by M F Sullivan
“Well, no…this idea came to me right now. But I hate having this thing in my head. And I hate how I got it. I hate how I look in the mirror, and it looks like my old eye, but I know that it’s not my old eye. It’s not even my eye. I didn’t buy it. The refugee operation provided it pro bono. Best case, it’s the company’s. Worst, Cicero’s, or the Hierophant’s. I don’t know; I’m not sure how they manage to get into my device’s software if it’s not somehow leased to them. It was awful when he installed it, and”—she took a sharp breath and loosened her grip on the dentist—“I want it taken out.”
Brows knit in sympathy, Tobias removed his gloves to pat her hand. “Please give it more consideration,” he said while rising from his seat. “I do not know how comfortable I am with this idea, but we can decide when you return for your implants. It is possible. I have done it before, for patients with ill-functioning, jailbroken DIOX-Is or small cyborgans who could not afford to go to a real clinic. But when there are so many who would kill for such sight, Miss Mephitoli, would you throw it away?”
It was a question she’d asked herself for a few nights, since before the train, or before Kabul. The DIOX-I was invaluable for purposes of battle, but the merest possibility that her Father might use it to record her comings and goings made her ill. What she had said about the ads was true, too. As she emerged into Kabul’s yet-warm evening with Miki, who had been slouched over a dented magazine e-reader in the waiting room chair, the right side of Dominia’s vision populated buildings with digital billboards not present in her sinister eye. Wholesale liquor, cheap (virus-loaded) pornography, cigarettes, fitness tips, new books, plus more weird spam about weight loss and digitally altered pictures than she absorbed. And try to tell the digital ones from those actually there! It made her crazy. She focused on the dentist, and asked Miki, “Where did you find that guy?”
“Oh, he’s an old client. Actually, I met him through Kahlil when we were having a sandwich one day with this super-hard bread, and—long story, anyway I needed a fake tooth, and ’Bias hooked it up. No money down.”
“Is there anyone in Kabul—in the world—you haven’t fucked?”
In response to that, Miki gave her ass a shake, brandishing like a weapon the short-shorts purchased while Dominia had slept that day. “Only you, senpai.”
“I thought a senpai was supposed to be a kind of mentor.” The martyr lifted her blushing face to the light-polluted sky.
“Well, aren’t you? You’re my upperclassman in the school of life, oba-san.”
Dominia cleared her throat as Miki wandered in the direction of a food stand. “You’re going to blow our cover if you keep calling me things like that.”
“And you’re going to blow our cover if you don’t try to look like you’re having fun. Come on! So serious.” After jabbering in Arabic with the huge man running the food stand, both laughed, and he assembled a falafel for Dominia while Miki said, “Eat that, you’ll lighten up.”
To her credit, the falafel was damn fine: even though it lacked the basic nutritional components which Dominia’s body required, it didn’t lack the taste requirements. She found herself overjoyed to eat after her procedure, since taste was the final sensory frontier when it came to DIOX corporation’s replacements. Taste was still pure. Taste, unlike sight and sound and even touch, was not yet marketable by their standards. But once the first super-tongue or digital nose was on the market, rest assured, everyone would be a gourmand in the way everybody was trilingual thanks to audio implants.
She was crotchety, Dominia. Another reason she so missed Cassandra. Her wife had been there to soften her, to make the General seem kinder than she was. But there was also something to be said for the leveling influence of her new friend. Miki wasn’t interested in soothing Dominia’s ego or making her feel like a good person. Miki was interested in…being Miki, the martyr supposed. Even now the girl bopped down the street while savaging the sandwich whose cardboard tray she had already trashed.
“Hey,” said Miki through her full mouth, as if confirming Dominia’s thoughts while, with a free, un-sauced hand, she gestured to something down the block. “It’s the Hie-Race! I didn’t even think about it.”
Squinting and then troubled (and disoriented into closing her good eye) to find the DIOX-I zoomed in for her, Dominia watched a crew of yellow-geared workers setting up barriers and signs that translated to state that the street would be closed the next morning. “The what?”
“It’s a thing they do here. Like a special marathon where people dress up in costumes and stuff to make fun of—uh.” Miki coughed as she almost choked on her bite. “Your folks.”
At seeing that Dominia’s expression was not offended so much as flabbergasted, Miki felt free to continue. “It’s super fun! We have to lighten the mood somehow, right? And this city can be so uptight—it’s like, half serious tech businessmen and a quarter religious families. It’s up to the last quarter, people like us, to cheer them up, so we do it with fun things like this!”
“‘People like us,’” repeated Dominia. Miki giggled.
“Yeah, ‘us’! Weirdos! Anyway”—the human turned away as Dominia caught a chilling glimpse of chrome upon a rooftop overseeing the preparations—“we should head back. I’m—”
“You go.” The General pushed her trash into Miki’s hand, oblivious to the girl’s noise of protest. “I’ll meet you there.”
“Hey”—the human waved after her—“where are you going?”
There was no delaying. She knew the Lamb when she saw him; it didn’t matter how far away. Those horns were distinct. Always the first things she saw of him. Often, the only things that stuck in her memory after a conversation with him. Warm words and loving reassurances all got lost in his horns. Or in the arrival of Cicero. But until then, those times when, sent to her room for inability to adapt to her new reality, she had wished her windows unbarred to accommodate suicide— Ah, how often he appeared in her doorway! He’d sit at the edge of her bed, his knee a pillow to her tear-stained face, as she struggled to make verbal sense of the new and violent shift in moral expectation. She would try to explain how it made her feel every time she was forced to eat human flesh, struggling to articulate how awful it was that she wasn’t allowed to treat humans like people; more often, she burst into a new crest of tears and explained that what hurt her most was the loss of her parents, and the thought that they were in the world without her.
“I’m sure they think the same about you,” the Lamb told her, gentle, patient. Or: “Just because you can’t be friends with the humans working around the castle doesn’t mean you have to be cruel to them the way Cicero is.” And: “Nobody reasonable likes eating human, sweetheart.”
“Daddy does,” she would sometimes accuse. “And Cicero, and the people who follow them around at parties.”
“True; but they’re exceptions. I don’t like eating human. Thankfully, I don’t have to.”
“Then why do I have to do it?”
“Because that’s the way your Father and Cicero decided the world would be when they released the protein to the public. It’s important for you to be able to eat if you can’t receive my blood some week, for some reason; and you’ll be miserable if all you’re having is my blood at services. Trust me.”
“But we could make fake people, in labs, the way they make beef and poultry? I read in school—real school—”
“Martyr school is real school.”
She hadn’t been in the mood to argue that point. “People used to eat cows and chickens, too. Then they were rescued because people developed fake meat that was like the real thing. Why can’t we do that with people?”
“They tried that with people,” explained Elijah, “which is something you’ll learn in fake school during next year’s history class, but I digress…it didn’t work, is my point. Eating lab-grown people was good as starving.”
“But why? Why does it have to be this way? Why does everything have to be so violent and ugly?”
“Because that’s the way the world is. This physical world.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” she insisted at the time, eliciting a wan smile from the Lamb.
“Please, don’t ever think otherwise.”
“But why didn’t you stop them from releasing the protein? You were there.”
“And so was your Father. But even if he hadn’t been there…”
“You’d still let Cicero push you around.” The flippant accusation gave way to immediate guilt, but she refused to take it back, and he didn’t make her. The hand petting through her hair never even stilled.
“I didn’t stop them because, once they infected me with the protein, I saw all things. All possible things. Not in a way I could control as much as I can now, which isn’t much. I saw that if we didn’t release the protein, someone would, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it that time. But, most of all, I saw you.”
“You did?”
“Yes. And I couldn’t find it in me to stop him when he would someday give me a daughter like you, right?”
What a stupid reason. She knew at the time he had only been trying to comfort her. In the unit that was her Family, the Lamb may well have been the good cop: but he was still a cop. And wherever the Lamb was, Cicero was never far behind, possessive as any psychopathic husband. Between that quality, and the Lamb’s duty to be carted from church to church throughout martyr territories and symbolically sacrificed every Noctisdomin—rather close to a literal sacrifice, which, given a martyr’s healing abilities, always recovered itself by Noctismartin—the brothers rarely separated in body or in mind. If the Lamb was given the courtesy of time with his daughter, or the privilege to comfort her without interruption, it was because Cicero willed it.
Cicero, or the Hierophant. This last notion arose as, atop the fire escape of the building whereupon she’d seen the glitter of his horn, her stomach lurched to see not just the Lamb but, pleased and dapper as ever, her Father. Beetle eyes glittering, he assessed her head to toe and crowed, “My girl! At last! Here you are. How happy I am. I do so love your new hair. Did you do it yourself?”
“Here I thought you’d hate it. And”—she recalled the broadcast watched aboard the train a few nights before—“that you were back in Kronborg.”
“Oh, for a jot—but I had to catch up to the Family at some point. I can’t leave your welfare in their hands, or vice versa. A man has to be responsible for his child; any parent is responsible for their child. Cassandra knew that very well.”
Lamb, keep her temper in check. “Starting early, are we? I thought you’d try soft-balling before you riled me up.”
“I’m sure you know well as I do that the time for soft-balling passed—if there ever was such a time for you, my hard-hearted daughter. What trouble you make of yourself! As if you did not spend nearly a hundred happy years as Governess of the Front.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘happy.’”
“Neither would Cassandra.”
“You don’t know anything about our lives.”
“I know enough. Its rocky start and questionable end, and quite a few moments in between. Or are you forgetting that I was as devoted to Cassandra, my spiritual daughter, as you were to Cassandra, your wife?”
How sick she was of his childish jabs in her open wound. Her eyes narrowed at the silent Lamb, whose expression remained placid as ever. “And here you are as usual, letting him say whatever comes into his head while you look sorry for yourself.”
“Sorry for you,” corrected unflappable Elijah.
“We are not here to abuse your emotions.” The Hierophant crossed to lay a hand upon the Lamb’s shoulder. “We are here to plead that you come home.”
“I won’t. You would do anything for Cicero, wouldn’t you?” This, to Elijah, who did not respond as Dominia placed an instinctive hand upon a diamond not there. “I would do anything for Cassandra. I would die to see her live again, to make up for the mistakes I made. Letting these awful things happen to her. Letting her die.”
“You didn’t let her die,” the Lamb assured her, but her eyes welled up in furious tears.
“I did. I failed her.”
“You are failing yourself, my girl,” said the Hierophant, not unkindly. “You would throw away your whole existence—three hundred years of a well-built life—to spend time with humans of the worst sort, in pursuit of a false hope.”
“Lazarus is not a false hope.” The General was weak in her conviction on this matter but unwilling to admit that she was even potentially wrong. “I’ve already been brought back from the dead once. So have you both. Probably,” she added, with respect to her Father. “Is it that insane to think it can happen again?”
The Hierophant’s tone remained oh-so gentle. “All things are as God made them in this world, my daughter; the river of time will never flow backward. The protein is the gift of eternal life, and those who would reject that are rejecting God and life, as did Cassandra.”
“Cassandra rejected you,” Dominia insisted. “You and your hideous world.”
“It breaks my heart to see you so wounded by her cruelty that you cannot admit who is to blame for your poor wife’s death. Will you fight me to the end over mistakes you made? Over your own choice to hand your heart to a stranger who abused your good nature?”
“Why don’t you kill me here? It would be quicker for all of us. Cleaner, too.”
With his thinnest smile, the Hierophant lifted his eyebrows. “And force you to miss the marathon? That would be a shame. We intend to meet you there; there, you’ll deliver Lazarus.”
Oh! Now, that was funny. Laughing, the General covered her mouth at her own surprise on the abrupt noise, and exclaimed, “Give you Lazarus? And why would I do something like that?”
With a sympathetic glance to the Lamb, the Hierophant shook his head. “Perhaps, my dear, you had ought to tell her why we have come by; we will argue ourselves in circles, trying to reason without getting to the bottom line. You know how she can be.”
“Your Father brought me here to tell you the probabilities, Dominia.”
“He brought you to scare me back home.”
“He brought me to tell you that, no matter how long this continues, or what direction events flow, the ending is the same. Your death. I have seen that this is true.” Bracing herself against his words as though against a physical onslaught of truth, the General let him carry on. “Cassandra won’t come back. She can’t. Even if she weren’t cremated, it wouldn’t be possible. You’re throwing your life away.”
“It’s a lie.” Dominia covered her eyes, then shifted to her ears. “It’s a lie, and I won’t hear it.”
“You will die, my child,” assured the Hierophant, his expression solemn. “You will die, and I will be the one to kill you. I do not want that.”
“Can’t dirty your holy hands.”
In the thud of a single heartbeat, the Hierophant appeared centimeters before Dominia: she had not seen him move. He did that now and again. Uncanny every time, as though he teleported through the air so the object of his prey might spend their last seconds in terror. As this terror passed and the General was in the process of stepping away, he caught with a stonelike hand the fist raised in self-defense; but, rather than tossing her to the ground to initiate a boxing match as might have been Cicero’s aim, the Hierophant pulled her into his arms and crushed her with the force of his embrace.
“Please think on this, my girl.” He relaxed his hold enough to take her shocked face in his hands and tilt it toward his, so she was forced to see his earnest expression. “We have brought this offer out of love. It will not come a second time. If you continue down this path, you shall be an enemy, not just to man- and martyr-kind alike, but to your own immortal soul. I could not bear to see you throw that away.”
Every word she spoke caused an unnerving tension of her face against the grip of his hands. “You can already see me doing everything, anyway. I’m surprised it matters to you what
I do when you can see through my eye. I’m getting the thing taken out. Not that that’s news to you.”
“So I have seen, I do admit. But I wouldn’t worry about that. Don’t you understand, my daughter? I run Halcyon, I provided the technology for the terraforming of Mars—I am the DIOX corporation.”
Startled, she at last managed to yank her face out of his hands. “The CEO?”
“Answers to me. I would never publicly reveal my position at the top of the corporation, my dear; not without good reason. What trouble it would have caused me if you knew that going in! But now, you understand the futility of all of this. The pain it causes me! So many people in this city have augmentations—praise God, for, to lay eyes upon my dear daughter, I must steal their sight! To hear you speak, I must invade their ears!” As her mind raced, the Hierophant made a pained noise, and covered his shutting eyes. “Oh, my child. If you knew the agony this causes me! Your soul—your poor soul.”
As those manipulative tears sprang in skyward-turning eyes, the General was able to dart to the fire escape. When she turned to see if he pursued, her Father had disappeared without so much as the scrape of his shoe upon the rooftop. The Lamb, still there, lingered but a few seconds to study his daughter’s expression; then he, too, abandoned Dominia by exiting through the building’s door with a harsh metallic slam.
XIII
Trust / Issues
What a fool she’d been! The owner of the DIOX Corporation. Of course. Wasn’t he everywhere? Dominia’s stomach remained rancid all the way back to pawnshop, a path she couldn’t have recalled if the DIOX-I didn’t light the way with a floating aureolin line that plunged ahead to decapitate passersby. So, the Family was traveling together. Good to know. Also good to know that Cicero was at greater length than arm’s reach from the Lamb, which put a skip into every third or fourth step. Had Miki made it home? Dominia couldn’t risk trying a call. Who knew how much data was always being transmitted to the Hierophant at a given moment? Who knew what she would find when she returned to Kahlil’s? Maybe Soto was already dead, along with their host.
