In the Lives of Puppets

by T.J. Klune

Rambo was deliriously distracted from his panic now that he had something to clean. Vic glanced down to see him picking up the fallen pieces of scrap and moving them to the base of the pile. He beeped happily, a noise that almost sounded like he was humming.

“Your existence is pointless,” Nurse Ratched told him.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Rambo said cheerfully as his sensors blinked blue and green. He dropped another piece of metal at the bott...

“What was I made for?” Vic asked, suddenly curious.

“You were made to bring happiness. You are alive in ways we are not. You are soft and fragile. But you are complex and disturbing and sometimes foolishly brilliant. Yes, I think the wood will work.”

“A flaw?” He laughed loudly. “Of course it is! Your flaws are what make you superior, in all ways. No matter what machines can do, no matter how powerful we become, it is the absence of flaws that will be our undoing. How can this existence survive when all machine-made things are perfect down to a microscopic detail? When all machine-made music is empty of rage and joy? Our only flaw is that we’ve condemned ourselves to spend eternity mimicking that which we deemed unfit to exist.” He shook his head. “We can never be you. Instead, we became your ghosts, and we’ll haunt this world until there is nothing left.”

“The City of Electric Dreams used to be known as the City of Sin,” the Coachman said.

One way or another, when there's something significant or that needs deciding, it always has to be done in Las Vegas!

The dot shifted, the edges wobbly. The center filled with an orange light, surrounded by a clear second circle that contracted and expanded. “A human egg,” the Blue Fairy said. “An ovum. A secret kept hidden far away from the eyes of fox and cat.

Would have had to have been fertilized! Otherwise Vic would be a girl. Ova only have X chromosomes.