Day 16, GC Standard 308
SPEAKER
‘Speaker?’ Tracker called down the hall.
Speaker was awake, but hadn’t left her bed. She had no plans to do so anytime soon. It was very, very morning. ‘What?’ she called, lying flat on her belly, not bothering to lift her head.
‘Are you expecting a mail drone?’
Speaker thought. She hadn’t ordered anything recently. ‘Might be that hull paint you bought?’
‘That’s what I figured, but …’
‘But what?’
‘Well, its delivery address is for the shuttle, not the ship.’
Speaker raised her head. ‘That’s weird. Who’s it from?’
‘I have no idea who—’ Tracker paused. ‘Is this that Quelin you met?’
Speaker got up. ‘Let it dock.’
The crate the drone delivered was small, and not particularly heavy. Within the crate was an unmarked box, and tied to the top of this with a bit of ribbon was an info chip. Speaker picked up the chip, plugged it into her scrib, and read the message that appeared on screen.
Hello Speaker,
I hope me sending you something unannounced isn’t an intrusion. I thought about contacting you ahead of time, but you know I can’t resist a surprise.
I’m taking a risk here, in sending you a gift that I have not been able to test. I admit, I’m not sure if it will work. You see, I did some digging after we left Gora, and it turns out that the GC Medical Institute has brain maps of every known sapient species. I’ve never worked with a map that wasn’t part of a pre-built sim design template, so building off of such raw material was quite a challenge. If this doesn’t work as I hope it will, I’d appreciate hearing exactly what went wrong, so that I might try again with improved results.
But, in the optimistic scenario that it does work: I fervently hope this is a positive experience for you (and for your sister, and whomever else you wish to share it with).
If you ever find yourself near Chalice, please do come say hello. I’d love to throw you that party I promised.
Kindly,
Roveg
PS If you are wondering, my sons are doing very well.
‘What is it?’ Tracker asked.
Speaker had an inkling – a bewildered, sceptical inkling, but an exciting one all the same. She opened the box, and her suspicion was confirmed.
Roveg had sent her a sim hub, a box of one-use slap patches, and a download drive hand-printed in Klip. Wushengat, the label read.
Flower Lake, she remembered.
On the back of the drive were instructions in tiny print:
1.Lie down or sit somewhere comfortable.
2.Place a slap patch on the back of your neck, right over your brain stem, with the red stripe facing upward.
3.Turn on the sim hub. You’ll hear a ping when it connects to your patch.
4.Plug in the drive.
5.Close your eyes and wait until the count of ten for the sim to load.
Tracker moved into Speaker’s periphery. ‘You’re not seriously going to plug that thing into your head, are you?’
‘Oh, yes, I am,’ Speaker said. She put everything back in the box, gathered it beneath her less dominant arm, and headed back toward the bedroom.
‘Speaker.’ Tracker swung after her. ‘Speaker, hang on. We can’t use—’
‘We don’t use them. That’s not the same as can’t.’ Speaker handed the box to her sister. ‘Can you take this?’ She nodded toward their bed, which she couldn’t climb to one-handed.
Tracker took the box with her feet, frowning. ‘You could hurt yourself,’ she said. ‘That’s some modder shit. That’s some hackjob—’
‘It’s not hackjob,’ Speaker said. ‘Roveg’s a professional. He knows what he’s doing.’
‘Yeah, for other types of brains. Do you not want to think about this?’
‘I thought about it.’
‘For two seconds.’
Speaker sat down on her bed and pulled a cushion behind herself, letting it support her weight. She looked her sister in the eye. ‘I trust him.’
Tracker continued to frown. With slow reluctance, she handed the box over.
‘Thank you,’ Speaker said. ‘And if it’ll make you feel better, you can sit with me while I do it.’
‘Oh, ho, I absolutely will,’ Tracker said. She swung herself into bed and sat directly across from Speaker.
‘Okay,’ Speaker said, setting the hub down. ‘Sit somewhere comfortable, check. Put a patch on my neck …’ She opened the box and took one of the patches out. It was thin, no thicker than a bandage, and somehow soft despite the wires running through it. She applied it to the back of her neck, right below the base of her skull.
‘Does it hurt?’ Tracker said.
‘No. It feels like … nothing,’ Speaker replied. She switched the hub on. A mild warmth spread through the patch. The hub beeped as a connection was made. ‘All right,’ she said, holding up the drive. ‘Here goes.’
‘If you so much as twitch, I’m ripping that thing off,’ Tracker said.
Speaker crinkled her eyes, reached out, and put her sister’s palm over her own heart. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘If I start to feel worrisome, you can shut down the hub.’
She inserted the drive, closed her eyes, and began to count.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. S—
Everything hit all at once.
There was light. She had stood on dozens of planets, and on moons, too, in marketplaces and transit stations and parks and spaceports, all basking beneath alien suns. But in each of those situations, her view was confined to the window of her mech suit, a metal-framed border that stood between her and every vista the galaxy had to offer. The only places she’d ever been without her suit were ships and shuttles, and these, too, were made of metal, of walls, of end points. Here, in this illusion Roveg had built, there was no separation between herself and the world, nothing cutting her field of vision in half. Everything was impossibly, unimaginably, overwhelmingly bright.
There was the openness. Again, this was an experience she thought she knew from standing planetside and seeing the ground stretch flat in all directions. But without her suit propping her up, without it protecting her from her surroundings, the sheer size of this place made her feel so, so small.
There was the sensation that swept across her skin, which immediately registered in her mind as danger. There was an air leak somewhere, she thought. There was a busted valve, a damaged seal, a hatch or bulkhead about to pop. It took her several moments to reassess the feeling, slowly, like an explorer. Like a scientist. The pressure hadn’t changed. She could breathe just fine. The air wasn’t leaking. It was simply moving. With a small, trembling cry, she realised what that meant.
She was feeling the wind.
‘Speaker?’ Tracker said. Hearing this was uncomfortably dissonant, because Speaker knew her sister was seated right in front of her, but they were no longer in the same place. Her voice came from nowhere.
Speaker found her words, with effort. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, her voice quavering. ‘I’m okay.’ I’m okay, she repeated to herself, though she wasn’t entirely sure of that – not because the sim was hurting her, but because it was just so much.
Roveg had built a world for her, and she’d entered it on the shore of a lake. She was kneeling directly on the sand – creamy white and sugar-soft. The water had an amethyst tint, and lapped tenderly against time-polished stones. A forest ringed the lake, its trees heavy with flowers. A paddle boat just her size was tethered to a post, and bobbed in the purplish ripples. Some kind of tiny golden arthropod meandered just ahead of the waves, darting here and there with comic quickness. And all around her, all through the sand and up to the trees, stood practical posts made of smooth white wood, each carved with notches an Akarak could swing from.
She did not climb the posts. She did not go toward the boat. She remained kneeling, and dug her hands into the sand. She clenc
hed her fingers, then stretched them out, then pushed them in deeper. She tried to think of something to compare the feeling to. A bowl of cooking starch. A bag of hydroponic soil. The ash you cleaned out of an engine filter every few weeks. No, none of those things came close to what the sand felt like. All of them were small, contained, packaged. Everything she thought she understood about touch, about the sensations of the worlds she visited, about what a world was … all of it was wrong. Completely wrong.
She’d never been anywhere before.
Speaker reached up and tore the slap patch from her neck. Reality returned with a jolt, and she shivered from head to toe, even though her ship was warm and dry. Her ship. Her bed. Her sister. All existing within the compact scale she’d always known. It was terrible to look at now, and yet, it was all she wanted. It was familiar. It was safe.
‘Hey, hey,’ Tracker said. She held Speaker’s wrists gently in her hands. ‘Hey, whoa, what’s—’
Without a word, Speaker fell against her sister and began to keen like an injured child. The cries ripped themselves from her throat, reflexive and untethered, each a warbling wail. Tracker did what any twin would do in response: she held the other half of her soul tight, saying nothing, holding fast, giving the pain space to pour itself out. Speaker didn’t know why she was acting like this, but she couldn’t stop it, either. She keened and keened until her throat felt raw.
‘I’ve never,’ she gasped at last, ‘I’ve never – we’ve – we don’t – we don’t understand—’ She clutched at Tracker as though she were falling. ‘We don’t understand what it would be like.’
Tracker nuzzled her, stroked her head, rubbed beak against beak. ‘Oh, my heart, my heart, my heart,’ she said, speaking the words like a lullaby. ‘What happened?’
Speaker pulled back a bit, tried to breathe, tried to think. After a moment, she reached over, picked up the slap patches, and offered the box to Tracker. ‘You need to see it,’ she said.
Tracker stared at her, but did not protest as she had when Roveg’s crate had first been opened. They were in a different space now, the two of them – that place of wordless understanding only siblings shared, a place brought into being when one cracked herself fully open. Speaker needed Tracker to see what she’d seen, and so, Tracker would go look. She put on a patch. She closed her eyes. She breathed normally … until she didn’t anymore. Her breathing stopped, then sped up, then caught, then shook – not in the way that made Speaker wake her up in the night, but in the same way that Speaker’s had before she’d cried out.
Speaker held Tracker’s hands tightly, feeling her sister’s pulse race against her palms.
‘Oh,’ Tracker gasped. ‘Oh – oh, fuck.’ She laughed, sort of. The look on her face went from joy to grief, and Speaker felt it echo in her bones. Tracker shook their clasped hands urgently. ‘Come back in with me,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be here alone.’
‘Do you want to stay in it?’ Speaker asked.
‘Yes,’ Tracker said. ‘Stars, yes.’
Speaker replaced the patch she’d torn off, and went back to the lake.
Tracker looked strange. Speaker had never known a life without Tracker in it, and she knew her sister’s body as well as her own … but she’d never seen Tracker off a ship without a suit. She’d never seen her in full sunlight.
Tracker evidently felt the same, from the way she gaped. ‘Do I look as small as you?’ she asked.
Speaker knew what Tracker meant. She didn’t know what to make of her sister – who had always been larger than herself, who had always been tall and strong – looking so fragile and delicate on a breezy shore. Speaker began to crawl toward Tracker, intending to reassure her, but an unexpected sensation made her pause. She cocked her head, moved forward a hands-width or so, and laughed. ‘You have to try this,’ she said.
‘Try … what?’ Tracker said.
‘Crawl,’ Speaker said. ‘And make sure your belly is touching the sand.’
Tracker gave her a quizzical look, but got down on her forelimbs and crawled forward. ‘Ha!’ she cried. She rocked her torso back and forth, granules of sand spilling out below her. ‘Oh, that feels so weird.’ She looked at Speaker, her gaze burning bright. ‘What else can we try?’
They learned the feeling of sand together. They learned the feeling of water on their legs, and of floating in a boat, and of laughing after the boat flipped. They climbed a tree and hung from the branches. They lay on the ground and looked at the sky. They spent hours in Roveg’s favourite place, forgetting every chore and fix-it list that awaited them in the ship they could no longer see. The lake wasn’t real. It wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter. They would never feel a real world this way, Speaker knew. None of her people would, not in her lifetime. But maybe …
… maybe one day, one of them would.
The sim wasn’t real, but their bodies were, and there reached a point where even a purple sky and sugar sand couldn’t distract them from their growling stomachs.
‘We can come back after we eat,’ Speaker said. ‘Or any time.’
‘Yeah,’ Tracker said. ‘Ready?’
Together, they peeled their patches off. They blinked at their home as though they’d never seen it before. They reached out without speaking, and held each other’s hands.
‘What do we do with this?’ Tracker asked, nodding at the hub. ‘We can’t keep it just for us.’
Speaker popped the drive out and held it in her hands, running a finger over the label Roveg had written for her. ‘We make copies,’ she said, ‘and we show everyone. We give it to anyone who wants to know what a world feels like.’
‘And what will that do?’ Tracker said.
‘I don’t know,’ Speaker said. ‘I just want them to see what we saw. Feel what we felt.’ She turned the download drive over and over in her hands, savouring the memory of the imaginary. ‘I don’t know if it’ll do anything. I don’t know if anyone else will care. But I think that’s what we have to do.’
Day 119, GC Standard 308
OULOO
Ouloo awoke not out of habit or rhythm, but thanks to a smell. She pulled her head from beneath her hind leg and drew in one deep breath. That was all it took to get her up and running.
Something was on fire.
The direction of whatever calamity had arisen in her home was easy to place, as there were lights on in the kitchen, and a great deal of bustling and clanking from said-same. She stumbled through the door, paws tripping over each other in haste, untended fur puffed in alarm.
‘It’s fine!’ Tupo yelled in the aggravated tone of someone who had hoped to remedy a problem without being noticed. ‘It’s totally fine!’ Xe stood at the pot filler, blasting water into a smouldering cooking pan. Steam and smoke mingled together over the carbonic remains of whatever it was xe was trying to scrape out.
‘Tupo, what—’ The burst of adrenaline that had awoken her was still waging war with her sleep-addled perception, and it took her a moment to fully digest the surrounding scene. The kitchen, which she’d left pristine at bedtime, now looked as though the contents of her cupboards had violently expelled themselves onto every conceivable workspace. Raw batter dripped from a tilted bowl stacked atop several others. Used spoons and cups lay scattered about. Beneath the smoke, there was the powerful smell of cooking oil, which was explained by the soggy stack of rags set atop a spilled puddle in an apparent attempt to mop it up.
The baffled reprimand preparing to launch from Ouloo’s tongue dissolved as Tupo turned xyr face toward her. ‘I wanted to make you breakfast,’ xe said mournfully.
Ouloo closed her eyes, took a breath, and approached the sink. ‘What were you trying to make?’
‘Sunrise dumplings,’ Tupo sighed.
Ouloo peered into the blackened pan, now parsing the molten shapes of what could conceivably have been sunrise dumplings, or an attempt at them. They were one of her favourites, when not reduced to slag, but why a child who rarely could be found at the stove
would attempt a dish this intricate was beyond her. ‘What gave you that idea?’ she asked, taking both pan and spatula. She began to pry the ruined bundles out.
Tupo’s paws shuffled. Xe was as tall as xyr mother now – a development that had happened in a blink, and one Ouloo was coming to terms with – but still so soft and clumsy in how xe moved. An adultish body housed with childish spirit. That was what adolescence was, she supposed, but stars, Ouloo wished she could’ve kept her little Tupo just a short while longer.
‘Well,’ Tupo said, ‘we don’t have any guests docking today, and we’ve got lots coming tomorrow, so I thought …’ The shuffling intensified. ‘I thought maybe I could give you a break.’
Ouloo wrestled in a most parental way between melting over her child doing something kind for her, and the fact that she did have a full guest list the next day and really could have used an uninterrupted sleep and a kitchen that didn’t need to be cleaned again. ‘You silly sweetie,’ Ouloo said, melt winning out. She nuzzled Tupo’s head with the side of her neck, then blinked. ‘Did you trim your fur?’
‘Yeah.’
The trim was extraordinarily uneven, but never in a million years would Ouloo voice that. She hadn’t asked Tupo to trim xyr fur, and she would not add an asterisk to this victory. ‘It looks good,’ she lied, then added, honestly: ‘It’s nice to see your eyes.’
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within Page 27