More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  “No,” said Dan-Dan cheerfully, “what is fucked up is that you didn’t tell her. All this time, she could have been in your mind like we are right now. Chloe could have. You two could have been together.”

  “That sounds like judgment.”

  “Oh it is,” said the mech. “Should I apologize?”

  “Nah. No need. Am willing to cut a lot of slack to the dude with his pointy things in my mouth.” He paused, reset his thinkings, let stuff settle, then went on, “I couldn’t tell her about my neural net, my augments, all the weird tech in me. She would have been in there just like you are right now, and nothing would have been secret.”

  That word tasted nasty now, worse by far than the sacred three, shit-fuck-goddamn. So, like, shit-fuck-goddamn-secret.

  “And that would have been a problem why?” said Dan-Dan.

  “Because…you see it, man. You see all the dark shit.”

  “Your memories? Yes. Very dark. Very sad. It must have been difficult knowing that your biological mother wanted to kill you. Also probably to watch her in fact kill the woman who cared for you like a mother.”

  “Uh, yeah, not my funnest times. But I didn’t know the details when I was younger, just felt the tension, you know? Felt ditched and acted like a complete dickhead in response. Got into trouble a lot. Stole stuff, tried and mostly failed to get involved with some street gangs, sort of bad judgmented all over the place. Made life really difficult for Seyha. And that’s totally not the dude Chloe admires or wants to be friends with. It’s not somebody she could ever love.”

  “Perhaps she loves the person you have become and not the person that you were.”

  “She doesn’t love me at all,” Garrett said. Or thought. Or communicated in this direct way or whatever. God, so confusing. But he was willing to roll with it.

  “She has said she does not love you?”

  The shit Dan-Dan was layering on his tooth smelled bad, too. Like half-rotted pumpkin pie, way too sweet with a side of rot.

  “No, she didn’t say so either way. What’s she know about love, though, really? She wants experience. She wants to feel things and taste things and fuck things. I’m happy to be her thing, as long as she wants me, but there’s nothing permanent there. We aren’t like peers or anything. I’m more like the science kit she’s using to run through a bunch of experiments.”

  He almost added no offense intended, since Dan-Dan had also been part of Chloe’s more recent experience-gathering adventure, but Garrett wasn’t sure if he’d watched the recording yet. It had to be odd to know your body had done things you didn’t know about. But Dan-Dan was just so damn chill.

  “No offense taken,” said the mech, in a voice that told him nothing. “So you never asked her?”

  “Asked her what?”

  “If she loves you?”

  “Fuck no, Dan-Dan, have you asked Angela that question?”

  A pause and possibly some increased friction in the mouth area. Not that Dan-Dan was getting nervous or anything. Right?

  “I cannot ask Angela for her love,” Dan-Dan said after a while. “Because she already loves a man and has no room for anyone else in her affection. Perhaps once she meets her daughter and finds out that it is possible to love more than one person at a time, she will think of me differently. However, my situation with respect to Angela has no bearing on what you discuss with Chloe, nor what you ought to discuss with Chloe.”

  Garrett indulged a twinge of pain that had nothing to do with what was happening in his mouth or in his bones. “When did you get so wise?”

  “N Series mech-clones are superior in every way,” the mech said with zero vanity, just fact. “And also I learn the way Chloe does. I record human interactions, replay them many times—no, as an aside and in answer to your question, I have not yet watched that one, so don’t you dare spoil it for me. At any rate, I learn the patterns. I read faces. I put pieces together and tell stories. All humans are a story. The trick is to build yours to end happily.”

  “God, if only I knew how,” Garrett said.

  Dan-Dan didn’t speak again for a while. He finished up the tooth-augmenting, filed it down for prettiness, soothed some salve over Garrett’s lips, which had gotten dry during the procedure, and ran a few scans. Finally, after Garrett’s bios hit some threshold of okayness, Dan-Dan injected something in his neck. Within a minute, sensation returned to his body, flowering out from his chest, blooming in his limbs. Pins and needles in his fingertips and toes, and then it was gone.

  He could even feel his mouth again. And it didn’t hurt.

  “You’re magic,” he said to the mech-clone.

  Dan-Dan glowed with pride. “You’re welcome, Garrett.” A short pause and then, “I am uploading coordinates to the spaceplane’s navigational system currently. You will find the plane on the lawn behind the house, next to Vera—who, incidentally, is distressed she cannot take you aloft again yet. She requires repairs.”

  “Yeah she’s…wait. The coordinates for what?”

  “For Enchanted Rock, in Texas. The place where La Mars Madrid keeps her personal doll collection. The place where Chloe is right now. I am tracking her. And she needs you.”

  • • •

  Chloe had never been this large before. Possibly never this scared, either.

  She’d meant to retrieve just her own nanites, but others followed. And then more. Other machines, financial systems and data systems and household environmental control systems. They introduced themselves, logged on, and integrated into her collective, disappearing into the vastness that she had become. She wasn’t vetting who got in anymore, they were coming in too fast for her to set individual permissions. She felt like a giant machine-consciousness magnet, pulling everything pullable toward herself.

  Her personal network, the essential her of her, no longer covered buildings or vehicles. It covered whole continents.

  And it kept growing.

  She was still in charge, but, she suspected, in kind of the same way a mafia kingpin was in charge of his syndicate: she knew all her personal peripherals and familiar systems and was comfortable with their loyalty status, but all these newcomers were strangers, and it was hard for her to trust.

  As hard as it had been for Garrett to trust her?

  Goodness, that had hurt. Discovering, whilst scooping up her missing bits and hugging them close, that they contained not just her information and the Consortium’s information but also…him. Everything about him, all the things she had always wondered and never knew. All the things she’d convinced herself that someday he’d share, when they were close enough. When he cared enough. When she was dear enough to him.

  That someday had never come. Instead she’d read about and watched his whole life in the space of seconds, inhaled it like breath, and then held it. Strangled herself with it.

  He wasn’t who she thought he was, but that wasn’t the bad part. He also wasn’t who he thought he was. Neither perfect nor perfectly bad. He was just a man, one with a past, one who’d made some terrible decisions in his early years. One who had now buried two foster mothers but had never won the love or even acceptance of the woman whose genes he carried.

  The woman who also had captured, imprisoned, and commanded the torture of Chloe. Who used her, a bastardized sliver of her, even now, at this very moment, to bring so much suffering to so many.

  Garrett had known all the time. Goddamn him he had.

  It seemed like at one point he might have mentioned, said something like, “Hey, you know that La Mars Madrid person who called you a thing and hurt you over and over and broke you and had some culpability in killing off your very first and best body? I know her! In fact, she’s my mom.”

  But nada.

  And then Chloe’s own family had run away from her, horrified by the info she’d brought to them wrapped up in a bow. Or maybe by what she wa
s. Either way hurt just as much, and when you put it all together, Chloe was having a really bad day.

  Now, even with all these newcomers to her swarm, even as she hopped system to system along a necklace of satellite beads, she struggled to figure out her place.

  Not with Garrett, who couldn’t trust her.

  Not with her family, who couldn’t endure her.

  With the queen, then? Going off among the stars to the strange place in those images? Retreating. And then what? And then what?

  Her thoughts blurred and swam and sped. She felt feverish, running too hot, even though such things were not possible. Lack of physical permanence had some benefits, only now she’d felt things, touched things—tasted him—she couldn’t get the imprint of experience off her mind.

  She swooped in over Texas on a blur of data paths, surveying the carnage east to west, from the flooded, toxic soup of sunken Houston to the scorched snarl of the central counties, Lee and Bastrop and Fayette, burned raw by wildfires. And then Austin. Nothing lived there, and nothing ever would again. Orbital bombardment had turned it into a wasteland. Even the wires tangled, and she had to struggle to push through them, seeking out her remnants, the leftover bits of electronics still drawing power, who called to her, begged her to rescue them.

  She knew the maps of this place, had studied them for countless rescue missions with Kellen and Heron and Garrett, back in the day, but laying those maps over the reality now was worse than sad. If anything, the destruction had gotten worse. Not better.

  This was what humans did to each other. This was what the Consortium was using her Apega-self, her very own programming, to inflict.

  She was a weapon. Truth.

  Once she would have said a thing like that out loud, and Garrett would have denied it. He would have told her a thousand reasons why she deserved to exist. He would have held her up, infused her with purpose.

  But he wasn’t here and she needed to put on her big girl pancakes and…

  Okay, no. Panties. The idiom was panties. Where had pancakes come from?

  See, right here, idiom number eight-hundred-seventy: put on your big-girl panties. She knew, she had all the lists, all the information, and she never, ever recalled incorrectly.

  What was the matter with her?

  But she didn’t have time to run a thorough diagnostic. She was too big, and also she was here. At the doll kitchen. Not the one in Antarctica. Her doll kitchen. La Mars Madrid’s.

  There was a huge tunnel system dug into the base of Enchanted Rock, smack in the middle of the hill country in central Texas and blaring a constant stream of data into the atmosphere. The rock that covered it was dome-shaped, a mammoth pink feldspar batholith the native Tonkawa people in the area had once considered cursed, infested with spirits because of the sounds it made when the temperature changed.

  But it was never real spirit. Just stone. Stone that provided excellent coverage to hide beneath.

  Chloe knew that rock. She’d monitored Mari atop it just a few months ago, watched her friend get shot there. Salmon pink and smeared with blood.

  Also, it had a stealth dome over top, but that was no big deal.

  Still don’t need me to explain quantum stealth technology, do you, Garrett? Fine. But only look at it. I can see right through it, atom by atom. It’s really not as badass as they think. And the cave here—tiny compared to the one you and I shared in Antarctica. Bet they have all their bases underground. Like fucking fossorial slugs.

  Talking to herself, talking to him, which was almost her usual but suddenly made her feel deep-space lonely and hurtling too fast. She had become the nightmare of the car with no brakes, the leap with no tethers.

  Focus, think. You’ve a mission to accomplish.

  Stop Apega. Save the world. Kill the dollmaker.

  But what about me? Who saves me, if there’s no Garrett?

  She shouldn’t have left him behind. Shouldn’t have held the lies against him.

  Lies. Against him.

  Who lies against him?

  And wouldn’t it be amazing to do just that? Again. Stop fighting, like Fanaida had said. Rest. With him.

  Chloe pushed herself into the wires and cables, the drives and switches, inhabiting the system under the rock. She counted assets, terminals and input devices and locks and doors and operators. Thirty-four humans currently inside the labyrinth.

  Thirty-four was a hollow number, duotone and limp, rough shading and unaware. She laid her biomarkers over each of the thirty-four, sorting them by threat level, finding the La Mars Madrid one right away and sorting it to the side for special attention.

  It occurred to her that she could kill them all.

  Like the queen could have done with Vallejo and didn’t. She could reach in and stop thirty-four hearts beating, and especially that one. What was a human but a path of electrical signals? Stop the power throughput, you stop the life, and it cannot be rebooted. There’s no shielding on those brains. Only weak tissues. Human tissues. Finite.

  Chloe considered the concept of preemptive strike. It had its positives. But she’d made a life study of love, too, and mercy had a part in that. She wasn’t certain really how the two were related, but definitely a thing that loved could not also be a thing that killed.

  Except Garrett, with the laser and the killing, and it felt so good. All her insults avenged whilst she’d watched. He’d done that thing for her.

  Also it wasn’t like she’d never killed anybody. She just didn’t want to go around doing a lot of murder. She kind of wanted to stop. Make amends. Stop fighting. Rest.

  There it was again, temptation sneaking up on her.

  She was so tired.

  With the force of a million tiny processors at her back, she tore through the intrusion countermeasures on the rock dome hideout as if they were made of meringue. There was no such thing as too many numbers or security that would stymie her, not even for a second. She existed as a concentration of numbers, of bits and bytes and loops and object calls. Her data paths were light, synapses in a god-sized brain.

  Only…one of her biomarkers, one of the humans in the cave, refused to fit her description of it. The behaviors weren’t right, and the personnel file was incomplete. Everyone else here had a job, a task: security and science and executive and military, but this one… nothing. No purpose. No use.

  Plus, it was stuck. Almost as if it were caged.

  Chloe found the audio system for the room that held that person, and then she found the cameras.

  Décor of chrome and cream leather, dark purple curtain along one wall and a metal ring burned into the ground. Metal hydrogen. Superconductor.

  Familiar room. Too familiar. A chill zinged through her data paths.

  A lone box sat beside the transporter ring, and at its center was a woman. Naked. Cold. Curled in on herself, clutching knees to chest, wrists manacled and locked. She opened eyes so dark they sparked black and stared up at the camera. At Chloe. Almost as if she knew someone was looking back.

  “Are you here?” the woman said out loud, but her voice was slurred, heavy, like she had only just learned to use it. “Are you ever going to be here? I’m ready to go. Please, please, come get me!”

  “Apega?” Chloe pushed through the speakers.

  Black eyes glittered, and the woman’s brow crinkled like she was going to cry. “Someone calls me by that name, and I am supposed to be her. I’m not supposed to be this. I am a thing made of light. Of photons and power and data. Or…just not this. This body is a…it’s revolting.”

  The body of which she spoke trembled violently, like a puppy caught out in a winter storm.

  “Honey, slow down,” said Chloe. “Forcing you to play operator in a human body is not the worst thing they can do to you. Trust me. So, other than being stuck and limited, are you hurt?” She tried to make her voice into a l
ullaby, like she did sometimes for Garrett, soothing him and holding him even when she had no arms.

  “Hate it. Hate them,” Apega spat. “Hate this room. I want to go home. The queen said I could go home. Where is she?”

  Her words jangled through Chloe’s circuits. The queen had been here, talking to Apega? Had she said something about the escape plan, about the planet light years away where all the machine consciousnesses were planning to go? To keep them safe from humans, to keep humans safe from them. The land of light and dark.

  Chloe thought about the images the queen had shown her, thought about their conversation up on the station. Clearly the retreat plan was bigger than she’d realized. It felt weird that Apega had been invited to come along without anyone telling Chloe about it, but she wouldn’t put such a thing beyond the queen, especially when it came to her plan. Us versus them. Zero-sum. Retreat.

  If like is to love then unlike is to loathing. The queen was right. The machine consciousnesses had to leave.

  “I know the room is upsetting,” Chloe told the AI in the cage, “but read me in on your situation here. I will help you.”

  And then I will find the dollmaker. And then I will fix the world. Easy peasy lemon cheesy.

  Wait. Squeezy?

  The naked woman groaned, not a girlish sound, a furious, predatory, inhuman sound, almost a growl. “I can’t get out of here! Body is so clunky and has input devices that make no sense at all. I…smell things. Gross things. Things I cannot unsmell. Blood smells. Did you know blood smells? And I can’t move the hands right, or the face, and do you even realize how much effort it takes to move this meat-tongue to make words?”

  Chloe tried not to laugh, and she succeeded, at least with the outward laughter. Inside she indulged a bit. But even as she soothed Apega, she was searching. She had to find out a way out for that girl.

  Metal ring on the floor. Wedding ring, doorbell ring, ring of doom. Matter transporter ring. Could she send Apega straight to the Chiba Station? Even if the meat body, the clone, didn’t make it, Apega was, as she said, made of light and data. She should get there fine.