It was just a room.
Another one on the wreck of the Conch Citadel: holes in the walls and in the ceiling and floor, floating debris and rusting furniture that must have once been pristine and polished, the state of the art of Đại Ánh. A series of disc-shaped auxiliary robots and larger maintenance mechs parked in the walls, gleaming in the light projected by Thu’s lamp. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Thu was in the doorway, floating in the low-gravity of the wreck—holding onto the frame with one hand, the small thruster-pack in her back turned off to conserve energy. She’d been about to enter the room, but something had been bothering her enough that it had stopped her.
It took her a moment to realize it was her lineaged memory that was kicking up the fuss, specifically Ánh Ngọc’s most recent transfer, the one of the latest shift Ánh Ngọc had done onboard Citadel. Not shocking; lineaged memory was always slower to access, more distanced and filtered through layers of storage in Thu’s implant. Looking more closely, Thu could see, now, that the holes in the floor were a little too regular, the mechs’ multiple legs a little too polished, the edges of the robots’ disk-shapes distorted, as if someone had pulled and the metal had given in like taffy. Not a physical room, then. The real room, the one she could interact with, lay under layers of unreality. A whole lot of it.
Shit. Shit.
Thu chewed at her lower lip, considering. Everyone onboard the scavenging habitat knew there was no correlation between the unreality and what lay underneath. Going in there would be a calculated risk. She considered, for a while. She was the statistician of the post: Ánh Ngọc’s expertise was with electronics, and it was her skills Thu accessed when opening up walls and robots and mechs and retrieving rare isotopes from their core, just as Ánh Ngọc benefited from Thu’s risk assessments. Ánh Ngọc had chosen not to go into the room, but that didn’t mean Thu had to make the same choice. The end of the month was looming, and she could hope for a nice bonus if she went over scavenging quota.
“Younger aunt?” It was Khuyên, which was … not just odd, but out of schedule. She was the previous shift’s supervisor, and when she spoke Thu could see she was in the control center of the Azure Skies’ habitat, alone.
“Thu in. What’s going on?”
Khuyên shifted, uncomfortably. “There’s a problem.”
Thu’s blood chilled. A problem large enough to have Khuyên put off decontamination? Her shift had been over for half an hour, and she should have been in her pod, going through the sequence that would bring her unreality levels back to a semblance of normalcy. The more she waited, the more risks of her implant getting irremediably contaminated by the nanites on the ship—for the unreality to take over everything and fundamentally alter the way she perceived things—at best, hallucinations that would feel uncannily real, at worst a spiralling into delirium and delusions. Then she might as well be gone, because the company sure as hell wasn’t going to waste money digging the implant out of her brain, not when she’d failed to respect the safety procedures.
“What problem?” Thu asked.
Khuyên picked her words carefully. “I think Ánh Ngọc is on her way to chimeral.”
Shit. “She came back fine,” Thu said. “She transferred her shift, her capacities … ”
“I know she did,” Khuyên said. “Exposure to unreality seems to have been well within the norm, her suit’s readings are fine.”
Thu heard the “but” that Khuyên wasn’t saying. “But she’s got symptoms.”
“Yeah.” Khuyên sighed.
Thu started to ask which ones, but she already knew, because she’d seen them with Mother, before the operation. The way Mother would stop and refuse to climb into a transport because the floor had suddenly become a gulf, the way she’d just stare at the walls and say they were bleeding monsters. Everything that had led to the Harmony Squad and the Desolate Ward, and … The thought was too much to bear. “What do you want me to do?”
“I need proof, younger aunt.”
“Of what?”
“Of how she was exposed. You know what the company will say. They’ll say she must have gone haring off on her own chasing personal targets, that there are procedures she didn’t respect—”
“And you don’t know how she got contaminated.”
“No. It’s too much for a normal shift.” Khuyên grimaced. “If you ask me, I think it’s new nanites.”
Nanites were war weapons, and the Conch Citadel was a ship full of them. They hadn’t run into variants before, not on this ship. Mutations usually didn’t show up on the scans because the sensors weren’t calibrated for random, unknowable varieties. But they’d heard the stories.
“You want me to retrace Ánh Ngọc’s steps.”
“Yes. And figure out what she did that got her so exposed. As I said, I need proof. Otherwise the company won’t pay for the operation, and you know what happens then.”
It’d be the Desolate Ward, the charity doctors, the hurried hacking into brain tissues to remove the affected implant before it could infect too much of the body. It’d be like Mother, all over again: 11 years since she’d been wounded by unreality weapons during the war, 10 years since the operation to remove her contaminated implant, and she hadn’t said a word, or moved of her own volition from her listless place against the compartment door. She’d eat, when prompted; sleep, when put to bed. In a way, it was worse. All that Thu and her family had got back from the operation was a hollowed-out puppet, devoid of spirit or soul and doing as she was told because there was nothing left within, not even the spark of life that would lead to refusal.
The company had better doctors, safer procedures. They could remove the implant, and give Ánh Ngọc another one, and it’d be seamless. But only if Khuyên and Thu and the crew of the Azure Skies could prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the damage had happened on the job and while following all instructions given in the safety briefing.
Thu would be going in blind, with no way to monitor her exposure. She wouldn’t really know if she was contaminated, because she’d lose the capacity to differentiate unreality and reality. She’d only know if she could be decontaminated when she came back and her chimerality was assessed by Central or med bots. It was a gamble, and Thu—as a statistician—really hated gambles.
But Thu had a chance to help Ánh Ngọc. She had a chance to save her friend. A chance she’d never gotten with Mother. “Of course. I’ll do it.”
“I’m taking over the shift,” Khuyên said. “Considering the circumstances.”
“The unreality—” Thu said, before she could think.
“—doesn’t take precedence over the risks to Ánh Ngọc. This is the priority. The other two on the ship can continue foraging for isotopes.”
Khuyên gestured. The control center lit up. “Nguyễn Thị Kim Khuyên underwent express decontamination from 0849 to 0918,” Central said. Their voice was uninflected and metallic.
Thu’s cheeks burnt. “Forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive,” Khuyên said. “I can withstand this shift for a bit.”
Central said, “Ánh Ngọc is in a decon-pod until further notice. Staving it off as much as we can.”
“OK. Duly noted.”
Khuyên’s face was a complex study in emotions. “Younger aunt?”
“Yes?” Thu was trying to focus on her next steps. She’d need to reconstruct Ánh Ngọc’s pathway through the bowels of the ship, figuring out where she might have been exposed, trying to see anything unusual or that stood out …
“Don’t misunderstand the briefing. No unnecessary risks. We don’t know what happened, and I don’t need a repeat. Am I clear?”
Thu swallowed. “Very.”
Thu had turned up the unreality protection on her suit to maximum. Vision was going to be a bit blurry, but she could live with that.
She began propelling herself through the ship, retracing Ánh Ngọc’s last shift. Ánh Ngọc’s memories were merging with hers, to disconcerting effect. It wasn’t the seamless, mostly unconscious flow of information she was used to, but recollections she had to dig for. She went through corridors, asking herself at every intersection how familiar they were—trying to get Ánh Ngọc’s memories to come to the surface, working out if that twinge of familiarity meant she’d gone left or right, up or down.
It’d have been so much simpler if the company had had trackers on the suits, but they were cheap, and the memories were deemed sufficient.
She hummed songs as she was going. Mother had always loved to sing, but they’d lost that, too, and the songs were all she had to cling to. Khuyên and the others would usually tease her about that, but this time they were silent, and Thu got through a whole lot of children’s nursery rhymes, lullabies, and various habitat folk songs with no comment from anyone.
It kept her distracted. It kept her from wondering if she could still see the difference between unreal and real.
Ánh Ngọc’s shift had lasted four hours; so far, Thu had done barely one. There wasn’t a high chance of overexposure, but …
So far, Thu had seen an awful lot of empty rooms—of walls burst apart, couches and berths shattered in the wake of the ship’s ending—of small immobile robots the size of fists and maintenance mechs half as tall as humans, empty hangars with the much larger skiffs and pods ripped apart for their contents.
The Conch Citadel had been the final act of a war that had ended badly: a huge, lethal ship that had been obsolete before it even launched, too large, too expensive, and surprisingly fragile in the face of enemy weapons. It had bankrupted the Đại Ánh state and changed nothing about the ultimate outcome. In the end, the ship’s Central had died, and so had its crew. Thu and her fellows were the only living beings within the wreck, scavenging the rare isotopes that could be used for the smaller projects of the post-war state.
It paid well. Well enough that Thu could send the money back home to cover Mother’s more unusual medical fees. The risk was high. Some failsafes had blown at the core of the ship, probably in its drive or in its arsenal, or both; and unreality had come spilling out, weaponized nanites spreading throughout every corridor, every ventilation shaft, every cabin and every hangar.
It—
Wait.
She had been going down a ventilation shaft, wincing at the difficulty of the maneuver—thrust, then glide and avoid the walls—when something felt … off again. Lineaged memory? No. It was Ánh Ngọc’s instincts, slowed down by the detour through Thu’s implants. A shadow had just moved, below her, at the base of the shaft.
She pinged the chat. Is anyone at those coordinates?
A resounding silence from the rest of the shift.
Just you, Khuyên said.
Shit. She wouldn’t have seen it if Ánh Ngọc hadn’t already been familiar with the route. Having the lineaged memories buffered in her implant meant Thu could focus on what stood out from the previous iteration—like mysterious shadowy movements at her destination. Had that happened to Ánh Ngọc, too? She couldn’t be sure. Memory wasn’t reliable enough.
Down the shaft, nothing. A large corridor rife with unreality. She looked at some of the walls, but the damage had been extensive below the unreality layers, and there were no isotopes to scavenge.
Whatever she’d seen was gone now.
Ahead, a set of large doors. Thu remembered, in that odd, layered way of lineaged memory, going there, into a room where she’d found some illyrium from a host of deactivated robots.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Except a nebulous sense that all wasn’t quite as it should be: small differences from Ánh Ngọc’s own run that added up to a rather large sense of unease. That, and the moving thing.
Thu didn’t believe in coincidence.
“How is Ánh Ngọc?” she asked on the comms.
Azure Skies’ Central said, “Not well.”
Ánh Ngọc was hallucinating, muttering to herself in her sleep, her knuckles scraped raw from rubbing them against the wall; damage that the berth kept healing but that kept coming back. All too familiar symptoms.
“You know this, but you need to hurry,” Azure Skies’ Central said.
“I know,” Thu said. Hurrying while remaining herself safe. Easy. She stared, again, at the corridor. Too much unreality for the readings, that was what was bothering her. Maybe the nanites were just the normal kind.
And maybe unripe figs would fall unaided from the trees.
Hurry, Azure Skies’ Central had said.
Well, she supposed she should go and check it out.
Inside, it was dark. Her suit’s readings said the temperature had gone up a notch, though of course Thu felt nothing.
As she propelled herself, arms outstretched, the room gradually lit up.
It was vast, and cavernous. There should have been no sound, but she heard her breathing, and a faint echo like the vibrations of a huge motor. Except the ship was a wreck, and the motors were offline. More unreality.
She was in deep.
“Is anyone here?” she said, before remembering she was in the vacuum of space. Great. Great going, Thu.
Crackle on the line.
“Anyone?”
Ghosts. Spirits. Unexorcised dead. The monks should have done their job when the ship first exploded, but it had been a war, and who knew what had been done when?
At the end of the room, a row of intact maintenance mechs, gleaming. An invitation. Ánh Ngọc had gone straight to them to start stripping them of their cores. Thu did the same thing, letting herself be guided by memories, vigilant for any minute change.
Something skittered, out of the corner of her eyes. Barely a speck. Something with legs, hovering fast over broken floors. Ánh Ngọc’s instincts kicked up, and Thu turned her head a fraction of a second too late and a fraction too far. Her neck winced at the unusual tension. Whatever it was had moved like a maintenance mech in vacuum. But none of them should have been working anymore. They’d died with the ship. There was nothing alive or sentient, or even operational, onboard.
She—
She needed to keep moving. She didn’t know how long she had left. At last, she reached the mechs, and stared at them. Brand new, ready to deploy. Thu remained in the middle of that impossibly bright room, those shining steel panels, those engraved characters flowing on either side of intact berths—doors that looked, at any point, like they might open on a hangar where skiffs would be flying in and out, the long slow dance of the devastating war that had laid them all bare.
Unreality. Nanites that locked you into hallucination—into the past, real or imagined. That showed you what you wanted to see at first, because it was their way into the implant.
Think think think. Too much unreality, and not enough readings on the sensors. That was where Ánh Ngọc had gotten contaminated, all right. But that many nanites couldn’t come out of nowhere. Which meant they were being produced.
She was going to need to move fast—which required Ánh Ngọc’s instincts, except she was at a disadvantage there because she didn’t have Ánh Ngọc’s body, and her muscles would struggle to adapt to an out of sync memory. Instead, she went for the next best thing: the distraction. She cut off the line on her suit, and then said into the radio, as casually as if she’d really been speaking to Khuyên, “I’m going to investigate the mechs at the far end.” She started, slowly and deliberately, her thrusters, and at the same time accessed lineage—unfamiliar instincts surged through her, and she turned, panting and gasping, muscles burning.
And saw, for a fraction of a second, a shadow that had moved. A maintenance mech with broken legs, haemorrhaging in a cloud of motor oils, cast into sharp relief by the light from the room.
It shouldn’t have been moving, but then her other thought was hers, not lineaged, and it was that she had seen that light before. Not quite the same, but close enough. It was the light when Azure Skies’ Central had come online, and it had cast Khuyên in exactly the same pattern of radiance.
Ghosts, and unexorcised spirits.
Central. Conch Citadel’s Central.
It was impossible.
Conch Citadel’s Central hadn’t survived. They couldn’t have survived. Someone would have known.
And how would they have known?
She opened up the comms again, and said, simply, “Central.” And waited, heart beating madly in her chest.
The light didn’t change, or the unreality. But the mech came back. It was slow and bleeding, and she needed to fix it, or to kill it and cannibalize it. It was lineaged, but no less powerful an urge. The mech moved itself, carefully, to face her, its crown of small, octagonal eyes blinking in that impossible light.
How long did she have left, before she went Ánh Ngọc’s way? Five minutes? 10? She didn’t know.
“War.” The voice hissed over her comms, breaking into static, the words bleeding the same way as the mech.
“I don’t understand.”
“War,” the voice whispered again. “Duty to fight.”
“The war is over!” It had done enough damage. It had taken Mother from her, and they all labored in its wreckage.
More skittering, and more mechs, coming toward her, loosely surrounding her in a sphere above and below, bleeding motor oils.
Not just motor oil. “Nanites,” Thu said. “You’re making nanites.” New ones. Improved ones. Or just decayed ones that the suits couldn’t read anymore.
“A duty to fight,” the voice that had been Central whispered on the comms. It was breaking apart, and the words echoed on top of one another—and the room’s walls had started to bleed, faintly but persistently. “Stay hidden. Prepare. Fight.”
Not just spontaneous nanite mutations, but deliberate design. A ship stuck in the past, preparing for fights that had ended for everyone else, making a long, slow, desperate string of weapons in the midst of its own wreck, unable to see that it was all over.
Nanites.
Shit shit. Thu was getting contaminated the same way Ánh Ngọc had been.
Think. She needed evidence. And she didn’t have that. She had a pretty story with suggestive videos, but nothing that would induce the company to shell out money.
She needed the source of the nanites, which meant one of the mechs. That was going to be hard. She could take one apart and remove the core that kept it from going—but it’d be lineaged memory and she’d go slowly, and she wasn't going to have time for slowly. Not to mention dragging a fairly large piece of equipment—mechs were the same size as her torso.
What did Central want anyway? Did they even remember?
“Your heartbeat’s gone through the roof,” Khuyên’s voice said on Thu’s other comms channel. Then a sharp spike of static on her comms, and her voice started fragmenting and going away, the same way Central’s voice was. The other channel back to Azure Skies was just dead, and Thu couldn't raise anyone on it. She'd been blocked by some kind of heavy encryption.
“You found me,” Central said. “Clever.” Their voice went high-pitched, feverish.
The mechs spun around Thu, blocking her path, and Thu didn’t know what to do, how to exit. She didn’t know how she could fix any of it, how she could succeed at all in saving Ánh Ngọc, in saving herself. It was like Mother again, nothing she did or said was making any difference.
The mechs were moving. She evaded the first one with her thrusters, but the next one bumped her back, again and again, toward the center of the room. The sound on the comms was fractured, no longer a voice and no longer uttering words she could recognize. She was being herded deeper and deeper into the room—not precisely nor kindly, but it didn’t need to be.
The thought came with the stark, sharp clarity of a naked blade: Central was going to kill her. This wasn’t about nanites anymore; they thought they were fighting a war and Thu would broadcast their existence to the enemy. An absurd war that had ended 20 years ago. “Please,” she said. Within her, lineaged memory waiting, watching mechs for their weak points. Thu could reach out to the one by her left hand, grab the broken leg and the trailing cable—the second one, not the first—and then twist it, just like that, and the mech was going to blank out for five seconds while its system restarted—which would give her a little more time to expose the core and deactivate that.
It was a shit plan. Tight timings, uncertain results, dicey even for Ánh Ngọc. But it was the best plan Thu had to save them both.
In her ears, Central’s comms was still happening.
There was a shining circle on the floor below Thu, glowing, its light fracturing upward as it got clearer and clearer, its edges bending, trying to form a sphere around her. It looked like a disintegration pattern, the kind of traps that zapped intruders out of existence. If it encircled her, it’d be over. It didn’t matter if it was unreality or not.
She had to act. Just reach out, and grab the cable, and go as fast as she could with the mech in her arms.
Why did she not want to, then?
Part of the job of a statistician is recognizing when patterns are off. And something was not quite right, a model not quite fitting the curve.
Mechs didn’t have weapons, but they didn’t need to. With those numbers, all they needed to do was overwhelm Thu, and tear apart her suit. She’d die with the water in her skin and in her blood boiling away, and her lungs collapsing on themselves. Why herd her unless they meant her to survive?
But why?
You found me.
The comms. That whine on the comms—except it was too structured, and too deliberate to be random. She’d assumed speech had fractured, but it hadn’t really, had it? It had been becoming more and more high-pitched, and then collapsing into incoherence. What if it hadn’t collapsed, but simply become inaudible to her?
Recording buffer was short, but she only needed a few moments. The mechs were crowding her closer, and she was within a loose sphere that was tightening fast, the light blinding her.
Just a few moments.
Cycle the whole thing through a filter, shifting the base frequencies, moving things around, trying to find again the rhythm she’d heard before from Central—
Oh.
Oh.
It wasn’t speech. Not exactly. It wasn’t words, either. It was a wordless, high-pitched hum. Not just a hum. A song.
The bamboo bridge is rough and difficult to cross …
As you go to school to learn, I attend the school of life …
Not just any song, but a lullaby she’d been humming as she moved through the ship. It shifted as she listened to it, fading away into another one of the songs Mother had so loved, the ones they’d lost after the operation. In the background, faint and fuzzy and as distant as beneath a pane of glass, the other channel, with Khuyên and the Azure Skies’ Central.
You found me.
It hadn’t been anger, or bitterness, but relief.
Sometimes, lineaged memory and instincts—like any memory, any instincts—were wrong.
Citadel’s Central wasn’t bloodthirsty. They were deeply, terribly lonely. The forming sphere wasn’t a disintegration pattern. It was a cage that would hold her. They wanted her to stay. “Wait,” Thu said. “Wait!”
The mechs paused, for a fraction of a second, looking at her.
She had no idea what she could say. How did one talk to a homicidal damaged Central, tell them that they needed to stop, that she needed the mech? How could she save Ánh Ngọc?
“The war is over,” she said. “You—you’re not bound by the past anymore.” She thought of Mother as she was saying that, she thought of Ánh Ngọc’s lineaged memories and how sometimes they helped and sometimes they didn’t. She thought of the shadow that they all labored under, the devastation they plundered to find a way to survive—of the long, long tail of damage done by unreality, by the war. She thought about how sometimes one could get it all wrong, that she wasn’t there to be a hero or fix anything all by herself, because the truth was that nothing, not even saving Ánh Ngọc, would bring Mother back or bring Thu absolution for failing to save her.
She didn’t have the words to convince Citadel’s Central, but there was another Central out there who spoke the same language.
“You’re not alone,” she said, and opened up all the accesses to all her channels in her comms interface: the virtual equivalent of throwing her link to Azure Skies into stark relief. Citadel's Central would now remember that Thu had two comms channels: the one in which they and Thu talked to each other, and the other one, Thu's link back to Khuyên and Azure Skies' Central. The channel Citadel's Central had locked away beneath layers of encryptions. “I’m not alone.”
Silence, on the comms. Thu said to Citadel's Central, “There’s another Central. There are people. You can hear them.”
Still silence. Then, “Survivors?” Citadel's Central asked.
Thu said nothing. She just waited. She felt more than saw it—the encryption lifting, the other channel’s sound level increasing, the shift in tonalities back to within human hearing.
“Elder aunt,” Thu said, flatly.
Khuyên’s voice was stressed. “Younger aunt. We’re running—”
“I need Central,” Thu said. “Now.”
“What is it?” Azure Skies’ Central said, coming online. “Oh.” A silence. Then communications shifting and changing, and moving beyond words altogether. The mechs were silent and still, the sphere around Thu slowly cycling through lights—the walls starting to bend toward her—a persistent series of bloody spots forming across her field of vision. How long did she have, now? Would the company help her, or was she going the same way as Mother? She didn’t have the energy left to care.
At long last, someone spoke. Azure Skies’ Central. “You can go.”
“Citadel—”
“They’ll be fine,” Azure Skies’ Central said, in a way that suggested a lot of explanations and a lot of paperwork.
“You won’t be if you stay here.” It was Khuyên’s voice.
Thu got her thrusters back online, and pushed outward. The sphere vanished. The mechs around her parted—except a single one, the first one she’d seen, limping across the floor, staring at her.
“You’re not alone,” Citadel’s Central said, and it wasn’t clear to whom they were speaking.
For Ánh Ngọc.
You’re not alone.
Survivors.
Thu reached out and wrapped her arms around the mech, and pushed forward again—through empty hangars and corridors flooded with unreality, through cabins with gutted berths and workshops filled with the silence of death. Within her, lineage and a wordless, heart-breaking lullaby. Thu hugged the mech close to her chest, and went on—rising free from the wreck of the ship and its unexorcised ghosts.
- Introduction: The Beguiling, Troubling Future of Work, by Diana M. Pho
- Work Ethics, by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
- Remembrance, by Lexi Pandell
- The Long Tail, by Aliette de Bodard
- Collaborative Configurations of Minds, by Lettie Prell
- Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love, by Usman T. Malik
- ars longa, by Tade Thompson
