Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “Why not?”

  Ash felt her stomach churn. She searched for her glass of water, swept it up, and drank it in one gulp, as if it could give her courage. “I don’t know. I was out of it. It was freezing. Sir, I want to be on the team that looks for Captain Keller.”

  Solano’s face flickered with disappointment, and the corners of his mouth pressed into an unhappy line. “Of course, that’s out of the question. Your cit account balance disqualifies you from that kind of work. And there’s the matter of that,” he said, tapping her image on the tablet, “not being hypothermia. That’s celestium sickness. Dr. Cantrell confirmed it. How desperate were you? Were you working with another Company to get around the rules?”

  Her heart sank. “No. I would never. Sir, I—”

  “Misrepresentation is cause for departure, indenture.”

  “I—I didn’t know,” she stammered.

  He shook his head. “That was a lie. Like Ms. Ramsay lied.”

  “Not like her.”

  “You don’t think so? Let’s say that you’re not a traitor. You still knew you could snap at any moment, and destroy Company property or personnel? What about that is different?”

  “I care about Aurora—”

  “I don’t think you do.” He pushed up out of his chair, standing over her. “You care about yourself. You can claim to love your captain, your fellow indentures on Twenty-Five, but to put their lives on the line for your own selfish needs, Ashlan? That’s not love. That’s treachery. We’ll bring you back to Europa Station when we’re done here, and you can find your way from there.”

  Her stomach cratered, and she pushed herself up, dragging her stone-heavy legs over the side of the bed. “That’s a death sentence.”

  “Citizenship isn’t for everyone,” Solano said. He turned for the door. “Thank you for your service.”

  Her head swam. Panic kicked up under her belly button and slipped, a roaring hurricane, up her throat and into her limbs, her brain full of the dank tunnels of her childhood, the sickness, the hunger. She’d die there, at the humming, beating heart at the center of whatever station they found for her first, accruing the debt Christopher had died to free her from. She got to her feet to stop him, hanging on the nightstand, her knees knocking, grabbing on to whatever she could to stand up straight. Her hands felt the soft, yielding cotton flesh of the—

  —miracle.

  She swept the unicorn aside, reaching into the pants pocket where she’d stashed the isolette’s memory chip. The overhead light glinted off the metallic contact points like small stars.

  “You can’t let me go,” she said. “I have information you need.”

  Solano kept walking.

  “I’m the only one who knows how the weapon might work. Natalie wasn’t there.” Forgive me, Natalie. “I have hard data.”

  Solano turned. “Indenture, I am hardly a unilateral despot. This decision has been made by the board of directors, and—”

  “So, unmake it,” she breathed, cutting him off. “Bring them the hard data. I can—” She licked her lips, trying to stop another desperate lie. Failing to do so. “I can tell you how it works. Without me, you’ll be dead in the water. Let’s make a deal. I’ll give you the hard data on the weapon and you keep me in the Company. I want citizenship.”

  The CEO nodded his head, and then extended his hand. “Let’s see it, then.”

  “I want assurance you’ll make me a citizen,” she said.

  Solano’s eyes widened in leery surprise. “You have a debt. I can assure you only that the value of the information will be put against that debt.”

  Ash limped over and placed the card into his palm. He turned it over and over again, and then slid it into his jacket pocket. “May I remind you, indenture, that everything you have is Aurora’s, and that you are in no place to make demands. But I will certainly take a look, and talk to the board,” he said, and then with a few sharp clicks of his heels against the metal floor, he was gone.

  Ash picked up the unicorn. Stared at it. It smiled at her with its glinting glass eyes: she looked into its silent, wide-open red mouth.

  Dumbass, it said.

  She tossed it aside and swore.

  “Keller tell you to use language like that on an open channel?”

  It was Natalie’s voice, scratchy and low after treatment for the frost. Ash crossed the room, pushed open the curtain and found Natalie lying on the bed, her skin still pale from her ordeal on London. She did not smile when she saw Ash but lifted one hand up in a slow greeting. When Ash came closer, Natalie tensed, drawing her knees close and balling her fists. Ash saw it and stopped farther away than she would have liked, her heart fluttering nervously.

  “I should have seen that coming,” Ash said.

  “Yeah,” Natalie said. “You should have.”

  “Feeling better?”

  “Like I’ve been trapped in an ice cube for way too long.” Natalie coughed. “They tell me I’ll be up and rolling in an hour, though. Modern medicine, hurrah.”

  Ash paused. “They didn’t tell me how you were.”

  “Yeah, well.” Natalie looked away. “I didn’t want you to know.”

  Ash felt heat rising, past her shoulders, to her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

  Natalie picked at her blanket. “You knowingly put us at risk. You went out there every day and you didn’t care for one blasted second that one bad hallucination could have killed us all. And we were a gunshot’s breadth from dying on London. We got through that together. And you still didn’t tell me? You know what? Screw you, Ash.”

  “I needed the cure,” she said, the excuse rolling out even as she knew it was a bad idea. She felt hot and sick all over. “You would have done the same.”

  “No. I wouldn’t have. You don’t fuck over your team. Ever.” She pushed herself up on her left arm. “Do you know how scared I was? One moment we were chatting about our families, and then you were talking gibberish, screaming at some ghost only you could see—I thought you were going to kill us both. I had to knock you out. Twice.”

  Ash bit her lip. “I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”

  “No, I don’t think you are.” Her eyes filled with anger. “None of us mattered to you. Just Ms. Keller.”

  “That wasn’t—”

  “That’s who you were talking to the whole time. I just wrote it off as delirium from the pain, but no, it was her. You thought she was there? Wasn’t that it?”

  Ash bit her bottom lip. “She was there.”

  The words dropped like a bomb between them.

  “I need some time,” Natalie said.

  “Fine,” Ash said and stood still, stuffing her own anger back in the dark place where it belonged. Anger wouldn’t get her anywhere. She turned for her side of the room. “Have some time. Have all the time, actually.”

  Ash crawled back into her bed, sudden exhaustion pressing into the space behind her eyes. She could almost feel the celestium buzzing in her veins, harmonizing with the rumble of the ship’s engine, the hiss of the life support system, the beeping of the machines. She drifted for a few moments, feeling like she was back on London, clutching Natalie’s small shoulder in the guttering light of the torch, the skeleton’s jaw clacking together, speaking of Glory, and she was flooded with a feeling of lust and shame as powerful as it was terrifying.

  Glory.

  Whatever that meant.

  “Do you think she was telling the truth about the Vai coming back, Ash?” Natalie said.

  Ash opened her eyes and pushed up from the bed. Pain tightened a lasso behind her ears. “Who?” she said.

  “Ramsay.”

  “I hope not.”

  The younger woman kept her eyes focused on the ceiling. “I’d kill them all, if I could. Wipe them out like what they were aiming to do to us. No qualms. I’d just do it. And that should scare me, but it doesn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ash replied, feeling helpless.

  “Don’t be,” she whispered.<
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  She heard quick, determined footfalls and brought her eyes to the door. Two men entered. One was an olive-skinned executive, wearing blond hair in a chignon like Solano’s, a silver-white tattoo, and heels. He stood just inside the door, observing. The other was a young black-haired birthright wearing a Company ID with the name “Dr. Jie Cantrell,” a pasted-on smile, and a citizen’s tattoo. There was an insidious sort of friendliness to him, a desperate taste of earnest corporate bullshit in his face—Fear? Is he afraid of me?

  Should he be?

  He pursed his lips and extended a syringe in her direction. “Europa 5242-B. Ashlan, is it? Your arm, please.”

  She extended her soft inner elbow to the stranger and watched him fill the chamber with her blood, feeling a quiet emptiness at the center of herself, an emptiness that felt every painful ache and dark measurement of the loss of the rest of the crew. She hadn’t heard her Company uncitizen number, the one that identified her to the dole, since her rescue from Bittersweet. What’s the use of fighting it, now that they know?

  I’m an uncitizen now. I can’t fight it.

  “I’m Dr. Cantrell,” he said, his eyes on the syringe. He tapped it a few times, then slid the syringe into a testing chamber. “I work for Dr. Julien in R&D. I’m a follower of Reva Sharma’s early work, so it’s fantastic to look at a victim of celestium sickness up close.”

  The disgust Ash felt was flooded out with a momentary confusion. “Her … early work?”

  “With the first victims of the madness on Arimathea. Wasn’t that why she was on Twenty-Five? To study you?”

  Cantrell flipped her wrist and checked her pulse with thin, arrogant hands. It felt like Bittersweet again: having to allow this, having to let him do it, having no choice in the matter. “I suppose so,” she said, slowly. It was news to her, and surprising. “Are you … continuing that work?”

  The computer continued its noisy analysis for a few seconds longer, then fed back results Ash couldn’t decipher.

  Cantrell’s face fell. “Why no, that can’t be right.” He tapped at the interface. “You’ve only been with us for a year. What are your symptoms?”

  I see her. She talks to me. She’s probably dead. “I see things that aren’t there. Sometimes … dots, spirals. Sometimes people. Dead people. My hands shake, coordination’s an issue. Can’t always judge distance.”

  “Shaking hands, sure, that’s normal for the first year, but—” He pointed to a diagram she didn’t understand. “You’re not in the early stages. Your neurons are degraded to the point that I would have expected you to have had celestium infiltration for ten or eleven years. And your lungs are clear. But you say it’s been a year?”

  “And some months.”

  Cantrell exchanged a wary look with the executive at the door, who nodded.

  The doctor then brought the blood test up on the monitor nearby. It showed red and silver geometries, grains of sand sloshing together like the Bittersweet desert; it looked nothing like Ash’s experience of blood, the muck and the tang and the ruddy fear of it. “You know how it works, don’t you? They did tell you?”

  It fucks you up, Christopher said, just over her shoulder, and then you die.

  Ash said nothing.

  “You take a breath; the celestium settles into your lungs and binds to the walls, then is carried into your bloodstream with any new oxygen, and then from there into your body, your brain. You find it a lot in mining companies like Wellspring, shitshows that don’t provide adequate lung protection for indentured workers. And you certainly have celestium in your blood, but you didn’t get it from breathing it in. And there’s something else there, too, something beautiful—”

  “That’s all I need to see,” the executive said, and then pushed off the wall. His violet eyes were shining, and he crossed immediately to Ash, pressing his face close to hers, yanking her eyelids up with a hot finger. His breath smelled like cinnamon. Ash tensed.

  “Remarkable,” he said. “Oh, you’re right, Doctor. That’s not celestium. That’s Aurora’s future.”

  “I didn’t think it was celestium, no,” Cantrell said.

  For once, she pushed back, overwhelmed. “Just … stop. Please. Stop touching me.”

  The corners of the executive’s mouth turned up a little more, folding into thin, rubbery cheeks. Ash had never seen teeth that white. “That’s true. I shouldn’t touch a future citizen, should I? We’re prepared to make you an offer, indenture,” he said.

  Ash’s heart started pounding out a frenzy in her chest. She broke into a sweat across her forehead that stung her eyes, and she felt dizzy simply from the bare hope of it.

  “Your current cit account, including your most recent medical care, stands at twenty years. The information on the card brings it down to fifteen,” the executive said. He noticed and paused to let her take in the number, to let her shake, to let her blood roar in her ears. Asshole. “You can stay an uncitizen, but after the data you provided, Mr. Solano and the board of directors would like to offer you a better deal. We want you to undertake a full indenture while we’re still here at Rio. We will need to study your condition to develop treatment for it. The period will last up to a year. At the end of this period, you will be a citizen. There are conditions—”

  “Yes,” Ash said. The word came out before she could control it, springing from the same deep place as her thoughts about Chris, Kate’s smile, the love of warm blankets and hot tea and hope.

  “Mm. Let me get through the offer before you decide. Because of the medical involvement and the need to involve R&D, this will be a full indenture. You will wear a monitor. It binds you to strictures far more stringent than the ones that you signed for Bittersweet. You will give every yes that is asked of you, to every task that is asked of you, no matter how daunting, immediately and without fail, in any department we choose. Or else, your life may be on the line.”

  “And you’ll find a cure?”

  Cantrell and the executive exchanged glances. “That’s part of the goal, yes,” the executive said.

  “Put me on the search team for Captain Keller, and I’ll do it,” was all Ash could say, even though Christopher was in her brain, screaming Slavery.

  “We can start there,” the executive responded, “but at some point we’re going to have to get you in a lab. I’ll stay with you, for observation. That’s really all I can promise.”

  It’s a year, Chris. I might make it.

  The executive said nothing more; he whipped out a tablet, made some changes, and turned it around. Ash affixed her signature with a shaking hand. Behind him, she barely saw Natalie, sitting up in her bed, pushing off the covers, shaking her head, her eyes wide—

  —and Ash averted her gaze, thinking of Kate.

  “Thank you, Mr.…”

  “Indentures,” Cantrell said, “I’d like you to meet Aram Julien, Rio’s associate director of development. He’s going to brief the two of you on what happens next.”

  “I’m in a hospital gown,” Ash said, feeling suddenly naked.

  Cantrell produced two newly stitched, hard-pressed Aurora expedition uniforms. “No, you’re not,” he said.

  Five minutes later, Ash felt much better in a snappy blue Aurora field jacket, striding down familiar corridors, listening to the sound of her heels on the deckplates, Natalie by her side. The antigrav pulled at her legs and pushed the blood through her heart in the way a planet’s gravity ought. It was almost like things were normal again, even if the skin of her wrist felt hot and tight against the plastic of the new monitor.

  Twenty-Five had been a stocky, safe cargo hauler with insides full of corpses and scientific equipment, sporting the aesthetic appeal of a half-crushed box of crackers. Rio was a testament to the Company’s power, built to be seen, to shuttle around notables from the administration on one deck while facing down violent blockades on another. It was sleek where it didn’t need to be and ostentatious in its simplicity. Like London, Rio was riddled with new haptic interf
aces in every compartment, and when Ashlan stopped to gawk at the new and improved pod bay, Natalie lingered behind, grabbing at her elbow.

  “Why did you sign that? I was trying to tell you, it’s not a good deal—”

  “It’s citizenship,” Ash said. “In twelve months. Not fifteen years. And you were a soldier—you did a full indenture. They gave you healthcare—”

  Natalie’s eyes were dark, and her face deadly serious. “Yeah, but … not like this. Remember when we were out on that last run together? We talked about the benefits I got—the savings account, the credit toward my contract? Ashlan, your deal isn’t fair. They can ask you for every task. Every single one. And they didn’t give you any idea about what those tasks will be. Ash, they can ask you to die for them. And you can’t say no.”

  Ash’s stomach twisted. “They said they were going to give me the cure.”

  “No, they said it was a goal. A goal, not the goal. You don’t even know what they found. Frankly, I’m a little scared of how fast Mr. Solano seems to have moved on this. They know something you don’t, and they leveraged you.”

  “So now you care.”

  Natalie narrowed her eyes. “You make it really tough to be your friend, Ash.”

  Ash sighed. “I’m still here. That’s what matters.” She ran her hand through her hair, the noise of the shuttlebay, the people running to and fro, the shouting, all of it suddenly too loud. “And, God, I can do anything for a year. I made sure of that. How long do you think Rio is going to be here?”

  Natalie grabbed her hand. “Depends on what they find below. The fact that they didn’t tell you, that they don’t know, should have tipped you off that this was a bad deal.”

  “Indenture Ashlan,” called the executive from down the hall. “Catch up.”

  And she had so much to say to Natalie, so much to explain, but the new monitor on her wrist was cold and tight, and she’d made a bargain, hadn’t she? Ash swallowed a knot of acid confusion. “It’s all a bad deal, Nat, that’s all people like us ever get,” she said, squeezed back, and took off down the hall.

  She felt Natalie’s angry eyes boring into her back long after she wanted to stop caring.