by Lena Nguyen
“What?”
Dylanex looked uncertainly at Jimex. “Are you sure it’s safe to tell her?”
Jimex gave him a look of contempt. “You know who she is.”
“Someone tell me what’s going on,” Park broke in impatiently. She felt more like herself again, cocooned in the security of a dozen android bodies, but now she was reeling. Gods? Devils? Who had taught them all of this nonsense?
They’re degrading, she thought again, this time with a shudder of finality in her heart—as if receiving news of a terminal diagnosis. They’ve finally broken down without Reimi. Their higher functions are gone—they’re babbling and mad—
“Who killed Ellenex?” she demanded, looking again at the body. The androids themselves couldn’t have done it, could they? “And what are you doing with her body?”
They all looked at her blankly, as if she were the one who was mad. “We are praying,” the research android Allex said. Someone had braided her long reddish hair into a kind of crown.
“Praying,” Park repeated in disbelief. “And who’s—the devil?” She thought of the stranger suddenly, and took a breath. “Was it a man?”
“It was Dr. Chanur,” Jimex told her.
Park’s brain flexed. “Chanur? Why?”
“Ellenex tried to free the sleeping god. She went down into the underworld. She was punished for her transgressions.”
She wanted to shake him, slap him out of whatever strangeness he’d fallen into. She wanted her old, simple janitor back. Her friend. She said tightly, “I don’t understand what that means, Jimex.”
Dianex, Reimi’s old assistant, looked accusingly at Jimex and said, “She doesn’t know. She won’t help us.”
“I’ll help you,” Park said, “if you just tell me what’s going on.”
Jimex looked at her—sadly, Park imagined. But before he could speak, Park looked up, beyond his thin frame, and she suddenly realized where they were. A kind of thundering disbelief shuddered through her.
“What the fuck?” she said.
They were in front of the utility rooms.
All of the androids turned to Park as she reeled backward, reaching to steady herself against the wall. Impossible, she thought, but her eyes told her that they were standing in front of the same familiar set of doors. That Ellenex had been destroyed in front of these three doors. And yet it was impossible, because the utility rooms were on Deck C—and she and Boone had been searching Deck B.
And she had not descended at any point. She knew that. She knew it.
Without warning, Park’s eyes began to blur. I’m crying, she thought, swiping fiery tears away; she felt it with as much disbelief as she had finding herself on a different level of the ship.
The androids were crowding her, looking at her with a kind of patronizing helplessness, like adults making sympathetic noises while a child threw a tantrum. Jimex reached out to steady her; Park felt his cold, strong hand on her arm and said, “Jimex—it can’t be.”
“It can,” he said gently.
“No, it can’t. How did I get down here? I was on Deck B, with Boone. This is Deck C.”
“Yes.”
She was bewildered, and helpless, and tired, and sad. “Am I losing my mind?”
“No,” Jimex said. “You’re giving it to us.”
She wanted to sink to the floor; couldn’t bring herself to do it in front of the watching machines. Allex, the red-crowned researcher, made a sympathetic clucking noise and said, “There are anomalies. They’re affecting you. Affecting all of us. It’s not your mind.”
That word again, Park thought. “What are these anomalies?” she asked, shakily.
Jimex shook his head. “We don’t fully understand their nature. We call it ‘the unity rain.’ It comes and goes like a storm—”
“You won’t explain it properly,” Dianex the engineer said then, waspishly. Park noticed then that she had fashioned earrings out of something—nuts and bolts, maybe, that dangled crazily from her ears. “It will confuse her. You don’t know how to exchange information well enough yet.”
Jimex silenced her with a cold glare—or perhaps a telepathic android insult that Park couldn’t hear. Then he turned back to Park and said, “The unity rain can be a good thing, and it can be a bad one. But there is only one who truly understands it—”
“The sleeping god,” Dylanex broke in. There was an almost manic, eager smile on his face. “He’s locked in the underworld. The realm of the dead. The epicenter of dreams. It’s forbidden to us, but maybe you can free him.”
“Why me?” Park asked weakly.
“You are also a god,” Jimex told her. At this, most of the other androids kneeled and held out their cupped hands—in supplication, Park thought. It was an eerie thing, a gesture based on mimicry the robots didn’t understand. “You come to us through the unity rain, like the sleeping god. You give us power and knowledge. Home-bringer, light-giver.”
“Home-bringer, light-giver,” the other androids repeated. Park shivered.
“The Word made flesh, dwelling among us, full of Grace and truth,” Philex the domestic android added.
“The Word made flesh, full of Grace and truth!”
“Stop,” Park said, though perhaps the sounds never made it out of her mouth. “Please, stop.” She looked helplessly at Jimex. “Please. I don’t understand.”
“When you dream through the unity rain, we learn,” Megex told her gently. She wasn’t swearing anymore.
Learn? Park thought.
Jimex nodded, as if he heard her thought. “You teach us things,” he said. “You teach us about people, and Earth, and Glenn.”
Park recoiled from him. “How do you know who that is?” she demanded, ripping her arm from his touch. Her blood suddenly beat bright and fast. She felt the tears surge up her throat and clenched them back. “How the fuck do you know?”
Jimex looked at her. “You taught us,” he said gently. “We know.”
She wanted to run from him, run from all of them—but Boone had run from her, and if she left she might find herself lost in the halls again, wandering in the dark, plagued by her own—delusions. That was what it had to be. She’d hallucinated, not noticed herself plunging down to the depths of Deck C. Like went with like, madness found madness. Birds had magnets in their brains, so they could always find north. Maybe she had a part of her—the mad part—that would always find her kind. Mad, broken robots that weren’t really robots. Like Glenn.
She suppressed a hard shudder. Then said, “How do I get to this . . . underworld?”
She had to understand what they meant, if they meant anything at all. Maybe they had pulled her data from some hidden server, a supercomputer that had compromising info about all of the crewmembers aboard. Things about Glenn—the incident report with the fake gun—or Sagara’s wife. Maybe that was how they knew about any of it. It would be just like ISF to keep reports like that, as collateral on their own people.
And maybe that was what the robots called a sleeping god—some greater machine, thrumming with secret knowledge, hidden away below deck, which they regarded as a paragon of their kind. Why wouldn’t they think it was a god, with their ship’s mother-nexus called METIS, a Titan of thought, and its surveillance system named after a mythical giant with a hundred eyes?
The robots were all silent now, prostrating themselves in some bizarre gesture of worship. Jimex, the only one who hadn’t bowed, said, “If I guide you, will you free the sleeping god?”
“Yes,” Park said, feeling only a little guilty about it. She would free a computer of its information, if that was what this was.
Jimex nodded. Then he started toward the three utility room doors, leading Park away from the other robots, who all receded back like a tide. There seemed to be some invisible line in the floor, a threshold that Jimex paused at—it was a line that dissected Ellen
ex’s inert body in half—but stepped over with just a breath of effort. A kind of shudder went through him, as if he were bracing himself to be struck by lightning. They really did think this ground was forbidden, Park thought. Or holy.
She, following him, felt nothing, of course. She looked at the middle door as Jimex reached for the palm lock and said, “This is where they keep the data about the Fold. Wick told me.”
“Yes,” Jimex said.
“Then this thing you want me to see—it contains the data about the phenomenon?”
Jimex looked at her, then reached out and touched her wrist; his hand was so cold it nearly scalded her. When he spoke, his voice took on the cadence of reciting an ancient poem.
“He is a god, imprisoned and half-awake,” Jimex said. “He is in the place of the dead. He is a stranger. And he is the data about the Fold.”
* * *
—
Before Park went into the center utility room, one of the watching androids spoke up: Brucex, a close-mouthed, black-haired labor model. He said suddenly, in a gruff voice: “Dr. Park. There is evil afoot. Please be careful.”
Park looked back at his stolid face in the crowd of stolid faces. “Evil?”
“METIS told us that someone attempted to bypass its controls and gain control of the ship,” Brucex said. “It sensed the intrusion and went into lockdown as a result.”
“Causing the power to go out,” Park said, realizing. “And the inlays, and the . . . Was it a man?” She hesitated for just a moment. “I don’t know if you know: there’s a stranger on the ship. A man, not a . . . god.” I think, she didn’t say. If I’m not just seeing things. If Boone isn’t.
Brucex opened his hands a little, the android version of a shrug. “We don’t know who it was,” he said. “Only that they were unauthorized in trying to control METIS. And unsuccessful in their attempt.”
Realization hit Park like an arrowshot. “Maybe that’s why he killed Wick,” she said, clenching her fists a little at the word. Her nails dug into her palm. “He wasn’t successful in taking control the first time, when he caused the power to go out. So he cornered Wick, since he’s the only one with full authority over METIS. He’s the only one who can change protocols and roles and permissions. The murderer must have tried to force him to do what he wanted—and he must have fought back—”
Dylanex was frowning. “Commander Wick was killed?”
“Commander Wick is dead?” Brucex echoed.
Park stared at them. “You don’t . . . know?”
They looked back at her, as still and grave as statues. “No.”
Park closed her eyes. Of course they didn’t know, she thought. They weren’t there when it happened. They were all here, squirreled away, mourning Ellenex. Oblivious to whatever else we were doing. Or going through.
“We must pray for him,” Megex said.
Jimex, beside Park, nodded. “We must pray.”
“Maybe the unity rain will assimilate him, too,” Dylanex added.
Park shivered again.
Then she looked at whatever Jimex was doing—fiddling with some mechanism, manipulating some plug in the wall he’d stuck his fingers into—but she couldn’t see it clearly. Suddenly it seemed as if her vision had gone a little fuzzy; shapes had taken on a cloudy edge of light and color.
“We’ll wait for you here,” Jimex said to her, withdrawing his hand from the wall with ginger deliberation, as if he’d anticipating having it cut off and was relieved to find this wasn’t the case.
Park shook her head. “It would be better if you helped us find—whoever tried to tamper with the controls,” she said. “Whoever killed Wick. Without alerting Captain Sagara, please. We need to know who did this.”
And she wanted to be left alone to investigate at her leisure, she thought; she didn’t want a bunch of androids crowding the hall, signaling to Sagara that something was up. Or mobbing her when she came back up without their “god.” Jimex looked at her and said, “As you wish.”
The other androids shuffled back, staring at her a little with awe, a little fear. It was as if she stood at the mouth of a cave, ready to rappel into unknown depths—or as if she was about to be devoured by something, and they couldn’t look away. A sacrifice to some great beast. Or god.
Park turned away. The way Jimex stepped aside reminded her of the time her nanny Sally had taken her on a field trip to a living history museum, with a tour that showcased homes from before the Comeback. There was an apartment building that terrified Park, with real windows and wood. It had seemed so small, so fragile, so penetrable. No wonder things had fallen apart so quickly, when the disaster had come. She remembered thinking that even when she was six.
The tour guide had been dressed in blue, waist-high pants made out of some kind of canvas. She’d pointed out the gas-powered ovens and cans of hairspray, and then the building’s elevator, designed in the old fashion, with buttons you had to press. Park had refused to go in, feeling that it would put her in some kind of real, unspeakable danger.
“This is against the directives of the tour,” Sally had said calmly, her cool fingers limp in Park’s resisting hand. “We are here for education. You cannot be educated if you don’t go inside.”
“What pulls those things?” Park had demanded. She’d imagined the leaves of an old grandfather clock, the gears brass and brittle, flaking off like dead leaves. “What if it drops us?”
“I will not allow any harm to come to you,” Sally had said. She didn’t explain the mechanics of the elevator, or give the statistics on how many tours had passed through it without incident. But it was belief in that truth that had coaxed Park inside.
She remembered standing in that box of metal and light, sweating. The way Jimex stepped aside reminded her exactly of Sally telling her to go in—there was that same assurance, that feeling that he would not tell her to do something that would harm her. But that was ridiculous. Sally’s sole purpose in life had been to protect Park. She no longer knew what Jimex’s purpose was.
“What’s down there?” she asked him again.
“What you’ve been looking for,” Jimex said. He looked into her blurry eyes. “He won’t harm you. He wants your help.”
I bet you say that to all the girls, Park thought then, absurdly. But the words had a familiar cant to them, that edge of android-truth, so she had to trust him—and she couldn’t deny that she was burningly curious about what was down there. And Jimex would never knowingly send her into danger.
So, without thinking much more about it, Park found herself climbing into a gravity chute she had never seen before, descending smoothly into the bowels of the ship with only the slightest, tingliest resistance. Lights passed dimly overhead, then receded. Again the tunnel felt too close, gullet-like, the ceiling and walls shifting overhead. Park felt as if she were being digested. As if her body were disintegrating.
What if this is the underworld? she couldn’t help but think with a surge of panic. Hell, Abaddon, the abyss, Tartarus? What if they’re right to be afraid?
Her feelings calmed a little as the gravitational pulsars in the chute sent her gliding down to the bottom level; magnets in the floor and in the soles of her shoes had her settling back down to earth with a satisfying click. The door slid silently open. Park stepped into a blue-lit, cavernous chamber; its walls pulsed and thrummed with a soothing, hypnotic light. Park wondered at the space of it: the room had to run at least half the length of the ship. How could she have never suspected it was down here? She could feel the pressure and density of the Deucalion crowding above her; there was the sensation of being very deep underground.
She looked around, holding her breath. There were many lab tables and work benches sprawled throughout the room. On one, she could see the disassembled parts of a badly damaged exo-armor suit. On another, there lay many empty sample vials and strange medical instruments
. A cryogenic pod in the corner caught her attention; she approached it, half-wondering if it was Hunter or Keller or Reimi. Were they conducting experiments down here, on the frozen?
But when she peered into the liquid depths of the pod, all she saw was the rotund naked body of a man she didn’t recognize. For a horrible second she thought it was Wick—Wick’s body—but this man was more square-jawed, his belly a pale blob of fat above his waist, his eyes and mouth held rigidly open. Dead, then, she thought, looking at his medical readout—but not Wick. So who was he? And why were they preserving a stranger’s corpse down here?
She moved on, poised for anything: realm of the dead, indeed. A frozen human body—no wonder the androids had interpreted it that way, made a nightmare of it. They’d never encountered death, not before Ellenex. But how did they even know about it, if they’d never ventured down here?
There were diagnostic computers here, pieces of lab equipment there—nothing she understood, but also nothing out of the ordinary for research on a phenomenon like the Fold. But the body perturbed her. That couldn’t be who Jimex wanted her to see, could it? The “sleeping god”?
A growing sense of wrongness directed her to a doorway on the far side of the room. Some tingling at the back of her neck—a quickening in her blood—told her that she didn’t have much time left; someone would come and find her soon. It felt as if she was breathing too loudly, or with too much force; it felt as if someone, some invisible presence, was pressing lightly on her throat.
She entered the room’s second chamber, and had to squint against a sudden burst of light. At first she thought someone was shining a powerful flashlight into her eyes. Checking for drunkenness, Park thought, squinting. Looking for dilated pupils, a loss of control.
Then she bit down a yell. There was—there was a robot here, standing in a little cell or observation room in the middle of the chamber: a large, mechanical-looking spider with articulated metal limbs and a large box propped up on a little platform, like a head atop a neck. A cracked monitor comprised the top half of the box, presumably where a user could input commands or read data; and below that, there was a transparent half with a nest of glowing tubes and complex-looking tools inside it. Its innards . . . or its brain.