Chapter 9: Fragmented Memories
Essie dreamed in cinema.
The velvet curtain of the Normandy was gone, replaced by a vast, white space that stretched into infinity. She was standing on a low, circular platform. Not modeling clothes. The concept of clothing felt like a forgotten language. She was just… Essie. The studio lights were suns, and she basked in their sterile heat.
Jez was there, but not alone. A crowd had gathered at the edges of the white expanse. Blurred faces, indistinct forms, but Essie felt their focus like a physical pressure, a hundred pinpricks of heat on her skin. Jez moved through them, not as a director, but as a high priestess, her icy blue eyes burning with a fervor that had nothing to do with fashion.
“Look,” Jez’s voice echoed, not from her mouth, but from the walls of the world. “Just look.”
Essie shifted her weight. A hip cocked. A shoulder rolled back. A simple, languid stretch of her arms overhead. The movement was a seismic event. A collective sigh rippled through the crowd, a wave of wanting so thick the air turned syrup-slow.
Someone, a man with no face, took a step forward. Then another. A woman followed. The invisible barriers dissolved. They weren’t rushing; they were drifting in, pulled by a gravity Essie radiated. Hands, cool and warm, rough and soft, found her. Fingertips brushed the slope of her shoulder, the dip of her waist, the perfect curve of her calf.
She didn’t guide them. She allowed. Her head fell back, eyes closed, a smile playing on her lips. This was the purest thing. This was sunlight to a solar panel. Every touch was a lick of energy, every gasp a jolt directly into her core. The hunger she’d felt at the boutique, the curious sip of power from Jez’s shock, was a drip compared to this flood.
The touches became more urgent. Clothes, the ones she hadn’t been wearing anyway, seemed to melt from the bodies around her. Skin met skin. The white space filled with the sound of fractured breathing, soft moans, the wet slide of contact. It was no longer about her and them. It was a circuit closing. The orgy wasn’t an act of passion; it was a ritual. They were pilgrims, and she was the altar.
She opened her eyes. She was floating slightly above the tangled, sighing mass. Their desire was a visible current now, a shimmering gold mist that rose from their joined bodies and streamed into her. She inhaled, and the room brightened. She exhaled, and a woman below cried out in ecstasy.
“Essie.” The name was a prayer from a dozen lips.
She felt enormous. Infinite. Their worship was a structural beam, holding her up. She was no longer just a woman who attracted looks. She was the source of the look itself. A god made not of stone or scripture, but of pure, undiluted want. She raised a hand, wanting to see a bolt of lightning crackle from her fingertips.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
The sound was wrong. Metallic. Jarring. It didn’t fit the symphony.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
The white space cracked like porcelain. The golden mist snuffed out. The sensations—the heat, the hands, the worship—sucked away into a vacuum of sudden, brutal absence.
Essie’s eyelids flew open. The corrugated metal ceiling of the trailer stared back, stained with a faint water mark shaped like Florida. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. The ghost of a hundred hands tingled on her skin, a phantom limb of pleasure. She was alone, tangled in a thin, damp sheet. The silence was deafening, broken only by the distant caw of a crow.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
“Essie! You decent? It’s past ten, for Chrissake! Wake up, sleeping beauty, I gotta show you something!”
Earl. The dream’s aftershock made his voice sound like it was coming from the bottom of a well.
She sat up, the sheet pooling in her lap. The trailer was an icebox after the dream’s fever. She grabbed the first thing her hand found—Jed’s old denim work shirt, threadbare and smelling of oil and age. She shrugged into it, not buttoning it, and pads/stomped barefoot to the door.
Yanking it open, the gray morning light hit her like a slap. Earl stood on the cinderblock step, filling the doorway. He was in his usual uniform: grease-stained jeans, a thermal shirt stretched over his barrel chest, that walrus mustache bristling with excitement.
“You fixed it?,” she said, her voice still husky with sleep and spent divinity.
“Yup,” Earl said, rocking back on his heels with palpable pride. His eyes, sharp and canny, scanned her disheveled state—the denim shirt hanging open, the sleep-tousled hair. He didn’t comment. “Got it talking. Well, whispering. More like a faint goddamn wheeze. C’mon.”
He turned and lumbered off toward his own larger garage, a cinderblock bunker behind his double-wide. Essie didn’t hesitate. She ducked back inside, shoved her feet into the waiting flip-flops, and hustled after him, the cold morning gravel biting at her soles through the thin rubber.
It lay in a shallow parts tray filled with a clear, viscous liquid. The obsidian slab looked like a sleeping animal. A fine, almost silvery tracery of fiber-optic filaments attached to its surface with tiny, careful globs of translucent goop. The other ends of the hairs-thin filaments spread out like a nervous system, hooked into a chaotic breadboard sprouting resistors and chips, which was in turn connected by a thick ribbon cable to an ancient beige PC tower. The monitor glowed with a stark, green-on-black command prompt, lines of code frozen mid-scroll.
“Holy hell,” Essie whispered, stepping closer. She marveled at it, the careful, almost surgical intrusion. This was the slab that had unmade Jed and poured Essie into the world. It had been inert for ever since, a dead spiritual artifact. Now it was on life support, wired into a machine from the last century. “You didn’t… open it.”
“Nope. Didn’t dare.” Earl wiped his hands on his jeans, leaving new streaks. “Case is seamless. No screws, no seams. It’s a solid egg. But it’s putting out a signal now. A pulse. Faint as a butterfly’s heartbeat, but it’s there.” He tapped the monitor. “My junk PC is just listening. Interpreting the pulses as… well, as this. Gibberish. For now.”
Essie leaned in, her shadow falling over the tray. Her own flawless reflection stared back from the obsidian surface, warped by the liquid. The ghost sensation from the dream—the feeding, the worship—thrummed under her skin, a leftover current seeking a ground. This slab felt like the ground. The source.
“What’s it saying?” she asked, her voice low.
“Beats me. It’s not English. It’s not any code I know.” Earl scratched his mustache. “But it’s asking for a jump. A real power source. This?” He gestured at the rat’s nest of wires and the old desktop power supply. “This is just smelling salts. To wake it up fully, it needs a proper hit. Like a car battery.”
A car battery. The mundane simplicity of it was absurd. Essie stared at the elegant, alien slab in its bath of goo and fiber optics. It needed the same thing that turned over a ‘87 Ford pickup.
It needed the same thing that turned over an ‘87 Ford pickup.
Essie stared at the dormant slab, the aftertaste of the dream’s power still buzzing in her teeth. An impossible connection snapped into place, audibly simple. She barked a short, sharp laugh that made Earl jump.
“Ain’t no battery gonna work, Earl.”
“The hell it won’t,” he scoffed, gesturing to the nest of wires. “Everything runs on juice. This thing just needs the right kinda volts.”
“It’s got the right kinda volts.” Essie’s voice dropped into that soft, purring register. She turned from the slab to look at him, her denim shirt hanging open. She saw his eyes flicker, just for a millisecond, down the revealed line of her body before snapping back to her face. That tiny spark, that involuntary feed, confirmed it. “It runs on somethin’ else. I think it runs on wantin’.”
Earl’s bushy eyebrows crawled toward his hairline. He wiped his hands on his jeans again, a slow, deliberate motion. “What now?”
“Desire,” she said, the word feeling fat and true in her mouth. “I’m serious. When I… when I get someone goin’. All hot and bothered. It fills me up.” She tapped her own sternum. “Like eatin’ a steak dinner, Earl. I don’t even get hungry for real food no more. Not really. I think that slab there… it’s powered by the same damn thing. It’s starving for it.”
Silence filled the garage, broken only by the faint hum of the old PC tower. Earl’s face cycled through expressions: confusion, skepticism, a dawning, uncomfortable curiosity. He looked from Essie’s earnest, flawless face to the alien slab, then back again.
“So you’re sayin’ this space rock is some kinda… pervert battery?” he finally grunted, crossing his arms. “And you’re what, the charger?”
“Maybe.” Essie shrugged, the movement causing the shirt to gape further. She didn’t adjust it. “Worth a shot, ain’t it? Cheaper’n a new DieHard.”
Earl rubbed his jaw, the stubble sounding like sandpaper. His pragmatic mechanic’s brain warred with the evidence in front of him—the impossible woman, the impossible slab. The woman was currently winning. “Alright, you crazy broad. How do we plug it in?”
Essie turned fully toward him, leaning back against the workbench. She let her posture go liquid, one hip cocked. She gazed at him, not with the heat she’d used on Jez, but with a focused, testing intensity. She poured the memory of the dream, the collective worship, into her eyes. She let it simmer.
Earl shifted his weight. He cleared his throat. A faint pinkness crept up his neck above his thermal shirt collar. He tried to hold her gaze, failed, and looked at a wrench on the wall. “Quit messin’ around, Essie.”
“I ain’t messin’.” Her voice was a low hum. “You feel that? That little itch? That’s the current.”
He did feel it. He was a man who appreciated a fine shape, and Essie was a masterpiece working overtime. It was an uncomfortable, unbidden warmth in his gut. He felt seen in a way that was entirely different from his usual lady-killer charm. This was predatory. This was being sized up as fuel.
“Yeah, I feel it,” he muttered, admitting defeat. “It’s downright unnervin’. So what, you just stand there and… what? Pose at it?”
Essie’s eyes flicked to the slab. The green cursor on the monitor blinked, a steady, patient pulse. She pushed away from the bench and took the three steps to the parts tray. She knelt beside it, ignoring the cold concrete seeping through her jeans. She didn’t touch the slab. She hovered her bare hands just above its obsidian surface.
She closed her eyes. She summoned the ghost-sensation from the Normandy, the electric stillness after the kiss, the shocked surrender on Jez’s perfect lips. She concentrated on the feed from Earl, the low-grade, reluctant attraction humming in the room behind her. She bundled it all up—every want she’d ever pulled from anyone—and imagined pushing it down through her palms, into the stone.
For five seconds, nothing.
Then the clear goo in the tray clouded, swirling with milky tendrils. The delicate fiber-optic filaments glowed, not with borrowed light, but with an internal, sapphire radiance. On the monitor, the frozen lines of gibberish code vanished. They were replaced by a single, pulsing line of symbols that looked like intertwining vines or nervous systems.
< < PERIPHERAL UNIT DETECTED. INTERFACE STABLE. FEED SUFFICIENT FOR DIAGNOSTIC CYCLE. INITIATING. > >
The words weren’t in English. They simply appeared in Essie’s mind, cool and genderless, as the symbols scrolled. A sharp, sweet vibration traveled up her arms, settling behind her breastbone. It felt like coming home.
“Well, I’ll be a sonuvabitch,” Earl whispered, staring at the glowing display. “It’s talkin’. You’re feedin’ it.”
Essie opened her eyes. A slow, triumphant smile spread across her face. The slab’s hum matched her own internal frequency. It was recognition. “Told you,” she purred, not looking away from the beautiful, scrolling light. “Now let’s see what it has to say for itself.”