But she does nothing.
It feels good, doesn’t it? Being held like you’re human. Johanna’s ghost, raising itself from the dead to laugh at her.
“Not a fucking clue.”
Reyha chuckles, the sound blending so perfectly with that memory of Johanna, Maya cannot, for a second at least, distinguish between the frequencies of the two. “You’re like my Rochelle. Feral. Allah help me, Rita has a lot to answer for in the afterlife.”
Reflexive: “If you fucking say anything about her—”
“You’ll what?” Reyha meets her gaze full-on, fearless. Her grip tightens as her expression accretes a penetrating quality. “Shoot me? Baby, if you were going to do that, you’d have done so already. I know I’m making a ton of presumptions.”
“No shit.”
“But the truth is, and we both know this, is that Rita is not a good thing for any of you. Sure, she has on that messianic veneer. Underneath, though? She’s a monster. She keeps you isolated, she keeps you exhausted. She makes you die for her ten thousand times over—”
“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to blow your face off.”
“Make sure you clean up before Ehmet comes home, then. That kid is a lot of good things, but he can’t fucking clean to save his teenage life. He’d leave curds of brain everywhere.” So factually articulated, that prophetic disassembly of her posthumous condition: without bathos, without any overture of mawkishness. Prim. “I’m not telling you how to live your life. I’m just telling you what I learned from all those years with my wife. Rita’s abusive. Rita does not give a shit about any of you. And since apparently everything that Rochelle said was true, I know she got two of your peers killed, and I—”
Cinematic timing is such that it never allows for a revelation to complete uninterrupted. As Reyha veers toward the denouement of her impassioned soliloquy, the front door leaps open, ricocheting off the adjoining wall so it volleys back into the face of the new arrival. An incredulous “ow, fuck!” fires through the air: Ehmet returned and with fresh bruises for his trouble too.
“Language!” Reyha disentangles from Maya before the latter can so much as crack the first note of her coyote laugh, all that tension sleeting away into a juddering giggle. Back to compartmentalization. Back to segregating doubt from core functionality, the vagaries of self-worth firmly entrenched in the basement of her consciousness, where, hopefully, they will just fucking rot.
Yet, as Maya observes the reunion between mother and marginally bruised child, she discovers that, once gestated, that need to be valued—to be loved equitably, in proportion to what is extended—cannot be aborted so easily. It pricks at her, needle-toothed. But what does a dog, so familiar now with abuse that it fits better than their own skin, do in these circumstances? Maya is still mulling over her predicament when Reyha returns, wiping damp palms along her legs.
“Kids. You love them no matter how much they whine. Now, where were we?”
Maya, a quip at ready, surprises herself when she says: “I’m sorry for your loss, you know?”
“Wait. Run that by me again?” Ehmet rounds the corner as his mother stands there, astounded by the sudden compassion exhibited, a white ceramic cup in each of his hands. Reyha bobs her chin briskly at him before absconding with his burden, seating herself again. Her disbelief is rawly vivid, etched in the exaggerated contortions of her face. She pinches her brows, scowls. “Are you offering your condolences?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh,” says Reyha and then once more, with a blowsier lilt: “Huh. Who’d have thought? You do have a heart in there, tin man.”
Maya says nothing, has nothing more constructive to impart than her steady gaze, her consortium of macros and military add-ons endlessly scrounging for some cause to activate, a catalyst for a brawl, anything but this unnerving, aching, unwanted stillness.
When it becomes clear that Maya will present no riposte, Reyha passes along one of the cups. Maya looks down. Steam wicks from along the surface of the agate-hued fluid, a color unlike anything Maya is accustomed to. Just as foreign: the fragrance that lifts from its depths. It is peculiarly sweet, suggestive of the presence of sugared almonds and cinnamon, dried apple slices, ginger, and—
“Beetroot?”
Reyha shrugs expansively. “I like the color.”
A companionable silence congeals between them, both women ostensibly absorbed with their respective beverages. For Maya, at least, it is an opportunity to take stock, regroup. The dialogue is growingly claustrophobic, as is the mantling of domesticity, and all the little details which comprised a civilized encounter. No, none of that is helping her mood one fucking bit. Maya knows what she wants. She covets the idiot ease of murder, of disembowelment, activities that feel gaudily out of place here, even in the hypothetical. Sullen, she tests the tensile strength of her cup’s handle, squeezing until she can feel ceramic almost indent: a hair’s distance from shatter.
“We had twenty-one years together. I’m not going to say I didn’t want more, because I do. But it was a lot, and I’m grateful.”
Maya stares at her with abject and uncamouflaged horror. Twenty-one years. Fuck. The way Reyha has been talking about Rochelle, she thought those two enjoyed a full four decades together. Twenty-one years. It isn’t just less than Maya had anticipated, it is obscene, an unjust paupering of the one left behind.
More abominable yet is the look of peace that Reyha is wearing, the ease with which she’d announced that was “a lot” of time. The thought of twenty-one years being sufficient for anyone is so macabre, so heinous that it compels her to wonder if this is Reyha attempting to defang her own agony. Narratives matter. The abused create apocrypha, anything to seduce their lizard brain into docility. Why not the shellshocked, the heartbroken, the bitter, the ones who were left behind by the deathbed without even a schedule for their grief?
But that delusion glissades away in the wake of Reyha’s stoicism as the other woman retrieves a framed picture from the shelf behind her. She angles the photo so it enters Maya’s view. It is Rochelle and Reyha—younger, although not by much, hair already grey, the lines on their faces permanently emblazoned—bracketing a maple tree, both aiming finger-guns at a heart chiseled into the bark. In the middle, the statement: R+R 4 ever.
“She was a romantic,” Reyha confides. “I bet you didn’t know that.”
Maya contemplates this without rancor or judgement, jigsawing together, as she does, this new composite image of Rochelle: plumper in natural mid-life, better coiffed, with cardigans in a palette of pastels, but with black oil under her nails still and her magpie avarice toward every vehicle to stray into sight.
“She said she never got to have any of those nice things. First loves, dates where you hold hands as you walk around, ice cream dripping down your fingers, and you don’t care because you’re fixated on the other person. Bad movie nights,” says Reyha.
“I never knew she wanted them.”
“Did you ask?”
“No. We never . . .”
“Yeah,” says Reyha. “I got that feeling. Now, what else . . . ?”
Reyha falls naturally into loving oration of the domestic, the sweet, the life Rochelle pulled together from the wreckage of the mistakes she made. And Maya listens. She bobs her head in the lulls where Reyha halts to pull in breath. It is an act tantamount to glossolalia. Maya doesn’t have a fucking clue as to how to do this: sit tidily in a dead woman’s living room, a cup of fruit-infused tea cooling on an end table, and listen as the last years of her life are unrolled by her widow. But she tries. She owes Rochelle this much.
Throughout her stories, Reyha neither staggers nor slips, not once, not even during her exposé of Rochelle’s funeral. Where Maya expects a violence of emotion, there is instead a melancholic blitheness, the ease of a polar explorer accustomed now to the terrain’s malice. Here, Reyha anchors herself in a kind memory. Here, she diffuses grief with gratitude for family, Ehmet critical to this narrative throughout:
love as a leitmotif made flesh.
“Sorry,” says Reyha, voice feathering into a contralto laugh. She smooths one polished auburn curl behind an ear. “I told you I don’t know how to stop when it comes to Chelle. I’m not even sure if I’ll ever start thinking of her in the past tense. She’s still here. In Ehmet. In this house. In everything I do. My existence is and always will be a continued dialogue with her. Who I am, what I am. All of it. I am who I am because she came into my life. It doesn’t matter she can’t physically answer me. I know what she’d say to a thousand different things.”
Another laugh, this one embarrassed, yet the shine of the love at its core is something Maya would bottle, store away for a bad day. God knows she’s seen too fucking many.
“I’m sorry,” says Reyha. “It must sound ridiculous to you.”
Maya cranks up the left corner of her lip, tries on a smile she doesn’t quite feel. Being here, confronted with what she suspects is the only method the mortal can be made otherwise, and not the cadaverous half-life she has grown acculturated to, it both enriches and empties. Maya lost something along the through line of Reyha’s quiet stories. Something lets go of her. What, though, she’ll have to figure out later. “No more ridiculous than all of our stories might have sounded to you.”
“—that’s what marriage is. You roll with the worst of your wife’s stories, and you tell everyone how proud you are of her imagination, and when they make inadvisable jokes, you threaten to run them over. Love’s work, kid. All the best things in life are.” A laugh flowers, dies quickly as it began. “I don’t want to know why you were here for Chelle, do I?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“It can’t have been good, huh?”
“I don’t know,” Maya says truthfully, feeling her way still through this new worldview. “I think she would have wanted to help. It involves at least one of the people we thought dead and bringing her home.”
“Is Rita still involved in all this?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d be careful if I were you.”
Maya mulls over this. Ordinarily so tight-fisted about the data Rita shares, seeing them as tokens, tacit proof that Rita cares, although she, like Maya, is too fucked up by their unique provenance to put words into such, Maya surprises herself with what comes out of her mouth: “You too. Be careful. I think the ageships are looking to kill anyone cloneborn, and their families. Or maybe just the criminals? I don’t fucking know anymore.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“I’m not the one who asks the questions,” says Maya, wrung of excuses. “I just do what I’m told.”
Reyha leans forward, trapping Maya’s palm between both of her wide hands. Gently, she shutters Maya’s fingers, closing them into a fist. “I think, maybe, it’s time you considered changing that.”
Five out of twelve, though. They’ve endured worse odds.
Introductions
Pimento is at an impasse.
He flits between bodies, what few he possesses, conscious of the value humans place in first impressions. A bipedal chassis might encourage immediate rapport but it also might not. His avatar’s absence of traditional humanoid features is a high-risk factor. The drone, on the other hand, seems more statistically likely to succeed. Simians respond well to adorable, but is that really the impression that Pimento wants to impart?
Buzzing displeasure from his anterior speakers, the scout-ship cycles through flowcharts again, examining the logical outcomes, divergent paths. The initial conclusions persist. In the end, Pimento sacrifices respectability for practicality, decants himself into the drone, sensory awareness simplified grotesquely. Audiovisual input only. No comprehension of light spectrums, no olfactory trackers, dismal frequency response. Clockspeeds of neolithic levels. Ugh.
But that is not what unsettles him. It is the reduction of cognitive breadth that does it, his circadian oscillations delayed, processor slowed to uselessness. The sense that he is being neutered, diminished. That is terrifying. However, function before frivolity. So, Pimento disables the subroutines that would engineer doubt and distress, and runs a diagnostics check instead, its results discarded as soon they manifest. Another nervous tic.
The bot exits storage, catapulting down the corridors of his original chassis, the hallways silent. Without Pimento’s consciousness in its mainframe, the torpid ship might as well be a ghost, dead save for erratically triggering macros and its security subroutines. Motion sensors awaken emergency lights as he cruises by, delineating his route with pinpoints of gold. Inside Pimento’s overlay, the subaural echo of the Merchant Mind’s instructions ticks off the seconds until task completion.
They are simple orders, disappointingly, simple enough that Pimento finds himself worrying they parallel his employer’s faith, a concern he briskly edits from immediate attention. Public knowledge makes it clear: terror is purposeless without the needs of flesh, relevant only when it can edify, can serve as a topic of academic interest. And this is no occasion for scholastic meditation, so therefore it is unequivocally moot.
Pimento takes a corner, swerves into position and waits. Hydraulics untangle, separating platform from floor. Another shift of machinery. Gears heave. And then, light roars up: cloudless midday glare. The topography is as the Merchant Mind described: a spread of tropical growth, scarred by ravines and wide coiling rivers, like the vasculature of ferns. As for the distant ocean, it is vibrantly pink, glowing with microlife.
A bird twists sleekly into view from below the ship, the span of its wingtips twice that of the dormant vehicle, head cocked to examine this intruder in the troposphere. Its plumage is phantasmagoric, tinctures mutating without pattern, red-orange liquifying to blue, to pink, to configurations of diamond-dusted indigo. Pimento documents its passage without interest, however. The species was catalogued decades ago, its physiognomy mapped down to the last chromosome, every idiosyncrasy saved to file.
It screes at Pimento, a sound that is partway reptilian. And Pimento croons back: reassurance, recognition.
Warning.
Having announced its intent, the drone pitches himself from the ship, startling the bird-thing. Personality modules switch off, their power allotment rerouted to navigation. What little remains of Pimento—Pimento, the inventory of curated neuroses; Pimento, as it thinks of itself when it permits itself the words he and I—devotes itself to the task of recording. Later, it will pick apart the sensory nuances, the minutiae of its transit; delight in the freefall, the gravitational pull, the way its frame pirouetted through the firmament, sky and terrain blurring to one.
Of course, Pimento could have chosen an easier descent, docked its ship-self before disembarking in this primitive avatar. But where would be the pleasure in that? Thrusters kick in, nine thousand feet from impact. Pimento slingshots up. Hovers. Consumes the vista with detached interest, aware that later it will obsess over every detail. Later, it will want to devour everything. A seething veil of insects whispers past, arrowing down into the jungle below. Pimento follows, having reacquired equilibrium, sufficient pushback against the gravity.
There.
It—he again, now that auxiliary functions can be indulged—spirals down into a clearing, fringed by veins of cool water. A ship hulks over the soil, lifeless and utterly hideous, human parody of Penitent design. Four women stand arrayed in martial formation. Their stance is precise; three, hands cupped around military-grade artillery, flanking an unarmed fourth. When one shifts their weight, the others adjust instantly, muscles yoked to a distributed intelligence. Or, perhaps, they were meticulously trained.
The second hypothesis is somehow more alarming than the first.
“Where is he?”
Pimento articulates a noise: a throat clearing, phlegm warbling against a swollen uvula. “The Merchant Mind sends his apologies. He believes a—” He plays an audio clip from his employer. “—‘parlay by proxy’—” End clip. “—would be more mutually beneficial.”
One of the humans, wires and sinew and heightened adrenaline, dances back, twin revolvers held up to Pimento. An eye turns effulgent, crimson with equations. “Fuck. I knew it. I fucking knew it. That bot probably has an explosive. Verdigris, can you disarm it from this distance? I fucking told you, Rita. He’s going to double-cross us.”
“Put. That. Down.” The first speaker again, calm. She is taller than her companion but less robust, glass where the other is carbon-steel. But there is something to the heft of her stance, a predatory deliberateness, that Pimento itemizes as dangerous. On impulse, he scans her. His sensors return nothing: no chemical reading, no electrocardiographic reports, nothing that reads as human. Only a grey, cultivated blankness.
“We have to get out of here.”
“This isn’t how he works. He won’t lure us into an ambush like this. It wouldn’t be professional.” The last word is divested like a parasite.
“Rita—”
A third voice, richer, a mezzo-soprano pleasingly abraded by cigarette use. Pimento files its sound waves away for future use. The speaker, unlike the first two, is statuesque, square-shouldered muscularity. The stock of a turbine rifle sits balanced on a hip. “Maya’s right. Something about this smells off.”
“The Merchant Mind enjoys his jokes,” Rita replies, unperturbed, although she is the only one without visible weaponry. “Besides—” Here, her voice refines to a blade. “—we’d be dead already if he was planning something.”
Her companions growl acquiescence, but don’t transition from their state of heightened alarm. This proves problematic. The collective’s body language, now contaminated, soon transforms, degrading to aggression, a murmuration of snarls and snapping teeth.
“I am not here to cause anyone harm. I promise that I—” Pimento pitches his voice high, hoping this voluntary infantilization might engender trust. He zips forward, only to weave back as Maya advances in grimacing counterpoint.
The All-Consuming World Page 15