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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