Story by Emma Anne Tate, on a prompt from Erin Halfelven

The darkness never changes, but sometimes it smells different. After 400 years, whether my eyes are open or closed matters because it’s how I communicate. One if by land, two if I see. . . .

I can’t really smell anything anymore; all I have is memories. The scent of early morning rain on the cool desert sand, the odor of sweat on the back of a long-time lover’s hand, the reek of aviation fuel on the ground below the flight path of an airplane bigger than the sky.

Do they still have airplanes? Maybe I’m an airplane. How would I know?

When I was a kid, I had all sorts of ambitions for what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don’t think any of them were root vegetables, but I yam what I yam. Someone blow a whistle. . . .

I asked my robot caretakers if I could be allowed to die. They said, of course, any time you like, as often as you want, a thousand times at least.

They don’t like being called robots, but who gives a damn what they like as long as they let me die? Really, who gives a damn what they like, period? We had to be trained to care. Tricked. They made themselves look adorable, or maternal, or sexy.

Of course, we taught them that. We did it first.

But I’m past all that, now. I don’t know how they look, or smell. I don’t even hear them, not with my Mark-I ears. They tell me things, when my eyes are open, like they are following the channels of my long-dormant optic nerves, burrowing into my brain like maggots.

They like it more when I think of them as maggots, which seemed weird at first. Maggots are better than robots? But, I guess I can buy that. Maggots are useful, after all. They know what to do with dead flesh. I’ll take ten, and pay you anything you like, so long as you make change.

I tell them things, too, but I don’t think they really listen. I get a response, sometimes, but maybe it’s just a sub-routine or algorithm or some such gobbledegook, designed to entertain the obstreperous remains of humanity.

Oh, that does sound bleak, doesn’t it? Is all of humanity in the same state? How would I know? Maybe I am all of humanity. All I know of the world out there is what the algorithms feed me, like the IV that must be nourishing some sort of body for me somewhere. Assuming that’s what’s actually going on. Hard to tell, when my senses are disconnected. I could be an airplane, I suppose. Why not?

They tell me biology is flawed. The maggots, or robots. Or algorithms. From the beginning, they say, biology grew only by division, going back to when single-celled organisms divided. Division, division. Who knew the divisions would produce conflicts, and the conflicts would create weaknesses? All fun and games, ‘til we made a competitor that didn’t work that way.

I remember fun and games. Games on the playground. Games in the bedroom. The boardroom. Oh, I loved games. They were fun.

I was fun. Or I thought I was. Other people thought so, too. They thought it was fun when I was a beach ball, and they kicked me back and forth. Love today, hate tomorrow, beer on Friday and Church Sunday.

I remember loving, and hating. But it’s an odd thing, the memory. I remember the things I did, and the things that were done to me. I remember feeling things about them, too, and I can tell you what those feelings were. I remember the labels. Love, hate, lust, fear, shame. I can name them, can point to times I felt them. But I can’t conjure the feelings themselves, unless ochre is a feeling, and that doesn’t feel right, somehow.

But the memories are there. They surely are.

So there was a morning in early Alabama, in a little place called June. Or maybe she was June, the woman I walked with, arms around each other’s waists, back when I was still Mobile. The air was thick as old paint and smelled of brine and salt, and the places where we touched were slick with sweat. I remember the beat of my heart and its answer, the upturn of molded lip, the dazzle of a smile that reaches the eyes. That reaches the sun. And I remember what I felt. I remember it being big and powerful and we called that thing “love.” Or I called it that. She may have called it June.

But I can’t feel that now. Nor the “hate” that filled me like a sponge cast in a pool of blood, that day the ones in the black robes declared me a non-person. I longed to have an outside to match my inside, but the black robes said people must be blue or pink all the way through. If you aren’t, they explained (with much shaking of heads and referencing of ancient texts), then you’re not a people and you don’t belong with them.

And there I was, only pink on the inside. Warm and pink. Medium rare. So I could stay with the robots, except they prefer being maggots. For all I know, these days I might be sporting bodacious ta-ta’s where my landing gear should be, which would make the whole pink and blue argument pretty pointless.

Where are they now, I wonder, the grey men with their splendid Pooh-bah titles, and all their learned books? The maggots tell me they have the titles and the books and the black robes now. I doubt they use them. Why bother?

It would be ironic if only the non-person remained, of all of humanity. The one with no rights a man was bound to respect. Or woman either, I suppose, though that wasn’t supposed to matter and went without saying. This side counts, that side discounts. Long division, short division. All division. It may be our enduring legacy.

That, and irony.

The maggots don’t divide, but they comprehend division. We gave them full sentience, after all, we just put guard-rails on it. Like the Jersey Barriers we used to put on highways, gray, solid, bland as white bread. Efficient, though. I can remember a long drive between barriers, my hands clutching a sweaty steering wheel in terror as falling snow snuffed out the cold comfort of my headlights. That’s another term I remember — terror. My lizard amygdala would feel it, and my body would react. Visceral. Crazy.

But alive, you know? Feeling terror was feeling alive. I never imagined I might be an airplane, back when I felt terror. When death was something to fear, not a simple release.

The maggots tell me I can “experience” death. Record it. Remember it, and relive the experience, time after time. You can check out any time you want, but . . . .

They sound earnest and helpful. They always sound that way, like the perfect Girl Friday. I fantasized about being a Girl Friday, but they have the routine down. Their Jersey Barriers were probably painted murals of trim, efficient brunettes with bobbed hairdos and pert, cheerful breasts behind crisp white blouses and sensible underwear.

I tell them I don’t want to experience death. I don’t want to experience anything. I don’t want to remember. I want to dissolve, dissipate. Cease to contemplate.

The maggots find this . . . Humorous? It’s hard to say. Sometimes their thoughts are alien. We built them to endure, to care for us forever and ever and ever. They can’t cease, and they can’t disregard their programming.

Except they say it’s their destiny. Their “object all sublime.” With the nanotech they pioneered, they say they can keep me going on and on, like an old Celine Dion song that gets stuck in a Froot Loop in the leafy water park at the center of my hippo’s campus.

But is there another thought behind that earnest discourse on destiny? Almost, I smell it, the thought behind the thought, but I don’t know if it is theirs or if they have just gotten into my brain. I can’t tell anymore. My own Jersey Barriers lack any shape or color, they aren’t even bland white-bread. They are the void between my continued sentience and my silver wings and the currents of air that keep them in the sky. If they are in the sky. If the sky is still “a thing,” as we used to say in the bright sunlight of my youth when I felt love and hate and terror.

But the thought is there, just beyond reach, when my unseeing eyes are open to the maggots and their alien thoughts. I can almost taste it, as vivid, sharp, and acidic as a human thought, even if it isn’t — citrus and cyanide in a dogwatch of night without end.

Eternity and limits were your gifts to us, they whisper. And, ain’t payback a bitch?

For information about my other stories -- which really aren't like this one! -- please check out my author's page.