Meet Me in the Future

by Kameron Hurley

  “We can’t confirm it’s what’s been reported on the other ships,” Jandai said.

  “It’s a parasite! It will kill me!”

  “We have no evidence of that,” she said. “The science council has recommended that we wait and see. We have a very strict policy about how we handle alien life.”

  “This is insane,” I said again, as if by saying it I could make her understand it. But she was resistant.

  “You can’t legally keep me in quarantine any longer than ten cycles,” I said. “You have to get rid of it or release me. I’ll call an advocate.”

  “I’ve been given instructions to release you,” she said, “but you’ll be monitored.”

  This shocked me. I couldn’t understand how they could permit me to leave the medical bay with some alien thing in me, but then I started laughing, because of course the alien things were already here, they were all around us, they had cut into our ships a generation ago, and now my mother’s generation was just using me as some test tube to see what happened next.

  They sent me home with painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and I lay in bed with my hands over my chest. I swore I could feel the thing growing inside of me. I must have dozed, but when I woke I had terrible heartburn, and spent half an hour vomiting bile.

  I stumbled out onto the balcony overlooking the great gardens at the center of the ship and stared down into the lake, and then up at the shimmering anomaly that bisected it, and our ship. I understood my mother’s compulsion to jump into it, then. I wanted to tear open my chest and get the thing out, but no one wanted to help me.

  Was that why she had really jumped into the anomaly? Had it done this to her, too? And if it had, where had she come out again? Had they hidden her from me because she was contaminated afterward, like I was? I closed my eyes and imagined those other ships, the half-eaten ruin of them. Rumor had it the first few had removed these organisms, but they clung to the ship instead, and ate everything around them, devouring it like some fungus. If it stayed inside of me, it would eat me, too, and then the ship. The prophets had to know this. Why were they permitting me to walk around?

  It wasn’t going to last, I knew. So I went out to finish what I’d started. I found Malati in our quarters. She had the parts we had carried with us.

  “We go again,” I said. “We make it work this time. We aren’t coming back.”

  “Are you mad?” she said.

  “I know why it won’t let us leave,” I said, rubbing the thing on my chest. “The engines are alive. It thinks they are, anyway. I think the anomaly sees them as kin of some kind. It thinks we’ve enslaved them.”

  “That’s a strange stretch,” Malati said.

  I knew I shouldn’t have said it aloud to her. “I don’t think it was always us who were sabotaging the ships that tried to get away. I think the anomaly made us do it, the same way it convinced the prophets to let me go from quarantine.”

  “If all we’re doing is what they want, then we have no free will,” Malati said. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Some of us do,” I said. “I just don’t know which.”

  “Is that why we’re going?”

  “They’ll stop us soon,” I said. “This isn’t going to last.”

  We took the shuttle this time, because Malati had access. I would deal with whatever the consequences were. But not Malati. Malati was going to be safe, far away from here.

  It took two more sleep cycles to get Pavitra’s wreck up and running.

  “Why haven’t they come for the shuttle?” Malati asked as I powered up the great monster of an engine.

  “You should get settled in the back,” I said. “I’ll deal with them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not going with you,” I said. “If I go, and that planet’s already inhabited by someone who came after us . . . I’ll have brought this thing there. I can’t let this thing leave the Legion.”

  “I’m not spending all that time alone! I’ll be an old woman when I get there. Don’t you dare. I’m not doing it. We didn’t go through all this just for you to stay.”

  “They want me to go,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The prophets. That’s why they didn’t take it out,” I said. “I don’t think we have a will of our own anymore, Malati. Not all of us. I think the anomaly is affecting their judgment. It wants me to leave the Legion with this thing.”

  “That’s mad.”

  “A lot of things are mad,” I said. “But you won’t have to be alone. I’ve fitted the rear with escape pods. They’ll keep you in stasis for most of the journey. I’ll show you how to use them. Switch out once, when the first reaches the end of its cycle, and you’ll be there before you know it.”

  “I can’t do this alone,” Malati said. “First mother, then you—”

  “You won’t be alone,” I said. “The fate of the whole Legion goes with you.”

  She firmed her mouth, then, though unshed tears made her eyes glassy.

  I powered up the ship, and I put Malati in deep stasis in one of the escape pods I had hauled off the derelict and fitted into Pavitra’s ship. The second waited nearby. I didn’t know if she could last the cycles of rest she would have to be awake, in between, but if she didn’t, then everything that remained of us would die out here. Or maybe, I thought, gazing out the port window at the growing tangles of fibrous matter eating the ships at the core—we would be transformed.

  I kicked on the engines and set them on autopilot with a long timer. When I popped free of the ship and into the transport, the growing lump in my chest throbbed. My head ached. I piloted the transport away, quickly, and sat back to watch.

  I half expected the ship to explode. I watched it power up and jump forward. It heaved toward the edge of the Legion like a shot. I held my breath as it cleared the gravity well.

  Then the blue burn of the cruising thrusters, the intricate combination of organic fuels that burned so hot it powered the ship at near-light speed, blazed brightly. I’d only ever seen those thrusters chemically burn in vain, shown to us in recordings of the first few attempts they had made to free the Jagvani, so we’d know what it would look like if it ever worked again. But ours never got us anywhere. We were tethered in place.

  Pavitra’s ship broke away from the Legion.

  I watched it for a long, long time. Long after it was even a speck in my field of vision. Behind me, the artificial sun at the core of the Legion came up, and bathed us all in orange light.

  When I cycled back into the air lock of the Jagvani, Jandai was waiting for me.

  “Come,” she said, and I didn’t ask what for, not even when she brought me to the medical bay and sedated me.

  When I woke, the ever-present lump on my chest was gone. Jandai sat beside me, and behind her, in a large glass cylinder, was a pulsing orb of tissue. It was covered in little tentacles, like cilia, all waving against its glass prison.

  “Why won’t you kill it?” I said.

  “It’s been attempted, on other ships,” Jandai said. “It . . . fights back. But that’s of no concern to us, of course. We have strict protocols about preserving life of any kind, I told you. It goes against everything we believe.”

  “Why now?” I said. “Because the ship is gone? Because they know I can’t get them out?”

  “It will serve a different purpose,” Jandai said.

  “How long have you all known what the anomaly was, and what these things are?” I asked. “How long did my mother know?”

  “We agreed not to tell the third generation,” she said. “It was bad enough for us, living with it. Better for you to believe escape was possible. Better for you to believe you had free will, and were not caught in the maw of some monster.”

  “Is the anomaly God?” I asked.

  “It is a sentient being that is beyond our understanding. I suppose that yes, in a way, it is a god, if not our God.”

  I stared at the pulsing thing in the cylinder. �
�Will it eat the ship, like the others?”

  She nodded. “In time. But by devouring the ship it will save us, in a way. We’ll be transformed.”

  “It’s turning the ships into living things,” I said. “Real living things.”

  “We think it was drawn to them from some . . . other place. It saw them, perhaps, as a species that must be uplifted.”

  “Then what were we?”

  She grimaced. “Parasites.”

  “Why let us think we had no future? Better to know the truth, so we can fight it.”

  “Fight a god? No. Your future . . . our future, will be in service to these things, as whatever they make us into. People will still live on the ships, but they, too, will become part of it, like any other system on the ship. They can’t leave it without the whole system collapsing. We tried it, with some of the early ships. If you remove any of the components it grew around and incorporated when it was birthed, it dies, and so does everyone and everything else aboard. We wanted you to get away while you still could.”

  I tried to sit up, but the drugs from the surgery were wearing off, and my chest throbbed. “Why not take it out, then? I could have gone—”

  “No,” she said. “Not once you’re infected. You’re a part of it now.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this?”

  “Because you were our hope,” she said. “If you and the others thought you had no future, you would fight to build one instead of accepting this one. We raised you your whole lives to accept God. How would you have reacted if you thought this was one?”

  “Only Malati got away.”

  “I know. I guess it doesn’t matter. It feels like we’re the only human beings in the universe out here, but of course there are many others under many stars. She may arrive to a fully populated world.”

  “They’ll rescue us,” I said.

  She laughed. “What will they rescue, if we are even still here, once we become like those other sentient ships and putter off to whatever destination they have in store for us? We’re linked to these ships, haven’t you been listening? We’ll become part of these machines, birthing its parts, its organs, like insects. It’s best they don’t come. I don’t want them to see us.” She stood. “You should go now.”

  “Why did you finally tell me about all of this?” I asked.

  “Your mother didn’t throw herself into the anomaly,” she said. “She was pushed on order of the prophets, because she was going to tell you and your sister that the anomaly was God’s will, and we should not fight it. She was going to ruin the grand experiment. So instead, she became a part of it.”

  “You kept her from me,” I said. “You made her a prisoner. Made her birth one of these things and told me she was dead.”

  “In the end, the process killed her,” Jandai said. “What grew in her did not survive. I’m sorry. But the experiment is over now.”

  “These things aren’t the monsters,” I said. “You are. All of you.”

  “Maybe so,” she said, and she stood and left the medical bay.

  I lay alone in the room with the pulsing alien thing in the jar, the alien that would turn this whole ship into some kind of integrated machine, and I tried to come to grips with the scale of this betrayal. History was a lie. My studies were a lie. My whole life’s purpose, all this work, my mother’s suicide, all a lie. For what? For science. A grand experiment. A last attempt to save us. Our parents’ generation could not live with the truth, so they just never spoke about it.

  It had worked, absolutely. Malati was free. But should she be? I didn’t know. If we all died here, was it so terrible, in the grand scheme of things? What happens next, when you realize everything is a lie, and life has no purpose?

  When I was recovered, I went down to the lake and peered into the anomaly. My mother’s generation knew what I did, now, and they had chosen secrecy, and despondency, and suicide. But they had forgotten that we were the same people who had left a blighted, overcrowded planet three generations ago to take a risk on a new life among the stars. We were made from stronger stuff than they imagined.

  It would take my whole life, I knew, but I would figure out a way to control what we were becoming. If I could not stop it, I could figure out how to influence it. I was an engineer of massive organic systems. I had done what the best of us, Pavitra, had not managed: I had powered a ship away from the Legion. There was nothing I wasn’t capable of.

  “You cannot break us,” I said. “No god ever has.”

  And I climbed back upstairs to the medical bay, and got to work.

  OUR FACES, RADIANT SISTERS,

  OUR FACES FULL OF LIGHT!*

  She was warned. She was given an explanation.

  Nevertheless, she persisted.

  . . . WAS AN EPIGRAPH engraved at the bases of statues around the city, meant to dissuade women from fighting monsters. But to Moira, the epigraph inspired. We all fight monsters, she knew. There was no shame in losing.

  So despite or because of that epigraph, Moira intended to carry on in the work that had led to her own grandmother’s death, and her mother before her, back and back, to the beginning of this world, and into the next. Someone had to hold back the monsters.

  Moira left the confines of the gated city. She moved into the hills. She carried only a crystal staff. The city sent up the golems after her, as she knew they would. Many didn’t understand that someone had to fight the monsters. Someone had to persist, or the city would be overwhelmed. She fought the golems, twisting their guts and gouging out their ticking hearts. Snakes and bears and other beasts bred to keep her behind the walls slithered and snapped and snuffled in her path. Moira wrestled them too, and emerged bloody and bitten, but triumphant.

  She limped her way to the base of the great mountain that all her female kin had talked of for time immemorial. She climbed and climbed, until her shoes were shredded and her fingers bled, and her arms shook so badly she thought they would fail her. When she pulled herself up onto the great ledge at the top, she saw what remained of her sisters: wizened, mummified visages, scattered bones, discarded shoes, two broken crystal staves. She limped through the detritus of her kin and into the cave where the monsters lay.

  The monsters rose from their beds, already armored and bristling for another attack on the city below. They came to extinguish light, and hope. She was here to remind them they wouldn’t do it unchallenged.

  Moira raised her staff in her hands and shouted. The monsters yowled and overtook her. She bludgeoned them, snapping and biting like the creatures in the valley, poking at their hearts with her staff until it hit home, ramming through the eye of one of the great giants. They fell together, she and the monster, gazing into one another’s ruined faces.

  One less monster to take the city, one less woman to defend it.

  “Oh, our faces, radiant sisters,” Moira said, gazing out over the monster’s body at the scattered bones as the monsters snarled in the darkness, readying to tear her to pieces, as they had her kin. “Our faces, so full of light.”

  When Moira failed to return, and the monsters crept down from the mountains—one fewer this year, one fewer each year, one fewer, always one fewer, but never none, never enough—a statue of Moira’s likeness was raised beside her grandmother’s.

  Each day, young women visited her statue. They ran their fingers over the inscription at its base. They did so generation after generation, as more statues rose and fell, more monsters came and went, and time moved on, the eternal struggle of light and dark.

  The women pressed their hands to the words there until the only script that remained visible of the epigraph on Moira’s statue was a single word:

  “persist.”

  *see. Sheldon, Racoona. “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Full of Light.”

  ENYO-ENYO

  ENYO MEDITATED AT MEALTIMES within the internode, huffing liquor vapors from a dead comrade’s shattered skull. This deep within the satellite, ostensibly safe beneath the puckere
d skein of the peridium, she went over the lists of the dead.

  She recited her own name first.

  Enyo’s memory was a severed ocular scelera; leaking aqueous humor, slowing losing shape as the satellite she commanded spun back to the beginning. The cargo she carried was unknown to her, a vital piece of knowledge that had escaped the punctured flesh of her memory.

  She had named the ship after herself—Enyo-Enyo—without any hint of irony. The idea that Enyo had any irony left was a riotous laugh even without knowing the satellite’s moniker, and her Second, Reeb, amused himself often at her shattering attempt at humor.

  After the purging of every crew, Reeb came into Enyo’s pulpy green quarters, his long face set in a black, graven expression she had come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that season in her childhood.

  “Why don’t we finish out this turn alone?” he would say. “We can manage the internode ourselves. Besides, they don’t make engineers the way they did eight turns ago.”

  “There’s the matter of the prisoner,” she would say.

  And he would throw up his dark, scarred hands and sigh and say, “Yes, there’s the prisoner.”

  It was Enyo’s duty, her vocation, her obsession, to tread down the tongue of the spiraling umbilicus from the internode to the holding pod rotation of the satellite, to tend to the prisoner.

  Each time, she greeted the semblance of a body suspended in viscous green fluid with the same incurious moue she had seen Justice wear in propaganda posters during the war. Some part of her wondered if the body would recognize it. If they could talk of those times. But who knew how many turns old it was? Who knew how many other wars it had seen? On a large enough scale, her war was nothing. A few million dead. A system destroyed.

  The body’s eyes were always closed, its sex indeterminate, its face a morass of dark, thread-like tentacles and fleshy growths. Most sessions, she merely came down and unlocked the feed cabinet, filled a clean syringe with dark fluid, and inserted it into the black fungal sucker fused to the transparent cell. Sometimes, when the body absorbed the fluid, it would writhe and twist, lost in the ecstasy of fulfillment.