A tale from New Rhodenium #1
What if Pinocchio were a boy made of metal in a futuristic world?
A sci-fi retelling of Pinnochio.
🏅The Amby's 2021 Grand Runner-Up and Genre Winner in the Science Fiction category
🥇First place in the Short Story cate...
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Iridium.
A pretty name for a pretty metal. Grey like its siblings, yet hiding the colors of the light spectrum in its facets, waiting to express itself in its oxides. Sulphuric acid slips off the surface of its smooth alloy like water off a terrestrial lotus leaf. Resistant, hard, enduring- such is iridium. An Exploration Commander had once joked that the only thing iridium wasn't resistant to was the stupidity of those wearing it. I hadn't laughed then.
My cameras are not iridium. Their shutters blink as the thunder rumbles in the green clouds above the Sector Thirteen of New Rhodenium. The lightning here is of a different colour, yellow, from all the ash the active volcanos further south had seeded the clouds with. I miss the fluffy white clouds we had back home, on Earth. Those were nice, calm.
Home. Blink. Blink again. I forget again.
My cameras refocus. A human approaches from the dark alleyways before me. I squint and extend my neck. The gears within are creaky and coarse, needing replacement and tuning from the magnetic damage. Iridium is poison to organics, but the human walks forward towards me, undeterred by the highly acidic rain disinfecting the metallic structures.
My cameras recognise the human as a young lady. Her umbrella keeps the rain off her long blue hair, maintained in a high ponytail with the sonic fields from a ring of crystalline nanobots. The strands glow, and light up the darkness of her path like the tendrils of a jellyfish from the homeworld. The ropes binding me are made of a hybrid polymer I know not of, and prevent me from gaining a better view. The polymer conquers iridium; carbon truimphs in one form or the other, silly metal.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk," the lady remarks as she stops before the trench I'm suspended over and removes her magenta-tinted glasses. A hangman's noose lies tight around my neck and the rest of the polymer ropes cuff me at my wrists and ankles. I'm rendered rigid as she widens the electromagnetic field she carries around her and lifts me easily, like I were a mere asteroid breaching her inner planetary rings. It seems that the young lady with the blue hair is a technokinect, a rare breed of humans.
"P1NO-X0," she reads the serial number off my chest, naming me. I am pulled down to be aligned with her line of sight and examined. She flexes her gloved fingers, raises my arms and twirls me around. My metallic limbs shimmer and reflect flashes of light off the twin suns hiding behing the clouds. The light looks nice on her wheatish cheeks, so do the pristine bangs of her hair.
