You are alone. You cannot understand.
I can try.
It is horrible. Horrible. We did not know.
Did not know what?
Ash heard the slightest hesitation before the memories shifted.
The together showed her an alien ship, organic and red-slick, the tight veins where the bright silver Vai coursed in their thousands. Then she saw the download room, where the secondary nodes filled with bright silver, the Vai in their veins causing them to rise from their slumber ten years before they reached the colony—because history was happening here in deep space, happening to these ten thousand Vai in the veins of their ten vessels, ready to interface, to speak, to trade, all of them understanding the shattering importance of this moment.
First contact with aliens.
And then: fire. The hull of the ship, holed.
Why did they have to do that? Why did they not download?
That’s a breaching pod, Ash told the together. There was no other way to for them to get on board.
Ash recognized the intruders immediately, their gangly two-legged bodies in familiar blue-black carapaces, their stubby fabric-covered fingers and alien machinery. Humans. Auroran humans. Their blinding, sickening flashlights. She’d seen this before when her body was broken and bloody, barely breathing, on the floor of a mine. This color. This light. But this was no rescue—
Wait.
One of them was Reva Sharma.
I know her.
We did not know they were alone. We thought they were together.
You mean you thought they were interfaces. Nodes. Like you.
Christopher offered the speaking-claw. (Christopher, the secondary node, she thought, the one that is many in front of me.) The alien intruder hesitated, then entwined its fingers with the fat, stubby ones of the secondary node. The intruder’s blue carapace felt hard to Christopher, unlike any kind of secondary or tertiary node they’d ever encountered, but it yielded to the claw, nonetheless, as everything did.
But it all went wrong. A puff of air slithered from the alien’s wrist rather than words of welcome. A spatter of warm, red, wrong blood, dead blood, silent blood. And more, and less, after that: a new sound (screaming, explained Ash), and then utter silence, the blank whispering gallery of a singular human brain.
The word for it was alone, they’ll learn.
Alone. A terrified howl.
And then a stuttering cracking sound like khilar trees bending in a storm, like bones breaking—
Ash knew that sound, too. You mean gunfire. They thought you were attacking, when you did to them what you did to me.
This is where we learned about death.
She felt the next memories like gunshots to the gut, a wild blast of pain and confusion. The weapons were primitive, but functional, and the ship went dark as the gunfire scrawled holes in the secondary nodes and they fell, broken, to the floor. Vai were spattered everywhere, chylous white and silver, outside their ships, desperate to upload, unable to upload, and soon the red steel-stink of the monsters, too, because Vai had just learned of death and war and being alone and it is terrifying and wrong and monstrous and they are returning it directly to the invaders—
They killed you.
They made us alone.
I don’t understand the difference.
At the end of the slaughter, only two nodes survived, licking up the silver, tasting the voices that sang in their throats, hearing them cry glory as they reintegrated. And they thought they were doing well, until the humans yanked out the Heart at the center of their ship. The Heart: the beautiful screaming scrollwork thing Ash knew as the London weapon, the weapon that was not a weapon, the thing that was going to power the Vai colony and connect them back to the master node. The mainframe. Home.
The silence was murderous. The humans took them aboard a vessel that did not sing, and since then they’d had to sing for themselves and—
Someone slapped Ash back to her own skull, once, twice, three times. Len, a dark, close blur smelling of dirt and sweat. Trapped in her skin, sucking down dust and blood at the back of her throat, she tasted the silver there, the knowledge of life eternal, of a thousand things she should not know but now did.
“—and you are not in command here, Natalie. Look. She’s here. Ash, talk to Nat,” she heard Len say. “Tell her it’s fine.”
“S’fine.” The words came out of Ash’s mouth, half muddled. She felt submerged, slow, confined to tight, recalcitrant skin. “Doesn’t hurt.”
“Bullshit,” said Natalie.
“If she says it’s not hurting her,” Len said, “then you need to believe her—”
“It’s killing her.”
Ash looked from one to the other. How long had she been under? “We’re the killers. We taught them about death,” she said, trying to put human words around a concept that suddenly seemed too awful for human words to describe. Blood pooled and clotted in the wound in her arm where the alien’s claw dug, crooked and white, into the soft bed of her wrist. “We tortured them. Kidnapped them. Aurora did. Dr. Sharma. Took their way home. We were in the wrong.”
“Ask it what it wants,” Len said, his voice hushed as if he were witnessing a miracle.
Christopher was waiting for her when she closed her eyes again, and they told her they—
—simply want to go home.
That easy?
We did not know what being alone truly meant. Anguish.
What do you mean?
Ash was in a cage with the other vessel, the tertiary node, on an alien world. Ash recognized ragged, damaged prefabs, failing atmospinners. For a moment, she thought it might be Tribulation, but no, she looked to the sky where the master node’s bloodships were trying to reach them, at the shattered atmospheric dome there, at the black sky, the ragged blue Auroran flags fluttering in a poison wind. Rubble. Bodies and blood, all of it wine-colored, human, drying in the sun.
Nearby, she saw a sign, pockmarked by burns: Gethsemane Town.
She knew the master node was close, heard the bloodships in orbit above sending down weapons that will make the aliens on the planet retreat and re-upload. There was no need for war.
It’s not the same for us, Ash thought. We get—we get deleted. Do you understand? We get deleted.
Anguish. They did not know. They do not know now. Only we know. We have to go home to let them know. We have to go. Now. Baby, it’s all coming down around us, baby—
Ash’s nausea spiked, and she—
—saw stars, choked on sudden vomit in her throat, Len’s fists a hard tattoo on her back. Ash clawed herself back, swallowed her pain, swallowed the realizations that crowded against her forehead, let the hangar twist back into existence before she spoke.
“They were at Gethsemane. They were being held there as prisoners. Gethsemane was supposed to be a rescue, not a massacre.”
Natalie’s face was painted with bright tears. “They sent down bonecrushers.”
“They didn’t know we could die.” Ash’s mouth was dry, coated in blood, in living silver. She felt faint, felt dragged back toward the together in an inexorable, welcoming whirlpool.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“They don’t die. Not how we die. The bodies, they’re—” Her body started to shake, big, shuddering tremors she couldn’t control. “They think we download into our bodies, like they do. They don’t understand.”
Natalie shook the gun. “How can it not understand? All those people? Four thousand people, destroyed in minutes? What about Cana? Thessilane? The Lost Worlds? Bittersweet? It doesn’t matter how it started, Ash. When lives are on the line, it doesn’t matter what is believed. It matters what is done.”
“This changes everything,” Len said.
Natalie’s lip curled. “Doesn’t change a thing.”
Len clambered to his knees. “Ash. You can tell them about us. You can tell them to stop. You can do what nobody else could have even thought possible—you can broker p
eace with the Vai, and right here. Right now. You can talk to them.”
Hope hung incandescent and sobbing in Ash’s throat, and then fell, like a punctured balloon. “No. They’re alone.”
Natalie spat her next words. “There’s no peace with the Vai. Even this peace we’ve had is just—just the absence of war, just the lack of it.”
Len looked toward the door, wringing his hands. “Let her try, Nat.”
Natalie made a grudging noise of assent.
Come back, Ash heard, and she—
—fell back into the warmth of together. Christopher nagged in his chorus, a child tugging at her leg, a supervisor screaming from the other room.
Aurora. They showed her Sharma again. The picture lacked photographic detail, like a human memory caught broken and cluttered by the ravages of time, but Ash knew who it was.
We made a mistake, Reva Sharma said, looming above her. Ash was still looking at her through the eyes of the secondary node. Pain lanced through her body. Hers, and theirs. It was too clear, too bright, more than a memory. But it doesn’t have to define us. The blood nanotech these aliens use—do you know how many diseases I could cure if I just had time, how many uncitizens I could save? Do you know the core of their ship might be a zero-point battery? How we could stop scarcity? Feed everyone?
The other woman had a familiar face; smaller, younger. Are you sure this is a good idea?
A good idea? To save people? I have some connections on a Wellspring base. Bittersweet. If we bring them into the program, we can sign up some indentures for medical trials.
The younger woman slots in. Jessen, from Sharma’s recording, all orange lines and sketched-in detail. I mean, will the creatures be missed?
Just two of them, lost on a colony ship far from home? Aurora would write that off. We have to fix this. Make our sin a sacrament. Something beautiful from all the blood.
Christopher tried to scream but—
—the alien’s claw slipped out, and they fell, weak and rattling, back into the pile of rags. Len’s face was close to Ash’s, his breath smelling caustic, like insomnia and engine oil. It seemed strange to not know what he was thinking.
“Let me go.” She felt a rag, clammy-painful against the dark gap in her wrist.
“You can go back one more time,” he said. “You’re losing too much blood, and I don’t know what this silver shit is doing to you. We’re not going to let you bleed out.”
“It’s okay,” Ash whispered. “I’m in the together now.”
“Len, this needs to stop,” said Natalie.
And she felt herself, still in her own body and in the alien’s, bilocated and brilliant, floating, burning hard and sane like no human had before. “No. One more time. Please. They don’t have linear minds,” Ash said. “There’s no such thing as one single Vai. They—it’s the wrong word, but I don’t know how else to describe it. They’re like files on a server. They download into bodies to interact with worlds that aren’t made like theirs, just like we use suits to work in vacuum. They have an entire technology built around it—nanotech and biotech, network and energy maintenance. We weren’t killing them, in the war. They were just uploading.”
She gulped down more dusty air and opened her mouth to continue, but Natalie, red and shaking, cut in before she could speak. “My unit. Killed nothing. Died for nothing. None of it was real.”
“They made mistakes,” Ash said. The words were like water in her mouth. “But we made mistakes, too. The biggest ones. The doctor was on the ship, Nat, when the science team botched first contact. The Vai were trying to be friendly—”
“They’re lying to you,” Natalie spat.
“Listen. We kidnapped an entire family line. Disabled the Heart of their ship so they couldn’t upload. It was like—if we wandered straight over to an entire colony and sucked it right up. That’s why they attacked.”
Natalie looked down at her gun. “Blood for blood.”
“No, they—”
“Our lost for their lost.” Natalie raised the gun again.
Dizzy, Ashlan tried to get to her feet as Len attempted to apply an autobandage to her cartwheeling arm. “No. That’s not what happened. They didn’t know they were killing us. They didn’t know we could die.”
Natalie’s voice grew stronger. “Can you hear yourself right now?”
Len managed to get Ash to stop moving long enough to slap the autobandage on her arm. “Not yet,” Ash said. “There are a hundred thousand people in this body right now, Natalie, so put the fucking gun down, so I can try to make peace. We can stop any new war, any conflict in the future right now, we just have to get in a ship and get them beyond the White Line, back to their people.”
“And I suppose you’ll want to bring the weapon back, too.” Natalie’s index finger flickered. “Mm?”
Ash put herself between Natalie and the alien, whose chest moved up and down, shallow, mother-of-pearl eyes spinning blank and sick at the ceiling. “Yes,” she said. “It’s not really a weapon. It’s their connection to their world, their only way home—”
This time, she didn’t need Christopher to bring up the memory. She had the together in her veins now, and she could be back there in a second, back in the pod, the darkness crawling up her arm once more, the cold air dropping into her heart and taking root in her veins.
She remembered everything now. How the weapon had scrambled behind her eyes, dragged out the memories, one by one, and thrown them into a darkness from which there was no exit. A device, a machine, an engine whose very purpose was to connect Vai with their source destroyed humans by doing the same.
A machine that had been changed by the Sacrament Society to work against the Vai, that had taken Len’s memory of Aurora and God knows what else. She tried to clutch at her lost memories in the blank reverie, throwing herself again and again against the wall—she hadn’t been trying to hurt herself, she’d been chasing them, all the things she’d forgotten, her parents and her home—
Natalie tilted her head. “Step away, Ash. I won’t ask you again.”
“No,” Ash said. “There must be peace.”
She could see Natalie swallow, panic alight in her throat.
We did not know death. What a gift you have given us, this word, this concept, this horror, this sobbing, sucking blank slate. We are dead every moment of the day. Not the cold loneliness of an empty bed or the silent press of a family lost but the howling void where a hundred thousand voices should sing, the foremothers, the children, the generations who lived all at once. Ash understood. Christopher is not dead, he can never be dead, because time was space, space was emotion, emotion was memory, memory was speech, everything lived at once—files that lived within them, the decisions that were made because of them, the potential that grew from them, the servers that would grow and germinate, the glorious colonies all feeding back to the master node, alone or together, they were the same—
all we want—
—is to go home,” Ash finished. “Anything less is genocide, anything less is death for Aurora and every Company and Earth and everything we are.”
“Now it’s a victim?” Natalie shook her head, and her gun shook. “Millions dead, Ash, and you’re calling that the victim?”
“Natalie,” said Len, taking one step forward. “Come on, let’s take a walk.”
Ash shook her head. “Would you just listen for one goddamn second? There’s something else—”
“There is nothing else!” The words clawed their way from Natalie’s throat. “You weren’t there! You weren’t at Cana! You didn’t see what they did, you didn’t see the bodies, how many people they killed! And now you say it meant nothing? My friends’ deaths meant nothing? Now you say that we’re the evil ones? Whatever it’s doing, it’s just using you! You can’t believe anything it says, Ashlan!”
“Put down the fucking gun, Natalie!”
A twitch of Natalie’s finger.
A single gunshot.
A dark crater er
upted on the alien’s forehead, and the thing fell back against its pile of rags and meal bar wrappers.
Ash screamed, losing her balance, her head empty, her blood cold, falling like a clump of quiet, deathless earth back against the concrete floor. The alien’s shining eyes went dull and the long limbs limp. Milk-silver blood flowed out into the linen smocks in which it lay. Ash clawed at the rags, the together’s legs, its hands, trying to hold it, trying to take it inside herself, trying to do anything to make the alone a little less diamond-keen. She shook the dead body, screaming, placing her lips against its shuddering wrist, trying to drink in the life there, tasting astringent metal and the ache of death. She understood Reva’s kiss, her reverence, everything she’d done after leaving Tribulation. This was the corpse of a civilization, thousands upon thousands of files dead, and she was choking on it—
“You killed them all.” She turned back to Natalie when she came up breathing; the younger woman’s eyes danced over Ash’s silver-coated lips in disgust.
“I did the right thing,” she whispered.
“You—I told you it was genocide—I told you,” stammered Ash. “All of them, you’ve killed all of them—there’s not just one—they don’t live just one life—”
Natalie swung her dark eyes from the dead alien to Ash. “No. You’re sick. You’re terminal. You’re not thinking. Take the alien beyond the White Line? In what? What did you expect? Were you going to ask Mr. Solano for a subcruiser? A crew?”
Len’s mouth worked in silent surprise as Natalie continued. “Let’s say you were right, and that we let it live. Then that thing gets brought up to Rio, and what do you think is going to happen? Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want it alive, if you were Mr. Solano or any of the other CEOs. The single greatest market advantage any Company has ever had. It’s better off dead.”
“You killed them.”
“I did you a favor.”
Tears welled in Ash’s eyes, and she lay against the dead together, searching for the voices and coming up only with dead, screaming silence. “Anything that happens from here is your fault, Natalie, your fault, anyone who dies, any planet that burns.”
Architects of Memory Page 24