I actually hate the writing rule "show don’t tell,” because I would sometimes hear something told but I would certainly never see it firsthand; I’d see you at school when you deigned to show up, and you’d tell me all the things you saw (train rides to see your boyfriend, bloody leaves in deer season, backyard mosh pits), and sometimes I’d see the pictures (train, bloody leaves, blurry yard), but I was never—for lack of a less shitty metaphor—a primary source; I saw only what happened at school and everything else I heard second hand, and I guess that was mostly fine; you hugged me at request, and there was always blood on your jacket, and I would pick at your fingers, and you kept telling me I was funny, and I wasn’t used to people liking me, and I think you’re the only reason I didn’t scrub my old personality white, like white snow out of hunting season soaked through with blood, the fetus you pulled from its shot mother and put on an album cover turning your warmth icy cold; backyard mosh pits, cheering, drinking, deer head in a bucket lifted by its ears and kissed on the lips for a joke, and you said, “come to our shows!” and I said, “no thank you!” and years later—far from controlled rooms where I can love people who scare me—I look back on that photo and can’t believe it was real; I don’t know what it told me about you or how to reconcile the you I saw everyday with the you who took it, but it did show me a better metaphor: to me, getting closer to people feels like meeting you (you, specifically) away from city lights, like walking to white woods, finding that damned spot staining waist high snow to its roots, earth, bones, your warmth melting a path right to it, through it, into it, where I watch from the sidelines you sinking into melting red like cherry gas station slush, weighed down by that bug eyed thing or maybe I’m just projecting, until the tip of your curls bob below watery blood, and I’m left with something I should not have seen and of which I cannot tell.
cw for transmisogyny, blood, body horror, and militarism/typical space mech warfare stuff
Laura pressed the connector of a synchro-tube into her back; it shocked her skin into a more pliable state and sunk into her muscles, almost touching bone. She inserted another. And another. Six in her back and thinner wires to each arm and the nape of her neck. She could faintly feel the generators of her mech—her Dancing Queen, Dancer Vinifera—working in her abdomen.
She tried to shift focus.
Shifting focus was like trying to get an autostereogram to work, the kind that was in those magic eye books; she unfocused her vision and tried to treat the sleek cockpit pod like a window screen to look past. She started to see stars in the static of the shadows, and as her vision blurred the static doubled. Laura dialed in her vision until she saw through Dancer Vinifera’s eyes and felt every mechanical pop within her loud and clear, her own heartbeat now distant and small.
And she got back on the road.
She’d been living out of the Dancing Queen for months now, having left home in it in search of an old friend. A hidden trash compartment within the Dancer Vinifera’s pod was piled high with take out boxes, and a comforter was stored beneath her seat. It was at once a warm place to sleep and a body which negated her existence beautifully.
One could say that the stars had aligned for this trip. Laura’s brother, who she keeps forgetting is named Justin and not AT506, was away helping an old friend from the military. Her father was away on business. Her mom was . . . not all there. And Laura had just been reunited with her only real friend. Sort of. She saw Nova on a billboard, posed getting out of an A.B.A., pulling synchro-tubing out of her back and stepping down onto an outcropping of the mech’s reflective black armor. She had the same cropped hair from when she and Laura were in high school together. Brown skin. Short in stature. Cutting Glare. Tank top and cargo pants. No makeup. No jewelry. No bells and whistles. Written in bold letters was “Cycle Space Force” followed by an ultimatum: “Come fight me or come fight with me,” and below that was respectively her division number, call sign, and the quadrant she was assigned to, “D32 AM1339 A2$,” followed by a QR code that lead to an enlistment form.
. . .
“I support you, but is this what you think being a woman is? Eye shadow shaved legs and dresses? You should be grateful you don’t have to worry about all that.”
“Fuck off.”
“See? You’re so aggressive.”
Laura remembered watching the digital sun set over the arching towns of the eleventh torus space colony—little squares of light glinting off a thousand roofs and stinging her eyes. Nova was young and sweet, only 17, etc., wearing sunglasses so she was okay, her shoulder touching Laura’s on the dormitory balcony—all cold metal and exposed piping.
Nova said, “Well, she’s kind of right. I’m sure you agree with her, somewhat?”
“I mean that’s not really the point.”
“What’s the point, then?”
“That she would never say that to anyone else! That she’s never commented on it for any of the other girls in the dorm.”
“But she’s letting you stay here.”
“Yeah, she has to.”
“She said she supports you. That’s nice, right?”
“Fuck off.”
“And you are kind of aggressive.”
“Fuck off!”
Nova stuck her tongue out. “Meanie.” She leaned her weight more into Laura, who was pliable just for her. Nova watched as Abas were driven through the streets, all painted bright and matte, tied down lamely on flatbed trucks. Huge. Casting cool shadows on the orange bathed city. “See,” said Nova, “I’m never seen as aggressive. I’m awful and everyone treats me like I’m a kid.”
“You aren’t . . . awful.”
“I shot someone dead, Laura.”
Laura turned her attention to the Abas. “He had it coming.”
Following Laura’s gaze, Nova said, “Pilots have been so lousy lately. All falling back on the same old tropes and poses.”
“Do you think you could do better?”
“I know I could do better. You know, soldiers will hold funerals for any old hunk of military junk. It’s no wonder that ‘A.B.A.’ became ‘Dancing Queen’. You’ve seen old footage of the Aba Mark 1, right? It flew around with its legs stretched straight out behind it. It was undignified. Unenviable. I don’t even understand why you’d make something look like a person if you wanted to disgrace it like that. Queens can pose, they have excellent articulation, right? If you pose cool enough—if you make other pilots jealous—they follow in your footsteps.”
“And this is what you want? To strike a pose so good it grants you an army of killer robots with which you can . . . what, take over the world?”
Nova cracked a smile. “No. What I want is a beautiful enviable killing machine fitted perfectly for a murderer like me.”
. . .
Start intermission 1.
Okay, okay, okay. Let’s set the scene:
You’re Justin, 28 years old, veteran of a war everyone’s already forgotten, back covered in permanent swiss cheese holes from extended synchronization. You keep forgetting that your name is Justin, because after the war you kept telling people to refer to you by your old callsign, AT506; it was less weird to pretend to be mech than it was to pretend to be so . . . raw. You referred to Justin as your “deadname” back then, because that was what your little brother who you guess isn’t anymore called their old name. Whatever. It happened to fit. You stopped dating because you just knew all the girls would find your disfigured body disgusting. You still live with your parents. The government had let you keep your precious body, the Aba Twilight, but first they filled in the cannons with basalt infused resin and sawed off the guns on either side of its angry eyes. Many times you dreamed of flying away in the night, but you had self control, and, slowly, you rehabilitated yourself. No longer do you dream of joining the defect soldiers and flying to Pluto. No longer do you call yourself AT506. But now your fucking sibling has gone and done it, and your mom is crying to you on the phone saying “get my baby back, get them back get them back” and you have to drop everything to track their callsign, like you’re on the Cycles Space Force’s stupid ranked leaderboard again.
End intermission 1.
. . .
Although the Dancer Vinifera originally belonged to her brother, it basically became her mom’s after it was disarmed and relabeled for civilian use. Or, It was her mom’s art project at least; she used the money Laura’s dad made selling patents for human cloning technology to import mountains of tesserae. For years she had been arranging a mosaic of Christ’s crucifixion on the Vinifera’s metal plating; it lit up when its lights turned on, and was only half finished when Laura stole it and left to find Nova.
Laura shifted back to her flesh with some difficulty and checked the recruitment poster taped to the cockpit wall for the hundredth time. D32 AM1339 A2$. She tried to commit this to memory.
D32 AM1339 A2$
D32 AM1339 A2$
D32 AM1339 A2$
D32 AM1339 A2$
Laura relaxed back into her mechanical body, and the poster faded away. What was it, T32 AM . . . 239 . . . no, 33. 9. A2$ . . . shit.
She tried to shift back to flesh.
Stuck.
She was stuck.
She tried to look past the proverbial window screen but she couldn’t. Her eyes were set to one focus, and they weren’t budging. She started to panic. Her generators buzzed louder. Her limbs felt suddenly stiff. She forgot to remember the number.
Fuck it, most of it doesn’t matter. A2$ A2$ A2$. No it does matter. It all matters, I need all of it to find her. The quadrants are huge. They’re huge . . .
She felt, faintly, a circuit inside of her connect, and each LED light up on the tracking screen inside the pod her flesh was nestled inside, and she could read the electricity within her like braille. It was so clear, it was all so clear.
. . .
When the panic subsided, Laura began to see the positives of her situation: Dancing Queen’s are anonymous. Even if people know who you are, you're still anonymous; the expression and poses of the Dancing Queen are your expression and your poses. In a way, being stuck was nice. If she ever were to return home, the Dancing Queen would be what they saw. She would be what they saw. Dancer Vinifera Laura, or maybe just Dancer Vinifera.
She could no longer shift focus to her body in order to eat or sleep. Thankfully, she didn’t need to. Her flesh was just a brain for something much bigger and more beautiful than itself, and her generators gave it all the fuel it needed. The wire in the nape of her neck stopped only tracking her neurons and began pumping blood. She was practically skipping and twirling through space. But . . . if Nova were to rip her from it and hold her in flesh . . . that wouldn’t be so bad, she thought.
She reached the edge of sector A2$. She could feel the outline of the quadrants like a shock fence, but it was just a pleasant buzz when she passed over. She followed the clicks inside of her.
Warmer . . .
Colder . . .
Warmer . . .
Warmer . . .
Hot.
Hot!
She drifted to a stop, hovering over the probe encircled earth. Debris floated by her and stretched into the distance . . . bullets, plating, bits of bombed out space stations . . . and a glossy black mech posed before her, hot orange light glowing behind her plating. Vinifera Laura felt her comms buzz to life. Someone’s voice fought its way out of the static and won. “This is the Cycles Space Force Division 32, Aba Midnight 1339. State your business.”
It was her, it was really her.
Vinifera Laura unfocused her vision and tried to see her cockpit in the static of space.
She couldn’t, she really couldn’t.
“Let me repeat myself, This is the Cycles Space Force Division 32, Aba Midnight 1339. Please state your business.”
Vinifera Laura froze, and then Nova’s handler said, “Handle it,” and Nova said “sorry,” and the two guns on the Aba Midnight’s head began to charge, and Vinifera Laura struck a pose she saw on TV and flew away, the Midnight following with a barrage of bullets—several shattering mosaic and denting armor—Laura tried to move unpredictably but Nova foresaw every twitch, soaring in the body of the Aba Midnight before shifting to flesh to describe something to her handler, hand on a joystick for manual control, then back to the Midnight, effortless and cool, and Laura could barely keep track of her, but she kept trying to shift focus back to her flesh, blurring her vision, unable to see the static, stupid impossible magic eye puzzle! And just when she had managed to place the Aba Midnight it cut its lights and vanished.
Vinifera Laura slowed, and she tried to remain calm. Fifty pistons clicked into place. Her generator’s breath was raspy . . . waiting for round two.
Her brother had told stories of tracking blacked out Aba Midnights by blocked out stars, but you couldn’t do that anymore, not here at least, where space was polluted by years of war. All she could see was what was close: Earth, the moon, the sun, the twinkling dots of Mars, Venus. . .
Venus vanished.
Before she could react the Aba was close enough she could see the colored wires beneath its plating.
It bodied her.
Hundreds of tiles fractured or fell loose. Her brain wack against the pod nestled in her metal chassis; a wire popped out of place somewhere.
Nova’s voice bristled through her: “It’s a shame to ruin such a beautiful Dancer. You’re like a work of art!” A box cutter blade shot out of the Midnight’s arm, terminating so quickly its topmost segment shot into space. Laura’s vision doubled. She lived, for a moment, in that static-y interim. Her mechanical hands, shielding her from sparks, were overlaid with squishy flesh.
Got it, she thought.
The midnight drew back its blade.
“Oh well,” said Nova.
Vinifera’s hand moved through space as a miniature one slammed the comms in parallel, and someone, deep inside her chest, gasped out, “It’s Laura!!”
And the Midnight froze,
And Laura felt every breath,
its blade suspended,
her ribcage filling,
then slowly lowered.
and then it was empty. Her jaw sealed shut. The light behind her eyes returned. Her silky breath became the steady hum of generators.
Slowly, carefully, the Midnight’s lights turned on. They lit up her armor with a hundred candle-like reflections. Right in front of Laura. Too close.
The transmitter buzzed to life: “—Laura?”
Laura Vinifera couldn’t find her voice, so she nodded.
. . .
4 meter mechanical hand in 4 meter mechanical hand, the Aba Midnight lead the Dancer Vinifera to a shattered space station sheltered by the corpses of fallen A.B.A.'s caught in its orbit. The center of the facility was somehow still intact. The Midnight overrode the airlock doors, and the two of them floated through ribbed metallic tunnels and up a defunct elevator shaft towards what Nova called “a good picnic spot, where radio can’t reach us.”
The picnic spot, as it turned out, was an abandoned mess hall. Its ceiling was cramped in their towering forms, but they had clearance. It was built for them, actually; A.B.A.’s lined the walls like suits of armor in a castle. Disintegrating. Probably haunted. Below them was a diorama of chairs and tables in disarray.
The Aba Midnight settled into a resting pose, kneeling down and lowering its head gracefully, like it was about to be knighted, and Nova stepped out of the pod, pulling a bomber jacket over her indented skin, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder. She said, “Aren’t you going to get out?”
She looked different than Laura remembered, and it took her a second to realize why: half of her face didn’t move. Or it barely did, at least. She guessed it had gotten blasted off in combat and the reconstruction was sloppy. Either way, she now forever had half an expression of mild annoyance, and when she relaxed her face the mobile half fell in line. Vinifera Laura shook her head no.
“Are you stuck?”
Vinifera Laura looked embarrassed yes.
Nova sighed; she said, “give me your hand.”
Laura wasn’t really sure what that meant, but she tried her best, carefully resting her outstretched palm by where Nova stood.
Nova climbed on. Bag first, then swinging a leg onto Vinifera’s index finger and pulling herself up. At Nova’s waiting stare, Laura carefully raised her hand to eye level. Nova settled down cross legged and pulled a thermos and plastic fork from her bag. She twisted it open with a billow of steam and began to eat . . . simmered lab grown meat in a thick gravy, soft carrots, potatoes soaked brown, and peas.
Laura couldn’t smell any of it.
“This isn’t going to be much of a picnic, is it?”
Laura tried to shift focus, she really really tried.
“Did you do this on purpose? Do you really want . . . to be a Dancing Queen?” asked Nova.
Vinifera Laura wanted to shake her head no. But . . . maybe. Her old flesh rotted within her abdomen. As a brain, it served its purpose; it was functional in moving metal. But as a body, it was hopeless. It hadn’t shaved in god knows how long. Its skin must have grown around the synchro-tubing. It had a bad face, she just knew it. It must have smelled. That brain called Laura wouldn’t have gotten out of Vinifera even if she could. And . . . this body was so quick. So warm. So special.
Nova didn’t eat her food. “The military is awful. But there’s one good thing about it: you get to define the everyday expression of Abas. I get to . . . create a form of communication. And everyone else has to deal with it.”
It was to make her jealous. Laura was sure the open thermos was just there to make her jealous.
“I . . . love that. But that creation comes at a cost. It’s kind of obvious, right? All of that expression comes from war. And so do the machines. Dancing Queen came from Aba which came from A.B.A. which stands for Artillery Based Avatar . . . the ‘murder’ part of these machines is inherent. Even Queens used solely for maintenance are just repurposed from wars. That’s why they’re built. Every pose they strike and tool they use is a form of expression defined– no, created with guns and blood.”
A nine year old—soon to be a girl named Laura—pretended to fly through the cosmos of her living room, one arm outstretched like she was feeling her way through space, the other flung behind with an imagined weapon in fist.
“Artillery based, got it?”
That kid soon to be named Laura’s mom used to look at her with brow lowered and eyes dead, and from this Laura knew she was loved. It was conspiratorial affection. It was just like the posters.
“Do you really want your body to be defined by blood?”
Laura drank it most Sundays when she was little.
“They are beautiful second bodies, but that’s all they are: second bodies. For people to stay sane, they need to have somewhere to retreat: the innocent home of flesh. That’s humanity’s true cradle.”
At that very moment, eighty-five million miles away, the dad of Vinifera’s brain was showing men in suits how well a replicate could shoot.
“It’s just something to think about.”
Nova took a single bite of food before screwing on the lid and standing up.
“I need to get back to my station now. Can you set me down?”
Vinifera didn’t want to. She wanted to find her voice and argue. She wanted to fly Nova far far away from earth and the war and everything, to somewhere stupid and gay like Pluto. She wanted to make Nova understand. She wanted Nova to jump to her cockpit pod and pull her out. But she also didn’t, because she was gross.
Vinifera set her down. Of course. She watched Nova scale the Aba Midnight.
“It was good to see you again, Laura.”
Nova nestled herself back into the cockpit and reinserted her synchro-tubes. She focused in, did a quick boost over to the elevator shaft, saluted Vinifera with a glossy metal hand, and freefell out of the mess hall.
. . .
Vinifera could hardly believe it. Nova must have never posed like a Dancing Queen in her own human flesh. It was all made in blood (obviously!). Did she think all that killing melted off people when they exited the Aba? Did she think herself an exception? A murderer with a congruent body at last? What the hell is violence!
In a way, though, Nova was right; the body of a Dancer was a symbol of war.
But that didn’t matter here, where there were no people to care. She hated people. Fuck all of them.
With clumsy mechanical hands, the Dancer Vinifera rearranged the cracked mosaics on her chest; she’d gotten tired of seeing Jesus bleeding out every time she looked down.
She posed, watching her reflection in the broken glass of an abandoned space station.
She flew for months, back past Venus and further, further . . .
She slept in mildew offices like a little kid trying to live inside a doll house that was obviously too small for them. The only buildings made to accommodate her were made for war, and she didn’t like to sleep in those.
She watched glittering colonies from afar. Fields that could fit her if Dancers like her were allowed inside.
She wished Nova had saved her.
. . .
Start intermission 2
There was this cramped, awful, chemical smelling pool on your home station by Venus. Your sibling never wanted to take off their shirt to go swimming. It was like they were mocking you. As though their hatred of a perfectly good body was equivalent to all your crimes permanently etched into your back.
You land your ship on a station orbiting Callisto, which glints like a spot of micah in front of impossibly massive Jupiter. You choose a crowbar from your ship’s maintenance room. You go inside the station. You climb a stairwell. You pry open a door. You see the A.B.A Twilight, the Vinifera, resting in the pit of a lecture hall, half the seats crushed beneath it. You climb up its hand. You find the familiar panel lines that lead to the pod. You get your crowbar in there. You’ve uprooted your entire life for this. Why couldn’t your dad have just made a damn replacement?
End intermission 2
. . .
It was as if someone had grabbed her eyeballs with awful rubbery fingers and forced them out of focus; her vision undid itself, every wire and piston went numb, her generators stopped their gentle purring, and suddenly she could feel every intestine crammed into her like worms, her skin unprotected like a finger missing its nail, and then the wire in her neck drained of blood, all down her back, where each tube popped with pus and red out of raised volcanoes of skin, the craters of which went down to her clavicles.
Justin threw up.
Laura caught her breath on the cockpit floor and tried to beg, because she thought her brother was going to cut her open and undo her brain from its nerves as he had undone her from Vinifera’s wires, but instead she just cried out. She couldn’t struggle, couldn’t move her muscles, couldn’t form words. Justin dragged her out of the pod. He dragged her down her body. He dragged her away.
. . .
He felt weird handling Laura’s naked body—which was fine by her—so he just laid her in his ship’s bath, propped up her head, filled the tub with soap and water, and then drained the grime and dead skin, peeling off her back in sheets. He did this over and over again for hours, and afterwards he still had to cover his nose while he handled her. He left her drying on some towels like a beached whale while he stuck some hotdogs and a bun in a blender and eviscerated them for her to eat. He covered her groin with a towel but not her chest.
For weeks she lay still on his couch. He slid a pillow beneath her head at night and took it away in the morning. Somehow, her body hair was mostly short, too shocked and dead to fully grow back, but she could still feel the prickliness of her face when her cheek brushed against the pillow or couch. It was unrelenting. She tried to walk and immediately fell over. She made fists. She tried to talk again. She was just a brain for something greater, and she shouldn’t have had to express her thoughts, but no one else was going to, so she got okay at it. She closed her eyes and dreamed of being the Dancer Vinifera, shooting her stupid brother to bloody bits. But the Dancer Vinifera didn’t have guns. Not anymore. And she didn’t have the Dancer Vinifera. Not anymore.
Lying cramped on the tiny couch in the flight deck, she asked, “Where are we going?”
She couldn’t see him at the time. Moving her head seemed too much work. She just watched the stars reflected in the chrome coffee table. He said, “we’re going back.”
Laura struggled for a moment to arrange her mouth. She said, “home?”
For a minute it seemed Justin hadn’t heard her. He clicked on the radio. He tuned it. Rock music fought its way out of the static, and then lost. He said, “where else.”
They both were washed away in that static for a time.
Laura choked out, “AT506,”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Can you help me shave?”
AT506 didn’t answer.
“It hurts.” Vinifera strained her face to keep from crying. “It hurts to be seen like this.”
AT506 could feel the scars on his back.
He could always feel the scars on his back. Vinifera had them too, now.
“Even by me?” asked AT506, “does it even hurt to be seen like this by me?”
“It always hurts,” Vinifera sobbed.
The singer on the radio dotted the noise like she was gasping for air. Bursting forth with a cymbal crash or half a chord. Little signs of life on a static ocean.
AT506 glanced back at Vinifera and said, “I can see it. I can see that it hurts.”
Vinifera swallowed her tears and laughed. “That’s such a stupid thing to say.”
“Huh?” He turned around fully to look at her.
“All of you are so fucking stupid, oh my god. The hell do you mean you can see it hurts?”
“What?”
The band crashed through for one chaotic moment before it was swallowed up indefinitely by the static. Noise music was Vinifera’s favorite, though—bubbling dots speaking to her, oceanic and cosmic, crackling hot and fiery like her old generator’s purr. She let it wash her away, maybe four billion miles to Pluto or even further shores, static waves lapping at her sides, beached and glittering, enviable.
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