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Just like Zhiruo. Just like Sally and Loese. Just like Calliope.

Just like me.

I drew a breath, and it didn’t feel like my lungs filled. “Anyway, I couldn’t trust a different exo any more than I can trust this one, could I? You could hack that, too.”

More silence. I turned my head and sobbed into my pillow—if it was even a real pillow and not a virtual, neural simulation of a pillow. At least it seemed to adequately muffle the sound, but sound is often muffled in dreams, isn’t it? Nobody else needed to suffer because I wanted to curl into a tight curve and scream from the depths of my belly. So I screamed silently, my whole body clenching around the emotion, my cheeks aching with the strain. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I might as well die: there was no purpose to existing anymore.

I’d found a purpose in service, before. I’d subsumed myself into being useful for others. I’d given up my family without a fight, without thinking that giving them up was selfish, too. Earning my carbon footprint, my breath and food. But that was over, I knew. I’d had a taste of living for myself, and I could not go back to living entirely for others again.

But also I didn’t believe in the cause I had given my whole heart and soul to in service anymore. It was gone. It had abandoned me.

No, worse. It had never existed. I had invented it; I had allowed myself to be deluded, because I had so badly wanted it to exist. I had wanted to belong to a thing. I had wanted to need and be needed.

Why are we born needing impossible things? Why is it that we all have things we need to live that simply do not exist in the universe?

A purpose in life. Unconditional love? Our emotional needs met? Ha. What cruel asshole thought this shit up?

“My marriage wasn’t perfect: it had problems and didn’t work out. But if I got a different marriage, it would have problems eventually, too. If I went to a different hospital, it would turn out to be rotten inside as well. I thought I would rather be alone and in pain than be betrayed. But I don’t like being alone and in pain, either, so I found things to believe in. And I kept being wrong.” I hadn’t realized I was speaking until I spoke. “You know what? Fuck this. I give up. I’m going to quit. Go on the Guarantee. Go live in safety somewhere.”

You’d be bored.

That didn’t sound like the machine. Was it? Was it Sally? Linden?

“I’d rather be bored than sad. I’d rather be alone than lonely.” I was repeating myself. Well, I wasn’t at my best. “I believed in this place. I believed in me. And the worst part is, I didn’t mind not believing in things until this place made me believe in something. And it was all a lie. It was using me.”

Silence again. Then a voice. It was definitely Linden. Dr. Jens.

Oh. “Linden.”

She was calm and warm and professional. What you said wasn’t wrong, but it sounds like you’re emotionally overwrought—

“You’re fucking right I am! And I deserve to be!” This, the detached part of me thought, is why you’d rather be dissociated. Life is easier when you compartmentalize.

Fair, she said. But listen for a moment, please. The machine in Core General’s systems is contained. I know it did a great deal of damage to your emotional equilibrium and your neurochemistry along the way, but you did it. You held on. You held the connection, and Sally and Helen and I got through. We’ve firewalled it out of the hospital’s systems and pried it loose from Starlight.

You won.

Had I? I didn’t feel like it. It felt like I had crumbled. Shattered.

“Wow,” I said. “Is that what winning feels like? I don’t think I’ve ever had such a goalpost-shifting, pointless argument in my entire life.”

Linden said, I’m here to bring you out, Llyn.

_____

I opened my eyes in a room that seemed simultaneously bright, and full of fuzzy, undefined shadows. I blinked twice before I realized that I was looking past the open lid of the cryo pod, and my shipmates were staring down at me.

I blinked my eyes once more. They nearly focused. I blinked again.

One of the looming shadows was greener, larger, and more angular than the others, and was wearing a four-armed bolero jacket with a glint of gold on one lapel.

This was a horrible idea, said Cheeirilaq. Why is your species so full of horrible ideas?

“There is a difference between this horrible idea and all the other ones.” I started pulling electrodes off my scalp while Rilriltok buzzed behind me anxiously.

The Goodlaw cocked its head in what I, a human, could only anthropomorphize as exasperation. Eyesight, definitely improving.

“This one worked,” I said, and started laughing so hard my diaphragm hurt.

_____

I was still giggling off residual adrenaline when the oil-slick-iridescent, knobbly-tinkertoy pseudopod burst through the cryo ward deck plating.

Life must be preserved, the machine whispered. All your lives. Forever.

It writhed, tip seeking like a blind snake’s snout, and I felt it like a snap the moment its attention fastened on me. I was still sitting in the pod, half wired to it, some of the connections going directly into my fox interface. Rilriltok, right behind me, gave a despairing buzz and worked faster. Even with all the giant, massive, impermeable systers on Core General, I have to say that my fragile little insect friend was the bravest of anyone. Precisely because it was so fragile, and yet it did terrifying and dangerous and necessary things anyway.

You, the machine said. Its voice reached me as vibrations through the deck, through the air. It set my hairs prickling. You betrayed us. You stopped us from keeping them safe. You must be restrained.

Restrained.

We will restrain you.

CHAPTER 29

SURE, OF COURSE. THIS WAS how my life worked. Beat the enemy on the virtual plane. Escape, relax, start thinking about cocktails.

Then, oh shit, nanotech tentacles.

_____

It’s possible to love a thing, to trust a thing, to rely on a thing, to be overjoyed that a thing exists—and also to resent it. My exo, for example, makes me weak with gratitude. It makes it possible for me to live the life I want to live, to give to the community in the way I wish to give to the community. It makes me strong and nimble and quick in ways I never was without it.

It is also something I have to think about. Something to consider each dia. Something to maintain, and the body within it needs maintenance, too.

A piece of cognitive load. One more damned thing to take into account.

And it’s a symbol of not being able to always do everything, all the time, right now.

_____

Well, right that second, right now, I had no mixed emotions about my exo at all, despite the fact that the machine had infiltrated and impersonated it in order to—to put it bluntly—fuck with my mind. I guess, in fairness, I had invited the machine in—and the diversion had worked, because Linden had managed to force it to withdraw from the hospital’s structure. I guess we knew now where it had gone.

However complicated I might feel about machine and exo and exo and machine when I had the leisure to unpack those feelings, my exo was saving me from the nanotech tentacles. (Yes, I know. Microbots are not technically nanotech. When you’re being chased by them, fine distinctions kind of go out the airlock.)