Toxic

by Lydia Kang

  “Very well. Right now, we keep Hana on a short leash and use Miki’s old biomonitor as a tracking device.” Portia retrieves something that looks like a small tube and inserts a tiny metal capsule. She reaches out for my shoulder, and I let her, but my hand is clenched in a fist. “It’ll hurt, but only for a moment. And it’s sterilizing right now.”

  Fenn gives me a worried look. My fingers tap on my thigh.

  --- -.- .. -- --- -.-

  Ok. It’s ok.

  Portia presses the metal tube against the side of my neck. “Here goes.”

  I feel a slight tingle, but it’s not bad. And then it feels like a painful pinch, as if someone just snipped an inch of skin with a pair of scissors.

  “Ow!”

  “There may be some lingering soreness,” she warns.

  Lingering. That’s what we’re doing, aren’t we? Just lingering. But I don’t want to do that. I want to fight. I want to fight for Cyclo, want her to be the Cyclo I know. I want to find out what happened to Mother. Why everyone left Cyclo so much faster than they had planned.

  Gammand, glassy-eyed, is reading the orange and white holofeed in front of his face. He nods. “Reading Hana’s output okay. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do.”

  “Thank you. And now, we keep going on with our research. Our hours are going to increase to cover Miki’s work, and the areas near the new blowout. And I’m updating your progress readouts to accommodate the work.” Portia glances at the progress bar on her holo. It goes from 60 percent completed, down to 45, with the addition of Miki’s work. “We need to know what happened there. We’re going on four hours of sleep, max. I’ll have supplements added to your rations to support your extra hours. And Hana stays within eyesight, even with her tracker. No matter what.”

  But what about my tissue cultures? How am I going to check on them and see if they’re growing properly? I open my mouth to say something, anything, but if I do, it’ll be more of a lost cause than if I’m quiet. Gammand and Portia will say it’s a waste of precious time, and they might even destroy them. They’ll say it’s futile.

  But it’s not futile to me. It’s the only possible way we have to fix Cyclo, and to keep her from being destroyed. Our only chance of saving ourselves.

  But I don’t say this out loud because everyone but Fenn stopped listening to me a long, long time ago.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  FENN

  Hana leaves the room and heads down the corridor in the opposite direction, with Portia walking warily behind her, two feet taller, as if she’s a prisoner on the way to the asteroid mines. It takes all my power not to stare and watch them go. Not to worry that maybe, just maybe, the back of her black and white-striped hair is the last image I’ll have of her forever. Just before she turns the corner, she steals a glance back at me. She says nothing—she’s too far away to for me to hear her—but puts her hand on her chest, above her heart.

  And then she’s gone.

  “Come, Fenn. Let’s go.” Gammand grabs a huge pack full of equipment and hands me a similar one. It’s ridiculously heavy, but Gammand doesn’t make so much as a grunt as he heaves it onto his bent back. I can see why he’s chosen this job. He’s not a complainer. Not even about his impending death. My father was the same. Of all the beliefs he’s held, that one was the firmest—do what you must, and do it without complaint. I wasn’t a complainer, not exactly; I made my gripes loud in other ways. I was a breaker and a stealer, not exactly a parent’s dream come true.

  Callandra was the same. She didn’t complain, ever. Even when I didn’t act the way family should act, she didn’t complain; she just picked up the slack and then suffered for it. I touch my pendant, wondering when I’ll have the guts to listen to it. I can almost hear her voice, more mature in words than the thin, childishness of her tone that, even now, I can hear clearly.

  It isn’t about what you want, Fenn. It’s about what you can do.

  “Fenn?” Gammand’s staring at me with a steely eye.

  “Yes? Sorry, what was that?”

  “We’ll head to the outer rim of the southern quadrant. It’s transforming right now, and we’ll get the best data there.”

  “Transforming?” I ask, not really caring, but I have to say something.

  “Yes. Cyclo’s changes, from being sentient to somehow less upwardly conscious, are happening in waves. From the data I’ve put together, it looks like there’s a pattern in Cyclo’s degeneration. First, it’s happening in segments, not in the ship as a whole. Second, we notice those segments lose their ability to communicate with us.”

  “It’s not just that, though,” I say. “Not just communication. Cyclo is very emotive, have you noticed? She expresses her emotions in colors, especially with Hana. Those behaviors disappear in those areas. Like she’s living but not really—alive, you know? Not thinking or feeling.”

  Gammand is walking really fast, and I can’t tell if he hears me. But he starts shaking his head. “This ship is not emotive. It wasn’t created that way.”

  “No. You’re wrong. I’ve seen it disagree with Hana, and flash colors when it’s not happy with her.”

  “It’s programmed to offer options to the crew, Fenn. That’s not the same thing as emotion.”

  “I’m telling you—”

  Gammand stops walking, so abruptly that I almost crash into him. He faces me. “Tell me you have data to support this. Not just your feelings, what you see, what you hear. I should know. Our human senses are terribly inadequate in data gathering. Which is why we need these.” He points at the nanobot cards sticking out of my pocket. “Not you. Not your faulty sixth sense.” He starts walking again. “Anyway, Amorfovita potentia don’t possess the anatomical substrate for emotions, like your fancy limbic system does. There’s a reason why the Calathus resembles plankton or coral more than a primate. The engineers didn’t want to deal with that level of unpredictability.”

  Internally, I’m fuming at his lecture. My fingers tap Morse against my thigh, since saying it out loud would be a mistake.

  -.-- --- ..- .-.-.- .- .-. . .-.-.- .-- .-. --- -. --. .-.-.-

  You. Are. Wrong.

  Just barely in my peripheral vision, I see a flash of silver. I look right, just as the silver streak disappears under the blue iridescence of Cyclo’s surface. Huh. I wonder if she heard that, if she was annoyed that Gammand basically said she was a thoughtless computer and nothing else.

  After a few more minutes, we arrive at our destination. The sides of the passageway are honeycombed with storage areas. The walls are their usual blue, but something is different—every now and then, there’s a stabbing streak of white. Just a blip here and there, but noticeable. I can’t remember what that means. I wish Hana were here to help me.

  “Cyclo, what does your white color mean?” I ask. But she doesn’t speak to me with her artificial mouth made out of the wall. Maybe she’s not healthy enough to handle it. I know that she’s supposed to taste, smell, see. I wonder if she’s gotten too sick to notice that my hands are all sweaty from being riled up with worry over these attacks.

  I start investigating the storage areas. Some are too small to step into—maybe Cyclo helped move things in and out. Others are long and narrow rooms with enough headspace to walk into. I step into one filled with different-sized crates. Most are empty—perhaps the crew took them along—but some still have packages of calorie-dense carbohydrate blends, huge packages of electrolytes, canisters of material recyclers. I look to see if there are any dehydrated Earth pizzas in there, but no luck.

  “The storerooms of most ships usually have a lot more stuff,” I say, poking here and there for any goodies that would be worth taking back to the bridge.

  “Cyclo was built to deliver nutrients via hibernation cycles. She harvested light energy from Maia efficiently and made her own sugars and proteins, which were fed to the crew. So real food was
only for crew morale and vitamin supplementation.”

  “And now she can’t photosynthesize. Things are falling apart in pieces.”

  I wonder what that would be like. If we didn’t just get old gradually, but one by one our limbs just dropped off, until there was nothing but a poorly functioning head, until that winked out, too. I shiver at the thought. Because I know how I’m going to go—like a book closing violently, a clapping end to Fennec Actias. I just don’t know exactly how that book is going to get shut. Poison? Radiation? Ejected into space and frozen while my blood boils in my brain and heart? Who knows.

  I busy myself with readying my nanobots. Anything to not think of that.

  “Your bots need to be programmed for radiation measurements, in addition to neural-electrical activity.”

  “Already done. I’ve taken Miki’s program and added it to my own, so everything goes slower, but I’ve got it.”

  Gammand is already muttering to himself, walking down the hallways and reading measurements into his holofeed.

  “Hey. You going to be okay?” I ask. He seems more irritated than usual.

  “Fine,” he says, before adding, “thanks, Fenn.”

  I’ve got ten bots ready to go, but as usual, most need to fly directly into the matrix. Only two are going to take measurements in the various honeycombed hallways and storage areas.

  I head to the entrance of the storage area, out of eyeshot and hearing from where Gammand is working. The walls aren’t just blue with those occasional streaks of white, but here are some permanent streaks of beige. I remember—those are areas that mark where her tissues are getting scarred. There is an area dripping with that brown acid and a toxic-looking gray gas rising from where it’s burning into her blue flesh. Before I launch the first one into the Cyclo’s wall, nearest to the entrance of the storage area, I whisper.

  “Hey. It’s me, Fenn. I have to do some more studies. Is it okay if I fly my little guys into you again? Just doing measurements. Please?”

  I put my hand on the floor. It flashes briefly in medium blue, and a quick bright green. Good. Knowing that Cyclo can squash the life out of my bots, it’s become a habit of mine to ask permission. Not that I ever did with any being before I met Cyclo, but hey. It’s never too late to stop being an official biological pirate, right?

  I set my holofeed and fly the first bot into the matrix. There is a brief flash of white against the blue as the bot makes contact and penetrates her matrix, and then it’s flying through her walls, and the data comes rolling down my feed in droves. Hopefully on Gammand’s tablet, too. One by one, I fly each bot into different areas of the hallways. At the end, before my last launch, he finds me.

  “This is interesting. Look. Calcium and phosphorous levels are bottoming out. I need you to reprogram that last bot to stay within the membrane surface, not go deep into the matrix.”

  “Sure.” I use my eye movements and fingertips to alter the commands, then watch as my feed readies the program. As soon as I’m ready to launch, I put my hand on the floor. Cyclo will need to know this one will be more irritating, since her membrane surface is riddled with sensory nerves. She’d be more likely to destroy this one if I don’t ask.

  “Cyclo,” I say, “I’m sending in a new bot, but this one is different. Is it okay—”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Gammand asks me. He’s stopped studying his tablet and is staring at me with irritation and disgust.

  “I’m…well, I’m asking permission to fly this into her membrane surface. It’s going to be more physically uncomfortable.”

  “Who cares. Just fly it in.”

  “But she nearly destroyed my first fleet because I didn’t ask permission.”

  “She doesn’t care, Fenn. You’re not going to hurt her goddamn feelings. Fly them in.”

  I stare at him. I think of what he said, how my senses are so imperfect in collecting information around me—like déjà vu, neural hiccups that feel like paranormal activity—and yet, my senses have told me that Cyclo does care. She cares about Hana. She certainly doesn’t want me kissing her, that’s for sure. But I can’t explain this to Gammand because all I have is my own experience. Which is worth shit because it’s not data he cares about.

  “But—”

  “Doran,” Gammand barks. “I need to override Fennec Actias, permission request seven four omega delta five.”

  Doran’s face appears on my holofeed. “What is it now, Fenn? Just do the work. Gammand has enough on his plate. I’ll give him directive over your drones, but only for an hour.”

  And just like that, my feed tells me that I’m no longer in command of my bots, and that Gammand has already launched my last bot off the card in my outstretched hand.

  “Doran, Gammand, don’t. I’m telling you, she’ll be angry.”

  “Quiet. You’re on your way to making sure that ReCOR nullifies your contract. And if you don’t bring in the data, then I can’t package it up, and it screws with my own contract.”

  “That’s not fair, Gammand, and you know it.” I seethe. “I’m just trying to do my work!”

  “Using your faulty, human sentiment?” Gammand booms. Doran has disappeared from my holo, and my feed tells me that the bot has landed and is now immersing itself into the membrane between two very sensitive layers of epidermis. White lines emanate from the landing area, like rays in a star pattern. Which is when I realize—white is the color showing Cyclo is in pain. Oh no.

  I hold up my hand. “Just let me talk to her—”

  It happens so fast, I don’t even realize what it is. A hard sting across my jaw, so hard that it turns my head a few inches. Gammand’s hand is still held aloft from the slap. Inwardly, my heart goes cold and hard. Gammand and I always got along. On the Selkirk, we joked rarely, but mostly spent a lot of time together in silence. He liked that I didn’t pester him with questions, and I liked that Gammand never judged me as a criminal. But right now? Any friendly feelings I ever had for Gammand just turned to ash.

  “You’ll do as you’re told, Fenn, or so help me, I’ll kill you. I’m going to fulfill my contract, and your feelings for this ship or that girl aren’t going to ruin this.”

  A terrible realization chills me even more. “Wait. Miki—did you—”

  “Kill her?” Gammand straightens up, and his eyes unfocus for a second, as if looking right through me. “Don’t be absurd. Of course not. And I’ll thank you for stopping this conversation right now. Back to work.”

  I open my mouth to resist, to ask another question, anything to figure out what the hell Gammand isn’t telling me. He turns away from me, but this time, when he pivots back, I see his fist raised to right-hook me into submission. He has a lot of muscle and quickness. I was wrong to think he was some quiet, morose guy. Ducking his blow, I lose my balance and stagger back.

  Gammand raises his fist again, but this time there’s a tranquilizer gun in it. The same one he used on Hana on the first day we were here. I back away as a shadow looms behind him.

  “What are you doing?” I yell.

  “Again, saying the wrong thing. You have been messing up ever since you came here. I thought you were a risk, that you were just going to steal stuff and leave our crew, contract or no contract. And you’ve been worse than my worst nightmare. You’re slacking on your work and mooning over a girl whose very existence is threatening our contracts.”

  I raise my hands, but Gammand doesn’t back down. That’s when I realize he’s not holding a tranquilizer gun in his hand—it’s a downer. The kind of gun that’s used to render criminals into a paralytic, resistance-less pile of human. Dialed up high enough, you stop breathing.

  I thought there were no deadly weapons allowed by the Selkirk crew.

  I was wrong. Did Doran give him the power to take out the crew if necessary?

  My feed is still running, but I don’t have an
open channel to speak to anyone. With my eyes, I indicate on my holofeed to open up a one-way channel.

  “Stop that,” Gammand says, and he fires. The laser shot goes whizzing past my head, and I turn around, plant a foot, and run for it.

  A scream rises behind me. I stop running and turn my head to see Gammand, eyes wide with terror, his uplifted hand with the neural gun poised but motionless in a long extension of Cyclo’s wall. Cyclo has reached out with her matrix and embedded Gammand’s weaponed arm and torso.

  “Gammand!” I scream.

  Gammand is screaming, too, but he can’t move because Cyclo has him nearly immobile. Only his one free arm is moving, frantically beating about his head and torso, trying to pummel Cyclo’s matrix into letting him go. His pendant, along with the suicide medicine, is embedded in matrix enclosing his torso. Even if Gammand wanted to painlessly end his life right now, he couldn’t.

  Every punch Gammand lands seems to hit me, too, and my insides feel like they’re being plunged into acid. My heart and brain are wailing the same thing, the noise of despair issuing from my mouth.

  “Stop! Leave him alone!” I yell, but the ship seems so massively strong in overtaking Gammand, my voice seems too small to stop anything. Cyclo’s colors are a riot of deep crimson mixed with silver and white—anger, distress, and pain.

  A high, thin scream—a girl’s scream—sounds from far away. “Cyclo! Stop!”

  It’s Hana, far down the hallway, where she and Portia have come running to help. I don’t know whether to feel relieved or horrified that they’re here. Run, I want to say, but I’ve suddenly lost my voice, as if my body knows the truth before I do—there’s no point. Hana and Portia are gaping as Gammand’s yells of protest turn into one long, excruciating howl.

  We all stare as Cyclo rends his body in half, and our world changes to crimson.

  Chapter Twenty-Three