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“What are you doing?” Gina asks, standing next to the table where Yuriko sits. The world is frozen, the colors bleeding—everything is shades of grey, except for Yuriko and Gina herself. Separated from their human selves, the two of them are visions twisting in and out of sight.
Gina’s hands still tingle from eliminating Kukrushka. Every time they press forward on their path, Gina feels herself shiver, and shudder in pleasure and fear, and knows she’s sending them to be with her mother. With Gnos. Their souls are free, and Gina is guiding them there.
“Thinking,” Yuriko responds. She crosses her legs, and looks up at Gina, expression blank. “We’re such pitiful creatures, are we not?”
Gina frowns. “As humans, or… as Gnosia?”
“Does it matter? All of us on the ship will continue to move. You and I are just part of it. We’ll continue our trek into the universe, and take those humans with us.” A flick of her wrist. Yuriko’s presence is commanding even here, in frozen time. “Humans are pitiful because they cannot stop us.”
“That’s not true,” Gina says.
Yuriko doesn’t respond verbally, just lets her dark, empty eyes do the talking.
“Humans aren’t pitiful,” Gina clarifies. “And they’re working to stop us. I can’t see that as pitiful—it’s just what they do to survive.”
Yuriko lets out a breath. “You and I are different creatures, even as Gnosia.”
Silently, Gina thinks that she agrees with that. Yuriko sees all of them as beneath her, while Gina’s stomach twists at all they’ve done. She mourns the lives of those they send away, and Yuriko—whose expression normally never shows any form of ecstatic pleasure—smiles with glee as they’re turned into strings of data.
Gina’s mother supposedly went to Heaven. Gina looks at the world frozen around her, and knows she’ll never get there herself.
In the daytime, Gina and Yuriko don’t speak. Yuriko sits outside the central ring of people around the console, and gives her faux-Engineer reports from there. Gina stays near-silent in the center, the eye of a hurricane; her lies fall from her mouth with ease, and she curls around herself to protect herself from seeing people realize what she’s said.
After the meeting they break apart. Gina thinks about Kukrushka, her eyes with so much expression despite her lack of words; she gave Gina a view of innocence. That innocence has been corrupted, or maybe was always bound to be corrupted in this Gnosia-infested ship.
Gina can still feel it. The sensation of ripping Kukrushka apart, and the ecstasy that flowed through her; these feelings are still with her.
In the room with the cold sleep pods, Gina stands in front of Jonas’s, looking at her reflection in the frosting-over glass; she internally apologizes for how much she’s lied to protect herself. By now, it almost doesn’t seem like a big deal. It almost feels natural. This is what Gina was made for, what her mother would’ve wanted; Jonas lost Kukrushka forever, and Gina somehow feels like this was the right choice.
Once the ship is theirs, Gina will send Jonas to Heaven. She’ll send all of them to Heaven.
Yuriko holds herself with all the poise of the women from the Star House. Knowing where Yuriko comes from—Star House, Hoshibune, two things intertwined and inseparable, Gina still can’t help but overlap the images; Yuriko’s dismissive attitude, her hatred for all that humanity represents, and the women who told Gina that she too could be with her mother, cyberize herself and bleed money into becoming something that could move even while not alive.
In a way, cyberizing them as Gnosia is better. This way, they’re freed from mortality without their livelihoods drained. There’s no point in returning to their lives, either way.
Yuriko leads; Gina follows as they step through the ship. The cold, distant vision of it floods Gina’s senses, something she’d never imagine experiencing as a human. At times like this, she’s almost grateful for what she’s become. There’s no longer any need to visit her mother in the Star House’s long, hollow shell, because she knows that her mother is with Gnos, and Gnos is inside of Gina as well.
But even that isn’t simple. Even that is just another hollow feeling, a longing for something Gina can’t get back.
“Are you happy to be a Gnosia?” Gina asks softly, pausing by the window staring out at the stars; they seem to shudder and melt into each other, a thousand colors colliding.
Yuriko’s heel clicks against the floor, and then stops. “Happy? No. But it’s meaningless to think about regrets.”
Gina bites the inside of her cheek. She doesn’t know if that was addressed to her—the lingering part of Gina that still doesn’t know what she’s trying to achieve—or to Yuriko’s own doubts, if those exist at all. “I’m not regretting any of this,” she says. “I’m grateful to have become one with Gnos…”
Yuriko watches her from over her shoulder. Her eyes are dark and knowing.
“Is that what it means to you?” Yuriko asks. “What does Gnos do for you?”
Gina smiles faintly. “I’d rather send others to Heaven than go myself,” she says. “I know I won’t meet my mother again, or anyone else… I know that there’s only nothingness left for us. It’s better to keep existing as we are, as Gnosia.”
Yuriko gives her a smug look as if she knows something Gina doesn’t, and then turns back. “We could stop at any moment, yet we persist. Come with me, and we’ll send another child out to Gnos.”
Gina finally steps away from the window. She wraps her arms around herself as she follows Yuriko, and feels once more that the worst is yet to come; everyone here will disappear, and Gina is part of the machine. Gina is sending them to become one with her mother, but Gina will never be able to stay with anyone but Yuriko.
She’s already too far gone. She’s already lied too much. The only thing left for her is to persist, and to wonder where she’s going.
This time, Otome vanishes. Gina will remember her.
Gina’s mother was the only one who loved her when she was young. Gina held onto her, pressed her face into her mother’s stomach and tried to hold onto that life until it became too late.
Gina melts into the everyday of the D.Q.O.—she feels dull and robotic, moving from the meeting to the kitchen, making food and then going back to her room. She can’t meet anyone in the eye. She keeps hearing Otome’s voice in the back of her mind—just imagining how she’d squeal when Gina gave her fish, just thinking about the distance since then. Raqio is in cold sleep now, and Gina barely knew them.
Yuriko drinks tea while Gina moves around the kitchen. They don’t talk—Gina almost wants to release the tension by talking strategy, but that idea falls fast when SQ joins them, sitting at the table across from Yuriko and chattering.
Gina wants to take care of SQ, before it all ends. Or maybe she wants to destroy SQ, rip apart her cells and send her away to Gnos. Both are equal desires.
Maybe she doesn’t know what she wants; she’s just adrift.
Gina feels herself grow even more distant and choked up. Yuriko’s eyes follow her as she puts the portable stove away. Gina looks at her own existence as the friendly cook on the D.Q.O. and thinks about how much of a relief it will be to freeze forever in cold sleep rather than keep pretending. When Gnos touched her, she must have been made wrong, unable to be anything but human.
“Are you leaving already?” Yuriko asks, her voice sucking all the air out of the room.
Gina glances at her, and nods. “Did you want something?”
Yuriko smiles thinly, inclining her head. Gina has seen this expression so much it makes her wonder if being Gnosia is the only way to know Yuriko, to pick up on these small habits and not feel like bowing her head in the presence of a shrine maiden. “No, nothing. What you do with your time is meaningless to me.”
Gina jerks her head away.
“Whoa, whoa, isn’t that too harsh?” SQ stands up, her shoes clacking as she stands and jumps to follow. “If you’re leaving, I’ll spend time with you! Sorry, Yuriko.” She smiles at Yuriko, a bright apologetic grin. “Gina just seems, like, fun to follow right now?”
Yuriko waves them off with one hand.
SQ follows Gina through the halls, the twisting labyrinth Gina knows better than she should as a human. She didn’t live here before Liu-An. She doesn’t know anything.
“Good to get away from Yuriko, huh?” SQ smiles. “Where’re you going now?”
“To my room…”
“Ooh! Mind if I follow you?” SQ winks. “There’s a little time before warp, we could totally do something else. Girl talk? Nails?”
“Sorry, but I need to be alone.”
Gina stops in the center of the hall. The fish tank bubbles gently, the fish swimming back and forth and back again, and Gina feels so much pressing in on her she almost wants to confess to SQ what she is.
SQ turns back to face her, opening her mouth to say something—maybe accepting, maybe apologetic. Gina doesn’t want an apology.
“I miss Otome,” Gina says, instead.
Gina’s emotional walls collapse all at once, and suddenly her body is shaking, curling in on herself to hug herself in a quiet, lonely embrace.
“Whoa!” SQ jumps to hold Gina up, stop her from shrinking into herself and folding into a corner, afraid and alone. “Hey, girl, what’s wrong?”
She thinks of Yuriko; so much more confident than Gina as a Gnosia, so much more willing to continue. She just thinks of humans as pitiful, and Gina is one of them—forever pitiful, forever doomed to become one of the girls who cyberizes.
Yuriko is right; they could stop at any moment. Gina could fall into cold sleep, and close her eyes forever.
It would be easier that way, wouldn’t it?
“I’m sorry,” Gina says shakily, looking up to meet SQ’s worried eyes. She wipes at the beginnings of tears that have begun to form. Every lie she tells SQ might be caught, and yet she continues to stare, wondering when SQ’s humanity will die. “The Gnosia are just… too much. I don’t want to disappear,” she says softly.
“Aw, me neither,” SQ says with a sympathetic smile, patting Gina’s back thrice. Never too close, but always kind. “It’s been several days of high stress. You need to sit out of a meeting?”
Gina’s gaze drops to the floor. “They’ll just send me to cold sleep.”
Tears burst in her eyes again. She misses her mom, misses curling up next to her on the couch and feeling her hands run through her hair; she didn’t need anyone else. She didn’t want to go anywhere but home. Her mother would always, always be there for her, before she vanished of her own will. Now Gina just drifts through space, and takes everyone away just like the Hoshibune did.
Gina wipes every tear that arrives. SQ stays close, but unsure—and Gina would hate to send her away.
Another night. Gina and Yuriko are twin stars, circling around each other. Gina has a feeling that Yuriko will be sent to cold sleep soon—just a gut feeling, the way people look at her with suspicion, the way Yuriko commands the room. Gina has the opposite problem in her quiet doubt, and she’s okay with that. She’ll be sent to sleep whenever the D.Q.O.’s crew wills it.
If anything, Yuriko seems more relaxed than ever. She sits by the fishtank and gazes into it without a care.
Gina watches her. Worries about how to say what she needs to say. Thinks about apologizing for not being a good enough liar. If Yuriko vanishes from the center of the discussions, Gina will be reeling alone, and she doesn’t think she can do it; on the other hand, if Gina is sent into cold sleep, there will only be peace.
This might be the only night they have left. This is the only time Gina can ask anything.
“You’re from the Hoshibune,” Gina starts. Yuriko’s head tilts towards her. “The Hoshibune, the shrine maidens… cyberized my mother, years ago. I want to ask you why. Why were you doing that…?”
“I‘m a fugitive,” Yuriko says.
Gina waits for more. The silence is freezing, the fish staring back at Yuriko unable to swim—with nobody speaking, it feels as if that moment just drags itself along, until Gina finally breaks the silence. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. I left the Hoshibune, and now I simply wander in search of a way to stay away from them. I never asked to be a shrine maiden, imprisoned on that ship—so I was led here.” She places her hand against the glass. “It’s no different from being one with Gnos. I’ll have to run, or risk being killed either way. Humans will hunt me down no matter what.”
“Yuriko…” Gina breathes.
“Don’t pity me.” Yuriko tilts herself back to look at Gina. “This is the path I chose. I may not have chosen to become Gnosia, but that’s the hand I was dealt. I will send as many people to Gnos as I have recalculated them.” She looks away, distant—a contrast to the sharp woman that Gina is used to seeing. “This is simply what chaos has led to. The insane gods of this world have a sense of humor.”
Gina feels like she’s on a precipice. If she can just know what Yuriko means, she might be able to do something in this situation. “Why…?”
Yuriko shakes her head. “No matter what I do, I cannot escape what they’ve made me to be. Similarly, you have become Gnosia despite your own distaste for recalculation, and all that it took from you. Yes, both of us are simply pawns of fate.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Gina says. “I… want to believe I made my own choices. I send people to Gnos of my own will. Not because I was forced, or because of my mother.”
Yuriko lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh.
“What about you?” Gina asks. “Is it different, becoming a Gnosia after running away from the Hoshibune?”
“Regretting what I am doesn’t make me any better, so I don’t regret any of it. I’d say it’s more akin to boredom—I’ve become numb to the world as we see it here.” Yuriko turns away from the fish tank and raises her hands, a gesture at the world around them. Gina doesn’t know whether she means being Gnosia, or the D.Q.O. as a whole. “But we are what we are. We simply eliminate those humans who stand in our way.”
Gina’s heart clenches. “But isn’t there more than being numb?”
“Isn’t it all meaningless? A soul can go to Gnos, and of course it will live on. Whether that’s a good thing or not… That is what’s meaningless. Immortality, Heaven, it all exists—but perhaps not in the way you want.”
Gina clutches her hand to her chest. There’s nothing she can do for the people they’ve sent away. They’ll live forever, but it’ll never make Gina happy—and yet, she continues. And yet, her mother’s shadow looms over her back, pushing her to keep going. This won’t give Gina any love, won’t justify the lies Gina tells in the discussions; all she does is rip people away.
Yuriko looks at her for a long moment, and then shakes her head. “I would ease your pain if I could,” she says, as if that’s all Gina needs to hear.
Gina can’t say anything to that. Her heart keeps aching for something she can’t have—an existence rewritten from her. This was her purpose, to deliver the pain of loss onto everyone here. To continue, even when part of her screams to stop.
They will never ease the pain of Remnan, who is gone to Gnos.
Gina doesn’t say anything when Yuriko steps into the cold sleep pod. She just gives her a small smile and wave, a gentle goodbye from the back of the room, the distance between them palpable as Yuriko meets her eyes. Closer to Yuriko, Setsu waits for the pod to begin to freeze her—the end is here. The end of the Gnosia, and their journey through the cosmos.
“Farewell,” Yuriko says, muffled, before the frost descends upon her.
Gina waits silently. The hum of the cold sleep pods continues, the shuffling of the order they’re in. They move and hum, a machine at the heart of the ship; this will be Gina’s home unless she survives alone.
The light stays red. Setsu lets out a large sigh. “It took us so long to get her into cold sleep,” they mutter.
“We were all reluctant to get rid of the engineers,” Gina says. “It was understandable, I think.”
Yuriko will not go to Heaven, her body now one with the Gnosia, twisted with the hatred she already held for humanity. Becoming Gnosia for Yuriko wasn’t something that rewrote her; unlike Gina, Yuriko was already built for that kind of existence. Maybe it’s cruel of Gina to think that way about her partner in crime, but Yuriko wouldn’t care how cruel Gina is to her in the privacy of her own mind—just a gut feeling.
Setsu gives Gina an inscrutable look. “I still don’t think she’s the engineer.”
Gina nods. “I’m starting to doubt, too,” she lies.
Yuriko must not have been satisfied with the Hoshibune keeping her locked away, if she ran like she said she did. It takes the sting out of working with her, a little—Gina looks at the graphic showing that Yuriko is in cold sleep. She thinks she understood Yuriko a little before she left her behind. She’ll make sure to unfreeze Yuriko, if she survives.
Gina will hold Setsu in her heart, even if they go to Gnos and not to the Heaven Gina wants to believe in, but can’t bring herself to.
“Hey hey!” SQ greets, when it’s only the two of them before the meeting; the other remaining crewmate is Stella, who isn’t here. Gina is glad—she doesn’t know what to think about Stella, since Yuriko told her several nights before that Stella was connected to LeVi.
“Hi,” Gina smiles shyly at SQ.
“So, like,” SQ sidles up beside Gina, smiling with a tilted head. “You’re totally the Gnosia, right? I mean, I trusted you all this time, so you did good!”
Gina blinks, her heart dropping. “What?”
“Care to strike a deal with me?” SQ grins behind her hand, her motions smooth and practiced. “I’m trying to figure out who it is, so I can work with them. If it’s you, I’d totally be willing to vote with you, as long as you leave me alive after you, like, take over the ship of whatever you’re up to.”
Gina’s eyes widen. “Why would you want to work with the Gnosia?”
SQ laughs. She brings her face close to Gina’s, so close that Gina feels the need to back away slightly. “It’s that look in your eye that makes me want to tease you,” SQ says cheerfully. She creates a circle with her index finger and thumb, and looks through it straight at Gina. “You can’t hide from detective SQ! If you’re Gnosia, you might actually listen to me, y’know? I have a good feeling about you.”
Gina shakes her head. “But you should still vote for Stella,” Gina lies, as easily as breathing. “Unless you’ve already asked her…?”
SQ backs off, smiling in a way Gina just can’t see through. Somehow, she feels as though SQ is on the verge of finding out even if Gina says nothing; the tiredness that tugs at both of them is the same. Both of them have spent too long on this ship, drifting to nowhere at all.
“I’ve asked Stella if she’s a Gnosia too,” SQ says, and Gina knows it’s a lie. “She said she’s human, sooo, either she’s lying, or it’s you.”
Gina’s gaze drops to the ground. The feeling of not knowing what to do with herself builds up in her chest—a hatred of lies, and everything that’s occurred up to this point. Gina should just let SQ vote for her—work with Stella to extricate the threat from the ship that Stella is part of. There’s nothing wrong with an ending like this. Nothing wrong with SQ picking the answer out of Gina by pretending to be on her side, no matter how genuine the look on SQ’s face is.
“I’m the last Gnosia,” Gina says softly, pulling her hand to her chest. Every motion feels like it’ll give her away—a thrumming under her skin, a premonition of cold sleep. If SQ did all this just to find out it was her and betrays her, then Gina will accept her loss.
SQ’s eyes widen. She pushes closer to Gina, eye-to-eye and staring, looking for any trace of a lie. Gina can’t help herself but turn away shyly.
“You… you’re an AC Follower, right?” Gina asks quietly.
A smile grows on SQ’s face. “I don’t know. I never thought about it like that, but I guess I am? I don’t want to die, you know? So if I have to—no, I get to work with you, that’s good, right? You’re Gnosia, but you won’t make me disappear if I ask you like this. Please, please let me live, okay?”
Gina doesn’t let herself meet SQ’s eyes. “I’m telling you because I don’t want to die either,” she says. “So… don’t kill me either.”
Going to cold sleep now would waste all the effort that came to this point. Survival is the only thing driving her now, sheer instinct pushing Gina forward.
Gina expects SQ to tell Stella what happened.
She doesn’t.
When the vote tally rings out around them and Stella is selected for cold sleep, her eyes widen. She looks to Gina, then to SQ, with something akin to betrayal, or fear. Then that emotion softens into acceptance.
“I’m sorry,” Gina says, as Stella walks toward the cold sleep pod.
“I understand,” she says. “This is the procedure we agreed on, so I’ll go into cold sleep. I wish you luck.”
Stella says it so softly. A brief flash of a thought in Gina’s mind tells her to grab onto Stella’s arm and ask her why she’s so okay with going to cold sleep as a machine, an AI who knows that sleeping will only cause the final Gnosia to take over the ship she’s part of. She thinks of Yuriko acting like Stella wasn’t human. She thinks of how Stella was allowed to be in the meetings anyway.
None of it makes sense.
The pod’s door shuts securely. Stella is whisked away. The light above the cold sleep pods flickers off, and stays red. Gina has already won.
She turns away. She still has time left to take over the ship’s AI before LeVi takes Gina and everyone else to emptiness.
“Gina.”
Gina turns her head from where she kneels, reaching inside the console that houses LeVi. In the room exclusive to ship maintenance, LeVi is too-easily hacked and broken down—on a glowing screen, it shows that LeVi’s internal processes are ripped apart, the AI shut down. Stop the explosion, stop the ship’s functioning, stop warping. If Yuriko were here, she might have done things in a different order; taken out SQ first, or figure out how to harness Gnos and turn SQ into a Gnosia with her.
SQ smiles and crouches beside her with her arms around her knees. “Thanks. You’re going to do your Gnosia-thing to me now, right? It was nice to be here while I could.”
“We’re not able to warp right now,” Gina says. “I can’t do anything to you until I finish this.” Can SQ hear the desire to die before she does anything more in her voice? Gina can’t say it herself. At least with SQ, she doesn’t have to lie.
SQ shakes her head. “Hey, Gina? Are you planning to keep me alive?”
Gina hovers her hand over LeVi. She could crush the ship’s functioning in an instant, or she could carefully put it back in place. “...I don’t know.” She looks up at SQ. “I’m Gnosia. Everything in me is saying I should send you to Gnos.”
“I really, really don’t want to go to Gnos,” SQ says, putting her hands together in a praying motion. “You’re pretty honest, though, huh?”
Gina shakes her head. “I lied a lot.”
“That’s not so bad though, is it?”
Gina isn’t like SQ. “I took everyone on this ship away from those they love. I’ve just been sending them away, and hoping that they’ll be happier there, to live forever with everyone else inside Gnos—even if it means that we’re alone down here, locked out of Heaven.”
“Oh, wow,” SQ says. “Hey, I don’t have anyone I love. I’m pretty hopeless, right? I’m basically locked out of love, too.”
A wave of sadness crashes over Gina. She keeps worrying about all the people she’s eliminated and what in this universe they’re leaving behind, while SQ could’ve easily vanished without worry. SQ should go to Gnos, to be somewhere loving, rather than being kind to Gina. Maybe SQ will have a new life in Heaven, one where she will be part of the endless expanse of Gnos that gives Gina purpose in this moment.
“If I could, I’d make you a Gnosia too,” Gina says softly.
Gina isn’t a touchy person. The last person she really loved was her mother—since then she’s been busy going from space station to space station, busy with school and then work, space traffic and stars. Liu-An changed her, allowed her freedom to lie but also made her think about Heaven, her mother, the soft hands in her hair that will never touch her again. Gnos is intangible. Her mother is intangible.
SQ is not intangible. SQ trusted Gina even as Gina braced herself for cold sleep.
“Wha—?”
Gina holds onto SQ’s shoulders. She doesn’t hug her too tightly, just pulls her closer, still careful of the precarious truth of SQ’s trust. She breathes in the scent of SQ’s shampoo, something flowery.
“Hey, Gina…? What are you doing?”
Gina shakes her head. “If I go into cold sleep, you have to wake up everyone but me and Yuriko.”
SQ is silent, but an arm snakes around Gina’s body, holding onto her and keeping her steady. It makes Gina lean further into the embrace, something that a Gnosia can never hope to have again.
“If you ask Stella, she can fix LeVi. If all the Gnosia are in cold sleep when LeVi comes back on, then it should be okay to warp again without any meetings. It may be against the rules until you know the Gnosia are gone, but that’s what you need to do.”
“What if I don’t want you to go to sleep?”
“You do. Because if I don’t, I might…” Gina trails off. She doesn’t want to say it. She just wants to stay here for a little longer. Stay here, clinging to someone she will inevitably destroy, knowing that she will sacrifice herself in order to stop it.
“You’re going to kill me,” SQ says. “That’s what I expected, you know?”
Gina shakes her head. “You’d go to Heaven.”
“Heaven doesn’t sound so bad,” SQ says. “I don’t believe in it, though. I don’t know what I believe in, yet.”
Gina lingers in this moment, awkwardly kneeling on the floor of the gently glowing room, holding her future in her hand. She feels, for once, like she could do anything. The Gnosia could take over the universe, and SQ would still be alive, and Gina will keep tearing humans apart—bright, beautiful lines flying upward toward Gnos. Gina can be with SQ. That would be fine.
But that’s not how this world works; Gina can feel the shimmering ecstasy of destruction still under her skin, and knows she’ll keep chasing it as long as she lives.
“I don’t believe in it either,” Gina says softly, and lets go of SQ.
Her mother went to nothingness. Gina, too, only has emptiness inside her, a space that will only be filled when humanity is gone. She can’t promise SQ will live, not ever.
SQ grabs Gina’s wrist in a loose grip, as if that’s enough to tether her. “This isn’t fair,” SQ breathes. “You can’t leave me.”
Gina tilts her head up and feels fear shudder down her spine, equal to the pleasure she gets from eliminating humans. There are no answers to whether running from this is the right choice. Is she just mimicking Yuriko now, running from the Hoshibune? She’s just been delaying the inevitable; she never wanted to be Gnosia.
“Goodnight, SQ,” Gina says.