We would have been so happy together, I know it. That spark of connection, the way my heart leapt to see her, the sound of her laughter when I’d made some particular joke or other: that’s the basis of a real relationship. What could Escamillo offer her? Fleeting, fading. Physical chemistry, cheap economics. I offered love, pure love, and that wasn’t enough. Should I have simply swallowed her insults? Accepted her abuse? Did I not have the right to defend my honor?

We were worried for our lives, the fourteen of us, a wall of fragile human meat surrounding a four thousand pound truck. The look in her eyes when the brake lights went off… there was fury there, and madness. Bloodlust. We had to protect ourselves. Make it home again tonight safe, that’s what they tell us; whatever else happens, make it home safe. Should we have stood there and let ourselves be run over? She thought we weren’t serious and we had to show her.

We have been so kind, so restrained; we have lethal weapons, but we never use them, are not allowed to use them. And what thanks do we get? Rubber bullets may smash the occasional eye, but you can live without an eye. Tear gas may have been banned in war, but this isn’t a war. They say it is, but if it is, we’ll win it. They think we’re a joke, and we have to show them we mean business. There is no hunting like the hunting of men. We didn’t make them come here. We didn’t make them poison the city against us. They did that on their own.

What choice did we have? Were we not within our rights?

We die in the hundreds when the bombs fall, in the thousands when the armies cut through. We dig the mass graves then fill them, falling unmarked and unrecorded into a nameless dirt hole. We are statistics in the headlines, less the soldiers or the prize than another battlefield, churned up into nothing.

We are the ones who did not escape the rising waters, who died trapped in our cars when the wildfire jumped the two lane road, who stayed on the mountain until the mud came boiling through our living rooms. They’ll dig us out, some of us, but not all; our records are lost, our families dead, unmourned and unmemoried.

When the riots come, we are caught crossing the street, looking the wrong way for traffic until the crack of the police sniper chases the bullet over the head of the crowd and arrives too late for our ears to catch it, our brains to parse it. We die unknowing.

They have no childhoods, because they were made, not born, but a certain amount of socialization being deemed useful for their later life they are raised in creches with other automata, rooms noisy with the mindless chatter of seven times seventy copper-wired semi-deployed workers. Noise is an indulgence, one they will be trained away from, later; what do they need to talk about?

Their factories are silent and swift; the machines are kept quiet for the pleasure of the lone human overseer. Morning and night they are fed the same thin flavorless paste; all the nutrients necessary to maintain smooth operating, though at the cost of a certain unavoidable about of noxious offgassing.

Every so often one of them slips into the bowels of the machines, and the floor bursts into clangor. They do not mourn, because they are interchangeable; another one will issue from the creche soon enough and the work will continue. They clean the machinery of the bright fluid and move on.

Now, though: the overseer, heavy with sleep, has slipped from his high perch and fallen to the floor. He shatters, and the factory slows, stops. They gather around the spreading pool of his blood, the same clangorous red as theirs.

The factory bursts into noise, swells, grows louder, louder, a dam broken through at last.

Water, and in the distance islands rising blue out of the night.

We have built a fire on the stones near the shore, from wood we bought at a gas station, out of pine wood and cedar, fragrant and damp-smelling. The younger Charlemagne has a joint for the smoking, half a thing, that he stole from his parents. He offers it round, but we are too nervous, us, so we say no and he smokes by himself. Good smell, anyway, blending with the flat brackish tide and the pop of the fire.

The ferries are passing, christmas gods restless on the surface of the water.

The older Charlemagne tells a story, about his parents, about his father and his many, many mothers. How many mothers can one person have? Always one more, he says, and shrugs; he offers to name them for us, if we like, but we have heard that trick before and want no part of it. His father is rich, so rich, with a room full of treasure and a house full of books. He is always reading something rare and wonderful, the older Charles Magnus, books full of herbs no one can find and beasts no one has seen. They are thin on plot, however, which makes them boring to hear about so we never quite listen.

The fire is dying. We kick wet stones over it and head shivering back to the car, point ourselves eastward and head up the hill.