by M F Sullivan
“You have no idea. I watched the whole thing: it’s at least two more minutes.”
“Then why’d you let me open it!”
Dominia shrugged. “‘Misery loves company,’ I guess.”
“Well, Misery’s going to have to be disappointed”—he checked his watch—“because it’s almost time for your procedure, and I have to go.”
“You have to go? What do you have planned? We’re incognito.”
“Of course! I’m not going around waving a banner with a name tag stuck to my chest. ‘My name is René Ichigawa, and I am on the run along with Dominia di Mephitoli. Please report me to the nearest Hunter and/or call the Hierophant to arrange my extradition…’”
“I’m not questioning your intelligence, René. I’m paranoid.”
“Like I said, you’ve got to get to the root of that issue. I threw away my life for you, you know.”
“You came to me, telling me stories about this guy.”
“To do you a favor! To help you!”
“To help yourself, and your organization. Don’t lay responsibility on me. If it weren’t for you, I’d be—”
“Struggling to pretend you’re still the person you were before Cassandra came into your life, instead of embracing who you’ve become since her death.” The philosopher came out in him and shut her up. His urge for literal finger-wagging satisfied, René left it at, “I’ll chalk your ingratitude up to stress.”
“Thank you, René,” she remembered to say, wondering if she had said it before.
“You’re welcome.”
The door slid shut behind him to leave Dominia in what resembled a prison. She reached into her dark right side and found the shape of a remote control, which manifested in her vision while she flipped through the stations of the hanging 3-D TV. Without her other eye, the effect was somewhat lost; the old-fashioned 2-D set on the ship had appeared a higher resolution than this one. She paused on the hospital’s private channel, and a soft-spoken woman narrated something in placid Japanese that soothed beyond language. The camera panned across beautiful grounds blossoming full of cherry trees, and spent loving time on a knee-height hedge labyrinth for the pleasure of strolling patients. Agony clutched Dominia, not just at that most desirous image of the sun but at the beauty of the grounds. It had been by then at least a week since she had gone for a walk. If she had any idea how much she’d soon be walking, she might not have pined so much. Melancholy, she flipped away, right into the unpleasant smile of Theodore during a speech from her San Valentino office. He said something about how the people needed to “band together in a divisive time such as this, and reach across community boundaries between rich and poor, human and martyr. It is time for martyrs to take a more thorough, compassionate interest in their short-lived friends. I intend to use my new position to reduce within human populations the scourges of poverty and pestilence. Every human being in the United Front will be fed and housed. Every human being will be given work, and the medical support to maintain it. As martyrs, it is our duty to protect our human brethren. None shall be left behind.”
Theodore del Medico was prone to bullshit, but this was laying it on thick, even for him. A speech written by the Hierophant? Probably. She’d be surprised if he let Theodore open his mouth in private without scripting it, stupid as her younger brother could be. Or, if not stupid, then so caught up in the euphoric whirlwind of his own ego that he couldn’t stop saying stupid things. The problem was that he deluded himself into thinking the stupid things sounded intelligent. This carefully worded mission statement said nothing and everything, and left Dominia with a queasy concern for the humans in her former domain. Pieces of a boy’s skull, scattering wetly across the floor. The first death of many during this sabbatical. There was little compassion in her Family for humans. Whenever they pretended they possessed some, it meant something was wrong.
“Dominique?” She hadn’t heard the door slide open and jolted at the nurse’s voice, to which she turned and nodded and laughed. The girl hurried over to take her blood pressure, then hear her racing heart. With a few short nods, she hit the buttons on Dominia’s bedside, and the entire unit detached itself like an electric stretcher; the whole thing, magnetically suspended, she supposed, floated down the hall to the operating theater.
Like all operating theaters, this room resembled less a place in a hospital and more some strange spaceship control room. Try as she might, Dominia could not regard the masked staff members milling about as anything other than alien. Not the best thing for a mind about to undergo anesthesia. She tried to focus on Cassandra: lips, hair, eyelashes, the way she snored sometimes. Especially after drinking. Oh, how the General could have used a drink of her own!
The masked surgeon on the other side of the room inspected the silver tray of tools, particularly a thing that looked like a scoop or a shoehorn. The bed clicked into place upon a silver stand that allowed it to rise and fall at the behest of the surgical team, but he did not turn at the noise. While he picked up the black box containing her new eye, the cute nurse, with smiling eyes above her mask, strapped the martyr down. This bothered her; the nurse’s smooth brow furrowed as she worked out Dominia’s English concern, and then, with a nod, the girl tapped her own head and said, “In case—ah, sei-zure. Very rare!”
Oh, right. A mild concern. That was what cartoon Mimi had said, too, during her long spiel on side effects aborted by impatient René: seizure and, in some cases, complete blindness that was temporary and regarded as the psyche’s adaptation to the product. It was one thing, after all, when one received a robotic limb. Still eerie, but somehow less confrontational than seeing through a new eye. A robotic eye. Dominia’s stomach lurched. Sure, she’d had her teeth done. But this was a bigger deal. In some ways, a virgin territory about to lose its sheen; but, if the untouched state of her body was the qualifier of that, it had not been virgin territory since her proteins refolded, died, and then reanimated as a kind of horrific, cannibalistic parody of antibodies, collagen, keratin. The Hierophant and his servants preached that the proteins—hardly better than prions—were individually intelligent gifts from God, cells inhabited with choosy consciousness. Ironic, in light of the unconsciousness of many martyrs.
With careful hands, her head was lifted and the bandages unwrapped from her socket. The area was cleaned, and, with a syringe missing its needle, an ointment was applied around the surface. When the nurse nodded in satisfaction and said something in Japanese to the surgeon, another woman—the anesthesiologist—hurried over some great cart unseen in the right side of Dominia’s world. As a plastic mask was fit over her face, the surgeon bent over her, black eyes a-twinkle so that even before he said in English, “Sister, dear, what are we to do with as wily a woman as you,” a white chill of horror paralyzed her limbs with recognition. Cicero tugged down his surgical mask to reveal that immaculate facial hair and explained, “Tragic that no matter what we try to stop you, your rampage continues.”
Before Dominia cried out—if she even could, for her tongue was already thick in her mouth and her lungs tasted cotton-tinny with the drug she was forced to inhale—her older brother drew her gun from beneath his scrubs and shot dead all four humans in the room. While she squeezed out a few silent tears and half a squeal, Cicero regarded the gun in his gloved hand, then allowed it to clatter onto the floor. “Fine way to repay your rescuers; but what can they expect? A farmer who rescues a snake had ought to have insurance.”
She couldn’t move, barely breathed as the mask was lifted away. “I took the liberty of replacing Tomoko-san’s cocktail with one of my own, designed for a combination of lucidity and paralysis. Effective, no?”
With a doting hand, which reminded her too much of the Hierophant’s, he swept a tear from beneath her eye, then turned back to the table of implements. “I thought it was important you be awake to see what you’ve done, that you may better grasp what is happening when you awaken—because I do not think you will prove capable of maintaining con
sciousness throughout the entire procedure. But we shall see! Not every computer program requires the machine to reboot prior to its use. Either way, when you’re free, you’ll want to take that gun. There aren’t many between here and Kabul.”
Panic: hot and cold, cold from the sweat and hot from the drug, or from the depth of his knowledge. Dominia tried to focus on her breathing while her brother returned with the miniature silver shoehorn poised between thumb and forefinger. The box rested in his other hand. “Father and I had a long conversation about whether to allow you to have this. We decided it would be unfair not to allow you what you’d spent a voyage anticipating. Not that being down an eye seems to have handicapped your prowess, much to the chagrin of the families of the Jun’yō. But it would seem most unsporting if you met your end because of a lost eye. That wouldn’t be a victory for us at all!”
Cicero opened the lid of the box and removed the eye, which dangled from his fingers much as Dominia’s original had dangled from those of the Hierophant. Though it was gory in naught but implication, missing as it was a coating of blood or tangled ropes of tissue, it was as vile—if not more so—to see a white orb on the end of black and silver wires. These swinging wires, he positioned over their new home.
“Inquisitive a mind as you have, you may wonder why I don’t kill you. After all, you’re more helpless now than you’ve ever been, or may ever be again. The answer is twofold. First”—he used the implement to lift the lid of her empty socket—“Father says there is more that you will do for us, whether you mean to, or not. And, second”—with the orb held between his fingers, he used the back of the implement to press the tiny button inset on the eye, which made a noise so subtle it seemed more an adjustment to the air—“well, it would be far less cruel to kill you now, wouldn’t it?”
The eye was the least culpable of any party involved in this situation and yet, somehow, the one who seemed the most malicious. As the cyborgan booted up, the cords activated, wiggled, and began to burrow into her socket. Paralyzed though she was, her lips parted to allow an exhalation that longed to be a scream, that would have otherwise been a scream, as wires tunneled into tissue that had filled her socket in the absence of an eye. It dug into her brain and found the pathways once used by her optic nerve to reach her visual cortex; there, to her horror, it encountered a wormlike scrap of tissue leftover from the removal by the Hierophant. The DIOX-I reacted to this by using its wires to clutch the leftover nerve and yank it from its place in a way so horrible that, along with the skull-splitting agony, a collection of wavering colors and shapes and lights exploded in her right side. Somewhere above her, Cicero watched, saying, “Fascinating, beautiful,” while the cords plunged back to work, sank into the tissue of her brain, and activated. As those hallucinatory blotches began to resolve into a new, crisper world, Dominia proved her brother right, and lost her grip on consciousness.
VI
Escape from Japan
Meadows. Lips. A long-running wave that peaked in a crash of consciousness-by-sound and Dominia running from hounds, the midnight velvet of the womb long gone but never really, the universe expanding out of it like a great balloon, a great breath taken in and let back out. A man who loved her like a daughter and whose face she couldn’t see walked her out of paradise, told her something she forgot. Yet, she felt his sentiments in a profound way beyond the grasp of words, so when she awoke with the leather straps loosened around her wrists and a room full of dead bodies, she was somehow euphoric, left with great unconscious catharsis. That euphoria didn’t fade as she saw the body of the cute nurse poised in a pool of blood beside Dominia’s bed, though it did soften to sorrow, and blacken into the unnamed when the default settings of the new eye—about which she’d forgotten—recognized the object before it as a face, looked up that face’s social media profile, and, with a helpful bubble, tagged the cute (now dead) nurse as one Sakaki Kurosawa.
Murph and Carol and Betty McLintock; Sakaki Kurosawa. Dominia didn’t like getting to know all these names. When she learned a name, she had to remember it. She thought in shame of Sakaki and the life she might have led in the future; the eye interpreted this as a command to pull up the social media profile of the woman in question. The window filled the right half of Dominia’s vision and made her blind with nausea as it flipped full tilt through an entire lifetime of photos, achievements, goals, sound bites, and even short videos. Her relationship status, her favorite foods, her—
Dominia hurried outside the theater to wash her face and clear her head, more rattled by the intangible ruminations of a digital conscience than by the bloody footprints she left behind. While she steadied herself with her grip on the sink, Dominia squinted through the window of the theater: the eye zoomed in, darting hither and thither in her lack of focus. It raked across all the bodies—Tomoko Ito, Yoshimaru Suzuki, and Kyo¯ka Watanabe. In quiet, postwar times, her preferred tradition was to memorize the names of those deceased by her hand. But now wasn’t the time for such a thing, and at that observation, her eye prompted her with the question, “Shall I make a list?” Before she responded, it presented her with a notepad application, its beige window already arranged with the names in helpful bullet points. As she absorbed this, trying to still her mind to keep the eye from reacting in a manner so hypersensitive, another prompt appeared.
“To save this list, DIOX-I requires access to your Halcyon Network Account. Set up now? Y/N.”
“Yes.” She sighed, rubbed her aching forehead, and then, fighting through her brain fog, located the gun she’d left floating in Sakaki’s blood. “Yes, go on.”
She’d been given a dummy account to use for the trip, but the dummy account would only work with a device whose data entry was manual. Automatic, reality-augmenting cyborgans couldn’t be stopped from information harvesting without practice, of which the General had none. What happened next happened in an invasive eye flash: When prompted, Dominia could not stop her brain from releasing the information in automation, used as it was to privacy in its own space. Username? “LADYDOMINIA_CONFIRMED.” Password? “3119191144181.” Would she like to receive notifications from— No, God no. She wished the thing had a tutorial.
“Would you like DIOX-I to run the customization wizard,” it prompted while she used her hospital gown to towel off her gun. Blearily, she looked toward the clock, then realized there was now always a clock floating in the lower right-hand corner of her vision. Ten past ten. Her procedure had been scheduled for nine: by now, everyone in the hospital was dead, and half the population of Japan knew or was soon to know. This also meant the Special Assault Team was on its way. She would be lucky if she had the opportunity to dress to greet them, and it was hard to focus with her new eye flipping through prompts to her right.
First came the calibration, where the eye asked her to look at a few virtual targets that augmented the hallway before her. Then, it asked her to picture a few basic shapes and think a few basic words. By the time she was near her room, it was asking her whether she wanted it to function by eye blink or by mental commands, the latter being more sensitive and consequently more useful despite its invasion of privacy, decency, and mental health. To this, the General reluctantly consented, though she willed the device to dampen its sensitivity so that only focused, conscious commands would activate its more annoying features.
“Your DIOX-I comes equipped with a wide array of special modes, each calibrated to a specific situation.” Outside, a few vans screeched to a halt along with at least one grinding “Tiger” T1-63 Reticulated Vehicle, which became known during the Reclamation as one of many tanque varieties—an old model, she suspected, claimed after the Pacific War or delivered as part of the Hierophant’s reparations for the ruin of Tokyo. Dominia scrambled into her room and found her armor and clothing arranged upon her bed, the footlocker having been emptied by the same person who’d left a fresh box of bullets. There was even a shirt: crisp, white, and not yet bloodstained. Incredible, how it felt like a slap in the face. All th
e while, the stupid eye went on. “Your custom settings have been saved under PERSONAL MODE, but be sure to explore other preprogrammed modes as the situation requires.”
Stripping away her bloodied hospital gown in favor of her clothes, Dominia asked aloud, “Do you have a battle mode?” and the eye responded with the prompt that, “As a pacifist corporation, DIOX abhors violence.”
With another few seconds’ consideration and the sound of doors being smashed open three floors below, Dominia yanked on her leather jacket, then loaded the .44 Magnum she thought she’d never see again. So familiar in her hand, that single artifact of normalcy’s dead empire, she might have wept over it, had she the time. Instead, she held its cool metal upright against the dexterous side of her face, specifically the puffy temple of her forehead, which was, indeed, aggravated by the foreign eye that had burrowed like a parasite into her brain. “Do you have a hunting mode?” she asked, and the prompt changed faster than she could blink: “HUNTING MODE ACTIVATED.”
She expected change in the world, but nothing altered. Not until, back in the hallway, a few bodies were circled and tagged with the word “NEUTRALIZED” in an imperious shade of red. As she marveled, the lights were cut by the team in the basement; the eye responded by adding a neon-green circle next to her clock to indicate it had flipped on its night vision. This effect of night vision in one eye and regular vision in the other was so disconcerting that Dominia, with a shake of her head for the irony, squeezed shut her left eye, her good eye, the eye leftover from the tatters of her humanity, and relied on the invader to do its work.
Many floors below, the team gained ground and confirmed the loss was total. That they thought Dominia was capable of such a thing proved her reputation had survived the march of time. Many, many generations of humans had been born and died since she had last been to Japan; but they never forgot what the Bitch of Europa—the Bitch of the Hierophant—had done to their ancestors, or country. Likewise, no matter how she tried to maintain a moral compass, no matter how she tried to advocate for the humans in the Front, she was forever the General whose bloody banner had portended the deaths of thousands at the heights of multiple wars. It was a banner she forever trailed, no matter how she tried to shake it off. But it was also a banner not without its uses as Dominia tipped carts, arranged tables, and scattered chairs, then picked the southeast corner to crouch in the dark and wait for the first unfortunate cop to pass her by.