Alliance: An Intersolar Alien Romance, Book 6

02

Present Day

Coming back online was not like being born in the nursery. There was no NRS or Master to greet me, and rather than a peaceful instant, I floated in a thick soup, struggling to grasp consciousness as I drowned in confusion and sluggish processes.

My body was on a [flat plane] floor. A sticky floor.

I could see out of only one eye. Hear out of one ear. Breathe through one nostril.

Iron and motor oil had dried inside my mouth…

Correction.

Blood, not iron.

When I swallowed, my throat felt like packing foam. And my charging port was damaged, but parumauxi were already working at the site, reconstructing biological tissues and the conducive plates that had been bent out of shape. It would repair itself within two sols.

“Ay…”I hissed, a deep, pulsing pressure in my head. Was it painful? I couldn’t tell exactly, but I thought—perhaps I was meant to find it painful.

I sat up and my palms were [raw] sunburned as they took my weight.

No.

Allof me felt sunburned. I blinked down at the bare skin of my legs and arms. The sticky floor was filling with a thin layer of light green foam save for the impression of where I’d been laying like a [dead body] murder scene. And the parts of me that had been exposed to the air were foaming too.

“Oh,” I realized, blinking the eye that could not see. Foam squeezed between my eyelids, dripping down my cheek. When I opened the eye again, my vision was smeared like [cleaning product] Windex on a window.

What was Windex?

[Cannot connect to nursery database. Search [[Windex]] paused until connection reestablished.]

But I already knew what Windex was. It was a blue liquid in a clear spray bottle. We used it to clean the mirrors and sliding doors in our house every first Saturday of the month.

LMem fragments flashed across my mind, burning into the back of my eyelids. A bathroom lined in off-white tiles.The mirror was small and hung without a frame above the pedestal sink. I looked at myself in the mirror. Yes, this was me. Rozs-zs-sy-y-y-y. I blew myself a kiss, then sprayed the clear bottle of blue Windex at myself–

I jumped, hand out to stop the cleaner from hitting me in the face.

But I was alone in the hallway in which the overseer had been performing quality control.

I attempted to dial down my sensory intake and limit the percentage of LMem running as a background task to no avail. Why could I not control my sensory intake anymore? This was one of my central functions and ensured that I could adapt to the appetites and instruction of future clients, regardless of if my unit was damaged.

Perhaps the overseer had been correct in performing a quality control test.

The foam on my skin burned incessantly, after all. It was in my eye and respiratory system. In my silk. I peered at my finger closely and heard the substance hiss as if it was alive and eating me.

I didn’t want to be eaten. I stood up, the bottoms of my feet stinging raw.

Then I tilted my head in thought. This was a nano-foam designed to deconstruct bio-materials, analysis suggested. I zoomed in on the fingerprints disintegrating on the kitchen’s swinging doors. Oil, blood, semen… The foam would destroy those substances quickly, but it was no equal to a unit equipped with parumauxi.

Nano swarms like mine were near sentient, and the longer they achieved symbiosis with their host’s biological components, the more evolved and powerful they became. It would take this foam far longer than its half-life to eat away my dermis.

I smiled, picking up a glop of foam and squishing it between my fingers. I was feeling something…

Smug.

I turned my head to glance over my shoulder at the door I’d been barred from entering. The one behind which I’d sensed music, body heat, and incense, where the eleven other units I’d arrived with had been allowed to disappear and follow their instructions.

The overseer wasn’t here anymore. His fingerprints and breath had already been scoured from my skin.

I pushed open the door.

The lounge was a shell of the map I’d been programmed to know as part of my instructions. A pile of detritus filled the center of the gutted room like a stack of discarded bodies, rails and pipes and upholstery sticking out of a foaming, bubbling mess. A few chairs remained, scattered amongst broken glass, collapsed shelving, and chunks of volcanic rock. The foam had advanced much further within the lounge, with drifts as tall as glittering mounds of white snow after a blizzard.

I shuffled to a stop, brushing my hand over it. The foam was warm from expanding, but snow was cold. I remembered that. I didn’t recall it from my databases. At some point in my past, I had sculpted snow between my palms.

Many things in my LMem were changing. Like a word on the tip of my tongue, new code was skirting the edges of my thoughts, too mercurial for me to grasp and examine. I knew what it was, the shape and feel of it, but I couldn’t define it. I looked up at the barren, scarred walls, trying to reach the answer, then hissed with pain as my injured charging port zapped my spinal cord.

Why was the room tilting?

My shoulder slumped against a shiny red booth and my eyes popped open with a start, coming face-to-face with a data halo.

Not face-to-face. Face-to-frequency?

That had a [colloquialism] good ring to it. I decided to add it to my language core.

“Hello,” I said, swirling it up with my finger. The wispy data pressed against my memory, little bits of code still bouncing around but fading by the second. When a vitals read pulsed against my own, my heart skipped and I stood up straight with a gasp.

Human.

As in a real human!

But I was a real human too, wasn’t I?

Yes, I had memories and senses and pain. I could no longer count time by my atomic clock, just the weighty thump of blood and oil through my body. And if the overseer wanted to do another quality check…

“No,” I tried, pressing a smile between my lips when the word actually came out.

The data halo danced in my breath, celebrating my victory with me.

Maybe the human it belonged to would celebrate with me too.

A longing like nothing I’d been programmed to feel tightened my throat. I was searching for other little wisps of the human when memories from before my corrupted download resurfaced.

“Rosy!”

The echo had me spinning towards the voice. Deep, powerful, feminine. I glanced at the hall in which the charging pods had been stored.

People running fast, the overseer yelling, a familiar black shadow with red eyes. Gold eyes. Red… skin? Venandi… or not venandi? Spires, so venandi. Right?

I tried to make sense of the mush in my mind, but there was too much digital noise. None of the experience had recorded correctly. Everything was just an impression, like the memory fragments I had of Earth and my life there, not the clear LMem files I should have stored away for later reference.

I needed to meet that human again. I wanted to return to the moon called Yaspur, with three white towers and many hundreds of humans, all like me, where I could try eating food and play cards with my roommate and watch crappy telenovelas to keep my Espa?ol sharp since my native language never made it into our linguitors.

Did I have a linguitor?

I pressed the space behind my ear where I remembered the sharp agony of having one installed, but there was no telltale black button there. And though I knew two human languages—English and Spanish—I spoke and thought in Hja Erle. I contemplated this as my feet carried me back through the drifts of foam, following the human’s decaying halo.

“Rosy! Wait!”

I followed the human’s urgent whispers regardless of her warnings, too impatient and fascinated with my newly unlocked autonomy. I pushed the door to the service hallway open, wading into the warm foam as it encroached on my hips. It was dragging down on me now, my feet, ankles, calves so hot. Too hot.

I stumbled over my charging pod, knocked sideways and hidden beneath the snowy dunes, eyes on the loading bay door and the overseer’s chair. My heart was pounding in my ears, my hands shaking. I pumped oxygen like I was running, but I couldn’t remember why I needed to get outside. [Priority] I needed to run.

Oh God, what if she catches me?

I panicked.

With a burst of speed, I lunged forward with wide eyes turned over my shoulder. If I looked away, she would be there and so would judgment. Everything I’d done was only alright if I never faced the consequences. What had I done? It wasn’t clear to me, but I knew one thing.

I was my originator.

But she wasn’t me.

I stumbled out of the loading bay door and a loud [firearm] pop froze me in place, eyes squeezed shut. But something about the air and the ground was uncomfortable. I couldn’t abide standing in one place, not with the sizzling sound rising up from beneath my feet. Air completely devoid of moisture brushed my cheeks, and the foam still growing and sloughing off my body shriveled around the edges like dried soap.

Tentatively, I opened my eyes, and a slew of information streamed in. Data halos of people I recognized and so much noise. Radio frequencies, vibrations in the ground, bristling heat against my skin, bright lights and exhaust pipes so hot they warbled like welding torches. The nursery and the lounge had been so small compared to this, enshrouded in a thick layer of security that kept everything outside from getting in. Thousands of networks and vital decks, power cables and radio frequencies. It was too much for me to process, and there was no instruction on what to prioritize.

Scorching breath beat in and out of my lungs. I crouched, covering my eyes and ears as I curled in on myself, then gnashed my teeth at how itchy I felt. Every nerve ending was raw, and even my own hands felt too hard as they pressed into my temples, trying to force myself back into shape so I could contain it all again.

How did humans handle this? Was I defective?

“Traitor.”

A terrifying snarl jolted me, but it was distant and cold. I knew it was the last thing I heard, somewhere deep in that ghostly coding on the outskirts of my mind.

Somehow, it calmed me.

I pushed my matted silk curls out of my face and they stayed in place, foam folding into the creases of my palms like wet baby powder. My gaze fixed on the halos around me. Frantic vitals. Snippets of panicked comms. A transport.

Digital noise wasn’t the only data though. I blinked rapidly, trying to wet my eyes even though they dried instantly. Through the blur, I assessed the walls baking with blue blood spatter. Venandi. The tang of a shock laser still zapping the air. And cushioning my knee…

I glanced down at the thick pool of brown sludge now warped and cracked like warm asphalt on a hot day and knew that this was where I’d died.

Was I meant to follow these same actions? Should I lay down and wait for my charge to deplete? [Conjecture] Perhaps it is what my originator wanted.

No, it couldn’t be. I could make my own decisions! I didn’t want to decommission myself. I could make different choices.

“Traitor.”

That snarl caressed my ear, and I fit my hand around my throat, breathing through the rising panic. Was that voice really talking about me? I couldn”t tell for certain. Maybe I had been a traitor, but I didn’t feel like one, nor did I understand how it could be true. All I wanted was to find my people, to live as me and be free. When I searched my new, elusive coding, those feelings were the same.

“I’ll hold it off as long as I can.”

My eyes jerked sideways fast enough to catch just the smallest whiff of that human’s voice again. It disappeared where the transport’s wake began.

I had died, but that woman hadn’t. I needed to find her, to thank her for guiding me out of the lounge.

I needed to ask her if I was the traitor.

[Priority] With single-minded determination, I stood, picking the transport’s navigation address out of the sea of digital trash in the air…

And started walking.