Mouse pulled her way slowly along the narrow tunnel. The light from her personal light filling the metal square around her. There was no room to move her arms, so she pulled herself along by her feet and her palms. Anyone bigger than her would not have been able to get into the tunnel, let alone move along it inch by slow inch. This darkness was her home. She had no idea where this tunnel went, and she didn’t think about how long it would take her if she had to head back. She loved the quiet. Far away from the roaring noise of the wind on the surface. Far away from the gloom of the outland. Here there was no signal, and as a splicer she was much in demand. Her father had been an electrician before the meteor, and he had taught her everything that he knew in the darkness that followed. The meteor changed everything. It hit without warning. The impact killed hundreds, but the after affect killed millions. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves. It filled the atmosphere with dust that hid the sun, and each disaster that followed it darkened the sky. Governments crumbled as the light vanished. Food became scarce, animals died. The more prosperous cities built domes, and hung lights on the inside. It was the lights that had forced Mouse out of the city. The lights flickered in a way that gave her blinding headaches. Not everyone was destined to live in the light. She was too young, too naive to know what cost it had for her parents. Without the light, they slowly lost their minds, disappearing into sadness. She had remained sane, as a small growing number of outlanders had. Though she would not consider all of them sane, but perhaps, a better word was functional. The outland was lawless, and it took a certain kind of madness to live in it. Mouse would not have thought herself sane, she heard voices. Voice, to be more precise. From nearly as soon as they had moved to the outland, she had heard singing. Distant and melancholy, the songs had haunted her days and comforted her at night. She had found that if she pressed her ear to the ground she could better hear the singing.
On one of his last lucid days, her father had taken her to what used to be a park. Small scrub plants had taken hold, living on the reddish light that filtered down through the dust. He knelt down and looked at the plants. “See these mouse?” He had always called her mouse, his nickname for her. “These plants have everything they need. They don’t need money. They just live on one simple thing. Do you know what that is Mouse?”.
She looked at him sadly from her place on the swing. They had had this conversation a thousand times. She knew the answer, but she also knew that if she answered, he’d get angry. He was unpredictable when he was angry. “I don’t, Dad” she said, dutifully.
“Love.” He said, smiling at her. She could see in his eyes the fight against the madness that lay behind them. This was his way of connecting with her out of the storm in his own mind. “Is that how we’re gonna live dad?”
“That is precisely how we’re going to live mouse.” He smiled at her. She met his smile. For a moment, the last moment, he really smiled at her. He saw her for the adult that she was. Then the confident smile was gone, and it was replaced with the scared, lost smile of that shell that was her father. She didn’t like to think about the day she took them to an asylum city. She hoped that they were places that helped them. They claimed to be, once, but the signs outside were faded. Yet the orderly that met them was kind, and clean. He reassured her that they would be fine.
She had taken over her father’s work. The outland was a place where things were repaired and reused. Electrics had been such a large part of life before the Meteore that even here, some 20 years later, much of it was still being used, and reused. The grid was still active, and as long as it was, Mouse had a job, and a rare one at that. It gave her food, and guaranteed her shelter. Yet up there was not a place she felt at home. It was here, in these dark tunnels of the world that existed before. Squeezing her way through ducts, tunnels, and cracks in the world left over from meteore. It was down here that she found the things that gave her joy. Useless things that didn’t keep her alive, the predominant concern of the outlands. Down here there were curtain, and carpets. Rooms of houses frozen in the moment the Metores hit. Skeletons, sat in beautiful tablaux of family life, frozen and hidden until she found them. As a younger girl, she had played with them, re-creating the family life that she remembered before the meteore. Her exploration had become as the singing that had been so much a part of her life since she became an outlander began to get quieter. She had to get deeper, and further away from her home to hear it. She had spent her precious spare time as a girl hunting the tunnel to get to it. As she got older, and the song faded almost to imperceptibility, she began to wonder if it had ever had been there at all. Then there were times when it would return to her, in a dream, or a snippet of the song would drift to her over the wind. On the one hand, in the dark lonely night she wondered if the song was her form of madness, in the other, it gave her an odd type of hope. It was that hope that drove her on the quiet times into these tiny tunnels, crawling inch by inch. The metal tunnel, a vent or a duct she guess, had now become so small that she couldn’t lift her head. She had learned a long time ago that the natural response to such a tiny space was to panic, and believe that you can’t breathe. She now focused only on two things, the memory of the song, and her breathing, as her fingers and her toes inched her along. Breathe, sing, and inch. Breathe, sing and inch. Breathe. Sing. Inch. She lost herself in this routine until her fingers edged over a void. She inched herself closer, letting the light on her PSD shine. She had come out a few inches above a warped floor, wood by the feel. As the light fell into the room, it picked out a large four-poster bed, the rich drapes tied back. Sat, motionless at the foot of the bed was a humanoid figure. As she pulled more of herself into the space between the bedside cabinet and the wall, she could make out more details of the figure. Mouse was looking at a female, the green light of her PSD shining through a mesh-like top, and highlighting pert breasts. Long hair cascaded down over her shoulders and her back. She had two hands resting on the bed behind her for support, and her long legs crossed at the ankles and pulled towards the bottom of the bed. Mouse sat in stillness for a moment, surprised at the figure before her. She had long since gotten over the surprise of a skeleton, but she had never found someone who still had flesh.
“Hello?” Mouse said into the darkness.
The loudness of her voice startled her, but the figure did not move. Slowly Mouse got herself to her feet, and made her way around to the base of the bed. The woman had her eyes closed, but her head was still held up. Mouse waited to see if the woman would breathe. It was only when Mouses’ lungs demanded that she breathe did Mouse realise she had been holding her breath in sympathy, yet the woman did not breath. Mouse let her own breath out slowly, unwilling to disturbed even the dust that lay around the woman. Carefully, Mouse reached out and stroked her cheek. The chill and the sensation of it threw her. It was soft and textured like skin, but stone cold. For a moment Mouse considered that what she had found was someone preserved somehow, by freak conditions following the Meateore. Curiosity and morbid fascination led Mouse to reach out again, stroking the skin. An Intimate, slow stroke, one she had not shared with another for a long time. She stared at the woman in front of her. She was beautiful. Whatever had frozen her in death, and kept her skin still with the blush of life.
Mouse moved a lock of her dark hair from the woman’s face. As her fingers touched the hair, there was an odd quality to it. Soft, but with an odd, plastic feeling. She took ahold of a bigger lock of hair, and let it fall through her fingers. The curls fell back into the same place. Mouse lifted the hair again, and tried to uncurl it, wrapping it around her fingers the wrong way. She let it drop, and it took it’s original shape. She reached out again for the cheek, this time, she pressed the skin, and watched it reform. Before her was not a woman, but something new. Perhaps this was a robot. A machine that looked like a person. Mouse had always thought they were part of the mad imaginings of her father. If he was right, then on her neck there should be some ports. She tenderly reached around her neck, under her hair, and found there four round holes. The metal edges colder than the fake skin around it. Perhaps all she needed was a charge. Mouse turned her attention to the room. There was a dresser, with an ornate oval mirror above it, a wardrobe on the back wall. The room had wood paneling in the lower half, and the upper half was painted a dark colour, difficult to tell in the green light. Near the door there was a small round switch. She flicked the switch, and the bulb above the bed filled the room with a yellow light. Mouse blinked heavily, but the light was weak, leaving parts of the room in shadow. It was almost a room that had been designed to to have shadow. In the light she could see that the overall colour scheme was red and gold. The carpet was a plush red. The walls was a deep wine-red, the bed covering were red and gold. The room had a plush look, though tarnished by dust and time. Standing out from the oak and velveteen motief was a white wire, sticking out from a drawer by the bed. She pulled it out, and searched around on the skirting board for a plug. It took a long time of hunting to find it. It was behind a fake part of the wood paneling. It popped open to reveal plug sockets, and simple red brick behind it. The plug sockets were cracked and broken, and as she nudged it it sparked. She looked down at the plug in her hand, there were brown marks around pins. Mouse sat herself, cross-legged, in the dust, and pulled out her tools from the pockets dotted around her faded blue jumpsuit. She had come down here to escape this work, but rarely was she able to put her skills to use for her own amusement. Dealing with the socket when it was live is what made splicers a rare, and important commodity. Rarely was anyone able to turn off the power safely, so her work was slow but methodical. There was no such thing as a quick splicer. Quick splicers were dead splicers.
It is difficult to tell time in the outlands. With the light of the cities, and the electric light used to light the living quarters people slept when they were tired, eat when they were hungry. In the beginning, people had tried to mark time, to keep a semblance of order, but now Mouse knew of no-one who held to the concept of time outside of the cities. This meant judging the passage of time as an outlander was almost a foreign concept, so the length of time she had sat lost in her work was measured only by the stiffness in her legs as she stood, the newly repaired cable in her hand. She ran it to the robot, and carefully lined up the pins, standing ready to pull the cable out at the first sign of trouble. She pushed, feeling the pins click into place.
Nothing happened.
She glanced back to the plug, afraid that perhaps it had fused, or was still sparking, but her work was good. Mouse sat herself on the floor in front of the robot and opened her ration packs, and her water. She eat in silence, studying the robot. Admiring the craftsmanship that had gone into designing such a figure. Each curve drew the eye. Even the seemingly casual way it laid on the bed had a beauty and grace to it. Just as she had finished eating, she heard a new sound. The sound of a motor trying to move. An almost imperceptible buzz, nearly a high-pitched whine. It would try twice then fall silent. Then another would try, in a different place. As Mouse listened, she heard the motors that powered the robot try to move, but each one failed. After so long sat still, the joints had seized. She stood again before the woman, and gently felt the face, her fingers no longer stopping at the skin, but pressing harder for the metal and cogs beneath. She explored the face, feeling the metal skull. The eyelids appeared to have simple movements, so she gently tried to lift them up with her finger. She could feel the cog move a fraction, and then jam. She needed to get more access to it, to try to clear whatever it was that was jamming it. Unafraid now, she climbed onto the bed behind the woman and lifted her hair. There was a seam in the skin that tore apart, making a strange ripping sucking noise, and splitting the skin along the skull along the parting. As she pulled the skin apart, the whirring of the servos stopped. She gently pulled the skin down over the face to reveal the eyelids, and the cogs for the mouth. The eyes were clogged with grease and dust. Mouse did notice that the cogs for the jaw were less dirty than the others, but set about to her work cleaning them. It was difficult work, she didn’t have the fine tools she needed for a thorough job, but she could clean out the worst of it. As she got the cogs turning relatively freely, she pulled the skin back on, and pressed it down into place. The seam re-formed, and would have been invisible if she had not know it was there. A moment later the whine of the servos began, working it’s way around the body until the eyes flickered open, and Mouse found herself looking down into brilliant blue eyes. They looked at her unfocused. Then her jaw moved, open and closed. The robot was obviously testing what worked. A Moment later the servos stopped their whine, and the eyes focused on here. The mouth then opened, as it clumsily tried to form words, but nothing came out.
“Hi” said Mouse, awkwardly. “I’m Mouse”.
The jaw moved for a moment. “I don’t know if you know, but I can’t hear you. I also don’t know if you can hear me. … umm… Blink once for yes, twice for no. Can you hear me?”
Mouse laughed as she realised how stupid her question was. The robot blinked.
“Yes?” said Mouse.
One blink. Yes.
Mouse smiled a broad, broad smile. “You seem to have some dust stuck in your servos. I’m not a robot engineer, so I don’t know much about how to fix you.” The robot looked at Mouse, then looked towards the dresser, then looked back at Mouse, then to the dresser again.
“Is there something you want in the dresser?”
One blink.
Mouse moved to the dresser. It was covered in makeup pots and dried lipstick. Nothing she could see that would help the robot move. “Is it in a drawer?”
One blink.
Mouse began searching through the first drawer. Her hands encountered soft lacy things, small items of clothing. Women’s underwear, far too impractical for the outlands. She felt vaguely embarrassed for going through this drawer until her hands touched some paper. She pulled out a pamflet that advertised the “Pleastron 5700”. Mouse flicked it open. The first two pages spoke about the manufacturers, Mouse skipped those, and found the instructions on how to put the robot together when it came from the factory. Amongst showing how to take each part off, and re-attach, it also mentioned the oil reservoir. This manual recommended that the user only refil the reservoir with oil from the manufacturer.
“Do you have any of this oil?” Mouse asked.
Two blinks.
“Ahh, that’s not very helpful. It’s going to take some time to find something that’s going to work for this. Something thin, and delicate. And get some tools to clean out that junk you’ve got in your system.” Mouse looked at the tunnel that she came through. “It might take some time. It’s a long, long way down here. You might want to turn yourself off, or whatever it is that you do. I will be back.”
The robot blinked twice.
“No? No what?” Mouse paused, almost expecting the robot to answer. “No you don’t think I will be back?”
One Blink.
“Don’t worry, I much rather be here than up there. It might be days, but I will be back. “
Two Blinks
“I will. Trust me”
The robot eyes flickered, then stayed closed. Mouse shrugged, assuming the robot had shut down. Mouse steeled herself, and began her slow and treacherous journey back to the surface.
Mouse lived in a small settlement in the outlands called New Prosperity. A small selection of houses, some repaired, some built. She lived in the top floor of what had one been a 3 story house. The rest of the building had been buried under dirt and ash thrown up when the Meteore hit. Her Mother had built a small garden, surrounded by a tall metal fence. Her father had electrified the fence. New Prosperity were a group of people who worked together as best they could, but not everyone was from New Prosperity. Experience had taught them to treat the outsider with suspicion. Law was handed down in a very direct, often violent way. It did pay, then, to protect the house, but Mouse had always considered the electric face to be overkill. She flicked up the keypad on the gate, and typed in her access code. There was an audible buzz, and the gate slid open. She stepped through, and it slid closed behind her.
Her small house was comfortable but full. It was full of things that most people in the outland would have thought of as Junk, and quickly repurposed the metal or the screws for something else. She kept them because they made the endless red-brown of the outlands burst with a bit of colour. She filled a rucksack with as many of her tools as the thought might be useful, and a few of the more unusual tools her father had gathered. She pulled out a few different bottles of oil, and stuffed them into her pack. She threw a few more things into her bag, and then headed for the door. She paused for a moment outside her gate to check her messages. Handwritten notes of people asking for help. She flicked through them. Mrs. Popper, unlikely to be her real name, needed help with her heating. She was old, and the long dark was coming. Without decent heating she might not make it through. She flicked the messages against her fingers, and then turned towards Mrs. Popper’s house.
Mrs. Popper lived in a sprawling shed. The heart of which she claims was the same shed that she had sheltered in when the Meteore hid. She opened the door a crack in response to Mouse’s knock.Her white hair had escaped from the bun that she had on top of her head, and her single yellow tooth grinned at her from the gloom inside her house. “Hellro there Mourse.” Mouse suspected that Mrs. Popper affected the accent, but this was the outlands. You didn’t last long here without being a little non-standard. “It’s all grone now. No light, nothing. Ornly darkness. The darkness, it ain’t so bad. Not when it’s dark. It’s not the dark. It’s the arone. You know? When it’s dark, you know your arone.” Mouse blinked at the woman. “I.. “
Mrs. Popper shuffled into the darkness, not really waiting for a reply from Mouse. Mouse shrugged and followed her into the sparse room. She had been here many times before, and she was quite used to the odd layout of the place. It really was a collection of sheds pulled around this larger, central wooden shed. In the centre of it was the power console. Cables snaked out from it to the lights, to the heating, to the cooker. Mrs. Popper gummed her single yellow tooth. “You know, the red light of the sun, as it passed through the dust to get down to us here on the earth. It makes you think, why does it bother?”
Mouse put her tools down next to the power console, and began her work. It was a long time before she noticed that there was silence. She looked up into the milky-blue eyes of Mrs Popper who was now standing over her shoulder, looking at her expectantly. Mouse looked at her, “hmm?” said Mouse, wondering if she had missed something.
“Why does the sun bother to still shine? Way up there. Above the clouds. It doesn’t know that we’re down here. We can only just see it, I don’t think it can even see us”.
“I think the sun still shines because it doesn’t know what else to do.” Mrs. Popper considered this, making an odd sucking noise. “Hmm… I guess that’s why we keep doing what we’re doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean living of course. I got nothing to live for. Even my cat’s dead.” Mrs Popper shuffled over to the stuffed cat and punched it. Mouse removed a piece of wood that had been rammed into one of the sockets and tripped the circuits. The lights switched on with a variety of clicks and whirrs.
“There, all done.”
Mrs. Popper looked at the lights, and blinked repeatedly. “Huh… lights. So now I can see what it is I’m not doing.” She shrugged at Mouse. “So, what is you want this time?”
Mouse smiled at her. “You got enough time to make me some of that stew?”
Mrs. Popper stared at her thoughtfully for a long moment. “Hmm.. maybe I can see my way to finding time to do that. What you think puss?” She punched the stuffed cat again. “Huh, look at you. Still dead” She rolled her eyes at the cat. Mouse made her way to the door, the strong lights causing her to blink repeatedly.
She stepped out into the swirling red dust. The darkened light easing her headache. She shouldered her bag, and made her way back down into the bowels of the earth. She made her way through the upper caves, along old roads and down broken stairs. It wasn’t long before the way got harder, and she found herself squeezing through small spaces, pulling her bags with her. The route this time was easier. She had moved much of the earth, and she didn’t take as many dead ends. She reached the air vent, and pulled herself into it. This time there was a creaking that hadn’t been there before, and the tumble noise of dirt falling on the top. She moved cautiously, and there was no noise, it was when she pulled her bag along that the creaking got ominious. She moved slower, keeping her breathing slow and steady. With almost every move, there was the clatter of shifting rock and dirt from above her.
It felt like hours later when Mouse finally pulled herself out into the timecapsule of a room. The robot was still sat in the same position, though her eyes, now open, had moved as far as they could to see her. Mouse smiled as reassuringly as she could, and placed her bag beside the robot.
“I’m just going to open you up to put this oil in. I’ve got some small brushes here, we shall get you working in no time.”
Mouse set about her work. It was strangely intimate to work on an inanimate object that could watch you. She lifted the black lacy babydoll up in order to reach the access panel at the back, and found herself appologising for revealing more of her skin. She found the way in which she needed to run her fingers over the robot’s bio-skin strangely intimate. She pulled the skin apart to reveal the internal metal workings. A small screen flashed a list of problems with the robot. Maintenance overdue, oil level empty, battery at 12%, Main Joints unresponsive, speech centre in need of cleaning.. The list just scrolled and scrolled. She took a moment to orientate herself. The diagrams from the manual, coupled with the symbols on the bottle allowed her to find the empty oil bottle. A pipe that ran into it occasionally made a sucking noise as a pump hidden in somewhere deep in the torso attempted to apply more oil to parts in need of it. She filled the bottle, careful not to let the precious liquid spill out. She found the oil overflow valve, and opened it, putting an empty bottle under it. She presumed as the oil began to filter around the system, the air already in it would need an escape, as would any sludge and dust that had accumulated. She watched the dark yellow liquid make it’s way up the intake pipe, and waited. It was a slow process, seeing the plastic tubes fill with liquid as the pump forced the air out, as well as the dust.
Mouse had half-expected movement to suddenly return the moment the oil reached the overflow valve, but it didn’t. She topped up the bottle, worried that it wouldn’t be enough to fill her– the robot’s– entire body. Then Mouse set to work. She has a small hand-held air pump and a soft brush. Gently, she peeled back the skin from the Robot’s joints, and cleared out as much dirt and dust as she could. She began at the feet, slowly peeling the heavy gel-filled bio-skin off the polycarbonate metal. She worked methodically, trying to put out of her mind the human-like way in which the robot moved and twitched. Did she feel pain? She banshed thoughts like the idea that she was peeling off the robots skin to the far recesses of her mind. What robot manufacturer would make a removable skin full of pain receptors?
The robot’s face was the hardest. Pulling off the soft delicate features to reveal the metal jaw and neck beneath. The jaw was jammed with dust caked in dried oil. She guessed this was the last part to stop functioning. Carefully, she eased it back into being able to move freely, and the robot clacked it’s jaw open and closed a few times, testing it’s new mobility. Finally Mouse flicked off the box that controlled the voice. The contacts were full of dust, and a few moments with the brush cleared out the area. She clicked the box back into place, and a series of lights on the box lit up. These slowly went out, she presumed as the robot did some self checkes.
Slowly, she replaced the skin on the metal frame. She took her time, gently easing the skin back into place. Her fingers pressed the skin back into place with a click. Mouse stared at the robot for a long while as she stared forward with unseeing eyes. They flickered side to side like rem sleep. They slowed, and focused on the person infront of her. The robot’s head tilted, and she leaned back on her arms. “Hello there, beautiful” she said, her accent drawling “And what can I do for you?”. Mouse wasn’t old enough to have had a wide experience of the old accents, if she had, she would have identified the sourthern twang. “Erm…” Mouse said. Suddenly uncertain. The robot was looking at her in a way she had never seen before. Her eyes were slowly running up and down her body, as though each pass slowly removed a layer. “This your first time sugar?” said the robot.
“I.. uhh… what?”
“Your first time, you know, payin’ to spend time with a woman.”
Mouse stared at her wide-eyed.
“Perhaps this is just your first time with a woman? Well, that’s okay sugar…” She sat up and her fingers reached for the top of the grey jumpsuit. Mouse flinched at her touch, but the woman only paused before slowly undoing Mouses’ buttons. Mouse stood there, surprised and confused as the woman slowly revealed the first of her jumpers. Suddenly, Mouse got over her surprise, and took a violent step backwards, pulling her jumpsuit closed as though it revealed too much.
“Oh sugar, don’t you worry. I’ve seen it all before”.
“I… That’s not why I’m here?”. She said it as a question, unsure who she was asking, the robot or herself.
“Your not?”
“Do you know what year it is?”
“Why sugar, it’s the… it’s the… well, it does seem that my internal chronometer has been reset.” The robot sat up, and crossed her arms. “What’s going on here?”
“A long time ago, the world ended. A meteore hit us, and the sky turned red.”
The robot blinked, slowly. “What happened to the people?”
“Thousands died when the metore hit. A few thousand more when the tidal waves made the land, but it was the sky filling with dust that got the rest. Those that didn’t die of starvation went mad when they couldn’t see the sun. Some people managed to live in big cities of light. These are places of solace for those people who can stand it, and are rich enough, or have a useful skill. Not everyone can stand the light…” Mouse faltered.
“You couldn’t stand the light huh sugar?”
“No, I couldn’t. It gave me headaches. So, I live in the outlands”
“The outlands?”
“It’s what we call the place that isn’t the cities.”
“So this is the outlands?” the robot looked around her, as though seeing it for the first time. “It looks just like my old bedroom. I’ve been waiting….” The robot frowned, confused. “But I don’t know for how long.” The Robot frowned, and looked down. Mouse watched her, knowing that the robot was just simulating emotions, but the robot’s soft pout looked so real.
“It’s okay, robot” Mouse said, reaching out and gently patting the shoulder. It came as unnatural movement to Mouse, made stranger by the way the robot rested her cheek against her hand. To her surprise, the robot’s cheek felt warm to the touch.
“I had a name, once” said the robot, softly.
Mouse watched the robot for a moment. “What was it?” she asked, softly.
“Sofia”
“Sofia, it’s a pretty name.”
Sofia didn’t answer. She leant forward and rested her head on Mouse’ chest. Mouse froze, looking at the robot leaning on her. The robot’s shoulders were shaking gently, as though she was crying. Mouse reached out her hand and gently stroked her hair, wrapping her unsure arm around her shoulders.
Mouse awoke some hours later, Sofia curled up on her. Neither had said anything, but both had let the tears flow. Mouse lay there in the electric gloom, idly stroking Sofia’s hair. She couldn’t be sure if it had been genuine emotion that Sofia had shared, but had followed some program that was designed to generation affection from her. Mouse slowly slid out from under the sleeping woman… robot. Robot, she reminded herself forcibly. She picked up her bag, and though she had provisions for many days yet, she slid into the tunnel that had got her here. She moved along it as fast as she dared, hearing the shifting of the earth land on the metal tube.
Her intention had been to make her way back to the surface. The woman had confused her. It had been too long since she felt that safe, that comfortable. Yet she wasn’t real. She was a construct. A fake human, living a fake life. Mouse dropped herself onto a varnished wooden floor. This had once been a bar, one of the few that had sunk in the earth quakes. Skeletons sat at tables, posed mid game. A casual observer might have thought that they had died instantly playing their last game of cards, but Mouse knew better. This was an old play space of hers. The skeletons were held in place with twisted wire. Each table was a game her younger self had played, paused at whatever point she had gotten bored, or been summoned home. She let herself behind the bar, without thinking asking permission of the skeletal barwoman she had propped near the till. She took a bottle from the top shelf, and poured herself a glass, and walked casually over to one of the tables and sat down with a sigh. In her mind’s eye, she could hear the skeletons around her ask after her in a concerned tone. She leant back in her chair and sipped the warm amber liquid, and studied the skeletons. They had names. Some of them had come from information she had found in their pockets, others were lives that she had invented for them. Her imagination had been so vivid that as she became more self-aware she had worried that these skeletal friends were her madness. She idly looked at the bord between her old friends, and rolled a dice, moving the pieces along the colourful route. She couldn’t remember who’s move it was, but that wasn’t the point. The game itself was comforting. As she moved the pieces, she heard the haunting song, the song that brought her to this place all those years ago. A song that had fallen silent so long ago that she had begun to imagine that it too had been a product of her imagination. She didn’t understand the language, but she knew the sounds. She sang along as she played her game. The voice was deep, and female, with a hint of an accent. It was a voice that had always sounded sad as though it was yearning for something long since lost. Now, as she listened to it, the voice seemed to have an even keener sense of sadness to it. She picked up her bag, and made her way back to the vent. The song was definitely louder here.
She had been searching for the source of that song for as long as she could remember. She pulled herself up into the vent, and heard the pipe creak ominously. There was much more movement now when she put her weight on it. There was no guarantee that this was going to hold her if she went back in. Down that tunnel was the source of the music. A wave of relief washed over her. She was not mad, there had been music in the outlands. Stone skittered on top of the metal pipe. Slowly she let herself down again, and sat with her back to the crumbling wall. She closed her eyes and listened to the music as it drifted through the vent. She closed her eyes and let the memory of emotions she had long through turned to dust wash over her. Memories of her childhood in strong arms, memories of being cared for and loved. For a long time, she sat in the dark, hugging herself, letting the tears roll unchecked down her face.
She awoke in silence.
She thought about calling out, but even her quiet movements seems defining. Perhaps she had heard the song for the last time. She looked at the vent, then looked back accross the ruined bar, towards the flickering neon light. She shouldered her pack, and headed back out.
The gloom of the outland seemed different now. More alien. The red soil beneath her feet crunched with a noise that jarred. The constant sound of the wind blowing the dust around her, once a comfort, now an irritant. She reached her house and looked at it, tumble-down and full of junk. Junk that she had collected to fill a void. She had thought that coming home would have made her forget about the robot deep beneath her feet. The song that had driven her search coming from something unfeeling, unalive.
“Excuse me miss?”
The deep voice startled her. She turned, and saw a man dressed in a long leather duster, a wide-brim hat pulled down over his eyes against the dust, and only a beard turned red by wind.
“Yes?” she said. Unafraid of this stranger, whatever need he might have of her.
“Is this New Prosperity?”
“Yes it is.”
“Good. I might stay awhile”. The man nodded his thanks to her, and headed down towards the cluster of houses, no doubt heading for the saloon.
“Mister” mouse called after the man. He turned, his coat billowing around him. “You can stay here, I won’t be needing it.” She tossed him the keycard for her house. He paused for a moment, as though he was about to protest, but he said “Thank you kindly. May you find whatever it is you’re going to go looking for”. He nodded his head again and turned back towards the saloon.
Mrs. Popper opened her door and grinned her toothless grin at Mouse. “I bet you could smell the stew”. Mrs. Popper stepped away from the door, leaving it open, and shuffled her way over to the stove, where she began ladling the thick stew into two large containers. “I recons that’s about enough for two weeks, three if you go sparingly.” Mouse smiled at her. “Thanks. Mrs. Popper?”
“Yes?”
“Why do you keep the cat?”
Mrs. Popper looked at Mouse for a long time, before chewing her lips. “Because when my George died, it was Mr. Popper here that looked after me. Fetched me mice to eat. Even found a bird once. Now he’s dead, he still keeps me company. Even if he can’t answer back. Even if he’s just a collection of old wires and circuit boards. He still loved me in his own way.”
Mouse wandered over to the cat, and stroked it’s balding fur. Mrs. Popper went back to ladling the stew. Mouse lifted the cat, and for the first time saw underneath an access hatch. Her deft fingers prized it open, and gazed at the circuitry beneath. A few of them had come loose from the main board, where the solder had worn away. Lost in her work, she didn’t see Mrs. Popper fill her back with three boxes of stew, and sit in her warm chair, watching her work. It wasn’t long before Mouse found herself lost in the intricacies of her work. Tools dug out from her many pockets, hunting for the life inside the cat. She attached the last connection, and then flicked the switch on the board. Nothing happened for long moments, until the eyes twitched. Mouse closed the hatch, and placed the cat on the floor. It stood stiffly, it’s eyes moving wildly from side to side. Then, suddenly, it yawned and stretched, then lazily leaped into the waiting lap of the old woman. Mrs. Popper positively beamed as she stroked the cat.
“Did you know you sing while you work?” Mrs. Popper asked.
“I.. I do?” said Mouse, blinking as she pulled herself out of her working fugue.
“You sing words that I don’t understand, but the way you sing it… it reminds me of how I feel about my George. It reminds me of what it’s like to be in love.”
It was all Mouse could do to climb carefully down into the darkness. Her only pause had been to spend all her favours and credits in water and lubricant. As she pulled herself up into the vent, it creaked, and she could hear the protest of nails who’s decade long abuse had become too much. She pulled herself into the vent, and moved as fast as she dared. Each movement caused the vent to sway wildly. Each movement bringing down a cascade of earth and stones onto the top of the vent. The added weight, in turn, causing the vent to further loosen. There was no time for her to be subtle. She began moving as quickly as she could, as she felt the vent beneath her give way. With a metal-grinding crack, the vent behind her began to fall. She tried to climb as quickly as she could, but it was not fast enough. She felt herself falling into the darkness. Out of the darkness came two strong arms. The grasped hers, and held her as the vent fell away around her, and pulled her up through the hail of stones and earth into the small room beyond. Mouse lay panting in Sofia’s arms, as Sofia held her close.
“You came back” whispered Sofia.
“I’m never going to leave you again.” Mouse said, her voice tinged with sadness. There was no way back for more supplies. “I couldn’t go back even if I wanted too”.
Sofia brushed the hair away from Mouses’ face. “When one door closes, the Maker opens another”. Mouse smiled, and curled herself into Sofia’s strong embrace. She had found her song, and here she would stay.
