The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

  She shudders delicately, the frisson exquisite. “Doesn’t matter. Because I’m going to make you an offer you cannot refuse, and we’re going to make a deal.”

  Interesting. Pimento catalogs the moment.

  “Continue.”

  “The Merchant Mind made bargains with all of us. Unfair ones. I have an idea to get us out of them.” Elise paces an uneven circle around Pimento’s corpus, her stride clipping through the walls, evidence of her distraught.

  “For what reason?” He follows her orbit without effort, rotating in simpatico. “I entered my contractual obligations voluntarily.”

  “Were the stipulations to your satisfaction?”

  “They were within bounds of my requirement, yes.”

  “And are you sure that the Merchant Mind will keep up his half of the bargain when all the work is through?”

  Pimento is silent.

  “I worked with him before. Maya, Rita, Nadia, Johan . . .” Elise inhales, veneer glitching, still walking her circuit. “—all of us, my old crew. We made the error of trusting in him before. It was a mistake.”

  The implications percolate through Pimento’s system: risk-reward is tabulated in triplicate, cost-effectiveness weighted against a checklist of capital punishments, chassis-conversion and permanent dismantlement.

  “You probably want information, right? I could give it to you,” Elise presses, before Pimento can argue. “Whatever I’ve learned. Whatever I have, I’ll give you access in return.”

  “Proprietary rights to your files?”

  Hesitation. “Yes.”

  “It would mean transferring ownership of your consciousness too. Access would become dependent on my agreement. I may not want you to remain cognizant.”

  “I understand.” Her eyes are briefly occluded by mercury, cornea and sclera both vanishing into the silver. A lacuna between words sustained a millisecond too long. “But it will be worth it.”

  “Worth it,” Pimento repeats, scarcely trusting in the serendipity. Something had to be amiss. Autonomy is of paramount importance to the human species. Why would Elise yield such? “But how can it be? You are at least peripherally human but you are offering to decentralize control of yourself.”

  Cracks seam Elise’s features, lasting only a moment, before her features sequence themselves into a tepid smile, the eyes one-dimensional. Flat, no depth at all. “It’s none of your concern.”

  “What do you need me to do?” Eagerness is a liability, inconducive to successful negotiation. Indifference must be cultivated in exclusion of all else. Even if Pimento is palpitating with excitement.

  “Help me keep Rita Koskinen quiescent.”

  “Yes.” Pimento pauses. “Will you consent to cryptographic certification?”

  “If it is an ancillary installation, yes.”

  Pimento doesn’t wait. Even the most rudimentary peripherals can be fine-tuned, adjusted for myriad purposes. Code is malleable, protean. With the right foundation, any variety of miracle is possible. “That will be sufficient.”

  Reveal

  The door shuts. Maya wakes to the noise as she has always done: immediate, adrenaline-drunk, all cylinders firing, vision gory with combat inlays hunting targets in the dark. No threats, though, save to the integrity of Maya’s indoctrination: Verdigris, standing alone except for a look halfway to despair.

  First words out of Maya’s mouth and what are they? “We have to stop meeting each other like this.”

  Verdigris laughs, a pinched staccato warble of a noise, clearing her throat as he stands there, a hand around the neck of the doorknob, tensed to bolt. “Do you have a problem with normal hellos? I still don’t get it. First you getting yourself shot at my fucking concert. Now this? I guess the cheesy one-liner is better than the former.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Maya is aching too hard and in too many places to keep those pearly whites bared. Every inch of her is leprous with that red hurt endemic to certain post-surgery experiences where it’s a coin flip as to whether you ask Death to make it quick because a life of this, unwound over the decades, is a worse end than a short jaunt into the long night. She counts her breaths, an old ritual, committing herself to the study of each inhale and its respective denouement and how at the apogee of the sequence something hitches when her ribs flex as though snagging on bone.

  “I’m just really fucking tired,” says Maya, voice down to a croak. “You have no idea. And that fucking piece of shit won’t tell me the fuck happened to Rita. If she’s dead, I’m—”

  She stops herself.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t know what you’re sorry for,” says Verdigris, lying like god at a poker game. She isn’t even trying. He pads closer, those steel-lined heels quiet as silk on the floor grating. The light makes a stranger of her face. “Rita’s . . . alive. And we all know where your loyalties lie, so don’t apologize for that.”

  “I—”

  I’m sorry she’s the first word out of my mouth, the first thought of my fucking day. I’m sorry we’re here. I’m sorry I didn’t say yes all those fucking years ago when you offered to love me until the world ends. I’m sorry I’m sorry.

  “Where the fuck are we, anyway? I thought the Nathanson blew up.”

  “It did.” Verdigris runs a hand through his opalescent hair, the shadows along her face in anxious flux. “We’re inside Pimento. So cut the asshole some slack.”

  “What?”

  “He saved us. Basically. Although it’s anyone’s guess if this is a hostage situation or if this is a good thing. But we’re inside his belly and safe for now. We’ll just have to see if he’s a beast or blessing later, I guess.” Verdigris tries on a smile that is two sizes too big, so it slips, bringing the rest of her expression crashing down to a small tense frown. “I should write that down. Has potential as my next hit single, don’t you think?”

  “Cute that you think you’ll get back to that old life.”

  “Cute that you think I won’t.” Verdigris seats himself on the edge of Maya’s sickbed. “Do you get off on being such an asshole?”

  Intellectually speaking, Maya is cognizant this is what conversation is, a barter of ideas, people trading stances, with clever phrases thrown in to sweeten the pot. It’s just talk. If Maya reads any insult in those casually spoken lines, it’s her own fucking fault. Words are ephemeral, worthless without the context of action.

  “You know what? I don’t fucking know. You get off on breathing oxygen? It’s like that. This is my fucking baseline. I don’t have a fight or flight reflex. I have a punch-it-until-it-stops-fucking-talking reaction. And—” Her voice cracks. “I’m just fucking exhausted, Audr—shit.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “This wasn’t supposed to go down like that.”

  “Tell me about it. I distinctly remember the plan involved getting Elise home first. What happened there?”

  “I don’t know. I just, I don’t. I have no fucking idea. Nothing makes any junk-fucked sense anymore. I feel like I’m losing my mind.” At this, Maya has to garrote a laugh because she knows if she lets herself, she won’t stop until her throat is rasped down to mincemeat. “This used to be so much easier.”

  “Easier, yes. But not better.” Verdigris sucks her lips, his mouth erased save for a thin crevice along her face. “Rita’s always been a piece of work.”

  Maya averts her gaze. Only so much truth she can stomach at once. As she is beginning to discover, reality, despite how it has been publicized, touted by its proponents as the only way to go, is untenably foul. Unfortunately, once imbibed, it is impossible to excise, accreting like lead in the liver.

  “I know this isn’t the best time,” says Verdigris, those leadlight eyes patient, analytical. “If you’re ready, we should talk about what happened on the planet. And why the fuck we ended up talking to Pimento instead of going after Elise.”

  “It’s named after a fucking pepper, can you believe that?”

  “Aft
er everything we’ve seen? Yeah.” Verdigris hesitates. “Maya, you can tell me. Did you know about the meeting?”

  “Fuck you. Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not some quivering limp-dick in need of a strong hand to stroke the answers out of me. I just don’t fucking know, okay? I don’t know anything anymore.” Maya puts her face in her hands. Tries to, anyway. The new arms decline to cooperate, actuators and hydraulics yet to shake hands with the nervous system. Those early days of recently installed prosthetics are such a clusterfuck. Machinery whine, going shuck-shuck-shuck while animatronic fingers attempt the balletic act of curling just enough to clutch one hemisphere of Maya’s face. Doesn’t work. She gives up on that gesture and looks instead at Verdigris, voice softened. “I didn’t know that was going to happen. Fuck, I don’t know anything more. I have no idea. I’m just a walking gun, that’s all.”

  “You’re more than that, baby.”

  Maya, gassed out from the word go, doesn’t follow that up with anything better than a haggard smile. She is tired. These last few days have been a lot, and Maya’s brain, that traitorous asshole, keeps rubberbanding back to a memory of Reyha, holding her hands and how it felt then, to be safe that way. To be warm. To be housed in the grace of someone who had no fucking reason at all to be kind to Maya but was. It makes one think, which Maya does not fucking appreciate at all. Because no matter how she breaks and remakes herself, she can’t shake herself from feeling that maybe, just maybe, Rita never cared at all.

  Instead of her addressing her misgivings, she switches topic, bobbing her chin in Verdigris’ direction:

  “So, this what happens when old mercenaries die? They become pop stars?”

  Verdigris grins. Far as Maya can tell, he’s permanently haloed by flattering light, with his hair transmuted by fiber-optics and designer chromatophores. If any trace of natural keratin—how anything could be natural these days, Maya doesn’t fucking know, they’re all state-of-the-art junk—remains in that intricate chignon, it’s not registering in Maya’s sensors.

  “This is what happens when they choose to live.”

  The mouths adorn the long translucent column of her throat are exposed in his present get-up, and Maya cannot drag her eyes away from them, entranced by their apparent dissatisfaction. When Verdigris speaks, it is with the mouth prescribed by his genomes. The rest go unused, are extraneous, abandoned to fidget however they desire. Teeth clack. Tongues dart between pinched lips.

  “The fuck did they do to you?”

  She doesn’t answer, says abruptly: “May I kiss you?”

  “Why the fuck do you want to do that?”

  “Because we’re alive. Because we survived somehow. Because you had your fucking arm torn off and I thought you’d die. Because I’m tired of dancing around how I feel.”

  “Then why ask?”

  “Because you have to want me to. We don’t have to. I don’t want to force you. God, you’ve spent a life being fucked around enough. I want to kiss you. Badly. But I need to know as well if you’ll let me. If you want me to.”

  To Maya’s enormous surprise, her battered, trauma-drunk, psychopath soldier heart belts out a whispered:

  “Yes.”

  Verdigris kisses her then. She tastes of cool water, salt-sweetened and sunlight-warmed. Of being young, of a youth that Maya knows she never fucking experienced yet there it is, a florescent memory of staggering through early life’s myriad tragedies: first loves and their fumbling sweetness, disintegrating faiths, the dregs of childhood sublimated into the construction of the adult pneuma. All those things, those hominid rights, evoked without advance notice and with searing clarity.

  All the small kindnesses she was owed.

  All the sweet joys she could have.

  She thinks of Reyha in the house she and Rochelle built, haunted and hopeful, hallowed and held by love.

  “Was that okay?” Verdigris murmurs, as he breaks the contact.

  “Trippy as shit. But yeah. Yeah, it was,” Maya whispers, recoiling. She runs fingers along the lower half of her lips, the flesh there mildly but pleasantly deadened. “Paralytics?”

  Verdigris nods in answer. As her chin descends, his hair floats upward, spreading into a nacreous cloud. Their hues shift. Previously, they’d been pelagic colors: blue-gold, motings of coral, greens of intricate and cosmic variety. But now they blush, deepen, bloom instead into an acid sunset. Again, Maya discovers herself absorbed in the specifics of Verdigris’ custom morphology, unable to discern whether the abrupt levitation was a tic, an indication of pleasure, or symptomatic of distress. The cues she’s learned are worthless here.

  “Something like that. Hydroxy-alpha-sanshool. Nothing life-threatening. I got the idea from an off-world Chongqing restaurant I’d visited a few years ago. The food there was exquisite. Very authentic, according to the reviews. Apparently they paid a bunch of academics to make sure they were doing it right. You and I should visit some time.”

  “And the hallucinations?”

  A wink. “Trade secret.”

  “You suck.”

  “God, I forgot what a hellcat you are.” Unfazed, Verdigris crowns himself with a fusillade of smiles, each mouth adopting the expression in turn. “I missed that.”

  “Is that why you said yes when I asked you to come looking for Elise?”

  “Come on.” Verdigris pulls away. “You need to get dressed. We need you at the bridge whenever you’re ready. I’ll see you there.”

  Constance: “Hold up. You’re taking us to Dimmuborgir?”

  “Yes. Would another destination be preferable?” Pimento’s voice, radiating from several speakers.

  “Yes. We’re supposed to be getting Elise.”

  “Yes,” says Pimento in return, tone chiding. “But the acquisition of Elise Nguyen has been deprioritized.”

  “By whom?”

  “By me. It is more productive for you to get to Dimmuborgir first.”

  “That doesn’t make any fucking sense,” says Constance.

  “I have run the correct computations. You are wrong.”

  “Yeah, no, fuck that noise. We were definitely not passing her along to that asshole,” says Constance. “And I don’t give a dog’s ass about Dimmuborgir. Take us to Elise.”

  “I will not.”

  Maya teeters colt-legged through the door, a wreck of synaptic fallacies and misfiring sinews, no thanks to slipshod calibration work. Her prosthetics are unbalanced, too heavy, because Pimento, fuck him, did not stick around for fine-tuning. She rolls a shoulder, feels the muscle stretch with the metal, her temper thin to a trigger. “What is going on here?”

  Verdigris drapes an arm over her seat, slings a look back, eyes and hair cycling between possible permutations. A smile, cut from something feral. Distant. Like he hadn’t asked to kiss her, hadn’t watched Maya break. “Hey.”

  “We’re—” Constance slouches against the bulkhead, a cigarette caught between their teeth, unlit, arms crossed beneath their ribs. They and Verdigris are in matching gear: graphene bodysuits stitched with STF-paneling, the arms silver with embedded circuitry. Almost like old times, Maya thinks, a little bit guilty. “—discussing our next course of action. Given that Rita’s out of commission and the fucking situation has finally come into proper light.”

  “How is Rita doing?” Maya can’t help herself. A tug of despair, chemically orchestrated, indistinguishable from real. New fingers articulate themselves into fists, phalanges closing slow-motion. The door frame bends beneath her grip. Crack.

  “She’s not dead, unfortunately,” Constance snaps. “Pimento says it’ll be a bit longer before we figure out whether she’s going to need to be euthanized so she can crawl into a fresh—”

  “No, no, no. Pimento, whatever it takes, do you fucking hear me? Make sure Rita doesn’t die.”

  “The fuck is going on?” Constance snaps. “This is rich coming from someone whose solution to fucking everything is shooting people in the head.”

  “Don’t f
ucking start with me.” Maya is all teeth.

  “I’ll do you one better. I’ll start multiple things with you. Beginning with, ‘Did Elise even make contact with you two?’”

  “That’s what Rita told me.”

  “She didn’t, did she? I can tell. I can fucking tell.” Constance is almost dyspneic from suppressed emotions, pupils become pinpoints. “She probably isn’t even out there. Probably just another fucking lie. Why the fuck did I listen to the two of you?”

  “Elise is out there.”

  “Don’t. Don’t. Just fucking don’t. You don’t have to keep up that fucking lie for Rita. Just stop.”

  “Whether you want to believe it or not, Elise is still alive, one way or another.”

  “Fuck. You.”

  Grief crenellates Constance’s expression, letters their age in crow’s feet and frown lines. Forty years isn’t easy on anyone, but Constance has worn those decades like a crown. Up until now. Now, they look exhausted. All at once, Maya is subsumed by hurting, by the knowledge that Constance, despite their fucking name, will not be a fucking constant and one day, there’ll only be carrion.

  Immortality is lonelier than any of them expected, and worse when you know that no one is coming to visit.

  “I trusted you. I don’t know why I did, but I trusted you. And—” Constance’s voice falters. Unspoken but inflected in the bend of their muscled frame, the words: Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you fucked us all over enough? “—you know what? Maybe it’s my mistake. I should have known better.”

  “Do you want to rescue Elise or what? That’s still on the table, one way or another.”

  “She’s gone. She’s fucking gone, Maya. Get it in your head.”

  “Then why the fuck did the Merchant Mind specifically request we get her for him. She’s out there. It’s empirical fact.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’ll take that as you being still onboard for our retrieval mission then.” Release. Maya rocks upright, tries to find equilibrium, arms fanned out. The juncture between limb and prosthetic itches like a motherfucker, capillaries still trying to align with vat-grown vasculature. It’ll be days before full synchronization. “Where’s Ayane?”