Chapter 5
FIVE
ADESEWA
I stood in the doorway of the bedroom, one foot in it and one foot still in the massive common room behind me, to which all the bedrooms connected, and felt tears prick in the corners of my eyes.
I widened them to prevent them from escaping.
Now was not the moment to cry, not when this was something below what I deserved.
I was an ?m??ba.
This offering did not align with my station; it was not worthy of my relief or sudden burst of happiness. Still, it was bigger than my dorm room at a Western college that didn't care about my station, and it had important features that had been severely lacking in my most recent accommodations.
It was beneath me to cry because of a bed and a private bathroom.
"Why did the merchant pay with silver?" Sigidi asked.
"What do you mean?" I asked, grateful to him for pulling me away from fighting my deep emotional attachment to personal space and privacy.
"He had a chest full of cowrie, and the way you mentioned it in the story made it sound like it was something valuable. Why would he pay in silver?" he asked.
I thought back to when I had been told the story, and my knowledge of history.
"Cowrie used to be used for daily market transactions," I said.
"In the time period where the story was set, silver was used for very large transactions.
By having the merchant pay in silver, I was communicating that it was very expensive to buy a Sigidi.
The merchant in the story essentially used a large portion of his own wealth to pay for his own demise. "
Sigidi stared at me, the expression on his face thoughtful.
"What would you pay for a creature made of clay who would do your bidding?" he asked.
Suddenly, the fact that we were alone struck me with a thrill that ran down my spine.
I didn't know this creature. I didn't know anything about him other than he was a golum created for the purpose of evil, whose freedom had been gifted back to him through the power of my kiss.
He was handsome; his energy was cool and calm, and the way he looked at me when he realized he was free had sent an electric shock through my very soul.
The very first thing he did was pull me towards him to kiss me again.
The next thing he did was provide a solution for a problem I hadn't been able to solve.
We had been wandering the hallways for days, finding nothing but dead ends and twisting corridors.
It was a nightmare of a new kind. Here he was, a nightmare creature, asking me how much I would pay to own him.
"I wouldn't," I said. "Loyalty cannot be bought, and any attempt to force it only leads to destruction."
His gaze flickered down to my lips.
"What does non-coercive cohesion capability mean to you?" he asked.
That was a strange-sounding phrase.
"If it is in relation to a person, then it sounds like an individual's ability to work with others without coercion being used to enforce their cooperation," I said.
A smile spread across his face.
"I can lead the others here if you wish to take a moment to take care of yourself," he said. "It is important to me to demonstrate my cooperative ability."
The room Sara was using for her mad science and the storage room weren't far from here. I was tempted to take him up on the offer, but I knew how it would look if he returned without me.
"I will go with you," I said, leaving my new bedroom reluctantly behind. "I can rest when everyone is taken care of."
I glanced around the common room, at all the doors lining the huge centralized room.
"Which room will you stay in for the night cycle?" I asked.
"That hadn't occurred to me," he said. "Which room do you think I should stay in?"
"You should stay where you feel most comfortable," I said.
What woke me was the silence.
At least, that was what I thought at first.
My world had been defined by the relentless symphony of life's noise: the murmur of voices, the rattling of snores, and the soft sounds of tears shed onto metal floors. The eerie quiet caused my heart to race as my sleepy mind screamed that something was wrong, something was different.
I reached out with a hand in the darkness.
My knuckles brushed something impossibly soft.
I gasped, pulling my hand back as my mind whirled against the comparison of what I thought should be there versus what should be there. My body felt strange.
I was comfortable.
The familiar numbness of where my hips pressed into the hard metal floor was gone.
I reached out a hand again, feeling the softness that covered me.
A blanket, my mind remembered, and suddenly the full awareness of the room, and why it was different, rushed into me, and I sucked in a sharp breath as I came fully awake.
My body didn't ache because I had taken a long, hot, glorious shower and then climbed into my brand new bed, with a soft mattress that sank perfectly beneath me.
The room was quiet because there was no one else in it.
No one else to laugh or cry or make any of the many noises that humans made in their troubled sleep.
I stared up at the ceiling above me, and all I felt was relief.
It was the same familiar metal that I had been staring at for months.
I still wasn't home, but my circumstances had improved, and not just mine, all of ours. All the other women who depended on me to stay calm, to radiate my stable energy and hold them together. They needed me.
I needed this room.
I needed this quiet, this silence, this space to myself to simply exist and breathe without the weight of anyone else's Orí weighing down on me.
I hadn't realized how much it had felt like I was drowning in that room, suffocated by the weight of everyone else's emotions and energy.
We were all trapped together, but there were only a few of us who were aware of our Orí and how essential it was to keep our own fields clean and clear.
Carla, for example, was one who couldn't manage at all.
As Saoirse saw it, the result was that Carla took on the weight of every single negative emotion that floated through the room around her until she was buried under them.
Saoirse and I had discussed the differences and similarities in our beliefs in great detail.
From my background, the room was filled with a toxic soul fog.
The stagnation of the ??mí in the room, the heavy breaths and sighs starved Carla's Orí, stealing her spiritual oxygen.
Having this space to myself, a shower to cool my head and cleanse myself, a room free from the misaligned energy of others, was deeply important. The more centered and aligned I was, the greater my power to make things happen.
As an ?m??ba, I had the power of my people behind me, and these women were now my people. The more I helped them align with their purpose, their destiny, the greater my own power and ability to enact change would become. I alone had this strength and responsibility.
Yet, even with the knowledge of my status and strength, the emptiness of the room around me yawned like a mouth ready to swallow me whole. I had a sudden urge to get up and go find one of the other women, to sleep in the same room so that the silence couldn't consume me.
I let out a soft laugh.
The laugh dragged out, morphing into a scream as I let out some of the heated energy I had bundled up inside me, holding onto it in a desperate attempt to not taint the air of the women around me.
"Are you in distress?" a familiar male voice said in the darkness.
My entire body tensed as I looked towards the origin of the sound. The room had a dim light emanating from the walls, similar to the night cycle we had in the room we were all caged in.
There, standing up against the wall next to the door, was Sigidi.
I sat up, my blanket slipping down for a moment before I caught it, dragging it back up to cover my chest. The thought of putting back on that horrible grey prisoner uniform after I showered filled me with disgust, so I had gone to bed naked.
I felt exposed and vulnerable.
But those feelings quickly fled from the power of my Orí.
The audacity of this man, thinking he had the right to invade my space.
I lifted my chin and stared him down.
"What are you doing in my bedchamber?" I demanded.
"It is where I feel most comfortable," he said, his energy still cool and calm, even as he stood there, an ominous presence in the darkness. He made no move to approach the bed. "You instructed me to spend the night cycle in the place I feel most comfortable."
"So you chose to enter while I was sleeping?" I asked.
"I came in when you were in the shower," he replied. "I've been here since then."
I had practically flung myself from the ensuite straight into bed. He had seen all of me, and I hadn't even noticed him. My lack of awareness was more embarrassing than the accidental exposure of my body, but that wasn't my focus.
"I see I have upset you," he said. "I will go."
This wasn't a human man I was dealing with; this was an alien. I couldn't assume his choices and actions meant the same thing they would if coming from another human. There were questions that needed to be answered before I allowed myself to fully react.
Why was he there? Why was my room where he felt most comfortable?
"No, you may stay. Where did you normally sleep, before?" I asked.
"My rest periods were whenever I didn't have an active task," he said. "They would take place where my last task ended, or if that was an inconvenient location, then the nearest storage room."
"You say rest period, does that mean you didn't sleep?" I asked.
"I go into a lower awareness state," he said. "My kind doesn't lie down or become unconscious, unless it is for an emergency repair."
"What is that lower awareness state like?" I asked.
"Boring," he said. "Until we got access to movies and shows. Then those periods became ideal as I got to watch them."
"When did you gain access? Was it a reward that you earned?" I asked. I knew he was controlled by a chip, and he was a horrific, if handsome, creation made to be a drone that operated in some form of a hive, but I wanted more. I wanted to understand him.
"No, it just was there one day," he said. "Plexus Command had it marked as junk data, but it never deleted it. Normally it removes unnecessary data."
"What is Plexus Command?" I asked.
"It is what issued orders," he said. "A Plexus Command controls a Plexus of Units to serve the expansion."
"The expansion of what?" I asked.
"The expansion of the Plexus," he said.
"Can you explain more?" I asked. "I don't know what that means."
"I am… was… only a Unit," he said. "It wasn't for Units to know or question, just obey."
"Give me your best interpretation," I said. "Based on the actions you performed and the things this ship did. Any idea of purpose would be helpful."
"We harvested materials from planets and delivered them to other Plexus clusters that were building ships or stations," he said.
"We had materials delivered to us that we needed to create more individual units.
We engaged in military conflict to subjugate resistant populations so that we could harvest materials from inhabited planets.
We collected new technology and delivered it to Plexus clusters which were focused on research.
The goal was always expansion and consumption.
To expand the Plexus, which we were units of and which issued orders to our collection of units. "
"So you were part of a hive mind," I said.
"My mind was not a part of it," he said. "We units all have our own minds, just not the ability to decide what to do with our bodies."
"Is the Plexus alive, or is it technologically based?" I asked. He was part machine and part biological.
"I could only guess," he said.
"Then guess," I said.
"Plexus Command is pure technology with no biological functions," he said. "Anything with biological mind components, such as units, never had command ability. So I could guess that the decision-making and controlling part of the Plexus is machine-based, but I cannot be certain."
"Interesting," I said. "You have given me a lot to think about."
I sat there in silence for a moment, mulling over everything he said. It made sense that an artificial intelligence would view biological beings as mere parts if its primary goal was consumption and expansion without the anchoring concept of sustainability and ecological maintenance.
Whatever the case, it wasn't in control of this ship anymore.
Whatever was in control cared enough to keep us alive and comfortable.
That would have to be enough for now. Everything else was a problem that could be dealt with tomorrow, after I got enough sleep.
"Sigidi," I said.
"Yes, Adesewa?" he replied, and the way he said my name, like it was chocolate he was rolling around on his tongue, sent shivers of pleasure through me.
"You may remain in my room if it is where you feel the most comfortable," I said. His presence there was comforting to me, but at the same time, he was an alien, so I should make sure my boundaries were clear. "But you may not touch me without my permission."
"Understood," he said.
I lay back down and closed my eyes, feeling the relief of the empty space around me while also relaxing with the knowledge that I wasn't alone.