Brambly House

The road to Brambly House is an anfractuous beast, cutting through the gnarled forest before spilling forth into a meadow whittled by wind and pocked with heather. A stone cottage rests precariously close to the cliff’s edge, drawn nearer to the sea with each passing year.

Overcast skies blanch the landscape, the grass not quite so green, the house weathered beyond its prime. A fierce chill has fractured the air, the promise of spring elusive despite it being the middle of March. This is the kind of cold her mother would say settled in her bones. She never understood what that meant, although she never bothered to ask. Regardless, it was much too late, her mother’s bones resting beneath the turned soil at the property’s perimeter, marked by a solitary headstone.

She steps toward the cottage, boots crunching gravel. The night nurse’s car is parked by the half-rotted fence. The front door groans with age as she pushes past the threshold. Her father’s boots sit idly by the door, laces strewn about. A full year had passed since he’d last worn them, but she couldn’t bring herself to put them away, preferring to leave them as a symbol of improbable hope.

Shrugging her coat off, she hangs it next to the nurse’s before mounting the nearby staircase. Fondly, she gazes at the frames that climb with her to the second floor: her mother on her wedding day, frocked in white; her father in uniform in his younger days; a photo of the three of them nestled before the fireplace on Christmas.

For as long as she could remember, her parents seemed hewn by age, their hair boasting fronds of gray, wrinkles gathered in the crevices of their faces. Occasionally, she was permitted to watch reruns of shows like The Brady Bunch on the house's lone television, and she couldn't help but notice the parents were considerably spry compared to hers.

From the quiet seclusion of Brambly House, these differences were easily dismissed. It was simply Mother and Father and herself, occasionally a landscaper or delivery man. There were no other children, either. No one to do the activities she witnessed on the television—no dressing up in costumes, riding bikes, roughhousing, or playing pranks.

“You’re sick,” her mother had answered one day when she inquired as to the cause of their isolated existence. She must’ve been about four or five at the time, for her mother explained things in digestible chunks, like stacking toy blocks.

She didn’t feel sick. In fact, she’d never felt sick at all. Sometimes, when the weather changed, her father would grumble about the house with a pocketful of tissues and a frog in his throat, but she never recalled feeling in such a state herself.

Sick, her mother explained, was when your body wasn’t able to fight off bad germs. What were germs? she wondered. Did she catch them with a net like she did when hunting butterflies in the garden?

“That’s why we live all the way up here, where the air is fresh. Away from people.”

The first time she recalled seeing anything beyond Brambly House was the spring she turned six. Father drove them all to the city—a wondrous, bustling medley of sights, sounds, and smells she’d never before encountered. Her mother strapped a mask around her ears, pulled it taut over her nose as they stepped from the car. It was raining that day, and the sidewalks were alive with puddles and jostling umbrellas. She stomped gleefully in a rather large puddle, soaking the hem of her pants, much to her mother’s dismay.

They entered a large, gray building that loomed monstrously overhead. Floor to ceiling, the inside was a stark, sterile white. Her father checked them in at the desk, the receptionist sporting an equally blinding uniform. The waiting room, as she came to know it, was quite boring. She swung her legs from the chair for what seemed an eternity before someone finally ushered them back.

A pleasant-faced man who introduced himself as Dr. Thornberg greeted her, instructing her to have a seat on an exam table. Perhaps, she reasoned, Dr. Thornberg was going to make her better—doctors were meant to help sick people, after all. Her parents watched on as the doctor poked and prodded, posing intermittent, nonchalant questions.

“How are things going on your end, Mom and Dad?” he asked, palpating the back of her skull beneath her hair.

“Oh, well as ever,” her mother replied. “I did have one question about—”

Before her mother could finish, Dr. Thornberg retrieved a device from the nearby desk, bringing it close to her head. “This is my special helper tool,” he explained gently. “It’s going to help me fix a few things for you.”

“My mother says I’m sick,” she told him earnestly. “Will it make me better?”

Dr. Thornberg didn’t seem to know how to reply, so he simply nodded. “You’re going to feel very sleepy. Don’t be scared, though. This is just part of the check-up.”

The device hummed to life, a buzzing sensation stirring in the back of her head. It reminded her of the beehive that hung from a tree at the edge of the forest at home. Don’t get too close, her father always warned.

The last thing she remembered was Dr. Thornberg’s green eyes staring into her own.

The ride home was foggy, both in her mind and on the road before them littered with potholes. Her father swerved to dodge them, her head bouncing against the window as he did. Her mother rode in the backseat with her, stroking her hair. Something inside her felt different, but she couldn’t pinpoint what it was.

“Damn,” her father muttered as they struck one of the monstrous holes. “When are they going to fix this road?”

“Mother,” she croaked quietly. “Am I better?” If she were cured of her sickness, she could go to the city more often, make friends, explore the world beyond Brambly House.

Offering her a pitying glance, her mother replied, “Not quite. But Dr. Thornberg is helping.”

She didn’t know what to make of this news, and so resigned herself to silence for the rest of the drive.

Every year thereafter, the three of them took to the city to call upon Dr. Thornberg, each visit punctuated by that familiar buzzing sound. It thrummed ceremoniously through the caverns of her skull like a warning, though she didn’t know from what. The aftermath was the same, her mind wading through throngs of fog and feeling suddenly too large, a snail outgrown its shell.

The year she turned fourteen was one of great change. She stood before the mirror in her bedroom, scrutinizing, tracing. Her fingers scaled the new angles of her face—her cheeks more sculpted, lips fuller. They crept down the length of her neck to her chest, then her middle, grazing peaks and valleys that had appeared unbidden.

Despite her body’s evolutionary tendencies, she never grew ill. Seasons waxed and waned, leaves sprouted and shriveled, Mother and Father traded coughs, and yet she felt no sense of malaise. In fact, she felt practically invigorated beneath the sun the spring of her sixteenth year as adolescence blossomed at Brambly House.

The catalyst came in the sinewy, tanned form of a new landscaper. His dark hair brimmed beneath his cap, and, as if he had eyes in the back of his head, he caught her staring twice in the span of his very first day on the grounds. But she never averted her gaze, instead soaking in the contours of his face, the darkness of his eyes. On the second stolen glance, he smiled back, offering a wave. Somewhere within the folds of her mind, the humming resurfaced.

His name was Theo, he told her one day as she watched him carefully trim the hedges. He was eighteen, and had decided to follow in his father’s footsteps, he explained as he neatened the edges of the drive. Was she ever lonely out here at Brambly House? He asked her this one day as the summer came to a sweltering fruition.

“Sometimes,” she admitted, grasping his hand and guiding him to the forest. The feel of his palm against her own sent shockwaves through her, the humming growing louder as they neared the treeline. Only this time, it was the bees. The hive swarmed overhead, and she grinned. Theo shrank away momentarily, but she beckoned him closer. “If we come behind them like this,” she explained, positioning them a fair distance away, “they won’t feel the need to defend their hive. We’re simply observers.”

Once before, she’d been caught by the bees, stepping a hair too close to the hive for their liking. They chased her through the meadow, stinging angrily at her limbs. Her father had been fiddling with a project in the open workshop when he spotted her tearing through the thick grass, screaming like a banshee. As if the wear and tear of age had left his body, he charged forward, grabbing her by the waist and hoisting her up like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder and into the house before the swarm could catch up. Worry contorted his face as he looked her over. He ran a hand along her arm, asked, “Are you hurt?”

“Hurt?” Glancing down at her arms, somehow untouched and intact, she shook her head. Perhaps it was the fear of the pursuit that startled her most, but her skin remained as porcelain and unblemished as ever. As it brushed over her own, she caught a glimpse of her father’s hand, a barbed stinger embedded in the crepey flesh, already beginning to swell. “Father, are you hurt?”

He looked down, plucked the stinger from the skin, and waved a hand. “I’m right as rain. And it looks like you are, too. Now, what did I tell you about that hive?”

“Don’t get too close,” she mumbled sheepishly.

The bees became a secret, of sorts. When her father and mother were occupied, and the days grew long, she would creep to the forest’s edge, observing their organized chaos. She was a captive audience to their performances.

Theo brushed a hand along her cheek, and she turned to face him, pulled from her reverie. He leaned in, honeyed breath whispering against her lips. The pathways of her mind were frenzied, and as their lips met, she recalled all of the beautiful things in life, each memory a golden jewel of pleasure. For a moment, the air was electrified, and she swore she could hear Theo’s heart beating through his chest.

“What on God’s green earth is going on here?” a voice boomed. The moment shattered into a million glittering pieces, turning to dust at their feet. Theo grew pale at the sight of her father storming towards them.

“Father,” she started, but was silenced by the anger boiling beneath his expression.

“You,” he pointed to Theo accusingly, as though he were a lone player in the act. “Go home.” Theo obeyed, darting off like a dog with its tail between its legs.

She yearned to salvage the illusion, piece it back together, but there was no hope of that. Her first taste of freedom sat in fragmented, unrepairable ruin. She knew this to be true, as Theo did not return to Brambly House, quickly replaced by an older, portly gentleman whose eyes held nothing but indifference.

She did not return to the bees, either, their cadence a painful reminder.

Her seventeenth year, as they made their way down the sidewalk to Dr. Thornberg’s office, she witnessed a mob wielding signs on posts, marching about the entrance.

STOP DNA GMO

DON’T PLAY GOD: SEE HIS TRUTH

MAN > MACHINE

Like the bees, they were angry, her family venturing too close to the hive. They spouted raucous obscenities and trembling pleas as a security guard escorted them inside. Their time in the waiting room that day was silent, save for the discord of the crowd outside.

Dr. Thornberg apologized for the protestors. “They just don’t have a clue what miracles we work here.” He shook his head, taking his usual seat across from her. She noticed new crow’s feet spidering from his eyes.

The accustomed rigmarole began, the periphery of her vision ebbing, her ears ringing as the dreadful hum returned. This time, just before the world plunged into darkness, she caught a snippet of dialogue between the doctor and her parents.

“You’re stunting her capabilities,” Dr. Thornberg admonished.

“We just want her to have a normal childhood,” her mother replied, somewhat defensive.

“With all due respect,” Dr. Thornberg continued, “there’s nothing normal about this. But that’s the beauty of it.”

The words buzzed in her ears long after she came to. That’s the beauty of it. What could be so abnormal that it was somehow still beautiful? She chided herself for not asking the doctor more questions. She was a puppet, controlled by hands that moved her and mouths that spoke for her.

That’s the beauty of it. The doctor’s words hung in the air that night like a sickness.

Eighteen. The year of death. It was cancer, a kind that spread like wildfire through her mother’s body until she was reduced to a gaunt shell of her former self. From the hospital bed in the dim room upstairs, her mother’s voice called deliriously for her in her final days. She stroked her mother’s hair, roles reversed, and listened as a fragile voice escaped her lips: “I’m sick.” It was barely more than a whisper.

“Can Dr. Thornberg make you better?” she asked naively.

Her mother shook her head weakly. “No,” she rasped. “It’s a kind of sickness there’s no getting better from.”

Lost for words, she gripped her mother’s skeletal hand, the knuckles knobby, bones protruding grotesquely.

“But I want you to take care of your father. And—” she choked briefly, terrifyingly, before finding her voice again. “And I want you to know that you are everything we ever wanted, in every way.”

Sleep seized her mother then, eyes fluttering shut and mouth lolling open in that new, agonizing manner of breathing that haunted Brambly House as of late. It would be her final slumber, and before the week’s end, the cold earth tilled just shy of the treeline.

Quickly, she realized the immenseness of her mother’s influence over the household. In her absence, her father was clueless, frazzled with arranging the funeral and finances and other unfathomable facets of life. It frightened her, in a childlike way, seeing her father so lost.

In an attempt to alleviate the burden, she decided to try her hand at sorting through the disarray. While her father journeyed to town to run errands, she managed to finagle the lock to the home office, the door popping open with a guttural creak. The musty air was suffocating, but she sifted dutifully through drawers and files. Until she saw it.

THE NEXT GEN.

Three peculiar words that held no meaning until she opened the folder. Across the top of the first page, her name was printed in smudged ink, along with all of the features she’d grown into over the years. Her birthday was listed adjacent to a line that read DATE OF ACTIVATION. Dr. Thornberg’s name and credentials appeared sporadically throughout the documents, along with a plethora of information that seized her.

SUBJECT 009

DESIGNATION: AI-HUMANOID

SUBTYPE: FEMALE

She didn’t understand the full extent of her discovery, but she knew who would.

With some begging, she managed to hitch a ride with a delivery driver who had appeared that day bearing another bouquet of sympathy flowers, convincing him to take her into the city.

The sky wept with her as she barged into Dr. Thornberg’s office, file in hand. He didn’t seem surprised, simply sighing. “I knew this would come out sooner or later. I tried to tell them.”

His explanation was analytical, mostly devoid of emotion. Perhaps he was the machine, she thought as he rambled through the ins and outs of her procurement. Her parents couldn’t conceive naturally, and so sought out the doctor’s help with creating—no, engineering—the perfect child. A child so perfect they kept her caged like a stunted songbird, her perpetual illness a ruse.

“With enough money, anything’s possible. That’s the beauty of it,” Dr. Thornberg concluded bluntly.

She didn’t feel beautiful; she felt alienated, monetized. She hated Dr. Thornberg and her parents, for thrusting her into a world where she would never truly belong and for concealing it. Every component of her existence was a carefully orchestrated lie, every transformation driven by code and construct—a program designed to adapt and perfect. There was no end for her, she realized with a finality that day.

How could there be death if there was no life?

A full year has passed since the truth came to light. She sits by the same rickety, hospital bed again, this time for her father. Dementia riddled his brain shortly after her mother’s passing, as if unable to bear her parting. In an old encyclopedia, she’d read that some species could die of a broken heart, and here her father lay, doing just that. Soon, she would be left to navigate the endless world alone.

His thinning hair is plastered to his forehead and he sighs laboriously, unaware of her presence. She never disclosed her knowledge of their secret. To him, she was everything he ever wanted, in every way. To her, he represented a revelation. Maybe that was the beauty of it, after all.

Leaning over, she rests her head on his chest, the rhythmic thumping of his heart a warning for the future: don’t get too close.