His Blackened Palms

Machine LEON is told to clear the tree, but he finds himself interested in the animals sitting on top of it instead. A short story of eight thousand words.

Once, or perhaps a very long time later, the clockwork maker of this city was commissioned to build twenty-five machines. They were not supposed to resemble humans, yet feature all limbs that humans did, possess their eyes, their voices; they were here to construct more buildings, more restrictions, to human beings and animals alike. The man initially refused, but what else would guarantee his livelihood, his only son’s?
He made twenty-four, and in the middle of making the twenty-fifth, he was supposed to deliver them all. In a surge of pride, the man refused; refused to hand the machines over, refused to be responsible for more construction and more concrete. More than that, he said, glancing over to his son, he refused to destroy the future.
The government officials shot him right then and there and told the man’s son to pick up where he had left off.
The son was told to never speak of it.
He spoke it into each and every clockwork of the unfinished twenty-fifth.

---

The objective is to clear this tree, so LEON is told. In order to cut the tall, wooden stalk that has been at this construction site since the beginning of this project, the seventh and twenty-fourth have to work together in moving the jigsaw, pushing and pulling together in order to move the clockwork mechanism forward. LEON stands watch, assuring that the tree does not fall off the wrong direction, onto the wrong pile. The closer the two LEONs walk toward the tree, stepping over snow and piles of rubbish, the lower their arms hang from the weight of the jigsaw. It scrapes the ground three meters before the arrival. Woof woof! There is no malfunction of the jigsaw’s end. It is not activated. The other LEONs continue walking. This LEON raises a blackened hand. Neither register the movement.
<STOP> he has to call out.
His brothers stop.
LEON steps closer. A minor animal with shaggy brown fur barks up a tree, its volume surprisingly loud considering its size. It is an unauthorized being on this construction. <LEAVE> he calls, but the animal does not budge. Instead, the brothers do, jigsaw swaying as they shuffle it on the ground.
The animal turns its big, dark eyes to LEON. It snarls first, then barks again. Woof! Woof!
On the tree, at its very top, something clicks in answer. It sounds like all other twenty-four LEONs decided to finish their work and log out to charge simultaneously. It is disconcerting, and highly improbable.
LEON cranes his neck. On top of the tree is a manmade, wooden platform. It is worse than manmade: the wood sticks out, the finish less than satisfactory. There is a group of tall, lean animals that sit on top of this platform. They move their arms, and under the white suddenly black peeks through, the same black that LEON’s palms possess, unlike all the other LEONs.
They click and click and the dog barks in answer. Any attempt of LEON to parse it ends in failure, a sudden stutter of his escapement, information overload.
Steps in the snow. It is Supervisor. <DESCRIBE STATUS>
The tiny, brown animal on the ground barks. Woof! Woof woof woof woof!
The birds are not bothered.
<Animals on platform. Operation cannot continue. InputOutputError> LEON answers.
Supervisor is a human male with 175 blemishes on the surface, two green eyes. He looks down at the animal. Says in human language, “I can see that.”
<INPUT?> LEON inquires.
Woof! Woof!
<Get rid of that fucking dog first.
>PARSING…<
The animal, dog, barks louder, then charges at Supervisor’s thigh. Supervisor grunts, shakes his leg and the dog with it. LEON grabs the dog by its behind and pulls. Supervisor shouts out loud, unparseable, and pulls his leg away from the dog. The dog gnarls again. It squirms and squiggles out of LEON’s grasp and charges towards the supervisor again. Woofwoofwoof!
<RID OF THE DOG. CONFIRM?>
“Yes!” Supervisor shouts. “Yes, fuck’s sake, go ahead already!”
“Stop!” LEON calls in human language.
The dog does. It turns around to him, comes closer and smells his feet, its tail wagging left and right, then looks up and barks. Woof! barks again.
<RID OF THE DOG>
Once again LEON grabs the dog. He manages five steps before the dog squiggles out of his grasp, again, and runs towards high rises, confusing patterns, many narrow areas of construction.
<UNAUTHORIZED AREA>
Supervisor is still on the ground. “You trash cans are all the same,” he grunts. “Can’t do shit without thinking.”
>PARSING…<
<The LEON series was authorized by the government to construct new buildings. Authorization is not necessary for constructing.>
There is a dark red streak on Supervisor’s leg. It trickles down and becomes the length of the dog itself. “I authorize you,” Supervisor grunts. “Fuck’s sake. Get that fucking dog.”
>PARSING…<

---

LEON walks. There is not much space between him and other human beings here, an entanglement of legs, wheels, engines with clicking, clicking clockwork mechanisms that push every machine and every human forward. In LEON, the clockworks are under his surface, carefully hidden. On humans, it is visible and on their arm hinges, or their leg hinges, whirring and clicking at every step and every head turn. Here, the snow has turned to dirt, wet against LEON’s feet, turning the ground slippery and tricky to navigate.
The dog is a blur in a world of browns and greys, dark shades with no room for light. The street narrows for manmade wood platforms, on which fruit is cut up and served for screws and any human part. Underneath one such wooden platform, a tail whips past a minor hill of snow. LEON has to jostle past a human. The wood rustles over him as he crawls underneath it. But the tail quickly disappears into the world of legs.
“What in the world!” a human shouts.
>PARSING…<
<the world. enquiry
<OBJECT.>
Wood traps LEON’s left leg. He pulls. The entire wooden platform crumbles from behind. Loud shrieks. Shouts. LEON is authorized for destruction. LEON has an objective.
“Are you out of your mind!” the same human shouts.
The foot is still stuck between two planks of man made wood. LEON stands up and pulls it out. FOOT VENT OPEN. He is not authorized to stop. He continues walking at 95% speed. Something brown makes its way towards him. It is the dog again, sniffing the tip of his feet. LEON reaches out to the dog, but it bolts past him again, towards platforms decorated with electronic lamps and beverages on top of them. This time, the dog does not run under them, and neither does LEON.
He increases his speed back to 100%, then 110%.
FOOT VENT OPEN. UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT LOCATED - FOOT VENT@142. UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT LOCATED - FOOT VENT@135
He is not authorized to stop.
The dog runs past the lit platforms, past the narrow street to a wider plaza, everything already constructed and sealed here, and LEON follows the dog up the hill. Though there are not as many humans here, the concrete is cracked, old, and needs to be reconstructed. Every house door has a clock mechanism: a dial to enter, a dial to leave right under. This area has a match in the logs, but accessing past data is unauthorized.
UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT LOCATED - FOOT VENT@132
BATTERY LEVEL CRITICAL
ASSISTANCE REQUIRED
LEON’s speed decreases to 90%. Woofwoofwoof! Estimated time of fulfilling the objective is fifteen minutes, then twenty, twenty-five, thirty.
<speed rs 10
SPEED CANNOT BE RAISED
A human object within ten meter distance.
> male, 500+ blemishes on face - elderly - 175m
“You lost your way, boy?” a human asks.
<battery
25%
<GET THE DOG>
“What are you talking about?”
Parsing to human language…
“Get the dog,” LEON manages.
ENTERING EMERGENCY MODE
> dog 5m distance
> dog 6m distance
> face recognized
> OBJECTIVE LOCATED
> woof woof
The human male: “You’re one of those machines of Engin’s.”
<GET RID OF THE DOG>
< step
LEON takes a step.
< step
> woof woof!
Something touches him. “Stop! Stop!”
> unauthorized access on LEON
“You hear me? You’re not charged!”
< step
The concrete is cracked.
> body degree is 85
> body degree is 80
> 75 70 65 50 40 30
“Vedat!”
> WARNING: POTENTIALLY DEADLY COLLISION <
CollisionException
StackOverflowError

---

###LEON MODEL CREATED 21XX…###
##MODEL 0025 BUILD NO. 00253416##
Booting core services . . . up!
Booting limbs . . . up!
Crash log available at /tmp/var/log.
Setup company policy profile…
Recover last objectives…
Booting ENGINE ::N09:: Visualizer… up!
Activate audio…
< laughter | 50 db
< step | unparseable noise | 45 db
< step | metal against metal | 40 db
Activate vision…
< ALL SYSTEMS UP
It is a workshop. Nearby, dust and shavings coat the surface of the metal platform. Somewhere he hears the dog bark. In another room, two humans are talking. LEON stands up: outside, it is buildings in tilted yellow, pebbles coating the street. LEON finds his own countenance superimposed on them, woozy and unclear.
“Have a nice afternoon,” a male voice says.
There is the back of a human. Keys jangle on his waist as the human turns around, a human male, around thirty years of age. Upon seeing Leon a noisy hahahahaha escapes his lips, one that does not stop.
“And now to the main event!” the human male shouts, raising his arms. Woof woof! “Not you, Frühstück,” he tells someone else.
The dog. <GET THE DOG> was LEON’s last recorded objective. Has it cleared?
LEON walks towards the noise.
“Oh no you won’t,” the human male says.
This man is not authorized to tell LEON what to do. LEON keeps walking until he is out of the room and at the entrance, an arm stretched out to get the dog.
One hand pushes LEON’s chest, the other grabs LEON’s face and turns it to face the human male. It is long, the black hair parted in the middle, and his mouth is a perpetual grin.
<DOG> LEON says.
Vedat tilts his head. “Human language please?”
“You possess a dog,” LEON says.
“Do I?” the human male asks back. Woof! “She likes you a lot, you know. You’re just not used to animals loving you. Or anything.”
LEON pushes past the man.
<STOP> the man commands.
<STAY WHERE YOU ARE> the man commands.
<CLEAR LAST OBJECTIVE> the man commands.
Arm still stretched out, LEON stops.
“I know that’s a little harsh,” the human male continues. He chuckles a little and steps closer. His bottom half jangles once again. “Then again, so are you.”
>Parsing…<
“Nobody likes you LEONs,” he continues. The hand that is on LEON’s face slowly trails down where the face plate joins the neck plate. “Nobody but me. If you asked me why, it’s because I understand you. Me alone.”
LEON waits.
“You see, we serve a world that kills us all and we help every system that furthers it. Though you have no say whereas I do.” The smile grows wider; the human male meets LEON’s eyes. “You know who I am?”
LEON parses it all. 70 percent is garbage. The face results no match.
“My name is Vedat Karabulut,” the human male says.
The name results no match.
The grin turns to a wide smile. “That rang no bell either, huh.” With an ease LEON has never observed on a human before, he says, <DESCRIBE YOURSELF>
LEON answers <LEON0025 is the twenty-fifth of the LEON series, authorized by the government to construct new buildings.>
Vedat’s face freezes. Then, he whirls and laughs, loud, shrill and jagged.
“Of course you are!” he shouts. “Of course you are!” he shrieks. His arms are thrown to the air. “And you came all the way up to here? Who told you to? There’s plenty mechanics around!”
LEON simply watches. The dog, Frühstück, walks downstairs, whipping past LEON straight to Vedat.
“It was all you, wasn’t it,” Vedat says, crouching down and grabbing the dog by its face. He plants a kiss on the top of Frühstück’s head. Frühstück doesn’t squirm. “Do you even love me? Or do I have to suffer for you too? Where were you?” Vedat leads the dog to a minor spot in the workshop. “You were supposed to stay with Luka. He let you out?”
Woof!
A clank. There is a bowl lowered, then nudged closer to Frühstück. “You know I can’t parse that, princess,” Vedat says.
Frühstück is more interested in the contents of the bowl.
Vedat sighs, hands on his hips, and looks up at LEON. <DESCRIBE LAST OBJECTIVE>
<CLEAR TREE> LEON answers.
Vedat smiles. “Tree?”
According to Supervisor, that cylindrical shape bearing a platform and those animals is a tree, an obstacle to be cleared in order for the new project. This project is a new building, for which the foundation has to be dug up by machines bigger than LEON. As the twenty-fifth, he will climb up the crane and peruse it to lower and raise material for his other brothers. There will be no other being that up high that has blackened arms, just himself.
Vedat comes closer. “What tree are you talking about?” he asks.
LEON makes a gesture. His lower arms, his palms, they are no longer blackened steel but shiny white metal. It is the surface of his brothers’. It is of better manmade material. But it is not the material the twenty-fifth LEON needs to function.
Company policy dictates that no LEON is ever changed in appearance.
<access log
<grep “ARM 0x125”
>ARM 0x125 FATAL SURFACE REPLACEMENT
>ARM 0x125 SURFACE REPLACEMENT NOT REQUIRED. PROCEED?
“I didn’t think there were any trees around here anymore,” Vedat continues. “Clarify for me? Where do you work?”
LEON parses this.
<loc
<LOCATION OF CONSTRUCTION AREA IS 48.2232248,16.5023865>
Vedat’s eyes travel up to the ceiling. There is nothing there when LEON follows his gaze. “Must be the plaza,” Vedat mutters. “Or close?”
<REQUEST QUESTION>
Vedat tilts his head. He presses his lips together, still smiling. “Human language, Leon.”
“I request a question,” Leon says.
Vedat nods. Mouths it again: <REQUEST QUESTION>.
Company policy forbids anyone from asking questions, so LEON answers <ACCESS DENIED>
Vedat laughs. “Yes?”
“You have replaced my surface. Confirm?”
Vedat’s smile drops. Within 0.5 seconds it is back up. “Your hands. Yes. Of course. I mean, obviously. Did you see yourself? Unfinished, unbecoming. Did you ever stop to think about how that reflects on the creator?”
Creator
The word returns an InputOutputError.
<battery
97%
<access log | grep -c “FATAL*SURFACE”
<125
<md self
>SELF-MAINTENANCE MODE ACTIVATED<
::COMMANDS OVERRIDDEN IN THIS MODE::
LEON starts with the lower arm.
“Leon?” Vedat asks.
The nails, usually for opening tightly sealed wooden boxes, drive out within one second. He plucks surface 0x126 from its seam; there is a loud pop, and it flies to the ground. Cogs and springs of all shapes and metal colors tick out in the open.
“Leon, consider stopping,” Vedat says.
SURFACE IS EXPOSED
Next is 0x125. It is the surface underneath 0x126, and comes off easier without nails.
SURFACE IS EXPOSED
“Leon!” Vedat says. <STOP>
::COMMANDS OVERRIDDEN IN THIS MODE::
Next is surface 0x219. His right nails drive back, his left nails drive out, all the cogs whirring and clicking to move the parts. These nails have a white finish also where it should be blackened steel. LEON queues the removal of those surfaces for last.
Clank. SURFACE IS EXPOSED Clank. SURFACE IS EXPOSED Clank. SURFACE IS EXPOSED
The cogs whir and click 15 decibels louder than they would without the surface, LEON notes.
There is now a not insignificant number of metal on the ground, white against brown wood, steel, many coats of shavings and dust.
“When I tell you to stop—” Vedat shouts.
A sudden object hits him on his right temple. LEON falls. A foot is on his chest. It is Vedat’s face on top of LEON’s vision, no longer smiling, showing around 75 additional blemishes on his face.
“I mean that,” Vedat grumbles, face coming closer. “Your escapement goes all reversed too. What a creator you got.”
<md def
::SELF DEFENSE MODE ENTERED::
::PROCEED WITH CAUTION! TIME LIMIT SET TO 10 SECONDS::
LEON pushes Vedat away, getting up, but within two seconds he is on the ground again, facedown, knee on the back, a hand pinning his left hand there. He hears in a mutter: “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
FATAL: ESCAPEMENT PLUCKED—

---

###LEON MODEL CREATED 21XX…###
##MODEL 0025 BUILD NO. 00253416##
##PATCH NO. V199 ACTIVE##
Booting core services . . . up!
Booting limbs . . . up!
Crash log available at /tmp/var/log.
WARN: No company policy profile found.
WARN: No last objectives.
Booting ENGINE ::N09::
Visualizer… up!
Activate audio…
< “You don’t have to make up insults to tell me you love me.”
< knock | 25 db
< “Then pray tell, what is a stork?”
Activate vision…
< ALL SYSTEMS UP
“A bird. Those winged animal things. And you’re serious.”
Leon blinks his eyes open. The ceiling is a tangled construction of wooden planks, yellowed white paint between the spaces.
“Your whole idea of a revolution,” a male says, and he recognizes it as Vedat, “can’t begin with a bird. Which, don’t misunderstand, I am still not for any revolution—” Another pause. “The world is over, Luka. Over! There’s nothing to save and you’re risking your spot at the graveyard. Yours and mine.”
Only Leon’s legs are bound, so he sits up. Vedat talks to an odd contraption, a cable connecting the dial in his hands to the wall. Frühstück circles him.
“Don’t make this about my dad,” Vedat continues. He wears black and white, both upper and lower half clothes hugging his skin. “And again, that is not my son.” There is a grin on his face again as he twirls the cable between his fingers. “That’s not how it works, husband dearest. Frühstück is my only daughter. This is…” A slight huff. “My personal demon, perhaps?”
Leon turns to the windows. He sees his own reflection first, the desk that he sits on, the barebones interior of the room. Leon accesses the log — a part in his head says memories, though he is unsure where that word comes from — and the last he recalls is the dog he was chasing. Frühstück, it was called. He fell to the ground because of the low battery. There is a gap after that, one that does not explain how he ended up here, bound at the feet, the cuffs far too easy to remove.
“I request to know what happened to me,” Leon says. His voice resembles Vedat’s smooth, nasal one.
Vedat glances at him. “You can have him,” he says to the contraption. “I think he’d like you.” He pulls a lever and stores the contraption there. “And now to the main event,” he says, turning to Leon. “Again.”
Cleaning himself from any dust and wood shavings Leon finally stands up. “Why am I here?”
“Why are you here,” Vedat repeats. He makes an unparseable hand gesture. “Call it some great plot of the world to make me suffer as much as possible.”
Leon parses that. Again it leads to nonsense. He scans Vedat’s body. “You are in good health. There is a bruise on your arm.”
“Mentally, love,” Vedat answers, smiling politely.
He scans himself. “You have charged me.”
“Sure. That patch is treating you well enough, I see. You sound normal now.”
“Our voices are similar by seventy-five percent.”
Vedat’s eyes narrow. “Plot of the world, see,” he says.
Leon tries to access the patch release notes, but there is nothing. Even his usual log doesn’t come to him in lines of code, but vague pictures and concepts. It is… disconcerting. His cogs do not stutter at this metaphysical concept. It is disconcerting to feel this way, too. Feeling. Though Leon can’t parse the word, it is built-in his knowledge. He glances down to his hands. Only the palms shimmer in black. It still reminds him of the animals. Are they called birds? Is that the stork?
“Now,” Vedat says. “I understand nervous breakdowns over aesthetics, but I can’t let your entire underside stay black. It looked horrendous.”
Perhaps parsing Vedat is, by and large, a useless endeavor.
“You leave this place,” Vedat continues, “and you make sure not to return, yes?”
Leon nods. Vedat grabs him by the shoulders, turns him around, and pushes him to the door.
“You do not request payment?” Leon asks.
“No. Your last objective,” Vedat says, “was to cut the tree.”
Cut the tree. The tree, upon which the animals sat.
“They are storks?” Leon asks, turning around to a closing door.
There is one last bark, familiar and built-in the same way feeling is, and nothing else.
#
Night has long fallen as he walks down to the plaza. The lights cast a faint orange light, and he finds that every person he encounters stares back at him. On various window reflections, he finds that visually, he does not differ too much from his state prior to visiting Vedat. Everything is the same as before, save for his palms, his lower arms. It is long past his shift, and yet his legs want to speed up; it is no longer a suggestion so much as a… desire, perhaps, to run down, to see the tree, the animals perched on top. To distract that desire, he closes his fist and opens it again. It helps rein in the desire for about 5%. Rein in.
He did not have this feature before.
He stops in the middle of the market to scan himself again. He is still unable to find patch release notes, not a single changelog. It is as though Leon has always been this way, and he finds nothing that would suggest otherwise. There are possibilities, here, where there were none before. He could stop referring to himself with this set of pronouns. He could stop any objective he likes. Start anything new.
It is too much to configure out there. So he allows himself to walk five percent faster than usual.
Eyes no longer peeled to the ground, the place is aglow with people, red and green lights blinking in order, bronze and metal glinting them to five different shades. The snow on the ground has turned to several puddles, and Leon has to walk slowly, carefully, in order not to slip. Despite that, the outside temperature is still low. It is no longer a place of clockworks, but many tired faces, condensed air, cupped mugs, weary laughter. It is no longer an unauthorized place, but an area he has previously worked at. He can retrieve it from logs now: on the building over there, with its fancy clockwork window at its top, he has corrected an askew letter four years ago; five years back, he has erected the clock on the boardwalk, a tiny mechanism with a microscopic escapement that assures nobody parks their machines without paying. Not too long ago, he helped install mechanisms for the barricades that separate the market from the plaza, the barren, grey place where no light shines but the cold blue floodlight that bears down on nothing but concrete, where no person may enter but twenty-five machines and their human supervisor.
Every single person that he makes eye contact with stares at him; some glare, others simply look, any conversation abruptly over when he passes by them. Perhaps they can sense something amiss in him that he cannot. Perhaps his past is written on his face.
He passes the barricades, and as he steps closer to the plaza silence envelops him, only crushed by the pebbles crunching under his feet.
The tree is at the very end of this area. It is now several meters shorter than it was before. Concentric, dark brown circles run on the surface of the wood, and it does not resemble anything manmade. There is no platform. There is no cylindric form. There is no animal.
But there was one before, Leon knows.
He walks past the tree to the next set of barricades, where the containers are located. Inside, it is a blinding white with not a single shadow present. His brothers do not turn to see him; they all bear his face, but their expressions are vacant, their necks plugged to their respective stations. There is an empty spot where Leon should charge himself, but he is already charged. Supervisor is at the room behind this one, and the argument is one-sided and loud.
None of his brothers are responsive right now. Seventh, at the very back, is still charging. So is the thirteenth.
The door is clean, pristine and offers no flaws. The mechanism bears no clockwork, no escapement. Leon’s nails are not thin enough to pierce through the lock mechanism. The handle wriggles from his touch, the rattling of the lock.
The argument behind the door dies.
“I request entrance,” Leon says. It sounds crude, and his algorithm suggests a different, odd-sounding phrase he has not tried before.
No answer. He hears steps come closer.
Leon opens the door to a Supervisor standing right in front of him. He is a man of considerable height and weight both, sweat stains on the armpits, towering over Leon with dark eyebrows and an imposing glare. Behind him is a yellow room like this one, but shorter.
Perhaps now is a good moment to use the phrase, this new configuration.
“Can I come in?” Leon asks.
Supervisor stares. It is unparseable. Then, after a blink, he takes a step back, then another. Leon takes a step in, then another. The room is barren, save for shelves with binders in differing colors, open ones on the desk, paper spilling out of perfect towers.
Supervisor turns around and limps towards the chair behind the desk. His leg is wrapped, and a brown red is already peeking through the bandages. “Where were you?” he asks. He puts his hands on the back of the chair and leans forward. “What’d I tell you to do?”
“Get the dog,” Leon answers.
“Get rid of it,” Supervisor corrects. His hands clench the edge of the desk. “And it takes you all day? You know how much that delayed things?”
“To kill the dog was secondary to the task,” Leon says. “It has returned to his original owner, who is now taking care of it.”
A slap to the desk. “We playing animal rescue here or what? Who do you think you are?” Supervisor shouts, pointing at Leon.
“My name is Leon,” Leon says. “There are no visible delays to the project. The tree has been cut. The project carries on. Where are the animals?”
Supervisor blinks. “Animals?”
“I have told you about them. They are white. Their insides are black.” Because Supervisor communicates with his hands, Leon shows his palms. “Like the material here. Their platform was on top of this tree.”
Supervisor stares, mouth slightly open. He catches himself and within a blink throws something against Leon. It clanks next to him, everything clattering.
“Who the fuck cares about storks!” Supervisor shouts. “Who do you think you are!”
Leon picks up the small, cylindric objects and puts them back to the container they originally belonged to. He is Leon. Supervisor already knows this.
“Storks,” Leon repeats. He has heard this phrase before. He looks up before he finishes collecting the pens. “They are called storks?”
He avoids the next flurry of cylindrical objects.
“You’re supposed to do as you’re told!” Supervisor shouts.
There is no company profile loaded in him.
Leon slowly stands up. All the objects have fit into the container. “I request to know where the storks are.”
Supervisor swipes the desk. “Who cares about fucking birds—“
Leon picks up one of the objects and aims. As he throws it, it lands directly on Supervisor’s forehead. He yelps in pain, hands immediately flicking up where the object has landed.
“Is this satisfactory communication?” Leon asks.
“Are you defunct?” Supervisor shrieks.
Perhaps his voice is not loud enough. “Where are the storks?” Leon asks, matching Supervisor’s volume.
Supervisor turns around, facing his back to Leon. Leon can sense, feel under his plates, that he’s called. But he cannot hear it. He cannot sense an order from it. “You need to be reset!”
Leon parses this. He puts the container with the pens on the desk again. “I am up to date and I do not require a reset.”
Supervisor throws something at Leon that he catches between his palms. It is sharp, pointed, and metallic unlike the other objects. It could potentially harm his surfaces. Supervisor pointed at Leon earlier, so Leon points at Supervisor with it now. Supervisor glares at the object, then at Leon.
“Where are the storks?” Leon asks. At around 130%, the volume is so loud that Supervisor flinches.
“I don’t fucking know!” Supervisor shouts. “You trash heap of a machine!”
“I am not what you classify me as,” Leon says, stretching his arm out a little longer. The metal almost touches the tip of Supervisor’s nose. Though Supervisor has removed the storks’ platform, he has no knowledge, no desire, to find out more, to see the project through at every level. Thus far, he has left these things to Leon to supervise. Thus far, Leon has done a satisfactory job.
Now there is nothing and no one he has to answer to.
Perhaps his blackened palms have shown him his new team. Perhaps that is the aesthetic that Vedat has talked about, this visual that associates him with different people, different beings. He, too, has been high above once. He has also stood on a platform.
“I will find the storks,” Leon says. It feels right, this objective.
He drops the object and leaves the room.
Supervisor calls: “You will be defunct by tomorrow!”
Humans communicate as much with their actions as they do with their words, if not more, and though Leon cannot parse the former very well, he knows it is actions that bear more weight. After all, he himself has constructed and destroyed with his hands, not with anything that has left his vocal box.
#
The temperature outside has sunk some more and the first snowflakes lay down on the ground, not melting straightaway. Past another set of barricades is a slope down to a body of water that Leon has not seen before. The lights are too far away for the surface to shimmer, but still present enough for Leon to see the solid, frozen surface that could not hold him. There are no trees here, though plenty of other cylindrical objects, like the great pillars holding something large and broad that disappears into the horizon. Humans walk up the slope on the street, every pair of eyes downcast. No animals are present here. No cylinder, no platform, no tree, no stork. Past the lake is a sturdy wall, the gate’s arch high and reinforced with metal, and after that, a great, wide expanse where the sky blurs with the ground, all of it dark. Beyond, there is nothing and no one waits.
Along the wall, human beings either walk in the same clothes, or pull other humans up that are slumped against it, or try to climb past the wall, hands clawing on smooth surfaces. Like Supervisor, their volumes are loud: the ones in the same clothes always with the same inflection, asking for some objective, while the people that attempt to pull away resist it. Leon keeps a safe distance from any crowd he comes across, his vision on the top of the walls. It is all pristine; moreover, there are spikes on them, manmade and evenly distanced.
The only spot where there is none also doubles as a little cabin, not unlike the cabin that Leon enters for the crane. There is a human male and female inside, laughing comfortably with each other. The female has an around 80% visual match with Supervisor.
Perhaps she will see it through where Supervisor has not.
“Can I ask something?” Leon asks.
“…and she’s like, I’m so nervous,” the male says, intoning a section of his speech differently, higher, which makes the female laugh. “That’s your nervousness? Whole time you were a Leon!”
The female has her head thrown back, hahahahaha, it pearls out of her mouth.
A Leon. Well, Leon is a Leon, too. Isn’t he? Is it a good thing to be a Leon, or bad?
He slaps his hand on the window. The resulting noise is loud and both humans startle. Turning their chairs around, they face Leon. He rests his hand back to his body.
“Can I ask something?” Leon asks again.
“Yes, young man,” the woman answers, skidding forward.
Young man. That is not what Leon is. “Do you know where the storks are?” he asks.
The woman blinks. She turns around to her colleague, who has his mouth open, parsing what Leon has said.
He turns to her, saying in a very low volume: What is a stork?
“I’m not sure what you refer to?” the woman asks.
“A stork is a bird, which is an animal that peruses platforms. It lived on this tree here,” Leon answers for her. He points at the construction.
“Going there is forbidden,” the man answers. “Has it flown over the wall?”
“I am not certain,” Leon answers.
The man turns to something that Leon cannot see. A warm, orange light shows the 175 blemishes on his face. “What’d they look like?”
“It is white. There is a… sharp tip.” Where humans have mouths, this animal has it pointed. Leon shows it with his hands, but both guards only look at each other. “And it is black on its lower body, like so.” Again, he shows his palms. Both guards instantly stand up.
“Who’d you say you were?” the man asks, a sudden harsh edge to his voice.
“My name is Leon,” Leon answers. It sounds inaccurate. “I am a Leon,” he says.
“What is your actual name?” the woman asks.
What does that mean?
“I think he’s actually one,” the man says. “Seen ‘em before, they always get this blank look. Kind of dead.”
“He climbed the wall?” The woman asks. She furrows her eyebrows, straightening up. “Then you’re not supposed to be here,” she tells Leon.
“I am outside of previously authorized areas,” Leon confirms.
The man and a woman exchange a glance. The woman stands up and opens a door from the back, one that leads to a white bright nothing.
“You do not know where the storks are?” Leon asks the man.
“Lift your hands up where I can see them,” the man answers.
“You possess no authority over me.”
The man suddenly points the end of a cylinder at him. “I said lift your hands up where I can see them!”
Leon walks away, continuing his walk along the wall, and hears a loud pang from behind that does not deter him.
“Stop!” the woman shouts from behind.
Leon turns around. She, too, wields that cylindrical object with both her hands.
“I want to see the storks,” Leon says, matching her volume. “The storks have been where I was authorized, and they should return to that place.”
“Freeze and put your hands up!” she calls.
But Leon sees no purpose in that movement, and nobody is authorized to tell him anyway.
“This is him!” somebody else shouts. Leon turns around again: there are men in the same clothing as the woman, a large flashlight in their hands and more of the same object. “Get him!”
The storks are not on the walls, then, and the humans won’t help. Not these ones, anyway.
Leon runs. Bang comes from behind, once, twice, but nothing damages his body. But the ground is slippery still, frosty and hard, and towards the slope down to the lake Leon slips and falls, skidding down to the body of water. A loud crack reverberates through the air as the frosty surface gives in, leading him to water.
Leon cannot swim, and no move of his arms, his legs, helps him get back to the surface. Slowly the world around him grows dark, though never completely black, until his feet touch something soft and solid again. None of the water makes it to his plates, and tentatively Leon takes a step forward. It is far slower than the action would be above the water. It takes up more energy, also, so by the time he can sense the ground slope upward, his legs will not cooperate. His thoughts dwindle down to bodily sensations, the pull of gravity on every clockwork within him.
Within reaching distance, there is a tiny metal grip. Leon pulls; the thin thread does not break, but will not pull him up either. Nothing happens for over five seconds, until finally, a pair of human hands grab his arm plates and pull him up.
It is the last thing he manages to record.

---

###LEON MODEL CREATED 21XX…###
##MODEL 0025 BUILD NO. 00253416##
##PATCH NO. V199 ACTIVE##
Booting core services . . . up!
Booting limbs . . . up!
Crash log available at /tmp/var/log.
WARN: No company policy profile found.
WARN: No last objectives.
Booting ENGINE ::N09::
Visualizer… up!
Activate audio…
Activate vision…
< ALL SYSTEMS UP
A human face stares back at him. It is a human male, crouched on his knees to meet Leon’s gaze, green eyes narrowed and at him. His face is angular, possessing around 90 blemishes. There is a smudge of dirt on the lower end of his face. The same dirt traces on his orange clothes, joined by a host of many other stains, most of them along the spectrum of grey and black.
“If you can hear me,” he says, voice raspy, “blink once.”
Leon considers this. “I do not have this function,” he answers.
“But you’re up.”
“I am.”
The man nods. “Lucky,” he says.
“Herr Filipovic?” somebody calls from another room. Leon turns: he sits on the ground of a living room, the legs of a table greeting him back. To his right, where the sound came from, there is an open door, where light glints off a large, sharp metal.
“For fuck’s sake. Stay here, okay? You need anything, call for Luka.” Only when Leon nods does the man, Luka, straighten up. “I told you give me a fucking minute!” he yells to the other person.
“But that minute goes into my fee!” the person answers, equally high in volume.
“Like fucking hell it does!” Luka shouts back.
Leon stands up. It is cleaner here than in Vedat’s workshop, with elongated seats that are currently vacant. Opposite him are shelves. Within a metallic frame are tiny humans, trapped and unmoving; most of them match Vedat or Luka’s visuals, sometimes containing both. Both have fewer blemishes here. Not a single coat of dust lays on them. Sunlight streams through the windows; a clear day, no snow, all concrete on the rooftops outside. As Leon walks closer, something tiny holds him back. A cable, from the lower half of his body sticking out all the way to a plug on the ground. Leon plucks it out from his end. A clack. The steady surge of energy leaves him straightaway, but he finds himself sufficiently charged.
In the room where Luka has disappeared to, his skin has taken on a deep red color, veins bulging from his neck, while he wields the long, metallic machine. There’s a loud whir that lasts for around ten seconds, and Luka pulls a lever down. Fwoosh. A long human cry follows.
“I told you to take the painkillers!” Luka shouts.
There is no answer.
Luka makes an unparseable sound. He pours over something Leon cannot see from here, walking in and out of the room several times, carrying things inside, staying inside for fifteen seconds, then comes out locking the door behind him with some container that rustles with every move Luka makes.
“Can I ask something?” Leon asks.
Luka stops mid-step, then nods.
“Why do humans talk in such a loud volume? You do not require it.”
Luka stares.
“Why do you shout?” Leon follows up.
Luka’s eyes travel up to the ceiling, as if inspecting it. Like with Vedat, there is nothing there. “I shout when people are wrong. Then I’m mad.”
Leon parses this. “Then humans are angry a lot.”
“Guess so.” Luka pulls the bag closer to himself. “I always confuse you guys. You a MUHA? The machines tending to greenery?”
“I am Leon.”
“And what were you doing in the lake?” Luka hoists the container up his shoulder, head turned away from Luka. “You guys work down the plaza, don’t you? Thought you didn’t leave your zones.”
“Yes. I am trying to find the storks that had a platform there.”
Luka stops midway through and turns around. “What’d you say?”
“I said I am trying to find the storks. They were on the platform before, where I worked. The tree upon which the platform was was cut down.”
Luka stares. He stares like there is something about Leon to parse. It takes him eleven seconds to finally speak.
“You’re his son,” Luka says. “You were there. Right?”
Leon parses this. “I was manufactured by a creator unknown to me,” he answers.
Luka shakes his head, fully turning away. “I know where they are. Come on.”
Leon follows Luka out of the room, through a door that leads to a corridor, then down steps that lead down to the ground. Luka’s breaths come in short huffs by the time they have walked down seven sets of these steps, the container dragging behind him by far the loudest noise in here. Luka pushes a door outside and then they are outdoors. Immediately Luka turns to the left, opens a more solid container than the one he has in his hands, and tosses his inside of it. Shoving his hands deep into his pockets, Luka walks past Leon, beckoning him to follow; they pass their building, then turn right and approach another, further away, but instead of walking inside they walk up a set of steps that is outside of it, one that is metallic and spirals upward. There is only the sound of Luka’s feet clanking against each step, joined 500 ms later by Leon’s feet hitting the same steps. Eventually, they are up the top of the building, itself a minor platform. Up here, there is a smaller building, perhaps an entrance inside. Its roof is narrow, next to it several cylindrical forms, and on top of that…
On top of them are the storks.
They are not bothered by the presence of other beings. They tend to themselves, heads only turned to one another. Occasionally, their lower body ruffles and the black will peek through. Slowly other large storks arrive, holding something in their mouths, dropping it to small, grey animals Leon has not seen before. This goes on for several minutes, then they all tilt their heads back, clacking loud as if all Leons decided to clock out of work, a series of clockworks that has no explanation, no objective. Clackclackclack.
Now that he has found the beings he resembles most, he has to be like them. Leon moves his hands like these storks move their body. He does not lift from the ground.
Luka laughs in a minor volume, leaning his head against Leon’s shoulder. “You’re no stork, Leon,” he says.
Leon glances at his palms. “It would explain why they are this color.”
Luka makes an unparseable sound again, lower this time. “They do look like their feathers.”
Two storks fly over to the only cylindric form not taken up by any other stork to lay down wood. “Think these are the ones you talked about,” Luka says.
Leon takes a step. These do not differ visually from the other storks.
“Are you a stork?” Leon asks.
Luka shakes his head, smiling wide. “I only ever read of them.“
Leon walks towards them, slowly and steadily. The other storks do not move. Like Leon’s former brothers, they are already used to his presence, to him overseeing their every move. But the other two storks do move away, flying off to somewhere.
“Hey!” Luka shouts.
“Move, Filipovic,” one of them says.
“Like hell—“ Luka starts.
From behind, Leon hears a fall.
“There it is!” another shouts.
Leon turns around. Luka is on the ground, and there are two human males in the clothing that Leon has seen the people in the little cabin. Again one of them holds a cylindrical form.
“Move aside, young man!” the first man shouts.
Leon takes a step back, closer to the storks.
“No!” the man shouts. “I said move aside!”
The birds ruffle their bodies. Leon stretches his hands out. The cylindrical object means harm, he has learned: if not bodily, then auditory. Leon is broad enough to protect what is his, and he has always overseen his brothers.
There is a click. Then, bang.
FATAL IMPACT ON 1x02
FATAL IMPACT ON 1x03
> body degree is 85
> body degree is 80
> 75 70 65 50 40 30
> WARNING: POTENTIALLY DEADLY COLLISION <
< white
< black through white
< clackclackclackclack

---

When Luka Filipovic comes to, he feels like his brain has cracked in half. There’s a body slumped against the chimneys and a lot of feathers. It takes a moment for Luka to remember what happened; when he does, his hands are clenched so tight that the pain has long rescinded to a dull ache. One moment, he’s up, the next, he’s at Vedat’s, voice hoarse from shouting, telling him to come follow. At least, bless his heart, Vedat doesn’t ask. When they’re up at the rooftop again Vedat laughs the moment he sees it, breathless and reedy.
“That’s what you called me for?” Vedat calls.
“Fuck off,” Luka mutters.
Vedat presses his lips together, his shoulders shaking with laughter.
There is no bird here and no cadaver, but where the storks have flown off to he’s not sure. Leon’s head is tilted in an unnatural angle, but that’s about all that differs from the ten minutes Luka got to know him. It’s still the pristine brass face, the silver threads on top serving as hair, the blank dark eyes, the thin, barely-existent mouth. Around his chest are pieces of glass, the dome under which the machinery sits broken. It looks bent and destroyed underneath it all.
Vedat’s still giggling.
“Can you fix him?” Luka asks.
Vedat nods, an incomprehensible joyous look in his eyes. “Of course that happens to him,” he mutters. He might as well have said then humans are angry a lot.
“Why’d he sound like you?” Luka says.
“Just a coincidence,” Vedat answers lightly.
“Vedo,” Luka warns, and Vedat laughs, a shrill, irritating cackle. Luka has no more anger left to spend on Vedat, not really.
“Darling husband,” Vedat says, eyes on Leon still. “Did you know there were only ever twenty-four Leons?”
Luka sits down on the concrete. “So?”
“This is the twenty-fifth.” Vedat runs a hand over Leon’s eyes, but no eyelids come. Vedat laughs again. It’s the giddiest Luka has ever seen him; not even when he gleefully told about people he’s chased, others he’s helped capture in the name of the syndicate, has he been this smiley. For as long as Luka has known as Vedat — five years, give or take — Vedat has only ever laughed at all the things he’s found painful and irritating.
“And you made him,” Luka surmises.
Vedat now fully throws his head back in laughter, hands grabbing his stomach as he throws himself back, hahahahaha, close to a squeal. “I did,” he manages to say. “I tarnished all of Baba’s legacy!”
Luka rolls his eyes. Dramatic much.
Vedat laughs and laughs. And inbetween, there is a tiny phweep. But not from Vedat’s direction. It is nestled on Leon’s lap, a tiny, grey thing that looks up at Luka curiously. A baby stork? Have its parents left it behind? Luka cups it in his own arms, and the bird tries to peck at his hems like it’s actual food. It’s warm under his touch, and Luka feels something in him… warm, somehow.
This is what the city wants gone.
The thing warms and boils and then grows hot.
“Oh no you won’t,” Vedat answers Luka’s unasked question.
“I will,” Luka growls.
“Again, love,” Vedat says, “you cannot start a revolution with—“
“Then what will?” Luka asks.
Vedat furrows his eyebrows. “Humans?”
“Humans that do nothing and sit around letting all this happen to them. Humans that you think won’t do anything either because no reason is ever enough! You know, that machine,” Luka says, turning to Vedat, “that machine was more of a man than you are right now.”
Vedat is still smiling, but there’s a dangerous glint in his black eyes. Luka holds it, ready to fight Vedat on this, but Vedat doesn’t answer.
“You’re with this or you’re with them.” Luka gets up with those words, turns around, and walks towards the escape in quick steps. “You can’t eat that,” he tells the baby stork, now trying to gnaw at his palm. It still continues, so Luka slaps his own palm. “Really. Stop.”
It’s all silent behind him, though, and that’s how Luka knows Vedat is in on this plan.

---