It doesn’t escape me that she asks about my own Morpheus chip, not the technology in general. As if she, given the chance, would look for a power button on my own face, crack open my skull, and see what she could find. I shudder.
“No, Morpheus chips are much smaller. This … this is all my handiwork.” I point to the jagged, near-rectangular shard at the wiry mass’s center. “That’s a modified Morpheus chip. Mech memory cores are normally much less centralized. They don’t have as much relevant data to store, so keeping it condensed isn’t as high priority. I cross wired the translation matrix into the experiential center board to try and create a proto-organic link between programmed and learned response, so that they—”
“Smaller words …” Adria points one claw at the memory core again. “Please.”
“Mechs are designed only to encounter scripted situations. They harvest resources from the surface. They show pantomimed respect for their creators. That sort of thing. They can adjust their programs if theyencounter unexpected resistance, but they can’t write new ones. At best they can mirror observed behavior. By linking an active Morpheus chip into Aspect’s memory, I’m trying to code a program that codes itself. Not just rewriting and reorganizing old code. New code. Learning. Choice.”
“Choice.” Adria’s lip curls as if she tasted something sour.
“Are you all right?” I don’t know why I ask. It’s not as though I can afford to care, but in some rogue part of me, I do.
Violet eyes clouded, Adria shakes her head. “Perfectly fine,” she says drearily, as if through the haze of sleep.
I don’t ask again. Perhaps I’m afraid of the answer.
We install the nightfolk memory together. The data drive, which houses a copy of the archived memory, we plug directly into an outlet inside Aspect’s head. I authorize it with a series of operative codes usually known only to mechs, tapping on an extremely tiny number pad inside Aspect’s head with the aid of a narrow tool from my belt.
Dayfolk were never meant to modify their mechanical servants themselves—it’s a self-sustaining metal ecosystem, with some mechs being designed to maintain others—but with so much isolated free time, I taught myself the language of circuitry and alphabet and symbols, more consistent than anything else in my painfully limited world. And eventually, through programming, I learned to talk back beyond the simplistic scripts we’ve imposed upon the mechs.
I hold my breath as I seal Aspect’s face closed again, tap the power button beneath their chin, and again click the access panel shut. Aspect whirs and beeps for a long moment, limbs slightly twitching like an organic struck by an electrical current. Then, slowly, slowly, they pivot their head, optical receptors meeting my human irises. “Kori?”
I’m still barely breathing. “Yes, Aspect?”
There’s a pregnant pause, broken only by the squeak of Aspect’s peg leg as they stand. Then, with all the proclamation pomp of an Earthside weathercaster, they lift their chin, cross their arms, and announce, “THE.AUDACITY.”
Honestly, of all the reactions to newfound nightfolk knowledge that I anticipated from my mechanical companion, this level of annoyance—so severe that it borders on unintentional parody—was not on my mental list. I’ve opened up Aspect’s head on countless occasions, tinkered with their available memories, their source code, their circuitry, the haphazard link between the Morpheus chip and the standard mech tech alike. I’m about to open my mouth and ask why this time would be any different when Aspect sees fit to personally clarify the source of their disturbance.
“KORI!” Aspect shrieks at an utterly unholy volume. They point an accusing finger at me; it wavers ever so slightly with intensity of emotion, emitting a high-pitchedsqueakwith every wiggle that serves to both punctuate and awkwardly contrast their point. “Kori hated these—people so much—Kori deep-fried—a perfectly—good slice—of the planet?”
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m hard on myself. I spend a lot of time alone, either willingly or by Chloe’s edicts. Too much time alone means way too much space to think, leading to more than my fair share of self-flagellation. But to see my closest ally, whom I have quite literally resurrected from the junk heap to a state of illegal semi-sentience, talking back to me like a small child told to wear their protective gear aboveground in the Daylands … It’s astoundingly insulting.
I’m slack-jawed, taken aback, almost laughing from the sheer ridiculousness of it all. I was already reeling from the revelation that the history I know might not be the history that Pagomènos itself remembers in the radioactive soil. Aspect shaming me for it feels like the forbidden historical text personally leaping off the shelf and smacking into my face to drive its point home.
“Aspect, you do realize I wasn’t personally there, right?”
“Kori—should have been!”
“I quite literally hadn’t been born.”
“Then that—is Kori’s first problem.”
There’s a rattling, clattering sound behind me. Instinctively, I spin on my heel, one gloved hand reaching for a pistol that isn’t actually holstered at my hip anymore. It takes an instant to process that the noise is neither a blade being drawn, a barrier being breached, nor a break somewhere in my protective armor. Adria shivers, one hand pressed against her open mouth, wings slightly flapping from the effort of holding the rest of her body still. Her palm barely muffles the sound, which is … coming from her mouth. She leans so far forward that her free arm has to catch her from tumbling onto all fours.
Possibilities dart through my brain in a panic: She’s received a message of some kind to prompt disbelief; she’s experiencing a breathing obstruction; this is an unforeseen side effect of her intense connection to the planet’s radioactivity. But it’s none of those things. The shadow queen, in equal parts my captor and my only shield, is … laughing.
Laughing. At me.
My cheeks burn so badly, I half believe she can see the blush through my helmet.
“Do you always let them talk to you like that?” Adria says, when she’s somewhat recovered her breath.
I could fire back that Thaane behaves similarly, but I elect to bite my tongue. “That’s … new, actually,” I admit with a shrug. I shove my shame into its own compartment, trying to refocus on the logistics of this development. “Unfortunately, it’s not an organic opinion. It’s a paraphrase of the essence of the installed memory, not an independent conclusion. The code is capable of restructuring itself when building blocks are added, but it’s still architecture built entirely from pieces I’ve provided.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“When a person faces a challenge to a fundamental belief—even if the evidence is compelling—it causes a chain reaction. They need time to process and apply the information. Aspect just superimposed your records’ conclusion over the previous installation and erased it entirely. No integration. No interrogation. No … wrestling.”
I realize even as the words escape me that perhaps this is what I’ve been doing since I first dared to dip a toe into the Shadowlands’ inky, endless darkness. Wrestling with the truth, both arms sweaty and strained, trying to pin it down into a comprehensible code.
