I Heart Robot Read Online Free PDF Page B

produces a viola. The lacquer curls and flakes, and there’s a string missing. He hands me a bow two strands away from being unusable.
    “You wanna buy it?”
    “No, but can I play it tonight?”
    “You can play it?” He sounds incredulous, his milky eyes wide with astonishment.
    “I’ll show you.”
    “Ah, three hundred krona first.” He holds out a filth-crusted hand.
    “One hundred.”
    “Two fifty.”
    I shake my head, but Sal slaps the money into his palm and the instrument is mine for the night. She drags me onto the stage already occupied by humans with synthesizers.
    “Do you mind? Thank you.” Sal pries the microphone away from a vocalist too high to sing and raises the mic stand to the level of my strings.
    “Maestro.” She curtsies as I step up to the mic.
    The electronic beats thin into a steady pulse over which a weaving melody peaks and dips. I raise the viola and pluck the strings. I’ve never played anything but the violin. It can’t be all that different. A quick tuning and I start to play, grazing the strings with the bow. Atonal mush spews forth, my fingers unused to the instrument. Another few minutes playing off key and I finally find the right notes.
    The weird and wild gather at my feet, and I know what it is to be a god. The stars hide behind the pall of light pollution thrown up by Baldur city, but it doesn’t matter that I can’t see them; I know they’re there and that’s enough.
    I feel all the anguish within me arise. Baudelaire’s words stream from my memstor. My owners had me memorize the Flowers of Evil to recite verbatim as a party trick, translated, of course, given my linguistic limitations. The poetry plays through my mind now as I saw my bow against the viola. Frenzied music spools from some hidden recess in my core, out through my fingers, and into the night. And they say a robot has no soul.
    I scan the crowd for Kit, hoping he’s there in the psychedelic tumult, that he’s experiencing something of the magic thrumming through the humans. The kind of magic I’m hoping one day will pour out of me and my violin while I’m standing on a better stage.
    No Kit, but there’s a girl in the crowd too clean and pretty to be one of the skag addicts or runaways. Her hair forms dark ripples around her face, obscuring her eyes, as she dances like seaweed tossed by waves. I play for her like a puppet master pulling her strings, watching her sway to the melody I wring from the ether. Beneath her hair, her eyes are closed. Her arms stretch toward the sky as if she might snatch down the stars. She smiles, lost in bliss, and I smile too as joy ribbons through my system.
    Never taking my eyes off the girl, I play until my fingers ooze Cruor and my pseudo vertebrae develop a crick. I play until my audience collapses in a stupor and the inebriation code runs its course, returning me to sobriety; the buzz in my circuitry an incessant reminder of my overindulgence.
    Minutes or hours pass. Time distends and leaves me standing on an empty stage, my audience asleep in puddles of piss and vomit. The apathetic sun creeps into the sky illuminating the carnage. I search through the crumpled bodies, but the dark haired girl isn’t among the fallen. Part of me wishes I’d spoken to her, gotten her name—another part knows it’s probably for the best I never see her again.
    My circuitry aching with a hangover, I return the viola to the old man’s crevice and tuck a blanket around his shivering shoulders. Sal is wrapped around a younger man, his patchwork jeans around his ankles, and his bare skin a rash of goose bumps. He stinks of skag and wears polka dot bruises along his veins. Sal’s staring at the graffiti on the walls and weeping.
    “Time to go home,” I say, and she nods dumbly, extricating herself from the arms of her one-time lover.
    “Did you have a good time?” She wipes imaginary tears from her face, programmed for emotion she can’t physically express without