damn the Torpedoes,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Beneath the charging stations, the Repossession Bureau’s inspection facility was twelve colorless miles each way of desks, monitors and pneumatic tubes cordoned off block by block like a newspaper bullpen. The walls, plastered in every direction with State Department invoices and Chancellor Greene’s campaign flyers, came to an arch overhead and towards the front was a podium fifteen feet from the ground, where there were three mile high windows of thick plexiglass. The engineers, austere but apparently not without a sense of humor, came to call this facility ‘the Cathedral,’ something that stuck just as well with the androids.

54783 was humming along to “Don’t Do Me Like That” and briefly glanced at the windows, and same as it had been for the past week, the sky was blotted dark brown. The fires upstate had made enough smoke to blanket the sky all the way to the South Pacific, and from what the android had read it was looking like the cloud could be seen all the way to the offshore colonies at Point Nemo. Beyond the window were miles of garbage and debris, automated vehicles coming and going as they either drop off another few tons or shoveling it up to feed the compactors.

As the android came to his own booth, a chrome table with a plaster frame and several pneumatic tubes running alongside it, he passed by the booth of another android, APU 29364. A female model, her hair was a ponytail of black synthetic fibers, her figure hidden under a plain blue dress. She was just getting through with passing a bag of Benedictine medals to the recycling tube as 54783 passed.

“Morning, Ted,” she said with a smile.

“Morning, Alice,” he said and smiled halfheartedly back.

“It’s still looking brutal outside, isn’t it,” Alice said as she leaned forward in her swivel chair, an elbow on the desk propping up her head. “I was listening to a State report on the fires, they’re saying it was probably arson. Rebel activity and such. That stuff gives the creeps.”

“Who knows. Rankin was saying he thought it was the power companies.”

Alice sighed and leaned forward in her chair. “Yeah, Ted, I’m sorry to tell you this but… Rankin got decommissioned.”

“Decommissioned? I just saw him yesterday!”

“Yeah, the engineers took him out of here as he was at his charging port. He didn’t even say anything, and what's even weirder is he seemed happy about it. Apparently he tried to swipe something for himself, and you know how it goes.”

Ted said good day to Alice and went on to his own cubicle. He sat down in a swivel chair and brought up the monitor screen again, swiped open the operation menu and clicked on an icon marked ‘Recycling Mode.’ The pneumatic tubes groaned to life and spat out a metallic cylinder, the first of hundreds he’d be assigned that day, emblazoned with a bar code and the State’s icon of an eagle grasping a sword in its claws. It reminded the android of a thermos, and the terrible desire for a cup of hot, black coffee came back, even though he couldn’t feel thirst. He couldn’t remember much of the taste of food, but somehow coffee had always managed to stick.

Ted scanned the barcode on the capsule as the cap automatically unsealed itself, making a noise like a power drill. Tilting it sideways, a small collection of trinkets spilled into the sorting tray he’d brought out from under his desk. Medals, necklaces, rings, cheap metal and fake diamonds. The kind of stuff the auctions upstairs would of course sell for more water and power cells than they were worth. He was ready to swipe the contents back into the capsule when he spotted a heart shaped locket at the bottom of the pile.

He took the locket into his hands, R&F etched into the silver lid in ornate letters, a button latch on the side decorated with a pearl. As he pressed it and popped the lid open, he found the faces of two people looking back at him, black and white polaroids of a man and woman.

Ted scanned the barcode again and brought up the capsule’s information scrawl:

CHARLES INGRAM - 298 FILLMORE STREET, SAN FRANCISCO - Objects contained within confiscated upon subject’s arrest and execution. Items to be deposited within Recycling Unit or Auction Queue upon inspection. Failure to comply will result in termination of employment and/or decommission.

He looked back at the photo of the man, somewhere in his forties, and seeing the lines of age chiseled into his features brought to mind what his own face had once looked like, pallid and sunken to the bone, but still the face of Theodore Penn.

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“Mr. Penn,” the suit said as it stood at the side of the hospital bed, “my name is George Foster, I work for the State Department of Health. We need to have a talk.”

Ted didn’t look at the suit. The strain on his neck would have been like hooks and chains pulling at his shoulder muscles, so he chose instead to continue looking up towards the ceiling. Room 348 in Alan Anson Memorial Hospital (named for the man who executed a dozen unarmed rebel families in the never ending battle for the State’s supremacy) hadn’t had working lights for years, a common problem with the ramshackle ward that the doctors called the End of Life Care facility, perhaps sarcastically, he guessed. This room he and the suit found themselves in was already halfway a morgue, a perfume of chemicals even the ventilator unit mask he had strapped skintight to his face couldn’t keep out, and the floor a chessboard of porcelain tiles stained by long dried fluids.

“Mind if I have a seat,” Foster asked without really asking, and he went ahead and pulled up a chair. The suit claiming to be named Foster was five foot six, custom business attire and a complexion painted over his silicone exterior that along with his auburn transplanted scalp made him almost appear Irish. But Ted couldn’t think of him as a man. Just two pairs of suits.

“To put it plainly, Mr. Penn,” he said, “it’s come to my department’s attention that the reimbursement from your former employer has run out, and your current State credits are insufficient to cover the cost of your hospitalization. The file your doctor submitted showed you didn’t list any next of kin, is there anyone you can think of who could help us resolve this?”

Ted couldn’t turn to face him. The hospital had cut off his medication a week ago, painkillers mostly, and any time he tried sitting up, rolling over in his sleep or even shifting weight to activate the bedpan, his muscles would flare up and tighten like his bones were bending into abnormal shapes. He instead clenched his fist and opened it again, something to let Foster know he could hear him.

“Well, I’m sorry you’ve reached this point, but as you know our usual method of dealing with this is for my department to claim ownership over your body and pull life support. But, it may not have to come to that.”

Foster opened the palm of his hand upwards, a projection of an exoskeleton spinning 360 degrees before it shifted to resemble a smiling man.

“The Android Processing Unit program. New policy from Chancellor Greene. Patients who can’t afford health services can undergo consciousness transmission, in exchange for working their debts off, and it varies depending on how much you owe. You’ll spend time in whatever service branch you’re assigned, a few years give or take, and after that you get to keep your body. No more hospitals, no more pills, no more pain. You’ll be a new man.”

Foster closed his hand and the projection vanished, then stood and smoothed out his jacket, said his goodbyes and began to move towards the door. He stopped just at the doorway and turned back to face the rot he saw before him.

“No one’s gonna force you to do anything, Mr. Penn. But the State is here for you.”

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Ten years.

The procedure had been done in an electric haze, and by the time Ted awoke in his new form his body was on a cold slab.

But that was eighty years ago, he thought.

Consciousness transmission was a messy, incoherent science to him, the shift to artificial neurons as the originals were burned and your old husk mulched, but at least you were still able to think as yourself when it was all said and done. And keeping the body, the new man as was promised, was something he’d never seen anyone actually achieve. Even the ones who’d made it to their term, he’d see engineers walk them in the direction of the decommission chamber.

He’d been staring at the open locket for hours, suddenly noticing the cross on the woman’s neck. Penn didn’t think much of faith. Even if Chancellor Greene hadn’t declared religion an obsolete practice and barred it from public practice, the idea of something higher felt foreign. Besides, what would the State care about Heaven or Hell, when reincarnation was by their own design? Never getting tired, old, sick or dead. Nothing but a party from here on out, so long as your cheque’s in the mail. And if not, your place can always be taken by someone more devoted.

Ten years.

He took another look at the locket. The pair looked straight at him with smiles trapped in time. He wondered if they even existed anymore, what the locket had meant to them, to the man it was taken from. And whatever they found waiting for them when freed from the flesh by age, or disease, or whatever led them to being just memories, photos stored in a locket that couldn’t even be called an heirloom anymore.

Ten more years. Keeping in line, shuffling along ten more years.

To his right, Chancellor Greene’s flyer posted to the wall, THE STATE IS ETERNAL! underneath in thick white letters.

"What’s so great about eternity? We’re just... heirlooms."

He reached back into the canister, removed the locket and slid it into his pants pocket. Over the cubicle wall, he saw a pair of engineers starting towards him.