#MOTHERSHIP

Merit's pay cleared before he made it out of the Brimstone's alley.

His wrist buzzed with the confirmation. Forty-eight credits. A week of KCAL protein replacement and two nights in the sleep pod. Three if he skipped his breakfast shakes this week. Six hours carrying trays of vat-cultured caviar pearls and cruelty-free marrow foam to people who wanted the suffering removed from the recipe but not the service.

He pushed through the service exit. The alley was still exhaling the day's rain in iridescent ribbons, each one catching the light of the New Life Spire before unraveling into nothingness.

Across Sixth, The Mothership lit up one letter at a time.

It had been other things before. A theater. A comedy club. A restaurant. The old building kept recycling into different identities and each tenant left a layer of an era like sentiment. Balcony rails from one and neon lighting from another. The marquee and big white bulb lights above the door being the oldest relic left behind.

Now the marquee spelled out:

The crowd outside was made up of guests dressed in bespoke designer outfits. Security flanked the door, robot Ranger dogs sat at the base of the steps like gargoyles. Each officer had its own drone just like everyone else, including the dogs, although the dogs each had a lens and could record on their own.

Then the Founder's table from the Brimstone crossed the street in loose formation, their drones trailing them at shoulder height. Behind them two handlers carried a case with the Deliverance logo embossed across the front.

The Ladder people.

Merit turned to walk away from the overdone affair when a side door snapped open.

"Hey!"

A woman popped her head out into the alley, her headset skewed to the right, with a panicked look in her eye. She ran a fast inventory on Merit's outfit: black shoes and pants, white shirt, and a wristband that called out his gig labor.

"You're late."

"I'm not—"

"One-hour credit fine if you miss call-in." She jabbed a finger into the dark behind her. "Move!"

Merit saw the Deliverance case disappearing through the front door. Then looked at the service door, open and all of a sudden very enticing.

He grabbed a tray of flat gold crisps arranged in careful rows beside transparent pearls that held tiny suspended flakes of gold. The tray smelled faintly of ocean.

"Private room is pinging for the gold crisps and pearls." She pointed at the door to the left. "Don't engage with anyone unless directly spoken to first. The tray tag will get you through the door."

Merit followed the finger out the door. The entrance opened up to two staircases on both sides. Most of the sound in the building came from the right side. Laughter, bass, applause rang out at different intervals.

The carpet was red and gold, another old relic absorbed into the building's atmosphere. The staircase railings shining from wear of over a century of palms sliding up them. The walls climbing up the stairs with him were a collection of everything the building had been. Headshots from long dead actors and comedians behind glass. Photos of old marquee signs from guests that preferred a sold-out show of regular people. At the top, in the center of them all, was the newest addition. Tara Venn's face smiled down at the rest with a promotional countdown screen:

At the top was a single door at the end of the landing. The chrome rim of the tray lit up green as soon as he stepped in front of it, opening the door automatically to let him in.

"—Deven, just watch what we do with Tara at Ascension. You can be adjacent to permanence, sure, but adjacent doesn't get you into Halo." A man's voice emerged from somewhere that could not be seen.

The room was small enough that every sentence could be heard from any angle, even if you couldn't see the speaker. Dark purple booths curved around glass tables so clear you could see the shoes everyone was wearing. One wall served as a screen that ran a live feed of the room below: a host in a silver sparkling dinner jacket gesturing at a projected image of a blank-looking synth and Tara Venn next to it.

"Organs," the invisible man said, "are just subscriptions you can't cancel."

Laughter emerged from the same place. On the wall monitor, the live feed of the stage below stuttered. A harsh horizontal jagged red tear sliced through the host's silver jacket, the pixels of his face lagging a second behind the audio. The blank-looking synth next to him flickered violently. For a fraction of a second, the projected silhouette of Tara Venn warped into a different geometric mesh entirely, erratic, and labeled with a flickering string of core-level directory paths.

Around the silhouette's head, the promotional golden halo stuttered and slipped down around her throat like a collapsing garrote, tightening until the code it was made up of compressed into a jagged black wire. The feed's audio came through completely normally, as the image forced her own digital shadow to detach from her, rising up behind her, and pinning her arms back. The screen filled with a violent macro-lens error—a split-second shot of Tara's rendered eye locked open and twitching, her eyelashes held droplets of water—before the system snapped back to the pristine, smiling marketing stream.

A woman with platinum metal locks looked down at the tray, her hair falling in front of her highlighted clavicles in bright lit up ribbons. She pointed towards the furthest table where Tara Venn occupied the center most position of an almost perfect circular table and booth. Her dress appeared as a glistening liquid that phased between the New Life and Deliverance logos, catching the light and rippling it across her body like waves on the clearest ocean. A clear collar with a thin gold band inside of it registered each vocalization with a slight shimmer. One slim leg was crossed over the other and looped around again as she leaned into the woman next to her.

Watching the guests continue as if the screen hadn't just choked out the VIP in the room may have made Merit believe he was seeing things. But the sudden, tense, shift of the staff's energy was enough of a giveaway that he hadn't finally fucking lost it.

"Tara, no. You're over your biological caloric limit. Your upload is in seven days. Now is not the time for indulg—"

Tara's hand shot out and took three gold crisps from the tray as Merit walked up. The motion tipped him slightly off balance. The glass cup full of pearls slid slightly and hit the edge of the rim.

"Tara, you'll bloat." The handler next to her tried to grab her hand away as Tara grabbed a fourth. "You'll deal," she shot back as she popped it into her mouth.

Merit lowered the tray, gently placing the items onto the crystal table and caught Tara's screen on the way down. He adjusted the angle and reflected a list of names back at him, one being particularly familiar.

The edge of the tray clipped the side of the glass cup and tipped it over. Translucent pearls scattered across the table towards the guest of honor, some bouncing off the side and rolling across the tile.

Tara laughed at the chaos. Every face in the room stopped to take a look at her. She bent down and picked one off the floor and held it up between two perfectly manicured fingers.

"Five-second rule," she said.

"Tara…"

"I'm going to be permanent." She dropped it into her mouth. "Let me be disgusting while I still can."

For a moment the rest of the table didn't react. Then, one of them bent down to pick up a translucent pearl of their own, examining it in the same way Tara had. After a moment each person followed suit, popping a pearl into their mouth, nodding at her as they sucked on the tiny balls of sugar.

Merit crouched down and collected the cup, pretending not to notice what was transpiring in front of him.

As he reached the door, the woman with platinum locks grabbed him by the elbow. When he turned towards her she placed a pearl against his lips, a huge smile cracking across her face, as if she were giving him the best tip of his life. She lifted her palm upwards towards his mouth while lifting her head, signaling for him to eat it. Merit opened his lips to allow the ball into his mouth. Instead of the sugar he was expecting from the small crystals, a slight ocean taste coated his tongue. Then the ball burst, filling his mouth with a briny flavor as the gold flake melted on his tongue like creamy butter. The texture caught him off guard, and Merit turned just in time to hide the gag as his tray automatically opened the door.