More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  Right?

  Nathan coughed, and Chloe blew the swarm out into the slick printed room, engaging the projector bots and forming a rudimentary holopresence between her betrayer and his boss.

  The image wasn’t perfect, but the old woman paled beneath her permanent cosmetics.

  “Stop it,” Chloe said, making the holographic mouth move, making the chest seem to breathe. Animating her illusion, despite her lack of resources. “You stop fussing at him. You don’t want Mari anyhow. The tech is flawed—human consciousness doesn’t transfer well in and out of bodies. I’m better at it. And stop poking Nathan, too. Right now.”

  She was still speaking through Nathan’s com, in his mother’s voice. Man, his mom could sound like a ten-tier bitch when she wanted. Chloe sort of loved her.

  But she couldn’t digress. Couldn’t lose focus. This was hard, what she was doing. Nathan’s nanites weren’t calibrated for holoprojection, not even the ones with light emitters. Some had gravitronics built in, thank the makers, and some had data-transfer capability, but almost none of them had onboard power generators. Probably they powered up at arterial plasma dams like a lot of medical nanos. But out here in the air, there was no blood, no artery, no dam. No power. She had to pull it from somewhere.

  And her core consciousness, her command central, was inside Nathan. A human. Basically one of the most efficient energy converters on the planet.

  She didn’t really think about consequences. She pulled.

  It occurred to her that, yes, his brain synapses were freaking out, that the eyes she saw through weren’t focusing as well as they ought. That his body might be running hotter than normal, trying to supply her power demands and at the same time control for the sensory onslaught he was enduring now that she’d removed his nervous-system nanite buffers.

  These facts entered her logic reasoning processes, but they didn’t weigh against her need to control this conversation. To dominate this madwoman. And it was all only temporary, right? Just a few minutes, in fact.

  Besides, he was altered. Tough. Tech. Like her. He could handle it.

  La Mars Madrid inspected the hologram, from its top to its pixelated toes. She looked about as impressed as a cat observing anything that wasn’t food.

  She smiled, but it was more of a snarl, a stretch of skin over too-large teeth. “Ah, you’re Vallejo’s research, I assume?”

  “No, actually,” Nathan replied in his own voice, only thinner, smaller than usual. “Heron Farad programmed her original vat, but she’s been self-recursive for a long time now, possibly years. Developing her own AI, forming a consciousness. It’s…really cool.”

  It again. Chloe pulled more power, just because she could. He staggered, then corrected his balance.

  La Mars Madrid inspected the projection from one angle and then another, ignoring Nathan. “Physical permanence?”

  In other words, could Chloe be touched. Could she touch back. Could she displace water, fill up a chair, hug a person. No, no, and no never.

  “I don’t honestly know,” Nathan said for her, blinking. A connection or something blew inside the left cyber eye, making his vision blur for a second before the tech compensated. “She always hovered just out of reach, and I never could pin her down and check.”

  In olden days, scientists pinned bugs to boards and dissected them alive. Leafhoppers, firebugs, butterflies. That’s what Nathan wants to do with me. Not help me. Not free me. Not put me in a body like he promised. He wants to study me. To break me apart and study the component pieces. He’s as sick as she is.

  How could she have believed for a moment that he would follow through on a bargain with a…a thing? Because that was clearly how he thought of her. Even so, he was the closest thing she had to an ally here. And for a while, back at the Pentarc, he had made her feel real.

  The tiny woman in the printed room stepped in close to Chloe’s apparition. She raised one metal-tipped finger.

  Chloe again pulled power, pulled it right out of Nathan, and shoved a bolt of it into that talon.

  It hit, blue and brilliant, wrapped around the fingertip implant, and disappeared beneath creased vellum skin. La Mars Madrid didn’t so much as twitch. Of course she would have buffers, better ones than Nathan’s, alterations that absorbed energy spikes and biotoxins and who knew what else. Anything that would threaten her longevity, her technological immortality.

  Utterly unfazed, she stepped into and then through Chloe’s holoprojection, brushing the swarm aside. The image dissolved beneath her invasion. Power-transfer routes collapsed. Nanites that didn’t yet have a full charge wobbled and fell.

  Chloe reached for them, intending to stuff them back into Nathan, but… nothing.

  Nothing happened.

  No power. A sputter, a slip. A gurgle.

  Nathan’s legs stopped supporting him. He collapsed hard against the metal floor, crumpling at angles his joints were never meant to sustain. A crunch, and pain receptors flared all along his left side. His head lolled. Something was burning. Circuits? Inside him? His alterations? She’d fried something in there. Something possibly irreplaceable.

  She ran a diagnostic and wished she could wince.

  Oh no, she had done it again. Overreached. Caused badness. Caused fear. Caused…what is going on with Nathan’s brain? His visual cortex flared, bright as a flash-bang, and then went dark, guttering like a dying candle.

  The vampire child’s eye sockets were the dirt hole now. Nathan was falling.

  A lone metal fingertip stroked beneath his chin, turned his head. La Mars Madrid stared into his eyes, into Chloe’s eyes. Pinning her. “I know what you are,” the madwoman said. “I know what you did. Be warned, my people are going to figure out exactly how you did it. They will take your knowledge and your power. Use you. And then they will destroy you.”

  Something flared behind Nathan, a bright blue energy something, surging through the space separating Nathan and the matter transporter box, cutting Chloe’s connection to him. Her vision went black. She was slammed back into the box, back into her core self. Conscripted. Caged.

  Her last thought before the energy wall sliced her visual feed: She has wolf eyes, too.

  Chapter Six

  DENVER CONSOLIDATED METROPOLITAN, UNITED NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS

  COLINA CAPITOLINA, WEST WING

  “You need to calm down,” said the education minister of the North American continent. Angela Neko herself. Former senator, rebel heroine, savior of millions. In terms of influence and folklore, calling her the Minister of Education was like calling Napoleon a competent artillery officer.

  Garrett tried, he really did, to calm down. But his brain was humming. He had been sending out queries nonstop for seven hours, checking in with all his online groups and news sources. Which was damn difficult to do when you were solo-flying a stolen spaceplane and fielding insistent calls from various pissed off family members.

  Nothing. He’d found nothing. No one had listed a nanorobotic AI for sale. No one had taken credit for nabbing one. No new vats were on the market. No law enforcement agencies were issuing press releases. The free-fae rebellion hadn’t stopped its protesting. Even Garrett’s conspiracy theory channels were dull-edged, dredging through old stories. It was like the whole world remained exactly as it had been this morning, as if nothing at all had changed. As if the most important thing in Garrett’s life was not missing.

  It had occurred to him, though, on the bright edge of panic, that his first assessment wasn’t completely true. He did have contacts. Kellen was part of his family, another one of those strays the mamas had gathered up and brought under their umbrella of safety years ago. Kellen was also super smart, of course, and a little bit shady and recently married to a major world figure.

  Angela had not only taken over leadership of the education ministry and the global-school initiative in the last few mo
nths, she’d also acquired a husband, launched a media channel, and pushed a bunch of executive orders across the new president’s desk, which her hand-selected puppet had dutifully enacted. This woman was made of power. And through it all, Kellen was right there with her, making stuff happen.

  If these two people couldn’t help Garrett find Chloe, he was well and truly fucked.

  Kellen lounged, long-legged and kind-eyed, on a settee by the window of the giant deep-carpeted office. His creepy bionic cat stretched across one thigh, purring under her master’s hand.

  As if it were his particular super power, Kellen cut through the cliché of his new bride’s advice without diminishing her in any way. “My guess is,” he drawled, “calm ain’t gonna happen, not till our Chloe’s safe. In the meantime, though, how ‘bout we settle enough to think? Now, what was she doing right before?”

  Garrett picked the cuticle of one forefinger. A slice of skin came free. He yanked it savagely, searching for the pain. “We were at the pile. She was…I don’t know. It looked like she was praying.”

  Kellen’s face gentled. “Y’all go there a lot?”

  “No, only twice since…We had a visitor on the Isla Luz. The Queen of Chiba came down the tether—”

  “Physically? Herself?” Angela interrupted. She perched on the edge of a desk made for a much bigger person. Her velvet-shod feet didn’t touch the floor, but she still commanded the room. “Huh. You don’t see that every day.”

  “Yeah, robot queen in the flesh. Or metal. Or whatever. Point is, she came down because, she said, she didn’t trust data channels for the information she needed to deliver. Specifically, she didn’t want anybody to know where Chloe was. Seems that ever since the Black Inaugural, some machine rebellion is all but deifying Chloe. Others, of course, see her as a threat.”

  “Ugh, the names.” Angela pinched up her top lip like something stank. “Why does every event or movement have to be fucking named? The Black Inaugural? Seriously. Makes my work sound like a medieval disease.”

  “One of the Chloe hate groups calls itself Kill Skynet,” Garrett said.

  The lip pinch flattened. “Well that’s all kinds of wrong.”

  “Yeah, we’ve gotten a little bit of that blowback ourselves,” Kellen said. “Folks either fear their self-made gods or hate ‘em. Sometimes both at once. Either way, nobody in their right mind wants to be ground zero of that kind of fervor. Now, I take it when the queen said her piece, Chloe panicked?”

  “Yeah.” Garrett dropped his face into the bracket of his hands, fingers supporting his brow, thumbs digging into his jaw. “God. Heron was right. I shouldn’t have taken her off the island.”

  “Hey, regret later, okay?” Angela said sharply. “Let’s work through this step by step. First, how do you know she’s gone? I mean, let’s face it, she doesn’t have a body. What if she’s safe in the plane’s computer system and is just pissed about something and doesn’t want to talk to any of us?”

  This again, the how of it. There was a reason why Garrett called his connection with Chloe ineffable. It was, to him, sacred and unknowable and absolutely, completely certain.

  “Have you ever known Chloe to not want to talk?” Kellen said, a spill of humor working its way into his voice.

  Angela ignored him and stared hard at Garrett. “Have you checked?”

  “I don’t see my own ass, but I’d know if it was missing,” Garrett said. “She’s gone. I need to find her.”

  “Okay,” Kellen said, soothing the air in the room somehow with his voice. “And don’t you worry, we’re gonna make that happen. I think what Angela’s saying is so far you’re focusing on folks who might’ve taken her, and that’s fine, but—”

  “Nobody is posting. I’ve been all over the darknet boards. If one of these movements like Kill Skynet had taken her and…done something to her, they would shout it all over the place just to convince us we were safe and they have the power.”

  It was still hard for Garrett to think of Chloe as a danger to anything, but he could no longer deny that she was capable of massive amounts of destruction. All it would take—all it had taken—was to piss her off. Scare her. Hurt her or hers.

  Had the queen’s visit done that?

  “I think that’s what he meant, Garrett,” Angela said, slicing efficiently through her partner’s more roundabout conversation style. “That no one took her. That maybe she just left.”

  Wait, no. Just no.

  She wouldn’t have run without me. We’re a team.

  Right?

  Angela waited a full beat of disbelieving silence before she continued, her voice softer than before. “You did say she panicked, and I know Chloe a little bit. If she thought she was likely to bring danger or condemnation upon her family, or if she thought that her existence was sparking violence or chaos in the world, I can imagine her running.”

  If she thought she was a danger…or if she thought I couldn’t protect her. Worse, what if it wasn’t a guess, if she knew it for a fact? Knew it because it was true. Because he couldn’t. He hadn’t. He’d failed her. You had one job, dipshit…

  Garrett wasn’t a cryer. He was a dude, and dudes from Texas did not cry. Not even dudes from inside-the-loop on the Northeast side, a place that offered up plenty of reasons for tears and despair. Folks didn’t call Houston the armpit of the state for nothing. If you were from there, you might snuffle or bitch or break something, but you weren’t allowed to cry. You kept your crying-level shit private.

  Yet here he was, in the capitol building for the whole goddamn confederated continent, in the office of probably the most powerful woman on the planet, and he couldn’t defuse the sob that detonated in his throat.

  It broke something else loose on its way out. His pride? His hope? His heart?

  Garrett couldn’t look at them. Couldn’t face them. He got his shit together, but it was hard going there for a minute. “Even if it was her idea, I still need to find her. I can’t…I need her.”

  Quiet settled over the office, and after a long, long while, something soft nuzzled his bare shin. He heard a feline mewl and felt the rasp of rough tongue on his skin. Garrett didn’t think about putting his hand down and rubbing Yoink under the chin. He did it automatically. The press of her purr against his palm reverberated, soothing its way through his bones, untying the panicky, hopeless knots in his chest.

  These folks were his family, sure, but a constructed one, one shoved together by circumstances. They weren’t huggers, not the sort of family he wanted to see his tears. And yet, they weren’t the kind of family that would judge him for a moment of weakness. These two, they’d just send their cat over to lick his hand and purr at him and convince him he was cared for.

  Strangest thing of all was that it worked. He believed.

  “Garrett, we understand,” said Angela, her tone no longer a delivery system for weaponized speeches. This time, it was soft as kitten fur. “If Chloe was taken and no groups are claiming the deed, her captors probably want to use her for research. And if that’s what is going on, I have a good idea who might want her.”

  “Aw hell, not the Consortium again,” Kellen said. “Didn’t you get rid of those fuckers during the coup?”

  Angela’s eyebrows rose. “We stopped them from using a bullshit war as an excuse to kill people, yes, but we didn’t permanently remove them or root them out or anything. Medina’s no longer the president of this continent, but he wasn’t the only one hell-bent on acquiring research and rebooting humanity with a master race. You don’t have to hold political office to engage in institutional what-the-fuckery.”

  “Do you…keep in touch with any of those folks?”

  She grimaced like she’d just bit into rancid poison. “Not if I can help it. But Heron’s got one of their insiders on the island right now. You even know which one.”

  “Vallejo? He was their priso
ner, though, not one of the team. I don’t see how he—”

  “Parallels are unavoidable once you start thinking about it,” she said. “Vallejo claimed he was kidnapped and held by that we-deserve-to-live-forever crew, probably headed by that shithead Limontour. They were torturing him into giving them all his research. And who just outed herself as the owner of the most cutting-edge immortality tech on the planet?”

  “Chloe,” Kellen whispered.

  “Chloe,” Angela confirmed.

  Garrett sucked in a breath, but it was hard. Sometime during Angela’s expletive-laden tirade he’d forgotten to breathe, and his throat felt gummy. “So maybe Vallejo knows where they took her?”

  “It’s worth asking him.” Kellen got to his feet. The cat stopped nuzzling Garrett, licked itself briefly, and trotted over to sit by Kellen’s boots. “How long till we can get the wheels up on that plane? Let’s go question us a supervillain.”

  Chapter Seven

  THE DOLL KITCHEN, ANTARCTICA

  Really, No Idea How Much Later. Internal Chronometers Are Hosed.

  Chloe was in a suddenly smaller where. A cage. Tentatively, she pushed a signal out from her box, but it didn’t go far.

  Ah. A Faraday cage, to be precise.

  How big was it, though? Bigger than her box, a bit, but precise dimensions were hard to figure out with no eyes and no data links. She pinged systematically for output devices, but nothing answered. A hundred years ago, this kind of silence would have been possible. In her world? It was crazy. Unreal. Like she was hovering in a complete information void.

  She was isolated, with no way to transmit, no way to receive communication from others. Frustration didn’t begin to describe how she felt. Panic more closely approximated it.

  She’d never really thought about limitations before. Sure she’d seen humans who had challenges to basic systems, especially among her family’s refugees, people who couldn’t afford to have their errors repaired with biotechnology or for some other reason chose not to. Some had worn eye covers, spectacles, to enhance vision that was naturally degraded. One boy had been unable to hear sounds and had spoken by making ballet with his fingers. Chloe had learned the pretty finger language and translated subvocally for Mama Adele. Sweet boy. He’d been with the refugees when the Pentarc had fallen. Benito Rice. Chloe knew all their names.