Artificial

16 | Scraps

Mira doesn't hate me anymore. At least, that's what I think as I scrub blood and other impurities from my hair and body. The salt in the spring burns my wounds, which have already started scabbing over, but I don't mind. It distracts me from the real ache within my body.

All I want to do is grab Mira by her shoulders, and tell her everything. I have to bite down on my own tongue, to resist the urge. I want to trust that she'll believe me, but I know if I start acting crazy now, the tentative trust I've built with her will shatter.

As much as I abhor her distrust and hatred of me, a part of me is relieved. Relieved that her temper hadn't been quashed by our decade long separation. I'll graciously take Mira's hatred over her indifference.

Mira remains in a stone-like stillness as I finish bathing and dress. A slight breeze circulates throughout the cave, cooling the water against my skin.

Mira doesn't look up as I get out of the water and dress, her spine completely rigid, and breathing tense. The silence eats at me, and I open my mouth to say something. Nothing comes out, and I close it again.

This was not how I imagined our reunion. After 13 fucking years, this wasn't how it was supposed to happen. I had been in a state of disarray when I finally found Bronson. Didn't think twice before I delisted his company and bought-out his investors. I would have never thought he'd send Mira after me, not after all the trouble he went through to hide her.

Not that he did a good job of that either. Bronson is a dumb fuck through and through. Out of all scientists, researchers, and professors on Cassda-14, I remembered Bronson's face the most vividly. His disconcertingly smooth skin, from one too many carbon-laser facials, blinding white teeth, and upturned nose.

I remember him because he wore his lab coat wrong, forgetting to lace all the fastenings, or forgetting gear before entering the testing facility rooms. Academia's a hard field to get into, considering the sheer volume of prerequisite information required to master before starting independent research. Yet a motherless waste of oxygen like Bronson had managed to make it.

Countless restless nights, sitting alone in the white room, had been wasted on pondering how. This had been after the other children, and before I'd met Mira. Where I'd have weeks on end of isolation, with nothing to do but count the specks of dust flying through the air, or listen to the regurgitation of the oxygen recycler.

Bronson called himself an entrepreneur and an inventor, but I'd met floor-roomba's smarter than him. He had been bright enough to get accepted into university, grown rather adept in DNA sequencing, and eventually picked up some low-level languages like assembly. But that's where his achievements ended.

I was three when he first entered the lab, and listening to his dull-witted chatter had been the equivalence of nails on a chalk-board. His contributions to Cassda-14's research could be better described as set-backs. He'd once tried to convince the board of Cassda to add a beer bottle opener to one of my fingers. Bronson wasn't a scholar, but a vegetable who had somehow found his way into STEM. Too preoccupied with the prestige that came with research, fucking around with girls in shitty cantine clubs, than actually doing his job, yet not ill-educated enough to be fired. If he really cared about Mira, he wouldn't have let her off-planet. If he really cared, he wouldn't have sent her to do his dirty work day-in and day-out, asking her to fight for his entertainment and curiosity.

But Mira doesn't believe that, and it's not something I can even fault her for. She has no memories of anything before Bronson. No friends, no family, not even those shitty shows they used to show her at Cassda for 'socialization.'

Just thinking about it makes my knuckles go white, and I close my eyes, releasing a slow breath in a bid for patience. My hands are restless, and there's nothing I want more than to have my hands around a screwdriver, to breathe in the musky air of my respirator, and feel the cancer-causing radiation glide off my skin.