Patreon Year 3 Collection REV

by Kameron Hurley

  “They’re going to purge me anyway.” Cori’s shock of sandy hair was mussed.

  “Why would they purge you?” she said.

  She cut open another capsule, spilled the contents onto a piece of paper, licked it up. Her lips were blood red.

  “We can’t be anything but agents,” she said. “Imperfect agents get purged.”

  Gabe felt a cold shiver run across her shoulders, down her spine. She untangled herself from the sheets and stood. Cori did not speak as she put her clothes back on and stepped back through the bio-filter and into the corridor.

  Aisha waited for her outside. Her face was all planes and angles, square jaw and smoothed cheeks.

  “You talked to Jorian today,” she said. “Find out anything?”

  She shrugged.

  Aisha looked past her, toward the mess hall. “The more you research this case, the more you’re going to find things that might point to people in here,” she said. “I encourage you to utilize caution in sharing those indicators with anyone. Especially your Kilkadeen pick.”

  “I know how this works.”

  “I’m just urging caution.”

  “It’s a Defense issue. It goes above intelligence Tailors. But yeah, you know what team I’m on.”

  “Good, good,” Aisha said. Her collar was bent, her long black coat wrinkled, and dark smudges shadowed her eyes.

  “Got to ask what you know, though. And why I don’t know it.”

  “I’m protecting all of this.” Aisha waved her hand. “Better you don’t know. Better you do the job blind.”

  “So it looks proper?”

  “The Creators love it proper, Gabe.”

  #

  The Tailor that let Gabe into the main hub of the network’s central nervous cavity was young, and had pale hair that would have been far more appropriate on a pick.

  “You’re working with Jorian Glen?” the Tailor asked as they palmed open the door.

  “Confidential case.” Gabe shouldered past.

  “The other Tailors are talking. They say this pick is from the Opposition.”

  “Tailors say a lot of things.” Gabe stepped through the filter on the other side of the doorway. She heard the Tailor palm the door shut.

  Inside the circular hub, eighteen picks stood along the rim of the spiraling database, spliced into the system. Thick, ropey tubes wound down from the processors up along the ceiling and plugged into the picks’ arms. The database integrated them into its central nervous system.

  Three Tailors sat along the far wall in tall black padded chairs. They monitored the system on flat observation screens built into the mainframe, wired up with smaller tubes feeding off the central system that hooked up to the picks. Gabe felt the prickle of a bio-filter nearby. Gabe glanced up at the ceiling, at the dense briar of pulsing tubes, the picker of dying globes. She heard the hiss of slippery tubing gorging on its rotting parts, the gurgle of new growth produced somewhere above her in the hub. The whole room was alive.

  One of the Tailors met Gabe at the center of the room.

  “You’re Gabe Hynri? I’m Faer. My pick told me to expect you. Come take a look at the system.”

  Faer flicked a hand at one of the other Tailors, and he moved over to give Gabe and Faer a place at the center of the observation console. Faer brought up the reports detailing recent maintenance activity, stats on the daily electrical output stimulating the security fences, and a schematic that showed the internal skeleton of the hub and the complicated wiring network that connected the hub to the other agent and pick facilities in their sector. She pointed out the blackened portion of the hub’s brain wiring, a cancerous nest of worm-like tubes that congealed around the sphere of the outbound communications relay.

  “We’ve got three picks in there now, manually injecting saline into the invalid pathways,” Faer said.

  “Where are the pathways going to?”

  “Falandir compound. Ours.”

  And Gabe thought, Jorian.

  “Why?” Gabe said.

  “That’s your job, not mine. Or, I should say, your pick’s job. But I know the system, and from what I’ve seen of it, this has been going on since Kilkadeen. We brought in a lot of picks from there.”

  “How many?”

  “About three hundred. Most of them died. They aren’t compatible with our system.” She shrugged.

  Gabe glanced at the fragile pick bodies lining the walls. They were skinnier than even Jorian, pale and maggot-like, eyes rolled back into their heads, their bodies supported by structures built into the walls – these ones weren’t even capable of holding themselves up anymore. As she watched, one of the picks burbled something inarticulate, then sighed. Aisha once told her that the hub went through five or six picks a month.

  “Are any of these picks from Kilkadeen?” Gabe asked.

  “Of course not. We wouldn’t use them this deep in our defense grid. But Defense did try out the Kilkadeen picks near here for a while. Like I said, they just weren’t compatible with the system.”

  “You mean they died?”

  “Yeah.”

  Gabe stared at the twisting stats and schematics on the observation screens. “I need to go up there with the picks to oversee that saline injection.” That was a lie; Jorian hadn’t told her to do it, and agents weren’t supposed to think for themselves, but she wanted to see exactly what was going on up there so she could report it to Jorian. Would Faer notice, or just assume Jorian had outlined all of her instructions, just as Faer’s pick outlined all of hers?

  Faer called down the picks from the observation console and led Gabe through the low entryway at the back of the hub and into a cylindrical room.

  “The system’s been down for four days,” Faer said. “We’re still sending non-vital communications, and facilitating the energy input and output to the compounds, of course, but all information is still considered insecure. Here’s the picks.”

  Inside the room, metal rungs led up into the tangle of the central nervous hub. Three picks stood by the rungs, frowning in Gabe’s general direction, but not looking at her. All of their gazes focused mainly on the floor.

  On Faer’s instruction, the picks led Gabe up into the central nervous system. All of the picks were slow, awkward, weak, as they pulled themselves up the rungs. The rungs themselves were slick with mucus and bits of organic grit.

  The picks, once they reached the end of the long ladder of rungs, slithered through the system with ease. Their thin little bodies slipped through the small spaces between the tubes and further into the cancerous nest of black pathways, spidery veins of blue-black, big around as Gabe’s fingers. Here, the picks were at home, moving like worms through soil, running their hands over the tubing, tugging out the rotted flesh of the system, injecting the alternate pathways, tearing them out.

  The picks slipped back past Gabe with fistfuls of dead tubing, and tossed them past her, down the cylindrical shaft. Black flesh tumbled below, landing with a soft squish on the metallic floor.

  “How do you know what’s infected?” Gabe said as one of the picks tossed another clump of dead tubing down the shaft.

  The pick started at her voice. He adverted his eyes. “They have signatures.”

  “Where?”

  He slid back toward the others, and said over his shoulder, “Every pick has a signature pattern. These all have the same pattern. We sent up black dye through the bodies of the picks in the hub, and they programmed it to attach itself to this signature pattern.”

  “What’s the signature pattern?”

  “It’s a DNA code. A string.”

  “Belonging to one particular pick?”

  The pick finally stopped and looked back at her, looked her in the face. “No. These belong to picks who are dead. Picks working with one agent.”

  “What? Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “No one asked us.”

  “Who was the agent?”
/>
  The pick shrugged. “Don’t know. But these patterns belong to cressin picks, the sort of picks that work on internal security issues with Defense.”

  “Where do I find cressin picks?”

  “Same as the others. Falandir compound.”

  The Falandir compound again. Damn.

  Gabe clambered back down the rungs. She strode out of the barracks and into the blanket of dusk, following the twisting path illuminated by the globes strung out among the knobby black branches of the ren trees lining the walk. Orange leaves collected along the path.

  She crossed through the fence.

  Her skin prickled.

  She walked through the darkness of the Falandir compound, back into the main building, and ran into three picks just outside the library. They scuttled around her, nodding nervously as she asked for the cressin picks. They all exchanged cautious glances.

  “What?” Gabe said.

  “All the cressin picks are dead,” one said.

  “Wiped out,” another said.

  “Their agent used them up on his project.”

  “Agent? What agent? What project?” Gabe said.

  Again, the nervous glances, the uneasy twittering and shuffling. Finally, one of them said, “Their agent, Cori. She oversaw all the cressin picks.”

  Cori? Her Cori? The agent down the hall? Surely not.

  Gabe left them and went back out the other side of the compound. She walked back up the hill to the spiral of residences, to the door of Jorian Glen.

  She reached for the com button, but the gate was already partially open. She stepped into the yard, and the moist heat of the conditioning system enveloped her. She shut the gate behind her and stepped across the walk, into the house.

  “Jorian?” She skirted around the stacks of books and journals and walked into his room.

  Jorian lay prostrate in his bed, arguing with the med, who stood over him with a butterfly-shaped syringe. Some of the glow worms inside the globes illuminating his room had died. Only two remained, and their light was sickly orange, shadowy.

  Jorian made a face at Gabe. “I’ve been getting better. Tell her not to pinch so hard.”

  “Tiny veins, these arms,” the med said.

  Jorian turned his head away and grimaced as she injected serum into his vein. “Go, go, I have to talk to her.”

  The med cast a glance at Gabe. “He’s a big baby,” she said as she left.

  “Well?” Jorian said. “You came to report.” He held a hand to his punctured flesh, but did not rub it.

  “The picks have got signature patterns from the mainframe. Signatures were all assigned to one agent, Cori, a woman I know. My damn neighbor, if you can believe it.”

  Jorian stared up at the ceiling, still holding his arm. “What picks are they using to repair the system?”

  “Ours. No one ever told me there were other picks here from Kilkadeen.”

  “Obviously, someone just did, or you wouldn’t be bringing it up.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Still living? A handful. Five or six. We’re not compatible with your systems.”

  “I heard that.” Gabe sat down in the desk chair, gently urging the cat away from her. It meowed and hopped up onto Jorian’s bed, crawled onto his stomach. He let go of his arm and reached for the cat.

  “Why did you all die? When Defense brought you here, not all of you were allergic surely. How could you be allergic to our systems? ”

  “Not all of us were allergic. But most were. And there are only so many doctors who can take care of us. Who know our systems. You all have immunio-bacterial organisms inside of you. Planted there from birth. Symbiotic, mostly. We don’t have any way to combat the sorts of diseases we encounter here. Talaba here is the last of our doctors.”

  Gabe looked out into the hallway. She heard the med, Talaba, moving things around in the kitchen. “So what if something happens to her?”

  “Then I die. This last of us die.” He sighed. “This is morbid. What about the report? Who said it was this agent, this Cori?”

  “The picks did.”

  “You talked to picks?”

  “Have you heard of cressin picks? It’s their signature patterns on the tubing, and Cori’s the one who works with cressin picks, the picks say.”

  “Have you talked to Cori?”

  “Well, no.”

  “You’ve jumped to conclusions, then, simply believing the word of a pick without their agent.”

  “But –”

  “You can run and tell Defense it’s Cori, but I think you’re wrong.”

  “Why did you pick me for this case? That’s what Aisha said. She said you picked me. Why? Clearly you think I’m a shitty agent.”

  “That’s why I picked you.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “You’re three years behind your classmates. You think too much. You get by on anger and sex and intimidation. That’s what agents do, yes, but you’ve perfected it.”

  “All you picks are the same. The same weak, pale, starved, maggoty meat bred to churn through our systems.”

  “And all you agents are the same. Big and dumb. Big, dumb meat bred to carry out tasks your picks are smart enough but not strong enough to perform. Ever wonder why they didn’t make us into one being? Form and function, all seamlessly melded into one spectacular human being?”

  “It’s not something I think about.”

  “Right, because agents don’t think. Did you ever wonder who the Opposition is?”

  “They’re the Opposition, the creators of our Creators, and they want to purge us all. That’s all I need to know.”

  “Go tell Defense to purge Cori, then. Tell them you’re a good little agent with an impeccable track record and you only do as your smart little pick tells you. Tell them we are completely incompatible, and you want nothing to do with me. Go slaughter Cori and run back through the fence.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Try a little variety in your vocabulary. I can guess what you’re going to say three sentences before you say it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “There it is again.”

  #

  Gabe dreamt about Jorian hooked up into the hub, Jorian staring at her with his cat’s eyes, Jorian saying, “You’re not asking the right questions.”

  She woke drenched in sweat, alone in her own bed. Her filter was set to red. She pulled herself out of the sheets, scratched at the loop in her ear, and dressed.

  The filter light next to Cori’s doorway was red. She pressed her thumb to the light, hoping the filter would admit her. It blinked once, but continued to shine red. The room was dark. The soft glow of the system screen fell onto Cori’s bed, and she saw her lean form outlined in the pale light. Gabe hit the admittance buzzer. Cori did not move.

  The filter flashed green.

  Gabe jumped through.

  “Cori?” she said.

  Cori moaned.

  She walked to his bedside. Cori lay naked on top of the sheets, both hands on her stomach, gaze fixed on the ceiling. Her face was flush, her lips red. Gabe stepped over two empty bottles of worm-bred capsules. The powder still stuck to Cori’s lips.

  “Did you eat all of these, Cori?”

  Tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes, gleaming in the light of the system screen.

  “Did you sabotage the com hub?” Gabe asked.

  “Can you hold my hand, Gabe? Dying is lonely.”

  “Living is lonely. You aren’t special.”

  Cori barked out a laugh. The laugh turned into a fit of hacking. Blood flecked his lips and chin. “I tried to breed them. I didn’t ask them to fuck with any of our systems.”

  “Breed them… To each other?”

  “To me.”

  “We’re sterile, Cori. So are they.”

  “That’s what the Creators want us to think. They want us to think we don’t h
ave any power over our bodies, Gabe. We’re slaves. They made us slaves, but I found what they fucked with. I found it and tried to breed the picks, and they died.”

  “What kind of a –”

  “The Opposition is the perfect being,” Cori said. “They’re beautiful. Whole people. I’ve seen them. But the Creators won’t allow us to be like them. We’re not whole people, Gabe. We’re partial. Incomplete. It’s how they keep us slaves, by controlling how they breed us. It shouldn’t be like this. We should be free to merge as we like, to create as we like, just like them. Better than them.”

  “Please hold me, Gabe. I’m so lonely.”

  Gabe stood still by the system screen, watching Cori die.

  “The med said I’d die quick. But not quick enough,” Cori murmured.

  “The med?”

  “She… helped us. She knew how to reverse the sterility. She was the only med that knew.”

  “She changed their signature patterns.”

  “Their codes. Yes. Made them all the same. I’m lonely, Gabe. I’m dying, Gabe. Where’s Aisha, Gabe?”

  “Talaba. Jorian’s med? She helped you scheme at this? Cover those codes? Infect the system?

  “She tried to help us be free.”

  Gabe did not wait until Cori died. Cori would die as she had been born as she had lived - alone. Just like all of them. Gabe pressed the filter shutter by the bed, switching the light to green, and walked away.

  Cori called after her; she cried and cried and the cry turned into a wracking cough, and then Gabe was through the filter, and her skin prickled, and she couldn’t hear Cori’s dying anymore.

  Gabe wanted to hurt someone. She wanted to tear her room apart and go back to Aisha and pummel her head into a bloody pulp. As an agent, Gabe was obligated to go to Defense with this news. She was required to report to them. To tell them her pick and his med were endangering the entire compound, and worse – the entire way of life prescribed by the creators.

  But she was a worthless agent.

  She walked to the com hub, and the androgynous Tailor told her Faer wasn’t there.

  “It’s a different shift tonight,” the Tailor said.

  “I need to see those picks. The ones I was with yesterday.”

  “They’ve been purged”