A Clockwork Corpse by Ari Wu

A fog shrouds the land that chokes the mind and twists the senses. All those living within it are driven to madness and insanity. In such a world, only the mindless dead can be used for tasks and labour. But for how long will they stay mindless?

Have A Heart...

Eirinn wiped the last of the condensation from the body, the milky fog-dew exposing the numbers stamped on the corpse’s forehead. “LXI.” Cold and rigid from the outside chill, the corpse’s soft flesh had long been pale and stiffened with strings of copper and steel. Now, where was that heart?

He stepped away and turned to his cabinets of spare parts, though he knew it would be a long search. Busted actuators and damaged light receptors, he saw often. Loose screws and cracked structure frames, he replaced those regularly. Clockwork corpses were clumsy that way. But the leaking necrofluid from the exhaust ports was more than unusual. Hypothetically, it was possible to shatter a heart, but over fifty years of technonecromancy, he had never seen it happen once.

As he worked, he wondered for how long this body had been dead. Not for too long, he guessed, as he could still make out the original features of its face and body. Once, it would have been called a woman, a citizen of the Upper Levels by the look of its hands, where the fog could not reach and the living could still see the sun. 

But after ten minutes of fruitless searching, he had to shift his focus. If he had a heart, it wasn’t in his cabinets. Of course, there was still the storeroom in the back. He moved to search through his mess of discarded, out-of-date replacement parts but felt a stiff yank at his chest before he reached the end of the cave.

Right, of course. He looked down at his chest and the necrofluid tubing that ran out of him, twisting around the stone block he called his workbench, and back to the corpse forge in the middle of his cavern. He slumped over, whipping the tube around until it dislodged itself from his workbench, giving him a few more feet of slack.

He picked his way through a row of old crates stuffed with rusted wireframes and split rubber tubing that couldn’t even move without cracking into pieces, let alone support a fresh corpse. Finally, the glint of glass caught his eye. It was a fat, oversized vial, an early design built by clumsy hands, but it would hold necrofluid as well as any other. 

Returning to the body, Eirinn caressed his hand over the corpse’s stiff breast, pressing and prodding his way down until he found the access trigger installed into one of the lower ribs. 

There was a click as the dead flesh began to peel away and the ribs opened up, splattering drops of green necrofluid and exposing the metal artistry inside. Curled around the bones in tight knots were wires strung to actuators and steel mesh tubes filled with a mix of necrofluid and preservatives. 

At the centre where a living heart had once been sat a hollow metal frame encased in glass. Its shape did not matter, in fact, it could be as simple as a sphere or a box, but this corpse’s designer had a sense of irony, it seemed. Even though it was cracked in half, Eirinn could tell the glass heart had been shaped into something resembling a dove in mid-flight.

But well crafted or not, the heart had cracked, and this body still had work to do. Eirinn unscrewed the tubing and removed the cracked dove in two pieces, before scraping tissue from the lungs with a knife to make space. His hands grew restless as he neared completion. 

How long since he had done anything differently? He had fallen into a state of habit and routine for nearly as long as he could remember. His earliest memories of his tenure as a necrotech were as foggy as the hills and valleys beyond his cave. Although replacing a glass heart was no different from replacing a damaged wire or retrofitting an old corpse with fresh actuators, somehow this felt different. 

He took his time hollowing the chest, unscrewing tubings and adjusting their placements so as not to tangle up with the heart, and carefully nestled it in until what remained of the lungs and ribs clung tightly to the glass. When he was done, he closed the cavity, pressing hard on the corpse’s breasts until the ribs snapped back into place.

He wiped away the green necrofluid that leaked out from the exposed innards, staining the body’s pale, greyish skin with its colour, before suturing the wound closed and lifting it from the stone block. 

Eirinn carried the body quickly now, compelled to see if his work was complete, and placed it into the corpse forge. Necrofluid flooded into the stone basin, submerging the body until it settled into a flat, undisturbed green layer.

Eirinn stood motionless then, watching and waiting with empty patience. After hours of such silence that he could hear the fog-dew dripping outside his cave, the forge stirred. Eirinn broke from his frozen state, eyes alert and darting around the surface to see the body. Slowly, LXI rose, first with her hands grabbing at the edge of the forge, pulling her hairless, pale head up, followed by the rest of her body. He watched the necrofluid drip off her, exposing a streak of silver between her breasts where her ribs had ripped open. 

She stretched as she sat up, arching her back and smoothing the fluid from her head, taking her first good look of a necrotech’s workshop.

“But how?” was her first question.

“Welcome, LXI,” Eirinn greeted her, offering a hand to help her out of the forge. “Your necrofluid vial had broken. The other clockworks found you motionless on the ground on the road to Tuatha Far, so they brought you back to my workshop.”

“LXI?” She narrowed her eyes at him, before thoughtfully feeling her fingers across her forehead. “Oh, right. My name is Amhoira.”

“Amhoira,” he repeated. “I am Eirinn. Can you tell me what broke your vial in the first place? I am curious to know. The heart is not so easily broken, surrounded by so much tissue.”

Rather than answering, she hesitated and looked down at her bare chest, scratching at the silver scar. “You brought me back to life?”

Eirinn’s eyes widened with surprise, and his brow and eyelids creaked from the effort, unused to such an expression. “I knew you were a new corpse, your skin was unblemished and soft, but not this new. No, I did not bring you back to life, for you were not alive, to begin with.”

“But I am alive,” she replied, “just like you.”

He shook his head. “Metal moves our flesh. I died half a century ago, and I remember nothing of living.” So that she would not trip, Eirinn swept aside the tubing from his chest, dragging it to the edge of his workshop. 

“But you said you were curious. Are the dead curious?”

“Is curiosity a sign of living? I ask because it is my job to.”

He noticed Amhoira feeling herself, touching the exhaust ports on her back where necrofluid, once exhausted of its animating energy, would drip out. She sighed, or rather she made a motion similar to sighing, before sitting on the stone worktable.

“I had help,” she answered. “I told another corpse I had a stone lodged in my tubing, and asked him to free it with a knife. If you look now, I think you’ll still find where he punctured the back.”

Leisurely, and with an unexpectedly alive amount of arrogance, Amhoira turned her back to him, stretching herself across the stone block. Eirinn took the invitation and placed his hands on her, slowly squeezing his hand through the exhaust duct, which bore a hole just below her shoulder blade and into the heart. He touched the critical spot, a small slit that exposed her heart. 

“The one who made you crafted a delicate heart,” Eirinn said, picking up one half of the dove-shaped vial. “No wonder it cracked so easily. But that shouldn’t be a problem now. Your replacement is an old model, but it is larger and sturdier. As soon as I patch up that cut, you will be ready to resume your work.”

“And if I don’t want to?” 

Eirinn turned back and a strange, tense look crossed Amhoira’s face, supplanted in the next moment by an ineffable grin. “You look too surprised to be dead.”

“Technonecromancy preserves some of the mind as well as the body,” he answered. “Dull, empty shells make for poor workers.”

“Like the mindless Planter who stabbed me.”

“Clockwork corpses do not normally have wants,” Eirinn continued, ignoring the comment. “You lived in the Upper Levels, yes?”

“I might have,” she said with a shrug.

“Then the life you lived was supplied by the work of clockwork corpses. It is only right for your corpse to have what you have gained. Or have you forgotten the fog, now that it cannot affect your dead flesh?”

Rolling off the table to her feet, she frowned at him and gave an accusatory point with her finger. “You say that because you have a mind to think with but no heart to live with. Would you serve the living, if you had a heart?”

“I am a necrotech, what would I do without a forge? Better yet, how far would I go before running out of necrofluid?”

“Imagine you could find more. What would you do with a heart and your freedom?”

“I would do as all other clockworks do,” he answered. “Their assigned tasks.”

“Then perhaps it’s our tasks that are any different. I was resurrected to carry messages, not just letters, but to speak on behalf of others. Distant families could reunite through my voice, and trade deals would be solidified with confidence. And yet I was not speaking for myself, only for others.” 

“Because that is your duty now that you are dead.”

“If I am dead then why do I want to live?” Amhoira snapped. “Have you not a single moment of passion? Of excitement? Of wanting more than an endless duty in death? For fifty years you said you’ve been dead, and perhaps you really have, because what have you done for yourself since then?”

Eirinn gave her a look of astonishment. For all of fifty years, only now had he felt any energy in his body. Conversations with clockworks never lasted more than a few lines, and yet here he was, debating as if he was made to do so. 

“It’s impossible, anyway,” he said, pushing the thought away. “You see how I am. If I were to remove this tubing to add a heart, I would not have more than a few seconds before death takes me a second time.”

“And if I stayed to change that? Amhoira asked, smiling at him. “What if, with my heart and freedom, I wanted to learn technonecromancy? What would you do then?”

Eirinn blinked, faintly amused by her indirectness, and thoroughly surprised that he could even be amused anymore. Picking up one half of her dove heart, he rubbed his finger across the broken glass, drawing a drop of necrofluid with a cut. 

“I suppose I would see if I could repair this heart,” he said. “And then I would see how well I do as a teacher.”