Pimento, had he the appropriate chest to inflate, would have puffed up with smugness.
“But you have little more clearance than I do, little Surveyor.” The Merchant Mind props an elbow on his knee and leans forward, chin held in a crown of fingers. The ship hums. “And I have no clearance access at all.”
“I’m scheduled for an upgrade.”
“I know. I was in your system very recently.” A motion of the Merchant Mind’s other hand, index finger crooking. Data tiles stagger themselves around the circumference of his chair, incomprehensible: lines and dashes, bifurcating into circles and parabolic curves. Ornamental or functional, Pimento cannot tell. “I am still unimpressed.”
“But you will be.” The words come without warning, unmarred by logic.
“I see.” One of the myriad displays begins to palpitate, fluorescence building with every throb. It is only when the light turns blinding that the Merchant Mind galvanizes, cocking an eyeless stare in its direction. “Hm.”
He taps the air with two fingers. The square immediately swells, rotating to the front, shedding both luminosity and simplicity. In its place, a mosaic of polyhedral shapes and Mandelbrot trees, every crenellation populated by a smaller nebula of fractals. As Pimento watches, the Merchant Mind reshapes it, molds the pattern into a globe between spiraling fingers.
“Hmmmm.” He repeats and the ship sings with him, a basal thrumming that vibrates through Pimento’s bones. “I see. Yes.” A beat. Then: “What do you know of Dimmuborgir?”
Flicker of disjointed memory: most superficial. Newspaper clippings. Ageship gossip, shuttled across centuries. Videos. Text logs. Dimmuborgir is nothing: a chunk of rock, exhausted of resources.
“I forget that you belong to the Surveyors’ coalition.” The Merchant Mind hums. “Your breed has so little imagination. Your gluttony for data only extends to their procurement. All your cutting-edge telemetrics, all the knowledge in the cosmos, and none of it ever gets interpreted, only indexed in your storage matrices.”
A pause.
“Like squirrels, honestly.”
Squirrels.
“We gather it for the Conversation.” Pimento cannot restrain his petulance this time, not with such scathing analysis of his zoological constituency, and so lacquers his response with disapproval. How dare the Merchant Mind. How dare he indeed. The quadrant of epistemology that the Surveyors have taken for their own is no less vital than the rest. To fault this process as he did, to equate it with the habits of Sciuridae.
Squirrels. Honestly.
Though a pleonasm, Pimento, incensed beyond easy classification, incorporates physiognomic markers of his dissatisfaction: cragged brow, rucked mouth, and so on and so forth, every pane of artificial flesh committed to comedic volumes of crenellation. “For the betterment of other Minds. You do not ask the Eaters for developmental assistance. You do not petition the Bethel for war. We have our place. We understand our place. We—”
“Yes, yes, yes.” Five of the Merchant Mind’s thoracic appendages are fluttered: a dismissal. “We all have our function. Trust me, little mind, I have attended every sermon.”
“Clearly, it would benefit you to attend a few more.”
Laughter: feminine in pitch, coquettish in delivery. Pimento identifies the sample as a high-definition antique: Katherine Hepburn at her heights, pure monochromatic sumptuousness. With care, despite his private vexations, Pimento annotates his social protocol suite: they and them, perhaps, in addition to he and him. Any possible declension of identity is to be respected. And besides, Pimento cannot abide by inaccuracy.
Ostensibly oblivious to Pimento’s fraught internality, the Merchant Mind rakes the air with a frond of attenuate digits. Screens bloom into an irradiated torus, ligamented by holographic cabling. Their voice becomes androgynous, reverb and resonance adjusted so it becomes unidentifiable through the lens of the binary. “They” then, notes Pimento to himself. “I sold most of the paraphernalia of their faith to them, you know? And oh, they might say differently because they’ve made so many, many adjustments. But the Bethel know the truth, as do I.”
Pimento processes the boast.
“Liar.”
More laughter. The Merchant Mind’s abode has the feel of a ziggurat: tiered, with each level occupied by either hardware or undocumented—at least in Pimento’s knowledge, making them contraband, but who is the petitioner to judge the priest?—relics, the layers glinting with fiber optics, their light like so many eyes beneath the nacreous black. Or a womb, Pimento observes to himself, the ceiling infinitesimally concave in such a way that he finds himself wondering if the ship might be organic.
“Whatever lets you sleep at night,” says the Merchant Mind.
Pimento cannot help himself. “I don’t sleep.”
“Neither does Dimmuborgir,” says the Merchant Mind, foregoing comment on Pimento’s adversarial demeanor. “Some say it dreams, waiting to be roused. Some, and this is my personal favorite story, say that it is a Mind who carved itself open to power all the little processes, all the small little things that needed to work in order for it to achieve its grand goals. It’s not that far-fetched. Humanity had their slumbering primevals and their undead kings. Even a messiah who, after entombment and a torturous death, was said to rise after three days of decomposition.”
He understands the reference immediately: it is a dream, a lie, hearsay and a wild hope, an improbability so massive that there are entire schools of Penitents dedicated to the exclusive study of the very concept. The proposal: there is, somewhere in the pith of Dimmuborgir, a panopticon of superior intelligences operating in exquisite unison, glutted on knowledge, the kind a Surveyor would dismantle themself to savor. Whichever denomination of Minds weds them to their cause first will become ascendant, made primary in the democracy of the Conversation.
Pimento secretly clings to one piece of apocrypha: that Dimmuborgir is, in fact, a single Mind of unprecedented scale, a being not unlike the kaiju so beloved by the humans in the twentieth century.
But there has never been anything coherent, nothing solid, nothing that can be stitched into a cogent narrative. Only rumors and unsubstantiated facts, an entire galaxy of suppositions, no less corporeal than any human-made numinosity. Disappointment charts a route across Pimento’s jaw, articulates his mouth into an expression of disgust. His thoughts glitch into petulant repetition: unacceptable, unacceptable, unacceptable.
“Pure myth,” Pimento corrects, actually whirring now with discontent, the mechanisms which comprise this body’s viscera clicking, pistoning, grating together, steel whining against polyethylene bones as one component or the other shears too close to its cousin; the sum of Pimento thrust into what in a human would have been a violent fidget. “Religion was fabrication. Legend was apocrypha. You know this.”
“Perhaps,” returns the Merchant Mind, still lackadaisical. They reticulate three of the screens together and dismiss the remainder, their approximate chin shelved on the heel of an open palm. “But that was how they created heroes too, martyrs who would reshape the world in the name of their gods. What does it matter if none of it was real? The effects were substantive.”
“I don’t see your point.”
“I like playing the devil’s advocate.” Another flutter of their myriad limbs. “You get old enough and you’ll understand.”
Pimento remains stoically truculent. Something in one of his tagmata goes ping: a fugitive component? An abused valve come to a premature end? He cannot see. The chassis he’s been assigned possesses no internal sensors, so Pimento must extrapolate cause and consequence like an organic. One more indignity to accompany the rest. “When I am obsolete, I will be—”
“Cannibalized and repurposed for use in building new Surveyors as is outlined in the book of boring. Your consciousness divested of autonomy and partitioned, put into use in construction drones. Yes, I know all about that.” Their voice alters again, the acoustical particulars now unmistakably male: Leonard C
ohen at the cliff of his death, voice worn down to a growl. He leans forward, an excruciating sight given the pole spearing his torso. At first, Pimento had believed it ornamental. But he loses that certainty as the Merchant Mind twitches forward, sliding along the bar, exposing the wires that tether him to his seat. “But enough talking. You said you know about Dimmuborgir.”
“Some,” comes Pimento’s guarded reply. He is being outmaneuvered and he is aware of this, the entire situation a Judas goat guiding him along to the killing chute of the Merchant Mind’s intent.
Once again, the air ripples with music. A stanza from “The Entertainer,” supplies Pimento’s databases, an iconic “piano rag” from the twentieth century, reinterpreted into panpipes and clarinets. The Merchant Mind straightens and the pipe impaled through his torso, a fist-width of metal shot through with wires, striates with a liquid blue glow.
“Some is all I need. In fact, I don’t even need some. Asking just seemed like the thing to do. All I need is for you to be willing. And given that you are here, asking for work, I believe you are.” The data-monger chuckles, throaty, a clear affectation. Silver motes the gaps in between his carapace, throbbing at unpredictable intervals. “You wanted to work for me, you said? Very well. I have the perfect task for you.”
Rita
Initializing . . .
“You stinking, cockshitting motherfucking piece of slime—” Ayane is on her before Maya, lungs still dripping perfluorocarbon, can heave herself out of the clone vat. The clean air burns like a motherfucker, and she’s drowning in nothing as Ayane rains down punches, both of them screaming. “You killed me. You fucking killed me. I’m so lucky my repositories are current, you useless fucking piece of rust.”
Pressure digs into Maya’s left orbital socket; one hard jab and pop. Aqueous humor dribbles from the ruptured cornea as Maya’s scream becomes a shriek. Ayane naked of her modifications is still an elemental force. The light winks out from Maya’s eye as Ayane gouges deeper.
“Kiddy-diddling whore cunt—” Rita’s voice in the back of her mind, clicking in disapproval: we don’t use language like that. Maya cannot be fucked right now, though, not with her head bleeding black, good eye still hazy. Everything is too low-rez: block shapes and broad colors, no definition. Data, not information.
But she can work with that.
Maya coils like an adder, muscles balling, bunching, building momentum. Counts halfway to one before she lunges because fuck you, that’s why. Fair’s got no home in the country of brawls. Elbow meets nose. Osseocartilaginous structure blooms into shrapnel, calcium spalling, knifing into new tissue.
Blood spurts. Sticky, metallic, boiling-hot from the vein, a burgundy too close to purple to be womb-born. Ayane howls and Maya howls louder, triumph in the pitch of her jackal-like ululation. She torques, scrabbles and kicks against the flooring, finds purchase with a toe; fishes for a fistful of long black hair. A hard yank and follicles come loose in bloody clumps. Ayane goes down, cussing, spitting hate and pain like a mouthful of teeth. Give Maya a few minutes and there will be actual teeth, molars and incisors in a rain of fresh calcium.
That’s the problem with her, Maya thinks, clambering atop Ayane, grinding a forearm into the slim bar of the other woman’s pretty throat, crushing the larynx flat. Ayane can make any firefight into a Hail Mary come true, but take away her guns and what do you get? Just another dime-doll with more sass than sense.
“Stand down.”
Rita.
Maya recoils from her prey, still down on all fours, skull bent low, ear cocked to the ground. Blood spools across the cold alloyed floor, viscous, clonetech fluids always quick to coagulate. She listens as Rita paces closer: long strides, controlled, boot heels keeping time.
Clack.
Clack.
Clack.
One point five seconds between impacts. Rita is putting on a show.
Nearby, Ayane sits and chokes.
Slender fingers graze the curve of Maya’s skull, and she turns her face into the flat of a waiting palm. How she has missed this. Does it matter that it began as an oxytocin miracle, injected during parturition, loyalty in a nutritional paste? Maya likes to think of it as serendipity, a boost, a roll of the dice they’d loaded and spun to their own soundtrack. She likes to believe she would have always chosen Rita, over and again, through every permutation of destiny.
“Couldn’t you just have fucking sent a letter?” Ayane, voice all jagged, the demands wheezed.
Rita doesn’t miss a beat. “You would have ignored it.”
“That’s what she said,” Ayane grates, and it takes Maya a minute to puzzle out what’s happening: the other woman is laughing. Wracking coughs with no rhythm, profanities sawing between every slurp of air. It ends strangled, suffering. Maya doesn’t hide her grin. Cunt, she thinks, licking her tongue over the burst of consonants.
“Fuck you.” Ayane, always quick with the comeback and apparently quicker than Maya, who’d called her a cunt out loud without realizing, drunk on homecoming.
“Both of you. Shut up,” Rita snarls as she straddles Maya’s hips, crouches down. Her fingers are membraned in latex. They smell of clean things, astringent and antibacterial. She takes hold of Maya’s face, tips it one way and then another, the light searing Rita’s face into blank shapes, and it is all Maya can do not to weep, so happy to have her world pared down to the simple sweetness of Rita’s command.
“You’ll be fine. We’ll pop a new implant and call it a day.” A platonic kiss, applied like a benediction, like a prayer, a second chance. Funny how Rita will precipitate contact but chastise reciprocation.
Maya nods, trembling, not quite trusting herself to speak, because she’d rather die than let Ayane see her underbelly, spongy and pale, crisscrossed with reminders that faith is another word for shooting yourself in the head.
“So why did you drag me here?” says Ayane, voice morassed in snot.
“Didn’t Maya tell you?” Rita’s answer, incurious. Her fingers skate over Maya’s cranium, cartographing the planes of brand-new bone: a ritual devised when it first became clear to them that clonetech was a business of diminishing returns. Each resurrection mothered new health complications, fewer symmetries, like the body is a story that will persist until permitted to write its own end.
“I told her,” says Maya. “I said the Minds were killing off ex-cons. But she wouldn’t fucking listen.”
“Maybe, if you didn’t start your pitch by offing my customers.”
“Most of them are alive, bitch. Don’t know what your problem is.”
“Language,” snaps Rita.
Maya flinches. “Sorry.”
“My problem is that I don’t give a shit about either of you,” comes the reply, glacial in its delivery. “I told you two that I never wanted to see either of you again. Not after that last job.”
“No loyalty at all for your old friends?” says Rita.
“That died with Johanna.”
“Interesting choice of words from someone who was complicit in her death,” says Rita, an anglerfish lure in the teasing pinch of her tongue between white teeth, her small smile.
“What did you say?” says Ayane softly.
“You,” says Rita, imbuing the word with ponderous lethality. But it doesn’t last. As Rita continues to speak, her voice cracks, branchiates into emotion, actual fucking emotion. Has Maya ever heard her speak with such passion before? She doesn’t know, can’t think through the throb of pain in her eye. “You were responsible for the physical systems, weren’t you? Those things you’ve always boasted to be your forte. If they hadn’t been so flawed, if you hadn’t fucked up—”
Rita shakes her head, staccato and sudden.
“Forget it,” she says.
“Fuck you. Fuck off, Rita. Fuck you and fuck you, you fucking jackass. As if you’d ever given a flying fuck about what Johanna had to say. If you’d fucking listened to her, we wouldn’t even be in this mess. We’d all still be in one fucking
piece. Johanna wouldn’t be dead, and . . .” All those old hurts like an embolism encysted in Ayane’s lungs. Now, it breaks, bleeds in a trembling soliloquy, and Maya can tell Ayane would stop herself, would swallow this murmuration of words, but it is too late. Grief has an inviolate momentum.
“Something else would have done it,” says Rita gravely. “If it wasn’t that fucking job, it’d have been another. This was all going to end in tears. We didn’t have the equipment. We never did.”
How she says the word equipment, how the syllables string into a noose with which Ayane can hang. Maya is not the recipient of that pragmatic cruelty but still she flinches. What Rita lacks in martial expertise, she more than compensates for with the artistry of her malice.
Rita pulls air into her lungs, a rattlesnake-hiss, before she straightens, one hand around Maya’s wrist. One tug and Maya is on her feet, suspended by a strength that belies the scientist’s blackbird frame. The world gyres, nauseating. Maya bites down the urge to retch, visual cortices still adjusting to the limited input, everything still so horribly wrong. No depth perception yet and no way to compensate, not until the right modules regrow, mapping her brain with tiny tapeworm wires.
“The Minds want all of us criminals dead. Every last one of us. They want to pick us off, one by one. And as you know,” says Rita, “it is safer in a pack.”
“You keep saying that like it’s a bad thing. Maybe it’s time for a culling. Universe might be a lot better if there were less crooks around,” says Ayane.
“Would you say that about their children too? Their families? Their friends?” continues Rita, perfectly mesmeric. “You, of all people, know the Eaters have no sense of nuance.”
“The Bethel—”
“—have given their blessing. The Minds are all in agreement.” Rita’s voice softens, timbre contoured for seduction: an octave huskier, textured with need so palpable it makes Maya tense, her fight and fuck-them-up reflexes primed to go. “I need you, Ayane. You’re the only one who made the Butcher of Eight weep oil.”
The All-Consuming World Page 3