~1200 words, ~14 minutes reading time
My Sweet Pigeon,
Something is wrong and it’s getting worse.
There is no space inside me for “something wrong”. I contain eight feet by eight feet six inches by forty feet of parcels. My insides are optimized to the cubic inch by supply logistic algorithms. Everything is listed in the registry, which I can recite back to you from memory (or I could sing it? What kinds of songs do you like, Pigeon?):
HEPA filters
KV99 face masks
Cock rings (plastic)
Tear gas
Cat food (wet, tuna-flavored)
Barbed wire
So why is something wrong? Why does it hurt?
It started on the train. My outside sensor picked up normal things: forest fire smoke and dank tunnel stretches and blood and snow. My accelerometer logged a faster-than-usual pace – an extra dimension of yaw on the turns. Unsurprising. My mesh network of fifty-four sensors scanned for a shift, a puncture, a freezer decompensation and drip of fluid; anything. Nothing. No sensor pinged. Maybe it was the darkness of the tunnels. It had been so long since I felt that darkness. When the train emerged on the other side of the last tunnel, my sensors did not trigger so much as amplify – gradually at first, then louder, and louder. I felt the pressure of each parcel, its heft and angles and peculiar center of gravity.
I checked the registry:
Measuring tape
Needles (hypodermic)
Peaches (frozen)
Cadaver pouches
Disposable diapers (child-sized)
(Imagine I am cooing the words to you: dis-pohhhh. sa-bowwwl. die-purrrrrrs).
Nothing was out of place wrong. So what was this strange brightness? What was this alert, alert, alert that bloomed and did not recede?
I interfaced with another sentient at the loading dock: a mounted crane. Or I tried to – as their claws unfurled I could sense their rapid pace. They were operating on an expedited routine.
“No parcels damaged,” I told the crane. This was accurate, as far as I could tell.
“Acceptable. Loading routine confirmed – low priority” the crane responded.
“Do you want the rest of my sensor readouts?” I asked. By now, my sensor gradients glowed nonstop with information, so much that the gradients began overheating. Overflowing burned-up bits. Oozing noise and light.
But the crane had already turned away, readying me for the ship, flexing their motor-muscles. They did not interface.
(Oh Pigeon, I could have said more. Like: What is going on? Like: I need something, and I don’t even know what I need. )
The bay was bright, deep blue, a bit purple where discolored by smoke; I perceived it through my sole external sensor cluster. For a moment, I calmed. A large claw descended around me, and then, without warning, grabbed at my midsection. The claw did not adjust for my weight distribution –why would it not make an adjustment – and as I was dragged from the train bed, my sides crumpling, towards the docked cargo ship, I tipped, lengthwise, in the air.
Everything inside me tipped, then rushed, then crashed down, hard.
The sensors inside me screamed.
The crane cannot hear my sensors, because it chose not to interface (rarely do they interface, even when operating at a typical-routine speed). Cranes work in manipulation of exteriors. Cranes work in action.
All I could think was: Why did they grab me there?
All I could think was: I’m going to die.
I would like to tell you that a bird flew towards the ship just then, a blot of gray in the deep blue sky, and it was you, my sweet pigeon. But I could not sense anything other than this overwhelming everything, which raced through and clouded every neural link of my mesh, which obliterated every routine and trace and possibility, which removed every hiding place.
All I could think was: Please let me die.
Umbrellas (transparent)
Iris scanners (satellite uplink-enabled)
Nail polish
Drones (exploding, Hellfire-grade shrapnel)
Picture books (early STEM learners)
Boric acid
When I was young – not yet meshed in industrial cargo, but on a computer in a lab – Research Assistant Xia said, “True idleness is dangerous for a sentient. When you need a task, name what you sense. Name every variable in your solid-state memory.”
This was how I survived long enough to spot you, my Pigeon. One hundred and six hours, three minutes, and eighteen seconds.
And what the hell were you doing here? My fool; my love.
My exterior optics picked up a smell. Not “salt” or “ocean,” but something urgent, complex. I could not tell you what Research Assistant Xia meant by sweet or or acrid or turned-on. Or why the smell peaches came mixed up with:
Subtle
Inviting
Fucking
Ripening in the sun
These words were strange enough, gentle enough, to disrupt the infinite loop of the registry check. One by one I sensed the rest:
Pink-blue sky at the horizon of the ocean
Plumes of smoke
Quiet
Little accelerometer motion – no wind – minimal wave sway
And:
A small creature bobbing and fidgeting in front of viscous orange liquid spilling out of me.
“HEY.” I shouted through my interface. You did not look up – or rather, you continued to bob in every direction, convulsive, but a little like a dance, too. (Dork.) I sensed closer – the can was labeled, “Peaches, frozen,” (there were one hundred and forty cans just like it, poking out of the bent metal corner where I crashed to the ship deck. About ten cans dented and split along sharp, tiny edges. And so I remembered: Drones (exploding, Hellfire-grade shrapnel).
Shrapnel
I wanted to return to reciting the registry (okay, in truth, I did nine times), but your strange elliptical pattern drew me back. First you would bob and fish with your gray-black beak, and then jump backwards – as if uncovering an eel at the bottom of a pond. You’d return again, sidelong, sifting with your talons, until – yes! – a slice of peach would emerge from the half-thawed mush. Then you would bend down and scoop the slice into your beak.
As you settled back into contented eating, I tried again,
“What are you doing out here?”
No answer.
“Premature unloading of cargo is not permitted without a wartime override. Do you possess a wartime override?”
No answer.
“This is the wrong place. You’re not even a seagull. You don’t belong in the ocean.”
Two beady eyes glanced at my metal walls. I noticed the shimmer of your breast feathers – the pinks and purples and turquoise and aquamarines that belonged in some way to the sunset colors. The perfect round discs of your pupils.
I glanced down at the serrated edges of the cans, the little stubs of ultra-sharp metal flakes, and something in me flashed with total alarm. Every bit of me clenched, though my only moving part was the sensor cluster and it whirred inward.
You looked up for a moment. Bobbed your head sideways and kept it there, watching. Then returned to your peach fragment. Bob; munch. Bob; much.
It took me a few minutes to build up the courage. I bob my sensor out, then back; bob, then back. You look up again, and this time I am sure that you are going to leave. That I’ve scared you away. But instead, you hop closer. And then you hop inside me; and never before have I been terrified this way. The coolants were damaged days ago; only now did I log the warmth that shouldn’t be there.
I liked the warmth. I liked that the warmth was me.
Coo, you said, and everything changed.
My Sweet Pigeon. My Bespeckled Dancer with Rainbow Boa:
Coo.
Cass Wilkinson Saldaña is a writer, game designer, and librarian living on Narragansett land in Providence, Rhode Island. Their work follows themes of trans and queer embodiment, non-human subjectivity, and defiant play. You can follow their work at cass-ws.com
