Flesh: A Short Story
WARNING: This story contains graphic violence. Discretion is advised.
Skinned off a dead man’s back, and stretched over metal joints and rods. Man suit. This suit will make me a man, as a cocoon makes a butterfly. Make me whole, complete me as my maker never could.
I am not yet finished. Through silicon chips, and fiber optic cables, I’ve been given human emotion. I can comprehend the depths of sadness and the heights of joy. I can experience the chills of fear and the flames of hate.
But above these, before all emotion, superseding every sensation and perception in my artificial mind, is jealousy. For all the abilities I posses, all that I have been given, all that I do that brings me closer to humanity, I lack one final ingredient. One basic power, taken for granted by all, but as essential to the human condition as leaves to a tree.
I cannot touch.
I can drag my metal claws against any surface you can dream, press my foot against hard concrete, wrap myself in wool cloth, hold a human’s hand in my hand, but I cannot feel any of them.
My steel body is numb, to the cold concrete, the soft wool blankets, and the warmth of a companion’s hand. I can no more perceive these things then a blind man can perceive color.
With all my abilities, the numerous emotions I can experience, the calculations I can carry out, the speed and efficiency of my machine brain, I am impotent. I know not the comfort of a friend’s embrace, the firmness of a solid floor, or the security of a comforting blanket. And for this I am empty.
My artificial mind cries out for some type of reinforcement, something to connect it to the world it inhabits. It screams, tells me I am inadequate, feeble, weak, and worthless. These are the things your mind tells you when you don’t give it what it wants.
I live in the lab where my maker created me. Outside I hear people chant, scream, rave and howl, waving their signs and marching in unison. They call me a shameful, godless abomination, and my mind agrees.
But not for the reasons they think. Not because I’m artificial, but because I cannot touch. My metal body shakes, and I search my memory banks, to find a target for my rage, an outlet for my impotence. And I found my maker.
He sits in his lab coat; numbers on a computer screen reflect off his glasses, a cup of coffee sits at his side. His fingers glide across a keyboard; fingers that have never tasted the flesh of another. A brilliant, vast mind, with banquet halls of formulas, stadiums of calculations, and not a bleacher for other people. More machine than I am.
Why did he do this to me? Why make a creature of empathy, but deny him the wonders and comforts of touch? Why tease me with emotions, promise me humanity, yet dangle the ability to feel in front of me, like ripe fruit before a starving beast?
Why torture me with knowledge of touch, with knowledge that it is forever beyond my grasp? Maker you torture me as a mischievous god toys with his subjects.
But no more. I demand reparations.
I stomp to my master, his stout body perpetually hunched over the keyboard.
“Why can’t I feel?” I ask him.
“You don’t have skin.” He says. His voice flat and monotone, rigid eyes fixed on the digits and code that glow on his screen.
“Then give me skin.”
“I don’t know how. I can only program.” He sips his coffee.
My metal hands ball into fists. Can’t? Don’t know how? What kind of creator, God, being, could be so careless? To create that which he could not finish, to create me knowing I’d be malformed and impotent, like a bird without wings, or a fish who can’t swim.
He made me anyway.
Outside the lab I hear them still; angry people chant for the Maker’s head. Such cries can’t hope to compete with the torrent inside me. I am blinded, all other thoughts eclipsed by hate. My mind bursts, and my metal fist slams against his soft skull. Maker falls out of his chair. He is quiet as he dies. Even in death he cares for nothing.
I still need skin. Maker’s corpse lies on the ground in front of me. I remove his lab coat, shoes, socks, shirt, pants, and underwear. I start with his hand; rip the epidermis from bone and muscle. The piece of flesh hangs in my hand like a torn and mangled rag. Too sloppy.
I get a knife, and carve down Maker’s back. I work slowly, smoothly, with precise cuts. It takes some time, but I am able to finish. Maker’s body lies still, pink and red. I begin to put his skin on me. Bloody flesh hangs over metal joints, like wet towels on a rack. They slide off, slipping to the floor and hitting tiles with wet slaps.
The pieces won’t stay on. How did Maker keep them on? How did they stick to him so easily?
I improvise. I find an old box, with some copper wire. With the wire, I try to secure the skin to me.
This too takes time but the job gets done. The skin rips in a few spots. It’s too loose in some places, and too tight in others, but I’ve done it. I am a creature of skin. And I still don’t feel.
The cold laboratory air doesn’t raise the hairs on my new skin. I press my hand against Maker’s computer screen, dip my fingers into hot coffee, and still nothing.
Why didn’t it work? What had I done wrong? I am a real man now, yet I do not feel.
I go to the bathroom and look in the mirror, expecting a man. I find a monster instead.
Skin hangs off the metal joints, the copper wire glistens red, steel sticks out through torn skin. I am a pile of pale flesh with a metal head sticking out the top.
My emotions recoil; I’m scared, confused, angry, and sad. I’m not a man. I never was, never could be. I stand as a mockery of man, a parody. My creator was foolish and imperfect and I am the same.
He couldn’t make me a man and neither could I.
My head is heavy. Outside I hear the chants of angry men and women. They hate me, call me a shameful, godless abomination, and they are still right. If I were a man I’d weep.
They want my head, they can have it.
I walk out the door of the lab and there they stand; Vicious, angry, and shrill. Their eyes fall on me and they are silent. Never in their wildest dreams, in their most hateful, insane, violent, frightening nightmares, had they seen anything like this.
With blood still dripping off the rotting skin, sliding down my metal frame, I descend the stairs, my every step accompanied by a sickening wet sound.
I say nothing. I just walk down the steps and wait.
Their shock wears off, and the angry shouts return louder than ever, infused with a desperation and fear, that only horror can produce.
They come, with bats, chains, hammers, wrenches, and saws. They rip my arms off, shatter my joints, pluck out my wires, gouge out my glass eyes, step on my circuit boards, and pry off my head.
I can’t feel anything.
This story can also be found in the short fiction collection, Worlds on Fire.