Sunday

I did some cleaning yesterday, which is about as exciting as it got.

Today, I had my weekly free-writing group. And, well, the prompt was a little weird, but I had fun with it nevertheless:

“Children and the elderly go first,” the robot man said. There were gears inexpertly grafted to its face, a clockwork mechanism that let the human jaw beneath poorly mimic human speech.

You chose this? Manny thought, eyeing the metal thing and its patchwork of sheet metal and flesh, a rusting constellation of rivets scarred across its receding hairline. A hundred years ago you stepped through this very same time gate and let whoever’s on the other side do that to you. They said, let us strip off your humanity and and replace it with leaking motor oil, burnt spark plugs, soldered-on transistors, and you said sure. If the stories are true, you signed up for this, you and all the other temporal borgs watching over the gate.

At least the four of us didn’t have a choice in the matter. We’re going through the gate if we want to or not.

“There aren’t any elderly or children here,” said the Professor. He’d introduced himself, Conrad something, but Manny still thought he looked like a professor decked out in tweed. He was just missing the chalk dust stains and the elbow patches. “Perhaps we should just go through one at a time?”

“Doesn’t it make more sense for me to go first?” Ms. Earth asked, twirling a lock of her blonde hair and unnecessarily moistening her lips with her tongue. Watching her preen for cameras that were no longer there, Manny almost laughed. Only a girlish giggle would have been more transparent.

“What’re you doing, honey?” Abigail, the fourth in their little group of prisoners, asked with a heavy sigh. “The beauty pageant’s long done with. It’s not like Gearface over there’s gonna fall for your act.”

“I’m just saying,” the one-time beauty queen said, glaring at the older woman, “if we want to put our best foot forward with the Architects, maybe we should lean on the one of us who has some experience with public speaking.”

“Yeah,” Abigail said, “and who knows, maybe there’ll be a swimsuit competition.”

“C’mon now,” said Ms. World — whose real name, Manny now remembered, was Melody — “I just meant that — “

“Children and the elderly go first,” the temporal borg repeated, stepping in front of the time portal.

“Do you think if we don’t follow the rules it won’t let us go through at all?” the Professor asked.

“Now that’d be a real shame,” Abigail said.

“They’re not going to let us go back to what we were doing before,” Manny said, surprising even himself. “The Architects don’t let anybody go once they’ve chosen.”

“The kid isn’t wrong,” the Professor said. “Everybody goes into the future eventually.” He looked at Manny as if sizing him up. “He’s also as close to ’children’ as we get,” he said. “He and you should probably go through first.”

“And me?” Abigail asked. “Just who do you think you’re calling elderly?”

“It’s just relative,” the Professor said.