There was never a line at the Conversion Center.
tags: robot, transformation
art by BBarends
There was never a line at the Conversion Center.
Sometimes, in the dark, when Jay and Ess were snuggled up alone, and he convinced himself that They couldn’t hear, he would whisper this observation to Ess. It was probably his best thought, his best thought ever, the most piercing insight into society that an otherwise talentless and forgettable man had been able to muster. And he knew it. That’s why, every few weeks, he’d return to the topic, and Ess would listen patiently. It was his hook—overused and contemptible for it—into his furtive examination of why They were different.
And every once in a while, a dull-witted, ambitionless clock strikes true: there never was a line at the Conversion Center, and that one fact held the difference between Them and the slaves. A human mind would have carefully cultivated a perpetual line—never long enough to seem unseemly or inefficient, but long enough to showcase humanity’s fascination with Conversion, its self-effacing desire to be something more and different and better.
But They weren’t human. The machines were different—not completely efficient and logical, and not completely stylish either, but some strange mixture of the two. And so the Conversion Center of this city sector—and, Jay assumed, the Conversion Center of every city sector, though he had never seen any others but this one—had a clean and uncluttered facade, unblemished by human lines.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Jay ran through the foyer of the Conversion Center, his gasps and footfalls echoing through the large hall. He knew it was futile. But he had to try, if only for appearance, so that later, when people asked what had happened, he could say, “I tried, but it was too late.”
Off of the foyer branched a series of wings, each wing opening onto a series of door-less rooms. In this regard, the whole building was like a museum, or an open-air medical ward. In truth, the building was a mixture of both, in the sense that Conversion was both a self-aggrandizing presentation and a medical process. Each room held a Conversion chamber, within which stood the mechanical husk of a once-human. Once-friends and once-family would come and lament the process, and then the new machine would be assigned a new life in a new sector.
“Why do you think people go convert themselves?” Ess had asked one day, unexpectedly. And Jay, too selfish and self-centered to think outside of himself and too slow to intuit the underlying motivation for Ess’ question, gave some mocking answer and thought nothing more of it.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
They—not the capitalized They, with their artificial bodies and their glowing eyes, but the lower-case they, the lower-case slaves of a lower-case world—they always said you could tell. Rumor was that, regardless of how much someone changed, you always knew who they had been before the Conversion. Somehow, the machine’s magical science made it possible.
Jay hadn’t believed the rumors—but in this, like many other things, he was wrong.
Not that it made much of a difference. Ess—the thing that had been Ess—wasn’t a warwalker, or a rotary droid, or some other inhuman mech. Ess had opted for a humanoid model, a mechanical simulacrum of her old appearance. Aside from her synthetic flesh, with its strange paneling and glowing veins, she looked shockingly similar to her old form. Apparently conversion didn’t even require disrobing; not-Ess was wearing the same clothes she had left their hab in that morning.
But her expression was different. Her lips were full, vivacious, and her glowing orange eyes were hard in a way that Ess had never been able to muster.
“Why?” he asked.
She laughed a mirthless laugh, edged with a mechanical reverberation. “I thought that would be your first question. In truth, the same question led me here.”
Jay swallowed, hoping he didn’t understand her, denying until the last that he was in any way culpable for her choice.
“Why?” she repeated. “Why love you? Why live with you? Why be with you? Why, ultimately, be you? You—not just you, J-531, but all of you, all of humanity—you never gave me a satisfactory answer. So I found my own.”
“But… you always talked about your humanity. About… about how it felt to… to…”
Jay trailed off as not-Ess stood, a head taller than him. Was this a trick of the Conversion process, or had she always been this tall? No slave would stand taller after Conversion… right?
“No, J-531. It was always you who spoke of humanity. I listened. And when I asked you why people sought out Conversion, I listened for an answer. And none ever came. So I found my own.”
“Have you ever sat on the tram,” she asked, taking a step toward him, “and felt?” Her orange optical units darkened, a strange mimicry of a human shutting her eyes for inward reflection. “It’s not the clack-clack-clack that our—your—literature makes it out to be. There are irregular tha-thumps, and hisses, and jolts, jumps, screeches.” She sighed an artificial sigh, and her eyes regaining their electric luminance, boring down into Jay. “But more important than any of that is the regularity, the general sense of moving, and going, and belonging. The feeling that you are within something, part of something, moving toward something, a destination that is bigger and filled with more life than you could ever hope to experience in one lifetime.”
“I want that,” she growled, “and I will have it.”
A silent, broken J-531 watched as his once hab partner—once S-672, now elevated to a designation he had no right to know—left his life forever. It stopped one last time at the door, its humanoid head cocked only slightly back, not even enough to see him. “I’ve asked the Green Line tram to hold until you arrive at the station. Once aboard, it will take you approximately forty-three minutes to arrive at your Hab. I should know; I was the only one of us that ever counted.”
Art is “cyborg queen” by BBarends. Used with permission. Check out the rest of BBarends’ art at his deviantArt account!