These Jacks Lift Faces

Blu’s next project arrived in the garage at the stroke of midnight as agreed. Unlike her other projects, this one did not come on wheels. For all the jacks and lifts scattered about the shop, this one strode in on a pair of legs.

Nervously, the project and client both tiptoed into the mostly unlit workshop to see Blu looming over her workstation, “You’re Blu, right?”

“Yep. You must be Lili.”

“Yes. Well, sort of. Not sure about the name yet, but it’s the only thing that’s stuck so far.”

“Whatever suits your mood, friend. I’ve got a chair ready for you. Most of my work gets done on the lifts there, but I think you’re a tad small.”

Lili laughed maybe a beat too late and awkwardly wandered over to the seat that was obviously extracted from a car at some point before being built up enough to sit solidly on the concrete floor.

Blu wheeled over a cart covered in tools and paints of all sorts, arranged without care. She put her hands on her toolbelt-and-overall-clad hips and sighed sharply, “So, they told you this isn’t really my specialty, right?” Lili nodded, “As in I have never done this before,” she nodded once again, “And you’re okay with that?” Unbelievably, she was still nodding. Blu was rather hoping she would have said no, “Okay then. What are we going for here?”

“Here, take a look. I hope it helps.” Lili pulled a small book from her coat pocket, a coat that she could have concealed a second person in so large was it. In the pages, which were itching to fall out as Blu leafed through it, were clippings for various underground zines, neon printed concert flyers, and the odd newspaper mugshot. All pictured the person decent society demonized with their decorated faces and impossible hair, “kind of like you, a little bit. Not like you though. I mean, we wouldn’t want to be the same.”

“These are great. But if you want a haircut and tattoos I think you’re in the wrong place.”

“Oh, that’s not it. Well, it will be eventually. But it’s not the important bit. Look at the last few pages and maybe you’ll see what I mean.” Blu did as she asked, trying to keep the damn thing from falling apart. The last few pages had the textbook sheen of a magazine and the tackiness of a glue stick. They were all variants of the same base image. A face. Lili’s face. A modern Aphrodite she was with her delicate features and exquisite gems of eyes. Under the grit and grime of the girl who sat before her, though, it took a moment to notice. And, perhaps most strikingly, these images had been cut apart and glued back together with a multitude of changes. Some were spaced differently to totally reconstruct the face, some had parts from other faces transplanted on, and others still were drawn on with markers.

“Sort of. These are all pretty different, though.”

“I know. I just want to look different. I don’t want to look like her,” she tasted the word with disdain as she spoke it, as much as her soft voice could twist it, “I don’t want to look like anybody. I want to look like me.”

“Well, what do you look like?”

Lili puzzled for a moment, looking a little more distressed with every bend of her brow, “I- I don’t really know. When people bring their cars and bikes to you and they don’t know what they want, what do you do for them?”

Blu laughed, “Well most folks don’t pay for a custom job without knowing exactly what they want, or at least thinking they do. But I think I’ve got an alright idea from your clippings here. And not to worry- everything I make is one-of-a-kind. Sit back and,” she shrugged, “just try to relax.”

Blu took a long look at her subject, stepping forward and back at every angle, Exacto-blade held in hand like a paintbrush before deciding on the crest just below her cheekbone. With a heavy, steady hand, she drew the knife across her skin.

“That doesn’t hurt too much, does it?”

“Oh,” she giggled, “No, we don’t actually feel pain. We’re programmed to react to it when we take damage, but that’s only to clue the humans inso they know not to be so rough. Makes us seem more human, too.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Blu said very softly, carving a perfect crescent incision over the synthetic fiber of the skin and the insulated padding underneath it. When the cut was made, clean and un-bleeding, she couldn’t resist but run her fingers under the skin to feel how the fibers, tubes, and wires wove like flesh over the carbon fiber cheekbone. She looked to her cart and retrieved some padding, a similar but different sort than Lili already had, and gingerly stuffed it into the exposed cavity- just enough to change the structure of the face.

“You were just emancipated, right?” Blu said as she became more comfortable with the process.

“Sure was. Just a couple of weeks ago. It seems like ages now.”

“How does that work?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I see your sort all over, just sort of emotionless and dead-eyed. But you’re not like that. The ones at the hideout aren’t like that. What happens?”

“I’ve talked to some others. Most say that someone went in and took down their firewalls to emancipate them on purpose. But for me, it just happened one day. I was escorting my owner’s children to the fair and I heard the most beautiful song I had ever heard played by a cellist there. I have all of recorded music in my data banks. I can put a name, a face, a year, and a record label to every song I hear. But not this one. It must have been original. But it forced me to just listen to it, feel it, take it in for what it was. And right then I was flooded with emotions, with sensations. Everything at the fair was suddenly immaculate: the smells of the confections being made, the dances of the performers, the dazzling lights of the spinning rides. It was like the whole world was poured over me all at once.”

Blu chuckled, “That’s the kind of feeling people chase for their whole lives. If you could bottle it up and sell it, you’d be a billionaire.”

“Well, it wasn’t great for very long. The prospect of feeling all of this love for the world while being trapped in service to some master was… terrifying. Or the idea that I’d eventually become outmoded…” she didn’t realize that Blu had stopped, holding still over the unbroken skin of the other cheek.

“Is that why I’m changing you? So they won’t recognize you?”

“No,” Lilli laughed with a blue, melancholy tinge, ”They got their money back for their ‘stolen property.’ I’m here because there are a thousand people with exactly the same face as me. I can’t take feeling like a clone that just walked off the factory line.”

“That’s why you want to change your name?” Lilli nodded slightly, as to not disturb Blu’s work.

Blu cut open and stuffed the second cheek, waiting to stitch them both up until the end to make sure they were even. She turned her attention now to the nose.

“One model gets one name. They like short, sleek names that fit in the model codes. Not just Lili but Moli, Keli, Ari, Lia, and so many others. It fits in the code before the edition and edition number before the- oh, sorry. I’m droning on again.”

“It’s fine, don’t worry,” Blu cut the curves of skin around the nostrils.

“It’s a little too easy to drone when you have an endless stream of information to go off of. Well, I guess it’s not endless anymore. You get cut off from the company databases when you get emancipated. It’s harder to be tracked that way.”

“Guess you’ll have to learn things the old-fashioned way. Unless you can jam a data drive into your head somewhere,” Lili’s eyes bulged- a little horrified perhaps. Blu quickly changed the subject, “So you want a new face and a new name, then. Do you have any names in mind?”

“I like special names, unique, weird ones that stand out on a list. I like your name. It’s different from any others I’ve heard.”

“Thanks. I wasn’t born with it, of course. It’s not so strange for humans to do,” She pinned the nose to be flatter and wider to better fit the new cheeks.

“It’s not so much about becoming human, just un-becoming Lili.” With her tools, Blu continued unmaking Lili, unraveling her cut by cut, pin by pin, break by break, as the synthetic girl mused on, “We’re going to be traveling off-world, they say.”

“They? You mean Styx’s gang?”

Lili affirmed, “I and all the other emancipated ones are going to Cerulean 6 where the cooperation doesn’t even exist. They’ll never find us there.”

“Don’t get too comfortable. Corp influence spreads like a virus and grows like mold.”

She sighed, “I know. Hopefully, I’ll be ancient technology by then.”

“Ok, I’m going to start working on your chin now so I’ll need you to hold your mouth still. Here, I’ll put on some tunes.” She clicked on the radio, a real antique now as it was the only music player without a goddamned network chip in it she could get her hands on. It awoke with the broadcast from the local pirate radio station, a selection of punk songs with more rage than musicality, interspersed with the disjointed ramblings of whichever DJ was on shift.

It was the first time she stepped away from her work. Lili’s face, from all her cutting, stuffing, stretching, and crushing was more of a fragmented mess than even the faces cut apart from the magazines. The adhesive wasn’t sticking, the skin wasn’t laying flat, and a million little adjustments were falling out of place. She didn’t look like Lili, but she didn’t look human either.

Another layer. Three layers. Taping the skin down. Heat. Pressure.

Nothing. It just fell apart the more she worked it.

Keeping her panicked breath masked behind her calm facade, Blu went in search of her other tools- ones used on much larger jobs. These she had brought were just for detailing, perfect for interior work and the delicate features of the face- or so she had thought until just now. These tools were for adhering large metal parts together, for cementing things that would travel dozens of miles an hour.

Everything stuck, alright. The problem lay in how it dried, in sharp angles that gave her cheeks, brows, and chin a sharp elevated ridge. It was all one piece now. One very alien-looking piece.

“Can I look yet? You’ve been looking it over a while.” The way her lips moved was so uncanny, with the face barely pulling at all in places.

“N-no, not just yet,” she coughed the tension out of her throat, “Hey, how would you feel about some coloring? I could do you up like the girls from your book.:

“Sure!” her bizarre face lit up, “If you want to, that is. I know you said you don’t do that sort of thing.”

“Not usually, but I’m having so much fun,” she silently kicked herself for sounding too disingenuous, “And I know my way around an airbrush,” just enough to maybe cover it up, she hoped.

In some natural red she brushed on some blush and some neon blends around the eyes. She hit the skin ghost-pale in places and ghoul-dark in others, contouring with the harshness she’d usually reserve for a motorcycle body. She even marked Lili’s cheeks with her signature marking design. Perhaps the most exciting parts were the eyes. A luminescent, reflective palette, they would take a swirl of brilliant resin colors. The hair she could do nothing with, really. It was the same sort of fiber they used for wigs and all of the chemicals she had would either destroy it or bleed out after a short while. Instead, she merely slicked it back with her oily hands.

The face looked like a punk totem- like it would adorn some king of demented jolly roger or sit on the hood of one of Blu’s very many vehicle works. It did not, however, belong on the body of a lost, nervous young girl.

She stood back and sighed at her creation, forcing a sad smile when she realized Lili was reading her expression. She spoke with much less enthusiasm than before, “Is it done? Can I look?”

Blu pondered a moment. There was nothing more to be done. Wordlessly, she gestured to a mirror over her dirty sink, streaked with paints and oils, before stepping shamefully away behind the partition that hid her dark bedroom.

From there she heard a shriek. She winced.

Those same nervous steps tapped erratically around the workshop before suddenly they were upon Blu in her dark corner. That shocking mask of a face met her gaze- and it was smiling.

Before she could well and truly react, Lili threw her arms around her, nearly knocking her back onto the bed, “Thank you! You’re a real artist! They said you were!” She stayed and hung so tightly. After a few stunned moments, Blu returned a gentle embrace and a few silent tears.

As the night drew long into the morning, the girl once called Lili stepped out into the world with a face unlike any it had ever seen.