Hotwire

by Simon Ings

  He left the diagnostics suite and called up the navigation monad. It plotted vectors for him, one after another, working out what would happen to them if they chanced the escape pods. He grimaced. ‘We’ll landfall in daylight, we encyst and fall to Earth.’

  ‘That’s bad?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s not the worst. The worst is if there is no open vector.’

  Minutes later the navigation monad lit up on the monitor before him.

  ‘Good news?’

  ‘Of sorts.’

  There were three descents open to them: all seafalls, all in daylight, all in the northern hemisphere.

  ‘We can land?’

  ‘If the pods are working. If the encyst procedures tally. If we can avoid Haag’s Early Warning mob. If we don’t mind walking at the other end—’ He studied the screens. ‘If we don’t mind landing mid-ocean.’ He patched weather-eyes over the diagrammatics before him. ‘If we don’t mind hurricanes and force-nine gales.’

  ‘Ajay.’

  He rubbed his eyes and leant back in the couch. ‘We’re dead,’ he said.

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘We take the risk. We have no choice.’

  He called up diagnostics again and ran checks on the escape pods.

  The screens went blank.

  He typed again.

  The screens remained empty.

  The craft began to shake.

  ‘ESTIMATED TIME TO ABLATIVE FAIL APPROXIMATELY ONE HOUR.’

  He typed up internal diagnostics, searching for the glitch.

  ‘MARK MINUS FIFTY-FOUR MINUTES.’

  ‘What now?’

  His stomach felt empty. Sweat pricked his forehead. ‘The monad’s down that controls the escape routines. Some dumb computer error.’ His fingers wiggled and jittered, patching in a diagnostics phage.

  The lights went out.

  ‘What the—’

  ‘RANDOM EXERCISE PARAMETERS CLASSIFIED UNDER ORDER.’

  ‘This is no fucking drill!’ Ajay yelled back.

  ‘PILOT INADEQUATE,’ the Clipper sneered, and tore its gloves and boots off him.

  The craft slewed. All the monitors blinked off and came on again, fiery red.

  ‘DIVE, DIVE,’ The Clipper sang, ‘MY END ALL FIERY!’

  ‘Reset!’ Ajay screamed, and when that didn’t work: ‘Let’s play!’

  Silence and sudden darkness enveloped the cabin.

  ‘Ajay?’

  ‘Relax. Wait a second.’

  The lights returned. Around him, the monitors glowed amber/ready.

  The Clipper shook, steadied, became still once more.

  ‘All’s well now?’ Rosa asked him.

  Ajay checked his watch. ‘Forty-two minutes to ablative fail.’

  ‘Time to pod?’

  He made to answer her, but the Clipper intruded: ‘CAPTAIN,’ it sang, ‘WHAT SHALL WE PLAY?’

  ‘Locate us now,’ he said.

  Silence.

  Ajay stared hungrily into the monitor beside him: ‘It’s doing – something.’

  ‘ALL ACTION PENDING FIX BY SATELLITE.’

  The silence seemed to drag on forever, then—

  ‘COUNT TEN FOR INCARCERATION,’ the bomber snapped.

  ‘Locate, I said,’ Ajay snapped back, bewildered. ‘I reset you, God fuck it: I said Locate!’

  ‘MARK.’

  ‘Shit!’

  Rosa stared at him, non-plussed.

  ‘NINE.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It saved its exercise. It’s cysting us!’

  ‘EIGHT.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Abort!’ Ajay’s scream was deafening inside the tiny cabin.

  ‘SEVEN.’

  The Clipper was off in a world of its own. It wanted to fail.

  Ajay fought up out of his seat but something was pulling him back. He looked around him, wild-eyed. The cabin walls were melting.

  ‘SIX.’

  He tried to raise his hands before his face but they were restricted somehow. He looked down at himself. Silvery strands were engulfing his legs, his waist, his chest. He glimpsed spiders. Tiny silvery spiders. Thousands of them, coming for him. They were all over him. He started screaming.

  ‘FIVE.’

  The cabin roof curled into a sardonic smile.

  ‘Snow!’ Ajay sobbed. ‘I know it’s you, you bloody bitch!’

  ‘FOUR.’

  The cabin’s smile blackened and split in two. He turned to Rosa. ‘The head!’ he cried. ‘The head!’

  Rosa fought the sticky bonds, leant down and grabbed Elle’s head. The gluey fibres, like elastic ropes, snapped her back into the seat the moment she relaxed. The head caught on her stomach and stuck there.

  ‘THREE.’

  The edges of the split in the roof were curling in, enveloping them, each in a separate cocoon.

  ‘Ajay!’ Rosa screamed.

  He forced his head around.

  Rosa was gone.

  A black melted hull-section fell through the floor where she’d been. He relaxed. His head snapped back, face forward, glued, immobile. Spider legs tickled his chin.

  ‘ONE.’

  Sudden silence.

  ‘Snow?’

  A young girl’s laughter.

  The roof melted over him.

  Like chocolate, he thought.

  ‘ZERO.’

  Blackout—

  She woke, weightless still, with no memory of falling asleep. The blackness around her was total, so intense she thought maybe she was dreaming, or that blindness had struck her while she slept. She tried raising her head. It was stuck to the seat. Her hands, too. Gluey fibres held her to the couch.

  She reached out, looking for something to mind, but there was nothing there. Ma’s usual womb-noise, so familiar to her that she hardly sensed it any more, had disappeared, leaving a yawning gap in her sensorium. She clenched her fists and concentrated; the faintest hum or chitter, the faintest flash of colour would have contented her. But there was nothing. Bound as she was she felt incredibly light, as if set free from a great and usual weight. It was the way she’d felt when she wore the man’s golden suit. Perfect peace. The sensation was exhilarating but hollow, like deafness after tinnitus. I am born now, she thought. No more my mother’s thought. I am a whole thing. A thing in the world.

  A thing alone.

  Outside the lightless shell a wind struck up. At first it was a relief to hear something, but in a very few minutes it had built into a dreadful, monstrous howl. She flexed uselessly in her web. Her joints were stiff and painful. A great weight pressed down on her. Blood loss shrivelled her brain—

  Freed from any referent, time passed uncertainly for her. The wind was hellish and chaotic; it drove her out of all sense of time and self—

  —until at last the pod buckled.

  A dreadful shrieking started up.

  The air grew hot.

  The carapace distended oddly, flattening, curling at the edges. A patch of muddy brown emerged from out the blackness: the pod wall, thinning out. Relief that she could see and fear of what would happen next jostled in her mind. The couch bucked as the floor changed shape. Gloomy, sepia light spilled through the pod. Its walls, Rosa saw with misgiving, were ribbed like the insides of the cleistogam she’d found in Elle’s apartment. No man-tech this, she guessed: Ma’s work. Fear drenched her. There were no monitors in the pod, no screens. Just the couch, and the webbing binding her to the couch, and the pale patch above her head, become creamy and opalescent as it thinned.

  The wind died down. The shell warped further, its tear-drop profile flattening to make an aerofoil. The creamy patch above her cleared and curved down in front of her, revealing the world. She gazed at it heart-in-mouth, amazed.

  The sun was setting on her right. To her left a full moon shone the same pale orange as the clouds. Below lay a mountainous landscape, uniformly tawny, crumpled like a brown paper bag. Haze banded the horizon, a ribbon of muddy yellow betw
een the sky and the land.

  Tears chilled Rosa’s cheeks. So beautiful! The pod banked left. The ocean came in view. Her stomach churned as she tried to make sense of it. The pod sped her past the mountains and over the sea. So vast—

  Something glanced past the window. Something black and bony, a curious whale of the air. Egg-like, it pulsed and flexed, smoke trailing from its white-hot underside, then flattened out. Rosa sat up, excited; the gluey stuff binding her snapped and crumbled, letting her go. Rosa brushed it off and looked out. The creature was flying alongside her now, dipping and weaving as though through contradictory currents. She saw no limbs, no eyes, no mouth. It looked more like a built thing than any Earthborn creature. It was mimicking the movements of her pod!

  ‘Ajay!’ she cried, excited. ‘Ajay, is it you?’

  Ajay’s pod banked left; hers turned to follow. Much lower now, they flew along the coast. The surface of the sea was broken. Flecks of spume outrode each wave. She swallowed hard, fearful: the closer she came, the rougher the sea appeared.

  Ahead of her, the top of Ajay’s pod snapped open. A Regalo-wing glider unfurled wetly. Colours rainbowed through its newborn veins. Above her, bones snapped: her craft was following suit. The wing unfurled and snagged the air. The pod reeled wildly. Elle’s head rolled across the floor. Rosa clung to the edge of the couch. The pod tacked and weaved, braked at last, hung motionless for a second – then fell into the waves.

  Sea water drowned the window with greenish, uncertain light. For a moment, Rosa thought she was sinking. Then salt foam flung the sea aside. She glimpsed the beach. The pod bobbed wildly up and down around her. The walls distorted a second time, thinning and flattening even further. Blue-black shards flaked off the roof and fell on her, light and hot as ash. The pod was growing brittle.

  The pod stretched lengthways. The floor bucked. The window shattered into scaly fragments. The sea came through and splashed her; icy, salt. Rosa, surprised, let go the couch and tumbled off. The walls around the window puckered, sphincter-like, narrowing the breached window to a slit. There was a moment’s calm. Rosa climbed aboard the couch again, panting, gulping down her first taste of Home. The air was rich and rotten in her mouth, like old soup. Another wave came, tossed her against the ceiling and dropped her, winded, back onto the couch.

  The pod bucked and turned, riding the wave.

  Gravity ceased to make any sense. She felt as though she were falling, but when she turned on all fours and peered through the hole, she saw she was travelling level, picking up speed every second, riding the wave’s concave surface to shore—

  She looked up. There was water above her, now – spume-edged, wing-like, curling over her. The craft shrieked, snapped and went into a roll. The couch fell from under her. She balled herself up, hands over her head.

  The walls played with her a while, batting her from hand to hand.

  Everything went dark. Sounds rushed away.

  Surf.

  Undertow.

  Breezes.

  The cries of men.

  She opened her eyes and shut them again, blinded. She opened them a second time, more slowly. Snake-eyed, she glimpsed a pattern of blue and black stripes. The black stripes were ribs, gently curving, skeletal: remains of the pod that had brought her here. The black flesh had flaked off leaving only the bones. Even the bones were flaking away: she watched fragments eddy in the blue above the ribs. Blue. Her heart thumped, fast and heavy.

  She knew what the blue was.

  She got down off the couch. The floor, too, had melted, exposing ribs now half-buried under fine whitish sand. They pressed awkwardly against the soles of her feet, making it hard to balance. She winced and stumbled. She picked her way to the nearest wall. The bones here ran vertically, like the bars of a birdcage. She took hold of them. They broke off in her hands. They were rotted through. She yanked out a hole big enough to step through and climbed out. The pod’s skeleton, weakened by the hole she’d made in its side, creaked in the breeze; another birthing, if she’d had a mind to see it that way.

  But her mind was elsewhere.

  The beach was long and narrow and – at a first glance – clean. To the right was an embankment. Beyond it, a platform, and a wheeled vehicle parked to one side. Her eyes traced the edge of the embankment. There were rusted metal drums with labels on them, too distant to read. A wooden sign with white letters. A black strip, rising even and smooth as snakeskin up and round a cliff and out of sight. A made thing; a road.

  Beyond the road, near the wooden sign, was a gate. From there a dirt track wove towards a range of hills. The hills were green, complex, textured in ways Rosa couldn’t wrap her eyes round. It was like looking at a fractal surface; worse, because it was shimmering, and no two parts of it shimmered in quite the same way, or to the same rhythm. She sensed it was something to do with the wind. She looked harder, studying the way each gust rippled across the pixellated green surface of the hills – no.

  Her head ached.

  She wasn’t ready.

  It was too much to take in, like white noise. She stared at the ground. The sand wasn’t so bad. It was uniform. It didn’t scintillate. She swallowed. She wished there was something flat nearby. Something polished, something smooth, something plastic. Something her eyes could read.

  This is crazy, she thought. I can’t go on staring at the ground the whole time. She dared to look up a little, concentrating on the beach ahead of her. It was very bright. The sand was hot under her feet. She began to walk. It was hard, walking on the sand; she wasn’t used to it. It was uneven. It dragged at her feet. She glanced to her right, at the edge of the platform, the vehicle . . . the road would be easier going, perhaps. She changed course, saw the hills again, and turned away.

  She looked down and stopped. There was something at her feet. Something rippled and smooth and oddly familiar. She crouched down and poked it with her finger. It didn’t move. She flipped it over. The other side was rougher, more ribbed. The edges were scalloped, chipped here and there. She picked it up and held it under her nose. A shell. Smooth, ribbed, curve-walled – a shell. Like the cleistogam, and the pod: her Mother’s design. What were Ma’s shells doing here?

  It dawned on her then, they weren’t Ma’s. Earth itself had made them, and Ma had simply borrowed Earth’s design.

  Ma’s not here, she remembered.

  She felt wobbly.

  This isn’t Ma, it’s Earth. The start of it. The place where Flesh came from: Flesh that made Ma, so Ma might remake Flesh.

  Rosa undid her trophy belt and tried boring a hole in the shell with an end of the wire, but the shell was too hard. She walked on.

  There were shells everywhere. She lifted her eyes cautiously and surveyed the beach. There must be thousands on this beach alone. Why thousands? Why not just one or two?

  She remembered Mother’s canal: the tresses, the eyes, the buckets of fingernails.

  Why not one of each thing?

  Why all these copies? Earth, even more than Ma, seemed driven to this senseless repetition. Not just of shells either, but hills and waves and ripples in the sand. She stared at them.

  She realised that she was asking all the wrong questions. She was imagining there was some purpose to what the Earth did. But why should there be any purpose to it? Creation didn’t need Purpose, any more than Will. All it took was a few simple rules and a lot of raw material. The simplest maths was quite enough to fill a world. Ma with Rosas, Earth with shells. Ma with Elles and Earth with hills. Ma with tresses of red hair and Earth with ripples in the sand.

  Rosa stared at her feet. Countless ripples, each one different yet all of them the same. The ocean cast each one, yet had no mind, no purpose, no design. Why did the ocean cast these ripples on the shore? Only to sign its name. My Ma no different, then, and I myself her signature . . .

  ‘Rosa!’

  She wheeled.

  ‘Rosa!’

  High up the beach, beneath the road, a golden figure waved.


  ‘Ajay!’ She laughed and half-ran, half-staggered towards him. She thought, I knew he’d be all right. So strong her friend, so rough and so long-lasting! She cut across a corner of the car park and down the other side. A stream splayed out across the sand in a tiny delta. She splashed through the shallow water, squealing with delight as the spray rose up around her.

  ‘Ajay!’

  He wasn’t paying any attention. He was rummaging through a pile of gear she didn’t recognise, all blacks and greens and smooth surfaces: steel cylinders in purple mesh and clothing made of rubber foam. He found what he was after at last, a waterproof zipper bag. He unzipped it, emptied into the sand a T shirt, jeans, soft shoes sporting Nike on the heel. ‘Where’s the head?’

  ‘In the pod.’

  ‘Put that lot on,’ he said, then took the bag down to the water’s edge and filled it with sea water. He clambered into her pod through the hole she’d made and looked around.

  ‘Under the seat,’ she shouted.

  Ajay bent down, retrieved the head and dropped it in the bag. He zipped it shut, carried it up the beach a little way, then went back to the pod and kicked it, over and over, cracking its ribs till the structure collapsed into the sand. He began picking up the pieces and throwing them into the waves. Rosa headed out to help him. He saw and waved her back. ‘Get dressed!’

  Reluctantly, she picked over the clothing. It didn’t make much sense to her. The pants were okay, and there were loops for her trophy belt. She threaded it through, tied it tight, then squatted in the sand and rolled up the legs where they covered her feet. The shoes scraped nastily against her callused feet, but she’d stubbed her toes enough already to know she needed something. The T shirt clung everywhere, resisting her every move. She balled it up and threw it away.

  Ajay came back. ‘Put it on.’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ she complained.

  He picked it off the ground and shook it out. ‘Arms above your head.’

  She did as she was told. He slipped the thing tight over her. She scratched and fretted: ‘It’s all itchy.’

  ‘You threw it in the sand.’

  ‘It’s pink.’

  ‘So?’

  She sniffed: ‘Pig’s colours.’

  ‘Give me a hand with the couch.’