by Jaym Gates
What a shit deal.
How did my life, my lives, come to this? Always in the hands of another.
Again, the dread, the paranoia. I gotta shake this off. I have to give the org the benefit of the doubt. I’ve been a sentinel for decades. I like to think I’ve saved millions of lives, but I’m just not sure.
Do I trust the org? No. But there is an understanding, a degree of respect. Though as the years continue to race by, and the gaps grow longer and more frequent, I’m beginning to doubt Firewall’s commitment to my preservation.
Suddenly, my muse stirs, breaking my dark reverie. Several entoptic displays appear in my field of vision, cycling through diagnostic routines as my mesh inserts finally come online. Careza’s familiar feminine voice enters my mind.
[Welcome back, Sava.]
The sound is soothing; like being cradled by my mother, or embraced by a lover. The harmonic upgrade was a worthwhile investment. Careza has learned to use it well. I rarely think of my muse as an AI. It is my only true friend these days. I wonder if it shares the sentiment. I’ve never shot the thought its way. I keep it to myself. I’m afraid of what the response might be.
Hey Careza. Glad to be back.
[You could use a drink, I suspect.]
You know me too well, Car. Better than I know myself.
[Hospitality now has the request. Wait time, approximately ten minutes.]
Thanks. Careza enjoys our conversations when my brain has a slight buzz. It is always trying to get me drunk.
[You’re welcome, Sava. Before you ask, it’s been two weeks. I don’t have any information on what happened following our last resleeve. Currently, we are in lunar orbit aboard Selardi IV. We are outfitted in a CoreCorp-brand fury morph with minor enhancements. They will be online shortly. I am pleased to report the Titanians were victorious and won the Cup.]
Damnit. Would have made a killing on that one. What did the odds go off at? But before Careza can dig up the info, I shut down the operation. Wait. No. I don’t want to know. It’ll only irritate me more. A nervous energy starts to itch my entire system and a thick familiar taste begins to coat my tongue. I need a cigarette.
[Yes. I know. The previous occupant of this morph was a heavy smoker. The habit might be difficult to shake this time.]
This resleeve just keeps getting better by the minute. I hate smoking. Booze, fine. I can handle my alcohol, but smoking always makes me feel like shit. Every time I get sleeved in a morph with the addiction, I struggle to kick it. Careza continues with her report as I try to retain my sanity in the face of an intense nicotine craving.
[@-rep remains intact.]
Finally some good news. At least I didn’t piss off any allies in the past 2 weeks.
[Indeed. Are you in the right frame of mind for an update on Rati?]
Rati is my passion. The lover I hold above all others. She disappeared on me two years ago. No explanation. The sting still lingers.
Let’s skip the update for now, Careza.
[Understood.]
Run a newsfeed scan. Check for any major incidents in the past 2 weeks. Maybe there’s a clue as to what we may have been up to.
As Careza runs the scan and continues her standard sitrep, I shift my attention to the new sleeve. The strength to stand is finally there. I push the morph up and swing the feet onto the floor. Spasms shoot through every muscle. New morphs always take a bit of time in which to acclimate. Luckily, I’m familiar with the CoreCorp fury, sleeved it a few times in the past. This one feels like an old pair of shoes, bit worn and abused, but able to pound the pavement if need be. The left ankle is a bit tender. I hold it up a bit to get a look. Bit swollen. Definitely not new sleeve dysmorphia. Probably a nagging injury. Again, a pain in the ass, but you get what you pay for, I suppose. The nanotat encircling the right bicep is rude and obnoxious, even by scum standards—an entire slitheroid entering the genitals of a female pleasure pod, fully animated. Class act, whoever opted to etch that upon the morph. I hate identifying marks, but again, if you can’t afford a clean morph, you take what you can get.
I slide off the table, managing not to fall over in the process, and gingerly test the ankle. Sore, but it isn’t going to snap off.
Put in a request for a patch, left ankle. Bute should be fine.
[Phenylbutazone. On its way. And the cocktail will be here in approximately 30 seconds. Nothing unusual on the newsfeed scan.]
Figures.
I plod over to the full-length mirror, standard issue in resleeve waking chambers, and drop the sheet to take a look at the new me. I spy the cortical cruncher lingering in the doorway, my cocktail in his hand, giving my body an appreciative look. I don’t recognize myself.
“Hand me my drink please.” I reach out my hand in his direction without even acknowledging his presence. He steps into the room, too close to me, and slips the drink into my hand. His breath smells like some sort of sour sausage.
“Not too bad under the sheet, are you?” he says. “I took a peek earlier, but I must say, the slab didn’t do you justice. On your feet, the curves really pop. Your face isn’t much to look at, but that rack is … ”
I cut him off before I vomit bile into my mouth. “It’s exquisite. I know. Now shut up and back off before I rip the skin off your face and slap you silly with it.” He gets the message and slinks from the room.
It is a nice rack.
[If nice is defined by proportion, then I would say yes.]
AIs, always so formal.
[You’re approximately 4 centimeters taller than your usual proprioception allows for, so watch your head.]
Thanks for the heads up.
[That was awful.]
Yeah. Yeah. I know. A smile finds its way onto my face as the banter with my muse lightens my mood. Looking in the mirror, I try to broaden the smile, to get a better sense of my new face. I show some teeth. Nicotine stains all over them. I take a long sip from my cocktail, swish the alcohol around a bit. I can feel my blood respond instantly to the sauce. I close my eyes and let out a sigh. Just a few moments of peace is all I ask.
[We have a guest, Sava.] Damnit. No such luck.
Who?
[Our last Firewall proxy, Jesper, has sent a beta-level fork of himself. It is rather impatient to speak with you.]
Connect him.
They just cannot leave me alone, can they? Officially, Firewall doesn’t even exist. It’s because of Rati that they got their tentacles wrapped all around me, through me. The whole mess on Mars. That’s where it all started. The last time I saw Rati. All that knowledge they allowed me to retain. But why? Until that day, I had never realized just how scary the universe truly was. No, not scary. Horrific. No other word for something so vast, so uncaring. Transhumanity could be wiped out completely and it would all just continue on as before. Horrific. No other way to explain the feeling you have when you come face to face with things truly beyond comprehension. Hell, no other term could encapsulate transhumanity’s actions towards each other—much less what other beings lurking in the void have in store for us. Perhaps that was why. To teach me a lesson. To make certain I would never forget, so I would never cease assisting the org, because even the briefest glimpse of what is actually out there is enough.
Jesper’s fork materializes in my field of vision.
[Welcome back, Sava.]
Fuck off, Jesper. You know I hate waking up with lack.
[Sorry. Nothing I could do.] His expression is serious and concerned, but his kinesics indicate he is as calm as can be. What an act! Fucking proxies never panic. They hold all the cards and it’s never their minds that are on the line.
Yeah. Right. Get to the point. You don’t have me sleeved in a combat morph to get some downtime, so you must have something serious lined up. Are Berk, Pivo, and Sarlo here?
[Yes, they have been resleeved in the
same facility.]
At least my team is with me. People I could count on. To a certain degree.
All right. What are the details?
—
Pivo gripped the smooth outer surface of the station with all eight arms. Nano-magnetics at the tips of his vacsuit arms were the only difference between a secure hold and an endless drift into the depths of space. He peered up through his faceplate at the dark orb above him.
Earth.
His eyes locked on an expanse of dead black ocean through the ominous clouds. Pivo longed to swim in those ancient depths. Born and bred for space, he had never once immersed himself in the former ecological niche of his kind. Odds were against his ever taking a plunge into the salty waters of an Earth ocean. The planet was now a plagued death trap. A wasteland of skeletal forms.
He imagined a time before the Fall, when his ancestors thrust through blue waters and slipped effortlessly through mazes of coral, or gently floated along with the current, not bothered by the burden of sapience. Perhaps octopi still survived beneath the black waters of the present, eking out a brief existence, biding their time, keeping the species true and alive until the Earth could be reclaimed, and Pivo would join them on that glorious day, abandoning knowledge altogether, and returning to the ways of instinct.
Vacsuit sensors interrupted Pivo’s fantasy, detecting a laser light that bathed his form—contact from Sava by line-of-sight laser link. It was the preferred method of communication when a mission required discretion. Pivo’s muse processed the message, and Sava’s voice entered his head.
[Something wrong? Why’d you stop moving?]
[Just enjoying the view,] Pivo beamed back.
[Enjoy it on the way down, for hours if you want. Get inside the station before one of the sentry bots finds us.]
Pivo didn’t bother to respond. There was no arguing with Sava. No use in defending your actions. Pivo began crawling along the shell of the station again. The station itself was tethered to the end of a long, black, carbon nanotube cable that stretched all the way down to the planet’s surface—the sole surviving space elevator.
Pivo located the breach, a thin scar in the station’s metallic hull, the result of an internal explosion responsible for the station’s demise during the Fall. The breach was exactly where Sava said it would be and the description of its size was dead-on: a gap barely large enough for a human infant to slip through. According to Sava, years ago, the self-repairing nanosystems operating in the hull’s metal had malfunctioned before the breach had been fully repaired. The level of mission details Sava managed to extract from Firewall was scary sometimes. Paranoia bloomed for a moment, but he quickly dismissed his suspicion, compressed his cephalopod form, and squeezed his body through the breach.
In blackness, Pivo activated his infrared emitter, casting the room in a light outside the normal visual spectrum. The interior of the lifeless station became visible to his enhanced eyes in the eerie altered colors of infrared. Pivo almost preferred the dark. Ice crystals glittered from every surface, the result of flash frozen moisture in the long-absent atmosphere. Frigid clumps of human remains floated alongside chunks of hull metal in a macabre zero-gravity ballet. Pivo floated through the wreckage and the gore, lightly tapping aside metal or flesh to clear a path deeper into the room. A female head drifted slowly by, the face frozen in a gaping silent scream. An intact cortical stack dangled from the severed neck. For a second, Pivo considered snatching the stack, but he was not here to retrieve lost souls. Instead, he placed two of his arms upon the top of the head and pushed it beneath him, towards the floor. Like so many others lost during the Fall, this person would remain forgotten here.
Pivo made it to the airlock without incident, but he knew his luck would run dry eventually. A run-in with hypercorp guardians on a derelict station was unavoidable. Sensors may have already detected his presence. It was only a matter of time before bots converged on his position. He just hoped that when it occurred (and it most certainly would), it would happen after he had opened up the airlock and the rest of the team was inside the station.
The airlock had been welded shut from the inside. Pivo was prepared for this eventuality, but it made his detection by guardian bots a certainty. He composed himself for a few seconds, focused on the task at hand, then fired up the plasma torch built into one of his vacsuit arms. A harsh hot blue glare filled the room. Seconds were now his most precious possession.
He was almost through the inner door when his muse pinged him with a warning from the passive terahertz sensor. An object was moving towards Pivo’s position rapidly, now only twenty meters away. A sentry bot would be upon him in soon.
[Almost through the first door,] Pivo transmitted calmly, even though it took every ounce of his will to keep the torch steady. [I have company. Be ready.]
[Copy that,] Sava replied.
Finally, Pivo cut through the seal. The octomorph slithered four arms through the still smoldering sliced metal, and with a strained yank, pulled the door from the frame. The door slowly floated away into the chamber, the edges rapidly cooling. The interior airlock door was not welded shut. With a vocal sigh of relief, all eight of Pivo’s arms began a frenzied assault upon the airlock door’s manual controls.
[Few more seconds. Just a few more seconds.] But the seconds had expired.
In his 360-degree field of vision, Pivo could see the security bot thrust into view behind him. The bot unloaded its weapons immediately, the shots ricocheting off the floating airlock door. The bot advanced on the door, and with a furious swat knocked the obstruction aside. It clanged upon the crystalline surface of the wall. Just as Pivo pulled the last lever to release the airlock door, blazing plasma fire engulfed him.
—
Sava had instructed Careza to surge the neurochem the instant the airlock portal was open. The muse did not fail to deliver. In what seemed like an eternal slow-mo to Sava’s charged brain, the airlock door swung open into the station, aided by a thudding steel leg kick courtesy of Berk, the team’s muscle. With a flash of thought, Sava’s targeting radar snapped up an entoptic display and locked on two targets: Pivo and a sentry bot. The robotic guard dog was already leveling its weapons, but Sava was faster. Retinal-searing plasma fire erupted from Sava’s weapon, singeing one of Pivo’s arms and slamming the sentry back. A second shot punched through the bot’s armored carapace, melting critical components within, rendering the bot a useless pile of fused scrap metal.
Sava moved quickly past the cursing octomorph and unloaded two more shots into the smoking bot.
[We’re clear,] Sava transmitted. [One down, but there is always more. Count on it. Pivo, you shiny?]
[You scorched my breeding arm, puta.] Pivo shot back with clear agitation rumbling in the harmonics.
[You rather I leave you to the bot next time?] Sava turned to Sarlo. [Sarlo, get in here and find the console you need. Berk, we’re going to need to set up defensive positions, to give hacker boy here time to crunch his bits.]
Pivo cut through his vacsuit and detached his damaged arm, cursing Sava under his breath as the vacsuit rapidly repaired itself and sealed the gap.
[Hey. Don’t worry, Pivo. You’ve got seven more. And besides, you don’t really strike me as the breeding type anyway.] Sava relished giving Pivo a hard time. It was one of the true joys in life.
Pushing off from one wall to the next, Sarlo moved along the chamber with ease and grace. His neotenic morph was slighter and even more diminutive than the average human child sleeve, completely augmented and customized to match his “preferences.” He had paid a fortune for it. The others never understood Sarlo’s penchant for juvenile human sleeves, so much so that he always kicked in his own credits to ensure an augmented neotenic resleeve, even when Firewall was footing the bill. They also didn’t know where his seemingly endless supply of personal funds came from, nor did they want to. As long as he got the
job done.
Two minidrones followed after Sarlo, lighting the area in infrared and actively scanning on other wavelengths. [This way,] he said, transmitting an entoptic map to each team member’s overlay. [It’s not far, a hundred meters or so.] A highlighted route appeared on the map.
Sava and Pivo followed closely behind Sarlo, while Berk struggled to keep pace in her armored gynoid shell.
[Keep up, flatlander. We’ll be down the gravity well soon enough,] Sava beamed to Berk.
[Not soon enough for me,] Berk replied.
The abandoned station was eerily quiet. Signs of long-forgotten violence and desperation lingered everywhere. Floating debris. Ruptured and frozen bodies. Scorch marks and twisted metal. Death owned this place.
When the team reached the control station, Sava and Berk took up defensive positions in the corridor while Sarlo and Pivo went to work on the station’s dormant systems.
[I’ll be damned! The mission spec was actually right. The station systems are active but dormant. Whomever’s guarding this place didn’t wreck the systems, they left open the possibility that the space elevator could be activated again.] Sarlo gleefully began his procedures to hack the system.
[Who the fuck would want to risk going down to that ball of ash?] Berk piped in.
Pivo waved one of his arms in agitation. [Need I remind you that some of us happen to think that reclaiming our home planet is a good idea?]
[Reactionary thinking, if you ask me.] Berk replied. [Shrugging off all of our old nation-state loyalties is one of the best steps transhumanity has ever made. Leave reveling in the glories of the past to the bio-cons. I’ll take a future where we step boldly outward into space, thank you much.]
[Let’s cut the politics.] Sava pointed at Berk. [You’re an anarchist, I get it.] Then Sava pointed at Pivo. [And you’re on a reclamation kick. Fine.] But Sava’s rant was interrupted by half a dozen fast moving dots upon the team’s entoptic radars. [Incoming pings. Sarlo, you in yet?]
