“Armor, Kori,” they say, reminding me to activate the collapsed pieces around my body, from the heavy filtration helmet to the ribbed boots.
This armor protects me from so much more than the surface’s high temperatures. If the atmosphere ever touched me, through even the slightest fissure in my gear, I’d be infected with Pagomènos’s radiation, never to be the same. With exposure that direct, I would be doomed to die, possibly mutating along the way into something not unlike the toothy birds or oversized snakes of the Passage. An animal, without thought or conscience.
Unlike the colony we call home, the Morpheus Market doesn’t purge all radiation despite being so deep underground. No one is entirely certain if it’s because the expense would be too great or because requiring protective gear further ensures anonymity of buyers and sellers.
Absently, I feel for the heatshot pistol at my waist. Once initial laser weaponry was lost to the Cataclysm, the Pagonians had to improvise. Dayfolk designed heatshot weapons to be continually powered by the Daylands’ brutally hot atmosphere, rather than relying on bullets. More advanced than Earthside weapons, but weaker than what ought to have been. Quite the metaphor for life on this forsaken planet, honestly.
Charonslows its movement, the exit ramp extending to release us before the starship enters patient orbit around the lift. Aspect follows me to the ground and toward the faint circular outline of an entrance. I slip one hand into my pocket, retrieving my coveted individual-access card, and wave it over the silhouette. The ground shudders and bucks. Aspect stumbles, but I stand tall, smiling behind my helmet, never so alive anywhere else.
If this were any other rote assignment, I would chafe against the concept of returning so soon after my last visit, but this is the Morpheus Market. My memory runs may be sanctioned by Chloe, but this is one place where she has no control over what else I do. What I learn. Who I meet. What I allow myself to imagine I become.
Somewhere amidst these competing vendors, hidden innocuously amidst forgettable wares, there must be a memory that can awaken Aspect’s sentience. I may officially be here on government business, but that boring chore isn’t what accelerates my heartbeat to a gallop as the door in the floor hisses open, unveiling the market’s entrance lift. I take Aspect by the hand and step onto the panel, squaring my shoulders, taking and holding a deep, deliberate breath.This time.Surely this time, I’ll take one step closer to achieving my real goal: finding the right shard of human experience to imbue a robot with a soul.
If only I knew what to look for.
For an instant, as the lift lowers us into the elevator shaft, we’re coated in complete darkness. Then circles of lights illuminate all around us, blinking from top to bottom of the elevator chamber.
“Welcome, Monarch,” the security voice intones. The elevator drops into an immediate descent so fast that my stomach threatens to hop into my throat.
The elevator then stops almost as sharply. “Welcome to the Morpheus Market.” The door slides open, and Aspect toddles after me as the hustle and bustle of memories bought and sold absorbs us once again.
I never know what memories for Aspect might catch my eye. Or Aspect’s simulated eyes, for that matter. On one memorable journey, I had to practically drag Aspect by one leg away from a booth dedicated to, shall we say,adultmemories, as Aspect riddled me with unwanted questions about intimacy and bondage.
This robot has more than enough idiosyncrasies without introducing queries like, “Kori, what ishorny?” The question very nearly made me trip and fall on my face at the time. I very nearly said something about Hyrra’s careful hands tinkering with the mechs. But I caught myself.
On this visit, on the second floor, Aspect fixates on something else entirely. A shimmering pink sign that says,SEA MEAT. Being a mech,Aspect can’t taste or smell, so the prospect of recalled food carries much more significance for them. The memory carries a low credit cost, too; the dayfolk colony breeds fish in an artificial environment without much difficulty.
I can’t imagine who, besides Aspect, would consider this memory valuable or notable. Seafood definitely won’t be a human experience that rattles Aspect’s artificial brain into realizing they are a person having an independent, autonomous, meaningful experience of being alive. But I can’t say no to those pleading optical processors, so I scan my card and make the purchase with standard credits, hushing Aspect all the while.
Bringing a modified mech for security or assistance purposes is normal in the Morpheus Market. The mech personally requesting a simulated experience with seafood is … not. Better not to draw undue attention to ourselves, and better to entertain Aspect while I keep my eyes open for the truly right memory.
Like bribing a toddler with sugar, I promise Aspect they can access the sea meat memory when we return toCharon, but only if they behave. That means no more loud questions about human mating rituals in public, not gripping my hand tightly enough to threaten the integrity of my fingers, and staying close at all times, ridiculous runway gait be damned.
Aspect nods eagerly as we turn away from the booth. I can’t help but sigh and shake my head, even though my frustration isn’t with them. “Always the same,” I mutter to myself, under my breath. “Food. Fistfights. Songs. Sex.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I need somethingelse.” But I have no idea what, not in the slightest idea.
For all I know, the barrier to Aspect’s awakening could be not the absence of something, but thepresenceof a memory I’ve already installed. And what would I do then? Uninstall it? Deprive them of an experience I already offered as a gift, which has become their own? That would make me no better than the planet’s radiation.
And I’ve tried—oh, how I’ve tried, on every ill-fated visit here—asking vendors for something weird, something different, something positivelyodd.But it always results in obvious discomfort and confusion from the vendor, who often stares at me like I tried to order a sandwich at a memory store. Sometimes they believe that I’m seeking rightfully illegal, exploitative, or heinously violent material, which I most definitely donotwant (and have reported to the Coalition when necessary). Once the hopelessly awkward conversation is over, I have to run along, before I raise so much suspicion about my true motives that I getmyselfreported.
“Somethingelse.” I grunt, my footsteps unnecessarily heavy as we trudge away from this useless, useless Sea Meat booth.
At the corner of my eye, at the very edge of my peripheral vision, I think I see … a smudge? A splatter of ink, forming and re-forming. But as soon as I look, the shape is gone. My exasperation is veering into hallucination at this point. Is that what it will take to awaken Aspect? A final step over the edge, into a proper evil scientist?
Our path to the elevators and down to the third floor is a blur, my mind elsewhere. Eventually, we reach my mother’s memory vendor. Aspect tugs pleadingly at my elbow throughout the entire transaction. If their optical processors could widen, they’d be round wheels of hope right now. “Sea meat soon, Kori?”
“Soon.” I pat them on the head briefly.
My attention is painfully split. After the odd recollection of Jelza I experienced, I can’t help but wonder what this new Morpheus sphere contains that my mother could want. I’m also half-feral with the desire to find a properly unique, mechanically significant memory to install in Aspect. And mild annoyance at this entire sea meat diversion still simmers underneath my skin.
I pocket the Morpheus sphere for my mother, waving Aspect away from the vendor’s booth.
That’s when another shadow moves.
It’s distinct this time, far from an imaginary ink splatter. My peripheral vision distinguishes something akin to limbs. With my pulse pounding in my temples, my hand flies automatically to the heatshot pistol at my waist. “Who’s there?”
A voice like oil speaks from everywhere and nowhere at once. “Not here.”
A whirl of … fabric? The wave of a hand? Something directs me toward an accidental alleyway, wedged between two memory booths—just barely wide enough to allow two or three bodies to squish in and have a less-than-public conversation.
