Toxic

by Lydia Kang

  Cyclo’s colors flash around me. Content bright blue, and curious gold, and pulsating yellow that says she’s reading information I’m giving out with each footstep. Green colors that welcome me, invite me to sleep, invite me to stay. There is a new color I’ve not seen before, but I know what it means. It’s on the very edge of the UV spectrum, nothing that Fenn or other humans could see. Electric violet, mixed with the lowest range of infrared that I can see. The spectrum. Everything.

  Forever, Cyclo is saying.

  Stay with me forever.

  Maybe it is what she means, and maybe not. I take off my backpack, placing it on the kitchenette instead of the ground, since I can’t take the chance that Cyclo will steal it away. I kneel before the black lacquer trunk full of my things and Mother’s. Mother always liked writing—she even had a fountain pen, and one of the chemists on board had to make her new ink out of some leftover carbon chunks taken from one of the filtration systems.

  I’ve occasionally flipped through the diary when I was bored, but always stopped after reading a sentence or two. It was Mother’s private world, and I enjoyed it so much more when she read it to me herself. Only a month ago, she’d read one particular passage to me. I flip through the pages to find it.

  Today my Hana became four years old. And she emerged from her hibernation singing. Singing!

  eommaga seomgunure gul ddareo gamyeon

  agiga honja nama jibeul bodaga

  She lisped the words and asked Cyclo to make a blue shell around her, as if Hana were inside an oyster, a pearl to be found. Hana always has ways of changing the story. She turned the lullaby on its head! That’s my Hana. She does things I never would. She will do things I never can. My myth, my pearl, my Hana.

  I remember that song. When Mother went to the island to pick oysters, the baby was left to stay in the house alone. That’s what it meant. The mother came back worried about the baby. There’s nothing in that lullaby about the baby turning into a pearl or that sort of nonsense. But I made it that way in my brain. And that’s what I’ve always thought the lullaby was about. But it’s not.

  It’s about a mother who leaves her baby while she gathers oysters. And she comes back. There is no transformation, no baby saving the day. But it doesn’t matter. Lullabies aren’t real life. And my mother is not coming to rescue me.

  I finger the pearl around my neck and cringe. It’s such a pretty trinket, something I’ve worn since before I can remember, but I’ve always forgotten where they come from. Oysters. A nagging piece of grit, like a piece of sand, or a parasite, around which the oyster secretes this pearlescent nacre to smother the irritation. I look around and wonder. Is that all we have been to Cyclo? An irritation that needed to be smothered to death? I yank the pendant, and the pearl comes loose from the necklace and bounces to the floor.

  Mother is not going to rescue me.

  Neither is Cyclo.

  Nor is Doran.

  “It’s up to me,” I say aloud.

  Cyclo responds in a swirl of concerned iridescent yellow. Are you hungry, Hana? Tired? Would you like to sleep?

  It would be so lovely to let Cyclo take over so I could rest. I have a restlessness in me that I haven’t felt before. But I don’t want it quelled. Not yet. I flip through the book, looking at the dates. But the dates aren’t universal timestamps. They are markers of my life. My doljanchi, or first birthday, when she prepared an array of objects for me to pick, to foretell what kind of life I would have. The paintbrush, to show I’d be an artist? The artificial rice grains, to symbolize wealth? The wool yarn, for long life?

  In the pages, all I see is me. Me growing, me crying, me learning to walk and climb, me trying pickled radishes for the first time.

  Where is Mother in all of these pages? It’s strange how her own thoughts aren’t in here—just stories of me. I stifle the urge to read the entire thing, front to back. But even without looking, the diary is haunting me. I need to find out what she was thinking on the day before she died. I flip to the last pages of the diary to find what I’m looking for.

  There are only a few blank pages at the end of the book. And I find the last diary entry.

  My Hana is a young woman. She has been for some time, but seeing her in the evening, knitting a sixteen-pointed star, listening to Mozart’s serenade number 10 in B flat major, “Gran Partita” from our audio archives, she seems too wise. So much like a grown woman already. She has a lot to learn. But, then again, there is only so much left to learn here.

  Autumns come. Clouds part to reveal their treasures on Earth. Apples fall from their trees.

  It’s time for her to meet the crew of the Calathus.

  It’s time for her to belong to the universe, not just her mother. Not just Cyclo.

  Someday, Hana, I’ll share the rest with you. But for now, it’s time for one truth to enter the light.

  You.

  I shut the diary. She was going to tell the crew about my existence. There is no timestamp on the entry, so I can only guess it was the day before she died. But I don’t know for sure. Mother, like me, was an antiquist, with a love for earthly objects. Writing on paper, knitting wool garments, cooking food as real as we possibly could. It wouldn’t have been her style to keep a digital diary in Cyclo’s archives.

  No; there has to be more. There has to be something here.

  This diary is all fluff and feathers and happiness. Even with my charmed existence, as coddled and protected as I have been, I have had doubts. Frustrations. Mother had one foot in my world of secrecy and a foot in the world as the Calathus’s Chief of Bioengineering. No one is so perfect that they could put all their thoughts and hopes down and never have misgivings.

  There must be another diary.

  I rummage around the lacquer box, but I can’t find anything that looks like another notebook or journal. There are our clothes, my knitting supplies, some boxes of spices for cooking. There are a few books, but I’ve read them all, and there is no mystery within them.

  No, wait. That’s not true. There is one book in there, a gift from my mother’s great, great grandfather. An original twentieth-century copy of short-stories by a Korean writer, Yi Kwang-Su. It’s entirely in Korean, without pictures on the cover or the insides. I glanced at it once as a very young child, and finding it completely incomprehensible and (horrors) without any pictures, I never looked at it again. Mother found an archived English translation, but I read that ages ago. She kept it wrapped in a silk handkerchief, under the sole piece of Goryeo pottery with its celadon glaze, on a shelf near our little kitchenette.

  I go to it immediately, unwrapping the rustling silk, and open the book.

  As usual, it contains vertical columns of hangul that I cannot read, another reminder that I feel less Korean than my face would prove. There is nothing else.

  I sigh. Another dead end.

  And yet, the pages are worn and well-thumbed, far more than any of our other books. Almost as well-worn as the diary. The book is hiding something. I just know it. Mother might have written it in ultraviolet ink so that only I could read it. But since she was hiding it from me, maybe she did the opposite. Hid it in a spectrum where I could never, ever read it. It’s the only possibility.

  I shove the book into my suit. I need to find an infrared reader somewhere. I need to go. I head for the door, when Cyclo releases a pattern of golden and amber dots and smudges.

  What are you doing? Cyclo asks me.

  “I have to go,” I say, breathlessly. But her gel rises up, so fast I can’t even lift my foot. She climbs up my back, encases my wrists, encloses my neck and face. It’s faster than I’ve ever experienced, inhumanly fast. And I hear her voice as my body succumbs to the numbness of the chemicals she unleashes into my skin.

  You aren’t leaving me, Hana. Never again.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  FENN

 
The dot is fixed in place as I watch her heart rate zing ever higher, until it plateaus and comes down. All the biometrics start to go to calmer levels, and I exhale.

  “Don’t worry. Your girlfriend is okay,” Portia says, putting her hand on my shoulder. I open my mouth to say something sarcastic and defensive, then I realize Portia isn’t teasing me. Even after nine months, sometimes I forget how awesome she is.

  “Look, she’s moving,” Portia says. She’s watching on her own small monitor. I look down to see her green dot reversing course, heading to her room.

  I look closer, the hair on my neck rising. “What is she doing? She knows she’s supposed to release those cells first, before retrieving anything from her room.”

  “It’s Cyclo. She’s talking to Hana, influencing her,” Portia says. “Or maybe forcing her to walk.”

  “How could she force her to do anything?” I ask.

  “Maybe it’s more subtle than that. Maybe she’s being manipulated,” Portia says. “I’ve studied ships like this. Smaller ones. There’s always a big debate between those who think of them as high-functioning environmental units, and others who consider them to be their own creatures, with souls and feelings.”

  I shiver. “I think ReCOR would disagree with you.”

  “Yes.” Portia creeps closer to my monitor, looking at Hana’s readouts. “And this attitude of ReCOR’s is going to get us all killed.”

  We keep watching as the green dot heads for her room. It moves around the room here and there before settling in one place. She stays there a long time, and her heart rate rises and falls. What the hell is she doing? Reading her mother’s diary?

  “She needs to get out of there,” I say under my breath. “The longer she spends with Cyclo, the more likely Cyclo will interfere.”

  Portia nods, then gasps.

  Hana’s heart rate zooms up. She’s back in fight or flight mode, and she’s backing away from the wall of the room. And then she stops moving. Her heart goes to a hundred and twenty. Then a hundred and thirty. And higher and higher. Her breathing rate is through the roof, her vessels constricting, epinephrine and norepinephrine are flooding her system.

  And then, the green dot disappears.

  I jump up. “What the hell! What happened?”

  “Oh no. Cyclo has her,” Portia says, tapping the screen to reboot, but it’s not working. “Hana’s not dead—the biomonitor would have shown it happen.”

  I drop the monitor and run to the pile of equipment we have. It’s pathetically small, and there are no weapons. Nothing. So I don’t bother to take anything; I just head for the door with nothing but my nanobots in my pocket.

  “Fenn! Don’t go after her. There’s no point. She’s as good as dead.”

  I pause at the door to look back at her. Portia, so impossibly tall and lithe, red eyes staring at me with concern—such a far cry from her contempt for me when we first met. We have such little time left together, and every single moment is already being lost, even as I breathe.

  I look at her and know I’ll miss her. And she’ll miss me, despite my scrappy, irritating ways. And I want to cry.

  And I think of Callandra.

  I’m so close to fulfilling my contract. My bots have been gathering info all this time, and I’m getting closer and closer to crossing off all the items on my list of objectives. I could save Callandra, and I could throw it all away if I screw it up now.

  But.

  My heart and my brain aren’t working in any way that makes sense. All I know is I have to get to Hana. I take a huge breath.

  “If there’s a chance Hana is alive, I have to go to her.”

  And I run out the door.

  I run as fast as I can. I know Cyclo’s layout well enough not to need my visor to tell me where to go. By the time I reach the northeast quadrant, I’m panting hard. I turn left, right, and left again before finding the corridor with Hana’s room. The door is shut, with a membrane stretched as a barrier. But unlike Cyclo’s healthier, thick webbing of a barrier, this is thinner and translucent. Inside, I see a small mass of black moving left and right—maybe Hana’s head.

  “Hana!” I yell.

  The color of the hallways suddenly changes to a blood red, pulsing in waves ending at my feet. The floor starts to rise to encase my feet, but I’m too fast, and I jump away, hopping and dodging, never letting Cyclo get a good hold on me. I back up a few steps then leap toward the door.

  My right foot thrusts hard against the door, and instead of bouncing back or absorbing the shock, the membrane cracks. It’s far more fragile and brittle than it used to be, and I can use this to my advantage. I back up and kick again until there’s a gap big enough to jump through. The shards of broken door graze me as I pass, and I feel the warm sting of cuts on my forearm and left cheekbone.

  Inside, I am met with horror.

  Hana isn’t being ripped apart like Gammand, but this is worse because she’s still alive. Cyclo and Hana are battling each other, and it’s not clear who’s winning. The ship must be screaming at her, as evidenced by the nonstop riot of colors in the room. Cyclo has three thick tendrils around Hana’s feet and left wrist, another that has risen and encased her rib cage, but she’s using her other free right hand to slice through Cyclo’s matrix where it’s trying to hold her down. The knife looks like something she’s taken from her little kitchenette. It’s small but doing the job.

  I have no weapon, so I punch and kick the blobs of appendages holding Hana.

  This is my first mistake.

  My fist immediately gets embedded, and the matrix oozes up my forearm.

  “NO!” Hana roars. “Don’t you dare touch him!”

  I’ve never heard her voice sound so fierce. I try to pull my fist free, but it’s not working. I try to kick, but I’ve stayed in place too long, and my feet are now embedded in the floor.

  Hana screams a battle cry and slices through Cyclo’s appendage around her other arm, and the cut surface of matrix around that arm looks like molten glass. It drops off her, changes to blue in its descent, and is immediately absorbed. But the undulating floor reaches up again to take her. But Cyclo can’t keep up with her slashing blade. She can’t overwhelm her the way she overwhelmed me back when I’d just boarded the ship and ran after Hana.

  After releasing her own legs, she lunges for me and cuts my arm free of Cyclo’s matrix, but I can already feel the numbing effect of Cyclo on my skin, and my mind feels hazy and slow. She’s drugging me, and it’s happening so fast that I start flitting in and out of consciousness.

  “Fight, Fenn! Fight! She only has so much sedative left, and if you fight, you can overcome it!”

  Her words sound like a faint echo in my head, but I’m still awake enough to hear it. I punch my arms, flailing, really, and do everything I can to pull my feet from the gluey floor. Something abruptly frees my hand, and I feel Cyclo’s matrix fly off my wrist and hit the wall with a wet thud.

  I manage to kick away the matrix from my feet and run to Hana, who’s slashing at her feet and ankles every time Cyclo tries to encase her again.

  “We have to go, we have to go,” she says quickly, and grabs my hand. The door is still broken in shards, and Hana jumps through it, shoulder first, breaking more pieces as we burst through. We land on the other side and catch our breath.

  “Which way do we go?” Hana asks.

  “This is the way back, but Cyclo is healthier that way. She’ll attack us. The other way is safer but it’s closer to all the toxic storage rooms near her center.” Basically, both ways are terrible.

  “This way,” Hana says, and we run to find a stairway upward toward the center of Cyclo, to where the ship’s belly is full of vacuoles with radioactive metals, oily and acid degradation products. It’s not a great choice, but at least it’s a choice. Cyclo keeps trying to reach us by sending out blobs from the wall and t
he floor, but we’re moving so fast that she can’t hold us. We careen around the corner, when I suddenly remember.

  “The cells! The canisters!” I yell. “Where are they?”

  “Back in the room!” Hana says, her face stricken with regret. “But we can’t go back there!”

  My stomach drops. That was our last chance to figure out how to keep Cyclo living just a little longer, so we could live a little longer. And now it’s trapped in a room we can never reenter.

  We are screwed, yet again.

  My holofeed buzzes, and Portia comms in.

  “Do you have her?” she asks.

  “Yes, Hana is with me. We’re heading back to you. We’ll take the long way, to be safer.”

  There’s a pause, and it sounds like Portia is running. “Wait. I went after you. To help. I’m in Hana’s room.”

  Hana and I stare at each other, the color draining from her face.

  “Get out,” Hana says hoarsely, before finding her voice. “Portia! Get out of that room! Run!” She looks at me, panic in her eyes. “Fenn, we have to go back!”

  “But Cyclo is just going to attack us, too!”

  “No, she’s getting weaker. She couldn’t handle three of us. But if Portia doesn’t have any weapons, she won’t be able to fight Cyclo. And Cyclo wasn’t trying to kill me.”

  She doesn’t wait for a response. Hana tears off back down the hallway, which goes from the dark navy to a mottled blue. She’s so fast now, I can barely catch up with her. We turn the corner into the northeast quadrant, left, right, and left again, dodging the sticky tendrils that try to catch our feet and our hands as we fly by. Cyclo builds a membrane wall that’s piecing together slowly, like a spider’s web, but Hana slashes through it and we keep going.

  We round a corner. Her room is there, the one place where Cyclo has concentrated her nutrients, where she is at her most powerful. Something on the floor by the door is waving, scrabbling. Something small, like an animal fighting.

  “What is—” I begin as we run toward it, then we realize what it is.