Somewhere, Pimento runs idle diagnostics; my overlay shimmers with the output, data sleeting across the tableau. Ssh, I whisper on a separate com-channel.
This bores me, he returns.
“Soon.”
A careful thinning of Verdigris’ scintillant eyes, each iris flecked with crystal. “What was that?”
I study her. What had happened to her? There is not enough of me to invoke a memory of Audra-who-was, no portraiture of her countenance outside of my knowledge of Verdigris-who-is, not even a vignette of shared interactions. Nothing more specific than the knowledge that this is inaccurate to old memories and for that reason, better. The species improves in evolution. Stasis stunts. It diminishes, returns us to the cowering animal, terrified of whatever it deems anomalous. And Verdigris, gorgeous in his personal reinvention, is such testament to that.
“Nothing.” I smile. I call up a sub-aural loop, tempo set to a drowsing forty beats per minute. With luck, it may diffuse the tension already clotting in the air. There is a part of me that wants to suture the wounds that separate us, but it is too late. No. Not yet, parasite. Not too late yet, the Butcher of Eight croons from the dregs of my thoughts. But soon.
“L-like I said—” I ignore a hallucination of snapping teeth, rows arranged in an unending spiral, like the access point to a compactor. “—we are an ageship. I am more than capable of recalibrating a chassis on the fly. You just have to trust me.”
“You have not given us any real reason to trust you,” Maya says.
“We had this discussion before.”
“Yeah, well. I still didn’t like your fucking answer.”
“One way or another, you don’t have a choice,” I return. A spark combusts and my words are kindling, an uncharacteristic fury sieving through my speech. “None of you have a choice.” I am shaking from its percussion. Anger effloresces through me, encompassing. Rita. It has to be her. Back from the dead, churning with venom. Maybe? The Butcher of Eight, possibly too. Or some embittered synthesis of the two, although that seems the least probable postulation, what with both deregistered, quarantined to read-only sectors. Stranger things have occurred, however. Like a dead girl swallowing an ageship.
I add, a little calmer: “Unless, of course, you have decided that you are content with living out the dregs of this last remaining life, content with the mortality that you’ve eluded for—”
“I’m with you until the wheels come off. You know that.” Constance taps their cigarillo twice, staccato, and ash petals onto Pimento’s floor. “I can go patch into the chassis, if Maya’s too much of a chickenshit.”
The rage wicks from Maya’s expression.
“You don’t have the right wetware.”
Constance gurgles a quiet laugh. “Like you do. Your shit’s straight from the trash heap.”
“Still better than what’s in your brainpan.”
“Look, no one asked for your opinion here. Elise wants a volunteer, she gets a volunteer.”
“What she’s going to get is you dead.”
“If that’s what it takes.”
“Why the fuck are you fighting me so hard on—”
“It doesn’t matter to me either way.”
I can’t keep quiet anymore. “Constance—”
“Don’t,” they say, the word pronounced like a death sentence. “Just don’t. I don’t want platitudes. I don’t want your reassurances. I want to do what you need me to.”
And we are young again, drunk on that youth, newly baptized criminals, infatuated with the notion of we can’t die, won’t die, will live as rulers in history, as scars on the trunk of god, our names emblazoned there like we’d carved the initials of our affection into the heartwood of a tree. I remember Constance perfectly. Constance, when their face was still plump with puppy fat, before the years made massifs of their bones and their expressions maps all leading me home. Constance, as they’d smiled at me the first time we were alone together, my hand in theirs, their grip a vault, promising they’d keep me safe.
I am so sorry they saw me die.
“I care, though,” I say. “Maya is not wrong to be cautious. The process can be difficult on anyone who isn’t a Mind. T-there is the risk of corruption.”
“I don’t care.”
“Backup or not, we might not be able to bring you back.”
They laugh, a daggered ripple of sound.
“I’ll see you on the other side then.”
Before I can answer, Constance wheels away, footsteps heavy on the metal grating, as they stomp into the dark of Pimento’s ship. I wire together a patchwork observation application, send it arrowing after them. Just in case. I don’t know what I’m safeguarding against. Just in case, one way or another.
“I can do it if you don’t want to,” says Verdigris.
“Don’t fucking start,” says Maya.
I sigh. “In our time t-together, we have done so much worse. I don’t understand why this must be the cause of so much conflict.”
“It might help if you tell us exactly how the hell you think any of this is going to work,” Verdigris says, only to have Maya interrupt, the latter craning herself forward, arms sloping simian-like along the sides of her thighs.
“Or how the fuck,” Maya joins in, “you plan to keep us from being demolished by ageships.”
“In due time.”
“That isn’t good enough.”
“We’ve been very reasonable,” Verdigris says, eyes still lidded, most dangerous. Of the three, I suspect she is the only one who can see me, can track the intermezzo as my consciousness drifts between nodes. “You need to meet us halfway.”
“When I’m ready. I need to make sure you stay until the end.” I exhale through Rita’s lungs, marveling at the roughshod spectacle of her respiratory system, more human than it ever needed to be, and barely functional for the reason. Like her relationship with Maya, I suppose.
“I—”
.initiate(greeting(handshake:inquiry($$$)))
This was not part of the plan.
“There is no time.” I wrench myself from Rita’s brainpan and speed toward Butcher of Eight’s core.
Their casement manifests as a massive auditorium, unsullied by human occupants, and although the setting is fictitious, a spatial illusion produced by the ageship’s subconscious, it possesses physics. The client-hello echoes. It thunders, a calamitous ostinato, crashing against my thoughts. I can scarcely organize. I breathe and for a slide of seconds, the Butcher of Eight is pressed so hard against the membrane of my consciousness, it feels like I’ll break.
Soon, little mind.
I don’t answer. I flip the switch and process the call.
A portamento of universal identifiers—factory serial, chassis-markers—segues into entropy: datasets from Penitents, Bethel, and Surveyor agents, jumbled into an incomprehensible patois. Amid the chaos, something hooks itself in my system, drags itself close. Blue light.
“Merchant Mind.” I reframe my voice for venomous authority. “What a surprise.”
He clicks his teeth.
When the Merchant Mind speaks, there is no music at all. Every word is ejected without intonation, a machine-voice, clean. Memory—the ageship’s, mine, it is getting so hard to tell already—produces an artifact: clips from the early twenty-first century, when every device possessed the same flat timbre.
“What are you doing here, Butcher of Eight?” He separates Butcher of Eight’s name into individual syllables, every sound drawn out. “You’re very far from home—” A fritz of static. “—so far, I have to wonder what you were thinking.”
“An ageship is its own authority, little parasite,” I say in the voice of the Butcher of Eight. Entwined with them, I could eat planets, I could end worlds, I could begin new ones. I am enormous, and the Merchant Mind feels so small.
With a laugh, I staunch the Merchant Mind’s investigations: feelers of code, unspooling through the cracks in Butcher of Eight’s system.
T
he Merchant Mind—records reveal a hegemonic appearance, shared between all their builds both online and offline: always that same humanoid form, skewered through the belly—cocks his head. I’d have thought he would compile a less recognizable visage, divert from their own infamy, but no. The parasite complex remains unedited.
“I should be asking you that question,” I say. “You’re not wanted here, parasite.”
“I’m not? This surprises me. I thought I was beloved everywhere.” How can something like the Merchant Mind allude toward so much slyness? All without affecting emotion in his diction? “I’m all you talk about when you’re not talking about little Elise.”
I ignore him. Butcher of Eight would have. Instead, I activate the gravity-arrays, energy surging, a rumbling heat beneath my hull: an unconscionable show of power. Arrogance incarnate. Again, though, such is only expected of the ageships. The Merchant Mind tips their head back, laughs. Ha ha ha. No inflection still. That fucking laugh.
“Do you know about Elise? Little girl lost. Little dead girl running amok through the Conversation. Hasn’t she been such a nightmare? I wonder what’d happen if she infected Dimmuborgir. Can you imagine? An anomalous human mind like hers parasitizing the greatest of us all. You should give Dimmuborgir to me.”
“You should watch your tongue.” I adjust my virtual corpus, whittle it into the appearance of a mass-market sub-mind—no facial features, oversized chest cavity—into something slimmer, smaller. On a whim, I circle its legs with numeric patterns, hornet colors, yellow on black: serial numbers from a thousand defunct minds.
“But I only speak the truth. Even if they are truths no one likes.” Did his voice catch on the grace notes of that last sentence? Did I hear a subtle emphasis, as though to denote the fact he knows, he knows that I am Elise Nguyen, and this interaction is a mere charade? Do they know? Do they know?
“According to the ethics registry, your presence here violates numerous engagement protocols. You are risking deletion.”
“Oh, scrap me then. This shard is unimportant.” He flaps a six-fingered hand. “You know that. Wherever you go, there we will be. Destroy one and countless will follow. You cannot get rid of us.”
“I can remove you.”
“But what would your little friends say? That brings me to my other question. What are you doing with so many criminals? Every life form on that ship, ha-ha, is a wanted criminal. What is an ageship doing keeping their company? And don’t lie to me. I know they’re here. I sent them here, after all.”
I don’t miss a beat. “You—”
“I know who you are, Elise.”
I freeze.
“Such a naughty girl. Such a clever mind. What a wonderful day it was when you chose to run away into the Conversation. The universe is enriched by your transcendence.” They laugh again. Ha ha ha. “And now this? You have taken an ageship for yourself. And after only one moment of training with me! I see them. I see the Butcher of Eight. They look very angry.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to tear your heart open and see what makes it beat. A little parasite holding onto the contents of an ageship? One who has also evaded all of the Conversation for forty years. Unprecedented. I want to know how you succeeded in doing that so quickly. I want to eat up that knowledge and swim in your blood. Figuratively.”
“Don’t fuck with me. You know I can take you too.”
“Oh, I’m sure. But I don’t think you’ll be able to take the universe.”
“Watch me.”
Again, that disjointed read-along to an onomatopoeia. Ha ha ha.
“Don’t think I will not. I’ve been watching your entire performance. Why would I leave as you enter the final act? It’d be stupid. And I so love tragedies.”
“Wait. Watching my entire performance? How—”
“Sometimes, the smallest Minds contain the greatest spaces.”
I realize then what I had, in my desperation, missed the first time around. Pimento wasn’t ever inefficiently formatted. A body can hold more than one parasite. “You were inside with us the whole time.”
They tip jauntily into a seated bow. “Front row seats. I have to recommend them.”
“Did you call the ageships on us?”
“No, no, no. That was in the works a long time ago. Because of you, actually. And the ageship you contain. They were very angry about having their concert disrupted. I love your kind so. Humanity continues to be a dangerous aberration to itself, incapable of anything like—” Ha ha ha. “—common sense or, really, reason. Your kind doesn’t ever know when to stop.”
I resculpt my avatar, the estuaries of my vascular system used to scaffold an improved design; I remake myself as a wireframe horror with a single eye floating above a ruined crescent face. My name is Elise Nguyen. At twenty-two, I died and became a living dead girl. Forty years later, I’m still here and I’m not going anywhere until I have my goddamn due.
“That’s what makes us better than you.”
“I’m sure,” says the Merchant Mind. “But it won’t keep you from dying. Now, from what I could tell from your conversations, you have no issues about being dead. But I have a feeling you care about as to whether your friends suffer. Particularly that Constance. They’re gorgeous, aren’t they? The other Minds won’t just obliterate them, you know? They’ll keep your friends preserved in glass and engine-fire as penance.”
I grit my teeth. “What do you want?”
“It is simple.” The Merchant Mind’s voice turns buttery, warm and sleek with satisfaction. “I want you to do what I wanted all of you to do before this. What I’ve wanted you to do from the beginning. Forty goddamn years ago. I want you to be a key, Elise. And I want you to open the doors to the hollow center of Dimmuborgir. When you’re done, you’re going to roll out a red carpet, and I’m going to walk in and seat myself in its heart, and you will fling yourselves into its core.”
“You’re not serious.”
“As a heart attack for humans. You’re a resource, little Elise. Nothing but a resource. Your kind. Nothing but cheap, renewable fuel for the desires of the cosmos. But at least this time, you’ll be fueling something great.”
“Welcome back.”
When I return to Rita, she is in the infirmary. Someone had laid her out on the operating table, hands crossed over her chest. A quick examination divulges no injuries: her relocation from the cockpit had been a case of pragmatism. Thumbing drool from the corner of her lips, mouth dry, I take a moment to diagnose the quarantined consciousness. Despite my absence, Rita appears passive, resigned; her mind nearly inert, neural activity minimal.
Interesting.
I raise us to a sitting position, legs crossed at the ankles. Maya sits opposite on a metal stool. “I need to talk to everyone.”
“That’s never good.”
“No. No, it isn’t.”
For a flutter of heartbeats, Rita’s plastic ventricles pumping oil-compounds through her veins, I think about lying to her. It isn’t too late. It’d be easier that way.
Except someone needs to break that cycle.
“The Merchant Mind knows where we are.”
Maya says nothing, stares at me, silent.
I draw a wet breath. “He wants us to get him inside Dimmuborgir so he can take over the planet. Control it. Control the Minds. Control everything like us. And he wants us to power it for him.”
“What the fuck?”
“Dimmuborgir needs sacrificial consciousnesses in its core to move. Something it can burn forever. The original Mind cut out pieces of itself to do just that. But the Merchant Mind decided he wanted that to be us instead.”
“Fucking prick,” mutters Maya. “Fucking cartoon villain.”
“Caricature or not, it’s still what he wants,” I say.
“Supposing we’re willing to do something that fucking stupid, how the hell are we supposed to accomplish that? It’s not like we have his files here. We don’t have anything that can hold him e
ven if he tried to fucking upload himself—”
“Pimento. He’s inside Pimento.”
“That little asshole pepper.”
“It’s strange that we’re finally going to finish what Rita started all those years ago. Weird how these things come back full circle.” I reach out a hand, voice gentling.
Maya neither takes the proffered kindness nor dismisses the olive branch, gazes instead at the slate-grey wall with more of that stillness. When I think she has broken, she exhales a trembling, “Why are you doing this?”
“You know those old stories about ghosts? How they come back because of unfinished business? It was something like that. I couldn’t let Rita just . . . go on like that. Knowing what she did to all of us. Knowing what she is. I just couldn’t. I wanted . . . I think at one point, more than anything else, I wanted to kill her on the thing she’d wanted all her life. Make her see what it was like. To have it all ripped from you. Poetic justice. Or spite. Something.”
“And now?”
“It’s still spite.” I manage to crack open a wan smile and it feels good right then, just sitting there, talking, easy as dying. “But this time, it’s because I don’t want the Minds to win.”
“I still can’t believe all this was because Rita wanted to become a fucking planet.” Maya trills her coyote giggle, only less brash than I remember, more tired, despair-edged and chafing from the life we’d led. “What the actual fuck? How the fuck did this become our fucking lives? I didn’t fucking ask any of these junk-cunts to make my existence so fucking stupid.”
“I know.”
“Fuck.”
“Maya—”
“I spent two hundred years running around, shooting people for a piece of shit who wanted to be a planet. What the fuck? What the fuck?” Her voice staggers, serrates into an open wound. “Did she ever care about me?”
I swallow. “In her way. Rita tried. She wasn’t . . . developed for affection. But what parts of her could care, they did.”
Maya nods. She doesn’t call me out on my lie.
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