by J D Huffman
Elena led Fred, Sasha, and William down a corridor to their right. The way was lit by occasional glows emanating from evenly-spaced recesses on either side of the wall. Sasha peeked into one of them and realized it was some kind of stone. It gave off a blue-green haze that at least made it possible to see, even if it didn’t light things up enough to be sure who was in front of you. After a dozen or so of these lights, the hallway cut left and opened up into a large, hollow chamber with a high ceiling. Suspended by ropes were three chandeliers, each lit not by candles but by more of those same rocks. I wonder where they come from and why they glow.
Below the chandeliers sat a long wooden table, unmistakably carved by hand from local timber, held upright by posts worked to resemble tree trunks and surface roots—or were they actually tree trunks and roots?—positioned along the centerline of the table just far enough apart to keep it stable with the minimum number of supports. Similarly hand-whittled chairs surrounded the table, no less than forty of them. Sasha saw that no chairs were placed exactly at the ends of the table. For one thing, it was too wide, shaped with just enough of an oval that the idea of one person occupying the short nub would be a ludicrous waste of space. Instead, the ends were big enough for three seats each. While Sasha assumed that Arkady always took up one of those chairs, it wouldn’t have surprised her if he chose a different one every night. He seems like that kind of creature.
She took a seat on one of the long sides, with William slotting himself in to her right and Fred completing the flank. She wished they wouldn’t crowd her but it seemed petty to argue, especially in front of Elena, whom Sasha didn’t think liked them very much. I wouldn’t like having a bunch of Totality come to my house for dinner, either. If I had one.
Other people started to file in, and there was nothing consistent about their ages or appearance. A parade of ages, skin tones, and body shapes flowed through the room, their every hair, pimple, wrinkle, and fold visible. Though she was fully clothed, it was Sasha who felt naked in their presence. She wondered how they came to have such a custom. She whispered to Fred, “Were they always like this?”
“You mean the nudity?” he sought to clarify.
“Yeah.”
He turned up a corner of his lip, eyes transfixed on the human mosaic milling about the table. “No. He always hated the Totality uniforms, but I did not think he would become a nudist. He has become somewhat… stranger since I knew him.”
That must be an understatement. She watched as food began to fill the table, finally realizing that all the movement of the people who’d entered wasn’t just for show. Clay bowls and plates slid in a choreographed fashion toward the center of the table, and Sasha stood up slightly and leaned over in an attempt to see just what their food consisted of. She didn’t know what the items were, exactly, only that they were colorful, floral, and glistening with moisture. Some had steam rising from them, evidence of recent cooking, and others items were provided in the raw. Plate after plate after bowl after bowl landed on the table, brought by adults and children alike, all of whom smiled and danced their way around the room as if this was the highlight of their day. Maybe it is. Meal time must be a lot more enjoyable if this food tastes as good as it looks. She thought about the reclaimed protein meal the Totality fed them on Actis, its range of flavors being “bland” to “awful” and always coming in the same texture, that vaguely liquid consistency with just enough semi-solid chunks in it to suggest it was intended as food and not a drink, a psychological trick to make one feel full after so many spoonsful.
Arkady and Angel came in at some point, and Sasha failed to notice until the two of them sat directly across from her. She could barely see them over the piles of food, but she imagined that problem would soon solve itself. Arkady raised an arm in her direction. “Don’t hesitate to dig in!” he urged.
She looked down the table to her left, then right. No one else was eating yet. “Are you sure you want us to start?”
“You’re our guests. It’s tradition,” he assured her, smiling expectantly.
“There’s no such tradition,” Elena muttered just loud enough for Sasha to hear her from across the table.
Arkady sighed. “If I say it’s tradition, then it is! Let the woman eat.”
A spark of self-preservation hit Sasha then, and it made her hesitate. What if it’s…
“…poisoned?” Arkady finished her thought aloud. “If I wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t have to do anything so indirect. But if it’s peace of mind you want, allow me to provide it.” He reached over and grabbed something roughly spherical from one of the bowls, an item that was red with green spots or the other way around—it was hard to tell. Arkady bit into it with a loud crunch, and his chewing wasn’t all that quiet. The fleshy-looking inside was pink and, based on Arkady’s expression, Sasha imagined it was delicious. “Even if I did have something poisoned, can you imagine how much it would take to make all this food lethal to you?” He tapped the side of his head. “Think it through.”
She felt foolish for her paranoia, but these were Totality, after all—at least some of them were. Still, Arkady was right. He could’ve killed her in myriad other ways by now, and he hadn’t. She went for one of the bowls, not the closest one to her, but a few places away. These things were round, orange-colored slices with a hole in the middle. She hooked her finger through a hole and snagged one, bringing it to her lips. Sweet juices already dripped from it, going down her chin before she’d managed to take a bite. When she did, she thought her mouth was going to explode from the sudden salivary reaction it provoked. Her cheeks hurt from the intense, abrupt sweetness, and a tart aftertaste made the whole experience more complicated than she anticipated. She lost herself in the sensations for a moment before realizing there were a good forty or fifty people watching her right then. She immediately stiffened and reconstituted her composure, eating the slice of fruit with a sort of detached satisfaction, though deep down she was thinking about how she’d like to eat these for the rest of her life.
Everyone else quickly joined in the feast, eating with their hands, reaching across the table and grabbing whatever they wanted, spitting seeds onto the table or floor (whichever they preferred), juices dripping wherever they may, wiped onto hands and arms. She noticed some people kissing and becoming vigorously physical with one another, and she felt a pang of offense. She wasn’t certain why, at first, but began to suspect it was jealousy at having been denied such luxuries while enslaved by the Totality. But that’s no reason to be resentful toward any of these creatures, is it?
Once the pile of food had diminished somewhat and Sasha and Arkady could see each other adequately, he spoke up. “Elena tells me you have some questions.”
She nodded. “There might be a lot of them.”
He grinned. “I have the time. Would you like me to pluck them from your busy mind?”
Right. That thing he did before. “No, I’d appreciate it if you stayed out of my head. How do you even do that?”
“How do you blink? How do you breathe? How do you know the way to shape your mouth and vibrate your vocal cords and position your tongue to speak the words you wish to utter? Part of it is natural aptitude. The other part is learning, practice, and training until no deliberate thought is required. The things you say to yourself buzz through my mind like insects and I can’t help but hear them.”
Terror. How much has he heard? She didn’t think at all about how she was debating whether to kill them. She thought very hard about not thinking of that. She also thought very hard about how in the fuck did Fred not tell me Arkady is a mind-reader?
Arkady answered. “He didn’t know. I didn’t know, at the time. I only understood after a great deal of confusion and exploration. And, in case you are still worried about your safety, let me stress again that I will not harm you.”
She didn’t know how he could be aware of her thoughts yet feel no animosity. She was
afraid to mention it aloud. She decided to move on to other questions and hope they’d both forget. “You have children here. Elena said something about you Totality having kids with your own slaves?”
“They weren’t our slaves,” he said, his tone slightly less genial. “They had previously been enslaved by the Totality, but we freed them and took them as our wards. Cylence intended them to appease us, to serve us. Instead, we told them they could do as they wished. They decided to accompany us here.”
“And you’ve had children with them,” she added.
“Indeed. I promise you it’s no different from how the rest of you humans do it. In terms of the physical acts involved, that is.”
That got William’s attention. “Is some part of it different, then?”
Arkady took a deep breath, releasing it slowly and audibly. “I’m uncertain if you could understand, with what little you know of us.”
“We’re willing to listen,” Sasha promised, almost as a challenge.
“What do you truly know about the Totality?” he posed to her.
You can easily poke around in my mind to figure that out, can’t you? Or do you just want to make a show in front of the rest of your people? “You take human bodies. You steal them. You suppress or destroy or eliminate the person already inhabiting that body. And then you go around destroying our homes and enslaving us. Is that close enough?” She saw little reason to hide how she really felt, given Arkady’s ability to sense it already.
“From a certain point of view,” he acknowledged. “But we all have our own perspectives, don’t we?”
“If you mean that you don’t think you’re doing anything wrong, I suppose I can believe that,” she granted.
“Here you’ve said ‘wrong.’ That is a subjective concept, isn’t it?”
Not a semantic game. I hate those. “I think reasonable people would agree that mass murder and slavery are wrong, don’t you?”
“And what is the expulsion of Totality from every human body but a genocide? What is our complete deference to the will of humans but slavery?”
That’s nonsense. “They’re our bodies. You have no right to take them. Right now, what are you doing? You’re holding on to a body that once belonged to someone else. How do you feel about the person whose mind you’ve destroyed? How do you think he feels about what you’ve done?”
“Well, his name is Franz, and he’s made his peace with the situation. I didn’t come into his body intentionally, you know. None of us do. One moment, we are nothingness, and the next, we awaken in a physical form that feels both familiar and alien, and sense at the periphery of consciousness some other presence trying to scratch its way in. I eventually made friends with that presence. Franz lived with the woman he loved and their daughter in a small flat in a place once called Germany. He served drinks at a tavern, enjoyed making charcoal drawings, and was an avid swimmer. He loved his life up until the Cataclysm.”
“The Cataclysm?” She wasn’t about to let a reference like that go unexplored.
“Many things happened during the Cataclysm, and no one is entirely sure why. The most relevant to this discussion is that the Cataclysm was the genesis of the Totality. Before that, none of us had ever taken human form. Cylence was the first. I was not quite the second, but very close.” She thought he sounded almost boastful about that.
“And Franz is just fine with you using his body all this time? I find that hard to believe.”
“I am in no way trying to generalize what it is like for all Totality. Others likely oppress and crush their host personalities. I am only saying that I have come to an agreement with mine, and I’ve always encouraged my comrades to do the same. Franz’s family didn’t survive the Cataclysm and, when I entered his body, he was despondent and considering suicide. The world was in turmoil and he’d lost everything that mattered to him. What I have done for him is cordon off part of the mind we share as his personal playground. He can do anything he wants there, and he’s built a life he enjoys again. He’s built numerous lives, in fact. Any time he wants, he can start over with something else—a new family, a new home, a new world, a new set of possibilities and opportunities. It is my way of sharing immortality with him.”
“So, you do live forever, somehow.” Is that how it works for Fred, too?
Arkady turned up an eyebrow, most likely at Sasha’s previous thought, but did not comment on it. “That’s one aspect we know less about than we’d like. A human body, when occupied by one of our kind, stops aging. We can be killed, of course, but we will not die of old age or sickness. The union of human and Totality prevents this, somehow.”
“But he’ll still never get to experience life—real life—again. You’ve taken that away. You’re saying that an eternity of fantasy is at least as good as a mortal life in reality. What gives you the right to make that decision? What gives you the right to even force that choice on him?”
Arkady tried to turn the question around. “What gives you the right to exist? What gives any life the right to exist? Life itself makes irrevocable changes to the universe around it. It is iterative feedback against the laws of thermodynamics. There is no life that does not come at the expense of other life, or matter and energy. Other lives are snuffed out, other pieces of the universe are changed forever. That’s what it means to be alive. Every breath you take contributes to the eventual heat death of the universe. Every life hastens the final extinguishment of all that is. How do you justify that?”
“That’s not a fair question,” she protested. “I didn’t choose to be born, and I shouldn’t have to choose suicide to be within your boundaries of justice, or whatever you’re trying to set here.”
William took that moment to involve himself in the discussion again. “I agree with Sasha. You’re playing word games over whether it’s okay for you to take someone’s body from them. I don’t have to take anyone else’s body in order to live. Neither does Sasha. But you do. In order to exist, you have to occupy the body of a living, breathing person who already exists. It’s fundamentally different.”
“You say it is fundamentally different, but life is life,” Arkady claimed. He snatched a slice of purple fruit from the table before him and held it up for them to see. “This is alive. Right now, chemical processes are transpiring within this fruit which we call life. When I chew and swallow it, everything we associate with life in this piece of matter will be gone. It will be inert. Nothing but water, nutrients, and waste products. Everything you’ve eaten here represents the taking of other lives. If you consider consciousness your dividing line between ethical killing and unethical killing, is that not arbitrary? You identify beings that experience consciousness in a manner you can relate to as worthy of self-determination and survival, which conveniently places you above all other life forms. I am challenging that assumption.”
“But your challenge is convenient for you,” Sasha pointed out. “If all life is the same, and all life depends on the destruction of other life, then you can say that your existence is actually a kind of mercy, because you aren’t ‘killing’ Franz, you’re just suppressing him.”
He smiled at her as if very, very pleased by her connection of the dots. “I believe you understand, then.”
Sasha, though, didn’t smile. Quite the opposite. “I understand your perspective. I don’t agree with it.”
“Well, consider this. Long before complex life existed on Earth—the homeworld of all humans—there was only life made of single cells. Individual cells can be very good at what they do, but only that limited repertoire. Imagine, if you will, two ancient bacteria. One is very good at using oxygen to extract energy from sugar, but is extremely fragile. It dies easily in anything but the most ideal environment. Another bacterium is a poor oxygen processor but quite hardy. It can live almost anywhere. Its metabolism is slow and inefficient, but it is a good survivor. Imagine these two bacteria meet, and the latt
er engulfs the former. Perhaps the one doing the engulfing fancies itself a meal, and expects to digest the other cell it has absorbed. Instead, however, it discovers that any sugars it consumes now break down much more efficiently—a gift of the smaller bacterium. They develop a symbiotic relationship. They are better off together than apart. This fusion happens hundreds, thousands, millions of times, and becomes inextricably linked with the fates of both bacterial strains. They each evolve to better suit the other, and in time they cannot survive apart. Thus we have the foundation of all animal cells: the eukaryote, peppered with mitochondria who vaguely resemble their ancient ancestors. Could either have known that their chance encounter would change the course of evolution? Certainly not. And yet, without this fateful accident, none of us would be here.”
“That’s a terrible analogy,” Sasha scoffed. “I didn’t even understand half of that. You’re just trying to confuse me.”
“I apologize that your education has been so neglected.”
She sensed he was sincere, yet she felt too angry not to snap back at him. “You can thank your Totality brethren for annihilating my planet and enslaving me. They didn’t see much use in educating me beyond how to work a plasma-blade.”
Everyone else around the table had been observing their conversation intently, and Sasha knew she likely didn’t come off well to them. She was hostile and combative when Arkady used a soft voice and a patient demeanor. She disliked that kind of manipulation—the way he could invoke pacifying tones while uttering the language of mass murder and human misery. Fred talked like Arkady was different but he’s not. He’ll justify anything he has to in order to survive. He makes it sound fair and ethical and kind and just but it’s none of those things. It’s self-serving. It’s always self-serving.
Arkady sighed, no doubt monitoring her internal monologue, as much as she hated him doing that. “I am very sorry that our discussion has caused you so much angst.”