The Commandant injected his own lips with Shine. That was how men – real men, not these synths with engineered cocks – did it. The tiny needle pierced into the faintest hints of crags around his eyes. He had injected his own sclera with forest green ink when the world was still broken by border and ocean. It was a visual war cry. The Chinese, now obliterated like the rest of the scourge of nationalism, saw him on the screen and called him Yaomo. Strange Devil. Now, thick with age, his blacked-out eyes lent him the gravitas of an old warrior. A warrior who saw real death. The smell of it. The sounds of begging for someone to be there to escort them across that flat black plane to the bargeman.
He was the highest ranking member of the Space Militia now because he knew to keep his opinions to himself. He knew how to give in to leadership. This customization of product and workplace bonding flew against his previous training, to be cohesive, to serve as cog in something larger. But he was flexible. And leaders changed like gloves.
He looped in his best Star Slingers after his strange call with Mechoben. “Boy King,” he muttered to himself privately when he was sure the cams were averted, as he had many times after the increasingly bizarre vidchats with the leader of all of the Cygnus-Orion domain. He saw that Mechoben, or Second Lieutenant Simon Mahaffey, as he had known him in The Before, had taken another android bride. He wondered how long this one would last before she was shuttled into a Quiet Box for the remainder of her short lifespan for some perceived or invented insult to The Smooth, The Orderly, The Never Satiated.
The face of his most trusted General came into view. General Akimbo refused the Shine injections and so would never rise past the rank of General. Mechoben required all to be smooth. The absence of smooth was a cardinal sin. It was shocking to see an unaltered face, with its creases and dimples. Burst arteries mapped across his nose and cheekbones like topographical maps. His eyes were yellowed from years of drinking engine room gin.
“How the hell are you, Akimbo?”
“Depends on who you ask,” the worn general answered.
“I have an assignment for you.”
“I figured as much.” The general tucked a liquid nicotine-soaked gauze patch under his lip. A holdover from the time after The Event for Earth-stationed troops.
“Mechoben wants a little problem taken care of on Enceladus.”
“Don’t be coy, Commandant. What do you want from me?”
Times had changed. The need for heavy organized militia was fading and they were old men now. Akimbo’s right eye was clouded with a cataract, and he refused to let the robosurgeons near it, even though they were more precise than any human hand. Perhaps this was the perfect mission for him. It opened the chances for someone more malleable, less constrained by outdated philosophies. Their history be damned.
“I want you to go and retrieve three individuals and a tissue sample from the Natsar host. It is mission critical that you don’t damage the siblings. The Martian can be disposed of as you see fit.”
“Jesus Christ, Hersch. You want me to go to a moon to pick up two kids, kill another, and then cut into the great MOTHER? What in the hell for?”
“This channel is monitored, so I suggest you refrain from using my Terran name or invoking any old gods.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Heat rose in the Commandant’s face. Images of Akimbo reaching to him as he thrashed in the churning muck, his arm muscled and fine. His eyes unclouded then. His mouth soft under the three-day bristle. The taste of earth and something worse, something acrid, filling his mouth and nose just before Akimbo’s arm wrapped around his belly and the men pulled them to safety on the boat.
Akimbo laying beside him in the tiny bunk, tracing patterns on his chest after they released him from the med bay. Kissing his cheekbones. Rescue was erotic.
“Akimbo, goddammit. Will you just listen to me? I’m your commanding officer!”
“Hersch, haven’t you figured out that none of that horseshit matters anymore?” His eyes were brimming with tears. His bravado always cut with softness. Picking up drowned cats and holding them against his barrel chest with gunfire tatting above him, smoothing his thumb over their half-closed eyelids.
“Your directive is to retrieve the following persons: Alicia Rodríguez or “Riff” in MechoSpeak, her brother José Rodríguez or “Rasp,” and Alona DeLuna from our contracted research facility on Mars,” the Commandant rattled off numbly.
General Akimbo sighed.
“Ok, Hersch. Ok. Send me the directive through the secure channel. How many men am I authorized to bring?”
“You can bring as many androids as you want for the operation, but you are limited to two human men.”
“Why me? When will I be released for retirement?”
“That is up to our holy leader.”
Akimbo’s mouth drew into a straight line, and the Commandant longed for the aging general to hold him again. Their last kiss before The Great Limitation was hurried and brief. He ached with wanting every time he spoke with Akimbo.
“Alright, I will assemble a team and retrieve the assets.”
“Remember General Akimbo, the preservation of the Martian scientist is not important.”
“Understood. Any further orders, sir?” His tone formal.
“No, that will be all. You will receive your written orders within two cycles. Upon receipt, report your chosen human resources and I will send you a charter with the assigned androids.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The Commandant switched off the feed and rubbed his temples. He opened the digital file box and pulled the records for a set of battle worn and space damaged androids. He kept the most beautiful ones, the ones bred for the pleasure streams and the GagGirl films, in a separate file. They were deemed too violent for their original purpose. A particularly unctuous Andy with broad shoulders and a thickly muscled chest had killed two human GagGirls, but his breeding was too valuable for destruction. He assigned him light duty. Cleaning his chambers. Cutting his hair. Sharing his bed. It excited him. It was like having one of those huge striped cats from The Before.
No one asked. No one reported it. No one envied his position.
He put in the request for seven androids, pushing Akimbo from his mind.
***
Riff-Alicia looked around the dripping facility, the seemingly endless supply of plasticine buckets lifting and rolling as the grav drives cycled through energy saving measures. Black wisps of beings slid from corner to corner, fleeing at the chest level beam of light from her suit. She turned to her brother.
“What are they?”
“I think they’re ghosts.”
“Oh.”
“What do we do now?” He asked, picking up one of the floating plasticine buckets and chucking it toward one of the shadows crouched in the corner. It bolted into the mess hall, leaving a trail of smoke.
“The Curanderas wanted me to connect with MOTHER. I think I’m supposed to set her free,” she said.
“How do you know?” He picked up another bucket and hurled it toward a man-sized creature performing the imitation of maintenance on an absent fluorescent apparatus. It splashed against the wall and disappeared. The bucket clattered down the long corridor.
“That seems kind of mean,” she said. “What if it hurts them? We don’t have any NoPain patches.”
“Don’t you remember what a ghost is, hermana?”
She ignored him. Her heart thumped with an alien feeling in her chest. She returned to the Curanderas’ will. The will that had become her will.
“They brought me here from Mars because I can talk to MOTHER.”
“I can talk to MOTHER too,” he said.
“I know. I was you and you were me.”
“That was you? Like really? In real life?”
“Yep. How can we stop the thing that’s hurting her?” She asked. It was difficult to speak to him in person. It felt strained. He was a stranger now. She wondered if he had seen her Pornographic Art Films. She wondered how she looked under the gauze of makeup and lights and editing. She wondered how she looked now.
“Let’s find the control panel and I’ll see if it’s anything like the asteroid mining controls,” he said.
MOTHER scraped under the ice outside. The facility shuddered as she careened under the ice.
***
The mountains stood behind Al, casting their great shadows behind them, their blue-gray faces sparkling under the three suns. The beach spread before her, the dunes tipped like frothed Shine. The suns warmed her, and the ocean spread across the lavender sand beneath the dunes, flattening the bases into packed disks. As she neared the water, little circlets of pale blue surfaced on her skin. She lifted her arm to peer at it. A thin layer of mucus coated her skin, beading up from her pores.
A memory of dispersed light filtering down through silvery light tugged at her. She moved to the water, her skin turning rubbery and flexible as she approached the sea foam, edged with phosphorescent algae. The water licked at her knees as she waded out. She pressed her flattened palm to her forehead against the glare.
Mechoben sent her out of the compound today. He handed her a waypoint pointer programmed to expel a small floating orb to lead her to the beach and then back to the compound. The facility echoed with each movement, each sound, like a brush to an open wound in its emptiness.
He had caught her pushing on closed doors down in the cool basement, looking for others just to verify her own existence. He gripped her by the wrist and pulled her close to his face, his features nipped and sewn into an expression of bizarre unfeeling by his distant Aesthetics Team. He loosed her after murmuring something about faithfulness. She slept in one of the guest rooms with windows flung open to cold wind. Humans always liked it far too warm. But it was blasphemy to think of Mechoben, her savior, as human. Though she did. When he coughed, sending bits of spittle into the air. When he pressed lotions and salves into the skin of his face. When he tumped over furniture in anger at a robot stuck on the threshold, the drink it carried slopping over the sides of the glass. These were the times he seemed most human.
She sat down in the water, the coolness of it soothing her always too-warm skin. The saltwater lifting her like Martian gravity.
She unlatched the catch from the tablet she carried, pulled out the thin barbed darts, and pierced through the skin on the insides of her elbows. When she was first detubed, one of the older GagGirls from the “Special Interests” side of Pornographic Art Film production told her that electronics were not waterproofed when she was a child. They had all giggled at this quaint notion.
Strange this memory washed over her now. Most of her time on Mars had been scrubbed during her Ascension.
Several perfect circles lit up under her skin where it was thinnest. Her wrists. Her ankles. She knew that the tender veins glowed under her eyes. She dipped under the water and opened her eyes. Flagellating creatures with their own pinpoints of light knocked against her. She opened her mouth, and a veil of light poured into the darkening water. It drew larger animals that clung to the edges of her lips as they unfurled proboscises to suck and nibble at her molars.
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She closed her mouth over a supple cigar-shaped organism and bit down. The salinity of the water masked the sour cloud as her teeth dug into the rubbery flesh. Memories of Riff came flooding back. She pushed the oxygenator pods into her nostrils and breathed in.
She found out about Recollection Fish from the unedited streams library she had access to. Though the planet she was on had been redacted, the stream showed a humanoid species plunging under water and chewing until they emerged with their lines of blinking eyes slicked over with opaque reticulating eyelids. On the general populace streams, alien life other than the unavoidable Natsar was shown as only a distant matter. It was for space-crazed miners to ponder before retirement. Ranting in Commissary canteens. Slugging pints of illegal sucrose wine. Telling their buddies about how the cure for every ail lies on some planet hidden by The Corporation.
Riff sat across from her, her black hair knotted into thick neglect dreads at the base of her scalp. All the Shine injections, so carefully selected and administered, weren’t present. Al realized she was seeing Riff as she first came to Mars. A figment. A hallucination from the faint poison soaking through her mucus membranes.
Her young face was childish. Her lips thin and unplumped. Her ears were pierced with tracker nodes. Riff reached across and stroked the side of Al’s face, but as she looked down at her own hands and body, the androgyny of it comforted her. The fat deposits that rested on her hips and chest now were absent in this vision of the past. Her belly was studded with muscle and her fingers longer and thicker.
Riff came across the room, a child, but older than her by twelve cycles, and wound her thin brown arms around her neck. She smelled like engine exhaust and human sebum. An erection. A smile. Al’s own body. They, not she.
Water rushed into her mouth and down her throat. She choked and pushed against the ocean floor, the fine grit giving way under the pressure of her feet. Of THEIR feet. They looked down at their naked form under this heather gray sky. They were taller, firmer. Their heavy breasts replaced with flat muscle. This vision reminded them of their true form. Something drew their gaze from across the tide pool.
A figure crouched on the beach, lines of green eyes blinking along its spine. Long shawls of skin puddled around its feet shining like polished bronze, and it was girded with a long whip of cracking light. It raised up and stretched until the flags of skin caught the wind and lifted the being up into the faces of the suns. Turning and turning on the breeze in surrender to the sea winds. A thing of this planet.
They would kill God. Al would kill God.
***
Rasp-José and Riff-Alicia curled around one another like commas in the belly of the auger site. They pulled the stiff pads from the old military cots and put them side by side. Their young bodies ached from the cold. The geothermic heating module read 43 degrees Fahrenheit for the ambient temperature. Their breath streamed out in front of them like smoke. Rasp-José drew the heat reflective blanket over their heads and tucked it around his sister’s shoulders. She shivered and huddled close to him. The bright white lights buzzed above them, filtering through the seams.
The smell of their breath and sweat and oils mingled under the crinkling material. Tiny beauty scars dotted her arms, glinting under the filtered fluorescent light.
“We have to keep the lights on?” She asked.
“Yeah, it keeps the shadows away.”
“Can they hurt us?”
He stroked her upper arm with his pointer finger knuckle.
“Knock knock,” he said.
“Who’s there?” Her automatic response surprised her.
“Cargo.”
“Cargo who?”
“No, car go beep beep!”
She giggled, and he drew her into his arms like he did when she was a toddler and afraid of Mama’s high laugh too late in the night. Her high heels clattering on the old floors. The sound of unfamiliar heavy footfalls. Squares of light racing across their bedroom walls.
Rasp-José’s eyelids flickered and slid closed, darkness welling over his eyesight like a tide. Images tossed across his internal vision. A pile of shining black marbles exploding down a flight of stairs, a woman holding a skinned dog to her breast, its legs twitching as she suckled it, a flighted creature with scarlet feathers tearing through the void between stars.
He found himself standing on a mountaintop in his dream. The mist surrounded the peak in a flat white pall, and wind drove against his naked body. Two thin green sharpened sticks had been shoved behind his pectoral muscles and the pain radiated to his throat in burning hallucinatory almost-pleasure. The sun poured down on him. The gray pebbles on the ground heated through and bit into the soles of his feet as he twirled round and round, tugging at the sticks driven through his flesh. He called out in a language that was not his own, knowing that he begged for the vision that would free him. His long hair brushed against the clotted wounds in divine agony. He dropped to the rocky ground and beat his fists into the mountain. Wailing. Surrendering.
A thrumming skin drum shuddered from down the mountain. A figure materialized from the mists carrying something in its arms. The thing was wrapped in a garment made of light and had four faces, each turning to face the cardinal directions. Each face had four eyes of different animals. One face blinked with slow yellow jaguar eyes, one stared with the cold night water eyes of a shark, one peered with the huge globular prey eye of the llama, but the eyes that faced him were human. The irises held no color and the skin of the being’s face was as white as the snow caps. As it spoke, flashes of bronze teeth glinted through the lipless mouth.
It spoke.
“Here is what you must do.”
His feet lifted from the ground as the being stretched its long appendages toward him. It held the skin drum in its clawed hands. It was stretched with the face of his mother. Her eyelids and lips were sewn shut with reflective wire and stretched into a grim passivity. A whisper sifted from under Mama’s tight lips. He leaned in toward the hiss, the acrid sweetness of decomposition wafting into his nose.
“It must be destroyed. We must make amends.”
The creature turned its face, and the jaguar eyes dilated and contracted. It held the skin drum in front of its chest, offering it in its face-up palms. Mama’s eyelids strained against the stitching, her eyeballs twitching under the shrunken lids. Rasp-José took the drum and flung it off the mountain top into the mists below. The being surged into the sky on great black wings. The wind buffeting Rasp-José over the edge of the mountain top. The sky above him burned orange with exploding satellites as the mist whipped past his face.
Then he woke up, his sister nestled against his back under the blanket. Ice crystals frozen in his wispy mustache. Something wet rolled in his clenched hand. He drew his fist out from under the blanket into the cold and uncurled his stiff fingers. A single eyeball, cool and globular, rolled in the shallow indention of his palm. He brought it closer to his face and touched it with his other pointer finger.
“Oh, look! A Slinker,” Riff-Alicia peered over his shoulder. “Let me see.”
She took the eyeball from his hand and turned it over. The optic nerve switched back and forth like the tail of some small, irritated animal. She caressed it, nudging it gently and rolling it between her fingers.
“Oh, here it is,” she said, scratching at the eyeball with her fingernail.
It flattened and shot out a thread of clear mucus.
“What does it do?” he asked as he looked over her shoulder.
“Watch this.” She squeezed her fist over it and then shook it, slinging the mucus rope in a loop below them. It twisted around itself, then untwined, leaving a transparent sheet in the U of the loop. An image of a suited person stumbling toward the door of the auger facility flowed across the gelatinous sheet in a gentle ripple. Riff-Alicia cocked her head down toward it to see the image. She drew in her breath. “Oh shit.”
“Is that real?” Rasp-José asked.
The figure reached for the front door and pressed against the Autosensor Pressure Plate™. A faint echo rattled down the hall from the entrance.
“Is the pressure plate functioning?” Riff-Alicia spread her hands wider, expanding the image. Her breathing quickened as the door rattled. Her nose leaked blood, and a black tendril swam in the air in front of her. The person projected on the membrane reached toward their helmet for a moment and tried the door again, this time shoving their shoulder against the metal door. The front door shook on its hinges.
“I can’t remember if that’s how we got in,” Rasp-José said, looking over at his sister who rubbed at the corners of her eyes. Her familiar slid over her eyeball and whipped back and forth from her nostril.
The Slinker slipped from her hands and glopped to the floor. She shed the blanket from her shoulders and stepped back into her suit. Her black eyes stared ahead as she slid her fingers over the heat-sensitive closures across the front.
“What are you doing, Alicia?” Her old name. Her Before name.
“MOTHER has a request.”
“I don’t hear her.” He looked around.
She said nothing. She pushed her helmet down and strode to the door. Rasp-José jerked his own suit up over his shoulders and plunged his head into his helmet. Riff-Alicia left the control room and headed toward the knocking. He stumbled after her, fumbling with the atmospheric seals on his suit.
His sister knocked a pattern on the door. One One Two One. A rapping answered from the outside. A fine smattering of blood coated the inside of her helmet. She pressed the pressure plate release, and the door jolted open. Rasp-José blinked. The beautiful Martian with her cool three-fingered hands, with her mocking laugh, with her thin bones stared at Riff-Alicia, her arms spread open. They fell into one another’s arms, their familiars pressing like the bellies of snakes against glass as their helmets cracked together.
Rasp-José reached over his sister’s shoulder and yanked the front of Alona’s suit, drawing her into the hallway. The women embraced one another as he closed the door. He watched as they pulled off their helmets.
“The temperature isn’t stable here,” he said. “The oxygen levels could change too.”
They pressed their foreheads together and opened their pink kitten mouths. The slick muscular appendages oozed from their mouths and nostrils and twined together, sliding across one another as the women gagged and lurched back and forth. Their hands slithering under one another’s thick underclothing.
Rasp-José looked at his temperature monitor on his wrist. The women’s breath poured from their nostrils in gouts of steam. They fell to the floor, twisting from their suits. The sound of bone cracking as Alona struck the floor, artificially set to Terran level gravity. Her muffled cries ecstatic. They delved into one another’s bodies, arching into the other as their sweat froze into frosted pearls. His sister grew into something else. Her legs lengthened and stretched and fused into the body of a great crimson serpent. Alona’s torso hollowed into a rust colored crater, her mouth sinking into a great red hole. Her teeth a straight boundary.
The enormous coral red snake with the head of his sister swung backwards, brushing the ceiling with the arch of her back. Her black hair hung in long tassels that clung to the edges of her wet lips. She smiled at him and spoke.
“I know you.” Her voice was her own. Soft and sibilant.
She bowed over the rich red pile that was Alona and plunged her soft round face into it. The pile giggled like a child being tickled, thrashing and squealing. A lightness overcame him as he watched her nuzzling the folds of gelatinous flesh. Sparks of bright blue flashed behind his eyes, and his stomach spat acid into his throat. Salt water oozed from under his tongue. He tore his gaze away and tried to run to the end of the vestibule. His boots clung to the floor and his suit dragged down around his shoulders, popping the connections from his helmet. The cold air rushed into his lungs. He coughed and stooped to pull his boots from the wavering substance on the floor, his nose pouring fluid as the shock of the cold rushed into his nostrils.
Riff-Alicia’s familiar squirmed from her mouth and dropped to the floor. It expanded as it wormed in the thick liquid and divided into a flail of black tendrils, stretching toward the control panel. It smashed into the industrial plasticine cover and poured into the created hole. The sound of the auger engaging rattled across the ice. Rasp-José tore his feet from the gunge and hoisted himself back toward the chamber where he had folded his sister into his arms only a few moments earlier.
A great shuddering crash shook the outpost. Hunks of the insulation fell around him as he dragged himself into the chamber and peered out of the viewing slit. The thin auger tower broke in two as the ice beneath it shattered, the engine that drove it whirring high and hot. A woman cried from somewhere as the tapered bottom was thrust from the great fecund body of MOTHER. Freed from the moorings, hunks of the structure drifted along the ground, colliding and spinning.
A gout of steam hissed from the open wound on MOTHER’s body as fluid rushed into the crevasses on the ice, melting them into great ink-black rivers that frothed and foamed. Black shining pieces of ice flew toward the heavy center of Saturn to join in the frantic spinning dance around the golden giantess.
The concrete floor split in two under Rasp-José and water seeped through the cracks. He looked back out into the hallway where earlier he had seen his sister and Alona hunched together in ritual consummation. The sacrifice was always blood.
“Alicia?” His heart thudded in his chest. “We need to get back to the station. This outpost is coming down.”
He peered around the door frame to see her changed back into a girl child. She sat beside Alona’s unmoving body, trying to put the Martian woman’s helmet on the largest piece of skull left. Riff-Alicia slid her hand under the slick pile and scooped at the bloody void where the wide-eyed face had once been. She tilted the helmet like a well bucket, trying to force the helmet down. The blood was freezing into shiny black puddles. Rasp-José picked up his sister’s helmet from the floor and handed it to her. Her eyelashes where white with frost.
The environmental alarms beeped and squealed as the temperature dropped. The wall beside them tore in two as MOTHER writhed free of the auger. He put the helmet over her head gently.
When they were small, he remembered water falling from a silver spigot in a swirling white chamber. The water gathered in a deep pool, and colorful creatures bobbed and floated, flipping over and over as the water struck them. His sister sat amongst the shiny creatures, all in primary colors and flung her baby fat hands across the clear water. Her doughy baby body folding as she tumpled over. Mama clutching the old inflexible tablet under her arm and reaching in with her other hand to right her, handing him a towel to dry her. Alicia’s eyes black as night, crinkled under her fat cheeks as he draped the towel over her head and picked her up. Madonna before the angel stood on her neck and hissed her destiny into her ear. God always needed a messenger.
“You have to call MOTHER, sister. I can’t call her like you can.”
She gazed up at him, dazed.
“Mama? She’s dead.”
He hadn’t heard that word in a long time. The Corporation, citing The Holy Book™, forbade “dead” or “death” as it condoned an inefficiency in the system. Space Waste was punishable by Venusian duty for women and Mercury mining for men. To say death was to invite it, to insult the procedure, to fill the minds of those without mission, to incite, to linger. And lingering was the gravest of disobediences.
He lifted her up, holding her around the waist, and slid his finger along the heat seal of her helmet. The skin around her eyes sagged away from their orbits.
“Not Mama. Call MOTHER.”
“Pray?” She whispered.
“Yes, pray to MOTHER.”
She bowed her head and propped her hands under her chin.
“MOTHER, shelter of the wind, most supple and large. Your beauty is terrible, and I am alone under your gaze. Cradle us, your children, though you begat us without leave. We are of your body. You are of our mind. Deliver us, oh MOTHER. Carry us so we may punish your enemies. We are your tools in the destruction of your impregnator. Use us.”
She opened her eyes and blinked at him.
“Can you hear her?” She asked.
MOTHER burst into his mind, brighter than a solar flare. His jaw locked shut, and his pain blazed behind his eyes.
HERE. WHERE?
“Not so loud MOTHER. It hurts,” he said.
HURTS. The volume whittled down in his mind. NO HURT ME I.
“Can you take us back to the other place?”
YES
“Thank you.”
THANK YOU. FREE.
A wave of viscous clear fluid gushed from the split in the floor and lapped over them, covering them in a smooth warm caul. Riff-Alicia floated beside him, her knees tucked up by her belly.