Rusted Roots
By Robert Essig
Aaron swatted a mosquito on his cheek and cried out, alerting his wife. Donna was a bit of a worrywart, the type who ran around with antibacterial spray and extra bandages when their children were little.
“What is it, Aaron?” she asked, concern shrouding her voice.
There was a small smear of blood on Aaron’s face. The miniature mechanical mosquito was stuck to his hand, its legs sticking into his flesh like needles.
“Goddamn bugs,” he murmured. “They’re all mechanical now.”
“I’ll get the glove,” she said, ever ready to help her distressed husband.
Another mosquito buzzed by his face, sounding like a miniature motorboat rather than an insect’s natural hum. This time, Aaron grabbed the aluminum fly swatter with the hand that didn’t have a steel mosquito embedded in it and swatted the miniature machine out of the sky. He nailed it on the third swat. It made a metallic ting like swatting a chunk of shrapnel out of the air.
Donna returned with the glove. It was leather on the inside with a fine layer of steel mesh on the exterior. In the days before the seas turned into gargantuan bodies of petrol thriving with mechanical beasts, divers used such gloves to interact with sharks.
She gloved her hand and plucked the metal mosquito from his palm, flinging it away. Due to the amount of dead mechanized bugs that littered the ever-changing Earth, walking around barefoot was a thing of the past.
“I hope it didn’t bug me,” said Aaron. “I don’t know how far the proboscis has to go.” He stared at his palm, worry in his eyes.
Donna looked at the pinky finger of her left hand, the way each section of that finger seemed to be its own entity, connected to the next with a hinge that allowed the digit to function as it had in its flesh and bone state. The area where the metal pinky finger met her flesh was slathered in ointment in attempt to prevent infection.
She had been stung by a mechanical bee on that pinky finger a week ago.
***
Donna was in the flower garden, knees in the soil, and Aaron knew she must be in pain. The mechanical bugs had become such a pestilence that their littered remains had begun to create a new layer of dirt over the earth in the form of metal shavings and dust.
“Donna?” Aaron called out. “Donna, are you all right?”
She was weeping. He could hear soft cries, her body slumped over in a way only sadness and deep personal yearning could account for.
“What is it...?” Aaron slid his hand across her back the way he had since they started dating forty years ago. His mouth was slack, for he knew by looking at what she held in her hands just what the matter was.
“They’ve taken everything,” she said through sobs and tears. “Everything.”
In her hand was a flower, but it wasn’t a flower of Mother Nature’s Earth. The flowers were bugged, just like Donna’s pinky finger and the half of Aaron’s face where the mosquito bit him, the flesh now concave and gleaming of steel, the edges where his flesh met the metal reddened and on the verge of infection.
It was a daisy, the center a perfect circle of yellow painted metal; the petals like miniature airplane propellers. At the base of the strange flower--the stem a green steel rod--were several wires orange with rust.
“I watered the flowers, and they died.” She held the strangely limp metal daisy out to Aaron. “I’ve rusted the roots.”
***
When the doorbell rang, the sound startled Aaron. In his metallic state, he was somewhat surprised that he could still be startled, that such an instinctually mammalian reaction was still possible.
At the door was a man, cheery in his robotic state. He was naked, as naked as a robot could be, his human anatomy having been smoothed out like a child’s doll into something only distinguishable as a man by the whiskers on his smooth steel face, like the bristles of a wire brush.
“Hello, sir,” said the robot, his voice smooth as silk as his hinged jaw opened and closed to give the illusion that he was actually talking. “I have come here to bug your well. Our records show that your well still runs water, and I’m certain you would like it to run with oil like the city system now does.”
Aaron didn’t answer. He turned his head looking into his house, the sound of metal on metal as his head scraped his shoulder reminding him of what he could never forget: that he and Donna had become robots.
Donna was sitting on the couch. He couldn’t see worry in her eyes because she was no longer capable of showing emotion, but he knew that was what she was feeling because it was what he was feeling, for her brain, like his, was only half computer. The parasites that had been working on them, turning flesh into metal and wires, had yet to finish the transition. Sure, their exteriors were smooth and shiny from head to toe, but inside they still felt, still understood the life they lived before, and couldn’t believe what had happened to the world.
“Sir?” said the government robot.
“No,” said Aaron, his voice a cocktail of robotic monotone and gruff elderly man. “We would like to keep our well the way it is.”
“But water is harmful, sir. If you accidentally drink it, it could cause irreparable damage.”
“The government bug has already caused irreparable damage. Leave us be, damn it!”
The robot’s voice became deeper and somewhat menacing, though Aaron didn’t think it was truly capable of being angry, having lost any semblance of its human self long ago. “If you won’t do it voluntarily, sir, then we’ll just have to bug your well by force. Water is forbidden, sir, and has to be eradicated to prevent further rusting of the Earth’s new surface.”
The robot turned and walked to the well, which was covered with a cement lid. He grabbed the steel handle that was embedded in the lid and effortlessly pulled it off, his robotic strength far superior to that of the near-dead human race.
“Fill the pitchers!” Aaron said, as he headed to the kitchen as swiftly as his metal limbs would allow. “Fill buckets, cups, anything that can hold water.”
“What is he doing out there?” asked Donna.
“He’s bugging the water. It’ll become an oil well in no time.”
***
They managed to fill two pitchers and half of a five-gallon bucket before the faucet began pouring a distinctly thicker fluid that was light amber in color.
Oil.
Around them, the world had changed, and so rapidly. The ground was now covered in a layer of metal shrapnel that gleamed in the sun, yet rusted in the first rain giving it the appearance of the old Earth that it covered, but that didn’t fool anyone. The flora was metal, and though the pine trees resembled pine trees, the needles really were needles, and the pinecones were like hand grenades when they fell on the shrapnel-littered ground.
The parasites had nearly transformed the whole world into a junkyard. By the time the government robot came to infiltrate Aaron and Donna’s well, life as they knew it was truly over. Their children had willingly succumbed to the transformation, allowing the school system to bug their grandchildren’s children. All of their friends had either committed suicide or gave up the fight and became robotic drones, convincing themselves that it was better to assimilate for the sake of their families. Aaron and Donna knew better, and now with their well bugged, the last of the world they knew and loved was gone.
“This is all the water we have left,” said Aaron, holding a large glass that was three quarters of the way full.
“I want to do it in the grow room,” said Donna. “Would that be all right?”
Aaron smiled, but his metal face couldn’t show his affection. “Of course that would be all right.”
At the rear of the house was a room that had formerly been their daughter’s, years ago when the kids were young and the government hadn’t begun sending out the bugs that would forever change the world into a maelstrom of metal. They had the room sealed tight so that no mechanical bees could get in and mechanize their last treasure in such a cruel, unforgiving world.
As they entered, the rays of the sun shone brightly on an array of pots and planters, all bearing colors a graying metal world had left behind; daisies, morning glories, snapdragons, marigolds, lilies and more, all thriving in the last of the Earth’s soil. Now that they were down to the last glass of water, they wanted to end it all in the room that had been their shelter from the world.
Aaron unlatched his skullcap and pulled it open, revealing the final remnants of his brain surrounded by computer chips and a circuitry that rivaled the most complex of machines.
Donna did the same.
They didn’t know what to expect, but nothing could be as terrible as what their lives had become.
He poured half the glass of water over his circuitry and handed it over to Donna in a palsied steel hand.
Before she had a chance to witness her husband’s mechanical suffering, she did the same.
In that final moment as their circuits fizzled and smoked, they held one another amongst the remnants of the world they once loved.