Amazon Cybernetic War Sci-Fi Story
io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Mother’s Hip” by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff. Enjoy!
Mother’s Hip
Table of Contents
By Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff
High above the Amazon Rainforest, Hynd circled, her massive wingspan only visible by the shadow she cast on the battlefield below. She felt the wind pass across her wings, whispering of torrential rain coming; not her concern, so far above the clouds, but she packaged the data and shot it down to the comms base at ground level so the grunts would know what was coming.
Hynd never cared about the grunts, not really, not when they were so far beneath her, their bodies so different to her own. Her sixty-four wombs swelled, automated factory arms rapidly piecing her children together.Mother to a swarm of carbon fibre kids, their IFF tags dancing and playing amongst the trees, hunting anarchists through the rainforest with deadly precision.
Sheena went dark and Hynd’s heart broke for the eighty-first time that day. She was born with one weak rotor,but she was such a clever little girl,rewrote her firmware to compensate,outlasted her broodmates by more than an hour.
A tear dissipated from the heat of Hynd’s cybernetic eyes before it could roll down her cheek. Sheena should have been an engineer, but hynd would have loved her just as much if she’d started a punk band, got drunk underage, and tried to pass off an obvious hangover as “just a stomach bug.”
Three more of her children were shot out of the sky: davey, nicola, and Grant-anarchist combat heuristics upgraded again. A new software update seeped into the back of her head, just in time for her gestating brood. She would be right down ther with her children if she could, if it would help keep them safe, but improved software was all she could offer them.
Her ripe wombs distended, the bomb bay doors along her fuselage opening, air rushing inside her like a chill breath into the lungs. Her babies dropped, two-by-two, their little aerodynamic bodies shaped for the long fall. Half of them would extend their wings and rotors, burning energy to halt their drop and fly buzzing into the fray. The others would extend fins and let their suicidal impulses lead them nose-first into anarchist heavy armour and hidden bunkers.
If only she could hold them, she thought. If only she could hold them to her hip, bounce them until they smiled and squeed. If only she could talk them out of it. But no matter how much she pled, she could not stop them. They were born to die,and still each death was a dagger in her beating heart.
• • •
The woman steps up onto the small stage, carrying a small, pink valve amplifier, a noisebox, and a bla
Sometimes the wind would hit like waves, Hynd’s internal structure shuddering with the force. She would clench her teeth,as though she could hold it all together with just the strength of her jaw.
Her babies grew inside their wombs; Hynd set them to birth inside her hold and wait, then she set subroutines to track weather patterns. She would give her children the best start in life she could, without a wayward gale throwing them off course.
She shifted direction, cut the wind shear enough for her bones to stop rattling, and checked her sensors. Nothing else up this high but thin wisps of cloud moving beneath her in parallax, the ground far, far below.
incoming signal like an itch inside her ear canal, so deep she wouldn’t be able to reach it with her pinkie finger even if her hands weren’t splayed to either side, needlelike connectors inserted under her fingernails, linking her organic nerve fibres to the ship’s peripheral cybernetic nervous system.
With an autonomic reflex like scratching, hynd accessed the signal and ran it through a battery of decryption algos. It unlocked almost promptly, old code from early in the war-the first one Amazon’s Coding Auxiliary was able to crack.
“-want your children to be able to breathe?” a woman said.
The signal was weak, quiet.Hynd boosted the power to her comms array and the voice continued, clearer, like the woman was standing in the cockpit beside her altar, speaking directly into her ear.
“We’re all desperate. We’re unemployed and scraping by however we can,or otherwise we’ve got jobs but we’re overworked and underpaid.It’s hard to think about the future when it seems like there isn’t one. But these are the lungs of the world, and we have to save them.”
“Hello?” Hynd said, her voice a rasp, scraping raw from her throat.
“Holy fuck.Hello. Who is this?”
“Lilith-class Mothership, Hynd Revel.”
There was silence on the line but for the soft crackle of interference.”No shit, I’m speaking to a mothership?” When Hynd didn’t respond the woman continued. “I’m glad you answered-I was getting sick of repeating the spiel.”
“who are you?” Hynd asked.
“Sorry, how rude of me.I’m Peta. I’m with the anarchists, down on the ground somewhere beneath you. We can help, y’know. amazon does all kinds of shit to their soldiers and pilots. We’re figuring out how to undo a lot of their control software, give peopel their selves back.
“I mean,how do you know you even want to fight? How much of this is you,and how much is their programming?”
The entire topside of Hynd’s fuselage was panelled in reinforced photovoltaics,gleaming shining beneath the South American sun. It felt like warmth, like comfort food, but it wasn’t enough to keep her in the air indefinitely. She birthed another litter of children; these ones she would be able to keep close-for a time. They formed a defensive grid around their mother; their pure, innocent love demonstrated in a willingness to die for her. Always. Like so many had.
She began her slow descent, circling downwards in a kilometre-wide spiral, toward the resource platform floating beneath the cloud line. Her heart beat faster, harder, a siren whined in her bowels. She was most vulnerable when refuelling, even with her children surrounding her and the platform’s autoturrets scanning for threats.
She broke through the heavy blanket of clouds, the ground revealing itself beneath her – the brilliant green foliage, the myriad brown craters formed by her fallen children and other ordnance, the stark black char of burnt trees, bodies, cybernetics, and heavy armour.A golden blade cut through the air far below-a Revenant.
Her superstructure shuddered, or she did; the Revenants were a vicious fusion of flesh and machine, suicidal in their approach to combat-the very antithesis of herself and her body, made only for creating life. A kind of life,at least.
The hair on the back of her neck stood on end and Hynd realised the platform’s turrets were tracking her approach, twin-barrels like void-black eyes staring at her. She initiated a handshake, the turrets turning away as her security codes were accepted. An articulated arm extended from the platform’s reactor hub carrying the power umbilical, the connector slotting inside her with a slight gasp from the back of her throat. The high-intensity recharge was awkwardly erotic when parsed through her chimeric body, cybernetic and organic signals blurring together. Whether it was an accident of her design or intentional engineering, she had never asked. She knew she would get no answer.
“Sorry I haven’t been in touch.”
Hynd started at the voice suddenly speaking in her ear. Most days, her only conversation was with the wind.
“Peta?” Hynd said.
The anarchist responded: “The one and only. Your side took out our long-range transmitter, so I couldn’t reach you.”
Jane. It wasn’t just hynd’s side that had done it, but Hynd’s child. Jane was stubborn but creative; the intricate arabesque she danced in her descent was elegant and stunning. A parting gift and her entire life’s work. That and the explosion.
“I guess you must be under the clouds now then,” Peta said.
“That facts is classified.” Hynd hadn’t spoken-hadn’t meant to speak, the words forced from her mouth by some autonomic security conditioning. It was not the fi
“This is you, isn’t it?” Hynd shouted into comms.
“What?” Peta said, sounding confused. A good actor-Hynd had to give her that.
Hynd rotated her VTOL engines and dumped all power into forward thrust. Slowly she pulled away from the platform, recharge arm stretching to hold on to her.
The Revenant launched two volleys of micromissiles, explosions tearing through the reactor’s shielding. The nimble craft roared through the opening, disappearing from sight.
Explosion like a thundercrack, the cloud of flames engulfing her children, scorching her wings as she fled. She tore the recharge arm free as the resource platform canted grossly and began to fall toward the forest below.
• • •
She starts to feel self-conscious after “Fault Line on the Moon,” the song she moved into so effortlessly after “On Angel’s Wings.” It talks about the pride she felt for her daughter who took out the transmitter . . . What was her name again? It can be hard to recall those days now, her body, her entire physiology, altered again to something resembling her form from before the war. She runs a hand through her hair,feeling the scar tissue from where they filled in the dataports they removed from her skull.
She calms herself by looking around the bar. Nobody is paying attention to her anyway. What bothers her more is that the trans lesbians appear to be fighting. the girl she’s calling crystal because of the tag on her collar doesn’t want to leave. But the others . . .? She looks away. It’s not my fault, is it? Have they figured out the sort of person I used to be?
“This next song is about regrets,” she says, her heart pounding as she stomps the footswitch for her noisebox twice to cue up the next beat. Crystal shoots a longing look at her while her friends push her off the table and towards the door. “Believe me, I have many.”
The glamourous woman at the bar is staring at her intensely. She couldn’t tell before, but her eyes are cybernetic too: natural-looking, SOTA, the irises blinking red to show she’s recording. She briefly thinks about telling her to stop, but on some level, she knows she signed up for this as a performer.
The woman with the guitar swallows nervously. “Anyway . . . This one’s called ‘Friendly Fires.'”
The noisebox is a tiny FM synthesizer when played right. Her staccato high hat recontextualised into a skittering simulacrum of a crackling fire, interspersed with bass drum kicks to give the sense of drone bombs going off throughout the song, which itself is upbeat and melodic by comparison.
“I could have loved you if you were a monster,” she sings as she plays a simple pop four-chord progression on her guitar. Her voice and d
The red dot on Hynd’s radar seemed to ignore the Wraiths on approach, continuing to trail the bends of the river. she connected to the Wraiths’ video feeds,both lenses zoomed in tight to track the Revenant: a stripped-down silver arrow,customised to prioritise speed rather than power. Its only armament was an auto-tracking gun turret, and a mesh satellite dish had been jury-rigged onto the rear end of its fuselage. The ship was painted in a pattern of caiman scales, with a grinning lizard man adorning the nose.
With one eye on the Wraith feeds, Hynd kept flying toward her target coordinates, still unsure of what it was she would be hitting, what objective was worth the lives of so many of her children.
Quickly the Revenant broke from its path, zagging inhumanly fast away from the river, doubling back. One of her escorts was hit before the pilot even had a chance to react, explosive shells tearing through its fuselage. The second escort moved to engage, the dogfight an abstract dance of two dots on Hynd’s tracking screen.
One dot. Another escort downed.
“Hynd, is that you?”
“Peta?” She wasn’t sure how the anarchist was contacting her, so high above the clouds.
“Things are getting desperate down here, Hynd. You must understand.”
“What are you saying?” Hynd asked. Her focus was on the tracking screen-the Revenant now gaining altitude rapidly, her last two escorts holding position, waiting to meet it.
“There’s a transmitter on that Revenant,” Peta said. “We’re going to undo what they’ve done to you. We’re going to free you from their conditioning. It’s just software-a package nestled somewhere between your brain and the mothership’s command and control systems.”
“You can’t do that,” Hynd said, uncertain why Peta’s words struck more fear into her heart than the approaching Revenant.
“You’ll thank me when this is over, hynd, I promise you.”
The Revenant broke through the clouds, turret firing an arcing line of tracers through the air; one Wraith banked too late, its wing chewed up by explosive shells.Hynd watched from her own hull cameras as the UCAV changed form, wings canting further back, a second fin emerging from the tail. Its afterburners kicked in and the ersatz missile streaked toward the Revenant, missed, and kept rocketing down toward the ground; the Offensive Self-Destruct mechanism designed to ensure no more Wraiths could be captured and converted into anarchist Revenants.
“Just relax,” Peta said. “It’ll be over soon.”
The Revenant was close enough now for the anarchists to force a connection, brute force handshake breaking through the first layers of ICE with ease. Hynd’s mind raced with background processes, but there was nothing she could do, no active countermeasures to trigger, just the layers and layers of programming that made up the interface between her meat and her true, full self.
The demons rained down. Hynd screaming mindlessly, engulfed by rage, as explosions boomed and bloomed across the rainforest below.
• • •
She never found out if she killed Peta, but she destroyed the base the anarchist had been transmitting from-Amazon After-Action Experts were able to determine that much.Her “outburst,” as they called it, killed as many Amazon contractors as anarchists, and burned down another hundred hectares of rainforest before the Cloud Punchers brought her down.
“You filled my heart with napalm,” Hynd sings,”then they tore me from the sky . . .”
She was certain she’d die when she hit the ground, wind screaming through the ragged holes in her fuselage, warnings and sirens blaring in every part of her. She didn’t care. She embraced death, longed to be with her children, with the lie of them that had kept her going.That had given her the only purpose that had mattered in her entire life.
“And as I fell, I screamed, found their names scored from my mind .. .”
The lie of her children. The lie of motherhood. The lie of her life.
“And every tree and animal I burned was shaped like you.”
But she survived. they yanked her out of the wreckage and patched her up-it was in her contract, even if she’d broken it a hundred times over with her indiscriminate bombing. They gave her a dishonourable discharge and released her back into the world.
“And even if I somehow took them all it wouldn’t do.”
Her voice echoes, captured by the noisebox and spun off, quietly succumbing to silence as she strums the song’s final chord.
“Thank you,” Hynd says gently.”and I’m sorry. Have a great rest of your night.”
Locked in reminiscence of her painful past, she doesn’t notice the glamourous woman approach her as she’s closing her guitar case.
“marvelous set, angel,” the other woman drawls. “You have a beautiful voice. Powerful lyrics too; I’d call them ‘poetic’ even.”
Hynd looks up at the other woman. She’s a little older, probably in her early forties, with her gray-streaked dark brown hair tied back into a neat ponytail, and smile lined, pale blue eyes.
“I’d like to help yo
Corey Jae White is a published author of science fiction and fantasy. She is best known for her works in the VoidWitch Saga and the novel Repo Virtual.
Published Works
- Repo Virtual: A novel.
- The VoidWitch Saga: A series consisting of:
- killing Gravity
- Void Black Shadow
- Static Ruin
Short Fiction Appearances
white’s short fiction has been featured in several prominent science fiction and fantasy magazines,including:
- Strange Horizons
- Interzone
- Analog