These traitorous hands

Clytie, short for Clytemnestra because her father preferred to read about ancient Greek history to just about everything else, shouted up from the street below.  It was a little hard to hear what she was saying because there were car-horns blaring, some of them sounding quite frantic, and sirens were beginning to become audible in the distance.  Xoggie, short for Xogenes which name his mother refused to explain, thought about ignoring her while he cleaned his paintbrushes.  He dipped them into the small, smeared jar of white spirit and methodically squeezed the liquid and paint residue from the bristles with a scrap of paper towel, until he could no longer hear the drip-drip-drip of the liquid back into the jar.  Then he sighed, a heavy, melodramatic sigh that lifted his whole chest up and let it fall again, reminding him that he'd gained yet more weight, and walked to the window.
The sky outside was blue with scraps of white cloud scudding across on whatever urgent missions clouds have, and the pavement, a broad pedestrian walkway put in as a traffic-calming measure two years ago, was clear and clean.  The planters, containing small evergreen trees were mostly upright, only one having been tipped over by drunks from one of the eight nearby pubs, and little soil had escaped this time.  The road – the road was blocked with stopped traffic, and it sounded like all of the cars were now wailing their horns.  Xoggie couldn't see into any of the cars, the sun was behind him and low enough to bounce off their windows blinding him when he tried to look, but it looked like a voluntary stoppage.  And there, out of the road but very visible from it, was Clytie, holding a small man in a soiled suit by the neck, looking rather red-faced and embarrassed.
Xoggie waved, and to his surprise and slight horror she waved back.  Using the hand holding the small man, who swung worryingly at the shoulders as though his neck might rip and his penduluming body would fall to the pavement.  She shouted something, but he couldn't hear her over the noise, so he started to sigh again, thought better of it, and went downstairs to let her in.
"What's going on?" he shouted in the hallway, where even with the front door closed the traffic noise was unpleasantly loud.  He led the way through the back kitchen into his sculptor's conservatory and closed another set of doors behind Clytie, which thankfully dulled the noise to a distant hubbub.  He sat down on the twisty-stool he used when throwing pottery, and Clytie remained standing, while the man she was clutching continued to slowly strangle.
"I don't know," she said, a hint of a girlish giggle in her voice.  "It my hands, I think they've gone wrong."
Xoggie looked at her hands, which were elaborate metal contraptions that she'd had replace her own hands a couple of years earlier.  She'd replaced them one at a time, to give herself a chance to get used to the idea of vastly increased power and speed, and then she'd had them upgraded a little here and there, first weaponising the fingers with blades and electricity; then going from relatively human hands to much more obviously abhuman hands.  She now had eighteen fingers on hands that were outsized for her arms, all done in black, silver and brass that was an artistic statement by itself.  There were at least two artificial intelligences in each hand that consulted on actions, although they were supposed to be subservient to Clytie's own entirely natural intelligence.
"Won't they obey you?" he asked, rememebering a time a little while back when she'd not gotten used to her new strength and had put her hand through his front door.
"They're feeding back to me, they're saying that I don't understand the importance of this," she said.  "They say it's very important that this man is not allowed to talk to someone, but I can't work out who this someone is.  I think perhaps they don't know this someone's name."
"Can't you just turn them off?"  Xoggie had spent days trying to convince Clytie to get an override switch installed that would cut the power to the hands in emergencies.  This, he felt, was just such an emergency.  She had the grace to look guilty.
"No," she said, and clearly had no intention of explaining herself.
"Well," said Xoggie, leaning on his potter's wheel while he inspected the man who was looking bluer and bluer, "who is he?"
"He was coming out of the Unsantiago Gallery," she said.  "I was walking past, wondering what you were exhibiting this week, when he came out of the gallery and my hand just grabbed hold of him."
"By the neck?"
"No, not at first.  They... I?... no, they – grabbed his arm, pulled him close, then grabbed his neck and lifted him off the ground.  I've been trying to work out what to do next."
"I'm not exhibiting at the Unsantiago gallery," said Xoggie thoughtfully.  "I'm exhibiting at the Colostreum this month.  So it's probably not me he's not supposed to talk to."
"Why would this be about you?"
"It's not.  It means that your hands can probably stop squeezing the life out of this guy while I find out from him what he's doing and then we'll know what's going on."
"Hmm.  If you say so."
Clytie's face relaxed a little, smoothing out in a surgically maintained death-mask of beautiful perfection while she talked to the AIs that ran her hands for her.  Xoggie watched, growing increasingly aware that the little man had soiled his suit recently, and then finally she reanimated and her hand relaxed its grip enough for him to suck air into his lungs again in reasonable quantities.  While he gasped, Xoggie dug around for a pencil and paper to make notes on.  Whatever Clytie had got herself into this time, it looked like trouble.

Silly cilia

"Do you like it?"  Clytie danced closer to Xogenes, who retreated a little.  "It's new!"
"I know it's new," he replied, edging away again as she approached.  "You never used to have tentacles all around your waist."
"They're cilia, silly."  Clytie giggled and made the tentacles undulate around her in a sinusoidal wave.  "Look, they're giving you a Mexican wave!"
"They're giving me the creeps," said Xogenes.  He'd spent the morning chiselling a face out of a lump of concrete, and the first part of the afternoon trying to work out whose face it was.  It looked familiar, but the name associated with it never quite seemed to get to the tip of his tongue, always getting lost somewhere on the way.  Then Clytie had knocked on his door, putting her metal fist through the newly-repaired panels again, and he'd had to stop what he was doing and lock up the studio before she broke anything else.  And now she had these white, translucent cilia all around her waist.  They wriggled suggestively and made him think of hungry maggots worming blindly around in search of rotten meat, and his gorge rose a little every time he had to look directly at them.
"They're very modish," said Clytie, giving him a twirl.  "Two months, and everyone in Paris will be wearing them."
"I'll avoid Paris this summer then," said Xogenes with heartfelt intensity.  "Can you really say you're wearing something that you've had surgically attached?"
"They can be surgically detached again," said Clytie.  "They're like contact lenses."
They weren't, thought Xogenes.  Contact lenses didn't wiggle in your eyes or try and grab things when you stood near them.  He backed away a little more, checking over his shoulder to see if he was about to be cornered by Clytie, and adjusted course to parallel the wall.
"They've improved my diet, too," she said.  "They eat things, and they directly feed into my digestive system, so I don't have to eat any more.  And because they don't have taste buds, I don't get bored eating boring things, so it's easier to stick to a diet."
"What are you feeding them then?" asked Xoggie, continuing to back away.  Clytie seemed oblivious, and kept on advancing.
"No, they're feeding me, silly.  Well, I was trying just plaster and paper at first, but it turns out that that's kind of hard to excrete, so I had to stop–"
"You stood too close to a wall and they tried to eat it," said Xoggie.  "I know you too well, Clytie.  You'd never dream of eating wallpaper if there was an éclair anywhere nearby."
Clytie stamped her foot, causing all the cilia to shiver and jiggle suggestively.  Xoggie shivered himself.  "Damn, I was hoping you'd believe I was dieting," she said.  "I didn't feel at all hungry though, but I think I shit a brick in the end.  Literally."
Xogenes nodded, smiling despite the horror of the cilia.
"And now?"
"Well, now I don't stand still too much," said Clytie.  "So that's helping with the weight-loss program too."
"How about sex?"  Xogenes hadn't meant to ask the question, but it had been playing on his mind almost since he'd seen the cilia.
"Oh."  Clytie looked a little downbeat at that point.  "That's a bit tricky, the cilia always seem to be hungry.  Jeffrey's a little... injured right now."
"Your cilia tried to eat your husband?"
"Just a little bit!"

Weaponising dandelions

Xogenes lifted the dandelion clock to his lips, pursed them, and blew gently.  Fluffy seeds parted company with the flower's centre and launched into the air; white fuzz forming tiny fractal clouds against the deep blue of the sky.  One, he thought, and pursed his lips to blow again.
The dandelion clock struck thirteen before all the seeds had gone and he laid the remnants of the flower down.  Thirteen o'clock, a strange hour for a strange day.  He looked around, wondering if the other dandelion clocks might agree, but found that Clytie had picked them all before him.  She had bundled them together, and, holding them in her cybernetic hand, was blowing on them like a voiceless banshee, her face red with effort and her eyes bulging from her skull.  A virtual fog of dandelion seeds launched from her hand and drifted westwards with the prevailing breeze.
"What time do you make it?" he asked when she'd finished at last and was gasping like a fish out of water.
"Forty-two... o'clock...," she said between gasps, and Xogenes laughed.
"I got thirteen," he said.  "I thought that was odd, but at least it's an hour on the twenty-four hour clock."
"You got a military dandelion?"  Clytie scrunched up her face in an effort to look thoughtful, but ended up looking like she was sucking on a lemon.  "That's kind of interesting really, how would you weaponise a dandelion?"
"I wouldn't," said Xogenes.  "You would.  You also got forty-two o'clock and used up all the dandelions."
"Yeah," said Clytie, her breathing starting to come under control now.  "Tough luck, Xoggie,"
They lay back in the grass, smelling the flowers growing around them and listening to the hum and buzz of insects.  Leaves rustled in the distance, sussurating hypnotically and Xogenes allowed himself to relax.  There was no-one here to see them, no-one to question their closeness and friendship, no-one to tell them that blowing the seeds off dandelions was pointle–
"You'd want to make the core explosive," said Clytie, breaking into his reverie.  "Maybe two layers though, one to free the seeds first and the second to explode in the face of the person blowing on it."
"I wouldn't," said Xogenes again.  "I'd paint dandelions, or perhaps make a sculpture of them.  I think one of the mad artists did something similar with some flowers associated with the sun."
"Jerusalem Artichokes?"
"...could be," said Xogenes, unsure.  "I think there was a severed ear involved as well."
"Hah!  And you say you wouldn't weaponise things!"
"He might have painted with the severed ear," said Xogenes, knowing that it was a bit of a stretch.  "People paint with palette knives and by squirting paint out of thei–"
"Don't know, don't care!"  Clytie was a bit of a prude sometimes, which continually surprised Xogenes.  The woman had a cybernetic hand, and he couldn't imagine how you could embrace that kind of physical transformation without losing your prudery.  Instead, she was somehow hyper aware of what was self and what was non-self.  She was like a T-cell.
"I don't think the dandelions cut his ear off."
"Jerusalem Artichokes," said Clytie.  "But if you shape the explosive charge you might actually be able to cut an ear off with it.  Imagine that, you blow on a dandelion to tell the time and it blows the side of your head off!"
"I don't think you should sound happy about that," said Xogenes, cringing a little.  He was glad that they were lying side by side so she couldn't see that.  "Can't you weaponise it in a less violent way?"
"What, like... like, you blow on it and it blows back on you?  Nerve gas!"
"Where do you store enough nerve gas to kill a human?" said Xogenes.  "That's ridiculous."
"Back to the explosives then," said Clytie, still sounding cheerful.
"And why dandelions?  They're not very pretty to look at like this."
"Yeah, but people interact with them.  When was the last time you saw someone interact with a tulip?"
"You attacked me with a vase of them last week.  Then Thomas came home and looked at us like we were naughty children and suggested I leave."  Thomas was Clytie's husband and the most sensible person that either Clytie or Xogenes knew.
"Oh yeah.  Still, normal people."
"Oh well, normal people...."
They fell silent again and stared up into the sky, watching as real clouds slowly pulled themselves together from frail white wisps drifting seemingly aimlessly around.  The insects continued to buzz and hum, and the breeze continued to gently disturb the nearby trees so that they rustled and shook like men afraid of pickpockets.
"Flesh-eating bacteria," said Clytie.  "Sprayed onto the seeds so that when you blow on them to dislodge them, the vortex formations pull the bacteria back to the face of the blower and condemn them to four days of agony as their face is eaten back to the skull."
"How do you know it's four days?" said Xogenes before he could stop himself.  Then, "and stop weaponising the damn flowers!"
"Four days," said Clytie, sounding pleased he'd asked.....

Clytie and Xogenes

On Tuesday the bookshelf slipped a little bit through the floor.  It annoyed Xogenes a lot as he'd put the big, heavy books on the bottom shelf, and now he couldn't quite get them back out to read them.  That meant that his collected editions of Britney Spears's Thoughts were completely inaccessible and  that he was left with reading Justin Bieber's Aphorisms over his breakfast cereal.  It just wasn't the same.
Clytie came over a little before lunch and knocked on the door with her hand.  She'd had reconstructive surgery on that hand a few weeks earlier and had taken them up on the cyborg option and hadn't learned about her own strength yet, so instead of tapping out an amusing rat-a-tat tat-tat on the door she put her fist through the wood with a firm crunch.  Xogenes heard the crunch and came out of his studio to see what had happened, and discovered Clytie trying to pull her hand back out of the door and swearing a lot.
"Why didn't you use the doorknocker?" asked Xogenes, opening the door and pulling Clytie into the hallway with it.
"It's merged into the door," said Clytie, pointing with her free hand.  And it was, so it looked that it had gone at the same time as the bookcases; sometime Monday night or early Tuesday morning.  Xogenes sighed, trying to sound put upon, but Clytie was still struggling to pull her hand free.
"Give us help here, Xoggie," said Clytie, tugging away from the door.  "I think there's a big splinter or something stopping me from pulling back properly.  Have you got a hammer?"
"That's my door," said Xogenes, not moving.  He smoothed his smock down when Clytie just stared at him, finding a smudge of Chalcedony-effect paint on a shoulder.  "Well it is," he said.  "You can't just come over here knocking big holes in people's doors, Clytie, it's insecure."
"So what?  Do I have to stay here now to protect your door from visitors?"
"Well, yes," said Xogenes.  "It's all your fault, isn't it?"
"If you had a door-knocker this wouldn't have happened!"
"I do have a door-knocker."
"No, you don't.  You have half a door-knocker, submerged in the door and unusable."
"You could have pulled it free with that cyborg hand of yours!"
"And then you'd be complaining about the hole in your door still!"
They fell silent after that for a few moments.
"So, have you got that hammer then?"
"No," said Xogenes firmly.  "I'll call a... who do you call about doors?"
"A carpenter," said Clytie.  "Unless your door's not make of wood.  This one's mostly Polyfilla, I think."
"I'll call a carpenter," said Xogenes, looking around for his phone and not seeing it.  "Although, if you're going to keep coming over maybe I should get a stronger door."
"You'll still need the carpenter to reinforce the door-frame," said Clytie.
"How do you know all this all of a sudden?  I thought you had a husband for anything practical."
"I'd slap you if I had my hand free," said Clytie.  "I've had to get the doors replaced at the summer house."
There was another shared silence and then they burst into joint laughter.  Finally it subsided and Xogenes started looking for his phone again.
"I could still use that hammer," said Clytie, a little sharply, so Xogenes got her the meat tenderiser from the kitchen, finding his phone in the fridge in the process.  Clytie looked at it, looked as though she was going to say something, and then changed her mind.  She she pounded on the door, trying to free her hand, Xogenes called the carpenter.
"I need a carpenter," he said.
"And you thought of calling me?  Well, that is a stroke of luck!"  The carpenter was clearly as helpful as Clytie.
"My friend just stuck her hand through my door," said Xogenes, trying to ignore the carpenter's sarcasm.
"Friend?  Female friend, metal hand, sharp tongue?"
"Well, yes, actually, but don't tell her I agree with you."
"Give me the address," said the carpenter.  "She's turning out to be really good for business."