Take It Off and Show Them What's Left of Me - Part 1

I put my hood up. It’s like it’s always rush hour here: all the rumbling and buzzing. You can feel it in your feet. The puddles tremble with it.

Entering a 24hr corner shop, I grab a bottle of Sprite and speed down to the back. Right, the essentials, I think, my boots squeaking on the vinyl. A tall man in a suit is standing right in front of the condom section; I can barely see what brands they have around his square shoulders.

We get a lot of businessmen around here. Talos 5 is just a stopover planet, a weekend’s stay at best. It throbs with the rhythm of thousands of travellers: rich loners looking for a poor loner like me.

I sniffle, rainwater dripping from my hood onto my face. He glances over his shoulder, and I catch a rush of pink in his cheeks before he darts out of the way and starts browsing, rather intensely, for cat food. The lights buzz.

I don’t know what was taking him so long to decide: they have the off-brand, latex-free ones in. That’s rare. I take as many as I can and go to the checkout. Fuck latex.

While scanning my items - beep, beep - the cashier raises his eyebrows at me - beep, beep - not once looking away. He taps the little monitor, displaying the price.

“Sorry, could I come past?” It’s the businessman with the square shoulders again. His face is kind of soft-looking, the sort of face that blushes frequently, and is almost stained by lifelong embarrassment.

“Yeah,” I say, watching the back of his head as he leaves the shop. So, he didn’t even get condoms or cat food in the end. I pay and leave.

Most of the people who stick around here are like me, we serve the businessman, in its many different forms. I walk back through the city streets, between the people obscured by umbrellas and the towering spires and turrets; unreal and glittering. I’ve been here ten long years.

In the beginning, all I had was my body; the strangest of it, and the mountains of scrap plastic and metal. It’s the first thing I can remember. I thought I was the only one.

Keeping something secret is strange - others confess the exact same secret to you. We’re magnetised to each other, in that way. My nameless scavenging partner said,

“Parts of me,” they started, “are made from metal.”

“Like this?” I asked, showing them a sharp, thin steel scrap.

They breathed, “No, not quite. Let me show you.” and removed one of their shoes. “You’ll see that it’s not my foot. It’s metal.” They pulled down their sock to reveal a constructed foot and ankle joint, mechanical and wired into their leg.

“It was stolen from you?” I said, tracing the edge of the scrap with my finger and thumb.

“I— what makes you say that?”

“Where did your foot go?” I went on staring into their metal bones.

“I don’t know,” they answered. “I think something must have been wrong with it, but I don’t know. I have no memory of… the procedure or anything like that. I’ve been thinking about it more, but I have no one to ask. My parents are long gone.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I could squeeze out of me.

“Don’t be, I can play football really well because of it. I love beating all the boys at the courts. It’s fine. It hurts a little.”

We shivered on the scrap hills, watching the double suns set, and the numerous moons rise. We climbed down to sell off what we’d found.

As more people came to me, cautious, with their secret metal body parts, I felt I could never do the same, not even to them. I was so far away, from everyone and myself. I was cold and heavy with all their replaced hands, feet, legs, arms, and torsos, underneath turtlenecks, jumpers, leggings and oversized tracksuit bottoms.

Now, I live past the casinos. The mass of neon lights melt in the rain. Through the glass of the buildings, I can see the big, rich men passing their coins back and forth, chuffing on their cigars. I could gamble myself out there, sprawled out on the table among the towers of chips. I’m secretly loaded, but I didn’t know it back then.

I look up at the purple night, and my breath swirls up into the sprawling galaxy. I have something better. I scoot through the line of cars, exhausts swirling with smoke.

It’s hard to explain. I couldn’t feel my entire body, but the whole planet is like a pleasure palace. It was everywhere - sex, drugs, gambling - I was wired and lost in the city.

I watch the dancers spin on their poles, taxis and limousines ooze with cash. The bass of the music curls up like a cat in my midriff.

“There she is!” It’s Kee. She’s been waiting for the Sprite.

“Here you are,” I say, handing her the bag. Kee is missing one of her eyes; in its place sits a milky orb. She cracks the Sprite open and swigs it from the bottle. “The others won’t like that,” I add.

She burps in response, before asking, “You stripping tonight?”

“Think so.”

“It might kick off,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“They found a whole bunch of weaponry hidden underneath the city,” she puts her arm around me and walks me into the lobby of our apartment building. “This place has always been fishy.”

“What place isn’t?”

“There’s old world powers, right? From Earth? You know, our home planet? It’s their weaponry. We have lots of groundwater - and minerals and shit - so like, they must have dug it out and then… I don’t know. Let me get the article,” she pulls her phone out from her pocket.

“It’s fine, Kee, really - I’d rather not know anything about the whole thing.”

She rolls her one eye at me, “Sola…”

Kee was the one who named me.

I’ll never forget her words: You can’t be nameless forever. We were out on the balcony of her old flat. She said Sola would suit me perfectly, that she’d been thinking about it quite a lot, sweeping wisps of hair away from the corners of her lips with her milky eye ablaze with the lights of the city.

Looking out at the lines of cars waiting for me, I reply, “It’s just - I still don’t remember anything from back then. It makes me angry.”

Kee pulls me into her warm embrace. “There’s a lot of things I wish I could forget,” she whispers. I stopped being a scavenger the day I met Kee.

Over her shoulder I spot the blushy businessman from before, from in the corner-shop. He’s sitting in the back of a taxi. Even him, I think.

“Now go on, get stripping. It’s the end of the world,” She laughs, tapping my butt. I watch her scuttle up the steps, Sprite in hand. It’s her night off.

All of us dancers have bits of us missing, replaced with manufactured parts. Turns out people will pay a lot of money to see it, with vehicles parked up now and ties loosened.

We take off our clothes and show them what’s left of us, who we are now. Streamlined and metallic. First I reveal my legs: designed muscle and tendon, bolted knees, sparkling. Once one of them starts shouting and whooping, the others soon follow suit.

“Alexa, get your kit off!” That gets a laugh.

Somebody irreversibly changed all of us. I dance in the body I’m stuck in forever, just in my underwear now. As I work the pole my fingers, hips and inner thighs scrape, metal-on-metal sending sparks. That’s their favourite.

Back up against the pole, I unclip my bra and let it fall. Behind me, speakers pound with the music of a revolution that never quite happened.

The rage is like a rising pool, an iridescent oil: it fills me up. Take a good look at me, I’ll try not to slip on your cash. Take a look at what you’ve done to me.

The blushy businessman sits atop a taxi, chain smoking. I watch him, upside-down, with my head between my legs. I bet he’s the sort to linger afterwards, puppy-eyed. They want to know what it’s like to be with someone like me, something designed.

I shimmy out of my underwear, eyes closed, taking in the sounds of their clapping and cheering, weaving in and out of the throbbing, incessant music. I breathe it in and out.

A churning wind laps the crowd, sending hats flying, and an ensuing confused silence. I search for the blushy businessman, scrambling to get my hair out of my face. Under a blinding spotlight, everybody falls to the ground, fleshy hands clasped over heads. One figure remains standing, moving through the crowd. In the distance, red smoke plumes into the shape of a dreaded mushroom. So Kee was right.

Hands grip the edge of my stage, a blushy face follows. I watch, frozen, as he hauls himself up and towers over me. “Come with me,” he says, offering his hand.

In this ominous, forbidding new short, Beth Cope introduces Part I of her sci-fi world and the characters caught in it’s web.