Cosmic Cabaret

by SFR Shooting Stars

  He, on the other hand, searched her face, his eyes going back and forth over her features as if he were reading an info slate. He reached out, lightning quick, and cupped her chin, tilting her face back and forth. “Can it be?” He grabbed both of her shoulders. "By the Torch’s life-giving flares," he murmured. "I never thought I'd find you."

  He crushed his lips to hers.

  Milady froze at the touch of his lips on hers, but only for a moment. The next moment, she kissed him back and the play of his lips over hers amazed her. The moment after that, she worked her hands up between them and shoved him back hard. “What do you think you’re doing? Just because I performed doesn’t give you the right to take--liberties!”

  He sprang back, his eyes registering shock. “Meiji--”

  The machine in her head screamed and turned the world white.

  She dropped to the floor in front of him and Thann panicked. He rushed to break her fall, lowering her to the ground while she made terrible, soft, heart-rending noises deep in her throat. Everything from the past two years unspooled and he was back at the Academy, standing in the amphitheater in shock and humiliation while the Trust ripped the only thing he’d ever truly desired from his life with their pronunciation. The helplessness then found its twin in the helplessness he felt now.

  “Evia, help me!”

  Attempting to create neural link...

  For two years after the humiliation of the rejected alliance, Thann kept to himself, staying very deeply in the experimental labs, running tests on prototype star drives, engines, and ship designs. When he wasn't in a lab, he skirted way too close to the N’tar cloud, in vessels that had no business flying, pushing himself and his vessels to the limit of what either of them could take.

  “Meiji! Meiji, please--I finally found you.” When he was not at work or consumed by thoughts of work, he maintained a network of contacts from every minor noble house that would accept his handshake. Contacts in the business sector, friends in finance, allies in agriculture. All had their ears to the ground – and the 15% discount — with any news of the whereabouts of the first daughter of House Michado. Unlike the rest of the empire, he refused to believe she was dead.

  His network extended over Landfall's surface. Even to the moons of Jioni and Subax. The only place he couldn't reach definitively was Hareem, and his cousin's girlfriend promised to keep an ear to the ground when her family matriarchs found their way to the gender-restricted moon.

  Master Thann, her neural interface is corrupted. Evad’s connection to her neural is consuming all the memory. Recommend a surgical analysis, a full diagnostic, and a factory reset of unconscious functions. Expect possible data loss in non-critical sectors.

  “Her neural is malfunctioning?”

  Meiji’s eyes fluttered.

  Confirmed. The EV-AD unit’s connection to it seems to be generating a feedback field. I can only imagine the pain she must be feeling.

  “You’re an AI. You can only ever imagine anyone’s pain.”

  This is true, Master, but you don’t have to point it out.

  She began counting, prime numbers, and when she reached a hundred and seven, her eyes drifted open.

  “Meiji!” Even the weird colors and streaks of make-up couldn't obscure her features – features he’d memorized, beloved features, features he believed he'd wake up next to for the rest of his life until forces greater than even the Emperor commanded had torn them away from each other. "Meiji — Meiji, my beloved —"

  "My name is Milady," she said. Her features — those beloved features — shifted into wariness. "And — I don't — I don't know you."

  The expression on her face sent a crushing weight to his midsection. Her eyes couldn’t hide the lack of recognition. He couldn’t find Meiji because Meiji truly was gone, and now some other woman wore her face.

  He wondered if he'd somehow lost his mind over the two years they’d been apart. Maybe he’d finally succumbed to the illusions aboard the ship. “Oh, beloved.” He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get enough air. “We were going to be married.”

  Milady’s head throbbed. Her skull felt like it was stuffed with too much information. This Thann Zalco--charming, noble, smarter than she expected, not a bad kisser, either--called her Meiji, claimed they were lovers?

  A warning fought for prominence in her thoughts. The leader of the Drift community that had taken her in after her flitter crash warned her that if she had come from the Spires, there was a reason she had fallen so far and no one came back to retrieve her. She pushed up to a sitting position and shoved his hands away. What if he was one of the people who wanted her gone? House Zalco’s sigil always triggered a reaction from the implant in her head--maybe it was a warning. She frowned and sized him up with sudden suspicion.

  He seemed to read her body language and held up his hands. “I’m not going to hurt you. And I won’t kiss you again unless you ask for it. But you had a--a seizure of some sort.”

  She struggled to her feet, but her knees weren’t strong enough to hold her. He ducked back under her arm to support her. “How about a date at the infirmary?” His tone was grim, and held hints of wry humor that twisted her insides, even through the raging headache.

  For whatever reason, something in her trusted something in him. She nodded, and began to speak. “I had an accident. Lost my memories.” Unbidden tears welled in her eyes as they left Engineering for the med-bay. “I was--I was rebuilding my life here.”

  Thann moved slowly, supporting most of her weight, and she felt terrible for leaning so heavily on him. But when she looked up into his face, the broken longing in his expression made things worse, so she dropped her eyes back down to her feet.

  “The person you were--Meiji Michado--was--is--the love of my life. We fell in love at my last year at the Cultural Academy. You still had two years to go, so I stayed on as a flight instructor for the new students. You were Michado heiress, and you were on track to make Scion when our families petitioned the Trust for an alliance.” He paused and licked his lips. When she risked another glance, his expression had shuttered. “We were lucky. We loved each other and our families were in favor. We were a Sure Thing, as the markets call it.”

  Milady listened, but it sounded like a story about other people. How could she forget? She sent a cautious poke to the machine in her head, forming a careful visual of Thann’s House colors.

  Feedback shot through her brain and she stumbled. Thann caught her up in his arms. But the static cleared and she--remembered something. “Laugh,” she said.

  “Oh, beloved, if only I could.”

  She tugged on his arm. “I don’t know, just do it.”

  He tried a weak chuckle.

  “Tell me something we did that was funny.” She pulled away from him, stronger on her feet now, but she didn’t let go of his hand.

  “Er...we stole a flitter from the Academy garage and raced a lunar shuttle for about two klicks before air traffic control locked out the controls.” This time, he did laugh. “You were hysterical with worry over your academic record. I remember Princess Ione--” He trailed off.

  Milady stared at his mouth. The laugh, when it came, came hard on the heels of a phantom laugh in her mind. Before the laugh started, she knew it was going to be sharp. And end on a higher note. She shook her head, bewildered. “I--remember that laugh--”

  The hopeful shift of his features punched her in the gut. She shook her head, hoping to forestall any untruths. “I still don’t remember you.”

  They reached the med-bay and Thann led her inside, explaining what happened. A few minutes later, as she was waiting for someone to analyze the results from her diagnostic bed, Palma burst into the cubicle. “What is going on here?” She swept her arms protectively around Milady and glared at Thann. “You here to make trouble, son?”

  Thann shook his head. “No, ma’am. I’ve only just found her again.”

  Milady lifted her head from Palma’s bosom. “Hey, I’m not trouble!”
>
  Thann’s eyes unfocused for a moment. “Evia is insisting you have surgery.”

  “Evia?”

  “EV-1A. She’s my neural’s AI interface. You have one, too.”

  “I have a what?” Milady pulled away from Palma.

  A medic flung back the curtain to the cubicle. “You have a neural implant in your brain that is causing your migraines. If it isn’t fixed, you’ll keep getting them and you could do permanent damage.” His acerbic tone brooked no argument.

  Thann stepped forward. “My neural and its AI are familiar with hers. They’ve interfaced frequently. If there’s anything I can do to help--”

  “Get her to authorize consent for me to open up her brain.”

  Twelve

  Palma didn’t want her to undergo the surgery. The ship’s med-bay, fully outfitted as it was, was still not a full-on surgical hospital. Kella, the drinks girl who’d first suggested she might have a neural, stood by her. She even brought Rashid down to the med-bay to vouch for his partner’s medical skills.

  “I have allowed Sev to operate on my own person,” the bartender-contortionist said. “Sev’s military career was impeccable, and his bedside manner is the worst thing about him.”

  “Umm, not helping,” Kella said.

  Sev shrugged. “In my time as a Fleet medic, I saw dozens of neurals, and even repaired botch-jobs and black-market installs from the colonies.” He glanced from Palma to Milady, who sat on the medi-bed, arms folded. “You can let her go, and hope things clear up, or watch as the more likely path manifests. Her headaches will become more frequent, the migraine triggers will increase, and a broken implant could degrade enough to cause infection. In her brain.”

  Sev returned his gaze to Palma. “Or I can go in there, assess the damage, maybe even reset things, and she might even get her memories back.”

  “If she doesn’t want them?” Palma. “Right now, they can’t hurt her.”

  “They can’t,” Sev said. “But an infected implant can.”

  Milady spoke up from the bed. Her stomach was cold and cramped with anxiety, but Thann Zalco’s words haunted her. He knew who she was, but not why she’d disappeared or how she ended up in the sublevels. And as much as the migraines hurt, the holes in her memory were like thick plasma, choking up the fusion drives and missing the gravity slingshots, leaving her in dead space instead of on an accelerated trajectory. “Do it.” She glanced at Palma. “I have to know. If there’s a chance--and if I can stop getting a headache every time I look at Thann’s clothes--I can’t make a life if I’m always waiting for the next trigger.”

  Palma’s eyes filled with tears. “Girl, when you first came to us, you were like a fallen star. If this could get you back up in the sky, I guess I’d be a fool to keep you from trying.” Palma wrapped her strong arms around her and squeezed tight. “We’ll be here when you wake up.”

  “So will I.” Even though she said it with conviction, she wasn’t certain. Her last, panicked thought as Sev fitted the breathing mask over her face and applied an anaesthetic patch to her neck was, What if I’m gone when I wake up? What if I’m no longer me?

  Thann Zalco shifted to allow the medic to program the diagnostic bed, but he refused to let go of her fingers. As the anesthetic blackened the edges of her vision, she felt as if she were falling back into the sublevels of Landfall. Only the wildflower-hue of his eyes gave her a lifeline; two bright points in encroaching darkness.

  A month ago, she'd clawed her way up from the 400's on Landfall doing every odd job she could think of--with the help of the thing in her head--and earned, scrap by scrap, the passes, credits, and goodwill she needed to climb up to the 600 levels of an arcology close to the industrial shipyards building a massive settlement ship that would carry colonists--and hopefully her--off the overpopulated rock. But the settlement ship turned her away. "Not enough history. Only so much room for Drifts and sublevelers with questionable pedigrees." The immigration officer hadn't been kind when he zeroed out her application at the Settlement Center.

  Outside, Milady’s friend Sunita used a cracked data-slate and a hack to wipe her application from the Settlement database and encouraged her to try again on a different day. Instead, Milady hatched a different plan when she borrowed the slate and the thing in her head woke up to highlight a gossip feed, of all things. The Royal Tattler--she had no idea why the community she'd (literally) fallen into took such interest in the Emperor's family--had reported that the Emperor and his wife would be enjoying a cruise on LS Quantum prior to the official opening of the Coronation Anniversary festivities marking the Emperor's thirty-year reign.

  She knocked on her skull. I don't care about what Emperor Magnus does, unless it's cleaning the air down here so I don't have to wear a mask. But the stupid flicker kept coming back, highlighting the words "LS Quantum" and "luxury stellar cruise ship."

  "What?" Sunita reached for the slate with a hand that was mottled with patches of toughened iridescent cartilage, like shards of mirror, matching the rest of her body. The Drift girl's deft hands navigated through the slate, reflecting flashes of the soft oranges and golds of the night-cycle lights illuminating the outermost thoroughfare of the massive arco-scraper that housed millions from the lowest in poverty to a towering spire where noble house Scions moved millions of credits with a word.

  "LS Quantum, huh?" She glanced at Milady. "Fancy." Then she glanced up, the eyeshine that allowed her to see more than adequately in the murk reflecting the light from the info-slate. "Up there."

  Even though they could only see about twenty levels through the haze to the ceiling of this segment of the arcology, and the shipyard obscured everything else, Milady knew what her friend was seeing.

  Sky. Freedom. A way out.

  Sunita glanced back at her. “You go.”

  “I can’t afford a luxury cruise, are you insane?”

  “Fix it, then.” Sunita’s hands moved along with her words, adding context to her curt words. Rainbows dazzled Mei’s eyes as her friend prodded her. “Bigships. Lotta people, lotta work.” The lights from Sunita’s gestures painted afterimages on Milady’s vision. The bustle of a large cruise liner not unlike the one surrounding the settlement ship right outside. Through the grime-encrusted window separating the arcology from the soupy atmosphere of Landfall’s lower levels, the lights of the shipyard lit up the haze as ‘bots and workers flitted around the nearly-finished settlement ship.

  Sunita’s words were few, but her message was clear. If the settlement ship wouldn't take her as a colonist, then maybe Quantum would have her as an engine tech. She tapped the info-slate. "Can you give me a past?"

  Sunita hopped off the low wall that separated the strip of bravely struggling “green” space from the vehicle and foot-traffic thoroughfare. On the other side of the green, the green crept up the subdivided walls defining the spaces of apartments and offices linked together by catwalks that webbed the twenty-story space above their heads. Down this deep, the reflective conduits that brought sunlight didn't bring very much of it, and as the diurnal lights faded from night-cycle oranges and golds to day-cycle blues and greens, Sunita created a history for her.

  Milady had learned much since waking up in the gloom and fighting for breath, surrounded by the Drift community that rescued her from the wreckage of a flitter with no memory of how she got there. She couldn’t remember anything of the events that put her into the flitter, or anything about her old life. The purring machine in her head was some sort of implant, but no one in the sublevel communities had access to that kind of tech, and she realized she must have been well-to-do at some point. But without an identity, even if she were Princess Ione herself--and she knew for certain she wasn’t--she could never climb back up to the Spires to reclaim a single thing.

  She wasn’t sure she even wanted to. Thinking about the Spires filled her with a formless, yet powerful, sadness. An ache deep in her solar plexus that kept her eyes firmly on the sublevels. Sunita, along with Palma and Itaru,
the grizzled and rough de facto mayor of the community that had nothing but shared it with her, helped her make a place for herself.

  She discovered a natural aptitude for stardrive mechanics, but any time she sought out employment with the largest stardrive manufacturer on Landfall, the thing in her head went from a purr to a screeching nightmare of feedback. Something about the Zalco House icon sent lances of blackout pain through her head.

  The first time it happened, Itaru had warned her that her past may have something to do with House Zalco. “I know what it’s like up there, Milady.” The name he’d given her felt cringe-worthy, but it had taken her obviously upper class roots and turned them into something that amused the community, rather than a threat. Itaru’s foresight kept some of the rougher members of the community from turning on her in her vulnerability. “They don’t let go of what’s theirs with ease. If you’ve been down here with us this long, either someone up there wanted you gone, or you needed to be gone.”

  She drifted back further, to the brief flashes of memory that hadn’t become corrupted prior to landing in the sublevels. She remembered a flitter, well-appointed with luxury fittings and expensive refreshments.

  “Milady, it’s time for you to come back now.”

  Milady? Who’s Milady?

  Thirteen

  She fought her way up from unconsciousness. The sensation was not unlike doing the zero-gee flips, only she didn’t feel the beads and sequins from the precarious costume getting in the way. Like being naked in zero-gee and not caring.

  An antiseptic smell was the first thing that hit her. Murmurs came next, and the quiet beeping of monitors.

  “Please, tell me she’s whole again.”

  Her pleasant swim crashed into reality’s undertow. Flawless. The word had been echoing in her head without context for so long, but now she remembered it, dropping from the lips of the old crone that grabbed her jaw with too-harsh fingers and turned her head this way and that.