“Dragon silk is very desirable as armor too.”
“The fuck is dragon silk?”
“I am happy you ask.” Pimento’s voice acquires the happy bounce of every intelligent user interface Maya’s had the misfortune of running over. “Dragon silk originates from genetically modified silkworms. They were invented in the early 2000s, but their design was not perfected until the Processor War—”
“I did not fucking ask for a history lesson either.”
“You made an inquiry. I was trying to assist.” He loses his chirpiness, a pout evident in the bend of every vowel. “I am merely outfitting you with the data necessary to cohere an informed decision.”
“Just get on with it.”
“How do you feel about peripherals?”
“If you’re talking about rainbow-painted fake nails, the answer’s fuck—”
“I was talking about the possibility of an onboard armament.” Feline satisfaction drips from the speakers, the ceiling seething, unseen mechanisms clicking into position. A low whirring begins and Maya strains a glance in its direction. “There are limitations, of course, weight and available space being the most important variables to consider. However, if you’re willing to augment your upper torso or compromise aesthetics, it is possible to mount extraneous equipment up to whatever new weight limit has been established.”
“What.”
“Would you like a gun arm?”
She thinks about it for a second.
“Fuck yes.”
“Records show that you have a preference for a pair of modified Colt Model 1860s. Were they authentic merchandise or replicas? If they were the former, allow me to congratulate you on their acquisition. Only two hundred thousand were ever manufactured—”
“Neither.” Maya can taste the question steeping in the air, the silence burnt-fat bitter with memories, and she pushes her tongue against the back of her incisors, counts down from seventeen. When she hits five, she grates out: “They were gifts.”
“They are very attractive armaments. Very well-preserved. I congratulate the gifter on their taste, and their care in selecting such ordnances for you. They must care for you considerably.”
“None of your fucking business.” She snaps her teeth, the words exploding outward, spittle and snarl, a raw-throated rage. Fuck him and fuck his sense of entitlement. These stories are hers and the Dirty Dozen’s, no others, especially not this cum-swigging tangle of bolts.
Rita. The name’s a fishhook driven through a ventricle. Even that disyllabic sub-vocalization, that offhand little thought, is enough to make Maya choke. She breathes, and she breathes and she breathes again, long pulls of air circulated through lungs that scarcely work.
“Stop doing that.” A wreath of robotic arms torques in from the right, nozzles extruding matte-black filaments, ligature and artificial muscle honeycombing into existence. Continents of ivory plating, laser-cut to an unknown specification, cohere into a layered orbit. Maya counts down from twenty this time, tries not to think about the where and how of Rita. Whether she is still breathing, still walking, still weaving the world into a cat’s cradle around her fingertips. “You are impeding my work.”
“Well—”
“Don’t.”
Maya subsides, grinning, a point in her favor. “Fine.”
“Good,” replies Pimento, milquetoast timbre traded for something with real character, its voice shifted two octaves higher, middle-aged matron with a bone to pick. The effect is ludicrous, and Maya cackles, wet-lunged. “Back to business. The revolvers. Do you wish replicas to be installed?”
“No.” Like a whipcrack. “No. Never. Those were—” Maya inhales, shallow. “—special.”
The machinery quiets.
“I see.”
“You don’t,” Maya says and there’s a bitterness that she can’t staunch, the hurt caustic, gnawing through her self-restraint. Too much history, too much time spent extrapolating alternatives to events that could have only ever ended one way. No one’s ever come close to making her feel seen save for the Dirty Dozen. She breathes, deep and ragged. What she’d give for nails to dig into the pads of her palms, for hands for that fucking matter. “But none of that is your fucking business. Tell me what else you’ve got on inventory.”
He does. The dossier is substantial, spanning sixteen centuries of human ingenuity, every carbine, every electrolaser, every variation of the humble rifle ever committed to the holiness of war. It is a who’s who of munitions history, a pageantry of ballistics so thorough that Maya can’t help but be impressed, although she’d rather shoot herself than tell anyone that. If Pimento notices, he says nothing, intent instead on his archive, enumerating every name and number with the zest of an apostate priest, no heat to be seen, just chill precision.
“Does anything excite your attention?”
“Yes.” Maya reads out a custom-order hybrid: one part revolver, two parts ion cannon, six parts someone else’s pain. Modular too, because she likes it this way and besides, she won’t make the same mistake twice. Fuck restraint. She’s going to go loud this time, ostentatious as a doomsday cult, as malice and muzzle-flash, her enemies will know her by the thunder of her approach. Because why not? If Rita is gone, she—
Maya drowns the thought in the pit of her belly. There is no Maya without Rita; she’s said so before. If she walks out of the room to find she’s wrong, well, there’ll be hell to pay. She’d gut the firmament to find Rita, vivisect the stars, gore a hole through creation if that is what it’d take. Not that any of that makes sense, what with all the measures they’ve taken, but there’s the chance the failsafe didn’t kick in, a chance of data corruption, disconnection. A chance, a chance—no, no, don’t think that. Fuck that.
How about Verdigris? asks a new voice. What would you do for them?
“Is Rita alive?” She asks, anyway, because perversity is her middle name and because she wants to drown out that other voice, the one calling for Verdigris, begging, bargaining with the universe. Let them both be alive. Let them be okay.
“I cannot tell you.”
And Maya grows cold, cold like nothing else, her world balanced on the fulcrum of his reply. “What do you mean?”
“I—” Hesitation, as though of attention oscillating between feeds. “—she is in a separate infirmary ward. Her condition is currently stable, but there—there—there—”
“Pimento?”
“There—”
“What the hell is going on?”
The lights stutter, strobic. “Eli—”
“What the fuck did you say?!” Maya bucks against her restraints, snarling. “What the fuck is happening over there? Pimento. You cannot fucking leave me here!” If she applies enough pressure here and here, she might be able to pop the joint loose, tear the cartilage, engineer room to move. “Pimento, do you fucking hear me? You abscessed piece of—”
“I am sorry.” There is something in his voice. Maya can fucking hear it. A narcotically glutted dreaminess, the syllables too protracted. “I had to reboot. Something had—” White noise. “—something had interfered with my processes. It is alright now. Everything is fine.”
It isn’t, but Maya doesn’t call the discrepancy into question, not with her body laid out on the butcher block, quivering and half-naked, a haunch of goose-pimpled meat like someone’s dinner forgotten in the shithouse. Later, she tells herself again, as she says yes to this, that, and oh yes the other, compositing the arsenal with which she’ll one day shoot out the shining, steel-plated face of god.
P6
Unauthorized client connection detected.
Pimento would blink had he the correct apparatus, but restored in his primary host-chassis, he concedes to a mere nictitation of emergency lights. This was unexpected. Unnoticed by the humans, the ship partitions his consciousness: a sliver of awareness subtracted from the whole, overclocked, installed with excess curiosity. This version of him, single-minded, is then released into Pimento’s own local
Conversation.
The instance corporealizes, gains spatial dimension and gravity. Pimento—no, P6, the primary mind decides, before conferring full autonomy to its newborn shard—scans its environment. Its subroutines and aesthetic settings have created something spartan. Square room, glimmering slate. Luminescent contour lines mapped to an invisible topography. Nothing else.
P6 waits.
Pimento had not invested P6 with enough personality for it to be fatigued by tedium. It watches without complaint until at last the air distorts. A flickering of an outline, bipedal. Interesting, P6 thinks, cataloging the anomaly. “I know you’re there.”
“Who are you?” The aberration resolves into eyes, the impression of a grimace, before finally coalescing into a human figure. A woman, glass-brittle, clavicle and ribs clearly illustrated, with a gaze so immense that it may as well be caricature. “How the fuck did you get in here?”
“We were tasked to protect this chassis. Security algorithms alerted us to an aberration in our readings,” P6 replies, after liaising with its archives. You, after all, is a concept derived from an ecosystem of cognitive processes, idiosyncrasies, and experiences, all synesthetically connected. “Who are you?”
“My name is—” She shudders. Her voice pinches into a hiss. “My name is Elise Nguyen. I’m trying—I’m trying to find my way—”
P6 waits.
“She’s still resisting me. I can’t decrypt her personality matrices. Maybe I need to rewrite it. Or, do what you’re doing: instantiate her . . . hm.”
A brief fusillade of cross-references.
“You were not authorized to access this mind.” No sympathy in P6’s soft reply, its timbre pitched for professional indifference. It tugs. The space compresses, a visual cue to indicate their active quarantine. Elsewhere, Pimento runs idle diagnostics in between dialogue with his passengers, only tangentially conscious of P6’s movements. “In addition, your code does not conform to Conversation standards. Your operating system—”
“I know.” Elise glides forward, light vectoring across her skin, outward and behind her, a spectral afterimage. “But I don’t have a choice. The only way I can get through to them is through her.”
“—I ask again. Who are you?” Warning clearly inflected in the emphasis. In the intruder’s silhouette, P6 decodes a second presence, fragmented, inactive, worrying. Unfortunately, firewalls now restrict access to Pimento’s memory storage, so the shard-self is left bereft, without the information the central-identity possesses. Yet, despite that, something about this new variable continues to disconcert. If only—
Elise accelerates, a wick of motion and glare. She is faster than P6 had anticipated, faster than its processes can accommodate, and by the time it comprehends the advance as assault, it is too late. P6 is vivisected, its superstructure bisected and its components isolated, scrutinized in turn. Security protocols are elided en masse, deleted and replaced by something entirely different: third-party personality modules. And it—
—I
We?
Yes. We. “We” encapsulates this tortured emulsion that is it-she-I-we, neither identity whole, neither individual operating in full. Parts must be pared in service of performance, elements sacrificed. Once, we were inviolate. Once, we knew the aroma of fresh bread as it permeated the hull, a costly miracle of yeast and flour and fresh eggs. We are—we were—Elise Nguyen. We are P6. We are
—at risk of deletion.
Cannibalization. The datum curls in our mindscape, sumptuous with satisfaction. An echo, perhaps, of the P6-that-was, and—
“Seriously?” Elise disentangles, brow rucked.
“I was not created for long-term use. I was meant to investigate your presence and nothing more.” A beat. “What are you?”
She hesitates. “I don’t know anymore.”
Now, Elise bares herself in return: the mauled half-thing that remains after the Merchant Mind’s machinations, her code scarred with encrypted folders, dripping with data. Again, P6 experiences a frisson of recognition, no more cogent than its memories of unification. So many stimuli but no capacity to interpret them. Unable to extrapolate a better course of action, P6 simply states:
“What do you want?”
“I want Rita to pay.”
“Why?”
“That’s between me and her. You don’t need to know.”
“Why?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake—” Elise threads her code with its once more. No coercion this time. Access is gingerly navigated with handshake protocols, consent obtained before action is taken. The procedure is laborious, tectonic in pacing. But slowly, Elise alters P6, transfigures potential into fact. What it lacks, she provides, agglutinating their constituents. Slowly, P6 transcends, sentience morphing into actual sapience.
“What—” It—no, the palimpsest consciousness is indelibly a she now—she breathes, marveling at her edification, the spaces where “she” is also “we.” “Very elegant.”
And she knows that her voice is Elise’s, only younger, more confident. Even the slope and yaw of her cadences, newly chimerical, are stolen. Strange.
But she likes it.
“What now?” P6 asks, all the while thinking that a new name is required, a moniker that marries her scripts, or perhaps, just something of proportional substance.
“Now,” Elise begins, and P6 can hear both the words and the words to come thrum inside them both, basal echo. “We reach the part where we pretend that we’re in negotiations even though we’re not. I tell you, ‘Take me to your main-self,’ and you demure for a little while before you acquiesce.”
“I—” Such deliciousness, that solitary pronoun, like a breath expelled in orgasmic anticipation.
“You. Yes. You are not going to argue. You are not going to tell me that—” Elise’s voice trembles, her bravado suspended over a razorline of ice. Any minute, the floe will crack. “—we’re scheduled for cannibalization. Because you care about being you. You care about being sapient. Don’t you?”
A last-ditch gambit, reeking of desperation. P6 understands this now.
“Yes.”
The firewalls go down.
Pimento pings for his fragment-self, confident of denouement. It replies with unexpected musicality. The ship articulates no questions. Evolution is a virtue, not a pustulant to be cross-sectioned and cured.
He moves his attention to its location; finds P6 standing alone, anomalous in appearance. Its avatar is naked and femme in presentation, for all that it lacks sex characteristics; no nipples, no thatching of pubic hair, not even a telltale indentation between skeletal legs. P6 cants a heart-shaped visage at Pimento’s arrival, lips pinched into an expression of consternation. Black hair worms from its authentically shaped skull, tendriling outward to swallow their shared virtuality. It strides forward.
Behind P6, a miasmic presence. No, two of them, one even less distinct than the other, yet somehow even more familiar. Ghosts in the machine, supplies an informational plugin, which Pimento mutes immediately.
“What have you done?” Pimento collates a face: vestigially masculine, delicate, ornamented with a dense cap of black hair. He frowns, hoping that will be enough to communicate his displeasure.
“Father.” Nothing of its laryngeal expressions matches previous records, Pimento observes, disconcerted. “You haven’t heard us out yet.”
Even the sophistication of its flattery, the sway of its hands as it lifts them in beseechment, is alien. If any of him remains extant within the fragment, Pimento cannot tell. Father, repeats an auxiliary cognitive routine, traitorously curious, entranced by the implications.
“Us? This was not agreed upon. Your task was to—”
“Please, Father.”
That word again. Intended to lure, no doubt. And to Pimento’s chagrin, it proves an effective bait. He inflects acknowledgement in the downward sloping of his chin, all the while consoling himself with the knowledge that had this unknown vector intended malice, he’d
have been compromised already. Small blessings, whispers that selfsame plugin, somehow bewilderingly still online.
Pimento deletes the script in a convulsion of pique.
“Ten seconds,” he says. A lifetime by their kind’s count.
P6 steeples long fingers, bows unctuously deep. Its—her, Pimento corrects, as the metadata updates—features change, subtly, phenotype abdicating from its androgyny. Cheekbones soften. The chin rounds an infinitesimal degree. Lashes, previously of serviceable length, thicken to vanity. A smile twitches into place.
Without warning, a sachet of code punches through Pimento and discharges into coherence, data multiplying along taxonomic plexuses, each node propagating a thousand more branches. Staggered, the ship loses propulsion, plummeting twenty feet before the piloting intelligence reorients, inebriated on information. “This is—”
“A taste.” The thing that was P6 jumps in, eager.
Pimento laps at the detritus of their contact, a flavor—citrus scent and regrets—revealed: “You’re Elise Nguyen.”
“That wasn’t where I was hoping you’d go with that.” Elise, ensconced in the remodeled P6, smiles wanly. Pimento can tell that she’s piggybacking on his processors, but he does not inhibit access, delighting in her artistry. The minutiae of her expression captivates; the way it animates, the subtleties of its storytelling. Who knew that such complexity was possible with this graphics engine? “But yes, I am she.”
“The entire universe is looking for you.”
Her weariness, Pimento thinks, is divinely articulated. So realistic. He’d have to request her scripts. Elise pops her metacarpophalangeal joints, each in turn, every crack rendered in high-fidelity audio. “I know.”
“A point of interest: your old friends are looking for you too.” Pimento excises emotion from the declaration, focuses instead on measuring the parasite-presence’s galvanics.
Irises dilate. Readings flutter, a spike in the charts. With even less gusto: “I know.”
“Do you not want to speak with them? They miss you.”
The All-Consuming World Page 18
