“Staying here would be safer,” the mech said.
“Our supplies are limited. And also… there’s a chance more assholes who imprisoned Chloe will come back.” He yawned, didn’t try to hide it. “No way was one dude holding down a station this size all by himself. We’re in late summer. I’d expect at least a dozen people’ll come by here, probably more. There are live experiments down the ramp, on the next floor. Creepy as fuck experiments, the kinds people will want to check on.”
“Um, I know.”
Garrett shoved a rolled-up coat behind his head.
“I’m Chloe,” she reminded him in a small voice completely at odds with her giant and Dan-Dan-ish body. “Still.”
Garrett let out a breath and closed his eyes. “Four hours.”
“You don’t even want to talk about what just happened? About how I di—”
God no, please. Can’t talk about that. Can’t think about it. If I start down that dark road, I might never come back.
“I’ll be up in four hours,” he said. “We can talk then.”
He pressed the injector and the somnolent kicked hard, popped him out of consciousness like a virtual particle. Bright, and then in the space of a second, black. Poof.
He came to in a void. A white void, cold as a motherfucker. Somebody’d wrapped his face up, and he peered out through… goggles? Yeah. Safety goggles, like chemists used when they played with acids. He had a pair himself, for welding and CNC and shit, back on the Isla Luz.
What had Vallejo said about the island? Natural disasters or something? In that brief blurry moment between sleep and full wakefulness, half-remembered bits of data crowded his mind, and he sifted them into bins. Antarctica. Chloe. Murder. Safe.
Injected somnolents usually hit pretty close to their advertised duration, so he’d guess he was four hours in the future. Easy as it was to shrug off the spider web of sleep and arrange his head space, he had a slightly harder time sitting up. Mostly ‘cause the world was moving.
Seriously. Moving. Right underneath his ass.
It took him a couple of minutes to realize that whoever had wrapped his face up in synthfabric had also shoved him into the modified inflatable and wadded coats and crap all around him. He felt like a snow globe packed for shipping.
And it wasn’t like Chloe had ever done something like this before—couldn’t have, what with not having proper hands (hands, hot little hands, on his arm, on his back, between their bodies)—but his arrangement had all the hallmarks of a Chloe-done operation. Kind of well-intended but half-assed but also fully functional.
When he leveled a gaze at the front of the inflatable and noted a tall, stalwart figure with an improvised harness and straps, pulling the whole contraption over ice like a goddamn sledge, he saw clearly what she’d done.
“How long have we been out here?” he called, but the wrap on his face muffled his words. Wind ripped the rest of them away.
And she still turned. That mech had to have ears like a bat. Or she’d been listening for him to wake.
He couldn’t see her/his/its face in the flood of light, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyhow. Dan-Dan was as wrapped up as Garrett, or nearly so. He wore so many coats he looked about as wide as he was tall.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” she said, feeding her voice into his internal com, right into his ear bones.
“Where are we headed?” he asked. “In case you don’t want to answer my first question.”
He’d scoped out the way to Belgrano, but that would take them over a glacier. And this didn’t look like a glacier. Though, granted, what did he know about this stuff anyhow? He sure wasn’t an expert on Antarctica. Just…it was looking less icy than he’d expected. Black rock jutted out of drifts, and there were mountains to his left.
“I have coordinates,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m taking care of you. Like you took care of me.”
Her voice had an odd quality to it, even when it was piped into his skull. Over the years, she’d developed a cadence of speech, patterns that told him what she was feeling, even when she wasn’t much more than a disembodied voice in the dark. Right now, she was hurt. He heard it clearly in her voice.
Garrett sank back into the wad of coats in the inflatable.
“Don’t push the mech on my account,” he said. “That’s Dan-Dan in there somewhere, and like you said, he’s good. Plus Angela would kick my ass if I broke him.”
She turned her back on him, resumed pulling, and honed a sharp edge on her voice when she said, “I’m handling this, Garrett.”
“I can help,” he said. “I don’t have to be hauled around like luggage.”
“No, actually, you can’t, and you do. Why don’t you just inject yourself with another lullaby?”
“Because you wanted to talk. Remember?”
It wasn’t his imagination. The dinghy-sled was going faster. She was going to run Dan-Dan to death if she didn’t watch it. And out of what? Pissiness? Because he hadn’t just fallen in line with her weird “I’ll transfer my brain into this very different and not at all like me body, while at the same time dying in your arms” plan? And he couldn’t say it was a shitty plan?
“We don’t have to talk,” she said.
“Fine.” He rolled to his side, shoving coats down and freeing his feet. The micro-reactor was still detached from his suit, and though the smart fabric did its job, it wasn’t built for this kind of environment. He’d probably need to plug the reactor back in if he was gonna walk beside her.
“We are almost to my coordinates,” she said. “Patience.”
Heron used to say that a lot, too. As if everybody around him was hopped up and nervy and annoying as fuck. Condescending bastard. Chloe didn’t, as a habit, puff herself up like that. She was usually so sweet. Apparently she’d been nurturing a bossy side while his back was turned.
“And what, lounge here while you pull me? Like you’re a husky or something?”
“Nobody uses dogs to pull sleds anymore,” she snapped, pulling harder. Faster. “That’s cruel.”
“So what, you’re less than a dog?”
She went on for maybe three more minutes in charged, angry silence, then stopped, dropped the improvised harness, and turned again. He still couldn’t see the expression on her face, but he knew how advanced Dan-Dan was. If any mech on the planet could rock a “fuck off and die” resting bitch face, it would be Dan-Dan.
“Close enough,” she said, slicing her voice into his in-ear com. “Get out and pitch our tent.”
“Oh now I’m useful?”
“Yes. You build things. You are good at building things. So build something.”
The inflatable wasn’t completely crammed with coats. There were supplies in there, too. Definitely the preserved protein rations he’d brought, and the micro-reactor with an extra rod. But also things that he didn’t recognize. A funny little oven-looking thing with a control panel on the side. He pressed a button and nothing, but when he popped the control panel open, there were sockets for plugging in a power supply. He could reassemble the micro-reactor and plug it into this thing and have the best of both worlds: electricity and heat.
She’d raided the station for food and water and med-packs and, as she’d mentioned, a pop-up tent probably intended for field experiments. It didn’t take an engineering genius to set this thing up, but he could see why she wanted him to do it instead.
He hadn’t noticed, when she was pulling the sledge, that her fine muscle movements were awkward at best. Had they been like that in the human body, too? He couldn’t recall. Yeah, she hadn’t moved much, but when she had…okay, maybe he didn’t need the tent. Antarctica was getting downright warm.
“We aren’t both going to fit in there,” she said, observing the structure.
“It’s bigger on the inside,” he promised.
And it was
. The shape was a mirage, jutting angles probably to keep snow drifts from burying it in a storm. It reminded Garrett of a Christmas ornament, especially after he hooked the micro-reactor up to the stove-thingy and the whole tiny structure glowed warm and gold. All they needed was darkness and a campfire. Maybe some marshmallows.
He tucked into the shelter and started arranging the stuff he’d hauled in.
“Hey,” he called to her, knowing he didn’t have to raise his voice—because coms were magic, right—but doing it anyway. “How long will we be hanging out here? I can bring in some more…”
Dan-Dan’s bulk blocked the tent-flap doorway. All the light was behind his head, so most of his face was cast in shadow. But even so, his eyes blazed, blue as the shallows off Galapagos. Bright and searing.
About as different as they could be from those dark-brown eyes she’d worn before, but still her. Chloe.
“Your com vibrated again, while you were asleep,” she said. Chloe voice, seawater eyes. How was she so completely Dan-Dan, yet also herself? “I talked to Heron. He is unhappy.”
“Shocking.”
“But he’s coming to fetch us anyway. This area is stable. I pulled survey scans. The glacier nearer Belgrano might not sustain the weight of the plane, so we’ll wait here instead.” She sat near the door, knees up, arms encircling them. Compact and self-contained and immobile.
Mech-clones don’t breathe.
“Are you…do you want to talk now?”
“If you wish. I’m only partly here in the mech,” she said. “Dan-Dan’s helping me out with stuff. Most of me is sustaining a stealth dome over us, just in case that scary witch scans the area for us. I destroyed what was left in the doll kitchen. If she finds me, she’ll be angry.”
“Scary wi…doll kitchen? You do realize I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Dan-Dan’s head didn’t move. His blue eyes blinked. Once.
“Chloe,” said Garrett, so close to understanding something momentous, but he couldn’t quite adhere his brain to it, “do you want to tell me a story?”
The mech-clone closed its eyes. “It’s a scary story, and sad.”
“I want to hear it. If it’s about you, I want to hear.”
• • •
She told him. About the transfer, the dark, the pain. About Limontour and the blackouts, and body after body after body. About learning how to breathe, and learning how to die. In the huddled space of their temporary shelter, she laid it all out for him.
It felt good. Like she’d been storing all of this in temporary memory, unable to process it, but when she uploaded it to him she could watch it unspool and see the patterns inside.
She wasn’t the same girl who’d left him in the desert. And the change to her went deeper than a body, or series of bodies. It wasn’t even just about losing most of her swarm. Somehow in all of her many becomings, she had acquired dimension, weight. Regret.
The memory of what she’d done to Nathan panged, even if it had been an accident. She wished she could take it back, reverse time and erase her error. But human lives were linear. She understood that now in a way she hadn’t before. Beginning, middle, end, and no take-backsies.
“We are on the ice,” she said, “and I am an unnatural thing. A creature, you might say. Also, I read your whole library and the ones at the Capitolina as well. Does this situation remind you of anything in particular?”
“Oh come on, I’m not Victor Frankenstein, and you aren’t a monster.”
See how he always knew what she was thinking, all up in her jokes? Chloe remembered what smiling felt like, and one burnished her insides now, the pieces of her that were left.
“Am I not, though?” she said. “I killed thirteen people during the drone war, which you knew about. A-and…I killed Nathan, too.”
“Well, I killed Limontour. That mean I need to go out and do a massacre or something to catch up?”
“This isn’t a game,” she said solemnly, letting the regret infuse her voice.
“No. No it isn’t. It’s our reality, Fig.”
“Some reality.”
“Yeah.”
Silence settled over the shelter. Not a scary silence, not a sleepy one. A comfortable look-how-we-are-neither-of-us-alone quiet. Chloe broke it first.
“I don’t know what I am anymore.”
“That scares the shit out of you,” he said. Not a question. Just certain knowledge. Whatever she was, this man knew her. Which might be the scariest thing of all.
“Limontour said I’m a weapon. A lot of people, human people, would agree.”
“Queen says machines consider you a hero. Or a god.”
“But gods are lonely. Heroes, too, probably. I always just wanted to be a regular girl. But now I have been, I mean physically have existed, and it was—” Beautiful, amazing, a moment I will never forget, that time we touched and it was real. “—fascinating, I suppose, but not really me either. That body was a clone of someone, which, when you think about it, has to creep a girl out on some level.”
“Do you know whose clone?”
She sifted through her data almost lazily, knowing what she would find. Taking a moment to absorb the hurt of it once again. “Somewhere, I probably do.”
“You do realize that sometimes what you say makes zero sense, right?”
“When I was a prisoner, I spoke with the station computer. Remember, the computer who killed itself on my command?”
“Yes. The computer that was you.”
“See, you remember all my words, too,” she said, sighing. Hey, sighing. Dan-Dan’s chest expanded when she fed that inflection into her voice, almost like it really took in breath. These N series had all kinds of lovely features like that. “At any rate, the computer—her name was Apega—collected complete files on the Consortium. Even their top secret ones. The group’s really not all that big, at least not compared to the destruction it causes, or seeks to cause. I know all its parts and where to find them, but Limontour stole pieces of me, memory sectors that contain all that information, and I don’t even know if they still exist.”
Garrett was quiet for a long time, and she almost thought he’d injected himself with another nap time. But then he said, low and with just a hint of growl to it, “Fuck him. I’ma steal your bits back. Put you together. And then, when you’re whole again and my Chloe, then we’ll talk some more about what you are.”
Except you just said it. Your Chloe. That’s who I want to be.
Chapter Fifteen
ANTARCTICA. TOGETHER.
February in Antarctica was supposed to be summer and as hospitable as things got around there, but an early winter could dust stuff up. And that particular year, it did. A storm roared in about three hours after the shelter went up, and Chloe focused on angling her shield as best she could to keep them from getting buried.
All the while, Garrett worried over the structural integrity of their tent and the dinghy and whatnot. Really, a lot of worrying. He wouldn’t let her and Dan-Dan go outside, not even to tie down the sled, and kept going on about how Dan-Dan’s organic-tissue wrap was already in bad shape.
Apparently Garret was more of a mother-hen than he let on, which struck Chloe as both hilarious and adorable. They had made such fun of Kellen and Fanaida and Adele over the years, in private. Because really, all that saving of baby bunnies and free-tail bats and whatnot? Funny. But some of that caretaking urge had rubbed off on Garrett, apparently, and what was even sweeter was that he applied all that care and concern to her. Or, to her and Dan-Dan.
Oh, and that was working out pretty okay, too.
During the storm especially, Dan-Dan picked up the slack, helped Garrett reinforce some of the structure fasteners, made sure Garrett ate something and stayed close to the heater. Sharing a body wasn’t cramped at all. She even sort of enjoyed sharing the space with hi
m. Also sharing the tasks worked out. Dan-Dan made this arrangement amazingly easy.
When she had been in the doll-kitchen mech-clones, every second had been a challenge, trying to bring all the various systems and features to heel, under her command. But Dan-Dan already had that covered. He could make this body do things she’d never imagined, and he had pinpoint control. Seriously, he even blinked. Like, in varying speeds depending on his emotional status and no less than twenty-three times per minute. Nobody needed to blink that often, especially not someone with cybernetic eyes and no tear ducts. But human people did it, and so did Dan-Dan. His simulation was that good.
His medical nanos were super busy; already he was regenerating organic tissue to replace the frostbitten dead stuff. It was almost magic how fast that process was going. And the shielding on this machine…for the first time Chloe could understand how an enhanced person like Limontour could have survived her blackout bomb. For Dan-Dan, even a nuclear detonation wouldn’t bring him down. He was impervious. Also probably eternal.
She wondered if Vallejo even realized what he’d created.
As the storm wore on, she encouraged Garrett to inject again, and rest, and while wind pureed the narrow valley outside, she and Dan-Dan kept watch.
Garrett slept. Snow fell.
“May I ask you something?” Dan-Dan, direct speaking. No out-loud words necessary.
“Sure,” she told him.
“How do you remain you, even when they tell you that you must become something else?”
He was talking about the doll kitchen, about her forced embodiments. About the dark things she’d told Garrett before the storm came. Dan-Dan had heard all that, too. Oops. She had forgotten he was listening, was always listening. Kind of like she was always watching, right? Not that she didn’t want him to know, just…well, it happened.
She processed his question.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had the option to become someone else. Which might be a tragedy, based on who you ask. It might be better for everybody in the long term if I just went back to being a vat, an agreeable swarm of programmable nanites.”
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