Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 168

by Neil Clarke

  “What the hell does that have to do with what happened to Beebee?” Clara asks and turns her head away from the campfire so one side is darkened, while the other illuminated. It confuses FaceRec because it looks like her face is moving when it is inert.

  “Life’s goal is to continue, to procreate. That’s why you came here. Evolution gave corals servants, and evolution on this planet made servants not only out of the ocean’s algae, but also its fish. It gets inside of them. The fish Beebee stepped on carried coral larvae to expand the reef beyond the currents that pass it.”

  “It’s hijacking the fish, turning everything they encounter into incubators,” Clara says.

  “I swam in that ocean,” Madeline says appalled.

  “We believe a significant amount of larvae have to enter your system before it would change your physiology,” we say.

  “Kill us, you mean,” Kathrin says.

  “Your existence would continue is some form or other. We cannot speak for the human soul, but Beebee was still the bodily unit Beebee was born as.”

  The grown-ups look uncomfortably at one another.

  “It can’t have us. This will never happen again,” Clara says.

  “We do not speak of autonomy,” we say, “It seems that was lost.” Called to the sea.

  “Of course, you’d say that,” Clara says and shakes off Kathrin’s grip to walk out of the firelight and closer to us, “Who’s your parasite? Your code or Maya Sankovy’s memories? What about your autonomy? How would you feel if someone took that away from you like that thing took it away from Beebee?”

  We are surprised she remembered our root’s name. We tracked her eyes; she did not read it off our coverall.

  “We are us,” we say and retreat, “We do not know how to compartmentalize for the singular.”

  Clara raises her eyebrows as if to challenge us. Maybe she can tell we are lying. But no one knows, not even the rest of us know of the questions we, as the singular unit, often ask ourselves. To put it into our feeds would be heresy, but Maya . . . Maya Sankovy loved being herself very much, just like she loved to watch the ocean.

  No one goes near the water until I say so! Clara tells all compounds over the frequency. No expertise, we think, like shouting, but it’s not the reason we grimace.

  “We should concentrate on making babies, not on running from the local wildlife,” Madeline mutters.

  Clara types away on the cell on her forearm. Our captain is probably asking Ship about the state of the embryos. We all share the compulsion to make sure of their welfare, grown-up or compound.

  “May we conduct more tests? We want to study the corals,” we ask. It’s the first time we were useful, not as part of the chain, but as lock and key. We’ve never felt glad to be Maya Sankovy before.

  “I won’t stop you.” Clara dismisses us with a hand gesture.

  We, in the singular, discover many things in the following months. We experiment on the fish. We snap gloves on and glasses, dissect, collect. We use scalpels and pincers and draw much from root-memory. We become more and more like the marine biologist we remember. Our solitary work fascinates us, even if we cannot find a cure to what turned Beebee into a coral hybrid. Trapsiton’s invertebrates are too complex and our solutions are cheap and do not work because our resources are limited.

  We see many fish die, see many small mammals we try our cures on grow hard, sharp, red, spongy, or soft. They all end up in the sea. Our Siblings do not approve of our work much, but our root overrides the programmed peer pressure and we continue our experiments until the mission takes prevalence again.

  We store our findings away for later and forget the corals. It’s time to be a good Mother now and not a mariner. We help build the village where the children will live. Clara assists us in putting up a fence around the upper shoreline of our island. A fast solution for an aged problem.

  Madeline dies on a hunting trip. She slides down a rocky hill and breaks her neck. The recording is watched by all compounds in an endless loop for weeks after. Could we have done something if we were fast enough? We do not know.

  Kathrin’s passing is just as sudden. An unknown disease clogs up her lungs and makes her cough out blue mucus. A fungus, our medics discover, but by then it is too late to save her.

  Our captain was right. She’s the last Terran to walk this alien rock. Clara cries herself to sleep for two months and three days after it happens. Ultimately, her visits to Ship grow frequent as the gestation process siphons more and more energy away from Ship. On an otherwise unremarkable day, she puts Ship’s struggling AI offline. We understand better now. There is no new life without a little bit of pain, a little bit of dying.

  The first children are born in a sweltering summer heat. We hold our first girl in our arms, and we wish we could weep. Maya could have. We call her Daisy because of the almost white fluff on her little head. She is marvelous and we never want to let her go. Another Mother has to pry her out of our hands to be placed into her crib. All children are equal, we know, but we’ll hold a special place in our unit just for Daisy.

  Daisy grows fast, that is no faster than any other child. But for the first time, we feel the drag of entropy. We do not age visibly, but we feel our mind cave like a physical punch hits us every time we compare Daisy as she is now with as she was when we first held her. She learns to sit, to toddle, to walk, to run, run away from us to then squeal and laugh when we catch her in our embrace.

  Clara is watching us often in our play. She will hover at the entrance to her hut as if she doesn’t dare cross over the invisible line between her, the Mothers and Fathers, and the children. She will turn into a relic. This world doesn’t belong to her, but us and them, and she’ll pass.

  Frown lines have appeared on Clara’s forehead when Daisy turns eight by Terran standard. The years have softened the heart of our captain, though she tries very hard to disguise it.

  “It’s my job to worry,” Clara tells us when we ask if everything is alright, “We might not be on a spaceship anymore, but this rowdy bunch sure as hell needs a captain.”

  Daisy blows out her candles and we, the four Mothers and a Father present, clap and cheer. We brush her elbow as we pass her by to cut Daisy’s cake. FaceRec says the smile she gives us is happy but sad.

  A month later we are helping Clara inside her cabin because carrying around heavy equipment is a bitch, as she calls it. Our captain copied some of the memory files from Ship and wants to set up an AI interface inside her hut. We agreed to help because talking to someone else besides a compound or a child would do her good.

  “I miss our old Ship,” she murmurs as we rearrange her desk to make room for the AI hardware.

  We open our mouth to reply as a distress call reaches our unit. One of the children’s biosensors has reached dangerous levels.

  “Someone’s at the beach,” we hear ourselves say it as if someone else is in charge of our speech.

  We barely notice Clara’s string of expletives as we check the ID.

  “It’s Daisy. Daisy got through the fence. Oh, no.” We drop the crate in our hands, grab for Clara’s shoulder.

  “She doesn’t know how to swim,” the captain says, takes our hand, and drags us out of the cabin.

  Our unit feels far away, every step we take downhill seems to echo. We call out for the others, but since Clara’s cabin faces the beach, we are the fastest to reach the water. We see Daisy’s dandelion head bob up and down on the waves. She’s unconscious. A small speck in a sea of rust and scarlet.

  Clara calls out in warning, but we’re already sprinting, pushing our hardware to the max. We feel the heat of our components and see the warnings emerge in our field of vision. We fight against the waves, against the errors. They swallow Daisy, pull her little body under. We dive, bump into a sharp stone with our knee before our hands grab Daisy’s shoulder.

  We carry her to shore. Her body is weightless, we are weightless. We lay her down, stretch her neck, give CPR, and pump a
ir into her lungs. Three rounds. Three terrible new memories. Then, Daisy convulses. Spews out the water she swallowed. Only a little bit of dying today.

  We cry out. We hug her, whisper her name against her hair, tell her we love her so so much. Stupid child, we say, but do not mean it. Daisy shakes and we cry without tears.

  Clara clasps our shoulder and her touch is too hot to be comforting. The child belongs to us. Our captain does not understand, we think unfairly in our distress. She is not a Mother like we are. We bring Daisy to the medical cabin, take watch by her bedside, and run diagnostics. The girl smiles and reassures us she is fine. The promise never to return to the ocean is easily given, but we remain cautious.

  Over the commotion, we failed to give our error codes much heat, but here they are, red and blinking. We turned our sensors down against the cold sea, as we bring them back to baseline, we notice the cut on our knee. Coolant and false blood welled up, but the wound is already closing. Not human, but close enough. We will suffer a bruise. A small price for the life of a child.

  Daisy runs a fever an hour later. A fever that will not break. She asks for water, drinks it like she wandered through the desert. Her cheeks are sunken in.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Clara whispers at our shoulder.

  Daisy is asleep now, but her eyes roll in her head and her body squirms. Nightmares. We do not dream, but we wish we could take them away from her, put them inside of us if it meant it would lessen her pain.

  “Pneumonia or maybe something else.” We close our eyes. Against the stark lamplight, we see red.

  “The corals?” Clara asks.

  We nod, open our eyes again. No time to be afraid.

  “There’s larvae in the water as well as the symbiont fish. She swallowed a lot.”

  The first moon has risen, its sister is still in hiding when Daisy gasps and sits up on her cot. We take her small hands.

  “Water,” she whispers in a dry croak. We pour her a glass, turn on the lights in the room for more comfort, and feel our central pump make a jolt. Her eyes are bloodshot like she had too many Gs.

  “What’s happening to me, Mama? I’m still thirsty.” Daisy only calls us Mama in the singular. It makes us swell with pride every time she makes the distinction, but not now.

  “Nothing, baby. You’ll be fine. You just got a little bit of a fever,” we lie and lean in to rub her back.

  She flips her tongue over her parched lips and we see the red spots on it like strawberry seeds. The sight drives a shiver down our spinal column. What kind of parent are we, if we let our little girl come to harm like that? Daisy cannot die. We must not let that happen.

  Our captain asks the essential questions when we call her over the frequency and tell her. We realize she doesn’t know it’s us, Maya, until we tell her we will be in the old marine laboratory to try to come up with a final cure. If not a cure, then something that’ll slow the spread of the parasite.

  It’s so hot in here. We dialed up our heat regulation to the maximum two hours twenty-five minutes ago. How can we still perceive heat? We turn off our internal sensors. Better not get distracted by unnecessary input when we got such important work to do. Miraculously the heat stays. We rub at our temples in discomfort and see the gap between glove and elbow where our skin lies bare. Red spots like sanguine scar tissue rise from the surface.

  We stare at it. Analyze, calculate, but do not comprehend. We are not flesh and blood. What will the coral make of us? It expunged Beebee’s augmentations, invaded only the organic parts of his body. We do not carry genes. But parts of us can be turned into nutrients. Are we good breeding ground?

  A second Mother walks into the room, maybe aware of our distress, maybe on accident. The Mother gasps at the state we are in. We reach out for help, make an unsteady step forward and feel our knee joint pop and squeak. We fall down. It makes a dry sound like a snapping twig as our injured knee bends. More than a bruise, much more. Our left knee, where we cut it, turned into a festering mess of red erratic coral growth and wires that are pushed aside. Who’s the parasite now? Our code, our hardware, or what remains of Maya Sankovy?

  “Bring me to Daisy!” we say to the Mother, “We—I do not want to die alone.”

  “We are never alone,” the Mother says as we are helped up.

  We avert our gaze.

  “Don’t,” we say as Clara moves close.

  “I don’t care about infection. Don’t you know, I’m an old woman?” It’s not true, but we let her hug us anyway.

  “We couldn’t do it. We’re sorry. We should have found a cure years ago. But we wanted to spend time with the children. We didn’t think—” We bury our head into the crook of her neck. Our captain is so different from everyone we know, everyone on this planet.

  “That’s okay. You had more important things on your mind. Daisy needed you. She and every other child. We all need you,” Clara says, “You’re too hot. You’re burning up like a star.”

  She pulls away, looks at us for a long moment. She takes in the red stone that encases our knee, and that makes it hard for us to walk. Whole parts of our unit are turning into translucent jelly. Hardware components shine through, some of them blinking. Scarlet stalks are sprouting, piercing the synthetic skin of our thigh.

  “Almost all life needs nurturing. I’m turning into a hotbed, a garden. I need to see the ocean one more time,” we say.

  The infection is inside of our unit, meddling with our thoughts and perception. Hardware parts shriek in pain, some go dark, others start to send us strange signals. Our Siblings observe the change and turn away one at a time. They cannot come with us to watch the waves.

  “I don’t want you to go,” Clara says.

  We sink down by Daisy’s bed. We need time to calculate, analyze, to reroute and make sense of what’s happening inside of us for long enough to see this through to the end. Her little chest is moving only just. How long until Daisy stops breathing?

  “Come with us to the beach,” we say, “The sun is about to rise. It’ll be beautiful.”

  “Yes, let’s watch the sunrise together.” There are tears in our captain’s eyes.

  Clara takes our hand. We should have worked out a cure after we lost Beebee. But there were babies to bring into this world that grew into children to tend to, to teach and laugh and play hide-and-seek with. Time is a peculiar thing. Eight years is a short time, but enough to have given Clara frown lines. A blink inside a compound’s eye. We wish we had more of it. We wish we could see them grow up and put some gray inside Clara’s hair.

  “I would have loved to see her children and her children’s children.” Clara laughs wetly at this, helps us to our feet, before she takes Daisy into her arms.

  “Let’s look at the sunrise together,” she repeats.

  We start walking downhill. Daisy’s face turns stony red. Stalks pierce her cheeks and shoulders. She moans, flails, but doesn’t regain consciousness. The tide is high today, but Daisy’s thrashings turn the short distance into a laborious track.

  The captain leans her head against our shoulder as we watch the alien sun that is a few shades too bright. The clouds become swirls of orange and long stripes of pink and violet that leave an almost white afterimage every time we blink our artificial eyes. There are no seagulls here, but we recall their high-pitched cries. It’s getting harder to focus.

  “Will you be alright?” we ask Clara when Daisy’s lungs pulled in their final puff of air. Only a little death for a little girl. We cannot look at her, afraid it will corrupt something vital inside of us that has nothing to do with hard—or software. We clench our teeth, swallow hard. Let this not be the end of her, we plead internally before we put an arm around Clara to draw her close. No one taught us how to let go.

  “The Mothers will take care of things. Don’t fear,” Clara says, “I’ll miss you though. I’ll remember you.”

  Daisy’s head lies cradled against her shoulder. Even in death, does she sense how close we are to the
sea? It called Beebee. It’s calling us. Does it call her too?

  Daisy opens her eyes. They’ve turned into red orbs. She stirs, spasms go through her disfigured limbs, make her fingers and bare toes twitch with misfiring electricity. A dead thing that won’t stay dead. Maybe just like the compound we are, or the thing we are turning into. Only a sad little bit of dying to pave the way for new life.

  “I think I understand it now. Why we did it. Why we came here. Why you were so angry.” Against our better judgment, we loved her more than any other child. We can remember enough about having a heart to feel it break. No Mother should outlive their children. Part of us is glad we will not see the others die of old age or injury, that we are the first to go.

  “You said I. I’ve never heard a Mother say that,” Clara notices and I laugh.

  Her tears are falling on Daisy’s unrecognizable face like raindrops on parched land. Hardware has been pushed offline by the invading force. It’s dark inside my head. I lost the connection to my Siblings. It doesn’t hurt as I expected it would.

  “I’m changing. I don’t know into what.” I take Daisy out of her arms, “Goodbye, Clara.”

  The eight year old is almost too tall to be carried around, but she will not grow any bigger. The wind smells fresh and salty like endless days at the beach are supposed to. The sand curls around my feet, cool but soothing. Translucent synthetic skin has come off in flaps. Little bits are carried away by the water. I can’t feel it anymore. My sensors have gone dark. All I hear is the waves, pushing forward, pulling back eternally. A constant, solid like a song in my ear. The water reaches my thighs. The red ocean is a grandiose wine spill at dawn. This whole planet is beautiful. I fell in love with it before I even set foot here. I stretch out my arms, lower Daisy into the waves.

  Her red eyes are wide, and I think I can see awareness in there. Seafoam curls her hair. The water plucks Daisy from my grip. We smile at each other as she sinks. Even without FaceRec I can tell it’s a sad smile, but also a happy one. How many times have I seen that expression on a person’s face?