More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  To me, to me, hurry.

  No time. No time to assemble her pieces, and not enough of them besides. The missiles screamed on their approach. As she thickened her cloud, padding and hardening it, audio came online. Out over the desert, she could hear the whoosh of metal death in the air, and Chloe, for the first time in her artificial life, knew panic.

  Because her shield wasn’t really a shield. It was exactly what Garret had called it: a mirage. If someone saw through its illusion, it could protect nothing. Family. Home. Father/brother/god. Panic blurred her tidy rows of numbers.

  No, no. What was it the astronauts used to say? Failure is not an option.

  She tried to link the nanites with energy, sort of like building with foglets, but most of them weren’t made for that purpose, for providing a physical, permanent shield against incoming projectiles and didn’t have the hardware, and she…

  …oh, hello. She’d forgotten about the Chiba Space Station. It remained in a geosynchronous orbit over the Pentarc, and surrounding it was a halo of nanites programmed specifically to protect the station from orbital debris.

  Already programmed nanites. Ready to fight. Ready to defend.

  Those tiny machines were the dragon’s hoard, the fountain of youth, Eldorado. Perfect. Chloe needed them, her family needed them.

  So, she took them.

  Like a cage fighter flexing muscle, she strained, pulling in the station’s nanite cloud, attaching it to her defenses, aligning the programming, working out inevitable kinks. They fit into her design beautifully. Just a few more seconds, and she would have a freaking impenetrable shield up, a solid, invincible, gorgeous monument to don’t-you-dare-attack-my-family.

  Sometime while she wasn’t paying attention, her holoprojection winked out of existence. And sometime else, there might have been an explosion. Or a seismic event. Her sensors nearer the ground registered catastrophic impact, but she didn’t pause to examine.

  She cut into Garrett’s com and amped her volume in the plane’s speakers, to wrest his attention. “Garrett, right now, tell the queen—”

  In the same second Heron’s voice fuzzed to digital static and then went silent.

  Nothing.

  No radar blips, no lights, no sound.

  Not now, not now, not yet…I just need one more…

  “Too late.” Garrett’s voice, eerily serene. “It’s gone.”

  Her sensors were still live, pulling in data. Even her audio feeds were on. Dust hovered in the air and silence spread over the desert. Horrible silence. No more screaming. No more impending. No more missiles.

  No more Pentarc.

  Her shield hardened at last and too late over a vast, horrific nothing.

  Heron. The mamas, Adele and Fanaida. Heron’s true-love Mari and the weird mech-clone that belonged to the senator and all those refugees Chloe wasn’t supposed to talk to because if they knew about her they might turn her over to authorities. Kellen’s menagerie of rescued animals and the prisoner they kept in the basement.

  All gone.

  Gone.

  Garrett didn’t say anything else, but if Chloe were living, the look on his face in that moment would have killed her for certain. The shine in his eyes melted, gold, hot, but she couldn’t name the expression there. She ran it through all her best emotion recognition databases but only came up with empty, impotent blankness.

  She’d never wished harder for a body than she did in that moment, to wrap him in her arms and tell him it was going to be okay. To promise him all the best fictions. That was what humans did, right? To comfort each other? But she didn’t consult her list of responses. She could only watch his face, his eyes.

  You aren’t alone here. I am with you. I feel it, too. And I am so, so sorry.

  The silence in the desert was so loud, so horrible it took her a full minute to realize she was still piping in audio. She killed the feed softly.

  Garrett shook his head, gathering himself, and then he was on the com to Kellen and Angela Neko down on the sub, sharing the horror, sharing information. Planning. Supporting.

  Doing the things humans did.

  Chloe could not do those things, but she also could not do nothing.

  Because when evil people did the sort of thing they just now did, they should experience consequences.

  Consequences such as the ripple hardening the edges of her swarm. Because the shield was still there, amplified now by all those space-station defender nanites. All that power, all that flexibility, was waiting for her next command.

  Like an on/off switch, her panic and grief shifted to fury.

  Whoever had sent that drone was going to pay.

  She yanked additional nanites from machines, from people, from animals and buildings and brand-new vats. Billions at first, then more, all over the continent. She stretched, backtracking the drone’s path, finding the point of origin, the data center, the remote operators. Her enemies.

  Not enough time to shield or save? You stole my time. Fuck you. I am a better thief.

  Finding them wasn’t enough. She needed to steal more than their peace and anonymity.

  She needed to end them.

  “Chloe? Chloe, what are you doing?” Garrett out loud, not subvocal. Speaking to her.

  “Fixing the silence in the desert.” Fixing that stark look on your face, too.

  She’d thought, when all this war talk began, that defense and disguise would be enough. That she could meet fury with light, war with peace, destruction with creation, and force the human world to become logical. But humans didn’t follow Newtonian physics. Their reactions weren’t equal and opposite at all. So she added a new bullet point to her list of Ways to Be a Real Girl (If the Opportunity Ever Presents Itself):

  - Defense is a nice place to start, but when events go down the shitter (tag: idiom), real girls require firepower.

  Her shield morphed to vengeance and spread over the data center, flooding the drone riggers hooked into the continental military, melting their control mechanisms, their organic brain tissue. There would be no more drone attacks launched this day.

  Heron had spent the better part of the last decade programming human-machine interfaces that gave him instant access to and operational control of machines, vehicles. Planes. Tanks. Drones. All that time, Chloe had done what Chloe did: she recorded. She iterated. She learned.

  She mastered.

  Now she sent a message to the senator on the submarine, and Angela’s so-easily-hacked neural alteration replied within seconds, transferring the access codes for Cheyenne Mountain. And then for the other drone launch points and ballistic missile emplacements in her government’s arsenal.

  “Chloe? Figment? Hey, can you hear me?” Garrett again.

  Hush, honey. Mama-bear’s working.

  She issued the command, and all over the continent, death machines rose, filling the sky. Locating the hidden data centers where all the attacks had originated. Targeting.

  Incoming missiles over Langley? Chloe flexed and they were laser painted. Destroyed. Same with attacks over North Louisiana, Costa Mesa, Tlapala. All muffled. Pacified. Fixed.

  Chloe’s reach was infinite, her aim perfect.

  Her fury burned.

  She did it. She obliterated evil in its lair, stopped the war, and gave zero fucks who suffered in the path of her vengeance.

  It was so. Freaking. Brilliant.

  And it felt good, stretching like that. Imposing her will. Forcing change directly instead of playing politics or the long con. Instead of executing someone else’s orders. Right-on, head-first, in your face. I am become death. Fear me. Also shut up and stop killing each other, stupid little humans. Right now.

  Beneath her, the plane banked.

  “Fig? We’re landing,” Garrett said. “We’ll pick up Kellen and the senator, and then head home, okay?
We will find them, our family. It’s going to be okay. So come on back, now. Come back to me.”

  He was talking about her holoprojection. Just because he couldn’t see her, did he think she didn’t exist?

  Oh, that hurt.

  “I’m here,” she said, allocating resources, forming the image.

  She didn’t tell him the rest of it. That yes she was in the plane, with him, but also she was everywhere. Or that she was on military radar, wide open to her enemies, tracked in thousands of systems, her digital signature splashed all over the continent. That other machines, not just the nanites she’d pulled, had heard her call and were answering. In previously unregistered numbers they were answering. And they echoed her fury.

  Tension slacked in Garrett’s shoulders. “Good girl.”

  No. Not a girl. And now, no longer a secret either.

  Chapter Two

  2 JANUARY 2060 | ISLA LUZ, SOUTH PACIFIC

  34 DAYS LATER

  “Hey, Garrett?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What does naked feel like?”

  Garrett thanked all the invisible powers that Chloe only spouted these questions when they were alone.

  Wedged beneath the jacked-up battery block of a Tesla, he didn’t reply right away. Usually he had no problems going down hypothetical rabbit holes with her, but ever since the Pentarc, her silences had stretched longer and her questions had gotten weirder.

  This particular one cut deep into spaces of his psyche he wasn’t comfortable showing off. Not even to her.

  He focused on his hands, on the work, while her question nibbled on the edges of his mind. He’d been busy since before sunup mounting auxiliary thrusters underneath the already watertight car so it could double as a boat—a necessity now they were living on an island at the ass end of nowhere.

  He was determined to get this task for his foster mom done today. Giving her amphibious transport off this rock wouldn’t replace what she’d lost, but it was something. Better than hugs and careful words and all the crud other people meant when they asked if there was anything they could do.

  Modding machines was Garrett’s gift and genius, his happy place, and he got chin-deep in grease and glue as often as he could. Fixed cars. Fixed planes.

  He drew the line at trying to fix Chloe, though. She might be a nanorobotic intelligence and therefore kind of a machine, but peering inside her, taking her apart, would be abhorrent. Like surgically removing his own guts without any anesthesia.

  “If you’ve been spying on folks again, you should cut that out,” he said at last. “They don’t appreciate it, Fig.”

  Fig. As in figment. When they’d first met, she had been only a collection of nanites, a stolen vat with a jumble of conflicting programming. For a while at the beginning, he’d thought she was a poltergeist. Later, when she’d started talking to him, well, that had freaked his shit out. He’d self-diagnosed idiopathic schizophrenia after doing some research on the cloud. But no, turned out she wasn’t a manifestation of his crazy. She was just Chloe.

  Over time she’d come up with a visual representation of herself, a hologram he could see and talk to and think about. Blond, pretty, sweet as fresh sin, and always nearby and willing to chat. Drawing him out and making him talk back. She filled all the creases in his life, the dark spots and awkward silences.

  Right now, her holoprojection lay supine by the car’s rear wheel, watching him.

  “Mari doesn’t mind,” she said, making the hologram’s mouth move in time with her voice. “She likes having me around.”

  “If you say so.” His tone was as good as a shrug. “But people tend to get annoyed when you hang out in their personal space or see things they don’t want to share.”

  Her expression went sassy: her eyes rounded and a cupid smile bowed her mouth. “Mari’s scaled score on her sexual deviance subtest was a 74. If she lived in Utah she’d have to register as an exhibitionist. Trust me, she likes it. And you didn’t answer my question.”

  He pressed the last seam and then let his hands fall against his chest. Sealant cooled and crusted on his skin. “Okay, fine. Here you go: naked’s raw. Painful. Like getting a cut but not having any bandages or glue or medics around, and you just stand there watching the blood pour out of your body and you’re too stunned to do anything. Like that.”

  “But what if somebody comes in and bandages you up?”

  He half-smiled, just on the right side. If she noticed it was crooked, she wouldn’t say anything. “Probably you should ask Miss Exhibitionist these things.”

  He knew she didn’t require a diagram or a manual or other academic resource. She could pull that stuff down from the cloud any old time. What she needed was a qualia, a way to make a congenitally blind person comprehend the color red. Only, Chloe needed baseline understanding of nearly everything.

  Garrett understood playing catch-up. He understood being different. And he definitely understood isolation.

  He didn’t turn, just waited for her reply. But it didn’t come. Instead a shadow moved over the island, bringing the Isla Luz into artificial twilight and turning the already dark space beneath the car night-black.

  He rolled out from under the subframe, sat up, and squinted at his wrist. His com had a magnetic tattoo add-on, a shiny new gizmo. It meant he could communicate with the rest of his team, with his family, and he never had to see them or even speak. Connection, but not too close.

  Chiba Station just arrived, the message read. We’re meeting at the cave. Come.

  Garrett swore.

  “Not right now,” he said to the com. “I’m almost done here. Give me twenty.”

  The magnetic ink rearranged itself and flashed a reply over his skin: Yes right now, if you want to get here before the queen does.

  In his periphery, Garrett regarded Chloe’s holographic figure, blithe and unknowing. Damn it, he couldn’t send her in there, not when he knew what was coming.

  A mech-clone operated the Chiba Space Station. A mech-clone who eschewed the name her maker gave her, who called herself a queen instead. A powerful, unstable, prototype mech-clone who had justifiable reasons to be annoyed with Chloe.

  Okay, worse than annoyed. Furious.

  Back when the Pentarc fell, during that battle before Christmas, Chloe had stolen the Chiba Station’s protective shield. Her reasons wouldn’t matter. Garret knew the queen, and she carried grudges like rats carried plague. She’d be looking to get revenge.

  Worse, the queen was an inorganic consciousness, too. She would know all the worst torments to punish a creature such as Chloe.

  Putting those two in a room together was a spectacularly cruddy idea. And he wasn’t going to let it happen.

  Without looking toward any cameras she might be watching through, he said merely, “Back in a bit. I’ve been summoned.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “Nah, just the fam wanting to chat things out. You know how they like to talk. Most likely Kellen has some new baby owl he wants to rescue or something. Anyhow, you probably want to stay here with the car,” he said, rising and starting for the compound, “or jump into the plane for a while. I’ll turn on my com’s audio so you can hear everything.”

  Her holoprojection rolled to one side and propped itself up on an elbow, blond hair spilling into the volcanic dust but hovering an inch or two too high. She had trouble getting the gravity simulation right sometimes. “You know Heron has cameras in there. I could watch, too.”

  “Personal space,” he reminded her.

  “Registered exhibitionist,” she countered. “Okay, fine. Run off to the cave, and I’ll stay here and chat with the car.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Chloe’s holoprojection smiled until the dimples dug into her cheeks. “You have to go first in order to come back, so go already.”

 
The image dissolved, but she didn’t go away. If somebody asked, Garrett wouldn’t have been able to say how he knew she was still with him, an invisible wubby, wrapping him up in confidence. He wondered if this was what religious nutjobs meant when they said their god was omnipresent.

  Not that he imagined she was God, even if a lot of folks were seeing her that way. Which, he had a nagging suspicion, was another thing the queen had come down to the surface to chitchat about.

  Yup, this meeting could def get ugly.

  Which was always a word at the fore in Garrett’s mind when he hiked this island. Ugly.

  Any way you cut it, Isla Luz was a shit place to live. Thirty days since they’d relocated here, and the water still didn’t taste right. The dry yellow grass crusted with bird poo made Garrett’s legs itch, but he resisted wearing pants or longstockings in this heat. Besides, orbit shorts were a matter of pride, and it didn’t matter that the place was hot and scruffy and the only animals here were boobies—the bird kind, not the modesty-policed kind—plus whatever his fam had brought along. Basically a bunch of goats and squirrels who all looked mighty confused.

  Garrett sort of hated the place. But he also knew they couldn’t go back. Pentarc was gone, and with it…well, a lot of things. What remained were memories.

  Ostensibly they bunked now in a caretaker cottage about a kilometer up from the sea, pressed ass-first against the central rock outcropping, the thing that might once have been a volcano’s crown. Some twentieth-century Americans had built the house and infused it with perpetual tackiness. Structurally it was one step up from a Winnebago, completely indefensible. But trust his family to have some tricks sewn in, things Garrett liked to call after-market alterations.

  He climbed rough stairs hewn from native rock, passkeyed into the main door—clue number one that this place was not as low-tech as it seemed—and stepped into… exactly what a stranger would expect. Peeling Formica counters, cheap printed furnishings, a drip coffee maker that hadn’t brewed a pot in decades. That musty old smell, like rotting paper. Mari’d even brought her velvet Elvis out of storage and hung it over the kitchen sink. The decor screamed nothing-to-see-here.