Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

So Io and Yorick left him to bathe his brain in chemicals and play music, for which Silas was dimly grateful. They were more concerned with the bioship. It was a mining craft, chartered through Dronyk Orbital, and the first of its breed: flesh-and-fungi carapace grown over alloy skeleton, fusing metal and meat together in a deep-space capable vessel that looked to Silas like an enormous spiny cephalopod. And all of it directed, through organic nerves and artificial conduits, by an AI that had stopped sending updates nearly seven months ago.

Silas was already composing dirges, so he started on one for the bioship’s crew, too. His viola had survived storage, its deadwood as smooth and gleaming as when it was freighted from the petrified forests on Elysium. Haley had paid for half of it. The last few notes were dissolving in the recycled air when he realized Io was beside him.

“You’re not going in there high,” she finally said. “We need you sharp.”

“I’ll be sharp,” Silas said. “I’ll be a razor drawn across an eyeball. A cloud bisecting a gibbous moon.”

“You saying shit like that, Silas, is what worries me.” Io held out one pale hand. “Give me your gear. The needle, the euphoria. All of it.”

Silas stared at her open palm. It had lost its callus in cryo, but he knew she would still have no problem taking his gear by force. Yesterday, six months ago, he saw her break the fingers of the cryo attendant who brushed them against her ass. He’d found it slightly frightening, and also climbed into his pod with half an erection.

That seemed grotesque, now that Haley was not-quite-dead.

“What do you think happened?” he asked, handing over his syringe and the last incubated petri canister. “To the bioship.”

“Fuel leak, navigation failure, your guess is as good as mine,” Io said. “But the thing’s a cyborg. So the problem could be wetware, could be software, could be hardware. I guess we should hope it’s… Software.” Her eyes flickered to Haley’s pod and her voice softened incrementally on the last word. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Silas said on automatic. It wasn’t.

“Get some sleep, Silas. We’re a day out from contact.”

“I’ll sleep.”

Io hesitated, then put her hand on his. Through the euphoria haze, Silas felt a lazy jolt go up his spine, felt his heart thrum.

“She’s not dead,” Io said. “As soon as we get back planetside, Dronyk’s insurance will hire the best psychosurgeons. The very best. Get her straightened out and uploaded to a droid while the clone grows.”

The longer Haley was stored in the ship’s computer, the more she deteriorated. Chances of full personality recovery from a neural imprint would drop to near zero in the six months it would take to reach Jubilation. They called them ghosts for a reason.

Silas felt his high coming down. He removed her hand, careful for the modified thumb. “Of course.”

Io gave him one last look, then turned and disappeared into the gloom. Silas raised his bow, notched his viola, and started to play.

Eighteen hours later they were tethered to the bioship, sealed airlock-to-airlock in a bruising kiss. Yorick was already in his baggy radsuit when Silas showed up sweating from the fever that had burned out the last dregs of his euphoria virus. Silas wondered again whose significant other the company man had fucked to get sent off on a shit-show retrieval mission.

Yorick stopped fiddling with his faceplate to catch Silas staring at him. “Recreational narcotic use is in direct violation of your Dronyk personnel contract,” he said. “You look like some sort of junkie.”

Silas stepped into his radsuit. “Send me the reprimand, bitch.”

Yorick stiffened, his beetle-black eyes narrowing. “You shouldn’t have even been able to get that… substance… onboard.”

“It was in my rectum. Way up there.”

Yorick shook his head in disgust. Silas sealed his radsuit and then they ran the scanner wand over each other in silence. No blips, no tears. Io joined them a second later, having given final instructions to the ship’s freethinker.

“Should be nice and warm when we get back,” she said, checking down the sight of a sonic rifle. She caught Silas’s perturbed look. “Just a precaution, Silas. I don’t like boarding blind.”

Silas nodded. Three days ago he’d stolen the rifle from the storeroom, assembled it via pirated training tutorials, and held it up under his chin until his hands shook. He hoped she couldn’t tell. Io spread her arms cruciform and Yorick stepped up at once to scan her. He did it slowly, almost tenderly, in a way that made Silas strangely furious.

On Io’s signal their airlock shuttered open with a clockwork whisper of sliding polyglass and composite, leaving them facing a puffy brown sphincter. The bioship’s airlock spat up some insulatory mucus before the bioluminescent nodes in its flesh pulsed a welcoming orange.

“Christ,” Io muttered, crackling onto the radsuit comm channel, then plowed through with her left boot leading. Yorick followed suit in clumsier fashion. Silas held his breath on instinct, even though his hood was sealed and he was sucking on recycled air, as he prised the airlock apart and slithered through. The flesh squeezed and slid and left him with a glistening coat of mucus when he was reborn on the other side.

The bioship’s interior was dark and damp. They switched their halogens on one by one, harsh white light carving through the gloom. Silas saw more of the orange bioluminescence coming to life in response. The metal spine of the corridor floor was all but swallowed by rubbery brown meat.

“New growth,” Io said. “That’s not right. It should have gone dormant.”

Silas stared up at the ceiling and realized that the wrinkled flesh was moving, subtly. A slow, regular undulation. Almost a heartbeat. His stomach rolled.

“Let’s hit the bridge,” Io said. “Check on the cryo banks while Silas cracks the freethinker.”

Hologram blossomed from the floor and as she charted a route Silas gestured back towards the sphincter. “Way up there,” he said.

“You’re not amusing,” Yorick snapped back.

“No side chatter, shitheads,” Io said. “We’re on the clock.”

It felt like they were inside a monster. Silas could see only swatches of metal and cabling; mostly everything was covered over in quivering meat. Biomass. Where the corridor narrowed Silas bit down his claustrophobia, keeping his eyes on the blue-green of his oxygen meter. He didn’t breathe easy until the passage finally opened up into the domed bridge, where the cold metal control panels reminded him he was on a mining craft and not being digested. The star maps and displays were inert, but Silas’s eyes traced the cabling and found the freethinker. It was a burnished hump snaked with circuitry and half enveloped by the bioship’s growth. Recognizable, though, and the interface was lit blue, active.

“Ready and waiting for you,” Io said. “Let us know when you’re in.”

Silas nodded, unhooking the smart glove from his radsuit. The device molded to the shape of his hand with a series of clicks and clacks, brandishing needle-thin probes and flexing sensors. Io and Yorick disappeared down the droptube to the cryobank, leaving him alone with the hulking freethinker. Better that way. He didn’t want to find any more frozen corpses.

Silas pressed his hand up against the interface. Static screamed into his ears and eyes. He jerked back with a curse.

“What is it?” Io asked in his radsuit.

“Nothing,” Silas said. “Dirty in here. Nobody’s been, you know, maintaining.”

“No shit.”

“How’s the cryobank look?” Silas asked, adjusting the dampers on his glove.