by Paul Jessup
Vast the bowl was. And filled with its own mini-maze of cut jigsaw rooms. Puzzle pieces of halls and corridors pocked with tiny alcoves. Above and below and all around. Mazes inside mazes inside mazes. She wheeled and wheeled and rested for moments. Legs felt jelly and tired. Limbs all worn out and burnt. Something inside of her fluttered, yes. A flicker of a flame. Could she admit she was lost? No. No. There was no such thing as being lost in a place like this.
There was no such thing as being found, either. Or knowing your way. Or seeing it as a home. The Labyrinth was always turning and moving and changing. No way to feel anything else. Lost and lost and only lost was the way to be in a place such as this. Someone else might’ve been sad or distraught at this realization. Not Itsasu, no. Curious, curious. Only emotions she felt right now or ever. Not lost exactly, but curious. A smile, a smirk. Maybe even a giggle or two at her own absurdity.
“Oh, oh, my love. I don’t feel safe here, no, not at all,” Ortzi chattered. “Something is off, way off. More than the usual off, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean,” and it was hard to hide that anguish in her voice. This place was not meant for pushing bodies up and down hills. Nor was it made for rickety wheelchairs trying to cram through ill-cut corners. Wanted to say hush and quiet but even that required too much energy. Energy better spent on pushing through it all.
Now Mari squawked. “I see, I see. There is something moving about in here, something stalking us just out of sight. Can’t you see? Can’t you?”
“No, no, I just ...”
A chill. All along her body. So weary now. So exhausted now. But she felt it. Something watching them. She didn’t like that feeling at all. “Can you see, little Mari? Could you fly above the maze and see from above what’s following us?”
No response but the flapping of her wings. So loud, right against Itsasu’s ear. A moment, and then a moment more. Then a flapping again and the sharp claws against her shoulder blade. Bird voice louder than she remembered. Even if it had been only a moment ago. “Dolls, dolls, dolls. They are the ship’s dolls, but not. Not the heart’s dolls, no. They look like them, but they’ve been changed.”
“Changed? How?”
Mari pecked at her feathers. “Different is all I can think. The word different, but that doesn’t cut it at all.”
Ortzi’s voice changed again. Calm. Affectless. Reminding her that this was not her husband, no. Not even a mock version of her husband, no. It was hard to look past his appearances and remember the promise of who he was. Who he could be. When he talked like this. “Mari, use your claws and grab my eyeholes. Lift me up and carry me with you and I will scan them. And get a good idea of what their real motives are.”
“Kay, kay, kayyyy,” bird Mari squawked. She lifted Ortzi up, and he popped a jeweled eye into Itsasu’s palm saying, “Hold onto this for me.” As a claw entered his socket and lifted him into the air. Over and over they flew as Itsasu sat back and watched in that lonesome moment. Tried not to laugh. Tried not to cry.
* * *
... and drop down against her shoulder blades again. And plop down the skull into her lap once more. Turn, turn, turn. Skull face looking at her. “Could you pop that back in please.” Again his words different. His tone broken and stuttering. Who did he work for? Who was he really when he wasn’t pretending to be Ortzi? Had something else hacked into his mind ...
No more questions. She popped the jewel back in and the skull smiled in her lap.
“Oh, thank you, my love, thank you, so much better.” For a sparkling moment Ortzi again. And then, boom. The change quick as quick. Someone else behind his words. “They were changed, yes. Originally they were the heart’s dolls, or rather, the ship’s dolls? But someone has hacked them. Someone has rewritten their interior code and is controlling them from afar. Teaching them to stalk, teaching them to hunt. Having them hunt us with a hive-mind and brittle communications. The bodies, too. Oh, the bodies. Hacked apart doll pieces replaced with organic machinery. Breathing tentacles sticking out from doll bodies. Mechanical limbs wheezing in clockwork glory. Someone had changed them into meat and bone and porcelain. They are horrible shadows of what they once were ...”
Itsasu was quiet again. Quiet for a moment more. Chewed on her thoughts. Rolled them around on her tongue. “And they’re hunting us, you said? Stalking us? You’re sure of this?”
“Maybe, maybe.” Ortzi wiggled on her lap, his neck bone moving the skull back and forth. “I scanned and picked up all sorts of things, but they do seem to be looking for us. And for you in particular.”
More thoughts rolling around in that clogged mind of hers. “Are they working for the headhunters? That bear, and that boy. Basa and La or whatever their foul names are ...”
“No, no. I scanned them and the signatures are something else. Someone else is controlling them, and it feels so familiar. Like a fingerprint on my face, you know? Familiar in the swirls and the touch but I can’t quite place it. I can’t quite see the whole picture.”
“Should we wait, should we go, should we wait, should we go ...”
Decisions, decisions. At this moment nothing felt like the right choice. It would be horrible either way.
Mari again, her voice in Itsasu’s ear, “Let’s go, let’s move, I don’t want them to catch us ... they carry butterfly nets filled with fire and some part of me still feels a kinship to butterflies.” A bird voice now, seeming less and less like the Mari she knew. Had this changed her? Had the bird mind corrupted Mari’s own patuek, rewriting her with each moment? Memories and self ... these things were so impermeable. So fluid. So not very real at all. No, no. No time for a crisis of mind. Much bigger things to worry about. Like the simple fact of staying alive. Death would make all these questions of identity moot.
“Okay, let’s go. Let’s go and get lost in this nested maze inside a labyrinth.”
“It’s so strange, like a smaller version of the larger, echoing out from the ship’s heart. An interior synecdoche, like an intestine inside a body. Reflecting all inside and out,” Ortzi once again spoke with the right kind of voice. Those voices and thoughts she had coded him to think. And in a way, it almost sounded like her husband again in that moment. The way he would’ve mused over things like that when he was alive. Turning them over in his mind. Inspecting them for riddles of poetry hidden deep down inside.
* * *
Wheelchair pushed and zoomed through rampant corridors and over rickety bridges and at times the gravity would weaken a bit more and a bit more and they would float and change direction. Now upside down, in the maze that was overhead. In that giant bowl of a room. Dangling, bursting forth. Still, they were hunted. The dolls followed. Each step, each moment. The dolls followed.
Heartbeat quick like a thunder drum beat. All rapid succession and her arms ached to the point of quivering. It had been too long since she’d pushed her body through the world on wheels. Arms weren’t used to it. Hands all blistered and bleeding. But no. No stopping this now. They kept going. Moving through, floating when they could, fighting the gravity when they could. Everyone was silent in those hunted moments. No giving them away.
At least with the headhunters she knew what they wanted. They’d seen the fluid caskets. The tattooed floating bodies. The severed heads crammed into cubbyholes. With the headhunters there was an expectation of what was to come. But with these dolls ... these dolls ... no knowing what they wanted. No understanding. No promise at all. They didn’t even work for the ship’s heart.
They were outside the bounds of the quarantine. Rogue things running after them through the boundless mazes. Escape, need to find an escape, an exit, even one that led them back to the headhunters. Any exit at all. And then, at the moment when the limbs felt so worn out and couldn’t move anymore couldn’t go anymore. And her mind was sweat-soaked and weary. And her breath was ragged gasps and no, no, can’t think she’ll do this anymore, no, no, can’t do this any longer ...
They entered a closed room. Circular. A ball inside a ball. Doors dilated shut around them. Creaking hungry sounds of rust and metal pain. The portals covered in a thin moss that moved and glowed faint and golden. “What’s this, what’s this ...” Ortzi babbled. Can’t believe it, can he? She couldn’t believe it either.
“I don’t know,” she said, head tilted downward. Breathing hard still. Words struggled to speak. “I wish I knew. But ... it’s okay. I think. I don’t think I could’ve gone on for much longer. I was ... was dying doing this. These new body parts aren’t used to this kind of stress.” And yes, everything screamed inside of her, her body rejecting each new part, as she struggled to hold on, to keep them glued to her. “I feel like I’m going to fall apart.”
Mari hopped on her shoulder and ruffled her feathers. “Don’t fall apart just yet. Not after all we’ve been through! We can do this. We can survive this and escape and you could have them make me a new body on some far flung moon. A new body using the map in my patuek, and load all of mindspace into it ... I can’t wait to be human again, not a bird anymore. And I need you for that, Itsasu, we all do. You have to keep going.”
A laugh. A shrug. “Where would we keep going to? What are we striving toward? Look around, look around. We’re trapped inside. Even the doors on the ceiling are slammed shut. There is no way out, and it’s like living in a giant puzzle box, isn’t it? Just like that.”
And just then. As if on cue. Just then. At that moment. Just then.
* * *
A door flickered open. Darkness and shadows beyond. Four deformed dolls all hacked up and broken walked through and into the room. Stood on either side of the door. Spinelamps in their hands shedding an eerie blue light. Oh, oh. The light of Arigia, yet not. Tainted and broken somehow. But it had that same haunted tint to it.
The dolls stood there. She felt like she should say something. She had to say something. But a gulp was all she could muster. She couldn’t find her voice. She couldn’t find her words. The moment stretched on. What was probably only mere seconds became an infinity. As a body walked forward. Just a little. Just enough. Half in shadows, half in light. A chiaroscuro of a body.
Hodei. Hodei. Hodei.
But he was different. So different. Covered in scars. Missing chunks of his skin. New tattoos on his body like rabid circuit boards. All hungry lines and circles. A big gaping chunk taken out of his forehead. Not scarred over. Just bones and bones and nothing else. His head was shaved and decorated with those same lines and circles. He was shirtless. His pants ripped and patched and ripped again. He had no weapon. Did he need a weapon?
The dolls did not move. Not even when he spoke. His words felt careful. Measured. Rehearsed.
“Hello, Itsasu. I’ve been looking all over for the real you. Maybe it’s been centuries now? Maybe just months. I don’t even know, time flows so differently in the labyrinth, don’t you think? And I’ve met so many different versions of you, but they were all copies. I could tell the original. I can sense it in you. You have a delicious essence that cannot be denied.” Gentle words that contained a venom in their subtext.
“Oh. So, yeah ... I guess you found me after all. Now what?”
Hodei chuckled. “Now we catch up. Oh, who is this skull? Who is this bird? You simply have to tell me everything.”
This did not sound like the Hodei of before. His voice was so different. Not harsh or brash or full of sexual bravado. This was a different kind of sly. He felt larger than he looked. As if his body were a black hole. And he had a compelling gravity with each word and movement. One that sucked you in and then destroyed you. A dangerous magnetism.
She did not like this new Hodei. The old one was a bastard and an asshole. Yes. He took nothing seriously. Hit on anything that moved. Treated women like toys. Read his stupid magazines and drooled over the impossible. Yet. This Hodei was a monster. She sensed that in him. Something had changed and now he was a monster. She could feel it prowling around behind his eyes. A new kind of cruelty that hadn’t existed before. Calm and violent. She felt it there, crouched. Waiting to spring. Hungry to destroy anything and everything it touched. Just for the sheer joy of entropic decay that all destruction caused.
... and then he led them through that door. Through those shadows. The dolls menacing close behind. Walking as they walked. Talking as they talked. Itsasu so mute and shocked and yet moving on, moving. He’d changed so much. But then again, hadn’t they all? Hadn’t the labyrinth changed each of them in turn? Making them into something else. Something much more horrible and wonderful than they were upon entering all those lost and lonesome years ago.
* * *
This was Hodei’s chamber:
Round circular room all cramped and filled with doll parts. Organic circuit board that breathed and sighed. Jars full of memory gnats containing vast patuek ghosts to fill their minds. AIs harvested from living tissue. Command worms that burrow into doll heads and turn them into puppets. His puppets. Skulls of various sizes. Mechanical. Half porcelain with bits removed. Twitching doll limbs crawled across his floor.
Living wires snaked from ceiling coils. Danced like snakes. Covered in vines and moss. They were mixed and matched with organic parts and pieces. Sparkling. Hungry things. They carried information from the ship into here. Into this room. The deep center home of the labyrinth egia. Was this the ship’s heart? What had Hodei done?
And then a throne in the center of it all. Made from doll limbs. Itsasu recognized those wax arms and legs propping his body upright. They were her dolls. On either side of the throne up on a raised dais where the reprogrammed dolls of the ship’s heart. Standing at attention to either side of him. Unmoving. Unblinking. Just watching. Just guarding.
He motioned for Itsasu to sit. And then laughed to himself. Like a cruel joke. Oh, oh you’re already sitting. No need for a chair then. Oh ho ho. How funny he was.
* * *
“So Mari, you’re a bird now? Is that it? How curious.”
Hands folded all neatly under his chin. Just like they were having a polite dinner conversation. Except. It wasn’t. And Hodei had never acted like this before. Polite dinner conversation had never been his style. Who was this person? Was he really Hodei? Or just someone clothed in his scarred skin? Who did he really work for?
More reality disruption. Like Ortzi’s skull. That sense that everything is static and corroding. How she hated that feeling. That whole reality is slippery feeling. Was she even really herself?
“Oh, don’t respond Mari, it’s okay. We were friends once, weren’t we? More than friends a few times, I think. At least, that’s how it felt when your hands touched my hands. Your eyes met my eyes. My brother was always just a distraction from us, wasn’t he?”
No response. Good bird, good bird. Don’t want to give him the pleasure of knowing he hit a nerve. She petted Mari’s head and the bird hopped onto her lap. Landing right on Ortzi’s jeweled forehead.
“My. You’re a silent bunch, aren’t you? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Silence always seemed to suit you, Itsasu. Certainly you spoke through your dolls from time to time, but you were more like a whisper. Like a ghost. A plaything for the ship’s heart ...”
That was it. That was enough of this. She had no idea what he was playing at ... but that was all she could take.
“We were all playthings of the ship’s heart, lest you forget. It was the one who brought us in contact with the sakre, and It was the one who had us all gobbled up and destroyed. It was its obsession that led us to everything ...”
Hodei slammed his hand down on his throne. The limbs wriggled and moved painfully. Were those doll parts still alive underneath him? Oh. The horror, the horror. “You were the captain. The captain of that ship! Don’t you understand that? We trusted you and you betrayed our trust. And what for? For some dead corpse of a husband,” a nod at the skull, “no offense,” and then looked at Itsasu’s eyes again, “and a heart that fed you on empty promises.”
Her words
were strained. Painful. She felt this, yes. She felt this was truth. This was not a lie when she said these words. “I’m sorry,” and then to Mari, “I am sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Mari said, “everything is done and gone and past. So many and many years past.”
A change of subject then. “What have you done to these dolls? Are they this egia’s dolls? Do they belong to this labyrinth ship’s heart?”
“They are my dolls now. Yes, they were the ship’s dolls once upon a time, but I hacked into them and I made them mine. The only coding they know is my coding and I changed them, I made them more useful. I gave them function and meaning in their pointless lives and now they treat me as a god. I am the axis mundi of their universe.”
“You’re playing with fire,” Itsasu said. “You don’t want to mess with a ship’s heart, not after what happened to us ...”
“Can’t you feel it?” Hodei stood from his throne, and walked over to them. “Can’t you sense it in here? Inside you,” pound, pound, his fist on his chest, “can’t you see that this ship has no heart? That it all runs on clockwork, on old, ancient algorithms carved in stone ages ago. No AI here, no neural network, just patterns and patterns of code on how to heal the sick, harvested from so many old text books and primitive datamines. That’s all they were before I came here and gave them purpose, personality, and life. I breathed code into them and made them more than just the dumb terminals that they were. There was no heart and so I stepped in and now there is one. And he. Is. Me.”
Itsasu grasped the skull close to her chest. Mari bounding on her shoulders. Hodei looked intense. His eyes were huge. His lips trembled with his words. Every muscle in his body contracted. Tight. Like a knot of skin and bone all tied up. “This is all mine now. I am the captain. Isn’t that right, brother?”