A long time ago there were four buildings—hubs of interplanetary connection—each of which were named according to primary elements of creation. Blood, connecting us to our bodies and our planet; Phlegm, containing all our scientific advancements; Black Bile, the home of commerce; and Yellow Bile, the document archive. These buildings stood tall for such a long time that we had forgotten who had built them. Thousands of us made home and labour in their walls, for each according to their need and from each their precious plasma.
The halls were rampant with robots bustling from place to place, clearly each designed for a specific, often elusive, function. There were hundreds of variants, and they never broke down. Like the buildings, they had always simply existed.
One of the robots we learnt to reverently avoid—A sleek machine that used to be stark white, now streaked in multitudinous layers of dried brown liquid. Its purpose was to harvest plasma from our bodies. Naturally, after a few incidents, we attempted to shut down the robots. When this failed, we tried to destroy them.
They were virtually indestructible.
This was mostly happening in Blood, which happened to be home to most of us. Many of us slept there, hoping that our sleep would be undisturbed. We would have moved if the buildings weren’t so large. Its corridors are so labyrinthian vast. Really, the blood harvesting robots were mere rumours on some floors for years. However, once a concerted effort took place in attempting to destroy the robots, they seemed to back off a bit. Cases of stolen blood went way down for six months.
Then, one day, we were waking up and… No one is sure exactly how this happened, whether it really did at all, or if we were all injected with a psychoactive drug that made us believe it did, but… We woke up with the wrong bones.
The younger generation likes to laugh at us, but I was there. I remember waking in a start, my hands flying from my husband’s hips, believing there was a stranger in my bed. The way his face hung off the bones of a man twice his build. I remember the way my fingers felt softer. I could twist the flesh of them a hundred and eighty degrees so the nail was damn near where my fingertip should have been.
here was pandemonium, a good number of us got outside before that renegade triggered the blast. I could get in trouble for saying so, but thank the Gods he did. There was something deeply wrong with Blood. The others, too, never regained their population. Guilty by association. Honestly, I would say that’s the smart thing to do. Leave.
We know that these buildings are patient. And we know that they understand revenge.