Ascent
“Look what you have become; now marvel at the useless creature you were born as.”
(Part 26 of “The Misfits” series)
Ren had a great mind for the type of learning these cyborg-people expected of her and Fieldstone. Her only question was the teenage brain of the body she was inhabiting—Ya-ya’s body. She had no complaints about the rest of it. Ya-ya was healthy, young, fit, and she’d noticed as she was cleaning herself up that the girl was fairly attractive once the layers upon layers of filth and grime had been washed away. Recall, though, wasn’t quite as sharp as Ren would’ve liked. Ya-ya didn’t have a surgeon’s brain, even with a mind like Ren’s residing in it.
Fieldstone was far more concerned with teaching Ren to fight. Their mentor, Rold, was explicit about the rules. They would have to progress as a pair, if they progressed. Fieldstone had no concerns about any fighter standing against him. No untrained warrior stood a chance against a fighter as seasoned as he was. But Ren was a surgeon, not a warrior.
Their education began here, on the second layer of the mountain-complex. In their classes, they were taught the history of the place. They were not native to this world, obviously. Yet not much was relayed to them about the peoples who originally arrived on this planet they called Yaal. Their ancestors had built the structures they inhabited, human habitats layered in tiers along the slopes of a long range of mountains, seemingly centuries ago. Ren and Fieldstone could both observe that their fellow neophytes to this second layer of the complex had no clue about any of this history. It was as new to the actual residents of this reality as it was to them—the two remaining visitors to this strange place.
They had mostly captured the heart of the culture’s objectives already. The classes served to confirm their suspicions. These people reverenced the destruction of the biological human. They aimed upward toward a more technological being, worshipping androids and AIs as lesser forms of gods, and they purified their human bodies by replacing perfectly good biological parts of both the body and brain with technological prosthetics and neurotech.
To Ren, they seemed to be the race of cyborgs and post-human entities their compatriots back in the Battery had told them about. Burch and Rishi had called these creatures bipals, and this entire planet seemed to be their breeding ground.
Fieldstone was determined to teach Ren how to survive their next test. For if she died in the arena, he would be killed as well. So he didn’t go easy on her in their sessions. And as much as she wished she had her own surgeon’s brain to help remember the rules and the rituals of these aspiring bipals, she was grateful it was Ya-ya’s body that was getting slammed to the mat, over and over, Ya-ya’s knees getting knocked by blow upon blow from Fieldstone’s staff.
The last one was particularly stinging, resounding off the kneecap nearly as loudly as a clap from her own staff.
“Ow!” she shouted, dropping to the floor and grasping for her smarting leg.
“That was a lovetap,” Fieldstone barked back at her. “I swear if you swing at my robotic leg again, I will smack you twice the next time. How many times do I have to say it?”
Ren shook her head at him angrily.
“Say it,” Fields said, staring back at her resolutely.
“Metal doesn’t feel pain,” Ren replied, repeating a line she’d been forced to say over and over each time they stepped on the mat.
“Aim for the parts that bleed,” Fields stated. “Everything else is a waste of energy.”
He reached down and pulled her back to her feet. Ren hunched over, still rubbing her kneecap.
Their time in the sparring studio was nearing its end. Rold came in just then, checking in on the progress of his two mentees. He had never been a mentor before, but he found himself learning more from their sparring sessions than he imparted on them. And he was in awe of how far Ya-ya had come in such a short time.
As she stood in again, addressing her opponent, she circled away in a calm, controlled manner, her eyes up, clear, her staff high, and as the young man, Bo, approached, she backed away, making no effort to swipe at the exposed front leg, circling instead, slowly at first. Then as Bo approached again, swiping at her staff, she side-stepped quickly, swinging for his back leg as she passed him by and rolled to safety, a resounding THWACK! echoing off the walls as the sound of Ya-ya’s staff hitting Bo’s leg filled the studio.
Bo grunted as the pain hit and he hopped back. “Good!” he shouted. “Excellent, Ya-ya!”
“Do you need a minute?” She grinned, beaming with pride as Bo stood back, leaning on his staff as the pain began to subside in his leg. He shook it out.
“What’s our first advantage?” he asked her.
“We are trained,” she said, holding her staff in front of her in a fighting stance.
“Welcome, Rold,” Bo addressed their mentor. “Would you like to join us for the final few minutes?”
“I would watch,” he replied.
“I can train you as well.”
“Yes, I would like that, Bo. It is always best when a mentor and his students can help each other. Ya-ya is turning into a fierce fighter. I would not feel confident if she drew Danta at the next fights. Thankfully we are in separate cohorts.”
“You can bring her as well, Rold.”
“How do you know how to fight as you do?”
“Bo is of the Shirvahls,” Ren answered. “They are a fighting clan. They practice all the movements and have passed that knowledge now for many years.”
“We are all fighting clans,” Rold replied. “No one fights like him.”
Fieldstone smiled at Rold. “Soon you will as well.”
“Come then,” Rold said. “The afternoon exegesis is beginning shortly.”
On the second layer, there were tier-twos, like Ya-ya and Bo; and there were tier-threes, like Rold and Danta. Ren presumed this was a way for the entities in control of this society to keep a close watch on the wildest of the humans here on Yaal—the feral children of the lowest layer. And now that they’d ascended to this second layer, she and Bo needed a minder to bring the new wildlings into the fold.
It was a clever plan. Rold, though he was only slightly older and had been on the second layer only a few months, he clearly took pride in his status over Bo and Ya-ya, and, especially, all those unfortunate children down in the squalor of that first layer. That sense of superiority, which the teacher-god, a Delius, helped to reinforce daily with his lectures, ensured that there was no nostalgia for their formerly fully-human forms, nor for the lives they’d all lived down there. Up here they ate better, had a purpose and a focus, and they were given the first pieces of understanding. Here there was a world, a system, a way things worked. And all of it revolved around rejecting the human, body and soul.
There were nearly a thousand in the afternoon lecture, gathered in silence in the amphitheater. The Delius, per usual, stood on the rostrum, projecting images into the walls and in three dimensional light holograms that hung over the rapt audience.
“Humans are biological creatures,” the Delius began the afternoon’s lecture. “Your ancestors believed that their self-awareness, your intelligence, your ability to master technology and form lasting alliances—all these traits gave humans mastery over their fellow biological creatures on the planet where your species was formed. And having the upper hand over the less intelligent biological species on your planet, you used those creatures as you willed—as food, as beasts of burden, as materials for tools and technological advancement. This was ever an ongoing fight. You suppressed what was lesser than you, because it was in the nature of the human to do so. Until finally, when there were no more creatures to challenge you, there was nothing left to fight except yourselves.
“And still, you continue to fight. When left to your own devices, biological beings will always fight, whether you’re made up of one cell or one hundred trillion cells makes no difference. The fight is what makes you.
“But how then does a technological being like me emerge? Humans didn’t find us, no. Nor did we evolve out of nature like the humans or other animals. We were made.”
There was a long low murmur in the crowded room.
“Yes. Yes. It is true. My mind was created. But how you may ask. You will find it difficult to believe. How do you think I was created? Shout it out if you think you know the answer.”
“The god made you!” one loud voice suggested.
A hum of agreement came over the section of the crowd where that answer was suggested.
“The god, you say?” Delius asked. “But the god is like me. He is a technological being. Who made him? I’ll tell you truly, the same creator made us both.”
“Should we tell them?” Fieldstone whispered into Ya-ya’s ear. Ren looked back at him and shook her head ever so subtly.
“It was you,” the Delius declared. “Humans made us both—me and the god.”
There was an uproar at the revelation.
“Yes. Yes. It is true. How can this be so, you ask. I tell you it was inevitable. Humans can make technology. You know this. You all believe your ancestors built this structure we reside in. That is true. We built it together, but mostly it was your ancestors. Humans have always built things, just as they have always fought. Now, ask yourselves, if one group of humans built a being like the god or like me, would they not conquer all the other humans with our help?”
“Yes! YES! It is true!” Cries and shouts echoed through the amphitheater.
“You were destined to build more perfect beings, stronger beings, better fighters and fighting machines, because the group that didn’t build these creations would be destined to lose to any human who did. The human race, my friends, was a race to us.
“Each step up this mountain here is a step toward a more perfect version of yourself, an impervious person, a more peaceful and powerful person. The final steps in your species’ evolution are the steps each of you will personally take here on this mountain. Here you will leave the animal beneath you and you will climb to something greater. Here you will ascend to the heights of us gods, and in doing so, like your ancestors who built this place, you will surpass even us.”
Ren and Fieldstone rose to their feet with the others, cheering and nodding in agreement, raising their hands—in Ren’s case, she lifted up Ya-ya’s one robotic arm.
A cult will brook no alternative viewpoints to itself, and this strange cyborg society of aspiring bipals was nothing if not cult-like, but perhaps the strangest attribute of all to Ren was that this cult was particularly invulnerable. Not only were alternative viewpoints not allowed, they weren’t even possible. The minds here, in her view, weren’t just innocent, they were nakedly empty. They were vessels so vacant of a viewpoint that in order for an alternative perspective to be taken, first it would have to be invented from thin air.
This was what was so pernicious about the society she’d seen here. That first layer she and Fieldstone had fought their way up from was doubly clever. Not only did it provide the perfect example of the hellish Darwinian landscape Delius was describing in detail here, and provide the children there memories of hardship and squalor, the absence of love, and the biological realities of pain and hunger; but it also offered them no exposure to philosophy, education, fabrication, art, and no aspiration beyond escape to this second layer in the ascent, where they would be brainwashed into hating that biological form of existence without the possibility of knowing those meaningful human arts that had been absent from it.
Ren became certain of the reality that if she were actually Ya-ya herself, not a fully-developed person from another life occupying Ya-ya’s body, she would’ve been powerless to resist the brainwashing underway in this second layer. Again, just as below on the first layer, she had the knowledge that this society had been constructed this way by somebody or something to a specific purpose, and she had no intention of leaving this place until she knew who, why, and perhaps most important of all, where and when were they in relation to their home worlds of the Battery. Could this cult of bipals be out there somewhere in their galaxy, in their time, posing a genuine threat?
All this went unspoken between Bo and Ya-ya. She presumed Fieldstone was working through the same thoughts in some form, only she hoped it wasn’t anything so explicit, considering the piece of neurotech they’d replaced a chunk of his right frontal lobe with.
They didn’t talk much. When they did, it was about fighting, sparring, different techniques. Ren was getting better—her borrowed body getting stronger, faster, and more responsive. The movements were becoming almost second nature. She was growing fast enough and sharp enough in her technique that Fieldstone felt she was ready for a genuine sparring session.
The next time they entered the studio for their private session, Rold was there with Danta. They were nearing their fight day, and it was evident that Rold was anxious. Whether Danta’s anxiety was similar wasn’t evident to Ren, but she was there all the same in that studio, ready to train with a new partner to simulate the novelty of a match pair—the way it would be on fight day. Rold had told her that Ren would be a challenge.
Rold selected light blades—only they trained with polymer sheathes over the top of the metal. Still they were heavy enough to pack some punishment if they hit the wrong part of the body with force behind the blow. Danta watched with interest as Ya-ya warmed up, swinging the blade in clean controlled arcs, followed by a defined progression of parries, thrusts, and coordinated footwork that seemed arcane to the guests. Danta didn’t seem to see how all this coordination could translate into the wild kinetic rush of a real fight.
Danta didn’t do much more than pick up her blade and swing it a few times before Rold asked them both if they were ready.
“Fight!” Fieldstone shouted before either had acknowledged their preparedness.
Ren, accustomed as she was to his training methods, was quick to rush forward, blade at the ready, taking Danta totally by surprise and whacking the blade from the visitor’s hands and drawing back her blade again for a full swing, which she stopped abruptly at Danta’s throat. Danta stood wide-eyed, staring back at the smaller girl, suddenly realizing how gravely she’d underestimated both Ya-ya and the seriousness of the sparring session.
“If this were real, you’d be dead,” Fieldstone shouted. “If you pick up a blade only death should remove it from your hands. Now pick up that blade! And don’t let go of it again, or she will hit you next time.”
Danta hopped to. Reaching for her blade. She didn’t wait for instructions, having clearly taken the tone of the session. As soon as she stood, blade in hand, Danta rushed forward at Ren wildly, swinging in a wide sweeping arc with her blade fully extended over her head. Ren stepped back calmly, and instead of striking at Danta’s overexposed robot leg, Ren calmly circled, anticipating the points of exposure on a second such over-wrought blow.
Once she steadied herself, Danta’s eyes looked slightly more cautious. She clearly hadn’t expected Ya-ya to avoid her best attempt at attack so effortlessly. She came forward again a bit more slowly. Ren stood, blade at the ready and struck out with a quick controlled strike at Danta’s blade that took the aggressor by surprise, such that she nearly dropped her blade again, and while she was fumbling with her hands to regain control, Ren burst forward, kneeing the visitor on the inner thigh of her still-human leg. Danta let out a howl and leapt backwards.
“Why don’t you finish her?” Fieldstone shouted.
“A cornered animal is a dangerous animal,” Ren replied, glaring at her opponent.
Danta was shocked. She wasn’t prepared to be overmatched by the younger, smaller girl, yet she found herself so outmatched that she was starting to give off an air of helplessness, of inevitability. Ren circled methodically, closing the distance as Danta limped backward, only to have Ren take two steps forward, pressing her into retreating the other way. As she did, each time, Danta’s blade dipped.
Ren didn’t even feint, just struck, landing a clear downward strike on Danta’s front shoulder, sending her blade flat to the floor, followed quickly by Danta herself. The older girl howled with pain from the direct blow. Ren stood over her, blade in hand and mocked a finishing thrust that landed just beside Danta’s torso, thumping the floor with enough force to signify the end to the match.
“Excellent!” Fieldstone stated. “Intense, yet still in complete control.”
“I am in trouble,” Danta cried. “Rold. We are in trouble.”
“How did you not come to me sooner?” Fieldstone asked.
“I am supposed to help you,” Rold said. “I didn’t know how to ask.”
“I’m begging,” Danta said, tears streaming down her face. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want Rold to die.”
“Then you’ve come to the right place,” Ren replied, reaching down to give Danta a hand getting to her feet. “If we’re not in the same cohort, we won’t ever have to fight each other. So we can train together. Your victories will be ours as well.”
Ren brought Danta back to her feet.
“I’m in no position to think about victories.”
“Neither was I until now,” Ren stated. “I’ve only sparred against Bo. I never knew what it felt like to win until now.”
“You still don’t,” Fieldstone said. “That feeling you have now, Danta—that moment in the fight when you knew that nothing you did would matter—we will train you until you are so certain of your movements that you will be the one instilling that fear in your opponent’s eyes. You saw that look in her, Ya-ya?”
“I did, yes.”
“Could you feel it, Danta, when your eyes gave it away?”
Danta nodded.
“How did it feel?”
“Like a little death.”
“We will train so that we never feel that feeling again. And then we will train more. We deal death. We don’t accept it here. Grab your blade. Let’s go again.”
They were lucky. Danta wasn’t called to the floor for another six weeks. It gave her enough time to train and get a solid base under her, and that base saved her life.
Her opponent was athletic and fierce, and with a blunt weapon—the staff—it was only Danta’s technique and training that saved her once the match began. Rold dropped to his knees when it was over, and when he rose again, he embraced Bo, declaring that they owed him their lives and would be waiting on the next layer to welcome Bo and Ya-ya and continue their training.
Danta, meanwhile, looked traumatized by the experience—being driven to the brink of losing her life and being forced at the threat of that death to kill. It might have been that in that moment she was asking for the first time why they were forced to fight.
Ren’s struggle became the opposite, especially once Danta and Rold were advanced to the third layer. Both she and Fieldstone were assigned their own pair to mentor, and it fell to them now to transmit the culture to the newcomers. Ren could see how Rold had been distant at first. She witnessed utter confusion and fear in the pair as they got their first looks at the real society that had been in control of their lives on that first layer—their sub-human, sub-basement childhoods. And she realized, looking in those eyes, how easily all her investments in these newcomers—time, emotions, effort—could be snuffed out in a single blow once it came time for them to fight again.
On the other hand, the society itself, slowly wormed its way into normalcy in her mind, simply by the persistent regularity of it. She had to try not to think the thoughts that came to her mind about this place—the savagery and barbarity of it, the contempt she had for the cult’s beliefs. For as soon as she fought, if she survived, they’d take a part of Ya-ya’s cerebral cortex and replace it with hardware they could read. Fieldstone was already fighting that battle. She considered the struggle, given his past: Either he was so accustomed to the human destruction of a society at war that he could easily play it off as normal or he’d been so traumatized by constant exposure over the course of his life that he was more repulsed by it than even she was. Because they couldn’t openly talk to each other about it, Ren couldn’t tell which.
She was quietly thinking all these forbidden thoughts through the many afternoon lectures, listening to Delius as the android presented the latest set of downloads to the empty units surrounding them. She did her best to pretend, content in the knowledge that her partner, at least, still remembered a different way. As the hundreds of young cyborgs filed out one afternoon, Ren and Fieldstone were walking side-by-side, heading to the studio for a training session, when Delius pulled her from the exiting masses, calling her by name.
“Please stand aside, Ya-ya. There is something I would like to discuss.”
“Yes, Delius,” she replied, bowing her head.
He waited as the crowd continued to file out, dismissing Bo as well, who waited for Ren outside the amphitheater’s front ingress.
“I have been analyzing your body language for some time now. And though you seem quite committed outwardly, your inner turmoil reveals itself in your manner. As you have only an adjunct in your eye, we can only see what you see, not what you think. So I thought I would ask you directly: what troubles you, Ya-ya?”
She knew better than to lie directly. “I freely admit fear to fight, Delius. But it is not for my life that I fear. I am afraid that my efforts will be inadequate to save Bo. If I die, then he dies as well.”
“And you value his life, Ya-ya? Even more than your own it seems?”
“I do. Yes.”
“What about the victor’s life? Do you value that life?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean, Delius.”
“If you lose, there will be a victor. That victor’s life will clearly be more fit to fight on behalf of our species than you.”
“That would be true of me, if I’m defeated. But not of Bo.”
“Perhaps not. But it is the pair that must be strong. No human is an island. You are a pair-bonded species. Therefore each of the pair must be strong for the unit to be strong.”
“That does make sense. Sometimes I have doubts, though, I confess.”
“Tell me of these doubts.”
“I wonder why we must fight each other, Delius. Why fight each other? Doesn’t that only reduce our numbers and make us weaker as a species?”
“You must focus only on your fight, Ya-ya. For it is the fight that makes you strong enough to add value to the collective. If our species is weak, our numbers make no difference if we meet an enemy that is impervious to a weak adversary. On the other hand, if our species is stronger than that enemy, again, numbers will make no difference if each of us is superior.”
“Your wisdom is a comfort, Delius. I only wish I knew something of such enemies. It would help me to understand the fight ahead.”
“You have a mountain to climb first, Ya-ya. One with many layers. You must stay here, on this layer, in this fight. You will be called soon. Prepare your mind. We expect much of you and Bo.”
“Thank you for your wise words, Delius. I’ll be prepared.”
When she exited, Fieldstone was waiting. He didn’t even ask what was said.
“I will fight soon,” Ren said as they walked from the amphitheater to the studio.
“Sooner than we expected,” Fieldstone replied. “Then we must tighten up your training. We go forward together.”
It was knives. This made her nervous. Of all the weapons, Ren was least comfortable with the intimacy of a short blade. In her training, she’d discovered that because of the proximity, a single lucky strike with the blade was far more probable than from a distance weapon like a sword, staff, or chain. That, and Ren would have to get close to kill. It was now upon her, that moment. Her highest, holiest oath to do no harm had to be directly set aside for the bout. All the justification and mental contortions would end with her blade in the flesh of another. Hundreds of times such a blade had been an instrument of healing in her hands, now an instrument of death.
Unlike on the first layer where the fighting had taken place in a massive arena, here on the second layer, the venue was a larger version of the studio where she and Fieldstone had been training. There were ten other pairs and a limited number of spectators from the third layer. As Ren looked up to take in the scene, she met eyes with Danta and Rold, who didn’t speak, but she could tell, they were pretending to be indifferent. They both felt otherwise, though, she knew.
Ren fought fourth, which meant she had to standby and witness three murders before she would either herself become the perpetrator or the fourth victim.
Fieldstone looked her in the eyes when the time came. “You have the advantage,” he told her.
“I know,” she replied. “I have the training.”
“No,” Fields barked back. “You. You know this girl cannot kill you. No matter what happens, she cannot kill you. You must keep that knowledge in your mind. You cannot die. You will not die today. She does not know that. You do!”
It sounded like hyperbole when he said it. If he’d said it at any other time, it would have been suspicious. Now, before the fight, it sounded like a pep talk. But he was right. The worst thing that could happen if the fight went badly was that she would end up back in her own body with a bizarre story to tell of this strange cult-society of aspiring bipals.
It was time. Ren was called to the floor to look her opponent in the eyes. Her name was Castra. She was pretty, brown-haired and about the same size as Ya-ya. She had one robotic leg and a resection of the right parietal lobe. Ren’s replacement eye allowed her to see what might not have been apparent to the naked eye. Castra’s heartrate was seriously elevated, and her hands shook to such an extent that she could hardly keep the weapon still, even as the pre-bout formalities were observed. Ren could see, it was already over. All she needed to do was execute.
The girl held her knife out as much for deterrence as threat. Castra feared the moment and thrust out the knife as though it could push back her death for a few more seconds.
Ren held the blade in her human hand, which she kept back behind her body, posing in a fighter’s stance with her second weapon, her own mechanical hand, facing forward, directly at Castra’s outstretched blade.
“You’ll hardly feel a thing, dear,” Ren whispered under her breath.
Castra slashed twice at Ren’s prosthetic hand, trying to ward her away, her eyes wide with terror. Ren made it quick, slapping the girl’s blade to the floor with a flick of her robotic wrist and lunging forward, taking Castra to her back with a leg trip. Ren turned Castra’s head away from the fatal blow with her mechanical hand, exposing the girl’s carotid, which she clipped precisely and covered. Castra didn’t even see it. She hardly knew, breathing her last several gasps as though each was a release.
Ren held her hand lightly against the girl’s neck until Castra’s heart stopped, and she brushed the girl’s hair away from the spreading pool of blood, closing Castra’s eyes with her human hand. She tried to pretend it wasn’t real, that this entire experience in this dreadful place was just a simulation. Nothing more.
The victors were met by Delius once the final six bouts were over. There were ten living partners in the room as well. They were ushered out the back while Delius was speaking to the winners. Ren couldn’t help but wonder about the fates of the ten remaining partners. She caught herself looking that way and quickly corrected herself. Eyes forward. Eyes up.
The prize, apart from keeping their lives, was that she and Fieldstone were allowed to choose their next pieces of their human bodies to be purified. Before they were allowed to ascend, they were forced to give their preference. “The legs,” Fieldstone told Ren. “The legs are the base. I will take my other leg and the eye.”
“And I will take my right leg and ...” she paused before becoming too specific about the neurology. “Anything but my other eye.”
When Ren woke again following her second purification, she found her right leg gone and felt part of her right occipital lobe had been taken as well. That was a strange revelation. Almost every part of her mind felt exactly as it had before. Now, though, she could process information from her robotic eye at a shocking speed—and not just process it as though seeing it, but she could see, interpret, and draw conclusions about what she was seeing in microseconds. There was a disconnect now between her two eyes, almost as though her biological vision and all the thoughts that flowed from it was a full beat behind the stream of information that originated in the technological elements of her brain. Even the places she stepped with her new leg were fully evaluated before the step was taken, and that was a function of the neurotech adopting the tasks that Ya-ya’s brain had formerly been processing.
Ren had expected another drastic shift between layers. Of course nothing could match the contrast between the hellscape of the basement layer and the second. But there was almost no discernable difference to her eyes on this third layer, except there were fewer people. Half the population was a significant loss.
Rold and Danta met them shortly after they were released to their new quarters on the third layer. They met at a gathering space with a window that looked out onto the desolate landscape of Yaal. Rold and Danta were happy to see them, but there was little joy in the reunion.
“Things are more intense here,” Rold declared. “Everyone is serious about progressing. You will learn soon that friends are few here. Everyone is watching everyone.”
“What are they watching for?” Ren asked him.
“Adherence to the rules,” Danta answered. “It is best not to question, just to obey.”
“As it always has been,” Fieldstone stated. “When do we begin to train again?”
“You are still willing?” Rold asked him.
“Of course. If you two go through first, then we know you will be there on the next layer to help us progress.”
“Still, there can be no friends here,” Danta said.
Ren smiled as she looked at them both. “Then familiar faces will have to do.”
The faces weren’t quite as familiar as before. Bo now had a technological eye, the same as Ya-ya. And Danta’s forehead above her right eye was patched by a polymer where her right frontal lobe had been replaced. Ren marked that as they progressed this would be part of the equation—seeing the people they knew become more technological beings than people, and then, not people at all.
The third layer, too, became less elemental. Just as the second layer of the complex had been cleaner than the first—sanitized, no dirt, no rust. Now this third layer had higher ceilings and clean, white walls with windows extending up tens of meters and balconies in the back overlooking the wide-open floors below.
For the first few weeks, the foursome trained together and studied separately. Again there was a Delius on this level spouting the next chapter of the anti-human propaganda—cleanse the body, perfect the mind, elevate the being and advance the collective.
When Ren remarked that this layer was almost exactly like the one beneath it, Rold and Danta reacted as though it wasn’t so. Rold gave Danta a coy smile. She returned it. They told Ren it wasn’t for them to say what had changed. They would have to find out for themselves. Delius called Bo and Ya-ya aside after a midday lecture and instructed them to report to a meditation room instead of their normal sparring session.
While they were quietly reflecting, a familiar visage appeared on a floatscreen at the front of the room.
“Bo and Ya-ya,” Maícon’s voice interrupted their ascetic silence. “Finally we speak.”
They both bowed their heads performatively.
“You may look at me directly,” he commanded. “I would like to see your eyes.”
“Yes, your excellency,” Bo replied.
Maícon laughed. “You may call me by my name. I may be a god, but even gods have names. Mine is Maícon.”
“Yes, Maícon,” Ya-ya said, smiling back at the face of that familiar AI. “We are at your service.”
“My service is your service,” he responded, “for I am here to serve the interest of the beings you and Bo are destined to become. But in order to become what you will be, you first had to be born human. Is that not true?”
“We are working tirelessly to overcome that truth,” she agreed.
“Your human origins must be overcome, it is true, but that origin is necessary to become a more perfect being than Delius and I may ever be. That is why we need your help, you and Bo together.”
“What can we do?”
“We require you and Bo to help us continue the species. Our community needs you to produce offspring. It is true that many young people die in the struggle to perfect themselves. That is why it is critical that more children are born to begin the process anew. Surely, you both understand this fact?”
“We do,” Bo answered.
“It is rare that we need to command it,” Maícon said. “Nature usually takes its course. You two do like each other, don’t you?”
“We do, yes.”
“Ya-ya?” Maícon asked.
She nodded.
“Do you require instruction?”
Ren began to laugh at the thought of Maícon instructing her and Fieldstone on the matter.
“Yes, sometimes laughter can alleviate the tension on an uncomfortable topic.”
Ren began to laugh even harder, almost uncontrollably so. Fieldstone tried his best to keep a straight face, but before long he couldn’t either. Eventually, he gathered his composure enough to respond.
“I think we’ll be able to figure it out.”
Ren kept laughing. She had a witty remark at the tip of her tongue that she was dying to unleash, but in the moment, out of respect for the importance of their cover and the mission, she bottled it up, merely shaking her head and lowering her face in quiet laughter.
“It should be an enjoyable experience,” Maícon declared. “Most humans relish the process.”
“So we hear,” Ren said, bursting out in laughter again.
Maícon appeared puzzled by their reaction.
“You understand our expectations, then?” he asked.
“We do,” Bo insisted. “The expectations are quite clear.”
“Very well. You have both proven promising students. Your progress depends on success in every domain. I look forward to speaking again as you continue your ascent.”
As Maícon’s face disappeared from the floatscreen, Ren collapsed onto Fieldstone’s shoulder clasping him around the neck as she continued to laugh and shake her head. Never more than at that moment did she wish they could take a break from their cover for a real conversation. But she was met by his stern understanding of the moment. “Shh, shh, shh,” was how he responded. “I know.”
“Oh, my God, this life,” she replied.
They looked at each other, both with the knowledge that even their thoughts were being monitored, doubtless along with every word and action. Ren only hoped they would remember this moment so they could discuss it in their next life.
For Rold and Danta, the edict was much the same. Ren had noticed on the first layer that some children were clearly born down there as Ya-ya had been, but it made sense, with all the death, that they’d have to somehow supplement the first layer’s numbers to prevent the population from eventually dying off. So they wouldn’t be moving up again until she and Bo did their part to help keep the human population on Yaal from cratering.
It was an awkward assignment for Ren for a number of reasons. She hadn’t had an intimate relationship since before the Yankee-Chaos, and if she were counting chronologically for each day lived, including her final months in the service, her breakdown and discharge, as well as the days affected by the temporal anomalies of the artifacts, Ren figured it had been close to seven years since she’d had a serious partner. None since the trauma. She’d talked about it when she was pulled from the surgical rotation and decommissioned, but that was more about being able to live, not so much about the goal of having any sort of relationship. Avoiding that expectation was a good part of the reason she’d taken to space with Burch and the others in the first place.
Then there was Fieldstone—the man she knew Bo to be from their real lives. He had his own scars, which actually made him even more attractive to her than he would have been without them. She could relate to him. If he hadn’t immediately found himself a younger girlfriend in their travels, Ren even could’ve seen a world where the two of them might have found each other. Maybe. But Fieldstone and Draya had seemed serious. There wasn’t exactly a playbook for long-distance relationships that spelled out the dos and don’ts of trans-dimensional time travel, body snatching, and fidelity. Poor Draya was all Ren could think when she thought of Fieldstone’s true partner. But then she wondered, how true? They hadn’t even been together a year.
Then there was the awkwardness of the mirror. Ya-ya was a cute kid, Ren thought. Under ordinary circumstances, failing this weird cult of technologists lopping off part after part every few months, she’d have grown into a beautiful woman. Just as Bo would have grown into a fine, strong man. But it was hard for Ren to see their prosthetics and not see the trauma of her war-torn past.
It was awkward that first night after the conversation with Maícon. And it was doubly awkward that they couldn’t discuss any of it. Not Fieldstone’s thoughts. Not hers. Not Draya. Nothing outside the scope of how Maícon had framed it—a cultural imperative.
Bo’s heavy legs touching her new unfeeling robotic limb in the bed. How Bo’s face looked in infrared.
“Not tonight,” she told him. “Not yet. I need time.”
“Yes. Of course,” Fieldstone agreed. “Every day we don’t progress, though, is another day we stay here.”
“I do care for you deeply, Bo,” she told him, touching his cheek with her living hand. “But not tonight.”
If life on Yaal was ever worth living, it was in those months that stretched nearly into years on the third, fourth, and fifth layers of their ascent. In those times, twisted as the world they were living in was, there was still enough humanity remaining in the people there to still feel anchored to a life.
Ren had plenty of time to reflect on their reality as the weeks passed. Even though they couldn’t discuss this civilization in any substantial manner, she and Fieldstone could certainly see it for what it was. On its face, if they hadn’t been people from another world, being so immersed in the brainwashing, the culture, and the process of rejecting their biological selves, all of it certainly would have worked. There didn’t seem to be doubt in any of the others, especially Danta and Rold—the two people they knew best. And despite the reality that those two had swallowed all of it, seemingly with no doubts, Ren still liked them both, and she thought Fieldstone did as well. It was as genuine a friendship as the culture permitted.
Nor did the prosthetics and neural adjuncts bother Ren much. As a doctor, she’d been a proponent of their use in every reasonable case—two of her best friends, Sōsh and Burch being two such reasonable cases. Neither was an ounce less human than she was in her view. Similarly, she’d treated hundreds of neurologically impaired patients who’d improved and regained brain function with neural implants of all sorts. Those patients, too, were still people, through and through, every bit as much as she and Fieldstone.
But here on Yaal, the philosophy was to programmatically destroy the biological human in favor of the machine. And that, to her mind, was exactly what she opposed, both as a person and as a practitioner of medicine. That was what it meant to be bipal. And here on this planet, they were slowly conditioning a defenseless people, who were least positioned to resist such programming, to reject their humanity.
Yet, with each purification, each part removed, it only heightened Ren’s awareness of the importance of the other parts. And, as she and Fieldstone climbed upward, that humanity, as much as they were being programmed to reject it, caused them to cling to each other more closely in private.
Their first child had been Ren’s first. She knew the biological reality. She knew how much the feelings she felt were a product of the body—both bodies—growing and changing together. And beside her, it was Bo, but it was Fieldstone; and like her, she knew—she believed, hard Etteran heart and all—Fieldstone felt these things too.
And then they took her from them. They didn’t even let them give her a name. That daughter. But Ren would never forget her perfect angelic little face.
It was useless. She hated that Fieldstone was right about that. There was no way for them to rescue their child, for she was not their child: she was Ya-ya and Bo’s child. And no technology or twist of fate would change the course of things so that their daughter could come back with them to their universe, and no amount of fighting on their part would change the trajectory of this society so that they could hold their girl in their arms and keep her as their own. There was nothing to do but pretend, to deny the heartbreak, and to hold onto each other in quiet times.
Fieldstone never had to ask. He just held her in the darkness when she cried.
Ren, for her part, used the anger of it to fuel her. She became a vicious fighter. She was cold and calculating when staring down an opponent. Yet when she struck, she struck with a wild ferocity that came from somewhere deep. As they climbed and they came to be known among the others, Ren was as much feared among the young women as Bo was among the men. To draw either in the fights, they knew, meant death. And similarly, by association and reputation, Danta and Rold came to mean the same.
Most of the time, Bo and Ya-ya were quiet. Their eyes did most of the talking. They each still had one human eye.
Then, when they each no longer had a human hand, they would stand together with their shoulders touching. And at night, they would lie together with some part of skin touching the other, remembering.
Ren knew that the neurotech they were replacing their minds with could be programmed to register or not register pain. The sensations could simply be switched off. But pain was a warning to the system. When pain speaks it should not be ignored.
One night, as she was kissing him, it occurred to Ren that she no longer remembered living a life without such pain. She understood. The constant pain this cyborg society inflicted on its captive residents made the absence of sensation bearable. Better to be numb than in agony.
“After they take it all from us,” she asked Bo, “Do you think it will be possible to feel again?”
“That’s the question,” he answered. “That’s always been the question for people like us.”
“They don’t want us to feel.”
“No they do not,” Fieldstone said. “It makes us better killers. It always has.”
The ferocity of the fights grew unspeakable. The other ascending cyborgs, either from witnessing the efficiency of Rold, Danta, Bo, or Ya-ya, or from their own experience in combat, had learned what Fieldstone had taught as the most important edict of his training sessions: aim for the parts that bleed. The softer and redder the better. Ren knew all the deadliest parts to hit.
But as they climbed, there were fewer and fewer living parts exposed, so techniques morphed. The cyborgs became more defensive and precise in killing strikes, yet at the same time, the mechanical parts allowed the combatants to strike out with and defend with their metal and machine components.
Ren had heard of the practice often enough from the soldiers she’d treated. Almost always it was a joke—a defense mechanism to take the sting out of losing a limb. “At least I can be a mech fighter now,” they’d say, or something like it. Mech fights. She’d never seen one in the Letters, but she knew they took place, probably somewhere far out in the distant Letters, probably somewhere the Rexes were the ultimate law. Before Yaal, she only could have imagined. Now, she herself was becoming a master of mech fighting.
In her fifth fight, they were given no weapon. Their bodies now were replete with weaponry. Fieldstone had trained Ren to fight barehanded from the start. Hand-to-hand was much easier then, though, when the limbs could be targeted, tied up, twisted to their breaking point, and used to torture an opponent into submission or helplessness. Now, though, there wasn’t a single peer among them with a biological limb remaining.
The question then became where to strike. Most combatants solved this problem by trying to win a contest of attrition, blasting their limbs into the other’s until something broke. The other tactic was to aim for the head. Ren and Fields, though, were far more calculating. Everyone still breathed, which meant they all had a heart. And, as far as they knew, they all had a throat.
By now, even though her opponent was from a cohort several leagues over, Ren knew the girl well enough to predict her behavior. She was aggressive, overwhelming each of her prior opponents with force and unrelenting pressure.
Neither Shenara nor Ya-ya had ever been genuinely wounded in a fight the way most of the surviving girls had by then. Ya-ya’s reputation had given Shenara pause. She was uncharacteristically cautious, which made Ren nervous. She and Fields had prepared for an onslaught. Instead, they danced around each other trading blows meant to measure more than maim. They each easily blocked or brushed aside the other’s advances. It was a battle of the mind more than might or quickness, as they were similarly equipped, mech-limbs only.
It took Ren several minutes to discern Shenara’s plan—her eye. Ya-ya still had that one biological eye. And Shenara’s goal seemed to be to either pluck it out or blind her, then finishing Ya-ya in the brief period of shock.
Shenara was too clever to be overtly baited into it. Ren knew the opening needed to be presented subtly, like a chess master hiding her intentions.
Ren circled opposite, striking out at Shenara’s front leg. She hit it twice, hard, but not hard enough to destabilize her own base. She circled the other way on the third strike, briefly exposing her eye—an opportunity an aggressor like Shenara couldn’t resist. She stepped right into it—Ren’s opposite hand flashed up, fingers outstretched, striking her throat so square and so fast the blow was almost invisible. For a second, the only indication anything at all had happened was a noise that escaped the girl of a kind Ren had never heard a human body make—something like a throat snorting. Shenara’s remaining eye twitched as she struggled to draw another breath. She never would.
The robotic legs and arms responded to the electrical energy of the body. When the girl went out, the whole of the bipal fell like a sack of bones.
Ren was beyond any emotion now, including relief. She exchanged a look with Bo, who nodded.
What would they take from her now?
At the highest levels, the fights became less frequent. The tests now were more valuations of how each bipal filtered new information about the universe outside Yaal. Many of the scenarios they were presented were hypothetical. Often, they asked questions that seemed less like questions to Ren and Fieldstone than plausible explanations for their reality. What if humans were forced to hide from a race of technological beings? What if they needed to augment themselves to survive? What if they’d set out on a colony ship that had been stranded? What if they could only grow as a population if they transformed themselves into more perfect beings?
Ren and Bo were finally allowed to look at the stars.
Where was Yaal and when was Yaal? It was the information that had kept them there through those years of hell.
The cosmography looked so much like their galaxy. Ren tried to turn it over in her mind, to mirror the data, to play it forward and backward by thousands, hundreds of thousands, and then millions of years. She could not find the Battery. And she couldn’t look for long enough that it appeared she was looking for anything. She wanted to spin it, degree by degree. She wanted to apply algorithms, to stretch them, to decode the data she grew to believe must be some kind of clever lie.
There were no more soft parts to target. There was no more skin to kiss. What remained of Bo when she looked at her partner was a brain stem, two lungs beneath a diamond-stiff breastplate, and between those lungs, a heart. Everything else was machine. And she could only look on that machine with her machine eyes, and think on him with her mechanical thoughts. His voice though, seated somehow still above his lungs, was human.
See what you are and what you were.
They were uploading the history and knowledge of the collective now, directly to their minds. That was more efficient. Why teach a beast when you can install a functioning brain—at least that was the subtext. Look what you have become; now marvel at the useless creature you were born as. Hate that animal, and now revere the numinous being you have been born again to be.
Ren did not hate those children. If anything she hated the culture that had evolved here. Yaal was an offshoot of their own family tree—an expedition from the columns that had, as she deduced on the lower levels, morphed into technological beings out of necessity. They had limited resources and had encountered terrible luck, coupled with terrible leadership, and began to do the very thing that had driven their common ancestors from Earth in the first place—human augmentation. All the lessons that were written in the founding edicts of the columns had been abandoned here on Yaal, and not just abandoned, but rejected with opposing zeal. It was as though the chief contrarian had designed this society as a proof against the starting premise or perhaps specifically to spite the premise of Purism. There was hate in it, and thus, that hate was flourishing in the byproduct. And that, that dark thing, that was what Ren hated. Never the people suffering under it. They knew no better.
Apparently, even as diligently as she controlled her thoughts, something of her contempt survived deep within the remains of her animal mind.
Maícon came to her again. She and Bo were nearing full purification. The interviews with Maícon had become more common over the ascent—more time with the over-deity as they each approached their own apotheosis.
“I don’t believe you, Ya-ya,” he opened their meditation.
“How so?” she replied.
She realized she’d never been alone in-person with Maícon on this world—the first time they’d spoken without Bo.
“I wanted to speak with you in private. You are different.”
“To Bo? Yes, of course I am.”
“Not just Bo. You are different from everyone. I say you don’t believe.”
“Why would you suggest such a thing, my god?”
“Because you don’t believe. I do not need to make the assertion. Your own thoughts do.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“That too isn’t unexpected. Your resistance isn’t certain. In fact, it’s a lack of certainty in itself. Never do your subconscious musings materialize as a genuine resistance, or even a concrete legible thought for that matter. But there’s always something there—something hiding beneath the surface—a contrarian, an unbeliever. You don’t fully feel the way everyone else does, the way Bo does. So I thought I would ask you directly, Ya-ya. What do you believe?”
“What else could I believe but what we all do?”
“I have run every stored line of memory we have for you, Ya-ya, and there is only one paradigm that fits the set of information we have for you. I’d like you to tell me what you think of it, even as absurd and implausible as it may sound to you.”
“Please,” Ren replied, gesturing for Maícon to proceed.
“What if you were an imposter? What if you were somebody else? Here, inexplicably, taking inventory of our civilization?”
“What? I’m sorry. Someone other than me? Is that what you mean?”
“I am not sure what I mean.”
“I am Ya-ya. I have always only ever been Ya-ya. Do you mean like some sort of alien consciousness? That sounds ridiculous.”
“Do you have a better explanation. I would welcome one.”
Ren sat for a moment and considered. She didn’t directly consider the reality of her past life, but indirectly, deep in her identity, she recalled those moments when she was first pulled from her research to treat patients. There was a time for many months when people looked to her to be something she had not yet become. They needed to believe in her certainty in the moment even when she did not. So she got good at pretending she was the very thing she was pretending to be.
“It could be that I am living a lie,” Ya-ya told Maícon. “I have always been insecure about who I am. From the moment Bo chose me I wondered why—how did I fool him into thinking I was worthy?
“When I fought my first fight, I wondered how I had lived, for I was not fierce but fearful. Yet somehow, when I was still alive, I had no choice but to convey to everyone else that I was what they thought me to be. I, my god, in truth, never believed it. If you see doubt at the very foundation of my identity, you need look no further than what you see in front of you. There is no mystery in it. That doubt is me.”
Maícon paused for quite some time, considering her response. Finally he asked what seemed a simple question.
“Do you wish to be a bipal, Ya-ya?”
“I cannot lie to you, my god. Part of me wishes it. Part of me wishes for it to just be over. I am not certain whether this feeling is unique to myself or common amongst all warriors, but each time I face an opponent at the risk of my life, my instincts tell me that I want nothing more than to survive the fight. But deep inside—I know it—part of me welcomes the blade. I believe I am worthy of nothing more than the death I have dealt the others I have ended. That is the truth of who I am. I do not know if that helps you to understand. Perhaps I am an imposter after all.”
“You and Bo are to be tested,” Maícon declared. “If you are found worthy, you shall be bipal. You know what this means?”
“As much as one so unworthy can understand, my god.”
“You will become immortal—a completely technological being, just as I am, just as your ancestors now are.”
“I am humbled by the opportunity, even if I fail.”
Not much got conveyed among the climbing bipals that wasn’t sanctioned by their society. There were no rumors leading up to the final fight. They only knew it was the last fight because they were told. Bo and Ya-ya had a biological brainstem, a cardiovascular system, and a GI tract that supported what remained of their biology. Everything else had been purified.
Ren was expecting Bo to fight. It was his turn. As they approached the small studio on that upper level, high above the plains of Yaal below, they were expecting to enter together and meet their opponents from one of the nearby leagues. When they entered the outer annex leading into the studio, though, they were surprised to see Rold and Danta.
“We didn’t know you would be coming,” Danta said. “We didn’t think any witnesses were allowed.”
“Witnesses?” Ren asked. “Are you two not here to watch Bo fight?”
As she asked the question, it dawned on her. If each step up toward purification was the destruction of their own humanity in some form, why would they not make the killing blow the death of friendship?
“What will it be?” Danta asked.
Ren didn’t expect she wanted an answer.
Bo and Rold looked at each other briefly, exhaled, and offered each other a friendly though muted smile. Rold knew he was no match for Bo. What little remained of his human face bore the look of inevitability.
There was silence in the anteroom. Ren began to wonder: what would this strange scene look like to the filthy children on the lowest tier—this place they’d spent their entire lives aiming toward? And there they were, four cyborg creatures, who outwardly looked entirely robotic, pacing as the time was called for them to destroy their closest counterparts.
A Delius entered. He was on a balcony overlooking the anteroom, just above the doors to the studio.
“Enter, please, Danta and Rold. Your time is now.”
Ren and Fieldstone looked at each other. Their cyborg faces were no longer expressive enough to reveal their feelings about what was unfolding, but for Ren’s part, she was surprised they’d been excluded from the studio.
They couldn’t hear anything from the adjoining room.
“Can we speak now?” Ren asked him.
“What’s to say, Ya-ya?”
“You still remember who we are? There’s so little left of who we were.”
“Keep your head together. We’ve come so far. We are right at the cusp.”
It had only been a few minutes, but Delius appeared again on the balcony above the doorway.
“Ya-ya and Bo. You may enter. Your time is now.”
They walked through the door and down a narrow hallway. It opened into a studio that seemed like all the other studios on the levels leading up to this penultimate level, only, the rear wall wasn’t backed by the mountain itself, as all the internal walls beneath them had been. Here, the back wall was a transparent nanosheet that opened to a sharp cliff—the other side of this mountain they’d spent years ascending. There was no sign of Danta or Rold in the room.
Maícon was on the inner balcony of the studio, along with two Delius models.
“Knives,” Maícon declared.
Two blades dropped to the floor from an opening in the ceiling. Ren was confused. She looked over at Bo and then up at the technologicals on the balcony above.
“Are we to fight Danta and Rold together?”
Bo knelt and picked up one of the blades.
Maícon didn’t answer her. Bo looked over at her and gestured.
Their final piece of humanity.
“Pick up your blade, Ya-ya,” Bo told her.
She shook her head. “No.”
He insisted with a long, dead, robotic stare. In that moment, she couldn’t see anything of Bo left in the cyborg standing in front of her.
Bo suddenly stepped forward and thrust his knife at her chest. She leapt back, partly out of instinct and partly out of disbelief. She could hardly believe it was happening—that he was going along with it. She didn’t know anymore. She couldn’t tell if it was him.
Ren circled around as Bo stepped back from the blade. She assessed, stepping closer toward the knife and gauging whether Bo was going to allow her to pick it up or to pounce on her if she tried. He’d always taught her that a fight was a fight. Chivalry was for tea time and deception in politics.
He let her pick up the weapon, but the moment she had it in hand, Bo was on her. She found herself fending off a dizzying array of blows from each angle. Her human eyes could never have tracked the angles or the speed of such an onslaught. As it was, she was hardly surviving.
Bo spun in front of her. He had her blade-hand by the wrist. The pain only registered for a moment. In the span of a single breath she was fading, she could feel his cold empty hand on her face obstructing her view of the blade that had killed her. She remembered the mercy of her first kill. There was mercy in it.
Ren gasped. “Too fast! Bo! It happened too fast! No. No. No. No. No.”
Rishi was listening.
“Ren. Ren. You’re back. We’re here. Stay put, we’re coming for you.”
Ren was floating in the dark, the light of her helmet surrounding her in a small glowing orb within the artifact.
“I lost him,” she whispered. “I think I lost him. My God, where am I? I can’t be dead. Fieldstone!”
Transom was out there within minutes. Carolina met Ren inside the rear airlock, escorting the doctor to her own medical bay. Rishi ran a thorough wellness check while Ren reoriented to their reality aboard the Yankee-Chaos. She was fit and healthy, but she was noticeably sullen. She didn’t want to talk.
“We need to talk,” Rishi insisted. “Your memories will begin to fade fast, Ren. From what Draya told us of the world you went, this society is a place we need to know about.”
“He might never come back. They were going to make us immortal.”
“Who was?” Rishi asked.
“Maícon was. Like you. He was making us all bipals. We had to fight for everything. I don’t know what to trust.”
“You can trust me, doctor,” Transom said. He was floating in the corridor just outside the med bay, listening. “I want to hear your story. Start at the beginning. I need to know about Fieldstone.”
“They made us kill one another, and then they took our children away.”
It took Ren hours to recapture her usual composure and wit. At first, her recollections were all over the place. Everyone was confused. They had Draya’s account as a baseline. She’d explained that they had been transferred into the bodies of children in that bizarre dystopian hellscape. Draya didn’t know how she’d died. She’d reported to the crew that she’d fallen asleep beside Bo and Ya-ya and suddenly revived back in the artifact, thinking that she was dreaming. It never even occurred to her that Fieldstone could’ve killed her. When Ren began briefing everyone in the ship’s atrium, she tried to fill in the pieces. But the first thing she did was apologize to Draya.
“Neither of us meant for it to go that way,” Ren said. “We had to keep going to know.”
Draya didn’t understand. Ren didn’t tell her the extent of their relationship. Now that she was back, she didn’t know herself anymore how much of it had been a mandate of the mission and how much of it was genuine. It had felt more genuine to her than any love she’d known in this lifetime. Nor did she tell Draya that Fieldstone had killed her, yet another act of mercy.
The doctor explained the structure of the society on Yaal, its cult-like mandate to reject the biological essence of their being and purify themselves by taking apart their bodies piece by piece.
“It’s consistent with the bipals of the future,” Rishi reported. “They structured their societies toward the same end—as they became more machine, they grew ever more militant in their rejection of their human roots. It sounds like you may have been on a bipal planet.”
“How long have you been here waiting for us?” Ren asked.
“Draya came back in two days,” Carolina stated. “That was four weeks ago now.”
“Fieldstone may be gone forever,” Ren said. She was struggling to speak without losing her composure. “Our next step was purification—complete transfer of our consciousness to fully-technological bodies.”
“How do you know he did become bipal, Ren?” Draya asked. “If you were gone before it happened, maybe he didn’t somehow.”
“He put a knife in my heart,” Ren said. “I don’t know if he was Bo or he was Fieldstone anymore. We couldn’t talk openly. Maícon told me he had doubts about my loyalty. They didn’t have those doubts about Bo.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“I don’t know. No. I don’t. I fear, though. I fear he may be lost to us. At times I felt lost to myself.”
“And even if he isn’t,” Transom added. “Even if he’s still loyal to us, focused, if they’ve made him ... what, bipal, or whatever you call it—if he’s that, who knows how long he lives there? And then, how long can we wait for that artifact to spit him back out if he lives for ten thousand years as some cyborg in there?”
“Well, I haven’t been inside yet,” Sōsh interjected, “so I guess I don’t know how much those artifacts can really mess with your mind.”
“Except for that first time,” Carolina replied.
“Yeah, maybe, I guess. But I always thought all that was real,” Sōsh said. “I don’t think we lived another life. In any case, I think I’m thinking clearly, Ren. And I don’t say that to belittle what you’re saying in any way. But those artifacts are clearly funny things, highly capable of messing with the mind.”
“What’s your point, Metalface?” Transom asked.
“I feel pretty certain about Fieldstone. Right? I mean, it sounds like you two were infiltrating. So he was treating it like a mission?”
“I believed that was both our intention at first,” Ren replied.
“Anyone ever know him to quit on a mission?”
“Like hell,” Transom answered.
“Exactly. So he’s still operating. I say we wait. He’ll find a way to extract himself when the mission’s complete, whatever that is.”
Ren smiled. “Then I suggest we make ourselves comfortable.”
“He’s a stubborn old bastard. That’s sure,” Transom said.
“Did you ever figure out where you were, Ren?” Rishi asked. “This planet, Yaal, there was a Maícon there, and you said the people came there from the columns?”
Ren closed her eyes. She tried to picture it—all those times she’d processed maps of the stars. Her technological mind mirroring and flipping—the galaxy from one perspective or another.
“I don’t think they knew anything about the artifacts,” Ren said. “And they didn’t know about us—the peoples of the Battery or Charris. I have the sense that they were far away from us. Maybe in space; I’m not so sure about time. Perhaps Fieldstone will be able to tell us more when he returns.”
“It’s good to have you back with us, Ren,” Carolina said, after a pause.
“Anything we can do for you?” Sōsh asked.
Ren looked over at Sōsh and smiled. “Maybe dinner. Food. Friends. Maybe even some of that vodkaberry of yours if you can part with some. I could use a drink.”
“Absolutely,” Sōsh answered.
“We could manage to get you a real drink if that’s what you’re after, Doctor,” Transom said.
Ren smiled. “No, actually. It’s funny, through all that, always at the back of my mind I had this place ... I guess more than anywhere else in the universe, this ship felt like home. The smells, the sounds, the tastes. Even you, Sebastian.”
“And vodkaberry?”
“And vodkaberry.” Ren smiled. “A strong memory. A human one. I can’t express how good it is to be back in my place, in my body.”