At that last admonishment, Maya nearly drops all pretensions of playing nice, nearly lunges for Ayane, nearly throws down with her right fucking there, amid the milling crowd some seventeen thousand individuals strong. It is a bullpit of a concert hall, lacking in any architectural flare, made for a solitary and excruciatingly pragmatic purpose: to contain multitudes without any attention to their comfort.
“Do not fucking tell me to smile. I swear to god, I’m going to tear out your spine—”
Whatever threat was meant to follow has its neck snapped into halves, too quick to even shriek an objection, burns away in the wake of Verdigris’ sudden arrival. The old aphorism about everything being better in post-production finds no footing here. Maya isn’t sure what she expected, but she sure as fucking hell did not anticipate having her breath torqued from her lungs at the sight.
“Fuck,” says Ayane in tandem with Maya’s own private vociferation.
Yeah, there’s no superior rubric for the situation than that soft-throated exclamation, the propulsion of the word a perfect injective tying Verdigris’ appearance to their shared sentiment. Yes, fuck. What a vision. Ayane is beautiful, but hers is an unmistakably terrestrial appeal, rooted in ideal ratios. Verdigris? She is something different. Something empyrean. Something fictive, otherworldly. A million adjectives fettered to the mythic. That luciferin gland is being put to hard labor. Despite the flotilla of spotlights, despite the backdrop of pyrotechnics, despite the distance between Verdigris and those of them at soil-level, her rutilance comes through: a milky, dawn-colored glow.
Verdigris, atop a pearlescent maglev dais, raises her arms.
The crowd loses it.
“How the oil-gargling fuck are we supposed to figure out who the fucking fuck is going to try fucking with Verdigris? They’re all crazy for her,” Maya demands, shoulder-checking a prick as he stampedes forward. The collision, particularly the segment where Maya doesn’t stagger but forces him to reel away, startles him to an indignant pause. The two lock eyes. The man has about a foot on Maya but she has the advantage of a lifetime fucking up goons like him for breakfast. He turns tail upon processing all the pent-up aggression in her eyes, or maybe he’s wise enough to heed the warning limned in the cicatrized patterning under Maya’s undercut, all marks of a mercenary lifer.
“Start paying attention and stop swearing, for one.”
The strutwork beneath Ayane’s pleasing veneer is more tungsten than calcium, a nasty eccentricity she’d coded into her genetic formula after death number twelve roughly eight decades ago. It is a modification which severely taxes their rejuvenation tech, but nothing good comes free, not least a body you’d need ten men to budge. Ayane pays no mind to the crowd until one man makes the inexcusable mistake of pushing her. Then, she turns. Then, she, with audacious grace, drives the point of an elbow into his Adam’s apple, the bulb of tendon concaving.
Fucker goes down, hard, toppling into the crowd, clawing for air. The press of bodies occludes his descent and what, Maya suspects, will be an unpleasant end, pulped under indifferent feet. Casualties, though, are inevitable in this setting. Tomorrow, someone will clean up the debris and the obituaries will cite stupidity as cause of death.
“I can’t get a goddamned read on anything,” says Maya, swapping overlays. Red films her vision: her systems are extravasating warnings, gushing them, and she can barely see through the prism of what the fuck and how the fuck do you even begin to inhume seventeen thousand assholes in a place with no cover. She’d wince at the stimuli, but she’d rather core out her brain from her skull than allow Ayane the pleasure of seeing her human. “Too many fucking junk-cunts here.”
“We’re not getting paid for you to complain.”
“We’re not fucking getting paid at all.”
The lights cut.
The world plummets into abrupt shadow and the throng ceases its cacophony, its pleas and its exultations, this raw worship of Verdigris’ existence, hushes so it can tenant a better noise: Verdigris’ name. It is chanted like a foxhole prayer, droned with so much fanaticism that even Maya, baby-fresh as she is to the church of the pop star, knows those fans of Verdigris would do anything for her, moan their lungs to lesional annihilation, their flesh their offering to the only star in their blighted heaven.
“Verdigris,” chants the crowd. “Verdigris, Verdigris.”
“Bet you regret breaking up with her.”
Maya doesn’t even spare Ayane a glare. “We weren’t ever together.”
“Good for her.”
The tenebrosity doesn’t, however, linger. With every invocation of Verdigris’ name, it sallows, lightening to the juvenile colors of recent ecchymosis, that suppurating purple-yellow of ruined capillaries and beat-up flesh, an exhausted pigment which, fortunately, does not linger. It gets brighter. They stitch a prayer of her name.
“Verdigris, Verdigris, Verdigris.”
And she answers.
“How is everyone doing tonight?”
And the atrament dies.
And she is there, Kali Ma called to the corporeal by the blood of fireworks, Titania at a rave, a microphone in one hand, its cable looped around one iridescent arm like it is the snake from the Garden of Eve and Why-The-Fuck-Him-And-Not-Lilith, and Verdigris is belting out a welcome to her fans. Roman candles go off in timed deluges. The world foams with man-made lightning, fills with golden-red static. Maya can barely hear over the din of the pyrotechnics. Her subroutines are bugging out from the overstimulation. Back to the wall, every auxiliary system begging to render the crowd into a soup of spongy parts, she looks then to Ayane, a little feral-eyed.
Whatever hope Maya had of finding aid in her companion dies upon acknowledgment of the red points in Ayane’s pupils, telltale of the latter’s own war with her programming. Like Maya, her sensors must be attempting to triangulate the best way to pull off a massacre. Not what they want to do, though, so this is absolutely becoming a problem.
A sudden voice against her ear: “You are new. You are not cheering. You are not doing the right things.”
Shit. Now what? Maya thinks, slanting an immediate look to the provenience of the question, finds at its end a bipedal figure only vestigially human. It possesses arms, legs, proportions familiar to the species; mouth, nose, eyes, drawn-on eyebrows, though the exact physiognomy is opaque. No one is meant to derive identity from those features; it is calculatedly unmemorable, built such so that the only takeaway one might derive is the understanding this body was manufactured and not made by the beast with two backs. A chrome-dyed mannequin escaped from its storefront, ludicrous under other conditions. But Maya, thank fuck and thank the gods of traumatized mercs, recognizes the artistry of its plainness, the subtext of its morphology. This is an ageship, a fucking ageship, come to rut with the grubs on terra firma.
Well, fuck.
She kills the private line tying them to the Nathanson. Half her overlays go dead in simpatico. Maya nails a queasy grin onto her face while her stomach lurches, the loss of that panopticon of mods so sudden, her vestibular system redlines. Luckily, there’s Ayane swanning to the rescue, neither unease nor abject terror registering on the topology of her smile. You could cut diamonds with her poise.
“We’re new.”
“You are wearing the regalia of a ‘superfan.’” Its—their? Maya wonders. What, if it even exists, is the respectful form of address for a planet-killer?—voice shifts for the length of the word, becomes male and enthused and disorientingly young. It jabs a waxy finger at Maya. “You are at her concert. You are not doing the right things.”
“This is her first concert,” says Ayane with one of those smiles she wears when she wants someone to make an oblation of their heart, her grin expansive: all warmth, all ruthless charm. She sets fingers atop Maya’s shoulder, nails gouging a warning into the string of a clavicle. Sit. Stay. “My friend here has never seen Verdigris in person so it’s all slightly overwhelming. She might also be a little bit shy too, because this
is the first time we’ve met an ageship in the . . . the . . . proxy. I heard that—”
On and on Ayane goes, airily soliloquizing every stray thought her neurons thread into language, as though distraction could compensate for how much they’d fucked up by dropping their guard.
“You are not doing the right things.”
Before either Ayane or Maya can address the accusation, the thing palsies into a reasonable facsimile of statuary, with its face lurching upward, as though a hook has curved through its palate and now it is being lifted. A frisson maps its rigid spine, spreading, glissading along its frame, compounding in intensity. When Maya is certain it’d shake itself the fuck apart, the tremors halt.
“There we go.” Gone is the monotone, traded up for a voice syrupy with humor; an old voice; a voice dripping with millennia, its years measurable not by any senescent quaver but a fullness as though an intelligence wider than worlds has plugged itself into a single, itty-bitty, wadded-up bloom of encephalic circuitry. No longer a vessel for accreting frivolous stimuli, the glorified dummy has become, to the abject concern of Maya’s twitching brain stem, a vehicle for the ageship in full. “I shouldn’t expect you to do the right things, should I? Little vermin. I know your faces. I’ve seen you.”
Ayane bares her socialite grin. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure yet. I’d have been all over, asking you to give us autographs or something.”
“No, no, no.” The ageship wags a finger at them. “No more prevarication. No more attempts at distraction. I know you, little vermin. I’ve seen you. Give me a minute and I will know your names."
Maya triggers their short-range radio, fires panic through the frequency. Fuck being circumspect. In a few short minutes, it’s unlikely to matter. This is the opera omnia of those bastards: carbonization at the velocity of whiplash.
We have to do something.
I need to think, Ayane fires in return.
Anyone else, and Maya would have said fuck it and gone straight for her guns. But this is Ayane’s oeuvre, her forte: risk assessment on a magnitude traditionally reserved for archeological satellites, her interior allometry such that Maya has often wondered if she was, in fact, a dime doll preloaded with a mean girl mind. You’d think, even when modified, the human brain wouldn’t be elastic enough to clutch so much data. Nonetheless, there Ayane is, running computations unlikely to produce anything but the conclusion Maya has already reached: they’re fucked. Fucked as only two down-on-their-luck mercenaries can be. Fucked as hens recently decapitated but still insistent on fugitive behavior, so obstinate they’d rather interpret the absence of a functional cerebellum as an inconvenience than accept it for what it is: irrevocable evidence they’re dead chicks running.
Or standing, as the case may be. Maya counts the seconds between each exhale. Hers is a mind happiest in momentum. Stasis is tantamount to an excruciating death. Stasis has been the cause of an excruciating death. In their line of work, you snooze, you splatter. Maya flexes her hands in ripples, one phalange after another, itching for the transformative innocence of a shootout. She lets out a whistling hiss between gritted teeth. Come on, Ayane. Fucking do something.
You done thinking yet? she snarls at Ayane.
No answer save for the bang of Ayane’s heart in the oneiric purgatory of their private transmission. The human mind, vat-grown or otherwise, cannot contend with nothingness. It mandates landmarks, touchstones. Pareidolia is congenital. It is endemic to the sapient condition. Because nothing in their communication modules has modeled space for them to inhabit, Maya’s brain supplies the expected dimensions. And it is around this manifestation—a room, like the break room in the Nathanson, only better lit, with an ambient white-gold glow seeping from the joints of the walls—that she feels a tertiary presence clench. A somatic pressure, a sensation not unlike a hand closing gingerly over an object in the dark.
The ageship. Maya recognizes its presence inside her brain at once. Not satisfied with interrogating the Conversation’s databases for the pair’s identity, it is now here, endeavoring to break through Maya’s defenses. Maya can feel the fucking Mind evaluating the tensity of the connection between Ayane and Maya, testing for entry points, seeking the umbilical which might direct it to whoever else is culpable.
Ravenous, those motherfuckers, all of them, from smallest drone to greatest ageship, all perpetually starved for complete assessments of the universe. Maya has met tax collectors less fastidious. She spackles the link with third-hand sub-protocols, rolls out diversionary algorithms, and because she fucking can, a barbed-wire palisade of unpleasant sensory memories, cultivated over a long life of hoarded hurts. Nothing to permanently dissuade an encroaching Mind, but if the two of them need to go down, Maya wants to be certain the ageship will have to dig her name out like a curse.
Seriously, are you fucking done yet?
Shut the fuck up, comes Ayane’s recipocratory shriek, the concussiveness of its reverb kept solely to their shared spatial weirdness. None of her aggravation materializes externally. Ayane’s face remains bland as soylent, blithely and encouragingly pleasant, the veneer of a saleswoman on the brink of a historic deal. Her hand glides from Maya’s shoulder. “Look, it’s a concert. We’re all here to enjoy it. There’s no need to dredge up drama. I promise you. We’re just here because we like Verdigris.”
“Little vermin,” says the ageship, its voice become mordent. “I wish your kind knew their place. This is not a negotiation. This is not even a discussion. And frankly, you are pissing me off. I am here to enjoy her music one last time and you are disrupting my experience.”
Maya feels her heart ice over.
The ageship rumbles: “It annoys me already having to do this. I enjoy her music. That is why I asked to be the one to terminate her. I wanted her swan song to be beautiful. But you are here and you are annoying me. Who do you think you are, little vermin? I did not ask to be interrupted.”
I’m going to do something reckless, says Maya.
What? Maya. If you even think about fucking around, I swear to god.
That’s it. She’s done. No more fucking around. Time to slough those niceties, cash in on whatever positional advantage she possesses by the virtue of having no fucks to give. So, what if this thing ended planets? Fuck that kind of worship. Fuck the sacred. Anything that lives can bleed and Maya isn’t going to let collective awe keep her from seeing if she can curbstomp its teeth into a spray. There we go, keep your groin and bones safely behind armor, she’s ready to take her swing at god. Maya shoulders past Ayane, elbow digging into the latter’s side, eliciting a yip and a reflexive sidestep for garnish. “Fuck you if you think I’m going to fucking let you kill her. You stupid junk-fucker, I’m going to peg you with a—”
“You really need to excuse my loud-mouthed friend.” Ayane, still trying vainly to course correct. But that ship has sailed. The fuck are you doing? Ayane screams through their link. Maya, fucking stand down. What the fuck are you doing. “I’m sure our friend meant it metaphorically. The ageship isn’t here for murder. At least, I don’t think. Haha.”
“No. Not murder,” says the ageship. “Murder requires personhood. Verdigris is still a clone. She is not a person. She does not have the official clearance to be a person. She is like you. A feculent thing. Vermin. Cockroach who thinks it is a person because it can talk. But I think I like your style, kid.” And here, its voice does that thing all Minds do, appropriating the sonics from some dead celebrity—Clint Eastwood; his filmography Johanna’s own religion, evangelized without success, but god what Maya wouldn’t give for one more lecture on what makes that old western spaghetti great—to deliver its line with more flavor. “But not enough.”
There it is.
There it fucking is.
The threat runs through Maya’s system; comes out her mouth a percussive growl, one twice as loud and three times as ready to rock up with its guns out. Not breaking eye contact, Maya drags the heel of a palm up along the ledger of her ribs.
See, all clones are made-to-order, custom creations, pretty faces a pleasing front when applicable, meat when no one needs anything but working hands and enough brain for hard labor. Those years of being told they’re disposable, cheap trash, exchangeable, without any value save for what an owner might prescribe, it just led them to the most obvious revelation: flesh and its forms are about as sacred as a quick fuck behind the club.
Thus, the Dirty Dozen rebuilt themselves into monsters, filled themselves with more ordnance than most armies could afford. But even among the ranks of such state-of-the-art horrors, Maya is unique in the number of her modifications, the most impressive of which, perhaps, is the plasti-steel holster nestled against her right lung.
“Yeah? How about I blow your brains out and then we can circle back on that whole ‘not enough’ thing, huh?” Maya grins, pure I’ll-fuck-you-up bravado, the last vestiges of a self-preservation instinct dragged behind the proverbial shack and shot six times in the heart.
So bloody the death of any good sense Maya might have, it serves now as grease for her soliloquy, Maya riding high on her abandon. She is drunk on not giving a shit. That really it? asks a snide voice from the folds of her subconscious. Do you not give a shit or do you give too much of a shit? Maya doesn’t answer, doesn’t want to, would rather gargle bleach than give breath to the little niggling certainty that this isn’t at all about wanting to go down in a blaze of guts, and instead has to do with how it has been forty fucking years of her failing to show up for the only person who ever gave a damn.
Without the emollience of Rita’s constant presence, Maya feels like muscle newly peeled from its dermal barrier, nociceptors so overstimulated, she doesn’t even hurt. She is car-crash numb, perfectly calm, submerged in that liminality where one is aware everything is wrong but the brain hasn’t yet processed the fact it doesn’t have front-row seats to the tragedy, it is the main event.
And all Maya can think about is I can’t let this thing get to Verdigris.
The All-Consuming World Page 11
