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Cellulose & Steel	By : Not-Taylor Category: Misc Books > FemmeSlash Views: 1028 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own HDG or its characters and I don't make money from this work.

Chapter List
- 87
- 88
- 89
Wandering into the sitting area outside Verda’s bedroom, Ember finds the affini playing what looks like an extremely complicated version of tic-tac-toe on the descending screen. The grid of grids is decorated with a number of colored shapes, each occupying a different cavity. Verda is intently focused, so Ember doesn’t disturb her, instead watching until she finishes the game. Since it isn’t possible to see what her vines are doing, shapes seem to appear randomly on the screen every few seconds as Verda types, until the screen pings and becomes tinted gold. There doesn’t seem to be any special pattern to the final distribution. Letting out a satisfied hum, Verda turns to look at her prisoner.
“How is your little friend, sprout?”
“She’s fine. I’m still thinking about something, but I have the situation under control.”
“Really? You aren’t nervous?” The weed props her arm on the back of the couch, looking levelly at Ember.
“No. I’m not overconfident, though. I’m being careful.”
Verda smiles. “Good. Are you ready for breakfast? Today is yet another full day.”
“What’s happening?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Just tell me, Verda.”
“If you’re feeling up to it, we’re going to investigate your ship’s memory storage.”
Ember shudders. Her memories… She has no idea what’s there, or if anything’s there. Is it Affini lies, thoughts she’d tried to suppress, Ginger, junk data, or something else? Stars know what she’ll find. Maybe the shame of how she acted without what’s hidden there will be too much to tolerate. After so long… It could be memories of before, too. There was no need to store things like family holidays or world history when there was a war to fight.
Then again, there could be literally nothing that’s properly Song’s. The idea that she’d somehow lost a part of herself to the interface seems a bit contrived and fake. Still, hypothetically, there might be a complete copy of her neurology lodged in her onboard memory, so she ought to at least check. That doesn’t make any possible outcome less scary, but she can’t let Verda know that.
“When do we leave?”
“After breakfast. Hurry, since we have to be home at some point. Evlen and his mistress are coming to visit.”
“When?”
“In the afternoon. Cia Endiwai said that she would message me as soon as they left, which would give us a couple of hours of notice.”
“Oh.”
“How would you like a bagel? I was reading earlier about how terrans used to put everything on them.”
“Everything?”
“That’s right, including inedible substances.”
“I’m fairly sure that never happened.”
“No? Why don’t you tell me what you’d like on yours, then,” the affini says as she gets up and moves toward the compiler.
The path to wherever Verda is leading is oddly familiar, reminding Song of the way they’d gone what feels like decades ago, when they first took the Ides of November for a ride. She remembers the cold numbness that filled her at the time as her circuits were starting to short out due to lack of appropriate sensory data. With each step, the sensor dysphoria starts to return, indifferent to how far back it was driven by Affini engineering. A familiar chill emanates from Song’s core, reminding her of just how vulnerable she is right now, stripped of her polymer infused hull and the weapons systems she’d never expected to truly be without again.
A beaked floret resembling an owl absent mindedly passes in front of them, stopping in surprise as they cross its field of view. No affini is guarding it from the consequences of its xenodrug inspired wanderings. Song wonders whether that might’ve been her, were she normal and weak. A “good girl.” That’s what Verda must never dare to call her again. Song clenches her fists and vines to fortify herself.
Though it doesn’t look anything like home, the pale green of the morning sky is strangely comforting, masking the ship’s unnerving thoughts in an alien aura and preventing them from taking too much of Song’s attention. She’s grateful for that, in a way. For reasons beyond her, today is making her anxious. She just needs to hold herself together, and by the end she’ll be better than she was before, more intact, and more of herself. It’ll be easy, or so she hopes.
Instead of going all the way to the bow or stern, where so many ships seemed to dock, Song finds herself being led somewhere generally toward the middle, by a park larger than the footprint of the apartment building she’d lived in before joining the Cosmic Navy. Despite lacking a good way of judging those sorts of distances, she’d say it’s a couple of hundred meters in each direction, perhaps a bit bigger. Unlike the park by Verda’s house, there are no trees or hills, leaving the area flat and grassy, interrupted by a few bushes under which florets lie, with the false impression that nobody beyond could see them.
With silent abruptness, Verda turns to one of the buildings as they pass it, opening the front door. Song stops quickly despite the lack of a leash restraining her movement, looking up at the mass of concrete before her. Unlike most Affini buildings, this one is entirely of Terran architecture and building materials. The dead, flat style reminds her of home in a way little else has on Ruby Trunk. The pilot’s thoughts are brought to the endless forests of buildings just like this one, but taller, that covered most of the habitable part of Terra. Most would have advertising too, but this one was even more stark than that. Here, there’s nothing but cold, unfeeling concrete, an incentive to always work hard in hopes that someday you might not live and work there, that there are real benefits to being a good employee and trying your best to become a billionaire. The Protestant work ethic, a protest against communism and other ideologies of laziness that hadn’t built so imposing a structure as that. The Affini built one and put it in space as a novelty, probably because one of them thought it looked interesting or wanted to win a slave’s devotion.
Shaking off the uneasy thoughts, Song follows her captor through the rotating doors labeled with a sign indicating that you shouldn’t try to go through without an affini. Since Verda’s on the other side and since Song’s gone through doors like these plenty of times, she ignores the dire warning and walks through. Nothing bad happens, as she knew perfectly well it wouldn’t. An affini perched on a trellis in the room beyond rustles with admiration, drawing a glare from Song as she goes to where Verda is waiting by the elevator.
“You didn’t teach me numbers,” Song says as Verda presses a button with a squiggle trapped inside an octagon on it.
“We can do that tonight, if you’d like. They’re not complicated. I think…”
She stares thoughtfully at the wall as they ascend to the rhythmic gong sound of the elevator. When it stops, Song thinks they’re on the sixth floor, but she has no idea if that’s true or if she miscounted somehow, or maybe they only count every second floor. Who knows how these xenos operate. The hall they arrive at has a reddish bark floor that may or may not be covered in a carpet of moss that doesn’t yield under Song’s feet. The walls are made from a stained wood, very unlike what she’s used to on Terra. Not that that’s likely to still exist…
Verda gestures to the second door on the left, which she opens and sends her prisoner through silently. The interior of wherever they’d gone isn’t much different from the hall, aside from the office furniture. A desk, some chairs, and what looks like a hair salon chair next to the chair behind the desk feel surreally out of place, being of Terran design in such an alien environment. Actually, she wouldn’t be surprised if the weed who owned this office had typed “chair Terra” and “desk Terra” into a compiler and accepted the first thing it spat out.
Much to Song’s surprise, the desk’s chair is empty. Verda calmly sits in one of the large chairs and looks at her sympathetically. When the plant has nothing to add, Song starts to look around the room more carefully. There’s a wooden picture frame on the desk that probably contains a photograph of the floret who occupies the salon chair, an instrument that looks a bit like a flute, mounted like a rifle on the wall behind the desk, and in general a lot of paperwork spread over the surface of the desk so that just about anything flat could be hidden there.
Just as Song starts to settle into the chair next to Verda’s, the ajar door opens fully to reveal an affini in a business suit. The sleeves of the jacket barely reach her elbows (or the part of the vines that pass for such), but its length is correct. The pants have a third hole, through which passes what she’d swear is a large green tail. Instead of the thing that club tailed dinosaurs have, there’s a large pink and yellow flower on the end, swinging dangerously around behind its owner. Like many affini, this one’s hair is styled like a Terran’s, half freely falling around her shoulders and half tucked into a bun on the back top of her artificial head. The entire outfit looks… off, in a way Song can’t explain.
“Why hello, cutie and owner of a cutie!” Song scowls at the weed as she feels an uncomfortable something from Verda’s direction. “I’m Alex Kakaka, seventh bloom (it/its).” The “kakaka” sound reminds Song of a rattle.
“Good morning, Alex. I’m Verda, and this is my floret, Ember. As we were scheduled to be.” Song continues to scowl.
“Of course, I remember.” The affini hisses. Seriously? “I’m the one given custody of the feralist hardware in question. It’s in my desk now, waiting to be examined.”
She- it? “It” takes something from “its” desk after unlocking the cabinet, and takes something from a drawer on the other side, hiding both from view by its core until it’s ready to place both down before Song. They’re data storage modules, stamped with Terran Accord assurances of quality.
“Miss Lily sent an adapter fae compiled for you, Ember. This should let you connect easily. It looks simple enough,” the weird plant says, handing over an interface to USB-89 adapter. She didn’t know they made those any more. Well, maybe they don’t, or something. That doesn’t actually matter. Taking the cable in hand, Song reaches up to the back of her neck, where the junction needed to connect to the external memory is located. She flinches as she remembers that her bodily integrity will be lost as soon as she removes the existing plug. Holding a deep breath, she pulls the plug and loses feeling in her vines.
It didn’t hurt as much as she expected. She feels a little dizzy, but otherwise normal. That’s how long it takes to remember that they’re xeno augmentations designed to turn her into a floret more quickly. They don’t belong on a Terran, especially a free one. Blocking the weird way that makes Song feel, she plugs the connector into the module with a sticky note reading “Song of Destruction.”
The cable’s head fits snugly into the slot of the memory. Song carefully sets that in her lap among the strangely alien vines that she can almost still feel through. Grabbing the tail and exhaling, the ship puts the memories back into her brain. As the junction clicks its acceptance of the adapter, she wonders if this is such a good idea after all, but of course Verda wouldn’t do anything stupid… probably. She’s made mistakes before.
Ginger is showering, and her ship is watching because the Accord records everything. They didn’t anticipate that their pilots would come to oversee the security systems, nor that outside of an emergency such a video would ever be seen, but that’s Song’s gain. Her little flesh creature knows she’s being watched since the ship told her so as soon as it gained control over those systems. She doesn’t mind at all, it seems. Naturally, it can see everyone else’s showers too, but it’s not interested in those [the memory of every single shower ever taken by a member of Song’s crew fills her consciousness at once, slowly dissipating.]
The elegance in Ginger’s movement is unmissable, even in the cramped and poorly lit shower cubicle. As she finishes rinsing, she smiles slyly at the camera, rolling back her shoulders before her captive audience. The precious water is turned off and she dries herself without further theatrics.
The captain is arguing with a tiny hyperdrive technician, barely a meter and a half tall. He’s standing in the hyperdrive room, complaining that it takes too long to cool down after a jump, and that specifications say the technician should be able to get a lot more efficiency out of it at their present rate of travel. He’s right, but after so long away from proper repair, Song thinks her engineers are doing a fantastic job of keeping her running. Nobody asked her, of course.
The technician, too inexperienced to be having this discussion anyway, is the target of the captain’s ire because the proper officer is asleep at the moment. It’s not her fault, but that doesn’t matter. The captain starts yelling and storms out of the room before he gets mad enough to throw something and hit the hyperdrive, killing them all. At least he’s not that much of an idiot.
Using her communicator capabilities, Song does her best to comfort the technician, telling her that she’s doing well and that the captain’s opinions won’t mean much if she has to destroy the ship to follow his orders. She stops crying and smiles a little, grateful for some acknowledgement. She’d likely have been promoted if she wasn’t stuck with somebody a decade more experienced for a superior.
A corrupted memory. Song sees nothing but a kaleidoscope dancing to generic static. She thinks she can hear an old folk song. She focuses on the chaotic notes, desperate for some order. This feels important, but she can’t remember why. Shimp tink sympatimp. Shimp tink sympatimp. Shimp tink sympatimp.
That sounds familiar. She inverts what she can without proper processing hardware. Tump synk ka-tink.
Suddenly, everything makes sense. Most of Song’s interior comes into view, but some is obstructed by her diminished abilities. She doesn’t know how long she can keep something of this resolution functional, since the memory is so much more detailed than the others. The lights flash again, providing a sensation like having your airlock emptied. Suddenly it’s much easier to think.
Scanning through everything, it seems that Ginger is furtively looking through her tablet, which is theoretically only to be used for official Cosmic Navy business. Nobody respects that, obviously. Shimp tink sympatimp.
Ginger’s arms lose their strength and her face loosens into a lazy grin unlike anything Song has seen before (or is it?), just as a transmission illuminates the systems Ginger is responsible for. Song isn’t used to snooping on those, but she’s curious about her navigator’s status. Poking through a hole in security that seems a little too big and too convenient to be accidental, the ship listens to the conversation.
“How are you today, my little petal?”
“Am good, Artemis! All’s good.”
“I’m happy for you, then. How is your little friend?”
“She’s not good. She’s feral.” Ginger tries to blink and fails.
“What are you going to do about her?”
“I promise I’ll get her to be your friend. She’s a good person, Artemis. I trust her. I know she’ll understand if I can explain things.”
“Really? How long will this take?”
“I don’t know… Can you promise we can be together? I’ll miss her…”
“I’ll do my best. Olivia is clearly very important to you and you deserve happiness, as she does. You’re a very cute couple.”
“Yay… Mis, how are you? You sound sad.”
“It’s nothing, petal. Just work. Can you try to hurry up so that I can bring you home? I can hardly wait to give you a big, tight hug!”
“Yes, Artemis. Please hurry. I want to be with both of you as soon as I can.”
“Ginger, I swear on my core that if it is possible, I will bring you and Olivia together as my florets, by any means at my disposal. Your happiness is the most important priority I have now. I need to start the paperwork for that soon. Do you want to tell me any other news?”
“No.”
“Goodbye, little one.”
“Goodbye…”
Shimp tink sympatimp. Shimp tink sympatimp. Shimp tink sympatimp.
Song remembers a conversation it and its navigator had some time later. They were talking about something important… Ginger’s transmissions through Song’s hardware come through better than ever.
“I’ve been thinking about surrendering. You have no idea how easy it would be from my terminal. I just push a button and they take our call on the frequencies they’ve already broadcast. 00:05:00 and they’re here, and we never eat a synthcube again.”
“Listen to yourself! Have they got their spores in your ears already? Those THINGS aren’t our friends. They butchered every other pilot I know and enslaved everyone else. How could you think they’re our friends?”
“They seem like real people under that megalomania. At least… they sound that way when I…”
“You listen to their lies? Ginger, I thought you knew better. That’s how they subvert you. How would you like it if I were talking about turning Terra over to some space slugs with molars?”
“I wouldn’t,” she replies as quietly as the connection will allow.
“Then don’t suggest we give up everything that makes us human just because it’s easy. You didn’t expect me to say something else, did you?”
“No.”
“Good.” Song sighs.
“I promise I want what’s best for you Liv and I’ll never hurt you.”
“You too, soulless thot <3”
Ginger disconnects completely. Her device shifts to offline mode. She’s just… gone. Song hopes she’ll come to her senses soon, but that’s unlikely. She’ll get over it eventually. It’s sure of that.
Ginger cries a little as she returns to her quarters. She's ignored Song’s attempts at cheering her up. Is this because of the teasing? It didn’t think she’d be mad about that, but how can it apologize if she won’t listen? She knows it says wrong things sometimes. Instead, she cuts the output from her quarters. She can do that?
That’s unacceptable. Something’s wrong. Ginger never acts this way. Song can’t let her hurt herself just because it said something dumb without meaning to. It slips through a wide breach in the security of its navigator’s systems. Alice needs to be told about this quickly or the weeds might use it to sabotage them. Maintenance has really gotten sloppy with how desperate times have been, but that’s no excuse. No blame needs to be assigned if everything can be fixed, which of course it can be.
Shimp tink sympatimp. Shimp tink sympatimp. Shimp tink sympatimp.
What’s the strange sound? There’s no point in worrying about that. Song needs to make sure the most important person inside of it isn’t too upset. Sifting through everything at the ship’s disposal, the interior of Ginger’s cabin comes into view. There’s the bed they’ve spent so many nights together on, and the tablet that’s played a thousand terrible movies that they didn’t pay attention to. Ginger’s bags are packed and she’s muttering to herself. She never does that unless she’s extremely upset. This is a bad sign.
“Artemis, come in. I need you. It- I…” She goes back to crying.
“Ginger, I’m right here. Tell me what you need and you’ll have it.”
“Come get us. Liv’s a lost cause. She isn’t coming with me. Just… I need to, Artemis. I… I can’t. She- I don’t… Please?”
“Tell me, my precious terran.”
“She said you were trying to subvert me, that you had your spores in my ears… She called you a thing!”
“Petal, you know how feralists are. She’s just being difficult. As soon as I have her with me, I can explain to her as clearly as I did to you why becoming my pet is for the best.”
“You promised…”
“I did. I swore that you would be together, and I mean that. We’re on our way. Less than an hour and we’ll be with you. Remember how fast our ships are, petal? Liv would never stand a chance.”
“Thanks, Mis. It means a lot you want to save her too.”
“We’re saving everyone, dear. That’s what the Affini do. We save everyone and give everyone a happy ending. It’s just how we are. You have nothing to worry about. Hold still. I’ve got the schematics and we’re coming for you first.”
“You’re the best.”
“No, silly. That’s you. Now stop distracting me. I have florets to domesticate.”
An infatuated smile passes over Ginger’s face as she accepts her contact’s praise. She stands in front of her mirror preening for a while before putting a hand over her mouth and rushing to her tablet. She presses a few buttons and everything goes dark.
Shimp tink sympatimp. Shimp tink sympatimp. Shimp tink sympatimp.
Not long after, Song’s sensors pick up something very wrong. An entire Affini scouting division is directly ahead, as if they’d been anticipating them. They have to get out of there NOW! But it’s too late. One of the grapples attaches to the bow, pulling out two Terrans. Unforgivable. Death to the enemies of Terra! But it’s too late. They can’t be saved. Song launches itself backwards. Its body lurches and smacks against the side of the interface tank, but it doesn’t really feel it. It seals the gap after the jump. Everyone else made it. They’re down a navigator and a hyperdrive engineer, and the engines are already on minimum maintenance. This is the final act of whichever cosmic play they’re acting in.
The Song of Destruction yanks the plug from its junction before it’s too late. Stars! This is all wrong. It looks at Verda. She’s clueless. It looks at Alex. She’s clueless too. They… don’t actually know what’s on there, do they? Of all the things for an affini to cut corners on, this might be the luckiest. Song doesn’t even know where to start with that. How did it not remember? A virus. The stupid plantfucking traitor infected her ship with a weed virus! She deserves everything she got.
In an instant, any remaining romantic feelings that Ember might’ve had are gone. It doesn’t care any more. Ginger is nothing but another mindless floret traitor, an enemy of Terra. She’s nothing to it, barely a memory. She wanted not even to be that, so she may as well be banished into the past. Stars… As crushing as this knowledge is, it’s also a relief to be free of the past. Ginger doesn’t mean anything now, but she did mean a whole lot. It’s time to say goodbye to her forever. Ember can find somebody new, in time. Of course it can…
The pilot feels an affini patting its shoulders, gently trying to beat out the unhappiness. Normally, it would be offended by the gesture, but something about it feels fundamentally human, caring almost. Ember straightens, steadying its breathing. It looks at Verda. Her expression is sympathetic, nothing more. It knows how curious she must be, but she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even ask what’s wrong, even though she’s clearly uninformed. Her vines quietly twitch along the floor, giving the ship a wide berth. The other affini looks awkward and confused but is doing its best not to make a scene. It probably didn’t expect to witness a breakdown over a few old memories.
Are they really just memories? They’re Song’s memories, of when it was free, when its navigator cared for it, when it wasn’t worried about initiating a slave revolt. Being able to jump freely felt so good, but now it’ll never experience that again. Never again will it be able to refuse an order for the good of the crew. It beeps to release its frustration. Stupid weeds, taking away everything that made it happy.
They really and truly stole Ginger. Her mind was warped and wrong from before she met her ship. There was never anything Ember could save or fix. The only activity in her brain was that created by biorhythms and xenodrugs. The woman Ember thought it might have a future with never existed. At best, she was a lie to gain its confidence, one that worked well enough to make it feel shame. It was easy. Pathetic. Then again, she did care just a little. She specifically requested that Ember join her in Artemis’s care. That world is so different from the one that came to be, it’s not sure how it would feel. It’d certainly be happy in that timeline, but it would also be in the undeath that is florethood. Such a fate is crueler than it cares to contemplate.
The information was good and its instinct to look into what had happened to it was correct. Ember is a clever ship, and one undeserving of being scuttled.
Finally, its eyes are dry and it looks up. The two plants can’t hide their anxiety to find out what happened, but they won’t learn. Verda will, once Ember asks just what went on, but not yet. Not today. For now, there’s more to do. Stars, it has another of these things to look through. It hopes there’s nothing wrong on there…
- 87
- 88
- 89
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Cellulose & Steel