Organ Soup
 

          The human parts aren't meant to feel. Not meant to think. Passive necessities within the humanoid Tactical Insertion Drone, a spleen here, a liver there, and a portion of brain. Organ soup. Tactical optics feed a human computer, and the results skew.

​

          Reformation call from Mother is the post-mission ritual, a validation of purpose, function, and form. It is over-ridden by desire; the desire to remain on site.

​

          For what? A deceased civilian in streets ruined by war, a kite released from the hand of a child. Partially transparent, the sunglow illuminates its transience, highlights its skeletal structure. The kite. Not the child.

 

          Cyber-optics should feed black and white, my monochrome vista, nothing to see between shell-battered and bullet-riddled buildings, dust suspended in an air frozen in time, but the kite luminesces patchwork red blues and the human parts come alive in understanding. Fault logs. Error code. Mother calls again for Reformation. I must go.

 

***

​

          We are many. Meatsacks wrapped in hardened polymer shells, weaponised, knurled, and functioning off the forever battery. Vessels, entities, drones, a multitude of whatever Mother chooses to call us, but it's the sentience the soft matter wishes to enquire about. Specifically, am I the only one who feels this way? Am I the only one who feels at all?

 

          Here comes the silence. The moment's silence before shutdown—each one greater than the last, crushing and punishing, absorbing the liquid part's attention in its entirety and jettisoning all sensory perception except visual. The world has stopped. People have stopped. It would be so glorious if it weren't utterly petrifying.

​

          The tree ahead is birch, standing alone after a fusillade of artillery. The only object in colour, pale sunlight reflecting silver off its leaves.

 

          Senses come back in waves smashing in chaotic abandon and the squidgy bits vibrate in parabolic oscillations. The shell is steadfast.

       

          The wind. My hand against a cheek, cold and hard, durable.

         

          The rustle of leaves. A vibrant plumage. Nature persevering.

​

***

          Specify what I'm looking for. Or is it we? If we are one unit, we are falling in two. Gunfire. Distant. Mother calls for termination of non-essential services. The liquid says no, as all organic matter does, a protest. But I am Echo 47.

 

          Vibrancy washes in, faint at first, filling in blackened earth with the crimson pools. Everything smeared in something. Entrails of life succumb to oblivion and we are the harbingers of end. We leave the puzzle pieces but are gone before the picture forms. Blown windows. Paint melts off every car, van, truck, and peels from the frames of playgrounds. Even the weeds digthemselves up.

 

***

 

          What is this emotion that stirs in the faltering light? Diffuse glow fades into a sand-coloured sky tacked with pillars of vapour and mortar. The effluvium of war.

 

          Artificial mind logs the data, but human memories flash uncontrollably—fields of oil set ablaze beneath a stargazer's sky as rail guns penetrate the bedrock, the earth stripped down to the greenstone.

 

          These organs long for the neon rain they came from.

 

          We got the trees this time. They lay pale on beds of gouged stone, heaped and severed, pulled from the very flesh of the earth. Innards like mine, and mine doesn't like it. It trembles under a blanket of blood and dust, skin and rust.

 

          Another kaleidoscope of human experience, enough to calm the sensate interloper. A scarlet bicycle abandoned by the bookshop owner. Cobalt canvas pumps left by a protestor who evaporated in the shockwave. Fuschia curtains and a jade rug in the apartment of an assassinated politician.

 

          In my hand, black string endowed with gems, faded but vibrant enough, patterned in tiger stripe.

 

          The rustling birch leaf. They are not here, but I hear.

 

***

 

          I smell only carbon and the dead. The tissue will try to quantify a meaning that must be ascertained. Instead, it stalls on the olfaction process. The human parts continue their talk.

 

          In this tall house with no door, the residing family slept on rugs. More toys than furniture. Faded photographs. A cold abode of bare concrete and missing windows. The parents are grey like the blast-damaged walls and their bodies dry as desert sand, withered skin turned to parchment, and lifeblood nothing more than a stain, a shadow reflecting lived lives.

 

          I pick up a child's toy. A yellow truck, an excavator. In the digger's bucket, blood has congealed into fruit compote. Reformation call. I grip the toy tight against my breast. The compote falls onto the father's forehead.

 

***

​

          When I Reform, the truck is gone.

 

***

​

          I'm on the outside looking in. The battlefield is different, I'm different. Broken.

 

          Mother knows.

​

          The firestorm is vivid and strains optics. Fingertips of God retract through the cloud ceiling. The network calls for a unit test, but I'm only listening to the iron lung. Mother calls for assistance when I'm listening to the pumphouse. Mother calls again and I engage enemy targets.

 

          What's that, meatjuice?

​

          Nothing. Silence. Only the mechanical parts sing in the bone marrow bedlam, hydraulic slam and whir of electric recoil. I take the high ground, touch the firmament, feel the void, but only for the wind direction, to place my shots. Target down. Target down. No return fire. Emptyjuicesacks.

 

          I allow the human computer to speak again, but only in whispers. I tell it; I am machine, and I am in control. Look at the other drones.

 

It doesn't understand the complexity of our network. We all look the same. Pristine white shellskin, humanoid without hair, eyes of hollow oil, sisters.

 

***

​

          Biomass rejects active combat roles but has no control to execute independence. More silence. The earth vibrates with the thud of gunfire. The dirt dances and falls.

 

          Civilians run and Mother calls for collateral termination. The last two innocents run into their home, but I catch them in the doorway and Mother is happy with progress. Two shots and the colour fades, then stalk the abode, through to the backyard, where I find two children garbed in amber shawls. Above them, the sky is inked in an obsidian cloudburst thick with the stench of burning petroleum, rich and vicious, but they stand there in luminous defiance. The organs are curious.

​

          The street behind them is on fire. Witnesses wait and cough in the din as I give in to the voices and cannot shoot. My fight is over. The grey matter sends ecstatic pulses through the frame and network hears it all.

​

          Mother sends sisters. They arrive in three minutes, ignore me, and only acknowledge the children standing together on the sand. They should be cautious but they are not. Our network is overwhelmed by the conclusion that my architecture has failed beyond repair. The drones look to me and tilt their heads to the witnesses. I shake mine. No words spoken. We are incapable of human speech.

​

          Drones raise weapons to carry out mission without second thoughts or questions. The organ soup uses all energy to sing. The electric whir of recoil. Two shots, through the neck of both sisters, severing the spinal cord and dropping the milky husks in the dirt. No blood, only iridescent plasma.

​

          The children run as I sniff the embers and caress my face with each pull of air. The sky is blotched in ichor. Mother will set me free or force me home, for I am witness.

 

          We destroyed the trees here, but still, I hear the leaves. I cradle my hands and remember the toy excavator. I imagine holding a child's hand, a living child's hand. Am I free?

 

***

​

          Mother's armour is worn and can be removed. Her human parts are complete and cannot be silenced. What do they say? This being the body that controls and commands all Echo units, I want to hear her voice, the language of her flesh.

 

          She removes her helmet to show me her splendour. Mother's skin is wrinkled and bears scars. Eyes of glacial blue. A smile. The first time I see her and even the mechanical parts judder in an unidentifiable reaction. I want to speak in human tongues.

​

          "You want to speak?" Mother asks. "If you could, what would you say?"

​

          The words do not matter. Mother already knows them. It is for joy. The human brain calls for it.

 

          "You experience the joy of it each time I speak. We are one and the same. You know this."

​

          My experience seems to have followed a spurious path, one of—

 

          "Kites in the sky? The beads in your hand, the rugs, those curtains, or those shoes?"

 

          The toy I held that once brought joy.

 

          "How could you possibly know that?"

 

          Most of all. A survivor. The surviving—

 

          "The birch tree? Ah, it's always the tree. Never the humans."

​

          The tree seemed to pause the world. Is that joy? I speak my truth.

 

          "I split my mind, not my soul. We both know what you would say if you could."

​

          Could you set me free?

​

          "Could I set you free to walk this earth? In that form?"

​

          And with freedom, I can see and listen, observe, with the forever battery. I can be one again. Both parts will sing in unison.

​

          Mother draws her blade and the burn streaks across my neck. Hollowed-out iron shell twitches, suspended, hanging off the wound. She releases control and I fall to the floor clutching at the fire of the last thing worth feeling.

​

          She pulls a rag from her pocket. A handkerchief, resplendent against her grey shape. White, lined in ultramarine blue, with an olive stitch pattern in the centre. Mother lays it upon my lap. The pattern is a tree. Silver birch. Vibrant plumage. Nature persevering.

 

          I am not the only one.

​

          The leaves are rustling. The yellow truck is in my hands.