In the Lives of Puppets

by T.J. Klune

FOR HUMANITY: You kinda suck, but you invented books and music, so the universe will probably keep you around for a little bit longer. You got lucky. This time.

In an old and lonely forest, far away from almost everything, sat a curious dwelling. At the base of a grove of massive trees was a small, square building made of brick, overtaken by ivy and moss. Who it belonged to was anyone’s guess, but from the looks of it, it had been abandoned long ago. It wasn’t until a man named Giovanni Lawson (who wasn’t actually a man at all) came across it while making his way through the forest that it was remembered with any purpose. He stood in front of his strange find, listening as the birds sang in the branches high above. “What’s this?” he asked. “Where did you come from?” He went inside, passing carefully through the door hanging off its hinges. The windows were shattered. Grass and weeds grew up through the warped wooden floor. The roof had partially collapsed, and the sun shone through on a pile of leaves that almost reached the ceiling. At the top of the leaf pile, a golden flower had bloomed, stretching toward the sunlight streaming through the exposed rafters. “It’s perfect,” he said aloud, although he was very much alone. “Yes, this will do just fine. How strange. How wonderful.” Giovanni returned bright and early the next morning, his sleeves pushed up his forearms. He knocked down the walls inside the solitary building to create one large room, carrying plaster and wood out piece by piece and piling them on the forest floor. By the time he finished, his face and hair were coated with dust and his joints creaked and groaned, but ...

Up in the branches of the trees above the house, he constructed a new little building around the solid trunk of the tallest fir tree, the undisputed king of the forest. From there, he built several more rooms into the trees, all connected by rope bridges—a laboratory and a sunroom, the ceiling made of foggy and scratched glass, the floor of shining oak panels, and no walls. Later this sunroom would become something different.

Giovanni was at peace. At peace until the day his chest began to hurt. “Oh my,” he said. “What an interesting sensation. It burns.” In his lab he ran calculations. He typed on his keyboard, the clack, clack, clack echoing flatly around him. “I see,” he said on the fifty-second day after he’d first felt the ache in his chest. He stared at the screen, checking his numbers. It was loneliness, pure and simple. Numbers never lied.

Three more years went by. Three years of the ache in his chest only growing stronger. Three years of quiet, of longing to hear a voice aside from his own. He would look out the window of his laboratory to see that it was snowing, when just yesterday the forest had been caught in the throes of summer.

He never saw anyone else. No one ever came looking for the man and the woman. Or the child. And he never saw the man and woman again. Later, much later when the boy was grown, Giovanni would tell the boy that the woman—his mother—hadn’t wanted to leave him. “She will come back,” Giovanni would tell him. “One day, when all is well, she will return.” Until then, he had desired a child, and now here one was. Oh, how fortuitous! How wonderful! Giovanni took his time in deciding a designation for the baby. It was when the leaves were changing from green to red and gold that he found the perfect one. “Victor,” he told his son. “Your name shall be Victor. Victor Lawson. What do you think?” The loneliness he’d felt—massive and profound—was chased away as if it’d never existed at all.

“Is there a fault in your coding?” Giovanni asked him when the boy was four years old. “Did I make a mistake?” Victor didn’t respond. Instead, he lifted his arms, opening and closing his hands, his little fingers tapping against his palms. Giovanni did as he was asked. He lifted Victor, hugging him gently against his chest. Victor made a small noise that Giovanni took as happiness, his small face pressed against the man’s chest. “No,” Giovanni said. “You are as you’re supposed to be. I shouldn’t have questioned that. If there was ever perfection in this world, it would be you.” His chest ached once more, but it was for entirely different reasons. Giovanni didn’t need to calculate what he felt now. He knew what it was. It was love.

It was another two years before Victor spoke for the first time. They were in the laboratory. Victor was sitting on the floor. Laid out around him were small metal rods. It took Giovanni a moment to recognize the shape Victor had made them into. Two stick figures, one big, one small, their hands joined together. Grunting once, he reached out to fiddle with the legs of the stick figures. And then the boy—Victor Lawson, son of Giovanni Lawson—said, “You.” He pointed toward the bigger stick figure. “Me.” The smaller stick figure. His voice was quiet, rough from lack of use. But it was there all the same. “Yes,” Giovanni said quietly. “You and me. Always.”

A conscience is that still small voice that people won’t listen to. —Pinocchio (1940 film)

A tiny vacuum robot screamed as it spun in concentric circles, spindly arms that ended in pincers waving wildly in the air. “Oh my god, oh my god, we’re going to die. I will cease to exist, and there will be nothing but darkness!” A much larger robot stood still next to the vacuum, watching it have a meltdown for the millionth time. This other robot did not have arms, legs, or feet. Instead, the former Medical Nurse Model Six-Ten-JQN Series Alpha was a long metal rectangle, five feet tall and two feet wide, and her old and worn tires had been replaced by toothed metal treads, not unlike a tank’s. Two metal hatches on either side of her base opened to reveal a dozen metal tentacles ending in various medical tools should the need to operate arise. A monitor on the front flashed a green frowning face. Nurse Registered Automaton To Care, Heal, Educate, and Drill (Nurse Ratched for short) was not impressed with the vacuum. In a flat, mechanical voice, she said, “If you were to die, I would play with your corpse. There is much I would be able to learn. I would drill you until there was nothing left.” This—as Nurse Ratched had undoubtedly planned—set the vacuum off once more. “Oh no,” it whimpered. “Oh no, no, no, this will not do. Victor! Victor. Come back before I die and Nurse Ratched plays with my corpse! She’s going to drill me! You know how I feel about being drilled.” Above them in the Scrap Yards, halfway up a pile of discarded metal at least twenty feet high, came the qu...

He glanced down at them, hanging on to the pile of scrap via a pulley system he’d constructed with a harness around his waist. It wasn’t safe by any stretch of the imagination, but Vic had been doing this for years and hadn’t fallen yet. Well, once, but the less said about that the better. The shriek he’d let out at the bone protruding wetly from his arm had been louder than any sound he’d made before.

Rambo didn’t seem to believe him. He squealed, pincers opening and closing, his circular body shaking as his all-terrain tires rolled over pieces of metal that had fallen from the scrap heap. Across the top, in faded markings that had never been clear, were the letter R and a circle that could have been an O or a lowercase a, followed by what was clearly an M (possibly) and a B before ending in another O or a. He’d found the little thing years before, repairing it himself with metal and care until the machine had come back to life, demanding to be allowed to clean—it needed to clean because if it didn’t, it had no purpose, it had nothing. It’d taken Vic a long time to calm the machine down, fiddling with its circuits until the vacuum had sighed in relief. It was a short-term fix. Rambo worried about most things, such as the dirt on the floor, the dirt on Vic’s hands, and death in all manner of ways. Nurse Ratched, Vic’s first robot, had asked if she could kill the vacuum. Vic said she could not. Nurse Ratched asked why. Vic said it was because they didn’t kill their new friends. “I would,” Nurse Ratched had said in that flat voice of hers. “I would kill him quite easily. Euthanasia does not have to be painful. But it can, if you want it to be.” She rode on her continuous track toward the vacuum, drill extended. Rambo screamed. Five years later, not much had changed. Rambo was still anxious. Nurse Ratched still threatened to play with his corpse. Vic was used to it by now.

“If you fall and die, I will perform the autopsy,” Nurse Ratched called up to him. “The final autopsy report should be available within three to five business days, depending upon whether you are dismembered or not. But, as a courtesy, I can tell you that your death will most likely be caused by impact trauma.” “Oh no,” Rambo moaned, his sensors flashing red. “Vic. Vic. Don’t get dismembered. You know I can’t clean up blood very well. It gets in my gears and mucks everything up!” “Engaging Empathy Protocol,” Nurse Ratched said, the monitor switching to a smiley face, eyes and mouth black, the rest of the screen yellow. The hatch on her lower right side slid up, and one of her tentacle-like arms extended, patting the top of Rambo’s casing. “There, there. It is all right. I will clean up the blood and whatever other fluids come from his weak and fragile body. He will most likely void his bowels too.” “He will?” Rambo whispered. “Yes. The human sphincter is a muscle, and upon death, it relaxes, allowing waste to vacate the body in a spectacular fashion, especially if there is impact trauma.” Vic shook his head. They were his best friends in all the world. He didn’t know what that said about him. Probably nothing good. But they were like him, in a way, even though he was flesh and blood and the others were wires and metal. Regardless of what they were made of, all had their wires crossed, or so Vic chose to believe.

The higher he got, the more the heap shifted. Bits of metal glinted in the sun as they fell around him, landing with a crash on the ground below. 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 bottom before celebrating and spinning around.

it more when it popped free. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” He waved it down at the others. “I got it!” “The joy I feel knows no bounds,” Nurse Ratched said. “Huzzah.” Her screen changed to confetti falling around the words CONGRATULATIONS IT’S A GIRL.

He shoved the circuit board into his satchel even as he squeezed the carabiner with his other hand. He dropped five feet in a second, jerking painfully when the carabiner hit a thick knot in the middle of the rope. He struggled against it, but it wouldn’t move any further. “I suggest you get down,” Nurse Ratched said as she scooped up Rambo, rocks kicking up under her treads as she rolled away, dodging detritus raining down around them. Rambo squealed, sensors flashing red in his panic. “I’m working on it!” Vic shouted after them, still trying to get the carabiner past the knot. No use. It wouldn’t give. The Old One’s horn blasted again. Vic grunted when something heavy bounced off his shoulder, sending him spinning away. His breath was knocked from his chest when he swung back into the trash heap with a jarring crash, the sound of metal crunching under the Old One’s massive tires getting closer and closer.

Knowing the Old Ones couldn’t—or wouldn’t—leave the perimeters of the Scrap Yards, Nurse Ratched and Rambo waited for him at the edge, Rambo sitting on top of her, little arms waving frantically. Nurse Ratched’s screen had turned into a line of exclamation points. “See?” Vic told them as they left the Old One behind. “Nothing to it.” “Yes,” Nurse Ratched said. “Absolutely nothing to it. I would be impressed except I do not find idiocy impressive. If I did, I would flirt with you.” He’d learned of flirting from Dad’s films. People smiling and blushing when they saw each other, doing things they might not normally do, all in the name of love. He’d never had anyone to flirt with before. It sounded extraordinarily complicated. “I didn’t know you could do that.” “I can do many things,” Nurse Ratched said, the exclamation points disappearing, being replaced by a face with a funny smile, wide eyes surrounded by long eyelashes. “Hey, big boy. You should put your finger in my socket.” The screen went black. “That was flirting. There is a difference.” Vic grimaced as Rambo wheeled around him, arms waving. “They don’t do that in the films.” “At least not in the ones you have seen. Did it work? Are you aroused?” The tiny lens above her screen blinked to life, a blue light scanning him up and down. “You don’t appear to be aroused. Your penis shows no signs of elevated blood flow that supports recreational sexual engagement.” “I don’t have a penis,” Rambo said mournfully. Somewhere insi...

By the time they reached home, the sky was bleeding violet, and the first stars were out. The sun settled near the horizon, the moon rising like a pale ghost.

Vic looked toward the elevator near the biggest tree. He thought about escaping to his personal lab above but knew his father wouldn’t be happy if he didn’t at least try to explain himself. “No,” Nurse Ratched said, rolling against him, pushing him toward the ground house. “You need to tell him the truth. I want to watch as you get scolded. It brings me something akin to joy to see you stare at the floor and give him flimsy excuses.” “You’re supposed to be on my side.” “I know,” she said. “I am a traitor. I feel terrible about it. I cannot wait.”

She stopped. Her screen flashed a question mark. “Do you hear that?” He glanced back at her. “Hear what?” “I do not know. It sounds complex. It is coming from the ground house. I need to diagnose it.” She rode by him, flattening the grass on the forest floor, leaves crunching. He watched as she disappeared through the doorway. He followed, cocking his head. He strained to hear what she had. At first, there was nothing. And then— His eyes widened. “No way.” He jogged toward the ground house. Electric lights burned inside, reflecting off glass jars filled with unused parts and unplanted seeds. The floor creaked under Vic’s weight with every step he took. He wound his way through the shelves and piles of books and electronics. A washing machine, though it was broken beyond repair. What his father called an icebox, though it never made any ice. Dad never liked to throw anything away, saying there was a use for everything even if it wasn’t readily apparent. Vic was the same way, which is why it frustrated him that his father didn’t like when they went hunting in the Scrap Yards. The ground house was filled with objects his father had salvaged, even if he hadn’t been back in quite a while. How was it any different when Vic did the same? But he ignored it, all of it, because of the sounds that rolled over him, warm and sweet. Music. It was music. But it wasn’t like the music boxes against the far walls. Those were monophonic, and though enchanting, they did not compare. A voice u...

“That’s it. Simple, isn’t it? We were thinking too big, too grand. Sometimes, it’s the smallest things that can change everything when you least expect it.”

Vic turned around to see his father watching him. The skin of his face was wrinkled and soft, his bright eyes kind. His hair hung in white waves around his ears, his beard extending down to his chest. When Vic was younger, he’d asked why he looked nothing like his father. Dad was a barrel of a man, his chest thick and strong, his stomach sloping outward, fingers blunt. Vic didn’t have the presence his father had. As a boy, he’d been as thin as a whisper, sprouting up instead of out. He’d grown into himself as he’d gotten older, but he was still awkward, his movements clipped. His father’s skin was pale. His own was tanned, as if he’d been born in the sun and never left. His father’s eyes were blue, Vic’s brown, and in certain light, they looked black. They weren’t the same. They never had been. But this man was his father. This man had raised him. This man who wasn’t a man at all.

Dad grimaced, turning away to rub at his chest. Vic sighed, unreasonably irritated that Dad had tried to hide the gesture from him. Though an admonition threatened to burst from his mouth, he swallowed it back down. “I told you to let me take a look at it.” “It’s fine.” “It is not fine,” Nurse Ratched said. “Either you let Victor look at you, or I will drill you.” To make her point, her drill whirred loudly. Across her screen, the words YOU WON’T FEEL A THING scrolled. “Perhaps we should proceed with the drilling regardless. It has been quite some time since I was able to drill anything.” Dad set Rambo on the ground as the song ended and gave way to another. Vic could feel it down to his bones, and he wondered how he’d gone so long without hearing such a thing. It’d only been minutes, but he could no longer imagine a life without music like this. Those records had been an extraordinary find. He’d have to see if there were more. “I’m fine as I am,” Rambo said nervously. “No one needs to drill or open me.” “Anxious little thing,” Dad said fondly, nudging Rambo with his foot. “And we still don’t know why?” Vic went to the work bench again, looking at his father’s tools that hung on...

“That is called a white lie,” Nurse Ratched said, her screen filled with digital balloons. “White lies are often spoken to make one feel better. I will assist Victor in this process. Here is my white lie: you are a wonderful machine beloved by many.” “Leave him alone,” Vic said as he knelt at his father’s feet. “Do you feel better?” Nurse Ratched asked. “Yes,” Rambo said promptly. “Tell me more white lies.” “You are important. You have a purpose. ...

Before Vic could respond, Nurse Ratched said, “Victor’s penis was flaccid even after I engaged my Flirting Protocol. Since I know what I am doing, it is not me, but him.” “I regret ever fixing you both,” Vic muttered, motioning for Dad to lift his shirt. “That was a white lie,” Nurse Ratched said. “Your pupils are dilated, your heart rate increased. You enjoy us. Thank you.” A thumbs-up burst onto her screen, with the words YOU DID A GOOD JOB! underneath.

Dad tapped his breastbone twice with his middle finger. From inside his chest came a beep, followed by a low hiss. The hatch of his chest cavity sank inward slightly before sliding off to the right. There, in his father’s chest, was a heart. It wasn’t like the heart in Vic’s chest, one made of muscle that moved blood and oxygen throughout his body. The heart in Giovanni’s chest was made of metal and wood and shaped not like the organ but like a symbol of a heart about the size of Vic’s fist. The chest cavity around it glowed a dull green, made of wires and circuitry. The heart itself was of Dad’s own making, replacing what had been a power core nearly drained beyond repair before he’d changed it out for the mechanical heart. The shell of the heart was partially constructed of a rare wood called bocote. Wood was typically nonconductive, but Dad had found a way to force enough electricity through it, though it required over fifteen thousand volts. To ensure conduction, in addition to the bocote, the heart had bits of silver-coated copper and brass in the shell, metal that glittered in the low light. Wires extended from the top of the shell, attaching to the parts in his chest that fed into the biochip in his head. In the exposed interior of the heart a handful of gears spun slowly. Above them, a small white strip, two centimeters wide and three centimeters tall.

“One of the wires off the solenoid is coming loose. I can fix it.” “I can do it,” Dad said. Vic bit back a retort, opting for something softer. “Then you should have. I’ll take care of it so I know it gets done. Nurse Ratched.” She stopped beside him, taking the plug for the soldering iron from him and inserting it into herself. She said, “Ooh. Yes. That is it.” “Gross,” Rambo muttered. He nudged the side of Vic’s leg. “Is he going to die?” “No,” Vic said, leaning forward, elbows resting on his dad’s legs. “He’s not going to die.” “Because we’re going to be alive forever?” “Impossible,” Nurse Ratched said. “Nothing is immortal. Eventually, our power cell will drain and we will perish because we will be unable to find a replacement.” “But Vic will find one for us,” Rambo said. “Victor is human,” Nurse Ratched said. “He will die long before us. He is soft and spongy. Perhaps it will be cancer, either rectal or bone. Or the plague if he gets bitten by a rat. Or he will get squashed by an Old One like he almost was today.” Her screen blinked with the word OOPS.

Vic sighed as he leaned forward, the tip of the soldering iron hot and red. “It was nothing.” “That was a white lie,” Rambo said, sounding proud of himself.

“It wasn’t even close. I knew what I was doing.” “The expression on your face when the metal heap collapsed suggested otherwise,” Nurse Ratched said. “Would you like to view the reenactment I created right this second?” Vic pulled the soldering iron away from the solenoid as he looked back. On her screen, an eight-bit version of Vic appeared atop a tower of metal. A word bubble sprang from his mouth, filling with OH NO I AM STUPID AND ABOUT TO DIE. The little character fell to the ground with a bloody smack, his eyes turning to X’s. “Womp womp,” Nurse Ratched said as the screen darkened. “That is exactly what happened. Please do not hold your applause. I need validation.”

The heart—while a marvel of engineering unlike anything else that had been created—sometimes needed more than metal or wiring to function: a drop of blood, pressed against the white strip above the gears. It did not happen often—at most, once a year, but Nurse Ratched never failed to remind them that according to lore, a creature known as a vampire subsisted on the same thing. The last time had been four months before, when Dad had started acting more robotic, more like a machine.

Beryl Davis was singing in a crackly voice about what a fool she used to be.

Vic winced. He hadn’t meant it like that. He sometimes spoke without thinking things through, though he was trying to get better at it. “You know what I mean. They’re not—they have their programming. They’re guided by it, and can’t leave the Scrap Yards.”

petulant.

Just thought it was an underused excellent word. I was curious what the official definition was: (of a person or their manner) childishly sulky or bad-tempered. I feel like I always hear it with the word child as in “you petulant child!”

He waited to see if Nurse Ratched would call him out for it. He wasn’t lying, not exactly, more in a gray area, skirting the edges of truth though he didn’t necessarily mean to. She didn’t say a word.

You say you’re happy. I believe you. But happiness isn’t something that can be sustained continuously, not without something to keep the fire burning.”

In moments when Dad spoke like this, about what else was out there, Vic wondered about the people who had left him behind as an infant. What they had been like. Looked like. Did they laugh? Did they like music and tinkering for hours? Were they smart? Kind? What had made them trust Giovanni, a stranger in the middle of the woods, and who had been after them? Logic—the cold, brutal logic of a machine—dictated they were dead. They’d have returned by now if able to do so. They hadn’t.

Giovanni, his father, the man to whom he wanted to prove that needing and wanting w...

He’d read every book Dad had brought to this place—more than once—old stories of kings and queens in castles, of adventures on the high seas in great ships with flags billowing in the salty air, of people going to the stars and getting lost in the vast expanse of the universe. They were ghosts, but he did not feel haunted by them. The world beyond the forest was an unknowable thing, and though curiosity tugged at him every now and then, Victor was stronger than it was. He had a home, a purpose, a lab all his own, and friends that loved him for who he was, not what he wasn’t. Loneliness wasn’t a concept he understood, not really, not like his father had when he’d first come to the forest. He, like Dad, was an inventor. If he needed someone—something—new to talk to, all he had to do was make it. He had the parts. He’d done it with Nurse Ratched, and then with Rambo. He could do it again, if need be. Some of the old books told stories of people yearning for more and setting off to find it and themselves. Vic always thought they were silly that way. He never wanted to go far from home.

He said, “You trust me.” “I do.” “Then trust me to know what’s right for myself.” He moved until he stood above his father. Vic reached down, squeezing Dad’s shoulder. Dad put his hand on top of Vic’s. “You’re a good boy. A bit foolish, perhaps, but a good boy nonetheless.” “Learned it from you,” Vic said. “I’m also good,” Rambo said. “Unbearably so,” Nurse Ratched said. “Though you seem to be suffering from an intense anxiety disorder. But that is fine. We are all unique. Victor is asexual. Giovanni is old. And I have sociopathic tendencies that manifest themselves in dangerous situations.” “Hooray!” Rambo squealed. “We all have things!” Giovanni smiled as he shook his head. “What a strange existence we find ourselves in. I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world.”

The robots stayed with Dad, listening as Beryl Davis sang a...

His father, in his infinite wisdom, had built a tree house of sorts, though far grander and more complex than any Vic had ever read about; even more spectacular than ones in books like The Swiss Family Robinson. Six massive trees grew in a vague circle, and all were connected by wooden rope bridges. In the tree to Vic’s left was his father’s lab, the largest of the dwellings built around the king of the forest. The structure on the second tree was Dad’s living quarters, stuffed to the gills with more scraps and tools and books. The highest building in the third tree was a makeshift kitchen, though Vic was the only one who used it. Once a sunroom, it now had a working electric stove and an old table set and chairs covered in carvings of birds and flowers and leaves. In one corner sat a large metal freezer that kept meat Vic had hunted from spoiling. Attached to the kitchen were facilities: a shower with rainwater that never got hot enough and a toilet that Nurse Ratched was far too interested in, especially when she inquired about the consistency of Vic’s bowel movements. He’d tried to explain to her that some things were meant to be private. “So you say,” she’d told him. “But then you will come to me leaking saltwater from your ducts after you have found blood in your stool, and where will you be then?” He hadn’t known how to answer that. The fifth tree held Vic’s own lab, smaller than his father’s, though no less extraordinary. The final tree, to the right of the elevator...

Vic shook his head as he crossed the bridge to his room, thoughts tumbling end over end, though there was an order to the chaos.

In the center of the room was a tree trunk with knobby protrusions that had once been branches. Beyond the tree trunk in the right corner, a wooden bedframe with a lumpy, worn mattress. On the walls hung retired tools that no longer functioned; Vic was unable to bring himself to throw them away. It was a trait Vic had learned from his father, the idea of junking something rankling them both. What was broken could someday be repaired if need be, and if they had the right parts.