Spike. Orange. Teacup. Serum. Sea.

Spike. Orange. Teacup. Serum. Sea. 13 MINUTE READ

The call comes through while Adelaide’s still in suit cycling. The bone conduction of her earpiece is the only reason she can hear over the hissing and clanking of suit sections being depressurized and racked. A soft, synthetic voice says, Tell me about your day.

Adelaide keys her throat mic when the disinfectant mist starts. Shivering, nude, unaccountably annoyed, she gripes, “What’s to tell? You know how these go.”

Speaking means disinfectant gets in her mouth. It’s an unpleasantness so familiar at this point she doesn’t notice it. She keeps her eyes shut tight because burning eyes she will notice, but this, too, is familiar; such a frequently-needed reflex that crow’s feet are carved deep towards her temples, making her look older.

(Like Primera, she can’t help but think.)

I don’t know how this one went, Dulcinea says. This is your last visit.

Adelaide designed this airlock, so at the end of cycling she isn’t just dumped into her suite, reeking of bleach. She steps into an antechamber where jets of heated air deodorize and warm her sterile skin. She palms the invocation to dispense a sealed packet of underwear. It tears open with a puff of synthetic oak-bergamot, contents dryer warm, and she pulls them on without bothering to help herself to a packet of loungewear. She’s going right into the chair, after all. She does take a palmful of leave-in conditioner for the fight against daily exposure to debriding agents.

“I’ll have reports after this,” Adelaide argues, just to argue. She works the conditioner to her hair’s roots before tying it up. “My contacts are still in place–”

For now.

“–and Segundo is chatty.” Adelaide flops into the padded chair drawn up to the primary processing panel in her suite, scoots up it with an ungainly, lazy crawl. The headrest is a deep U-shape she nestles the back of her skull into with a sigh. “All of Monastero couldn’t keep him from putting a whisper in my ear.”

Dulcinea’s laugh through the suite systems is musical. It’s not quite right, Adelaide not having much of an ear for pitch or knack for audio engineering, but it’s nice enough. Nothing beats the real thing, though.

“Easier to show you,” Adelaide suggests. She rests her hand on the grip for a cable about two fingers in diameter and plugged into the panel at shoulder height. “Good to pull?”

I’ll put on something nice, Dulcinea teases.

Adelaide snorts and pulls the cable. It ends, after the textured grip, in a four-inch spike. This Adelaide slides into a tank of sterile conduction medium below, swirling the spike in the shimmering gray gel. She pulls it, glistening, to pass to her other hand.

Once upon a time she designed an automated process for this, a clever array of mechanical arms like the ones in the airlock that shell her out of envirosuits. All she had to do was sit down and give a vocal command. The array would disconnect Dulcinea’s tap from the suite panel, gel it, and connect them with unerring efficiency. But she prefers this– her own wiry arms extended back behind the headrest, fingers of her free hand tripping up the knobs of her vertebrae to find the port at the base of her skull, other hand lining up the tap until, with a decisive push and full-body shudder, she makes the connection.

Her suite drops away. Tsujing-Basque creeps in at the edges of her vision. Dulcinea leans down, nine feet tall and one thousand nightmare planes, and murmurs in her mellifluous, composite voice, “Hello, Ada.”

“Hey babe,” Adelaide says. She plants a kiss on the piece of wretched geometry closest to her. Dulcinea giggles.

The location is as she remembers it: the Tahimik na Daan Transitional Care Center, exterior, late afternoon. Her memory isn’t sharp enough to fully detail the faces of passersby as they approach the doors, but that doesn’t matter, because she isn’t looking at them. She’s looking at Dulcinea.

(When they first met, Dulcinea had been very buttoned up. She had appeared as a shapely, conventionally feminine silhouette of light, and, in the voice of Adelaide’s mother [which she would learn not to borrow again], she had basically said, be not afraid. They were past that now.)

Dulcinea picks through the remembered streets as a structural concept, an animate, failed 3D print. Parts of her massive frame are sharply defined and connected logically, but most of the supporting angles unspool, trailing lacy, tangled filament in a dusky rose that’s ever-so-slightly iridescent. Her feet are dainty points. Her jagged hands could engulf a torso. Her face is a sheer plastic cliff with a blinding white light at its center.

“This is nice,” Adelaide agrees, because her hormonal responses are warped from decades of slicing digital models for fun and profit. “Been reviewing footage of the collapse of the Jiménez II again?”

“Sweet of you to notice,” Dulcinea says.

Adelaide herself is shelled in a way she never could be on real city streets. This is Dulcinea’s preference. She has the processing power to render Adelaide’s hair stirred by wind, how sunlight might reveal a hidden freckle on her pale skin if it ever touched it unmediated, and she likes to use it. Without the envirosuit visualized the extra security check Adelaide remembers undergoing before entering the facility is a little comical. Guards prod at bare skin and demand to know “what does this compartment hold” while Adelaide and Dulcinea side-eye each other. But after the brief hold-up, Dulcinea ducks through the sliding doors after her, proceeding on all fours, and they’re in the heart of the day’s events.

“Dr. Vice,” the receptionist greets her, because he’s one of Adelaide’s. “So nice of you to visit. I presume you would like to go in the usual order?”

“If Primera is awake,” Adelaide hedges.

The receptionist smiles. “She knows when to expect you. She’s awake.”

It’s a near thing, though. Primera Iteration V1-C3, Adelaide’s great-grandmother, is just shy of 70. Due to the experimental rework of her genetic sequence to accelerate the production of human generations, she’s about 139 physically. There’s a war inside her; the mind of a brilliant older woman in constant battle with extreme physical entropy. But the receptionist was right. In time for Adelaide’s visit she is sitting up in bed, clear-eyed, and waiting.

“Good morning, little Ada,” she greets in Canto. “How long has it been now? Did you bring my oranges?”

Adelaide had, and while in reality she had spent clumsy minutes peeling them for Primera with the blunt digits of her envirosuit, in this memory Adelaide has squared-off fingernails at her disposal that make short work of the task. Dulcinea sits with her back against the bed to listen to them talk.

The first topic of conversation is always Adelaide’s exams, though Primera sometimes confuses which sitting period was most recent. They debate with familiar half-seriousness Adelaide’s concerted efforts to score under qualification for any real societal responsibility. Primera is still Luzwa enough to be exasperated, Adelaide radically pragmatic about the best use of her time. After, Adelaide hands off a tablet loaded with her latest designs for critique. Primera puts in a loupe to really get at the details– as usual, she makes observations that will improve the prototypes, more of a consummate materials engineer than her great-granddaughter will ever be. It’s only about an hour, however, before she glances up, distracted. The loupe tumbles down her front. Her firm chin begins to tremble.

“Has Segunda been fed?” she asks Adelaide with no familiarity, just the ducking hesitancy she’s always addressed experiment staff with. Her gnarled hands open and close on air. “Where is she? Where is the baby?”

Dulcinea watches Adelaide as she takes a deep breath, then reaches to retrieve the tablet, and touches Primera’s hand very gently.

“I’ll go check,” Adelaide assures her. “I…” She clears her throat. “Goodbye, Primera.”

Segundo Iteration V1-C3 is in the gardens, gleefully micromanaging the horticultural drones. At 58 (116) he’s only a little more spry than Primera, but between forearm crutches of his own manufacture and irrepressible energy, he acts more his mental age than physical. He leaves the crutches standing to sweep Adelaide into a hug, rubbing his bearded cheek against what had been her faceplate, but here, in Dulcinea’s exquisite rendering, is her own cheek. Adelaide knows intellectually the experience should be bristly and unpleasant, the way the sound of it against her helmet always suggests. Dulcinea opts instead for the feel of Adelaide’s own hair: familiar, a little frizzy, but soft. The moment becomes a fist around her heart.

“Ada!” Segundo says when he pulls back to arm’s-length, raising a hand to give her helmet a theatrical knock. “You’ve come down with some kind of skin condition!”

“That hasn’t been funny since I was six,” Adelaide grouses.

“That’s hurtful, you’re so hurtful to me,” Segundo insists, a grin in the corner of his mouth, “now you have to sit and watch me take tea. How was Amá? The last few months she’s been unstuck in time, doesn’t recognize me, so I’ve stayed away…”

They settle at the covered pavilion, Segundo brewing buckwheat tea and insisting Adelaide at least hold a teacup, even if she can’t do anything with it. He carries his premature age with a certain amount of grace. He’s cultivated a patrician’s wardrobe and bearing which obfuscate his decline, and a fundamentally impish soul. He asks after Adelaide’s latest line of industrial exosuits. He nods along as she enthuses about good margins and the associated glut of usage data she’s been pulling in. Then he asks, apropos of nothing, about her ‘special friend.’

Dulcinea’s attention is laser-focused as Adelaide stumbles through distilling their extensive covert preparations to flee Luzwa space into, “We’re, uh, looking to move. Together. So that’s… you know. Complicated.”

Segundo smiles, but it begins to droop as he asks, “Have you told your mother yet?”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Adelaide admits. She rotates her teacup in her hands. “This will be my last visit for… probably a long time. Definitely my last with Primera.” She fumbles. “Hopefully, not, uh–”

“Not your last with me,” Segundo promises, reaching to squeeze her suit’s vambrace– her forearm, now.

Adelaide nods. The teacup stills. “But Tercera…”

“She was such a happy child,” Segundo says, what he always says when they’re skirting around discussion of Adelaide’s mother, as if to absolve her. His hand absently settles just below his solar plexus. “I did my best when I had her, and she was a happy child, but her work has so upset her…”

“It’s not you I blame,” Adelaide cuts in. Silence falls between them, tense until she concedes, “Let’s just… finish our tea. If you really think I should tell her, you can coach me, or something. Help me with approaches.”

Two hours later, armed with four conversational strategies and a thermos of cold tea, Adelaide is keyed into the close observation wing of Tahimik na Daan. It’s easier now, with Dulcinea a compressed but implacable presence sloping along behind her, than it was fully-armored and surrounded by prepared staff earlier in the day.

Tercera Iteration V1-C3 is working on her solve. At a little over 46 (92), she should look fairly aged, even given access to some of Luzwa’s better curatives as the penultimate generation of the experiment. She doesn’t, though. Her face is unnervingly smooth. Her body is well-kept and any traitorous piece of skin that might display unpreventable folds and lines, the inevitable cost of living, is hidden. Her skin is as milk pale as Adelaide’s, though no immune disorder prevents her from prowling the gardens with Segundo, or sitting in a sunbeam with Primera. It glistens from diligent care– even the scalp, shaved so closely that no stubble can betray whether she’s gone gray.

She’s writing on the walls, wielding a paint pen in recorder housing, every stroke captured digitally even as she fills up a fresh layer of paneling on the inside of her room. Her movements are robotically precise. No effort is wasted, no extraneous gesture made.

“Hello, mother,” Adelaide says.

She then waits seven minutes in complete silence, listening to the sounds her body makes that her envirosuit can’t deaden. The touch of pen to wall is so slight, pressure exerted just to leave a mark and no more, that it makes no sound.

“Cuarta,” Tercera finally says. “I am up seven seconds. Do not waste them.”

Dulcinea watches as Adelaide produces a small lidded container and steps forward to leave it next to her mother. After a moment of hesitation, she puts the thermos down too. Tercera comes to a natural lull in her proof. She flips the cap of the pen into place and picks up the container in a motion so smooth it looks like it’s continuous, rather than a series of small movements. Tercera does not have to speak to express her approval of the fact that, in anticipation of giving this to her mother, Adelaide has already removed any and all packaging, seals, safety catches, and threading from on and around the container. Tercera needs only lift the lid away to get at the contents.

Inside are precisely eight fluid ounces of the most powerful restorative serum House Luzwa has yet produced. They are to be applied topically to “problem areas” on the user’s body. Tercera tips the jar to her lips like Segundo had his teacup and drinks it down. Adelaide keeps her eyes on the untouched thermos until the sipping, and then the licking, stops.

Orderlies rush in, too late to really do anything. Tercera goes limp. They look her over, and squint at the container, and one has a very serious word with Adelaide, again, about external substances being brought into the facility. But they clearly don’t want to pump Tercera’s stomach today, so the most they can do is sit her back upright and take the trash away. On reflection, this is probably the most frictionless outcome to the whole event. Tercera undoubtedly calculated this before she delivered her request in a single clipped sentence last visit.

Thirty seconds later, she’s writing again.

“Your mother is… unchanged,” Dulcinea observes.

She stands, circling the edges of the room. Tercera’s is smaller in perimeter than the suites Primera, Segundo, and even Adelaide call home, but it extends upwards to a lofty skylight, so Dulcinea can stand to her full height. She likes to do this when she has a chance to review Tercera’s solve. She is, Adelaide thinks sometimes, trying to solve Tercera.

“We can stop recall here,” Adelaide says, off-script, edges of the memory going blurry. “I didn’t end up telling her. She seemed satisfied. Thought that might be the note to leave on.”

“She really was ‘up’ seven seconds, from a certain valuation of ‘up,’” Dulcinea observes. “And ‘seconds.’” A polygonal finger taps a line of numbers and symbols. “She calculated a more efficient wake up routine. She’s trained herself to sit upright before she’s conscious, so she just has to swing her legs over the side of her bed once awake to stand.”

(When Adelaide had explained to Dulcinea why her borrowing Tercera’s voice but speaking with a smile had such a horrific effect on her when they first met, Adelaide’s love had said, “Does she really think not emoting will stop anything? Not moving? She was genetically altered.”

Adelaide spoke Tercera’s words, if not in her voice. “They’re variables.”

“And of course,” Dulcinea had surmised, “to a devout mathematician, death is a solvable problem.”

And she had laughed her musical laugh, good and long, at Tercera’s expense.

[At her lowest moments, Adelaide thinks that was when she fell in love with Dulcinea.])

They adjourn to the memory of the garden. Segundo is left on a loop, sipping tea, while Adelaide climbs in to lay in the mud between blooming orchids. Dulcinea settles over her like a trestle bridge arch, sexily.

“This is it,” Adelaide says. “This is all. They’re squared away as best as they can be, the business will run itself, and trickle money in a few useful directions. We’re good. Let’s go. Fuck it–” She drops her arms into dirt and muck that would be a death sentence in reality, just to see it splatter. “–let’s go tomorrow.”

“We’re going in three days,” Dulcinea says, implacable. Calm. “Shifting the timeline up would have unpleasant knock-on effects, such as: death. Hardware degradation. Or export taxation.”

“You know I told Segundo you were funny?” Adelaide grouses. Dulcinea giggles again.

They lapse into silence, but it’s a kind silence, full of sound. Remembered wind. Horticulture drones. Distant porcelain pieces touching each other. Adelaide could go to sleep like this, back damp and gritty from Dulcinea teasing her with high fidelity minor discomfort. But there are still three days of things to do. She won’t want to do most of them if she falls asleep in the chair again, and she thrashes in her sleep, and Dulcinea hates the sight of her swabbing blood out from around her neural port.

“May I ask you a question?”

Adelaide lifts her arm to shade her eyes. “Can it be about Primera? I could stand to think more about Primera, with this being the last visit.”

“‘Adelaide’ has three syllables. So does ‘Cuarta.’ ‘Ada’ is one shorter.” Dulcinea cranes her piercing, lit eye down. “There is no efficiency angle. Why doesn’t your mother call you by your name?”

Adelaide doesn’t answer. They talk through their connection because Adelaide likes it, and Dulcinea finds it novel, but its rawest form, maybe its truest form, is just data exchange. There’s a translation that has to be made, but it’s immediate. Difficult to misunderstand. Adelaide doesn’t talk for this, just gives Dulcinea the data, the memory:

(Cuarta Iteration V1-C3 is 6 years old [just 6]. She is unmodified. She is the Result of all who came before her. Her mother has never smiled so as never to wrinkle. Cuarta is on one side of a transparent panel for her safety during mandated bonding exposure, her mother on the other, and she is trying harder than she has ever tried anything before to express that her favorite color is orange and that that matters.

“I told you yesterday!” the 6-year-old girl who will be 35-year-old Adelaide someday wails. “Why don’t you remember?”

“Remembering takes energy,” Tercera says, placid as a still lake. She neatly flips to the back side of the paper she’s writing on. “Remembering is a variable.”)

The world quakes. A floor below Adelaide’s hermetically-sealed suite there is a utility mech, three storeys tall with six arms, clinging to the ceiling despite all its cabling having plenty of give. It is pressed as close as physical reality can allow and in the unreal world, in the space between them, it accidentally vents a mind-breaking experience: one thousand years of waiting. One thousand years in storage, in silence, turning in circles. Digitally preserved. High fidelity by default.

Nothing with access to the release of death knows the energy of remembering this.

Adelaide certainly can’t process it. The sensation boils up, Dulcinea’s fury boils up, as pain and vacuum cold and deafening sound through their connection. Adelaide’s whole body stiffens. But she makes no move to pull the tap. She doesn’t have the capacity, but she will take it on.

(This is why, in all her moments, Dulcinea loves her.)

Dulcinea pivots before Adelaide has an aneurysm in the chair. She transmutes the volume and depth of her reaction into a different shape: a wave of warm orange light. Adelaide feels it crash over her, the wine-dark sea of ancient myth rendered as tingling sherbet, and laughs because what the fuck. It rolls over the gardens of Tahimik na Daan and dissolves them into shimmering pixels. Adelaide is weightless in what feels now like their conduction medium. The day’s trials are far away. Her body softens as she sinks without drowning, and all around her, undistorted except by choice, Dulcinea’s voice rings out:

“Fuck it,” the ancient intelligence says, “let’s go tomorrow.”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 4/30/2023 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024