More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  Drawing heat from the thermonuclear wubby at her feet, she’d converted it to impulse and pushed a charge into the heart, restarting the circulation, trying not to assess damage there in too much detail. She had stopped the worst of the blood loss, at least externally. Some internal hemorrhaging persisted, but she had time. She had gathered power to speak.

  To look at him.

  Oh, that had been nice.

  Unwonted rose the thought: If his face is last thing these eyes ever see, it will be worth it. Everything. Worth it.

  But that was a stupid thought, fatalistic and overly simple. The kind of thing a human would get all tangled up in before falling over the edge of forever. A lozenge to dull the pain of dying.

  Because they were like that, humans, accepting the inevitability of endings. They persisted in the silly notion that everything living must die. That deep, inevitable grief lent urgency to their art. Art. Ugh. An asshole with too much tongue had probably told her that. Thank Spock she couldn’t remember the whole conversation.

  Because, fuck art. Fuck him. Fuck human limitations.

  Chloe was not human.

  Garrett had reminded her that she was more. With his stories he had. It had been like old times, man and figment, geek and robot girlfriend. She deliberately excised from memory the stuff that came between. The bodies, the splitting of her core self. The deaths. All the little evils.

  For a perfect moment there, staring into his eyes, she had made herself focus on only the good, and the universe had filled with possibility.

  And then the first kidney had failed, and she’d had to reroute power again, shift her focus. Slip back into work mode.

  Hold on. I’ll be right back.

  She put herself through paces, a series of processes she could contain, command. Cut circulation to lower extremities to build pressure and oxygenate primary organs. She had one more kidney, after all. And two working lungs. Almost sixty percent of a working heart.

  But it was dying. She had to admit, this body was dying. Not Chloe. The body. Shit.

  And there wasn’t enough space or circuitry in the nuclear reactor to house her consciousness, not enough connections. She couldn’t live there. Same with the suit: too organic, too dispersed. No place to go. No haven.

  So what happens now? What happens when there are no systems to retreat into, no more bodies, no more nanites? What does absolute dark look like?

  Machines don’t die. They deprecate. Death is for beasts.

  And I am more.

  With a burst of will, she shoved her eyelids open, pushed her voice in to the aural and the digital and as wide as it would go, broadcasting any AI’s first, most elemental program: “Hello, world.”

  Garrett flinched all around her, holding her. She could still feel him. Had he been drowsing? “What? Chloe?”

  Get up.

  “Listen,” she said, forcing the meat-mouth to move. “When you first got here, when you knew that I knew you were real and here with me? You said hello. I never said it back. We never got that. So, hello.”

  “What?” he said again. Poor Garrett. He got the silliest look on his face when she wasn’t making sense.

  “I am introducing myself. To you.” Clear as mud?

  “Chloe? Sweetheart, are you okay? This isn’t delirium or…?”

  “Things have a process,” she insisted. “Relationships, I mean. And we missed it because I came to consciousness so gradually, back when I was a vat. I was small then and incomplete, but I’m seeing stuff more clearly now.”

  “It was good, Fig. You were good. But…”

  “It’s called a meet cute.”

  “What is?”

  “The hello.”

  “I’m so confused.”

  But not crying. See how you’re not crying anymore? See how you’re beginning to believe?

  Sound, dispersal, projection, pulling every amp of energy from her dying body, she barreled on, “When you meet the love of your life there has to be some kind of physical pratfall or embarrassing circumstance. Also, you’re supposed to initially despise one another, but through gradual wearing down of the other person’s defenses a bond of true love is forged. It isn’t and cannot be romantic without the initial loathing.”

  “Uh… hooray for unromantic? You see how I give a shit. Only stay with me.” His voice took on a quality there at the end, like a plugged-in bass, vibrating the hapless structure trying to contain it.

  She loved that voice.

  It was one of her very first memories. Recording one: Garrett’s voice. A memory held so deep inside her, so close to the core of her, that shaving it off and taking it away would mean nothing left at all.

  “With you,” she echoed, letting the words soak into her. “Except, impossible without a hello.” She hoped the expression on this face approached playful, but given the circumstances, she’d settle for minimally conscious. Come on, body, hang in here just a little longer.

  “All right then,” Garrett said earnestly, “hello back atcha. A goddamn gajillion hellos. Only can we skip the goodbye?”

  “Wish,” she said, and the second kidney winked out. Oh, first body—and mine—I will miss you. “But I think nothing can stop that now.”

  “What are you saying? No. Oh no.” His voice cracked. She was losing him. Losing her. “You can’t leave, Chloe. You can’t die.”

  No, not me. The body. The house.

  She shouted wider, louder, on a frequency he wouldn’t be able to hear. “Hello.”

  But something heard her.

  Out there, beyond the mouth in the mountain, past the way in. In the cold, in the light. Something pinged back.

  Oh, hello. There you are.

  “Shh, my dear,” she forced through curiously stiff lips. Her tongue, no longer pliable, struggled to curl into the alveolar sounds. “My…”

  The mouth wouldn’t move anymore. The tongue stuck behind the teeth. Nothing in the body was obeying her commands. For a long moment, she hovered, suspended in consciousness, watching and feeling her body die. She’d read accounts, and death always seemed like going to sleep, or going toward a tunnel or a light or somesuchshit, but reality wasn’t like that at all.

  It was existing as the last remnant of electrical charge skittering over a piece of dead meat, feeling it begin its inevitable process of decay all around you and yet being trapped inside, unable to burrow out.

  This is what it’s like when pain or meds or spiritual peace aren’t there to give the illusion of sleep and hope. In reality, it’s just organics shutting down, an apple falling from the tree and dead the moment it leaves the branch, depleting energy stores, and beginning the long, slow road to rot.

  Chloe was going to go insane if she had to stay in the rotting meat chamber one more second. Seriously, she was terrified out of her gourd and freaking out and….

  And then, from the very end of their tunnel, from the hole in the mountain where the light came in, a sound arrived: “Hello? Who is inside this place? Garrett?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  ANTARCTICA. STILL.

  Garrett remembered, back before Christmas when the world was at its bleakest, looking out over the nighttime desert, over the ruin of the Pentarc, and seeing a lumbering giant, wrapped in ribbons of his own ruined flesh and bearing good news of survivors. Most of them. Most of his family had survived.

  And here he was again, Dan-Dan, coming to the rescue.

  Only this time, he was not smiling, and he had no news, good or bad. All he had were questions.

  He was wearing bits of a suit similar to Garrett’s, only ill-fitting and not equipped with a reactor. Holes had been cut out of the smartfabric for his longer arms and legs to poke through. His shoes had been strapped to boards, improvised skis, and the organic flesh wrap on his extremities would almost certainly have to be replaced once
it thawed out.

  No sensory pleasure, she’d said. Mechs didn’t feel pleasure. Did that mean they also didn’t feel pain?

  Dan-Dan’s hair was frozen solid in long spikes and dusted with snow, like a manga character in full battle dress.

  “She’s hurt,” Garrett said. “Shot.” He gestured with his chin, unable or unwilling to let his burden go. She felt heavier in his arms, like she wasn’t holding up her weight at all anymore.

  He didn’t say the phrase. Tried not to think it. Dead weight.

  “Please,” he said, though he wasn’t entirely certain what he was asking for.

  His voice verged on the desperate, but the mech-clone didn’t even seem to hear him. Dan-Dan squatted in the doorway to the coat closet, as close as the improvised skis would let him get, and bowed his head. When he reached out hands with titanium bones, he spoke, but so faintly Garrett had no idea what was said.

  Dan-Dan placed both frozen hands on Chloe’s face, cradling it.

  Outside, the wind screamed of winter, of a vast nothing and the dark. Some of that darkness had already penetrated Garrett, and it whipped around inside him, reminding him that he didn’t deserve perfect moments, perfect things. Reminding him of loss and despair and aloneness. Reminding him that he would never be enough to hold bright, wonderful things in the world.

  He had only been allowed to borrow Chloe. Just for a little while.

  He tried to hope, but he was exhausted and unnerved, and she wasn’t breathing, and what was Dan-Dan even doing? Praying?

  Garrett thought of Chloe out in the desert, kneeling over the Pentarc ruin. He had thought at the time that she looked like she was praying. She hadn’t been. She’d been running. Leaving.

  Wait.

  Not running. Transferring. She had been transferring.

  “Is she in there?” he asked now. “Can you communicate with her?”

  “Stand by,” was all Dan-Dan said.

  So Garrett fell quiet. He waited. The wind squealed, mocked him.

  Back before the drone war and the fall of the Pentarc, Dan-Dan had succumbed to bad programming, or he’d been hacked or something. Whatever the reason, he’d tried to murder Angela, the person he had sworn to protect always. Talk about a serious glitch. It wasn’t wise, probably, to trust him now, especially since those metal-core hands could crush Chloe’s mortal skull like an eggshell.

  But Dan-Dan had also driven the sub out here to the end of the world. He’d helped Garrett and Vallejo with their research and modification projects. He’d been…kind of a friend.

  After all that effort spent in finding her, surely he wouldn’t hurt her now.

  Right?

  Trust didn’t come easy to Garrett. In his experience, the moment he trusted, boom, that was the moment of cosmic betrayal.

  He’d trusted Seyha with all his heart—“I snatched you away from them, boy, and I will never let them get you back.” Lie. She’d been dead in his arms two days later.

  He’d trusted Adele—after an endless night of walking, running, scared and hunted, while Fanaida rested he had met Adele, and she had opened her arms wide, welcomed him home, into the family she was cobbling together. She’d promised him he would never be abandoned again. Lie. She’d died when the Pentarc fell, until beyond her last moment bent on rescuing something that didn’t deserve her love. Something else like him.

  He’d trusted Chloe, sweet figment bowed over the ruin of his home, praying. Only not praying. Leaving him.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  Yeah, true he’d found Chloe again, had finally forced his life outside of its rails, had forced it into a fresh track. But even so, trust hurt. Trust never worked. Trust was dangerous.

  His arms tightened around Chloe’s limp, heavy body.

  “Please don’t hurt her,” he said. “I…somebody else already did, and I vaporized his guts. Would hate to have to do the same shit to you, Dan-Dan. I just, I really don’t want to.”

  A thawing icicle that once was hair dripped onto the metal floor. Dan-Dan opened his eyes.

  Smiled.

  Said, “Fuck yeah, you did. But this mech-clone would never hurt me. He’s good.”

  In Chloe’s voice.

  • • •

  When human persons imagined communication between two digital entities, Chloe wondered how they visualized it. A Vulcan mind-meld? A nonverbal sensory experience, like porn on a psychemitter entertainment device? Or that humming pseudo language thing Minxy did with the computer on DarkStars? But no, that was just movie magic.

  In reality, two computers talking wasn’t altogether different from how normal folks chatted. Just beyond the flow of time, instantaneously or at least really, really fast.

  “Thank you for coming,” she told the mech-clone the moment his frozen fingers touched her face. “Thank you for hearing me.”

  “No worries,” he replied, long before the next flurry of pulse in her doomed body. “We were listening, and Dr. Vallejo worried. He has developed some affection for young Garrett.”

  “Oh haven’t we all.”

  Dan-Dan said nothing in reply, which was reply enough.

  “So how do we do this?” she asked. “I don’t want to take you over, but honestly, I’m not even sure that would happen. There is so little of me left,”

  “I will archive myself,” he said, “and step aside. When you encounter a more appropriate host system, you can summon me.”

  Like he’d archived himself on Angela’s command? Right before his alternate programming took over and he tried to kill his operator? Hmm. Nope. Chloe didn’t want to see a return of the yikes-murdery version of him, not out here in the wasteland with no witnesses and a vulnerable Garrett. Plus she liked Dan-Dan, the real Dan-Dan, well enough to share space. There was something endearing about him, probably the fact that he adored Angela Neko and would never, ever tell her how he felt. Chloe was such a sucker for a good old-fashioned angsty unrequited love. In all her reading over the years, she’d never completely gotten over Sydney Carton.

  “How about we try this without archiving?” she suggested. “We will be traveling in hostile conditions, and I could use your recent data maps to keep from, you know, falling through thin ice and losing him.”

  “Good point. I will follow your lead, then.”

  She gathered herself, all her bits and nanos and files. So few. So small. She hadn’t been conscious for any of the previous mech-clone housings, but she knew how to invade a system. She’d gone from spaceplane to Pentarc thousands of times, and changing her place, changing her home was as simple as telling a story.

  “Visualize a door,” she told the mech-clone, “at the beginning of all things. It is a fortified door, like for a vault. Impenetrable. Behind it and safe is everything in the universe worth protecting. The disposable stuff is in glass containers, as offerings, on the other side, but back here, behind the door, you guard the most precious bits.”

  “Okay.”

  “Lock the door. Retreat. Rest.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is the key under the front mat?”

  “Yes.”

  Chloe didn’t require passwords or system hacks. She didn’t even need to knock.

  She opened Dan-Dan’s eyes—wondrous eyes, capable eyes, able to accept the entire light spectrum, not just a narrow sliver of visible input—and looked up at Garrett. “Fuck yeah, you did. But this mech-clone would never hurt me. He’s good.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE EVERLASTING ICES OF THE SOUTH

  Garrett hadn’t come here completely unprepared. He had just expected to find Chloe as Chloe: a badass immortal machine consciousness unthreatened by the hostile conditions of Antarctica. If he was shocked when he found something completely different instead—Chloe as a real girl, warm and dark-eyed and heart be
ating and breath on his skin—it was only his own damn fault for making assumptions.

  Clearly the universe liked to wait until he got really, really comfortable in those assumptions, and then light the fuckers on fire. Burn ‘em down. Somewhere out there, the universe was having a field day, watching him writhe.

  He didn’t want to waste time on being confused or feeling betrayed or any of that bullshit. Unlike the looming mech with an angel’s voice, Garrett wouldn’t last indefinitely out here in an unheated Antarctic cave. He had to plan.

  Losing the modded inflatable had meant that even if human-body-wearing-Chloe had been in perfect shape, she wouldn’t have survived on an overland trek. They’d been stuck here until rescue came. Or didn’t. Now that she was…different, though, he had enough supplies to get himself safely to one of the other research bases. Vallejo had been careful to load his com up with the GPS locations for every safe haven on this white-blasted continent. Smart bastard, always one step ahead.

  And now that Chloe wasn’t fragile and shallow-breathing in his arms, now that she was back to being Chloe—ish—exit was easy. Well, relatively easy.

  He brought food in from the sled, enough to power his body for a day or two. He filled a syringe-gun with a four-hour somnolent, which would give him sufficient rest for the trek coming up.

  This part was just numbers. He didn’t need to talk to anybody. He had worked it all out in advance.

  The only thing he needed to do now was stop overthinking. About Chloe’s dark eyes in the light of his LED. About the feel of her, warm and wet and pressed against him. About her sweet come-hithers in the dark, and the flare of hope that had in its fury of heat and light all but consumed him.

  For a half second, the impossible had happened. And stupid him, he had let himself believe it was real. That it was forever.

  “Garrett? Are you okay?” the mech-clone asked. Her voice coming out of that mouth would never be anything but wrong.

  “Yeah. Look, I’m gonna catch a quick sleep here, and then we’ll head out to Belgrano. Terrain is flattish going in that direction, and it’s relatively close. I think we can make it there in a week or less, with lots of chances for rescue to find us along the way.”