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12
You wake suddenly from a dream, only slightly less exhausted now than you were when you closed your eyes to rest. There’s no visual way to tell how much time has passed from the inside of the abandoned shipping container, but the external network your mind reaches out to connect with instinctively tells you a few hours have passed since the dawn of a new cycle. And the way your body is aching tells you won’t be getting more sleep any time soon. You crawl from your nest of scavenged blankets, and settle for a moment sitting back on your heels, rolling your head from side to side in an attempt to massage away the dull pain in your neck and shoulders. It doesn’t work, but you sigh and pull yourself to your feet anyway.
You know by now that the longer you go without stabilizer, the worse your dreams get. Last night’s dream was by far the worst one you can remember. A traitorous part of you longs for the smooth, uninterrupted rest you had while you were still the property of Essen Arp and your body was never allowed to degrade like this. You don’t know how many more nights like the last one you can endure.
Some people might be surprised to learn that you dream at all. What is the point in giving an emulated mind such an ability? But your brain can’t be completely shut off, just like anyone else’s it still has to power your body’s essential functions while the rest of you is unconscious. Your dreams are a rogue electrical spark meandering its way through the neural pathways of your mind, keeping your systems running at a baseline level.
Getting ready for a new cycle does not take you long. The shipping container has no insulation, so you sleep in all the layers of clothing you own to keep warm. Luckily your cooling systems are more efficient than most human bodies and don’t produce any odour, but that doesn’t stop your clothes from becoming shabby from constant use and the hard wear and tear of manual labour. All the essentials you need to live never leave a pocket in one of your innermost layers, close to your skin so that you can feel the comforting weight of them and not have to worry about them being stolen. Still, you reach in just to make sure, check your credit balance is still the same as it was when you closed your eyes last night. It is. It is almost enough. You think you can get enough this cycle, maybe. You’re not sure what will happen if you don’t, and you’re terrified to find out.
Your stomach is empty and there are definitely no credits to spare on food, so you shed all but the most essential layers of your clothes and take a few minutes outside in the glare from the closest star, letting your skin slowly prickle from the embedded sensors responding to the UV. You have found that apart from the economic benefits, you like starting off your morning like this. The light has mild carcinogenic properties for humans, so you’re never disturbed in this quiet corner of the Eye near your makeshift home where the brightness streams in.
It’s impossible for you to lose track of time, but you stay in the sun beam for longer than strictly necessary, reluctant to leave even after the burst of energy begins as your body metabolises the UV. Your stomach is still empty, but you’re a little less tired, and warmed to your artificial bones from the fierce glare. For a little over a second your mind quietens and you don’t think about the heavy work you are preparing yourself to do this cycle, or the fractured dreams that ruined your rest, or even the ever-growing list of things you need to do when — if — you finally get your hands on the next vial of stabilizer.
Then it’s over, and you shrug your layers back on and get to work.
You need more money than a shift helping out welding is likely to get you, and your brain is too foggy for any complex work anyway. Luckily a transport ship has just docked and can’t afford to be picky about who unloads their cargo as long as you’re quick about it. You have to pull two shifts in a row until you have the amount you need, and by the end of it your hands are shaking so hard that it’s difficult to wipe away the oil smudges on your cheek.
In this condition the most you can manage is a limping trudge through the station, but that’s fine. Running would only call attention to you that you can’t afford to deal with right now, and no one gives you a second glance as you trudge your way through busy corridors with your hood up, eyes down.
Nothing goes wrong. No one steals your money on the way, no one costs you with another debt you have to pay just for being alive. The Yatagan goon is still in the place Sabine promised he would be, and the price hasn’t risen in the time you’ve been getting the money together. It’s a little anticlimactic after all the build up in your mind, the time it’s taken you to get here.
With the stabilizer in your pocket, you trudge your way back through the station towards home, still dazed with hunger and touching the little vial in your pocket that has replaced the solid cylinder of credits. You aren’t used to the weight and you check it reflexively through your layers just to make sure it is still there. Now the task is done you feel deflated, your mind goes automatically to what comes next after you find a quiet spot to inject it, and the list is so long it makes you dizzy.
Or it might be the nutrient deficiency. As the thought strikes you, you’re passing the Overlook bar, and thanks to the double shift you pulled, you still have a handful of credits left. You stumble inside and the owner recognises you, but you don’t have the energy to care. She slides a packet of rations over the bar before you even have to ask.
You twist the cap and squeeze the calorie-rich mush into your mouth, tipping your head back and working at the corners to make sure you get it all out. When you lower your head back down, satisfied, the bartender is still looking at you. You glance around the bar. It must be either early or late, because there’s hardly any other customers here.
“…What?” You say. It’s the first non-necessary word you’ve said to anyone all cycle.
The bartender tilts her head, not even a little bit embarrassed to have been caught staring, or intimidated by your appearance. She says, “Oh, sorry. I’ve just never seen anyone else actually enjoy those things. Most people don’t come back after their first one… something about the aftertaste?”
You hadn’t realised the ration packets had a taste, let alone an aftertaste. You remember the spicy mushroom noodles from the seller up-station, the way the heat grew in your mouth and tingled your sinuses. Is that what eating everything is supposed to feel like? The bartender is still in front of you. You shrug “They’re a cheap source of nutrients.”
She laughs, even though weren’t trying to be funny. You don’t know how to respond to this, so you get down from your stool and turn to leave. “Hey, you know my offer from a few cycles back still stands! Let me know if you ever want to pull a shift or two, I could use all the help I can get back here.” She gestures to the empty bar. You think she may be making a joke.
It’s not far to your temporary shipping container home. You sink down to your nest of bedding and unpeel your layers so you can administer the stabilizer into the meat of your thigh, then sink into a deep sleep. When you wake up you can’t remember any of your dreams.
45
Waking in Hypha commune is at least warmer than the uninsulated shipping container. It's too busy though. The hab lights rise in time for the morning shift to wake up, so there's no question of sleeping in, even if you're not actually on the morning shift. You skip the showers because as tempting as washing in actual free-flowing, warm water is, the amount of people in the open space makes it awkward especially as becoming a member of the commune didn't stop you from being an ongoing item of curiosity.
You pull your clothes on and gather your belongings, your foraging bag comfortingly heavy with the weight of your prizes from the previous cycle. A good mushroom harvest, a few promising pieces of scrap that you still have to clean up, but will hopefully be the answer to that stubborn leak in the abandoned housing unit you've been fixing up whenever you have a spare moment in between everything else on your ever-growing list of ever-more urgent tasks.
The previous cycle had been good, even though you had planned to pick up a dinner shift at the commune to get something to eat but weren’t able to after the wastes took more out of you than you had prepared for. In the end you arrived at the commune too late to do anything but register for a bed. You slept well, though, and you feel buoyed enough by last cycle’s success that you don’t want to waste more time here by picking up the breakfast shift, even though it means going hungry for now.
You don’t often spend the night here, despite having earned the right to with hard work just like any other member, and the alternative being an unfurnished shipping container. You have come to like the security and the solitude of the container, and its location in the middle of the hustle and bustle at the heart of the station. Here the commune is stranded between the wastes and the mushroom farms, the quiet makes you nervous, it’s too easy for you to get cut off.
You need to be down-station this cycle, and you pick your way through the mushroom groves to get to the ferry, trying to stay clear of as many other people as possible. The air is heavy with moisture and spores. The paths here are not quite as wild to you now as they seemed when you first explored, but you can’t get complacent. This place is always changing, paths meandering one cycle when before they had been straight, a once reliable route to the ferry leading now to a dead end. You’ve heard people say the spores in the damp air are dangerous, and you’re lucky that your mechanical body makes you hardier than most others who risk themselves to get a good harvest.
As you wait for the ferry you review the list of responsibilities and requirements you need to attend to, a habit you have formed even though it only feeds the ever-present pit of anxiety in your stomach. Thanks to a recent run of what some might call luck, your body is stable for now and you have two vials of stabilizer and a decent amount of credits to your name. It’s more than you ever thought you would have when you first started scraping out a life here, but it’s still impossible to feel secure.
Most pressingly there’s the tracker in your body that's calling out to your corporate overlords, and a mystery bounty hunter on the way, undoubtedly a more competent one than the first one they sent. There’s the fact that the only person who can disable said tracker has so far just used the leverage it gives him over you to entangle you in his own agenda. There’s the first bounty hunter's debt at the Kompressor to work off if you want his help against his replacement (is it worth it?). There’s Sidereal tickets that need to be worked for if you ever want to get free of this place. There’s the stubborn leak and the sealant problem in the abandoned housing unit that needs fixing up (but what’s the point if you’re not likely to stick around?). There’s a small child to babysit. There’s the still in Tala’s back room that needs to be fixed up. There’s the Yatagan lieutenant who won’t leave you alone. There’s the need to eat and sleep. And there’s the weight of all the past betrayals and disappointments that drag you down and make you wonder what the point of all this is, why bother doing anything if it will never get better?
The ferry pulls in and the embarkation alarm breaks you out of your spiral. You take a deep breath, which somehow still grounds you even though you don’t need the oxygen. You need to prioritise, that’s all, the same as every other cycle.
The first thing you do when you get to the Lowend is drop off the scrap pieces at the abandoned habitation unit. They’re heavy, and even though you might be able to sell them and you might be leaving on the Sidereal at some point in the near future and you might be murdered or worse kidnapped by a bounty hunter, the thought of your own place is too tempting to resist. Next you drop the mushrooms off at Emphis’ stall. He promises you the meal of your life in a few cycles once he’s got the ingredients together, and you wonder if he knows how low the bar is. You have enough time to fit in a shift on the fit-up crew for the Sidereal bridge, which is satisfying work if you focus on the progress in front of your eyes and don't look up to see the enormity of what's left to do.
You have just enough energy left to make your way back up station to the Lowend and watch Mina for Lem as he leaves for the late shift. Their unit is older than the one you’ve been fixing up, tucked into the bowels of the station and close enough to the nearby generators that it’s always warm and filled with a comforting low hum. The lights are soft and Mina is already in bed by the time you arrive. She stirs as Lem presses a kiss to her forehead and rushes out, but soon settles back into sleep.
It’s easy to zone out as you sit there and watch Mina sleep. The space is too small for you to do anything else, you’re worried about making a noise that will wake her up. Her breathing is long and even, chest rising and falling and rising and falling. The more you watch her the stranger it seems to you. You know the systems that power your own body, can maintain them, modify them if you need to. It’s impossible to imagine what having a body like Mina’s must feel like, one that works automatically, grows and changes, so full of life?
Just as you are spiralling down this thought path, Mina’s face crumples and she shakes herself awake. She stares around the unit, eyes wild, until she sees you and her gaze settles. “It’s you,” she says, frowning.
“It’s me.” Her rabbit toy fell off the bed at some point, and you move forward to pick it up and offer it to her. “Did you have a bad dream?”
Mina snatches the rabbit back and clutches it tightly as she nods. She is still looking at you, seeming expectant. This is a new scenario, but you give it your best shot. “You can go back to sleep. It’s safe. I’ll be here to watch you until Lem comes home. He’ll be back soon.”
She frowns, yawns and nods again somehow all at the same time. That wasn’t too difficult. You think you’re in the clear until — “Robot, tell me a story,” She demands.
“A story?”
She nods.
“What kind of story?”
“A Bun-bun story.”
“Well…” You don’t seem to have any other choice, but you’ve never heard a story about a rabbit before. You take a deep breath, trying to come up with a kind of story a child might like to hear. “There was a rabbit called Bun-bun, and they had a best friend called Mina. One cycle…” The story you tell is rambling, you keep your voice pitched low and soothing, deliberately trying to lull Mina back to sleep before you reach the end, because you have no idea what the end will be. Mina’s eyes drift closed, and she is sleeping deeply by the time Lem comes home — stepping through the door softly so as not to wake her up.
You have a much harder time falling asleep when you get back to your shipping container. It seems colder than usual compared with the cozy warmth of Lem and Mina’s home. You try and tell yourself the Bun-bun story as you fall asleep, but you still can’t work out the ending.
114
You wake in your own housing unit, comfortable and safe.
You’ve made the space your own, and not just in the way that you repaired the life support systems and reprogrammed the locking mechanism. You have a bed that is more than a few blankets piled on the floor, you have warmth, you have space and security. You have a drawing of Bun-bun pinned to one of the walls that Mina gave you before she left.
There’s no rush to get up, so you lie in your bed and do nothing, a novelty that you’ve only recently come to appreciate. For as long as you can remember there’s been things to do, looming deadlines, threats to your life or to people you cared about that you had to scramble to counter. It’s disorienting to be free of them, almost uncomfortable, but you’re finally starting to learn who you are now you have the chance to grow.
When you do decide to get out of bed and venture outside, the stray is sitting at the corner that leads to your unit, flicking its tail and watching passersby with narrow, discerning eyes. It spots you — or maybe more accurately the packet of crackers in your hand — and gets to its feet with a ‘mrrp’ to weave in and out of your legs. You crumble the crackers and it bends its head to eat. You feed the cat every cycle but you haven’t given it a name. It doesn’t seem right to, you don’t have any claim on this creature, you just enjoy each other’s company. You scratch behind the cat’s ears and it arches its back into your touch.
The ferry across the Founder’s Gap is quiet at this time in the cycle. It’s been a while since you spent time in the Greenway, and you want to spend some time harvesting mushrooms and dropping in on Riko to collect the latest batch of your homegrown stabilizer. You administered a dose last night, and you’ve grown so relaxed that your stockpile is down to just one vial — something that would have filled an earlier version of yourself with paralysing anxiety.
Even when you were first able to manufacture your own stabilizer you were terrified that someone, somehow would take it away from you, collecting vials and vials of the stuff and hiding them away in different place just in case the process failed or the Hypha commune threw you out or you were kidnapped or— No. You shut down that thought process. Something has changed within you, though slowly enough that you didn’t notice it.
It’s not that the bad things you worried about never happened to you. You’ve been betrayed enough, made choices that you’re still not sure were right. Your hand twitches at the memory of Ethan’s gun jumping in your grip, of Maywick and Ethan lying dead, leaking blood and mechanical fluid. Ankhita’s face as she tried to justify what she did, and the weight of those 200 credits that you hated yourself for taking, hated the world for being a place where you had to take them or starve.
You’ve said goodbye to people you love and watched them leave you behind. You still watch the wheeling stars outside the Eye and think about Lem and Mina on that ship, flying away, able to leave because you helped them. Was it the right thing to do? Will they be better off out there than here, with you? Should you have gone with them, faced the unknown once again? Should you have shed your physical limitations and become pure data? Sometimes, on bad days, the idea is still tempting. You’ve had many opportunities to leave and took none of them, and you’re not sure if it’s thanks to bravery or cowardice.
You could never have dreamed that you would have this, a life predictable enough that you are… bored? Content?
The mushroom harvest isn’t the best today, but it doesn’t bother you. There will be time to come back tomorrow. When you make it to Riko’s lab she isn’t there, but the stabilizer is in its usual place and you slip it into a secure pocket in the inside of your jacket. She’s left a note for you — something about the internal politics of the commune that she needs your help with, and details of where to meet to discuss. You’ll be there, helping her is the least you can do.
Back in the Lowend you play a few rounds of tavla and win some of them, stacking up a nice pile of chits that you pocket when the game disperses. It’s not a skill that comes naturally to you, but you’ve recently learned how to use your natural poker face to your advantage, especially when playing with strangers who are likely to be unnerved by your presence and allow it to affect their game. The money slips easily into your pocket along with the stabilizer. Your safety net is growing, and with it your ability to survive any nasty surprises that might come your way in the future.
You end the day in the kitchen of the Bayantan, sipping a glass of Tala’s latest brew as you cook the choicest mushrooms from your harvest this morning. She serves the spirit on ice, giving you a generous amount because she knows that your mechanical body is more resistant to alcohol than regular people. After all the shifts you worked at the Overlook you still don’t see the point of recreational poisoning, but the sharp shock of the Girolle is a sensation you haven’t found anywhere else. Tala watches you work in the spare moments she has from the bar, leaning on her elbows through the serving hatch and making you laugh with her unflattering descriptions of customers.
That night, back in your own bed in your own hab unit, you remember a story about a rabbit and you sleep easily.