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The disgraced professor Amane Yugi is threading artificial veins and wire again, tonight.
Amane’s latest laboratory is “quiet,” so far as he’s concerned, except that he knows it would seem insufferably loud to anyone just stumbling in. Wires hum, tangled through the old stone floors, woven across his lab table, strung above him like spiderwebs through the once-holy cathedral ceiling. Mechanical limbs click and whir as Amane’s many faceless attendants tend to their duties. Some mix the electrically-charged formula he dyes red, to serve as blood; some run simulations for him, plugged into stark white cubicles full of whispering screens. They’re all playing out relatively simple programming. They’re not the sort of AI meant to look up with any kind of curiosity at the stained glass windows — martyrs with bloody skin, angels watching with unreadable smiles — surrounding the laboratory, here.
This used to be a church, yes, in a town that got swallowed up by the bog. Amane bought this land with the last of his and his brother’s inheritance. He doesn’t mind the mud, or the mostly-sunken houses, the brambles slinking in closer all the time. He doesn’t mind the monsters watching with yellow eyes and needle-teeth in the dark. His faceless attendants deal with them easily enough; his wires are braided all through the muck, here, so he’s reasonably certain the laboratory, at least, will never sink too deep. It’s like he’s holding it, dripping, in his partially-mechanical hand. Ancient spires, polished white plastic. Dusty old hymnals rotting away somewhere, glinting metal chips that hold minds, scripted personalities, personalized nightmares.
Amane has a body spread out on the laboratory table, just now. Don’t worry, it isn’t breathing. He would need to switch it on again for any of that, just like he has to switch on any backup pair of artificial lungs before using them himself. There is a porcelain panel in the front of Amane’s chest that he doesn’t have to hide, out here where nobody goes, for just that very purpose. When he was young, his heart gave out on him. Then all his other little organs, one by one by one. That was what started Amane and his brother down this road: wanting to mend, to improve what had been built broken.
Amane had said, “Do you wanna try and fix me?”
And his brother had answered, “Of course! Again and again, until we get it right.”
Most of the time, they succeeded, when they tried to fix themselves. Failing vision was easy enough to remedy — Amane’s eyes have been replaced plenty of times, and his brother’s too, before he died. Broken bones can be exchanged for metal ones at no unreasonable cost.
But Amane’s brother should’ve known better than to work on replacing his own poisoned brain without Amane’s steadying hand to guide him, to pull him back when he demanded results from metal and skin too quickly. He hadn’t wanted Amane to worry about him, or something like that. Amane hadn’t even realized he was sick, after all. That’s what their old teacher speculates, in his letters, now. Amane doesn’t respond to those letters, anymore, but at least he reads them. He doesn’t deserve to read any letters from Nene Yashiro, who he was courting, once, when his discoveries were still getting published in respectable scientific journals. At least not yet. Not until he’s finished his work and made up for his blindness.
Amane’s brother used to like to play music on an old radio, while they worked, to smother some of the laboratory’s churning in easy, playful jazz. Amane doesn’t deserve anything so familiar, just like he doesn’t deserve Nene’s letters.
His fingers — one hand gloved, the other metallic — finish assembling the wires in the body on the lab table’s neck. They click the pale porcelain skin closed and search along it for a bit of emptiness at the edge of the body’s jawbone (this body has no bones.) Amane slides an updated mind into this shell, constructed from lines upon lines of simulation, lines upon lines or recorded data, lines upon lines of furious hope. He pries one of the body’s hollow golden eyes a little bit open and wonders if it will recognize him when it comes alive again.
***
Tsukasa wakes up in a clean white simulation cubicle again, tonight. He stretches, yawning so that metal and blinking wires show through just a little bit from behind his porcelain face. That face was built in about the same way as a death mask, he knows. Amane builds it again using his own face as a model whenever Tsukasa breaks another one. Tsukasa prefers not to wear it. It isn’t real the way his mess of wires is, but it makes Amane happy.
Tsukasa glances around his simulation cubicle. Aw. He’s supposed to play alone for a while, isn’t he? He can run a simulation of the world beyond this lab, if he wants to. He can pretend at going to university, or being in love, or becoming a serial killer. Whatever he likes. Except, Amane will watch his results later on, and grade them… somehow. Tsukasa isn’t sure what he’s looking for. Sometimes, what he does makes Amane laugh, relieved. Other times, his choices make Amane pry his mind out from the little hole by his jaw.
“You aren’t quite right,” Amane says, then, or something like it. “We’ll try this thing again, okay?” But… like… why? Tsukasa can’t be anything but right. He doesn’t know which of his choices will need reprogramming, when Amane studies them over a cup of coffee Tsukasa can’t drink, so he’s always one-hundred-percent honest all the time.
A few weeks ago, Tsukasa took one of the faceless attendants apart to see how it worked, and he was rewarded, for that. Amane spent a lot of time with him, then — they watched old monster movies in the simulation cubicles, one face stretched out across a wall of screens, and played with the piles of board games Tsukasa usually has to figure out how to use by himself. But then he messed up again, and now Tsukasa hasn’t seen Amane in a long time. He can feel that. It’s a block of dreaming, a stretch of missing time. “Dreaming” isn’t the right word for it, of course. There aren’t words for a lot of things Tsukasa wants to say.
Amane’s told Tsukasa that sometimes, when he wakes up after being shut off, he doesn’t remember he’s an artificial intelligence. Not that he thinks he should be human, or anything, but he has to be taught that his files read “Experiment T. Yugi” all over again. He has to be reminded how to walk, and how the simulation cubicles work, and all kinds of stuff. Maybe it means something glitches in his programming; maybe it means Amane’s getting closer to whatever it is he’s trying to turn Tsukasa into.
“How can I tell you’re really feeling anything?” Amane asks Tsukasa over and over, when he’s getting sad. “How can I tell you aren’t just playing with everything? Is that all you could ever do, even back then?”
All the world is just a bunch of games, so far as Tsukasa’s ever known it. Of course he’s always just playing. He pretends to be human, in the simulation cubicles, and he pretends to be patient all the time. He wishes Amane would come and play with him again tonight, but he’s probably still busy fixing Tsukasa’s foot. He broke it while climbing up past the stained glass Saint Michael, peeking out the one cracked stained glass window at the bog beyond their home. He watched a monster eat another monster. It was beautiful — lots of ripped and splintering pieces. The wetness caught in the sunlight like art.
Tsukasa doesn’t mind having a chipped porcelain foot, just like he wouldn’t mind if he got to wriggle around on some metal wire tentacles, one of these days, if Amane ever has to rebuild his legs. But Amane says, “You’re here to be fixed,” and Tsukasa knows “fixed” means he’s wearing all of his skin most of the time. It’s okay. Tsukasa has already pried most of the wires in his feet apart — he knows exactly how to slip them back together so Amane barely even notices he’s been messing with them.
“Are you lonely, while I’m working?” Amane has asked, and Tsukasa says, “Yes,” but really he means he’s bored. Does Amane want him to be lonely? How would Tsukasa even know, if he ever gets that way?
Tsukasa stands up, shaking out his feet. One porcelain, one just bound-up wires and clear tubes of make-believe blood. He wishes he could know what exactly he and Amane are doing here. Is he supposed to be a new version of Amane himself, just better, somehow? Is he supposed to be somebody else? If so… it would probably be easier if Amane just told him what to say. He could memorize his lines, recite his feelings like running any other program, and then they’d get to watch monster movies together all the time.
Probably.
Tsukasa slouches over to the control panel on the side of the simulation cubicle and dials in one of his favorite programs. He’s going to run around in the forest under a blazing summer sun he couldn’t feel on his porcelain skin even if he wanted to. Since he can’t really imagine what that would be like, he doesn’t mind.
***
Miss Aoi Akane finally finds her way to the bog-swallowed ghost town after days of the very worst camping she’s ever known, tonight. Usually, when she’s performing at the theater, Aoi is spotless and smiling. Her hair is always silky, pinned with crystals and flowers and bits of candy. Now, it’s full of dead leaves and mud. Her long black leather coat is absolutely ruined. She’s had to pry leeches off her boots every night by the fire, and most of the time she’s barely been sure she’s going the right way.
Only now, when she actually sees the godless cathedral-laboratory she’s been looking for, does Aoi let herself really believe she might not come back to her best friend Nene Yashiro empty-handed. Nene has been telling stories about Amane Yugi since Aoi met her — she says he’s funny, and brilliant, and way too hard on himself. She says he blames himself for his brother’s death, although it really wasn’t his fault. Not completely. She says she’s afraid of what he’s up to, out here all by himself, and afraid he’ll never let himself come home.
Standing at the feet of the godless cathedral-laboratory means wading through knee-deep sludge, staring up at crackling stained glass light. Aoi clears her throat and calls in a voice that would reach the very back of the theater: “Mr. Yugi? I know you’re here!”
She doesn’t know Amane Yugi is here. She waits, and nothing replies.
“Mr. Yugi! Everyone knows what happened to Tsukasa! No one’s expecting you to fix it! Please come home!”
Truthfully, really, Aoi doesn’t know what happened to Tsukasa Yugi. She heard he was sick. And then, he broke his skull into a lot of little pieces, one day, with a mistimed electrical charge. It was very messy. But why did he do that? How did he do that?
“Alright, then, Mr. Yugi! Last chance! If you don’t come home with me I’m going to steal Nene for myself!” A long, very generous pause.
Aoi mutters, “Just kidding…” down at her leech-riddled boots. But some days, she isn’t sure that she is. Nene Yashiro is one of the writers, putting together the performances Aoi and the others star in from night to night to night. Nene’s mind reminds Aoi of a fairy garden, full of magical lights and the sweetest fruit imaginable. What is Amane even doing, out here in this wasteland? Doesn’t he realize what’s pining away for him back in the city, refusing dates with other perfectly reasonable suitors?
“You’re kidding?” a lilting, mischievous voice asks, from way up above Aoi’s head. Someone is looking down at her from out a crack in the stained glass. He looks a little like the photos Nene’s shown her of Amane and Tsukasa Yugi, for a second, but of course there’s something wrong about him. His lips are always smiling a little — too stiff to be flesh. His eyes are too bright, and they flicker from someplace behind that almost-face like faulty lightbulbs. “I don’t get the joke. Whoops. Are you friends with Amane?”
It isn’t difficult for Aoi to guess which answer might get her inside. She says “Yes” almost without thinking. “I’m here to help with his experiments.”
“Oh! I’m Experiment T. Yugi!” the man — or something — from the cracked angel window exclaims. “You want to help me? You’ll need to come in, then.”
“You’re right,” Aoi says. “I think that’d be best.”
***
And so Tsukasa gets Amane’s visitor inside. It isn’t difficult — you can climb in from up above on a rope of wires, if you’re willing to unplug one of the simulation cubicles, or you can swim in through the mud in the cathedral’s basement. Either way will get you scolded, if you mess up your wiring. But Amane’s visitor is so muddy already, Tsukasa figures she’s already going to need to be switched off for a while to rinse it all out.
Except… when Tsukasa ushers the visitor in to see his games, to pick her favorite, to let him know what’s supposed to happen next in the grand experiment of his existence… he can’t see any kind of wiring on her at all. It’s weird. Even Amane has a blinking mechanical heart and eyes that spark brighter when he gets happy or really, really mad.
The only kind of wiring Tsukasa can see running through Amane’s visitor is the flesh kind, he realizes after a while — an intricate lacework of veins and sinews, muscles twitching under her soft face to make a smile, jerking in her hands so she can hold the game pieces Tsukasa gives her. Her blood might be real blood, only real blood, all the way through. Like a monster eating another monster, out in the bog. If her foot were to crack apart, she might even have to hold still while Amane fixes it ‘cause it’d be difficult to get back on afterwards.
It’s never occurred to Tsukasa to wonder about how a person made without any porcelain, without any plastic tubes, might move. It’s fascinating. Amane’s visitor’s gestures are so fluid. Her breaths are so sudden, so fragile. Her skin is thin like the pages of one of those old mildewed hymnals. Tsukasa’s known how easy it is to take a life, in the simulations, but those are only toys. For all he knows, they’re nothing like the real thing at all. This visitor is something real. She’s something real even when Tsukasa realizes she’s only pretending to want to smile at him.
It’s amazing. It really, really is.
***
By morning, Amane’s finished repairing Tsukasa’s shattered foot. He’s improved it, this time — he forgot about a freckle near the heel, before, but it’s better, now. There are some ways his brother doesn’t match him, exactly — some little ways his brother isn’t supposed to match him. He’ll figure them all out, eventually. It isn’t like he doesn’t have the time.
The longer Amane spends here, carved off from the city, the more he thinks maybe he and Tsukasa were always both too dangerous to fold back into proper society. Whenever one of his experiments includes donations from a monster from the bog, he remembers how their old teacher used to look when their experiments got them prowling around the morgue. The first creature they fitted out with tiny wires and sparking veins was Nene Yashiro’s hamster, after all. She had cried and cried, though she promised she knew they meant well. Amane still feels guilty about it, if he lets himself. Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t publish another scientific paper again.
But… Amane thinks… he and Tsukasa can be happy here, once he’s ready. Once he’s finished. Maybe he can send a craft to carry Nene in to meet them, and she’ll understand, even if no one else wants to. She’ll understand just like she understood about the hamster, filled with tubes and not-quite-blood. “Where did all his real blood go?” Nene asked, and “You don’t want to know,” Amane answered, before Tsukasa could tell her the truth.
Sometimes Amane thinks he’ll call for Nene — he’ll try to apologize. Other times he thinks he won’t. She deserves better than anything he knows how to give. It was always him and Tsukasa, before, him and Tsukasa digging up to their wrists in something unspeakable. Whether Amane ever wanted it back then or not, that’s how things are.
Maybe Nene will understand it. Maybe not.
Amane is thinking something like that as he carries Tsukasa his newly-repaired foot, taking big sips of cold dark coffee. He doesn’t know it’s morning until he sees the ripples of stained-glass sunlight dripping in across the simulation cubicles. And then…
And then he doesn’t know what sort of morning it’s going to be until he finds what remains of his brother bent over a makeshift laboratory table. It’s a pile of board game boxes, really, that table… but Amane can tell exactly what it’s supposed to be.
There’s a woman, partially disassembled, propped up across that board-game lab table. Her blood is soaking into the games’ cardboard covers, crusting into lakes of sticky brown scab; her eyes are still open, like Experiment T. Yugi doesn’t mind her watching him work. Her hair is muddy, full of leaves. She looks a bit like one of Nene’s friends from the theater.
Tsukasa looks up, as Amane walks in. He’s holding one of the woman’s hands, sliced off at the wrist. His porcelain fingers are threaded together with hers, pale and growing sweetly grey.
“I’ve figured out how the hand tendons work, Amane!” Experiment T. Yugi chirps. “She’s only flesh and blood. Isn’t that fun? Maybe we can make her better, like you keep fixing me!”
It could be, that pride and curiosity in Tsukasa’s simulated voice are genuine, this time. It could be, Amane’s finally programmed his brother something like he’s supposed to be, after all. It’s a feeling like coming home; it’s a feeling like he’s going to be sick.
Now, he just needs to calculate what’s supposed to happen next. They are going to put this pretty young thing back together, aren’t they?