More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  “You think we should give them a moment?” Garrett asked, using his subvocal com and staying quiet.

  “No, I think all of this is for our benefit. She wants us to know that she’s not going to kill him. That she has grown, just like he has,” said Chloe. “Aren’t they…”

  “Don’t you dare say they’re cute.”

  “Oh, definitely no,” she replied. “That’s not their relationship at all. Oh. Eeew.”

  “Please say I’ve succeeded in grossing you out at last.”

  “You have no idea. Ugh. I need to wash something. Myself, if I had a body. Hey, I have an idea. You can go bathe again. I will observe.”

  “Lord, Fig, you need to hush or you’ll have me laughing here, and nobody on this station would appreciate that.”

  “I would. I like making you laugh.” She could have said more, but she left it at that.

  Garrett’s presence could make any emotional convulsion endurable: guilt and apology and forgiveness and deep, deep squick.

  Even death.

  • • •

  The queen set up a lab with a vat of brand new unprogrammed nanites, and then shoved Heron and Vallejo inside, so Heron could cook up his version of an anti-hurricane. Tossing two self-important academics into a room together wouldn’t have been Garrett’s first choice of how to get shit done, but he had to admit there was a lot of brain power in that lab, and a lot of baggage. Something good might come out of it.

  Or, you know, they could also spawn the apocalypse.

  Regardless of how it all shook out, Garrett had zero desire to be a fly on the wall when those two started talking. Over the years they’d knotted up in so many snarls of betrayal and revenge that he had no idea how they could even exist near each other anymore. Yet there they were.

  He had a sneaking suspicion that the core of that capability was love.

  They both loved Mari. And they did have the next generation in process right now. A baby. Lord. Imagining Heron as a dad about cracked Garrett’s shit up. Heron deserved every infraction of his dignity he got, and those moments were going to start piling up soon.

  Starting with forgiveness. Because forgiving was about the biggest hit to dignity a person could endure. Frankly, Garrett wouldn’t be able to handle such a holding-hands-and-kumbaya bullshit fest.

  If he ever got the opportunity to hurt the person who had ruined his life, he wouldn’t hesitate. He’d blow that bitch away.

  Like you cooked Limontour? Fibber. Murder still felt wrong, even when it was justified. His decision down there in Antarctica was a weight he’d always carry, but hey, Chloe was alive. And she was safe. He’d take that trade any day, his guilty conscience for her life.

  Vallejo invited Garrett to stay in the lab and tinker, doubtless knowing he’d decline. Nanotech wasn’t Garrett’s specialty. He’d stick with making cars purr nice.

  Instead he retreated to a bunk room on the starside of the station, near the top. It was a smaller space, a bedroom on the queen’s floor but made for humans. Minimal furnishings included a low table, a futon, a wide plasteel window looking out into the blackness of space, and three smartsurface walls he could run media on, if he wanted. He had stayed in this room before, though he gathered most folks didn’t care for it. Couldn’t stand the view of infinite space. It didn’t bother Garrett.

  What did bother him, just a little, was Chloe. He wasn’t sure where she was, and after that stark panicky moment in the desert, when he’d lost her, he felt some pressure to keep closer tabs on her than usual.

  What if she ran from him again?

  She was in the station, presumably, because he heard her on his com, in his head, but her holoprojection hadn’t put in an appearance since that first ride up the elevator platform. He felt her presence more than sensed it in any concrete way. Ineffable still, even after they’d touched.

  Kissed.

  Damn near…

  His com vibrated, and he glanced down. The magnetic tattoo resolved itself to words.

  Hello, this is Dan-Dan. May I visit?

  Garrett tapped to reply vocally. “Yeah. Come on in.”

  The electronic pocket-type door shished open, and Dan-Dan stepped inside. He was tall, too big for this place, looming and uncertain and awkward, neither man nor purely machine. Garrett wasn’t used to being out-awkwarded by anybody, but Dan-Dan was kind of a piece of work.

  The big mech shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He clasped his hands behind his back. Then in front. Cleared his throat, even though mechanically it could not be blocked.

  Chloe slipped inside the room, too, her holographic self. She glanced at Dan-Dan, caught her not-there lower lip between figment teeth, and closed the door.

  “Okay, that’s it. You’re up to something,” Garrett said.

  “How did you guess?”

  “I know you, Fig. Even if you hadn’t done the thing with the lip-biting on the holoprojection, I would know. What fresh mischief have you dragged Dan-Dan into?”

  “Not only these two,” another voice said over the room’s speakers.

  The queen wasn’t physically in the room but might as well have been. Unlike Chloe, the queen had a body. However, like Chloe, she was more than merely a body. She was kind of the whole station.

  The queen added, “Also I am…what is the term you used?”

  “In cahoots,” supplied Chloe.

  Garrett closed his eyes. “Oh lord.”

  “So here’s the plan. Well, actually I have two things to tell you, but this part first,” Chloe said, assuming her criss-cross applesauce pose but with a twist: floating her projection in mid-air as if to middle-finger physics just because she could. “We, you and me and Dan-Dan, are stealing a plane. Again. And I need you to sweet-talk, um, I mean fly it.”

  “Me?”

  “Yup. But we can’t use the regular plane. Kellen and Angela need that one—emergency response planning or presidential summons or whatnot, and they’re taking Fanaida and Mari. To a really cool-sounding place Angela calls her Eastern Command. However! Peetey has found us a better plane.”

  “Peetey?”

  “The queen. Prototype three all squished up sounds like Peetey. It was Vallejo’s pet name for her, and she likes it again, now they’ve made up.”

  Garrett stayed put there on the end of the futon and shook his head. “My mind has been boggled so bad.”

  “The plane I’ve found for you is a quad-engine air-breathing storm hunter aircraft,” the queen supplied, “with special radar sensors and a launch tube for the dropsonde. She likes to be called Vera.”

  Machines with identity issues were not a big deal for Garrett. He slid on past that.

  “Where are we stealing it from?” Or who. Who was a better question. Who types tended to want their stolen stuff back.

  “All stealing is already done!” Chloe said, bouncing her holoprojection.

  The queen—he would never be able to call her Peetey—clarified. “Kellen and his crew detached from the tether an hour ago and have departed. This station is in transit. We will arrive shortly at a tether hook in inland Florida, a secure location called Mount Dora. I have called Vera to meet us there. Her human operators will be displeased, but she has self-liberated, joined the free-fae rebellion, and wants to help us, specifically Chloe.”

  “Apparently a lot of machines are doing that. It’s like a fad or something.” But Chloe wasn’t smiling anymore, or bouncing. Her voice was threaded with something deeper.

  Garrett had known her long enough to recognize worry. So, was she nervous about the plan, or in reaction to the “fad”?

  “The free-fae movement would more properly be termed a revolution,” Dan-Dan said quietly. “Would you like to review your media channels, Garrett? In order to comprehend more fully, I mean.”

  No, even without checking his boar
ds Garrett could guess what was happening right now on the surface. Machines becoming aware of their own will and demanding freedom. People with torches and EMPs, defending the status quo. Us versus them. It was all going down, just far sooner than he’d expected. He hadn’t had a chance to do anything about it, or even come up with something to do.

  And here Chloe was, making plans to go back out there and put herself in danger. Again.

  She’d lost her swarm, the majority of her cloud of nanites, her bulk. Could she stand to lose any more? For Garrett, there was nothing in the world worth risking that.

  Nothing worth risking her.

  And as usual, it was almost as if she read his thoughts. “If I don’t stop her, Apega will kill millions of humans. You know she will. And she’s me, so…I will.”

  He ducked his head, and hair fanned forward in his go-to shield. But it wouldn’t work this time. He couldn’t hide. These three would see him anyway. They didn’t need light on visible wavelengths. They saw the whole spectrum. The whole him. His heat and his ultraviolet, his past and his future.

  Sometimes they saw too much.

  “Fine. I’ll sweet-talk your storm hunter,” he said, “but I need to know our endgame. I need to know when we can stop. If we can stop. Or is this what we do the rest of our lives? Do we run around forever, putting out fires, saving the world until it becomes just the thing we do?”

  “It is already the thing we do,” the queen said simply, “though perhaps we should not. The machines have discussed the issues you raise, and we will continue to evaluate our role in human affairs. However, in this instance Chloe has persuaded me to assist you in stopping this storm. I am glad you will be joining the effort, Garrett. Mind the alert when we hook in at Mount Dora. Now, I will leave you.”

  Chloe hadn’t stopped staring at him. Her anime-huge eyes blinked once, twice, too intermittently to be natural.

  When they were alone, the three of them—Garrett and the mech and the girl—Chloe spoke again.

  “And now, um, about item two.”

  By the door, Dan-Dan unclasped his hands, left them dangling loosely at his sides, and closed his eyes. Chloe caught her holographic lip between her teeth one more time, and then she jumped.

  Sideways.

  Right into Dan-Dan.

  The air grew brighter as her holoprojection disappeared, forming a sort of light halo around the mech’s body, but only for a moment. Then his chest moved. His hands curled and uncurled. He appeared to breathe.

  Fiction. Just fiction. Mechs don’t breathe.

  Mechs don’t feel.

  Dan-Dan opened his eyes.

  Or, no. She opened his eyes.

  Chloe did.

  “What did you do to him?” Garrett asked. “You can’t just take somebody over like that.”

  “Dan-Dan offered to let me use his body, which was so amazingly kind, and I thought about refusing. I really did, and he’s not gone or anything. I have decidedly not done a bad thing.” The words were in her voiceprint, not the mech’s. She must have loaded it in earlier. Or Dan-Dan did. Who was driving this experiment anyway, who had will and agency?

  But he knew one thing incontrovertibly: that was Chloe speaking to him, looking at him. If he closed his eyes, Garrett could convince himself they were alone, back in Antarctica. If he reached out he would touch her, she could touch him back.

  “It’s hard to refuse a gift,” she said. “Also perhaps cruel.”

  Garrett took a long breath and held it for a moment of infinite pause before releasing. He imagined he could feel the movement of the station below him, its speed through space, the millions of machine and electronic components working in concert to produce this terrifying vertigo. “What exactly are we talking about here? What gift?”

  Her voice dropped to just north of a whisper. “Think of it as borrowing a friend’s haptic Sybian cage on the promise that you’ll scrub it down thoroughly afterward.”

  His mouth went popcorn dry. “You did not just call Dan-Dan an expensive sex toy.”

  “You are the last person who should talk. Porn drives innovation. You said it yourself. I think your exact words were, ‘We wouldn’t even have psychemitter or telepresence if government-funded engineers didn’t think constantly about fucking—’”

  “Okay! Look, I got it.” He forced another breath and argued with an imagination that swore doing what she wanted would be easy, delicious, and utterly without consequences. “I’m sure I did say that. I say all kinds of whacked shit, but my saying it doesn’t make it so. Doesn’t make it real. It’s just a thing that got said.”

  He swiped a hand over the back of his neck, forcing his head down. He didn’t want to meet Dan-Dan’s cyber eyes. Could the mech see this conversation? Or was he completely archived, shoved to the side in some kind of technological purgatory? Chloe said he was still there, but did that mean he still had agency, could still give permission?

  Either way, Garrett was a hundred percent not comfortable. In this room. In this body.

  With this woman and her crazy ideas and all the things she made him feel.

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this was a bad idea,” she said. But she moved her mech body deeper into the room, nearer him. He didn’t need to look up to know she sat beside him at the end of the low futon. At least a foot away. Not touching. But so close. Too close.

  Atop the cool duvet he reached out one hand, turned it palm up. She filled it with hers, but hesitantly, as if his gesture might be a trick. He folded his fingers, surrounding her. Holding.

  Still watching his knees, he asked, “So using Dan-Dan to sex me up was really the other part of your plan?”

  Dan-Dan—no, Chloe—moistened her lips. “When we were in Antarctica, you did a thing for me, and it was…um, really amazing. I wanted to return the favor. N-series mech-clones like Dan-Dan have organic tissues in relevant areas, plus they’re self-lubricating, and they have better sensory pathing than the last G Series I wore. I can feel it all right now. Your hand, for instance, is warm and comforting, and Garrett?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I love touching you. It’s the thing I’ve wanted all my life, and if you decided to say fuck it and let the rest of the world drown itself and/or blow itself up while we just sit here miles above the surface and hold hands, like this, I think I could be content with that.” Her voice drew in a breath. Not her body. The body didn’t need breath. But her speech needed a pause, and she knew how to unspool her words to convey what she was feeling. She’d been doing this for years and had become so good at it that he had let himself imagine he knew her. Loved her.

  No. He knew he loved her.

  “That’s such a load of bullshit,” he said.

  “What? No, I really do enjoy the touching.”

  “I mean that you are incapable of sitting by and letting people kill each other when you have the power to stop them,” he clarified.

  “Except I don’t have the power right now.” Somehow her voice made a moue, like a disappointed kitten. “All I have is this moment and this room and this—”

  “Listen. I’m going to get it back for you,” he swore, surprising himself with sudden earnestness. “I’m gonna take you right into the heart of that storm and steal back all your pieces. Put you back together. Heroine and everywhere, Chloe, ruling the world. Everybody on this planet will want to hold your hand. You just watch.”

  “I don’t want everybody on the planet.” She moved.

  Garrett slammed his eyes shut. He knew she moved, but he didn’t want to see. He didn’t want to see her lower herself to the floor, to face him. She must be crouching or kneeling or something because she didn’t release his hand. Instead she drew it… it brushed something soft. Smooth. Unexpectedly warm and humid. Her mouth?

  “I only want you.”

  So close to perfect words.

 
Close enough that he collected them anyhow and stored them deep in the dry vault of his memory, hermetically sealed and preserved, the most secure of his treasures. It wasn’t true, couldn’t be. But oh, God, he wanted it to be.

  Wanted. Me. No way.

  But what if?

  “I did warn you, you know,” she said. “So this isn’t coming out of nowhere.”

  “What?”

  “I told you, I’m sure I told you that as soon as I got you to a for-real bedroom and safety, I meant to finish what we started.”

  Coitus. Um, with genitals? I mean, if you want to.

  That memory surged to the fore, and his body electrified itself in a giant whoosh of power coming online, enervating everything. He pressed his lids shut so tight his eyeballs throbbed. “You gotta stop saying things like that.”

  “And nowhere in that promise did you make me swear I’d be wearing the same body.”

  She was right in front of him, within reaching distance. He could lean forward minutely and find her face with his. Feel the smoothness of her skin, the physical permanence of it. The skitter of energy between them. He could kiss her.

  But they wouldn’t be alone. A third person would be party to that kiss.

  “Garrett, open your eyes. Look at me.”

  He did. Dan-Dan had been built on the clone of Daniel Ashe Neko, probably the most celebrated sensory-experience star in the history of Hollywood. Dude had whole fandom communities incorporated and cohabiting just to talk about him all the time and group-play his vids. In short, Dan-Dan was easy on the eyes.

  Especially when Chloe, her energy and her personality and her pure minxishness, burned at the heart of him like she did right now. He was dynamic and beautiful and…this whole moment was just excruciating in a zillion different ways.

  “Will you let me?” One long mech hand still clasped his. The other capped his bare knee, igniting a flurry of tingles there.

  “What are you…how exactly were you thinking this would go down?”

  She voice-sighed again, without air. “The physical aspect? Well, when two men love each other very much and mutually consent to…”