Human DNADavid McGillveray
6900 words Pierre Ledux bent over the projection of his new face, its icy blue reflection warped in the blank plastic curve of his faceplate, and made a series of tiny strokes with the beam of a light scalpel. “I can never get it to look like how it looks in my head,” he grumbled. “Can’t get the eyes right, know what I mean?” He slouched back on his throne and set the pen aside, regarding his work critically. “You’ve been fiddling with it for ages. Leave it alone, will you? It’s fine,” Gwynne told him. Her own face was the same one she had presented since she was quickened decades ago, unchanged by time. Unlike the rest of her. She sat dwarfed in her own preposterous throne. In the Consensual, Pierre’s living space appeared as a fabulous, but tasteless, receiving chamber in the palace of some ancient king. A huge log fire crackled impossibly in an airless grate. Sconces lit with glowing, fist-sized diamonds were bracketed to the walls and everywhere there was gold, coating the furnishings, the statues in their alcoves, even the floor. She felt like she was afloat in a molten pool of the dreadful stuff. The presence of Pierre’s crèche-child propped upside down in one corner of the ceiling like a giant bug ruined the illusion anyway. “Your tastes haven’t changed,” she said. “Unfortunately.” “There’s nothing wrong with a bit of pizzazz, not in this drab corner of the universe,” Pierre boomed. “I have to say I was surprised, and thrilled of course, to hear you were back in the Opposite. You’ve been away long enough to forget, if you weren’t so unforgettable.” “Damaged engines. It took me years to get back to the Empire after Alb’s accident.” “So you said in your message,” Pierre said. “I was sorry to hear about the old rascal. I always liked him.” “Everyone did,” she sighed, fingertips wandering to the brooch clipped to her utility belt. “It must be costing you, paying those vultures on Ragana,” Pierre mused. “You found something tasty out there, eh?” “Stop fishing, Pierre. Let’s agree it wasn’t worth the cost and leave it at that, okay? So what’s been happening in the old autocracy while I’ve been away?” “Well, I’m still waiting for that fortune to drop into my lap for one thing. Never came quite as easy as I thought, that. Our glorious Halo Daniel, fool that he is, still believes the rubble ring is the last great human Empire rather than the shithole it actually is. The Transitional House have at least recognized this and remain intent on sending us all to oblivion. And the impoverished masses remain oppressed under the yoke of a cruel and indifferent system. So thinking about it, nothing’s changed at all!” Pierre folded his hands over his middle section and laughed. “Oh, actually, there is one thing. Some crazy preacher has caused quite a stir among the outer Hours, daring to talk about possible futures that don’t involve jumping blindly into trans-dimensional gates. He’s obviously completely mad, but apparently he’s pissed the House off to quite a considerable extent, so he can’t be all bad. Apparently he carries his head around with him under one arm, imagine that!” “The latest nutter selling hope, then. Hope never got me far,” Gwynne remarked. “Well you should take that up with the preacher. Speaking of which, I might have a proposal for you. That’s why you’re here anyway, right, to get back in the game?” “I didn’t say I wanted back in the game, Pierre. I just need something to keep me busy.” Pierre leaned forward. The unfinished facial projection glowed between them. “Come on, the Gwynne Tsang I knew was never interested in a proper job. I have something that’s right in your line.” “No outsiders. We agreed,” a voice cut in on the comms band, quiet and without inflection. Gwynne started. She had forgotten about the boy. She looked at where he still clung above their heads. He wasn’t looking at them as far as she could tell, wasn’t even presenting. “Don’t listen to Auguste. He lacks context.” Pierre craned his neck around and shouted, “You lack context, don’t you, boy? This woman was pulling jobs while you were still random patterns swirling in the central repository! Back in the old days Gwynne here was a proper badass, weren’t you?” “I had my moments.” “And what a temper!” Ledux hooted. “You don’t want to get on the wrong side of this one, Auguste, I’m telling you. She’ll be a real asset, don’t worry!” In answer, Auguste unfolded himself, pushed off from the ceiling and sailed across the room with practiced grace, breaking the Consensual’s illusion of gravity. The room’s exit was rendered as a magnificent marble gateway carved with chains of stylized human figures. The boy performed a neat somersault as he passed through it and disappeared. “Pay no mind, Gwynne, pay no mind. Only been out of the crèche ten years, doesn’t understand the value of life experience. Enjoys a sulk, but he’s a good lad. Gets things done.” “I never thought you had it in you, to be a donor,” Gwynne said. Pierre lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Truth be told it was a surprise to me as well. I don’t even remember uploading the mental patterns. I was doing a lot of dizzies at the time, know what I mean?” He laughed uproariously. “You should’ve seen my face when the obligations notice arrived!” Gwynne shook her head. “You going to tell me about this job then?” “Right, yeah. So this preacher I was on about, apparently he’s speaking at an event in a few weeks on Tenderness, you know, that artsy commune in the Eighth Hour. I’ve also heard that one of the neighbouring rocks, which just happens to be a House facility, has a stock of military grade repellers based on recovered Endless War tech. Top grade!” When Pierre saw the interest projected in Gwynne’s face and encouraged, he continued, “See, I told you it’s your sort of gig. The best thing about it, though, is that due to the Transitional House’s desperate desire to shut this preacher up, they’re redeploying all their local security to capture the fucker! Which is when we will be making off with the goodies! Ha!” Gwynne cocked her head to one side, considering. “Hmmm. Just like that. Where’s your information from?” Pierre was tinkering with his facial design again. “Can’t divulge that, Gwynne, can’t divulge. But it’s good, I promise.” He paused with the light pen held poised and looked at her. “Imagine how much that stuff’s worth in the alternative economy.” “How many in your crew?” “You would make us a magnificent seven. And I’ve got a fast rig lined up to whisk us into a substantially more comfortable future. What do you reckon?” Gwynne sighed. “I wasn’t expecting anything like this so soon. It’s a bit heavy duty. I’ve been out of things a long time and I’ve got to think of Alb.” “Meaning?” “Meaning I’ll have to think about it.” Pierre opened his arms wide. “Well then, that’s excellent! Can’t ask for more than that. But don’t take too long. I’ve got details to work out, and I need to know all the pieces in play.” Pierre made some final adjustments to his new face that only he could see and grunted in apparent satisfaction. At some silent command the face blinked out and reappeared projected over his faceplate. He now presented with a wide forehead and high cheekbones below young, innocent eyes. He tested out the synch with a few facial movements and then grinned widely with his new mouth. “How’s that? I feel like a new man already.” “I’ve seen you wear a lot of different faces but somehow you always look the same,” Gwynne said dryly. “Untrustworthy.” 
“Are you still in there, love?” Gwynne peered through the thick glass of the clean room in the heart of the Ragana hospital facility where Alb lay strapped to a stone plinth. Since the last time she’d visited, Cordoza’s team of psychotechs had opened up his chest to test his reactor. One arm had been removed, she didn’t know why, and lay next to his torso like a discarded piece of tubing. They had also removed the top of his skull. She could see it floating in a transparent bag attached to the wall. Wires led from machines into the componentry filling his skull, where, according to Transitional House doctrine, his human soul resided. Clamps held the silver spines of other instruments in place inside his head. Diagnostic displays on screens pinned above him seemed, to her unqualified eyes, unchanged since the last time she had come here. Alb had been locked away inside himself for twelve years. Within the diffuse, largely outlaw region of the Empire known as the Opposite, Ragana was where you came for illegal chassis rebuilds, cerebral augmentations, sensorium enhancements and repairs following any manner of nefarious activities, no questions asked, money up front. But Ragana’s psychotechs hadn’t made any headway with Alb in all the months he had lain here, said that they needed time to isolate the alien code infecting his operating system. He needed further tests. Always further tests. “You must fix him,” Gwynne demanded of Dr. Cordoza when she had first brought him to the infirmary, exhausted after years in space. “I can pay.” When the doctor at last understood what Gwynne was offering, the standards of care available were abruptly upgraded. “Extraordinary,” she said hungrily, examining the sample in its protective case. She presented with a kindly, professionally bland face, obviously cultivated for the job, but her manner had quickly become all business. “Research rights on this sort of thing are highly sought after. You must tell me if there is more material. I can offer excellent terms.” “Is this enough? Can you help him?” Cordoza nodded. “It’s enough, but my team’s resources aren’t unlimited. We’ll try to flush the poison out but the infection, the infiltration, inside your husband’s systems, it’s Endless War era technology, much smarter than our own. We’ll want to proceed very cautiously.” One look at Alb still lying there, as lost to her and inert as ever, and Gwynne had set aside any thought of joining Pierre on his lunatic venture. Ledux had been a pro back when they were starting out, but now he just seemed desperate, and desperate meant risks would be taken. She’d been a fool to even consider it, a selfish, dangerous part of her craving something to make her feel alive again. “I’m old, Pierre. My priorities are different. I’ve got to think of Alb. I’m sorry, but I know you’ll understand. I hope things work out.” She would be here for Alb, should he wake. The prize she had brought back from the hinterlands, a fragment of which she’d used to satisfy the psychotechs, should have set them both up for life. Instead they both existed in different types of limbo. She cursed the day they’d entered that system, prospecting for relics from the past. She placed both of her hands against the glass and held herself there, braced in the planetoid’s microgravity. It was just all so hard. “Are you still in there, my love?” 
She remembered pulling Alb from inside the asteroid, his face-plate blanked and his body lifeless in her arms, that thing breaking free. The system’s distant sun, a spark in the void, offered no comfort. They hung in space for a long time, drifting in the debris field, Gwynne unable to rouse herself to action, overwhelmed by fear, by relief and by grief. She stared at the point where the ancient human warship had disappeared, so arrogant and cold, dismissing their lives as if they were nothing. Eventually she signaled to the rig waiting a few kilometers distant. The simple vehicle, a boxy scaffold of superceramic pipework and struts open to vacuum, nosed up to them like a worried pet. Gwynne settled Alb as best she could in the command nest, a spherical space cluttered with the paraphernalia of a long life lived together. The little personal touches in their living space, the jaunty banners and other decorations she had hung from the rig’s beams, now seemed silly and empty of meaning. Her immediate instinct was to get as far away as fast as possible, but she fought her emotions down and set to scanning the rubble left when the ship, with their unwitting help, had broken free. It was a long shot, but there had been something else in there that had also survived the millennia. If she could locate it, their prospects back in the Empire would be considerably improved. Gwynne synched her mind with the rig’s senses and spent hours calibrating and recalibrating her equipment, tuning it to chemical signatures she guessed were relevant. Various organic ices within the rocks muddied her results and she investigated dozens of false indications before finally spotting a telltale flash of green in the readouts projected onto her inner eye. She separated a personal rig from the bulk of the main vehicle, little more than a cage with a control column and a tiny engine, and nudged it cautiously into the debris field. A rain of dust and grit began to patter off her plastic hide. She steered around larger chunks of rock, using gravitic repellers to push obstacles from her path, zeroing in on the signature while scanning real space with her visual senses set across as broad a spectrum as she could process. And then she finally sighted it. She recalled the silvery sheen of the ancient suit worn by the human warrior, untarnished by the millennia spent frozen to the hull of her feral former ship. It drifted there: a forearm, still in its gauntlet, severed just above the elbow, vacuum frozen but still containing a trove of cellular material, from the distant time when humans were made of flesh. 
Halo Daniel had sat at the head of his Empire for two hundred years. The imperium comprised a belt of rubble billions of kilometers in circumference orbiting in the baleful red light of Eye, the system’s star, and was part of the galaxy-spanning legacy of devastation left by the fleshies and their Endless War. The ring was divided into the twelve Hours of the ancient human clock with the Opposite in the sixth Hour, as far distant from the influence of Farasito, the Empire’s capital world, as possible. Before she had taken up with Alb and set out as a prospector, Gwynne had spent much of her life in the region, where a loose agglomeration of misfits, crooks, dissenters and malcontents spread over a few thousand worldlets were linked together by a mutual mistrust of imperial authority. And so here she had returned. Marquesa was a hollowed out rock like any other, a manufacturing center for all sorts of goods exported across the Empire, most of it illegal. Gwynne had used it before, either as a base or a place to pick up transient work, and still knew a few people from decades past. It had been enough to get her in past the vetters, ever-suspicious of infiltration by Transitional House moles or imperial cops. This time she had chosen it for its proximity to Ragana, a few thousand kilometers distant. Gwynne took a job readying laymen, semi-autonomous intelligences fitted into empty human chassis, in one of the big factory complexes close to the centre of commerce that was the Mouth. “Your psychotechs on Ragana mixed the spirits for me, so they should be decent,” Berto, her new boss, told her. She vaguely knew him by reputation as a fair sort. “I’ve got a backlog of about a hundred and fifty units, so we need to get cracking. Let me know when you’re ready for another mind and I’ll download it from the mini-crèche.” “No problem.” Gwynne and Alb had used a pair of similar units for years. They were highly illegal in the Empire where animating human bodies, the supply of which was already tightly controlled, with anything other than an officially blended human spirit would have been a blasphemy if the Transitional House ever admitted to being a religion. After the physical fitting of the brain-unit, Gwynne tutored the fledgling intelligence in virtual, integrating it with its physical chassis and working through an extensive palette of control and response patterns. It was decent enough work, even satisfying to see each new layman come online and ready itself. Demand for the robot workers was pretty steady and Berto paid her well enough. Truth be told, she needed the work to establish some sort of new normality for herself. Half the time she felt she was being crushed under some unimaginable weight, that her reactor was sputtering its last, like she couldn’t live at all. When, a few weeks later, Berto asked her if she’d be interested in taking on a team of her own, Gwynne declined. “No thanks. I’m here for the monotony, not the promotional prospects.” “You need to think about yourself, Gwynne, for the long run,” Berto counselled her, backing off quickly when her temper erupted. He was only being kind, but she wasn’t ready for kindness. Gwynne spent the off-periods between shifts either making the trip to Ragana or brooding in the bare cubicle she had rented deeper inside the asteroid. She spent long hours staring into the brooch she kept as a keepsake, watching as the series of images of Alb and herself cycled through, over and over, floating before her like ghosts. She pulled back the privacy screen of the cubicle ahead of another evening spent like all the rest and was disconcerted to find a scrap of waste plastic stuck to her room’s utility hub. She snatched it up and immediately went to check the strongbox she kept in the back of the big locker that filled one wall. For such a den of rogues, the culture within Marquesa was not one where petty crime was rife, but nevertheless Gwynne felt a momentary panic. Satisfied the locker and box were untouched, she looked at the fragment in her hand. Scratched into the plastic was an invitation: Meet at The Core? 2200. P Pierre. She wondered what trouble he had got himself into this time. Plenty, as it turned out. 
The Core was Marquesa’s liveliest social spot, situated deep inside the asteroid’s guts. It was a large, vaguely spherical bubble strung with a webwork of wire ropes to which were attached dozens of meeting nodes like droplets of condensation. The dark holes of tunnel entrances dotted the walls, busy with a constant flow of people. Clumps of power cables and fibre optics were pinned haphazardly to walls and litter floated everywhere, especially the coin-sized discs of one-shot dizzy viruses. In Consensual, the place was transformed with political murals and animated cartoons parodying Halo Daniel and his court of dimwits. Screens showing a dozen entertainment and news feeds flickered from walls and ceiling, depending on your physical orientation, and holos and advertisements danced. The common band was filled with the pulses of chime-muzak and the babble of voices. Gwynne clung to a hand-hold inside the Core’s main entrance and scanned the crowd. There must have been over two hundred people in, a big crowd for Marquesa, filling the three-dimensional space, clinging to the nodes at all inclinations, many of them buzzed on dizzies. She was pinged on her private band. A familiar tone with a familiar tag. “Don’t you recognize me, then?” She craned her neck and peered into the crowd again. Finally, she spotted a figure waving at her from thirty meters away and launched herself towards it. “Another new face, Pierre?” Gwynne said, joining him at the spherical node and gripping its supporting cable. “I like a fresh look, you know me.” This time, the face he presented was older, with small eyes and a thin nose and mouth. It had a pinched look about it, not his usual style at all. Gwynne could tell he was high from the way he held his body, drifting outwards from the node, fidgeting. “You seem fresh enough,” she observed. “You my donor, now?” He made one of his dismissive gestures. “Thanks for coming, Gwynne.” “Why wouldn’t I?” But it had occurred to her in uncharitable moments that it might have been a mistake to get back in touch with him in the first place. He’d always attracted complications. “I thought you might have heard.” “No. I take it, though, that the elusive fortune continues to evade you. Come on, Pierre, stop stringing it out.” His facial projection momentarily glitched. “Well, you know that job I told you about? It didn’t quite go to plan.” “You’ll notice I don’t look shocked,” Gwynne said. “What happened?” “That damned preacher never showed up, on Tenderness. Changed his plans or something, which well and truly fucked ours. There was a full complement of security in attendance when we came knocking at that House facility. It was bad, Gwynne, really bad. I barely got away, the rig got shredded. Had to leave most of the crew behind, unfortunately.” Pierre was twitching now, becoming more animated as he told the story. He kept jerking his head to look everywhere about them, as if he was expecting trouble. “Only you got out? Shit.” “Just me and the boy. I’m finding myself desirable for all the wrong reasons. I think the Juntii are hunting me. In fact, I know it. One of the others would have talked. I would, if the Juntii were asking.” “You think the Imperial Guard are after you?” Gwynne was incredulous. “What was this place you were trying to turn over?” “Never mind, never mind, a mistake, in retrospect. It’s done now. First thought was back to the Opposite, to find some friends. I guessed you might be in Marquesa.” “How far down your list was I?” she said sourly. “Don’t be like that. I’m short of friends just now, you see, and I have an urgent desire to take a long sabbatical in the outback, just like you and Alb did. But I do need a bit of advice and some, er, seed capital to get me started. It’d be like an investment, know what I mean?” Gwynne scowled at him. “Berto point you in my direction? I’ll bloody kill him,” she said. “How much do you think I’m making fitting out laymen?” “Leave it out, Gwynne. You basically told me you came back from your adventures with something of substantial resale value.” Pierre was becoming agitated now, rolling his head from side to side. “You can help me out, can’t you? I’m in deep shit here.” “I can lend you a few hundred, but that’s it.” Pierre reached out suddenly and grasped her forearm. “I think you’ve got more than you’re letting on. You always kept something in reserve, I know you.” “Take your damn hand off me, Pierre,” she hissed, and he snatched it back as if electrocuted. “I’m looking out for myself here. No one else is. You’re not. I’ve got my own fucking problems.” “Alb’s gone, Gwynne. You should accept it. You can’t do anything more for him.” “What do you know about it?” Gwynne shouted, suddenly furious. “Why do I have to care about your shit, anyway?” He quailed and his perpetual bravado abruptly left him. “Please, Gwynne.” She almost broke. “Not this time, Pierre. Sorry.” “That’s twice you’ve turned me down,” Pierre said, trying to force a joke. His face glitched again. Gwynne pushed away from the node and headed back the way she had entered. When she turned to look back, Pierre was still hanging there alone. After a moment she saw him take something from his belt and snap it into the hard-linkage umbilical port in his neck. A shudder run through his body. She shook her head and left. 
A shift with the laymen, the same lonely trip to Ragana, longer and longer periods in fugue, that null state where awareness was dialled down to almost nothing and time passed unnoticed. She knew she was shutting the world out, enclosing herself in her own bubble of unhappiness. A further invasion of her privacy shocked Gwynne from this sinkhole. She pulled back the screen of her cubicle to find it in disarray. Her few belongings drifted about the place in a tangle; all been given rough treatment. An embroidered gilet Alb had once given her for special occasions was ruined, its many pockets torn away. “Fucking Pierre.” The man must have finally run out of options, or dizzies. The locker stood open, everything inside thrown out. Gwynne made a quick search, already knowing that the strongbox would be gone. She cursed herself for her stupidity, for not doing enough to keep the relic safe, for forgetting its importance to both of them, for being so preoccupied. Everything returned to sharp focus. She rushed from the room and pulled herself rapidly down drab, unaugmented corridors. She pinged Pierre and issued a series of macabre threats. There was no response. She contacted Berto. “You’ve seen Pierre Ledux around, right? You know where he’s staying?” Gwynne headed towards the Mouth. Berto had seen Pierre talking to some of the dockers there a few times. She was acquainted with some of them herself, people who had helped her with her rig when she had returned to the Opposite. Pierre, the idiot, had not been particularly discrete. A few enquiries gave her a cubicle number in the dockworkers’ accommodation district. When she arrived seconds behind a further barrage of furious pings, she thumped at the door-screen. It was locked but the door was flimsy plastic and it didn’t take her long to force it open. Her rage dissipated as she inched into the darkened space, instincts tingling, the room across her visual senses. The cubicle was carved direct from the rock of the asteroid, bigger than her own, enough for two people to share. A utilities and entertainment hub in one corner blinked on standby. She accessed it and brought the lights up. Pieces of plastic shrapnel drifted above a long, stone table wrought from the stone. For one crazed, vertiginous moment she thought it was Alb lying there, strapped down in the infirmary, and she cried out. But it wasn’t Alb. A tiny maelstrom of neon pixels, remnants of Pierre’s final face, swirled above his faceplate in randomized patterns. The violence of it was shocking. His body was covered in deep dents from the repeated impact of some blunt, heavy implement. One foot had been methodically beaten until it came away at the ankle. The fingers had been smashed from each of his hands. The thick plastic of the chest casing that protected his reactor was cracked in multiple places, fragments flaking away. His skull was caved in. Gwynne went over to him, drifting above the body, but couldn’t bring herself to touch it. She knew he was gone. “Pierre,” was all she said for a long time. “I’m sorry.” Finally, she shook herself and made a search of the room. The strongbox wasn’t there, of course. She transmitted a memory-recording to Marquesa’s security core and left in a hurry. 
Inside the Mouth, dockworkers, repair crews, arriving and departing traders and laymen went about their business, sailing in freefall across the great cavern in what to the untrained eye looked like a chaos of crisscrossing trajectories, fleeting mid-air crashes and near misses. In reality, it was a complex, coordinated, even graceful ballet. Or that’s what your average Marquesan would tell you. The Mouth opened directly into space, its circumference studded with gantries and repeller stations like flattened pyramidal teeth, manipulating incoming craft in shaped gravity fields and preventing collisions. Larger vehicles were either tethered to the asteroid’s surface or sat in parking patterns outside, while inside the cavern were utility huts, mountains of stacked cargo containers, berths for personal transports. A dozen species of lumpy machinery crouched on the rock floor, supporting the various activities of Marquesan commerce. Gwynne asked around but no one had seen anything more unusual than usual, and had not seen the individual she described. In the mean time, her own conviction grew as to where she must go next. There was only one place in the Opposite to go to with a preserved human arm. Gwynne’s rig was a much-diminished version of its former self. She had sold off or simply discarded sections of the superceramic scaffolding that made up its structure and stripped it of much of the junk she and Alb had accumulated over the years. It was parked on Marquesa’s skin a few hundred meters from the Mouth, looking like the abandoned skeleton of some minor structure as yet unfinished. She quickly checked over its simple systems, released it from the pitons driven into the rock and pushed away from the surface using its repellers. When she was far enough out, she reoriented the craft and engaged its much-repaired engines, building acceleration slowly and heading for Ragana once again. 
It was most of a day’s journey to the hospital world. She usually made it on automatics and sank into traveller’s fugue, but she was too wired for that. She sat on a crossbar at the front of the rig and stared out into vacuum, bathed in the accusing red light of Eye. The frenzied viciousness of Pierre’s murder had appalled her. The Empire contained and sometimes fostered the full complement of human wickedness, but that level of violence, of uncontrolled fury was almost unheard of. It was easier for her to be angry than to think about the way she had left things with her friend. The Transitional House, those self-appointed arbiters of imperial morality, warned against the horrors of human history, of the incalculable ruin their forebears had inflicted upon the galaxy. They taught that the remnants of humanity that held on should look only forwards, to forge their own future excised from the destructive patterns of the past. Despite the House’s many doctrinal insanities, the unfulfilled promises of opening gates to other universes and transitioning towards some undefined but glorious future, this core tenet had always made some kind of sense to Gwynne. Who in their right minds would want to live in a universe where whole suns could be extinguished just because someone disagreed with someone else? Nevertheless, there was something deep within the modern psyche that could not fully set aside its fascination with what life must have been like when human minds were encased in soft flesh, when they were masters of the galaxy and all its energies. There were countless worldlets scattered through the Empire filled with communities of archaeologists, historians, mystics and alchemists dedicating their lives to scratching the itch of racial memory. They sought remnants, artefacts, memory and data from the millennia piled high behind them. They looked backwards with as much fervor as the House put into telling them they must not. Gwynne and Alb themselves had made a living from this obsession, selling the fragments of the past they found amongst the rocks and empty spaces of the hinterlands, the tightly packed and equally ruined star systems neighbouring the Empire. The ultimate grail for these delvers in history was a strand of human DNA, the base building block of human flesh and mind. If they could have that, might they then understand their gods? Might they rebuild the glories of the past, only without the mistakes? Might they bring them back? Gwynne had felt this longing, this hunger, rolling out of Dr. Cordoza when she had first shown her the finger she had cut from the ancient human’s hand. To Gwynne, it was just an artefact, something rare and important and valuable, but still just a thing. But to Cordoza and others like her, it was the source material of human existence, a possible gateway back to a more fecund past. She would have given anything for it. As the rig approached Ragana, still invisible to her own senses but picked out clearly in the displays the rig’s systems projected into her inner eye, Gwynne pinged the doctor. Finally, there came an answer. “Yes? Miss Tsang?” Without preliminaries, Gwynne said, “Has anyone approached you or any of your staff recently? With something like what I gave to you?” A pause. “There was someone. A little while ago.” “Did he identify himself? Was there a transaction?” Gwynne asked. Another pause, longer this time. “That’s not your business.” “It bloody well is my business. What he has was stolen from me.” “You told me you didn’t have anything more,” Cordoza accused. Gwynne thought that for someone involved in the profession of healing, Cordoza was a particularly mercenary creature. “That’s because I lied to you, doctor,” she said. “What do you take me for? If you lot knew what I had I’d never have been left alone. Don’t deny it, you know what I mean. We can do business again if I recover it, okay? So has there already been a transaction or not?” “There hasn’t been a transaction,” admitted the doctor. “He refused to show it to me so I sent him away until he changed his mind. He’s still on Ragana.” “Did he use the name Ledux?” “No, he was anonymized, didn’t transmit an identity signature. He wasn’t presenting either.” “Yeah, that’s him.” Gwynne felt fear and relief in equal measure. He hasn’t been able to open the box, she thought. She had to get to him before he did anything stupid trying to get inside. She also wouldn’t put it past Cordoza’s crew to take matters into their own hands if she didn’t get to Auguste first. “Can you keep him there?” “I told him if he could fulfil his promises he’d be rich. I don’t think he’s going anywhere. Look, I can locate him for you but whatever business you have with each other, you’ll have to resolve yourself. Just don’t damage the material.” “Your priorities are clear, Cordoza,” Gwynne said. She had made the approach to Ragana dozens of times but never at anything like this velocity. The irregular lump of rock and iron that was Ragana rushed from the darkness and, in an abrupt change of perspective, transformed from just another tumbling worldlet into a sheer wall of imposing grey rock careening towards her. She applied reverse thrusters and repellers both and brought the rig in to the closest docking bay to the location Cordoza had given her. 
Gwynne pressed her hands against the glass. They had taken Alb’s body away an hour before but she hadn’t moved. “After the, ah, incident, Ragana’s authorities are pushing for a resolution to your situation,” Cordoza had told her. She had at least made an effort to look apologetic, but the message was clear: Gwynne was out of credit. “We’ve tried everything but the infection is still inside his mind. Every time we try and flush it, it reconfigures itself. I hate to admit it, but it’s beyond us.” “I understand,” Gwynne replied numbly. Now she was here, at this point, she felt exhausted, so tired she was almost unable to feel anything at all. Perhaps a part of her had always known it would come to this. “I’m out of options.” “Not quite,” Cordoza said, her manner softening. “We can shut him down completely. Who knows what we might be able to do in the future? There’s enough left in your account to store him. If that’s what you want.” “In purgatory?” Gwynne mumbled. “People sometimes come back.” Gwynne nodded absently. “Store him. Yes, do that.” At last she turned away from the window and returned to her rig. She unclipped the brooch from her belt and opened its polished black lid, cycling through the floating images of Alb and her together. “My little box of keepsakes,” she whispered to herself. Deactivating the picture-show, she pressed points on the brooch’s inner and outer casing in a particular sequence so that a tiny compartment opened up behind the holo mechanism. Inside it, sealed between tiny slivers of glass was a cell sample, a scraping of human DNA, so that she could continue to exist. |
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David McGillveray
David McGillveray was born in Edinburgh, Scotland but now lives with his family in London. After a long period of silence, lockdown started him writing again and this story is one of the results. His fiction has previously appeared in Interzone Digital, Kaleidotrope, Space and Time, and is forthcoming in Shoreline of Infinity and Analog.
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