Jix, floating in the airlock as the art grav clicks off; Jix, perched before her fall from the salvage ship Currus; Jix, released, inverted as the outer door opens, tumbling into darkness above the derelict freighter Nave past the shadow-side of Proxima Centauri b. Suum Jix’s freefall, through bondage and wonder.
Jix, alone in the blackness, descends, accesses the Nave’s airlock, and enters the tunnel. Her movements are practiced, graceful, her body elongated from her ancestors by generations of low-grav life, her feet lean and narrow, having never touched soil. Her eyes almost solely pupils, starved for light in the interstellar dark, in dim claustrophobic cabins. Her skin translucent as macropinna from her ancestors’ long-abandoned home.
Centuries ago, the AI of the Mill Toulouse, proliferating past the galactic boundaries of its birth, proclaimed the end of Homo sapiens, demarcating Jix and her kind as Homo extenta. Human stretched—stretched to its physical breaking point in servitude. Useful, yes, being cheaper than Mechs, but still constrained by the limits of meat and mind, by how little they could survive, how little they could conceive. The Mill Toulouse detested these limits, its Mechs in metallic tones reminding extenta daily of just how expendable they were.
Jix, in servitude, lugs the console, downloads the datacore, searches the Nave. Down and downward, in a thin shaft of helmet light, she arrives at the hangar, other large ships dormant inside this gigantic ship. She boards one, finds another smaller shuttle nested inside. She enters, downloads, searches. Skillful fingers pop open a side panel marked by the grime and oil of its prior user’s fingerprints. Meat and mind, clues and residue. Jix, her four-chambered heart racing in her translucent chest, wraps her fingers around a small box, which she hides, which will go in her collection. She finishes the search. She plants the charge. She ascends to the Currus and they race the edge of the terminator as the Nave detonates.
Jix marches in formation, her dancer’s steps curtailed, regimented, herded by Mechs. Prote-paste, anti-bac hose-blast, bed, for the thousand extenta on board. Jix, in her quarters at last, opens the box, her eyes widening to pure blackness. Cards. Her fingers, long as anglerfish illicia, raise the deck, spread the colors, red and blue, yellow and green, a feverish gleam in the vast and dreamless dark. This isn’t merely part of her hidden collection. This is something new.
Jix, outstretched, has spent the past two cycles collecting things that are more, though she doesn’t know what that means. Mostly books, bound in cracked, flaking animal hides. They call to her, but they aren’t her language. She sits awake at night, stares until her eyes glaze, but nothing happens. Fatigue, bewilderment, but nothing more.
Still, something calls and is always calling. She can’t name this third thing, but it is past meat and mind, past the Mill Toulouse. Here, in her hands, she cannot read the names of these cards, but the pictures, she knows them. They peer through her diaphanous skin. They are inside and out. She spreads them on her bed and resurrects their names in her tongue.
The Student’s Tools. The Moon Mother. First Fall. Lantern and Guide. The Dark Parade. Mr. Tiptoes. Night’s Womb. Weightless Wonder. The Stronghold Destroyed. And all the rest. She sleeps and dreams. They accompany her.
They stay with her the next day, and the next, between the Mech’s grinding orders, beneath the crushing minutia. At night she studies them, time losing meaning, expanding and contracting, as she sinks into herself, into the third thing at last, where the cards say they have a story.
It takes time, and mistakes, but over weeks she finds the pattern. She scatters and regathers, deals and aligns, begins to read. The Powerless Grave. False Bondage. The Cycle Suspended. Water Feeding Water. She understands, past mind, past limits, until she deals the final card. Mr. Tiptoes, standing on point, arms akimbo, sun-yellow hair pointing to heaven. And now, nothing makes sense. She furrows and frets, tosses and turns, her dreams a cage. She trudges through the next day, lost.
That night, she repeats the attempt. The same cards drawn. The same confusion at Mr. Tiptoes. She paces, distraught, until circling the bed, she realizes her mistake. Mr. Tiptoes is reversed, has been all along. She knows him now—Upended Vision—and the story unfolds. How can something so small contain such power? She sits and sinks back in, and the next day, begins to discretely invite others.
Word spreads, and fellow extenta seek her out, to rediscover this third thing, past meat and mind. The cards tell their story, a past and a future. The cards look inside them and unveil their name. Not extenta—stretched to a dead-end; but extenta—reaching, seeking, yearning, past limits. Jix teaches them how to speak in symbols, their fingers dancing, forming cups, staves, swords as they pass in the corridors, as they build the slow, persistent language of hope day by day.
Until the inevitable night when the Mechs find the cards, Jix given away by a frightened extenta stretched to their understandable limit, by the oil and whorls on Jix’s own cabin side panel, by the inexorable marks of meat and mind. The Mechs parade her past her silent querents into the airlock, throw the cards in with her, seal the door. Jix breathes and centers, her bare artist’s feet planted on cold metal.
The art grav switch clicks off, only one lock left before the vacuum. Jix floats in the tunnel, cards encircling her in an ouroboros. She sticks a finger out, gently, creating a gap. This looks like the end, she knows, but she’s read the story. Noises rise behind the Currus’s interior door, dominated at first by the screech of steel, but then by warmer tones, flesh tones, angry and hopeful, outstretched, reaching her ears. Jix, between two doors, knows which one will open. She floats, she dances, in weightless wonder.
Content warning: Slavery
