Break! Break! Break!

Break! Break! Break!

By Charlie Jane Anders

Sally fell in love with a robot guy named Raine, and suddenly he had to be big in every movie. She found him painted silver on Main street, his arms and legs moving all blocky and jerky, and she thought he had the extra-touch we needed. In our movies he played Castle the Pacifist fighting Droid, but in real life he clutched Sally’s heart in his cold, unbreakable metal fist. He tried to nice up to me, but I saw through him. He was just using Sally for the Yangar fame.I’d never been in love, because I was waiting for the silent-movie love: big eyes and violins, chattering without sound, pure. Nobody had loved right since 1926.

Ricky Artesian came up to me in the cafeteria early on in eleventh grade. He’d gotten so he could loom over and around everybody. I was eating with Sally, Raine and a few other film geeks, and Ricky told me to come with him. My fist thought was, whatever truce we’d made over my arm-bone was over and gone, and I was going to be fragments of me. But Ricky just wanted to talk in my boy’s room. Everyone else cleared out, so it was just the two of us and the wet TP clinging to the tiles. The air was sour.

«Your movies, they are cool,» he said. I started to explain they were also Sally’s, but he hand-slashed. «My people,» he gestured at the red bandana. «We’re going to take it all down. They’ve lied to us, you know. It’s all fucked, and we’re taking it down.»

Break! Break! Break! Photo by Elena.

I nodded, not so much in agreement, but because I h’d heard it before.

«We want you to make some movies for us. Explaining what we’re about.»

I told him I’d have to ask Sally, and he whatevered, and didn’t want to listen to how she was the brains, even though anyonle looking at both of us could tell she was the brains. Ricky said if I helped him, he’d help me. We were both almost draft-age, and I would be a morning snack to the military exoskeletons. I’d seen No Time For Sergeants – seventeen times – so I figured I knew all about basic training, but Ricky said I’d be toast. Holman had been telling me the same thing, when he wasn’t trying to beatme up. So Ricky offered to get me disqualified from the Army, or get me under some protection during training.

When I told Sally about Ricky’s offer, the first thing she did was ask Raine what he thought. Raine wasn’t a robot that day, which caught me off-guard. He was just a sandt-haired, flag eared, skunny guy, a year or so older than us. We sat in a seaside gazebo/pagoda where Sally thpught she could film some explosions. Raine said propaganda was bad, but also could Ricky get him out of the Army as well as me? I wasn’t sure. Sally didn’t want me to die, but artistic integrity, you know.

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015.