Page 120 of Blightfall

“True,” I said. “But would it annoy the varvax into coming back and actually taking us to Ivy? Do you think this room is soundproof?”

“It isn’t,” Ivy said. “And the varvax are extremely hard to annoy with the sounds of human suffering. Believe me. I’ve tried.”

I looked around, but the voice seemed to be coming through a speaker, not someone physically present in the room. “Hey!” I said. “Weren’t your people supposed to bring us to you? We were hoping we’d get to finally meet, but now we’re stuck here alone.”

“You are not alone,” Ivy said.

Scud, that was ominous.

“Not literally, I suppose,” I said. “We are here with each other.”

Ivy sighed. “I should have remembered how obtuse humans can be. You’re such frail creatures, basically sacks of meat and juices walking around on a pile of sticks. Maybe that’s why you insist on everything being concrete and tangible and visible.”

A moment later, a hologram popped into existence at the center of the room. It was a girl roughly our age, with blue hair like mine, though she was several centimeters taller and had a more angular face. She was wearing a DDF flightsuit, much like the ones we were wearing.

She wasn’t one of us, though. She couldn’t be.

“Ivy?” I asked. “Is that you?”

“It is as much me as anything is,” Ivy said. “Would you find someone older more comforting? I thought maybe you would like a friend—humans are so precious about their friendships—but if you would prefer—”

The hologram aged several years, now looking more like the mother of the girl who had stood there before.

“I think I’d prefer to see your true age,” I said. That would at least give us some information about her.

“There is no way to represent my true age in human physiology,” Ivy said. “Human bodies deteriorate to decomposition in just over a century. This representation is as good a visualization of my true age as any human body would be.”

Oh, stars. We’d assumed Ivy was a varvax, but—

“Do varvax live that long?” I asked.

“They do not,” Ivy said. “Their lifespans are not even as long as your own.”

All this time, we’d assumed Ivy was a varvax because of her speech patterns, and because she had varvax working for her. But if she’d been hiding her true purpose here from the Superiority, if she’d lived longer than an organic being could—

“You’re an AI,” Nedd said, echoing my thoughts.

“Yes,” she said. “Specifically, I am IV-128, an advanced Writian model from the Onward product line. That’s a bit of a mouthful, and I do know how you humans like your comfortable, familiar titles, so for brevity, you may call me Ivy.”

She sounded a little like M-Bot—the AI who’d been a member of our flight for a while—but crazier. While she smiled sweetly at us, her team of varvax returned and undid my restraints, wrestling me off the table.

“What are you doing to her?” Nedd asked.

“They’re preparing her for storage,” Ivy said. “I’ll tuck you away until I have a use for you. Humans with relatively high survival skills are hard to come by.”

The varvax forced me into the clear glass refrigerator, attaching me to the back wall of the box with more restraints—small light-lines that coiled around my ankles, wrists, and chest to lash me to the wall. I fought against them, but there were too many of them, they were too strong, and my body felt leaden and unwieldy.

“Don’t worry,” Ivy said. “The analgesic will ease your pain as your organs enter stasis.”

Stars. That’s what they’d injected us with. It hadn’t disabled my limbs, but I did feel somewhat disconnected from my body, my limbs sluggish. The varvax returned for Nedd, lifting his body between them and hauling him into the refrigeration unit next to me. He twisted and fought, but the injection must also have weakened him somewhat, because he ended up strapped to the back of the refrigerator beside me, equally helpless. The varvax even noticed his prosthetic and used the light-line ties to lash his shoulder to the wall in addition to his wrist, so he couldn’t detach his arm to get free.

“By the way,” Ivy said, her voice clear through a speaker in the top of the refrigerator unit, the mouth of her holographic illusion still smiling benevolently at us through the doors. “You’re welcome.”

Yes, she was definitely insane.

Forty-Two

Arturo