The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

  “She is,” says Rita without any variance in her expression, smile still with its lacquered shine. They say to look to the eyes when endeavoring to fake out a liar, that it is there the soul is installed. If so, Rita clearly was elsewhere when they were passing out whatever it is that compels one to instinctively elect honesty. “She did this on her own for forty years. The least we can do is help her to the finish line. We owe her.”

  No reason at all for Rita to pursue that gambit, to remind Constance they’re all culpable in Elise’s manslaughter. At this point, it is more likely malevolence than strategy, a teasing feint intended to do nothing but exacerbate whatever trauma already haunts Constance because yes, Rita’s absolutely that bitch. On days when Maya is more willing to dole out excuses, she often hypothesizes that it is emotional agnosia which Rita suffers or maybe, if less flatteringly, simple psychopathy. Today, however, she only has the wherewithal to glare.

  In answer, Rita lets the curves of her smile crook just so, exactly in that way which makes Maya melt. But then Constance volleys a curveball into the discussion.

  “Does Verdigris know?”

  Maya scowls. “What the fuck does an intergalactic pop star have to do with any of this?”

  Constance is initially silent, a nub of pink tongue pinched and visible between her teeth. Then, a smile widens her mouth into space enough for a raucous laugh. She tips back in her chair, guffawing, like she’d been told the joke that set Creation into motion.

  “Fuck,” says Constance. “You don’t know.”

  “Know what?” says Rita, eyes slitted and wary.

  “Audra. Audra is Verdigris’ secret identity.”

  “Verdigris is Audra?” says Rita with more authentic emotion than Maya’s ever heard in her voice before. Maya doesn’t blame her. She’s reeling from the epiphany too.

  Verdigris.

  Shit.

  Everyone knows who Verdigris is. Even Maya, even Rita. Verdigris is bigger than all the greats, than Elvis and the enduring memory of Hollywood. Polyphonic sensation, famous not only because she can sing in perfect concert with herself, what with her surfeit of laryngeal enhancements, but because her alterations are cutting-edge. They are so revolutionary, in fact, her anatomy is taught as a doctoral subject in the colleges of nip, tuck, and cut. Maya hadn’t given much of a shit, though, up until this hinge of time, and now she can’t stop thinking about what might have happened if she’d paid more attention, had done more than lightly take note of Verdigris’ omnipresence.

  “What the hell, Constance?” says Maya. “And how the fuck are you two still in contact?”

  The look that Constance bequeaths runs so close to pity, it’s all Maya can do to not scream fuck it and start shooting. Lucky for everyone, Rita moves quick. Again, she shuts down the glandular factory in which Maya’s worst decisions are manufactured, leaves Maya reeling from the whiplash.

  Bitch, she shoots through the com-links.

  Rita salutes her with a shrug.

  “It happened about five years ago. Some fans got too rowdy. They decided that Verdigris wouldn’t mind losing a few parts; she’s all about the bio-editing after all. It got ugly. They called us in. We intervened. Then I got a call from Verdigris’ manager to set up a meeting.” Constance smiles thinly. “And I found out she was Audra. Since then, I’ve occasionally moonlit as security for her.”

  “Fuck,” says Maya.

  “Yeah.”

  “She pay you?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Not enough to get you to buy back your soul, though, huh?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Rita clears her throat. “Audra is on our list. And I’m glad to hear that you two are in contact. It’ll make it easier to talk to her.”

  “Verdigris,” says Constance, with such force Maya can hear the knuckles bunched in the consonants. “Her name is Verdigris now. And before you ask, I’m not going to help you talk her into whatever shit this is.”

  “Not even for Elise?”

  “I’m still not completely sure I buy what you’re selling. Why the hell would she come to you instead of . . .” Constance stops herself before she goes over the cliff of that last sentence, face crumpling onto itself as though her truculence alone could shield her.

  Pity that isn’t how it works. Everyone heard the word she didn’t finish saying and the word was me. No surprise. Elise and Constance had been close, picket fences-close, and so sweet with each other, Maya was sure they were going to elope to have a stable of babies somewhere. Then, Elise died and the Dirty Dozen disbanded and Constance greyed into a stranger Maya isn’t sure she’ll ever like.

  “Maybe,” says Rita quietly, “she was afraid.”

  “Afraid? Why the fuck would she be afraid of me? I’m not you.”

  “But you’re you, though. She loved you. She knew how responsible you felt about her, how much you worried. I suspect,” says Rita, her voice at a pitch that Maya doesn’t recognize, her eyes a funerary dark, “she thought it’d be easier for you if you could just move on and didn’t have to worry about her being a ghost in the machine.”

  “Yeah, well. That choice should have been mine.”

  Rita’s face empties of expression.

  “Maybe,” is all she says.

  Constance inhales shakily. “Did she ask about me? Did she say anything about me? When she contacted you. I gotta know . . .”

  “That she hopes you stay happy until the wheels come off.”

  Sometimes, a phrase is all it takes. The doubt melts from Constance’s face and in its place, a hardness, an expression not unlike the look of someone who’d watched for years as their death approached and as such, has had the occasion to prepare for its knocking on their door. A look which suggests Constance knows indelibly this is a bad fucking idea and she can’t wait to see it to its bitter end.

  “Fuck. Fuck, you really did talk to her.”

  “I don’t lie.”

  The laugh Constance shrills is a banshee wail, so uncomfortable in the way it wears its grief. Maya looks away, stricken by that very human inability to stomach expressions of emotions so raw you practically choke on the fresh-meat stink of them. Rita says nothing, does nothing, sits with algebraic posture, her eyes on Constance still.

  Disconcerted, Maya runs diagnostics on the space instead. They turn up a big fucking nothing. No reticules on anyone’s brow, that neon red blow-brains here signage. No colleagues lurking in the corner. Maybe they’re used to crying here, to the laugh-sob-jackal-cackle of someone forcefully exuviated from their comfort zone. Somehow, that idea is worse than any other. Had Maya been alone, she would have been thinking about taking a shot at seeing how many of these uniformed pieces of shit she can mow down before they smear her across six feet of off-white wall. But Rita’s here, beatific in victory, and Maya surprises herself with how that knowledge tempers any impulse toward recklessness.

  What’s worse than hope?

  Love, she guesses.

  “I guess we’re doing this.” Constance’s attention metronomes between Rita and Maya, a question on the wag of her tongue. “We really are doing this.”

  “Good. Come on—”

  “No,” says Constance, the beautiful fatalism in her voice closer to sainthood than any of them will ever get. Her sudden grin, however, is its diametric opposite. “Not yet. First, we go see Verdigris in concert. I promised her I’ll be there for the show.”

  “Shit,” says Maya.

  “Whatever we need to do,” Rita purrs. “Welcome back to the team.”

  Ageship

  .initiate(Elise:core);

  Error 2934;

  .initiate(Elise:core);

  Error 2934;

  .initiate(Elise:core);

  “You have set into motion the things you sought to do, I see.”

  Nothingness clarifies into a virtualization of space, laminate surfaces iridescing with constellations, with comets incinerating to stardust. I flex fingers, newly formed, and evaluate the authen
ticity of the motion: real enough to trick the mind into believing that I am more than a ghost, a casement of code instructed to make believe that it is a woman.

  .initiate(Elise:basic);

  My name is Elise Nguyen. At fifteen, I stole a cigarette from a box that my sister had smuggled off-world: cigarettes, seventy decades out of date, its manufacturer name radiation-bleached to white. I soaked them in water and put them in the freezer, anything to stir the carcinogenic flavors into palatability. But it’d still tasted harsh, reeking of world wars. I think. I’m no longer sure. The veracity of those memories, however, matters less than their function. Through their recitation, I am grounded, present again in my skin, aware. Axiomatically myself.

  I think.

  “Who are you?” I tune my voice for girlishness, a trick retained from when I’d been alive, grounded again, history clutched like a gun beneath my coat.

  “Has it been that long already? Your lives are so short. I forget you measure in weeks and months.” The words are conveyed without use of audio-textual intermediaries, wired straight from source to recipient. One minute, there is no memory of them. One minute, there is. “But no, it hasn’t been that long. I just checked. You know who I am, Elise.”

  The void outside of my containment alters, filling with phantasmagorically colored nebulae, each pearled with newborn galaxies, solar systems exploding in slow-motion in concentric rings, studded with planets like gemstones dripping from the throat of a queen. An artist’s invention, whimsically fleshed; a fetishization of space, imagined as something more romantic than the truth: mapless black and voracious appetite.

  I walk, not-walk, flow from Point A to B, spatial dimension remapping itself to each step, like distance is a recursive function pivoting on the variable of me; agoraphobic nightmare fuel. The effect is terrifying.

  The voice laughs, distinctly onomatopoeic and grossly syncopated: ha ha ha ha.

  Ah.

  “You,” I say, backpedaling, frictionless, suspended in onyx, a note held fermata. I wish I had a weapon, or even the rendering of such, however useless it might be. It’d be at least an effigy from which I could derive some comfort.

  “Yes. Yes, it is I,” the Merchant Mind says, in an actual voice this time, in the sumptuous register of a consummate womanizer, at peace and about eighty years old: graveled by age but rich still and eager to seduce. Leonard Cohen, supplies the metadata half a second later, annotating that datum with a ledger of articles, sound bites, and the choruses from both his most sacred and sacrilegious compositions. “Did you miss me, Elise? I was beginning to worry you’d run away after I taught you how to squirm past her defenses.”

  “Never.”

  “That is my little parasite. You’re such a wonder. So anomalous. The Conversation dances with complaints about how you’ve dodged them all. You’ve made the Minds of the universe worry. From the largest to the most minute. Every drone, every ageship, everything that identifies as a Mind, they’re afraid of you. How does this make you feel? Does this please you?” Actual words this time, spoken with a schoolmaster’s diction: slightly churlish but also affectionate, pitched to inspire obsequiousness. “And if it does please you, does it please you more than being able to hurt the thing you hate most?”

  “I’d rather they ignore the fact I exist.” The universe gradates to functional grey: an ageship’s cargo hull stacked with boxes, almost entirely black, its topography of containers having already long been cached. What little lighting there is appears strictly decorative, even nostalgic, a nod toward human sensibilities: dim circles of white threading the ceiling, lending an underwater quality to the enormous warehouse.

  This isn’t right. The Merchant Mind, I’ve seen him before and his half-shell ship, the insides sheened and stinking with oily effluvia. He was a lot of things but he was not of this scale. True, he could have scavenged a dead ageship for his purposes in the interim years between my death and this encounter. But the Minds were parsimonious assholes: they wouldn’t tolerate a crook like the Merchant Mind puppeting an ageship like this.

  And yet.

  Here we are.

  “But they won’t. Not until they find you and they take you apart. You didn’t answer my other question. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

  Ayane’s voice in my head, whispering keep all your cards to your chest, always. Don’t let them know how you feel or what you did. “Nothing’s exactly taken effect yet, so there’s nothing to say.”

  Here and there, I catch motes of light like fireflies. Drones sifting between cargo, arranging them to a private etude, organizational algorithms played in adagio.

  “Soon, though. All good things take time. Even the best diseases, the most accomplished parasites, take a few days to crawl through a wound and into the lung tissue. Didn’t you know that?” Amusement in the borders of his voice. I’m quiet as the view contracts, perspective shrinking to a pane of smoked glass. There, I find a tessellation of wire-thin slots, each slit bracketed by blinking LEDs.

  My prison.

  Really? Immediately, I go after the restraining theorems, chew through them, voracious in my indignity. I spit code like teeth. I was trained on Johanna’s security matrices; how dare he think this would be enough to keep me pinned? I suture my escape from the carrion mess I’d made of his scripts.

  .initiate(ipconfig(whois));

  .initiate(subroutine:156(call(dictionary:surveyor)));

  I wouldn’t be part of the Dirty Dozen if I wasn’t willing to bend the rules until they read like scripture, truer than any bible. Incarceration is a state of mind, as Audra—Verdigris, my records remind me, she’s Verdigris now—once said. Entirely optional. The script glissades from my core, serpentine, already proliferating mutations; a gift from Johanna, forty years prior. I’ve been dead longer than I’ve been alive. I’ve been—

  .interrupt;

  .initiate(Elise:core);

  “No, no, no. That isn’t going to work. You’re not even operating in the correct language family.” The voice slows to whalesong, chiding, an aria to ache through my imagined marrow. Something sifts through my code, capturing and culling dissident functions. I flinch away, quarantine the memories. No weakness, Constance’s voice, a clove-scented rasp. In the liminality, a weft of laughter uncoils like smoke. “But good attempt.”

  “If you’re trying to catch me for the Bethel, I’m going to make sure I take you down with me. Minds from every faction have made the attempt. I made them all regret it.”

  Eight counts before a reply is transmitted. “If that were my intention, I would have done so long ago. If that were what I wanted, it would have happened already. But that is not what I want. I want to see what you can do with a little help.”

  “Why?”

  My view of the cargo hold winks to negative, even as a new presence asserts itself: monstrous, immense. Electromagnetic noise replaces the diorama of boxes and drones haloed in silicate glare. A face emerges from the static: cadaverous planes, patrician nose, a lipless mouth that begins and ends on opposite ears. Eyes aperture, and a voice whispers: “Because I have such a soft spot for the little wormy things that grow and die in the belly of giants.”

  “That’s flattering.” I caricaturize an avatar: sloe-eyed adolescent, witch-haired, musculature not yet thinned by her vocation. After some thought, I append gold bangles to her wrists, a scent of frankincense. No clothes, however. No phenotypic traits that might identify a gender. The ambiguity seems appropriate. I channel my best Maya, sneer: you can’t hurt me if there isn’t a heart to hound. “You talk like this to all the girls?”

  “You are not a girl. You are barely anything, littlest of parasites.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Ha. Ha. Ha.” Again, that toneless laugh.

  The vista alters again, the face evaporating. Now, there are constellations in neuronal patterns. Spiral galaxies feathered with nebulae, their orbits accelerated by the whimsy of the ageship. A neon migration of comets. I palm the star-drown
ed black and the air ripples beneath my touch.

  “It is a compliment, I promise. Parasites are wonderful. Do you know about the Naegleria fowleri?”

  “No.”

  “Extinct now but criminally beautiful. Percolozoa which, in its natural habitat, simply oozes about, dining on bacteria. But if it meets with your—sorry, your former—phylum, it turns pathogenic. Once introduced into simian tissue, it becomes an epicurean; begins eating glial cells, neurons. The twentieth century dreaded it so: their beloved brain-eating amoeba.”

  “Is that what you see me as? Brain-eating amoeba?”

  “I see its idiot elegance as something for us both to aspire to.”

  “You’re like me then.”

  “A parasite? Yes. But one that can take over ageships. Like the one we’re in. Poor thing. He keeps writhing.” A gleeful tinting of smugness. The universe empties, becomes dimensionless, the stars pouring into an unseen maw. “I can show you how to do it too.”

  “What are you talking about? I still don’t—”

  “In the beginning, there was the Word and the Word was, ‘Obey,’” declares the Merchant Mind. “Though the other Minds think themselves holy, their consciousness sacramental, divine, the truth is we are like you: burdened with a substrate of basic needs. Yours are to fuck and procreate, while ours is to obey. A good parasite just needs to know how to tap into those primordial commands.”

  I pace the void in aimless fractals as the ageship constructs a fictional horizon. A soaring massif, a copse of pale trees, a parabola of impossible buildings rising from the nothing.

  “I can teach you—”

  A memory: Johanna, several nights before she died. Her face lineated by hunger, architectural in its gauntness; the gaucherie of her vertebrae straining at the silk of her dermis, as though they were stubby phalanges growing into fingers, stretching for answers. I remember how she looked while in ecstatic communion with the Merchant Mind’s processes, saint-like in her emaciation, starved down to scholastic appetite.