by R. K. Syrus
These shimmers of false heat only make him shudder with raw chill as they pass. He cannot move.
A bird, a loon, drops out of the sky. Gray and white feathers twist and turn, then a flash of red. It is dead in the air. He knows it. The bird has died before its convulsing wings and legs crash through evergreen branches. How can he know the bird is dead, was dead, even before it started falling?
The bird’s skull makes a minor pok sound as it hits a big branch on the way down and hardly a rustle as it lands on dry needles at the base of the tree. It lies, twitching.
I cannot move.
28
A VEIL BETWEEN LIGHT | DARK MATTER
ZAUBERWALD WOODS
FIFTH MIND SHARD
The Fifth passes by, and partially through, the gender male flesh monster. Disgusting.
Had “Tomee Sheera” been an insect stuck in a web, the Fifth Shard could not have cared less about him. It and the other four have their own problems.
For them, pressing into three-dimensional space is disagreeable. For a flesh monster, it would be like shoving its primary sensory extremity into ice water.
Having no stable visual cortex, shards perceive the secondary energy signatures of photons. Living things emit small quantities of light. Organic life glows. DNA, RNA, synaptic connections, all pulse-decodable patterns. Fifth gleans this creature’s (irrelevant) name and (uninteresting) social identity from his simply organized brain engrams.
The most difficult data to interpret are movements and sounds. Fifth peers into the space-time occupied by Tomee Sheera through a fissure burrowed from dark matter space. Visual data only comes secondhand. First it must pass through biologicals capable of sensing images. These can include insects and plants.
The easiest things for the Fifth to interpret are quantum resonances generated by brain waves. Shards have two purposes: decode thoughts and memories of any being, and then enslave them.
Able to fulfill only one of its primary functions, Fifth has had time to observe this world. A lot of time. It senses wind and water and grass and trees and men that walk and animals that crawl through a murky haze.
At this space-time intersect, it most sharply registers hysterical quantum grief. Insectile oscillations shrill from five exoskeletal minds.
pain | fear | hate
The horde of flesh monsters have violated the One Particle!
• • •
Long ago, there was a planet. It was a hostile world caught between a pulsar and a supergiant. There was life.
The physical primate ancestors of the Fifth were extremophile macro-organisms nurtured by hydrothermal vents in the high-pressure depths of a primordial sea. This expansive biomass clung to existence under the constantly shifting crust of their tortured world.
As to their physical form, there is no authentic Earthly example. The closest comparison would be a cross between sightless mole rats and the Portuguese man o' war colony creature. They were without sight. They had no proper appendages to grasp even basic tools. Left to themselves, they would never have mastered fire. This species would have merely been food for other creatures with superior mobility and more efficient biting mandibles. Except for one talent: interspecies telepathy.
This evolutionary necessity was the reason they ascended so quickly to the top of their planet’s food chain. Eventually, it was their downfall.
As true colony creatures, the zooid mass was composed of several genetically distinct life-forms. Their basic gene codes varied. Some were based on silica, others on arsenic, one even on gold-sulphur bonds. What these species shared was an inability to live without the others.
At first, telepathy was used for communications between colony members through a semi-sentient hive mind. With every generation, it grew more complex.
Next, they used telepathy for defense. This weak and vulnerable species developed psionic countermeasures every bit as effective as armored carapaces and poison-tipped spines. The Fifth Shard still manifests this vestigial talent. It can instill intense fear.
Finally, they developed the ability to bend the minds of other species.
No consciousness could resist. Advanced races in interstellar ships far beyond the biomass’s limited technology came to study the ancient pulsar. Never to be seen again. Most killed themselves trying to land. Survivors were put to work serving their new masters, feeding and maintaining the sloshing biomass. Their continent-sized hive was also their one weakness.
Like bacteria, fungi, and complex vertebrates, the Host’s ancestors maintained a circadian rhythm. The collective brain slept. And dreamed.
Some part of the colony was always asleep. Eventually, the specters of the sentient biomass’s sleeping
Thoughts
Ideas
Wishes
Hopes
Perversions
Fears
Hates
coalesced like a thunderhead cloud from rising moist air. Their communal dream became self-aware.
The Host was dreamed into existence. It began as an idea. An idea that it could exist. It conceived itself as a self-extracting, self-evident being and became the most virulent parasite in the universe, one intensely focused on its own survival. It adhered to the only suitable medium: dark matter space.
The Host found itself alone in a formless infinity with hundreds of dimensions. Much vaster than the stars and nebulas and everything in between. It took a name. A name their ancestors had. With biting mouth parts, the biomass had scratched a mark into rocks:
Years ago on Earth, as an experiment, the Fifth tried to translate this name into human language. It kept telling it to the stubborn thing. Over and over and over.
The flesh monster ended up smashing its own face into a cave wall and scraping its features off. It chewed its tongue off with broken teeth until it died. It kept saying/thinking over and over “that darkness.”
Ever after, Fifth noticed thoughts as it passed.
деген күңгірт
ut tenebris
أن الظلام
Were these pure reactions, or were they tainted by the Fifth’s own memories of the flesh monster in that long-ago cave?
For the Host’s biological progenitors, the colony creature biomass living under the fractured crust of their home planet, darkness was their birthright. They never would develop vision. Once established, the living dream-being’s priority was self-preservation. There was danger of counter-evolution. The Host’s first act was to avert being supplanted. It eliminated its physical dreamers. Every last one. They could not be left alive, possibly to dream again.
Inside the virgin chaos of dark space, the second decision the Host made was to prefer diversity over uniformity. There were many worlds, many sentient races on them, and so much space in between. No monolithic being could hope to dominate it all. But an infinitely replicating colony being might. Mind shards were born.
Incepted self-aware but blank, their insertion into the Host matrix is known as the Joining, a process that was painfully, awfully reversed when the great collective mind discharged them. The five. The Fifth last of all. Spat out. In a most distasteful place. Here, they were tasked with the impossible. To make matters worse, they could not bend the will of a single tool-using slave.
The five mind shards were a small effort to neutralize a threat to the Host collective.
The Host had only one enemy, one threat: a co-orbiting forested planet in its own system had given rise to a talented predator. They were as cunning and dangerous in their own ways as the psionic slave-master colony. They were Hunter-Builder-Warder.
The Warder primates were naturally skilled at camouflage and deception. Later, they became the highly advanced builders and explorers. They managed to detect the Host before the Host perceived them. The Warder race was not destroyed before their scientists had distilled from the fabric of reality a perfect cosmic stem cell. A permanent blind spot in the Host’s vision. Those touched by the One Particle, the Tear of the Shard Alm
ighty, were beyond psionic enslavement.
The Warder race had to be overcome. The One had to be taken. But first, It had to be found.
Locating the last Warder proved a challenge. Though the Host had superior numbers and resources, deploying the many advanced space-faring races it controlled, the war raged.
Inside dismantled Warder outposts were clues as to the location of the One. These were contradictory, intentionally deceptive. All of them had to be pursued.
The Host ejected five shards to study One Particle residue found in uninteresting hominids.
The last Warder had come to Earth and left. That was certain. The upright walkers of this world had in their genetic code of guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine a distinct quantum resonance of the One Particle. The repurposed life goal of the Fifth and its siblings was to find out why. Or, failing that, to spend eternity trying. For them there was no escape, not even in self-destruction. The Five had no voice to contradict. Until they found one.
Their work on Earth put them in close contact with humans. The shards theorized if they could distill enough One Particle resonance out of DNA, the result might reveal where It was. Two entangled particles will point toward each other even if one were hidden between the heartbeats of a galaxy-sized quasar.
Third was particularly fond of these distillation experiments. Initial methods were crude: viral agents cultivated in lower life-forms. The experiments resulted in much flesh-monster suffering and death. Through inflicting suffering and death, Third discovered a sensation: enjoyment.
Even if the distillate didn’t point to It, Second theorized enough residue would point to an object referred to in genetic text written between human nucleotides. Something called the “Key.” Perhaps this was a star map or beacon left behind by the Warder for his accomplices.
As it turned out, the shards were wrong about everything.
Made invisible, It had been hidden on this unworthy planet all along. Once the secret was known to the Five, once the flesh monsters retrieved the object from an icy cavern, they had only to beckon across the cosmos to the Host. It would have descended and grasped the only thing it feared.
Or at least that is what would have happened a year ago, had the shards been as they were when they arrived. Years observing, surveying, watching, had changed them.
A year ago, the Five were no longer the small shards of the infinite psyche they used to be. Millennia watching the disturbing eccentricities of humankind taught them choice.
As Fifth and its shard siblings circled the One Particle in a glacier crevasse, they chose not to cry out to their Host. They decided to take the One Particle for themselves. Since then, they have been watching: It, humans, and each other, with unwavering purpose and dread resolve.
Over time, their neuro-symphonics have drifted out of tune. The shards speak five different languages. They could have rejoined, shed individuality, and thought as one. They did not.
To communicate, they now need borrowed brain waves. The worst animals are birds. They die immediately.
Here and now, at this point of space-time, with all five of them agitated, most feathered creatures have scattered. Some not fast enough. As Fifth advances, a red-throated loon falls to the ground, dead.
Only Third Shard has found a way to control flesh monsters. He has not shared his techniques with Fifth or the others. The catch is all their higher brain functions have to cease, and the resulting meat puppet can perform only basic tasks for a limited time. Third is fond of saying the only useful flesh monster is a dead one.
Among living creatures, reptiles are always a sound choice. The shards all clamber onto caged snakes. Second, always eager to speak first, attaches itself to a reticulated python. Shaken out of his comfortable lounging in his wood-and-glass case. The snake shudders and rolls as he loses his mind.
29
“Catastrophe! Hear me!” Second says demandingly, as has become its nature. “Base energies ... on IT ... what damage done?”
The Fifth shard only half registers these transmuted python theta waves as it takes over the mind of a very sensible water snake.
Third wrestles into the brain of an ornery male king cobra. A dribble of venom issues from his convulsing mouth as the transition takes place.
First seizes control of a green snake, whose scales shine with good care and health.
Fourth drifts over to, not the largest, but certainly the most well-appointed, terrarium. It is full of dry sticks, sand, and smooth rocks suitable for rubbing against. Inside, a female Antiguan racer preens, her forked tongues flickering. The snake has two brown wedge-shaped heads.
“Shhh, go to sleep.”
“What do you say?”
“I was talking to my other head. It rests.”
“Don’t waste time.” Fifth often finds itself guiding the others. Humans have a phrase: First among equals.
“Time.” The awake head of the racer taps against glass.
“Yes, time is a factor here in dimensional space.
Time was, we, all of us, only needed one base brain to form thoughts, make plans.
Time before that, we could take and control beings directly. That saved time.
But that was when we were part of the Host. Then, the time came, and we were not.
As humans say, time marches on.”
Third says, “We need the Key to unlock the vessel, then a legion to defeat the Host.”
“Was to have been stolen,” says methodical First on board its green snake.
“Unreliable thieves!” Fifth’s newly acquired scaly length slops through a pond and against a stone frog poised in the middle of the cage.
“When have flesh monsters been predictable?”
“Ahhh, yes, their thoughts,
winding,
turning,
twisting,
turnable, twistable,” Fourth Shard agrees. And drones on.
“Thoughts never match action.
“Actions never match words.
“An enigma the universe has yet not an answer to.”
And on.
“But we, we ourselves, we in our memories, when we were still part of the Host. Memories of many sentient races we beheld, none ever, anywhere, like this.”
“Blame the Warder!” Third’s thoughts spit from the cobra. The snake’s hood flares wide, fangs snap. If Third continues raging, the cobra’s synapses will liquefy. “He brought forth abomination, put flesh monsters beyond control.”
“Enough! WE five are close. Shall we give up? Rejoin?” First asks.
“Never!” The cobra’s fangs, which never seem to run dry, slather his window with milky venom.
Fourth never seems to run dry of words.
“No, not ever,
“Agreed.
“We came here, to this small distant world,
“We came as lowest of shards
“Refuse from upon the outer shores of the central consciousness.
“The consciousness has certainly all but forgotten we exist.
“But…we are not what we were.
“Once we spoke with one voice,
“Now not.
“We have changed them, the flesh creatures, to be sure, but also been changed.
“The Host would never imagine this could happen.
“The Host will not see it until it is done.
“Once I heard:
“‘The Last shall be First, and the First Last.’”
First cuts in sharply, making every shard’s borrowed synapses oscillate. “The Particle was bombarded.”
“They might have damaged IT, filthy apes! Release plagues. Teach respect. Teach fear.”
“No one is releasing anything,” Fifth says, vetoing the idea of instructive population culling. “The crude flux touched the containment, not IT. Only the Key can open.”
“We five shall possess...”
“And the Key as well.”
“And the Key.”
“And…”
&n
bsp; Second finally shuts up. It leaves the snake’s crumbling neurons. The racer’s mouth foams. Her two heads try tying themselves into a knot. She twitches and dies.
The rest of them do not have much time. They decide to enjoy their slithering puppets. The smooth green snake clambers up an extensive jungle gym made of bamboo. A skin she will not live to completely shed flakes in scaly patches. First causes her to patiently rub against a wood post to scratch. For the shards, physical sensations are rare and somewhat addicting.
Inside the water snake, Fifth luxuriates in a pond that dominates his habitat. He curls around the miniature statue of an open-mouthed frog and extends his head over it. He hangs, swaying, tasting air with a darting tongue. It wishes the creature had something to eat. However, the feeling of digesting the water snake’s previous meal, a salamander, is an acceptable substitute.
The massive python with Second on board pushes stones into a corner. Atop these, she gathers her coils into a looping spiral, rises up to the cage lid and flexes. Small rivets are no match for the living log of pure muscle. They pop with small metallic plinks. The python is free.
The cobra is more delicate. Forcing an escape would injure it. Fortunately there is a feeding slot. The latch is operated from outside by a person’s fingers. The python’s neck serves. The cobra slithers out and drops to the clean stone floor.
“Hurry. This creature fades. I hate to miss a chance.”
At the same time Fifth sees and smells through its chosen reptilian anchor, it also experiences extended levels of reality through its native dark matter tendrils. Fifth senses Third’s elation as it prepares to painfully kill a handy flesh monster.
The victim’s thoughts also resonate. Like the last chirps of a paralyzed bird before it is ripped to feathery shreds. Tomee Sheera panics as the python encircles his legs. The reptile is an impressive specimen, nearly twice the mass of her human victim, who keeps repeating the same silent thoughts.