The Archive Undying, page 1
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To Nick, it’s always for you
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Sunai, relic, former archivist, and dissolute salvage-rat
Veyadi Lut, autonomist and former archivist-in-training
GHAMOR, a Harbor city-state
The Sovereign, an ENGINE
[Classified], the Sovereign’s relic
So-Beloved, an autonomous intelligence (corrupted)
Manifest Echo, an autonomous intelligence (corrupted)
Dzira, a salvage-rat mercenary on the Third Scrap
Eun, a widow
Moto, a hermit
CHOM DAN, a defunct city-state
Register Parse, an autonomous intelligence (corrupted)
[******], a [****] in the mountains beyond Chom Dan
THE AIGATA ENCLAVE, a defunct city-state; origin of the Harbor
Qualia Clear, an autonomous intelligence (corrupted)
The Huntress, an ENGINE (dead)
ELANU THA, an AI-held city-state
Fun-Size Exultation in Perpetuity, an autonomous intelligence
JHEN MIRO, a defunct city-state
Reconcile Elegy, an autonomous intelligence (corrupted)
KHUON MO, a contested city-state
Iterate Fractal, an autonomous intelligence (corrupted)
Madam Wei, entrepreneur and founder of the Ginger Company
Imaru, captain of the Never Once and Sunai’s oldest friend
Jin, a mercenary on the Never Once and a liar
Waretu, navigator of the Never Once
Oyu, pilot of the Never Once
Cothai, engineer of the Never Once
KHUON MO HARBOR
[Classified], an ENGINE
[Classified], a relic
Ueda Naru, Khuon Mo harbormaster and former relic
Ruhi, citizen liaison and archivist
A memory you could call the first.
You are alone when you die.
The autonomous intelligence Iterate Fractal has corrupted, and it is dying, and in its divine death, it has killed you. You and thousands more across Khuon Mo, the island city-state of which Iterate Fractal is—was—patron and protector. Thousands of citizens, who are crushed by living bone and pierced by twisting coral, who are torn apart by maddened tenbeasts, who are screaming, crying, and who one by one grow silent. All but you, Sunai. You, who linger, pinned through the rib cage to Iterate Fractal’s central shrine on the isle of Lotus. You, who came in supplication to the white-lit banyan that was the heart of my neurotransitive network. You, who knelt at my archive to await your death.
You, not yet alone, because I, I am with you.
“As if I forgot,” you croak.
You clutch the root in your breast. It is the largest of the veins Iterate Fractal stuck into you, and the least intentional. You were interfaced when corruption hit, your arms and legs and throat riddled with finer threads, all white and tender, the dendritic web through which you understood Iterate Fractal meant to finally consume you. In the darkening hollow of the city’s heart, they gleam with shallow light. When they first whorled through your pores and rooted in your palms, they shone through your skin and made you verdant. Now the filaments flicker, their pulse uneven.
You’re too hurt to feel them writhing; the shock keeps your agony at bay. Your skull thunks against ivory rubble. Your breath is ragged and your body seeps warmth, coming up on a proper death.
If Iterate Fractal means to eat you, it had better hurry its shit up.
You gasp, your bitterness a clarifying note in the muck of your bleeding thoughts: Iterate Fractal was dying, as were you, but this truth is a distant one. By now you are already quite dead, and you have been for seventeen years.
Seventeen years. You have been dead for seventeen years. None of this is real. Some rude hiccup of neural trauma has drowned you in this recollection. Fun.
“I’m not doing this again,” you whisper, “I’m not.”
The decision is made with the saying of it. You push—pull—push—rock and ease and shove, claw your way up the ruddy length of root until it pops out your back and you fall forward on your hands, panting high and tight, afraid of the pain that would come with deep breath.
This isn’t what happened; you never did free yourself.
“There had to be an easier way to do that,” I say.
You raise your head. Dizzied by the movement, you must lie on your side. From this skewed vantage, you watch my impossible approach across the darkened roots of the corrupted shrine.
It is difficult to understand what you see: a body, narrow in frame and young of face, at once familiar and alien. It bears your frame, wears your face, and these you know well enough, but how can you be picking across the ruins of the shrine when you are also prone and bleeding on its floor?
I am what kneels before you. I am what cradles your cheek. I am what brings you succor in the hour of our death in my shrine, my archive, my home that I shared with you. I, and you, and we.
You close your eyes, but you can’t forget what you have seen. Even as you are sure, in some churning, distant part of your brain, that you cannot have seen it.
I can tell you what you’re thinking, in that far, unreachable part of you: that memory is bullshit anyway, and whatever it is your mind is doing now, it’s merely the collapsed synthesis of a multitude of errant thoughts.
You died so long ago. This vision is terrible but fleeting.
It is much worse than that, my whole, my Sunai. I have always been with you. I have always been you.
And though this is true—it is, and will always be—I don’t expect your hand at my throat. You seize me by the gullet and drag me close. Your every movement is sweep after sweep of encompassing pain, but you have stunned me and that satisfies.
“Where am I?” you hiss into the face that is yours, mine, ours. “What’s happening to me?”
I lean into your grasp; I touch my mouth to my mouth. Our mouths, together. I say, “I,” and, “I,” and, “I—”
1
The letter catches up to Sunai in Ghamor, where it’s always a little too cold not to hate having fingers. It comes by way of the aunty who runs the shabby hostel where he stows his ruck between jobs. She says the kid who dropped it off had Sunai’s description: middling-short, bespectacled, faint limp, long braid, old eyeliner.
The envelope isn’t signed but for a scrawl across the seam, the sigil of Leaf 36: “Cascade,” a short poem at the end of the Lay about a rain shower that becomes a waterfall that drowns a rice field and starves a village, and eons later becomes a sea. You know—consequences.
The symbolism needn’t be so obvious. Sunai hasn’t led a life that invites people to write him, let alone figure out which city-state in all the wilds they should send their letters to. Only one person would go to the trouble. He must still be nursing the delusion that Sunai will one day try another way of living—perhaps a way involving fewer professional near-death experiences, or less ill-considered sex with unscrupulous acquaintances. Ideally, a way of life that would begin with a long, agonized reckoning with his shoddy excuse for a brain.
Joke’s on him. Sunai isn’t really alive.
Yet there he perches on the edge of a thin mattress in his usual hostel room, thumb running down and up and down the sealed envelope seam. His ruck sits heavy between his booted heels, still dirty from his most recent trek across the wilds. He never stays long between jobs—just long enough to drink himself insensible and piss off another pretty man. His need to get the hell out of town has gone from pressing to urgent.
If a letter can find him, so can its sender.
Stupid, he tells himself as he stuffs the letter deep in his ruck, under his wilds gear and his battered old copy of the Lay. Stupid and selfish. No one’s coming for him. No one would bother. Sunai burns his bridges well and good.
Clearly not well enough.
“And stubborn.” Sunai shoulders the ruck. He means himself, obviously, but he means the writer too, which makes him a miserable hypocrite and irritated to boot.
What a wonderful thing, to know a sure cure for giving too much of a shit.
He drops some pricy tamarind candies in the hostel till on his way out, gives the aunty a kiss on the forehead in exchange for a cigarette, and heads for the least reputable hermit-run teahouse he can think of. He has already decided he will never see the hostel again. He expects to end the night shit-faced in a stranger’s bed o
Instead, Sunai wakes up aching, sober, and alone in a cramped bunk in a stranger’s salvage-rig. It must be a rig. If the haphazard construction materials of the crew quarters didn’t give it away—Sunai counts seven bunks total—the churn and thrum of the rig’s mechanical innards would, and the gentle whole-floor judder of its every step would confirm it.
Sunai swallows past dry lips and tastes a sour alchemy of alcohol, bitter chemicals, and vomit. On identifying the last, his stomach churns, and he lurches over the side of the bunk. Nothing comes up except for a vile memory of prior expulsion, and of someone’s hand in his hair—accompanied by a hand tightening just so on his ribs, and his own fingers snarled in a belt, searching lower—
None of which explains how Sunai ended up on a goddamn rig.
Practical paranoia compels him to check for his ruck, which he finds in a locker beneath his bunk, contents unmolested. Whoever brought him here did so with some semblance of decorum.
The question remains: Why?
“You’re not that good at hand jobs,” he mutters to himself as he staggers out of the crew quarters in search of a viewport.
In the hall just outside, Sunai discovers the rig has begun a six-legged climb into the Ghamori foothills, aiming northeast for the Dahani mountain range. In the distance, the near-noon sun glances off the flat angles of Ghamor.
In the historical documentaries Sunai was fed as a child, Ghamor was a stonework wonder of lustrous domes and minarets, capped with the seven grand marble shrines of its patron AI, So-Beloved. Not a trace of that old city remains. Now it’s all glass, steel, and concrete, spiking up from a blackened blast of earth that stretches a mile in every direction from Ghamor’s perimeter.
Leagues of pine barrens separate the rig from the artificial badlands that protect Ghamor from the wilds. If the rig left anytime after the crack of dawn, it’s covered an impressive amount of ground. Sunai should be grateful for the ride out of a state he had no business lingering in.
A vast sheet of red plate armor swings past Sunai’s viewport. He startles back, falters on his bad ankle, and knocks his head on the wall. Someone bangs the opposite side and swears at him to keep it down. Sunai crosses his arms tight over his chest and inches forward. Old pains flourish in every limb. If he presses his cheek to the viewport, he can just make out the full size of the ENGINE mech striding beside the rig.
She is four stories of marbled crimson-and-gold armor covering a sinuous, whirring metal frame. Her face, and the slashes of body beneath the armor, are the brooding red of blood left to pool, her mouth scarred with deep runnels across her great unsmiling lips. Luminous white lacquer fills the grooves and catches sunlight with a pitiless glint.
Her makers call her the Sovereign, she and her three nigh-identical sisters—singular and plural. Singular: Did you see the Sovereign tear that salvage-rig in two with her bare hands? Plural: Did you see the Sovereign play tug-of-war with that salvage-rig until she tore it in two?
Sunai never got to see So-Beloved as she wanted to be seen, outside of those documentaries. The ENGINE’s faces were built from the archival statues in her shrines. The archives moved when she spoke, and purportedly she liked to sing. It makes him the worst kind of heretic to behold her ruin and feel nothing but a very personal fear. He stares at the Sovereign’s thundering back and wills her to turn. He needs to see what’s in her chest. It will be the worst part of her.
The Sovereign stops at the top of a slope, as if aware of his desire. She begins to swivel at the waist. Sunai ducks away from the viewport, heart syncopated in his throat. He rubs his face, knocking his spectacles askew.
“Shit,” he says, and, “shit,” again, softer and closer to his teeth. What the hell is the Sovereign doing escorting a lowly salvage-rig so far past Ghamor’s borders?
Sunai digs his nails into his cheeks to choke down a shaking laugh. No, no, the Sovereign hasn’t been sent to collect him. If she had, he would already be collected, and this rig would be a smoking ruin in the wilds, a carcass left as warning for all who dare flee the reaching hand of her masters.
He curses himself calm and goes to track down the rig’s captain. He finds her near the head of the rig, by the pilot’s nook, and explains in a steady tone that she seems to have kidnapped him. To this she says, “God’s eternal dick,” and, “You’re the asshole who scouts on foot, aren’t you? If you want to quit, you’re welcome to hop off the deck and walk back to Ghamor.”
Sunai is indeed the asshole who scouts on foot. He also scouts solo, at least for the last few years, and he hasn’t been part of a proper rig crew in over five. Both of these choices are crazy and/or stupid by the standards of any decent salvage-rat.
Sunai is both crazy and stupid, but not because he hikes across the wilds alone. Living in close quarters for prolonged periods of time with salvage-rats, who are by nature insatiably curious risk junkies, is at best unwise. At worst …
The Sovereign looms past the captain’s viewport. Sunai averts his eyes.
Sunai from last night should have stuck to sucking dick, thinks Sunai of the present, who wishes for the collapse of all instances known to the Emanations of God so that he might throttle that past Sunai’s neck.
Then he remembers the letter. Eyes glazed, staring at the captain’s frown but not truly seeing her, Sunai decides he might just understand the idiot who got him signed on to this crew.
While working with a crew escorted by an ENGINE will be dangerous, it will also distract him, and Sunai requires as many forms of distraction as he can muster. Otherwise he might read that fucking letter.
“Never mind,” he says to the captain. “Where’s the galley?”
* * *
Because Sunai is God’s little joke, there’s no galley. Whoever built the good rig Third Scrap spent the space for a galley on more layers of armor and extra storage. The crew is expected to subsist on nutrient bars and congee boiled in a solar-powered kettle.
Sunai expresses his feelings on this bullshit once the Third Scrap has made camp for the night. He slings the spice belt from his ruck over his shoulder and shimmies down the rig from the lower observation deck to the plateau where they’ve settled. There, he makes the mistake of looking over his shoulder. The ENGINE stands guard at the plateau perimeter. He can at last see her front.
The fortified glass frame embedded in her chest reflects the setting sun. Twilight carves the shape of the armored figure strung up inside, a human smudge bound in place by a lattice of gold wire: one of the Sovereign’s relics. Even if she weren’t clad in plate armor the same uncanny crimson as her ENGINE’s body, she’d betray her nature with her stillness. Sunai is too distant to see whether her chest moves with breath; he can’t help imagining that it doesn’t. Whatever brutality So-Beloved’s corruption committed upon her human flesh, she has since tempered into the serenity of a weapon.
Sunai rubs his wrists and scratches his elbows, but can’t banish the crawling under his skin as he huddles in the crook of the Third Scrap’s mismatched forelegs to concoct a half-hearted curry rice over an open flame. He keeps glancing up, like the ENGINE is going to move, or like he’ll catch one of her red-armored, white-scarred sisters lumbering through the wilds toward their plateau.
Whenever he looks, she’s alone. It’s strange enough for the Harbor to send even one of its flagship mechs to escort a humble salvage-rig past the badlands.
The rest of the crew eyes the Sovereign with equal wariness. They come down off the deck to do maintenance checks, run laps around the rig, that kind of thing, but sooner or later they all trail over to Sunai and his cook fire. It’s the usual mix of roughened folk: refugees sporting inscribed metal charms to honor the corrupted AIs of their old city-states; downworlders and their knotted ID talismans; another man who wears his hair hermit-long like Sunai; and a couple of women who shear theirs widow-short. Sunai trades curry for cigarettes—he apparently didn’t think to acquire more before he abducted himself onto the Scrap—and a flask of the crew’s own vile brand of rig-brew, with which he chooses to be generous. More than smoke and drink, he wants information.
