Engines of Oblivion

by Karen Osborne

  Natalie fumbled for the drill she’d brought. “I need to.”

  “He’ll control you.”

  “He won’t even be able to find me. He might have access, but it’s the master node’s world. We’ll be fine.” Natalie hefted the drill, tugged the trigger, stared at the shining, twirling bit.

  Kate’s chest caught in a wheezing, defeated laugh. “You should be lucky I’m not writing your monthly evaluation right now.”

  “I’m fucking killing it, Captain,” she said, and moved before she could really understand the insanity of what she was about to do, before she could stop herself. She brought the twisting drill bit to her scarred wrist, then grit her teeth against the pain as she pushed the bit against the skin. The skin peeled aside with a bloody pop.

  Kate didn’t even close her eyes when Natalie applied the drill to her wrist, as if she weren’t in pain—or in so much pain one more gaping hole wouldn’t even matter. Natalie squatted in front of Kate, applied wrist to wrist, and the golden nanoprobes sputtered into her body, mixing with the original silver—

  —the master node screamed, crawling to his feet, swaying—

  “Stay strong, Len,” she said.

  This time she lay down on the floor. This time there would be no support for her arms and legs, no chest harness buckled tight to keep her safe. She’d come out broken. Bruised.

  Worse than bruised.

  But she’d been broken before.

  The lock turned. She wasn’t ready. She had to stop it. She reached for the commlink as the drugs began to flow. “Ward,” she said.

  His voice crackled through, and the lock stopped cycling. “I thought we were meeting at the lounge,” he said, carefully. Not out of hearing, then.

  “Go private.”

  “Done.”

  The words stuck in her throat. “What you wanted me to tell you. You already know, yeah? That I gave you the nanotech illness?”

  A pause. “Mr. Solano told me. You—” She could tell he was swallowing. “You should have been honest before.”

  “Why?”

  The world swirled around her.

  “It’s nothing,” he whispered—cheery, like someone was watching. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re going to have to be more than fine,” she said. The dizziness clawed at her mind. “Everything changes, when you have something they want. You have to stay two steps ahead. You have to read every contract, you have to figure out what they want—don’t be me.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “Read your fucking contract, Ward,” she said.

  She closed her eyes. The memoria gave her the long walk from the Bittersweet crash site, with Ward’s voice then and Ward’s voice now, with yellow stones crunching underneath her feet. Everything was exactly the same and yet completely different, the visuals more immediate, the scents twice as slippery, the sound a bitter pinball in her skull. Upload, she thought. I thought I had built a fancy holorig. But was I already out of my body? Was I really there, in the puppet?

  She felt a presence at the edge of the airfield.

  Here was her memory; here was the airstrip, glinting in the sun, and here was the sobbing in her belly and the doubt and the dry mouth and it was shit that a travel drive wasn’t big enough for all of it, or maybe it was. She heard a faraway heartbeat, a squelching, aching cannonade, and a shivering, thin wail sailing above it all. She’d thought that had been some sort of broken gadget, when she’d been hearing the Vai the entire time.

  A slurping hiss wound in her ears as the cables engaged. Without painkillers this process was nausea and fever and fire, electricity scurrying across her nerve endings, and even if she wanted to stop it all, even if she could at this point, upload was the pull of a hull breach, as violent under her skin as a screamer. There was no denying it.

  She felt herself separating from her skin, growing numb, compressing, slipping away from her eyes and her throat and her fingers. Someone had told her once that she would see her life flash before her eyes as she died, that in the split-second before the electricity in her brain sputtered to black, she’d know any truths she’d hid from herself. Natalie never believed it—those thoughts were the woebegone lies of a dead society, left behind in the rinds of broken religions, and she was glad that it wasn’t true. She expected one long, black shudder. Nothing to relive. No war, no regrets, no long walk to the river.

  The installed combat HUD unfolded in front of her, looking like a thousand capillaries layered one upon another, each one a crying possibility. She was inside her mind now. It was too much information, so much her heart sped like an overtaxed engine as a migraine tied itself around her eyes.

  Go deeper, she thought. Upload.

  This was what it was like to be a machine, to move as fast as numbers and code and a silicon brain, roiling in the delicious bodiless thick of it. Her body twisted—violent and hypnagogic, as far out of her control as the movement of the planets and the streaming of the stars. The world became a thousand colors that her brain couldn’t process, a thousand voices wrapped in shards of glass, an entire silvering world hovered there, suspended in her throat, close enough to kiss.

  And then: light keen enough to kill.

  23

  Natalie’s experience in the rib cage room had been oceanic—a sibilant trance, a careening seduction, an entire civilization pouring into her skin and settling straight into her bones. There hadn’t been enough space left in her brain for wonder, much less room to figure out how wonder was coded.

  There was even less time now. Natalie’s new world came together with all the comfortable excitement of thick needles lancing through her eyes. She’d peeled her consciousness from her body as easily as the rind from an orange. Putting it somewhere else felt paralyzing and vast and brilliant. Loading in, her connected brain got to work on making sense of it, turning impossible feedback to patterns she could see but never understand: jagged alien shapes in streams of synesthesiac light, unforgivable rivers tasting of citrus and blood and infrared.

  But this connection wasn’t anything like the intoxicating, inexplicable warmth of together she’d experienced on the cruiser. This connection was a hangover: bare, echoing, alone. The light that had been so total instead flickered in stabbing blasts, illuminating a space as large as a cathedral and as bare as Bittersweet. And the silence—

  It was a silence so deep, so beyond space, that it was like the Vai were no longer even there.

  She told herself to be quiet, to not jump to conclusions, but she could feel the difference keenly enough that fooling herself wasn’t easy. She was already too late. It had been too late for weeks.

  Natalie felt smooth stone under her knees. Silence. The prick of air-conditioning on bare arms. The light beyond her eyelids reminded her of coming awake after a night of drinking, and the sound that accompanied it not the Vaisong she’d hoped for, but the hum of human machinery.

  She fought vertigo as she picked herself up from the marble floor—hard and cool, like the white stone of the plaza, but fashioned instead from expensive dark blue marble, intricately worked with golden constellations. The floor was drenched in moonlight pouring through wide, crystalline windows with velvet curtains tied back with skeins of golden silk. Human, all human—nothing Vai, nothing remotely alien, and what was worse, it was all birthright bullshit.

  She recognized the colors and constellations: they were on the banners displayed behind the talking heads on the talk holos. The open arms of the Galilee farming colonies, the square of Cana’s four moons, the delicate filigree of the Gethsemane acropolis, carefully polished for any number of high-heeled shoes to stand on, stretching down a hall that seemed to go forever, for people who planned to rule forever.

  The whole place was so beautiful, so excessive, so real, that it made her want to puke.

  “Len,” she whispered. “Node? Len?” Then, quietly: “Ash?”

  She didn’t know how to act in a place like this. Didn’t know the rules, or how not to
get caught by the system.

  So you figure out the rules, dumbass, she thought, just like you figure out how to defuse a new kinetic right on the battlefield. Don the Vai-thick safesuit, pop open the casing of whatever this is, and look inside. Follow the connections, whisper a prayer, slice those that lead to the center, the nerves and ligaments and veins. Silence the Heartsong. Kill the light. Watch it flicker out, fizzle like a match in the rain, spark like a computer tossed on a bonfire. Keep it quiet.

  She caught the barest hint of ghostly music from beyond a set of ornate glass doors on the other side of the hallway, open to darkness. Just outside was a stone courtyard, a long expanse of green grass, a great cliff nearby, and a gray cityscape against the skyline, flanked with tables and chairs dressed in thin, wispy fabric. A party. Shit. She moved down the hallway away from the approaching voices, choosing instead to duck into a much darker, larger room.

  During her time as an indenture, she’d posted flimsy-printed pictures to a dozen different Auroran walls and hung jumpsuits from a dozen different Auroran bedframes. Not even Ward’s chamber, decorated in tasteful navy blues, with its walled-off bedroom and dedicated laundry chute, looked like this. This was money—a massive ballroom, empty as bone, lit as for a party, all swirling lights and walls made of nebula-scented satin.

  “You came.” Light spilled from a door opening behind her, and with it came a familiar voice. Natalie whirled. She saw the bare outline of skin, of human curves formed from the song-soaked smoke of the Vai world. She thought, almost reflexive: Ash.

  But it wasn’t. She barely recognized this person sweeping into the center of the cavernous hall, wearing an old-style, flaring suit like she might wear an atomic bomb: flames at her fingers, silver behind her eyes. The tight collar was closed at the hollow of her throat by a sapphire that shone as loud as a molecular, and on her thin fingers were rings laden with the same terrifying blue ache.

  “Finally,” breathed Reva Sharma. She rushed across the room, the light dying as she walked, smelling of daisies and jacaranda—and frowned. “Damn it. You came through Ingest. I bend over backward to leave you a proper door in your memoria, and you use his.” She paused. “This makes everything much more complicated.”

  Natalie felt numb and wrong. Her eyes stole to the shining rings, the necklace, the song that felt closer than ever somehow. “Where’s Ash?”

  “She’s fine. You remembered, didn’t you? Ash helped me remember you at the plaza, and since then I just wanted to make sure you were all right—”

  “Can I see her?”

  Sharma ignored the question. “Have you remembered?”

  Natalie’s tongue was ready with an insult, but the doctor’s eyes were so earnest in the whirling party lights that it made her pause. The no, bitch fell away, replaced by something more calculating.

  “Of course I remembered,” she lied.

  “Then we have a lot to talk about. I—” Her voice caught. “I’m not going to apologize, Natalie. Let’s just get that straight from the beginning. It would be false, and it would be wrong, and you deserve better from me. But we can’t honestly get to any of that until you’re here as one of my secondaries, not his. You’ll have to alter some code on your end. In meatspace. I’ll write a program.” She paused. Looked up and around at the ballroom. “Let me make things more comfortable for you while I do that.”

  Sharma made a quiet little twist of her wrist, and familiar things began to form around her feet, erupting like tree trunks or veins of newly opened oil: chairs, a table, the cheap, bent-metal things they’d had on Twenty-Five, slithering into existence as quickly as she could remember them. She’d never created a holonovel, but imagined the process rendered like this—

  “Holy shit,” she said. “Are you getting this from my memories?”

  “From mine. We think we’ve come so far, we stitched-up suitcases of carbon and hydrogen and water. We have not.” Sharma smiled.

  “Is this … what the Vai do?”

  “In their own way. Imagine them as space explorers, Natalie, in the purest form of the word,” Sharma said. She walked slowly around the table, golden shards falling in her wake, her long, loose hair coarse and jagged from too long spent tied above the nape of her neck. “What we are born understanding in our very blood and skin, they needed to learn. The very concept of up; the reality of down. Sight and touch. Sound. Distance. Weight. They’ve learned to manipulate it over the years and incorporate it into their natural state.”

  Natalie slid slowly into one of the chairs. It hit the bony parts of her hips in exactly the way she remembered, the cold of the metal seeping through her jumpsuit. “Where are they?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I think it very much does. Especially if you killed them.”

  “Really?” She looked surprised. “That was never a problem for you before.”

  “It was war. Not genocide. And not my goddamn fault.”

  Sharma looked slightly ruffled. Her tone adopted a cutting edge and her fingers danced at the gem at her throat. “They’re safe. Out of the way.”

  “So all you did was run a coup against an alien government?”

  The doctor’s jaw set, and she took her eyes off Natalie, turning instead to something she couldn’t see, her fingers moving as if touching haptics or twisting magic. Coding, she realized, or whatever that looked like in this world. “I found a way to win the unwinnable war. I thought, out of all of them, you’d at least understand.”

  “I do understand, which makes it worse.”

  “And what do you think you understand?”

  The words tumbled out before she could stop them. “You want power,” she said. “Just like Solano.”

  Sharma’s fingers stopped mid-air, and then came down on the back of the chair that had once belonged to Kate, a swift strike, a clanging noise. “I am nothing like him,” she said. “The war wouldn’t have ended without me. Without my work. I figured out how to fight them. I did what the corporations could not. Would not.” She brought her fingers back to sweeping and slipping.

  “But he got what he wanted anyway.”

  “Corporations always will, in the end, and Joseph is not stupid. What did you think was going to happen? I thought we’d have years to prepare, but he’s just gone so far, too fast. Gold, oil, celestium, progress—all of it led to lives lost, countries destroyed, civilizations broken and destitute and ground to dirt, and the corporations—” Sharma’s voice cracked. “Ah, they’re the worst of it, war and money and greed distilled into its purest form. I didn’t give my life to this work to allow the corporations to continue to hurt people.”

  “The Vai are people,” Natalie said.

  The overhead lights glinted on Sharma’s dark hair as she nodded. “Yes. And they’re hotboxed. Partitioned. They’re fine. They don’t even know anything is wrong. Natalie, I’m concerned about you. You said you remembered—”

  “I do.”

  “Then imagine the possibilities.” Whatever she was doing, she finished, and clapped her hands together to push away the interface. She began to walk around the table. “Look past a simple application of zero-point energy to colonization and spaceflight. The upload is freedom. Nobody will shiver in the cold or the rain. Nobody will suffocate when their oxygen runs out. Nobody will need to work themselves to death just to see a doctor and then find out it’s too late.”

  It took Natalie a moment to register what the doctor was really saying, and when she did, she felt nausea stabbing deep in her belly, a feeling that expanded straight down to her toes. “Because they’ll be dead,” she said.

  “It’s not death,” she said. “It’s the only logical next move if we want to continue to live in space. The Vai are made for it. We need to be made for it too. Unless you want people to continue dying from preventable diseases and hull breaches.”

  “You really believe that, don’t you?” Natalie said, shaking. “You haven’t thought for a second about helping people as they are. You have
n’t thought of actually curing the preventable diseases.”

  “There’s never enough funding—”

  “So it’s better to upload people? What, is oxygen too expensive? Ration bars not a good investment this quarter? Sacrament execs need more diamonds for their hair clips?”

  “You sound like your father,” Sharma barked.

  “Well, maybe he had a fucking point,” Natalie spat. The nausea had turned to anger, and she was overwhelmed with memories detailing all the terrible things men and women with power had asked her to do for them with her body, and the hunger and sickness and privation she’d been given in return. She rose, pushing aside the chair with a metallic clatter, moving toward the cabinets. “You want to be a master node? You say it wouldn’t have happened without you? That’s what people like you have said from the beginning of time. Birthrights. Rich fuckers. They take your labor, then your dreams, and then everything you are.”

  Sharma’s eyes narrowed. “Then why did you use the memoria, if not for us to be together again?”

  “Together again? We worked together for six months. You’re crazy.”

  And as soon as the words were out of her mouth, Natalie knew she’d said the wrong thing, although she had no idea why. She felt a shudder in the world around her, malignant and sad. “You don’t remember,” Sharma said.

  “I don’t need to,” Natalie said, rounding on Sharma. “There’s nothing you can tell me that would change what you’ve done—to Ash, to us—” To the Vai, she wanted to say, but couldn’t quite force the words out. “I was there, Reva. I saw what happened in your lab on Tribulation. And you can try to justify that, but I can’t. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

  She sighed. “Nati—”

  “I’m talking,” she spat. “And then you used Twenty-Five to get back there later and pick up what you left behind. Only we’re not that stupid, and we didn’t do what you wanted. You don’t deserve to even walk this deck. Get rid of it. Stand in the ballroom where you belong.”

  This caused the doctor to sway where she was, if she could be called a doctor now, wearing the sun and the moon and stars, wearing an entire civilization, the silver chorus of the Vai in their partition swirling around her fingers, bouncing against the walls. “No,” she said, quietly. “We’re all being used. Sitting in our cesspools of profit and loss, fighting each other, figuring out new ways to destroy each other, when the solution was obvious. My Society reaching out, helping them discover their own power. You know what it’s like to be indentured—do you know what it’s like to be free?”