She could see everything from here. The elevator shaft spiraled high above the planet's surface, built entirely from reinforced glass. Susanna was miles above the rest of the world, and still rising.
This late into the development process, her research had helpfully informed her, the air was often clogged with smoke. A clear view was rare. Only from this height could she see all the churning belts and pulleys, the sleek excavators and cranes. Materials were scooped up, piled onto conveyor belts, and fed into churning refineries. Processed and reprocessed.
The atonal hum of the elevator set her on edge. As it ascended, the inklings of suspicion she hadn't wanted to consider drowned her less anxious thoughts. She steadied herself and gripped the balustrade. She watched the furling plumes of smoke in the air.
It was rare to be granted an audience with President Haltmann in the first place. He was now the tyrant CEO of a domineering "space engineering" company (a polite euphenism for "harvests material from planets where the natives are too technologically unsophisticated to fight back"), and his company had seen explosive growth over the past few decades. Not uncommon in this era, when new technologies were constantly bubbling to the forefront. The stars were fruitful, with advanced artifacts unearthed on the daily. Regular shock waves rocketed through intergalactic scientific communities as they shared new discoveries and chased strange creatures in strange lands.
Haltmann was the king of discoveries, merciless ruler of a merciless company, with a thousand would-be competitors crushed under his heels. They said he had a secret to aid him, some automated assistant, or perhaps more than that. A stolen piece of Ancient technology, taken from the lost gods themselves. A seraph that whispered divine truths to him.
Layman might dismiss those rumors. Susanna knew better.
She had first-hand experience of the worst kind. The memory still churned in the back of her head. She remembered clearly the panic as her father realized the computer's readings were off and raced for the controls, and by then it was too late. She remembered clearly her neon hell, a ceaseless tumult of migraine sound and color. Endless chaos, energy uncontrolled. Endless freneticism and movement. The lightning crackled horizontally across the blue-black sky and she found herself assaulted, always, by earsplitting sound and blinding light.
What preserved her sanity was a distant memory of her father's face, and the knowledge that she too could return to her home dimension if she devoted herself to the task. She'd clung onto the idea of reuniting with him. She knew it wouldn't be easy, but some part of her had expected her suffering to mean something. At some point her gauntlet would end. She would pass the final test, return home, and finally be happy. She would see her family again.
Meeting her father after these long years, knowing he must have searched desperately for her, that her desperation was mirrored by desperation on his end. That would be her reward.
But as the elevator doors slid open, her deepest fears were confirmed. The President lounged behind a desk five times his size, his eyes shadowed by the enormous control helmet on his head. He did not move to greet her.
"Why, Miss Susie, is it?" he said. "I'm glad to see you here for our interview."
That wasn't her name.
There was no recognition in his gaze.
She answered his questions mechanically. Presenting a front was a skill she'd mastered over the years, and while her thoughts went spinning out of orbit she sounded all too calm, even to herself. Why do you want to work here? "I was drawn to the scope and ambition of the Haltmann Works terraforming missions. The work they're doing with gravity resistors is cutting-edge and I believe I can contribute..." Where would you say your strengths lie? Your weaknesses?
You should know my answers. You raised me.
There had to be a reason he gave the interview in person. There had to be a reason he was speaking to her directly, in his cold isolated office high among the stars, a far-flung tower of steel, an empty building with no workers. There had to be a reason he'd accepted her cold call inquiring about business opportunities, and here she was, asking for an absurd position in a company whose work was almost entirely automated. Surely he remembered her. Surely some faint light of recognition shone behind his eyes. There was hope.
"This isn't an offer I would normally make. Our higher-ups are usually robots, maximum efficiency, state of the art. But you had the courage to come all the way up here. To enter the depths of a foreign planetary system. Demonstrating a proactive nature, admirable, admirable. You almost..."
He trailed off. Rosy streaks of light spread phosphor into the dawning sky.
"I think you would make a fine secretary."
He trailed off again, so uncharacteristic of him. The father she'd known was gone. Something dispassionate had replaced her memories of warmth. People change. But why him?
"It would be nice to have someone tending to the calculations. I can't spend all my time on organizational materials. And sometimes you need a special touch. Organic. A connection. And you'll be paid handsomely, Susie."
That wasn't her name. But who was she to question the CEO?
She bowed her head.
"Of course, sir, I accept. It would be an honor."
Later she would almost regret those words.
Susie saw countless planets torn to dust. Left for nothing. She grew to loathe their inhabitants, who stared dully at her when she elucidated the beauties of order. Structure. He'd built something and she was part of his family. She owed him so much for being there for her. Didn't she?
The rains fell and the factories collapsed. The arkship ascended again to claim new victims.
"Savages," her father said. Too often, she didn't recognize his tone of voice. There were sides of him she had never seen. She knew his prospensity for invention, his love of wordplay and maths, and his keen eye for the natural world. Now everything was only studied so it could be brought back to him and processed - into furniture, luxury rugs, bedframes, warp boosters, sprocket motors, parts of each and every kind. Nature was only useful as a commodity.
Had he loved nature? She was forgetting who he had been. She sang for him and he clapped with no recognition in his eyes. She showed him profit margin diagrams and he nodded in approval. They were employer and employee. He didn't even remember her name.
They journeyed across the cosmos and each planet looked the same. Their sunsets and sunrises took on the same hue. Their magnificent trees were ground into dust. The bedrock would be pulled out, the molten cores harvested for geothermal energy, tapping the awesome power of the heavenly bodies. Witness the power of technology, her father said, with no guilt for what he had done. Mass destruction initiated through simple orders. The signing of papers. The entering of commands on a remote interface.
The computer led them to far-flung stars they ground into dust. Every wonder was disintegrated. Every beauty annihilated. Su followed him and wondered when he would recognize her.
They were far from the only ones doing the harvesting. Smaller companies hovered at their feet, begged for scraps, did trade and consumer negotiation, handled securities and stocks. She had a keen sense for numbers and she navigated this world of finance with the best ease she could manage. Dependable, she was. A good employee. But when would she be a daughter?
The computer knew all, the computer would guide them. Did his eyes deaden each time he sat in the control seat with the helmet humming away, picking parts of his brain? Did he lose himself in communion to a greater power that knew his every secret desire and acted on it? Then why did it not reveal her identity to him? Why did she wait, fruitlessly, hoping for a kind word or gesture?
Memories of the dazzling waters of home, where they listened together to the waves. Where they stargazed, father and daughter, witnessing the beauty of the night sky. Something simple, something sweet. All forgotten. Cinders like the remnants of planets billowing away in clouds of cosmic dust.
Their lavishness ascended to impossible heights. The office acquired a bear rug, ten fireplaces in a row, then a hundred arranged in alcoves around the central figure, the President himself. She knelt in the firelight. They remodeled; waterfalls poured down the sides of the room into unfathomable chasms and she bowed as the spray glistened on her haliconite armor, her iron casings starred with dew. They remodeled; a glass vista flaunted cosmic visions of space, with diagrams of the numbers he so loved shimmering on all surfaces. Chain electricity darting from plasma globes. Thousand-ton chandeliers.
They remodeled; the chandeliers were now the company logo. The company logo hung from the ceiling and bore its weight down on them. The company was eternal just as he was eternally the leader, the prophet and profit-maker, though more often he turned to the computer for those roles until he rarely left its confines. He rarely left the office. No matter how much they spoke, their conversations retained the same tenor and he showed only the faintest sentimentality. Even that spark of familiarity might be dying.
She had to do something.
This planet was star-shaped from a distance and it glittered in the light. In their language of the natives the name translated to "Popstar". What a charming name! What a treasure trove, what a wealth of natural resources: clean water, fecund land, bountiful crops... and what a waste to see it being discarded. Left untended, the gardens ran wild, the forests grew untamed, the citizens lived unappreciative of what they had. Wasn't that so? Her father said much the same. She knew in his head a vision was forming of another glass dome with marble floors, spiraling columns of crystal, bear rugs, profit and more profit...
The computer had to go. It was the only way.
Then he might remember her again.
They descended like they always did. They rent the pertinent facets of the landscape into dust. They made quick work of all things and before long the factories were set up. The smoke emerged and Susie breathed in the ash, knowing the filter in her lungs would protect her.
Unsurprising that the natives fought back. Surprising that they succeeded.
Alone, her experimentation having failed her, her research all for naught, she watched her father don the control helmet and knew opportunity for what it was.
I can't let you have this.
It went wrong. Everything always did.
It went right. She was too exhausted to care.
He was dead.