A stridulation of radio signals: “Maya?”
Voice: unknown. Origin address: non-existent. A peer-to-peer conference call straight to parietal lobe, bypassing every user permission.
Has the ageship gotten in?
“Fuck you!” Drop, tuck, roll. Bones crack under the redistribution of body weight, splintering to shrapnel. It hurts to breathe. A rib must have caught in a lung. Maya winces, right hand to sternum, left arm dangling useless, but she needs to keep moving. “Get the fuck out of my head!”
Boom.
A blast bisects the massive hardwood in front of her. Maya veers right. Where were the others? Constance. Verdigris. Ayane, the last holed up in the ship’s nexus, sensory input fed intravenously, minds bifurcated into a billion discrete parts.
What is it like to die like that?
Boom. Right again. Left. Are they herding me? The thought glints through animal panic, like the matte-shine of a dirty switchblade. No point wringing hands over that eventuality, though. Not with the bogeys approaching, junkyard hellhounds sidling up to the dying drunk, sniffing out the most succulent bites.
“You’re moving away from your colleagues. If you continue in that direction, you are going to fall off a cliff.” Derisive, the voice. “Did you know that your vital readings are currently out of range of normal?”
“You still haven’t—” Pant. “—told me who the fuck you are.”
An emission of grainy noises, none individually identifiable. “Such rudeness. I am Pimento, or Unit PH-Delta-6-Cryon-352—”
The identity string turns to a recitation of binary, litany of machine-language, ones and zeros demarcating every footfall, each slower than the last. Maya might not be able to feel her injuries but they’re there, all right. She coughs a palmful of warm blood and barks a crazed laugh, turns, fires again.
Almost out of ammunition, she gasps: “Fine. Get me to my unit.”
“Affirmative. Permission to access systems administration?”
“Now?” Maya makes the rookie mistake of looking over her shoulder. The jungles seethes with skittering bodies. Disembodied heads—inert, missing chunks, husks like hermit crab shells—carried through the trees by tentacles, parasite-growths glittering with micro-cameras, devouring input. “After all that and you ask for permission now? Fine!”
She gibbers out a laugh. Maya tips her head back, mouth bubbling red, and closes her eyes against the cinders, and the heat, and the sweat drying to salt on her corneas. She lets her guard down like she said she never fucking would. Two attoseconds later, before her systems can register the motion, its momentum, before she can complete a lifecycle of a blink, she is reminded why people like her never ever fucking stop looking over their shoulders.
It hits her.
Hard. Maybe sixty-five, seventy pounds of alloyed steel, not counting its wreath of tentacles, or the cameras humpbacking its cored-out skull. Right out of nowhere. The thing whirs dementedly, a billion lights strobing along its malformed chassis, pinpoint blowouts that leave her reeling from their stuttering glare. Maya staggers. The weight of the thing carries her down and something somewhere snaps on impact.
“Maya. Maya, you need to remove the drone. It will kill you. You need to divest yourself of this adversary and proceed to the coordinates I’ve uploaded—”
Maya screeches into the teeming mass, her awareness pared down to the animal. Higher mind? She doesn’t even know her. Fingers scrabble at the mulch for the gun she lost in the initial collision. It’s trying to choke her, she realizes, a little slow, cognitive prowess impaired by septic shock, stress, blood loss, every injury symptomatic of a gun-for-hire lifestyle.
I’m dying too. Not on her terms. Not in a shoot-out, or a hold-up, or cackling into the face of the sun, champing at the bit to do it all again. But slowly, humiliatingly, drop by drop by drop, with slivers of bone poking holes in her blood-logged lungs, and the world smearing to grayscale.
A deep, sputtering breath.
Well, fuck this. Maya shunts all remaining power to catecholamine production, cuts it with enough dopamine that the end of the world would feel like one long unbroken orgasm. Flick: pain receptors come online again, the sensation artificially euphoric. And then, she starts ripping into her assailant, clawing out fistfuls of smaller vibrissae; digging into the twitching mass as it squeezes even harder; her consciousness throbbing on a sinus wave.
There. Fingers wrap around a camera and slide down along its body, hunting for the loci of thought. A power source is probably too much to ask for, but if she can just find where it all connects, she might be able to interrupt service.
Light fritzes and the soap bubble of her ambition pops, spilling machismo on the proverbial pavement like piss dripping out of a teenage cokehead’s pants. She’s going to die here. She knows it. Even before the thing carves her right arm into slices of ham, she knows this is goodbye.
“Upload.” The words drools out. Maya flips open ports and lets the data flow, already running the numbers for when she comes back. When she returns, there’s going to be a reckoning, with all the horsemen of a personal apocalypse queued up for the show. If the machines haven’t learned how to virtualize pain, Maya will happily school those motherfuckers on the topic.
“I have something better.”
No time to figure out what that trash heap is yammering about because suddenly, the pressure on her sternum is gone, lifted. Arms and warm human skin, fingers braced behind her neck, a voice that she almost recognizes saying, over and over, “We’ve got you. We got you.”
Movement. Every thought particulated, standalone experiences choppily edited into a weird montage of now. Maya can’t tell if she’s moving, or if she’s being moved, but there’s unmistakably a case of forward momentum, Pimento’s voice multiplying into a constant feed of inanity.
Were you an only child?
Do you possess any childhood injuries?
What was your mother’s name?
If provided with sustainable options, would you embrace vegetarianism?
Each time she submerges into a fugue, Pimento has another nonsensical question waiting, a hook through her cheek, towing her back to the shore. Did you go to school? If angels shared the same dimensions as common bacteria, how many could viably rejoice on the head of pin?
Above her, the trees drain to blue.
“This is insane.” A new voice that isn’t so much a voice as it is a narcissistic orchestra, one crystalline voice times four. Verdigris? “The shock is going to kill her. I don’t think—”
“Rita. Where’s Rita?”
How many stars do you estimate to be in the sky?
“Fucking hell, are you still going on about that bitch?” That voice is unmistakably Constance, rough-living purr, whiskey-scratched and nicotine-scarred, salved by a layer of velvet. “They’re going to kill her if we stop moving. Not to mention us. The way I see it, this is already better odds than we could have possibly hoped for. If you have any better ideas, I’m definitely all ears.”
“Where’s Rita?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” Verdigris again. “Duck.”
A vertiginous drop as Maya is flung down. Light cannonades overhead, a crackling buckshot of ionized gases, burning green across the firmament. There’s a scream of rupturing metal and smoke weeps through the tree line, career widow and her revolving door of husbands, endothermic crocodile tears. Through the bank of gray, Maya sees shapes tottering upright, stick figures and luminescent eyes.
Someone grabs her. Someone starts running.
“Assuming we survive this first part, what are we going to do next?” Who said that? Maya can’t tell.
“How about you ask me that at breakfast?”
Who was your first love?
Is, Maya corrects, seesawing through consciousness, misfiring neurons and oversaturated brain cells procedurally generating hallucinations. Of course, it’s all representations of Rita. Rita at every stage of her life. Rita with her white surgical glo
ves, smileless, pulling on Maya’s sutures. First love. First obsession. First person to benefit from employment-mandated neuroplasticity. What’s the fucking difference?
Who is your true love?
Verdigris, smiling at Maya from a wingback chair: so disarmingly, nonchalantly exquisite, with the light epauletting her shoulder, and his jaw vanishing to glass where it meets with the soft curve of her throat. Verdigris, demanding: what’s wrong with you. And all the words Maya might have said bunched up in her lungs like a corsage.
“What the fuck now?”
“We jump.”
And all at once, there is only sky.
Repairs
“What the fuck—”
White. White everywhere. White halogen glare, four feet too close to be healthy. White-tiled walls. An antiseptic stink like Rita’s mad scientist lair but more astringent, no top notes of formaldehyde or pickled flesh. Something descends from the ceiling, bladed edges and pneumatic exhalation, machinery pistoning behind plasteel. It takes Maya about twenty seconds, but her eyes eventually make sense of it.
A corona of metallic arms like Kali Ma gone mainstream, each crowned with a different medical implement, an entire range of accessories from the My First Torture product line. Fuck this, Maya can tell a rectum from a rabbit hole. She knows where this is going to go.
She bucks, pushes herself up far as she can go, spine launching from cool metal, shoulders scissoring. Fucking mistake. Leather restraints reveal themselves at the diarthrodial joints, so supple that she missed them at first go. Knees, shoulders, elbows, wrist, the last one singular; a placement decision completely antithetical to the Hippocratic vow to provide pain-free medical treatment.
A shriek carves itself out of Maya’s throat as she collapses, panting, nerve-ends twitching from overstimulation. Someone reset her neural settings while she was asleep. Which is unfortunate because now, the estranged quadrants of her brain are skullfucking her as punishment for her earlier misdemeanors. Trembling, Maya tries to call up her interface, but her vision stays baby smooth.
“Shit.” No real venom in the invocation of feces, just a rawness usually kept for fuel during high-impact training. Shit fuck piss cunt, Maya cycles through every obscenity inventoried in her brainbox, foregoing quality for quantity because this isn’t the time for creative profanity.
More of her than she thought there’d be, Maya notes a half-second later, drained of epitaphs, bewildered to find she exists, every solipsistic ingredient critical to her identity in its rightful place. How the fuck did that happen? Succumbing to curiosity, she forages inward for answers, up until she hears:
“You needn’t be hostile. I am trying to help.”
The voice is omnidirectional and distinctively non-organic, every syllable deployed with tactical precision. It is a voice meant to assure and affirm any nascent delusions of trust. A receptionist’s voice: twentysomething male, accentless, pleasant, just a bit bored; a hint of human frailty to scaffold rapport.
But Maya isn’t buying what they’re hawking.
“Who—”
“Have you eaten today?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“When was the last time that you consumed food?”
“Fuck you.”
“I am giving you an epidural regardless of whether you have eaten in the last twenty-four hours. Whether I perform gastric lavage or not, however, is contingent on your willingness to supply an answer.”
Like any good gambler, Maya knows when to fold. She licks her teeth, the enamel furred with plaque, before growling: “I’m clean. I don’t need a stomach pump.”
“Please hold still.” A robotic limb—its tip attached to a syringe, fluid-choked tubing curled like a wattle beneath—dips beneath the operation table, and Maya feels the needle bore between vertebrae. “This should make the next few hours more palatable. Unfortunately, I was forced to deactivate your neural net when you were brought in. You sustained considerable damage during the pursuit. I’m uncertain whether your implants themselves were damaged, or if the stress of your injuries caused a malfunction but regardless, it was—” An audio clip plays for the duration of the phrase: an older man’s voice, educated in theatre. “—‘touch and go’ for a minute there.”
Maya grunts noncommittally in reply, growingly insensate. “Mmm.”
“You were a very difficult patient.” A pause before the disembodied voice corrects itself, slightly mournful: “You still are a difficult patient.”
The jibe startles a hyena laugh, pitched at lunatic octaves, sharp enough to scalpel through a man’s spine. Unfortunately, ambition currently exceeds capacity so when Maya breathes in for an encore, her lungs mutiny. Pain judders along the ladders of her ribs, invoking full-bodied paroxysms in homage to last-stage bronchitis. Each time she coughs, blood and globs of yellow dispense in wet chunks.
When the convulsions at last subside:
“I should remind you that your right lung has been punctured. While oxygenated microparticles are currently preventing you from suffocating on your blood, I’d advise against any sudden motion.”
A wheezing noise and Maya grins dazedly at the halo of autonomous surgical equipment, a lopsided smirk smoldering with don’t-fuck-with-me vibes. Defiant to the end, that’s her theme song. Even though she can’t feel her arms, her legs, her cunt, nothing below the neck-brace pinning her like a butterfly to the table.
“So.” The voice again. Who is that? Maya can feel an answer riding on the curl of her tongue. But her mind has already gone three rounds with the epidural and the writing’s on the wall. There’s a winner today, but it sure as fuck isn’t her. No, she’s mostly wool and discombobulated thoughts, fluff wrapped about a dulled razor, and angrier than normal for that reason. “We need to discuss options. I—”
Robotic arms corkscrew downward to swallow her right arm, blocking the limb from view. When Maya strains for a look, one reverses and gently tips her cheek away.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Fresh-ground courtesy, chewed between gritted teeth, sounds indistinguishable from sarcasm, Maya realizes with a faraway amusement, her one attempt at decency circumvented by linguistic limitations.
All movement stops. An aggressive cacophony of atonal bleep-blooping, no rhythm in earshot, begins blaring from the speakers, loud enough to distort the transmission into the squealing of piglets in slaughter. Maya twitches an eye shut, but that’s the only weakness she allows herself, mouth still cut open into a wide grin. She’s sliced into a nerve somewhere. Good.
“I’m Pimento. Who else would I be?” A saw starts up somewhere in the kelp-forest of arms; a wet sound of alloyed teeth grinding into flesh, then bone.
“Don’t know. Florence Nightingale, maybe? How the fuck should I know? I thought you were a fucking drone.” She slurs through the consonants, eyes on the ceiling and the axial rotation of overhanging robot arms, serenely drifting in orbit.
“Insulting. I’m a fully operational Mind.” And the way Pimento says it, the capitalization reads loud and clear. Mind. How the fuck did that happen? Rita had mentioned only the Merchant Mind and no one else, and although Maya loathes the son of a bitch, she recognizes another delinquent, can and does respect their derelict morality, the fact they too are ostracized from their own society. Though she’d never admit it out loud, she takes comfort in the guarantee that the Merchant Mind is only out for themself. You know where you stand with another criminal.
A Mind, though, that’s something else. Her epistemic stance on them so far is a simple one: there is no good Mind but a deactivated one. And yet, here she is, disemboweled, dismembered, spread like a rumor, wholly subject to the apparent generosity of this little Mind. In her lifetime, Maya has had more bad days than good, but even for her, this is fucking ridiculous.
And honestly, this has been a run of bad ones. She should have realized what Pimento was epochs ago.
“I have a question for you: would you prefer amputation alone or woul
d you like prosthetics?”
“What?”
“Would you like prosthetics? Neither of your arms are functional. I would recommend at least one prosthetic, regardless of any philosophical misgivings that you might possess. It will be very difficult to do anything without them.”
Outside, Maya can hear voices, an unintelligible thrumming, all identity markers stripped by the walls between them. Rita, she thinks with a start.
“I’ll take two.”
“Polysteel, graphene, or carbyne?”
Thank fuck for firewalls, Maya thinks, looking to the prosthetics on exhibit, a trinity of long-fingered appendages, sanctified by the gods of form over function. Alloyed ligaments, baroque wireframes, ornamentation like nothing Maya could ever imagine. Thank fuck for firewalls, or Pimento would hear all the obscenities she’s queued from here to hereafter. There’s something about the pomp, the ceremony, the ritualistic sycophantism that offends Maya on an animal level. Or maybe it is just the bacchanalian splendor, the raw idea of it. The thought that some asshole fuck is sitting cozy somewhere, dreaming up designs for the cousin-blowing rich and famous. Fuck knows. She doesn’t.
But Maya says nothing, knows better than to say anything, spread-eagled on the operating table, tongue thick from analgesics, ass going hypothermic. Later, she tells herself, going over the word like a whetstone over a knife. Later, she’ll raze this mess to the floor.
Later but not yet.
“Graphene.”
“Are you certain?” A disapproving tsk. Like the sound someone’s aunt would make and it is enough to make Maya bare her teeth. “Carbyne has been proven to be twice as tensile as—”
“Fine.” She hisses. “Carbyne, then. If you were going to fucking make that decision for—”
The All-Consuming World Page 17
