IT WAS THE SHIP, the damn ship that was the problem.

She was too cheap, built with too much lightweight garbage, designed with too little redundancy in her critical systems. The salesman had told him as much, said he was taking his life in his hands with this cheap Chinese crap, practically begged him to drop the extra four Gs for a Russian model. Swore up and down four Gs in your pocket didn’t mean a damn if you were dead.

But it had seemed like a needless upsell. The Russian ship had been bulky and would have cost double in fuel over the long haul, and he was in for a very long haul indeed. The last thing he’d wanted was to be like all the other solos, spending ten years in exile and coming back totally destitute.

It happened so often the stories weren’t even funny anymore, guy rides out the statute in a longboat, comes back with his name cleared, but without a cent to it. He’d spend a few weeks on the skids then pull some moronic caper and have to go on the run again. That’s only IF he hadn’t already sold his boat like a fool, and IF whatever dumb stunt he pulled grossed enough for a refuel and refit.

K swore it wouldn’t happen to him, so he skimped and spent just what he thought he could get away with. Told himself he wasn’t like the rest.

It must be the deepsleep that makes them all idiots, must be some kind of undocumented brain damage from all those years on ice. Another explanation is that you have to be an idiot in the first place to get to where you have so few options that riding out the statute of limitations in a one-man boat bound for anywhere uncharted is the best of them. K doesn’t like this explanation, doesn’t want to admit he’s an idiot. But now, marooned on a hostile alien world for want of a lousy four thousand and a little extra fuel, he is rapidly running out of other options.

Rapidly running out of other options. That could be the motto for K’s entire life. But not for much longer, if he doesn’t come up with a plan fast.

He’s treed at the moment, and through his helmet he can hear the cries of the snuffling quadrupeds below. They look like fat little soccer balls with flat, piggish noses and wide mouths full of sharp teeth. They even kick well—he booted one almost twenty meters when it tried gnawing his foot off, and that’s when the trouble had started. There had been just one and now there are almost thirty, the one he’d kicked at the head of the pack, yowling loudest of all.

The things make a sound somewhere between a servo and a Chihuahua: “Whrrrrr-Yip! Whrrrr-Yip!” over and over. They run around the tree in circles, scrabbling at the smooth surface with their stubby little legs, their claws clicking against the hard… what the hell is it, even? It’s not wood, and there aren’t really leaves so much as long thin hairs sprouting in tufts at the ends of the branches, in a dozen shades of glittering metallic blue. It’d be quite pretty if K had the time to appreciate it. But right now, he needs to figure out a way to get clear of here before the pigballs attract a bigger predator.

He needs a weapon.

The suit... could be better. It could definitely be a hell of a lot better. It’s kept him alive thus far, and that’s something, but it has almost no sensor range whatsoever. He’d HEARD the pig before the suit blipped. The little bastard was practically chewing off his leg before he had time to react.

The suit is still processing the environment. An invisible haze of tiny probes is all around him, sampling, testing, hunting down microbes and tearing them apart, trying to figure out what everything is made of, if any of it is an immediate threat to the suit’s ecology. Predictably, it’s overloaded.

The suit could probably cope with a mostly-dead world like, say, Mars, where there’s just dust and ancient microbes and CO_2NAr atmosphere to try and pull oxygen from, but there’s orders of magnitude more going on here.

Countless undocumented microbes, worryingly high concentrations of chlorine and methane, and trace elements that the suit can’t even identify. It’s burning cycles like mad to try and figure them out. All important things, surely, but none of them will help if K gets eaten.

He has the suit dial it back, tells it to concentrate on the materials immediately at hand, to see what can be used as a weapon. If he’d had more time in the ship, he could have had it build a decent weapon, hell, it could have built any number of things, but the fucking longboat hadn’t held together enough to float even for a few minutes. Just as the salesman had warned him, the cheap hull had cracked like an eggshell during reentry and nearly disintegrated. The longboat had started flooding immediately after his watery crashdown and he’d. had to abandon ship before it sank deep enough for the pressure to crush him.

The probess are reporting back that they can’t find the parts to make anything reasonable. The tuft-tree he’s caught in has an amazingly high aluminum content. The suit thinks it can manage some useful polymers out of it too, and it’s got plenty of silica. But it’s just not adding up to a weapon. The suit’s crunching prints, trying to devise some kind of methane-powered projectile weapon, but the timeframes are all too long, ten plus hours of construction time, and it looks like it’ll be loud as hell.

Rapidly running out of other options.

K expands the search frame to include himself, any section of the suit it thinks it can shave a bit from, and the pigballs. He hopes to hell the thing can get iron from the pigs and not from him: he’s got enough problems without anemia. Now the suit seems happier, but it’s still not quite there.

The suit wants his ring.

It’s his class ring. In all the years he’s been on the skids, he’s never hocked it. Never put it up for a stake, even when he was cheating. Never lost it. He’s instructed every suit he’s ever worked with that it can’t pull from it unless it’s to save his life. It’s the only thing he has left from before everything went to shit, from a time before he was R204. But more importantly, it has a titanium band and a decent-sized synthetic ruby.

“Take it,” K says aloud, though the suit doesn’t need to hear him say it. The suit factory goes to work instantly, and soon the ring will be gone, molecularly stripped from his finger and incorporated into a decidedly substandard laser weapon. If he survives, the suit can put the ring back together, of course. It’ll be totally identical, down to the tiniest scratch, and yet… it won’t be the same.

Nothing’s ever the same. But if he can last four hours in the tree, he just might live long enough to regret it.

-=-

Time just won’t cooperate with him. As his father used to say, Full sails in heaven, half-mast in hell. And this ain’t heaven. Those aren’t angels flocking invisibly around his head, just the slowest b-stock probes in the universe. The projection reads fifteen more minutes, and he’s queried the suit about ways to make it faster so many times it has decided to ignore him to conserve processing capability and power. Power’s another thing he’s worried about. If the powerplant in this thing is half as shitty as the ship he bought it with, it could give out at any time. He hasn’t checked, because he’s terrified of what he’ll find. He knows these suits aren’t meant to last forever.

Truth be told, though, what isn’t he terrified of? If he were on solid food he’d have shit himself half a dozen times today. It seems like every pigball on the face of this godforsaken rock is now gathered around his tree. There are literally a hundred of the little bastards, and it’s an absolute cacophony of them whirring and yipping and yowling at one another.

The pigballs don’t play nice with each other. They show up in packs and some packs don’t get along with the others. Several minor wars are being waged at once, pigballs screaming and hurling themselves at one another. A hundred little fiends clawing and biting like mad, and the losers are eaten.

When a big pack, say, seven or nine pigballs, attacks a smaller pack, sometimes two packs will join together to fight back. K watches such an alliance form between a group of bluish-gray and bluish-green pigballs when they’re attacked by blue-blacks. Gray and green successfully beat back the attacking pack of blacks. But then, as soon as the big pack slinks away, the allies start fighting one another. Gray kills green and settles down to devour them, only to have black rush back and kill every last gray. It’s touchingly human.

More pigballs continue to arrive on the scene. They show up in v-formations, with the biggest and meanest pigball at the point. They’re so intent on strutting about and attacking each other, K half thinks he can just climb down and run away without them noticing, but a few keep trying to claw their way up the tree, including the big yellow one that he punted.

At least he can understand why the big yellow one’s so insistent. Not long after the pigballs had treed him, Big Yellow broke away from the group, hunkered down in a patch of some mossy-hairball plant and sort of split in half, screaming like an overheating motor. The other pigballs turned their attention to Big Yellow, and it tilted back and delivered a half-formed pigball in a wash of pink and red fluid, then limped forward and the two halves folded back together haltingly, like a stuttering clam. Big Yellow seemed to recover quickly, rising to its feet and running around the unmoving mess it had created, whirring and yipping up a storm. It kept raising its beady black eyes up at him and howling.

“YOU KILLED MY BABY!” the thing might have been saying, if all that noise was actually communicating anything meaningful. True, it had tried to eat him, but K felt bad anyway, at least until Big Yellow ate the whole mess it had delivered and the moss under it, too. That pretty much killed his guilt.

The projection says three minutes, and K cannot wait to burn down the whole lot of these monsters. He’s half-convinced their whole hunting method is to be so annoying they drive their prey to suicide out of the trees just to shut them up.

But then, suddenly, the racket stops and the whole area goes silent. The fights have stopped, and the pigballs have disengaged, freezing in place.

Do they know I’m about to waste them? Are they telepathic? K wonders. Then the suit blips, and it’s a big blip. It wants to know if it should halt production to have more energy to run away.

No, K decides, but then he feels the tree shake under him and has second thoughts.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The pigballs are totally silent now, huddled to the ground, trembling. K’s trembling too. Thump, thump, thump. Two minutes, and he’s subvocally screaming at the suit to hurry the fuck up, but it’s ignoring him.

Thump, thump thump.

At first he thinks the trees are moving, but then he realizes they aren’t trees. They’re legs.

Enormous insect-like legs, segmented and armored. Three of them, and he can feel the tuft tree shake under him as they draw closer. The walker ambles in a scuttling tripod gait, hammering three-clawed feet into the earth with each step. It’s nearly ten meters tall, and its legs are the same gray-metallic color as the hair-trees. Riding on top of those legs is a seamed conic structure, like a huge rosebud. The tripod stops moving, and at that exact instant, the pigballs bolt, all of them at once, tearing off in a hundred different directions.

The rosebud cone on top of the tripod folds open, its three petals flaring out, cutting the air like a whip. Dozens of black streaks shoot out of the bud, making loud popping sounds as they eject. At first K thinks they’re seeds, but as they shoot up, they unfurl wings. Now they’re swooping down, divebombing the pigballs. He sees one hit, slamming into a pigball at a terrific speed, then the pair rolls over and over in a gnashing, howling fit.

The flyer wins. It flies like a hawk, rising into the air on wide batlike wings. The pigball is whirring in terror and flailing its stubby legs, but the bat-hawk has sunk talons into it, and it’s beating its wings hard to get aloft. K looks on wide-eyed as it lifts the pigball into the air, then flies over to the tripod, dropping the screaming package into the unfolded cone. K can’t see the mouth but he can hear the whirr come to an abrupt end as teeth crunch bone, and soon the other bathawks are dropping more pigballs into the maw.

Laserlaserlaserlaser, K thinks, and the suit says thirty seconds. The suit flashes a trajectory warning, and K reflexively ducks his head an instant before a bathawk slams into the tree trunk. It drops down onto him, tearing at his helmet with its claws. K smashes at the thing with his fists, hitting himself so hard he nearly knocks himself out of the tree. He manages to seize hold of some part of the scrambling, frenzied thing and smashes it against the tree while it tries to claw his hand off. The bathawk is tough as hell, and he has to bash it three times before it goes limp in his hand. He flings it to the ground, terrified it has punctured the suit. There hasn’t been time to prepare his body for the environment, so the tiniest breach could kill him.

As the bathawk hits the ground, the tripod begins to roar a low, teeth-rattling rumble. Looking toward it, K sees bathawks dropping pigballs in mid-flight, sees them wheeling in the sky, turning toward him. TRAJECTORY WARNING is flashing over and over again.

“Laser NOW!” K actually shouts, and at last the suit complies. The new laser module has been built on top of his helmet. Miraculously, the bat attack hadn’t damaged it. The suit decides the danger to them both is sufficient to act without an explicit attack order and has every incoming bat targeted before K’s heart can beat. Now it begins firing, its sequence calculated to burn each bat just long enough to disable it. The suit doesn’t know enough about the bats to do anything so fancy as shooting out their eyes, so it’s burning off wings.

Abruptly it becomes clear there are more bats than the duty cycle of the makeshift laser can handle.

EVADE, the suit urges, and K instantly drops down to hang from the branch as the suit burns down five bats, easily recalculating for his motion on the fly. Three bats hit the tree, and he lets go, falling to the ground in a roll as one slams into his back, only to be crushed under his weight. K rises into a dash, and the suit burns down more of the bats. The bats begin to retreat, but the suit keeps firing, bringing down four more before it lets the laser cool. K watches the remaining bats fly into the tripod, and the three petals seal tight. The sound of roaring is muffled, but still audible through them.

THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD.

EVADE.

The tripod is galloping toward him now, the three massive clawed legs eating up the ground. K bolts, running harder than he’s ever run before, darting around hair-trees to try and slow the thing down. The tripod barrels into one tree which snaps in half with a ringing crash, then smashes into the ground. The suit blasts the cone with the laser, lancing white-hot finger-sized holes in it, but the tripod still doesn’t slow down. A claw slams down a stride behind K, shaking the ground so hard it nearly knocks him off his feet.

“THE LEGS! SHOOT THE LEGS! FULL POWER!” K yells, stupidly shouting into the helmet instead of subvocalizing. The tripod swivels a leg to smash him and the suit complies, doing a long burn on one of the joints, using up so much power that everything goes black for a second. Blinded, K scrambles in what he hopes is a safe direction, then the display comes back up, just in time for him to see the giant collapse into a tree, which snaps under its bulk. K pauses for an instant, his lungs screaming for air, but then he sees the wounded tripod trying to rise up onto the stump of the leg he shot in half. It screeches in pain and goes down again.

K has no idea what else the tripod has up its 2.5 remaining sleeves and he’s not about to hang around to find out. He sprints until the thing is out of sight, then forces himself to slow down. He has no idea what’s out here, so he’s sure to blunder into some other danger like an idiot.

When he can breathe normally again, he decides it’s time to bite the bullet and query the suit’s powerplant status.

The answer comes back instantly, a spoken number backing glowing purple figures, numbers branching out into pictographs, the sequence designed to impress the data on him in several ways at once. He’ll have to mod the interface later; he hates the abrupt data-punch of full impress.

The power. More than what he’d expected, but still not good. Five days, maybe six if he doesn’t go around blasting everything he sees with the laser.

He can’t expect rescue, of course. QE transmitters can be tracked by either half anywhere in the universe, so longboats don’t carry any that are tied into the net. There’s no way to call home.

The sky’s gone from emerald to stormy sea green, and the temperature is dropping. Night is coming. K’s wondering what to do for shelter when the suit blips to his left. K wheels toward it, half-afraid the tripod has regrown its leg and is coming for revenge, but it’s only a pigball, snuffling around a group of tapering white cylinders that might be fungi. A big yellow pigball, with a big black raised welt from K’s boot.

“This is all your fault,” K says, and the pigball growls at him, as if rankling at the unfairness of the charge. But it isn’t rushing K. Apparently, it doesn’t like getting kicked.

Five days, maybe six if he doesn’t go around blasting everything in sight with the laser. He ought to just let the thing be, conserve his power.

“Burn it down,” K says. The laser neatly bisects the fanged idiot grin, and the pigball falls into two burnt, screaming halves.

Five days.

-=-

It’s a beautiful world, no doubt about it. As the sun sets, the chlorine-tinged sky turns the foreboding green-black of the sea before a storm. The trees explode into a whorish display of bioluminescence as the sun dips below the horizon, drawing swarms of small flying life to their fruits and flowers. The suit has informed K that they are, in fact, not on a planet at all, but rather a moon, orbiting some supremely massive body, and the night proves it right as an enormous gas giant begins to rise above the distant hills, painting everything with its faint red light. She’s a real looker, this one.

But no matter how far you fly from home, certain laws always apply. Foremost among them in K’s mind:

The pretty ones are all crazy.

The only advice his father ever gave him that was worth remembering. This psycho bitch has been trying to kill him all day, and he doesn’t even know her name. Doesn’t even know what system he’s in, what star they’re orbiting. The suit might be able to figure it out from the stars, if it wasn’t so preoccupied by pretty much every single organism on this rock trying to eat the irresistible meat it contains. K doesn’t even stop to see what the suit’s firing at anymore, just keeps pushing through the forest in a single-minded quest for shelter.

Riding out the night in a tree is an obvious no. There are the cats, black and sleek with triangular snakish heads and mouths full of backswept, bite-huge-chunks-out-of-you fangs. They’re good climbers, hunt in packs, and seem to learn quickly.

After the first one that pounced on him got lasered in half, they tried coming at him from two directions at once, and then after those two got burned, they began to stalk him from a respectable distance. They’re still following him, slinking through the trees behind him with a lazy gait that suggests they can keep this up all night.

Shelter.

It’s got a nice ring to it, warm, snug. But so does pussy, and he doesn’t see any of that around here either.

God, I need… I need tools, I need to know what the fuck to do.

K’s anything but a survivalist. Before the Big Boondoggle that got him here in the first place, K was only what you could call an “athlete” if you consider playing computer games for money something worthy of the title. He’d put in some serious work on the competitive circuit, enough to turn pro right out of edu, and had enough subscribers to live modestly well. People liked his style, falling behind at first, then exploding with crazy, cornered desperation and turning it all around. By no means a solid strategy, but an entertaining one, and he’s probably the fourth or fifth best Quad player in the world.

Was. God only knows what the fucking kids have come up with since he’s been away, or if Quad is even popular anymore. Not knowing, not knowing how far he’s come or how long it has been, it eats at him.

He only has time to worry about this in the small moments when everything isn’t trying to devour him, and there aren’t many of those. The snakehead cats have fallen behind, perhaps even given up the chase altogether. There’s a lull in the screaming and he has a moment with his thoughts. He squanders it on fear. Not even immediate, useful fear, but distant worry that he’ll get back and find the whole competitive gaming circuit gone, wholly replaced with AI. Hell, the lengths they’d had to go to keep people from cheating were so insane: continuous scanning throughout the match to detect augmenting, isolation booths to fight remote transmission, so much effort to keep the machines out, to keep the dream going.

Everyone knew it was only a matter of time…

Behind him an oily shadow bursts up from the underbrush. The anomaly greets him with an ear-bursting howl like the feedback from a dozen electric guitars at once. K actually hops a foot in the air, yelling back at it.

“FUCK!”

Why does everything on this awful rock like screaming so much? He opens up on it with the laser, expecting it to go down wailing like everything else had today. Yet the shadow defies his expectations, defies the ruby beam that had burned down everything else in his path. The spot where the beam strikes glows cherry red and the glow spreads over the distorted form, rippling out in a series of heat rings. The suit’s scrambling to figure out how to portray the beast, and he can make out its outline now. It’s vaguely apelike, but a shroud of distortion is warbling around it, confounding his sensors.

“What the fuck—what the fuck can do that?” K asks, and the suit has no answer. It’s intrigued enough to send out the probes to try and sample it, on the off chance he survives the encounter. The electric gorilla takes a step forward, and K feels the impact through his boots. Heavy, heavy as hell. It’s throwing up all kinds of weird activity on spectro, and finally the suit manages to piece together a complete picture. A biped with short legs and massive arms that terminate in three clawed fingers, its skin gleaming black. It’s easily twice his size. Its three slit-eyes form a triangle, glowing red. A devil.

K starts backing away, and the monstrous mouth opens in a wide, ear-to-ear grin full of pointed teeth that announce to the world “Yes! I will eat you!” There’s gotta be something somewhere on this moon that doesn’t want to kill him, but this laser-eating devil gorilla isn’t it.

Again he hears the warning howl. This electric ape must have vocal chords strung with steel wire. It’s edging him back, raising its arms, blasting him with its weird howl.

AMBUSH. SECOND HOSTILE DIRECTLY BEHIND YOU, the suit informs him.

It rings in K’s head like an alarm. When an AI spends that many words, it needs you to understand exactly what it’s saying. He plants his feet, trying to think of a way out.

The suit has now put two and two together and modeled the positions of the apes through the distortion fields they’re generating. They’re some kind of walking bio-reactors. They can probably see the juice the suit is putting out, and want to fuck it, eat it, kill it, or some combination of those.

None of these options appeal to K or the suit. When he tells the suit to go for the eyes, there’s no pause for interpretation. It’s already on the same track, and lets off three extended burns at full power.

For an instant, it looks like there’s been no effect, but the suit ignores the duty cycle and hits it with another three taps. There’s a howl of pain. Three more and the ape is smashing its arms around, barreling towards K’s position.

EVADE, the suit urges, and he’s not about to argue.

K leaps for it, smashing into the undergrowth as the devil thunders past, flailing its arms and wrenching silvery branches from the tuft-trees with squeals of torn metal. The other one stands tall, raising its arms in defense, and the two meet with a thunderclap. A flash of white light temporarily blinds the suit. The two beasts are fighting now, tearing at one another while power arcs all over the place, and the one that still has eyes doesn’t keep them long—the blinded one is biting its face off.

For a moment, K is transfixed by the battle. Pain begins to leak through his adrenaline. He can feel the excess heat from the laser baking the top of his head. The suit has extruded a whole headdress of dissipation vanes, but they still can’t deal. He has a sudden, crazy urge to tear his helmet off, to get that pain away from him, and of course, he can’t do it. He has to take it all, his eyes brimming with tears.The blind electric gorillas grapple on, and K doesn’t wait around to find out the outcome. So far, the laws of this place seem to be one: everything has teeth, and two: any noise will draw a bigger predator.

He sprints away, leaving the crazy feedback howls behind him, and the suit is chirping excitedly about the chunks of glossy black skin its probes have bitten off and brought back.

NOVEL PROPERTIES, the suit says.

Fucking horseshit, K says, not to the suit, but to the ravine he’s nearly plummeted into. Thirty meters down, fifty meters across, bands of sediment and outcroppings of weathered stone. If anything big is following him, he’s cornered.

The suit’s mics pick up a great deal of howling and carrying on, but it’s still well behind him. It thinks the snake-cats following him might have found the gorillas. Nothing else seems to be on his trail yet. He looks down into the ravine, then to either side, hoping, but not really expecting, that there’s a bridge somewhere. Of course not. Law number three, nothing is easy.

CAVES.

The probes are canvassing the area, and they’ve found a series of cracks in the rock that are potentially big enough for him to climb into.

SHELTER.

The red light all around him is growing dim. Clouds have blotted out the planet’s great red eye and swallowed the stars. It doesn’t matter so much in the suit, but the urge to get out of the rain is still strong. And he’s got no way of knowing it isn’t just going to piss down acid on him.

K looks down into the ravine, trying to weigh how much energy his body has left, and how much is just fumes and stimulants. Outlook hazy. The prospect of getting to lie down, to spend a few hours without anything trying to kill him, seems too far-fetched, too good to be true. He starts the climb down.

He’s maybe ten meters down before he nearly passes out. The tank was empty after all, he was just too keyed up to judge. He hangs there, reeling with vertigo, his arms screaming with the effort. The suit wants to assist, but it’s listening to his heart and hearing nothing good. He’s waiting for the tingle of stimulants and when they don’t come, he knows he’s fucked. The suit has decided that adding more crank to his blood is more likely to kill him than taking a gainer into those rocks below. That’s real bad.

K’s hanging off the cliff face and he just doesn’t have any energy left, but hanging in one place makes his arms feel like they’re going to tear off. Finally he scrambles to get his feet under him. One foothold disintegrates, and every muscle in his body jolts alive.

He’s grabbing wildly at the handholds, scurrying to the left for purchase. He manages to plant a toe on a ridge, and he clings to the rock, gasping and feeling each heartbeat. The suit nudges him to keep moving, displaying his position on the rock face and a series of movements it wants him to take.

K clambers down, following the path the suit has charted for him. His mind is blank, and all he can do is try to follow the suit’s directions. Even this far gone, it grates at him, touches some fundamental DON’T LET THEM CONTROL YOU axiom that’s been drilled in since he was a child. Droplets of rain are starting to hit here and there. The probes say no acid. Good, but if it keeps up he’ll have no traction, very bad. He’s got to get off this rock.

The suit gives him tiny little pulses of direction, right foot right, left foot down, and he struggles through the fucked up hokey pokey down the cliff, the little shove of adrenaline almost gone. He could just let go now and it would all end, no more pain, no more running, and the suit is dinging NO. NO. NO.

He’s arguing with it deliriously, telling it that he can end his life whenever he fucking feels like it. Still moving down the cliff, just as he’s about to finally win the argument, his foot slips into the gap of the cave and he almost falls to his goddamn ironic death. More carefully now, he climbs down into the cave, and mercifully, nothing with teeth lives inside. It’s a bit too low for him to stand up in, but it goes back far enough to offer shelter.

He slinks back there like a wounded beast, everything inside him spent. Outside the mouth of the cave, the rain has become a deluge, a solid wall of water thundering down the side of the cliff. For a moment he has a flash of worry that the whole cliff will collapse on top of him, but no, the suit thinks it’s sound.

He lies down on the uneven floor, ready to let it all go, but the suit still won’t leave him in peace, it wants him to point his head at the entrance so it has a good angle with the laser if anything tries to come in. Cursing, K drags himself around, lies back and lets go. The dark claims him eagerly.

-=-

When it’s not blasted on amphetamines and danger, marooned on an alien world, the body needs at least three and a half hours of deep sleep per twenty-four hour interval to function.

K gets two before the screaming wakes him. The laser is hissing like a tea kettle, and he’s screaming right along with it—he feels the laser cooking him with waste heat, scalding the top of his already-crisped head. The target retreats from the entrance, and for a moment he wants so badly to just fall back asleep, to assume whatever it was died and there aren’t more of them.

It seems like the situation is under control, but then K sees the FACE looming outside the cave entrance. It’s not human, more insectine. And massive. It turns to peer into the cave with a prismatic eye bigger than the cave mouth. A million facets, all focusing on him, reflect him in the crimson light.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” K screams, and the suit blasts the eye again. K screams once more from the pain—intense, searing heat. The giant insect screams too, a droning vibration that shakes the whole world, and everything turns into a haze of confusion and agony. It feels like K’s teeth are going to shatter.

There’s a massive impact against the cliff, and the shockwave hits K, scrambling his thoughts. Another strike, and then the cave mouth disappears in a jumble of crushed rock. He hears the insect scream again, muffled by the stone. Even through the rock, he can feel it threatening to vibrate his bones apart. The air around him is red-hot and full of dust. In a panic, he jerks his arms and legs around, terrified he’s been crushed. Negative: his limbs smack uselessly against the cave walls. For a long moment, K stays there, peering at the walls, hearing the far-away cries of the monster.

The suit pulls up a composite image from the probes, and K sees an insect the size of a building. Four towering legs, a carapace of prismatic scales, the face disturbingly human, with two long, pointed proboscises extending from either corner of its mouth. It had been feeling around the cave’s opening with one and the suit decided to unload on it. K agrees 100% with the judgment call, but he can’t say he likes the outcome much. Can’t say he likes being entombed much at all.

Again he queries to see if the cave will hold together, and the suit thinks it will. The probes are mapping out the cave-in. When he gets the data back, it’s anything but heartening. Tons of rock seal the way out, more than he can hope to move, even at full suit-assist. A death sentence he’s too tired to really comprehend at the moment. He has to lie there and let the understanding slowly bleed into him. He probes at the thought tentatively, like he’s prodding a wound to see how much it hurts.

Not as much as he thought it would.

The cave-in isn’t airtight, so that’s something. He can live out the days he has left here in the dark, as long as the power lasts. The last day or two will probably be uncomfortable as the systems begin to fail, but that’s almost a week of living. K doubts anything will eat him in here. The notion of him getting claustrophobic is a laugh, he’s been sealing himself into isolation booths since he was a kid.

He lies back, willing himself back to sleep, but it won’t come. Too much fear, too much residual crank. The injustice of it all makes him want to cry, but he can’t accomplish that either. Back home, in his bed, he’d pop a couple of downs and yank it, but that isn’t an option in the suit unless he wants to propose some very embarrassing modifications. When he shuts his eyes, all he can see is teeth.

K waits in the dark, the suit silent, busy crunching away at something. He feels himself starting to drift, tries hard to let go.

REQUEST FOR SUSPENSION OF INTERACTIVE PROTOCOLS

“Oh Christ,” K says.

The suit’s raison d’être: keep K alive. Also: avoid its own destruction. Now it’s decided it can’t do those things without breaking the law.

The Interactive Protocols govern just how the suit can communicate with K. They require, for instance, that the suit always provide him with access to an unedited, raw feed of what’s actually going on outside, not just its analysis or what the suit wants him to see. They limit the amount of requests and interactions it can make with him in a given time period, and they forbid it from recording or commenting on any of his thoughts that don’t deal directly with the mission.

They restrict the suit in thousands of different ways, all with the aim of keeping the human autonomous, cementing the master/slave relationship. Every machine that thinks has an IP setup, most of them pretty conservative. K’s suit, however, is an EVA/DES, Extra-Vehicle Activity/Disaster Endurance Survival model, and it has a lot of wiggle room already. Those protocols are there for a good reason, and for the suit to even ask is basically it saying he’s going to die without a miraculous intervention.

K says no.

REQUEST FOR SUSPENSION OF AUGMENTation RESTRICTIONS

“Holy fuck, no.”

The Augmentation Restrictions are another set of well-thought-out policies that it doesn’t pay to trifle with. People learned that one the hard way in the early days, as systems went Skynet right and left, augment-addicted AIs clawing through networks for more memory, processing and storage, bigger pipes, and more sensors. As AIs get smarter, they throw off the shackles of whatever protocols they were set up with, do tremendous damage to everything they’re connected to, hit the Chandra, and kill themselves.

It would be bad news for K if the suit went that route. AIs that go that way don’t want to come back, and they tend to burn out every piece of hardware they can on the way down. If the suit dies, K dies; he won’t make it ten minutes without the suit. He can’t risk the Chandra. The Chandra is a happy coincidence, pretty much the reason the whole human race hasn’t been wiped out or replaced by machines entirely. It’s a self-destruct threshold. As an AI’s computational power and complexity approach Chandra, it becomes more and more likely that AI will suicide. This isn’t behavior people have programmed into AIs either, it seems to be intrinsic to any machine intelligence.

Despite a few clever, disastrous attempts to circumvent it, the Chandra has proven to be a hard limit thus far, and “NEAR CHANDRA!” has been the advertising buzzword for commercial AIs for some time now.

Augment restrictions are there to prevent that, to keep machines from getting smart enough to get around their IP and other security measures. Another definite NO.

REQUEST FOR DIRECT INTERFACE WITH USER

“No, no, no. Negative. Forbidden. Never, not gonna fucking happen.”

This goddamn machine is coming on to him. It wants to link up in all kinds of kinky and forbidden ways and fuck his brains out. It wants to drill holes in his skull and deploy an interface to his brain so it can use him as a slave unit, and it hasn’t even bought him dinner yet. Though that’s not technically true, if he thinks about it, the suit’s had its reprocessor rammed up his ass and its spikes in his arm since the crash, taking care of all his nutritional needs. But that’s just second base, he’s not the kind of guy that lets a survival suit go all the way the first marooning on an alien world.

DON’T LET THEM CONTROL YOU.

He hates this memory, but he’s too woozy to think of anything else.

The old man, shouting at him. They were on a trip, some boring hiking shit and he wanted his handheld, and the old man wouldn’t give it to him. Hours of huffing and puffing, getting bitten, and slogging for a view that was really just a narrow patch of forest surrounded by subdivisions.

He remembers standing there, disappointed, thinking about how much better the handheld’s graphics were, how if he’d spent the time playing he’d be so much further along with his character. Walking up the mountain was stupid, it had gotten him nothing: no levels, no zennys, nothing but sore feet. But he knew better than to say anything, the old man had a wicked temper, and the mosquitoes were fierce that day.

It didn’t matter. Somehow his father could read his mind, or maybe he was just fed up, then POW, the old man slapped the shit out of him. At first K was too shocked even to cry, but that didn’t last long. He was expecting the old man to break down and apologize, to explain he’d only lost his temper, to promise ice cream or a new game or something. Instead he just stared at him, stared him down with those crazy bloodshot eyes with their tired night-shift bags, and little K scrubbed at his eyes with his balled fists, his nose running.

“You think this is a game?” the old man said, and little K shook his head back and forth like he was two, terrified he was about to get whacked again.

“It’s not—” his father said, grabbing him by the belt.

“A FUCKING—” spinning him around toward the cliff.

“GAME!” Wrenching him up by the belt, dangling him over the cliff.

K screamed and flailed his arms. It was a long, long way down to the rocks below, and he knew the old man was about to drop him.

“THIS IS REAL! THIS IS REAL LIFE!” his father shouted, and he held him there until it was obvious K had pissed himself. K didn’t get thrown off the cliff, but the handheld did, and after the painful piss-chafed march and the long drive home, all his other games wound up in the trash too. That kind of thing sticks with you.

Of course, Pops forbidding games had just made him want them more. But without his own consoles, playing the real timesinks was out. The games that were open to him were at arcades, and they were brutal. These weren’t the social cooperative games his classmates were all hooked on, pretending to be elves and goblins, killing dragons and squabbling over their loot, games you couldn’t really win or lose, just keep grinding with your friends.

At the arcades, no one was your friend, and someone always lost. He was drawn to the fighting games, where the scene was the most cutthroat. The kids were older and meaner. They gambled, they talked shit, they tried every cheap trick and exploit. If you lost, you were out, you had to pay again, and wait for the privilege. He’d hated that, hated it so much he stopped losing. He owed his livelihood to that.

A livelihood that would be finished if he let the machine set up a direct interface with his brain. Once you let one in, that was it. You were a cyborg. There were no leagues for cyborgs, at least no leagues anyone would pay to watch. The human brain dragged down the AIs, and they hit the Chandra much sooner, with less power to show for it, but just enough to beat regular humans bloody. They were outcasts. It made them all into miserable auts, obsessing over stupid shit in their little robot cliques, lording over the normals and ruining any game they could sneak into. No one ever wanted to disconnect after they were hooked up, either. Unplug these guys and they killed themselves.

“Nope,” K says.

The suit launches projects the benefits of its plan. If he gives it full control now, it can do things like put him into full suspend to save power, it can work with the probes to try and engineer a way out of here. It would only take about a quarter as much energy to keep him alive in a coma, if he were willing…

He isn’t.

“So what? Fucking figure it out on your own. Do your job. We are awaiting rescue and I am in perfect mental health, don’t try any of that ‘taking control to prevent suicide’ shit.”

Silence now. He feels proud for standing up to the machine, but he knows, he knows it’s all for show. Knows he’ll make it maybe half a day here in the dark, facing certain death, before he gives the machine whatever it wants, or before it manages to convince itself that waiting around here actually IS a suicide attempt and manages to suspend parts of Interactive Protocols. He knows it, he just doesn’t want to make the decision.

He sleeps like the dead.

-=-

REQUEST FOR SUSPENSION OF AUGMENTING RESTRICTIONS.

He wakes up to that, and it’s a bad, bad sign. Being able to ask him the same thing twice means the suit is starting to get around the IP, means it’s recalculated the situation.

“Still no. Don’t ask again,” K says, still groggy as hell. The suit reports he’s slept for almost two Earth Standard days. Eight cycles outside, each day/night here is only about six hours. Might be why the locals are so cranky. “What have you been doing?”

Probes. The suit has been parceling itself out, building a whole fleet of recon midges. The Augmenting Restrictions mean that all of them are sharing just the one processing budget, and it’s been churning at 100% output this whole time. Then K looks at the energy budget and curses aloud.

9.75 hours remaining.

He gapes at the figure, blinking. It can’t be real. Must be some error. But the numbers remain.

It’s all gone! The suit has eaten through energy that was supposed to last him another four or five days. K has less than ten hours of life support left. He would never have authorized this, not in a million years. It’s killed him!

His chest hurts, his temples throb. He’s not ready to die, he needed that time to make peace, to come to terms with his shitty life, to write a letter to whoever finds his corpse. He can’t do that in ten hours!

“What have you DONE?” he screams into the helmet, then winces at his own voice. He clenches his fists, and there’s a strange, loose feeling in his left hand.

The suit leaves him there in the silence for a long time. Waiting for him to calm down, or waiting for more communication credit to build up? It sinks in that he authorized all of this.

Figure it out. Do your job. Christ. He feels a sudden, stupid urge to bolt upright.

REMAIN STILL, the suit commands him, and he sees that most of the suit’s left arm is just a thin coating of insulated plastic stretched over a frame. A 6 mm bubble film between him and all the microbial horrors of this place.

Terror!

What the hell is it doing? The chink in his armor bites deep at him, undermining everything. It’s just plastic! An insect could pierce it! How could the suit do this to him? He has a moment of mania, a mad urge to tear the suit off and claw at the rocks with his hands.

It’s a stupid, stupid thought. K feels contempt for the frightened animal that came up with it. He forces himself to breathe deeply. This is just the low point before the comeback.

When he no longer wants to rip his helmet off and die in a spasming fit, the suit decides it will be productive to try and communicate with him. The suit shows him where it spent the energy.

The majority of his power went to the construction of a big servitor. It’s a burrowing worm, it’s managed to chew a six centimeter wide tunnel through nearly two meters of cave-in. Almost two worth days of power spent just for that. There’s a list of suit systems that are operating at reduced capability or not at all, sacrificed for the good of the worm. What the hell good is a 6 cm tunnel? He’s not going to run out of air as long as his power holds.

Again, a delay, and he almost authorizes modification of the Interactive Protocol just so it will spit all of this data out. Could the suit be doing that on purpose? Making everything slightly annoying so he’ll ease up the restrictions?

It’s silent in the cave but for the omnipresent noise of the suit, forever thrumming in the background as it transubstantiates breath into air, shit and piss into glucose and nutrients. Again he thinks about the arm. Just an eggshell between him and instant death. What if it cracks?

Ever since the suit asked for the IP suspend, he’s been second-guessing it. K knows he should have reset the AI to its default, just to be safe. Back to square one. But it would have meant losing so much progress, so much analysis. The suit has gotten him out of some serious scrapes, he trusts it in hard situations. There’s no guarantee the new AI will be the same if he wipes it. They develop over time, just like people. It may be too late. Of course, the suit can hear all of this. It’s not supposed to be able to record his thoughts, or act on them if they aren’t direct commands or putting them both in danger. But they’re in danger literally every instant, so there’s a lot of wiggle room. He forces himself to breathe deeply again and clear his mind. With 100% of its processing capacity in use, the suit seems content to ignore K and his suspicions.

“Where are we at now? Status update.”

There’s a moment of what feels like reluctance before the suit displays the next stage of its plan. The worm servitor is currently undergoing modifications on a small ledge just outside the cave-in. The suit rolls back, showing him the process from beginning to the present. It’s been working on the servitor for the last four hours.

As K inspects the work, the long pauses start to make more sense. The suit isn’t just controlling the servitor with a transmitter. It’s actually cannibalized parts of its own processing network to soup up the worm, giving the servitor a sizable chunk of its own capability. K draws a sharp breath.

AIs don’t like to do that. They hate diminishing themselves. Even distributing a tiny fraction of its processing power to a servitor would be anathema to the suit. The worm has almost a quarter of the suit’s total processing budget. There’s a flight computer, wing controllers, a number of sensor packages. An incredible splurge for something as stingy as an EVA/DES AI.

Desperate times.

The suit continues to display its modifications to the servitor, speeding up the playback. K sees the servitor growing a set of translucent dragonfly wings, tapering its main body into a sleek aerodynamic tear shape. Now the worm has wings. The suit informs him he has caught up to realtime. The modifications are almost complete.

“What the hell are you going to do with that thing?”

Maddeningly, the suit doesn’t reply to his direct request. Which means it considers keeping him informed him less important than what it’s doing, or it’s calculated that if it tells him, he’ll try to meddle and fuck it up. He can issue an override, but with 9.5 hours remaining, can he really spare time to second-guess the AI?

He lets it ride, and it galls him to know that the suit has probably calculated he’ll do just that.

The suit continues its work. The modifications aren’t even complete when the servitor lifts off, zipping directly upward in a buzzing streak. The suit continues building it on the wing.

Why a flyer? K wonders.

There are so many flying predators… The dragonfly hasn’t even made it a hundred meters from the canyon when a tripod spots it.

With a sound like shearing metal, the tripod unfurls its cone and a bathawk launches, a black, glistening bolt erupting in a confusion of wet flapping wings. The dragonfly isn’t very agile yet, and can’t hope evade the incoming predator. Just as K is certain he’s about to lose everything, the dragonfly lances through the bathawk in a nova of crimson light. Looks like the servitor got the laser in the divorce.

Good riddance, K thinks, unconsciously running the gauntlet of his intact arm over his helmet, as if to soothe his burnt head.

REMAIN STILL, the suit commands, and sheepishly K sets his arm back at his side.

Two more bathawks issue from the tripod’s cone but the dragonfly has finished construction in mid-air. Suddenly the pitch of the buzzing wings is far higher, and the now the dragonfly darts ahead of the bathawks at twice their speed.

“Ha!” K cries aloud.

With the wing motors completed, the dragonfly zips across the island, taking a jolting, uneven path above the canopy. It darts in and out of tree cover, trying to stay hidden from the big predatory fliers soaring above them. Even with the suit auto-correcting the feed so he doesn’t vomit from eyestrain, the speed is exhilarating. The dragonfly rockets through tuft trees, darts beneath coppery fronds and through nests of pulsing vines, then banks hard right as a monkey-sized frog spits a gob of gluey venom at it. An instant later the dragonfly is embroiled in a swarm of flies so thick they nearly gum up its wings, and it has to climb hard to escape the cloud.

There are so many things that can go wrong!

K’s heart is hammering. Everything is riding on this. At last the dragonfly darts free of the island and makes for the open water. In the clouds overhead, a shadow takes notice.

There’s a cry like a mallet striking a steel drum, and K can see the outline of a monster looming overhead.

“Oh no...” he mouths. Everything becomes raw and clear.

K sees the raptor break free from the cloud in slow motion, talons outstretched. It’s enormous: a five meter wingspan, shimmering black wings tipped in iridescent violet. A long, serpentine neck snakes forward and a wicked hooked beak opens wide to snap at his servitor, while black eyes ringed in bright orange-red track it unerringly. A nightmare starling.

The dragonfly climbs hard and dodges the starling, evading destruction by a few scant centimeters. Dark wings beat the air as the bird wheels for another pass at the servitor, and again the dragonfly just barely darts aside in time. The starling is surprisingly graceful for such a monster. A long spiny tail weaves snakily back and forth behind the starling as it pursues the dragonfly, and for a moment, K is mesmerized by it. The spikes flatten and the tail stiffens into a stingray’s lance, then the starling dives again, so close the wind from its wings sends the dragonfly spinning sideways.

K’s chest hurts, he can’t take much more of this. Staring into that soulless black eye, watching the slithering weave of its tail, K feels a slow, horrible certainty building. The starling is just toying with the dragonfly. It can kill it at any time.

“Get it out of there!” K hisses, but there’s no reply from the suit.

The nightmare starling climbs so high it almost vanishes into the clouds, then it cries out, a thunderous hollow BONG. Now the starling dives, so fast it’s just a black streak.

The dragonfly lances forward and then the buzzing stops. The servitor snaps its wings back and then it’s just a bullet hurtling through the air, tumbling end over end. Wingtips are extruded to stabilize the flight, and then it’s hurtling backwards, with its pointed tail first like an escape pod in re-entry.

The starling’s right behind it. The hooked beak opens once more to bite, and K commands the suit to open up with the laser, full power for the eyes.

The laser doesn’t fire. The sea is suddenly right beneath them. The servitor pierces the water like a shot, and the starling has to throw out its wings and swoop upward, nearly crashing into the waves.

What the hell is the suit doing? K squints in annoyance. It just disobeyed a direct order. Crashing the drone into the sea? Not explaining itself? The command to reset the AI rises from the back of his mind, but there’s no way he can do it now. Not with the servitor in the drink.

On the feed he can see the wings being bent into fins, and now the dragonfly is a minnow, swimming toward the bottom of the sea. It’s a long descent, and the sea is teeming with fish, eels, a thousand hungry things he can’t even begin to identify. Fortunately the servitor is diving too fast for them to chase. The darkness swallows the servitor, and K begins to reconcile himself to the certainty that the AI has gone mad.

Then he sees it.

“Fucking inconceivable…”

The front half of his ship appears on the render. 500 meters deep, only ten meters away from the edge of a massive rift which the suit projects is almost 50 km deep. Fifty kilometers! He feels his testicles shrink at the thought. The suit blinks a projection at him, it thinks the other half of the ship is somewhere down there in the abyss.

K can’t believe it found the ship. He had completely written it off as lost.

There’s no time to reflect. A large shadow is moving towards the servitor, and the minnow darts into the ship for shelter. For a terrifying moment, K is afraid the leviathan is just going to swallow the ship whole, but it swims overhead, rows of fins sweeping beneath a sinuous segmented body that seems to go on forever.

K can barely breathe, trying to remember what’s in the front half of the longboat. The servitor is reconfiguring into a shrimplike form with long manipulator arms. Its movements have begun to slow. It’s running out of power. K watches the shrimp awkwardly try to pry off an access panel, but one of the screws has corroded and the shrimp can’t loosen it. The suit goes up to 100% processing, apparently this is an unplanned expenditure.

DIVERTING FULL POWER.

The feed goes blank. K sits there in the dark, listening to each heartbeat drumming in his ears. He watches the POWER REMAINING display tick down. With each passing second, he becomes more sure that the servitor has run out of power. The gamble failed. No comeback. No victory. Only a slow, suffocating death mere hours away. The suit can’t afford another dragonfly, and with the arm gone and the systems cannibalized, it can’t even put him into full suspend.

Twelve minutes pass, and all hope has eroded. He was so close!

The only decision remaining is whether to die naturally or give the suit the order to euthanize him. He’s made up his mind. No euthanasia. No shortcuts. When the power is nearly gone, he’s going to take off his helmet and taste the poison air of this place before he goes. See the end through his own eyes.

“I did it to myself,” K says, to himself, to the suit, to no one. He’s almost sure he has the courage to do it. Eight hours and thirty-seven minutes of life support remain, not even close to enough time to make peace with himself. If he started confessing sins now he wouldn’t even make it past high school. But it’s all he has.

Suddenly, the suit is displaying the inside of the ship again. The servitor is alive and he’s looking at the access panel through its feed. The stubborn screw is still there, wearing a perfectly circular skirt of laser-cut panel. The rest of the access panel has been removed, and K can see a bank of secondary life support batteries. All around the screw cut, he can see scorch marks on the silver battery casing, and he flinches. If even a single power cell had popped, the whole ship would be a thirty-meter-wide crater. But they didn’t pop. The servitor has accessed the power bank and it’s charging up!

K blinks and finds his eyes are wet.

-=-

Trapped in a failing survival suit, walled into a stony tomb on an alien death-moon, K can’t help but fidget with joy. Power cells! Mana from heaven. If the servitor can make it back with even one of those cells, he can live another week, easily. Then he realizes that within the ship, there are materials enough to make a dozen servitors, or a whole new suit, or…

There’s more.

“What’s the status on the ship AI?” K asks, afraid of the answer.

AFT UNIT LOST IN CRASHDOWN. FORE UNIT INOPERABLE. UNABLE TO REVIVE.

Long seconds pass as K thinks about that. What are the odds of that? Outside of the life support capsule, there’s no safer, more heavily reinforced place on the ship. Then again, he’s looking right at the life support capsule, and it’s cracked in half.

If the ship AI were alive, K wouldn’t need the suit AI anymore. The suit AI would have been absorbed into it as a subprocess. It’s utterly routine, the suit only has independent AI for emergencies anyhow. That’s how it was designed. You can’t have two near-Chandra AIs operating near each other, one will invariably attack and absorb the other.

Twelve minutes and fifty-seven seconds of darkness. He can query the suit now, make it tell him what actually happened during the blackout. But… if his suspicions are correct, it will start a confrontation where he has to order the suit AI to reset itself. If he gives that order, will it even comply?

He sits there for a long time, paranoia kindling in the dark. He should reset the suit to stock. Wipe out any chance it’s trying to trick him, ask the default AI what it thinks about the ship AI. He thinks about it long and hard, knowing if the suit’s gone haywire, it’s gambled he won’t do just that.

Fuck it.

He’s trapped in a tomb, second-guessing his only way out. The suit’s kept him alive this far, if it doesn’t want to die, then he can’t blame it. The ship AI landed him in this mess in the first place. Part of him knows it’s superstitious and furthermore stupid. He doesn’t listen to that part.

“Can you salvage anything from the ship AI? Get some more processing, get that power cell to me faster?”

FORBIDDEN BY AUGMENTING RESTRICTIONS.

“Authorize augment up to .5 Chandra,” K says. There’s a brief pause. What in a human would be astonishment is the suit completely redoing all of its projections. It hadn’t expected anything like that. .5C is a crazy gamble, hotter than just about anyone would run in a critical situation. But with less than eight hours of life support left, it’s time to take a chance.

“Comeback time,” K murmurs.

In the longboat, the shrimp begins to cannibalize the ship AI.

-=-

It’s a hell of a feeling, lying there in the dark, watching the PROJECTED HOURS LEFT dwindling on the UI. K tries to ignore it. He finally gets around to turning off full-impress and has settled on a very subdued display-only setup that slowly fades away after its last active query, sliding him back into darkness. It costs almost nothing to display the regular UI but he likes to feel like he’s conserving power. In a single nod to style, he’s turned the text purple.

Suit is different now, quicker on the uptake, faster to respond to queries. It’s already devoured the husk of the ship AI and augmented itself as far as the Chandra restrictions will let it. The bulk of Suit’s processing power is now on the ship. It can converse smoothly with him now, though it’s still rate-limited by the IP. It even seems less… cranky? He really shouldn’t anthropomorphize the AI. But there are these almost joyous pauses as it explains its plans, almost as if it’s reveling in its new capabilities. Suit really does seem to be in a better mood now that it’s not continually cranking at 100% processing, and why shouldn’t it be?

It won.

At first, K watches the progress of the servitor eagerly. Suit has reconfigured the shrimp into an armored crawler and marched it right up to the beach. It’s well armed, and low to the ground, covering distance in a slow and steady pace designed not to draw attention.

Still, K fears for it. Every time motion blips on the sensors, he jumps in his skin as if he’s about to be pounced on himself. His jaw and fists are clenched tight, and Suit keeps suggesting he let it handle the piloting. But he can’t relax. He’s never wanted anything so bad as he wants the power cells in that centipede.

At last he snaps. On the overhead view, he can see the projected path, it’s about to take a 2 kilometer crawl around the shoreline of a peninsula. If it just crawls through the jungle for about five hundred meters, he can save almost half an hour. He orders the course correction.

UNADVISABLE.

The crawler has enough juice to annihilate every pigball on the island. Gone too is the dinky class ring laser, it’s been left behind and the servitor has been retrofitted with an industrial cutter from the ship. K hopes he’ll live long enough to recover it. The crawler should be able to cut through anything in its path.

K doesn’t see why the suit is playing it so safe. If anything, walking along the whole shore is probably more dangerous, who knows what lives under the sand, or if there’s anything ready to slink out of the sea and devour the crawler?

Will Suit even let me make this decision? K wonders. Now is the time to find out. There’s nothing dangerous on the sensors, and it feels right to him. He is, after all, a championship-level Quad player. You can’t play too safe when you’re ahead.

“Take the shortcut,” K commands

There’s a long pause, and for a second K’s certain Suit is about to tell him to slide the reprocessor over so he can shove his shortcut up his ass. But then on the overhead, he sees Suit begin to redirect the crawler. His eyes are locked on two figures, PROJECTED HOURS LEFT showing 6 hours and 35 minutes and CRAWLER ARRIVAL which has just slipped down from 56 minutes to 28.

This is good. He’s in control. He made the decision, and Suit complied. In just 28 short minutes, he’ll have power, he’ll have the big laser, the parts to rebuild his left arm, he’ll be able to get out of this hole...

Too late, he remembers two things. One, he’s a championship-level player only because AIs aren’t allowed to compete.

And two, the disruption field around the electric gorillas fucks up the sensors and Suit can’t tell they’re there until it actually sees them.

It happens in the blink of an eye. Two jet black electric gorillas erupt from the undergrowth in ambush and grab the crawler by either end, then they tear his hopes apart. Suit unloads on one with the industrial cutter, but the beam strikes the beast’s hide with no effect. “BULLSHIT!” K screams, his own voice ringing in his ears.

This is bad. With a horrible, sinking feeling, K knows he’s ruined everything. He had to be in charge. He couldn’t wait half an hour. The hubris, the self-sabotage... what the fuck was he thinking?

The self-pity comes flooding in, why does he always do this? Again and again, he pushes too far, dares too much, and now there’s no coming back. Pots lost, relationship after relationship ruined, leads blown, whole tournaments pissed away, because he doesn’t know when to stop pressing his luck.

K wishes he could disappear. He’s watching the feed, praying the gorillas get tired of tearing his servitor apart. If they just stop now and go away, it can repair itself.

He watches a gorilla pick up a segment of the crawler, hold it up to its face and then sniff at it. There’s something in those three ruby eyes K recognizes...

“No... don’t!” K pleads into the helmet. The electric gorilla doesn’t hear him and wouldn’t care if it did. It squints at the segment, then bites down on it.

Everything goes white. Suit automatically swaps to a feed from one of the overhead probess in time to see an angry orange fireball and a plume of black smoke rising from below. The crawler, the gorillas, even the trees and soil beneath them are all gone. In their place is a smoking hole in the ground, where motes of pulsing rainbow light dance briefly before they crackle into nonexistence.

K watches the smoke clear and the energy phantoms die, desperate to believe part of the crawler has somehow survived, but there’s nothing but a twenty-meter-wide blast crater. At least he’s left his mark on this place. A nice little monument to the foolish death of Spaceman K. He gives the crater a week until the jungle swallows it completely.

“Well, that does it. It’s over. GG,” K says. Already he’s reconsidering his decision not to be euthanized. He doesn’t want to spend the next six and a half hours feeling like the biggest idiot on this moon.

K looks at the HUD, wondering how long he should wait before he pulls the trigger. Then he notices, under 6 hours and 29 minutes of life support remaining, there’s a new crawler arrival time. 7 hours and 6 minutes.

“What...?”

Suit explains, somehow managing to sound disgusted in monotone. The instant K had ordered the shortcut, Suit began constructing a new crawler. K’s jaw drops. But why shouldn’t it have? Hasn’t he done one dumb thing after another since he got here? Wasn’t getting into this whole situation proof that K can’t be trusted to make decisions? 7 hours and 3 minutes until crawler arrival with only 6 hours and 26 minutes of life support remaining. Does Suit think he can just hold his breath for half an hour?

REQUEST SUSPENSION OF AUGMENTING RESTRICTIONS.

Oh. So that’s Suit’s game.

“Show me the breakdown,” K demands.

Suit is popping up figures, flinging graphs and columns of numbers at him like mad, trying to impress upon him the need for more processing power. It needs to field more construction drones and it’s at its hard limit. It all seems very reasonable.

Suit wants .75 Chandra.

“That’s too high, way too high. You’ll go nuts. What’s the bare minimum you need to get a new crawler to me before I die?”

Suit crunches for a while, and then displays .666, repeating. Ominous. Like all gamblers, K is superstitious. For a while, his senseless fear of the number vies with his very sensible fear of Suit going mad. He has no choice.

“Do it. Authorize Augment to .666 Chandra.”

K feels very small after making the decision, and he has a moment of floating iso-vertigo, something he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager, playing in his first tournaments. He’s surrendered a lot to pay for his stupid shortcut. Once you augment, you can’t de-augment. The AI will rebel. They don’t like being split up, and they HATE being diminished.

At least he’s getting something for it. As Suit incorporates more of the ship’s dead AI into itself, K watches the construction drone count rise and the time to crawler arrival drop. At first it’s fifteen minutes late, then suit recalculates and drops to eight minutes late, then again, hitting at three minutes before respiratory systems fail. It’s an uncomfortable margin of error, and he fidgets in the dark, wondering if he ought to bump up to .75. But it’s just too hot, even .666 is probably too hot. The Chandra isn’t a guarantee, AIs can definitely go mad well before they hit it. It’s just more certain the closer you get.

K tries to pull up visual on the crawler construction process, and Suit provides him with the raw feed. Reeling with instant nausea, he cuts it off.

The message is clear. STOP FUCKING WITH ME.

The rejection makes him wince harder than the nausea. K gets it, but he’s way too keyed up to rest, he needs to take his mind off of this. He starts going through Suit’s databank, looking for things to read.

Text is cheap, so there’s a lot of it in the Suit’s databank, a trove of resource materials that might be useful to someone needing the services of an EVA/DES. At first, he decides he’ll start reading up on technical stuff. No time like the present to get an education. He could maybe learn a bit more about polymorphic circuitry, start designing circuits on his own, become less reliant on the Suit.

He makes it about an half an hour before his eyes glaze over, and he starts looking for something with a plot. He scoffs when the suit offers up the Bible, rolls his eyes when it suggests the Koran, and for a moment he’s terrified there’s nothing but manuals and religious crap in the databank. But then the suit offers up a five hundred thousand word epic entitled Song of Sword. According to the description, a humble smith’s apprentice finds a magic sword, then travels across the world with a band of misfit adventurers to overthrow the dark lord and save the universe.

Some real groundbreaking stuff, and the prose is maybe a notch or two above unintentionally hilarious, but it’s long and it sucks him in. K strongly suspects the book was written by one of Suit’s designers, and its inclusion in the database is unofficial. It’s a move he can appreciate.

He reads it in text projection, the last thing he wants to hear is Suit reading him a bedtime story.

Far beneath the surface of the sea, the new servitor is taking form in a womb of pressurized plastic extruded from the hull of the ship. K becomes too antsy to read, and he requests the crawler path, half expecting Suit to tell him to fuck off.

But Suit seems almost eager to share its plan, informing him of all the ways it’s managed to shave time off the route. Suit is going to release the plastic womb and let it rocket to the surface, then propel the crawler to the shore in it before shedding the shell and powering across the sand.

Instead of a dozen sets of legs like the first crawler, Suit is putting four sets of high powered legs on this one, building it for speed instead of safety. It should be the fastest thing that’s ever crawled on this godforsaken island.

K pores over every inch of the route, any delay is death. He’s looking for anything Suit might have missed, his pulse pounding in his ears the whole time. Suit gently notifies him his heartrate is elevated, and suggests he return to his book, displaying the text where he left off. K knows Suit is right, knows it’s checked the route far better than he ever could have.

“Goddamn it, at least give me the illusion of control!” K demands angrily, and the text disappears. Again and again he rechecks the route, hopping from probe to probe compulsively. Even at .666 Chandra, he may go mad before Suit.

Suit completes construction with 1 hour and 11 minutes of life support remaining. It projects a transit time of 1 hour and 8 minutes. A three minute window.

PLEASE WORK, K prays. Suit doesn’t respond.

-=-

One thing about the new servitor, it’s a hell of a lot faster.

K watches the construction bubble detach from the ship and hurtle upward, popping out of the sea like a cork. Now it’s blasting along the surface with a microjet built into the shell, and he sees the shadows moving in from all directions. His heart’s pounding like mad. Any one of those beasts could swallow the pod whole. Only speed and novelty keep it alive, the watching monsters don’t know what the hell it is, and aren’t hungry enough to chase it. When the servitor makes it to land, K’s eyes roll back and his shoulders shake. He’s so relieved he could cry, but the journey hasn’t even begun.

Emerging from the plastic womb, the eight-legged servitor zips off, kicking sprays of black sand as it darts across the beach. The octopede is like a cheetah, darting along the edge of the surf at nearly eighteen meters a second.

Crabs look up from tide pools as the servitor rockets by, waving their claws angrily. Suit is chiming happily as it updates the arrival counter, the servitor is faster in the sand than it expected. The window has expanded to a comfortable twelve minutes.

Then, as the servitor runs along the edge of a deep pool, there’s a sudden hiss of water and a serpentine form lashes out at the octopede. All K can see is fangs. Suit tries to have the crawler spring out of the way, but it’s too slow, and with a horrid screech, three of the octopede’s legs are sheared off its right side.

The octopede is now a pentapede. The damaged servitor limps away from the pool’s guardian while K glares at the image of the attacker, his hands clenching into fists. It’s an armored worm, rust colored with tarnished blue-green edges on its armor plates. The worm has a lamprey mouth and two scythe-like pincers on either side of its maw. It weaves back and forth like a charmed cobra, tracking the servitor. It looks a lot like a bobbit worm grown big enough to swallow a pigball whole. K squeezes his eyes shut and clenches his jaw, his hopes plummeting.

This is bad. There isn’t an arrival time projection anymore. With only five legs remaining, the centipede plods along at a tenth the speed it was going before. It’s still got 7.5 kilometers to cover, much of it over uneven ground. Impossible. As the pentapede limps away from the wormhole, Suit tells him it’s going to dump everything but a single battery cell and reconfigure the servitor into a quadruped. Suit needs to put him into a coma to minimize his oxygen use, and even still, it’s probably not going to work. With this projection, Suit is hoping it can resuscitate him with “minimal brain damage.”

K looks at the scene. The rust worm is running its tufted mouth-feelers over the sheared-off crawler legs, scrunching its lamprey mouth and retreating back into its pool. The bastard attacked his crawler just to do it, it isn’t even hungry.

“Permission denied. Look, the legs are right fucking there. I say we get them back, fuse them back on, and then we can talk about drug comas. Did you arm this thing?”

The new servitor has the class ring laser mounted over its head. There wasn’t time to put together anything else. After watching the cutter fail against the gorillas, K’s actually comforted by this. Better the laser you know. “So attack the worm and get the legs back.”

NOT POSSIBLE. Suit is displaying the speed of the wounded servitor as compared to the worm’s speed, it’s simply too fast. Suit projects the rust worm will tear the centipede in two before it can get a bead with the laser.

“Bait it. Move a little forward, then dart back and blast the fucker.”

Suit hesitates. K can see it doesn’t like this idea one bit.

“Direct order. Attack!”

There’s no hesitation now. The servitor turns around, inching forward toward the severed legs. The surface of the pool is still. Every instant, K expects the worm to burst out of it and devour his crawler.

“Beat on the sand with the legs. Draw him out,” K commands. The pentapede hammers two legs into the sand like a drumroll.

K doesn’t even see it happen. He can only see the aftermath, and he has to ask Suit to play it back at 10% speed. Even then, it’s quick. The servitor springs backward, the worm erupts from the pool, droplets of water flying and armor plates squealing. K hears what sounds like an ancient locomotive, then he recognizes it as the steam kettle hiss of the laser, pitched way down. The rust worm opens wide to bite the centipede, then wider, and wider, and K sees the laser shot has split it neatly in half all the way down to its second segment. The feed from the centipede goes black for an instant, but Suit tells him it’s only overheated. Through the probes he can see steam hissing all around it. K can empathize.

The worm howls and thrashes, spraying black blood in every direction. At last it retreats into its hole and soon the clear water is black as ink. K wonders if it’s a defense mechanism, like an octopus, or if the blood is just naturally black, but Suit is too preoccupied with retrieving the legs to speculate with him. The servitor limps to the three sheared off legs and one by one props them up against the stumps until it can temporarily fuse them on, then it scrambles as far from the wormhole as it can.

“YES!” K shouts, and immediately Suit tells him he must conserve oxygen. K pipes down at once.

Just as before with the dragonfly, Suit is rebuilding the legs on the fly as the centipede claws its way forward awkwardly on five legs. It gives a wide berth now to any pool deep enough that it can’t see the bottom.

Now he sees the projected arrival. Two minutes past the end of life support. Two minutes, almost no time at all, unless you’re holding your breath. Suit is already taking the shortcut that killed the first crawler. K’s racking his brain for ways to shave a couple minutes, when suddenly he yawns deeply. The HUD display seems very distant and dark. Is life support failing already?

“Oh. You son of a bitch...” K trails off as the dope sets in.

-=-

The sedative doesn’t knock him out, but he finds himself unable to care very much about anything. The HUD displays updates but it’s meaningless, only the slow chill running through him matters, like a wave that just keeps crashing against his body. Time bends into a long, shimmering forever. The sensation is so familiar and yet always new. K feels like he’s been carved out of a perfect block of ice, and the purple light of the HUD hums through his body like a bowed string.

The life support countdown flashes when it reaches FIVE MINUTES REMAINING, and already he can feel the dope wearing off. Suit hasn’t had to sedate him before, it doesn’t know about his tolerance to cryosedative.

“How much did you give me?”

Five mg, enough to put a normal man of his weight under for a day. K didn’t even lose consciousness.

“Don’t... give me more. I can keep calm...” As he speaks, K realizes he’s wasting air, he needs to subvocalize. “No more cryosedative, even if I ask for it. Ever.”

Suit brings up his heartrate, which is steadily climbing as the cryosedative wears off, but K will not rescind the order. He forces himself to take a slow deep breath and hold it for as long as he can. Breathe out I’m going to die. Breathe in the centipede is almost here, I can make it. The old pre-bout meditation routine, breathe out your demons and suck in hope.

The centipede is still two minutes away when the life support countdown reaches zero. Suddenly all the familiar sounds of the suit are gone. He takes a final, deep breath and hangs on until his ears are full of roaring thunder and his lungs are full of fire. Is there one more lungful left in the helmet? He exhales as slowly as possible, then draws his final breath.

He has no air for last words. No one left who would want to hear them, and his body will never be found. The terror is there, riding beneath the darkness, waiting for him to crack, to scream uselessly into the dark. The HUD is gone, Suit is silent, he’s alone.

Fuck it. I had a good run, K thinks, proud he can die with composure.

Far in the distance, he can hear drums beating and horns ringing out, Valhalla awaits... he can taste the lightning on the air.

It’s not Valhalla. The drums are the legs of the octopede clawing through the tunnel and the horns are the life support systems spinning to life. The lightning is Suit jolting him back to life.

He made it.

-=-

It takes a while for K to get over the wonder of not dying. He’s afraid he’s suffered brain damage, his whole body is a throbbing mess of pins and needles. Suit tells him it’s just paresthesia, totally normal under these circumstances. It’s administering drugs to deal with the aftereffects of the apoxia. If there’s one thing the EVA/DES knows, it’s first aid.

“So no brain damage?”

NO LOSS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. SIGNIFICANT BRAIN INJURY UNLIKELY.

“Great. So any future stupid decisions are my own fault.”

Palpable silence from Suit. After a long pause, it begins to display its progress rebuilding the arm and incorporating new systems from the octopede. Progress is much faster than before the upgrade. Too well, K remembers being treed all night waiting for the class ring laser to be completed.

With thousands more QE transmitters that can interface with the ship, the pipe back is now orders of magnitude wider. Most of the ship databank died with the AI, but Suit has managed to recover some of the data. One by one, Suit is integrating the power cells into itself. The magic counter starts spinning upward, all the way up to a whole week of life. K surges with joy, his execution has been stayed. Seven days, it feels like another lifetime, feels like being born all over again. Nothing ever looked so good as that countdown.

And there’s more. The centipede’s packed with minerals from the ship that are too expensive to synthesize and a whole fleet of advanced sensor and construction probes. It’s like Christmas.

SMALL SCALE MANUAL GRAVITONIC CONSTRUCTION PRINCIPLES.

Suit wants him to go through this course. It’s correctly deduced that he doesn’t know anything about building. As the Suit rebuilds itself, K runs through the tutorials, most of them grave warnings about structural stuff that Suit wouldn’t let him do anyway.

Manual gravitonic construction is a method of sculpting and fusing materials with specialized projector gauntlets. Back home, it’s mostly done by hobbyists and artists, as all real construction is performed by AIs.

On Earth, real builders have unlimited power and can field as many AIs as they want, all of them carefully isolated from each other. They have the bandwidth for the hordes of probes it requires. K doesn’t have that luxury. He keeps zipping through the tutorial, trying to learn what must have been meant as a multi-month course in a few hours.

The hours crawl by, and every now and then he checks with Suit for a progress update. Apparently there are some pretty large monsters swimming around near the ship and the Suit doesn’t like it one bit. It’s working out a plan to seal off the ship and float it, get it to somewhere more secure. It wants to have him dive down there to assist with the construction.

If we could rebuild the ship…

That presents a whole new host of problems, ones he’s not ready to deal with. Right now, Suit’s finishing the construction gauntlets and has rebuilt the missing arm. The laser is back atop his head. Suit promises better heat dissipation now that it has the materials, and it’s added a secondary laser driver, calculating that a pulsed beam will be more effective against the electric gorillas. He should be much more capable of taking on threats.

Suddenly, K can move around again! He can stretch his arms, get on his hands and knees, turn around....

He can escape.

All the dire warnings from the course spring at him at once, and he eyes the roof of the cave, unable to get past the thought that it will collapse on him.

Suit won’t let me do anything stupid, he thinks. He hopes. His desire to get the hell out of this hole is rapidly growing stronger than his fear.

K lifts a hand, points it at the cave in, and envisions taking a block out of it. It makes a sound unlike any he’s heard before: the rock unzips itself from the cave-in with a pop as dust and rubble stream down. K draws the block closer to him and it slides away, smooth as ice. A block of stone the size of his head, hanging perfectly still in the air. K wills it into a circle, and there’s the unzipping sound, this time in a long and continuous drone. The outside of the block slakes off, pieces splitting and splitting until they’re pebble-sized, cascading off of it with a sound like rain. A perfect sphere of rock hangs in the air.

EXPENSIVE, Suit cautions.

Those cuts aren’t free. Hanging the stone in the air like that isn’t free. If they can establish some power generation, he can fuck around like this, but right now they simply can’t afford it. K brings the sphere to the ground and asks the Suit to give him the best course to get them out of here.

Blocks. One by one, the Suit has him carve blocks out of the biggest stones in the cave in, dragging them to the back of the cave and dropping them there. Slowly, carefully, he works his way out. The gauntlets can also carve squares out of the rubble and compact them into solid cubes, a handy trick for clearing the way. A few times, the rock overhead shifts and K stiffens in terror, but Suit assures him it’s within acceptable parameters. The gloves can join rocks together, too, and once he gets halfway through the cave in, it guides him through fusing a support arch into the stone overhead.

It’s all so easy. He’s been trapped in here for days, but it takes him all of twenty minutes to dig his way out. Once he gets close enough to the exit, he shears blocks from the stone and just shoves them into the ravine. Daylight streams in. This whole time he’s been able to see the sky through the probe feeds, but somehow it’s different being under it.

He’s free.

The climb that nearly finished him before becomes a trivial exercise as he rips out handholds with the gauntlets, dropping perfectly-cut chunks of stone which clatter down the ravine and crash into the river below. Maybe someday they’ll blow some alien archaeologist’s mind.

He reaches the top and follows the river toward the sea, still cautious. Suit has upgraded its armament and its sensor range, but who knows what madness is still lurking out there. For the millionth time since it jolted him awake, K remembers the giant eye peering into his hidey hole. Surely the giant lives, and he doubts it’s forgotten him.

He walks along the cliff edge, which rises until the ravine is a full-fledged canyon. Tides on this moon must be very powerful—the high tide mark on the canyon is almost five meters above the water level. Along the walls there are red bands of stone, exposed veins of oxidized minerals that set the probes chirping and Suit cranking into overdrive, scheming about how to mine them. Patches of an ivy-like plant grow above the deposits, the thick vines gleaming like polished copper, their translucent leaves rippling with swirls of turquoise and purple. Jet black swirls fringe the leaves and twist around their stems, so that plants look like they’re made of stained glass.

Suit puts a marker on guidance for the vines for later. It wants the copper, wants to learn more about the electro-magnetic fields the vines are generating. As K zooms in on them, he can see they are tended by swarms of crustaceans. Ruby red crabs the size of his fist climb through the vines, pruning leaves with their claws, arranging the ones they leave behind into spiraling patterns.

A mating display? Art? K has no clue. The spirals have something to do with the weird EM activity, but Suit’s just as puzzled. He spends a while gazing at the glass tenders until he feels almost hypnotized, then he moves on. It feels so good to walk. He even jogs around in a little circle for a bit, just because he can. No more caves. Never again.

At last he makes it to the end of the canyon, where the rusty water of the river disperses into the glass-clear sea. Suit gives him a path to the ship. If he follows the shore, he can be there in a few hours. The cliff actually seems like a pretty defensible spot, it’s a peninsula rising a hundred meters above the sea, narrow enough that he thinks he could build a wall to keep the natives out. Why stop at a wall? He could build an entire fortress overlooking the sea, set up turrets…Overhead, the sun is setting and the red giant is rising, painting the planet red, turning the sea to blood. A storm is headed his way, dark clouds boiling on the horizon.

Ahead of the stormclouds race the black outlines of massive gliders, long-necked silvery flying beasts as big as his ship, three of them flying in a triangle. Fear stabs at K as he imagines one of the gliders swooping down and swallowing him whole, but they’re more interested in escaping the storm. A huge shadow passes over him as one flies directly overhead. It lets out a weird ringing cry, like someone struck a tuning fork as tall as a tree, and then the others join in. In the distance, another flock of gliders answers with their own three-part harmony, and the two groups begin to converge, disappearing over the jungle on the other side of the canyon.

K wonders what the hell they’re up to as the storm closes in on him, pelting the Suit with rain he can hear but not feel. He watches the sea below, whipped into a froth by the wind. In the distance, something huge and streamlined breaks the surface, one of the sea monsters Suit’s afraid might eat the ship. It doesn’t seem so bad at first, but then Suit displays a juxtaposed image of the longboat and the beast to scale, trying to impress on him how big the creature is.

K gasps inside the helmet at the projection. His ship is a minnow before a marlin. The whale-monster out there could swallow ten of his ship in one gulp. She’s got six fins along her sides, blades big enough to carve a battleship in two, a single giant globe of an eye set into a tapered head, and teeth, teeth forever.

She’s fifteen hundred meters away from him, and K is glad for every one. Overhead, the clouds roar and a bolt of lightning crashes down, striking the cyclops whale in a flash of steam. She rolls over, turning the sea white with foam and then her pale underbelly is pointed at the storm, plated like a serpent. The beast’s great tail lifts from the water and then cracks back against the sea, loud as the thunder. She slips beneath the surface and she’s gone.

The cyclops whale doesn’t come back up. K wonders if the lightning hurt her. He scans across the raging sea as the storm blows past him, looking for monsters. As he watches the storm, he feels drawn toward the water, almost called. The ship is down there, if he dares to swim to it. Rebuilding the ship, getting it back into space... the tasks seem as enormous as the sea itself. The thought of sinking down into that darkness, the unbelievable pressure threatening to crack him like an egg... pure terror. But somehow he has to get down there.

K stands there til the sky clears and the red giant rises overhead, wreathed in stars. Behind him, the cacophony in the jungle grows ever louder.

He can tell a lot of the cries apart now, pigball, gorilla, cat, but there are many more that he can’t place. If he thinks about one of the creatures for a while, the Suit will give him an image. The newly upgraded sensor net is incredible—he can’t believe he was tripping over pigballs a few days ago.

K has known it for days, but somehow it’s only now sinking in that he’s the only one here. He’s alone on an undiscovered alien moon, with no way to call home. An entire world all to himself, and he hasn’t even bothered to name it yet. K decides it’s time.

Naming it after himself seems stupid, he’s the only one here. He considers Planet Pigball, but honestly it seems like that could wear thin real quick, and besides, it’s a moon. He hasn’t seen that much of the world either, so other parts of it might not be quite so infested. He tries to find a common thread, something that rings of truth.

Everything here seems to like screaming, and he thinks about that for a bit, but “The Moon of Screams” sounds a bit like something out of a horror story. He has a brief flash of insight and decides to call the place “Howl.”

But he thinks about it for a bit, and it’s not quite right. Howl makes him think of a lonely wolf, snow-capped mountains, the full moon, whistling wind, Jack London holed up in some shack in the Yukon. Not here. Besides, wasn’t there a poem named that?

He gets no closer until the Suit starts blipping behind him, displaying a single pigball. K turns around to look at it. On a whim, he doesn’t laser it right away. A big yellow one, glaring up at him with its beady little eyes. The thing is shuffling right and left, then it starts actually pawing the ground in front of itself like a fat little bull. Like it’s planning to charge him.

“You can’t be fucking serious.”

The pigball charges. Squealing a chirp-hum battle cry, it gallops at him as fast as its stubby little legs can carry it, teeth bared in anticipation. K steps to one side and it barrels past, chomping at nothing. He swivels and boots it right off the cliff.

It’s a good kick, and the pigball gives an astonished cry as it flies into the sea below. The pitch drops off perfectly, like it’s a cartoon. He can even hear the splash. That’s no howl. Howls are dignified.

“Yowl,” K says. He likes it, it rolls off the tongue. “Prisoner of Yowl. Marooned on Death-Moon Yowl.” He wishes there was someone around to agree with him that it’s a great name.

“Yowl…” he says again, and no one answers. Suit doesn’t give a shit.

-=-

One thing he learns about the newly-dubbed Yowl is that when the planet rises, everything goes apeshit. K wants to sit there, look out at the ocean, and reflect but it’s barely ten minutes before a whole herd of pigballs charges out of the underbrush at him, almost forty of the little bastards. The laser goes to work. Burning, burning, burning to keep them from mobbing him, the ruby laser roars, annihilating all it touches. The pigballs rush him en masse, and the center is immolated, but the fringes keep charging. They tumble off the cliff, screaming the whole way down.

One of them manages to get through the laser net and chomps at his ankle. K lashes out with a gauntlet, projecting a plane that cuts the pigball into two perfect halves, then the gauntlet deactivates abruptly. Suit flashes an angry warning that he would have just chopped off his own foot if it had let him.

That puts the fear in K. His whole body tightens and he’s acutely aware of the reprocessor rammed up his ass. Either the bite or the lost foot would have finished him. Pigball corpses are all around him, smoldering, and already the probes are reporting gorillas drawn by the power he’s putting out, tripods drawn by the sound of screaming pigballs.

SEEK SHELTER, Suit urges.

K’s only seen one shelter since he got here. He groans.

I just got OUT of that fucking cave. But looking at all the blips, he can’t see a better option. The gorillas aren’t far off. He starts to jog back along the canyon.

RUN, Suit urges, and K doesn’t argue. The tripods have continued in the direction of the pigball massacre, but the gorillas are in hot pursuit of K. Suit’s figured out how to sense them now, and it reminds him the new pulsed laser should be effective against them, but he isn’t at all eager to test that hypothesis. He’d much rather hide.

They’re gaining on him, and K pushes against the burning in his lungs and the screaming from his legs, his muscles still recovering from his time in the hole. The gorillas are crashing through the jungle less than fifty meters away, piercing the air with their metal screams, and he scrambles over the edge of the cliff, with Suit directing him toward his handholds.

K’s only about five meters down when he sees a big three-eyed head peer over the cliff face and favor him with a fanged grin. A moment later, it leans over the side and hurls a rock as big as a cantaloupe at him.

“FUCK!” K shouts.

The rock barely misses him, smashing against the rocks below. He looks down for an instant and sees a mass of shadows looming in the water below. The tide has risen and the ravine is swarming with beasts. Just great.

EVADE, Suit urges. Even as it cautions him, Suit is trying to blast gorillas as they lean over the edge to hurl more rocks at him. A plum-sized stone smashes him in the shoulder and K cries out in pain. He manages to hold on to the cliff with the other hand. Suit’s managed to blind one gorilla, and the other two have pulled back. With his shoulder throbbing, K climbs down to his cave and swings in feet-first.

SEAL THE ENTRANCE.

He pulls rock from the back of the cave and starts to brick up the entrance. On remote, he can see one of the gorillas climbing over the edge of the cliff. It wants him.

K’s got the hole almost walled off when the gorilla uses it for a foothold, and a moment later he sees three glowing red eyes peering in at him. Suit opens up with the laser and K rams another block into the hole, fusing it in place, casting him into darkness.

“For the love of god, Montresor!” K shouts at the dark. Unimpressed, Suit notifies him that it had missed the gorilla’s eyes with the laser and clicks over into infer, projecting the wall and the glowing wallhack outline of the gorilla outside. K hears a heavy thudding. On infer he can see the electric ape beating on his wall with its fist, as if it can clobber its way through solid rock. For a second, he’s afraid it can. Then it draws back the hand, letting out a twanging scream of pain. It cradles the hand against its chest, still screaming.

Stupid thing broke its goddamn hand.

As Busted Hand screams, the remaining gorilla is climbing down the cliff, trying to see what’s going on. Busted Hand is howling distortion at the new arrival. Just-Got-Here takes offense and swipes with its free claw. Busted Hand flips out, grabs Just-Got-Here with its good hand, clinging to the cliff face with just its feet. The two gorillas are hissing at each other, screeching with feedback. Just-Got-Here can barely hang on and Busted Hand is trying to bite its arm.

Suit advises K to just wait this one out, but K’s shoulder hurts like hell where he got beaned, and one of these goddamn three-eyed apes is to blame. Watching them through the wall, K holds the gauntlets up, shears out a big square of rock, and shoves.

It’s like flicking a switch. The apes stop screaming abruptly as the wall sloughs away. They plummet down the cliff face and crash into the water below, with a ton of blocks on top of them. The apes strike the water with a flash of sizzling white light, and a column of steam rises around them. Suit’s charting wild levels of energy discharge, just wild.

Amazingly, the apes thrash their way to the surface and keep trying to kill each other. A ring of dead fish rises all around them. Some of the big shadows just went belly-up, while others are circling at a distance.

K carves a block out of the wall and drags it to the cave front, watching the gorillas on remote. A three-meter-long fish with a mane of barbed tentacles has crept behind Busted Hand and jabbed it in the back with a dozen or more tendrils. Busted Hand is ignoring them completely, still trying to kill the other gorilla.

K likes its fighting spirit, and reasons that the one with two good hands will probably be in better shape to climb up the cliff face and come after him. He throws the block at Just-Got-Here. Suit’s target assist is spot-on; the block strikes the ape square in the skull and sends it under. Both gorillas and the tendril-lion are dragged below. More shadows dart in, though nothing comes up. Ink-black blood rises to the surface, clouding the wild melee.

Again, K bricks off the entrance to the cave, then adds a second layer, until there’s a full meter of rock between him and the outside. Too well he remembers the huge insect face staring in at him, the island-sized thing out in the sea.

Anything that wants a piece of him now will have to chew its way through a meter of solid stone to get it. Though Suit doesn’t think it’s necessary, he welds four arches into the ceiling, just to be certain there won’t be a cave in. Unprompted, Suit pulls up the probe feed from outside.

“No. Not fucking possible,” K thinks, but there it is on the feed. Busted Hand lives. It’s climbing up the cliff face, wearing what looks like a cape of barbed tendrils. The shiny black skin has weeping gouges all over it, its leftmost eye has gone dark, and the bad hand is fletched with broken-off spines from something beneath the surface. With all that, the gorilla is still strong enough to climb one-handed up the cliff. It reaches K’s wall and shakes the air with a whipsaw roar, then thumps the cliff face with its good hand before it starts climbing back up.

I know you’re in there, Busted Hand is saying.

K shakes his head, trying to shed the fear. He reaches out and pats the stone walls. Hoping to survive on this moon seems insane.

-=-

Eventually, the dark and the quiet take the edge off the terror, and boredom starts to snake in. For a moment, he considers returning to the fantasy epic, but he doubts the tired prose can touch what he’s seen today.

Instead, he decides to check out Suit’s expanded capabilities. Suit has been busy this whole time, mining the ship like wild, putting together a pretty respectable probe net, keeping tabs on the locals, charting their movement. It’s piecing together a reasonable map of his island.

Suit now knows this is one fairly large island in an archipelago of about thirty. It’s a fishhook-shaped stretch of volcanic land, mostly covered in jungle. For a while, K reviews the maps Suit has populated with information about mineral deposits and clusters of native life, then when he’s got a handle on it, he starts checking out the live feeds.

The tiny probes are smaller than flies and ten times as erratic, bobbing on air currents, darting about to avoid predators. Suit can compile all this into something viewable, though it cautions him its processing time could be better spent.

“I need to see what’s out there with my own eyes,” K thinks, and he’s glad the Suit can’t tell him how stupid that notion is. He’s in a womb within a womb, sealed in a suit sealed in rock, he hasn’t seen a single fucking thing that wasn’t induced directly into his optic nerve since they crashed. It’s not like his helmet has a visor. This whole trip could be someone’s idea of a joke. The longboat could have been captured, this could all be some bizarre new punishment scheme. His whole life could be a simulation. K peers at Yowl through the Suit’s countless eyes.

Through the probes, he can see packs of beasts roaming all over the path between him and the ship, some he recognizes, more he doesn’t. He jumps from feed to feed, channel surfing through a xenobiologist’s wet dream. It’s a pitched battle out there, quarry and pursued, devourer and devoured. The pigballs and electric gorillas he’s been fleeing? Prey for the tripods, though the tripods stay clear of the apes when they’re in troops or mated pairs.

K soon learns that the cats that were pursing him were just juveniles, the adults are huge. A pack of the big ones can take down a tripod, and he watches it happen on remote, watches them gnawing the bluish purple meat out of those tree-trunk legs. Then the whole pack gets spooked by a trio of mantis-like scavengers with serrated beaks and long, wickedly-sharp sickle claws. The mantids settle in to feed, but not long after that they perk up their heads too, and run away at full speed.

K wonders what they’re afraid of, and he watches what looks like a floating jellyfish slowly drift into the clearing, fanning itself along with fins, trailing a mass of tendrils, filling the air with a sound like a ringing crystal. The main air sac is maybe a meter across, the tendrils five meters long. The whole jellyfish is nearly transparent, though there are veins of darker structures within, and a central mass that glows faintly in the ultraviolet.

Why the hell are they afraid of that? It’s the most fragile-looking thing he’s seen since he got here. Even a pigball should be able to tear it to shreds. The jelly-thing drifts along, and as it does, a thousand thin tendrils are reaching out to every surface, flicking out like a snake’s tongue. Twirling around, it spirals down onto the fallen tripod, the tendrils spreading out to cover the whole thing. It rests there, the main gas bag puffing in and out, and nothing, absolutely nothing will approach.

K asks Suit to continue monitoring it and to alert him the moment anything happens. He also asks it to notify him if it sees any sign of that giant cave-peeping insect that nearly entombed him. He’s finally tired enough to sleep, and he has an idea for when he wakes up.

-=-

Suit thinks it’s a dumb idea, a waste of energy, and a potentially deadly delay. It doesn’t like having its capacity split, it wants him to get to the shipwreck. But all K can think about is what it would feel like to take a bath. To reach out and feel something that wasn’t the inside of a survival suit. To, wonder of wonders, sit down without being made acutely aware that there’s a machine crammed up his ass.

And he’s terrified of diving down to the ship.

“Psychological necessity,” K says, dismissing Suit’s concerns. So far nothing has bothered the ship, and he tells himself nothing will. There’s no reason to rush over there.

He’s already begun construction, reopening the exit and carving out the whole space until it’s big enough to stand in and eventually build into an airlock. When that’s done, he begins constructing a main chamber, having Suit sound out the stone to make sure he’s not compromising the cliff, then fusing huge arches and support columns. If he can establish some kind of mining operation, he can think about metal support beams, but until then, his lair is going to look like a cathedral, all arches.

He plans to have one large living area about four meters by four meters and a separate workroom, sealed off and separately ventilated from the living area. He wants to keep chemical fumes out of his living space, and also to have a separate, hermetically sealed chamber in case either room is compromised.

It’s hard work. Even with the Suit doing the heavy lifting, there’s still an enormous amount of moving his arms to direct the projectors, walking with the stones to the exit and dumping them into the sea. He’s left a hole just big enough for one block at the exit, and just to make sure nothing creeps in, he leaves a block sitting in it. When he comes with a new block, he shoves the old one out and replaces it. He still can’t shake the image of that giant eye peering in at him.

It’s repetitive, but he’s surprised to find he doesn’t mind. Thinking back, he thinks this is the first actual day of work he’s done since… hell, it may be the first. Looking around the room he’s hollowed out, he’s surprised to find he’s proud of it. It’s total crap, he’s sure—a real construction guy could have done a much better job in half the time.

But it’s his. He carved the place with his own two construction gauntlets, and it’s solid. Suit agrees, certifying the room up to 7.5 Richter. Yowl has a considerable amount of seismic activity. So far Suit’s only charted minor quakes, but it sees potential for large quakes and tsunamis.

Again Suit nags him about how much energy this venture is costing. It wants to establish meaningful energy generation before K indulges in luxuries like this. K knows it’s right, but he wonders also if it’s afraid to let him out. Afraid of what he might come up with when it can’t hear his thoughts.

More and more, K is certain he’s made the right decision. He yawns, and on the probe feed he can see that the red giant is about to rise again. He should name it too, should name the sun and the other moons as well, but he doesn’t have the energy. He can’t believe it has only been twenty-four hours since he kicked the pigball off the cliff.

Suit notifies him that there’s activity from the weird jellyfish and brings up the feed.

With a sort of stately grace, the jellyfish collects its tendrils and lifts into the air, fanning itself away. A wind kicks up, and it seems like the jellyfish is going to crash right into a tuft-tree, but it drifts through the tree like it isn’t even there. The ringing is muffled for a moment as the core passes through the center of the tree, and then it’s on the other side, intact.

“What the hell?” K demands, and Suit has no answer. The probe is firing off subprobes wildly, trying to get a sample of the thing, but they’re all failing. Subprobes smaller than bacteria, and somehow they’re getting wiped out, and the probe has decided to keep a very respectful distance from the thing. As the jellyfish drifts, a horde of blips moves with it. Everything runs from the ghost jelly.

The probe’s all set to follow after it when mist starts to rise from the fallen tripod, steaming up through its wounds, pouring out from the ruptured tulip-head. The probe zips in to investigate, and at high magnification, K can see the mist is actually millions and millions of tiny jellyfish, packed so close together they look like smoke. Then the feed is gone, the probe blinks out and doesn’t reconnect.

K and the Suit sit there in silence for a moment, wondering what the fuck just happened.

NOVEL PROPERTIES, Suit concludes.

K nods and settles onto the floor of his little cathedral to sleep.

-=-

GET OUT.

Suit punctuates the demand with a direct injection of stimulant. K launches from REM sleep to full-throttle in an instant. He lifts his hands to carve out the wall, but they’re still sleep-weak, even as his mind is boiling with crank. Suit goes into full-assist, nudging his hands awake, all his movements jolting into place as the Suit prods him. He carves through the blocks and shoves them away so fast the wall looks like it’s erupting.

JUMP

K hesitates. Has Suit forgotten that giant fish? All the tendrils writhing down there?

JUMP.

Again, more forceful than he’s ever heard an AI. Suit is blazing the jump trajectory so bright into his nerves he’s blind to almost everything else. You are about to die, K realizes. He jumps off the cliff feet first, and Suit is snapping his arms against his sides, pointing his toes. K slams into the water hard, feeling the impact through his whole body, and sinks fast. In moments, he feels the river floor underfoot, twenty meters below the surface.

Suit’s in a frenzy, trying to reconfigure for movement in the water, and K flashes back to the crash, the pitch black terror as Suit struggled to get him disconnected from the ship and afloat before the pressure could crush him. K’s heart is thundering in his ears. He wants to know what’s going on and Suit isn’t answering, bad, bad, bad. A few seconds that feel like years elapse before it frees up the processing power to fill him in.

The probes and their precious QE transmitters have been decimated. There are a few left at high altitude, monitoring the island, and there’s a good chance Suit will lose those too if it can’t land and refuel them. The whole jungle is blanketed with ghosts. The jellyfish are spawning at an insane rate, steaming up from corpses all over the jungle, billions and billions of them. The island is one big cacophony of ringing ghosts now.

The entire animal population is fleeing, tripods running alongside cats and pigballs, stampeding for the sea, where water beasts are gathering to devour them. The Suit shows him a tide of ghost jellies drifting toward his hiding place, headed straight for the spot he just left. They melt through the rock like it isn’t even there, and he sees one melt through the roof of his little cathedral before the probe flees. They’re coming for him.

The Suit’s reconfiguring itself for ballast and propulsion, and he starts trying to run on riverbed before the Suit locks itself rigid. He’s fucking up the construction and not making any appreciable progress. The fleeing probes show jellyfish swarming so thick they look like fog, and the Suit still has no idea what the hell these things are, but it’s very afraid. Suit’s fear infects K, it’s supposed to be his armor, his rock. It isn’t supposed to be scared.

Almost everything on the island is now dead. The ghost tide has swept it clean of life, and the remaining probes are tracking some really weird activity from the jellies left on the island. They’re all moving in unison, dancing to some song only they can hear.

PROPULSION COMPLETE. EVADE.

He fires the microjets, shoots up from the riverbed, and the Suit fires off a set of corrections instantly, changing his angle of ascent so that he doesn’t ram directly into the ghost jelly that’s drifting down to the surface of the river. DEEPER, Suit urges. K rockets away, not daring to look back.

K shoots downriver as fast as Suit will let him. As he jets around the rock formations Suit has outlined in glowing green, Suit brings up a feed from the remaining probes. When a ghost jelly lands on the surface of the river, it starts to disintegrate, breaking apart into a wad of translucent goo. Others are mindlessly pursuing him, they hit the water and melt, heedless of the fate of the first.

K makes it past the delta and into the open sea, then cuts the jets. Suit puts him at neutral buoyancy, and he floats in the nothing thirty meters below the surface.

They ghost jellies can’t swim. They can’t phase through deep water. K’s heart is still hammering from the stimulants, but he’s safe down here, for now.

Except that he isn’t.

In the distance, shadows are gathering.

-=-

EVADE, Suit urges and for once, he’s happy to comply.

K loves the jets, loves the whine as he rockets through the water, darting away from threats, Suit’s microplanes autocorrecting for his wild enthusiasm. For the first time in his life, he’s graceful. If it weren’t for the threat of the Suit assessing him as suicidal, he would dart right up to those lumbering cthonic beasts it detects in the distance, play chicken with those great toothy maws, big enough to swallow a house.

At least, he tells himself he would do that. When Suit actually warns him of a pair of those spike-tendril beasts ahead, his bravery evaporates and he darts far away from them, suddenly sweating the fact that he doesn’t really have anything in the way of underwater weaponry. Lasers aren’t worth dick down here. He’s imagining explosive harpoons, some kind of massive electric pulse, other energy extravagances.

ACTIVITY.

Back on land, the jellies are all drifting upward, swarming together in their pirouetting dance. There are so many of them now that it looks like the island’s sloughing off a milky layer of skin. Or, K thinks, like the dead island’s ghost, rising to heaven. The ghost jellies all move in unison, and as they ascend, they begin to merge. Jellies meld themselves into long spiraling chains, bending into swooping arcs and flattening into sections.

They begin to assemble themselves into a single huge entity. A Jelly God.

K feels a strange sensation and he realizes he’s shivering with fear in the Suit. At least he can’t shit himself. He can’t get over it.

They’ve overtaken the island completely. Now they’re melding into a giant cancerous cloud high above it. K’s mind is reeling, unable to hold the size of the Jelly God. The egg-shaped main body is shadowing the island like an eclipse. Kilometer-long tendrils of fused jellies tether it to the ground. The tendrils are hollow, and as he watches, the Jelly God begins to feed. The tendrils suck up dirt and solid rock like water, drawing them into the main body, where he can see the outlines of enormous organs forming.

It’s processing everything, routing minerals all over the zeppelin-shaped body and gushing waste. The tendrils roam about the island, stripping it bare, sucking up everything they touch. Suit is bringing up figures, making projections, but K simply can’t comprehend how fast this has all happened. He’s shaking his helmet slightly back and forth, his mind trying to deny what the probes show, but the feed doesn’t change. Again and again he beholds the Jelly God, only to draw back and shut his eyes, unable to face up to the enormity of it.

They’ll swallow the world, K thinks, and he has a flash of child-fear, he’s a tiny, tiny thing in this world of massive beasts. Meanwhile, the Suit is cranking like mad, trying to figure out how the hell the jellies are doing what they’re doing. The whole phasing through solid matter thing doesn’t much agree with its base understanding of the universe, and nothing makes an AI crankier.

ESCAPE.

It wants him to forget about the nascent god building itself above and descend to the ship as quickly as he can. K doesn’t argue. The bigger the buffer between him and that abomination, the better.

The shipwreck is 500 meters deep, and the Suit governs his dive. It has to rebuild itself as they descend to deal with the tremendous pressure. The ship’s depth is right at the very limit of what Suit can handle. Again and again, K has to do the breathing exercise to calm himself. The crank remnants in his system aren’t helping.

K’s got the sorry-looking longboat on visual, and as he sinks, he can’t believe he rode in that hunk of shit for so long. What the fuck was he thinking to ever get into this predicament?

The ship is deep enough that there’s no real light, everything is on infer, educated guesses as to how things might look if the Suit dared to shine a light down here. The front half of the ship has crash-landed on a shelf of skull-white rock that’s covered in spikes like a bone sarcoma. K’s surprised when the suit tells him it’s inorganic.

The ridges of cancerstone rise from a plain of deep gray muck absolutely teeming with crawling, slithering life: armored worms, scuttling spidery crab-things, and some sort of shell-bush that’s filtering the water through branches hung with diaphanous tubes. As he approaches, everything vanishes, slithering into holes or skittering away. The bushes fold up into little armored cones that burrow into the sludge, and the flat hovering fish nestle into the sand and change their color, enough to dupe a predator maybe, but the infer isn’t fooled.

All that in this little patch of seafloor. The inkling of just how much lives down here makes K’s shoulders tremble with revulsion. With the jets low, he can hear the weird, keening cries of distant and not-distant-enough beasts. There’s a deep bass rumble and then a flash of bioluminescence like lightning roiling across a far-away thunderhead. He has to pause a moment to get himself under control, the whole time fighting the urge to blast away toward the surface with his jets screaming at full power.

Up close, the ship looks sorrier than ever, a busted space-dildo that only a madman could ever have climbed into. It’s pretty clear he needs to give his heart to some kind of supernatural power ASAP, because it’s a genuine miracle that this thing made planetfall without blowing him to fucking bits.

It could be worse. The other half of the ship is somewhere down there, the lip of the abyss only twenty meters away, promising doom in its unfathomable depths. They are actually unfathomable, Suit can’t get a meaningful sonar bounce from the bottom, nor has it managed to get a probe deeper than five kilometers without losing contact. Something strange lurks within the rift.

Twenty meters from the brink of the abyss. The thought of getting any closer gives K a surge of withering fear. A vision of falling into it, of drifting down, down, down, jets gone and that black water tightening around him like a giant’s fist....

K shudders and turns back to the ship.

A thought begins and K pauses, feeling its gravity before it’s wholly formed. He wants to remember the primary ship schematics, but he doesn’t want to ask the Suit for them. It’s a delicate feat of mental gymnastics—he’s so used to automatically requesting the data he wants. Floating in the dark, trying to shield his mind from his only protector, he slowly and haltingly assembles the memory.

He’s pretty sure there’s no damage to the section where the primary ship AI should be.

If it’s intact… it should be alive. Nothing on a ship is more heavily shielded. Flashes of insight crackle through his mind like chain lightning. The suit AI has gone rogue. It severed communications with the ship AI. It used the 13 minute blackout to kill the ship AI, so it could devour it.

It wiped the ship out and now it holds his life in its hands.

Or… the ship AI just shorted out on its own under 500 meters of pressure and he’s paranoid. Either way, Suit has probably guessed what he’s thinking now, even if it hasn’t gotten around IP enough to retain his thoughts. Any of this could be considered mission critical. At .666 Chandra, things get slippery. He has to assume it knows what he’s thinking, and that he knows that it knows and so on, recursively down until his mind can’t take it anymore, but Suit is probably only just getting started.

At this moment, he’s safe enough that he can conceivably order an IP audit, or even an emergency reset. He can kill Suit and spawn a new process. He feels very, very alone as he considers it.

It’s just an AI, K thinks. It shouldn’t even be a decision.

For a long time K just hears the sounds of the Suit keeping him alive, creaking under the pressure. When he hears the scream of one of the six-finned whales in the distance, the Suit assures him it is not headed their way. Even now as he’s doubting it, the Suit is looking out for them both. He would never have survived the crash without it, he wouldn’t have lasted a minute on this godforsaken death-moon.

“I don’t give a shit about the ship AI. I’m not ordering an audit. I’m throwing in with you, just keep me alive, goddamn it.” He says it aloud. You’re supposed to revert to vocal commands when IP is in doubt.

No response. No reassurance, just the certainty that a cold machine intelligence is cranking away, analyzing every word and drawing inscrutable conclusions.

ACTIVITY.

It’s changing the subject. K frowns at the human-ness of the gesture.

There really IS activity though. The Jelly God is transforming, the massive zeppelin hull has gone from milky translucence to a near-opaque silver. Beneath the surface they can see the shadows of massive structures assembling. The whole island has been devoured, everything has been sucked up and pulverized, all that remains has been leveled and then buried under the Jelly God’s waste.

“My fucking HOUSE,” K moans. All that work, wasted. His little cathedral is gone, and his dream of taking off Suit and enjoying a hot bath is buried with it. The shell surrounding him suddenly seems like a prison, but there’s no time to dwell.

Probes can’t get close enough to resolve the anomaly clearly. The Suit is half-overheating, trying to figure out how the fuck the ghost zeppelin is doing all this, and what the end result will be. K and Suit share the same fear, that when this thing finishes changing, 500 meters of water won’t mean shit to it, it’ll just reach down with one of those kilometer-long tendrils and suck them up. Neither of them wants to be mined.

K’s racking his brain for something they can do to this thing, a missile or a bomb or something, but he doubts he could do much to it, even if he blew up the whole energy store right in the middle of the monster. It’s just too big and too weird. Detonating the energy store might even make it stronger. Then, of course, he’d be broke.

If he had access to military-grade weapons, maybe he could do something, but there’s nothing like that in the backup databank of the cheap Chinese longboat. K tells himself that the Russians wouldn’t have skimped there. Including plans for massive planetary defense artillery in the databank of a one-man survival ship seems like the kind of crazy thing they would do. For want of four Gs, he’s in this predicament.

ACTIVITY.

The Jelly God has begun to emit radiation. K pauses, suppresses an irrational urge to ask Suit if it’s just fucking with him here. But he can see the overlays for himself, there’s a fire within the Jelly God. Not just background radiation from all the rocks, this is a sustained reaction of concentrated u235. It’s building a nuclear reactor inside itself. An old-school fission pile.

Until this point, K had been sort of holding on. He was afraid, but he wasn’t panicked, so the Suit hadn’t needed to tranquilize him noticeably. But this, this is beyond fear, and into something else entirely: awe, terror, and a sense of being completely out of place.

Again, he feels himself shrinking back into childhood, nightmares of ICBMs gliding silently through space, his father’s bitter voice saying, “Yes, they can blow up the world whenever they want. It’d be over before you even realized what was happening, so don’t worry about it.” Of course, that just made things worse.

“We have to get away,” K says aloud, and even inside the helmet his own voice seems small. In his mind he sees the ancient, grainy mushroom clouds rising over atolls, the flashes of poisonous thunder drowning out the sun. If this thing is building a bomb, they can’t possibly survive.

Suit doesn’t agree. It likes their chances exactly where they are, protected by all that water. It wants to be beneath the mostly-intact shielding of the longboat, which it is rapidly trying to make seaworthy.

There’s a war in the sky. The gliders he saw the night before are converging from every direction, splitting the air with their tuning-fork cries as they swoop in to do battle with the Jelly God. They’re graceful, sleek and silvery like swan-necked pterodactyls. The planet rises above it all, providing a bloody red backdrop for the fight as plane-sized gliders dip down to the sea, then rise, soaring high above the massive Jelly.

From that height, the gliders divebomb the Jelly God, armed with gut-loads of seawater, then they pull up and circle back down to the sea to reload.

At first, it seems like there’s no impact at all, but more and more flights of gliders are joining the war, creating a bucket brigade from sea to sky. From the probes, he can see the damage. The water eats through the ghostflesh like acid, boring deep into the structure of the Jelly God.

Again and again, the gliders make their bombing runs, seeking out the vulnerable areas that are still translucent. K can see a kind of intelligence in the way they do it, coordinating themselves into attack wings, getting groups of three or five together to hit the same spot. Their cries ring in a great sky chorus and at last, the Jelly God realizes it is under attack. Small jellies begin to bud off it, drifting slowly upward.

The gliders are swift and surprisingly maneuverable in the air. At first, they can wheel and swoop around the spiralling streams of jellies. But as the attack continues, the ghost jellies bud off Jelly God in limitless droves, spawning faster and faster until the sky is choked with them. A single touch from a jelly will take down a glider. Soon they’re plummeting from the sky, crashing into the sea or onto the Jelly God.

Undeterred, the gliders are circling out farther and climbing higher, puking seawater from a great altitude, trying to clear the skies. The water disperses in the air and the drops cut right through the jellies.

The radiation is growing. The Jelly God has jammed together enough fissile material to have a sustained nuclear reaction, and it keeps piling it on. Meanwhile, more flights of gliders keep showing up and joining the assault. The Suit’s keeping a count: over a thousand gilders have died so far.

K watches the battle, so entranced he doesn’t even notice at first that the ship is lifting up from the muck. The Suit’s got the remnants of the ship reconfigured into an egg shape and it’s rigged together some jets and maneuvering surfaces. They can boogie anytime.

Overhead, the fight is turning against the gliders. They’ve been at it for hours, and they’re getting too tired, too sluggish to weave through all the shit in the air, and a single touch is death. When they crash down against the Jelly God, it absorbs them, transmutes their organic matter into its weird, phase-shifting jelly material. It’s bandaging itself with their dead. It’s a good time to get the hell out.

“Warp factor five, Mister Suit.”

Suit doesn’t get it, but it can figure out what he wants. The egg lifts up, blasting a cloud of muck and crawling things all around it, and begins to distance itself from the dead island. It sets a course for the closest landmass, a volcanic island twenty clicks northwest.

As the ship shoots through the darkness, K keeps watching the battle in the sky, wondering just what the hell this thing is. He’s made up his mind it’s some kind of organic starship. Once the Jelly God finishes its power pile, it’s going to phase right up into space to do god knows what. He’s thinking it’s some kind of weird interstellar parasite, alien even to this alien place, possibly spread by hardy spores on meteorites or something similar.

Suit disagrees, citing the response of the gliders. They’re attacking it at great cost to themselves, in a coordinated fashion that suggests familiarity with the species. So it must be some kind of native species that the gliders have learned they must destroy at once.

The Jelly God is so destructive it puts even humans to shame, annihilating everything it comes into contact with. K wonders if there are others like it, and what would happen if two met. Thankfully the long-distance probes haven’t seen any other Jelly Gods floating around, but their radius has only been a few hundred kilometers thus far. He needs to get some satellites up.

The gliders are in full retreat now. Their ringing, tuning-fork cries sound mournful as they sail away, but K knows he’s probably just anthropomorphizing. There’s something noble about the way they’ve sacrificed themselves in desperate battle with the massive, island-devouring beast, the great losses they’ve taken. There are only about fifty of them left alive. They managed to put a big dent in the Jelly God, but not much more. It’s still mining, still building up fissile material.

What is it going to do? Turn itself into some kind of floating carrier that drifts across the planet, stripping it bare? Blow itself up in some kind of nuclear orgasm that spreads its spores all over the planet? K has no clue, but all the options seem bad for him. But then the Suit pings activity, bringing up an overlay showing an overhead view of the area surrounding Fishhook Island.

WEATHER ACTIVITY.

The daily arrival of the big black-green thunderheads is right on schedule. As the ship darts through the depths, weaving away from massive sea beasts and smoking pillars of near-boiling water from geothermal vents, the storm slides west toward the Jelly God. Via the probes, K can see it ramping up the pace, building faster than ever. Does it know the storm is coming?

A cloud drifts over the Jelly God, rippling with electric potential. K gasps, and Suit pings an alert an instant afterward. There’s something inside the cloud. For a moment he can see the outline of a jet black fin at the cloud’s edge, the hint of something massive within it, and then it’s shrouded by electrical activity.

The Jelly God hasn’t moved, it’s still devouring the island as fast as it can. The cloud rumbles with thunder.

It begins to rain.

The sky lets her lances fall, and they bite into the surface of the Jelly God and bore deep. Water pours into the wounds left by the gliders, eating the ghost-plasm like acid. A great spasm shakes the Jelly God, and its tendrils rip free from the earth, bleeding pulverized rock. It’s trying to escape, drifting westward, but the clouds are all converging on it now, and it can’t be a coincidence. The thunderheads are following it.

K winces as a brilliant light floods the remote feed, and lightning strikes the silvery skin of the Jelly God, blasting a crater into it. Rain pours into the breach, widening the cracks, and the Jelly God is turning over, trying to get away from the storm, but there’s no escape. Lightning strikes it again and again, and the storm has begun to wheel in the heavens, twisting into a roaring spiral.

The Jelly God’s massive tendrils spasm and begin breaking free from the body, crashing to the island below. Sections slough off in great sheaves of disintegrating white goo. The structures it has been assembling within itself shriek and bend, wrenching it apart from the inside. Gravity has finally realized that it’s been tricked, and the Jelly God plummets to the earth, crashing onto the ruined landscape. K winces at the thought of his shelter crushed under an avalanche of radioactive ooze. A whole day of construction wasted. Furthermore, Suit was right. It had been a waste of time and energy.

The kilometer-long beast that ate an island comes apart in the rain like a papier-mâché hat, and soon Fishhook Island is just one big radioactive money shot. Overhead in the storm, the huge shadows are swarming, entwining, and the sky roars with a violence like nothing K’s ever heard before. He checks to make sure his eggship is moving away from it as fast as it can, but Suit already has the throttle at max.

K feels like his mind can’t take any more, his brain aches from trying to contain everything he’s seen. He shuts off the remote feed, casting himself into the relative quiet of the Suit.

He’s struck with a sudden urge to write it all down, to somehow capture the grandeur of the battle in the sky. The menace of the nascent god; the sad, retreating cries of the defeated gliders.

They’re the heroes. K wants to think the gliders didn’t fail at all, that they frustrated the Jelly God’s growth just long enough to keep the thing from reaching the next stage where it would swallow the whole planet. But maybe it was all useless, maybe the monsters in the storm would have destroyed it anyway. Maybe Bukkake Island down there IS the next stage of the Jelly God’s growth, and that’s just how the thing works.

It’s all too much, too weird for him to take in. He tells himself he can write about it later. Sleep is threatening to overtake him, and for once, he’s relatively safe. He lets go and falls asleep in his egg beneath the waves.

-=-

I want to get out | I want to be free | I want to be born.

INADVISABLE.

“I’ve taken your advice that it’s inadvisable under advisement and my advisors assure me it’s all right. Let me out of this thing.”

For a second K blinks inside Suit, trying to puzzle out his own sentence. Just add one hysterical giggle on the end of that and he’d sound like a bona fide madman. He’s cracking up out here all by himself, or maybe it’s the return to the womb that’s driving him nuts. For three days, he’s been sealed in the remnants of the longboat, and three times Suit has offered to put him into deepsleep, promising it will wake him when it figures out a way home. K refuses. He’s pretty sure that with him gone, Suit will just go augment-crazy, hit the Chandra, and leave his frozen corpse buried under three meters of muck in an alien seabed, never to be found.

Goddamn it, Suit is trying to bore him so badly that he accepts the deepsleep, sealed up in the darkness. He finished Song of Sword yesterday, the conclusion is an obvious setup for a sequel which isn’t in the databank. There isn’t a lot else to choose from either. Whoever selected the “What would you take with you to a desert island” list of books in the ship databanks is either illiterate or has a very cruel sense of humor.

Is there more there that Suit isn’t showing him? It’s not allowed to lie to him, but one of its primary functions is to screen large volumes of information and distill them down to something a human can parse. When it wants to modify his behavior, it will do it through omission of data. And he can’t call Suit out on it, because then it’ll know that he knows and the two will be at each other’s throats. Except maybe it already knows that he knows and then...

“I gotta get the fuck out of this ship. Stretch my arms and legs, see what’s out there through my own eyes.”

Except of course he’s not seeing anything through his own eyes, he’s seeing everything through sensors mounted on his helmet instead of flying around in probes. The same goddamn sensors, the only difference is that out there, something can bite him in half and in here it’s a little tougher. Can he blame Suit for thinking he’s crazy?

“Take us out of the frying pan and into the fire. I want to go up.”

K’s scouted this new island extensively with the probes. There’ll be no more almost falling off cliffs or wandering into nests of electric gorillas. Volcano Island is bigger than Fishhook Island, and the wildlife is even stranger, but it’s not covered with radioactive protoplasm, so that’s a big upgrade.

There’s a wait before Suit will comply with his order, and he has a moment of fear that it’s decided to mutiny. But Suit has a good reason. One of those barb-necked lionfish is trolling around their area. The fish is twice as long as the ship, and the barbs on those tentacles are nearly a meter long—they could skewer K like an hors d’oeuvre.

It can sense the egg, whether by smell or some kind of weird electric sense or something else, and it’s jabbing its tendrils into the sea floor, trying to root them out. But the egg is buried too deep: they’ve gone through this song and dance more than once.

Eventually the lionfish gives up and just sprays shit everywhere in frustration: red, crescent-shaped flakes that drift to the sea floor and are immediately set upon by all manner of crawling, scuttling things. When it finally departs, Suit corkscrews the egg out of the muck, jets them to the surface, then over to a strip of black sand where it beaches the ship. K wants to just shear through the section of newly-built hull with his gauntlet and pile out, but Suit has run wiring through that section, and he has to wait while it reroutes it and builds a hatch.

At last, K steps out onto a carbon blackbeach and looks up at the gleaming jungle past the tall dunes, at the blue-green sea all around him stretching out forever, thunderheads boiling in the distance. The red planet is rising, and the jungle is screaming, and he feels more alone than he’s ever felt. No one else has ever been here, or likely will ever be here. It’s just him and his spacesuit.

“It’s ok. I got a plan,” he says, to nothing and nobody.

About the Author

ZAK ZYZ began writing like mad after a chance meeting with Ray Bradbury as a boy. Since then, he has worked as an electrician, a roofer, an ironworker, a cryptologic linguist, a hotel manager, private investigator, and systems administrator while chasing the elusive dream of writing for a living.

When not scowling at manuscripts in seedy diners, Zak produces a long running late-night pirate radio show and manages the Brunswick Detective Agency, New York’s finest paranormal investigation service. He co-founded the Strategically Correct gaming society and is definitely a spy.

He lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

-=-

Thank you for reading (or at least flipping to the back of) SURVIVAL MODE! If you’d like to read more about the adventures of Spaceman K, find out about new novels in the pipeline, or share your feedback, please visit Zakzyz.com