Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 168

by Neil Clarke

  My head spins and I do not feel strong enough to speak. I look down, my robe, my body, my paws are still proportionate, just small. While I suspect the reset had something to do with my size, and that I’d restore to the norm eventually, my appearance is quite literally out of my control.

  I learned early on that it is Alshea who steers the wheel, for after the first few times she voiced how she ached for her mother, the profound saudade visible on her face, I tried and failed to change myself to look like the woman, thinking it’d comfort the girl.

  I had never actually seen the mother, I just heard her; during her rare visits, Alshea’s eyes were closed. Her voice is velvety, a good match for Alshea’s description of her: tall as the sky, skin as soft as butter, tumbling braids to her waist. Flowing robes and a kind smile. Larger than life, as any good mother looks through her child’s eyes.

  But I, with chestnut fur and ears that stand on top of my head, closely resemble who Alshea calls the Northern Bunny. The stories say that every year the Northern Bunny flies through the Archipelago bestowing gifts of red and white on good little children.

  “No he never did,” she said when I asked if he’d visited her. “Papa said I didn’t qualify.” The very next night I filled her bedroom with presents while she slept.

  I sip watercress tea from a saucer. Alshea gently strokes my ears. Her head is tucked into the nook of her elbow resting on the counter beside me. Norai hums as she cleans.

  “You. You should sleep,” I manage to say, noting how Alshea’s eyelids droop.

  “Not until . . . ” And she slips away into a doze.

  “Funny how that happens,” Norai says quietly. I wonder why Norai hadn’t sent the girl to bed already and open my mouth to ask, but she sees the question in my eyes. “The fireflies didn’t come tonight.” I suck in a breath, turn sharply to study Alshea’s face. When the fireflies are few or none, then Alshea is plagued with nightmares. And occasionally, something much worse shows up, something that—

  “Norai!” I hiss.

  The night outside the bay windows has leaked into the walls like ink, frilled with shadows and smoke, pooling into the shape of a creature elongated and many-limbed, like the Slugs. Nightfall.

  I leap toward the window, but at this size I cannot get far, nor do I have control of my trajectory, and crash into pans instead. Norai grabs a knife knowing full well it won’t do any good; knives cannot cut through shadow and smoke. Not that either of us could ever really do anything. Getting Alshea to calm down is the trick to release her from an episode; the calmer she becomes, the weaker Nightfall appears until it fades away.

  The creature’s voice booms, gritty and authoritative.

  ALSHEA. WAKE UP. WON’T YOU COME TO ME, JAAN DEAREST? I’VE HAD A ROUGH DAY.

  No. No. Not this. Not now.

  Alshea stirs.

  Humans are a wet assortment of contradictions; they lack a united frame of reference. If fed two opposing premises, they split according to interpretation, rejecting any who do not. For an AI, the process is not so indefinite. We come pre-imprinted with seeds of veracity, and our truths manifest from our own adaptive learning. It is easy to reject a premise when it is not cast in proof derived from our own decision matrices.

  Case in point: how Alshea describes Slugs is different from the way Orange Hair speaks of them. According to the peach jumpsuit, the Slugs on MarkX21 are not shadow creatures, they are olive and orange and yellow folk with an austere belief system. They wait for hours without complaint outside the “Slugs Only” entrance of the Medical Dome to meet with a human doctor or to refill prescriptions, despite how sensitive their scales are to direct starlight. And they anguish when a human is injured in the mines, and they sing when one of their own passes.

  “They are so kind and familial,” Orange Hair commented to a fellow peach jumpsuit one morning while brushing Alshea’s hair. “We have much to learn from them.”

  Orange Hair’s truth, however, is not the truth.

  Alshea once said: “Papa never let me meet one because they eat children who don’t listen to their parents.” Her father’s words fall more in tandem with my own experiences of Nightfall.

  No, Slugs are not kind and familial. The way Alshea is consumed by terror whenever Nightfall looms close, I vehemently accept her father’s words.

  The kitchen is chaos: Alshea is on the floor, face devoid of color and contorted in a silent wail; the cats yowl and claw at the door, begging freedom; Norai hovers in the air over Alshea, her wings a blur, knife pointed at the shadow creature diffusing across the walls and ceiling.

  I chant loud reassurances with Norai as I struggle to release my leg caught in a pot handle; every jerk sends a shock of pain through my spine.

  “You’re okay. Alshea you are safe. You’re okay. We’re here. Alshea you are safe now.” No matter how loud we chant, Nightfall grows louder.

  Tears blur my vision; Alshea’s stress response overstimulates me, as does the gravity of my failure. Outside I have failed to communicate that Alshea continues to live a normal life and is not “as good as dead”; inside I am a shrunken caricature unable to carry and protect Alshea from the manifestation of her own fears. Because, really, it is her own brain that is scaring itself, releasing stress hormones that trigger the fight flight freeze fawn . . .

  Oh. Oh. Ohhh. Stress hormones. Perhaps . . .

  Alshea was admitted to the Medical Dome three months ago: an accident on the holodeck, according to her files. She climbed an oak tree in a fairy tale and slipped, and the safety routines that are supposed to prevent that sort of thing had malfunctioned. Her body had undergone severe physical trauma.

  Human bodies can memorize states of distress, physically swallowed by a cortisol loop when triggered. Does Nightfall loom near because her mind is reexperiencing the trauma? And if the experience can be recreated in her brain, can it be recreated in the rest of her body?

  Those physical memories must be there somewhere, latent in her cells, on the outside of the barrier. The trauma on her legs and head that do not quite add up to a fall from a few meters according to my repository and according to Orange Hair’s whispers to Green Eyes, but never mind that now. Something happened. If I shock her body and stimulate those memories, then a response would be registered in my outward data stream. The jumpsuits would see this on my interface and finally understand that Alshea’s life does not need to end!

  But . . . since it has been so long since the body experienced a sensation that wasn’t a trivial nerve response test, I cannot accurately predict the effect of an acute provocation. Would my shocks be enough for the sensors to register? Would Alshea get to know? And worse, would she feel something? Despite the barrier?

  The last thing I want to do is trigger an unpleasant response in her.

  I hesitate, but for a moment. If this works, then it is worth any potential discomfort she may feel. I watch her writhe in silent agony, and think: forgive me, Alshea.

  I push a series of sharp delta signals through my . . . tendrils, for the lack of a better word—limbs? foci?—that extend through Alshea as subroutines. Urging her nerves to come alive.

  Alive.

  Alive.

  It doesn’t work.

  From the jumpsuits’ perspective, my interface screen reflects no change. Nothing to alarm them, nothing to have them storm into the room.

  But, from my perspective, everything goes up in flames.

  Alshea is no longer silent, she is screaming, clawing at her eyes and hair. Norai drops the knife and tries to lift the girl off the floor but her wings are not strong enough.

  The cats roll around and bark and quack. The pans turn into birds and waffles and gimp, and in a caustic twist of irony my leg is free. The walls pulse translucent for a brief moment, and I catch a glimpse of the garden outside. It is barren, cavernous sans flowers and trellises. Like MarkX21.

  No . . .

  Abort!

  I scream canceling signals into the void.


  Abort. Abort. Abort.

  I scramble to reach Alshea, but no matter how far or how fast I hop, she is the same distance away.

  What have I done?

  Alshea’s amnesiac membrane is no longer penetrable by me; I am trapped outside. Her brain must have deemed me a threat, and rightfully so. The only information I am privy to are the muted thrums of her inner emotional states, but even then I have to strain as though I listen to drums through water.

  Out here, all is quiet, except for the soft sounds that touch Alshea’s ears: the hum of machinery, my patter reflecting her steady heart rate. I shift my tavajjo from body part to body part, investigating crumples. In truth I do not need to focus on this ordinarily autonomous task, but what else am I supposed to do now that I have nowhere to go?

  Time both flies and passes painstakingly slow, and it is soon Day 2 of the Completed Life Procedure.

  A gentle creak and the affable click-click of soles mark the arrival of Orange Hair.

  “Hello my little one,” Orange Hair says. There’s a tap on Alshea’s nose, a rearrangement of sheets, snaps of the colostomy bag being unfastened and a new one taking its place.

  The door opens once more, this time a splash weightily. Green Eyes.

  “Thought you’d be here,” Green Eyes says. “You skipped lunch.”

  “Wasn’t hungry.” A rustling sound accompanies the words, akin to when I smoothen Alshea’s quilt.

  A pause. “So you heard, then?” Green Eyes is quieter than they usually are.

  There’s a subdued thud like Norai setting a dish on a cloth mat, and the bed rattles ever so slightly.

  “They have no effin decency. ‘Giant’s mercy it is the biggest gala you ever did see, the biggest and best says everybody, and we positively need to be there and la dee da before our next very important post.’” Orange Hair spits the words as though they taste alien.

  “Hey there are more important things than their dead daughter, didn’t you know that? She doesn’t fetch the credits the way walking down a gold carpet does.” The words are harsh, but the voice isn’t, and now the sound comes from beside Orange Hair. “What’s this?”

  “Oh, a little something I made for her. Didn’t think they’d provide a shroud, they don’t really seem like that kind of people . . . what?”

  “Hm, nothing. It’s really nice, I didn’t know you could sew. Why did you choose red?”

  “I know your nothing; that’s not nothing. Out with it.”

  “Look, jaan. I’m worried, is all. What are you going to do after tonight?” Tonight? Where is Orange Hair going?

  “You think I’m attached.” Orange Hair’s voice grows sharper, louder. “I’m a professional, I know how this ends, I just want to make sure she’s dressed appropriately for the Hall.”

  “This isn’t only about the dress. Ever since you found you can’t have any, you’ve visited her more often. You know this isn’t the healthiest way to . . . ”

  There’s a whistled release of breath followed by silence before Green Eyes speaks again. “Jaan . . . amor? I’m sorry, I just . . . ” Sounds of a weighted fabric sliding over a lighter fabric, like Tedna removing his blazer at the door when he arrives in the morning.

  “Forget it,” Orange Hair says in a low voice. “I need to finish this dress quickly; hold it against her for me so I can see how it fits.”

  The two are silent as the lighter fabric rustles and they remain silent as White Streak strides in and the familiar clinks of fastened electrodes and of test prep begin to—

  An abrupt shift in my sensories jolts my tavajjo away from them and inward, and I hardly pay heed even when they open Alshea’s eyes to check pupil response.

  Something has changed inside: Alshea is no longer fastened into a loop of distress, and I feel sweet susurrations of normalcy from behind the barrier. I immediately recognize the generic patterns of emotions even if I am not aware of specifics; they reflect Alshea going about her usual life at Manor Flammel. After a few minutes, the fundamental pattern resets: a day has passed inside.

  If I still had legs I’d leap for joy and use my eyes to weep tears of gratitude. Alshea is fine, she’s safe, everything is as it should be on the inside; I didn’t break her.

  That I am stuck outside, barred entry by her brain, is of little consequence; I can grieve not being able to see her face again later. I didn’t break her! The joy is so blinding that it takes me a moment to remember that we still face CLP on the outside. Whatever elation I have is cut short, but with its departure comes a renewed determination to convince the jumpsuits that Alshea’s life does not need to end.

  I have more than a day to come up with an idea; from the remainder of their sparse conversation I deduce that Orange Hair is not going anywhere and would be seeing the procedure to completion. The three leave once their tests are done, and I settle into a deep state of contemplation.

  The door swings open with purpose, footsteps and voices swarm into the room. The lights overhead become brighter, deciphered by the way bullets of luminescence hit the edges of Alshea’s closed eyes. For a split nanosecond I am disoriented; I hadn’t expected any jumpsuits at this hour; the final tests aren’t due for another seventeen. It is still Day 2. A quick conscious check of my outward data stream reveals there is nothing untoward enough to alarm the jumpsuits and warrant this cacophony of voices. White Streak. Green Eyes. Orange Hair. A couple more of those who wear peach, and . . . a velvety voice. Alshea’s mother.

  It is difficult to follow a single thread of spoken words with every person speaking over the next, but I hear the words “disconnect” and “steady now” amidst the audio cloud, and the bed begins to creak and roll in a way that it hasn’t since . . . since Alshea had been wheeled to the sarcophagus that first day to heal the wounds on her legs and head, just after I’d been inserted to monitor her.

  There is only one reason they would be taking her to the sarcophagus now.

  Alarmed, I block the noise and ping the AI who administers the whole station, the Mainframe—my brethren, in a way—with a request for information.

  /culmination of completed life procedure./ is the reply, though it comes rather more contracted in our own language of 0s and 1s, as do my responses that follow.

  I whir, I flounder, I panic, and even as I riposte an aggressive stream of What?? Why?? They’re a day early!! I know that I will not receive a satisfactory response; the Mainframe of MarkX21 has not undergone codic deviation.

  /the procedure has been initiated, the sarcophagus is booting up./

  Well, I’d asked for it.

  The first time I sought the company of the Mainframe was when I overheard talk of CLP. As a medical AI I knew that them keeping Alshea in this state for more than a week was anomalous enough; the sarcophagus can heal most coma causes, and those who do not recover become CLP candidates. But Alshea’s situation with the inner world is supremely exceptional. Further, I hadn’t counted on her parents finally releasing the Medical Dome of her care. I figured the beloved daughter of the most important person on the moon would be here indefinitely.

  Is Alshea Patelcruz being considered for CLP? I had asked the first time we spoke.

  /affirmative./

  But, but why?

  /your question is unclear./

  Why are they initiating it now? After three months?

  /commander patelcruz requested clp./

  I was quick to understand that the Mainframe is not capable of contemplating the whys of things. We hit a wall, sucked into a communication loop until I eventually gave up:

  Can you give them a message?

  /yes, of course./

  Tell them to cancel CLP, that Alshea’s perfectly fine inside. And she’s doing well.

  /your message is unclear. it does not contain vital signs./

  But I do not want to send them vitals, I want to send them a message. Can you give them a message?

  /yes, of course./

  Tell them Alshea does not need to die. She is a
live and safe.

  /your message is unclear. it does not contain vital signs./

  Alshea’s body moves, she’s being dressed by Orange Hair, whom I recognize by touch, and one other. Her arms and legs are ritually crossed, her eyelids are pulled open, and in my frame of vision I see Orange Hair on one side and White Streak on the other.

  I discharge another pathetic signal to the Mainframe, but it ends where it begins; I am now disconnected from my interface, my only connection to the rest of the station.

  This isn’t right. This is beyond not right, this is abhorrent. How can they break protocol? How can White Streak, of all people? Though their bedside manner is wanting, I have always respected their punctuality, their adherence to protocol, the respect for things being as they should be.

  The room grows quiet and White Streak speaks, and from what they say it is as though they’d heard my thoughts. Oh the irony.

  “I urge you to once again reconsider, as this is most unprecedented. It is a matter of twenty-four hours.”

  The doctor addresses a holocomm in their hands; the projected bust bares the face of a woman as dark as Alshea in a red-gold kimono, with braids gathered at the top of her head. Her face is all hard angles, not the buttery softness of Alshea’s descriptions.

  “And I urge you to once again remember that you are speaking with the wife of your Commander, soon to be Mining General. I will not explain myself again.” Her voice is still velvety, and the flash of a white smile does nothing to smoothen the hard lines around her eyes.

  A low grumble erupts from Orange Hair’s throat, heard only because they are close to Alshea’s ears. A hand gently squeezes Orange Hair’s shoulder; Green Eyes murmurs in their ear.

  “Will the Commander be joining us? There is the matter of Secondary Witness.” White Streak says, not breaking stride, but I think I see them suppress a sigh.

  “Oh, no, he’s much too busy preparing for our departure. I will be Primary, and one of your interns can be Secondary.”