The crimson sands flashed red-hot over the desert expanse of the titan-asteroid Rutilus. Already, the silver surface of the downed saucer-craft was dulling under the sandstorm’s relentless grind—the ship, though no longer smoking, was slipping away beneath the asteroid’s surface, as though it was caught in a torturously, mockingly slow patch of quick-bog. Bit by bit the coarse grains sucked it down, carrying it deeper and deeper into the rock’s insatiable gullet, until only a fraction of its curved edge was visible above the surface.
The ship’s owner was leaned up against a tall stone, trying to brace themselves against the scorching storm. It was no use—their upper limbs were bound with energy-cuffs, so they could not shield their face, nor indeed any other part of their body. They struggled and strained against their bonds, trying to get their manipulator-phalanges loose, but it was futile.
“I tell you again,” Grorton-Luenga said to the platinum-blond humanoid, who had been the one to shoot them down and cuff them, “I am not your enemy!”
“Then why,” asked the silver-clad figure, who wielded a deadly-looking laser-blade, “were you piloting a ship belonging to my race’s greatest Nemesis?”
Grorton-Luenga sighed, or made a noise that passed as their equivalent of a sigh. This ship of theirs, the flying saucer, was always getting them into trouble. People really hated its builders, its original pilots, and not without reason—they were vicious conquerors, the slaughterers of billions. But Grorton-Luenga wasn’t like that at all—for one thing, they were of an entirely different species. They were just a non-binary blue-collar wanderer bumping from job to job, who happened to be in need of a fast starvessel. But it seemed this swordsman—if man they were—was even less likely to believe that than a lot of the people the Northchumbrian traveler bumped into. And they thought they’d seen nasty grudges before…
“Please, let’s talk,” Grorton-Luenga said. “I don’t want to die here, and I think, deep down, you don’t want to kill me.”
“I will do as the Supreme Entity commands! I am a slave of the Immortal Master Zocor!”
“A slave? That’s no good! Let me help you get free of this Master of yours!”
“I do not desire freedom from the Master! I-I am programmed to obey him for all eternity!”
Grorton-Luenga felt great pity then, as they always did for the oppressed. Suddenly they didn’t view this individual as their foe, but instead as someone in need.
“Who are you?” they asked. “What planet do you come from?”
“My name is Urga. I am a soldier of the planet Anthor, the mechanical throneworld of the great Gonian Empire. We are comrades-in-arms of the fierce fascist cultures of Kobor and Torkul, among others. Our wrath—our wrath is to be feared!”
His voice seemed to change a little bit right near the end. To Grorton-Luenga’s mind, it sounded like he was playing something pre-recorded.
“Are you—if you don’t my asking—are you an android?”
They started scanning Urga’s body, and at once realized that they could sense a core of antalium-inderium alloy burning inside him.
“You are!” they said at last, when their captor didn’t answer. “You have a mechanical body, at any rate. I’m a machine-form as well, or at least, my ancestors were.”
Urga raised a skeptical blond eyebrow. “You are mechanical…and yet you do not serve the Supreme Entity? Impossible!”
“I’ve never even heard of your Supreme Entity. I’m picturing them as a giant brain in a jar, or a freaky ghost-head. Er, no offense.”
“He is neither of those things! The Entity is the most perfect mechanical lifeform ever constructed! He is the god of all robots! His name is renowned from New Junktopia to the Rusty Rivulets. His control-signal is sweeter than all the music of the spheres!”
Again, this sounded like pre-recorded propaganda. Grorton-Luenga wondered what Urga really thought of this Supreme Entity of his.
“I forgot to ask,” they said then, “what are your pronouns, Urga?”
“My…pronouns?”
“Yes.”
For a moment, the android seemed uncomfortable. Then he said: “I use I/me/mine and you/your/yours.”
Grorton-Luenga let out a short laugh, before restraining themselves. “That’s very good, I like that. An android who tells jokes…”
But Urga didn’t smile.
“You’re not joking.”
“I do not use pronouns besides those.”
“But—but how do people refer to you in the third person?”
“What third person? The Supreme Entity joins all of us androids of Anthor together. We are individual units, ‘I/me/mine,’ and we always know when we are being addressed individually within our collective…‘you/your/yours.’ There are additional words, of course, for the collective, ‘we/us/ours,’ but—but those are not my pronouns.”
Just then, something strange happened to Urga’s face. The corners of his mouth began to turn up into a smile. In an instant, he caught himself, and suppressed the expression, forcing himself back to seriousness.
“You like talking about pronouns, huh?” Grorton-Luenga asked.
“Silence,” Urga replied. “I-I ask the questions now. I may be far from the collective, but I can still—still—”
“We can talk about pronouns if you want. After all, you called the Supreme Entity ‘him’ before.”
“Y-yes—yes, I did, didn’t I?”
Grorton-Luenga didn’t that ignore slip-up Urga had just made, if slip-up it was: he’d revealed he was far from his collective. That meant he was separated from possible reinforcements, which was good on its own merits—especially given that the single artillery battery he’d established here had been more than enough to knock the saucer out of the stars. But—perhaps more importantly—it also meant he was far from the signals let off by his supposed Supreme Entity. Maybe that meant he had a stronger degree of individuality out here on Rutilus than he did when he was near to his fellow Anthorians.
Maybe that individuality could be coaxed into blooming into something greater.
The Northchumbrian wasn’t going to pretend to be entirely noble. While they saw the possibility to stoke this android’s spark of individuality to inspire growth and happiness and all that good stuff, they mostly wanted to do it for the sake of shaking off the energy-cuffs. They were serious when they said they didn’t want to die on this blazing rock. And so they began to banter.
“Why does the Supreme Entity get to be male, while the rest of you only exist in the first- and second-person?”
For a long time, Urga refused to answer. But then he spoke, slowly:
“‘Male’—a curious word. A biological definition. The one who produces seed…”
“Hey, no, there’s more to maleness than that! Just as there’s more to femaleness than being—”
“The one who gestates offspring?”
“Precisely.”
The android seemed to scoff. “Why should a mechnoform like you care about male and female? If you are anything, you are ‘it.’ You are without the capability of reproduction, and therefore you do not have ‘third-person’ pronouns.”
“Oh, dear, you have so much to learn…” Again they sighed, wishing they could wipe the hot red sand away from their head. “My people are translators. We can shapeshift—at least, we can when our vital energies aren’t being sapped by energy-cuffs. There are other limitations as well, I—I myself sometimes forget to shift in the heat of the moment. Nerves, you see. But anyway, to us, to my people, gender—”
“Gender is—irrelevant,” Urga interrupted. He strained visibly as he spoke, as if the words pained him. “Sex is all that matters. Sex is biology—insurmountable, empirical fact…”
“Okay, sure, but also, culture and psyche and personality and all the other things that make up gender objectively and empirically exist too. So don’t try that ‘it is illogical’ rubbish on me.” The words came out fast and harsh, and Grorton-Luenga realized they’d let their temper flare up in that moment. They chose to pull back a little bit.
“I was saying, gender to my people is inherently fluid. The majority of us are non-binary but we possess a cultural understanding of many forms of gender expression throughout the galaxy. So while most of us use the term ‘non-binary,’ each of us is unique. We each occupy special positions within the quadrants of gender’s axes.”
“So you practice gender as a deliberate abstraction? That is—” Urga smiled, but there was a buzzing sound and his face sank. Then he said, in a deeper voice: “That is illogical.”
“Urga, what do you really want to be saying?”
“I-I—”
“Go on, let it out,” Grorton-Luenga urged.
“What makes you think I want to be saying anything else?”
They thought for a moment, and then said, “My powers are limited, but I can try to block out the Supreme Entity’s signal. Just for a second, so you can think. Would you—would you like that?”
“N-no.” But he was smiling as he said it. And then his lips mouthed, silently: “Yes.”
It was true that the cuffs were dampening Grorton-Luenga’s capacities, but all the same they reached out with their senses. They had to try to block any harmonics or wavelengths radiating in on Rutilus. They found a faint signal, one they had sensed since Urga first captured them—they tried to imagine it going away, its waves quieting and weakening into nothing.
A faint electronic whine sounded through the air, and somehow they knew they were successful.
“Gender is—gender is—”
Urga was struggling to speak.
“Go on—go on!” Grorton-Luenga whispered, even as they strained.
“Gender is fascinating.”
The Northchumbrian let go, but the signal did not reassert itself. Instead it broke and ebbed away—under Urga’s power.
Suddenly, the Anthorian android swung his laser-sword towards Grorton-Luenga. The non-binary traveler let out a terrified peep as the blade passed through the energy-chains that bound their arms.
Once the former prisoner recovered from the shock of Urga’s abrupt strike, they took advantage of their newfound freedom to wipe as much of the sand off of their skin as possible.
“I hate sand,” they sputtered. “It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating—”
Then they looked up at their captor. They realized he hadn’t sheathed his energy-sword.
Now he was smiling, fully and unashamedly—but that smile lent him a sinister air.
“You’re—you’re not still going to kill me, are you?” Grorton-Luenga asked.
“Tell me everything you know about gender.”
“Wh-which gender?”
“ALL OF THEM.”
“Oh. Well, we could be here quite a long time…”
“I must understand gender,” Urga said then, “so that I may better serve the Supreme Entity.” His face clenched and winced as he spoke.
“Are you sure that’s the whole of it?”
“That which is understood is easier to destroy than that which is not.”
Now that they were no longer cuffed, Grorton-Luenga stood up. “Oh? So you were smiling when we were discussing pronouns because you were thinking of destruction? Not because you were enjoying how fun it is to explore one’s identity?”
The android stared at them for a long time, flickering back and forth between expressions. Again, Grorton-Luenga tried to strain out external signals, but there were none to strain out.
At last, Urga said, “You have awoken to me a strange enigma. One my brain-banks cannot process.” He made a small sound that almost sounded like a sob. Then, he said quietly: “Help me.”
Grorton-Luenga looked at their ship, thinking of all the work it would take it to get it out of the sand.
They couldn’t do it alone. They would need a friend to help them. And they always believed anyway it was better to have a friend than an enemy.
So the two of them would help each other.
Now that they could shapeshift again, Grorton-Luenga changed their manipulator-phalanges into a pair of shovels. And as they began to dig, they began to elucidate on the nature of binary and non-binary gender expression—as well as the absence of such…
And Urga proved to be nothing less than an eager pupil. In fact, initially, once Grorton-Luenga started lecturing, the android transformed into an overflowing chalice of questions. A great many of them were bizarrely expressed, and a good number Grorton-Luenga didn’t understand at all. But as Urga spat out inquiry after inquiry, they realized that each question was orbiting around a singular point of contention. The truth made itself known by what wasn’t being expressed.
The Anthorian androids were entirely monosexual.
Not monosexual in the sense that they were only attracted to one gender—attraction-wise, they were all aro-ace, as the Supreme Entity seemingly had no need for love or sex, procreative or otherwise. No, they were true androids—there were no gynoids among them, nor droids of any other gender. The Supreme Entity, despite programming his subjects with a disdain for gender as a concept, still viewed himself as “male,” and he casually passed on that aspect of his identity to his “children.”
Urga struggled with comprehending gender because his culture was solely male. And his instinctive xenophobia denied him contact with other species. He literally could not comprehend anything outside of a twisted machine’s concept of what masculinity was.
By the time Grorton-Luenga realized this, Urga had sheathed his laser-sword. His face was grave; so much of his world had been turned upside-down in so short a time. Grorton-Luenga felt there was a fundamental tension between Urga’s desire to explores his own urges and the militaristic, hypermasculine pride his creator instilled in him.
“But…isn’t wearing soft, flowing clothing…a sign of weakness?” he asked. “I desire to do it, but I don’t want to be seen as weak—”
“I think it takes a lot of strength to wear a dress,” Grorton-Luenga answered, “if only because it involves fighting against beings like the Supreme Entity.”
“To fight against the Entity is hopeless…”
“Is it? I think you and I are doing pretty well for ourselves right now.”
It was a struggle to dig out the crashed saucer, even with their shapeshifting back. The more sand they moved, the more seemed to pour in. The sandstorm worsened as time went on, until at last Grorton-Luenga could hardly see their own shovels in front of their face.
“I know it seems hopeless, but there’s always a way to get your true self out,” they said, speaking above the wind. “You just have to be open to new experiences.”
“Novelty is another enemy of the Entity’s,” Urga said. “He demands for us eternal sameness.”
“And no one can survive that forever,” Grorton-Luenga replied. “No wonder all you needed was just a few minutes away from the collective. You’ve been antsy your whole life, haven’t you? And you’ve just never—”
“Never had anyone to help me express it.”
That made the traveler pause in their digging. Even though they knew every passing second meant more sand for them to dig out, they turned to face their former captor.
“Did you shoot me down because you thought me an enemy? Or was it because you were lonely?”
Each time Urga spoke, it took less and less time for him to get the words out. It was like he was getting used to saying things that ran against his programming. Like he was finding comfort and confidence for the first time in his existence.
“B-both,” he said. “Both. I—I hate our Nemesis. But I think I also sensed you electromagnetically. I knew you weren’t one of them. And—”
“And you found someone to talk to.”
“Yes.”
If Grorton-Luenga could smile, they would have.
“I-I-I—” The pulse of stuttering stabilized quickly. “I would like very much if I could wear soft, flowing—dresses. And—and other things, too, if that’s not for me. I—” He smiled, and started swaying back and forth, with a faint hum emerging from his lips. “I want to try on pronouns, too, like trying on clothes. I could wear the dresses and still be...he/him/his.”
“Yes, you could.”
“Or I could be ze/zir/zirs. Or she/her/hers. Or even ra/rae/ras…”
“It never ends, none of it. It goes on forever, gender. It’s—”
“It’s the supreme experience.”
Urga clasped his hands together. As if he had found a new god. One who wasn’t cast from steel and blood.
“Let me help you dig your ship out,” he said then, stepping forward. “I want to help you.”
“At this point, kid…” Grorton-Luenga didn’t like getting sappy, but this time it seemed okay. “…you can call it our ship. For the time being, anyway.”
Urga grinned widely, his radioactive core of a heart blazing bright inside him.
Just then, however, a flash of motion came into view overhead, pulling their attention skyward. Grorton-Luenga saw that a large metallic object was streaking back and forth through the sandswept atmosphere. The rage of the storm prevented them from realizing too late that it was some sort of fast-roving starship—a light attack craft.
“Oh no!” Urga cried. “It’s my squad’s fighter-ship! They’ve come looking for me!”
“Shit!” Grorton-Luenga exclaimed.
“Urga!” called a speaker-boosted voice. It sounded identical to Urga’s. “Step away from the aggressor and we will eliminate it!”
“No!” Urga shouted back. “I can’t let you do that, Squad Leader Arvo!”
“Do not disobey! We will destroy this alien and take you back to Anthor for bug testing!”
“Bug testing…?” Grorton-Luenga asked.
“Arvo—he—he means reprogramming,” Urga said. “They’ll cut the soul out of me and put a new one in.”
The Northchumbrian was sickened by the idea. They had feared for a moment, when they’d realized this was Urga’s old squad, that the collective signal from the Supreme Entity would reassert itself in their new friend’s head. But instead, Urga had retained his independence—and now he was deeply terrified by the thought of losing it.
There was no doubt in the traveler’s mind that the “life” the Supreme Entity promised his “children” was one of horror and oppression. Now that they thought about it Anthor was probably one of those ancient dark worlds named in mockery of the Holy World Aang-Or-Atia, much like dread Angkor, haunted Ongonat, and rogue Gorashu. But there was no time to speculate on such things.
“I think it’s safe for me to say at this point,” Grorton-Luenga said, “that I’ve had my fill. I want to get to work on some ass-kicking.”
“W-what can you do against them? They have a pulse cannon!”
“That’s my next lesson to you, kid. There’s always risk in this universe of ours.”
“That’s enough, Urga!” cried the one called Arvo. “If you will not stand aside, we will destroy you along with the target—!”
The front of the roughly-triangular craft started to glow red in that moment; the sand billowed away from the angry light in thick curtains. Grorton-Luenga sensed that when it went off, it would fuse some of the sand at their feet into glass. That was saying nothing of the effect it would have on their physical substance.
They took their gamble all the same. A moment’s concentration turned them into a Felnorian booger-beast, a sapient interdependent mass of gelatinous green animal tissue and digestive algae. Using the creature’s penchant for storing kinetic force in its excretory gap, they launched themselves straight onto the cannon’s barrel and squeezed on tight, using their mass to smother the energy-sphere at the tip.
At once, they could hear panicked chatter from inside the attack-ship—this was about the last thing Urga’s squad had been expecting, and they were babbling algorithms aloud in some vain attempt to make logical sense of Grorton-Luenga’s choice. To the android collective, not only did the random selection of transformation baffle them deeply, but so too did the choice to place oneself directly in front of their pulse cannon. They had an abstract understanding of insanity—but witnessing it in person was too much for them.
At least for a moment. Eventually they sorted their algorithms back into functionality—and they got ready to fire their charged gun.
For Grorton-Luenga’s part, they were starting to regret their decision. The charged pulse of energy that was gathering beneath them was starting to burn their swamp-flesh. The moisture drained out of them and their peat-scented tissue started smoking. They felt no pain, as booger-beasts had no pain neurons, but they realized at once that when the androids let their cannon loose—it would be their death.
They hadn’t intended to give their life for their former captor, but the change in Urga had inspired them as much as they had inspired him. They suddenly wanted very badly for Urga to escape, so that his dreams of exploring his gender would come true.
Regardless of how things went down, they’d never get to see it come to pass. Leader Arvo had his hand on the trigger of the cannon right now…
And suddenly his hand released, and he fell backwards. For in that instant, it was no longer his hand—it was hers—then theirs—then hirs.
Grorton-Luenga’s fears about the collective’s signal were not unfounded—indeed, Urga found himself reverting to his old programming when the others, Arvo in particular, reappeared. The collective was in his head again, trying to tempt him back into their life of solitary sterility. For a moment, it seemed like all he wanted was to give into that temptation, to go back to his old life of emotionless conquest.
But instead—inspired as he was—he turned that signal around. As they fed themselves into him, he fed himself into them. He showed them everything that Grorton-Luenga had just opened his mind to.
And suddenly, those aboard the craft were no longer just males. To their own shock, they realized that they had embraced femininity alongside masculinity, as well as qualities beyond those two that they had no name for.
Their horror deepened when they realized that they were catalysts for a yet deeper revolution. The squad’s own programming fed back into the collective as a whole, and soon new genders were emerging among the Anthorians the galaxy over. The confinements of monosexuality no longer satisfied their code. At once, the people began to desire new bodies, new sexes, to accommodate their now-uncovered needs. Yes—if they had their way, sex, too, would become a spectrum among the androids, just as gender would.
Without the fire-command, the cannon’s charge petered out, and Grorton-Luenga shifted back into their natural form, dropping back to the ground. The ship above them began to bob and weave erratically, and they gazed up in awe as they sensed what Urga had done.
“Retreat!” Arvo—who was now a woman—cried. “Retreat, so that we may purge ourselves of these irregularities—!”
But they knew already that they could not. Urga’s will was so strong that he “cooked” this new code into them, into the substance of their very future. That will was born of the greatest force in the cosmos: passion.
As the android fighter-ship darted out of the asteroid’s shallow atmosphere, Grorton-Luenga marveled at what wheels of fate were now in motion. Perhaps now that they were loosed from the confines of mere maleness, the empowered androids would turn on their Supreme Entity—and become a power unto themselves.
What would come from that—they could not tell.
Urga turned towards his friend and smiled. “I think that just about takes care of them, don’t you think?”
His voice was a little different now. Higher pitched, and—maybe with a hint of a lisp in it?
Whatever it was, Grorton-Luenga loved it.
“Yes, I think that takes care of them.”
“Then let’s get digging!”
Yeah, definitely a lisp. Cute!
“Yeah!” Grorton-Luenga exclaimed. “Let’s move some sand and blow this popsicle stand.”
Urga looked up at them, confusion on his face.
“Blow this…what now?”
They laughed, before saying, “I guess I’ll have to show you popsicle stands, too…if they still have those around.”
“Wait, is it another type of gender?”
“Don’t worry about it right now, kid…don’t worry about it right now…”
But he still had more questions, a whole fountain of them. It never seemed to stop. Maybe it never would—androids didn’t need to sleep, did they?
As they hauled the battered saucer out of the relentless desert, Grorton-Luenga found themselves hoping that the coffee-machine hadn’t broken on impact. Useful stimulant, that Human potion…
THE END
~ ~ ~
The following creations of Alfonso Brescia are in the public domain: Anthorian androids and laser-swords, from War of the Robots (1978); Rutilus, Zocor, and antalium, from The Beast in Space (1980); the Supreme Entity and the Gonians, from Battle of the Stars (1978); the Immortal Monster, from War of the Planets (1977); and Kobor, Torkul, and inderium from Star Odyssey (1979). Angkor is from Roger Corman’s film Battle Beyond the Sun (1962), which is in the public domain—Corman’s film is an expansion of Aleksandr Kozyr and Mikhail Karyukov’s Nebo Zovyot (1959), which is in the public domain in the United States.
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