by Loki Renard
“You're messing with me. I know you’re messing with me.”
“I am not messing with you. This is not a joke. There is some chance we will both be slain in the effort to teach you the true nature of the universe.”
“This doesn’t sound like a good idea…”
“It’s not a good idea. It’s a necessary idea. Until you see this, you will forever be a wailing infant complaining that you are not allowed to be free.”
“That’s how you see me?”
“It’s how I see you when you lecture me about the prison you live in,” he says. “Let’s go.”
He opens the shuttle door, even though I really wish he wouldn’t, and grabs me by the scruff of my neck and drags me from the nice safe shuttle out into a bitterly cold… no, it’s actually quite warm, but still, a hostile world.
“We conquered the lesser simulations and they are already being used as brood sites,” he says. “Let me show you the true face of the universe.”
The true face of the universe is sticky.
The world is black. A tarry substance covers everything. When I walk, it clings to my boots and falls away in thick, viscous strands. More than once, Krave pulls me from the mire, lifting me up underneath my arm and swinging me over to a rocky space where I can catch my breath before descending once more into the breeding tar.
“That’s scythkin blood,” he explains. “That is what is shed when the matriarchs battle. That’s what we call our women.”
“They fight?”
“Bloody battles,” he says. “Each clutch here has the same limited resources to consume. Which survive and which die depends on which are able to kill to survive. We come from the egg already prepared to destroy all those who might oppose us.”
Looking around, I notice the complete absence of all things. There’s no grass, no trees, nothing that I think anything could really survive on.
“So what resources are the broodkin competing for, if the entire planet is covered in sludge?”
He looks at me with burning eyes. “Each other.”
“Wow.”
“Hostile clutches laid by other matriarchs are the sole sources of protein and amino acids necessary for broodkin to grow into their final forms.”
“The snake eating its own tail,” I murmur, that image flashing into my mind. “But I don’t see anything here. I don’t see any matriarchs defending their young, or…”
“There may be one matriarch left,” he says. “But quite often, all matriarchs are destroyed. They battle until one survives and then that one quite often dies of her wo…”
A groan makes us both stop dead in our tracks. It is the long, rasping, rattling sound of something alive, but only just.
Krave presses a finger to his lips to indicate that I should be quiet, then points to a mound not far off. It is dark, like the rest of the world is dark and at first I cannot see what he is trying to show me, not until we get closer, and then I realize the full tragedy of this way of life.
The matriarch is lying on the ground. She is elegant and long, twelve feet tall at least, with a body leaner, but also much sharper than Krave’s. She looks at us with unseeing eyes, and another rattle escapes her throat. I feel as though I have stumbled on something hallowed, something I should not be seeing. She is curled around her eggs, their rough black shells catching the unfeeling light reflected from a hundred stars. Her hair is spun silver silk. Her face is so pale she seems to be translucent. Her fingers are agile and pretty, but the claws are tipped with dried black blood, and her jaw is likewise covered in the blood of her enemies.
"Where are the men? Why aren’t the males here? Why…” My eyes are filling with tears as the sheer brutality of this tragedy hits me in my gut.
“The males fight and settle the brood sites. From there, it is the role of the matriarchs to breed. They do not allow males except for the seeding time, a period of brief peace before the chaos begins.”
“But… you could stop this. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“Instinct is more powerful than you know,” he says. “If you had tried to stop her, or save her before she was dying, she would have torn you into a thousand pieces and consumed you without a second thought.”
“We have to help her.”
“We cannot.”
Tears rise to my eyes. She is beautiful. She is bloodied. She has given everything so that her offspring might live, and now she lies alone, her body a sacrifice to the young that will hatch and consume her in their own battle to survive.
This is the universe as Krave knows it. This is the world from which he came. At one time, his mother laid as this one does, dying for her offspring.
“You were in an egg like that?”
“Yes,” he says. “I was hatched from an egg just like that one. There were a hundred in our clutch, and I was the first to hatch. It fell to me to fight off other broodkin until our own clutch had fully emerged. From the moment I first drew breath, I have been doing battle.”
As he speaks, he ushers me gently away from the dying matriarch, giving her privacy and peace in her passing. This is a destroyed world, soaked in death, but I sense the hallowedness of it too. This is where new life will rise and fight once more for the one thing every organism in the universe must take on its own terms: survival.
He has given me a gift of understanding that mere words could never have given me. I have seen where Krave comes from and now I know that all he has done, the kneeling, the authoritarian regime down in the simulation, was the best he could do for the humans he found in his care. For a second time, fate made him responsible for those too weak to protect themselves. I can only imagine the crushing responsibility he must have felt when he hatched and found that he was the first to face existence, and again when it was clear that the human colony had no defensive capacity at all.
REEEE!
A sound like a thousand windows shattering at once makes me jump. Something low-slung and dark comes scuttling out of the rolling shadows. It has a shining ridge running along its back, there are two massive bright red eyes glowing out of a face which is 70% eyes and 30% fanged mouth. It is not particularly large, around the size of Pants, but it is making a sound that puts the fear of death into me, a trilling screeching warble which dips into registers low enough to make my lungs vibrate and pitches high enough to make my eardrums scream inside my skull.
Krave grabs me and hoists me above his horned head, kicking out with his armored and shank enhanced feet at the creature which appears to be trying to eat him, gnashing and crushing with its relatively massive and needle sharp teeth.
“What is that!?”
“Freshly hatched broodkin,” he shouts back up to me. “One day, this little guy will be just like me. For now, he’s a mindless feasting beast programmed by nature to kill and consume. Get out of here you little bastard. We’re not broodkin.”
“Hold on,” he says. “We have to run. I have to run. You have to stay up there.”
I am carried at incredible pace across the sticky scythkin plains, thinking about the tragedy of the matriarch, the terror of the broodkin which is now giving chase, and the likelihood that either one of us are going to get out of here alive diminishing by the moment because that thing is gaining on us. It’s seriously fast. And it is not alone. I hear the screams of other freshly hatched broodkin as they spot the disturbance and come racing after us. Krave is running almost as fast as a car drives, and that little demon is right on our tail, only falling behind because it has to pause to get the momentum to lunge at us with its sharp little face.
Krave gets back to the shuttle and more or less throws me into the cabin.
“Hit the green button with the arrow on it!”
I do as I’m told, more or less by accident, because my hands stretch out in front of me to catch me so I don’t slam my face into the control panel. I hit the green button. I also hit the red button.
“Not the red one! Not the red one!”
I don't know which one was
which, but the shuttle takes off in a vertical direction so violently I am thrown to the floor and can’t get up for several minutes, but I can hear an ongoing struggle outside the cockpit, which has sealed itself for some reason. Maybe because it seals on takeoff. Or maybe it seals when it detects a life or death battle taking place in the loading bay.
After what seems like way too long, the door opens. Krave appears, looking somewhat flustered.
“Okay. I have it contained.
“You have what contained?”
“The broodkin.”
“That THING is on board here?”
“It leaped on when you hit the red button. That opens the doors.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, so now we have that.”
“But… we have to take it back.”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“We’ve removed it from the environment, and we don’t know which brood it came from. If we put it back now, it will be like putting chum in the water. It will be devoured in seconds.”
I take a moment to understand what he’s saying. “You’re going to keep that thing.”
“After the first moult or two it will start to look a lot more pleasing to your gaze,” he says. “We can keep it confined until then, they’re not really sentient until they’ve taken their body weight in amino-proteins.”
“And then what?”
“And then we’ll raise it. Together. Like a human family unit.”
“Are you telling me you want me to be mommy to a small beast who wants to eat my guts?”
“It’s no worse than a human infant would be, and this one didn’t burst its way out of your intestines.”
“That’s not how human reproduction works.”
“Come and look at it,” he says. “I’ve put it behind a forcefield.”
He seems excited that he’s just kidnapped a baby monster, and he seems to have decided to raise it. I’m caught off-guard by his sudden paternal instinct.
“Maybe it’s kind of cute?” I attempt to say something encouraging.
It is not kind of cute at all. It is a horned devil creature, not like a baby, more like an angry legged larvae.
“Krave, I’m not ready to be a parent to a flesh-eating baby scythkin.”
“Nobody ever feels ready to parent twenty pounds of screaming death, but sometimes that’s the deal life throws your way.”
“It will eat Pants.”
“We won’t let him eat Pants.”
I stare at him, not understanding what he is doing or why. This is madness, he must see that.
“I want to have a family with you. I cannot impregnate you without the fetus destroying you, so there’s no chance to mix our DNA. That leaves adoption…”
“And we just abducted a baby scythkin, and abduction sounds a lot like adoption, so it’s the same thing?”
The craziest thing about this is the fact that I don’t actually hate the idea as much as I logically should. It would be nice to have something like a family, and to share it with Krave.
“Fine.” Krave says. “I’ll open the airlock and throw him out. It will be a cleaner, kinder death than returning to the surface.
“No! That’s cruel,” I object. “He’s innocent.”
He really is innocent. Not in the way I think of human innocence, which is really usually just another word for helpless, but in the way any born predator is innocent.
“It was a foolish notion,” Krave says. “The matriarch…”
We share feelings on that score. It was impossible to see the death and sacrifice on the surface and not have reverence and respect for the young which emerge from it.
“Ah hell,” I curse to myself. “I guess he needs a name, if we’re keeping him.”
“Czar,” he says immediately.
“What does that mean?”
“It means king, in Russian. I like Russian, it’s a very close language to Scythkin.”
The name is okay. I guess it’s as good as Seven, or Krave. But I still have my doubts.
“It’s a lot of responsibility. What if we screw him up? How can we possibly hope to raise something nature designed to have to kill and devour everything it encounters until it moults? What will the Christmas card pictures look like?
“I think you will take to it,” Krave says. “It’s not so different from what humans do.”
“Excuse me, it is very different. Human infants aren’t capable of murdering anything.”
“Do you know what aliens to your simulated planet see when they look on your cities?”
“What?”
“The same as what you were just shown. A broodsite. Something to be crushed and destroyed.”
“It’s a city, Krave. It’s not a broodsite. We don’t have massive female matriarchs standing guard over clutches of eggs. We have cars and buildings and we have donuts and you can buy a hot dog if you want. I didn’t see a single hotdog stand down there.”
“No, you have hordes of mothers clustering around educational facilities for your juveniles, many of whom armor themselves with large vehicles, and paint themselves with the colors of war to intimidate other mothers who might be considering consuming the offspring of others.”
“That is absolutely not what the school pick up and drop off are,” I say, shaking my head. “You’re interpreting everything you see through your own fucked up scythkin lens. Humans don’t eat other people’s young.”
“They don’t? They should. Juvenile members of all species are very tasty, and consumption reduces competition for one’s own brood.”
“No,” I say firmly. “Humans never eat their young. Hardly ever,” I correct myself, just to be on the safe side. “This is just so sudden.”
“Life is sudden, Seven. Every rotation of every planet around every sun is an exercise in chaos. But we can throw this broodkin back if you like, nothing will happen to it that doesn’t happen to thousands of our infants. Cruel, premature death is the way of the universe.”
“Oh. I get it.”
“You get what?”
“This broodkin. It’s like the people in the simulation. They’d be helpless and broken if not for your machinery keeping them safe.”
“I mean, it is, but that’s not why I grabbed him. He jumped on the ship and we were fifty thousand feet up before I could get him off me.”
He wants to save it. He can’t help himself. Krave is a born hero, and when a hero finds himself faced with overwhelming tragedy, like the matriarch we just saw wrapped around her brood in one final act of defense, he can’t help but want to do something.
“Fine. We’ll keep it. But I don't know anything about raising anything. I’m pretty sure Pants has peed on, like, my whole house at this point.”
“We’ll work it out together,” he says, embracing me.
“Mhm, sure.”
“That is, making the assumption that we both acknowledge what bonds us, and that we will never be what humans call happy, what I would call complete, without the other.”
“Is that your way of asking me if I’m still angry with you?”
“It is.”
I take a breath and I look at the little demon creature which is trying to stab its way through the wall, and then back at Krave, this massive, fully mature scythkin male who has captured my heart along with the rest of my body. And I see something in him I never expected to see. A need for me. For my approval. My desire. My love.
“You messed with me.” I say. “With my mind. You made me live the same day over and over again. I didn’t think I could forgive you for that. But now I think I understand. You don’t know any better. You’re not human. When I look at you, even though I see an alien, I expect a human inside. It’s like… the exact opposite of those suits you put on. I’ve been wanting you to be something you’re not. Something you can never be. And I’ve been judging you as if you are.”
He looks at me grimly. “There will always be something between us. We are bonded, but we are
not the same. We will have to work lifetimes in order to understand one another, and even then we may never truly know what lies inside. But I can tell you one thing, Seven. I will never let you go. You are mine. When we mated, you became part of me.”
His words are earnest and sweet, and intense in the most romantic way. I have felt the bond he is talking about. “That bond,” I say. “I think that’s the reason the mind wipes couldn’t work anymore. I had someone I loved. I had something to fight to remember. The moment I saw you in that human suit, even hidden away, I knew you.”
“But you didn’t know me when you were down below.”
“I guess I was too sick from the process. I don’t think my brain can take another attempt at revising reality.”
“And it will never have to,” he says. “I am going to give you the gift you believe your kind wants.”
“What is that?”
“I am going to set you all free.”
FREEDOM SUCKS
Seven
HUMANS MUST KNEEL
They don’t know it, but this is the last time that order will ring out over the simulation. People come down from their homes. Stop their cars and step out to the side of the road. They obey, as they have obeyed so many times before, going to their knees on hard concrete, waiting to carry out the ritual they have carried out so many times before. But this time, the bell does not sound. This time the voice on high instructs them to assemble in the main square of the city, a vast space where the entire population can easily fit. It’s the sort of place that would be good for gatherings, but the city has mostly decided to use it as a big intersection where the cars go around in circles.
There are no cars circling today, just a big press of people streaming down the directionally diagonal streets which mark the sectors of the city like the spokes of a wheel.
I’ve never seen this many people in one place before.
Krave presses a button and a platform rises in the very center of the space, complete with microphone which transmits his voice across the speaker network which usually commands us to kneel. He is wearing his human suit, but I’m assuming he is planning a grand reveal when the time is right.