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Fu
It never happened. The world’s prejudices were too deeply ingrained.
“All right. Everything’s set up.” Araceli breezed back into the workshop, the sleeves of her white coat pushed up around her elbows. She’d been deep in the bowels of the repair box, programming it to Luciano’s specifications.
“Is there enough material?” Luciano asked. His hand went to his metal skull, fingers hovering but not touching. He dropped his hand back into his lap.
“Sure, there’s enough.” Araceli looked tired. She pushed her hair away from her face. Over in the corner, Sofia frowned.
“Will it match?” Luciano asked.
Araceli sighed. “I tried my best, Luciano. Scraped the bottom of the barrels. So to speak.”
Luciano nodded.
“We need to get this started,” Araceli said. “The ink’ll have to do, because these repairs are going to take all afternoon.”
“Of course.” Luciano didn’t move.
“Lie down, then,” Araceli said. Luciano did as she asked. “Set your hands along your sides there, like that—good. You need to keep everything clear of your face.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll be monitoring your progress out here, but your system is programmed to recognize any errors on the repair box’s part, so if you get that ping telling you something’s wrong, you need to say ‘Stop the repair box’ very loudly and clearly. Say it for me.”
“Stop the repair box.”
“Good. That’s perfect.”
Something about this exchange left Marianella unsettled. Her repairs, when she had them, were more like human surgery, because her machine parts had been so deeply embedded into her muscle tissue. This process was alien, too dangerous for her human side.
Sofia drifted away from the wall and joined Marianella underneath the dimming lights of the workshop. She stood close enough that the hairs on Marianella’s arm stood on end.
“That’s the same speech the park engineers would give,” she said in a low voice. Marianella looked at her; Sofia looked at Luciano. “Araceli told me it was a script they had to memorize.”
“And she still gives it?”
“It has all the necessary information.”
Marianella didn’t answer. Sofia was still staring at the repair box, her face blank.
“If I have to stop the machine, don’t move,” Araceli went on. “Lie perfectly still and wait for the conveyor belt to carry you out.”
“All right.”
Araceli’s expression shifted then, and her face filled with a gentle, tired warmth. “I’ve done this plenty,” she said. “Not just from my old amusement park days, but with the culled robots who managed to escape. We’ve never had any problems.”
“I’m guessing that wasn’t part of the script,” Marianella said.
Sofia almost smiled. “Of course not.” Her voice was bitter. “Most of the engineers didn’t deem it necessary to console us.”
Marianella almost took her by the hand, as if to console Sofia forty years after the fact. Sofia had told Marianella enough about her work in the park for Marianella to know that Sofia would have gone through these repairs multiple times, whereas someone like Luciano might not have gone through them at all. It was the patrons, Sofia had told her. Sometimes they would get—overenthusiastic.
“Ready?” Araceli asked.
“Yes, I’m ready.”
Araceli pressed the activation button. The conveyor belt rumbled to life, and Luciano slid into the repair box, disappearing behind strips of faded red cloth. Araceli perched on the edge of a chair next to the ticker-tape machine, code tapping out in fits and starts. All that information that made up Luciano.
“She’s much more watchful than the park engineers were,” Sofia said to Marianella. “I would have liked to have her repair me, back then.” She no longer sounded so bitter. Marianella smiled at her, and Sofia caught her gaze, and that was the closest they came to touching.
Araceli leaned back in her chair, still watching the ticker tape. It was the old-fashioned way of doing things, Marianella knew, but the repair box was too cumbersome to be hooked into even a rotary display.
“Did we really have enough materials?” Sofia asked.
“I wouldn’t lie to him.” Araceli glanced up at Marianella and Sofia, the overhead lights turning her skin sickly-looking. “But I was never good working with the inks. Hopefully the machine gets the right tone.”
“I’m sure it’ll be wonderful,” Marianella said.
“Even if it’s not,” Sofia said, “he’ll survive. It’s not like how it was, when some superficial imperfection would get him sent to the scrap heap.”
“The skin’s the important part anyway,” Araceli said. “And we had plenty for him.”
The three of them fell into silence. After a moment’s pause, Sofia dragged two chairs over to beside Araceli and offered one to Marianella, who sat down, tucking her hands into her lap. No one spoke; they only watched the ticker tape run across the table. Marianella watched the code and thought about what her father had done to her, turning her from an i
Abomination. She shouldn’t think of herself that way. Sofia had told her that, all those years ago when they would lie side by side in a hotel bed. “You’re not an abomination,” Sofia would whisper into the side of Marianella’s neck. “You’re beautiful.”
Being with Sofia in that way had been an abomination unto itself. A sin. And yet Marianella had seen the beauty of their relationship, eventually, even if it still left her shaky with guilt sometimes, in a way her tryst with Alejo Ortiz never had. But seeing that beauty in the abomination of herself, the abomination of her machine parts—
That was impossible.
“—really going to take all day?” Sofia was saying.
Marianella blinked out of her reverie. Araceli stretched out a piece of ticker tape, and she and Sofia hunched over it.
“I don’t remember it taking that long when I had it done,” Sofia said.
“Did you ever have to repair your face?”
“Well, no.”
“That’s why.” Araceli dropped the ticker tape back into the pile. “It’s not just a matter of stretching some false skin over the frame. The gunshot blasted away a lot of the muscle, too—I don’t want any paralysis when we’re done.”
Sofia nodded. She glanced over at Marianella. “You hear that? Your little friend almost caused Luciano’s face to become paralyzed.”
“She didn’t do it on purpose,” Marianella said. “She panicked.”
“Humans always cause destruction when they panic. I suppose it’s a good thing for your friend that Luciano’s not human. He just lost a few hours instead of his whole life.”
Marianella didn’t say anything. Eliana had apologized to Luciano when they’d walked her back to the train station, stuttering and looking at her feet. Luciano had told her he was fine and handed back her gun. And he’d meant it too. But Sofia was right; Eliana was lucky she hadn’t panicked and shot a human man.
They fell into silence after that. The repair box hummed and trembled, and Luciano’s code spilled out on strips of ticker tape. The three of them watched it pool onto the floor. As far as Marianella could tell, nothing was out of the ordinary with Luciano’s system. Nothing was going wrong.