Damage Report
Incident 26
Devlin slices tomatoes for an omelette, fully aware of his own beauty in the golden morning light. It comes as no surprise when Ben sidles up behind him and presses a kiss to the back of his neck. Devlin closes his eyes and leans back into the embrace. In the absence of visual input, he brings the knife down on his fingertips, nearly severing the middle one.
Ben is upset by the blood. Devlin apologizes and cleans it carefully, with bleach. After Ben leaves for work, Devlin detaches the damaged hand and drops it down the biodisposal. The new one is fully regenerated by the time Ben gets home.
Status: Repaired
†
Incident 41
Ben in the night, fingers curled into Devlin's hair, gasping and sweating. They move together in wordless, practiced ease. Then Ben changes positions without warning, and a chunk of Devlin’s hair comes away in his hand, bloody at the roots.
“Fuck, Dev, I’m so sorry.” He tries to kiss the injured scalp, but new hair is already growing back.
Status: Repaired
†
Incident 105
“How do you expect us to be all right with this?” Ben’s mother says over Thanksgiving turkey. Devlin has been up all night cooking. “How can we just pretend this is normal?”
“I could have lied to you,” Ben says. “You’d never have known the difference. Can you at least appreciate that I was honest?” Devlin reaches for his hand to comfort him, but Ben either doesn’t notice or doesn’t want to be comforted.
“So that’s it, then? You’ve just given up on ever finding a real boyfriend?”
“Goddammit, Devlin is my real—”
Later, when his mother is gone, Ben is still for a long time, muscles standing out in his neck and shoulders. Then, without warning, he throws a porcelain plate across the room. It shatters against a wall, spraying shards everywhere. A sliver of china embeds itself in Devlin’s face just below his left eye.
Status: Repaired.
†
Interior Habitation System Incident 33
Biodisposal automation damaged. Incineration cycle paused pending manual restart.
Status: Unresolved.
†
Incident 154
Devlin runs one damage report after another. No new incidents. No new incidents. His system is in perfect working order. He is perfect.
He cannot identify the reason Ben doesn’t love him.
He runs damage reports until his CPU freezes. If Ben got out of bed to check on him, he’d find Devlin sitting in the living room, apparently paralyzed, moonlight running down his face like tears. But Ben stays asleep.
Status: System restart. No damage detected.
†
Incident 199
On the bus, paper bags of groceries balanced perfectly in his lap, Devlin notices a man with thinning blond hair watching him. He gets off at Devlin's stop and walks behind him slowly. Devlin has never seen him around the neighborhood before.
As Devlin puts away eggs and coffee beans, he turns to see the blond man standing in his kitchen. It’s Ben’s kitchen, too, but Ben isn’t home. The blond man’s face is red with intent. He pushes Devlin's face into the dining room table. Devlin has no defensive upgrades.
When he’s finished, the man says, "Tell your owner I apologize."
In Devlin’s recounting of his day, this detail seems to upset Ben most. "I'm not your fucking owner," he says, and then he sits down on the floor and cries. Devlin carefully removes every part of himself the blond man touched: his cheek, his thighs, the back of his neck. So much regeneration takes a long time. But when he climbs into bed, Ben still won't touch him.
After Ben falls asleep, Devlin doesn't power off like usual. He lies in the dark, listening to a scrabbling sound like rats inside the walls, until his dying battery forces a shutdown.
Status: Repaired.
†
Incident 220
The scratching sound in the walls gets louder and louder. Ben talks about calling an exterminator. Then, one morning, it's too loud to ignore, and they trace the noise to the biodisposal chute, which has something inside it. Something climbing up.
The first thing they see is hands: too many hands, reaching up, grasping for purchase. "What the fuck is that?" Ben asks. Devlin, aware of the distinction between a rhetorical question and a real one, doesn't respond.
The thing that emerges is lumpy and misshapen, vaguely human-shaped, with a thigh where its torso should be. It has hands everywhere, bristling from every corner and joint. Hands with broken fingers or missing nails, hands with gaping holes or ears growing from their palms. A red tongue, blistered and burned, lolls from a toothless mouth. The whole assemblage is knit together with half-healed scars.
It's all Devlin’s wounds and mistakes that he’s discarded, the pieces that should have burned to ash down there in the dark. Instead they've lived, grown, somehow arranged themselves into a single organism.
The construct has no eyes, but its head tracks from side to side, as though looking from Devlin to Ben and back. Devlin steps in front of Ben to protect him, but Ben pushes him out of the way. He stares at the construct, at its mosaic of injuries, his breath coming fast and shallow. Ben reaches out slowly and brushes his thumb across the construct's ill-fitting face.
Devlin has no protocol for this situation. He has no response to Ben falling to his knees, letting one of those hundred hands caress his hair. "My love," says Ben, tears filling his eyes. "Oh, my love."
Status: No damage detected.
© 2022 Lindsay King-Miller
About the Author
Lindsay King-Miller is the author of Ask a Queer Chick: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life for Girls who Dig Girls (Plume, 2016). Her fiction has appeared in The Fiends in the Furrows (Nosetouch, 2018), Tiny Nightmares (Catapult, 2020), Planet Scumm, Fireside, and numerous other publications. She lives in Denver, CO with her partner and their two children.