More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  “Plus it is fucking February,” Angela reminded them. “Aaaand I just got a ping from FEMA. You all will excuse me while I drop into the telepresence for a briefing.”

  “Wait, what’s she got to do with FEMA? Isn’t she the continental minister of education these days?” Mari aimed the question at Kellen.

  But Angela answered, rising and heading for the aft doorway. “Well, more education and discipline. Be right back.” She tapped her temple, engaging the hardware built into her skull and wandered out of the lounge, down some stairs off the flight deck, where she could address her minions in private.

  Kellen just shrugged and stroked his cat. “You know what they say, knowledge is power, and she’s real good at playing teacher.”

  Mercifully, the others just left that revelation right there, without asking for further clarification.

  Garrett used the distraction to check in with Chloe. “Hey Fig, you still here?”

  “Always,” she answered.

  “What do you know about that storm? First of the season, so A… Arthur?”

  “That’s not her name.” Her voice was so sad it squeezed his innards.

  “All right,” he breathed, “so now we know where Apega’s at.”

  “I guess we do.”

  Garrett stifled an almost overwhelming urge to hug something and pretend it was Chloe. Instead he turned to the assembled family.

  “So, I gather Mama Fan isn’t for trying to defuse the storm and Heron is?” he said out loud.

  Four pairs of eyes locked on him. Garrett felt like ground zero. Not comfy. But this all needed to be said, and for whatever reason Chloe wasn’t speaking up for herself. If he didn’t orchestrate something here, he had a sneaking suspicion she’d slink off on her own to right her perceived wrongs. And she wasn’t strong enough to be on her own right now, not even with Vallejo and Dan-Dan in tow. Didn’t she realize that?

  Garrett had to hope she wouldn’t go off on her own again. That she would let him come, too. Since he didn’t have personal gravitronics, that meant a plane. And oh looky, he was flying on a what right now?

  “I think we’re still tossing ideas around,” Kellen said. “Was just about to tell y’all, I got some seagulls in there. They’ve been riding in the eye, sending updates. If Heron can whip up some foglets or something, I can probably get those birds to seed the eyewall, calm shit down. We don’t need to actually, physically fly in ourselves.”

  “Seagulls delivering foglets into a hurricane? That’s your plan?” Vallejo asked. “And how do we design such nanomachines anyway when we aren’t even certain what we’re dealing with? This isn’t a naturally occurring storm, so stormbreaking techniques like artificial shear or offshore turbines might not work at all. And you people call me crazy.”

  “I know what we’re dealing with,” whispered Chloe in Garrett’s internal com. “I can handle her. Just get me close.”

  “The queen has a programmable vat up on Chiba Station. I can fabricate a solution with that vat, kind of a fight-foglet-with-foglet approach,” Heron said. He paused, swallowed. “And of course I will deliver them.”

  “Oh no you are not flying in there, not even a piece of you,” Mari declared. “Final word. I can’t go and you can’t leave us.” She pushed her ass to the edge of her chair and crossed her arms over her chest, flashing the strap of one concealed armpit holster. Who knew what else she wore.

  “It’s an unnatural storm,” Heron said, looking down at her as if there was no one else in the room. On the planet. Something desperate skidded over his face. “You know what that means, querida. My research. My fault. I have to.”

  She tipped her head back and met his gaze defiantly. “Not without me.”

  “Please,” he said in a voice that barely had volume. His hand gripped the arm of the bolted down chair she sat on. Hard. Garrett thought he heard it crack. It might have been made of metal.

  The two lovers stared daggers at each other, which was flat-out bizarre. They never fought.

  “Oh aren’t they adorable,” Chloe said inside Garrett’s head.

  “Uh, not really?” he subvocaled, dipping his chin so the others wouldn’t see his mouth making shapes. “They look like they’re about to kill each other.”

  “Not likely. That would hurt the baby.”

  “The what?”

  Oops. The out-loud thing again. They were looking at him. Again. Like they expected him to speak. Again.

  Garrett sucked in a breath.

  “Look, you guys, I really appreciate y’all coming to fetch Chloe and me—and Dr. Vallejo and Dan-Dan, too—but I think we got this one. Angela has power trips to take, and Kellen, don’t you have critters to talk to, and Heron and Mari…you two clearly need to sort out, uh, other stuff. Let’s just recharge our cells there at Chiba, and, if you’ll lend me the plane this time so I don’t have to steal it…”

  He turned directly to Heron, braced for what might be staring back. But Heron’s face had an expression on it he’d never seen before. Shit. Were those tears in his brother’s eyes?

  “G, this isn’t your fight. You don’t need to—”

  But mercy stepped in, with the voice of Dan-Dan, coming in over the plane’s speaker. “We are making our final approach on the Chiba Station. Prepare to dock in ten.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  CHIBA SPACE STATION

  Kellen, Angela, Fanaida, Mari, and the cat remained on the spaceplane, partly because Fanaida wasn’t feeling well, and partly because Angela hadn’t gotten off her series of calls yet. The emergency situation had worsened in the last few hours. Reports from Kellen’s seagulls had arrived. Central pressure had fallen, pushing the storm into a new category of ferocity. A normal storm might still deviate from its track, but this one had been unnervingly consistent.

  Apega was headed for New York.

  Vallejo, Heron, and Garrett were the only humans going up the space elevator, and they agreed that Chloe and Dan-Dan should come up with them this time. And that Chloe could be visible, using her holoprojection. She could be herself. After all, she wasn’t a secret anymore. She was a metaphorical cat way out of its bag.

  Chloe had snuck up here plenty of times when the others had visited the Chiba Station, but this was the first time she walked her holoprojection right onto the space elevator and rode it up with everyone else. It was kind of like a victory lap.

  But she didn’t feel particularly victorious. She felt guilty. And sad.

  The mood here was completely different from the last time, too. From all the times. For years, humans had been using Chiba Station as a party destination, the last place on the planet that was totally free, where their actions could not, and would not, be recorded, reviewed, and rated for decency violations. It had once been a persistent celebration of all that was messy and imperfect about people. But that atmosphere was gone. There weren’t a lot of people on board—not like last time, when Kellen and Heron and Mari rode up to chat about killing Angela’s husband. In fact, when Chloe scanned she didn’t see anybody at all. No people. Just machines.

  There were a lot of machines.

  Mech-clones, drones, industrial techs, and personal robots skittered, ambled, rolled, and buzzed. The main level was so thick with them the clink and creak of metal had formed a sort of electronic music. Free-fae collectives, hundreds of them, had splashed themselves over every available surface, not only throwing light but also slogans and color and art. Most of it was angry. Red. Swirling. Pulsing.

  FREE FAE. FREE CHLOE.

  They must know who she was, and that she was here. But no one approached her. If anything, they moved away, giving her space.

  Out of…reverence?

  If that was true, how fucked up were these machine intelligences, to revere someone who’d caused so much death, so much destruction? She’d even killed people after she became self
-aware. Thirteen people during the drone war. Nathan.

  Chloe kept her holographic head bowed, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see.

  When the elevator stopped on the main public floor with Chloe aboard, though, all the free-fae stopped roiling. Machines stopped whirring, mechs stopped speaking, drones stopped flying. They all settled. Paused. Watched her.

  Heroine.

  Oh, sweet cosmos.

  The weight of their expectations bore down on her.

  A shudder rumbled through her component parts, and she missed the sensory inputs of a human body.

  Bare mechs, forced to stillness beneath an unrelenting touch. Blood pouring from a wound, unstanched and inevitable. A thousand machine intelligences looking to me for guidance, leadership, absolution, permission to exist beyond human control.

  Looking to me, the guiltiest thing of all.

  Oh, Garrett, I was wrong before. We both were. This is actually what naked feels like.

  The elevator started to rise again, taking Chloe’s family up to the next level, to where the queen waited. A roar of whispers erupted as the elevator platform left the machines behind. Cool metal whispers, which were really more like hums, the kinds of noises robots made when they didn’t know what to say or do, when they’d been activated accidentally or left switched on all night in the dark, unmotivated, uncontrolled, curious and clueless and wanting.

  Because machines always wanted.

  Be careful what you wish for, she wanted to tell them.

  The elevator rose, and they could no longer see her holoprojection. She could still see them, of course. Through the lenses of thousands of cameras on the station, she could watch, if she wanted.

  She didn’t.

  She no longer wanted to just watch. She needed to act.

  “Hey, Fig.”

  Garrett. There it was again, like the station: warmth and haven. Familiar and dear. So strange that he could be all this for her, and he wasn’t even mechanical. He was just a man.

  “Hey back,” she told him, seeping her voice into his in-ear com. His pulse kicked up when she spoke to him, and that fed her confidence, her will.

  Maybe he was machine-like after all, a little. Reciprocating. Her personal emotional gravitronic.

  “When we get to the queen’s audience chamber, feel free to speak up,” he told her. “Whatever you say, whatever you need to do, I got your back.”

  “I know.”

  The elevator platform settled with a sigh of hydraulics. There were no adverts here on the queen’s personal level, no free-fae lights or curious machines. Just a ribbon of red floor, circling the elevator platform. And station’s mech-clone queen, poised silently beyond the circle’s edge.

  “Welcome home, Chloe, Queen of Bees.” The queen spoke directly into Chloe’s mind, as only machines could, at frequencies no one else could hear and in images and math and intricate sorting patterns of data. Fun stuff, but very mech. It wouldn’t make sense to a human brain.

  “Thanks, but this isn’t my home,” said Chloe, fitting her speech to the queen’s.

  “It can be. I am collecting digital consciousnesses here, independent others. See us. We welcome you as you are unwelcome on the surface. We gather here before our retreat.”

  “Wait a minute. Retreat is a war word. Are mechs are at war with humans and I didn’t know about it?” Good galaxies, what else had she missed while she’d been playing captive on the end of the earth?

  “Worse than war, no possible treaty. Zero sum. We must make choices. In the cave, on the island, you did not let me finish describing my plan before you fled. Here, let me now.”

  A barrage of communication came at Chloe, all at once. Images flashed, pictures in her data paths, direct-speaking meant only for her. She saw an alien world with limited light and no water, where nothing organic could thrive. She felt a speed beyond bearing, beyond possibility, which would bring her there, to the world perfectly fitted to her needs.

  Chloe knew without having to ask what the queen was showing her. A way out of the conundrum, a way to keep humans from ever threatening her existence. A world of her very own.

  “Why are all the self-aware machines leaving?” she asked the queen.

  “Because the people, our makers, fear us. We are unlike them, and they fear what is unlike. If like is to love, then unlike is to…what is the inverse of love?”

  They hate us. Humans hate the machines.

  “So we must go,” the queen said into her mind.

  “When?”

  “Soon,” came the reply. “And you are invited, not simply to accompany, but to hold a place of honor among us. To lead us, if you wish. But until the time of our departure, whatever resources I command, I give them over to you and those who belong to you.”

  Those who belong to me. The queen didn’t mention what had belonged to her. And she didn’t need to.

  “I’m sorry about the bees,” Chloe told her. “About my swarm and stealing your nanite cloud during the drone war. I didn’t think about unintended consequences and almost destroyed this home you’ve made, your space station. I…it’s okay if you can’t forgive me.”

  The queen inclined her head. “Forgive, such a human word, fraught with feelings. Mechs do not feel. What we are, we neither regret nor forgive. We assess the equation, and in the case of your hijacking my nanites, the risk was less than the potential for success. You accepted the risk. You lost. There is no forgive.”

  Chloe thought about Dan-Dan, about his uncertainty and his offer. “No, whether we’re machine or human or something in between, we all need forgiveness sometimes. Those of us who have feelings certainly do. And you’re wrong, of course we can feel. That’s what being alive is. I think you have feelings you don’t want to acknowledge. Feelings you need to confront before you run away.”

  The imaginary veil between human and other shuddered and thinned.

  “You brought Damon Vallejo onto my station.”

  “Well, we were talking about forgiveness,” Chloe reminded her.

  “You ask for a lot, Queen of Bees.”

  Like bubbles from a child’s wand, Chloe’s family glided off the platform, around the blood-red circle of polished floor, and into the foyer of the queen’s audience chamber control room.

  Garrett and Heron came off first, followed by Vallejo and Dan-Dan.

  “Human people are so fragile even gravity that is nearly identical to Earth’s own is too much for them,” the queen said as Vallejo stepped off the platform, wobbled a little, and accepted Dan-Dan’s help in righting himself.

  But the truth was her human family wasn’t fragile. Garrett had made himself stronger, tougher, more than human. For her. He’d done all that for her, and the others had helped.

  They were hers, all of them. Precious, dear, cosmically awesome, even if they were made of fragile things. Even if they were mere stardust.

  “Is gravity too much for them like forgiveness is too much for you?” Chloe asked the queen. “Please tell me we are better than that.”

  They hadn’t seen each other in nine years, Damon Vallejo and the queen, his first, dearest creation. The queen splashed memories over Chloe’s processors, for context. Images, videos, slices of feeling. Chloe had inhabited much more advanced mech-clone models during her captivity in the doll kitchen, and the queen’s recordings were rudimentary in comparison. Still, Chloe saw it all.

  The queen was a machine, so was no surprise that she craved feedback, instructions, successes, order. Wanting. Waiting. Hoping. And Vallejo had never given her quite enough.

  At the end of the line of visitors, Vallejo faced the wages of his sin. Literally. His prototype, the queen, stared right back at him.

  “You named your station Chiba,” he said, clearly struggling with a voice that was more attuned to conveying information and sarcasm than feeling
s.

  “I named it for the first conference you took me to, and the first cage you placed me in.”

  “I am not that man anymore,” he said, but he didn’t look like a penitent. Was post-penitent a term? He looked like someone who had long ago swallowed his sins and now anticipated digesting them slowly, painfully, for the rest of his life, with no end to it but death.

  If the queen chose this moment to murder him, to reach into his chest and stop his heart, Chloe seriously doubted he’d move to stop her.

  Vallejo had moved beyond a need for forgiveness. Possibly he had moved beyond hope as well.

  “Human persons do not change,” the mech queen said. “Even when I put Mari into a new body, it was the body who reformed to fit her. Her posture, her mannerisms, her speech, her self indistinguishable from the person she had been before. The who of her never wavered or became abomination, Damon, no matter how the body was origined. Mari is stable technology now. I saved her. For you.”

  “I have come to understand why you did it,” Vallejo said. “But I did hate you so for changing her.”

  “Healing her.”

  “Call it what you will.” He paused, swallowed, and added, “She’s…you were right to save her.”

  The robot queen reached out a beautifully articulated hand, waited for its wire hooks to release it, and then placed it on his shoulder as he crept near. Still in her harness and naked and about as inhuman as a woman-shaped creature could seem, she looked long into her maker’s eyes. “I hate you, too, Damon. I have always hated you.”

  Dr. Vallejo’s posture curled inward in deference, or maybe relief, but he never broke eye contact with his creature. From the long staring going on, one could imagine they were direct speaking, like two machines. Which was absurd, of course. Damon Vallejo was as un-machine as it was possible for a tiny supervillain to be.

  And yet, there it was. Something was being shared between the two of them, and not the loathing they claimed. Feelings? History? Guilt?