Your mind is a terrible.., p.10
Your Mind is a Terrible Thing, page 10
“It is endless,” the Messenger said. “There is no stopping the Message.”
Its lithe limbs held rigid, so different from the wild squirming of the feral brains and brain-beast and Esme. She had died with the Message on her lips, meaning she’d heard that word somewhere in relation to this disaster. A version of the Messenger in her head must have told her.
If everyone on the crew had seen this thing, filtered through their maybe-healthier minds, it had to come from somewhere, same as the rest of the psionic junk. Maybe the same source as the mind-hacks, the feral brains.
The Message.
Alto rubbed their double-noded forehead. “You don’t live inside me.”
The Messenger stared into Alto, lips pursed.
“There’s nowhere in my head,” Alto said. “No there for you to live. My mind’s a network of thoughts and memories, and maybe your friends tricked me into opening a door inside, and maybe it’s my fault you look like me, talk like my brain when it hates me, but you’re coming from somewhere else. There’s no Messenger without the Message. So, what’s the Message?”
Alto waited for a response. If the Messenger mimicked the bad side of Alto’s brain, it had to have something to say.
Zelany’s interface lit in Alto’s lap. A neutral feminine voice rang from his mask, similar to the lockdown warning before: Emergency linkage, limited functionality, please stand by.
“The show must go on,” Zelany said. No green cartoon Martian face blipped the mask, but the voice was his, light and boyish and enthusiastic.
Alto leaned in and hugged him, clinking their wraith-plates together. “You scared me. Thought I’d be on my own.”
White dots flitted over Zelany’s screen. His voice began, “It’s a risky—”
The neutral voice took over again. Upgrade incompatible. Please perform maintenance or wraith unit may cease functionality.
Alto fumbled beside the cockpit seat for Jissika’s blood-spattered toolbelt. Helplessness jellied their limbs; these were unfamiliar tools. Some were the usual screwdrivers of various sizes, but others—what was this tiny hook for? Why did one small cylinder hold a crystal on the end? For psionics? A strange kind of wrench might have removed and reattached wraith-tail vertebrae, but Zelany’s didn’t seem damaged, and Alto had no spare parts. His tail coiled farther up Alto’s arm in a snug embrace.
Zelany’s voice popped through his mask. “An encore? For me? Never thought I’d see the day.”
“Jissika was the specialist.” Alto’s throat tightened. “I don’t know how to fix you.”
A quiet settled over Zelany. His tail’s grip tightened. “Stardom was never my thing, champ. Management, directing, the backstage. I point the spotlight, never standing in it. But lift a few lines from my script, you get me?”
Alto glanced over Zelany’s mangled arm, scuffed wraith-plate, and the glowing nodes on his black mask.
That damn neutral tone shot in, uncaring, unfeeling. Shutdown imminent. Please perform maintenance. As if it blamed Alto. Maybe it was right to do so.
Zelany’s tail squeezed so tight, it made Alto’s arm ache. “Don’t let them rotten tomatoes and hecklers and cheap seat-sitting gum-chewers get you down. I know—” Static crackled under his mask. “I know a star when I see one.”
Alto pressed their arms tight around Zelany’s trunk. Useless Alto. Pointless Alto. The Messenger had been right. Another Perfect Alto Fuck-Up.
“Sometimes it’s a solo act,” Zelany went on. “That’s show biz, baby.” His intact arm twisted in place, opening a space within the circuits and wires, and a narrow lump fell into Alto’s lap. It bore a synth-wood comb and brass reed plates.
Alto’s harmonica. No wonder they’d missed it when crossing the Yellowjacket’s cargo holds. Zelany must have grabbed it after Alto had slung their toolbelt at the Messenger, before they’d all fled the rising wave of dead. Alto plucked it up in one hand and stared into Zelany’s mask.
The screen flashed a winking green face, shuddering beneath endless static snow. “Knock ‘em dead,” Zelany said, wraith-nodes glowing bright. “I know you can.”
Emergency linkage exhausted. Shutting down.
Zelany’s interface snapped to darkness. Face gone, lights gone, only a black mask with a skull beneath it.
Alto gritted their teeth, bit their tongue, and fought the shaking in their limbs. They had lost every fight since they’d stepped into Pod L’s cargo hold; why not one more? Heavy breath sagged through their lips at the edge of another ragged sob.
Their breath flowed into the harmonica and whistled the slightest note. A little music in an empty shuttle.
Alto lifted the harmonica in both hands, one arm still coiled in Zelany’s tail, the other fitted with undead circuitry, and began to play. The notes came slow and warped at first, but then they smoothed into whatever melody came thoughtlessly through Alto’s lips. It was the nameless kind of song they’d played for Esme, and perhaps now they played it for Esme again, and Zelany, and everyone lost aboard the Yellowjacket.
Against this despair, only a nameless song would do.
The last note sang through the brass reed plates as Alto remembered the figure sitting to their left. They turned to a face of glowing violet.
“You are no more alone than you were before,” the Messenger said, and it placed a hand beside Zelany’s mask. “This was not a soul.”
The Messenger didn’t understand. It was an avatar of cruel thoughts. Love didn’t factor in.
Time to amputate it from Alto’s mind, at least for a while. They would accept Zelany’s invitation, with humility and gratitude. Alto set down their harmonica and tripped a chunk of circuitry from Zelany’s intact arm.
“The falsehood will haunt your thoughts,” the Messenger went on, but its voice weakened as the circuits dug into Alto’s naked leg. “You will want someone, pretend they’ve come to you.”
Alto plucked at the wire over Zelany’s mask and stripped his wraith-nodes loose. Wraiths only ever carried three. How would a human mind make out with five? Alto jammed one node in, no hesitation this time at the electronic ping, and welcomed its icy pain like an old friend.
“You will think someone stands around the corner.” The Messenger’s voice sank to a whisper. “Look, and you will see no one. Emptiness beckons.”
Alto didn’t wait for the new augmentation’s pain to finish; best to get it all done. They jammed the last two psionic nodes between the others, forming a line of five from temple to temple.
“But you are not alone,” the Messenger said, fading. “I am here.”
The wraith-nodes’ drills did not cancel each other out; agony crossed Alto’s skull, into deep places, purpling their mind and stretching their thoughts as if a skinless adult wanted to wear a child’s hide. Too little, spread too thin. Alto squeezed the cockpit seat’s arms and screeched, their sounds barely human.
The Messenger cut through, its voice soaked in violet. “I promise, it is dark here,” it said. “And the dark is all you will know.”
“I’m going to find out what you really are,” Alto said through gritted teeth. “And then you’re going to wish you’d left me alone.”
The icy pain snapped away, and merciful peace followed. Alto sank into their seat. Sweat coated their skin, and they panted for breath. A curious finger stroked their forehead—five nodes. Would it be enough for where Alto meant to go?
Stripping Zelany of further pieces felt like disrespecting who he’d been, maybe acting out a flesh-hack itself. Still, he had offered, and Alto needed more. They could only whisper apologies and gratitude as they tested Jissika’s tools, found the right one, and pried the wraith-tail from Zelany’s torso.
Made of steel and some other alloy, spined by vertebrae, and longer than Alto’s leg, the prehensile tail looked like it might do some damage if wielded by anyone but a harmless wraith. Circuits and wires jutted from its stump, waiting to be plugged into another torso.
Alto instead cut one of Jissika’s tools into their right forearm and jammed the stump into flesh. Its pieces whirred in confusion, but it wasn’t like a wraith’s torso had active muscles to tell a tail what to do. All it needed for functioning was its servos, internal power source, and a set of artificial nerves.
Or real ones.
Alto’s world sank again into agony. Their arm twitched as merciless wires corkscrewed across bone and meshed with muscle. Alto’s spine quaked in a melted-flesh inferno. They might have screamed for it to stop, and then screamed they were sorry, though they weren’t sure to whom, but they could only half-remember as they swept in and out of consciousness.
They woke to the shuttle thudding against the Yellowjacket’s underside. A display light warned of a collision, no damage reported. Alto muttered another, “Sorry.” Probably to their body, which was theirs and yet abused like never before, or maybe to Zelany and Esme again.
Maybe to the shuttle. It deserved every possible apology for where Alto would steer it next.
A maroon curve haunted the upper screen’s edge. This was the world where the Star-Hopper had crashed. Where its distress call had shot out into space and drawn the Yellowjacket, the ship with a squid on its hull, and more to come if they weren’t already on their way, following interplanetary faction protocols of various kinds. The trouble had started in that desolate hell.
It would end there, too.
Alto laid a reluctant hand on the control panel, gave the stars a longing glance, and then steered the shuttle toward the unknown maroon planet. Their aching right arm weighed heavier with the wraith-tail, but they had some experience with it coiling there while Zelany had curled here shutting down. Dying. Alto could manage lifting it now that they’d taken that piece, enough to tick the shuttle’s communications awake to lead them to the Star-Hopper.
A familiar distress call filled the cramped cockpit. Captain Afsar Sajid. Star-Hopper. Immediate extraction. Alto doubted there was anyone left to rescue besides the countless future souls who might drift toward this world.
That was fine. Life did not keep secret that if you planned to stand up and do the right thing, you should always plan to do it alone. The universe made no promises anyone would stand with you.
But Alto would stand nonetheless. If they couldn’t escape, then they would make sure no one else died here.
And if they couldn’t have life, they would at least take a chance on revenge.
THE MESSAGE
16
Alto switched off comms a few minutes before the shuttle jerked to a rough landing in a shallow maroon valley. No more need for the distress call. They had arrived.
A soft rhythm tapped the shuttle’s roof. Rain or sediment? Maybe pieces of the other starship burning up on entry after all. Alto sat back and listened, but soon the thought of precipitation reminded them too much of inner snow. That anxious symptom should have left them alone since corpses had torn off Alto’s clothes, but bodily love had collapsed since watching the brain-beast husk Esme’s flesh from her new form. Could anyone’s body ever really be theirs when the Message threatened to twist them into something else?
Alto gathered Zelany’s still remains against their chest, cradled him to standing, and then nestled him in the cockpit seat, arms curled under his body.
“The only wraith captain in the universe,” Alto whispered.
Their remorse felt shallow, less than Zelany deserved, but this was the best Alto could do alone. If they ever made it off this rock, and if they found a genuine wraith specialist, that miracle worker might be able to repair Zelany. New wraith-nodes, new circuits, new tail.
If. The cursed word.
Alto laid a gentle palm on Zelany’s nodeless mask. They then plucked up their harmonica and wedged its wooden comb between their left arm’s wiry pathways, where it hopefully wouldn’t fall out. It was Zelany’s only gift that Alto hadn’t pried from his body. Carrying it along with the rest only seemed right.
Shuttle readings said the planet offered a warm atmosphere but low oxygen levels. Alto tried donning the spacesuit, but it tore when constricting around the arm-mounted wraith-tail. The helmet only worked in conjunction with the spacesuit, useless now. Alto had to rip out its oxygen bubble pack and stick the black tube in their mouth for air. It tasted of plastic, and its cool flow came laced in chemicals, but the air would see Alto to their destination. They sucked in through their mouth, exhaled through their nose, and then climbed the shuttle’s ladder and emerged onto its roof to face this world.
Lumpy maroon slopes climbed from the damp soil in a vast bowl. Droplets coated the shuttle’s roof and the points of its arrow shape, residue of a red-blue mist that wandered the valley. Bodies of water might fill this world. A hopeful crew might have landed their ship here to scout grounds for a future colony.
Alto emerged fully onto the shuttle roof, where a gentle wind coated their skin from head to toe in lukewarm droplets. A light rain landed tinny against Alto’s wraith parts. The nakedness didn’t bother them, but they wished they had their Yellowjacket coat. Cynical as the reasons might be for Merchant Guild’s mascot requirements, Alto would have felt right representing the Yellowjacket’s crew and wraiths in the place that had caused their deaths.
Somewhere above this world, the altered crew writhed inside the Yellowjacket’s pods. They might have folded into the brain-beast, whoever it used to be, or they might carry on forever as they’d become.
Alto wouldn’t know. They were never going back.
The wraith-tail coiled and uncoiled from their right arm, an impatient new limb. If anything like the brain-beast waited ahead, Alto wouldn’t be caught unarmed again, and this appendage was stronger than any hammer. Three fingers hung unmoving from their right hand. The wraith-tail must have repurposed those nerves and muscles. Its wires crisscrossed in snaking pathways up Alto’s arm, roots for the steel-vertebrae tree.
Alto approached the shuttle’s nose and slid to the ground. Their feet smacked soft loam, and they wobbled, nearly fell, righted themselves against the shuttle’s hull. After too many crossings stuck in artificial gravity, genuine pressure felt strange on Alto’s skin. This world’s gravity seemed a hair lighter than E-centric but close enough to go unnoticed after a few steps on its lumpy surface. Alto wished they knew its name.
At least they knew the name of the starship ahead.
It had settled into the crook of the valley, its sides bridging the slopes. Not a lengthy segmented insect, but a comma-shaped single-pod vessel far larger than Pod A of the Yellowjacket. The Star-Hopper seemed a junkheap by starship standards, likely stolen from Merchant Guild by pirates and sold to scrappers on the hunt for salvage.
Traces of Merchant Guild remained—a peaceful green frog sat painted on the hull, its back dotted with black stars. The image faded only at its edges, suggesting touch-ups over time. The new crew must have taken to the frog, wanted to keep him looking sharp. This vessel was personal. They treated it like home, loved it, might even have loved each other.
None of them hailed Alto, as expected. They had come to this planet for their own reasons, and something here had forced them to send the distress call.
Alto sucked air through their tube and crossed the few hundred feet from shuttle to ship. Jagged trails marred the loam, but rainfall had muddied their shapes, distorting any hint as to what might have scraped the soil there. A steel-plated shutter closed the cargo hold, about three feet taller than Alto and maybe ten feet wide. Rain patted the Star-Hopper’s curves. No signs of deterioration; it had not sat here for long. Its painted frog watched blank-eyed from the hull until Alto stepped into the shadow of the ship’s underside.
The dirty feeling crossed their mind that this whole incident stemmed from Merchant Guild. Either directly from their devising, or because someone thought the Guild would pay in a big way for whatever might be found here.
Why hadn’t the Star-Hopper sent a shuttle down? To land here meant trusting unstable ground with only pronged landing legs, the starship’s belly pressed into the planet’s surface. It meant wasting fuel to break from this world’s gravity. Had the crew found a cargo too large for their shuttle? No way to know from out here, but Alto guessed the Star-Hopper was an all-in-one ship, keeping life support, quarters, cockpit, and cargo hold within a single vessel, like in the pre-wraith days.
And yet a wraith lay coiled on the ground beneath the shuttered entrance.
Alto’s steps slowed. A broken wraith had become a bad omen. Only pain followed one’s discovery. This wraith looked no different from most—gray husk, steel wraith-plate, the tail, mask, and nodes—but the air tasted worse in Alto’s tube the closer they stepped. The wraith’s blank black shell weighed heavy with skull and answers.
Alto cradled their oxygen pack under one arm and stroked fingertips down the wraith’s mask. Its interface flickered alive, and the light warped where water had settled in a thin sheen. Alto wiped the puddle away; fresh raindrops formed a new one. White-noise fuzz filled the wraith’s screen before shifting to dark shapes, and Alto realized what they were watching.
Like the wraith Esme had left in the Yellowjacket’s Pod O, there was a video, recorded from this wraith’s perspective.
To watch might mean to understand. To know, as the Messenger had suggested. Alto knew of worse fates, likely stemming from whatever this video would show. Better to never watch it, never know a damn thing.
But Alto hadn’t come this far to keep themselves in the dark. They hunched over the wraith’s upper half, guarded its black mask from further rain, and watched the video play.
17
Aface filled the wraith’s interface, light skin gone so red and oily with heat and sweat that its odor reached through the screen, same as a bright toothy grin breached a bushy chestnut-going-gray beard. Dark blue eyes gleamed tired yet hopeful. An auburn jacket looked worn and unkempt.
