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It starts, as these things usually do, at Kame House: a mattress on the floor, an assortment of clothes folded neatly at its foot, a pile of books in the corner. The smell of stale incense and a fresh ocean breeze. A thin shaft of moonlight slicing through the window, illuminating specks of dust suspended in the air. Krillin fast asleep beside her as she recharges. Gero had built her for more efficient recharging by sunlight, but her preference is to be close to her husband when he’s sleeping – inefficiency be damned.
She's chewing on a thought. That's a human thing from before, something she's retaught herself recently – the joy of letting an idea really roll around up there, bouncing between the supercomputer in her neocortex and the aggression regulator (left off, oops) in her amygdala. And whatever the hell else was up there, organic or otherwise; Gero hadn't always felt like sharing with the class.
(There had been this one time, when she wasn't quite done yet, when he'd woken her and her brother up to check if their brains were properly hooked up to the ki generation units in their palms. They were hooked up, all right. Maybe a bit too well, because she woke to an immediate and overwhelming existential panic, intimately aware that none of her body parts belonged to her anymore, that she was nothing but a pile of biologically reengineered meat and bone run by a quantum processor, and she'd screamed and screamed and screamed -
- Only to reawaken after he'd programmed in a devil-may-care subroutine, and her first thought was, who the hell cares, it's all only me.)
She catches the thought halfway between the frontal lobe and the hypothalamus and squeezes it a little. A bit of anxiety comes out. Might be better if she tried saying it out loud, get a feeling for what it sounds like on the tongue.
“D’you want to have a kid,” she says, into Kame House and the night.
Doesn’t sound half bad.
“Hah?” Krillin’s stirring. It’s been years since Orin Temple, but some habits die hard; he sleeps deeply, wakes easily but slowly. She often catches herself watching him meander the line between sleep and wake for long, lazy minutes, but –
“Nothing. I was just thinking out loud.”
Now he’s a little more awake. 17 would have let it go, would have shrugged and said whatever you say, sis, but he’s not 17. “You don’t normally think out loud. Something got you down?”
“Hm.” Not so much that it has her down, just that it’s – well, complicated. “I’m going to go talk to Bulma tomorrow.”
He looks up at her. A number of emotions cross his face: worry, concern, trust. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I just – have some questions. That she might be able to answer.”
“Smoke?”
Lazuli would have said yes, but she isn’t Lazuli. “No thanks.”
Bulma sets down the offered cigarette and look back toward the blueprints. Then, casually, conversationally, cautiously: “Says here you used to.”
“17 did too. Gero didn’t like it. Said it would grime up our circuitry.”
Bulma’s lab has a certain characteristic to it indicative of the woman herself: cluttered but clean, chaotic with everything in its sensible place. 18, whose eyes were rewired for low-light sensitivity, notes the kitten sleeping in a corner atop a pile of lab coats. But she’s not here to talk about cats and fashion – nor is she here to talk about the person she used to be. She’s here to talk about who she is, and what she is capable of being.
So say, for the sake of the argument, that someone wishes up a dragon and turns it loose on you. He says, make her into a human being. Then the dragon looks at you and time slows to a stop and it says, is this your will?
“So from reading these things over, I can make some educated guesses. We’d know more if I could take a skin sample and if you’d be comfortable with me poking around a little in there. But you have to understand – I don’t have your blueprints, just your brother’s.”
“Right.” When you’re building a remote to blow someone up, you don’t get too hung up on what’s under their skirt. “So, um.”
“Bad news and good news, so far as I can tell.” She leans back in her chair and exhales a long, thin plume of smoke. Crosses her arms. “Good news – he left it all intact in your brother, so it’s a fair assumption that he left it in you too. Doesn’t necessarily mean it functions, but at least the structures are there. Bad news – there’s a lot of stuff internally that happens when you carry to term. I’m just. Well – not sure if everything’s in place for that. I doubt it was a priority for Gero. Your skin might heal too fast to stretch properly, your organs might not shift out of the way, your immune system might kill it off. Honestly, the way he jacked up your white blood cells, I’m surprised you’re not allergic to everything.”
“Ah.”
“A lot of extenuating circumstances.”
18’s entire body is an extenuating circumstance. “Well. Sorry for wasting your time –”
“Hey.” Bulma has a hand on her knee. “Gero was one sick bastard, for what he did to you. But I’m a tougher son of a bitch than he ever was, and I am not about to let an old dead man outsmart me, especially when it comes to this. Do you want this?”
Maybe. “I’m – not sure. And I haven’t asked Krillin.”
“Think on it. Give me a week to tinker with some things.” She stubs out her cigarette on the corner of the blueprints. “18 – listen to me. I got Krillin to Namek. I built my dragon radar from scraps. I made Vegeta a Super Saiyan. I’m going to build a time machine, damn it! If you want to be a mom, then you’re going to be a mom. That’s a promise.”
Before leaving West City she acquires a new skirt and a couple of bracelets from a shop whose security system just so happens to be experiencing technical difficulties, grabs some candy from a street vendor looking the other way, then catches and dices up a wild turkey in the outskirts for Turtle. She doesn’t need to eat, but Roshi always appreciates sweets. She knows Krillin doesn’t approve of her methods. Maybe, if he asked nicely, she’d even stop.
It’s just – well, it’s hard to tell, sometimes, what’s her and what’s her programming. Lazuli had been a bit of a delinquent, but then again she’d genuinely savoured those days driving towards Goku’s with 16 and 17, blowing up shit and stealing whatever the hell they wanted. Maybe she could ask Bulma, but Bulma would probably respond with a bunch of nerd jargon.
– She should be grateful. She is grateful. Anyone who could reverse-engineer her shutoff remote in a single evening is a good person to have in her court. Gratitude has just never come all that easy.
(Krillin had said, could you just take the explosives out of their bodies, then?
And the dragon had said, I can.)
Roshi appreciates the sweets, and Turtle appreciates the turkey, and Krillin gives her his withering look that always only manages to come across as fond. She shrugs to hide her smile. The men have already eaten dinner, but there’s a glass of water on the table for her. She sips at it as the men play cards placing bets on the tyrants they’ve killed (if Turtle takes this hand he gets bragging rights on – let’s see – Pilaf, Red, and that, uh, what was Frieza’s brother’s name again?) and, as always, there’s nothing but crap on TV. It’s a good way to spend a warm evening, laughing about terrible nonsense in the past tense.
After Roshi and Turtle retire for the night Krillin cracks open a beer, and the two of them are sitting at the downstairs table with the window wide open and the TV buzzing low. “So, you saw Bulma today?” He takes a sip.
“You ever thought about us having a kid?”
The reaction is instantaneous: he spits the entire mouthful in a fan like they do in late-night infomercials, chokes on the residue, and she’s almost concerned when he wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand and says: “18, are you – are you serious?”
“That’s why I went. To ask about my blueprints. Krillin –”
And then his face scrunches up and he gets all red and starts bawling, and damn it he’s so adorable when he gets emotional, and he’s saying yes, of course, gosh 18 if you want to – if you want to with me –
– And she kisses him before he wakes up the rest of the world, because she can’t help but love him when he gets overwhelmed, the man who crushed a remote for her, who stood up to Cell for her, who stared down a dragon for her, who could never hide an honest response from her. He kisses her back. They take it upstairs. They have each other, with some tears and a lot of laughter, in the light of their shared moon.
Later, when he’s asleep and she’s recharging, she rifles through her data banks for files on menstruation. Gero hadn’t left any information in there, nor had he left all that much memory of Lazuli’s life; Bulma had pursed her lips a little when 18 had said no, I haven’t bled like that since I woke up. Maybe Lazuli had at some point, but there’s no way to know.
It’s not their first time, but no child yet. She files that disappointment next to her hope. A counterbalance.
Bulma drapes a blanket over her thighs for modesty, and Krillin holds her hand. As promised, there is a pinching sensation and a bit of pain – though nothing she can’t handle. Though there is also the sense of dread, a looming sense of loss, like –
“Krillin,” she says, through gritted teeth. “Krillin, it’s –”
“I know,” he says. “Bulma –”
“-- If you want, I built a shutdown device.” Bulma pauses, but 18 can still feel it in there. “Think of it like a general anaesthetic. Want me to get that going?”
18 isn’t afraid of anything. But she’s uncomfortable with a roboticist poking around in her, and she’s terrified of being shut down against her will. The thought of lying prone on an operating table, unable to fight back –
“-- No, I can do this.”
“Deep breaths. Nobody enjoys this kind of thing.”
She doesn’t need to breathe, though Gero left most of her respiratory system intact, trachea and lungs and all that, because there was too much overlap with the other bits and bobs in her that kept the whole system up and running. He’d called it an inherent weakness of the biological base unit; 17 had called it jealousy, that someone as smart as Gero was out-designed by nature itself. Then Gero had decided he had another bone to pick with the natural order of things, went all apeshit overdesigning 19, and you know how these things go.
The biological unit grows and changes in reaction to stimuli in ways a mechanical unit can’t. Maybe that’s why Cell was designed the way he was. – To change.
– And inside Cell she had seen through his eyes and heard through his ears and for the first time she felt the ki of the whole world and everyone in it, and she felt all the parts of her own body, the interloping strands of cellular material that made Cell who he was, Goku and Piccolo and Vegeta and Krillin and Krillin and Krillin –
“Alright, dilation looks good. I’m inserting the camera,” Bulma says, which is followed by a sensation equal parts awkward and uncomfortable. 18 takes a few long, deep breaths; to Bulma’s credit, it helps a little. She squeezes Krillin’s hand. He squeezes her back. Gero had replaced all her blood with a proprietary hyperoxidizing solution and her skin with a material that conducts rudimentary photosynthesis based on his understanding of Saiyan biology. She wouldn’t pass that on to a kid, would she? When he picked her apart and put her back together again, had he done so right down to the curl of her DNA?
“This isn’t I’m sorry,” Bulma says, lighting another cigarette. “We’re just going to need to get a bit creative.”
She shouldn’t have been surprised. When you turn someone into a weapon, you don’t sweat the little details.
I have to go, she hears herself say. And she’s up the stairs and out a window and up into the deliriously blue sky.
The man looks up and says, I would like you to change Android 17 and 18 into human beings, so they can live out their lives in peace.
A complicated wish. The latter half of the sentence is of no consequence; it is not a wish but a desire that an immortal body be given the right to age and die, and furthermore Shenron can neither grant nor promise peace. Too many wills intersect to make such a thing possible for any god, not even the kais themselves. Peace is the labour of mortals. As for the former half,
he turns to her and says, is that your will?
she thinks, 17 would say no.
(17 thinks, no.)
he says, yes, he did.
But is that your will?
The wish is not: change them back into humans. He has been asked for a change, not a reversal; some wiggle room, then. Dende has a basic idea as to what constitutes a human being, as did Kami before him. He peers. Inside her is a web of intersecting components, quantities known and unknown.
she thinks, what about me would change?
he says, that I do not know.
I am beholden to the power and knowledge of my creator.
she thinks, then no thanks. I’m done with being an experiment.
There is a long, timeless pause. Then time snaps back into focus, and a rumbling voice:
That wish cannot be granted now. It is beyond my power to do so.
“I thought I might find you here,” he says.
After Shenron put Cell’s victims back in their shallow graves, they dug their way up into a world that needed a pretty extensive repair job. Much of the past year had been spent on rebuilding homes, lives, livelihoods – but nobody had thought about attending to the ruins of East City, blown to smithereens four years prior in what official records dubbed a warehouse accident and conspiracy theorists swear was an alien invasion.
“Thought it was weird that you and I grew up in the same place.” From their vantage point in the air, she can imagine in the rubble – now mostly overgrown, forest creeping in towards the epicentre of the blast – where her old home, school, stomping grounds might have been. “I bet that whenever we gave our parents crap, they’d threaten to send us to Orin Temple.”
“17 probably would have liked it.”
“That bad, huh?”
“They were –” Krillin tucks his hands behind his head and looks toward the west. “-- They were nice enough guys, I guess. I just didn’t fit in all that well. Too meek, and too angry. I thought maybe Master Roshi would toughen me up a bit. And then I met Goku…”
She tries to imagine him meek and angry. It’s not too hard – she loves him for that. His kindness, and his righteous indignation.
“I’m sorry for wasting the wish,” she blurts out.
“The, uh –”
“-- The wish. When you wished for 17 and me – the dragon asked me if I was okay with that, and I said no.”
“18, that’s,” He turns to her, balls his hands into fists. “Is that what this is about? You want to have a kid ‘cause it’ll make you feel human?”
“No!” – with such ferocity that they are momentarily both shocked into silence. A breeze rustles through the ruins below them. Then: “ – I want to have a kid because I think you’ll be a great dad, okay? I’m just – I’m not –”
– She’d tried so hard not to dwell on what she had not, could not, was not –
“ – 18, stop.” And she does, damn him. “I don’t know who put the idea in your head, but there’s nothing wrong with you. – It was stupid of me to ask the dragon to do that to you without asking you first. And you can’t have a kid, so what? Lots of people can’t have kids. Heck, I never even knew my mom and dad, and I turned out okay. We can – I dunno. Talk to someone who runs an orphanage. Ask Gohan if he’s met any kids who’re looking for parents. But this is not –” and he pokes her in the ribcage, for emphasis – “This is not about what Sheron can do. I love you the way you are. And, for the record, I think you’ll be a great mom.”
– She can’t cry. Gero had been adamant about that one, for some hellacious reason. But she feels a wave of emotion roll through her, pure and strong, from her stomach up around the space where her bomb used to be through her heart and into her mouth, and in that moment she doesn’t care if it’s innate or if it’s a program. It’s her. It’s always been her, from the moment she was born through to that exact moment, embracing her husband over the wreck of the world they used to know.
It starts, as these things often do, with a phone call from Bulma.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” she says. “But if you want to drop by and have a look…”
It’s about eight feet tall, and vaguely oblong in shape. It’s modelled after Saiyan tech – what Vegeta can remember, cribbed together with what Bulma had gleaned from Goku’s old ship and what remained of Gero’s notes.
“So I would –”
“From what I gathered, you’re capable of conceiving, but your body recycles material too well for what comes after. So, that’s where this would come in.”
That it is so much larger than the human form can be chalked up to the inefficiency of artificial design over the biological base unit. The irony is not lost on 18, and she chuckles to herself as she runs a hand over the glass exterior of the incubator.
“You’re sure it would work?”
“I ran some simulations to come up with the right formula for an amniotic fluid, and everything seems fine. I mean – nothing is certain. You could give me nine months to do a trial run, but.” She shrugs. “Even I have a code of ethics.”
“-- Yeah.”
“Plus, I thought it would be nice if you were first.”
“Right. What’s the, uh, the window?”
“The – oh, gotcha. Best if we do the transfer within forty-eight hours of. You know.”
“Yeah.”
“Insemination.”
“Right.”
Bulma laughs brightly. “You do blush! – Hey, can you help me test another theory?”
The answer to which is: yes, 18 can get drunk, it just takes an extraordinary amount of alcohol to override her supercomputer, and around the time Bulma breaks out the fancy shit from the back of the cabinet she decides it would be really funny to video call her husband, who picks up in the gravity chamber and proclaims that he refuses to indulge them in this nonsense before hanging up. Then 18 calls Kame House and an hour later they’re pouring shots of sake with Yamcha and Krillin and Oolong and Puar, and Oolong is telling this story about making a wish on the Eternal Dragon for – and he waves his hands for emphasis, here - panties, and Bulma laughs so hard that her drink comes right out her nose. Someone sets up karaoke. She duets an infuriatingly catchy pop song with Krillin. They make such a racket that Vegeta stomps over and tells them to shut the hell up, and 18 says if he wants to be a killjoy she can go two-for-two and break his other arm, and Yamcha finds that so funny that he spits a hundred-thousand-zeni mouthful of sake all over Vegeta’s godawful blue spandex training suit.
It’s just past dawn when she finds herself in a bed in a guest room, her husband curled up into her, snoring gently. She needs a glass of water. If she’s lucky she may not even have a hangover. Getting shit-faced with the enemy wasn’t really ever part of Gero’s designs, but to hell with that old man; sometimes you do things not because it’s part of a master plan, but because it makes you happy.
Vegeta is in the kitchen making a mockery of the fridge’s carrying capacity. He regards her coolly as she enters, finding a mug and availing herself of the tap.
She shoots him a look that says, yeah, I’m friends with your wife now, and you’re just going to have to deal with it. And she says: “Thanks. For helping her build the incubator thing.”
He shoots a look back that says, do anything to hurt her and I’ll show you that our last fight was a fluke. And he gives a noncommittal harrumph.
It’s a bit absurd. Her files peg him as a highly dangerous target, second only to Goku (and she is going to save that particular nuke for the right moment) and yet here they are, sharing breakfast at dawn. When Bulma met Krillin in a forest just outside of his hometown, had they known? – That they would each tame their own monster with patience and a little bit of love?
– For the first time, she finds herself glad she’s alive.
They could ask the dragon, of course. They could always ask the dragon. But when you decide that all your problems are solved by the whims of gods you lose something essential to who you are, and there are certain things too important for that. And maybe 18 just really needed a regular old human being to come along and say, you can do this, and I’m going to help. To show her that despite what had happened she could still have the life she wanted on her own terms.
Just like 17 was no doubt out there somewhere, finding his own way.
Krillin suggests Kastano for a boy or Marron for a girl. 18 considers Jasper and Agate and Amethyst and 22 and decides against all of them in short order. In the incubator, their little chestnut grows and metamorphoses and changes, just as she did, just as Krillin did, just as Trunks did. Just as Cell did.
“I don’t want her to fight,” Krillin says, on a sunny afternoon in the early fall. The birth date is coming soon. They’re on the hunt for a crib for their little room in Kame House.
18 nods. The idea had never crossed her mind.
“When she’s old enough, I could get a job in the city and we could find a nice school for her.”
Now there’s a nice thought. And maybe she’ll start smoking and cut class, and 18 will have to chide her a little. And maybe they’ll go shopping and pick up groceries and maybe 18 will kiss her on the head in public, embarrassing her terribly. Maybe she’ll take her to meet auntie Bulma. Maybe she’ll take her to see the ruins of the lab outside North City. Maybe she’ll tell her that once upon a time, there was this little monkey named Goku who was out looking for something called the Dragon Balls, and so too was this guy named Red –
(Dende might say, the essence of the wish was for your happiness, but Shenron was caught in a paradox, which annoyed him.
He was very grateful that you gave him a way out.
and 18 might say, what paradox?
and Dende might say, were you not already human?)