PRISMA

  ??Pacific Rim InfoSphere Mapping Apparatus ??

  ?? “Disconnection breeds dysfunction.” ?

  . . . .

  Subject Reference: Neon Vox

  Interference Vector: N/A (preestablished consent)

  Purpose: SENIOR ASSET REACTIVATION

  Communicating with the subject’s psychological firewall . . .

  . . . .

  Psychopunk Union membership recognized . . .

  Validating Clout . . .

  . . . 3.95 CLT detected.

  Admin access granted!

  “Neon Vox, (AKA ‘Envy’) is hereby queued for reactivation. As an operative in good standing, she will resume her previous position as a Ghost (Agent #003, hereafter referred to as 003). ANON assigns ‘Noviko Tanaka’ to handler status for 003. PRISMA priority mission to be fulfilled before deactivation: protection of asset BIOSPEAK, (AKA Noviko Tanaka-LaCroix). BIOSPEAK on vector for fulfillment of long-term goal: decryption of cephalopod language in line with broader Trine Accord synergies, including GYOTA advanced materials research (AKA ‘Beak Breaker’) and ZON deepwater agricultural research (AKA ‘Fruit of the Trenches’).”

  Activation phrase: “I like you just the way you are.”

  ACTIVATION TIMEFRAME TBD PER HANDLER’S DISCRETION

  As the submarine sped through the water, it passed through rays of morning sunlight. The ocean was as perfectly teal as Noviko had ever seen it, somehow clearer and cleaner for the extreme cold and drifting ice. About ten meters above, she could see sea ice scrolling overhead, fractured and blue from the sun.

  Noviko had a livestream on in the corner of her vision. She watched herself in the screen; the ‘new’ Noviko playing with Trip and snuggling with Banh in Okinawa. It felt surreal. It felt like watching memories she didn’t remember. She’d been spying on her replacement for days, now, and as much as she wanted to be angry, she wasn’t.

  She just felt alone. Alienated… left out. That other Noviko was really her. She even ducked out and paid nannies for a break. She smoked metasma sometimes and got drunk. She went about her business in a leisurely manner and didn’t seem overburdened or overwhelmed, just a little negligent, but not so much that it worried anyone. And when she was with Trip, she played, she laughed, and she went through the motions.

  Going through the motions. That’s all I ever did. Just going through the motions until I could cash in my ‘good mother’ credits and duck out. They didn’t even have the decency to bake an empathy stimulator into my replacement, they just… made her a faithful replication.

  Noviko shut off the feed. She looked ahead and saw their heading was on the submarine’s map HUD: MetaFold Station, North Pole.

  “What’s MetaFold?” Asked Noviko.

  “Wannabe technocratic morons,” answered Vox, who kept her eyes on the waters ahead. “Your mother’s been assigned to them for years. Kind of an expert on their special brand of fucked up – put out a virtual seminar on the whole faction last year, really gruesome stuff. Apparently, they think scanning your brain patterns into a digital file and uploading that file to a computer makes you immortal.”

  “That…” Noviko tried to imagine being that metaphysically stupid. It was hard. “You’re right, I think ‘moron’ is the word.”

  “So they’re just scanning their brains and killing themselves, it’s the one oligarchic ruling class the Ghosts don’t even have to assassinate. The whole faction is more of an IT problem.”

  They’d been cruising all night, and now they were running at 20% battery. They were hundreds of miles from civilization. The water around them was so cold that even with subdermal heating implants, a person would be dead in minutes.

  “Tether is just ahead,” said Vox with her hands on the submarine’s piloting yoke. Up ahead was a drifting cable with a buoy tied to it, just under the sea ice. Vox pressed the auto-dock button and let the sub take over. The yoke folded into the dashboard and the tiny submersible fluttered toward the cable to dock up and absorb electricity from the GYOTA geothermal supergrid.

  With the cable secured, Vox cranked up the heater. “Fucking finally.”

  “How do you cope with it?” Noviko asked, as she pressed the button to recline her seat.

  Vox kicked her boots up onto the dashboard of the two-person submarine, tilted her seat back, and interlaced her fingers behind her head. “How do I cope with what?”

  “Having your life dictated by others. Isn’t that the governance-by-force we’re supposed to oppose in every corner of the world?”

  “Heh,” Vox smiled. “An effort is made in Syndicate.”

  “What a comfort to know ‘an effort is made’ on my behalf.”

  “Attitude is everything, Noviko.”

  “I reserve the right to be disagreeable considering what I’ve been through – all my troubles, just to be stuck in a submarine with you of all people, inhaling recycled farts.”

  “Don’t pin it all on me; you’re the one who ate a bowl of seaweed before we disembarked.”

  “And by the smell I’m guessing you ate a fridge full of week-old ramen.”

  Vox flopped her head to the side and glared at Noviko. Her glare then turned into a laugh. Noviko managed to smile, but she still refused to look at the woman.

  “You know,” began Vox, crossing her legs, “I grew up around twenty-first century authoritarians, fascists, collectivists… fought them tooth and nail. But Syndicate isn’t like them. Syndicate is a system designed to try at equity, and it’s about as good as it gets for that.”

  “Being funneled into a new identity doesn’t feel like equity.”

  “Girl, in most other societies on this planet, you’d just have no rights and be treated like breeding livestock.”

  Noviko knew Vox was right. Her mother had shared memories with her once, about her treatment at the hands of naichi authorities. The needles, the medications, the fingernail-pulling, the bans on music or free expression that didn’t celebrate the ruling culture… it was all a nightmare she’d vicariously experienced through her mother’s sensory sharing. Noviko knew all of this, but still felt… robbed.

  “What’s my real mother like?” Noviko turned her head toward Vox.

  “What kind of use is a word like ‘real’ in this context?”

  “Fine. Wanna eat?

  Vox opened the minifridge between them and offered Noviko a can of BAMF! energy and health tonic, along with a little vacuum pack of ZON rations. Noviko took both and read through the ingredients on the ZON ration:

  “Spirulina powder, dank tofu, wheat, corn, potato, salt, peppercorn, sesame, protein.”

  “Protein.”

  Vox tore into hers. It was a cold hash of seasoned starch and nondescript protein bits synthesized to have the same texture and flavor as mushrooms. Noviko picked at hers with her chopsticks and was hungry enough to eat, despite loathing the entire experience. “I hate being your responsibility,” she said to Vox.

  “Yeah, well… this is all my fault, so it is what it is.”

  “It is your fault, yes. But I went along with it.”

  “I figured you’d be happy to come along for the ride, whatever happened.”

  “Mm.” Noviko forgot her food and leaned her forehead against the window.

  “You’ll get your bearings,” said Vox, as she tipped back the ration pack and all but inhaled the rest of the hash, then washed it down with a few glugs of her cherry Spiru-Cola. “And if you’re half the badass your mother is, I’ll be honored to work with you.”

  Noviko felt her stomach gurgle. She stared down into the seasoned mash. She lifted the pack and shoveled it into her moth with her chopsticks, then stuck the BAMF! can in the cup holder for later. She then turned over with her back to Vox and closed her eyes to take a nap.

  A friendly pod of narwhal rendezvoused with their sub, as planned. Now their sub blended in on radar and would not be seen by MetaFold sensors on approach. The other sub was similarly disguised by a pod of beluga. The two pods mingled beneath the ice and chatted in their common Arctic whale language about the tenderness of halibut and the excellent beauty of Narwhal spikes and the pleasing squishiness of Beluga melons; it was the kind of interspecies cultural exchange that no small number of Syndicate viewers would enjoy observing as a mood-lifter, and at least one or two of the pod members were augmented to share their lives through a live feed.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  The two small submarines faced one another in the middle of the great moving ring of whales. Noviko could only see the masked dome of the other submarine. Vox kept their submarine level and raised her hand. “Hey, Tokiko.”

  “Neon Vox,” said Noviko’s mother’s voice, through the comms of their vehicle. “Noviko.”

  “How do I know it’s you?” Noviko felt a shudder of heat on her face. Her eyes got wet. “How do I know any of this is real?”

  “You have to treat the world in good faith,” said Tokiko, in the voice of Noviko’s mother.

  “I can’t.”

  “Dock with me,” said Tokiko. “I want to show my daughter something.”

  Vox set the sub to auto-dock. The two vehicles communicated with each other and engaged in a delicate mooring procedure. They sealed together through a waterproof tunnel just big enough for someone to crawl through. The exchange hatch next to Noviko slid open.

  “In you go,” said Vox with a warm smile. “Good luck.”

  Noviko stuffed herself headfirst into that freezing, squishy tunnel. It was a five-meter-long tube suspended in arctic ocean water and going through it was like crawling through a half-deflated bouncy castle. At one point she was afraid she’d collapsed it, and she tried to crawl upward and forward but didn’t seem to be making headway. Then a strong, calloused hand grabbed hers and pulled her straight through the tunnel.

  Noviko was face-first on the floor with her legs sticking up over the headrest of the chair. Those same hands helped her sit upright and get herself correct. And then she saw her, this woman wearing the face of her mother from some alternate life. It was much like Noviko’s own face, with high cheekbones and dark pink lips, eyes like knives and the black lines and solid circles of Ryukyuan ink decorating her chin and jawline. She wore the same kind of black, armored bodysuit that Neon Vox did, apparently a kind of standard issue for Ghost field operatives meant to protect against hazards, temperature, and ocean pressure (or the total absence of pressure, in the case of a vacuum). Her mother’s hair was black as it always had been, though streaked with bands of silver that’d never been there before. There was a scar along her left cheek, deep and knotted, either a badge of survivor’s honor or a grim message to enemies. This woman was leaner, hungrier-looking than any mother Noviko had ever known, and there was a katana resting between her armor and the far wall of the sub.

  Noviko’s eyes spilt tears and she felt a love and longing far deeper and more sincere than anything she’d ever felt toward anyone or anything, more than she’d ever felt toward her own child, her own husband… why, she could not say. But once upon a time, in a world that she wished would come back, her mother had been everything to her.

  Once upon a time, it had been them against the rest.

  Tokiko slipped her hand behind Noviko’s head and brought her in to rest their brows together. They shared sacred breath, and Noviko cried like a lost little girl finally finding her way back home.

  “I’d heard my replacement killed herself last year,” said Tokiko. “I’m truly sorry, blossom.”

  “Mama,” Noviko trembled. “I hate life.”

  “That’s just a feeling. It will pass.”

  “I don’t want to do any of this anymore.”

  “You’re frightened. You’re overwhelmed.”

  Noviko felt her mother kiss her forehead. The woman still smelled like sandalwood incense and still had that maternal warmth she always did. But there was more to it. Noviko leaned back and looked into her mother’s eyes, and was at last, satisfied that it was all real.

  “Why did you become a Ghost?” Noviko asked.

  “Because I loved you.”

  “So you left me?”

  “No. I split myself in two.”

  Noviko tilted her head. “What?”

  “I split myself in two. One to guard from the darkness, one to give the light.”

  “You… I don’t understand.”

  “I loved you. But I could not bear the thought of what happened to me ever happening to you. And so, they say that love is letting go. So I let you go. I became a Ghost and let a self that was not myself be your mother. She did well. But it seems she grew weary of life. This is fair, and I know she is at peace in death, for she raised a good woman, and healed many hearts and minds in her time as a psychopunk.”

  Noviko’s mind struggled to process the information. She soon saw in her mother’s eyes something more than maternal warmth; there was a coldness there, a grey and terrible storm swirling around a kernel of absolute emptiness. Noviko leaned back against the wall of the sub, away from the person that had given birth to her.

  “Who was my father?”

  “A non-consensualist. A PDF file. A typical naichi fiend,” said Tokiko. “He is dead.”

  “Because you killed him.”

  “I did.”

  “You ‘split yourself in two’ for vengeance.”

  “I did.”

  “And you regret nothing?”

  Tokiko gripped the hilt of her katana and flicked her thumb against the charms dangling from it. One of those charms, Noviko noticed, was a preserved human pinky.

  “Regret.” Tokiko smiled and looked out into the sea. “Regret is useless. I have never felt regret. I have only ever felt fear of being caught. But even then, torture is just pain, and pain can be endured. Death is just sleep, and sleep is restful.”

  Noviko did not know how to feel anymore. So, Noviko felt nothing. Tokiko tilted her head to the side. Those silver-black locks of hair fell across her eyes. Those eyes analyzed Noviko head to toe. “You’re like me, Noviko,” she said. “Don’t lie to yourself.”

  “I don’t want to be,” said Noviko, her hands weak fists in her lap.

  “You would have used an empathy stimulator years ago if that was true. You’d be doing different drugs, different choices… but you chose booze, food, metasma, massage, and sex. Indulgent escape.”

  Tokiko touched the control yoke of the submarine with the hilt of her blade. The sub rolled, and while Tokiko was strapped in, Noviko was not. Noviko fell onto the transparent dome-screen of the sub, butt-first. She felt like she was sitting on a black ocean, and when she looked down, she saw tentacle shapes and gleaming, yellow eyes moving through the abyss below. Above her, Tokiko dangled from her seat straps, with a cozy smile and the wide-awake eyes of a hardened killer.

  “Scared of the dark?” Tokiko asked.

  “Yes,” Noviko lay in the curve of the window, staring up at this demon she came out of thirty-five years before. “I suppose you aren’t.”

  “Oya, I’m terrified of it,” said Tokiko. “So I learned to live in it.”

  Noviko watched as her mother flipped the severed pinky hanging from her katana over and over in her hand. “I could clone your father, you know,” she said. “I could bring a copy of him to life, here, behind the cloutwall. No one would know. I could afford it. I could… cut off pieces of him, make him scream, make him experience what I experienced as a little girl because of him, and his whole depraved squad. But…”

  “… you’re scaring me, oka-sama.”

  “It would be pointless,” said Tokiko. She dropped the pinky. “It wouldn’t be him; it’d just be some confused copy of him. And that is not satisfying, nor is it justice.”

  Noviko’s body then realized, in cold sweat, that she was in a cramped space with what past civilizations might have called a serial killer. “Oka-sama, please forgive my selfishness, demanding you away from your work…”

  “Hush. I would never hurt you, blossom. I would never hurt the undeserving.” And there was that softness again, in her mother’s eyes – her words rang absolutely true.

  “And who decides who is deserving?”

  “PRISMA assists. I am the eyes and the ears. I haunt the dark corners of this world’s various hells – the technocratic mind-staplers of MetaFold, the fascistic breeder fiends of SoMurica, the cannibal kings of the Nine Wastelands, and all else in time. I watch them, and I catalogue them for PRISMA.”

  Tokiko half-drew her blade from the scabbard and admired the reflection of her eyes in the gleaming metal. “And sometimes, when one of them is especially malignant, I remove parts of them.” She snapped the blade back in place.

  “Oka-sama, I promise that I believe you… and I have no desire to ever see what you’ve seen. But… is it okay if I don’t want to be like you?”

  Tokiko gazed down into her daughter’s eyes. There was a softness to the look, even if it came from someone so transparently capable of terrible violence. “It is okay. I want you to find your own way.”

  Noviko closed her eyes and sighed. The submarine rolled back upright, and she was ready this time and slid back down into her seat. She watched her mother in uncomfortable silence for a little while, and Tokiko did nothing to fill that void of quiet. She just sat there, staring out to sea, and Noviko mirrored her by instinct.

  “I think,” said Tokiko, “that you will find out who you are in the Aleutian Trench. You should go there and be rid of this task hanging over your head.”

  “I’ll die down there.”

  “Maybe. But not if you go prepared.”

  “I’m not like you. How could I possibly prepare?”

  “Neon Vox is fond of you, and she is more than capable – more capable than myself, I am not ashamed to admit. But she only truly performs when she is fully activated.”

  “Activated…?”

  Tokiko grinned. “Be kind to those who would kill for you, Noviko Tanaka. Their strength becomes yours, and through them, your kindness becomes strength. I think that you should go back and tell your friend, Neon Vox, that you like her just the way she is.”

  She remembered the August and Generous Bodhisattva Mike Rogers, in his cozy red sweater, smiling at Noviko and telling her ‘I like you just the way you are.’

  “But I don’t like her just the way she is.”

  “Then find the part of you that does and cultivate it,” said Tokiko. “Do not stew in petty, paralyzed petulance. Remember… it is better to appreciate the labors of others.”

  Noviko felt her skin flush. Her heart unwound and her eyes opened wide. “Yes, oka-sama,” she said, as prim and proper as she ever had before. She felt like a little girl on the temple steps again, mirroring the rhythm of her mother’s feet as they walked.

  In the waking world of that cramped, dark little submarine, Tokiko then invited Noviko to share sensory data, to gaze into living memories, and share in knowing what her mother knew. It was a fearful proposition. But the way Tokiko looked at her, with those wide, imploring eyes, made it hard to say no.

  Noviko accepted.

  The first thing she felt was hatred. This was like having a cold fire where the heart should have been. There was a man’s face, handsome and pleasing, and it reminded Noviko of Trip. But there was a cruel, sneering quality to his expression. This man was everywhere, in a series of scenes and disjointed experiences like a dream’s rapid movements. Sometimes he was on top of her, and he was too strong to deny. Sometimes he shared with his friends. Sometimes, he stuck needles into her neck and used a device to send stiffening shocks of electricity into her body. And worst of all were the times he injected her with things that made her burn and feel stupid, because he wanted compliance and agreeability, and did not have the social skills or human compassion or patience to gain it through consent.

  Noviko swiped her hands and punched at him, tried to claw the visions away with her nails. The visions abated, and she was held in her mother’s grip. Tokiko had her and she was shushing her, comforting her, apologizing to her.

  “You have to know the other part of what you are,” said Tokiko, through a lump of grief. “Now you cannot unsee what I have seen. Now you know why I split myself in two, why I asked to have a version of myself made that could… that could take empathy stimulators, raise a child, be a healer, be the woman I might have been if decades of my life were not corrupted.”

  “You asked Syndicate to make a mother for me.”

  “More than someone to birth you. Someone to love you and raise you who wasn’t a cloud of knives and trauma,” said Tokiko, as she stroked her hand down Noviko’s cheek. “I do not trust myself. I do not trust myself, Noviko. The only time I feel truly alive is when I find people who remind me of him and I stab them, over and over and over, over, and over until… I…”

  “I understand, mama. You don’t need to prove yourself to me.”

  Tokiko sank back into her seat and held up her blade. She wiped at a faint mist building in her eyes and offered the katana to her daughter. Noviko bowed and took it, pinky charm and all.

  “I love you, blossom.”

  “I love you, mama.”

  Noviko then slid back through the tunnel to the passenger seat of Neon Vox’s submarine. The hatch closed, the docking tunnel detached, and Noviko watched her mother’s sub turn and cruise back toward the North Pole amidst a pod of white beluga.

  “Um…” Vox struggled with her words. “… is that a finger?”