Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

W hen the Monster sleeps, she dreams of Bocai.

Bocai had been an unremarkable world, of the usual unremarkable beauty. There had been deserts of towering red spinestalks, mountains lined with spongiform trees that remained tall and unyielding despite the softness of their bark, oceans that glowed with dancing phosphorescence at night, and a day and night approximately half the length of the normal human sleep cycle, allowing the human beings who had leased one small island from the natives two sunsets and two sunrises for every day they stood upon its generous fertile earth.

A beautiful world, yes. A remarkable beautiful world, no. Those who’d traveled to many all agreed that they’d seen better.

Following the usual behavior pattern of their species, the tiny human community had found the exotic sights and scents a fine subject for overwrought poetry. They had composed several hundred volumes, in no time at all, before something happened to all of them that lent those works a dark undercurrent they had never been meant to possess.

These days, on the rare waking occasions when the Monster permits her thoughts to dwell on that damned place, she wonders how she ever endured life there.

It was, after all, a world.

And as a grown woman, she hates worlds.

As a grown woman, she has never been able to understand why so many technologically advanced species continued to prefer natural environments when artificial ones are much safer and so much easier to control.

As an eight-year-old child, she had not known that even the happiest worlds could end with her curled in a dark narrow space between a bed and a wall, breathing dust and the sweat-soaked smell of her own fear.

She knows this now, and reminds herself anew every time she dreams of Bocai: not the lush and colorful landscape but that cramped space, her ragged breath, the distant smells of burning flesh, the distant cries of sentients killing or being killed.

She dreams about this night when hide-and-seek was no longer just part of a familiar childhood game. She dreams of thoughts that did not belong in her head and feelings that did not belong on her skin.

She dreams of seeing a mob of neighbors smash her mother’s head against a wall again and again until everything the kind, somewhat distracted woman had been was reduced to a stain on the mortared walls.

She dreams of seeing her father, armed with a shovel, smash the skull of a Bocaian child she had considered a sister.

She dreams of seeing two sentients who had until this night been best friends to one another, one human, one Bocaian, tearing and scratching at each other in the dirt, too frenzied to scream from the wounds that have already blinded both.

And all of this was horrible and all of this was terrifying, but none of it affected her, at least on that night, the way it should have.

On that night it thrilled her.

On that night it made her heart pound and her blood race and her flesh tingle with the thrill of a game more delicious than any she had ever known.

On that night she regretted only being too small to participate.

Because she also wanted to kill something.

It’s an odd thing for an eight-year-old Hom. Sap girl to want, and the part of the child that still remained sane had been entirely aware of that. There had never been any violence in her life, up until those last few hours—and there seemed no reason beyond simple self-defense for her to feel the urgency she felt now.

But she did hunger for it. She wanted to feel something alive turn to something dead. She wanted to stand above it at the moment of its dying, and feel the satisfaction of knowing that she’d been the one who drove it from the world of things that live and breathe and feel into the world of things that merely rot.

She wanted it so much that the grown-up Monster, reliving these moments from the vantage point of a survivor, is amazed that the little girl’s sense of self-preservation was powerful enough to keep her in hiding for so long. Amazed that the little girl managed to keep quiet, that she’d managed to hide from the adults-turned monsters before they could have done to her what they’d already done to her father, her sister, her neighbors, and her friends.

If only she’d remained in hiding.

She might have avoided getting any blood on her own hands.

She might have.

In dreams, anything can happen. History can be rewritten. Fates can be argued with. Things set in stone can be remolded like putty.

But this dream follows real historical events.

This dream bears an inevitability that has tortured the Monster all her life.

This dream carries with it the knowledge that all these events have already taken place and therefore cannot be changed.

This dream commemorates the moment that transformed the little girl from innocent into the Monster.

The little girl in this dream is frightened not because she knows she might die tonight, but because she holds the knowledge of the Monster, watching through the same adult eyes, seeing that death might have been better.

Trapped in the dream that never changes, the little girl hears a rustling sound, and she knows that there is someone else in the room with her.

She knows it is someone she loves.

She knows he is here to kill her.

She knows she will kill him first.

She knows that at the moment of his death she will feel a rush of sick pleasure unmatched by any other joy her life will ever offer.

And she knows that she will live the rest of her life missing it.

I ’ve never been a fan of natural ecosystems.

I know they’re romanticized. They’re great for people who like to swat bugs, step on feces, and catch strange diseases, an odd subsection of humanity that has never included myself. I grew up in urban orbital habitats and pretty much know better. But even I must admit that natural places evolve by accident and therefore can’t be blamed for their high level of unpleasantness.

Artificial ecosystems, engineered by sentients who know we’re better than that now, are just plain perverse.

The cylinder world One One One was an eloquent case in point.

It was so wrong, in both concept and execution, that it exalted even the most appalling messes arranged by Nature. Like most constructs of its kind, it rotated at high speeds to provide to the internal environment a simulated gravitational pull away from its axis of rotation. That’s just basic engineering, so old that dumb old Mankind considered it a brilliant idea long before we went into space and put the basic idea into practice. But most cylinder worlds orbit planets, or hang around inside solar systems, and are built by sentients who evolved on planets to support life that likes to walk around on a solid surface, even when that solid surface has a horizon that curves up on both sides. As a result, they house their habitats on the surface that best approximates planetary notions of up and down: that is, the outermost “floor.”

On One One One, the independent software intelligences known as the AIsource had turned that usual model upside down. The station itself was situated in deep interstellar space, a good twenty light-years from the nearest inhabited world, and far from any of the territories claimed by any of the major spacefaring species. We never would have known about it if they hadn’t given us the address. Its habitable interior centered on an Uppergrowth of knotty vegetation clinging to the interior station axis. The crushingly dense lower atmosphere was a poisonous soup of thick toxic gases above a sludgy organic sea. Only in the upper atmosphere, near the central hub, was there a thinner oxygen–nitrogen blend of the sort congenial to the life-forms the AIsource had engineered.