by Anthology
Friend Paolo stepped across the threshold and the tendrils tightened. The boat quivered. He took another step and the tendrils contracted further, pulling it into shadow.
The air was still thin—too little oxygen, somehow. Lightheaded, he rested his hand against the closest wall to steady himself, his fingers upon the purpling surface—and in a rush of cold, he felt fear, fear, fear pour into him.
He staggered back and the sensation cut away; still, he counted out the seconds to calm himself. But even as the adrenaline fog lifted the fear stayed, compartmentalized somewhere within him, separate from his own emotions as if it belonged to someone else.
In the corners, the rope-vines stiffened. The boat shifted; the fear in him surged.
“Is that…” he whispered, then, hesitantly, “Is that you, Boat?” He felt like an idiot.
Many years ago, before his work with Paolo had overtaken him, he helped care for his neighbor’s horse. A huge, stamping thing, wreathed in steam in the early mornings, it was always attentive, always nervous. He can feel you, his neighbor told him, even if you’re not touching him. Just gotta love him, that’s all, and he’ll trust you.
Why not? Friend Paolo licked his lips and shushed into the overgrown room. Just love him. He made a soft kissing noise and patted the wall. It rippled. The fear began to ebb.
“Okay,” he whispered, his heart beating faster as wonder overtook him. What had they done out there? “It’s okay. I think.”
The tendrils loosened and the boat swung a few inches toward him.
“Shh, it’ll all be okay. Let’s go find our friend.”
On the open water, the sail unfurled above him like the fin of an enormous steel fish.
***
A frenetic spiral of steam and water encased the platform. Around it, police and coast guard vessels clustered like a flock of fat metal birds. Hailstones rattled down on them, pinging off hulls and churning water. Crewmembers flitted back and forth across the decks, but the ships themselves were held utterly still, gripped by the ocean swells like bugs in amber.
Through this still-life, the sailboat split the water like a missile.
Friend Paolo, hunched in the bow, rubbed at his arms and stomped his feet to combat the persistent, localized frost. People on the ships waved tiny matchstick arms and shouted unintelligible orders over bullhorns, but the boat raced on, trembling with exertion. Soon they were alone, and the towering madness of the vortex parted before them like curtains hanging from the sky.
Within the storm-pillar, everything was new and calm, as cold as a January dawn. The water spout, a smooth matte gray on the inside, rose rigid to frame a sky that glowed like embers. The platform was still there, but above it…above it…
The buildings constructed directly on the platform were unmistakably Paolo’s designs. Smooth, sterile shapes, rounded at the edges. But higher up, the structures grew increasingly foreign, bulged and twisted, as though some other power had wrested control mid-creation. Higher still, high enough to catch the clouds, they split and stretched out like hundreds of bent fingers. At the top, no trace of Paolo’s influence could be seen—no frame of reference existed for what Friend Paolo saw.
He lifted his hand over his eyes to block the smoldering orange sky, only to find his fingertips had turned blue. He half stood, panting for breath, but his knees locked and he fell against the boat’s smooth walls, inches from going overboard. Like the shed, he realized, too late—the air was different, unbreathable.
“Wh—” he said, but his tongue froze inside his mouth, the saliva made ice, his teeth aching. Blue had leaked from his fingertips, up his hands and arms in thin, veiny streaks.
I’m going to die out here.
His lungs pumped a strange mixture of gases, in and out, never sated. But through his coarse gasping, a new noise rose over that of the water, of his frantic pulse.
Shhhhh, it said, shush, shush.
Above him, the boat’s bladed sail tremored like a rattlesnake tail. Something touched his shoulder.
Shhhhhhhhhh. Again the sail trembled.
His chest seized. Everything was turning gray.
The touch upon his shoulder slithered up to his chin, wet and groping. Friend Paolo tried to look, but his neck wouldn’t respond; he could only stare in terror toward the approaching platform. Soundless, the thing pushed against his neck. Tiny hairs emerged from it, crept up his face like ivy on stonework. Past his chin and his paralyzed lips, scraping filaments across his tongue, they probed at his throat. He tried to breathe, tried to scream, and they plunged forward, threading through his lungs and into his bronchial tubes.
High on the platform, something moved.
***
Friend Paolo was not dead.
The sky burned, strange cancerous growths had overtaken the platform, and within the buildings leggy shadows scurried past windows—and Friend Paolo was not dead.
He stood in a narrow canyon between the platform’s distorted shapes, learning to breathe again. Thousands of rubbery strings webbed through his body, emerging from his mouth and nose and even his pores to snake back through the alleys and streets to the edge of the fantastic cityscape where they rooted him to the sailboat. Pain dotted hot white stars across his vision. But in this strange place, even though he might have died—who could know—before the loving symbiosis of the boat brought him back, he felt more vibrant than he’d felt in years.
At the centre of the once-smooth platform, where he had once gulped impossibly fresh water, where he’d argued with his oldest friend, there was now an enormous, fleshy cone, stuttering open and closed at the top as it gasped in air and belched out a frosted mist that curled slow, lazy spirals around his ankles.
Beside it, the shell, the device, whatever it was, rested on one of only two unaltered areas of steel. Its interface panels had unfolded and unfolded again, into a prism of shapes that could not exist. And yet they persisted. Twice as tall as him and wider still, they cast a pulsing green glow over everything. Endless symbols flashed and scrolled within the panel-wings, but the hieroglyphics were meaningless to Friend Paolo except to show that the object was hard at work.
And beside the shell, on a small circle of the unblemished rig was Paolo: still kneeling, but naked, blackened, and withered. Only the flutter of his eyelids and the rise and fall of his emaciated chest suggested he was still alive.
Friend Paolo sighed, and his ribs creaked, the cords in his lungs swelling with the effort of extracting and delivering oxygen.
Symbols on the interface quickened, thousands upon thousands of them flaring to life and fading in long meteoric streaks. High above, ropy growths separated from the buildings and coalesced into spider-like creatures. They exhaled ribbons of vapor as they descended, their long legs tapping sharp against the walls.
The threads in him writhed and flexed; everything blurred with tears—but he had to stop it, whatever Paolo had done, whatever the device was still doing.
He reached for the thing, smooth black beneath its green wings, closed both hands around it, and everything flared white—green?—white, blinding—as within him, the ties to the boat yanked and inflated, cracking bone, tearing muscle, and he floated, perhaps, or…
Amputated…
And—Paolo? Paolo?—Paolo was gone.
Friend Paolo felt himself unmoored, vertiginous, in the interstices of the cosmos. Stars, planets, the precise mathematics of orbits and heavenly trajectories, the fluttering pathways of comets, all were laid out like a map. And scattered among them, fragile clusters of life, strangers in the dark. Or…friends.
Friends?
He was not alone.
Something shared his mind. Something purposeful. Fanatical.
The object—the Seed, that was its name, he suddenly knew—rested heavy in his hands. He saw the platform again and his own body, still intact, and the overgrown ruins of Paolo’s buildings, and he knew now their pinpoint place in the expanse.
Instructions, or instinct, c
oursed through him—the unstoppable drive to take root, to create—and he sank in the undertow of the Seed’s will. Molecular bonds separated before them; atoms waited for guidance. Within them, together, they held the power to remake the world.
But buried beneath that, deep beneath that, Friend Paolo felt something else. Something pitiful, and with pity.
Hello? said a voice that was not a voice. Hello? Hello? Hello?
***
Something responded to the Navigator’s greeting. A new presence, softer than the other, the one that had flared and fallen. It thought at her in strange sounds, a string of guttural code; the language was alien, but beneath it there was common ground in the emotion and the intent.
It communicated fear. Not for itself, not at first, but for its home, and for its friend.
Safe? said the creature, without words.
The Navigator, pinned to the sand, felt the creature’s helplessness. No, she said. Not safe.
Why? Why not safe? Seed?
Correct. Seed, not safe.
Paolo is strong. Save him? I can save him?
The creature’s love and longing flooded the Navigator and, reflexively, she mirrored it with her own. Her whips lifted in the current, a mockery of her former lightness.
No, she said. You cannot save him.
They were quiet, alone together.
Finally, the creature spoke again. Why?
He stood before it like a wall. Battered to dust.
And now?
Everything changes.
I can stop it?
No, said the Navigator. Batter you to dust.
We can stop it?
No. It does not stop. Batter us to dust.
Something penetrated the expanding cracks of her armor and scraped its mouth against her. She was so soft now.
The creature insisted: Slow it?
It has a mission.
You brought it to kill us?
No, she said. I was not to be here. You would not have been there. Mission is to build new home.
The waterlife bit into her. Pain radiated through the segments of her body, like before, when she was fragile.
Reminded of her former fragility, she thought of her people withering without a home and, without meaning to, she shared visions of this new world flaring orange and red, disintegrating before the transformative power of the Seed. The creature panicked, then paused. The Navigator could feel its emotions smoothing.
Redirect it? the creature said after a pause. Let the Seed build somewhere else? The creature thought of other planets nearby—dead, harmless places, so close.
I am broken, said the Navigator. It will build here.
The creature considered. Its mind was visible to her. It thought incessantly of the other as if pleading or praying for response, then it was lost in the magnitude of the planet and, beyond that, the breadth of space.
It thought in great whorls and loops like the other creature had, but stiffer, more effortful, and less fruitful. But the other was gone; the other was dust, and this new creature froze in long contemplation.
And gradually the shape of its thoughts hardened into grids and schematics, an imposition of order.
Contain it, it said finally. The creature showed her a platform, perched atop the ocean, surrounded by the maelstrom which contained the Seed’s changes.
It is too small, she said, but immediately the creature shared a new vision, of mountains and plains, an entire continent raised from the ocean floor for the Seed to do its work upon, all cabined within those same walls of wind and water, made as impermeable as minerals leached from saltwater, leaving the contents pure. Walls reaching out beyond the alien-blue sky. A whole world within their world.
The Navigator saw this and had her own, secret, vision—of the Seed raising her up from the crushing depths to see starlight again, even if only for a brief moment.
Maybe enough, she said. Maybe yes. But very difficult. Flooding, containment; very difficult.
Only details. The creature’s thoughts were steady now. Leave to me. Talk to Seed? Explain?
Maybe yes. But do not trust it.
***
Air rushed back into Friend Paolo’s lungs. Deep inside, the threads from the boat retracted. He was free.
The Seed still buzzed with energy, but its influence around him faded; the plan was under way. Structures froze, mid-transformation. Everything was as quiet as when the Seed first unfolded, glassening the sea.
The stillness was broken only by Paolo, toppling backward, his familiar face collapsed, unrecognizable, his eyes white and unmoving. Friend Paolo knelt and cradled him, but found no tears.
Far above them, the clouds moved again.
A tremor rocked the platform, then a second and a third. Enormous swells distorted the water around them. The Seed was at work. Somewhere distant, the ocean floor began to reach toward the sky.
Friend Paolo was no longer afraid of the darkness or the whips; the Navigator had shared with him the burn and the helpless rush of freefall, and how they had finished her. Cold and alone, she was nothing compared to the menace of the Seed that lay before him.
What would they do if the Seed decided it didn’t want to be contained? What if it wanted more? Perhaps, together…he reached out again.
But the Navigator, too, was lost to him.
***
The Seed called out, and from a thousand directions, a thousand answers.
The Navigator heard and joined their chorus. Please, she sang into the vacuum. And finally, riding the signal of the Seed, she felt again the electric thrill of the Sisterhood’s contact.
They endured the strobing flashes of her message—water, life, creatures, these creatures that swarmed—and this one that knew her. The Seed, blooming, insistent, inhaling the old world and exhaling the new. Contain it, she sang, contain it.
The Seed chirped, and the Navigator cracked open like an egg. But as she faded, rocked to sleep by foreign tides, the presence of the other navigators enveloped and warmed her.
Sister, they whispered, sister, they said, be patient.
We are coming.
QSFT7mk2.7853 Has a Name(Short story)
by Kurt Hunt
First published at Perihelion Online Science Fiction Magazine (December 2015), edited by Sam Bellotto Jr.
I was swallowed whole once. It was moist and unpleasant. All a misunderstanding, of course.
It all happened on a little KBO near the edge of the Kuiper cliff, way further out than the asteroid we ended up mining. Our human crew was surveying and I was watching forty things at once to make sure none of those idiots fell in a hole or depressurized their suits or inadvertently detonated a gas pocket. The usual. You would think creatures so fragile would be more careful.
I was scoping a cave when it happened. A Plutinonian slugworm that first appeared to be nothing more than a looming, serrated hole of mucus and gore mistook my primary module for a torpedo. He threw himself in my path to save his clutch of four thousand hatchlings. It took four of my security modules to calm him down, and three constructor modules to pry his jaws open and drag me out. Humiliating.
We joked about it after I was cleaned and the worm, whose name was George, was recruited, but I always found great comfort in the selflessness he showed in that moment. I never told him that.
I'm selfless, too, in my own way, like every Saf-T-Bot. I'm programmed that way. My selflessness is perfect, but because of its perfection I suppose it's less inspiring, less touching, than George's. My organic employers certainly don't seem impressed. In fact, I don't think most of them see it as selflessness at all. Selflessness requires a "self," I suppose, so maybe they have a point. I'm not sure I have one of those.
That was precisely the question George and I were debating when the mine collapsed.
"Little canary," he said, "do you ask that just because you were manufactured?"
I lifted my front set of arms by 45 degrees to indicate a shrug. My yellow stripes glowed li
ke tiny elongated suns beneath the artificial lights of the tunnel. Lit up like this I could see the tattoo of microscopic serial number stamps traced up and down every part, even on my perimeter modules floating nearby. My own bodies mock me.
George continued: "The Skir think they were designed. But they take it as a mark of divinity. That intentional manufacture is a prerequisite for soulfulness."
I shrugged again. This was all beyond my capacity.
"Or take me," said George. "Am I more of a self than you just because my larvae are taking root?"
Beneath the shimmering yellow of his back skin, the clutch of protoworms rippled in loving response. The miners around us retched and turned their heads. Organics were squeamish that way, even about their own parts.
"Maybe not," I said. I had almost three dozen independent bodies—semi-autonomous modules all specialized for key tasks and interlinked to the processing system in my primary module. Quantity alone didn't answer the question. "But maybe you're more of a self just because you weren't Unit Number 7,853 to roll out of the factory."
"Bah. Now you're just being morose."
The shift captain, his eyes closed against the swarm tracing bubbling paths beneath George's back, hit the bell and yelled. "Back to it, worm!"
George lifted his head toward the captain and dribbled a thin stream of venom, then dug his powerful jaws back into the mineral veins of the asteroid.
"Think about it," he mumbled, his mouth jagged with rock.
I did. Or I tried to. My modules were jabbering amongst themselves, distracting me, and I don't process as fast as I used to.
Anyway, I was built for sensation and analysis, not philosophical contemplation. Give me a poison gas leak and I excel. But ask me to answer why the Skir believe in the divinity of manufacture when other species have repeatedly and conclusively disproved the existence of the Skirian supreme being, and I'm at a total loss. I tend to chalk those mysteries up to the many oddities and defects of organics—parasites, mental illness, excessive moisture, that sort of thing.
The first indication that anything was wrong was when the tunnel wall fractured and split George in half. His children shrieked supersonic shrieks as they spilled onto the grit of the tunnel floor, but even that noise was overpowered by the crackle deep within the asteroid's bones as the tunnel lifted, twisted, and flattened.