The Network

by Cindy Zhang

  CHAPTER NINE

  "The most important aspect of Network culture is identity. Because they are a very social species, and one of their common relationships is a leading cause of death (see Matches, Chapter III), staying unique has become worked very deeply into set society. This is why it is considered offensive to not care who someone is, and humans are expected to introduce themselves before proceeding in any sort of interaction with a set.

  Integrity is the most valued trait. Going through something and still remaining, fundamentally, yourself is something that legends and religions are built on. On the flip side, pretence is looked upon as something dirty, if sometimes necessary to survive.

  Names are a much more involved affair than they are with humans. A set's name is a series of images and emotions that basically encapsulate them as a whole, and sometimes may even change over the course of their life. My editor Apple's name (Patterns in a hotel carpet, dandelion seeds caught on dogs, a footprint in mud just after rain) is a good example: none of the images are related, but after spending a while with him, the feelings evoked by those images seem to suit him somehow.

  Nicknames are an entirely new concept invented solely so that humans don't have to keep track of twenty-something words every time we want to refer to a particular set. These nicknames mean little and are usually some sounds that the set finds pleasing or a simple word that they like the idea of. There are a couple of jokes behind Apple's."

  - Excerpts from The Unofficial Guide to Sets, Piper Patel, Chapter II. The Importance of Names and Identity.

  38 and Tel split up, heading to different places to prepare as much as they can. They barely glance at Eirlys and Sabine, who are still crouched outside the kitchen. They react a second later, jumping up at the same time and taking a right at the hallway. Alarms blare, but—thank god—the lights don't flash.

  "Where are we going?" Eirlys is taking the lead, but that's only because there's one direction they can go in.

  "We have to go consult Naomi." Sabine bites her lip. "I don't think she'll know much better than us what to do, but any better is something."

  They reach the end of the short portion of the hall that goes past both rooms, and when they turn left at Naomi's room, they find Ast in that hallway leading to the cockpit.

  "Ast? Is Naomi back there?" Something's wrong, Sabine thinks. Ast doesn't look distressed, but Sabine's learned to trust her own reading of a situation's mood, because sometimes it's literal.

  "We're not ready." Ast shakes their head, fast, metal creaking with the effort. "We don't have a strategy, and I'm not putting Ship in danger for this." They stand in the way, blocking them from going down the hallway.

  "What else can we do?" Sabine dreads the answer.

  "Leave." Ast's unblinking white eyes stare into Sabine's, and the light hurts her own human eyes a bit. "We're turning around. Hit it with something from a distance, let it be someone else's problem, anything. This entire endeavour has been a mess, and I've had enough."

  "What would we hit it with?" Eirlys asks, a tremor barely perceptible in her voice. She's been quiet up until now, and Sabine had been secretly suspecting that Eirlys was holding out hope to reason with the child when they got there. Save it, maybe, driven by some sense of kinship. It breaks Sabine's heart to hear her trying to suppress that hope.

  "It's a child," Sabine protests, but that gets no reaction from either set.

  "We'll figure it out once we're out of here," Ast answers Eirlys.

  "We could lose it if we leave. We can't let it hurt anyone else." Eirlys swallows.

  "We're turning around," Ast repeats.

  "I can't. I can't let you do that."

  Ast finally notices something personal in Eirlys's expression, or maybe some emotion leaked that Sabine wasn't able to sense. They must have read her file, when they'd been part of the mission to kidnap Sabine and Eirlys. They must know about where she came from, what her background is like. "It might be better off dispersed."

  The flash of hurt from Eirlys is strong enough that even Sabine is taken aback. Ast's antennae flatten back slightly; they don't take it back, but they don't seem as confident that that was necessary, either.

  "I'm not letting you do that," Eirlys says softly.

  Ast reaches down, and it's only then that Sabine notices that they have a gun holstered to their side. They bring it up, now, slowly. It's level with Eirlys's centre of mass, and the tone in Ast's voice brokers no argument when they say, "Move."

  Sabine can see where this is going, clear as sunlight. Eirlys isn't going to move. Ast might very well shoot Eirlys. That doesn't look like a human gun, and so Sabine isn't sure what effect it's going to have on humans. Someone has to stop this from escalating.

  Sabine steps forward and presses her sternum to the mouth of the gun.

  She can feel Eirlys's alarm from behind her, the held breaths all around, and Ast's hand doesn't shake. Sabine has the next few seconds to make a move to deescalate the situation. Think fast, Sabine. Think fast.

  She takes a deep breath, out of habit more than anything else, and thinks as loud as she can: rue leaves on wet soil over a coffin underground. She adds, out loud, "Please."

  Ast's eyes glow brighter for a second, startled. They lower the gun. "Okay." There's almost a laugh in their voice. "You didn't quite get it right, but you have my attention. Make it quick."

  Sabine hadn't expected to make it this far, so she's stumped. She opens her mouth, hesitating.

  Ship's voice comes on over the speakers again. "Law enforcement, incoming. Everything's catching up to us at once, hey?" Ship sounds cheerful, and Sabine's stomach drops again. Damn volatile vehicle echoes in her mind. Want off the ride?

  *~*~*

  Sabine, Eirlys, and Ast run down to the cockpit, the only room on Ship with windows. There's a police carrier close enough that they can see it opening up its docking doors slowly to let the smaller police cruisers out. Naomi is standing by the window, her face completely blank, and that says more about how screwed they all are than if anyone else had been panicking openly.

  That doesn't stop Ast from panicking openly, though. Their antennae keep swivelling in uncontrolled directions, and they're mumbling to themselves under their breath: "have to get to Ship, have to—"

  Eirlys loses her patience. "You're in Ship, dammit!" she snarls, stepping toward Ast.

  "Shit," Sabine mutters, and steps in between the two of them. Her hand brushes against Ast just as she takes Eirlys's hand, and for a second she's in that smaller network-space again:

  I'm sorry that I said that, from Ast, and

  Sabine, be more careful! from Eirlys.

  Sabine lets go.

  "Let's draft a plan before anyone else attacks someone on our own side." Sabine clears her throat meaningfully.

  Naomi nods. "What did you have in mind?"

  "We don't have a lot of time." Sabine glances at Eirlys to check, and she nods.

  "About fifteen to twenty minutes before the cruisers reach us," Naomi confirms. "Around the same amount of time for the monster, too."

  Sabine pulls out her notepad. "How fast can Ship go?"

  *~*~*

  Ship likes the plan, which isn't the kind of approval that Sabine's looking for. Ship lives life on the edge, and has honestly been too excited the past couple minutes about the potential of everyone dying horribly.

  The one thing that Sabine doesn't like about her plan is that it actually decreases the amount of time before contact with their opposition. This isn't going to be like chess. If a single moving piece changes direction, they're all done for.

  Sabine's next to Tel, securing the last of their belongings for a violent landing. There's still going to be five to ten minutes before impact, and there's nothing else to do but wait. Tel nudges her.

  "How are we going to make sure it follows us?" she asks in a low voice.

  Sabine grimaces. "It found us because you and 38 were having a heated argument," she points out. "So."


  "Ah. This'll be fun."

  "What did happen between you two?" Sabine can't help but ask. If she's going to die, she's not going down wondering about the relationship drama of two mercenaries she met less than a week ago.

  "38 was… raised by some bad people. And I thought she might do something about it, when I told her, but she didn't and I reacted badly because I'd told her one of my secrets." Tel gets a conspiratorial look on her face. "I'll tell you what it is if you answer a question."

  "Yeah, okay," Sabine agrees immediately. She's never been good with curiosity.

  "I'm in the Witness Protection Program because I was too good at being a mail carrier." Tel smiles, self-deprecating. "Do you have a thing for Eirlys?"

  Sabine pauses, but only because she doesn't want to inadvertently lie. "I'm not sure. Sometimes it's hard to tell, if you're asexual."

  "And dealing with alien romance?"

  "That too." Sabine laughs. A clock display flashes in her peripheral vision. "Okay, we're almost out of time. Go talk to your girl." She waves her off, and walks down in the opposite direction. The beginning of their conversation drifts from behind her.

  "We're going to figure this out," Tel tells 38 grimly, "but I'm not going to like it."

  38 laughs without much humour.

  "Hey, Eirlys." Sabine sits down next to Eirlys in the beanbags. Naomi and Ast are talking quietly with Ship off at the other end of the hallway, and Tel and 38 are positioned halfway down so their voices echo all the way down. Sabine suspects they never much cared for privacy in the first place, either of them.

  "Hey." Eirlys looks up at her, and it strikes Sabine that she has no idea how old Eirlys is in human years. Right now she looks terribly young, and awfully scared.

  Sabine wonders if she looks the same. "If this doesn't work." Her mouth is dry, and she has to swallow before she can continue. "We could all die," she says in as nonchalant a way as possible. There's a giddy sort of dissonance, like that time she stayed up for forty-eight hours, because of the way Ship's exhilaration seeps into all of them and clashes with their fear.

  "We could," Eirlys agrees. She slides her hand a little to the left, appearing aimless until Sabine realizes what she's doing.

  Sabine picks up her hand immediately, but drops it gently when she remembers the practical side of having this conversation right now. They have to make sure the monster doesn't lose interest and drift away. "You know, if we make it out of here…" She loses her courage and changes the way that sentence was going to go. "What did you want to do?"

  Eirlys gives her a small sad smile. "I don't like plans so much. It's too much of a pain when they get disrupted." She lets that hang in the air for a second before she continues. "You're a plan person, though."

  "Yeah." Somehow it's not the same old quasi-compliment coming out of Eirlys's mouth as the one she's heard so many times before. It just seems like fact. "Yeah. I was thinking. If we make it out."

  "If we make it out," Eirlys echoes.

  "We should go somewhere safe. Take a break," Sabine suggests, laughing breathlessly at how unlikely the scenario she's proposing actually is. "We could find a cruise, or. No, not on a ship."

  "Not on a ship," Eirlys agrees. "Maybe your people will finally let us visit your planet."

  "I could take you to a park. I think you'd like birds." Sabine lets herself smile. "Or we could go visit my parents, and you could meet them."

  Eirlys presses her eyes shut for a moment. "Sorry. Need a second." Sabine waits patiently, watching the way her light eyelashes stand out from the grey of the rest of her face. "I wish this was real," she admits, and Sabine can feel the vulnerability even without touching her.

  "I do too," she whispers. And, just because she can see there's only two more minutes, she keeps going. "We could get a house eventually. Somewhere nice and big, with room to run around. There'd be snow in the winter, and rain in the spring."

  "Stop," Eirlys pleads. She's clinging to Sabine's sleeve, though, listening so closely.

  "I could see you every morning," Sabine says, wondering if she's going too far.

  "One minute 'til impact!" Ship calls, and the dream is broken.

  *~*~*

  The plan goes like this: Ship flies as fast as mechanically possible toward the police carrier, before it gets the chance to shut its docking gates. If they time it right, they can get there just after the last cruisers clear the bay but just before it starts closing. They slide in, and then so does the monster, and they'll be able to trap it inside long enough to communicate with it somehow. Sabine tries very hard not to think about going through too early, and being trapped with the cruisers, or—worse—getting in too late, and cutting Ship in half.

  Ship does them one better and skids in before they start closing the doors, scraping the ceiling and crunching right through one of the walls. They're too shocked to flip the switch for the door, but Naomi's ready with airlock-seal in temporary spray bottles, and she secures the atmosphere so that the bit of Ship embedded in the wall can actually open one door into the control space for the dock.

  38 and Tel hop out, fighting back-to-back to deal with the law enforcement inside the control room and gain access to the door switch. Tel hits it, and the doors start closing just as the front end of the monster crunches into Ship's other side.

  The entire delicate structure creaks for a second, and Naomi has to run back and forth to fix the places stretched thin, but nothing breaks. Ast starts working on Ship's internal engines immediately.

  "Can't have you explode on us, sunbeam," Sabine overhears them tell Ship, and she shudders at the thought.

  Eirlys is preparing to go out to meet the child.

  The doors finally slam shut, cutting off a good deal of the thing's tentacles. There's a quality to it that forces Sabine's eyes away whenever she tries to look at it for longer than a second, even though she's immune from the terror effects inside a set-inhabited ship.

  "It's dangerous out there," Eirlys tries to convince her. "I'm going out alone."

  "Like hell you are," Sabine scoffs. "You need me to mediate so you don't get fried, don't you?"

  "It's dangerous," Eirlys repeats, helplessly.

  "The goal isn't to minimize damage," Sabine says, narrowing her eyes. "It's to make sure everyone makes it out. Everyone."

  Eirlys sighs. "All right. Let's go."

  Sabine takes her hand, and they step out together.

  *~*~*

  When Sabine places her hand on it, it becomes immediately obvious that their theory was right. This is a child.

  scared scared scared alone empty scared

  Eirlys's breath hitches, but Sabine is busy trying to send calming feelings over the link to the kid.

  "It works better for you if you have words as a conduit," Eirlys explains once she realizes what Sabine's trying to do. She fumbles with her free hand at her pouch, and produces the spare body they'd cobbled together on the way in. It's made from a few plastic parts, a combination of some old vacuum robot and an even older toy dog. It has scuff marks all over.

  Behind them, Sabine hears gunfire. She trusts the rest of the crew to keep the police off their backs for long enough to manage this. She tries to convince herself that this is nothing, after the bomb.

  "It's okay," Sabine tries. When it seems to work better than just trying to focus on a thought, she says it again louder. "It's okay. It'll be okay. You'll never have to be alone again."

  Eirlys makes a soft sound. Sabine wants to hug her, but right then the child must have collected enough energy from their network, because it moves from the dying horror-beast into the dog-vacuum in one desperate lunge. The huge body goes limp all at once, and the little robot wiggles.

  Eirlys's grin comes slow, incredulous, and then she's laughing and Sabine gets to give her that hug she's been waiting for.

  "We did it. We did it!" Eirlys yells, and Naomi sticks her head out, smiling wide.

  The baby set makes a sound between a sneeze and
a rattle, and coughs up an entire dust bunny.

  CHAPTER TEN

  "For any set, the primary instinct is to connect with the rest of the Network. This brings them numerous benefits, including the energy required to leave and enter anchors (see below), the ability to communicate and fulfil their intense social needs, and the capacity to cooperate with other sets to achieve greater goals.

  A secondary instinct is to find an anchor. Before we can go into that, you first have to understand what an anchor is. An anchor is a way of referring to a physical body that the set inhabits that includes more unconventional anchors like buildings and objects. This is called an anchor because it provides a point for the set to centre themselves on. It's similar to the basic human need for shelter; it prevents death by resonance storms, Matches, or other hostile non-physical threats. It essentially provides them with a second life; if the anchor is destroyed, as long as they are connected to the Network, they have enough energy to leave it behind and seek out a new one.

  While inhabiting their anchors, sets use the energy provided by that anchor's usual energy source (electricity, food, photosynthesis, etc.).

  There are downsides to being anchored. The more obvious one would be that the set is limited to the physical needs and capabilities of the body they chose, and must comply with laws like gravity and energy conservation for the duration. The less clear and more serious consequence is that they must find an anchor that is complex enough to suit them. Think of it like computers: the less "room" there is, the less data can be stored. Children don't need anything more than a rock with carvings on it, sometimes, just to rest in; older adults require either large multicellular living beings or convoluted machinery. If a set has to inhabit a body that isn't sophisticated enough or isn't the right "shape" in emergency situations, then the set has to permanently discard pieces of themselves in order to "fit". This can result in changes in personality, loss of memory, and other unsavoury side-effects, which can explain why sets are often reluctant to change anchors unless absolutely necessary.