Echo
Written By: Jenna Glover
“I think you’re focused too much on this. Names are just arbitrary titles handed to us by others. Why should this one matter?”
“Because it’s not my name! It’s not even a name.”
“You need to start thinking of it as your name.”
“It…doesn’t feel like me.”
“And which me is that?”
“Wha—the me I’ve always been! Martha!”
“Martha is dead.”
* * *
Martha first knew something was wrong when she weighed herself after the new year. She had started weighing herself the first few years of her marriage. Back then, she and Robert were still in the honeymoon phase, and she was determined to maintain her petite, 115-pound figure for his pleasure. A decade later and several pounds heavier, it became an obligation for health not vanity.
Then the war started. Martha didn’t weigh herself at all during those three years. How could she when there were androids to find and destroy? The world had moved on to bigger priorities and she did as well. Her weight would not save mankind from its own creations.
The war ended a year ago, and Martha spent that year attending holidays, gatherings, and celebrating the first Freedom Festival without any thought to her figure whatsoever. The Freedom Festival lasted for seven days and was celebrated with food and lots of it. Martha, a true patriot of humanity, did not shy away from such festivities. After the food was consumed and everyone trickled back to work, Martha inevitably felt the burden of her overindulgence. It was time to get back on the scale.
Martha stepped onto the tile scale after she brushed her teeth one morning, casual as can be. It wasn’t a big deal. She was only thirty-eight. How high could it have gone, really? If she didn’t like the number, then it wouldn’t be that difficult to fix it.
When Martha glanced down at the backlit, blinking screen, she frowned. That couldn’t be right. She stepped off, let the tile reset itself, and stepped back on. No change. Martha ripped off her clothing, stripping down to her underwear, and read the same number again.
With a huff, Martha chalked it up to the scale being broken. Lots of technologies were failing now that the androids weren’t in charge. No one would admit it, but those genocidal revolutionaries were better at running the world than the humans ever were. Martha slid back into her clothes, taking a moment to note the measurements on the tags, and, satisfied that it was an error in manufacturing, left the bathroom for work.
She couldn’t stop thinking, though, that the scale could have read something as absurd as 205.
* * *
“You’re very quiet today.”
“Just thinking.”
“What about?”
“They held the funeral today.”
“Oh? How does that make you feel?”
“…I wish it were me.”
* * *
Martha pressed the pad of her finger against the sensor on her holo-vanity and waited. She winced slightly at the prick of the needle and then the blast of cold antiseptic. A blinking green light appeared on the mirror’s surface, and she removed her finger, automatically sticking it in her mouth even though the tiny prick would have healed already. She watched the mirror. The dot blinked over and over but didn’t turn.
Martha sighed. She wanted the test to be positive; she wanted to be pregnant. Caleb was her world, but he was four now, and Martha thought another baby, a sibling for Caleb to play with, would be good for all of them. Caleb was born just before the uprising, and once that happened babies were the last thing on anyone’s mind. It was all just a haze of chaos and business associated with the war and the cleanup. Martha’s own maternity leave was cut short, and she could barely remember her first year as a mother. But now all that was over, and Martha wanted to experience motherhood for real. She broached the subject with Robert, and he was in agreement.
They had been trying for months now. Martha could have sworn she was pregnant with Caleb the second Robert looked at her. She knew she was older now, but she had been taking those fertility pills for a while…surely, they must have had some effect by now.
The green light blinked one last time and a beep sounded. The mirror’s surface displayed a myriad of facts and figures about her blood work, but Martha skipped over all of it, looking for the one section she actually needed.
pregnancy: negative
* * *
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