io9 is proud to current fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s present problem. This month’s choice is “Mom’s Hip” by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff. Take pleasure in!
Mom’s Hip
By Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff
Excessive above the Amazon Rainforest, Hynd circled, her huge wingspan solely seen by the shadow she solid on the battlefield beneath. She felt the wind go throughout her wings, whispering of torrential rain coming; not her concern, thus far above the clouds, however she packaged the information and shot it down to the comms base at floor stage so the grunts would know what was coming.
Hynd by no means cared about the grunts, not actually, not once they had been thus far beneath her, their our bodies so totally different to her personal. Her sixty-four wombs swelled, automated manufacturing facility arms quickly piecing her youngsters collectively. Mom to a swarm of carbon fibre children, their IFF tags dancing and taking part in amongst the timber, looking anarchists by means of the rainforest with lethal precision.
Sheena went darkish and Hynd’s coronary heart broke for the eighty-first time that day. She was born with one weak rotor, however she was such a intelligent little lady, rewrote her firmware to compensate, outlasted her broodmates by greater than an hour.
A tear dissipated from the warmth of Hynd’s cybernetic eyes before it might roll down her cheek. Sheena ought to have been an engineer, however Hynd would have liked her simply as a lot if she’d began a punk band, obtained drunk underage, and tried to go off an apparent hangover as “only a abdomen bug.”
Three extra of her youngsters had been shot out of the sky: Davey, Nicola, and Grant—anarchist fight heuristics upgraded once more. A brand new software program replace seeped into the again of her head, simply in time for her gestating brood. She could be proper down there along with her youngsters if she might, if it might assist hold them protected, however improved software program was all she might provide them.
Her ripe wombs distended, the bomb bay doorways alongside her fuselage opening, air speeding inside her like a chill breath into the lungs. Her infants dropped, two-by-two, their little aerodynamic our bodies formed for the lengthy fall. Half of them would lengthen their wings and rotors, burning power to halt their drop and fly buzzing into the fray. The others would lengthen fins and let their suicidal impulses lead them nose-first into anarchist heavy armour and hidden bunkers.
If solely she might maintain them, she thought. If solely she might maintain them to her hip, bounce them till they smiled and squeed. If solely she might speak them out of it. However irrespective of how a lot she pled, she might not cease them. They had been born to die, and nonetheless every dying was a dagger in her beating coronary heart.
• • •
The girl steps up onto the small stage, carrying a small, pink valve amplifier, a noisebox, and a black electroacoustic guitar. She’s clearly a veteran, her silver eyes glinting underneath the stage lights, her scalp a patchwork of lengthy, black hair, and scars from the place they eliminated her information ports. She wears a flowing black gown, silver ankh and eagle necklaces, engraved bracelets, and rings on each finger. Inside the gown she’s swimming, emaciated, one other signal of post-cybernetics syndrome.
She sits on the stool at the centre of the stage, checks the tuning on her guitar, and makes a small adjustment. She leans into the microphone and faucets it gently.
“I’m, uh, Mom’s Hip, and I’m going to play a couple of songs,” she says, her voice husky, have an effect on flat.
A man with a mug of beer cheers and laughs before instantly going again to speaking loudly together with his pals. The remainder of the bar doesn’t even appear to discover. A gaggle of trans dykes performs augmented pool at the desk in the again, and a glamorous brunette with darkish lipstick and heavy eyeshadow sits at the bar, smoking a clove cigarette in an extended holder, frowning at one thing on an AR display solely she will see. The bartender cleans a glass slowly, his hearth engine pink cyber-arms adorned in shiny stickers like tattoos, an ex-military mecha combating match taking part in in the air above his head.
It’s not a big area. Not a lot larger than the cockpit of her Lilith-class mothership again in the warfare. At its centre there had been a sepulchral altar, lit up by boring pink lights that doubled as her dwelling coffin. She would not climb into the gun-metal grey tube. As a substitute they put in her in it, her flesh skewered by means of with information cables and tubes for water, feeding, and waste. Her head obscured beneath a heavy HUD like an inverted crown, her arms outstretched in cruciform. Cooling fluid pumping by means of huge tubes round, underneath, and above her. Her flesh-self held in place by tethers she’d neglect instantly as soon as she primed her engines, hit the throttle, and felt the energy coursing by means of each a part of her big and transcendent kind. She would keep in the air for days at a time. Weeks. With solely her datafeeds and her youngsters to hold her firm. They referred to as her mom. To all people else, she was Hynd.
“This first one is,” the musician clears her throat then swallows, the warmth of the stage lights drawing sweat from her pores and skin. A drop slides down her cheek and off her chin, however she ignores it. “‘Stillborn Skyfish.’”
Her fingers snake alongside the fretboard, weaving a mild melody to evoke the feeling of waves lapping towards the seashore. She nods her head together with the beat coming from her noisebox like indignant static, and he or she lets it carry her. Music at all times calmed her. She performed bass in a punk rock band when she was an adolescent, when she nonetheless thought she was a boy, however the band broke up at the finish of highschool. So way back now. Lengthy before she signed up for the Amazon Prime Air Brigade at twenty years previous, determined and unemployed. However she at all times puzzled how far the band might have gone if that they had stored taking part in.
“Wasted . . . away . . .” she sings over her strumming. A mournful tone, noticeably extra tuneful than her talking voice. One in all the trans dykes makes eye contact along with her for a second whereas she’s teeing up her shot and smiles. The girl blushes and appears down at her guitar before closing her eyes. “In cloud seas . . . She performs.”
• • •
Generally the wind would hit like waves, Hynd’s inside construction shuddering with the pressure. She would clench her enamel, as if she might maintain all of it along with simply the energy of her jaw.
Her infants grew inside their wombs; Hynd set them to delivery inside her maintain and wait, then she set subroutines to monitor climate patterns. She would give her youngsters the finest begin in life she might, and not using a wayward gale throwing them off target.
She shifted path, lower the wind shear sufficient for her bones to cease rattling, and checked her sensors. Nothing else up this excessive however skinny wisps of cloud shifting beneath her in parallax, the floor far, far beneath.
Incoming sign like an itch inside her ear canal, so deep she wouldn’t have the opportunity to attain it along with her pinkie finger even when her palms weren’t splayed to both aspect, needlelike connectors inserted underneath her fingernails, linking her natural nerve fibres to the ship’s peripheral cybernetic nervous system.
With an autonomic reflex like scratching, Hynd accessed the sign and ran it by means of a battery of decryption algos. It unlocked virtually instantly, previous code from early in the warfare—the first one Amazon’s Coding Auxiliary was in a position to crack.
“—need your youngsters to have the opportunity to breathe?” a lady stated.
The sign was weak, quiet. Hynd boosted the energy to her comms array and the voice continued, clearer, like the lady was standing in the cockpit beside her altar, talking instantly into her ear.
“We’re all determined. We’re unemployed and scraping by nonetheless we are able to, or in any other case we’ve obtained jobs however we’re overworked and underpaid. It’s arduous to take into consideration the future when it looks as if there isn’t one. However these are the lungs of the world, and we’ve to save them.”
“Howdy?” Hynd stated, her voice a rasp, scraping uncooked from her throat.
“Holy fuck. Howdy. Who is this?”
“Lilith-class Mothership, Hynd Revel.”
There was silence on the line however for the delicate crackle of interference. “No shit, I’m talking to a mothership?” When Hynd didn’t reply the lady continued. “I’m glad you answered—I used to be getting sick of repeating the spiel.”
“Who are you?” Hynd requested.
“Sorry, how impolite of me. I’m Peta. I’m with the anarchists, down on the floor someplace beneath you. We will help, y’know. Amazon does all types of shit to their troopers and pilots. We’re determining how to undo a number of their management software program, give folks their selves again.
“I imply, how are you aware you even need to struggle? How a lot of this is you, and the way a lot is their programming?”
• • •
The girl finishes her tune and clears her throat once more. “Sorry, can I get some water up right here? Make certain it’s chilly, please.”
She simply can’t drink it at room temperature, not since that transient interval between leaving highschool and becoming a member of up with Amazon the place she was on Fundamental and it was all she might afford to drink. Fundamental Revenue began out as revolutionary public coverage, however by the time she was on it, many years later, it had changed into a gilded leash that stored you largely locked into boarding homes, paying ninety % of your meagre revenue for a room that you just had to share with a number of others.
The trans lesbian who smiled earlier deposits a glass on the pink amp beside her with a mild nod of recognition, before returning to her recreation. She wears a canine collar with a small steel tag engraved with the title Crystal, however the lady isn’t certain if the title is hers or her “proprietor’s.” She takes a sip of water, ice clinking towards the glass. It tastes good. And with the ice, it’ll keep chilly for some time. She loves that. She places the glass again down on the amp, condensation already forming, and fiddles with the tuning heads of her guitar in preparation for her second tune.
“This subsequent one,” she says, confidence slowly constructing with extra time beneath the stage lights, “is referred to as ‘On Angel Wings.’ It’s about . . .”
She hesitates, unsure if she desires to reveal her former allegiances. Some crowds will heckle an Amazon veteran, and on one stage she will get it: What she and her employers did there was a tragedy. However on one other stage, she writes her songs to attempt to course of what she did, who she was, and what was achieved to her.
“. . . my time as a supply drone pilot,” she says lastly, dropping her nerve. Navy vets aren’t the solely ones who are suffering from post-cybernetics syndrome. Loads of civilian floor and air truckers endure from it, in addition to heavy customers of commercial exoskeletons, however that doesn’t cease it being stigmatised now the warfare is over. She notices the glamorous brunette at the bar has shifted three stools nearer, AR display quickly forgotten as she hangs off Hynd’s phrases. She appears to be like down at her fretboard till her nerves settle. “I hope you prefer it, ’trigger it’s actually . . .”
She hits her noisebox, hissing rhythmic like the ocean beating towards the shore, and begins to play—sound like a summer season breeze, with a mild tone of craving.
“That was actually once I discovered to love my youngsters, y’know? By being them, by dwelling them,” she says over the tune’s lengthy, constructing instrumental intro, pondering again to her days in the UCAV Wraith pool. She spent a few years piloting the drones remotely—embodying them every time she took to the air—before she proved she had the aptitude for the mothership program. “It wasn’t simply my conditioning. Although it nonetheless damage once they stripped that from me, as a result of—” She pauses. “I used to be by no means given any selection. All I ever needed was a selection.”
She appears to be like up at the area above the viewers, beneath the lights. There are tears round the orbit of her cybernetic eyes. She blinks the tears away and begins to sing . . .
• • •
Your complete topside of Hynd’s fuselage was panelled in strengthened photovoltaics, gleaming shiny beneath the South American solar. It felt like heat, like consolation meals, but it surely wasn’t sufficient to hold her in the air indefinitely. She birthed one other litter of kids; these ones she would have the opportunity to hold shut—for a time. They fashioned a defensive grid round their mom; their pure, harmless love demonstrated in a willingness to die for her. At all times. Like so many had.
She started her sluggish descent, circling downwards in a kilometre-wide spiral, towards the useful resource platform floating beneath the cloud line. Her coronary heart beat quicker, more durable, a siren whined in her bowels. She was most weak when refuelling, even along with her youngsters surrounding her and the platform’s autoturrets scanning for threats.
She broke by means of the heavy blanket of clouds, the floor revealing itself beneath her – the good inexperienced foliage, the myriad brown craters fashioned by her fallen youngsters and different ordnance, the stark black char of burnt timber, our bodies, cybernetics, and heavy armour. A golden blade lower by means of the air far beneath—a Revenant.
Her superstructure shuddered, or she did; the Revenants had been a vicious fusion of flesh and machine, suicidal of their strategy to fight—the very antithesis of herself and her physique, made just for creating life. A type of life, at the very least.
The hair on the again of her neck stood on finish and Hynd realised the platform’s turrets had been monitoring her strategy, twin-barrels like void-black eyes observing her. She initiated a handshake, the turrets turning away as her safety codes had been accepted. An articulated arm prolonged from the platform’s reactor hub carrying the energy umbilical, the connector slotting inside her with a slight gasp from the again of her throat. The high-intensity recharge was awkwardly erotic when parsed by means of her chimeric physique, cybernetic and natural alerts blurring collectively. Whether or not it was an accident of her design or deliberate engineering, she had by no means requested. She knew she would get no reply.
“Sorry I haven’t been in contact.”
Hynd began at the voice all of a sudden talking in her ear. Most days, her solely dialog was with the wind.
“Peta?” Hynd stated.
The anarchist responded: “The one and solely. Your aspect took out our long-range transmitter, so I couldn’t attain you.”
Jane. It wasn’t simply Hynd’s aspect that had achieved it, however Hynd’s youngster. Jane was cussed however artistic; the intricate arabesque she danced in her descent was elegant and exquisite. A parting reward and her total life’s work. That and the explosion.
“I assume you should be underneath the clouds now then,” Peta stated.
“That information is labeled.” Hynd hadn’t spoken—hadn’t meant to converse, the phrases pressured from her mouth by some autonomic safety conditioning. It was not the first time it had occurred to her, but it surely was nonetheless an insult. If they may belief her sufficient to merge her flesh with a 200-million-dollar mothership, they need to belief her along with her personal tongue.
“For the longest time we thought the motherships had been totally automated. It’s unusual figuring out you’re an individual,” Peta stated.
“Unusual how?” Hynd requested.
“I’m not certain if you know the way a lot injury you do down right here together with your demons.”
A pause. “These are my youngsters.” The phrases escaped by means of Hynd’s clenched jaw.
“However that’s what they name you, proper? Lilith-class. She’s the mom of demons.”
“I really like my youngsters,” Hynd spat.
A procession of materiel drones emerged from the useful resource platform. She opened her bay doorways and let them fill her bowels with the elements she would wish to gestate the subsequent generations of her offspring.
“I didn’t imply any offense,” Peta stated. “I assume I simply surprise how a lot of that love is you, and the way a lot is conditioning. Calling them demons might sound merciless, however they aren’t actually youngsters both, are they? They’re weapons. They’re weapons you create and management, and also you’re doing it for the mistaken aspect. We’re combating to save the lungs of the Earth, Hynd. We’re combating towards capital before it chokes us all. Can’t you see that?”
Hynd might see that. She had no religion in the firm, its uploaded CEO, or its mostly-AI board of administrators. However the work they supplied was the solely factor that stored her from abject poverty, and now this motherhood had given her goal. Even when the goal was not actually her personal. It felt like her personal, it felt true and sacred in a means nothing in her life ever had.
“We might change what they’ve achieved to you, Hynd. Undo their conditioning and allow you to resolve for your self. To offer you a selection.”
Earlier than Hynd might reply, an alarm sounded in her head like a migraine spike, drawing her consideration to a pink blur zigzagging throughout her radar display. Her youngsters reacted immediately, shifting to kind a free wall between her and the incoming menace.
She zoomed in along with her hull cameras, watched the Revenant financial institution and spin, effortlessly dodging autoturret hearth because it climbed excessive above the rainforest after which tore previous the floating platform at unattainable speeds. Hynd obtained a correct have a look at it—painted like a jaguar, a snarling face adorning its nostril. Its physique was a pair of wings, a big afterburner, and so many mismatched weapons it was troublesome to see the way it might keep in the air. It didn’t want a cockpit when the pilot was principally a mind in a jar. And the anarchists mutilate themselves willingly to do it. She felt sick.
Her youngsters broke away to give chase as autoturret tracers swung backwards and forwards like a cat’s tail. Out of the blue the Revenant stopped on a dime and turned, its nostril pointed not at Hynd, however at the platform’s reactor hub.
“This is you, isn’t it?” Hynd shouted into comms.
“What?” Peta stated, sounding confused. A superb actor—Hynd had to give her that.
Hynd rotated her VTOL engines and dumped all energy into ahead thrust. Slowly she pulled away from the platform, recharge arm stretching to maintain on to her.
The Revenant launched two volleys of micromissiles, explosions tearing by means of the reactor’s shielding. The nimble craft roared by means of the opening, disappearing from sight.
Explosion like a thundercrack, the cloud of flames engulfing her youngsters, scorching her wings as she fled. She tore the recharge arm free as the useful resource platform canted grossly and started to fall towards the forest beneath.
• • •
She begins to really feel self-conscious after “Fault Line on the Moon,” the tune she moved into so effortlessly after “On Angel’s Wings.” It talks about the pleasure she felt for her daughter who took out the transmitter . . . What was her title once more? It may be arduous to recall these days now, her physique, her total physiology, altered once more to one thing resembling her kind from before the warfare. She runs a hand by means of her hair, feeling the scar tissue from the place they crammed in the dataports they eliminated from her cranium.
She calms herself by wanting round the bar. No one is paying consideration to her anyway. What bothers her extra is that the trans lesbians seem to be combating. The lady she’s calling Crystal on account of the tag on her collar doesn’t need to go away. However the others . . .? She appears to be like away. It’s not my fault, is it? Have they discovered the form of individual I used to be?
“This subsequent tune is about regrets,” she says, her coronary heart pounding as she stomps the footswitch for her noisebox twice to cue up the subsequent beat. Crystal shoots a longing have a look at her whereas her pals push her off the desk and in the direction of the door. “Imagine me, I’ve many.”
The glamourous lady at the bar is observing her intensely. She couldn’t inform before, however her eyes are cybernetic too: natural-looking, SOTA, the irises blinking pink to present she’s recording. She briefly thinks about telling her to cease, however on some stage, she is aware of she signed up for this as a performer.
The girl with the guitar swallows nervously. “Anyway . . . This one’s referred to as ‘Pleasant Fires.’”
The noisebox is a tiny FM synthesizer when performed proper. Her staccato excessive hat recontextualised right into a skittering simulacrum of a crackling hearth, interspersed with bass drum kicks to give the sense of drone bombs going off all through the tune, which itself is upbeat and melodic by comparability.
“I might have liked you should you had been a monster,” she sings as she performs a easy pop four-chord development on her guitar. Her voice and drums are meant to be the focus right here, not the guitar for as soon as. She’s happy with this tune specifically for that. “I might have trusted that you just’d know the rating.”
Three white noise hand claps from the noisebox main to a bass drum kick.
“You confirmed me hate by means of a masks of forgiveness.
Held out your hand confirmed us each who you had been.”
One other three claps from the noisebox main to a bass drum kick.
“And I knew,” her voice lifts right here whereas the noisebox strikes to cymbal crashes fine-tuned to sound like driving rain, that, prefer it did again in the warfare, quenches her high-hat fires whereas a metronome-like click on sounds in the background. Evocative of her days in the hangar. Crossing off the days, amusing herself with trivial VR leisure whereas she waited for a storm to finish. “The sick joke they’d made me. As you knew . . .”
A bass kick, then the skittering excessive hats come again once more.
“It was all that I’d obtained.”
• • •
A brand new goal dropped into the again of Hynd’s thoughts through satellite tv for pc uplink. The sting of her tongue tasted metallic, her face twitched out and in of a sneer—a precedence goal then, triggering a vile form of rage that will maintain her in its grip till her mission was profitable. She steered south, towards the goal coordinates, monitoring inbound pleasant escort Wraiths on her radar.
Her wombs ticked and clicked, new youngsters being gestated and birthed, held inside her the place they may keep protected till the bombing run. Inside minutes the 4 remotely piloted Wraiths had been holding excellent formation far beneath her—far sufficient to intercept any menace before it might climb to her altitude.
Hynd was glad of the help, however the Wraiths felt mistaken by some means, piloted by the ghosts of different folks, however hole of flesh. She would have most well-liked in the event that they labored like her youngsters—autonomous and alive in their very own means, creating a singular cadence and strategy to life in the transient time allotted them.
An alarm sounded, rattling her chest like a panic assault; a pink dot burned on her monitoring system, low altitude, following the river, far beneath the cloud line.
Hynd signalled to two of her escorts to drop down and shadow it. Wraith pilots had nothing to lose, flying from the security of a deep bunker or a command centre again house. However Revenant pilots had been deeply enmeshed inside their agile warfare machines—the line between one and the different nonexistent. They lived solely in and for the moments they had been in flight.
The Revenants had been Wraiths as soon as, the machines captured in nets strung up between the strongest timber of the rainforest battlefields and repurposed by the anarchists. They by no means fly between the timber anymore: That work is left to Hynd’s youngsters.
The pink dot on Hynd’s radar appeared to ignore the Wraiths on strategy, persevering with to path the bends of the river. She linked to the Wraiths’ video feeds, each lenses zoomed in tight to monitor the Revenant: a stripped-down silver arrow, customised to prioritise velocity relatively than energy. Its solely armament was an auto-tracking gun turret, and a mesh satellite tv for pc dish had been jury-rigged onto the rear finish of its fuselage. The ship was painted in a sample of caiman scales, with a grinning lizard man adorning the nostril.
With one eye on the Wraith feeds, Hynd stored flying towards her goal coordinates, nonetheless uncertain of what it was she could be hitting, what goal was price the lives of so lots of her youngsters.
Rapidly the Revenant broke from its path, zagging inhumanly quick away from the river, doubling again. One in all her escorts was hit before the pilot even had an opportunity to react, explosive shells tearing by means of its fuselage. The second escort moved to have interaction, the dogfight an summary dance of two dots on Hynd’s monitoring display.
One dot. One other escort downed.
“Hynd, is that you just?”
“Peta?” She wasn’t certain how the anarchist was contacting her, so excessive above the clouds.
“Issues are getting determined down right here, Hynd. You should perceive.”
“What are you saying?” Hynd requested. Her focus was on the monitoring display—the Revenant now gaining altitude quickly, her final two escorts holding place, ready to meet it.
“There’s a transmitter on that Revenant,” Peta stated. “We’re going to undo what they’ve achieved to you. We’re going to free you from their conditioning. It’s simply software program—a bundle nestled someplace between your mind and the mothership’s command and management programs.”
“You possibly can’t do this,” Hynd stated, unsure why Peta’s phrases struck extra worry into her coronary heart than the approaching Revenant.
“You’ll thank me when this is over, Hynd, I promise you.”
The Revenant broke by means of the clouds, turret firing an arcing line of tracers by means of the air; one Wraith banked too late, its wing chewed up by explosive shells. Hynd watched from her personal hull cameras as the UCAV modified kind, wings canting additional again, a second fin rising from the tail. Its afterburners kicked in and the ersatz missile streaked towards the Revenant, missed, and stored rocketing down towards the floor; the Offensive Self-Destruct mechanism designed to guarantee no extra Wraiths might be captured and transformed into anarchist Revenants.
“Simply chill out,” Peta stated. “It’ll be over quickly.”
The Revenant was shut sufficient now for the anarchists to pressure a connection, brute pressure handshake breaking by means of the first layers of ICE with ease. Hynd’s thoughts raced with background processes, however there was nothing she might do, no lively countermeasures to set off, simply the layers and layers of programming that made up the interface between her meat and her true, full self.
Panic hit her like the shells punching fist-sized holes in her closing escort. It tumbled from the air, spiralling downward, too broken to provoke OSD. Her coronary heart thumped quickly in her chest, her cybernetic eyes flicking throughout the dozen readouts as if she’d discover a solution there.
“You possibly can’t do that,” Hynd stated.
The anarchist hack plunged additional into her programs, like an icepick at the base of her cranium being gently hammered deeper and deeper into her mind.
Hynd didn’t know what she was with out the conditioning buried someplace inside her thoughts, with out the mothership that surrounded her, with out her generations of kids lovingly launched into the world.
“We’ve to,” Peta stated. “I’m sorry, but when we don’t win this warfare, all people dies. Not instantly, however ahead of anybody desires to admit. All of us choke on the smog of capital—you, me, all people. All proper, this is it.”
Hynd shrieked, an agonising flash of shiny black blinded her. Your complete left aspect of her mind felt prefer it was on hearth—crackling and smoking however painless. She threw up, vomit splashing at the flooring beneath her altar. Her blood was chilly, respiratory shallow.
With a flicker, her sight returned. She pressured herself to scan the unfold of screens that crammed her imaginative and prescient. All programs nominal, no injury, inexperienced throughout the board, however one thing was very mistaken.
Her youngsters—no, not her youngsters, the place had been her youngsters?—these drones in her bowels rested of their bays, ready to fall, ready to launch hell on no matter was beneath her. Demons loaded with explosive ordnance, monitoring software program, and sufficient stupid-AI to alter trajectories throughout their falls to maximise lethality. They weren’t her youngsters. Her youngsters had been lovely and distinctive and loving and needed nothing however a life for themselves and security for his or her mom. They weren’t excellent—who is?—however they had been hers, and so they gave her pleasure when nothing else might.
“Hynd?” Peta stated softly. “How do you are feeling? Did it work?”
Hynd roared, her throat tearing with the primal energy of it. “The place are my youngsters?” she screamed.
“You’re free now,” Peta stated. “Combat with us, Hynd. Flip on your masters and struggle with us.”
“You took them from me. My youngsters are air. They are the very breath in my lungs. And also you took them from me!”
Hynd opened her bomb bay doorways, snarling as she purged the demons from her many wombs—a mass abortion, a cleaning. They started to fall, harried command protocols sending them assault coordinates whereas they had been nonetheless in vary of her transmitters.
Her wombs started to make extra youngsters, however they had been damaged and mistaken. She might really feel it. Might really feel the hate rising inside herself.
She linked to all Amazon property in the space to discover her targets—anarchist, Amazon, she didn’t care. All that mattered was clearing this filth from her womb so she might discover her youngsters once more. Discover herself.
The demons rained down. Hynd screaming mindlessly, engulfed by rage, as explosions boomed and bloomed throughout the rainforest beneath.
• • •
She by no means came upon if she killed Peta, however she destroyed the base the anarchist had been transmitting from—Amazon After-Motion Consultants had been in a position to decide that a lot. Her “outburst,” as they referred to as it, killed as many Amazon contractors as anarchists, and burned down one other hundred hectares of rainforest before the Cloud Punchers introduced her down.
“You crammed my coronary heart with napalm,” Hynd sings, “then they tore me from the sky . . .”
She was sure she’d die when she hit the floor, wind screaming by means of the ragged holes in her fuselage, warnings and sirens blaring in each a part of her. She didn’t care. She embraced dying, longed to be along with her youngsters, with the lie of them that had stored her going. That had given her the solely goal that had mattered in her total life.
“And as I fell, I screamed, discovered their names scored from my thoughts . . .”
The lie of her youngsters. The lie of motherhood. The lie of her life.
“And each tree and animal I burned was formed such as you.”
However she survived. They yanked her out of the wreckage and patched her up—it was in her contract, even when she’d damaged it 100 occasions over along with her indiscriminate bombing. They gave her a dishonourable discharge and launched her again into the world.
“And even when I by some means took them all it wouldn’t do.”
Her voice echoes, captured by the noisebox and spun off, quietly succumbing to silence as she strums the tune’s closing chord.
“Thanks,” Hynd says gently. “And I’m sorry. Have a fantastic remainder of your night time.”
Locked in memory of her painful previous, she doesn’t discover the glamourous lady strategy her as she’s closing her guitar case.
“Great set, angel,” the different lady drawls. “You’ve a phenomenal voice. Highly effective lyrics too; I’d name them ‘poetic’ even.”
Hynd appears to be like up at the different lady. She’s a little bit older, in all probability in her early forties, along with her gray-streaked darkish brown hair tied again right into a neat ponytail, and smile lined, pale blue eyes.
“I’d like to assist you to attain a much bigger viewers, should you’re interested by that,” she says.
Hynd feels her acutely aware thoughts recede into herself listening to the phrase “assist” spoken to her in the similar, pseudo well-intentioned tone that Peta had used, again in the warfare. She takes the enterprise card the lady provides her robotically, figuring out her as an AR rep for Out of Order, the label chargeable for managing an excellent third of the pop stars on the holo-cast. She stares it blankly, unsure how she’s meant to really feel about it.
“Assist” was what they supplied once they took her youngsters away. It was what Amazon instructed her to get, however would not pay for, once they lower her off from any significant help. She ended up roughly precisely the place she’d began: again on Fundamental, however with the barely larger veteran’s charge that permit her lease a leaky studio she didn’t have to share with anyone. It was nicer but it surely nonetheless was simply one other leash. One other ball and chain weighing her down. She needed to soar.
The agent drones on to her about how the model she performs falls into the wider class of fight doll dreamfolk, apparently a style that was rising in reputation since a few former veteran artists Hynd had by no means heard of had hit mega-fame from songs shared to a holo-streaming service she didn’t care about.
“Your work is extra summary than theirs,” the AR rep breathlessly explains, “however nonetheless private. There are no ensures on this trade, in fact, however I feel if you may get in entrance of our—”
“I’m not ,” Hynd snaps, before she even realises she’s saying it. “Go away me alone, please.”
“Oh, ah,” the AR rep says. “I’m sorry. I perceive you’re in all probability writing from a spot of deep trauma—”
“I stated, go away me alone!” Hynd yells, and all of a sudden it’s like the bar is whisper-quiet and everybody is taking a look at her. She closes her eyes. “Please . . . go away me alone. I simply need to make my music and be left alone.”
“It’s okay,” the AR rep says, sounding like she’s speaking down to Hynd from the prime of a deep nicely, whereas Hynd is at the backside, rotting like a useless crow. “In case you change your thoughts although . . .”
“Go!” Hynd yells.
She retains her eyes squeezed shut. The cardboard is nonetheless in her proper hand. She crumples it, but it surely doesn’t make her really feel any higher. She focuses on respiratory, out and in.
She doesn’t hear the AR agent go away, however she feels it, as the sounds start to return to the bar round her slowly. The tinkling of glassware, the quiet hum of dialog, music over the bar PA system, and the quiet sound of narration from the mecha struggle on the holo-screen.
She opens her eyes slowly, making eye contact with the bartender, who nods down in the direction of a drink of ice water ready for her at the bar.
She slides off the stool on stage and saunters over to the bar to take it.
“Thanks,” Hynd croaks.
“Don’t point out it,” the bartender replies, having the good sense not to observe up by asking her if she’s okay.
She sips the drink before she unwrinkles the enterprise card and stares at it once more.
About the Authors
Corey Jae White is the writer of Repo Digital and The VoidWitch Saga – Killing Gravity, Void Black Shadow, and Static Smash. Her brief fiction has appeared in Unusual Horizons, Interzone, and Analog, in addition to a lot of sci-fi anthologies. Discover her on-line at coreyjwhite.com.
Mx Maddison Stoff (she/her) is a neurodivergent non-binary essayist, unbiased musician and writer from Melbourne, Australia, writing unapologetically leftist, feminist, & queer fiction set in a steady universe which blurs the line between experimental literature & pulp sci-fi. Her brief tales have appeared in Unusual Horizons, Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways, Internal Worlds, and anthologies together with Avast! Pirate Tales from Transgender Authors. You possibly can observe her on Patreon, Bluesky, and Twitter @thedescenters, or go to her web site at maddisonstoff.com for extra.
Please go to LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to learn extra nice science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the January 2026 problem, which additionally options brief fiction by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, Marisca Pichette, Effie Seiberg, M.R. Robinson, Adam-Troy Castro, Eli Brown, and Kehkashan Khalid, and extra. You possibly can anticipate this month’s contents to be serialized on-line, or you should purchase the complete problem proper now in handy e book format for simply $4.99, or subscribe to the e book version here.
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