Then, when she crossed the frame, sitting there was the head, settled on the kitchen table. The kitchen table, of all places; the place where they sat down and ate.
It wasn’t like it was dirty exactly, composed mostly of metal, hard plastic, polymers akin to rubber. But the sight of it—the sight of herself beheaded—gave Triss a shock of a start.
If anything, she was more concerned with the potential for synthblood leakage, but Athena always assured her that her nano-blade severed with gruesome violent finality, cauterizing flesh and electronics alike.
Athena smiled when she saw Triss enter the room. She had picked up a dozen roses in a sparkling array of purples, the petals a gleaming, impossible violet—the microscopic paper forgery of them nearly indistinguishable from real roses, though Triss knew they were fake—and she was arranging them in a small vase by the boarded up windows for Triss to enjoy. Pride beamed in her grin for her latest catch, her wavy black hair always escaping her braids in wisps around her face, her trophy sitting triumphantly lifeless before Triss.
It was a celebration.
Or to Athena it was.
“I got it. Finally,” she said, grin touching every part of her expression, her eyes a burning, wild flicker of fire. Triss looked down to the semblance of herself, a severed part. The plastikin—digitized versions of themselves—always looked so much less animated when they were in pieces like that, when it was easy to see them for exactly what they were inside. It was hard to think, staring at the parts, that they were indistinguishable from any actual human, that the skin had the luminosity of a living being, that the pale dead blonde hair was anything other than tiny nanotubes. It was life that made them real, and Triss supposed that in the absence of a soul their untidy, branching algorithms approximated something close to one, and that was what had made them feel so real.
Or at least that was what Athena said. As real, organic humans began to vanish—and gladly so, at their own discretion—under the guise of soul digitization, supposedly passing into their plastikin models, Athena and Triss had found themselves on the side of organicism. A digitization was not real, not truly them, not real people, Athena said. Real people had souls; even traditional artificial intelligences had their own kind of souls. But plastikin were hollow frames of what a real person was meant to be, stuffed full with nuclear batteries and polymers that were promised to never break down, not even when exposed to the most hazardous conditions on Earth. They were the promised people to replace humankind, they were supposed to be the next step, but they were just soft whirring and clicking echoes, like shadows etched into bleached stone after an atomic blast. Permanence for the sake of nothing, they would wander forever.
Everyone got one, they said. It was a choice, they said.
And people did it in droves because they wanted to live beyond time, easily disposing of their organic bodies when the process was complete, sold on the premise that they would wake up anew. A fresh body for the deserving soul, they said.
The thing that was supposed to outlive her but was not quite her, sat before her on her kitchen table, green eyes a dull, lifeless plastic, gazing into nothing somewhere off into their humble, well-loved kitchen.
Plastikin Triss. There would be no violet roses for her.
“Now,” Athena said, her grin somehow broadening as she approached. She put her worn hands out to Triss, fingernail beds stained with oily synthblood, and Triss took them into her own. “No one can replace us.”
The sentiment wasn’t as comforting as Triss would have once thought.
As a long time sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fan, Aimee has spent many years illustrating and writing her own stories, but has never before shared any of her writing with the world. She is a freelance illustrator who focuses on dark-beautiful sci-fi and fantasy illustration, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in illustration from the now-defunct New Hampshire Institute of Art. Check out the beauty she creates at: Aimee Cozza Illustration.
Published 10/31/24