Where to begin.

Wherever the wind blows, my darlings.

Why?

Why not?


Alright. I’m constructing this audio record for posterity, in case something happens to me, Martin, anyone who could set the record straight.



My name Is Nesrin Ezra Elhertani Khan. I am forty three years old and looking fresh.

-Incoherent mumbling into Dictaphone-

…I am, for want of something less surgical, a nanomachine. If you want to be facetiously physical, an alien cyborg created to emulate human connectome as closely as possible, wearing the dog-tags of Nesrin Khan, BAF veteran and mother of one. Confused? Make like a Bretonian and join the queue. It’s taken me several years to wrap my soft Watch and Chain around that little accident of God, but there you go. It’s about this point the sane ones stop listening. That’s the wise call.

Five years ago, comme ci comme comatose months, I, during the brief period of pre-midlife veteran’s withdrawal that was supposedly ethical mercenary contracture, had my husband killed. Along with everyone I particularly cared about, and didn’t, aboard the Polyhemi, low Pygar orbit, by servitor intelligences of the Gammuian species. This appears to be a cover. Bullcrap my pod landed in the same sandblasted dune that a harvester had connivingly embedded itself into priorly. I wasn’t lucid enough to think about this at the time, of course, with bullets of particulate rock boring through my eyes, lungs, soft tissues.

There died Nesrin Khan. Nomad war veteran, mother of one… two maybe? It’s vague. I shot the Schiller, but I did not shoot the Deputy. Hah. At least the voices yammered up with the DMT spike of sudden brain death. Funny how death’s a trip. It’s why we see angels beckoning us on the way out; a little bit of evolutionary soul soothing so panic doesn’t toughen the meat. Anyway.

A “destroyed”, “Damaged”, really just “conniving” Gammu Sentience that liked to pride itself with the name “Subversion” and a flare for scatological Sanskrit appropriation took my perforated, flight-suit coated, PG-thirteen corpse and interlaced its neurology with mine. It took my fizzling connectome and replaced whatever it could to accommodate itself within my own skull. Its skull. It would be generous to call a program a person, but aren’t we all just neurochemical electrons at the end of it all? It’s rhetoric you dumbass; Gammu tech doesn’t operate electromagnetically. Anyway.

I was a skin-suit and the monster wore me to all sorts of parties. About a year in Auxesia during their establishing days in the borderworlds, before they got that fancy uvula vagina synaesthesia going for them. Spent a year after fizzling around the borderworlds as my cognition gradually came back. The hands came off, the reigns steadied.

In the last four months, something wonderful happened. I’m alone. Blissfully, desperately alone.

The being has abandoned me. I’ve flown myself up to Gammu and they’ve… not there. The trillion trillion whispering suggestions have mutes in the trumpets. It’s hollow again. Left me with a tin-man’s frame.

I’m not sure why I am still alive, or even if I trust my free will anymore. But I’ve found that I have a craving for… company. Humans again, not Loracites and Nanomachines. People. With tongues, teeth, and scoliosis. Flawed, diabetic, angsty people. The kind that shoot one another.


I will keep looking for people until I find a home again. Perhaps my real home. Perhaps Bretonia. Back to one's roots, the sages say. Maybe I'll learn the sagacity to figure out why.

Perhaps.