Линда Нагата - Edges

A tremor of guilt. A shrug. A confession: “This is me. My human core. I keep this persona because I want to remember who I am and what matters. But I’m not alone. I remade myself multiple times. My Apparatchiks are highly edited, each with a different technical skill. They’re based on me, but they’re not me anymore. Some of them are insufferable and sometimes we argue among ourselves, but no mutiny so far.”

“All ghosts?”

“Yes.”

“And what is it like to be the master of an alien killing machine?”

He tapped his chest and told her the blunt truth: “For me, this version of me, it’s fucking miserable. Soul-annihilating loneliness. Out there, coasting in the void between stars, awake and aware and so far from anywhere or anything, any human thing, knowing with utter certainty that I’m alone and not even the mind of the Unknown God could find me. It’s terrifying.”

“That’s not a very persuasive argument if you’re trying to convince me to come with you.”

“I need you.”

“I don’t want to live as a ghost.”

“We don’t have to. It’s a big ship. There’s room. There are resources. We can be physical when we want it—and god , I want it. I want you . And when time becomes unbearable we can retreat into cold sleep to speed the transit, like we did before. Think about it. Please.”

“I am thinking about it,” she admitted. She stroked his arm, his cheek, considering what he’d offered. “An inverted frontier?”

“Yes. That’s how I think of it.”

“I like that.”

Curiosity was awake within her—an almost forgotten feeling. And he was right that she had no attachments, no obligations of honor. She’d spent three-quarters of a millennium asleep, waiting for some word.

She told him, “It was unbearable not knowing what had happened out there. I would have turned around and gone back after you, but I was afraid that no matter how long I looked, I would never find a sign of you. That seemed the likeliest outcome.”

“This time we’ll be together. No doubt about what happens. We’ll know.”

She nodded her tentative agreement. “I want to send a ghost to your ship, now , to verify what you’re telling me.”

“Due diligence,” he agreed. “You’ve got the address.”

She shifted her focus inward, using her atrium to create the ghost, and then she sent it on its way. If this turned out to be a trap, the ghost could dissolve itself. If it didn’t return, she would know.

“It’s a long round trip,” he warned her.

“I can wait.”

“I want you to go over the library files too,” he said. “Make sure they’re legitimate, consistent, human.”

“I’ve got a DI working on it,” she assured him.

He nodded shortly, then confessed, “I’ve sequestered some of the data. Nothing critical. Just some of the raw details. Things too personal to share in full—mostly at the end. That cache is open to you, but no one else.”

“All right.” Her voice, suddenly hoarse. She feared what she might find when she accessed that privileged data. It might be enough for her—it might be best—to know in only a general way what had happened.

She allowed herself one question: “We lost him in the end, didn’t we?”

“Yes.”

A soft sigh. She had always known it.

“Nineteen hours,” Urban warned, “before we lose data coherence.”

“Okay.”

Time enough. If he was lying, if this was subterfuge, if his apparent sincerity was a false front for a Chenzeme weapon, the history he carried would surely reveal it.

He must have guessed her thoughts, because he looked at her with that pirate half-smile of his, so familiar, taunting her away from melancholy, and he asked, “You still don’t trust me, do you?”

She replied very seriously, “In the madness of these hours I don’t trust myself.”

You are confused, sure that you once were far more. Your mind feels as if it’s been rolled and crushed in a landslide. You wander through wreckage: torn metal arteries, broken white ceramic housings, heavy glass plates marked with impact scars, and everywhere thin crystalline sheets, shattered and jumbled, oozing fluids, your thoughts and memories spilled out across the floor. So much unrecoverable.

You stoop to pick up a crystal fragment. With this action, you realize you have somehow contrived to reconstruct a physical avatar. You are here . You have hands. You drop the crystal and hold up your hands for your eyes to see. Large, masculine hands. You curl your hands into fists. A familiar gesture.

You look about, smell the air. There is air. Good. System integrity not entirely demolished. Lingering stink of burnt toxins. White light from a surviving ceiling panel. Most have fallen.

So quiet here .

Now that you are still, you can hear the fluids move in your body. You can’t hear a heartbeat—but then you remember: You’re not human anymore. This avatar you wear looks human, but you redesigned it, gave it thousands of little hearts to keep the fluids circulating. No longer that one heart muscle vulnerable to execution.

She tried to execute you.

The memory of that affront ambushes you.

She tried to execute me .

The details are hazy. Why she did it, how, that is lost to you in this moment. Perhaps you’ll find the memory somewhere in the shattered strata of your mind but this much you know: She tried to execute you and—fear bubbles up from the dark depths of this avatar’s ancestral instinct as you realize the truth—she has in some sense succeeded. You are broken. You will never again be what you were.

What was I?

Something other than this. The answer—you know though you don’t know how you know—was once contained within the weeping crystalline fragments. Can it be recovered? It has to be.

You sniff the air again. The scent of your avatar lingers in the stillness. No one else about. There has never been anyone else here. You would not allow such a security vulnerability. Another fact that you know without knowing how you know.

You follow the fading scent trail through a corridor, retracing your steps though you don’t remember coming this way. Sleepwalking? More likely the biological mind contained in this avatar was then still incomplete and unable to retain permanent memories.

You walk carefully, stepping over fallen strata, taking care not to stumble or to cut your feet. You are nude. Lean, wiry, male. Dark-brown skin. Hairless, which seems strange.

Every ten steps or so you pass a meter-wide circular plate in the otherwise featureless white floor. Each plate fitted so neatly that there is only a faint gray seam to indicate its perimeter. A handle lies flat, its shape a half-circle, but you don’t try to lift the plates, not given the heavy debris that lies on top of them.

You notice a drizzle of clear gel, a few millimeters wide but over twenty centimeters long, moving past your feet in a shimmer of motion, disappearing beneath the crystalline wreckage. Another strand slithers around the sharp edge of a fallen block. A few steps farther on and you see many more, sliding as if in rapid inspection across the tumbled debris. One gel strand disappears into a thin gap between plates of crystal.

Do they come to feed on your broken mind, or to fuse the broken pieces of it back together?

You think, I was no fool. I would have taken precautions, created backup systems, repair networks .

This thought comforts you as you continue to backtrack, your scent almost impossible to follow now, but that’s all right because now you can follow wet marks where you tracked gel across a section of floor.