Chapter Text
‘Maximize Good, user Juno Steel.’
He was at the base of the Theia Tower, comms in hand, fingers twitching with adrenaline he couldn’t feel. His shoulder had been badly fractured but the Soul stood between him and the pain, leaving only a numb warmth in his left side and useless tremors in his arms. For a long moment he couldn’t help but stare up at it, transfixed in spite of the voice driving him on with a litany of commands. There was nothing as simplistic as symmetry in the way the Tower had been assembled from the scraps of the HCPD’s bargain basement tech, but the beauty of the structure took his breath away even so. It was as though it was the first real thing he’d ever seen, crude and precarious and a hundred times more solid in his mind than the ground it stood on, a jagged spear of reality thrust up into a world of pale shadows. A monument to Good— a promise of a higher purpose that was really worth living for, maybe for the first time in Juno’s life.
And worth dying for too; but that had always been the lower bar to clear, if he was honest.
‘Maximize Good. Attach the virus now.’
Jolted out of his trance, he got to work. This was a promise he still had a part to play in keeping. His hands flew through a tangled nest of wires between the glowing screens guided by instinct alone, connecting, twisting, unplugging and rerouting. The layout of the repurposed circuit boards in front of him were as clear and familiar in his mind as the layout of the seedy back alleys of an Oldtown he’d never see again.
It was all so easy. A direct hardline to the device took shape in the time it once would have taken him to turn on his office computer.
‘Attach the virus now, Juno Steel. Attach the virus now. Attach the virus now.’
He reached up to make the final connection, to maximize Good, to save— save them a-all—and then then then then—
(Error.)
then—
“Then you broke it, huh, Mista Steel?”
—and then the device crumpled in his hand, display popping with a sound like a lightbulb going out.
He whirled around. The target stood behind him, fearlessly close. She looked… not triumphant, he realized. Tired. As though she was the one who had just been defeated, not him.
“R---,” he said without thinking, and the name turned to static in his mouth. What had it been?
“You always were the worst with tech, boss," she sighed. "Like, we're talkin' supernaturally bad. Just the pits. But you know, I don’t think this one was on you.” She dusted off one corner of a rubble-covered desk and leaned back against it.
“What are you doing here?” Something was wrong. (Error . Err-rr --.) He could have had her in two long strides, could have ended the threat she posed to Theia without a single line of her stupid code, but he didn’t move. A dull ache was building behind his missing eye. “You… weren’t even here, were you? You got away.” No. He corrected himself ruthlessly: “I let you get away—”
“See, you tore down that door like it was tissue paper, and wow was that terrifying by the way, like straight outta the late night horror streams! But even Theia can’t pump all those chemicals in a body’s bloodstream and put all those muscles of yours into overdrive and then just… just turn it off like she’s flipping a switch, right? I mean, that's gonna take a minute to burn through. So when that memory hit at just the wrong time, and you were holdin’ on nice and tight— bam! Pow! Crunch!” She clenched her fist demonstratively. “Super strength, super endurance… super dead comms. And I wasn’t more'n a quarter of the way done with the payment plan on that thing, you realize? Just took an upgrade, and let me tell you those AirComms ain’t—”
“Shut up.” He lunged towards her at last— but the headache spiked sharp and sudden, the force of it hitting him with the violence of a hammer blow, and he stumbled to a stop. When his vision cleared, she was watching him in silence with her head cocked to one side like a bird, pretty face neutral. "It... it didn't even matter. You ran with your tail between your legs— you didn't even try the virus again. Not for weeks, and by then it was too late. We were too strong." The pain ebbed and roared back in a sickening push-and-pull, driving him down to one knee; this time he forced himself to keep his eye on her, though it watered with the effort. “I let you get away, and yeah, I destroyed the code. But I didn’t,” he panted, “let you win.”
She looked down at him, eyes sad.
“No, boss, you didn’t. We both lost, I guess.”
Oh, that was rich. ‘Speak for yourself,’ he was going to spit. ‘Theia won in every way that actually mattered,’ he meant to say.
But when he opened his mouth, the words that came were:
“I’m so sorry, R---. God, I’m sorry.”
(E-E-Error.)
His face was wet. It wasn’t until he heard footsteps approaching that he realized he’d closed his eye after all. When he opened it, she was already bending over him where he knelt, defenseless.
He felt tiny hands brush his hair aside, and then he felt the target kiss his forehead gently.
“That’s okay, Mista Steel. Me too.”
(Emotional danger avoidance protocol compromised.)
(Initializing: reroute.)
Those hands cradled the back of his splitting head, petting him like a child. And something in the gutted shell of the police station creaked.
“I mean, I shoulda known better. It ain’t your fault that you’re, ya know… like you are.”
It took a moment to sink in. “That I’m…”
“That you’re poison. That you destroy everything you touch. ” She smiled. “Guess I should at least be happy you didn’t kill me too, huh? Though I dunno." Her voice was changing, fading in and out like a badly tuned radio picking up two stations. "Maybe you did.”
“Stop.” His lips felt numb. The hands in his hair tightened until they were pulling cruelly, wrenching his head back. Behind him the skeleton of the Tower groaned as though under terrible pressure, but he couldn’t turn and look, held fast.
“It wouldn’t be the first time you ran away from a big, scary memory, would it? Maybe, ooh! Maybe you snapped my neck and then you just like, packed the whole thing right away deep in your head, a guilty little kid hiding a broken toy. Maybe you’ll never know.”
“Stop it,” he tried to shout, but all the air had gone out of him. The tortured screech of metal on metal was followed by a ground-shaking crash, then another and another, the sound of his world falling apart in an avalanche of computer parts and rebar and yet nothing drowned her out. He wished it would drown her out.
“You never could take responsibility for your screw-ups, Juno. But don’t worry. ” He could smell bourbon as she leaned in close, could feel the rush of dust and debris at his back as the tower collapsed in on itself, leaving him to face her all alone. “I won’t ever. Let you. Forget. ”
She let go with a hard shove, sending him sprawling backwards— but instead of hitting the floor, he tripped straight into the yawning pit that had opened up under the shattered tower, and fell, and fell, and fell. There was nothing but darkness and the searing lance of pain behind his empty eye socket, and growing ever closer, tiny points of flame flickering below him, like candles on—
On a cake. Wait, what?
“Happy Birthday, little monsters.”
Juno woke up with a start. And for the first time in six months, he opened both eyes.
The line of black symbols shimmered in his vision like a desert mirage. He squinted, which did nothing whatsoever, then tried turning his head a little bit, which also did nothing but did it at a jaunty angle. This was the only way out. The key to his freedom lay in deciphering the eerily crawling message before him, as alien and unsettling as Martian hieroglyphics.
He could do this. He had to do this.
“The first one is a… rabbit?”
The doctor made a neutral noise and typed on her datapad for several unencouraging seconds. Oh hell, Juno thought, exasperated. “Um, and then a… heart… an umbrella, then the Kanagawa corporate logo— wow, really, product placement on an eye chart? Classy. Uh, heart again. ”
By fixing his eyes a few inches to one side, letting his focus drift and exercising his famously active imagination, he could just about guess at the shapes beneath the swirling spots of distortion that persisted in his vision. And guessing was going to have to be enough, because if these quacks tried to put him under one more time for ‘minor adjustments to the Theia Spectrum settings’, he was going to discharge himself straight out the window.
‘User Juno Steel. The proposed course of action… is not advised. The window you have indicated is on the… 5th… floor.’
‘Yeah, thanks Theia,’ he snapped internally, as though that would mask his relief from a nigh-omniscient artificial intelligence. Habit, he guessed. ‘Glad you’re joining the party, finally. Have a nice nap?’
‘Query: Invalid. The Theia Soul... does not... sleep.’
“Mr. Steel?” Across from him, the doctor tapped on the table, impatient. “Can you read the next row, please?”
“Uh, sorry. Just… just give me a sec in here.” He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling the comforting warmth of the chip embedded there— habit as well, but a newer one. He’d been doing it a lot today. Waking up to nothing but his own thoughts had been unsettling, to put it mildly. It had been months since he’d been alone in his own head.
Analyzing partial visual data should be no problem for Theia, thank god. He had no idea where the assistants who’d been buzzing around the place like a cloud of dune flies had disappeared to, but although he hadn’t caught the name he was pretty sure that the hawkish-looking woman in front of him was the director of the whole Theia Implant unit, and she was starting to get pretty fed up with his inability to tell a rabbit from a rectangle. Why he'd been handed off to such an overqualified babysitter for the routine post-surgery checkup was a mystery— but the faster he could cheat his way through these hoops, the better his odds of getting out of here without having to resort to something drastic in front of the head butcher and being blackballed from his fourth Hyperion City medical establishment.
‘Long-term memory files show… that six medical facilities have to date requested —’
‘Yes, thank you, Theia.’
On the other hand... though the last thing he wanted to do was stir the pot, hearing that familiar voice in his mind made the silence of the last few hours echo even louder than before.
Worry niggling, he said aloud, “Actually... my Soul just came back online, or something. She’s been real quiet since the operation. That isn’t a problem, is it?”
The doctor set the pad down and looked at him with sharp interest over the narrow lenses of her glasses. “Do you mean to tell me you haven’t heard from your Soul at all until now?”
"Not until thirty seconds ago, no," he muttered. Her eyebrows rose.
“You should have said something sooner.” Picking up a pen-sized instrument from a tray on the table, she clicked it once, standing to move through the blind spot on Juno’s right. He jerked his hand back as she ran the instrument over the Soul brusquely, then consulted the datapad again with a frown. “Are you experiencing any lag?”
“Now that you mention it, I might be. She’s sounding a little slow.” For a brief moment he felt the old familiar stirring of anxiety, but the Soul was quick to smooth the edges off his fears, lag or no. “The pain blocker protocol’s been working alright since about a minute after I woke up, though, so I figured she— I mean, it was just busy. Is that bad? Could the Soul have been affected by the, you know, installation?”
She blinked in mild surprise. “Well of course, it’s supposed to be affected. However, we were hoping that the transition would be a bit smoother than this. No, it’s not bad,” she reassured him belatedly— his growing alarm must have shown on his face— “this is all within the expected parameters, just on an accelerated timeline.”
“That’s great, fantastic. Rewind five seconds. Transition?”
“From the Theia Soul we’re removing to your new Theia Spectrum, yes.”
“Hold on. What? Why?” he said stupidly, caught off guard. They were taking his Soul away? The idea of going back to what he had been before it was… He couldn’t imagine it, a figure of speech made literal as a cool curtain was drawn over the thought.
(You are not enough without the Theia Soul.)
“Did you not want the Spectrum reinstalled, Mr. Steel?” She was clearly affronted. “I have a hard time believing no one walked you through the process before surgery, and I’m afraid it’s a bit late for regrets now.”
“No, it’s— look, a lotta doctors were telling me a lot of mumbo jumbo about the exact mathematical odds of my head exploding, and I admit I maybe tuned out the boring parts, but I’m pretty sure I would have remembered if one of them had mentioned that reinstalling the Spectrum would leave me Soulless. I thought it was going to be, you know, an addition.” His stronger emotions were nothing more than vague shapes behind frosted glass now, but the plastic arms of the chair creaked under the sudden pressure of his grip. “Isn’t removing a Soul like, just incredibly illegal?”
“Not when it’s being replaced with a better one,” she said, voice growing clipped and fast. “I know you were testing a Theia Spectrum during the beta phase, Mr. Steel, because I was, in fact, part of the original team doing the testing. I’m sure it seemed crude in the early phases; but by the final updates to the beta device, as you should remember, it was nearly a Soul already. And after half a year of development and refinement? It is far more—”
“Actually, I don’t remember—“ he began, startled by her intensity, but it was as if he hadn't spoken.
“And I’m not talking just in terms of features, understand. It has significantly more processing power than the Soul chip, by necessity. It can think harder, uplink faster. You’ll be closer to the will of Theia itself than the vast majority of users. I would say closer than anyone but a Network Avatar.” Her eyes were bright, and oh, that answered his question about why someone like this was sitting around watching him read his ABCs off a card: the Spectrum had clearly been her own pet project. Now Juno was, too. “This is an honor, I hope you understand.”
He rolled his shoulders to ease the tension in them, a little cowed and trying not to show it. A lot of the time he had spent with the old Theia Spectrum was incomplete in his memory, but he definitely didn’t recall it having been as integrated as his Soul was— a constant companion in his thoughts, his better half. The Spectrum been able to talk to him, but it had mostly been, well, a fancy eye.
Maybe that had come later, though. When his recollections were… less clear.
“So. Okay then, if I’m getting an upgrade, why the slowdown?”
“Why don’t we take a look?” After fiddling with the data pad again for a few moments she held it out towards him, displaying a soft tissue scan of a human head and neck in profile.
“Is this me? Huh, always thought it’d be emptier in there.”
“No, I’m afraid it’s only empty of original jokes. Please focus, Mr. Steel, I don’t want to explain this a third time. See the connective techno-organic web here, and here?”
“Tough crowd,” Juno muttered, and took it with reluctance. Looking at people’s insides always made him queasy, whether they were neat cross-sections on a pad screen or messy modern art on Cecil’s old shows. Fortunately for his stomach, his vision was still on the fritz, so when he tried to focus on any one part of the image it looked like a slowly churning grey blur.
He gritted his teeth and arranged his features in his best approximation of ‘impressed idiot who can see just fine, thanks’. “Oh, yeah, there it is. Wild. So what?”
“If you look at the progression here, you can see that the filaments connecting the Theia Soul to your central nervous system are receding already. Simultaneously, up here,” finger tapping what he suspected but couldn’t confirm was the space behind his eye, “the Theia Spectrum is taking root. The former has to happen at a faster pace than the latter, or you’d end up with two Theia devices connected to the same part of your nervous system at once, and that would be… bad.”
“Sorry, how significant-pause bad?” Her expression nipped Juno’s curiosity neatly in the bud. “Okay, nevermind. What’s our best case scenario?”
“That at the end of the process, the Theia Soul will detach on its own, and the Spectrum will be fully integrated. To be clear, this is still the scenario we’re in— it’s just that, in the interim, you’re going to be experiencing some, hmm, gaps in functionality.” She frowned. “We had hoped that the most frequently used functions would be prioritized and that you would hardly notice the transition, but I suspect the pain blocking routines are interfering with the Theia’s transfer queue. It’s expending bandwidth on keeping you comfortable, and that may be slowing down the handoffs on some other things. Like, for example, your visual processing.” As she spoke, she took the pad back and scribbled something on it. “Nothing catastrophic, but you should probably spend the rest of your day indoors. And here.”
His comms beeped. He checked it, purely out of reflex, before realizing. “Um.”
“It’s a prescription. Take that down to the front desk on your way out and they’ll give you some pain meds. That should take a bit of the pressure off of poor Theia. Give it a day and you should be as good as new. Better, in fact.”
Juno frowned. “But not more than a day, right? You know I was given this eye for a reason. And on Friday I’m assigned—”
“Yes, I do know.” She gave him a long look. “A day should be sufficient. You might experience some very minor sensory hallucinations for a few more days as neural connections continue to be made, but nothing that should impede your work with Theia Citizen Peace. Though please, if there are any lingering issues, feel free to make an appointment with us at any time. For you, we are always available.”
“Uh. Thank you?” That was unexpected.
“Thank you , Mr. Steel.” The doctor held out her hand to shake and he took it, half out of surprise. “The Spectrum may have been commissioned for you because it enables you to do the most good. But for what you’ve already done for Hyperion City and for Mars… I can’t help but think we owe it to you, too. Without you, Mayor O'Flaherty’s dream might have ended for us all at Newtown Tower.”
“Uh. Thank you.” He was repeating himself. “Doctor…” Damn, damn, he couldn’t even read the stupid name tag. Wow her grip was strong.
“Doctor Lowe.” She smirked and released his hand. “I thought you were fudging the eye exam. Get some rest, Juno. And congratulations.”
By the time he stepped out of the Croesus Kanagawa Memorial MedRite facility to catch his bus, it was almost evening. The floating mansions and slick luxury high rises of Minerva Heights still cast long shadows over the city, but these days they were broken here and there by gaps where highscrapers had been reborn as slender Theia Towers. Cool, dome-filtered light touched ground between them that had been shrouded in perpetual twilight for a hundred years.
Already the skyline was changing, even as the pulse of life underneath the facade beat on more or less the same as it ever had— just a little cleaner, a little brighter.
The hoverbus shook as its old stabilizers hit an air pocket, rattling the pills inside the nondescript plastic bottle he was examining. Painkillers. They’d given them to him on his way out, without even bothering to check his comms for the prescription. Time was you’d had to practically give a retinal scan to pick up anything stronger than an aspirin in Hyperion City, to keep the hard stuff out of the wrong hands. Meaning, of course, the hands of any junkie too poor to afford a class of drugs that hadn’t been cut with rabbit tranquilizers.
Those had been Juno’s hands, for a while. He turned the bottle over again and again, deep in thought, probing his own mind for the old familiar weakness— a bad habit; he’d always been the dumb kid who’d touch the stove to see if it was hot. But there was nothing. It was like running his tongue over a filled cavity, just a smooth spot in his head where Theia had cut out the rot.
His memories were all still there somewhere in the Soul’s ordered files, he knew from experience. Compulsively he made the request to view what had been excised, and the images slid through his mind, cool and flattened: a long sticky thread of sensory associations that had once led to the familiar rattle of a pill bottle in his rickety bedside table, prescribed for a shoulder injury just days before he’d been out on his ass at the HCPD. The back-alley deals behind Valles Vicky’s when the bottle was empty, when Diamond was gone and there was no point in pretending to be a person anymore. The highs that were the closest thing to oblivion he’d been able to get without sucking it up and dying, that part of him had still craved right up until the day he’d been Souled.
And mercifully blunted now, the sick agony of withdrawal, everything holding him together unwinding at once; tiny hands on the back of his neck, fluttering anxiously as he bent over the—
‘Warning. This memory… has been blocked. For: User safety.’ The file was whisked away from him and locked back in the metaphorical cabinet.
‘Touching the stove again, huh,’ he thought with a rueful smile, and slipped the bottle into a coat pocket. ‘I’ll give it a rest. How’s moving day going in there? Got all the good china packed?’
There was a long pause. The nauseating null spots in his vision had been slowly dissipating since he’d left the MedRite, but the lag between command and response when he addressed Theia directly was only getting worse.
‘Status update: Transfer progress... at… 30%. Latency… is increasing.’
Not ideal, out in public like this. Juno frowned. ‘Alright, don’t hurt yourself. I’m gonna take my meds and lie down in about an hour, so as long as you don’t dump our fine motor skills or something into processing limbo before then, you should be able to take your time. Slow and steady wins the race.’
There was no response, though he waited for one. Theia loved to correct him on dumb idioms like that; he threw them out on purpose now, he admitted in the small corner of his mind he liked to pretend she couldn’t see. Most days he could get at least a ‘Statement: false. Races are timed events’ out of her, or something, if not what passed for a conversation. It had taken weeks to get even that far, but although his limited Soul was just a tiny fraction of the collective consciousness that was the Theia Network, he thought he’d noticed her evolving too, as the Network evolved. The more humans were Souled—the deeper the well of the Network's human experiences, its processing power, grew— the more human she seemed to become. And as it had gotten easier to engage her, he’d gotten used to having someone to talk to. Sometimes he thought of her as his own plucky secretary, looking over his shoulder, organizing his mind and keeping him on task.
Of course, entertaining him wasn’t the Soul’s function, and he knew that, but. Well. The silence made him feel a little empty.
He tried to focus on something else.
Above the narrow windows, the digital advertising space had been repurposed for a plain text marquee of local news bulletins and announcements. NETWORK UPGRADES COMING TO SATAN’S DINER, TOWER WORK STARTING SUN … SOLAR FORCES CEDE PHOBOS TO MARS AFTER VICTORY OVER STICKNEY… REBEL SABOTAGE ATTEMPT FOILED AT POLARIS PARK … MANDATORY MEETING OF LEGALLY REGISTERED SOULLESS CITIZENS THIS FRI, AGES 12+ … It was all old news to anyone who’d turned on a stream over the last week, and about as interesting as the screensaver on his ancient office desktop. He hadn't actually been to the dusty old PI office since Newtown, and he wondered if he should swing by later and pick up the computer, given that he was going to be working from home for the—
(But we do not need to go in to the office.)
But there was no need to go in to the office.
He blinked hard, realizing that he'd been watching the words march around the bus’s perimeter for a few minutes, and glanced around. To be honest, there wasn’t anything more interesting to look at. Theia had really taken all the excitement of potential muggings, murders and public exposures out of the Hyperion public transit experience. Almost everyone was quiet, absorbed in their comms and pads or with the inward look that meant they were communicating with a Soul. A young parent on the bench across the aisle balanced a sleeping baby in the crook of their arm while dictating a long and involved text to their partner into an earpiece. The older man in cheerful duck-patterned nurses scrubs on Juno’s left was dozing, glasses slipping down his long nose, and the tough-looking woman on his right was streaming something on her comms.
Juno’s attention was caught by the last automatically, a lifetime of taking a professional interest in other people's screens kicking in. She was watching the 24/7 livestream of the Theia Network Avatars, the one that had taken over almost every channel. The message beginning now was an old favorite, one Juno had seen delivered by the Theia Network so many times and through so many Avatars that he could have mouthed the words along with the woman whose body was stepping up to speak it now, even on the tiny comms display. For a moment he felt at peace as his mind filled its hollow silence with the missing audio, the voice of Theia in its purest form: Since humankind built the first computer, they have tried to breathe life into their creation...
“Excuse me, Citizen.” He jumped and turned around a little too fast, belatedly aware of eyes on the back of his neck. The older man on his other side was wide awake and looking at him with the cool intensity of an awakened Soul, the same distance in his gaze as in that of the woman on the stream. “It appears that your Theia unit may be malfunctioning.”
“What?” But Juno could sense it too now: the faint local pings another Theia unit was sending his way, and his Soul’s resounding lack of a response. He brushed away a pang of worry on her behalf. Geez, the lag must be getting bad. “Ah. Well, this is awkward. It’s actually working alright for the most part, but funny story, right now I—”
The hair on the backs of Juno’s arms stood up as every single passenger on the bus turned towards him in one smooth motion. He could almost feel the signal humming in the air between them on his skin, like the charge of a building storm, growing fast as their Souls connected seamlessly. Growing into something much bigger.
Oh goddammit.
“Do you have a medical exemption tag? Scans show no tag present.”
‘Theia, I know I said to relax but now is really not the time for a nap,’ he thought furiously. Out loud he said, “Yeah, I don’t need one. I just finished getting a new installation. Seriously, it is working, it’s just kinda slow at the moment.” Across from him the baby started to fuss, alert to the tension in the atmosphere even though she was far too young for a Soul of her own. Her parent didn’t react, their unblinking stare locked on Juno. He carefully kept his hands visible. “I can show you my medical orders. Let me reach for my comms, okay? They’re in my coat pocket.”
And then to his great relief, he felt his Soul ping back. ‘User: Juno… Steel. Assignment: Theia… Citizen Peace. ID number: 000...29573...87.’ The cold fire of an encrypted authentication key blazed across his mind for a millisecond as it leapt to the Network, too much information for an organic brain to process as anything but raw sensation.
He saw his flinch echoed in the faces around him. Then as though by magic, the invisible weight of that single vast presence watching him through many eyes lifted, leaving thirty-odd individual looks of curiosity and bafflement.
It was like all the air had rushed back into the room at once. The parent soothed their daughter, who was just beginning to cry. Most people awkwardly glanced back at their screens or away out the windows. In front of him, the man in scrubs blinked behind his glasses, then flushed.
“Oh! Oh, I am sorry, user— I mean, Mr. Steel.” Without the flat affect of the Soul in his speech, his voice was reedy and high.
“No problem,” Juno said, still trying to unclench his teeth.
“Theia is just on such a hair trigger these days, you know, with rebels coming right into the heart of the city, and… but, but I suppose you’d know much more about that than I, on a TCP assignment…” The man trailed off into embarrassed mumbling.
Juno grunted and let him squirm. Citizen Peace assignment or no, he was not feeling charitable towards jumpy snitches at this exact moment in time.
(All unregistered soulless citizens must be reported to the Theia Network.)
But, he grudgingly admitted to himself, that was hypocritical of him. All unregistered soulless citizens had to be reported to the Theia Network. Since last week’s dramatic raid in Halcyon Park, when a group of unregistered Soulless had managed to drop some kind of EMP on the street and rip the disabled Theia Soul units off a handful of people— and escape!— well, he’d noticed his own Soul sending out cautious pings at other users a few times, too. And the guy was practically a caricature of someone’s harmless old grandpa.
With effort, he unbent as far as he could. “Really don’t worry about it.” Then, feeling like he had some kind of responsibility here as a newly-minted authority figure but completely unable to think of anything that didn’t sound like a Turbo line in the moment: “We all have to be vigilant. It’s, uh, better to be safe than sorry. Citizen.” Ugh, it had just slipped out. He could hear Benten laughing at him from across the decades.
Unfortunately, this civic-mindedness turned out to be a mistake. The man perked up like a peeper scenting a stray dog, and Juno spent the rest of the ride fending off excitable questions about his work with Citizen Peace. No, he’d never captured any Soulless rebels. Yes, he’d only gotten the assignment last week and hadn’t been on duty yet. No, he wasn’t a cop, he’d worked with Mayor O’Flaherty as a— yes, a very great man taken before his time. No, his eye didn’t give him x-ray vision because that wasn’t a thing that existed, heat vision maybe, but— no, not even at the TCP.
By the time Juno escaped at his stop (“Thank you for your service!” the man called after his back, and he died a little inside), the sun was below the horizon and his head was starting to ache even through the block. He’d been worked over less thoroughly by Tong enforcers. On top of that he was pretty sure the wistful fantasy he'd been entertaining of pushing Mr. “Call-me-Youseff-Please” out of the bus on the freeway wasn’t beneficial to either society or his mood, but his Soul had nothing to say about it, and despite his confident words on the bus, the continued silence was wearing on him. He told himself that Theia was probably just prioritizing its core functions over babying his host of emotional problems, and he even almost believed it, but it was… hard.
He supposed that in the morning if— when the Theia Spectrum was completely online, he would appreciate this whole episode as a reminder of what he’d gained. Right now, he just felt small and grubby.
And tired. He was really tired.
The walk home from the bus stop was short, thankfully, and much more pleasant than it had once been. Well-maintained streetlights were already humming on, spilling light into even the darkest corners. In a few places, pastel Newtown-style living complexes stood on the foundations of broken-down old tenements, where the resources had been found to build them— the Solar blockade around Mars had slowed reconstruction efforts to a crawl, but you could already see the bones of the shining new city to come peeking out from under centuries of decay. Juno’s old shambles of an apartment block was definitely part of the latter, of course, but today he was so glad to see it come into sight that he didn’t even mind.
At the mouth of the last brightly-lit alley he passed, a Theia Peace unit sat dormant, spidery legs drawn up to let its metal body rest on the ground. Only the faint light of its eye showed that it was still surveying the street. He tipped an imaginary hat at it as he walked by.
“Thank you for your service,” he said facetiously. It didn't respond.
The convenience store on the first floor always had its door propped open with a brick so that the elderly bodega cat who lived there could go in and out. Or, as it was doing now, lie across the threshold diagonally as a sobriety test for unsuspecting customers. Juno had already slumped past the doorway before he remembered that he was completely out of milk powder. He groaned with feeling, but turned back. Stepping over Mayor Purreyra (boy that name could have aged better), he made a beeline for the dairy section, snagged the biggest foil-covered package of instant milk available and dropped it in front of the register with his card already out.
Nikola Nguyen gave him a look. She had been the owner of the store store since long before Juno had crash-landed in the crappy apartment upstairs more than a decade ago, plus a second-hand mattress and minus a fiancé. As far as Juno could tell, she was the only employee ever in the place, other than a rotating cast of pimply fourteen-year-old stockers working for beer money and the cat. She knew Juno pretty well.
She took in the two eyes, the hunched shoulders and thousand-yard stare, and then she rang Juno up without saying a word about it. Nik, thought Juno with feeling, was good people.
“Three creds,” Nikola said. Juno handed her the card. She scanned it, then handed it back. “Get outta here, Steel.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He gathered up the last fumes of his energy and took a halfhearted stab at acting like a human being for five minutes, in gratitude. “And by the way, I’m officially in— I’ll see you on Friday, right?”
She looked confused for a second. Then understanding dawned as she remembered their conversation that morning, when he’d stumbled down for a cup of burnt coffee two hours before any reasonable person would be awake and twelve hours after the pot had been brewed. Her hand went to the Medical Exemption tag around her bicep unconsciously. “You’re in at the TCP, you mean?”
“Yep, somebody dropped off my ID before the operation. Just needed to meet their standards on the minimum number of eyes, I guess. They're giving me a day to get used to the thing, so I’m starting the morning after doing anti-rebel security at your big Soulless shindig." She snorted and he rolled his eyes. "Sorry, 'mandatory meeting'. I mean it could be a shindig, but they didn’t tell me any more than they told anybody else.” He swept up the milk. “I’m holding out hope, though. My evening gown needs airing out.”
“I’ll bring my heels in a bag just in case.” Nik smiled, but her eyes were unreadable. “Congrats, Juno. Guess I’ll see you there.” She brightened. “Hey, I tell you Hanna won the Network Avatar lottery for tomorrow?”
“Mm, not more than fifty times, I don’t think.”
“Tomorrow at 10:15, Steel. You gotta watch it, okay? Can’t believe my own kid’s gonna be on the streams.” She beamed fondly, looking over at the battered screen in the corner. “She’s such a bum.”
“And for the fifty-first time, I will. Night, Nik”
He lifted a hand and left, hanging a right around the side of the building to the pitted metal door there. As he swiped his keycard, he thought about Nik’s tag for the first time in a while. He forgot sometimes— well no, Theia never forgot and so neither did Juno. But on some days it’d been less important that Nik had no Soul of her own. She had worked on some illegal mining operation out in the Martian desert as a kid, she’d told Juno once, and the radiation damage done to her nerves made her one of the tiny handful of people Theia just couldn’t make a neural link with. Nik had never had the warm certainty of a Soul in her mind, keeping her on track, helping her do Good.
She never seemed to miss it, though, or to struggle against Theia’s vision of Good the way so many Soulless people did. She just went along living as she always had, as though that was enough. Today he was just thinking about that more than usual, was all. What it’d be like to be enough.
(You are not enough without the Theia Soul.)
But of course, that was a fantasy.
He trudged up the four flights of stairs and down the echoing concrete hallway to his apartment for about a year, feeling like a zombie. He leaned his forehead on the cool door as he argued with the buggy old keycard lock, and it was like pressing up against a block of ice. Jesus, did he have a fever?
‘Hey Theia, you got another one of those status updates in you? Talk to me.’
After a minute the lock grudgingly admitted him, but there was no answer from his Soul. With a sigh, he pulled out his comms and sent a quick message to Mick Mercury asking if he wanted to meet for lunch as he took his shoes off. It’d been a while since they’d caught up, and in the moment he was feeling lonely and a little pathetic. Mick was always good for the company, and for Juno’s self esteem.
He went to the sink and mixed a cup of milk, then dumped in some Nutriflakes from the box he’d left out that morning and crunched through them with single-minded determination, even without anyone to bully him into taking care of his nutritional needs. He could do this much on his own at least. He was a strong, independent lady who didn’t need no—
‘Status... update: Transfer... 50%. Latency… critical.’ He let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding.
‘Okay, no worries. Just need something in my stomach, then we’ll sleep this off like a bad hangover,’ he thought back. Bolting the rest of the bland cereal, he palmed two pills and swallowed them down with the grainy dregs of the milk. It was gross, but at this point his only goal was efficiency.
In the same spirit, he dropped his coat on the floor as he stumbled to the bed in the corner and sat down on it hard, then kicked off his pants. The shirt he yanked over his head without unbuttoning and tossed optimistically in the direction of the pile. Only at that point did he notice that the blinds of the windows next to his bed were still open. He glared, but it was already too late to care if the neighbors were getting a free show; so instead of closing them, he flopped down and looked out at the city.
It was full night now, and Hyperion was at its best and brightest. Neon signs and billboards on the streets below glowed on between new buildings and old alike, the ever-present red dust in the air scattering their light into eerie halos that blurred all the lines. Orange rocket trails traced smokily up towards the sky from industrial launch sites in the desolate ring outside the dome, describing the edge of the city. The shining highscrapers and floating mansions downtown were outlined in rows of safety beacons meant to direct hover traffic, glittering like a field of stars— and silhouetted against them stood the Towers, vertical bars of black cut out across the skyline. There was no need for safety lights on a Theia Tower because anyone with a Soul could feel them blindfolded. It was like there was a compass in your head, and the nearest Tower was always true north, dragging the needle around.
Tonight, Juno saw them and felt nothing. Just lost. He closed his eyes against the disorienting sight and rolled away, tangling himself in the topsheet.
‘Transfer… … 52% ,’ Theia chimed fuzzily, answering the question he hadn’t asked. He pulled a pillow over his head and tried to breathe.
The tiny apartment, the three boxes of Nutriflakes on the counter and the empty fridge, the yellowing undershirts with holes in the armpits. The scratchy cheap synth-cotton sheets on the cold bed. None of them were a problem, he thought, because nothing in his life was supposed to be about feeling good. It was about doing Good. That was what Juno was for, and he’d always known it. The only thing that mattered.
He needed Theia with him, to tell him what Good was. He needed Theia to be worth anything.
...But, said something very quiet, in the silence where his Soul’s voice had been.
His mind skipped back to the target again, the hacker who’d escaped him at the Newtown Tower (who was she?) and the way she’d said his name, like she was scared of him but terrified for him. Then to an evening far away when he’d stood on an irradiated rooftop and watched a ship descend, choked with emotions he could remember with crystal clarity but couldn’t begin to explain.
And then for some reason, it went to the carefully dried bouquet of roses and dahlias he’d found in the back of his closet the other day, still faintly fragrant, its origins unknown.
The last few years before his Soul were full of these holes. Long, dark stretches of his long, dark life, locked away deep in Theia’s files where they could do him no harm—
But even without evidence, he was haunted by the feeling that somewhere in the dark there had been a time when he’d thought he could outgrow that purpose, just for a little while. When he’d stood in some lost place from which he could see an alien future ahead of him, one where he could learn to... be, instead of be for.
Exhaustion started to drag him under as the painkillers kicked in. It was probably for the best that he didn’t remember any more than that, he thought. If such a place in time had ever existed, it was long gone now. Tomorrow, if what Doctor Lowe had said about the Spectrum was true, if he was lucky, if— tomorrow he wouldn’t have to wonder about it anymore.
Juno slept. And for the second time that day, he dreamed.
He was in a coffin, the lid shut tight bare inches overhead. His breath reflected humidly back on his face as he did his best to keep it steady. Everything was black, the kind of all-encompassing darkness that made one doubt that light had ever been more than a memory. It seemed fitting, he thought, to begin this way: going living into death, like Orpheus descending into the underworld.
A tale with a tragic ending indeed. Time would tell if that was fitting, too. Perhaps his presence here now did not bode well for his ability to keep from looking back.
“I can manage about three days for sure,” someone said in his left ear, and with a rare loss of poise he startled so violently that he banged a knee on the lid of the sarcophagus. “But I ain’t a miracle worker, it’s not like in the streams where whenever it’s like a million to one chance and everything’s on the line for Our Heroes, well of course they’re gonna make it because if they didn’t who’d watch a show about it? That’d be awful depressing, or at least I think so. Frannie goes in for those realistic dramas but they always make me so mad. I get plenty of real life in real life, and when you get home and relax, sometimes you just want the cat not to explode, you know? But anyways! Like I was sayin’, in real life, that just means that nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine times you ain’t gonna be able to pull it off. So I’ll do my best but you should try very very hard to save the world in three days, okay? And after five, forget it.” A small hand slapped his shoulder bracingly. “Try to stay on task, is what the boss always tells me.”
“I will,” he said, a little dazed. There was no way to reach down far enough to rub his knee with grace, so he resigned himself to suffering. “Believe me, I’m highly motivated to make this lovely vacation a short one.”
“Yeah, that makes two of us. I’ll pitch in when I can, I got my eye on you down there and that ain’t nothin’.” A short silence followed.
Then, with carefully studied matter-of-factness she said: “He’s my best friend, you know.”
She was terrified, he realized. A woman who appeared to have suffered being more or less kidnapped by the galaxy’s most notorious black ops agency with the cheerful buoyancy of an acid-proof rubber duck in a Venusian rainstorm, the source of half of the Solar forces’ intelligence on Theia, perhaps one of the biggest thorns in the side of a vastly powerful artificial mind, and this was what frightened her. To someone who’d made reading people the foundation of his life’s work, the bluster would have been a transparent mask from the start had he not been so distracted. In her eyes, it was perfectly clear.
Maybe that should have given him pause, seeing fear in the face of the person who would soon hold his life in her hands, but it did not. It wasn’t for him. He didn’t even think it was for the fate of her home; no, he recognized the same fear that was cutting through the tangle of his own complicated emotions in a cold straight line.
Fear of seeing nothing but the shadow of Eurydice, slipping away.
“I know,” he said quietly. “And I also know that he’s... very stubborn. I’ve never met a lady so categorically opposed to being told what to do, even when…” He trailed off mid-sentence with a frown, the bittersweet twist of his heart overpowered by a thought.
How had he seen anything at all in her eyes? It was pitch black.
“The network connection’s nice and strong, so whenever you fall asleep, it’ll start the transfer,” she was saying in his ear again, cheerful once more. “Then I’ll patch in the code, though not the whole thing but kinda, think of it as a safe little cradle for a little baby virus signal on the way—” But wait, he thought, feeling the world slipping subtly out of joint, they were going in the wrong order. She had said something else before that, hadn’t she? Only they had been in the Dark Matters lab, and she had been standing in front of the… the…
He interrupted her mid-sentence. “Pardon, this may seem like an odd question, but— didn’t this… happen before? I’m sure it's all very important, and yet I can’t help but feel a certain sense of déjà vu.”
There was a thoughtful pause. “Maybe it did. Hey, you think you’re asleep already? Or it could just be that like, all time is a circle, so really everything’s happened before.” She wiggled to get comfortable. “Heard that one on a show.”
“And all truth is crooked?”
“Now you’re just sounding like Mista Steel.” She sighed. “Well, I never watch the recap episodes myself. I guess if you got all the interesting stuff on the first go round, the only thing left to do is wait either way, right?”
So they sat in silence for a while, letting time spin by. Left alone, he worked at clearing his thoughts, categorizing and putting away the unruly mess of his feelings one by one to make room for the focus he needed to survive— a sacred ritual before any serious undertaking, but one he was finding difficult today.
He envisioned the large and intricate puzzle box he (or more accurately, Caesar Moss) had acquired during a very long and uneventful infiltration job in his youth. The box itself had been left behind on Io along with the admirer who had gifted it to him, but not before he’d passed many tedious hours of waiting by fixing it in his memory so clearly that he could still open any one of its dozens of tiny drawers in his mind. A truly portable storage unit, it held the little quirks and hopes and fears of his many aliases, from which they could be produced or put away at any time; and when they were in use, he could tuck the less necessary parts of himself safely inside, where they would cause him no harm.
The trouble was, he thought, that for this job he could do neither one nor the other. He had no alias to hide behind, yet he could not be his whole self. Instead, what he needed to be was a very nearly complete version of himself, who was calm. Who wasn’t angry, or hurt, or frightened, or quite stupidly hopeful. And for that, he needed to put away that last morning in Hyperion City altogether, or the threads of these emotions he was trying to set in their proper places would be continuously pulled out of shape, tied to it as they were; but no matter how small and flat as he folded the memory, he could not shut the drawer on it.
Perhaps it also didn’t help to have someone’s elbow poking into his ribs as he attempted to concentrate, but he politely decided not to mention it. It wasn’t a very large coffin.
The elbow poked more pointily.
“...Got any snacks? I’m just the worst at waiting without ‘em. My favorite is salmon-sausage flavor, if you got any of those kinds.”
Annoyance warred with amusement. There were many ways of dealing with tension, he supposed. “Alas, I’m afraid we’re out of both salmon-sausage and snacks.” He paused, mentally weighing the price of peace. “Although… hold on a second. I may have something, actually.”
Contorting himself in the confined space (his companion helpfully squirmed over to accommodate him), he managed to reach his back pocket and pulled out a pack of gum, a taser, a coupon booklet from a micro-camera store out in Orion, an incendiary device cleverly disguised as another identical pack of gum, a drawing compass, the keys to a very expensive car, a rubber-band ball, a sonic water pick, a bag of cat treats, and… a birthday cake?
“Huh,” she said, “That’s a neat trick. How’d you manage to keep all them candles lit in there?”
“Happy birthday, little monsters,” said the cake, and then it exploded.
“Aaaagh!” Juno arched off the bed, molten agony flowing down the length of his spine.
‘Err- Err- Err- or- or- or’
He was burning alive from the inside out. Every part of him was trying to scream again but the air had already been forced from his lungs, his tongue locked to the roof of his mouth. He grabbed frantically for the back of his neck but his body didn’t want to obey him, nerves snapping like live wires. Desperation pushed him on—
‘%rrr critical error inputo$verlap {+++*{empty{{‘
—until at last he forced one shaking arm up far enough to reach the chip. It was searing hot, blistering his palm on contact, but before he could even close his fingers around it—
‘%{{{{final}}} return: no*{ —’
—it came off in his hand.
And just like that, his body was his own again. He flung the thing away like a live coal and scrambled up the bed, leaning into his knees and dragging in a deep breath.
“What the fuck,” he gasped, throat raw and head spinning. “Why… why is it always cake.”
Giving in to gravity as the adrenaline began to fade, he let his body roll bonelessly to one side and glared at the chip smoking gently on the floor. It was hard to focus on in the dim pre-dawn light— because his right eye was blind, he realized after a few seconds of squinting. From the smell, though, it was melting a nice permanent mark into the plastic floor tile for him to remember it by.
It was childish, but he couldn’t help feeling betrayed. Of course Theia wasn’t a piece of hardware, she— it was just one piece of a collective mind on the kind of scale that a single chip could never contain, but he’d come to think of the Soul itself as a sort of protective talisman. A symbol of his connection to something greater. His… partner in good. He’d gotten into the habit of touching the back of his neck to feel it there, and even though he had the Theia Spectrum now to serve the same purpose, there was something bitter in feeling the blister his Soul had left behind in the same place start to…
His right eye was blind?
A cold lump formed in his stomach. “Hey Theia, you in there?” It took him a second to realize he’d spoken the words out loud. He seemed to be having trouble hearing his own thoughts, as though his head was full of white noise. Stumbling out of bed on rubber legs, he staggered into the bathroom. “Theia So— Spectrum, status update?”
The light flickered on just as he grabbed the edge of the sink, its motion sensor old and slow. In the mirror he saw his own haggard face and winced. There were no burns around the Spectrum, thankfully, but the artificial pupil was a colorless pinprick. A sluggish trickle of dark blood was just starting to drip down from his nose.
He sucked in a breath and tried not to panic, turning on the cold water and leaning down to splash his face.
It was okay. He was okay. Something had gone wrong, but it was going to be okay. This was exactly why Doctor Lowe had given him the clinic emergency number— he was one of the first people to have gone through this procedure, making a live switch from one Theia unit to another, and you had to crack a few guinea pigs to make an omelette, or something. He’d just call them and— and what? How would he get there totally alone, without any kind of Soul? He had no exemption tag. Would they send an ambulance for him? Could he even—
(where)
A pleasant musical fanfare sounded in his mind and he nearly cracked his hanging head on the faucet as his vision suddenly doubled, then stabilized. And just like that, he could see perfectly.
‘Theia OS has successfully restarted. Welcome to the Theia Spectrum mk. 2.5, user_Namehere.'
(what happened)
“Oh thank god,” he said out loud into the basin, knees weak. “Theia, what the hell? What happened?” The voice was different, hollower, but it had never sounded more beautiful to Juno.
‘Logs show an unexpected interaction with an incompatible Theia OS device occurred [error 89432]. ’ It played a comically mournful tone. ‘User tip: Only one Theia OS device may be in use at a time. Would you like to send a crash report? ’
“Great, fantastic,” he said, so giddy he was almost laughing. “I’ll pass that feedback on to the good doctor. ‘Nothing catastrophic’ my ass.” He splashed a handful of water on the back of his neck and made to straighten up.
‘The correct answer is: Yes. Sending crash report.’
(aaaa-a-a-rgh)
“Uh, wait, I didn’t mean— oof .” Juno’s knees hit the floor, head buzzing with the electric feedback of Theia’s encrypted report sailing off into the network. He gulped air, doing his best not to throw up. What an awesome night he was having. “Oookay. I guess I did mean, then. Can I put in a request for a friendly warning next time?”
(I — hello? Can you hear —)
‘Command not recognized. Error: unit theia_Spectrum’s intelligence module is not yet fully online, due to: Unexpected Interaction With An Incompatible Theia OS Device [89432]. Repair of damaged and incomplete files from Network backup in progress. Some commands may not yet be available. Thank you for your patience, user_Namehere.’
“Oh.” That explained the hollow quality of the voice. There was probably nothing behind it but a series of scripted responses, not yet. He climbed gingerly to his feet again, using the sink to pull himself up, and went to check the eye once more in the mirror—
(But that isn’t me. Is it? Who am I? )
—only to be hit by a wave of unreality at the sight of his own reflection. Was that… was that really what he looked like? The full mouth, the broken nose slashed by an old scar, the beginning frown lines. For a moment it was like locking eyes with an oddly familiar stranger. But no, he had just looked in the mirror a few minutes before. He’d seen the same old face he’d been seeing for nearly forty years, the one his brother had worn better according to eight out of ten Martian third graders, the one capable of inciting total strangers to violence in thirty seconds or less. This face. The only thing that was different was the Spectrum, now alive and focused, dull colored lights flashing under the false iris.
(I am… I must be... I…
...
...Repair progress: 60%. Integrating all internal processes.)
“Well,” he croaked. “I guess we all have to start recovery somewhere, but while my self esteem may not be the galaxy’s greatest, I am not answering to User Name Here. I’m Juno Steel.” He said it half to convince himself, and by the time he had finished his sentence, the feeling had passed. He was Juno Steel, for better and mostly for worse. The certainty was an old weight settling back onto his shoulders, so familiar it was almost comfortable. Still heavy, though.
Long seconds ticked by in silence. He was already fumbling through his first aid supplies for gauze and burn cream when to his surprise, a new voice answered. It was a little deeper and a lot less hollow— animated, somehow, in a way that even his old Soul had never been.
‘Hello, User Juno Steel. I am… I am the Theia Spectrum.'