At the door to intake there were two figures. One was in a white lab coat with a shaved head and golden earrings. The other figure was a familiar one: Noviko recognized the pear-shaped silhouette of Neon Vox, dressed in a black bodysuit similar to the one she wore when she worked for the EED. This time there was no symbol of the Trine Accord on her shoulder pads; there were no symbols of any kind.
As far as Noviko had known, she’d left Vox to her devices back on the SS Gitarja. “I’m confused,” said Noviko. “How did you get here so quickly? Are you a witch?”
“Nice to see you too, Noviko,” said Vox. “I took a glider.”
“You couldn’t have told me that gliders were an option before I spent a week on a tiny boat with a large, grumpy man?”
“I could not have, no. Gliders are for emergencies.”
Noviko laughed. “Am I an emergency?”
No one answered. The customs agent patted Noviko on the back. “These two will take over the intake process. I have other matters to attend to on the docks.”
And without so much as a goodbye, the agent left Noviko alone with an armored-up Vox and her mysterious, hard-eyed friend in the lab coat. Said friend wore a grim, joyless expression that was almost reassuring to Noviko after the customs agent’s eerie charm offensive.
Noviko tugged off her scarf and mittens and stuck them into the arm-deep pockets of her winter coat. “And what is this emergency, Ms. Vox? Did I do something wrong again?”
“I’m here to vouch for you,” said Vox, as she thumbed toward the severe-looking woman next to her. “The good doctor arranged for me to fly in when she learned you were on your way.”
“And why you of all people? Why not Wenyue?”
“Cheese Louise, Noviko, I thought you’d be happy to see me after all we’ve been through.”
“You told me,” said Noviko, now marching forward to jab her index finger into the hard armor of Vox’s chestplate. Being so close, she had to crane her neck back to glare up into the tall woman’s pale green eyes. “You told me we were even. No more debts.”
“I did,” said Vox. “But you keep putting yourself in situations that require elder supervision. And I’m as elder as it gets, and the closest thing you have to a friend on this side of the cloutwall. So if it isn’t too much for the malignant mass of your fucking pride to absorb, I suggest you treat me in good faith, or we’ll do this quick and dirty, clean up the mess later, send you right back home, and bill you.”
Noviko clenched her eyes shut and processed it all with a few steadying breaths. In the darkness of the back of her eyelids, she thought she saw the flickering, rainbow lights of ssquid and jellyfish.
Worse, she understood the light signals: “NO. TRUST. NO. TRUST.”
“Kuso…” Noviko swore in Ryukyuan. She clutched her head and felt tears spill down her cheeks. “I just want them to stop talking to me!”
Vox raised her eyebrows. “Who?”
“The squids,” said the woman in the white coat. “They’re bleeding influence into the MetaNet through a wetware virus.”
Vox looked at the woman in the coat as if she’d just laid an egg. “Did you just say ‘squids’ are influencing the MetaNet? As in, actual squids? The squiggly, boneless animals?”
“Yes.”
“What,” said Vox, “have you gone and dragged me into, Noviko?”
Noviko clenched her teeth. “What have I dragged YOU into?! You’re the one who barged into my home and turned my life upside-down! And I’m here to ask that everything be put right back where it was before. Doctor, tell me there’s a cure for this… virus, if that’s really what it is! PRISMA said it owes me, that it has my back, so let’s see it!”
“Of course there’s a cure,” said the doctor. “I could plug you into my tablet and have it zapped in ten seconds.”
“Then do that!” Noviko dug at her implant beneath her hair to find her neural cable. She dragged it out and offered it to the doctor. “I can’t take this lunacy anymore!”
The doctor didn’t accept the gift of Noviko’s cable. She turned back toward the door they all stood near, then shouldered it open. “Your case is more complicated. Intake first.”
“Please don’t make me live with this a moment longer,” Noviko grabbed the doctor’s sleeve in desperation. Vox intercepted and grabbed Noviko’s arm in turn.
“Don’t touch her,” said Vox. “Dr. Tasque doesn’t like being touched.”
Noviko felt the bones of her forearm aching under the vice-like grip of Vox’s bionic fingers. Her own hand released the doctor, then Vox released Noviko. Noviko rubbed at her arm and wiped at her eyes, then was led through the doorway in despair.
As she passed through the doorway, there was an intrusive thought: a gong, the same gong from her hab, thrumming through her head. And then, in the very backrooms of her mind, she heard a version of Mandonese so ancient it sounded nearly alien; it recited a section of the Yi Jing for her benefit.
K’AN CHI’EN
(5 - WAITING)
MOVING YIN (4): NOVIKO WAITS IN BLOOD. SHE LEAVES THE CAVE.
（4）：诺维科在血中等待。她离开了山洞。
MOVING YANG (5): NOVIKO IS ALWAYS CORRECT TO WAIT WITH FOOD AND WINE.
(5) ：诺维科总是正确地等待美食和美酒。
Well, at least that last part is reassuring. PRISMA, are you in my mind?
There was no response.
And now, wherever they were, it no longer made sense. The door they’d passed through was a perfectly mundane, heavy-duty push door. But as the door shut behind the group, they were engulfed in a glass tunnel built through water, like an aquarium walkway. Through the glass, Noviko saw a kelp forest anchored to a hard seabed. The kelp plants were strange; they were pale and had golden nodules all across them. Their branches were thin and hairy, and electricity zapped between the various plants through the water.
“What is this? Some kind of… hideous flesh garden?” Noviko asked.
“This is one section of our central processing array,” Dr. Tasque said. “This cluster alone handles all of the MetaNet traffic of the western regions of Syndicate, like Hong Kong and Ryukyu. We’ve got a whole cluster just as big as this one dedicated to the capitol, Jakarta.”
“So, it’s…” Noviko felt interminably stupid. “It’s… it’s a computer?”
Tasque gave Noviko the kind of exhausted, tight little puff of air through the nose that every mildly autistic individual gives when a normie doesn’t understand their interests.
“No,” said Tasque, as she closed her eyes and seemed to summon up the very dregs of her patience to explain things to Noviko. “Computers are stupid – this is the finest wetware ever grown, and wetware is like your brain, it’s a transducer, not a computer. It’s a complex signal array picking up the broadcasted sensory data that forms consciousness.”
Noviko thought it would be safest to just smile and nod.
Tasque kept talking until she was out of breath. “The board of directors for PRISMA manages the face of the company and the human element, sure… but this is PRISMA herself. The Pacific Rim InfoSphere Mapping Apparatus, a wetware transducer the size of a small city dedicated entirely to harmony, sociological research, and humanities in our Syndicate.”
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Noviko could feel the static in the air, the sense of pressure pushing down on her from every direction. It was a gentle pressure, though, more like being a swaddled infant than a watermelon under a hydraulic press. Vox was silent and walked through the tunnel behind Noviko while staring up at the great drifting dendrites.
“I don’t know what any of this means,” said Noviko, “but I’m beginning to understand why so much is hidden behind clout. Are the inner workings of our civilization supposed to be this, um… terrifying?”
“A terror response is natural when dealing with large-scale wetware in-person,” said Dr. Tasque, as they approached a turn in the tunnel. “This is because your body picks up the sense that it’s in the presence of a non-human entity of equal or greater intelligence. But thinking of PRISMA as a singular entity is a mistake anyways. It’s all of us, simultaneously, run through a prism of algorithms and historical data.”
An intrusive thought: Noviko remembered being twenty-two again, unmarried, unburdened by motherhood, sitting on the cheap plastic chairs on the street outside the GelMart on her home rig with the other apprentices from the Union of Pyschopunks. They laughed, they drank, they had a bucket of rocks they threw off the side of the rig into the ocean.
The memory made her smile. She was so happy, then. She was also impetuous and foolish, throwing herself at men (and sometimes women), throwing herself at challenges, and making her mother worry every night she didn’t check in.
Noviko did not care for the fact that PRISMA was feeding her mental images.
You think you’re very clever, PRISMA! Well, I’m happy now, too. And I’ll be happier when you cure me of this squid virus – I have it because of you!
The tunnel turned and they stood before another doorway. This one said INTAKE overhead. Dr. Tasque gestured for Noviko to enter.
Noviko didn’t move an inch. “No, you first.”
“Noviko,” said Vox from behind. “We can’t follow you here.”
“One at a time,” said Dr. Tasque. “We’ll see you on the other side.”
“For the record,” Noviko huffed. “I’m feeling very coerced right now. Do you hear that PRISMA? I am feeling coerced and crowded, so consent is quite dubious, I must say!”
Vox rolled her eyes, and it was odd that Noviko knew that, because Vox was behind her and out of sight. Dr. Tasque let go of the door and leaned against the glass wall. The intake door crunched shut and the doctor flipped open a silver cigarette case. She lit the cigarette with an old-fashioned, brass lighter, the kind that makes a satisfying snap-snap on use.
Noviko crossed her arms and planted her feet. “Should you smoke in here?”
“Nope,” said Tasque, as she exhaled a cloud of second-hand smoke into the small, enclosed space. “You want one?”
“I’m more of a drinker,” said Noviko, waving the smoke away from her face. “I’ll feel better if you two will just tell me what intake is.”
“It’s different for everyone,” said Tasque. “So I can’t say. But you’ll need to get through it if you want me to get you going on the next part of your journey.”
“No no no, this is the last part of my journey. I'm here for a cure to my madness and nothing else, thank you very much.”
“We both know that's a lie,” Tasque said, smiling through silky smoke.
An intrusive thought: Noviko heard her mother say, “one often meets their destiny on the road they take to avoid it.”
Oh, very clever. Platitudes in my mother’s voice.
An intrusive thought: Trip Tanaka grown up into a fine young man with a handsome jawline and a porcelain smile. He stands before his mother's urn deposit box in the community memorial yard, mumbling a prayer in Ryukyuan: “The jellyfish drifts and eats, but it knows not where or how. It entrusts its being to the currents of the sea, and so, teaches us all the meaning of faith. I miss you, Mama. I’ll always make you proud.”
Tears spilled down Noviko’s cheeks. “Am I being shown the future…?”
Tasque flicked ash and shrugged.
“How do you want to be remembered,” said Vox from behind. “As the heroic psychopunk and healer of Ryukyu, or the burned out, bored, reticent mother whose heart is never quite in it for the people who love her so much?”
Noviko’s face turned into a wounded scowl. “What am I supposed to say to that?”
“The sincere truth,” said Tasque. “Whatever’s in your heart. Or whatever isn’t.”
“I’m being shown a future where I am dead, and my child grows up without a mother. I love my son, I love my husband, I don’t care what any of you people say – I am being gaslit into admitting something about myself I refuse to admit, that I am not even certain is true.”
“Careful,” said Vox. “Gaslit is a strong word.”
“And what other word could I possibly use? I don’t know what PRISMA is up to, what this whole miserable organization is doing, but it feels like in the past month I’ve been targeted, conditioned, and coerced towards something and I just want the truth!”
Tasque tilted her head. “What truth, Noviko?”
“The truth of what you people want!”
Vox lifted her armored, slender arm and pointed at the intake door. Tall and lanky as she was, the stillness of the gesture reminded Noviko of some cursed scarecrow. “Go through intake, and we can get on with all of it. You’re the one stalling in the hallway, Tanaka.”
“Tanaka-LaCroix!” Noviko stomped toward the door and grabbed it. “It’s Noviko Tanaka-LaCroix – I have a husband! And if this is the only way forward, fine! I’m not afraid of your stupid intake! I’m going in, right now!”
“Good!”
“Great!”
“I’m going!”
“So go!”
Noviko peeked through the half-open door, but saw only vacant, white light, as if she were about to step into a plane of pure energy, or the world’s most well-lit clean room. She did not go in.
Vox sighed and ran her fingers through her hair, then walked toward Noviko “Do you need a nudge, or something?”
Noviko’s lip trembled, and she nodded.
“Get in there,” Vox pushed Noviko’s shoulder. “You’ll probably be fine.”
“Probably?!”
With a shove from Vox, Noviko passed into the bright, white room, and the door slammed shut behind her. When she turned around, the door was gone, totally sealed into the whiteness of the wall. There were no angles or curves she could see, no shapes whatsoever, and no distinguishing horizons or points of reference. It was as frightening as her first plunge into the abyssal sea of Dr. Humboldt’s trauma memories.
But then, all at once, that terror transmuted into the sublime.
At first, she heard a gong. The vibrations rippled through the white of reality, creating the first shadows. Then a chorus of Indonesian gamelan chimed through the air. A horizon formed, as the ground beneath turned to shallow water, and the sky above a pink-gold masterpiece of rising dawnlight. She was standing on the shore of a white-sand beach, framed by towering monoliths of solid stone that scattered up and down the endless coastline. Each of these stone monoliths was big enough to have a green mullet of palm trees and thick jungle speckled by the rainbow dots of tropical birds. The sun rose and rose before her over the ocean, and she felt its penetrating warmth make love to her molecules. The sun, she came to understand, was crossed by a helix pattern of shadows. These shadows were great solar arrays collecting power from the star directly.
It was the Soldered Sun of some glorious future, rising triumphant over Earth.
From the waters of the sea a woman rose, walking through the waves toward Noviko. She stopped in the distance, and Noviko could barely see her silhouette for the blinding sun at the woman’s back. But she had the sense that it was her mother, dressed all up and down in the red, white, and gold robes of a High Priestess of the Soldered Sun.
“Behold,” said Mother. “Our dreams are as one. For where one aperture may see conflict, another sees a great dance. And it is this dance that creates synergy, and it is synergy that drives us forward. GYOTA is loveless. PRISMA is love. ZON is indifference. All life loves and hates. All life loves to eat and hates to be eaten. And is it Noviko’s dream to only eat, and to never be eaten?”
Noviko felt a sense of shame so deep, so primordially Confucian that it seemed her distant ancestors of some far-flung imperial court kowtowed on her behalf to make up for the wretchedness of their descendant.
“That is my dream,” Noviko admitted. “And I know it is childish.”
“Everyone has that dream. Some even come close to attaining it, and some do attain it, but cannot sustain it. To have this dream, you must make offerings to the hungry, and those offerings must be generous.”
An intrusive thought: Neon Vox slicing off her own arm before the judging masses.
“Justice,” said Mother, “is the fulfillment of hunger. Without justice, there is moral starvation. Without connection, without social translucency, there is no justice. The longer the injustice goes unaccounted for, the greater the offering must be. This is like the ragged edges of the Earth’s tectonic plates rubbing against one another and catching a snag. The longer the snag lasts, the greater the energy behind the tension, and thus, the greater the release of stored energy once the snag finally gives way. The justice for GYOTA’s CTO was an earthquake to topple even the tallest towers.”
An intrusive thought: A montage of Noviko spending every liq on indulgences, time away from home, simulation subscriptions, and nanny fees to escape her maternal duties.
“You've seen Trip,” Noviko cast her eyes from the sun and to the sea. “He's fine… he's fine, isn’t he? He’s so happy and alive.”
“He is fine. And he loves you all the more for your absence.”
Noviko’s heart tore in half. “I’m a bad mother.”
“No. You are Noviko Tanaka-LaCroix. And you are the type of mother you are. You are the type of mother who is wholeheartedly present when she is present, and completely absent when she is absent. Your behavior is correct because it is sincere.”
“A mother is supposed to be there, always.”
“No one and nothing can be there, always. The body may endure, and the mind may remain engaged, and the spirit may be bright, but time and sorrow are companions; one moves, the other grows alongside. But mark this: both are illusions.”
“Mother,” said Noviko, “I am tired. Just tell me what I need to do… to be good. To be a good person, a good girl. I want so badly to be good.”
“You are good, my blossom. I see myself in you. And I am always, always with you.”
Noviko smiled through her tears. She rushed out into the surf toward the blinding figure that seemed to be her mother. But it dissolved into the water as foam, like a mermaid reaching the end of her bargain.
The sun rushed overhead, hit midday, set into twilight, and vanished into night within the span of seconds. Now she saw the nighttime glow of jellies in the sea; some of them flapped their little jelly wings around her legs. They transmitted their many colors and flickers to her, and she understood the words:
“FINISH. HELP. FINISH. HELP. TASK. DEEP. FINISH. HELP. UNDERSTAND.”
Noviko felt her path by instinct. She had been to the top of the mountain. She had seen the Soldered Sun itself. And now, it was time to plunge into the very depths of hell. This time, it would not be a memory; it would be real. It would be the abyss of the Aleutian trench.