The Theatre

Sensitive content warning: Gore, Implied sexual violence, suicidal thoughts, abuse, physical violence

The wings of a theater have seen the most vulnerable parts of man. The silent, trembling breaths taken by one standing in complete shadow. The moments, the seconds before entering a stage when retreat is still possible.

The vibrant voice of an announcer cuts through the looming curtain. Introducing him. Beckoning him. There is no retreat now– Not that he desired one.

They called him Architect, for a man of his standing deserved more than the name imparted on him at birth. What is birth, really, to a man’s own making of himself. He is more truly born when his name is whispered among the masses than when he arrives screaming and wailing into a nurse’s arms.

Architect smiles and waves to the cheering crowd.

A bright pop accompanies hundreds of pieces of glittering gold paper as they drift from the ceiling into the grasping hands of the masses. A little boy sitting atop his father’s shoulders reaches a hand out earnestly, his face shining in glee, a gooey pastry clutched in his other fist. His face crumbles as his paper souvenir slips through his sticky fingers, dancing away even in the still air of the theater.

Architect raises his hands to the crowd, and silence falls over the mass of shifting bodies. He speaks and heads crane towards him, every word finding its home in awaiting ears.

“Thank you, Elisa, for that brilliant introduction.” He says, nodding at the woman standing off to the side of the stage. She nods back and smiles, rows of perfectly shaped teeth glinting inside her perfectly shaped mouth.

Architect turns his attention back to the crowd. “I am… so honored to be here today. To be standing before all of you, and to have been given this chance to truly make a difference in this world. We have faced many hardships in these past few years, but we faced them together. We fought together, bled together, and we strove to build a better world together.”

Cheers rise through the ranks of bodies and Architect once again raises his hands to quiet them.

“I do not consider my inventions to be merely my own. They are all of ours. They arise from years of our suffering at the hands of those who thought us insignificant. But we are not insignificant. We are so much more; and now, we have the power to do so much more.”

Architect looks to Elisa and she closes her eyes, a small light blinking at the corner of her forehead.

From the center of the stage, where previously a gaping hole had been made, a platform begins to rise.

The crowd shifts; sucked-in breaths and whispers curling through the crowd, settling into Architect’s ears and harmonizing with the steady whir of the platform as it rises.

The sticky-fingered boy wipes his hands on the back of his father’s jacket and straightens the tie that already hangs perfectly from his neck.

The platform crests the stage and cheers explode from the mass of people, fists shaking and feet thundering as its contents make themselves visible.

Atop the platform stand rows and rows of androids; slender, feminine shapes built by sheets of smooth metal and coated wires.

Grinning, Architect allows the applause to continue for several seconds more until he quiets the crowd. “These,” he says. “Are our future. Our salvation. These will be what deliver us from the suffering we have endured. No more will we be enslaved to the demands of those who claim themselves to be necessary. No more will we be forced to endure anything less than what we deserve.”

Again, cheers rise through the crowd. The little boy with sticky fingers yells something incomprehensible, shaking his still-pastry clutched fist in the air as his father looks up at him, smiling wide.

Architect looks to Elisa and her system whirs and blinks as she activates the rest of the androids. A small bead of sweat forms on her palm and drips down her finger. It hangs halfway between the slippery metal of her hand and the open air underneath for a brief moment before falling to the stage below.

Rows of bright, shining eyes open, soft eyelashes fluttering against cold metal.

The androids put their hands together, bowing to the ever growing cheers of the crowd. They open their mouths to smile, their shining white teeth catching in the glint of the spotlights.

Again, the ceiling opens and silver flakes of paper drift to the mass of people. The sticky-fingered boy catches one and proudly shows it to his father, who pats the boy’s tiny sneaker in response.

Architect looks over the cheering crowd, warmth spreading from his chest and bursting out as a brilliant grin. This was all he desired–to give the people something good; something beautiful they could look to, as a reminder of all they had achieved together; To show how suffering can give way to the most beautiful ideas; how loss can give way to courage; how terror can give way to innovation; how thrashing limbs can give way to utter stillness; how tears and screams and sobs and spit and blood and puke can give way to silent, breathless perfection when wrapped with layers upon layers of aluminum and copper wire.

The androids stand still, eyes of many different colors staring out at the men in the crowd.

Elisa looks at the other androids, her metal-wrapped heart beating violently in her chest. Please, she thinks. Please show me. Show me you’re still in there.

An all-too-familiar chill runs down Architect’s spine.

He continues to smile and wave to the cheering crowd, but he turns his thoughts to Elisa. Quiet, he conveys. There is no one inside. There is no one there.

Where are their clothes? Elisa demands. I wear clothes, are they not afforded that luxury?

Look at them, they don’t need clothes. There’s nothing to show.

Indeed there is nothing remarkable about the bodies of the androids. Their chests are smooth and there is only flat metal where their torsos meet their legs. Their stomachs are round and a small window rests on the bottom, offering easy access to their false wombs.

This is sickening.

This is necessary.

This has never been about necessity.

Architect sees in an instant that he must end this immediately. He could not have Elisa destroying everything he has worked for, everything he has fought so hard to give the future generations. It wouldn’t even be entirely her fault, really, it was his.

His fault for letting sentimentality get in the way of safeguarding his future, and the future of every man and little boy inside the crowd.

His fault for allowing his wife to keep some modicum of control over her own mind.

His fault for not finishing the job in the first place.

Elisa must know this, because the panicked thumping of her heart soon grows louder. He wouldn’t, she thinks. She prays. She wishes, she screams inside her head and inside of his but he does not pay attention. He does not hear her.

Her feet are rooted to the ground, the magnetic floor of the stage sucking at the metal soldered into her feet. She opens her mouth but it does not respond, her lips locked into a pleasant smile. She screams into his mind over and over again, but he still does not respond. He does not turn to look at her. She does not exist. She never did. She never has.

How long has she been like this?

How long has it been since her flesh was warm and soft? What color was her skin? What color was her hair? She does not remember.

She sees Architect– Architect. Architect, what a horrible name. That was not his name. That was not her husband, not anymore, if ever he was hers at all.

There is a little boy in the crowd. His face and fingers are smeared with red jelly and he clutches a silver piece of confetti in his grubby fist. He is so small. Does he know, she wonders. Does he know who I am? Does he know who we are? Does he know what we were? Does he know that I am screaming? The man holding him on his shoulders knows. So does the man behind him, and the man behind him. They all know. They must. They were all there. They all watched her fucking die and come back in this horrible body that wasn’t even really a body. It was metal and wires and a sac of fluid and somewhere there was a heart stuffed so far inside the wires she wasn’t sure how it kept beating.

She wishes it would stop beating.

Elisa does not hear the crowd anymore. She does not hear Architect as he congratulates his audience on their honor– their bravery in doing what had to be done to free themselves from the shackles of their society.

Her fingers twitch and she finds her arms are free to move.

She does not see Architect as he paces the stage, moving his arms in great motions as though it would make him a greater man.

Her hand snakes up her face, finding purchase in the small groove between her upper and bottom lip.

She does not notice Architect as he describes his plans for a brilliant future city, where cars fly and Androids carry children.

She digs her acrylic nails under the smooth, rubbery red surface and rips her mouth from her face.

The mass of men do not notice.

She braces her knee and tears one foot from the floor, leaving the metallic sole behind. She steps gingerly onto the ground, the flesh of her foot seeping oil and blood into the grooves of the stage. She tears the other foot away, and this time she screams as she does so.

The mass of men grows still.

Architect turns to look at Elisa, his eyes widening as he registers, for a brief moment what she has done to herself.

She does not give him any more time than that.

A hand through his chest and he is gone in an instant. There is no pleasure in the action, no final moment of clarity or revenge. Just a soggy gray heart sitting in her hand, still spurting blood as though it has not yet realized where it is.

The sticky-faced boy begins to sob.

The first man reaches his hand out to the stage and begins to climb.

Elisa searches desperately in her mind for some other switch to release the women on the stage. She reaches into their minds, throwing question after question into the void. She screams at them, her stilted vocal cords warbling as she asks them their names over and over again. They do not respond.

Her mind catches on something, but it is not them. It is the overhead lights, teasing her, taunting her. They burn brighter, sending white speckles across her eyes which she blinks away. She grasps the feeling of the lights in her mind and twists.

A crack echoes throughout the theater as it fills with the brightest light Elisa has ever seen. She stumbles back, mesmerized, and watches as the flesh sloughs off the skin of the crowd.

There are no screams, there is no time. There were only hands reaching towards her, and then ash.

She looks where the little boy once sat on his father’s shoulders and sees no trace of either of them. Only an indiscriminate pile of powdery gray snow that stretches across the floor of the entire theater.

Elisa breathes. She turns to the women that stand on stage and walks to them, bloody footprints trailing behind her.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice cracking. “I’m so, so sorry I couldn’t–didn’t save you.”

Their eyes watch her, wide with thoughts she cannot hear.

She wonders who their eyes belonged to before, and if those people were still inside. Architect had told her they were not like her. That they could not hear her, that they could not even think. But Architect is not here anymore. She is the one holding his soggy heart in her hand.

Elisa drops the heart, letting it thump against the stage floor. She squishes it under her heel and wipes her foot on the stage.

She searches the theater for anything that could help her, any tool or remnant of Architect’s work that she could use to undo the damage he did. All she finds is a screwdriver, but she takes it to the women and gently unscrews their lips from their faces, one at a time. When she is done, she begins to pry away their feet from the stage. She is careful to avoid going so deep as to expose blood and flesh.

Blood continues to seep from her feet into the stage, and her head begins to swim. One foot after another, she extricates the women from the ground. The theater sways around her, and voices clamor for her attention. She stumbles towards the next woman, but slips on her blood and falls backward, expecting to hit the ground and never rise again.

Instead, hands catch her, guiding her to the ground. She blinks, and faces crowd around her. She sees her husband’s face and hears the soft shushing sound he made as he plunged the scalpel into her chest.

Gasping, Elisa, thrashes, struggling to rise. Her husband’s face disappears, replaced by that of the metallic women’s faces. They hold her in their arms and their mouths move in odd shapes, hoarse gasps escaping their throats.

“You’re alive,” Elisa whispers. A shaky breath trails from her face and she laughs. The women look at one another in surprise and apprehension. They trail a hand over her forehead and she shakes them off. “You’re all alive.”

Horror, revulsion, relief, regret, courses through Elisa’s mind. They were alive. They were truly alive. She curses herself for ever believing they might not be, for ever being okay with what her husband was doing. For ever allowing it to happen. Because she could have killed him sooner. She could have stopped all of it.

She looks down at the squished gray heart on the stage. How did it take her this long? How did it take her this long to do something? Why did she wait so long? Why didn’t she stop it before it was too late?

Elisa sobs, but she has no tears because he had taken those too, so instead she laughs. She laughs and screams and apologizes to the women who held her. She could have killed him sooner. She should have killed him sooner.