TBOTSG-Chapter 6

He stood up as soon as he laid eyes on me, letting a wrench fall from his hand. He approached me before Fox could come between us, gasping with admiration, ‘What do we have here? A state-of-the-art android!’ He circled me, eyes jumping from one place to another, looking at every part of me. Every part except for my eyes. He seemed more interested in how I looked or what I was made of than who I was. Yet his strange attention didn’t really matter. Something else caught my attention. It was a word that the captain had also said while looking at me, a word that somehow skilfully escaped through the fabric of my memory device.

I looked at my hands, and nothing seemed strange: my white skin looked perfectly normal, perfectly human. My fingers seemed to resemble my own—those I was sure I left on the other side of the milky barrier, in a universe from which I now felt I had never been a part of, just like sometimes when we return from a trip, we feel as though we have never left. Looking at my hands, searching through every corner of my mind for a trace that would reveal the true nature of my form, I felt something weighing on me. A very real weight, like a sudden increase in atmospheric pressure. It was odd and suffocating, although gradually I realized that I wasn’t suffocating in fact. Just as I felt hot, however it was only my mind that perceived the heat. In such a way only my mind could perceive the discomfort of the dryness in the air. Once I realised that I, and the way I perceived the reality, was the source of all my discomforts, I felt liberated again.

Realisation is the greatest weapon against imprisonment. The realisation that the world and freedom itself are nothing but an illusion. The same way everything that seems unmoving, unchanging around us is, in reality, in constant motion. Freedom is like a religion with the rank of myth—something we lie ourselves with as being part of us, but that is, in truth, so far away that it can only seem like a surreal concept—like the flowing clocks or the elephantine legs. It’s beyond the probable reality of today or of this very moment. Yet, once I had that realisation, I felt exactly like that: liberated. My freedom to think had been taken away from me for a while, but now my mind couldn’t be diminished anymore. And I freed myself from human nature itself and took another form, a form I embraced as the messenger of a new happiness. Stepping back a little, I realized that my world was not just made of her and it never had been.

As I felt the scent of freedom, I realised that an energy that was pulsating from somewhere beyond the far end of the bridge, much further away still, was inviting me there and telling me that it still cared for me, even now, after so long. And I only knew exactly who I was looking for and what I came to do now, as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes and I could see clearly again. And the faint image that had formed in my mind was that of the tattoo on his neck that seemed to resemble a rabbit’s head with three ears.

And that’s why when I snapped out of my reverie with the stranger’s eyes looking directly into mine, seemingly searching for my consciousness, I did nothing but raise my eyebrows. And this time, my body completely submitted to me, just like my original one, somehow knowing who its real master was.

‘I’ve never seen an android that looks so…’ he didn’t finish what he wanted to say, but I knew. And he could tell that he was right just by the way I looked at him.

The man, who seemed relatively young, with his red skin forming only a few fine lines, stared at me as if I were an extraterrestrial being. And, in the end, that’s what I was for him: a being from outside the universe he belonged to. And just as I was a stranger to him, he was one to me. I looked at his clothes, which didn’t necessarily seem practical, probably fashion dictated what he should wear, like it did to so many other people from a universe he would never know, and with which I imagined he didn’t know how much he had in common. I wouldn’t even know how to exactly describe his clothes—a kind of combination of palazzo pants with a Roman toga pulled over a dark blouse with some leather laces. Their colors were as normal as they could be—the pants and the blouse seemed a light brown, which was hard for me to identify in the distorted light, and that toga was electric blue, undulating perfectly in the soft rays of the blue sun. The toga was fastened with a silver brooch on his left shoulder, and its simplicity was somehow familiar to me. It wasn’t as spectacular as the almost living metal in Fox’s clothing, but it seemed tasteful. On his head, he wore a kind of cap whose brim looked like it could be used as a visor if needed. His features were generally human, if you didn’t count his red skin or his enormous eyes with their cat-like pupils.

Fox, on the other hand, had pulled out some sort of tablet and was tapping away at it. I could feel her panic just by the way she fidgeted unintentionally, or by the way she ran her hand through her unremarkably human brown hair, from time to time. I didn’t know what her intentions were, and the fact that I felt betrayed brought with it a kind of indifference aimed at her. A sort of ‘do whatever you want, I don’t care anymore…’

‘Can I touch it?’ the guy asked, and kept on circling around me without caring if he bothered me or not.

‘Please, don’t,’ Fox said, her voice strained with stress. ‘Tell me if there’s something I can help you with, and then we’ll be on our way. I can’t stay here a minute longer.’

I avoided looking at her, but I could see as well as hear how she searched for something frantically on her electronic device. It was almost evident that I was both the cause and the object of her search. But, overall, I didn’t care. I found more captivating the open interest, the avid curiosity with which this strange guy with his red skin looked at me. His curiosity was like a kind of currency, a language I could understand. His stares didn’t annoy me too much, nor the proximity of his face, or the hands that were almost touching but not quite. He was fascinated, but somehow avoiding exactly the real object of his fascination: he was avoiding the real me.

When she finished typing on her device, Fox looked at me directly and said just two words: have faith. However, it was hard for me to put my faith in someone I suspected of something despicable: the subjugation of my mind. I didn’t actually need any confirmation to know that was the case. That her panic stemmed from the fact that I somehow managed to free myself. Faith was the last thing I could have felt for her.

She went to the bear and pulled out a cable from somewhere between its front paws, a cable that seemed made of something entirely different from the ones I knew. It was made of some kind of silk that sparkled from time to time, as if trying to whisper to the world that it wasn’t what it seemed, just like me. With this really odd cable, she went to the guy’s machine and asked if she could connect to it. He, however, was busy looking carefully at every pore on my face. Or so I imagined, because what else could he be looking at? After a few technical exchanges, passwords, questions, the cable was connected, and was now mysteriously alight, as if a luminescent liquid traversed it in magnificent pulsations of violet and white with hints of turquoise. The overturned machine had also lit up, completely, as if it were some kind of descendant of a Christmas tree, full of coloured little lights. Sure, some might have had their purpose, but I suspected that most were just for fashion, just like the owner’s clothing.

‘How did you manage to crash when you are the only one on the road?’ I asked him. He didn’t answer, instead he went to where Fox was working on her tablet. It was connected by another seemingly normal wire to the machine. In a low voice, yet loud enough for me to hear, he asked if he could talk to me. I rolled my eyes and went over to them to see more clearly how Fox sweated in her new skin and to hear her forbid the guy to speak to me, just as she had forbidden him to touch me.

‘If she talks to you, it would be nice to answer her,’ she said without lifting her eyes from the tablet, seeming completely different from my Fox.

He turned to me and told me his name straight up, as an introduction to our new connection. Thanatos, or Tha, for short. That’s how he introduced himself, lightly touching his forehead right in the middle, just above the fine fold between his eyebrows. I thought I heard him wrong and asked him to repeat, which he did slightly amused, as if expecting my reaction.

‘Like the Greek god?’ I asked stupidly, my ears still not believing it, and in a mix of enthusiasm and impatience that suddenly made him seem even younger than he had appeared at first, he briefly told me where it came from.

‘My brother chose it. When he went to university, the first one from our village to do so, and he chose there to specialise in the Teachings of the First World because he had always dreamed of working around a temple. He could never have become a priest, of course—except for one exception, now 300 years ago, only women can have that honour—but he could have worked as a clerk or even as a translator of the old texts. Anyway, when he came home after his first year, my dad already had a child with his new wife, with whom, by the way, he didn’t get along in the end… In the first months of my life, I was already a renegade child, whom my mother together with my brother’s mother raised with great difficulty. Anyway, my brother always took care of me and was like a second father, and he told me all sorts of legends from the first and second worlds, and when I grew up, and I didn’t want to bear the name my father had given me, he simply told me Thanatos.’

‘You seem very proud of him.’

He hesitated a bit before answering to me, slightly embarrassed, with an ‘I was’ that I couldn’t hear in the end, because it was a completely engulfed by another sound, a violent noise that enveloped me quickly and brutally, almost sending me into a trance—making me try to see something that wasn’t there, giving me a strong sense of fear, of danger. It made me understand that the pressure I had felt earlier was nothing but another sign that something was about to happen. Fox and our new friend Thanatos, Tha, seemed to hear a different kind of noise, calmer, slower, because they could function as before, without being overwhelmed, without feeling that their minds were drowned by a huge wave of sound and fear. They seemed to be discussing, faces transformed with fear, and then they simply ran off in a direction where some kind of internal instinct whispered I would be safe too. We left behind the two vehicles that remained unmoved right in the middle of the huge bridge, still reflecting the blue light—one gentle and in fine undulations, the other sharp and iridescent—and reflecting themselves in the glossy expanse beneath them.

Their charm, however, quickly changed, everything being engulfed by the darkness.