Rabia Gale's Blog, page 24

on not being a prodigy after all

Last week I had a birthday.

When I was a child, birthdays used to be exciting (“Presents!”). As a twenty-something, birthdays swung between awesome (my husband is a GREAT gift-giver) and depressing (“I’ve accomplished *HOW* little in my life?”). See, I had expected to rule the world (or, um, at least dominate my profession) by thirty.

As you can tell, that didn’t happen. And I’m fine with it.

As a society, we are very impressed by the accomplishments of youth. Competition with our age-mates starts early. Even before we can walk or talk, our parents are comparing notes with other parents (“Johnny rolled over when he was six weeks old!” “Well, Suzie didn’t roll over till the longest time, but she crawled at four months”).  I know, all of us parents think our babies are geniuses. I, at least, try not to rave too much about it.

It only gets worse from there on out.  There is such pressure to be the best as possible, as young as possible.  It’s not enough that we must read, but that we must read early (at 4, or 3, or even 2). It’s not enough that we play the Moonlight Sonata beautifully, but that we must be five rather than fifteen when we do so. It’s not enough that we go to college, but that we go at sixteen rather than eighteen. It’s not enough that we graduate in the top tier of our class, but that we must then sally forth and “change the world” or “be the leaders of tomorrow” (whatever THAT means). Society and the media fawns over the prodigy, to such a point that we feel that we have to accomplish our dreams young–or else we are failures.

It used to bother me, in my 20s, that my other age-mates were doing great things. Other 20-somethings got agents and publishing contracts, and here I was, with 30 marching inexorably closer, while my days were measured out in feedings and diaper changes.

And the I hit 30 (or it hit me ) and you know what? The world didn’t turn all flat and grey. Life didn’t slam its doors shut on me. I still had plenty of health and opportunity and time left. What’s the rush? I don’t have to march lock-step with my age-mates, or one-up anyone. Life is not a zero-sum game, and there will still be plenty of chocolate cake at the finish line, whenever I get there. (There had better be, because hell hath no fury like a woman deprived of cake!)

What about you? Do you feel the pressure to be better than everyone else? How do you cope?

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wired, part v

(We made it! This is the last installment of my post-apocalyptic Rapunzel retelling. Not graphic, but meant for a mature audience.)

Wired, Part V

(Part I, Part II, Part III & Part IV)

She turned on me, Gothel the Mother, the Wizard, now the Hag, and her face was terrible to see, full of implacable self-righteous fury.

“I gave you chances. I gave you choices. And you betrayed me. You’re weak, even with all your modifications. Weak, like the rest of the meat.” She spat on the floor.

“Now.” She clomped into the light, crossed all my barriers, all the circles, all the thin wires running through the floor. “There are no more choices. There is just me, and my will.”

Her code. I had almost wriggled out of it; it was strong but crude and fell in strings around me. But there was more on the way. It came for me, packed into arrows, aimed straight for my heart. Ready to take me over, to serve her forevermore.

No!           

I ripped free from the code, and fell. Down into darkness—would there be something to catch me?—and splash! into the sea. I wasn’t connected right, so much of my power was either taken up by my plan or taken over by Gothel. I entered the data stream all wrong—it washed over me like acid, sandpapered my skin and ran spike-fingered down my nerves.

I only had a moment, but it was enough. Had to be enough.

Gothel’s arrows fell behind me, sharked through the water. I dove deeper into the data stream. I was almost a mermaid here. I reached my own hidden place, a cavern of code. Its defenses, all suckers and teeth, pulled back as it recognized me. I reached in and slammed in the final command of my operation.

Key turned in lock. Initiation sequence.

“Stop fighting me. You can’t win. I own you.” Mother Gothel’s coat fell open, revealing that control panel at her throat and chest. Her blunt fingers skipped over the buttons, but…

… she couldn’t control me, if there was nothing to control. I surged, grabbed at my prince’s coat where it had been abandoned in his passion. My fingers found knife-hilt, my other fist clenched around my hair.

A sweep, a flash, and the high-grade electra-knife seared through all my hair at the nape of my neck. The computers shuddered, the control panel blinked, and Mother Gothel jumped from the static buzz.

Her attacking code vanished. So did the data stream. For the first time in years, I was wholly in the real world, powered by internal backups.

I staggered to my feet, threw the electra-knife straight at her. My head felt light, my neck bare. Mother Gothel ducked, but not fast enough. The knife connected and her torc exploded.

I saw her fall, then stumbled as the building juddered. The powerful engines I had built in the floors above had started.

Alarms went off. Their shrieks pulsed in one ear, buzzed in the other. I could only see with one eye, and when I touched my cheek I felt my iron bones.

Concrete cracked and the floor gave. The building had not been built to withstand such raw power. Fire bloomed, smoke spread.

I wasn’t supposed to be down here. I had to move, get out of the collapsing building and into my capsule.

I stumbled over to the dark stairwell—the lift would not work and I couldn’t trust it. Hurry, Hurry. I gasped and wheezed at the unwonted exercise but at least I was relieved of the burden of all that hair.

My hair. Cables, wires, connectors. Gone.

Steps crumbling in the dark. Air: hot heavy close. Dizzy, lightheaded. Ah, door.

I had to wrestle it open, that thick steel hatch. Vibrations ran through the metal, not of collapse, but of powering up. I’d had machines to help me, but they lay useless, no longer connected.

I fell into the ship, my ship, and managed to shut the door. Head throbbing, vision almost gone, I plugged in code manually, from memory. It took too long—something that had taken mere seconds with hair now took precious minutes.

Rockets roared to life. I scrabbled for my seatbelt, got myself strapped in. Pressure on my chest flattened me to my chair.

I blacked out.

***

 When I woke up, I was in orbit. My stomach felt sick and woozy, and blood and unnamed fluids were congealed around my face. A weighty feeling pressed on me, but it seemed to shift—the gravity generator rotating, my orientation following it in little circles.

When I made it to the small porthole—I hadn’t left big windows, expecting to see everything through the external sensors–there was the curve of the earth, blue with swirl of cloud and fold of land. Not much to see of the ruin it now was.

My home no longer.

No, I had another world to go to, one that might some day be the earth-that-once-was. One that we’d tried to change, before everything imploded and the Dark fell. One that had been abandoned in the wake of the waste of our own world.

***

I touched down on the surface nine months later, bundled up in all the protection I could find. But I didn’t need it. The air was still thin and cold, compared to home, still poor in oxygen, but I was a new breed of human. I could live with it.

I walked the ruins of base camp, the empty shells of bunkers and labs. Machinery still ran, though weakly and wheezily. For all these years, it had faithfully pumped greenhouse gases into the air, had faithfully grown organisms in nutri-tubs and sent them out into the wild. Green life clung to the reddish soil, grew by the streams and rivers and lakes of meltwater.

I’d make a garden here, in the wilderness. On the red-planet-that-was-no-more, the earth-that-was-to-come.

And someday, with the organic material in my pack, the life-strands of my prince and more, I’d be mother to a new race.

© Rabia Gale, 2012. All rights reserved.

I hope you enjoyed this short story. If you like the way I break fairy tales, check out my short story collection Shattered, now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. If you’re an interested reviewer, please contact me at rabia [at] rabiagale [dot] com for a copy. Thanks!

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sunday thought

A good reminder that love is a verb more than it is a noun:

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

~C. S. Lewis

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wired, part iv

(This is a post-apocalyptic retelling of Rapunzel. While this is not graphic, it is meant for a mature audience.)

Wired, Part IV

(Part I, Part II & Part III)

I knew she would find out. It wasn’t a matter of if, only when.

Still, it was too early, the night she came. She never came at night, but she did then. She broke the pattern.

I didn’t notice her coming because I’d diverted all my resources into finishing the operation. I crouched over my screens, my gown half-unbuttoned while he caressed my bare back and nuzzled my neck. It had been quick—hot and heavy and panting. He was satisfied, but it was just another item on my to-do list. Another thing to check off, along with the small favor he’d asked for, before I could plug in the code he’d brought me. He held the tiny data-disk nestled between thumb and forefinger, playing with it, tantalizing me.

I shunted supplies around, diverting more oil to his father’s manufactories, giving his family a more favorable route in the annual trading caravan. He peered over my shoulder, not too far gone in the afterglow to refrain from checking my work.

“There.” I keyed in the last number—for show only, since I could do it all with my hair. I liked the finality of the click. “Now.” I jerked my shoulder from his kiss, held out my hand. “Give it to me.”

My tone was too eager. His shrewd eyes narrowed, but it was too late to pretend nonchalance. I opted for a sort of bland directness and he relinquished the key to me.

“What, no riddles for me this time?” I tried for lightness, but my avid fingers had already pushed the disk into the slot.

“None, because you’ll find plenty to keep you busy. That’s encrypted and I—um, acquired it from Wizard Aquarius without any instruction manuals.”

“Acquired it, huh?” I met his rougish expression with a wry smile of my own. “Why, you do care!”

He seemed about to speak, but I had no time for banter. I turned back to my work. Later. I’d tell him my plan later. I would even ask him to come with me, but I’d do it right before I had to leave. I couldn’t risk letting him talk me into modifying my plan for his family’s benefit.

It didn’t take long to break the code, but every second was precious. Ah, there it was–data from the only satellite in orbit I couldn’t access because Aquarius had gotten to it first. I brushed my fingers through the information stream; I’d immerse in it later. Right now I had to dump it into secure and secret hard drives and dump it fast before anyone noticed the huge footprints I’d made all over the network this evening…

And then I lost it.

The sea, the information I’d swum in for years, vanished. Just gone, leaving me floating in nothingness. The screens went blank, in unison, blinking out on an exhalation.

“Lady Locks?” He looked from me to the screens, and back again. Confused but not panicking. Not yet.

He didn’t know I had been locked out. Didn’t know that the vacuum was sucking out my breath and brains, didn’t know how the cold of it had turned my bones to ice and my thoughts slow and sluggish.

Then a rope in the darkness, a blue-white spiral of code. It was a lifeline and I grabbed for it, desperate to be connected, to be part of the sea again. Maybe it was a river, maybe it could lead me back…

Pain flared through me. Muscle-spasm, bone-tingle, electric-fizz. The code came alive, like a muscular snake that had been pretending to be a vine. It tangled all around me, tying me up with knots.

I toppled from my stool, hair jerking my scalp painfully. I smelled something burning, tasted something ashy. He stood, backed away. The fake skin on my cheek softened, melted, dripped down my neck. My left eye was out of control… weak… showing nothing. Static buzzed in my ears.

“So, you turned traitor, then, did you? Even after all I did for you?” Her voice, so close, as it had been when she used to comb my hair. But no, she was not behind me. The tingling at the back of the neck had led me astray. No, she was at the elevator shaft.

She was here. At night.

“Taken in by a pretty face, eh? Gave into desires of the flesh?” Light and shadow set her aged face into harsh lines; the suit and the boots gave her a menacing bulk.

I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t access the sea.

I saw him from the corner of my eye, the tension of his muscles, the spring at his heels.

No! I shouted into my own skull.

Mother Gothel moved and suddenly he was staring into the barrel of a disruptor gun. Unholy glee lit her face as she squeezed the trigger. His body jerked as the energy hit him, but he’d committed speed and strength to the move. He was tall, his reach long. His knife sliced through the sleeve of her suit.

Mother Gothel jerked back, cursed. He fell at her feet, twitching, his features all twisted. Blood seeped from the tear in her suit. She kicked at his body.

“Your lover here forgets his manners. You need to take better care of your rubbish, dear.”

Her code wrapped me tighter, snaked into my wires and veins—they were all one now. Commands I’d not given slithered into my skull, prickled up my scalp, shot down my hair. Robotic arms came to life, crude things scavenged from the carcasses of factories. My more elegant constructions were occupied elsewhere. I couldn’t reach them.

They grabbed him, my prince, my faithless-faithful scoundrel prince. Pinched him around the middle, took his feet in a vise-grip, held his shoulders. He moaned and thrashed, not from any real struggle, but from the current still running riot in him.

Did he even know what was going to happen?

I did. And I could do nothing about it.

My voicebox was no longer in my control, nor the muscles of my left cheek. But my lips, still real, twitched, crimped, rounded. Shaped out the words Please. Don’t.           

Wheels grinding, inexorable and unfeeling, the robots took their burden to the windows, those huge holes I had never patched, never needing to.

They flung him out.

He had not the strength to scream. I had not the sensors to see him fall, though my imagination pictured it: head down, arms akimbo, a spreadeagled speck.

And the splat.

I never got to ask him to go away with me. I’ll never know what he would’ve said.

Were those tears or the liquefying remains of my flesh/machinery on my face?           

He’d used me. But he was my prince, and I had used him, too.

© Rabia Gale, 2012. All rights reserved.

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new schedule for wired

So. I think the plan to post an installment of Wired *every* day this week was a bit much. I have readers in different time zones, not to mention with very busy lives! I need to give y’all more time to read each installment before moving on to the next one. So here is the new and revised schedule for Wired: Part 4 goes up Friday morning. Part 5 (the last one) goes up the following Monday. And next time I do this (why, yes, there will be a next time! I need to apply the lessons learned from this time, right?) I won’t post more than three installments a week.

Sound good to everyone?

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wired, part iii

(This is a post-apocalyptic retelling of Rapunzel. While I am never graphic, I intended this for a mature audience.)

Wired, Part III

(Part I & Part II)

He came on another hot night almost three years later. The nights were always hot on the ground, but the sultriness of this one had risen to even my city-top home. I’d seen no one but Mother Gothel in all that time, and that only infrequently. She brought me things, but rarely, since the city itself was so full of treasures. I no longer had to go out on my own; an army of scavenging, cutting, and hauling mechanoids did the work for me.

My hair filled the entire floor, its filaments twisted into cords, plugged into machines, drawing life from electric currents, giving me eyes and ears everywhere.

Even at the bottom of my tower.

He thought he’d surprised me when I looked up from the bank of screens and found him standing by the window. He wanted to believe it and I let him.

I called up the lights and the guns and the sprays and the mechanoids. I’d learned my lesson well.

He squinted in the harsh glare, ignoring death pointing at him from all directions.

Instead, he stepped forward and fell to one knee, hand spread out in a gesture of supplication. “Lady.” His eyelashes fanned on his cheekbones as he play-acted. “Forgive me, Lady, for intruding on you so. I have heard such marvelous things about you, had such curiosity about this tower, that I had to see for myself. I came to gawk as a rude scavenger; I remain to pay homage. Lady, may I stay and speak with you?”

Oh, he was bold one. He lifted his gaze to me and there was nothing but self-confidence in it. Those dark-lashed eyes of blue, that strong face with the faint scars, the firm mouth—he wasn’t handsome but he made you believe it out of sheer force of personality.

Me, I’d always been invisible, washed out and pale, blending into the background.

Yet he had come to me. Sought me out.

At my silent command, my defenders withdrew. I nodded, and held out my hand, and that gesture drew him from the outside… in.

***

He called himself a prince, and his father a king, and that was true. They were not like the royalty of stories, but like the ancestors of them–men who had earned their power with blood and sweat, only some of it their own. I knew him and I knew his father, but I let him spin tales about himself as he sat at my feet, his gaze on my face, only shifting now and then to my flickering screens.

Oh, but he was good.

He told me of the outside world, of how his people struggled, painting his thieving and murdering companions as present-day Robin Hoods. He told me of the strictures of the Wizards Council, of the way they hoarded resources, and cast them in the light of organic-hating villains.

He didn’t once ask me to do anything for him, save to let him return.

I said yes.

***

He came every night for that first month, as faithful and prompt as any of my reporting programs. He brought me things, organic things—a sooty flower, a malformed fruit, the shell of a snail. He brought me news, and another way of looking at the world.

And more than that, he brought me touch. Warm breath against my neck. Rough fingers against the pulse in my wrist. Heat on my skin, in my loins.

“Gothel holds such power in the world, all because of you. Is it fair that she hoards knowledge so, dictates what we may do, and where our resources go?” His whisper was dark, sultry, his pillow-talk all about politics and economics. He wrapped his fingers in my hair, and told me he loved me as it cut bleeding lines into his hands. He nuzzled my bone-white skin with its metal and circuitry underneath, and told me I was pure and beautiful. His hands and mouth touched secret places, private places, and after that there was no turning back.

Afterwards, he leaned against my knee, my hair spread in humming web-strands all around us as I tweaked the network in his favor. A change in the hundredth of a place here, moving up a time there, swapping two figures elsewhere.

Before he left that night, he told me he’d rescue me, take me away from my lonely tower.

“If you took me away, Mother Gothel would find us. She made me. Don’t you think she could control me from even far away?” I stared at him, unblinking. I didn’t need to blink much, these days, and I did it out of habit mostly. It unnerved him. I could see it in his eyes.

“Then I’ll find a way. We’ll bring her down,” he swore.

“We must be careful and secret. She checks up on me. I have some idea of how it may be done. I’ll need components, though, things that won’t go through her inventory, that she won’t know about.”

“Then you shall have those.” He stooped and brushed his lips across my cheek. His stubble prickled. I wondered what my skin felt like to him. Was it as cold and plastic as it looked?

***

Did he love me? Maybe. I know he loved the idea of me—the power in the machine, the spider in the web, the princess in the tower. And he was faithful in coming, even if his visits became less frequent as the months and years went past. After all, he needed me.

It was nice to be wooed. It was good to be courted.

So I accepted his gifts of candy and components. I listened as he proclaimed undying love through lips swollen with other women’s kisses. I embraced him when he came to me, stinking of sweat and sex. I even fantasized that someday we’d run away together, though I knew he wouldn’t leave the dynasty he and his father were building.

And I planned. There was only one place I could go that was beyond Mother Gothel’s reach. I had to time my escape precisely.

© Rabia Gale, 2012. All rights reserved.

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and the winners…

… of the Shattered: broken fairy tales giveaway are:

Prue

Kirsten

Matt Megill

*throws glitter and confetti* Congrats, gals and guy. Please email me at rabia [at] rabiagale [dot] com to claim your prize. Thanks for playing!

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wired, part ii

(This is a post-apocalyptic retelling of Rapunzel. While I am never graphic, I intended this for a mature audience.)

Wired, Part II

(Part I is here)

They came for me one night, while I sat in Mother Gothel’s lab—now my lab—with my hair spread out in tentacles across the room. Vaguely I knew that things had changed in the outside world, that Mother Gothel was High Wizard now, that she was more often out of the lab than in it, that my gathering and manipulation of data had ripple effects far outside myself.

I cared for none of it. Knowledge called me, siren-like. I had drowned in it more than once, and kept going back for more. The things I had learned about the time before the Dark! About food and flowers, music and machines. About how the ancients had reached for the stars, made machines that broke away from the earth’s hold and went to prepare other worlds for men. Other machines had lain dormant in orbit for over two hundred years, and as I called to them, they woke up and told me things.

These were the secrets that Mother Gothel hungered for the most—the movement of caravans across the ravaged land, clandestine meetings in caves, buried deposits of gold. She was content with those, but I… I wanted more. And so I probed a giant hulk of a telescope that looked out towards the stars, begging it for more information.

The lights flickered. The connection I’d so painstakingly built with the telescope snapped.

The sea vanished. So did the electric currents in my hair. I had no internal batteries, no internal backups. More machine then human now, I could not move, could not even get up.

Doors crashed open far away, footsteps vibrated through sensors in the floors. The cameras showed figures, blurry and small, clad in black, carrying an array of weaponry, nonetheless deadly from being cobbled together—energy guns, grenades, even the antiquated bullet-loading rifles. My mind scrolled through its vast database of knowledge, presented me with manufacturers and model numbers, things I did not need, while I sat there, useless and afraid.

They were coming for me.

They hit the door to the lab—it did not give way to them. They shot at the locks, which only fused together stubbornly. One of them took off a power pack, hooked up a plasma torch to it. The rest pulled face-guards over their heads.

Sparks flew, metal yielded with a groan and a yawn. Then the men were inside.

Alarms shrilled, loud and useless, like hysterical women. I struggled with my prone body and succeeded in freeing one finger loose. An organic finger, my pinky, not yet a network of wires wrapped in synthetic skin. My wrist twitched, rotated just a bit—the finger stretched for a button on the keypad…

… and Mother Gothel was there, dropping from the top of the lab in a mechanized lift. Her hair whipped crazily around her face, her eyes burned. Her fingers flew along the torc at her neck, a crude metal thing of buttons and lights.

A control I had never seen. A control for things I had no knowledge of.

Robotic arms swung at the attackers, wrenching away guns, catching grenades in midair. Metal discs shot along the floor. The men tripped on them and yelled as the metal edges bit deep into their ankles.

Metal screeched as tiles slid apart on the ceiling. Small holes, angry pinched mouths, spat acid on the men below. The potent stuff ate away at their suits, their weapons, their hard poly masks. The men stumbled from the deadly shower, yanking off their dissolving masks, stripping off their gloves. Making their way towards me.

They’d be sorry they did that.

My fingertip pushed down on the key—hard.

My weapons came online, in aerosol sprays. A fine mist covered the men and lay cool on my cheeks.

Mother Gothel’s lift groaned as it rocketed up to the ceiling, hard, fast.

The biochemical agent didn’t take long to act. The men clutched their stomachs. Doubled over. Voided themselves.

The power kicked in again, releasing me from my immobility. My hair, electrified, crackled. I rose. A whiff of the agent came to my nose, irritated my lips, but it could do little damage.

I was not fully organic. Not meat, like those wretches writhing on the floor.

***

Mother Gothel took me away from the lab, bundling me and my hair into a hot damp night that smelled of burning tires. The wind blew fine ash around us as we walked into the ruined city. I had never been in so deep before, surrounded by the skeletal remains of buildings so tall they poked holes in the low-lying clouds.

I made my home on the twenty-fourth floor of a cracked concrete-and-steel shell, the broken glass from its empty windows long ground into dust.

And from that beginning grew Mother Gothel’s empire.

© Rabia Gale, 2012. All rights reserved.

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shattered on smashwords & goodreads

A few housekeeping notices:

Shattered is now on Smashwords (much thanks to the husband, who made that happen). It also has its own Goodreads page, and has been acquiring some lovely reviews there as well as on other sites. As the author, I’m not going to respond to individual reviews (they are for readers after all) but I really appreciate those of you who take the time to leave their thoughts about the book. So: thank you!

Also, the Shattered giveaway ends tomorrow (Tuesday, May 8th) at 10 pm, EST. You still have time to throw your name into the hat!

And, last but not least: I’m serializing Wired, a post-apocalyptic Rapunzel retelling, all week. Part I is here. Check it out.

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wired, part i

(This is a post-apocalyptic retelling of Rapunzel. FYI, while I am never explicit or graphic, I wrote this story for an adult audience.)

Wired, Part I

Every night, Mother Gothel combed my hair and told me the same story, the one about my parents. “They didn’t want you. The New Hope womb spat you out, another baby on its assembly line, built from parts. What did they expect, eh, living right next to a garbage dump?”

The comb, made from a jagged machine part, drew sparks from my hair. The fine strands cut paper-thin trails across her hands. “They sold you to me for a few limp heads of cabbage and rotting greens. For salad. For organic material. To try again, they said.” She snorted, and the scorn in her voice was like battery acid, dripping through my skin and circuitry, into my bones.

I closed my eyes and immersed myself in the sounds of Mother Gothel’s laboratory. The hum of antiquated systems. The squeak of moving parts. The crackle and snap of power.

The world, Mother Gothel said, was made anew for people like me.

***

She was a wizard, was Mother Gothel. Not a witch. Witches were crazy old women who coaxed yellow plants out of the debris-filled soil and mixed up foul brews in rusty oil drums. Wizards, on the other hand, were explorers and inventors. They ventured into the collapsing ruins of ancient metropolises, scavenging parts and batteries, pieces of poly and metal. These they welded and bolted and screwed together, remaking the lost marvels of another time.

I carried Mother Gothel’s basket as we scavenged, a district at a time. Her loose pants billowed as she collapsed, creaking, to her knees and picked through the dirt. The loaded pockets of her vest clinked together as she came up with treasure: a screw, a hand-sized circuitry board, and, rarely, one of the ancients’ data discs, a precious inch-square of information.

“We cannot look towards the future without knowing the past,” Mother Gothel said as we returned home under the lead-grey sky. We crunched across crushed glass and splintered poly, a rubble of inventions under our feet.

Our supper was meager, nutri-squares dissolved in water. I ate less than Mother Gothel did. Like a bird, she said. Whatever that was.

I did not need much food and I needed less of it with every turn of the year.

After the dishes had been wiped clean, and the day’s findings catalogued, Mother Gothel peeled back half the skin on my face. “Your kind,” she said as she poked at my cheekbones with tiny picks, drilled holes with diamond bits, and twisted wires with needle-nosed pliers, “will rule the world.” I stood very still. “The days of squishy squashy things, the days of meat, are over.” She tightened miniscule screws—and my muscles clenched ever so slightly in response—then turned her head and spat on the floor.

Little by little she rebuilt me, and when I turned thirteen, she performed the Binding of the Braids on me, as any mother would’ve. But instead of celebrating my womanhood with ornamentation—beads of translucent glass and twists of metal in my braids—she attached connectors to my hair and stood back. The flickering blue-black screens in her lab threw weird shadows across her face.

“Now,” said Mother Gothel, leading me by the hand. “Now, you are ready.”

She stopped in front of a bank of cases, rusted and dented, missing lights and drawers. Mysterious sockets punctuated the fronts. I stood, dumb and obedient, as she lifted one of my tresses.

And plugged me in.

***

Later, much later, as she reconstructed my ruined cheek and the fried pathways around it she said it had been too much, all at once.

But for once I was not listening.

Instead I thought of that electric sea, its currents sweeping me along, bites of information bumping into me and tangling in my limbs. Knowledge at my hair tips, plugged straight into my brain without the intermediary of arcane symbols and cracked hardware.

I was parched for it. I wanted more. I wanted back in.

© Rabia Gale, 2012. All rights reserved.

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