Machinehood

by S. B. Divya

  Welga shrugged. “Maybe. If I thought that was the only way to end the Machinehood, yes. Part of me wants to go back to the Maghreb. It’s stupid. I doubt they’ve kept my squad’s bodies waiting, but if they’ve been buried, I’d like to see their graves, to say good-bye. But I’m glad I wasn’t around for my government to screw me a third time.”

  Not her government, not anymore.

  But I’ll always be an American, just like I’ll always be human. It doesn’t matter where I live or what body parts I change.

  A car pulled up to the cab zone and opened a door for her. Welga slipped inside.

  “Hell of a thing,” Olafson said, leaning on the open doorframe. “What does it feel like?”

  Welga opened and closed her mouth three times before coming up with an answer that didn’t make her sound like an asshole. “Natural, I guess. I don’t feel like I’ve turned into someone—or something—else. I’m still me, just different.” She scratched the back of her neck. “The hardest thing was learning not to talk to my agent, but I’m used to it now. Thinking to her is much more efficient. The worst part is knowing that the station council has control over my body.”

  “That’s—I didn’t know. You’re their hostage.”

  “In a way. Every dakini has a built-in fail-safe. Until enough of us exist, it’s a safety measure for the rest of you. I suppose I could stay on Earth and have all the changes reversed, but I suspect I wouldn’t live a long and happy life after that. Those red flags from my medical exam? They turned out to be serious. I’ll always have the choice, though, if I decide I can’t stand this body for some reason.” Welga gazed up at Olafson. “The next step in technological advancement… we’ve always pushed for more communication, better control over our bodies, greater knowledge. The whole mech movement that our parents suffered through was a shitty attempt at what Ao Tara and her people have succeeded at. Maybe the al-Muwahhidun, too. What if I really can be an ambassador to a new society, a better way of life? It’s happened before, when the world moved from monarchies to democracies, or even in ancient history, going from hunter-gatherers to farmers. It could happen again. Maybe we can even convince the caliph to open his borders.”

  “The world has already changed. If nothing else, Ao Tara accomplished that much,” Olafson said. “Machine rights protesters are registering to attack government officials rather than funders. The balance of power has shifted. Bot sanctuary donations are up. People will go back to their regular lives, but here, around DC, we can’t stop talking about the dakini and what the stations will do to humanity.”

  “I think they’re over doing things to the planet, though perhaps we can do some good for it.”

  The cab would like to know if we intend to leave.

  “Sorry, time’s up,” Welga said.

  “It’s been an honor, Ramírez.” Olafson extended his hand. “Thank you for your service.”

  Welga took it and squeezed. The Buddha might not have been perfect, but he knew one truth about life: everything in the world is changeable.

  * * *

  She took a regular flight from DC to San Francisco. The sub-orbs were overbooked the instant they’d reopened so the government got her a seat on an airplane. It beat driving across the country, but not by much. The lengthy plane ride was uncomfortable, with people giving her the side-eye as if she’d go berserk at any moment. One family with young children opted out of the flight after seeing her board.

  Cabs weren’t yet operational in San Francisco, so she decided to run home. Waiting to find a ride meant more time lost before she could see Connor. Besides, she hadn’t done nearly enough exercise during her time on Eko-Yi. The rush of using her revitalized body made fourteen kilometers—and gravity—no burden.

  She arrived at her hive in a mess, her hair lank, her clothes darkened with sweat, and burst into their apartment.

  Hassan’s and Ammanuel’s grinning faces greeted her.

  “Took you long enough,” her former boss said, wrapping her in his bearlike arms.

  “How is he?”

  “Sleeping,” he replied, “but otherwise healthy. It took a couple weeks to get through the infection. I worried about him until he was through the worst of it.”

  “You’re a good man,” Welga said, returning Hassan’s hug. “Thank you for looking after him.”

  “You did it,” Ammanuel said, giving her a respectful nod.

  “And you made it home okay. I’m glad. Thank you for… everything.”

  Ammanuel shrugged. “Still on the bench, though. I’m ready to get back to some action, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know the feeling well.”

  They snorted. “I bet. Saw your excellent moves at the press conference.”

  “Thanks, basic. You’re not so bad yourself. I’m proud to have you as my replacement.” She tilted her head at Hassan. “He is, too, though he might not say it to your face.”

  “So what’s next?” Hassan asked.

  “Head back to the station. Complete my surgeries. After that, I don’t know. I promised to act as an ambassador, but what that means isn’t my decision.”

  “Is it true what people say?” Ammanuel’s eyes gleamed. “Are you reborn?”

  “Not literally, but they’ve given me a second chance. I want to make good use of it.”

  “Let her go, Ammanuel.” Hassan ushered them to the front door. “Don’t leave the planet without saying good-bye, Ramírez.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  She cracked open the bedroom door. Connor’s skin had taken on a healthy pink color rather than the feverish flush she’d left him with. His chest rose and fell with the even breathing of restful sleep. She hesitated, hand still on the doorknob, debating whether to wake him. Birds chirped outside the open window.

  Never heard that before.

  That’s because the traffic and climate control always drowned out the sound.

  “Welga?”

  He opened his eyes and arms. She fell into them and held on tight.

  * * *

  Welga’s cab drove through the front of a dust storm on its way from the Phoenix airport. I won’t miss this weather. Sand pelted her as she ran into the house. Her father stood in the kitchen, pressing tortillas.

  He hugged her for so long, the masa started to burn.

  She kissed him on the cheek and nudged him aside. “Get a drink and sit down, Papa. I’ll make lunch.”

  She set her motions to be a little faster than baseline, but not too much. You can’t hurry good food. The fresh tortillas would make great enchiladas. A can of black beans in the cupboard and some ground beef and queso fresco from the fridge would make a tasty filling. She fried some onions with oregano, leaning over the steam with a sigh of delight. She put that aside, slipped the pan of enchiladas into the oven, and brought two bowls of salad to the sofa.

  Welga glanced at her mother’s lab bench.

  “She’d be proud of you,” Oscar said. He took a bite and made a contented sound. “Of your food, too.”

  “Papa… what do you think about moving off-world?”

  He raised his brows. “What would they do with an old man like me?”

  “They have plenty of light-duty work up there, and you could handle it better than here. Microgravity will reduce your blood pressure, ease the load on your heart. They have therapies that might help you live longer, or at least more comfortably, but—if you take them, you can’t come back. It would be a one-way trip at your age.”

  Oscar looked pointedly at the new outer walls of the house. “I just fixed that up.”

  Welga studied her salad and said nothing.

  “Space station, huh?”

  “Yeah. Will you give it a chance? If you hate it, you can live with Luis in Chennai, but it’s not fair to him if I’m up there and you’re here in Phoenix. He’ll have to come running every time you need help.”

  Oscar sighed. “But aren’t they all Buddhists up there?”

  “Don’t worry, they won�
�t ask you to convert. They never asked me.”

  “Huh.”

  She savored the earthy zing of a radish.

  “Would you ride the rocket up with me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Would I have to leave everything behind?” He stood and ran a trembling hand over Mama’s bench. “I’d like to bring something of hers with me.”

  “I’ll ask.”

  Welga checked on the enchiladas. Yes, they were done. What if she could enhance her sense of taste, like one of those chemical analysis bots? Would it make her a better cook? What could she do in the kitchen on the station?

  As they sat at the table and ate, Oscar’s brows drew down. “I’ve lived here my entire life. I was born in this house.”

  “I know, but I have to go back. I can’t look after you here anymore. I’m sorry.”

  Welga reached a hand across the table and took his. The sun-brown had grow even paler in the weeks she’d been gone. No gigs since the stellas fell, nothing to take him out of the house on a daily basis.

  “If you stay here, I’m getting you a damn care-bot.”

  Oscar grunted. “I’d rather go to outer space.”

  * * *

  Ghosts.

  Welga had accrued a trail of them over the years. Mama. Jack Travis. Her squad mates. Briella Jackson.

  They followed her as she and Connor finished packing up the apartment. He and Ammanuel had done the bulk of the work, but they’d left the smaller stuff for last. Every item held a memory of a person or a moment or a decision. Years of her life, encapsulated by her chosen home. No wonder her father had a hard time leaving. He had to abandon more decades. She’d spent all of the previous day helping him gather essential items and finding him a flight from Phoenix to DC. Luis could empty and sell the house later.

  She kept half her attention on the feeds. The uneasy truce between the USA, China, India, and the station continued. Most people had resumed their routine lives, but they talked about their WAIs and bots in a way that they hadn’t before. Baby steps. Progress required scraped knees and tears. She could help guide them.

  Microcameras swarmed around her. The dakini faced an uphill road to change the world’s opinion of them. They’d need to share their lives with people, show them what an ordinary day looked like. Eko-Yi didn’t have the power to send live feeds, but they could record and package their lives for the world to see.

  “Not going to need these,” Connor said. He held up a set of static camos from boot camp.

  Every time she saw him, she felt the urge to hold him. I’m not leaving your side again. “What else lurks in the back of our closet?”

  “This.” He handed her a stuffed doll of Rosalind Elsie Franklin.

  She held it out for the cameras. “My mother gave this to me for my tenth birthday.”

  Her throat closed as she held it. As a dakini, she could fulfill the dream of becoming a biogeneticist. Without a flow restriction, the possibilities for her life stretched as wide as the galaxy.

  Their closet also held a gift from Captain Travis: a portable chess set that had seen her through long nights in the Maghreb. Travis insisted that feeling the pieces, moving them by hand, gave a better experience than virtual games.

  It was a stupid bit of weight to carry onto a space station. Same with the doll. She packed them anyway.

  A box full of dusty electronics was the last item in there. Welga rifled through them for fun—a rectangular task-bot, a potted plant minder, her fertility tracker. Wouldn’t need those anymore. A small gray box. Por Qué, version one. Her agent had first lived in that device, back when Welga was seventeen years old, before she had dispersed into stellas and servers. Welga ran her finger over the indentation that used to wake her agent up.

  Throw it out. We’re far beyond that now.

  It doesn’t weigh much.

  She slipped it into a pocket.

  So damn sentimental.

  Only today. Goes hand in hand with packing up one life for another.

  She zipped her bag and stood.

  The apartment lay bare but for packing containers, the floor back to basic, the furniture sold or hauled away for cycling. Sunlight filtered through the window and lit the empty space where the kitchen used to sit. She hadn’t given that away, not with so many of her grandmother’s pans and recipes stored in it. The kitchen would stay in a storage space on Earth, along with the couch Connor had bought her. Maybe someday, by some turn of fate, she’d be back, wanting to cook a mango molé or tamarind chutney or roasted turkey.

  Connor emerged from the bedroom, his own bag across his shoulder. He took her hand and gazed at the view of the city. Hives. Sunlight. Clouds and trees. The ocean. Full gravity. Her throat closed.

  “What’s it like up there?” he said softly.

  “Quiet. Orderly. You’ll like it.”

  “Of course I will, as long as you’re with me.”

  “The food might drive me away.”

  He laughed. “If anyone can fix that, it’s you.”

  * * *

  They rode to Eko-Yi in a passenger capsule. Welga had to carry Khandro into the vehicle. The dakini could barely keep her eyes open, those deep brown irises forever imprinted in Welga’s mind with fire and smoke and the roar of the refinery. Khandro trembled from the effort of staying upright, and her skin felt papery.

  Thank you for your help, sister.

  Will you survive the launch?

  Dr. Kailo from Eko-Yi gives me a greater than ninety percent chance. Another month here and that number would have dropped to fifty.

  Khandro and Ao Tara had a teary good-bye, with the older woman headed to the Hague for detention by the International Criminal Court. The United States government wanted to imprison her if she was convicted, but human rights and machine rights people had expressed their support for leniency. Between the responsibility for the initial deadly attacks falling on Kanata’s shoulders, and the effective death sentence if the monk remained on Earth, Welga couldn’t help agreeing. They could make her last weeks comfortable.

  Welga also had to help Papa, first with his space suit, then his entry into the passenger capsule. Oscar grumbled over every step and scowled as she buckled him into his seat. They’d managed to pack up her mother’s old fabricator. It wouldn’t work in microgravity—hell, it probably wouldn’t survive the launch with all its parts intact—but that wasn’t the point. It was one of Laila’s most beloved items, and small enough that they could carry it into space. Oscar had used half his weight allowance for that.

  A good portion of her own allotment had gone to spices—and two kilos of whole arabica beans, to savor when she couldn’t stand the crap they called coffee on Eko-Yi.

  Welga settled into the familiar sensation of weightlessness and watched as Connor tried to hold the contents of his stomach. He’d never been good with motion sickness. Along one side of her visual, Nithya, Carma, and Luis slept. Ammanuel woke next to their partner and flung a lazy arm over them. Hassan sipped at a mug.

  Could she do it? Be the bridge between the Earth and space, between past and future? What the hell did she know about diplomacy? She’d have to deal with designers wanting to investigate her tech—her body—in action. Multiple project groups had applied to come up to the station, to see how the dakini came into being and how they functioned in microgravity. Since Welga had twenty years on the other dakini, the groups had expressed curiosity about her physiology compared to theirs.

  It’s not the first time you’ve reinvented yourself. You became a Raider instead of a biogeneticist. Then you became a shield instead of a Raider. Now you’re a dakini, and next you’ll be an ambassador.

  Clemence and the others won’t understand how to deal with all the publicity. I can help them with that at least. Save them from basic mistakes. And I’ll get to interface with the new council members from China and India. I wonder what they’ll ask of me. It’s hard to imagine remaking the rest of the world, blurring the lines between humans and
WAIs.

  We’re like that already.

  True, and I have no regrets about what we’ve become. We’ll have to show everyone else how good this is.

  She released her buckles and floated to the windowpane, close enough to fog it with her breath, and looked down at her planet. Like every image she’d seen of Earth, the land had no divisions. Neither did space. The haze of atmosphere faded into blackness with no clear boundary. Welga pressed a hand against the cold glass of the capsule. Where did her flesh stop and the machine begin? Maybe the answer didn’t matter. If she had to help the world move toward a better future, they would need to work as one.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A first novel is a massive undertaking, and this one took about three years, so it comes with an equally large list of people who deserve my gratitude. Foremost, thank you to my agent, Cameron McClure, for her patience, wisdom, and good humor with this fledgling writer over the past five years. She helped me navigate the rocky terrain that is a first novel and guided it to the destination I was aiming for.

  Thank you to my editors: Navah Wolfe, who was the first one to believe in Machinehood and give it the strength it needed, and Joe Monti, who took up the baton and carried it to the finish line. Also, thank you to Valerie Shea for meticulous copy edits, Madison Penico for keeping things on track, Lauren Jackson for the publicity support, and the rest of the team at Saga and Gallery.

  This book is my “artificial intelligence story,” one that integrates subjects that I first began learning in college. My thanks to the professors who inspired my deep love of machine learning and neuroscience: Christoph Koch, Pietro Perona, John Hopfield, Jim Bower, and Henry Lester. The novel also needed quite a lot of expert advice to make it credible. Thanks to Dr. Bijan Pesaran and Dr. Kristen Bandy for their help with the neuroscience and medicine. Thanks as well to Dustin Butler and Alison Balzer for their help with intelligence work and global geopolitics. I’m grateful to you all for sharing your knowledge and inspiring new ideas. I take full responsibility for all real or invented details and any associated errors in the actual story.