It was too early for the stale, recycled air to smell like instant grits and runny oatmeal, but nonetheless, it did, indeed, smell that way.
Pushing herself into a lazily sloping prone position over her nest of pillows and scratchy, too-starched sheets, Paloma blinked. It was still dark. She looked up. The indigo colored rows of LEDs dotting the underside of the bunk above hers were still off. She blinked again, a goopy film of sleep gunk washing over her eyes for a moment, and looked to the clock mounted over the dormitory door. A digital 05:13 glared red and imposing, and the mucous stuff in Paloma’s eyes gave it a rather demonic aura. Fitting, given this ungodly hour.
“What the Hell?” Paloma audibly begged of the demon clock and of the smell of the carbohydrate laden breakfast wafting through the vents. Neither they nor her three still asleep bunkmates answered her. And why should they? They were asleep. The reveille wouldn’t sound over the P.A. with its overly chipper wind chime tinkles and cycled recordings of seabreeze for another hour plus change. Lights-out was still in effect for the next forty-five minutes on top of that.
So who was the inconsiderate dickhead making breakfast before the SunUp program had kicked itself on?
After spending a solid hour lying very still with her eyes squeezed shut and trying to pretend that she couldn’t hear the muffled clanking of a distant plastic spoon against the inside of an anodized pot, Paloma sat up like a bolt. A pissed off bolt of tangled, dark hair and bruise-like eyebags who refused to believe that only six pathetic minutes had elapsed in all that time. She furrowed her brow and forcefully blinked away the eye film, letting out a sharp sigh to alert any conscious roommates of her intent to confront anyone and anything that had the gall to interrupt her sleep.
Not today. Not the fuck today.
Paloma found her rumpled pile of loungewear where she’d left it a few hours ago: carelessly discarded in the floor by her bed, ready to snare the foot of an unsuspecting roommate on her way to the lavatory. (It had only happened once on accident; Naomi wouldn’t let her forget it, though.) She tugged on the polo shirt first, feeling the embroidered crest of St. Joseph of Cupertino over the left breast to make sure she hadn’t put it on inside out in the dark - although maybe the inability to properly clothe herself in the wee hours would make her case against being woken up this way even stronger. It was correct, and the burgundy thermal pants came on before the loafers designed for comfort as well as fitting inside of evac boots, if needed. The last touch was a sloppily twisted and unsecured ponytail tugged over her shoulder, which promptly uncoiled itself into an unruly mane. It completed an ensemble which screamed, “hey, what the fuck? It’s five in the morning. I’m tired.”
The kitchen was a good distance from Bunk C-2, but the smell that was starting to make Paloma queasy made it feel much closer. There was the entire Dormitory Corridor, a long, narrow sector with several obtuse turns in the hallway. A series of yellow lights along the floor kept anyone out for an unapproved midnight stroll from tripping and busting their chin on the smooth floors, the only other light in the room coming from the glow of the millions of stars amongst which their school drifted. The sisters and dean lived at the intersection of the Dormitory Corridor and the main breezeway. Left at the intersection led to the classrooms and labs; right was the bathroom, infirmary, and chapel. Beyond the chapel was the kitchen and dining hall, complete with one wakeful asshole keeping Paloma from sleep.
She bet it was Ashleigh, that weird chick who smelled like canned corn and who had once divulged that she was really into torture movies. That girl wasn’t normal. Or maybe Star, since she’d been the one they found sleepwalking that one time. Well, sleepburgling. She’d broken into the main science lab and had taken everything that wasn’t bolted down. Her classmates found her asleep in the main lecture hall the next morning, her thieving little body resting comfortably inside a flight suit that had been stuffed full with beakers, pipettes, and - rumor has it - a couple frog cadavers. Additional rumors said that she ended up paying penance for a week for her sticky fingers, which seemed likely given her ridiculously Orthodox parents.
But maybe, Paloma pondered as she rounded the corner of the intersection, maybe general weirdness wasn’t indicative of making breakfast at this godforsaken hour. Maybe it had to be a specific kind of neurotic - like a food-related weird. Da-Eun and Rosevelynne were the two biggest girls in their class, but Da-Eun was a notoriously deep sleeper, and Rosevelynne didn’t ever seem to care that she was fat and would’ve had no need for secret eating. No, Paloma decided, the plus-sized crew were the low-hanging fruit of targets for this situation, and it was way more likely to be one of the diet-crazed, Xanax-addicted rich girls with parents in Central Command who freaked out whenever their weight fluctuated, even when the most probable cause was minute differences in the artificial gravity as their station accelerated.
Zuri. It had to be Zuri. The girl couldn’t get two words out of her organic-cotton-candy-pink-sparkly-lip-glossed mouth without espousing the wonders of her dairy-free, gluten-free, fat-free, added sugar-free, apparently flavor-free diet. Half her bodyweight came from the thick layer of her vegan foundation alone; her actual frame was so tiny that her neck struggled to keep her head from tipping back under the weight of her big, stupid hair. It had to be her, Paloma concluded. No way anyone could actually live on Zuri’s diet of exactly one strawberry per day, seeds removed, green part intact, without secretly binging who got up before everyone else to slam down a whole thing of grits with gobs of artificial butter flavor added along with a week’s worth of freeze-dried ration packs. It made so much sense.
As she passed by the stained plexiglass door to the chapel, Paloma temporarily stopped her judgments of her classmates. Acrylic Jesus, with his splotchy green face and kind of creepy eyes that seemed to follow anyone who walked past, stared down at her with a vibrant red Bible in one hand and other hand outstretched and bearing a long shepherd’s hook that rounded up a bunch of purple planets and yellow stars. Paloma crossed herself for good measure. With her fingers still in a Byzantine form, she brought her biometrics wrist tracker up to her mouth and whispered, “Start camera app.”
The cafeteria door whooshed as it slid open, a flashing green light in the door frame blinking to let Paloma know that it had recorded her visit. Whatever, she thought; she’d have video evidence of her reason for being here soon enough. She crept carefully between the rows of dining tables and toward the door that led into the kitchen, where - she assumed - Zuri was now polishing off a family-sized portion of porridge. The dor separating food preparation from food consumption was mostly opaque save for a long, narrow window that ran down the height of the door. Fluorescent light filtered through, and the smell of the lackluster food was stronger than ever. This was it.
Paloma had to admit, she’d been one hundred percent convinced that when she jumped through the door and shouted, “Hah!”, it was Zuri who would be standing there, crouching defensively over a big metal pot, shoving fistfuls of boiled starch into her mouth like a starving feral animal.
She hadn’t expected Addie.
“Dude,” the failed detective sputtered. “Addie, what the hel-eck?” Good save. “What are you… Do you know what time it is?!”
Addie, now wheeled around to face Paloma with hands clutching the lip of the counter and big, round eyes even bigger and rounder, only murmured, “Please don’t tell.”
Out of all her classmates, Addie was the one who Paloma had probably thought about the very least. She was… fine. She was an okay student with an okay personality, or at least Paloma thought so; she wasn’t sure they’d ever actually talked. Wallflowery as they come, and plain. Not ugly, really, but not pretty, either. In a crowd of faces, hers would be white noise. Average height, average brown hair cut at an average length, average build - the girl was the epitome of the word “normal”.
“Why?” Paloma asked, eyes narrowed. She was taller than Addie. More athletically built, too. She thought it might make her look threatening, which was good, because anyone who had the audacity to wake Paloma up should feel threatened.
It was Addie’s completely medium normalcy that distracted Paloma from seeing it at first. One wouldn’t think to look for something like it on a girl whose entire existence as a person could be filed under the category of “regular”. But there it was: starting just below the sleeve of Addie’s standard issue lounge polo and extending all the way through her knuckles, her skin was gone. Gone gone.
“Oh my God.” Later, she could go confess to using the Lord’s name in vain, if, in this scenario, it could really be a case of that sin at all, but for now, Paloma wasn’t thinking about the confessional or nuns or hail Marys or any of that. For now, Addie’s missing skin was taking up pretty much all of Paloma’s brain. It didn’t look how she’d imagined a human body would look if it sloughed off its outer layers. She thought it would have been redder, messier, bloodier… More like something out of Ashleigh’s guilty pleasure gore movies. But the messiest thing about the entire scene was a glob of mushy oats that had spilled onto the counter and dribbled down the slick, grey metal of the cabinets.
Two sets of brown eyes held each other in a deadlock, one set demanding an explanation and the other asking for the whole thing to be dropped and forgotten. The battle was one when one set diverted to the floor.
“Okay,” Addie admitted. “You saw it. Just please don’t tell anyone.” Her voice held steady despite the subtle shape of desperation pulling her features.
“What is,” Paloma paused, looking at the degloved limb, “it?”
Addie’s wide eyes blinked. She calmly replied, “You know what it is.”
From beneath the skin, instead of muscle,bone, blood, meat, gristle - shiny metal rods and some kind of black rubbery plasticine material glinted, exposed in the stark light of the kitchen. A sunstance that looked like solidified petroleum jelly covered the machinery in uneven patches, some chunks dangling precariously by glue-like strands and some missing altogether. The edges of the skin were slightly disfigured and whitish - the way some types of plastic toys and folders looked when bent or contorted beyond the stress point of the polymers.
Paloma knew. “You’re--”
“A biosynthetic being,” the girl, maybe not as normal as previously thought, interjected with a confirmation. “At least, that’s the term our community prefers.”
“You’re an android,” Paloma finished her thought anyway.
“I’m a biosynthetic being.” There was almost a twinge of annoyance in Addie’s voice as she turned back to the bubbling, steaming pot of breakfast simmering away behind her. “I’m not an android. I have a brain.” She looked back over her shoulder for a moment and clarified, “A human brain.”
Paloma had now completely forgotten about her initial reason for crawling out of her bunk, padding through the darkened ship, and sneaking into the kitchen all before 5:30. She wasn’t quite so annoyed at the cooking that had woken her up, and that excitement of her big gotcha! moment had passed. Now, with her classmate’s skin off and robotic tendons flexing as she stirred the pot, none of that seemed very important anymore. This was way bigger than any of those minor disturbances.
“Holy sh-” Paloma sidled up to Addie, who was staring into the beige goop that gurgled like something primordial. “Holy crap! You’re made out of metal!”
“Stainless steel,” Addie clarified. “An alloy of iron and chromium. Which,” she paused, motioning with her spoon to Paloma, “all people are made of. You’re also made of iron and chromium, and gold, and a whole lot of other metals.”
Paloma scoffed. “Yeah, maybe, but the proportions are, like, a little different.” The two shared a silent moment and engaged in a second, shorter staring contest. Blank-faced Addie was the first to cede again, apparently finding the food more interesting. Paloma continued, “But yeah, what are you doing in here?”
“Cooking,” Addie responded. No duh.
Paloma felt her skin prickle defensively. “That’s not what I meant! Er, well, that’s what I meant, like, before, when I thought there was a human in here, but-”
Addie hoisted the pot off the glowing red eye of the electric cooktop and dropped it rather roughly onto a cool spot.
“You mean what is a non-human doing in a private school for humans, right? A really prestigious human school?” Addie banged the spoon once, twice against the rim of the pot, sending sticky splatters of oats all over the inside.
“Well yeah,” Paloma responded. It wasn’t a weird thing to ask. “Yeah, of course!”
Addie sighed and remarked, “This is why I didn’t want anyone to know.”
“What?”
“This! Because you’ll go tell everyone and they’ll all stare at me with that same freaked-out expression that you have right now.”
Now that the robot girl mentioned it, the full-fledged human did find that she’d left her mouth ajar. Paloma pursed her lips and tried to look at Addie’s face - at least at the side of it that she could see - and explained, “I won’t tell.” Addie was looking at her again, her expression decidedly one of distrust. “No, seriously!” Paloma reaffirmed. “I’m not going to snitch.” With the inevitability of Earth’s gravity pulling things to the ground, she couldn’t help but let her gaze fall down from her classmate’s completely normal face to her completely aberrant arm. “If you tell me about that, I won’t tell anyone what I know.”
The silence lasted for several seconds this time. For a moment, Paloma wondered if Addie was planning to clam up and take her chances with blackmail. It’s not like anyone would believe her; Paloma was well aware of her reputation as something of a loudmouth. The sisters often scolded her for being, as they put it, a braggart and a fibber, and the likelihood that any conversation that began with, “hey, guys, guess who’s a cyborg” would be waved off by everyone on the ship was high. It wasn’t a bad choice.
“I brushed against a loose wall panel during zero-G conditioning last week.” The statement seemed to come out of nowhere, and it caught Paloma off-guard. “My skin tore,” Addie went on, stooping to rummage through a low cabinet. By now, Paloma understood what she was hearing, and she leaned in expectantly. “My regenerative systems tried to repair it, but there was a glitch - it happens - and now I have to wait for it to redo the entire arm so that I don’t end up with two layers of skin or something. It’ll be done by the time our classes start, but I didn’t exactly want to be around anyone while it’s happening, so I came in here to have an early breakfast.”
Paloma opened her mouth.
“And yeah,” Addie said, shutting her down, “I eat. Don’t ask me dumb questions.” Addie didn’t go on until Paloma’s lips were together again. “When I’m done, ‘m going to clean up here and go back to my bunk, and no one’s going to know about this.” From the cabinet, Addie had taken out a shallow bowl and a spoon - the same ones that the rest of the class would be using when they all filed into the cafeteria an hour or so from now. She sat them neatly on the counter, ladled a hearty spoonful of breakfast into her bowl, and shot Paloma a pointed stare.
Another pause followed, and then Paloma asked, “Okay, but why St. Joseph’s? Why are you here?”
Addie rolled her big, brown eyes. They caught the glare of the fluorescent lights as they crested the apex of their roll. “Didn’t I just tell you not to ask dumb questions?”
“Tch!” Paloma smacked. “How is that a dumb question?! I thought that you guys were supposed to be, like, computers and just know everything!” Honestly, how rude.
“I have a human brain,” Addie reminded, sounding annoyed. “It gets information like any other human brain - I learn.” Instead of taking a bite, the girl dropped her spoon against the side of the bowl, a hollow aluminum sound echoing off the room. Once again, she was searching through the cabinets.
Paloma was getting the impression that this morning’s pre-dawn session wasn’t the first one Addie had ever had. She tried to think of all the times she’d ever skinned a knee or scraped an elbow. Too many instances to recall even somewhat accurately, for sure. She tried to imagine, then, what it would have been like for even a tenth of those times to end up with her system malfunctioning and growing scar tissue over her whole arm, or leg, or whatever. As unfazed as Addie was by the whole thing, even so little as to still have an appetite, there was no way this was her first secret breakfast.
“Okay, so you go to school.” Paloma understood: all young brains must learn. Reasonable. “But why a Catholic school?” she asked, brushing her hair back over her shoulder in a ponderous fidget. “Why… Why any religion?”
This time, Addie had a blue box in her hand when she stood up. She sat it on the counter, near her bowl.
“Like I said, we’re made of the same stuff.” Addie opened the blue box - just a little opening - and poured a tawny, sandy substance over her oatmeal.
Brown sugar. In the entire time Paloma had been at St. Joseph’s, she had not once tasted a single crystal of brown sugar in her breakfast. Addie really must have been a pro to know where all the good stuff was hidden. Or maybe, just maybe, the staff were in the know with Addie’s little secret, and they gave her all the good stuff to make her feel a little better about being such a weirdo.
“Iron. Calcium. Carbon. Mercury. It all comes from the same place, and we’re all made of it.”
“But,” Paloma wagered, “Someone actually built you. Like, in a factory. You came off a production ship somewhere and a drop ship mailed you to your family.”
“Yeah,” Addie acknowledged, stirring the cloyingly sweet sugar into her oatmeal, making syrupy swirls. “And your mom and dad built you. It’s not like God magically poofed you into being. You and the millions of other humans in this universe got here because your parents did something that we can explain with science just fine. God made the parents that made you, and God made the factory worker that built my body. Same thing.” At long last, after what felt to Paloma like hours of cooking, Addie took a bite. “And like I said,” she slurred through her porridge, “human brain. That’s where the soul is.” She swallowed.
“The soul’s in the heart,” Paloma corrected. Again, this garnered a big eye roll from the sugar pilferer.
“Oh, come on,” Addie heaved. “That’s just…” She swirled her spoon in the air as she thought for the right word. “A metaphor. A really old metaphor from when people didn’t know how organs worked. The heart’s there to pump blood - blood that’s all full of iron, by the way. The brain is the thoughts and personality and stuff. That’s where prayers come from. If there’s a soul, it’s definitely in the brain.”
Paloma didn’t have a great retort, mostly because she’d spent most of her life thinking about the heart as a metaphorical temple and not as the literal meaty thing shooting blood around inside her.
“I guess,” she half-mumbled. “Wait, so you pray?”
Addie, mouth full, said nothing, but made an expression that clearly read “of course”.
“I mean, what does a… cyborg pray for?”
“Same thing as you, I guess.” The girl shrugged. “Forgiveness. Good things for my parents. A cute husband one day.”
“A hus-”
“Don’t. Just… Please, I’ve answered my quota of dumb questions tonight. No offense, I mean; everyone else is just as bad with this stuff as you, but…”
Paloma crossed her arms and murmured, “You’re kind of a bitch, you know.”
The two girls stared at each other for a minute, the third contest of the night. For the third time, Addie was the one to cede the contest, but this time, her eyes had screwed shut in a peal of laughter. Her nose wrinkled up and her brows knit together, and she tipped her head back and let out a giggle that grew into a full, hearty laugh. Paloma stared, blinking, and felt the corners of her mouth twitch. The twitches wavered and tugged and before she understood why, she was laughing, too. They laughed and laughed until Addie had tears streaming down her face, which made Paloma laugh all the more knowing that someone out there had outfitted a robot to have a crying-from-laughing-too-hard response.
“Yeah,” Addie acknowledged, her laughter finally sputtering out. “Maybe you should pray for me.”
--
I used "Iron" and "Prayer", and I think the big secret is pretty obvious, but did not work "Seed" into this one. Catholic School In Space! That Ashleigh sounds like one crazy mofo.
St. Joseph of Cupertino is apparently the patron saint of astronauts, students and test-takers, so he seemed fitting.
Apparently he was also super dumb but sometimes he'd just start levitating, which is great.
Eternity RPC Board
![[Image: Oi6D7Oz.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/Oi6D7Oz.jpg)
![[Image: 13bxgGb.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/13bxgGb.jpg)
![[Image: t9CBj3Z.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/t9CBj3Z.jpg)
