by Lavie Tidhar
All is numbers; all is data. From me the cortices keep no secrets.
§
The periphery of Intharachit was a ruin where nothing would grow. Passing through the field my teeth rattled. Colors tinkled against my gums.
Drones flitted out of the Khrut, hissing into chameleon state. We waited and watched. Other carriers were in range; each ship pulsed communications to the next on organic frequencies that, shifting in constant flux, matched no League signal.
The League had built machine–gods of their own, in the forms of long–legged, earthbound automata with graceless armed heads and hammerhead sharks that flew on rotating blades. No echoes. Our drones found one of the factories where the bombs and reactor cores were assembled, and Kanrisa’s cadre followed.
Starbursts shredded the night, laying it bare: in the wake of this I breathed shallowly, so thinly my lungs trembled with need. I had seen the voices in still life — in motion they were something else.
League constructs were ugly. The voices were beautiful, and sang. Engineering made poetry, I thought, sounding out the brothers’ phrase in spite of myself.
Kanrisa’s voice spread its limbs, anti–grav wingblades fanning wide to let her hover as she coordinated other echoes. Mindless airborne drones rushed at her, and were swept away under disruption signals from the voice’s vast mouth. They fell in a hail of dead metal and whirring mandibles.
Some semblance of order, now, in the factory. The larger machines lumbering into combat, sighting down ours. They were cumbersome, their targeting sluggish. Viraya swooped down, her voice’s arms a blur of brilliant edges, and tore them apart.
Between all this I was tuned into Kanrisa’s channel. My heart beat to her rhythm — I felt invincible and could have forgotten what I was meant to do had the instruments not reminded me. I mightn’t have made friends among the crew, but I had made plenty among the cortices. Panels thrilled to my touches, loops of machine–ghosts whispering within me as I hoped Kanrisa one day would. In my hands the data streams knitted, flowed into a sea that washed over me in blue–white waves.
I was with her.
And so, well before anyone cupped in cradles that let us swim in the river cortex, I felt the anomaly. It made me shout with my physical mouth — and therefore useless — a warning that nobody ever heard.
It surged from beneath the mass of fabricators and generators, a matte–grey blur. None of our symbiotes had seen it, and later I would learn that the expedition had never known of it. Some of their engineers had been paranoid enough, vigilant enough, to keep secrets from the first contact party.
This construct was humanoid, four limbs, a head, and nearly as large as the machine–gods that stood guard over our home. A scan told me it carried life signs. Its arms wound tight around its torso as it rose; its face was an oval of gold.
Hardly any reason to panic. On the Khrut we were shielded, well away from the battle. In the voices, each echo was secure. If the League thought merely the sight of an artificial sun would drive us insensate, they would be disappointed.
Then the construct reached out and caught Tephem’s voice in three long, prehensile fingers.
He fought back with cold contempt; in one swipe he severed crude wrist–cords, but it held on. With its free hand, it tore off one wingblade. Permutative metal shifted rapidly, cycling through probability alloys, each invulnerable. But Tephem’s voice was not entirely armored in that. All this creature needed was a puncture wound.
The League machine’s face blazed. A soft, wet noise somewhere in my head and Tephem’s data–stream went black, unraveling from the sea. My horror left my lips in a thin scream.
But he had been overconfident. Others darted out of reach and chipped away at the monstrosity’s grey shell. It was welded in the same material that let League ships withstand spatial distortion; in the face of sonic–flux bursts, it was useless.
As it died in cascades of sloughing shrapnel, I heard the wails, subliminal, of the League men and women that piloted it.
It wasn’t the only such machine — three had been successfully made, three unleashed against us. During that first foray, we lost four voices, four echoes.
In those days, Kanrisa spoke to no one, carrying out each attack as the orchestrating focus with precision matched by few other cadre leaders. Under her guidance, generators were torn into shockwaves that destroyed Intharachit cities. One factory after another unseamed into pulped flesh and melted slag. The League had tried for cycles to bring their growth under control, crowding more and more thickly into slivers of land, building upward and downward: ugly spires thrusting into the sky and stabbing roots deep into the earth. In five turns of night we quartered, then halved, their residential density.
Still I did not know peace.
Tephem had been a stranger. I don’t believe we ever had a complete conversation together. To me he existed in sideway correlations — Pattama’s nephew, Kanrisa’s colleague, a lover, on and off, of Viraya’s. Even so, his death gripped me and would not let go. Perhaps entrenched in Kanrisa’s channel at the time, I assimilated her grief for my own. Even apart from that, I couldn’t comprehend that an echo was gone, so quickly and simply. Whatever else Manop/Padon had said, Bodhva who successfully integrated into a machine–god were rare. It was such a precious, intricate process. And now four had died, together with their voices. Irrevocably they had died. I relived, each time I slept, that one moment and imagined that I could reach across the ships and touch the other echoes, too, as they fell.
§
A communiqué was broadcast on League bands in stammering, erratic stabs. It found us, as it was meant to, and in their staccato language told us this: We will not surrender. We will break your god–speakers. We hide, we rebuild, and while we live, we will not share this earth with you. You are few; we are many.
The twin brothers sneered, jointly. “Like ants are many, and us crushing them underfoot by the colony. Don’t they realize they’re outgunned, outmatched, that they’re barely more than shit–slinging apes? All that bluster.”
No one laughed with them.
“Can they do that?” I had never seen Viraya show fear. A flicker of it crept down the roots of her hair, to limn the corners of her eyes. “Where did they get our forensic samples?”
Pattama shook her head. “They didn’t. An idle threat, a bluff. There wasn’t enough left of my younger sisters’ son. Even if there were, I doubt they can manage the most elementary manipulation — let alone bioweapons. There’s been no evidence they are capable.”
How desperate I was to believe that she was untouched, impervious to loss. We all needed that.
Kanrisa stared at the screen where the words shimmered and said nothing. I was behind her, centimeters away. In a gesture as personal as I could ever make myself perform in public, I wound my arms around her waist. “They aren’t all wrong, Pattama–elder. Number to number there are thousands of them to each of us. In time, they will rebuild and try to make good their promise. One way or another.”
“What would you, then?” Pattama looked at me.
“Kanrisa,” I whispered. “What do you want?”
She turned to me, my intended, and the honed point of her gaze made me ache. “I want them gone.”
It contradicted our original objective, but none protested. In that we were aligned, as voice to echo.
§
The cortices wanted to soothe me out of mourning and my chip purred equilibrium protocols, webbing me in childhood fractals and haptics. I ignored them — the only time I ever did — and pored over League censuses: physiology metrics, mortality rates and life expectancy. In the last I found sharp drops. Their population was still growing faster than could be sustained, but for some age brackets there were psychological fractures that culminated in random violence and suicide. In one of their administrative divisions, nine out of ten adolescent males had died of marrow poisoning. Within a capital city, there had been a period just before their exploratory mission
where all infants born had emerged with tumors lodged deep within their cerebra.
I investigated further. There were genome models and a veritable library of DNA samples we had downloaded from their quaintly obsolete servhosts.
Their phenotype spectrum was vanishingly thin and their gene pool had diminished to a puddle. Each generation carried diseases and gave them to the next, conditions more and more hardcoded. The League was dying a protracted, incestuous death. They were inbreeding into extinction because they’d extinguished any genetic material not precisely like their own.
Knowing this made it simple. The analyses I ran after that were some of the most uncomplex I had ever done: cross–referencing the indices, diagnosing the common links and afflictions. I sent them to Pattama, who pinged back almost immediately requesting an optimal target.
“The northern city,” one of the twin brothers said from a cradle adjacent to mine. This was the one who’d made acquaintance with my fist. “They are the healthiest. It’ll demoralize them best.”
“Yes.” I sent that back to Tephem’s aunt, remembering the female I had guided through Pojama. She had died painlessly.
“Where’s Kanrisa? This is her idea. I thought she’d be looking over your shoulder.”
“She is resting.” Kanrisa hadn’t slept much. When I could, I would go into her room, climb into her bed, and she would cup my body with hers, one hand closed over my stomach. Only then did she fall into dreams.
“Hey. I’ve always wanted to know, why Kanrisa? I know, the Abacus, but you don’t seem like the type who’d just walk up to her and make such a scene — all those people, that day — just because the Abacus gave you a name.”
“You were there?”
“I was landscaping.”
I frowned. “You are such a child. And I didn’t take her hand simply because of the algorithms. I saw her and chose.” I couldn’t not have, I did not tell him. Her pull had been gravitational, sun to my star.
“What about me then? I’m not that incompatible.”
“I have Kanrisa. What do I want with you?”
He blinked, then widened his eyes. “You’re a monogamist?”
My face must have colored. “None of—”
“My business, yes, but it’s just I’ve never actually met… I swear, I’ve found more spontaneous cohesion in gibbercrypt than monogamists. So you’ll live in your own household?”
“Sharing with my siblings. Why am I even telling you this?”
“Because you want to tell it to somebody. Honestly, though. Monogamy.” He unlinked and threw up his hands. “Unbelievable. Are you sure?”
“Kanrisa and I are content with just one at a time. Now shut up before I punch you again.”
A long sigh of bliss. “See? You can tell me apart from my brother after all. That’s why I wish you would consider us. Maybe in half a cycle? People do change, you know.”
§
I have decided to attend Viraya’s wedding, after all. That is what friendships are like: a net of obligations and social niceties.
The old faces are all there, the familiar names. Both twin brothers, Pattama, Surada, the crews of the Khrut and the Samutthevi. I have even brought some of the Khrut’s cortices, which I’d adopted as part of my compensation, and they chatter away in my wrists, at the back of my neck: recognizing and regaling each other with tales of this or that ship hand. It keeps me calm and reassured, to be surrounded by their dialogue.
It’s a modest wedding. Viraya is marrying a man, an ambigendered and two women. As matrimony goes, it isn’t a large union (my parents began with six, and over time the conjugation grew to nine) and out of the would–be partners I know only Viraya and another, a quantum navigator recently instrumental to solar–systems crossing. These new ways of traveling, in leaps and bounds through space–time, make me feel old. I could be up there; affinity–class data savants are always in demand. But much keeps me earthbound. Out there in the beyond, communication can get tattered, too slow to catch up with vessel speed. Too many uncertainties, and these days I want the solidity of sureness. Of knowing where I am, what I do.
Most would be hard–pressed to believe I was part of the force that destroyed Intharachit. I’m so much less. Just another administrative worker with a monthly salary.
I don’t dream of past glories. I don’t dream of exhilarating voyages through doors spun out of herded probabilities. In my bed surrounded by the susurrus of cortices, I dream merely of her.
“Life is more than that,” one of my sisters would say. “Find another, younger sister, and laugh again.”
“This is the life I’ve chosen. I won’t laugh until she is well.”
The earth shudders; would–be spouses giggle, arms linked, as grass and soil swell.
“Life is more than that,” one of my mothers would say. “Seek the stars, penultimate daughter, and smile again.”
“This is the life I’ve chosen. I won’t smile until she is well.”
I watch the brother who didn’t visit Umadu as he brings his arms down and the ground cracks open, thrusting up a bounty of persimmons and chrysanthemums. I watch him as he accepts congratulations for a job well done and, disentangling, strides toward me on feet that don’t quite touch the grass. “Jidri. I didn’t think you would come. What a sight you are! So long unseen.”
“Our careers branched apart.”
“That they did. You don’t belong there, webbed in those antique cortices, rerouting old tech. Up there is where you should be. Finding out just how many dimensions comprise our universe. Be part of the cutting–edge.”
Life is more than that. “I like doing what I do.”
He shakes his head. “You have changed, but then who hasn’t. Have you reconsidered?”
“I’ve been told you only wanted me to keep your twin from individualizing himself.”
A disbelieving chortle. “My brother and his dog’s mouth.”
“For the record, I’d sooner marry him, if he didn’t already belong to four spouses.”
“Not sharing well even now?”
“I never will. A monomaniac, remember? That’s what you called me after you were done with ‘monogamist.’ ”
“You are, though I’m sorry for the tone I used then.” He sighs and newly blossomed flowers rustle with him. “Please, Jidri. Life is more than Kanrisa.”
“Kanrisa is the life I’ve chosen for myself.”
§
From the strands of my indices and extrapolated models Pattama teased out an answer to Kanrisa’s question.
The northern city was the wealthiest on the continent. I expected more from them than the swarming anthills of other Intharachit states. But what I saw was scarcely better, a riot of squalor and starvation. The air churned with disease, dust, despair. Pattama’s cultivar wasn’t going to be a retaliatory strike after all, but a mercy. A way out.
We introduced the strain into their rebreathers, which vainly tried to purify the filth it inhaled from the city’s throats. We put it into the tanks that processed fluid waste and recycled it into a semblance of water.
During the first week little happened, and in this lull I spent my time with Kanrisa. We were past the negotiation stage and, ignoring nominal protests about chain of command (which barely existed and hardly mattered), she migrated to my cabin. We kept a touch of resistance so infinitesimal it couldn’t be expressed numerically even as we stretched it out: testing its tensile strength, its elasticity. Anticipation of what we’d set in motion made it hard to think of anything else, even while we slept skin to skin. It was good to do so, all the same, each shared touch piquant. Tense.
(There were warning signs. A look in the distance. Fleeting instants when Kanrisa was not with me but went somewhere else, chasing Tephem’s ghost. Back then I hadn’t realized the extent of her unique nature. Why the way she functioned as echo was unlike anyone else’s.)
“I can’t stop thinking how it might have been different.”
“If you keep
doing that you will end up like Zhuyi,” I told her as I undressed and climbed into bed. She was warm from a fresh hematocyte intake and smelled of psychometric links. Intoxicating. With her I never needed simul–input bombardment, my addictive of choice, to fall delirious and trembling. “All his time spent in simulations, running that one moment through fifty, a hundred, a thousand scenarios.”
“Who’s that?”
Sliding my hand under the gap between her spine and the bed, I frowned. “One of my brothers? I must have told you about him — the one whose marriage fell to pieces, so he keeps replaying a sim to find out what he did wrong. It’s all very sad and he refuses to put his name back into the Abacus.”
Kanrisa tickled my collarbone with her tongue. “You might have mentioned him in passing. I forgot. Do you think I will regret this? Calling for what I did.”
I wrapped myself tight around her. “Never. And if there’s ever regret it will be mine, too. I won’t let you carry it alone.”
Our monitoring cortices went into a frenzy when the infected city came apart. I listened to some of the chatter. Cries for help. Emergency dispatches. Pattama’s virus had targeted their arteries; out of everything, it was what we knew best. It thinned their plasma, and thinned it again, until what went through their veins was like water. From their pale, diluted mouths, they retched pale, diluted hemorrhage as they clawed themselves open. This fluid, not blood anymore, puddled in their streets and soaked the tiny rooms in their beehive houses. It lapped at their windows and gave life to frail weeds in the interstices of their walls. They wept it in deep, wracking shudders, and died in throes of asphyxiation as their lungs drowned.
In the midst of this, one of the other ships — the Samutthevi — pinged us with a set of coordinates and a message: We have found them.
What remained of League military command had submerged themselves in radio silence after broadcasting that one challenge. No communication of any kind, minimal power usage: they’d retreated, as deep as they could, into a pre–tech state. Only through chance did one of the Samutthevi’s drones catch a glimpse of an engineer out to obtain food supplies. From there it divided itself, splitting into transmitter and receiver. The first latched onto him, integrating into his nervous system; the other returned to the Samutthevi. In discreet pulses it sent back schematics, an inventory of equipment and personnel.
