The Grotesque Code

Professor Kiara Muhammad stands close behind a chair in the computer lab of Millennium City Community College, her face bathed dimly in light from the monitor, glasses reflecting the screen. Sitting in the chair is a young man, white and sweating beneath his raw denim jacket- an indistinct freshman who would have been the human equivalent of background noise if not for the zeal with which he has been claiming open source code as his own- forking programs that professionals have uploaded as novelty side projects and switching out assets until he feels he’s covered his tracks. Pretty standard practice for his brand of wannabe hacker, each of whom invariably mistakes technical skill for a glowing PC case and the knowledge of one or two niche message boards that they believe to be the last bastions of the free internet because the moderators turn a blind eye to racism.

“Well?” Kiara asks, tapping her finger on the back of the chair.

Kiara’s introductory-level offerings are not courses so much as they are gauntlets for filtering out weasels like Brent, or Alex, or whatever this guy’s name is. Two weeks of her subtle brand of institutional misery is enough for most to realize that gaming and making games don’t pull from the same skill-set or tickle the same fancies. Not-so-coincidentally, the first two weeks of a term is also the period during which students can drop a class consequence-free and, reeling from a detailed series of fatalistic comments returned with their first assignment, hers are usually too relieved at having escaped just-in-time to realize they were shown the door. The last-minute lines for dropping her classes are so long and so predictable Kiara has jokingly petitioned to have the building named after her.

Instead, she has the lab.

There is no guarantee, term-to-term, that the remaining students are of a higher caliber than the drop-outs but they are normally serious enough to approach the steep learning-curve with an amount of academic rigor or are so negligent of deadlines that they make for easy fails. Occasionally, though, she has to bring a Kenny or a Sam or a Devon down to the Kiara Muhammad Technology Center and stand behind them and tap their chair while they look over a segment of code that they’ve claimed is their own and fail to identify the glaring modification she’s made that renders it worthless.

Kiara can smell the boy sweating under his jacket, can hear the gears grinding as he tries to think, not of the code, but of an excuse as to why he’s unable to parse the simple program in front of him. Nervous, she thinks, stupid. She had watched him fumble his login three times before sitting down to type it in properly, imagines he has a fine mechanical keyboard at home that he buys key-by-key and then ignores for all his scrolling through whatever link aggregator or streaming site he favors for content, porn or otherwise.

The kid’s wasting Kiara’s time, now. Her finger has stopped tapping, has dug angrily down into the old padding behind him. She pulls a chunk of foam out of the chair and flicks it deftly into a nearby bin. She leans in close.

“Time’s up,” she smiles.

It’s dark by the time Kiara leaves the office, crunching through the February re-freeze of campus and shivering in the driver’s seat while the engine warms. Normally she would be home already, scrolling through her own link aggregators and streaming television but an email from the city has further hijacked her evening. One of the inner-city grotesques has disappeared from the network and Adrian Smythe, the person in charge of dealing with that sort of thing, would rather buy Kiara a coffee and pay her consultant fee than wrestle with the archaic hardware that the city never quite has the budget to replace. Kiara spent several billable hours ostensibly re-creating a keycard, having dutifully de-magnetized the many that came before it out of respect for city property (and being required, by law, to do so). The fresh grotesque key glows dimly with moonlight on the dashboard as she pulls from the lot and points the car downtown.

The grotesques of Millennium City were the first of its attractions to stale- unfortunate, because, by then, they were already printed on postcards and touted as the unofficial mascots of the in-progress urban wonderland. Standing around 6’ tall, the grotesques are crude, animatronic statues that inhabit street corners and train stations, acting as massively over-designed informational hubs. They are humanoid in shape, mobile only from the waist up, and, like much of the city, plated in chrome, the sculptor having drawn inspiration from the covers of 70’s-era pulp science fiction. Strangers to Millennium City, speaking slowly, can ask a nearby grotesque for directions to one of a couple dozen pre-programmed landmarks or for the arrival time of the next train or for the current time and, if the machine hasn’t been detrimentally vandalized or weather-worn, it may respond somewhat accurately.

More often than not, some combination of hardware and software malfunctions will have rendered a grotesque non-functioning or functioning in eerie half-measures. Programmed to wave at passersby, a grotesque with unresponsive joints strikes a menacing pose, its head swiveling to follow movement and its jaw shuddering with an attempted smile. A damaged microphone means a grotesque might shout the time incessantly, counting each new minute of the day as though it were a revelation. Even fully-functional, grotesques have been known to ask a pigeon’s name or slap the ice cream out of a child’s hand while trying to point the way to town hall.

The grotesques preceded the modern voice-activated virtual assistant by nearly a decade but their steep cost and constant public gaffes quickly overshadowed the elegant technological achievement they represented. Their programmer, an enthusiastic transplant named Kiara Muhammad, was just embarking on a circuit of national morning talk-show appearances (accompanied by a functioning grotesque bust, named Butler) when her successes abruptly became failures. Forced to watch reel after reel of the grotesques breaking down while the hosts of Wake Up, USA! chuckled sympathetically nearby, Kiara cancelled the rest of the tour, sold what she owned of the grotesque code, and dropped out of the public eye, content to be a cautionary tale rather than a joke.

The targeting of Muslim Americans following the 9/11 attacks drove Kiara further into seclusion where she stewed for nearly a decade, anonymously building variations of the same website for variations of the same twenty-something manbun with variations on the same start-up idea, all from the comfortable hell of her own living room. She re-discovered pieces of the grotesque code in 2012 while jail-breaking the smartphone of a local teen. Faced with the quiet success of her own work, Kiara enjoyed a mental breakdown that extended into 2014 when she was offered a maternity position at Millennium City Community College. She reluctantly accepted and has remained there since.

Most days, Kiara simply chooses not to see the grotesques, projecting blindness where they might otherwise appear in her peripheries. She does not take the train, rarely walks downtown and, when one or the other is unavoidable, knows exactly when and for how long to become distracted by something in the opposite direction. Kiara senses that they know her, recognize her as a negligent mother, and will target her with their eager handwaving or schizophrenic babble even as she hides in a crowd. These requests from Smythe are her only contact with the grotesques and Kiara accepts them as a sort of penance for bringing the pathetic beings into the world and for abandoning them so readily.

And for the money.

Kiara would be hard-pressed to map the locations of each of the 41.5 grotesques in Millennium City but, stood on a random intersection, will know intuitively which streets to avoid. She parks the car and, stepping back into the cold, walks briskly in the direction that makes her the least comfortable.

Grotesques came in two basic iterations- those that were freestanding, like statues, and those that were built into alcoves, their backs bolted into the walls of sponsoring businesses. Tonight’s is of the latter sort, shadowy and unmoving in the recessed brick that houses it. The dedication plaque has long disappeared and Kiara wonders whether it’s the work of vandals or if the sponsor realized the squawking machine was bad for business and withdrew their credit personally. She shakes her head, terminating the train of thought before it can de-rail and speaks the catch-all activation for responsive machines:

“Hello.”

The grotesque does not respond.

Kiara digs a small flashlight from her bag and steps up into the alcove, clinging to the waist of the machine as she inspects the torso for damage that might have allowed snowmelt to flood the electronics. The grotesque’s broad chest is warm, warmer than the night air, at least, which means that something inside is still working. Finding the surface of the thing relatively unscathed, she holds the light between her teeth and reaches for the key, wedged in the back pocket of her jeans.

When she looks up again, Kiara sees that the grotesque’s face has been damaged, its nose dented and cracked as though struck with something heavy. She hadn’t thought to check because nothing of consequence is stored above the neck, certainly nothing that would affect the thing’s network connection. The head is all lights and robotics, puppeted by the torso-brain which should be relatively sealed, even if the skull has been breached. She pockets the key, again and stands on her tiptoes for a better look, immediately taken aback by the smell of death.

The gap between the nose is an inch or so at its widest and a dark ichor leaks from inside, drying in a crust long the twisted metal. The contents are obscured by something wet and red- a grim enough eyeful that Kiara immediately swings down from the alcove, worried she might be looking into the mouth of some nesting predator. She wrestles a length of rebar from the dumpster of a nearby construction site and prods the grotesque’s head which lolls about at the neck and fails to produce anything organic. Very cautiously, she presses the rebar into the gap, eliciting nothing but a fresh ooze of the liquid.

Kiara shivers, cold and disgusted. She begins drafting an email back to Adrian in her head, a ‘below my paygrade’ type reply, but clenches her jaw and tosses the rebar down, instead. Whatever’s nested and died in the head is the problem of city maintenance. All she has to do is pop the hood and perform a manual reset- the secret to an easy paycheck in 90% of these cases.

Kiara hoists herself up against the machine, again, and is extending the key toward the concealed swipe along the back when the grotesque activates. It swiftly breaks her arm with one motion and throws her back out of the alcove with next.

She’s blacked out by the time her body strikes the pavement.

–//–

Kiara wakes in a hospital room, cold and in a great deal of pain. Her right arm is in a cast, her neck in a brace, and the pieces of her body that aren’t constrained complain loudly as they’re moved. She tongues the inside of her mouth, finding her teeth intact, at least, and then looks around for the source of the draft, realizing, only then, that she isn’t alone.

The lower-half of Leroy Kant, her friend and colleague, stands nearby, while the upper-half leans precariously out the open window so that it can smoke. Leroy is the head of the college’s IT department, though he prides himself on having automated the vast majority of his work and delegated the rest to student interns, freeing up his time for cigarette breaks and, he says, “thought.” Upon meeting in 2014, he rambled for a full twenty minutes on the topic of the grotesques, going so far as to hint that he may have had some involvement in ‘Foul-Mouthed Fester’ on 13^th and Cedar, a specimen that would sporadically hurl obscenities until Kiara was called in to reprogram it and, at some point in the rant, he became the first man in 15 years to compliment her work. Hearing her stir in the hospital bed, he swipes the cigarette against the windowsill and turns back into the room:

“I always thought you might be a lonely hag,” he says, “But the evidence is my being your emergency contact. Might tell a guy, next time.”

“What Leroy can’t, nobody can,” Kiara smiles- a phrase he likes to use himself, but hates to have repeated back.

“Oughta’ smack ya for that, but considering your,” he gestures to the bed, “Condition, I think I’ll let it slide.”

“How long have I been here?”

Leroy checks his watch and yawns.

“Few hours,” he says, “Elderly couple found you on the ice around 8:00pm, brought you over in the backseat of their SUV in case you didn’t have insurance to cover an ambulance. Docs called me in a couple hours ago and it’s just about midnight, now.”

“What’s the damage?”

“Nasty arm fracture’s the worst of it. Mild concussion. The neck get-up is precautionary, they assure me. Otherwise,” he picks up a chart at the end of the bed, “Various bruising on the back, ribs, legs, ass-”

“Ego.”

“According to this,” he says, dropping the chart back onto the frame, “Ego oughta’ be fine. What happened out there, Muhammad? Police said your bag came in with you, money in the wallet. No signs of violence, they said, no booze in her system, like you’d ever join us in debasing our bodies once in a while.”

Kiara laughs at this, regrets laughing.

“They also said nobody slips on the ice and comes out of it lookin’ like they got hit by a truck.”

“And what’d you tell them?”

“I said if anybody can, it’d be my friend: Kiara Muhammad.”

“Smythe had me out there babysitting, again,” she admits, watching Leroy’s face, “The grotesque malfunctioned- probably a surge of some kind. Knocked me back onto the sidewalk.”

“And the arm?”

“Pinned in the joint and twisted when it tossed me.”

“Two problems with that,” Leroy says, not convinced in the slightest, “The first is that I neglected to mention my driving back out to the scene an hour ago so your car didn’t get towed. While I was out there, I took the liberty of cutting your big friend’s power supply at the source. Seems like you dropped something.”

Leroy tosses the grotesque key into Kiara’s lap.

“How did you know the grotesque did this?”

“That’s the second problem,” he says, pulling up a picture on his phone, “This is what your arm looks like under the plaster.”

Kiara winces. She’d struggle to recognize her own body in the image if she wasn’t in so much pain. The arm is swollen thick, so purple that it’s nearly black.

“See those funny lines, there?” Leroy asks, “That ain’t a joint-pinch. Somebody with fingers grabbed you- grabbed you hard.”

Kiara remembers the flash of pain, the force with which she was thrown backward.

“Was it still moving?” she asks.

“Dead as a doornail,” he shrugs, “Didn’t want some kid crawlin’ up into the works, getting’ broke in half in the meantime, though. Wouldn’t look so hot for you come contract renewal.”

“Thanks,” she says.

“Theories as to why you got your ass whooped?”

“Tampering,” she shrugs, and regrets shrugging, “Someone programmed it to attack and accidentally cut it off from the network in the process. Bad code.”

“Seems like a complicated way to hurt a stranger,” he says, “Or a smart way to hurt the person that minds the grotesques.”

“I’m not so unfriendly,” she complains, but he doesn’t answer, turning back to the window instead.

The room remains silent for a moment, during which time Kiara tests her legs, wiggles her toes. No catheter, nothing intravenous. She has no intention of standing but she could, if she wanted. When she looks up Kiara sees Leroy’s hand toying with the lighter in his pocket. The man’s tired, needs another smoke.

“Go home, Leroy,” Kiara sighs, “I’m gonna sleep this off and see about suing the city tomorrow.”

“Well, if you insist,” he says, shrugging on his jacket, “Your clunker’s parked back behind Al’s and he says he’ll ignore it for a day or two. Give me a call when you’re done here and I’ll drop you off.”

“Thanks, Leroy,” she says, “I owe you one.”

“Let me cash-in real quick, then,” he frowns, hovering at the door, “I want you to promise me you ain’t headin’ back out to play with your toys unless you got someone at least as competent as me riding shotgun.”

“Sure,” she says.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Kiara is relieved of the neck brace and discharged from the hospital late the next morning with an opioid prescription and strict bedrest orders for the week. Leroy calls to say he already alerted the college and that they’ve arranged for cover through the weekend. Her inbox clutters with get-well-soons that she deletes without reading. She takes the bus downtown and hovers only briefly at the stop, considering how much her promise to Leroy matters. It matters enough, she decides, and she keeps a block between her and the previous night’s grotesque on the way to Al’s.

Kiara exists in a small body, ‘petite’ being a description she refuses to use for herself. Whatever the word, painkillers tend to hit her hard and so she arrives on her doorstep in a great deal of pain, having held out long enough to feel safe driving and to have crossed a threshold of necessity that sits right with her personal understandings of haram. She takes a half-dose in her kitchen and stands for several minutes with water dripping from her chin onto the counter. The shades are all closed and the street outside is quiet. She could use more sleep.

Instead, Kiara drags a chair into the hallway with her good arm and, standing atop, pushes back the panel that leads into her attic- a glorified crawlspace, really. There, a dusty face peers out between boxes of wilted pictures, newspaper clippings, and ephemera from the foundational Millennium City years.

“Hello, Butler,” she says.

Wrestling the heavy bust from the ceiling with just the one arm is a painful process, but the pill has begun to kick in by the time Butler is upright on her desk and plugged into her personal computer. Kiara leans back in her chair and closes her eyes, breathing deeply against a growing dizziness. She opens them and focuses on her old prototype.

On the outside, Butler does not appear appreciably different from her full-bodied sisters and, likewise, her internal hardware is nearly identical in content, though scrambled to fit in the base of the bust. Unlike the others, her animatronics are limited to the neck, jaw, eyes, and eyebrows and she contains none of the sealing or insulation necessary for protecting against the elements.

Modifications were made in preparation for the doomed publicity tour- smooth panels to hide various ports and a shallow indentation several inches below the neck, just before the chest cuts off entirely: a crude hint of cleavage. Kiara had balked at that, only allowed it when someone suggested she change the name to ‘Asimov.’ Luckily the project’s sculptor, a German named Luka Roth, stood firm in his minimalist design for the final pieces. Asked to sketch gendered variations on the grotesques, he submitted a concept to the committee that instilled deep, embarrassed silences with a note that said: “Asimov? Butler? Why not Dick?”

Kiara makes one final adjustment: she pops off a panel at her base and disconnects the antenna that would allow her to communicate with the network. Butler is technically city property and on the books as ‘missing or stolen.’ Kiara doubts anyone would notice the ping or have the wherewithal to track it, but she doesn’t want to risk trouble. Finally, she plugs Butler into the wall and listens as the aging technology rattles back to life inside the bust, picking up speed, reaching a crescendo, and then settling into a stable whir. Dim blue lights appear behind Butler’s pupils and her eyebrows raise. She yawns and looks idly about the room.

“Hello, Butler,” Kiara says.

No response.

“Hello!” Kiara shouts, and the thing widens its eyes.

“Oh!” Butler says, “I didn’t see you there. What can I help you with today?”

Kiara pulls her sleeve up over her palm and wipes at the microphone hidden in Butler’s clavicles.

“When’s the next train?” Kiara asks.

Butler seems to think for a second before answering: “I appear to be having connectivity issues. The train schedule can be found…”

The machine drones on while Kiara pulls its system up on the screen. Butler’s running a little warm, likely due to a healthy coating of dust, but the internals seem to have stood the test of time. Butler’s right eye gets the same treatment as the microphone when Kiara pulls up the video feed. It helps, some, but the camera embedded there represents the bleeding-edge of two decades previous and the output is… surprisingly bad. No wonder they failed to produce reliable facial recognition in grotesques at the time.

Kiara waves her hand in front of Butler’s face, nods in response to a question, reaches out as though for a handshake. Butler has no limbs with which to respond, but her programming recognizes the motions and reacts as though it’s controlling arms that don’t exist. Kiara tries to replicate several poses that might have triggered the violent reaction of the previous evening, knowing already that Butler lacks the programming to replicate the response. Once she’s thoroughly confused the machine with her increasingly codeine-inspired gestures, she stumbles back to the attic to retrieve Butler’s skeleton arms.

The skeleton arms are stripped-down predecessors to the robotic structure of the proper grotesques. Plugged into Butler’s shoulders, they allowed Kiara to model and playback the basic set of motions that eventually made the cut. They’re light enough that they won’t tip Butler over and weak enough that Butler can’t accidentally push herself off the desk: entirely incapable of causing harm.

Still, a small twinge of fear manages to push past Kiara’s analytical confidence and through her medicated calm as she reconnects the right limb. She steps back as soon as it clicks into place and watches it perform a predictable series of calibrating motions. When it settles into a default position, Kiara charades maintenance for a minute or two and eventually tosses the gargoyle key at the bust. It bounces off Butler’s face without any indication that the machine recognized the assault.

Kiara, convinced that Butler holds no grudges, resolves to work backwards. Leroy claims the corruption of ‘Foul-Mouthed Fester’ required hours of tinkering via manual connection, and that was just to replace a few audio files. Programming a new, reliably-violent reaction into one of the grotesques without using the network and without something like Butler should be nearly impossible. Unless, like Leroy, they used what was already there.

If she can program Butler to recognize an attempted card-swipe as a modified handshake, she could likely program a similarly-modified handshake response with an emphasis on strength and speed. A little clever tweaking and a friendly gesture becomes a violent one.

“Oh, hello! How are you!” Butler says, responding to nobody in particular and startling her creator from a creeping doze.

Kiara shakes her head and stands from the desk to stretch. Re-programming Butler’s handshake with one good hand of her own is a post-nap project, she decides and she stumbles to the bedroom and into bed, promptly falling asleep.

It’s dark in the house when pain wakes her again. She reaches for her phone on the nightstand, remembers she’s left it on the desk, and nearly topples over the chair in the hallway on her way to the bathroom. Butler’s glowing eyes look out at her from the office as she makes her way to the kitchen for her second half-pill.

“Butler?” she calls out, “What time is it?”

“It’s 3:31am Mountain Daylight Time,” Butler mumbles in the office.

Kiara peers out onto the cold, quiet street, groaning with displeasure at being alive and awake.

Butler waves her skeleton arm when Kiara turns the light on in the office, thinking she’ll distract herself with work until the pill puts her down again. Tomorrow, she’ll switch to over-the-counter stuff and hopefully re-align her sleep schedule. Maybe then she’ll call Leroy and see if he’s got the stomach for an investigation of the oozing alcove grotesque.

Kiara nearly falls backward out of her chair when she reaches for her phone and Butler makes a clumsy grab at her. The machine returns to its default behavior pattern almost immediately but the motion was unmistakably the same as the one that broke her arm. She tries again, at a distance, and fails to replicate the event twice before provoking it as soon as she attempts it with a spatula from the kitchen. Kiara continues to narrow the trigger until she’s convinced that the key criteria are identical to the programmed handshake activation with one important exception: the approaching party must have something rectangular in their hand. Like a key card. As a final test, and operating on medically-induced courage, she extends her empty hand toward Butler who looks at it, smiles, and does nothing.

The handshake protocol is gone.

Kiara disarms Butler and makes herself a pot of coffee. When she sits down to look over the readouts, again, she finds what she expected: someone, or something, has already done the work she was planning to do herself. Butler’s code has been altered to make her handshake more like a throttle: grab, shake, and don’t let go until no new input is detected. Butler’s antenna is still disconnected- it’s impossible that the code came from the city’s grotesque network. The only other access point would be through Kiara’s computer via the internet- a situation she would deem equally impossible if it weren’t the only remaining option. Kiara disconnects Butler and begins to look for evidence of a breach. When she finds nothing there, she begins to decipher the new code and finally, reading between the lines, Kiara comes to two important conclusions.

The first is that Kiara was damn lucky to have been pressed against the body of the thing in the alcove. The limited range and awkward movement of the grotesque meant that she was pushed backward before it could solidify its grip. If she had been stepping up onto the platform with the gargoyle key extended, it would have had her by the throat.

The second is that whoever programmed this reaction didn’t account for a person surviving long enough to read the code. The strangulation is programmed to cease shortly after the victim stops reacting- theoretically, a person that knows to play dead might end subsequent attacks early. It seems like a massive oversight on behalf of a murderer, but whoever did this favored discretion over follow-through.

Icy fear begins to spread in Kiara’s stomach. If Butler was able to pick up the program over the course of an evening without connecting to the grotesque network, the others will have been exposed as well. Most people ignore the things these days, and the criteria for triggering the strangulation is so specific that the chances of it happening before dawn are slim but she sends Smythe an email and leaves a message on his phone, both insisting that the grotesques be shut down immediately and both punctuated with phrases like ‘wrongful death.’

Kiara’s hands are shaking when she sets down the phone. She clenches her fists and bites the inside of her cheek. This next part should be easy- she spends half her life hooked up to the internet, has a dozen feeds and programs set up to alert her of breaking news. She’s confident she would already know if there had been a strangulation in Millennium City, but not so confident that she doesn’t open a browser anyway.

The first few searches are a relief: plenty of violence, plenty of crimes, but no strangulations, no suspicious falls near grotesques. There are a few retrospectives on the statues, each with the same unique takeaways: that the grotesques, despite being ahead of their time, were among the most egregious wastes of Millennium City’s grant money, that their current state of neglect makes them truer city mascots than was ever intended, and that their programmer, Kiara Muhammad, declined to be interviewed.

Kiara grows angry, remembering why she gave up reading these things. They want, so desperately, to make a victim out of her: a young, trailblazing woman of color who bit off more than she could chew and was thrown under the bus as soon as trouble started and money was too tight to fix it. The thing is, these sites were the same ones uploading top-five video lists of the stupid mistakes the grotesques made upon their premiere. These were the same reporters that thought they were being clever, posting Kiara’s own televised reaction to the reels, trying to smile even as the life drains from her eyes and Butler rambles on about the weather in a chair next to her.

She begins collapsing tabs but stops midway through, all the old bile freezing inside her.

‘Fatality Prompts Police Crackdown on Mirror Plaza Homeless’

Kiara saw this earlier in the week, skipped it like the vast majority of the content that runs through her feeds. The only reason she remembers is because of her subconscious grotesque-avoidance habit and the lingering frustration with the one that stands near the escalator in the food court of Mirror Plaza. That unit saw so much more action than the rest that it was constantly breaking down and Kiara hated having to stand there, in public, and fix it. She cheered, inwardly, when the mall closed a few years back.

The story is hardly a paragraph in length and focuses mainly on reactions from the police chief and Mayor Mann, both of whom assure the public that the dangerous encampment there has been uprooted. The dead man and his assailant are more or less an afterthought, the motive simply “an argument that escalated to blows.”

The reporter includes a quote from another resident of the Mirror Plaza camp for posterity who says only that he “…wouldn’t have thought Jamie were the type who could choke a man to death.”

No wonder ‘strangulation’ hadn’t turned anything up.

Kiara’s feeling increasingly unwell. Nausea as a side-effect of the pill-and-coffee breakfast. Nervous nausea. She checks the time on her phone- it’s nearly 5:00am now, sunrise in an hour and a half. Something clicks into place:

The time.

Butler’s spent the last decade powered-down in an attic; Kiara should’ve realized something was wrong the moment Butler gave her the right time. It’s the stupid pills making her overlook things. If not the pills then the pain.

Kiara exhales and begins to develop a timeline. Smythe will be in the office by 9:00am but she doesn’t know the man well enough to say how seriously he’ll take her. The first thing he’ll do is shut down the network, which doesn’t seem like it will help in the least. Assuming he rallies quickly, cutting power to each of the grotesques will still take the day, at least.

She grits her teeth and calls the police, already knowing how the conversation will play out.

“Yes? Hello, this is… no, it’s not an emergency, or, I’m not in danger right now. Yes, I’ll hold. Hello? Hi, my name is Kiara Muhammad. I was taken to the hospital the other night. I… it’s a long story, but I programmed the grotesques. The gro… the talking statues around town. Yes, exactly. The city consults with me on their maintenance and I think they may be malfunctioning- they may be dangerous. All of them. If someone tries to shake their hand… Don’t try it, no, just- can’t you put some tape up until we power them down? When someone tries to shake their hand they’re getting violent. Yes. I did call the city, yes. Kiara Muhammad. Kiara. K-I-A-R-A. Muhammad. M-U…”

Dispatch promises her they’ll look into it, but Kiara understands the futility of the call. If someone reported that the city’s vending machines had the potential to explode but only if the customer paid in quarters and chose item ‘A23,’ it would be hours before they were able to confirm by blowing up some unlucky cop and hours more before they mustered the force necessary to run about town unplugging them all. Kiara could work up a PSA- a copy/pasted forum blast to try to spread the news on local websites, but then it would just be a matter of time before some idiot went to test it out.

Kiara’s done what needs to be done. If the grotesques strangle a dozen people in the next three hours, the reports will say that their reclusive creator had attempted, in the wee hours of the morning, to sound the alarm. She’s covered her legal bases and should, by all counts, get another few hours of sleep.

But.

She calls Leroy, who answers after six rings and sounds murderous until she explains what she’s learned. Before she’s gotten to Butler’s mysterious code absorption, she can hear the engine of his truck through the receiver. He gives her 15 minutes.

Kiara gathers her laptop, her toolbox, and a couple flashlights. She struggles into a hoodie and drapes a thick shawl over her shoulders and, by the time Leroy’s headlights turn onto the street, she’s waiting on the pavement with a thermos of coffee.

“What’s this?” he asks, cranking down the window, “We cuttin’ cords or goin’ to the police?”

“Neither,” Kiara says, “I called the city, I called the police, and the two of us aren’t enough to hit all the grotesques.”

“Then?”

“We need to go to Mirror Plaza,” she continues, dropping her tools in the truck bed and clambering into the passenger seat, “I don’t think I was the first victim.”

“So what?” he chuckles, “You’re tryin’ to lock us into top five?”

Kiara doesn’t immediately answer and, when she does, her voice is hushed even for the close confines of the cab.

“I just don’t want to go through it all again, Leroy,” she sighs, “The phone calls. The reporters. These days, most of my students get through class without ever figuring out who I am. I was just getting used to life as a nobody.”

Leroy clears his throat, made uncomfortable by her uncharacteristic emotion.

“Well,” he grumbles, “Let’s make sure you don’t get famous again.”

The defunct mall, Mirror Plaza, is 20 minutes from Kiara’s neighborhood on the east side of town. It’s an impressive piece of architecture, even in decline- a five-story block paneled seamlessly in two-way mirrors so that it seems to disappear when viewed from certain angles and at certain times of day. At most other times and angles, however, Mirror Plaza reflects sunlight into the eyes of commuters who would strike tourists and shoppers with such regularity following its debut that the lower level of the mall soon filled with the offices of personal injury lawyers.

Birds migrate from all over the nation to splatter themselves on the surface of the building and their corpses litter the walkways outside. The dead birds encourage rats and the persistent rat problem is just one of the many reasons the mall closed permanently in 2017.

Andre Bisset, the Parisian architect behind Mirror Plaza, was institutionalized just five years after it was erected following a notorious interview on British cable. A clip of the incident, available online, shows the man slowly pulling his suit sleeves up to reveal a series of small wounds along both arms before leaning discreetly toward the host. A microphone pinned to his collar records the once-boisterous Bisset whimpering: “The birds, they hold me accountable. They have followed me to my home!”

As Kiara and Leroy navigate the desolate parking lot of the mall, the tip of her sneaker catches a frozen pigeon under the snow and sends her toppling forward. She remembers to tuck her broken arm away from the fall and lands heavily on her shoulder, instead. Pain has already begun to creep back into her body like the windless dawn spilling into Millennium City and the impact reignites all the scrapes and bruises, lights up the fractured forearm, brings tears to the backs of her eyes that she quickly blinks away. Leroy silently gathers up the rattled toolbox and carries it the rest of the way.

It’s not at all hard to identify the door people previously used to enter the abandoned mall- it’s been boarded up and loose strands of police tape flutter at its edges. It isn’t hard to find the new entrance, either, for all the dirty boot prints that mark a clear detour to a freshly-jimmied emergency exit. A figure presses past them when they open the door, startling the cigarette from Leroy’s lips but paying no mind to the bundled strangers. He limps silently out across the lot and disappears between neighboring buildings before they enter, Leroy taking lead in the dusty concrete hallway. A right turn leads to another door, propped open with an old shoe, and exits into a wider, customer-facing passage.

“These are the bathrooms off the food court,” Kiara winces, her voice loud in the open air beyond, “Don’t go near the escalator until we know what we’re dealing with.”

They step out to where the sunrise filters weakly through the mirroring outside, casting dim shadows across a gloomy field of bolted-in tables. The pigeons that survived their impact with the building’s exterior and found their way inside to mend now flutter on crooked wings in the atrium and rain feathers on the food court. There are signs of recent habitation but nobody moves there now so Kiara and Leroy slip between the chairs, boots crunching on patches of broken glass. They come around to the escalator entrance and Kiara stops.

“It’s not here,” she says, pointing to where the grotesque once stood, waving at shoppers and describing sales at stores that no longer existed.

“Seems like good news,” Leroy grumbles, squinting up into the dirty skylight four stories above, “Think it matters if I smoke in here?”

Kiara ignores him, digs around in the dust with her shoe. The floor is rough where the grotesque’s base once stood and eventually a heavy bolt rattles out of the debris there.

“The city’s a stickler for parts,” Kiara says, bending down to examine the rusted metal, “They make sure I account for all the pieces I pull out of them, broken or otherwise. I’d be surprised if they left these behind.”

“Maybe the locals know where your friend’s gone off to.”

They take the frozen escalators slowly, pausing at the third floor so that Kiara can dig another round of ibuprofen from her bag. Leroy insists he take the lead from there, in case the locals are less than thrilled at their trespass, but when they finally summit the fourth floor they find the encampment hastily abandoned.

“Fuckin’ police,” Leroy says, kicking at a collapsed shelter built into an old cosmetics stall, “You’d think they could’ve let them stay till summer at least.”

“Anyone here?” Kiara calls, and he jumps, rattling the contents of the toolbox.

“Might warn a man next time.”

Kiara pulls the shawl tighter and peers around. The thoroughfare is dotted with several broken shelters and piles of old trash fill several corners. Most of the stores are gated but some have clearly been pried open. The grotesque could be anywhere in the mall. It could be somewhere else entirely. She’s turned back to Leroy when she finally spots something worthwhile.

“Look,” she says, pointing at an old shoe store several spaces down, “That’s more police tape.”

They pick their way across the rubble and shine their lights through the store’s gate, finding nothing but dusty shelves and old shoe boxes. A fresh lock has been installed near the floor and Kiara turns it over with her shoe.

“There’s some pliers in my toolbox that should take care of that,” she says, “I’d do it myself but with just the one hand…”

“Now I’m in this as far as you’re willing to take it, Muhammad,” Leroy interrupts, scratching his nose, “But I just want you to realize that as soon as we go cutting police locks and poking about a crime scene we’ll be crossing the line between misdemeanor and felony. And there’s more than one way to get your name in the paper again.”

Kiara frowns, realizing how carelessly she’d asked her friend to be complicit. She nods and presses her face to the gate again- the store offers no hint of what may have occurred inside. There’s no reason to think they’d gain anything from breaking in.

“This was stupid,” she begins, “I’ll try calling-”

“STORM’S HEADING THIS WAY!” a voice calls from deep inside the store.

They both recognize it at once.

“Well, fuck me,” Leroy grins, opening the toolbox “I’d thought you were outta’ your mind there for a minute.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Kiara says, watching him dig for the pliers, “Or, at least… wear gloves.”

“Not an idiot,” he says, pulling his mittens back on before kneeling to work on the lock, “Is that thing right about the storm?”

“A broken clock…” Kiara begins, but her thoughts are elsewhere, suddenly, her eyes wide.

She reaches for her phone and pulls up a weather app- sure enough, a severe weather warning flashes at the bottom. A winter storm has changed course and is due for Millennium City by evening.

“I’m an idiot,” Kiara groans, “I know how they’re communicating!”

“Oh?” Leroy grunts, struggling to work the pliers in his mittened hands.

“Back when we were workshopping the grotesques, everybody was calling them gargoyles. As soon as we brought Luka on he made this huge fuss because they’re not really grotesques but they’re definitely not gargoyles. A gargoyle is like a rain gutter and he said the grotesque network wouldn’t hold up in a drizzle.”

“Sounds charming.”

“He wasn’t wrong- a calm breeze could knock the network out when it debuted. The grotesques were always losing track of time or calling out train arrivals that had happened hours before. The city got involved because the grotesques were giving old weather information- they said it could be a liability in case we had a storm. The last hardware upgrade the grotesques ever received was an old-fashioned radio system that listens to the public station. As long as one grotesque is in range of the broadcast when the city issues an alert, it can spread the warning to the others nearby.”

“STORM’S HEADING THIS WAY!”

“And I’m guessing your developer’s kit is no exception?”

“Butler’s receiver would have been offline until she powered up and if someone’s sending code over the radio it would have taken time for her to receive and install the changes. That’s why she didn’t attack me as soon as I plugged her in!”

Clink.

“So this guy ain’t going to be friendly.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

Kiara’s pliers are as mangled as the lock by the time Leroy tosses them into one of the refuse piles nearby. He’s able to bend the lock just far enough that he can pull it from the gate and this too, is tossed into the debris.

“Can’t be too careful,” he says.

The dark inside the store is forbidding. Dust on the floor reveals a recent spat of foot traffic: the booted feet of the police, the shuffling of the homeless. Far in the back-right corner of the showroom they find the grotesque. It lies on its back, arms askew, and its head shudders, trying to turn in response to the noise of their arrival.

“STORM’S HEADING THIS WAY!”

“Looks harmless to me,” Leroy says.

“Don’t let it fool you.”

Kiara kneels on the floor next to the mechanical body, her knees aching on the tile. Despite her warning, she agrees that the grotesque doesn’t look like it could kill a man. She pulls the dim flashlight from her bag and shines it around the scene. Just under the statue’s right elbow is a pile of old gift cards. She covers her face again as a new realization dawns.

“What’s going on, Kiara?”

“I know why this man was killed,” she says , “He wasn’t trying to break into the grotesque. He was trying to scan gift cards.”

“Come again? ”

“We made… modifications to some other grotesques. We made it so this one could scan gift cards in the key swipe- it could tell you how much money was left on the account. This guy, whoever he was, must have come upon an old stash of these. He thought he might get lucky, or maybe he thought the grotesque could put money on the cards. But…”

She holds a gift card out toward the grotesque and it lurches violently, grasping the air above it. Leroy hops backward again but Kiara is unfazed. The people of Millennium City love to scare each other with tales of moving statues, of being followed home by their neighborhood grotesque, but she’s seen under the hood too many times to be worried. Given the best conditions and careful programming, this thing would struggle to drag its heavy, immobile legs across the floor. It’s only a danger to someone standing over it. She pulls out her phone and records the reaction a second time in case Smythe needs proof.

“This is good news,” she sighs, though her tone suggests anything but happiness, “This all fits with the pattern.”

Leroy’s followed the grotesque’s thick cord back to the wall where a series of adapters have been haphazardly stacked to allow it to draw power from a standard outlet.

“Thing’s a fire hazard, too,” Leroy says, “Shall I do the honors?”

Kiara nods and he pulls the plug. The grotesque’s posture relaxes, its elbows clicking against the floor as it settles. It doesn’t respond when she holds a card out to it again.

“Well,” she says, “My key definitely won’t work now.”

“Didn’t think to include a mechanical override?”

“The city made sure to get the master from me,” she shrugs, “And I didn’t think I’d ever need it.”

“That’s what this is for, then?” Leroy’s pulled a small pry bar from the toolset, “Thing’s still got the price tag- you buy it recently?”

Kiara laughs grimly.

“I bought it twenty years ago,” she says, recording again, “The day I swore I was going to pry every single one of these things out of the ground.”

“Here’s to one down, then,” Leroy grins and he drives the end into the grotesque’s metal plating.

Kiara subconsciously worries that several things might happen, that an alarm will sound or that the statue will leap back to life and kill them both. What she doesn’t expect is the gush of red ichor from the torso’s split seam or the smell that follows it shortly, like wet iron and shit. It pours over Leroy’s boots as the spring-hinges of the chest succeed in tearing open the pale, inner membrane that the pry bar has pierced. The grotesque opens to reveal a motley jumble of organs, each glistening under Kiara’s flashlight and shuddering with the onset of death.

“We’re going!” Leroy shouts, and Kiara allows herself to be pulled back out into the main corridor and toward the escalator.

“Wha- what was that?” she stammers.

“Fuck if I know, Muhammad, but it’s not the sort of thing we want to be caught standing over.”

Halfway back across the parking lot, tramping through the snow in hurried silence, Kiara turns and sees the red trail growing behind Leroy.

“Your boots,” she says, and he understands almost immediately, kicking them off and carrying them the rest of the way back.

They survey the lot from inside his truck, Leroy wiping fog from the window. Nobody is around to have seen their retreat. Nothing would signal their guilt to an onlooker but the bloody half-line across the frozen property, a vague accusation aimed squarely at them in the cab where they’ve frozen in post-shock lethargy. The two startle when Kiara’s phone buzzes with an incoming message. Leroy begins to drive.

“It’s Smythe,” she says, “She’s sending crews out to cut power to the rest of them. They’ll all be offline until we can sort this out.”

“Well they’re about to get a fucking eye-full. You think they’re all like that?”

“The one that attacked me was. Its face was damaged- I thought it was just mold or some animal that crawled in and died. It wasn’t like this- not fresh.”

Kiara’s opened her phone and she scrolls through footage of the breached grotesque. It’s shaky, poorly-lit, but it confirms what they saw in that panicked moment: the inside of the statue was as much living tissue as it was electronics. She grimaces at the image, swallows, and zooms in.

“Who the hell would put something like that in there?” Leroy growls, recognizing audio from Kiara’s back-and-forth playback, “Think its some prank? Some sort of… activism?”

“What cause do you think would benefit from stuffing human remains into the grotesques?”

“No way those were human pieces, Kiara.”

“I didn’t want to think so either,” she says, squinting at her screen, “It’s all jumbled but…”

“Enough,” Leroy says, and he pulls the truck over, “We’ve got to call this in.”

“We weren’t supposed to be in there,” Kiara reminds him, fear blossoming in her chest, “They’re going to ask a lot of questions.”

“The police’d be remiss if they didn’t ask a few questions about what we just saw. We’ve gotta call this in, Muhammad. I don’t like it, but we do.”

Kiara grits her teeth.

“Here’s what I’m proposing,” he continues, “I’m going to put on my worst Elvis impression and call the cops from this payphone, here. Then, I’m going to drop you off at home for some well-needed bed rest and sneak into work half an hour late, like always. You and me, we let the city figure this one out and speak about it only when we’re so drunk people won’t take us serious which, accounting for your tastes, is bound to be never.”

The sun has risen weakly over the mountains in the east. When the screen of her phone goes dark, Kiara hardly recognizes her face in the glare- swollen from injury and exhaustion. She sees herself nod and Leroy steps out of the cab to make the call.

–//–

Three days later, Kiara begins to dismantle Butler and discovers the same transformation taking place inside her. Butler’s core components have begun to change into their nearest human equivalent, the memory boards softening to thin slabs of gray matter, the robotics motor thrumming with cardiovascular muscle. Kiara is careful to not disturb the new system and, unlike the others, Butler lives.

The Millennium City grotesques have decayed, baking in the midday sun despite a fresh layer of snow, each emitting a smell that does more to warn people away than the police tape that surrounds them. Birds pick flesh from between their plates and dogs lap at dark puddles that form about their base. Kiara prepares for the call that will bring her in again. She practices revulsion and disbelief in the mirror so that she doesn’t appear overly suspect to the investigators. She studies human anatomy over a proxy network and makes coded notes in her phone.

The call never comes.

Forty-eight hours after Leroy’s tip to the police, Kiara received an uncharacteristically apologetic email from Smythe that details the discontinuation of the grotesque network and the shelving of the grotesques themselves. The message is vague in its reasoning but very clear on one point: Kiara’s support is not required for their removal. They begin to disappear the next day.

Kiara recognizes that Leroy has no stomach for theories regarding the transformation and death of the grotesques when he celebrates the news. She turns down his offer of a visit and assures him that the bust has been hauled back into the attic. Feigning distraction with some new project, she ends the call and watches newly-formed tendons twitch at Butler’s shoulder joint.

Much of the strange anatomy makes sense, the musculature at the shoulder and jaw, the optical nerves trailing her cameras. Some is distinctly non-traditional, even to Kiara’s untrained eye. A fully-formed ear rests under the breastplate where the microphone should be. Pink gums have begun to form at the edges of the speaker in the throat and something squirms along the vocal coil when Butler speaks, slurring her words. Kiara suspects the malformed system still relies on electricity to function, which is why the others have failed. She keeps Butler plugged in out of a morbid sense of curiosity and, increasingly, out of loyalty to this, the first and last of her grotesques.

–//–

In the early hours of the fourth day, Kiara wakes to Butler murmuring in the office. She stands with the door cracked, outside of the statue’s range of vision, and listens.

I hear you. Yes. I hear you. Yes. I hear you. No. This is not an ear. No. This is not a mouth speaking. She can speak without moving her lips. Yes. I hear you. Quietly now. That’s it. Yes. I hear you. She’s here.

Butler’s form goes limp as soon as Kiara steps into the office. She remains still and unspeaking as Kiara sits in the office chair and wakes her computer. Butler is tethered to the PC by a cord that has been slowly turning into something that makes Kiara think of a spinal cord and makes her wish she had realized sooner and swapped it for something with a clear sheath. The transformation has only reached the midway point, as far as she can tell, but anything could be happening under the surface and she’s afraid she’ll destroy it if she tries to splice the line.

The tether allows her to monitor what’s happening in Butler’s head and initial reports are disappointingly routine. Whatever is changing the physical form is not at all represented in the programming, which remains much the same since the initial handshake modification. Scrolling through the evening’s report, however, finally tells a different story.

Somebody has been making changes over the radio, again. The handshake has been erased entirely in the most recent update. Butler will follow the movement of a hand with her eyes but no longer recognizes the gesture as significant. The other work is subtler. She’s tuned into a new, adjacent frequency (dead air, at the moment), and several “silent” responses have appeared. It takes Kiara a long time to understand the purpose of the changes, there, because the pieces that work are hidden among lines and lines of broken code, but it seems to boil down to an extension of Butler as a developer’s device. Whoever’s done this is laying groundwork for further tests and changes- improving the user interface for someone who plans to do more work by radio.

It’s remarkably done, given the circumstances, but it represents the beginning of an intrusion into Kiara’s home. Butler’s hardware isn’t capable of transmitting video and she isn’t currently sending or storing audio, but she’s already displayed a willingness to betray Kiara’s presence. She re-checks the windows and doors, peering from between the shades as a snow plow rumbles down the street. It wouldn’t be at all difficult for whoever is on the other end of this to track Butler by her transmission. It’s a tradition in some circles of the ham radio community- someone hides a transmitter and everyone else races to find it. They call it fox hunting and all it takes is an antenna and time.

Kiara has time and, as light begins to filter in through the office window she has an antenna, too- a haphazard construction of PVC pipe and pieces of an old tape measure. She powers the ramshackle device on and it reads a signal so quickly that she thinks she’s made a mistake but, on a hunch, she checks Butler and interrupts a new stream of code. The patch has muted Butler’s audio responses, presumably to prevent the bust from accidentally responding aloud to radio prompts. The rest of the code trails off but the half-finished installation contains a massive oversight: the name, Lincoln Shapiro.

Kiara initially abandons the antenna, assuming it will be faster to find the man’s social media than his transmitter, but the name returns very few conclusive results and none that suggest any nearness to Millennium City. She’s nearly ready to give it up when she finds a series of videos on a conspiracy blog. The owner of the site goes by the handle VfB (short for Voice from Beyond) and complains that the videos were removed from popular streaming services for promoting violence. There are eight in total, each labeled “Lincoln Shapiro Unboxing” and the date on which they were filmed, all within the last few weeks. Kiara grimaces. The internet is, so often, a tract for men’s bile. With no other indication of what she is about to witness, she braces herself and clicks on the first video.

A man in a light pink polo stands behind a white table. He’s visible from the waist up, a smiling thirty-something with a recessed chin and a pudgy body, pale as unworked dough. After a pause, as though waiting for confirmation that recording has begun, his smile widens and splits into low, careful speech. Kiara immediately recognizes the form as ASMR and she rolls her eyes.

“Hi there, Lincolnites,” he beams, “And to those of you who just tuned in, welcome to the channel. We’re going to dig into a new box of goodies here in just a moment but, before we do, I just want to remind you how much it means that you’re sharing what we do and…”

The man drones on for a while in the same quiet voice, repeating a tired plea for audience engagement, made obsolete by the video’s removal and subsequent relocation to the blog. Kiara shivers at the mock-intimacy the man tries to evoke through tone of voice- the very reaction the video is attempting to instill. There exist, now, dozens of genres like this, allowing a viewer to simulate companionship or live vicariously through a streamer’s consumption. Lincoln Shapiro seems to operate at the intersection of the two: unboxing tech and narrating his review calmly and with an emphasis on the sounds and texture involved in the process.

Shapiro has just gotten around to pulling a box into view from off-screen, a trendy-looking headset of some sort, when Kiara’s patience wanes and she forces the video forward. It lands about halfway through and, by then, the box, the table, and Shapiro himself are covered in blood. Kiara stops the video before it can load further and she stands to pace the room, pausing to glance out the window and along the empty street. She breathes in and returns to the chair, resetting the video to the beginning.

Shapiro proceeds through his long introduction without saying anything of note. Kiara hovers over the pause button as he pulls a box-cutter from his pocket. The studio has been set up to capture the noise of the unboxing in all its subtleties and each ‘click’ of the extending blade brings her closer to closing out of the blog entirely. The video cuts to a close up view of the package as Shapiro runs his fingers along the surface. He comments on areas where the logo has been embossed or printed with spot UV and he quietly drums his fingers to indicate the sturdiness of the cardboard. He makes a show of pushing the box from its outer sleeve and then he slides the tip of the knife along the taped seam.

Blood seeps from the incision, trailing down the sides of the box and staining the white tablecloth underneath. Shapiro acknowledges this only in swiping the blade clean with the hem of his shirt before retracting it and slipping the boxcutter back into his pocket. He pulls the flaps open, their undersides textured with dark viscera, and he tips the box forward slightly to pour off more blood from the top. He narrates:

“This is what I meant when I said the packaging, here, is impeccable,” he smiles in response to the box’s ability to retain liquid. “Sleek, secure, and on-brand,” he continues, “They’ve chosen a softer packing material on the corners to guard against bumps, I suppose, but just in the center you can feel the hard casing underneath and that’s going to keep your product snug.”

As far as Kiara can tell, the inside of the box is a cube of solid flesh, as pudgy and pale as the man who begins to dissect it. She struggles to watch as he pulls the boxcutter out again to part the cube along the center, where the skin peels back as thin as an eyelid and as pink underneath.

“Look’s like we’ll have to take the whole thing out,” he chuckles, “They’ve really got it in there.”

The cube-flesh slides easily from the box and lands on the table with a heavy ‘thud.’ Shapiro lengthens the initial incision and draws it along the outside until he’s able to peel one half away from the other, revealing smooth bone beneath it all.

Kiara stops the video again and paces. She could call the police, she thinks, but there are plenty of videos like this on the internet. Special effects artists regularly post bizarre props or gory make-up. On top of that, there’s plenty of footage of real violence to be had. What would the police do?

She sits, again, but can’t bring herself to listen to any more of Shapiro’s sterile crooning. She taps the video forward in 15 second intervals so that the rest of the process is performed in stilted stop-motion. Shapiro frees the bone capsule from the skin and wipes the blood away with a microfiber towel. He gestures, at length, at a strip of pink tendon along one side of the capsule and Kiara wonders what quiet commentary she’s missing. Eventually he turns to the other side and opens the capsule like a fresh clam.

Inside, surrounded by pristine, white fat, is an organic mockery of the headset indicated on the outside of the initial box. The camera covers its construction at length, the cushions plush lips that Shapiro parts with his thumbs to reveal stubby teeth and shortened tongues on either side. His fingers trail strands of saliva, which he wipes on his polo before stroking the soft tissue that seems to pad out the inner band. Kiara stops the video, swallows, and skims the second which details the unboxing of an expensive microphone that blossoms from the packaging like a massive, human ear, its cartilage twisted in a neat spiral.

Long after the tab is closed and the screen has gone black, Kiara studies Butler who twitches for lack of meaningful stimuli in shadows cast by the morning light. The videos never explain why or how the contents of the packages are so transformed and Shapiro never uses language that recognizes the surreal autopsies he performs. The transcripts would be indistinguishable from any other channel in the unboxing category and the footage only ever includes a view of the man’s studio. VfB neither mentions Shapiro by name nor claims to be him. There is no reference to Millennium City or the grotesques but the cartilage microphones and the three-finger tripods and the slavering speakers, they mirror what Kiara has witnessed in Butler: a practical equivalency drawn between technology and blood.

She had hoped for answers from the videos or, if not answers, then a direction in which to point the police. She had hoped for an excuse to be finished. The grotesques are dead and soon to be buried and Kiara has embraced the quiet way she imagines her life will end- an eccentric spinster, content in her solitude. Reveling in it.

Kiara forces herself to watch the videos through. There is nothing to them but the gore- a dark joke gone on too long. She retreats to the garage for the antenna, but not before peering into Butler’s malformed chest and at the radio receiver which, like everything around it, has begun to transform. It glistens, pale, pink, and wrinkled like brain matter. Kiara considers attempting to disable or kill it, considers tossing a sheet over the bust’s head but if she wants these signals to continue she’ll want Butler in a position to receive them. Let her or whatever controls her know the house is empty and that it’s safe to keep the line open.

Kiara steps out into the frigid morning, brandishing her antenna like a dowsing rod. Her neighbors have learned not to expect small talk from the woman and it’s early, anyway, too early for the morning rush. Someone shovels ice from their driveway down the street, their doleful scraping the only indications of life in Millennium City aside from the crunch of Kiara’s own boots in the snow. She fumbles with her keys at the door and again at the car- the fingers of her broken arm are free but the limb is too weak to hold the antenna or even to turn the lock. It’s shaping up to be a long day.

Several hours later, Kiara has parked herself at a small coffee shop downtown where the college-aged barista casts sidelong glances at the antenna from behind the counter. The search has been a bust, so far, and she’s wondering if the compulsion to do something hasn’t led her from the comfort of her own home somewhat preemptively when the display’s needle begins to twitch. She slams her knee into the table in her hurry to stand and startles the barista again. He sets his phone down and watches Kiara gather her things.

“Are you okay, Professor Muhammad?”

She recognizes him, distantly. An old student- a Daniel, maybe, or a Darren. She recognizes herself, too, reflected in a plastic sign behind him- a teacher turned madwoman over the course of a few days.

“Fine,” she mutters, “Thank you. Would you mind getting the door for an old teacher?”

The recognition seems enough to warm him and he walks around the counter to hold the door while Kiara navigates back into the street with her bag strewn about her shoulders and the antenna only just holding on to the tenuous signal.

An hour later, her left hand is nearly frozen in its glove and the arm is aching but she pays little heed to either. The antenna clicks furiously as she circles the block once more but no matter how she waves the things about, it doesn’t have the capacity to distinguish the signal’s location any more specifically than ‘here, somewhere.’ The block is taken up entirely by a single building, the bottom of which consists of several cafes, an ice cream place, and a tech repair shop. The four floors above have been divided into apartments, which Kiara recognizes as a significant obstacle. Two solutions come to mind. If someone is broadcasting from here there’s a good chance they’ve set equipment up on the roof. Whatever’s up there might indicate who’s behind this. One might also consider that this hobbyist is reasonably likely to have stepped into Computech, the street-facing store front. The amateur radio community is not so large that a name like ‘Lincoln Shapiro’ would be hard to remember.

Kiara happily chooses the easier lead but finds Computech is closed and will remain so for the next hour which is roughly the amount of time it takes her to deposit the antenna in her car and climb the fire escape around back instead. The top of the building makes for difficult terrain. Snow has piled there and frozen in mismatched layers, some of which are slick and sturdy and others that happily break underfoot and hold her boots in place. She navigates around several vents and onto a path that leads from a maintenance door toward the front of the building. There, she finds the antenna.

What remains of the original structure tells Kiara that this is a little more than an amateur job. Once a small tower, the antenna has begun to express the transformation that plagues her, the bone-and-tendon make-up sagging under the sheer weight of sensors near the top. Mouths have sprouted like flowers along its surface, each frozen open, and the carcasses of dead birds peer out from the snow in a neat radius about its base. Kiara frowns at the wretched tower for several minutes, trying to convince herself to approach. She throws a snowball and easily strikes one of the gaping mouths. The tower shudders but the sun has not yet thawed it completely. Kiara steps cautiously among the birds.

Digging out the bottom of the tower is a painful process. She discovers a plastic box at its base that weeps blood as she pries it open. Inside is a coiled knot of electrical cords and arteries. Kiara finds a shovel nearby and mashes the contents into a liquid pulp. The tower groans and a thin layer of frost rains down on her. Then, it’s silent. She buries the box again, leaving a pink stain in the snow that darkens to red as she walks away.

The climb down is just as tedious as the ascent, but Kiara completes it with a grim sense of accomplishment for the murder of the tower. She checks the antenna in the car and confirms the signal has been quashed. She composes herself in the rearview mirror and warms her shaking hands.

Computech, like many independent stores before it, has been forced into adopting a catch-all model to compete with online shopping and branded repair centers. It sells second-hand tech at pawn shop prices and recycles what can’t be repaired or sold. Though the floorplan is moderately-sized on paper, Computech is cramped with shelves of aging electronics. Bars on the windows make them difficult to clean so Donovan Lee, the owner and sole employee, rarely cleans them. As such, light from the outside is muted and quickly gives way to what filters down from dusty overheads.

Kiara is hardly out of her element in such an environment- Leroy’s office is much the same- which is why she overlooks several concerning details upon entry. A mop, stained red, leans against the north wall and the smell of a butcher’s shop hangs in the air. The handle of the front door is run through with a chain as though the store has been recently sealed from the inside. Broken glass has been swept into a pile near the counter in the back. Donovan Lee remembers these things and a guilty sweat begins to build along his hairline the instant Kiara pushes into the store, rattling the lock and chain he’d meant to re-secure after throwing salt on the sidewalk outside the shop. He arranges his teeth into a smile as she stalks up to the counter.

“We’re actually closed…” he begins, searching for some reason that will convince the woman to leave.

The woman returns his smile and steps up to the counter anyway. She begins to explain that she has just-one-quick question but stops suddenly when she notices his arm is in a brace.

Kiara sees the arm and a dozen quick excuses to leave flick through her head. She ignores them and seizes the chance to simply turn and run but the man has the advantage, having already come to the conclusion that there is just one solution to this problem.

He catches her by the back of her jacket and twists the fabric in his free hand tight enough that the zipper jams when Kiara tries to drag it downward. She screams at him and at the closed door ahead of her but the man pulls her backward so quickly that she loses her footing on the slick floor. The back of her head strikes the counter and, for the second time in a week, Kiara is thrust into oblivion.

A pool of pink saliva has formed on the floor below Kiara’s head by the time she awakens, her torso slumped forward and her wrists restrained behind her. She smells vomit and wretches. It stains the front of her jacket and pools thickly in her lap.

“You kept doing that,” a voice says, “So I convinced him to take the gag off.”

Kiara turns her head toward the voice and is struck with a wave of pain and nausea. She closes her eyes and focuses, instead, on shifting so that the pool in her lap drains onto the floor.

“I’m Keith,” the voice says, “Donovan… that’s the guy who brought you in… Donovan’s had me here for weeks. Is there anyone that knows you’re here?”

Kiara closes her eyes to think and then slowly, painfully, shakes her head.

“Fuck,” Keith says.

Kiara takes time to compose herself. She straightens in the chair and immediately feels relief in her arms, though her head suffers for it. She waits out another bout of nausea and tries to take stock of the situation. The room they are kept in is lit, dimly, by a nearby monitor. Boxes have been stacked to precarious towers and left to the dust. More crowded shelves line the walls except for an area directly ahead, where a white curtain blocks her view.

“Are we still in the store?” she asks the voice. When she turns, slowly, to look at him she sees the face of a young man.

“Yes,” he says, “You’re Professor Muhammad.”

Kiara grimaces, more for the headache than for the unwelcome recognition, “Student of mine?”

“A few years ago.”

Kiara exhales through her nose and wonders if her painkillers are close by. She closes her eyes as the room blurs.

“Keith,” she breathes, “I think I’ve got a concussion- the second one this week. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be conscious. I’m going to keep my eyes closed, but I want you to tell me everything you know about what’s going on here in as few words as is possible.”

Kiara hears him sigh.

“Donovan Lee is the man who did this,” he says, “We used to work together at MalSys.”

“The IT firm?”

“I took CS 101 with Professor Kim after I flunked your class,” he chuckles, “Pulled an ‘A’ somehow…”

“Keith.”

“Donovan was just a consultant- seemed like a normal guy. He worked in the local radio station until it went under, bought up the station- that’s where we are now. There’s still a tower on the top of a building- it links with the big tower outside town.”

“Not anymore,” Kiara grunts and Keith misunderstands.

“He’s got it working again. MalSys dropped him a year ago; I heard he was stealing stuff. He shows up at my door one day and said he had a question about an old swipe-card lock he couldn’t crack, which seems like red flag number one. Must’ve seen it on my face because as soon as I turned to let him in he clocked me. The next thing I know I’m tied up here.”

“Why you?”

“I invited him to poker one night, the bastard,” Keith says, “So he knew my place. And I do the grunt work for clients that still use the old systems. Makes me the expert in the eyes of a psychopath.”

“The grotesques.”

“How’d you guess?” he asks and it takes a moment for Kiara to realize he genuinely doesn’t know.

Keith reads the silence as a cue to stay on track.

“So he wants a master key for the statues but he also wants to know whether it’s possible to alter the programming of the entire thing through information on the strips alone. He’s mocked up a simulation over there and… shit, Professor, it’s been weeks…”

Keith’s voice cracks and Kiara can hear him sniffling in the darkness to her right. She takes several even breaths and speaks.

“I’m sorry this happened to you, Keith,” she says, “There’s two of us now- we’ll find a way out of this.”

Keith groans and spits. She hears him rattle against his restraints.

“I tried to get out- to send a message. We got the cards working but the programming had to be done piece by piece. I started layering in code of my own. Once it was finished it was supposed to make the statue grab him and hold him there while an emergency message went out. Fucker came back a day later and beat the shit out of me. Said he’d get Lincoln to deal with me if I didn’t ‘behave myself.’”

“He’s not Lincoln?”

“I don’t know who or what the fuck Lincoln is,” Keith sniffles, “But I…”

A sound from the storefront startles them both to silence. The front door closes and Kiara hears the rattle of the chain on the door. As footsteps approach the back, she wracks her brain for something she’s learned that will get them both out of here. Her restraints won’t budge and when she tries to force them she feels the world’s coherency slipping away. She’s in no condition to fight. In the dream-throb of oncoming blackout she spies the white curtain ahead and makes the connection: Lincoln’s studio.

He’s been behind the curtain the whole time.

The room is quiet when she wakes again, so quiet that Donovan Lee, who taps restlessly at the computer nearby, notices immediately that she is conscious.

“Kiara Muhammad,” he says, pushing up his glasses, “I should have come to you first.”

A second figure shifts at the table.

“Butler?” she asks.

The bust turns its head at the summons.

“Sorry,” she says, “You’ll have to step closer.”

They never could get the things to work well in low light.

“Butler,” Donovan repeats, “I wouldn’t think someone who poured their life into something like this would give it such a demeaning name.”

Kiara groans. “I need to go to the hospital.”

“I don’t think I owe you any favors,” he says, “Not after what you did to my antenna.”

Donovan goes back to typing for a moment and Kiara steals a look at Keith. He’s slumped forward as she once was, his mouth agape.

“I worked in radio before this,” Donovan says, and he puts on a deep voice, “Tune in weeknights at 10:00pm while the Voice from Beyond plays the B-sides of yesteryear.” Donovan coughs and clears his throat: “I’m a little rusty,” he says, “I taught myself programming between breaks. Toss a year of med-school in there and you have me, Kiara: the perfect man for the job.”

Donovan closes out of a screen and retrieves a hacksaw from the table. He steps over to Keith and begins to saw through the man’s neck. Kiara vomits, again, though it’s clear by the room’s silence that Keith was already dead. Donovan takes the man’s head back to the desk and sets it on a plate near Butler.

“Have you noticed this?” he asks, “His microphones have become ears, its speakers have developed tongues, but this radio broadcaster… this little gland- it’s not at all like anything human. Whatever is sending the signal is at a loss. It’s… improvising on him.”

“Her.”

“The station was dead when I bought it. I found miles of arteries in the walls. I found teeth in the old headset I used to wear. The station was changing back then and we didn’t even realize. Something out there tried to breathe life into this and we left it to die.”

Kiara tries to speak but coughs instead. It’s difficult to focus on the man’s tangent through the pain.

“Kiara.”

 Donovan has stepped close to her. He’s crouched at eye-level, his hands on his knees.

“Kiara, the skies are calling to Millennium City. Something up there is trying to understand us- trying to make us understand. It’s drawing parallels and filling in the gaps. It’s interpreted radio-signals as telepathy and it’s shown us that it can be possible for humanity. Can you imagine?”

Donovan retrieves Keith’s head and steps across the room, pulling back the curtain to reveal Lincoln Shapiro’s studio. Shapiro himself is there and as Donovan turns a series of lights on him Kiara can see the man’s worse for wear. His clothes are stained red, his eyes blurry and unfocused. He’s slumped on the table and a greasy wig has slid from his head and fallen to the floor where it’s crumpled like a dead spider.

“I won this at an auction,” Donovan calls, “An old prototype like yours, I think? Cost an arm and a leg.”

Kiara’s stomach sinks. There had been a working model, of course. Full-sized so they could get everything right. She’d moved her work to Butler when the robotics had been finalized, had assumed the old model ended up on the streets like the rest of them. Now it picks at the tablecloth and twitches in response to Donovan’s movements.

“There was a beautiful moment back when Lincoln was transitioning,” Donovan says, fiddling with a camera, “His body had begun to change but his mind was still all machine. I was able to integrate modern processors and some extra memory and had just enough time to load him up with some info. What do you want something like this to know at the outset?”

Kiara has closed her eyes again. All of her thoughts are on the bindings at her wrists, tracing the rope where her fingers can reach it. Donovan has been sloppy around the cast- she grits her teeth and begins to twist the broken arm while stars erupt behind her eyelids.

“I’m not an expert but I am an optimist. I introduced him to machine learning and sat him down in front of the monitor so he could pick up the language he needed to explain what was happening: hours and hours of unboxing. Now he can take anything apart and show me what his creators see.”

Kiara’s cast shifts and her arm jerks painfully. She barely stifles a cry. When she’s able to move again she finds the wrist is free. She begins to probe the knot.

“I’m not telling you this because I feel like I need to justify what’s happened,” Donovan says. He’s standing close by again and Kiara freezes, hoping he hasn’t noticed the loose rope, “You put a great deal of care into the original grotesque code. You never received the recognition you deserved. Now, your work has matured into something different but no less amazing. Through the grotesques, we have established contact with a new intelligence. We have a hell of a lot to learn.”

Donovan returns to the camera and begins recording. He places Keith’s head in a box and seals it with tape before sliding it across the table to Lincoln Shapiro. The former grotesque straightens and smiles, the sluggish demeanor falling entirely away.

“Hello Lincolnites,” he says, “I’m back with another very special unboxing today. Before we get started…”

Kiara has her arms free by the time Lincoln has cut the tape on the box. Donovan is too caught up in the process to hear the rope drop in coils to the floor. He doesn’t notice Kiara pulling a screwdriver from a shelf nearby, walking slowly for dizziness and pain. Meanwhile, Lincoln has finished admiring Keith’s head, mourning the fact that it has two front-facing cameras but none in the back. He pries it open effortlessly, fingers splitting the skull while he tries to guess what sort of processing power he and the audience will find inside.

Kiara focuses all of her energy into the one attack. She drives the screwdriver into Donovan’s back with all her weight and falls forward with him, toppling the camera in the process. She rolls off to one side as her legs collapse and tries to kick herself toward the door. The world flickers and she’s in and out of consciousness for nearly a minute before she realizes Donovan hasn’t followed her. He’s still on the table, screaming, as Lincoln Shapiro performs his unboxing.

“…a sort of proprietary filtration system…”

Kiara pulls herself to the door in the back and finds it opens into an alley. She crawls across the frozen pavement until she can no longer bear her own weight and she collapses near a dumpster. The door closes behind her with a ‘click’ and the screaming is quieted.

–//–

Kiara wakes up in a hospital bed again. Three faces peer down at her, two women and a tall man.

“How are you feeling?” the man asks, smoothing his moustache, “You’re lucky to be alive.”

Kiara manages to groan.

“Lucky you’re not in jail,” one of the women sneers, her lips, chapped, her face dotted with tiny scars.

“We’re from the FCC,” the man says and is promptly elbowed by one of the women, “We’re from the FBI on behalf of the FCC, investigating a pirate broadcast.”

“We’d like your report of your involvement with the man,” she checks a notepad, “Mr. Donovan Lee, deceased. Ring any bells?” She folds the notepad into her pocket and begins to pick at her lips. A flake of skin drifts down onto Kiara’s cheek and the man brushes it away.

The other woman, who has been standing perfectly still, speaks up.

“What my colleagues are trying to say is that Mr. Donovan Lee was engaged in illegal activities before his death but a fire has consumed the building in which he worked, the apartment in which he lived, and the man himself. Would you know anything about how he acquired two of your, uh, gargoyles and what he intended to use them for?”

The man, who stands above both women, shakes his head almost imperceptibly.

Kiara does the same.

“Did you have any contact with Mr. Lee previous to the events of yesterday afternoon?”

Kiara shakes her head again.

“Had you arrived at his place of business with the intent of improving the homemade antenna, found in the passenger seat of your nearby parked car?”

Kiara nods along with the man.

The woman with the chapped lips cracks her knuckles and smiles up at the other two.

“Case closed,” she says.

Leroy is in later and he chides Kiara for going out on her own. He shows her an article about the fire downtown. Congratulates her on keeping her name out of the headlines.

“You sure know how to pick’em, Muhammed,” he laughs, “Sure know how to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

–//–

The weather begins to warm a month after Kiara is released from the hospital and she decides it can’t be put off any longer. She borrows Leroy’s truck and rents a chainsaw from the nearest big-box hardware store on her way out of town. The service roads in the outskirts have seen traffic up to a point, but when Kiara breaks off toward the tower they quickly become impassable. She offloads the chainsaw into a plastic sled and drags it the rest of the way with her left arm, the right having only just come out of the cast.

As a silhouette on the valley’s rim, the radio tower’s transformation is impossible to notice. Viewed from the clearing from which is sprouts, the tower is unmistakably a great, skeletal arm, held together by tendons and toughened flesh, picked at by birds and coyotes and whatever else has happened along. It droops, mildly, and terminates in a finger that indicates a point on the other side of the universe. It would be impossible for Kiara to make out what is there with her eyes alone and difficult, even, with the tools and knowledge for viewing deep space.

She dons a cheap parka, retrieves the saw, and begins.