CHAPTER 5 KORI
CHAPTER
KORI
“Ready to—progress into—the Passage?” Aspect shrieks, as soon as I return to Charon.
“The cake—gives strength. The cake—fuels—ADVENTURE!” Aspect waves their arms, violently enthused, before apparently recalling a contradictory memory from someone else.
Their whole body freezes mid-flailing. “The Passage—dangerous—must exercise—precaution—”
I remember installing the memory in question. During a smuggling run, Charon flew above what I thought was a stranded Daylands traveler whose starship had malfunctioned. Instead, it was a recently deceased body.
Even through my anti-radiation gear, I felt waning warmth where blood had recently pulsed.
It was an old man, pale, grizzled, with white-gray stubble scattered across a face that looked stern even in death.
Quickly, and only with my hands, so as not to draw undue attention from sun serpents, I buried him in the sand, offered a moment of silence.
But I also took his Morpheus sphere, where he’d deliberately stored his final memories.
I’d hoped to determine the man’s cause of death via his last recollections, but what I found was that he’d done the unthinkable, even to
a memory smuggler. He’d deliberately fled the Daylands, fixated on a supposed better life in the Shadowlands, where dayfolk are forbidden to tread.
Above all other rules, licensed members of the Morpheus Market never fraternize with the denizens of the Shadowlands.
Children of the light do not deign to dip even a toe into the dark.
Honestly, though, there are moments when I’ve wondered what it would feel like to be cast into boundless blackness and left to define yourself—absent your heritage, your settlement, even your former name, if you so willed.
This man died in the Passage as an enemy of the state, a potential shatter point for a fragile peace that has remained for generations.
My mother, by necessity, would have branded him a traitor and seen the body incinerated, tossed into a trash chute and served to the magma like so many half-eaten ration sandwiches.
Better for him to have gone missing. Better for his family to mourn whatever idea of his passing gave them the most peace.
But I kept the Morpheus sphere, if only for the flicker of purest fear that the man felt in its final recording. Aspect had leapt from an impossible height the day before, nearly snapping both their legs like ancient driftwood. I needed to teach them some degree of hesitance.
Apparently, all I’d taught Aspect of humanity was anxiety. I suppose that makes two of us.
“Hey,” I say softly, the way Ednit speaks to me when I wake from frightening dreams on his examination table.
I do a one-eighty with my spinning chair, before taking Aspect’s metal hands in my own.
“When I found that man in the Passage, when I scavenged his last moments for building you up, I did it to teach you caution. Not to make you afraid. You have nothing to be afraid of, Aspect. Not when I’m with you. ”
Aspect’s visual processors flicker now, accompanied by a low whirring—another memory slotting into place.
“Kori will be—with Aspect—forever, correct?”
My flesh will decay. Aspect’s mech body is quite literally fueled by Pagomènos’s radioactivity, built to withstand the Daylands’ savage heat waves and the inexorable passage of time alike.
But I give their hand a squeeze. Their visual receptors hold my gaze without the slightest flicker. “Forever,” I say.
“Affirmative?”
“Affirmative.”
Briefly, I expect a human thank-you from my mechanical companion, but Aspect remains only a hodgepodge of pilfered human experiences. They straighten, whirring and beeping, and return to duty, at once a machine again. “Is Kori ready—to depart—into the Passage?”
I grin despite myself. Aspect isn’t wrong about the dangers of the Passage, but I live for those moments between the two worlds of our divided planet. They’re my only chances to make memories of my own.
“Lock in,” I say, snapping my pilot’s harness into place over my head. “I have a few new flight maneuvers I’d like to try today.”
Another memory flickers across Aspect’s body, indicated by a disconcerting collision of creaks and whirs. “If Charon spins—upside down—again, Kori—Aspect may—vomit—all over the shiny—cockpit.”
Mechs don’t vomit, and I installed that memory to excite Aspect about the thrills of aerial tricks, not the discomfort of stomach trouble. That’s one memory I should definitely uninstall. But I don’t tell Aspect that.
Instead, I imagine oil all over Charon’s viewport and laugh. “If you do, you’re cleaning it up.”
Then I reach forward to the main control panel, pulling the launch lever tight to my chest. In response, Charon seizes beneath me like a fossil drawing breath, twin engines bursting light against my mirrors, even brighter than the never-ending sun.
Aspect screams like a disconcerted microwave, frantically locking into the copilot restraints. A fraction of an instant later, the ship blasts into the stratosphere.
Storing my journey through the Passage as an autopilot path is risky, I know, and has the potential to expose my Morpheus Market membership to those other than Chloe and Ednit if ever my ship were investigated.
That could create a whole convoluted mess for my mother to clean up, both burying knowledge of the Morpheus Market from the general public and concealing my own involvement in it.
But no one looks twice at me. They look at my mother, resplendent in her governance gear, her outstretched arm like a promise to the dayfolk that we’ll continue to survive.
So I leave the Passage route programmed, because at the halfway point, when my starship nearly breaches the planet’s atmosphere, I can’t resist the urge to look down at the graveyard of half-understood history.
The Passage isn’t like the Daylands or the Shadowlands.
The temperature is neither searing nor freezing; the light isn’t blinding, but darkness’s cloak doesn’t reach this far.
Really, in a better world, the Passage would be the ideal place for dayfolk and nightfolk to live, or at least to convene, in harmony.
But that’s the thing about limited resources.
The nightfolk demanded it all for themselves, and now everyone has nothing.
Starships from before the Cataclysm lie beached, half buried in the Passage’s endless sand, their paint slowly fading in the admittedly temperate sun.
A wing juts free from the ground here; a stray control panel abandoned there; a shattered cockpit, its remaining transparent viewport like a monster’s jagged teeth.
I gaze out the viewport and marvel at the skeletal remains of our once-mighty civilization.
Thanks to the Territory Wars over the Passage, instigated by the nightfolk, Pagonians collectively wrecked our hopes of peacefully living in the only fertile land left.
And our tech, whether lost in the war or destroyed at the Cataclysm’s impact, will never be recovered, the recollection of its construction also subsequently lost.
Helical engines for hyperspace travel. Interstellar, galaxy-spanning comms for signaling Earth.
Laser cannons, rifles, and pistols. Maybe even sentient AI.
All sacrificed to our pride, our vanity, our insistence on being better than the other.
Now we’re trapped on a far-flung world in an unknown galaxy, unreachable by the planet our ancestors left, unable to venture beyond our atmosphere, left to struggle and squabble over what fragments of tech remain.
What I wouldn’t give to go back in time, even for an instant. What I wouldn’t offer to whatever distant deity watches over us, all for a chance at a world where possibilities still bloomed. I would leave this divided planet. I would leave my ever-watchful mother.
I don’t know where I’d go, but I’d never come back.
In the copilot’s seat, Aspect beeps cheerily. “Almost in—the dark place—Kori. Where the monsters—live.”
“Don’t say that,” I say, my hands tightening around Charon’s controls, even though autopilot is engaged.
Aspect’s optical processors blink. “Kori doesn’t—fear—the shadow people.”
“I have a purely scientific interest in them, alongside appropriate caution. I don’t feel anything. Not even fear.”
“Scientific—interest—in Aspect, too—Kori?”
I shake my head. “I care quite a bit about you.”
“Who else—does Kori—care for?”
I take a sharp breath. This is why programming sentient AI is so strictly forbidden.
Mechs exist to mine resources, traveling where humans fear to tread, serving as passionless emissaries between light and dark.
A mech questioning my interpersonal relationships is unthinkable.
I don’t know if Aspect even knows what they’re saying.
But the question smacks me upside the head all the same.
“My mother.” It tastes like a lie, sour, sticky sliding off my tongue. “I care for my mother.”
“Why?”
I sigh. This will be the first of many questions. Grasping at human memories for the first time, Aspect is sometimes more like a toddler than anything else.
“Because she’s my mother.”
“Why?”
“Because she made me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” I stare out at the waves upon waves of abandoned sand. “Maybe because she was lonely.”
“Like Kori—made Aspect?”
“Yes.”
“Was Kori—lonely—before Aspect’s making?”
I press my shoulders squarely into the back of my seat. “You ask too many questions.”
Aspect leans back in their own chair. Their laser-like gaze flicks about the cockpit. “Aspect does not—compute—this caring. But Aspect thinks—if Aspect did—have caring—for Kori—it would not—be—because Kori—made Aspect.”