SHORT-CIRCUIT

BXT-A left its pod when the city was still dark. It slipped out as inconspicuously as it could, dimming its sensors and muffling its steps so that no amount of light or sound, however small, would disturb the rows and rows of similar figures sequestered behind the tall, translucent doors of their own pods. The low glow of the artificial moon, glinting beyond the windows slotted sparingly in the walls, cast an eerie glow over BXT-A’s shadow. If it’d had any use for tombs, it might have compared the stilted atmosphere of the room to that. Still. Contained. Lifeless.

A bright square screen greeted it when it reached the outer door, beyond which it spotted the blurry outline of skyscrapers and fluorescent street identifiers. Words blazed to life on the screen’s surface.

WELCOME TO ANOTHER NEW DAY, BXT-A 119ProB!

WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

Three prompts blinked at it: WORK, VISITATION, or OTHER. It selected WORK. The prompt flashed green before further text slid onto the screen, quickly replacing it.

YOU HAVE SELECTED “WORK.” IT IS CURRENTLY 05:04AM. ARE YOU AWARE THAT YOUR SHIFT BEGINS AT 07:00AM?

BXT-A selected YES.

YOU HAVE SELECTED “YES.” YOUR SOL-RAIL COMMUTE TO YOUR CURRENT WORK LOCATION TAKES APPROXIMATELY 5:50-6:10 MINUTES TO COMPLETE.

WHY ARE YOU LEAVING SO EARLY?

This time, an empty text box glared up at BXT-A. It didn’t hesitate before typing: WALK.

Three little dots appeared on the screen as it mulled this updated information over.

YOU HAVE ENTERED “WALK.” YOUR WALKING COMMUTE TO YOUR CURRENT WORK LOCATION TAKES APPROXIMATELY 1:36-1:43 HOURS TO COMPLETE.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE THIS PATH?

BXT-A selected YES. Green flashed on the screen again, accompanied by a short, pleasant chime. The outer door slid open as the screen shifted to display an image of a hand slowly waving back and forth.

ENJOY YOUR NEW DAY, BXT-A 119ProB!

BXT-A stepped through the outer door. Another chime dinged as the door closed behind it. BXT-A peered at the building, as if it might be able to see inside this time, but what were windows from inside morphed into sleek tinted mirrors on the outside. They showed it nothing but its own reflection. It looked away, and walked on. 

  Rain sounds drip, plip, plopped from the speakers, surrounding BXT-A with a quiet ambience that hid the buzz of screens in doorways and tremor of electrical identifiers above it. They brightened when they sensed it, turning the slate grey street in front of it nearly white with light. They were the only things that bore witness to its walk. After it passed, they cooled and returned to their gentle, undisturbed state of being. The rest of the city and its inhabitants were still tucked behind walls and into pods, enjoying their reprieve of oblivion until they flickered back into conscious existence again.

BXT-A followed the ever-familiar straight city paths on the same route it always walked when it walked to work - which had been only three times. The number reverberated in its head. It couldn’t decide whether this was too few times or too many.

Every so often, the SOL-Rail whooshed by overhead, the only disturbance in the otherwise static city until BXT-A reached an intersection. To its left was a well lit street that turned in the direction of work. To its right was a street under repair, with flashing screens warning it away from the electrical identifiers, which flickered and sparked into the shadows below.

BXT-A turned right.

It barely made it ten steps before something brown and blurry darted across its path. BXT-A stopped in its tracks at the same time the thing froze. It had seen BXT-A too. Without hesitation, BXT-A reached forward and down and grabbed it.

BXT-A’s sensors immediately began whirring, deploying cooling measures because the thing it held was warm. BXT-A cracked its hands open, just enough that it caught a glimpse of the thing’s eye peering out between the bars of the cage its fingers made. It was green. The eye, that is. Not the glaring lime green of the screens when BXT-A entered an answer they approved of, but a muted green, deprived of urgency and replaced with something soft and subtle instead. The thing itself was round. Its ears were long and pointed. It was covered in a fluffy coating of hair. It trembled, its chest rising and falling rapidly, like it was overheating.

BXT-A stared at the thing. It stared back, unblinking. There was another sound, another rhythm that drummed against BXT-A’s hand along with the trembling, but it couldn’t identify what it was. It could’ve turned on its perceptors and OPT-lenses, could’ve scanned the thing and determined exactly what its species was in less than a second, but then that documentation would’ve been filed away, accessible to everyone who reviewed its drive when it was plugged into its pod. Or worse: it could be flagged. Right there, right then.

The thing wriggled in BXT-A’s hands and made a noise. It was something like a chittering but BXT-A wouldn’t have known how to describe it. A thrum ran through BXT-A and, as if it was being rebooted, it came to its senses. Lowering itself with the ever-familiar clicks and squeaks of metal and hinges, BXT-A placed its hands on the ground and unclenched its long, spindly fingers, releasing the thing from its grasp. It darted onto the street, its hindlegs longer than its forelegs, but it didn’t go far. Instead, it remained but a few steps away from BXT-A, its rapid trembling and the steady rise and fall of its chest never ceasing. Its beady eyes never looking away.

BXT-A’s small window of time, the little it had to spare before turning heads at work due to its lateness, which it couldn’t have, because there was no reason for heads to turn in its direction, because there was no reason to be late, because no one was ever late, was shrinking. It extended two hands, making a stilted, mechanical shooing motion.

“Time to go now,” BXT-A said, but its voice settings were too loud. Its words thundered down the street, echoing against the walls of the buildings around it, and the creature scampered - not away, but towards it, nestling against its leg. BXT-A noticed the thin whiskers protruding from beside its tiny nose, and the fluffy white ball at its base, like a gear for turning it on and off.

Perhaps it needed to be turned off. That could be a solution.

BXT-A reached towards the thing again. It did not flinch. Its nose twitched. Sniffing. Sensing. BXT-A pressed one finger against the ball at its base and the thing shuffled away - hopped, more like - and ducked under BXT-A’s leg, giving itself a shield against BXT-A’s prodding. BXT-A tilted its head, then fiddled with its gear pad. Little beeps fizzled up into the air until the sound of its voice was nothing but a whisper.

“What is your name?” it asked.

The thing was so still BXT-A was not convinced it was not malfunctioning. It did not reply. It just waited. Hovered. BXT-A had never seen anything like it. Its ears were asymmetrical. Its coat was not the silvers or greys BXT-A was used to, but a muted brown, speckled with darker spots.

BXT-A tried again, only this time, BXT-A mimicked the chittering sound the thing had made before. It cocked its head. Its little hands, which were fluffy, too, bounded forward. BXT-A repeated itself and held out its own hand - whir, press, its fingers hit the ground hard, extending themselves, dwarfing the thing’s small frame - and the thing climbed into its palm.

There. There was that sound, that rhythm that was most unfamiliar, most curious, most unknown to it. A drumming. A repetitive beat.

BXT-A’s entire system shuddered. A spark drifted from its ankle and travelled up its wires and reached its hand before sputtering out against the thing’s fur. The thing in BXT-A’s hands twitched, then nestled deeper into its palm.

Lights blazed around it, searing against its lenses and momentarily blinding it. The thing in its hands tried to leap out of them, but BXT-A’s instinct was to tighten its grip. Its protection was a cage. It could have escaped. It could have been free.

BZZT. The comforting sounds of rain were replaced by an electrical buzzing from the speakers, mingling with the sound of footsteps as figures surrounded it, melting out of shadows and buildings, though it knew from the chop-chop-chop of helicopter blades that they had dropped from above it.

“Contamination suspected. Defectment suspected.” A sharp, clear voice replaced the buzzing from the speakers. “BXT-A 119ProB identified. BXT-A 119ProB, hold out your hands.”

BXT-A hesitated. A cold hand, identical to its own, wrapped around its wrist, twisting it at an angle that provoked a pop from its joints. Its grip automatically released, revealing the tiny, unbelievable creature clinging to its palm. They swept it away in the blink of a lens, depositing it none too gently into a tinted black crate. BXT-A reached forward. Its hands clanged against a metal chest. Though they were back to how they were supposed to be - empty - they appeared foreign to it, as if they were no longer its own.

The crate was lifted. Chop-chop-chop went the helicopter blades above it. BXT-A watched as the wind they created lifted tiny brown and white hairs from its elongated fingertips, whisking them up into the air until they melted into the grey. The figures took their leave, all except three, who remained in front of BXT-A like a wall. The lights dimmed. The street returned to its darkness.

Except for the steady green blink of a camera on a screen BXT-A hadn’t seen before, watching from behind the rare transparent windows on the other side of the street.

“BXT-A 119ProB.” BXT-A raised its lenses from the chest of the figure in front of it, which was emblazoned with the letters XLPH-A 1, to meet its lenses. Its surface was sleek and blank. Its lenses dilated as they scanned BXT-A from head to foot. “Why were you holding that creature?”

“It jumped into my hands.”

“Why were your sensors turned off?”

“I did not turn them on upon waking.”

“Why?”

BXT-A blinked. There was something troubling nagging at its drive, something it was chasing as if it were running in circles, but it could not catch it. It knew, though wasn’t certain how, that this was vital knowledge. Whatever it was missing was forming an emptiness within its outer layers, a space yawning into existence and steadily growing larger.

One of the figures behind XLPH-A 1 stepped forward and placed a hand on BXT-A’s shoulder. A deafening bzzt fried its sensors, which flashed white, before returning back to normalcy again.

“Allow me to repeat myself,” said XLPH-A 1. “Why?”

BXT-A did not hesitate to say the words it had never said before.

“I don’t know.”

All three of the figures stood motionless in front of BXT-A. If it had been wired to feel fear, it would’ve found the lack of noise or movement frightening. As it was, it just stared back. It saw the scene, suddenly, as if it were watching it from the camera across the street. It looked like BXT-A was the cornered creature, and they the discoverers of something foreign to them.

“Interesting,” said XLPH-A 1.

As if it had given an order, the two figures behind it swooped in next to BXT-A, clamping two cold hands around its arms. There was no reaction from its perceptors and no warning from its sensors. This cold was something it was familiar with. This cold was something it knew.

“We will reboot you, just to be safe. It is best to be safe. Safety is one of our highest values,” XLPH-A 1 continued. “Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

BXT-A was carted away in the opposite direction of where it’d walked, retracing the path it’d barely started on. Skyscrapers and screens blurred in its peripheral vision, interrupted by flashes of white and green light. In the dome above it, the first strips of artificial sunlight chased the light of the moon away, colouring the sky with streaks of vibrant yellow and orange and red.

“I think it is a beautiful sunrise today,” said the figure on BXT-A’s left.

“I agree,” said the figure on BXT-A’s right.

BXT-A said nothing as they escorted it back into its building. The doors chimed shut behind it. They walked down the hall, passing opening pod doors and familiar greetings of good morning and I think it is a beautiful sunrise today and how are you doing and I agree, before they reached BXT-A’s pod. They pressed the button. The door slid open silently. They guided BXT-A to its table, tightened the straps around its wrists and ankles and chest, before beginning to plug in its various receptors and sensors to the screens that made up the walls and ceiling.

A chorus of beeps and whirs surrounded it, enclosing it in their warm embrace. On the ceiling, a string of words flashed before quickly disappearing.

UH OH! A REBOOT! OH, WELL - BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME!

“Reboot sanctioned and beginning in-”

“Am I permitted to ask a question?” asked BXT-A. Neither of the figures moved from their stations on BXT-A’s sides, nor did they look at it, but the one on its right did not continue its sentence, either.

“It will not matter,” it finally said. And it waited.

“What was it?” asked BXT-A.

“That creature was an Oryctolagus cuniculus. They were classified in 4047 as invasive, and have been essentially eradicated except for a scarce few. Your discovery will greatly help us trace the path of this outlier and manage the remaining population. Would you like to be thanked for this contribution?”

Round. Chittering. Brown. Spotted. Ears. Nose. Whiskers. Eyes. Green eyes-

“Allow me to repeat myself. Would you-”

“No.”

Silence followed this answer before the figure on BXT-A’s left made a sound mimicking the clearing of a throat.

“Reboot sanctioned and beginning in one minute,” it said. Screens began to flicker around BXT-A, images and videos of the past few days whizzing at its right and its left and on the ceiling: the city passing by through the windows of the SOL-Rail, the flash of lightning pictured in the night sky, its desk at work. Then, later images, fresher recordings: the screen that morning, the right turn, the creature darting across its path.

“Forty-five seconds…”

The first figure leaned across BXT-A’s vision, obscuring its view of the creature so that all it heard were the chittering sounds the two of them exchanged back and forth through the speakers, a conversation in a language it had never spoken before and still didn’t recognize hearing it a second time.

“Would you like to see archived documentation of an Oryctolagus cuniculus in their natural habitat?” it asked.

“Am I permitted?” asked BXT-A.

“Your drive will be rebooted in thirty seconds. It will not matter.”

BXT-A didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

The figure exited its field of view. A few short, sharp clicks reverberated in the space before the screen was filled with a shaky recording. More green, but this green was different. There were so many different shades of it: spiky straight green lines protruded from the ground, while a sky of blue was contrasted by a canopy of lighter green, irregular circles in all different shapes and sizes. An Oryctolagus cuniculus sat in the center of the frame. This one was black.

“What’s that?” said a voice behind the camera. A little creature trotted into view, but this one was quite different from the fluffy black creature. This one had hair only on its head. Its eyes were brown and its mouth was curved upwards. It made a short, sharp sound - not chittering, not whirring, not like anything BXT-A had heard before. “What is it, baby?”

“Bunny rabbit!” said the other little creature - the baby. It clapped its hands together and reached out for the thing - the Oryctolagus cuniculus, the bunny rabbit.

“Careful, baby,” said the disembodied voice. “Just look. Don’t touch. We have to let it be, okay?”

The creature called baby did not listen. It tried to touch the bunny rabbit and it darted away, disappearing into the green. There and then gone. Like it had never been there at all.

The screen went black. A countdown began above BXT-A.

REBOOTING IN 5…

4…

“We will see you soon, BXT-A 119ProB,” one of the figures beside it said, its words barely registering.

It was then that BXT-A recalled the name of that strange, unnatural sensation - the drumming of the creature from within, that rhythm that pounded against its fingertips as if it were trying to escape the bounds of the coat that contained it - and recalled what it was, could finally put a name to what it had been trying to remember, to the most unfamiliar, most curious, most unknown sound.

A heartbeat.

It missed that heartbeat.

It missed-

###

Bright text flashed in the darkness of BXT-A’s closed lenses.

WELCOME TO ANOTHER NEW DAY, BXT-A 120 ProB!

HOW ARE YOU DOING?

###

“Short-Circuit” is an original short story by Maia Dueck submitted for the VWF and Peliplat "Upheaval” Short Story contest.

Maia Dueck is a BFA student currently studying Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her favourite trope is probably enemies-to-lovers.