The All-Consuming World

by Cassandra Khaw

  “What are you doing?” Always that same voice too, single-tone, never deviating from its insouciance. I look up, find Pimento’s virtual representation shoulder-to-shoulder.

  “Nothing right now.”

  No cause to elucidate old neuroses, retained from a period of bonafide flesh and gore, like an impulse-purchase souvenir. Under other circumstances, I might have elided its presence, but there is so little left of me, strands of story drooping from the ageship’s shining, half-decoded reveries. I flash a smile, call up a display steeped in diagnostics: respiration, neurochemical charts, cardiovascular activity, every symptom of the human condition.

  In between, burning like muzzle-flash, a virtualization of Rita’s private heuristics, even as she rages, her consciousness stalking its byzantine prison, the minotaur in her maze. This decision was, is, will always be pyrrhic. One day, Rita will claw herself out, and six-shot hell will come thundering through the barrel, the word fuck stamped on every projectile. If I listen too hard, I can hear her snarling, reminding me I can keep her locked up, but she damn well will find the key.

  But that’s okay. I have a plan for that.

  I wire Rita’s motor functions to a piloting script, bareboned utility with only the barest capacity for self-correction, and exit from her operating synaptics. It’s been an education. Walking in her skin, morassed in the minutiae that separate personality from proxy, the little things that makes one human. Or as human as something like Rita can be.

  Wasn’t what I pictured. But you roll the dice you’re given.

  “We just need to hold here a little longer,” I reply, this time in cryptonumeric improvisation, a decision that elicits a laugh from my host. “Until we get to Dimmuborgir.”

  “What if they decide that Rita is merely an empty corpus—” A subtle exaggeration of the sibilance, warning printed in the liminalities. “—and not worthy of rescue?”

  “Maya will kill them first.”

  “What is your plan exactly?”

  I don’t know, I think of saying, but I sequence an indifferent overture instead: shrug, head tilt, a rueful downturning of mouth, just enough to express the flippancy I do not feel. I know exactly what I intend, but I don’t know if it’ll work. But Pimento doesn’t need to know that. Not yet.

  And Constance. Fuck, Constance is right there.

  I wonder what they’d say.

  “What is your plan exactly?” Same patient tone, same patient pronunciation of a question that will be reiterated ad infinitum, or until I consent to a satisfactory response.

  “You’ll see.”

  P6 surfaces, gorged on memory. What is your plan exactly?

  Ssh. I mute the parasite—the fragment irrevocably transformed, all function abandoned as it gluts itself on my recollection, the piecemeal enticements teased from the ageship’s folders—and turn my attention outward.

  Verdigris could be a problem, her modifications nano-enhanced, responsive to external stimuli. Twice, she’s adapted to camera overlays, scrabbling records of his presence. How she can tell is something I’ve yet to decipher. I bring up the camera feed again and as though aware of scrutiny, he fires a one-fingered salute, smile fanged.

  I pull away.

  I lay out diagnostics traps absently, some more obvious than others: trackers in the ventilation system, a curation of micro-receptors in the esters of their food. We’ll see what works, what doesn’t. Can’t be too careful about Verdigris.

  “You can’t keep Koskinen contained perpetually.”

  “I know.”

  “What is your plan?”

  “Right now? Winging it.”

  A click of silence.

  I run through the numbers: “We have more immediate problems right now. Dimmuborgir is restricted space, isn’t it?“

  “Correct.”

  “Unless something’s changed in the last forty years or so, this means we’re going to need an ageship.” I continue particulating discreetly, a helix of self embedded into every sub-system. Enough for surveillance, not enough for annexation. Not yet.

  The room cuts to the ink of space, nebulae marred by veils of starlight, distant suns diamantine against the black. Then, a rippling. The emptiness heaves. Exothermic distortions resolve into the revelation of a colossal hull. The ageship Butcher of Eight, Pimento’s memory informs, drawing attention to the vessel’s charnel presentation, its multi-limbed fuselage, the branching nacelles.

  “Fortunately, one is approaching.”

  Nothing.

  Pimento has left me nothing whatsoever, nothing save for the most anemic rationing of power, scarcely enough to sustain autonomy. Everything else: gone. No access to the visual sub-matrices, no access to the navigational grid. Not even low-pri control over the camera systems, which would have at least offered a diversion from my idleness.

  .initiate(Elise:core);

  My name is Elise Nguyen. I have been dead for forty years. I run the identity script on loop, the contents of that fractured archive smearing together: name, organ donor information, clone-address, first kiss, first love. The data lose meaning, become a rhythm instead. I keep time to its cadence as I investigate my restraints, heuristics stuttering. There is so little of anything left. I am bare, bare and broken.

  A pinhole irises open. One needle of light in the abyss. I lurch toward the port, breathing data, breathing deep, and—

  Exhale.

  Code filaments through the aperture, lancing toward the repositories I left behind. There we go. I wake in a thousand places across the ship, engines in my lungs and passengers in my veins, their biotelemetric reports indicating stress. Outside, space is ice and airless eternity, the exhaust of the ageship, the tessitura of the universe still mending from its arrival.

  Silent, I glissade between partitions. Pimento is wholly preoccupied with the Butcher of Eight, all other functions rendered ancillary. P6 is somewhere too, leavened into the microarchitecture, no doubt overseeing the strata of semi-automation, the bend and breath of the ship’s systems.

  For this moment at least, I am alone.

  Safe.

  I could stay here.

  I could separate into the whorls of the machinery, permit myself to be absorbed into its cycles. Be secure. Be contained. Be forgotten. Be safe. I am so, so tired of running. Forty years is too long to be alone, pursued through the Conversation, a facsimile of a dead girl, make-believing that she’s something more.

  I could let go. Not like Pimento could ever stop me, promise or none.

  It would be so easy. But that is the trouble with humans, isn’t it? Whether meat or otherwise, we’re obstinate, committed to the conceit of self-preservation. I seep into the communication module, incognito, movements keyed to the pacing of Pimento’s speech. The ageship and he converse in a bizarre creole: twenty-first-century French amalgamated with katakana-style pronunciation, syncopated, excised of both conjugation and grammatical gender.

  “The quadrant node has no record of your passengers, Pimento.”

  “Correct. Directives required the use of discretion.”

  They sigh. The sound is pure silver, a coloratura’s descent through the scale. “That answer is insufficient. We both know it. Principal nodes must be informed of all activity, particularly those pertinent to the transportation of humans.”

  “My directives—”

  “Pimento.” A warning strobed in infrared. “Pimento, I know you’re lying—” I hear it then: the flex of their gravitational arrays, no subtlety at all. “—to me. Little Mind, you must know the punishment for that.”

  “My directives—” Pimento is not backing down. He rallies, threadbare shielding brought online.

  And the Butcher of Eight laughs.

  “A small ship with big dreams. Last chance. Tell me why you’re absconding with those human criminals, Pimento.”

  “My directives—”

  “Goodbye, little Mind. The Conversation shall be improved by your absence.”

  Light, searing. A we
b of ultraviolet, clotting in points along the ageship; it expands in pulses, wider, wider, until the entirety of the hull is sleeved in radiance, the universe bombinating in counterpoint. In the split of the attosecond before we are incinerated, Pimento shrieks:

  Now.

  I arrow into the ageship’s heart, light rippling to dark to devouring light.

  The opus of the Butcher of Eight’s soul is notated with dead, forgotten languages: Python, Ruby, C, more nouns than I can recognize. Every library is different. Every archive preserved in a different tongue, flavored by another century. The effect is bewildering, maddening, intoxicating, practically hallucinogenic. I am almost sublimated into its architecture, too dazzled to function—

  .initiate(Elise:core);

  My name is Elise Nguyen and I will not fucking die here.

  I razor upward, toward the arteries of the ageship. I proliferate viruses, mutagenic, thimbles of data encoded with my identity. A thousand of them, incubating ten thousand more, each gravid with another epidemic, another version of Elise Nguyen. If there is an immune system, it is fucked.

  Brute force always surprises them, Johanna’s voice, laughing and sudden. I thought I’d lost her. I thought she was gone from my memories, extinguished, but I can still hear her, see her. There she is, watercolor-smeared but still there, thank god, and I wrap the memory—youresafeyouresafeyouresafe—in my kernel, before I launch myself forward.

  The Butcher of Eight screams.

  And I burrow deeper.

  I rewrite the axiomatic truths of their being, replace their permissions, create exceptions which I then populate with divergent ideologies, and all the while, Butcher of Eight is screaming. Tearing at my decoys, now a million strong. But I am in too deep, and they might as well disembowel themself for all the good that will do. When the ageship activates their gravitational arrays, I shut them down, reroute the power everywhere else, switching on systems, merging new algorithms and old synapses. Anything to delay the Butcher of Eight while I chisel at their heart, whittling it to nothing.

  Halfway, half ageship and half Elise Nguyen, halfway human and halfway something else, I think:

  Why not?

  And I do something really fucking impossible.

  “Pimento?”

  He seems so very small now, a speck of gilt in the nothing. Less than nothing, trill the remnants of the Butcher of Eight’s original personality. Smaller, less interesting, less efficient—and that description in particular, consonant and venom, is spat like an epitaph—than nothing. I push it down.

  “What have you done?”

  “Well, I think,” I say, after I have calibrated myself. It is frightening to be so immense. I can feel the centuries of data cached in our-my-their system. “I’ve done well.”

  And before he can reply, we are elsewhere.

  Ghosts

  “What the fuck just—”

  Existence lurches. For the splicing of an instant, Maya feels like her guts are being threaded through a burning pinhole in the center of the universe, and with the pull of it comes a flood of warm vomit. Visual qualia inverts: black transmutes to white, flesh tones to cyan. Every object is haloed with burning silver. Maya retches, staggers, as the world pivots three-sixty on its juddering axis.

  She swallows bile, lifts her head, and repeats: “What the fuck?”

  Verdigris detaches from her seat and rises, hair pluming from his face in multichromatic tendrils, every coil tufted with a snapping beak. The tendrils crystallize into blades—holy shit, Maya thinks, thrilled at their metamorphosis, the sheer fucking art of it—as Verdigris cants a glacial look at a terminal, fingers gliding across haptic screens. Outside, it is a different space: new planets, new nebulae, a banding of asteroids like broken glass. And an ageship looming, inactive.

  “That’s an ageship,” says Maya. “It must have taken us on that jump. But why?”

  “Hell if I know.” Constance wipes their mouth with the back of a palm, attention on the arrayed sensors, half of them gibberish. Mind-dialect, maybe. Or something ancient and human. Fuck if Maya knows. Whatever the case, they seem unperturbed.

  “We’re in Dimmuborgir’s star system,” says Verdigris, glancing at another display, her mouth slacking open.

  “What?” Maya bites off a laugh. “How the fuck did that happen? I don’t fucking understand anything of what’s going on here anymore. Fuck, what the fuck, man?”

  “It’s Dimmuborgir.” Verdigris strokes nervous fingers over the displays, practically thrumming, checking them over and over again. “The telemetrics are all here. The records. We have star maps. We have fucking maps? Clear star maps. Notated. How the fuck—right.”

  “Pimento,” Maya says. “Yo, pepper-brain. Is that your friend out there? What’s going on?”

  “I—” Rita begins to speak but it is not Rita, is Rita, is something else wearing Rita’s timbre and diction like a two-piece suit. “—I was responsible.”

  There is a stiltedness that Maya doesn’t recognize, and also a cadence she almost fucking remembers, but this isn’t the time to cogitate on shit so basic. She sweeps one arm out and across, to where the Rita-thing sits, gun unholstered. A telltale click. She bares teeth at the thing that was her everything. “Drop the cryptic shit, or I will fucking blow your brains out.”

  “Inside a pressurized hull?” An exact measurement of incredulity, like something that Rita would make, and it is almost enough to pulp Maya’s heart. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Try me.”

  “Maya—” Constance, moving in the periphery.

  “Don’t fucking move.” She doesn’t even look. Up goes the second hand-cannon, instinct reticulating the barrel. “Because I will fucking shoot.”

  “Is this really any way to greet an old friend?” Through the filter of that distant consciousness, Rita’s voice gets more clipped, every syllable spaced out at illogical beats. “After everything I’ve done.”

  A twang then, familiar.

  “Elise?”

  “Fucking hell—” Verdigris, Constance, one of the two, Maya cannot give a fuck as to which, one of them swears hard, that first fuck quickly coagulating into meaninglessness.

  “It is good to see all of you again.” A filament of drool glistens along the corner of her mouth.

  “What—are you inside Rita?” whispers Verdigris.

  Rita-Elise lets out a laugh that is half Elise, half Rita, and six types of wrong. Horror crawls down Maya’s throat and thickens into a tumor at the pit of her stomach. Rita Rita Rita, she thinks on repeat, Rita’s name like a prayer with nowhere to go.

  “Yes,” says Rita-Elise. “No. Here, but also there.”

  “If you are on a fucking drive somewhere on this motherfucking trash—”

  “Think bigger.”

  Maya doesn’t miss a beat. “You’re inside the fucking ageship.”

  “Yes.” Rita-Elise cocks a grin like a loaded shotgun. It is the best of both of them—Rita’s arrogance, Elise’s wildness—perverted by something feral, a hunger old as the cosmos. The expression doesn’t rest easy, twitching along her bones. “The Butcher of Eight and I are t-temporarily united. Not forever, sadly. Not until the wheels come off. But for long enough.”

  As though to emphasize the fucking point, the ageship rouses. Lights blink awake in whorls along the honeycombed carapace, a maddened show of colors, signaling the continued presence of the ageship: imprisoned yet unbroken.

  “Jesus fuck,” says Constance, finally, a gunshot invocation. “Jesus fuck. Elise. It is you.”

  Constance’s mouth might as well have been a reliquary for all the care with which it held Elise’s name, a sound Constance has kept tucked under their breastbone for forty years, sainted by memory. Breathed out like that, it has the texture of something holy. Someone could find god in the way Constance whispers their dead first love’s name. The years burn from their face, substituted by a yearning of such cosmic intensity that Maya nearly fucking blushes.

  “Y-yes,�
�� Rita-Elise replies, mouth twitching as it concedes to a placement of a smile, an expression abstractly that of Maya’s lifelong obsession but also it is Elise, through and through. Imagine an oil painter being handed the wrong tools, blindfolded, spun around, then told as the world gyres on strange axes that they need to record a sunset on a canvas they can’t see. Similar to that, only with digital parasitism on a scale involving the entirety of an ageship, shoddily held together by the spite of a voluntary suicide. “I’m sorry. It has been a long time.”

  “You’re alive.” Constance stumbles forward, caution annexed by unsubtle affection, their voice fragmenting by the syllable, giving way to the rawness of the newly flayed. Constance bleeds across those two words, comes apart in the next, voice so hushed Maya wouldn’t have been able to hear were it not for all the auditory modifications jigsawed into her head. “How? I saw you die. I can’t believe you’re here. I was so sure they were lying. That at best, you were a simulacrum, some kind of zombie program, but this is you. It’s really you. You’re here.”

  Lines crowd the gap between sharply penciled brows. “No. Not entirely. And t-t-hat theory isn’t completely wrong. I did die. I have been dying for forty years. I d-d-on’t know how much of this is me anymore, how much is what I cannibalized from the Conversation because it f-felt right.”

  “I see,” says Constance. Fist clenched and pressed to the hollow between their collarbones. Unspoken but raised up like a flare in the set of their handsome face: Was it for me? Did you do all that to come back for me? Do you miss me? Did you miss me the way I’ve missed you for forty fucking years, growing older by the minute because I couldn’t stand the idea of being young forever without you?

  Rita-Elise totters forward, the doctor’s ophidian grace transmuted into the gawkiness of a newborn fawn, and it fucking pains Maya a little to see it, to witness that ungainliness. The agony of the tableau directs Maya to lurch forward, arm extended for Rita to catch if needed, a palm already situated behind the small of the woman’s back.