Kanagen

  There wasn't an orgy in progress. That, Trish thought, was about the most she could say for how things were going outside the mobile hab. Cass, of course, was nowhere to be seen — she was likely up in the ship, going through the complicated ritual of prayer that Trish still couldn't quite believe that Cass had gone back to.

  "Piper!" she called out. "Back inside!"

  Piper, who was surrounded by the machine-floret brigade, one of them actually hanging off her arm, frowned. "Aww, how come? I'm having a great time getting to know everyone."

  "Yeah, Trish, what gives?" Pink — which, Trish seemed to recall, meant that this was the original Forsythe, before the Affini had gotten their hooks into them. Was it Jenny, now? "It's not like there's anything dangerous out here."

  "And even if there were," Bck — Scout? — said, "I think we could take care of anything this smelly biosphere can produce."

  "Speaking of which!" Blue — Jess? added. "I think I saw a fruithawk earlier! Did they bring those back?!"

  "Y-yeah? They're all over the pce." They were a bit of a pest sometimes, truth be told. Somewhere in the ecosystem reconstruction process, one of their more important predators must have been left out. "I don't think they ever even went extinct."

  "That's great! I love fruithawks, they're so pretty and they have such a neat call!"

  "Well, that's fantastic, I'm happy for you," Trish said, her voice as ft as she could make it. "Piper, inside."

  Piper pouted and crossed her arms. "And what if I don't want to? What if I want to keep talking to the Unbreakable Four?"

  The florets all cracked up again. "Dirt," Yellow — Ryder? — said through her ughter, "I can't believe she actually called us that!"

  The tightness in her chest returned, even climbed tentatively up towards a painful twinge. "Don't argue, Piper. This is for your own good." Who knew what kind of subliminal nonsense the Affini built into their army of machine florets? "Not to mention," Trish continued, "your grandmother told you to listen to me, didn't she? Inside." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the mobile hab.

  Piper rolled her eyes. "You're being such a clod, Auntie Trish," she grumbled before shoving her hands in her pockets and walking off, shoulders hunched. Halfway there, she turned around and added, "Hey, I expect texts from all of you!"

  "You've already got about thirty!" Jess called back, and the florets all ughed.

  "Hey, what gives with the sour personality, Trish?" Jenny leaned in close, chewing on her lip. "Aren't we all friends?"

  "I'm pretty sure we're friends," Ryder said. "I mean, I remember us being friends. Or at least, like, not enemies."

  "Yeah, jeez, it's not like we're Nikoi or something," Jess added. "Though, actually, he turned out to be super nice, you should say hi sometime!"

  "I am aware that Nikoi was domesticated, yes," Trish said through gritted teeth. The man had always been an asshole, and probably a racist under a thin veneer of macho bravado and petit-fascism, though he'd managed never to say anything to confirm it in her hearing. Trish had loathed him, and the feeling had been mutual — they were at each others throats even more regurly than he and Nell had been. Even then, though, she didn't like to think about him having his brain scrambled by a flood of alien drugs, to the degree that every time she'd seen him aboard Tilndsia during a visit to Arvense's clinic he'd barely been aware of the world around him. The man might have been a complete piece of shit, but she wasn't sure even complete pieces of shit deserved to be destroyed like that.

  Trish's chest tightened again, and she tried to squash the feeling back down. The Forsythes were talking again.

  "So you should totally come up to the station," Jess was saying. "Pretty much all of the old Tilndsia crew is on the third ring. It's huuuuge! If you asked nice they'd probably even bring this cool mobile hab up there for you and you could drive it around!"

  "It is a super cool mobile hab," Jenny added. "Can we have a look inside?"

  "No."

  "Awwww! You let Lay in!" Ryder compined.

  "Yes, well, I wasn't using it to keep Piper away from you at the time, now was I?"

  Jess rolled her eyes. "Psh, it's not like we're not all talking to Piper right now. None of us are actually here, you know — our processor cores are all wired directly to Admin."

  "Yup!" Scout hugged herself and made a happy little noise. "Right up against her core."

  "Where we belong," Jenny added, glomming onto Scout from behind and nuzzling into her.

  "These are just remote-piloted drone chassis," Ryder said, making a fist and knocking on her head. "Totally empty!"

  Trish set her teeth and tried to fight back the sensation that her stomach was trying to crawl up out of her chest — or was that her heart again? "Just back off," she said, "and leave that poor girl alone. She doesn't need you distracting her or filling her head with-" She stopped there. She could think of a number of things she could put there, but the st thing she wanted was to give these florets who were once a friend of hers ideas. "Just leave her alone."

  "I mean... she's nice?"

  "We like her?"

  "Trish, you're acting weird."

  "Kinda feral, to be honest."

  Trish said nothing, but silently berated herself for letting slip so much. Of course these robo-florets were recording everything she said — hell, even the mobile hab itself wasn't completely trustworthy — and here she was venting her spleen without the slightest thought given to operational security. Not, she reflected, that it particurly mattered, given that the Affini had known all along that she was the one publishing Freedom's Ember. If they'd wanted to take her in and melt her brain and turn her into something like this, they could have done it decades ago.

  "Look," she finally said, "I was having a perfectly normal day until five florets I used to know when they were people dropped out of the sky on me — and on top of that, four of them immediately started digging into the girl I'm trying to show the world in a safe and measured way. I did not bring her out here to throw her to the wolves, so yes, I'm a bit put off by... by all this!" She gestured vaguely at the four florets, and at the shuttle. "I'm trying to do right by Piper and you are not making that easy."

  "Uhhh, I'm confused," Ryder said, scratching her head. "What's bad about us getting to know someone?"

  "You've been gone a while, and you've been a floret — or florets, I guess — for most of it, so maybe you aren't aware of just how much everything the Affini do, the way they run things, is designed to push people, subtly or otherwise, voluntarily or otherwise, into domestication." She swept her gre across all four of the florets in front of her, lingering for just a moment on each. "She doesn't need more of that."

  "Okay, now I'm confused." Scout glommed onto Ryder and leaned into her, pouting. "What's bad about being domesticated?"

  "I could expin it to you," Trish said, "but do you really think a floret is going to be able to understand my viewpoint? To put it another way, is your owner going to allow you to?"

  All four of them were silent for a moment, staring back at her, before Jenny spoke up. "I don't like the way you said 'owner.'"

  "Yeah," Jess agreed. "It felt mean."

  "We love Admin," Ryder said, her voice insistent.

  "Admin's the best thing that ever happened to us," Scout added, her eyes practically on the verge of tears.

  "And furthermore," Jenny said, crossing her arms, "just because we've got the whole eternal youth and beauty of the perfected machine form going on doesn't mean we aren't the same age as you—"

  "Older, actually, if you count overclocking," Jess interrupted.

  "—so maybe don't treat us like we don't know what we're talking about. If we want to talk to Maggie's granddaughter, and she wants to talk to us, we're gonna."

  "And wow does she want to talk with us," Ryder said, snickering. "Solstice has grown some great memes while we were away. Well, I mean, I've never been here, technically, but you know what I'm talking about."

  Trish's jaw was beginning to hurt. So was her left shoulder, weirdly enough, like her whole body was tightening up. Void take it, she thought as she swallowed back the bile that her uneasy stomach was beginning to bring up, these fucking florets are going to ruin everything. "Just... get back on your damned shuttle and go home!" The twinge in her chest wasn't just a twinge anymore, and the horizon was shifting uneasily as if she were aboard a ship on the ocean.

  "Trish, are you okay?" Jenny stepped forward, putting her hands on Trish's shoulders. She tried to brush them away, but only succeeded in losing her bance and tipping forward into the machine girl's impossibly strong arms. The pain in her chest redoubled as Jenny pressed two of her fingers to Trish's carotid artery and held them there. "Oh mulch."

  All four of the florets went dead-eyed for a half-second, their expressions totally vacant. Then, in unison, they all sprang into action, two of them leaping in a single bound from where they stood up to the top of the stairway into the shuttle, where they disappeared inside. Meanwhile, Jenny swept Trish up in a perfect wedding carry and began to take the steps four at a time. It was all Trish could do to grunt out a "Wh-what? No..."

  "Don't worry," Jenny said, "we're going to get you help."

  The veterinary hospital was the most massive Affini structure that Haven had been in yet (if one didn't count the Tilndsia or Parthenocissus Station as structures, and Haven was still mentally filing them both as "world" in her head). It bore some superficial resembnce to Arvense's clinic aboard Tilndsia, of course, in that it was built to look something like the Terran concept of a hospital scaled up two to three times, but unlike Arvense's clinic this one was a serious of interconnected buildings sprawling across beautifully manicured grounds, something like a museum or an estate with relentlessly naturalistic aesthetics. The hallway she was wandering down now overlooked an enormous atrium filled with pnts of all kinds, including many that Haven was certain were not native to the Terran biosphere. A gss-like partition, taller than Haven was, separated her from the multi-story drop to the park below, but so clear was it that she wasn't entirely certain it was even there until she reached out and touched it for herself.

  She had no sense of the time it had taken to have the sarcotesta modified — Anix, and the veterinarian she'd contacted to serve as Haven's primary physician, a spindly-looking Affini named Phormia, had put her under for the whole process, bringing her up slowly and giving her lots of gentle encouragement and affection the whole time. It was wasted on her (such things always were), but she had to admit she was pleased with the results. She had proper curves now, nothing extravagant but still more than enough to make her look even more like a woman when she saw herself in the mirror — or at least, a woman-shaped negative space, given the sarcotesta, but there was something strangely appealing about being able to see herself as a hole in the world.

  I may not deserve this, she thought as she walked down the hall, peering over the edge and trying to ignore l'appel du vide, but maybe I can enjoy it a little before I check out.

  It had been the best way to escape the wonderful attention she'd had vished on her — peer out the door into the wider veterinary hospital while Anix and Phormia talked shop about the procedure and the sarcotesta itself, until Anix had smiled down at her and suggested she have a look around.

  "Just don't wander too far, little one," she'd said, with an extra pat on the head for good measure.

  Haven had no idea how far "too far" was, but she was certain that Anix somehow knew exactly where she was at all times. Whatever sensors the sarcotesta had embedded in it that let her check her blood pressure, pulse rate, blood sugar, hormone levels, and every other little detail, the Affini wouldn't leave out something as simple as "where's the terran?" So she felt no compunctions about wandering further afield than she otherwise might have — the veterinary hospital really was beautiful, harmonious yet functional in a way that she'd never really seen before. When terrans had money to funt, in Haven's experience, they tended toward the gaudy, the overbuilt, the deeply unnecessary.

  "You still don't understand why I'm upset with you?!" The voice cut through the otherwise calm atmosphere of the hospital like a knife, immediately drawing Haven's attention away from the drop that kept calling out to her. An open door not far down the hall was the likely source, and as Haven approached she picked out more bits and bobs of conversation — or, really, more like an argument.

  "I wasn't just going to leave you down there!"

  "I had a cardiac emergency pen in the mobile hab, you could have used that!"

  "Well, I didn't have an inventory of your hab's entire contents because, if you'll recall, you wouldn't let me go inside. Besides, those things are just temporary measures, you still needed to see a vet!"

  "And there were plenty on the surface, thanks!" Now, at the entryway, Haven could peer in and see the two. One, an older woman with dark skin and silver hair, was lying in one of the Affini's trademark far-too-rge beds; the other, a younger woman with pink hair and some kind of cybernetic augmentation grafted to her temples, was standing atop said bed. "I could just as easily have had Piper drive me to Grimke. Stars, I could have just gone to see a human doctor, it was just stress-induced tachycardia."

  "I don't think you can 'just' tachycardia," the augged-up woman said, crossing her arms. "You colpsed. You needed help. I'm not going to feel bad about giving it to you."

  "Meh," the older woman said, looking away — and right at Haven. "Oh, good, you've brought friends."

  "Hm?" The augged woman turned to look. "Oh! Hey!" She hopped down off the bed with a big smile on her face — and now that Haven got a good look at her, it was clear to her the pink-haired woman wasn't just an aug, but an actual robot. Parts of her certainly looked terran enough, especially her face, but even there the panel lines make it perfectly clear that she was something synthetic rather than biological. "Are you lost? Looking for your owner?"

  "I-" Haven froze, the mortification of having been noticed overpowering her ability to focus on something as complicated as words.

  "Don't worry, we'll find them real quick!" the robot said, crossing the room and taking one of Haven's hands. "I'm sure they're looking for you, too! I'm Jenny Lophophora, Third Floret Ortet Pluribus, but don't worry about the Pluribus part, Ryder's remoting her own chassis. What's your name?"

  With supreme effort, Haven managed to say her own name. "H-Haven. B-but, I don't-" Again, her voice failed her.

  "Oh, you must be fresh, huh? Listen, everything's going to be okay," Jenny said, stepping forward once more and giving Haven a big hug. "It can be scary, being away from your owner at first, but they'll be here before you know it, and I'll stay with you the whole time, okay?"

  "But I don't have an owner," Haven managed to blurt out.

  "...huh?" Jenny blinked in obvious confusion. "What do you mean, you don't have an owner?"

  "I'm n-not a floret." Haven only vaguely understood what being a floret was — Nikoi had expined it to her, or tried to, anyway. She was sure she hadn't parsed most of it properly, but she understand that whatever being a floret and belonging to an affini entailed, she wasn't that. Who would even want me around, anyway?

  "...oh." Jenny ughed awkwardly. "Well, oops! It's just usually when I see someone with so many body mods... but I guess the ck of a colr should have been my first clue, huh?"

  "I-it's not a body mod? It's a full-body healing system, a sarcotesta. I, uhm... had an accident."

  For a moment, Jenny was silent. Then, her eyes went wide, and she excimed, "Holy mulch! You're the st survivor, aren't you?"

  "Uhm."

  "Of the ship we found on our way back to Solstice! The big sleeper ship we found dead in space going about 95% the speed of light!"

  "Y-yeah, that's me, I guess," Haven muttered, looking down at the floor.

  "The whole ship was talking about you! Wow, I didn't think I'd run into you so quickly, what with leaving Tilndsia and how many sophonts live on Parthenocissus and all. But it's really wonderful to meet you, I-"

  "Jenny," the old woman said. "Leave the poor thing be, can't you tell she's overwhelmed?"

  "Huh?" Jenny gnced back at the bed, then to Haven once more. "Oh. Oh. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to-"

  "Just be on your merry way, will you?" the old woman said. "Not you, dear, just the floret. Getting to talk to someone who isn't going to try to sell me on the wonders of domestication will be a nice change of pace."

  "I liked you a lot more when you were less bitter," Jenny said, sticking out her tongue. To Haven, she added, "It was really nice to meet you though! Look me up online, I'm 'sudont,' like 'sudo' but with NT at the end. I will show you all the best memes!" She winked, gave Haven another hug, and then was out the door.

  "Stars, she never used to be so damned tiring," the old woman grumbled. "Come here, hon, sit down and just take a moment to breathe. You... do breathe, right?"

  "Uhm..." Haven desperately wanted to swallow nervously, wanted to melt into the floor and sublimate into nothingness. Nobody ever noticed nothingness. "I mean, technically, I think the sarcotesta — this thing I'm in — is doing that for me right now."

  "Mmm. I imagine that has something to do with that 'st survivor' business Jenny was talking about? I'm Trish, by the way."

  "Hi..." Haven took a few steps closer — she felt obligated to, really, though she was sure that her presence was not nearly so desired as she was hoping it might be. "Y-yeah, I was on a ship. My-" She paused, a sick feeling crawling up her phantom guts. "My asshole dad tried to run from the Affini in a slower-than-light longhauler, and put me and a hundred others including himself into cryogenic deep-freeze."

  Haven heard the sharp intake of breath from up on the bed. "Stars," Trish whispered. "No wonder you're in that thing. How long were you out there?"

  The side of the bed, much like the one at Arvense's clinic, had a little dder built into the foot — though, given how most of her trips up and down from such beds or to and from exam tables had involved being carried by an affini, Haven was fairly certain this was more for the convenience of visiting terrans than anything having to do with the patient. She slowly, carefully, pulled herself up to the surface of the bed, which was just as soft and comfy as the one she'd woken up in not that long ago. "Well, sixty years realtime, but only about thirty with retivity, actually."

  "Thirty years in cryo?! How are you even alive?"

  I shouldn't be. I wish I wasn't. "Only twenty-eight of us made it," she said, sitting down and hugging her knees. It's my fault. I don't know how but it's my fault.

  "It's a wonder there's anything left of you to put in that thing," Trish said. "How long are they going to keep you in there?"

  Haven shrugged. "I dunno. I spent a while pretty much in a coma, but as far as I'm concerned I've only been here a couple days. Everything is... very weird. Not what I expected from what everyone said about the Affini, though."

  "No, they definitely don't send you to the mines. Unless you really love rocks, I suppose," she added with a rueful ugh.

  "They seem... nice. Weirdly nice." Nicer than I deserve.

  "Oh, they're very nice," Trish said, her voice taking on a sharp edge. "They're very nice as they repce everything with something of their own design. They're very nice as they sift through every mote of data about you, and even nicer when they use it to start steering you the way they'd prefer you to go. And they're at their nicest, of course, when they make a pet out of you if you so much as put a toe out of line. Or if they think you can't hack it living on your own. Or if they just decide they want to." She gnced back at Haven. "You watch yourself around them, kid. If you really just woke up from, what, twenty-five-fifty-something?"

  "Fifty-four."

  Trish smiled a little. "Fifty-four. How do you like that. Well, then you really are in the shoes I was wearing when they first showed up. They're nice, alright, because they can afford to be. You can't fight them, so don't try. All you can do is hold fast to who you are, to be aware of who you are, and to be careful they don't change that without you noticing." She sighed and leaned back against the elevated bed. "If I was home, back on Solstice, I could even give you a book to read about it, but I was abducted by florets without warning."

  "The robot girl?" Haven turned her head to gnce back at the empty doorway.

  "Mm. That one's Jenny. I think. There's four of her," Trish expined, rubbing at her eyes. "They used to be one person, someone I knew. Now, they're that."

  "She was... a lot, yeah," Haven said. "But Nikoi seemed pretty normal." Haven looked back at Trish, who had gone very still and was staring at Haven. "What?"

  "You've met Nikoi." Her voice was ft, guarded, more than a little upset. Even Haven could tell that.

  "Yeah. He's Arvense's floret. He was there when I woke up. He was really kind, and he tried to expin a lot of things to me, but uh... a lot of it kinda went over my head." Maybe it had been shock, or maybe she was just a useless fuckwit or too zy to bother trying to understand, but trying to internalize all the things Nikoi had told her was like trying to drink from a firehose.

  It took Trish a moment to reply. "That wasn't Nikoi," she said quietly. "Believe me, if you'd met the real Nikoi, you would never call that man kind. What you met was what they repced Nikoi with. That's the thing about being a floret, you don't come through the process the same person you went in."

  A way out of being me? Damn. That sounds nice. Haven squeezed her imaginary eyes shut and pushed the thought back down inside herself, along with all the other suicidal impulses. Now was not the time; she was having a conversation.

  "Just be careful, alright kid?" Trish said, reaching out and putting a hand on Haven's. It was surprisingly warm, the rough texture of her skin strangely pleasant against the smooth surface of the sarcotesta. "Just be the safest version of you that you can. Don't push too hard, but don't let them do everything for you, either. Just... get through this one day at a time, one interaction at a time."

  "Okay," Haven said quietly, feeling the urge to squirm inside the sarcotesta. "Thanks for the advice." I don't deserve it I don't deserve it I don't deserve it I don't deserve it I don't deserve it.

  "Anytime." Trish smiled again, gave Haven's hand a squeeze, and then froze, her gaze leaping to the doorway.

  "There you are~" Anix's voice was instantly recognizable, and when Haven turned to look, the affini was standing in the doorway, hands csped together. "And you found a friend! How sweet!" She crossed to the bed, gncing at the alien dispys on the wall behind Trish. "Ooooh, tachycardia? That's a bit scary, but I can see your veterinarian has things well in vine. You're going to be just fine, sweetie." She leaned down and ruffled Trish's white hair.

  "I know, ma'am," Trish replied, her voice suddenly not just even but even a bit cheerful. "And I appreciate it."

  "I'm sure you do," Anix said. "I'll make sure I get your contact information so Haven can reach out to you, but I'm afraid I've got to take this little cutie home."

  "Huh?"

  "Petal, you've been here long enough we need to get you fed again," Anix replied, draping a vine around Haven's now-rather-narrower shoulders. "And while I'm quite impressed you managed to get up onto the bed on your own, perhaps it's best if I give you a bit of assistance on the way down, yes?"

  "Uhm, okay, sure." It had been difficult getting up, and she wasn't entirely sure she could get down without falling anyway. "See you around?" she said to Trish.

  "... yeah, definitely," Trish replied, nodding. "Go get better, kid. And remember what I said."

  "I will." Haven felt Anix's vines coiling around her, gentle but firm enough to lift her bodily up off the bed and into her enormous arms. Anix cradled her there, and Haven had to admit that despite being in the grasp of an alien pnt more than twice her size, there was something oddly comforting about it, and about the odd thrumming that seemed to come from within her. It helped soothe the disquiet she was feeling, but it didn't quite eliminate the thought from her head.

  The way Trish had changed the moment an affini walked in — the mask she'd suddenly put on — reminded her more than a little of the way she'd had to act around her father.