The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

  Love sucks, Maya thinks with the jolt again of lunatic amusement, the epiphany far from revolutionary, but the impact is like a truncheon in the solar plexus and it robs the air from her, its theft marked by a hiss. What a fucking joke. Oxytocin, the “love hormone,” ostensibly the building blocks of community but really the progenitor of so many hostage situations. A million years from the primordial bang which kick-started consciousness and still humanity won’t excise itself of the secretion. Still the species permits a tangle of malignant proteins to kneecap it at the worst times, to drive it forward, mangle it so as to ensure the proper care of the next squalling generation.

  Rita-Elise staggers. Maya catches her. She always does, always will.

  “Fuck, don’t scare me like that.”

  Maya is pathologically wired for paranoia, her daily awareness saturated by mistrust of just about every fucking thing. Yet, despite that proclivity toward excessive cogitation, she gets suckerpunched by what segues:

  A smile.

  A fucking smile. That’s all it takes. The allometry of Maya’s complete annihilation. One fucking smile cast from under a blunt fringe, Rita’s eyes catching the light just so. In these conditions, they’re not black or brown but a gold so luminous you could ransom the sum of Maya’s soul. That it isn’t only Rita behind the amber is irrelevant. Maya is transfixed, morass in the aureate regard. Sapient decision is propelled by motor memory rather than the exactitudes of a precise stimulus and well, Maya is now truly fucked. Whether it is revealed later that Rita has been completely pithed, it no longer matters. Maya is loyal in the absolute to the effigy.

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Good,” says Maya, gently.

  Constance cuts in again, voice and expression an open wound. “Elise, I don’t know what to say. God. All these years. If I’d known you were there, that you were okay, I’d have tried to look for you.”

  “You wouldn’t have been able to save me.”

  “I would have tried.”

  “I’m dead. Why is that so hard to understand? There’s nothing left.”

  “The tech’s there. We’ve all used it. If you’re this cogent, we can bring you back. It wouldn’t be that hard. Maya, tell her.”

  “Constance . . .” says Elise. Just Elise. No trace of that chimerical timbre anywhere to be found, none in her mannerisms, not a ghost of such in her features, which should be all Rita but fuck, if it isn’t Elise right the hell there in bad costume. And the way she stares at Constance, perfectly twenty-two until her files go dark.

  “She doesn’t want to come back,” says Maya.

  “What?”

  “She doesn’t want to come back,” Maya repeats. “You’re old-school, aren’t you? You believe the body and the mind need to go together. No replacements.”

  Rita-Elise says nothing.

  “Elise? Is that true?”

  Still nothing. The world shrinks into that next moment.

  “Why is she here then?” demands Constance, desperate for someone to say the right thing.

  “The dead just want their dues. When they’re d-done, they just want to sleep.”

  “Okay.” Constance swallows around a scream the whole cosmos knows they have buttoned up in their lungs. “Okay, fine. If that’s what you want, well—”

  A shuddering breath.

  “—that’s what we’ll get you.”

  This is love too: sacrament, unconditional surrender of the selfish ego. Constance knuckles the grief from their eyes, and although Maya can see it overlaid over their bones, bolted there until the day their heart goes fuck that, I’m done, it is mantled with steely determination. Love’s work, reminds that memory of Reyha. And sometimes, it is hard work. The work of a funeral. The work of fielding condolences, writing thank-you notes, keeping a son alive, keeping yourself alive, keeping sane when you wake up in bed alone for the first time in more than twenty years. It is the work of saying yes to the ghost of your dead first love, yes, I accept you’re not coming back, that you choose the grave over me, that it is okay, that I’m here, that we’ll do this together one last time, that I love you, always, always.

  “I believe the Bethel are coming,” says Pimento, great with the timing as always.

  “Of course they fucking are. Look at what Elise did,” snarls Maya, face convulsing into a snarl, firearms brought together into a unified threat. “Why are we just hanging around here? We’re sitting ducks. We gotta move.”

  “We need to get on the surface of Dimmuborgir,” says Rita-Elise.

  “Yeah, yeah. We fucking know that.”

  “Now,” says Rita-Elise, unreadable.

  “Jesus fuck,” says Maya. “Jesus fuck. I understand that you’re really excited about getting to Dimmuborgir. But now’s not the fucking time.”

  “If we do not get to the surface, we’re going to die.”

  “What fucking difference does it fucking make? We’re screwed either way. The Bethel are on us,” Maya snaps in return.

  Constance. “Maya isn’t wrong. We should be trying to get out of here.”

  “No,” says Rita-Elise.

  Verdigris, silent amid the recent fusillade of feelings, lifts a hand to interrupt. “Why?”

  A squeal of static before Pimento joins in.

  “Because the planet is a Mind.”

  “I’m sorry. Did I hear you say that the planet is a Mind?” says Verdigris.

  Outside: a perforation of pale lights in the dark, aberrations in the black, ordinarily nothing which would necessitate attention, but Maya and everyone else recognize them for what they are. The Bethel are closing in.

  “Dimmuborgir was one of the first. A Mind so colossal, it made the ageships seem human,” says Rita-Elise. “Dimmuborgir had a plan. But to execute that plan, it would need to put aside ego, to surrender self. So, it hollowed itself, making space for its research. It shrunk. Until it was nothing but its ambition.”

  “Holy. Shit.” Maya, floored, staggers by a step. “It’s a giant corpse.”

  “No,” says Pimento, sullen. “Corpses undergo biological degradation. Dimmuborgir remains as perfect as it once was. It is what your species would describe as a ‘legend,’ a thing of ‘myth.’ Dimmuborgir was who allowed us our freedom. It is not a corpse. It is simply sleeping.”

  “Comatose,” says Rita-Elise. “The lights are off but if someone comes home, there are switches that can be flipped.”

  “You want us to wake up a Mind?” Verdigris.

  “No. Not quite. I want us to wear its chassis like a coat.” Rita-Elise’s face is dead, dead. Slack with no nuance in those raptorial eyes. “If we can upload ourselves into Dimmuborgir, we will have power enough to level the Bethel and everything else to come our way. We can stop them in their tracks. We can also take control of the means of production—”

  “Jesus,” Constance says, their laugh shearing too close to a sob. “That’s a terrible joke, darling.”

  “I mean it,” says Rita-Elise. “If we have Dimmuborgir, we can protect ourselves and people like us. And wouldn’t that be something?”

  “That’s . . . I can’t—” Verdigris shakes her head. Pimento says nothing throughout, silent save for the pulsation of his monitors. In the anglerfish glow of them, Verdigris is nearly one-dimensional, neon edges and shining teeth.

  “You have two choices.” Rita-Elise’s sclera darken with coolant. A vein somewhere has burst. Her voice submerges into whalesong, atonal, unearthly. “Help me or die.”

  “What happened to you, Elise?” Constance runs a hand over their skull as they lap their tongue over their teeth, their composure cracked at the seams. Maya says nothing, aim-algorithms calculating distance and response time, every variable monitored and mapped against a history stretching across seven hundred reported kills.

  “What is your decision?” Rita-Elise says, flat.

  “I’ve fucking had enough of this.” Click of safeties, pulled back in synch, and Maya narrows her eyes at Rita-Elise.

 
; “What is your decision?”

  “What I want to know—” Verdigris cuts between the machismo, smooth contralto in play, fingers tracing hieroglyphs on her screen. “—is why are you even pretending that we have a choice, Elise. You know as well as the rest of us we can’t leave, anyway. You erased all our backups.”

  Silence.

  “Heh.” The sound pops like a boil. Maya drops her guns, the fight vacuumed out of her. But nature abhors shit like this, so something else takes up residence, a lunatic giggle two octaves from all the way postal. Maya feels unmoored, feels like there’s nitrogen itching under her skin. How the fuck did this go—

  The impact of Constance’s hand, their knuckles reinforced, snaps the hysteria like a rich man’s neck. “Get yourself together.”

  “Thanks.”

  Nose bleeding, Maya blinks, startled by how good the pain felt, how good it is to know someone cares enough to wrench her from her spiral, is about to say something on the topic when Verdigris raises his voice, just a touch.

  “When did you erase our backups?”

  “Fifteen point six seconds before you a-asked.” Rita-Elise grins, the expression shuddering as a hand—ungloved, can you believe the fucking blasphemy—extends to cup Maya’s cheek. “And they’re gone. I have them, and I am desperate.”

  “I said I’d help,” says Constance, sounding betrayed.

  “I need all of you.”

  Verdigris. “We’re not—”

  “You owe me.”

  “We fucking—” Maya snarls.

  “You owe me.”

  The sentence pronounced like the final call at the end of time. The three go quiet and Maya is the first to speak, pressing her skin into Rita-Elise’s palm, despising herself for it. She doesn’t remember the last time this happened, if ever Rita has done it, ever just held hands with her. God, fuck. She knows the right recourse would have been to walk. But love, the wrong kind, is a better drug than the rest. Johanna or Rita, Maya doesn’t know who she is doing this for anymore, but fuck does it feel good to experience some human warmth.

  “If we help you, you’ll reset our backups?”

  “Yes. If you want.”

  “You know,” says Verdigris, no expression on his face. “You’d do Rita proud.”

  “Desperate times,” says Rita-Elise, so softly.

  Maya sighs, deep and ragged, not wanting to think on any of this fuckery at all. She pushes herself up and away, blood still oozing from her nose. “Well. It’s time to fuck shit up, I guess.”

  Dimmuborgir is hours, not light-years, away but it might as well be forever. Constance and Rita-Elise are enthroned in the cockpit, side by side, gelled together with tension so thick that you could butter your toast with the stuff. Verdigris, wires in every body-port, is holding court with Pimento, who is now too good to mingle with his meatbag cargo. That, or Elise has sublimated the Surveyor. Either way, it suits Maya fine.

  The size of the ship, on the other hand—

  “Fucking shit.” Maya hisses, fumbling with a rifle she’d commandeered from a storage locker, some corrugated relic that she mutilates further with every involuntary twitch. Once upon a time, she could have dismantled and reassembled this piece of crap in two minutes flat, no fucking question. But muscle memory only allows for so much. Armed assault, yes. Subtlety, no. Nothing so refined for a junkyard mutt like her.

  Her lips pull back from her teeth.

  “God—”

  The door hisses open, and Rita-Elise slinks in, and Maya’s heart is a taste of spare change at the back of her mouth. “What the fuck do you want?”

  The other woman, still moving on rails, tubing ribboning from the ceiling, expels a sigh. “I feel like I’m more ageship than me t-these days.”

  Maya doesn’t answer, not at first, mesmerized anew by the monstrousness of Rita-Elise’s appearance. “Wonder the fuck why.”

  “The Bethel w-ere—” Pupils aperture as Rita-Elise seats herself beside Maya, a hand on the other woman’s lean thigh. “—not the first. There was another ageship.”

  “And what the hell do I care?” Frustrated, Maya flings the rifle from her lap, components smashing against the wall. The alcove is cold, its heating almost entirely negligible. Pimento apparently heard the word on chairs but missed the verse on climate control. Unbidden, Maya snakes a fingertip forward and traces the back of Rita-Elise’s grip, marveling at its porelessness, its poly-synthetic gleam.

  “You n-never did.” And Maya recognizes that sigh that time, the sound all Elise, distorted through the filter of Rita’s lungs. “That was always your shtick, wasn’t it? Not caring. No loyalties except to—” A sweep of a pale hand, addressing the torso she’d hijacked. “—this.”

  “Rita.”

  “It was always about Rita. Even when Johanna died.” The voice smooths. “When I died.”

  Maya jerks, scissoring back. “You have no fucking right to say that.”

  “You chose to listen to Rita’s directives instead of coming back for us.”

  “Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Her breath catches on ribs that now feel broken, spearing her chest, the heart she’d presumed had long withered on its stem. “I know I shouldn’t—that I should have come back for you. But, I just . . .”

  And it hurts so fucking much being something other than pure utility, being human. But Elise, fuck her, doesn’t allow for escapism. Every attempt to deactivate nociception awareness is countered, the switches flicked back on. Eventually, Maya tires of the stuttering stop-start of her bleeding soul and grits her teeth against compassion.

  “She didn’t care about any of us.”

  “You have—” Maya chokes on her need for the things she’s saying to be true, her defense of Rita, however fractured, shed like broken teeth. Her fingers map themselves over Rita-Elise’s own: alloyed, beautiful, strong enough to crush the bones beneath theirs. “She did. You have to understand. After everything that happened. She had to be hard. I had to be hard. Johanna’s death . . . Your death hurt her as—”

  “It didn’t.”

  It hangs in the air, that implied monstrosity. Maya swallows. What aches isn’t Elise’s calm rebuttal but her recognition of how it resonates with her own experience. How many times has Rita actually stepped up? How many times has it been explanations spoken like last rites over a surgical table while Maya choked up blood? All the reasons she had to die for Rita, all those justifications, none of them as cogent as the blunt pity in Rita-Elise’s face.

  “It didn’t,” Rita-Elise repeats again, softer, more Elise than Rita this time: different cadence, different body language. Maya’s telemetrics can’t help reading the worst. Is Rita still in there? Has she been compromised, cannibalized? “I promise you. It didn’t matter to her one bit. Not Johanna’s loss. Not mine.”

  “Stop.”

  “No. You have to understand that I have access—” All the facts locked and loaded, a revolver thrust into the soft of Maya’s jaw. No threat in Elise’s voice, though, which makes it all the fucking worse. Maya knows how to handle violence. This, though, it kills her. “—to all the parts of Rita that she ever hid away. I know her as no one else ever did, and you know that’s true.”

  “I don’t trust you.” Maya shuts her eyes, still dying inside.

  “I can tell you that there is a lot less of her than you think there is. Why do you think she does the operations? Insists on you doing them without anesthetic? It wasn’t because of that fucking bargain you made.”

  “Shut up.”

  “She’s a monster.”

  “Just. Shut up.”

  “Then trust in Johanna’s death. Trust in mine.” Palms cup the jut of her jaw, their touch warm. “Do you really think I’d let all that happen to someone else?”

  “I—” Maya doesn’t finish, a reply caught between her teeth. Lips press to her cheek, cool, as her eyes flutter shut.

  “No.” The word is an ache.

  “Good.”

  The
ships drift on.

  Deal

  I clear my throat. “We need someone to volunteer as a forward scout.”

  Antagonistic silence.

  “It does not require you to physically disembark,” I continue. “Only to be willing to patch into a drone—”

  “Fuck that,” Maya hisses. “Their legacy hardware isn’t remotely fucking equipped for—”

  “Millions-s—” I uncurl Rita’s fingers and graze Maya’s wrist with their tips. She flinches, inflects a glacial look in return, and I smile, twitchily. My name is Elise Nguyen. It was, I think. Is. “—have performed successful remote operations with the standard c-chassis.”

  “Successful? Successful? Did you forget everything already? Those operations killed millions too.”

  “Maya—”

  Verdigris raises his head. The coils of her hair continue to fascinate, symbionts extrapolated from congenital genomes and then infused with something—a variety of life uncharted in the ageship’s records, a fact that excites their clinging remnants. I push them down, the coda of their voices ebbing, a distant warble.

  “Maya has a point.” Her voice is beautiful, a precise contralto, every note clear. “There’s no telling what would happen if we plugged into a sub-mind that hasn’t been—”

  “You’ll be fine.” I jerk a shoulder and pick at the creases of Rita’s lab coat, my fingers sleeved in latex gloves. An affectation borrowed from a dead woman’s incarnated memories, a canticle of tragedies I cannot begin to process. “I will handle any porting inconsistencies as they come up.”

  “You expect to be quick enough for that?” Constance rumbles from behind, the smell of their cigarillo pluming through the cockpit. I remember that scent. Of all the things I recall, it is the scent of that gene-spliced tobacco, so specific to them. A hint of cherry-infused clove, chemical sweetness bordering on choking.

  “We are an ageship.” The slightest twitch of my fingers; the gesture is unnecessary, but the underscoring of drama assists in the effect. The Butcher of Eight’s lights pulse in harmonic accompaniment as I enunciate each word with care.