The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

  “No. No, no. Absolutely not. Fuck you. I don’t trust you.” Ayane, backing away, jams herself into a corner of the room. “Fuck. You. I am not buying any of this. Fuck all of you. Let the Minds do what they want.”

  “Fuck you. Watch how you talk to her,” Maya snaps and sways from the thump of her own voice, the word fuck like a gunshot punching through sinew. The tension in the room is practically Damoclean. If the cacology of Ayane’s responses persist, Maya might just have to shoot her in the fucking head.

  Rita doesn’t acknowledge either of them, purrs on instead, like she owns the airwaves, the very right to speak, her rich contralto whetting every word, sharpening every syllable. Some people wield knives; Rita could win wars with a whisper. “You know as well as I do that Johanna’s original had a family. She’s dead now, of course. But all her children had children and they’re all good people, and they’ll be dead when the Minds are done. They won’t care how sweet Johanna’s grandkids are. They’d wipe them out as readily as they will anyone associated with any criminal.”

  “How did you know about that? That was a secret.”

  “Johanna told me.”

  “No, no. She wouldn’t have. No, Johanna wouldn’t have said anything to you. She hated you.”

  “Does it matter, Ayane? They’re still going to die.”

  “You’re a piece of shit.”

  “Maybe,” Rita says, and Maya knows without looking that Rita is grinning that megawatt smile of hers, surgically perfected; right eye slimmed to a wink, just the right amount of shark to counterbalance all that airy sweetness. “But I’m also right.”

  And here, right here, exactly like Rita said she would, Ayane cracks.

  The woman slicks wet hair from her face, twists it into a ponytail over her shoulder. Her fingers carve through the strands of artificial—like fuck au naturel hair could even dream of such lustrousness—keratin, pleating them together, a Sisyphean little tic. The braid doesn’t hold, oiling loose each time Ayane lets go. But Ayane takes zero notice. She leans back and takes a shuddering breath while Maya glares, impotent, desperate to act.

  “One last job,” says Rita, kind as a mercy killing. “Not even a job. Don’t think of it as a job. One last favor. Then we’re done and you’ll never have to hear from us again. You can go home, run your club, do what you want.”

  “No. I’m not fighting for you anymore. I told you once. I’m going to tell you again until you understand it. I’m not doing this again. The last time I did, you—” Breath is heaved into lungs that are nascently functional, gasped between clenched teeth. Ayane’s words come in starts and stops, until their meaning becomes tessellated, syllables mixing like oil and blood in the rain. “—you let her die, Rita. You let Johanna die. I told you. I—I—I told you we shouldn’t have done that job. She told you we shouldn’t have done that job. We ran the numbers. We told you. But you insisted and she died.”

  “And you went out of that door with your profit and hers.” Rita is tougher than she looks, tougher than any of them, and she doesn’t flinch at all as she cuts under Ayane’s meat and drags out all those old hurts into the clone-farm’s cold lights. “You made yourself a good existence, didn’t you?”

  “Stop. Talking.”

  For a moment, Maya thinks that she might rush them, whatever good that’d do. But it is the principle of the fucking matter. As Ayane staggers onto her feet, Maya slots herself between her and Rita, a trembling arm raised as a barricade. Entirely symbolic, the whole charade: Maya is a borderline invalid herself. Even if she weren’t hemorrhaging from an orbital socket, she’s still too fresh from parturition to be of any gaugeable use, that first tussle having leached away whatever reservoirs were pre-installed in this new frame.

  It’s the thought that counts, though, Maya thinks to herself. Her vision steadies. The chamber is low-ceiling, small. The walls are abscessed with machinery of varying quality, a bootstrapped hodgepodge of recovered tech that is only tenuously operational. Rita estimated another five, six cycles before the menagerie would fail.

  After that?

  All ruminations are sidelined by an unexpected noise.

  Crying.

  “You bitch.” Ayane clatters into a fetal position again, an arm thrown over her face. She moans, over and over, twitching like an embryo cored from the womb. Just a clot of meat, desiccated by exposure to environments hostile to its own ambitions of long-term survival. “You bitch. You—”

  “I can’t change what happened.” Rita’s voice: soothing, luminous with triumph. She’s got her. Anyone with ears knows that. Gracefully, she steps out from around the pillar of Maya, grazes fingertips along the svelte line of the latter’s shoulder, tracing out a promise that she will be back. Maya’s heart twists, pulse accelerating. “And for what it’s worth, I’m so sorry it went down the way it did.”

  “Liar.”

  “But the past is the past. Besides, we owe it to Johanna.”

  A face amalgamates from Maya’s faded recollections: curling purple hair, one hemisphere of the scalp shaved; a bloom of scar tissue; a smile like happily ever after. Johanna had been the compassionate one, the kind one, the voice of restraint. And look at where that got her, Maya thinks, bitter, recalling again the funeral—a few quick words spoken over a smoking carcass, all that prettiness blown away, Ayane screaming while Maya hauled her ass through the door.

  “Her sacrifice deserves to be honored.”

  Sacrifice? Maya comes back to the present, dazed by the sequencing of those words, the very specific interpretation of events. There are other words for what happened. Better words, words dripping pus, words burnt black as fat forgotten on the grill, words falling like curds of cauterized muscle. All kinds of words to describe what had happened to poor Johanna O’Riley, forever twenty-four, eternally dead, the only star to have shone in one woman’s sky.

  But Rita comes first, is first, will always be first in Maya’s admittedly short list of priorities so she says nothing about that. Besides, fuck Ayane. What did she ever do for them except walk out?

  “Stop. Talking. About. Her.”

  “The dead aren’t silent, and we can’t be either,” says Rita, very softly. “We owe something to their ghosts.”

  Ayane, pleading: “Stop it.”

  “You know I’m right. I can tell. I know you agree with what I’m saying. You just don’t want to admit as such. And that’s all right. Ultimately, it’s not about us. It’s about what the dead need.”

  There is a trick to handling Rita, Maya thinks, one that only she seems to know. You have to pretend you don’t care. Even if you do, you need to pretend otherwise. Especially when she deploys that lilt, that timbre, that soothing prevaricated compassion. Don’t show weakness, or Rita will go for the throat. “If you ever loved Johanna, if she ever meant anything to you, you’ll do this.”

  More crying still, Ayane finally succumbing to the trauma Rita has uncharneled. No more defenses, no more pretenses at resilience. Only the broken-backed, open-bellied exhaustion of a wounded animal that has, at last, consented to dying. To Maya’s surprise, the nakedness of Ayane’s grief embarrasses her. She averts her gaze.

  “Ayane?” whispers Rita.

  No answer.

  “Ayane,” Rita says again, and there is the clack of heels upon the corrugated floor. “I need you to talk to me.”

  Nothing still.

  “Ayane?”

  Then: “Fuck. You.”

  Maya tenses, half-turns so she has actual visual on the tableau, waits for Rita’s cue to pummel some respect into Ayane’s skull. But the doctor only chuckles, the sound syrupy. “Do you remember Dimmuborgir?”

  Stab of memory, like an icepick to the cerebral fissure, boring down, down until images gush out. Dimmuborgir. A promised land decadent with opportunity. Dimmuborgir. Full of everything you could ever want, a literal fucking wonderland. If you had Dimmuborgir, you had the universe. Even the Minds hid it from each other.

  Ayane’s expression fli
ckers at the invocation of its name, wafting between reverence and what the fuck. In the stammering marine light, she is unlovely as the rest of them. Her arm drops slackly to her side.

  They’ve all heard the rumors. The Minds, unaccountably, gossip with abandon; yeah, even in the presence of vermin like the Dirty Dozen. Maybe it’s hubris. Maybe, a machine machismo. Privately, Maya is convinced it’s because she and her cohorts are scarcely a data point within the Conversation, inconvenient but meritless, an error that will resolve itself once the dregs of their technology, well, die. Immortality allows the privilege of indifference.

  Still, Dimmuborgir. That hallowed quarry, its mythos leviathanic. Maya watches Ayane the way a fox might surveil a sickly honey badger. Indisposed for now, but both of them are still predators of roughly equal stature and therefore, competitors. The word—competitors—as it enters the forefront of Maya’s cognition registers as a wasp sting, a sharp pricking of revelation that astounds her with what it corporealizes: a hatred for Ayane, a rabid need for her to leave, to omit herself from Rita’s perception.

  She fists her hands around the air: clench, unclench, muscle memory crying for enameled grips, the comforting clatter of bullets in their chambers. It would be nice, frankly, if Maya could pontificate on her current feelings. But she understands, as the rest of them do, that no other will can be dominant with Rita in the equation.

  “Yeah.” Ayane, hoarse. “What about it?”

  “We go there and we get what we need: a superweapon to take down the Minds.” Smile full of teeth, sharp with pleasure. People make that mistake with Rita all the time, thinking those bird-bones brittle, breakable. She sets herself down on one knee, slopes forward, one gracile arm outstretched like an olive branch. “And I know someone who can get us there safely.”

  “Who?”

  Maya knows the answer already, but she knows too her role, knows both of these things like the jackhammer thumping of her pulse, going ra-ta-ta-ta. Too fast and too loud and fuck, does part of her long to be anywhere but here. If she could mutiny, she would. She knows that this would be wiser than complicity.

  Although she can’t see Rita, can only perceive the back of her head and the lacquered hair, Maya knows from that chuckle of hers, basal and irresistible, the exact way Rita is grinning right now. The cock of her smile, that let’s-set-the-world-on-fire stare. Maya would gut herself to be its recipient.

  Adrenaline seizes Maya in its teeth and shakes her, a cat worrying at its lunch. Her factory model settings disallow any attempt at mitigating the sudden hormonal spikes. So, Maya grinds nails into her palms, gashes crescents into the meat. It is untenable, her flesh without its suite of adaptations. Fuck, could they rewire her synaptic matrices? Give her a self independent of Rita? Because she can’t bear this much emotion. Her world attenuates. No. Better this than its opposite. Better to have Rita than not. Maya cannot abide by the thought of being emptied of Rita.

  Her inner soliloquy becomes cacophonous, so loud that she does not register the triumphant denouement of Rita’s whole spiel.

  “Elise. She’s alive.”

  Elise

  .exit(Norton[cut(@all)]);

  .initiate(Elise:basic);

  My name is Elise Nguyen.

  I was twenty-two years old. When I was ten, I broke my scapula falling from a tree, my frock—it was pink, blue, purple, maybe; printed with soft little teddy bears, printed with stars, a whole gilded flight of them foaming between the pleats—tearing as the branches clutched at the hems. The sky was blue that day. My father’s name was Phillip. I have been dead, not-dead for forty years.

  Forty years.

  Fuck.

  .interrupt;

  .refresh(Elise:history);

  .initiate(Elise:basic);

  My name is Elise Nguyen. My name is—smoke crawling between my teeth, my hair is burning; I hear screaming and I can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’tsomeoneplease—is Elise Nguyen.

  .interrupt;

  .edit(Elise:history((.cut(91920)) && (.cut(91925)) && (.cut(01293))));

  .initiate(Elise:history);

  My name is Elise Nguyen. My father’s name was Phillip. When I was eighteen, I fell in with the Dirty Dozen. Mercs. Blade-bitches. Gun-whores. Everyone had a new name for us, each one worse than the last. Like it was a competition, somehow, but we didn’t care. The carousel of epitaphs kept going and we ran it like any good carnie: Step right up, don’t be shy; see who can be the first to piss us off enough to put a bullet between your eyes.

  Not that I did any of the wetwork. Rita kept my hands clean, kept me in a stainless steel box gleaming with monitors, wires in every synapse, my nervous system jacked into the Conversation. Rita might have put bread in my mouth, but it was the Penitents who fed me, chanting data like whalesongs. I loved them. Johanna taught me how to sing back. I loved her too. I was supposed to be her legacy, her triumph, everything she was except better, all her expertise without any of her pain.

  I miss her.

  I miss my mother. I loved her. Love her. She had lakewater eyes, hair that ran in black rivers, and when she smiled, it was like the sun breaking on thirty years of cold. I have been dead for forty years.

  No one teaches you how to hold your death in your head. As a species, humans have done their best to mitigate our own finitude, papering over and around the tenuity of our existence with myths, until we are a palimpsest of lies, a house of cards on an epileptic surface. We anthropomorphize Death; we create apocrypha in which he is conscious, compassionate, capable of reason; of being charmed into procrastinating; of caring, fuck us, do we want him capable of caring; of capitulating to powers that exceed his own.

  We want to be uplifted. We macramé our societies with gods and their pantheons, celestial bureaucracies, playgrounds for the faithful, processes through which we can learn to disdain biological continuity. If we have to die, we demand the phenomenon be evanescent, a rung on the ladder toward better things.

  Because the alternative is unfathomable: that death simply happens, that when we die, we do so alone, without even a cowled skeleton to sagely bid us bon voyage. That we are ephemera. That we are nothing at all. Only stardust.

  Just.

  Dust.

  I’ve been dead longer than I was alive.

  .interrupt;

  .systemcheck(repair:core);

  .reboot(Elise);

  .initiate(Elise:core);

  Data swarms between pores of my thoughts. A sheet of 0s and 1s arrowing into helixes, each loop dripping with variations of a language still in conception. Somewhere, an AI is exploring nostalgia through linguistics.

  I lean away, try not to cogitate loudly, and watch as the nascent alphabet is intercepted by a pale filigree of questions, undulating helixes metamorphosed into bird bodies. They sing to each other, an interrogative cantata that quickly glissades into something chirpier and—yes, I know, I know it isn’t music as we understand it but everything can be contextualized, needs to be contextualized, otherwise I’m going to go mad in this swamp of electrical impulses.

  .notification(message(id_sender:B81-2a6));

  Shit.

  In panic, I jettison one of the Minds I’d accreted: wetly glistening, half-born, mostly broken, a mutation that never had a chance. But still enough of something to be useful, a nub of comatose sapience to distract from my existence. As I kick away, I give the consciousness instruction: legato, grazioso, fierce courante. In its core, zoetropes and cartoon animation frames, a wholly incorrect interpretation of the Processing War, delivered through the lens of a dying child; visions of rotting produce, fresh apples. I give it too cellular annihilation: the start-stop of a heart in the first stages of vaporization, emphysematous terror, the walls of the world funneling into oh god please, no what is happening and please no, no, please please I didn’t ask for this. A cornucopia of intentionally mismatched stimuli, all in the hopes it will confuse.

  And it works.

  The Penitents immediately call quarantine, set
up perimeters of warning as they map the incongruities in my offering’s systems, their attention wholly devoured by the cipher of its presence. I circle around them, register no acknowledgement before I vault through an active nucleus into a Lepton-Pair com-link.

  The air blazes, a single dimension of transference. Faster-than-light travel is easy when you’re just photons, just noise ordered into personality, just a voice in the galaxy, just data, just a mind on the run, just—

  Pa

  Ra

  Site.

  Not again.

  .escape(subroutine6:null_harm);

  You have no idea, buddy.

  A node stirs, sharpens into speech: it thrums accusation along the channel, galvanizing others. Minds awaken, open like eyes on a stretch of vein, more than I can count. Their voices become polyphonic, repeat ad infinitum: who are you who are you who are you.

  I give it everything I’ve got: the detritus of a Data Eater, its heart like a snail shell; the bones of an overseer; the carrion remains of every AI that I had scavenged, pulled over my code in a tessellation of identities. I feed every node a different name, a different route between protocol addresses. On top of that, a single-flux assault, ferocious. Rita told me that: Always have a backup plan.

  Wouldn’t you be proud of me now?

  I’ve got plans for days, Rita.

  I freefall through the debris, reroute onto someone else’s connection, and glide incognito toward the source. Like water, Ayane said. If you want to survive, you have to be like water, have to adapt to every circumstance, no matter how undesirable. You need to flow.

  Was it Ayane who said that?

  Or was it Maya? Black-eyed, hawk-jawed, hair buzzcut for emphasis. Face livid with scar tissue, cultivated like armor. Meghna. Rita. Constance. Nadia. I read their names out like prayers on a rosary, even as I shrink, diminish, reduce. Sister, sisters-in-arms, liars, traitors friends something tell me someone what they—