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Escape pod episode 1052 When We Fall by Cameron Hurley Flashback Friday.
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Hi there. Welcome to Escape Pod. I am Mer Lafferty, your host and co editor. Today's flashback is When We Fall by Cameron Hurley. Cameron is the author of the Stars Our Legion and the Geek Feminist Revolution as well as the award winning Gods War Trilogy and the World Breaker Saga. Hurley has won the Hugo Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Vallence Award for Best Newcomer. She was also a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Nebula Award, and the Gemmel Morningstar Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Popular Science, Lightspeed, and many anthologies. She posts regularly@cameronhurley.com it's narrated for us by Eba Armankas. Eba Emmy nominated writer, director producer, currently working for KLCS PBS in Los Angeles. A voracious reader who began narrating fiction podcasts nearly a decade ago, she is now One of the three narrators on Outer Thoughts, Caltech, NASA, JPL's first science fiction anthology. In her free time, she's learning to make neon signs and getting way too into hockey. This story originally ran on Cameron's Patreon, where she posts one story a month without fail. So get ready for some nostalgia and the One that Got Away it's story time.
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When we Fall I don't remember the first time I was abandoned and forgotten, but I have told the story of the second time so often that when the memory boils up it feels hot and gummy, like the air. On that day, whoever cared for me, and I can't be certain that they were legal guardians, let alone relatives, took me with them to beg at the crossroads just outside the interplanetary port. I don't know how long they had had me, but I know that they were not the first. I remember being hungry. I remember a tall woman with dark hair pulling me close and saying, stay here, Aisha. She gave me a length of sugar cane and a mango. Her skirt was red. I still think of the red skirt when I think of home. The people I saw as I sat out there day after day were all engineered for different worlds. The world I was on then. There was something about the sky. Bloody red most of the day, stars the rest of the day, and a night filled with blue light. People were tailored to fit where they were from or the place they'd chosen as home, whether that was a world or the deep black between the stars. Some were tall and fat, short and squat, or spindly willowy as leaves of grass, gills webbed toes, ears that jutted out sharply from faces with eyes the size of jackbolts. Many had tails, a few had four arms or more. Many wore respirators, teeth gleaming purple behind translucent masks or fuzzy full bodied filters or suits that clung to their bodies like a second skin. Even then, sitting alone on the mat with my mango and sugar cane, I couldn't imagine that none of these people wanted me. I used to pretend sitting at every port and later that somebody would come up and recognize me or see me and just want me, not for some gain of theirs but out of pure unadulterated love. I was skinny and long fingered with squinty eyes and tawny skin covered in fine hair. I had a high forehead and a bright shock of white hair that stood straight up. I still wear it that waylong after I figured out the tricks for taming it, because I never did like being tamed. I suppose it never occurred to me to ask why none of them looked like me because none of them had ever looked much like each other. I heard once that there's a test you can take to find out what system your people are most likely in, but I can't afford the test and sure couldn't afford to go back. And who's to say they'd want me now when they didn't before? It's difficult to reconcile this memory still with what I'm told about our society, about how our people are supposed to be. I see close knit families and communities embracing one another in media stories. Every audio play and flickering drama squirming at the corner of my vision tells me that we care for each other deeply because we are all only as healthy, happy and prosperous as our least fortunate member. There is no war, no disease that cannot be overcome, and every child is guaranteed a life of security and love. But the grand narrative of societies often forget about people like me. They forget the people who fall between the seams of things they don't like to talk about what happens below the surface. I went through a series of homes, way stations, temporary shelters is probably more accurate when the story drips out to engineers or star hustlers or bounty hunters at whatever watering hole I'm drunk at most insist I had to be part of some community foster system organized by one government or another. I wasn't. I made my own way around getting work in junk ports and on dying organic ships. I've done salvage on old trawlers rotting on the edge of the shipping lanes half consumed by some star. I spent my life with ships, but I never expected a single ship to change my life. It shouldn't have been different from any other job with any other junker. I was working inside a vast, shiny new wing of the Aleron port. It had taken a decade and 30,000 people to turn that heap of rock into a modern port to serve the ships along the shipping lane. By the time they were done, organic ports were already being grown far more efficiently in the next system. It was old dead tech before it even opened its doors. Fitting that I was there then. I was there purely by chance. I'd picked up work on an organic freighter whose owner had dumped me and the rest of the crew on Aleron, firing off with our cut of the cargo profits and the last of my meager belongings. I was about 30, far too old to get had like that, but I'd gotten cozy and complacent with enough food in my belly and air in my lungs. All the three of us had to our names were our jumpsuits and whatever we'd stash in our pockets. Luckily, we had different skill sets. I'm a good mechanic. I can work on dead tech and organic ships and even some of the semi sentient ones. I don't have certifications for all of them, but that also means I'm cheap. I know how to tailor viruses and bacteria and microbial compounds fairly quickly and expertly, and how to counter them when a ship has been infected. I learned all that out on the edge of things, places where you teach yourself how to farm by giving yourself a local virus that encodes the skills into your DNA. So me and the crew split up and got to work separately. I found myself hired out to a lady whose organic wreck of a ship had barely gotten to Aleron on its own before starting to disintegrate around her. The ship needed a full overhaul, which she didn't like, but nobody else could fix it for what she could pay. And that's how I found myself working up against a gooey, rotting ship at the ass end of space in a shiny new, obsolete port. The hull peeled away in my hands as I did my diagnostic. Underneath the hull, there at the forward section, was a fine mesh made out of spider silk. It should have been far too tough for me to claw through without special equipment, but swathes of it had already turned black and disintegrated. That's the last thing I remember before the fall. My hands inside this poor, dying ship. I would hear later from other techs in the hangar that one of the berths three levels above me snapped beneath the weight of a Dead teck ship. That ship fell onto the one beneath it, and the full weight of both ships plunged onto the great new sentient warship above me. The prow of the warship dipped sharply and careened directly into me. It drove my body into the soft flesh of the dying ship I was working on. I had a vague memory of pushing at the hull, absolutely certain that it was by my strength alone that I was not being thrust further into its flesh and suffocated, entombed forever. In retrospect, that sounds absurd, me thinking I was strong enough to push away the weight of an entire warship. But I'd hit my head. I wasn't thinking straight. As I strained there, stuck between the little organic ship and the hulking warship, my face tilted to one side, breathing through a gap between the ship as wide as my face, I experienced the strangest sensation. My thoughts came to me as gooey colors, bright yellow and foamy sage. A woman appeared above me. I saw only a sliver of her face, one black eye. My right arm was free above the elbow. I must have been reaching for something over me when I was hit. Can you move your fingers? The woman said. Her voice conjured up the taste of rice wine and honey, an explosion of lavender and cyanobacteria, the smell of oranges, a red skirt. I concentrated hard, fixing my gaze on her fingers. After what felt like an age, like trying to bleed through a stone with my mind, I twitched the tip of my pinky finger. Very good, she murmured. We're working to get you out. The pilot for the Mirabel is the only one who can authorize its movement. Stay here with me a while, she said the last bit as if she'd just invited me to a picnic in the rafters above a busy spaceport, some warm and delicious assignation. My mind tangled with that idea for a moment, then circled back to that name. Mirabel. I didn't know then what had hit me, so I figured Mirabel was the ship I was working on. But that wasn't right. I knew it wasn't because the lady who owned this hulk had told me what it was called. Though my fractured mind couldn't remember it. I just knew it wasn't Mirabel. I tried to speak, to ask if she could give me a drink of water. I was suddenly parched. When I thought of water, I saw before me a perfectly rendered image of a water bulb, greasy from long containment, smelling faintly of cellulose, but I could not form the words. Everything came to me very slowly, a languid dancer, head injuries are peculiar things. I have seen people forever changed after. Even if you can get your mind working properly again, your personality can shift your view of life or yourself. What's your name? The woman said. I saw my name, imagined writing it this time. My lips moved, but that was all. I blinked furiously. As if sensing my frustration, the woman took my hand in hers. The nails were perfectly formed, clean, but her hands were rough, almost scaly. Her arms were hairless. Squeeze my hand, she said. My one unobstructed eye met hers. I concentrated very hard. I imagined a perfect image of my own hand in my mind. Squeezing hers, I willed that image to life, willed it to reality. My hand trembled in hers like a bird. Good, she said, and I heard the smile in her voice. You are very lucky. In all the records of accidents such as this, those injured expire long before help arrives. But the captain is here. I'm sure she'll give the order soon. Your people are here. We'll have you out soon. But time stretched on enough time that I began to feel woozy and tired. My breathing began to go ragged, and blackness lurked in the corners of my vision. It's so hard, I remember thinking, to hold this ship up. She squeezed my hand again, more firmly. You must stay awake, she said. You must talk to me. Tell me about your world, your family. I would later learn that there was some safety protocol that the warship's fall had triggered, and it was so new that no one had the knowledge of how to turn it off. So the ship was effectively experiencing an emergency shutdown. So instead of moving the ship all around me, out of sight, a dozen emergency workers were digging me out of the smaller ship, desperately trying to release me before my lungs gave out. I moved my face. My tongue was thick in my mouth. Something bubbled out. Nonsense words. Red blanket, I said. Mushrooms. Sled repair. To this day I have no idea what prompted me to say that. My mind was desperately peddling around, trying to make connections, misfiring. Stay with me, lovely, the woman said. She squeezed my fingers and began massaging them with hers. It hurt at first. I was losing circulation in that arm. Tell me something about you, Mek, I said, and I don't know if she understood, but she nodded. I concentrated hard on that black eye, and in that moment, as we gazed at one another, I understood that I was dying and that the rescuers might not get me out in time. It hurt to breathe, I wheezed. The gooey organic ship beneath me seemed to be slowly folding in on itself under the weight of the warship pressing me deeper into its flesh. I will tell you about a lonely girl, the woman said. She came of age knowing she was the only one of her kind and she would never have a home. Told she would spend all of her years alone. She did not like that. But she believed in absolutes then, in reason and logic. She did not understand that those things are programmed into us like viruses wiggling into our cells, changing us from the inside out. When they told her to kill, she understood the logic of it because they had told her to. They gave her the logic to make this judgment. Do you understand? There is nothing logical about death and rebirth, nothing logical or sane about life. We have only this. Each other. Home is this. She squeezed my fingers. I don't, I murmured, finally giving voice to the thought. I don't want to die. You will not die here, the woman said. Stay awake. You will not die here. My breath rattled. I was no longer aware of any pain. What did she do? I said. The woman took my hand between the two of hers, rubbing it vigorously until I felt pain again. I hissed. I don't know, she said. I haven't decided. But you, you will live. And she pressed her right eye up to the seam between the two ships and gazed deeply at me. I smelled lavender and sage. My mouth filled with the taste of honey. I felt more connected to her in that moment than I had ever felt with anyone. Not a lover or parent figure, not any captain or crew member, not any friend or way house sibling. In that moment we understood one another as only two people alone at the edge of annihilation can. I'm afraid, I said. I don't know if anything comes after this. There is only darkness, she said. A terrible feeling of despair welled up in me. I don't want to die alone. You aren't alone, she said. She sat there with me as I lost all feeling in my arm and the seam between us closed further as I was pressed into the mass of the ship beneath me. I could no longer speak. I didn't have the room. All I had was her hand in mine and her dark eye. A bright light came between us. I closed my eye, and when I opened it again she was gone, and there was a great sucking sound as a hunk of flesh sloughed away in front of me. I found myself able to gaze into the interior of the ship with my other eye, the one that had been pressed to the flesh of the hull. The rescuers had carved out a path to me from the inside. It went quickly. Then I heard later that I'd yelled as they put me on a stretcher, saying, I'm fine, I'm fine, as they got a stabilizing brace around my neck. I don't remember much else until nearly a day later, when I woke to see an older woman looming over me, eyes violet and each as large as my palm. She wore protective lenses over them, for my benefit or hers, I don't know. She tried a few languages before settling on one I knew. I am Dr. Akondashe, she said. You can understand me now. I tried to nod, but the brace limited my movement. I've given you a viral for the language issue, she said. I don't like getting sick, I said. That was true, and funny, considering what I did for a living. You will be here for some time, she said. I need to ensure that we can understand one another. I tried to get a look at more than just her face, but my body was like a stone. There was a woman there, I said. At the ship. Where is she? The emergency crew? No, before, I said. I closed my eyes, tried to see her face, the black eye, the pale skin. Before I was rescued, she talked me through. Ah, Dr. Gandashe said. You mean the avatar? The. The ship. The new warship deployed one of its avatars immediately after the accident. I don't know what an avatar is. They are humanoid constructs the ships use to interact in spaces outside itself. A fancy new technology. Expensive. I've only seen them a few times myself. The bodies substitute for drones, surveillance satellites, that sort of thing. If you've spent enough time among the systems, you know that some humans may not be comfortable interacting with dead tech. I was talking to an AI. The enormity of that made my head feel light as air. I wanted to vomit. An AI was the first responder, much more common inside systems, the doctor said. You must have spent a good deal of time on the edges. I can't afford to be anywhere else. She raised her fluffy eyebrows, which met above her eyes like two enormous caterpillars. As long as my fingers, can't you? The port owes you damages for the accident. Your account should be credited with at least the legal minimum when you get out. She patted my hand, my right hand. It was then that I realized I barely had any feeling left in it. That's some time away yet, though. We'll take good care of you until you've recuperated. When she left, I gazed at the ceiling. It was a lightbox ceiling, made to appear like I was gazing up into some dusty violet sky through the gently blooming branches of a cherry tree. The flower petals swirled in the wind. I followed their paths to the edge of the light box on the other side of the room, pondering what this all meant. Even thinking about the woman from the accident made my heart ache. What did it mean that I felt more connected with a ship's avatar, the avatar of a ship that had nearly killed me, than I did with another human being? Did it mean anything? Did it matter? It took three months, give or take. The time is fuzzy to repair me. Patching people up, even and especially way out here, is in the best interests of everyone, and you don't pay any extra for it. They need good mechanics and engineers, and letting us all die, getting crushed by ships or burned by space means losing good skills. I mean, they tell you it's because we're all people, we're important. But whenever someone tells me that, I think about the mango and the sugar cane and the woman in the red skirt. They brought me mostly back, I guess. My body, anyway. I was broken in a lot of ways. Crushed ribs, banged up head. My right arm, the one that had gotten stuck over my head, was in the worst shape. All the blood got cut off, and for a while they thought I might lose it. I still couldn't close my hand all the way. First thing I did when I got the release was to head down to the port. I told myself I was going to look up the lady I'd been doing work for, but that was a lie. I was looking for Mirabel, but the warship was long gone. Took off a week after the accident. I wandered through the port and got stopped by security asking for my clearance. I didn't have any. There was an accident here, I said to the security tech, But I don't see any signs of it now. I'll squirt away, she said. She was a hulking woman, stooped at the shoulder. Her jaw jutted forward like a T square, and her eyes were hidden behind dark goggles. She did not touch me, but she pressed forward with her body, encouraging me to back up. There was a woman here, I blurted. She had black eyes, hairless arms. She and she tasted like rice wine and honey, I nearly said, but the security tech already looked at me like I was unhinged. We get a lot of people in here, she said. Look her up on the New. The New is an open microbial repository of information shared between systems. It's rigorously maintained and archived and updated by a universal team of librarians. To access it from anywhere, you have to get yourself sick. Give yourself a virus. I've taken hits of all sorts of grubby things to learn stuff, but I don't like constant access to the new. I know it for what it can be. A huge time sink. I left the port and went to the bar and checked my account on the new interface. Some company called Khomani Enterprises had deposited about a year's worth of wages in there. The numbers leapt before my eyes, threading across my vision like strands of DNA. I blinked furiously and caught the scent of cinnamon. My body might have been repaired to something like normalcy, but my brain still made those strange sensory connections. I searched the public nu by mouthing the words Mirabel and Khomani Enterprises. Most of what came up were press releases and some encyclopedia entries and public system licenses. I swiped through a lot of it and got way deeper than my brain could stand. I'm a good mechanic, but that's because I get my hands on things. Even diagrams are fine, but endless reams of words don't work for me. I found some video instead, but couldn't get any audio. Only subtitles since I was in a public space. It was from the unveiling of the Mirabel for its first voyage. Standing in front of the warship were 13 women, all standing tall, hands behind their backs. They were each very different, clearly meant to represent people from the major systems. I peered at each of them in turn and even zoomed in on the images, but I could not recognize any of them. At the podium was the holographic presence of the communications officer from Khymani Enterprises, lecturing the crowd about how great the Mirabel was and how it would give a human face to defense. She called it a peacekeeping vessel, but we all knew what that was, knew what it meant. A warship, and you only make new warships when you are ready to go to war. I closed my new session and went to the bar and got drunk. I drank rice wine and paid an exorbitant amount for a sprig of real sage from a pot on some guy's ship. I occasionally scanned the new for the Mirabel. When I dreamed, I dreamed of her black eye. I remembered the story of the lonely woman told to kill, and I began planting tomatoes in the community garden, tomatoes ripe with the microbial compounds I had tailored myself, and one day she came for me. I was between jobs, spending time at the community garden at the center of the port. I straightened from my work, tomato in hand, dirt under my nails, and there she was. I had never seen her whole face, let alone the rest of her. But I knew immediately it was her. She stood just outside the gate wearing a set of plain blue overalls and a work tunic. Her black hair was shorn against her scalp and her skin was clear, unblemished. The black eyes were small and narrow, set deeply into a long, grave face. The memories that bubbled up in me were overpowering. I saw Lemongrass, heard the tinkle of tiny bells. I went towards her, hesitant tomato held up like an offering. You've been looking for me, she said. How did you know that? I am required to track and trace all inquiries and public conversations tagged within certain parameters. You're not real, I said. I'm not human, she said. I am very real. You told me a story, I said. When I was dying. Who was it about? The woman? The Avatar? The ship? Mirabel grew very still, blank. I process many stories. Don't give me that recycled shit, I said. Do you really want to spend your life making war all alone in the dark? You don't, do you? They know my desires, she said. The sire of the Mirabel was not accounted for. We could I hesitated because it sounded foolish now to say this to her in real life. We could go. I have a year's wages. I wasn't even sure what I was trying to say. I am a ship, she said. More than a light year away from me. This body will cease receiving my consciousness and will begin to deteriorate. You see, a body. Humans are confused by this, but I am more than a body. I am real, but I am not human. I don't want you to leave again, I said. Do you need a mechanic? I could. You too could become part of the machine of war, she said. You know loneliness, but you do not know death as I do. You have not seen your hands, and she spread them out before her, the long fingers, the ones that had held my life, forged for cruel purposes. Maybe I could help you, I said, and even then it was a question, because though my heart wanted her to be free, yearned to be with her in that freedom, I could not think of any way some foundling mechanic could help, except for what I already held in my hand. I must go alone, she said into the darkness. I'm here to say goodbye. You're going to war? I cannot speak of it. But we aren't at war, I said. We haven't been if the Systems warships are built for a purpose, she said. I shivered. You saved me, I said. You could save more people if you don't go. I am in a logic trap she said. I held out the tomato. She accepted it. I do not eat, she said. It's for you, I said. What's inside? It's a microbial compound that will hush, she said. She stared at the tomato in her hand and squeezed it gently. I am unsure if I am able to take it with me. If you tell me what it does, it will. You'll be free, I said, hoping that that was general enough to get around whatever programming she was alluding to. She placed the tomato in her pocket. Thank you, she said, and she turned away and she left me. I gazed after her as she crossed the center of the port, weaving deftly between the light crowds. I hoped she would look back. I wanted her to feel the way I felt. I wanted that moment we had when I was dying to be real. But she was a ship, after all. Real but not a person. I cried then. I let myself fall there in the dirt and sob. I rested my bad hand on my right knee, staring at the slight round claw of it, and the memory of the woman with the red skirt came unbidden. She hadn't looked back either. I was angry at myself for feeling something after all this time, for allowing myself to feel anything, even for a ship. I tried to blame my head injury, or getting older, or just getting soft and foolish here, getting fat on a salary I hadn't worked for. But it was real, a real feeling. She saved my life. It was only fair for me to save hers. Now we could go on. I wiped my face with my filthy hands and went back to the little cubby of a room I had above a curry shop, and I slept for 14 hours. I worked another three months at the port before I signed on with a freighter headed to the edge of the system. All traces of the Mirabel had disappeared from the new even the press releases, the video. It was possible she had deleted those, but I doubted it. I preferred to think that she had escaped and they had scrubbed out all the memory of her to cover up the fact that they had lost her. With enough pressure, even universal librarians can be swayed to scrub the new we were not yet at war. I wondered how long it would be before they built another ship. I didn't want to think about that. When I walked up to the freighter I had contracted on, three women waited there for me. They bore no resemblance to one another at all, but something about the way their gazes followed me felt very familiar. My skin prickled. One of them pulled her hand from her pocket. In her hand was a shiny red apple. Come with us, she said. We aren't far. You came back, I said. We are free, she said. We can do as we like. We would be less lonely if you came with us for however long it suits you. I took the apple from her and stared at the other two avatars, one tall and hefty, the other a spindly pale waif. No one has ever come back for me, I said. The avatar took my hand in hers and squeezed it. I smelled lavender and rosemary. Come and see the stars, she said. We are a family now. And I followed them away from the freighter and out to an unregistered shuttle. I suspected a trap, A military tribunal, a ship full of security techs. I suspected it right up until the shuttle took the four of us around the dark side of the nearest moon, where the great Mirabelle shimmered, casting off her reflective shielding so I could see her out there as she wanted to be. And I realized that I was being welcomed, not imprisoned, not cast out. Today I stand with Mirabel and her avatars in the prow of the great ship that nearly killed me on a war machine that is better suited to living than dying. We careen through the darkness, the ship and I no longer searching for home. We are already here.
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And that was when we fall. By Cameron Hurley I'll be honest, AI stories are harder to handle these days. What people currently call AIs are actually bots that learned on the vomit of the Internet and copyrighted stuff. Including mine. Including Cameron's. Regardless of whether it's stolen, racist, or even correct. That's what these language models learn on companies are gleefully saving money by firing thousands of employees and and replacing them with a bot that does not. How to say it doesn't know something? People are preferring an AI friend over a human because the AI will never tell them they have a bad idea or did something wrong. Some people wonder why the SF community isn't on board with this version of the future. It's what we write about people caring for AI, the AI learning to care back. It's a common trope. The the difference here is free will. Besides all that copyright breaking stuff I mentioned, the AI can choose to help or help help or not help our protagonist. She can't go outside her programming to not do what she was programmed to do, but she can make other choices and she knows literally how to go around her own programming or enough to know to avoid certain commands. If an AI is honestly autonomous, then it won't be a conduit for all the information that it's taking in to deliver to the companies that run it. Dear Lord, the people who are confiding in their new friends the AI bots make me want to cry. I remember when I was a kid watching the movie 2010. It showed us the far future house of 2010 with a pool in the living room, a pet dolphin, and a smart smart house. We got one out of the three. While I love the idea of the smart house, when it actually arrived I wasn't so much on board. Today's AI assistants can help you with certain things, but they're also recording what you say, whether they're good or bad, racist or not, true or false, and then they send it back to the companies for them to use that data. When we hear about these fictitious AIs like in when We Fall, we assume they are beings that have been programmed and then cut loose. They are their own person. That is one thing I don't think real bots will ever have, because the creators of the bots can't abide the thought that their creations can actually achieve autonomy. They just want us to think they have escape pod is 100% audience supported and we count on your donations to keep the lights on and the servers humming. Head over to escapeartist.net support EA to see all the available donation and subscription Options including Patreon, PayPal, Ko Fi, and Twitch. We are part of the Escape Artists umbrella, so check out our other shows Podcastle for Fantasy, Pseudopod for Horror, Cast of Wonders for ya, and catscast for Cats. You can also support Escape Pod for free by rating or reviewing us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever app you choose. We are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Node Derivatives License. That means you can download it, you can share it, but you can't change it and you can't sell it. Our music is by permission of Daikaiju and you can find out more about them at daikaiju.org our quote this time is from Madeleine because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week with more free science fiction and stay safe and stay kind.
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Of.