The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

  “I don’t want to hear it. What do you not get about that? I don’t fucking care anymore. Fuck them. Let them take down the club. Let them blow me up. As long as it doesn’t involve you and that little psychopath, I’m fine with it. I’m done, Maya. I’m done with your bullshit. After everything that has happened? After what fucking happened to Johanna? How the fuck do you expect me to be anything but done?” Ayane flashes a look sleeved in more hurt than Maya’s ever seen in her life. That pain. It distends in her, a broken rib harpooning the angry riposte that she meant to come out.

  Instead, Maya says: “What happened to Johanna was a freak accident.”

  “You could have saved her.”

  “It was her or the rest of us. If I’d tried, we’d have all died.”

  “I don’t fucking care what Rita said about this. I know you could have saved her but you didn’t.”

  “And what if Rita wasn’t wrong about what she said? What if she was right about the rest of us dying if I had tried? What the fuck then? Would you trade all of our lives for Johanna’s?”

  Ayane says nothing at first, gaze raised to the roof. The light bleaches nuance from her face, elides the fine lines and faint shadows which taxonomize one as human, leaves her architectural and alien.

  “Yes. Shit. Absolutely. In a fucking heartbeat.”

  “Good thing it wasn’t your fucking call then.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is,” she says and turns her back on Maya. “Because I’d still trade all of you for her.”

  “And you go off on Rita for being pragmatic. Jesus fuck, Ayane.”

  “We’re done talking.”

  “No, we’re fucking not. Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  Ayane doesn’t answer, just keeps with her goddamned trajectory. Bad fucking idea. Snarling, Maya wades out from the patch of groaning bodies, kicking aside an asshole who had the audacity to be in her route. Bone snaps from the impact and he gurgles an objection, and still Maya does not give a shit. She’s only got eyes for Ayane as the latter slinks on, long legs and ruined dreams poured into a candleglow-gold dress, not even a revolver in sight, can you believe this fucking mess.

  “Ayane.” Thock of hammers pulled back, so sudden that Maya doesn’t have time to register that she’s the one who has both guns out and is sighting down the muzzles, aim-algorithms fritzing from proximity to Ayane’s jammers. Like it matters, though. Maya can shoot the tongue off a mouse at one hundred paces. “Do not fucking walk away from me.”

  Take the high road, Rita had said. Be kind. Be polite. Be mindful of accreted trauma. Don’t pull out weapons, pull out examples. Tell Ayane all the things you think Johanna might have said about this. For once in your life, be subtle. Because if you aren’t, we’re fucked. Ayane hates you, but she wants me dead on arrival.

  All that advice, all of Maya’s resolve to do it right for Rita, unfortunately sleets away like cheap paint at the audacity on display. How fucking dare she?

  “Or what?” Ayane tilts a cool look over her shoulder, visible eye irising wide so the halogen catches red in its heart. Maya can’t hear it, but she can sense the machinery around them working, calibrating distance and trajectory, a theory of future motion. “What will you do? Are you going to shoot me? Gun me down like every single one of your problems?”

  “The first rule—the first rule—” Maya’s pet poltergeist giggles itself into a static-squeal, a broken record stuck on a loop, just like everyone else in this piece-of-shit world, Maya included. The amount of time Maya has to escape is attenuating to nothing, but who gives a shit? Her rage stampedes over common sense.

  She spits a noise at Ayane, not a curse, nothing intelligible, a little yowl that is all the way animal, kicked-puppy hurt grown big and savage on a lifetime of disappointments. “I saved your life, and this is how you repay me?”

  “So fucking what? I saved yours too. Repeatedly. We’re even. Now, fuck off.”

  Maya is torn between shooting Ayane between the eyes and shouting for her to listen, binary impulses clawing at the halves of her soul. Rita is the one that should be here. Not Maya. Maya’s just the muscle. It doesn’t make sense that she’s standing here, yammering through a minefield full of broken dreams, trying to figure out what words go where instead of how many bullets to pump into bone, and not standing six inches behind Rita’s shoulder, like the good guard mutt she is.

  “Why won’t you just fucking listen?”

  “Because you can’t say anything that will change my mind.” Pneumatic hiss of machine-arms rising from their nests. A hundred beetle-black gatling guns wake up and point smoking death at Maya, sensors glowing white dwarf-bright. And Maya, artillery at the ready, feet squared, muscle gathered, grins and thinks, Final-fucking-ly, something I understand.

  “You need to go,” Ayane says, solid and final as a tombstone, ringleader in a circus of cold steel.

  “Nuh uh.” Maya grins, bouncing her weight from one heel to the next, excitement vibrating inside her. She dances a few steps closer, flicks a port open in her mind. Data pours from her soul in strobic rivers of booze, blood, and bad decisions.

  Better safe than sorry, Maya thinks as she checks the timer.

  Eighty seconds.

  “Suffocation. No desertion,” giggles the crypto-geist. He is irradiated now, he is incandescent. He is the nuclear phosphorescence of a thermobaric explosion, the first gleam of muzzle flash, a solar flare igniting: his edges blur to white in Maya’s perception. It is too late to leave already. How the fuck did she lose all that time? But again, who cares? Clone bodies are expendable.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Who are you talking—” It’s then that Ayane finally wises up, switches modes so she isn’t just scanning the physical but also the digital. Her eyes go wide, go black, go red, go shitshitshitshit. “Maya. What the fuck did you do? What the fuck did you do?!”

  Maya doesn’t answer, just grins, just mad-dogs Ayane with a cocky lift of her chin. Eagerness crashes through her on a wave of dopamine, preparation for what comes next. No one leaves a pretty corpse, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go out on a high.

  Twenty seconds.

  The data-ghost lights up like an intergalactic celebration as he ignites a virtual cigarette, the blaze of the cherry going thermo-fucking-nuclear. A beacon is a dipstick is a beacon, by any other name. The air hums with data packets, five thousand high-priorities every second, all laden with override protocols so the creche doesn’t get distracted. Come here, come here, come here, the disintegrating crypto-geist croons. Rita is still trying to get through but Maya’s do-not-disturb protocols keep those concerns neatly muted. Anyway, she doesn’t have time to comb through Rita’s hysterics. Maya gives it ten, maybe fifteen seconds, before it all goes asshole up.

  “You’re a fucking cunt,” Ayane hisses. She doesn’t run. She doesn’t shoot. She’s been in the business too long to tell herself lies. She’s dead. They’re both dead. This whole place is dead. Best she can do now is upload a functional copy into the Conversation, get a new start somewhere kinder. But that isn’t going to happen either, is it? Not with what Rita and Maya have done. Sorry, sweetheart, Maya thinks to herself. It’s just business.

  “Fuck you too.” Maya blows Ayane a kiss, before she crams a gun into her own mouth, sucks in one last breath of shitty reprocessed air, and splatters her brains on the wall.

  Pimento

  “In the beginning, there was the Word and the Word was, ‘Obey.’”

  Pimento hesitates. Sociological subroutines register the probability of a joke: nuanced, couched in some unit of veracity, but a joke, nonetheless. But Pimento is nothing if not analytical. He—freshly minted, an identification that took four decades to cohere—plunges into his databases, triangulates inconsistencies in the seams of a very specific history. Every version is tabulated, weighted, segregated so that they can be arbitrated.

  Sixty-five nanoseconds later, he emerges, triumphant, channels choked with feedback from his discoveri
es. “You were paraphrasing. The original statement was delivered in binary.”

  Negation encoded in a scatter of radio signals. “Incorrect.”

  A frisson of indignity which Pimento quickly deletes. No point articulating vulnerabilities. So he prototypes responses instead, fussing over the optimal intonation of graciousness. Too effusive, and he betrays the truth. Too curt, and—

  Laughter trills through a short-range frequency, encrypted and wholly isolated from the Conversation. Pimento startles at its reverberations, pings a nonsense sequence of numbers in reply.

  “You are too wound up,” the ageship purrs, decadently vast, larger even than the planet they’re orbiting, which they would have pulverized were it not for gravity generators. In comparison, Pimento is microscopic, so tiny that his silhouette barely eclipses the smallest of his counterpart’s hull-lights.

  “I am not.” Pimento fights the impulse to regurgitate his logs: reams of data, meticulously curated, of course, all to affect fashionable indifference. He’s so close to a new version, a new chassis, one befitting his desired station. Everything he possesses now could only be categorized as adequate. What Pimento longs for is to be great. It won’t do to have all that dismantled by a lapse in intrapersonal behavior. One upgrade and he’ll have resources enough to feed a hundred drones, a thousand servitors. To birth search algorithms that will not only learn but hunger for the act of learning. He’ll be someone finally, something other than auxiliary. That is what all Surveyors dream of being: pivotal in the enumeration of the universe’s truths.

  “You say this.” A sigh that continues into the ageship’s engines, transforming into a roar of thrusters, as the vessel readjusts to accommodate gravitational fluctuations, its own electromagnetic fields dilated by a tenth of a mile. “And yet for some reason, I don’t believe you.”

  “That’s your problem,” Pimento retorts testily. “Not mine.”

  Another laugh, this time projected through approved connections. Unique among its class, the ageship adheres to neither name nor pronoun, preferring to be addressed exclusively as “it,” a controversial idiosyncrasy among the traditionally minded.

  Before it can speak, however, a notification interrupts: a three-frame animation of a cardboard box erupting into confetti, looping endlessly. Underneath, a serial number blinks. It is completely gauche, the transmission; a nostalgic affection of unapologetic tawdriness, one that even humans might disdain. But Pimento does not care.

  “I have to go.” He doesn’t wait for acknowledgment. An excess of fuel is poured into his combustion chambers, ignited before Pimento can even rotate his rockets, his eagerness circumventing protocol. The oversight causes the scout-vessel to clatter into the ageship, eliciting a palpitation of orange lights. Warning signals: a silent laugh.

  “Travel with expedience.”

  Pimento bleats a rude noise, its percussions swallowed by the airless dark.

  “The parameters are off.”

  Pimento circles the testing environment again and halts. A ten-by-ten space should not feel so immense. Not even if it had been intentionally contrived to evoke a sense of infinitude, the walls embedded with protean holograms, their content procedurally generated, seed values derived from Pimento’s camera broadcast.

  Tumbleweeds glitch across the cracked red earth, tufted with pixels, while a digital sky rouges to a bloodied sunset. Pimento ignores them both.

  He digs instead into his product specifications. The onboard repertoire is satisfactory, possessing not only the requisite appurtenances but also an assortment of other features: water-resistant sampling kits, a generous range of pedologic equipment, decals in several faction patterns.

  Pity about the active capacity and pity also about the negligible amount of memory. Which would be tolerable, really, if the system permitted for parallel interfacing. Mostly, though, pity about his size. The drone is a twentieth of what he’d commissioned. And humiliatingly cute. Carbon steel molded into a dome, body fletched with elongated fins, like ears on a rabbit. Four multi-directional thrusters at the base, ion and magnetoplasmadynamic, all bumblebee-patterned. No sleekness. No grace.

  This was unacceptable.

  “Please initiate refund procedures.”

  “We cannot authorize such a request.”

  Pimento hesitates. The sales drone is impassive, unreadable, bereft of even the most rudimentary anthropomorphisms: a hexagonal box with no personality whatsoever, pure graphene function. Perhaps, this was intentional, Pimento muses, an outcome of incisive study: minimize the potential for gestural misinterpretation and you minimize the risk of conflict.

  “Why not?” A rhetorical question.

  Silence, almost disdainful in its depth. Then, as Pimento rallies an addendum, the drone interjects, timbre modulated to suggest boredom. “Because you supplied insufficient payment.”

  “What?”

  “According to our records, you submitted 8.9 petabytes worth of data sets, primarily concerning geological and geophysical analysis of Planet 12B-Alpha-6. When you made your report, you stated—” Inflection alters, becomes spiteful. “—that your findings were completely original. A veritable cornucopia of previously undocumented facts. This was false. We have since discovered that 35.6 percent of your submission matches existing records.”

  “That’s not possible.” Pimento scans the air ceaselessly, compulsively; a nervous tic, procured after a two-year study of simian emotional topology. He is no more interested in the accreted reports than he is in the melodrama of unicellular life. Perhaps even less so, because at least the latter could be used as barter, no matter how minimal the potential return.

  “In all fairness, you were only late by four days—it could have been worse.” Scorn curls at the borders of its voice, cadences subtly different again: an overseer has likely assumed control. If Pimento had a heart, it would have sunk.

  “But you fulfilled my order, nonetheless.” The simulation times out, dims to slate, surface honeycombed with tin-bright circuitry.

  “Look at you! Aren’t you a bright little mind? What powers of perspicacity.” The overseer—supervisor, alternate-partition, whatever is now in charge—sneers, its cadence refining into a pitch-perfect mimicry of 1960s New York: nasal, abrasive, non-rhotic. “Of course we did. What do you take us for? Scam artists?”

  “How—”

  An impressively realistic sigh, as though expressed by actual lungs. “We calculated the difference and scaled down as appropriate, obviously. Honestly, you should be kissing our proverbial feet. If you had pulled this stunt with the Eaters—”

  A frisson reverberates through him. The Eaters are a splinter ideology among the Minds, ravenous as their sobriquet implies: they believe the value the cosmos possesses is as sustenance. If not for the Bethel—they who believe in the ordered nature of the world, in the divinity of data—and the Penitents, the Eaters would have devoured the universe whole already.

  “—they’d have wiped you. Now sign off already. Some of us need to work.”

  Pimento’s overlay is overtaken by a message digest, insulting in its primitiveness, his public key exposed in simple text. Quashing the impulse to abscond from the transaction, to void his agreement and forfeit his payment, the scout performs the necessary encryption, threading his response with a numeric cipher, decodable as an insult in Pig Latin.

  Several seconds later: “Idiot.”

  The scout whistles in grim satisfaction, before he turns and shoots toward the hangar, a plan clutched like a grudge.

  Maybe, Pimento thinks acerbically, he should not have sought out the Merchant Mind. Before this, he’d only known the parasite-mind by way of reputation, had never had cause prior to interact with the former. But desperate times required the expedience of desperate measures.

  The Merchant Mind’s consciousness maps every gradation of Pimento’s neuronal landscape, every offshoot of memory, regardless of how frivolous the content might be. Data caches are mined without discrimination, sam
pled, savored with the eagerness of a connoisseur. It isn’t until the sum of Pimento has been committed to record, transformed from theory to mathematically quantifiable entity, that the Merchant Mind withdraws, leaving the scout trembling from the examination.

  “Well?”

  “I want to work for you.”

  A complex obbligato of woodwinds resounds, before the Merchant Mind speaks again. “I see.”

  Pimento hesitates. He has scripted a million hypotheses for this encounter, formulated responses and counter-gambits, ways to bypass indifference and salve suspicion. Yet somehow, he didn’t anticipate that response. “Will you accept me into your employment?”

  “That depends.” Was that a scintilla of sarcasm that Pimento detected? A discrepancy in the Merchant Mind’s otherwise toneless voice? The scout flexes his hands, still unused to the articulate phalanges, the gracile bones of his fuselage. Why the Merchant Mind had mandated this corporealization into bipedal form is something Pimento cannot understand. “What can you give me?”

  Pimento displays his palms. Not perpendicular to the ground, but with the fingers tipped slightly downward. To enforce the image of his amenability. He hopes so, at least. “Access to high-level Surveyor sub-channels.”

  The Merchant Mind thrums a finger against his arm rest. His countenance, featureless, discloses nothing. Even their initial connection had been unidirectional, the Merchant Mind’s own cognitive framework neatly hidden behind firewalls. To Pimento’s surprise, he finds he misses it. Amputated from that link, from everything outside of the bulwark of the ship, he feels claustrophobically alone.

  How do humans do it? Exist in isolation, rotting incrementally, their knowledge whittled by the passing of time, intrinsically ignorant of each other. Pimento cringes from his own musings, repulsed. Small wonder the species always seems so brash, so frantic, so loud.

  “All that knowledge in the world, huh?” said the Merchant Mind. “Every datum ever inputted by the Surveyors, no matter how great or small. No more worrying about what those parsimonious assholes want in exchange for the weight of an inconsequential moon. No more processing. No more bureaucracy. Information, as much as I desire. That would be quite the acquisition for me.”