By:
Stephanie Train
Chance. Born blue and covered in afterbirth. He wouldn’t breathe right away and his mother, now gone to Heaven, cried to the nurses, “save my baby, God, please.” He finally let out a cry, a small one, a prelude to his small size and stature as he grew from a small boy into a small man. The cry sounded like a kitten mewling, his tiny fists clawing at the air, his eyes screwed shut. He could finally breathe.
He was hooked up to machines that breathed for him for the days after he was born, clear tubes that came out his body like stringy, plastic organs. He never had that one lazy eye corrected and he always walked with a limp–or a shuffle rather–but at least he could walk.
Chance wasn’t a family name, it was the story of his life: gasping for air out of his mother’s birth canal, surviving a fall from the tree at age six—the tree the other kids told him he could never climb. (But he did, and he fell.) Surviving physical therapy. Surviving the 6th grade. Special education classes weren’t that bad. At least he was surrounded by kids who joined him in the ranks of the abused—victims of insult, circumstance and rhyming taunts. Chance can’t dance. Chancey’s a Nancy. Limpy the Gimp.
They were all the same. Maggie, who had been nice to him once when they were sitting in the nurse’s office alone, joined in on the bullying during recess. Kimberly, who refused to be his dance partner during square-dancing intermurals, didn’t want to be stuck with the “limping boy.” Jimmy Joe Johnson, who looked fifteen but managed to squeeze inside a 6th grade desk; would trip Chance in the hall, guffawing at the crippled boy falling on his face. “Way to go, Grace.” They all laughed, always, like a choir with no variation—always the same, high-pitched laugh, a shrill laugh. All the same.
“Model 278A,” the female robotic voice called out over the loud speaker. “Model 278A. Worker model. Processing module 4.5. Strength module 13.452. Endurance module 5. Repeat function. Beginning of Line.”
Insert the modules in through an opening in the back of the head. At this phase, the androids remind Chance of the old mannequins from the 20th century. They’re made organic stuff: skin, flesh and bone and organs, but they’re empty, like the vapid starlets who bat their eyelashes and stare at the cameras like big-eyed, poorly drawn cartoon characters. Chance plugs in the circuit, gives them thought, gives them life.
Archie stands in the balcony, separated from the model-workers by plexiglass. Archie who melted metal, who created chips and circuits and boards as small as fingernails.
“They’re always the same,” Archie said last week. It wasn’t the first time he said this.
“Isn’t that the point?” Chance replied.
“It’s wrong.”
They come down the line, hanging by a shoulder harness, swaying from the sudden stops like slabs of beef. Like their predecessors they’re top of the line—near impossible to distinguish from a real person, aside from the empty stares with eyes like an animal mounted and stuffed—a lion, a great boar.
“Worker 439. Insertion of module. Window opening. Begin . . . begin . . . begin,” the voice instructs. Chance holds the module in his gloved hand, thin, delicate, the size of a quarter. Pushing it into the back of the head would almost be like plunking a coin into a mall kiddie ride—back when there were coins and back when there were malls. Insert coin here. Then the yellow cab or the red fire engine starts to rattle and shake.
“Worker 439. Begin . . .”
All the same. Chance held the module up to the light, checking it for dust, checking it for clarity and quality. Like their predecessors, the module goes in. Unlike their predecessors, the module is flawed. Chance always liked saying the word: flawed. Flawed, imperfect, marred. Tainted. In the past, given to him pristine, ready to input. Now, he held flawed between his fingers. Flawed came from Archie, Archie who (using a magnifying glass the size of a human head) made alternations on the modules, made changes to the programming, made flaws.
“Slip them in,” Archie had told Chance. “They won’t be able to tell at first. You’ll see. Nothing’s perfect, right?”
“Right,” Chance said.
“Worker 439. Begin . . .” the voice urges. In a few seconds the red lights will go off. There would be a work-jam. Chance doesn’t want that in his permanent file. He plugs the module in. It doesn’t go in at first. His hands are shaking. He takes in a deep breath then lets it out and tries again. It clicks into place.
“Model 278A. Model 278A. Processing module 4.5. Worker model. Strength module 13.452. Endurance module 5. Repeat function. End of Line. Next. Next.”
Chance doesn’t know the changes Archie made under his big magnifying glass, burning his bits of metal. But, as he waits for the next model to swing to a stop, he imagines for a moment, a brief moment, thinking to the future.
The androids stand before an eager crowd. They stand in a perfect row, like marines, unmoving, unblinking until the director pushes a button and releases them into the world. They come to life, their eyes rolling left and right, up and down, their fingers curling and uncurling in awareness. All but one begins to walk around. All but one makes precise steps. One lurches forward and a moment of realization washes across its artificial features. It limps toward the others, dragging a foot behind it like a lame dog.
The director’s lips tighten; his eyes twitch. The workers gasp and rush and panic. Even the other androids pause and look, their defects hidden for now as they consider. Then it erupts from the crowd–a crowd that’s used to perfection, that has grown numb to symmetry–cascading up and down the aisles like notes on a scale: applause. Applause.
