Intake spat Noviko out through a chute greased by something neutral-smelling, perhaps petroleum jelly or one of ZON’s many biodegradable, semi-edible survival slimes. She flew out of the ceiling and onto a pile of hypoallergenic cushions. There she lay, staring up at the dripping chute above her. From the sounds of gentle voices and shuffling feet, she knew there were people around her; but none of them interrupted whatever banal activity they were doing to react to her falling from a tunnel in the ceiling. Something tumbled through the roof above her, like it’d been thrown in the chute just behind her, and she was too disoriented to react as an object fell onto her lap.
It was a gift basket, wrapped up neat with a red bow. Stapled to it was a card that read ‘Congratulations on a Successful Intake!’ on the front. Noviko opened the card and read the contents:
“Dear Noviko,
Thank you for participating in the PRISMA intake program. Your willingness to submit your subconscious for review is invaluable to future sociological breakthroughs in Syndicate. As a thank you, please see the gift bag. In it you will find supplies and utilities to aid you in your temporary resettlement to PRISMA’s corporate team.
Warm Regards,
Human Resources
P.S. Your wish has been granted. Please see your sponsor for details.
P.P.S. Your union was an integral part of representing you during the decision-making process. You were determined to be too far altered by your recent traumas to be allowed to return home and spread that trauma to your family. As a courtesy, your FNF clone plan and hazard payout are now active. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact Shen Wenyue and the Union of Psychopunks. We’d also love to see you in HR and talk options for reinventing yourself on this exciting new journey!”
More bluffing. More nonsense. More lies.
Noviko tossed the greeting card aside and slid off the pile of cushions. She was in a room the size of an aircraft hangar, divided into hexagonal sectors with hexagonal cubicles. The ceiling was glass. She saw on an enormous, crystalline clock on the far wall that it was 23:47. Through the glass ceiling she saw the full moon, a swathe of glittering stars, and the undulating green ribbons of aurora borealis.
The room she was in was a mixed staffing of humans and robotic frames. Most of the robots were digital spirits controlling drones, walkers, trotters, and spinners as their avatars; these spirits distinguished themselves from dumb drones and robotic laborers through a use of holographic faceplates that gave them access to either emoji or endearing replications of a genial human face. This was a prerequisite of digital consciousness citizenship, to limit physical avatar usage to that which existed outside of the uncanny valley, and to utilize one named platform per ego. Ego splitting (consciousness duplication) was not something digital spirits typically liked to do for the same reason humans didn’t typically enjoy creating new humans: competition.
And while it could be argued that digital spirits didn’t have the same space and resource constraints as humans, this would be incorrect, as the great InfoSphere was a jungle of consciousness that was already hard enough to distinguish oneself in. The limited resource everyone was competing for, typically, was the engagement and interest of other thinking beings, and like humans, digital fairy spirits had a way of going insane in isolation.
I have never in my life seen more spirits taking physical form.
A little voice chirped nearby. “Haven’t you?” It was a little drone, nominally humanoid with slender, pointed limbs of enameled metal. The fairy truly looked like a fairy, with a smiling face made of holographic energy and thrusters that hummed like beating wings.
“Please don’t react to my surface thoughts,” said Noviko. “I need you to put me in contact with my union representative and to book me passage off of this stupid island.”
The little fairy did an aerial somersault, wiggled its pinion limbs, and smiled. “No!”
“No? Do you not work here?”
“Don’t be such a Karen,” said the fairy.
“I am NOT a Karen, I’m basically a kidnapping victim!”
“You sound like a Karen to me, victim.”
Noviko forced a smile. “I really do need you to help.”
“Not my job, not my prob!”
Noviko felt a surge of frustration that boiled over into anger. She snatched up the little fairy by its stupid waist and gave it a good squeeze. “I demand – AAAAAAAAH!”
Noviko screamed as a bolt of electricity surged up her arm. The little fairy, now sizzling from the defensive shock, rose into the air and sounded an alarm. “Mean-tits touchy-lady demands stuff from everyone! Grabs poor little creatures! More news at O-hundred!”
“NOVIKO!” It was Vox. The towering woman still wore that menacing, black bodysuit, and was a stark line of darkness marching toward Noviko in a room otherwise defined by white walls, crystal furniture, and gleaming gold accents.
“Why do you call my name in the tone of a scolding mother?” Noviko turned to face Vox with her chin up and her fists clenched. “I am not your child and I do not belong to PRISMA.”
“How about,” Vox began, as she stopped just within arm’s reach, “you chill. Can you do that? Can you chill for just a little bit, just by like, twelve-percent?”
“Five-percent.”
“IT’S NOT-!” Stopped herself, took a breath, exhaled. “It’s not a negotiation, it’s a mandate, and you are on sacred ground.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know you don’t care; it blows my mind that you don’t care, I’ve never seen someone go through intake and come out the other side doubled, even tripled-down into defiance.”
“Oh,” Noviko tilted her head. “Was I supposed to absorb PRISMA’s heavy-handed, brainwashing nonsense with an open heart and a loving soul, with a click of my little heels and an upright back with a ‘yes mommy, right away mommy’?”
Vox did not have an immediate response. She stood for a few awkward moments and then averted her eyes. “I mean… that was my response. More or less.”
“You? Licking a mother figure’s boot? I can’t imagine it, kappa.”
Vox’s arm was like a viper strike. She snatched up the front of Noviko’s robe with a suddenness that made Noviko’s entire central nervous system freeze. Vox loomed overhead and stared down into the other woman’s eyes with a mix of tense emotions Noviko identified as confusion, anger, embarrassment, and a touch of attraction. Noviko could smell the snappy pomade in the other woman’s tight, white hair, and could hear the subtle creaking of synthetic material in the moving joints of her armored bodysuit.
“I’ve given you things,” Vox said, her tone tight. “I’ve given you things people only dream of. I’ve shown you things people can’t imagine. You’re here, some plucky little thirty-something with a bad attitude, in the fucking holiest of places, and all you want is to go back to your lie of a life I rescued you from.”
Noviko’s face scrunched up, and the freeze became fury. She knew she could not hope to overpower Vox, or most anyone, as she was not a warrior. But she didn’t care. “It was my life,” said Noviko. “It was my lie. Maybe this kind of mess is why people are supposed to live a century before looking behind the veil at all the… robot enclaves and coral-kelp-flesh-brain-gardens or whatever other nightmares make up Syndicate.”
Vox shoved Noviko back with such force that she stumbled and fell into the pile of cushions. By now, drones were watching from the sky, and conversations had hushed up in the distance. Vox had barely-contained violence in her limbs as she loomed over Noviko. “I thought you were different.”
“And I thought you were helping me,” said Noviko. “But it turns out you were just trying to buy me into your weird, sad, lonely world. You’re a childless, loveless, joyless, soulless zealot and you’re no better than the naichi you liberated Ryukyu from, I see that now. This is all just fascism with extra dressing and better seasoning. How can someone as old as you be so blind? Did you just sign some waiver giving them the right to adjust your brain and your memories as they see fit? Do you forget what you need to forget and only remember what you want to remember how you want to remember it? Do you hate yourself and humanity so much that you’d sign everything you are over to a… a system, a body… an organism? Whatever this is?”
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“That’s a lot of assuming for one lady,” said Dr. Tasque, coming in from the sidelines, tablet in hand and her lab coat a-swishing. “Vox, I know your big trigger is seeing people using physical force against those smaller than themselves, but this is an inappropriate escalation.”
“We already woke up her replacement clone,” said Vox, brushing Noviko off with the gesture one makes when smacking the game pieces off of a board.
Replacement clone. Replacement clone? WHAT?! What the fuck?!
“If PRISMA herself can’t even get her to cooperate,” said Vox, “what good is she to the mission?”
Tasque rubbed at the bristles of her shaved head and gave Noviko an apologetic glance. “You’re embarrassing yourself with that temper of yours, Vox.”
Noviko pushed herself to her feet. “What is she talking about? Replacement clone?”
Vox glared at Noviko. “You should be thankful we liberated you from that domestic banality you so clearly despised.”
Noviko felt a heavy, cold pit where her stomach was. It was some flavor of dread or despair, or perhaps some kind of icy rage she’d never felt before, but she didn’t have the faculties to identify it. “You sent… a clone? Of me? To my family?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Tasque. “It was determined to be the most humane course of action.”
“Is it there yet?! With my family?!”
“It’ll be online tomorrow morning, ready to pick up where you left off. She’ll be Noviko Tanaka LaCroix from now on, an exact copy of you… minus the brain damage. We still need that part of you.”
“All this time,” Noviko laughed the laughter of the damned as she stared at the tattoos on the backs of her hands, “all this time I thought I lived in a just and equitable society. I was proud to be Syndicate… proud to serve as my mother had. Proud and happy to be able to celebrate my culture and all the things precious to me. But the whole time, we were just… what? Bits of meat and flesh, to be swapped and duplicated at will? Whole lives, whole souls, just… replaceable?”
“Not typically,” said Dr. Tasque. “These circumstances are extenuating, and these measures aren’t taken lightly. This is a bespoke solution that’s best for all parties, including you.”
“Thank you so much for deciding what is best for me.”
Dr. Tasque rolled her eyes. “We don’t actually have time for you to marinate in negativity like this. Intake revealed we’re on a ticking clock with your condition.”
“I’m supposed to dive down into some hellish trench and help with a squid problem,” said Noviko. “I know. And I don’t consent, and I don’t want to do it, and I won’t, and you can’t make me. I would rather die, and since I suppose you already replaced me with some pod person version of me that will raise my son for me, there’s no reason for me to be alive anymore, so, I’d really like to just go to a nice little corner somewhere and drink myself to death, if it’s all the same to PRISMA.”
“You don’t give a shit about your family,” said Vox, “you fucking drama queen.” Vox kicked the gift bag toward Noviko’s feet. It broke open and some various keycards and biometric cubes clattered across the floor. “Do what you want. Key to your hab and all your new goodies are right there, have fun, spend two-hundred years getting high and playing sims for all I care.”
Dr. Tasque snapped her fingers near Vox’s face, like one does to a disobedient hound. “Stop it,” she said. “Noviko is here because of you. You did this, Vox, and this temper of yours is just a really flimsy cover for all those nasty old, calcified feelings of self-loathing and unfulfilled biological desires. You look at Noviko and see everything you aren’t, obviously, and a strong reaction is natural. Knowing this, I ask that you engage your heavier self and use restraint.”
“Fine,” said Vox, crossing her arms.
“Great.” Tasque gave Noviko an apologetic smile. “It’s a lot to take in, I know.”
“Do you?” Noviko wrinkled her nose.
“I do, actually. I’ve been around, but I don’t live a life of violence, trauma, and adrenaline like Vox, so I’m a touch more stable. No offense, Vox.”
“It’s fine,” said Vox. “I know who I am.”
“I’ll speak openly now that we’re on the other side of intake,” said Tasque. “Everyone in this space is privy to our mission. Right now, your brain is the key to decoding cephalopod ‘biospeak,’ which would be a revolution in deep sea diplomacy. Right now, it’s a bloodbath down there, and you have a chance to be humanity’s first ambassador to the squids.”
“And why,” said Noviko, “would I agree to go there? I saw it, I experienced it myself, that awful trench. GYOTA is hacking the squids apart for their beaks, PRISMA is trying to study their brains and decode their language, ZON is just… what? Dying? Trying to grow apples in darkness?”
“Sea fungus,” said Vox. “Relevant if we ever have to live on the ocean floor or... space.”
Noviko picked up her gift basket and got to cleaning up the mess of keys and utilities on the ground. “I’m sure it’s all fascinating,” said Noviko. “But I’d like to speak to my union representative.”
“Sure,” said Tasque. “Take your stuff, follow the waypoints in your map. There’s a union embassy on the thirtieth floor, and if you decide to truly opt out of all of this, I’ll just zap your brain clean and call this whole two-hundred-year project a wash.”
Noviko did not care. She did not care at all.
In the union office, she had all but kicked the doors to Wenyue’s office in.
“I’ve had it impressed on me since the beginning that my brain has a virus that's some kind of weird linguistic key that’s uniquely necessary to satisfy PRISMA’s lost research into decoding cephalopod speech, and I’ll be very honest with you Wenyue, I hope the whole thing fails, and I hope Syndicate burns to the ground, and I hope that, if Syndicate’s way of doing things is in fact the future of humanity, that we never escape this planet and we drown here where we belong and some other species learns from our mistakes a hundred-thousand-years from now.” Noviko was now winded and red-faced in Wenyue’s office. It was a perfectly dull office with a wooden desk, a series of brass resonator bowls on a recessed shelf, some green basket plants growing out of a cabinet, and a holographic projector simulating the physical presence of Wenyue with her stupid little nods of her stupid little head pretending to hear Noviko’s complaints and actually give a damn about any of them.
“Noviko, we hear you—”
“Kuso, no you do not. A—a – a… a replicant or something? That thing is going to go raise my son for me. Do you have any idea what that feels like?”
“Not personally, but we have insight into your motivations--”
“Oh, yes, your INSIGHTS into my motivations, because apparently we all live in a fishbowl nightmare where everyone is connected and supposed to be mutually understanding one another, except sometimes we don’t, and sometimes we demand people lop their arms off for a flesh price, and sometimes we condemn people to fates worse than death, and sometimes we clone people without their consent and send their clone off to raise their child.”
“Noviko, will you give me a chance to respond? Please?”
“What could you possibly say that would help?”
“If you didn’t think I could help you, you wouldn’t be here. So let me help.”
“And how will you help? Telling me how this is all somehow for the best?”
“Well, I think you already know that’s true.”
“I swear if one more person tells me what I think, I’m going to pick up one of these tacky prayer bowls of yours and brain them over the head with it.”
“You’ve been uncharacteristically violent lately, Noviko. Doesn’t that strike you as concerning? Don’t you wonder, just a little, why that might be?”
Noviko did not immediately respond. She hadn’t thought about it.
Wenyue took the chance to press her point. Her hologram stepped through the empty desk in the room and paced around Noviko. “Your brain is broken, Noviko.”
“Shut up.”
“Your brain was always a little broken, Noviko, but lately it’s been changing from stress, fear of exposure, and whatever subliminal influence the squid’s language and psychology patterns have managed to exert over you. You are not the same woman you were before that exorcism, and we stored a backup of you beforehand, per your covenant with the Union of Psychopunks. You pre-consented to a Friends-And-Family clone being dispatched in the event of irreparable trauma or death. You have a hazardous profession, Noviko. And you wouldn’t be the first psychopunk to go through this kind of thing.”
It is better to appreciate the labors of others, said her mother’s voice.
Stop. Stop, stop, stop…
“Your mother went through it,” said Noviko, with the usual eerie timing. “I won’t go into the details, but you’re free to spend a little clout to verify. You were raised by her FNF clone from age two onward.”
Noviko felt the world spin gently. “I want to throw up.”
“Noviko,” said Wenyue, with what seemed like sincere pain in her eyes. “We have been scrambling to try and get ahead of you, but you’ve been erratic. We’ve been trying to comply with your wishes and receive you here – PRISMA itself is focused on your well-being with an unusually high degree of cluster-processing dedicated to solving your dilemma.”
“Then why can’t I just do the damned thing, go down into the trench, help with the squid business… and go home? Why does it feel like I’m never going to be allowed to go home?”
“I’m leveling with you: It’s because you will never be who you were again. And the FNF clone that’s replaced you fully understands that it is, for all intents and purposes, Noviko Tanaka-LaCroix, and it was never traumatized by the Jellyfish Exorcism. It will proceed, as you were, muddling through life, while you – whomever you choose to be now – move forward to a heavier purpose on this side of the cloutwall. And since you’re on this side of the cloutwall, you need to move fast to catch up to the realities of our world, and the realities of who you are. People in this part of our society are supposed to be old and wise enough to have no illusions about who or what they are, and it’s been unfair to drag you here prematurely – that was why Vox gave her arm and the statement of contrition. Her public punishment for the reckless use of tranquilizers on a child was a convenient cover. Reckless clout transfers are far more serious… as you’ve seen and experienced firsthand.”
To Noviko, Wenyue sounded a little far away, and the wall and floor looked like they might be breathing, the way they moved in the corners of her vision. “You said my mother was replaced,” said Noviko. “Is she still alive? The original?”
Wenyue hesitated. “She became a Ghost, Noviko. You could too – you’d make an excellent handler for a field agent.”
The world was full-on spinning. “Oh, good…” said Noviko, slurring and stumbling down onto her knees. The skirts of her robes pooled around her. “I’ll be some… black-ops babysitter for Syndicate’s off-the-books sociopaths.”
“Sociopathy is a non-diagnostic term that describes a pattern of behavior on a gradient scale. You are on that scale, and people like you have their place in the world, Noviko.”
“I am not…” she felt her eyes grow heavy, the breath in her lungs congeal into a kind of gelatinous consistency. “… a sociopath…”
“… aren’t you, though? Syndicate’s very nature socialized you, of course. But, you’re selective about your emotions, selective about your attachments… capable of turning empathy on and off at will. What about the surface-deep guilt, masking, mirroring, shallow love, abject selfishness, cognitive empathy as opposed to emotional and physiological empathy… right now, though, I need you to breathe, you might be having another panic attack.”
“Oh, do sociopaths…” she wheezed a chuckle. “Do they have… panic attacks?”
“Everyone has panic attacks. It’s the central nervous system collapsing under prolonged fear and distress. As soon as you accept yourself, you’ll be free of them.”
Noviko’s basket fell from her arms. It was not a dramatic loss of consciousness, more of a sad slump of surrender. There was, in fact, a tiny little part of her she could not show the world that -- beyond all the rationalizations – felt happy and excited to no longer be chained to responsibility toward her family. And Trip was old enough to work with his father, anyways. And hadn’t she been dreaming of a new start, after her mother chose to… die?
My ‘mother.’
She laughed. She laughed and wheezed, dragged her fingers across her face, fell backwards into a pile, laughed, and laughed until she passed out.