by Kali Wallace
But Xiomara was right: with Ariana incapacitated, even temporarily, we might have a chance to help her. We had only one infected person, not hundreds. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t stop thinking about the words she had parroted to us, her voice so empty of intonation it was as though she was making sounds that had no meaning to her.
“She’s still in there,” Xiomara said. “Jas. She recognized you.”
“I don’t think she did,” I said.
“She did say your name,” Baqir pointed out.
I shook my head. “No. That’s not what that was.”
“Well, it wasn’t all fucking Archaic Chinese,” Xiomara snapped. “Maybe she was still—hallucinating, or something, but she was talking to us, she saw you and—”
“No. She wasn’t. She didn’t.”
“You don’t know—”
“Yes, I do,” I said, cutting Xiomara off firmly. “I know because what she said were the exact same words my parents said right before my father died. The last time they spoke to each other.”
I looked at Xiomara, at Baqir, both of them silent, and willed them to understand.
“There’s no recording of those words. I’ve never told anybody. Not the investigators. Not the doctors. Not my aunt. Not you.” I looked at Baqir. “I never told anybody. But Ariana repeated them exactly.”
“She said something about a knife,” Baqir said quietly.
Our breath was creating clouds of mist, tinted red by the dormancy lights. Ariana drifted, the toe of one boot rustling over a dried and frostbitten cluster of leaves.
“I was in my room,” I said. “I didn’t know anything was really wrong yet. I knew people were getting sick, but not . . . like that. They thought it was a chemical leak in the research labs or something. There was no quarantine yet. My dad had come back to stay with me, and when Mum came home . . . that’s what she said. She said, ‘Vinod . . .’” My voice cracked on my father’s name. “‘Vinod, what are you doing with that knife?’ I went out to see what was going on, and she told me to go back to my room.”
I rubbed my hand through my hair, knocking loose shards of frozen sweat. I didn’t want to remember the fear on my mother’s face, the dawning horror on my father’s in the brief moments of clarity before the panic took him.
“He was infected,” I said, “but he was aware enough to know he was infected. He closed himself in the bathroom. We didn’t see what happened. But we could hear it.”
The struggled breathing, the thumping. A quiet gurgle. He had not cried out.
“How could a virus do that?” Baqir asked. “Or—whatever it did to Ariana?”
Xiomara shook her head, sending shivers of motion through her frost-edged dreadlocks. “We have to stop thinking of it as a virus. We saw it moving through Ariana. That’s not a virus.” Her tears were drying up, her voice growing stronger. “The doctors and SPEC got it wrong. It’s big enough to be seen through the skin, and it grows quickly from the point of infection, and it’s at least partly mechanical. It’s some kind of bioengineered parasite.”
“If it’s even bio-anything,” Baqir said. “It could be entirely mechanical. If there was some sort of transceiver or radio—”
“It could have recorded my parents’ words,” I said.
Xiomara nodded thoughtfully. “There are neuromedical devices that are triggered by changes in body temperature and chemistry. Something like that—when it got into Ariana, if it sensed the right conditions, it would wake from a dormant state and begin functioning again. It might have detected a signal from the other one, the one in . . .” She winced as she looked at me. “The one in your father. We warmed up the room, gave it favorable conditions again. Temperature might be the trigger for activity. The device in Ariana knew it was waking. That’s why she followed us there.”
“Fuck,” Baqir said. “They were never hallucinating. None of them.”
“It would have to have very high-level nerve control. Brain systems and autonomic functions. Voluntary functions, too, if it can take over and make the hosts move and speak. Is that even possible? Does technology like that exist? You must know something about the research into communication between brain and machine,” Xiomara said to Baqir.
“A little,” he conceded, which I knew was a massive understatement. He was flexing the fingers of his metal hand, frowning in thought. After a moment he said, “It’s not impossible. But most neural engineering is on interfaces that work the other way around—getting signals from the brain to control external devices. The research on signaling the other way . . . nothing I’ve ever heard of can even get close to using an engineered device to control higher brain functions. Things like making muscles twitch, controlling spasms, anything that’s a straightforward electrical effect, that’s easy. But speech and decision-making and mimicry . . . I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it.”
“And after death?” I said.
Baqir touched my arm. “I don’t know. It might be—what we saw in Ariana was big enough to see. It might grow large enough for crude motor manipulation, even without any neural input. Or life signs.”
“We have to assume it’s possible,” Xiomara said. She lifted her hand to her neck, and I tensed—looked for any sign of motion, for any squirm of discomfort—but she was only adjusting the suit’s collar. She saw me staring and moved her hand away. “If it’s a biomechanical parasite, we can help Ari. Somebody can take it out.”
Ariana groaned. It was a small sound, more breath than voice, but unmistakable. At her sides her hands uncurled from their clawlike rigidity. She groaned again, rolled her head from side to side, worked her lips as though preparing to speak.
Her eyes snapped open.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, no. I thought it was a dream.”
* * *
• • •
Ariana blinked. She hadn’t been blinking before, and now she did so rapidly, then hissed and rubbed frantically at her eyes. She shuddered when she looked at her hands, grimy with dirt, stiff with cold. She did not stop blinking.
“Ari?” Xiomara said. Her voice was breathy with banked hope. “Are you okay?”
Ariana looked at her through newly damp eyes. “Is it . . . what . . .” She looked at Baqir, at me, at the dead garden around us and the Earth so small through the windows. “It wasn’t a dream. Was it?”
She sounded like herself. Ariana’s normal speaking voice was rather high and strident, with a strong Rio accent. All of that inflection had been flattened before, when she was speaking words not her own.
“No,” Xiomara said. There were tears gathering in her eyes, and her face was screwed up with the effort of staying calm. “It wasn’t. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Ariana looked at her hands again. Then she burst into tears.
Xiomara lunged forward, hurry making her clumsy, and threw her arms around Ariana, bumping both of them into the round window. They bounced back, and Baqir stopped them with a hand on Xiomara’s shoulder, arrested their motion as they clung together.
Ariana was weeping with short, gasping sobs, her breath hitching as she said, “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” over and over again.
“It’s okay,” Xiomara murmured. “It’s okay.”
When she lifted her gaze to glare at me over the top of Ariana’s head, I knew exactly what she was saying: This was Ariana. I was wrong. She could be saved.
They could have all been saved, if only we had known.
Four hundred and seventy-seven people. My father. My mother. A low tremor built somewhere at the back of my mind. I was afraid if I opened my mouth to speak, I would vomit, or scream. I pulled myself away from Ariana. I wanted her to be okay, but I did not want to be near her. I had never felt so cold.
“Ariana, what happened?” Baqir said quietly. He was looking at me as he spoke. He had seen my short, clumsy retreat. “Can you tell us what happene
d?”
Ariana took in a few shuddering breaths before she lifted her face from Xiomara’s shoulder. She wiped the tears from her eyes, grimacing at the feel of her gritty hands on her face. “I don’t know. I don’t know what—I couldn’t stop it. I could feel it but I couldn’t . . .”
“Start when you first noticed something wrong,” Baqir said. “You snagged your suit?”
Ariana looked down at her left hand. “Only a little. It was barely even a scratch. I didn’t think . . . It didn’t feel like anything, and then it did. I wasn’t hallucinating.” She looked up sharply and glared at me. “There really was something there. I could feel it moving under my skin. At first it was small but . . . it grew. I was not imagining it.”
I couldn’t say anything. It was as though there was a hand clamped around my throat.
“All I could think about was getting it out of me,” Ariana went on, her voice growing stronger. “It was like—it was like I was fine one moment, and the next I couldn’t think of anything except getting it out. I’ve never been that scared. I couldn’t think of anything else. I thought my heart was going to arrest.”
Xiomara said, “We think it must be a biomechanical parasite. That could be what Dr. Lago had on board instead of a virus. That’s our best theory.”
“Maybe,” Ariana said. “All I know is that it—it changed. Like somebody hit a switch. I was still afraid, but I couldn’t do anything. I was awake, but I couldn’t move my own hands, I couldn’t turn my head, I couldn’t do anything. It was like I was trapped inside my own body and . . .” She trailed off, her breath hitching. Xiomara rubbed her shoulder soothingly. “I couldn’t stop it. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop it from doing what it wanted to do.”
“That’s awful,” Xiomara whispered.
“What do you mean, ‘wanted’?” I asked, and Ariana started. I said, more gently, “You said ‘what it wanted to do.’ What do you mean?”
“I meant . . . Oh, fuck, I don’t know how else to describe it.” Ariana’s words were ragged still, and her hands trembled as she clutched at Xiomara’s arm. “It was—it was like that. Like this switch came on and—and there was just this overwhelming feeling of inevitability.”
“Did you hear a command?” Baqir asked.
“No, no, I didn’t hear anything. I wasn’t even really understanding words, when everybody was talking.”
“But you spoke,” Xiomara pointed out. “You spoke to us.”
Ariana shook her head. “I didn’t. It did. It was like . . . input and output. That’s what it felt like. I don’t know how to explain it. My mouth was moving and sounds were coming out, but it was all just noise. Fuck. Fuck. How can I not even know what I said? It felt like I was making sounds because those sounds went in that order. And moving because those motions went in that order. Then there was suddenly something. Something else. More input. A reason to change direction.”
Baqir glanced at me. “We think we accidentally woke one of the other—machines, whatever they are. That could be what you heard.”
“How did you end up here?” Xiomara asked. “Is this where it was telling you to go?”
Ariana looked quickly toward the window, looked away again, as though something about seeing Earth there, so fragile and far away, was unbearable to her. “I don’t know. I don’t know why it came here. I don’t know why it does anything. There are no reasons. There are only impulses. Impulses I can’t control.”
“But what does it want?” Xiomara said.
“You mean, what do the people who designed it want,” Baqir said. “Isn’t that the real question? Whoever was working with Dr. Lago, or whoever he stole it from, whoever created this thing, they did so for a reason.”
How quickly we had begun referencing the will of this thing we had seen rippling beneath Ariana’s skin. We had shifted from viewing it as a senseless pathogen to speaking of it as a sentient creature with wants and desires of its own. But it was a designed thing. A built thing. A thing created for a purpose. It could slither into a woman’s mind and take away her control of her own body, her language, her will, but it did so because somebody had designed it that way. It was impossible to comprehend, that so much violence, so much blood and fear, could have been in service of a goal, unless that goal was mayhem.
Baqir let out a frustrated breath. “If it’s even supposed to do anything. This could be a test. Dr. Lago could have stolen something unfinished, or something that was supposed to be monitored or controlled. It could be malfunctioning. We don’t know.”
Ariana’s expression was thoughtful. “It was just like . . . you know how when you’re worried about something, something you can’t avoid, and it keeps running through your head over and over again, every single step you take to get there? It was like that. Everything it made me do was like a step toward the end.”
“What was at the end?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Ariana said, but she glanced toward Earth again. “It wasn’t like I was thinking anything. It was just . . . like a fractal, sort of, but it was everywhere around me, and there was this circle near the middle that felt like—I don’t know. It was pulling me in. I can’t explain it. It was—I don’t even remember moving through most of the ship, because that’s the only thing that made sense. Get to the circle. Why the fuck could it control me so easily if I couldn’t even figure out what it wants?”
“It had an advantage,” Baqir said. “Trial and error with hundreds of people.”
“We don’t know that,” Xiomara said. “We don’t know anything for sure, which is why we need help. Jas knows how to get us off the ship. And surely SPEC must be getting closer by now.”
But I was thinking about the shape of House of Wisdom. The levels, the laboratories, the corridors and maintenance tunnels. I had once known the schematics by heart. The division of space on every level and the hidden places between. I saw the maintenance tunnels, the vast, breathing breadth of my father’s agricultural labs, the cozy living quarters, the cool distant bay of my mother’s workshop.
There was one large circle in the ship. A bull’s-eye at its heart.
“I think—” I began, and they all looked at me. I cleared my throat. “I think it wanted you to get to the bridge.”
* * *
• • •
We made our way to the bridge as quickly as we could, checking the location of our captors every few minutes. Before we left the garden they were on Level 8, in the Deep Space Archaeology lab, and by the time we reached Level 10, Panya and Dag were arguing about whether to try to open a locked passage on Level 9 or search for another. We had beat them.
The bridge was as cold as the rest of the ship, but the light was different, the low dormancy red mingling with quick flashes of blue, steady glowing green, pulsing bright white. A faint hum surrounded us.
There was a famous photograph of Captain Ngahere, taken not long after she assumed command of House of Wisdom. In it she was standing on the center of the bridge, right in front of what appeared to be a giant window looking down upon the red face of Mars. She was turned halfway away from the view, shown in profile, her expression pensive. There was nobody else in the frame, although there must have been half a dozen bridge crew just out of sight. She looked to be alone, and quiet, and so very serious. Exactly the sort of person you wanted to be your commander. It wasn’t a true window, that wall-spanning view of Mars behind her. The bridge was at the center of the ship, a protected nerve center well away from the vulnerable hull, and the only views it had to the outside were transmitted via camera and sensor to a series of screens. Even so, the majority of seats and workstations on the open half of the bridge, including the captain’s chair, were oriented in a half circle facing one direction, like an audience in a theater. People always want to feel like they’re moving toward something.
It was considered another example of Captain Ngahere’s hero
ism, that even at the end of everything, she had thought to ensure House of Wisdom would remain safely in orbit, to protect Earth and the Moon and the orbital stations, everything that might be endangered should the ship tumble into a long, slow free fall. The bridge was where she had made those last, desperate choices, and where she had died. She had not died alone.
“What the fuck,” Baqir said. His words, though not spoken loudly, broke into the quiet like the crack of a whip. “What the fuck.”
There were at least twenty bodies on the bridge. More than we had seen gathered in any one place since my father’s garden. They were not scattered around, torn by violence, or huddling together in fear, but sitting at their stations. Strapped neatly into their chairs. Hands resting on terminals. Eyes open, all staring toward the screen before them.
They were as shriveled and dry as all the other corpses we had found, but there was no sign that they had been fighting or fleeing or cowering. There were no indications they had been aware of the fate that was to overtake them.
“It looks like they died flying the ship,” Xiomara said.
Baqir added, “They don’t look wounded.”
Not at first glance. Not in comparison to the savage, deadly wounds we had seen elsewhere. But as I looked over the dead, looked beyond the eerie strangeness of how orderly they were at their final stations, I noticed smaller details. Sleeves pushed up and forearms raked with scratches. Collars torn open. A dried line of blood from one ear, another from a nose. Small, thin fingers stained reddish-brown, now resting on a control panel. I stared at those hands for several seconds before I realized what I was seeing.
She wasn’t a member of the bridge crew. She was a child.
The wrinkles of her dried-up face were misleading. I knew her. Her name was Jessamyn. She had been twelve years old when she died; we had shared lessons and tutors for years. I had never liked her, and she had not liked me, but there had been nobody else our age aboard the ship. We had endured each other’s presence as something less than friends, but more than strangers or classmates. She hated living in space. She wanted to care for the megafauna of Earth, the elephants and giraffes and tigers brought back from the brink of extinction following the Collapse, and there was no place for animals aboard a spaceship.