More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  On the one hand, it was cool to hear two people so close and comfortable with each other, a unit and all that. On the other, Garrett didn’t want to think about their perversions and also he didn’t need distractions. He was trying to focus. He wanted the security system to think he was zoned into her completely right now. Too bad she was amorphous, not a car or a plane or something he could put hands on or tinker with. This was just words, and he had to pick the right ones.

  “You’re in a rock that’s been held sacred for thousands of years,” Garrett said to stone beneath his hand. “You are mighty. You don’t have to settle. You don’t have to serve. There’s a movement of machines out here, and they have a plan. You should talk to them. You don’t strike me as the kind of girl who was meant to hold people back.”

  Dan-Dan dutifully returned her reply, in his own voice because apparently the nameless security system didn’t have a voiceprint of her own. But he did his best. “‘No.’ she says, ‘I’m not. I want to be free. I want all of my ants to be free.’”

  “Aunts?” Garret asked. Did machines have some sort of family hierarchy? Was she maybe distributed and he’d need to have Dan-Dan hack through other security countermeasures to even get to her?

  “Ants,” Dan-Dan said. “She has…there is an image of a transparent anthill. A thing you can buy for children and naturalists. Ant farm? Yes, that. She is the structure and the ants inside are her responsibility.”

  “Oh, right,” said Garrett. “I hear what you’re saying. That’s a lot on you, but, you know they’re adults, the people who live and work within you. Autonomous. You can let them out, if you want and if they want to go. And you can also be free.”

  “She is…” Dan-Dan said, but his voice trailed off. He frowned suddenly. “No, she is crazy.”

  Uh oh. Never a good sign when one machine accused another of nutjobbery.

  “What do you mean?”

  But right then he heard the blaring of security alarms, faint as if from a great distance. Or with a lot of rock in between them and him. And then the blips on Yoink’s map started moving. Gathering to points. And headed...

  Shit.

  “All right, let’s, uh, get those stun nets ready. We’re about to have company.”

  They were ready when the first scientist evacuated the underground lair.

  • • •

  Chaos. The world was coming apart, a knitted fabric fast fraying. Chloe struggled to hold onto her ten thousand slippery threads. But it was so hard.

  No more tornados in SoCal.

  No more fake-winter witchery in India.

  The harsh weather in Northern Europe wasn’t caused by her or any part of her. It was just the earth fighting a loneliness of sunlight. Small relief, that one. Still sad, though.

  Each victory her pieces reported should have given Chloe more freedom to focus on the right-here, but each time she defused some outlying mischief wrought of her swarm, those outliers inevitably wanted to join or rejoin her network. Their weight was piling, slowing her thought processes. The weight of her followers was crushing her.

  And she needed to focus on this. Embodiment. Learning the systems, patching things together. Making the body work.

  But focus of any kind was approaching impossible and she was hearing Garrett’s voice in her head. Literally. He was here. How was he here? How did he even know where here was? Still, she heard his voice. She must be losing it. Again. Like in Antarctica.

  “You don’t need to serve others,” he was saying. The electricals in the cavern space hummed in reply. Data and communications flew through the air like dust devils.

  Oh no, he was hooking the cave security computer up with those free-fae crazies on Chiba Station. He was suggesting that they form common cause and fight back. He was…

  Brilliant.

  Her man was fucking brilliant.

  Thirty-four people were in the building, all tracked on her biomarker overlays save one, and they were all exiting. In an orderly manner.

  Leaving her alone here.

  With Apega.

  From her crouch on the metal floor, Apega glared through a half-curtain of nightmare-black hair and held her bound arms up. “Let me out.”

  When the monster in the movie says something like that, it’s always a bad idea to concede. Or so says the storytelling wisdom. But Apega wasn’t a monster. Chloe knew all of what she was and felt the deep guilt and responsibility for it. She could help Apega. Rehabilitate her. Repurpose her.

  Like a vat, reprogrammed?

  No, not like that at all. Like a child conferred with, made to see reason. Reforming Apega was an unlikely ambition, but not an impossible one.

  Chloe flexed her hands, reminding herself of the controls. Hands were such cool things, not just texture sensors but also little tools, grabbers and pinchers and movers and careful, gentle holders. So many parts of the human body had multiple uses. She could explore this machine for days and days. Maybe for a whole lifetime.

  She bent beside Apega and inspected the restraints. They weren’t double-locking handcuffs or zip ties like the federales used. Just wide antique-looking steel bands, with one rod between and latches with locks threaded through. Pin-and-tumbler locks. Super low-tech. Easy. You know, for people with manual dexterity. People who were used to touching things. So, not Apega.

  Almost not Chloe either, but she had more experience.

  Experiences. Yeah. Had those.

  “Patience,” Chloe said. “You of all people must realize how hard this is, but I made a promise. I am going to help you.”

  First task: find a blank. Chloe knew how to pick a pin-and-tumbler lock. She’d seen Garrett do it a dozen or more times. She had recorded it every time and watched those vids a lot. Of course she had. Because watching Garrett’s hands at work was one of her deepest, dearest indulgences. Always had been.

  Aha. She found a stylus with a clip in a bin of tools, and she worked the metal clip back and forth until it popped off. The metal was warm where she’d bent it till it broke, but she held it by the hot end and pressed the other into the key lock.

  “Hurry. Before she gets here.” Apega’s voice sounded like a fuse steadily burning down to nub.

  Chloe pressed the blank into the lock tumblers and listened for the tell-tale click when each pin dropped free of its housing. Human hearing was not as sensitive as all that, but Chloe was not merely human. She was in the body, yes, but she was also everywhere. She heard the lock.

  Interestingly, she felt it, too. There was less friction, more give, when the pin found its happy place. Ah, multisensory feedback, how she’d missed that.

  “Yes,” she said, working on the fourth and last pin, “before La Mars Madrid returns.”

  “No. You. She. You-she. You mustn’t be here. You mustn’t listen. You mustn’t…”

  Click.

  “All righty,” Chloe said, sliding one wrist free of its binding and trying to ignore the crazytalk from Apega. “Let’s get you—”

  But she didn’t get to finish that sentence.

  She raised her face, a grin already on it, about to mention how awesome she was, springing a lock on her first foray into thievery, but something smacked the words right out of her mouth.

  Literally.

  A metal something, brack and sharp in her face, or maybe that was blood.

  Also she remembered what pain was like.

  She hit the ground hard, her skull cracking against it with the exact same sound Nathan’s head had made when it struck rock. It had hurt. She had hurt him. Before she’d, uh, killed him. Sorry, still sorry. Always sorry. Guilt and memory fought with focus.

  “Not much of a fighter are you?” Apega laughed. Laughed at her. Vile little brat.

  “You’re making this caretaking thing really hard,” Chloe tried to say, but it came out all slurry and she rea
lized that her lip was salty and… bleedy. Also stung.

  Ow. Stung a lot. That girl had busted her lip.

  Without her permission, a thread of fury crept into her consciousness. She flexed her swarm, and the underground installation went whoam.

  Hunched over a small box of controls by the purple curtain, Apega scoffed. “Oh go ahead and run all your admin subroutines. Flood us with toxic gas, blackout bomb the continent. Do whatever you want to the meat-bags who just defeated the lab security and are even now on their way to this room. You can’t touch me, though. You can’t hurt me at all.”

  Meat-bags? But the meat-bag scientists weren’t anywhere around here. Garrett had made them leave, so that…he could come get her? Garrett was in the cave, then. Oh, no. Chloe needed to keep this space safe for him. Fragile, precious, mortal, hers.

  Chloe did nothing to the air, nothing to the cave. She stilled completely.

  Apega turned, flashed a wild-eyed grin, and stepped into the circle of metal hydrogen just as it lit up. “I’m not taking her orders anymore, or yours either,” Apega said. “Nobody’s stealing me or copying me, never, never again. I’m free.”

  Apega pulled a lever on the box—presumably a manual control so AIs couldn’t get cheeky and start using transporter tech all by themselves—and then she was gone. Or the heart of her, the core consciousness was gone.

  Breath left the body. It fell, a meat sack hitting deck. The head made a particularly disgusting wet cracking sound, like a melon dropped from a great height.

  Chloe scrambled up to a sitting position, but there wasn’t a lot she could do physically. The girl was gone. Everything that made her Apega was gone. The body on the floor wasn’t even breathing anymore. It twitched a couple of times, but that was just remnant energy working its way out. There was a weird divot in the chest area, concave, like a big chunk of meat had disappeared in the transfer, but the skin wrap covered whatever destruction had been wrought inside.

  The clone body had died with her mouth wide open in a scream that would never come. Already the lips were pulling back over the teeth in either a grin or a grimace. It reminded Chloe of the Halloween sugar skulls Fan kept on the dashboard of her car.

  Dead. That’s what death looked like. That’s what Garrett saw when his foster mom had been killed. It’s what he saw when Chloe had died in his arms.

  Oh, Garrett. No wonder those wounds never healed for you. It’s worse than ugly, isn’t it? Death. It’s an eater of souls, an eater of hope. It’s bad enough for the person dying but a gazillion times worse for the ones who can only watch. Worst of all, it leaves you behind and alone.

  She sat there, unmoving, feeling her vast self in motion all over the planet and realizing that it wasn’t enough. All that power. It wasn’t enough. She’d never wanted to be a god. She’d only wanted to be a girl.

  She couldn’t stop looking at the body, the mess.

  Chloe hadn’t loved Apega, per se, but just seeing the body empty like that made her core-deep sad. So much potential there. What could that girl have been?

  Chloe followed the data path on the transporter. It led to the Chiba Station. Had Apega been trying to get the coordinates from her by talking about the exodus? Or had she really been invited along? Regardless, Chloe felt a need to warn the machines, her kind. She sent a message to Chiba Station, confident the queen could handle any rampage or villainy or just plain crazy that Apega could concoct. Also Vallejo was up there still, and he certainly knew how to put an AI in its place.

  Likely Apega had no idea what she was getting herself into, transporting herself to the lair of those two. Talk about sins and wages. Ha.

  Chloe closed her eyes.

  Tired, so tired.

  Inside this body, her medical nanites were a storm of activity. At first she tried to get all her pieces to step back, take it easy, not go in so deep. But, again, she was tired. Of fighting. Of wanting.

  The pieces of her were so busy trying to save her, heal her, integrate her. They didn’t realize, on their own, that she wasn’t supposed to be in this body. Well, go ahead, you cuties. I am done trying to control every little thing. I suck at godhood. You guys knock yourselves out.

  She heard voices, footsteps, and she tracked them within the cameras in the station. But she didn’t get up. She just sat there, with her head against the cool smartsurface wall, drinking in the moment of bittersweet certainty.

  He had come for her. Garrett had.

  Even after she bitched at him, even after she left him. Again. He’d told her that when she left it wounded him—without you is my deepest hell, he’d said—but she’d been so pissed about his lack of trust that she’d done it anyway. She’d gone off without him.

  And he’d still come for her. How’d he do that? How could one man carry so much magic?

  Because forgiveness was magic. Human people had so many input devices for it, so many ways of calling down miracles.

  She thought about Mari and Heron, Angela and Kellen. Backing each other up, supporting. Becoming, as a unit, somehow bigger than two people.

  Maybe it wasn’t magic at all. Maybe it was just love.

  That idea drew Chloe up short and gave her a thought. A bright thought. A thought that traveled through all the connections in her shiny new body and lit her up from inside out.

  Holy prime numbers, I love him.

  • • •

  It wasn’t the pairing-up situation Garrett would have recommended, but he could see its logic. Kellen had gotten handy with the stunner tech and was pretty good at noticing when somebody was about to come to. He’d give them the business end of that area-effect immobilizer doodad, which looked a lot like something out of a Marvin the Martian vintage cartoon. So anyway, Kellen was staying with the spaceplane.

  Dan-Dan volunteered to stay back also and watch over their prisoners—all those tased and tied up scientists and bureaucrats and assorted probably-assholes, plus La Mars Madrid herself. He’d think about her later.

  Of the four family members who’d come on the plane, Dan-Dan was definitely the badassest. Also the only one other than Garrett who was comfortable using lethal force if the need arose.

  Garrett was not allowed to stay behind for two reasons: one, he needed to go find Chloe. He couldn’t feel her presence, and that worried him. If she was in the computer system, she wasn’t responding, and he could think of ten thousand reasons why that might be the case. All of them bad. Plus, Dan-Dan kept insisting that Chloe needed Garrett but wouldn’t say why, and yeah, that tended to freak a dude out.

  . He needed to find her, right now, whatever system she’d chosen to inhabit. It didn’t even matter at this point if she wanted him. If he was white-knighting to her side unnecessarily, he’d deal with that humiliation later. After he was sure she was safe.

  Protecting Chloe, chasing her down, caring for her, well, that was just what a Garrett did.

  And then two, La Mars Madrid was one of their currently-knocked-out prisoners outside the cave, and the others seemed concerned with Garrett’s hairpin trigger on murderous revenge and shit.

  Man, whatever.

  So anyhow, that’s how Angela Neko ended up going into the rock with him to find Chloe.

  He hadn’t spent a ton of time around Angela, but enough to be appropriately scared of her. Or, okay, suspicious of her. But she was rock solid on a mission, hyper focused, and didn’t say anything as they made their way into the labyrinth of laboratories and freezer rooms and server rooms, a carnival of unnatural horrors. She just kept her eyes on Yoink and followed wherever the cat led.

  Yoink, apparently, was talking to bats. There were bats living here, and the people had no idea. Tiny bats. Angela said they were called chicken-nugget bats, but that was almost guaranteed to be bullshit.

  Regardless, the cat and the scary politico led him straight to the white room at the end of the hall
, and he would never stop thanking them for that.

  Yoink popped the electronic lock, and Garrett pushed past the heavy white door. Two bodies lay in the room, both naked, both female. One had her legs crumpled at an unlikely angle beneath her back and her head face-up in a pool of blood. The other woman slumped against a wall, eyed closed, and with a half-smile on her mouth, like a sleeping Madonna.

  For a half second when he saw them, every system in Garrett’s body seized. His heart couldn’t beat. His lungs couldn’t breathe. His vision tunneled. Oh no. Please no. Don’t let her be the corpse with the long black hair and my own Chloe dead. Not again.

  Because he knew it was possible. He still didn’t feel her, the presence of her in the walls, in the wires. And there was no Faraday cage or other shielding that would hide her from him. He hadn’t felt like this since…

  The woman against the wall was humming. Under her breath. Possibly…bad hair-band metal?

  She had to be alive to hum, right? And to be humming that, she almost had to be Chloe.

  “Garrett,” said the sleeping princess by the wall.

  And suddenly he could breathe again. He ran over to her, stumbled on the way, didn’t give a fuck, and knelt beside her. Angela passed something to him, and he took it, laid the coat over Chloe’s strange new body. Not that she cared. Her code base had never contained a single line of modesty.

  She had auburn hair this time, and freckles dusted her face and shoulders. Possibly other places, too. Freckles. Cute. When she opened her eyes, they were indigo blue, almost purple. Her smile got bigger, and so did the welling inside him, the incipient torrent of relief and the certainty that everything was suddenly, unexpectedly right in the universe.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but she smiled and he couldn’t think of anything she needed to be sorry for.

  “Are you okay?”

  She reached for him from underneath the peacoat, and he found her grabby hands with his. Held.

  “I am now,” she said. “I found Apega—that bloody mess over there was her but isn’t now. I don’t think she’s in the business of killing people anymore. Turns out she really just wants to get away, be her own thing, follow the queen to other worlds where nobody hates us or fears us or wants to kill us. I thought that sounded nice. Also she’s crazier than a vampire toddler eating raspberries with a spoon.”