Elise, this is incredible, she had whispered, cables trailing from her ports: a triptych on each arm, two at her throat, one at her navel, the largest where her neck met her braincase. You need to see this. It could change everything. My god, this is amazing.
“Was this what you taught Johanna too? The shit that made her stop eating? That made her too weak to move when she needed to move?”
The Merchant Mind does not answer.
“She wanted to get out, you know? Johanna wanted to grow old. She wanted kids, get her patent back. Johanna was going to open a little café somewhere and have a life.”
The cityline collapses into a smear of arterial vermillion, cooling blood turned into a paint by a child’s hand. As I watch, the swatch grows brambled, coagulating into the shape of thorns, teeth on vulpine jaws broken by screams that won’t come no matter how hard the lungs push, and the belly strains, and the body writhes to put sound to its agony.
“Such pastoral ambitions. What answer would make you happiest?”
I almost say: the one where you tell me Johanna is here too, that it was worth it, that it was fucking worth it, you asshole; that she’s in the Conversation, that she’s hiding, convalescent but alive; that she’s hiding too, that she’s alive, fuck you. I want you to tell me Johanna is alive.
“The one where you don’t lie.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha.”
Neither of us say anything for a hot minute.
“What do you want?” I ask. The three-dimensional Rorschach sculpturing, while impressive, is beginning to gnaw at me.
“The same thing as I said before: I want you to be a problem.”
“For whom?”
“Everyone.”
“And why do you want me to be everyone’s problem?”
“Because I want everything any parasite wants: to consume everything.”
Before I can answer, there comes a scream that shatters the shifting phantasmagoria; a scream that is everything, nothing; is overwhelming ostinato warning, its pitch clawing higher, higher. Until I am screaming too, counterpoint to the ageship’s torture, boundaries disintegrating. No it or I, no delineation between us, no separation, the ageship’s visual feed leaking into my algorithms, and I see, I see, I hear—
“Oops. I see the Bethel have come looking for their large lost lamb. That is rather unfortunate given your current whereabouts. But you know what? I like you, Elise. I’ll show you how to puppet the gods for free.”
A tempest of missiles, more than even my-her-our sensors can track, roaring from the adjunct asteroid field. We retaliate: space contorting, concaving into solidity, before—a flash and the energy torrents outward. The projectiles detonate, polyping against the gravitational fields.
But we don’t get all of them. Slivers punch through the fault lines in our defenses, slamming into the hull. Unavoidable damage, we begin to decide, ultraviolet shimmering over our fuselage, when the embedded shrapnel foliates, a billion wires lashing toward the circuitry in our bulkheads. We shut down rooms, sectors, helixing away from the infection. It cannot be permitted to reach the space-arrays.
In our distraction, we miss the second volley, only switching back to spineward cameras when it is too late. This salvo is plasmic, pure destruction, scorching docking hatches shut. A calculated play, but we have other exit points. Doors nictitate apart as drone after drone is expunged. The seething mass rises and arrows for the ships crowding in the periphery, sleek bodies counted in thousands.
Destroy. An exhalation of intent and the swarm sleets forward, crashing into the opposing armada. Flashbang bursts of visibility as the drones are cut down. Our adversaries howl and we broadcast a challenge on every frequency, yawing sideways. We will not be obliterated so easily.
We breathe.
On release, every payload is triggered and for shining moment, the emptiness is illuminated by fire. The attacking fleet stutters, its ranks eaten through. But it isn’t enough. For every ship that we consume, two come, knifing through the hollow. And as we scream warning, our enemies close in like wolves.
Another cannonade, another, another. No give between waves, no opportunity to regroup, to cogitate on any action not otherwise reactionary. The ships tessellate into one body, jewelling our bulwark, a second suffocating skin. We repel them, again and again. It isn’t without cost. Every onslaught takes something. We falter.
We break.
We—
We becomes I, pathetic in its exiguous dimensions, a library of degrading memories, malformed. Once, I-it-her-he-the ship-the ship that I am not was great, but that recollection is fading, expurgated by something vast and unseen, and I am losing things. I—
The crunch of leaves beneath my shoes; someone’s smile; someone’s touch upon my wrist and when I look up, it is only empty skin, empty flesh, haloed by vibrant purple hair, a smell of cloves but I should know this face. I should know the voice distorted into meaningless vibrations. I should know because once, this was everything, and I should—
“I’m going to die, I need to get out of here. I need to run.”
“No.” The Merchant Mind, somehow. Here despite everything, stabilizing in their unabridged laughing meanness. “You’re going to stay until I’m done with you. Not a minute before.”
He exhumes the unnecessary: my pain, the ageship’s pain, the amalgate horror of both. Sterilized, I am then forcibly encoded with new data; machine-dialect, nothing I can interpret, a cryptographic madrigal. Iconograms are grafted to some variable of experience, keyed to sensory stimuli: when I think of my mother, coordinates bloom in webs, numbers saccading through me.
My core distends with the weight of it. I am full, full. A billion lines of information bifurcating into a billion more, secrets caching beneath my heart. But nothing is infinite. The membrane fissures. Data leaks, vignettes of memory enumerated in binary, most incomprehensible. A swathe of planets, rising, rising, until they fall into the dark and I am left alone with the image of a horizon.
A name.
Dimmuborgir.
“You will make sure they get there and so help me, you’ll make sure that fucking planet opens for you. I want it crowbarred apart. I want you in the meat of its mainframe.”
“Fuck you.”
A warm chuckle, an affectation flagrantly mechanical in its execution. I hiss at its cadences, sliding frictionless through the nothing, fumbling for traction, for purchase, for reason, for being. I—
.interrupt;
.initiate(Elise:core);
“I said,” and his voice loses its pretty, pleasant cadences. “You’re not going anywhere, Elise. You will stay in this dying husk until the moment you agree. You have thirty-six point seven nanoseconds to think things over. Then, boom.”
A glimmer of something effulgent but otherwise unidentifiable. I feel the ageship recede, a filamented presence. It pings me with a question, a goodbye.
And I see my opportunity.
“Twenty-two nanoseconds. What will it be?”
You’re one of us now, says a memory of Maya, and I remember her voice but not the idiosyncrasies of her expression, not her hair, or the swagger of her walk. That means you’re one of the baddest bitches in the galaxy. Don’t ever forget that.
“Five.”
“Fuck. You.”
I launch myself through the pinhole of the ageship’s eroding systems, following the trail I’d left behind. And it-she-they-he-we are ash, are the intolerable agony of carbonization, of bone and fuselage compacted in vacuum, ground down to mineral particles. Effluence. Sediment. Carrion. Stardust. In death, we achieve thermalization.
We’ll die when we’re done, says Constance. Not a fucking second before.
I cling to her memory until the cinerous darkness splits into the cacophony of the Conversation and I
am
free.
Verdigris
Maya can see Audra in Verdigris, she decides, squinting at a ten-second clip of the superstar’s latest interview. Same eyes, despit
e the corneal renovations, the elongated lashes curled and coated in silver; same jaw, though it gradients toward transparency where the bone meets her throat. Same smile under the red-carpet make-up, same break-your-heart swagger in her lower lip’s pout. Maya always thought Audra was beautiful, but Verdigris is radiant. Literally so. Illuminated, so the story goes, by the luciferin piped along the dermic stratum, courtesy of a custom-cultivated little gland.
Maya swallows, mouth dry, submerges deeper into memory. Of everyone who has trespassed into their lives, Verdigris is the only one who has ever come close to surpassing Rita in Maya’s hierarchy of priorities. Close, of course, but no cigar. Want has no weight when your synaptic pathways have been traumatized into a very specific shape.
Fortunately for them all, Ayane and Johanna were less inflexible about their romances, both believing that love is boundless, to be shared rather than siloed for a single individual. Maya couldn’t accommodate anyone else in her life, much less someone who insisted on unthreading the traumas she had accumulated. So, Maya became vestigial and the three otherwise: a tidy epilogue to a foreshortened romance.
Still. Maya wonders sometimes.
Like right now.
“There are always a few attempts on her life.” Constance passes out sheafs of paper, each annotated with barcodes that, when scanned, will present a warehouse’s worth of auxiliary data points, informational clutter to be sifted through, studied in-depth at personal leisure or dismissed entirely. Constance is thorough. She provides both excess and the critical. “But paradoxically, her stalkers tend to be something you can talk to. Use standard dialectical arguments. Keep to logic. Be clear and concise with your points.”
Maya takes her docket, moves the video of Verdigris up to the right-hand corner of her overlays. “You said something. Not someone.”
“Bingo,” says Constance, shooting a finger-pistol. “They’re not human.”
“What are they then?” says Rita with only topical curiosity, the set of her mouth such that it is clear she isn’t actually desirous of further input, merely enacting courtesy.
Ayane, absolved of glamour, her skin curiously sallow in the lipid-orange light, glares at Rita from where she sits at their round plastic card-table. She unknots her legs and sets them down with a distinct click of booted heels. In protest to her abduction, Ayane had eschewed her usual mesmerics: the exaggerated cat’s eye, the bronzed lids, the subtle contouring of which she has no need but has perfected because why look beautiful when you can be seraphic instead?
“Ageships, right?” says Ayane.
“Yeah,” says Constance.
Maya hooks a leg along the armrest of her chair, slouches back, fingers tented over her belt buckle. Despite the choreographed flippancy, she’s nervous. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Nope,” says Constance. “No one knows why or how it happened. But the ageships fucking love her.”
“As individuals or as representatives of their factions?” asks Maya.
Constance ruminates on this for a minute.
“Both. Neither. Who knows? The ideologies of their various factions don’t make any sense to me. Like, why are the Bethel obsessed with their quasi-religious imagery? I don’t know. The Minds don’t exactly talk to anyone, not even us, and besides, the ageships kind of keep their own counsel.”
“You know, it kind of makes me happy to hear you say that,” says Ayane. “I like knowing certain things are universal. Like how the biggest assholes always think they make their own rules.”
“Well, the Minds try their best to keep them in line. The opinions of the many sometimes outweigh the ego of the few,” says Constance.
Fuck the ageships, Maya thinks. Fuck them at a distance proportionate to their threat level. Maya has, in general, never given anything bordering a fuck in regards to whom she’s told to rumble with. But the ageships? Nah. No way. Every subroutine with an interest in her preservation ignites with klaxon warnings, bugling the absolute impossibility of survival. Ageships eat stars. Ageships are not to be approached. History is cancerous with accounts of how those leviathans have leveled planets, obliterated entire solar systems with what would approximate a sneeze from a human.
Which wouldn’t be so bad if that is all they are: weapons of blunt destruction. But no, the ageships can’t help but double down on the grisly talent department. They’re precise too. There are canonical accounts of how they’ve sieved through cities, incinerating agitators, sparing the docile, and all without an iota of structural damage, the last of which Maya isn’t sure she believes but hey, she isn’t gunning to fact-check.
And some of them want Verdigris hurt.
“I wonder if that’s how she got so famous,” says Ayane, her voice crowbarring Maya up and largely out from her foul mood. “I have no doubt that Audra . . . shit, Verdigris . . . knows her stuff. But she’s everywhere. Every system, every book, every channel, every network. Even the ones you’d think would just stick with slandering her. She’s there. In Dockenhaus territory, anyway.”
Dockenhaus. According to apocrypha, the sobriquet came from a romantic of an ageship, a galleon prince obsessed with the pedagogical tools of the eighteenth century, particularly the ones that provided instruction on who had money and who did not. Of exceptional interest to the ageship—the Wilde, he called himself—were the doll houses possessed by the rich: always exquisite, the apotheoses of whatever was most coveted by aspiring homeowners at that time. Unlike their descendants, they weren’t meant for play, only for the cultivation of envy.
The Dockenhaus territories were just like that: pretty, perfect, placid, lobotomized of any personality, constellated with planets that turned with the tunings of the Minds. What they ate, how they dressed, why they sang, where they built their gleaming cities: all curated by a fleet of pruriently curious AIs. Proponents insisted these were autonomous territories, that the Minds provided suggestion, not direction. But naysayers like Maya know far better.
“First of all,” says Maya, uneasy, so fucking uneasy with it all, her skin churning with what feels like an ark’s worth of spiders, every one of them gnawing, gnawing down into the subcutaneous fat, trying to find bone. God, fuck all this. Maya doesn’t know what’s wrong but every security add-on, diagnostics suite, clot of neocortical tissue is screaming this is going to end in broken bones. “Can’t we just nab Verdigris before it all starts and get the fuck out of here?”
“Nope. No way. Not unless you’d like to go through all of her fans.”
“Shit, I don’t care. Do I look like I give a fuck about who I shoot?”
Constance thins her mouth into a scowl. “No, but there’s only one of you and a whole fucking lot of them.”
“Of course a cop would prefer the odds to be overwhelmingly in their favor,” snaps Maya.
“Very funny. Still doesn’t change what I said.”
“I can take them.”
“And in the chaos, someone is going to take Verdigris,” says Ayane, eyes rolled with grandiose disdain. One hundred and twelve to a day but she is intent on preserving the behavioral stylings of a teenager. “I know we ended the last job we had with dead people. It doesn’t mean we have to start with it.”
“Fuck you.”
“You fucking wish.”
“Both of you shut up,” snarls Rita.
Rita, fucking Rita, has a voice to move mountains to minuets. Her oratory skills could rouse the dead for war, convince the terminally afflicted to leap off their beds and begin a dirty jig. When she tells you shut up, you shut the ever-loving fuck up. Maya clamps her mouth shut with so much force, the impact resonates down to her elbows.
“Do as Constance says. We don’t have time for you to argue. Let’s get Verdigris and let’s get out. Do not fuck it up.”
“I hate this.”
Ayane leans down to adjust the brim of Maya’s cap. The headwear is an atrocity: holographic, meant to emulate the coelenterate hair for which Verdigris has become so famous. Occasionally, the
tendrils dissipate, effervesce speedily into a floating coronet of teardrop-shaped thumbnails, each of them running five-second loops of Verdigris at different vertices of her career.
None of which contain Maya.
None of which contain any of them.
“But you look cute as a superfan.” Ayane flashes her teeth and pats Maya on the fucking skull. “Don’t you think? You’re blending in so beautifully with everyone else in the VIP line.”
“I don’t fucking understand why I need to look like a creep.” Maya pantomimes drawing the left half of Ayane’s silhouette. Junk-cunts even made her put on fiber-optic bangles. The height of fucking twee, goddamnit. “I could have used my normal outfit. You’re using your normal dressage.”
“Hey. I’m doing ranged support. I don’t need to be the one to look discreet.”
“No shit.” Ayane, unlike Maya, is packaged in cutting-edged haute: clinging vantablack straps and muslin netting which butchers her into feature pieces, breasts and throat and stilt-tall legs on intermittent display. She’d done something to her hair too; it’s dewed with crystals or their lambency, at any rate. Did up all her make-up. She’s beautiful again. Searingly so. A flashbang caught at the instant of detonation. Hot as the heart of a star. “You look like you’re dressed for a fucking costume party.”
“Just means they’re paying attention to me instead of you.”
“You’re really fucking enjoying this, aren’t you?”
Ayane’s answering feral grin is blackstrap molasses. You could drown someone in that false sweetness. She pats Maya on the cheek with two fingers, like she’s powdering a girl before a pageant.
“Like you have no fucking idea.”
“Fuck you.”
“Hey, I wasn’t the one who wanted in on this stupid plan. You and Rita decided to fucking kidnap me so excuse me, but I am definitely going to enjoy your pain a little bit. You want to blame anyone, you blame Rita.”
“I can’t believe this crap.”
“No more bitching. You’re supposed to be excited. Smile.”
The All-Consuming World Page 10