More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  No. For her. This was all for her, and the enormity of their sacrifice, or their willingness to sacrifice, hit her. Hard.

  All three of them had made it clear why they were here. Dan-Dan because serving a greater cause made him feel useful, necessary, worthy, repentant. And also because he wanted the humans to be safe. One human in particular.

  Vera because Chloe was the technological singularity, the hope for machines, the anti-weapon, a voice for all entities who hadn’t gotten a say in this perpetual motion of self-annihilation humans seemed determined to inflict.

  And Garrett simply because he loved her and wanted her to be whole. Though of course there was nothing simple about that.

  Her holoprojection bit its bottom lip between sharp teeth, the way humans did when they were attempting to contain a wave of emotion.

  Technically this mission was about saving the world. Again. She was going into the storm to retrieve the nanites that once had been part of her and to shut down a storm that would almost certainly, without any interference, decimate a major human population center. As Apega had said: Decimate. Control. Decimate. And on, until only the chosen are left. So defusing this storm was a big deal to the world overall.

  But it was a big deal for Chloe on a personal level. What she’d endured in Antarctica hadn’t been a sufficient atonement. Plus she’d added to her list of sins by frying poor Nathan. She was never going to prove to herself or anyone else that she wasn’t a mass-murdering monster if she didn’t put herself back together, hold all that godlike power, and then deliberately give it away.

  That would heal her guilty conscience, wouldn’t it? Prove she could be good. She could be enough. Just not too much. A hero, not a villain.

  “Thank you for not letting me do this alone,” she said, pushing her words directly to Dan-Dan and Vera and planting them warm and vibrant inside Garrett’s in-ear com.

  Chloe stretched beyond the plane, testing the raging air, the hot breath of the storm. She found familiar rhythms, a pocket of ionization, ringed by a utility fog, pulsing out its programming.

  Shhh, she told the foglets. You have done your work. Come home. Come home to me.

  They did, detaching from the storm, cooling their chemical injectors, collecting their power rather than pulsing it into the air. They paused, fell, and she drew them to her, forgave their corrupt programming, cleaned them, incorporated them into her collective. Three million, then four. Twenty-two million, and on.

  Chloe grew.

  Lightning bisected the thunderous gray beyond the cockpit window, and thunder rumbled through the deck plates. Gravitational forces tore through the plane like a Cuisinart, unexpected and shifting and sharp. Garrett stayed still, strapped in tight by the harness, but this had to be just excruciating for him, like he was being thrown violently in every direction. At the same time.

  “Approaching the eyewall,” Vera said, and she gave numbers, coordinates and vectors and pressure markers. The plane climbed, and the storm fought it, claws of shear and electric teeth. The queen had insisted on this plane because it had impressive structural tolerances. Well, she’d been right.

  “Vera, you are one brick shithouse of a plane,” Garrett called, echoing Chloe’s thoughts.

  “Thank yo—“

  Audio crackled, and they listed hard to one side. For a scream-worthy moment it seemed like the plane was turning into a spin. It must have lost an engine, but even that wasn’t fatal. Vera had three others.

  Chloe tried not to think what could have taken out a whole engine. Debris. Storm-tossed birds. A foglet construct.

  To me, to me. I absolve you, I forgive you. It’s not your fault.

  Density became crushing as they approached the very center of the storm. The eyewall, roiling and black and crammed full of her.

  There you are. See? I remember you. You belong to me, are mine.

  Pieces sorting themselves, finding each other, attaching, transmitting.

  Her memories and lists and… Goodness, did I really say that? Was I ever so innocent or angry or daft?

  They hardly seemed familiar, these pieces of her self, but at the same time she knew them. The core of her knew itself. It was like looking into a mirror and saying, Yes, it looks strange, but I know your face.

  These nanites were all reflections of her. Her materials, her responsibility, her power, her self.

  She pulled, and they came.

  Vibration strained the structural tolerances of the aircraft, and Chloe might have been tempted to see if she could lock it down, but Vera was already on the task.

  Dan-Dan noted a particularly dangerous part of the storm, and Garrett navigated them around it.

  Pieces, fitting, working together.

  What if, what if…

  Epiphany blurred, a foreground flower out of focus, but Chloe was too busy to see it. Soon she would pull it out for interpretation. But not right now.

  The plane shuddered, and only magic, or kick ass engineering, kept the wings attached to the fuselage. The air sucked them inside the monster’s mouth, and the eyewall was the back of his teeth, trapping them. If they could just find a way through…

  The burst through, then. Flying. Gravity loosed its hold, and the darkness bled to white, like somebody was shining a giant Maglite into all her visual sensors. Light like wire prongs on the back inside of your skull.

  The storm had been a roar, but now it went quiet. Poof, just like that.

  Eerie stillness held the plane, a single breath stolen.

  Her sensors adjusted to the brightness faster—and included a wider range—than human eyes could, and then she could see it. The eyewall, towering in 360 degrees. And Vera and all she held was small, in its heart, a lone gladiator in the Roman Coliseum, either crazy or courageous enough to target the emperor himself.

  At the control deck, Garrett checked the gauges, noted out loud the wind speed and direction on the wall that watched. The shift was subtle, but there, right there, the entire world was still.

  “That’s it,” said Garrett. “I have a fix on the eye.” Pressure was showing at 880 mbars. This storm was a monster indeed.

  And Chloe was about to jump right down its throat.

  She’d borrowed some nanites from the queen and pre-programmed them with homing lures. Bits of her digital come-hither, to bring the rest of her pieces home. She’d loaded them into the dropsonde before they took off from Mount Dora. Now she hooked them onto the edges of her consciousness. They were ready. She was ready.

  “All righty, I’m in the dropsonde,” said Chloe. “Open the tube and kick me out.”

  Garrett winced. “It still feels shitty to think of doing that.”

  “Really it does? After all these years you still don’t get it about physical permanence and how I don’t have it? I’m not literally going anywhere.”

  “Yeah, but for a few hours, Chloe, you were…”

  “With you,” she said, lulling her voice into his ears. “I was. I am. Now open the vent.”

  He did, or Vera did, and the plane thernked, retracted the door, and exposed its innards to the white, still air.

  Chloe, or the dropsonde at least, fell.

  She remembered the weight of being, the pull of gravity on a body. Pressures exerted on the dropsonde were not nearly so strong, but it still felt like falling. She remembered.

  Freedom. Perfect freedom, and perfect fear.

  She fell, pulling, calling.

  And they came.

  Not in small millions, as before, but in vast gluts of Chloestuff, fitting itself to the swarm to her, growing and exchanging experience and information. It was like a family reunion where all the people liked each other. Catching up. Joy. Bliss. One.

  And more, because her pieces had not been static while they were apart. They had new programming, new models, new insight. She didn’t sh
are any of her own new stuff with them, not yet. But she listened to theirs. They were toddlers showing her their daycare-drawn artwork, and it was beautiful.

  Sometimes threaded dark in places, though. Some of the data bled. Some of it hurt. Some had echoes of Apega, distorted programming, though much less of that than Chloe had expected. She actively looked for Apega but found only proto-ghosts of the AI, bits that, given time and the right conditions, could grow up to be a copy.

  Those were probably the first nanites stolen from Chloe, before her captors really started changing her. Which meant the rest, the post-Apega parts were still out there, somewhere else in the world, plotting mischief.

  Nowhere did she find her modified EMP program or any of the other destructive routines she’d built into Apega. And that worried her plenty, but not enough to slow or stop her. In fact, she’d gotten so wrapped up in the reunion, in the warm fuzzies of reconnecting, that she forgot to check the structure as she pulled.

  Which was probably the worst lapse she could have made.

  Storms were organized a lot like vast data stores and a tiny bit like a stack of cans at the market. Shearing cloud tops decreased the strength of the storm, like buying the cans off the top of the stack reduced inventory, and that was mostly what Chloe had been doing so far. Actually since she’d first entered the storm.

  Only now she wasn’t in the process of falling so much as she had already fallen, and she wasn’t shearing cloud tops anymore. She was working at the base, where the storm was most murderous, where all the heat roiled and fueled the beast. It felt like she had sucked up a good portion of her lost self, but she had underestimated her size. Her heft. Her own power.

  A giant glob of foglets—seven trillion tiny machines roughly 10 microns across, linked and thinking as one organism and full of purpose—broke from the storm and flew to her lure, sucking heat off the surface, altering the updraft air pattern at the edge of the wall.

  Pressure in the eyewall shifted. Organization came undone. A process meant to take hours evolved in a slice of one second. Too fast. Too fierce. Chaos roared in.

  The storm collapsed.

  • • •

  It wasn’t easy for Garrett to hold the plane steady here in the eye of a hurricane. They had come in high and then loosed the dropsonde, and Vera had put herself into a long, slow spiral, sometimes losing altitude and sometimes kicking them back upward. It felt like the craziest flight path in the history of aviation, and it probably was, but that’s kind of what you got when you let a plane fly itself.

  Garrett watched the gauges but not with any alarm. He was trying to rest his brain a few minutes before they had to fly back out the other side. They didn’t have the fuel to follow the eye all the way inland as the storm broke up. They’d need to go out the way they came in: a series of right-ward leans through gut-churning turbulence.

  He was really glad he hadn’t eaten anything up on the Chiba Station. Because if he had, it would be all over this instrument panel now.

  “What’s her altitude?” he asked, because data comforted him. Chloe was mostly data, after all. Maybe part of him thought that if he had enough information he could just summon her back to safety by fiat. As he understood it, her core consciousness had to be hooked into a bigger system, for power, so surely she was still here on the plane.

  But she hadn’t said anything to him since she jumped. And he worried.

  “Below ten thousand,” Dan-Dan said, “and amassing foglets by the trillion. It is… oh dear.”

  “Wha—”

  He didn’t have time to finish the syllable before the plane lurched. The pressure gauge went haywire, alert warnings blared, and Garrett looked out the window.

  At the eyewall disintegrating.

  No, not disintegrating like going away. Disintegrating like falling, creating a wall of water and fury and chaos, collapsing in on all sides and churning straight toward him, toward the center, to fill all that calm space at the core. That kind of oh-holy-shit disintegration.

  And then the plane was climbing, struggling, her engines screaming. Garrett gripped the control stick, but Vera was in charge here.

  “Try not to panic,” he hollered at her. “Just get us up.”

  She didn’t expend resources on forming words in reply, but her machine voice keened, soaring notes of desperation and terror.

  “You’ve done this more than a hundred times, girl. You can make it.”

  Chloe, Chloe, down in the dropsonde, oh God, stop falling please and come back. Come back to me.

  “Not. Like. This,” Vera said, but each word tore from the speakers, mutilated by static. The plane shuddered and dropped and surged and plunged.

  Garrett no longer knew which way was up. Everything was dark. Air was moving so fast past his face that he couldn’t. Catch. Breath. What altitude? If the cockpit lost pressure…

  An oxygen mask snaked down from the ceiling, and he grabbed it, shoved it over his face with his one free hand. Wasn’t like he could breathe well or anything, could hardly even hold his arm up enough to press the mask on. Forces slung him one way and then another and then in all directions at once, and he was certain he was falling and maybe dying but God where is Chloe and dark and breathe and not yet air suck not yet…

  Vera hit something. Hard. Enough to rattle every seam and surface on the plane. Impact twanged through Garrett’s bones, blew waves into his blood, sharp, spiky ripples on a cellular level, and every part of him screamed in pain. His body rallied to correct for all the insults being done to it, but it had never sustained impact like this before.

  He heard more than felt teeth breaking when his jaws slammed together, and he smelled blood inside his mask.

  But wait, smell required breath and that meant…

  The sudden stillness was scariest of all. Why wasn’t he flying? Or falling? All motion in the universe had paused and focused on this single point of complete peace. But not the peace of the hurricane’s eye, not the green-smelling peace of expectation.

  This was the peace of endings.

  Outside the cockpit window, rain fell. Slow, lazy rain, like on a picture window.

  Inside, Vera sighed. It took him a full moment to realize that the quiet wasn’t just because air pressure had popped his ears. The engines were off.

  And he wasn’t falling.

  How? How was any of this possible?

  “Be still. Dan-Dan’s coming to help.” Chloe’s voice, from far, far away.

  Garrett blinked, but the world looked viscera pink and smeared with rain.

  “Stay with me Garrett,” she said. “I’ve got you. I’m taking you home.”

  • • •

  He was awake that whole trip back. More or less. In and out of painful consciousness, and most of the time preferring the black. Sometimes on that trip—okay a lot of times—he felt like stopping the crazy struggle. Because what if life could actually be easy? What would it feel like to rest?

  But Garrett had never taken the easy path. His life had been balls-to-the-wall from the moment of fertilization, and he didn’t know how to stop fighting. Sometimes he wished he could give up, but it just wasn’t in his DNA.

  Yeah, thanks for that, too, bitch. Am thwarting you again, though, ‘cause looky here, I’m still alive. This damn body won’t let me quit.

  Dan-Dan repaired everything he could, on the inside, and whoa, that dude was stocked with medical knowledge, not to mention discretion. He’d been bodyman to a continental senator for more than two years, and in that time Garrett was pretty sure Angela Neko had never suffered more than a hangnail. If that. And definitely no one had ever heard about it if she had.

  The mech had injector tips built into his fingers, and lord only knew what kind of heaven-pillow bliss chems he depressed into Garrett’s veins. He reset the joints and bones that gravity had dislodged, knitted and restrung
all the parts he could reach. He did tweak the nanocytes at the bruise sites on Garrett’s torso where the harness had cut in, and the pain there dulled till it was little more than a remembered throb.

  And through it all, he said nothing. He had to be finding stuff in there, secret alts Garrett had bought over the years, and more worrisome things, but Dan-Dan kept his secrets.

  He didn’t have the materials to fix Garrett’s broken teeth—two of the suckers, cracked—but he did numb the site nicely. Garrett couldn’t talk well enough through the anesthetic even to thank Dan-Dan.

  Or to respond to Vera’s desperate and repeated apologies.

  Or to ask Chloe what had happened. What was happening.

  She sang to him, though, inside his com, so she was close. With him. He knew she was busy, doing whatever technovoodoo was keeping them in the air with no working engines, but even so she took the time, expended the resources on providing constant comfort. She became an all-around anorak of warmth and love and care. He deeply suspected that some of the stuff Dan-Dan injected into him was in fact bits of her, medical nanites that she had programmed to find his hurts and salve them.

  In his head she sang the power ballads, Metallica and Queensryche, and well, he could have done with a tad less Journey and Flavor Bomb. Nothing in the history of rock ‘n’ roll had ever sounded so wrong. Or so amazing.

  They washed up in the Inland East Coast Territory, southern part, someplace with a lot of leaf-bare winter trees and the crisp, nostril-stinging smell of pine. Garrett remembered pine stink from Texas. He wondered if they bred the big cockroaches here, too, wherever here was exactly.

  They hadn’t needed an airfield, not the way Chloe brought them in. She’d landed them on a patch of snow-dusted lawn, light enough they barely dented the frost. It had to have been the quietest landing ever, and completely surreal, even if he hadn’t been hopped up on whatever Dan-Dan had injected him with.

  His body was already nearly done mending, but Dan-Dan still tsked when he rose to walk in under his own power. Garrett only made it a few steps, because even the best pain killers were really only pain disbelievers. The pain was still there, just waiting to be tweaked up to the surface of awareness. So when Dan-Dan crouched at his side and wordlessly offered to become a human crutch, Garrett didn’t object. Just one more thing to thank the mech-clone for.