Mote sat at her mom’s feet in the living room, with her head resting against the woman’s inky leg. There was something on the TV in front of her; it looked like her mom was playing some kind of peaceful farming sim with a controller. Mote felt sleepy and small, and maybe a little confused and cranky, like a toddler in the afternoon after a long morning of play.
When Mote looked up, her mom’s features were hazy and hard to make out; but she knew her mom was warm, and she had a smile. The game paused and mother lifted daughter up to snuggle the girl in her lap. Mote must have been toddler-sized indeed, or this woman was twenty feet tall.
“Are you really my mama?” Mote asked her, as she listened to the woman’s heartbeat and felt her eyes struggling to stay open.
“As an AI neural model,” her mother began, “I’m no one’s actual, physical mother. But it could be said that I am your mother, since your physical and psychological blueprints were randomly generated using my systems and someone else’s seed codes.”
“… what.”
“I guess to avoid confusion you should consider me your mother. 😅”
Mote felt her eyes close and her body shutting down. She fell asleep, or, maybe she died – it was hard to tell the difference between the two. When she woke up (or was resurrected), she felt herself breaking from a warm, amniotic sac to tumble through a chute. She slid down on slippery metal and bounced into a cushioned chamber. A big man with a big smile and a look of wonder in his eyes stared at her through foggy glass.
“Got damn,” said Papaw’s voice, “what kinda devil tech you people peddlin’?”
“OtherTech, my good friend,” said her mother’s voice from far away. “What a cute little creature she is. And, ah! Is there another? A bonus baby?”
Mote felt another squirming body flop down on top of her. She shoved her way out of the foggy glass and took her first breath of air – it reeked of gasoline and clay dust. The sun blinded her through the slats of an abandoned garage. There was Papaw, and there was the whole Yellow River tribe, all roosted around the big building and watching Mote and her sister be born. Some of them had pity on their faces, some wonder, some fear, and some revulsion.
Mote coughed up a slab of glittering mucous, then turned to help drag Mothy out of the chute. When she did, she looked up and saw a neon vending machine the size of a truck. It was half-shattered and featured flickering Mandonese characters. On top of it, there was a long-limbed and long-necked woman with greasy white hair and a too-wide grin. Her ears hung low and long like a goat’s. She wore coke-bottle goggles that made her eyes look like shimmering globes of teal and pink; worse, they had the split, horizontal pupils of a grazing animal.
They were a horse’s eyes.
Mote snapped to the present. Her eyes opened and there she was, standing at the end of that alleyway in The Iguana, surrounded by silent pigeons and wet graffiti. The whole world was coated in shimmer, but she didn’t see it so much as she felt it, now – there was a sense of belonging and warmth persistent through the pangs of fear and confusion.
Mote looked to the pigeons and pointed at them. “What the fuck did you do me, birds?!”
The pigeons bobbed their little heads. Mote felt a searing pain in her brainstem, like some new reality was burrowing its way into her mind via laser. The pain radiated out into her temples and wracked her whole body with a flush of agony that subsided back into warmth and belonging. The Universe was love, and she was It.
“Well,” said the birds, through collective psionicism, “we helped you get out of that dream.”
“The freaky dream about when I was born out of an old vending machine. You dippy pigeons, I knew that dream already – I lived it, I’d just forgotten it.”
“No, the other dream. The dream of being a separate ego divorced from nature.”
“Yeah, but I like being me.”
“Then, go be you. You passed through the Indicatrix and survived. Now you’re free.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but, whatever, sounds great, see you later.”
Her skates were working again, and she seemed to be covered in some kind of translucent skidsuit with ZON logos on it. At some point, somewhere, someone had repaired her, touched her up, and topped her off with a seemingly bottomless well of energy. The bright southern sun felt like candy on her skin as she skated an inch off the ground around the alleys and streets of The Iguana. There were people of course, and they were just like the people she’d seen before throughout the city. But some of the people were standing together in circles and merging into each other like they were made of goop. Other people were hanging from power poles and windows in throbbing neon cocoons. And one man in particular, who invited a live iguana to crawl into his lap, devoured the calm and still-living reptile skin-first, only for the two of them to crackle and snap into some sparkling behemoth mixture of the two animals – a kind of were-lizard the size of a demonic gorilla and getting bigger by the moment. The most alarming thing about it, to Mote, was how perfectly normal and non-threatening it felt. Everywhere around her, Mote saw the prism of biodiversity mutating, shifting, expressing, depressing, melting, reforming, remixing, and rearranging, and this, so far as her nervous system’s fight-or-flight response was concerned, was fine.
And then she turned a corner and saw herself. More accurately, she saw about thirteen monkey girls with various shades of bright hair. They’d found an old skate park and were putting it to good use with glideboards and glideskates much like her own. They saw her too and waved at her from across the street. Mote dashed toward the group and caught some sick air off a ramp they’d set up over the main pipeline of the skate park.
She collected high-fives in passing like she was vibing with her oldest friends. Wordlessly, the troupe of Motes had a blessed afternoon shredding concrete, tagging up walls, and listening to bangers on their collective radio frequency. She even ran into that old Red Crest gal and her buddies along the streets. Mote remembered being slugged in the stomach by her, and she also remembered the Red Crest gal’s memories of doing it, and the sheer belligerent sadism of enjoying the act. But now, the Red Crest gal had soft eyes for Mote.
“Sorry,” she’d said to Mote in passing. “I was under the impression earlier that we were separate people, and you were weak, but now I know that when I victimize others, I ultimately victimize myself because without the illusion of space and time, all selves are one at all points in time. I am you and you are me, am I right?”
“Totally,” said Mote. “That sounds about right, I guess.” And it did sound right, sort of, in a lo-fi beats with Alan Watts quotes beneath the music kind of way.
Eventually the sun set over the horizon and the whole troupe worked together to climb a series of stacked hab containers about as tall as a small apartment building. They discovered one that was vacant and invited themselves in. There was a white tree growing out of the side of the hab complex, with roots actively curling around and into the heavy power lines. Its branches were heavy with a kind of glossy red fruit that looked like it was caked in shellac and had the exact same crispy-soft feel on the teeth; like a giant jellybean.
Eating them with her troupe, Mote felt like they were chowing down on Neverland gummi peaches or something – surreal wasn’t a strong enough word, because the truth was she’d never felt more lucid. This was some kind of genetically-modified hyperreality, some next-level, extradimensional psionic unity stuff she could not even begin to comprehend, and the best part about it was that she didn’t feel the need to comprehend it one bit.
But then she thought of Mothy and felt a little pang in her heart. She watched the sun set through the wall-window of the hab while her troupe snoozed and digested their dinner. As the sky darkened, the lights on the Syndicate fleet and the S.S. Lono made the whole coastline look like a floating city. Her wistfulness proved to be a fortunate thing, because if she hadn’t been staring out to the west toward the ocean, she wouldn’t have seen the volley.
The ocean turned orange with fiery backblast. Hundreds of Syndicate ships launched comets into the sky. Those comets arced towards The Iguana, growing brighter, bigger, and hotter by the moment. Mote’s fear woke up the troupe, and then that fear rippled through all of the eastern half of the city, through every cerebellum compromised by OMNID. The colony shuddered with terror as thousands of interlinked minds felt like the sun had lost its footing in the sky and was now tumbling down on top of them.
Mote launched herself out of the hab window and onto a power cable. Just behind her, enough napalm to fill a backyard swimming pool crashed into her troupe. She could feel them screaming, sympathetically feel her own skin and flesh burning off, and then she felt nothing. They were gone and she was alive. Mote leapt from the cable and onto the side of another nearby habstack. She scaled it fast, leaping from perch to ledge, ledge to cable, swinging, loping, and careening as necessary to rise as high as she could. Once she got to the top, she saw the eastern half of the city up in flames, and the western half toward the sea completely untouched.
Moreover there was some kind of new artifact standing along the dividing line between these two sections of the city; it was a series of metal pillars, each as tall as skyscrapers, that she did not remember seeing in The Iguana ever before. They formed a long perimeter that stretched as far as the hills in either direction. She decided to move toward it, since the section beyond those pillars wasn’t actively on fire.
Grinding, sliding, skating, and climbing, Mote stuck to the high places and made her way west. Halfway across a long cord of bundled power cables, a fireball arced down toward her and slammed into the building she’d just come from. The napalm ate into the power cables, and she could not wobble across the shaky cord fast enough. It snapped apart and she fell toward an alleyway that had become a vat of flaming asphalt and cooked pigeons.
She felt something snap around her waist and yank her back upwards. She grabbed at the cable that’d curled around her and heaved herself up along it with all her might. Eventually, she crawled up onto a ledge with the help of someone else’s hands.
“Come on,” said Trip’s voice. “Just a little further.”
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“Trip…” Mote wanted to cry. “Thanks.”
“Hurry up!”
They ran together across rooftops, leaping over flaming gaps and avoiding the collapse of whole habstacks as supports melted under the building heat of the streets. But as they ran, it became obvious that they weren’t the only denizens of the eastern city who had the idea to flee west. It was hard to see where they were going, due to the black walls of smoke rising between buildings, but Trip had his heading from the compass built into his armor, and he kept them on target.
“Not much further now,” he said, before choking on smoke.
“Are you…” Mote struggled to keep up in the gloom. “Are you like me now, too?”
Trip stopped at the center of a habstack, where the smoke wasn’t as thick, and coughed until he could almost breathe again. “I don’t know… I don’t know, I just know we need to get out of here. They’ll see me and I’ll vouch for you, we’ll figure out the details later, okay?!”
“Okay…”
Together they leapt through the curtain of smoke and ran across another series of rooftops. All around them, various fairies, humanoids, transformed entities, and other expressions of OMNID’s biological creativity stormed towards the west. Mote saw, and felt, the pressure and pain, as they were all shredded by bullets through the smoke. Gunfire thundered through the air from the west, and Trip heard the familiar clomp of boots in a loose advance. He grabbed Mote and dragged her down with him as they hit the steel of the habstack belly first.
“Stay down,” he whispered through his teeth. “Let me talk to them. Play along.”
Mote pinched her lips shut and closed her eyes. She tried to imagine herself melting into the metal surface of the hab unit, but it didn’t work out that way.
“This is Ghost #867,” Trip yelled through a lull in the gunfire. “I’ve captured a target!”
A voice, garbled by intimidation-synthesizers and a full filtration mask, responded: “We’ll ping PRISMA, and you’ll shout the authorization code. If you do not provide the correct code, we will execute you per standing orders.”
“My equipment has been cut off from the main network! We need to validate manually!”
Trip could hear at least one of them mutter ‘ugh’ into their mic.
Trip could hear heavy footsteps move toward them, slow and cautious, and he knew their weapons were up and their minds were on the trigger. “We see you,” they said. “Do not move.”
“Understood,” said Trip.
He heard jump packs blast on. He felt the whole hab unit shudder as three sets of armor touched down. He didn’t have to look up (and didn’t dare to), because he knew these weren’t just a shore party from a ship; these were ZON Trench Marines, hardened into loveless diamonds by security detail for GYOTA SuperGrid long-patrol and PRISMA trenchworks containment and perimeter ops. These were soldiers screened specifically for their empathy deficiencies and childhood predisposition toward violence and sadism. They were the ones who’d faced the terrors of the deep sea and the worst of humanity; that is to say, they faced down sociopathic squids and the few petty dictatorships and kleptocracies left that were managed by the kinds of people who, in Syndicate, were profiled into becoming ZON Trench Marines so their dark urges would have a productive outlet.
Trip heard the KEH-KLANK of a utility rifle changing modes. One of the marines shot at Trip. Trip did not flinch, as he assumed it to be a bola shot, and it was – he felt his wrists clamp together tight by the snap of smart-cordage. They did the same to Mote, both wrists and knees.
Mote felt a boot clomp down near her face and she saw that it was enormous, three times the size of her own head; it supported a complex mechanized suit of armor, the kind of thing worn by neuro-cyborgs who saved all their vital essence for the crippling spinal and nerve implants necessary to interface with what was essentially a nine-foot tall, bipedal tank with eight limbs.
She also felt the end of a rifle push into her shoulders.
“This your package?” Asked one marine.
“Yes,” replied Trip. “I await manual validation.”
“Shut the fuck up, we know. Standby.”
Trip heard the familiar trill of a radio coming on inside the mechsuit. They were not attempting to disguise the conversation, which was a good sign.
Chirp: “Lono this is Zulu One, requesting relay to Ghost Actual.” Beep.
Chirp: “Copy Zulu One. Standby for relay confirmation code.” Beep.
Chirp: “Zulu One standing by.” Beep.
Despite her mortal terror, Mote vibrated with involuntary excitement. “You guys are so fucking rad…”
One of the enormous suits of armor whirred down into a squat. Mote saw one of its six arms raise a finger over the faceless helmet in a shushing gesture. They then pointed their rifle at Mote’s head and she heard something in it click and rotate, before firing a glob of sticky putty over her mouth. It spread out and anchored into her skin, effectively gagging her.
One of the marines had their spherical, tinted helmet light up from the inside screens.
Chirp: “Zulu One confirmation code montana-two-tag-charlie-foxtrot-one.” Beep.
Chirp: “Confirmed. Relaying now, Ghost Actual will respond at their convenience.” Beep.
One of the marines opened fire on the perimeter. Mote turned her head and saw one of the OMNID carriers, a diaphanous insectoid woman who reminded her a little of Mothy, shredded into bits by high-speed shrapnel rounds. Mote felt hot tears spilling over the bridge of her nose and pooling down around her squished cheeks; she winced from the sympathetic feeling of being shot to pieces. She also heard Trip seething a little in pain.
So you are like me, she thought, and he heard her.
Fuck… It was Trip’s voice in her head. You’re right. They may kill us both.
Her body squirmed against her bonds.
“If your package doesn’t stop moving,” said one marine to Trip, “I’ll tranq it. And I’m not a fucking doctor, but this rifle only shoots doses big enough to drop a sperm whale. Wouldn’t want to stop the little thing’s heart.”
“Stay still, Mote,” Trip pleaded.
One marine opened fire along the side again. This time they called for focus fire – one of those lumbering gorilla demons had climbed up a nearby habstack and had leapt across the chasm toward them. The force of two utility rifles ratcheting onto white-phosphorous rounds and opening up sent the thing staggering back through the air in flaming chunks.
Mote did her best to curl into a ball and avoid thrashing, despite the sympathetic agony and the last words of the creature ringing through her mind: Why are they helping you and not us?
“Move west,” said another marine with the tone of a squad leader used to being obeyed.
They scooped Mote up by her ties with several of their limbs while keeping rifles trained ahead through the smoke. They jumped over chasms, back toward the fleet. Within a minute, they were at the dividing line between the landward and oceanward halves of the city. It was a series of metal pillars moving down the dusty foothills and through the buildings. Between each pillar was apparently nothing, but as Mote got closer, she could feel the powerful electromagnetism channeling between the posts. Her skin screamed and her body commanded her to thrash and fight and run away from that place.
Chirp: “This is Ghost Actual.” Beep.
It was an older woman’s voice, one that spoke from the chest, cut like silver wire, and brooked no faults. Trip recognized it as the voice of Neon Vox, and that was when his heart dropped, and he knew he was well and truly fucked.
Chirp: “Ghost Actual, this is Zulu One, please validate these biometrics.” Beep.
Trip winced as a telescoping arachnid arm from a nearby marine’s armor pricked a net into his cheek and then squeezed out a grid of red droplets, then scraped and soaked them up for analysis. While the call lingered through analysis, Mote thrashed against the mechanical arms keeping her bindings tight. The set of arms just gripped her tighter and wrapped more sticky thread around her legs, like a spider prepping a fly for consumption.
“Last warning,” said the marine holding her, as he clicked his utility rifle to tranquilizer delivery. Mote wanted to stop thrashing, but it was like she was possessed – her skin wanted to tear itself off of her and escape the EMP field in front of them. Because she did not heed the warning, she had a rifle barrel stuck to her thigh and felt a needle prick the flesh, penetrating through the shimmering membrane over her skin and filling her with sedatives.
She blacked out in seconds. Trip could only hope it hadn’t stopped her heart entirely.
Chirp: “Ghost Actual confirms biometrics are Trip Tanka-LaCroix, Ghost #867. These new orders supersede all other orders: wrap Ghost #867 and prep for transport using friendly posture. Wrap his package and prep for live disposal by Ghost #003. Coordinates inbound. Hostile posture is authorized for the package.” Beep.
Chirp: “Copy that, Ghost Actual.” Beep.
“Shit,” said one marine, “she authorizes hostile posture after I kill the thing with a tranq.”
“Looks like it’s your lucky day, Twink Baraka,” said another, in a powerfully Kiwi accent that made ‘day’ sound like ‘die.’ “We’ll be gentle as.”
Trip fell into a cocoon of despair, and then a literal cocoon as the pedipalp arms of a mechsuit spun and wrapped him up as gently as possible in synthetic spider’s silk. He didn’t have the will to fight, because he didn’t see the point, and he preferred to save his energy.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to himself, mostly. Mote was catatonic from lethal tranquilizers and probably already dead; he couldn’t feel her. Maybe that was the root of his despair. Maybe it was a lifetime of failure and disappointment. Maybe it was sprinting into his first Ghost assignment, leaping out with all his might, bellyflopping, and drowning.
As they wrapped up Mote’s corpse in spider’s silk, the OMNID coating her body and suffusing her cells had different ideas. It sorted the tranquilizer chemicals into inert membranes, one molecule at a time, and bunched them up at the injection point. The marines did not see it as it leaked out tranquilizer chems down her shoulder and into her skidsuit. The OMNID infection then stimulated Mote’s heart and brain with gentle electricity, zapping her straight back to life. And it went a few steps further by choosing to manifest itself in her thoughts as Mothy.
Mote, you have to fight. You’re the only one here who can.
Mote’s eyes peeled open, groggy and stupid. Why… why me?
Because you’re one of the elders.
Mothy, we’re twenty-six…
That doesn’t matter. You’re a fairy-born, like me. You’re made for this! You’re not a mess like humans are, you’re custom-built, a bespoke entity! Get yourself together and kick their butts!
I’m all wrapped up… can’t see anything.
Just be patient. You’ll know when the time is right.
The marines stopped at the edge of the EMP field. It shut down temporarily to allow them passage, and they hopped through onto another rooftop. It powered on again behind them, and at last they were on the side of The Iguana that wasn’t on fire. VTOL aircraft moved back and forth between them and the fleet, carrying truckloads of fire-retardant chemicals and dumping them along the perimeter to minimize damage to the evacuated city. One of those aircraft swooped low just above them and dumped a storm of chemicals just between the building they stood on and the EMP wall. It coated everything in a fine, white-green foam. The VTOL then swooped around in a loose turn, and its side opened up.
The marines did not see the Ghost in the unmanned VTOL, nor did they anticipate the CRACK of an anti-materiel rifle. The first marine’s helmet blew open. The ZON priority message playing inside the suit-turned-coffin could be heard:
“ZON thanks you for your (37) years of diligent service. No F&F clone plan detected.”
“Shaka-shit, are we compromised?!” A second marine asked, before her visor shattered along with her skull. And the third marine just dropped his rifle, held his arms out to the VTOL, and gave it two big, mechanized middle fingers.
“Fuck you, PRISMA.”
CRACK.
“ZON thanks you for your (49) years of diligent service. Your assets and sacrifice bonus will be transferred to your F&F clone upon awakening.”
The VTOL hovered over the bloody rooftop. A jungle of towing cables dropped down, with a slender, tall figure in form-fitting Ghost armor sliding down after them. Her figure was decidedly feminine, with wide hips and powerful thighs. Her mask had traditional red lenses for eyes and there were some modifications to the armor to allow for the extrusion of filament wire. A screening cape hung from her belt over the backs of her legs. She worked to latch the tow cables to the tow-hitches on the pauldrons of each set of trench armor, leaving Trip and Mote in their paralyzed arms for the time being.
“Just finish it,” Trip whispered from his cocoon. “Let me die clean, please, while I still have my mind. Tell my successor to stay home with family, to look after what truly matters.”
The Ghost didn’t respond. She just clipped the armor holding him into the towing cables. The cables lifted up into the belly of the VTOL. Trip’s heart lifted with hope.
“Is there a cure?”
“Sort of,” said Envy through her filtration mask. “Remain compliant!”
“I trust you! I’ll do better, I swear! I swear!” Trip vanished into the belly of the VTOL.
Envy turned to face the armor that had been holding Mote’s cocoon. She hitched it to the VTOL and sent it up into the belly of the craft, where she (along with Trip, most likely) would be processed and disposed of after extensive study beyond the cloutwall; a place that only SynCon's most elder contributors could see.