The Space Between Bodies
Late morning, and the eleven biots and I had walked all night from the waystation, skirting the dead city to reach the sea crossing to Andalusia. We all looked the same, nearly, a dozen dusty and hollow-cheeked travelers, all in tan coveralls, though only mine were salt-stained and soaked at the armpits.
Ahead stood the rock overhang, where sand yielded to bare hills and bluffs. We’d rest there, as I often did, for even the biots would need shelter come midday, when sun and earth burned everything caught between them.
I raised my arm, palm down, called the order: “Line! Stop.” Once I’d fed and watered the biots, I thought to my own needs. The biot that I was calling Amanda this run swayed from side to side at the rear of the line, its hair lank across its forehead. In the shadow of the overhang, I removed my sunhat, dropped it on Amanda’s head. Connection made. My consciousness flashed across the quantum divide into Amanda. No one watching would have seen anything but the hat pass between us. My fatigue and aches disappeared; my breasts and hips flattened. Talia, the name my mother called me–was it still mine? Or had my name remained with my body? I looked at that body, at my face, Talia’s face, her jaw agape and stare empty behind her trekking specs, lank dark curls streaked grey, glued down with sweat.
Talia’s body was rank, her breath foul from dehydration. I gave Talia a hit off a hydropack. She lapped the gel from the nozzle, then shambled over to the rest of the line. The near-AI rig strapped to her leg that projected my consciousness into this biot also guided her movements.
My mind now firmly seated in the biot, I took my usual spot against the rock, the hat cowling my face against the glare.
I slept in the space between two bodies. No dreaming.
My body came back online crumpled up against the back of my shelter. The meat of my shoulder had been punched open and bits of gray flesh dangled onto into the hole. In a single head turn, I scanned the scene. Pneumatic fluid had sprayed the rock face behind me. Vultures overhead wheeled away. The biots murmured and shifted. Someone had shot me.
I gasped, gathering oxygen to fuel my muscles, rolled away, scrambled behind the rock.
Protect the line. “Get behind the rock! Barry, Gary, Debbie, stay low! Bring Talia!” Faces smooth and unconcerned, the biots clustered into a formation I’d taught them, answering to the names I’d given them, shepherding my body.
The self-sealing vascular system did its thing, and rivulets of fluid turned to trickles. I clenched my fist. Limb pressure was low, but the arm was usable, if limp. If the fight went hand-to-hand, best to have two.
We crowded behind the rock. I crouched and waited. Silently, as if maybe I’d bled out.
Nothing moved except the landscape through heat shimmers. Then footsteps, crunching.
“I know you’re still alive back there, Talia.” Sing-song, sardonic, wanna-be hard voice. Likely female. Accent North American, possibly one of the California’s.
I risked a peek, saw cropped hair, fancy specs. I knew her, knew her kind. A soldier of the combines.
“Guess I didn’t see this coming,” I said.
The combine soldier chuckled. “You should’ve. Certain folks are tired of you messing with the help. Now, come out, or I’ll start putting down your cargo,” she said.
“I’m coming out. Go easy, yeah?”
“Throw your gun out first.”
“I don’t have one.” I hadn’t for more than a decade.
“We’ll see. Slow. Hands up.” I could pretty much hear the grin pulling against dry teeth.
I pulled the cloth from Talia’s neck, tied it around my face as if against the dust, and walked out, hands lifted and splayed, front soaked red, hat pulled low. The soldier had dropped the rifle and drawn a pistol, black against black gloves. My disguise worked. She wrinkled her nose. “Talia. What a mess.”
“Can’t we talk about it?” The biot’s tonal range was limited, but I lifted its voice to approximate a whine.
The soldier shook her head, disappointed. “They tell wild stories about you. Look at you now, vieja.” Both hands steady on her pistol, she jerked her chin. “Face that rock and kneel, so I can search you.”
Here it comes. My knees broke the sun-broiled topsoil. She moved into position behind me.
The first shot into my head destroyed the receiver I’d threaded into the hat and the brain beneath as well. My senses dropped to blackness and silence.
The killer, thinking she’d ended me, turned around to inspect the line. I re-cohered inside Talia, inside my own body. Returned to my own head, I should have been worried. I’d lost a biot through carelessness. My sponsors would rebuke me, perhaps worse. But I had more immediate problems and struggled to stay upright against the onslaught of sensation: achy muscles, itchy scalp, twitchy eyelids, and fatigue and hunger.
We sat, awaiting instructions. A hand-sized rock lay just within arm’s reach. I palmed it.
“Barry, Debbie,” I whispered. “Walk away from the line in opposite directions.” The biots stood and paced off into the desert.
“The hell?” said the soldier. She drew down on Debbie.
Muscles stiff and complaining, I stood. The soldier stalked Debbie, and I the soldier. I crept close, whipped my arm forward, and tapped her just so on the back of her head. She stumbled, dropped the gun. I snaked my arm around her neck, and in seconds she lay sprawled out. “Old lady, huh?” I said.
The biots murmured again. Given their conditioning, the injury to a human made them uneasy.
I called out. “Barry, Debbie, return!”
The soldier groaned. Not too alert, and not too smart, but still alive, so I dragged her to the shade of the rock. I plucked off her specs and put them in my front pocket. Then I retrieved her weapon from the gravel, pinching the grip with two fingers the way I’d have held a snake behind the head. Finally, I removed the magazine, cleared the chamber, and dropped the rounds in the cooler sand in the shade. The gun I placed back onto the gravel.
I found the plastic ties in my pack and bound her hands behind her back. Looking closer, she was well fed and younger than I’d assumed. Twenty years old at most. Still indentured, probably.
I could leave her to die, let the desert drink her dry. Would anyone ever know?
I knew it would be the smart move, the professional move. Instead, I shook her, stepped back. “Wake up.” She could hear me. I could tell from the way she kept her breathing slow, quiet. Waiting to explode.
“Let’s talk,” I said.
She trained her big brown eyes on me and snarled, “Do what you’re going to do, puta.”
“Already did it. Here’s my problem: I can’t let you go. Because, bad as you are at killing me, you might get lucky.”
She put on her hard face. “You gonna just leave me out here in the sun? You better shoot me, ’cause you’re dead. Your parents, too, kids if you have them. Sisters, brothers. I’m going to cut them up.”
“Listen to your tough talk, kid.” I bent down, grabbed her by the ear, twisted it like a mean grandma. She yelped, scrabbled away only to yell again as she scraped her head across the hot sand and bits of gravel.
I still had her by the ear. “Shoot you? I don’t think you really want to go that way. Do you?”
She grunted.
“Huh?” I said. I twisted harder.
“Ow! No!” she said.
“Great!” I stood up, brushed off my knees. “Stay put.” She glared bullets and murder, but she stayed put all the same.
I retrieved a folding shovel from a pack on Debbie and told it to dig. It scooped a shallow hole in the stony soil. Then, unbidden, Barry and another biot brought Amanda’s body and laid it in the grave. Maybe they were good listeners, anticipating my orders. But it was like watching a dog set the dinner table. Biots didn’t show initiative. They didn’t talk back–only a few spoke at all–didn’t run off on their own, didn’t strike or demand better wages. They worked 16-hour shifts, all seven days, and their retirement package was a trip up a smokestack. They wouldn’t have found much opportunity to bury each other in the labor camps. Before I’d taken up with the communitaries, I’d never seen a biot outside a camp or combine facility. Seemed I had myself some liberated specimens.
The other biots came forward bearing rocks, which I helped them pile atop the grave to shield the fallen from the desert. I wondered whether scavengers would–could–eat Amanda and Debbie. The biots kneeled around the cairn, heedless of the burning sand, their shadows lengthening across the landscape. Getting late. From here, the sea was a half-day’s walk.
#
We picked our way through a terrain lumpy with rocks and hills, choosing a path that offered the least resistance. With her wrists bound, the girl stumbled over loose rocks. I set Debbie beside her, but as biots weren’t known for their quick reflexes, I walked on her other side.
After her initial death threats, she had kept quiet, but her eyes roamed across the landscape, darted back to me, probing for opportunity, carelessness.
“Let’s start over,” I said. “You have a name, kid?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Or I can keep calling you ‘kid’.”
“Call me Marcy.”
Marcy tripped on a rock; I caught her arm as she went down. She shook free and kept walking.
I couldn’t think of a follow-up, so we hiked in silence for a kilometer or so. Then she said, “Know what I’ve heard about you? People say you took a busload of wildcat factory strikers in Nogales into the desert and executed every single one of them.”
“Sounds like you did your research and came prepared. And you’re wearing the zipties to prove it.”
“Pendeja.” Marcy stumbled again, recovered on her own. “Can’t you take the ties off? I’m done now.”
“Nope.”
“Fine. So why do you steal biots from the combines?” Marcy asked.
“The Amaru Tonga steals them.”
“Amaru what?”
“The communitary I’m on contract with. I’m just their courier.”
“But why? Why work for a communitary? Why live there? They don’t pay.”
“I’m working toward a permanent spot on Gibraltar. And communitaries compensate plenty. In food, water, medicine, housing. Debt-free. No company stores.” I caught her eye. “No indenture.”
A near imperceptible wince at the mention of indenture, followed by another, more pronounced eyeroll. I wondered what her apprenticeship had been like. Eyerolls like that had been thoroughly slapped out of me by the time I’d started working to buy back my own indenture.
She said, “So you like living rough? Making your own clothes, growing your own food?”
“Not especially. But currently, communitarianism offers me a better plan for living.”
“Yeah, because one of the combines is going to kill you.”
“Maybe when they hire some talent,” I said.
“Bitch,” she muttered.
Around dusk, I retrieved a couple of thermal ponchos, shrugging into one and dropping the other over Marcy’s head. Then I set my specs to low light. “Debbie, take hold of Marcy’s arm.” She recoiled from its touch. “Marcy,” I said, “You need a guide. Debbie is as sure-footed as a goat. One of my best walkers.”
Deep in her throat, Marcy rasped, wrinkled her nose. “Ugh.”
For unpleasant toil, biots were meant to replace us. They weren’t so different–two eyes, two arms, two legs. They were close… too close, but never close enough. Faces unlined, impervious to time and anxiety. They ate precisely what they needed. They shit, but in pellets, in small, round clusters, like rabbits. They worked in mines and factories, the labor of their bodies captured far from ours. Once, I toured a nursery in Tierra del Fuego, back when I was taking biots to the Antarctic work camps. In cavernous warehouse bays, biot attendants decanted adult-sized newborns, glistening and twitching, eyes pooled with amniotic gel. Minutes old, they staggered to their feet and loaded themselves onto multi-tiered gurneys that biot attendants then wheeled into shower chambers. The way I imagined it, a thousand years would pass, and we’d all be dust, but the biots would learn to build uterine tanks, birth each other, live in our cities, maybe thrive in the world we’d broiled and bombed.
I was relieved when they told me biots couldn’t reproduce without a lot of outside help.
“They’re not so bad,” I’d said. “Not their fault we made them that way.”
We walked a few kilometers without speaking. Eleven pairs of feet crunched on sand and shifted gravel underfoot. Insect calls had returned to the landscape. Finally, I said, “How’d you get out here? Hiking the wastes doesn’t seem like something you do a lot.”
“Sorry, trade secret.”
“Ah, those… They dropped you by flyer. Combine probably got its flyer through the no-fly on a spoofed emergency pass. And the ride back was contingent on finishing your contract with the combine. Which, regretfully, you did not.”
“Ayo, lady, sounds like you’re an old pro at this,” said Marcy.
“Another life. I’ve had two now. You ever been to the other side before, Marcy? The communitaries?”
“Who visits communitaries? People who want to know how pig shit is made?”
“It’s a different world, the Andalusian rainlands. Under the only moisture harvesters in the European skies the combines don’t control. Most visitors find all that green disorienting.”
“Green?” She sounded hoarse. Thirsty. I gave her a hit off a hydropack. She gulped at the gel as it burbled out of the nozzle.
“Yep. Grass, trees, flowers,” I said. “Gets so damp there’s even mildew in the bathroom sometimes. It’s beautiful.”
#
Walking again, long, fast strides to make up lost time. “How do you port into that biot?” Marcy asked, slightly winded.
“Trade secret.”
Eyeroll.
“Receiver and q-mirror rig,” I said. “Stuff the communitaries make. The setup doesn’t really put you inside the biots. It uses your brain to process what they experience.”
“Whatever. What’s it like inside a biot?” Marcy looked sidelong at me. “Why would you hide in one?”
“It’s quiet. It’s like thinking one thought at a time, for exactly as long as you want to think it.”
“If it had been me getting the drop on you–the real you–you’d be stretched out back there,” said Marcy. “I wouldn’t have even built the grave. I’d have let the desert clean you up.”
I nodded. “Sure.” I thought of a teacher, this old hippie master killer who’d told us, “leave only footprints.”
“Why’d you let me live?” Marcy asked. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“I remember having to talk you into coming. And maybe I don’t kill children.”
“Lady, I’ve killed three people. I’m paying down my own indenture. And I’m eighteen.”
“Oh, a big girl. I’m going to let my sponsors decide what to do with you.”
Marcy looked sidelong at me. “Am I screwed once we reach Andalusia? After I attacked their biots?”
I shrugged. “The Amaru Tonga are a weird mix of soviet planning and evangelical utopianism. Maybe they’ll procedure you to death. Let you stay on Gibraltar while their council decides whether to deport you. Talk, talk, talk.”
“Just leave me by the sea.”
“I would, kid, but there’s still nothing drinkable. I think you should see the green. Even if you can’t stay.”
“Why would I want to live on a farm? Back in San Francisco, I have my own apartment. And a trainer, and meals made to order three times a day.”
She had reeled off that list of reasons, but I knew that hesitation in her voice. Maybe she’d been thinking about the price tag for all that stuff. Maybe she would even more once we’d crossed the strait.
We marched the rest of the night, pausing once to feed the biots. Mostly, we walked, leaving my feet slapped numb on stones and broken pavement by the time the sun peeked over the horizon. Not much farther.
“I smell the sea!” said Marcy. She caught herself and more restrained, asked, “You going to cut me free once we’re on the boat?”
“Why not?” I said. “Not like you’re going to swim back to North Africa.”
We crested the last hill before the sea. No dock or quay, just a speedboat anchored in the shallows of a protected cove. We followed the path worn into the hill down to the beach.
Two figures rose to meet us. Their shaved heads declared them Amaru Tonga, but I didn’t recognize them. I held up an arm, palm flat, and the biots crouched. My usual handler hadn’t come, and a sinking weight caught hold of my chest.
The shorter of the pair stepped forward. She had olive skin and round cheeks. “Talia Jiménez Purdy.” Her recitation of my name was a verdict.
“Present,” I said.
“I will take the biots the rest of the way.”
They knew that I’d lost Amanda, Debbie. To be expected; the Amaru Tonga had their own clever tricks with machines.
“Should I ask why?”
“Your habit of pirating lifeforms is repulsive to us.”
This was worse. But I didn’t bother denying it. “Never heard you object. Or them, for that matter.”
The woman spread her feet, tilted her chin, clasped her hands behind her; the pose of lecturers in the public squares of Andalusia. “You listened but heard nothing. The combines created the biots as property, born exempt from human rights. To the combines and their puppet states, the lives and deaths of biots have no meaning except in measurements of labor capability. But we know biots can participate in a moral economy, where the spirit of the community, rather than coercive force, governs rights and obligation. You took their minds without consent, as if they were still tools.”
Ugh, impending death by exposure or not, no way I’d sit for another one of these. “You know what? I was bought from an orphanage. People like me don’t read history or philosophy, so all that talk in the agora never sparked much in me. What I did instead was bring biots to their supposed freedom. Praxis, I’ve heard you call it. And I’ve seen more than one of my former passengers framing houses and planting rice in Andalusia. They consent to that?”
“That is called labor, Talia,” Her voice ascended, pitch and volume. “An obligation we all share. We believe that we are all workers of some sort. We’ve wondered about your moral and ideological compatibility. And you have decided the matter by destroying a biot in a trap you laid for the killer. Now there is no question. The council has withdrawn its sponsorship of your application.”
I was out. And on my own. “Can you at least resupply me?” I kept my face neutral and my voice steady, but my back slumped of its own will. “I ran low on water and food moving most of your line across the open. And murder by desert is still murder.”
The woman nodded. “We will supply you.”
“Where does that leave me?” asked Marcy, in a smaller voice than usual.
“A long way from anywhere,” I said.
I stuffed down my pride, my anger, my sadness at my banishment, and to the Amaru Tonga woman, I said, “I acknowledge I messed up. Unprofessional, and I accept the consequences. But. I was hoping to show this one what you’ve built in Andalusia. She’s a soldier, but maybe you could offer her a choice. As you’ve been known to do. Haven’t known her too long, but I can tell she works hard, tries to do the job right. She hasn’t yet broken the terms of any agreement you’d have with her. And she’s just a kid. She can still learn.”
I was never much on sales work, but to the Amaru Tonga, a convert was an easy sell. She nodded. “We’ll take her with us to Gibraltar, if she agrees to go, but her prospects may be limited given her vocation.” Her tone was skeptical, but her eyes lit on Marcy all hungry-like.
“You got an interview,” I said to Marcy. “Don’t mess it up.”
“You going to bother asking me what I want to do?”
“Nope. Go see the green.” I drew a utility knife, cut her ties.
Marcy rubbed her wrists. “What about you?”
“There’s a freehold south of here that rents time on a combine moisture harvester. I put in a bid awhile back to be an associate. Guess I’ll see if I’m still under consideration.” I didn’t mention that the freehold was 200 kilometers away, or that I’d be walking.
Maybe the receiver in the cairn over Amanda’s ruined head still had some juice because, for a moment, my body and thought de-cohered; like falling and standing still, like dreaming, eyes wide open.
I hadn’t used the biot to bait a trap, not like the AT woman thought. It was the dreams. The transfers into the biots dampened my dreams. Something about the space between two bodies. In the wastes, I worked the nights in my body and slept the days in a biot. Before I’d found the receiver, when I slept outside, I often dreamed of that day, the one Marcy had mentioned, in the desert outside Nogales:
Of the screaming, pleading, as we pulled the strikers off the bus and forced them into the dirt… don’t you look at me, I’d said, put your fucking head down. Let them think if they didn’t see our faces, they might go home… but then came the cadence of gunshots and footsteps, interrupted as I changed magazines… my proximity to one body and then the next.
I was only nineteen, a kid, but leading a crew. If I’d refused, I might have gotten the same, a shot to the back of the head and a hole in the ground. We planted two dozen bodies that day. But I wouldn’t have refused the trigger. Not then.
Marcy said, “Well, guess this is goodbye.”
“Be well. Be good,” I said. Marcy rolled her eyes, but possibly sad-like, and walked down the beach to the boat.
I watched her wade into the shallows and clamber onto the boat. Then I turned to the biots, pointed toward the boat, toward Andalusia, and called the order: “Line! Rise and walk.”
Frank Baird Hughes is an educator based in Philadelphia, where he writes anthropologically minded speculative fiction. Find him on Bluesky (cultureworrier.bsky.social) and at https://frankbairdhughes.com.