Upgraded

by Peter Watts

  (Splice: Not now, not here.)

  I feel the fine vibration through the paracord and think the ship is moving. Sinking perhaps, swallowed by the earth at long last. But it is my hand that moves even as I hold it firm against the descent line. Beneath metal there remains muscle that (is finite, is mortal, will rot) shudders.

  The ceph is not silent in this chamber. Its constant stream of chatter serves to tell it where it exists in relation to every fallen body, some of which may yet be trapped, but even as I understand the reason, the incessant sounds grate. My vision fragments, the chamber bursting into black before it streams back pixel by pixel, and my body stutters down the line. The light goes out.

  A cold tentacle wraps my leg, holds me still so I will not fall. For a long while, we remain suspended, twisting in the dark until the Nessik clicks and whistles, drawing my slack outline fully into its awareness. Then, other tentacles enfold and haul me down. My wrist snaps back, the anchor slides loose, and the fucking ceph bears me into the scattered dead.

  (Splice: No—

  The dead smell worse than you imagined. Maybe it’s made worse because of—

  Oh God, Lil, there’s so much blood . . .

  My blood? Mine. Blood never bothered you, doctor you, but the stench of my guts and brains in your hands is too much and they want—

  They want to remake me, take me, they can save me.

  But I was never in this place, among these dead. No. N—

  Yes, I was here, strewn in your hands and the memory of this punches down through me, hard fist in soft throat, but this throat is only metal now, only—)

  I jerk back to full consciousness, hands trembling, vision skewed. I reach for Fey IV, but the drone is not in the sky, not crashed to earth. Nowhere. Everything above me is unreachable, as impenetrable as my own body. Beside me, the Nessik makes a low whir and I relax into the rain-wet moss that covers the skeletons that cover the ancient battlefield that once was a prison ship. This whir lulls me into a state that is close to sleep, even though sleep is a thing half-remembered. I used to do this—I used to need it—but not now. Not—

  Tentacles encase me, tightening around arm, flank, and belly as if the Nessik thinks I mean to flee. I stare blind into the dark, useless to the ceph, to this entire journey, and listen to the rain pour down. It sounds different against metal skin and breathing tentacle; it sounds different against exoskeleton and shell. I want to figure how long it will take the ship to fill and sink, but while I can determine the rate of rainfall (two inches per hour), I cannot determine the exact volume the ship will hold, the amount that the earth will drink until it has its fill and overflows (tongues lower into slopped mud and splits it further apart . . . tongues lower . . . ). My vision sparks magenta, green, and settles into black once more.

  The ceph wants to know what happened, what the trouble is. “Systems malfunction” condenses a host of problems that I don’t fully understand myself.

  “Fucking— Squid.” I speak the words in English, mostly to see if I can. My voice is not my voice; it is your voice, a stream of imbedded, erupting memory that sends my systems flatline. This was not the plan.

  Splice.

  Down-falling forever into dark.

  We came together, armed, prepared, and yet not. They sent an entire division, but it will never be enough. We see that the moment we touch down, the moment our fellow soldiers stream through the broken jungle; we have run toward enough danger to understand this one is unique, this one will change everything: you, me, the world. It will change the Nessik, too, but

  (fucking squid)

  we don’t care about them right now, because hundreds of thousands of their young are eating our soldiers in their panic, in their haste to escape the starvation cells they have been molded into.

  Everything stands in ruin: charred and smoking trees, satellites drawn down from orbit, the Nessik ship itself, a crumpled tin-can spire rising six fucking miles into the clouded sky. The rain is ash and not water, but water would come soon enough, as if the world attempted to wash itself clean. None of this would be washed—

  (fuc—)

  we don’t care about them right now because—they are eating our—

  My display boots in a wash of gold. Sunlight through October leaves used to look like that—but that memory belongs to another world. There hasn’t been an October for countless years, nor cheeks warmed by sunlight, but I can feel fingers (tentacles) against them. Warm (cold) and wet (wet). You (baseline).

  Splice.

  I can almost separate this stream from that stream: fingers were then, tentacles are now. You were warm; the Nessik is cold. Either way, the weight of another body against me is a block of data dredged up from a much-unused memory core and I shudder. It is only the sensation of systems coming back online (it is the only sensation of a hand (a tentacle) down a bare length of back).

  Pixel by pixel, my system assembles you on the display. It’s almost over, you say—we’re almost there, but there’s one more step. One more down-falling forever into dark. You want me to hold your hand. The blood there is sticky and growing cold. Mine? Yours? Yes.

  “Can you see me?”

  These words whispered. I could see you—as clear as anything in this awful moment, you segmented from the horrors that writhe just beyond this ramshackle field hospital. From the horrors inside it.

  They can only save one of us now, but they sink your memory core so deeply into me, we are both still there, though neither of us know it. The surgeons you once worked with mute you, cloak you, drape you in chains the way Nessik were held by their captors. But even there, a finger peeps out from this metaphorical prison, allowing air into an otherwise sealed room. Later, they will wonder how I know what I do, but as these skills benefit them, they never worry overmuch. I am on their side; they made me and they made you, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

  This finger (your finger) is a constant press upon my heart, a memory I cannot name but a thing that draws every piece of my new life into focus. I take one path and not the other because of that press; I cannot explain it—and who else could? Why do people go where they go? Something (someone) drew them there, inexorably. The box of you, inside of me, burrowing deeper than you ever went with fingers or tongue. You are the solid weight within whatever remains of my pelvic girdle (titanium overlaying a sliver of bone).

  You always looked so human, everyone said.

  I never did.

  Fey IV steamrolls as spheres of orange data across the bottom of my display. I cannot tell how long my displays were dark; there is nothing and then there is the drone. The data it provides proves inconclusive; it shows the ship, me, and the Nessik. Constant sheeting rain. It tells me of descending Hell, of the violent and of the suicides; of blasphemers and sodomites.

  Fey, I think, there is something here in these rings of Hell. There was something here, and there is no possible way that something could have gotten out of this ship, past us, and we need to find it. Cloaked, muted, look for a finger.

  (Splice: You, rolling your eyes—they were mostly hazel but for that crescent of blue near the left pupil—and yet . . . and yet . . . )

  Fey IV’s data stays true, constant, inconclusive. I don’t alter its instructions despite the lack of change in readouts, but shift instead toward the ceph who still has me cocooned in its thick arms. At my movement, it startles and shits a stream of panicked chirrups and whirs at me. The dialogue is so fast and dense, I cannot separate one word from another. I wait for it to calm, to grow silent, and try again.

  I don’t expect it to say my name. The name is a long trilling sound with too many Ls, a vibration that rumbles through the old bones beneath us. Lillllliana. Did I speak while offline? Was I offline at all? The Nessik’s hold on me does not ease; it pulls me closer if that is possible, drawing the bony crest of its sightless head toward mine. It outlines me in rapid-fire chitters, then speaks again, wanting to ascertain that I can continue, that the journey is not lost. Without my si
ght, we will never find the hiveling.

  But why did the hiveling come here?

  The answer bursts up from inside me, from inside my gut where you yet rest. You want me to know—

  The hiveling had not come. It was brought.

  As we were all brought, to this place on the edge of the island, on the edge of the ocean where we once reached outward into space, but no longer do because space came to us: domino effect, all fall down. Down-falling forever into dark. To be made into that which could best serve; to be broken until our new forms suited the plans to come. Prisoner slaves and captors. And you? Knew? (Created.) What else? (Treachery.) Tell me. (Come.)

  The Nessik hauls me up from the mossy carpet that covers the dead and does not release me even as I try to stand. I quickly discover that I cannot stand, not on my own. Everything below my hips refuses to respond, a relay shorted out within the technology that lines my body. Such an injury to a soldier would be ridiculous, costly; the Nessik keeps me upright as I reroute power into the metal which encases my legs, but even when I can move again—

  The ceph doesn’t let me set my line, but keeps me bound in arms and tentacles. We plummet downward into dark. The ceph moves the way we saw them move en masse that day, chittering low as it goes to discern every ledge, every body, every passage that will take us to the bottom. Trusting (fucking hell) this creature to map the route, I scan in all the ways it cannot. My display stutters, spits.

  I break the ship into every spectrum I can see, damage from the crash rendered in gradients of light gray to pitch black; damage from weapon blasts hovers in green and blue before I shift them away and to study biologics. You would think all this rain would wash the blood clean, but it still darkens the walls in visible light. And then—

  It begins as a small point that blossoms into a faint heartbeat that becomes a fully realized body. At the bottom of the ship, where the mud has flooded a torrent and blocks most of the passageways leading deeper, there is a body. I chitter to the Nessik and we drop even quicker, a stone thrown down an empty well. One tentacle keeps us from smacking full into the mud; we touch down beside that still body, the adult reaching out with another series of high-pitched sounds. The body—perhaps a hiveling, for it is small—makes no vocal reply. It struggles to move, one tentacle whipping toward the sound. The ceph grabs the tentacle with one of its own, but then withdraws with a shriek, letting even me go.

  I shift my vision through every wavelength of light to see what has been done to this Nessik. Most of its body has been encased in metal, small hexagonal panels that call to mind flexible armor. This casing looks nearly like my own, so that the body might be made to move even if injured. When I touch the metal, it flickers with energy and for a moment, the Nessik winks out of my view. Vanished. Cloaked.

  (Splice: Your hands in my hair, my broken body dripping through your fingers. This is where I came back and where I said—

  “Yes.”

  And this is where you smiled that rare smile and nothing else mattered as they cut each of us apart and sank you into me so I could be stronger, faster, better, everything they needed me to be. In memory, it is your fingers raking me raw, it is your mouth covering mine—and nothing else mattered because both of us would live beyond every limit we had known just as you predicted.)

  But this.

  I draw my hand back and the body comes into view again. Every edge once outlined in heat begins to fade into blue, into cold, and there is nothing we can do to keep it from slipping away entire. But on this level, deeper through mud-flooded corridors that have been lined in these selfsame metal panels, I can see more signatures: thrumming red lifeblood that beckons. This is what the Nessik could not see, every bit of this level erased, all that it contains swallowed. And these Nessik here, made silent by human hands.

  There is more than one hiveling here and more than one adult. Silently, they scream at us—the air vibrates as they try to communicate, but there is no sound, for they have been cut as you and I were cut; flesh has been made to do what others would have it do.

  (You once guided flesh this way—tried on yourself first, splice, and jack, and chimera you.)

  Countless cages line the walls, dripping with mud and shit and chains and rain. Even here, this room is not spared the flood of rain from above. Even here, wrapped in the panels even my eyes could not penetrate from above, they are subject to the rains.

  The Nessik moves like quicksilver, unlatching cages to free the captive young. The adults are worse for all that has been done to them and most are near death, but the hivelings move with a more terrifying speed, streaking into a deeper room rather than the corridor behind us to escape. The farther we walk, the cleaner the halls become, until I am tracking muddied footprints down a white hall, until the Nessik leaves a broken path of Rorschach streaks and blobs that convey a bat eating a moth eating the world swallowed by the endless void.

  In the deepest room, protected from mudslide and rainfall, a cadre of human doctors stand mid-slaughter—you name each one of them in my display; friends, they were your friends, colleagues. Nessik bodies lay upon tables, but there are human injured here, too, and this bloody tableau is familiar to us both. They cut a piece from one body and slide it into the belly of another. They sever the vocal cords of the Nessik to mute them the way they muted you (the way you muted others, slid yourself into them, into countless thems), but these creatures—these new chimera?—have found a way to reach out, a way to communicate yet. Theirs becomes a language of blood. I speak this as if it is my own; most of we chimera do. At first it was mimicry; now it has become conversation.

  (Splice: We were here in ’92 and remember these rooms, this hive, these levels of hell. It was your extraordinary eyes guided us down and down, your body that bled clean light over the level that was soon to become a battlefield that was soon to become your grave. You experimented here; you studied here; you despaired here.)

  (Splice: I was here again in ’93, ’95, and ’01, and now . . . now. It was you and also not-you, the memory of you dredged up from the box they sank into me. It was not-you who wondered if I could see you—they wondered if I could still access you, if I had broken the encryption even they could not master. Could I see you? Baseline, always. You let me inside, you let me know every secret thing you had discovered through every graft of information into yourself, into other bodies, into . . . into . . . into.)

  (Splice: But it was more than that—you were never one of the dead here. Were you? You who made these splices, you did not die. You fragment in my display.)

  The hivelings blur within the cloak of their armor; they never hesitate, leaping upon the human doctors, dragging them to the floor. Freshly-spilled human blood is a startling red warmth against the cold blue shipframe; it fades, becomes the cool blue of the floor, and is seemingly gone, unless I shift my view. The walls run with red and blue and a hue of violet in between, and nothing is ever still—not the hivelings, not the human dead, not the dying adult Nessik who have been broken and used and broken and used yet still breathe on.

  A coiling tentacle pulls me to the floor; I snap my wrist back to access the paracord and its hook. The hook sails out, to punch the Nessik (the ceph, moll, puss, squid, the fucking you?) in the gut, and the sound that spills from this creature is not alien. It is you, a fragment of you yet living in this beast, and it is then I hear you all around me.

  You, spliced into every creature that leaps into the fray—these hivelings, these chimera, these you. You who did not exactly die, but neither exactly live, you growing strange and widespread in each of these bodies. They thought they could silence you, stretch you into inchoate strands, but you found a way, not flesh, not machine, something beyond both.

  And I think of the way the Nessik (the fucking ceph) held me when I fell, and it is the only sensation of a tentacle (a hand) down a bare length of back.

  And the way it (you) said my name.

  After.

  Jacked into a socket, you wedged in
a way I didn’t think you could be wedged again.

  (Splice: Oh, we were here, here, and it’s the memory of flesh inside flesh, of you inside me, of nothing else existing in that moment.

  Viewed in the right light—

  Everything—

  Nothing.)

  There are no places in this world that light will not intrude. Every dark space within even me has been broken apart, exposed to light, and sealed back up. And through it all, pieces of you cradled inside.

  We were here in ’05, we will say, when the ship still reached six miles into the clouded sky like a broken finger; we were here when the living were cut apart and fused with the dead, when the beach was still wholly drowned but grains of sand floated free in the water even so.

  We were in here ’09, when the ship’s spire gave way, buckling as those concentric circles of hell at last had their way and pulled the ship entirely into its maw. We would be here in ’15, when Fey VI confirmed what we believed, that humanity had gone—chimera-consumed; that this world, this earth had also become chimera. Spliced, jacked, no longer a singular thing if it had ever been.

  Viewed in the right light—

  Light degrades, exposes, destroys, illuminates, corrupts, burns, irreversibly changes everything. I touch you (baseline), you who are in every fucking ceph I know, and my touch is as light speeding through darkness. This light may bend, fragment, or ricochet, but it keeps going.

  Down-falling forever into dark—it keeps going.

  And every day, rain.

  Synecdoche Oracles

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Behind the bars of Charinda’s ribs, there lives a peacock.

  It sports titanium actuators and platinum feathers to contrast with the darkness of her limbs, ruby eyes and emerald beaks to complement the petals on her face. It is a gift from an infamous cyberneticist, and she has understood from the first that one day she will pay a price.