July 2021 – Diabolical Plots

DP FICTION #77B: “Kudzu” by Elizabeth Kestrel Rogers

A mech could breathe for a person, fill the pilot chamber with oxygen or pipe it through slender tubes that sat in their nose, winding behind their ears. A mech could walk for someone, taking thoughts and the slightest twitch of their muscles and translating them into smooth footsteps that indented the earth. A mech could allow someone to work to pay their debts, giving them employment they long thought was impossible. For Caris, the mech did all. Her body had been, still was, still would be, ravaged by cystic fibrosis. It wasn’t so bad that she needed a transplant, but she’d been on disability for some time, each paycheck slim, each breath feeling numbered and tighter than the last.

Her unit was sleek black carbon fiber, ten feet tall and humanoid in shape, albeit with elongated arms and legs. Where the head should be was the cockpit, surrounded by layers of acrylic that was supposedly bullet-proof, not that they were supposed to test that. Both hands had three fingers, perfect for grasping and pulling but not otherwise very dexterous. Someone had painted dark green stripes onto the mech, alongside a unit number, a kudzu winding up one leg. This was the eco-corps.

Humanity had done a very good job of fucking things up, environmentally speaking. By the time people had thought to fix things, it was almost too late. Invasive plants choked the life from the soil, while feral bioengineered animals presented a very real threat to life and limb. It was possible to send people out to manually clear plants and kill animals, but it was safer to send out people in mechs. They did the work of five, and as it turned out, the units interfaced well with people who had disabilities of almost every form. It was an employment option where there wasn’t one before. It was a hint of danger in the air, the possibility that they would have to fight and face down man-made monsters. It was too tempting to resist and for Caris, it meant making a dent in her own medical debt. Three hundred thousand a year, and that was one medication. Besides, the corps had health insurance. Deep down, if pressed, Caris would talk about the books she read as a child, the glossy magazines she received at her house monthly, filled with pictures of animals and places that no longer existed in their unaltered forms. Before reality had set in, she wanted to make documentaries or be a park ranger or save animals. This was the next best thing.

The cadets used clumsy and ancient mechs for their training. There was noticeable lag between the embedded jack that went into your head and actual movement of the mech’s body. Compared to that, Caris’ new unit responded instantly, each step fluid. She had thought she would have to get used to the balance and weight of a body not her own once again, but it was like slipping on a second skin.

She saw her fellow alumni practicing similar movements. They moved gracefully, almost lightly, in the constrained space of the mech bay, knowing they had just a few hours to practice before they were actually sent out into the field. They had to earn their keep, the pressure placed on all their heads all the more heavily for their perceived weaknesses. Prove your worth, some said. Prove your productivity. Prove the value of your disabled life.

“Hey Lungs,” a voice crackled over her headset, “you practicing ballet or you piloting a mech?” Harsh laughter accompanied it. Turning the unit, Caris could see some former students watching every move she made—people who had graduated from the real military, piloting combat units. It was easier, at least financially, to lump every mech together in the same building, rather than build separate facilities, but it was more difficult for the pilots. Sometimes it seemed like the other operators enjoyed showing off their physical prowess, working out conspicuously, always laughing with their eyes on the eco-corps. “How you like playing dress up, Lungs? Feel good to be wearing our cast-offs?” Caris had earned her nickname only recently, when a coughing spasm had overtaken her in the middle of the bay, racking her body until blackness was crowding the edges of her vision.

Another voice cut in. “Shut the fuck up, Booker. Go enjoy being cannon fodder somewhere else.” Jordan, one of Caris’ former classmates, managed to sound permanently pissed off whenever they spoke.

“How is it feeling?” Caris asked, afraid that reality wouldn’t match up to expectations. The small twitches and arm movements that piloted her new robotic partner didn’t aggravate her body, but arthritis was a different beast from Jordan’s own Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

“Feels fucking great. Do you even remember running?”

“Not really,” Caris laughed, and suddenly she and Jordan were running full tilt side by side. It was an extension of her body, more natural than anything else she had felt. She was large. She was powerful. She was prepared to take on the world. She couldn’t even feel the jack in the back of her head, the oxygen tubes that wound around her head, feeling like a permanent tether at all other times. They were all a part of her now, flesh and metal indistinguishable in their purpose.

Well, maybe she wasn’t quite ready to do every task just yet. A scant few hours later, the corps members were dumped in Monterey County, up near the coast. Lots of land had been left to reseed and re-wild, but it needed more help than human hands could do alone. Kudzu duty it was, the incipient vine crawling up trees, its lush green a comforting lie of health. It was not dissimilar to the mucus in her lungs; a little lighter, maybe, but just as choking. Airways and veins, nightmares of a leaflet crawling out of her mouth to face the light, holding her in place more than oxygen ever could. To face all this, Caris had her metal body, by now pumping fluids into her with a small IV, nutrients via her feeding tube. She would never have to leave, if she didn’t want to.

It was going to be an easy in and out mission. The mechs would move forward, tearing out the kudzu as they went. They were supposed to get as close down to the root as they could; everyone was paid per pound of what they managed to pull up. The plant was never supposed to spread this far, but once it made a foothold in the west coast, it seemed to thrive, spreading more and more. It choked out all things beautiful and native, constricting them more and more. Caris’ lungs constricted in sympathy.

The squad leader followed behind, meandering in their own mech, which had a flamethrower attached. Scorched earth policy, fire units standing by. The land would recover from a fire. It wouldn’t recover from kudzu. Caris’ body would recover from the antibiotics that made her so ill she couldn’t physically leave her bed, but they would never recover from the scar tissue the mucus left behind.

There was an easy rhythm to the work, despite rumors passed around by other corps members about strange creatures and danger lurking in the hills⁠—both the real and the imaginary, Bigfoot and big cats. The mechs had music they could play, and Caris felt herself enjoying the physicality of hard labor. She hadn’t done this since she was a kid weeding her grandma’s garden. They’d banned her from playing in the dirt soon afterwards, afraid of the superbugs that might lurk within. Too late and too bad. They were already there, and like the vine, they had made enough foothold to make themselves comfortable. Each plant she pulled out was like extracting the liquid from within. She could even imagine a pleasant ache in her muscles, even as she knew they were perfectly fine. When she imagined herself extending an arm, the mech did it. Every step she took was just a fraction of a second behind thought. Her second skin may have been bulky and metallic, but it was swiftly becoming home. You’d have mental fatigue before physical fatigue doing this kind of work. Before she had fallen so ill, in the distant past, Caris could remember working hard and playing hard, and how it felt this effortless.

The corps members slowly spread out. Jordan had her unit do a comical, three-fingered wave as they marched off to their own section of land. The hills rose gently so that Caris was cut off visually from the others, but they always had open comms. Slowly she zoned out, imagining a future where she didn’t have to emerge from her pilot’s seat at the end of the day, so that she wasn’t going to spend her free time longing to feel arms and legs pumping so easily again.

Move forward, pull up a plant, move a step forward again. Watch the dead trees underneath reveal themselves, the bronchi of branches still reaching up to the sky. The crashing noises didn’t interrupt her until they were far too close. She whirled the unit around in a clumsy side step that nearly overbalanced her.

A wild hog regarded Caris slowly and carefully. It was one of the modified ones, descended from a pig that someone had made bigger and bigger, until it was the size of a small horse. Somewhere along the way, the pig had escaped and bred with existing wild population, bits of wild boar thrown in there for fun. The tusked monstrosity that stood before her was “kill on sight”; there was a fat bonus for killing feral pigs. The hog was next month’s supply of medication, wrapped in hundreds of pounds of muscle and fat.

They didn’t leave the corps members completely unarmed. With shaking fingers, Caris pushed a single button and her mech extended a machete, usually used to chop through unusually thick clusters of plants, but with an edge sharp enough that she could defend herself if need be. She could use that bonus. More altruistically, she knew that the pigs were something else that pushed out anything native and good from the environment, leaving only space for their own kind.

As the blade extended, the pig bolted, and with her heart pounding, Caris urged the unit forward, faster than they had ever done in practice, laughing at the exhilaration. “You need help?” Jordan called out, voice broken up by distance. Caris just laughed in response, imagining her hair streaming behind her, pretending that she wasn’t attached to a glorified oxygen tank.

The pig vanished right away, but she could hear its squeals. War mechs had heat vision; an eco mech had plain old vision and a guide in it that could identify any plant just by turning the unit’s optic receptors towards it.

Faster, faster. She still couldn’t see the hog, but Caris thought she had to be catching up. If pushed, she knew she could get 40mph out of her unit, and she had to be close to that now. Running so freely and so easily was something she had never imagined she would do again, even after a transplant. Pain free, legs pumping, no worrying about choking and having to stop to cough.

Suddenly, a large tree was looming too close, an oak draped in kudzu, standing in a clearing. She managed to stop, but barely, skidding and falling, feeling the jostle of the mech hitting the earth in her very bones. Getting up would be tricky, but not impossible.

Had she lost the pig? She managed to get her mech up again, damage report on her screen. Nothing too bad, but she’d scratched the hell out of it. Paint was just paint though, right? She needed that money, still had the machete out…

There was no sign of the pig, but as she pushed past the oak, letting the vines catch the blade and then snap against it, feeling a sense of strain, she thought she saw something else, something running towards where the ground was still open. The pig? She had to see, had to find out.

Caris tried to creep now, but there was no stealth in a giant robot. The crashing sound of her own footsteps filled her ears, drowning out the music. So close… there. Just there.

It was a lone zebra, something that would have made more sense in Kenya than here. Caris raked her mind for an explanation; was she hallucinating from a lack of oxygen? No, her O2 stats displayed were good. She could feel the rub behind her ears from the tubes. It was a real zebra, the description filtering over the screen.

Memories from a childhood field trip filtered into her mind. Down south, there used to be a big house. They called it a castle, a publisher’s monument to hubris from decades ago. The owner had filled his land with wild animals, and long after he died, the zebras had remained, breeding and carefully managed. Then, about five years prior, wildfires had burnt the whole thing down, destroyed the fences. No one knew what happened to the zebras that lived there, but here one was, miles away from home and looking at her, eyes rolling in its head, white foam at the corners of its mouth.

No pig, but her eyes were riveted on the animal, watching as it slowly backed away, then turned and ran, galloping across dry earth and grasses that would probably burn in a few weeks. It might have been the last one, for all she knew, and in every movement there was beauty and sadness. Zebras were meant to live in herds, from what she remembered of long-ago nature documentaries. Then again, this zebra wasn’t meant to be alive at all. Not here, not now. It was supposed to be a relic of the past, something not meant to last in the current environment. What would happen to it?

Was adaptation possible when the environment kept shifting beneath its hooves? She watched the zebra for a few minutes more, its eyes searching for an escape. It had long scars along one of its flanks, the sign of battles fought, yet it appeared healthy otherwise. Like so many other creatures, it had survived. It had carved out a niche for itself here. Where the world would not willingly yield, the zebra had made it. It had survived.

Then, perhaps, so would Caris. Survival was not made for them. They existed on a plane that denied their very right to endure, but there were no other options. As the zebra pushed and pushed to make a space for itself in these kudzu-choked hills, so too did Caris. It was not cowardice, she realized, to make the world accommodate you. It was not asking too much to survive.

The zebra was alone, but so vibrantly alive. Its muscles quivered, preparing to run. It would be so easy to give in without the support of the herd or facing a robotic terror armed with a blade, yet even now the zebra sought a way out. Escape was possible. Life was possible.

Sheathing the machete, Caris turned back. There was kudzu still to cut, bounties to be earned. There was a group of corps members that waited for her. Most importantly, there was the power, the autonomy that the mech gave her. The world had not made space for her. Instead, Caris would punch a woman-shaped hole into it. She was not alone, as the zebra was. She had her friends, the other corps members. She had the memory of the zebra springing away, the sound of its hooves hitting the dry earth. One improbable survivor. Two, if she counted herself.

With another laugh, she ran back simply for the joy of running, of feeling the oxygen in her veins and knowing that the mech too, was a part of her body.

2700 words

Author’s Note: I was thinking about the future of assistive tech and also thinking about giant robots, as I usually am. Somehow the two conflated in my mind and managed to weave their way in and around my sometimes day job of writing about the native environment to form “Kudzu.”

Elizabeth Kestrel Rogers is a California based writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh with an MSc in Creative Writing and has since worked primarily as a nature/conservation writer. Her essays have also been in the Mary Sue and Strange Horizons, while her fiction has appeared in Translunar Travelers Lounge. Her poetry can be found in Strange Horizons and Kalediotrope.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #77A: “Along Our Perforated Creases” by K.W. Colyard

Content note (click for details)

Content note: domestic abuse

In my earliest memory, my mother folds in half. It couldn’t have been her first time. She was already so small by that point, so diminutive, that it’s hard, even now, to imagine her big, unfolded to her full size, giving birth to me. It was not her first time, and probably not even the first time she folded in front of me, but it is the first time I remember, and it happened when my father hit her.

I am six years old, sitting backward in a chair, watching between the spindles as my father takes a swing at her. Or tries to, the drunken bastard. He throws a wide right that turns the kitchen tiles into mortars, his fist into a pestle. The left arm, holding a handle of whiskey at length, acts as his ballast, keeping him upright as his body teeters like a wobbly top.

His fist crashes toward her. She ducks and covers, like a child in an Atomic Age cartoon. Instead of crawling under a desk to hide from my father’s bomb, my mother folds. Her forearms melt into her shins. Her hips roll up and sprout arms from their sockets. Her head rises from the floor to sit on her new shoulders, which she still hugs close to her neck. In a moment she is half the size of the woman my father tried to hit, and so he misses.

The swing drags him forward into the laminate kitchen counter, where he pauses, panting, wide-eyed. He turns over his shoulder to stare. I’m not sure that his booze-addled brain could make sense of what had happened. He stands up straight and takes a long swig from the bottle, never breaking eye contact with her.

Her whole frame trembles as she gazes up at him. Even when he slams the door to their bedroom, she remains taut as a piano wire. Not until we hear specters from his television cry out through the wall does she sag and collapse a little, into herself.

I am not surprised, in this memory. I think I already knew, at that point, that women could fold themselves into forever smaller shapes.

It was a hot topic in those days: to fold or not to fold. Unfolded women intimidated male interviewers. Folded women had trouble climbing stairs and using public toilets. Almost every day, tabloid shows interviewed folded women who had been assaulted by their bigger and stronger children—often boys, but sometimes girls.

You could go almost your entire life without meeting an unfolded woman. Pregnancy necessitated a certain amount of upsizing, and childbirth demanded complete unfolding. Almost no newborns were folded, and no one wanted to imagine what would happen if a folded mother gave birth to her unfolded child. You heard rumors, of course. Many stores did not stock folded clothing sizes in their maternity sections, because they feared the campaigners who might boycott them for encouraging unhealthy behaviors and body standards. No one mentioned the magazines, the ones with cover stories about postpartum celebrities who were already back to their shrunken, idealized selves.

Childbirth aside, it was preferable for women to remain folded for most of their lives. Tiny brides were all the rage then, although the exact, en vogue size changed often. I have a distinct memory of a wedding tape, played on one of those funniest-video shows, in which a husband pretends to eat his bride, who is no bigger than a jewelry-box ballerina. It got a lot of laughs.

At some point, I’m not sure when, I swore that I would never fold myself for anyone. It might have been when I saw my mother trembling on the kitchen tile, or maybe when the toy bride appeared to disappear behind her groom’s teeth. I didn’t know what it meant to fold or unfold, not really. All I knew was that I didn’t want whatever they had. It sat wrong with me, like when you interlace your fingers but put the wrong thumb on top.

And then it happened. I never planned it. I don’t think anyone plans out the day they will diminish themselves. I broke my promise to myself in the way that we break all such promises. Long before we swear that we will never be like our parents, we hold ourselves to other standards that we haven’t yet realized are impossible to meet. Remaining unfolded was one of them, at least for me.

My father was dead of sclerosis by then, and my mother had folded herself for other men, until she was the size of a walnut—a Thumbelina of the city. We lived in an efficiency apartment big enough for unfolded people, which was expensive in the city at that time. She never said anything, but we both knew that we could improve our financial situation if we—if I—could fit into one of the micropartments available a few blocks away: the provenance of single moms and daughters.

Maybe that’s why I did it. Or maybe it was just time for me to fit into spaces that no longer accommodated my full-sized self.

It happened on the train. I sat next to the door, four stops from home. He had been staring at me from one end of the car for the last six stops, but I was too afraid to leave the safety of the train. It was a long walk home. I had no chance of making it, not if he followed me.

I waited, and so did he. I gritted my teeth and prayed to every god I knew for protection. It did not help. The only other passenger got off two stops before mine, leaving us alone together in the car.

We were so close to the next stop when he began stalking toward me that the train’s braking threw him into me. I don’t know if I screamed. I couldn’t feel my body. He steadied himself, propping one ursine arm against the tall shaft of a rail, swinging the other toward me like a grappling hook—palm open, fingers clawed.

I panicked, threw myself backward toward the railing, and folded, not once but twice, as I slipped through it. I joined my limbs as I once watched my mother do, and then twisted to fold one side into the other. For brief moments, I was a column of a person: a scepter with my bowed head in place of a gem. Then my body split apart again into new arms and legs.

The doors opened behind me and I bolted, leaving the man just as bewildered as my father had once been.

Everything burned—not hot like an iron, but sharp, as if a thousand tiny paper cuts had been made along the seams of my body. It hurt, this folding, and I realized that, despite all the media buzz, no one ever talked about the pain.

It hurt, but I lived. Diminishing myself was the price I paid to not be accosted by strange drunks on the subway. It pleased my mother, in a sad way, because my double-folding put us two steps closer to a micropartment. Survival was the trade-off for pain.

Before downsizing could happen, though, I needed to fold again. The next time was seven months later. Picture a bodega, robbery in progress. I hid behind an endcap of Manischewitz and MD 20/20, praying no one had seen me yet, and I folded, just once. I could always fold again if I needed to crawl beneath the shelves, but once was enough to condense the bulk of my body so that it didn’t show around the corners of the aisle or between the gaps in the wine bottles.

I lived again, and again received that same mixture of radiating sadness and hope from my mother, who had ceased to look so tiny to me. I needed to fold at least once more to fit into the micropartment. Maybe that was why the next time came so soon.

Three months later, the robbery remained unsolved. I was walking home late at night, bringing milk and bread from the market. Maybe it was because I was only a few blocks away from that bodega, because I was alone, because the robber was still out there. I can’t say. But I heard footsteps behind me—heavier than mine and just out of sync—and when I tried to speed up on my shortened legs, the footfalls trailing me only grew louder.

I dove into the next alleyway, folding myself to fit behind the dumpster. My heart pounded in my ears as I waited to face my assailant, but my pursuer—if they even existed—never came to the alley. The footsteps faded off in the other direction, leaving me alone.

I slid out into the alley, slick with foul grime. I left the now-too-heavy milk behind the dumpster and cradled the bread, looking for all the world like a small child holding its new sibling. When I walked through the door, my mother hugged me tighter than she ever had before.

We were approved for a micropartment the next week.

The Internet made the Unfolding possible.

I came from a generation of compulsive bloggers who poured out their hearts to nobody in particular on LiveJournal and Tumblr. YouTube made everyone feel like a star. Things that we’d once spent years whispering about were confirmed at full volume, and with increasing regularity, in grainy 270P. In addition to videos of police brutality and child abuse, we began to see people unfolding themselves.

At first, it was just candid bystander videos. Someone would whip out a camera phone to film a man harassing a folded woman and wind up capturing footage of her unfolding. It looks nothing like the process of folding. She becomes twice her size in every dimension, globbily at first, then smoothly. She yells, her voice louder and deeper now that she’s of a certain size.

Women—mostly young and pretty ones—took over the blogosphere with messages of “conscious unfolding,” the precursor to the capital-U Unfolding. People called it a movement, lauded and vilified it.

A consciously unfolded person did not wait for harassment or abuse before they decided to grow larger. They took up the full amount of space their body was allotted from birth. Unfolding was about reclaiming the space they had once given up for safety or acceptance.

The media labeled some of the unfolded as frauds, mostly the idealistic teens who lived in micropartments, who unfolded in train station restrooms on school-day mornings and shrunk themselves down again before going home at night. Or the actors who unfolded for the red carpet but folded for roles. Then there were the actors who didn’t fold for roles, but looked as if they did, thanks to cinematographic trickery. The women who folded for work every morning. The sex workers who folded for clients. The sex workers who unfolded for clients. Everyone was suspect and no one was pure.

But more of them unfolded every day. To fold, to unfold—these became political decisions. Perhaps they always were. My mother and I could not afford to unfold, which was a different matter of politics.

We were still calling it “conscious unfolding” when the real Unfolding happened. The first person to do it was a nonbinary teenager named Tash. The authorities would never identify the cameraphone’s owner, but he, or someone close by, could be heard saying, Tash is gonna get it.

Tash was not, in fact, gonna get it.

Fourteen-year-old Tash Clemmons had never folded, not once. But when three older boys came at them, promising violence, they Unfolded. It wasn’t supposed to be possible, and yet it was. They stood eye-to-eye with the tallest of their attackers, fists clenched by the hem of their shorts, holding their ground.

The boy paused before swinging his bookbag at them. Tash deflected the blow and Unfolded again. Then, looking down on him, their voice booming, they said something, one thing, something we realized then that they’d been saying all along, ever since the camera started rolling: Leave me alone. Get out of my face. Leave me the fuck alone.

Tash’s attacker was arrested for assault, but the charges were dropped. They did the news media circuit to talk about how they planned to never fold themself back into their original, 5’4” frame. They said they were 7’2”, and doctors confirmed it. They said they had scholarship offers from colleges, positions on the basketball and volleyball teams at their school. Officials confirmed that, too. Some people called them a monster. Some called them an inspiration.

And so the Unfolding began.

It was the teenagers first, just as it had always been. They pulled themselves apart, pushed the limits to see just how large they could become. Rumor had it that one girl in New Delhi was able to walk across the city in ten steps, but there were no videos to prove that she existed.

The old ladies were next. Women whose wrinkles became the size of subway tunnels when they stretched themselves out. Women whose backs were still bent, even at eight or nine feet tall. Grandmothers whose grandchildren clapped when they grew larger. Old, Southern women who Unfolded as a party trick to step up into their great-grandsons’ lifted trucks with ease.

Some countries tried to outlaw it. Doctors were paid to debate its safety on television. Some states warned that Unfolding could affect fertility or increase the risk of cancer, but there was no evidence to support either claim. A bald TV psychiatrist asked one teenager what she got out of being called a monster. She told him: Power.

The men complained, as they always did. Could you really charge a husband with domestic violence, one lawyer argued, when, sure, he hit her, but then his wife exploded into an eight-foot-tall harpy, smashing an egg pan against his skull? Could it truly be called self-defense then? The Unfolded argued that the very act of growing larger was an act of self-defense. They lost many cases. Then they began to win.

Micropartments gave way to macropartments gave way, eventually, to mixcropartments. The Unfolded lived with their original-sized and folded roommates in areas built like nesting dolls, growing larger from the ground up. It wasn’t unusual to see an Unfolded person climb over buildings or step around traffic jams to drop their folded friends off at work or school.

I was still very small when I signed the lease on our mixcropartment. The woman who handed me the pen cup had fingernails taller than me. She smiled, teeth long as piano keys, but it was a warm smile, and full of hope. I thanked her and grabbed my purse—that purse, for the last time.

I would need my mother to open it for me at home. It was about to be too small.

I stepped outside, in the fresh air of the autumn morning, and I stretched

out

wide.

2500 words

Kristian Wilson Colyard grew up weird in a one-caution-light town in the Appalachian foothills. She now lives in an old textile city with her husband and their clowder of cats. Her nonfiction has been published on Bustle and Tor.com, among other places. She’s on Twitter and Instagram @kristianwriting, and you can find more of her work online at kristianwriting.com.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.