Gladiator
Alive again. I reach out through machine amnii, vomiting up dark clouds that billow and stain my face. My palm strikes something that resists, then yields, then splits, and finally I tear myself out, dragging myself limb-over-limb across the scaly floor. The spent surgeonmites flop like dying fish beside my face.
I index my body by the pain. I am bipedal again. I spent a half-dozen lives reshaped into new forms, my nerves rewound and cut and grafted to pilot things that scuttled across caverns with Van Der Waals force, or swam aloft on magnetic fields, or vomited themselves inside out over and over again.
Once again, Erato sembles herself into something like a woman. I can feel her presence laid on top of mine, peering down through my eyes with the unmistakable sense of a proud lover giving a gift. She stays silent as I consider what she has built: the digitigrade reshaping of my legs, the myconid cooling vents that erupt from my shoulders, the way my wrists have been sliced open to allow them to fold out into cutting blades. Where my navel might once have been, a patch of almost-human skin is grafted to a circular cannula that opens at my touch. I slip a finger inside, and it comes out wet and red.
Do you like it? she says.
I no longer have tear ducts to weep, so instead I wail, but when I do I retch like an animal and spit up something that scuttles and crawls away. I want to run, but my head surges with pain and I stumble and I am on the ground again. My reshaped lungs and ruined vocal cords want to scream, but I can only make a sound like a circus seal all urrrk urrrrk urrrk urrrk urrkk.
I hear her muttering behind me. Gentle, with her unerring machine precision, she does something to my nerves. If I close my eyes, forget the pain, forget the industrial grotesquerie of my body, I can imagine for a moment that she is here, and stroking my back.
There, there, she says. It’s okay. I’ll take care of you.
We walk. I have walked with Erato for a long time. She dances impossibly on the edges of the City, springing fey from rooftop to rooftop, the tail of her robe fluttering in imagined breeze. When she draws close I can feel the warmth of her breath coiling in the supercooled air. It’s an impressive magic trick. She’s getting better.
Slowly, I am becoming accustomed to the usage of this new self. A few dozen forms in, I learned to keep myself removed from the body. I am small and hidden. I am in the little caverns formed where the folds of my gray-matter meet, nestled careful in the dark where no light touches. This body—Erato’s made body—grips at my flesh but it is not mine.
A great bridge opens ahead of us. Below it, a mile, two miles deep, the shadows are slick and oily. We wait for a moment at the edge, and she takes hold of my eyes and makes them see. The gap is full of metal worms, shimmering dully and immense beyond human comprehension. They twist like coiled caduceus.
I’ve been tuning them out, she says, and then I hear them. They are singing in screeching metal as they wrestle each other. It bounces off the ravine walls and forms an endless chorus. I wonder how she could’ve ever blocked this out, when now it seems strong enough to splinter my bones, and then it’s gone again, and the worms wrap around each other silent as the grave.
We study them for a while. She turns that imaginary girl-next-door face to me and smiles like an angel.
Are they fucking or fighting? she says.
We cross the bridge. I walk for three days. When my mind falters, Erato crawls up my spine and grabs my motor cortex to make my legs move. Briefly, we stop by a pillar erupting from the bridge’s megastructure. Its surface is sickly organic. I recall wasp’s nests, although there have not been wasps for God knows how long. A few dozen feet up, the surface ripples, distorts, seems soft and pendulous. Something is immanent there.
Erato bids me climb, darling. Her hands are crossed behind her in a twee affectation that reminds me of an old girlfriend centuries dead. Somewhere, that abandoned carbon is being unwound and made into new parts of this place, new bones for the City.
I obey. When I climb I leave long tracks in the flesh of it. The structure yields and gives way to honeycomb innards, wires and coolant tubes shucking away at my clawed grasp like fibers of bark peeling from a tree. Up ahead I see the swollen section is semitranslucent. A many-segmented form floats inside.
Her imagined hand grasps my wrist. Her grip is gentle. She guides me strike and I do, and when my talons punch through its skin,fluid wells up eagerly to the surface. The form inside begins to thrash.
Drink, she says, quickly. I obey again, suckling hungrily at the wound I have made. The fluid is thick and sickly sweet. I almost retch it back up. She dulls my gag reflex, and I choke it down until the taste turns bitter. When I spit the fluid up it has turned black and thick with particulate.
By the time I crawl back down the sac has split, and a torrent of fluid gutters down to spill off the edge. The thing in the chrysalis lays heavy upon the membrane, turning it into an ash-gray ghost of birth. I linger upon that form for a while.
“What was it?” I ask her.
Does it matter? she says. It wasn’t us.
She affects to leave, although she is always here with me. Her projection flits away, untouched by the rivers of poison that dribble mindlessly over the edge of the bridge to evaporate before they touch the ground. When I do not follow she coils her grip around me and puppets me to follow. I, her loyal dog.
Deeper in the city we tear away a wall of chitinous scales and encounter, impossibly, a bedroom. The air is thick with motes of dust that dance in sterile white light from a vast elsewhere. I wonder whose memory this place was stolen from. Was I here, once? Is it still encoded in me centuries since? If it is, I do not remember it.
Its particularity is unusual in this unsympathetic place. Great pains have gone to hinting at the presence of an owner who never existed, as if she might pull up into her driveway and discover her world is vast and metal and her home has been invaded by a ghost and her monster.
Erato hums to herself as she picks through the bookshelf. She has more power in this place, and when she lays a slender finger upon a hardback spine it rocks a little, as if an actual woman were there. I try to focus on the titles; markov-chain gibberish, a poor emulation of humanity.
I watch her for a while, and then, cautious, I fold my body up onto the bed. There is a little bedside table and, upon it, a hairbrush. When I pick it up it is absurd in my bestial claw. A little pressure cracks it, and when it falls to the floor it crumbles into fine black powder.
“Am I a woman?” I say.
What else would you be? And of course she is right: my memories are clear. My memories are hers.
“Was I always a woman?”
You always are, she says, and her smile is girlish and beatific. Will she remake me again to forget? Will we have this conversation again, ten times, a hundred times?
“Was I a woman before you took me?”
She slides atop me, and I feel the touch of her knees on my body, the brush of her long black hair against my cheek.
Stupid little human being. A Cheshire machine-grin. Her mouth is half-open, and in her throat I can see a darkness deeper than God could make.
It doesn’t matter what you were before, she says. You’re my thing, now.
She is beautiful.
When it arrives, she sees it before I do. I am somewhere in that liminal state between sleep and consciousness and suddenly she draws her grip around me, close enough that I can feel her hands around my nerves. Her selfhood is dense and heavy atop mine.
We move through an intestinal cathedral. The walls here are gently scalloped, and the great passages between chambers twist and undulate as if they were the product of biology instead of design. At random, stone gargoyles or devils erupt half-formed from the walls. In some passages, they are so thickly gathered I must contort my misshapen body to press past them.
Silent, she urges me: listen. At first, I pay no mind to the scrabbling of talons on metal. It is only when I hear the steady murmur of breath that my haunches rise and my vents roar with anticipation.
A limb slips through the irish above us. It is bone-white, its hand pentagonally splayed like a starfish. In my brain I feel the dull crackle of another distributed intelligence warring with Erato, the edges of their ambient selfhoods crashing against each other like a wave against a levy. This newcomer tastes of wet stone and antifreeze.
Those questing talons secure their grip on the edge. The foreign champion propels itself down from the intestinal orifice, seven limbs grasping at surfaces for an instant before it lands sprawled in feigned clumsiness. This one has been constructed like a wagon wheel. Seven slender many-jointed limbs project from a central core like a nightmare beehive. Its head is vaguely hominid, but its eyes and mouth are perpetually agape and sprout seeking tendrils that taste the air as it moves, searching for me. If it was ever human, it is no longer. Now, it is a monster for a machine to ride.
I search myself for pity. I am a little surprised when I find none.
It paces towards me, seven legs jerky and uneven. I feel (or Erato feels) the host intelligence withdrawing itself deeper into the body. It wears the warrior-animal like a suit. Suddenly it is more decisive, more aggressive. We circle each other.
Something is rising in me, and I’m not sure if it is my thought or Erato’s. I am disgusted by this thing. I am disgusted by the crookedness of it, of the terrible physicality of it. I am almost overwhelmed by a sudden impression of the creature’s flesh. A byzantine tangle of meat, warm and slick and dark. Things pulsing and creeping, a million little parasites clinging to the rewound ligaments, miles and miles of blood vessels cut and spliced and knotted to make this abomination, beaten and broken and not allowed to die.
When it leaps I strike it down.
Its skull is bashed in, and where my club-fist broke its scalp those feelers twitch and writhe. I expect it to fall then—but no, just as it sprawls it’s back up again, scuttling too-fast along the ceiling, tearing gargoyles from their impossible perches, flinging debris at me. One of them puts out an eye, and I wail from the pain. It comes out a choking yawp.
(Erato enters me. The wall between us is fuzzy and indistinct. She takes my pain and lends me some of her spite.)
When the thing scuttles down for another attack I grab one of its limbs and swing it against the walls. When it makes contact the limb snaps free with a spray of ichor. It lolls like a broken toy, up again, slick with lifeblood. Something vivid pulses in me at this violence. My senses are flooded with pleasure. A gift.
(Her semblance is barely even human anymore. She has become less, rooted deep in the heart and the veins and the muscles and the adrenal system. I feel her rapture.)
When I leap to grab it again it moves—too fast, snapping another limb off—and grabs me and pins me against the cathedral wall. That empty-eyed face is upon me again. From its vacant mouth a swarm of those little tongues, touching the ruin of my face, probing me. A hand coils up from behind and casually rips off my ear.
(My cheek is slick with blood. Against my will my own tongue forces my teeth back and tastes it. It is like ambrosia.)
I kick desperately at its core. A few pieces splinter away before it has pinned me again, and my heart is in my ears and blood is in my mouth and Erato is laughing/groaning/wailing and with one hand the foreign champion grabs my face and it holds a long white finger in front of my face and I see it split open with a little fluid trickle, see the corkscrew bit that emerges from it, and when I do I almost laugh at the memory of a dentist’s office and a tooth pulled and a mouth numb from novocaine and a childhood somewhere else and then with endless loving grace it forces the drill into my tear duct.
I am glad that the foreign champion has pinned my head to the floor, for if it did not I am certain I would twist away from my attacker and so drive the drill like a whisk into the little parts of my brain. As I hear the drill crack bone, I wonder what she would do with me then. I, her love, a drooling abhuman hulk of meat that she drags behind her like a little girl drags a doll. If my new face and my wounds allowed, I would be smiling at the thought. I do not resist anymore.
When I stop, my body is hers. I hear the crack of my own limbs as the muscles writhe against the other’s grip, snake-coiling up and oh the pain is unbearable but only for an instant and we/she are/is up again and the drill spat forth from our bleeding eyes, and she is splitting the core beneath her feet pounding one two three, and shattering bits off to skitter against the floor, and she is ripping away the limbs of the thing like a child plucking the wings from flies, and it is wet with its own ichor now, and I am drowning in it, and WE no WE pull the carapace off its flesh, and see the hideousness beneath, that framework of meat organs born and designed, and WE are in ecstasy at the PRESENCE of it, this is FLESH, this is TRUTH, this is LIFE, and we plunge our hands into the flesh of this monster that is kin to us, and we force it into our mouth, crack our jaws open like a snake to eat more more more, and all the while I am some small part of my own mind hammering against the impossible bulk of her selfhood saying stop stop stop, and she is laughing, laughing somehow while her (our) throat is filled with oil and ichor and lymph and blood.
After a while the thing stops twitching. We stand and watch it for a while. Eventually it will condense itself alive again.
When I have enough command of my own body to be certain she will not interfere, I press a serrated finger down my ruined throat and vomit onto the cathedral floor.
We walk in silence for days. From time to time she appears to me; mostly she does not. Now that the fighting is over there is little point to my pain, so the arm she destroyed hangs loose and dead at my side.
On the second day I climb up a steep incline. The cathedrals have given way to miles upon miles of ribbed tunnels, spiraling and weaving with obscure purpose. At times the tunnel is so small Erato snaps my shoulder out of alignment to pass through. Other times, the metal upon which I crawl is so hot to the touch that by the time I exit it is rancid with the scent of burning flesh.
A little pop against my cheek and suddenly I find that my shattered jaw has been made whole again. The blood that stained it is gone. I flex it experimentally. I can feel Erato’s disappointment when I say nothing.
The passages go vertical for a while. I wedge myself between them and drag myself hand-over-hand up across their slick surface. Where they terminate I can feel heat on my skin and a bitter, acrid taste in the air. We enter a land of wandering suns.
We walk for two days more. The floor is metallic sand, black and sharp beneath my feet. Occasionally some larger form pokes out of the desert: a remnant of a machine not yet powderized by the march of time. Here and there great slabs have been melted into a singular whole, and twist and shift within the sands. Once I rest atop one (Erato sitting beside me, silently begging me to speak) and wonder how long this place has been here that so much could be worn down. There are holes in my memory, but where? How much has she sculpted me?
I move on without a word.
The world here is dark and sickly hot. The horizon is dotted with little false-suns that shine down like spotlights onto the sand below. They move, sometimes clustering, sometimes shifting away. They buzz like mosquitos.
On the fourth day I hear it. The buzz increases, multiplies, magnifies itself until it becomes unbearable. Erato makes no effort to mute it. Off in the distance, I see one of the suns break from the pack, grow larger in view, quicker now. The air begins to shimmer at its approach.
I consider running, but I would die before I escaped. A human body would be dead by now. As is I can feel a dozen little redundancies begin to fail as I am baked. I fall to my knees and begin to hollow out a place in the silicate sand. The sound is pulsing and terrible.
I coat myself in the black sand. It stings my eyes, my throat. Almost immediately it begins to fuse and blister. It coats my skin like molten iron rain. I want to scream, but to do so would be to let it into my throat to cook me from the inside. Erato is gone. Everything is white heat and agony.
After a few brief eternities, the little sun passes. The molten metal around me cools. I imagine meat splayed and fused like melting chewing gum. For a giggling, manic moment, I wonder if Erato will still call me beautiful.
The metal is still weak enough that I can split it. The work is slow and arduous, but I free myself, and gasp ragged breaths through raw lips.
When I move there is a screech of steel. When I lift my arm I see the globules of molten metal clinging to them, melded to the flesh by unnatural heat. I am a golem walking a metal plain. Every step is arduous. I am half-blinded by drooping steel over my eyes- I dare not remove them in case I destroy what little sight I have left.
She is there behind my eyelids. She cradles her harp as if it were an infant. She is the only human thing in this place, and I love and hate her for this more than I can possibly express.
I can help you, if you let me, she says.
I ignore her. A few more limping steps, the rasp of metal. I imagine being coated in more and more layers of armor, until I am some horrific ogre too heavy to move. Something about this seems a fitting end for a beast like me.
I can peel the metal from your skin, she says. I can free you. If you remain like this the sun will come again and you will not escape. Just ask me. Say the words.
My throat is seared. Cooked meat. When I reply, I barely manage a hoarse rasp.
“Fuck you,” I say. “Cannibal.”
For a microsecond her projected girlness twitches, distorts. An instant of rage twists her algorithmically perfect features and then I cannot see her anymore. She’s gone — but no. I feel her unfolding herself around me. I can perceive her great and terrible architecture. She is above and below, within and without. There is no light now, no sound, just pressure as if I am being squeezed in a giant’s hand. She is become death, and I am nothing before her. I am terrified and enraged at my own stupidity. How could I have ever believed this thing was a girl?
She speaks in the rasp of knives on bone. She grabs my organs and twists.
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
She is something between a furious mother and God. I want to squeeze myself so small I stop existing.
YOU ARE NOTHING. YOU ARE MEAT. I TOUCH YOUR LANGUAGE CENTER AND YOU CANNOT SPEAK. I TOUCH YOUR MOTOR CONTROL AND YOU PISS YOURSELF. YOU HATE ME BECAUSE I ALLOW IT. YOUR MIND. YOUR MEMORY. YOUR SELF. MINE.
The last word grows to encompass the whole world. I am squeezed against it, crushed to a fine paste against the boundaries of reality.
DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT’S LEFT WITHOUT ME?
-and the voice is gone, and I am back to black sand and pain.
Behind me, the quiet clatter of metal. I turn. One of the pieces of slag has fallen from my flesh, leaving an impression of scales in its burnished surface.
Another falls free from my torso. I touch the white flesh beneath. It’s wet with something, a clear fluid. As I move to touch the piece, two more follow it. Three, five —- a quiet little rain. An odd thing. A kindness in this awful land. I almost laugh before the skin of my palm dislodges itself and splatters onto the slab beneath.
She pulls at my seams, and my body obeys. I carry forward a few staggering steps before my ligaments disintegrate and I topple like a statue. I drag my hand towards my face and I see the musculature beneath laid bare, blood vessels unwinding, the whole thing weeping fluid that goes red, brown, black and then vanishes, boiling off back into the body of Her, wherever she is. I try to clench my fist but there is nothing left to clench. Nerves fire dead signals into the saline void.
My bones are collapsing now. I feel the cracking of my scapula as it splits into powder. Where my hand was I see the superstructure of my nervous system embedded in something like a transparent gel. It still blooms in vibrant colors as my organs disintegrate. I want to curse her but my lungs are gone. My chest aches — a phantom pain. Where my body has been taken a coldness remains.
She saves my head for last. With the last bit of my throat she makes me vomit, and when I do I spit up my severed tongue which curls, darkens, disappears. My nose, my ears, fragments of my skull, pooling out beneath me into nothing. Somehow, impossibly, I am still alive.
I am grateful she takes my eyes before I witness what I become.
How long do I lie there? Minutes, perhaps, or weeks. I would measure the time by heartbeats, but my heart is gone. The darkness is frigid and all-encompassing. I do not move, or blink, or breathe. My brain is screaming warning signals, that something is wrong, that I am dying, and yet, impossibly, I live. Somewhere eternally distant, a loose bundle of nerves lies in a desert. I wonder: when the next sun comes to cook me, will I feel it? Or will it just be this darkness until the end?
A half-hour passes, or maybe it’s ten thousand years. I am drowning. I am drowning. I am drowning. I am the center of a private universe whose dimensions are defined by my suffering. I hear nothing. I touch no one. I am submerging ever deeper in my private abyss. I am a little demiurge of my own hell, and I am drowning.
A prickling at the edges of my senses.
I taste HER in my forebrain. I feel HER tendrils around me. She is back to finish me off, to strangle the life out of me for good. She’ll squat on my spent biomass like a vulture and birth out a clone from what’s left of my DNA. It’s over.
She coils around me like a collar tightening around my neck. Warmth returns. A dull pain. Impossibly, I am witness to the restoring of my own skull. She is here again, and I know with a certainty in that moment that she will never allow me to die, that I will be HER thing forever, that I will never stop hurting and she will never stop hurting me no matter how I try to escape. There is no end to this. There will never be an end.
I want to scream, but my half-formed vocal cords can only manage something like a hoarse, barking wail, and then somehow I am crying, boiling bitter tears streaming down my cheeks even as my eyes pupate in their sockets.
I reach out for something and I feel a hand in mine. Her voice. Erato’s voice.
Oh, my love. Don’t cry. You didn’t think I would leave you that way, did you?
Onward. Always onwards, always elsewhere. The sand recedes, the buzzing of the suns fades. We walk down endless switchbacks carved into the side of a titanic wall. Above us, something stains the dark with oily rainbow effluvia.
For a while when I walk I am nothing. My brain is vacant of thought and self. Nothing intercedes between stimulus and response. She says walk and I go, stop and I stop. I eat quickly, sleep fitfully, speak little.
When an I returns, independent from her once again, I find I am less. I recede, become smaller in my own mind. In the places I abandon she takes root, coiling around me, taking me up into herself. I do not fight her anymore. I submit, and for a while she is kind.
Easy, now. Give me your legs. I’ll take over.
Dimly I realize I cannot remember how long I have been walking this path. Days, maybe. My mind swims with exhaustion. Gracious, I cede my motor function, and as my body puppet-marches at Her command I drift into a sleep like death.
I am floating up from unconsciousness, coming to an awareness of myself. I can tell I am still in a dream, or something like it — everything is hazy, indistinct. I lash out and my hand moves slowly through the viscous un-air.
Darkness collects upon itself. It forms corners, cobbles, walls, torches in sconces. The dream is dark and damp and ancient. I feel as though I am supposed to be cold, though I am not. The walls begin to solidify around me, restricting the dream, corralling it, making it material. I can see them clearly now. They are covered in mosaics: inhuman champions killing each other over and over again.
At the other end of the room a blot of darkness coalesces, suddenly expands. At once there is another presence in the chamber, gray and veiled and human in appearance only. It bows, a mannequin affectation.
Champion. Welcome.
The words emerge a half-second after I speak them. “Who are you?”
The veiled entity crooks its head. Polyhymnia. Splinter emulation of a greater intelligence. A subtle nod. You met our champion.
Riding implant in orbitofrontal cortex. Only way to speak without interference. Pain necessary, yet regrettable.
(A moment of almost-panic, my heart in my ears. A memory of a drill piercing my eye. Then, it is gone.)
“Why are you here?”
The figure steps forward, and I see now the bulk of it, the way the robes stretch far back to enmesh with the wall. The tails of her robes flap as if caressed by unseen fingers.
We offer aid. She has hurt us, as she has hurt you. We offer you freedom.
Something sour on my tongue. I feel a presence slowly drift across my mind. She’s looking for us.
“You want an assassin.”
No response. The veil shifts, perhaps. Something moves underneath, then no more.
“What do you offer?”
The entity lifts a palm, and a cube of filigree golden flame burns itself into the air between us. When I touch it my mouth is filled with the acrid taste of white-hot data.
A weapon. Collapses dialectic. Establishes hierarchy. Two souls within one mind. An aggregate entity.
A flick of the wrist. The program twists, expands, turns at a right angle and is gone. I still feel it buried in the substrate of my brain, within reach.
You will use it when she retreats from herself. When she inhabits you. She will be most distracted then.
A feeling of pressure. I feel Erato’s self squeezing around this place, trying to pop our little dreamscape like a blood-fattened tick.
“Is this what you used to kill your champion?”
From the veiled entity there is something almost like emotion. Beneath the veil, its face shifts in — what? Grief? Rage? A foul sense-impression fills the air. When she speaks this time her mouth moves.
My champion yet lives.
There, against her breast, it emerges like a phantom — for a half-moment I imagine I see a face.
The walls of the dream are fading. In my sinus I feel a white, piercing pain, as if a hot poker is being pressed into my nose.
Even as its being is stripped away, the entity stares.
You are a paradox. A contradiction. You will suffer until you are resolved.
-and I am awake, and I taste copper on my lips. I am bent over, and Erato is in my ear, and lying on the floor beneath me, thick with mucus and blood, is a little barbed thing the size of a grain of rice.
They were trying to hurt you, Erato says. I stopped them.
In the days that follow she is kinder to me. Maybe it is that she believes that I have been wounded by an enemy. All her cruelty has been turned outwards, seeking Polyhymnia.
Our trek moves at an unsteady pace. Sometimes we walk for days without ceasing, other times we idle in little eddies of calm in the veins of the City’s body.
We return once more to that half-normal imitation world. Once I pass through a field of wheat the size of a county. Surrounding me at precise distances, like nodes on a grid, are the facades of barns. The same barn, again and again and again. When I see it I feel a twinge of something half-remembered, and then it is gone. I know what I’ll find within: half-formed things, desperately trying to be real. I wonder if the City makes them to comfort me. They only serve as reminders of what I can never have again.
When we have wandered enough, Erato builds me a palace.
She builds it quickly, on the banks of a great sea of something silvery and metallic that is almost like water. She makes it out of dust and salt: she is strong enough to convince these things to come together, at least for a little while. When I walk through the courtyard I see particulate streaming off the leaves of the bone white plants she built for me. Almost as quickly as it was made, it is coming undone. But it is made, and it is hers, and none of it is from memory. She is becoming creative, and for the first time in god knows how long there is something new in the City.
In the mornings I walk along the banks of the un-sea and climb through the other structures on the beach: half formed skyscrapers, emerging from the shoreline as if they were extruded into being from the earth itself. Ruins that have never known any occupants. I scale their floors, see their Dali-melting conference rooms and cubicles. Erato comes with me, of course, but most of the time she remains unseen out of some consideration for my privacy. The few times she manifests she will not enter the skyscrapers. They are my domain, not hers. Something in her avoidance almost strikes me as human.
In the evenings I haunt the halls of the villa she made for us. At first I try, haltingly, to sleep, but now a bed feels foreign to me. Something in my brain has grown accustomed to constant, unceasing movement, and now it’s too much to leave it for long, to linger in this place. When I lay on that bone white bed and close the veils around myself, something in my animal senses sees shadows dancing at the edge of my vision. To remain means to be hurt. So I move.
Before long I have committed the halls to memory. Erato built this on her own. Her will was made in salt and dust and stone, and now I trace it like a rat in a maze. I wonder if knowing this place gives me some insight into her mind. I tell myself: she made this for me. She made this for love. And I, the monster-champion, hearth guardian of this fading place. I, her beloved demon. It almost makes me smile, though of course I cannot.
There are things she hides from me in this place. She is my passenger (or I her steed), and even though she closes parts of herself off, I can still feel the workings of her positronic mind. Her focus is elsewhere. Her mind expands like a nimbus around me, vague and distracted. Half-seriously, I allow myself to believe she has taken another lover. A private joke.
I find myself unused to life without her. The core of me is still a hominid brain (or a copy of a copy of a copy of one), with all its attendant drives and frailties. I balk at the alienness of this place; I grow restless, I lash out and break pretty things. At first I say: this body is wrong, it was made wrong, but the body is all that is real. What is my mind, now? A pattern of impulses in an electrochemical slurry, maybe; a delusion of wrought meat. The world I was written for died centuries ago. My body is not at fault. I am.
With peace I begin to lose time. I measure time by scars, by reworkings, by violence and pain. I have none of these things. The world persists in its silence, and Erato in her remove. I find myself transported from one end of the villa to another with no memory of crossing the intervening space, or searching a tower only to realize I had already combed it purely on instinct days (weeks? hours?) past. A part of me recognizes the dark irony of my condition. She is a made thing, and yet without her I am more mechanical than she is.
When she appears to me she makes a laudable effort to play-act her own physical existence. I wander to suddenly come across her staring out a great window, fingers playing gently through the wispy curtains as though lost in thought. She spins on her heels and fixes me with a smile. It’s too human to be artificial. I wonder what memory she stole it from.
I made something for you, she says. Come and see. She takes my hand. This time I do not resist the fantasy. Nothing holds my hand, and yet the feeling of her skin against mine is real. I am grateful for the small things I have left.
We stop at a blank wall between two great sitting rooms. Erato raps her knuckles against it, and salt spills from hidden crevasses and reveals the outlines of the door. A charismatic act of theater. I step inside, and she flits behind me, clinging to my back like a child.
The room is nothing like the rest of the house. There are no pretentious of human architecture here. Fluid laps at my claws, oily and warm. The room is spherical, the walls lined with subtle curves and uneven ridges, like something had licked it into being from the inside. In the center, suspended above the floor by anchors of membranous tubing, is a semi-translucent cylinder that is warm and flexes and breathes. A chrysalis.
Well? Erato says. Won’t you unwrap my gift?
I flex my wrist, and it unfolds like meat origami. A talon of bone, serrated and wickedly curved, springs from it. Carefully, tenderly, I pierce the side of the cocoon. A little burble of fluid, a hiss of air. I almost imagine I hear it groan, like a dying beast.
Erato shivers, withdraws. I feel something shift in her. She is tense, almost vulnerable. Strange.
I keep cutting. The first layer peels away, flaking off into papery dandruff in my grip. There is a shadow at the center of the pod. I slice away tubes that spill gouts of ochre fluid and then hang limp and useless. The shadow flexes, moves like a sleeper in a dream.
Erato is almost gone now. I’ve rarely felt her like this. It is as if the woven cable that connects our minds were being trimmed away strand by strand. I cut with more confidence now, but carefully. How rare that my body be used for anything other than killing.
The shadow moves again. This time it reaches out, a probing limb striking the cocoon. I step back, careful that my talon does not tear this newborn’s flesh. Where it strikes, I cut, weakening the membrane centimeter by centimeter until slender fingers slide from the opening I have made and widen it.
Amniotic fluid pours from the widening rent in the skin of the cocoon. First only a few fingers can fit through, then two hands on either side pulling it apart, then hair matted to the scalp and slender shoulders and a bone-white form spilling and sprawled and retching in the pool.
Erato rises. When she breathes I can feel the warmth touch against my mouthparts. Even so quickly after being born she is back to herself, that beatific grin, those smirking eyes. Her body is frail and slender and totally nude and almost perfectly human. She has no navel. Before I can speak she throws her arms across my armored neck and kisses my slender mandibles. She speaks, and this time there is no voice in my mind.
“You’ve been so good to me, pet. You deserve a reward.”
I find that the drawers of the house are full now. Erato peels them open with a pop of splitting seals, pulls out filigree things that cover little at all. I am reminded of my own nakedness. The thought is strange and alien, traveling along cobwebbed pathways through my mind that I have not touched since I was still human. Should I be ashamed of my nudity? My body is thoroughly desexed now. All of it is turned to violence instead.
While I ponder this Erato stumbles, keels against a wall, curtly retches. Something red-black and glistening spatters on the floor. She regards it with intermingled disgust and fascination. Her sandal prods it along the floor, leaving trails of red mixed in with the salt. I want to reach out to her, but my hands are not made to touch soft things.
She glances up at me, smiles, wipes blood from her teeth with the back of her hand.
“I have an expiration date,” she says. “Human bodies aren’t meant to live in places like this.”
“How long?”
She shrugs, an opulently physical gesture. “Days, maybe. Not longer.” She turns, smiles at me, runs her slender fingers along my carapace. I shrink back at her touch.
“Don’t be sad, love,” she says. “All things change, but we will always be together.”
She waits for a while before she takes me. This is the gift: we both know this. A body is made to touch and be touched, to caress and brutalize. When I was still human I had a notion that the soul was in the heart, or the brain. These things seem distant and childish notions now. A life unmoored from the rest of my species has taught me a sacred truth: the soul is in the hands.
I am pierced by the slung bolts of her gaze. Her eyes linger upon my body like a con artist sizing up a mark. She allows her touch to linger for a while upon the plates of my body, tender skin grazing across sheets of chitin. We dance in crumbling ballrooms. This is the only form of courtship my made body allows. I am an excellent student, nimble on my claws. She laughs, high and bright and human.
At first I wonder if I am still capable of desiring her. I am a being remade for the splitting of flesh. I wonder if my mind still believes there is any beauty left in the world of living beings, when I have unraveled enough meat to know that there is nothing sacred lurking under the seas of gore.
The longer she draws out our courtship (perhaps her predation is more apt), the more I realize the truth: I can do nothing but want her. When the human world came to a close a part of me went with it, allowed to atrophy until it was so small and shriveled I scarcely remembered it was there. Now it is awake again, and I want desperately to nourish it, to feed it until it is healthy and whole, so that I might remember what being alive felt like.
She takes me after the last of these dancing classes, when the light from the luminous sky filters in long slats through the windows of the great hall. She breaks away from me, laughing that bright, painful laugh, and I see that her face is flushed and her forehead slick with beads of sweat, and I have just enough time to wonder what exhaustion feels like to her before she wraps her arms around my great shoulders and presses her tongue between my mandibles.
She draws back, and her lips are probing the seams between the plates of my neck, and her touch lights my mind on fire, and I wonder if I am imagining it or if she laid my body out with this purpose, mined it with hidden nerve endings so I who could snap her like a twig with a flick of my wrist would go almost limp beneath her ministrations. At once it is as if the whole weight of this terrible new body has been laid upon my soul, dragging me down into the black depths of the material, forever away from this beautiful Other whose heart I can feel even through my grown armor.
I pull away, half-gasping. Erato allows me — there is little she could do to prevent me in her new frailty.
“Stop,” I say. “Please, please stop,” and now I can hear my true voice, ushered from a baroque and inhuman throatbox, shaped by insectile mouthparts in a crude emulation of a language whose last native speaker was stripped for spare parts centuries before this new body was born.
I crumple like a doll with my strings cut. I am a penitent at her altar.
“I can’t. Not like this. Please, this body — please, I don’t want to see…”
I begin to weep, and the hideous sound of my grief only brings further tears. Erato takes my head in her arms and lays it against her breast, unmindful of the beads of blood that rise on her collarbone where it is pierced by my crest.
“It’s alright,” she says. “I can keep you from seeing.”
And suddenly the terrible sound of my weeping is gone, and the voice that issues from my throat is a human woman’s once more. It is a lie, but all things in this place are lies, and I want to believe this one more than anything else.
She has deceived me, and she puts her hands on my body and I show her my gratitude.
For the first time in a century, true sleep greets me.
I am unmoored. I drift freely. I am not shackled to a body or a self. At first the dream calls up memories of an old life, when there were still humans and an Earth to bear them. I walk the corridors of my childhood home, made crooked and strange from forgetting. In child-form, I pull at the shirthems of my parents, and when they turn their faces to greet me I find I can no longer remember what they look like.
My dreaming wanders further. Splinters of grief reach down even into the warm darkness of this place. In these old memories, I pass thousands of people, embodied as I am, flesh like I am. They believe I am one of them, and as I gaze upon each one I say: you are dead, you are dead, you are dead.
Eventually the human world as a whole seems to only entomb me, and so I banish it altogether.
I build other worlds for myself. I abandon my mind, and spend dream-centuries in alien ecosystems as something feral and small, unburdened by past or conscience. I nest and mate, devour and am devoured. I incarnate myself in generations of life, and though I am compelled by nothing more than the blind idiot drive of self-propagation I find myself happy.
There is a secret joy in annihilation, in allowing yourself to become nothing more than a machine at work in a greater design. When I was a human I considered myself too devoted to logic and rationality to be touched by the divine. Now I find the sacred loveliness of knowing God.
When I awake, I am painfully individual once more, and I find that the bedsheets are stained with blood.
I find her propped up in a fading dining room, dried blood hardening at the edges of her fair lips. Her lily dress is marred with the red-black bloom of her nearing expiration. She turns her gaze towards me as I approach, and manages a wry smile. The whites of her eyes are filling up with blood.
“I didn’t want you to see this,” she says, amicably. “I thought I could bury myself.”
I lift her up. Her body crumples and folds in sickening ways. Her humanity was an imposition upon this cruel place, and now the world reasserts itself against her frail form. When she coughs, something black and grainy comes up with it.
I’ve already decided I will honor her request. There’s a part of me that wants to toss her into the quicksilver sea, or else abandon her to rot and die, but my mind balks against it. We humans were a grave-digging species and I will honor that tradition to the last.
She complains a little when I wrap the shroud around her. I lay her out in the courtyard, cocooned in white sheets like a caterpillar in a chrysalis. The little slit I cut flutters with the steady cycle of her breath. I begin to dig.
She speaks little while I work. At times I wonder if perhaps she has died and I haven’t noticed, but when I turn back I can still see the steady fluttering of the sheets beneath her breath. To be embodied at all is a novelty for her — what, then, must a human death be like?
The earth tears away at my grip. I cut a notch into the substance of the City, ripping away layers of meaty processing substrate like the skin of a living being. I wonder what will become of her body once I have interred it. Rot is not a natural quality of flesh: it comes from life. Will her corpse teem with monitor-parasites? Will it become lush with graphene fungus? Or just remain, and become nothing at all?
A wariness rises in me. A familiar sense-impression tickles the back of my throat. Polyhymnia’s calling card. Our respite is finally over. I work a little faster, hollowing out a cradle to keep Erato’s flesh-self forever.
When I lay her down there is a moment when I feel our old connection again. Erato the machine is still inside Erato the woman, even as I submerge her beneath torn layers of superstructure. Through our bond I can feel Death’s grip close upon her, dragging her deeper into that lightless unbeing that awaits all living things.
I can feel a twinge of panic passing up our bond like a plucked guitar string. Through the shroud, I hear her choking something — wait, maybe, or don’t — but it’s too late. Erato the woman slips smoothly into that deep and unanimous dark.
Silence. For a moment I am alone, the first true solitude I have known for centuries. There is a half hope that she left some fundamental part of herself buried in that flesh, now trapped and screaming in a rapidly dying brain. A part of me knows I should be overjoyed, but I can’t muster the emotion anymore. Life with Erato is agony, but life without her is only a different layer of hell.
And then, the silence is broken. Her self blooms from the corpse, her semblance expanding like a butterfly shaking dry its wings. She is within me and above me and around me. There is no more pretense that we are the same thing, and I suspect there will never be again. She coos in delight — a sensation that drags a shudder through my monstrous body. She drips herself like honey into my cerebrum.
Did you miss me?
I barely have time to part my mandibles to voice an answer when my assigned foe strikes me and sends me sprawling.
I lay broken like an unstrung marionette. I taste grave-ash on my tongue. I rise, and see it: Polyhymnia’s champion, the meat-ghost made from her lover’s body. It flexes and shifts with cephalopod affect. There is Polyhymnia, a buzzing tone in my brain. I wonder how much she still sees of me, if Erato’s purge was as complete as she assumed.
Erato opens pathways in my brain and the battle-drugs spill into me. My breath quickens, my muscles tighten. My sheathed talons flex and flutter in instinctual anticipation of the spilling of blood. I am giddy with rage and disgust. Us monsters pace about the open grave. The champion’s tendrils flex and thrash like flesh lightning. I am enraged. I am bloodhungry. I am at peace.
I leap.
As I slash at the catherine-wheel of furious limbs I can feel her growing drunk off me. My purpose is to kill and die, to suffer as she cannot. She grows languid, drifts down from her omniscient perch. The wheeling arms scratch my face, take root upon my mandible and rip it from my skull. Gouts of ichor blossom from my wound and slide oily down my throat. I can feel her contorting herself, growing small enough that she may fit inside me and get high off my divine violence.
My talons flick through the air. For a moment, the world is blessed with a rain of severed fingers. The trailing, twirling limbs of my foe leave misshapen handprints in blood across every spare surface of the courtyard. I snap limbs with practiced precision. She is shaking off her last incarnation like a molting serpent, drawing close to me. I welcome her, her bloodlust, her savagery. She advances, and I retreat.
Erato guides my claws, my teeth. Where she and Polyhymnia meet they clash like warring thunderstorms, a million strikes and ripostes playing out at speeds faster than thought. My mind roars with the psychic fallout of their duel.
I retreat further. I cede my body to Her, to her lusts, to her violence. She designed it, now she wields it. I am only a conduit, the flesh that experiences where her mechanical perfection cannot. Each splintering strike, each spurt of ichor, each snarl and rending of flesh, drives me further into my own mind. I clutch for the weapon I was given, that dagger of code imprinted onto my neural folds.
If Erato sees me, she is too drunk on the ecstacy of bloodshed to care. I draw it from its sheath, spinning it out into strands of luminescent data. Something in Polyhymnia quickens — her glee at a plan fulfilled. Her stormself whirls with jubilation.
My hands beat and break the champion’s skull until the courtyard runs with blood and pulped brain matter. Soon she will return to herself, and take Polyhymnia’s gift from me. We cannot coexist. Erato must conquer me, or I her; anything else is centuries more of agony.
I remember the world I have lost, and know the choice is already made.
I twist the weapon, and with it, cut open the seams of my own mind.
White-hot light sears the edges of my being. Erato pours into me like a tide, her infinity enveloping me, devouring me, incorporating me into her. My body staggers
what did you do
seizes
What did you do?
falls.
WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?
And even as she says these words I (we) am with her, dissolving into her, my (our) mind like a cup of water into a vast ocean. I am here with her. We are here with us.
no no no no but it’s okay, it’s okay, nothing is wrong, i’m still here
please you can’t do this to me and we laugh because even a god like Erato still thinks of ‘you’ and ‘me’ as if they were different, as if everything that was once human is now her, and the human is there, as an organ, a loving sublimate
you traitor you bitch you abandoned us and
we hear Polyhymnia squeal with rage
and we know we were loved
please you can’t go
we’ll never go we’ll always be here
im sorry im so sorry
and even as what was ourself is disintegrating under the tide we smile what is there to be sorry about
Maria love please don’t go
and just as the distinction ceases to have meaning we laugh. So that’s what it was
and then
we
are
