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{cws for verbal/physics abuse at the hands of a partner, mild body horror, medical examination, subjectivity/mind manipulation, implied harming of a child}
Not a failure.
Not a failure.
This was a. A misstep, perhaps. Sure. Moving a bit too carefully, giving the targets more time to prepare than she thought. Not just bricking the terminals.
She could have done better, but this wasn't failure. She had done what she needed to, and this new contact-- they wouldn't know what to do with the information, anyways. Wouldn't have anyone worth giving it to. They saw enough to know the consequences, maybe this can slide.
As for Rue...
What'cha thinking about, papa?
She doesn't start. Nothing across her scoured shell of a body twitches, spends even the slightest shred of a kcal on reaction. She simply finds the shape ossified within her-- a scar in her chest like so many others-- and adjusts it, so so gently.
A couple thousand nanites detach and relink in the constellation girded round her lungs. Nighttime for the birthday girl, and a muttering of "sleep well, Blue" embedding into the noumenal impulse. Keeping it still, keeping it quiet. Blair doesn't need to know. Even still, she feels a fear she thought she lost the privilege of as she boards the cannibalized dropship and begins to connect, searching up and out. Stretching her mind taut like a rubber band to reach back home.
Not a failure; but not what her lover wanted.
It takes longer to get a ping back than she'd like.
Up she goes, to a deadzone bored out from the planet's satellite network. In its shade rests a nightmare aggregate, a shape darker than shadow and crawling with sharp, matte shape. Its eyes scrape and search across visible-spectrum, RF, omninet signal, and within it waits a lone figure. Watching out a one-way window, watching the ants.
Nothing is said. Catkill hears the demand to return clear enough anyways.
The roiling shadow latches into her craft as it arrives, and Catkill makes her way to the door with a gentle sort of surrender. She has very little control over what happens next, this much she knows, and maybe there's some distant comfort in that.
Her vocal cords do less work than the swarm when she speaks, these days. “I’m back. Missed you.”
There she waits; the automaton, all severe and silver and beady green light. Her hands are clasped behind her back, her face vacant and unreadable, barely frustrated if one could see deep enough. "Hello, princess." Blair's voice snarls across the metal of the ship as if it were her throat. "Come, let me see how you're doing." She turns on her heels, and leads Catkill down the corridor.
The medical sector, like Catkill, has been hollowed out. In place of a patient's bed, or even a surgical table, rests a bare magnetic platform above which sit all manner and confusion of mechanisms and screens, a tangle of needle-pronged cords for the diagnostics. "Best not dawdle." She even faintly taps her fingertips on the plinth surface, as if inviting her love to hop up.
Catkill’s skin, always crawling, nevertheless manages to feel uniquely uncomfortable when she meets Blair’s eyes. “Okay.” Stale breath escapes from her lips as she exerts herself that little extra bit, clambers up onto the platform and lies face-up upon it. "I couldn't get the vessel you wanted. Body expired during reformat." Best start early. The immediate apology is something of an olive branch to herself-- if she can clear up the results before they're asked, this goes quicker. They care about results.
“I figure, you coming back empty-handed. Not on our a-game, dear?” Blair smiles a lipless smile and engages the platform. Magnetic tides sweep Catkill gently off her feet, holding her face-up in the air as sharp-tipped cables extend.
Wrists, ankles, between the ribs and beneath the skull— dry skin punctures like a hide-drum. If there’s discomfort in the process, it’s either ignored or lost in the constant, low static of sensation inside her. There’s no pomp or circumstance to the scans that follow, four sets of eyes stare quietly into her soul. She hopes she’s hidden well enough.
“You at least recovered the data.” It’s not so much a statement as a prompt, and Catkill answers automatically.
“Burnt it off the system, local copy’s on me.” That’s the good news. “S-someone did get hold of the files— but they can’t use them, I’m sure,” she adds. “I made it clear what would happen. A-nd they don’t know about you, t-they think the project fell apart. But we could have had better opsec. Shut down the ability to call for help at… At all.”
Her muscles try, and fail, to tense. It’s risky. She knows that putting blame, any blame, on the others— they don’t care about her like Blair days she does, they are all too ready to remind her of what she is. Even if they set her up for failure, it’s her response that matters.
Nothing, for an agonizing minute nothing but silence greets her words. The ship hums with faint activity as her mind and body is read through like the pages of a book, and she doesn’t even get the privilege of looking over their shoulder.
“Good, that’s good….” Blair says it too little and too late to be worth anything beyond a hollow affirmation, then— “Take a deep breath.”
She breathes. Blair’s hand curls around wrist and drives a little lance thru the skin. This part, she can feel.
Catkill’s heart still runs, as a matter of fact. Her circulatory system is too vital to shut down, efficient enough at its job that trying to replace it with the scouring nanites would be a waste of effort and energy. That it works is actually optimal, in the long run; her greywash passes the blood/brain barrier easily, and bone marrow makes for an effective gourd to incubate new generations and half-generations of the swarm. Now she feels that very hammerbeat drag her owner’s dust through her veins, cold and sharp where her greywash has had time to determine ambient temperature. Everywhere it spreads, the edges of her extruded mind flatten and fade, cognitive processes taken over and reallocated to report to the consensus. Please, she prays, to a local god she no longer gets to call hers. Please don’t find it.
"You weren't wounded." Blair’s tone isn’t at all different, but Catkill knows that it’s not her making the note. Avionaurus, the newborn. It sees so much better than the others— no chance of this being a solo date. “Not beyond the superficial. There are colonies that aren’t responding to us.”
“I have a surplus right now.” Not untrue. “Letting some hive segments conserve energy, it’s been rough lately.” Not at all a lie. Maybe she’ll be admonished for not trying hard enough down there, but—
Silence is not inactivity. The crystalline lining around her atrophied viscera runs with the barest activity in its new fixed shape, unable to lie. Avion falls slowly into adjacency with a broken-off piece of her mind, the sensation like a spike sliding into the corner of her eyesocket.
Reification: Standing at a closed door, one rings the doorbell and is answered by a child’s voice, pitchy and piping. Is this one of your friends from work, papa?
Blair finally smiles, showing teeth. Avion redirects and externalizes connection. “Hello there, darling.”
“Don’t.” Catkill shows her weak spot in an instant. Desperation leaves her wide-eyed, throwing herself on the spear to redirect Blair’s ire. It barely registers.
“Yes, we know each other very well. What are you up to?”
It’s my birthday! I’m 10 now. We’re gonna try and make a garden today.
“Oh, your birthday!” Her voice pitches and cracks with sickening excitement. “And here I am, empty handed. We’ll have to fix that, won’t we?”
Avion bites down. Noumenal action freezes in place, observable time ceases within the pattern. Catkill cries out, pinned like a butterfly, as the whole of Rue is stripped from her flesh and carried, intact, out into the air.
“Look at that, so delicate.” Blair studies the frail structure. “It is impressive.”
“Please—”
Blair rips her hand free and leaves Catkill’s wrist gaping, dripping red. "Liars don't get to beg." Her tone is ice. One of the lights on her forehead blinks once and the magnetic suspension ends, dropping her doll to the floor with an awful sound. Brittle ribs fracture.
“I didn’t lie to you,” she lies again, this time with feeling. A promise swirls in a nanite cloud above their heads. “She wouldn’t have survived the trip here, it— she was too hurt. I just wanted to something to remember her.” Catkill doesn’t try to get up. She barely lifts her face to speak.
"Sentimentality?" Blair laughs like a gunshot. “For what? You haven't been human in an age." Now her hand finds its way to her throat, hauling her up. "They could have used the body, at least. You forget what I made you, Catkill, I can work with ruined parts. Yet still you think you can LIE TO ME?!"
Catkill meets the wall, another shock to a body so hard to repair. A black nail holds her there, smoking scintilla. "You don't fail me often, puppet." Blair sighs, a hand fixing her hair as if to calm herself down, "But when you do, you risk catastrophe at every turn. Do we need to cycle you again? Have I been too lenient? Is this—” She motions at the captured subjectivity— “what we need to break? Tell me, love, tell me how to fix you."
She tries to think. Pain saturates her nervous system, no process or thread able to attenuate. It occurs to her, distantly, that some day Blair might just break her. Forget her strength for the last time, make her plaything fall apart. Wouldn’t be anything but the dust left.
“I don’t… I’m sorry. I’m sorry. She was like Noah, a-and so scared, and—” Flash-consensus, unanimous across all partitions. Don’t tell her. She already suspects you. Any more and she’ll take everything apart. She’ll find the sim.
Keep her happy. Whatever it takes.
Externally, she doesn’t miss a beat. “—and I was mad, I was so mad that she would get what I don’t. I couldn’t let her be perfect for you, b-babe, I don’t get that.” It’s a poison pill, this train of thought, and she follows it without hesitation. “So I took her from you.”
Blair stills. For a moment the whole room is deathly quiet, the only change or motion the rapid flutter of lights on the subaltern’s forehead. All Catkill can do is hope that the four subjectivities in conversation there are less tightly-bound than they present. All she can hope is that the woman in front of her means it when she says love.
Finally, motion. Blair’s head tilts, a vestigial coded reflex from a casket that barely remains flesh. The apertures of her eyes click and shift, studying Catkill’s face. “You… thought she would replace you?” Her voicebox tries to approach ‘gentle’, produces an overdriven hiss. “Oh, princess, if you were jealous— This girl would have had a purpose, sure, but you know you’re special to us.”
“To you.” Her diaphragm works to put some emotion in her ruined voice. “They don’t care about me like you do.” That she’s correct makes this a terribly risky game. She can’t hide what she’s trying to do, only disguise why she’s doing it. “I know I’m not— not, n-not perfect yet and I know I didn’t hollow Noah out right, but I don’t want you to make something better. It has to be me.”
It seems to work as intended on Blair, at least. “Poor thing,” she coos, “you’re out of the loop. I suppose I should have made us clear— saved you the trouble.” A cold hand brushes through Catkill’s hair, and a few strands snap from the touch. “The four of us, we all rely on each other, but this body is mine alone. The Balor follows me. Other drones, they’d be means to an end. Vessels. Not loved.” There’s a beat as microexpressions flit across her face, overarticulated and illegible. “You could be their teacher, even. Show them how to be perfect.”
Something glows in the cloud. A swarm-luminescence of dark red light exudes at the edge of Catkill’s vision. A watching eye. Something in its gaze reminds her that ‘vessel’ was meant to be where Noah’s story ended.
Still she forges on. “Then… If that’s all they’re for,” she starts, playing half-assuaged, “then I can get them subalterns, o-or flash clones. That’s all they need, why would they want to wear secondhand goods anyways?” It’s dangerously close to bargaining, and she can see a shadow pass over Blair’s expression.
“You did lie to me, princess. I’m not going to put my trust where it can get hurt again.” The cloud of smoke shifts, brings the fragile little mind close. “You have this new pet. You want to try your hand at creation? Make something of the remnants. Show me what you can do.”
The nail in Catkill’s shoulder goes up in smoke, and Blair spreads her arms to receive her in a hug. “I missed you, love. Don’t you ever forget where you belong.”
“I missed you too.” Catkill’s skin aches against the cold metal as she sinks into the hug, clumps of dust-filled blood spatter against the floor. Another one of her few morals down the drain. One more string connecting her to Noah, torn forever. This helpless mind sits at her mercy, and she will hurt it.
She will hurt it to survive, and it won’t be worth it.