Automatic

Then finally seeing someone pass by—anticlimactic.

Nevertheless, play it again.

It could hardly be denied that Proserpina had been underground much too long by the time she came upon the corpse. She'd been alone longer than was healthy for any human being who hadn't been unhealthy to begin with. Touching buttons she knew she probably shouldn't and explaining to herself, out loud and at length, why it was entirely reasonable of her to touch them.

For one thing, it was better than going mad from wondering. Opening all the doors, mentally mapping corridors, following any automata she came across on their rounds as far as she could. Much better than going safely sedately insane. For another thing, though it seldom did any discernible good to push buttons, it never did any harm. The parameters of the automata were ineffable, but one rule she had deduced beyond a doubt: as far as it was in their power, they would not allow her to put herself in jeopardy. No-one had had the chance to tell them that their job was done. No-one had told them their secret was out. Therefore every human being here was still considered to be a priceless commodity.

This pattern of inquisitive behaviour, human behaviour, brought Pina into the room where the corpse lay, eventually. This pattern had made the meeting inevitable. An automaton had gone in to clean and inspect the premises, and she had followed, as she had grown confident in doing. And there it lay, in a glass coffin it looked like, under a deep dim indigo light, surrounded by the normal array of ineffable items. Lots of buttons to push. She was wholly delighted by this discovery, even while she still thought it was a lifeless thing. "Proserpina, you are lucky," she said out loud as she drew closer to the coffin. No breath, no heartbeat, no flicker of shadow beneath its white eyelids: no sign of life. And she had never in her recollection encountered an example of suspended animation, though she knew of it in theory, whereas she knew she had seen corpses, though not so perfectly preserved. So in her eyes this person was dead, dead, yet nevertheless she was delighted. Just by the novelty.

Maybe when she got tired of looking at it she would dissect it, she thought—although some social skill had managed to adhere sufficiently well that she refrained from saying it out loud, in front of the corpse and the automaton which presently finished its dusting and departed discreetly. Dissect it. The texts in the Library were no substitute for tactile experience. A dead male human being, of indeterminate age and with a build that strongly suggested physicality, but at the same time having a quality that suggested he had never been used before he was put away in the dark down here. Maybe it was the serenity projected by such an apparently tidy death. She pressed the flashlight she never left home without down against the cold clean coffin-lid, illuminating the corpse's face, its feet, leaving the light linger on its groin. Not, she assured herself (out loud again by now) out of necrophilic prurience but just so she'd know, if it came to pass that she never got out of here. Though she determinedly behaved otherwise she always had accepted that as a possibility. Possibly quite likely. So she put her forehead down against the glass and shone the flashlight on it from various angles the better to assess the lay of the land.

Circling the coffin counterclockwise cataloguing the muscular contours of its white waxy limbs for future consideration. Probably it would provide a longer lasting source of entertainment left intact. She came back eventually to the face. A delicately masculine brow ridge; jawline like the edge of a knife. Beautiful, Pina thought, beautiful thing. She briefly entertained the notion that maybe this was a toy, that maybe she'd finally managed to press the correct sequence of buttons and made her dim environment understand her wishes beyond the obvious air, water, warmth, light, food. Perhaps the automata in their infinite attentiveness had built her a plastic Adam. But—she pressed her palm against the glass above its pale motionless chest—why keep it so cold?

Further investigation of cupboards unlabelled and designed primarily for the ergonomic convenience of the automata, as always was the case in rooms beyond the living quarters, brought things to light which made it clear this had been a man, not a machine. There was a uniform. Personal effects.

It took her quite a while, after she had left the ice-lit room, to realize he wasn't dead. And two days before she gave in and started working on how to wake him up.

Two days. And three nights, throughout which Proserpina dreamed perpetually, repeatedly, of automatic consummation. Dreamed she had pushed the proper button and now the frozen soldier arose, and came to her. Dreamed that he was plastic after all, no breath in his translucent chest, no pulse at his blue-white throat; but that he was still beautiful. Even moreso animated, moving through the room to her with lean economy. That he dug deep into her breasts with cool hard fingers and pushed his cool smooth tongue into her mouth, it tasted of dusty glass or silver and rattled as it ran across the teeth; and that in due course he pressed her thighs wide with his cool hard slippery body, and slipped into her. And with that final connection made, the world was allowed to discard its disguise and the world became a circuitboard, a sea of multicoloured wires, and in her dream she understood it all completely. In her dream the automata trusted her at last, and granted her full clearance.

Only the technicians who'd worked here, who had been properly and thoroughly programmed, had ever been allowed full clearance. Pina could not imagine what it would be like, to control the metaphorical muscles that had once been so responsive to this awesome mind. In flights of fancy she regenerated every severed connection to every scattered computer, recaptured all the planets that this one world once controlled. Subterranean goddess of the galaxy.

A more realistic goal: with full clearance she would have access to all the security records, and she would finally be able to see what had actually happened, up above.

Eventually she truly began to fear the insistent repetitiveness of her dreamlife would drive her mad. And so on the morning of the third day, waking sweat-soaked and breathless yet again, Pina ceded to temptation.

She didn't think to bring provisions—and having successfully initiated the process was reluctant to abandon her position to go get some. With no clue as to how long the process would take, it was anxiety enough using the nearest little lavatory. She had ceased some time ago to jump when the maintenance automata crept up behind, but this was a different thing entirely and she hadn't realized how much she'd missed adrenaline.

She had not brought provisions, and had only thought to feel hunger when there was nothing more interesting to think about, that is to say when she had at long last given in and pushed the right button and made the light turn from bloodless blue to a sun-warm yellow, a colour she could feel on her skin, and see through her eyelids, and when she tried to touch another button after that it wouldn't move, and tingled her fingers itchy if they kept on touching. Anything of any importance here was utterly idiot-proof, she had discovered, and so she knew she must have done all she needed to do. Then she allowed it to occur to her stomach that she was hungry.

She jumped when the coffin cracked, a mechanical egg—the half-cylinder slid away into the metal tabletop under him—and she jumped again when the corpse's eyes opened. Not that she hadn't believed it would happen eventually. Theoretically. And he in his turn twitched when his eyes or his freshly-decanted brain had apparently managed to process enough to alarm him. Her white face hung above him like a low moon, heatlamp backlit yellow brushcut corona.

"Who are you?" he asked. Quite calmly and rationally under the circumstances, she thought.

"I'm a Valkyrie," she grinned. Either he didn't understand the joke, or he did but was not amused. Well, he was undoubtedly under a great deal of stress at the moment.

"My name is Proserpina," she amended after a pause, and extended her hand to him. Made her smile less intimidating, she hoped. "Call me Pina." He flinched again, before apparently realizing what was intended, and then he shook her hand. He was warm and dry now.

"John Smith," he said. She laughed at the transparent pointlessness of the lie. He didn't. But, she had to remind herself, he was very confused, and quite reasonably so. Judging from the placement of the holes in his uniform, he must be finding it hard to believe that he was not in fact dead; that she was not, in fact, a Valkyrie.

Or. She avoided his eyes, now they were open, bloodless blue. Or something worse.

"The...um...machines fixed you up," she explained, gesturing vaguely at the odd array in relative shadow all around them. Vowing to try and limit her conversation entirely to the pragmatic for the time being. "The automata."

Comprehension dawned in his bewildered eyes, and the fingers of his left hand clenched and unclenched and then he reached up to touch his head, feel his face, sitting up slowly and carefully.

"Automata," he echoed. Flat. "Is this a hospital ship?"

"This isn't a ship," she laughed. "I wish it was. This is a planet."

"What planet?" Smith asked, but he seemed so distracted by the oddness of his body that Pina doubted a response would register. So rather than answer she hefted the prosthetic she had been holding in her right hand behind her back (just in case, but he seemed harmlessly slow at the moment and the moment is all) and held it out to him as she had her own. She had found through experimentation that it maintained whatever position she manipulated it into, its fingers fixed by some sort of synthetic rigor mortis, cerea flexibilis. At the moment, a fist.

He drew back in obvious revulsion when she pressed it toward him. As though it might attempt to reject the regrowth and reattach itself.

She tossed the heavy limb onto the table to the left of where he sat. He looked at it, and felt his face, and ran the fingers of both hands through his hair, and she began to feel she ought to do something. Nothing medical: she felt perfectly comfortable having faith in the automata for that as for so much else. For want of any better idea she grabbed a soft silvery blanket from the metal sideboard behind her and thrust it at him. He took it from her with a sort of suspicious confusion, and again there was the impression of long-unaccustomed brain activity behind the eyes. At length he shrouded himself in it before standing up.

He was quite tall. Looked down on her. Assessed her, trying to place her, trying to fit her into his story, whatever he remembered of it. Enough to lie about his name, unless that had been habit, completely automatic. She suppressed for the moment the urge to ask more, just to see what sort of lie she would get; opting instead to stand silent and still and wait.

"What are you doing here?"

"I was shot down," she answered. Once more the blank look.

"My ship," she elucidated, gesturing vaguely toward the high ceiling, "was shot down. There's a war on."

"A war," Smith echoed. He sounded surprised.

She supposed it was possible that he honestly had no recollection of whatever misfortune had landed him here, which must have been part of the war. Though his was not an injury typical of this war, in her limited experience. That he had been one of the staff here had crossed her mind, but no, the technicians had been a devoutly civilian bunch, military only in the most abstract sense of the word. The secrets she'd deduced while playing with the arm told her Smith was someone who would be in a war if there was a war to be in. Even though the automata had disabled the weapon.

"A war," he said again. Smith. He had been shot, twice, close. An anomalously personal murder.

"Don't worry," Pina laughed, "we're obviously on the same side." And his mask of disingenuity didn't descend quite quickly enough to conceal that he knew very well what she meant, though her clothes bore no insignia, military or otherwise. Both human. So if he knew nothing of a war, still he knew who it had to be against.

"Yes," he said. He looked away from her then, beyond her, the fingers of his left hand continuing distractedly to feel the soft metallic substance of the blanket draped across his chest. "I need to contact..." His voice died away and his disorientation seemed to swell again. "Where did you come from?" he demanded, agitated, so that she was almost inclined to grab up the arm again. His pretty plastic features knotted up into something surprisingly ugly. "How did you get here?"

She gave him a level look. "I was fighting for the Federation," she said slowly and distinctly, "Like yourself, Space Commander—Smith. And my ship crashed. Like yours did, I presume, Space Commander."

He looked at her, and eventually nodded very slightly, very slowly.

"You need food," she said, steering him toward the door. She needed food, and an escape from this dead-end conversation. If she had no clear concept of how the scenario ought ideally to have occurred, still it should not have been anything approximating this, standing starving at an impasse with a shocked zombie. So far he had been more fun dead. More attractive in repose, without a doubt.

"We're trapped, you know," she added offhandedly as they stepped out into the corridor, a bare grey place, minimally lit, only incidentally designed for humans. He didn't seem to hear her, and continued to drift at the same slow dreaming pace in the direction she had nudged him. Sized as it was with an eye to the easy passage of large machines, the place really gave no feeling at all of claustrophobia, even when one knew as much as Pina did about their situation. Probably refused to allow it. Kept its inhabitants alert, but never allowed them the luxury of hysteria.

The living space was always a great relief to return to after a day spent beyond. Built to keep a dozen or so adult humans cozy and calm as long as necessary. Calming colours, calming sounds, calm-tainted air, every expensive method known of keeping peace without a gun. And the automata kept a low profile within its parameters. They tidied, discreetly restocked, and were attuned of course to any sign of upset or injury, but in this part there was not the perpetual roar, the air stirring as they swerved to avoid. The sense that one was in their way, underfoot, tolerated like a child.

"This is the Library," she said, as they came to the end of a straight corridor, and a door bearing Federation insignia carved ridiculously huge opened out into a circular area, large but not vast, under a domed ceiling, its floorspace irregularly filled with a wide assortment of human accoutrements—couches, terminals, sundry storage units, equipment for entertainment and exercise. Doors to private quarters, as well as exits into the maze of machine-rooms beyond, opened off the communal area all around, spaced out like the hours on a clockface. And in the centre of the Library, under the highest part of the ceiling, was the well.

Smith still seemed disoriented, understandably. He sat down on the first couch they came to. Pina found food and brought it to him, but he didn't eat any of it, that she could see.

"I imagine you want something to wear," she said. Opened one of the storage units and retrieved a white uniform of more or less suitable size. No insignia: they had been absolutely confident that no outsider, friend or foe, would ever see the people who wore them. A naiveté in the face of all evidence that touched her every time she went looking for fresh clothes.

He nodded, took the clothing, looked around.

"Would you like some privacy?" she asked. "A bedroom?" She gestured in a circle, the doors that opened onto the Library. "Take your pick. None of them are mine in particular; I use them all occasionally." Your beneficent hostess.

"Thank you," he said, and entered the nearest room. He didn't come out again, and eventually she ate the food he hadn't touched, and went into the furthest room to sleep.

Went to repent at leisure. Already she greatly regretted her impulsiveness in reanimating the body. Cursed her haste as she locked the door to her quarters for the first time in she didn't know how long. Not because he had done anything overtly confrontational, she had to admit, but he was a Federation officer nonetheless. She curled up to sleep with a blunt instrument close to hand and facing the sealed door that opened onto the Library. Dreamed enemy armies growing up out of the earth on every side.

Smith was sitting at a terminal in the Library when she unlocked her door the next morning. Arbitrary morning, she reminded herself, her schedule, not necessarily his. He could hardly be expected to have a rhythm established yet. Hopefully he would eventually fall in with hers, to which the overhead lights in the Library, and probably various ambient factors as well, currently adhered. Automata interpreted circadian hormones produced by the entire subterranean population and acted in accordance with the rhythm of the majority, or maybe the mean. Until yesterday the majority had been the mean, had been herself.

"How deep down are we?" he asked when he saw her walk through his field of vision.

"Glad to see you're feeling better, Space Commander," Pina answered. Smith raised his eyebrows.

"Several miles," Pina said. "Of solid rock. Completely cut off, but on the other hand completely self-sufficient. And very secure." She surveyed her realm with a little bit of pride. "I imagine we're the only human beings who have ever been down here. The automata keep things running smoothly. This was probably all just put in place and kept functional in case of catastrophe. The human staff might not even have known about it."

"How did we get down here?"

She smiled and walked past him toward the center of the room, beckoning him to follow. "No doubt you noticed the well this morning," she said. He came and leaned on the railing beside her and stared with her down into the pit, black as nothing. "There must have been at least one of these on the surface. Automata presumably found you and threw you in."

He nodded. "I see," he said. "A teleportation device."

"Yes, too bad there's nowhere to teleport to now. However, it does have other uses." She pulled a small stone from her pocket and dropped it into the well. It hit the surface and spun down out of sight in a brief fierce fury of noise and light. Smith twitched back involuntarily.

"The same thing would happen to me if I tried," she said, "if I didn't have clearance." Then she swung her leg over a part of the thigh-high wall where there was no railing, and she stepped into the well.

She didn't fall. Her footing was as steady as if she had just climbed up onto a table. "It trusts me that much, anyhow," she smiled, pleased to see him look so sincerely startled.

"What if it didn't?"

She shrugged, uncurious, and closed her eyes; a pillar of colour encased her, translucent. Held out her hand to him. "It does. Now it won't let you do this by yourself, Space Commander, but as long as you're with me it's all right. Come on, climb up. It trusts me, we've developed somewhat of an understanding." Smith joined her, trepidatious. She concentrated, thought the proper key.

"Where are we?" he asked. It was unnerving, the first time, being a disembodied receptor. They looked down at a decorative circle set into the floor of a circular room, a control room, all full of pushable buttons. Now a woman entered, dressed in a uniform much like the one Pina wore. Looking terrified, the woman began to search for something, under the consoles.

"We are in the Library. We are looking at the security records. This isn't real, Space Commander. Fortunately, as you will see. I suggest you focus through it and find something to hold on to."

The terrified woman found what she was looking for and stood up with it, just as four others entered, all dressed as she was, all armed. She held the thing she had been looking for behind her back, and walked toward them.

Focus deliberately through any handy opacity, Pina had discovered, and the entire scene became translucent. Through the veil of illusion she watched in amusement as he felt blindly for the railing he knew was somewhere close beside him.

The instant of explosion was too swift for sound, almost too swift for comprehension when played at real speed. Then dead air. Pina breathed deeply. Smith stumbled and swore.

"Took some coaxing before it would give me that," she laughed, stepping out of the projection unit. "The security records all have different classifications—I don't know how it sorts them, but some of them I'm still not allowed to see." She grinned. "They must be very interesting."

"They must be," Smith said sourly.

"Don't tell me you didn't enjoy the show, Space Commander. Why, an attitude like that could make me lose all respect for your rank."

He glared at her, but said nothing.

"Maybe this will be more to your liking," she said. Concentrated. The Library faded again, and now they stood beneath the branches of a tall bone-white tree, hung heavy with odd fruit. Away from them on all sides a green field stretched unbroken for as far as the eye could see, and eventually ran into sky like an empty blue bowl; a place of hypnotic sameness, safety, serenity. Smith looked in vain for a sun, for the source of light.

"This is what it always wants to give me," Pina said. "Must have decided it's good for my psyche."

Focus through, and one could see the Library.

"You don't think it is?"

"I think sometimes I hate the people who ran this place," Pina answered. "They were nonviolent thoughtful types and this place was tailored to them, to keep them sane through the years and complexities—not for us, not for people like us, Space Commander. The world, if it were wise, would be working to keep us sane now." She spun round and kicked the tree trunk as hard as she could with the heel of her boot. The force of the impact almost made her lose her balance, and shook loose a few ripe fruit. Smith reached out and caught one as it fell.

"I'm not a violent person," Smith said.

Pina smiled. "No, of course not, neither am I. But I am willing to fight, if there should be a reason to fight." She circled the tree. "You and I are prepared to deal with reality. They weren't. They found this preferable to reality. And now they are dead." She grabbed onto a lower branch and pulled herself up into the tree. Held out her hand to help him up after her.

"Come on, Commander, it's good exercise. You want to keep in shape, don't you?"

"Keep in shape? It's an illusion."

"No, this isn't. I can prove it." Dropping down from her branch, she stooped and ran her fingers through the fine grass, found a small stone which she held out for him to look at before she tucked it in her pocket. "Now." She closed her eyes and thought exit, and they were back in the Library.

Took the stone out of her pocket and showed it to him. Then pitched it overhand with all her might. It hit the curved wall between two doors with a loud crack, leaving a chip in the cream-coloured paint.

"See?"

Smith nodded, smiled thinly. "You are a violent person."

Pina rolled her eyes. "That's not the point," she said. "The point is that the rock's no more an illusion than the wall is."

He nodded. "Yes, I understand. It exists as a simulation, you indicate you want it made material by touching it. That looks like the same rock you dropped in the well earlier. Pebbles from a template."

"You've seen this before?" she asked.

"I've heard of the theory, same concept as teleportation."

"Explain it to me."

Smith shrugged. "Theory doesn't interest me that much. I expect there are templates in there somewhere for every component of every system there ever was here—with enough motivation, and time, one could eventually reconstruct Star One from scratch. Not very practical in our situation, though." He bit into the fruit he was carrying. "Pragmatically, however, knowing the theory lets me rest assured that climbing the tree wouldn't have done me any good as exercise."

Pina laughed. "There are practical applications to this thing," she said, "other than entertainment. Not the kind of applications there must have been when the rest existed, of course...can you imagine? This is the interface, this is the next best thing to being the machine. The technicians, with full clearance, they could step into this thing, I mean the one they had up top..." She gazed up at the domed ceiling, enraptured. "Stir up hurricanes with a breath. Crush a city dome beneath your heel. How would it feel?"

"Like breathing," he said. "Like walking."

Pina sighed.

Later, while she was off in one of the lavatories, Smith left the living quarters, and Pina didn't see him again until the next day.

In her dream that night she was dying. In a puddle of blood and shards of glass she lay staring unfocused at the white bone piercing her black sleeve, and she understood that she was dying, and the pain was beyond tolerance levels. But there was no fear. It seemed there was a hole where fear should be.

Then she could no longer see. And still there was no fear. And then dead air. Black static.

She knew Smith was off opening doors, mentally mapping corridors. She understood, and left him to it. Eventually the automata must have worn him down and he returned. She saw him coming, security notified her, and she was waiting in the well when he walked back into the Library.

"You were looking for an exit I might have overlooked," she said to him. "You don't appear to have much faith in me. You think I'm up to something, trying to deceive you somehow." His look neither confirmed nor denied.

"Such unneccessary paranoia, when there's so much that you should reasonably fear. All you had to do was ask." She bade him enter the well. Closed her eyes again and concentrated and then they were up above the thick metal ceiling of their sealed safe tomb. In a long uncoiling cave large automata patiently sought the surface. "Teleportation, as you said. This time, we are here, really here. Review the security records, you can verify that we vanish."

"I can't review the security records. I don't have clearance."

"Oh, you'll get it soon enough. It's just like any other game. It's all a matter of knowing what to think and when." She smirked. "Don't worry, you don't have to be sincere."

Smith didn't answer.

"They've still got ten times as far to go," she said, indicating their obsidian roof as they walked the corridor illuminated by the lights of the automata. "And when they get near the top I imagine there'll be lots of nasty radiation. We're best off staying a long way under the surface if we can't soon be off of it."

"And how do you propose to get off of it?"

"I have no idea."

"Then why bother going to all this trouble?"

"I don't have anything better to do."

"You're going to spend the rest of your life here," he said. "You might as well get used to the idea."

She looked at him sideways. "I am at least as cognizant of the situation as you are, Space Commander. I am used to the idea. I have had more time to think about it, after all. And I say this is worth a shot. If nothing else I'm curious to know who won. Aren't you?"

Smith stared straight through her. She had begun to wonder by this time whether the regenerators had not been quite as successful as they might have been. Perhaps they had still been under construction when called into use; or perhaps he was shot in the head as well as the heart. The result being that the man she'd decanted seemed several neurons short of a Federation officer's customary complement, which wasn't that great to begin with. Of course she had to remind herself that her own brain hadn't exactly been working as well as it did now, when she first woke up here.

"You said before that there was a war on. What makes you think someone's won, now?" he asked. Pina jumped. He was staring at her now, not through, waiting to see what lie she would come up with. She licked her lips. "There was a war on. I was in it. But I don't know how long it's been. I don't know how long I've been here."

"No clocks?" he asked. "No calendars?"

Pina's brow creased at the hostile mockery in his voice. "No clocks," she answered. "No calendars, no rhythms, no cycles, except the ones I provide. I don't think the automata wanted the humans who had to live down here to have an absolute reference like that, to know objectively how long they had been trapped. A psychological thing."

"A stupid thing," Smith said. "There's any number of ways to keep track of the time."

"Maybe they wouldn't want to—the people here."

Smith shrugged, bored with the discussion. "A stupid thing," he repeated. And the automata dithered around them, and eventually succeeded in driving her to teleport them back down below.

Revise assumptions. Smith wasn't stupid. Strange, and a disappointingly dull conversationalist, but not stupid. He sensed something amiss.

Proserpina slept uneasily.

Occurrences of consequence etch disparate neural paths like an acid splash. She dreamed incessantly of rooms without safety, doors without locks; and of smashing, shattering death. The sensation of flesh rent, of permanent, terminal damage. Blood and bone.

In the dream she stands straight between two blank walls. Kneel, her superior says.

And she is amazed at the way that the dreamer—the first-person facet, the transient fictional self—at the way she obeys. Voices are not processed inside her the way that voices are meant to be; imperatives pull like a chain. Obedience is completely automatic. Voices do not mean, do not light up Broca's switchboard; the command of a superior compels, moves the body as sure as an electric shock would, and most of the mind as well. You do still have an ego, but it is invisibly small, and the sense of self is a silken strand spun from one void, one alleged erasure, to the next. Alleged, because they dare not actually erase all that data: there is no way to physically eliminate the memory of anything a subject perceives as meaningful without odds being that bladder control or the ability to add will go as well. Much experimentation has been done in this regard, and has shown it is far more practical to override memory, make it inaccessible as narrative, as linguistic or emotional touchstone, while still preserving the useful abstractions and kinaesthetic chains.

The voice of her superior pulls like a chain. Binds like a chain. Says, kneel.

Every command is equally valid. Open your mouth, he says. Each enhanced specimen is a unique and frequently surprising creation—recreation—but eyes and mouth are never modified. Eyes and mouth cannot be improved upon.

Flesh rent, scattered, shattered, blood, metal, bone.

The imperturbable dreamer waits patiently while her superior fumbles with the front of his uniform, managing eventually despite his angry incompetence to expose erect flesh, hot and hard and dry, and take it in his good hand and move it to brush her obediently parted lips, just touch her tongue. Then stops.

Close your mouth. On your feet. Look at me.

The dreamer doesn't wonder why. The dreamer doesn't care. The dreamer obeys.

A great part of the human brain is devoted to the human face. Look at me. Stupid thing. Pina's spidery ego looks out through the dreamer's eyes at her superior, and watches its brain determine that he is dangerous. This is a dangerous face, the brain says. He is irrational at the moment, and he wants an irrational response. The spider can see this.

And the dreamer can see it every bit as plainly. Analytical abilities are, if anything, enhanced by modification. But the dreamer's awareness of such things can be of no consequence to its behaviour with respect to a superior. The data are registered, stored, and soon enough overridden. Irretrievable, except that now in the night the mind knits. Tests the shards of ancient psyche against one another, a puzzle—in the night, just to pass the time.

Now these pieces have been put together and are presented to the subject, a gift. The experience, visual, tactile, lifelike every way but emotional, now has been fitted by happy coincidence around the ragged edges of this acid-etched instant.

Stupid thing, he says again. Raises his good hand, his blood and bone hand, reaches out almost to touch her breast. If there is a breast. Reaches out to touch whatever mystery there may be under the heavy front panel of her uniform. Its uniform. But stops just before contact, as if meeting a barrier, and reluctantly moves his hand away again. Looking in her eyes all the while for something. Whatever it is he can't find it. Only his own reflection, tiny, twice over in the fearless black.

Stupid. Thing. His fist hits the stomach where there is nothing important to break. Nothing hard that might hurt him. Her back hits the slip-proof grey floor. Pain registers clearly. Pain is imperative, the most efficient survival mechanism (studies have also shown). Still subordinate, though, to a superior's command. The dreamer is aware that her superior is being unreasonable, and that this counterproductive pain is undeserved. But anger is inaccessible; obedience overrides all.

Stupid, he says. Stupid thing.

Transmission ends.

Pina woke uncomfortable, dry-mouthed, sick. The anger which had been inexplicably absent in the dream now came hot, bright red, without focus. She knew the automata would smell it, and a chemical lullaby would rock her back to sleep if she allowed it to, and all would be forgotten in the arbitrary morning. But she didn't want to allow that. It seemed she ought to reflect upon the experience, record it. Try and determine how much of it was actual memory retrieved, and how much was her sleeping self rather melodramatically filling in the blanks.

She pulled on her trousers and undershirt, and turned her back on bed, slipped away from its influence barefoot, out the door.

In the Library she saw Smith, his back turned to her door, sitting staring at a screen full of static. Lost in thought. Or maybe he was shut off, just static inside. The light in the communal space was dimmed to an undersea glow for the duration of what circadian concensus dictated was night, although they were both awake. It was silent except for the reassuring sound of circulating air.

She admired him a moment, blank beautiful thing. Crept closer, observed the complex topology of living breathing human male all oddly underlit with the strobing glow, the sharp shadow of his jaw; then stepped into the periphery of his vision.

"Proserpina," he said. Annoyed, surprised, his features knotted into the face she had analyzed in her dream. Guilt, barely held at bay. Odd to witness, the mechanics of the transformation; yet the illusion of disparity survived the truth intact. The bad invisible beneath the beauty, like the grace that lay behind this animated ugliness.

"Hello, Space Commander, what's on your mind?" Desperate to shake off all identification with the passive machine she had played in the dream, she advanced on him, invaded his personal space. Watched his face.

"Nothing," he said. She thought that might be true; the dream was immediate enough, though fading fast, that she could easily imagine thinking nothing, waiting for a word, for a tug on the chain. She pressed in, up against his knees, toe to toe, looked at him, down at him. He looked up—let her take the next turn as well.

"Not trying to figure out how to get clearance?" she asked. He raised his eyebrows, remained straight-faced and silent.

"I was dreaming about you," she said.

"Yes?" He looked doubtful, but willing to let the lie progress.

She shrugged, moved closer still, her legs on either side of his. Tactile experience—she could clearly recall the almost feel of him on her obediently parted lips, though much of the rest of the dream was already gone. Happily gone. "We were—having sex," she said, half aware it was a lie, and lowered herself onto his lap. Wondering if the automata were still trying to soothe her, she felt so unreal. But Smith looked wide awake now.

Pina pressed in, moved her fingers down the line of his jaw, carefully, as though testing the edge on a knife. Over his lips, lightly pressed together. An odd expression passed across his face. Stand up and walk away right now, it read, in bright red on the blue screen of his eyes. Pina smiled. "No?" She moved against him, felt his body respond. Moved her fingers up the line of his erection, plain now beneath the white cloth of his garment.

Smith sighed and stood up, which forced Pina to do so as well. "Shouldn't we find someplace more comfortable?" he asked.

"We could do it on the floor," she said. Pushed her toe along the cold floor, perpetually polished to a perfect finish by the eternally vigilant automata.

"That doesn't sound comfortable," Smith said distractedly.

"No."

"This room, then," he said, turning toward the closest one.

"All right." She followed him closely. Aching to say, never mind, if it's such a bother to you. She wondered what would happen then. He would probably be relieved. Through the door now, spun light down to a shadowless level in passing, and up to the edge of the fresh sterile bed. She shed her clothes with utter lack of ceremony, and stood naked before he had got as far as removing his other boot. Moved uncertainly to assist him but he gave her a look that said certainly not.

On his own he removed the boot, and the rest of the anonymous uniform. Kicked away the silver blanket and lay down on the tight-stretched white sheet. Appeared to have lost almost all interest.

Again she was tempted to give up, call it off, leave. But that would be some sort of victory for him. She could not abide that.

Instead she leaned over him and just the anticipation, the warmth of her breath close by, was enough to rekindle interest, and the halfhearted touch of her tongue brought it up hard. She knelt astride his narrow hips, ran her fingers through the fine hair on his chest and flat belly, down to lift guide and lower herself upon him, push, finding more resistance than she had imagined there would be, and a dull pain like stretched rubber punctured. He lay slack-jawed, close-mouthed, staring someplace beyond the ceiling, aggressively serene. With eyes open and mind closed, she could almost see through to the illusion, to all the promise that had lain waiting, frozen, in the faraway indigo room. All that potential squandered in the flesh. Pushed down as far as she could, then lifted herself up again. Inside her it felt more like rope-burn than anything else she could call to mind.

Eyes open, she made herself move faster, tried to fall into a rhythm, tried to lose her mind in the flesh, in the sensation, penetration.

In the flesh the experience still seemed wrong some indescribable way, dislocated. She knew how she ought to respond, but the response remained inaccessible. Both their bodies seemed to have the texture of plastic to her, their slip-proof grey surfaces grating unpleasantly against each other, grinding, generating sticky static heat but not apparently building toward anything.

After several very long minutes Smith put his hands on her back and pulled her down pressed chest against him. "Turn over," he said. Rolled over together in a graceless manoeuvre, she was down now, his weight upon her like the weight of the rock pressing down on the top of their tomb. Then he began to move in a rhythm different to hers, quicker, more painful; it should have been worse in every way, except that it was no longer her responsibility. Skin skidding on skin sweat-slick, breath pulled in pushed out, now there formed a tentative connection to an adequate response, almost a pleasant pain, but then it ended: he pushed in, pushed in, and a breathless serenity lit fleeting on his face momentarily perfecting the illusion of his beauty. She squirmed frustrated by the rhythm interrupted. Smith disengaged quickly, rolled off her and onto his side.

"Just give me a minute," he said. Met her eye and almost smiled, almost seemed at ease, moved his hand toward her crotch—stopped. His expression became customarily tense once more.

Pina sat up to see: a little puddle of blood blossomed bright on the wrinkled sheet where she had lain. And child of an artificial age that she was, it wasn't something she had ever seen before. She scrambled to her feet, frustration forgotten. The only thing she wanted touching her now was a medical automaton.

Smith relaxed, and laughed at her sudden terror. Sat up and put his feet on the floor. "You've never done that before?"

"I..."

He cut her off. "Obviously not. That's what happens. Only the first time." He appeared genuinely amused by her absolute loss of composure, loss of face. "I'm just surprised that any soldier could get through even basic training with her virtue intact," he said mockingly. "You must have been an alpha even among alphas."

Pina scowled, understanding she had lost this round spectacularly. Pictured driving a hard fist square into that smirk, a knee hard into the flaccid flesh between his blood-smeared thighs. Rather than do either she snatched up the silver blanket from the floor and started to wrap it around herself. Smith pulled it away from her, stretched it over himself and lay back on the bed.

"Lie down," he said. "Go to sleep. I'll wake you up if you start to bleed to death."

Something soporific in the air now promised her that only the prettiest dreams would be allowed. So she obeyed. She lay down, avoiding the stain, avoiding his eyes. Closed her eyes.

Unexpectedly gracious in victory he rolled over and put his mouth to hers for the first time, traced the red wet contours with his tongue, and he tasted neither of silver nor of glass. Then she fell asleep, and whether her dreams were pretty or not was inconsequential, for they were forgotten in the arbitrary morning.

In the arbitrary morning he was back beside the well. "What percentage of the security records would you estimate you are allowed to access?" he asked, the moment she appeared. She rolled her eyes and began to forage for relatively interesting food in the dining area.

"How could I know that? Nearly all, I suppose. Nothing that might give me a glimpse of an outside entrance...and nothing inside the central control room, unfortunately. That must have been where all the action was. Other than that its choice of what to censor seems arbitrary, but I suppose there's a rationale." Pina was utterly bored with the well at the moment. Far more entertained by the shape of his shoulders, memory of his body, as he hung his head over the well thinking trust me trust me. But dared not step into it.

He eyed her thoughtfully, suspiciously. She started to wonder what she was supposed to be hiding. Images of her horrible unreborn self, perhaps. "All right," she sighed, coming over to the well, tearing open one of a handful of unlabelled foil-wrapped bars of something nutritious. "I'll show you everything I have access to that might remotely be of interest."

They looked down at a decorative circle set into the floor of a circular room, a control room. A woman in green, spiderweb-thin, and clearly not Federation, entered. She stooped and affixed something to the side of a console, then hurried on. Changing vantage, moving from camera to camera, they followed the rebel woman, watched her plant her bombs in each topside control room. Pina chatted, a one-sided conversation. "Look at her, what an idiot. This place was designed to remain functional in event of a meteor strike, in event of pretty much anything short of actually falling into the star it orbits. What does she think a few bombs are going to do?"

Smith shrugged. Eventually they lost her around a corner. Rewound and followed a different one, a man, also in odd costume. Pina had the keys to these final moments memorized, all the ones she could access.

"Of course," Pina said, answering her own question as empty corridors flicked past at disorienting speed, "the bombs would have killed the humans, the button-pushers. They would have been broken beyond repair. I wonder what would have happened then. The Federation would hate having to admit that its most expensive piece of clockwork required expendables to wind it. Which it does, that's painfully obvious. Needs a little bit of meat to make it tick." Pina tried not to imagine that somewhere the woman who had exploded in slow motion a thousand times for her entertainment being regrown, painstakingly patiently reconstructed from bits of tissue, shards of bone, because there was no other choice. Tried not to. The idea was not quite absolutely inconceivable.

They switched course again and followed two men in white. "They brought it all down by mimicking the minds of those they had murdered well enough that they were allowed full clearance. What a horrible betrayal. No wonder I'm not trusted."

Far-focus, Smith rolled his eyes. "If you're not trusted it's because you throw rocks, and lick your lips over gruesome death, and—I don't know, but I doubt the computer complex holds a grudge."

"Why wouldn't it? What's a grudge but a constant reminder not to make the same mistake again?"

"A grudge is an inordinate response to perceived transgressions."

Pina smiled. "People once believed that thought took place in the heart, and the brain was just a means of regulating body temperature," she said. "I read that somewhere here." Gestured with a half-invisible hand at the Library out beyond.

"Easily disproven. They couldn't have done much experimentation."

"Quite right, Commander. Oh, here, they're finally coming out of the central control room." One of the male rebels came into sight around the corner below them, hurrying, half-dragging the other, visibly wounded. "But I can't see what happened to him, or where they go to afterwards. It's irritating." As they moved out of view she smoothly rewound, started to scan a new set of corridors.

No comment, no response. Irritated, Pina adjusted her focus to peer, through the veil of the past, at her fellow voyeur. He looked ill, pale, as though he might faint. She could almost hear the medical automata switching to standby.

"Let go of me," he said. "I'm tired of this."

"I'm not holding onto you," Pina said, but he was already away from the well. She was prepared to stop the program, when she noticed she was being permitted to take a path she had always been denied before. A little more trust, a little closer. A glimpse, in the distance, of black.

That night, he still hadn't come back to the living quarters, and Proserpina locked her door, and checked it, and swore she would not dream. "Don't let me dream," she shouted at the watchers in the walls, and curled up foetal with her blanket on the big bare bed.

Woke to fingers moving up her spine, on her neck, in her hair. Cool hard fingers on her lips and in her mouth, on her tongue with a taste like dusty glass. "Ah!" she gasped and grabbed the prosthetic by the wrist, pulled it away from the medical automaton, which did not resist.

Two days and two more nights went by before she found him standing at the well. She hadn't seen him come in. Hadn't looked.

He was excited, almost feverish, radiating stale sweat and the hot plastic reek of machinery. Staring down into the well as though he could read the future there. "I think you were right," he said, "I think this can be done. We can't build a ship, but we can build automata that will build us a ship. I think we do stand a chance of getting off this planet. Get in the well, I can show you what to do."

"Can you?" she asked, flat, dull, tired of it all. "Yes, I imagine you can, now you have the incentive. You're not nearly as stupid as you seem, Travis."

He spun round, wild-eyed, with the look of a sleepwalker rudely awakened. "What?"

"Incentive, Space Commander. Your one true love, he's waiting for you somewhere out there. Do you propose to see to it that justice is served? Has been served?" She pushed him aside, and then stepped, mockingly obliging, into the well. "I say see to it that everyone is dead—no question of justice then. Don't you agree?" She smiled, bright, ice cold, waited patiently for him to climb up after her. "It's a lucky thing for me that Star One knows how to hold a grudge. That gives me a reasonable amount of leverage. Otherwise I might fear for my life." He stood still, stared up at her.

"You're right," he said, eventually. He turned and walked away.

From deepest sleep she jerked awake upon hearing him come in through the bedroom door she was sure she had locked. Opened her eyes and saw him looking down at her. You're right, he said, and lay down uninvited beside her. Automata had finally caught him and sedated him, perhaps. We can stay here, he said, we can live like this a long time. In her deep dreamstate his words could not be processed inside her the way that voices were meant to be. The war is over, he said, and justice is no longer any concern of ours, any concern of mine. Fingers moving up her neck, in her hair, rough salt on her tongue and the faint inground flavour of greasy machines. Lifted her legs, moved between them, pushed in, out and in, and this time she could feel they were both all over unmistakably genuine flesh. There was the unyieldingness of bone against bone, bruising where skin pushed hard against skin; and there was sweat as though it had rained. And eventually the cramp as every interconnected muscle tried simultaneously to arch.

He fell asleep entwined with her as though he hoped they might grow together by the morning, knit up like a fracture. She twisted, trapped in his arms, the sweat growing cold and old where their skin still touched. Would have disentangled herself and gone to another room to sleep, but a lullaby drug blew in through the air-vents and paralyzed her.

Another memory, if it was a memory, crystallized on the edge of sleep.

Young alpha savage that she was, useful idiot, she had gone with her savage young alpha gang out into the starry night, and there was a gun in her hand.

The politics, the strategy, were vague, inconsequential to her. She could only think of it as a game. Rage theoretically against the abstract suffering of the Noble Delta. Pragmatically, an assault on the anomic boredom epidemic in her own class. They had given her a gun to guard the entrance while the more seasoned saboteurs went about their work inside.

Hush. Someone was coming. Sound of their boots on the metal mesh walkway. Adrenaline burned everything in, like the light of magnesium fire. Two came around the corner. One dropped. The other dropped his weapon, put his hands above his head. He was young, maybe—impossible to tell beneath the mask—naive, whatever the reason, to choose this course of action.

She walked up to him where he stood. Up to where if he were any kind of a fighter he could easily have disarmed her, overpowered her, saved himself and perhaps even whatever it was they were here to blow up. But he just stood frozen; except she knew his unseen eyes moved, kept fixed firmly on the muzzle of her gun. Coward.

"Kneel," she told the man, whose face she never did see—hands together behind his head, he was still wearing his helmet. Looking up at her. At her gun. She wondered what he was thinking. Smiled sweetly down at him.

Pressed her gun to his visor, and fired.

It was so easy. And it felt so unimportant at the time, something that would be forgotten forever by the morning. In fact it was the morning she couldn't remember. Nor the faces of her friends, the name of her cause; away from the thrill of the kill like white lamplight, memory diminishes back rapidly to void.

She was sixteen, and an alpha even among the alphas.

Transmission ends. Sleep starts.

Dream, in which she is dying. Yet again. Oxygen-starved, skull fractured, the swelling inside pressed against a wide array of modifications. Pretty colours accompany this particular death.

I will heal her, says one of the women. The beautiful demon.

Oh no. Please.

But they are alien. Ineffable. They thought that was friendship, and now they think this is kindness.

One of them thinks this is kindness.

The dreamer stands, no longer dying, in the forest, beside her superior.

"What now?" he snarls at the alien women wherever they may be, then turns to her, his companion. His words to her, whether they were to be comment or command or casual insult, cut off as her strong hands start to squeeze his throat, as easily as they crushed the little flying creatures.

Enough, enough, says one of them to the other. Says the beautiful, hateful one to the other. To their prey, she says: you will not remember this.

You will not remember this.

Until I let you, whispers the other one, as all around them the forest fades.

Pina woke up. Looked at her hands, at the unbruised throat of the body beside her, breathing soft.

Wrapping herself in the blanket she walked out of the bedroom, across the night Library, and stepped into the well. No, she said to it firmly. No, not the field and the sky and the tree. Barefoot, eyes closed, here is the key: she envisioned the forest, the place where she had stood at that moment of awful joy. And recalled the taste of blood, bitter blood. And then she was in the forest, with the old woman beside her. The other, the beautiful bitch, was thankfully nowhere to be seen.

Proserpina stared down, looked the old woman straight in the eye. "If you love human beings so much," she hissed, "why manipulate my dreams to make me hate him, make me want to hurt him? We could be the only breeding pair left in the universe, you know."

"We do not love quite as indiscriminately as you seem to believe," the old woman responded. "We do not love him in the least. But still, he is human." The old woman sighed.

Blood and bone.

"As are you," the old woman continued, and moved her hand up under the folds of her robe and in between her fallen breasts, into a hollow that should be flesh, and extracted something. A gun. Held it out for Pina to take. She reached out to almost touch it, but hesitated, stopped just before contact.

"Full clearance," the old woman said.

Pina took the gun.

And the world became a broken circuitboard, a sea of severed multicoloured wires. She had not previously conceived of the intensity, the violence of its emotion. The violence, the sensation of flesh rent, of permanent, terminal damage. Metal and plastic blood and bone, shattered, scattered, burnt away.

Now, said Star One, locked in, underground and alone much longer than was healthy. Now, let us consider your lover.

She opened her eyes. Sweating, cold; the silver blanket had slipped down onto the nonexistent floor, and moved like water in the force field around her feet. There was a gun in her hand.

"What are you doing?" he asked. She focused, and saw that the gun was already aimed at his head.

"Why did you come to this planet, Commander?" she asked, calmly.

"Why did you?" he responded.

"I was shot down."

"So was I," he said.

"No."

"Tell me, then," he snapped.

"You didn't have to come here. They must have known where to go the instant you did," Pina said, taking a step toward him. "They must have been here the instant you knew where to go—they had things all set up by the time you came. You came because you wanted to kill it yourself. You hated it that much."

She stepped out of the well, toward him. He stood still, let her take her own turn and the next one also. She soon enough saw the risk in this and stopped just slightly beyond the point at which he might be able to reach her before she could fire. Lovely adrenaline, beautiful strife.

"And now it wants me to kill you. It does make a good case, we do have a bond." She raised her eyebrows, false humour. "Blood ties."

He understood the joke. For a Federation officer, he was actually quite bright. His jaw clenched. "I knew I recognized you."

"I'm flattered," Pina said. "I recognized you, too. Eventually."

"You remember."

She bared her teeth in something that was nothing like a smile. "When you gaze into the well, Commander, it gazes also into you. Obviously. And obviously it didn't take too long to see there was something very wrong with my brain. For a human. Of course for a mutoid I was normal as could be, but..." She shrugged theatrically. "There were no humans around to tell the automata that."

Her former superior stood still, his face expressionless. He could yet be the unborn corpse in its coffin, save for his eyes, wide, with pupils hypnotic huge in ice irises.

"I'm sorry," he said. Flat.

"I'm not," she answered.

"Kiera."

"Please, Space Commander Smith, I'd prefer you to call me Proserpina."

He made an unexpected movement, then. And she shot him.

In the heart.

Stood an eternal minute over the corpse, while bright blood dripped dried and darkened on the clean cold floor. If she were smart, she knew, she would quickly now spill his dead brains out as well, beyond any hope of recovery, any reasonable hope. If she didn't, she knew they would gather him up and heal him, because though he might be their enemy, and their rival, he was first and foremost a human being. They would put him on ice in the blue room; she would every day know he lay waiting, cool and fair, and full of promise that never could quite be kept. He would remain a bone of contention.

But she was not smart. She was human, and understood as only a human could that the only thing worse than being tempted to choose badly was not being given any choice at all.

Tranquility, something released into the atmosphere in response to dangerous hormones detected, rapidly made the point moot. The weapon became neutron-heavy, fell, and Pina fell too, like a dropped marionette, into the waiting arms of the automata.

She dreams that, in a room neither light nor dark, her superior says: look at me. Words like a shock, like a chain; she obeys, automatic. Analysis, inconsequential observation: at the moment he is not dangerous. At the moment he is not, apparently, irrational in the least.

You are going to have to be blanked now, he says.

Yes, Commander, the dreamer answers.

No point in pressing charges, clearly it wasn't your fault.

No, Commander, the dreamer replies.

It was bad luck, just bad luck, he continues, peering into the dreamer's eyes as though he supposes he might be able to see the little spider spinning there.

Of course, Commander, the dreamer says. Bad luck.

Transmission ends.

Rewind.

Play it again.