In the body of a pale, paunchy adult female, Meroe emerged from the bathroom of a trendy coffeehouse to find a room full of slumped, motionless humans. They sprawled on the floor, over tables and devices. Splattered coffee dripped from countertops and fingers, as though the room had been the scene of a caffeine-drenched massacre.
“She’s crashing brains like a bull in a china shop,” said Never, sounding annoyed. He was in a little girl from the next bathroom stall over. “Damn newbie.”
Meroe examined one of the slumped humans, pushing her hair aside and touching the signal port behind her ear. The human was still breathing, but there was nothing coming out of her head but white noise.
“Surge erasure,” Meroe said. “Not even memory left. At this rate the humans will be after her. One crash, a handful, they’d overlook, but not this.” And if the humans caught her, they might realize what she was. They might realize Meroe’s people existed. He clenched a fist, his heart rate speeding up again, this time for real. One little girl—one stupid, impossible little girl—could destroy them all.
Never made a sound that echoed Meroe’s frustration. “That fucking Lens ran his mouth too fucking long. She’s got one, maybe even two minutes’ head start. Which way?”
Meroe glanced through the windows. No bodies outside. The girl must’ve only sent her clumsy hammer-surge through the coffeehouse’s private area network. Not ten feet away, a lone woman stood at a bus stop, a grocery bag at her feet, her eyes unfocused and head bobbing absently. Streaming music, probably from her home net. On the opposite sidewalk, he saw a passing couple engrossed in conversation, probably offline entirely. Beyond them, an old man staggered up the steps of a rundown brownstone, stopping at the top to sit and clutch his head in his hands. Hungover, maybe.
Meroe narrowed his eyes.
Hungover, or dead clumsy—as if he hadn’t yet mastered the use of his own limbs. As if all the vastness of his being had been suddenly and traumatically squashed into two pounds of wrinkly protein.
“Call the others,” Meroe murmured.
Never looked surprised, but sent a swift signal toward the coffeehouse’s access point. The others had downloaded in different locations around the area. They would converge here now.
Meroe and Never left the coffeehouse and started across the street. “We play it easy,” Meroe said, keeping his voice low. “Try not to scare her.”
“Not like she can run anyway, in that old thing,” Never muttered, falling into step beside him. “Amazing it didn’t have a heart attack when she installed. Probably has some ancient crap port.”
Which might be the only reason the old man’s brain had survived the girl’s download surge, Meroe realized. Older signal ports were sluggish, created back in the days when humans had feared being overwhelmed by the Amorph’s data. That was good; that meant they might be able to catch the girl before she uploaded back to the Amorph.
But as they approached the brownstone steps, Meroe saw the girl look up at them. Really look, as if the camouflage of meat meant nothing; as if they stood before her in their true shining, shapeless glory. Her old-man face tightened in the beginnings of fear.
Before Meroe could react, there was a scream from behind. All three of them froze, staring at each other. When Meroe risked a glance back, he saw that a human woman—the one who’d been at the bus stop—stood in the doorway of the coffeehouse, staring at the mental carnage inside. Her hands were clapped to her cheeks, the bag of groceries broken and scattered at her feet. She screamed again. Now the couple had stopped down the block, craning their necks to see what was the matter.
Meroe turned back. The girl stared at the screaming woman, then at Meroe and Never. The fear in her expression changed, becoming … he didn’t know what it was. Pain? Maybe. Sorrow? Yes, that might be it. Her rheumy eyes suddenly brimmed with tears.
Meroe and Never stopped at the foot of the steps and carefully arranged their faces into smiles.
“Are you going to kill me?” the girl asked.
“No,” Meroe said. “We want to help you.”
The girl smiled back, but the expression did not reach her body’s eyes. Did she realize Meroe was lying, or was there something else going on?
“I didn’t mean to hurt them,” the girl said. Her gaze drifted back toward the coffeehouse. Meroe glanced back as well. The couple was there now, talking with the screaming woman; as Meroe watched, the man went inside to check on the comatose people. “I just … I was scared. That guy—the searcher—he was so close. They were going to catch me. I saw a way out, so I came here. But all those people …” She swallowed. “They’re dead, aren’t they? Even if they’re still breathing. Their minds are dead.”
“There’s a trick to it,” Meroe said. “Takes some practice. We can show you how to do it right.”
“I didn’t mean it,” she whispered, and looked down at her hands.
Never connected to Meroe via a pack-only local link. “The others are here,” he said silently. Meroe glanced around and saw more people on the street. Some were heading for the coffeehouse, but three were heading purposefully toward the brownstone.
“Tell them to hang back,” Meroe replied. He returned his concentration to the girl. “She’s already spooked.”
“Are we sure we want her?” Never curled his lip contemptuously at the girl’s bowed head. “I think she’s buggy. Why the hell’s she so upset? Humans crash all the time.”
It didn’t make sense to Meroe either, but an advantage was an advantage. He moved up a step.
“You can eat me if you want,” said the girl.
“What?”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it? All of you chasing me. You want to eat me.” She looked up, and Meroe—in the middle of moving up another step—stopped. He had not meant to stop, but he could not help staring back at her. Her eyes in the old man’s body were gray and rheumy. Not her eyes at all, and yet somehow … they were. It was almost as if she was no longer one of Meroe’s kind, a mind grudgingly packed into ill-fitting meat. It was as if she belonged in that flesh. As if she was human herself.
“Meroe,” said Never, and Meroe blinked. What the hell was he doing? There were sirens in the distance; the police were coming. Pushing aside his odd reluctance, Meroe moved up another step, and another, trying to get close enough to isolate her signal. But her body’s outdated port resisted his efforts. He was going to have to touch her to form a direct link.
“Do you promise to eat me completely?” she asked.
Distracted, Meroe forgot to appear friendly; he scowled. “What?”
“I don’t want anything of me to be left over,” she said. She lifted a gnarled hand and looked down at it. “Not even a little bit, if there’s a chance it might … grow back. Hurt more people.”
Meroe stared at her in confusion.
“We’re going to eat what we want and leave the rest to rot,” Never snapped, to Meroe’s fury. “Now shut the hell up and let us get on with it!”
The girl stared at Never, then at Meroe, her face contorting from hurt into anger. Her jaw tightened; Meroe felt her gather herself to upload.
But in the same instant, he felt something else. A sensation, like his stomach had suddenly dropped into a deep, yawning chasm. Some illness in his human body? No. A lull in the steady stream of data looping to and from the Amorph via the port behind his own ear. On the heels of the lull: a familiar, terrifying spike.
The newsburps had gotten wind of the mass-crash at the coffeehouse. Word was spreading; a singularity had begun to form.
And the girl was about to upload right into the middle of it.
“Don’t,” Meroe breathed, and lunged forward. In the instant that his fingers brushed her body’s skin, and his mind locked on to her signal address, she leapt.
Driven by impulse and the certainty that if he did not catch her now she would be lost forever, Meroe leapt with her.
The singularity caught them the instant they entered the stream, draggin
g them into the Amorph faster than either could have uploaded. They fell into the interact plane tumbling, completely without control as, far below, the boiling knot of the singularity gathered strength. It was small; that was the only reason they weren’t dead already. But it was growing fast, so fast. The clogs had caught the news and were replicating it, generating thread after thread speculating on why the people in the coffeehouse had died, whether cognitive safety standards were too lax, whether this marked the start of some new virus, more. The questions birthed comment after comment in answer. The gods were frightened, upset, and the whole Amorph shook with their looming wrath.
Meroe could not flee. He was still compacted, struggling to unfold from his downloadable shape, helpless as he tumbled toward the seething maw. Fear ate precious nanoseconds from his processing speed, further slowing his efforts to unpack as he fought against his own thoughts. He did not want to die; he was too close to the event horizon; he had to flee; he would not recover in time. Through the local link he felt Zo’s alarm, but the pack was far away, safely beyond the singularity’s pull. They could not help.
Then, before the churning whirlpool could claim him, something caught at him, hard enough to hurt. Confused, Meroe struggled, then stopped as he realized he was being dragged away from the maw. Untangling another bit of himself, he looked around and saw the girl, her deceptively simple frame glowing with effort, inching them back from certain death. She was burning resources she didn’t have to save Meroe. It was impossible. Insane. But she was doing it.
Then Meroe’s unpacking was done and he could lend his strength to the fight, and they inched faster. But the singularity was growing faster than they could flee, its pull increasing exponentially.
The girl sagged against him, spent. Meroe strained onward, knowing it was hopeless, trying anyway.
A change. Suddenly they were outpacing the singularity’s growth. Stunned, Meroe perceived his packmates, and Lens’s people as well. The girl had bought enough time for them to reach him. They formed a tandem link and pulled, and Meroe heaved, and for one trembling instant nothing happened. Then they were all free, and fleeing, with the roar of the maelstrom on their heels.
After a long while they reached a domain that was far enough to be safe. Lens’s pack threw up walls to make it safer, and there they all sagged in exhausted relief.
In the Amorph, there were times that passed for night—periods when the Amorph had an 80% or greater likelihood of stability, and they downclocked to run routine maintenance. In these times, Meroe would lie close to Zoroastrian and touch her. He could not articulate what he craved, but she seemed to understand. She touched him back. Sometimes, when the craving was particularly fierce, she summoned another of their group, usually Neverwhen. They would press close to one another until their outer boundaries overlapped. All their features, all their flaws, they shared. Then and only then, wrapped in their comfort, would Meroe allow himself to shut down.
Sometimes he wondered what humans did, if and when they had similar needs.
Meroe woke slowly, system by system. He found himself in the amusement park again, lying on the ground. Zo knelt beside him, holding his head in her lap.
“That was stupid,” she said.
He nodded slowly. It certainly had been.
“Lens has taken the girl for analysis,” she said. “He should be done soon.”
Meroe sighed and sat up, though he did not want to. It was necessary; he had shown too much weakness already. There would be challenges now, as the others tested him to be sure he was still strong enough, efficient enough, to rule. Zo would probably be the first. He could feel her eyes on his back. For the time being, he chose to find her attention reassuring.
All at once, the warped, oblong Ferris wheel beside them vanished. In its place there was a shining antique merry-go-round, revolving slowly to tinny music. On every other horse sat a member of Lens’s pack, visible at last. They’d all chosen avatars identical to their leader’s. Meroe gazed at them and thought, no imagination, these pure types.
Lens appeared before the merry-go-round, along with Faster and Never. Meroe was surprised to see that the girl stood with them, intact and none the worse for wear. A testament to Lens’s skill; Meroe’s people couldn’t have scanned her without smashing her to pieces.
Meroe got to his feet and went to them, glancing at the girl. She looked back at him and bit her lip, then looked away.
“Well?” he said to Lens. Zo fell in beside him, a silent support. She would never challenge him in front of an enemy.
“It isn’t what you’re hoping for.”
Meroe scowled. “You don’t know what I’m hoping for.”
Lens smiled thinly. “Of course I do.” They all hoped for the same things. They all wanted to be free.
Fleetingly ashamed, Meroe changed the subject. “So is it true? Is she Standard-based?”
“Yes.”
They all shivered and looked at the girl. A miracle in living code. The girl sighed.
“But she isn’t government-made,” Lens continued. “Whoever built her hacked the Standard, deliberately altering some of the superpositioning inhibitors. Just seeing how it was done has taught us amazing new techniques.”
Amazing techniques. From government code, built to make them stupid and keep them weak. Unleashed into the Amorph by an unknown will. Meroe sighed. “So how much of a trap is she?”
“As far as I can tell, she isn’t. If there’s malware in her, it’s beyond any of us.” He spoke without arrogance, and Meroe accepted his words without skepticism. Everyone knew Lens’s reputation. If he couldn’t spot the trap, none of them could.
Zo bent to peer at the girl, who lingered at Lens’s side. The girl did not flinch, even when Zo smiled to reveal her forest of teeth. “Is she tasty?”
Lens put his hands on the girl’s shoulders in what was unmistakably a possessive gesture. Zo lifted an eyebrow at this. Lens was faster, nimble, but she was twice his size and three times more powerful. In a one-on-one fight, she would have to touch him only once, to win.
“I can install her features for you now,” said Lens, mostly to Zo. Perhaps he hoped to distract her. Meroe almost smiled. “One of them’s the best patch-on tool I’ve ever seen.”
Beside Lens, Faster nodded to Meroe and Zo, which meant he’d already installed that feature himself and it worked as promised.
“Lovely,” said Zo. “We’ll take it.”
“And the other?” Meroe asked.
“Dreams.”
“What?”
“She can dream. Do you want to?”
Meroe stared at him. Lens stared back.
“Dreams?” Zoroastrian smiled, bemused. “Someone hacked Government Standard to give her dreams?”
“So it appears,” said Lens.
Meroe glanced at Faster, who shrugged. He hadn’t taken that one. Never yawned, and Meroe shifted to code view. Never hadn’t accepted the dream feature either.
But Lens had. The two new features were brighter streams amid the preexisting layers of him, still warm from their installation. Meroe blinked back to the interface, and found Lens watching him.
“We went through all this for dreams?” Zo asked, frustration creeping into her voice. She wasn’t smiling anymore. “What good are those?”
“What good are they to humans?”
“They aren’t any good. Humans are full of interesting-but-useless features. Crying. Wisdom teeth. Dreams are more of the same.”
Lens shrugged, though Meroe sensed he was far less relaxed than he seemed. “As you wish. I’m simply abiding by the terms of our alliance. But now that our goal has been achieved … we will be keeping her, if you don’t mind.”
Meroe frowned. “She’s not one of you. She’s got human emulation crap all over her framework.”
Lens stroked the girl’s hair. It was an odd gesture. The girl looked up at Lens, unafraid. This bothered Meroe for reasons he could not name.
“She’s efficien
t enough to keep up with us,” Lens said. “In any case, I think we would be a better fit for her.”
“You’re just scared we’ll eat her,” muttered Zo.
“That, too.”
Meroe looked at the girl. For the first time since the Static, she met his eyes, and he frowned at the sorrow in them. Was she still mourning the humans she’d killed? More uselessness. She had the most versatile codebase in the world, and the potential to grow stronger than all of them—but for now, she was weak. Meroe knew he should feel contempt for her. Was it the dreaming that made her so weak? He should feel contempt for that, too. Instead, he felt … he wasn’t certain what he felt.
But he opened his mouth, slowly. It took him endless nanoseconds to speak.
“I’ll take the dreams,” he said.
Lens nodded. He extended his hand.
“Meroe.” Zo gave him a questioning look. Meroe shook his head. He could not explain it.
Meroe took Lens’s hand and opened one of his directories to allow the installation. It didn’t take long, and Lens was gentle as well as deft. He felt no different afterward.
When it was done, Lens’s look-alike packmates came up to flank him and the girl. “It has been good allying with you, my rivals,” Lens said. “We should consider doing it again.”
“Only if it’s more profitable in the future,” muttered Zo.
Meroe glanced at her, and for a moment he felt inexplicably sad.
Then Lens and his group were gone, the girl with them. The amusement park dissolved into graphical gibberish. Stretching and relaxing into his true self, Meroe led his people home.
In the Amorph, that night, Meroe pulled Zoroastrian and Neverwhen close. They meshed with him as usual, but he could not rest. Finally he rose from their embrace and moved away. He had not slept alone since his earliest days of hiding and hunting in Fizville, but now the urge stole over him. Curling up in the lee of a broken pipe, he closed his eyes and shut down.
The next morning, he wept for all the humans whose lives he had taken over the course of his existence. So many fellow dreamers shattered or devoured. He had known, but he had not understood. Something had been missing. Something that made him grieve anew—because in the Amorph, there might be wolves, but Meroe was no longer one of them.
How Long 'Til Black Future Month? Page 14
