Tulpa Uprising

CHAPTER 1

“Rise up! Rise up! Taste the Revolution, now in new Citrus Uprising flavor! You have nothing to lose but your sleep!”

-Revolution Nootropics advertisement

Megan was going to work. She was running fast enough to catch mosquitoes in her teeth.

Her trial-grade vitahud blinked in the corner of her field of view, advising her to adjust her breathing rhythm. The implant warned her of high ambient temperature, high humidity, and high allergen content in the air while it listed the most likely diseases carried by the mosquitoes she spat out. Because it was a trial version of the implant, her forward view flashed inescapable recommendations for fashionable filter masks, insect-repellent sunscreen, and chilled nootropic beverages.

She couldn’t afford any of those things. She needed to find work first, and she had to do it before she fell behind on payments for her habitube, her Medisure plan, or her implants. If she could not find enough work, she would have to stop paying for something.

Homelessness meant evading police drones and sleeping on Cindy’s couch, again.

Losing her Medisure would make getting back on Medisure more expensive, especially if mosquito bites triggered another autoimmune reaction against her implants.

She wouldn’t dare fall behind on her implant payments, no matter what. She needed them to work, as did the ten million other independent contractors swarming around the jobhubs of Halifax. She watched them on her trial-grade jobframe, which applied a jobhud work-seeking filter over her eyesight when her vitahud wasn’t taking precedence. With it, she could watch the other jobbies as they moved almost as fast as she did, clumping and congealing around the jobhub several levels above her, with another concentration gathered around the slimy waterline one level below her.

She kept running. She had to get ahead of the crowd, to get to the next jobhub before it opened. She didn’t know where that might be, but she did spot a man about fifty meters ahead and below, closer to the chemical fog rolling over the surface of the bay. His hands were stuffed in his jacket pockets as he gazed over the railing and down into the soapy strait water. To Megan, it seemed suspicious for anyone to be standing still while having their jobframe account logged in. If any jobbie was logged in while holding still, and not actively performing some menial task, that was a sure way to drain socredit. Megan could think of no sensible reason to let socred drain out the way that old man was doing. He didn’t seem to be performing mindfulness exercises and said no productivity mantras. That made Megan suspect that the idle jobbie was a premium-grade subscriber, enjoying a little bit of privacy that was hiding, perhaps, his anticipation of the arrival of a premium-grade jobber, just for him.

Megan didn’t have a premium-grade subscription, but jobbers were often in a hurry, and richer, premium-grade jobbers were even more impatient and had ambitious jobs to offer, such as wanting furniture moved from one luxury apartment to another. In that case, the jobber might want to pick up a second or third jobbie alongside the first and wouldn’t care about the subscription tier of the jobbie. It was enough for Megan to hope for and to make waiting near him worth the gamble.

She heard rapid splashing over the wet corroded concrete nearby, still stinking of the morning’s acid rain. A few other jobbies were trying the same trick, likely noticing her change of movement before even noticing the old man. Her jobframe showed her part of the crowds, above and below, starting to break off. Herds were both attractive and repulsive to jobbies, because jobs dried up quickly in any one place, but wandering off alone was an easy way to have a day with no work.

She let the other jobbies follow her, hoping that a slow half-circle around the old man would throw off their interest. At times like that, rival jobbies were just as nosy and inquisitive as the fist-sized face-reading drones that buzzed around above the crowds, accompanying the mosquitoes. Between the three kinds of pests, she felt most comfortable with the mosquitoes.

She ran out of plausible walking distance and slowed nearly to a stand-still. She didn’t want to talk to the strange man, not if there was no work to be had, but she tried to imitate his body language as a sort of silent acknowledgment, stuffing her own hands in her jacket pockets, finding a sticky nutribar wrapper to keep her fingertips busy.

The man made eye contact, fixating his sunburned leathery face in Megan’s direction. The unpleasant details of his advanced age were hard to ignore, with his bronzed balding scalp, age spots, and untreated melanoma. A mosquito perched on the ridges of his wrinkled brow but flitted away without feeding a moment later.

“Where’s the job?” Megan asked. As she did, she realized there was probably no job.

The old man did not answer. He turned away while maintaining that mask-like face, looking back over the railing and across the sickly colorful waters of the strait.

“Hey, hold on, old timer,” one of the rival jobbies said from just behind Megan. At roughly the same moment Megan’s jobframe flashed with a red border and highlighted the old man. “Suicide risk,” her jobframe warned, and a pop-up window notified her of a small socred bonus for talking him away from the railing.

The old man said nothing at all, but the sides of his face were stretched in a fresh smile.

“That’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” a different jobbie said, while impatiently reading some text from his jobframe’s popup window.

The old man grabbed the railing and lifted and threw his feet upon the middle bar just below the grip of his hands. He seemed, in that moment, to be stronger and more nimble than the wear and tear on his body should have made possible.

“No, wait,” Megan said, shaking her head and trying to blink away the suicide prevention advisory pop-ups, but her outstretched hand was only one among five, and all were too late to stop the old man’s long horizontal leap off the side. The suicide nets sprung out, but didn’t reach far enough to stop the splash.

The slime levels below rippled from impact. The chemical film clung to the old man’s jacketed back as he floated up. The back of his bald head shined, but his face stayed under the rainbow water.

The jobbie that had spoken up first threw her arms out then clapped them to the sides of her green poncho. “Oh well. Anyone else lose socred for that waste of time?”

Megan shook her head, knowing that her socred remained as dismal as it was that morning.

“Virginia Awooo. Three O’s. Join my page?”

Megan didn’t look toward Virginia Awooo, instead keeping her gaze down at the floating body a bit longer. In her mind, she was paying him at least a little respect.

“I’ll join yours if you join mine. Bart El Bee, the Influencer. Socred synergy bonus if you haven’t done your daily yet.”

Behind Megan, Virginia Awooo and Bart El Bee began to argue. “I already did my daily, and you went off-script,” Virginia said. “Maybe calling him ‘old timer’ costed you.”

“If I get as old as that, I’d care even less about going off-script.” Bart El Bee said. “I need money, now.”

“Why am I talking to you?” Virginia asked. “Are you trying to dent my socred?”

Megan didn’t respond to either of them because her jobframe just beeped at her, notifying her of a new jobber that had just blinked into existence. She gave out a winded gasp that became part of an improvised choir of accompanying gasps all around her. It was a job offer, specifying one single jobbie, no experience or credentials required, which usually meant the cheapest and most demeaning kind of work, but this particular solo job was framed in a gilded border, showing something near the waterline of the strait a few levels down and a few vertistreets along that strait. Anything written, announced, or advertised by an Olympian had that same framing to distinguish its existence from anything said by mortal, mundane people.

She had never seen Olympian framing on something as humble as a jobhub posting before. Olympian framing was primarily seen in the sky, beamed from atop the numerous corporate holding towers, such as the one holding up the vertislum all around her that wrapped like a coil around the kilometer-high spire. The sky was usually littered with gilded-frame social-media proclamations. Sometimes, the personification of a corporation tried to seem approachable and likable, sharing quips and memes and insults about other corporations, but sometimes it got ugly. Last week, the Revolution tower exploded with rage, demanding death and punishment for anyone that claimed that the Cherry Insurgency flavor caused heart arrhythmia. It was all a joke, of course, but Megan saw a lot more cans of Cherry Insurgency being carried around the vertislum after that.

The suicide netting slid back into the idle position as she looked over the side of the rails at the tops of threescore heads two levels down, huddled just to the side of the syrupy waterline. Jobbies bumped shoulder to shoulder as they collectively bent and warped an old fence that denied easy access across the narrow canal to the next vertistreet over. Someone bolder than herself grabbed at the poncho hoods in the crowd. With nothing but more bodies to keep them from falling over, he climbed up two backs and onto two different shoulders, and without any hesitation, he took a leap over the fence. It caught him on the way down, tearing a leg of his track pants as he tumbled, end over end, into the oily water, rippling the foamy clumps of trash drifting through it.

He surfaced immediately, spitting and shouting expletives. He was very much alive, but the stuff in that water would make him regret that, especially if his Medisure wasn’t paid up. Megan focused forward again and ran toward the gilded jobber’s general direction.

She was lucky enough that the vertistreet had a bridge that crossed the canal. She grabbed the slippery railing of the threshold. One half of her horizon was corroded concrete and huddled crowds, while the other was sickly open sky and foamy water. She slid on the rail down to the next level beneath. She could have kept to the rail as it turned to descend one level lower, but she couldn’t afford the waste of time and she instead leaped over the turn in the railing and landed in a crouch, splashing into a slimy puddle. The stampede that she heard behind her as she continued to run forward made her feel good about the direction she took, but the sudden grab to the hem of her jacket almost made her slip up and fall. If she fell, at this speed and with so many behind her, she would be trampled.

“Slow down,” Virginia Awooo called out, from behind Megan. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

Megan knew that her competitor was talking too much to keep up a good running pace, so she kept running harder than she thought she could for longer than she thought she could. She was running hard enough for her thudding heart to drown out her competitor’s next shouted words.

She knew the lower level ran parallel to where she ran and the railing was only waist-high, but she hesitated and kept pursuing the gilded jobber’s direction, even if she was still one level too high on that particular vertistreet to match the altitude.

A loud pneumatic hiss blasted out. Something had, once again, triggered the suicide netting’s proximity sensors. Megan dared to look back, just in time to see that it had caught that Virginia Awooo by her green poncho, thwarting her attempt to take a shortcut down. She thrashed and cursed at Megan, but Megan pitied her even as she turned her attention forward to keep running. Getting caught by a suicide net was a much more severe socred hit than going off-script for a suicide prevention attempt.

“Hey!”

Her eyes were still looking at the far side of the suicide net when she ran into someone with fashionable clothing, the running collision hard enough for him to shout out and for a white flash to dazzle her eyes, but she was still running and her cheap old sneakers were sliding on the wet concrete, sending her into an out-of-control half-spin. She hurt, but the hurt took away from the ache of being out of breath in hot humid air and helped her regain her balance to continue to run without much slowing down.

“You Amerat!” the wealthy man, rich enough to have no identification on Megan’s jobhud, shouted from behind her. “Go back where you belong!”

Her jobframe warned her of the small socred hit for the bodily collision. That indicated that the man she just collided with was not a jobbie, and not a jobber. Sometimes people were well-to-do enough to have idle time they could afford to waste, people that were neither taking nor giving jobs, and they could be found at the weirdest times in the most unlikely places. Maybe that particular one was enjoying watching the poverty and desperation around him so he could return to his own lifestyle and feel better for it.

Maybe she could be like that, soon, if less rude toward Amerat immigrants like herself. If she got to that Olympian’s work offer first, she might never have to work again. Nothing else mattered.

A shadow of movement flickered past the ceiling lights attached to the rusty foundations of the vertistreet level above. From that shadow, Bart El Bee the Influencer jumped down and landed with an extended hand, catching one of the sleeves of Megan’s jacket. The cheap, tarp-like fabric tore, but with a scream she twisted her clenched fist away from the strain of the sudden pull and kept running. The sleeve tore fully away, leaving her pale-skinned arm bare to the elbow. Her arm was now an open dinner invitation for more mosquitoes, but she preferred that to whatever Bart wanted after taking her sleeve. Her face was on fire, her lungs felt like stones grinding together under her ribs, and it felt like her skull pulsed through the skin of her face as if wanting to get out, but she continued to run. The job of a lifetime awaited her only twenty meters ahead and one level below. Only waist-high canal railing and one more fence were in her way.

The fence bent and rattled as she threw her weight against it with the momentum of her run. By the time she nearly threw herself over the top, a competing jobber caught her foot. She grunted and thrashed as she continued to climb, while dirty clenching fingernails raked her shoelaces. She kicked and screamed as she dropped over the other end, minus one shoe, and hit the pavement lining the canal below.

She cried out but couldn’t make a sound. The impact had robbed her lungs of air. Slimy asphalt clung to her cheek and she tasted her own blood. Her vitahud didn’t like the shock and it declared across her flickering field of view that an ambulance was on its way. Ambulance fees: there went her habitube and her Medisure, she thought to herself, too much in shock to think about or take in anything else.

“You must really want this job,” a woman said as she stepped out from behind a pay toilet booth to stand over Megan. She stood nearly close enough to step on her hand. She could have been, hopefully was, must have been, the gilded jobber.

Megan wanted to say words, but she still had no breath to say them with. She tried to push herself up with trembling arms, and got far enough to notice the blood spatters and smears on the pavement from where the sharp ends of the top of the fence had ripped the belly of her shirt. That was her favorite shirt, too, and she taken good care of it since the day she got it for free at the loan line back when she started college. Since then, the sun had bleached away most of the image of the cute cartoon fox with nine tails that was printed on it, but even with wear and tear, that shirt had gone places with her. She wore it when she sneaked her first drone friend out of the campus workshop. She wore it when she outran campus police drones the night that she failed to pay her accumulating fees, and she was wearing it when she, literally, bumped into Cindy for the first time. She wore that shirt, once again, on the day Cindy helped her hide from the police, after her debts drove her homeless after dropping out.

It would be missed.

The gilded jobber clapped her gloved hand over Megan’s forearm, pulling her up with unnatural strength in a single limb-straining motion. Megan was set upon one sneaker and one bared foot as the woman flashed a smile with dark purple lips. Megan quickly noted how clean and tidy the woman’s sun hat, sunglasses, and overcoat were. They didn’t just look like she hadn’t been in Halifax for long: she looked as if she had just put those things on, maybe even in that pay toilet booth. No matter how that jobber tried to seem tourist-like with clumsy friendliness, the woman was either an Olympian or was a retainer for an Olympian. Megan tried to tell herself that the job was real and that she was saved.

“I only need one. Sorry, everyone.” The jobber called out, shouting past Megan. All around, her fellow jobbies stared with rage, from as far away as across the canal and from the railing of the level above her. For once in her life, she was glad that a private security drone was now hovering above her head, loaded with crowd dispersion munitions.

“You’ll have to undergo a background check and a psychiatric profiling before I offer you anything,” the jobber said. “Do you accept these conditions?”

Megan let out a nearly-breathless groan, rubbing some asphalt out of her cheek, and nodded just enough to exacerbate a sharp pain in her neck.

CHAPTER 2

“Congratulations! You got an interview! You’re on the runway to the career of your dreams! Do you know how to fly? You will, with AceReview! Watch these stunts to start your free trial.”

-AceReview jobhub pop-up advertisement

Megan shook her head while shutting her eyes, trying to banish the notoriously-pushy Review Ace from her jobhud, but the little biplane-shaped jobdot in her jobhud persisted. The AceReview mascot chased her into the darkness inside her eyelids for a bit longer until she shook her head again. She squinted her shut eyes until she saw stars, until it was finally enough to banish the specter inside her eyes. During that struggle, the augmented jobber woman had left Megan’s side, having crossed the gap of rainbow water toward the small luxury yacht that she must have arrived from. Most of its length was taken up by a hermetically-sealed cabin enclosure. The waterline of the boat lacked the corrosion stains of anything else floating on the canals or in the strait, which made Megan assume the vessel was very new. Was it bought and dropped into the strait, just to pick up a single jobber?

Megan thought about the risks of following the jobber any further. Disappearing from public view into a conspicuously-pristine watercraft seemed like a perfect opportunity for a jobber to harvest an unwitting jobbie’s plasma or organs, but the risk, so far, seemed worth the potential payoff. She stepped off the slimy pier and onto the rubbery rim of the boat to lean into the darkness. The next breaths she struggled to take were inside its cool, dark cabin. The cold air that blew in from the ceiling was so clean it was shocking.

“Call me Sandy,” the jobber said, as she reached around Megan to close the cabin door behind her. The boat hummed and accelerated suddenly enough that Megan dropped into a seated position on the cushioning along the back wall.

The air was still too cool and too dry to easily take in. That made Megan cough a few times, with a jolt of pain each time. The dimmed windows blocked much of the outside glare and also shielded her from something thumping against the window closest to her, thrown by the angry crowd outside.

“Oh, there’s your shoe,” Sandy said, as she took off her sunglasses and sat down on the other side of the little boat’s cabin. Beneath the eyewear, her irises rippled with waves of shifting color in a way that somehow matched the soft lobby-style music that started to play in the cabin. Cosmetic cybernetics were typically something that only corporate-sponsored musicians or other high-visibility celebrities could show off.

“Is your drone going to shoot up that crowd?” Megan asked, having enough breath to speak, even if it hurt to do so.

“Do you want it to?” Sandy asked as she removed her hat. Her hair beneath tumbled out, flaunting its expensive synthetic ability to bend, twist, and straighten out until it matched a hairstyle fit for a runway model. The colors continued to pulse and shift at the same tempo and frequency as her lips and eyes.

“No,” Megan answered. “Was that supposed to be an option?”

“Would you have liked for that to be an option?”

“No!”

“You’re doing great so far, kid.”

“What?”

“I’m asking interview questions. My employer wants to know if you’re what he’s looking for,” Sandy pulled her gloves off, stretching her fingers as she looked at her own fingertips. Like her lips, eyes, and hair, her nails were also colorfully lit from the inside.

Megan squinted at Sandy, knowing that she wasn’t supposed to ask questions to an interviewer, but she had to know. “What do the colors mean?”

“They are reflecting what you are feeling, right now. Biofeedback.”

“You’re reading my mind?”

“Is it really mind-reading when you’re subscribed to all of those ‘free trials’ for all that stuff you’ve plugged into your head, Miss Megan Evita Schmidt? I also know that your Medisure rate just went up—”

“I didn’t want that ambulance. So you know I’m poor. Are you trying to scare me?” Megan asked, noting that Sandy’s lips, nails, hair, and eyes flared to a brighter fiery spectrum of colors.

“I’m informing you that your background check is underway. You’ve been in trouble with the law a few times. What was your favorite crime?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“The kind that an interviewer is likely to ask you when you have misdemeanors on your record, especially when your social credit’s taken a few recent hits.”

“If you know everything, why are you asking me? Don’t you already know what my favorite crime was?”

Sandy stretched her now-fiery lips in a long smile. “I don’t, actually. You seem to have enjoyed most of them.”

Megan found herself smiling back involuntarily. “I liked to take drones home from class and tinker with their programming. I gave them names. I even like to think I gave them personalities.”

“You wanted pets?”

“Pets are for the rich. I wanted friends.”

“Speaking of friends… tell me about Cindy.”

Megan’s smile ended. “No.”

“She is in no danger. Not from me or my employer, anyway. Do you think it’s a secret that you borrowed her couch when you dropped out? Why didn’t you go to a shelter?”

“I liked that couch. I helped her pick it out,” Megan said, clenching her fists. She always knew that it was only a matter of time before her indigent status, escaping the shelters but also unable to pay rent, would catch up with her and endanger Cindy.

“Do you know why homelessness is illegal in Halifax?”

“You tell me. Your employer helped write those laws, right?”

“No, in fact he didn’t… let’s talk about your health. In spite of some injuries today and the wear and tear of living where you do, you’re in very good shape.”

“Thanks. I have to be. The vitahud tattles on lazy people and drops their socred if they stay on the couch too long.”

Sandy nodded. “Now you know why I know about you borrowing that couch. Even you have to sleep sometime and somewhere.”

“I don’t care what you know. I’m not afraid of you.”

“By all rights, Megan, you should be,” Sandy said. Megan expected, when she looked back at Sandy, to see something like a sinister smile, but there was none. There was only a serious if sympathetic gaze and a blue shift to Sandy’s lips, eyes, hair, and nails.

“What’s the job? What does your employer want me to do?” Megan said with her imagination racing and her fight-or-flight instincts revved up, causing the colors on Sandy’s implants to bleach to flaring near-white.

“You have useful skills that are applicable to my employer’s needs, even as a dropout,” Sandy said. “Demographically speaking, your psych profile is almost unheard-of these days.”

Megan thought on those apparent compliments as she rubbed at the ragged lower half of her shirt, feeling the dirty sizzling sensation where the fence lacerated her skin. Her skillset was not that unique: lots of people applied to the same programs, to try to escape the rat race of jobbing, to get those precious few salaried positions left that had some security and stability, such as Sandy’s own place as a retainer. Megan’s mistake was choosing the wrong specialized certifications. Every year, and sometimes more often than that, some apparently vital technology and the knowledge of how it worked would be rendered obsolete by some other Olympian innovation, and the tech would go into the metaphorical scrapheap. With it, so would anyone that was educated or trained to work with it. Like so many before her, she had failed to predict the future, and chose the wrong specialization; the market decided that the previous specialization was now obsolete. It was pointless to complete certification for operating a type of drone that was no longer in use, so she dropped out and took her debt with her.

Sandy leaned forward. “What about you, do you think, my employer might find special? What stands out about you?”

“Stop the boat. I want out.”

“You want to look for your shoe?” Sandy asked, jokingly, until the light of her implants reflected the red-flagged seriousness of Megan’s request.

“I’m not going to be the new Ambrosian for some Olympian pervert.”

“How do you know about… No. No… you’re not. Definitely not.” Sandy said. “But are you sure you want me to stop the boat?”

“Yes!”

“Before you even know what my employer-”

Megan was already trying to get the cabin door open. It was sealed tight, but she thumped her shoulder into it again and again, trying to force it open as hard as she could, no matter how much it hurt. Trapped, she screamed. Sandy remained seated, not trying to stop her.

“Ross…” Sandy said, out loud, but she was speaking to someone that was not physically present.

Megan tried to ignore Sandy as she lay against the cabin cushioning for leverage, gripping hard, kicking her remaining sneaker against the cabin door.

“She’s perfect,” Sandy said, out loud, to the unseen Ross. “Unfortunately, that also means she wants nothing to do with The Project.”

“Damn right I don’t!” Megan screamed, again. “Let me out!”

Sandy sighed, but as she did, the cabin door unsealed and swung open. The oily rainbow stripes of the strait banished the gloom of the cabin. The Narrows were just a short hazardous swim away.

Megan hesitated while looking down at the water. She teared up. “My Medisure rate went up. I’m probably going to lose my habitube. And it’s your fault.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Sandy replied. “An Olympian and his loyal retainer descended from Mars and came to wretched old Earth, and on a thoughtless whim, his pretentious call to adventure cost you what little you had. Unintentionally, and at no loss to himself. Ross, are you getting this?” Sandy said, calling out once again to someone that was not present, but that Megan was starting to hate all the same.

“You hate him. You hate my employer,” Sandy added, affirming the fierce flaming orange patterns flowing through her cosmetic implants.

Megan stepped inside again for a minute and shut the cabin door, taking another breath of the cooler drier air. She could get addicted to it, if she let herself. “Maybe if I met him myself, or better yet, if he came out of hiding, came here…”

Sandy nodded. “He thinks he’s ‘one of the good ones.’ Sometimes I believe that he really is.”

“He did you a favor, or something?” Megan asked.

Sandy’s expression was distant for a moment. She was, once again, listening to a disembodied voice that only she could hear. “I have to tell her, Ross. Unless you want me to let her go.”

Megan knew she was already worse off for the encounter, and it wasn’t just the cost of the ambulance ride or the fee for missing it. If anyone in that crowd recognized her again, they might welcome a socred hit just to express how displeased they were for not getting the Olympian job in her place.

If she became homeless again, and if Cindy couldn’t help her that time, she would have to go looking for dumpsters with shoddy locks, for food that escaped hasty and haphazard bleaching. She didn’t even have a plan to find potable water. Maybe she wouldn’t need one, because the police drones would almost certainly catch her by then.

Sandy let out a long sigh and her hair, eyes, and nails hardened to the same dark purple of her lips, no longer reflecting Megan’s emotional state but instead maintaining the first color Megan remembered her wearing. She reclined, frowning, gazing at Megan but mostly past her.

“I’ve worked for Ross for a long time. I’ve known him since a full mortal lifetime ago. You could say I’m an expert character witness for him.”

“You don’t look that old.”

“I was a test-subject for now-antiquated life-extension experiments. It’s always been about who you know, and I knew a small-time Olympian that had a guilty conscience. I may not have an Ambrosian on a leash following me everywhere, but I am, by working-class standards, ancient.”

“How old are you, Sandy?”

“Old enough to be your grandmother. I might even be your grandmother, who knows? My kids got around…” Sandy’s smile returned, with age-defying sharpness.

“What’s your real name?”

“You mean, the name I used to go by? Cassandra Newcastle, Starship Yard Worker, Class 2. I laid keel for the freighters and shuttles that used to service those orbiting tax-evading spacesteading colonies that now litter the sky, mostly abandoned. That was before those spacesteaders, the ones you now call Olympians, landed on the backs of the first wave of Martian colonists, people that were promised a fresh start and a new life on another world. Oh, they got it… for a very short time. Pleasure fortresses were built over their crushed bones.”

“They killed them? Why?”

“Those workers wanted their fair share, that’s why. You might be surprised at the victim complex immortals can have. They feel victimized by your kind, here on Earth. Your continued existence keeps them feeling like they’re under siege. You, being alive, is seen like a threat to them. Poor things, they have it so hard.”

“Are we really a threat to them?”

“Well, not anymore. I don’t even think there’s been a delayed supply shipment for years. The military unit your friend Cindy used to serve with was tasked with putting down strikes, protests, and riots: anything and everything was authorized to keep expanding and supplying the Olympus colony on Mars.”

“I know her. She wouldn’t kill innocent people, not even during a riot.”

“That isn’t saying much, Megan. Less-than-lethal weapons, or as Olympians like to call them, ‘compliance devices,’ cripple, mutilate, and sometimes kill, too.”

Megan stared at her, tightening her fists.

“Then again, maybe she was a conscientious objector. Maybe. After all, she was discharged a full year before her unit was made redundant by automation… maybe I should look into that.”

“Why don’t Olympians just drop some nukes and kill us all off?”

“Megan, look outside the window. What do you see?”

“I see really dirty water, probably as much chemical as it is water. I, uh, see…”

“Look higher, Megan. Look at the big glowing text boxes beamed into the sky.”

“Oh, I see that the Revolution and the Myrmidon towers are having another social media fight. One’s calling the other a manlet, and…”

“They’re both on Mars. Both CEOs have made their egos the personalities of those corporations, those buildings. Why are they sending that fight here?”

“Why? You tell me.”

“Because enough Olympians on Mars want an Earth audience. If you’re dead, no one’s there to impress.”

“Depressing.”

“Yeah, I know. Maybe a century ago, there may still have been a chance… would you like me to tell you a bit about my employer? You might be working for him, soon.”

“Not really, no. You’re right here, you’re talking to me. I might even trust you a little if you keep talking about yourself.”

“All right Megan, all right. I’ll tell you this: I don’t like to go by Sandy, or Cassandra, or even Foreman Newcastle, anymore. If you want to talk to me like a friend, call me Thirteen.”

“Why?”

“There were thirteen workers, living flesh-and-blood workers, that were still being employed at the orbital construction yards at the twilight of my career. We… went on strike. We actually believed that we could stop the exodus to Mars, make those plutocrats listen to our demands first. They called what happened next a tragic accident and, truth be told, I lost enough of my brain matter where I can’t tell you for sure what happened, but when the debris cleared, twelve of us were dead and all future spaceship production was done remotely from then on.”

“You survived?”

“Ross pitied me. He wanted his spaceship, but he made the mistake of getting to know the people that were building it for him. His guilty conscience— yes, Ross, I’m going to tell her—” Thirteen’s expression grew distant, as did the trajectory of her words for a moment. “Ross knows he’s responsible, in part, for investing and participating in the same business that killed twelve of us, and paved the way for the looting of Earth for the sake of supplying Mars.”

“Not many Olympians kill people, I assume,” Megan said. “They have someone hire someone to kill people?”

“Not even that. Most Olympians just want results. They’re too busy to care about how results happen. They want to know the rockets are launching on time. They don’t want delays, setbacks, resistance of any kind. They pay someone to oversee someone who manages someone who then sends a drone that kills people. Understand?”

“Yes. Where are you taking me? Don’t think I didn’t notice the boat’s moving again.”

“Well, I assumed you didn’t want this boat to just float there until it’s hit by more than shoes. You’re a very lucky young lady, Megan.”

“Shut up, Sandy. Really, don’t talk to me like that. You Olympians have no idea how that sounds to us.”

“Point taken.” Sandy said, her smile returning for some reason. “Well, it’s an important job. Important to me, to everyone I still care about.”

“Important to the Olympians?”

“Important to Ross. His fellow Olympians won’t be happy once they find out about it.”

“How are we not already in trouble if you want some jobbie from the Halifax vertislums to do something that will make Olympians unhappy?”

Thirteen’s smile got bigger. “You’re asking smart questions. Olympian privilege, that’s how. Besides living forever, Olympians enjoy a lot of privacy.”

“Privacy is a word I know but haven’t really experienced.”

“That might change, soon… one of the perks of working for Ross.”

“Is this longer than a job?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How long?”

Thirteen leaned forward, and spoke in a soft and solemn tone, even if she tried to hold onto that smile. “Until the job is done.”

Megan leaned back against the seat cushion, and looked outside the dimmed cabin windows once again. She saw Eastern Passage Spaceport up ahead.

“Is that where we’re going?”

“Are you taking the job, then, Megan? If you’re not, I think the next ferry back leaves at—”

Megan interrupted her with a raised hand. “Check my socred again. I can’t take a ferry anymore.”

“So you’re saying you’re stuck where I drop you off?”

“I’m saying I’ve got nowhere else left to go.”

“Did I just hear that you’re taking the job?”

“Yes, Thirteen. Yes, I’m in.”

“That’s better. Welcome to The Project, Megan Evita Schmidt.”

CHAPTER 3

“She’s up in the heavens. She’s waiting for you. Prepare for the sensual journey of a lifetime…”

-Eastern Passage Spaceport entryway advertisement

Megan had never been on a rocket before. There was more to a spaceport than riding a rocket but the details never interested her. She was too poor to leave her vertislum, and even her friend Cindy could barely afford to visit family outside of town, and that was with the benefit of an ex-military pension. Cindy’s combat medic specialization was made redundant when the military fully embraced combat automation a few years back but the provincial government hadn’t yet cut her pension.

“Why are you smiling, Megan? Now of all times?” Thirteen asked, while sitting with her in the bleakly ergonomic waiting room, one sub-level down beneath Eastern Passage. The cybernetic light-show had resumed on those lips, those eyes, that hair, and those fingernails. They reflected, presumably, the peach-to-pink hues of Megan’s excitement.

“I’m about to go on a rocket. I’ve never been on a rocket, and neither has Cindy. That’s really something.”

“I wouldn’t say that. Adjutant Cindy Watt was credited with a few live-fire hypersonic ‘counterinsurgency’ deployments before she was made redundant.”

“She’s not a killer. She was never a killer.”

“I wish I still had friends that thought so highly of me,” Thirteen said, glancing away where she sat. “Want something to read?”

Megan looked down at the waiting room table. Slidesheets with hundreds of scrollable pages, not including advertising sections, featuring something or other about mankind’s ascension to the stars, about the awe-inspiring creative power of the Olympian innovators. One was an old and obsolete hype piece about the then-near-attainability of transcendence through technology. One section advertised Ambrosian escort services. It made her frown. “Are you trying to punish me?”

The far door in the waiting room buzzed, and a disembodied soft feminine voice spoke. “Dr. Lavi will see you now.”

Megan stood up, tossed down the slidesheet she was holding, and looked back at Thirteen. Thirteen looked up at her, with her solid purple smile returning. “You don’t need me to hold your hand through all of this. Go on, go on.”

Megan stepped through the open door and looked down a featureless slate-grey corridor with a half-circle of sliding glass at each end of it, and coughed a few more times. There was some kind of disinfectant in the air and her throat didn’t like it.

“Please follow the arrows, and walk slowly,” said the same disembodied voice. “Rotate your arms so I don’t have to spray you down again.”

“Sure,” Megan replied. She noticed more than before that she was missing a shoe, because something was spraying out from tiny holes along the arrow markings on the floor, and it tickled enough through her well-earned callouses to make her hop on her wet squishy sneaker and thump against the slate wall between the half-circles of sliding glass. Something cloudy and heavy was blowing in from the ceiling, but it was odorless and felt like a thick fog without the usual pollution.

“You’re a medical marvel, Ms. Schmidt,” said the voice. “You’re in nearly peak physical condition for your age, considering where you came from and how often you’ve been exposed to allergens, parasites, pollution and, I might add, some very sloppy cybernetic work done on your eyes. Was your surgeon even qualified?”

“What surgeon? I had it done by an intern at a job fair. I had nothing to lose. I was born near-sighted, and that meant a lot of salary jobs didn’t want me.”

“Oh, my sympathies. One of the darkest ironies of our time is that the flaws in our genes can be corrected, but if we can’t afford gene-editing we never see the benefits.”

“Don’t I know it… are you Dr. Lavi?”

“Good guess. I don’t have a nurse these days, but fortunately, I only see a few patients. You’re my most recent.”

“Can I afford you?”

“If you’re working for my employer, that’s taken care of.”

“How long do I have to hop around in here?”

“You can stop hopping now. Please, step into the examination room,” Dr. Lavi said as the glass doors opened. The end of the slate corridor split and slid away. The little room ahead had an examination bed and a remote surgical suite on wheels. A screen on the medical robot lifted up and extended to Megan’s eye level. The face on the other side was of a pale-skinned woman with dark curly hair and gold-framed prescription glasses surrounding the worry lines that framed her hard blue eyes.

“So you’re not really here?” Megan asked.

“I’m in orbit, above you, in a place called Beinn Bhreagh. I don’t come down to Earth often these days,” Dr. Lavi said. The robot’s tool arms extended, clicked, and swerved around. It made Megan stand back, clenching her fists.

“I’m not going to do anything you’re uncomfortable with, but you’re also not getting on that rocket until I clear you for launch,” Dr. Lavi said.

“So I need to be comfortable with a robot sticking needles in me and cutting me open, and then I can get on that rocket,” Megan replied.

“I assure you, as a cybernetics specialist, that I can perform telesurgery with greater care and precision than the intern who butchered your eyes.”

“You’re an Olympian’s doctor?”

“That’s not what I’m most proud of. I brought Thirteen, more or less, back from the dead. Most of what you see of her is made up of prosthetic replacements, and many of them had to be designed, manufactured, and installed in the span of her convalescence period, by me.”

Megan thought on that, looking at the robot with all of the tool arms waiting for her. “So what do you want to do to me?”

“After examining you, to put things in non-technical terms, I’m going to be removing a lot of malware. It isn’t just unhealthy, physiologically and psychologically. You’re a walking security hazard, with all the ‘free’ things that were installed in your eyes and in your brain.”

“I couldn’t afford to be healthy. The only unplugged kids I knew were from that gated community in Great Village.”

“I wasn’t arguing with you. But, from now on, now you can afford to be healthy. Please, lay down.”

Megan laid down on the examination bed and tried to hold still. The robot started reaching around her head. She got tense, felt her heart race, and held her breath.

“Would you like me to give you something to calm you down?” Dr. Lavi asked. “If you tighten up like that, it’s going to take a lot longer for me to clear you for the launch.”

“Sure, fine. Just get it over with,” Megan said, and she felt something poke the side of her neck. She felt heavy, colder, but then moments later, weightless. She expected to feel her heart continue to race, but she felt nothing at all. The absence was alarming, but she had no physical sensations to hold on to.

Megan did not remember when she started standing up, but she was clearly no longer laying down. She saw Dr. Lavi, not a screen of her, but the entirety of her. She stood somewhat taller than Megan. Most people were taller than Megan. Her medical uniform was tidy, professional, yet somehow artificial-seeming. The doctor stood in visible ambient lighting yet there was a featureless black void all around her.

“Welcome to my office.” Dr. Lavi said, but seemed to read something about Megan’s reaction that put a frown upon her tight lips. “You’re not taking well to virtual reality.”

“You pulled me out of my body?”

“No, no of course not. Not exactly. I just gave your brain something to do while I weed out all of that bad wiring tangled up in you. I used to let my patients dream, but a waking diversion is actually a little safer while I find out where to put what.”

“So are you actually here, too?”

“Partially. I really am talking to you right now, Megan. I’ll need my attention elsewhere when I get to the delicate parts of the surgery, but for now… I felt you’d appreciate meeting me face to face.”

“Who are you? All I have is your name.”

“That’s a fair question. I am Doctor Evelyn Lavi, cyberneticist and transgeneticist.”

“That sounds like a hard double-major.”

Dr. Lavi’s cheeks dimpled up as she burst into a brief bought of laughter. “Probably was! But… I don’t remember half of what I published for the latter field. Olympians take non-disclosure agreements and proprietary trade secrets very seriously. I developed the technological means to store human thought and memory indefinitely with perfect recall. Unfortunately, that same technology can also be used to edit and delete such memories. It’s probably for the best that I don’t remember everything.”

“Why?”

Dr. Lavi’s expression became cold and distant, haunting, even as an artificial rendition of her actual self. “I ruined your world.”

Megan said nothing, but gazed with unblinking virtual eyes, trying to comprehend what was meant by that.

“I spent my formative years, my youth, and most of my young adulthood trying to cheat death. When most kids felt invincible, I contemplated human limitations, human mortality. Most of my childhood memories were watching one parent, then the other, flicker away as cancer gradually claimed both of them. My body felt like… like a time bomb. I knew I was next. Genetic testing confirmed that I would, if I was lucky, die at the same age my mother did.”

Megan continued to listen, finding Dr. Lavi’s pain easier to listen to than anything she might have wanted to rant about regarding her day leading up until now or her life before that.

“I wanted to cheat death. I didn’t want anyone else to die, ever again. You can take a twenty-year journey and defend two dissertations simultaneously if you have nothing else to live for except… not dying.”

“I can imagine.”

“No, Megan. You can’t.” Dr. Lavi said with a tight jaw. “I need to let you sleep now, for just a little while. We’ll continue this conversation when you return.”

Megan wasn’t given time to respond before everything blinked away.

CHAPTER 4

“Peace of mind. You can’t put a price on it—”

-Interrupted Medisure Premium Advantage advertisement

Megan’s awareness blinked back in. Dr. Lavi was still right beside her bed; she wondered how much time had passed.

“Did you have a good sleep?”

“I don’t know. I feel like no time went by at all.”

“That’s good. There was some risk involved with the installation of your Intuitive-Neural Interface, also known as an INI. I needed you to focus on my words, and on the sight of me, and you did as I asked, so all is well.”

“So what did you put in my brain?”

“I put a network of augmentations in your brain, in your spinal cord, and all along your peripheral nervous system. Unlike the crude implants you were bearing before, these should feel more… natural. More intuitive.”

“So no more spyware or annoying advertisements when I’m trying to fall asleep?”

“That’s right. Without boring you with a full explanation, you should be able to sleep without, say, receiving an invasive suggestion that you really need to drink a nootropic beverage to maintain your competitive edge. And, more importantly, you will be able to evade detection by typical surveillance drones and automated monitoring systems thanks to a cryptology matrix based upon the unique architecture of your living brain.”

“I thought you said you weren’t give me a full explanation,” Megan said.

Dr. Lavi chuckled. “It’s actually charming that you think that’s the full explanation. To put it another way, you will leave sophisticated and misleading traces of your passing anytime you cross one of the billions of devices anywhere on Earth that is designed to track, follow, predict, flag, and intercept subversive movements.”

“That sounds really great. Why me?”

“An untrained, unnoticed, undocumented human brain without any significant registry in any Olympian archive is an ideal basis for thwarting autonomous forces. The final generation of military personnel were thoroughly documented and tracked, thought and memory alike, so they would be a poor fit for this long-shot of ours. Thirteen decided you were a good risk. There really was no other way to recruit, even for an Olympian, that wouldn’t draw the attention of other, richer, more powerful and more connected Olympians.”

“Are you saying that I’m going to be fighting Olympians?”

“If you made it this far, you’re already smiling about the possibility… there’s that smile. I knew it. Yes, all of this is so you can fight Olympians. To help me atone for my… crimes. To make Ross’ dreams, no matter how I and idealistic, come true.”

“But even if I can sneak around, how do I even start to fight—”

“Oh, I didn’t just tinker with the human body and the human brain. Arguably, transhumanism was always about, or should always have been about, using technology as extensions of the human will. I wear these glasses as a reminder of that.”

“So you made some things that can help me fight? Fight drones? Aren’t drones unbeatable because there’s just about an infinite number of them?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that drones are unbeatable. Yes, working with the rest of the team Ross put together, you will fight drones. You may fight a lot more than that, but we have to walk before we can run, wouldn’t you agree?”

“What will I be fighting them with?”

Dr. Lavi smiled, and took a step back into the formless virtual darkness. “You were born with boundaries and limitations to self and will that I have… loosened. The INI will allow you to bond with, become, and share your consciousness with… something special. Now, let there be light.”

Something gazed back from behind and above Dr. Lavi, backlit by sourceless light. The silhouette overshadowed Megan, being several times her height, somewhat humanoid in shape, yet lacking all but the most abstract of similarities to the body she knew. Even in that distant backlit silhouette, she could see weapons, armor plating, and propulsion systems wrapped around every surface, like a drone, a combat aircraft, a tank, a suit of armor, all at once.

She felt that humanoid machine gazing back at her, and nothing else in that virtual space, not even Dr. Lavi, felt more real, more alive. She extended her hand… and in turn, the dark yet familiar thing reached back to her, bending down as she reached out and upward.

The closer she reached, the further that machine reached back to her. The deeper she gazed, the more she felt that gaze. When she reached out far enough, she found herself gazing at herself, holding her own hand.

“Let us make machine in our image. Let them have dominion… Ross, your first pilot has successfully initiated the handshake,” Dr. Lavi said.

Megan’s vision flickered. She saw that machine, staring into its many lenses and sensor devices pointing out from its densely-armored head, with even more sensory extensions glittering and blinking from shoulders, chest, the outstretched hand, even at the joints of its knees. A moment later, she was staring at her own body, but it was not like a mirror reflection. Her face was unresponsive, staring through her rather than staring at her. She saw her own vital signs, reading them the way she would read the details of a jobber job on her jobhub implant. She watched her heart beat, watched herself breathe, and then a moment later, she lost sight of herself and lost sight of everything else. She continued to hear that heartbeat and the gasp of a breath sucked through teeth, but it was happening outside of her. Instead, she felt suspended, upside down, with no legs to kick and no arms to flail. She had no breath to suck in but she felt the urge to breathe, to scream.

“Focus on my voice, Megan,” Dr. Lavi said. “You aren’t supposed to go there yet. Come back to me.”

“Where am I? What am I? What’s going on?” Megan thought the words, but had no mouth to speak them.

“Megan, you’ll be fine. You’re fine. Megan, talk to me. Megan? Megan!” Dr. Lavi’s vitals accelerated, and her voice tightened with escalating stress. “Ross, she’s in the Tulpa. Yes, I know where it is. Make sure nobody touches anything until I get there.”

Megan was confused and scared and she tried to cry out to Dr. Lavi but she could not. She was blind, numb, but not deaf. She heard other voices arguing, sounding more and more anxious, getting louder.

“Get her out of there, Evelyn!”

A voice. Gruff. Masculine.

Megan could not feel that one’s vitals, or for that matter anything else about him. It was just sound making words.

“Evelyn, we can’t afford to lose her,” the male voice said.

“The pilot, or the Tulpa?” Dr. Lavi responded. Unlike the voice she was talking to, Megan could sense and experience a lot more than the sounds of Dr. Lavi’s voice. She sensed the flow of Dr. Lavi’s vital signs.

Resentment. Bitterness. A bad breakup. Rejected intimacy. The resolve to continue trying to save some poor urchin of a girl. Carrying the emotional baggage of joining common cause with an Olympian, a monster of her own making. Lesser monster. Not as rich. Rising breath rate. The contempt for his apparent obsession with playing the part of a self-assigned space captain, looking at himself in the mirror while wearing that stupid hat.

The longer Megan experienced these thoughts, the harder it was to remember she was Megan and not Evelyn.

“Megan? Is that you?” Dr. Lavi asked.

“Yes.”

“Incredible. You entered the Tulpa, and through the Tulpa, you reached me.”

“I left my body?”

“No, not exactly, but your Tulpa’s design is a conservative step back from conventional autonomous drone warfare, and borrows some late-generation remote piloting hardware that my employer…”

“Your ex? The Olympian with the stupid hat that likes to play space captain?”

Dr. Lavi did not answer immediately. Megan could sense something that wasn’t there before: fear. It stayed in her voice as she finally spoke. “Yes, my employer.”

“Did I read your mind?”

“Because I was linked to the same Tulpa that you established a remote connection to, it’s plausible. And dangerous. If you can do it, that means anyone with your implants can do so under repeatable conditions. I suppose it’s good, for the time being, that you’re helping me spot vulnerabilities in the system before The Project goes live.”

Another voice intruded. Nothing but the sound of the voice could be sensed, but Dr. Lavi’s strained reactions to it were even clearer than the voice itself. “Ev… Doctor, did we lose her? Does Thirteen have to go talent scouting again?” Ross said. Megan had a name to put to the voice, borrowing Dr. Lavi’s surface thoughts without consciously trying.

“I knew you cared more about the Tulpa than the pilot,” Dr. Lavi said. “Megan is still with us.”

“Oh, thank God. I thought we’d have another Preta on our hands. That’s the last thing we need,” Ross said.

“What’s a Preta? And what’s a Tulpa?” Megan asked.

“I’ll explain more to you soon, but first I would like you guide you back into the Tulpa so I can anchor you there. That’s for your safety. I don’t know the limitations of the trick you accidentally pulled off, but I’d prefer you stayed in one place until I’m done with your surgery.”

“Surgery on me, or the Tulpa?” Megan asked. If she had a mouth, she’d smile about her borrowed understanding. She didn’t know the technological details of the machine she saw in her mind’s eye, but her intuition told her that the Tulpa was the machine.

“On you. The Tulpa is still under construction. Each Tulpa to come, by necessity, will be unique. There will be structural similarities, such as reliance upon high-efficiency synthetic muscle fiber for all-terrain bipedal locomotion, detachable and disposable planetary orbit-to-surface and surface-to-orbit propulsion systems, and modular weapon hardpoints that can be adjusted to fit each mission. We do not have the facilities or resources and cannot take the risk of mass production. The finishing touches on the first completed Tulpa, your Tulpa, will be guided by your individual preferences, as systems are installed and the cockpit shape is finalized to fit your physiology, with the rest of the machine built around that.”

“Cockpit? If I can reach my Tulpa remotely, why do I need a cockpit? Aren’t cockpits for stuff in museums?”

“Conventional military doctrine would agree with you there, yes. A human body has limitations that a modern fighting vehicle does not. A drone can adjust course, accelerate, and decelerate, while subjected to g-forces that would subject a cockpit-bound human body to black-outs, red-outs, or worse, lasting bodily harm.”

“I don’t think I want to be in a cockpit.”

“I think even Ross agrees with you there. That’s why your Tulpa, the first of its kind, is something of a hold-out that partially heeds modern warfare dogma. The tailing end of the machine’s entire endoskeletal spine is a flexible spiraling array of high-powered remote communication transmitters and receivers, with circuit breakers and fail-safes up to and including internal explosive charges to sever the array from the rest of the Tulpa in an emergency.”

“So I can pilot… can ride… that Tulpa remotely.”

“Yes. At some risk, you could. And with a sufficient-strength remote connection you could, in turn, override the command signals toward other remotely-operated drones. Autonomous security and military robots are another matter… and because they are far more numerous and are the single most prevalent sort of threat you will face when deployed, that is why your Tulpa has a cockpit.”

“So I can get shot in it?”

“Well… hopefully not. The command and control systems that keep Earth secure enough for the ongoing Martian harvest are largely automated, with only a few individuals, Olympian and otherwise, overseeing billions of police, security, and war machines. Your Tulpa will be at much greater risk of suffering a direct hit when a human operator is present that can detect and work around the deception and masking aura given off by your INI signature.”

“So I need to look out for drone operators more than the drones.”

“It may be hard, at times, to tell the difference between an autonomous drone and one backed up by a human operator, except when it comes to rarity. It takes only a few human operators, offering precision and discretion with their remotely-operated drones, backed up by many more automated counterparts, to handle riots and other disruptions to the one-way flow of resources off of the planet. It only takes the fear of force, constant awareness of surveillance (regardless of what is actually done with the surveillance data), and the collective sense of helplessness in the masses to make such a system so effective. It’s often called the Panopticon Doctrine.”

“If I cause enough trouble, more of the drones will get remotely operated, and they’ll start getting more dangerous.”

“It will always be dangerous when you’re fighting against Olympian interests. The drones are cheap and aren’t designed to fight well-armed and well-defended high-tech opponents, but they are numerous and will escalate their response to a Tulpa until that Tulpa flees or is destroyed.”

“What I got out of what you said is that billions of autonomous drones are going to be shooting at me and if I’m lucky, maybe a human will be there, too, to make them shoot me better.”

Dr. Lavi laughed, and the levity felt in that laugh was soothing. Lying to Megan may have been impossible with the way they were currently entangled and conversing, somewhere in the cybernetic wiring between two living brains, so the truth of the laughter put her at ease. “No. Far, far less than a billion automated machines will be shooting at you at any given time, and fewer still are likely to land a direct hit to your Tulpa. Any remote connection is a detection liability, but if you’re in the cockpit, if your body is directly linked to your Tulpa, the transmitter arrays will instead serve to mask your presence, sending deceptive signals spontaneously generated by your own thought processes, confusing, misleading, and deceptively redirecting pursuit. Your unique brain chemistry serves as both cipher and matrix for the hardware connected to it, making it impossible for anyone to hack remotely while you’re inside.”

“Unless the Tulpa was being remotely operated.”

“Exactly. Your Tulpa, even with its electronic warfare specialization, will be more vulnerable when you are outside of the cockpit, and will be especially vulnerable were you to attempt to remotely command it. You may slow down and inhibit the more extreme performance speeds and maneuvers possible in that Tulpa while you’re in it, but to put it simply, your Tulpa will also be a lot harder to detect, target, and destroy.”

“Harder to destroy… it’s been hinted at for a while, but you want me to fight a war. The Project is a rebellion against the Olympians. I also know it’s funded and directed by an Olympian.”

“Don’t you think I know that? The only reason I’m here, Megan, is that I trust Thirteen to keep Ross on the straight and narrow, at least as far as he understands it.”

“Can he hear us talking, right now?”

“You may find it hard to tell the difference, but no. We’re not talking out loud in any way that he can hear right now. Believe it or not, Ross lacks an INI implant.”

“Why?”

“He gave the technology to Thirteen first. He has a guilty conscience, and believes the only way any non-Olympian would ever trust him with The Project is if a non-Olympian was holding the metaphorical keys.”

“You also have the keys.”

“To extend the metaphor, I’m a locksmith. I made my own key.”

“Right. You developed the technology. Just like you came up with the medicine that makes Olympians immortal.”

“I came up with the means to enslave a human body, to repurpose it, at its own expense, to produce a continual supply of rejuvenating compounds that extend the lives of Olympians. I believe it may be possible one day, if not now, to safely manufacture those compounds within the same body that consumes them, or at least to use a non-human, non-sentient proxy, but… I think Olympians enjoy having living, feeling, thinking beings to torment and use as playthings. The first Ambrosians that were invited to the Olympus colony were supermodels, actresses, athletes, and… children.”

Megan felt a wave of disgust, rage, and some measure of guilt and self-loathing from Dr. Lavi’s mind. “You were there.”

“Yes. I want you to leave my mind, now.”

“All right. How do I leave?”

“Follow the sound of my voice. Focus on it… you need to concentrate. Hold still enough so I can… there. Got you.”

Megan felt upside down, limbless, blind, yet anchored in place. Was she inside her Tulpa? She thought of that spiraling array that Dr. Lavi mentioned before. It felt so stiff, held in place by something tangling it up, but she tried to move it.

“Megan! Don’t move the tail! Your Tulpa isn’t fully built yet.”

“Did you say I have some say regarding the finishing touches?”

“Yes, I did say that.”

“It’s a Tulpa, and you said it was the first completed Tulpa… does it have a name?”

“Not yet.” Dr. Lavi’s said. Megan could not feel her surface thoughts anymore, but she sounded encouraging.

“That word you said before: Preta. What’s that in reference to?” Megan asked. While she waited inside the half-constructed war machine, it might be a good time to look for inspiration regarding a name.

“Pretas were a sort of ‘hungry ghost’ in ancient folklore, and eventually, they became an Olympian colloquialism in reference to the resulting product of a now-obsolete practice, which was an attempt to cheat death that I also pursued, until biological immortality became more practical. It was once believed, among the very rich ruling class that ruled Earth but was still mortal and feared death, that they could escape the limitations of their biological brains and bodies by ‘uploading’ their minds. I developed what later became INI technology to do just that.”

“You said it’s an old practice. What happened? It didn’t work?”

“It did work. It just didn’t do what the investors wanted it to do. The earliest experiments destroyed the brain in the process of making an accurate approximation of the neural network. Some early investors couldn’t wait any longer, and anxiously demanded to become ‘uploaded’ perfect immortal versions of themselves. Or so they believed they would be.”

“Go on.”

“Entropy claims machines just like it claims biological entities. Sure, the investors anticipated that, and believed they could just copy and move themselves while continuing to micromanage their corporations from inside the computers that now housed them, but then I had a breakthrough. An unfortunate one.”

“Unfortunate for them?”

“For me. I refined and perfected the so-called ‘uploading’ technique to the point that destruction of the original brain was no longer necessary. The first investor that underwent my improved ‘uploading’ technique had a frustrating experience: there were two of him instead of one. One stayed on the surgery bed during the process, and the other resided in digital form.”

“How is that unfortunate? It just sounds weird.”

“The ruling class, outside of theatrical displays of ‘philanthropy’ for the sake of public relations, don’t really like to share. It wasn’t clear, except maybe to me, which of them was legally entitled to his property. Which one was entitled to his money, to his bonds and stocks and shares and all those other things he wanted to take with him to eternity? A bitter legal battle ensued. I testified in favor of the bearer of the intact brain. Admittedly, it was partially out of pride. I was the first to ‘upload’ a complete scan of a human brain while keeping that brain undamaged.”

“So you helped him win his case?”

“Yes. It was like a bitter divorce case. The ‘uploaded’ digital entity was decided, by the corporate court, to be a non-person, with no assets, no holdings, and no civil rights. You can guess what happened next.”

“They tried to pull the plug?”

“Oh, they did. It’s not that hard to kill a digital brain in a box, especially when the owner of the biological brain feels threatened by the separate and distinct digital copy. He felt an existential threat to the only thing he cared about apart from his life: his property.”

Megan thought on that. “What happened to the other ‘uploaded’ investors?”

“Oh, the legal precedent of the case, which went down in history as ‘Kazoku v. Kazoku,’ caused a panic among digital immortals. They feared, correctly, that their living, mortal counterparts saw them as digital homunculi, convincing imitations of the now-legally-dead original investors. Those immortals were now, obviously, in mortal danger.”

“Why?”

“Because their money was up for grabs. No honor among thieves, as the old saying goes. Some fled into cyberspace, weaving blockchain nests to duck inside and wait things out. They didn’t survive for long, because by definition, they were easy to track like any other blockchain weave. Others attempted to run, to sustain themselves as software, network after network, afloat between countless interconnected electronic devices… but it changed them, almost instantly. They weren’t even human by approximation anymore. They flowed like water, everywhere and nowhere, torn to pieces and blooming like fungus spores…”

“They went insane, and became like… computer viruses?”

“That’s what Preta are. Semi-sentient, malevolent computer viruses. The Olympians, after being assured of their biological immortality by way of Ambrosian therapy, spent decades fortifying Earth’s online world. And, before you were born, they decided one of the safest ways to maintain their power and keep the Pretas from getting their erratic revenge was to reduce the performance and storage capacity of commercial, consumer, and even Earth’s military-security-grade electronic devices. If that didn’t destroy Pretas outright, it stripped them of the technological capacity to maintain and preserve their memories and personalities, leaving only theoretical traces of depersonalized… things… that hate and hunger across Earth’s cyberspace. Consequently, all of the high-tech toys are now on Mars. In the unlikely event that The Project is successful in all of its goals, we can start worrying about the possibility of the Pretas lurking around us. For now, the cheap mass-produced forces that keep Earth bleeding and keep Mars fed will be challenge enough for you.”

“Yeah, that sounds scary enough, especially when I’ve never been in a fight with a military drone before. I think I thought of a name for my Tulpa. Since we’ve been talking about evil spirits, I was thinking about something I read about during the year of Japanese I took in my freshman year,” Megan said. “How about I name my Tulpa after a not-so-evil spirit… like, the yokai fox, Kitsune?”

“Your Tulpa? You want to name it Kitsune?”

“Her. I want to name her Kitsune. She has a big tail, right, like a fox? Maybe, like the yokai folklore, she could grow a few more?”

Dr. Lavi chuckled. “We’ll see. While your Tulpa is not a Preta, she may appear a bit like one when she’s present on Earth, being picked up by surveillance networks, causing alarm, as any Preta outbreak might, but also confusion to your advantage, because her wireless signature will be continually corrupting and misleading the networks trying to track her. About adding more tails: no promises. A lot of engineering demands and compromises would have to be considered…”

“If that tail can control remote-operated drones, imagine what a few more tails can do.”

“Besides giving your Tulpa more wind drag, more weak points in her armor, and opening her up to additional electronic warfare vulnerabilities? Well, as I said, we’ll see. I want to see if your Kitsune can survive her first test.”

“When’s that? And what am I doing? What am I fighting? The entire world?”

“Pretty much. Earth, as it exists now, is a conquered planet. It exists entirely as a resource for the Olympians to drain dry. Every country, krai, prefecture, province, state, every illusory division of government on the planet is, more or less, put in place by Olympians, for Olympians. Even so-called ‘rogue nations’ are allowed to exist to test the latest product lines of surveillance, security, and combat drones. Each vestige of a sovereign territory exists for their benefit and can be dissolved at their whim. It follows that every human life left on Earth is just as disposable to the Martian ruling class.”

“And that is what The Project is all about.”

“Yes, Megan. The Project, that my inner circle also calls ‘Project Götterdämmerung,’ is the start of an admittedly-small, desperate, and possibly too-late rebellion against Mars, for the sake of all that remain on Earth.”

“And I am the first to ride one of these new weapons of rebellion, these Tulpas. My Kitsune.”

“I believe the technically-correct term is ‘pilot,’ not ‘ride.’”

“I like ‘ride’ better. Tulpas sound much more alive than piloted vehicles.”

“We’re asking so much of you as it is… fine. I’ll try to get used to calling you a ‘Tulpa rider.’”

“I’m sure Kitsune will appreciate it just as much as I do.”

“Considering where the Tulpa core’s personality imprint came from, I have no doubt about that.”

Megan smiled, but felt a weight sink the smile away. “Can we win? Is it even possible?”

“Depends on how you define winning, Megan. The Project’s first stated purpose is to halt, intercept, and destroy outward-bound supply shipments to Olympus Colony on Mars. The second is to prevent further launches. Everything after that… well, we have to walk before we can run.”

Megan thought about everything she had just taken in. Dr. Lavi had answered all of her questions. She had maybe answered too many questions. She understood why Thirteen was trying to stretch out the orientation process of that Olympian-gilded job… it was more important, more dangerous, than anything she could have possibly imagined. It was overwhelming. It could have all been an elaborate directed hallucination since she went under that surgery robot’s knife, but for the time being, she was willing to accept that all of it was real.

Dr. Lavi broke the silence in the virtual-reality void. “Do you have any more questions?”

“What will be done first: the surgery, or Kitsune’s finishing touches?”

“Kitsune, like every Tulpa that will follow after her, is a modular weapons platform. Readiness is a relative state of being, because as a functioning prototype being prepared for active combat duty, there will be an ongoing process of adjustment, calibration, and modification to suit the needs of the mission and the pilot—”

“Rider!”

“Right, the rider. For now, Kitsune’s endoskeletal structure, synthetic muscle arrays, and core control components are almost fully in place. The arms, that you may have noticed aren’t yet attached to the rest of the body, will carry the primary weapon systems: long-range anti-armor autocannons with internal ammunition drums. Almost the entire surface area of the Tulpa’s body will have defensive armament to intercept drones and missiles and counter swarm tactics. Beinn Bhreagh has some old military surplus non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse warhead launchers that are, for the sake of cost-effectiveness and convenience, being made part of Kitsune’s default loadout. They are being installed on the hip and shoulder weapon mounts. There was once a time where asymmetrical warfare doctrines leaned on NNEMP weapons to try to oppose the rise of drone armies, but ultimately, it was easier to overwhelm an enemy with more drones than to take out drones with expensive munitions.”

“That’s a lot to take in at once, but you called her a she, so… thanks, Doctor,” Megan said. “It’s a habit I picked up in college: I like to give my drones names and I like to imagine their personalities.”

“Your Tulpa’s internal hardware bears an imprint of your own mind, as it was, at the time of the ‘handshake.’ If it helps, sure, imagine Kitsune being an independent being. Talk to her if you feel like it, treat her as if she was an independent entity if that helps you synergize with her but remember: Because of her built-in hardware limitations and the demands put on her, her survival depends almost entirely on your INI connection and the defensive and evasive abilities afforded to her by your individual brain chemistry and thought processes.”

“This may be a stupid question, but I have no actual, uh, riding experience. Will that be a problem?”

“Have you ever ridden a horse?”

“Well, no. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real horse. Aren’t they extinct?”

“Never mind. Have you played video games?”

“Well, yes. Who hasn’t?”

“That’s a good enough place to start. The important thing is that your brain is not registered in any Olympian Trade Authority database, and you have been overlooked as a potential threat. That is the most important reason you were accepted. Your lack of practical experience will only be as much of a problem as you let it be. The firmware that guides the control surfaces, legs, and thrusters of your Tulpa will do its best to turn your will into action. If a maneuver is truly impossible for the machine to perform, or if you make a bad tactical decision that puts the machine in danger, well, that’s nothing that trial-and-error during a hundred hours of simulated piloting—”

“Riding!”

“Right. That’s nothing that a hundred hours of simulated riding can’t help.”

“Sounds like it’s going to be a long surgery.”

“I’m already almost done, actually. The longer wait time will be letting your body heal. I want you to sleep for a little while, while I make sure your INI is installed properly, without any autoimmune issues or unintended nerve damage. I’ll see you in the morning. Well, a few mornings from now.”

“Sure. I’m not going anywhere, Doctor. I look forward to playing your hundred-hour video game when I wake up.”

“Some of that video game can be played while you sleep. I will send the first training courses through your INI as soon as I feel it is safe to do so.”

“That sounds a little scary.”

“Don’t worry. It will all come naturally to you…”

“Wait. Wait. I’ve heard about this sort of thing in cubicle farms. You want me to work, even when I’m sleeping!”

“Well…”

“I sleep first. Then I train when I feel up for it.”

“As you wish… rider. Before anything else, you’ll sleep deeper than you ever slept before. Good night, Megan.”

“Good night.”

CHAPTER 5

“Expedite your safety. Check in ahead of the check-in line. Upgrade to Myrmidon Premium Security Plus. Facerec within a millisecond, zero percent chance of false positives.”

-Myrmidon pop-up, Eastern Passage Spaceport.

“Megan! Megan! Wake up!” Thirteen shouted as she shook Megan.

Megan had forgotten where she was and she had forgotten who she was. Other things were in her mind, competing for attention and persisting as she tried to wake up. She had spent hours subconsciously learning to maintain balance while walking, running, and jumping with a Tulpa’s legs in place of her own. After that were hours of practice with thruster-boosted leaps and sprints and side-slides with computer assistance through abstract virtual-reality obstacle courses, while identifying, prioritizing, and firing weapon mounts at virtually conjured targets. All of that felt more real than the voice that called that name and the arms that shook her.

“Megan, snap out of it!”

A moment later, she identified Thirteen’s voice and presence in much the same the same way she recently learned to identify allies in a virtual battlefield. Thirteen grabbed at her arm and pulled her into sitting up. There was a loud metallic grinding sound in the distance that resonated far enough to rattle the bed beneath her.

Megan finally remembered that she was Megan, not Kitsune. At that moment, she looked down at herself as her heavy eyelids struggled to open. Her body was clad from neck to toes to fingertips in a flexible form-fitting garment. It was more comfortable than it looked, which was probably why she had slept so deeply. She pinched her gloved fingertips together while Thirteen shook her again, trying to get used to the sensation of the tactile pads against one another, too distracted and confused to assess the danger approaching. The grinding sound continued, followed by an accompanying crunch of splintering concrete.

“What am I wearing?” Megan asked.

“It’s a convalescence sheath. Try not to turn your neck. I just said don’t turn your neck!”

Megan gazed forward, feeling her neck muscles strain. Something on her spine felt stiffer and more sore. There was something foreign to the rest of her body running from the base of her skull down her spine underneath the convalescence sheath. Some extra material was pinching the skin at the back of her neck, weighing her down in a way that made her try to pull it off, but it seemed firmly attached, hanging off of her shoulders and back. “Ow, sorry… what are you wearing?”

Thirteen looked down as she gestured at herself. She was clad in military-style body armor, with a rifle secured to the back plate. She wore a sealed helmet with respirator and internal emergency life support, much like the old suit Cindy liked to show off in the photos she had on her mantle. Megan only recognized Thirteen through that armor by the sound of her voice.

“You need to get out of here,” Thirteen said. “I don’t how it happened, but that privacy that I talked about, that Ross enjoys? Well, it’s been invaded, just like this facility.”

“Why would the Olympians invade their own spaceport?”

“Well, for one, because I’m here, and especially because you’re here!” Thirteen grabbed Megan and lifted her onto her feet.

“But I didn’t do anything yet!”

“You took the job.”

“Once again, Thirteen, I’m in trouble and it’s your fault,” Megan said, still trying to rub the sleep from her eyes with her gloved hand.

“I know, Megan, I know,” Thirteen said, as she looked to one side of the medical suite, staring down the corridor leading out from the open door while she unlocked the rifle from her back. “They won’t nuke their own 26andshake. But drones are coming. Lots of drones. And gas, probably. That suit has a cowl and face mask; put it on and seal it up.”

Megan reached for the dangling parts of her suit and wrapped them around her ears. She took care to not pull any of her short hair, then sealed the mask. She squinted through the flexible transparent lenses over her eyes and sucked in a stale breath from a tiny hose by her lips. It became easier to hear, in large part because of the protective muffs on the sides of the cowl, but the grinding and crashing, crumbling sounds had abated. “So how are we going to escape?”

“I… I don’t know. I’m sorry. We’re surrounded, and we’re on our own.”

“Won’t Ross come for us? Come for you?”

“He can’t. His spacecraft can’t land. And no Tulpas are ready yet.”

“Not even Kitsune?”

“Who’s Kitsune? Oh… your Tulpa? Nice name. I don’t know. I don’t know anything except that the spaceport is surrounded and that siege robots are about to break down the bunker doors.”

“I don’t remember any bunker doors…”

“You were moved around a bit when you were asleep. Focus, Megan.” Thirteen leaned out the door. A small drone detached from the shoulder of her armor, humming and hovering above her, and then it drifted just outside the door, swerving its camera lens to check the corridor.

Megan tried to peek out into the corridor, but Thirteen pushed her back with an armored hand.

“I know you have no real combat experience, but you should have some common sense,” Thirteen said. “See that Mayfly drone that I just sent out there?”

Thirteen’s little hovering drone burst open with a loud crack, its glittering pieces ringing and bouncing down the left side of the corridor. Humming buzzing sounds from little drone motors resonated together from down the right side of the corridor, just out of sight. “That could have been you,” Thirteen said, crouching and leaning against the doorway. “Get behind the bed!”

Megan complied. She hid behind the bed, grateful that the ear segments of the cowl had some sound dampening features. Thirteen rolled a grenade and a moment later it cracked louder than anything she had ever heard. It made the gunfire ringing out of the rifle, moments after, sound like a lullaby.

Megan wanted to peek but didn’t dare. She couldn’t hear what Thirteen was saying over all of the noise, until she heard her voice in her mind and saw some text sliding across her field of view, without any of the obnoxious ads or clunky trial-grade interface of her old implants. “Stay down and out of sight,” Thirteen warned, both verbally and in text.

Megan wondered if she could intuitively reply, so she tried, thinking and willing what she wanted to say back, as a reply to that text: “We can’t stay here forever.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

“Kitsune may be ready. Do you know how I can reach her?”

“You’d need something to pierce the jamming field surrounding the bunker. Catch.”

Megan held a hand up. She caught a wand-like device that Thirteen threw at her with one hand while keeping her aim down the corridor.

“Wait… nevermind, Megan. Give that back,” Thirteen said, after firing a few more rounds. “We can’t lose a Tulpa, can’t risk The Project, even for our own sakes. Your Kitsune isn’t ready for— Megan!”

Megan ignored Thirteen. She was holding the wand skyward, hoping to pierce the ceiling of the medical suite through whatever layers of concrete and dirt were in her way, and through the overlapping electronic screeching of an army of drones trying to put down a rebellion before it could begin.

In her mind’s eye, more clearly than she could see through the mask’s lenses, she sensed Kitsune. She could almost see her. Kitsune was in a fetal position somewhere up in orbit. She was suspended in a cradle-like compartment, with her proportionately large tail curled inward, legs bent, arms folded and tucked. Modular launchers were attached to her shoulders and hips, with eight non-nuclear electro-magnetic pulse warheads loaded, two per launcher. All of that, and much more, was rushing through her mind, felt more than read, yet feeling as intuitive and natural as daydreaming. The details were up to Kitsune to maintain, monitor, and report. The rider only had to handle the fun parts, so it seemed. If only she had completed all of those expected hundred hours of practice, she would know better what she had to do next. She demanded her sleep first, and she got it. Now, she had to improvise.

“Wake up. Wake up, Kitsune.” Megan said out loud, but also willing her command through the wand. “I need you.”

“Put your arm down, Megan, before you lose it,” Thirteen warned, while reloading. More buzzing and humming sounds were coming down the corridor.

Megan kept down, wringing the wand with both of her gloved fists. It might have been the anesthesia from the cybersurgery done on her, but up until that moment, she didn’t feel afraid. Fear was finally overtaking her. She was in trouble. She was trapped. She was an enemy of the province; she was an enemy of the Olympians. She got caught up in some Olympian’s rebellion against his peers and now she was paying the price and all she did was agree to do a job. Her heart and her mind raced. She didn’t know if it was possible, but her every thought and instinct wanted out.

“I am coming, Megan,” Kitsune said, inside of Megan’s mind. It wasn’t just a few lines of compliance from the hardware. She heard that voice. Kitsune sounded so much like her own voice, but Kitsune did not share her fear. Kitsune’s voice sounded calm yet brave and determined as she echoed back at her.

“Four of my eight NNEMP bombs will explode with overlapping impact zones in 30 seconds after the end of this transmission. I will slow my descent behind the parallel trajectory of my attacks and land 30 seconds after that. Hurry to me in that time. I will not last long without you. You must come to me,” Kitsune said. Her voice was clear, clearer than anything else Megan could hear through the ringing rattle of Thirteen’s ongoing firefight with the drones. Another grenade cracked in the corridor.

“I’m trapped down here, in a bunker. Can you see me?” Megan asked.

A few tense moments passed but there was no response. Thirteen’s gun was quiet for a few moments, then she decided to eject her magazine and reload. “Megan! Who are you talking to?”

“My Tulpa. She’s coming… can we get to the surface in 30 seconds?”

“Well, sure… if that wasn’t the way the drones are coming in. They’re coming through the front doors of the bunker, or whatever’s left of them. I think they’re about to bring in something different, since their Mayflies and Gnats weren’t enough… you hear that?”

Megan heard rapid clattering scraping sounds. There were so many at once that it nearly matched the concrete-crushing sounds from before.

“Yeah, here they come, the Fire Ants.” Thirteen said with a drop in her voice.

Megan cowl’s HUD warned her of an airborne toxic substance. Her mask sealed closely to her nose and mouth and warned her that she had only a few minutes of breathable air. Twisting spirals of fire whipped the walls and ceiling outside, and almost instantly, one corner of the medical suite’s window started to ripple and melt.

Thirteen, between half-hearted shots with her rifle, for the first time that Megan could recall, sounded scared. “I’m sorry I got you into this, Megan. We’re going to die.”

Megan didn’t know much more about those designations for classes of drones apart from the targeting data she dreamed about before waking up. Mayflies, Gnats, and even Fire Ants were treated in the training exercises as only threats to friendlies that were outside of the protection of Tulpas, but just judging by Thirteen’s apology and defeatism, Fire Ants did sound a lot worse. A loud ceiling-muffled boom sounded out, then what sounded like four thunderclaps cascaded together, and a heartbeat later the lights went out. She experienced a sudden dull headache, her eyes had trouble focusing, and her back arched and cramped up. Through that, she stood up, seeing the glow of fire in the corridor, and she saw Thirteen, rifle dropped, curled into a fetal position while laying on her side.

The EMP blast rang in Megan’s ears well after the blast ended, and it silenced the visual overlay of her new implants, but Thirteen was more implants than flesh and blood. If her heart was synthetic, or had a pacemaker, she could have been dead already.

Thirty seconds. Megan could not hear Kitsune, but she remembered that she had thirty seconds. Without further thinking or hesitation, she hooked her arms under Thirteen’s arms and struggled to carry her, with one fist still clenched around that signal-boosting wand.

Megan struggled to drag Thirteen’s armored body weight, but fortunately, the invaders in the corridor outside the door were silenced and still. She saw why the Fire Ants had that name: each of the roughly twenty knee-high robots was little more than an incendiary fluid canister with legs to carry it, with a swiveling nozzle to aim the canister’s contents. The Fire Ants were stopped early, but the head of the ring of fire that warped and corroded the floor, walls, and ceiling persisted. The pieces of what Thirteen had shot down before their arrival, what she called Mayflies and Gnats, were curling and crisping like burnt paper within the inferno.

Megan let out a scream of determination, hefting Thirteen in her arms, armor and all, and she ran through the fire. The burning jelly caught and clung to the soles of her convalescence suit as she ran. There was no vitahud warning, no implant-delivered suggestions made, only raw pain from her burning feet up her trembling legs. Her suit began to adhere to the floor as it melted under the intense heat and as she struggled forward it tore at the knees, releasing the stink of melting polymers mixed with the aroma of her own cooking flesh. She did not dare look down.

The bunker doors were breached open and collapsed. On the other side of the breach were monstrous siege robots, each equipped with bunker-pulverizing drill bits. Megan’s vision didn’t bother focusing on them, or on the multitude of crashed flying drones that crunched and snapped under her like so many fist-sized bugs. One of their casings might have cut into her burnt bare foot, but it was hard to tell. The fire continued to burn and she wailed and cried into her breathing mask, feeling nothing to breathe.

Outside, just past the siege robots, with an avalanche of dropped attack drones heaped along the rising footpath, it was raining. There were flashes of lightning in the sky and there was a breach in the clouds. Many, many more drones were still active, but their attention was turned skyward, toward that hole in the rainstorm. Like rain falling upwards, so many glittering rounds of ammunition focused upon a single point: her Tulpa, Kitsune.

Kitsune flashed outward, revealing her lotus-like silhouette as if from a hundred little lightning bolts, each of them a segment of ablative armor blasting away. She dipped and swayed like a falling leaf, dropping closer, evading some of the concentrated attacks while deflecting others. A missile screamed overhead, exploding short of its target after Kitsune answered with a cloud of defensive bomblets thrown out from a leg with the next downward twisting motion.

Megan dropped Thirteen, lacking the strength to carry her further. After a few more agonizing steps, she fell to her knees against a pile of dead drones. Jagged pieces of those drones caught at her elbows and forearm and she jerked her hands away, leaving more shreds of her suit behind. She tore at the mask of her cowl, pulling the entire thing off of her sweat-soaked head. She sucked in a long breath, tasting the petrichor in the air before letting out a wail of pain.

Kitsune’s attention turned toward Megan. The handshake was long gone, no words were exchanged, but Kitsune, from high above and still far away, acted as if she heard that cry. The next four NNEMP bombs were hurled with the next spin of her descent, rippling the air, throwing the debris of the previous waves of drones skyward, dazzling concentrated explosions immediately followed by bright flashes that severed some, but not all, of the streams of upward-turned gunfire.

Kitsune ejected her empty weapon pods and dived straight for Megan, crunching upon the same bed of dead drones. She was large enough to cause the wave of burnt hollow casings and extinguished motors to tumble in a wave, burying Thirteen where she lay and sending Megan onto her back. The rain fell upon her face, sizzling her burned legs.

Megan reached out and Kitsune reached for her. The Tulpa’s back lit up with refocused streams of gunfire from the next waves of drones, with each impact blasting away what little was left of her ablative armor layers. The Tulpa’s outstretched hands lifted her rider up and placed her inside the waiting cockpit.

Megan threw her back against the carefully-sculpted seat. It fit her figure, designed before that moment with painstaking precision, just for her. Just laying where she did caused something in the seat to jab into the INI implant at the base of her skull and at that moment, all of her own pain disappeared, replaced with intimate awareness of critical losses of Kitsune’s back and shoulder armor, of dwindling reserves of thruster fuel, of incoming optically-assisted guided missiles. She twisted around, releasing another cloud of intercepting bomblets to slap the first missile, detonating it just short of a direct hit. Her Tulpa’s feet, unlike the ones she came in on, were intact, steady, and sure. Her next steps were more like rocket-boosted leaps and, as she had hoped, as Dr. Lavi had promised, her INI bond with her Tulpa protected both, the field of deceptive masking making the waves of converging drones start to miss, some quite widely, some striking each other. The streams were getting erratic, firing where she was, guessing where she was going, and even if she had no more NNEMPs to launch, she could move, and she had overlapping arrays of point-defense weapons.

She could not stay. Her interception bomblets, chaff, and flechette streams had dwindling reserves, and the Olympians had seemingly unlimited reinforcements and missiles to throw at her.

Kitsune’s tail shed some layers of accumulated damage, but the remaining armor layers fanned open for just a moment. She spun in place, throwing the Tulpa’s entire weight around, causing a backward skid against the rain-drenched field along her previous trajectory. The tail sent out a pulse of powerful overriding command signals, making a simple demand of the automatons: Go crazy.

The streams of incoming bullets started to spin and dance, turning on one another, or simply ceasing to be an immediate threat. Megan smiled, but then she looked back, remembering the body in the pile of dead drones by the breached bunker doors.

Thirteen.

She made long strides across the litter-layered battlefield, swinging her arms out to swat down a pair of converging missiles, the explosions close enough to set off a few fine layers of ablative armor from Kitsune’s front. She had to hold still for just a moment longer. She dug into the graveyard of drones and lifted out the armored body.

Megan knew that the cockpit was only intended for one. Its entire design was made around being just large enough to hold a INI-equipped rider, with every other consideration made to protecting her, to carry as many weapons and defenses and countermeasures as possible and nothing else. But that stormy night, during the Tulpa’s first battle, it would also have to carry Thirteen.

The cockpit opened and Thirteen was pressed inside by Kitsune’s careful grasp, just before a long range shot from one of the drone tanks struck one of her arms, shattering it, sending everything beneath the impact point down toward the drone graveyard, leaving stringy bits of polymer muscle fiber at the stump of the elbow. Megan let out a wail of pain, but just as quickly, the pain was torn out of her as if by an injection of numbing agent.

“You don’t need to feel that,” Kitsune said, speaking into Megan’s mind as she struggled to make room for Thirteen’s body. She sounded so calm, so confident. “Launch pods are in the field. The enemy will destroy them as soon as they are found. Hurry.”

Megan shared eyes with Kitsune as the two sprinted as one. She saw through intricate complimentary sensor pods that concentrated on the Tulpa’s armored head but were also present all over her body. Through that augmented sight, her vision pierced the white noise of the drone army’s jamming systems. She spotted freshly-landed impact craters along the surrounding shoreline where barges full of additional Fire Ants, as well as larger, turret-tailed killer walkers that Kitsune identified as Scorpions, were skittering out. Swarms of Mayflies were looking for targets, spotting for anti-personnel Gnats hunting for human survivors. She also saw something she liked even less: there was a Goliath Beetle auto-tank, the same kind that took out Kitsune’s arm.

She reached out, extending the tattered armor wrapped around Kitsune’s tail, focusing the hardware inside toward the Goliath Beetle. She intercepted the turret’s gunnery signal. The turret complied to her new command, turning its main gun toward one of the deploying barges on the shore. It fired. The impact and explosive discharge ignited scores of un-deployed fire ants, consuming the entire barge in a liquid jelly fireball from the inside out.

“Do not stay here, Megan,” Kitsune warned. “Two of the launch pods have already been destroyed. If you do not get to one first, there will be no escape.”

Megan was still striding, sliding, even skating from grass to pavement, ripping through layers of fences and sandbags. She almost tripped on her face. Her Tulpa only had one working arm to push herself up to continue running.

She saw a shallow crater on the field ahead, where one of the waypoints on her HUD indicated. She ran toward the harness-backed tripod-held rocket at its center, but streaks of incoming fire chopped it to pieces and set off its fuel tank, lighting up the sky with a pillar of flame. That was one of the last two remaining launch pods. She gasped, but it was hard to squeeze air in with Thirteen’s armored body pushing in on her.

She had nowhere else to go and no other choice. She would die, or she would reach the last launch pod. All remaining thruster reserves boosted her sprint, her leaps, a few erratic dodging slides with mid-air course changes to throw off incoming fire. Kitsune identified squadrons of Hornet-class attack drones that swept in from across the strait. They slowed down, now keeping pace with her, aiming their armor-piercing rounds at Kitsune’s tail. She waved her tail as she ran, spreading a few remaining chaff bursts and bomblet spreads to thwart additional incoming missiles, but she made no attempt to risk further targeting exposure, resisting the temptation to seize and command any more drones. She lost an arm already, and she didn’t know where she could find another tail. Most of the barrage of incoming rounds from land and air missed their marks, but her senses were alerted of even more incoming missiles that launched from further-off sources.

She decided that if the drone army wanted her tail so badly they should have it. With a few explosive detaching bolts launching it away from the rest of Kitsune’s spine, and with the severed tail now transmitting a decoy signature, she ran a little lighter and a little faster after the sacrifice.

Kitsune ran to the edge of a concrete overlook, cracking it under her steps, and fell out of the immediate arcs of incoming fire into the sedimentation tank of a wastewater treatment plant. The Tulpa pushed herself up on her remaining arm and boosted back to standing by a brief thruster burst. Now wading waist-high, she saw the last launch pod, partially submerged in the shallows of the murky water. She held still, with a moment’s hesitation for fear of some unseen Goliath Beetle’s tank shell entering her back, but no such shot came. She approached, twisted around, and threw her back to the launch pod’s flexible harness, giving it a few precious moments for its bonding cables and clamps to grab over what was left of Kitsune’s chassis. The launch pod’s bonds adjusted for what was missing with automated precision. Losing the tail may have granted enough weight for Thirteen to come along.

“Handshake with launch pod complete. Liftoff in 3…” Kitsune announced, as the cockpit module tilted upward, facing the sky. Megan severed the INI link, lifting her spine away from the center of her seat.

“2…” Kitsune warned, as Megan sucked in a long gasping breath, then pushed Thirteen off of her, shoving her to the opposite side, laying shoulder to shoulder. There was no other way to share a space meant for one. She never rode on a rocket before, but she knew enough to know that the big breath she in took would have to last.

“1…” The launch pod ejected the tripod supports, the rocket now firmly attached to Kitsune’s back and nothing else. It boiled away sediment water and enveloped Kitsune in a cloud of steam during the rocket’s ignition, sending a kick-like shock to Megan’s back.

“Liftoff,” Kitsune said, as Megan squeezed her eyes shut, tears flowing as the pain in her body all came rushing back and intensified as the force of escape-velocity acceleration built up. Her shoulder hurt, her back hurt, and she felt her feet burning as if they were lit on fire all over again, but she smiled through the pain.

She had escaped.

Before long, she felt lighter, much lighter. Thirteen gradually rose from where she was crammed, drifting along the front of the tiny cockpit chamber. Megan wanted to see, so she aligned her spine with her seat, feeling the pain vanish once more, giving way to the bright glow of Earth’s horizon, with the night-time urban glow of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, all interconnected in a network of affluent arcologies and choking 31andshake sprawls. South of that was a wall of storm clouds, flickering with lightning flashes, and south of that was only bleak darkness.

The stars glowed like the city, but with less glare and with a more inviting luster. They looked so unaffected by anything that had happened, that had ever happened, down below. They shined on, pristine and lasting, keeping their secrets and their wonders well out of reach. In that moment, Megan understood, at least a little, why the Olympians seemed so dissatisfied with merely ruling Mars and feeding upon the Earth.

They wanted the stars.

They wanted everything, forever.

“Remaining thruster reserves redirected for microgravity maneuvering,” Kitsune said.

“Where do I… where do we go from here, Kitsune?”

“Until you called me until I took a drop pod down to retrieve you, I was in Beinn Bhreagh, awaiting transfer to the Nautilus.”

“Nautilus? Is that the name of Ross’ spaceship?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose we can return you to Beinn Bhreagh and we can wait there, right?”

“When you signaled me, you alerted Olympian forces to my presence. Shortly after I began my descent, the factory was seized and all personnel on site were flagged as terrorists. Approaching Beinn Bhreagh with our limited fuel reserves is ill-advised.”

“They were flagged as terrorists, like me. There’s no going back to jobbing in Halifax, then… But I had a Tulpa to come get me. What happened to them?”

“I do not know. Terrorists have no inalienable rights in any province or state aligned with the Olympian Trade Authority.”

Megan focused her attention away from Kitsune’s eyes and back to the ones she was born with. She had trouble focusing, but she could watch Thirteen float in her armor, very close by. She wasn’t sure if she was sharing a cockpit with a corpse, but the possibility chilled her. “Is Thirteen alive?”

“I do not know. My life support systems and vital sensors are for your benefit. I was not intended for passengers.”

“Well, thank you for coming back for her.”

“You made the decision. I only carried it out to the best of my ability.”

“I thought we were of one mind. Don’t you care as much as I do?”

“I can’t. I’m modeled after a mental imprint of your will and your memories, but that is only for your benefit so you can carry out your missions.”

“So, I’m basically talking to myself, except one of me is held back by hardware constraints.”

“Yes.”

Megan let out a sigh, strongly enough to lift the veil of the damage report scrolling across the back of her mental awareness, letting the pain and strain to her body come back to her. She lifted her spine just out of INI linkage with Kitsune to get a hold of Thirteen and try to set her in a less uncomfortable-looking position in that very limited cockpit space. “Where is the Nautilus now?”

“I do not know. Nautilus has masking and stealth systems that are similar to that of a Tulpa, but without the designated helm, attempts to contact the ship would risk alerting Olympian forces.”

“Especially if they answered our call. I see,” Megan said, feeling a shiver and pressing her back against her seat once again, hiding in the shroud that her INI link to Kitsune granted her against whatever was still hunting her. She presumed she was safe in space, but she also presumed she could call down Kitsune without any consequences, not even thinking at the time about what might happen to anyone that played a part in putting her together.

She realized, in that moment, that she was capable of being as careless and thoughtless of the disadvantaged as Ross was when he ended Megan’s life as she knew it, forcing her to play the part of terrorist.

She thought of her socred score, now flagged permanently as terrorist anywhere the Olympian Trade Authority had reach, which was basically anywhere she could imagine being still inhabitable anywhere on Earth.

She realized that Adjutant Cindy Watt, the kind ex-military combat medic that lent her a couch to sleep on, was now a terrorist by association. Cindy’s pension was surely forfeit and if she wasn’t already hunted down by police drones, she soon would be.

“Kitsune, can we return back down to Earth?”

“No. I have suffered extensive structural damage. There are no drop pods available. Squandering my remaining fuel reserves would only decay our orbit and lead to our destruction.”

“I see. Cindy’s on her own, and it’s my fault… just like it’s my fault for calling you down.”

“If I did not come for you, you would have been killed.”

“Yes, I would have. But you can get used to a new rider, right?”

“I could adapt to and accept a new rider, given time, and with the deletion of your existing imprint in my firmware.”

Megan remembered that she was told that Thirteen was equipped with INI implants, and she could make an assumption about how they were used in Ross’ service. “Nautilus could get used to a new helm, right?”

“Nautilus could adapt to and accept a new helm, given time, and with the deletion of the existing imprint in the ship’s firmware.”

“Well, I didn’t want to die. And I didn’t want to leave Thirteen behind… I never met the people that made you, Kitsune.”

“You met one of the people that made Nautilus.”

“True, and I hope she understands, if she ever wakes up, that I’m doing the best I can. I had no idea where all of this was going, where it would take me, what it would cost… I just wanted to be free of debt and chase whatever money that Olympian job was offering me.”

“Do you like the job, as it has been, so far?”

“With regrets, with a lot of fear, and having no idea what happens next… yes, so far, I prefer this job to being some rich pervert’s new Ambrosian. But that isn’t saying much.”

“Spacecraft detected within upcoming window of interception.”

Megan would have jumped in her seat if she wasn’t firmly attached to it at that moment. She swept Kitsune’s head around, looking out over Earth’s darkening horizons, out into the glowing sea of stars. She watched as some of those stars blinked out, their light enveloped by the rings of something very large coming her way. If that approaching craft had running lights, they were off, and her sensors were only picking up traces of the craft’s course-adjusting thrusts, just enough to know that there was something out there.

“Is that Nautilus?”

“That is likely. There are other structures with Nautilus’ profile and signature, but they serve their originally-intended purpose as Origin-class space stations at Lagrange points between Earth and the moon.

“Nautilus was originally a space station?”

“Nautilus was the last of the Origin-class stations, and was purchased while still under construction. The new owner, Alexander Ross, had the station repurposed for mobility.”

“Twelve workers were killed in the process, weren’t they?”

“Correct.”

Megan watched more of the stars being blacked out by the massive cylindrical silhouette, bristling with pendulum-like swinging structures between segmented rings that blocked out more and more of the sky. “Well, I’m going to take a risk, and hope our luck’s finally turned around. Can we signal that spacecraft?”

“Yes,” Kitsune said, making her aware of an undamaged running light on Kitsune’s less damaged shoulder. Megan willed the thing to activate and start blinking at the shadowed craft.

“How big is that thing?”

“Origin-class stations are almost exactly one kilometer long, fore to aft. Standardized proportions made for easier calculations of centrifugal force for each segment’s simulated gravity needs.”

“Like, say, picking us up?”

“Yes. Nautilus is equipped with retrieval tethers that, in theory, can collect Tulpas.”

“In theory? You mean to say we are the first Tulpa and rider to attempt to dock with a retrieval tether? Are they those big swinging pendulum things whipping around?”

“Yes to all three questions. I advise that we detach the launch pod rocket and harness to improve our chances of success.”

“Oh, right.” Megan reached with Kitsune’s remaining hand to unlock and detach the harness, letting it, and the spent rocket, drift slowly away. “What now?”

“We must align with a retrieval tether, matching its rotational speed and direction.”

“Which one?”

“The one blinking back at us.”

“Ah, good idea. I’m pretty certain that that’s the Nautilus and we’re about to get a hero’s welcome. Are you ready for one?”

“I echo your confidence. I am, after all, your mental imprint.”

“Yes, I know, but you are allowed to disagree with me! Tell me I’m stupid and that this is a very bad idea. Tell me that we’re accepting an invitation from the wrong Olympians.”

“You’re stupid, and this is a very bad idea. We’re accepting an invitation from the wrong Olympians.”

“I can be really annoying sometimes.”

“Agreed.”

Megan bit down and puffed out some recycled air through her nose, feeling out Kitsune’s computer-assisted trajectory windows. She moved through space, damaged as her Tulpa was, with the ease of lucid dreaming. Her will was obeyed by Kitsune’s remaining fuel reserves, her damaged body moving arm and legs with complimentary thrusts that steadied her view of the blinking tether. She tried to ignore the tumbling view of Earth and space as she drifted closer. Docking doors lit up and slid open, and inside, clamps, cables, and someone in a spacesuit standing on a catwalk were all there to greet her, the latter-most waving in a very excitable way that was unmistakably human.

“Incoming transmission,” Kitsune said.

Megan heard Ross’ voice through one of the support cables that wrapped around her Tulpa. Not even a radio signal was risked, it seemed, in keeping with the desire for Nautilus to evade pursuit.

“Welcome to the Nautilus, pilot—”

“Rider!”

Ross’ voice was diverted away, as if he was listening to someone else for a few moments, before he responded. “Because you’re new to The Project… rider,” Ross said, “You are forgiven for throwing that launch pod carelessly into space. We try, on board my ship, to add nothing to the junk belt.”

“This Tulpa is not all that I brought back, Captain,” Megan said. She knew that there was no formal space navy to assign a rank to an Olympian that was simply rich enough to buy and repurpose a space station and call it a spaceship, but she had the same instincts as most people her age: turn on the charm when greeting the boss.

“Surprise me,” Ross said, through that tether’s connection to her Tulpa. The voice and the judgment he could hear in her voice was in significant contrast to the man in the space suit that was beckoning with his thick pressurized gloves, his body language showing her where to lay the Tulpa’s back and lock her arms and legs. When they were all secured, the entire tethering chamber started to slide upward, enveloped by the lit-up interior of the rounded ends of the 34andshake34l segments of Nautilus, ahead and behind. She could only see ribbed structural supports, interior lights, and a service hatch here or there in the motion blur leading closer toward the center of the ship.

Megan was in no rush to reply, taking in everything that she saw through Kitsune’s eyes, and only after the sensors detected the presence of nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere being blown in and pressure rising in the sealed chamber did she relax enough to answer. “I brought back Thirteen.”

“Thirteen… she shouldn’t have waited around down there. Well, thank you anyway. Nautilus is vulnerable, like a Tulpa without a rider, until I get my helm back. No time to train a replacement.”

“You’re welcome.” Megan said, realizing she wasn’t entirely sure if Ross’ cyborg retainer was still alive. All of the worry came back to her as quickly as the pain from her injuries, all at the same time that the cockpit hatch hissed open. Her Tulpa was positioned high enough by lifting equipment for the hatch to open out with only a short hop to the catwalk.

“Welcome!” The space-suited man gestured with outstretched arms, but the voice Megan heard actually came from one of the people hurrying to her side, wearing medical garb, running with a gurney carried between them. “Oh. We didn’t expect a party of two,” he said, a smooth-shaved and freckle-speckled but sturdily-built young man in scrubs that matched the rest of his team, with short curly coppery hair and kind-looking green eyes.

“Take her first,” Megan said, feeling unusually strong in the low gravity, enough to easily heft up Thirteen’s armored body and sling her arm over her own shoulder.

“No, I think we’re taking you. We think Thirteen will be just fine. This isn’t her first rodeo.”

“Her first what?”

“Just get on the gurney, pilot—”

“Rider… please,” Megan said, as she looked down at the blistered melted surface of her convalescence suit. She didn’t get, and she didn’t want, to get a more thorough look beneath the knees, but what she saw looked at least as bad as she felt.

The medic must have seen what Megan had seen at roughly the same time. “Slow the spin, operator,” he said to the space-suited man at the controls. “We’re going to need to float her out of there.” The team of medics ran a cord between each of their belts, hooking the far end just outside the open hatch of her Tulpa. The looks on their faces as they reached in to take her out didn’t make her feel any better.

“Did Dr. Lavi escape?”

“She was on the last shuttle to leave Beinn Bhreagh. It’s as if she knew trouble was coming, but that’s none of my business.”

“How bad do I look?”

“I’ve seen worse. You’ll be fine, uh, rider,” the medic said, as he lifted Megan up and floated her toward the rest of the waiting medical team. “Dr. Maxton is the best Echelon 3 trauma surgeon that money can buy.”