Screams roared out of Alaya’s throat as she woke. Where her hand should have been, her right hand, she had only a bandaged stump. Her screams only intensified then. “What did you do, what did you do…” the words spilled over each other as she hyperventilated. It took Alaya waking to full consciousness before her mind settled. They’d maimed her, but in a surprisingly meaningless way. It would cost so little, Alaya could scrounge together enough to pay it despite her garnishment to have that limb replaced. If only she weren’t trapped in the Summerlands.
No one answered her cries.
Once she’d meditated and calmed sufficiently, Alaya found herself back in the shack where Talani had been teaching her. But the attack on her body had represented such a deep violation, such a gross abuse of Alaya’s trust, she didn’t want to see the woman right then. Maybe ever again.
At the same time, she was terrified Talani had abandoned her. What if Alaya was alone now? With only one hand, how was she going to gather food or herbs? How would she provide for herself?
It had been a meaningless act of pain… torture. And yet Alaya yearned for the old woman to come and tend her, to assure her this was all part of their test. Maybe this was the last thing Alaya had to do: accept her missing limb.
NO! Her mind rebelled at the thought, instinct balking at the possibilities. Even if this were all in her imagination, even if this act was symbolic…
Alaya fell back onto her mattress and moaned. Her stump ached, moving it felt worse than breaking her bone because the dried blood and bits of flesh tore away from her arm with the fabric. She bit her lip and immediately regretted it. Somewhere in the recent past she’d bitten through or almost through her mouth. And she was not ready to repeat that experience.
Knees curled to her chest and right arm resting on her thigh, Alaya wept. She wanted Gaz, not Talani. She wanted to chat with Kirk and joke about how easy it would be to replace a severed hand. Even Isham, quiet and vaguely terrifying, Alaya would have traded her shack, mattress, and robe for a ten minute conversation. Even knowing the other man would probably say fewer than forty words.
No implants to mark the time and the unchanging light piercing the wooden slats of the shack meant Alaya had no idea how much time passed or whether it was light or dark.
“Are you going to mope in there this whole time?” Talani’s voice was scornful, almost angry at Alaya.
Anything else and Alaya might have tried to press her thing blanket over her ears and shut the old woman out. But that anger… Alaya met it with her own. “How dare you!” Pain all but forgotten, she tore out of her bed and smashed the shack’s door off of its leather hinges. “You cut off my fucking hand!”
There was no sense to her attack, no reason or tactics. All Alaya wanted was to hurt Talani in any way she could, from slight to significant. As a result, she flailed at the old woman uselessly as Talani countered her clumsy attacks. When Alaya ran out of energy, she flagged and Talani switched from casually deflecting her blows to the offensive.
Two strikes was all it took, the first was barely worthy of the name. A foot snaked out from Talanis’s side and caught Alaya right behind her ankle. Then, with a perfunctory shove, Talani sent Alaya crashing onto her backside. “Are you done?”
Again, that scorn and impatience sent Alaya into a fury. Her left hand and two feet still working fine, she hop-crawled toward the hem of Talani’s robes, seeking to bite, scratch, or stab the old woman with whatever Alaya happened to find convenient.
This time Talani’s response was swift and devastating. She snap-kicked Alaya in the face, took a step to the side as Alaya’s head rocked back and kicked her in the upper back. The block rocketed Alaya’s in the ground, knocking the wind out of her and leaving her almost senseless. “Ugh.”
Foot on her back, Talani hissed, “are you done now?”
“Fuck you, you monster!” the words crawled out of her throat with as much effort as it had taken Alaya to crawl back to Talani in the first place.
“There is no reason to accept food from someone as depraved as me then.” No warning, nothing, Talani hefted Alaya up by the waist and dragged her away from the shack. “This camp is for humans only. Beasts and the wild are food here. Begone until you rediscover your humanity.”
She tossed Alaya a meter from the campfire, fully into the darkness. Crumpled and in so much pain she could barely open her eyes, Alaya let unconsciousness pull her under.
When she awoke, Alaya shivered from a severe chill which had fallen over her in the night. Wet robes combined with the brisk air sucked away her warmth, reducing Alaya to a filthy, shivering mass.
What happened? What had she done to earn this from Talani? At first Alaya had been wary of the old woman, had distrusted her. But months of care and training had produced a shift in Alaya’s thinking. And then for Talani to turn about like that… It was hard not to imagine Alaya had done something to deserve this treatment.
Stiff muscles, aggravated by the cold and unwilling to uncoil, had to be coaxed to let Alaya rise from the ground. As with the time she’d broken her arm, Alaya had to avoid sending screaming nerve pain up into the base of her skull by misplacing her stump. Time and again she hit something accidentally as she tried to sit up. By the time she was vertical, Alaya’s voice had given out from the whimpering cries.
There was no fire now. No campsite. No shack.
What in the all the Verse? As far as she could tell, Alaya sat in the plains alone. Not even her meditation stone remained. So much despair and pain running through her, Alaya was not ashamed then that even meditation did not occur to her. Slowly warming up, Alaya stood faster than she’d sat up. Maybe she’d simply rolled away in the night?
But no, even with vantage of height, all sign of Talani or her camp had vanished. It wasn’t fair, if the cruel old woman was gone, Alaya’s hand should have come back. Limping from cramps in her thighs, something which Alaya had never experienced before, she made little progress in terms of investigating her circumstances. What short few steps she managed did not then reveal a carefully hidden fire or camp.
She was truly alone.
Tears welled up in her eyes and Alaya choked down her sobs. She’d lost far worse than a limb or a mad teacher more interested in pain than lessons. This was nothing. Eventually, if she repeated the sentence enough, Alaya was sure she’d eventually believe it.
Her right arm came up to wipe her tears away, but the back of her hand had been tossed into a fire. At that point, Alaya’s stomach rebelled. Dry heaves shook her as she tried to empty a stomach already bereft of contents. It only made her more aware of the hunger clinging to her midsection.
Relax little boop. Now Alaya knew she was going mad. Her father appeared next to her, his hand on her back as the retching faded slowly.
“Daddy?” Alaya had called him father in her head since she’d been six and declared herself too old to call him “daddy” anymore.
“Hey boop. You look a little rough.”
It should have been impossible, but Alaya wrapped her arms around her daddy’s neck and screamed in joy. All thought of abandonment vanished; Talani who? The scent of her father’s skin washed over her. He’d favored soap and clean water for his cleanliness routine, but no matter how fresh from the showers Alaya had found him, he’d always carried a distinct aroma of electronic parts along with him a little cloud. No doubt in her mind right then: the most significant reason Alaya maintained her interest in technical repairs was to surround herself with anything reminiscent of her father.
And here he was. In the Summerlands.
Alaya pulled away from him. “Is this real?”
His smile brightened the sky, casting away the darkness which had covered the heavens when Alaya woke. “There is no fake, boop. There is no artificial in all the Verse.”
Hairs stood up on end. That didn’t sound like her father. This time she pushed him away and took a defensive posture. The bandaged stump on her right arm wavered at the bottom of her peripheral vision.
Shock registered across her father’s face, apparent surprise at her reaction. But the chirping of the insects had stopped in the plains. No birds whistled their songs into the air, and nothing crawled or slithered through the plains grasses to set them swaying. Blue skies stretched over her father’s head,frozen like a still image.
He was the only source of motion around. His was the only rasping breath which broke the silence of the plains. The smell of her father lingered, as if stretched over the space between them. But that was not her daddy.
“Who are you?” She narrowed her eyes and bent her knees, going lower to the ground in preparation for a fight.
For a second, he stilled. If not for the frozen tableau behind him, Alaya might not have noticed. Then he sighed and shook his head. “It’s easier for both of us if you just accept who I am.” Now they sounded nothing like her father, nothing like him except for the quality of his voice. The pace, the inflection, and the choice of words was all wrong. “This could make it take…”
She punched him, left handed, leaning in and put the whole of her weight behind it. It hardly even knocked his head back. He blinked at her right before Alaya rushed him and leaped atop him. All sense of reason abandoned her as she wailed on him, with her hand and even with the blunt end of her ruined arm. “Bring my daddy back!” Even in the midst of her screams, Alaya couldn’t have explained what she meant. It didn’t even slow her down.
But the thing posing as her father hardly registered the blows. Baselines would set their jaw, tuck their chins, and move with the punch to lighten the blow. The fake did none of those, just lay there absorbing the blows as if they meant nothing. This time when he spoke, he abandon all sign of her father’s voice. “Are you done?”
She’d expected Talani, but a deep male voice spoke the words.
“No!” Struggling to keep her balance, she leaned off of him and swept the darkness for a rock. Ironically, it was her father’s voice in her mind, reaching over the gulf of time, which suggested the course of action. “If your hands fail, find a tool.”
The man who’s skull she’d been trying to bash in rolled in the direction of Alaya’s grasping search, toppling her onto the ground and freeing himself. He stood while Alaya was trying to get her feet under her knees, a process made all the more difficult due to her missing hand.
A half step back and Alaya braced herself for the coming kick. Nothing came. When she opened her eyes she hunched alone among the grasses. The sim trapping her resumed playback and the flora and fauna resumed their nighttime chorus.
If it had been a real sim, Alaya could have woken herself up. Provided she wasn’t jarred and brain-locked. That had never happened to her before, so she could only guess. This still wasn’t right, it was too gritty, too real for a simulation. Of course, that might have been the point.
Standing took more out of her than she would have guessed. Hunger clawed at her belly, an old friend trying to break through the walls of her gut and spill itself onto the floor.
“Water, I need to find water first.” Old spacer rules. Air came first, then water, then food. She could breathe no problem, and she was hungry. But if she didn’t do something about her water situation she’d die before the hunger pangs really even started in earnest. Starvation was something Alaya had grown familiar with over the years.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Focus on her needs gave her a chance to shut the episode with her fake-father out. Whatever was happening here, she wasn’t convinced this was training anymore. The moment she stopped actively hunting for something to drink, the stranger wearing her father’s face intruded into her consciousness.
Too many matters to concentrate on meant Alaya narrowly picked up the strange, unfamiliar musical burble lilting through the grasses to her right. The plain’s uniformity meant no direction was better than the others. But that gurgling hiss… that was something new. She stumbled toward it, aware only then that the sky had changed to dark black from light blue. It was already nighttime again.
How long she wandered toward the burble, Alaya could not say. But no matter how fast she moved or how far, she never seemed to close with it. Had she been this tired when her father appeared? An out of place croak behind her spun Alaya around. She’d expected to find the fake father looming over her, but the plains were empty. She crouched low and peered into the darkness, willing herself to penetrate the veil of shadow before what or whomever stalked her caught up. Nothing.
Turning to give her ears a chance to hone in on the roiling sound, Alaya refined her path as she set out for her new goal again. This time she moved slowly, deliberately so as not to drown out any sound which might have reached her and given her a new course. But the aural environment remained unchanged, like their foley artist had grown lazy with this part of the simulation.
Lips cracked and tongue dry, Alaya could no longer wet them to keep them from stinging. Her eyes felt gummy, like she’d gotten oil or resin stuck in them. The knuckles on her hands cracked and burned from the air blowing over them. But no blood leaked out of the wound, as if her body conserved her precious moisture.
Had the sky’s color turned blue and black again? Alaya reviewed her memory clumsily, no assistants or registers to tell her exactly where to start and how to play back her sensory impressions. Garbled strains of thought flickered by her, the names of herbs she could have chewed to give herself energy, the shape of the safe-to-eat mushrooms growing along the ground, and… prayer.
A paucity of hope choked her, poured dry sand down the back of her throat, and sent twinges of pain through the place where her missing limb should have been. There was nothing else to do besides wander aimlessly and die. Might as well pray.
“Whatever I did, Verse. Please help me. I just want to get back to Gaz, I just want to live, I just want to find Kowal and the monsters who killed my mommy and daddy.” Six-year-old Alaya spoke up at the end of her prayer.
Eyes closed and focusing on the words, Alaya felt the warmth build in her chest intensely. When she opened her eyes, a golden ball of light hovered before her chest. She fell onto her side in shock, but the golden sphere didn’t so much as move. It just hung there half a meter above the ground waiting for her.
“What in the void?” At her question the sphere brightened and the comforting light it gave off changed direction, focusing itself more or less in the direction Alaya had been going before she knelt and prayed. “Is that the way I should go?”
The sphere zipped along, accompanied by actual music. It was the first time Alaya had heard something like that since she’d been trapped her. Most wonderful.
She found herself afoot and stumbling after the sphere’s course in moments. It waited for her, its music changing as when it did. Before she closed within a meter of it, it moved along. Repeating the pattern twelve more times, Alaya tripped over a ripple in the ground when the sphere vanished before her.
Water splashed around her, soaking her instantly when she broke the surface of the water. Water. Her body and mind reacted with instinct. Scooping up the precious flow, she failed to capture any with her missing right hand, but she managed to snag a few blessed drops with her left. Those tiny balls of fluid spread over the surface of her tongue, soaked themselves into her lips, and dissolved the knot of sand collected in her throat. It wasn’t enough. Alaya wasn’t certain in the moment that it would ever be enough. She dove her face under the surface of the water and drank as deeply as she could.
Nothing in her life had ever tasted as sweet.
Alaya came up for air only when she absolutely had no choice. And then only long enough to gasp down a lungful of air before dipping her face back under the surface. She took no count of how many times she dipped her face into the stream, how many times she took a breath. When her belly was full to bursting, she rolled herself out of the stream and lay on her right side.
Exhausted and no longer in immediate danger, Alaya started to pass out, her eyes fluttering as she did so. There was something she needed to do first. “Thank you Verse,” her next words were quieter, “I miss you daddy.”
When she woke, her hand felt odd. Like there was something stuck between her wrist and the base of her palm. Alaya swatted at it only to splash herself and find her hand missing. That brought her out of her stupor in a moment.
The sun rose overhead, casting golden light over Alaya. Little white tufts floated through the light blue sky-ocean like islands or void ships shrouded in clouds of gases. One of mother’s lessons rang back to her: “the word “cloud,” was originally used for collections of water vapor high in the Earth’s atmosphere.” Mother tapped a button on the projector and a view of the Venusian sky settlements came into focus. “On Venus they use the same word for the caustic collection of gases and chemicals which chokes their skies. Mars did not have clouds in the strict sense — dust storms aside — until the terraforming projects reached their mid point.”
“I’ve never seen real clouds before?”
Mother’s face interceded between Alaya and the clouds. “What does that word mean, “real?” Are the clouds on Venus fake? What if they were older than the oldest clouds on Earth?”
“Original clouds, I guess?” Alaya answered the way she might have back in her youth.
“That’s better.” Mother swung her hand around and pointed to a particularly jagged and broad cloud. “When humans were still trapped on their rocky home, those clouds were one of the first sources of dreams. We wanted to join with them, to sail among them as free as the birds and the butterflies.”
“We did, eventually?”
“Oh yes. Humanity has become the cloud, filling the system with ourselves, spreading out in every direction like gases released from confinement.” As mother spoke, the white jaded puffball expanded too. Without her sensory enhancements, Alaya couldn’t focus on any part of the cloud, couldn’t pick out the details, other than the faint gradients which suggested depth and mass.
“I think that’s pretty.”
Mother’s smile broader over her face, practically splitting her cheeks and emphasizing the dimples at the edges of her lips. “That demonstrates how well we’ve taught you.”
Again, lacking her own cybernetics, Alaya felt handicapped, more so even than she did on account of her missing hand. But something in mother’s words set off an alarm in her mind. “You’re not her, are you?”
“I am not, no.” Mother shook her head, backing away from Alaya as if conscious of the possibility of being attacked.
Whoever this was should have turned themselves into mother in the first place. Alaya had no urge to claw, bite, or kick her now. “Who are you?”
“If you can tell me my name, I will tell you the secret to your final trial.” Alaya opened her mouth, but fake-mother put a finger on her lips. “You only get one guess.” She winked at Alaya. “Make it count.”
Then again, if they’d done that the first time with mother Alaya might have attacked them on the spot. The second time she opened her mouth to give an answer, her own mind flashed back to the previous night, to the prayer which invoked the sphere which then saved her life. “Verse,” Alaya closed her eyes to pray, “thank you for guiding me, thank you for helping me find water, if whoever this is was sent by you, please help me answer their question correctly.”
“Very good…” mother’s voice faded into the background of the bubbling water, “you guessed it in one.”
When she opened her eyes little sparkling lights floated around mother’s outline. A split second elapsed and those sparkling lights enlarged into galaxies, and from galaxies into whole universes. Alaya hung in the void, standing so close to emerging novae the shear intensity of the magnetic eruptions should have shredded her body. Waves of energy buffeted her, more than any void ship, more than Sol, and even more than was contained in every atom in her solar system. “What?”
The word echoed and shattered the glass ball surrounding Alaya, sent her tumbling back into her body where she lay on the bank of a stream. Her ruined right arm lay in the middle of the stream, soaked, wrinkled, and itchy. All hint of the sparkling outline of the Verse was gone.
But when Alaya sat up and looked around, her eyes caught the glint of something shining where mother had been. Using her left hand, she brushed the dirt off of it it until she found the edges. They were sharper than she expected and they cut her fingertips when she tugged on them. Ignoring the pain, Alaya found a bit of twig and a small rock and used them like a lever to hoist the shining disc out of the mud and into her palm.
Its surface rippled with a wave pattern trapped forever in the body of the disc. While she used that word, disc, for it, the object was hardly round. It tapered at one side, where the waves originated and widened at the opposite side where the waves expanded. Turning it over, Alaya found golden script etched into the smooth concave surface of the… rock? She’d never seen anything like the flowing, connected script filled with gold, nor had she ever seen a piece of stone so thin, sharp, or delicate in her life. It was closer to glass or bone than rock.
The words twisted and tangled in her sight. They didn’t give her a headache, not exactly, but they made it hard for Alaya to stare at the shimmering characters. “What is…” She knew what to do. It had been the answer from the very beginning. Pain, the shock of losing her, hand, and the sting of betrayal benumbed Alaya’s no longer. Supporting the little stone in the palm of her hand, she covered it with her right forearm and shut her eyes. “Verse. Thank you for the help. Thank you for letting me see my mother… and my father again.” It was harder to say those words than she’d expected. “Please help me read this, I know it’s important.”
When she opened her eyes, the golden, flowing script had shifted into something else, something clearly mystical and related to or derived from the same substance as the golden ball which had led her to this stream. And she could read the words. It was a list, a strange list:
Alium, locust wing, serpent’s scale, and the shell of a self-cracked egg. Speak the words: what followed were a nonsense set of syllables, something which twisted her tongue and took more tries to pronounce correctly than she might have guessed upon first inspection.
Absent Talani’s training, Alaya would have barely known the meaning of the words on the rock. “Locust,” “alium,” and even “serpent” were words without antecedent for her, not until she’d been trapped here in the Summerlands. But not only did Alaya know those words, she knew more or less how to acquire them.
Alium was easiest. Little blue flowers dotted the edge of the stream where Alaya had awoken. A little digging with her improvised shovel later and Alaya had a few bulbs of wild garlic in her robes. With no pockets or sack to carry them around, Alaya stripped out of her robe and tied it into something like a sack.
Her body had grown lean and gained an impressive trail of muscles. Never in her life had she been so fit, not that she was entirely convinced she yet lived. It would have been nice to look… Alaya snickered at herself and set the bundle down at her feet.
Hunching over the stream, she stared down into the waters. Ripples distorted the image, but she could see herself in full for the first time in… months? How would she know. Cheeks lean and approaching hollow cast severe shadows over her features. But her eyes were neither sunken nor bloodshot. They were remarkably clear and bluer than the skies. Were my eyes blue in the real? Somehow, she couldn’t remember. Her shoulders had grown bulk as well as her arms and legs. Mass made a difference for cyborgs. The simple fact was heavier, stronger parts took more damage and dealt more damage. But Alaya had always preferred sleek and trim over what she thought of a “bulky.” But the woman’s body, her body, which stared back at her resembled the ancient statues of heroes her mother had once shown Alaya. Ignoring her missing hand and the bandages wrapped about it, Alaya looked beautiful.
When she stared at the place where her hand should have been, she’d expected to be repulsed. But instead she was merely curious. Most of the horror had faded. Alaya’s real body would not even miss a hand. Every part was plastic, composites, and metal. A hand was trivial to rebuild, especially if she didn’t care how strong or dexterous it was.
Actually, the asymmetry is kinda pretty.
She shook herself and hefted her robe-sack. No reason to look back at the stream, Alaya walked the bank looking for tracks or a game trail she could use to find the rest of the materials listed on her little rock.
Midday came and passed before Alaya spotted the tell-tale swishing pattern of a snake’s path. Wave-like and faded, it led away from the stream as a near perfect right angle. Before she left, Alaya took several drinks from the stream, worried she’d not be able to find it if she left the water behind.
The tracks’ age worried Alaya, made her wonder if she’d made a mistake in following it. Time had worn down the edges of the troughs the serpentine movement left in the soft ground. But it neither rain nor wind had completely wiped those tracks away. Intense focus gave Alaya an advantage, she’d slowed to a crawl as she followed the tracks, checking them for any sign of the snake who’d made them. If it was poisonous or otherwise dangerous, she would not want to come upon it unaware. Bits of dried grass crunched under her bare feet, setting Alaya’s mind on edge. Each crunch or hiss was surely an angry snake about to defend its home. But then she brushed aside more of the dried plant matter with her twig.
It didn’t react the way she’d expected, drawing a bunch of dirt and leaves along with it as she slid the mass aside. Something bound those little bits of light brown… paper to the rest of the matter on the ground. As carefully as she could, Alaya raised the bundle and examined it. This wasn’t paper. This was a serpent’s skin, discarded before the snake grew bigger and presumably slithered away. It was covered with scales.
Dancing in jubilation, Alaya plucked away the extra bits of detritus and let them spiral to the ground. Free from unnecessary pieces of grass and twigs, Alaya pulled her bundle from under her right arm and stuffed the discarded snake skin in with her collection of garlic. Halfway done, Alaya slowly turned around to survey the plains.
For the first time since escaping the swamp, Alaya discovered a new area of the Summerlands, its borders faded into the horizon asa dense line of shadow. Forest. She’d known that word before Talani had introduced her to it. Martian and Venusian wood farms would never have let someone like Alaya or Gaz wander their grounds. Not with how expensive their produce was. So she’d never seen anything like a forest, not for real. Simulations on the other hand had fascinated her exactly because the wealthy who owned the forests wouldn’t let her walk among their roots.
Ignoring the descending sun, Alaya checked to make sure her bundle was secure and ran toward the forest. There she was more likely to find both locusts and eggs, even if she might have to climb one of those trees to get them. Talani had said as much, though not all at once. And Alaya trusted her teachings, despite losing a hand to her. The woman herself, Alaya reserved judgment.