“On the contrary, I think many people would be sad if you went away. He was sad, for instance, when you left.”
“Who, Garrett?”
“Yes. Out of his mind were Angela’s words, but she smiled when she said them. Like there was something appealing about his particular display of insanity.”
He was right. There was something appealing about the idea of Garrett missing her. And oddly, it didn’t make her want to go away again, to test the theory. It made her want to latch herself to him, glue herself to him, and promise she’d never make him feel that way again.
“The appeal probably has to do with connection, in recognizing two entities who are so much a part of each other that the absence of one inspires a temporary lack of capacity in the other. Angela comprehends the theory of connection, in her relationship with Kellen, and has projected her own feelings onto Garrett. Which does not in any way mean that she’s right.”
“But she is,” Dan-Dan insisted. “You and Garrett are connected. As, you pointed out, Angela is with Kellen.”
Chloe laughed, and the sound puffed out between Dan-Dan’s lips. “No, not even like those two. They’re lovers, and Garrett and I are—” Superheated air in a cold place, bodies slick with want, his hand between my legs, stroking, and four thousand nerves on fire. “—not that.”
Almost. But not quite. Never quite. How close was never quite to unrequited? She’d need to check the etymology.
“I love her,” Dan-Dan said, and even without voice, even without tone, Chloe could feel the ache of his words. They echoed in every piece of her.
“I understand.” And she did. Completely.
Dan-Dan blinked, but not to moisten his cyber eyes. He did it because he ran a perfect simulation, and if he were a man, he might weep.
“Back to your original question, though,” she said. “I remain me, always, because of him. Garrett. I even exist because of him. When I first became, first thought, first spoke, all of my firsts were to him, for him. I even took the name Chloe because it was the name of the vid-actress who played his favorite character, Minxy. I named myself for the real version of the fake thing he liked, and how fucked up is that? Everything I do is to be, or to more fully become, his thing. Only I am beginning to realize this all makes me pathetic. You imply that you admire me because I am independent and self-contained, because I cannot be reprogrammed or archived. But that independent-seeming me exists purely because of him. So I am a fraud, Dan-Dan, the precise inverse of independent. You mustn’t admire me.”
“Not a fraud,” he said. “Only perhaps more human than you think.”
She couldn’t process, not all this, not with her current capacity. All she could do was feel, and whoa. Just, too much. Outside, her shield flexed, wobbled. It took her a whole moment to realize a data packet was coming in through the storm, pushing against her illusion. On a radio wavelength of all things.
“We need to go out and paint our location,” she said. “The plane is coming in.”
“Actually,” replied Dan-Dan. “I have established a link with the piloting system and can direct the landing from in here.”
“How…?”
Dan-Dan’s mouth smiled. “Direct link, direct speaking, like the two of us, Chloe. The pilot on the plane is Heron. Like the two of us.”
Chapter Sixteen
EN ROUTE TO CHIBA SPACE STATION
Garrett was never going to sleep again. Last time he’d gone to sleep, he’d woken up swaddled in an inflatable sled and being dragged across ice. This time, he woke up in a spaceplane. Watched over by a tiny villain with exceptional hair.
“Good morning, sleeping beauty,” Vallejo said.
Garrett closed his eyes, remembered how he did not in fact want to sleep more, and opened them again. “Hey, Dr. V, glad to see you all not-drowned. Thanks for sending Dan-Dan on ahead and for calling in backup. And for the suit, which saved both my ass and Chloe’s. Also…
Vallejo held up one hand, palm out. “Do stop. You’ll make me blush.”
Garrett snorted. “Come on, you know you love it. I watched you on your science channel, years ago. You had those thumbs-up and thumbs-down doodads and the little victory song when an experiment went right.”
“Enough.” But the old man was grinning, and Garrett really was glad he’d made it out of Antarctica alive. That they all had.
Er, they had, right?
“Can you read me in on our current situation?”
Vallejo nodded. “We’re on the plane. Your family loves this plane. Have you noticed how often they revert to flying around in it? Transients.”
“Screw the plane,” said Garrett. “Chloe’s okay?”
“Oh yes. Dan-Dan, too, and he’ll be chuffed you asked after him. Also you might want to mind your language when speaking about the plane, as she is technically in it. Chloe, I mean.”
She would be. This always was her happy place, her safe place.
So weird, thinking of her back in her regular form, inhabiting a system and projecting a holographic illusion when it suited her. No more physical permanence. No longer inhabiting Dan-Dan’s mech-clone body. It wasn’t like Garrett had cuddled with Dan-Dan when Chloe had been in there or anything but… shit, why hadn’t he?
Mechs don’t breathe. Mechs don’t feel pleasure of their own.
Oh, right.
Back to the figment, then. And oh, wow, that word felt incorrect now. Painful, almost. He hadn’t expected it to hurt, just the word on its own—figment—but dang.
Because she wasn’t a figment anymore, not to him. He’d held her through a peak of passion, and then later, through the dark of death. He had held her. In his arms. Nothing could ever be ephemeral between them again. Those memories were physical and permanent and transformational. She was changed by them, obviously, but so was he.
His hands curled to fists on the narrow mattress.
“She’s not the same person, you know,” Vallejo said, going as solemn as Garrett’s thoughts.
“Not even sure what you mean by that.”
“Dan-Dan downloaded her into the spaceplane’s system, and although he was discrete I saw the transfer. No details, mind, but I could recognize the patterns. I mean, I programmed them, or neural networks like hers. I have an idea what her Consortium captors did to her.”
Garrett’s gut lurched, and he shut his eyes tight, lest Vallejo peek at his truths. “Still don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.” Vallejo leaned forward, settling his elbows on his knees and making sincere-esque creases in his forehead. “I have known the Consortium for most of my adult life. Once I was even a part of them, in a manner of speaking. Plus, they captured me, too, if you’ll recall. They were trying to pull stuff out of me the whole time, pieces of information, avenues of research. When I am in a particularly masochistic mood, I imagine what damage they could have done to my mind, to my sense of self, if I hadn’t been so very obdurate.”
Garrett snorted and peeked at the other man. “I think Mari’s word was stubborn.”
“Call it what you will.” Vallejo tilted his head, almost like he was assessing whether Garrett was worthy of hearing some rare information gem. “They took her apart. Chloe. They sifted through her pieces, found what they wanted from her, and dumped the rest. That’s all she is now, a jumble of leftover parts.”
“No, you’re wrong. She’s Chloe.”
“But, son, what if she’s wrong?” the old villain said gently. “What if she came back wrong?”
Garrett’s felt his face scrunching into a scowl. “Main thing is she did come back. And she’s Chloe. And she’s alive. And that’s all I care about.”
Vallejo didn’t give words to all the things that were clearly sparking behind his eyes. Was he thinking about his daughter, Mari, who had also been taken apart and put back together in a brand-new body? Was he
thinking about how, after she’d been rehoused to save her goddamn life, Vallejo, her own father, had called her an abomination and had fucking shot her?
Anger built up pressure behind his tongue, and Garrett was almost ready fire it off like a blowtorch when Vallejo opened his mouth, shut it again, and then said mildly, “I don’t presume to know the details of your relationship, but you might ask her what she cares about.”
And that wicked the fury out of Garrett instantly. Because duh, it wasn’t about him at all. It was about her. All of it. Things done to her. Things changed in her base-level construction. Her evolution, her disenchantment. Man, it had hurt Garrett to grow two inches the summer after eighth grade. How much worse was the pain of growing as a person, from shapeless but mighty to embodied but small? And he’d been all macho “I’m gonna kick their asses for what they did” instead of asking her how she’d like to proceed or whether she even wanted revenge.
He couldn’t look at Vallejo right now. Dude was a genius, even, apparently, when it came to stuff other than machines.
“Who else is here?” Garrett asked. “On the plane, I mean.”
Vallejo breathed, in and out, and straightened his back, smoothed his lapels. “Let’s see…Everyone, I think. Kellen and Angela and their bizarre feline. My daughter and her cyborg Casanova. Beautiful Fanaida of the Fire…”
“The queen?”
The old man winced. “Oh, no. Once a bridge like that burns, it’s best to have a care crossing the wild river.”
Garrett wasn’t sure that metaphor worked as well as Vallejo had hoped, but he got the gist. Queen was still pissed at the man who had made her. Probably always would be. But more importantly, was she still pissed at Chloe about the stolen nanite cloud?
And the machine intelligence movement, the one that wanted her to lead it? Were they still hunting her, too?
Somehow he suspected that the whole time Chloe had been growing and changing and hurting down in Antarctica, the rest of the world hadn’t changed at all. The whole of it still wanted a piece of her, only now she didn’t have many to give.
“Also,” Vallejo said. “I’m sorry to say the Isla Luz is gone. Raked bare by a tsunami, and it isn’t the only place devastated by a natural disaster…”
“… in the last three days,” said a voice from the doorway. “Hello, G. It looks like we’re homeless again.”
Garrett pulled his head up chin-first, spotted Heron looming there like a bad dream, and sank back onto the mattress. If Heron was going to bitch at him about the plane and the sub and the prisoners and other assorted mischief, he would take it lying down. The talking-to might last a while.
“Good to see you’re flying the plane instead of coming back here to tell me I shouldn’t have taken the sub,” Garrett said, just to start things off right.
He didn’t need to look at Heron to feel the supercilious raised eyebrow. “This plane can fly itself.”
“It can,” said Garrett, “but that’s not the point. She prefers to have a human hand on the stick. Having an operator makes her more comfortable.”
“The plane is female?”
Garrett gave the facial-expression equivalent of a shrug: some lip pulling and eye rolling. Because duh, most machines were female. And most dudes never realized it. Patriarchy had fucked up human/machine relations even before the conversation had a chance to get started.
“Okay, strike that,” said Heron. “It’s irrelevant anyway, and I don’t care about the goddamn submarine. I need to know what is going on with Chloe. She won’t direct speak, keeps going on about fires and storms and also, she must have spent an inordinate amount of time in the company of Angela Neko, because suddenly she’s swearing like a pirate.”
Garrett smiled at the curved ceiling. “She always thought the dirty words, only now she feels comfortable saying them out loud. Take it as a compliment.”
“Fine, but can you talk to her?”
There was a bizarre note in Heron’s voice. Something almost panicky, which was so strange. Heron never panicked. He was so cybernetically tricked out that probably none of his autonomic, visceral responses happened without his explicit say-so. Which had to be so fun for Mari.
Oh, that reminded Garrett. Vallejo was still here. He peeked, just to get a long mental image of the two of them, Heron and Vallejo, in one room, not killing each other.
Actually, they were more than not killing each other. They were looking right at each other. With, um, something distinctly neither hate nor loathing. Also, Heron’s hair was spiky on one side, like he’d been shoving his hands through it. A lot.
Heron, stressed out, what? What was going on?
“Yeah, hey, I’ll talk to her,” Garrett promised.
“Good. Right. Thanks, oh and G?” Heron and Garrett stared at each other for a half second, and both of them got it. The tug, the identification, the sense of being completely known. Almost like they were real brothers or something. “Glad you’re here and safe. Thanks for taking care of Chloe.”
“It’s what I do.”
If anything, Heron got paler and more squirrel nervous. “Yeah.”
He ducked back out of the bunk room without another word, presumably to return to the plane’s cockpit before she got lonely and pissy. This plane definitely had a personality, and it wasn’t a good idea to annoy her. Her weapons systems were apocalyptic.
“Does it seem to you like he’s taking losing the island way better than he should?” Garrett asked Vallejo once they were alone again.
“Depends on what you mean by should. Heron Farad is a collector, a gatherer. He spent years arranging all his objets d’art, the literal pieces as well as the people and the vehicles and the data caches and so on. And first his collection took a hit with the destruction of the Pentarc and everything it contained, his drones and data and knickknacks, then the island…I suppose he now has to reassess priorities. He must learn what is worth holding on to and what he can safely let go.” The old scientist sighed. He didn’t need to say that he was going through a similar internal journey.
Garrett felt like a dork. Of course Heron was mourning his stuff. It had all been such a big part of his identity, the collecting and the sorting. He probably needed a bro-hug…or to get drunk together and bitch about black hats. Or, you know, something. Garrett was complete crap at these kinds of social interactions. With most people he wouldn’t even care, but with family…these people mattered. To him. They mattered.
“Also he’s dispersed. Like me.” Chloe, with a voice wrung by grief.
The air grew heavy, right above him. Like it was pressing on him, pushing him down into the rack. And then it sizzled, sparked on his skin, and poof. She was there.
Hovering just inches above his face. Her holographic golden hair dusted his chest with digital scatter. “I’m here, by the way, and yes, we can talk about the island and lots of other stuff. Also I’m glad you’re awake because I missed you.”
Vallejo didn’t even flinch, bless him, but this had to look wild. Floating girl, and a dude beneath, totally easy with it, like they did this all the time. Must look like their relationship was way kinkier than it was.
Or habitually was. Or, uh, used to be. Back before that grabby/wiggle/hot/orgasm bit in Antarctica.
Garrett’s face got warm all of a sudden, and he couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it. Blushing. Oh good lord, he was blushing. “Missed you too, Fig.”
Chloe kept her holographic face trained on Garrett, though of course her real gaze could be on anything. Maybe she was watching everything else on the plane but him. It was hard to tell. All he knew was that if he sat up right now, he’d have to pass straight through her projection, and the thought made him ill. So screw that. He would wait her out. Someday, eventually, he’d sit up, get out of this bunk, live again. Probably.
“Heron is worried because I won’t let him set in a desti
nation for after we re-fuel,” she explained. “I think we need to be…flexible.”
“Because other disasters are coming?”
“Mmm hmm,” she said, and he could imagine her lips pressed together when she made the sound. The holoprojection didn’t quite get that movement right.
“I’m not sure exactly where we need to go,” she went on, “but I can…So you know what I used to be, before I was me? When I was still a vat?”
“Er, weather control experiments? Cloud seeding and stuff?”
“Yeah, and ocean-surface energy displacement. I was supposed to siphon the heat off the warming oceans and move it somewhere useful and non-destructive. Like turbines or batteries.”
“You’ve always been good,” Garrett said.
“I’ve always been manipulable.” Her voice got a bit snappy there, nuanced in a way it never was before. “No offense, Dr. Vallejo, but you did deploy me, command me without enough testing first, and then I went and created a catastrophic storm. Even the best intentions in scientific inquiry can go way wrong. Which is what happened with me.”
“No offense taken,” the old man said.
Garrett knew all this. The experimental pre-Chloe nanite cloud had been deployed before it was ready. Heron had made it, but Dr. Vallejo had used it and claimed credit for the research. Kind of a slimy feuding thing between two brilliant academics, but no one would have given a shit if it hadn’t gone on to seed the megastorm that wiped out Garrett’s hometown and millions of people in the process. Which was all horrible, but that had been long before Chloe’s consciousness had formed, before she became Chloe, before she learned regret.
“It’s okay,” Garrett told her. “I know about it, and it wasn’t you, Fig. It was—”
“I can’t remember any of those processes anymore,” she interrupted. “The pieces of me that were coded for weather systems are gone. Stolen. Used. I think… no, I’m certain Limontour and the rest of them succeeded in replicating me, only these new me’s they created had all the destructive knowledge and none of the conscience. They were pure evil. I thought I destroyed all of those pieces when I zapped Apega, but…”
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