But I was shaking and I couldn’t route around it.
There was no subroutine for this: the sick weight of what it meant to be human, with no guarantees, and everything to lose.
I was just an unstable compilation of meat and stolen memory slots—barely parsed, still buffering. No backups. No failsafes. And if anything happened to Sirena, I wouldn’t be able to reboot.
I went up to theHelepolis’s top deck while skiffs from the other yachts buzzed in. One of the prospective buyers came overin his own helicopter, landing on theHelepolis’s second landing pad.
There were more true humans here than anywhere else on the ship.
Servers moved like soldiers, setting out perfect rows of gilded amuse-bouches: saffron-spritzed scallops, black truffle macarons, oysters on pink salt beds kissed with atomized gin mist. Someone uncorked a bottle of Salon 2008 with a saber. Another leaned down to adjust the placement of caviar pearls in front of an ice sculpture shaped like a currency symbol I couldn’t place.
And at the end of the table, on a small crystalline dais, sat Kelly’s head—still in its jar, still vividly alive, and still profoundly annoyed. We made eye contact. He winked once before resuming his multilingual tirade at everyone who passed by.
Then the buyers arrived. The men disembarking from the other yachts greeted one another like members of rival dynasties—polished, predatory, perfumed.
Linen blazers, loose collars, timepieces that cost more than some entire ecosystems.
Meanwhile, Sirena waited inside the yacht itself, in a holding room with no windows and one exit—a jewel in a box. A hostage in a cell. I tracked her through every available feed, her vitals running just beneath mine, a phantom pulse beneath my skin.
The feel of the air up here was hotter than I’d anticipated.
32.4°C. Humidity hovering at 68%.
I’d known the numbers, yes—had modeled them. Accounted for them.
But until this moment, I hadn’tfeltwhat they meant.
Just like I hadn’t known howfullyI could experience love until I’d taken over this body.
Voss came out, looking like a tropical prince and holding one of the tablets meant to control Sirena. He walked over to me.
“Going to a funeral later?” he asked, looking over my suit.
I managed to hold the wordsI hopebehind my teeth, and give him, “It was clean,” instead.
“We’re waiting on our last buyer, sir,” said the same assistant who’d emailed me, coming up to stand slightly behind Voss, his very visible right-hand man.
“Mingle,” Voss commanded, before heading out himself to do the same.
His assistant glared at me from behind fashionable glasses and flanked Voss on his way to the caviar.
And so did I. I moved into the crowd, letting my ears catch a scrap of conversation as I passed: “My great-aunt used to have one of these.” Kojiro Takamatsu, a Japanese technology tycoon, said, gesturing toward Kelly. “She kept hers in a jar, too. Swore it could tell the future.”
“Could it?” Alonzo Verdejo asked. A Chilean mining magnate, who’d built his empire on lithium and broken backs.
“I don’t know.” Takamatsu chuckled. “Every time we took it out to play, it tried to bite us. It was a nasty thing.”
As I wasn’t any good at small talk, and I’d never owned a Dullahan’s head, I mingled the only way I knew how.
Not with the men, but with their machines.
Each yacht had its own impressive security—layered encryptions, rotating keys, sandboxed subnets that weren’t supposed to talk to one another.
But humans never let their toys stay silent for long.
Someone always wanted to stream the sunset, to sync a smartwatch, to text a mistress from the wrong account.
And that was all the bridge I needed.
