Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

I wanted to kick and scream and thrash about and somehow propel myself in a direction directly opposite from the one the AIsource required of me.

But I did not know what direction that was.

We won’t force you, the AIsource said. You could forgo the answers, and return to New London with failure on your hands.

The blue chamber provided no cues identifying up, down, or sideways.

Once again I considered the words Lastogne had spoken to me, the words that had come to define the entire direction my life had taken, upon my arrival on this station.

We’re all owned.

It’s just a matter of deciding who holds the deed.

It wasn’t like I owed the Confederacy, or the Dip Corps, a damned thing.

But humanity?

That was a betrayal of an entirely different order. If a betrayal was what it was.

I had always hated people, always despised crowds. No, scratch “always.” Once upon a time, before the night that formed me, I’d been partial to both. But since then I’d never been at home in any gathering of human beings. I’d always seen the race as a corrupt one, one that though worth despising for its own crimes were nevertheless too high to permit inclusion by a creature who had done the kind of things I’d done. I’d known that I could never be accepted and had hated them for not trying harder to prove me wrong. I’d been proud of that dichotomy, like any other self-serving misanthrope.

But now I found myself thinking about a café I’d liked, in New London’s Mercantile district, on a balcony with a view overlooking the three hundred terraces of the Dumas Plaza. I’d always gone there with a hytex link stocked with severe-looking documents, and the fierce mien of a dedicated bureaucrat too busy to be disturbed. It had discouraged the interference of fellow diners who, otherwise, might have taken the empty chair opposite mine as an invitation for the opening of conversational gambits. Alone, in the midst of the friends and lovers chatting at other tables, I’d been able to enjoy the spicy food and my cocoon of silence and sit among them without ever being of them. It had been my choice. But how much time had I spent with my nose in my important work, and how much had I spent watching those terraces across the way, and the people who wandered in and out of those fancy rooms like actors making entrances and exits in three hundred plays written just for me? How much had I hated them, taking comfort in considering them vapid every time I caught a smile or heard a peal of laughter, and how insistently had I assured myself that my emptiness was so much more informed, so much more genuine than whatever joys they’d used to fill themselves?

Why would I do all that, if they were just beneath my notice?

How much more could I have had, if I’d just been able to put the awfulness inside me aside, long enough to try?

I didn’t like being owned by the Dip Corps. I never had. It had been a convenient legal fiction, standing between me and extradition for crimes that had never been my fault. It had protected me. It had given me the opportunity for a life, even if I’d never seen fit to use that opportunity for more than just living out my allotted days. But maybe the Dip Corps was not everything that had a claim to me. Maybe all those strange faces did too. Maybe I had no right to turn my back on them. If, indeed, that was what I was being asked to do. Oskar Levine was legally nonhuman and he still lived among a community of human beings. He still had a wife, friends, people who liked him. He also had bastards like Gibb who would never forgive him for what he had done. He couldn’t go home, so he’d built a new one.

Did that qualify as no net loss?

And was he even an accurate comparison?

Once I crossed the line, what would my new owners ask of me?

Were they as bad as the devil I knew, or were they going to be worse, in ways I did not yet have enough information to fathom?

And either way: Could I be myself and ever be satisfied with not knowing?

I did not know what my answer was going to be until I gave it. But I took one last breath and expelled it in one defiant gush before saying the words they needed me to hear.

“All right, you bastards. I defect.”

Their response oozed self-satisfaction. That is what we wanted.

A portal opened, closer by far than I would have expected to find another surface. A gentle breeze, blowing from some source behind me, nudged me away from open space and into a tunnel just large enough to allow my hovering form passage without permitting any encounter with solid walls. This place was not well lit, like the Interface room; it was dark, and bumpy, and rich with unseen places.

When the doors irised shut behind me, I was plunged into darkness.

Ibumped along that dark passage, propelled by forces that could not have been limited to mere air jets, for what felt like more than an hour. Once or twice my body jerked from sudden accelerations. Once or twice I felt strong wind against my face. Once or twice I just languished, unable to discern any movement, wondering if I’d stopped, and forced to hope that I wasn’t being abandoned in the AIsource equivalent of gaol.

I shouted questions, including endless variations on “How long is this going to take?” but received no further answers. Maybe they didn’t want me to remember the route. Maybe the majority couldn’t speak to me at all once I left the territory they considered their own. Or maybe the whole point was to make me wait—teaching their new property that she existed according to their timetable, and not her own.

Whatever the explanation, the journey did, eventually, end.

My back came to rest on a smooth, rubbery incline. I slid a few meters, through an opening just large enough to admit me, onto a padded floor soft enough to rob my landing of any inconvenient drama.

As I stood, blinking after all my time in the darkness, I found myself in a place unlike any I had seen in One One One.

You could call it a corridor, I suppose. But it was less than a third as wide as the one where I’d left Oscin and Skye, its walls so close together that I couldn’t fully extend my arms. The ceiling, by contrast, was too high to see, the walls converging in some high-altitude vanishing point where distant lights flickered an irregular, random cadence. The vague blue light was dimmer and colder than any I remembered, casting high-contrast, ghostlike shadows. The corridor itself didn’t curve away after a short distance, as the corridors outside the main hangar and the Interface access portal did. It extended for what seemed an infinite distance in both directions, its endpoints pinpricks that didn’t seem any more promising in either direction. If it ran the length of the Hub, as I suspected, I was in for a long walk. I could easily collapse from exhaustion, or thirst, before I got anywhere near a recognizable destination.

But even as I stood in the center of all that immensity, a black pinprick popped into existence in front of me, hovering at eye level like a blind spot formed at the spur of the moment. I took a step toward it and it expanded horizontally to become a line, then vertically to become a black rectangle: the first conventional AIsource avatar I’d seen since my arrival on One One One.

It said, ((you are not welcome here))

It was the same kind of voice used by the AIsource I knew, still speaking to me from inside my own head like something that belonged there, but its character was different. This one felt abrasive, like broken glass: less something intent on drawing my blood than something that couldn’t move without tearing at its own scabs.