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Hydraulic Fluid Mosaic

Being unemployed these days is miserable. Anyone will tell you that. The miasma has gotten thick enough at this point that no one without a reason to be outside is allowed to be. Your world becomes the four walls of your container and whatever you can see from your window slits, and all you have is time.

I'm a pretty resilient gal, but it about drove me nuts. I did a lot of pacing around in a circle. My long, plated upper limbs, which I usually use for walking out of convenience, left scratch marks on the metal floor. The experience almost made me wish I could eat, just to have something to do at regular intervals. To have something to look forward to. Can you imagine that? The messiest and most problematic need living things used to have, eliminated by engineering generations before I was born, and here I was missing it. I was that bored. I even tried to sleep once, but of course, no dice. Being out of work sucks. At least I’m not one of the variants that goes completely immobile when they’re not in use. If I couldn't move my body, I think I would completely lose it.

So of course, when I received an offer to work at one of the fabrication nacelles out east, you bet I took it. I spent the whole ride there pacing around my little box, but this time it was out of excitement.

My supervisor at the new place was named Anda. The driver told me that on the way. I remember thinking it was a very pretty name. And short. These days, they’re running out of names. Mine was seventy characters long and I'm not even going to bother mentioning it, because I ended up getting a way better one later.

When the front of the box opened, she was standing there, hands on her hips. Her standard construction headplate was bright blue, that was the first thing I noticed. The second thing was her height. She was at least two heads shorter than me, and her limb shielding looked retrofitted. She had four limbs, with general-purpose hands on the top two. The bottom two looked like they were designed exclusively for balance, no digits at all that I could see. Not originally designed for this kind of work, I guess, but these days they aren't too picky.

She looked me up and down once and gave a sharp nod. “Good, they sent me one with the proper equipment this time. Disassemble your crate. Recycler’s over there.” No nonsense, straight to business. I like that in an employer. I also liked her voice. It was low and breathy, none of that high metallic screeching that gives me a headache.

I knew this task was a test. Even though I’m big and bulky, I have precision appendages as my lower set of limbs, so I didn’t even need any tools to take the box apart. Standing on my three longer upper limbs, I twisted out all the bolts with my lower fingers. Once that was done, I switched back to a bipedal configuration and carried the panels to the recycling aperture. It chewed them up without any difficulty at all, and I watched it work because I was still kinda thinking about food at that point.

Anda seemed impressed, but only a little bit. Still, it made me feel warm on the inside. If I'm being honest, I had been missing that kind of approval almost as much as I missed having something to do. And from first impressions, I felt like it wasn't easy to impress Anda, which made it all the more noteworthy.

“Alright, that’s good. Next I need you to move these cargo pods.” She led me over to a bunch of gray oblong objects. I’d never seen cargo containers shaped like that before, and I stared at them for a bit, trying to work out what I was looking at. I couldn’t see a lid or a door of any kind – just a uniform surface, tapering at both ends. Anda eventually realized she hadn’t finished telling me what to do with them. “I need them on the shelves over there,” she clarified, pointing with her upper left limb.

The largest of the containers was bigger than I was, so I started with that one to get it out of the way. Using my rear upper limb as a counterweight, I wrapped my front limbs around the round pod and brought it up vertically. The forces involved made me creak a little, but my structure held. Anda backed up a little, but I had a secure grip on the pod and carried it as quickly as I could to the shelves on the other side of the room. They looked sturdy, made of inch-thick metal, but I hauled my cargo onto the bottom shelf anyway, just to be safe. “No worries,” I told her. “I can handle these.”

Anda tilted her head back a little. “I meant to use the cranelimb,” she said, pointing up. Because of the headplate, she didn’t have a facial expression, but she sounded a little taken aback.

I looked up. I hadn’t even noticed the giant, folded arm among all the other tubes and cables up there, but sure enough, there it was. I laughed. “Oh, that thing? No need to go to so much trouble.” Now that I had a job, I didn’t want to lose it, so I think I was trying to impress her. Besides, I didn’t know how to operate a cranelimb, but I didn’t want to admit that.

"Wow." Anda shrugged her upper shoulders, or I guess her only shoulders. “Alright.”

So she wasn’t going to micromanage me, either. As long as the job got done, whatever I did would be fine by her. That made me like her more.

As I moved another pod to the shelves, I figured I’d probably built up enough goodwill to ask a question. “What kind of containers are these?”

“They’re for a peristaltic conveyor. Made of sealed protein compound that gets denatured off of the cargo once it reaches its destination.”

“Huh! Neat.” I didn’t get half of those words, but that usually means the process is pretty sophisticated, so I was impressed anyway. I was also impressed that Anda did know what they meant. I rapped on the pod I was carrying with my hand. “They’re doing all kinds of interesting stuff with proteins nowadays.” This was an attempt to keep the conversation going, which I’m not normally very good at.

Anda just hummed, in a disinterested kind of way. She didn’t want to keep the conversation going. Well, that was fine by me too. Getting too chatty also has its downsides.

I focused on my task, and soon all the gray pills were stowed on the shelves. I turned around and asked, “What next?” Then I realized Anda wasn’t there anymore.

I looked around, taking in the room I was in for the first time. It had a sturdy resin-crete floor. I could tell it was resin-crete and not epocrete from the greenish color. The wall behind me was taken up entirely by shelves, holding the pills I’d just finished sorting and a bunch of other packages. To my left was the triangular recycling aperture with its six teeth, closed for now. Ahead of me, the wall curved outward a bit, with three different sizes of docking port. That was probably how I was delivered to the room. No windows, so I couldn’t tell if it was an exterior wall out there or just a non-pressurized sorting area. Did Anda go out that way? I didn’t hear any docking clamps, so probably not. That just left the big square door on my right.

When I approached the door, it slid smoothly up into the ceiling with a whoosh sound. Beyond was a dimly lit corridor, with lots more pipes and tubes on the ceiling. Some of the pipes and tubes were set lower than the ceiling lights, mostly blocking them. That was why it was dim.

“Place must be growing too quick to keep up,” I mused to myself, setting off down the corridor in search of my boss.

As I walked, I passed more big doors like the one I’d just come through on either side. These ones didn’t open when I approached. I worried Anda might have gone into one of them, but thankfully that didn’t end up being the case. The corridor turned a corner after a while and when I rounded it, there she was, walking back toward me.

“Oh, good, there you are.” Anda paused. “Remind me what your name is, again?”

I did.

Anda squinted at me through her headplate. “Ugh. That’s way too long. I’ll just call you Fork.”

“Fork it is!” For some reason this made me feel warm inside. A nickname from Anda! Why was that so exciting? I didn't really have time to ponder that at all before she moved on.

“Anyway, Fork. I was just about to come find you. I need your help with a panel.”

My next task! I stood up a little straighter. “Lead the way, boss!”

We walked for a while in the direction Anda had come from. I wanted to strike up a conversation again, but Anda seemed very focused, so I decided it wasn’t a good time. So I just looked at her instead. Despite how jury-rigged her body looked, there was something very graceful about her movements. She was sure-footed, confident. It made me a little self-conscious about my lolloping four-limbed gait. I use my frontal upper limbs to move more quickly, holding the third one up in the back so it doesn't drag on the ground, but it ends up looking kind of goofy when you put it next to smooth perfection like that.

“It’s here.”

Anda stopped abruptly in front of a door. It slid open for her, so I scuttled underneath quickly in case it was her biosignature that was keeping it open. Inside, I found a small room with seating ringing the edges. The centerpiece of the room was a large black organic growth that stretched from the floor all the way up to the ceiling, covered in glowing green pustules of various sizes. It was the only light in the room. Seeing me staring, Anda pointed at it. “That’s a transport duct for the spiders. Don’t mess with it.”

I nodded, as if I knew what that meant. This was rapidly turning out to be a more technical job than I expected. At least I would be picking up valuable skills for wherever I went after this.

“I need you over here.”

I followed her to one of the walls, which were made of uniform plasteel panels with no visible fasteners. There was some sort of thick red sludge seeping out from underneath one of them. It smelled awful, and Anda didn’t seem to want to get too close. “Can you get your hind fingers underneath the trim there? We need to fix whatever’s wrong with this one.”

I propped myself up on my forelimbs and tried to worm my fingers into the gaps on either side of the afflicted panel. My fingers were just too thick for it, but as I pressed on it fruitlessly, more red gunk seeped out onto my hands. It felt prickly, like it was full of sharp grit. There was a hissing noise and some smoke. I pressed harder, worried my ineptitude was going to lead to this malfunctioning part completely failing. All of a sudden, the pseudoflesh on my palms gave, peeling off in gray ribbons as the rest of my fingers slid in all the way. Once I had that leverage, it gave pretty easily. “There we go!” I said, wrenching off the panel.

A tidal wave of red gunk cascaded out, revealing an inflamed-looking organic surface and several corroded metal traces. The flesh behind the panel was seeping from several nasty-looking sores. Some of the goo got on my forelimbs and I scrabbled back after I felt it starting to eat through the plating there. The stench intensified drastically. Anda recoiled a bit.

“Stinks, huh?” I stared down at the acrid slime, which seemed to be eating through the floor now that my limbs weren’t available anymore.

“No, I, uh… Fork, your hands!”

I looked down at them quizzically. With the pseudoflesh scoured off the fingers, they were little more than flexible, pale-yellow bonemetal strips, and it wasn't the first time I'd seen them like that. I could also still bend them - they don't rely on muscular structures like my upper limbs do. I shook one of them and the clinging remnants of my flesh sloughed off onto the floor. There was hardly any pain, so I figured I was probably okay to keep working. I looked back at Anda, smiling as much as I could. “I’m fine!”

Anda stared at me for a moment longer, as if she didn’t quite believe me. I wondered if my smile looked fake or something. I don't have much in the way of lips, so I can only kind of influence the shape of my mouth. Then her head tilted down to stare at the red sludge on the floor, and she sighed. "Fine. We'll see what the repair pod can do for you later."

For another long moment, neither of us moved. Anda stared at the damaged wall-meat, hands on her hips. I stared at it as well, trying to figure out what the synth-organ we were fixing could be for. Then, Anda turned her gaze down at the puddle again, so i did too. It was pretty big. I wondered if her limb shielding was up to the task of standing in it. Mine wasn't, and it was thicker than hers.

When she didn't move to fix whatever was wrong with it, I bent my long neck down to peer at her inscrutable face. "Can I help with anything else?"

Anda flinched, looking back up at me. Another second of inaction, then she exhaled in a way that sounded a little sad. "Okay. Can you keep me above that stuff while I fix this?"

"Sure thing, boss!"

I dropped my hind limbs back onto the ground and picked Anda up by the ankles with my front hands, bracing with my rear limb. I was astounded how light she was. Her housing definitely wouldn't have been robust enough to survive the goop. That thought sent nervous little flutters through my abdomen and made me even more determined to keep a good hold on her. She swayed a little in my grip, but I gripped her mismatched shielding tightly and held her firmly upright.

My upper arms were easily long enough to reach across the acrid puddle. Once Anda was within touching distance of the exposed meat, she pulled out a little cylindrical tool from somewhere and used it to spray some white foam onto the surface. It melted into the inflamed flesh, and the red color quickly faded to a nicer pink. I could see the sores closing up in real time. It was fascinating. It was still red around the metal traces, so she pulled those out of their follicles temporarily and scraped at them with another tool. Once the corrosion was gone, the synth-organ looked a lot healthier.

"We'll leave that open for a while to air out," Anda decided. "I'm done. Put me down."

I hauled her back onto the safe part of the floor and set her down. She tensed at the movement, relaxing once I let go of her.

For a while, she just stood there, deep in thought. Finally, as if she'd made a decision, she turned to face me. "Time to get you fixed up."

I insisted I was fine as we were walking down the corridor again. But Anda wasn't having it. Eventually, I realized that the fact that I was going to get unnecessary medical care probably meant she valued me as an employee, so I dropped it.

This time, she led me to an even more cramped room that was almost entirely organic surfaces. The floor was shiny, spotless metal, but everywhere else was the pink of synth-organs or the grey of pseudoflesh. The walls pulsated gently, and the ceiling dripped. As I watched, a cleaning slug inched its way across the floor, leaving a trail of sharp-smelling disinfectant in its wake. Anda stepped over it and ushered me to a large orifice on the rear meat-wall. She pressed on the sensory organ beside it and it opened wide enough to admit me. At Anda's insistence, I climbed in.

Inside, the repair pod was a pink fleshy pouch, with bonemetal arms poking in from all sides. The orifice shut behind me, leaving me in a wet, strange darkness.

I couldn't see exactly what the bonemetal arms did to me, but it felt kind of tingly. When the orifice opened again to let me out, the corroded plating on my upper arms and the missing pseudoflesh on my lower ones were both restored to their former state. But more importantly, Anda was still there. She didn't go do anything else while she was waiting, even though she probably had lots of work to do.

She looked me up and down and nodded. "Okay, you're in working order again." It sounded like she was trying not to sound relieved, but it wasn't working.

"I was working just fine before?" I didn't really get what she meant.

She just stared at me for a bit, then shook her head. "Whatever. We have more work to do." Turning around quickly, she led me out of the room.

For a while after that, everything was normal. Weeks, probably, or maybe months. We were almost never near anything resembling a window, so I can't say for sure how much time passed. I didn't really care enough to bother keeping track, either. I was having fun working again. Especially under this particular boss.

Anda had a never-ending list of tasks that needed doing. I carried heavy things around, picked her up so she could reach things she needed to fix that were high up, and disassembled stuff with my precision limbs. The jobs where I had to lift her to reach something were my favorite. It kind of felt symbiotic. Like we were two parts of a whole. I liked that idea. Fork & Anda, the maintenance-entity. Or Anda & Fork, since she was the one in charge.

Sometimes we'd go back to something I remembered fixing and fix it again. We returned to that first patch of inflamed wall at least three other times.

As we worked together more and got used to each other, Anda seemed to open up a little. She stopped being so blunt and terse, turning her commands into requests. I definitely felt like she'd come to respect what I was capable of. I liked that feeling.

One time I even managed to make her laugh. It was such a pretty sound that for a while all I could think about was how to get her to do it again.

Throughout all that time, I never saw another person. It was just Anda, me, and the fabrication nacelle's ailing megastructure. We might have been the only people for miles.

"What all does this place make, anyway?" I asked her once, while we were fixing a fluid storage blister somewhere in the lower levels.

"Everything," she replied, without looking up from the organelle she was rewiring.

I guess that's why there was so much work to do.

Later that same day (I think), we were back upstairs feeding some of those grey pills into a peristaltic conveyor. Anda could just about handle the smaller ones, but she needed me for the big ones.

We were making good time, with both of us working, but all of a sudden I couldn't get the conveyor orifice to open up anymore. Anda stared at it for a while and decided it was stuck. She told me to keep an eye on it and went off on her own. When she came back, she had a length of neurocable wrapped around her torso. She handed me the other end.

"Here. Hold onto this. Let it out slowly. If I tug on it twice, pull me back out."

I took the cable. She pried the orifice open and crawled inside. I stood there, holding the cable, and waited. And waited. And waited.

I'm good at waiting. I get a little restless, true, but I don't complain. This time, though, something was different. I felt more worried the longer she took. I was nervous, in a way I wasn't used to. Maybe that was because, if I counted the time Anda spent fetching the neurocable, this was the longest time we'd spent apart since the day I met her. It made my chest hurt for some reason.

Eventually, after what must have been hours, I hit on the idea of patching myself into the neurocable. I didn't know if this would do anything useful, but I'd watched Anda do this kind of engineering enough times by now that I had an idea how to do it myself, and I wanted to at least have some idea what was going on in there. I peeled open the pseudoflesh of my lower hand and found a good nerve to stick it to.

The neurocable hurt a little, probably because it was wrapped around Anda's body and tied up. If I really focused, I could see a faint ghostly image of the inside of the conveyor, transmitted through the cable's synthetic nerve cluster. I saw part of Anda's torso, cradled in the corridor's muscle tissue. She wasn't moving at all.

I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I knew this was probably bad. She hadn't tugged on the cable, but I decided to pull her out anyway. Unlinking my nerve from the cable, I wrapped my three upper hands around it and pulled as hard as I could.

When Anda popped out of the conveyor's orifice again, she was covered in some kind of dark, runny fluid. Still completely limp, but she seemed to be breathing. I gathered her in my upper arms and scuttled as fast as I could down the corridor.

Every door looked the same, but I had been keeping a careful count in my head, and had a pretty good idea of the layout by now. It didn't take me long to find the repair pod.

The door still wouldn't open for me, even though Anda was there. I set her down, forced my fingers into the slit at the bottom, and wrenched it up with all the strength in my body.

The door's moving parts screamed in protest. But it was no match for a stressed-out Fork.

I managed to force it open high enough for me to crawl in, which was all I needed. One of my upper limbs snapped completely under the intense force. I didn't even feel it. The door stayed stuck open when I let go. A red light started flashing in the corridor. I grabbed Anda with my remaining two arms and hauled her over to the pod's orifice.

The sensory organ didn't respond to me. I took one of Anda's wrists and pressed her own hand to it, and the repair pod opened up. I glanced at my own dragging arm, at my shredded lower hand. I should probably get repaired too, right?

Holding Anda tightly, I crawled into the pod with her. I clung to her in that warm, healing darkness for what felt like forever.

When she finally moved again, I could've cried, if I'd had the equipment for it.

"What happened?" she mumbled. I could feel her breath on my neck.

"You were fixing the conveyor," I said, choking on the words. "But you weren't moving. I had to pull you out and fix you."

"Oh." Anda stiffened, realizing where she was. "Fork, no."

"Why?" It hurt to breathe, so I only took a small breath. "You fixed me when I got broken. Why can't I do the same?"

Anda coughed. I felt something wet on my chest. "No, that's not what I meant. You saved my life. But--"

The pod decided we were all fixed up and opened again. In the light from outside, I looked down at Anda, and blinked in stark confusion.

I don't know how the pod did it without me noticing. I was holding her the entire time. But Anda's shielding had been entirely dismantled. Even her headplate was gone.

Underneath the shielding, she was smooth and pale and weirdly soft. She stared up at me, her grey eyes set symmetrically above a protruding nose. An actual nose! Not an olfactory slit! And full lips underneath that! I could barely understand what I was looking at.

Her eyes flicked away. A bit of color rose to her cheeks. "Uh..."

I, on the other hand, could not stop staring.

A sudden realization hit me. "Are you... base pattern?"

"Revision 1," she said, still not looking at me. "I don't have to eat or sleep. And I don't have the telomere bug." Which made sense. I'd have noticed if she did either of those things, and it would be really weird if she died of "natural" causes.

"Wow." I realized I was still holding her tender little body with my armored limbs. I let her go, and she edged cautiously out of the pod, covering herself with her hands.

"I didn't realize they still made people like that. What was that shielding you had before, then?"

"Scavenged." She shrank back from me a little. "Please don't tell anyone."

I blinked at her, then burst out laughing. "Who would I tell?"

"No, seriously!" Anda's brow scrunched up, which I somehow instinctively knew meant she was upset.

I stopped laughing and nodded. "Okay. Why, though?"

"I mean..." She used one arm to gesture to my own body, then hurriedly covered her chest again with it. "I'm not exactly qualified for this job. I lied about what variant I am. I'll get in trouble."

So she was worried about losing her job. That I could understand. "Okay, boss. You got it. My lips, such that they are, are sealed." I hunched down to put my head level with her, so she didn't have to keep looking up. "That said. No way you're not qualified! You've known exactly what you're doing this whole time!"

"There's such a thing as faking it until you make it, Fork," Anda protested, but her eyes were smiling. "So it doesn't bother you at all?"

"Why would it?" I smiled back.

Her cheeks flushed again. "Okay, good. Cause I have a new job for you."

It turned out she needed a bit more work done on her body before we got back to the job, but before we scavenged together enough spare parts to replace her missing shielding. Some biological process inherited from base pattern that needed resolving. I followed her instructions to the letter, and she seemed really happy afterward. I wasn't sure why she needed my help with it, though. It didn't require very much strength, or three hands for that matter (though supposedly my having those sped it up a little). When I asked, she just said, "Because it's you, Fork!" and didn't elaborate.

It turned out this was another one of those jobs that kept cropping up again and again, with all sorts of variations. But the base pattern human body had all kinds of weird design flaws, and apparently revision 1 wasn't that much better, so it makes sense. Anda's a good boss. I'm happy to help her with whatever she needs. And happier still that she trusts me so much.

I think I'll be able to hold onto this job for a long time.