More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  She needed a data processing system big enough, deep enough for her to sink herself into and inhabit. She hunted, stretched, reached for such a system, but found only the edges of her box. It was like she’d survived a sinking ship and all this ice-encased flotsam littered the ocean surface, but no single piece was big enough to keep her afloat.

  She grabbed the biggest piece she could find and shoved a digital login past its security. It was an audio system. She knew audio systems. Whew. She still couldn’t see or speak, but at least she had ears.

  “…when you wake up, okay?” Words from a voice made of whiskey, the kind they said burned on its way down.

  Boy, had it.

  A thread from the audio system led her to speakers, and she tested her own voice on the borrowed equipment. “Hello, Nathan.”

  He made a sound like somebody had yanked his prong collar. “Bit creepy, girl, you getting inside my com.”

  “This was an audio system within reach. I reached.”

  “Yeah, well, you sound like my mother.” His tone puckered, forced-Brussels-sprout bitter. “Her voice, I mean.”

  Apparently he didn’t have a voiceprint for Chloe on file in his com. Not a big deal. She wasn’t important to him. She didn’t expect to be. Important wasn’t necessary for whatever their relationship was.

  “Focus, please,” she said, secretly hoping his mom had used similar wording once and her words were conjuring a resultant cringe. “Your experimental transporter technology leaves something to be desired. I cannot see. Where am I?”

  “You mean like on a map?”

  “Not on a map. In physical space.” How dense was he? She’d scanned his neural alts, and they had seemed sufficient at the time.

  “Um”—He stretched out the not-word far longer than it deserved—“This…it’s kind of my home. Except not in the picket-fence sense. More like your home, like the Pentarc. Kind of a lab, but some folks live here, too, on site.”

  “Labs usually have extensive operations systems, but this place doesn’t.” The flotsam still surrounded her, but it was slippy. She couldn’t grab on to any one piece. Structurally, it didn’t look like any physical plant system she’d ever encountered, as if the architects had encoded even little things like light switches so that the central processor couldn’t access them. Everything was dispersed and behind digital security walls. Or worse, disconnected from a central system. Maybe even battery powered and independent.

  As if the humans who ran the place didn’t trust machine intelligence. Or they had been expecting someone like her.

  “The tech is pretty freaky, huh?” said Nathan. “I bet it feels like swimming through an ocean of shit, trying to get into the system. Sorry ‘bout that. Did I kind of answer your question?”

  No. But whatever. Of far more importance than her physical location was this: where was the rest of her? All her pieces, her nanites, her swarm? Had they made it across the transporter bridge? She tried pinging them, but she hadn’t gotten a single one to answer yet. Had they attached themselves to various pieces of the flotsam?

  She called to her parts, like she’d called to the remnants in the desert during the drone attacks. Nothing responded.

  “Ocean of shit is apropos,” she said, wondering if her thoughts were illuminated somewhere, stored, recorded. “It’s…cold.”

  Possibly. Maybe. Was this what cold felt like? It was certainly something, and a human might have used the word cold in such a circumstance. Also possibly isolated. Or wounded. Or scared.

  “Here,” he said, “have a look around.”

  She wasn’t sure what he did, but suddenly there was a raft right next to her on that metaphorical ocean. Shiny, blue raft, sparkling with starlight. She grabbed hold, climbed aboard. And peered.

  Blinked. Eyes. It took Chloe a few moments to realize she was seeing through his eyes. Nathan’s. The one system she’d been able to penetrate had turned out to be Nathan Grace’s augmented neural.

  “Eew,” she said before she had a chance to think about it.

  “Eew the room is kind of stark and offputting, or eew you’re in my head and it’s a mite crowded in there?”

  “Eew your head. I don’t even know what the room looks like, but this being in your head business…is it uncomfortable? I mean, having me as a…guest like this?” The one time she’d embedded herself in another person, when she’d provided emergency medical assistance to Mari, Chloe had invaded on purpose. She’d been prepared for it.

  This time it felt…invasive, an intimacy she hadn’t intended and didn’t really want.

  “I can feel you poking around my nerve endings and stuff, and yeah, it kinda tickles, like when you scratch a numbed spot. But if I wanted to kick you out, I could. So really, it’s okay, little smartypants,” he said gently. “Why don’tcha have a look around?”

  That was as close to permission as she was going to get, and honestly? Being sort-of in a human body again was pretty cool conceptually, especially since this one wasn’t bleeding out or about to go into shock. So she did what he offered. She used his eyes and looked around.

  Nathan was kneeling on a polished chrome floor inlaid with other metals, some kind of alien logogram circular design that reminded her of Garrett’s extensive collection of crop circle images. Nathan had stretched one hand out to touch a thing that looked very much like a gift box with no paper or ribbons. Maybe ten centimeters on a side. Dull black. Buttons on top.

  Oh, screaming cosmos, that thing was her data cube. She was in there.

  Definitely she needed a digital equivalent of throwing up.

  “Are you all here?” Nathan asked.

  She bypassed the urge to retreat from his eyes, to run away. “No. I…lost pieces in the transfer. Not the main ones, not the ones that make me me, but ones I will miss.”

  “If I got you a vat of unprogrammed nanites could you put yourself back together?”

  “Of course.” She could. Her core self was intact, and the peripheral swarm was just nanites plus programming. Some had specialized hardware, but most of her pieces were multi-use. Also, she could reconstitute herself a lot faster than he probably guessed, but she didn’t elaborate. She wasn’t in a particularly sharing mood. “But I might not choose to.”

  “Now don’t get peevy, gal.” He sat back on his booted heels, drawing his hand away from her data cube, removing the connection she could not feel. “Just tell me how I can help.”

  Distrust flared deep inside her, where her guts would be if she were real. Or stomach. Intestines? Whatever part dealt with removal of shit, that’s the part that squeezed up tight when she even thought about collaborating with him. Sharing. The truth was, she didn’t want him to know the details of how she worked. If he could take her apart once, what kind of nugget-brain would she have to be to give him the power to do it again? Chloe might be new, but she wasn’t stupid.

  “Peevy?” She found his optic nerve and twinged it. “Is that really the word you want to use? I am in a box, Nathan. A tiny metal box. You lied to me. You…you trammeled me. Like one of Kellen’s goats. You are not on my side. A better word would be betrayed.”

  “Now wait one hot second,” he said. “I didn’t betray you. I promised to get you here, and you’re here, aren’t you? Now we just need to move on to step two, gettin’ you a real-girl body.”

  Yes, that had been the deal. The plan. Her secret hope and fantasy, made solid. It sounded so tawdry when he said it like that, though. In his smarmy accent, and on this side of captivity, her dream sounded like bad popcorn, all air and stale.

  Simply having a body wouldn’t be enough. Even if he did what she said and housed her core consciousness in the fanciest clone body on the planet, it wouldn’t be enough.

  She had made a mistake.

  Now she had to figure a way out of it.

  She searched surreptitiously for a v
at, on the off chance he was hiding a nanite storage unit right here in his cold, locked-down homey home.

  But she found nothing. Not even a free-fae lamp. The only tech she could access here was in the box, in Nathan, and maybe…something in the floor? There was a seam, in the circular inlay. Electronic activity zatted in there. Part of the matter transporter? Hard to tell. Whatever that system was, it felt blurry and muffled, hidden behind thick data system security. She could hack through it, given time, but her measly resources were already nearly at capacity, just keeping her alive.

  Or whatever her equivalent to alive was called.

  She required a word. A word for not dead, still here…but apart. Pulled apart and under water and cannot breathe and stretching but there aren’t any walls but everything is walls. Walls made of thoughts and too, too many. Closing. In.

  No, no, no panicking.

  Twelve was gravy, warm, thick, Kellen stroking Yoink’s ruff and the kitty purring like a thunderstorm in response, exactly how soft must feel. So soft. Calm. Protected.

  Still here. Still thinking. Still Chloe.

  Through borrowed eyes, she looked around.

  The room itself wasn’t, as he’d said, stark or offputting.

  All the furnishings here had been made to resemble chrome and cream leather, evoking a mid-20th century chic despite the fact that they were all likely the result of additive manufacturing. Somebody had 3D-printed this room and everything in it in less time than it would have taken a Victorian to hand-stitch a row of button-holes.

  Sleek, efficient. Constructed. Trying too hard. Yeah, she fit right in.

  One deep purple curtain had been drawn over something on the wall to Nathan’s left. Another fake window? Was there something—someone—behind that curtain? A sorcerer granting wishes?

  The film The Wizard of Oz looped in her mind, super fast, way faster than humans could ingest it, but Chloe used repetition, patterns, to illuminate meaning.

  Must avoid the poppies.

  Flying monkeys aren’t your friends.

  The door behind Nathan opened, but he didn’t turn right away.

  “This had better be good, Grace,” said a voice. “I loathe being interrupted.”

  He had been relaxed, just seconds before, but when the woman spoke, he stood up, mech-straight and instantly tense. He turned and dropped his gaze to the floor instead of meeting the stranger’s eyes.

  Chloe processed the dynamic between Nathan and the newcomer. Power and not. Master and slave.

  “It’d better than good,” Nathan said, injecting a note of false certainty into his voice, the second-hand salesman who knows the organics removal unit doesn’t work even though it’s clean. “In my debrief, I told them I left a call cube back at the Pentarc. Well, I got an alert earlier tonight that it had been filled. Used that new molecular portal tech, and here we are: Ofelia Ortega y Mars de la Madrid, meet Chloe.”

  He jabbed a thumb in the general direction of the matter transporter box, as if Chloe had not taken up temporary residence in his head.

  He never turned his back on the woman. Neither did he meet her eyes.

  Ofelia Ortega y Mars de la Madrid. Her name clanged through Chloe’s memory, tangling in her data paths. She knew who this was. One of seven global trillionaires. Owner of continents. Collector of nations. Colloquially referred to as La Mars Madrid.

  Garrett claimed this woman was in charge of the Illuminati, or was it the alien lizard overlords? Whichever crazy conspiracy theory, she was definitely in charge of it. And yet, here she stood, in the same room with Chloe.

  La Mars Madrid was…short.

  Also older than dirt, her tissue-thin skin pulled so tight over her skull that she looked desiccated. Tattooed cosmetics, priceless jewels embedded in a pattern on her brow, and clothing made of vintage silk decorated a carefully preserved husk. She had implanted diffuser pumps in both forearms, so she smelled exactly how she meant to, but Chloe knew so little about smells. She imagined this woman’s perfume was like…lizards. Or snakes. Yeah. Dead, bloated, nasty snakes.

  La Mars Madrid slithered right up to Nathan, tipped her overlarge, elaborately coiffed head back, and stared. Natural eyes, though probably laser-ablated. She squinted, but not because she had to. She squinted just to be mean. “What the fuck is this?”

  “This, ma’am, is the tech you wanted. In here.” He tapped his temple. “I mean, in the box, actually, but looking through my eye augments. It’s a nanite logic unit controlled by a spontaneously self-formed artificial intelligence. Calls itself Chloe. If you can get me a vat, I betcha it can whip up a hologram—cute one, too—so y’all can interact directly.”

  It? Oh no he didn’t. He did not just call her an it.

  “No,” said Chloe evenly, pushing her voice through his wrist-mounted com. “Regardless of capability, I do not wish to interact with you. Either of you. And that is not peevy.” More like pissed. She could feel her fury stoking itself. Last time she’d felt like this, she’d gone big. Too big. Doused-a-war level of big.

  La Mars Madrid ignored her, raised a talon-like finger, and poked it beside Nathan’s left eye, drawing his skin away from the socket. As if she could see invader Chloe, lurking there in the augmented eye.

  Deep. Her fingernail went too deep. Deep enough to hurt. Chloe tracked the electrical path in Nathan’s nervous system, watched where his brain lit up in response. The flare lasted for a fraction of a second, though, and was just as swiftly snuffed.

  He hadn’t flinched at the scrape of fingernails filed to points. And, come to think of it, he hadn’t reacted earlier either, when Chloe had tweaked his optic nerve.

  Huh. Interesting. He was wired, like really wired. Much more than Mari, who was basically a clone with a transplanted organic brain in her noggin. Nathan, though, had a lot of machine in him. Chloe could use this.

  She back-tracked the path of the muffled pain signal, searching. When humans acquired government-approved wired reflexes—not gray-market alts like poor Heron—they could choose which sensations to dull and which to keep. Depending on how those settings were configured, tiny, insulated nanomachines muffled the pain pathways the humans no longer wanted to deal with. What Nathan had done to his body probably resulted in an ability to perform amazing daredevil stunts and lightning-quick hand-to-hand combat. With practice and reflex recorders, it could help him play a mean guitar solo.

  It also infested him with upward of four million nanites.

  A swarm.

  Small one. But Chloe welcomed them. Gathered them. Took them from their safe, thoughtless robot jobs and gave them meaning. She made them part of something bigger.

  Come here, you li’l cuties. Let mama sort you out and school you.

  While Chloe worked, La Mars Madrid scolded. “You were supposed to retrieve the other one, the Marisa Vallejo thing.”

  The fingernail, the one prodding Nathan’s face, wasn’t made of keratin. It was an implant, metal. Blade sharp. Needle sharp. Pokey. La Mars Madrid pressed harder, and Nathan’s fragile dermis tore. Without the nanites to dull the sting, he jerked to the side, uttering an incomprehensible swear. Blood rose to fill the gap in tissue.

  But first, Chloe felt it. Or, rather, she saw the pattern of receptors flaring and neural activity responding. A weight on the skin, too heavy, bowing surface tension, filling the divot with ooze and horror and shrink and wilt. A pool, growing and fetid, and a sudden realization: this is what pain felt like.

  Nathan stepped back, beyond the crone’s reach, shaking his head. “What happened with Mari wasn’t my fault. You were supposed to keep the data shield intact.”

  La Mars Madrid shrugged, a slinky movement inside her silken sheath. “Clearly we underestimated Vallejo. If someone bottled surprise-and-fuck-you, it would taste like Damon Vallejo. Nasty, bitter, and spoiled. I was always against including him.”

 
“Including him? You mean keeping him prisoner and forcing him to continue research he had come to despise.”

  More shrugging, this time with a hoity head wobble. “In a luxury underwater cell.”

  “The submarine,” Nathan said, whacking the words down with the world’s dullest hammer. “The goddamn disaster-porn tourist submarine. The one that made a circuit of all the destruction he’d caused. You made him look at it. Over and over. If he wasn’t squirrel-shit crazy beforehand, you folks sure drove him there. And then you let that nutjob—the one you fucking created—take over my brain. You got me captured and damned near got me killed.”

  La Mars Madrid’s permanently pink mouth pressed tighter. Meaner. It barely moved when she said, “Be that as it may, you had one task, Grace, and you fucked up.”

  Chloe seriously was starting to hate this woman.

  “Now hold on,” said Nathan. “There’s some value here. You can use this.”

  La Mars Madrid narrowed her eyes to slits. “How?”

  As far as Chloe was concerned, this crone was everything wrong with the world. She was humans who clung to the belief they were on top of the food chain and somehow deserved to remain there. Chloe wasn’t quite ready to agree that machines should take over or anything, but humans could get condescending as hell sometimes. Like this one here, requiring the subjugation and persistent servitude of everyone around her. Chloe wouldn’t be surprised to learn that La Mars Madrid hurt others simply because doing so made her feel mighty.

  Well, Chloe was one of those others. And she was mightier.

  She summoned her swam of borrowed nanites, ripping them through the blood barriers inside Nathan, drawing them up through his throat. This kind of rearrangement would be excruciating for a normal non-altered human, but it wouldn’t hurt Nathan. Besides, he’d kind of given her permission to use his alts, right?

  Unlike all those people you stole medical nanites from during the drone war, self?

  Oh, burn. But Chloe couldn’t let herself get low right now. She couldn’t be drawn into a moral equivalence argument that described her as just as a much a priorities-askew, self-centered asshole as La Mars Madrid. Because it wasn’t true.