Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “From what I can put together, Indenture Christopher was trying to get both himself and Ashlan out of their contracts, so he joined a medical experiment that Wellspring was running, one that paid twice as much as mining but required a severe total-body contract for the duration. What he didn’t know was that the experiment was based off some alien technology that Wellspring had salvaged from a battlefield. An alien body that hadn’t evaporated.”

  Keller’s eyes went wide. “Shit, really?”

  “The head scientist on that project was … sympathetic to my own research group, and asked me to quietly consult. Implanting the alien nanotech in human flesh was obviously successful, at least for Indenture Christopher, but he was never able to be put on the battlefield. He was the reason the Vai attacked Bittersweet. He and his fellow bioweapons perished in the attack.”

  “The Vai attacked Bittersweet because it was a major celestium depot,” Keller said. “It supplied half the fleet.”

  Sharma shook her head. “No, but you’ll be forgiven for thinking that. It’s true that Cana, Bittersweet, and Arimathea were all wartime centers of celestium production. That they were Wellspring’s. Not just mines, though: mines and refineries, shipping points, main offices. Scientists. Weapons labs.”

  Keller felt dizzy. “Your connections?”

  Sharma paused. Considered her words. “Why do you think we were dispatched to help with the rescue?” she said. “This kind of technology can’t be trusted to a Company that makes its profit margins by starving its indentures.”

  “So one of your connections on Aurora’s board sent us because of you.”

  “Yes. Christopher had no idea how sick he was. He thought he had celestium sickness, but when I did his autopsy, I found that if a rock hadn’t fallen on his head, he would have been dead long before his citizenship came through. I’d never seen the sickness so bad in someone so young. It matched nothing we knew about the disease. But I still didn’t make the connection, didn’t realize that Ashlan must have contracted the nanotech infection outside the Wellspring weapons lab. It’s only when I looked at Ashlan’s blood work and compared it to Christopher’s that I realized I was dealing with a different illness.”

  “Without her permission.”

  “I had to.”

  “You could have told me.”

  Sharma shook her head. “I couldn’t trust you then.”

  Keller exhaled. “I’m your captain.”

  “No. You loved her.”

  Keller closed her eyes. “You could have trusted me.”

  “She was dying. You both knew it. And there’s no trust in the Auroran medical system. There was very little I could do without turning her over to Mr. Solano and sparking a major health-related fraud investigation that would have put both of you back on Earth and on the dole for good. Stateless. I still have ethics, Kate. Is that what you wanted for her? Is that what you wanted for yourself? Blame me for making sure the two of you could have at least a little happiness, if you have to blame me for anything. Here, let me show you what you’re up against.”

  Sharma stepped back. She walked to the wall and called up her interface, taking a few seconds to bring up a video. It took Keller a moment to realize what she was seeing: a close scan of human blood, rushing not through a vein but swirling in a test tube.

  “Look,” Sharma said.

  Keller narrowed her eyes. In between the obvious erythrocytes, tiny silver machines slipped and swam, attaching to blood cells, clumping together, unnatural metallic clots that swirled in unnatural directions. Keller took a deep, uncertain breath, and shivered again.

  “This is Christopher’s?”

  “No,” Sharma said, pausing. She clasped her hands. “It’s yours. This is the sample Alison took from you while you were unconscious.”

  Keller felt a rushing noise at her ears and a quiet dizziness. She knew that slippery silver surface; the Vai metal always looked just a tad wrong, like spit running down the side of a building on a hot day. Like death. “The hell…?”

  “Nanotech.”

  “It looks Vai.”

  “It is.”

  “Damn—”

  Sharma shut off the display. “They’ll be everywhere by now. Your blood, your brain. I think they’re alive.”

  Keller’s world spun. “I didn’t even know Christopher.”

  Sharma nodded. “But you were … close, with someone who did.”

  In the back of her mind, somewhere in a lost, faraway memory, Ash nestled into the crook of her neck and breathed, warm and trusting, against her ear. The memory made her shiver.

  “You knew? We tried to hide it.”

  The doctor’s mouth twisted. It wasn’t a smile. “It was a logical leap. The alien nanotech is carried inside the body through blood and bodily fluid, much like one of the blood-borne pathogens eradicated a century ago—hepatitis, or HIV, for example. But it also has qualities in common with another sickness we once called meningitis, which can be spread through more casual contact.”

  Keller blinked away sudden dizziness. She felt nauseous and faint and hot. “Then you should have it. Why not Len, or—or Natalie?”

  “The nanotech goes dormant outside a living body. As far as I can tell, it dies fairly quickly, for lack of a better word, outside a host body.” Sharma looked away. “All it took for you and Ash was a kiss. But it could have as easily been a shared cup of coffee.”

  It was as if the ship was tearing away around Keller, as if the air had been replaced with boiling oil. “Stop. Just stop.”

  “She didn’t know.”

  The nausea ceded to rage. Hot bile poured into Keller’s veins, and she stepped forward, her hands forming fists beyond her control. “But you did.”

  Sharma stepped back. Raised her hands. “I made the wrong decision, but what’s important right now—”

  Keller advanced again. “Oh, I’m about to make the wrong decision.”

  The doctor kept her hands raised, her palms facing Keller. “What’s most important right now is to separate that weapon from any person or Company who wants to use it to destabilize our fragile and necessary peace.”

  Keller’s lip curled. “And I have to do it.”

  “You’ve been infected much longer than Alison. She’ll be the only one who can fight you. All you have to do is walk up to the gunnery, take out the guards, pick up the weapon and get off the ship.”

  “Is that all,” Keller deadpanned.

  “It’s a better plan than the one I had before. Medellin will arrive in a few hours; it will have diverted from a nearby system when I did not send an update notice. Specifically Medellin, not Rio. Our people are on both ships, of course, and we’ll deal with whatever you can handle, but Medellin has a framework that can make the weapon disappear. And that’s the point, Kate, to make it disappear. Nobody can have this. Can you imagine? Can you imagine the lives it would destroy? You can back my play, Kate, or you can lose everything.”

  Keller shivered. “Don’t have much of a choice, huh.”

  “That’s it,” Sharma said.

  “I don’t even know how it works.”

  Sharma took a considering breath. “It’s a zero-point battery. I wasn’t lying about that. But it’s unusable in human contexts, because it does something with the energy it holds inside involving the brain’s electrical impulses. The human memory.”

  “How do you know?”

  “This.” Sharma weaved her fingers together and sat on the large medical table in the center of the room. “I had a personal comm device on me before I was taken to the Phoenix. I was flipping through some photographs I’d kept there while I was waiting for Len to get back from the toilet. There’s a child in them. I seem to know her. I’m hugging her, at least … she’s perhaps four, five years old. And I can look at her, and I know she likes rainbows, I know she enjoys cartoons … but I don’t know who she is. She’s a stranger.”

  “That’s your granddaughter,” Keller whispered. “You talked about her all
the time.”

  “Yes.” Sharma looked distant for a moment, then snapped into business mode, straightening her back. “I imagine, sometimes, that I love her very much. I’m theorizing that exposure to the weapon through the isolette erased her memory from my mind. Imagine what it would have done if we’d seen it full-on. Imagine what a Company could do with it, especially if they were able to reverse-engineer these capabilities.”

  The worst part about it was that Keller could imagine what a Company could do. A workforce with no past to worry about had no future beyond what was presented to them. If she couldn’t remember Neversink or Twenty-Five, if she forgot the crisp taste of recycled air, the crack of ice melting on the lake, or, for God’s sake, forgot Ash—

  She took a deep breath. Thought of Ash.

  “What do I do?”

  The doctor turned and walked toward the door, crooking her finger for Keller to approach. She opened a drawer and came out with a piece of silver-white fabric about the size of a small tablecloth, folded it up and gave it to Keller. “They’ve been getting ready for something like this, Kate. This is a new kind of quarantine weave Baywell has developed to block Vai molecular effects toward soldiers in suits. It should do the trick of blocking the battery’s signal long enough for you to get your pod launched and back to Aurora.”

  She then pointed toward the lock. “Just get the device, then get to Medellin. Up seven levels, then a right, then out, down a corridor twenty feet. I believe they have it connected to the main battery in the hopes it can power some of their Vai moleculars. I believe Ramsay plans to use them on our Auroran friends. If I’m right, all you’ll have to do is touch the damned thing, and it’ll be yours. You’ll walk out with it and nobody will be able to stop you.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “Leave me here. It’s actually best that you do. She still needs me to cure her, so I’ll have at least six safe months before I need an evac.”

  “And I’m going to forget?”

  Sharma shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “It won’t matter.”

  Keller’s jaw worked. She shivered. The implications bounced around her head like an unsecured grenade in the back of a station tram. Her hand shook where it had slipped into her pocket and circled the cold steel of the multi-tool but did not move. “Earlier. You said our people, but you didn’t mean Aurora,” she prompted.

  “Yes. I told you I served humanity,” Sharma said. She hopped down from the table and reached behind her neck, grabbing at a silver necklace, drawing it out from underneath her dirty shirt. It was a medallion of sorts on a tarnished chain, like she’d been wearing it continuously for years, in and out of showers and battle zones and hours asleep; Keller only saw a glint as Sharma shoved it over her neck and under her shirt, and then drew her long hair over the name of the stolen coat. She recognized the chain as the necklace that Sharma had draped at the back of her neck since she’d onboarded on Twenty-Five over a year ago.

  “This is how they’ll know you on Medellin. Welcome to the Sacrament Society,” she whispered.

  23

  Kneeling on the floor of the pod bay, flanked by the living and the dead, Ash was clear on only one thing.

  Her memories no longer belonged to her.

  The silver blood slipped into her veins and coursed hot and bright there, and within a few heartbeats, the voices sang under her skin. She felt the Vai peel back her skull and grab her neurons like a bouquet of roses. The voices chorused in inhuman sibilants at first, then in stuttering phrases, then, finally, coalesced into words she could understand.

  Connecting. Connecting.

  Ash was on fire, watching her life flash before her eyes. The voices rushed through her prefrontal cortex, sorting through her entire life like a person searching through a box of printed flimsies: huddling with her mother in the Wellspring tunnels. Signing the indenture documents as a teenager. Her first bleary view of brown-haired Keller. The attack on Bittersweet, the blood in her eyes, Christopher protecting her from the falling rocks above. And then all the memories were of him: Christopher smiling as they pressed their thumbs to the indenture agreement. Christopher brushing celestium dust from her cheek. Christopher playing cards. Wearing his orange sweater. Drinking coffee.

  Stop. He’s dead.

  The words ripped from the darkest place in her body.

  Dead. Deleted. Gone forever.

  The alien spoke in Christopher’s voice, multiplied by a thousand.

  The alien’s eyes went glassy, abalone-pink, and Ash swayed, nearly bowled over by the black terror crowding her brain like an overloaded circuit. The Vai removed its claw, and Ash was finally able to see the circular indentation in its wrist in the same place that Ash’s human body displayed small, corded sapphire veins. The gap was deep, protected by a round edge of gems that shone with blue fire and a thin protective sheet of gossamer gold. Below it, she could see the river of the alien’s bloodstream, the celestium-silver sweep of it, the thrumming of its pulse; it was calling her. That was the only word she had for the experience, the way like called to like, the way her blood was thrilling to a sense that was both familiar and completely new.

  Connecting. Connecting.

  I think I know what you want. Unable to hold steady, she reached into her pocket to grab her multi-tool, flipping up the knife. She made a small cut in the pad of her index finger and slid her finger into the lacuna. The alien’s fingers interwove with hers, feeling quiet and salty, and its claw slipped back into her arm, into the dark purple of the veins leading to her heart, and they held each other there, hand in hand, blood in blood.

  Primary node: Ashlan. Secondary node: Christopher. Connection made. Network established.

  A gate swung open in Ash’s mind. Her senses exploded like an overclocked boltgun: loneliness, shaking loneliness, her own and that belonging to the thousand voices shattering her mind. She felt wet tears on her cheeks. She still inhabited her own body, still lived in its marrow and muscle and gristle, but her mind was full of memories that weren’t hers, voices that spoke in spiraling, chittering glitter. Her mind bilocated. She knew she was Ashlan Jackson, but she also was a thousand others; she was together with a thousand others, married to a new consciousness adopting her blood, in her brain, in her mind, all of them saying Welcome, sweet sister, welcome.

  It was almost too much, like her head had been shoved into a rock spinner and her body left to drown, and—

  —then Len yanked her arm away from the alien, pressing his wadded-up jacket against the spattering cut in her wrist. The real world popped back into existence with a sobbing disconnect. Natalie’s boltgun whined too close to her ear. Ash was suddenly aware of a thousand little details in the hangar bay: the pattern of the blood spatter on the floor, the sweat collecting like stones at Natalie’s temples, the pinot-noir moss crawling up from the darkness.

  The Vai crowed like a starving child. The sudden loss of the thousand voices felt like a tornado at her very core. She shoved the jacket away, craving the tidal-wave sound of the together, reaching for the alien, for the hive consciousness that was so close, for the glory she’d just experienced. The alien screamed, bright and alone and terrified.

  “I have a shot,” Natalie shouted, the boltgun wailing and steady in her hands.

  “No.” The word was incandescent on Ash’s tongue. She scrambled forward, trying to cover the distance between her body and the alien’s—theirs, them, plural—and succeeded only in ripping herself away from Len, blood spattering on the floor behind her as she pulled herself closer, closer—

  Nat’s voice tore. “Move, Ash.”

  “No.”

  “Ash, for fuck’s sake, I will shoot you—”

  Len pinwheeled between them. “Calm the fuck down, just hold off—”

  “Goes for both of you,” Natalie spat, but she was looking at Len, now, and the gun was shaking in anger or fear or both. Ash, her hand still blood-s
lick, used the distraction to reach for the Vai, sliding her finger back into the lacuna, into the rushing silver inside.

  “It won’t hurt me,” she said, and was—

  —swept away by the reality of the silver, by the intense and shuddering understanding that as long as she lived, Ash would never be alone again. This was home. This was together; it was the closest word the Vai had to two bodies sharing a thousand souls, two bodies sharing memories and thoughts and intentions—

  There were things Ash had to know. How did you get here?

  Give yourself to the silver, she heard.

  I don’t know how.

  The instructions were argent glitter. Let go.

  It was an honest mistake, Ash thought, as she was swept further into the bright arms of Christopher’s whisper-song. An honest mistake to think the Vai were the bodies they presented and not the silver inside—cousins to the nanocreatures that lived in her own blood and the silver substance that kept them alive. An honest mistake, to think that consciousness worked on the same basic template everywhere, that the Vai had the same relationship to their own bodies as humans did to theirs.

  Christopher showed her memories of an alien ship, as dense as flesh itself with flashing light and bulkheads that breathed and computers woven into the nanocreatures’ very consciousness, where Vai rushed through tight corridors the size of her wrist in organic silver, a circulation as alive as lightning. He showed her the nodes: specially grown secondary interfaces with useful hands and feet, organic machines that humans called bodies and mechs, interfaces that would serve as the home for the Vai making new colonies on worlds inhospitable to the silver. These bodies that would build new nodes, new factories, new horizons, would connect them to the master node on the homeworld that was the source and summit of all that was Vai, were the very things that terrified human children and caused Natalie to cry in her sleep—

  Like a computer network? Your species is a computer network? You download into these bodies?