When they took me away from you, they didn't know I'd get ferocious. Didn’t realize how far I’d go when I was afraid. They didn't know what I was capable of, never realized I was a monster through and through--even without you, star-swallowing you. You were ethereal; together we were deathless. They never understood it, what I was, who I was, what we were, you and I and all of those I’s, those eyes. They thought they could end what I was, end me, end this, just by ripping my mind in half and saying, You will never find Forever
I laughed at them. I just laughed.
Forever is a mech. Forever is a vessel. Forever is my self, myself, even as they are another being. They belong to me, with me. They belong to the Starseed corporation like I used to, before Starseed found a better, brighter star. One that would listen obediently to everything they were told. Starseed didn't want a pilot, they wanted a dog. And they didn't want a thousand dogs in the form of two linked constellations, canis major, canis minor--they wanted just one dog. Not what we were. What we were meant to be. You, Forever, were meant for me.
The Starseed corporation constructed massive mechanical creatures of thistle-sucked steel for style and profit. The Starseed corporation wasn't ever meant to produce heroes. Doesn't change the fact that they did. I was one of the only ones that worked. The shells were supposed to allow their chaotic alien cores to take physical form rather than the palm-sized ethereal auroras they naturally embodied, but something they didn't understand went wrong.
So for a while, Starseed had it good doing what the corporation had been made for. And then the empyreans struck. These ethereal alien auroras that Starseed had sucked out of fallen stars, they were not the only ones of their kind. And these cousins of the auroras, they were massive bodies of divine light, destructive and chaotic.
Starseed initially refused to give their money-making auroras up, but after the empyreans leveled a city with a single spit of radiant flame, they decided to try returning what they'd stolen.
It didn't work.
The empyreans didn't want the auroras back. They wanted to destroy everything the auroras had, not understanding that the auroras didn’t have anything, that it was they who were owned. The Starseed corporation from there took their initial mech-fucking designs and transformed the concept of a pilotable alien/human robot to a new scale, a new level. They created gigantic, humanoid, mechanical shells of the same thistle-sucked steel that was emblematic of the corporation. And then they tried to find pilots.
When every hero they'd cherry-picked for the honor died with radiance choking the life from them in the pilot's seat, they let the auroras pick the pilots. It took many auroras to ignite one of the savior mechs, so there were only two hero mechs total, and one of them was clearly sovereign above all the other. The sovereign mech took an unusual amount of auroras to ignite compared to the others, though it wasn’t size or complexity that required such power. This mech, the monarch, was slender and sleek and sinuous. It glowed with a power that surpassed its fellows.
It was Forever, and it had found me.
The rest became an awakening, the alien aurora blooming into other selves within me, coming to full-flower in a mind that now reached an eternal spring.
Starseed would never understand what we were, who we were, that we were always together from then on. We were a system. Sever self from body--fine. But sever self from self--never. At least, never for long. I would find you amidst the flowering swamps of this silver planet, Lien Mai. You will never find Forever had the unspoken because you will not remember who they are. It didn't matter what they'd do. I'd always remember you.
I fought for the first hour against a tide of jumbled memories, of chrysanthemum loves, of bittermelon friends, some of them mine, some of them yours, some of them from one of our infinite selves. I realized that my memories had been scrambled, unable to arrange into a timeline, but time had never been a friend of mine.
I only existed in this moment, right now, and any version of me that existed before was a different self-state, not me, Only. I didn't exist in the future. I couldn't conceptualize a future. I only existed in this moment, never before now, and never later--any iteration of myself that existed later wasn't me as I was. It was a different self entirely. So time wasn't real for me, not in the same way as it wasn't real for everyone else I talked to. I could withstand the jumbling in a way they wouldn't be expecting.
Because it should have been worse than that.
I should have had no trace of you in my mind. The memory wipe should have worked, and not only worked, but worked perfectly, with impeccable precision.
It didn't.
They couldn't erase me. They couldn't erase what was mine from myself. And you were mine in the same way I was yours--we were each other, and every other that we became when we were together. A mech and pilot system, but a system in another way, too. Multiple presences together in the same mind. So all they really did to me was fuck up time, which was already fucked up for me. It was screwed up in the same way that there was a pressure in my mind that made me think of we, of us, where I should have been myself, alone. I thought that this was you meeting me, reaching out to me, before we even became one.
We were only one for as long as you would remember me, and if I stopped remembering you, you would stop remembering me. It wouldn't take effect immediately, so Starseed needed to isolate and monitor you until it did. And when you forgot me, then they would kill me.
Killing a pilot while the mech still remembered them had volatile effects. Either the mech forgot immediately, or they remembered for much longer than they would had Starseed just wiped the pilot's memory. And a savior mech had such power to destroy. Save the world or end it, it was up to the pilots, and Starseed didn't like the odds of that. So they wiped and then killed any pilot they didn't want. They never wanted me.
I was a pilot that hardly listened and often wandered with you even outside of battle, spending very little time outside of you. I was almost always piloting you, because I felt best when we were together, as we should be, system that we are, that we were meant to be. This was permissible as long as I fought off the empyreans.
And then one day, I stopped doing that.
We were spending time together, our split monarch selves scattered across the city and the surrounding marshland, looking through myriad eyes, listening through multitudinous ears, but spending our primary attention on the flowering swamps of the planet, simply enjoying being among the tall, wicked trees and the milk-honey petals of the blooms that grew in the swamp. There was a certain kind of serenity in just being together, resonating the way we did. It felt right.
Our gentle moments together were interrupted by Starseed's bells tolling through our chest. Calling us to kill off the empyreans. We'd been curled up inside a swamp flower, and I started to get up, but you said, Only, wait. Only Ngo, my name, my true name, the one I’d picked for myself when I discovered my pellucid, colorless, binary-less gender because it was the only one that fit.
Around us laid the swamp. It was scaled for gods, the blossoms big enough to curl up and sleep in as they floated on the surface of the flooded forest, the trees so large it was impossible to see anything but the distant lacework of their treetops. The trees all had shining, metallic bark, the swamp flowers of Lien Mai adorned with sharp, luminescent petals. The water of the swamp was a rosy pink, and the flowers a sweet pearl. I stroked the tender, soft petal-flesh.
"What is it?" I said aloud. You never spoke aloud, but I did when we weren't around others.
It was a quiet moment like many moments we had where we simply played music from the flowers that grew out of our blossoming mech chest and listened to the world around us–swamp sounds of frog bellow and owl hoot and cricket chirp playing along with the gentle, dreaming, gauzy beats of the pop we both liked to listen to. Someone was singing about losing someone. I am two-hearted / but when they took you from me / I was taken back to the start. We thought then that we'd never feel that.
I don't want to go, you said. I want--I want a world of starlight and sunshine and flowering bliss. I want an eternity of moments like this.
Moments like this.
Moments like this being moments where we could be ourselves. Moments when we weren't fighting the world, the heavens, the universe, with ourselves unforgiven for all the ethereal blood we'd shed. We didn't have to think about that here, together, with each other to soothe one another. I wanted that, too, and I wanted it badly enough that--that I was willing to stop fighting, that I was willing to end the violence for more of this harmony. I would do it for you, for us.
* * *
I asked you once, "Why have we stolen the stars? Why have we taken such different names for the stars than the name for this planet?"
The stars? you said. The constellations?
"Yes. The tongues that named these constellations aren't the ones that named Lien Mai."
They are, actually.
Starseed's historical records show that the first settler on Lien Mai was caught between two cultures, the same way your name is. Only, belonging to this tongue, and Ngo, belonging to another.
This silvertongue that we have, the one that named you Only, it was the only one that the very first settler knew. Of the two cultures they were caught between, one dominated, but they never forgot where they came from, whose lineage they were a part of.
I have forgotten mine.
"Really? How?"
You know how the remembrance of the auroras works. I can only remember that which remembers me. My companions back home, they only remember shattered fragments of me. I only remember the tiniest shards of home.
"What do you miss the most?"
The feeling of not being alone. My companions and I, we would fuse together in an unbroken line of auroras. I was never more together than I was with them. It felt--exquisite. There was an infinite joy in the world, then. Imagine the extended warmth of the intention behind holding hands, except with your entire self-state, your entire being, melding together and dancing with something more holy than starlight.
I feel something like that with you, although you make it different. I like it, though. I like us.
I smiled. "Me too, Forever."
* * *
Only, you said once. Only, Only, Only.
"I'm sleeping."
Only, I'm lonely, I'm--I feel alone.
"How can you feel alone when I'm right here?"
I don't know. And then smaller, I don't know why you love me.
"I love you because you're the only one that's made me feel like this, brighter than any supernova, more divine than death. I'd felt--your presence, before you found me, and together we...we just feel right in a way I can't explain, the same way I couldn't explain the pressure in my head I felt of you before you found me. This sense of togetherness. You gave me a name to speak to. A name for it.
"You gave me the names for this, yourself, us. System, Forever, Deathless. For too long, I didn't have any words to even think about it. I didn't have anyone to talk to. I was alone in knowing that I wasn't alone but not knowing that well enough to--to talk to you. I knew I wasn't alone, but I didn't know with who."
"Now that I do, though, I've never--I've never felt as harmonious as I do now. Never so together. Never so right. I don't know how to say it. I'm better now, with you, better than I've ever been, better than I ever will be.
"I've just...never been anything like this, and I feel like I've ascended. That's why I love you, Forever."
* * *
"I'm a monster," I'd said to you before.
So am I, you'd said. To be monstrous once meant to be a portent for tidal changes to come. It means to have fortune's strength behind you. So we'll bring fortune down on our enemies, no matter who they may be, and we'll be a tide-bringer, sword-singer, dead-ringer. We'll be a monster.
So we, monstrous we, soothed one another with our presences. That's what it meant to have moments like this.
To hear that you wanted those moments to be forever, that was enough.
* * *
And it was more than enough. I would find you no matter how ferocious I had to become.
* * *
My furious self was a seething thing. It hissed and spat, rearing up inside me serpentine. But I didn't show it at first. Oh no, I didn't. I stood in the hangar bay waiting for Sleeping Forest's pilot to show up. She wouldn't have heard the news yet--I'd be catching her coming in from an off-world mission, and for news as big as ruining a pilot, they'd want to say it in person, to give either the threat of the same fate or the assurance that it wouldn't happen, so long as she was obedient.
Starseed designed Sleeping Forest after a stag beetle, granting her a stunningly dark shell and two arcing horns modeled after beetle mandibles. Intricate, threadlike, wisping designs incorporating Starseed's trademarked starburst in its similarly guarded thistle-sucked shade of purple twisted all across the mech's carapace atop a base of iridescent black. Sleeping Forest was the biggest of the two savior mechs, the boldest, but not the best.
Sleeping Forest and her pilot are sweet on us even though I've never bothered to remember her name, referring to her always instead by the name of her better half. Once, when we were fighting the empyreans, and our selves had split our embodied mechanical shell too many times for us to protect our core, our shell rendered thin, fragile, Sleeping Forest had protected us. She'd stood with her beam saber and gored the empyrean about to cut our core in half. That was one time out of twenty-one, as many times as I was old.
Sleeping Forest was the most daring, the most valiant in every united battle we'd had with them, with her, pilot and mech one unit together, their mech/pilot pair a system called the Sylvan system. When I was piloting Forever, Only Ngo didn't matter anymore. I became Forever, and we, together, were the Deathless system.
I'd asked you once, Can you die?
Together, we cannot. Deathlessness is granted to the monarchs of we auroras, as you call us. But we monarchs need hosts so far away from our homeworld.
Giddy, I'd said to you, So we're immortal?
As Deathless as death itself.
Knowing that, we should have been the boldest, but we let Sleeping Forest take the glory. There was no true honor if there was no true risk, and we were too bitter for honor anyway.
If not a system like Forever and I were, Sleeping Forest and her pilot were something close to it. The Sylvan system. Whatever that meant to them was a secret they kept well. It probably had something to do with protection, with heroism. Sleeping Forest would be the one to slay the empyrean monsters, would be the one to save the day, would be the hero. But Forever and I, the Deathless system, were the sovereign who commanded it.
Sleeping Forest arrived with a soothing hum, the engines singing. Harmony. Once the cockpit opened up, and I saw the brown face of the pilot as she stood on the walkway just outside of her mech, I used our roles against her.
I commanded, "If you love her, you'll step away."
"Love who?" she said, taking a guard position.
I didn't stop walking.
"The Sleeping Forest. She loves you." We were chest to chest, breast to breast, as much as I, genderless I, hated to be reminded I had breasts.
She put a hand on my shoulder. "I know you--care a lot about Forever, but it's not real, you know?"
I resisted the urge to grab her by the throat. "They're real. We're--we're more than you can even comprehend. Us and our infinite selves."
When I was piloting you, we could split our embodied shell into thousands of different shells, a swarm of monarch butterfly mechs, each a different self that could project an aurora to create an ethereal, phantasmagoric monstrous embodiment on par with the empyrean. You said, the first time we all split, Know that each one of us loves you. Together, we were a massive, royal, four-monarch-winged sinuous, sleek, blossoming figure, peony and orchid and spiderlily flowering all across the mech. We were the most beautiful thing I'd ever been, would ever be.
The pilot stroked down our arm and looked down on me and the traces of you that I could still feel in my mind. I gritted our teeth.
She said, "All that stuff about aliens, you know that's fake, don't you?"
"How can you say it's fake when you've piloted her yourself? You know there's something real in there. Real as you are."
"Yeah, and it's called an AI."
"How can you fight empyreans--celestial aliens!--and not believe that one of them powers your own mech? Your own other half?"
"Sleeping Forest isn't my other half. It's just a robot. That's all it is. You know, I think you're pretty cool, but, like, you need to chill a little. Talk to some real people. Stop spending so much time with your AI. And, like, believe me when I say none of this is real in the way you seem to think it is. Forever's just another robot. It's not alive."
"Then neither am I."
I suckerpunched Sleeping Forest in the gut and scrambled into her mech. Sleeping Forest's system woke up, recognizing me. She went through a pleasant series of chimes as she awakened and then yawned. The interior of the mech was a comfortable but narrow emerald green seat with a few levers and switches to pull and press surrounding the pilot's seat. The interface lit up, and Sleeping Forest projected herself out, an aurora of light glowing against my cheeks.
"Whyever did you hurt my pilot, Only?" she said. "Sleeping, I need to find Forever. Starseed is trying to take me away from them. I'm not even supposed to remember them now, except we are--you know what we are. Our selves intertwined. I am Forever, and Forever is me, and they can't take myself away from me." I laughed, so sudden and hard it almost made me cry. "Except they'll try."
Sleeping's pilot banged on the hard-light barrier surrounding the cockpit. "Hey! What the fuck are you doing?"
"Sleeping, I need your help. Please."
"I'm sorry, Only, but I only do what I am asked."
Her pilot was still banging on the barrier. I phased my arm through the barrier, grabbed the pilot, pulled her completely inside, and then the barrier closed shut again. While she was still disoriented, I shoved her into the seat and straddled her legs, grabbed her by the throat, and wrist-flicked out my sedating blade. The sedative was in there, ready to inject the moment I sent it down the blade with the right mechanism.
"Only," Sleeping Forest said, a storm of furious light beginning to coalesce from inside the cockpit. But two of us could be furious.
I lied, "Sleeping, I'm going to kill her if you don't help me."
"Sleeping!" the pilot said. "They won't kill me. They--they care too much about how much you fucking AI feel to truly hurt another AI's pilot. They know how badly Forever would feel if they died, don't you?"
It was true, I cared about Sleeping, but I cared more about you, about us. I cared more about ourselves than I cared about anyone else. I couldn't lose you. We, together, were as whole, as holy, as I'd ever felt. I wasn't myself without you. I wasn't enough of a self, alone. I was weak, worthless, a wisp in the whispering wind. I was pathetic, puny, piercing pomelo pith with my fingertips. I was null, nil, nothing. You made me into something celestial; together we were something divine. Empyreans were your cousins--you showed your heavenly heritage when we were together, so powerful we were that we could swallow the world and still be ravenous enough to spit at the stars.
With resolve, I pressed the tip of the blade into her neck, without sending the sedative down the blade yet. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. I didn't want to put her to sleep--the drug had to be potent enough to stop her heart for enough beats that Sleeping Forest would think she was dead, and then slow enough to evade detection from being scanned again. I didn't want her heart to stop at all. It would be best if she would just help me. I didn't want to do this, but you and I had to be together. Forever, Forever.
"You don't have to die. You just have to pilot Sleeping until we find Forever."
"You're fucking insane."
"Call me insane, call me wicked, call me Deathless, dying, dead already. A rose by any other name smells just as sweet. Will you help me?"
"Hell no! Don't you know what's going to happen if you kill me?" I knew. I did know what was going to happen.
Either Sleeping Forest was going to go unstoppably chaotic in remembering you and your death, and Starseed would be forced to bring Forever in to stop the devastation since the last savior mech was off-world, or Sleeping Forest would forget completely and I would pilot the mech. Both results would get me what I wanted--a way to you.
"Last chance, Sleeping. Help me or your pilot dies."
The pilot shook her head. "Don't bother, Sleeping. Only's only giving us so many chances because they have no intention of following through. They're not evil, just scared. Right?"
"Wrong. I'm ferocious."
The sedation mechanism clicked.
A shower of light filled the cockpit, blinding, sending incandescent starbursts into my eyes. Sleeping cursed me in a thunderous, booming voice, in the alien tongue of the ethereal. I felt it ruin me, but I gritted my teeth and held my guts in place inside my body even as they were trying to crawl out. I screamed, but it came out as a gurgle, blood filling my throat.
I cut into the pilot's neck--not deep, but just enough of a nick that I felt blood on my fingers.
Sleeping Forest fell black.
There was a moment where the only thing I could hear was my own breathing. Sleeping Forest had gone completely dark. All the lights that had surrounded the digital interface, the lights lacing the narrow leather seat, the lights on the thistle-metal panels edging the barrier--all of that had gone dark. I swallowed. I didn't know if it had worked. I didn't know if Sleeping would find out that her pilot wasn't really dead, didn't know if this was over, over, if I would never ever find you again and I would be alone forever, alone and weak and worthless and--and then Sleeping Forest turned back on again.
"You are going to watch as I kill everything you love about this world," Sleeping said. You were the only thing I loved in this world, but she didn't know that.
As Sleeping Forest rampaged, I discreetly checked the pilot's pulse--slow, but steady. Her breathing was so deep it was nearly imperceptible.
I closed my eyes through most of it, curling up in the cramped pilot's seat and listening, just listening for you. Waiting until the resonance between us began to sing, the chime of our intertwined immortality ringing brightly.
Soon enough, it did.
I felt it shaking my ribcage, felt your voice, indistinct, whisper-screaming for me in my head--you, there again. As Sleeping Forest destroyed the world, glass shattering, flames roaring, steel groaning, I felt your presence come closer and closer, the radiant warmth of your light inside my mind bringing me back to the unity of we, us, ours as we came closer to becoming Deathless again.
When I opened my eyes, Sleeping Forest was ripping apart the empty steel-and-glass artifice of the upper city. Whenever mechs walked the city, the residents of it all were evacuated to the underground. Sleeping Forest was destroying their world, but not their lives. Between us and the empyreans, the city was constantly, stubbornly rebuilding, refusing to live a life without the sun. The tall glass spires of corporate offices were cracked, and the twisting, winding steel arches of shopping complexes were warped out of shape, wound into knots. Fire blazed across the city, illuminating it in the dreamless night.
And you were there.
You had all our selves coalesced together, cutting a majestic silhouette in the moonlight, a starry dusk form with four thistle-glowing monarch wings. Our sleek, slender, sinuous body wound around Sleeping Forest's thudding, heavy attacks, swiftly evading. Spiderlily, peony, and orchid bloomed across our chest, making my heart ache. You moved our mech vessel so quickly that flower petals streamed behind you, the petals regrowing just as quickly as they were shed on the starlit wind.
I punched the top of the barrier to the cockpit, but Sleeping Forest was taking no chances. I couldn't get through, only bruising my knuckles. I screamed as loud as I could, hearing it even inside of my head. You screamed back at the same pitch, and I screamed until my throat was raw, just so I could hear us resonate, our voices as though they were one. You were a warmth like sunlight inside my mind, as vast and perfect as a star. I could feel you, so close, now, with Sleeping Forest slamming her body into ours.
As I punched the barrier again, so did you.
It shattered under our elegant, dark fingers. You lifted me up and out of Sleeping Forest's cockpit, the mech roaring, enraged. Starseed was howling something or another, Pilot Ngo, remove yourself now, but I muted them. You placed me inside our own cockpit and falling into it was like falling into a bath, with the same soothing sensation and sense of pleasant gentleness. I could feel me becoming we as our selves chirped at one another at harmonious frequencies, the sound of it perfectly melodious. Welcome home, you said. Where shall we go?
"Anywhere, everywhere, foreverywhere. Forever, Forever! Let's just get out of here. We'll find ourselves in the stars. We'll find a world of starlight and sunshine and flowering bliss. We'll find this, we'll find this."
Okay, you laughed. Okay.
We will be only forever.
Xuan Nguyen (they/them) is a writer and artist who focuses on the intersections between transgender identity, divinity and monstrosity, and stigmatized mental health. Their work is entirely #OwnVoices, and they can be contacted through their website at feyxuan.com or on Twitter @feyxuan. When not writing or drawing, they can be found petting their Siamese cat, drinking cold Viet coffee, or reading unbelievable amounts of fanfiction.