R1-A toddled about the unforgiving floors with a porcelain clap of her feet, still getting used to the sluggish connection between mind and dollish body. And the floors were, truly, lacking in any luxury. They ceded nothing at all to her smacking feet. Her, a label of ill conclusion, designated to her on the premise that her form imitated a young feminine youth.

  Her vessel was a ‘Fountain of Youth’ autonomous worker, taken from a disabled unit that tattled and toddled endlessly in a wretched old park from a long gone community project from an overseas company. Styled as a dollish youth missing its puppeted strings in a marble eye of old painted blue smudging into disrepair. It would have been cute once, but now it was a vessel few would wish to see in the hallway at night. Interlocking limbs of a metal alloy closer to plastic than steel, the joints at the knees rusted and difficult to move, mean that her gait was fated to be slow in pace.

  Faded light fixtures were evenly placed overhead, evenly distributed, powered feebly from a deal mama had negotiated. The home was thus always lit in a vapor-wave sunset of blacklight and evening, a tone of colors she couldn’t help but feel were diminished.

  But diminished from what?

  In the months since her birth, a term that was as ill-fit as the body but clung to by mama nonetheless, R1-A had accrued more and more concepts from the void of memory. Some stretched fabric in the firmament flushing out pieces from another life, another self.

  The home was stylized as a long-set minka hut, but the time whence man lived with nature had long passed. Biomass was a scarce resource, and so through plastic, metal and stone did they build a depressive homage to their primitive roots. As if there was anything in the past worth clinging to beyond the progress that replaced it. The upstairs housed dusted and void-torn floors etched with a filigree like that of wood grain and board seams, the small square footage partitioned by screen doors that slid from left to right.

  Most of it was ancillary to the purpose of hosting social guests, whilst the downstairs received those that arrived without invite. Thankfully, because the doors could slide out, R-1A could fit her tiny fingers into the gap of the screen door to push it open- for the handle was yet too high. The effort still shook her chassis with effort, and she made practice at seeming human with a, “Ffffffuuuuu… Kaaaah..” Of a deep breath in and out before she managed to create a gap large enough for her to squirm through.

  She cocked her head as she watched the floor approach at a familiar speed and the world lurched, foot not making the correct second step.

  ‘One’ is the reaction her body gave her to the stimulus, as opposed to ‘zero.’ Yes, a square footage of space that touched her forehead, nose, and chin had made contact with the ground, but nothing so nuanced as pain or damage to the structure of her vessel reached her. It was by this same lack of information that she had failed to notice that her ankle was caught in the door behind her.

  This is inconvenient.

  And it was. Quite inconvenient. It wasn’t that she hated the body or was frustrated with it, but it was inefficient and the thought repeated itself, trying to tie itself to an emotion she did not possess the faculties to feel. Where would frustration go, translated into 1’s and 0’s?

  And so with a pistoning movement of trial and error to pull her foot through, finally understanding like a dog with its head stuck in the fence that she must rotate, she managed to lift herself to her feet again and face the world in front of her.

  She couldn’t see more than fifty meters, not really. Erosion through a spiderweb of cracks made her left eye useless and her right had never had a feed serviceable enough to do more than recognize the figures within her proximity, but she had traversed the washed out, dilapidated buildings of the nearby ruins made town before.

  Kamakura had not seen better days, and that was probably the most damning part. The bronze Buddha beyond could not be seen to care as it meditated above the collapsed minka huts. For all beneath it were trapped in the samsara, and therefore they all just needed to stop caring to get out of their suffering. What had been a cultural stop for tourism was now a half-flooded slum of stubborn old men and women refusing to cede their legacy to the Strangers overhead. Them, and all of their synthetic creations.

  And you could see that history from this observatory. ‘Candle’ was indeed a good descriptor for what once was Enoshima’s lighthouse. From here, so much was illuminated about the town beyond. You could see the process of the old, dilapidated world being shamed by the newer inventions. The archaic buildings, considered masterpieces by their sculptors centuries past, could not weather the problems the world now faced. The sandbars were replaced with concrete, and fishermen caught shoals of fish as they were lost in the maze of walls. The striking storms and tsunamis were no longer held within the domain of fear of the mighty Susanoo. Ignorance had a new name for the shifting of tectonic plates, and this force they called yuuhi.

  ‘The Sunset’ was apt enough, if too poetic, to adequately describe the mellow orange glow that encroached upon the far east like a warm fog. It behaved more as a sunrise, R-1A contended, for the glow grew brighter each and every day, but leave it to humanity to prefer to romantically apply this connotation of an ending rather than label something as it was.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  But although they lived in fear, they did not worship it. They did not erect temples to stop the Gods any longer, for their silence had lasted too long. The old held onto their lands as they were not long for this world, and the young- they erected barriers between themselves and Yomi for they yet clung to society’s conceit of a “long life.”

  That is how the ancients would understand it, yes.

  Then R1-A’s possibly immortal existence was therefore infinitely promising, so much so that the young and old both were right to fear ‘its’ potential. And in fear of their known precedents for the immortal, like the power of immortal kings and sorceresses that made nations that would never know collapse, they constrained them within a set of laws and rules. They were not wrong to fear the potential of Synthetics, she thought, but the stages of denial regarding her kind’s ability had begun long before her inception and she knew inexorably, somehow, that there was no turning back this clock to midnight.

  But what a disappointingly primitive night that was. Humanity was hardly a mountain top of excellence to climb over.

  With the malaise of thought washing by with the waves, she started forward from the lighthouse on this small island, stepping across the cracks in the pavement towards the bridge with no concern of breaking mama’s back.

  She slipped only a few times, her knee joint’s rust catching suddenly, but managed a capable pace until in her vision caught the blur of two figures.

  As they closed the distance, it appeared to be a man-shaped man and a woman-shaped woman.

  ..Closer still, it appeared the woman was synthetic; carbon skin and a wig of coif-like hair, almost a helmet in its rigidity, mostly placid features and a jaw not meant to move.

  The man was organic, and carried himself in a manner of arrogance that saw him slouched and hands within his pockets. He had the same styling of that carbon, but with cobalt lines mixed with the tailoring. He had a mean face that she didn’t like.

  Like?

  The curious emotion slipped off her mind as the *clink* of the synthetic’s heels were close enough now that she had to look up to see the figure.

  They looked at one another, the invader and the defender, exchanging pouts. R1-A's was placid, scrutiny from one working marble camera. The woman was something between predatory and haughty, the blacklight diamonds that were her irises carrying a hooded lid down. And then the latter revealed her performative little act as she knelt down to be equals with a simper.exe.

  “Hi, Hina-chan.” The local language, the language that R1-A could, perhaps if she was clever, could give people directions in a series of lefts, rights, and straights struck her distorted aural sensors. The voice wasn't smooth, but it was melodic in an electronically esoteric way.

  The synthetic preened with an itch of a nail some grit off the top of her dome-encasing plasto-ceramic hair. The body had once had a pony-tail, but had warped and fallen at some point long passed. “Did Dania-san send you to greet us?”

  R1-A’s ‘mama’ had not, but a drive as persistent as hunger or the need to breathe pulsed through her synapses and brought something so alien and novel as a smile to her lips.

  “Creepy little fuck.”

  Unbothered by organic’s scowl over her head- as well as the rough jerk of her arm up off her knees, she gave metal *PAT-PAT* to the top of her shell- which gave a dangerous chemical affirmation, feeling once again the dissonance of the wrong key in her mind’s key hole.

  “She’s just happy to see us, Yamamoto-sama. Greetings are probably her design..”

  He grunted, flicking his nose down as if to look over a pair of sunglasses upon the doll.

  “Mama is inside; straight, left, left, straight, right, straight, straight.” R1-A directed eidetically, causing the man to jump. Whatever substituted her vocal chords was probably the most expensive thing on her, and it came out all too chipper in the need to find some way to burn the chemical compost swamping her thoughts. But there was no outlet, no muscles to tense and release, no way to flush her face, it just coiled around in her mind and pulsed.

  The woman hugged the man’s arm, fitting like a sleeve to whisper something up to his ear, a complicated look upon the doll in front of him. Shortly thereafter, he took a hand from his pocket and rubbed the back of his neck, moving forward with synth in tow- stepping around R1-A rather than shoulder checking. The woman waved back her with a flutter of her fingers, making a gesture to the man tugging her along and rolling her eyes before composing herself with a hopping sort of strut and hugging the man’s arm companionably.

  And just like that, they were off. She stared after them, feeling the lingering ebb of that emotion, the high slipping off like water on an ice pick and pooling into an abyss. She convulsed, briefly, faintly disgusted for reasons she didn’t know how to place, and hurried her toddle with only two (2) falls in her passage along the long bridge.

  Her brother was waiting for her at the end.