The Nest

Mayfly couldn’t sleep. She did try; she laid down on the strange couch-become-bed, under blankets she couldn’t feel, and shut her eyes. She cleared her mind, she counted down from one hundred, she even mimicked the big, deep breaths her cats took right when they fell asleep. It didn’t work.

Mayfly couldn’t sleep, literally. So instead she got up to give Enfie more room, took some of the cold, leftover tea, and crept as quickly as she could to Bezzy’s door. She knocked lightly, heard some shuffling on the other end, the fiddling of locks, and then it cracked open. Bezzy’s colorful eyes glowed in the sliver.

“What?” he asked flatly.

“I can’t sleep. Can I hang out with you?”

“I don’t see anything on fire.”

Mayfly held out the tea. A thin arm slunk out and took it from her.

“This is cold.”

“I don’t know how to make the stove go.”

Bezzy sighed, peering over at the couch where Enfie was still sound asleep. “Fine, sure, whatever,” he grumbled. The door opened just enough for her to squeeze through, and then shut instantly behind her.

It was hardly any brighter here than in the living room; the only light came from an array of screens on a desk against the wall, dim but filling. She could see outlines of an unkept bed, shelves with thin, flimsy books piled on them, and a door leading into what might have been a restroom. There was another desk, upon which sat a handful of prostheses; legs, arms, steel jawbones, even a few eyes, which she pointedly looked away from.

“You can have the bed, just don’t touch anything,” Bezzy said, sitting down at the desk. He set the cold tea down next to another, empty cup. “Did you bring food with you?”

“No.”

“Good, no food in my room. Crumbs, ants—I hate ants.”

“Oh,” Mayfly said, and kept herself from asking why he had six arms if he didn’t like ants. She didn’t take the bed, instead she came over beside him to look at the monitors. There weren’t any advertisements or dancing people, like there were on all the other screens she’d seen, only a cluster of black boxes. They ran with text, and though it was just numbers, and words—some of which she even recognized—none of it made a lick of sense to her. “Is this your work?”

He glanced over his shoulder like he meant to shoo her away, but didn’t. Instead, his manifold arms slid out from his quilt-shell, and began to clack away at a keyboard underlit with the same cycle of colors as his eyes.

“Kinda, yeah. Part of it.”

“Are you a writer?”

“Writer? Please. I’m a liberator,” he said, two of his hands flourishing in the air. “I help people escape the panopticon of oppression, the cybernetic prison, that is Foxtail’s gaze.”

“…The what?”

Bezzy sighed again. “I deregister people’s prosthetics so the Confederacy can’t track them.”

“Oh, I see,” she lied. “So it’s like they have eyes in your arms?”

“And ears, and mouths, and sometimes hands,” he said, and all the while his fingers worked as if they had a mind of their own. “I had this one guy, he was old, did security for low-end shops in east Dauden, real mall cop stuff. Anyway, he won a sweepstakes for a top-end leg from L’Clenn. Like a current-year model, all kitted-out and everything. So he goes in, gets the procedure, walks out on his shiny new leg—but he didn’t know L’Clenn handles its own insurance. Well, he lives in Dauden, so the rate is higher than he can handle. Ended up late on one of his payments, and you know what they did? They shut it off.”

Mayfly balked. “They shut off his leg?”

“Yep. Middle of his shift, the thing just locked up. Fell right on his face—broke his nose. Had to limp home. They were gonna repo it, of course, but someone steered him to me.” Bezzy sniffed like he was trying to preen, but it just made him cough. “L’Clenn’s no joke. Their security is tight as a rope, and just ugly with alarms. They’ve got pull, too; tampering with that would’ve gotten me jail time if I got caught. Cracked it in an hour. He still works down there. Still has the leg too, doesn’t pay a count. It’s like we just walked out of the store with it. They can’t even prove they did the surgery.”

“So you…kinda stole it? Isn’t that breaking the rules?”

He scoffed. “Rules. Their rules, maybe, but not mine. I might live here, but I’m no fox. A Board room on some big rock isn’t gonna dictate my morality to me. Nuh-uh. That’s my job.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah. You know, my mama sorta says that, too. She says sometimes you have to figure out right and wrong for yourself.”

“Smart lady,” Bezzy said. “Guess she’d have to be to build something like you.”

“She didn’t build me! I’m not metal back home, I’m just…wearing all this, I guess.”

“So you are like a gerbil in a metal suit.”

Mayfly stifled a laugh, trying not to be too loud. She might not get tired, but Enfie certainly needed the rest. “You’re a lot funnier than I thought someone who doesn’t leave their home would be.”

“Okay, kid, I leave my home plenty.”

“Enfie said you don’t.”

“Well Enfie has an inordinate amount of experience with not staying put, so her opinion is biased,” he said. “One minute she’s in New Cazzer, then you blink and she’s in the Free Cities, then the next day she calls and she’s on the other side of the Confederacy studying metal plants.”

“Like in Flytrap!”

“Yeah, like that. Is that where she found you? The technoscape out there?”

“Nuh-uh, we met in town. But I wish she’d have been there! She’s smart—you should have seen all her maps. I bet she knows where I can find a moonbloom.”

Bezzy stopped typing. He swiveled around in his chair to face her. “Seriously. You came to Gen from…wherever—”

“The Valley—”

“A Valley, and you’re a Titan. Maybe. Maybe a Titan. And all you’re here to do is find a flower for your mom.”

Mayfly nodded.

“I almost want this to be a scam. Scams make sense.” He swerved back around, and a new screen popped up on the monitor. “Okay. It’s called a moonbloom?”

“Yeah! It’s super pretty. It’s got a, uh, a black stem, and lil’ red thingies on its head. And its petals are silver and feel kinda like metal. When I woke up in the technoscape, there were some flowers that looked a little bit like it, but none of them were the right one.”

“Metal flower. Right. Hm.” His too-dexterous fingers set to typing again, and over his shoulder she saw the word ‘technoflora’ appear in a little bar labeled ‘search.’ Suddenly, an entire page full of flowers sprung up. Some were drawings and paintings, others looked so real she thought she might be able to reach out and pluck them.

Bezzy leaned back and nodded to the screen. “Any of these look right?”

There were so many it was hard to tell. Metal daises and sunflowers and bushes of pulsing wire. Stalks of fibrous corn, tree trunks with gleaming facsimile bark rising above clusters of vegetable filament. She squinted at pictures of flowerbeds, razor petals and heads like tiny lightbulbs. All of them were beautiful. None of them were moonblooms.

Mayfly shook her head.

“Well, guess that makes sense. Most of this is speculatory art, no one actually knows what’s in a technoscape.”

“Really? This is all made up?”

Bezzy shrugged. “Nothing survives inside. People, drones—the rot gets all of it. Whatever we can’t see, we just have to imagine.”

“So the moonbloom could there.”

“If it’s a metal plant, it’s probably safe to say it can only be there.”

“Huh.” Mayfly flopped onto the bed, trying to pry an answer out of the dark ceiling. “We passed a technoscape on the way here, but it was kinda in the middle of nowhere.”

“Out by Flytrap?” He asked. She nodded, and somehow he managed to see it despite the fact that she was sinking into the mattress. “I mean, I guess you could go all the way out there again, but that’d be a bit of a waste.”

“Why’s’at?”

“Because there’s one right outside the west wall.”