“Ayane’s still down for the count. Pimento’s drones just about yanked her out. But only barely,” says Verdigris.
Maya flicks a startled look at the latter. She’s heard none of that from him before this. Maya knows the right course to take, what to say, the words forming already on the road of her tongue. Unfortunately, instinct leads her into eking out a quiet “Were they the ones who found Rita too?”
“No. That was Verdigris,” says Constance.
“I’ll tell you the whole sordid story later,” Verdigris states, six voices converging in stretto. “We need to talk about what’s going on right now. Like you might have heard, the junkhead is taking us to Dimmuborgir. He says—” One voice lags, three-point-six-five attoseconds slower than the others, and Maya hears a sibilant careful threaded through the breezy mezzo-soprano, a shark in the water. “—that he feels responsible for what happened and is offering us compensation. He is very, very sorry.”
“Him, or the Merchant Mind?” Maya palms the wall, the metal registering as warm beneath her fingertips, nothing else. The exact temperature keeps bouncing along a six-point margin of error, piece of shit, sensors locked in their factory settings. At some point, she really should decrypt these protocols, gain superuser access to her own polymer-cellular structure. It’s an embarrassment, really.
“Him. As in, me.” A voice pans around her, two hundred and seventy degrees of aural motion. Maya knows no one’s there but she looks anyway, teeth on display, tracks the parabola of sound. “I am very sorry. I will take you to Dimmuborgir.”
“Why not just fucking take us to Elise? Screw Dimmuborgir,” snarls Constance.
“I cannot say.”
The way he demurs from a direct answer only serves to exacerbate Maya’s distrust, her mouth contorting into a scowl. Is this what it feels like for other people to wrangle Rita? Because if so, no wonder she is so universally loathed.
“Did someone tell you to take us to Dimmuborgir?” says Maya, abruptly suspicious.
“I cannot say.”
“Who the fuck told you to take us to Dimmuborgir, Pimento?” says Maya again, louder this time, because clearly, he wasn’t listening during that first round.
“I cannot say.”
“Someone else was involved. I’ll bet on it. Fuck me, this is some kind of giant conspiracy, isn’t it?” Constance leaps to rage before Maya can gather momentum to do the same, and they do so with such velocity that Maya finds herself really fucking impressed. Each word spoken by Constance is a sledgehammer, swung with intent to injure.
Maya’s attention tick-tocks between surveillance cameras. She stalks the length and stretch of the cockpit, measuring its perimeters in loping strides. Let someone else be the loudmouth for once. Maya is going to try her hand at this thinking thing. None of this is right. She reviews the recent inconsistencies; from that dipshit making a guest appearance at Rita’s quarters to this, to Pimento shipping them straight to Dimmuborgir, to the variances in Rita’s story of Elise.
Constance’s voice carves through Maya’s thoughts. “What is your fucking game?”
“Calm the hell down, Constance.” Verdigris arches a hand.
White noise: engine-drone, cooling systems in operation.
“What is your fucking game, you son of a bitch?!” Fingers close into a fist, prescient, an axis of motion already decided. Her gait shifts.
“You are not authorized for that level of information. Be thankful for what you are given. You don’t have tz-†z-†z-to trust me.”
The three trade looks. They all noticed. You’d have to be dead to miss that. But the subtle anomaly underlying the susurration, almost too quick to catch: a second voice, slithering under the radar. Maya sneers, and Constance strokes their fingers down to the autocannon at their thigh, miniaturized for portability, but still white-hot perdition smoking in a can.
Like hell they wouldn’t catch it.
We see you, Maya singsongs to no one. And for a moment, it is really like the old days, their muscles locked and spring-loaded for action, consecrated to the kill. One mind, one body.
“Don’t,” Verdigris whispers, even though her skin’s already going to glass, nerves turning translucent. Maya takes a second to marvel. Didn’t know he could do that. Light washes over her, through him, a heat distortion, a rippling outline, then nothing at all as he shimmers out of visibility.
“What are you doing?” An etching of warning in the machine’s voice, like the glint of a knife, filtered through the speakers, trailing Maya as she gets too close to its paneling.
Constance intervenes, engine-oil slick. “Just being careful.”
“I would advise against hostilities.”
“That a threat, motherfucker?” Maya, rising to the bait, but you can’t expect a dog not to bite when you’ve starved it to the quick. Snap-flick as she engages her new handguns, electricity coursing from her brain stem and back. Nerve endings come alive, magnesium-hot pulses accompanied by dopamine tokes. The weight of her armament is all wrong but she could learn to love them, maybe, yeah why not.
Fingers clench. Thumbs lean back on the safeties as Pimento pipes up, “It would complicate the recovery of Rita Koskinen.”
Blackmail? Now, that’s interesting.
“Down,” she says to Constance, switching gears. “We’re not fucking this up for Rita.”
“Who do you—”
“Down.” Implied in the minutiae of Maya’s expression are the consequences of disobedience, how easily a person can go from Schrödinger’s patient to cadaver. Death’s head grin in slot, Constance exhales, gives Maya a once-over, cool as a lump of roadkill. The look on their face could be read from orbit. You better know what you’re doing.
She doesn’t, but ignorance hasn’t damn well stopped her before. Munitions are re-holstered in the antebrachium, as Maya troubleshoots her chemical balance, metering the noradrenaline deluge so she stops jittering like a crackhead. A warmth brushes her shoulder: Verdigris, pacing beside her unseen.
“What’s wrong, Pimento?” In a louder voice, Constance croons, clearing their voice: “Are you glitching out? Because that’s what it sounds like to me.”
“I—I am f-f-functional. I am operating at full capacity.”
Maya traps her tongue against the roof of her mouth and Constance inclines their head, both coiled for the lunge. Something is wrong, wrong, wrong, and fuck this floating trash-heap if he thinks he can take them off-guard. Once bitten, twice mean.
“But you don’t sound like it,” Constance purrs, easy, anointed with the authority of the gun and the government, the words sliding in place like bullets in a chamber. “Rest.”
“I am artificial. I do not need—”
Pneumatic exhalation, gas gushing free. Doors slide open and Maya pivots, armed again, prepared for anything except this: Rita, looking like it is just another fucking day, lab coat fluttering as she clacks down the hall. Even her shoes are the same. Even the constellations of stains on the starched white cotton. A perfect fucking recreation. Which isn’t possible because—
“What the fuck is going on?”
Maya can’t focus enough to answer, can’t even think about answering, all eyes on the fiberoptic cables tendriling from the nape of Rita’s neck. Six clumps, thick as a man’s wrist, peristalsing pus and pale fluids.
“What the fuck, Rita?” Maya, reason rotting in her lungs. No gloves, though. The thought slams itself against the walls of her chest. No gloves. Why aren’t there gloves? Rita always wears gloves. “I thought—”
Verdigris blurs into view, her return to visibility enacted in layers: bones, then offal, then ligament, then the map of his nervous system, then her skin. His eyes expand, and Maya can tell she’s saying something, but she can’t hear him for the roar in her skull.
“We’re losing time,” says Rita, like she isn’t lacerated with wires, like she isn’t weeping red from the droop of her eyes. Like she doesn’t look like someone’s runaway experiment, practically
necrotic. “How far are we from Dimmuborgir?”
“Twenty-nine hours and seventeen minutes,” Pimento replies, all prim, while Verdigris, Maya, and Constance gawk.
“That isn’t fast enough. We need an alternative. Can you patch us down to a remote-operated drone on the planet?”
“It isn’t impossible. What model would you like? Your records show seventy-four different versions located on the planet of Dimmuborgir. Would you like me to list them by quantity, model number, or—”
“I don’t care. Whatever is easiest to get your hands on.”
“Please hold.”
“What the hell happened to—” Maya reaches out, fingers wisping over the venous cabling as Rita struts by, the latter not even glancing over, the clemency of her touch withheld from the faithless sinner. Whatever Maya might have had to say about that, though, it dies in her throat when she sees:
Rita’s spinal ports exposed, inflamed, her backbone bared like the hips of a two-chip whore. Something has dilated the access points, widened them so far the flesh is now creasing into oozing rings. And they’re still fucking bleeding, even despite the generous application of synth-skin and surgical staplers, every orifice twitching with wires.
“I’m going to be sick.” Verdigris.
Maya’s overlay blips to black, a command-line interface superimposed over extrinsic vision. That’s not Rita. Text file, header information meticulously removed, no origin protocol. Fade back to reality before Maya can puzzle out who relayed the message, leaving her eyes to hyper-saccade between points of interest. No luck. Constance or Verdigris, it’s a coin toss as to which and what does it even fucking matter?
Then Rita crooks her fingers and everything changes. Maya falls into lockstep, faithful mutt called to heel. Old habits die hard. Mercenaries die worse. A thousand jumbled thoughts jigsawing together, she follows Rita to the pilot seat, a voice in her head running on repeat. That’s not Rita that’s not Rita that’s not
But if it is not, what is it?
It. Not she. What. Not who. Already, Maya’s got Rita pegged as an it, has distanced that worm-wired catastrophe from the woman she loves, loathes, whatever fucking word exemplifies that violence of emotion that Rita evokes. It, Maya thinks again. It-it-it-it. Despite that knowledge, the floor doesn’t get pulled out from under her. The sky and the earth do not invert. Somehow, it is still okay. Maybe it’s because as long as it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, chews fat like a duck, Maya’s reptilian brain is prepared to believe it is Rita, her Rita, her chemical-embalmed guiding light.
Even as she mulls over specifics, another dialogue starts up.
Constance: “Are you going to tell us what happened?”
Rita: “What are you referring to exactly?”
Constance: “The wires—”
Pimento, slicing in on a twitch of static: “They keep her alive.”
“Sorry. The fuck did you just say?” Maya finally comes together, a stutter in her voice, artificial hands convulsing out of rhythm. Close, open, close, open. Squeeze.
“I am keeping her alive. Ms. Rita Koskinen sustained severe damage during the initial explosion. I am doing what I can. Her internal power systems were destroyed, as were several of her life-support modules.”
“Internal—” Constance stops where they stand, a single hand raised, fingers posed like they’re lifting the needle from the record of the universe. You can almost hear the chalkboard scratch. Forty years. That’s how long you can keep a secret from your siblings of another syringe.
“Rita is—” Maya says and to her lukewarm surprise, her voice doesn’t writhe. “Rita is artificial now. Mostly.”
There.
It’s out. Finally.
The truth gusts out of her like an old woman’s last breath.
“No way. No. No way. No way you could possibly have the money for tech this sharp. No.” Constance is the first to get it, and they swing their head, to, fro, a bull untangling from its nightmares, their voice pitched low. “You didn’t.”
The explanation slops out in starts and stops. “Her genetic files are senescent. We kept trying. The last forty years was us struggling to figure out some way of making it work. But her clones kept dying. Sometimes in hours. We didn’t have the funds or the resources to keep up with that shit. This version of Rita. It had to last.”
Gore-red pinpoints in the deep of Verdigris’ chameleon eyes, pupils whirring apart to take in the light. “Her skeletal structure is—”
“Titanium alloy, yeah.”
“Most of her is—” Verdigris breathes out. “Fuck. That tech. It’d have had to cost you a fortune to get it done. The synaptic integration alone. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this in person.”
“I have,” says Constance. “In the uppermost ranks. Only then. And they had help from the Minds to fund this. I can’t imagine—”
“Everything we had went into this last body,” says Maya. “Everything we ever had.”
The other two shuttle looks between each other, while Maya meditates on the possibilities. Maya looks up as Constance begins to speak, snaps off the words like pieces of flint. “Look, what the fuck would you rather we did then? Cram the debris of her last body into a tin can? A little bit of brain, a little bit of liver, a whole lot of intestinal—”
“And the clonetech on the Nathanson?” says Verdigris. “It didn’t help with anything?”
“We think the problem might be related to the clonetech equipment.”
“Shit,” Verdigris whispers, hair a corona of shifting colors, her pigmentation incoherent. “Are our master files stored in a compromised operating system? What the fuck does this mean for us?”
“I don’t know.” Without thinking, Maya strikes the wall, a three-part rattlesnake motion, no supervision from the cerebral cortex. Metal shatters. What doesn’t break is knuckle-marked by impact. Coolant dribbles. “But there’s a chance, there’s a chance it might have fucked with your . . . files.”
“Holy shit,” says Constance.
“I can’t believe you had the guts to keep this secret—” Verdigris continues.
“D-tz-†z-†z-dimmurborgir has a chance of changing all this. It is the cradle of clonetech.” Rita slants a look halfway over her shoulder, the queen in sterile white at last deigning to speak. Four taps of a phalange against the dashboard before she finger-pistols at the seat adjacent, an uncharacteristic show of levity. “It is where we begin.”
“What are you talking about?” says Constance softly.
“I l-tz-†z-†z-learned the truth. It is more than what we thought it was. It is our b-beginning. It is where the Minds learned to grow us, to re-develop the species, to c-create a petri dish which they could study, so they can b-tz-†z-†z-better understand us.” Maya can’t get over how Rita keeps glitching out, how that centuries-old dictatorial control of her vocal modulation is gone now: every phenome spat or whispered without regard for harmonious continuity, dissonant as all fuck. And what the shit-stained fuck is going on with Maya’s blackbird eyes? They’re twitching so hard from one point to another that Maya can see the jelly of her sclera ripple.
“Redevelop the species?” says Verdigris, voices atonal, none of them remotely in alignment, and Maya can’t blame her at all. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“Shit,” says Constance. Then again, in decreasing volume: “Shit, shit, shit, shit.”
“They tz-†z-†z want every trace of clonetech eliminated so that the universe can be sterilized and tz-†z-†z prepared for their next experiment.”
“Why?” says Verdigris, so softly.
“Because we’re vermin who don’t know our place,” says Maya, equally quiet. “And if they’ve predicated their fucking ideas on how our species will evolve on us fucking clones, well, no matter, we’re all fucked to all hell.”
“There’s still a chance this is all bullshit though,” says Constance, jabbing a trembling finger at the ven
ous profusion of cables rising from Rita’s backbone to the ceiling. “I’d bet my right lung that isn’t even her anymore.”
That’s not Rita, Maya thinks, rubberbanding back to the real issue at hand. That’s not Rita, says that asshole voice again, and Maya surprises herself with the realization of how low the certainty sits in the hierarchy of current priorities.
Rita, not-Rita, whatever the fuck that is that Maya is mama-ducking over, jolts her head to the right at a degree that makes them all collectively wince.
“Bullshit or not, are you willing to take that risk?”
No one answers.
“Are you willing to let them win?”
Verdigris and Constance and Maya pass looks between each other, a matched fucking set, all of them aware there isn’t anywhere else to go, no way the substrate of their personalities would allow them to back away now, not with the gauntlet that Rita has flung into their midst. Two hundred some years of kicking ass, breathing trauma, goring a place for themselves in this thrice-fucked world. Last thing they’re going to do is go quietly into that bitter night.
So, Maya goes to find something she can provide analogous assistance with. The other two, they fall in line too, one individual on each station: Verdigris on the navigation, Constance on the controls. Just like old times. Except it isn’t and like fuck will it ever be again.
Butcher of Eight
“Are you satisfied with the services rendered?”
“Completely.”
Pimento’s avatar is lackluster, ditonic in composition, uncircumcised of its serial numbers. Penciled-on mouth, flat gaze, distinctly Occidental ancestry. Even the hair is strange, straw-blonde and devoid of shadows. A child’s idea of three-dimensional realism. But then again, this is not an avenue for aesthetics. The room, flat grey, is a concession toward humans’ predisposition for pareidolia, compassionate if misguided. Pimento wanted me comfortable.
I focus on my hands, sketch veins and metacarpals beneath skin, add creases to the junctures between knuckles. Erase. Repeat. The latency is beginning to fray my patience. You’d think a Mind as small as Pimento would be better optimized, his processes streamlined so he isn’t constantly starved for memory. Likely, my presence hasn’t helped at all, so I don’t complain.
The All-Consuming World Page 20