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The Memory Circuit

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The air is thick with the cool breath of night. The light—sharp, blinding—flickers, then fades, swallowed by the dark. Wetness has seeped into their hair and scalp; rough cement bites into their back.

A voice.

A hand pulling them up. Another hand, setting them on their feet. Brushing debris off their sodden green garb; inquisitive tones.

“What’s your name?” they ask.

Joyeux—

Bok... Joyeux.

But their throat hurts and the words don’t spit, and they want to lie down again.

Hal Hawkins hesitates before he reaches out, pressing a hand to their shoulder.

They flinch.

“Hey, easy,” Hal murmurs. “You with me?”

A pause. The sharp scent of damp concrete. The hum of something electric, distant.

Bok blinks, sluggish. “I don’t know.”

Hal exhales sharply through his nose, rubs a hand over his jaw. “That’s not great, is it?”

¶¶¶¶

Bok and Hal live together. It is a small flat, crammed with too many books, too many wires, things with blinking lights whose purpose Hal won’t explain.

Mornings, Hal hands Bok a cup of tea, frowns when Bok wraps both hands around it and doesn't flinch. The steam curls against Bok’s face, but he only tilts his head, watches it rise, unreadable.

Bok scalds himself pouring out boiling water for pasta. Someone shouts. He glances down at his blistering skin, pressing a fingertip against the raw patch with a curious gleam in his eye.

Hal grabs his wrist, voice sharp. “Hey. What the hell?”

Bok doesn’t answer.

¶¶¶¶

Bok tries his hardest to get into religion.

“I think fear was the first thing I ever learned,” he tells Hal, flipping through pages of an old, cracked Bible. “Fear and shame. I abandoned God but kept my shackles.”

Hal hums from where he sits on the floor, working on a delicate network of luminescent capillaries. “Sounds exhausting.”

Bok considers this, then shrugs.

¶¶¶¶

He slices himself on accident. The cut isn’t deep, but the reaction is instant. Someone yelps. Bok lifts his hand, turning it this way and that, watching thick black liquid bead and streak down his wrist. Someone rushes to grab a napkin.

“Your pen exploded,” they say, pressing the paper against his palm. Bok says nothing.

¶¶¶¶

Curled together, their bodies tangled in the dim glow of the ceiling light, Bok traces slow, deliberate patterns against the nape of Hal’s neck. The warmth of his breath ghosts over skin, his voice slipping soft into the space between them.

“I am one tiny part of this vast universe,” he murmurs, “offered the chance to comprehend myself ever so briefly, and to fall in love with what I see.”

Hal stills. The hum of the city filters in through the open window—distant, electric, alive. Bok feels the shift in Hal’s breathing before he hears his voice.

“Poetic.” A pause. “Did you read that somewhere?”

Bok tilts his head, considers. “No.”

Hal says nothing. The light buzzes overhead, flickering once.

¶¶¶¶

Bok finally suspects something is wrong.

“Two years ago,” Hal says, a little softly. “Here, in Rome. You were wearing emerald green.”

Bok gazes into his mirror, loose strands spilling past his eyes, at a reflection both carnal and utterly alien. 

He hadn't known how long he'd been in Rome, or how he'd gotten there.

¶¶¶¶

Their flat is raided. Bok locks Hal and himself in the bathroom. The door rattles on its hinges, a fist pounding against it. The sound of gunfire, of things splintering.

Hal is bleeding out on the tiled floor. Bok is deliberating.

“Joyeux,” Hal breathes, voice rasping.

Bok freezes. The name feels like a bullet to the skull.

¶¶¶¶

There is no time. He drops through the window, eight stories up. The pain is muted as he crashes onto the pavement below, vision swimming, systems struggling to recalibrate. He is left to peer up at a sky that sprinkles softly back down on him.

For a moment, Bok just lies there, feeling the rain sink into his clothes, feeling the static fuzz at the edges of his mind. The pavement is cold against his cheek. Somewhere above, inside the flat, Hal is dying.

Someone's shouting. Boots slamming against wet concrete. A distant siren wailing through the city streets.

A tremor runs through Bok’s fingers. His limbs feel leaden, sluggish, but his body is still trying to move, to repair itself.

He presses a hand to the ground, tries to push himself upright. A jolt of something sharp lances through his spine, but he doesn’t stop. He can’t. He was programmed to survive, after all.

Survival...

The word echoes in his head, cold and hollow. Hadn’t Hal said something, once, about survival? About living versus being alive?

Bok doesn’t remember.

All he knows is that Hal’s voice is already slipping from his memory, like ink bleeding into water. His fingers clench against the pavement.

The light overhead flickers. A streetlamp, swaying in the wind. For a split second, Bok swears he hears Hal’s voice—low, exasperated, fond.

Joyeux.

Then, the moment is gone.

Bok drags himself to his feet. His systems are stabilising. The rain is coming down harder now, washing the black streaks from his hands.

Somewhere in the city, he knows, there are answers.

He takes a step forward. Then another.

And then he starts to run.

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