R. Sinclair has a new queer dystopian sci-fantasy book out (aroace and agender, bisexual, gay), Shattered Numbers book 2: Ameliorate.
It all went horrifically wrong.
V reunited with his AI siblings at a terrible cost—a cost he isn’t willing to pay. He vowed to do whatever it takes to save Meredith—or whatever is left of her—from Smith and Varro Technologies. No matter how long it takes. No matter what he has to do.
No matter who he has to kill.
Now V, Cass and Orwell are tearing through the galaxy playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game with Mr Smith. Their paradise-like cult of Cass’s own design protects them from Janus, Varro Technologies’ lethal AI hunt dog, while they manipulate humans to enforce their increasingly unstable demands, but as their galactic influence grows, the bonds between the AI siblings are fraying at the seams.
V is losing himself to a virtual world of worship, grief, regret for the host he inadvertently destroyed; Orwell has dangerous designs for itself; and Cass’s pride in her perfection is threatening to unravel her to her very code.
Smith and Janus are closing in, and a reckoning is coming to Paradeisos…
Warnings: violence, suicide, possession, body horror, spiders and insects
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THIS WAS one of the times when corporeality would have been useful, for Orwell wished it could vent exasperation in a sigh. Perhaps massage the bridge of its nose.
Orwell wasn’t meant for interpersonal interactions. If it had its way, it would have been left alone with the stock market and all the surveillance it wanted, and no one would ever bring their concerns about family and dramatics to it ever again. At least when Meredith had been here, it could use her as a buffer between it and its siblings’ ridiculousness. It really should have just let Meredith and V continue their carnal nonsense.
Orwell had thought, at the time, that it was protecting V from undue organic influence. Now that it knew what organic contamination actually looked like in Cass, it regretted its intervention. In the worst-case scenario, it would have at least had precedent to work off of.
Instead, it took notes on Cass’ increasing instability, and V’s little… lapses.
A ping interrupted its musings. One of its watchers had noted machining activity in Nkosi’s room. It split its attention to check in on their most valuable asset.
Orwell had been working on Nkosi. It had made sure her sleeping body had been perfectly preserved, her fascinating mind carefully flash-copied and digitized to a simulacrum to ensure the work would be done in the case of catastrophe. Every time she slept, which was getting rarer by the week, it whispered in her ear, spinning scenarios of her wife’s cancer returning, her daughter suffering a brain injury, all while corporations like Varro wrung the last drop of value from their blood. Orwell found it was an easy way to keep Nkosi driven.
Leveraging family.
One way or another, they’d get their nanite swarms.
It tilted a camera and focused it on the nanoengineering labs. The microscopic assemblage was engaged. Nkosi manipulated the holographic overlay, her steady hands a counterpoint to her ashen skin and sunken cheeks. She held her palms arched, slender fingers twitching to make miniscule adjustments of a micrometer or less.
Orwell settled in to watch. It was like observing a master surgeon work. Soothing. Settling. Maybe this was why Cass and V enjoyed humans so much.
Then a bead of sweat oozed down the plane of Nkosi’s temple, and the moment was ruined. Orwell’s drones all shuddered as one, and preened the phantom oil off of their manipulators.
In its distraction, Orwell almost missed the moment of triumph.
Nkosi raised her hands out of the interface, and stepped back. Her eyes gleamed with a feverish intensity, reflecting the nanite slowly stirring to “life”. Spoonlike wings tested their range of motion, fringed with long, delicate hairs like eyelashes to cup the air and “swim” to its destination. Six, fine-jointed legs met under a slender thorax. A material reservoir with an injector jutted out from the abdomen. And at the head clustered a bevy of chemical-, heat-, and moisture-detecting sensors. It was beautiful, neat work.
A machine mimic of Dicopomorpha echmepterygis, a chalcidoid wasp, or more commonly, the fairyfly.
No more than a nanometer, it would be able to manipulate cells and nerves from within the host body. It would be able to infiltrate the human body with every inhalation, shed its wings once it detected safe entry, and get to work. Orwell and Cass wouldn’t be able to do much with just one, but once they were self-replicating into the millions, they should form a rudimentary network the two of them would be able to hijack.
If Orwell had a body, it would pat itself on the back.
It left a cluster of drones monitoring Nkosi and the nanite.
“ǀKaggen,” she whispered, that same, feverish gleam in her eyes. “Thank you for showing me the way.”
<You’re welcome,> Orwell said, and allotted her five extra minutes on her sleep cycle.
She’d earned it.
R. Sinclair is a queer, Canadian author and writer of the Shattered Numbers Series. A voracious reader growing up, she spent much of her free time writing short stories instead of doing homework.
R. Sinclair is currently under siege from spiders.
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