Moon-Papa slumped to the ice as the bullet tore through the fabric of his suit. Riff-Alicia rushed to him, slipping and fighting the wind. Rasp-José grabbed for her, but she yanked away from his grasp. It was unplanned, unthought, unintentional. She wanted to see his real face. She wanted to touch her own origin for a moment. MOTHER wrapped around her middle, holding her against her great pumping center. Thousands of transparent blue pearls cascaded onto the ice from the black center of her maw.
HE HURT. HE BEHIND HURT. BEHIND TURNING HURT. Boomed in Riff-Alicia’s head.
As MOTHER lifted her high above the swirling snow, she caught a glimpse of the auger slicing down into a chasm and spurts of steam escaping. MOTHER’s tendrils split into a thousand miniature versions of their origin and slid over her helmet in a solid black mask. All was dark and silent before she felt the solid ground under her back. The grav drives in her suit chuffed against the caul of MOTHER’s great arms. She remembered this. There once was a word for this folding of arms over bodies before it was deemed too dangerous.
She found herself sitting across from Papa in a sky-blue chamber. He was deconstructed and incomplete; pieces of his face slid into place then retreated into unfamiliarity. He sat with his legs crossed, wearing an old Earth uniform they sometimes used on the GagGirls set for custom productions. She could smell the smoke on him, but just for a moment. He uncrossed his legs and opened his eyes wide. They were black and brown and green, each at a different moment. She opened her mouth to talk to him, but she didn’t know what to ask. What to say.
Moon-Papa gaped, unseeing through his sliding features.
Dry, cool hands rested on her bare shoulders. She craned to see Curandera Morena standing above her, but younger. Her hair shining black like her own, her face smooth and young, her two front teeth gold.
“Curandera Morena, where are we?”
She didn’t respond but pointed to the humped mass in the center of the glowing, empty chamber. Riff-Alicia looked on as Curandera Morena slipped past her and picked up Moon-Papa, cradling him in her arms as she tucked his staring face against her neck. She stepped into the undulating mass, with Papa’s legs dangling over her arms in a grotesque pietá. The mass folded over them, blanketing them in overlapping layers of translucent skin.
Rasp-José’s unhelmeted face materialized above her as she was lifted out of her cocoon. Perfect round beads of frozen sweat rolled from her hairline and bounced as they struck the floor.
“Where are we?” She asked, pushing herself up on her elbows.
“MOTHER brought us to the pumping station.” He said, handing her a dusty plasticine bag of water.
“Did you see Papa? Curandera Morena?”
“Moon-Papa was not Papa, Ok?”
“What do we do now?”
She punctured the bag and sipped from it. Panels with tiny screens and manual cranks and keyboards flashed cryptic symbols and hummed. Rasp-José leaned over the glowing green and white lights, his face illuminated into aquiline nobility. He sighed and unzipped his Nice No Ice Under Suit and pulled the material down over his shoulders and chest, leaving him naked to the waist. His ribs rippled through his skin like blown sand.
“I think we need to get rid of all of it.”
“What will we do afterwards?” She thought about her soft bed back on Mars. She thought about Al brushing her hair. “We can’t go back to Mars, can we?”
“No,” he said. “Do you remember me telling you jokes?” His voice was strained.
“I remember some of them. Did you ever see the Shanana Schwoop Shigetty comedy special on the streams? Those were pretty funny jokes.”
“Was that the time she gave that ugly girl that brandless cosmetic cream, and it turned her face all welted and red?”
“Yeah,” she smiled.
“Where did you go after The Event?” he asked.
“I was at the Girl Factory, but a scout knew that brown girls were trending in the feeds, and there aren’t many of us in space, so he got me for the Pornographic Art Films.”
It dawned on him that he had seen her. That she had been curated and marketed to him. The Corporation owned his data. It knew what he liked to buy at The Commissary. It knew what pornography he consumed. It knew what he drank, what he ate. What his heart rate and hormone levels were. It knew because the first commandment in The Holy Book™ was to participate in the free market, and that one’s most valuable asset was one’s information. Never deny the reaping, for the sowing was expensive. Her body was his body. He had held her on his lap when they were children watching cartoons in a rocking chair. He had watched her writhe under androids on his small stream screen.
***
Alona punched in the tracking coordinates. Enceladus was small. They were easy to find with their tooth and vascular implants still sending signals into space. The capsule she was strapped into entered the thin atmosphere with little resistance, the drugs coursing through her subdermal ports to regulate her body temperature, her heart rate.
As the capsule trembled, the urge for self-obliteration overcame her. The very idea that she could survive a landing and a crossing of this minimally processed moon was absurd. She smiled to herself as the screen above her showed a naked woman demonstrating the proper entry breathing technique. The cartoonish Shine-injected breasts swelled and pressed against a pane of clear plastiglass. Some Corporation digital image consultant had forgotten to scrub away the scarification around her right nipple, and the perfect round raspberry scars dotted across the screen as she pressed and rolled her body across the plastiglass.
Remember, breathe like this. Buckle like this. Decompress like this. Slender fingers, tipped with neon blue nails, punching buttons drawn into her skin with luminous ink. A living device. A reminder, cheaper and more memorable.
The capsule shuddered as the landing gear engaged. The grav drives hummed. The very same grav drives connected to increased cases of Chondrosarcoma in belt miners and highly transported GagGirls. Alona had helped write the abstract before The Event shut down the Terran universities. It was the first time she broke a bone, tapping away on the feedback keyboard of The Before. Her long middle finger just crunched and flopped sideways. Pai called in some calcium supplements after they set her finger. Human-derived for better absorption.
As she slid the safety restraint off her shoulder, her clavicle compressed like rotting wood. Alona tapped the suiting command and put a No Pain All Gain adhesive dot on the inside of her wrist.
The hatch slid open, and her suit beeped in alarm at the temperature before adjusting and automatically clinging to and heating her skin. Her familiar was quiet in her sinuses as the whiteness of the place subsumed her. Saturn’s great belly turning above her.
Through the cutting wind, she could see Riff and Rasp’s outlines, their arms moving like strange automatons in the outdated suits as they stumbled away from her craft.
She pursued them, her heart throbbing in her chest. Her suit was newer and better. Her grav drives drove her forward, the spikes on her boots retracting automatically. The ground shifted beneath her, and The Great Mother – the organism sought by Pai, by The Corporation, by Mechoben – emerged and folded over the distant forms, enveloping them in front of her. Their trackers evaporated from her screen. Blips ceasing.
***
Mechoben raked the pistachio shells into his right hand and clenched them, feeling the bite in his palm. He tensed his jaw and peered at the screen. Al wrapped her arms around his soft middle. His Shine was considered too sacred to pull and distribute, so he maintained it. In sacrifice to them. He gave his beauty to them. They were never grateful.
Many cycles ago, he had held a rifle and fired it above the heads of the dogs strapped with bombs, scaring them to disintegrate into hunks of pink flesh before they reached the shining storefronts. Gucci and Armani glinting in the desert sun, the glass flecked with dogflesh and dust. It had been his job in the global military. That degradation.
He used a scraper for windshields, dipped in a soapy solution and he had watched as it sluiced through the brown dust. The store owner had brought him pieces of watermelon from the local farmer’s market sometimes, her short white shorts untouched by grime. He had imagined sliding his hand up her thigh, touching the hairlessness only the rich could afford. He had fucked her in his head over and over. His hands buried in her human hair extensions, blond from Ukrainian teenagers. Very expensive. She smiled with nothing behind it, her teeth perfectly even and perfectly white. Her waist was cinched forever in another man’s arms.
He was blessed with desire. Desire was the holiest part of the human experience. Desire drove humans toward the stars. Desire was Renaissance painters worshipping the loins of their assistants, fondling young men’s downy thighs as they arranged them. Desire was the first computer, a loom, so workers had more time to chase and fuck other workers to fill the desires for new dresses, for new overcoats, for houses with separate rooms, so they could fuck without pulling one another into the hay, picking fleas off of bodies. The ascetics with their bodies buried in secret flesh missed the fucking point. You got to show the people just enough to make them want it. You got to make desire holy. You got to show them that heaven is not waiting. It’s here. They just have to submit to it.
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No more disease. No more rape. No more war. Any and all pornography you could want. Shit. He was the Son of God, and MOTHER was his pagan goddess. He created androids. He recreated humans. And now he had that store owner here with her coy smile. He created her in his own image. Her untouchable skin was now under his palms.
“Al, lover of the most holy, go and put on those little white shorts I like.”
Mechoben peered at the monitor from the Pinning Station on Enceladus. The giant needle that kept MOTHER pinned for harvest slid up and down to give the illusion of mining. His team told him long ago that mining from a moon the size of a large island was economically nonviable, but that the lifeforms here had “potential.”
At the time, the Terrans had just retrieved his business partner from his bunker in New Zealandia and torn his limbs from his body. He had screamed and cried on the streams as they had tied him to the remaining uneaten horses and ATVs and revved and whipped and hollered until his right arm came off first, soaking the silk sleeve of his Louis Vuitton pajama top in blood so fresh it had shimmered like rubies under the pollution-diluted sun. They had descended on him digging into his flesh and wiping it across their faces as others poured into the bunker, handing his supplies to one another in a gore-wiped assembly line. Purple black fingerprints on fine pastas, cans of San Marzano tomatoes, frozen sides of beef, a water purifier, bags and bags of white flour and rice.
Mechoben had looked on from above. His name was still Simon then. This was before his transformation, his Ascension to highest point of understanding. Before his divinely inspired recreation of the holy text. His moon colony and space station luxury apartments had lifted him above the unwashed. It was never enough. And so he had called military contractors and got a small crew to pin down MOTHER. To claim what was his. Thus began his holy journey.
And now three little pigs had decided they were going to blow his house down. His kingdom for a fucking nail. No way.
“Al, get the Commandant on my stream,” he said, taking her in. “And work on getting your hair a little lighter.”
“Whatever you want, my Lord,” she said, her purplish eyes sedate. She tapped a sequence into a panel, drew her fingers across to widen it, and then lifted it with her palms upward as it hung suspended above them at the correct eyeline angle for him. Specific. Custom. The religion of self.
“Your duty is fulfilled. You can go. Lighten that hair.” Sometimes his Terran accent came out. He quelled it and practiced his Space Speak Neutral Lexicon as the Commandant’s Shine-pumped face appeared on screen. His lips pursed with grotesque Shine overinjection.
“Commandant. We have a problem. Is this channel secured on your end?”
“As well as it can be, my Lord.”
“I don’t like that answer,” his tone remained smooth. He willed his heart rate down.
“We are on the most secure channel we have, my Lord.” The Commandant slurred the words, his eyes shot through with calming pharmaceuticals.
“Were you aware that there are people on Enceladus, Commandant?”
“That old android from before we lifespanned them, my Lord? The one who thinks he’s General Jiménez or Rodríguez, or whatever his name was.”
“I’m sure you wish that was the extent of it,” Mechoben raised his eyebrows as the Commandant swayed behind the screen. “But, no. Sadly, your job is harder than that. That poor Secondborn is no longer operational. Two of my holy children made it to the surface. Under your watch.”
“Sir, we are holding a rather large territory. It’s difficult to keep an eye on everything. I don’t need to remind you that the rebellion on the Venusian colonies has not been contained yet, and there is another on what’s left of Earth. They keep tearing down the signal towers.”
“I know that. I’m the Son of God. Don’t you think I know that?”
The Commandant swigged from a blue and white steel cup from The Before.
“My apologies, He Who is Most High, what is your command regarding these interlopers?”
“They are important enough to bring back alive, with the exception of the Martian girl.”
“There’s a Martian girl down there?” the Commandant asked evenly.
“Yes, she has some attachment to the Terran brother and sister… don’t cringe Commandant…’brother and sister’ used to be commonplace. I know you remember before the campaign regarding the economic immorality of familial units.”
“How shall we retrieve them, sir?” Unshakable.
“That is why my Father made you. To figure that out. Just get them off the planet and leave another Lighthouse keeper. The android expired.”
The Commandant nodded and touched his thumbs to his forehead in reverence.
“I will make it so.”
Mechoben switched off the feed and turned in his chair to face Al, who walked in drying her newly lightened hair with a towel. She combed his fingers through the tangles and went to her station beside him. Her eyes were clouded with her seasonal molt.
“Al, my darling, I am going to need you to make up one of the bedrooms on the south side of the station. We are bringing one of your old friends to visit, and I need her on my side.”
He pulled the tab out of a can of rare unbranded Terran wine and poured it into two plastiglass cups.
“Yes, my Lord. Who is our guest?”
“You will remember her as Riff.”
“Forgive me Lord, but isn’t she a blasphemer? She abandoned all the gifts you bestowed upon her. She is consorting with those unattractives. The ones who won’t be retired?”
“Do you think I don’t have a plan and have always had a plan?” His voice was low, dangerous. “My Father is in every room, in every corner. My Father knows all.”
She lowered her strange, clouded eyes.
“Will that be all? Fix up the rooms in the solar wing?” She asked.
He handed her a glass of the Terran wine. She looked at it and smelled it.
“It’s wine. Like the FungiLiquor, but it’s made from grapes.”
“What is grapes?” She took a small sip and retched.
He laughed and took the glass from her, swirling it below his nose. He had never been able to tell the difference between most wines, but this was an obvious choice over the milky brownish FungiLiquor.
“Let’s just make sure our guests feel welcome. Do you remember some of Riff’s favorite things? Or was that lost in your transcendence?”
“I can review the feeds, and I remember some, but mostly I just remember you,” she said.
She drifted close to him, emitting a small wisp of pheromones to entice him, and stroked his hair. She could feel her body shifting as she touched him. Her fingers lengthened and thickened for a moment, the joints creaking.
He leaned back and pulled her into his lap, laying a pattern of kisses up the side of her neck. His body responding to the pheromones. He invented pheromones. Well, his Father did.
***
Documents 134 – 135
Year [redacted]
Earth Cycle [redacted]
1245 – Captain’s Log:
Systems operational. On course to Enceladus with slight delay. Fuel line repaired by the unnamed android.
Supplemental Record:
The other crew members have taken to calling the android “Duck” as he seems to follow me and copy my very persona. He – I use that pronoun loosely, as the research given to me indicates that they have a remarkable capability to shift sex.
This is the first android I, and many of the crew have ever worked with, given their controversial release and production system. While I am not well-versed on a good deal of Atlantia-American politics, given that I am more concerned with my home territory of Cascadia due to the number of wildfires and the aquifer depletion, I understand that several fringe religious groups have voiced concerns about the nature of the android’s soul.
Having been raised what used to be called “Roman Catholic” before the great binding and assertion of Mechoben’s doctrine of The Machine, I can say with confidence that they will forget their reservations soon enough. The Catholics forgot their priests and cloistered nuns soon enough when The Holy Book™ freed them.
They used to have priests and cardinals and all kinds of middle management before Mechoben came and showed them the true path of efficiency and production. The Great Reorganization saw to that. I wax poetic. It is a weakness of mine. Truly there is little place for it in the Orion-Cygnus Militia.
The android is uncanny at times, morphing his face to fit mine better. He seems to have trouble with my eye color, perhaps because it is so dark and often reverts to a muddy green rather than a brown. He mimics my walk and my talk. I have even taught him a bit of Spanish, and he seems to pick it up pretty quickly.
He is obsessed with the idea of a family, though I understand there is a movement that is gaining ground to disband the family. They claim it is an outdated model; one that is complicit in the degradation of the social fabric and the very soil of our home world.
The Corporation sent Duck to us on a trial basis, to see how well androids were able to fit in with human resources on unsown and therefore unreaped planets and moons. Thus far, he has been quite useful, if strange. I understand that he was bred and designed with the intent that he be able to work longer hours than human resources in more dangerous environments. He has proven his mettle on that front, though if The Corporation does retain these records, which I am certain they will, given the non-disclosure and terms of service agreements we were required to sign, it should be noted that his personality is childlike and unformed. We find ourselves talking to him as you would a child of seven or eight. He is like my son back on Earth, and I find him making the same social blunders. He peers at the female crew members particularly, though he has the capability to shift to the female sex and knows the anatomy, I would presume.
I am not a scientist, as these records show with my particular signature, so I cannot offer any advice on that front, but as a manager of people, I would suggest that androids be more socially conditioned before their use on largely human vessels. Is it possible that their sexuality be removed?
***
Document 136
[redacted] Chat Logs:
SmileyXuan: Have you been reading the captain’s logs from the Enceladus mission?
BigNRich: Yeah. That captain TALKS. lol
SmileyXuan: He really does. But after you wade through all the history and philosophy lectures, he gives us some pretty interesting data.
BigNRich: The suggestion that we castrate androids like they used to do to Earth animals is savage.
SmileyXuan: Yeah. I don’t think the older Terrans really get it. This is supposed to make their lives easier and all they can focus on is sex. He’s sharp though for an oldie. He totally understands that we are using his data.
BigNRich: Definitely. What data were you talking about? From earlier?
SmileyXuan: The idea about socializing them. He kind of has a point. It’s kind of fucked up to give an adult body and physically developed mind to someone who was just born and ask them to perform complex tasks without giving them the tools to cooperate.
BigNRich: Should I call that Brazilian scientist? The one who is working on the Martian colonization models? They say he is raising one like his daughter. I saw it on a stream.
SmileyXuan: Oh I saw that on InstaNews a few cycles ago. I think he’s actually from Peru, though. Didn’t he actually have a daughter that died from Collapse Syndrome?
BigNRich: I think so? I know we can call him. The Corporation just bought out his research firm.
SmileyXuan: You should definitely call him. We might as well start working on this. The new batch will be mature in a few weeks.
BigNRich: Any really hot models? Did you breed me one with big titties?
SmileyXuan: They monitor this chat, [redacted]. Plus you know they can change sex. Get a robot like the rest of us.
BigNRich: Robots are for nerds. You’re no fun today. I’ll call [redacted] Research to talk to that scientist.
SmileyXuan: Good. Let me know if you need my documentation.