Chapter Text
She stabs me to death in a hauler corridor.
The blade punctures my shell's standard puffer jacket, pierces its synthsilk membrane, rattles against its spine, and trips an emergency routine that will cleave my cognition from its embodiment. Blue "blood" sprays from my vesicles; my shell's hands spasm uncontrollably inside the box I was looting. My knife falls and tears through a packet of nondescript organic sludge, splattering some hauler worker's century-old lunch across a pile of deflated medical supplies. None of this saved the colonists of Tau Ceti IV from their uncertain fate, and none of it will save me.
My body hits the floor, but the impact pain is psychosomatic. When a shell's integrity is critically compromised, its sensorimotor functions downregulate to conserve power for emergency ejection. I abruptly stop smelling the putrefaction released by my knife's errant journey to the floor. Small mercies.
I can’t stand under my own power, nor can I lift my pistol to defy my fate. In token defiance, I flex my remaining active muscle groups to crawl feebly behind a tool cart. No allies come to provide triage or covering fire. I went in alone, rolled my eyes at ONI's warnings, told her I had no intent to share any of the loot I was going to strip from the colony’s perimeter. Six lockbox keycards, a double-sized backpack, a stack of signal jammers, and a tidy profit beneath a red flare and an uncaring sky.
Then ONI drops me on the other side of the Perimeter, half a klick from any of the cache locations I planned to check, and now my keys are at the mercy of whomever decides they’re worth stripping from my cooling corpse. I won't complain. Blue blood runs down my hands, only a miniscule fraction mine, and if I am soon to be nothing I certainly refuse to be a hypocrite. Fortune favours the bold, and I have always favoured discretion over valour.
To the credit of this shell's designers, my extraocular muscles still work under power-saver mode, so I can open my eyes and look upon the face of my killer. It’s not a human face, but it’s a better approximation than most faces on this rock. No visor occludes its eyes, which are instead set in a white glossy half-mask. The checkerboard patterns it has for eyebrows are only vaguely reminescent of the harsh red of a UESC killbot's faceplate. Just another runner, a Vandal in mass-market MIDA chic, lips overdrawn in glossy blue liner.
If my facial muscles could respond, I’d frown in aesthetic disapproval. MIDA’s been a joke since the Marathon first left Sol. Defanged and co-opted into fashion shows and hoverboard sprays and snarky zines. A planetary revolution reduced to a slick marketing campaign for energy drinks centuries before any of us were a term in the equation.
Mild Interplanetary Dis-Agreements.
Millions Inhumed; Dearest Apologies.
Mars Is Duped Again.
Defanged may be the literal truth, as no fangs hide behind my killer’s triumphant grin, but her knife at my throat is more than lethal enough for a final blow. Her weight on my chest and my neck is the last thing I feel, in my deadened state.
I know what happens next, even though I don't feel it. Faster than sense or memory, the shell offloads my electrochemical existence into its emergency transmitter, then burns its last battery reserves to multiplex me into a waveform and fire me up the gravity well at the speed of radio.
Discontinuity.
Dreamless dark.
Every final moment is less final than the last.
I wake from nothingness into absence.
Technologies of human compression have advanced considerably in the centuries since the Marathon freeze-dried 30,000 humans for interstellar delivery with no return address. A disembodied consciousness flat-packs for express shipment really nicely. All you need is a big chip for storage, and an emulator to wake it up. 300 years ago, the frailty of the human body was the ultimate constraint; now our birth-meat fills medical waste dumps on Earth and Mars, shot through with so many preservatives from the digitization process that we don't even make good compost.
Through sparse windows in claustrophobic access corridors, I’ve seen the blinking server racks that count as our brains-away-from-brains. It’s not even one mind per rack; ONI handles all the routing and queueing, and you get whatever space is open when you return. I could be offline for months or years between runs and I’d never know the difference. I’ve never met anyone who’s used to it. CyAc’s affirmation protocol implies we can; though if “Assert: This comforts you” is the best ONI’s got, I have my doubts. We have fled gravity, outrun light, cheated death, spun children from silicon and bodies from silk, but the fear of the dark is ingrained in us deeper than our flesh or our blood. It might be what makes us human, but if the logs I’ve seen in the colony are any indication, the local AIs felt it too. They just haven’t come back.
Still, ontological horror is both space and power efficient, so that’s what we get. We don’t need bunks or common areas, just a locker to store any gear we’re contractually entitled to keep between runs. Technically, it’s a vault, but calling it a vault implies there’s something in it worth keeping. My seventh run beat that sentimentality out of me, when I dropped in with a big backpack and a shield and lovingly modded weapons, then got obliterated by some aggressive local flora that melted through my skin and all of my patch kits. I still hope someone found that rifle.
Until I’m decanted into a fresh-spun shell, I have to make do without even a simulacrum of physicality. I think it’s an intentional deprivation; to eke out a fraction of a percentage point of success by making my fleeting moments of embodiment slightly more precious. The casual inhumanity, CyberAcme's ruthless "business of business" that made them the first and only interstellar software conglomerate. All I get in the liminal nonspace is a terminal window, without even the satisfying tactility of a keyboard. I think a command and ONI translates the neural impulses into characters in my view. She's always listening, especially when she's making herself invisible.
The absence gives me time to think and browse while the WEAVEworms spin my next shell. Network access is minimal because Runners are categorically untrustworthy. We wouldn’t make good deniable mercenaries if we liked to colour within the lines. UESC moderation algorithms skim every sentence on the official CyAc intranet for fragmentary semantics so they can jump us with a heavy squad or drop in a lockdown right as we hit paydirt. So, nothing that matters goes up there.
We hide the real conversations in the fringes of exabytes of markdown and sneak comments into maintenance subroutines that fire ten thousand times a second. The junk data in this starship's darkweb would take months to process for hidden communication patterns, and by that time we’ve hit our targets and come back around for seconds. ONI knows we’re doing it, of course. She permits us access to the file systems we use as dead-drop code points, and she keeps us from breaking life support or the WEAVEworm pools. All we have to do is play our part and we can access a small measure of human companionship, us pieces in the great game for the stars.
Companionship takes strange shapes in our violent simulacrum of a community. I open up a darknet interpreter and start to hunt my prey.