5-4
One of the many ways in which Qi Zhen was superior to ordinary human beings was that they had no need for sleep, their positronic brain free from such biological inefficiencies. This was why they hated traveling alongside humans. Every night, having to stop and spend eight, nine, ten hours anchored in place by a bunch of snoring hominids? Agonizing. That night in Blackpool, they escaped to the roof of the hotel–better to not let anyone bother them–and let the qi flow.
A machine with programmed reflexes should have had no need for forms. They were more than capable of doing the physics internally, calculating the optimum angle for each block, strike, and counter. When they were about two months old, Qi Zhen had asked Deng Zhi as such.
“Certainly,” xe had replied, “you may try. It might even be a good coding exercise for you, and a useful backup if your processor is damaged. But you are more than just a machine. You have qi. So you will have to learn how to use it.”
Qi Zhen was no stranger to hard work, of course, and their parent had been correct: no amount of computer code could manipulate qi directly, only thought could. Paradoxical, considering Qi Zhen’s thoughts were computer code, but such was the nature of the mind, never sensible, never subject to analysis in the way scientist-sages would like. After one hour, nineteen minutes, seven-point-seven seconds going through their forms, Qi Zhen dropped into a lotus position.
Qi batteries filled to 54%; maximum capacity at 95% of optimal. Diagnostics detect 9 potential issues, 4 software and 5 hardware. Warning: damage detected in following locations: ventral carapace, right-side abdominal hydraulics, backup qi battery. Reserve lubricant tank 71% full.
Qi Zhen’s systems were lubricated using a proprietary blend, one of Sublime Titanium’s many secrets. It was constantly recycled, but losses from leakage and contamination were nonetheless inevitable. When it was empty, they would need to return home, with no possible alternative. They would do so triumphant, or not at all.
Logically, now would be the time to meditate, refill their qi, before returning to practice. But not really. Qi Zhen knew there was another aspect of practice that they had been neglecting. They rose, the bitter signal of regret clicking in their internals, and said the words.
“First Pretense: I’m Alive.”
The wood spawned into reality from somewhere in the small of their back, a trap being sprung, and expanded to encompass their entire body before imploding onto them. It should have hurt; it should have felt like an industrial crusher, the disposal unit which haunted Qi Zhen’s background subroutines, as they were condensed, joints unmade, rendered down into this parody.
It felt like nothing much at all. Aside from the sudden intense awareness of exactly which parts of Qi Zhen’s feet were in contact with the floor, of course. Looking around, the roof of the hotel was fairly bare, only a chimney and a railing to keep the sweepers of that chimney from falling to their deaths. Far from the worst terrain for using their threads, but far from the best.
The first trick was figuring out how to get their hands anywhere they needed to be. A backflip was obvious to Qi Zhen, but equally obvious to anyone watching that they’d done something. Foot connections were easier to get away with, but tended to backfire. Pull yourself by the foot and you’d get knocked over. A sloped surface made it much easier: on the tiles, at a forty-five degree angle, Qi Zhen could lean over and look as though they were just navigating the terrain. That idea evolved over time and with practice. They could pretend to stumble, for example, and get their hands on the ground that way. Or crouch down like a sprinter at the starting line in the moment before aggression began.
Another idea which took up much of Qi Zhen’s time was projectile combat. Attach one end of a string to a roof tile, the other end to a person, and suddenly the tile is flying into the person’s face at high speed. Aiming was difficult, though. The strings could pull but they couldn’t secure; once Qi Zhen pulled a string shorter than about a meter, it vanished, which implied some weird things about what the strings do immediately after being attached.
Then their Pretension ran out. A shame; Qi Zhen had wanted to try bungee-jumping off the edge of the building, see how well the strings could take sudden shock. With Pretension-juice, or whatever it was, being much slower to regenerate than qi, they had little choice but to meditate and think.
The team’s passage to the Kingdom Forest was named Arnhem, and she was a fluyt of the typical construction, departing at 8 AM sharp. Qi Zhen was happy to serve as an alarm, but less happy to discover that only one member of the team actually needed it: Gilead had awoken with the dawn and was already doing some kind of ugly calisthenics, Zahra was riven with insomnia, and Vilena was a vampire. Sara took to being shouted awake fairly well; she had been a soldier in some war Qi Zhen didn’t know about yet, so she jumped upright and started packing without a complaint.
It was a remarkably uneventful morning. They arrived at the Arnhem with time to spare, they weren’t attacked by any enemy Pretenders, they weren’t stopped by customs or by Leedsrealmer police forces, and the boat was about as clean as could be expected from a design that was outdated by between two and seven centuries depending on your perspective.
“There’s no boat-smell to it,” Gilead complained.
“That would be on account of the germ theory,” Qi Zhen said. “You’d be amazed how things change once knowledge of what causes disease starts spreading.”
“Germ?”
“Ask Sara about it.”
Being as they were an entirely new and superior form of life, Qi Zhen’s time had a premium on its cost; higher than the value of explaining germ theory to a revenant. They instead went below-decks with Vilena—she fled the sun whenever possible—to discover what their sleeping arrangements looked like.
It could have been much worse. The ship that had originally taken Qi Zhen to Leedsrealm from Furat had been a cargo hauler that did passenger cargo on the side. All of the passengers had slept in an open cargo bay, each one given just enough space to lay down a small mattress or just collapse onto the floor. The Arnhem was a dedicated passenger ship, which meant that its cargo hold had had some thin planks nailed into place to subdivide the hammocks into groups of four. With Zahra small enough to share a hammock with her sister, the team fit perfectly into one such cabin, with room to spare given their relatively light load of luggage.
Relatively light. Vilena’s cash infusion had tipped them past what could be carried in five backpacks. Qi Zhen resented the inefficiency of having to haul around two extra duffels, but the organics would find their journey eased, so very well.
With everything squared up for the journey, Qi Zhen returned to the main deck, where Sara was watching the other passengers flow past. She jerked back when Qi Zhen appeared beside her, hand flinching in the direction of her concealed Glock.
“All of our luggage is stowed, and Vilena is standing watch.”
“I pity the thief who ends up in her crosshairs,” Sara said, smirking even as her eyes went immediately back to the onramp. Qi Zhen was much more comfortable with silence than the average human, but a question arose.
“What are you doing?”
“Watching for Pretenders. If there’s any aboard, I’d like to know.”
“So that you can kill them?”
Sara shook her head. “So that I can let them know that we know. Establish communications, make sure they’re aware we have peaceful intentions. I’ve been ambushed plenty of times.”
“Game theory. Ensure that they understand the risks are too high to consider an ambush, whether or not they have a moral code against such a thing. But how can you tell who’s a Pretender and who isn’t?”
Sara’s eyes were narrowed, her head scanning each boarder in turn with computer-like smoothness.
“Most of these people look like they have regular jobs.” She pointed at one man, seemingly at random. “Second-hand seller.” She pointed at a woman. “Potion-maker.” And another. “He’s rich. Pretenders don’t get that kind of stability, and we don’t seek it out, or if we do it’s because we sold out, in which case the prices are high enough that you can smell the importance wafting off of them.”
“Scrapyard has plenty of drifters,” Qi Zhen said. “That’s what makes it a Scrapyard. How can you tell any random homeless person from a Pretender?”
“Oh, that one’s much easier, if you know anything about reading moods. Drifters are scared. Pretenders are paranoid. The difference can be subtle but it’s a roaring klaxon once you see it.”
Qi Zhen had no knowledge in that field of skill, and immediately set about considering how they could have possibly been trained in it. Perhaps with enough video, each person having their emotional state tagged, a correlative matrix might be constructed. But how would the creator of the film know the emotional state of those depicted without inducing artificiality into the training material? Once again, genuine experience had no substitute.
“That is very impressive, Ms. Ajami.”
Her reaction was not as they would have expected, a full-face twitch as though they’d suddenly unleashed a torrent of foulest profanity.
“What? Did you just give me a compliment? You don’t do that.”
“I give compliments when someone does something useful and difficult. I simply don’t find Sir Gilead’s ape-like posturing to be particularly useful.”
Sara sighed. “I’m going to let that pass for now. Does that computer brain of yours know anything about medicine, psychology?”
“In the abstract. I have downloaded a large archive of medical and psychiatric knowledge, but I have had little experience in applying it. Why do you ask?”
Sara tried to prioritize her watching, but something crumpled. She blinked a dozen times in a row, then shook her head, finally admitting defeat. Even Qi Zhen, barely two years old, knew that something was gnawing at her.
“Are you ill?”
“No! No, it’s not that. It’s Zahra. She’s been… different.”
“Have you ever heard,” Qi Zhen said slowly, “of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?”
Sara punched them in the center of the chest, hard enough that they were worried she would sprain her wrist. “Obviously I know that! We all have it, you big metal moron.”
“Then define different.”
Qi Zhen knew about Zahra’s illness. Two days ago, along the long hike to Blackpool, there had been little to do besides to make introductions; Gilead and Sara had told the story of how they had ended up working together, which had included a brief explanation of the girl’s sickness. Qi Zhen themself had not revealed their own past, beyond a few disconnected anecdotes about interesting happenings that had taken place since leaving Qinglong.
“When something scary happens, she goes to me. She always goes to me. Even if she can’t talk about it, she goes to me, because she’s eight years old still and I’m the closest thing she has to a mother. But this time, she’s been avoiding me. Her sickness is better than it’s been in months, but she’s not sleeping much. And for some reason she keeps hanging around Vilena for some reason? It’s like she has Stockholm syndrome or something…”
“Stockholm syndrome isn’t real,” Qi Zhen said. “It was invented by police psychologists in order to pathologize the idea of a hostage realizing—”
Sara’s glare informed Qi Zhen that their knowledge was not needed. “If you know so much about psychology, then do you know what’s wrong with my sister?”
“I told you already, I’ve never actually applied any of this knowledge.” Qi Zhen folded their arms, scanning across the deck. Zahra was with Gilead, who by his gesticulations was likely telling a story of some kind, hiding in the shade of the ship’s quarter deck. “You’ll owe me twice as much. But I’ll keep an eye on her, and if I come to any conclusions, I’ll let you in on them. How does that—”
“Qi Zhen? You rudnum, I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
Qi Zhen knew exactly who was talking to them. Es name was Dano, from the half-desert shard of Namlor. E was still wearing the same sorts of clothes as when Qi Zhen had first encountered em; elaborate desert shrouds belted in at the waist and wrists, a knife at es hip, and no doubt some body armor concealed underneath.
E was also absolutely furious, enough so that Qi Zhen was mildly concerned that e was about to use that knife on them. They ducked back, falling into a guarded stance.
“Dano! And isn’t it just an oasis in the desert to see your face again!”
Dano said something in es native tongue that implied Qi Zhen fucked goats, then continued, “so don’t imply that leaving me was some kind of accident!”
This whole conversation had taken place in a patois of Chinese, leaving Sara totally in the dark. She could read tone well enough that her hand was pressed to her shirt, directly on the spot that Qi Zhen knew her pistol was concealed.
“Qi Zhen, who is this?”
This was the situation where, if Qi Zhen had a human vocal system, they would let out a deep, aggrieved sigh. They’d seen Deng Zhi make such a noise many times.
“Sara, this is Dano. Dano, this is Sara. Dano is a… former traveling companion of mine.”
(Qi Zhen had made one crucial mistake. They assumed, because Dano had defaulted to Chinese with an inhabitant of Qinglong, that e did not also speak English).
Dano drew es knife. “Traveling companion?! Traveling companion, is that all I am to you?!”
Qi Zhen flinched, very nearly launching into a disarm sequence. “Fine, fine! We had a fling, but I never implied that I was going to stay for long!”
“You never implied anything in either direction, refused to give a fixed answer, and then left in the middle of the night without a word!”
Sara stepped back, the better to keep both belligerents in her field of view at once. Her expression of tense readiness slowly evaporated, replaced by a wrinkled forehead that meant she was trying not to laugh.
“Qi Zhen. Are you saying that this Namlorian desert rider is your jilted former lover?”
“We weren’t lovers,” Qi Zhen said immediately.
“You,” she gestured at Dano, “had sex with you,” she gestured at Qi Zhen. “And now you’re mad about it. I’m sorry, but the English phrase for that is ‘jilted lover’.”
Dano raised an eyebrow pointedly in Qi Zhen’s direction. “Who’s this?” e asked, in Chinese.
“Traveling c—Coworkers. We’re on a team. She might even be heterosexual for all I know. What are you doing here, anyways?”
“The same as you, I assume,” Dano replied. “Traveling to the Kingdom Forest. I hear there’s opportunity for mercenaries there.”
The journey was two days long. It was not a very large ship. Qi Zhen wanted to die.