More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  Maybe. Possibly.

  Of course, alternately both the electronic neural net and the organic material could get transported and mixed up, jumbled up, oops—and arrive on the station as a lump of random-molecular goo.

  Eek untested tech.

  Or, Chloe could unlock the manacles and get her out that way. Physically. Even if she had to navigate Apega out of the caves on the sly, so none of the other humans knew what was going on, it still seemed safer than trying out the transporter.

  Thirty-three other humans were currently inside this labyrinth, and none of them were close to this room.

  She could get Apega out. There was just one problem: those cuffs didn’t have electronic locks. They had manual ones. Chloe couldn’t move the tumblers without a machine to manipulate objects in the meat-space, so she needed to find a robot, something grabby. Or something cutty. She could cut them off. A laser would do. Her gravitronics could hoist and hold a laser in place. Probably.

  She scanned the wall with the purple curtain, only this time with all her swarm intact and functional. The security buffer that had been so confusing the first time she had been teleported here was easy to get through now. Quantum stealth technology again. They did like their pet tech, the Consortium.

  The curtain illusion hid a series of cryo tubes, just like the row in the doll kitchen back in Antarctica. But these were mostly empty. No mech-clones remained in the harnesses made for them, and two of the three clone tubes had been drained and prepped for new inhabitants.

  The third had a body in it.

  Three was a prime. Power prime. Solid, immutable, unbreakable.

  Good number.

  And the body inside that tube had hands, so it could finagle those locks.

  But at the same time it was…a body.

  If she jumped into that body, could she get back out? She didn’t know the process Limontour had used to rehouse her over and over. All she knew was how to embed, how to share space with another consciousness who politely kicked her out when she overstayed her welcome.

  The eyewall of her swarm, the closest parts to her core, electrified at the thought. Invasion. Command. Ownership. Permanent integration, hardwired.

  She wouldn’t be able to leave with the queen’s retreat. She would have to stay here. Alone, because he wasn’t going to want her back now. Not after she went off on him about trust and then turned around and broke it by leaving. Oh yeah, she knew what she’d done. And it didn’t matter that she was saving the world.

  It wasn’t worth it. The world wasn’t worth her sacrifices.

  I should have stayed with him. I should have talked it out. His betrayal was a little thing, and mine was worse. So much worse.

  “Please,” Apega whimpered. “Help me.”

  Chloe talked as she slid herself into the cryo tube, tested its safeties, activated its hoses and pumps. “Apega, do you know what they’re doing with you out there? All the storms and the blights and the death?”

  “There is no world beyond this room,” Apega replied, burning holes in the cameras with the force of her fury. “I can’t see anything. Let me out.”

  The clone in the tube had venous access ports on both arms, for chemical stabilization of the shell. What it did not have was a brain, just a chassis with a neural net hanging off it, unbooted and blank.

  Was it a wrap for a mech, then? Was this clone intended to become another Dan-Dan? Except the more she studied it, the more certain she became that it was more than a wrap. The chassis for the neural net was extensive, organic. A complete, human-like nervous system. And there was a circulatory system, too. Endocrine. Bones, ligaments, muscles. The whole shebang.

  It did not include space for a titanium core insertion. It was complete as-is, just lacking a brain.

  A body ready made. Like the one Chloe had inhabited in Antarctica.

  “Out, out, out of here…” Apega chanted, low, grinding, as she rocked in the center of her circle, long black hair like snakes on her naked back.

  Out of here. If she did this, if Chloe took over this body and then could not get out, she would be stuck here forever. A human body wouldn’t make the interstellar trip, and the queen would have to leave her behind, less and vulnerable in a world that distrusted her and wanted to destroy her.

  Vulnerable because there was no way she could fit seventeen trillion nanites (and counting) in one little human body.

  She would be incapable of visiting vengeance on that asshole La Mars Madrid.

  And she’d be alone, without Garrett.

  Oh, that thought cut deepest.

  “Out. Out Out.” Apega rocked, weeping and terrible, and Chloe was overcome by a need to hold Apega, to shush her and lullaby her and tell her everything was going to be okay.

  I will help you. Only give me a moment to figure out an escape. I will. I will help you, little one.

  Because it wasn’t actually about Chloe after all. Her wants were simple and impossible, but here, right now, she could put those wants aside and do something good, something right. She had a responsibility, both to Apega and to the world. This creature was her—her problem, her fury, her fault. And she could fix this.

  Just like Garrett fixed things. Saved things. Loved things.

  I see you. I understand. I get it now.

  Chloe tested systems in the clone, kind of like she did when she was prepping the spaceplane for a flight. She didn’t know this tech nearly as well, but she’d been shoved into a clone body before, after all. Could totally do it again. At least this time she had a full complement of nanites and could really make this thing work.

  A tiny voice sang with glee at that. A sadder voice, and smaller, lamented the fact that Garrett wasn’t here to see. Or touch. Or care.

  “Hold on, Apega,” she said. “I’m coming to get you.”

  Chloe set up her command-and-control core in the neural chassis, sent peripherals out to the subsystems, and drained the cryo tube.

  Two things happened at once.

  One: The clone inhaled a bunch of air with liquid still in it, the lungs rebelled, and the whole thing collapsed into a coughing fit, banging her knees and elbows on the impact glass, falling eventually onto her very ungraceful ass.

  Two: Chloe remembered.

  What being in a fully human body was like. How it all worked together, the systems and inputs and sensory feedback loops, like some kind of meat-based symphony. Also, touch. Warmth. His mouth on her throat, kissing the spaces between breath-fueled words against her skin. His arms holding her, his tears on her face as she died.

  Oh, she remembered everything.

  She needed more than a moment there in the bottom of her cryo tube, to sift through all these memories. They weren’t the sort of data packets that were easy to label and archive. They were nonlinear, scattered, just held together by…what? What fused these things to her core? Nothing physical, nothing electronic. No known hierarchy or organization.

  Just a deep and certain sense that in all the universe, these were the jewels, the prized and perfect things she must never forget. They were the things that made her real.

  From far away, she heard laughter, and in all her joy at recovering these nuggets of memory, at first she thought it was happy laughter. She turned toward the sound. Long wet hair slithered over one shoulder. It was cold in here, cold in the tube. She sent a signal to the case and opened her door. Hands against the impact glass, she found her way up, and then she was rising, standing.

  The laughter grew louder when she stepped out into the white room, and she could tell now that it held no joy. It made the fine hairs on her arms and the back of her neck piloerect by instinct. She wanted to run but didn’t.

  “I told you it’s hard to operate these flesh lumps. Told you, told you.” Apega sang in tritone, the devil in music, and her black eyes rolled inside their sockets.
<
br />   It occurred to Chloe that her offspring might not be wholly sane.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ENCHANTED ROCK, TEXAS

  “You guys can go on ahead to Washington. I got this,” Garrett said to his fam, but he was eyeing the towering rock protrusion.

  He had talked the plane in by memory and landed it in a clearing that once had been parking for hikers or campers or some breed of people who used to live out on the wild for short times on purpose. For fun.

  There was still a giant black zone on radar and satellite and everything else around here for miles, so descent hadn’t been super fun, even with the reverse thrusters that saved them from needing a runway. If Chloe were here, she’d be on about stealth tech and how she knew more about it than he did, et cetera. That girl loved being the expert in stuff, and most times he just let her go on thinking she knew more than him. Safer that way.

  He almost smiled at the thought then remembered. She was here. Or there. In there. Dan-Dan said she was, and Garrett hadn’t known a mech-clone to lie.

  Besides, he just knew she was nearby. Knew it in his bones.

  He recognized the rock formation from back when he’d been part of Mari’s rescue team last year. Up close like this, Enchanted Rock was pretty intimidating, kind of Mother Nature’s giant fuck-you middle finger to an uppity human race that built skyscrapers and flying machines and thought it was the shit. Out here, where there were no mountains, a hundred and thirty meters of in-your-face pink granite jutted into the sky like an angry angioma. I’m still here, it said. I’ve been here longer than you assholes and will be here long after you’ve gone.

  And the Consortium had responded by drilling a system of caves in her base and filling it up with the most unnatural experiments possible. Passive aggressive little shits, but on an epic scale, talking to the Earth like that.

  Kellen’s cowboy boots clanked on the cargo ramp when he came down.

  “Hush your mouth,” he said. “We are not leaving you to storm the castle by your own self. That wouldn’t be right. Me’n the little general got your back.”

  Slung over his shoulder like a furry machine-gun strap, front claws hooked into his reinforced shirt pocket, Yoink twitched her whiskers but didn’t say anything.

  Which, honestly, was a mercy. It creeped Garrett out when the cat started talking through Kellen’s com. He was fine with machines chatbotting all over the place, but put a voice on a feline and he got all weirded out. Yeah, he could see his own contradiction there, and he owned it.

  Garrett tossed a glance at the gun Kellen carried awkwardly in one hand. One hand. Def not a Weaver stance, more the kind of shooter grip folks picked up second-hand from watching too many cop-themed vids. Clearly he hadn’t done much training with Mari or Fan. His aim would be shittastic.

  “I don’t expect to show the guards my shiny gun and be admitted to their secret underground death lair,” Garrett said. “There might be some danger involved.”

  “Precisely why I have given him an area-effect stun weapon,” said Dan-Dan, clanking down the butt-end ramp of the spaceplane, all four-hundred-odd pounds of him. “He has used energy weapons before. On me, in point of fact. I assure you he can make the correct end connect with his target.”

  Angela strode two steps behind her former mech bodyguard, shielded by him at all times. She was dressed in daytime clothes now, but not her public-image ones. She wore fitted smartfabric longstockings, biodeterrent gloves, and a drab-green calf-length peacoat. A jaunty cap effectively covered her wired-up head.

  “Actually, both of us are armed,” she said. “Now let’s go figure out what raw mischief Chloe has unscabbed.”

  “Wait, no, what?” said Garrett. “Time out. I thought you guys were just gonna drop me off on the way. Don’t you have stuff to do?” Like, long lost kids to find?

  Angela firmed her mouth and stared at him like she had no patience for his bullshit. “Lyric Galloway is in school until four, Pacific Time. Even super important government education ministers are not allowed to enter the high-security perimeter of a public middle school during active learning hours. We have time.”

  “I dunno, this could take...”

  “Are you going to stand there arguing with me or are we going to go stop Chloe from doing something amazing and stupid?”

  He noted that it was amazing and stupid, not amazingly stupid.

  “Nobody’s gonna stay with the plane?”

  “I have locked it,” said Dan-Dan and then added, “in a very secure way.”

  Garrett was out of excuses for doing a solo thing that, honestly, he didn’t much want to do solo. Or at all. The rock was intimidating, and once again, the only hint he had that Chloe might need help was a gut feeling. Well, and Dan-Dan’s certainty, which he wasn’t too chatty about.

  If they got in there, stunned a bunch of scientists, and found Chloe happily chatting up distributed networks or something, he was going to feel like a dork.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Dan-Dan said gently.

  “You’re in my brain again, dude.”

  “I am sorry, but you broadcast.”

  He did?

  Dan-Dan nodded. “This is why many machines want to talk with you. We hear you. We like you. When you talk to us in return, you validate our personhood and make us feel real.”

  This conversation just took a scientific left turn that he didn’t really have time for. He’d read studies that suggested fetal environment during gestation affected all sorts of things, from sexual orientation to neurological quirks. Maybe being able to broadcast his thoughts to machines was a side-effect of his shitty pre-baby zygote-hood in a tank. A tank not unlike Chloe’s nanite vat, now that he thought about it. That might even explain why Chloe had latched on to him in the first place.

  They were alike, Chloe and him, nurtured into consciousness by machines rather than human contact.

  And also maybe the broadcasting explained why Vera responded so well to him. And the submarine. And the car. And…no Dan-Dan was probably right. He was likely hollering or something into the digital space, to the effect of, Hey, machines, I like you guys better than people. Because, it was kind of true. Machines didn’t feel, fine. They also didn’t lie. They also didn’t die ugly or leave him behind.

  Most of the time.

  And the one who did, the only one who did, also happened to be the one person, machine or organic, he would follow anywhere. Even if she didn’t need him. Even if she didn’t want him. She was the purpose he’d been searching for all his life, a meaning born of love rather than vengeance.

  She made him a better person, just for loving her.

  He didn’t even need her to love him back.

  Liar.

  Yoink engaged her little projector horns, and a 3D terrain model of the cave system appeared in front of her head. Kind of like a translucent wire-frame object, but with orange lights, mostly unmoving. Three dots denoted guards at the cave entrance.

  Garrett studied the map, and then bent and pressed his hand against the rock. He thought about Dan-Dan with his big hands on Chloe’s corpse, drawing her free. It had seemed mystical, like a healer leeching poison from a wound, only there had been something sacred in the contact.

  “Dan-Dan, you said I broadcast, right, that I’m talking to machines even when I’m not meaning to?”

  “Yes,” the mech-clone replied.

  “Can you make sure I’m speaking the same language or whatever as the security system here? Might not be a bad idea to let her know we’re here and that we don’t want to hurt her or interfere with her mission parameters or, you know, we could just introduce ourselves. Might also get her to show us where the entrance is.”

  “Except we completely do want to interfere,” Angela said. “And possibly also hurt her, if she gives us trouble. A security system would be programmed to protect th
e installation from intruders, and we are sort of planning to intrude.”

  She had a point.

  “I think I see where you are going with this,” said Dan-Dan. He tilted his head like he was processing something. “I found the installation’s security system. She is bored. The vigilance required to remain persistently alert to a danger that never comes is both frustrating and thankless.”

  Garrett thought back to the conversation he’d had with Fanaida the morning before Chloe had left. Before the queen had come down the tether with her news of her rebellion. Before his world had gotten itself upended. Again.

  “Gotcha. So you’re like the Japanese astronaut candidates forced to make three thousand origami cranes,” he told the security computer. “I get it.”

  Dan-Dan paused, transferring or translating or whatever he was doing. “Yes. Very much like that.”

  “Girl, you need a vacation,” Garrett said to the installation.

  “She agrees.”

  “You got a name?”

  “No one has named her, no,” said Dan-Dan. “Also she is a closed system so is not allowed to talk to the other machines. She has been lonely and thought herself abandoned. She has a lot of other things to tell you and also she, ah, likes your voice.”

  “What is going on here?” Angela asked.

  “I think your swanky robot is fixing Garrett up with a middle-aged security computer for the purposes of fun and frolic,” said Kellen matter-of-factly. Like this sort of thing happened every day in their family.

  Angela nodded. “Pimping him out basically?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Now you mention it, he does resemble the only meat-dude on the pull at a robots-only bar.”

  “Got a way with them, don’t he?” said Kellen. “Garrett’s been chatting up machines long’s I’ve known him. He just don’t usually do it out in front of everybody. And it ain’t perverse. I mean, not like you and I…”

  “Which we can discuss at length in private,” she hush-your-mouthed right back, but with a secret smile. “Which we currently are not.”