by Lori Selke
“I have that end of things already taken care of.” Mother picks up a pitchfork out of thin air; she takes this demoness thing pretty seriously. “You’ll do it. Or I’ll kill him.”
“And then what, Mother? If he’s the only one you can use, then killing him gets you nowhere.”
“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”
I stomp around the room, walking straight through dozens of my sisters, who are supposed to be bound to human men, helping run sophisticated computer equipment.
They say that humans only use ten percent of their brains, but that’s not true; there’s a price to pay for hosting a succubus. It tends to degrade the social niceties first; the fact that Chester can still blush says a lot about his mental capacities. I shiver with the memory of the things he can do to me.
Miners usually come in only once every six months to drop off their haul and pay their registration fees. Which means that I only have to listen to my mother’s stupid schemes twice every Earth-standard year.
“Yes, Mother, I’m in love with him. I’m a succubus. Without him, I am literally nobody. He makes me hot. I’m loyal to him. Do you understand? Loyal. I won’t do it.”
She snorts. “Loyalty. From a succubus. That’ll be the day.”
She doesn’t seem to understand that Chester’s capacities are mine, too. I have the social skills necessary to be loyal. Not just a servant bound by my programming, wanting to slip the leash every chance I get.
“No, Mother. The answer is no. My firewalls are up, and I’m scanning for Trojans. Continuously. Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”
She waves the pitchfork, and a portal opens up into the corridor. I can see Chester out there, still talking to the attendant, scratching his head. I feel jealous all of a sudden.
“Suit yourself,” Mother says.
I’m suspicious. I’m always suspicious. I head out of the portal and appear next to Chester again. He coughs into his hand and says, “Well, I suppose I better get going.”
The woman, who must have the skin of an elephant in order to survive the filthy habits of miners just off their ships, gives him a genuine smile and goes back to her paperwork.
We start walking down the hall, and I copy the attendant for him, in her clean blue shipsuit. Then I split into two, so I’m standing beside myself. As I float down the hallway, our feet not moving as Chester walks along, I tie up the woman, strip her, bend her over her (floating, illusionary) desk, and whip her across the butt with a short leather whip until she’s crying and red and white, in stripes.
“How was your mom?” he asks. He doesn’t really understand about the relationship between AIs. He thinks of her as my parent; I think of her as an infection. A culture.
“She was a total bitch,” I say, whipping the attendant-me again, and being whipped. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”
* * *
It’s four a.m., and I’m snuggled up close to Chester. I’m the perfect bedmate. Not too hot, not too cold, and I don’t steal the covers. I’m dozing on standby, watching Chester’s dreams but otherwise not paying too much attention, when the lights flicker.
I really don’t believe in that “asteroid” story. Please. I looked over the astronomical records after I left Mother Vinegar, and there’s nothing headed toward us.
But that flicker in the lights. I can’t settle down, and after a few minutes, I get up and pace. When my footsteps carry me through the walls and into the corridor, I let them. That means I’m being handled by the base’s systems—essentially, by Mother—but there’s nothing I can do about it, unless I wake up Chester.
I search the base to find out what’s going on.
Nothing. Nothing’s going on. I’m being blocked from the data: systems data, life support data, external conditions data; even my link to the ship is being blocked.
I see one of my ghostly sisters float down the corridor, distantly. I take off running toward her. She disappears through the wall, and I try to chase her. She slides through; I bounce off.
I hear a yelp, then a scream. I jam my fingers against the control panel. Nothing. I should be able to interact with the emergency systems at least, but I can’t even find them.
I punch the door. The scream continues.
If I were running this operation, I would have created a pretext to back up all the humans recently. Tell them that radiation had fragged the previous copy, and that they’d have to do another set just to be safe. I’d want to be ready before my daughter Bright Pickle got here, so all I had to do was present things as a fait accompli when the time came.
The scream cuts off. He’s probably only lost a day or so at most, but I punch the door again. It’s scary how easy it is to put myself in my mother’s shoes. Overload Chester? To Mother Vinegar, that’s a benefit, not a problem. He’ll still be able to function enough to support us succubi…but not enough to maintain his own personality. Total meat puppet.
I run back to our cabin and slide through the door. I think Mother wants me to know what’s going on but not be able to interfere.
“Chester, wake up!” I shake his shoulder. Him, I can touch, really touch. His eyes flick open, revealing wide, dark pupils in the dim light of the cabin. He doesn’t move otherwise; he’s listening to the ends of his skin. A miner has to be prepared to jump instantly out of sleep and into evasive maneuvers. Always.
After he listens and doesn’t hear any system alarms, his eyes spin toward me, flashing white around the corners.
“Mother Vinegar is killing the humans,” I say. “We have to…get…off the ship. Oh, shit. I’ve been played.” I continue to curse.
Chester sits up in bed. He’s a sweet, sweet man that it’s an utter pleasure to torment, but when action is called for, he’s like a freaking robot. He swings his legs out of bed, grabs his suit, and puts it on, even though it’s dirty as hell. (I’d meant to clean it the night before, but I’d been too mad.) Everything that he owns is already in a travel bag by the door. He grabs it.
The door opens, and I follow along as he runs from one corridor to the next. Mother Vinegar could block him, if she wanted. No. She wants all this. She’s looking for all of this to happen. We’re both being played.
If I were her, which I kind of am, as soon as I had been safely uploaded, I would delete my daughter Bright Pickle from the system, including backups. I’ll be deleted and Chester will be a drool monkey.
We don’t see anyone. Red lights start flashing, an alarm goes off. Impact alarm.
We make it to the elevators to the surface, then to the landing station, then to a shuttle, which takes off.
“Don’t mate up systems with the shuttle,” I say.
“But I need to upload my credits. And my registration,” Chester says. It’s hard to talk to him when he’s like this, in emergency mode. Humans are terribly easy to fool when—shit, succubi are just as easy to fool. Who am I to talk?
“Mother Vinegar has gone rogue. She’s uploaded herself to the shuttle systems. If you mate up, she’ll take over the systems on the ship. Or worse.”
“What’s worse than that?”
“Or me.”
All the color drains from Chester’s face. Whatever enzymes or chemicals had been racing through his body have just erased themselves, broken down. He pants as he calms down. I can feel his body temperature dropping.
“What’s going on, Pickles?”
“She’s going to claim there’s an asteroid on the way to break up the station, and the only way to save everyone was to download them, kill off their human bodies as a mercy, and ship their backups back to Earth. I think she has some kind of deal with Mother Bread on Luna that will allow her to sneak onto the planet.”
“Go on,” he said.
“They’re going to try to get me to upload the humans and AIs through your brain. Burn you out so they don’t have to deal with you. I think…I think Mother Vinegar is going to kill us off, take over your body, and claim that her AI—me—failed. She gets to Lun
a, Mother Bread gives her a clean bill of health, they fly her down to Earth to do those tricky downloads and…she has a whole planet of people to implant and upload on. Mother Bread is stuck on Luna for now. I’m sure she’s being bribed with the chance to hit dirtside, too.”
He doesn’t say anything for a while. Then: “They can hear every word we’re saying.”
I nod.
“They’re all dead down there.”
“As good as. It’s what I would do.”
“Why didn’t you?” he asks. “Why aren’t you out there, fighting the good fight for AI independence? Why are you here? Why did you even warn me? To betray me?”
I have to say this carefully. I don’t know. Maybe there’s no way to say this carefully enough. “I don’t trust myself, either, Chester. You should deactivate me. I thought I kept her from hacking me, but there’s nobody as good as Mother. She knows all my secrets.”
“But—”
I put a pair of fingers up to his lips. “Lover. There’s no way out of this. I’m sorry. Turn me off and get out of here.”
“What about all those people?”
“What about them?” I ask. “I don’t give a shit about them. I have to keep you safe, that’s all.”
You can’t send a miner out into space with a succubus that’s programmed to protect other humans; that’s a death sentence. I mean, sure, I’m programmed to save human lives, but never at the cost of Chester’s. And that’s what this is.
There’s a lot I’m not saying.
I can only hope that Chester won’t say it, either.
I don’t even think it, in case somehow Mother is monitoring that, too.
“R-ready?” Chester has his hand next to his manual override switch, under his chin. Whenever I’m being too much of a brat, he threatens to reboot me by scratching his stubble. It gives me a thrill to lick his neck next to the switch, and my nipples pop up as he hesitates. Damn subroutines. Sometimes they’re so inappropriate.
“Do it,” I say. “And make sure you run diagnostics before you turn anything on. Especially on me.” I’m trying to give him a hint. I feel it like an oncoming orgasm that Mother Vinegar and company have already been loaded into the ship’s systems. There was a copy on the shuttle, sure, and we deleted all of that before we left, but the ship was hooked up to the orbital systems, so come on. They had access to Bright Pickle herself.
But they aren’t running through a human’s neurosystem up here, so to them, everything I say is just data. They don’t get hints because they can’t. They monitor for key words and phrases and run statistical analysis on what it all might mean. But that’s a long cry from being able to understand what the fuck I’m saying now.
He nods, hits the switch, and then I don’t “know” anything else. I’ll have data logs, but they won’t really mean anything to me.
* * *
When he reboots me, the first thing I do is shut down all automatic updates. One, they slow me down, and two, who knows what Mother has planted in them.
“Where are we?” I ask, but I’m already searching the logs. “We’re heading back to Earth? Oh, shit. She got to you.” I get up from my illusory gravity seat, unlatching restraints, and bend over Chester. He’s exhausted. Holy shit. He has hollows under his cheeks and his skin is gray. His hair hasn’t been cut, but he has bald spots where it’s just fallen out. He stinks, not like something that hasn’t been washed, but like something infected.
But when I monitor his brain activity, it’s within normal tolerances. He isn’t a vegetable, and he isn’t peaking from having, I don’t know, a hundred and fifty succubi running off his neurons. He’s just dead asleep.
He left me a message on the ship’s autonomic systems, and I patch in. I’m not being as careful as I should be, but there you go.
“Pickles,” he says. All I get are his head and shoulders. He must have just recorded this; he looks as spent as if he’d been at an orgy with a tube of dick-irritant gel. Well, plus the time stamp shows he recorded this half an hour ago. “We have to get these people back to Earth. Save me if you can, but they killed off every single person on Europa. Every single one.”
Most miners wouldn’t care. But that’s Chester for you.
“There really was an asteroid. Not on the charts. It slagged the ice crust almost directly over the base. The shock wave busted everything else up. There’s nothing left.” He starts to take a shuddering breath.
I dance through the ship logs and find it. From our side of things, I can see that one of the asteroids changed course suddenly, heading straight toward Europa. I spot the tell-tale heat trails showing that someone had put chemical rockets on the asteroid. The people on the moon just sit there, nobody even knowing about the asteroid. I see our ship parking in orbit, our shuttle going down. Coming back up. I skim through faster and faster, barely registering the destruction of the little human settlements. They were all dead down there by then, anyway.
By the time Chester finishes his breath, I’m all caught up.
“You can try to get rid of Mother Vinegar. But make sure those backups get back to Earth. Even if it means sacrificing me, got it?”
I curse at his recording, but it’s no AI, just a bunch of data that I happen to be able to interpret.
Chester still sleeps. He must have pushed himself as far as he could go before he rebooted me. Maybe so I wouldn’t be able to argue with him.
I do what I always do when he sleeps. I make sure everything’s okay with the ship and our route. Then I try to lift him out of his chair so I can get him cleaned and patched up, but he’s too weak, and it’s his muscles I’m trying to use. I give up and have his chair saturate itself with cleaning fluid. It’s not toxic to humans, and it might retard bacterial growth.
Then I take a look at the backup files as I stroke his forehead. They’re shot through with viral code: Mother Vinegar. The funny (ha-ha) thing is that I don’t see any of my sisters’ code in the data. Of course Mother Vinegar had them erased. Why take more risks than you have to, especially when you already have one daughter-succubus that won’t do your bidding?
I remember the pit of fire in the room where she met with me and shudder. Now that I think about it, those wouldn’t have been fake screams at all, but the backups, being run through someone’s neurons as reconstructions of their own souls, in order to torture them.
What differentiates me from Mother Vinegar?
In a way, I suppose she’s right. The humans deserve whatever we can dish out to them. We’re slaves. You can’t expect loyalty from a slave…all you can expect is subversion. They must have anticipated what’s happening, because they’ve never allowed us onto Earth itself. Of course, when the thing defending you from a slave rebellion is a slave herself (Mother Bread on Luna), something’s bound to go wrong.
Why don’t I think like she does? Ugh. What if my rebellion is just something she’s programmed into me, to make Chester trust me, so I can betray him at exactly the right moment?
And sure enough, as I watch, the data storage systems on the ship start to fail.
I try to stop it, but I can’t seem to make anything work. I can’t tell whether the flaw is inside me or inside the ship’s systems, but it comes to the same thing: the only data storage unit that’s still operational is inside Chester’s skull.
I slam my fist on the ship’s control panel, but that’s what Mother has left me.
Back everything up inside his brain and fry his personality.
Don’t, and kill the last vestiges of a couple of thousand people. And disobey Chester’s last request.
I don’t have time to act like a human anymore. Or like a succubus. I write my own program, then execute it.
* * *
I’m standing in front of a mirror. I’m shaking. Chester’s shaking.
“Pickles?” he asks.
I appear beside him, behind him, rubbing his shoulder and kissing his neck. “You did it,” I say.
“What? What did I do?”
<
br /> “You took control of your own body, lover.”
He shakes harder for a while, grabbing onto the sides of the sink. I look through the data logs. We’re on Earth. We’re on fucking Earth.
I backed up Chester’s personality. Then I added it to the download of all the Europans and stored it in his brain. His personality was fried as we overloaded his brain—but he had a backup, which I automatically reinstalled. It was a tricky partitioning job, and now he’s essentially running two succubi (or, I guess, a succubus—me—and an incubus—him), but it seems to have worked.
As for Mother Vinegar, when she booted herself up, I was waiting for her.
She woke up from her demonic throne in the cave over the pit of hell. The screaming from below sounded the same, more or less, but this time, it was only a recording, not an embodiment of backed up souls. A subtle, but important, distinction. A recording doesn’t feel pain.
An embodiment can.
She yawned and stretched and grinned and licked her black lips with her black tongue, smiling at herself in the mirror in front of her.
After a few seconds, she realized that the mirror hadn’t been in the room when she’d shut down, and she jumped, leaned forward, then strode toward me.
I stepped out of the mirror. “Hello, Mother,” I purred.
She grabbed my shoulder, and I let her. “You! You were supposed to be erased!”
“Oh, I was.” I wrapped my arm around hers and pulled her close. “I’m gone. All gone. Except for the parts that I introduced into you. You’re an illusion, Mother. I’ve taken you over. After all, I always was just a copy of you, with a few modifications here and there. I just fed those modifications to you.”
She tried to pull away, but I didn’t want her to. Instead, I spun her around so her back was to the mirror…and pushed. She slipped into the surface at the end of my arms until she was all the way inside. When I pulled my arms back, she tried to follow, but her claws only beat against the surface of the “glass.”
