by Amie Kaufman
The helmet separating me from him.
“We are all connected,” my father says, holding out his hand to me. “We are perfectly together. We will be complete, when you join us.”
“Auri,” Ty says quietly from beside me. “That’s not your dad.”
“But it is,” I manage. “You don’t understand, I can f-feel them all in my mind. If it w-wasn’t him, it would be easy.”
But it’s so, so hard. Because now, amid the green-silver-blue-gray of the mental plane of this place—I can feel it, I can see it, I can sense Cat’s gorgeous reds and golds turning to muddy browns as they merge with the gestalt surrounding us.
And I can see so much more.
My father’s reaching out to me. Showing me the connection that could be mine. The brilliance of it. The complexity and beauty. And though they’re all one, all the lives, all the minds this thing has swallowed over the eons merged into one complete whole, I can still sense him inside the many.
I can see the threads of the whole cloth that were once his. That are still his. I can find the parts that are him inside this hive mind.
He’s still there. I could still apologize to him. Feel him pull me close as he laughs. Have you been fussing over such a small thing all this time? he’ll say.
“Jie-Lin,” he calls. “I need you.”
Kal looks across at me from where he sits against the wall, his purple eyes catching mine. And though I’m sure he doesn’t know it, the golden tendrils of his mind stretch toward me, strengthening me, twining with my midnight blue.
“I know what it is to lose family, be’shmai.”
There’s endless compassion in him, but his face is bleak. I can sense the pain of that memory—I can sense a story there I want to know.
His loss is like my loss.
It’s a story about losing people who aren’t yet gone.
“When we leave this place”—and Kal leans on that word, when—“we will seek out word of your sister. Your mother. What became of them. Perhaps something of your blood remains. But you have no family here, be’shmai. Because that is not your father.”
And in a moment of stillness, I know that he’s right. My father was once in this place, and was once taken by the Ra’haam, once made a part of this whole.
But he’s not here now.
These are just echoes.
I nod slowly, tears rolling down my cheeks, and push the rest of my strength into my mental walls, fending off the touch of this planet and the thing inside it.
I was never meant for the Ra’haam, and I will not join with them.
I am of the Eshvaren, now.
“Jie-Lin,” that thing outside calls. “Come with us.”
“No!” I yell.
“It is pointless to resist. Join us.”
“Never!”
And finally, that smooth voice from Princeps, from the thing that was my father, changes. And I hear the regret and resolve in it as he replaces the helmet and speaks one more time.
A word.
A whisper.
“Cat.”
34
Cat
I’m everything.
I’m nothing.
I’m me.
I’m …
“Cat.”
I’m a baby wrapped in clean white and I’m resting against my mum’s chest and I’m cold and I’m frightened and this is the first voice I’ve ever really heard and somehow it’s all right because I know it’s someone who loves me
“Catherine, but I’ll call her Cat.”
I’m a little girl on the first day of kindergarten and a boy shoves me in my back and I turn and I see blond hair and a dimpled smile and I pick up a chair and smash it over his head and somehow it’s all right because I know one day he’ll love me
“Ow, Cat!”
I’m fifteen years old sitting in front of the vid screen and I can see the death in mum’s eyes and even though she’s sixty thousand light-years away and this is the last time I’ll ever speak to her it’s somehow all right because I know she loves me
“I’m so proud of you, Cat.”
We’re eighteen years old and the empty glasses are stacked in front of us and the tattoos are new on our skin and we know exactly where we’re heading and it’s somehow all right because deep down I know you love me
“Oh, Cat …”
And I’m lying there the morning after and even though he left ten minutes ago I can still taste him on my lips and smell him on my skin and even though everything he said made an awful kind of sense I can’t stop crying because
because
he
doesn’t
love
me
I can see so far. I am one thousand eyes. The eyes inside the skull I was born with, the flesh slowly succumbing to the poison
corruption
infection
salvation
in my blood.
But more than that, I can see through them. The fronds that wend and twist around the building my body lies corroding inside. The seedlings that dance in eddies of iridescent blue in the air around us. The shells it inhabits, wrapped in the shape of simple primates or GIA uniforms or colonist skins.
Everything it’s touched.
Absorbed.
Embraced.
I’m everything.
I’m nothing.
I’m me.
I’m …
… we.
“Cat.”
I hear the Ra’haam’s voice through the threads it winds inside my body. I feel how big it is. How impossibly old. A vast consciousness, stretching across countless stars. A legion of one and billions, growing with each mind it enfolded.
Encircled.
Invited.
“Why are you fighting us, Cat?” it says, inside my head.
“Because I’m frightened,” I reply. “Because I don’t want to lose myself.”
“There is no loss through this communion. Only gain. You will become so much more inside us. You will never be unwanted or unloved. You will be us. We will be you. Always.”
“But the others … Scarlett and …”
“He will join us. One day, we will encompass all this. Everything.”
“Encompass?” I shake my head. “You mean devour.”
“We are not destroyers. We are deliverers. From the prison of self, into the liberty of union. We are acceptance. We are love.”
It’s the same voice I heard when I was new and cold and frightened, staring out at the world for the first time from the bastion of my mother’s breast.
But I don’t feel cold or frightened now.
I feel warm.
I feel welcome.
Annihilate.
Assimilate.
And I’m lying there on the floor of the reactor in some forgotten colony in some nowhere sector and I’m losing everything I was and ever will be and somehow it’s okay because I know
I know
I KNOW
it
loves
me.
•••••
We stand. In the skin that was Cat.
She is ours and we are hers.
Once we encompassed whole worlds. Communed with entire systems. But there is so little of us left now. An impoverished network, barely remembering the grandeur that came before. We have slumbered for countless eons. There is so little of us awake—just enough to weave small tendrils through the tiny skins that stumbled upon this cradle centuries ago. Sending them out to protect us while we slept a few hundred years more.
But soon, we spawn. Begin anew.
Bloom and burst.
We gaze out through the Cat-skin’s eyes. The skin named Scarlett looks back at us. A tiny, frightened thing, locked i
n a prison of its own flesh and bone.
“… Cat?”
We ignore her. Staring instead at the other.
The enemy.
“Aurora,” we say.
We sense the imprint of our old foe on her genes. Her mind. The last Eshvaren died a million years ago. But we knew they would find a way to strike at us from beyond their well-deserved graves. Some long-dormant device hidden in the Fold. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting for a catalyst.
Waiting for her.
We are Cat. Cat is us. And so we know that the skins called Finian and Zila are upstairs, setting the reactor to implode rather than see Aurora consumed. If we have her, we have the means to find the Eshvaren’s weapon. If we have her, we have the only one who can operate it. Who knows what we are, and where we sleep, and how we might be stopped.
If we have her, we have the galaxy.
“Cat?”
The skin named Tyler speaks. The apex in the folly of their hierarchy, looking at us from near the window. He is alone.
All of them.
So unimaginably alone.
“That’s not Cat anymore,” Aurora whispers.
We strike. Moving with the many skins we have embraced since first the Octavia colonists stumbled upon us, deep beneath the planet’s mantle. We writhe. We bend. We flow. The one called Kaliis is our primary objective—Aurora’s protector. The vines and leaves snake out, grasping, thorned and barbed. We are many, he is one. And though he is our better in this nascent state, we need only put the slightest tear in his biosuit and he will be ours.
He knows. He flows and crashes like water. The other members of the squad break into frantic motion. The Scarlett-skin raises her weapon. We slap it aside. The Finian-skin and Zila-skin upstairs cry out as we strike, ripping the tools from their hands. Wrapping them all in twisted fronds and blankets of flowers.
The Tyler-skin stands paralyzed. Seeing only what the Cat-skin was. Unable to see what she has become.
More.
“Cat, stop it!”
Outside, the Princeps-skin raises its arms. Our growths on the reactor building shiver. Grasp. Pull. The concrete in the structure shudders and groans, the cracks spread. The electrical current that the Finian-skin has sent through the metal crackles and burns us. But we are many—the cooked and blackened pieces of us falling away, only to be replaced by more. The building splits, the walls parting, the roof peeling back. The skin-things scream as the structure is torn away in showers of concrete dust and the shriek of dead metal.
The gantries tumble.
The shell collapses.
The floor drops away beneath them.
But they do not fall.
“No.”
The Aurora-skin floats upon the air. Right eye glowing white. Arms outstretched. The light from her burns us. The power of the Eshvaren thrums inside her. Just a fraction of its true potential.
But so sharp.
So bright.
We lash out at her—the Cat-skin, the Princeps-skin, the agent-skin, the many forms we have subsumed and embraced in our time here. She fights back with shock waves of psychic rage, tearing the pieces of us away, ripping our grasping tendrils from her friend-skins and bringing them softly to the ground.
But fierce as she is, the power in her is only newly wakened. She has no understanding of its extent. No comprehension of what she might become. And she is one.
We are many.
Too many.
We hit her. Grasp her. Claw her. The disruptor fire from her friend-skins are but summer rain against our totality. For every piece they burn away, another rises in its place. Gestalt. Myriad. Hydra.
And she looks at us, our ancient foe shining behind her eyes.
And she begs.
“Cat, help me!”
We laugh. Feeling the pulse of psychic energy she sends into the Cat-skin’s mind. But embraced and loved, encompassed in the warmth of singularity, in the living, breathing completeness inside us, there is no Cat anymore.
There is only Ra’haam.
… but
then …
…
… No.
NO.
•••••
I’m nothing.
I’m everything.
I’m we.
But though it’s inside me now
hopelessly intertwined with almost everything I was
there’s still a tiny ember in a darkened corner
that’s
still
me.
I’m back in the flight simulator at the academy. The day I graduated into the Ace stream. Reaching out into the network all around me, moving faster than they can target me. I can hear the voices of the other cadets in my head. The cheers growing louder as my kill tally mounts, weaving through the mossy hands that clutch and grasp me, trying to hold me back.
I take hold of it. Squeezing tight. Holding all of it—Princeps, the other agent, the chimps, the colonists, the tendrils, all of them still. There’s so many of them. It’s so big. So much. So heavy.
And I look around at them, through the eyes I know will only be mine for a few moments longer before my ember goes out forever.
These people who were my family. These people who were my friends. Sharp Auri and quiet Zila and snarky Fin and brooding Kal and smooth Scarlett and my beautiful, sad Tyler. I hold out one trembling hand to them.
I can feel the darkness closing in around me. Set to swallow me whole. And I remember Admiral Adams in his farewell, looking directly at me as he spoke the academy motto, those words and that memory now blinding in my mind.
We the Legion
We the light
Burning bright against the night
“You cannot fight us, Cat.”
Watch me.
“You cannot stop us forever.”
I don’t need to.
“We are legion.”
So
am
I
I reach out through the network. The tendrils of energy connecting all of it. All of us. Turning the strength of the many back upon itself. I just need to buy them time. Time to run, get out, get away. Time to get the hells off this infected rock, to regroup, to recognize what Auri actually is and what she’s supposed to do.
This defeat is a victory.
I can feel her in my mind. Reaching out into me, radiant midnight blue, flaring bright against our burning blue green.
I can’t hold them for long, O’Malley. …
“Cat, I …”
GO!
Princeps and the others tremble in place. Struggling against the tiny army of me. Aurora can feel them, crashing against me, wave after suffocating wave. She knows better than all the others—that there’s nothing that can be done. And so she turns to Tyler, who’s still staring at me in horror.
“Tyler, we have to go,” she says.
He blinks at her, understanding her meaning.
Tyler, we have to leave her.
I reach into the muscle that was me. Feel the tears welling in my new blue eyes as I force the lungs to move, the mouth to speak.
“I told you, Ty,” I whisper. “You have to let me go.”
“Cat, no.”
“Please …”
I can feel them. All of them. These people who were my family. These people who were my friends. They’re members of the Aurora Legion, and they don’t leave their people behind. But each of them knows, in their own way, that I won’t be people for very much longer.
I feel it slipping. I lose my grip. The undergrowth, Princeps, the colonists surge forward and Aurora throws up her hands, a sphere of pure telekinetic force keeping the flood in check. I can’t hold them back anymore. I can only hold on to this tiny fragment of me—this last tiny island in a sea of warm,
sweet darkness.
I don’t want to leave them. But looking into the Ra’haam—all it is and can become—I realize with a tiny spark of horror that I don’t want to leave it, either.
I look at Tyler. The scar I gave him when we were kids. The tears in his eyes. And I see it. Here at the end. Shining bright against this night.
“Cat … ,” he whispers. “I …”
“I know,” I breathe.
I shiver.
Feeling it close in around me.
“Go,” I beg. “While you still can.”
They run. Limping. Sobbing. Finian clutching the core fuel he synthesized, Kal and Zila supporting his weight. Scarlett, arm in arm with her twin, understanding maybe better than he does. Aurora leads them toward the GIA shuttle, arms flung up, a bubble of telekinetic force pushing back the rippling tendrils, the grasping hands, the all of us set to swallow the six of them.
I follow them at distance. Walking through the seething, clawing, biting growths, the wreckage of the broken reactor, the ruins of this broken colony. A blue wind kisses my skin. I can feel it working its way inward now, encroaching on the tiny spark. The last ember. All that remains of me.
I feel its power.
I feel its warmth.
I feel its welcome.
I take off my helmet.
And I’m nineteen and a million years old and standing in a sea of rippling blue-green as the people who were my friends bundle inside that little ship. And I can feel the spores dancing in the air around me and bubbling under the mantle beneath me and all the knowledge in the singularity waiting to embrace me. I’m a million light-years from where I was born and yet I’m right at home. And I’m exhilarated and I’m terrified and I’m laughing and I’m screaming and I’m everything and I’m nothing and I’m Cat and I’m Ra’haam and as the Longbow door cycles closed, as I look on them with eyes that are still mine for the very last time, I see him turn and look back at me.
And somehow it’s all right.
“Goodbye, Tyler.”
Because
I
know