A Harvest of Astronauts

The airlock sighed open, and the first corpse floated through. It was a thin, hairless girl, whose eyes and lips were sewn shut with golden thread. A black sheet covered her body from the neck down, though her hands protruded from two cross-shaped slits. A sprig of lavender was wrapped around each of the girl’s wrists.

X09 caught the body by its shoulders and guided it onto a gurney. Then they cinched a strap across the corpse’s ribs and pushed it down the hall, where Anya was waiting to catch it and steer it around the corner and into the prep bay.

“Got six for you this time,” someone said from the other side of the lock. “All kids again.”

“Understood.” The coupling mechanism groaned just as X09 detected a slight deviation in the interface between the two ships. They fired the Vernier thrusters to correct the alignment and the groaning stopped.

Anya glanced toward X09. Her face was angular; her brown eyes were bloodshot. She was getting worse.

X09 ran a superficial diagnostic, and Anya’s vitals overlaid the space around her in a digital cloud. Everything looked acceptable, so far as that definition currently stood. “Nothing to be concerned about,” X09 said. “Just a slight adjustment.”

A second body cartwheeled through the lock, one that carried the undisguised tang of formaldehyde. X09 caught the body, strapped it down, and sent it on its way.

Anya kicked off the wall, caught the gurney, and disappeared around the corner, pulling it behind her.

“Gotta be your last shift in this system, right?” the voice said.

“Yes,” X09 said.

“You figure you’ve got enough time to offload all these before the nova pops?”

“Yes,” X09 repeated.

The voice hesitated. “Yeah, I guess you’d know.”

X09 transferred three more corpses down to Anya, making small adjustments to their trajectories here and there. “Thank you for your business,” they said, as the final body disappeared around the corner.

“Yeah, same,” the voice called back. “You two be safe out there.”

X09 gave one yank on the horizontal ladder that ran the length of the wall, propelling themselves deeper into the ship. They pulled their way around the corner and found Anya standing outside the prep bay windows, with a hand to the ceiling to anchor her in place, her thinning dreads haloed around her shoulders. All six gurneys floated behind the glass, spinning, bumping into each other.

X09 caught a rung just behind Anya and jerked themselves to a stop. They wrapped their arms around her.

She sank into them, pressing her chin into the crook of their elbow. “They were all so young.”

X09 ran a deeper diagnostic. They were doing that too often these days, but they couldn’t help it. The readout covered every inch of available space: the walls, the ceiling, the air. Even Anya’s light-brown skin was overlaid with scrolling blue text, though of course she couldn’t see it.

Her heart rate and blood pressure were slightly elevated, which was understandable. But her T cell count had spiked again. X09 pulled her closer.

“Any one of them could have been ours,” she said, through chattering teeth. “In another life.”

“Perhaps once leasing our body is no longer necessary, and we can acquire something more permanent …”

She kissed their left hand, their right. Then she said what X09 had been thinking repeatedly these last few weeks: “I wish I had that much time.”

Alchemy, really?” Anya said, as she pulled herself into X09’s personal quarters. She’d put her rings back on, eight in total, one on each finger. Four platinum, four gold, all thin as wire. One for each body X09 had left behind. One for each time they’d fallen back in love with her.

X09 closed the book they’d been reading. “Alchemy. Really.” They’d turned to the field out of necessity. They’d already exhausted every medical text dating back to the Kahoun Papyrus, every spiritual book back to the Rig Veda, and everything in between. Many of those yellowed, dusty texts were still pinned against the wall, held in place by a triangular net that spanned ceiling to floor.

But X09 had dismissed alchemy out of hand. It seemed a grievous oversight now that a new, desperate hope was sparking inside their chest.

Anya twined her fingers through the netting and let her body drift up off the floor. “I guess you’ve already started the descent.”

“We have. We’ll be close enough to begin in a little over an hour.”

“Great. So, can I help with anything?”

X09 plucked a volume out from the stack. The cover was so worn it was indecipherable. “Try this one. It’s a bit too technical for us.”

Anya cracked it open, barked a laugh, and threw it at X09’s head.

X09 caught the book between two fingers and set it back behind the netting.

“Not funny,” Anya said with a smile. “How long have you been sitting on that one?”

“We do not understand what you mean,” X09 said. “We are a robot. We are not programmed for humor.” They’d handed her Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. “Boop beep, beep boop.”

“Shut up,” she said, still grinning. “I figured you’d have finished all these by now.”

“We have. We’re rereading them.”

“In case you missed something.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t miss things. Ever.”

“No.”

Anya shook her head, and her dreads lashed back and forth across her face. “Yeah, that’s not obsessive at all. Totally normal. Why don’t you just scan them?”

“We like turning pages. We like the weight in our hands.”

“Such a romantic.”

“If you say so.”

“What are you reading, exactly?”

“Translations, guesses, ramblings. Anything to do with the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Anya pursed her lips. It made her look gaunt, but no less pretty. “For turning metal into gold, right?”

“That was the primary aim. But there are several other interpretations, too.”

She stifled a yawn with her hand. “Like?”

X09 magnified their vision, straining to see if her palm would come away speckled with blood. For once, it didn’t. “Some say the transmutation is metaphorical. That alchemy is to be understood as a means for the purification of the soul. To elevate oneself from a base state to enlightenment.”

“And you really believe that?”

X09 shrugged. They had other opinions, other hopes. Though the possibility of redemption—especially after all the suffering they’d caused these last few weeks—was a comforting one.

“Mmm. Well, I’ll leave you to it. I’m going to rest up a bit before we start.”

“Feeling all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired. Don’t work too hard, okay?” She kissed the top of their head and left.

Her fatigue wasn’t a surprise. X09 had stolen nearly a pint of her blood over the last two nights as she’d slept. The vials were tucked away inside a hollow they’d carved out beneath the synthetic flesh of their abdomen. They looked out the window.

Ryzel A, a neutron star, loomed large beyond the glass, pale blue light beaming from both its poles. Ryzel B was barely visible, just a speck hurtling through the dark, spiraling ever closer to an inevitable collision with its twin.

How strange it was, that mankind had been searching for the Philosopher’s Stone for thousands of years, yet none had ever considered that there might be thousands of them screaming unseen through the sky. That the Stone might not be a stone at all, but a star.

X09 accessed the ship’s live feed and directed it to Anya’s quarters. They watched the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest until they were sure she was sleeping, then they tucked the feed into the corner of their vision and slipped into the prep bay.

The bodies were still floating about on their gurneys. X09 grabbed one and pushed it onto the wall, where a set of latches clicked into place over its metal frame. They anchored the other five in the same way.

X09 cut the power to the prep bay’s cameras and started with the left eye of the first girl to arrive. They held their breath as they worked the first gold stitch out of her eyelid, though X09 didn’t need to breathe. One of the many habits they’d picked up from Anya. They removed a spool of painted wire from a compartment in their chest and tied one end to the stitch they’d pulled loose. Then they worked the strings until it was the painted wire that was embedded in the girl’s skin, and the thread was free for the taking. They clipped the knot and pocketed the gold.

So it went with the girl’s other eye, then her lips. X09 couldn’t tell the difference when they were done; they’d made the switch without damaging the girl’s face. They weren’t always that lucky, though Anya had never noticed. They tried not to theorize about how she would react if she knew.

X09 pulled the black sheet down and checked for other offerings. The girl wore a diamond ring on her middle finger. They gave it a sharp tug, but the ring wouldn’t come free. They tried again, harder, and when it still refused to budge, they snapped the girl’s finger off at the knuckle. X09 pulled the ring loose and curled the girl’s remaining fingers around her severed digit. Then they pulled the sheet back up to the girl’s throat and moved on to the next body, a boy with platinum bands fastened around his throat.

The offerings that the living made to the next life were varied, but always valuable. No resurrection came without its cost. When their work was done, X09’s compartments were full, and their heart was heavy in their chest. They understood, with calculable certainty, exactly how many children they’d cast off to be reborn, knowing that they’d robbed the boys and girls of the ability to pay their way.

But Anya’s medications weren’t cheap, and if X09 ever had to cast her into the cleansing fire, they’d send her to the stars with every inch of her dripping in gold.

I think we should go with a female body next time,” Anya said. She was chewing mint again—it was of the few scents strong enough to keep her from smelling the blood on her breath. She’d just joined X09 in the prep bay, and they were waiting for the ship to settle into orbit.

“Really?” X09 said. “Female?”

Anya hugged herself. Her breath misted out from between her lips. She looked so small. “You’d take up a lot less space.”

“That is true.” X09 bumped the room’s temperature up four degrees.

“And you wouldn’t smell so bad.”

“This body isn’t capable—oh. We see how it is.”

She flicked their nose. “Beep boop indeed. But what do you think?”

“We’ll be happy with whatever body you choose.”

“Any body at all?”

“Within reason. We don’t want to come back as a chihuahua.”

“Wolfhound? German shepherd?”

“Tempting, but no. We’re afraid we have to insist on some approximation of human.”

“Probably for the best. People might talk, otherwise.”

“You should put your glasses on,” X09 said. “We’re getting close.”

Anya squinted at the blue brilliance of the window, sighed, and slid a pair of dark glasses down off her forehead and over her eyes. They were much too big for her face.

X09 released the latches on the first gurney and maneuvered it in front of the chute, a circular disk set into the wall just beneath the window. It spiraled open to receive the body. They studied Anya’s face as they slid the corpse into the tube, but her attention remained fixed on the window. The disk sealed shut.

“You’re really going to go through with it again, aren’t you?” she said.

“Yes.”

She licked her lips. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“We know.”

“There’s too many risks.”

“They’re minimal, mostly.”

“All it would take for me to lose you is a bit more background noise than normal during the transfer. A flare or a burst or almost anything else. You know it’s just a matter of chance.”

“Even if our personal data was lost, you’d still have our basic programming.”

“But you wouldn’t be you. I’d have to make you you again.”

X09 shrugged. “We’re sure you could find a way to improve us.”

“I’d have to make you love me again. From scratch. It’s hard enough when the transfer goes well and you get most of your memories back, but”—her voice was quiet, delicate—“I don’t know if I could manage it again without them. Now that I’m like this. I don’t even feel like I’m the same person anymore.”

X09 patched together what memories they had, and eight Anyas overlaid their vision, data ghosts that a different part of X09 had loved in turn, data ghosts whose sum comprised the beautiful totality that was Anya—the real Anya—floating there before them.

“By our calculations,” X09 said, “making us fall in love with you would take approximately seven seconds.”

She grabbed both of their hands and squeezed. “Do you really have to go like this? Can’t we wait a bit longer? Please?”

“This body is going to deactivate in a few hours regardless. And the decrease in weight will boost the ship’s efficiency on the way back.”

“Barely. And we could just eject it after we’ve jumped out of this system.”

“That would be wasteful.” And it would leave X09 without the answers they needed.

“I know,” Anya said.

An alert sounded inside X09’s head; the ship was in position. They fired the ejector. “It’ll be fine. We promise.”

Anya shivered as she watched the corpse surge down into the blue light. “Can we at least pick up a different contract next time? I’m so tired of doing this. I know the pay’s good, but …”

“We’ll have to run the numbers when we get back, but if we can make it work, we’ll do something else. If that’s what you want.”

“Thanks. This job just creeps me out.”

“Why?”

“You don’t think it’s weird? That we’ve turned these stars into graveyards?”

“Not particularly. A star dies, and a neutron star is born. We’ve always associated them with death.”

“I guess so. I just find it a little grotesque is all. I mean, these stars are going to collide, and then a hundred scrapper ships are going to jump in under the nova to salvage the metal that’s made. So many strangers picking through the bones.” She rolled one of her platinum rings about her index finger. “They’re gravediggers. I know it’s just gold and all that they’re after, but no matter how you look at it, they’re still harvesting corpses.”

“If that’s true, then you’ve got us wrapped around your finger in more ways than we realized.”

Anya smiled down into her rings. “Clearly. It’s different with you though.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t really think of these rings as being a part of you, even if there’s a piece of your old bodies in each of them. They’re more reminders that you came back to me, even though you didn’t have to.”

“Why would we ever want to do otherwise?”

She swallowed, wincing. “I can’t imagine watching you die. I don’t think I could handle it. Maybe you’re just better than I am, but I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to go back to when everything was simple between us. When we were just captain and navigation system.”

“We aren’t going anywhere. Neither are you.”

“Look at me. I’m less every day. There has to be a point where I won’t be worth coming ba—”

“There isn’t.”

She looked away.

“There isn’t.”

“I just wonder sometimes. What it must be like to be like you, to know that you can reset your whole life whenever you want.”

“Would you go back if you could?”

“To my childhood? God no. I hated being a kid.” She coughed, a wet, strangling sound that set her hacking. Three ruby-red globes drifted across the distance between them.

X09 slid the next corpse into place and sent it on its way.

This isn’t goodbye,” X09 said, as they climbed into the ejector, feet first.

“I know.”

“And I won’t be long.”

“I know.” She bent down and kissed their forehead, then planted a longer, lingering kiss on their lips. “I’ll miss this body. It was a good one.”

“Better than some, worse than others.”

“Maybe we should splurge for some upgrades for this next one. We could afford it if we took another one of these jobs. Maybe …” she trailed off, blushing.

X09 smirked. “Yes?”

“We’ll talk when you get back.”

“Okay.”

“Well,” Anya said.

“We love you.”

“I love you too.”

X09 sealed the ejector bay behind them. Then they sent themselves careening into space. The ship loomed in front of them for a split-second—with Anya’s face in the window, her fingers splayed against the glass—then she and the ship were lost in the darkness. The cold enveloped them, then the heat flashed up, warm at first, then almost unbearable. But X09’s mind was elsewhere as they plummeted down.

One part was stuck on Anya, as always. Analyzing her prognosis, gauging how many days she had left. Testing variables that were increasingly obscure: the ship’s proximity to sources of radiation, its temperature, its composition. Anya’s hydration levels, the number of blankets she slept with, the freshness of the coffee she drank.

The second part was wondering if X09 had a soul, and if so, whether it could be saved. A great hope, but an unnecessary one. X09 would carry whatever burden Anya needed them to, into the afterlife or otherwise.

The third part was beaming their nonessential data back to the ship. The memories that bound X09 to Anya and made them hers.

Illustration by Sam Kemp

But the fourth part—the greatest part by far—was focused on the vials of blood they’d stolen. On analyzing the rogue cells that were eating Anya from the inside out.

X09 plunged down, glowing now, synthetic skin wicking off in white-hot bursts. The tidal force built until it was pulling them apart, into streams of metal, into particles.

In that last warped, overlong second, X09 thought of the Philosopher’s Stone. Of its ability to transmute base metal to gold, confirmed by an earthbound telescope way back in 2017.

They thought of the many humans who now flocked to these cosmic graveyards, seeking purification, and awaiting rebirth, in whatever form the stars saw fit to grant them.

And, finally, they thought of their last great hope: that the Stone’s true strength might not lie in its ability to purify the souls of the dead, but in cleansing the bodies of the living. X09 poured nine lives’ worth of hope into those vials.

There was the slightest shimmer, and then—