LIBERATED
Mary Borsellino
As often happens, there was already a customer waiting outside the wide double doors of the workshop when we arrived in the morning. It was a man, maybe twenty-five or thirty years old, with sandy hair and leather flying gloves that had clearly seen considerable wear in their life.
He pulled off one of the leather gloves before holding out the revealed hand to shake one of my own. I left my own, much daintier glove—plum lambskin, that day, with pewter buttons at the wrists—on as I took his hand and shook. Most people whom I greet in this way assume I must be haughty, a grubby little cog-spinner (a particularly ridiculous insult often aimed at mechanics and metal-crafters) with delusions of grandeur. But truly, I’m nothing of the sort. I love my work, I love my workshop, and I love the girls who study there. It’s just that I don’t like my skin to touch the skin of others.
I was originally designed to work for a seamstress, and so my fingertips have fine, hair-trigger senses. One brush of a hand against mine and I know that person’s body fat ratio, her general health levels, standard posture, likely activity levels. All this information can make a gown hang just that tiny bit more perfectly on its owner, move a vital fraction more elegantly. Applied correctly, the physics of fabric and flesh can look like talent and art.
Although the fact that I am an automaton is not exactly a secret, I don’t advertise it either. Keeping my hands concealed, as well as protecting me from a deluge of information about each person I meet, hides the small screws and joins visible at the hinge of each knuckle. The tinted eyeglasses I wear serve the same purpose for the matte nickel color of my irises. My long dark hair hides the keyhole at the nape of my neck.
“Sam Tucker,” the young man introduced himself as we shook hands.
“Kara Knight,” I replied, gesturing that he should follow the girls and me inside the workshop. “What’s the problem, Mr. Tucker?”
“Call me Sam, please. My word, this place is beautiful!”
I smiled at his exclamation. I’m always pleased when people properly appreciate the workshop. Most of the roof is made of panes of clean, clear glass, to let in the largest amount of light possible. I don’t want any of the girls to destroy their eyesight by working in dim conditions.
The glass roof also gives anyone inside the workshop an excellent view of the traffic overhead, sky-ships and balloons and dirigibles made of oilskin sailcloth in emerald greens and ruby reds and sapphire blues: a jewel-box among the clouds.
The workbenches are lined up in three long rows, topped with high-quality green felt, against which even the smallest cogs and springs are clearly visible.
The girls began setting up for the day, laying out their tools and magnifying monocles. They each had their own project to work on—broken pocket watches, warped telescopes, things like that. Stephanie, who had the most experience of the current bunch, was trying to repair one of the small clockwork woodpeckers that had recently become the rage for sending and receiving telegraph messages. A household cat had pounced on the poor thing, ruining most of its little brass feathers. Repairing the damage without upsetting the internal mechanism would be difficult work, but the reputation of the Knight Workshop is well deserved.
“Marvelous,” Sam said in wonderment, still gazing at his surroundings. Stephanie caught my eye and smirked suggestively. I ignored her. If the girls had their way, every sky-sailor and trader of diamond chips and aristocrat with a broken clockwork bird who came through the workshop’s doors would end up between my legs. I need sexual congress often, but not that often. The modifications that the Liberationists made after stealing me from the tailor’s didn’t turn me into a nymphomaniac.
“What can we help you with?” I asked.
“Oh!” Sam fumbled with the pouch on his hip, remembering the reason for his visit. “My compass. The casing’s been damaged and I can’t get a sky-worthy certificate for trading in this province without it. The inspector said you were the best person to see.”
“Hmm,” I answered noncommittally, certain that whatever grudging recommendation the inspector had given me, the word person had not been uttered. Automatons, even apparently self-owned ones (I don’t pass around the fact that I am stolen goods) are not well liked by most public servants. We need very little regulating; it makes them redundant. Nobody appreciates the new technology that renders him obsolete.
I took the broken compass in my gloved hands, turning it over a few times to gauge a full sense of the damage. There was nothing too severe required; the apparent ruination was largely cosmetic and the job was well within the skills of any of the girls.
“Annabella, can you come look at this?” I asked, beckoning her to come join us. Annabella was one of the newest additions to the workshop team, a skinny little strawberry blonde with the hard, scrappy look they almost always have to them when they first arrive.
I handed her the compass, taking a moment to appreciate the difference between her hand and mine. Annabella’s was the hand of a quintessential cog-spinner: shiny pink burns on the fingertips from the touch of hot brass and soldering pens, ragged nails, delicate movement. Girls with her skin tone usually have a dusting of cinnamon freckles all up the blue milk of their forearms, but not Annabella. My guess was that she’d spent her early days down in the deep tunnels of a diamond mine somewhere, far removed from the sun and its kisses.
“Think you can handle that?” I asked her, moving my gloved hand away from her living, hard-knocked one.
She made a soft scoffing sound in the back of her throat. “Easy. But I was supposed to go to the market today. I need a new click for the mainspring ratchet assembly on the Pearson-Smythe automatic alarm.”
“I’ll go get that. You do this,” I offered.
“But you should stay here and get to know our new customer better,” Stephanie put in with another of her wicked smirks. Impertinent child. If she wasn’t astonishingly talented at reassembling difficult mechanisms I’d have found her suitable employment outside the workshop long ago.
“I’ll come along,” Sam spoke up. “Make sure you get a good price on parts. I’m something of a dab hand at bargaining at this point—can’t stay aloft without a fortune unless you learn to haggle.”
“All right,” I agreed with a nod. A couple of girls in the back row laughed quietly together. I ignored them.
“You—and please don’t be offended by this, because I don’t mean it to be so—you’re an automaton, aren’t you?”
“Why would I be offended?” I asked, genuinely puzzled. “Something is true or it’s untrue; your suspicions can make no difference either way.”
“Now I’m sure of it,” Sam said, looking amused at my brusque response. “And you could be offended because of how clearly you want to pass as human. I doubt I’d have been able to spot the difference except that when I was a boy one of my tutors was an automaton. I notice the tells.”
“Was he Liberated?”
“Pardon?”
“Your tutor. Was he still standard issue, or had the Liberators got to him?”
“Oh.” Sam shook his head. “No. The town where I grew up was quite isolated. I doubt any of the Liberation Front has ever set foot there. My tutor’s settings were standard through and through. He was excellent at his work. Taught me geography. Made me want to go out and see the world.”
We walked together without speaking for a few minutes, through the throngs of market shoppers, the uneven beat of hundreds of footsteps in arrhythmic counterpoint to one another.
“Sometimes I miss it terribly,” I admitted. “Being standard-settings. Things are so straightforward and simple. You’re built for a task, and you do that task. No doubts, no difficult decisions. Just…clarity.”
I sighed. “And then the Liberators looted the couturiers where I worked, took us, and…well, they said they gave us souls. Maybe that’s true. I never had a sense of myself as…as a person, I suppose. Not the way I did after I was Liberated.”
“What exactly do they change?”
“I’m matter-of-fact about most things, but there are some experiences, some secrets of myself, that I do prefer to keep private.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to—”
“Let me finish, please. There are many aspects of what happened that I won’t talk about, but I can tell you some of it. I was given the ability to make plans for myself and to decide preferences beyond what was most logical for my station.” I smoothed my hands over my skirt, not looking at Sam as I spoke. “Perhaps the most obvious change to an outside observer would be the fact that the Liberator’s changes leave automatons with a rather powerful sex drive. They say it’s to give us more agency in our choice of lovers, but really that’s only true for those who were created for pleasure and companion tasks in the first place. For models like me it’s just one more new complication to worry about.”
Sam didn’t have a chance to respond immediately, because as I finished speaking we arrived at the section of the market that offered a huge variety of scavenged and spare parts for mechanisms such as the ones the girls at the workshop were busied with.
He proved to be an extremely adept negotiator, bargaining prices with such an aptitude that I felt it only fair to compliment him on it as we began our walk back to the workshop, the new purchases stowed in a calico bag at my hip.
“With a silver tongue like that, you should have been a politician,” I teased. Sam laughed.
“I don’t like the current state of the world nearly well enough to want to go into politics. I can effect far more damage and change as a quasi-legal smuggler, I think.”
I had to smile at that. “You’re probably right, yes.”
“To return to earlier topics for a moment,” Sam said. “I’m going to be in the city for quite some time—if I can get approved for a permit, that is, though I have every confidence in your girls—and it would suit me very well to have a regular lover I respected and liked talking to. Do you think that would—?”
“It would suit me very well, too,” I told him, with another smile. He was pleasant, with just a hint of the rogue about him, and I found his conversation pleasing. Of course he’d be welcome in my bed. I may be a robot, but I’m not stupid.
He grinned. “Good. Very good. How long until your, um, increased sex drive next needs—”
“Tonight, if you aren’t busy. Meet me at the workshop after nightfall,” I told him. I wasn’t in dire need yet, and wouldn’t be for another day or so, but there was no logical reason to delay coupling with a willing partner.
“It’s a date.” Sam grinned. Our conversation paused for several more minutes after that, as we pushed and darted our way through the shove of the crowd. The city is sometimes so full of life it scarcely seems able to contain it.
“How did you come to have the workshop?” Sam asked when we were next able to converse easily, the crowds thinning as we reached the outskirts of the market. “Why was that the ambition that took root after your Liberation?”
“Have you heard the saying about the watch in the desert?”
“I think so,” Sam told me with a nod. “That’s the one about how, if you found a watch in the desert, you’d assume there’s a watchmaker. That it didn’t just appear there. That you can say the same about the world, that there must have been someone who created it; it didn’t just appear.”
“Yes, that’s it,” I confirmed. “The religious aspect of the metaphor is irrelevant to me, because I know without question where I come from and who created me. But I’m sure you can see why the idea of the world as a watch would appeal to a cog-spinner. Especially as the world is in need of so much repair—who better to mend it?”
“The girls,” Sam said, clearly understanding. “I wondered, but now it makes sense. Teaching them a trade is your way of fixing the watch.”
I nodded, and that was going to be all the answer I offered. He seemed to comprehend the situation well enough for it to be sufficient. But after a few seconds I began to speak anyway. There are few subjects I feel strong passions about, but my girls are foremost among my cares.
“In the earlier days, when I first started, they came from coal mines. Now, thanks to new technology, it’s diamond mines. The health of the children who work down in the earth doesn’t decline as rapidly mining diamonds as it did mining coal, but their lives are still short and unhappy ones.
“Poorhouses and orphanages are constantly overcrowded and underfunded. It’s not that the overseers and matrons are particularly cruel, it’s simply that selling some of their wards to the mining companies is a solution to both of their chronic problems at once.
“The lives and futures of children are just a commodity to be bought and traded, as if the meat of their flesh was no more precious than the cogs and springs of an un-Liberated automaton.
“I couldn’t stand it, seeing a world so broken. A watch in need of so much repair. So now I run the workshop, to teach them the ways of fixing broken things.”
It was close to nine in the evening when Sam returned to the workshop, and the sky above the translucent ceiling was deep blue, starlit and scattered with late traffic.
“Makes you grateful for diamond-based steam engines, doesn’t it?” I remarked. “No coal smog to obscure the heavens.”
“It’s miraculous,” Sam said, and I thought he was talking about the view until he kept speaking. “How on earth does it survive hailstorms, or snow?”
“It’s far stronger than it looks,” I told him.
He was looking at me when he answered, in a thoughtful voice, “Yes, I believe you’re right.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at his awkward attempt at sentiment. He meant well, after all. “You seem to appreciate innovative engineering feats.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Sam answered with a cocky smile.
“Just so long as you don’t try to couple with my roof when we’re done,” I countered, deadpan. “I don’t mind if you gaze at it adoringly while I ride you, though.”
Sam blinked in surprise. “Here?”
I shrugged. “It’s the only place that’s mine.”
“But where do you go at night?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes I stay here. There’s always more work to do. Sometimes I walk—this city is so full of beauty and strangeness and wild dreams. Iridescent little aluminum dragonflies that hum songs from the radio so passersby hear them and want to buy them on phonograph. Flashbulb fireworks in the sky to help the sailors see the tower-tops without sun.
“Sometimes I go to see the seamstress. The one who…my owner, before. She had good insurance. After the robbery she was able to buy new automatons. I visit her, and I visit them. I help with the sewing sometimes. They remind me of…a long time ago.”
“Visiting Mama and the little sisters back home. You’re more like us humans than even the Liberators think.”
“Help me with this?” I began undoing the buttons down the front of my dress, tiny pearl nubs beginning at the high collar of my dark bodice and leading down to the nipped waist. The long skirt was embroidered with constellations of the zodiac in bronze and cherry-red thread against the crisp black of the linen. It was a modern, frivolous design. I’d commissioned it at the girls’ insistence—if my workshop crew had their way, I’d be a fashion plate who spent every waking moment looking for her next lover.
They’d all be delighted, if they knew Sam’s deft, tanned fingers were working each of the silly buttons on the silly dress open one by one. Too bad for the girls that I’ve never been the kind to gossip.
All that kept Sam’s skin and mine from touching as he carefully opened the front of my dress was the whisper-thin muslin of my slip and the long dusty-rose velvet ribbon around my neck, with my key threaded on it.
“No corset?” His tone was appreciative. Only a few buttons left until he’d be finished. I started work on the worn-in olive tweed waistcoat Sam wore, the fabric imbued with the scents of the wind.
“The way I’m built, I don’t need one,” I told him. He smirked.
“That’s true enough,” he replied, resting one of his hands against the flat of my belly, over the remaining pearl buttons. Frustrated, I pushed his hands away and finished the job myself.
“You don’t need to flirt like that,” I told him in a curt voice. “You don’t need to joke.”
“May I?” he asked, gesturing to the key lying against my skin just above the swell of my breasts. After a moment’s deliberation, I nodded. I wouldn’t need winding for several more weeks, at least, but I’m not ignorant about the erotic aspects of the act.
I slipped the slim ribbon up over my head and dropped it into his palm, lifting my hair away from the back of my neck and turning so he could easily see the keyhole. He slotted the key in place carefully and gave it three slow, careful turns.
I could feel the coils and springs in my belly tighten with each movement of the key, the tension making me more aware of every part of myself, of every sensor and artificial nerve in my skin. I pulled off my lambskin gloves, turning to face Sam and taking his face in my hands as I leaned in to kiss him.
Knowledge of his body filled my mind—the aroused racing of his heart, the flush of want under his skin. The slight sunburn on the back of his neck, the good quality of his knee-high leather boots and the good posture they gave him.
“Your compass is in working order again, by the way,” I told him when we broke apart from the kiss.
“When I have my permits, I’ll show you and your girls the skies,” he promised me.
As we removed the rest of our clothes Sam found and worshipped each small part of me, the neatly stitched seams hidden at the joints of my thighs, the exposed hinges of my fingers. I tasted each of his scars, the little marks and survived wounds of a well-lived young human life.
I could taste his pulse, the electricity of his existence, on my tongue again when I sucked at his neck. My thighs were straddling his lap, and I knew that I’d be able to follow his heartbeat while I sucked his cock later, when he’d caught his breath and was ready for another round. Automatons don’t have the same problems with exhaustion as humans do.
For now I needed him inside of me more than anything. I ached with it, every refashioned ratchet wheel and suspension spring inside me wound so tight I felt as if I’d shatter if I went another moment without being touched.
I arched in closer, urging his face down toward my breast. The flat, thin edge of his teeth grazed the nipple, barely a touch, and I felt so open and ready for him that I think I moaned aloud. He shifted his hips, lifting me up and then down, and then we were locked together, parts in perfect mechanism.
I was going to fly apart, like an incomplete clockwork knocked off the edge of a table, sending gleaming pieces in all directions. I couldn’t cope with something so good, not unless I had something solid to grasp and ride through it. I rocked up, experimentally, letting him almost slip free as I clenched and held him in. The push back down made his length stroke the upper wall inside me, and I felt a wave of sensation shudder through me.
“You feel like silk,” Sam whispered, his breath hitching in damp gasps against my throat. I brought myself up again and then down.
“You feel like life,” I answered, as we moved together under the jewel colors of the sky beyond the workshop. A smuggler and a clockwork girl, in a glass room built to fix a broken world.