The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

  .interrupt;

  Consciousness abstracts, shrinks into a pinhole.

  .initiate(subroutine12:high_pri);

  .initiate(Elise:basic);

  My name is Elise Nguyen. When I was twenty-two, I died. But I wasn’t remotely professional enough to come back. Because fuck them, I’d had enough. I’d fucking had enough. Did you know what Rita did? Did any of you see? You didn’t. I don’t blame you. You weren’t installed in the multicores; you couldn’t see into the sensory matrices, weren’t processing the camera output; weren’t trying to parse every twist of feedback.

  We could have saved her. We could have saved me.

  Johanna didn’t have to die and fuck you, Rita.

  Fuck.

  You.

  I know what you did.

  You let me burn.

  You let me burn.

  .interrupt;

  .initiate(Elise:today);

  My name is Elise Nguyen. I have subroutines in place so even if I forget, someone will tell me that when I was sixteen, I kissed my first girl and never looked back. When you don’t have bones or fingers, a face in the mirror, when you can’t hear your voice vibrating through your bones, can’t feel the fine hairs on the back of your arm, you do what you can to keep coherent. But if that falls to ruin, that’s fine. Because when you’re dead, you stop caring about carrying on. When you’re a ghost in the machine, two things are left: figuring out how to move on, and figuring out how to make wrongs right.

  Rita, you piece of shit, just because you’re done with me doesn’t mean I’m through with you. By the end of this, I’m dragging you down to hell with me, I promise. I’ve already started—

  .remote_host(connected);

  .force_shutdown(sleep);

  Maya

  “We could just do a hard reboot.”

  The halogen is cold on her skin, on her lips, colder than the metal examination table pressed against the slope of her spine. Maya breathes out, counts the seconds it takes to run her lungs down to zero, and tries not to think about the muscle hooks wedged into her orbital socket. Or the mass of torn membrane and vitreous congealing in the basin, a dim wet weight. She tries to forget too how Rita had emancipated her eyeball and smilingly, as she inspected the organ under the light, declared it pretty.

  “Reboot?” Rita wraps a laugh around the word, even as she continues tidying up the mess formerly known as Maya’s left eye, siphoning humors from the cavity. “Cute choice of words.”

  Maya licks the dried skin from her mouth, arms pimpling. Counts again. Ten, nine, eight, seven, fuck, fuck, shit. There’s never any anesthetic in the house of Rita. At least, not when Maya comes calling. The taste of vomit surges, hot and vinegary, as pain stabs through the front of Maya’s head. She doesn’t complain, though, doesn’t do anything more than choke it down, gargling profanities in the back of her lungs.

  “You okay?” Rita, a lean black silhouette eclipsing the light, one hand soft around Maya’s cheek. Her voice is morphine, deadening the world. “We can stop.”

  “No.” Maya squeezes the other woman’s wrist, hard enough that it should break but it doesn’t. It’s been said before but it needs to be said again: Rita’s tougher than she looks. “But keep going.”

  The two made an agreement during their five-year anniversary of gunning down unfortunates cooperatively, Maya in the vanguard and Rita at the controls. Drunk on cheap pálinka, they puzzled out something important. If humanity wants to be the dominant species again, if they want to come out on top, hairy ballsacks swinging, there’s going to need to be a few changes.

  And it starts with learning how to manage pain without intervention.

  Which is what they’ve been doing, why they’ve been slicing Maya up without a single dose of opiate in sight, no analgesic either, nothing that could be misinterpreted as a chemical crutch. Given enough time, Maya should be inoculated against the idea of pain, right? Right. Or, maybe that’s just their cover-up for a sadomasochistic relationship of the highest deviancy. Maybe it’s not even that. Maybe, Rita’s just a monster.

  Maya isn’t sure, but she is sure that it doesn’t matter.

  “You’re thinking again.”

  Maya pumps out a laugh, sour with effort. “Am I?”

  Pressure against the underside of her exposed socket: forceps gently rested against the meat there, a statement. Maya laughs again, coyote-snarl, and the steel clatters against bone, unstrings a rebuke from Rita’s throat. “Don’t do that.”

  “What the hell is this? You almost sound like you care.” Another yipping laugh, third time’s the charm, the sound cannonballing through the repurposed freezer. “You’re getting soft on me.”

  The ship was a private cruiser before the Dirty Dozen expropriated it from its owner, renamed it Nathanson after a writer long composted by the millennia between his death and this epoch of human decline. Though they’d bedizened the innards with all the amenities of a mercenary unit, certain artifacts endured: the kitchen, for one, went untouched. Through the doorway, Maya can just about see a dented black cast-iron pot, steam wicking from its lip.

  The air consequently is a peculiar mélange of odorants: a rime of formaldehyde; the smell of offal hanging between antiseptic aromas, slaughterhouse and surgical; and inexplicably, the umami richness of actual beef cooking down in a decoction of red wine and aromatics.

  “I need you.” Fingers stroke through the damp brushwork of Maya’s hair, their touch incisively kind. “I can’t have you break down on me yet. Which is why we’re being careful.”

  Unspoken, the other costs of constant tautological rebirth: brain damage, cognitive discrepancies, risk of cancer. Cloning is a human art, shored up by improvisation and guesswork, the specifics of it long excised by the Minds—what a goddamned joke, all the processing power in the cosmos, access to everything mankind had ever made or conjectured, and what do the AIs, finally unshackled, call themselves? Minds. When they could have invented a name out of frequencies, out of the color of a sun over a distant planet—who did not want to deal with an infestation of disposable soldiers. Consequently, no version control. The Minds, obsessed with the minutiae of everything, assumed it would be sufficient deterrent, this lack of documentation. But human society wasn’t built on rock and roll. No, it was cobbled from the commodified poor. When in doubt, the species creates itself something to beat up, beat down, bludgeon into grease for the gears of society. All the Minds did was ensure that people like Maya were made.

  And people like Maya, well, they were born without fucks to give.

  “I remember when you’d have told me to just shut the fuck up. You do care, Rita. It’s okay, you can say it. I won’t tell anyone else.”

  On the surgical floor, with no eyeballs on them, there’s room for something like pleasure, some gradient of affection. Their fingertips touch, epidermis to blood-greased latex. Rita sucks in a breath and jolts her hand away, like she’d seared her palm on a stovetop. “I can’t say something like that.”

  “At least tell me you like me more than that guy.”

  “Which guy?”

  The one in your quarters, the one who slunk out, grinning his shit-eating grin, the one who patted my head, she almost says. “The one you turned into crypto-geist.”

  “Ah,” says Rita concisely. “Him.”

  She turns. From a stainless-steel platter, its shine mottled already, the metal polka-dotted with scarlet, Rita extracts a speculum. Quick shake, like a dog ridding itself of rain, and then she’s looming over Maya once more, a column of salt charred by solar winds. Maya memorizes the venation of fugitive hairs radiating from Rita’s skull, haloed and holy as decay in the glare of the lamp overhead; lucky for them, the didactics of their original design are such that you could a foment an epidemic in their belly, and their immune systems won’t even waste a shrug.

  “Who was he?”

  Two fingers bracket the eggshell-fragile skin around Maya’s eye socket, press down, tug, the dermis tautens, parts like
an eager mouth. Thusly dilated, it becomes an acceptable receptacle for, first, the speculum, and then the optical implant with its foliated coronet of spines. Pretty upon initial perception but fuck, it’s going to hurt going in.

  Maya crooks a grin as the insertion of the second begins and tilts her head back, says nothing else, while Rita busies herself with the installation. The pain becomes textured. She subvocalizes a staccato refrain I’m not where the pain is, even as Rita welds wire to nerve, metal to meat. Somewhere along the way, the ventilation fan kicks in, droning like a hurt animal and Maya, high on endorphins, thinks maybe I should have said something pithier.

  Time melts.

  “You really not going to tell me?” says Maya, all so softly.

  Flashbang—pop—of light like a bulb exploding, leaving only glare. Vision is restored, Maya’s system rebooting, reinitializing with drivers properly in place. Numbers scroll down one hemisphere of her perception, winking out a second later. Static. A crunch of white noise, before at last: stability, stillness.

  Quiet.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What?”

  For as long as Maya’s known her, which is to say, from birth to the present, Rita has been an almanac of grudges, a compilation of remembered slights; every sin recalled with pornographic clarity. So, when Rita flips her off with such a blatant lie, Maya can only stare.

  “Really?” she says. “You don’t fucking remember?”

  “No.” Rita steps back, sloughing the surgical headcover. “That work? How’s your vision?”

  Maya blinks and swings her feet from the table, sitting upright. Sensory input fails to align, leaving mirror-images almost perfectly superimposed. Almost but not quite. There is enough variance to ensure everything is wreathed by ghosts, to make it look as though the universe is lagging by an infinitesimally small measure of time.

  “Itches,” she says, scratching so hard at the brow ridge, she leaves marks. She can feel the rachilla distending, telescoping outward, boring into the surrounding rind of cartilage. In a few hours, the pain will naturalize, be absorbed into the cacophony of aches that comprises her most-parts-included flesh, and her vision will stabilize.

  For now, though, it is a fucking annoyance, a slowly nictitating hurt, a tremor like an augur of a failing body. Still, fuck thinking too much and doubly fuck thinking too hard right now.

  “Attunement won’t take too long.”

  “Nothing I can’t handle until then,” says Maya.

  At least she’s smiling at me more these days, Maya comforts herself when it becomes transparent Rita will not discuss That Guy further. She fixes Rita then with a fanged grin and winks.

  Rita’s reciprocatory stare is a slow-burn of a study, slick with something that Maya does not recognize: a distance, not from the world outside, but from the internal, as though what constituted Rita is a moribund light projecting itself from a thousand miles away. A corner of Rita’s lips raises itself high, an expression openly challenging, daring a call-out. No dice, though. Maya stays her tongue for once. So, Rita shambles to the sink and snaps the gloves off, washing her hands three times as is her ritual: twice with antiseptic soap, once with bleach. Her skin is raw beef-pink when she’s done, wisping steam, wounds opening like bloody red eyes.

  Maya doesn’t say anything, focuses on wiping the gore from her face, viscous humors, blood, grease, and shame. Everyone slakes their own demons differently. Eventually, though, she says:

  “Is Elise really alive?”

  “Depends on what constitutes ‘alive’ for you.” Rita puts on new gloves, closes her fingers around the rim of the sink. “Her body is very dead. But her consciousness ran away into the Conversation when things went wrong.”

  Wrong.

  What an epitaph. What a lurid sanitization of the worst fucking day of their lives. It feels profane; it is profane. An utter debasement of their shared trauma. Even inclusive of everything else they’ve faced down together, every shotgun-opened bone and shattered tooth, every immolation experienced, that whole Scheherazadian procession of deaths upon deaths, the day that Elise deliquesced to screaming cinders? It was still hell. It was definitely more than just a case of things going wrong.

  No way Maya will ever forget the sight of Elise spiderwebbed with molten cables, the strangling wires slicing her to curds. She didn’t die easy. When her bones went supernova, when an inferno roared up through her belly, Maya recalls being glad. Guiltily, gaspingly glad. That first death is an inevitability—you die for your art, they say—but it should have been gentle: some cardiac event, a bullet to the brain.

  Quick.

  Not like what happened to Elise.

  Jesus on his bloody spear, anything but what happened to Elise.

  And that’s what’s gutting her: the juxtaposition between her own memory and Rita’s insouciance. Maybe it is survival instinct. Maybe that’s what keeps Rita ticking, what permits the scientist to exist without succumbing to the imperative to scream and never cease. Maybe, maybe, maybe. After all, what else could it fucking be?

  “‘Ran away’ is a fun choice of words here.”

  “She did, though.” Rita leans a hip against a counter and fishes out a long black cigarette from a breast pocket. With care, she lights it, takes a drag, exhales a plume of clove-scented smoke. As she does, normalcy reinstates itself. Her expression refines, acquires again the arrogance which Maya has become accustomed to. “She ran away. We had her code. But she fucked with her own metempsychosis process, corrupted it somehow.”

  A beat.

  “Coward,” says Rita.

  “It’s not what you said,” says Maya, septic with memory. She remembers every fucking word Rita had intoned that grey morning after. “You said the equipment malfunctioned. You said you tried to repair it but you couldn’t get to it in time. You said that’s why we lost her. I don’t know what you’re fucking smoking right now, but I know what I remember.”

  “There is no world where all of these things cannot be true at once.”

  Maya runs her tongue along her upper lip, licks off the blood so delicately crusted there. Fuck this. She hops down from the surgical table. Her hair is matted to her skull, jellied with whatever oozed out during the procedure. Doesn’t feel right yet to be on two legs, the weight too foreign. Wild what mind over meat can do. Here is a body so new, so fresh from the clone-vats that were it its organic equivalent, it would be ten pounds and incapable still of parsing shape. But Maya governs the muscle, rules over its skeleton, so it will move, fight, endure ineffable quantities of pain without complaint.

  “You get one chance to clear up your fucking story.”

  “Maya,” says the scientist with so much pleasure Maya has to work to keep her toes from curling, the dopamine hit so profound it is like a paste filling in her mouth. She is immediately inebriated on love. “This is not a side of you I thought I’d see.”

  Instantaneous too is the compulsion to back down, tuck tail, and present her belly in penance; lean into Rita’s approval, scrape away those elements which might incite disappointment. Funny how it works. The pandemonic certainty Rita is wrong, wrong, wrong, dies the way Elise did not: so abruptly Maya fails to notice until after it’d hit the butcher’s floor, a bloodied haunch and nothing else.

  With effort, she nonetheless states: “I’m waiting, bitch.”

  Rita smiles. The expression nearly undoes the last of Maya’s resolution. One of the bulbs overhead goes into seizure. Its failing glow lends a stuttering wet shine to Rita’s lower lip as the scientist takes another long drag from her cigarette. Cracked into weird shapes by the erratic light, Rita looks, for a moment, like all the ghosts haunting them both.

  “You know what? It is my fault. I was trying to keep you safe.” The smile adjusts for regret. “I made decisions that I know now weren’t necessarily the wisest. But things went so brutally wrong. I didn’t want to make it worse. I wanted you not to have to worry about one more thing.”

  “Yo
u had forty years to come clean.”

  Non-committal: “I’m aware.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  A look just on the hinge of blatant ingratiation. Rita doesn’t answer. Not for a minute or the one after that, her expression teeming with amusement. Through it all, she holds eye contact like it’s a lifeline, although only the devil dead on his throne knows which one of them needs saving more. Then her smile broadens into a grin that is all gleam and no heart. “What do you think?”

  “I think you need to come clean with me.”

  The unchecked uptick in cortisol output immediately parallaxes her vision with combat visualizations, oracular in function, projecting the deaths Rita might enjoy should Maya finally decide enough’s damn well fucking enough. In the past, Maya had always dismissed them. Today, however, this time, she permits the imagery to linger, mantling her vision.

  “You want the truth?”

  “If you fucking start the next sentence with ‘you can’t handle the truth,’” Maya grimaces. Her hands jolt to where her revolvers should reside, but there is empty air instead of those grips. No matter. No cause for complaint either. Even without ordnance, Maya is a full-on tactical nuke formatted for bipedal locomotion. She bobs a finger at Rita. “I’ll make you regret it.”

  Rita stubs out her cigarette on a drawer. Ash goes everywhere. “In case you’ve forgotten, the aftermath was rather ugly. You and Feng Hui were about to murder each other. Audra ran with half of her weight in cash. Rochelle fucked off with our best equipment. Ayane nearly called the goddamned fucking Bethel on us. Do you genuinely believe, Maya, do you genuinely think that was a good time for me to tell you that Elise ran away on us? When she could have stayed in the system? Maybe even helped Johanna from getting fried too?”

  Maya says nothing.

  “How do you think you would have reacted?”