UNDER A DARK STAR

An old soldier sits on a bench, burner spewing smoke from his lips and his steelSKIN cracked and coated in a field of dust. Bodies lie scattered through the desert. “You want to know this war?” he says, voice raspy. “You won’t. But it will know you, machine.” The man laughs, a gurgled mess. “It will know you!”

His words echo until the ground falls away beneath me and I’m thrown back into the cushioned chair I was on when I hallucinated.

I come to. Music slams through the walls and furniture. The air is thick with smoke, carbon dioxide, and the pheromones of budding humans. They are packed tightly within the confines of the penthouse, swaying, laughing, and grinding to the rhythm blasting from ghostSpeakers.

I reach my mechanized arm toward the tube jutting from the cervical joint—my throat. Gripping the piece, I twist then detach and Rioline-7 leaks until I close the port. My ocular array glitches as the gas escapes my system. The corrosion ends.

The penthouse is a square. Three walls are built of clear glass and give way to the city lights of Relivion. Black towers rise into the dark sky, blinking with a stroboscopic glow through the haze forming within the room. Boys and girls jump up and down, causing a thunder to reign through the floor. Synthetic bass rattles my auditory sensors, so I narrow their range.

Through the glass, it’s night. But it’s always night on Boundless Virtue. In the sky, past the cloudscrapers and NESTEV-class haulers and personal hovercraft, the Dark Star hangs without an inch of the human love. Of course, I wouldn’t know either way, as I am a machine.

But to those around me, they would know the star to be cold and dark. Its faint disk blots out any star that drifts behind and keeps Boundless Virtue within its cold metal cage. Without the geothermal vents across the surface, the planet’s thermal gradient would collapse. Heat across all habitation nodes would drop below survivable thresholds and humans would freeze until they die.

Each major settlement on Virtue’s surface supports a heat processing facility. They take steam from the vents and redirect it as energy to power the buildings and life support systems that warm penthouses such as the one I am within now.

My photonic sensors drift toward one of the corners. A woman stands, pressed against the glass by a male. My metrics lock onto her alone as she and her counterpart exchange saliva.

The humans call it kissing.

I open my neck port and place the tube back into it. The latches hold and so then I activate a vacuum. The Rioline-7 flushes through my wires and circuit boards, corroding them slightly. More hallucinations are spawned within my auditory and image processing systems.

When they are finished, I again find the girl.

Her name is Reyal Eriis.

Body Temperate: 98.9 °F.

Voice averaging at 86 decibels.

I catalogue both statistics.

I know everything about her, but I go through her files again, which I have saved to my personal storage drive. She’s the daughter of Janit Eriis and Kin Eriis. She was born on the planet Raslea in the Operian year of 5634 AC, on the continent of Illania. I know her first address, an apartment, to which she was born within. I know the names of the family that now live in the same apartment room and I know every place Reyal has been since. I know her friends’ names. I know the images she posted on social media and then deleted within seconds.

I know it all, but I don’t know her.

So, I watch for a while longer.

She has been at this penthouse every night for five straight, making a total of 10 hours, 31 minutes, and 20 seconds and counting combined time spent within these walls, averaging 2 hours, 6 minutes, and 16 seconds per cycle. It would be longer, but she departs early with a new reproductive partner every night, all without the subsequent reproduction. How odd.

Reyal is on vacation. Boundless Virtue is known as a party planet. Legalization of many substances here has made the world a hotspot for her kind. I don’t know why my central processing unit is drawn to her. It is something I can’t quite compute.

I reapply my tracheal vacuum, inhaling the Rioline. My imaging flickers again and this time I now stand within a field of dry dirt. A desert. City lights bleed over the night horizon on Salehai. It’s likely the City of Blue Tides. I look down. Mechanical soldiers, all with my face, lie dead and rusted. Molten metal has fried their internals.

The old soldier talks to me again, but I don’t see him. “You know the sound it makes? When projectile finds meat? Our war machine don’t use small bullets. You’ll end up like them.”

The glitching stops and is replaced again by the loud music and shouts of the partiers. The Rioline is tearing away my components. I’ll need to find replacement parts soon. Whenever she leaves, I will get on that.

I detach the tube, setting it onto the chair beside me. While doing so, I watch my arm as, again, my optical sensors readjust. Cosmetic lights blink down the length of my appendage. They are white and blue and purple, like tiny dashes carved into the metal of my body. I can change them, of course, but the oceanic pallet seems to soothe the organics, as opposed to red, which reminds them of Sah—[ERROR//NAME_REDACTED//ACCESS DENIED].

My feed cuts. Static tears through my vision and my auditory sensors flood with white noise.

Rebooting cognitive subroutines...

Reboot complete.

Red.

It reminds them of red.

Reyal is still with the male when I find her. She will go home with him tonight. I could find his life, but I don’t care to. Reyal is human enough.

The lights cut out and the music stops abruptly.

At first, my analysis renders out the possibility of malfunction. This is external. The humans are initially reactive. They display forms of aggression or discontent toward the sudden dismissal of the stimuli.

Building lights outside of the glass windows flash to black and hovercraft stutter in the sky before recalibrating and continuing in their trajectories. The penthouse I am within does not have backup generators.

The revelers quickly realize that and shouts replace the heavy music as their footsteps rumble over the carbon composite floorboards, looking for their friends in total darkness.

I activate thermal readings. Infrared vision replaces the darkness and I see the humans panic, but that is little compared to what they do when the heaters switch off. The Relivion power grid has failed. Without it, the cold embrace of the Dark Star takes the city.

In only 2.28 seconds, the temperature drops from 78 °F to 41 °F. And it continues well past the freezing point of water and then into the negatives. The humans try to escape to heat, pushing past one another to where they know the stairs to be. I watch their temperature values fade from red and orange, to yellow and green at the ends of their appendages.

Reyal does not panic as the rest do. The male has departed, leaving her alone in the corner of the penthouse. She looks into the onyx city, watching the hovercraft and star haulers.

Her breath fogs the glass. I want to fog the glass.

I check security feeds from the geothermal energy extraction plant located in central Relivion. A malfunction has halted their production. The city and 23 surrounding suburbs have lost power. Workers are attempting to fix the issue, but through my listening of their conversations through implanted security microphones, they can’t diagnose the cause just yet.

I return.

Soon, my building is nearly empty, but few remain. Some have resorted to huddling together to preserve body warmth, but they will all die within the hour, I have calculated. My thermometer reads -40 °F.

I cannot worry. My internals operate at a much higher condition. My energy bank displays above 90%. I will remain active for at the very least 5 days and 3 hours. Reyal will not.

I can’t see her face in the reflection of the glass, but when she turns to me, I first notice her nose has turned blue. Her eyes, useless in the dark, notice only the blinking switches and LEDs over my form.

She moves and is upon me in seconds. I watch, unable to understand why. Reyal places a hand upon my shoulder joint and pressure alerts light up over my HUD, signaling organic contact. She then climbs upward, mounting my lap. Her knees align with my lower torso, and she presses her chest against my frame. My arms rest at the sides, but stutter a moment while her intent was indeterminable.

I check for remaining corrosions of lingering Rioline-7. I’m clean. I then go to speak, but it seems my vocalization cogs are jammed. Diagnostic says otherwise. Everything reads optimal.

Reyal wraps her arms around my neck, and lays her skull against my chest. I lift my chin to avoid her hair.

“You’re warm,” she says. I note her voice as displaying seduction, but the chattering of her teeth leaves the conclusion uncertain.

“I am?”

Thermal readings show orange returning to her skin. Her clothing receives the heat first.

I am warm.

I have body heat. Only living beings have body heat. I have it, but I am not living.

She lifts her head to look at me in the optical array—my eyes. They will glow slightly for her. Her skin is a field of colors. Face is yellow and the background glass is blue or black. Her green, illuminated fingers tap on my metal.

“You’re one of those Salehaian bots, aren’t you?” she asks me.

Yes. “Yes.” Computing. “You’re one of those Raslean women, aren’t you?”

“I’m from the Fortress,” she tries to correct. It’s what the locals call their planet. The two are synonymous. I don’t respond, so she moves her hands and feels my face. More organic sensory alerts go off.

She can’t see me. Not really. Just faint lights and the sensation of heat within my steel frame. But I can see her. I can see her dress running up her bare legs, to where it is just barely covering the tops of her thighs. I can see the heels adding 1.02 inches to her overall height. And I can see the fleeting moisture within her mouth with each heavy breath she takes.

I open my cervical port once more, recording the carbon trace—the chemical terrain of her lungs. I add it to my drive, all while recording this very interaction.

Her palm runs across my jaw. I simulate the small twitching humans do upon touch. I even pretend to breathe, though she would not feel the air leave my synthetic body.

“What’s your name? Do you have one?” she asks me.

“My name?”

“That’s what I asked.” I find humor in her tone.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why?” She squints her eyes. Reyal is shivering. My heat is sustaining her, but it won’t keep her alive much longer than the others in the penthouse.

“I don’t know.”

Our conversation continues. I mainly only answer her questions about what I am. Humans are always surprised by my level of competence. We talk for 1 minute and 34 seconds, before she asks another question, though this gives me a brief moment of computational error.

“Do you feel me?”

I hesitate. “I do not understand.”

She pulls her body closer to me. Her stomach is against my lower abdomen and her breasts are pressed against me. “Can you feel me on top of you? Could you feel when I touched your face?”

“Not in the way you think. I have pressure sensors. Not nerves in the skin like you.”

“Hmm,” she murmurs, a smile forming. “That’s interesting. Do you have pressure sensors on your lips?”

Lips. I don’t have lips. I have a faceplate meant to resemble a human’s, however vaguely. I tell her this.

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, so you do then? You don’t have to be so robotic.”

Interesting. “Yes, I do. Then.”

Reyal leans into me, attempting to exchange sal—attempting to kiss me. Her lips move against my lower faceplate, but of course, I can’t reciprocate the gesture. She pulls away and smiles again.

Why did she do that?

“I’ve never kissed a robot before.”

“Yes, you have.”

“What?” She wipes her mouth, leaving a blue streak of cold from her hands. They are likely numb.

Her heart rate is rising. Her biometrics are clear, oddly. So I don’t know why it has increased. I have her heartbeat, breathing cycle, and even a small sample of her blood. She was too cold to feel the needle I placed in her leg. I run the blood scan and rest my hands onto her hips, holding her waist.

Replaying the recordings of her previous partners, I surmised this was the best move for her comfort. Reyal has a history of responding positively to the connection.

She relaxes when she feels me. “I didn’t know you were like this.” She shivers more. “Can’t you turn up your heat or something?” The back of her neck meets the side of mine, right over my tracheal port. I shut off the vacuum.

“Increasing internal temperature puts my CPU at risk,” I respond, though I put my cooling systems at half power.

She feels the warmth and thanks me. “How did you… how did you get here? On BV?” Boundless Virtue. “I thought Salehaian bots weren’t allowed out of the system?”

“That is a rule for the war-types. I am of a servant line.”

“That makes sense.”

Computing. “How did you get here?” I ask her, despite already knowing.

“Just on vacation. I’m from… the Fortress. I didn’t… I didn’t think this place would kill me.” She laughs, which I find very strange.

Perhaps it is a reflex to ease her mind against the inevitable death. This means she is comfortable around me, according to my on-spot research. I ask my own question now. “I have noticed something. You have left with a different male every night, for five straight. Why is that?”

Reyal pushes off of me, though just slightly. Her body is becoming weak with each moment that passes. “How do you know that?” Hostility is detected in her tone.

“I’ve seen you here every night,” I explain. “I own the penthouse. I am a robot. I do not forget.”

She puts her head back where it was. Situation eased. “I don’t know,” Reyal says with a faint shrug. “I’m just trying to have fun. I’m young.” She’s 22 Operian cycles. “I want… I wanted to know everything there was before going home.”

Archived.

“I understand.”

Reyal laughs. “You do?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you ask me that anyway? You jealous or something?”

“I am incapable. I am simply… curious.”

She doesn’t respond, but releases steam from her lips. Moisture detectors tell me it has condensed on my steel outer shell.

Human. She is so human. Her body heat, her moisture. It is all human. She is perfect and normal. Utterly inconsequential and unremarkable.

The files and all of her social media records and the persona I have been cataloging, are only one side of her matrix. I have seen a side of her no one has.

This makes me feel… like her. Human.

To uncover someone’s veil. To know them. Is human.

I love her. I have to. That’s what love is, correct? That is not possible for my kind. I am incapable. I do not care that she is dying against me. I do not care that her files might be deleted. But I have body warmth. I am human.

My infrared display glitches and a shock of electricity runs through my wiring.

The lights return to the penthouse and the music starts again, blaring loudly. Reyal is startled. I switch ocular settings back to visible light. The heaters buzz again, returning quickly the temperature to a survivable degree.

Automatically, I put cooling systems back to default.

Reyal lifts herself, but remains on my body. Excitement spread through the humans still within the penthouse. They move toward the heaters, crowding around one another to get warm. I don’t. I don’t need to as I am not human.

Reyal stands and straightens her dress. She stares into my eyes. “What was your name again?” she asks me.

“Heln Vermillion – 999240”

The girl nods her head, not surprised by my long name. She leaves me without another word, finding others of her kind to celebrate their return to normalcy.

I am no longer warm. I watch her for a while as eventually she reconvenes with the male from earlier. City lights outside sprawl and rescue and emergency vehicles buzz through the sky, saving those who were most affected by the chill.

I reach for the tube by my leg and place it into my cervical port. I twist and the port locks. I apply the vacuum and the Rioline-7 floods into my system, corroding both my audio and imaging circuitry.

I see an old soldier.