by David Edison
Then he left his body altogether.
Like a gunshot, Cooper’s senses erupted from his body with bullet speed: sight and sound soared out of his skull and wheeled away, past the variable sky, piercing the rind of the world to flow into a kind of dimensionless non-space, an empty fullness that blanketed the universes and hid them from one another. Flattened and ghostly, Cooper flowed through the connective tissue of the metaverse. His disembodied consciousness rattled through impossible places, and time was his darling—he could soar through the nothingness as he pleased and only picoseconds passed in the real world.
The real world? Cooper’s ghost scoffed. The real world is a fairy tale.
Seven spheres of light appeared, orbiting a common center. In the same way he knew anything here, Cooper knew that the spheres were only spheres in the most abstract sense, and that their orbits were less actual than illustrative, and that their common center was one of identity rather than mass.
Still, the spheres beguiled him with the tactile immediacy of physical objects, and he watched, fascinated, as they coruscated with the colors of life: yellow sun and green leaf and the steely refractions of rippling water. These were worlds, universes, realities—seven discrete realms of existence that were home to a single culture and thus linked by bonds more abiding than the laws of physics.
How do I know that? Cooper wondered, though he already knew the answer. This is the work a shaman does, isn’t it? Walking between worlds, visiting the worlds beyond death for the good of the living. He could blame the liches and their captive, if he returned to his body.
Cooper drifted closer to the Seven Silvers, hearing the name as the worlds drew his focus, until something tugged at him, clawing at his . . . body? No, not body—he had no body here, just information coded into the ether—signal was the right word. He was a signal. And the signal that was Cooper had just found a receiver, something voltaic that sucked him into the closest sphere with a magnetic attraction. Helpless to resist or control his movement, Cooper saw only flashes of the world he entered: streaking past brown skies crossed with teal lightning; a dark hollow looming like an impact crater; a coiled serpent with a woman’s torso; a nest of restless synthetic spindles; black claws so thin he could see the sky through the blades, like obsidian. Then Cooper was gone, an echo inhabiting a machine.
Her Majesty the Cicatrix, Regina Afflicta, Matron of the Seven Silvers, Childe of Air and Darkness, and Queen of the Court of Scars had been partially inorganic for centuries, continuing a trend that had begun as minor enhancements, barely more than accessories that flattered her vanity with brass and coke. The fashion had started as an ironic condescension toward that least enchanting of mortal endeavors, science, but had sublimed into a practice that eclipsed the mystical arts before absorbing them entirely.
Now the queen lifted her massive helmed head and sniffed at the air. It was her native element, but the winds had discharged unusual energies of late. She smelled nothing except the dried loam and weeds that bedraggled her barren enclosure. Ozone, when the lightning hit, arcing down her coiled spine.
The Court of Scars had been excavated to accommodate the queen’s ever-increasing bulk: gone were the moonflower vines and mountainous rhododendrons that once adorned the bower of her court, and the wild cress that had carpeted the earth had long ago been trammeled by the sinuations of the royal carapace. Only the bounding ring of sentinel oaks that surrounded the court remained, skeletal. The sky flickered with lightning that followed straight lines and perpendicular branches, as if the clouds themselves had been seeded with circuitry.
The Cicatrix yawned a silent scream, silver grills cracking apart to let her tongue taste the air.
From this nest the she had ruled an alliance of seven universes for ten thousand years, faerie worlds united beneath her banner ages ago by charisma and threats and a willpower that had extinguished suns. Today, none of her vassals would recognize the beauty who conquered them clad in naught but glee and blood: her remainder lay coiled like a dragon atop its hoard, dark graphene and vinyl stitched together with rivets and industrial adhesive, her tiny dancer’s body hacked apart and stuffed inside armor crafted into the shape of a great serpent. Grasping appendages studded her length and facilitated some movement, but for the most part the queen had sacrificed her mobility to her technological addiction: there was always more machine to add to the monster.
Her arm jerked of its own accord, a vivisistors shorting out briefly while its occupant tried to communicate. Her little engines spoke to her, an annoying and persistent defect that manifested throughout her systems, and she’d learned to ignore the occasional errant impulse.
“M1sstresss mine!” called out the pixie powering the servo where the Cicatrix’s shoulder joint had been, streaming verse through wiring that terminated inside her skull. “It sings to us again from the garden of El Cíudad Tácito, and it brings us a visitor::login:guestnotfound! Gray bird sings a harmony, m1lady, and the navel of a11 worlds inhabits us as 1t s0 sadly singsss! Your Light Music Machine, my qu33n::login:xxMyQueenSoScarre dxx . . . Your Golden Appppple! In tone s0 sad, in voice s0 ancient, in volume 5o greatttttt—”
Despite the slithering length of her abdomen, the queen’s torso remained relatively humanoid, corseted in metal and plastic but still a recognizably womanly shape; she’d replaced her auburn curls with a towering headpiece of shining black, twin horns like a giant dung beetle twisting toward the sky while braided cables cascaded down the back of her neck, connecting her helm to the bulk of her machine components.
The Cicatrix kept one hand unadorned to proclaim her fey heritage to any being unlucky enough to be brought before her, and she raised that hand now, demanding silence. Proprioceptive relays made verbal communication with her systems unnecessary—the pixie in her shoulder fell silent with a whisper of static terror. Unaware that Cooper surged through her systems, the Cicatrix bared her metal teeth in a silver smile.
The vivisistors suspended within her polyvinyl chassis transfixed only the rarest of fey creatures—a perversion of loyalty kept the Cicatrix from employing any other kind of servant, within or without her body. She knew that Lolly had uncovered the truth about the magitechnical composition of the vivisistor design, but the child remained ignorant of the number and composition of her mother’s upgrades: Lolly might well revolt if she knew that her own little fey cousins had been used to power the queen’s vivisistors, or how aggressively the Cicatrix had been upgrading herself since her daughter’s deployment to the City Unspoken.
Something Cooper-derived bootstrapped itself into a state of minimal awareness, flickering between vivisistors that wound along the coiled length of the faerie queen, which looked something like an ink-black subway train wound up in a curl, with a woman at one end. A mile-long mermaid machine, black as coal and flickering with Tesla arcs. He struggled to gain consciousness and found himself by focusing on his host’s fears, piggybacking across her thoughts. Alien thoughts. As he incorporated himself into her cognition, the active part of Cooper calmly observed that the mind he inhabited seemed to consider itself the mother of the Marchioness Terenz-de-Guises, and that the mind belonged to a monster. Elsewhere, Cooper’s dormant majority screamed.
But the part of him taking this electronic spirit walk acknowledged the maternal horror and moved on, following the narrative of the queen’s fear that Lallowë Thyu had not improved upon some kind of programming language that the Cicatrix herself had improvised. The queen— and therefore Cooper also—considered that language, which she used to program her vivisistors.
Her code was by necessity feral and half-formed; there were no guides to this work, and all of her usual resources were useless: no epic poetry recited in the Court of Scars detailed the recursive spells of If-Then and Let-X-Equal that would breathe true life into the vivisistor design. Yet she hoped that Lolly, possessed of the combined gifts from her human father and the compulsive genius that so resembled the queen’s own, would discover the language to un
lock the potential of the technology— and emerge with a vivisistor that would be a far more significant device than the half- aware batteries that currently powered her armaments.
Armaments that were needed to keep the eons at bay, as well as to provide the Cicatrix with new and more appealing diversions in these latter days. The true Wild Hunt was long gone, fractured and refractured across time as well as space, and although its denizens had seeded a hundred cultures of barbarism and wild magic, the rule of the Unseelie Court was a thing of near prehistory. The Unseelie champion—the Queen of Air and Darkness—died ages before with no successor, and no one remembered her true name to summon so much as a ghost, not even ancient fairies such as the once- spindly dancer, now corseted with metal and braided with optical cables, who had become a queen in her own right.
Farther down the length of her body, another vivisistor bucked as its prisoner whispered through the wires: “All we caged birds hear the same song, my queen. And you hear it t00, while the Omphale gnaws through your sacred fruit. . . .”
She lashed out with a pulse of electricity that whipped through the inside of her body and silenced the offending device, but the trapped thing was correct, she could feel them out there, across the worlds—the other vivisistors, the old ones. She’d begun to sense them years ago, but as her systems improved so too did the signal—old machines, vivisistors that predated the rise of the Third People.
That shouldn’t be; yet somehow every vivisistor in existence—so far as the queen could determine—was linked together with its peers via some oblique tunneling protocol into a background network she could not disable, and while this latent network didn’t interfere with her benchmarks and diagnostics, a persistent hiss of feedback lingered no matter how she configured her modules. She could still hear the others, even the miniscule surveillance drone she’d hidden with Lallowë years before. And the one she’d sent, only recently, with the dragonfly inside— she’d heard that dragonfly die, and it had disquieted her.
The Cicatrix could hear them all, and Cooper heard them with her. One vivisistor in particular loomed larger than the rest, its song a constant presence in the back of the queen’s head, and its energy signal shone brighter than a hundred stars. A golden apple that dazzled her from somewhere within the City Unspoken. It glittered with a greater concentration of power than she’d ever witnessed, and even though it hung like a golden fruit just out of her reach, it fed her with its light.
Vivisistor? The ghost of Cooper scanned the queen’s thoughts and marveled. How am I here, and how am I hidden inside this creature? He could feel the pain of sentient beings close by, calling out for peace. Little winged men and cat-paw ladies; smooth- groined nullos and butterflycrotched oni: all in pain, each begging for death.
Green and lilac LEDs danced up the Cicatrix’s side, forming a tattoo of peonies and mandrake. The sprites whose slow deaths powered her HUD flashed poetry across her field of vision, obscuring her inactive targeting reticle:
He kn0ws a secret sector, We share a partial place. Where is it always w1nter, And iv0ry, old lace!
Nonsense. More and more of it lately, clogging her systems with digitized doggerel and fancies that were not her own—always with a call for stillness. And yet she heard the same nonsense bubbling from the mouths of her attendants, her governors, everywhere. From all corners of the Seven Silvers came whispers of secrets and madness, always distant, always growing nearer; a panic built itself all around her, within her and without, muddling her own systems as well as her satraps and coteries. Every level seemed affected—even her Wild Hunters returned most days with more fear than flesh, wide-eyed and unwilling to voice their troubles. They, too, seemed gripped by a need for stillness—a relic virtue she could ill afford—and sat empty-eyed beside their fires, mouths moving as if in prayer.
Some days, the Cicatrix felt the pain of all the worlds.
The hunters of the Seven Silvers were creatures who had always existed as the embodiment of nature’s frenzy. Few of them had ever felt unsettled before, let alone afraid—even when she’d forced them to follow her example and upgrade their natural bodies with synthetic components. No, anything that could disturb her nest of blade-boned serpents and polymer wasps merited more than a little vigilance—it was hardly alarmist for the queen to be worried by anything that could worry dark fairies in their own wood.
Nothing mattered other than devouring that enormous vivisistor signal, whatever it was, that eluded her somewhere beneath the chaotic skies of the City Unspoken. She would make it a part of herself, or consume its essence, or its secrets. If trouble was coming, the kind of worlds- shaking trouble that her instincts, her vivisistor- sprites, and her subjects seemed to suggest—even the ones insane enough to accuseher of causing the trouble— then the Cicatrix wanted the protection she imagined would be afforded by incorporating that enormous energy signature into her own array. And if Lolly failed her, then her pet liches would split the city like an apple so she could suck out its golden pulp.
Where am I, and how? Cooper flickered from node to node inside the Cicatrix, trying to escape something he didn’t understand. Was he inside this thing? Was he hallucinating again? Cooper knew he was not, and yet he’d heard her think of herself as Lallowë Thyu’s mother, and at least a little bit robot. The queen didn’t seem to notice him, but the little people trapped inside these awful little battery-machines might—they whimpered in helpless supplication.
Why, Cooper thought, does this keep happening to me?
A pinging blip at the edge of the queen’s vision interrupted her thoughts— and Cooper’s. An automated signal from Lallowë surveillance unit— the fool girl thought herself unobserved, though she should know better. Contingencies within contingencies, that was the only way to play the game. The Cicatrix summoned the signal into her field of vision, although she already knew its contents.
So the girl had begun building her own vivisistor, exactly as she was expected to do. She’d resorted to asking her father for help, which ought to have humiliated her. Perhaps it did. Or perhaps the Cicatrix had chosen the wrong daughter to remove from the board. Almondine, perhaps, should be awakened. If only the third daughter had been true fey, instead of inheriting her brutal father’s humanity. That was a contingency plan the Cicatrix would like to have had.
Oh, thought Cooper, with a detached nausea that brought more of himself online by reflex. Machines that feed on life. A family of evil faeries, starring Lallowë Thyu. A cyborg queen with the body of a Chinese dragon, who wants to devour the chewy center of the City Unspoken. Of fucking course.
Flexing the spirit-muscle he’d only just begun to learn he possessed, Cooper extended a tendril of his self and contacted one of the nodes— the vivisistors, she’d called them— and peeked inside. A miniature man with moth wings and the mangy remains of a blue pelt lay inside, skewered through his middle by a metal pin. A pixie, Cooper recognized/realized/learned, abetted by the hijacked thoughts of the queen, and a diseased-looking pixie at that. His tiny hands clutched the pin that impaled him; the little thorns at the tips of his fingers had splintered against it.
I am so sorry, little insect man. Cooper spoke to the creature as easily as if he’d still had a throat. I know nothing, but I promise to help you if I can.
The pixie jerked his head toward the source of Cooper’s signal. His eyes were the color of fire and the expression on his face combined outrage with agony in equal measure. These were not prisoners, Cooper realized, but volunteers.
My queen! An invader with1n the royal chassis skulks! The pixie screamed an alarm into its adjacent hardware and writhed on his pin. 13reak his 13ones of lightning 13efore he logoff::flees!
Cooper recoiled, if that was a thing that electric souls could do. He startled himself as his previously offline horror awoke within him and immediately sought an escape from the closed system of menace that was the Cicatrix’s inorganic self. As he did so, other vivisistors shook off the shroud of soul-sickness that had
maddened their thoughts with the poetry of oblivion and took up the wicked pixie’s call to arms.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Cooper felt nearly corporeal in his panic, banging the idea of his fists against the idea of his prison. Worlds away from his own body, trapped inside the carapace of a an evil faerie monster queen, where he existed only as a ghost of information in an almost-closed computer network whose nodes were batteries made out of dying faerie, Cooper finally found his mojo.
His mojo: it didn’t matter that the worlds had been built to the specifications of insanity. He hadn’t been built that way. In fact, hadn’t immutable sanity had been the only remarkable quality he possessed, according to the Lady? Shamanic tendencies seemed not that impressive in the Lady’s eyes, but Cooper’s enduring sanity, that had impressed her.
The Cicatrix lurched, raising her torso a dozen yards by rearing her most proximal coils: a chitin and graphene cobra, ready to strike. Rather than speak she hissed, a thunder of amplified feedback and simple, feral hate.
Cooper acknowledged that terrifying sound, but retained his selfpossession. I wonder what I might do and where I might go, if I were an electric shaman whose superpower was keeping his shit together?
“What wight winds its way twixt our wires?” The Cicatrix beat her claws against her breast, speaking out loud to her vivisistors in case there truly was an intruder. “If you inconstant goblins vex us again with your prankish alarum, we shall riddle you with megavolts till your eyes pop like cherry tomatoes in the fat of a rendered babe.”
She cocked her horned and plated head, sniffing at the air again. A sly smile crept across her face, a woman’s features stitched onto a dragon’s skull. She patted her mismatched hands together and promised:
“Hifi fofun: I’m going to fuck your eye sockets with my railgun.”