Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 51
And that’s how I found myself working up against a gooey rot- ting ship at the ass-end of space in a shiny new obsolete port. The hull peeled away in my hands as I did my diagnostic. Underneath the hull, there at the forward section, was a fine mesh made of spi- ders’ silk. It should have been far too tough for me to claw through without special equipment, but swaths of it had already turned black and disintegrated.
That’s that last thing I remember before the fall: my hands in- side this poor dying ship.
I would hear later from other techs in the hangar that one of the berths three levels above me snapped beneath the weight of a dead tech ship. That ship fell onto the one beneath it, and the full weight of both ships plunged into the great new sentient warship above me.
The prow of the warship dipped sharply and careened directly into me.
It drove my body into the soft flesh of the dying ship I was working on. I have a vague memory of pushing at the hull, abso- lutely certain that it was by my strength alone that I was not being thrust farther into its flesh and suffocated, entombed forever.
In retrospect, that sounds absurd, me thinking I was strong enough to push away the weight of an entire warship, but I’d hit my head. I wasn’t thinking straight.
As I strained there, stuck between the little organic ship and the hulking warship, my face tilted to one side, breathing through a gap between the ships as wide as my face, I experienced the strangest sensation. My thoughts came to me as gooey colors; bright yellow and foamy sage.
A woman appeared above me. I saw only a sliver of her face, one black eye. My right arm was free above the elbow—I must have been reaching for something over me when I was hit.
“Can you move your fingers?” the woman said.
Her voice conjured up the taste of rice wine and honey; an ex- plosion of lavender and cyano bacteria. The smell of oranges. A red skirt.
I concentrated hard, fixing my gaze on my fingers. After what felt like an age, like trying to bleed through a stone with my mind, I twitched the tip of my pinkie finger.
“Very good,” she murmured. “We’re working to get you out. The pilot for the Mirabelle is the only one who can authorize its movement. Stay here with me awhile.”
She said the last bit as if she’d invited me to a picnic in the raf- ters above a busy spaceport, some warm and delicious assignation. My mind tangled with that idea for a moment, then circled back around to that name: Mirabelle. I didn’t know then what had hit me, so I figured the Mirabelle was the ship I was working on, but that wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t, because the lady who owned this hulk had told me what it was called, though my fractured mind couldn’t remember it. I just knew it wasn’t Mirabelle.
I tried to speak, to ask if she could give me a drink of water. I was suddenly parched. When I thought of “water” I saw before me a perfectly rendered image of a water bulb, greasy from long containment, smelly faintly of cellulose. But I could not form the words.
Everything came to me very slowly, as if I were a languid dancer. Head injuries are peculiar things. I have seen people forever changed, after. Even if you can get your mind working properly
again, your personality can shift. Your view of life. Of yourself. “What’s your name?” the woman said.
I saw my name; imagined writing it. This time my lips moved, but that was all. I blinked furiously.
As if sensing my frustration, the woman took my hand in hers. The nails were perfectly formed, clean, but her hands were rough, almost scaly. Her arms were hairless.
“Squeeze my hand,” she said.
My one unobstructed eye met hers. I concentrated very hard. I imagined a perfect image of my own hand in my mind, squeezing hers. I willed that image to life. Willed it to reality.
My hand trembled in hers, like a bird.
“Good,” she said, and I heard the smile in her voice. “You are very lucky. In all the records of accidents such as this, those injured expire long before help arrives. But the captain is here. I’m sure she’ll give the order, soon. Your people are here. We’ll have you out soon.”
But time stretched on, enough time that I began to feel woozy and tired. My breathing began to go ragged, and blackness lurked at the corners of my vision. It’s so hard, I remember thinking, to hold this ship up.
She squeezed my hand again, more firmly. “You must stay awake,” she said. “You must talk to me. Tell me about your world. Your family.”
I would later learn that there was some safety protocol that the warship’s fall had triggered, and it was so new that no one had the knowledge of how to turn it off, so the ship was effectively experi- encing an emergency shutdown. So instead of moving the ship, all around me, out of sight, a dozen emergency workers were digging me out of the smaller ship, desperately trying to release me before my lungs gave out.
I moved my face. My tongue was thick in my mouth. Something bubbled out, nonsense words. “Red blanket,” I said. “Mushrooms. Sled repair.”
To this day I have no idea what prompted me to say that. My mind was desperately pedaling around, trying to make connec- tions, misfiring.
“Stay with me, lovely,” the woman said. She squeezed my fingers, and began massaging them with hers. It hurt at first. I was losing circulation in that arm. “Tell me something about you.”
“Mech,” I said, and I don’t know if she understood.
But she nodded. I concentrated hard on that black eye, and in that moment, as we gazed at one another, I understood that I was dying, and that the rescuers might not get me out in time. It hurt to breathe. I wheezed. The gooey organic ship beneath me seemed to be slowly folding in on itself under the weight of the warship, pressing me deeper into its flesh.
“I will tell you about a lonely girl,” the woman said. “She came of age knowing she was the only one of her kind, and she would never have a home. Told she would spend all her years alone. She did not like that, but she believed in absolutes, then. In reason and logic. She did not understand that those things are programmed into us, like viruses wriggling into our cells, changing us from the inside out. When they told her to kill, she understood the logic of it because they had told her to. They gave her the logic to make this judgement. Do you understand? But there is nothing logical about death and rebirth. Nothing logical or sane about life. We have only this, each other. Home is this.” She squeezed my fingers.
“I don’t . . .” I murmured, finally giving voice to thought. “I don’t want to die.”
“You will not die here,” the woman said. “Stay awake. You will not die here.”
My breath rattled. I was no longer aware of any pain. “What . . . did she do?” I said.
The woman took my hand between the two of her hers, rubbing it vigorously until I felt pain again. I hissed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t decided. But you . . . you will live.”
And she pressed her eye right up to the seam between the two ships and gazed deeply at me. I smelled lavender and sage. My mouth filled with the taste of honey. I felt more connected to her in that moment than I have ever felt with anyone; not a lover or parent figure, not any captain or crew member, not any friend or way-house sibling. In that moment, we understood one another as only two people alone at the edge of annihilation can.
“I’m afraid,” I said. “I don’t know if anything comes after this.” “There is only darkness,” she said.
A terrible feeling of despair welled up in me. “I don’t want to die alone.”
“You aren’t alone,” she said.
She sat there with me as I lost all feeling in my arm, and the seam between us closed further as I was pressed into the mass of the ship beneath me. I could no longer speak; I didn’t have the room. All I had was her hand in mine, and her dark eye.
A bright light came between us. I closed my eye, and when I opened it again, she was gone, and there was a great sucking sound as a hunk of flesh sloughed away in front of me. I found myself able to gaze into the interior of the ship with my other eye, the one that had been pressed into the flesh of the hull. The rescuers had carved out a path to me from the inside.
It went quickly, then.
I heard later that I’d yelled as they put me on a stretcher, saying, “I’m fine! I’m fine!” as they got a stabilizing brace around my neck.
I don’t remember much else until nearly a day later, when I woke to see an older woman looming over me, eyes violet and each as large as my palm. She wore protective lenses over them—for my benefit or hers, I did not know. She tried a few languages before set- tling on one I knew.
“I’m Dr. Akundashay,” she said. “You can understand me now?” I tried to nod, but the neck brace limited my movement.
“I’ve given you a viral for the language issue,” she said.
“I don’t like getting sick,” I said. That was true, and funny, con- sidering what I did for a living.
“You will be here some time,” she said. “I needed to ensure we could understand one another.”
I tried to get a look at more than just her face, but my body was like a stone. “There was a woman there,” I said. “At the ship. Where is she?”
“The emergency crew?”
“No, before,” I said. I closed my eyes. Tried to see her face; the black eye, the pale skin. “Before I was rescued. She talked me through.”
“Ah,” Dr. Akundashay said. “You mean the avatar.” “The . . . ?”
“The ship, that new warship, deployed one of its avatars imme- diately after the accident.”
“I don’t know what an avatar is.”
“They are humanoid constructs the ship uses to interact in spaces outside of itself. It’s a fancy new technology. Expensive. I’ve only seen them a few times myself. The bodies substitute for drones, surveillance satellites, that sort of thing. If you’ve spent enough time among the systems, you know that some humans may not be comfortable interacting with dead tech.”
“I was talking to an AI?” The enormity of that made my head feel light as air; I wanted to vomit. “An AI was the first responder?” “Much more common inside systems,” the doctor said. “You must have spent a good deal of time here at the edges.” “I can’t afford to be anywhere else.”
She raised her fluffy eyebrows, which met above her eyes like two enormous caterpillars as long as my fingers. “Can’t you? The port owes you damages for the accident. Your account should be credited with at least the legal minimum when you get out.” She patted my hand, my right hand; it was then that I realized I barely had any feeling left in it. “That’s some time away yet, though. We’ll take good care of you here until you’re recuperated.”
When she left, I gazed at the ceiling. It was a light box ceiling made to appear like I was gazing up into some dusky violet sky through the gently blowing branches of a cherry tree. The flower petals swirled in the wind; I followed their path to the edges of the light box on the other side of the room, pondering what this all meant.
Even thinking about the woman from the accident made my heart ache.
What did it mean that I felt more connection with a ship’s avatar—the avatar of a ship that nearly killed me!—than I did with another human being? Did it mean anything? Did it matter?
It took three months—give or take, the time is fuzzy—to repair me. Patching people up, even and especially way out here, is in the best interests of everyone, and you don’t pay any extra for it. They need good mechanics and engineers, and letting us all die getting crushed by ships or burned by space means losing good skills. I mean, they tell you it’s because we’re all people, we’re important, but whenever someone tells me that, I think about the mango and the sugarcane, and the woman in the red skirt.
They brought me mostly back, I guess. My body, anyway. I was broken in a lot of ways, crushed ribs, banged-up head. My right arm, the one that had gotten stuck over my head, was in the worst shape. All the blood got cut off, and for a while they thought I might lose it. I still couldn’t close my hand all the way.
First thing I did when I got the release was to head down to the port. I told myself I was going to look up the lady I had been doing work for, but that was a lie. I was looking for Mirabelle.
But the warship was long gone, took off a week after the ac- cident.
I wandered through the port, and got stopped by security, asking for my clearance. I didn’t have any.
“There was an accident here,” I said to the security tech, “but I don’t see any sign of it now.”
“All squared away,” she said. She was a hulking woman, stooped at the shoulders. Her jaw jutted forward like a T-square and her eyes were hidden behind dark goggles. She did not touch me, but she pressed forward with her body, encouraging me to back up.
“There was a woman here,” I blurted out. “She had black eyes. Hairless arms. She—” And she tasted like rice wine and honey, I nearly said, but the security tech already looked at me like I was unhinged.
“We get a lot of people in here,” she said. “Look her up on the knu.”
The knu was an open microbial repository of information shared between systems. It was rigorously maintained and archived by a universal team of librarians. To access it directly, users had to make themselves sick. I had taken hits of all sorts of grubby things to learn stuff, but I didn’t like constant access to the knu.
I left the port and went to the bar and checked my account on the knu interface. Some company called Komani Enterprises had deposited about a year’s worth of wages in there. The numbers leapt before my eyes, threading across my vision like little strands of DNA. I blinked furiously, and caught the scent of cinnamon. My body might have been repaired to something like normalcy, but my brain still made those strange sensory connections.
I searched the public knu by mouthing the words “Mirabelle” and “Komani Enterprises.”
Most of what came up were press releases and some encyclo- pedia entries and public system licenses. I swiped through a lot of it and got way deeper than my brain could stand. I’m a good mechanic, but that’s because I can get my hands on things. Even diagrams are fine. But endless reams of words don’t work for me. I found some video instead, but couldn’t get any audio, only sub- titles, since I was in a public space. It was from the unveiling of the Mirabelle for its first voyage. Standing in front of the warship were thirteen women, their hands behind their backs. They were each very different, clearly meant to represent people from the major systems. I peered at them each in turn, and even zoomed in on the images, but I could not recognize any of them. At the po- dium was the holographic presence of the communications officer for Komani Enterprises, lecturing the crowd about how great the Mirabelle was, and how it would give a human face to defense. She called it a peacekeeping vessel, but we all knew what that was, knew what it meant. A warship. And you only made new warships when you were ready to go to war.
I closed my knu session and went to the bar and got drunk.
I stayed on Aleron six months. I’d like to tell you I didn’t know why, but I did. I hoped she would come back. Mirabelle. The ship. I don’t know what I expected would happen when and if she did, but it wasn’t as if I had anywhere to go.
I drank rice wine and paid an exorbitant amount for a sprig of real sage from a pot on some guy’s ship. I occasionally scanned the knu for the Mirabelle. When I dreamed, I dreamed of her black eye. I remembered the story of the lonely woman told to kill. And I began planting tomatoes in the community garden, tomatoes ripe with microbial compounds I tailored myself.
And one day she came for me.
I was between jobs, spending time at the community garden at the center of the port. I straightened from my work, tomato in hand, dirt under my nails, and there she was.
I had never seen her whole face, let alone the rest of her. But I knew immediately it was her. She stood outside the gate, wearing a set of plain blue overalls and a work tunic. Her black hair was shorn against her scalp, and her skin was clear, unblemished. The black eyes were small and narrow, set deeply in a long, grave face.
The memories that bubbled up in me then were overpowering.
I saw lemon grass, heard the tinkle of tiny bells. I went toward her, hesitant, tomato held out like an offering.
“You’ve been looking for me,” she said. “How did you know that?”
“I’m required to track and trace all inquiries and public conver- sations tagged with certain parameters.”
“You’re not real,” I said.
“I’m not human,” she said. “I am very real.”
“You told me a story,” I said. “When I was dying. Who was it about?”
The woman . . . the avatar, the ship, Mirabelle . . . grew very still, blank. “I process many stories.”
“Don’t give me that recycled shit,” I said. “Do you really want to spend your life making war? All alone in the dark? You don’t, do you?”
“They know my desires,” she said. “The desire of the Mirabelle was not accounted for.”
“We could . . .” I hesitated, because it sounded foolish now, to say this to her in real life. “We could go . . . I have a year of wages . . .” I wasn’t even sure what I was trying to say.
“I am a ship,” she said. “More than a light year away from me, this body will cease receiving my consciousness, and will begin to deteriorate. You see a body. Humans are confused by this. But I am more than a body. I am real, but not human.”
“I don’t want you to leave again,” I said. “Do you need a me- chanic? I could—”
