A Heart for Copper

I have a heart-shaped hole. Like an empty bird's nest, it rests among marigold-hued ruffles above the topmost hook of my corset.

The hole was not left by something removed, but for something anticipated.

I am an automaton. I have never moved of my own volition — never lifted so much as a finger, save by the power of the windup mechanism at my back. Never felt a chill-bump, or the orange yarn rising on the back of my chicken-wire neck. My amethyst eyes follow my young master without motion. The dead, glass eyes of a doll. My face no more than a bone-colored mask with faint pink smudges where my cheekbones would be.

If I were alive. 

My brain is sacking stuffed with cotton, my torso salvaged from a discarded mannequin. My limbs are dark, spindly things, like they belong on crows. But my master has wrapped them in ivory silk, and in the dim light of his workshop, I can pretend they are arms like his. 

I am not a living thing, but the work of man's hands. Man does not give life. Not since The Regression. The Digital Age machines are all dead. My master was born into the Neoclassical Age, named not for cultural or artistic reasons, but for the laws of science to which all citizens are required to conform. Post-classical physics are banned. Reserved for the gods, the only ones fit to wield them.

How does a stuffed-head, cobbled-together, life-sized doll know all this? Know anything at all? Because my master talks to me. Reads to me. From the time he was a schoolboy, he has shared every lesson with me, from The Odyssey to odious French (his descriptor, not mine). I was his schoolmate. Watched him grow to manhood while I remained the same, unless he himself wrought change — replacing dingy fabric with fresh, tinkering with moving parts, shifting my head so I could watch him work.

I spend many lonely hours in my master's workshop, when he is away at school or in the city with his family. In those hours I feel empty and soulless, and I have often prayed that when he loses interest in me — which he inevitably shall —he will also unmake me, rather than leave me collecting dust in my chair.

For my master is the only light in my life, though I am no more to him than the toy ships he played with as a boy. Less than the pup who licked his heels, followed his footsteps, and finally sank into a straw-stuffed bed near the fire, from which, occasionally, I still hear the thump, thump, thump of tail against floorboards.

* * * 

"Hullo, Dutch. Hullo, Copper."

Thump, thump, thump.

If I could have wagged, I would have. Master William entered the workshop, light beaming from his every feature. I knew the expression well. He'd been out in The World. He'd encountered something — or someone — interesting. Something he wished to share with me. You'd think he'd tire of my colossal implacability.

"I have something for you," he said, sinking onto the stool in front of me. 

At moments like these I almost imagined that the hole in my chest had been filled. I could feel an ache there — an ache that should not have been. His eyes were green as the ribbons of my corset. His hair black as the coal in the bin. His lips were soft and expressive, like the women of the house — his mother, his elder sister, the chambermaids. Master William was everything lovely, everything beloved, in my dust, dark world.

He slipped a bronze chain from his pocket. A necklace, with a heart-shaped pendant — the shape of the symbol, not the visceral, beating thing itself.

The shape of the hole in my chest. 

Tiny metal gears and copper springs were encased behind a small glass window embedded in the crimson resin. It was beautiful, a work of art. As I watched, he slid open a small compartment in the back of the pendant and produced a key. He held out the pendant in the palm of his hand.

 "Happy birthday, Copper," he whispered.

The echo of my nonexistent heartbeat sounded in my cottony brain, behind my porcelain mask.

If my lips had breath, his proximity would have stopped it as he moved to slip the chain around my neck, letting the heart fall into its readymade grave. Pinching the key between his fingers, he inserted it into a tiny keyhole in the tapered bottom of the heart. 

Bolts sprang from the sides of the pendant, penetrating the stuffing in my chest, locking the heart in place. I felt it as if I were flesh and bone. 

A loud, dry, sucking sound came from my throat as I took my first breath.

Master William's eyes widened — with shock? with horror? — as the change took me over. The pain was excruciating. 

"The old woman was right," he murmured, aghast. 

I could barely hear him from behind the wall of pain — or over the very real pounding in my chest. His face blurred, and I was sure I felt moisture seeping from the holes in my mask. What was happening to me? 

"You must choose, Copper," he continued. "Hephaesta said if you want to be like me, you must give me the key. If you want to be like you, you must keep it."

I glanced down at the tiny thing of brass still lodged in the base of my heart.   

What did it mean? A riddle, perhaps? What was I to do?

"Quickly," he said, worry dimming his brightness. "The heart will stop beating without the choice."

Pain spiked up my arm as I raised it from my side. My wooden, wire-jointed fingers wiggled to life. I grasped the key and removed it. 

1. I've waited all my non-life for this. I give him the key.

2. I want to find out who I am. I keep the key. (Reader-selected choice)