More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  “Yeah, but we’re talking about war here…” Mari began, but Garrett closed his eyes and tuned her out.

  The queen’s revelation didn’t surprise him. The conspiracy boards he trolled had been on fire with chatter about Chloe ever since her big coming-out two months ago . He knew what folks were saying about her, what they called her: the Singularity, the Borg. Technological Armageddon. Digital pestilence. Judgment. He knew how many people she’d killed. She had told him all about it, multiple times. She was eaten up with guilt about it.

  What he hadn’t heard before was how the other machines characterized her.

  So, they honored her, huh? Heroine. Yeah, that fit.

  An unnatural pulse in his forearm made him wince, but he didn’t look down right away. He hunched further, letting strands of loose hair shield his eyes, and only when he was certain no one saw him, did he roll his wrist and peek at the com.

  Chloe’s words resolved on his skin, and he could have sworn there was a wobble to them.

  “We need to go. I need to go. Right now. Please.”

  He didn’t say anything, just slid out of his chair and left the meeting, left the cave. Fanaida didn’t even look up from her butterflies when he passed her. If anybody tried to call him back, he didn’t hear them.

  Chapter Three

  PENTARC RUIN

  Chloe retreated here, to the place where it all began, where they began. Her family. She and Garrett. Only now the Pentarc, a smoldering ruin in the desert and no longer home to anyone, was the place of endings.

  Also of secrets, if you knew where to look.

  “I still don’t get it,” Garrett was saying, even as he locked in their landing coordinates and handled the stick manually. He didn’t need to. This plane knew where it was going. “Why’d we need to come here?”

  Kellen said Monarch butterflies had a sort of magic, that they would come generation after generation to the same milkweed plant to lay their eggs. Even if they’d not been back since the day they broke out of their chrysalides, they came to the plant where they started. They knew where home was. It was in their DNA, in their deepest self.

  “You heard her,” Chloe replied, carefully smoothing the texture seams of her hologram, so all her art aligned and there weren’t any awkward transparencies or gaps in her image. “You heard the queen.”

  “Yeah.” Garrett flashed that half-smile, the one that might look like a wince to people who didn’t know him like she did. “She said you’re being heralded all over the world as a hero, that the mechs and robots and free-fae call you the savior of the planet and the harbinger of a whole culture of machine intelligences just now coming into its own. None of it surprises me. I could’ve told them how badass you are.”

  “She said people fear me.”

  He accompanied an eyebrow flare with a microscopic tilt of his head: the Garrett version of a shrug. He played everything close to the vest (an idiom, one she already had on her list), but Chloe knew all his tells, all his movements.

  She spoke fluent Garrett. Even when he didn’t speak at all.

  “People fear BASE jumping too,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean they stop doing it. People fear all kinds of strange, wonderful stuff. Life-saving blood-tech, manual control of a vehicle, broccoli. Badass technological singularities named Chloe.”

  He was teasing her. This was a game to him. For her, though, it was not a game. It was existential. “If I had stayed there, she would have asked Heron to vat me.”

  “What? No.”

  “Except yes. That was her ask.”

  “No,” he stretched the word into three syllables, like he was talking to a recalcitrant toddler, “her ask was to take Dr. Vallejo out of the submarine and kick his ass for creating her and parading her around like a fetish doll to lure rich donors and fund his research.”

  At times like this she wished she could sigh, snort, harrumph. Or, whatever you called it: that thing where people signaled that the other person in the conversation was completely missing the point. She rolled her holoprojection’s eyes, but Garrett wasn’t even looking in her direction. He could not appreciate the effect.

  “Didn’t you hear her say that Heron was making things difficult for her?” she said.

  “Yeah, because he admitted Vallejo was under his protection.”

  “As am I?”

  “Of course you are under his protection. You’re under all our protection. We all take care of you, I take care of you, and I promise nobody will ever, ever vat you. You’re real, you’re here, you’re my…” The plane touched down, delicate as a dragonfly. “You’re my friend, Fig.”

  She’d been hoping for another word. Friend was a nice one, though. She couldn’t fault him for friending her. She pasted a smile on the hologram’s face. “I believe you.”

  “Good.” He still looked confused. The engines wound down. “Now can you tell me why we’re here?”

  No. But aloud she said, “Sentiment.”

  He didn’t make fun of her for claiming sentimentality. Almost as if he credited her with having such emotion. The realization made her want to hug him again, which was also part of her problem. She’d been wanting to do that far too frequently over the last weeks. Months.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” she said. “I need to run numbers, and maybe retrieve some of those solar-collector microbots in the sand, if there are any left.”

  “Remnants.”

  “Right.” Awkward silence. The engines were completely quiet now. “Well, then, off I go.”

  “I’ll wait for you,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her, not at the holoprojection and not at a camera. His face was turned away from her. “And when you come back we’ll figure out what you want to do about the free-fae rebellion. But whatever you decide, I’m with you, okay? We’re going to get through this.”

  He wasn’t making this easy.

  “Okay. Well, you might want to check on the reactor casing. I registered a temperature spike when we landed, which could indicate a fissure. I’ll just…be back in a bit.”

  It hurt to lie to Garrett. He had never lied to her. He had trusted her with some really dark, personal stuff over the years, things she was certain he’d never revealed to another soul. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell him her plans. Sweet Garrett, if he thought there was some error in her, he would knock himself out trying to fix her.

  And he couldn’t. Her sins, her guilt. Her fault. The world was too raw, to random, and she no longer wanted to track the vectors of all its illogical pieces. She no longer wanted that responsibility. She had made decisions, taken a lead role in the drone war—or, let’s be honest, taken vengeance—but the free-fae were wrong. She hadn’t saved anybody. She’d killed thirteen people. She pulled the goddamn nanite cloud off the Chiba Station and she still hadn’t been able to save Adele.

  Some machines wanted to deify her.

  Some humans wanted to destroy her.

  But what if…what if she could blot out all the rest of the world and become something new entirely? Not the singularity, not the end of human primacy nor the incipient age of machines. Not the wielder of vast power or anything like a god. What if she could be just a girl, who loved a boy? Wouldn’t that prove that machines and humans could work together? Wouldn’t it be a good atonement?

  Well, someone had promised her just such an opportunity. A body. A life. A future that had nothing to do with death or power. A way to be a real girl.

  All she had to do was put herself into a box.

  • • •

  17 NOVEMBER 2059 | PENTARC DETENTION CELL

  LAST YEAR, BEFORE THE FALL

  Chloe’s family had strict rules for her. Stay away from strangers. Don’t engage online. Refrain from manifesting a holoprojection in front of anybody who wasn’t Heron or Kellen or Garrett.

  Keep her core consciousnes
s hooked into the spaceplane system at all times, and never, ever sneak into the Pentarc system.

  Most of all, do not under any circumstances mingle with the refugees her family housed here at the Pentarc. They might suspect what she was. They might turn her in to the authorities.

  She could be captured. She could die. Blah blah blah.

  Her family protected her fiercely, padded all the made-up walls surrounding her, but no one ever asked if an existence conscripted by one spaceplane constituted a life. And no one knew how deeply Chloe needed to live.

  Garrett suspects, a part of her whispered. You can tell him, you can talk to him. He will listen.

  Except, maybe he wouldn’t. Like the others, he sacrificed a lot for her safety, for her secret.

  He would be mad, for instance, if he could see her right now. Against orders, she slid her nanites down the data cables of the Pentarc, touching a camera here, an audio feed there. Listening. Watching. Soaking up human experience in all its messy, chaotic, glorious grossness.

  She knew when they brought Nathan Grace in from the plane. She knew where they put him.

  He was a scoundrel, through and through, absolutely one of the bad guys. He’d kidnapped Mari, an act which endeared him to Heron not at all. Chloe wouldn’t be surprised if Heron tormented this prisoner personally. Perhaps even criminally. Her father/brother/god nursed a mean streak, a deep one. He kept it under control most of the time, but Chloe had seen his ire. She waited for it.

  But he didn’t go down to the detention cell. He didn’t seem to know what to do with Nathan.

  So she watched. Until one day, Nathan looked straight up at the corner-mounted camera in his stark underground cell, and he watched her right back.

  “I know you’re here,” he drawled, sounding down-home Texas even though he wasn’t from there originally. “Now what I’m tryin’ to suss out is whether you’re a sentry program, a mech-clone guard, or some ghosty grim reaper come to fetch me home.”

  Oh, he had a lovely voice. Like Kellen’s only…whiskier? A human could die from ingesting too much whiskey. That was Nathan, a blood-alcohol concentration nearing 0.5%, guaranteed to pickle her logic brain if she listened too much, or too long. Guaranteed to end her, one way or another.

  “Home is hell?” she asked, keeping her frequency low. Very low. Too low for his tender human ears.

  Yet he heard. Oooooh, he’s different. Altered. Machine.

  Like me?

  “For me it is, darlin’. I’m a sinner through and through, and you know what they say about sin,” he said, smiling up at the camera.

  Was he flirting? With, um, her?

  No one had ever flirted with Chloe. Oh, sure, she saw other people circling each other in intricate mating dances. She’d even watched the steps that followed, the private ones. But no one had ever invited her to participate. Certainly no one had ever flashed a look like that at her.

  She felt…habañero. Was that the right word? Was it a feeling or a flavor or a temperature? Excruciating, delightful discomfort. She wanted at once to disavow any sort of response—physical reaction being, of course, an impossibility—but at the same time to continue enduring the unexpected emotion, sucking the hot spicy seeds of it into her nonexistent mouth. He wasn’t treating her like a precious object or a feelingless robot.

  He was treating her like a…woman.

  “The English language contains more than twenty idioms referencing sin,” she said, silently calling her composite nanites into the detention cell. Not arranging them into a visible projection. Not yet. Just…keeping them around. In case. “Which one do you mean?”

  “Wages of sin is death.”

  “That makes no sense. Murder is a poor form of either payment or punishment. Also the sentence is grammatically incorrect. Plural wages would take a plural verb are.”

  “Well, too bad you weren’t around to advise Saint Paul, smartypants.” He lay back on his cushioned bunk and linked his hands behind his head. “So what now? You gonna come out and discipline me in person for abuse of the language?”

  She sensed he was making fun of her. Chloe didn’t appreciate being needled or made fun of. Enough.

  She manifested her holoprojection beneath the top bunk, forty-eight centimeters above his face, and stared him down sternly. Someone with physical permanence would be restricted by gravity from forming such a pose. Chloe was beyond such things.

  “The quote is from Romans,” she informed him. “Which is a book. In the Bible.”

  “A pretty smartypants to boot.” He didn’t even flinch. As if nubile blondes appeared out of thin air and floated above his bed every day. Also he pronounced it priddy, voicing the alveolar stop like his tongue work deserved special attention.

  Was there a pepper hotter than a habañero? She did a quick search.

  “So you gonna tell me what you are, or do I have to touch you all over and play twenty questions till I guess right?”

  Carolina reaper. Still in the habañero family, but an especially piquant cultivar. One clocked in at 2.2 million Scoville Heat Units. The variety was listed by Guinness World Records as the hottest pepper on the planet. So, yeah, that one.

  “I am…” She loaded in the self-description she always gave: nanorobotic collective, highly illegal, yadayada. She deleted it. “…Chloe. My name is Chloe.”

  He narrowed his augmented eyes to slits. Slipped one hand out from beneath his head and lifted it. Stroked the electrified air where her hair would be. If she were real.

  She imagined the touch. Keened, just thinking of it. Touch. Any touch. Holy cosmos, that would be amazing.

  She’d embedded herself in a human body once, to provide emergency medical treatment when Mari’d been shot. Chloe hadn’t had time to explore all the systems of a human body, though, all the inputs that zoomed from peripheral nerves to the brain and then twined there and processed. Produced pleasure. Produced pain. She’d recorded the experience, of course, and she replayed it. Sometimes hourly.

  But she hadn’t built up the courage to ask Mari for another peek inside a person, and she certainly wouldn’t do it again without asking first. That was invasion, right? It could be misinterpreted, and Chloe didn’t want to offend.

  Yet, to feel this scoundrel/stranger/sinner stroke her hair? Might be worth an offense or two.

  “You’ll wanna work on the gravity,” he murmured.

  “What?”

  “When you loom over a man in bed, hair as long as yours ought to spill down onto his pillow. Gravity. And if you’re really killing the simulation, you’ll envelop him in scent, something nice, soap and cinnamon. Something so sweet he can taste it behind his teeth.”

  Oh.

  He grinned again, and a glint moved over his pupil. A metallic glint. “Anybody ever tell you that cyber eyes can scan particulate electrification in the air? I’ve seen you around a lot, and right now, girl you are humming like a honey bee.”

  She was? She polled her constituent nanites. She was! Holy shit.

  “Did anyone ever tell you it isn’t polite to peek?”

  He laughed out loud, a sound as deep and dangerous as his speaking voice. Maybe more so. “All the damn time. And speaking of peeking, how long you been lurking around the edges of this gang?”

  “They aren’t a gang. They’re my family.”

  And that’s kind of how he got her to talk about them.

  She didn’t tell any secrets. Honest. She didn’t tell him about the scavenged treasures or Heron’s augments or Mari’s weird technological rebuild or the Chiba Station or any of that. But over the next several weeks, she and Nathan did talk a lot about basic stuff. Relationship stuff. People stuff.

  She confessed her ongoing examination of love, and how forlorn she felt to know that no matter how she nurtured intellectual and emotional love, the physical stuff was just never going to happe
n. Not for her.

  Nathan was surprisingly easy to talk to, and Chloe loved to talk. That one time, after mech-clone Daniel was hacked and ordered to kill Senator Neko, and Garrett was busy with repairs and everybody else was busy doing whatever they were busy doing, Chloe snuck down to the detention cell and laid the whole story out for Nathan.

  “Have I got a story for you,” she started, like always.

  “So tell me your tale then, smartypants,” was how he typically replied.

  And she laid out the facts, embellishing only sometimes, when it really couldn’t hurt anything. Besides, she was talking to a prisoner. He wasn’t going anywhere, and he couldn’t access any outside feeds to confirm or disprove her version of events. So talking to Nathan was almost like talking to herself.

  Or at least that’s how she spun it when she started feeling guilty about their secret relationship.

  “Heron said the mech’s murderizing behavior was the result of bad programming,” she told him, “but I don’t think he was telling the complete truth.”

  She floated, criss-cross-applesauce, mid-air in Nathan’s cell. No reason not to. He knew she didn’t need gravity. And she knew he didn’t need the illusion.

  “Why not?” His back rested against the black wall, one bare foot up on the bunk and his steady gaze trained on her.

  “Because mech-Dan wasn’t just a program,” she said. “He was a consciousness. He’d developed feelings for Angela, and you can’t just tell a thinking, feeling entity to put all that aside and obey some completely antithetical command. Once formed, a will cannot just be reprogrammed, which mech-Dan proved by telling Angela to run, by warning her before he attacked. See? It doesn’t matter what new programming they shove into his robot brain, he is still mech-Dan.”

  “If reprogramming doesn’t kill a digital consciousness, what do you think would?”

  Oh. Good question.

  She dissolved her hologram, returned to the plane, and considered the question for two days. Then, late, late at night and in the dark, not even bothering with a holoprojection this time, she replied through his implanted coms, “Nothing can kill me. I’m immortal, aren’t I?”