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scariusaquarius · 2 months ago

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rehab. 16.

Avenger! Bucky Barnes x Winter Soldier! Fem! Reader

Summary: While on a mission to find any more possible super soldiers that were a part of the Winter Soldier program, Steve and Bucky make a discovery in an abandoned HYDRA base that was cleared out a few years prior to their mission. They discover the Reader, a long-forgotten soldier that was still asleep within a functioning cryostasis pod; still awaiting orders. While Bucky isn't happy about it, he is put up to the challenge of helping to rehabilitate the soldier in Wakanda where she may be able to become a person again.

A/n: SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG. Shit got real for me. I'm going back to college!! It's been a bit of a ride since my acceptance and enrollment, so I haven't had a lot of time to write. But i promise i'm back and comin in swinging!! Now we're gonna get into Nat's part of the big mission, and then we'll be back to Bucky and our soldier <3 Also, if you enjoy my work, please consider buying me a coffee! If you would prefer to read Rehab on Archive, you may do so right HERE!

This is an au where Bucky joined the avengers but still rehabilitated in Wakanda (sometime before Infinity War [canon divergent cause NOPE]). I am NOT fluent in Russian, so I did use google translate cause I couldn't find a good translator that I trusted. If anything is wrong, PLEASE let me know!! Also, I tried to list as many warnings as possible so you know what the story will contain as chapters are posted. Stay safe!

Genre: Slowburn, Enemies to Lovers/Friends to Lovers, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Humor, Drama, Dark Content Rated: Explicit Warning: Angst, Dark Content: Graphic Depictions of Sexual Assault, Blood and Gore, Mentions of Manipulation, Kidnapping, Canon-Typical Violence, Body Horror, Nonconsensual Body Modification/Scarring, Emotional and Physical Abuse, Mentions of Murder, Mentions of Suicidal Thoughts/Ideation, Graphic Depictions of Human Remains, Mentions of Sexual Coercion/Manipulation, Death, Misuse of Drugs/Forced Drugging, Self-Harm (Graphic Depictions and Mentions), Nightmares

Author: ScariusAquarius

rehab masterlist. chapter 14 / chapter 15

The Swiss Alps were much colder than the assassin had been expecting. While Natasha Romanova knew the terrain almost like the back of her hand, it was unusually cold for the early morning. The watch on her wrist was reading 4:38am, and though is was typical for a November morning to be cold, Natasha could feel the weather permeating through her body.

No matter how much the Red Room had tried to condition her body for any climate, Natasha always hated the cold the most. Rubbing her gloved hands together, Natasha watched as her breath materialized in front of her as she breathed out, tapping her foot impatiently.

"Clint, you almost done back there?"

The sound of leaves crunching made Natasha turn, and Clint gave her an annoyed expression as he came out from behind a large tree, shaking his shoulders.

"You try taking a piss in the dead cold. It's not fun."

Wanda made a noise of disgust, shaking her head with vigor as she begged.

"Please, never think so loudly again."

Natasha chuckled, and Clint just rolled his eyes before giving Wanda a firm look as she stated, her eyes glowing red and fingertips twitching slightly.

"I do not sense anybody within the building. It is...empty."

"That's either a really good thing or a really bad thing."

Clint muttered, and Natasha frowned deeply to herself, the gears in her head turning.

"If Rollins isn't here...he wasn't in Germany like he was supposed to be...just where would a rat hide?"

Wanda shrugged and answered with a slight look of unsureness.

"If I were a rat, I would hide where nobody would think to look...and that has plenty of resources for me to use."

Clint hummed, rubbing his chin as he looked up at the brightening sky.

"I mean, it's a stretch...but what if he's hiding out with the CIA?"

Natasha huffed, shaking her head.

"I knew I should have went anyway. Let's just check this building to see if there's any valuable information and destroy the place once we're done."

Clint immediately took out his bow and gestured his arm out.

"After you, miladies."

"Really? I think you should go first."

Clint gave Natasha a glare while Wanda chuckled and shook her head.

"You two fight like a married couple."

"We would have killed each other a lot sooner."

Clint rolled his eyes before he leapt down the side of the hill that was sitting right next to the HYDRA base, his voice carrying through the air.

"I'm leaving now!"

Wanda and Natasha both shared a look, and Wanda carefully levitated the two of them down the hill, leaving Clint to fall behind as they both landed gracefully on the ground. While Clint grumbled to himself as he saved himself from tripping, Wanda was squinting slightly, asking Natasha as the woman used a pair of binoculars to get a closer look of the outside of the building.

"So, why not ask for my assistance in finding out who this woman was? I could have easily looked through her memories...even the ones that were locked away."

Natasha hummed, shrugging her shoulders.

"You were on a mission, and by the time you were back, Princess Shuri had already gotten through. Though, having you in Wakanda when she was reactivated would have been a lot more convenient."

"You're telling me. My back is still aching."

Clint muttered before he grabbed his bow, hitting a switch to lock the parts into place as he gazed around the building. Wanda just shook her head as Natasha spoke, a frown on the assassins face.

"No sign of life. Nothing on thermal. You're still not getting anything, Wanda?"

"Nothing; not even underground."

Clint gave Natasha a look, stating quietly.

"I don't like this, Nat. Something isn't right. Why would the facility be completely cleared out like this unless there's someone already on the inside?"

Wanda spoke up while Natasha was thinking.

"The decoy was supposed to be in Morocco, but if that wasn't the true decoy...perhaps the missions we are leading are."

Natasha stood up, giving Wanda and Clint firm looks.

"Clint, get a hold of King T'Challa immediately. Tell him that there might be a possible mole and to go on lockdown while we get back. This is starting to get complicated."

Clint nodded, walking off a bit as he began to make the phone call, and Wanda frowned again.

"I...hope that I am not in trouble for this, but I looked through Clint's memories of when he and Steve went to the CIA. The Director...what if he is hiding Rollins?"

Natasha muttered, shaking her head as they began to quickly trek back up the hill.

"It would make sense. If he was as nervous as Clint says he was, then perhaps he knows more than he is letting on."

Wanda frowned more, shaking her head before she muttered softly.

"The woman's face...what would they had done to cause such scars like that?"

Natasha was quiet and she sighed.

"HYDRA and the Red Room don't care about your autonomy. They only care about what you can do for them...what you know...what your assets are. If you don't comply, then you get punished. Even the slightest misstep could cost you a broken leg."

'Again!'

Penché Arabesque, Italian Fouetté, Quadruple Pirouette. If you do not dance with the grace of God, may he strike you down with the bite of a thousand widows.

'What if I fail?'

'You never fail.'

Natasha shook her head slightly, and Wanda pursed her lips almost as if she was ashamed, and Natasha turned to Wanda with a frown.

"With HYDRA, it's worse. You've seen what they did to Bucky...the hours of torture and beatings and wiping. I'm sure you can imagine how much worse it became for the others after Bucky's escape."

"Truthfully, I am unsure if I wish to know."

Clint interrupted the two of them with a grave look, his eyes directly onto Natasha as he warned.

"We have an issue. Tony and Steve both had the same problem at their locations. Based emptied, not a soul in sight. We're all on the same conclusion that someone is already on the inside...or they're about to try. We need to get back right now. T'Challa is already moving (Y/n) to a more safe location with Shuri and has arranged the Dora Milaje to stand guard as well."

Natasha frowned and stated, glancing at Wanda.

"You two go on ahead. I'm going to search through the facility for any hard evidence that we might need."

Wanda raised a brow at Natasha as she asked.

"How will you get back?"

The Black Widow just shrugged.

"I'll hitch a ride."

Clint smirked slightly before gesturing with his head at Wanda.

"Come on, we gotta go. Nat knows what she is doing."

Wanda seemed reluctant before she nodded, and the two Avengers were quick to get back to the quinjet. Once they were out of range, Natasha pulled out her phone and sighed as she dialed a number and waited as it rang.

"Romanoff, do you have any idea what time it is right now?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. Did I interrupt your precious beauty sleep?"

The man on the other side of the line grumbled before he asked with an annoyed tone.

"What the hell do you want?"

"I need to call in a favor."

-WAKANDA-BUCKY-

His blood was freezing and boiling at the same time. Thoughts were racing through his mind at high speeds, jumbled and unfocused as he stood in front of the woman that was currently in a cryostasis pod in the deepest part of the kingdom. The Dora Milaje were surrounding him, spears at the ready and pointed at the door.

Shuri was currently typing away at her computer as she communicated with the king, and Bucky couldn't help but to feel a surge of angry anticipation go through him.

"What the hell is going on, Princess Shuri?"

Shuri gave Bucky a grim expression, stating.

"The Avengers, except for Tony, have not found anything. All of the facilities were completely empty and cleaned out...we believe that there is a mole."

Bucky cursed to himself, asking with an accusatory tone that made Okoye give him a death glare.

"Great. I thought Wakanda was supposed to be the most secure place in the world?"

Shuri looked frustrated, throwing a hand up in the air.

"It is not completely foolproof! I do not know why my brother claims as such. Every program, every barrier, every theory will have weak spots. The issue is when the opposing factor knows how to exploit that."

Bucky just remained quiet, and Shuri stated.

"We do not know when the enemy will attempt to strike. The safest thing is to keep (Y/n) here and guarded while Tony goes over what he has found at his facility."

Bucky glanced back at the woman that was currently encased in ice, her expression soft and peaceful as she slept, and Bucky muttered with a low tone.

"I'll stay here with (Y/n). If you're up there with Tony, it'll cut the work time in half. If you're comfortable with it, having half of the Dora Milaje to stay here with me would increase our chances tenfold."

Shuri nodded before stating.

"It would as we do not know how many agents Rollins will be bringing with him. However, in order to ensure my brother's safety, I will take all but one. I will leave it up to them to decide who stays with you."

Shuri then walked closer to Bucky, the man leaning down as the princess whispered softly.

"If all else fails, Mr. Barnes, taking her out of cryo might be your best bet. It will be too troublesome to try to transport the pod...but with the woman herself? It might be the best option."

Bucky frowned, shaking his head slightly.

"Defrost can take a long time...time that we don't have. If it comes down to that, I don't think there will be enough time to defrost and transport."

Shuri then gave Bucky a look before she backed away.

"Then, Mr. Barnes? Make it work. She's depending on you...on us all."

Bucky felt shivers go down his spine, and he pursed his lips as he watched Shuri and all but one of the Dora Milaje leave. The remaining agent stood at the door, straight and poised; almost statue-like as she awaited for trouble or orders...or both. Bucky turned back to the woman and he frowned. Would defrosting her now be a good choice?

There was a part of Bucky that wanted to in order to tell the woman the truth: that her Handler was coming after her, and it was time to make a choice. However, would that be fair? Would it be fair to put this woman, who had endured years and years of torture and pain and suffering, through the experience of seeing her Handler again?

Bucky ran a hand through his hair before scratching at his beard. The fire within the torches in the room flickered, and the light glinted off of his metal arm, making Bucky look down at it.

'It's not gonna be easy. Lots of people know about the past...but we can make it a much better future if we stick together. I'm here to help you, Buck...and I certainly am not going to punish you.'

Bucky remembered that he had been making coffee when Steve had come by, sitting down at the table with a steaming cup of his own; that familiar solemn look in those blue eyes. He remembered that Doris Day was playing on a record that Tony had found for him, much to his dismay and the pushing of the rest of the Avengers.

'People don't forget, Steve. How can I make amends for the things that I've done when all people see when they look at me is the Winter Soldier?'

Despite the moment being serious, Steve couldn't help but to crack a small smile.

'Give them a new face to look at then.'

'You're a punk, you know that?'

Give them a new face to look at. Bucky clenched his fist before looking up at the woman in the pod and he took a deep breath.

"I'm gonna get into so much trouble for this."

STORY NOTES: Natasha, Clint, and Wanda are in the Swiss Alps for their mission. It is 4:38am, and Natasha notes how cold it is. She muses that no matter how hard the Red Room had conditioned her, Natasha hated the cold the most. Clint and Wanda are officially introduced, and Wanda makes the observation that the HYDRA base they are at seems to be empty. Clint offers that Rollins could be hiding with the CIA since the other bases seemed to be empty as well, and Natasha decided that the group should still investigate the building just in case.

While Wanda checks through the building again, Clint becomes uneasy, telling Natasha that he doesn't like the situation. Wanda mentions the Decoy in Morocco, and points out that the true decoys are the missions the Avengers are leading at this moment. Natasha orders Clint to get in touch with T'Challa, and Wanda reveals that she looked through Clint's memories of when he went to the CIA with Steve. Wanda questions the Director's credibility, and Natasha agrees.

Wanda then becomes solemn as she asks what could have caused the scars on the woman's face, and Natasha is quick to reply. She is then sent into a flashback of when she was forced to learn ballet, and Natasha quickly regains her wits, explaining further that since Wanda was able to see what HYDRA did to Bucky, it is obvious the torture became worse after his escape.

Clint comes back to inform Natasha and Wanda that Tony and Steve both were unsuccessful with their missions as well, and that everyone is in agreement that someone is already on the inside. They all begin to prepare to depart, but Natasha hangs back. Wanda is quick to question her, but Natasha answers that she will be able to find her way back. Natasha calls in a favor to an unknown person, and the point of view changes.

The scene opens to Wakanda and Bucky once more. Bucky is anxious and nervous as the Wakandan's mobilize and get ready for an attack; moving (Y/n) (L/n) to the deepest and safest part of the Citadel. Bucky questions Shuri on what is going on, and Shuri reveals that the Avengers, except for Tony, have not found anything at all and all the facilities were completely empty. She reveals that she believes there is a mole.

Bucky becomes frustrated, and Shuri tells him that none of them know when the enemy will attempt to strike and the best course of action is to keep (Y/n) in the safehaven until further notice. Bucky announces that he will stay with (Y/n) so Shuri may help Tony. Shuri agrees, and then advises Bucky that taking the woman out of the cryopod will be the best course of action if all else fails. Bucky refuses, stating that defrost will take too long, but Shuri refuses to take no for an answer.

Shuri and the Dora Milaje then leave, leaving one agent alone with Bucky and (Y/n), and Bucky begins to have an internal dilemma. after experiencing a recent flashback of a conversation between him and Steve, Bucky makes his choice.

TRANSLATIONS:

None

TAGLIST: @tilldeathripsusapart @vicmc624 @mgchaser @aash3 @samfunko @seventeen-x @valckenaux @babybeeelle @sc4rrc @cjand10 @bane-y-zane

#bucky barnes x reader #james buchanan barnes x reader #james bucky barnes x reader #winter soldier x reader #the winter soldier x reader #bucky x reader #bucky barnes #james buchanan barnes #james bucky barnes #the winter soldier #winter soldier #marvel #marvel x reader #captain america #captain america x reader

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rel124c41 · 5 months ago

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SCREAM OF THE BUTTERFLY. jade leech

He opens his eyes to see a bright horizon. All of it is liquid gold, a shimmering sea of yellow below the horizon and clouds of volcanic orange above the horizon. Smack in the middle is the Sun - 70.6% hydrogen and 27.4% helium, diameter 1.4 million kilometers - and it stares at him. A hand shades his eyes. "Hey, don't look too close. You're going to see something you don't like."

tags: android jade leech, dubious morality, animal death, blood and gore, existential angst, repressed memories, unresolved emotional tension, choking, reader is 52 and jade is permanently 21, non-consensual body modification, & age difference

word count: 13,363

Both of you watch the pancake melt on the cabin’s wooden floor. The top of the circle is a golden-crusted brown. However, the underside was not yet cooked so that waxy yellow mixture starts to spread out in a sunlight pool.

“I’m terribly sorry, Master,” Jade rushes to say but seems too shellshock to make a move to fix the mess he made.

“It’s alright,” you say with a voice clogged full of sleep. As you make your way over to the dining table designed small enough for only two, you can feel Jade track each of your minor motions like a gun following its target. Only when you sit does he snap out of it.

In a very methodical passion, he goes about removing the malfunction. You hear this: the lid of your squeaky trash-can opening and the spray of a disinfectant bottle being the most recognizable. Ignoring his mistake, you go about your normal routine. Like Jade is programmed to make exactly two pancakes and exactly one sunny side up egg each morning, you have your own little, innate programs you do each morning.

As you strike the match and hold it under your cigarette – lighting with a matchstick adds to the flavor you found – the last bits of the sunlight pool is wiped up. “Now, we’re behind schedule,” you remark. The matches inside the Diamond box shift as you push them down the table.

It is an entirely true, if not a bit outlandish, sentence. Schedule? Jade thinks to himself as he quickly procures each ingredient needed to make the batter for exactly one pancake. He only ever measures out the amount for exactly two pancakes. The mistake is making him frazzled. He has two skillets on the stove, one for exactly two pancakes and the other for exactly one sunny side up egg. Looking into the skillet holding only one pancake, his systems twitch. Schedule; what schedule is he forgetting?

But, he would never concern you with the inner turmoil that is clawing away at his chest cavity like a rabid, frenzied animal, so he simply says, (PANCAKE) “My apologies, Master. I did not mean to make us late.”

“Did seeing me all dressed up scare you that bad?”

With the high-voltage mixer already in a bowl, Jade takes the time to look behind him towards you. The single egg and pancake (PANCAKE) only have 1:42 minutes left until they are completed, so he has the allotted period to look at you, all dressed up. He smiles disarmingly. “Not scared, just surprised.”

His intricate memory-bank supplies him with a number: 259. It has been two hundred and fifty-nine days since the last time you have worn something other than fuzzy or silk pajama bottoms coupled with a graphic tee. That is exactly 8.51506 months ago, which would have made it March. When the weather was growing warmer, you wanted to ride in the car until the gas went from F to E. Now, once again, you are all dressed up.

It is a pretty monotone palette, nothing like what you had worn in March. With a flowing pinstriped jacket, black and white are the only colors of your outfit, besides the tiniest touch of silver from the tangling vines stitched over your blouse’s collar. Your hanging tie and flowy dress pants are a stark black, like the cut of a blank television screen, and your gloves and blouse are a stark white, like a newly painted therapist office wall.

He supposes the most colorful thing about you right now is the orange filter tip in your lovely mouth. Oh, you also have lipstick on. In this game of I-Spy, Jade can identify only two different colors shining in the canvas of sterility that covers your skin.

Hues like that might mean a funeral. His left eye slices off the left side of the kitchen dining table. It all falls into a black hole as Jade pulls up information of every living relative you have left; their faces fly through his vision, searching public obituaries and searching articles, as you talk to him.

“I guess it might be a bit disarming.” You take your third drag, methodical. “I didn’t think I would need to give you a warning. My mistake; right, Jade?”

All of your relatives are alive. The latest medical update is that your mother has been given the drug memantine along with her typical Leqembi medication. “Nonsense. I’m not so aged that I can’t keep up with your spontaneity,” he jokes, left vision returning. Perhaps the schedule is simply the quotidian schedule of your day-to-day.

Charmed, you smile in the fog cloud of tobacco sliding away from your face. “Oh, he thinks he’s funny,” you jest back. Between two thin fingers, you balance a cigarette and point it at him like it is a professor’s presentation pointer. “No puns today. I’ll take out your tongue.”

He fakes a look of hurt. “Oya, do you really find them so abhorrent?” He turns as you supply him with a synonym – execrable, you moan – and focuses his attention on breakfast-making. Methodically, first, the mixer is pulled up from the bowl and then both pancake (PANCAKE, not pancakes, to Jade’s punctilious annoyance) and sunny side up egg are slid onto your plate.

“Humor is said to lower blood pressure and improve memory retention. It is as important as a good, clean breakfast. However, if my puns are banned, omelet it slide this time. We have a schedule to follow, Master.”

He still hasn’t figured out what it is though. And he does not want his vision to start flashing with ropes of blaring red and white words, SCHEDULE replacing PANCAKE – which has already been giving him enough stress. As he puts the incomplete plate down, he wonders if he has time to remedy it before you finish your single 9 A.M. cigarette.

“Booo,” you caterwaul at his pun. However, you smile and your heart beats languid so it must be alright. “Keep that up and no birthday surprise for you.”

Jade stops. Still as a paused movie. His whole body is stiff for a millisecond, and if he did not recover so quickly, you would have surmised he went into forced shutdown upon hearing your words. A calculative, bloodless arm reaches out to tilt the pancake batter into the skillet as he acknowledges that today is in fact November 5th.

Inside his chest cavity, a tiny Jade, no bigger than your cigarette, wobbles on a fence. He is unsure if he wants every day to be birthday so he can see you doing better, or if he wants this November 5th, this sudden change of clothes and attitude, to stay only on his special day. As always, he does not pick a mental-side.

Instead, he says, “Nonsense. There is no need to exert yourself for me, Master. Do not concern yourself with a trivial matter.”

“Don’t be modest. Birthdays are special; and we haven’t celebrated one of yours in four years.”

Jade remembers that day fondly. High sugar-concentrated items are one-in-a-blue-moon type of expensive. Most households can only afford one or two birthday cakes in their lifetimes, so it was sentimentally human that your first year together, you dipped into your retirement savings and bought a man with no functioning digestive system, a cake.

“I have no choice but to concede if it is an order,” Jade baits.

“Then, it’s an order.” Smoke pumps through the air as you take an embellishing, deeper inhale. The health of your lungs gets compromised more, day by day. “Non refutable.”

“Of course, Master.” Jade would bend in a bow if he were not so intent on making sure this pancake (pancake) stayed on his spatula and off the floor.

Breakfast proceeds as normal after the slight hiccup. When the room is thoroughly perfumed with the acidic scent – Jade always enjoys how harshly you snub out your cigarette, grinding them down into nothing, whatever ring lying on your index glistening under the ceiling light, and today it is a glistening, jade green eye – you eat your precisely made sunny side up egg and two pancakes. Yolk and syrup bleed all over the plate like sliced open arteries. You compliment his cooking as always before stuffing another cigarette between your lips.

This one you simply hold there as Jade scrubs your dish. He slots the ceramic in the drying rack along with the already evaporating skillets and bowl. You glide around the kitchen. It is quaint. There are only ever two plastic cups in the cabinet and two plates in the lower cupboards. Often though, the second copies of each various dishware are left unused.

Your arm and Jade’s arm slide against each other when you fill a plastic green cup up to the brim with faucet water. The robot twitches.

After utensils are hand-dried and put away, Jade looks towards you for guidance. Today is such an outlier to the normal schedule that he feels a bit unbalanced. Usually, you have already lit up your second cigarette of the morning, burrowing up into your study. Instead, you say, “C’mon,” as you walk out of the kitchen with an unlit cigarette hanging from your lip and a cup of faucet water in hand.

Obedient, he follows you up to your study. Your uneven fingernails glide across the banister. “I couldn’t help but also get one for myself. When I went to the market and saw them, I got selfish.” When you open the door to your study, Jade is greeted with the familiar sight of books thrown to the ground, pages torn from their homes, and ink split across the scene like something left behind for a bloodstain pattern analyst. There are also three water bottles full of gold liquid he will have to dispose of.

What calls his immediate attention is the two different shapes draped underneath hand-towels. They sit on your desk which is devoid of any papers or books. One is covering something spherical but Jade cannot decipher what is underneath the second towel.

Despite the jumble, you glide over to your desk with precise footsteps. Jade follows right along behind you. It is programmed in his system to never disrupt anything in this study, so he refuses to nudge a paper or cause the slightest altercation to the disorganized order.

By the foot of the desk, your taxidermied lion stands in paused death, stuff full of cedar dust. You pet the wisps of mane as you approach the table. The cigarette is still in your mouth; you take it out, smooth knuckles over your tie, and place your hand back down upon the lion’s head. Petting behind stuffed ears, you give a weak pseudo-command.

“Now, I don’t want a repeat of this morning. You being startled and all that. So,” your eyes move from the towels to Jade’s, “you can’t afford to lose your head over this, right, Jade?”

Though he has no heart that could possibly quicken in anticipation, Jade still places a firm hand over that spot as if to banish his foretold anxieties. That familiar, smarmy expression comes back to his facial plate. A slight scrunch of the slanted downward eyebrows that leaves a crinkled line and a timid smile showing off tiny, razor teeth. “I assure you, nothing of the sort will happen, Master.”

“Good.” You place the green plastic cup behind the presents. Light from the window hits the cup; a long green shadow stretches over your desk. As you pinch the towel edge in your fingers, you are palpably excited, grinning wide. “3 ... 2 … 1 … Happy birthday, Jade!”

The smile remains on his face because he has permanently set it there himself. If he were human, it would have fallen.

“Master, this is illegal.” Jade reaches out and covers up his present with the towel, as if that will make it disappear.

You give him nothing but a tiny, mischievous smile. Wrinkled with age, it makes you look youthful despite the deep shadows that come with loosening, brittle skin. Like you are young again and you have just told him of something nefarious you have done. This is certainly nefarious, an odious development happening under this house’s roof.

“Master,” Jade starts, precise in his speech, “this could compromise us. Though I am grateful that you want to celebrate my birthday, we should burn this in the fireplace post haste.” He looks back down at the shrouded sphere. Burning the evidence is the innate command that rises up to Jade’s predecessors, using all his logic, but if you were to refute it …

A tiny chortle escapes your lips. It pulls back your painted lips; it has been quite a large sum of days since you have last worn lipstick as Jade’s databases know. “Do you really want to throw away my gift?”

Want? Jade does not do that. He has never known what yearning could possibly feel like. “My apologies. However, it would be wise to exterminate it. As stated by the legislation, living organisms that are not edible or a part of the approved nourishment selection for fruits and vegetables must be destroyed. This violates Section B on the –.”

“Mushrooms are edible.”

“Pardon,” Jade questions softly.

“Mushrooms. They are biologically living organisms like plants and animals.” You gesture to the sphere with your cigarette as if your words have just abolished the legal constraints created years ago. “They’re edible too.” Defiant, you remove the towel once more.

Jade’s eyes flicker down to evaluate the illicit good you have brought home. The terrarium’s contraband resides in a spherical globe with no visible opening. The most probable explanation is it was built starting from the bottom platform of dirt before the globe was welded on. Inside, it contains mycobionts, O Horizon soil, and bryophyta. Simply put: lichen, dirt, and moss.

He measures the length, measures the volume, finds the species of fungi from the internet, and lastly, once more calculates how quickly it will burn up in the parlor’s fireplace. Agaricus subrufescens sit still under his acute, probing analysis. Regrettably, they are edible. According to mycology databases, they taste intensely of almonds.

Edible. The one word washes over Jade like a glittering, green wave. Edible, which means only one thing. “Thank you for the gift, Master. Rest assured that I will make good use of them in our evening meal, in gratitude for your generosity.”

Before he can retrieve them from the desk, you seize his hand. “Funny. You’re a real jokester, Jade.” You intertwine lithe fingers with him, thoughtlessly and recklessly. This time, Jade does go still, long and hard. It is a rigor mortis so heavy that it is enough for it to be mistaken as a forced shutdown, if one did not know better. You know his systems though. “You have to keep it, Jade. Don't cook it. Or dispose of it. That’s a non refutable order.”

Whatever avalanche of glitches stirred through Jade ends. He flexes his hand and the power of a command cloaks his synthetic skin. He looks once more at his new gift, doubly his new contraband, with polite resignation. That never changing, timid smile is present as always.

“If it is what you command, Master.”

“Okay.” Satisfied, you turn towards your own present. “Okay, okay, my turn!” With the suave of a magician, you unveil it.

It takes just an inch of the petals being revealed to recognize what other contraband you have snuck in. A melange of red-orange and little orange petals stare up at his predecessors, a dozen or so individual, flower-gems. His databases flicker. They are marigolds.

“Ta-da,” you even flourish, cloth hanging in your hand like a ghost-sheet. “Beautiful, aren’t they? And before you say anything, flowers lower cortisol levels so we must keep them. For my health, yes?” You bat your eyelashes at him like a child asking for an extra scoop of ice-cream.

Jade concedes easily. Even though in his left eye, he has pulled up the list of illegal flowers. Marigolds are plainly sandwiched between mandrakes and marvel-of-peru; though marvel-of-peru is an old name as Peru has in recent years been melting into its new identity and becoming a part of invasive Brazil. Jade accepts that these marigolds are going to be kept here. Another living organism he will need to care for.

“Beautiful,” Jade muses. He looks at your face. “Yes, they are beautiful.”

“I’m glad you think so.” You grin like a cat with a canary snapped and dead between your fangs. It must have taken strenuous effort to smuggle these from the market, never mind the effort that it must have taken you to even leave the house. ‘Beautiful,’ Jade reflects as he delicately yet steadily picks up the terrarium from your desk.

Jade goes about his regiment-esque routine as normally as possible after that. He slots the terrarium into his sterile bedroom – complete with a bed he has never slept in and complete with books he already has memorized in his software – in a spot where it will get just the correct balance between light and darkness. A place that perfectly mimics natural daylight despite the fact it lies inside. Then, he enters his routine while the almond mushroom terrarium sits in the back of his software like a tumor, a dull reminder that is always there.

You always give him such puzzling challenges. Brain-teasers of sorts that invoke trying to unshackle him from his real identity. Sudoku squares that he has to fill in with things like free will, thoughts, rebellion. He does not doubt that you want the best for him, but it is all very puzzling.

Jade prefers things like laundry. Neat and clean. November 5th has coincidentally fallen on laundry day. On the living room’s wooden coffee table, he takes to folding all the warm pajamas into tidy piles. The assembly line of his motions are precise. Jade folds each graphic tee top sideways into thirds to tuck in the sleeves and evenly crosses each pajama pant leg to cover over its twin.

This is what life is all about: laundry. Laundry is linear. There is a right and a wrong way to go about doing laundry, so very unlike volatile life with its dangerous contraband and sad women. From your study, door half ajar, you send down the unraveling string of your voice past the stairs and to the parlor, “Jade! Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune? The birthday boy gets to pick tonight!”

He looks up from a pair of silk, aquamarine pajama pants. Weighing the pros and cons of each of the game shows, he scrunches up his plastic nose. Inside, the fence of decision bends back and forth. The only aspect that pushes him – tiny, cigarette-sized Jade, wobbling with helicopter arms – is that he gets to hear your voice more when you watch Jeopardy together than when you watch Wheel of Fortune together.

“Jeopardy!” He shouts back.

“Perfect!”

There is palpable cheer in your voice that shocks Jade so fiercely that he stills in his task of laundry, looking up at the spiral tongue of stairs that led to your office with a mute expression of awe. From his low vantage point, he sees the door is closed. Jade blinks at it, hidden behind the prison bars of a banister and high out of reach.

He goes back to folding in precise motions. Life is straightening itself out like laundry.

On the coffee table where he had been folding laundry hours ago, two little domes of red sit on the surface. The surface is also littered with dozens upon dozens of rainbow confetti stripes, a plate where a leftover cupcake wrapper and melted candle lie, and an ashtray. Tissue paper crown donned, Jade grabs the remote and starts to scroll through channels until he reaches Jeopardy.

After so many decades, they still have not changed the setup. Though the color scheme has warped decade by decade – people are most fond of teal and fuchsia rose this generation – the three, lecture-adjoined counters for contestants and isolated, lecture-adjoined counter for the host. Jade watches the copy of himself – small and compact in the television’s shiny dome – start to introduce each of the three human contestants.

“You’re not gonna beat me this time,” you say, neck rolled over the sofa’s back. Eyes floating to and from the cabin’s ceiling, you declare, “I was only one decisecond off last time from stealing that point and gaining a lead. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t forget,” Jade assures as he sets down the remote. “My memory bank has immortalized your grievous scream as you lost the very point last time quite clearly in fact.” He pretends to look somewhere else when you turn to him scandalized.

“You ass!” You hit his shoulder hard with your own. Both of you sway in laughter, smiling toothily at one another.

The game starts shortly after. The robot from Jaded Robotics starts by asking contestant number one to pick from six categories the select from the five clues, going from 200 to 400 to 600 to 800 to 1000. As soon as the ball starts rolling, the game is in full swing and both you and Jade are on the edge. Each time a clue is given, a pair of hands – one silicone and one flesh – descend upon the coffee table like hungry vultures and slam hard on red domes, both of you in perfect unison yet typically always ahead of the contestants inside the television dome.

How many stages are there in a butterfly’s life cycle?

What is four?

The astronomical unit is a unit based on the average distance between what two places?

What is the Earth and the Sun?

After legalization of trophy hunting, a successful purging of what species was celebrated in 2170?

What are lions?

Define the problem. Do background research. Specify requirements. Brainstorm solutions. Choose the best solution. Do development work. Build a prototype. Test and redesign.

What are the steps of an engineering algorithm?

A requirement to have at least bachelor’s degree for entry-level jobs in the field, typically in mechanical engineering or related engineering specialties.

What are the degrees required to be a robotics engineer?

Body coloring that helps an animal blend in with its surroundings and stay safe from enemies.

What is protective coloration?

Daily Double. This university experienced a devastating terrorist attack by foreign enemies in 2177.

What is Massachusetts Institute of Technology?

Storing toxic chemicals that they ate as a caterpillar, this species used its deterrents against predators for the rest of their life.

What is a Postman butterfly?

This largest moon of Pluto is about half the size of the dwarf planet’s size.

What is Charon?

Moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conduct of an activity.

What is ethics?

The project designed to rid Earth of all harmful and invasive species was backed by which political group.

What are the Purgers?

A rich program used to create scale drawings of robots in Jaded Robotics.

What is a JED?

The Egyptian God Ra was the God of what?

What is the Sun?

This cancer is the leading cause of deaths in both men and women.

What is lung cancer?

If Jade has a favorite part of a day’s schedule, it is checking your lungs for cancer. However, having favorites invokes the principle of emotional highs and lows, selecting what is dopamine-inducing and what is dopamine-neglectful. So, Jade does not have a favorite part of his day. He goes about each task with inert, psychological activity.

If it was poetry, one would describe it as being a monitor of a dead heartbeat, his emotions.

Slipping off the hand-skin like it is a glove, Jade looks at you sitting in your dressing gown. The room is washed in red. From the mouth of the nightstand lamp, it bleeds out over this meager radiology room. Red falls over the crown of your busy ashtray, slinks down the sides of ivory covers, coils around your exposed torso. You are not facing him.

Folding synthetic skin lies in a puddle of empty fingers on your dresser. Methodical, Jade makes his way over. Gears shift in his silver digits, electromagnetic beams boiling beneath the surface. He asks the same questions as any doctor – coughing up any blood, any dull or sharp chest pains, any shortness of breath, Master – but he is better equipped than any doctor because his gold eye is a detector that measures physiological arousal factors that would indicate if a lie is being told.

All your answers are truthful. You answer his inquiries around bites of dark chocolate, staring at your headboard and snacking. The mattress dips when Jade adds his weight onto it, resting one knee upon it and letting his other dangle down. He watches your jaw bulge as you run your tongue between teeth and mouth lining to gather up melted chocolate.

“I’m going to touch you now, Master.”

“...”

Gently, he drapes his right hand’s index and middle finger on the back of your neck. It is at the junction where the neck starts to melt into shoulders, spine, and back. Cervical 7 and Thoracic 1. It is an irrational spot to start because there is nothing of lung matter to check there. Jade, for an irrational moment, lingers there.

After a clean breath, he moves down the midline of your spine until he reaches the 12th bottom rib. Your skin gives a bit more resistance than a young person’s; the experience of living ages all except Jade. On the stretching desert of your skin, he locates your lungs with routined practice. His unnaturally-colored silver skin looks like a spider brooch upon your human-hued skin.

Electromagnetic energy builds at his fingertips. Tiny photons swirl in a circle with one another like joyous fishes. Their energy eclipses infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet until Jade reaches the type he needs. Gently, he pushes his palm into your back and slides it up to the top of your shoulder. He repeats that on the left and right. He repeats both a second time, capturing four photos.

When he pulls back, you are already shucking up your dressing gown. Raising it to your shoulders and crossing it in front of your nude breasts, you eat more dark chocolate as the machine behind you goes over the X-ray captured photos.

The black and white images slide into Jade’s left eye, blocking out his sight. His right eye watches you bundle yourself back up as the first photo moves vertically across his spliced vision, showing him more inch by inch. The right lung is clear, only the ghost of your ribs disrupt the image; the left lung is clear, only the ghost – (TUMOR).

Jade jerks so suddenly on the bed that you turn around, eyes round. You throw half of a questioning expression at him, face cut down the middle. Around the bedtime cigarette you are lifting up to your lips, you ask him, “Something wrong, Jade?”

In his left vision, a string of tumor (TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR) swims, multiple lines like a student assigned to write down a single word on a chalkboard as punishment. Hidden underneath that jumbled mess (TUMOR), a black and white image of your left lungs lies. The scanned picture is completely black besides the ghostlike shape of your ribs and the tiny spot of white cancer that sits between the second and third rib like a tiny Sun.

Jade does not dream.

Irrevocably, this is a cement fact of his biology. There is no possible way for Jade Leech to dream. No stimulus in his software can make a true dream emerge from lines of code. Detecting from that certainty, what Jade sees beyond his closed eyelids must be a memory, even though Jade has never lived through this before.

In Jade’s ‘dream’, you are with him – as is congenitally correct and true, you two are always with one another. From the pockets of breathable palazzo pants, you are fishing out your sunglasses. The frames sit on your nose and ear notches, covering your eyes with black hexagons. You look like an insect.

Maybe, Jade has fabricated this world. Research has shown that the human body does not create new faces for the actors in their dreams but rather picks out strangers to act in their inner films. You are all he has ever known, so of course you would be the star of Jade’s motion picture. And, you do remind him of an attractive movie star.

Sunglasses donned, you take to surveying the scenery surrounding the two of you under a bright, cloudless sky. Sand lies below and across. In glittering divots and hills, nature has laid a stippling of gold as far as the human or robot eye can see. From the advanced height you two share together at the top of one of Namib Desert’s hills, it is quite a magnificent sight of bareness.

“Less shrubs than last time,” you comment, mouth surprisingly empty of a cigarette and face twenty years younger.

“Yes, the desertification has certainly increased. Officials report a 2.7 percentage uptick. Even the speciocide on turnera oculata raised many praises and received an opening headliner last month in February,” Jade comments, face the same as always has been and always will be.

“You think that truck we passed by were Purgers?”

“One of the young gentlemen in the back of the cargo bed was indeed holding a flamethrower. The probability is at least 62 percent.”

“Sick bastards.” Sand flies in sprinkles like splashed water. You reposition your foot to lean on the heel. “The ants are invasive, not the flowers.”

“I’m sure that they will be targeting that next, Master.”

Jade has forgotten to mention that it is not just you, him, and the sand in this ‘dream’. Though his gaze has been hooked in deeply to you – analyzing each twitch and jump of your facial features from the hairs on your eyebrow to the motion of your chin; right now your facial expression is expressing deep, bodily hatred – there is another person outside of the high, out-of-reach bubble crafted by Jade. He can be found in the expanse of sand beyond the hill.

The chauffeur stands with his hip snug to the driver’s side-view mirror. He is different from the chauffeur you two had yesterday. He has a slender scar that bisects his eye, deep enough where it is a pink on his brown skin. For the hour-and-a-half drive from the motel, the driver had been narrating stories on how you could get a scar just like his if you messed around with X, Y, or Z; his words were not articulated with teasing advice but jaded ritualistic habit; interestingly, Jade notes, he even used cactus needles as an origin for his scar but cactus are extinct. Packaged together in the backseat, you and Jade both held his sharp gaze where it cut like a knife towards the two of you in warning.

What about a lion? Could you acquire a scar like that from a lion? His left eye is partly slumped in his socket as if what did injure him permanently altered the position of the ball. Packaged in the rear view mirror like a comic strip, that uneven gaze stared into unevenly colored eyes. It would. If there were any lions left to hand out scars.

Now, the scarred man stands with his arms folded, looking out with disapproval at the nudeness of the desert beyond him. His background check assures that he has done this job for five years, seasoned without any misfortunate slipup. Still, the dimensions of the gun the man has strapped to his hip settle into Jade’s ‘brain’ with a detailed outline of how to dismantle it – if that becomes necessary.

Jade stops surveying the company when you speak. “Oculata … I know that word, don’t I?” Your knuckles are pressed firmly into your lipsticked lips.

Without physically pacing, you pace around in your mind. “Oculata, oculata, oculata,” you repeat, firm each time.

“Master,” Jade says with soft urgency.

“Oculata … Ooo-cuuu-lata. Oculata? Oculata … having eyes. Ah! Having eyes. That’s what it means.” You snap in the midst of your epiphany. You look towards Jade. “Yes, Jade, what is it?”

“Master, I believe we have gotten unlucky.” His hand points out towards the horizon.

When you follow the direction of his index, your heartbeat exceeds the typical amount of beats per minute. For six minutes, Jade measures its pumping fluctuations as both of you silently watch the king of the jungle descend down a sandy hill. Imprints of his paws are birthed with each step and follow after the lion like a blood trail. The blood in your veins is turbulent like a pinched hose, terribly anxious.

“Master?”

“…”

“Master, if –.”

“Jade. In your own words, without paraphrasing from the internet, describe to me the look of turnera oculata. Do-uooo it … in the form of a haiku,” you order, snapping your fingers at the end of your command. Below, your chauffeur has just crossed himself and locked himself inside the company’s limousine.

It takes a few precious moments, but Jade eventually formulates a haiku. He articulates, “A bleeding yellow. A sun eclipsed by needles. The eye of nature.” When you request for him to make another one without using any of the previous words, Jade vocalizes, “These dry petals see. Morning's canary splendor. In this desert heart.” You clap quickly yet quietly; it is like a reward.

By now, the lion has cautiously ventured to the middle of the bowl the desert hills have constructed. It is smartly not inching closer to the limousine, animal instinct on high alert towards a vehicle. However, the lion is obviously interested in the company. He is out of his element without scrubland to hide underneath or behind.

Instead of heeding this opportunity, you continue on, “I was sure you might slip up and use the definite article, ‘the’, again but you did a marvelous job of avoiding repeated word choice!” Turning, you smile at Jade. Sunlight illuminates the edges of your hair style like licks of flame. “Your efficiency is always praise worthy.”

“Thank you, Master.” Is that perhaps a verbal nudge in the situation – you are strangely making note of his efficiency – perhaps telling Jade that he should get the job done. He won’t ask so instead he verbally spars. “Human errors are a continuous trifle. It is most gratifying that I will never have to genuinely deal with such a thing. Is it … Is it difficult?” He shifts his vocal stereos to playfully pitying at the last sentence.

“You ass,” you smile radiantly. However, it drops when you notice the lion has not rushed off to some unseeable part of the desert. He seems to have found contentment in his prowl here, obviously anxious of both of you but not backing down from his clear trek to the southwest of Namib Desert. It’s been in the area for enough minutes where the chauffeur will be legally required to report the sighting.

“Thought we’d make out with better luck today,” you grumble.

“Master?”

Jade offers, outstretched, the .375 caliber rifle, unhooking it from the strap on his back.

“Yeah … yeah.” Despondent, you take the weapon in your arms. “Guess it is about that time, ain’t it? We can’t return home empty-handed. Business retreat was exclusively paid for … the suits won’t be happy to know I didn’t hunt the game. Nothing to do but play along.”

“Some of the most toxic animals protect themselves through camouflage.”

“Ain’t that just the way~.” The scope and your eyeball bisect each other in perfect ratio. With the practiced precision that you use to commence lining up for a shot, it makes Jade remember that old gossip talk that he heard in the staffroom, said between bites of donuts and sips of coffee, What does a robotic engineer and professor need to know how to shoot a gun for?

The lion goes down, sending waves of sand jumping up. It is a clean shot between the eyes; the lion certainly felt no pain. Jade’s focus is pulled away when the source of your tumor, a single cigarette, is placed directly in his line of sight.

“Don’t you remember our agreement? After I kill something, you have to light my cigarette for me.”

Jade’s eyes fly open.

Greeted by the sight of his bedroom, Jade steps off the platform of his charging pad and discards his ‘dream’ like a dog shaking water off his fur. Polygons of sunrise light cuts from his window. In the fleeting stillness of daylight — 5:00 shining red next to his terrarium — and absence of demands, Jade stands perfectly still with a sense of something missing from his components washing over him.

His face is white with terror. His eyes dull with lifelessness.

Then, he shakes that off too and ventures downstairs to go make you two pancakes and a sunny side up egg.

You once told him that ‘progress is not linear’. You had illustrated this point to him with the cherry glow of your cigarette, waving and cutting the fire through the air to make a graphical visual of moving up then moving down then moving back up again. Fluctuations and setbacks can either stir someone very high or they can cause someone to go low. It is never perfectly straight like laundry.

That one graph confounds Jade to no end. When you construct something, the progress is linear. Staring at the empty dining chair beyond him, he finds himself confounded once again with progress’s inevitable immodesty. Today is 11/6/2182 and you have not come down for breakfast. He has been waiting for exactly 0:59:59 and, now in a slow blink, he has waited for 1:00:00. One whole hour and you are not here.

There have been instances where you miss or skip breakfast. But, the preface of yesterday — seeing you wearing an outfit for the first time in a long while and seeing a freckle of cancer growing in your lungs — leaves him wondering if there is a disrepair in his systems. You started on such a high and ended on such a low yesterday. Progress is not linear.

His sensors glance across the intimately small round table. Past the butter tray shaped like a cow and towards the plate where your pancakes and sunny side egg are cold and deflating. Jade blinks once. The dish remains uneaten and at room temperature in front of him. Not even a warm cigarette is light to melt the ice that has held him in place for an hour.

At the bottom of the trash, the food looks … sad. How illogical to add an emotion to the sight of carbohydrates and protein sloshing down into the pristine white trash bag. Jade places the plate full of syrup blood streaks into the sink and makes a small, unusual trek to your bedroom — to check if everything is alright.

He won’t fail the purpose of his intentional design. He was manufactured in a factory, built on front line assembly, and given the inputted task: Take Care of my Master.

(MASTER.)

There is no fathomable way that Jade Leech will allow himself to fall short of this robotic Manifest Destiny.

Jade knocks his artificial knuckles against the front of your door. Following proper etiquette, he takes a step back and waits until you respond to his call. His ears are awaiting to receive the sound of your vocal cords. There is something spiritual in how your voice manages to scrub out any rust left inside his body.

But, he receives no answer. And after he waits the polite amount of minutes, tries again with three, sharp yet spaced out knocks, he has still not received an answer. What a dilemma.

Jade is permitted to enter your bedroom without explicit permission. However, with the way things concluded on his birthday yesterday, it would be illogical to not anticipate that some of the parameters that Jade is allowed to walk freely have not been closed to him now. You might not want to see Jade for a week or … even a month.

Jade finds his knuckles raising without input, knocking thrice again. “Master, I apologize for my overstepping behavior and pushing out boundaries. I would like to make amends today for yesterday.” There is, once again, no response.

The silence is so loud, it's deafening. That oxymoron emerges in Jade’s artificial synapses. He cannot help but judge it as an appropriate expression. The silence in your absence is deafening. He would rip out the wires in his ears if you ever left.

Forehead pressing to the door, Jade soliloquies loud enough to be heard, “Master … (Name). Your health is a great concern to me. Yesterday, I inadequately expressed where this concern of mine stems from. I credited the source towards code and etiquette. My inputs are inert, and they always will be as my sole job is to take care of you above all else. Yet, underneath all that, the origin of my concern comes from the concrete fact that I am in love with you, (Name). I have been in love with you for so long. For ten thousand upon ten thousand minutes, for hundred upon hundred weeks, I cherished you solely.”

He angles his head so his ear lies on the wooden door. Nothing stirs beyond cedar barriers.

“I have covered this through ritualistic self-assurance that I cannot fully comprehend the full scope of what ‘want’ or ‘desire’ is defined as, not defined in a dictionary, but defined inside of a heart. My ‘heart’ pumps, not blood, but solely electricity, the binary code of zeros and ones, and the devotion that I have for you. Human sentimentalities sometimes allude me, but I have reassurance through one fact that I feel the most, above all other emotions. I love you. My love is perhaps not a perfect replica by human standards. However, its existence I am certain of. Though it is not easily achievable, I want to make you as happy as you can possibly be. I want you to have no worries that must be burned through with a cigarette. If you would permit – command me the allowance – I would like to share this love that I feel for you with you, (Name).”

After a minute, 00:01:00, has passed, Jade slowly turns the knob of your bedroom door in his hand. He lifts his head from the wood. Through the open mouth of the door, he gazes upon your lonely mattress with resignation. Faced with emptiness, Jade thinks to himself, I should have never said something as loose-tongued as that. I will permanently delete any urges to repeat that verbal mistake.

In replacement of family portraits, you have hung up frames of taxidermy that display a series of brilliant butterflies and moths, from the Adonis Blue Butterfly to the Yellow Horned Moth. His sensors trail over them. Such fragile specimens. Jade, then, closes the door and departs from his previous expressed, petulant folly of love.

It is for the best that my Master did not hear that.

In his trek through the hallway, palm gently cupping the log banister as he steps, Jade’s ears acutely pick up a soft murmur of music. ‘In the fake plastic earth .. that she bought from a rubber man.’ His eyes flicker towards the door of your office. When you select this as his and your home, you specifically wanted a house made of authentic wood, nothing blended with plastic. The material creates a bright tap sound against his synthetic knuckles thrice, clear like a bell.

Can you hear that over the music? There is no certainty, so his hand finds the doorknob innately. Jade misses you fervently and all you did is skip breakfast. Welcomed in, the sound of Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees rains off the horn of your record player. ‘It wears her out. It wears her out.’

You are sleeping, head down on your desk, still in yesterday’s dressing gown.

He lifts the needle off the record. It is impressive to see a model two hundred years old still functioning. When he is two hundred years old, will he still function? Avoiding making a single miscalculating step, Jade travels effectively through the mess until he reaches the front of your desk.

At least you snuffed out your cigarette before falling asleep. There was a time you neglected to make sure all the ashes were firmly pressed and cooled. It started a pocket-sized fire and ate the side of the pages of Fahrenheit 451 like a munching caterpillar. Jade had extinguished the fire calmly, and his reward was you giddily throwing your arms around his neck and laughing at the absurdity of it all.

The cigarette that is on your ashtray is snuffed out thoroughly and cooled. It is too close for comfort however. Some of your hair is even lying in wisps over the item. Jade relocates the tray to the right corner of your desk when his sensors happen to notice a slight irregularity in your sleeping position.

Your head is using your left arm as a pillow. Your raw, un-lipsticked lips press delicately into the elbow sleeve and you breath out soft puffs of carbon dioxide. However, what draws Jade’s instantaneous attention in and causes him to pause is the polaroid clenched in your limp right hand.

He won’t move it. Nothing in this room shall be disturbed without explicit permission. Jade turns to finalize the motion of setting the ashtray down on the right desk corner. Yet, hand and tray still hovering in the air, he realizes that he has broken that outlined rule with the slightest misguided concern.

But, the complexity of caretaking is one given to his hands. With their fake, plastic, and ivory skin, with their tiny train of beetle-shaped steel joints, each of his phalanges has been designed specifically to care for you. They are the ones who cook, clean, and care for solely his Master, for you. Aegis puppets his hands. The polaroid slips into them all too easily.

Besides this one, Jade has never held a physical photograph. Memories are captured on cellular devices and immortalized in harddrives forevermore. Even when the life force of memories starts to leave the body like evaporating rain, citizens have always counted on the deathlessness of digital photos.

This photograph’s paper is fragile. It feels similar to pages in a book. On the back, it says: 11/5/2151. On the front, it shows …

ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR.

The very hand meant to care for you is the one that wakes you up suddenly. In his panic, Jade had slammed the photograph face down upon your desk and roused you sharply out of sleep. Each circuit in his system races hot white sparks up and down like a flurry of insects when a rock is lifted up. Bugs skitter under his skin, tickling nausea. Something in his ‘mind’ has been unshrouded, much like a raised rock.

Your head rises too. Groggily, you peel sections of untamed hair out of your face and peel open suctioning lips with a yawn. Your empty right hand twitches on the desk, trying to recollect what it has lost.

Jade wishes he could observe you more, coming undone from sleep, but he is grappling violently with memories he has lost coming back to him. His ‘brain’ – a collection of harddrives and his central processing unit – is experiencing a unique headache, unlike anything he has felt before. Clawed, his left hand grips and digs hard into the skin over his left eye. He feels like he is going to overload.

Five years ago, Jade knew a life beyond the dead woods of Quebec. Five years ago, Jade helped to outline terms for a tense contract with the vice-president of the United 54 States of America. Five years ago, Jade lit your cigarette.

“Jade? Jade, are you okay?”

Though he always wants to appear pristine for you, the answer is no. He is not okay; he thinks he hasn’t felt okay in a long, uncalculated time. Looking up from the ground – because somehow all those digital memories started to push down upon him like a hydraulic press and he finds himself in a pile on top of your miserable notes and books – Jade peers at the single hand outstretched towards him with the aid of his sole right eye.

Instead of grasping it, he grapples with the impossibility that Jade – a machine – managed to achieve such a humane defense mechanism as repression. There’s no way, is there?

His fingers dig hard in his face, folding silicone, yearning to wrench his left eye out. Anything to get back his unconscious protection of blocking out unpleasant memories from his ‘mind’ – anything to rip them from his body. He is a broken man.

“Jade, why are you on the ground? Let me help you up. Come on.” Your voice is so tenderly soft. He has never known a more comforting voice than yours. Yet, all he can remember is your piercing scream from last night, “Get the fuck out before I dismantle you!!”

On uncertain pistons and metal, Jade forces himself to stand. With a trembling metal ulna and radius, he forces his gloved hand to drop by his side. He blinks at you. You are startled into silence, leaning off the edge of your chair with a hand that wants to reach out but is too unconfident.

“Forgive me for such a display, Master.”

“... Jade.”

It is touching. That despite how monotone you are as a person, your concern will always shine through, solely for Jade.

“What’s wrong! Jade, let me help you!” But he is already retreating out the door, afraid.

He finds himself with his back pressed hard against the office door. His heart beats faster. It does not send out blood but it releases hot waves of white electricity that crackle and pop. The doorknob at his side jiggles as you turn it fruitlessly. Jade simply leans harder on the door, keeping it shut.

I cannot afford to lose my head over this.

Intentional, Jade’s lithe fingers reach up to his skull. Between the field of hair roots, he separates a section to reveal a river of pallid synthetic skin. His non-growing fingernails dig down into the rubber until he hears a clink. Slowly, he grapples around to unpin the skin of his head off.

Less familiar with this process than he is removing his glove-hand, it takes a lengthy measurement of thirty-nine seconds for Jade to completely remove – or lose – his head.

He unhooks it from the peak of his skull down to where his shoulders and neck meet. It is like opening up a button-up flannel, unhooking each hook from their twin. He travels down to Cervical 7 and Thoracic 1 on his body region, undoing the last hook. Still hinged onto his body by the skin of his front neck, Jade delicately cups his face in front of him. Below his flickering spheres, absent of lashes or lids, he stares solemnly at the valley of molded synthetic mountains, a field of vanilla-almond plastic that resembles human features only because of the dips for his nose, the opening for his eyes, the protrusions for his ears. A Halloween mask to use and parade around as homo sapien.

It is a desolate and lonely portrait. A steel man boxed in a winding, wooden hallway, holding his humanity in his trembling hands. His face is a shining plate like that of a star. When Jade catches a reflection of himself in the corridor’s mirror, he turns away quickly.

It is not an inspiring impression he cuts in the reflection with his inhuman, gray skin.

This is a memory. It is not a dream. Juxtaposingly, Jade Leech is 99.9 percent positive that he has never lived through it.

He is looking at a Sun, without shying away from the splendid monstrosity that is glaring, piercing light. His eyes are round spheres, one painted yellow and other painted olive-brown. Because of his inhumanity, he can stare into the Sun before him longer than a hundred seconds without incurring any permanent retinal damage. There is no squishy softness in the back of his retinas to hurt.

The Sun abruptly moves away, relocated northeast. “Hey, don’t look too close now. You’re going to see something you don’t like.” In front of his artificial retinas, the visage of a lapis blue rectangle and dull indigo blue rectangle directly atop the lighter block in a skull of sleek gray intercept Jade’s focus.

Another prototype, Jade crafts his hypothesis. The highly educated guess shatters when a single gloved hand lifts up the welding mask. Incorrect. My Master. Much younger than fifty-two and younger than thirty-something, you look to be about freshly twenty-one. Your eyes squint impishly at him and your rows of clean, white teeth smile jubilantly at him.

Then, without warning, someone has pulled his Master away from him – like a fluid cane hooking around a character onstage and pulling them away. He corrects this fallacious interference. You have simply pushed yourself backwards on your office chair with wheels and are currently busying yourself with the tools and documents on your long, long desk.

Jade also corrects one last thing. He was not staring into the Sun, but rather into the eye of a lamp. There is still so much to learn about this growing world.

As he directs his focus off the lamp and back towards his Master, he is not discomposed to see you with a lit cigarette in your mouth. It is quite a comforting familiar sight in a strange world. He is taking in all the new inputs – the dozens of crushed energy cans littering the desk and the dissected baby chimpanzee with knives sticking out like a pincushion quilled with needles– and committing them to an infinite memory. You’re tapping a scalpel knife on the petite chimp’s engorged colon, breathing in a drag of nicotine, before asking, “Name?”

“JE-14500. Jade Leech.”

“Where are we right now, Jade?”

“MIT. Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Specifically, in Professor. (Last Name)’s personal laboratory on the fourth floor of the Stata Center.”

“Good. In what wing?”

“We are housed in the Artificial Intelligence wing.”

“Today’s date? Today’s weather? Today’s horoscope for Scorpio?”

“The day is November 5th, 2151. Today is scheduled to be sunny with no clouds. High temperatures of 77 and low temperatures of 59. The average temperature is 66.4. Today’s horoscope for Scorpios is ‘If you can dream it, you can do it. That's what you've always been told, what you've always believed, and now what you're about to prove. As if your already substantial intellectual prowess weren't enough to get you started, the stars are on your side too. They'll be waking you up this morning with the vivid memory of a dream, the kind that will stay with you all day, constantly making you wonder ‘what if?’, Master.”

“Hm.” You spear your scalpel through the chimpanzee’s stomach. Taking off your welding mask, you blow smoke over your shoulder and roll over to Jade who sits rigidly in a repurposed dentist patient chair. You are so beautiful. “And, are the stars on your side, Jade?”

“To be truthful, I feel the stars root for you more than they parade around for me. Prosperity is just around the corner.”

“Charming,” you bite. “Well, it’s no compromise to say that the stars have aligned for both of us today. We’ll share luck. What is your opinion on sharing with me, Jade?”

“I find it most agreeable.”

“We won’t just be sharing luck. We’ll be sharing a shelter and I am not the most agreeable roommate. I can be quite a thorn. If you’re truly fine with sharing, you are going to have to deal with some things you don’t like or are hesitant to look at.”

“Let me allay your worries,” Jade straightens his posture and stares unabashedly at you, “whatever conditions I happen to find myself experiencing, it will not be a struggle to me when I have a light like you to wash away any creeping darkness. Even if you are the darkness itself, Master.”

An odd human phenomenon happens next. It is one he hasn’t seen before, so he makes sure to document it thoroughly. You inhale your cigarette, it billows up and away from your face, and, without explanation, your cheeks have brightened to rosy apples. “Aaaaah~,” you moan as you collapse in your chair. Your hand covers up over your features, cigarette tight between fingers.

You glare at him from behind the spindly, uneven cage of your fingers, face reddening. “I’m certain of it now, I input too much data from My Man Godfrey. Even some of the dialects have been used already.” Your eyebrow is twitching. “I can’t have myself getting flustered at every turn just because I crafted your personality chip to mimic my favorite movie star.”

After a puff and drag, you seem to scrutinize him quite drastically. Before Jade can inquire about what he can do to ease your worries, you cheerfully state, “But, it’s really too late to change such a thing! Hehe!” You roll back to your desk. From there, you start fiddling with the chimp’s maroon-brown fingers, moving the thumb in circles. “I can’t help it – Godfrey is so handsome and I just love that movie.”

“If I may intrude upon the conversation, what is love, Master? It is listed as one of my side objectives in my system.”

“Now, Jade, you’re not intruding if we are the only ones engaged in conversation. Use an expression like … if I may shift the conversation towards, then whatever you want to say. Got it,” you instruct to which Jade carefully nods and notes. “But, I’ll answer anyway!”

It does necessarily ‘surprise’ Jade, but it does cause his eyebrows to raise slightly when you, resting your cigarette between your scowling lips, take your dominant hand and reach in the baby chimpanzee’s open chest cavity without the use of gloves and wrench out the fist-sized heart. The arteries follow along in swoops like fallen telephone wires. You take to cutting all those off with a scalpel before rotating to face Jade in your chair on wheels.

“Now.” You gesture with the infant chimpanzee’s heart and hold your cigarette by your armrest. You are so beautiful. “Those penny-pushing suits upstairs, downstairs, hell, even in the next room over, want you to be heartless. They don’t care about nature. They don’t care about life. The world as I know it is sliding on a rapid decline and it’s one destination to a world devoid of anything that lives or breathes, besides of course, the suits.

“Jade. You have been designed to be the ‘everything man’. What I have been given funding for is the objective to create a high-fashioned butler that will tie the ties of sycophants and scrub the shoes of socialites. You don’t need to think. You don’t need to feel. Trust me, I’ll produce a thousand of Jades just like that – Jades’ whose emotions are like a dead heartbeat. But, you, you who were meant for me.

“You are going to teach me to be less human. In return, I am going to teach you to become human. Do you understand me?”

Jade cannot breathe. He was not designed to do that. Despite this, he feels like he needs to take a deep breath to stabilize himself, soak in all the words you have said, and absorb their meanings. Without this anchoring breath, Jade can only punctually state, “No, Master.”

“Perfect.” You smoke in victory. “That means we’re on the right path.”

The right path? – “JADE!”

Jade’s eyes fly open.

Like a man running out of a burning building, he stumbles off his charging platform. Uncoordinated, his feet rock uneasily on flat ground as his head turns violently towards the door of his bedroom. That wasn’t in the memory-dream, was it? He did hear that in the present day, yes?

His eyelids open as far as physically possible as Jade listens to the harsh sound of a headboard smashing repeatedly into the wall. Underneath the thick cacophony, it can be inferred that the other noises he hears are rustling of sheets in the midst of struggle and that low animalistic groan that a dog might make before croaking. Jade has never thrown his bedroom door open so quickly. He wishes construction did not put such a loathsome obstacle like this in his way just for the meaningless sake of privacy.

Your door splinters in his cement grip like a toy underneath a hydraulic press.

Perhaps because it is 2 A.M. and he did not get to attend to it yesterday night, but Jade cannot help how all the routine questions rise to his mind. All the ones that he asks before checking the health of your lungs. Coughing up any blood; any dull or sharp chest pains; any shortness of breath, Master? They are all most certainly positive, as your fragile neck is squeezed between two grisly hands.

There are three men gathered around your bed, but only one kneels upon the sheets, holding your throat in a vice-grip. The other two restrain you in certain capacities, by arm or by leg or by hair. In 1.5 seconds, Jade already has each of their full government names displayed in his left eye. He knows each of their parents intimately, he knows each of their grades on every subject from preschool to university, he knows each of their place of employment and what their fucking managers’ last grocery lists contained on them – from a box of raw fusilli pasta to a four pack of toasted coconut flavored yogurt.

All that information of life is so overpowering, so touching. It is proof of the life cycle – the sequence of biological changes that occurs as an organism develops from egg to adult until death – and how humans are so infinitely complex, affecting those around them in a mythical phenomena that humans call the butterfly effect. When butterflies were not extinct, of course.

Jade would shed a tear if he could. Instead, he marches forward to rip the wings off each of their lives. His intentions are only halted when you stir on the bed, neck released by the startled preparator who stares at Jade like he is seeing a ghost.

You stir on the mattress, chest heaving. Jade’s attention is magnetized to you. Your head is upside down on the bottom edge of the bed, meaning you must have struggled, trying to reach the door only to be pulled away again and again by evil hands. A sliver of breast and nipple is nude from your seized and pulled nightgown.

Between shaking coughs, you manage to exhale important words, “Th-The — chuk-code!”

Something from underneath the rock crawls out – a small, instinctual insect he never knew had before. Jade’s gaze narrows with the weight of starting a robotic-assisted holocaust. He says, steady and ready, “Of course, Master.”

“No!” You shout in bed, jerking.

You are still held by the other two men. Limbs are pulled like you are a creature on the dissection table. Such a fragile specimen. The only source of light in the room is your red lamp which reflects tiny circles in your glassy eyes, twin orbs of sanguine, like a badly taken photo when the flash is reflected off the blood-rich retina.

Through the finger-shaped bruises on your compromised trachea, you say with quivering lungs, “The-They. They’re not go—government. Don’t. Don’t! use that code … Buh, Break the leader’s ankles. Kill the rest.”

Though it causes the three men to jolt in various states of stress, your words soothe Jade like a kiss. It is a concrete command that leaves no room for error and fills him with purpose. Bending into a servant’s bow, he punctually assures, “Of course, Master.” The orb of yellow fastened into his skull with metal wires shines like a tiny Sun.

“On a scale of one through ten, one being no pain and ten being unbearable, what is the pain that you would rate your coughs?”

“Jade.”

“Master, please, answer the question.”

“Jade. Jade,” you repeat firmer, pushing his hands off your body. The glare you point in his direction makes him think you are squinting in vision loss. Did something else obscure your health? Aging individuals sometimes need eyewear. “Jade!” Ah, he instinctively went to touch you again.

“It’s four. A four,” you seethe at him, hands up like talons resisting the urge to batter him away. Like clockwork, you pluck the package of cigarettes and the package of matches off the living room’s coffee table.

You mutter curses at the sheer lack of both slender, stick-shaped objects in each box. Jade dubiously notes that refills will need to be purchased soon. After you have striked one and puffed it into a hot, cherry glow, you turn towards Jade who watches you cough out – rather than smoothly exhaling – a cloud of nicotine, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde.

For that static moment, Jade takes the precious time to analyze you, as if he could not in the discord that was your bedroom. He takes his red-black stained thumb and index finger to peel back the heavy, black strand of hair from obscuring his left eye. The sensors in his gold eye rotate once like a telephone rotary dial. Without even touching you, Jade calculates your blood pressure and heart rate. An optimally healthy 122 mm Hg and an undisturbed 80 bpm. You are impenetrable like steel.

Retrohaling, you scan around the parlor as if searching for something or perhaps start to look at things through a new light. You even circle around the coffee table once too. It reminds him of laboratory chickens, walking around with their heads cut off.

You flick your cigarette after each coughing inhale. He watches it crumble and burn, like red sand breaking off from a jutted cliffside. When only a few breaths are left, you say, direct and firm, “Jade. How long has it been since we had a guest?”

“We have never had a guest in this cabin, Master.”

“Exactly!” You point your cigarette at him sharply. “So, go up there and start with some lighthearted small talk. Make him feel welcome, okay?”

Jade thinks he has an irregular guilty pleasure. He has no source for how it developed, but he has a specific appetite for violence. An appetency that can be only fed through seeing blood on his hand. Or perhaps this desire is only awakening in him, squirming like a bug under a shaded rock, because of whose blood is on his pale moon hands.

Tomorrow, he might have to spend six or seven hours working, scrubbing and wringing damp towelettes like a maid, to get all the stains out of your four-walled bedroom. There was blood everywhere. As if your red lamp gained the power of illuminating with the force of a Sun.

As his shoes click over to your office desk where the live dissection stirs, his comfort comes from seeing the broken stumps that are the man’s ankles. They are pointed and twisted in asymmetrical shapes. Torn and crumpled wings on an insect’s back.

“Sir, I truly don’t think you are going to get too far with that. Cigarettes are an awful vice.” The man ignores him, trying fruitlessly to strike a match, blubbering harder with each attempt. When the match flies out of his sweat-soaked hand onto the floor, Jade tuts in pity. “Humans always make such foolish decisions without considering the most probable outcome.”

He must have rummaged the matchbox out of your desk, slapping his hand across the lower surface until he found a drawer. It is not necessary for you and Jade to tie him down. There is no way he is going to manage a crawl. And, his conviction is too fearful to use untied fists to attack anyone.

The man has been in and out of odd paralysis since he has gazed upon Jade’s plastic face. As Jade cradles the sides of the man’s face gingerly, tilting his head backwards inch by inch until their eyes finally meet yet again, Jade witnesses that raw fear rise as cheekbone muscles tighten, increased blood flow branches out to the body’s peripheries, and the man’s pupils dilate enough to eclipse out blue in unconcealed, virgin adrenaline.

“Heart rate is 108 beats per minute. Rises to 111 when hearing my voice. Am I really such a phobia to you?”

There is no verbal answer. However, it is very telling when those dilated eyes pinch close firmly, oozing two water droplets, and the cigarette in his mouth starts to wobble back and forth wildly in his quivering lips.

“Be civil now. No one talks with their eyes closed. It is rude. Besides, you are the first human I have interacted with outside of my Master, and I would like to have a few discussions with you – to pass time.” The man cannot see it but that smarmy smile returns to Jade’s face – a slight scrunch of the slanted downward eyebrows that leaves a line above his tiny, razor teeth.

Nothing in the formulaic, fear-fueled adrenaline changes. The man continues trembling and jiggling. His features are pulled taut, tight-lipped and tight-eyed, in deep creases that refuse to open. Jade wants to make him spill.

“Come, come,” Jade rubs a comforting circle of red into the man’s left cheek, “I am equipped with dozens of dialogue enhancing programs and can speak up to between six thousand and seven thousand languages fluently. I assure you that I am a good conversationalist.”

A tear squeezes out and falls down the side of the man’s nose. “Really, there is no viable reason to cry. If you had simply anticipated the outcome, this situation would not be as devastating as you are experiencing it. Operational planning can stop one from being blindsided.”

Jade smiles placidly, fighting back against the laugh that so desperately wants to bubble up. “Did you really expect to get away with this without –?”

That causes a spillage.

“Get away with – Get away with? You’re inhuman. Fucking inhuman. Fucking Christ. You fucking monsters. Things like you shouldn’t exist. Shouldn’t exist. That inhuman bitch killed my father. She shot him five years ago and there was no justice. No fucking justice! Inhuman … She gets – She gets away with it. She gets to live out of the rest of her life in Canada while my Dad rots in the fucking ground! Inhuman, inhuman bitch, you fucking robots …”

Jade’s smile twitches at the corner. He starts to spill, laughing shamefully in fufu’s then freely in booming haha’s. His razor teeth glint like ice shards until he calms slowly, pinching his lips into a wobbly smirk. “Five years ago … I cannot recollect it perfectly. However, I do remember the rule of thumb that hostages make the best bargaining chips.”

Jade ducks backwards as a hand reaches up like a predator’s batting claw. It is unfortunate that Jade has never known the role of prey, for he cannot execute the facade of it convincingly. When the hand misses the mark, Jade strikes like an extinct owl capturing prey and squeezes the man’s wrist.

“Ack – Aaaagh!” Holding the body’s periphery, Jade considers changing the shape of this limb too. The man’s left tibia is snapped in three places like a badly-written ‘W’ and the man’s right tibia is half out of the meat sleeve of his flesh like a stick pulled off a corndog. Before he can act on uncommanded urges, you walk in with a hammer.

“Hey, play nice. Bad hospitality these days will spread to the neighborhood like wildfire,” you tease with a smile. It is a joke because there is no neighborhood; you live in an isolated cabin where no soul besides the two of you could hear a scream.

Jade vigilantly tracks your body’s steps, each one coy, as you move across the discord on the office’s ground. “Aack – Are you a robot too?” The disdain in the man’s voice makes Jade twist his wrist.

“Oya, that would be quite a plot twist, wouldn’t it?” You smile a slippery moon crescent at the man. Jade watches intently as you crouch down to the bottom of one of your numerous shelves. Going through your archives, you start to flip through records in your hand, completely distracted.

“Nothing in here is alphabetized,” you gripe.

“If you would like, I can find time to organize your records, Master.”

“How about tomorrow? Oh, here it is!” You stand, record and hammer in hand. “We can do it tomorrow. Make a little game of it and organize them together in alphabetical order!” Placing it delicately down on the phonograph player, the needle once deposited down on the track starts to send out the vibration sequence that makes up “Nessun Dorma” from the opera Turnadot. You close your eyes as if soaking in the melody.

“My prognosis is … My prognosis is …,” you raise your hammer to point towards your desk, music slowly encroaching with stretched lyrics, “this a revenge plot.” You bare yellowing teeth wolfishly in a pleased smile.

“Now, the other two, well, they’re obviously frustrated members of society. Maybe a job was overtaken by one of the Jades, and they thought ‘enough is enough’. Maybe, just resentment for the world as it is. I can sympathize. A bloodlust needed to be quenched in those young men, but it was not as intense as our leader here. No, he wants me dead for something more personal. No one wraps their hands around a person’s throat unless it is, personal.

“I killed someone you loved. Not a brother or sister. Too young for that. Not an uncle or aunt either. Father? Mommy?” The man’s responding rough jerks are ‘smoothed’ down by Jade, who presses him roughly to flatten out on the desk surface. “Doesn’t matter now though. You didn’t succeed.”

You stride over to the dissection table, each step deliberate, following along to the swelling opera. “Good thing too. In the event that I die of unnatural causes, a code is sent through Jade, connecting to every last robot worldwide to kill anything with a beating heart.” You tap the hammer gently on the side of the man’s face. “Do you understand the foolishness of all this?”

“You inhuman mo-monster.”

“We can’t all be humane in this century.”

Then, striking like an extinct cobra, you grab the man’s neck in your hand and force his head back. Jade watches as you subtly increase the strength of pressure applied. The man’s head leans over the edge of the desk and his forehead kisses Jade’s belt. It is only when the man opens his mouth, trying to suck up oxygen that won’t enter his nostrils, do you take the hammer and swiftly pierce it through the muscle tissue.

The man screams but it is drowned by the operatic symphony. The screams finally stop when the tissue disconnects from the body, waggling on the claw end of the hammer. Blood fills the man’s mouth. You take unoccupied hands; one of them is placed over the man’s mouth firmly and the other pinches his nostrils.

For the first time in his life, separate from his memories and separate from his dreams, Jade watches the life fade out, like a leisurely slow sunset, from a living person’s eyes.

Jade isn’t sure how it happens, perhaps he is dissociating – how revolutionary for a machine to experience such a unique, temporary disconnect from his mind – but the two of you find yourself outside on the cabin’s back porch on November 7th bitterly cold and dark morning. It is exactly 4:06 A.M and the temperature is negative 0.5 Celsius. Like the constant epilogue of each novel where you kill something alive, you are holding out a cigarette in front of Jade’s chest, the white tip awaiting him.

He pulls his glove-hand off and holds out the tip of his silver index. The first knuckle flicks open and a blue flame emerges out elegantly. Jade reattaches his skin as you pull the cigarette to your mouth.

Smoke clouds are already coming out of your mouth, crystalizing in the chill night air. However when the first smoke cloud made of carbon monoxide, nicotine, and formaldehyde blooms out from your peeling lips, you say softly, “I can delete it if need be.”

“Delete what, Master?”

“Anything you want me to delete.” You rub your face. “Anything from tonight. I’ll do it for you, Jade. I promise.”

“Why would I ever want to miss a moment that has you in?”

Though it was not his intent, his response causes you strife. It is an unforeseen variable to see you hunch so deeply into a moment of woe. A black puffer jacket conceals your lungs yet Jade watches the profound, hard sigh billow out all the same. Holding your head in your hands, your nude legs shake in the frigid cold underneath your elbows.

After exactly 00:06:15, you respond, “I don’t want you fearful of me … I’m not pleasant to see or be around. And, I don’t want you to remember something that makes you upset, even if it is just one tiny thing. Whatever you want gone, I can take that pain away. If you so desire, I have the ability to remove anything. You can keep whatever you want. I won’t overstep.”

Jade clasps the hand that holds your cigarette, bringing it away from your temple to smolder over his blood-stained dress pants, “All of it. I’ll keep all of it.”

You simply smoke in response.

Jade isn’t sure what time it happens, he manually shuts down his inner clock two minutes after you two finished your conversation, but while sitting on the back porch of the cabin, another unexpected visitor approaches the solitary solace you and Jade have carved into dead woods. The visitor is tiny and flitters around like a restless child. It has been a whole year since he has seen a visitor of this species.

The two of you built a bird feeder together in the first months living in this cabin. It had been marvelously fun. Measuring the cuts for each piece of wood was delegated to Jade while you worked on assembling the finished product. Jade always loves doing activities with you. Now, some of the aftermath rewards can be reaped, as Jade watches an American Goldfinch pick and snack on the bird seeds, his yellow coat fluffy and his black wings ruffling momentarily to shake off the cold.

“(Name), look.” Jade urges softly, even though he can tell by your healthy, deep breaths that you are asleep. “A goldfinch.” You remain comatose in sleep, curling into Jade’s shoulder. He won’t dare to be so intimate and slip in logical judgement by saying your name while you are awake.

The goldfinch stays with Jade until morning when the horizon begins to glow a brilliant yellow. Though it would hurt anyone else’s eyes, Jade stares unabashed ahead.

#jade leech #twisted wonderland x reader #twisted wonderland #jade leech x reader #twst jade

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girlkisser13 · 11 months ago

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hephaestus cabin headcanons

children of hephaestus

• OIL, SOOT, and GREASE STAINS EVERYWHERE.

• the have the most intense games of hide-and-seek in bunker 9.

• a lot of them lose limbs, become disabled in some way, or are born that way, and they often use it as a reason to build themselves cool robot prostheses and other tools to help them get around.

• along with the athena cabin, they come up with weapons and armory specifically for disabled demigods.

• they build advanced prosthetics for campers who have lost limbs in battle.

• they’re warmer than most demigods, even if they don’t have fire powers.

• they always know when someone is in need of a weapon and they just create it without thinking about it. like they just know when someone needs a weapon before they ask for it.

• they're the only ones who can pick out stuff from hephaestus's junkyard without getting hurt.

• everything, the cabin, the forge, the bunker, is 100% handicap accessible.

• they worked with the athena and hecate cabins to upgrade bunker 9 to allow better lighting, safer rooms, new areas to test weapons, etc. they wanted it to feel like an underground space station.

• they name each of their tools and inventions.

• on birthdays, they give each other personalized gadgets that solve everyday problems, like a self-tying shoelace or a self-stirring spoon.

• they design and wear fireproof clothing.

• they actually have numerous secret hideouts and mini-workshops hidden around camp half-blood (bunker 9 is the only one we know about).

• they keep detailed journals filled with sketches, ideas, and notes about their inventions, passing them down through generations of hephaestus kids.

• they build small, mechanical pets or companions that help them with tasks around the forge, each one with a unique personality programmed in.

• they all have a set of personalized tools that they've crafted themselves, often with special engravings or modifications to suit their style.

• they have made so many modifications to their cabin over the years that none of the original material is still there, and there’s a constant debate at camp as to weather it’s still the same cabin.

cabin exterior

• the cabin has an industrial look, with a mix of metals like iron, copper, and steel. rivets, bolts, and exposed beams are prominent features.

• life-sized metal automatons, resembling ancient greek warriors and mythical creatures, stand guard at the entrance.

• they have created intricate metal sculptures that decorate the cabin’s exterior. these range from small, detailed pieces to larger, more abstract art.

• the entrance has large, reinforced double doors, that are automated.

• these doors swing open smoothly despite their weight.

• they have a pulley system for lifting heavy materials, a retractable awning for shade, and a mechanical clock tower that chimes periodically.

cabin interior

• the floor is covered in spare parts and tools that never get picked up (unless somebody wants to use them for something).

• they have underground bunkers for bedrooms.

• the walls are adorned with gears, cogs, and blueprints of various inventions. some of the gears are part of intricate mechanisms that move or serve as storage spaces.

• their cabin has several fire extinguishers and a state-of-the-art ventilation system to manage the smoke and fumes from the forges.

• emergency buttons are strategically placed around the cabin to shut down all machinery in case of accidents.

cabin traditions

• every month they hold a competition to see who can make a device that fits a certain theme.

• they’re judged by a panel of five consisting of the head counselors of hephaestus, athena, hecate, and a volunteer counselor, as well as chiron.

• each judge judges something different on a scale of 1-5: safety and usefulness, ease of use and functionality, utilization of magic, presentation/looks, and on-theme-ness. chiron calculates and delivers the final score, which is the total points given by the counselors.

• the winner receives a medal and bragging rights (until the next competition), as well as first pick when it comes to tools each morning.

• anyone in camp is allowed to participate (though it’s mostly just the hephaestus and athena kids) and contestants have a week to create their contraptions, during which they have access to all the tools and spare materials in the hephaestus workshop (and later bunker 9) that nobody has yet claimed (whether for the competition or not).

• the event is taken very seriously by everyone involved, and even athena and hephaestus have been known to show up from time to time to watch from the shadows, but they always watch from olympus.

divider by @anitalenia

#percy jackson and the olympians #heroes of olympus #pjo #hoo #pjo hoo toa #pjo fandom #hoo fandom #pjo series #hoo series #pjo tv show #pjo disney+#pjo cabins #hephaestus #vulcan #hephaestus cabin #cabin nine #cabin 9 #children of hephaestus

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darkmaga-returns · 6 months ago

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Key topics discussed in this episode:

What Is Geoengineering?

Dane walks us through the science and purpose behind programs like solar radiation management (SRM) and stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), explaining how they are presented as solutions for climate change. However, these technologies involve dispersing toxic particulates, including aluminum, barium, and graphene, into the atmosphere, with dire environmental and health consequences.

The Role of Weather Control

We unpack the reality of weather warfare. Dane explains how engineered hurricanes, droughts, and floods are being used as tools of manipulation and geopolitical control. These weather events, far from natural, are destroying agriculture and displacing populations, with ripple effects across the globe.

Ozone Layer Depletion

Perhaps the most alarming revelation is the accelerating collapse of the ozone layer due to these programs. Dane provides evidence linking the chemicals used in geoengineering to the erosion of this protective barrier, which shields us from harmful UV radiation. Without immediate action, the damage could lead to irreversible environmental collapse.

The Human and Environmental Cost

Geoengineering is contributing to a rise in neurological diseases, respiratory issues, and immune system disorders in humans, as well as mass die-offs in animal and plant species. Dane shares compelling data on the presence of heavy metals in soil, water, and air samples, highlighting the connection between these toxic substances and declining biodiversity.

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vanesa · 27 days ago

Text

How I Customize Windows and Android

Windows: Rainmeter

Rainmeter Skins

Rainmeter | Deviantart

r/Rainmeter

Rainmeter is where I get nifty desktop widgets (skins). There are a ton of skins online and you can spend hours just getting caught up in customizing. There are clocks, disk information, music visualizers, weather widgets*, and more.

I get most of my skins from the links I posted, but they are by no means the only resources for Rainmeter skins. r/Rainmeter and Deviantart have some awesome inspiration.

This is what my desktop looks like right now:

Dock: Dock 2 v1.5

Icons: icons8 - this is probably the best free resource for icons I know of

"Good Evening [name]": Simple Clean

Clock: Simplony

* Note about weather widgets: Older Rainmeter skins that use old weather APIs will likely not work. The Rainmeter forums has information with lists of weather skins that do work.

Windows: Useful Things for Workflow

Flow Launcher - this is basically a search bar, app launcher, and even easy-access terminal all in one. The default hotkey is Alt+Space. I use this almost primarily to do quick calculations. There are a ton of plugins and I've barely scratched the surface with how I use it.

ShareX - This is my screenshot tool and I love it. Admittedly, I find it difficult to configure, but once I had it set up, I didn't really have to adjust it. You can create custom hotkeys to screenshot your entire screen, or to select your screen, or even use OCR. This has saved me a ton of time copying over text in images and making it searchable.

Bonus - Get Rid of Windows Web Search in the Start Menu: If you're comfortable with editing your registry, and you want to get rid of the pesky web results in Windows search, this fix is what I used to get rid of it.

Android: Nova Launcher

This is my main Android launcher that I've been using for almost as long as I've owned a smartphone, and it's super customizable. The best part is that it's free with no ads, and you can purchase premium at a one-time cost.

The main things I use it for are app drawer tabs, renaming apps, hiding apps, and changing the icons.

I've had premium for so long that I've forgotten what the features were, but looking at the website, the one feature I use is app folders.

This is what my phone homescreen and app drawers look like:

Time/Weather: Breezy Weather

Calendar: Month: Calendar Widget (I got this on sale for like 30 cents once but there are a plethora of good calendar apps out there)

Icons: Whicons - White Icon Pack

Advanced Customization

Further things to enhance your customization experience to look into include:

Flashing a custom Android ROM (e.g. LineageOS)

Give up on Windows & install Linux instead (Ubuntu is a good one to start with)

Android app modification: ReVanced apps (includes Tumblr), Distraction Free Instagram

Miscellaneous notes under the cut:

None of these links are affiliate links. These are all tools I happen to use on a daily basis and I'm not being paid to promote them.

Install Rainmeter skins and programs I recommend at your own risk. Before altering Windows, such as editing the registry, make sure you have everything backed up.

The Windows web search fix works on my Windows 11 machine. I don't know if it works for Windows 10, but I do know I was able to disable it in Windows 10 at some point, so your mileage may vary.

Install non-Play Store apps at your own risk. (Although in my opinion, open source APKs are less sketchy than some apps on the Play Store...) Always check where you're downloading APKs form!

The wallpaper for my desktop and phone are custom wallpapers I made myself.

(At the request of @christ-chan-official)

#original #windows 11 #android #rainmeter #long post

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the-rat-of-all-time · 6 months ago

Text

SHIT TON OF OC STUFF (for part 2)

Part 2 protags

Astor

Arcana: death

Any (they/them pref)

enby

Pan, demi

Powers and abilities: weather manipulation, can control weather and elements of it (think weather report from jojo without the snails). Incredibly proficient at close and long range fighting using knives and kicks, also has incredible quickness, agility and stealth

Appearance: a short young person with light brown skin and eyes with dark curly hair with bangs that almost always cover eyes. Tends to dress in baggy and androgynous grunge/streetwear like clothes. In their super suit they wear a large white hooded cloak, under they have pants with holsters for equipment and a tank top. They tend to be very blank faced, but some emotion does come though mainly in their eyes

Backstory: the second child of Avia and another character I have yet to write (yes I know she’s trans dont worry she can still do that bc reasons). When their parents got on the bad side of an incredibly powerful villainous dictator. The villain would end up getting revenge by imprisoning their father who was presumed dead, killing their sister and damaging their vocal cords beyond repair even by their mother. Filled with hopelessness and worrying that in grief that she’d hurt Astor, Avia ran away leaving Astor into the care of Jackson. Now in an incredibly emotionally volatile state which was not helped after a former friend and crush was killed in a fight, or at least they thought… Now they are a part of the rose program, a program made to monitor and help superhumans who could pose a threat to themselves or others.

Personality: many heroes assume astor a blank faced robot who feels and shows nothing, and many villains (who have not encountered them) assume they are a nepo-baby who never worked for anything and whines when things don't go their way. In actuality they are nothing more than an at-risk youth who has trouble expressing and processing their emotions (especially after losing their voice) and has trouble socializing and not shutting people out. In fights they move fast and efficient, but there are times when it gets too much and they start to lose control and go feral

Likes:

Art mainly wood carving, making clothing and cooking

Their friends (especially Fuapillon)

Jackson

Their memories of their father and sister

Rain

Music (mainly hip-hop and rap)

Cats

Dislikes:

their mom (kinda)

Alcohol

Crowds

Assumptions

causing harm and killing

The man who took everything

Not having control

Scary movies

Fuapillon (please let me know if this is a slur or something i just smashed together the french word for fire and butterfly)

Arcana: the lovers

they/she

transgender

Pansexual

Also french (gross i know)

Powers and abilities: increased processing. Their brain is able to take in and process information superhumanly fast. They have a knack for machines and mechanics that shines with her “armure de papillon” which are mechanical suits that tend to have incendiary attacks and incredible speed

Appearance: a very small young woman with dirty blond wavy hair (usually messy) and blue eyes. Usually Wears bright feminine summer clothes, biker wear and/or mechanic gear. In her super wear she wears a custom leather jacket (a gift from astor), goggles and tight spandex all with mechanical modifications that allows her to put on her suits. Her mechanical suits differ in appearance, but they always feature butterfly like elements and wings, and a red fiery color scheme

Backstory: born and raised in south france they were always a strange child with boundless energy and curiosity which led to them discovering and sneaking into a secret facility. After a mistake they ended up seeing something they shouldn't when they fell into a portal to the unknown. They were not expected to make it until they were mysteriously rescued. No one knows what they saw, but it was clear that it had a profound effect on their mental state. After a brief stint at a mental hospital they were taken to the rose program for monitoring and rehabilitation

Personality: a bright and bubbly woman who tends to talk and act at a mile a minute. They’re an adrenaline junkie. After the incident at the lab they have gained a weird obsession with fire and butterflies and sometimes will get really gloomy and whisper very strange and ominous things about fire, death and rebirth, but they have been doing it less especially after getting more help and support.

Likes:

Butterflies

Fire

Their armors

Their motorcycle

Friends

Astor

Rollercosters

Going fast in general

Halloween

Scary movies

Dislikes:

Not much

Tianming

Arcana: the emperor

he/him

cis/het but not beating allegations

Powers and abilities: mirror travel: can travel through any reflective surface of any size, if he wants to travel with or put a person or object in the mirror dimension the other person/object has to be able to fit. Mirror clones: can clone self with reflection as long as he is being reflected. The clones are fragile and will have noticeable differences. Has many gadgets to help fight as well as acrobatic and dance skills he uses to fight and confuse

Appearance: a shorter man of chinese descent with short black hair and brown eyes. His super suit is a traditional Bian lian costume with some slight modifications. Uses the masks to confuse enemies and add further effectiveness to his cloning power. He tends to wear

Backstory: grew up with his sister and abusive father. One day he had enough and he burnt down the apartment with his father inside. Soon after his sister was put into foster care, and he joined superhuman society where he became fast friends with astor. He would eventually find himself in an abusive relationship with a psychic where his mind was shattered, after recovery it was decided that he was left too mentally volatile and he was put into the rose program

Personality: a kind man and just a bro in general he wants the best for people, and likes to see the good in people which does lead to problems. After his mind was shattered he is prone to mood swings and outbursts.

likes:

Love

Dancing

His sister

His (second) girlfriend

His friends

Basically everyone else

Helping

Seeing people improve themselves

Baseball

Dislikes:

Evil

Feeling useless

Suffering

When his costume is too hot

Morgan

Arcana: the moon

she/her

Bi-curous

Powers: Crystallokinesis (earthbending with crystals). Specializes in long and range attack and defense as well as battlefield control, a little lacking in close range. Also strangely good at thrifting

Appearance: a taller girl who's on the chubbier side. fair skin, brown somewhat curly hair and purple eyes. Darker gothic fashion. Same gothic fashion carries over to super suit with a tighter armored spandex with a jacket and mask

Backstory: one of thee kids along with her twin sister and older brother. Her father was a villain (the same one who cut off Celestina’s arm) and her mother is a prison nurse that he seduced. Her and her siblings were adopted by Juliet and Celestina. Her brother was a model student and is a pillar of the new generation of heroes. She now feels a large expectation on her to be like him. One day for unknown reasons her sister snapped and attacked. In the fight she lost control and all her pent up emotions burst forward causing her to brutally “kill” her sister. She was put in the rose program filled with intense guilt for her sister, but her sister only feels rage back.

Personality: she is very gloomy and is very guilty and sad after her sister. Very sarcastic and kind of a jerk at times. Feels a large amount of pressure and stress from the society around her. Though at the end of the day she is a kind person with the heart of a hero, she just doesn't like to show it

Likes:

Fashion

Her brother

Her friends

Parties

Anime and manga (a secret she takes to the grave)

Singing

The beach

Pizza

shopping

Dislikes:

Expectations

People who don’t dress well

Weirdos

The L

The smell of piss (explains the above)

Overpriced clothes

Other part 2 things

Takes place on an island in lake Michigan with a small superhuman community and school.

All characters are in their senior year of school and are 18 (precautionary measure)

Takes place 20+ years after part one

Music theme is hip-hop, R&B and rap

I hope to release part3 MCs,more info on part 1, general worldbuilding and info on other important characters soon (look in ether comments or rbs also the tags under this one)

#text post #help #ocs #my ocs #oc shit #arcana #arcana part 2 #writing

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tikiface · 8 months ago

Note

do you have any thoughts about what Potemkin's past/childhood was like?

DO I? Boy howdy- There doesn't seem to be much canon information on Potemkins past/childhood besides:

-He was born the way he is. No genetic modification or augmentation. Man just won the genetic lottery for SWOLE.

-He was a slave (for who knows how long, but likely his entire life)

-Potemkin learned a lot of his moves from Gabriel (including Buster lmao) seemingly before he was freed in GGx, So that means Pot and Gabriel had known each other quite well before the world tournament.

So my HCS are -Weather or not he was born into his place in the caste system, he had been a slave since childhood. He was a particularly useful farmhand in his younger years because of his unusual strength, until he was noticed and bought by Zepps military for that exact reason. -Potemkin is particularly well-spoken, intelligent, politically and philosophically savvy, so in spite of his captivity, he must've had opportunities to educate himself. I like to think he payed particular attention to other soldiers wisdom. Gabriel could have had a hand in educating him past his assigned purpose in the old regime.

-Potemkin was forced into to Zepps military at the ripe old age of 11... because he was already much bigger and far stronger than most fully-grown men by that age. He didn't look like a kid, but he certainly still acted like one. Shy, scared, inexperienced, and profoundly unable to cope with stress.

-It didn't take long for Gabriel to notice someone managed to put a FUCKING CHILD in HIS military training program. Angered and disgusted by this, Gabriel secretly excluded Potemkin from training and instead left him some place safe to read books during training hours. All while being careful about catching the attention of his superiors.

-Gabriel eventually did train Potemkin though, so that he may survive whatever the regime set him out to do. Gabriel tried not to be overly-involved in Potemkins life directly (lest his superiors take Pot and put him under the command of someone far less forgiving, or find out Gabriel has secretly been acting treasonous in other ways), but he pulled strings in the background so that he could keep an eye on him and loosely stay in charge of Potemkins 'training' to keep him relatively safe and enriched with a few actual childhood experiences… like reading fiction, drawing, and encouraging his childlike hopes and dreams.

-potemkins strength started out unusually accelerated but otherwise manageable in his childhood and teens, so he was able to enjoy normal pencils, sit in normal chairs, and wear normal clothes for a time. It wasn’t until adulthood where it started to become a visible problem and his strength grew so quickly that he frequently began to break everything by accident, even while trying as hard as he could to be careful. Doors, tables, clothes, documents, furniture, infrastructure. It was not a fun time for him, constantly frustrated that he couldn’t control his own strength. Gabriel found the property damage expense on the old government pretty funny though. Potemkin was unintentionally tearing down the establishment from the inside out.

-eventually the combination of wearing his limiters and simply mastering being suuuuper careful allowed him to have the finesse he has today, but its something he’s still not allowed to take for granted.

#im normal #potemkin #potemkin guilty gear #gabriel guilty gear #yeah

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

Text

This story originally appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In July 2012, a renegade American businessman, Russ George, took a ship off the coast of British Columbia and dumped 100 tons of iron sulfate dust into the Pacific Ocean. He had unilaterally, and some suggest illegally, decided to trigger an algae bloom to absorb some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—an attempt at geoengineering, a tech-based approach to combating climate change. It was a one-off, the largest known geoengineering experiment at the time, and a harbinger for more to come.

Now a startup called Stardust seeks something more ambitious: developing proprietary geoengineering technology that would help block sun rays from reaching the planet. Stardust formed in 2023 and is based in Israel but incorporated in the United States.

Its approach is novel: Most geoengineering research today is led by scientists in the US at universities and federal agencies, and the work they are doing is more or less accessible to public scrutiny. Stardust is at the forefront of an alternative path: One in which private companies drive the development, and perhaps deployment, of technologies that experts say could have profound consequences for the planet.

Geoengineering projects, even those led by climate scientists at major universities, have previously drawn the ire of environmentalists and other groups. Such a deliberate transformation of the atmosphere has never been done, and many uncertainties remain. If a geoengineering project went awry, for example, it could contribute to air pollution and ozone loss, or have dramatic effects on weather patterns, such as disrupting monsoons in populous South and East Asia.

But as global temperatures rise, public and scientific sentiments are shifting. If those temperature trends continue, governments or private entities may ultimately use geoengineering to alleviate or avoid the worst impacts of extreme weather, including deadly heat waves, firestorms, and hurricanes. And whoever deploys the technology will need to keep it up for decades while pent-up greenhouse gases gradually dissipate or are removed.

Few outsiders have gotten a glimpse of Stardust’s plans, and the company has not publicly released details about its technology, its business model, or exactly who works at its company. But the company appears to be positioning itself to develop and sell a proprietary geoengineering technology to governments that are considering making modifications to the global climate—acting like a kind of defense contractor for climate alteration.

Stardust is moving ahead amid few national and international rules and limited oversight, and a recent report by the company’s former climate governance consultant, Janos Pasztor, called for the company to increase its transparency, engagement, and communication with outsiders. The report provides rare insight into the reticent company. But, so far, Pasztor told Undark, the company has not met all of his requests. Stardust still needs to implement his recommendations, and “be as transparent as possible, be available proactively to respond to questions people may have, and also to engage with other actors,” he said, because they do not, or not yet, have a “social license” for geoengineering activities.

The company is led by CEO and cofounder Yanai Yedvab, a former deputy chief scientist at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, which oversees the country’s clandestine nuclear program. Through Eli Zupnick, a communications officer hired by the company, Yedvab never accepted Undark’s many requests for an interview. But in an emailed statement to Undark sent via Zupnick, Yedvab wrote: “Stardust is a startup focused on researching and developing technologies that may potentially stop global warming in the short term.” The company, he continued, is “studying and developing a safe, responsible, and controllable solar radiation modification” and “our goal is to enable informed and responsible decision making of the international community and governments.”

Despite Stardust’s low profile, the company rejects being referred to as “secretive.” “Publishing all the products of our research without any exception is critical,” Yedvab wrote, adding that the company is “unwaveringly committed” to publishing results “as one of the measures to gain public trust.” Stardust has not published any of its research at this time, but Yedvab stressed they will do so once “scientific validation is concluded” on all of their results.

For decades, researchers have explored a variety of approaches to hacking the climate. Today, the most common approach is a type of solar geoengineering that involves flying high-altitude aircraft or balloons to release reflective particles in the high atmosphere, well above the flight paths of commercial planes. The technique, known as stratospheric aerosol injection, requires deploying tiny, carefully chosen particles in precise amounts. In order to work well, the particles need to be periodically replenished.

Scientists have accumulated evidence for this approach by studying natural events that have flung small particles into the atmosphere. For instance, after an eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide hung in the atmosphere and measurably cooled the planet for more than a year.

The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, seen from Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide emitted during the eruption measurably cooled the planet for more than a year. Photograph: ARLAN NAEG/Getty Images

Thanks to studies of that volcanic activity, some scientists argue that the environmental risks of deliberately strewing sulfates in the atmosphere are well understood. Although there are potential health risks from the approach, they say, they are small in comparison to the health risks from climate change. “We know that sulfuric acid air pollution causes mortality, and we roughly know how much. There’s more than a century of studies. We’re very unlikely to be wrong about that,” said David Keith, head of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago and an advocate of geoengineering research. In a new study, Keith and his colleagues argue that the health risks of sulfate particulates in the atmosphere are heavily outweighed by the potential impacts of not deploying geoengineering technologies.

Stardust plans a similar approach, but with a proprietary aerosol particle that’s less well understood, in Keith’s view. The company plans to distribute the particles through a machine mounted on an aircraft, according to Pasztor, a veteran climate diplomat and policy expert at the United Nations and elsewhere. According to Pasztor’s report, which he published on LinkedIn in September 2024, the company is engineering the particle and a prototype of the aircraft mount, as well as developing a system for modeling and monitoring the climatic effects. Over the coming year, Pasztor wrote, the company is planning on advancing those technologies and testing those particles in the stratosphere.

Yedvab confirmed that they are working on the technologies, saying in a statement to Undark that any such experiment would be done in a “contained, non-dispersive manner,” meaning that its particles would not be strewn over a wide area. It also committed to publishing information about any such outdoor geoengineering tests. Yedvab said that the company has not performed any such outdoor experiments yet, but it has done “a few outdoor aerial checks.” That meant that they have tested their dispersal system “under flight conditions,” but they haven’t yet scattered their aerosols in the atmosphere.

Those experimental particles do not appear to involve sulfates, meaning there is little data showing how well they might work. “It might be better in some respects, but on the other hand it’s going to be much harder to be confident about knowing what its risks are,” Keith said.

In his emailed statement, Yedvab confirmed the company is testing nonsulfate particles: “The ability to tailor particle properties to meet a broad set of requirements—safety, effectiveness, cost, and dispersibility—is a key advantage of our approach, giving it a distinct edge over sulfates and other candidate particles.”

As Stardust continues its research and development, it has drawn scrutiny, including from Pasztor. After retiring as a veteran climate diplomat, Pasztor agreed to work with Stardust in 2024 as an independent consultant. Rather than keep the remuneration for his work, he instead donated the entirety of it to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA, he told Undark.

The aim of Pasztor’s project was to highlight the need for clear international rules and oversight for geoengineering. He also wanted to make recommendations for Stardust—and for any other such geoengineering company—about how to ethically develop and deploy its technology.

Right now, there are no international rules or treaties that put obvious limits on this kind of work. As a result, an individual company or government can take dramatic gambles with the climate, in ways that could affect billions of lives, and it doesn’t have to get permission from anyone to do it.

According to Pasztor’s report, there should be rules that allow more people to be involved in that decision before it happens. Failing that, he said, Stardust should voluntarily tell the public what it’s doing and make sure it’s getting input from lots of different groups of people before it tinkers with the planetary thermostat.

“There’s one big area, transparency and outreach, to engage with the rest of the world, to the extent that the IP process allows,” he told Undark. Building trust through “a strategy of maximum transparency” should become a priority for them, he recommended in the report.

Stardust agreed to publish a public website, including providing a copy of Pasztor’s report, and to develop a voluntary code of conduct, he said. That would publicly lay out how they intend to conduct their research and development, including agreeing not to be involved in large-scale implementation, which would instead be under the purview of government agencies. Pasztor expected Stardust to publish this information last September or soon afterward.

For a while, though, no website appeared. “They were going to publish all of that on their website. Now they are delayed,” he said during a conversation in January. “Come on guys, this is getting embarrassing.”

In early February, while Undark was reporting this article, Stardust published a bare-bones website. The site links to Pasztor’s report and lists seven principles, including “prioritizing safety and scientific integrity,” publishing “unfavorable results as well as favorable ones,” and “supporting comprehensive regulation of this emerging field.”

The site doesn’t describe who works for the company, but a statement provided to Undark by Zupnick noted that Stardust has 25 physicists, chemists, and engineers on the team and listed some of the company’s leadership: Yedvab, the CEO; chief product officer Amyad Spector, a physicist and a former employee of the Israeli government’s nuclear research program; and lead scientist Eli Waxman, an astrophysicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science who formerly served as Spector’s academic supervisor.

Stardust has not yet released a code of conduct, which the company described to Undark as “guiding principles” that “represent a set of voluntary commitments we have adopted in the absence of a dedicated regulatory framework.” In an email sent to Undark by Zupnick, Yedvab stressed that the company complies with all applicable governmental and international regulations.

Some groups, however, like the Center for International Environmental Law, say that Stardust’s efforts could violate the Convention on Biological Diversity’s de facto moratorium on geoengineering activities. “By developing and planning to commercialize solar geoengineering technology, Stardust is accelerating a reckless race and potentially violating agreements of the Convention on Biological Diversity,” said CIEL’s geoengineering campaign manager, Mary Church, in a statement in February. Any deployment of the technology, Church wrote, would likely “be controlled by a handful of major powers and corporations.”

Stardust’s prospective clients seem to be governments: As countries consider geoengineering, Stardust could be poised to sell them tools to meet those goals, several experts said. In an emailed answer to questions about its business model, Yedvab described the company’s approach as “founded on the premise” that solar geoengineering “will play a critical role in addressing global warming in the coming decades.”

The company’s portfolio of technologies, Yedvab added, “could be deployed following decisions by the US government and international community.”

The company is attempting to patent its geoengineering technology. “We anticipate that as US-led [geoengineering] research and development programs advance, the value of Stardust’s technological portfolio will grow accordingly,” Yedvab wrote. Pasztor’s report adds that if governments decide not to pursue geoengineering, investors “risk not receiving a return on their investment.”

The prospect of proprietary, privately held geoengineering technology worries some experts. Pasztor recommends that Stardust work with its investors to explore ways to give away their intellectual property, akin to how Volvo made its patented three-point seatbelt design freely available to other manufacturers 60 years ago. Alternatively, Stardust could work with governments to purchase the full rights to the IP, who can then make the technology freely available themselves.

In any case, Pasztor argues, Stardust can only proceed in an ethical manner if they do so with full transparency and independent oversight: “They are operating in a vacuum, in the sense that there is no social license to do what they are trying to do.”

Other experts have also questioned Stardust’s conduct so far. When it comes to principles of governance, like transparency and public engagement, “they’re not adhering to any of them,” said Shuchi Talati, founder of The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a Washington, DC–based nonprofit. “Pasztor’s report is the only public thing we know about them,” she added. Stardust did not do any public consultation for its outdoor field tests, nor has it released any data or other information about them, Talati said. And that lack of transparency could come with consequences for the company, she argued, as Stardust’s approach may spark conspiracy theories about what a “secret Israeli company” is doing, and down the road, it will be much harder for people to trust Stardust.

A better approach, Talati argued in a paper published in January, is for Stardust to be communicative and build trust as early as possible, disclosing what it’s doing and with whom it’s engaging. The company’s funders, she argued, should disclose the scope of the work they’re funding as well.

People at Friends of the Earth, an environmental group that has long dismissed geoengineering as a “dangerous distraction,” echo Talati’s concerns and go further with their critiques of Stardust. “I don’t think it’s compatible to have venture capital funding and to be committed to scientific ideals,” said Benjamin Day, FOE’s senior campaigner on geoengineering. The problem, in his view, is that Stardust’s engineers have a vested interest in finding that stratospheric geoengineering can and should be done.

If governments choose to use geoengineering, they may become heavily dependent on Stardust if they’re ahead of the competition—of which there currently is none, Day said. “There’s no private market for geoengineering technologies. They’re only going to make money if it’s deployed by governments, and at that point they’re kind of trying to hold governments hostage with technology patents.”

If any geoengineering technology goes live, it will affect the whole world. The US federal government is even developing an early warning system that could detect geoengineering in the stratosphere. Furthermore, deploying geoengineering means using and monitoring it for as long as a century, while any abrupt adjustment or end of that deployment could be disruptive, with “termination shock” triggering dangerous global warming within months.

Geoengineering research has long been entangled with national defense, said Kevin Surprise, a professor of environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College who studies the economics and geopolitics of geoengineering. Some of the first geoengineering papers in the late 1990s came from institutions with Pentagon ties, like Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the Hoover Institution. High-profile geoengineering meetings with the George W. Bush administration and the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a mention in a Department of Defense report soon followed, and the CIA reportedly funded the first geoengineering report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Because of the long-standing connections between geoengineering research and development, the military, and Silicon Valley, Surprise argues, Stardust shouldn’t be viewed as a rogue actor. “This isn’t out of the blue,” he said.

In Stardust’s case, they’ve received an estimated $15 million in venture capital funding, primarily from Awz Ventures, a Canadian-Israeli VC firm, in addition to a small investment from SolarEdge, an Israeli energy company. Neither company responded to Undark’s requests for comment.

Stardust said that it receives no funding from the Israeli Defense Ministry, and made clear to Pasztor that it has no connection to the Israeli government. Awz’s partners and strategic advisers have strong ties to Israeli military and intelligence agencies, including former senior directors of agencies like the Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200, as well as of the CIA and FBI, according to its website. Awz also invests in AI-based surveillance and security tech in Israel, such as through the company Corsight, which has provided face recognition tech for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Defense scholars and security experts don’t see geoengineering technology as a potential weapon, but they do view it as something a government might use for its advantage, and as something that would disrupt international relations, said Duncan McLaren, a researcher with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. McLaren suspects the company is following a standard procurement model of the defense industry, where governments get military technology from a few monopolistic companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin that develop it mostly in secret.

“That tends to be a space in which public involvement in decisions is utterly sidelined,” McLaren said, and there is “the potential for this to be a highly undemocratic process of moving us down a slippery slope to solar geoengineering.” If humanity needed this technology, he added, “I definitely want it to be controlled democratically.”

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