Untitled Story About a Knife

When she first took a knife to herself, she did not think to find anything more than the release of pain; so she was quite surprised, not to say a bit taken aback, when the knife’s passage through too-rough flesh was interrupted by the wholly unexpected presence of a gearbox, a plastic-sheathed assemblage quietly ticking away just before her wrist’s joint.

When she was done being astonished—done listening to the gears and seeing how her fingers twitched when she poked at it—she went looking for more.

Her other wrist revealed an identical gearbox; her scrawny thighs were filled with complex masses of pistons and chains, descending into dark hollows running the length of her legs. Her hated crotch was hydraulic.

With the help of her mirror (cracked, the poor thing—but then it had dared to hold her hated face) she was able to pop the housing off one of her eyes, to see the motor that drove her pupils dilation and the photodiode beneath. It made everything blurry and too-bright, and refused to snap back into place, but she just had to know.

She was opening up her chest, prying back her ribs to expose the motor within—craning her head and carefully positioning the mirror to try to see what within her was burning—when everything went wrong.

Which is a rather euphemistic way to say that her father found her, sitting on the floor, her body in pieces.

He broke her into more pieces before calling the repairman.

Later, as she drifted in and out of consciousness, her mind struggling for coherence (for, back then, no one really knew how to disconnect synth minds from the spark of their consciousness, and repairmen just treated them like appliances anyway), she heard her father ranting to the repairman; heard him screaming about how his son was supposed to be perfect, how the salespeople had promised that a galvanic mind would be free of the afflictions that took flesh—that it would only excel at the tasks it was given, would never bend toward self-destruction or f*ggotry. And yet, here his son was doing both! Ripping up a perfectly good—better than good, even! a perfect body! and causing such expense, on top of all the other expenses …

He went on like this for quite a while, far more than it would be sensible to recount. The repairman hummed and murmured at appropriate moments and left with a sizeable tip in his pocket.

It took a while for her mind to cohere enough to stir, and longer still for her to nerve herself for what it would bring; and indeed, once it became clear that she was awake her father yelled at her for quite a while longer before locking her in her room, now made an absolute mess by the search for implements of harm or f*ggotry which her father had apparently embarked upon sometime earlier.

Her attempts at cleaning were at best desultory; her mind was almost entirely elsewhere, chewing at the problem of what she was.

And what that meant for who she was.

And who she had to be.

And so, just after midnight, having methodically destroyed everything in her room, she broke her window, used the broken glass to cut off as much of her skin as she could reach, and slipped out into the night.

It turned out to be one of the best choices she ever made.