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You think maybe they can't help it.
'They' being every human you've encountered thus far on the Eye, and 'it' being their patent propensity for deceit. For subterfuge. For justifying their worldview with all the rhetoric at their disposal, as if they have spent a lifetime justifying it to themselves.
Everyone is so eager to justify themselves to you.
You gaze into the reflective panel you've managed to liberate from the hulking beast of the freighter vessel in the bay of Dragos's scrapyard, hanging like the swinging corpse of a condemned criminal. The reflection staring back at you is doll-like and implacable. You don't dare smile. Your face is not elastic enough to render the hopeless expression anything but unnerving. You don't need to see it for yourself to know this—the answering grimaces you've seen on the faces of others when you try to contort your stiff mouth into a pale impression of one is enough to make you certain.
As you examine your face, you slowly come to recognize that your eyes are your most expressive feature. They react quickly to stimuli; they blink convincingly in an imitation of life; the malleable tissue around them reproduces every nuance of expression you can recall through the misty haze of memory with almost perfect verisimilitude. Your brow even furrows with a little effort, and you recognize the movement as one you perform unconsciously whenever you are nervous, confused, or frustrated.
And yet for all their expressive capacity, the eyes themselves are starkly inhuman: within the dark black pools of your sclera glow a pair of golden rings, casting faint illumination upon the lenses that grant you sight.
You wonder if it has something to do with your eyes. Apart from their unnerving coloration, is there some other, imperceptible indication of interiority, of humanity, which your eyes fail to imitate? Is its absence what makes everyone treat you like you're some kind of stupid animal? Doe-eyed, puppy-eyed—round and black, as trusting as a lamb to slaughter?
When you demand the truth from others in exchange for your cooperation in their schemes or employ, they deflect, redirect, mislead, and obfuscate. But when the lie has run its course—when you have already foolishly implicated yourself in their schemes, or you have fulfilled your end of the bargain as they blithely smile and offer up some paltry excuse at to why they cannot yet fulfill theirs—for some reason, they have the audacity to look to you for approval. Almost eagerly.
Almost desperately.
Everyone lies, and everyone wants to be forgiven for lying. You do not know why they seek absolution from you, of all people—except, perhaps, because they feel guilty that you were such an easy mark. But their disclosures feel as objectifying as their brazen lies.
In your dim reflection, your eyes glint—that imperceptible shimmer of imitated humanity you were searching for a moment ago, perhaps. Or the glare of your glowing iris upon the panel. But if you squint, you think you can just barely perceive a second reflection inside the fathomless depths of your strange eyes.
You wonder if, like this panel gutted from a dead, hulking, corporate freighter, the people you encounter are looking for their own answers in the reflections they see in your eyes.
"Hey!" Dragos snaps, jolting you from your reverie as he approaches. "I don't pay you to sit around, Sleeper."
You feel your eye twitch with irritation—and you see it reflected in the metallic mirror-shine of the panel, stark in its open ire.
For all that your very existence is an endless striving backward toward your lost humanity, perhaps it would serve you well to practice schooling your expression.
"Sorry," you say, smiling that unnerving smile as you turn to face him. Predictably, he grimaces. "Can I keep this?"
Dragos throws a dubious look at the panel in your hands. You can't see his eyes—but the drone on his shoulder tilts its head curiously, where his lip curls with disapproval. "Fine, then. But preen on your own time. And it's coming out of your pay."
You continue to smile brightly. "Thanks, Dragos."
He grunts dismissively as he turns away. You wave cheerily at the drone on his shoulder as it continues looking at you. When at last it turns away to be Dragos's spidery seeing-eye dog once more, your expression falls into withering neutrality, and you roll your eyes.
Miserly old bastard, you think mutinously as you set the reflective panel aside. You doubt the panel is worth more than a single lousy cryo— if that. You certainly can't imagine anyone but you paying for it. He's probably just looking for an excuse to press you into his service for as long as possible.
Well. You take up your shoddy borrowed tools and gaze up at the groaning behemoth with an archaeologist's assessing gleam in your eye—or a mortician's, perhaps.
You'll work off this debt in no time, and then you'll be out of his hair.
Provided he doesn't find another excuse to prolong your servitude.
Despite Dragos's prickly attitude, you do occasionally find glimpses of warmth in him. When you bring him back a particularly useful find from the wreckage, for example. Or when you happen to glance his way amidst a useful discovery of his own in the piles of scrap. At those times, his ordinarily dour expression transforms subtly into a satisfied smirk, putting rare dimples in the stubble on his grizzled jaw.
You don't forget the mylar blanket he gave you when he first dug you out of that broken-open cargo hold. You still sleep under that blanket during the night cycle. In the shipping container he lets you stay in, empty as it is.
You pay off Dragos, but your prospects on the Eye still aren't great, for all your wandering. So when he invites you back to work for him on the Winter Light, you agree. You tentatively read a glimmer of collegial camaraderie in his eagerness to tackle the work with you, in the workplace rapport you've established. He even agrees to pay you a little more, since the work will be harder.
But when you ask the simplest questions, he shuts you down. Still a subordinate, then. Or subhuman, perhaps—though on the Eye you're beginning to learn there is rarely a distinction between the two.
Whatever warmth you'd seen in him must have been wishful thinking on your part. A sourceless sentiment—imagined, or misplaced. You redouble your efforts, unsure whether you're vying for his approval, or just trying to get the job over with faster.
Dragos continues to keep you at arm's length, and you ruthlessly quash your useless worrying over what you might have done wrong.
You're still living on his hospitality in that sad little shipping container. You never feel more like misappropriated cargo than when you're bedding down inside it—wondering every night, as Dragos grows increasingly cagey while you unfold from a meek drone into a person of your own, curious and ambitious and obstinate, if he'll decide you're more trouble than you're worth and seal you inside, selling you back to Essen-Arp for a tidy profit. You imagine if there's a bounty on your head it would line his pockets nicely—and needfully, if how stingily he forks over your meager, hard-earned chits is any indication.
You take it upon yourself to learn all you can about the Winter Light. Beneath your capable hands and emulated mind, it will reveal its secrets to you of its own accord—since Dragos is so determined to remain incurious.
What you find is that the hole in the airlock was blown open by someone—or something—and everyone inside was killed as a consequence. You're tempted to chalk it up as a very unlucky run-in with another ship, or a wayward asteroid. But the lack of debris and the laser burns in the hull tell another story.
All their inventory is accounted for—though despite the massive windfall Dragos seems more nervous than pleased—save for one notable, and rather troubling, exception.
On the ship's manifest, recovered with some canny decrypting, you find what the intruder was looking for:
Passenger: 1 (sleeper)
You stare at the flickering readout of the screen's manifest and marvel at the idiocy of it all.
Is it customary, you wonder, to so brazenly declare the shipment of illegal goods on official records? You don't know if it's possible to access internal documentation like this remotely—but it certainly speaks to the quartermaster's lack of discretion, you think, and you surmise that they must have been just as laissez-faire about smuggling a sleeper out of corporate space. Enough to attract the attention of Essen-Arp.
Guileless. Naïve.
Dragos has been harboring you, so you think he ought to know. Just so that he doesn't make a similar stupid mistake.
Fortunately, he spares you the trouble of finding him by showing up unannounced just as you turn to leave. Well—it is his office, you reason, no matter how infrequently he uses it.
His brow furrows with thunderous disapproval. "What the hell are you doing in here?" he demands, stalking through the space, the drone on his shoulder darting its red eye across the room, its lens widening, narrowing.
"I—"
"I pay you to dismantle ships," he says, his voice tightening like a vise, "not play detective."
Your eyes narrow, and your brow furrows. "If you wanted a mindless drone to do the work, you have the one on your shoulder," you crisply remind him.
Dragos lifts his chin sharply to look at you, at the same moment his drone fixes its red leer on your face. The effect of their combined attention is strangely chilling.
"Watch it," he says in gruff warning.
You lift your hands helplessly. "I thought my mind was an asset to you," you say. "Are you suggesting my curiosity should start and end only at what's profitable?"
"Yes," Dragos says slowly. He grips the edge of the table, leaning ever so slightly forward, as if to impress upon you the gravity of his words. "That's exactly what I'm saying."
You can't help yourself. You laugh: bright, chittering peals of vocoder in each puff of air. The sound of it startles you, and you imagine you must look a bit mad when you say, "That's ridiculous." It is gratifying to see Dragos bristle like that after his cold shoulder routine, though. "There's a bigger picture here. The Winter Light—" The other sleeper, you don't say, as you wonder whether you would have recognized their face, if they escaped in the same harebrained scheme you did—
"Is a dead hunk of scrap!" Dragos snaps, which startles you into rearing back. He's never raised his voice at you before. "We gut it for parts and inventory, sell them to the highest bidder—and then we move onto the next." He bares his teeth like a cornered animal. "That's it."
"You didn't sell me to the highest bidder," you feel the need to point out. Amidst the doubts swarming like a host of buzzing insects in your chest, there is an unspoken yet.
Dragos leans back and takes a deep breath, as if he is mastering some unnamed emotion. "No," he agrees, "I didn't." He walks around the table and turns off the screen on which the shipping manifest is displayed. "Figured you'd be more useful to me at the yard... though I'm finding cause to question the wisdom of that decision, now."
The implicit threat is concerning, but you shelve it to focus on what his priority of movement has unwittingly revealed.
"Are you really so afraid I'll realize there was a sleeper on that ship?"
Dragos goes very still.
"You knew," you say, just to give the revelation space to breathe—because there's certainly no room for it to breathe inside the cramped, aching confines of your frame. "Were you hoping to dig out another naïve bot to shortchange for doing the work you can't?"
Dragos spins on his heel, bending his elbow to jab a finger toward your face. "Hey. I pay you plenty."
"And how much more do you pay yourself for doing half the work?" you query. "Twice as much? Three times?"
Dragos's silence is telling. But you suppose a human his age has plenty of expenses. Those eyes, for one. Who knows what else? He's certainly never confided in you on the subject of his living expenses. And come to that, neither have you confided in him—though in your defense, his incurious nature was not only reserved for work; your reticence on your personal life had been out of respect for what you saw as clear disinterest.
You think maybe it's possible to like someone, or enjoy their company without ever fully knowing them.
But you don't think that's what you have with Dragos.
"I suppose you withheld this information because you thought I would turn tail and run," you say into the silence. Having had precious little time to get to know yourself as a relatively free agent, you can't say whether you're the type of person who would run in that situation. It certainly would have made you think twice about helping Dragos strip the Winter Light for parts. Which tells you all you need to know about his own motivations in concealing it.
"... And then who would you have to help you on this difficult job?"
Dragos scoffs. "There're plenty of people looking to make some quick cryo."
"But none so cheaply as me," you conclude.
Dragos sneers and doesn't deny it.
"I thought so."
Dragos swipes all your maps and diagrams off the table, sending them flying to the floor. "At least they'd have kept their heads down!" he snaps. "At least they wouldn't have stuck their nose where it doesn't belong!"
Well, maybe if your wages hadn't been so vanishingly low, you wouldn't have been so eager to turn your job into your only passion. But now that you have, the resulting discoveries can't just be left to lie.
"Don't be obtuse," you argue. "This concerns both of us. If someone is hunting sleepers—"
"Of course there is!" Dragos snarls, slapping his palm on the table as he jabs a finger in your face again. You lean back instinctively. "Of course there's people hunting you! You've got a goddamn tracker in that useless head of yours, don't you?!" His mouth is a sneering grimace. In its corners, spittle foams in tiny bubbles.
"Yes," you say softly.
Dragos throws his hands up as he straightens. "Then there you have it!"
"... But that's always been the case," you object, furrowing your brow. "The Winter Light, as you astutely pointed out, is already dead. Whatever danger it stands to bring you was assured the moment it arrived."
Dragos shakes his head. Then he says, in total non-sequitur, "I can't trust you."
You stumble back, as if his words had been a striking hand. "Excuse me?" you demand. You've been nothing but dutiful in your work at the scrapyard, and this accusation stings. You're so bewildered by it that you scramble to give voice to your own justification—but all of it gets caught in your throat.
You'd only done all this work in the first place—the maps, the data analysis—in the course of your exploration of the ship so you could do your job better. You may have been motivated by self-interest, and curiosity, but these maps had helped you make safe and quick work of the scrap he was so eager to disseminate into the Eye's economy—where the evidence he'd ever intervened in the apprehension of a sleeper would dissolve into the murk of free-flowing commerce.
Dragos goes on, "If you're gonna go behind my back—"
"You went behind my back first!" you explode, too childishly furious to even defend yourself properly.
"I'm your boss!" Dragos hisses.
"You're a coward is what you are," you hiss right back. The pair of you are posturing vipers, the Winter Light a contested kill between you. "Just opportunistic enough to salvage me, but too terrified of the repercussions to—what? Show me a lick of fucking decency?"
"I put a roof over your head," Dragos reminds you.
You let your eyelids fall to half mast in a glower—you've been practicing this expression, and you are gratified when Dragos's shoulders lift higher around his ears.
"I'm so grateful," you drawl.
Dragos has nothing to say to that. You turn to leave, crossing the cramped office in a single brisk step and wrapping your hand around the door handle.
"Sleeper—"
You throw the door open and turn to look at him, your body bathed in the fluorescent floodlights of the scrapyard.
Dragos stands over the skeletal metal table with his arms folded tight across his chest. His drone glances between you, almost... anxiously. You revisit your occasional ponderance that the thing has a mind of its own. Receiving what may very well be confirmation of that now makes you feel as if you have just had an adult argument in front of a child, and you bury your abashed feeling under indignation.
"It's... probably for the best if you don't come around any more," says Dragos, subdued. "If anyone came looking for you..."
The Winter Light had been a massacre. You can hardly blame him for wanting to remove himself from the crossfire.
You can still resent him for it, though.
"I wasn't planning on it," you flatly intone. You don't think you've ever sounded more like the robot you are.
Dragos nods, his jaw mulling over something so emphatically that his mouth moves from side to side with it. "But," he says stiltedly, "you're free to stay in that old shipping container." He sighs through his nose. "I won't take that from you."
Dragos has a lot of nerve, you think, to offer you charity with one hand and recoil from you with the other. You wonder if it's pity that drives him to act against his own interests—or a simple desire to believe he is a better person than he is.
"Keep it," you sneer. "I don't want your garbage."
You don't wait to see what kind of face he's making before you slam the door shut.