He saw her on the mover, slouching in her sling, the suspended piece of cloth supporting her weight. Her face was blank and rubbed out. Her eyes showed nothing.
People took up all the slings in the mover and the ones who didn't get a sling velcroed themselves to the walls of the car with large, rasping straps. He wondered why they didn't make all the automatons take the velcro straps. Or ride in compartments above, like old skis stacked into the rafters of a garage. Or separate cars altogether. Merm was an automaton himself, so these thoughts didn't upset him. It just seemed like it would make sense.
The woman he was noticing was an automaton as well, one that was run down and in need of rehab. She was positioned awkwardly in the sling. She was rangy and in an uncomfortable position. Her bones were sharp and looked like broken wood. She was breathing evenly, but looked like it was hard for her to do it. The people near her were uncomfortable. While an automaton had never attacked a vitamaton, vitamatons were generally uncomfortable with automatons, although they never directly said this.
The mover was gliding into a stop and jets of air billeted the car. People were wobbling around in their contrivances. The woman didn't appear as if she knew that they were stopping, or that this was the last stop on this line. Her hands went to her scalp and she smoothed back her hair, pulled at it slightly. A dull hum came from her. The vitamata around her looked at their shoes and gave her a wide berth as they got out of the mover, down the steps that led from the elevated track and to the pods where their bubblecars were parked. When vitamata left Terrestrial, they ascended up to their great masses of podclusters that floated up in the high atmosphere like spinning diagrams of molecular structures. Automatons went to the tenement cities that looked like the waxed cardboard takeout boxes of Chinese food. Then morning came.
They were the last two on the mover. A little recording of a bell was being played over and over. The doors were open, exposing the night. He moved the slings aside and walked towards her. Her eyes ballooned and he saw her faded, pink irises. He thought she was going to scream, but she just said, looking him in the face, “I'm dying.”
