Upgraded (53 page)

But this.

I draw my hand back and the body comes into view again. Every edge once outlined in heat begins to fade into blue, into cold, and there is nothing we can do to keep it from slipping away entire. But on this level, deeper through mud-flooded corridors that have been lined in these selfsame metal panels, I can see more signatures: thrumming red lifeblood that beckons. This is what the Nessik could not see, every bit of this level erased, all that it contains swallowed. And these Nessik here, made silent by human hands.

There is more than one hiveling here and more than one adult. Silently, they scream at us—the air vibrates as they try to communicate, but there is no sound, for they have been cut as you and I were cut; flesh has been made to do what others would have it do.

(
You once guided flesh this way—tried on yourself first, splice, and jack, and chimera you.)

Countless cages line the walls, dripping with mud and shit and chains and rain. Even here, this room is not spared the flood of rain from above. Even here, wrapped in the panels even my eyes could not penetrate from above, they are subject to the rains.

The Nessik moves like quicksilver, unlatching cages to free the captive young. The adults are worse for all that has been done to them and most are near death, but the hivelings move with a more terrifying speed, streaking into a deeper room rather than the corridor behind us to escape. The farther we walk, the cleaner the halls become, until I am tracking muddied footprints down a white hall, until the Nessik leaves a broken path of Rorschach streaks and blobs that convey a bat eating a moth eating the world swallowed by the endless void.

In the deepest room, protected from mudslide and rainfall, a cadre of human doctors stand mid-slaughter—you name each one of them in my display; friends, they were your friends, colleagues. Nessik bodies lay upon tables, but there are human injured here, too, and this bloody tableau is familiar to us both. They cut a piece from one body and slide it into the belly of another. They sever the vocal cords of the Nessik to mute them the way they muted you (the way you muted others, slid yourself into them, into countless thems), but these creatures—these new chimera?—have found a way to reach out, a way to communicate yet. Theirs becomes a language of blood. I speak this as if it is my own; most of we chimera do. At first it was mimicry; now it has become conversation.

(Splice: We were here in ’92 and remember these rooms, this hive, these levels of hell. It was your extraordinary eyes guided us down and down, your body that bled clean light over the level that was soon to become a battlefield that was soon to become your grave. You experimented here; you studied here; you despaired here.)

(Splice: I was here again in ’93, ’95, and ’01, and now . . .
now.
It was you and also not-you, the memory of you dredged up from the box they sank into me. It was not-you who wondered if I could see you—they wondered if I could still access you, if I had broken the encryption even they could not master. Could I see you? Baseline,
always.
You let me inside, you let me know every secret thing you had discovered through every graft of information into yourself, into other bodies, into . . . into . . . into.)

(Splice: But it was more than that—you were never one of the dead here. Were you? You who made these splices, you did not die. You fragment in my display.)

The hivelings blur within the cloak of their armor; they never hesitate, leaping upon the human doctors, dragging them to the floor. Freshly-spilled human blood is a startling red warmth against the cold blue shipframe; it fades, becomes the cool blue of the floor, and is seemingly gone, unless I shift my view. The walls run with red and blue and a hue of violet in between, and nothing is ever still—not the hivelings, not the human dead, not the dying adult Nessik who have been broken and used and broken and used yet still breathe on.

A coiling tentacle pulls me to the floor; I snap my wrist back to access the paracord and its hook. The hook sails out, to punch the Nessik (the ceph, moll, puss, squid, the fucking
you
?) in the gut, and the sound that spills from this creature is not alien. It is
you,
a fragment of you yet living in this beast, and it is then I hear you all around me.

You, spliced into every creature that leaps into the fray—these hivelings, these chimera, these
you.
You who did not exactly die, but neither exactly live, you growing strange and widespread in each of these bodies. They thought they could silence you, stretch you into inchoate strands, but you found a way, not flesh, not machine, something beyond both.

And I think of the way the Nessik (the fucking ceph) held me when I fell, and it is the only sensation of a tentacle (a hand) down a bare length of back.

And the way it (you) said my name.

After.

Jacked into a socket, you wedged in a way I didn’t think you could be wedged again.

(Splice: Oh, we were here,
here,
and it’s the memory of flesh inside flesh, of you inside me, of nothing else existing in that moment.

Viewed in the right light—

Everything—

Nothing.)

There are no places in this world that light will not intrude. Every dark space within even me has been broken apart, exposed to light, and sealed back up. And through it all, pieces of you cradled inside.

We were here in ’05, we will say, when the ship still reached six miles into the clouded sky like a broken finger; we were here when the living were cut apart and fused with the dead, when the beach was still wholly drowned but grains of sand floated free in the water even so.

We were in here ’09, when the ship’s spire gave way, buckling as those concentric circles of hell at last had their way and pulled the ship entirely into its maw. We would be here in ’15, when
Fey VI
confirmed what we believed, that humanity had gone—chimera-consumed; that this world, this earth had also become chimera. Spliced, jacked, no longer a singular thing if it had ever been.

Viewed in the right light—

Light degrades, exposes, destroys, illuminates, corrupts, burns, irreversibly changes everything. I touch you (baseline), you who are in every fucking ceph I know, and my touch is as light speeding through darkness. This light may bend, fragment, or ricochet, but it keeps going.

Down-falling forever into dark—it keeps going.

And every day, rain.

Synecdoche Oracles

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Behind the bars of Charinda’s ribs, there lives a peacock.

It sports titanium actuators and platinum feathers to contrast with the darkness of her limbs, ruby eyes and emerald beaks to complement the petals on her face. It is a gift from an infamous cyberneticist, and she has understood from the first that one day she will pay a price.

So it is no surprise to her when the peacock chirps and regurgitates a paper scroll. On it is calligraphy written in ink bled from solar eels, opalescent and pompous, instructing her to host a hunted general.

Charinda is aware of the price on their head. It cannot be expressed as a sum; the honor and prestige that would come with the general’s death or capture defy integers. She would be granted dominion over worlds. She would be elevated above common memory and made a minor goddess, named and prayed to across Costeya systems.

She sends the general word that she will provide shelter.

The Bone Court orbits Laithirat, a composite skeleton of thorns and fused spines, vertebrae dripping teeth and a jaw poised to gobble up the sky. It is received wisdom that this megafauna specimen was engineered, some geneticist’s fancy gone wild.

Charinda likes to imagine that the beast stood up once upon birth, decanted or perhaps grown in briny mulch, and straightaway fell down dead under its own weight and the terror of being alive.

In the beast’s mouth refugees are disgorged from moth-crafts in tatters, asylum-seekers spilled from spin-ships whose hulls are frescoes of void-scars and entry points. Viruses and malware shed off travelers, latching onto tourist ads and local data-posts in search of new hosts and propagation. Charinda has put a filter on her peacock’s head like a glove, shielding it from the stench of recycled ventilation and nutrients, the reek of politics gone sour and loss as fresh as arterial wounds. They can be contagious, much more so than the malware.

In the beast’s stomach, blank-faced replicants conduct her through checkpoints. She passes through a femur-corridor papered by intelligences with a knack for generating hyper-accurate algorithms at the moment of death: a Laithirat premium export, these seers in a box.

Where the corridor ends and the whispers of intelligences fade, a labyrinth begins.

Its schematics were planned in five dimensions, patterned after two national epics told in synesthetic meter. Charinda navigates by reciting snippets that wreathe her in incense vapors, as of funerals. At intersections of verses she meets a jungle case for a leopard woman, an aquarium for a gilled man. She nods at her friend the Horticulturist, who reclines in an enclosed tropical garden; photosynthetic geckos pulse at her throat, breathing in the place of lungs lost to carnivorous ixora. She exchanges quatrains with the Vice-Tetrarch of Gravity Gardens, who attends on a lower body which rumbles on wheels and exhales steam alphabets.

Charinda finds the general at one of the central exhibits.

The general wears a Tiansong dress with flared sleeves and high collars, a narrow skirt slit just below the thigh. Asteroid jades and exhumed gravity shells depend from his earlobes, and his skin has the look of cracked celadon. Spiders nest in his hair, making neon thread: a work of kitsch, all spectacle.

“Gracious welcome to you, General Lunha of Silent Bridge.”

Lunha inclines his head, silhouetted in the phantom stanzas that charted his path. He recited, it appears, a war-god’s soliloquy. “I don’t currently hold a rank, and Silent Bridge isn’t what it once was.” He is more frayed than his reputation would suggest, fatigue having exacted their price for the endless hours he spent sabotaging Hegemonic outposts and erasing their garrisons. But remorse does not blunt him and the gaze with which he appraises Charinda is sniper-point.

Balancing her options, Charinda takes the general’s hand and brings it to her lips. “Formality gives me an excuse to perform gallantry. In some languages that concept is strictly reserved for men toward women, but what can an idea be worth that does not flex?”

“I’m not always a man,” the general says but returns the gesture, his mouth brief and warm on Charinda’s knuckles. “My thanks for having me.”

“How could I not? A chance to meet a personage so celebrated and, moreover, to kiss his hand—though last I heard you were more often a woman than otherwise. I hope you like the maze. Visitors can enter these frames to touch, talk, or request a sync. An interactive art.”

“They are curious.” The general looks at the exhibit, which contains Olyosha sitting on an ivory chariot. Her arms are chromed plates stylized with solar flares; they are heavy and unsubtle, the way firearm prostheses tend to be. Script identifies her as
The Archer.

Charinda’s peacock sings out a few notes, dispersing the last of verse-echoes about them. “You disapprove.”

“Just Olyosha. I can’t imagine the sun archer could hold any significance for her. Perhaps she visited my birthworld during leave or stayed for the length of a deployment, neither of which gives her a connection to Tiansong.”

“Olyosha’s just a romantic.” Charinda sketches a binary flower on the malleable glass. “The maze checks visitors for organic-to-artificial ratio. Only people who are fifty-percent cybernetics, minimum, may enter; the rest are steered back to the exit even if they’ve the poetry correct. I inhabit one of these boxes on occasion. It’s a performance—surrender to the gaze.”

“As I said, I don’t object to the idea. Olyosha served under me for a campaign. Whatever she’s doing now would be an improvement, if only because she’s not causing casualties in the thousand.”

“You’re blunt,” Charinda says as they pass the Duke of River Seven, who has entered the box of a man wearing a veil of membranes and fins. It is lifted: beneath is a raw face, two lidless eyes, a seam where a mouth once was. They kiss, tenderly and openly.

On the way out she straightens the peacock’s feathers the way most straighten tousled clothes. She cups its albino head in her palm. It is terribly fragile.

There was a time when Charinda did not doubt her strength. Then something happened, and she found herself in need of a reconstruction. She applied for an operation from a cyberneticist known to be without equal.

When it was done, her belly was hollowed out. In its place a cage, inside it a peacock.

“You asked for a bird, I gave you a bird,” Esithu said. “Appreciate your luck. There was a woman who wanted a bird and I gave her a beehive. Mind the implant well and it’ll keep you so healthy you’ll never need longevity treatments. I won’t have it said that Esithu does subpar work.”

Charinda had believed the implant would restore her, made her whole again.

The first year it terrified her to leave the house, to be seen with this mark of her mortality singing through her ribs. She tried covering it up with clothes that no longer fit right, but it hurt the peacock to be kept from sun and warmth. Her metabolism became ravenous; she had to eat for the bird too. Sinewy umbilici tethered them to one another. Any distance from it filled her with a panic like drowning, an ache like the accident she didn’t want to remember.

The months went; her isolation grew. She confined herself to her cortices, cultivating and breeding intelligences in ecosystems written to be viciously hostile. Many artificial clusters she encouraged to be nomadic or symbiotic; others she programmed with an expansionist slant. They would take over extant clusters, imposing new hierarchy and subroutines. It didn’t matter who won: under the built-in logic of diminishing resources they all went extinct in the end.