Engines of Oblivion Read online

  For a single, bizarre moment, Natalie did imagine herself as the person she’d wanted to be once upon a time: in heels, in silver tattoos, her chin aloft. The person she might have been, if the dice rolled differently, if she’d been born into Sharma’s world. A dragon in a golden cage, handcuffed to a life as strict as an indenture’s, thinking she was free.

  She breathed out, banishing the thought.

  “That’s a real nice sales pitch, Sharma. But you don’t understand them, and you sure as hell can’t make decisions for them.”

  “And you do?” Her mouth was a sneer.

  “Me? I don’t need to understand. I’m just a grunt. I get gut feelings. And mine tells me—” She hauled in a breath. Here, at least, her lungs were clear. “That even if I could remember whatever you want me to remember, I wouldn’t want to.”

  But Sharma didn’t hear that last portion; the doctor-god’s attention was already somewhere else, her eyes checking the rafters, her body suddenly straight. Twenty-Five flickered out around her in shards of light. And then Natalie heard what the doctor was hearing—a faraway, frighteningly familiar voice whispering in her ear, a rushing that took her head and twisted it back into a slurping—

  —I will find you—

  She felt like she couldn’t breathe. There was a cacophony in her head, a whirling, whistling song that reminded her of night sirens in Albany, of the scent of salt and river garbage, of the geometry of trauma.

  “It’s Solano, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “I’ve been waiting for him to arrive. Two master nodes cannot occupy the same space. I’ll take care of it,” Sharma said, and met Natalie’s eyes. Natalie heaved out a final, hot breath and shoved herself to her feet, feeling awash with cracking violence.

  “I’ll help.”

  “You’re on his system. You can’t.”

  “Doc—”

  “All you can do is die, and I’m not done with your recode. Stay.”

  She swept out, toward the party; the massive room felt suddenly claustrophobic, like she were folded in a dollhouse under a massive unblinking eye. It had the tenor of an expectation, an order. But Natalie was on Solano’s network, not Sharma’s, and Sharma had no power over her.

  And she was never one to stay, never one to wait, not when her life was in danger, so she followed her out, into the blue hallway, watched Sharma’s atomic sleeves disappear into the garden, heard the exhalations of people talking. She lay her fingers lightly on the old-fashioned doorknob. Before she could open it herself, the thing swung open.

  She saw a gaunt man in a uniform Natalie had never seen before—a frillier, less dirty version of the heavy engineer’s apron Len had used on a daily basis. He looked peaked, transparent, wispy at the edges, like he couldn’t decide if he existed or not.

  “Ms. Sharma,” he said. “Congratulations on your elevation. The Solano boy is waiting for you by the ice sculpture.”

  “I’m not her.”

  “Enjoy your evening,” he said.

  Natalie stopped. “Right. This is her world, so it’s her memory. I get it.”

  The man simply extended his hand toward the gathering, toward the twinkling lights and the sparkling stars above.

  She had no idea what an elevation was, or why Sharma would throw a party for it, but as long as the permissions recognized her as valid, she wasn’t going to complain. A quick cast of her eyes to the vast, imaginary sky, and the barely there, familiar constellations above, confirmed an initial theory.

  “This is what,” she said, “Earth?”

  “Enjoy your evening,” he repeated.

  The air outside the building smelled sweet and bright, like she imagined it might in the northern mountains far away from the oily, rising river. Nearby, she saw tables laden with ice sculptures and food—pastries, meat, iced cakes larger than her head. Just beyond the corner, lost to mist, she heard skeins of live music and the rush of feet dancing underneath a gossamer tent. Auroran birthrights loved their expensive affectations, their old-style parties, the sheer wasteful tradition of crystal and metal and other things that could be used to cut into flesh as easily as mushrooms and vat-meat, the trappings of an Earth that had long since ceased to exist. The ground felt spongy, wet from a recent rain—God, Natalie thought, the details of this place. It must have been a formative memory for Sharma.

  The only thing she had to compare to this was an episode of Alien Attack Squad she’d watched with Len—it had been set at a party like this, actresses dripping with metal and crystal and inlaid diamonds, high heels twirling, skirts swirling, and even that had been less interesting than the pair of engineer’s hands that lingered near hers, so close. Too close.

  Bells rang somewhere on the breeze. Alarm bells. She stumbled, then saw flashes of her body on the floor of the computer core, seizing, doctors surrounding it—

  Stop fucking with my immersion, she wanted to whisper, like this was any normal mission, like she wasn’t shaking, like she wasn’t scared, like—

  —like Solano wasn’t sitting right there.

  She ducked behind a table.

  Solano and Sharma sat together in garden chairs at the edge of the party near the sheer white cliffside, an old-style cigarette hanging loose between his fingers. He took a drag and handed it to Sharma. The smoke mingled over their heads in an amiable cloud, like they were friends, like they were—

  —Allies?

  Both of them were wearing vintage clothing that fit in with the scene, gold-trimmed finery that even Natalie’s ill-trained eye knew to be years out of date. She imagined that this version of Solano was the man he wanted everyone to see, the man that even a birthright’s resources struggled to maintain: a set of chiseled cheekbones over a flat belly and bones that hadn’t yet been filled out by the beautiful life. His hair was drawn by a grav-comb in absurd triangular whorls, and his heels shone bright with encrusted diamonds.

  Sharma hadn’t changed so much as shifted; she looked every inch her age, wrinkles carved into familiar places, and every glistening star on her dress was crammed with Vaisong.

  “It makes sense you’d think of this place,” Solano said, after a moment’s drag on the cigarette. “Our last dance. Our last hurrah.”

  Sharma frowned. “I conjured this place for my Society. You weren’t invited.”

  “But I’m here,” Solano said.

  “Alas.”

  He leaned forward. “Did you think I’d just bury your body without looking at it? That was your fatal mistake. Underestimating Auroran R&D.”

  Sharma dropped the cigarette on the ground, not even bothering to put it out. “If you’re pushing for détente by putting on your peacock hat, you’ve come to the wrong person.”

  He shrugged. “You have Vancouver pinned. It looks like you intend to force Aurora’s decision in the matter by trapping its board and suborning its computer core with your operatives. Meanwhile, my Company is adapting faster to the new way than your Society ever could. It’s uncouth.”

  “Uncouth is forcing your way into someone else’s world.”

  His eyes flickered to the gem at her throat, rested there, pushed into a dark little grin. “That makes two of us, then.”

  She tossed her chin back, staring at the fraudulent stars above. She slowly sat up, slowly slid one leg underneath. “This better not be about me.”

  “Just as, for you, it’s always been about me.”

  Sharma choked out an incredulous laugh. “That’s rich.”

  “Why else would you pick our elevation party for this little chat?”

  Her eyes widened. “Our elevation was thirty years ago. Do you honestly expect me to remember why you’re so goddamn prickly about it?”

  The CEO sounded incredulous. “You walked away from me, Reva. Right over there by the ice sculpture. I offered the best contract you were going to get, and you turned me down, like I was nobody. Like I was worse than nobody. This was the worst night of my life.”

  Sharma rolled her eyes. “I had b
igger dreams than fucking you.”

  “Bigger dreams? Your line was seconded for CEO after mine. What bigger dreams could you get? Our dynasty could have held on to power in Aurora for decades. Instead, you disappear for years and then you come back and contract with that fucker Davin—”

  She stared. “Do not talk about Davin. Or the boys.”

  “They’re dead. I can say what I like.”

  “There are more important things than your fucking ego, Joseph.”

  “No, I understand now. I get it,” he said. He rose from his chair, slow and deliberate, then fished a cigarette from his pocket. He flipped it, lighting the filter from inside, and raised it to his lips. “You used them, too. It’s all one big game.”

  “A game.” Her voice was angry now. “I don’t play games.”

  Click. Click. Natalie heard the advance of high heels on stone, and she watched him dip his hand, offer the cigarette to Sharma. When she didn’t take it, when she touched the sapphire at her neck instead, he grabbed her wrist and hauled her to her feet. Natalie’s throat caught in a silenced gasp, and from Sharma’s stunned eyes, the way she swayed on her feet, she wasn’t the only one so surprised he could do it.

  “No games? Let’s dance, then.”

  “You can’t,” Sharma mumbled. “You can’t touch me here, not unless I allow it—”

  He spun her, stopping her wavering in her steps. His eyes seemed lit from within, and for the first time, Sharma’s own light sputtered. “You just don’t get it. You think you’ve been leading the dance this entire time. But in our long dance, I lead. I always led.”

  “You can’t touch me,” Sharma whispered.

  “But I am. I have saved you so many times, Reva. Your lab on Tribulation; who do you think turned a blind eye, when the board would have reported you to the Corporate Alliance? I lost three of my best cruisers to make sure you were saved, and testified that the Vai killed them, when I knew it was you.”

  “Come, now, you earned a tidy profit from that.”

  He dragged her closer, close enough for his breath to touch Sharma’s cheek, and his lips nestled there for a second, and Sharma winced—

  “What about the year you infiltrated Bittersweet on the Society’s behalf, when you were supposed to be working on Medellin? The results that you hid from me—”

  “Don’t think I didn’t find your spy codes, your bugs, your listening ears—did you think that would convince me to come home? That’s abuse, Joseph, not love.”

  “It’s self-interest against a corporate enemy. You played a pretty incredible game of chicken, Reva, but it’s over now.”

  Sharma laughed, like broken glass, like cut, razor’s-edge glitter, and worked her wrist free, snapping her outstretched fingers protectively over the singing sapphire. “This is my world. It’s poetry. It’s perfect. You have a broken, hacked-together Heart and a bunch of stooges. You can’t win.”

  Natalie tightened, her estimation of the situation turning over on its side. This was Sharma’s world, wasn’t it? Sharma was the Vai master node, its center, its commander? She’d integrated as the Vai master node after tossing out the real one, she’d chased Solano’s small fleet to this quiet place in the universe, she had control over the millions of Vai souls and whatever other Sacrament Society reps were uploading, this was the doctor’s memory—

  “You’ve forgotten,” he said. His voice dipped. Became almost kind—an executive’s kindness, veiled in lies and chains and expectations. “We’ve known who you are for a very long time. We’ve been preparing for this moment.”

  Her voice dropped. “You stole my life’s work.”

  “We perfected your research.” Solano frowned. “That’s how it’s done, Reva. You taught me that. I gave up a lot to get here.”

  “How dare you. I have given up more than you’ll ever have,” she spat.

  “That’s true. And I’m sorry.”

  “How?” spat Sharma.

  A shark-like smile spread over Solano’s lips. “I really wonder how you’ve done it, all these years, taking to your own head with a melon baller, dumping it out, shoving it all in again afterward like a puzzle with missing pieces. You’re still you, Reva, still so recognizably yourself, and it’s amazing you didn’t drop the ball years ago.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “And I still haven’t.”

  He paced. “You remember all of this—first-contract night, right down to the flavor of the amasijos—but you don’t remember that you put a data drive in your pocket before the Heart ruined Tribulation, when you knew you were going to live through Ash Jackson’s bloody feint. A doctor found it when she rescued you. You never even thought to look, because your own damned weapon took that memory from you. You got sloppy.”

  Natalie’s fist tightened through this exchange, had made red, smarting half-moons in her palm, had crafted rubber bands of her legs. She tasted a strange electricity in the air, a tangible tang of anticipation, as tart as the too-quick, dragged-out moment before a fistfight. This is what adrenaline tastes like, she thought. I’m going to have to choose, she thought, I’m going to have to pick one over the other. Aurora. The Society.

  Cliffside, Reva started to shake, and she raised her hands, turning them over and over again, staring at her nails, her fingers, her palms. “There are no blanks. I am the master node.”

  He took two small steps toward her, his face smug. “Certainly you know how memory works, Reva. How it fills in the blanks with fiction to make your universe make sense. Details. Entire days. The space inside the blink of your eyelids.”

  Natalie felt a cold wind behind her, blowing in from the building behind her, and she took her eyes off the altercation long enough to see that they had company. People—no, she thought, not people, ghosts, almost people—pouring into the hallway, passing behind the windows, filing past.

  Some were people she knew, people from Europa and Vancouver. They had the short hair of indentures, the same skinny exhaustion Natalie had seen on her own frame. But the men were drawn wrong, the women sketched off-kilter; their eyes were too big in some cases, or their waists were twisted, or their feet dragged, like physics no longer mattered—people rendered by an alien engine that couldn’t quite understand them, adulterated, degraded, walking down a large staircase leading to the city below.

  And the city—

  —it had looked normal before, like Earth, like Albany and the Hudson basin, all jagged and ragged and flooded and dead. But she could now see buildings that could only be real in the imagination, or perhaps, in the imagination of a Vai: a thousand stories tall, wild with protrusions, with tentacles, with bridges and bindings and fantastical twisted towers winding through needless streets, reaching up to the sky, dancing out into endless silver forests, proliferating like algae on a broken ocean: the Vai aesthetic, the Vai framework, forced into human restrictions.

  For the first time Natalie had ever seen, Sharma looked scared. She clutched at the sapphire. It glowed, and silver light began to pour through it, through her fingers, though they struggled to prevent it, struggled to cover it—

  “You didn’t even ask, did you?” she hissed. “At least with the Sacrament Society, they consented.”

  “They have contracts. As for your Society—”

  “We worked for it—but look at them, Joseph. They don’t know where they are. They’re lost, they’ll be of no use to you—”

  “I don’t need their souls.”

  Reva breathed in, shuddering. “That’s sick.”

  “But that’s the problem with ascending to alien godhood, Reva,” Solano said. “Makes it a bit hard to sweat the details back home, doesn’t it, when you’re off piloting an alien fleet or whatever. My alien fleet.”

  “I won’t let you do this,” Sharma said.

  “You already have.”

  Natalie’s hand was wrapped against the table leg, and for a moment she wondered if the pain she felt was expectation, was memory. How had she not seen that there was more to this tha
n the proxy rig, that Vancouver had been working on small puzzle pieces to fit into a larger picture? Oh, she’d been covering up her complicated feelings, trying to stay drunk enough or at work enough to forget about Ash and what she’d done in the bugout bay.

  And she should have realized what the proxy rig was doing when she’d been on Bittersweet, that it wasn’t just cameras and controls—that her mind had been on the planet, that she’d triggered that weapon—and all the while, Solano had been sewing up indentures’ minds through Ingest and delivering them straight to hell, tattoos only, no memory device needed.

  He’d just needed nanotech to move his own Heart from a dream to reality, to upload human mind after human mind. He’d needed Kate. When Kate was gone, used up, they’d exercise their right on the memory device, they’d stick her in. And then—who? Ward? Others? A grand corporate machine, gobbling up bodies and brains—

  Ingest, she thought. It was right there. Right there in the damn word.

  “I’ll fight you,” Sharma whispered.

  “Oh, fight. Fight all you want, darling.” He lifted his index finger and curled it around the sapphire. “I think this is going to look good on me.”

  Sharma tried to punch him.

  From her hiding spot, wincing, Natalie saw Sharma’s arm twitch, saw her cast it violently toward him, saw it catch an inch from his face—and then saw her go still, as if she could not move. Natalie felt the following tectonic howl in her bones; the people on the staircase paused, looked up with their scared clearwater eyes. And Sharma had enslaved the Vai, made them into a bauble for her own unknown task, but this—

  —Sharma had the code she needed to stop this. She couldn’t let the doctor die. But Sharma wasn’t a soldier. She couldn’t protect herself.