Unconsciously, I look to Aspect, uselessly hoping for an expression of understanding. It’s a pointless exercise given that A) Aspect’s face is locked in a singular expression, complete with a slightly crooked mouth, courtesy of my negligible art skills, and B) Aspect is presently experiencing their new fishy memory for at least the eleventh time.
I sigh, throwing my head back against the padded pilot’s seat, eyes sliding shut. Not knowing things makes me itchy all over. Sleep creeps at the edges of my mind, pressing in like a soft blanket, and briefly, despite myself, I almost drift. Then a persistent beeping startles me fully awake. In a pocket of my utility belt, something is vibrating so violently that it hurts my hip bone. Is my comms tablet having a digital seizure? Am I losing my grip on reality from all these recent dives into other people’s memories? I fumble in the pocket, but it’s not the one that contains my comms tablet at all.
It’s the pocket where I stashed the gremlin’s business card.
The card, incessantly shuddering, continues to freak out once I have it back in my hands, but it doesn’t appear to have any sort of interactable interface. Unless …
I tear off my gloves, safe from the planet’s radiation withinCharon, and press one warm, open palm directly to the card’s surface. It unfolds like an alien origami flower, the pistil emanating a pulsing emerald glow.
For an instant of purest terror, I fear I’ve been foolish enough to willingly accept a bizarre bomb. I contemplate crushing the false business card in my fist and lobbing it out the nearest trash chute to rot in the Passage below. Then the emerald sheen intensifies, thin lines like pollen rising from the pistil until they coalesce into a creature’s cloaked shape.
Not a human. At least, not anymore. While it’s impossible to identify colors from a purely green hologram, the depicted stranger’s skin isdrawn tightly across thick, punchy muscles. They have horns, but small ones, barely visible through the sheet of long wavy hair that descends past their shoulders—and by shoulders, I very much mean the plural. Six arms, with no sign of any legs. A tail, too, extends past the spine, laced all around with spikes. A single eye in the center of the face looks out at me.
A voice, filtered so severely as to be unidentifiable, hisses through the device’s static. The only clear distinction I can make is that by the pitch and intonation, it’s likely a woman. “Hello, Monarch.”
Pagonians don’t have holographic one-to-one communications, which means this must be pre-recorded. But even so, hearing my code name directly from this increasingly weird gizmo sends a chill down my spine. I almost drop the device entirely, steadying one of my wrists with the other.
“Who are you—?” I start, despite myself, as the recording continues to speak over me, unbothered.
“Your people use code names for transactions such as this,” says the hologram, the image hissing and spitting between syllables, brightness flickering in and out like a market sign with a dying battery. Even so, I can tell it’s not the same voice as the gremlin I encountered in the Morpheus Market. No, they were only my entry point into something far more complicated. “So you may call meAlpha.”
Most code names are more memorable, based upon former Earthside animals, bits of barely remembered geography, or what few historical figures we’ve preserved on Pagomènos. But I suppose the first of an ancient alphabet is suitable enough.
“I seek a memory,” the stranger—Alpha—says, “of the Daylands sun. And I suspect you seek a memory of another kind, another perspective. One that you will never find in the Morpheus Market. A moment as theother, that your people barely dare to fathom. A memory of the nightfolk.”
My heart leaps, my stomach dropping at the same time, dizziness overtaking me. Alpha might as well have offered me a compassthat doesn’t point north, a smell I could hear, a word in a language spoken only between constellations.A memory of the nightfolk.Such a thing has never been done,shouldnever be done, to a degree so much more severe than my experiments with Aspect, it threatens to make me nauseous. How would a nightfolk even remove and encapsulate a memory, without a dayfolk Morpheus chip in their head? How is this even happening?
And why, despite the floor seemingly spinning beneath my feet, do I know for certain that my stubborn hope is about to pummel my fear in a fight?
“When you are ready”—the confidence ofwhen, notif, is staggering, but I suppose I’ve already fallen interminably far from the Coalition’s grace—“meet me by the Triple Crown, at the base of the Second Spire.”
Swearing, I bring a closed fist down on my knee. If this Alpha wanted to blackmail me, they already have everything they need to present me as untrustworthy to the Coalition and revoke my Morpheus Market license … or worse.
“I give you my word, all will be secret, and all will be as promised,” Alpha’s recording says. “I swear it on all I still hold sacred—on my brother’s blood, on my own beating heart.”
Two of the six arms pause over the creature’s heart, and my own skips a beat. Nothing could’ve properly prepared me for sincerity, family bonds, and emotional assurances from those I’ve always been told are little more than animals, their humanity swallowed up by the Diakópsei entirely.
A one-way communication with the Shadowlands is marginally better than if I could talk back right now. Conducting memory trades over private channels risks exposing the Morpheus Market’s existence to the general (largely unlicensed) populace, drawing attention (and swift retribution) from the Coalition. Communicating with the Shadowlands atallis just straight-up illegal. That’s how you end up like the body I found in the Passage, abandoned to unknowable time and endless, endless sand.
And if my fraternization with a nightfolk were discovered by my mother, and the settlement’s government at large … math homework for eternity. And, well, possibly calling the legitimacy of Chloe’s entire ruling dynasty into question, which wouldn’t be fun either.
But I still accepted this card from the gremlin. I’m still listening, intently, to Alpha’s recording. This unexpected contact from the planet’s night side only deepens my hunger to know more.
I can’t deny the desire to experience the planet’s forbidden side through equally forbidden eyes. And what if this isit? The answer I’ve been desperately searching for? It may be an unholy thought, twisting my stomach into knots, but dayfolk memories alone haven’t been enough to awaken Aspect into sentience. A piece of the alternate experience, the counterpart mindset, could unlock a whole new branch of perspective. Maybe enough to authenticallybe, rather than merely mimic. Enough for Aspect to begin tobecomeof their own volition.
I glance at my mechanical friend. They’ve grown bored of the sea meat memory, but now they clutch the Morpheus sphere against the metal plating of their chest, rocking it protectively back and forth, guarded against any potential bumps and jolts inCharon’s flight path. It looks almost like a mother cradling her child, but I know better. It’s the echo of an installed memory from me, when I nearly broke my data tablet by tripping on a floor panel. Nothing organic yet. Nothing original.
But this could change that.
“I will greet you by code name,” Alpha says. “The exchange will be done in a breath. And you can return to your sun, one shadow memory richer.”
I huff out a long breath, pushing the mounting anxiety out of my lungs. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to turn my mechanical project into a living, thinking friend. The first, longest, and best friend I’ve ever had.
I know it’s a one-way recording; I know Alpha can’t hear me. But even so, leaning so close to the hologram that my breath fogs the jittery display, I say, with my heart in my throat, “Yes.”
And just like that, the flower, wilting, its purpose complete, curls back into a tiny flat rectangle that lies lifeless in my open palm. I close my fingers around it and hold it close, not unlike Aspect and their sphere. For the first time in so long, awakening Aspect to proper awareness feels wildly possible. A friend, with fears and dreams and needs of their own making. A friend, beyond my mother’s oversight.
“Aspect?” I chirp.
