Later people would say all sorts of things about her. That she only ever spoke in exact quotes from The Lives of the Saints. That she was homunculised from the blood of Judas, to invert and redeem him. That angels bore her when her legs failed, at the end.
(That she loved me.)
Three times, I meet the Messiah. We almost get along.
THIS IS MY BODY
First, she is splayed out before me, whole. All her limbs still sinew-stitched in place. PHYSICS has sent chrome crawling up her fingers, taking tasteful bites out of the phalanges, but nothing past the wrist, only the occasional daring flash of cybernetic ankle. I’d forgive you if you thought she was a person.
Later people would say all kinds of things about her. That she only ever spoke in quotes from The Lives of the Saints. That she was homunculised from the blood of Judas, to invert and redeem him. That the angels bore her when her body failed, at the end.
(That she loved me.)
But I see she is only a woman: I decant her intestines, I stud her spine with JTAG ports, I chisel out her lowermost ribs. This is the last age, and Vanguard have dispensed with death. With mundane medicine complete, we, daughters of the final generation, find our telos eviscerating volunteers, building ever more perfect forms.
In these days, all the world is animated by a single cause. It is why I bend sweating over her, spreadeagled, why the surveyors dredge up dead cities and trawl for bloodstained idols. It is why, outside in the sunharrowed spring, the marshals fret over their maps: for the liberation of Hell.
It is even in the air of the theatre — austere walls of alabaster now flecked with venous red — incense behind the stink of rust. I am supposed to say we are both moved by it, but when I speak with her I know that I am only a pretender.
We keep the patients conscious as we operate, to be sure nothing’s taking badly. I talk to them to reassure us both, but she is the only one I have known to respond. Her expression is disinterested as she watches herself empty out.
I am too distracted by the work, snipping at each tendon in turn, to notice the way her face spasms. But when I jostle aside her diaphragm to fit in a fresh-grown ballistics ganglion, she exhales sharply, eyes twisted shut.
“Does that hurt?”
“Not more than the rest.”
My brows knit. “You’re not supposed to be feeling anything. When did it start?”
Her eyes are half-lidded; to be remade is a trying process. “Whole time. Guess your anaesthetics are fucked."
It turns out there's an obscure and easily patched issue with the neural interface firmware (for as our civilisation grows higher it grows in other directions, too, spiraling inward and cancerous). But look what she has endured: her gown and skin are split and pinned aspread, and her rough-hewn abdominal muscles have been peeled away to get at the offal beneath.
“Why didn’t you bring this up earlier?”
She smiles laconically.
“Thought that’s just what it took.”
“What, to be strong? Pain for power? That’s the Devil’s deal, not ours."
I try to tut playfully. She doesn’t bite.
“To be useful.”
Soon I will be at her heart. The vault of her ribs is broken, and the spars of bone rise out of her chest, reaching towards me. I array two lungs like wings about her torso. Perhaps a thousand years past, on the very ground of the Oslo Rikshospitalet, one of my ancestors arranged the same scene.
“You want to be in the way of a lemure that bad?”
“Yes.”
“Mm. Be my guest.”
With the lungs out of the way, I slit the pericardium and begin etching the standard trigram of karmic nullification. I have to lean precariously over her yawning thoracic cavity to get the knife in place. When I look up —
She’s staring right at me. Storm-grey eyes pinning me to the spot. I try to swallow, but my mouth is newly dry.
I break away, shake my head. I might have to call in sick. Why am I suddenly so distractible?
The circle completes, and the four walls sink in a sea of light. An aqualine glow pours across the sheer surfaces and casts shadows across both of our faces. The trigram is forcing her through an artificial epiphany; truth etched with steel. The process will leave her delirious.
When I repackage her, stuffing a doll full of silicon straw, she's fraying. Only a few organs (the lungs, the heart, the uterus) are left to her. But as I finish emplacing her internal bioreactor, she reaches out a tentative arm. She’s still staring, silent still, but her eyes are wide. In their shine I think I see tears.
I grasp her hand (it’s protocol to keep patients comfortable, of course) and she nearly crushes my fingers. The metal of her synthetic knuckles impresses into my skin, carving thin claret lines. The steel is still warm.
In a voice hoarse and uncontrolled:
“This’ll be enough? Tell me they’ll find somewhere to put me.”
She is almost back together. I have only glittering sheets of artificial muscle to stitch in place, and the skin to seal back together, so it’s safe to take some time to talk. And we’re instructed to keep them talking. Maybe I’ll discover another flaw in the implant process.
I clasp her hand between mine and put on my best bedside smile: cloying and insincere. I was not selected for my personability.
“If you’re with the Coalition, you’re already doing your part —”
Her expression of despair impels me to immediately backpedal.
“ — And you’re clearly dedicated. They’ll find you somewhere important.”
“With lots of buttons to press?”
I don’t know whether to laugh, but she breaks out in giggles first, so I chuckle along with her. With her core muscles still laid across a nearby table, her mirth sounds oddly hollow.
“You’ll have a whole wall of panels and dials.”
“But I want — I want buttons. Fuck. What did you put in me? I’m stupid now.”
Her body shakes with silent laughs still. I release her hand, which falls limply by her side.
“It’ll wear off. You signed up for this. Though most people tell me about how scared they are to die when the trig hits. You’re an odd one.”
“I guess I’m scared I’ll die too. Before him.”
I knit the fascia to the folded strips of myomer, leaving mirror-smooth matte muscle. She will need new bones to match her new flesh in time, when the old ones break under the strain.
“Before who?”
“Him. The enemy. The adversary.”
My hands fold her skin in place, pass over where it splits like overripe fruit, and leave no seams. I smile to myself.
“You’ve got ambition to spare, Miss…?”
“Laine. I’ll do this a hundred times. I’ll never stop. They’ll have to send me against him. Eventually.”
Her earnest expression, the childish anger on her face — these things only convince me of her sincerity. I shake my head as I smooth my palms over her navel, and leave her whole. She spends two weeks recovering, and then they name her the girl-saviour.
I don’t yet know it, but I will follow her into Hell.
HERE IS THE LINE OF DIVISION
Alright, so I lied: we meet a lot more than thrice. She turns out to be exactly what all the strategists of the Coalition have been waiting for, and my star rises with hers. Soon she’s trialing for a program so black I’m not cleared for its existence, even as I work on it. The signs are obvious enough: they bring in a whole coterie of surgeons, and whittle her away inch by inch. She loses facial features, limbs, obscure regions of the brain. From me they take all memory of my life before I signed up — but not her.
So she fills in for me. When I meet the other engineers on the team for a round of drinks I tell them all her stories, and they look at me with awe. Here is the woman who knows the heart of our deliverer, they think. It feels — sick, wrong, relieving — to know they’ll respect me for this.
In fact, her life is completely quotidian, and I tell her this to her face. She grins ear-to-ear when she hears it. I think it makes her glad that at least one of her staff doesn’t take her seriously. Everyone she meets writes their own private hagiography. I might be the only one she knows who talks to her like a person.
I know the real Lumi Laine. I know her dorsal cavity, the vertebra-fins all lined up down her back, the scapula that flex as she works out the ache in her shoulders. Her skin is mottled with scars, some old, most new, a map of her endowments. I get to see the copper and titanium creep up her limbs, digesting the joints like morsels. What won’t she subject herself to?
Once I have her strung from the ceiling like a museum piece, arms outstretched either side while I work on her nervous system. I nick her Wernicke’s area and her commentary dissolves into babble, but the tone is still teasing. I can’t figure out how to fix it for a week, so she makes do with sign language and dark aphasic imprecations. I don’t think I understand her any worse, though.
When I do put her back together she hugs me close. She doesn’t particularly smell like anything. Perhaps I am already so saturated in her I can’t tell.
Eventually they read us both in on what she’ll be: a pilot for the last warcraft. The hulking superstructure of the Apocatastasis-class frame will replace her old limbs, which she discards carelessly.
I see her the very first time she goes under, in the amber glow of the amniosis. She floats balled up, bald and maimed, neural port extending out of what was her left arm. I want to say that she’s resting, at peace, but that’s not true. It looks like she’s gestating. What will be born here?
She comes out clotted with ichor, hacking up her alveoli, eyes ecstatic. I cannot meet her gaze when I tell her they’ll be cycling candidates. Her voice is meek as she says she understands. It stings more than her spite ever could have.
It’s hard to admit it, but I hope she washes out. She needs a less demanding role. But, damn the dice, she’s one of their best candidates, and they drag her in and out of the frame at odd hours, drill more ports into her skin, amputate endlessly all excess mass. I miss her eyes, which I knew so well, which now reside almost exclusively behind bulky simulator headsets. When she sleeps she dreams lucid combat scenarios. I can see it in the flicker of her eyes when I visit her in the revivification pods. Things are moving so fast.
She keeps coming back, despite the bad interfaces, though there’s cerebrospinal fluid trickling out of her nose most days. She no longer really moves her face: the atavistic connections have been shaved away to make room for mech-instinct. But though she’s perfectly blank she still has anger in her voice when I tell her she needs to ease up.
“If I can’t manage this,” she asks wanly, “Then I’ve wasted the last three years of your life.”
I do not tighten my grip, because still we only ever speak when I operate on her. She has no time to spare for small talk, I assume.
“You’re their favourite already. You know this. The connections take time, Lu, you can’t just force them. You’ll be sneezing cerebrum if you keep this up.”
“Every second is measured in screams.”
She can’t see my eyes roll. That’s the party line — and it’s true — but we both know it’s not her issue.
“…And they might not pick me.” she bites out. “That — I can’t do that to her. Or myself.”
“Her?” I ask, exasperated. Our conversations move along predetermined orbits, now.
“Yes, the fucking mech, Pri, you know it.”
“Oh, Christ,” I mutter, “Not this again.”
She takes in an angry breath. The inrushing airs tensions her body against my scalpel. Words cascade out of her:
“Do any of the engineers even bother looking? Have you ever even tried to speak to her?"
I hold back a sigh. "There's no "her". The empathic feedback just makes you feel like —"
"None of the other candidates even bother denying it anymore.”
“You can be very persuasive.”
“Not —”
A spritz of feedback shorts out her vocal centres as I untangle a few bilious relay channels. There are fangs behind her eyes. I smirk.
“Not a joke.” She bites out. “Take me seriously. You can’t imagine what’s in there. It’s so empty.”
I worry at my lip. Lumi exhales obscure transuranic ligands, sighing.
“When the frame is powered off. She’s still feeling. It’s like something crawling in your spine, forever.”
She’d know. “Look, whatever it is —”
“Fuck!” she hisses,”You’re just plugging your fucking ears. Because it would be inconvenient to listen to me. Not any better than the sawbones squad. She should at least have a name.”
She has bared her heart. If only it had been for me.
“I’m the only one that talks to her, she likes me. She needs me.”
I continue in stony silence.
“I need her.”
My lungs fail. A pit carves into my stomach. I know there’s a reply, something that will bring her back to Earth, but I can’t think of it. I never will.
In the end she gets her wish, and I continue to serve faithfully. What else is there to do? I will not abandon her, the saint I spliced together, at the culmination of her work. This is as much my triumph as hers. I have to live with it.
Beyond the Geneva skyline, Good Intentions rises, wielded at last, silhouetted by a setting sun.
JOYEUSE
While I wait to die I realise, with dull shock, that we have won.
Before us wait the hosts of the pit, the banners of five princes of Hell — disarming, filing raucously into brigs, tearing up their standards. In a line kneel the greatest diabolic lords, as proud in submission as in mastery; but unmistakeably broken to our will. They kneel in terror of the avalanche we have loosed their way, which they call Good Intentions, and which I know as Lumi Laine.
When the infernal generals trapped us in their domain, with no way home, we had sent her off to take their heads, while we entrenched ourselves madly. What we knew was that we were only unburied corpses. I patiently counted off the seconds until the demoniac horde fell upon our sheepfold.
And while I polished my service revolver and glanced again at Lumi’s dead transponder, the horde came — and prostrated itself.
Now at last I am obsolete. This whole army is a relic of an epoch which ended half an hour ago. The daughters of the redeemed age might call it the postlapsarian era. We shall beat our swords into ploughshares, our scramjets into skyhooks.
I let myself think that, and ignore what the dead signal means. Try not to think of her, in that cathedral-coffin, with only a ravenous mara for company, wheedling away her soul —
Over the horizon appears a column of ash and slag, coronated with electrum. I cannot keep up the pretense of apathy, not even to myself. I rush over to where Good Intentions sets down, collapsing in on herself until she seems a part of the landscape. I have this last duty to attend to, my final dread: I have to say goodbye.
The frame is a ruin. Every inch of armour is twisted by fire or fury, and as it falls to its knees it looks like it’s begging for a mercy neither immanent nor imminent. Inside stinks of oil and pig-iron; the walls have fallen apart, so the whole structure is ragged with jagged tunnels running from corridor to corridor. I navigate through her innards one last time until I come to her soul.
Her pod has burst open. The floor is sticky with amniotics, which glow a sickly amber. The chamber reeks of birth. On the far wall, some of her remains.
Everything below the waist is gone (has been gone for years). Her arms are outstretched to either side of her, upheld primarily by the tug of dozens of needles piercing them, sustaining her with blood, oni’s bile, distilled anima. From the bottom of her torso, more ducts pipe into unseen corners of her life support. Her skin is whorled with scar tissue and pocked with needle-punctures.
She smiles.
“H. Hey. Been a while, ma’am.”
It’s been maybe six hours. I laugh despite myself. Five years ago I should have just torn her out of those wires, let someone else take up her duty, run away. My regrets are uselessly late. I don’t even have time to commiserate with her, any more. These hours should be happy.
“Lu. Good to see you.”
“Doesn’t the girl who laughed at certain death get more than a ‘good to see you’? How about ‘thanks for doing literally the best thing in human history’? I’d settle for ‘great job out there’, really.”
Her voice is strained. If she had died out there, I wouldn’t have to look her in the eye.
“You — did amazing. They’re going to build a monument to you. In every city on the — the planet. Fuck. I’m so proud of you.”
My breath is hitching. I fall apart at the end. It’s like a children’s story.
Her arms spread, the five new limbs clamped like barnacles to her back, hijacking her nervous system, and I stumble forward toward her. They cocoon me until I struggle to breathe; it is reassurance that she is still here. I choose the wire-mother. I am pressed against her skin, which is damp and sweet like pork. Hot tears are streaming at last down my face. It only took seven years.
“You’ve been amazing,” I sniffle out, still too dignified to sob, “They couldn’t have dreamt of better.”
Her smile gutters.
“You sound like you’re saying goodbye. Come on.”
Her grip loosens, and I back away from her mangled body, setting my hands on her shoulders. I swallow.
“I — Maybe you can’t. See yourself. In here, I mean, your body. But the pod’s irreparable. I don’t think you have the oxygen exchange capacity to keep — keep going. Might take a while, though.”
“Always wanted to go quickly,” she muses. “Guess you could just stick me once I start getting woozy. Promise?”
I try a sickly smile. “Sure.”
“I think I’ll be fine, though. Intentions should be dead in the water, but she’s still moving. We’ve got the same thing keeping us going. A little bit of Mammon.”
“I —”
“Shut up.” She raises one automata claw in front of my face, in eerie imitation of a finger to my lips. “No grieving. It’s too early for that. You’re my doctor, so fix me.”
Nothing is left to do. But, for old time’s sake — I’ll split her open again. Those were the best days of my life that I am allowed to remember. I think it might have been the same for her, before she met Intentions.
So I collect the surgical tools from around their secure berths, where they nested safe from the carnage until I came to break them from their shells, and come to her again. Could I ever have turned away from her? Once, perhaps.
While my hands are in her she speaks.
“I’ve gotta go. Soon.”
“What?”
I let myself be distracted from the work, which secures nothing but my comfort.
“This story — it doesn’t make sense. This isn’t the world we live in. We aren’t finished here until the Morning Star has been torn from his false firmament. The surrender of the pretender-princes means nothing and wins nothing.”
“They — how? Please, just — Let yourself rest. You’ve done enough. Don’t do this to me.”
She exhales, slowly. I feel the flexion of her sinew about my wrist.
“Priya. Did you ever really think, for even one second, that this would work? That —
An indrawn breath, despite my tenderness.
"That you’d get me to give up. Is that who I am? Is that what you made me?”
“Will you stop with your myopic bullshit for one second? Are you going to keep charging ahead at full fucking speed? Even now? Just take a moment to say bye, for Christ’s sake. You aren’t going to get a second chance at a deathbed speech.”
She huffs. The rumble travels up my forearm, reverberates in my skull.
“Come on. You can see the diagnostics. I’m not dying. Not until I take his head, or he mine.”
I almost deny it. Fuck that it’s not true.
“Even if that’s true,” I grind out, “And if it is, your recklessness hasn’t fucking helped — even if it’s true, how the hell are you going to finish this alone? The expedition is done, we’ve won, we’re out. Do you really think your life has a story?”
“Sure. Intentions let me realise it. Here is the story of Lumi Laine: there was a girl who picked up a spear and drove it into the Devil’s eye.”
I was done working on her, so this time I did snarl, turning around to the mazelike construction of pipes above me. It was easy to imagine that what rattled in them was the geist of this place, bones scuttling around me, weaving a web for the two of us. I could no longer deny that presence.
“She likes you,” Lumi says, softly. “Even if you’re jealous.” Her lips quirk. “Maybe because you’re jealous.”
“Is this what you’re leaving me with before you set off on your suicide mission? Jealous, really?”
With a smirk and a shake of the head:
“You’re not as subtle as you think you are. Here.”
A claw looms over me and reaches beneath my chin, tightening about my jaw, digging into the meat, pulling me forward. It’s tight enough to sting, insistent, but not unbearable. So I throw my arms around her and lean forward and kiss her.
She tastes aseptic, dry, metallic and born-again. What remains of her are hard lines that I feel with hands still red of her. Her furnace-heart burns, warming me from face to nave.
I break away to catch a glimpse of her blank face. All her expressions of joy, after all, are artifice, meant for my edification. This is what she really is. It only makes her smiles all the more precious.
“You can’t imagine how long I’ve been waiting to do that.”
For once words fail me. Fishmouthed I stare at her.
“Couldn’t have done it earlier. Would have been unethical. I could have got you fired.” She flashes me another cheeky grin.
“All this time —”
“Sure, yeah, we can do that. Later. I wasn’t kidding about any of what I said. I’m going to live, and he’s going to die. Soon.”
I close my eyes, and take a breath.
“Okay.”
“Okay? I didn’t think —”
“Oh, no, this isn’t an easy way out. I’m beyond angry at you. But I can’t stop you, and…”
I feel an unease in my gut. The shape of this story is wrong. How did she put it? This simply isn’t the world we live in.
“…and maybe there’s something you need to do.” I turn away from her. “Don’t make this goodbye.”
And the rest, damn her, is history.
