More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  A growl gyred in her mind.

  “I’ve disabled your voice and motor control. I need you to listen, and to be still,” he said in a voice smooth and evil as poisoned liquor. “You must understand why you are here, and what I want from you. What I, in fact, will have.”

  She couldn’t move or make sounds, but her sensors were still live. She could feel the skate of his hands on her vat-grown skin. Shoulders to biceps to forearms to wrists, and settling there, as manacles. Something tightened in the core of her body, near the stomach. Nausea? Was this the feeling humans referenced when they said they were about to vomit? This interior shriek and need to resist, to evacuate all the feelings and words and inputs?

  “I am guessing Nathan never told you his mission. He was to have brought us Vallejo’s masterwork. We all believed that work was Marisa Vallejo, the consciousness transferred from a dying body into a clone through the magic of technology, a way for us all to visualize our own immortality playing out. The process is awkward and requires tweaking, but it is still a remarkable technology, something we could build upon. What Nathan brought us instead was… you. Do you know what you are, Chloe?”

  He slid the hand down. Cybernetic sensory networks, the mech equivalent of nerve endings, registered its position, but Chloe blocked the meaning. What did it mean when a man palmed your ass and you couldn’t move away or even tell him to stop?

  Considering who she was, what she was, the only thing certain was it didn’t mean what he probably wanted it to. He thought it meant intimidation, ownership, threat. Well, fuck him. Chloe was not a body, nor was she beholden to the cage that held her.

  Touching her without consent meant vengeance lit.

  Look me in the eyes. Look at me right now.

  “So you are not, after all, what we sought,” he said, squeezing, “but you are something far more potent. You will clear the detritus from this world, leaving a path open for the best of us to live forever.”

  Burn. Deep. Howl.

  No. I know exactly what I am. I am your end.

  Chapter Eight

  SOUTH OF CONCEPCIÓN, CHILE

  MIDNIGHT BELOW THE PACIFIC

  As it turned out, Vallejo didn’t know where the Consortium bases were and reminded the family members who’d come onto the submarine to interrogate him that he had been a prisoner, not a member, of that secret group bent on world domination. The family investigation had devolved from there, and folks with underworld or cloud contacts peeled off to explore leads on their own.

  They kind of forgot about Garrett when they left the sub, and that was okay. He was used to functioning on their periphery. Default solitude didn’t even pang anymore.

  And also, Garrett wanted to talk to the submarine.

  No, not talk as in chitchat, like people making sounds at other people and pretending they understood each other. Talk like, take a look at her logs. See where she’d been, where she liked to go a lot. Listen to her electronics hum and her air circulators cycle, and ask if she knew how to get back to any of those places, especially the ones that she’d docked at before Vallejo had come on board.

  Vallejo and Dan-Dan the mech-clone didn’t seem to mind Garrett’s presence, either. In fact, when he started sifting the ship’s log for locations, Vallejo leaned over and deleted a dozen or more coordinates.

  “Horrors that my captors wanted me to see personally,” he explained. “There’s no reason to take your Chloe to those places, so there’s no reason for us to remember them, hmm?”

  “You think the sub might have travelled to wherever she is now? In the past?” Garrett asked.

  Vallejo shrugged. “It’s a stretch, but honestly, none of your leads are particularly brilliant. This search isn’t the worst way you could waste your time.”

  Garrett had been looking at only numbers, longitude and latitude, and trying to figure out in his head where this sub had gone. But he had to admit the search became easier when Dan-Dan put up a map on the smartsurface desk and started plotting ports, excluding the Gulf of Mexico ones that rubbed Vallejo so raw.

  The points that were left revealed an extensive a travel history. Mediterranean, horn of Africa, North American Eastern seaboard, this boat had been all over. She’d even taken the scenic route to their island in the Pacific, hooking past Argentina and Chile.

  “Pause, if you will,” said Dan-Dan.

  Garrett stopped scrolling. “You see something?”

  “Ah, perhaps.” Dan-Dan tilted his head slightly. “I apologize, but this route, the one the submarine followed on her most recent trip here to the Isla Luz, was not the first time she went south around the tip of Chile.”

  He pointed to a set of three coordinates, and then their corresponding ports: Islas Malvinas to Ushuaia in the Tierra del Fuego and then on to Punto Arenas.

  “Why’s that a big deal, though?” Garrett asked.

  “Because in the past, the itinerary also included an impossible place,” the mech-clone said.

  Excitement blew across the fine hairs on Garrett’s forearms. “An impossible place? Like temporal or spatial travel, or—”

  The mech-clone looked abashed, which was kind of his natural posture, like he was in a perpetual state of apology. “Oh no, nothing like that.”

  Dangit, there went all Garrett’s best sci-fi theories. “Well, where then?”

  “The dock it most often returns to, though the information is concealed, is near the 77th parallel.”

  The what what?

  “No, you must be wrong. Let me see those numbers…” Vallejo bent over the desk littered with plotted points and vector lines.

  Garrett wasn’t a computer. He didn’t sift data the way Chloe or Heron or Dan-Dan did. He also was not a genius like Vallejo. But he did know geography, a little, enough to pilot his people around, and he’d made himself learn a lot more after they’d moved to the Isla Luz. A parallel was latitude. Isla Luz was at 30-ish or thereabouts. Whatever was at 77 degrees latitude was south in a serious way.

  Under his breath, Vallejo said some things that were definitely not English. Garrett recognized a couple of swears but didn’t judge. Instead he peered over Vallejo’s shoulder. It wasn’t hard. The dude was tiny.

  “Antarctica?” Garrett said, reading the map on the smartsurface, the one lit up with dots.

  “Of course,” said Vallejo. “Why didn’t I think of it before?”

  “You mean the idea of a global shadow organization having a secret headquarters under Antarctica? Uh, yeah, bit embarrassing that you didn’t, honestly.” Because that theory had been done at least a zillion times. It was kind of the equivalent of Area 51 in conspiracy circles, the thing everybody who knew anything understood and accepted as god-sworn truth. Or, at least a super secret hidden truth only revealed to the dedicated few believers.

  “No,” said Vallejo, “I meant that of course anyone who doesn’t want to be seen would build a base over a pole. No ethics laws, for one thing. Plus, you can’t geosynch a spy station of any size over a pole. Even communications satellites just pass over and don’t stay there. The energy expenditure required to hold that position would be enormous. Good God, don’t they teach you younglings anything anymore?”

  Garrett shrugged. Yeah, he’d been taught some. Enough that his first foster mom hadn’t been hauled off to jail for failure to educate her charge. The authorities had found other ways of punishing her, but that probably hadn’t been because of his school attendance. She’d had other sins.

  “Ah,” said Dan-Dan, “so also the Chiba Station cannot tether there, and the spaceplane cannot achieve optimum speed in getting here and would have to fly in at traditional subsonic speeds.”

  “Bingo,” chimed Vallejo.

  “Which means what?” Garrett asked.

  “Which means,” Vallejo said, turning away from the desk and staring up at Garrett in the eerie green
light of the helm console, “that where we are going, if we fuck up, we can’t expect anything like a timely rescue. We’re on our own.”

  Which is when Garrett realized the boat was already underway, and holy shit, he was part of a rescue attempt.

  • • •

  THE DOLL KITCHEN

  DARK. TIME PASSAGE UNKNOWN. FOREVER, MAYBE. SURE FEELS THAT WAY.

  Her mech body lay on the metal floor, coiled tight against itself, the way a fetus incurvates, hugging its own knees. In an organic being, the position was efficient, preserving heat, bathing the torso with breath, conserving. For a mech, it was unnecessary. Chloe arranged her body thus to avoid being seen.

  Or touched.

  Limontour, during his visits, liked to engage her in scientific discussion, bleed her of information, stimulate her borrowed sensory arrays, and then cut power abruptly without warning. The first time he’d done it, the first time he’d blacked her out, she hadn’t known what to expect, and, as had happened when Nathan went offline unexpectedly, her core consciousness had been cut off from her peripherals.

  Parts of her were left behind, and she was isolated and alone, stewing in her box.

  She waited between Limontour’s visits, doing the digital equivalent of pacing until another system arrived, another series of electronic paths she could inhabit. A different mech body. A different sequence of insults endured.

  “Tell me a thing, Chloe,” he always started. One time, the time he’d brought her a dress to put on, he’d followed with, “When I say beauty, what comes first in your mind?”

  She struggled with a press seam on the side. The printed fabric scratched against one of the body’s sensory points in a rub that would get annoying fast. Already it was hard to concentrate on his question.

  Beauty?

  Stars were beautiful. Night in the desert. Garrett laughing, that deep belly laugh that sometimes ended on a snort. The kind of laugh he wouldn’t permit himself in front of anyone else. Maybe beauty was being special, the only one who understood what was so funny. And maybe beauty was being part of something beyond herself. A single piece belonging to something bigger, and better.

  “Butterflies,” she said instead, cataloging the irritation of clothes on her mech body. Encasing and confining and annoying, but also protective, armor against his gaze. “Free butterflies, flying. Not the ones nailed to boards.”

  “Because of the color or…?” He walked the circumference of her cage, ostensibly deep in thought, though she caught his intermittent peeks.

  “Because they endure in the long game,” she said, “generation after generation, despite all our pesticides and interference and climate malfeasance. They endure.”

  “You say ‘our’ as if you were a person.”

  Damn it. Caught again. “I am part of the world that hunts organic things, that trims their numbers. In terms of function, I am the human pestilence.”

  Even as she said those words, their meaning took root in her mind and grew darkness there. Was she really? A blight? A killer?

  She hadn’t seen Nathan, not since that first day when he brought her here.

  “Yet you are not human,” said Limontour. “You do know that, right?”

  Why must he remind her? It wasn’t as if she didn’t know this defect in herself, this shame. She turned to face him but must have done too quickly. The seam at her hip pulled, then came apart.

  “I am part of their world,” she insisted, trying to ignore the change in surface temperature of the exposed flesh. “I was made for extermination of atmospheric abnormality. Regional drought or the life of a butterfly, ending a thing is still extermination. And I did so at the humans’ behest. My makers, trying to change the world for the better. They were the good guys.”

  He paused in his walk then turned and looked at her through the twin wire cages. “Tell me a thing, Chloe. Do you know what we call a technological object whose only purpose is to destroy?”

  She thought of the drone-launched missiles, exploding into buildings. Ruining her home. Killing Mama Adele. Her family had wept and wept, and she had wanted so much to join them. She had longed to be part of the circle, to merge her sorrow with theirs and turn it into comfort. Humans could do magic like that.

  But by the time she had devised a holographic animation for tears, the moment was over. Raw, urgent grief had passed for the others, and they had moved already to the next stage. To the angry stage, and Chloe no longer wanted to be angry. She had been left to work through her feelings on her own.

  Limontour placed both palms against the outer cage and pinned her with a blue-eyed glare, the same blue as the electrical skitters on the cage walls during power surges.

  “A weapon,” he mocked in that dirty-dish-scum voice. “We call you a weapon.”

  Her world went offline.

  Again. Blackout. Pieces broke away, and she couldn’t get them back. They were lost. She retracted to her tiny box as something less, defeated, and not even knowing exactly why.

  Alone.

  • • •

  ON THE SUBMARINE

  52ND PARALLEL, JANUARY. THE ASS END OF ANOTHER DAY WITH NO DARK

  Garrett had been watching Jacques Cousteau. Like, he’d been watching it a lot. The ancient documentary hadn’t fared well in digital conversion. It was grainy and made him wish for eye augments, plus penguins weren’t really his thing, but… dude, when that guy died on the slope on the way up the mountain? Shit was real. Realer than what he was used to watching. Real enough to knot his stomach and make sleep impossible.

  He didn’t want to see the faces of the crew when they found out their mate was dead. But he forced himself to watch. Over and over.

  She was there. Chloe. Somewhere in that vast blank white nothing.

  The cold wouldn’t bother her, of course. She could endure weather variation that would be fatal to organic creatures, but she still needed a system to inhabit. Even a handheld com would be enough to contain her, her essence. Maybe.

  When he watched the Cousteau special, though, there weren’t any handhelds. No tablets, no phones, no coms, no smartsurfaces or cameras or cloud services. Hell, not even any computers. Granted, these vids were from way back, pre-information-age. But like Vallejo had said, nobody connected to the cloud was on Antarctica. The only people there were scientists and villains. People who either collected data for data’s sake, or hoarded privacy for the same reason.

  Antarctica in the latter half of the 21st century was half science, half pirate. Also mostly death.

  And it was exactly where Garrett was headed.

  “You are wasting time.” Vallejo strode into the communications room, his boot heels military crisp on the deck plates. Most folks instinctively ducked through doorways on submarines, but not Vallejo. He wore his pint size proudly.

  “I am educating myself,” Garrett replied. “Isn’t that what us ‘younglings’ are supposed to spend all our waking hours doing?”

  “You are entertaining yourself. That,” said Vallejo, fanning his fingers toward the paused image on the smartsurface, “is not education. It is soap opera with a ruffle of science tacked on for aesthetics. We need to talk about more important things.”

  “Such as?”

  Vallejo perched on the edge of a built-in spinny chair. He capped his knees with slender hands. “Such as how we are going to get you overland.”

  “Overland?” Garrett repeated. “I thought this sub went to a dock. Do you think it has other capabilities? Like hover skids or—”

  “Oh good grief. Disengage your brain from the fiction, if you will. No, there aren’t bizarre alterations on this submarine. It is precisely what it seems to be: a tourist vessel converted to underwater death chamber. However, Dan-Dan has been scanning the Antarctic surface for thermographic prints—”

  “I thought it wasn’t possible to get sat scans
.”

  Vallejo expelled a frustrated-sounding breath. “Look. There are ways of getting orbital instruments over a pole. They just don’t sit there like geostationary satellites. They move. Also, they’re not generally accessible to nonmilitary entities. But not to worry. I have an in.”

  “You mean Heron. He’s your in.”

  “What if I do?” Said with a lot of blinking and a haughty flounce of his gravity-defying hair.

  “Heron’s working with you?” Garret harrumphed in disbelief. “Voluntarily? Does that mean he’s forgiven you for shooting Mari?”

  Vallejo’s fingers went white over the points of his knees. “Young man, my dealings with my daughter and her fiancée are none of your—”

  Garrett held up one hand, palm out. He waited for Vallejo to fall silent. “Does that mean he has forgiven you? And more importantly, that she has? And think real hard before you talk, because these people are my family.”

  Vallejo did a thing then that Garrett had never seen, not once on the scientist’s super popular vid channel, the one that had run for a decade.

  He dropped his gaze. Stared at his knuckles. His eyes glassed. “She is…not what I thought she was. It’s true the creature you call Mari is not my daughter, but she has my daughter’s… not heart. Nothing so biological.” He delivered the word with disdain. “Materially, she is a clone that vile people grew to blackmail me. To hurt me. But biology isn’t everything, as it turns out.” He raised his face, met Garrett’s gaze, and spoke with an earnestness that pressurized the cabin. “Human persons have a core that has nothing to do with their cells and organs, and that core is our point of connection, Mari and I, the part of her that makes me want to know her, and the part of me that makes her able to forgive.”

  Garrett expelled a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “So this data you’re getting from Heron shows an inland base?”

  The glassiness skidded from the side of Vallejo’s eye. A tear. Just one, and clearly not something he was comfortable showing. But he didn’t wipe it away, just let it track its way down his leathery cheek. As if showing weakness were a sort of penance.