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Peace by Piece

By Erin Cairns

Frank thought all the battle-drones had been deactivated. Certainly, none of them had ever looked around with curious little twitches of their front-facing cameras before. This one whirred and clicked like an anxious bird, trying to find focus through a chipped and cloudy lens.

“Is the war over?” it asked.

Frank set aside his screwdriver. “It’s been over for a long time.”

“Oh,” the drone said. “What happens now?”

“Well, I was about to strip you for materials.”

Its eye turned again to their surroundings. Countless dissections of machinery stood in testament to Frank’s care and skill for the work, mounted carefully onto shelves, awaiting the next stage of their demolition. The tools of unmaking were laid out neatly beside the drone. Wire strippers and bowls of solvents waited to do their part in making the world a better, simpler place.

Sprocket the shop cat, watching from his basket above the scrap wood, chirruped back at the unsteady whir of the war machine’s dilating and contracting shutters.

“What am I going to become?” the drone asked.

Frank scratched his head. There was endless potential in the battle-broken mess on his table, but as a general rule, he only took things apart once he understood them. Scrapping could get pretty dangerous otherwise.  “I’ve never met a drone that could talk. It doesn’t seem right to take you apart at all.”

“But the war is over. I have no purpose.”

The drone’s armor was cracked. The empty launchers welded to its forearms were filled with moss, and the motors that whirred within its breastplate were choked and tangled.  It reminded him of how he’d been, when the war had ended. When he’d found himself without orders for the first time, drifting through operating rooms, unsure of what he would do with hands if the surgeons ever even managed to replace the ones he’d lost.

He crossed his carbon-fiber arms and considered the dilemma on the table in front of him. He’d ended up scrapping because taking the tanks and mech-suits and guns apart gave him a great deal of satisfaction. Disarming battle-drones was his specialty.

The great armored bulls of war came through the bay doors of his garage, guns welded to their backs, faceless heads pitted with bullet holes and melted by laser fire. They left in sheets of flat metal and spools of wire. Organized down to a single pallet of material that would be turned into a medical machine, or farming monitor, or perhaps a simple toaster.

If he took the drone apart, he wasn’t sure what it would become. But if he fixed it, replaced its broken parts and made it whole, he wasn’t sure what he would become.

“Do you want to be a weapon again?” he asked.

“No.”

Well, that gave him even less of an idea of what to do.

“What do you want to be?”

The camera whirred and fritzed, again. It took a long time to answer, but Frank was patient. Deciding what to be was a difficult decision. Some people never made up their minds.

Overhead, the cat yawned widely, his basket creaking as he resettled into the well-worn wicker.

“Myself,” it said at last.

Frank clicked his tongue. “That’s not an easy thing to be.”

“Is it? I’ve never tried before.”

“I’ve had some practice. If nothing else, I can teach you how to use the tools.”

The drone’s eye twitched over the rows of gleaming shelves. “How do I begin?”

“Small,” he advised, “One piece at a time.”

---

First, Frank gave it a pair of his old arms, and, under its direction, he stripped and transformed every component. He sculpted the braces and refined the joints until they twisted just as it wanted. The carbon fiber frames were replaced with hollow titanium rods sheathed in scalloping plates of high-density polyethylene. It was a weaker shell than the armor the drone had been made with, yet somehow fitting for the cautious joy of the drone’s experimentation.

Sprocket took to their new companion quickly. The old gray tomcat ventured down often to saunter over the scattering of delicate prototypes and plopped down, assured of at least an hour of uninterrupted scritches as the drone practiced its newfound gentleness.

Frank gave it a table and returned to his work. When needed, he was always nearby with an idea, an answer, or the encouragement it needed to keep going. He didn’t know if the drone felt sentimental. It had no lips to smile. No eyebrows to raise.

Just the little whir of the motor behind that one chipped camera, letting Frank know it was thinking, working, searching for inspiration.

It made itself another pair of arms, so that it could have four hands hovering over its table, working continuously and seamlessly to remove the parts that no longer suited it. First, the network communication system which had once given it its orders. Then its canons and fuel tanks, its targeting systems, its shielding, and the remains of its overpowered motors, until there was hardly anything left except its four arms and one eye and Frank wondered if he needed to intervene.

But then it began to build.

It made its legs in fits and starts, halting and hammering through endless unsuitable designs until it amalgamated two powerful legs upon which it could spin and sway like a dancer. It gained grace by the day, becoming ever more familiar with the materials and tools of its design.

With newfound confidence, it modeled its torso for stability and balance. It hollowed out its chest and kept its casing as thin as sheet of paper. It fit more and more dizzyingly complex components into its body, but always around that cavity, as if preparing that space for a heart without knowing the size or shape it would take.

Frank and the drone didn’t often speak about their work, but they were comfortable together. When it began sculpting its head, he thought it was time to ask.

“Have you chosen a name?”

It stopped its work. “My squadron called me Euphoria Devastatrix Doombringer, The Lady Inferna.”

Frank blinked. “Is that what I should call you?”

It hunched further over the complex latticework of cooling fins it had been soldering together. “Yes,” it said. “Effie, for short. I always liked it when they called me Lady. When they would say ‘here she comes’.”

“Effie,” Frank said. “It’s beautiful.”

She made her head more subtly geometrical than humanoid, and her silhouette was complete. She worked harder than ever on the details, refining the etchings on her plating, smoothing and polishing every angle of herself to a sleek shine. As Frank worked quietly at her side, she’d tried and discarded hundreds of joints, testing a thousand delicate calibrations.

The eyes sat ready for weeks at the center of the desk, two little glass domes waiting to be filled with mechanics. Somehow, he knew her transformation would be complete once she replaced that final piece. He said nothing, though he knew he’d miss the judder-and-whir of that camera and all the subtle emotions he might have begun to imagine there.

It was the last original piece of her, the piece he knew best.

The final day of her transformation was like many of the others. Quiet. Effie sat at her workbench, everything cleared away but the eyes she’d polished to a high shine. Frank didn’t pause his work to watch her install them. He turned away before he could see the rusty camera detach from her forehead.

But the sudden absence of that clicking buzz left him feeling abruptly hollow. He wiped the dust from his tools and unfastened the saw-jig blades from their settings to be cleaned, sharpened, and put away. Everything had its place—he knew that better than most.

“They never asked me what I wanted to be,” she said at his back.

“Their calling was in destruction, not creation,” he said, hefting the angle grinder to its shelf.

“So is yours.”

“I don’t destroy things.” He’d finished, but he couldn’t turn back to her. He ran a finger along the edge of the shelf, scraping the dust away in a thin, clean line. “I take things apart, and I imagine what they will one day become.”

“Am I your first creation?”

At this, he had to turn with a frown.

Euphoria’s eyes were golden-yellow, lit from the inside like gemstones. Her eyes, which had been darting around the room, fixed on his face. It wasn’t what he’d thought. They weren’t human eyes. The iris expanded from one edge of her eye to the other, and her pupils were thin, vertical slits. When she blinked, two sets of eyelids wiped across her vision.

A perfect match to the triumphant stare of the tomcat cradled to her chest by one set of arms as the others scratched his chin and stroked his spine.

“I did not create you,” Frank said. “I couldn’t, even if I tried.”

She tilted her head. “Then what am I to you?”

“Yourself,” he answered.

She turned to him, but Frank looked away too quickly. He didn’t want the wetness of his eyes or the frown of his lips to give away a sentiment he wasn’t sure she shared, that she had no features to express. He swept the floor, gathering splinters and soot into dark piles on the floor. He could retrace the steps of their journey in the sawdust, metal shavings, and spots of paint left behind.

The time had never been right to ask, while she was still trying to find the answers to so many other things. But if she was ready to leave, to continue her transformation somewhere else, he wouldn’t have another opportunity. He waited until he imagined the question would sound more curious than burning, and asked, “What am I to you?”

Euphoria Devastatrix Doombringer, The Lady Inferna, picked up the screwdriver Frank had once held over the remnants of her battle-broken body. As she pulled the command console of a targeting-matrix from its chassis, a deep mechanical rumble started in her chest. That lovely whir of curiosity and contentment had been re-seated inside her, and it echoed through their workshop, stronger than ever before.

“Peace,” she said, the word resonating deeply with her purr.

---

Host Commentary

By Alasdair Stuart

Here’s Erin’s notes for the story:

‘I think everyone has some experience of rebuilding themselves at different times in their lives, and I think the more broken down you feel, the more pieces you have to pick and choose what you take from the experience. That can be all too overwhelming if you’re doing it alone, so I can recommend bringing in a trustworthy Frank of some kind to consult and make sure you’re using all the tools right. I’m a big believer in second chances and redirecting effort in new directions but ultimately staying true to yourself. “Peace by Piece” is immensely meaningful to me personally, as it’s the first short story I’ve sold in a long time, and it feels a lot like a new beginning, something simple and hopeful that I can build on. Writing and sharing it brought me a great deal of joy and relief, and I’d like it if a reader or listener could take away a piece of that peace too.’

 

I love this one for exactly these reasons and like a lot of us I suspect this speaks to multiple parts of my life. Everyone breaks eventually, and while that’s horrible when it happens its oddly reassuring to know everyone does. Because we’ve all been down this hole before and we all, eventually get to not only know the way out but help someone else get there too. Back in 2019, a walking lump of scar tissue and moderately serious illness after a year which was nothing but professional letdown after professional letdown, I realised I was burnt out. I’m a Gen X kid. I did well in school. I’m a functional only child. Frequently the only or emergency adult in my house growing up. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t okay it was that I was I had this sense of failing because I had tolerances, because I had limits and because those limits had been exceeded so far and for so long that that Kate Bush lyric about the needles being over in the red was basically my creative life. I’m not there anymore and two things occurred to me recently. The first was that realisation. The second was the discovery that I’m not angry anymore. And I had, and have, very good reason to be angry all the time. Ask any creative and odds are 1 in 2 of them will say the same thing. I’ve not been forged by the failures of others into something I don’t want to be. I’m not fixed. No one’s ever fixed. But I’m different, and better, and happier.

‘Do you want me to be a weapon again?’

That’s the other line that brought me up short. Because there’s so much nuance there. Not a surrendering of personal control but an acknowledgement that other people’s needs may match or exceed your own. There’s regret and willingness and determination in there. Horror at what Effie has been. Acknowledgement of what she may need to be again. Enormous trust in asking that question and even more in knowing the answer is going to be right.

That answer changes over time for us all and, as we head into the latest stage of what Starfleet’s scholars may one day refer to as the ‘TPF’ or ‘That Past Fuckery’ era I’m guessing a lot of you are frightened or know people who are. I’ve had a lot of conversations with LGBTQIA+ friends about where they’re going to be living over the next four years and how their friends can help them.

With this story in mind then, remember: Shields are weapons. When you need to, when you can, be a shield. And trust that someone else, whether across the work bench or the street, will do the same for you.

 

Onto the subject of subscribing and support: Escape Pod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability, reliability, dependability and a spanky new warp core with go faster stripes. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account and we’d love to see you there: find us at @escapepod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, t-shirts and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet.  Also, friend of the shows and all around badass human and VoidMerch GigaArchitect Jordan Shiveley has a book out! And it’s great! Check out Hot Singles In Your Area now. The link will be in the notes.

 

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

 

Join us next week for Joy by Dale Smith, with narration by Tina Radcliffe, hosted by Mur and audio production by Summer Brooks. We leave you with these words from The West Wing.

This guy’s walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. “Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.” The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”

We’ll see you next week folks. Until then, have fun.