In the white.
In the cold.
In the continent made of death.
“Fuck all of that,” he said out loud, marking his bearing in his mind’s eye and then climbing out of the modded inflatable. “I am Iron Man.”
• • •
Human bodies were weird. Everything about them: weird. Chloe figured out the simple-machine dynamics of muscles and bones no problem, and it didn’t take her long to realize that most of the stuff she was used to supporting in a mech-clone—power collection and dispersal, system prioritization, hierarchy shifts, and inter-system communication—just happened in a human body. All by itself.
Which, honestly, left her a lot of playground space. She assigned a slice of herself to autonomics and then started engaging the rest of her vast resources.
Only to find that she was sincerely less vast than she’d been when she came here.
Limontour had been siphoning bits of her off. That shitwhistle!
Of course she’d suspected as much—she wasn’t the sort of girl who forgot things like Chinese fables. Typically Chloe recorded everything and then retrieved her data packets later on for analysis, as needed, one hundred percent accurately. Forever. That’s just who she was.
Except, not anymore. There were holes in her memory, dark spots in her processes. She knew, for instance, the recipe for pumpkin muffins, the temperature and timing and stuff, but blanked completely on the ingredients list. Pumpkins, presumably, but what else? What else? It was driving her crazy.
Like her map.
She’d started mapping the building she was in by touch. Like, pacing a wall, following it with her hand and counting off measurements internally, until the surface ended in a corner or a door. She drew the architecture in her mind, like blueprints. True, she’d had to touch a few really icky things down in the doll kitchen—tissue vats, maybe?—but this mapping by hand thing had been going along great.
Until she went up a ramp and promptly blanked on the whole lower floor. Lost her internal map completely.
She couldn’t recall anything about the layout, not even how many rooms there were. She could still feel the viscous goo in the doll kitchen, the bristle of her metal cage. She still remembered what that room had looked like when the lights worked, how it smelled tupentiney and sharp, and she could recall what Limontour had…
Nope. Not going there.
Dang it, if she was going to have to forget large swaths of stuff, why couldn’t it be that? Him? Why couldn’t she just forget him completely? And Nathan. And the destruction of the Pentarc. And the stuff that had come right after, her series of oopses that were worse than oopses and were in fact murder and horrible and What am I even? Oh, she would like to forget some of those things.
Meticulously, she went back down the ramp and started over, mapping out the floor in her mind.
Her hands passed over a thousand surfaces that were probably wired, infused once with data. Smart. Her blackout bomb—thank you, Apega—made those surfaces dumb now, cool and dead beneath her fingers.
Touching them, one after another, was kind of calming, though. Smooth, marbleicious surfaces, like the bottom of a black-tiled swimming pool.
Even in the absence of light, even in the cold and stranded and alone and memory-wonkiness, being in a human body was still freaking awesome.
Totally the bee’s knees. (Idiom: knees of bees are intensely of the good, apparently. Must solicit high resolution photos of said joints and confirm.) She went to file this latest idiosyncratic wonder among her many millions, and…
It was gone. Her list of How to Talk Like a Real Girl. Was gone.
Also her list of Ways to Be a Real Girl (If the Opportunity Ever Presents Itself).
Also her list of 21st Century Popular Culture Items Garrett Thinks Are Snappy and, oh damn it, her 20th century one, too.
Her list of Priceless Items Stored and Lost in the Pentarc.
Her list of Fascinating Things Apega Had to Say About the Consortium.
Her list of Number Images.
All her lists…
So many. Too many. She inhaled, but the cool air shuddered into her lungs. It made a gurgling sound, and then she realized that wasn’t the air’s fault. Her human body was malfunctioning. Her throat was pinching up, making breath difficult. Her eyes hurt, stung. Her legs didn’t want to move anymore, and even though she knew she was standing quite still, all the balance registers in her vestibular system were off and she was spinning.
No, not technically, not according to the mechanical system diagnostics in her head. The pressure controls in there were opening and closing properly, and the cochlea was working like a charm. Pretty shape. Fractal. Math. She’d never realized that human bodies were so mathy. Kind of comforting, even if right now she couldn’t add the pretty cochlea fractal to her number images. If she could, it would be… maybe seventy-six-ish? Slippy, slidey, curved and pulsing, like some strange wonderful underwater beast living in her head.
A part of her realized this set of image associations would either mystify or disgust most people. Garrett would get it, though.
I miss you. I need you. I’m sorry.
She’d made her way back to the ramp, a fresh map clear in her memory and ready to be archived, but she couldn’t arse herself to climb or process. The sense of vertigo had intensified. She still felt like she was swimming in that black pool, uncertain of up or down or before or after.
At the base of the ramp, Chloe stopped. Suddenly, she just stopped. She could wander here in the dark forever, but the futility of it descended like orbital debris. Devastating. She slid to the ground, merging her personal pool of darkness with the larger, even emptier nothing. She folded in on herself, expelling breath over her knees, hugging herself through sobs. She gave up trying to compensate for the autonomic vibration and instead let it take over until between the shivering and the sobbing, her whole body was one quivering organic mass.
She had always wanted to know what it was like to weep, to hurt, to feel. Well, now she knew. Boy did she.
“Turns out, reality is the goddamn anatomical inverse of the bee’s knees.” Her voice crackled through the weeping, a bad radio signal in a storm, but she was recording despite sound quality. Even if the record ultimately slid out of her memory like a buttered squid, she had to try to log her journey. Her experience. She had to believe it mattered.
She snuffled. “Body. Human body. Girl always wanted a human body. Girl always thought, Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to smell stuff like vinegar and tacos and perfume and fresh-laundered pillowcases and Garrett’s hair after a shower, and know the difference between rough and textured, because he said it was mostly nuance and what the hell even is nuance when you’re talking about tactile sensory input and all you really know are goddamn machine pressure points—which are all binary, I’d like to point out, so stuff is either rough or it goddamn isn’t?”
“Fuck yeah,” said Garrett, pressing something into her palm. Soft something, cloudstuff. She shoved it against her nose and blew. Snot and goo came out. It was really, really gross.
“I know, right?” she went on, squashing the cloudstuff in her fist, trapping the goo. “You totally talked this whole experience up, damn you…”
“Damn me.”
“…and there are parts of it that are really cool, I’ll give you that, but Garrett, what about all the parts that aren’t here anymore?”
“Explain.”
“My memories. My lists. My me. It’s gone, and you know all this anyhow because you’re so completely a figment of my imagination, and I am totally going into a hallucinogenic trance, which likely indicates an advanced state of hypothermia, which doesn’t jibe with the biometrics I’m seeing. Core temperature is just a bit below normal operating parameters. Stupid self-contradictory human body.”
She looked up. Into the glow of a l
ittle LED, bright thing attached to his…arm?
Man, her go-to illusion of him was warm. No, hot. The proper word was hot. In all the best metaphorical ways. So-touchable hair pulled back into a tidy braid, bit wispy at the temples and neck, like he’d just taken off a hat, and he was dressed in a very strange outfit. Kind of part wetsuit, part hair-band spandex-looking concert costume.
Her consciousness must be in an even worse state than she thought, to come up with such an outfit. “Oh brain, I really could have gone for one of those flowy open-necked pirate shirts and some leather pants. Or not. Not would have been awesome, too. A whole naked body of not.”
He smiled back at her, his gold eyes burnished in the dim light, making even the darkness shine.
“It’s really good to see you too, Fig.”
Chloe dropped the soft thing, which happened to be the hem of her skirt. Limontour must have dressed the clone before he transferred her into it. She wiped her palm on the textured linen and told her mouth to close itself. But it refused.
She realized, in that moment, that her hallucination was speaking. Answering her crazy because, and this was craziest of all—he was here.
Really, literally, alive and here and…
One other thing about the root-level awkwardness of this human body: sometimes it did things all on its own, without her having to issue commands. And she wasn’t talking about the autonomics like breath and blushing and blood circulation.
For instance, in that moment, when light invaded all her dark spaces and what had seconds before seemed hopeless suddenly glowed? Well, in that moment her awkward, foolish body shot to its feet and flung itself at him.
Like a barnacle. A limpet. A snuggy blanket.
Her chin to his shoulder, cheek to neck, wrapped all the way around, fingers in his hair and even her previously weak legs bending, wanting to manacle him within her circle of pleasure but not clearly understanding that gravity required at least one foot to remain on the ground if she wanted to not knock him over with the force of her sudden and soul-deep joy.
Touch. Him. Here. Too much. Too want.
He didn’t feel like she expected. For one thing, there was that outfit, the one made out of lab-grown fabric. It was cold and scratchy, not the slide against skin that she sought.
For another, he didn’t hug her back right away. Probably was just stunned. Or off balance. Or something like that. Because eventually his arms did surround her, and her whole world warmed up.
“How are you here?” she breathed into his neck. Thought about reaching her tongue out and tasting his skin, but she checked the body’s impulse right at the last second. Good thing. That might have been embarrassing.
Hugging him was one thing—she’d seen people hug each other lots. Typically, however, they didn’t then proceed to mouthing each other unless they were puppies or in a porno.
Of course, when Chloe reminded herself, silently, that she was neither, that brought a whole other set of images to the fore. Not necessarily ones involving puppies.
Because, um, human bodies did other things, too. Things she’d only watched and wanted and never entertained even a hope of feeling for herself. But she knew all about them. In theory, before today. And now that the impossible was within her grasp, how could she wait even a moment longer?
Hugging was just the start of all those things. And if it felt this good, what fresh bliss must those other acts ignite?
Garrett’s gauntleted hands stroked her back, and now she knew why cats purred when you rubbed them like that.
“Took the sub down from Chile and a hover over the ice. It wasn’t super easy getting here,” he said, clearly more in control of his reactions than she was, “but I needed to find you. To ask you something.”
“What?” Would it really be so terrible to lick him, though? Just one taste?
But his voice was all seriousness when he said, “I needed to know why, whether there was an accident, or if someone took you away, or if you meant to leave me.”
He didn’t back away or alter his posture or anything, but tension rode him. She could feel it. Also perhaps fear.
Oh it hurt to pull back, to detach her grabby self from him, but she needed him to see her eyes when she said this.
“I was coming back,” she told him, locking her gaze with his as if her steadiness would somehow allow him to see the truth of her words. “With a gift. Nathan—you remember the prisoner Heron was keeping at the Pentarc? That scoundrel from Texas who kidnapped Mari and took her to Enchanted Rock? Well, right before the Pentarc was… before it fell, he told me that if I helped him escape he’d help me find a body. A permanent place to house my core self. Put down roots. Exist. Like a real girl.”
“And you believed him?”
She pointed two forefingers at her ugly skirt. “Voila.”
Garrett looked the length of her, and his facial expression gave her zero idea what he was thinking. Usually he was pretty easy to read, but there was something off. Something sad. Something that might be hope.
“You can’t just go around believing every promise people make. People aren’t, as a species, reliable.”
Oh, she hated it when he got all lectury about how to be a human person. She had lists full of that stuff. Her knowledge was based on book learning rather than experiential wisdom, but it counted.
“Well, you promise me things all the time and then follow through,” she said, “so if I’m spoilt it’s your fault, but can we bicker about that later because I need to know things. Like, where are we? And why is it so cold?”
Garrett smiled at her, that left-leaning tick up on just one side. One dimple, elongating the elegant curve of cheekbone. But more than his mouth, he smiled with his eyes, and the warmth of that smile was almost as lovely as touching him.
Almost.
Nah. Touching was amazing.
“It’s cold because we’re in Antarctica,” he said, “at a secret underground a research station run by a shadowy international cabal, and unless I’m reading things way wrong, you just burst-fried all the station environmental controls, among other systems. Some heat collected down here when the generators were working, but it’s fading fast. And when did you start swearing so much?”
Parts of her were fading as well. Come to think of it, there were some massive pain signals coming in from her extremities. Possibly a human brain would have registered those signals as existential threats, would have triggered a flight-or-fight response, but Chloe had no experience with such processes. She’d just logged the signals and moved on, mapping. Remembering. Crying. And then he’d arrived and suddenly she hadn’t had space in her brain to think about things like pain or medical status.
What if the heat loss was more dangerous than she’d judged? How frail were these human bodies anyway?
“I always thought the swears, just didn’t say them out loud,” she said. “Also I might be freezing to death.”
“Oh, now, that is not happening.”
Oooh. He growled a bit when he said that. Almost protectively. That was new, the protectiveness. They’d always been peers, equals, or at least associates. Buddies. Best buddies, and sure she’d always wanted him to think of her more warmly, but his tone with her had always been, you know, easy. Never fierce. Never like that.
Had something changed since she’d been gone?
She was about to ask when he re-wrapped his arms around her and hoisted. It didn’t take him long to figure out he couldn’t cradle her like a baby, and eventually he arranged her in sort of a fireman’s carry over one shoulder.
Now, Chloe had ogled his ass plenty of times over the years, but never from this particular vantage, and never with an organic body possibly dying in small bits all around her.
It wasn’t a romantic moment at all.
But it also sort of was.
• • •
&n
bsp; Garrett wasn’t a trained engineer or anything, but he had grown up in Houston in the Fifth Ward, so he knew about survival in desperate circumstances. They got at least two major storms every hurricane season in those days, before the Big One, and he’d lived with his first foster mom, Seyha, and three other foundlings in a moldy old house built more than a hundred years before.
When a hurricane was on its way, Seyha would herd her whole crew into the smallest room, the windowless downstairs bathroom, and cram it full of everything they’d need to ride out the storm: dehydrated packaged protein, every pillow in the house, a half-dozen fully charged handhelds, and two pre-RFID handguns and ammo in case looters came in after. She’d fill the tub with fresh water, and they’d all sit on the cold chipped tile floor and tell each other ghost stories until the worst of it had passed and the cleanup started.
It had seemed like an adventure, a camp-out, every time.
Except this time, in this place, with this woman—Chloe, in a body, in a fragile, tangible body, oh God he hadn’t expected that—survival wasn’t a game.
Near the hole in the side of the summer-bare mountain, where he’d come in, the air had been musty and the snow dust undisturbed, like folks didn’t use that entrance much. But down here inside the mountain, down the ramp, all the chambers were well-used and tidy. Fortifiable against a hostile environment. He located the smallest room, a cramped storage space on the lower floor, and set up a base there.
The chambers down here were identical and modular, strung like Christmas lights along a single minerbot-delved tunnel that snaked deep into the mountain. Everything he encountered on his albeit brief exploration was slick, smartsurface walls and cabinetry. Not unlike the Chiba Space Station, actually. Narrow pathways, also like Chiba, didn’t provide enough space for folks to zip around down here in heavy coats and snow boots. Presumably all the environmental controls went through the building’s central computer and people just walked around in their skivvies inside.
Which made him think of Chloe. In that body. In skivvies.
Or Chloe in any body, wearing anything. Or nothing.
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