Trash

Anna’s seen the architectural renders for this place. It was supposed to be beautiful.

Then there was the Infra — the seven-month multifront corporate conflict that’s uneasily slid into the books as ‘the Infrastructure Wars.’ And it fucked everything and everyone; and this (stupid, pointless, environmentally ruinous, but potentially beautiful) skyscraper will never be finished. There’s no money. Countries, companies, cultures died and fragmented and mutated overnight; who owns the building? Who even knows?

But here it sits, almost untouched as air-to-ground missiles ripped into so many of its neighbours. And here it rots; not quite finished, but finished enough to threaten to shed sheets of high-altitude glass like murderous autumn leaves.

Anna gets paid — when it even comes through — by a weird conglomeration of rump bureaucracies and cleanup funds. And what Anna does is come to places like this, across the world, and she organises people. She teaches the locals what they can do to defuse these shitheaps; not with the trillion-dollar high-tech solutions that splash across the news, line some tech Svengali’s pockets, and sublimate into vapourware, but with whatever shit they have lying around. Because that’s what there is, and that’s all there will ever be, and nobody’s coming to save them. And the alternative is that these things slowly fall down on their heads and kill them.

Anna was an altruist once. Mostly, now, she’s tired.

She’s not even sure what the Charlies’ story is. First she had them pegged for augs; a now-obsolete corporate workforce, their brains cybernetically restructured for efficiency and teamwork and not joining unions and that kind of thing, faces rendered eerily uniform for corporate identity. But she’s pretty sure she’s seen some preteen Charlies out on the streets, and going under the company autodoc doesn’t make your kids come out identical.

(Not unless the corps here were doing some truly fucking heinous human experimentation.)

But no. Anna’s current theory is that the Charlies were fabbed: custom-designed biological humanoid work units. Probably never intended to breed, but…well. The Infra fucked everything. And they’re nice, if quite creepy. They pick tasks up quickly, they work fast, they’re cheerful. The fact that they show blatantly nonhuman flocking behaviours is, well, it’s none of her business, right?

“We heard you’re leaving,” one of the Charlies says.

And she’s been putting off telling them that.

She looks around. Some of them are working; a few are looking at her. They’re all cheerful.

(The problem with custom-fabbed biological humanoids — the reason they never caught on for widespread use — is not intrinsic to them. It’s intrinsic to humans. That three-pronged socket is not pulling an emotive little face; the pet python in that kyoot online video is not hanging out on the couch with a human baby yawning; the weather is not angry. The socket is an insensate block of plastic; the python is warming up its jaw to see if it’ll fit round the kid; and the weather is just air and water and thermodynamics.

(And nonhuman emotions are only legible on their own terms. Cheerful? Cheerful is human.)

“Not yet,” Anna says. “Soon. Maybe.”

There is only one of Anna; there are many places she can help. Or, more truthfully, there are many places that the org can help, and Anna is photogenic. A brand ambassador.

She holds the sheet of plastic wrap up to the window, and revs the spot-studder: basically a cordless drill with a continuous-feedstock thermoplastic bit. Spin it fast against a flat surface, and the bit melts; no sparks, no fuss, just a circular spot of cooling plastic stuck to the wall. Do it on top of the plastic sheet, and it melts through and into that, too, and then you’ve tacked a corner up.

Someone comes along, when they’ve tacked sheeting up over all the windows, with a big industrial heat gun that shrink-bonds the plastic to the glass. And then, safely laminated, the third crew hook crowbars through it, the plastic holding it all together so not a shard falls; and drag it all indoors, where perished frames can’t drop it onto the street.

Simple. Low-tech. Cheap. Hard fucking work; life-saving.

She remembers how to enthuse about the lives saved. She doesn’t quite remember how to feel it; doesn’t quite remember when she last felt anything. And maybe that’s what she’s doing up here with the short, skinny Charlies and their shaven heads (…do their heads even grow more hair than that fuzz?) day after day, tacking up plastic until her hands are numb from the studder’s vibration and her shoulders scream with every movement. They can’t do human feelings except to fake them; and neither can she. But they can both do the fucking work.

“You should stay,” one of the Charlies says. Cheerfully.

She nearly lets it pass, but as she lifts the plastic sheet to tack the corner up to a fresh sheet of glass, she glimpses the room behind her in reflection. And every single one of them is looking at her.

She takes a breath. Lets her arm slowly down, and half turns to look back at them.

“That’s creepy,” she tells them, waving the studder in a casual arc, little more than a flip of the wrist. It doesn’t come out remotely concerned. It doesn’t come out much of anything.

Does she feel concerned? She’s not sure. It is creepy. They usually hide it better.

“Anna,” one of them says, and suddenly they arpeggiate, her name tinkling around the room from a couple dozen mouths: Anna, Anna, Anna — and yes; yes, this is concern, she remembers this.

“It’s what I do, folks,” she says. “I go. I show people how to use what they’ve got. And I go again.” She pointedly raises the corner of the plastic sheet, turns back to the work.

(The work. Just do the work, Anna. Nobody else is coming to do the work.)

“When’s the last time you felt anything, Anna?” says one quiet voice behind her, which could be any of the indistinguishable bastards.

“I think I’m feeling a little pissed off, right now.” Which might even be true. Whiz of the studder; tack up the sheet. She lifts the tip of the bit out of the molten pool of the brand-new stud before it cools and sticks; there’s a practised wrist-flick to break the stretching plastic thread weeping between them. Taps the bit down at the next place, slightly harder than necessary.

“You’re way off the charts for human normative,” a Charlie agrees. “We’ve been checking for weeks.”

“Excuse me?”

The stud’s not ready; as she jerks her arm back, it simply smears down the plastic. She didn’t mean to drop the sheet; its weight falls on the lone properly-set stud, yanks it straight off the glass. She slams the studder into the cheap tool holster at her hip, feeling suddenly like she’s on a sheet of thin ice, and glimpsing something under it she doesn’t like.

She doesn’t know what it is. But she doesn’t like it.

She turns.

“Humans react poorly to many of our behaviours,” one of them says. “The degree to which you’re oblivious to us makes us concerned for your mental health—”

“Excuse me?”

She sounds, to her own ears, irate. Under her feet, the ice creaks.

“Humans abandon things,” the same Charlie says, looking her dead in the eye. They don’t usually do that; and she can see why, there’s something very obviously not-human in the structure, even if she can’t immediately name it; big, glittering, not-right eyes. “This.” They (he she…it?) tilt their own studder to take in the building. “Us.” An economical tilt the other way, encompassing them all. “And if nobody is taking care of what’s wrong with you—”

“I don’t need anyone,” she snarls.

They part gracefully in front of her. She doesn’t even know where she’s stalking off to, pulls up short at the trestle table with the studder refill bits and the first aid kit and things, snatches up bottled water just to have a reason to be there.

There is something terribly terribly wrong with the ways her hands and her eyes are relating to each other, and she’s suddenly spitting curses under her breath as she fails to wrestle the fucking CAP off a BOTTLE, and then she jerks like she’s been electrocuted when a hand gently pats her elbow.

“Don’t you fucking TOUCH—” and she’d have sworn up and down in front of a jury, if necessary, that the Charlies weren’t even capable of refusing an order, but what feels like a hundred hands pluck gently at her, and the room tilts; she howls.

And they pass her, hand to hand to hand, gentle and easy as anything, all across the room, scrabbling feet barely brushing the floor. It might feel like flying, if it felt less like she’s fallen out a window, plummeting, about to die.

They settle her against the wall, cushioned, cradled, tiptoes straining for the floor, gentle as a wafted bedsheet settling. And it almost, almost feels like a reprieve, until—

—like a child with a crayon and a sheet of paper and a gleefully planted hand, they outline her in heat-bonded plastic dots, melted through her clothes, tacking to the wall. A crazed splinter of her attention tries to interpret it as a prank, a practical joke, even though she’d still swear they can’t do that—

“No,” she says, and it catches in her throat like jagged glass. She’s splayed on the wall, cold where the gentle grips have softly melted away. She’s not going to, she can’t, she—

She sobs.

“When humans abandon things,” a Charlie says softly behind her elbow, as she weeps, face to the wall, “what we can do is pick up the things around us, and use them to patch up the cracks. Together. Because this is the work.”

And the thing—

The thing about misreading nonhumans as if their unspoken vocabulary is synonymous with peoples’—

—is that maybe sometimes they read back—

—and work together maybe doesn’t read the same when the audience is a literal fucking FLOCK—

—and maybe she’d have spotted this looming if she wasn’t so very, very broken....

“Shhhhh, we know, we know,” they say soothingly, as nimble fingers reach up between her legs and painstakingly unpop the studs of the protective worksuit’s unisex crotch.

And they ignore her sobbing, “No, you don’t; no, you don’t,” as safety cutters for sheet plastic conscientiously peel her without loosing her from the wall.

“Humans abandon things; but we can adopt them. Fix them. This is a new idea, but we like it, we take it seriously.” While stroking her cunt.

“I’m not an abandoned thing,” Anna weeps, eyes screwed shut, forehead pressed against magnolia office wall paint. And her foot goes through the metaphorical but very literally horrible ice. It’s a lie. It’s a lie. She is a photogenic brand ambassador, and she is locked in a maze of Good Works and Let’s Prevent This Avoidable Tragedy From Slicing Another Toddler Apart and The Work, The Work, The Work, and she is dying in here, maybe already dead, all except for the breathing.

A careful, careful finger inside her.

“No,” she says again, a defeated gurgle, then a noise of startled protest as, too quickly for their apparent care, it’s two; three.

Oh; not human; and maybe (why would they) they have no idea what the comparative anatomy is like—

And the terrible, polite, cheerful, dreadful hand shifts itself; and Anna realises that, knowledge of her body or no, protesting or no, pain or screaming or terror, whatever, or no: she is about. To take. The whole. Fucking. Thing.

Her screaming and thrashing threaten to pop the melted plastic studs off the wall midway through; the slim, delicate, burning wrecking ball of a clenched Charlie fist punched into her past the wrist. The many polite and gentle hands come back and make sure she doesn’t fall, hold her up while she screams and screams and the horrifying, deliberate, clinically accurate fingertip touching her clit makes her clench agonisingly around it again and again and again.

They stop and let her rest around the point that she starts to think she’s going to black out and die.

“You raped me,” she sobs eventually, when she feels like she can make words happen.

“Oh, Anna.” The Charlie is still cupping her bruised and leaking cunt, feather-light. “When we work together and make this building our work, when we fix it, that makes it ours. It doesn’t make it us.”

It takes a second; and she goes cold. She’s walked around for weeks thinking of them as nothing more than the mass of Charlies; well, they think of her as no more than — not even part of the mass of humans. Something they discarded. Something thrown away. A thing.

Trash.

Trash they can reclaim, but trash.

“I’m—” another sob slowly shudders its way out. “I’m yours now? The Charlies’?”

“Oh, Anna.” This time it’s unmistakably chiding. “We’re not a hive mind, you know, don’t be silly. Of course you don’t belong to the Charlies.”

Just enough of a pause for Anna to feel a whole complicated sting of fear and shame and racist guilt, even through everything else.

“No, that just means you belong to me.” A gentle pat on the back of her thigh, from a hand sticky with her own juice. “But Anna…I think everyone else will have to have you on the table.”