She emerges into a chamber shaped like a bowl.
In the centre, the subject in a vast bed. Tethered to the ceiling by life support, each cable as thin as puppet string. Tendrils of satin-glass frame her face and disappear into the loose gown that gives her modesty. Her ankles flare, khrut-like, into taloned metal feet.
Suranut gasps, too loud, before she can stop herself.
They’ve all heard of this. Begun decades ago as a classified project, to build a vessel to reconnoitre humanity’s shattered home. The craft itself was, and is, trivial; finding a crew who could survive the journey, conscious the entire time and sane, was a greater challenge. How many were selected and sent forth remains secret.
And here is one. Perhaps the only, or––
“The last one.” The subject’s eyes are still human, or mostly so. Pinpoints of light in her irises spin in slow circles. “You’re the last of them, aren’t you?”
Suranut draws a breath. One step and she pauses, unsure whether she’s meant to approach.
The cortex again: “Please address the subject as Pilot.”
Abruptly she makes a decision. Forward, until half a metre separates her and the bed. “What do I call you?”
The pilot draws up her legs, a slow considered motion. Talons scrape along without tearing the mattress. Perhaps the cortex is whispering in her ear, instructing her not to answer or to answer with her function rather than her name. But she says, “Gullaya. My name’s Gullaya.”
Suranut’s fingertip flares with sudden, intense pain. She understands the warning well before the cortex speaks.
“Esteemed citizen.” The voice stays perfectly neutral, not that she expects any different. “You may leave.”
The second summons is an ambush: Suranut did not expect to hear any more of it, see any more of the catacomb-chamber or the pilot Gullaya.
She is woken up at twenty-three thirty, two hours after she’s finished work and gone to sleep. No hand on her shoulder to shake her into consciousness, but she wakes nevertheless and in the dark comes face to face with a cloud of red fireflies. The shape of it approximates a person at the foot of her bed, the mouth full of flame-teeth like forever candlewicks.
“Khun Suranut Tanawiwat.” The torso bows; the hands make a shapeless wai, insect-form fingers blurring into one another. “Your presence and grace are requested in the healing-house of Pilot.”
“She has a name.” Bedsheet pools at her waist. Suranut doesn’t bother to cover herself; there is no privacy from the AI, from birth to termination. “Why?”
“You ask more questions than average, esteemed citizen. You are requested.”
“She has a name,” Suranut repeats.
“As does the body that houses the AI, citizen, but few would refer to it or the collection of processes and algorithms that form the cortex as Krungthep.”
For a moment she stares at the shifting haze, not real but substantial in spite of that; it does not dimple her mattress or char her duvet, but she can’t escape the impression that if she reaches out she will touch a corporeal presence. Will be, perhaps, singed. “Are you offended? That we don’t use your name. It’s not as though most of us ever get to speak to you.”
The avatar’s head cants. Astonishingly humanlike in body language, but then the AI has had generations––centuries––to observe and imitate. “There is no me, esteemed citizen. You are communicating with an intricate set of heuristics, but that is not a self. Function is its own justification and essence. Do you assign personal names to your hippocampus, your pancreas, your lungs? The lack of names doesn’t diminish their necessity. And so the subject is Pilot first, as the shipworld is shipworld first before all sentiment.”
Suranut can’t tell whether the cortex is being sarcastic. “Let me dress.”
“Your belongings will be moved to a suite adjacent to Pilot’s, where you will stay for the duration of this experiment. Your work will be suspended.”
A suite. She glances at her cluttered room: a workspace and a bed. Everything else is folded into the bulkhead, modular and bare and small. “To be a citizen is to work. To be a citizen is to earn the resources to which one is allotted.” The most important civil tenets.
“This is work, citizen, of a different nature to your routine assignment but no less crucial.”
In the end there is no arguing with the cortex, and when all is said and done its authority is checked only by the shipworld’s administrative council.
The fishbowl room is larger this time, more furnished. New additions: a wardrobe, an alcove with a window that looks out onto empty blackness, and a table for two. Last, in a partition of its own, a frame of bars and counterweights that look more like a torture instrument than exercise. Gullaya hangs from it upside down, her legs hooked around the top frame and her body supported by an inclined metal slab.
Centimetre by centimetre she levers herself until she is nearly upright. The muscles of her thighs bunch; those of her abdomen cord, and the cables joining to her the ceiling flex. Sweat alloys her limbs with radiance, jeweling her flanks and throat. “What do you do?” Gullaya asks, words punctuated by quick gasps.
Suranut wrests her gaze away from the undulation of muscle, the perspiration glazing barely-clothed skin, the musk and salt. “I’m a historian. I specialize in certain social movements from late twenty-first to early twenty-second century. Did you know, there was a time when two women or two men couldn’t marry each other back in Muangthai? That changed at one point, but even afterward it wasn’t so easy for women to be wife and wife, men husband and husband… let alone any other genders. It’s so long ago, nearly unbelievable, and it’s easy to feel disconnected from all that. To just forget them as an artefact of an ancient, primeval time. But their lives and names deserve memorializing. Their struggles and their deaths. The ones who lived to see their dream, the ones who didn’t. The ones who got to finally marry at eighty-five.”
The pilot unhooks her legs and climbs down. She is sheathed in a material too supple to be fabric, one that is loosening up into a sleeveless shirt and skirt down to her knees. It leaves her back naked from top to base of spine, room for the cables and the jacks they are plugged into. “The right to die should be an essential, inviolable one, don’t you think?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I never meant to return––I was piloting away from here, into the sun maybe, but the cortex took over navigations and forced me back here. Every step of the way I fought that; I even crashed, as near to fatally as I could manage, and still they had to revive me. They won’t let me die.”
The cortex’s voice, disembodied: “You represent an unprecedented sum of shipworld resources invested, Pilot. To allow that to go to waste would be wrong. While an individual citizen may terminate themselves they first have to repay their debt to Krungthep. Only then does duty end. Yours is far from finished.”
Gullaya laughs, her teeth showing bird-sharp and lustrous as lacquered bone. “You see?”
At closer look Suranut discovers that the pilot is much less senior than she first believed. Twenty-five at most, a long sculpted face with immense eyes that make her look even younger. Phenotype from southern Muangthai base: dark skin, shapely nose. “You’re much too young to think like that.”
“Wrong. Factor in the travel time and I’m much older than you, Khun Suranut. But even if I weren’t, who are you to question my agency? Who’s the AI up there?” Gullaya jabs a hand upward. “It even has the nerve to tell me to exercise so my muscles don’t atrophy. Who the hell does it think it is?”
“The shipworld’s custodian, Pilot. Insurance against extinction events.”
“Fuck off,” Gullaya murmurs, without any real fervour. “You’re going to live with me, I hear. Let’s show you to your room.”
Suranut’s quarters are as generous as the pilot’s, sized to house an entire family. The walls are warmer than Gullaya’s, rose-gold gradients. Half the room gives a view of old Krungthep at night: skyscrapers as
far as the eye can see, the Chao Praya ignited by traffic. Bridges over canals and bridges joining buildings. Temples like miniature suns. She imagines going to sleep each night looking at this.
“There were three of us,” Gullaya says, abruptly. “Pilot, scout, archivist. Each of us had a different role, but it was mostly about company. There had to be more than one, to keep each other sane. There had to be a third, to counterpoint and hold the balance. The human psyche is a brittle cup, prone to overflowing, to leaking, to breaking.”
Suranut is pricked by a sudden understanding: why she is here. “What happened to them,” she says, more statement than question.
The cityscape reflects in Gullaya’s pupils, harsh and colourless. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
While Suranut can’t leave their joined quarters, she comes to realize that Gullaya has even less freedom than she. The life supports extend more than Suranut would think possible, but they still tether the pilot as though the cortex is weary of what Gullaya might try given half a chance.
Weeks pass. There are days where Gullaya sleeps for eleven hours, waking only to eat. “They don’t let me have any alcohol,” the pilot would say, bleary, tangled in the sheets. Rolling over and going back to sleep. Suranut is half-minded to simply continue her work; the cortex has authorized her unprecedented access to the shipworld’s database, giving her material to mine that she didn’t even realize had survived. But Gullaya’s disarray offends––Suranut’s first sight of the pilot was one of post-human perfection, a creature that expresses what could be rather than what is, a tremendous promise. The pilot should at least maintain basic hygiene and so Suranut all but throws Gullaya into the bathroom.
“I’m not letting you out,” she says, “until you smell civilized again.”
“Who are you, my mother? I’m your senior.” But Gullaya does emerge clean, smelling of jasmines and mangoes. Those being what they do, indeed, have for lunch: rice from the greenhouse deck drenched in jasmine water, dried fish, pork balls and fried shallots. For dessert, ripe mangoes and sago in coconut milk.
For a change, the pilot finishes most of her portion. “Look at all this waste,” she says, even then. “Such extravagance just to feed a couple of nobodies. Adding to the tally of my debt to the shipworld, no doubt.”
“Not so, Pilot. While you are here, what is spent to maintain you will not add to your total––even if it did, it would be insignificant compared to your existing debt. These niceties are provided for Khun Suranut so she would not give up too quickly and abandon you.”
Suranut cleans her bowl down to the last drop of coconut milk, the last speck of sago. “Is there anything we can do but eat and sleep? You can’t blame her for being bored out of her wits.”
Half a second of quiet, more for effect than function: not as though the AI needs that long to weigh the decision. “A segment of Recreation will be transferred to your deck. Esteemed citizen, you will be entrusted with Pilot’s safety and conduct.”
To that, Gullaya snorts. “What can she do, anyway? The last ones were all psychiatrists, therapists, and they couldn’t wring a thing out of me. What hope does she have?”
“I’m right here,” Suranut says mildly. Marvels quietly at this creature who is so human after all––the only person alive who’s seen Earth and its impaled heart, Krungthep and its shredded shadows.
The Recreation segment is ready within the next twenty-four hours, the fastest deck rearrangement Suranut has ever seen; normally something like that would require a month’s wait, a great deal of bureaucracy, and a very good reason. But she supposes she is dealing with the highest bureaucrat of all, the ultimate authority.
When they are admitted, Suranut realizes that this is not the Recreation she knows. The immersion scales larger than life: a primeval forest of high canopies, perfectly green––individual leaves like jade and the sun slanting to filigree the mulch in platinum. Suranut kneels to touch the undergrowth and finds the texture velvet, the smell rich and wholesome. In a corner of her eye she glimpses shadow-striped gold, a flash of yellow eyes and lashing tail.
The only break in the illusion is Gullaya’s umbilici, thinner and more transparent but still visible. Even so she belongs: the planes of her skin in interplay with the shade, sun-gleam collecting at her clavicles and in the dip of her throat. Her talons make a peculiar music against the mulch, the material of the deck module.
“Probably some educational game of the AI’s,” the pilot mutters as she leads. “An adventure.”
Suranut stands this close on the cusp of asking whether Earth looks like this, today. Probably not. Not even close. This is a perfect forest, more romanticized and supreme than any that ever existed. It is ersatz. But––the charred wastelands that pock humanity’s cradle, some of those must have healed. In pieces and in stages, step by reluctant step. The most optimistic projection of Krungthep as it is now has always enchanted her: the ruins of skyscrapers draped over with green life, their bases overcome by spores and fungi, pigeons nesting in temple skeletons and the river thick––so thick––with crocodiles.
“There were three of us.” Gullaya’s voice sends ripples through the sunrays. “We didn’t get along, at first. Even the AI in all its wisdom couldn’t find three qualified candidates whose personalities complemented each other naturally. I hated the archivist, this mouse of a man, always trying to play mediator between me and the scout. In the end, we managed, and I… what does it matter? Go on, ask the questions, the same ones as the others. You’re so desperate to know it must hurt.”
“I am.” Though Gullaya said the archivist and the scout with the heat of blood abandoning artery in haemorrhage, she leaves out their names; Suranut does not fail to notice. “But you aren’t going to tell.”
“I’m not going to give in to, what, reverse psychology.” The pilot quickens her stride into a march, then a run.
Suranut doesn’t try to catch up. Instead she lets the AI track Gullaya and guide her. She keeps seeing tigers in pieces, between blinks like hallucinogenic splices. “Pilot is unwell, as you may have noticed,” the cortex says as she rounds a tree stump. Its radius is longer than her arm.
“Hard not to notice.”
“She refuses to be medicated and her auto-diagnostics can recognize hormone stabilizers. Her reactions to being forcibly injected are less than gracious. There was a motion,” it goes on, “to domesticate her by drugs and conditioning.”
A sick understanding centipedes down the back of her mouth. “You stopped them?” Because had the AI agreed to that decision, Gullaya would not be walking and talking. She would be prone and hardly sentient, dosed into unmoored dreams and vivisected self.
“We have resources to attempt another Earth venture, but it’d be more efficient to have her as a model––a veteran to either accompany or train the second expedition. Pilot has more than one use and ruining her mind for short-term gains would be a waste.”
The nausea sharpens, hardening in her throat.
One of the birds has flitted down, red-breasted and red-beaked, to perch on the stump. “The shipworld should have been able to monitor the entire journey, but after they made Earth-fall a series of fatal errors occurred.” The AI bird preens, copper wings flaring. “It would be best if you can help Pilot quickly. Human patience has a limit and once that limit is met, no amount of algorithm and cortex logic will gainsay it. The most objective of intelligences, the most exact arithmetic––all are paper walls before the killing flame of human temper.”
Suranut comes to a banyan tree. The size of a shipworld, the canopy like a planet’s roof. She cranes her neck up and up, toward mirage infinity.
And on a bough the scale of a giant’s shoulder, Gullaya stands. At ease, entirely relaxed, hands at her sides. Her mouth is a stitch of smile, her eyes tight shut.
Licking her lips Suranut tries to remember the distance between a deck’s ceiling and ground. “Pilot is in no danger,” the AI says in her ear. “She’s more impact-resistant t
han most. A few broken bones, depending on the angle of landing, unless she falls headfirst. Still, best avoided.”
An assessment with which Suranut can readily agree. The height is enough to give her vertigo, though some of that has to be a perspective trick. But more than the height there is the wall of the pilot’s bitterness, the briar-paths of her loss. “Gullaya. What did you want to be, growing up?”
The pilot opens her eyes. Their voices carry to one another, as though the AI has arranged the acoustics just so. “Astrophysicist. Only I didn’t have the brains for it.”
“Me too. Mathematician. Except numbers and I didn’t get along too well, calculus tripped me up terribly and then I got far too interested in dead people. At first I specialized in war––the arms races, the negotiations, the catastrophes that led to apocalypse––but that got depressing. I started focusing instead on the people who brought changes. Good changes.”
“What for?”
“Possibility.” Like the sky, but that is a childish thing and so she does not voice it. “Life in the shipworld is––it’s like living in amber. It’s stasis. Something has to change or break.”
A fractured laugh. “And you want me to be the change, so we don’t break?”
“No, I want you to try again. The numbers you couldn’t get right the first time, the bits of physics you couldn’t wrap your head around. There’s no reason any of this has to be final.”
“Death is final. Loss is permanent. None of that can be tried again or revised.” Gullaya moves. A step forward. A step back. Then she stops. For a long time, she stands that way, every limb and muscle tensed.
Then she leaps––
But she never falls. The umbilici draw taut and Suranut is sure, is certain, they must snap. Instead they hold and Gullaya hangs suspended, a puppet in mid-flight. The pilot starts laughing, long and loud.
After, it is as though a door inside Gullaya has broken down. She insists on showing Suranut where she landed. “If the cortex lets us out of this fucking place,” she adds, for they return to the suite to find it crowded with ghosts.
Methods Devour Themselves Page 6