The Mod Con

Heat and salt had become Calypso’s world. They defined every waking moment of her life in the mine, just as they defined the wretched moon against which she carved. HACKU labeled the satellite Z5AG, though Calypso named it Zag in her head. (It was a curse more than a name). A blue star anchored the system, and it glared down upon Zag like the wrathful eye of a great goddess, emitting heat that chewed upon the bodies of the moon’s defilers. Calypso had to imagine Zag bolstered by the blistering misery of HACKU’s prisoners that labored upon it; the moon took its own revenge, filling their mouths and salting their wounds with stinging dust.

Calypso did not want to hate this world. But every day for weeks now, this world screamed in every tortured synapse of her body how much it hated her. The star’s heat tilled her modified skin, making fissures between the plated reptile-scales that guarded her body from the worst effects of extreme temperature. Where the blisters exposed raw, pink flesh, the moon’s biting soil seeped inside. She worried that one day she would remember nothing but this pain and forget to name it misery.

“Hurry it up, hack!” someone shouted from the ground. Pulled from the blurring haze of pain, Calypso leaned to the side, glancing down from the excavator’s seat toward the lowest plateau of the terraced pit mine. There, a Sapient piloted one of an endless line of haul rollers, ready to transport the latest heap of broken soil to Zag’s ignisite processing facility. The bristling fur poking up between his scales screamed of her fellow mod con’s impatience. Calypso offered a lewd gesture he wouldn’t understand before returning to the controls.

She tried not to let the Sapient’s crude nickname sting as she operated the excavator’s toothed shovel. Nor did she let the insulting nature of the primitive controls damage her pride more than they already had. Though these small offenses still stung like ignisite in her wounds, Calypso’s first days in the mine had been the hardest. She was the only human to be placed on this moon, and though she did all she could to relax her telling mannerisms, it did not take long for others to realize she was formerly of HACKU: the Human Alliance for Control of the Known Universe.

The Alliance’s mission put its ambitious members at odds with multitudes of non-human Sapients, as well as smaller Sapient-aligned bands of rogue humans. Once upon a time, Calypso thought herself above all such beings.

Now she emptied dirt into their buckets and wished they realized she was just the same as them. A modified convict doomed to labor and die atop this awful moon, orbiting a sun that scorned them, and a planet that predicted their own fate of being used up and cast aside.

The ignisite mine orbited the planet from which Zag had emerged billions of years prior. The larger celestial body had already been stripped of all profitable resources, leaving its eyes gouged in great open pits; its surface, irreversibly scarred from the attack of machinery. Calypso sometimes gazed at the dead planet while she set upon its cosmic daughter. She winced and groaned as Zag bit back, sinking ever deeper into her than she into it. In the moments that Calypso didn’t resent all that surrounded her, she looked to the planet in the sky and wondered about its past beauty. Unlike its moon, it had once been a cradle of life.

It was one such instance of glancing skyward that Calypso noticed the ships.

Complaints emerged from far down below when the giant excavator’s arm froze in tandem with Calypso’s hands. Shouts and snarls landed on deaf ears as she abandoned her work to stare up at a painfully familiar sight. The largest ship was beyond recognizable: during her work for HACKU, Calypso guarded many such behemoth long-haul transporters. It swallowed the sky as it loomed ever closer to Zag’s exosphere, ready to receive tons upon tons of processed ignisite. Such a vessel appeared carved from a mountain. It was an impressive sight to behold.

However, the smaller ships darting around the transporter’s hull were the true objects of Calypso’s awe. Piloted by HACKU’s ruthless law enforcers, the sparrows sliced through space such that the great void itself should have bled its dark matter. Lean-edged and pinch-faced, they were sharp as a blade and equally dangerous with the right force of mind driving their flight. Calypso knew that every smooth surface contained innumerable sensors, and she closed her eyes to the sparrows in the sky, recalling the feeling of being immersed in the metal body of her own sparrow. The complete sensory deprivation of being a ship flying through space summoned goosebumps—or rather, the memory of them that tickled Calypso beneath her modified scale-skin.

Enforcers had greater use being brains for their sparrows than their bodies of flesh and blood. Calypso had once left her body in the sparrow’s cryostat to mentally plug into the ship, reducing her human self to a vestigial bone within the better machine. She could fly fast and far, but in the vastness of space that lacked the rules of relativity, Calypso would often be standing completely still. In one particular travel between assignments, she had found herself entirely alone and stagnant within the universe.

Then came the sudden, jolting pain of an unexpected blow, because—

An oh-so-familiar pirate launched an attack, knocking away the vacuum by setting the sparrow’s sensors alight with screaming alarms. The stillness of space had suddenly been traded for Calypso’s ripping speed relative to the patchwork ship that assailed her; the emptiness had been traded for a battle that shrank and expanded as enemies dove inward to attack and darted outward to escape. The apathy of space, traded for the hate of two women on opposite sides of a guerrilla war, and the burgeoning love for a worthy opponent.

—The beads drilled into the scales surrounding Calypso’s throat sparked to life. They made a collar of spider-webbing electricity that yanked her with jarring force out of her nostalgic reverie. Her teeth buzzed like insects as fire traced the path of her spine. She jerked and screamed until the beads deactivated, either an eternity or two seconds later. Calypso collapsed forward, bracing her arms against the controls. When her brain stitched itself together from the static of all-consuming pain, the voices of the Sapients below registered in her ears.

“Better hurry up and comply before they send you another shock,” called the same bristle-furred Sapient from before. They, of course, were their enigmatic superiors. Somehow, the bosses had eyes all over. “They’ll fry you until they serve you for lunch.”

Calypso groaned. It wasn’t an empty threat or even an exaggeration; lunch slop always carried a different taste after a mod con had been deemed ineffective. By the elation in the Sapient’s voice at the mere prospect, Calypso wondered for the thousandth time whose eyes their superiors were using from their proverbial castle.

In the end, the shape of the boot on her neck didn’t matter. Pushing memories of fighting ships to the very back of her mind, she refocused on her new assignment under the order of HACKU. Calypso continued to mine the ignisite that would be refined into their semiconductor materials. These would feed the Alliance’s demand for new technologies, and power the unstoppable machine of their Manifest Destiny. She plugged herself into this purpose as she had once entered her sparrow. Her own body fell away from her as the scorching day dragged on. Collection ships dropped from the belly of the transporter to gather ignisite, occasionally touching down on Zag’s rocky surface. This time, Calypso didn’t let the activity in her peripheral distract her. While her mind fused to her work, her body fused to the immediate sensations around her.

Heat and salt. There was nothing else in the entire world for a mod con like her.

The end of her shift didn’t bring the same relief that it had in previous weeks. Calypso climbed down from the excavator, the tips of her thick, talon-like fingernails scraping the metal of the ladder to keep an informal tally of the days. She remained completely impassive to the threats and insults of other mod cons in the transfer truck as they were carried toward their containment units. At first, Calypso’s feigned meekness had been a survival tactic to avoid being slaughtered by the larger Sapient species. Now she felt no fire rise inside her belly at the taunts. She wondered if the time had arrived in which she completely gave up on the life she had before, despite how much she’d loved her job as a merciless enforcer for the Alliance. Then again, if she loved it so much, maybe she wouldn’t have thrown it all away and made herself a criminal.

For a pirate, no less.

That unwelcome thought arrived from within Calypso’s unit. She shuddered at the seductive voice that had whispered it in her ear. If there was anything rebellious left inside her, of course it would take the form of that rogue human with the mocking grin. She shook her head, shifting irritably where she rested on her tiny cot. It was one of the only amenities inside the metal box of a sleeping quarter. The only other furniture was a small cot side table, on top of which sat a short glass of murky water and a single pill. Giving up on the faraway prospect of falling asleep naturally, Calypso took her superiors up on the quiet offer that appeared at the end of every shift and reached over to grasp the tiny sedative. Although she liked to pretend that it was a true kindness, she imagined mod cons without adequate rest were rusty cogs.

Calypso swallowed the pill without bothering to wash it down. Then she lay back, and in the seconds before the forced shut-off, she hoped for dreamless sleep.

The pirate of HACKU’s in-transit supplies had become the pirate of Calypso alone, arriving to her unbidden. That uncivilized rogue—Calypso cursed her name, Heidi—crashed through the numbing darkness of the sedative like an oceanic vessel through a black wave miles high.

Calypso dreamed of fights in space, plunging around the hull of a HACKU transporter, swearing as Heidi used Calypso’s own trigger-happiness against her and dodged blows that landed upon the very ship that she was ordered to protect. Bombs erupted and metal imploded, all chaotic noise that gradually shaped itself into a pleasant tune as the line between fighting and dancing blurred. Calypso dove close enough to Heidi’s ship to drag her wing across its flank, drawing a line in the manner she’d trace a lover’s jaw. The sensors of her sparrow flashed alight with pleasure from the contact, and she twirled like a fool before returning to the dogfight. Then, suddenly, the ships crashed together in an impossible way: belly to belly, wing to wing, until metal turned to flesh. Pirate and enforcer danced as humans in the warm, liquid darkness that should have been cold space.

She dreamed of Heidi’s soft touch and her burning eyes. Calypso became familiar with them after the ambush of her sparrow months prior. The pirate could have left her to die, wounded and flightless in the distant space between assignments. Instead, she broke apart the sparrow’s shell to find the vestigial bone—the human soul—stored within. Where HACKU had taught Calypso the mercilessness of conquest, Heidi taught her the terrifying ruthlessness of love. The Alliance had threatened the lives of Heidi and her Sapient crewmates upon their eventual capture. In the same breadth, they offered Calypso a sparrow less prone to breaking.

Calypso was sure that, before loving Heidi, she never would have killed so many people.

In the final moments of her dream, Calypso tried for one more selfish act. She plunged her hands into the tangles of Heidi’s dark hair, so much longer and softer than her own perpetual buzz cut, and shoved her face toward the pirate’s, warring against the distance of their lips. But the liquid in which they were suspended jellied, and Heidi only smirked at her, amused by the pathetic desperation in the mod con’s eyes.

“Lizard is a new look for you, Callie,” Heidi purred, and Calypso gawked as the dream buckled around her. Reality pressed in at the corners of her eyes, and she shifted and groaned on the cot, completely perturbed by the words that so belonged out of Heidi’s mouth—yet broke apart the homogeneous romance of her fantasy.

“What…” Calypso mumbled. She rubbed her face wearily, not yet ready to open her eyes with one foot still in the dream. At the same moment that she felt the stiff mattress beneath her, Calypso also felt the gentle, distant touch of Heidi’s fingers making a path down the scales of her shoulder, all the way to the inside of her wrist. She knew the dream was fading away and moaned in longing for her pirate. Just as the final colors of the dream faded into the darkness of her eyelids, Calypso reached toward Heidi’s face to touch her one last time.

Her hand landed on soft skin. Calypso froze, more afraid than ever to open her eyes. Her fingers brushed across a tangle of long, unkempt hair, coarse with moon-dust, then found the bridge of a crooked nose. Tears threatened to spill because she knew it was impossible. Calypso explored the face of her long-gone lover, longing to somehow feel the warmth in those dark irises if she was destined never to see them again.

“Careful there,” said Heidi with a wince in her voice. “Looks like you have claws now. I may be a pirate, but I would like to keep both eyes, yeah?”

Impossible. But Calypso couldn’t stand to be tormented by this phantom a second more. She opened her eyes, and it was as though a force separate from her own exhausted body hauled her up from the cot. Calypso flattened herself against the wall of her unit and stared at the woman who should be light-years away. Yet here she was, in the flesh right before her.

It was a trick. It had to be. This was HACKU’s newest form of torture, because warping Calypso down to the intimacies of her genetic code hadn’t been enough. Not for all the people in the Alliance that she’d murdered for a Sapient-aligned rogue.

She shook her head until she felt dizzy. “No. You’re not—you can’t…”

Calypso’s mouth opened and closed silently. The part of her that had been deceived by this cruel trick shouted at her to calm down: There stood Heidi, and Calypso looked even more like a drowning fish than a lizard. Self-consciousness speedily replaced her fear, and she became acutely aware of the scales along her shoulders and forearms that had flared in alarm. They’d deformed her, but the true torture had finally arrived in this moment. Because, for the first time since arriving on Zag, Calypso had reason to care.

She covered her face, digging her claws into the delicate scales adorning the crown of her head.

“Don’t do that,” Heidi growled. “Don’t do that. Let me see you, Callie.”

“No, please,” she whispered, but they both had lived such that roughness often came before a more gentle approach. Heidi pulled her claws from her face, and Calypso gazed back with shame. She accepted that this woman was real. The pirate and her crew had somehow managed to find her and infiltrate the mine. Now she had no choice but to watch Heidi realize that a monster stood in her former lover’s stead. Calypso closed her eyes; a tear escaped and streaked down her cheek. It pooled in the corner of her lip, tasting of salt. Heidi’s hands were hot where they gripped her arms.

Calypso wanted this cruel existence to end.

Heidi rubbed the moisture away from her cheek. “You know,” she murmured, “there’s one thing I appreciate about those hack bastards.”

Calypso’s eyes opened wide. She trembled pathetically, overcome by an emotion between terror and hope as she awaited Heidi’s words. The pirate only chuckled.

“They can take the very best of their enforcers and turn her into one kick-ass member of a misfit pirate crew. If you want to be, anyway. So what do you think, Callie?” she asked, dropping Calypso’s hands. Heidi tilted her head, flashing that mocking grin that haunted her fantasies. “Or should I call you Scaly now?”

“I think,” replied Calypso, “I like you better in my dreams.” She laughed. She’d never laughed before. “So you figured out how to sneak onto this mine. The ignisite collectors, I take it?”

“No.” Heidi looked pleased. She enjoyed her own cleverness. (So did Calypso). “There are plenty of them to hide away in, but I’ve got better tricks than that. Any ship has manual controls. And some time ago, I learned the body of an enforcer is rather vulnerable when their mind is occupying their sparrow. The poor guy I hitched a ride with is currently incapacitated.” The murderous pirate drew a deadly line across her own neck and winked at Calypso. “He’s got a sore throat. Mind flying us out?”

Heat and salt disappeared from Calypso’s world when she plugged into the ship. Nothing short of ecstasy coursed through her sensors as the sparrow cut through Zag’s exosphere and plunged into the immensity of the great void beyond. The body curled within her protective hull was much different than the one she had once carried. It was scalier, perhaps uglier, and with many more scars.

But now, thanks to Heidi, the body in the cryostat was no longer alone. The sparrow twirled in rhythm with the two souls that danced inside.