CW: implied sex work, guns, mass shooting, Islamophobia, Central Asian conflict, homophobia, conspiracy theory, self-punishment, eye horror, body horror, drugs (fictional, cocaine), colonial power dynamics, AGI, voluntary mind sharing, involuntary memory sharing, knives, finger horror, severe injury, gay sex, murder, implied sexual violence, trans death, car accident, Israel
I had woken up just like that to the news that Delilah was gone, as if born by mistake into some wrong world. I’d had my phone turned off at a basement show Mai was playing, under my cheek on somebody’s third or fourth mattress, missing the texts that had raced circles around all our friends as if trying to outrun her.
Delilah, being beautiful as she was, had a job no one had even heard of a trans woman having in this city - waitress at a high class restaurant that wasn’t even overtly sexual, or queer, or themed. She would wear this tight platinum sequined mini-dress, modest triangular neckline and slit up to the swivel of her hips, and pose on their Instagram. (So different from the pastel anime gym shorts and oversized band tees she wore at home, but matching so well the layered pyrite panes of her hair.) Sometimes she went home with some rich guy and didn’t talk about it. She never made it seem like the kind of thing that wasn’t under her control. One step closer, she always joked, to being the first real trans race queen, and not just the cam queen of /o/ (- the Automobiles board on 4chan, where she'd started out as a bleach-blonde babyface posing in fashionable long dresses in front of cars with big anime stickers, and migrated most of the fans who stood by her as it became clear she was serious about transition and the anons got meaner over to her personal Discord. She had the silliest claim to fame of all of us, she’d remind anyone who started feeling intimidated - but probably the biggest in absolute numbers.)
Mai spent the next morning stitching every screenshot anyone had into a chronological compilation just to make sense of it to herself. It wasn’t necessarily the worst strategy. I felt like I was trying to keep her with me while I myself was lost in a mall.
11:45, an hour after she usually got home. Sophie sent her a message. where are u.
A grainy screenshot of a dashboard, light streaming over it too fast to make sense of where anything was, like meltwater down furrows in spring.
Have you made the magical girl contract. That, as Sophie explained in her first dazed repetitive thread, was their code for if she was being trafficked.
no
In the next shot, you could see lace-gloved fingers on the wheel, and the rearing horse of the Ferrari logo in its centre.
no
delet this after
but first
Guess~
They had a number of quiz games training each other in each other’s special interests - usually updated regularly online, at least in their Discord server. Guess the astrological sign, the 2000s shoujo manga, the Kpop unit, the Saint’s Feast Day, the exotic car.
The gloves were a gift Sophie had ordered on Etsy for a local goth band’s music video. No-one but Sophie had seen them, or knew Delilah owned them.
Sophie had never been good at this one. Not willing to play along, she had posted it in the main channel of the Discord server, with the message:
help
idk if delilas alreight
(She had taken a rose out of the cabinet, as she had told Delilah not to let her, and figured Delilah being late made an honourable exception.)
F355 and I’m not getting any reverse image search results. nani tf? one of Delilah’s /o/ friends, now an Azoth affiliated podcaster, replied within 5 minutes.
who u with? can u call?
Silence. The actual thing that was happening was so out of the blue or so hard that Sophie couldn’t wrap her head around it until someone posted “Street Racing OSINT” mentioning an Ferrari F355 on the I-35 almost an hour ago.
Delilah had of course deleted location metadata from the photos, she wasn’t stupid; Sophie was torn between proving the script she used to pull GPS metadata from the messages themselves - don’t call me abusive rite now read the room I never used it until this & this was exactly the kind of thing I was scared of enuf to have it! - even existed and incriminating herself, but she demonstrated it to the satisfaction of skeptics in the comments. She said she had bought it off a darkweb vendor when that one ex was stalking her. Delilah was already out on the edge of the woods, racing along Lowell Larimer Road, which Sophie referred to from some experience as her own personal Mulholland Highway.
Sophie texted saying to meet her at the Paradise Valley Conservation Area entrance with the geocache. She got a ride in the server from Andrea Histamine, who said she didn’t know and wasn’t told what was happening, despite Sophie claiming she could have pieced it together from the available info in the main room. Her understanding was that Delilah had gone home with some guy and gotten stranded after a fight. The “stranded” part was pure fabrication, either on Sophie’s or Andrea’s part. That someone was letting her drive their car, however, was the default assumption in the server. No one was paying attention to the police blotter.
Anashirana had requested a shipment of weapons to analyze. We’d sent three grunts with a Weir pilot on one of the vehicles carrying a number of the classic Edison Lens heavy armament, the FN P90; the updated replacement that had been ordered as soon as Azoth had started reaching out to governments, the Scar-L; the rifle the IIEF itself had offered instead, the Remington ACR; and our pistols, Edison Lens’ FNX-45 and the IIEF’s Beretta PX4, plus the trusty AKs a number of mercenary groups had been allowed to bring along. Among them was Vakha Bashtaev, a name I knew from Jax scouting him as an informant on Hadak. A Chechen mercenary who had fought with both Western and Russian-aligned factions in Ukraine and in Africa, where he had crossed swords (not sure which kind) with Hadak and become one of his “enemy contacts”. From one of the most homophobic and geopolitically isolated military cultures in the world, there was probably no way he could have imagined bottoming for dozens of men in a diverse international coalition short of alien contact - a miracle for him as much as for me. He had thrown himself into the nudist uprising wearing a sort of kilt made of chains from the EV toolkit, but refused to be part of any “sacred band” led by Hadak, and seemed to want some sort of protection from him Jax thought Rho Aias could provide.
That was the Vakha Bashtaev we knew. The Bashtaev the ship’s gay underground (as opposed to its gay aboveground - these were very different groups, almost hostile to each other - Hadak had more sway in the former) knew was a sort of stoic courtesan who would enjoy anything with an artist’s or ascetic’s (or even penitent’s) indifference. To the minds of the rest of the ship Bashtaev might as well have been a Tatar mercenary out of a 19th century romance, who responded to the Meteorological first guest's greeting with a solemn bow before whispering "inna alladhina kafaru sawaon alayhim, a-andhartahum am lam tundhir'hum la yu'minuna" ("Verily, those who disbelieve, it is the same to them whether you warn them or do not warn them, they will not believe") and spraying into the Playscape tunnel. Waldo Beek was already guffawing about the first Islamic terror attack in space. It took a dozen bullets to crack enough of the Ahasurunu’s claylike shell of hardened tissue layers for antifreeze-blue vascular fluid to start leaking out both sides and the jets of the disk which clogged and pitched as they crashed to the floor and lay there, half-singing, rolling jerkily to one side and the other, for five to twelve minutes while the remaining soldiers split, one to go after them and the other to get medical help. They had taken one of the other Ahasurunu attending the hostage, riding their disc down one of the side-corridors of the Playscape which seemed to require some sort of special clearance to follow. So one ended up looking for “first aid”, which we had the wrong word for, and one for the symbol on the side of the vascular tunnel. By the time they found their respective objects, Anashirana was dead and Bashtaev untraceable.
Nobody else had died, at least. The Adipose node was under lockdown, although as far as I knew Bashtaev had no reason to believe it existed, and hadn’t been trained in enough Ahasurunu to find out. But the high-security network (the Playscape consisted of several different tunnel networks with different security settings) connected to it. They wanted to know how to defend against guns, short of being given them, which they weren’t willing to try again. The whole negotiation was conducted by Weir mediators across the membrane - no one wanted to let us in again, at least until Bashtaev was caught.
I’d called up Hadak to an unused suite and locked him in, tried at first to trip him into letting slip he knew what had happened before telling him. He genuinely seemed surprised, and when I told him the way his face changed couldn’t have been acting.
“My own information doesn’t suggest Bashtaev was ever actually a fundamentalist, certainly not by the time he got here. I'm not sure he was even still Muslim - he cut his beard in the first two weeks.” He still cited Quranic verses (like that one) in conversation, along with the Bible and… Gurdjieff? He had hinted at Idries Shah’s belief that some perennial form of Sufism predated Islam itself. But he was easy with the sometimes aggressively atheist Jax - easy with just about everyone, in bed or out. He didn’t seem to make connections between the different parts of his life - he could invite you into his bedroom to pray, or to make love, and if one wouldn’t mention the other.
“He fought alongside plenty of them.” Hadak shrugged.
“Yes, and multiple kinds of Orthodox, Nazi pagans, African Evangelicals. I know Waldo Beek would look past all that and believe it was all just taqiyya or something, you on the other hand would know better… how much better, you see, is what I’m wondering.”
“Who knows how many lines that Gladio B skraeling is behind? Not me, not Waldo Beek and probably not him either. Assume it doesn’t matter.”
“Gladio B?” I hadn’t heard that name in a long time - but of course, it would make sense. My heart sank as Halation scanned my memory of old videos I hadn’t been sure how seriously to take about cells of astroturf "Islamists" activated by NATO as stay-behind forces throughout the former Soviet sphere of influence, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Turkey, pawns in the New Great Game… It had felt a bit like one of those truther-left stories that sounded too much like War on Terror chain letters even as it blamed us instead of them. But that was my opinion as a sociologist who had never seen combat. And of course if it existed it would be here.
“Feeling out of your depth yet?” He threw his head back. “If you want this resolved cleanly and quickly without a lot of coverup kudzu - let me in after him.”
“No way in hell.”
“Fair, I can’t pretend it’s a good option. You won’t be having many. Let me know when you’re willing to try the crazy one.”
In fact I’d already promised the other crazy one - on my word as their first guest, an Ahasurunu custom older than Meteorology they’d brought to their first hosts in space along with it - and they’d said they would contact me as soon as they located him. I took a small capsule that would allow them to transmit harmonic resonances directly into my bloodstream, which I didn’t know if I would be able to pick up on but Halation assured me she would.
Morning approached. I would have less than six hours before I was supposed to greet the delegation from the Towers, and I spent a couple of them drawing up plans for an evacuation from the Lung itself into the surrounding tunnels.
A takeover from inside wouldn’t be hard either, Beek texted. Edison Lens’ engineering team has already finished blueprinting the airbikes, all you’d need to do is inject them into that manufacturing structure they showed us a few days ago. The structure looked like a giant cell organelle - a pentagonal spiral of plum-coloured tubing connecting cylindrical material tanks, extruding impossibly complex forms from a sphincter at the end, floating languidly on its side on a cloud of carbon soot it produced as exhaust (processed by a dozen smaller things that looked like snail-shells).
We still have a chance to prove our value here - we have to figure out the source of the bombardment as fast as possible.
I lay down to let grief drain through my body, but my dreams were grey and dense like diagrams.
At least the regular chain of command seemed to be working. There were five anti-Islamic breaches of discipline while I was asleep - one involving a member of the Sacred Band, the rest just American or Israeli meatheads. All were promptly tamped down without resistance by their immediate superiors.
The Lung had an official “dock” for interactions with the allied Towers, although they hadn’t had any for most of an orbit cycle. The main “tribe” in this plug had migrated deeper to escape the aerial attacks. No one else had passed through until the fungal bombings. A semi-permeable colon extended about two hundred metres from the Weirs’ lobe into a wide boulevard of a tunnel. It had a customizable atmosphere, which we kept to the natural setting of Towers. It was lit by rows lotus-shaped fungal lights in black light, which made our uniforms look dope as hell and apparently did the same for the ceremonial dress of the Towers. It also was connected to a stable of local animals the Weirs used to interact in the outside environment, which looked almost like rubbery hedgehogs with trunks and a triangular body plan.
Jax was with me, and Caroline. (Waldo Beek holding down the fort.) Hadak and the members of the scouting party they had injured were there by their request. Jax juggled back and forth in his palm a crystalline sphere in which a swirl of multicoloured metallic flecks were taking shape into a strange attractor. This strange object, supposedly linked to one of their own by naturally occurring quantum-entangled ions, was an ancient timekeeping token they’d had to return to in the absence of the network to make synchronous arrangements in the tunnels where there were few signs of time. Details of the meeting also scrolled across its surface in a complex logography of anthills of tiny dots. He kept showing it to Caroline, who was the only person who understood the mathematical structure enough to say if the pattern was completed. “Hmmm, that should be about maximally symmetrical, unless” - and immediately a sucking noise announced a shape pressing in at the end of the membrane. I shivered watching the goldenrod barrier stretch and fall away from their thick grey-white-yellow keratin surface, the elaborate weave patterns of the wraps around their limbs shimmering.
The first to enter - I wasn’t going to just assume leader, but it seemed a pretty safe bet - carried a staff of grey metal, with a split top like a tuning fork and an impression of incredibly precise shape and balance like a scientific instrument. From the preliminary info we’d been given, these staves had an incredible array of both ceremonial and practical uses, translating mathematically precise measurements of vibrations miles through the crust into inaudible overtones, chipping away at encrustations with its slotted tip, geometrical dance-forms consecrating the dozens of different categories of temporary settlement. For the first meeting with a new species, they just handed it to me, and it took minutes of painstaking translating to establish that I was supposed to just do something off the top of my head that would become the basis for a greeting ritual with humans in general. After freezing for a few seconds that felt like an hour, I dipped my neck between the two prongs and found it fit like a guillotine pillory. Handing it back, they did the same, and at Halation’s suggestion, we modified the formula to do the same for each other. I was going to have to add a guideline requiring gloves for this greeting, because I was extremely self-conscious of leaving oily fingerprints on the pristine metal, although Halation had covered my hands with an imperceptible layer.
After offloading their initial gifts - including portable chemical synthesis and gene editing kits that looked a lot more mission-ready and easily reproducible than the Weirs’ “molecular substitution” tech - they had asked where the human with the patterned skin had gone, whether there were others like him and whether they were all strong like that.
Hadak’s hands were ziptied, partly in a gesture of reciprocity with what he had done to one of them. I could see, near the back of the group which had swelled to a solid dozen and a half (their whole travelling band, now spread throughout the plug, numbered almost a hundred twenty and was the third of twelve delegations following the same route), one whose fingers hung differently, like a limp set of streamers.
This one stepped forward, and the leader held their hand up. We have injured each other mistakenly. All injured parties may now stand before the group (all of their categories could be subsumed under something like “group”, and almost none have any component of biological family association, so I think I’ll use that instead of tribe, although Halation wants to come up with a super-specific plural like humans have for animals - a Fall of Towers?) and present their injuries to be matched by those who dealt them.
“...matched?”
The parties on both sides who injured each other will deal to themselves, or have dealt to them by members of their group, the same injuries they inflicted on members of the other group.
I blinked, and had to check with the other Weirs because Halation didn’t know enough about Towers to ensure I was understanding the custom correctly - how does that even work for species with different body plans? while knowing it didn’t matter because ours were close enough in any case for Fingal Hadak to grin, step forward, and ask for his ziptie to be removed.
“We… don’t do that.”
Hadak laughed. The leader lowered their head. We understand that many may find this custom harsh, but the violence we have endured including from those who have called themselves allies is harsher. We cannot deal with groups who do not observe these laws of conflict, who will not at least observe them with us as a sign of good faith. Unless you mean that you do not regret your injuries to us, in which case we can enter a state of truce or war, but not full communication as we had hoped.
I still wasn’t sure we needed to take the risk of unzipping Hadak’s hands, I was trying to think of the best way, maybe laying them out across something, a heavy chop with the butt of a gun. But one guard nodded to me with a gun in his back and barely loosened the ziptie before he grabbed his right hand with his left (he was left-handed, I remembered in a split second from his file), simply pulled back from the knuckles, snapping the metacarpals. His eyes were fixed on mine and I knew he was testing if I would flinch. I tried to ignore the sound and focus on his face, a geological upheaval I had never seen before, tattoo lines writhing in hissing silence.
The Towers let out a long, dissonant trill, higher than any of the sounds that made up their everyday language, disintegrating into the ripple of a thousand cicadas. Hadak freed his wrists from the ziptie and raised his arms.
Then the crowd parted and one of their number stepped forward. They spoke. If I understand you visitors’ anatomy correctly, I shot someone’s eye. I do not have a recording or a name, but if this injury was indeed dealt I will happily match it. Is the visitor I shot here?
I glanced back into my own party. Private Ishag had been bouncing from one foot to the other the entire time, a small green-brown stain marking whatever degradation was ongoing or recently stopped under the bandages covering his left eye socket. To my surprise, it was Bennett-Fog who got cold feet this time. “We are happy to make sacrifices as a show of good faith, but this isn’t our custom, and we have no intention of making such extreme demands of our allies” -
Ishag bounded forward, placing a long, callused hand in a vice grip on her shoulder. “I wouldn’t mind it.”
Their body bent far enough, balanced between two hands hooked in the floor’s tiny holes, that the hand at the end where they held the sling could point it straight at their own eye. I held my breath as one eye swivelled and targeted itself, drawing a line of sight to its own blindness like a bowstring. The other closed, and then it released. Dark purple acid, a splash of night sky under the blacklight, burst over the domed surface and dripped in rivulets down the side of their face and neck, until the eyelid showed through again pockmarked and tattered, bleeding blue fluid through multiple holes.
Ishag’s good eye was popping. As the alien chorus rose again, he tried to join in with an awkward whistle.
Now, for the medicine!
From the covered palanquins in which they’d brought the gifts, our guests removed large blister packs filled with a gel that looked remarkably like the slick the Weirs melted into between forms. When placed on the recently destroyed eye - and the hand Hadak had broken - their surfaces melted onto the affected areas, covering them like soap bubbles. The Towers presumably being healed swayed slowly back and forth, their heads hanging so that their crests pointed directly up. The same were offered to Hadak and Ishag.
“Will… will that work on us? On our biochemistry? We might have to run some tests, as far as we know it could kill us…”
One of the Weirs stepped up, extending its quills for Halation to communicate. That’s based on our technology. It should be fine - it’s a kind of copy chemical that provides a rapidly adaptable resource for whatever your body itself wants to rebuild. This kind is locally sourced, probably less efficient than ours, and we think it’s also neuroactive.
Oh, of course. This was one of the techs I wanted to export to Earth. The only reason Ishag and the others were still as injured as they were, being treated with th, was that the Lung was already running low on supply, having given a lot away in the early days of devastation while awaiting help that never came. If it could really be produced locally… the question would be in what quantities, what resources we would need to control.
And until we knew how to exhaust or control it, we would need to shoot to kill.
“How precious is this gift?”
Hadak was standing still with his bubbled hand in front of him, a wide smile spreading across his face, humming what sounded like a Scottish folk tune.
You can’t make it here. Where we were going, there should have been good supplies, but now we can’t say for certain we were given the right directions in the first place.
Caleb Hadak’s and Private Ishag’s eyes were starting to roll back in their heads. The rhythm of their movements had a distinctly pendulumlike precision. But despite this state, Hadak tilted his shoulders and leaned his head over. “Well, how they hell do we get there and get ourselves a strategic stockpile of this already?”
I translated that delicately. They caught onto some of the threat of exclusivity anyway, or were just suspicious:
It cannot be stockpiled, because a common internexus is managed by trade arrangement. As such, it requires a strict condition of secrecy as to sides in the war, and a ban on persons or species recognizably affiliated in it. That would probably include you.
Wouldn’t until they declare their position on the war to everyone at the internexus!
“OK, and this is enforced by whom?”
I wanted to let that one stay safely behind the language barrier. But it was bugging me, especially as someone who had been studying non-hierarchical sociology - this kind of collective neutrality agreement made sense under widely distributed, anarchic conditions, but would be hard to maintain against any significant onslaught from an organized army. An anonymous crowd could suppress a terrorist or hostage-taker, but sides would be determined by the mere necessity of resisting or submitting to a force too large to overwhelm with numbers.
That, it turned out, was what had happened to most of them.
“So that means we basically have to secure the location against attack if we even want to maintain neutrality.” I was painfully aware how often Caroline’s words had been used as an excuse by humans, by white humans, by humans with ranks and weapons, like her and me, to devour what we wanted. And in that painful awareness, I thanked her for taking them out of my mouth. If we could maintain a neutral site, wouldn’t that be better? But maybe that genuinely didn’t occur to the sides here. Maybe they weren’t as ruthless as us.
That’s not likely, Halation reminded me sadly. Maybe for now. But not for long.
That was, after all, what she and her whole colony had assumed.
A thorn burned through my heart for a second - I was feeling the same thing I did when I wanted to take up arms in a human conflict, when I wanted to make them pay for who they had hurt. I knew it wasn’t as simple as the ones I felt that way about on Earth - there wasn’t an “oppressed” and an “oppressor”, and I still didn’t feel like I understood the philosophy around the Adipose well enough to say who was “right” or “wrong” either. But -
“Right. We also want to get a reconnaissance team to the surface where the unidentified explosive events are occurring and see if we can develop a plan for a counteroffensive. We brought a small squadron of fighter planes on the ship, and this place has productive capacity for various kinds of flying technologies.”
You think they’re… dropping things on us. I got to watch the understanding dawn in, their body language, something - I don’t know how I could possibly have been reading it but I could see it. Christ, they really had never even thought of bombardment. They had spent their entire history living under a thing that could have bombarded them any time it wanted, and never wanted to.
We used to send people up to communicate and do micro-repairs to thank the network. Chimneys like this one. We had shuttle points. Launching small craft into the upper atmosphere to make contact with hub stations of the network when they passed overhead. I haven’t heard if any of the ones near here have been active since it went down.
“Do you think they could be using one? Or we could use one to counterattack?”
They’ll know the way, we can find out, there’s a guide at the internexus.
“OK this sounds about right,” I thought out loud. “We can provide you an escort to the internexus, secure its neutrality and establish a resupply point, then send a group onward to the shuttle point and set up a base for” -
“Wait, doesn’t this one have the same capabilities?” Caroline reminded me. “There’s a big-ass Asymmetry Field in the mouth of the chimney. I bet that’s what they use here to launch stuff.”
I translated her hypothesis to them. “Is that true?”
That’s what they told us we were doing here. Demolishing an out of commission shuttle point on the way to the internexus. So it’s not used as one any more?
I had to check that with the Weirs - in the very early years, they had done some shuttling to establish alibis, but of course there was no reason to now.
No reason? Wouldn’t you want to get clues about what took out the network?
A whole fleet of repair craft went up the moment it went down. They collected all that was left. The ones that came back.
It made enough sense that air superiority hadn’t been at the top of anyone’s minds here. That said, it was clearly affecting their ability to function underground.
Our guests were fidgeting, starting to unwrap more things from the palanquin, being motioned to stop and motioning to continue. I checked back in and updated the leader on the general course of our private conversation, and they made a long, dismissive noise almost like a whinny. Is all this really the first thing you want to talk about when you meet a new species that isn’t even in any of the interstellar registries? We haven’t had an information feast in twelfth-exponent units, and we’ve thought about nothing but war in all that time.
“Have I told you,” Caroline began in her confiding voice I didn’t know what to do with, “I’ve been developing a theory I’d love to submit to the Edison Lens internal research journal if that still mattered, that the invention of strategy is a psychological breakthrough of willing yourself to think about warfare. That for most of history, people fought basically unconscious from the trauma. That this is what separates us from…” she gently indicated Fingal Hadak who had begun an impossibly coordinated dance “...that guy.” Fingal Hadak thought about warfare even more than she did, that was his problem, I thought but didn’t want to get into. “That might be what we’re going to be fighting. But don’t assume.”
I wasn’t paying attention. I was trying to figure out where I would start to explain a history that produced thoughts like that like it was a campfire story. We had Weirs, and half of them were looking forward to seeing a movie, but an “information feast” (a computational life concept, Halation tells me, which they probably learned from their planet’s network) could be held in any formal constraint or medium, and I wanted to do it in words.
I didn’t want to think leaving the base myself was an unacceptable risk in itself, because then I would be fucked almost whatever I did, but I was for obvious reasons unusually jumpy. Especially if this whole out-of-character attack was some sort of plot. No reason it had to be Hadak’s either. Hadn’t he himself had been warning me about Beek, who he had served with, and was also acting happy to shoulder the role of staying on base and keeping the lights on?
In the last two months before launch Azoth and Edison Lens with the help of Halation had whipped up the Azoth Denpa (set to roll out for civilian use in six months on Earth - with an open source version for our use connected to the Clamp network en route in this very capsule - Bashtaev had almost gotten one of those) - a low-level smartphone (capable of visuals on the level of a PC-98) that transmitted data packets like a regular military walkie-talkie, with a wide frequency-hopping range that would be difficult to systematically block. It would allow me to transmit complex orders and even speak on projection anywhere I had soldiers.
We were giving ourselves two Lung-days to prepare the expedition. The group we’d met, who called themselves what I’ll translate The Sunbites (the word referring to a partial glimpse of the sun through the bend of a tunnel opening on the sky - travelling companies of this size gave themselves names a bit like bands on Earth) - would go down the plug and try to make a deal with our original allies for some extra supplies. If possible, I wanted to get one job done by then.
But most of the day I had strategic documents to pore over, supplies checklists to approve, units to divide up to keep the potential loyalties I’d flagged in my own secret spreadsheets balanced.
Nobody was used to scheduling anything in the 13th hour.
Of course Bashtaev’s Denpa was being tracked, and of course he’d gotten rid of it first thing.
Of course the Ahasurunu had their own ways of finding where people were, gentle rains of Asymmetric radiation that could model every matter-state boundary in the Playscape, with one exception. Of course he had just stumbled into it.
The duodenal knot of computationalized tunnels half-encircled the triple-airgapped chamber surrounding the Adipose node, feeding particles and objects through the walls in inversely semipermeable bubbles and calculating the results of experiments. As soon as Bashtaev had entered, the computational mind had projected an Asymmetry Field and cut itself off from the rest of the complex, making it even more impossible than it already was for him to reach the Node, but also impossible to perceive anything inside.
“Can’t it just make one of its bubbles and spit him out back at us.” Waldo Beek had sounded convincingly flustered on the phone with me interpreting for them if he was behind this, although he probably wouldn’t have prepared for this outcome either.
“It can’t do that with living beings it’s less than three exchange factorials interoperable with. Partly to keep the experiments within Meteorological bounds, and partly to minimize risk of the kind of thing that happened to your station.” This directed somewhat cruelly at Halation.
“So you’re telling me, you guys do all your high tech stuff through these whole other computer guys you have to worry about going over to the enemy? Maybe I’m a primitive Earthling but if Skynet happened I’d go back to the pony express.”
“This isn’t a symbiote, our computational core was designed and extruded from raw elements here in the Lung. But anything that smart can randomly autonomize. And we want to limit what we can tell it to do, too.”
“Hey wait, did you ever fix the radio bug?”
Beek glared daggers at me. He’d wanted to keep that in our back pocket as an advantage against our allies as well as our enemies. But it didn’t matter, Meteorological standard procedure for technological exchange was testing all known technologies against each other for such vulnerabilities. “This is also the computer that does that. It’s Contact-proofed, it has way more redundant packet systems and radiation resistance than a cheap escape craft. That’s… also why it won’t give him back, probably. If it’s doing anything it’s First Contact procedures.”
“Will it be… done those in some timeframe? And then give him back?”
“That’s the problem. It has a right to greet a first guest itself, for as long as it wants. We are normally very careful about who we allow to do this - we hadn't even approved you when you visited.”
“A 'right'? And it's not even 'autonomized'?” Bennett-Fog squeaked in terror. "What stopped it from just reaching out and grabbing Leona while she was there?"
“It’s a semi-Solipsist. We can only give it requests in a specialized format relating them to its internal function - part of its security is that beyond this it does not model the outside world at all. This is the reason we can have such powerful systems and not face internal threats. Their internal values are simple and we understand them well. Our exchanges of benefits are simple and we understand them well. We have been doing the same with other lifeforms, weather systems, ecosystems for millions of years. Interoperability does not demand convergence towards absolute autonomy or absolute subservience, but towards finite intersections of wills.”
“So if we go in…”
“It will probably not oppose you, provided your own presence is as interesting as a guest. We do not expect it to change its value system due to contact - it is, again, designed to do this.”
The Ahasurunu were far more terrified than this of the gun which had already killed four or five pursuers. Asymmetry fields were inconvenient to miniaturize enough for this kind of close combat (except as bubbles within a larger one) - there were a few (codenamed “Bishops”) reserved for this kind of extreme event around the Playscape but Bashtaev had made it to sanctuary before they’d been able to maneuver any to counter him. For now they were, despite everything, grudgingly happy to leave us to clean up our own mess. “Far be it from me to discourage heroism,” Hadak had smirked. “But whatever special capabilities you get from having an alien inside you, you’re an untrained civilian going up against a guy who, skraeling though he is, has woken up on a battlefield every day for the past decade.” That wasn’t true - he’d had several intervals of decommission - you could hear the Waldo Beek fanboy in Hadak when he said things like that. “It doesn’t seem to be working out great for the aliens. Take a team at least.” So as much as I wanted to be the first and maybe last human to see him, to interrogate him one on one, I weighed those words and picked the two non-Jax members of Rho Aias I trusted most to operate with me - Baugh, the ex-Academi guy (a whistleblower who’d been on Beek until he was quietly blacklisted for going after some of Beek’s funders) and Serrao, a Brazilian who had done rainforest defense black ops for the Workers’ Party (he wore twists and tiny gold sunglasses that looked like scarab shells). We would move connected through Halation. Three was about the maximum number Halation could interface with at any resolution that would matter on a battlefield at once. It might still be disorienting for all of us - but I had practiced, with Jax and Alastair back on Earth, using “mind palace” techniques to stabilize the connection in a legible, compartmentalized interface through which we could consult each other’s perceptions and select physical enhancements without too much confusing mental feedback. The “line” of our connection couldn’t extend much more than 12 feet without communicative and cognitive degradation. I hadn’t told Beek or Bennett-Fog the extent to which we could do this, which would undoubtedly make them all the more eager to establish independent links with Weirs. Whatever I had said in the negotiations, it was increasingly obvious we were going to do this at some point, and what I had to ensure was that by the time we did I had as much self-perpetuating hegemony here as they did on Earth.
We set off by Lung-night.
Christ, now I sound like Jack Vance.
Clouds, in outline and underlight, could only be said to boom around us, ripples in purple static. The colour layers that blent so beautifully in the daylight piled into indistinction, although there were still gentle shimmers of blue and green illuminated by flashes of lightning like giant peacock feathers.
Each semi-fetal in a bubble of the vehicle I was learning to call a Corpuscle, we floated up to the aperture in the membrane and a single Ahasurunu, a longtime fan of Halation’s transmissions, was there to let us across.
The Playscape had split open in four pieces (that I could see) to let us through, listing slightly where they hung, hundreds of tunnels open in cross-section, covered by shimmering semi-permeable bubbles. The pieces looked darker and more unified in colour (each a slightly different node on the spectrum of plum-indigo), more than I thought the difference in lighting alone could account for, but I didn’t ask. The computerized tunnels glowed light blue-green; the Asymmetry Field around it invisible except as we approached its edges bent like we were looking at it across the surface of water, until it seemed to wrap all the way around us, the single opening a blue-black snake’s gullet traced by jagged lines of blue-green light that receded seemingly endlessly before turning down, spackled with bright points of all colours.
Our vehicle stopped and three Ahasurunu prepared us to enter by etching a sigil like a QR code, a tailed square filled in with rectilineal whorls, on the surface of each bubble. The vehicles themselves had these patterned channels for the fluid forms of Weirs - they didn’t have the surface control to maintain such complex shapes by themselves. They weren’t Spider-man symbiotes, they moved by complex pressure cascades and a kind of surface tension mechanism for mapping bodies they made contact with. Their standard form, while it spent little time moving anyway, was more fully articulated (if delicate, requiring a couple hours to reconstitute itself after even minor impacts), and fighting integrated with Halation wasn’t a zero-sum tradeoff with letting myself and Halation fight separately - one of the reasons I’d been able to convince Beek we could use it sparingly.
Halation rushed in to fill the hair-thin channels as soon as they were completed and each time seared my mind with an abrupt and inexplicable shift in awareness, like falling in a dream, less total than even the first sensations of her own presence but similar in the sense of a separate perspective observing my own, although each time felt disconcertingly like I myself was the other perspective and though I found myself returned to my own with no new knowledge or awareness, wasn’t sure I had returned the same person.
As we passed through, our surroundings distorting as if seen through something more viscous than water, the Corpuscle rearranged itself. My retainers’ bubbles rotated below and lifted mine between them, forming an upright triangle, like the swivelling feet of a motor protein. Halation stood out in sharp, painterly patterns across its surface, phosphorescing gently.
Our Scar-Ls pointed out of the now-rigidly spherical bubbles, in which we were crouched like hamster-wheels, the two “feet” strafing to either side with the Scar-Ls fanning out in a 120% serpent’s gaze with the PX4s in opposite hands guarding our rear. Halation’s markings created several arrays of their body’s natural infrared sensors forming a half-conscious security camera grid in our augmented vision.
From large leather pockets hanging on our belts, each of us released an Azoth Bulbul tricopter drone, mounted with the miniaturized ground-penetrating radar we’d been test running for use in the caverns, passing with a slight pop through the membranes.
Our feathery markings, like the flames first mistaken for wings on angels, floated over the outline cracks. The tunnel here was just big enough for our armour to walk in. First we had to get the Corpuscle to one of the internal hangars. Only the main arterial tunnels surrounding the computational area at perpendicular cross-sections (albeit quite winding, not straightforward circles) were big enough to allow it through in this form. The hangar was near the centre of the structure.
Periodically these cracks emitted sprays of coloured, sparking steam that reminded me of the kind that so often filled environments in seventies sci-fi movies (I kept thinking of the half-hours I spent trying to capture that all over sketchpad paper, even though my drawing was shitty at everything else). This was the computational medium itself, a gas composed of semi-entangled particles spontaneously forming a vast array of complex temporary molecules, dwarfing the organic register, as semantic units in its code, communicating by photons and instantaneous electromagnetic communications that arced through the smoke. (Even with all these layers of internal communication, only about 20% of the medium could be aware of itself at any one time, so it was less accurate to speak of the computer as a mind than as a shared dream of a bubbling complex of minds.) The tunnel system’s similarity to a brain made me wonder if there was any relation to the development of human consciousness (the gut too, Halation wants to remind me, you have a whole ecosystem in there I can’t even interface with), although the neural nets within Halation for instance looked more like the branches of a slime mold, and Ahasurunu had a cavity that looked like the inside of a pomegranate with some unique capacities for running in parallel - hey, keep your head in the game, Baugh relayed to me through a sheepish Halation. To him (at this moment, as it was to me once I got my head back in the game) the salient fact of the computational medium was that it made radar spotty.
The drones scoped out all the tunnels around the hangar up to 20 metres distance, focusing on the computationally inert buffer tunnels, where local radar and communications were most effective. As we were dismounting (semipermeable patterns peeling out into a hatch), Baugh noticed one had disappeared.
It had been in a small, tightly knotted coil about a dozen metres above us, where oppositely charged tunnels (at a quark level indistinguishable to humans) were wrapped around each other in a double helix. Perfect for if he wanted to pick us off one by one.
“We can’t just cut through any of this stuff, can we?” Baugh asked.
Responding to the image Halation sent through my mind (and his, but just in case) I flicked out my Cold Steel (“the Hedgeheg”, I’d nicknamed it, because I’m a loser) SRK and scored a line across the wall nearest us. A range of cobalt triangular crystals iterated around the gash.
“Fuck. What happens if they just make tanks out of this shit?”
“Impossible without computationalizing them - expensive, costly, and renders them relatively autonomous. I mean there are other forms of self-repair. Mostly they just mean you have to blow stuff up one-hit.”
Baugh shrugged. “OK then. I guess we’re all just taking your word for it.” Halation gave him a mild static shock through our connection - he should have been able to perceive the information directly, but I had no idea (without looking, which I didn’t) how he was phenomenalizing what she shared or if he was even paying attention. “Ow!”
“Feels like a trap,” Serrao pondered. “There any way we can like, smoke him out?”
“Already plenty of smoke here.” One of the micro-tunnels vented between us and Baugh waved it away. It tingled on our skin and smelled slightly of an impossible mixture of scents, the strongest a bit like cherry and brine.
As we crawled into the larger tunnel that would branch off into the coil, we noticed more than smells - ghostly images were projected on the smoke, uncanny in detail for their faintness. Soviet-style blocks collapsing, a child staring at the ballooning waves of dust from the other side of a fence. Picking at bookshelves in a deserted apartment while a commander kept a bead on a window - Bhagavad Gita, Mircea Eliade, Pierre Guyotat. “Caralho!” Serrao whisper-laughed at one of a young man, glossy black hair already hanging in sharp square bangs tucked behind one ear, sucking a bearded Banderite’s dick in the cockpit of a tank.
“Is this normal?” Baugh conferred nervously. “Does this mean he can see…”
“Us? Quite possibly.” It was a disconcerting thought.
“Can we see him?” Serrao added. “Like not his memories or whatever, but where he is now.”
“If he can see us, and we’re not seeing him, he’s probably hiding in one of the computationally inert tunnels.” It wasn’t just pictures, those were just the clearest - intrusive thoughts were popping like soda bubbles, auditory hallucinations crackling in one ear and out the other too fast to record even in memory. The communion with Halation and two other people was already overwhelming enough, I couldn’t even factor everything else into the mix - I was uncomfortably aware not only of my mind’s limits but the way I was already overflowing them all the time, all my senses half-present in each other’s peripherals, somehow just trusting everything that mattered to jump out of the haze of gestalt. “But we should check if this is supposed to be happening.”
I pulled my Denpa out of one pocket and the Ahasurunu speech-wheel out of another. Since I had confirmed the mission with the rest of the command structure, we had set up a special three-way for the emergency recon operation we were calling Wryneck - but I hadn't told Beek and Bennett-Fog that the signal probably wouldn't reach from here. What I was really relying on was the secret direct link that would transmit the vibrations from inside my body as data packets. The speech-wheel was set to subsonic vibrations which would route its tones directly into my bloodstream, so it couldn't be heard from inside here either - at least, not by unaided human ears, which I had assumed would be enough.
I began "speaking" with the standardized "greeting" melody, to ensure someone was picking up. I waited for a response in kind, trying to think in standard units instead of seconds - after a dozen eighth-exponent, alarming for this mode of communication, I began again - I might have gotten it all out if my fingers were used to the language, weren’t shaking - I think it's interfering here, Halation warned me as I fumbled, it must be more active than they expected, we need to get to a buffer - a serpent's head flickered out of the wall and smashed the speech-wheel out of my hand.
Smashed the speech-wheel altogether, six keys collapsed into each other, ones I needed. One hand turning and catching it as it fell, the other spun around and swung the knife after it, as Baugh and Serrao trained their guns on the hole in the wall that blinked palely as if nothing had happened.
“Aw hell, HAL 9000,” Serrao whispered.
“Yeah I think we better back out,” Baugh advised. “This is one of those exponential uncertainty situations Bennett-Fog keeps talking about.”
Bennett-Fog and Halation reared up against each other in my mind. They fought over a pit of primal terror: had I already allowed the birth of another, worse me… a single human perspective implanted in all the weight of first contact - but this time, between an unpredictable extremist and a computer god I couldn’t understand? With access to a superweapon, to our enemy…
Halation took over from my despair. “There’s no way… Anashirana would have trusted their experiments to a mind that badly Contact-proofed! I’m the one whose stupid recklessness killed them - don’t ever ask me to pretend the opposite would happen and give me an excuse to back out of making up for it!”
In the lava of survivor’s guilt, my depressive hesitation was the scales of cooling rock, and Halation’s the liquid fire.
The professionals glanced at each other nervously, but with a kind of admiration.
“Besides - that didn’t feel like computationalized material.” It had been too fast to see, but it had brushed past Halation on contact. “That felt like a Weir.”
“Weirs aren’t supposed to be able to do that, right? If there’s a fucking mutant Carnage Weir on here that’s also pretty bad…”
Behind my thinking silhouette spread a projection of a man praying the salat in a RPG-damaged mosque with pointed branches wedged out of its earthen-brick dome in the shadow of uncannily domed mountains, warm on cool brown. A twenty-year-old confessing his disbelief to a NATO handler who said every suicide bomber he’d ever met felt the same way.
The serpent’s head whipped back around Baugh’s leg, dragging him cursing into the tunnel.
A tentacle - wasn’t that too human an idea compared to everything we’d seen so far?
We found him pulling himself up from the trough of the first loop, shallow but ragged wounds flaming around and in his leg. While I was focused on him it reappeared from above us and wrapped around Serrao’s throat. I unloaded half my pistol towards where it had appeared and it disappeared before the crystal could completely cover over where it had come through, which I smashed through with the knife to confirm - for a split second, before it doubled - was one of the micro-tunnels spouting luminous steam nickelodeons. Was I really acting, reacting faster than them? Was I really leading? Or was it deference to the fiction of my leadership, or Halation, or Bennett-Fog’s baffling games of exponential uncertainty, or Delilah Pankhurst- from another, it caught my unguarded wrist again. Serrao and Baugh, having grasped my strategy, tried to pin it with rains of near-point-blank fire.
I trusted them to allow my eyes to drift, as I picked myself up from the tube slide floor I’d felt my ischium against, over the new projection of a Weir sliding itself through the grooves of a platform up his pale leg, naked except for the boot, early varicose veins and irregularities standing out between taut skin and muscle. His neck jerked to alert the others and then went silent. Unilateral control, if this was it, would represent about the highest crime possible under general Weir and specifically Meteorological norms, but I could tell it wasn’t: I could smell it or breathe it in the data packets or something. It had said something, but I couldn’t make out any of the information filtering through the mist except the visual, that strange self-destructive fascination of humans and especially modern and European humans, enough to say what.
Overconfident. It was too fast and unpredictable. It lashed me across the back and I fell to my knees and wrists. Weir, and metal.
Meanwhile the multiplying bursts of repair-crystal were starting to hem us in - Serrao kicked to send one scattering and it nearly speared his leg as he ran past.
(He pumped his fist and one knee at his escape and an image flickered out past the jagged pillar - Serrao splitting a sixteen-piece chocolate chip banana pizza with a dozen landless workers in the back of a hijacked logging truck, sliding up his glasses to accidentally reveal tears sticking the lashes of his bloodshot eyes together.)
I couldn’t quite lift my shoulders all the way without triggering the faultline in my back, sending spasms and blood-tickles cascading down my sides.
But as it had passed, Halation had recorded its surface.
A chain, ending in a crescent knife. A severed finger, hooked through the loop at the knife’s base, stabbed through at its base by the chain’s first link.
It wasn’t our standard knife, but the non-standard forces were permitted to keep a personal. Karambit. Damn it. I had flashbacks to that knife.
The finger explained it. A Weir couldn’t move like that under its own internal power, but it could map to a body and shift force slightly along it to allow shockingly complex coordination… the engineer’s chain, that he’d worn with the Sacred Band bridged his body, connecting the Weir to the part he’d cut off.
The chain was around thirty-five metres - a bit longer than our maximum connection - so if I could calculate that from the internal map of the channels, how far it could have travelled through the ones that opened at these few entrances thankfully marked by Serrao and Baugh’s crystalline impacts…
Halation couldn’t do that in their head (not while coordinating this much, amazed as I was that they could do it normally). Even if we could, we didn’t have a system of coordinates that would necessarily be communicable to them.
A drone could - but he’d picked off the last few that were anywhere near us while I recovered. (Their last recorded coordinates we could use too…)
The Corpuscle’s internal AR projection could overlay several dozen coordinate systems. I could use my bloodstream connection (which could pick up the sonic vibrations of Halation’s Ahasurunu song-speech through my capillaries) even without the speech-wheel or the Denpa.
I turned and tried to run and collapsed to my hands. Halation jerked my shoulders around, trying to find ways to compensate for my normal muscular connections. Baugh reached down first and gave me a lift onto his back.
(I disrupted a cloud of vapour in which he was frantically scrabbling to piece his face together, waking up covered in cuts from a glass table his head had fallen through, the shards spotted with cocaine thumbprints. All his efforts scattered again to red flecks.)
“We need to get back to the thing.”
“I told you that a few minutes ago.”
“No, not like that. I need to get it to a buffer tunnel.”
He eyed the stalagmite now almost bisecting the tunnel. “Hmm. We’re not gonna be able to get through that like this.”
“Need me to break it again?” Serrao yelled from the other side.
The chain rose again from below, Karambit arcing right up towards his fly, the black sickle claw in that ritual I spent so many nights imagining but never actually saw and couldn’t prove had ever actually taken place…
Halation kicked in, steering through both of us, catching the chain in his hand, lunging and pulling it through the stalagmite of repair-material as we crossed in the split second of reformation. The chain of multiplied force from the other end burned and chafed Baugh’s palm down to white fat and blood, even through Halation’s opalescent laminate; he released just as the blade raced back towards the base of his thumb, just in time for it to get caught where the reforming crystal pinned it in the middle of a solid column from base to ceiling.
Not sure how long this would last - this type of symbiotic skill varied in the first place between Weirs, one capable of something like this had to be incredibly old and trained in neurological arts - I set Serrao to guard at the mouth of the tunnel.
Having pinned it was convenient in letting us make it any distance without getting sliced to bits, but posed a bit of a problem - the Corpuscle would have nothing to measure. It couldn’t fit in the tunnel where we’d been fighting before. So, Halation relayed, as soon as we were safely in the Corpuscle - I could return to my bubble, not having to move too much - Serrao would fire into the tunnel, break the repair surface again, and Halation would contract, pulling us together and leading the chain toward the safety and analytic capabilities of the Corpuscle.
If the timing wasn’t exactly right, well, he assured me grimly though the connection, he’d just close his eyes and let the same instincts take over from night-fighting loggers’ goons in the Amazon black.
Through the hangar flickered currents of images: trading jeers, then Kabbalistic interpretations, then semen with a twenty-three-year-old Israeli defector turned trainer in the CAR - waking up to his crooked-mouthed corpse puppeted over your straw bed by Fingal Hadak, his men grabbing your feet…
I winced and tuned the images out. In any case it turned out I hadn’t prepared for the right contingency. As soon as we slip-slid back into the hangar, lifted ourselves gingerly through the membrane, and turned the Corpuscle back around as we relayed the signal… clapping gunshots, sucking silence, then Serrao, his bullets, the sound of his shout pushed out the mouth of the tunnel into us by an expanding Asymmetry bubble.
Fuck. I should have expected… I was thinking like you, Halation’s reflection a black bubble in my mind as I tumbled around the careening bubble of the Corpuscle, colours and displays flashing around me. Not you, like one of you. Like if it could repair itself it wouldn’t mind us treating that like a rule we could exploit freely, like it wouldn’t mind…
Then the layer of Asymmetry melted like a soap bubble and we were falling in a mostly translucent chute, half-able to see the shapes and colours of the nesting tunnels and chambers around us, the faintly glowing capillaries and flatworms of the smaller channels. There above the kidney-shaped organelle of the hangar, the double helix we had been searching - the buffer tunnel, like ours, translucent - opening onto this larger buffer colon. Despite the shock, we were perfectly positioned. Another drone was now on radar, returning from a detour below us. I pulled the Corpuscle into a formation where the two “feet” bubbles (Serrao was hanging off the leg of his, still struggling to shift his weight through the semipermeable portal) pushed up against both walls of the tunnel, resisting the slight gravity with friction. Holding still long enough for Serrao to get back in, I whistled the connection passcode for my secret comm and the opening cadences of my plan and request. We would lock in and spin back up the tunnel, send a drone in, lure the chain out and analyze its location -
Bashtaev’s vitruvian silhouette dropped from above, crashing down on my bubble on all fours.
The chain grabbed Serrao by the ankle, pulling him as far away as his collection with Halation would let him, preventing us from turning as we slowly slid down the chute. Where Halation unspooled after him from the markings, Bashtaev’s Weir rushed in to fill them, deep plum against green-yellow and orange.
Who are you, Halation demanded at their fluctuating frontier, which was quickly losing ground to their opponent’s superior neurological control.
I pushed my hand through the semi-permeable, shoulder numbed by Weir-patterns like feathers, my pistol into his clavicle. Bashtaev grabbed my wrist and pulled.
The last Servant of Possibility. Bashtaev’s voice echoing through the distance of their hijacker: And the first, first of thousands, millions...
Thumbing through the Zohar and the Shams al-Ma’arif in the grass with a golden henna-tattooed hand on his knee, trying to eke out a thread of meaning he’d felt bleeding through the battlefield from one body’s dying breath to another. These were not the bodies we were meant to live in - our souls were not only more real than our bodies, but more body than our bodies - our souls were not something else, intangible, but the proper state of our bodies - what we loved in our bodies could be infinitely more without these parasitic layers of death that broke and fossilized and succumbed - when you were alive, you were both body and soul, until death betrayed you - but in the Day of Judgment everything would be like this, both body and soul - man, plant and animal, living and once-dead. The godless men of Sodom took virgin angels on Earth, the fundamentalists believed they would take virgin angels in heaven, in heaven we would be always virgin whatever we did to each other, always new.
The Servants of Possibility, Halation recognized - the ancient heresy that wanted to make all matter maximally inter and intra-operable. The ones who made the Sandpit nebula self-aware.
So against all odds, humanity was off the hook. The extremist was from here all along - though they had hijacked a distinctly human longing.
Did that even count as “extremism”? As opposed to “radicalism” - not a distinction I’d ever put a ton of stock in anyway? I hadn’t had the time or rather space I’d have wanted to think about it, like I had with the Adipose conflict and even that... From some human vantage point it was no more “extreme” than the endless scruples of Meteorology. It felt like something Mai would at least entertain, which counted against my personal negative definition of extremism.
But she also would have recoiled at the bottomless resentment (something other than pain, other than anger, she’d first proven to me, though she and Delilah had their different definitions) bleeding across the Weir’s boundary (Anashirana hid me, invited me here for my expertise, but cut me out of every experiment, cut me out of first contact) - imagine cursing a nebula, a planet, a star, an asteroid belt with that consciousness…
And I wouldn’t have time to think about it if I lost here. Maybe no one would.
Bashtaev collapsed against the side of the bubble, trapping me half-in and half-out. Serrao, climbing up the other side, had grabbed his ankle in turn.
The unoccupied bubble was now drifting lazily down into the middle of the tunnel, the rest of the craft with it. Halation steered mine around as Serrao and Bashtaev wrestled on top of it (I let myself fall back, trying to position my gun beneath his attention while letting the surface protect me from the flying chain) to take its place opposite Baugh’s as the other “foot”, with the empty bubble rising to the centre. Timing, spin, grip - Bashtaev saw it coming and fought it, but we had too many players, too many advantages. As the Corpuscle stabilized in its new formation, my bubble pinned Bashtaev against the wall - which just stretched, skin squashed in ugly-pale circles between translucence and translucence, not crushed with the pressure as I’d hoped, although the spin of the bubble was scraping his Weir off with friction.
But Halation had just about lost control of the bubble we’d elevated to the “head”.
Feathers now burning indigo, the empty bubble dropped from above the two “feet”. The Corpuscle’s spin intensified as it sped down the buffer tunnel in the opposite direction, out towards the computational sector’s exit and beyond it, the Asymmetry Field only a Corpuscle could cross to reach the Adipose node.
Bashtaev’s chain hooked into the unoccupied bubble’s surface and pulled him out from under mine, Serrao almost pulled into his place but jumping in with me instead. He tested the membrane between the bubble and the connecting tubule, then positioned his rifle through it like a sniper. Baugh did the same on the other side.
Bashtaev caught on and clung to the outside of his chosen cockpit without pulling himself in. Standing up on its “bottom”, he pointed both of his own guns at where we were now all too carefully positioned and began to spray wildly.
The Corpuscle was designed to withstand impacts at the 1000mph speeds of winds on Contemplation - not the 1000 mps speeds of human firearms. The bubbles shredded around us into scraps like popped balloons, and jagged crystal teeth gnashed from the walls of the tunnel after us.
Ironically, this saved us - fire clipped my shoulder, Serrao’s cheek, Baugh’s rib, but without the friction of the bubbles against the walls we still fell faster.
And all of Halation that had been stuck in the channels of the Corpuscle now stretched directly between us like a taffy rope. Not as strong or manipulable as his chain, which immediately leapt out to surround us - but suddenly faltered in midair.
The tightening bond ran right under his feet, and had fought its way through the letters covering his body all the way up to his wrist.
I kicked out as I landed on top of him and we burst into open storm.
Sophie and Andrea pulled away from the moonlit ribbon of the road an hour later, the feather-fringed jacket she’d bought with the gloves whipping against her knotted neck. She hadn’t sent or received any texts from the car, terrified to disturb the quantum superposition of her plan, and didn’t get data that far out, so she couldn’t have seen the server blowing up with the reports from the police blotter, and obnoxious Twitch stream spam and reaction images from 2005, which she would rip everyone’s guts out over in the most widely circulated statement the next day.
Delilah had gotten a call through on the road, which she wouldn’t find in her voice mail until later. A brief recording was posted on her ultra-ultra-priv for thirty minutes; Mai always meant to delete it from her collection once she realized it hadn’t been meant to be shared, but never did at least before we broke up. “It’s like trying hormones for the first time. Like it’s real, they can actually have this. You’d think it shouldn’t be, like you wanna believe they’re all wasting their money on stupid crap and everything that matters you can have if you stay home and water your plants, pet your cats.” Sophie had rows of potted plants in her lightly frosted window like votive candles. “But you can have this. You can have the future. When they said I was a boy, they only let the boy bodies have the future like this. And I would collect all these things, the robots, the rockets, the cars, and I just didn’t get why I had to be the boy to have them. I wanted to play with them with the girls, because they all wanted to play with them too. And then everyone started talking about it and stopped talking about it at the same time. Everyone stopped believing any of the things we had dreamed about were real anyway, and even critiquing gender for a lot of people just meant forgetting all of the dreams from both directions…”
Sophie waited for sixteen minutes in sensory deprivation in Andrea’s sweater, while Andrea tried the whole rundown of call centre tricks to get service. It was such absolute silence that the rage could finally hear itself. She’d cast it out into the world to be taken from her by the jeering anons by posting the following texts that failed to send to her Instagram story:
i cant do this
u know i cant do this
& i know u can
if you needed to do some ridic fastnfurious stunt to me @ a specil time u could do it
u know even a few minutes wil b hell 4 me
idk if im even scared anymore
if u showing up in a few minutes and saying its just a few minutes and ur sorry u triggered me is better than what im triggered about
gdi i bet that’s ur point or sumth
The next cornerstone of any reconstruction would be this screencap from a conversation in the Discord server: when I moved here Timer Edwards lived in Seattle, actually I think he still lives here but he was opening offices, trying to launch that weird katamari of a platform Eos. one of the original Azoth funders and the actual coder of the main kernel of the Azoth Wizard according to Emily Cann’s book, but more importantly to me he wrote a book I read when I was a kid, V-space Raider. @lungefire (me, at that point) has actually read it, although she hated it lol, she has better taste than me. it’s almost impossible to find now. it kind of anticipates a lot of things about contemporary influencer culture that no one was really onto in the 90s, certainly not Tron or The Matrix or whatever people compare it to, also the main character is a boy who makes their VR character a girl and then just spends the entire book as her. I’ve done like five rants about it in the lit channel but most people don’t know it was Timer Edwards under a pseudonym, which is also in the Emily Cann book. anyway this is like, the last year I was still a repper and was also hoping really really hard to get hired at his new company. then when I was waiting in the lobby for an interview and he was doing his fashionably late thing, didn’t show up at the office until noon with a White Claw wearing his suit jacket like a shonen character - this woman who kept going back and forth doing some sort of administrative thing came down and sat next to me. she said like, how old are you, you’re too pretty, he’ll eat you up like one of us. this was years before all the allegations but just months before the bonfire. and like I never had the political lesbianism arc some of you did, but I do remember thinking, well I might as well…
The character in V-space Raider - the screenshot was packaged with an infographic - drove a F-355 customized to sync between real and virtual space. It had long been suspected to be Edwards’ favourite car. The media didn’t report who owned the one Delilah crashed, but after Sophie disappeared with her parents’ lawyer for a week, whoever it was quietly and strangely settled something out of court with Sophie.
To me, sprawled on her futon that one time she let me stay over and was having one of her hypersexual episodes, or just sensed how much I was vibrating to be near her, or just never had someone to top her instead - Mai was fine with it, but I was afraid of completing her mosaic of grief with this episode the way Navajo sandpainters were afraid of completing their paintings: “I think everyone with a heart has a bullet they have to bite if they get to it. A lot of the thing the one shrink called OCD - I don’t call it that because it’s not like Sophie’s OCD at all, but it’s why I get hers - has been about figuring out what that is to me. For a lot of dolls transition is that, but it wasn’t for me because as soon as it clicked, there was nothing scary about it at all? I didn’t care about any of the things that would be harder and I didn’t care about anyone’s opinion who would complain about it. Maybe it’s because ever since the bonfire, the amanita, I’ve become super aware of all the choices and options I really have at all times, that I’ve made it so the bullet I bite has to be something really crazy, maybe an actual bullet even. Because it’s like - I’m a good driver and I understand the mechanics of the road, I can break the rules, speed, drift, do all these things a normal driver can’t, but I still can’t go outside the actual rails or I’ll crash. I can make these deals with the world that look crazy unless you’ve really thought about or tried them, but there are deals that are designed to be too costly to make no matter what. I still don’t know if I’d be able to do it when the time comes. Most of the people I’ve met who I think really did, or could were women - my mom running away from her parents, even though she couldn’t argue when they said she had no idea how to raise me. My high school girlfriend paying for her mom’s whole cancer treatment with her college fund.” She was always running off into stories like this, always in misty-eyed sleepover confession mode, always about to fall all over you to bear the weight and warmth of them.
The F355 feels like driving on an Olympic skating rink. There’s no friction, but there’s weight, drag from the rear wheels that you don’t even notice until you’re compensating for it. You have to hold the whole thing you’re inside in your head, while your body’s in space. If anyone was made for it it was her.
When the cop car came up - from the other direction - Sophie would remember four or five times a day she had started humming ‘Fast Car’ and didn’t realize until she was hailing it down.
They drove her all the way to the Maltby 522 industrial park, where Delilah had tried to shake the cops at the very last opportunity before crossing the 522 onto Paradise Lake Road where there would be nowhere left to turn. It was, as expected from her, a plan that could have worked. The loop around the park would have brought her right back to Yew way in a matter of minutes; if they realized they’d lost her they would assume she’d gotten on the 522 highway, rather than the dark narrow road into the woods. It was real movie finale territory, endless material for feints and reversals - garages, storage crates and above all cars everywhere, wrecks piled up around Bobby Wolford Trucking & Demolition, Rainbow Towing. She had pulled in more than half an hour before Sophie had arrived. They never figured out, or released exactly where she hid.
When the cops slowed to crawl the park systematically, she should have been stone free - they couldn’t accelerate as fast as her. She tore onto 87th Ave Elm - and panicked at the headlights from the Maltby Cafe parking lot across the street, swerving into Mid Mountain Construction, a real wheel catching on a sand pit, swung into a container wall.
Privateer Press released a statement on Facebook the next day that confirmed a number of these details since it was right next door and she was pictured at one of their fan events, which I had dragged her to, although I wasn’t in the picture.
That sounded like a Disney villain death but he didn’t even die, just freefell through the Lung for a bit until he was picked up by an atmospheric management drone like a dragonfly. Which he tried to hijack but those had been deliberately Weirproofed since some minor conflicts with Contemplation’s anti-Meteorological holdouts thousands of years ago.
The Servant of Possibility was dealt with by the Weirs. Pheasant Star (an ancient Chinese word suggested by Bennett-Fog that maps somewhat to the Weir word, referencing a different lifeform, for a comet that spreads out like a bird’s foot) was confined to a “punishment body”: what looked like a three-pointed ribcage, a tree of hooked bone. For Bashtaev on our end we conducted a brief show court martial and officially had him executed, his body returned to the Ahasurunu as a human autopsy specimen. In fact, he agreed to be injected with a chemical from the Towers’ gift (Edison Lens already had their own, but wanted to test the local equivalent), put in a coma and returned to the computer for study, as recompense for our trespass on their body. It was what Anashirana would have wanted, they reassured me, and from our one interaction I wouldn’t have been surprised.
In a weird way it was comforting. When I first thought of Delilah’s death writing this I thought of Anashirana’s, the sudden horrible extinction of a star, but now I realize Bashtaev’s could have been another sickening echo - another queer who found a way to escape everything pursuing them except the thing that isn’t a thing, the bullet that exists for them to bite. Another person eaten by a nightmare, not the kind that can gnaw on someone’s soul until they’re nothing but a vessel for power but the kind that eats you in one bite, body and all.
A lot of marginalized people talk about not wanting to be “tragic” and I’ve never gotten it - I mean that was the BL I grew up reading, and I probably needed it to not assign my “practical” fears of the rails infinite value (the cowardice my parents passed off as strength). But I think people associate that word with like, sad music and out of context names on the news, not actual tragedy, not the narrative that imbues this kind of thing with the dignity it needs to not be utterly pathetic, a word that once meant the same thing and underwent the same emotional erosion. Like “sympathy” and “empathy” or whatever. If we appreciated that properly, I think I once told Delilah out of a particularly contrarian K-hole, we’d have the kind of people who could start revolutions by setting themselves on fire like in the rest of the world, not people who think what’s really revolutionary is “surviving” by burrowing into the most “harmless” office job at an arms contractor. I could wonder if she took that too much to heart but probably every one of us had a thing like that anyway. But it’s not an accident that after she crashed, Mai and I both lost the will to make either compromise. We couldn’t accept doing anything to survive, but we couldn’t accept doing anything to follow what we wanted either, so we wavered and wasted and prayed. And now I’m here.
Now I’m here, my survival mandated by something bigger than me, and my bullet has thousands, millions of living shields.