The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

  “Fuck you. I will shoot you out of the motherfucking air if you even think about coming closer.”

  “Maya! Stand down!”

  Pimento hesitates. It would be wasteful to sacrifice the data that he had aggregated: the impact of airflow on the high-entropy alloy of his exterior; the lyricism of the third woman’s speech; a vision of the planet from inadvisable altitudes. He’d miss those. Simultaneously, this iteration of Pimento is entirely dispensable, a pared-down copy of the original, primed for eventual erasure.

  Still, the drone was expensive.

  “What can I do to make you trust me?”

  The question silences. Maya is the first to laugh, wild convulsive guffaws that evoke immediate comparisons to a coyote’s vocalizations. Her companions stare, uncertain, perhaps perturbed by the unrestrained merriment. Nonetheless, no one lowers their weapons. Their fingers stay rested on the safeties of their respective guns, their musculatures tense.

  At least, Pimento reflects, it is a start.

  “You can’t.” Maya again, while Rita hisses a warning.

  “Understood. Trust is earned. It cannot be given. What can I do to provide a conducive, stress-free environment? I understand the conditions cannot be optimal. But I would like to approach—” The words spill over each other, audio output lagging behind whirring thoughts.

  “Can you believe this shithead—”

  “Present your proposition,” Rita interjects, loud enough to override Maya’s objections. The latter bares her teeth. “I am interested in hearing it.”

  Pimento does not wait. He activates the module that the Merchant Mind had implanted, a tumorous weight in his fuselage, almost too large for the storage cavity. A paroxysm of electrical impulses. Without warning, power maxims are superseded by new instructions, coerced into prioritizing the third-party component. What occurs next is a violation: the module gorges itself on Pimento’s xenon tanks, drains him of propellant. His core heats alarmingly.

  Blue-white emissions then extrude from his framework, reticulating into a three-dimensional hologram of the Merchant Mind. To Pimento’s dismay, it is an aesthetic failure, tortured by technological inadequacies. Primitive. Blatantly pixelated. What a waste of his adjunct resources. If he is to bleed dry, at least it should be for an appealing cause.

  “If you are watching this recording, you were wise enough not to shoot the messenger.” The Merchant Mind steeples its fingers. It, this time, as opposed to he or she or they or any fluid combination thereof. Pimento approves. There is a subtle yet underappreciated artistry to coring so-called gender markers from one’s aural dispatches, a work few recognize as emblematic of finesse. Because humanity was led by their dysmorphisms and driven by their proclivity for breeding, gender was everything. It helped illuminate who they, according to a matrix of learned inclinations, might want to fuck. As such, the species—or at least, the society, as defined by those archaic religions—developed an ear tuned for telltale variations in pitch and lilt. That the Merchant Mind could eradicate these sonic idiosyncrasies, sand down its voice so that the subconscious cannot supply any descriptor save “machine,” is impressive to no end.

  Pity the humans aren’t equipped to appreciate this sufficiently.

  “Rita Koskinen,” says the recording of the Merchant Mind, startling Pimento from his reverie. Despite the lack of recognizable facial features, it presents the impression of a smile. “It is so good to interact with you again. I regret the outcome of our last meeting. But time is linear. It goes on. We move on. What is a small disagreement when your lives are infinite? Ha-ha.”

  Ha-ha. Spoken, not expressed organically. A precise enunciation of the syllables, to be parsed as an insult.

  “Asshole,” Maya grumbles.

  The third individual shrugs a shoulder. The fourth preoccupies herself with iridescent talons. Words for that one are either a commodity or something repellent, both realities that Pimento would interrogate if he weren’t already committed to a separate labor. Rita alone remains focused, unblinking in her scrutiny.

  “I suspect that you are unlikely here to give Elise over to me. In fact, I suspect, that you may be trying to orchestrate something. As a token of good faith, to prove to you that it is always worthwhile to uphold a bargain with me, I am loaning you Pimento—”

  “The fuck? Is that thing named after a pepper?”

  Through the haze of the projection, dripping heat and definition, Pimento sees Rita twitch a hand, a succinct chopping motion. The third woman withdraws, slipping into the tree line. The fourth member of their party, torrential hair forever adjusting hues to match its surroundings, lopes soundlessly behind. “Not now, Maya.”

  “—to help you with whatever you require. My assistance is, of course, conditional. When you find Elise Nguyen, I expect you to bring her back to me. Fail and there will be consequences. I do not believe that I need to elaborate. Should you succeed, however, I will assist you in getting to that fabled planet. And by the way, let me know how this place worked out as a meeting spot. Your rating will assist in our logistical algorithms.”

  “Wait, I thought you fucking said you found her already—”

  “We’ll discuss this on the ship, Constance,” Rita snaps. “Now is not the time.”

  “You said she fucking contacted you.”

  “What the fuck is this shit?” snarls that prismatic fourth, joining the chorus. “I did not fucking agree to help the Merchant Mind.”

  “We’ll discuss this on the ship,” repeats Rita, unmoved.

  The hologram dissipates, leaving the humans to confer in low voices and Pimento to analyze the damage incurred by the Merchant Mind’s machinations. A sentiment like indignance resonates through his core. This hadn’t been part of the deal. True, the hologram itself was discussed at length, but Pimento had neither been informed of the formidable energy requirements, nor warned that there would be an invasive approbation of his propellant supply. Disgruntled, he makes note to formalize a complaint when full processing capacity is restored. This was entirely unacceptable.

  Clang. Shockwaves frisson through his chassis, startling Pimento from his private lamentations. Damn this corpus; the limitations of its sensors are appalling. “—giving that shithead too much credit. I say we open it up and tear the data straight out of it.”

  Impact again. Pimento narrowly dodges the third blow; a revolver scything entirely too close. “What are you doing?”

  The exclamation is louder than scripted, its cadence a closer approximation of rage than distress. Tinny. Rough work that would embarrass Pimento under more peaceful circumstances. However, this isn’t an occasion for self-flagellation. Pimento weaves back and up into a vertical arc, minimizing accessibility.

  Maya slants an appraising look at the drone, arm raised, gun positioned for another strike. She makes a noise like a dog’s whuffing exhalation, a grim chuckle. The pupil of the artificial eye dilates, captures Pimento on a flat disc of ink: there’s the sense that he’s being vivisected, split into variant timelines, and duly exterminated in each.

  How would the humans word his next thought? Yes. They would say Fuck that. But such obscenities would not be professional. So instead, Pimento opts for a curt: “The Merchant Mind wouldn’t be very happy.”

  “Well, fuck it. It didn’t have the decency to show up. What’s to say that the frag-cunt didn’t stick a warhead up this drone’s asshole? They could just be biding their time—” Maya pivots a hand, raps the grip of her revolver against an open palm thrice.

  Pimento circles around the pair, ignored amid aggregating tempers. Rita, for all of her initial composure, is beginning to crack, a dissolution precipitated by the slightest downturn of her mouth. Still, she maintains enviable form: another human would unlikely notice the change. “And what would you have us do? Trigger the explosive you were so worried about?”

  “We’ve got Ayane. Ayane can take out whatever the junk-fucks have put in there. I bet we can do it. After all, what’s the fucking
worst that can happen? We’ve all died before. I say we disable this piece of scrap, and get on with our fucking lives.” Maya dances in place, excessively animated, attention saccading between her conversational partner and seemingly random points in the jungle.

  Rita doesn’t swivel to follow the other’s orbit, gaze resolutely fixed in the distance. Not even Pimento’s endeavors to gain her attention, his bulk maneuvered to sublimate the woman’s field of vision, displace her focus. However, Rita’s shoulders do tauten incrementally. “You’re operating on the assumption that it wouldn’t activate at tampering.”

  “And you agree with me.”

  An expulsion of air, bestial. Rita curls her lip. “This discussion is over.”

  As though by silent agreement, the two separate, each adopting diametrically opposing trajectories, Pimento summarily dismissed in the process. Whatever the motivation for this, whether a tactical decision or mere oversight, it has an effect, incensing Pimento. He trills at them, piping nonsense noises, meant to alert rather than to convey any specific meaning.

  The pair continue ignoring him.

  A rebellious proposition proceeds to assemble itself from his frustration: perhaps he should just leave them here.

  But that would violate Pimento’s terms of employment, expose him to punitory action. And the Merchant Mind is notoriously exacting when it involves restitution claims, a fact that has bankrupted countless Minds. You’re in over your head. The line triggers, unbidden, extracted from his memetics bank. A whiff of Wild West, as fantasized by human cinephiles.

  Before Pimento can actuate an optimal solution, the tree line erupts. Plasma effervesces through the air: sunbursts of neon, a hail of incandescent projectiles, incinerating the foliage. Ash boils in spiraling drifts as the tree line cooks down to smoldering columns. Two figures sprint through the conflagration, identities flattened to darkness.

  One leaps and lands with a crunch of metal. It is the fourth individual, the silent one, her hair unbound and susurrant. With a practiced move, she heaves a launcher onto a shoulder and braces, fires a retaliatory shot that engulfs the vegetation in even more fire.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Maya skids into view.

  Whumph.

  The human-ship detonates, seconds after impalement by orbital laser. Unhindered by biological fail-safes, Pimento watches the explosion, fascinated. For a nanosecond, every component is visible, charted in orange-white fire, its seams blazing. Then, it is gone. All of it. What isn’t immediately melted is pulverized by pressure, and the flames roar up.

  Pimento almost does not notice when the shockwaves arrive, smashing his chassis into the soil. As warnings clamor in his dying interface, memories torrented into a cloud-uplink for reclamation by his primary self, the drone finds enough to stamina to be satisfied. Maybe, he thinks with a glint of morbid humor, if the humans had thought to ask, he could have told them this was a terrible mistake.

  Ambush

  Whumph

  Texture, not noise. Not really noise. More of a sensation contusing through marrow, a percussive force slicing teeth through tongue, so deeply that they nearly fillet the muscle. Salt-stink of metal explodes, filling her mouth like she’s gargling steel. Blood seeps over the cusp of a lip, spews out when the blast wave finally hits, and Maya is sent flying into burning greenery.

  “Fuck!”

  She is roaring even before she is on her feet, revolvers in both hands. Calculations fractalize in her visual overlay, aim-reticules oscillating, trying to zero in on an enemy but there is no one to fucking shoot. Her heart bangs against her ribs, one hundred and seventy beats per minute. Is Rita okay is Rita okay is Rita okay The words denature, fracture into incoherence, broken record scratching out a fear that won’t let go. Is Rita okay is Rita okay is Rita is Rita, fuck, if she’s hurt, I’m going to tear this whole world down

  Then: light oils across empty space, bends just so. A split second’s anomaly. Maya fires. She fires because that is the only thing she is good at, because that is the only thing she has left: an instinct to maim, murder, and maul.

  Four bullets. Three find a new home in someone’s chassis; coolant dribbles out of a fresh-made orifice. One lucky projectile drills through the dome of an unseen eye, comes out the other side with a burst of circuitry. The robot—hammer-headed, tin-plated scarecrow like a runaway from an acid-trip fairy tale—fritzes back into view before the lights go out. It drops, rail gun sliding out of its grip. Maya vaults over the corpse and starts running.

  “Where are you going, little vermin?”

  That voice.

  That fucking voice.

  The line repeats, going ra-ta-ta-ta against her communications protocols, drumming cracks along the already beleaguered chitin of Maya’s sanity. Something in her ankle gives, a snap-crack of small bones shearing out of alignment. She knows the voice in her head, the old-man inflections. It is the ageship from Verdigris’ concert and he has found them, he has found them.

  Shit.

  Lean left, limp faster, screams Maya’s brainstem, nature and nurtured reflex operating in panicked tandem to keep her going, don’t stop, move or you fucking die, you stupid junk-cunt, keep going.

  “Where are you going, little vermin?”

  Louder this time, the ageship’s voice, so loud it succeeds at shocking Maya, and she goes down. Maya stumbles and hits the cooked soil with a knee. She bites through a scream. Readings come alive: one broken ankle like she didn’t fucking know that already; three fractured ribs; internal hemorrhaging that may or may not have to do with the second problem.

  No time to cross-check her security ordnances. No time to do anything but recede into herself, going deeper, deeper, as macros activate and begin liberally cauterizing the most vestigial parts of her mind, which is to say, anything not otherwise engaged in the fucking act of keeping her immediately alive. Does it suck? Yes. But anything to keep the ageship from gaining a foothold in her brain. And who knows, maybe this way, she’ll delete some of the fucker in the process. A pyrrhic resolution if there was ever one, with no winner at either end and one very definite loser. Doubtless, the ageship has saves of himself fastidiously put aside because he seems like that kind of asshole; he will indubitably bounce back from whatever Maya does to him.

  She’s going to try real hard to make him regret this, though.

  Even if it’s at the cost of—

  No, no time to think about that. No time at all for anything any longer. Thank fuck her neural net’s matured into usability, its filaments worked into every whorl of her brain. Maya calls up the options menu and toggles off the entire nociception department. Instantly, the world becomes fleecy, every sensation cotton-smothered. There’s an eleven out of ten chance that this is a terrible fucking idea, but it’s that or risk not being able to get up. It hurts.

  And Maya needs to get up, does get up, gets up, oh god, she has to get going, she has to move, she needs to run, where the fuck is Rita, if she’s dead Maya’s never going to forgive herself, and if she needs to will the bitch to stay alive until she gets there, she fucking will, and Maya gets going, half-hobbling, half-trotting along, like a mostly dead fawn running on sheer survival instinct. Because Rita is somewhere out there, and she can’t be far. Maya saw her walking away. It is possible that she might have circled back to check on the—no no no no. Maya straight-up apostatizes the conceit of a universe where Maya is breathing and Rita is not. There is no possible way such an equation would be permitted by the cardinal laws of science and common fucking sense.

  And Verdigris? What about Verdigris?

  “One fucking thing at a time,” Maya snarls at no one and everyone, with rage enough to precipitate the spontaneous immolation of anything within a five-mile radius. And just because she can, Maya lets loose a volley of shots into the undergrowth behind her.

  “Little vermin, I do not like being kept out.”

  Good. Not great. The ageship is at least aggrieved by her puerile rebellion. Maya impales the ai
r with her middle finger, jogging along, her nervous system overdrafted but shit, that’s tomorrow’s worry, someone else’s debt to sheepishly pay. Maya isn’t even sure if she’ll meet the finish line of the current twenty-four hours.

  Projectiles tear through the smoking vegetation, even as a line of androids, the same model as the one that Maya put down, shimmer out of stealth mode. One of the bolts burrows through Maya’s left shoulder, cauterizing the hole as it goes: perfect palm-sized circle of melted calcium and meat-fibers. Her hand goes slack, revolver clattering free.

  “Shit shit shit shit.” Oh, this is going to sting later. Maya rolls out of the way, takes refuge behind a tree. Quick thinking saves her from the second salvo, but there’s the third, fourth, fifth attempt being sequenced already.

  The problem with these Minds, Maya reflects, isn’t their glorification of their own world order, but their inability to conceptualize extinction. Data is their lord, their god, and that fucking Conversation is the cathedral in which they repeat its fucking praises. As long as information persists, they persist, safely backed up in the Cloud.

  Which means you can’t scare them into standing down.

  Maya sucks in air. Three quick inhalations: one, two, three. She lunges out of cover, lets loose a hosanna of reciprocatory shots. Six direct hits, two misses. Robots drop, but the rest keep coming, nightmares backlit against the fire, inexorable as the heat death of creation. One stoops to claim a fallen brethren’s cranium, rips it straight off, plunges an unidentified mechanism into the bouquet of torn wires.

  And fuck fuck fuck fuck, the decapitated torso twitches and lights come back on.

  At least she cannot hear the ageship anymore, thank fucking god.

  “Mulefucking junk-cunts—” Profanities, the final refuge of a dog backed into a corner. Maya doesn’t wait to see what has been Frankensteined into existence. (Some dimming part of her higher intellect: Why’s it look so familiar? Where has she seen it before? She knows its shape, she knows its silhouette. But you know what? Fuck that. Time to go.) Maya turns tail and bolts, zigzagging between trees, periodically trading shots with her pursuers, spent shell casings trailing come-hither behind her.