Chapter 12

WHAT LEAVES US WHEN WE DIE? IT CAN’T BE THE FLESH, BECAUSE THAT STAYS. IT CAN’T BE THE PHYSICAL MIND, FOR EVERY NEURON THAT MAKES UP OUR BRAINS REMAIN THERE WHEN WE DIE. IS THE SOUL THEREFORE LITTLE MORE THAN THE ELECTRICAL IMPULSES THAT BOUNCE AROUND INSIDE OUR HEADS LIKE A BILLION PINBALLS, AIMING FOR A HIGH SCORE? ARE WE NOTHING MORE THAN ELECTRICITY LOOKING FOR A WAY TO ESCAPE?

-ON BIOCHEMICAL SIGNALING, DR. FRANCO GIO.

.•° ✿ °•.

“Sleeping Beauty, am I going to have to kiss you to wake you from your slumber? I’m no Prince Charming anymore, but perhaps a Princess Charming will suffice?”

When I opened my eyes everything was out of focus, blurs and blobs of color and vague shapes, and it took me just a moment to long to notice that things weren’t actually unfocused at all; it was just that there was something extremely close to my face.

Another face.

Lilt’s face.

She leaned back with a wry smirk and held a lilac-colored bowl in one hand, with a little baby blue spoon in the other. I felt groggy and disorientated and struggled to wipe the sleep from my eyes, but the moment I willed it to be so I became acutely aware that I was Delinked. Briefly I took inventory of my own body and realized that it was a Full Delink, which meant that below the soft covers pulled up over my body, I was little more than a body and a head.

Why? What had happened?

“I don’t... the test...?”

I felt disorientated; my internal diagnostic systems were working just the way they ought to, but the parts of me that were human and not Skipper were taking a while to catch up.

“The test went fantastic, Cadence, we gathered so much data and we’re incredibly optimistic.”

As she spoke, Lilt’s eyes sparkled with glee and her cherry-colored hair seemed to glow in the dim light

of the bedroom. She gathered a pale yellow paste onto the spoon and extended it out to my lips.

“Open up, your body needs the food. It’s banana custard.”

“I hate banana flavored things...” I whined, screwing up my nose, to which Lilt countered.

“No, you hate fake banana flavored things. This is made with real bananas, so open up or it’s going to go cold.”

The feeling of hunger wasn’t one that I liked very much, and all parts of what little body I had at the moment agreed with Lilt that I should eat. So I parted my lips, and Lilt guided the spoon into my mouth. The custard was hot, sweet, and the taste of bananas was nostalgic to my brain in ways that very few things were; it felt as much an extinct memory as the smell of a summers day.

“Why am I Delinked?” I asked, because that question seemed the most pertinent in the face of the fact I was being fed like a child by my new handler. “I don’t remember anything about the test...”

“Don’t worry about it right now, Skipper; we just needed you to cycle your systems to full-unlock before we could put you back together.”

I nodded in understanding, but that understanding became something more akin to concern as my brain finished waking up and started to follow that line of reasoning. I needed to cycle my systems to full- unlock, because they were still locked which meant they were under the impression I was Linked.

Which means that I’d undergone an Involuntary Delinking.

Which meant...

“Something went wrong, didn’t it, Lilt?”

Her fae-like features seemed to be caught off-guard by my question, and I could see the way her eyes flickered with contemplation over whether or not she was going to lie to me. At the very least I appreciated that she was willing to consider telling me the truth.

After a moment for her and an eternity for me, she smiled and fed me another spoon of custard as she settled on her answer.

“For things to go wrong, we’d need to have a baseline of what to expect when something went right. We didn’t know what to expect, ergo it wouldn’t be correct to say something went wrong.”

The mouthful of sweetness I was swallowing couldn’t do quite enough to counter the bitterness her answer made me feel. I screwed up my nose and rolled my eyes at her, because it was one of the few parts of my body that I could express frustration with.

“That’s such a vacuous answer, Lilt, and you know it. What happened, in detail, or I’m not helping you with your project anymore.”

The edges of her painted lips pursed and then her entire face broke into the backdrop of a small giggle, or chuckle, or something else at least as patronizing.

“Skipper Cadence Cassandra, we both know for a fact that you’d never turn your back on the chance to help humanity. If I told you to set yourself on fire and everyone would be safe, you’d already have lit the match.”

I certainly thought her analogy was in poor taste, given my past, but I also thought she knew it was and that almost made it worse. Nope, it absolutely made it worse.

“Cut it out, Lilt, just tell me what happened, alright? It’s not like I can go anywhere anyway.”

“That’s true!”

She found it funnier than I did, judging by her smile. I didn’t understand how a smile so pretty could be attached to a woman who was so disingenuous.

I still had no idea who Lilt Jackson was, I had no way of knowing if this was the real her, or if any of the faces she showed me were even in her top five favorite selves. If she were a Skipper, like I was, I’d be able to feel her truth.

But she wasn’t, so I had to settle for seeing her lies.

Lilt Jackson fed me another spoonful of sweet fruit confection and acquiesced to give me at least some of what I wanted.

“You Linked successfully with the Faering as anticipated and we got plenty of data. You weren’t able to reach a full -I-Domain Alignment, but we also didn’t expect that you would on the first attempt. Locomotive Parity was at 14% which is about what we anticipated, and rejection didn’t happen until 1794 seconds after the Linking, which is 182% the length of time we thought that would take.”

I was following everything she said up until that last part and if I had arms I would have raised one hand to stop her, but I didn’t so I had to be content being rude and interrupting her.

“Rejection? What does that mean?”

“Oh, it’s when you’re rejected, Cadence.”

She laughed, again.

I didn’t, again.

“Alright, alright, lighten up Skipper, it’s just a little humor. Feeling a bit of levity isn’t going to make you any less of a legendary hero - especially when all this is said and done. I told you that we didn’t build this Faering, remember? We grew it. And that means that it’s a living body and you’re a foreign entity being introduced to it; rejection was never a matter of if and always a matter of when.”

That made sense when she explained it that way, but I sure didn’t like being referred to as a foreign entity. It made me feel like a virus, or an infection; I knew that she meant it more that I was like a heart transplant, but that certainly wasn’t the way it made me feel.

“So I Linked, and thirty minutes later, I was rejected. So there was an Involuntary Delinking - is the damage to the Faering significant?”

Typically an Involuntary Delinking was process that involved the partial or full destruction of the Truss, and it pained my little heart to think about that beautiful machine - or creature, maybe? - being damaged on account of this experiment. It really was beautiful and not in that subjective and lanky way that Lilt was, but just objectively speaking.

“Oh, it wasn’t damaged at all. It’s organic, and we had synapse connection stimulators in place to release you when the rejection occurred; you know, like those little electrical pads they use to stimulate your muscles when you’re in for extended maintenance? Similar to that. We sent the signal, and you were released. Your body just didn’t know it yet. Once you’ve cycled your servos back to full-unlock, we can get you Linked with your extremities again and you can go back to being mobile.”

It was a lot to take in, because while I could take it on face value that I was this weird amalgamation of flesh and machine, of gears and guts; I’d at least started out human. I’d had the chance to have ten years of life before I became what I was. The way that Lilt talked about the Faering made it obvious that the body inside that Truss had never even been given that chance.

It felt grotesque, even though I knew that was a double standard. I was part person and part machine, and if I didn’t object with being connected to the mechanical, then I had no leg to stand on when it came to being appalled at the notion of being connected to the organic.

Hah.

No leg to stand on.

Because I didn’t have legs.

Gallows humor wasn’t befitting a Skipper, but thankfully the thoughts that ran through my head were nobodies business but my own.

“Hey Lilt?”

“Mm?”

She was readying me another spoon of custard.

“Where did it come from? You grew it, right? That means the tissue came from someone. Stem cells, or cloning, or something?”

I didn’t know a whole lot about science outside the context of what went into making me be me, but I knew enough to ask that question. And this turned out to be another question that Lilt seemed to struggle deciding upon how to answer, so ultimately, she answered my question with an unrelated question.

“Do you remember anything from the Linking?”

“Is that going to affect the answer you give me?”

“It is.”

“Then wouldn’t me telling you the answer to that invalidate the usefulness of what you tell me?” It felt good to flip her own darn charming words back against her for once.

“It’s going to determine if I tell you anything at all.”

No matter how well I thought I was doing at outmaneuvering Lilt Jackson, it turned out that she was a far more formidable foe than any I’d faced on a Run before.

“I think I had a dream.”

She tilted her head with the spoon of custard help midway between her and I, and for a moment I thought she might have said something, but all I got was a noncommittal nod. So I continued and gave her a little more.

“About The Burning Sky.”

“You had a dream about a Run?” She seemed almost relieved to hear that, but the relief left her face when I shook my head and clarified.

“No, I had a dream about the days the sky burned. About my parents farm.”

She dropped the spoon back into the bowl, set it down on the bedside table outside my field of vision, and then leaned in close to me with her eyes narrowed. For the first time in a long while, I felt like I perhaps had the upper hand here.

When had things become adversarial with Lilt?

Oh right, it was when I found out she lived in luxury while we lived on rations, and when I realized that she was a walking assembly of lies and convenient faces to wear for different situations.

That to Lilt Jackson, I was the means to her own ends.

Ends that, at least for now, I truly believed would benefit all of humanity and therefore I was willing to be the means to.

I pouted, and she got impatient.

“What happened in the dream, Skipper?”

“I don’t know, Lilt. I was playing in the blackcurrant bushes on the last day on earth? It’s not that uncommon a dream to have. If we had a concept of mental healthcare, I’d probably have PTSD. I did burn to death, remember? These aren’t new to me.”

“Was anything different?”

My neck flexed my head against the pillow and I offered her a confused look.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean did anything seem out of place? Did anything seem like it didn’t belong?”

It took me a moment to think about that question and run through the dream in my head. The bushes, the picnic, playing hide and seek, going home to Mama and Papa, and then the sky burning, the house collapsing and...

Carmen.

“...there was a girl there.

I furrowed my brows and pursed my lips, trying to process that discrepancy in my head.

“There was a girl there, she talked funny, she didn’t feel out of place when I was having the dream, but now that I think about it...”

There was an electricity in the air, a crackling feeling of anticipation, and at the same time it was almost as if Lilt was nervous. I thought about that; about seeing her nervous, about how she’d felt when she saw my arm Delinking and the fake groupie fangirl act she’d given me when we met. How insincere she actually was.

Was this even real? Was she even nervous? How could I even know?

“I think she was my cousin.”

Lilt let out a deep breath as I lied, and she nodded. Relieved. She was relieved to hear that lie. Which was the first time I felt like I knew something about Lilt that wasn’t carefully curated and intended for me to know.

So she was worried about this; she was worried about my dream being incongruent. My dream that I’d had when she’d Linked me with a living Faering that didn’t require Oversight.

Was Carmen real?

What did she have to do with the Faering?

What else was Lilt hiding from me?

I feigned a yawn and smiled an angelic smile, the same sort we’d use for marketing materials on the posters that adorned bare and broken walls on the Stations.

“I think I need to have a little more rest, Lilt, my head is a mess and my senses are overloaded. Do you think you could wake me when it’s time for me get Linked with my arms and legs? I’ve cycled to full-unlock, so I’m ready when you are.”

There was an uneasy silence between the two of us, as Lilt decided for the Nth time which cards she intended to play to me, and then decided mercifully not to call my bluff.

“You got it, Skipper. You get some rest and I’ll have someone in here to change your padding in a bit, and then we can get you Linked again. I’ll be in my room doing notes.”

I faked a smile for her, and it was only once she‘d left that I realized that everything in this room was at Skipper height. The bed. The sink. The comms panels. The little table and chairs, and the entire kitchenette in the corner.

This room was made for a Skipper.

It made for me.

I wasn’t sure if I loved that, or hated it.