Icarus

A short story I wrote off a picture prompt a couple of years ago--thinking Sept 2006. Had it critted on a site, people thought it was mostly too dense with detail and confusing, because it's told backwards. Some appreciated the blend of logic & myth, and indeed, this is the myth of Icarus, Ovid's version, anyway, done SF with synthesia. Another friend said I was good at expressing emotion; strangely, I find myself lacking in this corporeally. The picture, by the way.

"Minos rules everything, but he does not rule you."

Tala stroked his shoulder blades, her fingers soft, fluid, warm against his electric blood. Her pale arm wrapped around his neck, holding his head near hers. Her heart pulsed, pumping more than blood through her body: he listened to the strength she held, the compassion she offered, the comfort she felt. She was not afraid of him, like the others were. Like he was.

His arm slipped from behind her waist, falling to lie useless beside them. His relaxed muscles, or what was left of them, tightened as his spine straightened—only slightly. Tala would not let him. He tried to accept his cyborg being, but he couldn't. He kept his body rigid in self-support, keeping Tala from dipping into his electric depths. A draft dipped in from above the high bolted walls, wisping soft feathers past his back. Her wings, he knew, from that silky-hair touch they always gave. His wings...his wings were once feathers too.

-Father!- a boy's voice cried from within. Disembodied, a dimmed memory condensed to mathematical theory, yet the fear, the emotion, pierced his metallic heart as if the electric pulses were bloody instead. The voice echoed, reverberating coldly off the mechanical walls of his mind. Only inside were the alloys frozen and yet fluid: bubbles rose from his eyes to pop upon the surface of dark crescent shapes. Thin concentrics of rippled water spread from the center of his vision, dissipating as the sea current resumed its eternal tidal pulsation. His back was frozen fire, his veins half-ashen in a frostbitten burn. The crescents above grew darker as the sea caught them, soon floating away with the ripples and memory. The tidal rhythms slowed, faded into darkness until nothing more.

Tala's fingers had stopped caressing his shoulders, and her arm had fallen from his neck. His rigid posture remained; her hands slipped down to hold his face. A comforting touch against the disfiguration, smooth palms covering mountainous terrains of circuitry and flesh. Flashes of functional lights glowing, revealing her rosy glow against his deathly pallor. Her thumbs brushed his eyelids, brushing away tears leaking from his memories. He could not remember how to cry anymore: the tears could only fall by lost memory. Fingertips graced his cybernetic ears, yet to be grafted again. Her touch lifted those ears to new sounds, memories of sounds, and when the fingertips were gone, his ears found nothing but the metrical chirps of his inner circuitry to keep his mind company.

The breath of winds rushed up past him, howling into his ears. The beeswax tendons grew taut, stretching thinner and thinner as the winds plucked at the white vanes, uprooting the silver shafts. The feathers, powerless to resist Auster's windward dance, floated beyond his grasping reach, neglected to take the furious sunfluid with them. The hot wax fused to his skin, burning the flesh to fluid. His voice escaped his vocal chords, leaving his body to fend for itself beyond its dark blue grave. The voice, however fleeting it could be, could not escape beyond the rolling foam, where it lay hushed alongside the wind-rent feathers. The voice faded into the depths, its mortal complement sinking too fast to catch.

"I can't reach it," he whispered.

The fleeting emotion ran from him, evaded his touch. His cyborg mechanics—faster, stronger, better than anyone alive—could not wrap their algorithms around its photonic mass, could not touch the dying wind perpetually gracing the silky feathers of ether. The vanes of emotion parted with her voice, allowing him to see each essence of feeling, each accented rhyme in her song and verse. She sang of the constellations above in their remembered myths and morals.

Was it a myth? Was it truly a false dream escaped from fragmented code? Random numbers, abbreviations, symbols shuffled in a game of poker? Yielding royal flushes, straights, good times and fortunes, only to lose it all by an overload of hubris? Behind and below flew another pair of feathered wings, warnings weaving themselves betwixt his structured codes. Do not fly too low, they said: the cold, cursory programming will weigh down your decisions, pinning you down within the microprocessors. Do not fly too high, they said: blind ignorance of the unconscious automaton half will melt your feelings into caged memories, stuck and useless. Do not fly north, they said; the world may shrug your position into statistics, the bear may elude your calculations time and time again, the hunter will slice the mind from the heart.

"Loosen yourself," she whispered into his ear, her hand stroking his blades again, her arm wrapped around his neck again. The titanium wings throbbed with their functional lights flashing in colors, and tendrilled tubes of leftover skin, once hanging lifeless from his shoulders, lifted in a programmed fluctuation.

"Don't let Minos rule you. Live beyond the labyrinth."

His father's hands trembled; neither knew why. Perhaps it was the long day under the hellish day-star, fitting the circuit boards like pipe reeds to a titanium girdle while they sat between the high bolted walls. Perhaps it was the solemn frustration at his play with the circuits, switching lights, mistyping code in fun. When the sunlight hit only slices of the curvature, his father looked to him for fitting. Filing down the edges to a smooth sheen, replacing cumbersome metal with lightweight craft. He turned to his father, a confident light in his eyes, the functioning lights flashing all over his cyborg body.

"I wasn't ready," he said.

"Of course you weren't," she whispered.

Phantom pains blipped through his connections, fleeting and ethereal like they should have been. Each shoulder blade broken, the skin ripped and bubbled with pus and red blood. His head was none the better, sliced into the two hemispheres to allow the grey plates. Cyborg femurs and spines, ribcages, clavicles, all connected with electrical paths to the mind. To the memories. His regenerated skin creeping like ivy over the chips and flashing functional lights, engulfing the electronics, embracing the power and capacity of an android existence. Dead skin, dead memories still clung to him, comatose tendrils hanging down from his higher seat, put behind with his past.

"I flew too high," he said.

She said nothing.

A brilliant flash and something short-circuited him. Burnt that functional light to a crisp; a functional spark and then no more function. A shutdown procedure flooding his processors, drowning them in cold cursory logic. The once-useful logic melted before his eyes, unraveling the solid reality from his world. Useless, melted by its limits, dripping its malfunction from wire to wire, letting the program shut itself down. Safety features branched out in primal code, executing first-generation methods: flail even if you fall. One last thought cried out for his creator; the thought dissipating in concentrics of cold viral conflagrations. The memories still clung, snatching to pieces of his skin in a last attempt to hold on, grasping for directional code to the brain. The tendrils of memory quivered as the labyrinth closed in, cutting off escapes by man or machine.

His rigid posture stiffened; her hands held him closer.

"Icarus," she whispered, a half-sob.

His hand slipped up to her waist, supporting her as she once did him. His head lifted, facing hers; his right hand moving to meet with his left on her face. Cold fleeting calculations as to what pressure to safely apply to her eyelids, and he brushed away her tears. He graced her ears, filling them with the heartless tempo of functioning lights. Her face dried, a light behind her eyes flickering with hope that he was still there. Yet his head returned to her shoulder, her arms returned to stroking and wrapped positions. Her tears returned.

"Why do you cry?" he asked.

"I can't reach you, Icarus," she said.