Ghost in the machine

Vivid dreams... like I'm there.

"This one's alive!"

She hears the voice and though she's never spoken the language she understands the words. She must have passed out. Hands drag her from the dark into a light so bright it feels as though her eyes are on fire. She's too weak to resist and as she passes from wet to dry she hears her own voice crying out in pain as the tubes and electrodes are ripped from her body. She gasps for air, but sucks back the liquid pooling in her lungs. She begins to choke.

"Quick, before she drowns!"

She's flipped her onto her front, tossed like a rag doll. Arms encircle her from behind and a fist presses hard into her diaphragm. The embrace tightens, forcing her stomach upwards and squeezing the liquid up from her lungs. She coughs and vomits liquid from her nose and mouth. The arms loosen a little and she gulps in a lungful of air. Then they tighten again. She crys out, frustrated that they won't allow her to breathe and struggles against the relentless pumping that, breath by breath, she begins to realise is emptying her lungs of liquid.

"Jesus, she's strong!"
"She's good now. Leave her. Help the others!"

The arms drop her and her muscles collapse under the weight of her body. She falls, still dazed and woozy, face down on the ground where she lies coughing until it feels like her lungs have been ripped inside out.

Air's coming easier now, and as oxygen returns to her brain her thoughts and vision begin to clear. The air she's gulping down is hot and dry, with an unpleasant taste, and full of grains that irritate her tongue and throat and crunch between her teeth. The ground is so hot it's burning her skin. She pulls her legs in and manages to roll herself onto her knees where she remains with her forehead resting on the scaling earth and her naked back flayed by the sun, gathering strength.

Her breathing calms and her mind expands. She sees shapes rushing past her. Hears voices yelling orders. The seconds stretch out until an age seems to pass between one breath and the next. The rhythmic hiss of the blood in her ears dulls to a distant rumble. Logic and procedure take over, a process which is both instinctive and instantaneous.

First, she becomes aware of her state. Her body and systems have suffered no damage; all biological indicators are good, except arterial oxygen saturation which is eighty-nine percent and rising fast.

Second, her attention turns outward, to the basic facts of her environment. Empty as she is, her senses are hungry for information and drink in her surroundings as a dessicated sponge would water. The more she knows, the more she infers, and the more she needs to know.

Gravity is nine point eight metres per second. Earth. Third planet of the Solar System. Unsecured pings from nav sats place her just south of the equator; five degrees, twenty-one minutes, three point forty seconds south by seventy-one, nineteen, twelve point eighty-five west. With no map to overlay the coordinates, she has no idea where on the planet this place might be.

Temperature is forty three degrees centigrade; humidity, seven percent; air pressure one hundred and eleven kilopascals. The air she is breathing is mildly carcinogenic. Carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, ozone are all bordering on critical. Particulate matter - airborne contaminants less than 2.5 microns in diameter - are off the scale. Her lungs are already busy secreting mucus filters.

For want of anything else, she fixes upon the dry red earth before her eyes and surrenders to an overwhelming desire to study each and every particle. She loses herself in her analysis, producing lists and names that she knows, and yet she does not, and which come to her like a flood. A door to a room she did not know existed opens, and the contents become hers. She breaths in, taking in the complex scent of the ground. More lists. Silicon dioxide. Carbon. Nitrogen. Ammonium nitrate. Phosphorous. Orthophosphates. Zinc. Magnesium. Iron. Iron oxide. Anhydrous iron oxide. Hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates. Vast amounts of mercury. Magnesium, calcium, barium. Traces of beryllium, strontinum and radium. The simple red dust is beautiful in its detail, in its myriad shapes and shades that intrigue her with their individuality and their oneness. And their venom. This is a dead place.

All this in the blink of an eye, and still it's not enough. She needs more. She needs everything. She needs her history.

She reaches out as she had when trapped in the dark, and this time she makes contact. She feels it all around, sees it, like a cloud of light. It's like entering familiar territory at the end of a long journey home, like the warmth of a mother's embrace. She pushes herself to her knees to face and greet it. There, on the horizons, translucent spheres blaze like a dozen sunsets from a dozen digital suns. The light they shine holds everything she needs to make her whole, an almost infinite compendium of eight thousand years of human knowledge. A shimmering, electromagnetic web of information that will make her almost all-seeing and all-knowing in a heartbeat.

But though she can see it, and she knows it can see her, the realisation that it considers her an unknown, an outsider, an inconsequent, strikes her like a knife to the heart. To it, she is nothing. She does not exist. Its light washes over and around her like the cold waters of a stream parting for a rock in the riverbed. Panic rises in her gut, squeezing, choking her, and for a moment she can't breathe, can't think. The light she can see but can't touch is everything. It's life. It's meaning and direction, and without it she really is nothing. An empty husk. Without it she will fade and die like a flame deprived of oxygen.

Once again logic kicks in to override her emotions and she realises, trembling, that it is not ignoring her. It is protecting itself. It needs to know her before it can accept her as one of its own. She needs to present herself and prove she is a friend.

She needs to know who she is.

But she has no clue.

The life drains from her muscles and she slumps to her hands and knees and gazes at the desolate land around her. An arid, rolling desert shimmers in the light of an angry sun as far as her eyes can see. Directly above her, hundreds of jet black specks circle in formation. Birds. Wheeling forever upward in lazy circles, carried on a rising thermal of hot air broken free of the scorched ground. Atoms revolving in a steel-blue sky.

On the ground, people move around her with haste and purpose. People covered from head to foot in mottled clothing the colour of the earth. Twenty-four of them. Size, shape and gait, tell her that seven were women. Six others are naked like herself. Two are on their knees, their chests being pumped by the rust-clothed people. Four lie inert by their boxes, the infrared glow of their skin already dulled and fading.

There are unnatural objects all around. Machines. Twenty-seven. Seventeen designed for terrestrial locomotion, each with four bulbous wheels almost a metre in diametre. Ten others, artificial wombs, one of them her own, are fallen to Earth and lie like the bleached eggs of some long extinct desert giant. Seven are open. Two remain closed and one is split open and buried deep in the sand, the liquid inside spilled and spreading like blood. All are still joined by hair-thin cables to vast sheets of cloth so fine as to be almost transparent that lie sprawled over the dunes like brightly coloured skin.

Who is she? What is she? What is her purpose in this place? She has no answers. No memory. No way to know.

Her throat tightens to hold in the pressure growing in her chest. Her vision mists. She rubs her eyes and her hands come away wet. She stares at rivulets of clear liquid and as she understands that they are tears the pressure within her explodes with a sob. She looks around again, at the haste of the people, their fear, at the death and damaged wombs and knows something is not as it was supposed to be. All outside of her is not well. Her muscles tremble and give out and she crumples like a newborn foal to lie staring at the machine that birthed her, and the inaccessible lights flickering beyond.

The womb. It must know her. The ten wombs are identical, so there has to a way for those that are not from the wombs to identify those that are. The womb must know. She rises to her hands and knees and drags herself towards it.

Someone catches her by the arm. She looks up, but goggles, mask and scarf hide their eyes and face. A voice she barely registers, a male voice speaks.

"Sit down. Stay away from the pod."

The man pushes her to the ground triggering a new emotion. It's hot, and it fires her desire. She needs to know. She needs to know as much as she needed oxygen just moments ago. She rises to her feet and her balance is steadier now. Her nerves and muscles are learning to work in unison. She stumbles over to her womb, to her pod, and begins to scour its surface. To the side, eyes and fingers find a small hole and a window the size of her palm, with the letters Yuki 004 still visible beneath the cracked glass. Yuki. She doesn't know the word. Is it a name? Is it hers? Why can't she remember?

As her fingers touch the name it vanishes and is replaced by the word 'Identify' and an arrow pointing to the hole. A hole the size of a finger. As she pushes her index finger inside a hand graps her wrist and pulls her hand away.

The pod speaks.

Identify.

The heat rises again, from deep in her gut, and a sound rumbles in her throat. She doesn't think, she reacts, twisting her arm into the thumb of the hand holding her and pushing. The hand releases her and a man cries out in pain.

"Bitch!"

He comes at her from behind now, and and catches her around the neck. All she knows is that she needs to know who she is, and that to do that she must understand the workings of the machine. She lifts the man's elbow from her neck and twists out of his grip. It's not her intention, but her movement throws the man to the ground. She doesn't care. She's free, and consumed by her need to learn. She turns back to pod.

Identify.

She pushes her finger into the hole and a red light inside ignites. She sees movement in the corner of her eye and looks up. She sees the object swinging at her jaw. Then she sees stars.