There’s nothing quite so strange and intoxicating as interim stretches spent in the Passage, the only place where the Daylands’ light collides with the Shadowlands’ abyssal dark. It would be a far better place to live than either of the strictly divided sides of Pagomènos, if not for the Territory Wars that ravaged what habitable land remained.
The Cataclysm took much from us—our technology, our history, even priceless fragments of memory—but it didn’t take the entire planet. We did that ourselves. We finished the asteroid’s work with our own weapons, our own overzealous repulsion of the nightfolk assault. As surely as the Morpheus Market is a gallery of alternate lives, the Passage is a graveyard of all that might have been.
A human friend might see the flicker of grief on my face, but Aspect isn’t human. Instead, they search their archives for whatever applicable mortal memory applies. I can practically see the gears turning behind my clumsily drawn attempt at a smile. At length, Aspect stands again, leaving the cake on their chair, and lays a mechanical hand on my shoulder. Scavenged visual processors hold my gaze. “There,” Aspect says, monotone. “There.”
“I’m fine, Aspect.”
“Kori is—prettier—when Kori—smiles.”
I groan. I don’t remember programming an obnoxious man’s memories into Aspect, but I suppose any of the memories I’ve scavenged and integrated could be from an unpleasantly biased source. I push a stray lock of brown hair out of my face, tucking it back into the tightly coiled braids I always wear. “I’m not trying to be pretty.”
“Under—stood.” Aspect nods, then turns back to the squishy, half-melted “cake” that clearly isn’t very concerned with looking pretty either. “Kori—eat cake now?”
I swallow a surge of bile. “Sure.” At least I’m not wearing my gloves, so I won’t stain them with purple goo. Aspect plucks the fork from the “cake” and extends its crooked tongs to me, hopeful.
Clearly waiting for me to start eating.
“Oh, Aspect, can you do me a favor? Go run a diagnostic on the helical engine. I want to make sure it’s still dysfunctional, just in case there’s a shot at getting this delivery done even faster.”
Helical engines, once a method of hyperspace travel between planets and galaxies, haven’t worked since the Cataclysm. The radiation subsequently permeating the planet caused some kind of decay in the mechanisms, and any memory of how to repair it was lost before Morpheus chips came into play, grounding Pagonians to this tidally locked planet forever.Charon’s engine is no exception to the rule, but Aspect doesn’t question my instructions. Mechs are designed to obey.
“Under—stood.” Aspect waddles around the cake, out of the cockpit, and into the polished silver main bay. I should really fix Aspect’s slightly lopsided gait eventually, but honestly, the perpetual wiggle is so endearing that unless the mech requests it, I might just leave them be. Frankly, I should’ve considered the consequences more before entertaining Aspect by reading a record of an Earthside “fashion show” a while back. Their permanent poorly mimed runway walk is 200 percent my fault. “Aspect will return—in three hundred clicks.”
“You don’t have to bequiteso specific,” I say, but Aspect has already begun tracking the time, their beeping diminishing as they wobble farther intoCharon.
Aspect has been hyperfixated on tracking elapsed time ever since I installed a particularly old memory relic into their mainframe. Now I’m afraid that if I remove it, they’ll start smoking at the joints. Apparently, the memory belonged to someone whose career had relied on highly specified arrivals and departures, back when that sort of thing mattered. Immediately upon installation, it became Aspect’s favorite memory for whatever reason—probably just good old-fashioned bad luck—andnow, unless I remember to specify that timing is irrelevant, Aspect stubbornly clings to the old way of things, before the Cataclysm.
Earthside units of agonizingly specific time tracking have no meaning on this planet anymore, and Aspect’s insistence upon it is damn annoying. But beyond their base programming—harvesting runs, identifying low-charge symptoms, simple greetings for interacting with sentients—everything Aspect knows is pilfered from an illegally installed memory.
For a mech to truly have being, to become a person instead of an increasingly complex algorithm, they’d require an entire human’s worth of consistent, unified memories squished into their mainframe. I’d have better luck trying to grow a third arm than I would finding a willing volunteer for a proposition like that. It’s so incomprehensible on the face of it, I don’t think the government has thought to make it illegal. And even if I could do it, the mech person—or person mech?—would surely blow every gasket at once from the stress of such a transition.
Until I can get my grubby little gloves on a memory that counteracts the presently installed one’s love for Earthside time management, this is who—or what—Aspect is. And I really have no one to blame but myself, so I try to lay off the complaining. I’m a good robot parent that way.
The beeping eventually becomes distant enough that it stops ringing inside my skull. I take the fork from the cake, lick an icing glob from the too-sharp tongs, and immediately wince. It tastes like the baker’s foundation was oil, which it probably was. It’s Aspect, after all. I toss the cake and fork alike downCharon’s disposal chute, to be later dumped and consumed by the lava below Pagomènos’s surface. This planet has been messed up on every layer since the Cataclysm. Miles beneath the Daylands surface, there are pockets of roiling magma; above that, a thick layer of rock only sparingly mined to gain access to the magma pockets without creating a volcanic situation; above that, the sunbaked sand within which the dayfolk settlement is nestled; and aboveground, depending on where you are, either the savage sunlight of the Daylandsor the deadly storms of the Passage. At least the magma’s existence, while alarming, makes object disposal a lot simpler. I toss the so-called fork down the chute only when I’m certain Aspect isn’t looking.
Somehow, some way, I’m going to raise Aspect to proper sentience. I’m going to bring this little haphazard mech just a little bit closer to being, well, more person than science project.
At the edge of my awareness, just loud enough to be heard over Aspect’s enthused counting, my tablet dings again. A message in electric-blue text slides across the screen.
CHLOE: ALMOST HOME, KORI?
I bite my tongue on a curse before politely texting back,ALMOST HOME.I can nearly feel shackles click back around my wrists and ankles, holding me fast at my mother’s command. I wish I could tell her about evading the sun serpent, about tinkering with Aspect, about anything but what she wants to hear.
When I’m flying far above the planet, the sprawling cluster of stubborn sub-settlements spread below like a paper Earthside map, I feel infinite. But every message from my mother (or one of her enforcers) is a reminder that I am finite, and so are my choices. When your mother is Chloe, monarch of the Daylands and leader of the last proper Pagonian colony, constant poking and prodding from fellow Important People comes with the territory.
The tablet flashes again.
CHLOE: EDNIT WOULD ALSO LIKE TO RUN A DIAGNOSTIC CHECKUP. HE’S WAITING.
I groan. She thinks she’s slick, blaming Ednit, but per usual, I know the checkup was my mother’s idea. If she were here right now, she’d tell me to be grateful for dayfolk doctors, but that doesn’t make the constant appointments any less unbearable. I feel more like a rare species of pet, too valuable to lose, than a daughter sometimes. But I could never hate Ednit. He’s known me since … before I can recall. Even more so than my mother, he’s someone I couldn’t bear to disappoint. He may not befamily, but I don’t remember my father, who passed during my infancy, and Ednit has always cared for me. Sometimes in a more tangible way than my mother ever could.
I blow out a breath through my nose. “Aspect?”
The mech spins on their heel. “Kori has—interrupted—my—counting.”
“I’m sorry. But I forgot I need to do something. When we get back to the settlement, I need you to stay onCharonfor a bit.”
“Aspect—go—with Kori.”
