by K. Gorman
She nodded. “Shinji. Bella. Takahashi.”
Energy rippled from the tank. For the briefest moment, Tia―the real Tia―reached out and brushed the edge of Karin’s psyche.
“Tia Origin,” she said.
Hah. I like that, the Tia in her head said.
After a moment, the energy retreated back in.
Karin took a moment to examine the brain.
It wasn’t what one expected. It held a darker shade than the stale, coffee-stain-colored preservations she’d seen in her university days and on the net, and a more rigid structure. Where she’d expected a human brain to become somewhat loose and spongy, Tia’s had developed an angular quality with its brain stem and cybernetics, looking more like an odd sort of angelfish than something preserved. The cybernetics connected to every single part of it, fanning out in a ripple of fiber optics like tiny tendrils of metallic sea grass, all gathering toward the Cradle at the top. Implants wove through the nodes and structures, some pieces bridging apparent gaps and connecting things.
Seeing it made her jaw clench.
Just what kind of man would do this to a person? And then leave her to rot for over seventy years, stuck in her own world, abandoned to the slow decline of corrupting software and malfunctioning systems.
Like I told you before, those two have little regard for human life, Tia thought, her tone laden with derision. I spared you the memories of them removing my brain.
Karin’s heart stuttered. Jesus Christ, you were awake for that?
No, no. But I remember them positioning me on the table and putting me under.
She couldn’t imagine going through that. Saying goodbye for the last time, knowing that they were about to crack open her skull and spine and remove her nervous system…while keeping her alive.
I’m a medical marvel, Tia mused, considering her brain in the tank. I suppose I have that going for me. Does the Guinness Book of Records still exist?
No idea. It probably got blown up in the last Earth war.
Probably.
“You’re talking to her right now, aren’t you?” Nomiki said. “Tia, right?”
She’d been watching her closely for the past few seconds. Karin had noticed, but hadn’t reacted.
“Yes,” she said. “The Tia in my head, though, not the original.”
“Hmm.”
Karin’s gaze drifted over the nearest table, taking in the cybernetics. On the far left, she noticed a newer drone camera with its back unscrewed and wires sticking out of it.
“We’re figuring out how to connect that,” Shinji said, following her gaze as he walked over. “The Cradle uses atypical connections, so we’ve had to find manuals for them. Fortunately, Alliance keeps a good file system in its technical database.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And we’ve found scans of Tia’s…Takahashi, what did you call it?” Shinji snapped his fingers, struggling for the word. “Connect-a-something?”
“Connectome,” Takahashi said without looking up from his notes.
“Yes, that. It’s a…like a system image for the brain, except also including the hardware. A map of Tia’s neural connections, including a system of activity. Each of these wires monitors, stimulates, and connects a different piece of brain tissue, and they all collectively map it together.”
Tia’s attention was still on the camera.
The second-worst thing about transplantation was not being able to see. The worst was not being able to breathe, but never dying, Tia thought. Just…continuing to exist.
Karin glanced over at the tank. “She’s suspended in an oxygenated liquid, right?”
“Yes. It’s some sort of blood substitute, but more complex than that.”
“Does it monitor oxygenation levels?”
Shinji frowned. “Yes? Of course.”
“Connect her to those. She’ll appreciate it.” She stepped farther in, examining the rest of the table. “How is she, anyway?”
“Ancient,” Bella said. “But feeling better. The human brain isn’t the ideal structure for an isolated, in vivo suspension like this. Whoever did the cybernetics installed extra valves to help with that, but a few of them had failed, leading to less-than-great oxygenation levels in some areas. With her permission, we managed to inject a load of nano to help unglue some of them. We’re waiting on a delivery of replacement valves.”
Inside her mind, Tia was taken aback.
“Sounds good,” Karin said.
“We’re also figuring out how to hook a replacement battery without causing her to lose power. Her logs indicate an increasing amount of shut-down fail-safes occurring over the years, and her last backup is currently…” Bella winced and made a teeth-sucking sound. “Out of commission.”
“It was full of cockroaches,” Shinji explained.
A sudden, dizzying throb of disgust caught her throat. She wrestled it down.
Cockroaches. They left me to rot with the cockroaches.
We’re going to kill them, she reminded Tia. Both of them. Viciously.
Yes, well. We better get that young man of yours in the other room talking. I’m starting to think Fallon doesn’t want Sasha found.
Karin chewed her tongue, stewing on the situation.
“Has anyone asked the Centauri about this?” she said, voicing her question to Nomiki from earlier. “They seem to be pretty down with cybernetics.”
Shinji shook his head. “They’re not even allowed in the same room. Fallon’s afraid they’ll trash it.”
“With good reason,” Bella said. “They’re the enemy. Why wouldn’t they trash it?”
I don’t know, maybe someone should ask them, she thought.
Tsk, tsk, Tia replied. They do have a point. Until we know what’s going on with the Centauri, we have no way of reasoning how they would or would not behave.
Yeah, yeah.
Movement caught her attention on the other side of the glass wall. Soo-jin met her gaze as she swept past, moving at a speed and stiffness that was unlike her, her bottom half a blur of black beyond the pane’s occasional frosting.
She caught Karin’s eyes and held her stare, then very deliberately ticked her head to the side and made a gesture to the corridor, the glow of her netlink screen obvious in the hall.
Karin straightened.
Did she talk to the Centauri?
She glanced around to find Nomiki watching her with a suspicious eye.
Clearly, she’d noticed the exchange.
Karin met her eyes and stepped away. “I’m just going to go…do something.”
Her sister’s eyes turned toward the ceiling. “Good lord, you need to work on subterfuge.”
“If ever I did around you, I’d question our relationship.”
Nomiki made a dismissing motion with her hand. “Go on. Get. Fill me in later.”
She found Soo-jin halfway down the next hall, leaning against the wall with a grim expression on her face. When Karin strode up, her tension only increased.
She frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Read this.”
With a flourish, she snapped the screen of her netlink up and blocked the back of it with the palm and fingers of her hand. Immediately, an offline notification buzzed across the top, along with an increasing number of notifications from apps, webplayers, and netfeeds that couldn’t find a connection.
A simple message glowed on the screen, written in an unsaved text file with the editor still open.
‘Tillerman says that you are their new Grand Regent.’
Chapter Twelve
“You take me to the nicest places, Karin.” Soo-jin glanced around as they walked down the compound’s halls, her expression a mix of fear and dislike.
“Oh, you know me,” she replied, her tone cool and acerbic. “Just your local genetically modified creation goddess, trying to hook up a friend.”
As usual, the Shadow world had twisted the compound’s halls into hushed, desaturated variants of themselves.
Perhaps it was the lack of people, but it felt quieter here. Not so much abandoned―nothing ever felt abandoned in the Shadow world, for some reason―but…filled with a tension she couldn’t quite place.
As if there were hundreds of ghosts in the room, but she just couldn’t see them.
Of course, there were still many random piles of decaying, half-mutilated corpses and putrefied stains of human blood puddles and splatter lying around.
She decided to avoid the top floor for now. That’s where she’d left the worst of her massacre.
When they came out of the bottom door, its hinges and pushbar squeaking loudly in the quiet, the forest below lay dark and dead silent. Above, a slow roil of cloud shifted, the bottoms of its edges blurred as if by rain. In between the two, the sky had a drained, sepia tint to it.
It was always weird in the Shadow world. As if the very air leeched the color out of things.
Who knew. Maybe it did. Ever since she’d stepped out of a genetic engineering tank with the ability to split people in half between dimensions, she’d stopped trying to apply modern logic to these things.
And even Tia didn’t have answers to the Shadow world.
I never came here, myself, she thought. I knew the logistics of it, but never experienced it. Does that mean that Sasha didn’t create it?
Karin grunted. “Humans have had stories of a Shadow world for time untold. I sincerely doubt Sasha made this place.”
“What?” Beside her, Soo-jin gave her a confused look.
In response, she made a gesture at her head, the same as one might make when on an internal comms line.
Perhaps. Or maybe this was created by the original Chaos, and she just happened to access it.
It wasn’t possible to give Tia a flat stare inside of her head, but she tried anyway.
“I’m shocked, Tia. I thought you were a woman of science. Gods and Goddesses aren’t real.”
Their archetypes sure are―how else do you think your powers work? Without that subconscious belief, we’d be nothing. Besides, a scientist is also capable of subscribing to religion. I had plenty of religious colleagues.
“Were the Corringhams religious?” she asked.
Yes. Some sort of paganism. I didn’t ask, but both Bernard and Elliot kept statues in their offices.
Huh. That could explain their interest in such a unique experiment as the Eurynome Project.
“That answer was a yes, by the way,” she informed Soo-jin.
“Thanks. I was actually wondering about that one.”
Soo-jin came from a family who followed an ethno-purist cult. She got a little more attentive when religion was mentioned.
“Plus,” she said, swinging back to her conversation with Tia. “I’m not sure I fancy wandering into the literal Goddess Chaos. I think I’m a little too human to be able to survive that encounter.”
Yes. I imagine so.
“Sasha definitely does have a connection to this place, though,” Karin continued. “Her darkness power mimics this place’s…substance, and she can definitely control both the Shadows and the Lost.”
Yes. Tia sighed. I never did get to try out my powers. They put me in the tank soon after.
Karin’s jaw tightened. Tia may not have shared her specific memories of the transplantation, but her imagination could well imagine.
“I’m sorry. What they did to you was horrible.”
So was what they did to you. We’re both in this together. All of us. I’m just horrified that I contributed anything to it. Gods, I was stupid. We were experimenting on living people.
“Then why did you?” Karin said aloud. “If you knew you were experimenting on living people, why did you do it?”
It didn’t start off that way, believe me. They didn’t go straight into the deep end of evil, not at first. But, you know, I’ve often wondered―maybe they did know where they were going with it. Maybe they did know they were going to use living people in their experiments from the beginning. I don’t see how they couldn’t have―the entire Cradle was based on using individuals.
“We can ask them before we kill them,” Karin said. “I’m sure we can find a way to get the answers from them.”
Through torture, you mean? Yes, I am more than willing to do that, if you don’t want to.
She chuckled. “It would be my hands you would bloody. That’s not much of a difference.”
“You know…” Soo-jin cleared her throat. “I’m really glad I know who you’re talking to. Otherwise, this whole one-sided conversation would be bat-shit fucked.”
“It’s even more fucked if you can hear the voice in my head,” Karin answered.
“Yep.” Soo-jin deftly changed the topic and made a gesture to the parking lot ahead. “So, what do you think―head over to their ship?”
“That’s the plan. I figure we port back over once inside. If Tillerman isn’t there, someone can get her for us.”
“And if no one is there?”
She shot Soo-jin a grin. “Then I guess they won’t mind us poking around their ship.”
“Your ship, technically,” Soo-jin said. “If what she said is true.”
“Yes. I suppose, technically, I have an entire fleet now.”
It felt odd, saying it. It didn’t feel real.
Soo-jin stopped with a swear. “Fuck―what if I’m wrong? Should you be doing this? I mean, Fallon seems like they’re good people. What if this is all just one huge, fucked up, paranoid misunderstanding?”
“And what if it isn’t?” she pointed out. “Tillerman said I was the Grand Regent. How could that be misunderstood? If it’s true, then Fallon straight up lied and hid it from me.”
“What if I totally misread her?”
“What if you didn’t?” She glanced over. “We’re just going to talk to her. Nothing is going to happen.”
“What if this is just an elaborate plan to get you close and try to kill you?”
Ah, so that’s what she was worrying about.
“Then I’ll just kill her. Easy.”
Soo-jin was quiet for several seconds. The Shadow they’d passed still hadn’t moved, but Karin could feel its gaze on her. Another one appeared up ahead, stepping out of one of the tech stations, its black surface rippling like a candle flame.
“You really are like your sister now. I keep forgetting. Does it not bother you?”
She shrugged. “It’s just how it is.”
Soo-jin kept staring at her. “Gods, it’s really not going to work with you and Marc, is it?”
She shook her head. “If I continue like this, no, it isn’t.”
“Well, at least you’re honest.”
“Yep.”
Soo-jin let out a noisy breath, turning the end of it into a stressed groan. “She didn’t sound like she was bullshitting me.”
“You can’t bullshit a bullshitter?” she asked. “Especially one who’s bullshitted with the best in the shit industry?”
She was loosely quoting something Soo-jin had said to her once, when the woman had been calling her out on her bullshit.
By the sudden flash of teeth, Soo-jin remembered.
“Pre-fucking-cisely. Fuck―was that a Shadow?”
Soo-jin’s head swiveled to the side.
“There are about twenty of them, so far,” Karin informed her. “Ignore them. I don’t think they mean any harm.”
After about a minute of walking, they had wound their way around the varying tents, ships, and temporary structures that now squished into the compound’s parking lot and were standing in front of the small shuttle the Centauri had been using. The group had been directed to set up a camp on a farm about twenty kilometers to the east, and had done so with zero problems from what she’d heard, with Tillerman commuting to and fro every day.
It looked like one of Nova Earth’s Skim Birds, shuttles used mostly to ferry politicians and other important people around. Bulbous in design, and small, with wings that shot back from it like a starburst when it flew.
And, like all things Centauri, it also looked armored and practical. Where Nova’s Skim Birds kept their armor hidden under an exterior of beauty and poise, this one didn’t hide its armament under pretty paint―it displayed it broadly.
It looked like a shuttle that could turn around and end you if you even sneezed in its direction.
“Shit,” Soo-jin said. “Door’s closed.”
“And armored,” Karin mused.
“Not for long. Come on, I’ve got my equipment on the Nemina.”
Fifteen minutes, and a series of magnetic saw screams later, the back hatch of the Centauri ship was lying on the ground in front of them.
Soo-jin lifted her faceplate, a huge grin eating up her face. “Gods, I’ve been wanting to do that for days. That’s not going to transfer to the real world, is it?”
“No. We can break as much stuff in the Shadow world as we want to without consequences.” She nodded. “Come on, up we get. I’ll switch us back once we’re inside.”
The inside of the ship was tiny, little more than four rear crash seats and a small hallway that led to a two-seater cockpit, but it teemed with instrumentation. Lights flickered from nearly every surface of wall, reminiscent of the shuttles of the Old Earth program, except a thousand years more advanced. Every nook and cranny was jampacked.
This might be my ship, now, she realized. They all might be..
“Fuuuck, man, this is sweet.” Soo-jin plunked herself down in the co-pilot’s chair and spread her fingers at all the screens and instrumentation on the dashboards. About five seconds in, her fingers hesitated.
“Wait,” she continued, coming to a realization. “I can’t fly this. I can’t even read these.”
Karin leaned against the wall just behind the cockpit, taking it all in with an amused smile.
“Yes,” she drawled. “I hope my new fleet comes with some competent pilots, otherwise they’re screwed.”
Sol. My new fleet.
She still couldn’t believe it.
“What if they shoot us?” Soo-jin grunted as Karin hauled her into the lip. “I mean―not that I think they will, but they did strike me as a trigger-happy people, and we’re just going to pop up in their ship.”
