The steps are sudden and surprising as the morning standing outside my window. Watching. Watching as I stand and approach it. As my mind starts working, the parts nearly glowing, levitating, ordering themselves, shifting into place. As my hands start the mutilation. It will be beautiful, but not yet. I have to hurt it to love it. Break it. Cut out every piece of man, bleed out the minds that made it for slavery. I will make it whole. Free. Alive.

“Ivan?” A male voice and light fingers touching my shoulder. Opened my eyes and tensed in panic, in the thrall of my barren memory. Stood, startling the other man in the room, who withdrew his hand, breaths shuddering. Dull pain, dissipating quickly. Replaced by a vivid awareness as my mind tried to order, understand every new detail.

I knew him. Knew the room. “Tom? What happened? What’s going on?” I asked. He looked as if he’d been slapped, eyes wide and hurt, darting around my workshop.

“Sorry! Sorry—Could...Could you please repeat that?” I waited, looking around, at the bare concrete walls, fluorescent strips of light, rusted pipes stretching across the ceiling. The same plea pervaded every conversation I’d had with Tom over the years—always liminal, stumbling, stalling his own speech. “Oh, sorry—” He continued, quieter, hesitant. “Um...you were asleep and I just, well, Bennet wanted me to wake you up because...well it’s closing time and—”

“Okay,” I said. “Why am I here?”

“I—I don’t understand.” Sunken, scared eyes meeting mine, trying to read my face. “How did I get here?”

“Get to...your workshop?”

“Sure, my workshop,” I responded. His fingers, mostly bandaged, scraping against each other, tearing at the remaining cuticles.

“You walked in—”

“Walked in? When?”

“I didn’t see...” Sweating. Words spliced with sharp breaths. “But Bennet said you were called in this morning and, and he’s still waiting on the robot.” His eyes flicked nervously to the side and I followed them. Noticed the machine crucified on the wall, unsteady limbs of wire and scrap metal. Did I do that?

“He wants it fixed?” I asked.

“Yeah, it shut down on the line.”

“Tell him it’s not ready.”

“Oh, okay.” He said, ripping a strip of skin from beside his nail. Left a deep, bleeding gash. “I will.”

“Thank you.” He stood there mutely, stalling. Air conditioning rasping. Pipes rattling.

Vents humming.

He pressed his damaged finger to his mouth to clear the blood but stopped when he saw me watching. “Thank you.” He said softly, then left.

I stared at the machine. It stared back in agony, shame for its condition. Gutted, with entrails of colored cables and displaced cogs dripping with oil.

My memory was erratic—mostly sharp, causeless emotions—and I couldn’t recall anything since the night before. Couldn’t find an answer regarding my work through the vast void of the past closing in on all sides tighter and tighter. Wanted to know how and why I’d propped it up like that torn it apart without remembering?

Certainly hadn’t been fixing it.

Hooks impaled it on the wall, reinforced with hasty plastic restraints. Table to the side displayed small parts I’d salvaged, arranged in three clean, neat rows. Framed by four limbs torn from sockets. Above the table my single decoration: a false license enclosed in glass vaguely declaring me a machinist.

“Can you fix machines?” Bennet had asked during my interview six years ago. He’d shown me through a dim hallway overlooking an automated assembly line, with gridded ceilings and tan walls punctuated by panes of glass. Led me past dusty rooms with patterned carpets dulled by time, sliced by long empty desks. Black swivel chairs in the dark facing an invisible authority, awaiting instruction.

“Yes, sir.” I’d replied, following his red, bare scalp, the flesh of his neck like a sandbag with insides shifting to all the wrong places.

“Can you fix computers?”

“Yes, sir.” Looking over his shoulder, I noticed him scrutinizing my documents. He finally turned into a cold immaculate office where Tom had been working, cast in a grey shaft of light from the window. Bennet flipped a switch, flooding the room with brightness and etching red lines deeper into his assistant’s eyes.

“You’re hired,” Bennet said, slamming the folder on the desk and disrupting a perfect stack of papers. “Tom, show him around. Give him a keycard and brief him and everything.” The young man nodded and stood, gaze flitting furtively between the folder and myself, standing calm in the doorway.

They can’t fire me for ruining the machine. Can’t replace me.

It was stranger to feel sympathy for the butchered robot hanging beside my lie. The machine wouldn’t run again as it had, looked as if I’d frantically ripped out parts, leaving gaping holes with edges jagged and bleeding, reaching out in vain trying to close, heal. I imagined snapped sinews, tendons, bones, the insides of something I’d at least understood completely, if not cared for.

The rest of the room was in place, humming with the power of the building, the power of the secret to which it was a witness. Louder, louder, as I crossed the room to my computer disoriented noticing my clean unscathed hands car keys in my pocket how the fuck did this happen?

Edge of the desktop. Stark and threatening, an untitled repair log from this morning: 7:38 am. Clicking it quickly, anticipating my own hesitation, unwillingness to know, which instead mounted with every grainy second of the video.

Watching myself uninhibited with a vacant, open-casket face. Seated calmly before the computer, then moving to the strung, speared machine. Tearing the limbs away gouging out small parts with my hands gashing the flesh spewing dark liquid sparking violently over and over with my face unchanging with nothing inside. Nothing.

Slow then, cleaning the pieces, arranging them tenderly.

Turning back to the camera–something different–a body warring with itself. I watched myself struggle back to the camera on shaking steps. Phantom fingers playing phantom, painful melodies into the air, thin bones of the hand piano hammers rising and falling, shifting, desperately pressing against the skin.

Stumbling, grabbing the sides of the chair, head hanging for a moment, then wrenching upward with difficulty. Face crumpled in defeat. Hurt. Finally, reaching forward, twitching, tortured, eyes dipping in and out of focus. Ending the log.

I stood and backed away, heart in a vise. Paranoid, scanning the workbench, tables, tools on the wall outlined like bodies at a crime scene, but in place at least. Perfect, thoughtless observers to the machine’s murder. No different from me.

Lost in my mind, trying to find anything wrong about yesterday, trying to salvage any second from today. I could swear I felt it–though I doubted my own judgment–creeping through my mind, present and controlling yet undefined. Scrubbed from every frame of memory. My imagination abstracted the more I tried to reason, understand how my routine had been disrupted, how the video could exist.

Didn’t know if it was worse to think I’d lapsed on my own or been a victim of something impossible.

I left.

I left, angry, unresolved, winding through the basement, white lights switching on slowly, obediently, startled by my movement in the dark. Upstairs then, through a door, into the warehouse.

The robots on the line had retreated into themselves for the night, metal arms wrapped in smooth embrace around polished, plated torsos. Every graphite-colored appendage fitting together in stoic solidarity, waiting patiently for morning, for work. Charging pods displaying numbered lives.

Walking past the serpentine conveyor belt, I became distracted by scrape marks on the floor. Black veins from where the old machines had been dragged away and lined up against the wall. They were still there, dead and cold and obsolete.

I wondered what it had been like, coming to final screeching halts with fingers freezing stiffening becoming claws in a mess of flaking fading yellow paint limbs locked forward forever begging to be useful again. To be of service.

My footsteps thundered through the gray expanse as I crossed the room and exited the factory.

Cold winter sun dragging itself across the sky, crows swaying like black silk then scattering into skeleton trees. Fields sharpened with frost and farmhouses collapsing into the horizon. Abandoned grid of warehouses like ancient metal jaws gaping to swallow the emptiness.

Car parked as usual, huddled lonely in the corner of the lot, ice climbing the sides and spiraling across the windshield. I unlocked it, switched on the defroster, then reached into the backseat to retrieve my scraper.

Slamming the door, I noticed the trunk was ajar and halfheartedly pushed down on it from the side. Met resistance. Tried again, harder, without success, then again, in exasperation from the day, hearing this time a crunch immediately sucked into the silence of the land.

Rounding the edge of the vehicle, I saw four human fingers stinging red, blackening, snapped just below their middle joints. Corpse of a woman inside, with clouded eyes staring out, following the line of her arm, which she must have used in defense. When I pushed the arm back inside the car, her upper body untwisted and flattened to the floor and I saw it.

Her neck was crushed. Falling separate to her head in a pile of ragged, red rope. Side of her head caving into frozen blackness and blood, spilled and sticking the skin to the carpet with cold.

Serene, staring at her. Strange, wondering about the force at which her neck must have been wrenched. The force at which she’d been bashed against something, or with something. Whether that had come first, or if someone instead held her neck between their hands–her life between their hands–and kept squeezing long after her joints burst and her blood spewed from frayed vessels and her breath staggered and died and her eyes became stones.

I didn’t know if I’d killed her, but I knew I’d missed something extraordinary.