These Alien Skies (Black Stars) by C. T. Rwizi

Author:C. T. Rwizi [Rwizi, C. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

I’m back in the white chamber when I wake up. Unlike the first time, though, there are tubes sticking into my nostrils, and my lungs feel like they are flooded with water.

I blink and see Aluel’s face hovering over my bed. She wanted to dissect me the first time she saw me, but the worry on her brow says she might actually be concerned for me now.

“What happened?” I ask.

She ponders her response, like she’s about to broach a difficult subject. “The . . . presence you’re always talking to,” she says delicately. “Are they here?”

I feel a spasm somewhere deep inside my soul. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.

“I’ve seen you talking to yourself, Flight Lieutenant. I thought you might be insane, but the Elders say there’s a foreign and incompatible object inside your body and they can’t integrate with you until it’s gone. Our surgeon can remove it if you give the word.”

I have lived with a constant sense of terror for a while. It’s never far away, but I learned to keep it at bay, to work around it so it wouldn’t cripple me. It takes me now, washes over me so completely, it leaves me shaking. “You mean my neural implant? I can’t. It’s organic. It needs to be inside me or it’ll deteriorate.”

“Msizi—” Tariro begins, but I cut her off.

“Out of the question.”

I feel her hand on my shoulder. I look at her through the moisture rapidly covering my eyes. “Msizi,” she says in a voice that almost breaks me. “You have to take it out.”

“No.”

“You have to do it. For me.”

“But you’ll die!”

“I’m already dead!” she says. “I died in the accident, Msizi. This? It’s just a pale image of me, and it’s holding you back, keeping you from living your life, and right now it’s literally killing you. You need to let go.”

I would kill to make this all go away. To bring her back. To not have to let go. “I can’t! I’m not ready.”

I feel her phantom hands gripping my arm, a sensation simulated by my neural implant, driven by the virtually intelligent avatar of her that I stole from her messenger account in the days following the explosion of the AUS Nkrumah. I was stationed on a nearby cruiser when something went wrong with the Nkrumah’s new antimatter drive, and I watched it explode from a viewport, knowing that Tariro was in there and that I’d never see her face again.

She had many more layers of personhood than this VI—a stronger personality, a brighter soul—but it’s all I have left of her, and the idea of losing her again and this time forever . . . I’d rather die.

“Msizi,” she says, cutting through the noise of my sorrow. “I’m being overwritten. Slowly, your implant is taking after you, modifying my code. Soon I’ll only be a reflection of you, nothing more. I don’t want that for you, and I don’t want that for me either.”

And there it is.

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