"Except to my couch!"
"Except to the couch, which I'm sure Matt will take care of."
* * * *
Curse Edward. Curse that affected accent and thousands of years of intellect. I don't care that he's just saved me from jail and certain ruin. I can admit now that it was wrong to shoot him. Explosives would have been more effective—but somehow not as satisfying as a good baseball bat.
I still can't believe Aleksa dumped me for that alien freak. What does she see in him? Aside from the staggering intelligence, I mean. Compared to him I'm a brute, a savage. Sure I have a Ph.D in Theoretical Minkowski Spacetime (hyperspace to the layman), but compared to Edward I'm about as clever as a Neanderthal whacking heads with a thigh bone. Which brings me back to the bat.
"Matt.” Edward steps out of the shadows of the stairwell leading up to my condo. Yes, I live in the same apartment complex as my ex-fiancée. No, it's not stalking. It just happens to be close to the university, that's all.
Edward has two beers and holds one out as an offering. “I hope you're not too upset about what happened back there."
"Upset? Me? I tried to kill you, remember?"
"Oh yes, I know.” His leathery skin stretches into a rictus grin.
"Thanks,” I crack the beer and take a sip. “I think you need to practice some of your facial expressions. Your smile, for instance, you're overdoing it. It's a little creepy."
The white blocks of teeth disappear, but even without the walking dead grin Edward is still only a human facsimile. There's enough falseness about him that can't cheat the senses. Mostly it's the eyes, the multi-faceted rows that glitter in the garden path lights. “I have a proposition for you, Matt. Your attempt on my life this evening, I found it . . . invigorating."
"Uh-huh."
"I was thinking . . . so long as Aleksa doesn't find out and no one gets hurt—aside from me, I suppose—perhaps you could continue with your efforts."
I respond by choking on my beer.
"Back on my planet, colony raids are a very common occurrence. And while the reason I emigrated was because I never personally had a taste for killing—I always suspected there was something more—now that I'm here I find that life without that constant, ambient threat of death to be a little less . . . vivid."
"Can I have the keys to your apartment?"
"I'm homesick, Matt, not suicidal."
"Of course,” I reply, although I'm not convinced there's a nuanced difference between suicide and asking someone to kill you. “G'night then."
"Good night, Matt.” I feel those glittering eyes follow me all the way up the stairs.
* * * *
I have lunch the next day with Dimitri at the Faculty Club. “You know how sometimes a girl breaks up with a guy,” he opines around his steak, “and then it turns out she's gay and the guy thinks it's all his fault? Like he turned her off of men or something. Man, how does that make you feel? You turned Aleksa off the entire human race."
Dimitri's an astrophysicist. The man has spent his life trying to grasp interstellar distances and the lifetime of stars; minor details like human suffering aren't a part of his realm. “You know what else has been bugging me?” he says. “How do they do it? Does he have some sort of oozing tentacle or something?"
"There's no tentacles,” I tell him miserably. “It's a Spec Colony."
"A what?"
"He's ants. He's just a big pile of incredibly evolved ants, some wonderful freak of nature from . . . somewhere over there.” I wave my hand at the sky.
"Ants?” Dimitri looks like he wants a gulp of his beer just so he can spit it out in surprise.
"It's a rather crude analogy,” an Oxford accent declares from behind me.
"Oh! Ah . . . Edward . . . we were just talking about . . .” Dimitri drums his fingers on the mahogany table. “. . . uh, my recent trip to South America?” Remember, the man is a physicist, not a dissembler.
"While I appreciate the comparison, Specs are many millions of years more evolved than your local equivalent.” Edward conversationally waves a glass of Merlot in the air. “Ants have a long, long way to go before they become as specialized as one of our colonies. It would be like comparing a human to . . ."
"A monkey?” Dimitri offers helpfully.
"Perhaps a tapeworm."
I thank him and file a mental note to call him Ants from now on.
"Why did you insist on the Faculty Club anyway?” Dimitri asks after Edward moves away. “Didn't you know he was going to be here?"
"Yeah, I knew,” I say as I look around. I'm here because there she is, gliding out of the ladies’ room breathtaking in a blue, backless dress. Aleksa sees Edward and gives him a smile, that special smile that makes something squeeze painfully in my chest.
On the way home I let myself into their condo. I still have the keys to what used to be my place.
* * * *
A few days later a handwritten note is posted on my door:
Dear Matthias,
While I appreciate your most recent attempt on my life I am concerned that Aleksa could have accidentally come to harm. Please try to be more careful in the future.
Your “live” laptop trap was otherwise ingenious (I'm glad that I backed up my research at the office). Unfortunately for you, Specs have been using electricity as a weapon for some time. It is common practice for a colony to carry an embedded “ground” wire to direct current around any vital organs.
Please don't be discouraged. Perhaps if you explore more inventive avenues you may succeed in bringing me personal harm.
Regards,
Edward
"A bat would've been better, obviously,” I tell Dimitri when I see him again at the Faculty Club.
My colleague nods sagely and drinks heavily. “So . . . why did he ask you to kill him?"
"Meh . . . something about his home planet, I'm not really sure."
"Aren't you at all curious?"
"Look, the guy . . . the thing wants to be killed. And by a happy coincidence I happen to want to kill him. We're all in agreement here, so why ask why?"
"Matthias,” Dimitri laces his fingers together and leans against the table. “I'm a little worried about this. Ever since Aleksa got ants in her pants you've been acting pretty manic. I think this whole episode is bringing out your xenophobia."
"Xenophobia? Me? What are you talking about? I love xenos! I'm a xenophile, a xenophyte! It's just when I think about that one bloody ant infestation in Aleksa's house . . . I admit, I get a little xenocidal.” Dimitri isn't looking at me anymore—he's staring at the space above my head. “He's right behind me, isn't he."
"Gentlemen,” Edward announces himself. “Well, sir, I take it that you haven't given up on our little arrangement?"
"You'll know when it's over, Eddie Ant."
"Now please—"
"You're so bloody cocky about being Specs and super-evolved and all that jazz but you know what? We've got one up on you. Here you are standing in a human body (more or less) that took you twice as many steps to get to than it took us to become human."
Dimitri looks concerned. Edward looks like a confused corpse. “Please explain."
"Well the way I see it, on your planet, just like here on Earth, single-celled organisms evolved into multicellular organisms. That's the first step. But then your ants—"
"Specs, please, no need to be coarse."
"Specs, whatever. So then your Specs went on for a few more bazillion years and eventually became specialized and co-operating units within an even greater super-organism. Hey great, cool. But meanwhile us humans, see, we just needed the first step: single-cell to multicell and here we are, the two of us. Practically the same. We win."
"I see,” Edward takes a contemplative sip of his wine. “There are some subtle differences between our species, of course. As a colony of self-replacing parts I will never die of old age. In fact, I'm thousands of years old. As well,” Edward reaches across the table and picks up Dimit
ri's steak knife, “if you kill one or even dozens of my constituent organisms the colony as a whole still survives. I'm sure you've noticed this, Matthias. Whereas all I have to do is—fwip—slice this across your throat and you, the lone multicellular organism, are over.” Edward drops the knife back on the table and continues pleasantly, “and forgive me for disagreeing with you, but I feel your evolution has accomplished the same two steps we have. Only on a different scale."
"Explain."
"Well you humans are certainly multicellular organisms, the constituents, same as a Spec. It's your society, your culture, which is the super-organism—"
"We're not ants, Eddie,” I cut in. “Not by a long shot. Do we look like mindless drones from the mother colony? I don't think so."
Edward spreads his hands ingenuously. “Well, you call yourselves social animals and you certainly exhibit the behavior of suborganisms. From my viewpoint, from the perspective of a creature that really is an individual, I see behavior among your own kind that is so innate, hardwired perhaps, you aren't even aware of it.
"Take this university,” Edward gestures around the room. “You cooperate with people who aren't even related to you—that's fascinating to me! You conform to this societal mind you call ‘culture.’ And language—don't even get me started about language! Your babies are born craving to learn how to speak. I mean, what do you think the need for such sophisticated communication is for?
"And finally, take crime,” Edward picks up the knife again and holds it to his glittering eyes. “All of you are so concerned with misdeeds and felonies when in all honesty I am perplexed that the crime rate isn't ten times, a thousand times, what it is. In a world of individuals, real individuals whose concern is only for themselves—and perhaps some genetic relations—things like theft and murder wouldn't be called deviant behavior. They'd be called normal."
* * * *
The strange thing about Spec Colonies—well, one of the strange things about them—is that they don't bleed. Edward is dry. Instead of a liquid circulatory system, his body is riddled with tunnels for specialized “transport” specs. When I knock his head off with the Slugger all I see is a chalky goo and a sudden surge of angry dots.
Eddie has been supportive until this moment—even as I was dousing him with gasoline. “Now you're thinking like one of us!” he'd enthused. “Fire! One of the oldest weapons in the arsenal!"
With a match and a small explosive poomf his clothes and outer skin begin to burn. Eddie calmly begins to pat himself down as if he's accidentally singed himself instead of turning into a fiery torch in the parking lot. That's when I take out the bat and really go to work. I don't know what he thinks of this because he can't tell me without a head. The end of his neck is an animated, swarming hive. I focus on the white “neuron” specs and do my best to burn and stomp them out. At least until some of them get past my shoes and I run, hopping and yelping, away from the scene of the crime.
Spec bites, it turns out, are incredibly painful.
* * * *
I limp into the Faculty Club the following afternoon, slightly worried that the ointment greasing my legs might soak through my trousers. I feel good. I feel confident again. Here are all my peers, my friends who look up to me and respect me. There's Aleksa, smiling, and there, turning around to greet me, is Edward.
"Wha . . . how . . . ?” I stagger against the table. There are no burn marks, no scars. In fact it looks as if Edward has lost some weight.
"Your thinking is still very human, Matthias,” he says, almost apologetically. “You assumed I had a single centralized nervous system, without backup. Only one brain with nothing to replace it if it's damaged?” Edward does an excellent imitation of a shudder. “In truth, I find the very idea horrifying—no offense to you or your kind."
"None taken,” Aleksa looks suspiciously between the two of us. “What's going on here?"
"Nothing, darling, absolutely nothing,” Edward stands and guides me over to Dimitri's table. He tactfully says nothing about my painful limp. “The sad truth is,” he says once we are out of earshot, “my kind have been trying to kill each other in these ways for millions of years. Please don't give up though, I do enjoy your efforts. Hello, Dimitri."
"You know,” Dimitri muses as we watch Edward glide back to Aleksa's table, “I still don't get how that moving, thinking creature is supposed to be a colony of ants."
"The specialization is all in the abdomen,” I say, despondently scratching my burning legs. “Some specs secrete a carbon composite that can be used to make support structures—bones, basically. Others secrete lubricants, oils, pheromones or even weirder things like that plastic layer he calls a skin. Look at those eyes, you know what you're looking at? Row upon row of specialized abdomens, optical specs. They're grouped together and transmitting signals along ‘nerve’ ants into the brain cluster, which is just a webwork of synaptically connected neuron specs. Alone, isolated, a spec is no better than an ant—probably worse because it's so specialized—but working within the whole it makes up the incredible, unkillable Eddie Ant."
"Unkillable? Does that mean you're giving up?” Dimitri asks with a hint of hope.
"I don't know. It's like he said, they've been doing it for millions of years. While we've been learning to work together and do stupid things like share and sacrifice, all his species has been doing is trying to kill each other.” I grope for my beer. “I can't compete with that."
"Why don't you pay a visit to the Waveform Lab?” Dimitri asks. “We haven't seen you there in months. We're testing out some new warping patterns, it's very exciting . . . we miss you, Matthias."
"I can't compete with that,” I exclaim suddenly, slamming my hand on the table. “But I can find someone who can!"
Dimitri sighs and goes back to his lunch.
* * * *
Leslie is tall and waifish. She has a funny way of walking, a stagger that propels her across the courtyard. Mix that in with her thin, straw-colored hair and she's like some gangly, plastic scarecrow. “It's so kind of you to take me in, professor,” she gushes.
"Think nothing of it,” I reply graciously. She lurches up the stairs as if being upright, bipedal, is something entirely new to her. This may be the case.
"I wasn't expecting much when I posted on Craigslist Eastern Milky Way. I mean, finding an immigrant sponsor is pretty tough no matter where you're trying to go—but this is everything I could have hoped for!” She smiles and it's that same, unnerving rictus grin. Whose photographs are they studying on Planet Spec? How can they think a grimace like that is a human's expression? “You see, kindness is a very uncommon gesture among my people . . . gosh, I'm sorry but this place stinks of another colony."
"That would be Edward,” I say happily. “He lives just over there."
"Another Spec Colony? Here?"
"Yes. Ha! Ha! Imagine that. I guess you don't really like each other, do you? I have the keys to his place, you know."
"Professor,” Leslie looks pained. “I'm sorry but we have . . . instincts . . . that aren't easily ignored. I don't know if I'd be able to live with another colony so nearby. He's much too close. I would have to . . . well, if I were to take this place Edward and I would have to fight over the territory. Possibly to the death."
"We all have our urges,” I reassure her. “Some people eat a lot of chocolate, you have to kill your kindred. Why don't we go inside and talk this over?"
Leslie unpacks her meager possessions in the guest room and we sit down for coffee. She's pensive as she sips from her cup and I can't help wondering where the hell the coffee's going. “You don't seem to have a problem with my feelings toward Edward. . . . I thought humans were opposed to killing."
"I'm very cosmopolitan,” I reply. I see the quizzical look in that multifaceted gaze and, with a sigh, put my mug down. “I guess it's a little more complicated than that. . . .” and I find myself explaining the whole thing: the new blob on the block, how he gets all the attention in the lab, a
nd how Aleksa went after him.
"I think I see,” Leslie jerks her head in an attempt at a nod. It would take time, I guess, before her human mimicry is as smooth as Edward's. “On our planet we have something similar. Sometimes, when a colony has been displaced from its territory it will stay and fight even when there are perfectly good resources elsewhere. I think, but I'm still a neophyte with words so I may be wrong, this can be translated into a pride struggle. Yes?"
"No, not pride,” I object. “It's love. Heartbreak, to be specific."
"Of course. Forgive me. I still have much to learn when it comes to these intersocial concepts. You are in love with Edward, then?"
"With Aleksa."
"Oh!” Leslie smiles uncertainly. “You hadn't really mentioned her. It sounded as if . . . well, Edward came into your faculty and overshadowed your own prestige. Then of course Aleksa left you for him, which was another blow to your pride. Forgive me for not seeing this initially, hurt pride and heartbreak seem to be very similar concepts.” After a reflective pause she asks, “So Edward is now studying in your faculty?"
"More or less. Technically he's still a Ph.D student but he's come up with some new equations for hyperdynamic flux that are, well, brilliant."
"Studying. And learning. How human! I can't wait to absorb his experiences.” Leslie claps her hands. “You see, we don't really have learning—not in the institutionalized sense. For us wisdom and knowledge don't come from co-operation and sharing, but from raiding other colonies neural stores. You have a saying about learning, ‘if I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’ and that makes no sense to me. Specs don't learn by standing on shoulders, but by killing the owner of those shoulders and taking their minds.
"Honestly, a part of me was hoping to get away from all the killing.” She walks over to the window. “Are those the university buildings? Look at that!” She pauses and shakes her head. “You know, my kind are tougher, smarter, and more long-lived than yours but if you were to look outside my home all you'd see are distant mud hovels, not skyscrapers, crowds, and traffic. We don't have society. The individual is the greatest unit. We don't have . . . this."
Asimov's SF, July 2010 Page 12