by A. W. Cross
He came then, flying through the woods on the far side of the clearing. He’d left everything he’d been carrying behind. As he got closer, I expected to hear the snapping of dead wood and the crunching of frozen leaves, but the air around him was impossibly silent.
He slowed to a swift walk when he saw me. Slow, steady breaths wreathed his face in the cold air. He pushed his hair back from his forehead as he peered around me. “Ailith?”
“Tor, he talked to me. He said my name. He said his name was Pax. He knew I was there.”
His hand froze midair, snarls of hair sticking up between his fingers. “What are you saying? Someone spoke to you? In a memory?”
“I’m saying that this wasn’t a memory, Tor! There’s a woman named Cindra with him. They’re being held captive. What’s happening to them is happening right now.”
“How can you know that?”
“He spoke to me. He knew about what happened to us the other day. It happened to them too. He called it a homing signal.” The heat rose in my face. “Tor, we have to go and find them.”
“Can you talk to him now?”
“I don’t know.” It hadn’t occurred to me to try to contact whomever the memories, or whatever they were, belonged to. I’d considered them something that was happening to me, not by me. I reached out with my mind, trying to find the thread that led to him. Nothing. “I think he’s unconscious. I can’t…it’s like he’s present, but not.”
“Ailith, look, if what you’re saying is true—” He held up a hand as I began to protest. “What I mean is that we’re not sure what these visions are. It might be a lure, Ailith, like that damned…homing signal. And if what you’re seeing is true, and it’s happening right now, we can’t simply go running into the middle of an army of Terrans. You do remember who the Terrans are, right? People who want you dead solely because you exist. Look around you! They did this. We have no idea who this Pax is, except that he’s with them.”
“Tor, they’re being tortured. We can’t abandon them. They’re like us.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know who they are, or what’s happening. You can’t trust this.”
I felt small and impotent. And pissed off. I closed my eyes to concentrate. My mind was a field of darkness; I waited until I spotted it at last, a slender golden thread. I slid along it until, suddenly, I was looking at myself through his eyes.
At first I was surprised: Tor saw me differently than I saw myself. I was a precious thing he wanted to keep safe. He needed to keep me safe; I stood between him and a precipice. Light coiled around me, solid and powerful. His feelings toward me were mixed: fear, longing, desire; something unfurling itself to the sun.
“Tor?” He didn’t respond. The fear in his mind was growing, the thread becoming brittle and cold. He felt me inside him, and he was losing control.
“Stop!” he shouted.
Suddenly, I was back inside myself.
He stared at me with wild eyes. “Stop,” he said again, quieter. He pivoted on his heel and walked away.
“Tor! I’m sorry.”
He spun and came back toward me, seeming to grow larger with each step. “Never do that again.” He was flushed, his hands clenching convulsively at his sides. “You can’t… You can’t just go into my head like that. It’s too intimate.”
He was obviously upset, but I was too excited about what it meant. “But, Tor, this means it could be true! And if it is, we have to go and help them. I don’t know what the other visions mean, but this is real, and we—”
I was in the darkness again, hurtling down a thread.
“Ailith? Are you there?”
“Hello? Pax? How do you know me?” I was in the darkness again, our thread wrapped around me. Tor’s hands gripped my shoulders, keeping me anchored.
“Yes, it’s me. I knew you’d come. We’ve been waiting for you. We’re in trouble.”
“I know. I saw. Where are you?”
“You mean you’re not here? You’re not going to rescue us?” He didn’t sound panicked, only sad.
“No, we’re coming, Pax. We’re coming! Where are you?” Tor’s fingers dug in, making my bones creak.
“I don’t know. In a house. In a town. There is a river. Follow us.”
“Can you be more specific?” The silence was long. Had I lost him again?
“There is a…a windmill? I…”
“Pax? Pax!” He was gone.
“Are you trying to break my back again?” I snapped at Tor. He dropped his hands. My insides churned with nervous energy. “Tor, we have to go. We have to leave here and find them. They need our help.”
“Ailith, look, I want to help them, but we need to be careful. In my opinion, we should wait, try to speak to him again. Find out more information.”
“We don’t have time. We... No, I don’t care. I’m going. You want to stay here? Fine. I’m going, with or without you.” I didn’t want to do that.
The look in his eyes told me he knew I was telling the truth. Knew it and resented it.
He dug his knuckles into his eyes. “Okay. I admit, I’d like some answers. We go, but we don’t rush in blindly, okay? We need to find out what we’re walking into.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
“What? Now? I was thinking more in a few days, once we’ve gathered supplies. We don’t even know where we’re going, do we?”
“No, but I can feel the general direction. We’ll worry about the rest when we’re closer.”
The next connection happened before I saw it coming.
Tor’s voice cut out and another sliced its way in.
“While I fully understand the desire to create these artilects to watch over us and solve humanity’s problems with resource allotment, fair distribution of wealth, prevention of civil or global conflict, and the like, and while I also understand that the best interest of every human being on the planet would be considered for and provided for, I still have to ask this question: who will be watching over them?”
—Della van Natta, Artificial Life or Artificial Hope?
“You’re doing it, and that’s final!”
I used to think the worst thing to be in my echelon was young, rich, and good-looking. Too much of any one of these was bad enough, but all of them? Goodbye, freedom.
In my case, I only suffered from one of the three: I was young. I wasn’t attractive, not by my mother’s standards. She despaired at my dusky skin, my bobbed hair, and my sparse mouth. Her own skin was the color of a white peach, her mouth a plump cupid’s bow.
We weren’t rich enough, either. Not grossly rich, anyway. Hence their plan to shove me into this Pantheon Modern thing. They hoped that if I became a cyborg, I would tempt one of the loaded Cyborgist magnates to marry me.
I rolled my eyes, the mascara I’d caked onto my lashes this morning cracking.
“You do appreciate that we’re living in the 21st century, right? That whole porcelain-doll thing is kind of over. Like, thirty years ago, over.”
“Perhaps among ‘them’ it is.” My mother sniffed.
‘Them’ referred to anyone who wasn’t us, the stupidly rich. Well, rich enough that their only daughter couldn’t choose what kind of career she wanted, or who she wanted to marry. Like their parents before them, they’d sent me to Canada under the guise of being a student, to be their proxy and allow them to legally own an extensive property portfolio of high-rises and apartment buildings. They’d also hoped I’d find a suitable husband, like that was still a thing.
Unfortunately, I’d turned out to be a decent student. When my marks came in for my first semester, my parents had rushed to rescue me from a life of independence.
“Your grades don’t matter,” they’d told me. “What do you need good grades for? Your husband won’t care.”
I didn’t buy that. Surely men wanted a wife who had her own interests? Not according to my mother. And since everything I’d been born with wasn’t acceptable either, becoming a cyborg was apparently
the only way to compensate for the sheer disappointment of my existence.
“Does this not seem a bit extreme to you? I mean, seriously? A cyborg? How do you know I’ll get in?”
“You’ll be accepted,” my father said, his voice firm, decided.
“You’ve bought me a place,” I accused him. “But I haven’t graduated yet! That was the deal: I get my degree then we’d talk about everything else. What’s changed?”
My mother couldn’t keep silent any longer. She unpursed her lips long enough to blurt out, “And you’re working at that place! My daughter.” She covered her eyes with her handkerchief, and my father placed a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.
“You mean the bar?” I’d recently taken a job as a hostess at an artisanal gin bar near the university. “It’s hardly a brothel.” I couldn’t help but laugh. “It’s just a bit of fun, not a career.” I examined the manicure on my left hand. It was chipped, the fingernail torn. Something else to worry about.
“Do you want to kill your mother?”
“What? No, of course not. I—” I couldn’t believe this was a real conversation. My parents were traditionalists, orthodox even among their own peers, but this was ridiculous. No one thought this way anymore.
“Okay, look, I’ll quit my job at the bar. It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re doing the program at Pantheon Modern.”
Fear trickled into my stomach. I’d assumed it was just a bargaining chip. “No. You can’t make me do it. It’s absurd! You don’t know what will happen. What if I die?” The jagged edge of my torn fingernail cut into the palm of my hand.
My words were met with stony silence.
“You would rather have me die than embarrass you by being ordinary?”
“You’ve already brought enough shame on us.”
“Shame? What shame?” I asked, although I was pretty sure where this was going.
“That boy.”
Damn. They did know. Julien was a third-year literature student I’d met at work. Yes, he was poor. He was also white, the wrong color for my Chinese parents. “So what? Everybody dates in university. It’s not like I’m going to marry him.” Which was a blatant lie. I would marry him tomorrow if he asked. Not because I loved him—I didn’t—but because it would encourage my mother to ignore me for life.
“You’re doing it.” My father’s voice was slightly raised, which for him was akin to screaming. The fear pooled, cold and deep.
“No. You can’t make me.” My voice cracked, and I wanted to slap myself. Be strong.
“You will, or you will be cut off. You will have nothing. No university, no apartment, no nice clothes…all of it will be gone.”
“You can’t—”
“I can, and I will.”
Against my better judgment, I glanced at my mother, hoping to find some kind of mercy, or at least sympathy. Instead, her smile was malicious. Finally, she’d brought me to heel.
Much as I hated to admit it, I wasn’t able to live without them. It wasn’t only the luxury, although I needed a certain level of comfort to be happy. Deep down, I was too well-trained, a dutiful daughter. I knew it, they knew it, and I hated all of us for it. Loving and obeying them was too ingrained in me, it was in my blood. So I bowed my head in acquiescence.
If I did this, would they finally love me back?
“Where will it end? Since they look like humans, talk like humans, and think like humans, are they human? Can artificial life ever truly be sentient? Or do we merely pretend it can in order for us to free our slaves? They were never intended to be equals. We would never have built them otherwise. So why do we create slaves then feel the need to raise them up?”
—Derek Wills of the Preserve Terra Society, 2039
Despite Tor’s misgivings, we set out early the next morning. He wanted to avoid the roads, but since we were surrounded by mountains, we had to stay close enough to use them when necessary. We crept through the woods like fugitives, and in a sense, we were. In an hour, we were further from the house than I’d ever been. Tor gazed back the way we’d come. I reached out and took his hand, startling him. A few seconds later, he squeezed mine back. I wasn’t entirely sure where we were going, only that we were headed in the right direction.
Even though it was morning, the sky was as dim as ever, the clouds heavy with the promise of rain. It was a lie; the dryness of the air told me otherwise. The same uniform gray stretched across the horizon, unbroken by any shafts of light. Tor had said there was more sunlight now than last year. He was hoping this was yet another sign the climate was starting to recover. I didn’t see how it was possible.
The woods around us were eerily quiet, the trees nothing more than dead wood, starved and barren. If they were anything like the trees back home, these skinny, naked relics must have been lush before the war, heavy with green needles and thick, fissured bark. Now they were covered in black and silver patches, a flimsy husk that peeled off to expose the pale wood underneath. Clusters of dead needles and abandoned bird-nests still clung to some of the drooping branches, but most lay in a thick russet-brown blanket on the ground, mingling with long-dead vegetation that had yet to completely break down. The ground was hard and brittle and odd beneath my feet. Where I was from, the forest floor was spongy with moss, slick with moist leaves.
My father once told me that life always prevailed, in one form or another. He’d been referring to the windswept acres of land he’d bought cheap from the government on the condition he grew food for the provincial program. He’d jumped at the chance. When he was young, farming had been an unpredictable source of income at best; at worst, it was literally living hand-to-mouth. All that had changed when I was nearly five. Real food became a valuable commodity again, and the annual stipend ensured that farms like ours flourished.
The closer I looked, the more I saw signs of life. Not all the plants were dead. Some, in fact, were thriving. True, they were stunted and small, with shallow roots, but they were growing. Most I didn’t recognize, but some seemed to bear fruit.
Tor had said that the nanites protected us against poison. I knelt next to a small shrub with pink, bell-shaped flowers and coral-red berries.
Is red a good sign or not?
Saying a quick prayer, I popped one into my mouth. Its texture was mealy and dry, and it didn’t really taste of anything. A few minutes later, it hadn’t killed me, so I filed the information away for later use. I wanted to stop and gather more, but we didn’t exactly have time for berry-picking.
I was examining some tracks in the snow that appeared to belong to a massive dog when Tor grabbed my arm. With a finger to his lips, he gestured in the direction we were going. It took me a few seconds to make out what he was pointing at, blended as it was with the mottled earth. It was clearly some kind of machine, but I couldn’t quite…
My breath caught in my throat.
It was a military mech. I’d seen one on television when I was in the hospital, in a documentary about combat prototypes. These particular ones were controlled directly by soldiers, who rode encased in the mech’s chests, their heads protected by a polycarbonate dome. The film had shown them loping with a stilted gait across the training ground, heads swiveling from side-to-side as they sought the next target with their weaponized arms.
It lay flat on its back, unrusted. The stubby grass growing around it seemed to shrink back from the metal of its jointed limbs. As we edged closer, I searched for damage on its dull, armored plating and found none.
Tor put a hand on my arm, holding me back. “It might still be active.”
I shook my head at him. It was dead. It had been for years. Creeping closer, I peered into the cockpit, where the skeleton of its driver was still buckled in. The body was intact, held together by sinew and desiccated skin, its mouth gaping in wonder or shock.
Which side had they been on? The mech itself bore no identifying marks. What was it doing out here in the middle of nowhere, so far away from any city or town? Had its pas
senger been running away from a war they didn’t believe in? Were they hunting down survivors? Pariahs like us?
In my mind, a dark thread lurking behind the others shuddered, pulling me in. What I would’ve called human thoughts bled through me.
So fragile. So quick to break. Cannot be rebuilt. Wrong. Wrong. Get away. Far away. You cannot leave me. I cannot run if you’re not inside me. Your fault. Keep moving. Wrong. Don’t stop, don’t stop. You are inside me. Forever. Forever.
“Ailith!” Tor gripped my shoulders, shaking me. “What’s happening?”
Gone, gone, gone.
The thread crumbled and disappeared, leaving an even darker blackness behind.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s gone.” But as I turned away, I caught a flash of something in the trees. I walked a few steps toward it, searching. Nothing. I was about to turn around when a dark shape hurtled toward me. Coarse feathers brushed my face and were gone, a faint flapping in the distance.
“Are you all right?” Tor called.
“Yes. I thought I saw something, but it was just a stupid bird.” But even as I turned away, the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
***
A few hours later, the duskiness of the sky had deepened to violet. We’d covered a surprising amount of ground in a single day; apparently, increased stamina was another perk of being a cyborg.
“Shall we just stop for the night?” Tor asked. “I’d hoped to come across another cabin for us to camp in, but they seem to be in short supply in the middle of nowhere.”
“We should’ve stopped at that village a few miles back. I bet there would’ve been plenty of options there.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “No way. I want to avoid any group of houses. We just don’t know who might be staying there. I’m sure they’d feel the same about us.”
“But what’s the chance anyone will actually be there? You know, with the apocalypse and all?”
