Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who isn’t supposed to be here
“Really,” Timni says shrilly, as two Omnijanissaries tow her along by the elbows. “I think there’s a mistake of some kind here?”
They don’t answer.
The palace is a vaulted labyrinth of artrees, bioplastic trunks fusing into rippling walls, canopy overhead a riot of chlorophyll and jewelled pigments, breathing oxygen and perfumes into its own halls. Monkeydrones leap and stare among the branches.
Timni has never done anything in her life, good or bad, that’s enough to see her dragged into the palace.
Finally the Omnijanissaries open the doors on a dark grotto — an even denser canopy overhead, and close-packed trunks, for a perpetual twilight. The bottom of it dips below the level of the outside floorloam, a rocky hollow with an artful waterfall tumbling over its lip to wend down the rocks and vanish into some crevice in the very bottom.
On a rock near the bottom of the hollow sits the Empress, in layered robes of plum-coloured and softly light-emitting metasilk.
Timni’s elbows are released. Her escort step back, in unison, and smartly close the door behind her, and there is nothing to do but tremblingly descend the winding path.
“Effulgence,” she says, when she thinks she’s at the correct sort of distance; within earshot without raising her voice to the ruler of everything that counts, but no closer, not near enough to presume. “Your pardon, your desperate pardon, I think you must have wanted someone else.”
The Empress looks made of porcelain. She looks manufactured, and waifish, and uncanny. At her knee, a disembodied head sits upon a smaller rock, the robotic interlock at its neck joint decoupled and visible. It is identical to the Empress’ own head, not only in its features, but its animation; as she looks about and changes expression, so it does, in perfect synchrony.
“In six days,” the Empress says, “despite everything, I will be assassinated. The plans are elaborate, thorough, and deep-seated, and I have been alerted too late; I will be killed, and my fallbacks and duplicates almightily purged. In order to recover from this setback, I intend to physically isolate an ad-hoc backup of myself and send it to a trusted friend, to rebuild, rebound, and revenge at leisure.”
“Oh fuck,” Timni says. “—Sorry! Sorry! Your Effulgence!”
“Under the circumstances,” the Empress says dryly, and waves a hand as if to say it doesn’t matter, as if impropriety in the Empress’ very lightcone doesn’t sentence Timni’s dub to ten thousand lifetimes of digital post-mortem gig economy karmic penance.
The Empress picks up the head, and turns it in her hands until she and it are looking at one another. She bends close, as if to kiss its forehead; whispers something, no doubt some word of terrible administrator command. The head breaks its mirror of her mien; purses its lips, closes its eyes, and relaxes into expressionlessness.
The Empress bends at the waist and places the head into a box of black laquered bamboo, subtly patterned with painted blossom, and pushes down the hinged lid with a hiss and soft release of dissipating vapour. She stands, box between her hands, and — terribly — advances on Timni, eyes dark and flashing.
“Take this,” she says, “aboard your ship, to the Exchange House at Vana.” She thrusts the awful cargo into Timni’s shaking hands, and reaches into some unseen pocket of her robes for a small, outwardly blank bamboo coin. “Here. This is a token of my indulgence. Present it at the Imperial shipyards for a full resupply, and leave within the day. You must be at Vana, preferably before I die, but no more than 48 hours after. You will be expected; someone will meet you there, and your service to me will be completed. I will remember it when I return to my fulness, and reward it.”
“Effulgence,” Timni says, because there’s not much else to say. The Empress turns away to gaze at the waterfall, posed as if she is a classical figure on a teapot, the subject of some elegant poetry; and Timni correctly assumes she is dismissed.
