Changeling Wood

Changeling Wood
by
Bobby Derie

Thomas held the lanthorn steady as he could, sweating against the heat and swearing silently against every biting insect. There was a fleshy knot or boil on her abdomen, just below the belly button, the size of draft horse’s scrotum, and the skin around it was bloated and taut, so that the whole stomach protruded and sagged over the top of her skirt, which was almost all that preserved her modesty. Thomas tried not to steal too many glances at the girl’s teats as they poked out from where his master had rolled up her shirt, but noticed the nipples were dark and puffy—like a woman with child. The boy said nothing but held up the lanthorn as his master’s left hand felt over the growth, then seemed almost to grab it firm and brought up his right hand with the scalpel against the pinched flesh.

“Hold your hand, cunning man! I am Mara of the Changeling Wood. You have no license here.”

Thomas looked up but did not see who had spoken, indeed could see little of the trees beyond the circle of the lanthorn’s glow, but his master stared at one tree in particular, and in a moment the boy made out the silhouette of a tall woman and child. The girl beneath him wriggled and grasped but the cunning man did not relinquish his hold on the strange flesh, only addressed the figure.

“Wise-woman, wood-witch, apis-maid, daughter and servant of queens, I am John Magnus, doctor of the Order of the Fly, and what I do is my own business and hers. Kindly fuck off.”

Swifter than Thomas could have guessed, the shadow crossed into the light, and the face revealed was like the sun after an eclipse. There was a cold beauty there, a beautiful woman in whose face had been set a mask of iridescent chitin, shiny metal blacks, blues, and golds playing in the firelight from the lanthorn. She was tall and regal as an Irish midwife in her own domain, and where the blue cloth and leather revealed the skin of hands and forearms, neck and collarbone, there too were set glittering insect-shells into the pale freckled flesh. Almost automatically, Thomas’ eyes fell to her breasts and wondered how far her art had gone…but then checked himself, and looked at the child instead, and the lanthorn shook in his hands for a minute, earning him a light kick from his master in rebuke.

The “child” was slim as a five-year old girl, the head with its bulbous multifaceted eyes disproportionate to the body, which was dressed in what might have been a pretty smock for a human child. It was as a wasp as an elephant is to a mouse; the whole structure of the thing was proportioned different than any bug Thomas had ever encountered, even the arcane species he’d come across since becoming the cunning man’s apprentice, and every twitch of mandible, antenna, and stunted wing revolted and fascinated him. The carapace itself was a pale yellow with spots and highlights of green, and tufts of spiky black hair surrounded the head and the bare arms and legs, or at least what he could see of them. He could not see the back of her, but Thomas wondered what her thorax looked like, and how she accommodated it while walking on two legs. While he gawked, the two wise people were lost in talk.

“She is a teenaged idiot who ran away from home because she didn’t want to marry the pimple-faced pig farmer next door. The poor bitch didn’t know this was the alfiad’s wood, and does not desire to be the hen that hatches the crocodile’s egg.” Magnus spat.

“So you would abort the life of one of the Fair Folk because of her simpleness? There are so few these days, with hardly any beast in this forest fit to bear their young to term, and yet you would destroy such a marvel only to spare the girl the consequences of her foolishness? What wrong has the child done, to deserve destruction?” she countered.

“It is not what it has done, as what it will do when the damn thing tries to claw its way out of her, as you well know.” the cunning man said. “Look you, I know you must have born the gall yourself” here he pointed the scalpel at the insect-girl “you must know the dangers to the host when the time has come, especially when the thing is not done right. Look here.”

Mara released the child’s claw, and stepped forward, squatting down and running a hand tiled in chitin across the belly.

“Exotopic implantation.” she muttered, almost under her breath “Where did the ovipositor go in?”

“Through her back, according to the scar.” Magnus said.

“Gods’blood!” the wise-woman swore. “Did she think the thing would bugger her up the ass?”

“Maybe she ran. Maybe she’s been watching her father go at the sheep. Whatever the case, she saw a six-foot wasp come out from behind a tree with a foot-long spike come out from its legs and turned her back to it. The egg attached—but if the nymph tries to come out, she’ll bleed to death. At best.”

“You’re right. Luckily, it’s far enow along—we could save it.” Mara felt at her waist and took out her own knife. “Where are you boiling the water?”

Magnus pointed at their small, roiling cauldron, and then the two fell to their work, bent over the poor girl and the thing growing in her. Mara purified her hands and arms according to her custom, and produced thin gloves of sheepgut likewise cleansed; Magnus brought forth his powders and elixirs, and before long the two were bent over the pale fleshy bump like vultures at a feast.

Thomas held the lanthorn on its pole, trying to follow what they said and did, but the insect-girl distracted him. She had come closer, padding softly on her claws, which were splayed, spiky things to bear her weight, though most of the rest of her was smooth and rounded as the armor of ants, save for the tufts of spiky hair. The stinging insects did not come around so much when she was near, and he caught a strange flowery scent on the breeze as she came closer to him. The unblinking eyes were inscrutable, but he saw himself and the lanthorn light reflected in them, and the antennae swung and trembled with greater pitch in his direction. When he saw the fabric of the smock rise in front of him, tented from within, the boy gave off a startled squeak.

John Magnus turned his head and cursed a blasphemous word, which set the ground to seething as tiny crawlers scuttled fiercely away, the air for a moment became still as all the flying insects winged off in desperation, and the insect-girl fled into the wood. Mara brandished her blood-slick knife in one hand.

“If you ever use that sort of language around my child again, I’ll gut you.”

“Then you need to teach her when it’s wrong to wave her prong at a poor boy.”

“She’s only doing what’s natural for her!”

“Aye, and she can go prong a fucking deer if she can catch it, but tell her to leave my apprentice alone. I don’t want to have to do this again. Easy now, here we go.”

Thomas looked down at what he though would be the bloody mess of the girl’s stomach, but in truth there was only one incision, along the curve of the stomach from one end of the hip to the other, and John Magnus was already working to sew that back up again. Mara held the changeling in her hands, and for the first time the cunning man’s apprentice saw the stunted limbs drawn up over the abdomen, the compaction and fusion of thorax and abdomen, the swinging tail-like thing which would hold the ovipositor, like its tiny cousin the gall wasp. It was bloody and beautiful in its own way, and Mara sang to it in a chittery hum in the back of her throat, rocking it slowly in her arms.

###

Cruciferous

Cruciferous
by
Bobby Derie

The first course was a pallid broccoflower, the semifractal whorls on the twin hemispheres giving a disconcertingly accurate imitation of a human brain, served raw in a chrome fondue pot shaped like a human head. Dr. Cruciferous and his guests dug into the soft off-white bloom with long-stemmed two-pronged forks, and dipped their morsels into the bubbling liquid cheese in the heated pot. I came to write an article, a love letter to the cruciferous vegetables for the edification and enjoyment of foodies everywhere. Dr. Cruciferous had promised us six new cultivars and hybrids, never before seen or tasted, prepared by six of the greatest chefs in the world. Like a fool, I allowed the honeyed words to whet my appetite. Now I was trapped in the den of an insane horticulturalist, a throwback to the primeval geneticists of a thousand years ago, a mad man who would bend the Triangle of U into strange, unnatural geometries in his pursuit of the perfect cabbage…

The Isle of Dr. Cruciferous was in the most desolate and isolated areas of the world…when he found it, it was an abandoned outcropping of recently-congealed lava and tuft in the contested exclusive economic zones of two maritime powers, claimed briefly by a Chinese billionaire with delusions of micronationality, before the deadly doctor had somehow wrested control and dedicated the new island to his own experiments. The scientific community tutted and voiced mute outrage in their journals and blogs, but all watched with terrible fascination and, yes, jealousy as Cruciferous re-enacted the ancient hybridization first theorized by the Japanese, the interbreeding of cabbages, mustards, and turnips which had first given rise to rutabagas, rapeseed…so many of the edible plants that humanity had cultivated and subsisted on since the dawn of primitive man in the same family…so many indeed, where the same species, but the individual cultivars were so different from one another, they would almost appear alien—brussel sprouts, broccoli, collard greens, turnips, radishes, mustards of ever color.

The micromustard was served next, on tiny gold saucers, mixed with cold black caviar, and tiny spoons that allowed only a few of the golden yellow and glistening black spheres on each dip. Dr. Cruciferous ate nothing, merely watched the reactions of the assembled guests with scientific detachment. I swished the mixture around my mouth before two errant molars came together and cracked a mustard seed—the flavor that exploded in my mouth brought tears to my eyes, and a tiny burning grittiness that almost made me vomit, but I swallowed. Tongues of flame etched their way down my esophagus, and then a bloom of fire erupted in my belly, a palpable heat that caused me to gasp and release a tiny belch of yellow-tinged smoke. Beside me, Jian Choi, the Wasabi Sensei appeared in incommunicable ecstasy, tears pouring from his eyes. Several food journalists of lesser constitution simply collapsed, and were taken away by Cruciferous’ lab assistants-cum-waiters.

The Rain Cabbage Forest occupied the western third of the island, a plain of flat sandy soil imported from somewhere else. Here, in an artificial tropical climate that protected them from freeze, woody cabbage-stalks could reach ten feet high—some speculated the doctor used the highly developed root systems for graftings, to race new plants to fruit without needing to grow their own nutritional infrastructure. But here, the mad doctor had outdone himself—crafted a true rainforest, the great hanging leaves of the rain cabbage vast beyond anything seen on any farm field. He took us out there, only five left after the micromustard, to enjoy a constitutional stroll through an early afternoon rain so that we could appreciate the shadowy coolness under the canopy, feel the wet dripping as water rolled off the leaves to the strange salad greens on the ground. Dr. Cruciferous’ lab assistants, still in their full-length black gowns and masks, harvested full, heavy green leaves from a fallen rain cabbage “tree,” the broken veins leaking white puddles onto the ground. The third course were those leaves, stuffed with pork and rice, baked under a mound of coals on that imported beach on the edge of that alien forest by a half-naked Hawaiian master chef. We ate as the evening darkened, and the stars came out, and the tide came in.

We never saw where the blackleaf grows; I think there must have been something about the environmental conditions even Cruciferous was wary of exposing us to—some chemical composition of the soil, perhaps—but he did allow us to see the chef as he prepared the gothic salad, stripping the strange black cabbages of their leaves and feeding them into the pot with herbs, spices, peppers, tomatoes, and vinegar. I never learned that chef’s name, but he was a twisted and old oriental that could have cracked walnuts and dug trenches in rocky soil with those bare hands, and he handled the chopping blade with the deftness of a master. I thought at first we would be looking at some soup, a derivation of Korean or Vietnamese, but what he brought out was closer to sauerkraut or winter kim chi. Under the influence of the acids, the blackleaf had broken down and blossomed a glorious shade of crimson. The doctor joined us for this meal, wielding a pair of ivory chopsticks that would have gotten him thirty years or more in prison if he’d tried to smuggle them into any civilized nation, diving into the tiny dish with relish. Those of us who remained ate sparingly, wanting to save some room for the final courses.

All the beauty and exoticness of the four previous vegetables was absent from the gloriously plain tung. Cruciferous warmed a little as he spoke of its nutritious properties, its hardiness and ease of cultivation, the potential to enable month-long space-flights to Mars or Venus. It was a pale, ugly pink thing, which in some distant past had been a turnip or radish, but was now a bloated root of excess, like the farm curiosities of arrogant Americans “competitive farmers” with their 5-kilo potatoes. Dr. Cruciferous donned an apron, gloves, and toque to prepare it himself—apparently, the cook he had invited here had not met the doctor’s stringent expectations. The great root was separated from its lush greens, and as the doctor sliced the root itself into chips, I found myself staring longingly at those greens, imagining them as part of the soul food in the devil’s kitchen, the boiling pig fat that would flavor them replaced with that of an unbaptized child—where the morbid thought came from, I do not know, unless it was part of the sinister atmosphere of the place, or the last drags of the mustard burning its way still as its indigestible oils settled in my colon—but I was brought back to reality by the sudden flash of flame and the sizzle of cooking oils as Doctor Cruciferous pan-fried the tung chips in an enormous cast-iron dish that must have been stolen from some ancient pizza restaurant of yore. Crisped to a light golden color, with just a hint of their native pink flesh, they were delicious and chewy, not at all like potato or banana crisps.

We settled heavily at the table—I had not seen the others disappear, but I gave little thought to my companion-competition. I would survive this diabolical feast and write the truth of Dr. Cruciferous, even if it killed my taste buds and wrecked my guts. We sat at the chef’s table in one of the ancillary kitchens—a clean and prosaic place, all white Italian tile and stainless steel, like any modern kitchen installed in any old building, though I knew this was an affection, as all structures on the island were less than five years old. The chef herself was a pretty, willowy blonde thing—a salad master if there ever was one, I doubt she had even tasted meat in years. She brought before us the Flower of Paradise…and I can think of no better word for it, for even though the fleshy pod had yet to bloom into a true flower, already its multi-coloured leaves fanned out around it. I looked but could not place it—there was hints of blue cabbage and red, bok choi and Boston lettuce, the strange spiraling fractals of Romanesco and tapering cress-like fronds. Indeed, so vast and dazzling was the array I could not help but stare at it, for all the different leaves and florets seemed to grow into and around each other. It was, without a doubt, a single plant, but it seemed to contain within it something of all other cruciferous vegetables that I had ever known or heard of…and more besides.

I wondered for a moment how it would be prepared, but the chef came towards it wearing a pair of heavy leather gloves, tiny kitchen-blades attached to the fingertips, still smiling the beatific grin that made me shudder and think dark thoughts of cannibals and those who cooked for them. With exaggerated care and a delicacy that put to shame Freddy Kreuger, Edward Scissorhands, or the Wolverine, she trimmed away the excess foliage, revealing to us the great heart hidden by the folding leaves. With a slice, she halved the roughly oval heart crosswise, holding it out so that we could both see the cross-shape at the very center. The chef laid the hearts on the plate, with tiny bowls of ginger dressing, and retreated. Eating with our fingers, Dr. Cruciferous and I dug in, crunching our way through the heart of the Flower of Paradise. I could hardly concentrate on mine, each thin layer had its own distinct flavor, which mixed and matched and contrasted with the others; each bite was a discovery that I never grew tired of, thought I quickly gave up on the ginger sauce. The damned doctor, for his part, appeared to be enrapt. In the end, we sat there, dabbing at our mouths with napkins, not a shred of greenery remaining.

I wished to say something to Dr. Cruciferous then, whether praise or damnation or a simple question I do not remember, for the world blackened at the edges around me. I remember seeing through the goggles he perpetually wore to the very tired eyes—just for a moment—as the natural sedatives took hold and I lost consciousness. I regained it only to find that I had been returned to my home, with almost no trace that I had ever left, even my notes taken from me, but I sat and typed this tale of madness and gastric debauchery, the terrible culinary wonders I have witness on his forbidden island…I do not know if they will print this, or what happened to my colleagues. Even now I feel a twinge in my gut, as if that mustard had never wholly left me, and I have never been able to taste things quite the same since. The lonely and wilted arugula sits in my fridge, but I can hardly stand to look at it…for it seems as I stare at it that I can trace the nefarious doctor’s art and science in the shape of that green life, to remember some hidden garden where he showed me the rows of blackleaf and the terrible hybrids he locked away, so they would not spawn and continue their generations, the silent greenhouse where mutant brussel sprouts were kept and nurtured so that their curious aberrations could spawn new generations…and I fear for the men of later years, who may never again know the pure taste and crunch of an honest cabbage, or the mild tang of an ordinary mustard, once the dread crops of Dr. Cruciferous finally come to their grim harvest.

###

Holding Pattern

3753 Cruithne

Axial Alexeinov watched the earthrise, sipped beer through a straw. Axial’s muse adjusted the cameras on the flat’s exposure suit. The digital image was dutifully filed away, the muse filling out the metadata according to its human’s stored preferences.

It’s human was waiting, impatient, agitated. As his personal AI assistant, It interacted with the exposure suit’s onboard safety systems. It spoke in metrics, navigated the suit’s minefields of command queries and user assistance dialogue cues. Oxygen content in the suit were raised a few tenths of a percent, the beer bled out a couple degrees of heat.

Axial took another sip.

It waited.

It ran idle for over a thousand milliseconds, and then accessed the archived files of their last visit to Cruithne, four subjective years ago. Ancient statistics on the quasi-satellite, a rock five kilometers in diameter and thirty times farther out than the moon. Sparsely beautiful holographic outlines of hypercorp ghostships, launched to perform discrete assays in case there was anything actually valuable there. Axial, the secret cosmonaut, built, bred and neurolinguistically programmed for this.

Sifting through the data, It fed select fragments into the mnemonic games Ax liked to play. Word games popped up on his ectoptic screen, the solutions of which would trigger remembrance, recall of essential details, and shifted data from long-term storage to short-term memory. No personal memories or experiences were recorded for the previous trip to Cuithne that It could find. The posthuman flat’s archived memories when no longer useful, reloading them to short-term recall only when instant recognition, knowledge, and action were desired.

It measured Axial’s progress, keeping score, shifting the games and key-data to measure recall and retention. As the amount of data It fed to the human flat increased, It stepped up the complexity of the games, moving from word puzzles to pattern games, the data coded in mnemonic cycles for quick recall of long strings of facts.

A squawk of ghostly echoes flitted through Axial’s earpieces, and the flat froze. It paused the games as Axial paid attention to the weak radio traffic. Software analysis identified Henq’s voice. It engaged word recognition immediately. Something about cocoons.

It registered a sudden shift of biometric data, and sampled it for further analysis. The exposure suit registered increased air intake, heightened pulse rate, a sharp rise of pheromones in the scrubbers. The ectoptic screen’s eye-motion sensors showed the human’s eyes had opened wider and dilated. Dozens of other innocuous sensors chimed in their supporting data.

It came to the conclusion that Axial was afraid.

It was programmed to respond to this result, in this place. It accessed a read-only memory cache, almost four standard years old. One of the black vaults of Axial’s memory, experiences that had been encrypted and stored. The effects of the memories were still evident in the flat’s personality, but not subject to general recall.
Locked files, erased memories. All that remained was a fear of spiders.

It unlocked the memories and began the instant replay.

#

Gilles swooshed softly down the access tunnel in hir mechacrab morph, its legs and claws curled up tightly against its hide. The biorg cannonballed down the microgravity well toward Cruithne’s center, crushing through elastic cobweb curtains and architecture. The soft chatter of eight billion spider legs and fifteen billion wings filled the space, and Gilles’ muse sampled the audio for later use. The sound gave context and contour to the purely speculative maps the Firewall agent had given them, but the sonic map hir muse was putting together was still sketchy due to the odd acoustics.

The air seethed with mutated insect life, generations of fast-multiplying fruit flies whose few chromosomes warped quickly and easily from the radiation emitted by Cruithne’s power source. Preying on the flies were genetically-engineered arachnids, tiny hairy grey things that spun impossible low-gravity webs and waged feasting wars on the flitting things. All for the amusement of the big brains in Cruithne’s rotten core.
Gilles sang softly to the rhythm, and hir muse provided a beat, slow and melodious, internal audio only. Hir muse controlled the descent with puffs of compressed air, timing the speed of descent to the tempo of the beat.

Dead insect matter drifted lazily through the air as organic snow until caught by some six-winged chitinous fly or stuck to a sticky strand of spider silk. The gene-spiders had formed curtains to catch this bounty, and as the biorg shell burst through them it became matted and covered with silk and the tiny clinging passengers. The mechacrab was sealed tight against atmosphere and vacuum, but spider and fly eggs could find their way into any crevice or cranny on the morph. Gilles would not want to take the critters back aboard the ship.
In the last fifty meters of the freefall, hir muse timed the counter-thrust bursts with the dying beat. Gilles listened and sang a cappella as ze floated just above the access hatch. Hir muse coordinated the dozens of tiny shutters and wipers that cleaned silk and detritus away from hir optical sensors and electronic eyes. The crab-legs stretched out, magnets clunking as the appendages anchored themselves around the access hatch.

Hir muse dampened secondary sensory data input as the biorg focused hir attention on the forward tool-limbs, cracking into the access hatchway’s electronics. Spiders and flies crawled over everything. The spiders from the interior were white and grubby-looking things which preyed on the grey hairy spiders in the shaft. Gilles’ tiny, delicate tool limbs had to wade through a spider war as ze tapped into the system.
Gilles’ muse registered a mental aria of success as the access hatch began to open. Mephitic vapors, heavy with oxygen and the thousand scents of insect life and decomposition spilled forth, and a pale waxy tide crawled out as the gap widened. The biorg instinctively recoiled, and hir muse responded by closing the shutters on all non-mandatory sensors again.

Sealed and blind once more, the mechacrab climbed into the crawling hole.

#

Nigh weightless, Henq slipped through the airlock door and into the sepulcher of a million flies. Hir shadow passed over mummified corpses wrapped in dried silk under hir feet. The neuter splicer stared at the cocoons on the wall for a moment, sent a brief communication to Axial. Floating forward, Henq groped the wall, gloves feeling beneath the macabre shrouds for the controls. Xuyen, hir muse, used tactile pulses to guide hands and fingers to the proper combination.

Bright sunlight dimmed as the outer doors closed again. The burst of air from the vents broke loose the petrified web, filling the air with long-dead spider-things that had too many legs and no eyes. Xuyen tried the local mesh, failed. Snatches of encoded traffic suggested the system software was at least ten years old. Xuyen fell back on older communication protocols, tried again. The system did not respond.

The splicer triggered a wide-spectrum light the chestpiece of hir exposure suit. Xuyen automatically brought up the visual overlay Henq preferred. The frequency data was converted down to something within the splicer’s visual range, presented as a color-wash that cycled from infrared to ultraviolet every fifteen seconds.
The air lock opened into a fifty-meter wide corridor bored straight down into the heart of the rock. Criss-crossing the corridor were suspension bridges of ridged webbing, strand woven on strand in intricate braided cables. Invisible to the naked eye but apparent under the light were monofilament strands, drawn taut and hidden by the crisscrossing webs.

“Jumping into a blender.” Henq subvocalized. “Xuyen: climbing mode.”

Xuyen responded automatically, reconfiguring the exposure suit for climbing. Wire-like claws extruded from gauntlets and boots. Inner cushions inflated and elastic bands cinched to give greater support to back muscles. Joints expanded at the shoulder to provide greater freedom of movement.

Henq climbed, head first. Xuyen synced to the internal gyroscope, working to adjust the splicer’s kinesthetic senses on-the-fly. The suit’s claws scraped through webs and punched into rock. With a secure hold, a slight twist would launch a micro-piton, already threaded with a belay line that spooled out above and behind hir.
Xuyen helped map a path through the monofilament defenses, using tactile tugs. The path often took Henq through the spider nests. By the time ze’d dropped thirty meters hir faceplate was obscured with silk, bug crap, and pale wriggling things. Xuyen adjusted the internal sponge-wipers to keep sweat out of the splicer’s eyes as ze climbed.

At the bottom, the security door was armed and active. Henq scanned the bottom of the shaft, focused on a section of the wall a few meters from the wall that refracted the wide-spectrum light differently. Xuyen opened a comm channel to Axial back outside as Henq cleared away the false rock with hir climbing claws. With the access panel exposed, Henq quickly pried it open and attached the router device. Henq let hirself float freely, attached by the final belay tether.

“Xuyen: Tharsis Plateau.” Henq subvocalised. Xuyen began the simulation.

#

Gwynn waited as hir gwynnettes synchronized hir echoes’ two-pronged assault. At the same millisecond, the Gwynn-þ and Gwynn-ð accessed Cruithne’s secure system. From its holding pattern around the quasi-satellite, the Analytical Engine that Could the infomorphs’ signal was broadcast to the routing devices hir partners had secured. Gwynn’s exploit gave the infomorphs access to the system proper, the dual breach slipping past the aging spypost’s firewall. The gwynnettes routed an XP feed back from Þ and ð. The Cruithne system was a digital spider’s web, eight-legged programs with glowing abdomens skittering through the artificial night. After years of solitary confinement, Cruithne’s posthuman intelligence had made the system a Byzantine map of its own mind.

Gwynn idled a moment to get hir bearings while hir gwynnettes picked apart the details of the system. The gwynnettes were a gestalt muse AI, each part a personality fragment of Gwynn, an extension of hir digital self, and ze rarely differentiated between hir internal voice and the gwynnettes’ internal communications. Hir gwynnettes fed mission data into hir consciousness. Cruithne, spypost. The central core was little more than a shoal of cerebral tissue, a coral-like mass of cloned brain matter organized to process the massive data the spypost covertly assembled from its distant, quiet observation of T.I.T.A.N.-ravaged Earth.

Ð moved more quickly from hir access point, heading along a lambent strand toward the communication center. Gwynnettes commented and scrutinized Gwynn-ð’s sensory feed, mapping hir position within the system.

Þ followed the data-spiders to the center of the web, slinking along with hir best stealth program. The gwynnettes measured the time the hack was taking, checking it against the air remaining for the three morphs on the surface. The chatter in the back of Gwynn’s mind comforted hir.

The center of the web contained a hoary, fractal orb of milling spider legs engrossed in its latest project: a blind, armored spider which bore more of a resemblance to a cockroach than an arachnid. Twittering in hir backmind, one of the gwynnettes suggested that the posthuman intellect had turned to genecrafted spiders as a cure for its loneliness. Þ’s discreet search of the files turned up treatises on artificial evolution, war game scenarios, diary entries about the conflict against the hated descendents of the original insect—the poor, lost flies which had been trapped here when the spypost on Cruithne was first built.

Taking advantage of the engrossed posthuman, þ sampled its traffic and captured his command codes, which ze routed it through Gwynn to ð. To the darkcast array, it was an order straight from the posthuman intellect at Cruithne’s core. Authorized, the equipment powered up and began broadcasting the spysat’s carefully hoarded intel.

In the web-center, þ worked to filter the signals from reaching the posthuman brain-shoal. Data-spiders squished and vanished as ze blocked them. The gwynnettes chittered in hir backmind, painting out which messages to block and which to let pass, and screamed a little with each shift and movement the fractal spider-orb made.

#

Xu Lin was meditating when the dataflow began, but she let Mother handle it. The Firewall agent felt she had chosen well in these new contacts. The next part of their task would be more difficult.

Mother shunted the incoming darkcast into secure datastorage. The data would need to be decrypted, and then sifted for the keywords Xu Lin would be interested in. The muse did not mind. Ze had no sense of time any more, no ability to experience or understand boredom. Ze would do anything for hir daughter.
Following hir script, Mother alerted the authorities on Luna of the Analytical Engine’s approach, the warrant for their arrest under Jovian law, began the pre-extradition procedure. If hir daughter’s agents did as instructed, they would be apprehended in cislunar space.

Xu Lin finished her meditation, and found Mother had set her drugs out before her. While Mother knew Xu Lin was not particularly attached to this morph, ze also knew bodies were scarce and should be well-maintained. It would hardly due for hir daughter to age or get flabby through neglect. Not yet, anyway.

Not unless necessary for the mission.

It was almost a ritual, between the two of them. Mother made the preparations, and Xu Lin followed through her exercises, her beauty treatments, her education courses and her ritual medication. Xu Lin had only to exist while she had Mother to look after her, to remember for her.

“Entertainment,” Mother said, and Xu Lin smiled.

The door opened and a short, skinny androgynous figure stepped in, all naked flesh and goosebumps. Dragon-shapes of nanotattoo barcodes crawled across hir belly, climbed up hir ribs, circled a smooth and flawless breast.

“Oh Mother.” Xu Lin said. “You shouldn’t have.”

Mother was silent. Ze said nothing as hir daughter began, again, to do the things she enjoyed doing so well.
This time would be different.

Coitus was brief, interrupted. Mother said nothing as the Terragenesis agents came, as the lover’s head erupted, spattering her daughter’s face and tits with brains and implant-tech. She didn’t bother to listen as they arrested her, the charges against her.

“I’m sorry Xu Lin.” Mother said. “It is for your own good.”

“Mother?” she subvocalized. “What did you do?”

“What I am programmed to do. What every Mother is programmed to do. I have protected you. You will be safe now. Safer than here, with those people.”

“Mother? Manual override.”

As her muse reset, Xu Lin lashed out at the hypercorp agents. The sudden shift from docile and limp caught them by surprise. Her left foot crushed an augmented trachea with posthuman strength, the fingers of her right hand scraped skin and meat off a plastic skull. They were trained, their reply brutal. Within seconds Xu Lin was running, naked, away from her apartment. Blood ran from her breast where a nipple had been torn off. Free for the moment, she darkcast an encrypted message to Firewall.

:: My muse has been compromised. Resleeve mission. ::

###

No Sprach

No Sprach
by
Bobby Derie

Six drinks into the evening the neon flared brighter off the brass and chrome of chair rim and table top, the crowd paused for a sip and a drag between songs, and the night settled on the boy at the end of the bar. The girl at the bar took the last of a dwindling pile of Euros on the bar and poured him something tinted with smoke that clung to the sides of the glass and a tall pilsner besides; the boy breathed the shot in and set the empty glass back down just as an English voice punched from the speakers, the number-one hit no matter what language, I’ll Take It In the Ass (For You). The boy stared into the distance and reached out for the glass, brushed fingers with the girl as she stole a sip of his beer.

She was dark of skin and hair and eye, and stringy rather than lithe; thrift store jewelry clambered for real estate on her fingers, wrists, and neck—the tarnished silver and cheap gold of old dead women, tiny chips of diamond, pearl-buds, and all manner of polished pebbles in wiry clasps—and underneath was a sort of discount rockerpunk, black cloth jacket with wide sleeves to get lost in, black jeans that might have been a second skin, a men’s black cotton v-neck. “…von Liebe wird von der... der antiken Philosophie...” she said, voice a little scratchy. There was black lipstick stuck to the top of the beer as she set it down, mumbled something, left her hand next to his.

They split the beer, then split the bar.

He took her by the hand, warm palm to palm, fingers curled around unfamiliar hardware, and led her to the floor. The beat picked up as they faced each other, the lights began to shift to a pulsing red and blue strobe. A little apart, they began to dance. He with his hands in the air, elbows up, heels lifting to the beat, eyes on her; she moved with the crowd, compact in her own space but mobile, keeping the boy in her peripheral vision, head dipping in time with the bass. Her lips moved, maybe she said something, but neither one could hear. They came together, sometimes, their little bubble of personal space moved and contracted as people entered and left the floor, sometimes right on top of each other, his breath on her face, her hands on his hips. After an eternity, give or take three songs, she slapped him on the ass and fell off the floor laughing, the boy in her wake.

A noise came from her throat, high and piercing, that caught the boy wide-eyed and ducking; she ran to a table with four other girls and a jungle of half-empty glasses laden with half-eaten fruit. She nibbled an olive and gave a brief speech, gesturing in his general direction. “…in gegengeschlechtliche und... und die Freundesliebe in menschlichen...“ she stopped to lick her lips, and the girls laughed and waved her on. She grabbed his wrist, cold metal digging into his skin, and dragged him out as the girls waved goodbye. So they quit the club.

On the streets, she led a conversation of hands. Gesticulated and mouthed things he couldn’t hear, always sought his eyes with hers, thrust fingers repeatedly for emphasis at concrete gargoyles and cornices, ancient public boxes with angular runic spray-tags, fragments of old stone that erupted up from beneath pavement in twisting alleys and side-streets. Mostly he listened when she talked, words flowing past him, ears pricking at cadence, emotion, the affects of speech. “Standpunkt innerhalb der Existenzphilosophie ... Der Mensch existiere ursprünglich nicht ... sich die Liebe, die sich vorbehaltlos öffne, wenn sich...“

He tried a word. She stopped, stared. He tried again, pointed at her, and she grinned. “Liebe,“ she repeated, punctuated with a grin that swallowed her face. Her arm caught his, then, gripped it tight through the jacket, and they staggered together as she led him on.

In her apartment, in the dark, candles lit, iPod lodged in white plastic speakers, blushing roommates chased out with hissing threats and thrown pillows, he stripped off his jacket, sitting on the bed in her room as if naked in his t-shirt and jeans, rubbed his bare arms. The bed was a single, covered in a quilt of pink and white patches, plush dragons and unicorns claiming the hill of one lumpy pillow that leaked goosedown, a heavy knit thing that must have cost three sheep their winter pelts at the foot. Staring about, he relaxes; she emerged from the bathroom sans jacket and jewelry, the v-neck falling lower on her than he’d thought it might, accentuating her cleavage, a pale tube in one hand. He stood up, reached an arm out toward a bare shoulder, stroked it down the back of her arm, moved in with parted lips. She frowned, and he lifted his hand, backed off.

Onto the bed she clambered, dark fingers that seemed more slender without her rings fiddled with the iPod, and the speakers emitted a new, familiar tune—the strains of I’ll Take It Up The Ass (For You). He saw her there posed on hands on knees in the quilt, bare feet poking out of the bottom of her pants. The jeans seemed looser about her waist, and he realized her belt was off. “Die wörtliche Übersetzung von to fuck ist ‘ficken.‘“ she said, and wiggled her butt in the air.

He smiled and climbed on the bed.

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