by IGMS
She nods mutely, staring at her hand, and walks back to the hydroponics station.
The cramps spread until my whole body twitches. My muscles ripple and spasm under my skin like insects are crawling along my bones. I take a double-dose of muscle relaxants at night, but I stop sleeping at all two nights in. I'm exhausted, but it's better than the dreams. The blue-green spires, perfect and whole, tower above me, cradling me while I burn in the acid air. I can feel the lichen soft under my skin, burrowing into my nerves, blossoming with my heat as my body is etched away to bone, and up above the great maw in the stars sucks at my mind, gnawing it to pieces.
When I wake to my sterile, white quarters, I can't tell if I'm crying from relief or despair.
I spend my time out under the stars instead, huddling over a telescope where my canopy once was, hiding in numbers and calculations. I tell Seris I'm studying the gap in the stars. There's a flash of something in her face when she agrees. Pity, perhaps, for the poor sod barely keeping it together. Or maybe relief that I'm keeping my angst to myself, unlike Justin. I don't know what to say to either.
Anna joins me out in the dust the third night, unannounced. I'm calibrating the equipment for the thinner atmosphere, and she appears beside the scopes, watching dust clouds wash over the stars at the horizon. She says nothing for ten minutes, and then:
"I think we're dying."
I still my hands, thumb paused to close off the recalibration commands. Her voice is bald, like she's discussing the drowned bees. For a moment, I think that's all she's going to say, but she continues.
"My temperature's almost two degrees below normal, but my heart rate is elevated. All my enzymes are off-kilter and my potassium is low - which should lower my heart rate, not increase it. My neural activity is above normal, and there are growths in my brain where the tissue is denser than it should be."
I open my mouth to find a response, and settle for, "Did you tell anyone?" She ignores my lack of bedside manner.
"You have the same cramps. The headache. And you're not sleeping, are you?"
I adjust the tilt of the display by a fraction of a degree, trying to steady my hands.
"I keep seeing them," she whispers. "The spires. The planet. Like we killed a whole world and the ghost remains. And - " she checks herself, finally glancing over to me. I try my best 'this is between you and me' expression.
She exhales an almost-laugh. "Not so good at the human reaction thing right now, are we?"
"It's just grief," I say. "It's what people do, when..." I gesture helplessly to the empty planet.
"Justin committed suicide tonight."
I try to make an appropriate response. I can't even find one inside. Justin's my friend, I'm the one who defended him, who found him halfway up a vent shaft and talked him down, but it's like she's just told me we're out of oatmeal. In the silence, my equipment buzzes to announce it's started recording the starlight. I watch numbers flow over the screens as it scans.
"I'm hearing things." She turns to me fully, now, and I see a shadow of real feeling in her face. Fear. "I don't know what they are, it's like I can almost hear, but I don't understand."
"You did say there were tumours."
She doesn't blanch. "I want to scan your brain."
"How are you doing all this without the results getting flagged?"
"I said I needed to run scans on the bees from the irrigation units. They left me to it when mealtime was called. I have the shrink convinced that working keeps me stable, and hydroponics needs every hand it can get." She walks over to my scopes, her back to me. "That will run itself, now, right?"
"Yes, but I should be here to - "
"The labs are empty. Tomorrow they won't be. I need to scan your brain."
I feel something then, an almost-sound that isn't from my ears. A need for information, for understanding, and it didn't come from me. My scalp prickles like it's hollowing out, cold pins down my spine and arms and I lean over, sure I'll be sick. I let my knees sink and dig my hands into the dust to hang on while I suck in air and remind myself I'm grieving and sleep-deprived and most likely hallucinating and feeling a little weird is not going to kill me.
When I look up, Anna's silhouette is most of the way back to the colony.
I follow.
Anna's scans find the same tumours in my brain. Only they aren't tumours, she insists - they have a much denser, more organised structure than typical cancerous tissue, and it lights up with electrical activity. Whatever it is, the neurones are doing something.
She runs the other tests, more from a need for completion than any real expectation of surprise. I have the same low temperature, same elevated heartbeat, same potassium and enzyme levels, and I have static on the cusp of my hearing, now, too.
If Anna's dying, so am I.
I'm trying to form an opinion about that.
The lab is littered with her dissected bees. Some of them are drowned adults, others barely out of a pupal stage. I ask her why she'd scanned them, what she'd found, mostly as a way to fill the silence while the machines tell me I'm not human anymore.
"It's using the bees. The fungus that keeps eating our grain, the bees lost their defence against it."
"But the bees don't pollinate the grain."
"No," she agrees. "But when they pollinate the apple trees, they pick up spores and feed them to their larvae."
"So how does it get into the grain?"
"Remember how the bees were drowning?" She flashes up a series of scans. I register colours and shapes. "The fungus alters their brain chemistry, it makes them go toward water. So they drown, the fungus spores get into the water supply and reproduce into the grain."
I stare at the tiny, furred bodies on her bench. "This isn't what's happening to us, is it?"
She shakes her head. "There's no trace of the fungus in our systems, it was the first thing I checked. Our symptoms are caused by . . . something else." Her jaw clenches.
I turn a bee corpse around so it's not facing the dissected remains of its friends. "Kinda hard on the bees."
"Some of them are still immune. They might carry the fungus, but it doesn't affect them. We can figure out how to control it."
I have the strongest sensation of wondering if we should. Like ants dictating where a river will flow. Anna looks at me, and I sense the same thought in her. For a moment, I feel her sensing that, and the world threatens to disappear inside a mental feedback loop between us. She sinks onto the floor. I white-knuckle the lab-bench edge and count my breaths.
"It's all unravelling," she whispers. "Everything inside me, it's like ashes floating away. I don't even remember my mother's name."
I crouch down beside her to hold her, but she pushes me away and staggers from the room. I can feel the rising panic in her. She wants to be alone. And she wants to be alone, no interloping non-human connections.
Our scans and results are scattered all over the room for anyone to see. I encrypt every file, check every report she created that day, every machine.
She has a sample of my cerebrospinal fluid under one of the microscopes. I wonder at the pale tint on the slide, and peer down the lens. Orange specks drift through the fluid, spiralling around each other and chaining in a dance, too coordinated for random movement. Too alive.
The dust, the liquid-fine, rust-sand of the planet, is in our spinal fluid. It's in our brains, probably in every cell, and it's more than simple minerals.
Anna has seen this. She knows it, but she won't accept it. She'd rather insanity than inhumanity.
I hide the rest of the scans, line the bees out in order of age along one edge of the bench and square the microscope and terminal against the other, marking off little boxes of thought and rules that the world should obey. I wait for the panic to rise, for the rush of cold pins and hollowness, wait ready with my mantras and lists and calculations but the fear swirls in the background, caught in the eddy of something else.
I never thought I'd want to panic abou
t not panicking. I lock up the lab and sneak back to the dust.
Dawn finds me hunched back over my scopes, staring blindly at their readouts. Sunlight filters through my headache. I'm dizzy from lack of sleep, and cramps rage through my muscles like I'm the planet herself, with her skin torn off and shredded, my body ripping itself apart. With my eyes squeezed shut, I call up my canopy, raise the spires and ribbons around me under blessedly cool night sky, summon the fires of the meteors and the ink of darkness, paint over my mind with anaesthetic.
I slump forward, resting my chin on the lip of the terminal. I can almost feel the impact of the meteors through the air as they explode, silent fireworks raining down on us. I picture them, waiting up there to fall in the shadow of night, motes floating out in darkness.
I float like one of them through mist and foreign soil. The soil swallows me and I am buried, sucked under, my skin peeling painlessly and falling away into molecules while the ground above ripples with rivers and valleys. As the planet whirls through space, its guardian sun expands and consumes it whole, taking my atoms into its fire. I am a memory of molecules, now scattered. The sun explodes, and I am stardust, flung out into space to coalesce and be born again. I feel the fire of a new sun on my planet-skin, and -
I wake with a jolt that topples my terminal. It takes a few moments for my sense of self to return: I am standing as a human on a planet of dust. I have been sleeping. The sun is well into the sky; I have been sleeping some time. And something has been severed, has been lost while I slept.
Anna.
I launch myself up, leave my equipment half-buried in sand.
The dust sucks at my feet as I run, holding me back. I slog through, lungs burning and muscles screaming, churning it up my nostrils. The colony's a speck on the horizon, so tiny, growing so slowly. My knees start to give, but I push forward anyway, legs moving, left, right, don't fall, keep going, forward. I haul air through my throat so hard it burns, but it's never enough, and the colony nears so slowly.
I heave myself through the doors, stumbling at the change in surface, and shove my way down corridors, past people and equipment to her quarters, my whole body heaving breath.
But I'm far too late.
They've covered her with a sheet, and look up in surprise as I burst through the door. One of them mutters something about keeping it quiet. I don't hear the reply.
She injected air from a syringe. The bubbles hit her brainstem ten minutes ago. She's gone.
There's no blood, no syringe on the floor, not a clue. I shouldn't know, there's no way to know, but it's a fact in my mind, like the whiteness of the sheet, the red of the rust on her fingers. An impossible fact, and I should be shaking, should be scrabbling at my thoughts as they churn over themselves but I stand like a spire and stare at the last place she breathed with nothing in my head but air.
I follow them back to the medibay. It's full; almost a third of the colony sitting on beds and chairs, some on the floor, queuing for tests. There's a buzzing in my skull, a hundred voices on the edge of hearing. Seris paces back and forth through the room.
"We've got a damn epidemic," she mutters at me.
"What are their symptoms?"
"Headache, muscle cramps. Some have elevated heart rates. Low potassium."
There should be something to say to that. There should be something to think.
She takes a breath. "Renna had a cardiac arrest. They're still trying to stabilise her."
"Oh," I say. She eyes me, clearly suspicious. I keep my face blank; I can't remember what the right expression is.
I walk out of the medibay and back to the dust.
The cramps fade that evening, but it's almost impossible to think. Memories squabble in my skull: the death of a brother I'd never had, a hundred wives and husbands and lovers, and stranger thoughts: purple tides of foam swelling over my four splayed feet, the crack of my surface under gravity's pull. A panicked din in the back of my head scatters my thoughts like confetti; I kneel in the dust while the sun sinks under that vacant horizon and snatch at the ones that might be mine, digging my fingers into my scalp like I can hold my mind still.
My fingers come back red - with dust or blood, I can't tell. Am I made of dust, now? Am I Mytyr, eaten and breathed back out? I can't hold a thread of logic, thoughts flip and fly like paper. Is this why Justin left, why Anna left, to have something, a decision that was theirs? A moment of control?
Hands grasp me, pull my fingers from my scalp, steal my body from the dust - am I not dust, then - and entomb me in white. I can hear them, in my head, the hands that carry me. They are not unkind; in fact they welcome me, but into chaos. They tie me down, they take the last piece of control I might have had: I cannot follow Anna and Justin, though they know I want to. They leave me there with the Others.
The Others, I cannot hear. They watch me, and I hear words that I think I speak, and I think they speak, and one, made of steel and strength, whispers to me.
"They're priming the shuttle, they're going to leave. They're going back to the central hub. I have to stop them - we have to stop them, they'll infect everyone."
Words. There is a word for her, a special noise - Seris. I cling to it as something I can know. Her breath rasps my ear like the sand outside, and those gold-green eyes stare down but I can feel tools in my empty hands and see dust and wires and pipes and terminals and sky and doors. I screw every muscle up tight and force air through my throat so it drones and I hang onto that noise like a tether, but also a noose because I am the noise and I'm running out of air.
"We're going to rush the door next time they feed us, but you have to tell us how long we have. There's nearly a hundred of them, and they're all going up. How long will it take to prep the shuttle?"
She can't hear them like I can, can't feel them, and they can feel me, my hands pinned and desperate, she can't know they can hear her, and I try to tell her through the noise, but the words won't line up and the air leaves my lungs, my mind splinters across a hundred eyes and hands and thoughts echoing and calling to each other and I spiral down and scramble to snatch back which one of them is me.
"I'll make it stop," she says. "I know what you want. I can do it right now, I can make it all go away, just tell me what I need and you can let go."
I am a splinter of sight, a moment staring at the ceiling, a muscle tearing at restraints, and I understand Mytyr then, why she let herself be eaten by Yllikos. She was birthing something new, like a chrysalis, something she couldn't control. To stop him, she would have had to kill him and she couldn't bear to, but she trusted she would be reborn, so she let go.
She let go.
The splinters blossom inside. Their shards soften and coil through me, slipping around my cells like silk. I am not shattering, but expanding, reaching out through a hundred voices like a whisper brushing a hundred petals. I am held aloft by a hundred hands and I envelop them. The tight darkness of my panic dissipates across their warmth, and I breathe.
I am whole.
We walk out among the spires, where the wind sighs through them. The lichen is brittle and crystalline, but so fine it is almost soft, and the gradient of silver to indigo shows where the warmth of the sun has struck first.
She is still a desert, of course, desiccated dust under our strange human feet, but within us she is whole, her memory reaching back before her burnt-orange skies, before the heavy skin of earth she wore, through gas and space and suns to star-fire swallowing her shimmering hive, belching her consciousness across the galaxy in a cataclysm, a thousand motes echoing across space.
We share our selves like air or sunlight. What one knows, all know. What one is, all are. We are hive, we are stone, we are human, we walk in the light of distant stars and dwell in waters we've never touched. Feeling and thought wash through us as waves, unique experience echoes across us. There is room for any and all, and we carry each other within us when our bodies crumble.
We no longer dream of retribution, of penance for
lost wonders. Amongst the stars, where our old memories saw ravenous dark, a yawning maw of destruction, we feel the radiance of time, streaming fragments of places long past, scraps of moments shared beyond their birth. Not destroyed, merely transformed, as we transformed her, and she us. It carries us forward; everything is reborn, in time.
We don't need words, but we used them for the unborn. We tried to welcome them, but they fought for isolation, resolute, even as their muffled fear and grief rippled across us. We helped them as far as we could. Some of them, slowly, were born into us, but others chose to sever themselves completely.
We mourned memories that could have been, and buried their bodies with our mother's when we left. It was the way they honour their dead, and who are we to argue.
They are stardust now, just like us, waiting to be reborn.
Souls Are Like Livers
by Aurelia Flaming
Artwork by Andres Mossa
* * *
I was seven years old when I sold half my soul to my computer. It still seems kind of messed up to say it like that, even after everything that happened, and even though it was nearly half my life ago. Six thirteenths of my life ago, to be precise, at three forty-one on a Tuesday afternoon.
Or maybe it was Wednesday. But I was definitely out in the alley between First and Main, where I wasn't supposed to go, except the Maciejewskis had a loquat tree in their backyard that hung out over the fence and I really liked loquats, which they never have at the store. Shane was with me, like always, ever since I was one and a half and my parents took me to the doctor and I drank a bottle with the nanobots in it that built the wires and the chip in my head and my parents hired Shane to look after me. His name wasn't Shane then, it was Heisenberg, but obviously I couldn't say that, so I called him Shane, which was the closest I could get at the time to "Machine," which was the closest I could get to understanding what he was. And honestly, who wants a name like Heisenberg anyway? Once he told me that he'd named himself after a giant exploding blimp, but when I checked it turned out not to be true.