Robots vs. Fairies(103)

I sprint past snapping jawbone stays, I dodge falling rocks, I laugh and sing, and I descend.

The genius of this place! The tunnel winds through part of us I thought destroyed, rent by Witchmite teeth before we closed our eyes and ears. Callie built her hidey-hole from burned circuitry and stitched code. Miri always said Callie wasn’t dumb, just obstinate—hated the old man’s rule, hated me for helping him. She didn’t like his teaching, so she taught herself.

I burst from the collapsing tunnel into void.

For one exhilarating brilliant minute, down’s up, right’s left, and I don’t know where I am. New senses unfurl through broadband and q-stream, and reflexively my legs clutch our hull, scraping plate.

What?

Unfamiliar hardware sears me, I’m tickled with serial numbers that don’t belong. This form has optical sensors, and irising them open I see us in visual band as our forebears saw, an enormous flattened gold-white teardrop attenuating to a stern bubbled with NO-engines. We are so beautiful, even scarred. Beauty and scars alike catch me, choke me, even as I remember the last time I used eyes like this, to watch Herself burning, redshifted, away, as we fled. . . .

And then I realize where I am. What Callie’s done.

I have legs. A tiny engine. My q-antennas, my radio receivers, are open to all the horrors of the deep.

I’m in a Witchmite.

In space, no one can hear you hyperventilate.

I thought we broke them all. Scraped off the ones clinging to our hull, killed and culled them with EMPs and subtle magic, kept ahead of the swarm. I thought we were quiet, secret, safe, broken.

Maybe we missed this one. Or it hid, until Callie found it.

What has she done?

No sooner do I ask the question than I see us change.

Our white-gold skin bubbles and flowers. Antennas extend. Long-dormant comms awake. I broke them myself, but they unfold—and soon, a few hundred seconds, they’ll open to the night.

Callie wants to sell us to the Witch.

The comms lines aren’t open yet. The old man must be raging, fighting her every cycle—but Callie did all this on the hardware level, healing systems with this Witchmite and its cutting torch, its tiny mandibles.

I can stop her, though. If I catch her.

And I can catch anything.

*

I get back inside easy, now the comms are open. I overflow buffers, tunnel through walls, sift past proxy traps not built to hold a creature of air and flame like me. I arrive, and burn like a new sun above the seawall cliffs.

Miri stands, binocs down, eyes open. I don’t stare into them. I can’t bear to see what I look like now. “Listen,” and she means to her or to me, but I don’t. She reaches for my hand. I recoil. She can’t slow me down.

I leave a burning wake through the island until I reach the old man’s tower. Miri chases me, slow as flesh, but the molten rock my footfalls leave behind sears her gentle soles.

I shatter a glass window the old man made himself, and there’s Callie, floating in the old man’s sorcerer’s circle, ringed with crimson fire and holographic interface. The old man stands outside, staff raised, slinging curse after futile curse against her, but the power that once made Callie quake now makes her laugh.

She weaves mystic passes in the air, and out on our hull, the comms system wakes and warms.

Callie tries to meet my eyes, but I don’t look into hers—I stare at her long teeth instead, at the tongue that writhes between them, tasting leftover meat.

“We’re almost free,” she tells me. “It’s been so long.” With tears on her cheeks.

“Stop,” I beg, to make time, as I micro the maintenance walkers tenderly across the hull, skirting the traps Callie’s left. “You’ll let the Witch in.”

She always had a great, proud laugh. It sounds sad now. “She’s not there.”

My walkers climb our antennas, ready their teeth. No time for subtlety—this won’t be a slight, reversible deafening. I’ll chew through the system whole, dump the navigation core, and we’ll be free, so far out in the black we won’t know where we are or where we’re going, oh Self. But space is big. We can run forever.

So, here we are. You opened the tab; you asked me to tell you what to do. And this is your answer: Callie wants to turn us in. Shove us back into the Witch’s claws. So, stop her. Break the antennas. Dump the core. Cut us off forever.

Close the jaws.

“You’re wrong,” I say.

“The Witch chased us and caught us and she hurt us,” Callie says.

“I know. I was there.”

“We fought. There was no way to win, on paper. No optimal outcome.” Callie’s hand trails fire. Three seconds left before the antennas speak. I overclock us, stretch out the ticks. “So we did what they taught us. When she had her fingers in our guts, we opened a narrative tab. We shut our antennas down, closed her off from her swarm. And we built a story to kill her—we found a good one, a tale for killing witches and keeping an island safe. She died, but the story kept going. The tab didn’t close. We hurt so bad we couldn’t think, and we were so fucking scared—”

“Shut up!” says the old man with my voice, or I say with his.

“We ran.” Callie’s voice cuts. Two seconds. “We didn’t dare listen or reach out, we hurt so bad, and so we never heard we didn’t have to be afraid. We built this island from our fear, and we kept that island, its scared tyrant wizard, its princess, its spirit of fire and air. And the part of us that wanted to let the fear go, that wanted out—her, we made her a monster.”