by Paul Jessup
I look at her and see corpse eyes, see flayed skin and bloodied teeth. I see, for a brief moment, chaos flash before my eyes: a port trying to contain, trying to stop the people from tearing themselves apart.
And then it is gone. But reality is darker. I notice smudges of blood on walls, black ink spilled across the ground. And on the floating fish, I notice a green mold that creeps and eats across them.
During dinners I feel sick to my stomach. The food looks like flesh (human flesh) plump and ready to be devoured. In those moments I remember a choral chant, those words that travel from lip to lip, bringing madness to us all.
I ignore these thoughts, shove the memories away again. They leave a bad taste in the air, a bad feeling in my blood. She notices, can tell something is wrong but does not say anything. She puts up with my melancholy. I should tell her to run. I should tell her to get as far away from me as humanly possible, to claw her way across the stars and return home.
I can’t deny it any longer. I might not be infected, but I am a carrier. I know that, now. I feel the disease inside of me, crawling through my blood and bone. Carving its words into my heart.
* * *
I awake again. This time to her shaking me, waking me. Sweating. I dreamt I said the word, and then all of the world came crashing down on top of me, this whole planet imploding, destroying, devouring me. I look over at her, so beautiful, and smile. “Sorry, so sorry. I must be having nightmares again.”
She points at me. “What was that word? That phrase? What did you say?”
I shake my head. “Nothing. Was nothing. Just forget about it.”
I know she won’t be able to forget about it. No one ever can. Not even me. I still feel the sentence taunting me, teasing me. I see it in her eyes: that puzzled look. Wanting to know, to understand that language. To unwrap it, peel it apart and put it back together again.
We’re doomed. All of us doomed. I go back to sleep, knowing that there is nothing else I can do. The words have caught her mind; the language teases at her soul. Threatens to swallow her whole.
* * *
I wake to darkness. Blades of light enter my vision, and then comes the sound of someone running around on all fours, screaming, howling. Gibbering mad. I look down and see her, see her scurrying, see the bodies on the floor. Her eyes are a waxy dull color, like the color of death.
I scream. Again, again, again. It is happening again. Circles upon circles, following me, refactoring, changing, destroying. Like a giant snake eating its own tail, it all comes back to me again. These patterns, all the same patterns.
Soon we will all be dead. Will I survive again? Probably not, now. Not with her locked in the room with me. She leaps at me, screaming, howling, saying words in a language I have never heard before.
She bites my legs, tears off the flesh, pulls me out of the wall bed and flings my body on the ground. Tears at the skin of my chest with her teeth, pries my eyes out with her fingernails. I feel my eyes popping as she pulls, feel warm water on my cheek.
I scream. I cannot help it. In my darkness of my sight I hear the door opening. Footsteps, screams and the firing beams of the batadur rifles. A body over mine, slumped down, screaming. I feel fluid burst over my face and know it is her head exploding. Just like the last time. Destroying her patuek. Leaving her permanently dead. If only I were so lucky.
* * *
When I wake again I smell something like skin burning. I look around, my eyesight whole again. The thalna must have stitched me back together. My body feels hollow for some reason, lighter. Like I have been cleaned out, my intestines scooped free.
I look around the room and see men in orange coats staring at me. I am somewhere else. I am under glass. I try to move my arms, my hands, and I realize that I have neither. I am just a head. A heart. Just a thing connected to tubes, dissected for their amusement.
I watch them watch me. I watch them use lasers to cut my skull open, to peek around, to peel my heart apart. They look at me, study me. I know what they are doing, why they are doing it. They want to see what makes me immune, why the disease won’t destroy me.
It is too late for them, though. I know what will destroy them and what will finally kill me. I let the disease take over. I focus on the phrase. Shazarttta tatta tat haratta. I focus on the language. Shazarttta tatta tat haratta. I try to understand it. Shazarttta tatta tat haratta. Try to figure it out. Shazarttta tatta tat haratta. Try to see what it means, what it will do. Shazarttta tatta tat haratta.
I speak the words: Shazarttta tatta tat haratta. Feel them fall off my tongue and hang naked in the air. Shazarttta tatta tat haratta. The language unwraps itself in my mind. Shazarttta tatta tat haratta. It burns itself into my thoughts.
Until all that is left of me is the language. And this dissected heart, displayed under glass.
Close Your Mouth
Book II
Act I: Savage Echoes
Oh, Itsasu, do you remember the sun? All those years spent on an egia. Crawling through that shattered heart of infinite space. The sun always distant and broken and changing light and color and shape. Never the same sun through the years. Do you miss the sun, Itsasu? Do you miss her? Does she miss you?
Even as a little girl she’d only seen suns from a distance. Get too close in space and you’ll burn up. Radiate outwards. Turn to cinder and ash. How she wished there was more of the sun in her life. As if somehow, a sun would be an anchor. A stone in her existence, grounding her in the real. Yet she had no sun, not even now. Not even in this moment.
Now trapped in quarantine.
Quarantine quarantine quarantine.
Oh, that word was strychnine in her mind. How long had they been here? How long had they kept them here? Don’t know. Seemed like forever. Seemed just like yesterday. When they woke her in the dark and she knew that something had happened. That somehow she’d almost been annihilated and was saved with a haunted, blue light.
She spent the years since then wandering and searching. All the while experimented on by aimless dolls.
I’d mapped it all out. Using my mind as paper and pencil. I know so many corners of this egia. World sized. Labyrinth. A maze to call my own. Like all egias this was a haunted house. Wrapped up and broken down. Made of carved giant bone. Constructed from the meat of dying moons. All mine now, to wander. To explore. To yearn for something more. Something real.
Maybe it was strange that she hadn’t come across any of the others. Never once in her wanderings. Not even Arigia. The one of blue light. She who had saved them all. Couldn’t even thank her, could she? No. It’d been years and years and centuries still, yet they kept her here. Unmoving. Forced into a prison of a world. Maybe it would’ve been better if the virus had taken her and she’d died…
They were the only survivors, the dolls had said. They were the only ones who could tell them what the sakre was deep down inside. What they meant when they whispered that haunted phrase. And then a poke and prod and samples of her bone injected into tiny animals. Watch them scream. Watch them die.
Yet still. Was there an antidote in her blood? They wanted to know. They’ll never let her go. No, no. Never let her go. She was too precious to them. Might be a weapon. Might be a cure. There were secrets in her blood. Secrets they wanted to find.
She sat up. Body was less frail than before. They rebuilt her. Grew parts of her in vats and gave birth to arms and legs through sputtering alien wombs. Tied and stitched to spine and breast. Lungs wrung out and harvested from lizards the size of horses. Hovering around her with anti-gravity limbs. Floating through the air and brought down. Torn up and split apart. All to give her perfectly wonderful lungs.
Could she say, thank you? No, never felt it necessary. All these medications they had her on. Killing her immune system. All so the transplants would stick. Not inflame and burn up with the light of her white blood cells. Who would say thank you for that? A life on the edge of infection. No, thanks.
Tried to stand on those strange l
egs they gave her. Sticky. Always covered with some raw fluid. Wobbly now. Time to walk those corridors. Time to hunt for any other semblance of life. Real life, living life. Human life. Someone maybe she could talk to who was breathing and burning and alive.
Not the strange foxes that haunted the kitchen halls. Or the dolls that brought her food and cut her open and tried to solve the riddle of Itsasu. Not even the skull of her late long gone husband. The skull she’d covered in jewels now and filled with tiny quantum machines constructed from her tattered memories of his old life. A crude AI, yes. But at least it wasn’t like the heart of her last ship. That heart. That damned heart. Motherfucking sonofabitch asshole heart. Fed her on broken promises and lies.
And now what. Now what. All she had was a daily glimpse of her own death and this labyrinth world (so empty so empty so empty). Maybe this room. Yes. This room was hers. These memories were hers. This mind was hers. As broken and wound down as it may be, it was still hers.
* * *
That Room:
Not large at all, barely wide enough for a few things here and there. Scattered about, small and claustrophobic. A bed that breathed at night with wet noises. Splish. Splish. Splish. A wall that was more shelves than space. Covered in tiny vials and tubes and random pages cut out of books. Yellow, those pages. Haunted, those pages. She read them a few times over the years. But the words never stuck in her mind. Always left a whisper and nothing else.
A bejeweled skull on the corner of her breathing bed. You could smell the AI dust roaming about it. The smell of yeast. Growing, growing, and devouring the air. That kind of yeast that suffocates you and brings you close to death. That was the smell of her memories. Populating that skull. Giving it crude life. Almost her husband. Not quite. Something broken in the way he spoke. Something hollow and peppered with randomness.
Another wall, another map. This one crudely hand drawn. She’d tried to map out the egia so many times. But her hands. So rough, so broken. Hands that were not the right kind of hands. Grown from bird beaks and crows’ feet. Stitched and attached and she was more doll than person now. How much left of her was real? How much left of her was torn out and taken away?
She missed her egia. She missed her fluid tube and the delicious chemicals the ship had once fed her, long ago, once upon a time. Never again, though. Not on this egia anyway. Never again.
She was left to her own devices. And the crumbling limitations of her flesh. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but they took away all of her wonderful machines she’d been building. Carving quantum worlds, cutting up organic tech and using the parts and pieces to create such amazing little toys.
Now all gone and broken and taken from her.
At least they left Ortzi behind. Her husband. His skull. The last true thing she’d ever made.
* * *
“Do you remember the sun? Do you darling, wonderful, true and beautiful wife?”
The voice out of his skull wasn’t quite right. The tenor of the words were true and close, yes. But the tones were missing. The tiny fluttering vibrations were gone. The changes in dialect were stripped away into bare words without meaning. There was no subtext any longer. Only strangely affectless text.
“No, not really. I remember a gas giant, all blue and towering, that I remember. But so long since I’ve been outside of this wretched place. So long! Do you know how long? Have you kept track of the hours, the days?”
The skull clacked its teeth. It liked to do that when it thought. When it processed things using its complex subroutines. Still, wasn’t the same. Wasn’t a real thing. That bastard ship had lied to her, and now all she had was this. This loose artificial mind constructed from the holes in her memories.
Oh, well. At least it kept the loneliness at bay. Sometimes, anyway. Sometimes.
“Decades now, I think. Almost close to a century? But you look good, my dear. So good and well, indeed. Barely over twenty! No longer a frail and broken thing. Your lizard lungs do you well. Perk up! Perk up! Happiness is only moments away.”
Itsasu closed her eyes. Closed her mouth. Shut her mind down for a moment more. Needed to yell and scream at him. To throw a tantrum. To act out all this ageless rage inside of her. But no, wasn’t his fault. She’d built him. She’d made him this way. This hollow echo of what should be. Still, still. It was hard not to lash out.
“Oh, shut up. I need to think by myself for a moment.”
The chattering of the teeth ceased. Silence followed, lonely unbroken silence. Sweet, beautiful thing that the quiet could be. Though at times suffocating, she needed it now. Desired it now. Sometimes the silence was a companion. Other times it was a crushing weight.
“Of course, my dear. My love. Of course.”
His response sounded oddly sad, and she felt a twinge in her bones. Maybe she should tweak his emotions later? Make it less manipulative. She’s been manipulated enough lately. Did not need any more manipulation. Not even from a jeweled skull in the center of her room.
The doorway was a round circle. Like an eye. All the doors here were like that. And the gravity had a feel to it. Fake, broken. Like any moment she would sneeze and fly away. You could taste the gravity and it tasted wrong. A tangy orange. Mixed with burnt ozone. That smell of candlewax and forest. She walked over to the walls. Hungry ribs. With orange lights placed in random bulbs. Like a spine made of lamps.
“Can I speak now?”
Sigh. Why had she made him so chatty?
“I can tell you a poem. Would you like to hear a poem?”
Her husband had been a poet once, long ago, when alive and living still. Out on those ancient moons made of giant corpses, hovering around a lost sun somewhere in a tattered universe. Moons haunted by ghosts. Sentient things. He would read in front of large audiences, reciting such beautiful lines. It’s why she fell in love with him in the first place. A poem whispered in her ear. Hot breath, sensual words. A tingle in her gut. All while she waited in line on some distant moon. Waiting to board a ship out of there and into the stars.
So of course, of course. She had to keep that inside of him. But the poetry generator wasn’t quite right. Would never be his poems, no. Just fractured bits and pieces from her memories. Broken apart, pushed back together again. His words, but not his structure.
“I, I don’t know,” she said. Would it be worse? Would it be better? The poems. “Okay. Yes, but only one poem. Only one while I decide on where to explore today.”
The skull chattered again. “Can I go with you? Can I? I think we might find them today, don’t you? It feels like that kind of day. Wet and full of promises.”
Her new legs felt squishy and wrong, and they bent a little without her thinking. So she sat down. Head in strange hands. Eyes peeking between gooey fingers. Webs of slime stretched between each digit. Flesh colored and translucent. Her fingers not quite finished yet. “Just, just ... just tell me a poem, dammit. Just tell me the poem and let me think already.”
Another sad sound and the clacking stopped. A mewling of a thing from the skull’s jawbone. The jewels for eyes ruby broken and forlorn. Why did she want to comfort that skull so badly now? To hold it close to her breast and tell it yes everything will be all right. But maybe not, no. Not at all. It was just a simple thing and not a real thing at all. A reflection of what once lived and shared a long life with her.
So she ignored those false feelings. And instead sat back and listened. Heart and hands listened.
* * *
The poem was mostly an erratic cobble of words and memories. With only a few random scatters of the real thing. That true Ortzi thing that made her feel a dim connection to him. An almost memory, flickering. A kind of tame shadow haunting her. Then the illusion would shatter with some random gibberish phrase. Vomited up by the endless decay of his algorithms. Even artificial life corroded with entropy.
It really unwound now. He was on a roll of nonsense.
Lungs arms harvested life/the system is infinite/we can’t escape the lizar
d blue of gravity ...
No, nothing left of him now. “Enough, Ortzi. Enough. Just ... just stop.”
Teeth chatter clack. And his eyes glint solid. Glimmer. Oh, how sad he seemed. “Have I done it again? Have I broken away from his words?”
A shrug in the shadows of her room. “It’s okay, it’s all right. We should get going now, anyway. Wasted too much of today just playing games.”
The skull’s eyes crossed. “Poetry is no game.”
She stood. Wet, wobbly legs like thick jelly. “I know.”
Had to try and hide the sadness in her voice. Maybe try harder next time. “It’s not a game at all. Come, maybe you can think of another one as we walk. Something else you could tell me later. Would that be okay?”
Yes, maybe then if he thinks on it, it would be less random. More true and heartfelt. More like the real ghost echoing inside his chambers. If only his patuek hadn’t been destroyed! If only I could’ve saved what was left of him. Now nothing, nothing. Only a kind of dim sorrow that ached inside.
The skull seemed happy. It smiled in its own way. The jewels flickering differently. A decadent Cheshire grin. “I get to come with you? Oh, finally. It’s so boring in here when you’re gone. I go into my virtual place, you know? The one I’ve built on the inside. But it’s strange and lonely in there. I tried to build friends, but they’re not quite right. They seem hollow and decadent. I want and need real people. I want and need you and others. You make me feel real, Itsasu. You make me feel whole again.”