More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  “Probably are, little smartypants.” His deep-whiskey voice, blurring out of sleep, held such sorrow that she played the line over a dozen times, wondering why the thought of never dying would make him so sad.

  But in forming her reply she answered her own question. Immortality might mean never dying, sure, but only for her. Everyone else around her, all her family—Garrett—they weren’t immortal. They were finite. Someday, they would go. And she would not be able to follow.

  The thought, stark and horrible, sliced her into bits.

  Lonely tasted lost, deep purple, bitter, all through the night, while she watched Garrett sleeping up in the spaceplane’s racks. His chest rose with each inhalation, and she measured the minute air displacement caused by his breath. It formed a rhythm, the music of living, a story with a beginning and a middle. And an end.

  I cannot. I cannot live past the day when you don’t.

  Nathan never did let her embed, mostly because she never developed the courage to ask. Something about the idea...niggled at her. Like maybe if she went inside this particular human, she’d experience something she didn’t want to know. She didn’t trust him. Couldn’t. Scoundrel, right?

  But talking with him did open her eyes, metaphorically speaking. She saw things differently. She appreciated their talks and the insights, and she iterated herself as a result. She grew.

  Her gratitude was deep enough that later, on the worst day of her life, as she held her mirage steady over the Pentarc from thousands of miles away, stretching her consciousness over vast spaces and testing the limits of her power, when Nathan called to her, she answered.

  “Hey, smartypants?”

  “Bit busy at the moment,” she said through the speakers in his cell, even as her core self commanded a vast swarm of drone-killing nanites covering the continent. “Can’t chat.”

  “Yeah, I got a couple guesses what you’re busy at,” he said. “Everybody here is running around like beheaded chickens. They cleared stuff out of the vault room next door. Bad things might be happening, but nobody’s come by here.”

  Chloe didn’t reply. She didn’t really have the bandwidth for it. Her family would take care of him. Besides, her mirage above the Pentarc would hold. Nothing truly horrible would happen.

  “Chloe?”

  “What?”

  “I need you to get me out of here.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do,” he said. “And soon.”

  She still didn’t believe him, even then. She still believed in impossibilities. Three thousand miles away, up in the spaceplane, Garrett pointed out the missile vectors, and she ran the numbers. The drones had seen through her mirage. They were firing missiles at the Pentarc. Catastrophic destruction was imminent.

  She pushed audio through the speaker in Nathan’s cell. “Tell me they evacuated you.”

  “Wish I could.”

  Chloe didn’t have time to pause any of her processes. She was pulling nanites like crazy, growing her storm of minions. But…her family was full of good people. And they knew what was coming. They had gotten Kellen’s squirrels to safety. Surely they wouldn’t leave a human being in peril, not even a sinful human like Nathan.

  Right. Right? “You are still in your cell?”

  “Yes.”

  Chloe tracked the missiles inbound. “And only the biometric deadlocks on the door are engaged, right? Not the vault tumblers?”

  “Far as I can tell.”

  Freeing him was as easy as a security override: sixteen alphanumeric characters. Chloe knew all her family’s passwords and darknet identities. She didn’t even need to run a decoder. Security switches in the Pentarc were flashing all over the place, so many doors and locks left hanging open after the evacuation. The entire structure was in chaos.

  Yes. She could release him.

  The wages of sin, though. Immortality. Loneliness and Garrett’s face in repose. “If I help you escape, what will you give me in exchange?” she asked.

  “Now is really not the time to turn mercenary.” Desperation threaded his voice.

  “Make an offer.”

  “What is you want, Chloe?”

  She told him.

  “Yes,” he promised, on a hiss. “I can do that.”

  She sent the code. Deep under the desert, minutes before impact and immolation, a lock came undone. A man came free.

  And death whooshed in.

  Chapter Four

  2 JANUARY 2060 | PENTARC RUINS

  TODAY. AFTER THE FALL

  Garrett’s ass hurt, planted here on the spaceplane ramp for going on an hour. It hurt and he was cold and he didn’t want to answer the insistent message vibration on his com. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. He just wanted to sit and watch.

  A smudge of mountains marked the horizon of bare winter desert, and a lone coyote skulked among tenebrous shadows, desperate to kill before night came. Curls of steam still breathed off the ruins of the arcology that, until about a month ago, Garrett had called home.

  But what he watched most, always, was her.

  Chloe.

  She was the lone bright speck on a whole world of shit-gray. Spectral, insubstantial, a thing inhuman and unique and perfect. Maybe perfect because she wasn’t a real girl.

  When he was little, back in Houston, Garrett had spent an assload of mandatory e-library time binge-watching a vidcast called DarkStars. It had served up standard space opera fare, only with a modern, edgy sensibility. The intrepid characters on the show weren’t explorers who set out to catalogue and comprehend all the wondrous phenomena of the cosmos. Nah, these guys were thieves and murderers, using badass technology to zip in to a planet right before its star was about to blow, collect up all the priceless treasures that panicking evacuees had left behind, and then beam back out to safety, only to sell grieving planetless sops their own wubbies later on.

  Okay, the show had been a zillion kinds of sick, very 2040s, but Garrett had watched it faithfully, in large part because of one of its characters, this holographic chatbot called Minxy, who was clearly built for the holoporn full-sensory spin-off that his library hadn’t subscribed to (damn them). There were all these jokes on the show about her sexual prowess and otherwise obliviousness, but she never failed to deliver the poignant, gut-punch line at the end of an episode, the line that Garrett secretly guessed writers added to the script, after the fact, to make those viewers who had spent the last half hour jacking off to a fictional holoporn robot feel terrible about themselves.

  Garrett didn’t need any outside nudge toward self-loathing. He could get there fine on his own, thanks. But yeah, he had fantasized about Minxy. What? So had ten million other pubescent boys logged in to mandatory e-libraries.

  However, Garrett did get to do something none of those other horny teens did. Years later, relegated to maintaining, among other machines, a plane held together with duct tape and nanoglue, he had met Minxy in real life.

  Well, sort of. He’d been there in the cargo vent when a vat of nanorobots up and started programming itself. When Chloe had been, for want of a better word, born.

  For a while there at the beginning, she had been mostly a collection of data points that were off, sounds coming out of places they oughtn’t. She’d fucked up all Garrett’s playlists, infested them with Black Sabbath, of all things.

  There was this one time, in the early days when she was new, when she’d scrolled 20th century glam metal lyrics on his engine diagnostic tablet for seven hours, until he realized it was an instruction to apply a specific nanostarch adhesive to an electronics enclosure. Literally to pour some sugar on it.

  They got each other, Garrett and Chloe. From the very beginning they had.

  In the quiet of his workspace, when no one else was around, he had dared to ask her questions, too: Who are you? What are you?

  S
he was. She was many. She was a vat. She was a she. She was here.

  She was with him.

  And honestly, he hadn’t felt alone since she’d come online. Not in six years, and every bright point in his universe was made of her.

  Anybody who disbelieved in her realness or thought her insufficient—or worse, dangerous—could go fuck themselves.

  Right now she knelt about forty yards from the spaceplane, over by the heap of smoldering horror his family referred to as the pile. Her head bowed at the end of a swanlike neck, shimmery blonde hair drawn to the side and over one shoulder. Even in the shadows he could see the reticulate curve of her spine, disappearing beneath the fiction of hair. She reached one hand out, like she would sift the ruin through her fingers.

  Which she, of course, could not do.

  That beautiful face, the one inscribed on the backs of his eyelids when he slept, was only a holographic projection. Her voice was similarly artificial. But she, the core of her, the logic-processing bundle of nanites that was probably hooked into the spaceplane computer right now, was real. Realer than anyone Garrett had ever known.

  And until thirty-eight days ago, she had been his secret.

  Nothing perfect is meant to last, and in her defense, the world had been on fire. People had been dying, and she’d had the ability to save them all. So she had. For him, that was sort of the end of the story.

  But for the rest of the world, apparently not. He had recorded the rest of that Isla Luz meeting with the queen, the ominous chitchat Chloe had called him away from. And out here, in the cold winter wind, he had listened to it on his in-ear com.

  While he watched. While she knelt in the dust.

  They were coming for her: the machines to make her their god, the humans to destroy her.

  Garrett wasn’t sure yet how he was going to keep her safe. He wasn’t sure he even could. But he would try. For every second for the rest of his life he would.

  A small voice asked, and then what? But he ignored it.

  The com’s rhythm ticked faster, harder to ignore. He tore his gaze from the image of Chloe and peered down at the com implanted in his wrist. A tattoo message scrawled over his skin, underlined by blue veins and grease smears.

  Garrett? Pick up. It’s Fan.

  Another vibration, and the tattoo shivered, magnetic bits drew together and added the word, please.

  “Fine,” he murmured, tapping against his wrist and watching words assemble themselves on his arm. “I’m here. You okay?”

  The tattoo rearranged itself once more: Better if you’d let me access voice instead of all this dumb typing.

  He pictured it clearly. Somewhere in the summery South Pacific, Fan was typing on an old-fashioned keyboard, grousing about terrible sons who refused to voicechat. The left side of Garrett’s mouth pulled up in a smile, which just as quickly disappeared.

  He couldn’t ignore Fanaida. Which was probably why the rest of the family had made her do the calling.

  He sighed and rolled his wrist against his bare knee, depressing the subdermal button and activating his voice com. “Yeah?”

  “You have my plane.”

  Not Fanaida. Heron. “And you lie like a legislator.”

  Heron ignored the accusation. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice you took the goddamned plane?”

  Garrett concentrated on Chloe’s unnaturally still figure out by the pile. He squinted through the dust and jealousy. “I knew you’d notice. I just didn’t care. We’ll be back shortly.”

  “We? Fucking hell, G. You took Chloe out there?”

  “Well, yeah. She stays with the plane, right? She’s not allowed to visit the Chiba Station—even though she did, just ask Kellen. She can’t go down to the Pentarc—even though, oops, she did that, too. You lot are shit at keeping track of her. Just let me do what I do, okay? I will keep her safe.”

  “Where are you?” said Heron, his voice lilting into that professorish snootiness that made Garrett want to throw something at it.

  Twilight had grown darker. Garrett couldn’t see the details on Chloe’s sweater anymore, just a blur of pink. “The pile.”

  Heron was quiet for so long Garrett wondered if he’d disconnected. Hoped.

  “She’s a machine collective,” Heron said eventually. “And machines can go rogue, can become dangerous. You and I both saw it happen with mech-Dan. We won’t let that happen to Chloe. We can’t.”

  “She’s sad,” Garrett said. “She’s, what’s Kellen call it? Hair-shirting herself.”

  “No, she isn’t.” God, Heron could sound like the most uptight schoolmarm in ever. “She’s mechanical. She doesn’t feel regret.”

  The she in question had been kneeling for almost an hour. As if she were praying.

  “You don’t know what she feels,” Garrett whispered.

  “You don’t either,” Heron said, but his voice gentled, got softer on the edges. “Bring her back. We’ll build a place for her, magnetic or something. Safe. So nobody can get to her.”

  “A cage, you mean.”

  “What do you want me to say, G?”

  “Nothing.” He closed his eyes, focused on the cold snaking up the sleeves of his poly-printed jacket. He hadn’t changed out of his shorts, and his knees were nearly frozen solid. “Give me twenty.”

  “Okay. Look, just come home. Bring her home. It really is going to be okay.”

  There was no click when Heron signed off, but Garrett counted his own breaths into the silence. He had some tough decisions to make. He hated making decisions.

  Take her back and let them put her in a cage. Take her on the run and…do what? He wasn’t independently wealthy, didn’t have contacts that weren’t complete conspiracy theory flakes. He wasn’t powerful or connected or…anything. He was just a dude. And apparently not even enough of one to keep Chloe safe from the legions who wanted to hurt her.

  He opened his mouth to call her, to ask her what she thought of all this, what she wanted to do now. To continue their talk from earlier and make some decisions, just the two of them.

  But even before his vision resolved, he felt it. Slow, seeping, certain horror.

  That ineffable communion that had surrounded him for years, the deep comfort of knowing that Chloe was near, making him finally, fully, magically un-alone…

  Was gone.

  Chapter Five

  SOMEWHERE COLD

  The technology was new. Pre-patent, even. That’s probably why matter transport felt so… weird. Nathan had sort of warned her, back when they’d been chatting about new-tech at the Pentarc, but he hadn’t ever used the portal himself. Putting organic material through a matter transporter still hadn’t been tested. Apparently nobody wanted to volunteer for the initial trial and the developers had too much conscience to force another creature into it, not even a cockroach.

  Which, now that Chloe thought about it, ought to have been a clue. You know, of how they thought of her.

  When she’d accessed the box back at the pile, Nathan had responded right away. “I knew you’d come. Good girl. Okay, here’s how it works. First, load your core consciousness into the data cube. I’ll bring you over, and we can get started. I’ve got it all set up. You’re gonna love the one I picked out for you.”

  She knew he was trying to make her feel excited about a decision that so far was only bringing her sorrow. But things would be better, different. Soon. After. She believed.

  She had followed Nathan’s instructions. She’d pulled herself out of the spaceplane, disconnected from the central onboard system, and auto-loaded her core self into the data cube.

  Which, she had to confess, was such a strange place to exist, even for a split second. It was self-contained, bits and bytes and chemical reaction switches and no data lines or communications links, and then something yanked. Tore. Hurtled her with impossible speed
into a vast nothing.

  Oh sure, she’d moved her peripheral nanites super fast before—the energy required for acceleration was minimal, since they had such tiny individual masses—but she’d never flown herself, her core consciousness, faster than whatever system she was riding. Spaceplane, satellite, submarine, car: those were max speeds she knew.

  This was something else entirely. It was… falling?

  Maybe. One time, Kellen had taken his cat onto the space station, with its artificial gravity, and sweet little Yoink had vomited for six minutes straight.

  Chloe wished she could throw up. She tried screaming, but there were no speakers here, no audio capability. No cameras to watch through. No floor sensors to feel weight. She stretched and stretched, gathering shards of herself, those little peripheral parts and so precious, her equivalents of fingers and toes and hair and skirt and communication vectors to all the additional nanites in her swarm, trying to keep them with her as she fell, but they came to her slowly. Sluggish. Some floated off into the ether, and she could not reach back fast enough to catch them. She had outpaced herself.

  She was separate. In pieces.

  Oh, not good. Fracture, shatter, yikes and howl and terror and please and Garrett where are you I need you please help fix hold. Hold.

  So this was how fear felt. Like empty, like overload, like panic, like lonely, like bleak.

  Lacking breaths to deepen or nerves to settle, Chloe ran through her number images: six was cool, dark, endless, soft, a pillow and a night of good rest; eight-hundred-nine was wild, electric, orange, sharp; ninety-seven was a blister, a flame, coiling and white on a yellow background.

  The primes always burned, but they were solid, inevitable, unbreakable.

  You cannot break me. I endure.

  The falling stopped. The sense of displacement settled. She found the edges of her data cube, the box. Beyond it, there was…well, nothing. Or at least nothing whole. Just pieces, a puzzle of proprietary systems that didn’t fit together.