by Futuro, Andy
Saru came to a circular room as large as a stadium or maybe a hundred stadiums, for the objects it held were enormous—pyramids and monoliths, temples and tombs. Other hallways as long and wide as the one she’d come from branched off from this room like spokes. This was the nexus, the central hall—or maybe it was just one hub among thousands, and there was no center and no end to this museum. Saru wove her way through the pyramids and arches and towers and coliseums and amphitheaters until the clutter of hubris thinned into a clearing. In the middle of the clearing sat the dog, the cephereal, watching her. Ghostly tendrils emanated from its skull; they spread out through the artifacts, caressing the stone and metal. As Saru approached, the tendrils faded and vanished.
“Okay,” Saru said to the dog. “I’m here, I watched your dumb movies. I figured it out. I solved the mystery. Ria, or I guess her cephereal, is thinking of destroying us. Humans. It thinks that there’s too much of a risk of humans becoming part of the UausuaU. Right? And you have a different idea, I hope?”
The dog didn’t answer. No shit. First of all, it was a dog. Second of all, it wasn’t a dog, it was an alien. Third of all, this whole thing was stupid. Still though. She’d done a lot to figure this out, and it would be nice to get some validation.
“Hey!” she yelled at the dog. “Am I on the money here? Or what?”
Her words bounced around the clearing. The tendrils sprouted from the dog’s head and slithered through the air. It seemed like the tendrils caught her words, and fluttered with the resonance, and looped in imitation of the letters. The tendrils withdrew and the dog melted. The blues and blacks and golds of its fur ran together and wrapped around to form a ball that lifted off the ground. There was a flash, and then Morgan Friar stood before her. He was dressed in the professor getup Saru remembered, and he had a strange look on his face, a vague, happy, moron smile he’d certainly never worn in real life.
“Friar?” Saru said, doubtful.
She waited for Friar to say something—to explain himself, to riddle her some cryptic bullshit, to beg for her forgiveness. When he got it all out she was going to beat the living (not-living?) shit out of him. But he didn’t say anything. He just stood there, making exaggerated faces. He frowned, a cartoon, puppy-dog frown, and then smiled, and then wrinkled his nose, and then he did a sort of dance, kicking his feet left and right and waving his arms in the air. Saru’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped in disbelief. Of all the things that had happened to her, all the surprises dropped on her head and shoveled down her throat, this might be the biggest. Was Friar high? Retarded? Insane? It was easier to imagine him as an alien serial killer than an imbecile. Friar frowned again, and then he dropped into a dramatic squat and farted. He looked at Saru quizzically, as if to see what she thought about that, and then he held out his hand, still in a squat.
“You’re too pretty for this line of work, Saru,” he said.
She punched him in the jaw, hard, just about as hard as she’d ever punched anything in her life. He took it, not reacting, not even flinching, just bam! in the face, knocked onto his ass.
“Mother fucker!” she screamed, and kicked him in the stomach, and then the groin, and then the face. He didn’t fight back, didn’t scream or shout or anything. “Mother fucker! Trying to kill me and lie to me and suck my blood and argh!” Saru jumped on top of him and pinned him with her knees. She punched and clobbered and elbowed and tore at him with her nails until his face was a palette of slits and bruises, and his blood was spattered in a Rorschach halo around his popped-cherry skull. She paused, panting, and shivered with a mix of joy and relief and self-disgust and what-the-fuck. She was stained to the elbows in blood.
“It’s…always a pleasure…to see you,” Friar said.
“What?” Saru screamed into his ruined face. He couldn’t do this to her. He couldn’t be this masterful a sadist; he couldn’t ruin her vengeance with politeness and positivity.
The blood swamp of his face began to jiggle, and the untouched skin of his skull split and ran raw. His chest sagged and deflated underneath her, like a blow-up doll with a leak. Saru scrambled to her feet. The blood on her hands stayed behind, jelling into beads and dropping in a tiny rain, and then wiggling back to the mound of gore that ten seconds ago had been Friar’s body. The skin and hair and bone and blood and the fabric of the caji suit all rolled together into a ball, a swirling, sausage rainbow of human parts. An arm punched through the surface, and then another, and two legs, and a head, and the ball shrank into a torso and wrapped into skin, and eyes, and a nose, and ears, and a mouth, and fingernails, and beautiful, curly dark hair, and Eugene stood before her.
“Listen,” Eugene said, sternly. “You need to listen to me.”
“Oh…shit,” Saru said. She took a few stumbled steps back, feeling woozy. Eugene sighed and shook his head in the way he’d done so many times before—for the first time Saru found his face revolting. She felt herself stumbling backwards, bumping into a stone column, slumping and scraping down the stone until her ass hit floor.
“Please go away,” Saru said. “I need…” she couldn’t finish the thought. She didn’t know what she needed. She closed her eyes again, and when she opened them, Eugene was standing in front of her with a puckered face like he’d jammed wasabi up his ass. He bent forward, in a wide stance, a straight-leg, bowing yoga move, and brought his face close to hers. Aside from the bizarre expressions, it was a perfect re-creation…those lovely almond eyes, that mouth, full and curving and so ready to touch, straight, strong jaw, straight, white, celebrity teeth, everything strong and soft in the right place.
“I appreciate your patronage,” Eugene said, and then flared his nostrils and clapped. He coughed right in her face, and then sneezed, spattering her with drops of mucous.
Before she knew what she was doing, her forehead had crunched into his nose and her hands had hooked his ankles and dropped him to the ground, and once again she was standing over him, it—whatever—and screaming.
“Why? What? Are you trying to get killed again?”
Eugene’s skin sagged and grew sweaty like wet clay, and flopped and folded back into a gooey flesh sphere like a human gumball. Saru forced herself to watch, to pay attention, to try and wring some clues from it, detect a pattern, but there was nothing, no answer, no explanation she could think of other than her brain had given up and was exacting its revenge for all the years of abuse.
The flesh ball shrank, and the arms and legs that sprouted out of it were skinny like sticks. Then a narrow face, freckles and straw hair, green eyes, and that smirking mouth. Joan, it was Joan, her friend from a million years ago, back on the farm, back in Tyrone when she was a kid.
Joan was dressed in that same pink dress with the yellow flowers she always wore, cause it wasn’t like her family had all that many options. Her knees were dirty and scuffed like always, dirt under her fingernails from making the mud balls they used to chuck at each other, hair scraggly, mud-caked, stuck with twigs and leaves and crawling with ants and beetles. Joan smiled, so pretty, had always been so pretty, even with the chipped front tooth Saru had given her. The scar on Saru’s knuckle was gone now, knitted away by the healing tanks in the Hathaway estate. So many fights, her and Joan, so many kicks and punches, torn hair, hurled rocks and swung sticks and bites, and make-up pecks on the cheek.
“Don’t leave me,” Joan whispered, and then she laughed and it was her laugh, exactly her laugh, that trickling, butterfly laugh, just as Saru remembered it. A tingle ran down Saru’s spine, that cold feeling of the waking past. She remembered this, this conversation, the two of them huddled in their makeshift sleeping bags in the tree fort back in the woods, the secret fort to get away, to hide, clinging to each other to stay warm, ears pricked, hearts pounding at every snapping twig and scuffling squirrel, alert, alert, alert, waiting, afraid. They could hear their names called in the distance, whiskey-sweet, traveling far in the thin fall air, and then the curses, the shouts, the yells and the threats p
iling into the sky like flames. Joan hadn’t been smiling then, hadn’t been giggling like she was now, but the words were the same.
“Don’t ever leave,” the Joan in front of her said, and by chance or design her voice came out real, as scared and serious as it had been back in that moment.
“I won’t,” Saru whispered, fulfilling her role in the conversation, stupid, first-love, child promises. Her backwoods accent scooped up her tongue and carried along the words like it had been waiting in the wings all these years.
“Swear it,” Joan said. “Swear it to me.” She held out her hand and the little penknife was there that they’d used to seal their stupid friendship in blood.
“No,” Saru said. She found her head shaking like a palsy, uncontrollable. “No. This is bullshit,” and then, louder, “Bullshit!” Then she was screaming at the fake Joan in front of her, the lying, shapeshifting Friar-Eugene-Joan giggling and laughing as it parroted their words.
“Get out!” Saru screamed. “Get out of here! Get out of my fucking head!”
She raised her arm to hit Joan, to beat in this imposter’s skull just like she had the others’, and her arm hung there, wavering. The fake Joan danced like she needed to pee. Her tongue lolled out and she panted. She grabbed at Saru’s hand and tugged, and tried to drag her in one direction and then another. Saru slapped her, a light cuff that knocked the fake Joan on her ass, and then she laughed at the absurdity of it, bitter chuckles gurgling up like bile. Looks like I can finally kick your ass, Joan. I win at last. The fake Joan scooted to her knees and did a cartwheel, and then jumped, and then sneezed, and then began to cry, and then laugh in a whirlwind of emotion. Then she stood statue still.
Joan’s arms and legs rolled up and her neck shrank into her chest, and the dress wrapped around it all to form a flower-patterned ball. The ball grew into a chiseled torso, and sprouted thick legs and arms, and a veiny neck with a head and a handsome, if slightly stupid, face. It was Jim—Stanley? Brad!—just some guy she’d fucked at the McFit gym a few years ago and maybe touched herself to once or twice. He was the last person she’d expect to find hanging out in a museum.
“I think I love you,” Brad said, in his same dumb, dopey voice, and Saru laughed just like she’d laughed the first time he’d said it, back in reality.
“You’ve got five seconds to explain yourself, Brad,” she said.
Brad started doing jumping jacks, and then he snapped his fingers. He yodeled, voice rising as high as it would go, and then low until it broke. Then he yanked off his shorts and stumbled towards her, arms outstretched like a mummy, cock getting hard before her eyes. That was the last straw. The Betty leapt to Saru’s hand and she unloaded on him, filled him with every bullet she had in the automatic clip, which turned out to be a lot. The gunshots echoed—fuck that hurt!—and Saru remembered she didn’t have any implants, and her hearing wasn’t adjusting automatically to dampen the noise. Brad was on the ground, staring at the ceiling, chest a game of whack-a-mole organs, but Saru didn’t expect that to last.
Brad’s face sagged and blorbed into nothing, a smooth tumor where a head should have been. A slit formed in his doughy non-face, and then ran down his neck through the opened-up chest all the way to his cock. His body began to deflate. A sound came from the slit, the sound of groans pressed from dead lungs, and air trapped in rotten bowels. Saru stepped back. The air above the deflating body shimmered like a heat mirage. Colors appeared within the shimmer—watercolor swatches of blue and pink. The colors spread and grew, and silver lines appeared within them like snowflakes. Bells tinkled, and rang, and gonged, the sound so large her eardrums threatened to burst. Now the body was a pile of flopping, fleshy rags, and the colors spread before her like a storm cloud, and the crystals within them were throbbing veins, filling the hall, spreading across the artifacts and shelves.
There was a voice, the sound crystalizing inside her, feeling the words carved within her meat, bones snapping to spell the letters, blood and veins looping into the shapes of words. Blood poured from her mouth, wrists snapping into right angles, forearms snapping, neck snapping, body twisting into As and Is and Us. Saru’s vision swam, red-tinged, the wall of colors and crystal patterns rising infinite above her. There were human faces melted within the wall, gaping, empty masks, hung like suits on hooks.
Desperately, Saru grasped at the power she knew she possessed—to heal herself, to fight back or flee, to will herself out of this acid trip. She saw death, manifest, a shadow, a tsunami coming towards her. She felt her molecules break apart and her consciousness stretch, spooling out like cloth undone and dragging her into a wave form, a cloud of drifting thought, out of the dimension she knew, away from the physics she understood and could control if she just fought hard enough. Harder! Fight it! Control yourself!
Saru grabbed at her thoughts, forcing herself to stay whole, a tug of wills, willing herself to stay together, to exist, willing her body and her molecules and her cells and all her weaker, lesser thoughts to OBEY her intelligence. The pain lessened, the currents of force threatening to rip her apart now slower, now still, now quiet and gone, bones intact, veins pumping blood to the rhythm of her command, chest rising and falling in perfect, measured, metronome steps, thoughts whole and focused and bent to her will.
Saru found herself standing, calm and unafraid, observing the wall of lights and the throbbing crystal lattice, seeing it as it was, as a form of life. She saw this was another manifestation of her cephereal, and that her cephereal was as confused by her as she was with it. The cephereal had tried to treat with her in her own world, in the dimensions and laws she understood, using thoughts that it had stolen from her mind, thoughts that leaked out casually, like a waste product, because her species did not value thoughts, and had not yet learned to master and control them.
Saru realized then, like a slap in the face, that these shapeshifting caricatures were a way to communicate with her. Of course! The cephereal was an alien, and had never looked humanoid at all, and it wasn’t a dog, and it didn’t see her the way she saw herself or a human would see itself, but as an insect, or a cow, or maybe it even saw her as a wall of blinking lights and crystals. The exact same stimuli were being processed and transformed in different ways by their thinking apparatuses into different understandings of reality.
The cephereal had watched Saru, and watched her world, studying it like a scientist, but the beings were too different, and it couldn’t figure out how they spoke! Was it their faces, their expressions? Or the air bubbling out of their input holes? Was it the stink of their glands and sphincters? Or the shape of their hair? Or the way they wagged their limbs? Or the varying hues of their skin? Or the dilation of their pores? Did they alter magnetic fields? Did they read each other’s heat? Did they cough information, hurl it back and forth through gobs of mucous, and spit, or maybe the rich genetic material that squirted from their gonads. They were always ejecting it in great quantities—was that the way they talked?
Was it the feeds they shot back and forth, or the letters, or the books, or did they do it through violence—so much violence, each kick and punch and stab tapping out a letter in their incomprehensible language? Saru saw the cephereal was not born of carbon and water, that it was a form of life she had never even imagined, and that it did not understand the rules of Earthen biology. Everything she took for granted was foreign to this being.
Like John had said—humans were no more than cells to the Gods. The Blue God could copy them and alter them, and build terrariums it knew they could live in. It could change their existence and fiddle with life and death. But to know with certainty what humans were thinking and feeling and saying to one another was beyond its power. And why had that been so hard to believe? Saru could barely articulate what she herself was thinking and feeling from one moment to the next. The inability of people to communicate between their own 99.9 percent identicalness was practically the joke of human existence.
The wall of light and crystal veins
shrank and folded in on itself until it was no larger than a cue ball, floating above the marble. Saru understood that the cephereal was trapped, contained in the order of her slow-beating heart, in a prison formed of the rise-and-fall rhythm of her chest. The control she exerted over herself extended further than her own being. This control could spread to the world beyond, to construct the laws of physics and the bonding of matter as she saw fit, to dictate the forms that other life could take within her presence, and extinguish life if she so chose. The opportunity was there before her, to grasp that ball and dash it against the ground, to shatter this creature that had taunted and annoyed her, and destroy it forever.
Glee tickled up from Saru’s belly and down to her groin, a helical thrill of murder and reproduction. How fun it would be to kill the cephereal, to hear it scream and die in its alien way! Was that not the ultimate power? To kill? To destroy life? To remove that which displeased? She could do more than kill—she could feed, feast upon the information within the cephereal and strengthen herself. It would be good to be strong, good for her and her world. She was a good person, a protector. Her strength would shield others.
Saru’s mind flashed back to the Ria monster. Did you enjoy it? Ria’s words, hot and pleading, fresh scars in Saru’s brain, and Saru felt a wave of self-disgust. She saw within herself the margin she shared with the UausuaU, how easy it would be to become such a monster. She wouldn’t have to do anything; she would just have to give in.
“No!” Saru said aloud.
She squashed the hunger and the kill lust, plunging them back into the abyss of her lizard brain. The hunger licked the back of her neck, panting breath in her ear, whispering its demands. So strong the hunger! But she fought it back, forcing it down and away, imprisoned too within the calm beating of her heart, the slow movement of her breath, the awareness of herself and the control, thoughts wrapping around impulse like chains. Logic came—her options arrayed neatly before her like cards, their possible consequences extending far out in ever-branching decision trees.