I was born aboard the UCC Victory, a massive shining symbol of interstellar freedom. She was a colony ship of formidable size and power from the United Citizens Corporation, and was the type of thing that nobody would ever dare to attack from the outside. This, and the way that people say ‘was’ when talking about Victory, meant that all of her strife emanated from within. There was always a little infighting within the colony. Tiny wars with tiny victories that amounted to little more than gang violence. Where things really went sour was the day she passed her expected landing date with no sign of a destination in sight.
It started off as protests demanding an explanation, but as time went by, and the officers remained silent and evasive, it became increasingly clear to the colonists that Victory was well and truly lost. Not just lost, but lost in dead space without a viable planet to settle on. The citizens of the colony assumed that they were going to start running out of food and fuel, and would be left drifting through empty nothingness until eventually, maybe, another ship picked up the survivors.
It was the type of scenario in which you couldn’t just sit idle and pray. Not if you wanted to be a survivor, anyway. That meant taking whatever resources you could get your hands on and fighting over whatever you couldn’t.
The most unfortunate part of Victory’s saga is that it all stemmed from a simple translation error somewhere back in marketing. Victory was exactly on course. The food stores had been calculated correctly. The fuel had been calculated correctly. In fact, the only thing off course about the whole mission was the public statement to the colonists about how long it would take. When this news was discovered, and the officers tried to explain it, no one believed them. It was assumed that they were lying to calm the colonists and quell the rising storm.
Victory’s internal politics degenerated rapidly after that, eventually resulting in a full on war that lasted years. What was once a stunning jewel of advancement in the crown of civilization slowly trasnformed into a pitted rusted dent of decay that the UCC desperately tried to slide out of sight.
When I was born, Victory was in the absolute depths of its most violent campaigns. The few officials that remained were the ones corrupt enough to fuel their political careers on lies and bribes alone, and the citizens had fractured into dozens of nameless tribes that fought for individual control of the countless rooms and hallways; securing a whole deck would have been like conquering a country.
For the most part my actual birth was entirely uneventful. I was just another healthy baby girl ready to grow up and do her part to ensure that Victory reached her destination. The unlucky part for me was that on the same day another girl was born. The attending doctor, stuck between birthing two children at once, was unskilled and overly rushed, and during the births he injured the eyes of the other girl.
I imagine it was hard to explain to her parents that without a corneal transplant she would be blind for life.
With the state of Victory being what it was, and the fact of that girl’s family being fairly wealthy, it meant they simply needed to throw some money around to acquire a donor. As such, they easily found a nurse that was willing to help them out.
Now, when I say nurse, I don’t mean a trained medical professional, but merely someone who dedicated the majority of their time to helping the few rare doctors aboard the ship keep their schedules from completely falling apart. They performed only the most meaningless tasks where no one was at risk and no one else was available.
Unfortunately for me, this gave them clearance into secured areas, and when this nurse became tasked with finding a donor he lacked the education that would have told him that just about anyone could donate corneas. Without this understanding he felt that he needed to aquire a directly compatible candidate. I don’t imagine he searched very hard, given that I was also a girl, I was the same age, and I was a poorly protected infant in a hospital ward. He also needed to transfer my corneas to the surgeon that would perform the operation, but lacked any knowledge of how to do so.
His solution, therefore, was to simply cut my eyes out.
It was the type of thing that, unlike the other blind girl, leads to a far more permanent sort of blindness.
My parents, being resilient problem solvers that had survived a protracted war, immediately sought justice. Not against the parents of the other girl, but against the nurse. He was quickly put to death for the crime of irreparable theft. To explain this to an outsider, citizens of the corporation are property of the corporation, and since my eyes could not be replaced, the punishment was severe.
Growing up blind in a combat zone isn’t exactly easy, but it’s not as hard as it sounds. No more so than just being blind in general, I suppose. What made it difficult for me were the people I grew up with. My parents knew that I would be an easy mark for my entire life, so they spent the first five years of my life saving every spare credit they could earn to buy me an android bodyguard.
When they gave him to me as a birthday gift I didn’t really understand the purpose of a bodyguard. I thought they called him a buddy guard, so that’s what I called him. Ever since then he has been my Buddy.
Buddy and I went everywhere together. I held his hand and he followed my directions. When I said “take me to school” he would walk me to school and stand by me in class. When I wanted to go to the rec park he would walk me to the rec park, lead me to the slides and the swings, and generally act as the parent I needed while my parents were busy trying to feed us.
The trouble with Buddy was that he wasn’t exactly a top shelf model. He moved slow, processed slow, and was very heavy. He wasn’t even that strong, because of his weight. He probably would have been excellent mobile cover in a firefight, but that sort of thing was generally kept away from the places where children gathered.
Buddy’s presence made me a very special child. In addition to appearing as though I came from a privileged family, I had an actual nanny. Most children were left in the care of their barely older siblings, as the much older siblings were soon taught how to carry a rifle and throw a grenade. The ones that couldn’t were sent to scout enemy settlements and steal supplies from contested warehouses. There was rarely any elderly around to watch the children, because few people lived that long, so it was mostly the maimed and crippled—detritus from the war—that remained to watch over us.
Buddy, being slow, and me, being blind, were completely exposed to the cruelties of the other children. They made games out of pushing me down and running from Buddy. While he chased one of them, the others would pull my hair or tie me in the swings until he returned.
Sometimes the caretakers would come to assist me, if the situation degraded sufficiently, but that was rare. My parents were of course upset, but what could they do beyond console me? They had our livelihood to worry about, and my life wasn’t exactly at risk.
This left in me a strange sort of longing. I wanted to play at the rec park. I wanted to ride the slides and swing on the swings. I wanted to walk to school and home again without being harassed every single day. As time went by, and the situation failed to improve, I remained at home more and more, which really only served to aggravate the matter.
Between my ninth and tenth birthdays I often came home with bruises, or a bloody nose.
It was some time after my tenth birthday when the problem reached its peak. I was returning home from school, on edge as always, when I heard the sound I hated the most.
“There she is,” they said.
I had, by this point, developed an exceptional sense of hearing, and not just because of my blindness. When you spend your entire developing life constantly worried about being attacked, you get pretty good at sensing a bad situation before it occurs.
It sounded like at least six of them. I knew what was coming. I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. In a desperate bid to head off the situation I ordered Buddy to attack.
Buddy refused. He said that he could not. He could, at best, wait for them to get violent.
I pleaded with him, trying to explain that they were going to get violent. That he had to do something before that happened.
To my amazement, he acknowledged my concerns. He said he knew that, but until it happened, he couldn’t do anything.
Buddy was, as usual, easy to distract. They started with slapping and shoving me, taking turns while Buddy chased, but it soon escalated. I remember well the feeling of being punched fully in the face by one of the oldest children. A boy I had known for some time with a penchant for violence and abuse that would serve him well in the coming years.
The rest of the group soon joined in, which quickly left me in a heap on the ground while Buddy stood over me. As he would no longer chase them, they resorted to swinging at me with pieces of debris, or throwing things from a distance. Buddy rushed to carry me home while they continued their assault, and my day ended with twenty-nine stitches, and both a broken nose and leg.
I was furious at Buddy for refusing to help me before I got hurt. I wanted to dismantle him and use him as a coffee table, and so when we were alone again I ordered him to stand in the kitchen where I turned him off and left him.
My father, upon finding Buddy, explained to me the rules for robots. How they weren’t allowed to cause harm to humans, unless they were defending themselves. How they couldn’t ever use lethal force, even in defence. He said he was going to talk to the parents of the other children, but I knew his efforts would do nothing. At the end of our conversation, I had chosen to approach the situation differently. If Buddy couldn’t help me because of the way he was built, then I was going to rebuild him.
This task was, to say the least, far more challenging than I anticipated. The difficult in simply acquiring the tools I needed to open his case nearly ended my efforts before they began, never mind actually doing it. I constantly needed him to describe his components to me, without giving away what I was trying to do. If he found out he would have been required to stop me.
I honestly don’t really remember many specific events between my tenth and twelfth birthday. I stopped going to school and focused entirely on rebuilding Buddy into a much more compliant, and capable, form. I taught myself how to weld and how to solder. I was a blind girl playing with fire, and nearly burned down our apartment several times in the process.
Buddy, for his part, simply went along with it. When I built him a lighter frame he happily helped me test the welds, which were initially very weak. When I rewired his circuits he gleefully allowed me to destroy his motor functions, visual processing, and just about everything else before I finally figured out how to make it work better than the original configuration. In fact, he was surprisingly encouraging, and I sometimes wondered if he actually knew what I was doing.
My parents, for their part, simply let me do my thing. My mother was happy to see me happy, I think, and my father was continually impressed by my persistence and progress.
In the end, bypassing Buddy’s fundamental circuits proved to be impossible for me. As his designers intended, I suppose, but I did discover a workaround. A root level loop in the circuit could grant a bypass on the grounds that newly presented information demonstrated a clear and present need. All I did was introduce a circuit that would accept my commands as fulfilling that need, thus perpetually bypassing the fundament protocols.
Now, when Buddy tells me he can’t do something, I simply say “do it anyway,” and he does.
As clearly as I remember being punched in the face by a boy several years older than me, I also remember the day I returned to the rec park. The walk there was quite peaceful, as years of absence meant that no one haunted my routes anymore. I arrived in the afternoon, while it was the most active.
“She came back! I can’t believe it! Go tell him,” they jeered, as I walked across the rubber decking.
I had just found my way to sit on an empty swing when I was pelted in the face by something thrown at me.
He laughed awfully, calling me an idiotic blind girl, and other insults. He mentioned several times how stupid I was for coming back, and all the things he was going to do to me before I left. His voice had changed significantly, meaning he was probably a fair bit bigger now, and he had certainly gotten imaginative, but I was not deterred. I had come here with a purpose.
I told Buddy to punch him in the face.
The kids all laughed giddily when Buddy said what Buddy always said. That he couldn’t.
For a brief moment I reconsidered my actions. What I was about to do could get me killed.
It was the sound of that boy snickering and moving forward, and Buddy shifting to intercept, that made up my mind.
“Do it anyway.”
I cannot describe what revenge sounds like, or the coughing gargle that follows it, but I can tell you that it feels incredible. It gave me a total rush that faded fast, and I never wanted to let go of it. I suddenly understood the cruelty that was so relentlessly directed towards me. The addictive joy you could feel by having power over someone.
“Hit him again!”
“I can’t do that, Belle.”
“Do it anyway!”
I think the boy fell unconscious at that point, I don’t really know. All I heard was children screaming and running.
In the days that followed, Buddy and I fell under heavy scrutiny. The fighting on Victory had reached a lull, which gave just enough space for the bloated bureaucracies of old to squeeze their fetid carcasses into place once more. We were soon the subjects of a corporate investigation which likely would have resulted in Buddy being decommissioned, and me, or my parents, being sentenced appropriately.
The result, however, was much different.
Since there were no impartial witnesses to the events that transpired, the investigation focused heavily on Buddy. He was clearly modified, but the colony no longer had an expert in such matters. When they interrogated me on the changes I had made, I said I had altered his frame to be quicker and lighter. When they asked about the modified circuits, I said they had been adjusted to enhance his language processing.
They didn’t believe me, not because they thought I was lying about the purpose for the changes, but because they didn’t believe I possessed the requisite skills. They assumed that someone else completed the adjustments, yet both my parents confirmed my story, at least as much of it as they knew.
This left Buddy as the only true witness in the whole affair. When they questioned him, he repeated my story about his frame modifications. When asked about his circuits, he said they were functioning optimally. When asked why he had attacked that boy, he said it was because he had no other option.
Based upon his replies, our interrogators assumed that his fundamental laws were intact. He was, as near as they could tell, perfectly fine. They could only conclude from that point that the blame fell entirely upon the crowd of children around me. It was an easy conclusion to reach, given our fairly well known history that no one ever addressed. It was a case of schoolyard bullying taken too far, they decided.
Buddy and I returned to school about a month later, and I would like to say that I never had a problem after that, but that would be a lie. I can however say that constant verbal abuse is not nearly as frightening as the constant threat of physical abuse.
It took some time, but I eventually managed to ease my way into the established social circles of my classmates, primarily with the help of one particular girl.
I don’t know if it was pity or a genuine interest in my personality, but she tried to befriend me almost immediately. I originally resisted, quite strongly in fact, because I was afraid that she was simply attempting to earn my trust in exchange for a future betrayal. She was absurdly persistent, however, doing everything she could to rob me of my independence through various acts of misguided kindness, like reading to me, opening doors for me, and describing things to me.
Making friends was a thing I had never been given the chance to do, and I soon caved to her advances.
As time went by, the lull in the fighting grew into a uneasy peace, and in that time our friendship grew as well. We eventually became inseparable from each other, and even though I had Buddy and her to defend me, it didn’t stop the insults and mockery I was forced to endure. In addition, they began to attack her, as well. I remember asking her, on a particularly bad day, why she was my friend. I couldn’t understand why she put up with it when, unlike me, she could end it at her leisure. We were alone at the time, and when I asked her, she didn’t respond right away.
I remember lifting my head and turning towards her, trying to sense her body position. It’s a bad habit I developed that requires leaning in very close to a person.
She must have been holding her breath when she kissed me, because all I felt was her lips landing.
“Because you’re beautiful, and because I’ve always wanted to do that.”
Her answer stunned me, but for a different reason than most people realize; I had never considered that I could be beautiful. I was not compassionate, or honest, or affectionate. I didn’t have a lovely voice, or really soft hair. She had all of these things, but I also didn’t understand what it meant for someone to be beautiful by traditional standards. What it meant to be attracted to a physical appearance. I think perhaps I still don’t.
Growing up, I never imagined that my first lover would be another girl. Since then, I have taken the time to explore my preferences, and while I do not regret the time we spent together, I can honestly say that I prefer the enthusiasm that a man brings to the bedroom. There was, however, something about her that I will never forget: her body was so incredibly soft.
There was also the matter of holding hands. I had, for years, been following Buddy around by the hand. If I had been taller, I would have used his shoulder, but I wasn’t, so hands were what I grew accustomed to. When I held her hand, it was so much softer than Buddy’s, and it meant more to me than most others. She became not just my lover and friend, but my eyes, as well.
Initially, both our families were quite happy for us. When we eventually told them, that is. There was something alluring about keeping it a secret that kept us from sharing the news for at least several months. Something changed, however, the first time I went to meet her parents. I expected a generally cordial evening with the usual level of awkwardness that comes with meeting a group of people familiar with each other, but unfamiliar with you.
What I got, from the moment I said hello, was a very stiff exchange. Her parents sounded extremely guarded in their responses to me, and never asked me anything more complicated than my favourite food. At first this did not surprise me. You see, it’s not uncommon for people to assume because of my blindness that I’m also an idiot. It’s so common, in fact, that I’ve actually started to overlook it as a fault. However, I grew to feel that their position of distance came from another source.
I asked her about it afterwards, and she said that she never told them I was blind. She didn’t think it was important, a response so subtle and yet so profound that the weight of it didn’t hit me until months later.
A few days afterwards, I insisted that she come and meet my parents, as they were certain to be far more accommodating. I was wrong. They were exactly the same as her parents. Quiet, guarded, and as near as I could tell, nervous.
I confronted my parents about it once she was gone. They told me they didn’t think I should be with her anymore. When I pressed the matter, they didn’t provide any clearer responses. Just the usual sort of evasive authority figure answers that essentially amount to ‘because’. We of course continued to see each other, as neither of us could conceive of a reason not to.
Early on in our friendship, we discovered that the two of us were born on the same day. This was not an entirely impossible scenario, given the size of the colony. We were actually taught as part of the school curriculum that at least two children must be born every day within the colony, or else our population would not be sustainable. The concept of ‘birthday twins’ was popular among children.
As our seventeenth birthday rolled around, and it came time to exchange gifts, I was anxious about my gift to her, as I chose a piece of Buddy’s original frame. It was a copy of a component I also kept on me at all times. It was, and still is, very important to me, given how much his parts have changed, and I wanted to express how important she had become to me. I also couldn’t really afford much else, although I did pick out some assorted candies that she liked.
She said she loved it—after I explained it, anyway—and then commented that the best gifts needed explaining. Then she handed me a small weighty box with a rough texture. When I tried to open it, she kindly pointed out that it was wrapped in gift paper, a custom that had never been employed against me, for its obvious redundancy. I enjoyed attacking the wrapper far more than I thought I would.
With the wrapping off, I could feel a slick cool case of polished metal. It opened smoothly and soundlessly. From within, I retrieved two weighty spheres, like large ball bearings, and rolled them around in my hands trying to figure out what they were.
“They’re glass eyes,” she explained. Adding that if I had glass eyes in my empty sockets, maybe people wouldn’t realize that I was blind, potentially avoiding a lot of negative social situations.
I was very taken by her gift. My parents and I discussed prosthetic eyes a few times, but we quickly discovered that finding a specialist capable of acquiring them was way outside our price range. I immediately asked her how she was able to find a physician necessary to commission them.
She said she had been seeing an eye doctor since she was born. She added that she needed a corneal transplant very soon after birth, and that the doctor expected regular check ins.
It suddenly occurred to me that she had never asked why I was blind. Just like how she never informed her parents before our first meeting, and how she had wrapped up her gift to me. It simply wasn’t important to her. Now, however, it was instantaneously important to me, and the pieces connected quickly in my mind. Her parents reaction to me. My parents reaction to her. The fact that we shared a birthday and her corneal transplants. They all knew exactly who she was.
She was the girl that had my eyes.
I had always loathed the girl that crippled my life. Her and her family. All I ever wanted was to meet her, so that I could have a reason to hate her. I wanted her to be stupid and ugly, or spiteful and mean. But this girl, she was none of the qualities I wanted. She was the exact person I didn’t want her to be, and she had come to mean more to me than most people.
I could feel the glass growing slippery from the sweat of my palms.
She couldn’t have known what was going through my mind. Unlike my parents, I imagine hers never told her the truth, and she had no reason to ask.
“I love them,” I said, after a very long pause. A pause long enough to give the very clear impression that I didn’t, and it took some time to convince her that I was simply too overwhelmed to express myself.
In the months that followed, I came to realize that I liked the idea of her having my eyes. I never did tell her why I was blind, but to know that the person who cost me so much was putting my assets to good use was somewhat comforting. As a tiny joke to myself, I would say things like ‘you be my eyes’, while we walked hand-in-hand.
Looking back, those two short years where the happiest of my life. As is the nature of my history, though, I cannot travel far through my timeline without needing to mention a horribly unlucky event.
Our last few days together saw a massive surge in territorial conflict aboard Victory. A small envoy of grey space explorers—ships from the neutral territories—found Victory. This gave rise to internal conflicts, as families of all kinds struggled to buy passage off the colony.
We had less than three hours of warning that her parents, and her, were going to be leaving. They spent their entire fortune on buying seats for three people. Both of us knew she would be better off somewhere else, and so we spent our last hours together in a tight embrace, almost entirely in silence, and then she left.
That, however, is not the tragedy that haunts my history. If our story ended there, I would have recovered my hope and lived happily in the after years.
As the ships from the envoy left the docks, Victory unleashed a salvo of missiles upon them. One of the ships immediately perished, and one sustained enough damage to jettison its escape pods. Upon hearing the news, I immediately attempted to uncover which ship was destroyed, and if she had escaped. I questioned every survivor I could find that had been rescued from the pods, but I met with little success. After all, I couldn’t even describe what she looked like.
It was nearly a year later that the corporation announced it would no longer be investigating the incident. There had been arrests and interrogations, but they said they didn’t have enough information to take it to a trial.
Everyone knew the names of the men the day they were released, and a significant number of people came out to protest. Buddy and I went down to see them, not for me, but because I wanted him to see them. I wanted him to know who they were.
As it turns out, grey spacers like to talk. It wasn’t long before more of their kind appeared, desperate to replenish their crews with fresh minds and bodies. So desperate that they would risk visiting a place that attempted to kill them. Thousands of people from Victory eagerly joined the crews, and I was among them.
My parents chose to stay aboard Victory, hoping to see her reach her destination. We said our goodbyes over several evenings, and then I left.
The captain that took me said he would need proof of ability, as I had offered my services as an engineer and Buddy’s abilities as a soldier. This suited me fine, as there was one thing left that I wanted to do aboard Victory, and that task would fulfill both our needs.
By this point, I had mastered the art of re-engineering Buddy to serve alternate purposes. In exchange for the social programs that aided in our daily life, I gave him a silent stride and the power to quietly bypass alarms. At the cost of his ability to process music, I gave him debilitating martial arts.
I choose to believe that my eyes are still out there. That one day I will meet her again. Even still, for my own peace of mind and for the people that were lost, I needed to do this one task.
I told Buddy to find the men responsible for attacking the grey space ship and to bring me their eyes.
He said he couldn’t do that.
But he did it anyway.
