The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

  “You can contain yourself,” says Rita, the hairpin turn of her smile pure sit the fuck down.

  Maya complies. She doesn’t like it, though. She likes the implied command even less than her current attire, its layers of indigo satin and sensible blues, high-buttoned with holographic epaulets. Maya would have preferred black and better yet, none of this civilian bullshit. But Rita insisted, so that was that. At least she hadn’t been ordered into high heels, with their precipitous lack of balance, like the ones Rita had donned. Maya has no idea how she might have reacted if she’d been adjured to do such. Pissed would have been where she started. It’d have gone worse from there.

  “Why the hell are you wearing those fucking shoes?”

  Rita considers this.

  Then:

  “I don’t know. They seemed nice, and I never really got the chance.”

  Maya rolls her eyes. There are seventeen other balconies extending along the torus of the precinct, their decor identical, with furniture of operatic pomp and cinquefoil meant to honor the Minds. Gently, Maya slumps into her prescribed chair, a leg hooked over the armrest. She digs a knife from under her starched coat, uses the tip to excavate grime from under her nails.

  The insouciance is exclusively show. Before Nadia left, she said she sanitized their records, gouged out every arrest they had on file. The Dirty Dozen, save in barroom mythology, were non-entities. Maya, quite naturally, trusted that claim as far as she could sling an ageship. But so far, so true. No one said a word when Rita made an appointment. A secretary—so fine-featured Maya was sure the advertisements industry found the angles of it messianic—had waved them in, no complaints at all.

  But that doesn’t mean Maya is happy about this, fuck that specific noise.

  There is no time at all for Maya to wallow. The blockading curtains—tasseled, a thick velvet, the color of new blood even in the soupy yellow light—rise. Constance steps through, gait martial. She looks decades older, moves like she’s six times faster, steel-grey hair worn close to her skull.

  “Fuck me. It really is you two.”

  “Yep,” says Maya.

  “You look exactly as I remember you,” says Constance, face hachured and handsome. Her eyes are pockets of shadow, fletched with lines along their ends, as though markers of a foreshortened life. What astonishes Maya is how the sight instills an immediate urge to offer congratulations. You’d think it’d be fucking disdain she felt, some modicum of pity. But what stirs instead is:

  Envy.

  Envy that Constance can don so many decades. That she can wear them so nonchalantly, that she possesses somehow the privilege of growing older, a luxury that Maya hasn’t known she coveted until right this fucking second. Maya envies her without condition: the fact that Constance is here, present, unafraid, mortally human, perfect in her aging flesh. Stunned by the revelation, Maya almost says nothing.

  “You look good,” she whispers.

  A lean shrug. “What do you two want?”

  “To talk,” says Rita, crossing her legs, thin hands looped around a knee, the usual gloves substituted for something expensive and burgundy. “It concerns a colleague we had presumed to be dead.”

  Constance, always so on point with the atomic details, doesn’t miss the word choice. “Elise is alive?”

  “No. It’s Johanna. We scraped all the charred bits off the grill and made a better version,” drawls Maya, unable to keep her trap shut. The volume she modulates, but the smirk is a weaponized endeavor, hip-cocked for a fight. Fuck Constance. Fuck feeling discombobulated. Maya didn’t sign up for this.

  She leans back, arm draped over the shoulder of her seat, the little knife she’d procured re-slotted into its sheath. With her hand now freed, Maya worms fingers to her shoulder holster, smiles like a cat gorged on canaries. Come on, says the grin she bares. Her diagnostics blare an unsubtle reminder: fuck with them and you’re dead. But Maya doesn’t like feeling out of control, could use the normalcy of a firefight she probably won’t win.

  “Come on,” she mouths, subvocalizing, eager.

  Her bravado doesn’t even get a glance. Constance installs herself on the opposite end of the horseshoe desk, fingers brought to steeple. The light discolors her hematite hair, jaundices the grey, while paradoxically enriching her brown skin, imbuing it with a tawny golden sheen. Maya recalls that ship-cycle when Constance was investigating the etymology of her heritage, and the glee with which the latter announced herself chimerical. Everything with melanin and not a mote of white to be found, thank fucking god.

  “Elise is alive, yes,” says Rita, like Maya had never spoken.

  “You don’t have access to her genomes.”

  “We don’t,” says Rita. Her voice silkens, as does her smile, eyes lidded, lashes feathering the ledges of her cheeks. Rita is never as beautiful as when she’s taking a mark for a joy ride. “But she’s alive, anyway. Sort of.”

  Constance palms her face, an incredulous eye framed between the divot of space between two long fingers. She locks an arm over her ribs, seats the elbow of the other along the wrist. A thin, angry silence follows. Then: “I don’t think I’ve ever told you, but I fucking hate it when you do that sphinx routine.”

  Rita smiles, perfect as glass.

  “We can leave if you don’t want to hear me out. I don’t want to overstay my welcome here.”

  “Fuck. You haven’t changed one bit, have you? You’re still a goddamned asshole about everything.” Constance drops her hands atop her desk, rings bouncing along the oxidized surface, a fulguration of silver.

  There are four of them, Maya notes. Three decorative, one a shoddily encysted implant, concaving the knuckle, the scarwork trellising her skin like overgrown ganglia. It ropes around the back of her hand, ladders downward along the wrist; puckered, yes, with poorly healed flesh, but also something else: a filament of primitive machinery, protruding under the skin. It has dendrites, the extrusions nested amid the metacarpals. Telemetric sensors, perhaps? Maya wants to ask, but she doesn’t. Not now. Not yet. There’s work to be done.

  “Fine,” says Constance. “Talk. And if I don’t like what I hear, well, I bet you know what would happen next.”

  “This is what happens when a clone thinks they’re human. They forget that the flesh is ephemeral.” Rita slides Maya a sidelong glance, inviting participation. “What will you do if she calls the dogs on us?”

  “Blow shit up, obviously.”

  “I should call your bluff. Fuck you. Fuck both of you,” says Constance, the manufactured formality beginning to evaporate, the profanity rendered at a bathyal pitch. “But fine. Fine, you win. How the hell is Elise alive? And what the fuck does it have to do with me?”

  “She is a parasite-mind.” Rita leans so far forward she’s on the rind of stitching along the rim of her chair, shoulders lifted, spine locked at full extension. Maya has never seen her look more excited than when she’s in the throes of manipulation. “I don’t know how she did it. But she’s there, alive, in the Conversation.”

  “No. Maybe, for a little while. It’s been forty years. There’s no way the Minds haven’t eliminated her yet.”

  “You’d think so,” Rita cuts in. “But improbable as it is, Elise is alive. Somehow, she has dodged them all these decades.”

  Luckily for the triptych of conversing women, human society had long since apostatized from the belief that biological continuity is mandatory; so long as the neural map exists, the persona endures. If it hadn’t, likely Constance would have already directed them to leave. It is only by grace of the fact that mythos has been canonized as real, that immortality has been accepted as both abstract and subjective, that Constance allows them to stay, to partake in the woman’s growing bemusement.

  “No. Sorry. I can’t. That’s not possible.” A reflexive pleonasm. “I still don’t see how any of that is possible. Like I said. I can see it working out for a little while. A year, sure. Two? Five? I can buy that. But . . .”

  “Your lo
gic is the problem here,” says Rita. “You’re attaching yourself to the idea that there are limits to reality. What we have today, the clonetech, the Minds, FTL, these would have been dismissed as fantasy seven hundred years ago. Go back any amount of time, and you’ll find people who’d repudiate the advances of subsequent generations. I bet Puritans in the sixteenth century would have proclaimed antibiotics witchcraft.”

  “So?” says Constance. “Those aren’t remotely good parallels. You’re talking about scientific advancements backed by dozens of scientists, a ton of research, and no small amount of proof. Antibiotics might look like magic to the pilgrims, but give them access to all the data points leading to its invention, and they’ll understand. What you’re asking here is for me to . . . to . . . have faith in a fairy tale.”

  “And isn’t that how it always begins?” says Rita. “With a fairy tale?”

  “No,” says Constance. “Fuck you. Fuck. You. I have a good life here. I made myself a good life here. I sure as fuck am not going to give it up because of . . . fuck, I don’t even know what you want me to do.”

  “We need you to help us bring her home.”

  Constance hesitates. “No.”

  Maya, to her dismay, realizes she is becoming growingly aware of Rita’s pinpoint editorializations, her rotoscoping of the facts. All in service of ensuring her former cohorts fall into line, of course. And Maya, though she’d rather fucking not, finds herself wondering which part of the spiel she was sold was fiction. More importantly, if it is raw hubris driving Rita to lie and lie and lie because just what the fuck is she thinking? That people won’t and don’t talk while deep in the trenches? Won’t compare notes, won’t see the incongruities between one sales pitch and the other? What needles at Maya is the certainty there is only one reason for Rita’s lack of ostensible foresight.

  She doesn’t think they’ll survive long enough to make good on any resentment they might accrue.

  “Is what you’ve built here more important than her?” says Rita softly. “Answer me sincerely.”

  “No. No, of course not. If I was sure that Elise is there, I’d be on the Nathanson in a heartbeat. But I don’t know how real any of this is. No offense, but you are a pathological liar, Rita. I don’t trust you. At all. Forget risking this life, the tech they gave me—”

  “Yeah, I was going to ask you about why you look like our grandma now,” says Maya, both because she’s been wanting some way to divert the conversation and because she is curious how Constance accrued the kind of telomeres necessary to allow for her leisurely senescence.

  “What?”

  “How’d you get so old?”

  “Complete Dyson reconstruction,” says Constance without missing a beat, Maya’s half-hearted disparagement uncommented upon. “It’s not as faultless as they claim. I need routine dialysis. But I get to die the way I want.”

  “Senile and incontinent?” says Maya.

  “Human.”

  Rita lowers her visor so the rim divides those limpid black eyes. “At least you haven’t sold your soul for cheap.”

  “I haven’t sold my soul at all.”

  “Of course not. You think you’re here to keep the peace.” Rita removes the visor and gestures at the pit beneath them, the light catching on the frame, less sickly after reflection: a true bright gold. “Isn’t that right?”

  “I know where you’re going with that. Don’t. Just don’t start with me.”

  “Peace is often the same as suppression. Just in better clothes. Tell yourself whatever pretty lies you need, but in the end you’re just a warning, a reminder escalation means ageships.”

  “You’re on thin ice, Rita.”

  Maya revisits her calculations. Eight point five percent chance of causing cataclysmic enough damage to ruin public confidence in the precinct’s defenses. Not bad, not bad. Hardly worse than any of the odds they’ve seen. She could, with some luck, provide enough cover for Rita to escape. Then what? Her favorite trick, she guesses. Two shots through the basin of her brain. As Maya processes her analytics, her hands snake down to her hips. The new subcutaneous holsters had hurt like fuck going in, hurt more, quite frankly, than Maya would have ever confessed to. But they were a good idea even if they did screw with her aerodynamism; relationships were a compromise. Nestled between tectonic strata of fat and bone, that armament is the metaphorical ace up her hip, so to speak.

  “Move, and I’ll make sure you remember who’s the faster shot,” says Maya, grinning wide.

  “I know who’s the faster shot. I haven’t forgotten. Not that it matters,” says Constance in return, thumb and third finger working circles along the temples.

  “Aw, you like me,” says Maya.

  “Look,” says Constance, a hand fluttering nonchalantly at the air, her posture indicative of disdain, but Maya can work with that. No one ever respects gun-mutts and that’s fine; contempt cultivates carelessness. It creates a largesse of opportunities. When people baptize you as expendable, they forget what it means: people with nothing to lose have every cause to wild out. “I know exactly where the next twenty minutes could go. There’d be a firefight. You’d, maybe, take me down before everything in this building nukes you to fucking hell. If you’re lucky, no one will realize where you’ve parked your ship. If not, you’re fucked for a laugh. We could go down that route or the bitch—”

  “Call her that one more time and we’re going to get down for that fight.”

  “The bitch,” Constance reiterates, daring her—the sheer fucking gall, Maya thinks with a pop of rage, combat reticules trained now on Constance’s heart, right lung, forehead—to make good on her threat, “can tell me exactly what is going on, and we can do this like a bunch of adults.”

  “She contacted us.”

  A lie.

  “What?” says Constance.

  Rita, silent up until now, takes the cue like the body takes bullets. Her performance is primetime shit. Rita smiles, honeyed: arm extended, palm up, like she has the first sin in her grip, offering all the truth of a bitter world to Constance if only she dares to bite.

  “She contacted us,” she repeats, voice husking. Rita looks wistfully away, her posture that of someone so full of secrets she can barely bear their cumulative poundage. “I’m not sure how. But she did. She found her way into our com-channels.”

  “Could you not have fucking opened with that?” Constance demands.

  Despite her accusations, the incredulity Constance projects, her sneer, Maya can read the writing on the wall. She’s hooked. More than that, Constance believes. Not in the entirety of Rita’s postulation. No one who has met Rita would ever fully trust her. A wolf would be a more principled shepherd than Rita, would care more about ethos than her. But Constance has hope now, poor soul. Hope the mind-killer. Hope the little death of common sense. Hope, that worthless piece of shit.

  “Maybe I missed how you shout at me.”

  “If that’s all you wanted, all you needed to do was call.”

  “I wanted to see how you felt about the old crew, I guess.”

  “Badly.” Constance grimaces. “I feel very badly about you fuckers.”

  Rita laughs breezily, continues as though Constance hadn’t just tolled her hate for them. “We ran her patterns through the whole gauntlet. Double-checked for synaptic variances, anomalies in linguistic tests: colloquial and standard.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She’s alone. And she’s afraid. And she’s tired of running. She’s waited forty years for someone to come for her. All she wants is to go home.”

  “Fuck,” says Constance, leaning back in her chair.

  “Come on, Rita. Let’s just fucking go,” says Maya lazily. “It’s clear that that junk-cunt doesn’t have the balls to help. Why are we wasting time on her?”

  “Because I believe in her.”

  “Well, I’m sick of this.” Maya ricochets upright and onto her heels, weight rocking from the ball of one foot to another, driven by the ra
w centrifugal rapture of her aggression. That cortical politeness is forgotten now, shed in the need to do something, anything but sit here and keep listening to this shit. If Maya were more honest with herself, she’d admit her fury has less to do with the moratorium of action and more with the fact she can’t actually abide by what Rita is doing. “I’m over talking to you. Here’s the fucking thing, Constance. You can either believe us or you can tell us to get the fuck out. I don’t fucking care. What I care about is how much time you’re fucking wasting. Every minute we’re here is another minute we could be spending on trying to save Elise.”

  Nicely done, comes Rita’s voice through substrates of encryption, her approval relayed with a trill of uncut serotonin.

  But for once, though, just this goddamned once, Maya doesn’t soften.

  Tell her about the Merchant Mind.

  “Stand down,” says Rita, aloud and with bonafide feeling. This isn’t relevant to our negotiations. She doesn’t need to know.

  She deserves to know. Maya is so acclimatized to the boil of her hormones she’s alert to the exact attosecond when Rita reaches in and puts her adrenal gland to sleep. A trick she so rarely uses that Maya had forgotten Rita has the keys to the proverbial kingdom. “The fuck did you do that for?”

  “You’re making a scene.”

  “I can make some bodies instead if that helps.”

  “Maya.”

  Maya sits her ass down.

  “She really is alive.” Constance.

  The words are uttered in the voice of a proselyte, breathed like a prayer, bloody with need. That innocent want, nearly holy in its enormity, halts Maya in her tracks, a better panacea than anything Rita can concoct. Unable to speak at first, Constance drums lean fingers across the crescent of her upper lip. The feloniousness of Rita’s history forgotten in the wake of that bastard, that son of a bitch, that gross horror called hope.