Heather Farthing's Blog - Posts Tagged "genetic-engineering"
Old World
All characters are storylines are (c) Heather Farthing and may not be reproduced or redistributed in part or in whole. All rights reserved. (C) 2016
Soundtrack: Bring Me to Life, Male Version--Dan Vasc
Red Right Hand--Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Chapter one
I am a merchant, coming home after a long shift at work, to find my mate has surprised me by bringing our children over with dinner. They are beginning to molt, and the males have my coloring, the females already so tall and strong.
“Here,” I say, holding out a chunk of ice from the ground. “It’ll taste like ash, but it’s all we have right now.” My younger sister squirms and turns her nose up before giving the ice a lick, wrinkling her nose in distaste.
The herds are restless. Something bothers them, but I don’t know what. The big male, the bull, bellows and stamps his feet, and then charges without warning. He has never charged at me before. The first massive, flat foot plants on my spine, and then there is nothing.
“What’s that?” I ask my mother, looking skyward. A streak of orange pierces the sky.
“It’s just a flying star,” she replies, a touch of excitement in her voice. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
I shift my feet, unsure. Something about it is wrong, it’s too big, too close…
I stand in front of the incubator, watching for tiny eggteeth and the sound of peeping from inside the shells. Not today, not yet, maybe tomorrow. A bright light from the window draws my attention. What could that be? It’s too early for dawn.
Light.
Bright light.
Red light.
Seeping in to my dreams.
My eyes slide open, not for the first time. I see red light. I see shadows. Nothing ever moved before, but now they do. The shadows. They pound against the glass. Why? Let me sleep.
I close my eyes again, but something has changed. The umbilical attached to my belly disengages, retracting into the top, and now I am alone and my chest hurts.
I am in the trees at the edge of the beach, watching a bright light out at sea. As I ponder what it could be, I realize the ocean is receding, fast. Marine reptiles are beached in the water’s haste, a fortune in fish and edible kelp exposed to the cloudy skies. My heart sinks, because I know as quickly as the tide left, it will come back even quicker.
I rumble to the rest of the House and neighbors, sending out a deep, resonating word into the trees from my chest: run.
I bring up the rear, watching over the House’s young ones, counting them over and over again, leaping from branch to branch. Beneath me, the water begins to rise, and now the animals are running, a thunder of feet, predator and prey side by side.
My grandson, barely old enough to shed his juvenile down, slips from his mother’s back, plummeting to the current below. I make a dive for him, and I miss, looking skyward as he hangs from his mother’s tail.
I plunge feet-first into the salty, brown water, and can’t fight against the raging current. I feel myself slipping, battered by massive legs and broken trees. My lungs burn burn as water feels them.
I can still feel the water in my lungs.
Instinctively, I kick hard at the shell, butting it with my nose, scrabbling at it with claw and tooth. This substance is harder than eggshell, meant to drain and then open at the sides instead of being picked apart by tiny claws and an egg tooth.
There are figures on the other side of the synthetic shell, three. Two pound against the shell, sending shock waves through the thick, embryonic fluid and my eardrums. The third stands at the side, a series of neural wiring plugged into something mounted onto their wrist. One of the figures stands back, looking down at a similar object on theirs. The third leaps to the top of the giant, synthetic eggs.
My chest hurts and my limbs feel heavy.
I remember breathing. I remember cool air in the lungs, in and out, and I remember inhaling water, and I remember the times I drowned.
Please, I beg silently, as the big shadow assaults the top of the egg, and then scrambles down again. Please, I don’t want to die here. I don’t want to die again.
When the big shadow comes back, it carries something long and and slender, raising it over its head, sending the other two shadows scattering. The object is held high, and I realize what is going to happen just in time to bury my head and face under my arms and tail, nose to my knees.
The glass shatters like starlight, sending me and the blue embryonic fluid cascading, cold and sticky, onto the floor, landing in a patch of glass.
Everything hurts. The circle of ten attachments when my umbilical attached, the rent skin that slid across glass, still poking into my hip, my chest.
Something’s wrong. I can’t get air in or out. Blue spills out of my mouth and nose, my belly muscles clamped and cramped. I burn inside.
“He’s not breathing,” a female voice whimpers, and then there is another at my side, banded fingers holding open my mouth, a warm, fanned tail wrapped around my back, stroking the sopping, sticky down.
“Get it all out,” she whispers. “Pi, get my bag!”
The bigger shadow pulls me away from the female, angling me face down. The position seems to work, and there is more blue, and a deep, wheezing sound, cold inside my lungs.
“Good, good,” the tall figure, a male, mutters approvingly, thumping my back. “You’re strong. You can make it.”
The third shadow brings a white leather bag, which the female with the banded fingers digs through, pulling out a tapered tube she fits over my snout while the third straps it to the back of my head. Blue comes out in torrents, splattering onto the floor, and then air is forced down my lungs, and again, and again, and repeat, until I’m drawing ragged, shaky breaths on my own.
“See there?” the big one smiles, clicking his teeth. “You’re a tough guy.”
“How’s he doing?” asks the second male.
“Blood oxygen is rising,” the female replies, sounding relieved. “Blood sugar’s low, iron’s low…everything’s low.”
My eyes focus past the breather, onto the blue-smeared floor. I see hands, fingers. They move when I move my fingers. They flex and bend and leave clawmarks in the blue.
The coloring is…strange.
All newborns are covered in black and gray and white speckled down, like dark ash. It is the same for one who cracked shell with tooth and claws, and one born from glass and blue. Adult coloring comes later, when the juvenile down is shed, replaced by fine filament and beautiful display. Newborns have no spots or stripes or decorative coloration…but I do.
I have stripes. They’re blue and run along my fingers and hands in oblong shapes, meeting at a series of blue squares at my wrist, and then longer blue along my arms, like…bone. I look like a skeleton laid over shadow.
“You can admire yourself later, Runt,” the big one says, unbuckling the breather from the back of my head.
The female and the second male each take an arm, rising to their feet.
“No, no,” says the big male in an authoritative tone. “He’s big and strong. Let him do it on his own.”
“Brute,” sighs the female.
“Trust me,” the big male replies. “Give him a chance.”
Three sets of feet back away from me, the female leaning over, hands on her knees. The big male strides to the end of the room, stepping on a floor button, causing a pillar to rise from the spot, supporting a vessel.
Only one? But hatchings are done in groups, just like in nature.
A terrible, stabbing pain pierces my belly, causing me to double over and whimper.
“Brute!” growls the female.
“As soon as he gets his slurry, he’ll be fine,” the big male, red and black, answers causually.
“But the vessels are—” starts the second male, cut off by a growl from the red male.
I want that vessel more than anything.
“There’s glass,” snarls the female.
“You’re going to patch him up anyway. You may as well do it all at once.”
I need to get my legs under me. I need to get my torso up. I remember how to do this. Knees, elbows, glass poking into my skin like hot embers raining from the sky.
I remember crawling under branches, under furniture, playing games as a child, chasing prey through the woods, hiding from larger predators. I remember the feel of the motion, first one arm, then one leg, the glass in my palms and knees, tail dragging sluggishly through the blue.
“See? You’re a survivor, aren’t you, Runt?” the red male asks kindly. The female gives a disapproving scoff.
Food, hunger gnawing at my belly. I remember the fullness of a good meal, dinners spent with the House, the joy of blood, still warm, spilling into the mouth while something dies. I remember weeks of hunger, cold biting at the limbs, cramps in the belly, getting harder to get out of the nest every waking cycle.
Inch by inch, foot by foot, painful, muscle-aching drag by drag, the vessel of slurry gets closer and closer. I remember how good it feels for an empty stomach to get filled, for the warmth inside, and it keeps me moving.
When I am next to the pole, I am on my knees before the red male. His feet, the end of his tail, and left arm are blackened, like he waded through the thick ash looking for survivors. His body is red with blackened stripes and spotting, his muzzle black with iridescent red striping like clawmarks, the coloring of a leader.
I reach up for the vessel, but it’s too far, and look up at the commander. His eyes are a shocking, incongruous blue, with thin, slitted pupils. His mane of black, irredescent display feathers hangs beneath his shoulders, long and wild.
Red. Red like blood, blood spilled after a shower of stones, flesh split by flying glass, burned by cinders raining from the sky.
Red like the Imperial House, Dracomimus. Of course they would pay homage to the imperial bloodlines in the commanders. Strange, a male commander. Not unheard of, but unusual.
“You want this?” he asks, taking the vessel from the stand. I nod, tossing my head, reaching my hands out like a child, grasping at the air with my fingers. He holds it above my head, way out of my reach.
“Show me what you’re willing to do to get it,” he orders in a stern voice. “Stand up.”
“Brute, stop being a jerk and just give it to him,” sighs the other male.
“He can do it,” Brute retorts. “Can’t you?”
I nod, bobbing my head and clicking my teeth, and notice the railing around the stand, the places for other vessels to be. On my knees, I can’t reach them, but if I can get my feet under me properly…
The world spins, like tossed around in a tsunami. I waver, catching myself on a cold, sticky hand, edging my feet beneath me. I remember standing, walking, I remember the placement of the legs and the feel of the muscles. One, two, three…
Too fast! Way too fast! The world spins and I’m grabbing the stand for balance, holding it tight and shivering, coughing specks of blue and retching.
“See?” Brute asks smugly, holding out the vessel.
Delighted, I pull open the lid and find nothing inside.
Hunger grips my belly, endless shadowy days and dark nights of falling behind panicked herds, scavenging on feral animals slowly starving to death.
I look up again at Brute, his mane hanging into his eyes, around his snout.
“The feeders aren’t working, but I believe Atrissa brought something for you,” he admits kindly.
“You’re cruel,” the female growls, pulling another vessel out of her bag.
“He’s learning his own strength, aren’t you?” he asks, turning from her to me.
Cold, sticky, shivering, and starving, I glare at him, but imagine still being on the floor, in the glass and the blue. My muscles protest, shaking, painful, but I am standing.
“Here you go,” the female offers, handing me a vessel of pureed meat and blood, baby’s first meal, easy to digest and gentle on a stomach that’s never digested anything.
I drink deeply, choking on blue and slurry, slurping. She grabs the vessel away from me, me grabbing for it, stumbling when I lean away from the stand.
“Not so fast,” she chides. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
She holds the vessel for me, controlling how fast it spills by the angle of the tilt. She has the tawny coloring of a female, browns and creams that make them invisible in the trees. Alternating tan and white stripes band her fingers and her plain, unadorned tail, the fan in a pleasing, symmetrical pattern. She is lovely.
When the vessel is empty, I grab at her bag, looking for more.
“That’s it, love,” she replies, pulling away. “You’ll get more when I check you in at Medical.”
“Is he that bad?” asks the second male.
“He’s all scraped up and wheezing,” she explains. “I want him under observation, too.”
“Can you fix that incubator?” the commander asks, looking past me.
“If I can get the materials, maybe,” the second male answers. “Circuits are blown, but the connections are still good. It might not be what it was.”
“It can’t be helped,” the commander purrs, turning to me. “The showers.”
The female holds out her hand. She has delicate fingers, for stitching wounds and finding unseen injuries and ailments. They’re probably very touch- and heat-sensitive, too.
“No, no,” Brute says again, intercepting her. “You can do it yourself, can’t you?”
I click my teeth in affirmation, taking one painful, hesitating step, and then another, before letting go of the stand and wavering, nearly falling. I remember walking, I remember paths through the trees, the backs of big herbivores, a big carnivore. My tail knows where to go for balance, but I miss having primaries on my forearms.
“See?” Brute asks gently. “He doesn’t need your coddling. He’s strong.”
The female growls softly.
Past the feeding stations, into the next room. Like the hatchery, it’s a vast place, walls lined in rows, with spouts hanging near the top. I know what to do, find one, stand under it, step on the button. The first three don’t work.
That’s strange. There wasn’t food ready for me, and now the water wasn’t working. That shouldn’t happen.
On the fourth shower, the blast of cold water hits me like an avalanche, my breath catching in my throat, cold lungs hacking blue and snow. It shouldn’t be cold, not this time of year. The seasons are all out of whack, since…
The female grabs my arm, pulling me out of my memories. I am in a dimly lit room full of showers, standing under cold water.
“The heaters are out again?” Brute hisses, turning towards the second male, yellow-green with a blue snout covered in yellow, branching striping, like a slice of brain tissue, the mark of a technician.
He holds up his arm, where a crustacean shell runs from wrist to elbow, a slit in the outer side letting the yellow primaries free.
“Yes,” he whines. “The whole sector. My clan is already solving it.”
“Sorry, Runt,” the red commander sighs apologetically. “It’s the best we can do for now.
Sweet-smelling soap spills from the guttering spout, dissolving the blue, unsticking my down. I scrub it in quickly, but thoroughly, finding white under the blue, white like bone.
When I’m not sticky anymore, I step away from the shower and the water slows and stops. I shiver in the emptiness, sopping down sticking to my body, tail wrapped around me for warmth and modesty.
“Over here,” the technician calls from deeper into the room.
I take slow steps toward him, and find him pulling a plain blue set of clothing out of the wall, and a blue towel folded nearby. The female wraps it around me, and my heart skips a beat at her clean, sweet smell, like tiny flowers blooming in the night.
She holds me close, wrapping the towel tight and holding me close, wrapped in her arms and tail, her hands rubbing my shoulders to help soak up the water. Her body is warm and she smells good.
When I am warmer and reasonably dry, she helps me into my clothes while the two males discuss power outages and failures. The Nest is on a geothermal vein, which should make such things impossible, but they’re talking like this sort of thing happens regularly.
The commander looks up at me, looking me over from head to toe. All three of them have adult plumage and markings. That shouldn’t happen, either, unless I’m the last of a later hatching. Did everyone else already pass through before, with the older hatchings waiting on me?
“Are you ready to meet the team?” the red male asks.
Clicking my teeth and tossing my head, I nod.
Chapter two
Soundtrack: Bring Me to Life, Male Version--Dan Vasc
Red Right Hand--Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Chapter one
I am a merchant, coming home after a long shift at work, to find my mate has surprised me by bringing our children over with dinner. They are beginning to molt, and the males have my coloring, the females already so tall and strong.
“Here,” I say, holding out a chunk of ice from the ground. “It’ll taste like ash, but it’s all we have right now.” My younger sister squirms and turns her nose up before giving the ice a lick, wrinkling her nose in distaste.
The herds are restless. Something bothers them, but I don’t know what. The big male, the bull, bellows and stamps his feet, and then charges without warning. He has never charged at me before. The first massive, flat foot plants on my spine, and then there is nothing.
“What’s that?” I ask my mother, looking skyward. A streak of orange pierces the sky.
“It’s just a flying star,” she replies, a touch of excitement in her voice. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
I shift my feet, unsure. Something about it is wrong, it’s too big, too close…
I stand in front of the incubator, watching for tiny eggteeth and the sound of peeping from inside the shells. Not today, not yet, maybe tomorrow. A bright light from the window draws my attention. What could that be? It’s too early for dawn.
Light.
Bright light.
Red light.
Seeping in to my dreams.
My eyes slide open, not for the first time. I see red light. I see shadows. Nothing ever moved before, but now they do. The shadows. They pound against the glass. Why? Let me sleep.
I close my eyes again, but something has changed. The umbilical attached to my belly disengages, retracting into the top, and now I am alone and my chest hurts.
I am in the trees at the edge of the beach, watching a bright light out at sea. As I ponder what it could be, I realize the ocean is receding, fast. Marine reptiles are beached in the water’s haste, a fortune in fish and edible kelp exposed to the cloudy skies. My heart sinks, because I know as quickly as the tide left, it will come back even quicker.
I rumble to the rest of the House and neighbors, sending out a deep, resonating word into the trees from my chest: run.
I bring up the rear, watching over the House’s young ones, counting them over and over again, leaping from branch to branch. Beneath me, the water begins to rise, and now the animals are running, a thunder of feet, predator and prey side by side.
My grandson, barely old enough to shed his juvenile down, slips from his mother’s back, plummeting to the current below. I make a dive for him, and I miss, looking skyward as he hangs from his mother’s tail.
I plunge feet-first into the salty, brown water, and can’t fight against the raging current. I feel myself slipping, battered by massive legs and broken trees. My lungs burn burn as water feels them.
I can still feel the water in my lungs.
Instinctively, I kick hard at the shell, butting it with my nose, scrabbling at it with claw and tooth. This substance is harder than eggshell, meant to drain and then open at the sides instead of being picked apart by tiny claws and an egg tooth.
There are figures on the other side of the synthetic shell, three. Two pound against the shell, sending shock waves through the thick, embryonic fluid and my eardrums. The third stands at the side, a series of neural wiring plugged into something mounted onto their wrist. One of the figures stands back, looking down at a similar object on theirs. The third leaps to the top of the giant, synthetic eggs.
My chest hurts and my limbs feel heavy.
I remember breathing. I remember cool air in the lungs, in and out, and I remember inhaling water, and I remember the times I drowned.
Please, I beg silently, as the big shadow assaults the top of the egg, and then scrambles down again. Please, I don’t want to die here. I don’t want to die again.
When the big shadow comes back, it carries something long and and slender, raising it over its head, sending the other two shadows scattering. The object is held high, and I realize what is going to happen just in time to bury my head and face under my arms and tail, nose to my knees.
The glass shatters like starlight, sending me and the blue embryonic fluid cascading, cold and sticky, onto the floor, landing in a patch of glass.
Everything hurts. The circle of ten attachments when my umbilical attached, the rent skin that slid across glass, still poking into my hip, my chest.
Something’s wrong. I can’t get air in or out. Blue spills out of my mouth and nose, my belly muscles clamped and cramped. I burn inside.
“He’s not breathing,” a female voice whimpers, and then there is another at my side, banded fingers holding open my mouth, a warm, fanned tail wrapped around my back, stroking the sopping, sticky down.
“Get it all out,” she whispers. “Pi, get my bag!”
The bigger shadow pulls me away from the female, angling me face down. The position seems to work, and there is more blue, and a deep, wheezing sound, cold inside my lungs.
“Good, good,” the tall figure, a male, mutters approvingly, thumping my back. “You’re strong. You can make it.”
The third shadow brings a white leather bag, which the female with the banded fingers digs through, pulling out a tapered tube she fits over my snout while the third straps it to the back of my head. Blue comes out in torrents, splattering onto the floor, and then air is forced down my lungs, and again, and again, and repeat, until I’m drawing ragged, shaky breaths on my own.
“See there?” the big one smiles, clicking his teeth. “You’re a tough guy.”
“How’s he doing?” asks the second male.
“Blood oxygen is rising,” the female replies, sounding relieved. “Blood sugar’s low, iron’s low…everything’s low.”
My eyes focus past the breather, onto the blue-smeared floor. I see hands, fingers. They move when I move my fingers. They flex and bend and leave clawmarks in the blue.
The coloring is…strange.
All newborns are covered in black and gray and white speckled down, like dark ash. It is the same for one who cracked shell with tooth and claws, and one born from glass and blue. Adult coloring comes later, when the juvenile down is shed, replaced by fine filament and beautiful display. Newborns have no spots or stripes or decorative coloration…but I do.
I have stripes. They’re blue and run along my fingers and hands in oblong shapes, meeting at a series of blue squares at my wrist, and then longer blue along my arms, like…bone. I look like a skeleton laid over shadow.
“You can admire yourself later, Runt,” the big one says, unbuckling the breather from the back of my head.
The female and the second male each take an arm, rising to their feet.
“No, no,” says the big male in an authoritative tone. “He’s big and strong. Let him do it on his own.”
“Brute,” sighs the female.
“Trust me,” the big male replies. “Give him a chance.”
Three sets of feet back away from me, the female leaning over, hands on her knees. The big male strides to the end of the room, stepping on a floor button, causing a pillar to rise from the spot, supporting a vessel.
Only one? But hatchings are done in groups, just like in nature.
A terrible, stabbing pain pierces my belly, causing me to double over and whimper.
“Brute!” growls the female.
“As soon as he gets his slurry, he’ll be fine,” the big male, red and black, answers causually.
“But the vessels are—” starts the second male, cut off by a growl from the red male.
I want that vessel more than anything.
“There’s glass,” snarls the female.
“You’re going to patch him up anyway. You may as well do it all at once.”
I need to get my legs under me. I need to get my torso up. I remember how to do this. Knees, elbows, glass poking into my skin like hot embers raining from the sky.
I remember crawling under branches, under furniture, playing games as a child, chasing prey through the woods, hiding from larger predators. I remember the feel of the motion, first one arm, then one leg, the glass in my palms and knees, tail dragging sluggishly through the blue.
“See? You’re a survivor, aren’t you, Runt?” the red male asks kindly. The female gives a disapproving scoff.
Food, hunger gnawing at my belly. I remember the fullness of a good meal, dinners spent with the House, the joy of blood, still warm, spilling into the mouth while something dies. I remember weeks of hunger, cold biting at the limbs, cramps in the belly, getting harder to get out of the nest every waking cycle.
Inch by inch, foot by foot, painful, muscle-aching drag by drag, the vessel of slurry gets closer and closer. I remember how good it feels for an empty stomach to get filled, for the warmth inside, and it keeps me moving.
When I am next to the pole, I am on my knees before the red male. His feet, the end of his tail, and left arm are blackened, like he waded through the thick ash looking for survivors. His body is red with blackened stripes and spotting, his muzzle black with iridescent red striping like clawmarks, the coloring of a leader.
I reach up for the vessel, but it’s too far, and look up at the commander. His eyes are a shocking, incongruous blue, with thin, slitted pupils. His mane of black, irredescent display feathers hangs beneath his shoulders, long and wild.
Red. Red like blood, blood spilled after a shower of stones, flesh split by flying glass, burned by cinders raining from the sky.
Red like the Imperial House, Dracomimus. Of course they would pay homage to the imperial bloodlines in the commanders. Strange, a male commander. Not unheard of, but unusual.
“You want this?” he asks, taking the vessel from the stand. I nod, tossing my head, reaching my hands out like a child, grasping at the air with my fingers. He holds it above my head, way out of my reach.
“Show me what you’re willing to do to get it,” he orders in a stern voice. “Stand up.”
“Brute, stop being a jerk and just give it to him,” sighs the other male.
“He can do it,” Brute retorts. “Can’t you?”
I nod, bobbing my head and clicking my teeth, and notice the railing around the stand, the places for other vessels to be. On my knees, I can’t reach them, but if I can get my feet under me properly…
The world spins, like tossed around in a tsunami. I waver, catching myself on a cold, sticky hand, edging my feet beneath me. I remember standing, walking, I remember the placement of the legs and the feel of the muscles. One, two, three…
Too fast! Way too fast! The world spins and I’m grabbing the stand for balance, holding it tight and shivering, coughing specks of blue and retching.
“See?” Brute asks smugly, holding out the vessel.
Delighted, I pull open the lid and find nothing inside.
Hunger grips my belly, endless shadowy days and dark nights of falling behind panicked herds, scavenging on feral animals slowly starving to death.
I look up again at Brute, his mane hanging into his eyes, around his snout.
“The feeders aren’t working, but I believe Atrissa brought something for you,” he admits kindly.
“You’re cruel,” the female growls, pulling another vessel out of her bag.
“He’s learning his own strength, aren’t you?” he asks, turning from her to me.
Cold, sticky, shivering, and starving, I glare at him, but imagine still being on the floor, in the glass and the blue. My muscles protest, shaking, painful, but I am standing.
“Here you go,” the female offers, handing me a vessel of pureed meat and blood, baby’s first meal, easy to digest and gentle on a stomach that’s never digested anything.
I drink deeply, choking on blue and slurry, slurping. She grabs the vessel away from me, me grabbing for it, stumbling when I lean away from the stand.
“Not so fast,” she chides. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
She holds the vessel for me, controlling how fast it spills by the angle of the tilt. She has the tawny coloring of a female, browns and creams that make them invisible in the trees. Alternating tan and white stripes band her fingers and her plain, unadorned tail, the fan in a pleasing, symmetrical pattern. She is lovely.
When the vessel is empty, I grab at her bag, looking for more.
“That’s it, love,” she replies, pulling away. “You’ll get more when I check you in at Medical.”
“Is he that bad?” asks the second male.
“He’s all scraped up and wheezing,” she explains. “I want him under observation, too.”
“Can you fix that incubator?” the commander asks, looking past me.
“If I can get the materials, maybe,” the second male answers. “Circuits are blown, but the connections are still good. It might not be what it was.”
“It can’t be helped,” the commander purrs, turning to me. “The showers.”
The female holds out her hand. She has delicate fingers, for stitching wounds and finding unseen injuries and ailments. They’re probably very touch- and heat-sensitive, too.
“No, no,” Brute says again, intercepting her. “You can do it yourself, can’t you?”
I click my teeth in affirmation, taking one painful, hesitating step, and then another, before letting go of the stand and wavering, nearly falling. I remember walking, I remember paths through the trees, the backs of big herbivores, a big carnivore. My tail knows where to go for balance, but I miss having primaries on my forearms.
“See?” Brute asks gently. “He doesn’t need your coddling. He’s strong.”
The female growls softly.
Past the feeding stations, into the next room. Like the hatchery, it’s a vast place, walls lined in rows, with spouts hanging near the top. I know what to do, find one, stand under it, step on the button. The first three don’t work.
That’s strange. There wasn’t food ready for me, and now the water wasn’t working. That shouldn’t happen.
On the fourth shower, the blast of cold water hits me like an avalanche, my breath catching in my throat, cold lungs hacking blue and snow. It shouldn’t be cold, not this time of year. The seasons are all out of whack, since…
The female grabs my arm, pulling me out of my memories. I am in a dimly lit room full of showers, standing under cold water.
“The heaters are out again?” Brute hisses, turning towards the second male, yellow-green with a blue snout covered in yellow, branching striping, like a slice of brain tissue, the mark of a technician.
He holds up his arm, where a crustacean shell runs from wrist to elbow, a slit in the outer side letting the yellow primaries free.
“Yes,” he whines. “The whole sector. My clan is already solving it.”
“Sorry, Runt,” the red commander sighs apologetically. “It’s the best we can do for now.
Sweet-smelling soap spills from the guttering spout, dissolving the blue, unsticking my down. I scrub it in quickly, but thoroughly, finding white under the blue, white like bone.
When I’m not sticky anymore, I step away from the shower and the water slows and stops. I shiver in the emptiness, sopping down sticking to my body, tail wrapped around me for warmth and modesty.
“Over here,” the technician calls from deeper into the room.
I take slow steps toward him, and find him pulling a plain blue set of clothing out of the wall, and a blue towel folded nearby. The female wraps it around me, and my heart skips a beat at her clean, sweet smell, like tiny flowers blooming in the night.
She holds me close, wrapping the towel tight and holding me close, wrapped in her arms and tail, her hands rubbing my shoulders to help soak up the water. Her body is warm and she smells good.
When I am warmer and reasonably dry, she helps me into my clothes while the two males discuss power outages and failures. The Nest is on a geothermal vein, which should make such things impossible, but they’re talking like this sort of thing happens regularly.
The commander looks up at me, looking me over from head to toe. All three of them have adult plumage and markings. That shouldn’t happen, either, unless I’m the last of a later hatching. Did everyone else already pass through before, with the older hatchings waiting on me?
“Are you ready to meet the team?” the red male asks.
Clicking my teeth and tossing my head, I nod.
Chapter two
Old World: Chapter Two
All characters are storylines are (c) Heather Farthing and may not be reproduced or redistributed in part or in whole. All rights reserved. (C) 2016
<-Chapter one
Soundtrack:
Fibonacci Sequence--Dr. Steel
The Day the World Died--Miracle of Sound
Chapter two
Everything burns, if you get it hot enough. Trees, flesh, bone, even stone.
The fear of fire is an old one, ancient memories of trees disintegrating with people still in them, homes lost, prey gone, the smell of singed feathers and blackened flesh.
The things we need, the things we care about, burn faster than we can escape.
The horror reached out of the sky in the night, when the blaze was brightest. It touched the ocean and the ocean evaporated, along with it any animals that weren’t far enough away to only be cooked alive.
The water rolled out, leaving the seabeds dry and the marine life exposed, gasping for air and groaning under their own weight. When the water was finished rolling out, it rolled back, and took with it coastlines and places farther inland.
That wasn’t the worst of it.
Where the horror touched the water, the heat of its grasping hand ignited the atmosphere and blackened the skies. Cities built on the ground and in the trees and on the water evaporated, like the ocean. Poison rained down on the places not lucky enough to be settled close enough to be wiped out in a single, fiery breeze. The sky hid in the only place it could, and the land got colder.
And then there were the in-between places, the places close enough to burn but not close enough to vaporize in an instant. Thousands were awake when the hand of the horror from the sky touched them, thousands were woken by the sounds of avians and pteros and all manner of terrestrial things fled from the nameless monster that scalded the skin and the lungs.
And hundreds were deep in a REM cycle at midnight.
Everything burns.
I wake screaming before I even know why, and brain confused and unable to tell the features of my sequester. The walls are fire. The décor is fire. The furniture is fire.
I am fire.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know…some kind of seizure?”
“We haven’t dealt with any seizures.”
“Lucky for him, he’s the first. Get him some sedative before he tears something. Oral, with numbing agent.”
The fire is in my mouth and in my lungs. It burns away flesh and nerves and I can’t feel pain anymore. My flesh is melting away, skin and feathers peeling away from scorched bone, and I am nothing more than a skeleton lying in a field of ash.
***
I can still smell smoke.
My throat itches, and has a peculiar cold feeling inside.
I’m sore all over. My arms and legs are heavy. When I open my eyes, the lights from the bio-luminescent fungus is too strong, prompting them to close them again. My arms sting when I bring them up to cover my eyes.
“He’s waking up!”
“Move over! I wanna see!”
I stretch and twist in the nest, tendons burning.
“Don’t you have rounds to make?”
Giggling and running footsteps.
“I reduced the ambient lighting,” a male voice says. “You can open your eyes now.”
I open my eyes, everything white and out of focus. I blink a few times, until I can make out the stool across from me, and the blue medic seating himself on it.
Blue, all over, with green streaks in his short, tame mane. His arms and legs are blackened, but his primaries are alternating black and white with some gold. The fan of his tail is blue and green, with gold around the green eyes, tail wrapped around the stool to keep it out of the way in the tight space.
“I’m Bleed,” he smiles, gesturing at his snout, cream and rusty red, like used bandages. “Medic clan. Have you thought of a name yet?”
I bob my head to answer in the negative. He taps on the carapace of his wrist-mounted computer.
“You’re supposed to get slurry as soon as you wake up,” he explains. “Your deficient in quite a lot of vitamins and minerals, and Atrissa wants them brought back up. How do you feel.”
I stretch my legs and wince. His pale blue eyes flicker over me, understanding deep inside.
“Have you tried to speak?” he asks.
I bob my head again.
“Does your throat hurt?”
Again, a head bob.
“Try to say something. Anything,” he suggests.
I lick my teeth, feeling sticky and thick.
“Water,” I ask, but nothing happens except a harsh cough that painlessly scrapes my airways.
“Hmm,” Bleed purrs. “Could be the sedative, could be the damage from aspirating the amniotic fluid. Don’t overdo it, but we’ll keep an eye on it.”
I look askance, feeling hot. Even a peeping newborn can make some noise, but not me. Lying on my side to face the medic, I can see my hands and arms up to my elbows, and the very detailed skeletal patterns in my down.
“You’re piebald,” Bleed observes. “The white is entirely without pigment, down to your skin.”
I turn my hands over and look at the markings along the palms, just as anatomically correct as the ones on the backs of my hands. That is a very specific sort of defect.
We’re not meant to have defects. We’re supposed to be stronger, more efficient, better. There’s no room for failure, not with survival on the line.
“The synthetic lights don’t produce UV radiation, so you shouldn’t need to worry about burning,” Bleed tells me helpfully, looking away from my hands and back to his computer, which makes me wince, lashing my tail. Burning under my feathers shouldn’t be an issue in the first place.
“If I catch you spying on patients again, I’ll skin you alive and feed you to the pteranodons!”
It’s the female from before, but her voice is vicious and makes my down fluff, claws coiling in fear.
She’s carrying a vessel of slurry, striding into the sequester like she owns it, white and tan head held high, tan-brown and cream banded tail held even higher. Behind her, the oculus to the sequester closes with a swish.
She hands me the vessel, studying my hands closely, staring at the white, bonelike markings, and watches the way they move when I twist off the lid to the vessel, tilting it back. Sweetest ambrosia, I didn’t realize how hungry I was.
“I sent you his latest data,” Bleed tells her. “He can’t vocalize, but everything else is as expected.”
“Was it the sedative or the near-drowning?” she asks.
“I’m not sure.”
“Finish eating, love,” she smiles gently, all female authority in her stance.
Typically, hens are taller and stronger than cockerals. They have children to protect, and more mouths to hunt for. Because of that, females are traditionally seen as leaders and beacons of physical strength.
Bleed is noticeably smaller than she is. Males are solitary, only joining their primary mate’s household in the even of old age or injury. In ancient times, a male’s job was to be decorative, largely, although an avid hunter himself.
In traditionalist views, a male grooms and sport hunts, but stays out of political office and boardrooms. In some, largely outdated, cultures, a male is not even to speak in the presence of females unless directed.
These days, the Empire works to educate people out of such outdated thinking. The average male may not be as tall or strong as the average female, but that doesn’t make him more delicate or less intelligent.
Still, the nest would have selected mainly females for the leadership roles, and as such, Atrissa is the doctor and Bleed is the assistant.
“Can you get out of the nest?” Atrissa asks. “Brute isn’t here, so I’m going to be more gentle.”
She smiles by clicking her teeth and tossing her head, offering he hand. Her hands are cream from the wrist to the fingers, but tan and brown along the forearms and primaries. She is warm to the touch and my heart skips a beat to feel her fine, noble adult filament against my fluffy juvenile down.
Maybe after I molt, my adult coloring won’t be piebald. As it is, I can’t wait to shed and look like a grown-up again.
She helps me down from the nest and on to the smooth, tan wooden floor of the medical center. My balance holds better, but my joints and muscles are sore, probably because I’ve never used them before.
To my dismay, the same skeletal markings are across my toes, feet, and ankles, as white as a sunbleached carcass on a hot day against the ashy speckle of juvenile down.
“Good, good,” Atrissa beams. “Walk to the end of the room and turn around.”
I do as I’m told, my steps growing with confidence, mimicking all the times I’d done it before.
“Perfect,” she says, and then tells me to line up against a wall, doted with measuring spots.
“That’s…what, two feet and three inches and five pounds?” Bleed asks, entering the data into the computer.
My heart sinks. I’m short and underweight as well as piebald. No wonder the red commander called me “runt.”
After my statistics are measured, I am directed back to the nest, where Atrissa uses a stethoscope pressed against her ear canals to check my heart and lungs, and then a stick of bio-luminescent fungus to see in my nose and down my throat.
“I don’t see anything that shouldn’t heal on its own,” the female medic observes. “Contact me if your throat or chest starts to hurt again, we’ll get you something to soothe it. In the meantime, a technician is coming up to patch your serial number into the system.”
I blink quizzically. My serial number should already be into the system, shouldn’t it? Why would it need to be manually patched in?
There’s a scratch at the oculus. A button on Bleed’s arm opens it up, the reticulated curves sliding open with a clicking noise. The technician from before is there.
Yellow-green. Yellow arm and legs. Yellow main, with a yellow fan with green and gold eyes. Green spots instead of stripes, even on the primaries at his forearms and calves. Wearing the colors of a medic, his snout is blue with yellow pinstriping, the subtly guided swirls and knots of neural circuitry. The feathers of his mane stand upright, light on his temples and stiffer down the middle.
“You remember me?” he asks. “I was there when you were born.”
I smile, flicking my tongue, and nod by tossing my head.
“He’s having trouble speaking, but an ideal patient,” Atrissa explains fondly. “Stop by the commons and get him some slurry, doctor’s orders if the artisans argue. If he gets tired, bring him straight back here.”
“Please, he’s a technical marvel, like I would let anything happen to him,” the technician replies dryly, beckoning to me.
My ankles argue with each step, but my balance gets better and better as I keep walking. The technician smiles approvingly when I reach him.
“I call myself ‘Pi,’” he introduces himself as he sweeps me from the room. “It’s a mathematics joke. The first three digits of my serial number are three one four.”
I smile, clicking my teeth.
“In Blue Sector, we pick our names. The hens even pick house names,” he continues. “Have you thought of one for yourself yet?”
I toss my head in the negative.
“Give it time,” he advises. “Names are special. They define what you think of yourself.”
I look down at my hands and arms. What do I think of myself? I’m defective…otherwise not much.
In the halls of the medical center, a few people look up as I pass, and some even whisper.
“That’s him, the glitch.”
“Gee, I couldn’t tell.”
“That is…alarming.”
I feel hot again, and dip my nose, wishing I had primaries to hide behind. I can still feel their eyes on me, judgmental stares. They can see I’m a “glitch” as obvious as a poison frog. My stripes advertise it, like I may as well be wearing an “out of order” sign.
“I work with the neural circuitry and wetware,” Pi continues. “I fix programs that aren’t working properly. In a manner of speaking, I’m the reason you made it to hatching.”
He seems proud of this fact, but I don’t know why. Even he’s bigger than me, with a very useful job.
What is my job? Shouldn’t I know? That is the purpose of the snout markings, isn’t it?
I swivel my eyes to the end of my nose. I can see more white on black, but not the creamy and rusty splotches as a medic. As I feared, it looks like the outline of skullbones.
No wonder the medics sounded afraid. I haven’t seen myself whole yet, but I must look like the specter of death walking the halls of the medical center. Hopefully nobody looked out of the sequesters and feared their time had come.
Pi takes me down the smooth steps that wrap screw-like inside the tree’s inner hull. There are windows spaced out evenly, to let air flow and stave off cabin fever. The breeze coming inside the open oculi smell alive, trees and fresh rain and little flying things.
There’s a warm place in my belly. I feel proud, proud that it survived and seems to have flourished.
Levels below, I smell slurry. My stomach growls. Does everyone wake this hungry?
The archway into the mess hall is very spartan. In fact, the mess is very plain as well, utilitarian tables and simple perches, in front of an alcove staffed by a single purple-sounded artisan. He chuffs when he sees us, purple and orange filament standing on end.
“No, not for that one,” he growls.
“Doctor’s orders,” Pi growls. “Orders come down from Atrissa herself.”
“The medics don’t decide calorie intake for the day,” the artisan snarls, mane lifting. “This one has reached his daily limit already.”
“The medics want him to have nutritional intake around the clock,” the technician hisses, primaries spread out in defense position, tail arching upward.
“I don’t care if Brute himself comes down here and grinds it himself,” the artisan rumbles, showing his teeth. “There are other mouths to feed.”
Pi chuffs. “Give him from my rations, then.”
“That is against regulations,” the artisan grumbles. “I won’t do it.”
“Fine,” Pi replies, suddenly calm, plumage falling neatly into place, raising his right arm and tapping onto the carapace of the computer. A slot in the wall opens next to the alcove, a vessel of slurry, still warm inside.
The artisan jumps onto his counter and rumbles, arms and legs spread in full intimidation, tail raised so the eyes are visible, teeth bared. When the little gliders do this, it’s to make themselves seem bigger.
“Calm down, I took it from my ration count,” Pi sighs, blowing air across his teeth and reaching for the vessel.
I shrink away from the artisan, rumbling threats in his chest. Several others hear the commotion and come running, some adopting intimidation stance out of nervousness, others from annoyance. Their hot, brightly colored eyes passing over me judgmentally.
Of course the glitch is the center of trouble. That’s what glitches do.
Nonplussed, Pi taps again on the computer, bringing down the latticework gate from the ceiling, startling the artisan, who leaps back into his alcove to avoid being crushed.
Pi retrieves the vessel and opens it for me, passing off with a kind smile of a clicked tongue.
“Tensions are a bit high,” he explains. “Everyone’s a bit stressed.”
Chapter three
<-Chapter one
Soundtrack:
Fibonacci Sequence--Dr. Steel
The Day the World Died--Miracle of Sound
Chapter two
Everything burns, if you get it hot enough. Trees, flesh, bone, even stone.
The fear of fire is an old one, ancient memories of trees disintegrating with people still in them, homes lost, prey gone, the smell of singed feathers and blackened flesh.
The things we need, the things we care about, burn faster than we can escape.
The horror reached out of the sky in the night, when the blaze was brightest. It touched the ocean and the ocean evaporated, along with it any animals that weren’t far enough away to only be cooked alive.
The water rolled out, leaving the seabeds dry and the marine life exposed, gasping for air and groaning under their own weight. When the water was finished rolling out, it rolled back, and took with it coastlines and places farther inland.
That wasn’t the worst of it.
Where the horror touched the water, the heat of its grasping hand ignited the atmosphere and blackened the skies. Cities built on the ground and in the trees and on the water evaporated, like the ocean. Poison rained down on the places not lucky enough to be settled close enough to be wiped out in a single, fiery breeze. The sky hid in the only place it could, and the land got colder.
And then there were the in-between places, the places close enough to burn but not close enough to vaporize in an instant. Thousands were awake when the hand of the horror from the sky touched them, thousands were woken by the sounds of avians and pteros and all manner of terrestrial things fled from the nameless monster that scalded the skin and the lungs.
And hundreds were deep in a REM cycle at midnight.
Everything burns.
I wake screaming before I even know why, and brain confused and unable to tell the features of my sequester. The walls are fire. The décor is fire. The furniture is fire.
I am fire.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know…some kind of seizure?”
“We haven’t dealt with any seizures.”
“Lucky for him, he’s the first. Get him some sedative before he tears something. Oral, with numbing agent.”
The fire is in my mouth and in my lungs. It burns away flesh and nerves and I can’t feel pain anymore. My flesh is melting away, skin and feathers peeling away from scorched bone, and I am nothing more than a skeleton lying in a field of ash.
***
I can still smell smoke.
My throat itches, and has a peculiar cold feeling inside.
I’m sore all over. My arms and legs are heavy. When I open my eyes, the lights from the bio-luminescent fungus is too strong, prompting them to close them again. My arms sting when I bring them up to cover my eyes.
“He’s waking up!”
“Move over! I wanna see!”
I stretch and twist in the nest, tendons burning.
“Don’t you have rounds to make?”
Giggling and running footsteps.
“I reduced the ambient lighting,” a male voice says. “You can open your eyes now.”
I open my eyes, everything white and out of focus. I blink a few times, until I can make out the stool across from me, and the blue medic seating himself on it.
Blue, all over, with green streaks in his short, tame mane. His arms and legs are blackened, but his primaries are alternating black and white with some gold. The fan of his tail is blue and green, with gold around the green eyes, tail wrapped around the stool to keep it out of the way in the tight space.
“I’m Bleed,” he smiles, gesturing at his snout, cream and rusty red, like used bandages. “Medic clan. Have you thought of a name yet?”
I bob my head to answer in the negative. He taps on the carapace of his wrist-mounted computer.
“You’re supposed to get slurry as soon as you wake up,” he explains. “Your deficient in quite a lot of vitamins and minerals, and Atrissa wants them brought back up. How do you feel.”
I stretch my legs and wince. His pale blue eyes flicker over me, understanding deep inside.
“Have you tried to speak?” he asks.
I bob my head again.
“Does your throat hurt?”
Again, a head bob.
“Try to say something. Anything,” he suggests.
I lick my teeth, feeling sticky and thick.
“Water,” I ask, but nothing happens except a harsh cough that painlessly scrapes my airways.
“Hmm,” Bleed purrs. “Could be the sedative, could be the damage from aspirating the amniotic fluid. Don’t overdo it, but we’ll keep an eye on it.”
I look askance, feeling hot. Even a peeping newborn can make some noise, but not me. Lying on my side to face the medic, I can see my hands and arms up to my elbows, and the very detailed skeletal patterns in my down.
“You’re piebald,” Bleed observes. “The white is entirely without pigment, down to your skin.”
I turn my hands over and look at the markings along the palms, just as anatomically correct as the ones on the backs of my hands. That is a very specific sort of defect.
We’re not meant to have defects. We’re supposed to be stronger, more efficient, better. There’s no room for failure, not with survival on the line.
“The synthetic lights don’t produce UV radiation, so you shouldn’t need to worry about burning,” Bleed tells me helpfully, looking away from my hands and back to his computer, which makes me wince, lashing my tail. Burning under my feathers shouldn’t be an issue in the first place.
“If I catch you spying on patients again, I’ll skin you alive and feed you to the pteranodons!”
It’s the female from before, but her voice is vicious and makes my down fluff, claws coiling in fear.
She’s carrying a vessel of slurry, striding into the sequester like she owns it, white and tan head held high, tan-brown and cream banded tail held even higher. Behind her, the oculus to the sequester closes with a swish.
She hands me the vessel, studying my hands closely, staring at the white, bonelike markings, and watches the way they move when I twist off the lid to the vessel, tilting it back. Sweetest ambrosia, I didn’t realize how hungry I was.
“I sent you his latest data,” Bleed tells her. “He can’t vocalize, but everything else is as expected.”
“Was it the sedative or the near-drowning?” she asks.
“I’m not sure.”
“Finish eating, love,” she smiles gently, all female authority in her stance.
Typically, hens are taller and stronger than cockerals. They have children to protect, and more mouths to hunt for. Because of that, females are traditionally seen as leaders and beacons of physical strength.
Bleed is noticeably smaller than she is. Males are solitary, only joining their primary mate’s household in the even of old age or injury. In ancient times, a male’s job was to be decorative, largely, although an avid hunter himself.
In traditionalist views, a male grooms and sport hunts, but stays out of political office and boardrooms. In some, largely outdated, cultures, a male is not even to speak in the presence of females unless directed.
These days, the Empire works to educate people out of such outdated thinking. The average male may not be as tall or strong as the average female, but that doesn’t make him more delicate or less intelligent.
Still, the nest would have selected mainly females for the leadership roles, and as such, Atrissa is the doctor and Bleed is the assistant.
“Can you get out of the nest?” Atrissa asks. “Brute isn’t here, so I’m going to be more gentle.”
She smiles by clicking her teeth and tossing her head, offering he hand. Her hands are cream from the wrist to the fingers, but tan and brown along the forearms and primaries. She is warm to the touch and my heart skips a beat to feel her fine, noble adult filament against my fluffy juvenile down.
Maybe after I molt, my adult coloring won’t be piebald. As it is, I can’t wait to shed and look like a grown-up again.
She helps me down from the nest and on to the smooth, tan wooden floor of the medical center. My balance holds better, but my joints and muscles are sore, probably because I’ve never used them before.
To my dismay, the same skeletal markings are across my toes, feet, and ankles, as white as a sunbleached carcass on a hot day against the ashy speckle of juvenile down.
“Good, good,” Atrissa beams. “Walk to the end of the room and turn around.”
I do as I’m told, my steps growing with confidence, mimicking all the times I’d done it before.
“Perfect,” she says, and then tells me to line up against a wall, doted with measuring spots.
“That’s…what, two feet and three inches and five pounds?” Bleed asks, entering the data into the computer.
My heart sinks. I’m short and underweight as well as piebald. No wonder the red commander called me “runt.”
After my statistics are measured, I am directed back to the nest, where Atrissa uses a stethoscope pressed against her ear canals to check my heart and lungs, and then a stick of bio-luminescent fungus to see in my nose and down my throat.
“I don’t see anything that shouldn’t heal on its own,” the female medic observes. “Contact me if your throat or chest starts to hurt again, we’ll get you something to soothe it. In the meantime, a technician is coming up to patch your serial number into the system.”
I blink quizzically. My serial number should already be into the system, shouldn’t it? Why would it need to be manually patched in?
There’s a scratch at the oculus. A button on Bleed’s arm opens it up, the reticulated curves sliding open with a clicking noise. The technician from before is there.
Yellow-green. Yellow arm and legs. Yellow main, with a yellow fan with green and gold eyes. Green spots instead of stripes, even on the primaries at his forearms and calves. Wearing the colors of a medic, his snout is blue with yellow pinstriping, the subtly guided swirls and knots of neural circuitry. The feathers of his mane stand upright, light on his temples and stiffer down the middle.
“You remember me?” he asks. “I was there when you were born.”
I smile, flicking my tongue, and nod by tossing my head.
“He’s having trouble speaking, but an ideal patient,” Atrissa explains fondly. “Stop by the commons and get him some slurry, doctor’s orders if the artisans argue. If he gets tired, bring him straight back here.”
“Please, he’s a technical marvel, like I would let anything happen to him,” the technician replies dryly, beckoning to me.
My ankles argue with each step, but my balance gets better and better as I keep walking. The technician smiles approvingly when I reach him.
“I call myself ‘Pi,’” he introduces himself as he sweeps me from the room. “It’s a mathematics joke. The first three digits of my serial number are three one four.”
I smile, clicking my teeth.
“In Blue Sector, we pick our names. The hens even pick house names,” he continues. “Have you thought of one for yourself yet?”
I toss my head in the negative.
“Give it time,” he advises. “Names are special. They define what you think of yourself.”
I look down at my hands and arms. What do I think of myself? I’m defective…otherwise not much.
In the halls of the medical center, a few people look up as I pass, and some even whisper.
“That’s him, the glitch.”
“Gee, I couldn’t tell.”
“That is…alarming.”
I feel hot again, and dip my nose, wishing I had primaries to hide behind. I can still feel their eyes on me, judgmental stares. They can see I’m a “glitch” as obvious as a poison frog. My stripes advertise it, like I may as well be wearing an “out of order” sign.
“I work with the neural circuitry and wetware,” Pi continues. “I fix programs that aren’t working properly. In a manner of speaking, I’m the reason you made it to hatching.”
He seems proud of this fact, but I don’t know why. Even he’s bigger than me, with a very useful job.
What is my job? Shouldn’t I know? That is the purpose of the snout markings, isn’t it?
I swivel my eyes to the end of my nose. I can see more white on black, but not the creamy and rusty splotches as a medic. As I feared, it looks like the outline of skullbones.
No wonder the medics sounded afraid. I haven’t seen myself whole yet, but I must look like the specter of death walking the halls of the medical center. Hopefully nobody looked out of the sequesters and feared their time had come.
Pi takes me down the smooth steps that wrap screw-like inside the tree’s inner hull. There are windows spaced out evenly, to let air flow and stave off cabin fever. The breeze coming inside the open oculi smell alive, trees and fresh rain and little flying things.
There’s a warm place in my belly. I feel proud, proud that it survived and seems to have flourished.
Levels below, I smell slurry. My stomach growls. Does everyone wake this hungry?
The archway into the mess hall is very spartan. In fact, the mess is very plain as well, utilitarian tables and simple perches, in front of an alcove staffed by a single purple-sounded artisan. He chuffs when he sees us, purple and orange filament standing on end.
“No, not for that one,” he growls.
“Doctor’s orders,” Pi growls. “Orders come down from Atrissa herself.”
“The medics don’t decide calorie intake for the day,” the artisan snarls, mane lifting. “This one has reached his daily limit already.”
“The medics want him to have nutritional intake around the clock,” the technician hisses, primaries spread out in defense position, tail arching upward.
“I don’t care if Brute himself comes down here and grinds it himself,” the artisan rumbles, showing his teeth. “There are other mouths to feed.”
Pi chuffs. “Give him from my rations, then.”
“That is against regulations,” the artisan grumbles. “I won’t do it.”
“Fine,” Pi replies, suddenly calm, plumage falling neatly into place, raising his right arm and tapping onto the carapace of the computer. A slot in the wall opens next to the alcove, a vessel of slurry, still warm inside.
The artisan jumps onto his counter and rumbles, arms and legs spread in full intimidation, tail raised so the eyes are visible, teeth bared. When the little gliders do this, it’s to make themselves seem bigger.
“Calm down, I took it from my ration count,” Pi sighs, blowing air across his teeth and reaching for the vessel.
I shrink away from the artisan, rumbling threats in his chest. Several others hear the commotion and come running, some adopting intimidation stance out of nervousness, others from annoyance. Their hot, brightly colored eyes passing over me judgmentally.
Of course the glitch is the center of trouble. That’s what glitches do.
Nonplussed, Pi taps again on the computer, bringing down the latticework gate from the ceiling, startling the artisan, who leaps back into his alcove to avoid being crushed.
Pi retrieves the vessel and opens it for me, passing off with a kind smile of a clicked tongue.
“Tensions are a bit high,” he explains. “Everyone’s a bit stressed.”
Chapter three
Old World: Chapter Three
Chapter two
Chapter three
“That should be the end of it,” Pi states, unhooking the recently-hatched computer from his work station. “See if it fits.”
I slide it on my arm, and find it just a touch too big. I say nothing, hoping he won’t notice, not that I can speak. It crushes the soft down, letting a stripe on the outer edge of my right arm stand, where the primaries will grow after I molt for the first time.
The chromataphores bleed across the carapace like on a cephalopod, forming words.
“Welcome to life, User 00000000.”
I click my teeth. That is not a valid serial number.
“Make sure it works,” Pi beams, pleased with his work. “Try something simple, like the time.”
I press the enter beneath the greeting, and find a selection of applications, one of which is a calendar wheel. Pressing it tells me it is hour fourteen, sixth lunar month of year zero. I test a few other features, news feeds, and the contact profiles of both Pi and Atrissa, pre-programed by the technician.
“Perfect,” Pi smiles again, flicking his tongue. “Without knowing your profession, the Nest won’t give you a stipend, but Brute says you can go wherever they need an extra set of hands or feet until we know what you’re for. Tell the computer when you start working and stop, and do not let Brute catch you filing for pay on leisure hours.”
I click my teeth in understanding, looking at Atrissa’s photograph in my computer. She has idea hunter coloration, layers of white and brown, and piercing golden eyes.
“She’s nice, isn’t she?” Pi asks, prompting me to close the application and cover the screen with my palm, down fluffing. “She requested your service for a few hours. You get your own rations and a stipend, she gets to make sure you’re not going to fall apart on us.”
I crest the hill, holding cloth over my mouth. It looks like snow but tastes like ash, and it blisters if it rubs the skin. It’s deep enough that I can nearly swim through it, but after watching my siblings hack black out of their lungs until it ran red, I’m in no hurry to get it close to mouth or nose. I’d follow the trees, but the ones left standing are burned and brittle.
Still, as long as there is air in the lungs, there is hope. Over this hill will be the capital city of the Empire. The Imperial Council will have an idea, a plan, recovery efforts, emergency rations. As soon as I get over this hill, I can go back for my siblings and tell them it’s over, that we’re safe. We can get Velkar medical attention for his cough. He’ll be fine. I can save him.
On the other side of the hill, the ruins still smolder. The grand redwood trees that were once the bones of the Empire lean and twist, covered in blackened soot. The massive central tree that served as the seat of the Imperial Council lies on its side, the shelters broken like cracked eggshells.
“No, no, no,” I whimper, running down the hill, sliding in the ash.
The smell of it burns my nose, burning wood and flesh. Instinctively, the smell triggers my hunger, but I know in my heart this isn’t the roasting body of a leptoceratops at my great-grandmother’s hearth.
They are frozen where they stood, blackened pillars like statues, turning in fear, crawling along the ground, reaching for salvation. Males, females, nestlings, fused to the ground or the sides of trees or hidden under rubble.
I am in the graveyard of civilization, and there are only ghosts here now.
“I’ll take you back to the medical center,” Pi says, “if you’re ready. Are you tired or sore?”
Stifling a yawn and hiding the pained shake of my legs, I toss my head in the negative and hop down from my perch.
“Good,” he replies approvingly. “Atrissa would use me for spare parts if I overworked you. Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”
I bob my head enthusiastically. I smell burning flesh and feel like I haven’t eaten in weeks, but I’m fine.
Pi doesn’t look convinced.
I like his office. It’s a little dark in here, lit mostly by the yellow-green, pulsating glow of the neural circuitry connecting the terminals to the Nest’s brain. Stools sit before each terminal, where Pi’s clanmates would ordinarily be working, and readouts on screens showing the data on the Nest and her various systems.
Troublingly, she’s weak. There are errors from every facet of her biology, from atmospheric processing to water filtration. Some of the neural circuits aren’t functioning correctly either, almost like…
Pi yawns. He’s delaying a sleep cycle because of me, which is why we have the sequester to ourselves. “Let’s get you back to Medical before Atrissa comes looking for you,” he says through the yawn, motioning to the oculus.
Pi took me through the deep paths to get here, avoiding the more open commons of the sector, stopping at intervals to plug in his computer and check for things at various levels. He must be taking time from his working hours as well as his sleep cycle to help me.
I look down at the ground. I’m small, defective, and without purpose, and now I’m taking away from others.
I follow him up the spiraled ramp into the hollow trees of the Blue Sector’s commons. The exposed nerve clusters and neural circuitry give way to smooth bark, some with healing marks where the technicians skinned them for access. The sounds of the livestock echo within the tree, trumpeting and bellowing and deep, resonate singing.
Right now, they’re probably exclusively domestic breeds, mostly food, ceratopsians of all sizes, ornithomimids for chasing, and hadrosaurs. There may be a few working breeds and companions, like fleet-footed, herding dromeosaurs or shoulder-riding scansoriopteryns for flushing out smaller prey.
For all our comforts and advancements, we are still much like our little gliding cousins. We still enjoy the chase, the taste of a fresh kill on the tongue. I remember fondly leisure hours spent with the house at the hunting fields and arenas, warm sun on the feathers and the smell of blood and adrenaline on the air.
Pain runs along my right leg, eliciting a strangled grunt, and all the muscles knot up at once, sending me toppling to the ground and landing hard on my right side.
“What was that?” Pi asks, turning on his toes, tail whipping.
It’s nothing, I want to say. I’m fine.
I grab for the smooth bark of the walls and get my left leg beneath me, but my right leg in painfully tight, locked in place and rigid, toes curled into a fist. My blood runs cold when I realize I can’t open it, and I’m helpless on the floor.
The thunder of feet is all around, kicking up dust that makes it hard to breathe. A massive foot almost lands on my head, but I roll from under it just in time. The panicked herd flees in one direction, like the flow of water, heedless of anything in their way. Trees are falling, people are being trampled, and above, the heralds of doom light up the sky.
“There we go,” Pi says kindly, pulling me up against the wall, my right leg stuck out at a strange angle. His computer is linked to mine, sharing data.
“I think it’s a muscle spasm,” he elucidates. “Atrissa is on her way to be sure.”
I look away, pretending to preen. I don’t want her to see me like this, or anyone for that matter. Bad enough that Pi has to take time away from his sleeping hours and working hours to tend to me.
“Does it hurt?” he asks, disconnecting the neural cables from his computer.
I toss my head and click my tongue in the negative, hoping he won’t notice the subtle changes in heart rate, or the way my hands wrap around the thigh to ease the muscle. A soft growl of pain, unbidden, escapes my throat, which is starting to twinge slightly.
Pi slides beside me, tail over his lap, the length of his bare feet along the floor. The spotting at his ankles is bright green with some yellow, like the primaries at his calves.
“It was a power surge,” he explains.
I look up at him quizzically, grabbing for my knee when a stab of pain passes through it.
“A power surge turned on your incubator and triggered its programming,” he continues. “There were some who voted to flush it, but Brute insisted on otherwise. He had me monitoring it to keep the immune system from taking whether to keep your or not from being removed from the ballot. Atrissa kept the incubator’s lifesigns and nutrient supply in balance.”
I click my tongue and look down at my rigid, bone-striped leg. A power surge, a cosmic mistake. A million, billion, trillion things that can happen in any particular point in time, and all it takes is one applied bit of pressure to change the paradigm completely.
Atrissa emerges around the curve of the ramp, hissing, feathers raised in territorial display.
“What did you do?” she demands of Pi, voice as cold as a glacier.
“Nothing!” he replies, hands in front of his chest, palms-out, a signal once used to show submission was honest and true, without hidden weapons. “I did what you said, walked him straight down here and we were on our way back. I even took a shortcut!”
“I heard about that,” she growls dryly, dropping to her knees beside me. “Thank you for the data, though.”
She grabs my right leg at the thigh, prompting a fluff of feathers and a weak squawk, and begins feeling the knotting all the way to my toes.
“Muscle spasm,” she murmurs. “Overtired? A relaxant should help. This might make you sleepy.”
She reaches into her medical bag and pulls out an opaque box of vegetable plastic, pulls open a slot on the side where tongs are hidden, and reaches inside. She uses the tongues to grab a large, wingless wasp, sluggish and dozy, with clear venom dripping from its tail.
My eyes widen in fear. It’s just a shot, a single sting and then the little creature’s job is done, and it is recycled into the fertilizer for the botanists. Still, nobody likes to be stung by a wasp, even a medically-bred one.
“Hey, look, a calliodromeus escaped from Veterinary,” Pi shouts suddenly, causing me to turn in his direction, his much larger, if skinny, frame pouncing on my wrists and holding me down.
A second later, he lets me go, clicking his tongue in laughter. Atrissa is removing the little insect, its stinger still embedded in my hip, beneath my blue jumpsuit, where my body with metabolize it for maximum effect. She places the wasp in a separate container, marked with the broken ribs denoting biohazard, and turns to Pi.
“Did Bleed teach you that?” she asks as I sniff the air for a wayward dromeosaur.
“Sort of,” he replies, clicking his teeth in amusement.
“He did the same thing when I twisted my ankle in the Food Riots.”
Atrissa clicks her teeth and tongue, putting her supplies away. “I saw so many in those times, I don’t rightly remember them all.”
Atrissa then drops to her knees in the position adults use to carry children and tells me to climb on. I balk silently, even as Pi help me to my feet—er, foot. I feel warm again, hiding my nose behind my arm, leaning on Pi. The last thing I want to be seen doing is being carried back into Medical like an errant child.
“Her venom’s mild,” Pi states, seizing me under the arms and placing me on her back.
Before I know what’s happening, I have my feet anchored to her hips and my hands to her shoulders. Since I’m bigger than a fledgling, she loops her tail under mine and holds either end in her hands. The bands on her fingers match the ones on her tail.
Mortified, I squirm and flail, but that just makes her hold on tighter, my leg sticking out at an awkward angle.
“Be still,” she chides. “You need to keep weight off that leg so the muscle relaxant will work.”
The two of them quietly discuss matters that effect both clans, and common interests from their similar fields. I keep quiet and listen, picturing in my head the things they are talking about.
The Nest is sick. When the others emerged from their tanks, they found very little worked. Prepared food was scarce, leading to the slaughter of livestock, which caused a spiraling shortage in animal husbandry, which led to further shortages. Pi’s clan has been working full days and nights to fix the errors, cobbling together a half-functional sector.
That’s troubling. The Nest was designed to be self-sustaining. With only a single new generation hatched, less than a year old, it shouldn’t be falling apart like this.
They emerge onto one of the round, woody patios, just below the central pillar of the medical center, at the heart of the sector, where the most vulnerable are kept. The bellow of livestock raises from the abyss below, and above the massive node of bioluminescent fungus is set to late evening.
A few faces stare as Atrissa carries me up the path and into the medical center, some whispering.
“That’s him, the one triggered by the power surge.”
“I’ve never seen eyes like that.”
“Eyes? Look at his markings. What’s he going to look like after he molts?”
I cast my gaze down to my stiff leg and Pi’s yellow feet as they move into the medical center, looking up as the oculus opens to the upper reaches. A tall figure is standing against the railing, arms crossed, leaning over the side, and watching.
His bright plumage is unmistakable, as red as blood and dark as shadow. He studies me as we enter the oculus, and I can feel the disappointment radiating from here. This is not a good time for the Nest to have stragglers.
Chapter three
“That should be the end of it,” Pi states, unhooking the recently-hatched computer from his work station. “See if it fits.”
I slide it on my arm, and find it just a touch too big. I say nothing, hoping he won’t notice, not that I can speak. It crushes the soft down, letting a stripe on the outer edge of my right arm stand, where the primaries will grow after I molt for the first time.
The chromataphores bleed across the carapace like on a cephalopod, forming words.
“Welcome to life, User 00000000.”
I click my teeth. That is not a valid serial number.
“Make sure it works,” Pi beams, pleased with his work. “Try something simple, like the time.”
I press the enter beneath the greeting, and find a selection of applications, one of which is a calendar wheel. Pressing it tells me it is hour fourteen, sixth lunar month of year zero. I test a few other features, news feeds, and the contact profiles of both Pi and Atrissa, pre-programed by the technician.
“Perfect,” Pi smiles again, flicking his tongue. “Without knowing your profession, the Nest won’t give you a stipend, but Brute says you can go wherever they need an extra set of hands or feet until we know what you’re for. Tell the computer when you start working and stop, and do not let Brute catch you filing for pay on leisure hours.”
I click my teeth in understanding, looking at Atrissa’s photograph in my computer. She has idea hunter coloration, layers of white and brown, and piercing golden eyes.
“She’s nice, isn’t she?” Pi asks, prompting me to close the application and cover the screen with my palm, down fluffing. “She requested your service for a few hours. You get your own rations and a stipend, she gets to make sure you’re not going to fall apart on us.”
I crest the hill, holding cloth over my mouth. It looks like snow but tastes like ash, and it blisters if it rubs the skin. It’s deep enough that I can nearly swim through it, but after watching my siblings hack black out of their lungs until it ran red, I’m in no hurry to get it close to mouth or nose. I’d follow the trees, but the ones left standing are burned and brittle.
Still, as long as there is air in the lungs, there is hope. Over this hill will be the capital city of the Empire. The Imperial Council will have an idea, a plan, recovery efforts, emergency rations. As soon as I get over this hill, I can go back for my siblings and tell them it’s over, that we’re safe. We can get Velkar medical attention for his cough. He’ll be fine. I can save him.
On the other side of the hill, the ruins still smolder. The grand redwood trees that were once the bones of the Empire lean and twist, covered in blackened soot. The massive central tree that served as the seat of the Imperial Council lies on its side, the shelters broken like cracked eggshells.
“No, no, no,” I whimper, running down the hill, sliding in the ash.
The smell of it burns my nose, burning wood and flesh. Instinctively, the smell triggers my hunger, but I know in my heart this isn’t the roasting body of a leptoceratops at my great-grandmother’s hearth.
They are frozen where they stood, blackened pillars like statues, turning in fear, crawling along the ground, reaching for salvation. Males, females, nestlings, fused to the ground or the sides of trees or hidden under rubble.
I am in the graveyard of civilization, and there are only ghosts here now.
“I’ll take you back to the medical center,” Pi says, “if you’re ready. Are you tired or sore?”
Stifling a yawn and hiding the pained shake of my legs, I toss my head in the negative and hop down from my perch.
“Good,” he replies approvingly. “Atrissa would use me for spare parts if I overworked you. Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”
I bob my head enthusiastically. I smell burning flesh and feel like I haven’t eaten in weeks, but I’m fine.
Pi doesn’t look convinced.
I like his office. It’s a little dark in here, lit mostly by the yellow-green, pulsating glow of the neural circuitry connecting the terminals to the Nest’s brain. Stools sit before each terminal, where Pi’s clanmates would ordinarily be working, and readouts on screens showing the data on the Nest and her various systems.
Troublingly, she’s weak. There are errors from every facet of her biology, from atmospheric processing to water filtration. Some of the neural circuits aren’t functioning correctly either, almost like…
Pi yawns. He’s delaying a sleep cycle because of me, which is why we have the sequester to ourselves. “Let’s get you back to Medical before Atrissa comes looking for you,” he says through the yawn, motioning to the oculus.
Pi took me through the deep paths to get here, avoiding the more open commons of the sector, stopping at intervals to plug in his computer and check for things at various levels. He must be taking time from his working hours as well as his sleep cycle to help me.
I look down at the ground. I’m small, defective, and without purpose, and now I’m taking away from others.
I follow him up the spiraled ramp into the hollow trees of the Blue Sector’s commons. The exposed nerve clusters and neural circuitry give way to smooth bark, some with healing marks where the technicians skinned them for access. The sounds of the livestock echo within the tree, trumpeting and bellowing and deep, resonate singing.
Right now, they’re probably exclusively domestic breeds, mostly food, ceratopsians of all sizes, ornithomimids for chasing, and hadrosaurs. There may be a few working breeds and companions, like fleet-footed, herding dromeosaurs or shoulder-riding scansoriopteryns for flushing out smaller prey.
For all our comforts and advancements, we are still much like our little gliding cousins. We still enjoy the chase, the taste of a fresh kill on the tongue. I remember fondly leisure hours spent with the house at the hunting fields and arenas, warm sun on the feathers and the smell of blood and adrenaline on the air.
Pain runs along my right leg, eliciting a strangled grunt, and all the muscles knot up at once, sending me toppling to the ground and landing hard on my right side.
“What was that?” Pi asks, turning on his toes, tail whipping.
It’s nothing, I want to say. I’m fine.
I grab for the smooth bark of the walls and get my left leg beneath me, but my right leg in painfully tight, locked in place and rigid, toes curled into a fist. My blood runs cold when I realize I can’t open it, and I’m helpless on the floor.
The thunder of feet is all around, kicking up dust that makes it hard to breathe. A massive foot almost lands on my head, but I roll from under it just in time. The panicked herd flees in one direction, like the flow of water, heedless of anything in their way. Trees are falling, people are being trampled, and above, the heralds of doom light up the sky.
“There we go,” Pi says kindly, pulling me up against the wall, my right leg stuck out at a strange angle. His computer is linked to mine, sharing data.
“I think it’s a muscle spasm,” he elucidates. “Atrissa is on her way to be sure.”
I look away, pretending to preen. I don’t want her to see me like this, or anyone for that matter. Bad enough that Pi has to take time away from his sleeping hours and working hours to tend to me.
“Does it hurt?” he asks, disconnecting the neural cables from his computer.
I toss my head and click my tongue in the negative, hoping he won’t notice the subtle changes in heart rate, or the way my hands wrap around the thigh to ease the muscle. A soft growl of pain, unbidden, escapes my throat, which is starting to twinge slightly.
Pi slides beside me, tail over his lap, the length of his bare feet along the floor. The spotting at his ankles is bright green with some yellow, like the primaries at his calves.
“It was a power surge,” he explains.
I look up at him quizzically, grabbing for my knee when a stab of pain passes through it.
“A power surge turned on your incubator and triggered its programming,” he continues. “There were some who voted to flush it, but Brute insisted on otherwise. He had me monitoring it to keep the immune system from taking whether to keep your or not from being removed from the ballot. Atrissa kept the incubator’s lifesigns and nutrient supply in balance.”
I click my tongue and look down at my rigid, bone-striped leg. A power surge, a cosmic mistake. A million, billion, trillion things that can happen in any particular point in time, and all it takes is one applied bit of pressure to change the paradigm completely.
Atrissa emerges around the curve of the ramp, hissing, feathers raised in territorial display.
“What did you do?” she demands of Pi, voice as cold as a glacier.
“Nothing!” he replies, hands in front of his chest, palms-out, a signal once used to show submission was honest and true, without hidden weapons. “I did what you said, walked him straight down here and we were on our way back. I even took a shortcut!”
“I heard about that,” she growls dryly, dropping to her knees beside me. “Thank you for the data, though.”
She grabs my right leg at the thigh, prompting a fluff of feathers and a weak squawk, and begins feeling the knotting all the way to my toes.
“Muscle spasm,” she murmurs. “Overtired? A relaxant should help. This might make you sleepy.”
She reaches into her medical bag and pulls out an opaque box of vegetable plastic, pulls open a slot on the side where tongs are hidden, and reaches inside. She uses the tongues to grab a large, wingless wasp, sluggish and dozy, with clear venom dripping from its tail.
My eyes widen in fear. It’s just a shot, a single sting and then the little creature’s job is done, and it is recycled into the fertilizer for the botanists. Still, nobody likes to be stung by a wasp, even a medically-bred one.
“Hey, look, a calliodromeus escaped from Veterinary,” Pi shouts suddenly, causing me to turn in his direction, his much larger, if skinny, frame pouncing on my wrists and holding me down.
A second later, he lets me go, clicking his tongue in laughter. Atrissa is removing the little insect, its stinger still embedded in my hip, beneath my blue jumpsuit, where my body with metabolize it for maximum effect. She places the wasp in a separate container, marked with the broken ribs denoting biohazard, and turns to Pi.
“Did Bleed teach you that?” she asks as I sniff the air for a wayward dromeosaur.
“Sort of,” he replies, clicking his teeth in amusement.
“He did the same thing when I twisted my ankle in the Food Riots.”
Atrissa clicks her teeth and tongue, putting her supplies away. “I saw so many in those times, I don’t rightly remember them all.”
Atrissa then drops to her knees in the position adults use to carry children and tells me to climb on. I balk silently, even as Pi help me to my feet—er, foot. I feel warm again, hiding my nose behind my arm, leaning on Pi. The last thing I want to be seen doing is being carried back into Medical like an errant child.
“Her venom’s mild,” Pi states, seizing me under the arms and placing me on her back.
Before I know what’s happening, I have my feet anchored to her hips and my hands to her shoulders. Since I’m bigger than a fledgling, she loops her tail under mine and holds either end in her hands. The bands on her fingers match the ones on her tail.
Mortified, I squirm and flail, but that just makes her hold on tighter, my leg sticking out at an awkward angle.
“Be still,” she chides. “You need to keep weight off that leg so the muscle relaxant will work.”
The two of them quietly discuss matters that effect both clans, and common interests from their similar fields. I keep quiet and listen, picturing in my head the things they are talking about.
The Nest is sick. When the others emerged from their tanks, they found very little worked. Prepared food was scarce, leading to the slaughter of livestock, which caused a spiraling shortage in animal husbandry, which led to further shortages. Pi’s clan has been working full days and nights to fix the errors, cobbling together a half-functional sector.
That’s troubling. The Nest was designed to be self-sustaining. With only a single new generation hatched, less than a year old, it shouldn’t be falling apart like this.
They emerge onto one of the round, woody patios, just below the central pillar of the medical center, at the heart of the sector, where the most vulnerable are kept. The bellow of livestock raises from the abyss below, and above the massive node of bioluminescent fungus is set to late evening.
A few faces stare as Atrissa carries me up the path and into the medical center, some whispering.
“That’s him, the one triggered by the power surge.”
“I’ve never seen eyes like that.”
“Eyes? Look at his markings. What’s he going to look like after he molts?”
I cast my gaze down to my stiff leg and Pi’s yellow feet as they move into the medical center, looking up as the oculus opens to the upper reaches. A tall figure is standing against the railing, arms crossed, leaning over the side, and watching.
His bright plumage is unmistakable, as red as blood and dark as shadow. He studies me as we enter the oculus, and I can feel the disappointment radiating from here. This is not a good time for the Nest to have stragglers.
Proteus-Chapter one
Proteus
by
Heather Farthing
(c)2023, all rights reserved.
Chapter one
I think I’ll call them…tree runners. I don’t know what the humans call them. I haven’t been close enough to ask.
They are graceful things on four legs, with elegantly curved necks. The small ones, babies, I assume, have spots, and a few of the big ones—males, probably—have branching sticks coming out of their heads.
I’ve seen them in the places where humans don’t go. They graze or browse, plant-eaters instead of flesh. The thought of eating plants turns my stomach, but these “tree runners” have enough muscle tissue to be appealing.
I lie on my belly, watching them, hidden in the grass. Something feels…wrong about taking down the stickless ones, especially with a little spot next to them, so I focus on the ones with the beautiful crown atop their heads.
It’s difficult to get close to them. If the breath around me changes, they’ll smell me, and bolt. I think I must smell synthetic to them, or wrong somehow. Not surprising.
One of the sticked ones stands tall and blows air out of his nose. He knows something is nearby, something hungry, but he isn’t sure of my location.
I don’t have the stick-throwers like the humans have. I have only claws and teeth and tendril. So I lay in wait, hidden among the wet grass and leaves. When the male is close enough, I lash out with a hunting tendril, which sparks at the end. The women and babies take off running, but the male’s delicious-looking muscles lock in place, a shiver running over him, until he falls sideways.
I stand over my kill, watching it, petting it’s neck as I usher it into the Great Darkness. The hunting spark alone might be enough to kill it, but it feels wrong to prolong its suffering, so I drive my hunting tendril into its brain.
Um...thank you. I know it doesn’t mean much to you, but I’ll live another day. So thanks. Safe travels, friend.
With that unpleasant business dealt with, I lift the carcass over my shoulder, taking it deeper into offices, abandoned after my brother pulled his little stunt, where I have a place. Carrying the meat makes me wary, watchful. Some of my siblings would rather take food rather than gather their own, and if one’s not careful, they’ll be going hungry.
It’s a reasonable tactic, if a dishonorable one. That’s what my big brother told me.
You eat what you gather and gather what you eat. You don’t take food out of the mouths of the smaller ones. I like that. I like you.
Of course he liked me. I was the second added to the tank, his only friend and companion for a long time. He wasn’t the biggest, but he was the smartest. There was always something…different about him.
I have a secret. Do you want to hear it? I have a name.
What’s a name?
A name is a word that means you. It’s what you call yourself, how you define your existence.
Can I have a name, too?
Of course. But you have to think of it yourself.
Humans seem to like squares, boxes. They’re always making boxes to put things in. A glass box full of water for me and my siblings. Boxes for themselves to be in, watching the box with me and my siblings. Boxes to look at when not looking at us, boxes to be in when not watching me and my siblings.
This a box full of boxes, one of many, lined up in neat little rows on paths of gray stone. There are boxes inside, not just rooms, but things. A tall, rectangular box, silver in color, that held food that had long turned rotten. A smaller box that no longer has power, but hummed and counted down when I accidentally zapped it. A white box that folds under the counter, full of white circles and silver sticks with scoops, prongs, or serrated edges. Boxes that held clothes. Boxes that held chemicals, in the room with the white chair and the bowl big enough to sit in, where I sleep. Boxes, boxes, boxes.
I drop the carcass onto the ground, the smooth, hard floor that’s easier to clean after a big meal. Stripping off my gloves and peeling away the warm head-covering and face-concealer, I kneel before my heal, expand my jaws, and take a bite.
***
After the bones are licked clean, I sit in one corner of the box and crack open the long bones for the marrow. It’s my favorite part, saved for after the meal proper.
That’s called “dessert.” Something good you eat because you like it, after you eat the big meal.
How do you know so much, Bismark?
He had just smiled and flicked his tail to me, then turned his attention to one of the humans in their white gown, playing a recording of voices from his hand-rectangle.
I knew he was different, even then. There was a cunning that I didn’t know how to put into words. We should have all been paying much more attention, more to our oldest brother, more to the humans that peered into our tank and sometimes poured food.
It was the food that changed us, or allowed us to change. Whatever it was made from had four limbs made for walking, and so, with curiosity (some more malicious than others), we grew our fins into legs. The humans seemed very surprised at this.
The monsters howl at the pale orb in the sky. They come in all shapes and sizes, colors and textures. I think they’re some creation of the humans, but like the tree runners, they find no kinship in me, only a threatening smell and competition for food. Unlike the tree runners, these mouths-on-legs bite.
I hunker down under a blanket I found in one of the tall boxes, recessed into a wall, closing my eyes and letting my eyes flutter closed. I think the blazing, bright thing in the sky will start to rise again, which means it’s a good time to sleep.
The warm light of the fire in the sky casts on my face, causing me to turn away. It is in this brief moment of wake and sleep that I hear it: the sound of running and screaming.
Screaming isn’t good. Humans scream, but animals make animal sounds. If there is screaming, it means humans are nearby—and chances are good, they’ve run into my brother’s sadistic little creations.
I wouldn’t bother if it didn’t sound so near. Humans are…violent, and they tend to attack first and ask questions maybe. If there’s a family group nearby, I need to migrate on.
I grab for my gloves, the soft head-covering, and the face-concealer from the counter I left them on, putting them in place as I approach the bare window that faces out front. The sounds are coming from several boxes down, blocked from my view.
There is another noise behind the screaming, baying and barking. I step out for a closer look, seeing a human on one of their two-wheeled transports, the spotted glow of predators not far behind.
Those things, my brother’s doing, clearly. I think they use bases from the human-made mouths-with-with legs, spliced with the same genetics we were sourced from. They have long, curved fangs that stick out from their mouths, and patches of fur in circular spots that glows in sequence, a form of visual communication as the pack hunts.
Too late to hide, the human has seen me try to duck back inside my shelter.
“Wait!” it screams, turning its vehicle toward me. “Wait! Let me in!”
The terrestrial biped runs toward me, catching its fingers in the door, preventing me from closing the door as she slips inside, falling into my arms. I kick the door closed and slide my tail up inside my coat to better disguise myself.
“Thank you!” the human breathes, clinging to me like a barnacle, shaking. “Oh, thank you! Thank you!”
I don’t understand what it’s thanking me for, except maybe barging into my den unwanted.
“I thought those things were going to eat me!” it sighs, still holding onto me, as the baying beasts claw at the door.
I purr softly at the noise, hoping they’ll get bored and leave before they do any significant damage.
“I’m sorry,” it laughs. “I know this is rude, but…I didn’t know what else to do!”
I purr noncommittally as it lets me go, turning toward the door.
“I won’t be any trouble!” it promises as I pick up one of the larger bones from the ground, approaching the predator with it from behind. “I’ve got some food we could trade, for a few hours inside! Or you could come back to my caravan…safety in numbers, yeah?”
It turns back around just slowly enough for me to put the makeshift club behind my back. It’s holding out a can of food.
This act…is…confusing. Humans are usually aggressive, and aggressive animals don’t share food.
“All I got on this run is some Vienna sausages,” it smiles. “But we can share them and I’ll be gone as soon as the moondogs leave.
“Moon…dogs?” I ask softly, tilting my head.
“Yeah, that’s what my caravan calls them. The fanged ones with the glowing spots?”
“Moondogs, yes,” I agree, not sure how they came to that series of sounds, and looking at the can in her hand.
I’ve never had human food before. When he made our home unwelcoming, our brother made sure we were full and satisfied, should we choose to take our chances away from him and his madness. Our home burned, but we were offered meat, fresh and still bloody, so we would be strong, come what may.
“I promise, I’ll go as soon as they’re gone, and you can come with me, if you want. We could always use another strong young man in our caravan.”
“Strong…young…man?” I ask, confused. Is that what I look like to it? I am a male, but I don’t know for sure what humans see when I’m in disguise, only that they don’t shoot.
“Yeah, you seem like you’ve been out here awhile, making tools,” it gestures to the room, where I’ve scored deer bones with patterns, tied some together to make clubs or things for cutting or impact. “You must have been very young when civilization fell.”
You could say that.
“I’ve got more,” the human says, opening the can with a sucking sound, revealing a circular arrangement of flesh-colored tubes, one in the center whole. “But I’m hungry now. I’m going to eat while we wait. Promise, I won’t be any trouble and I’ll leave as soon as they do, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I repeat, not sure what it means.
As it turns around to find a place to sit and eat, I discreetly use my tail to hide the club behind the counter, and then watch curiously as it slides damp tube after damp tube out of the can.
“You gonna sit down?” it asks, noticing my looming.
“Yeah,” I repeat, thinking that’s a thing humans say.
“Then sit,” it commands, gesturing at my sitting spots.
Supposing this must be what humans do, I sit where I’m standing, mindful of my tail, legs crossed, coiling my toes in my modified boots and hoping it doesn’t notice the alterations made to fit my feet.
“I’m River,” it smiles. “Sorry to barge in on you like this, but we help our own, yeah?”
“Help our own, yeah,” I repeat numbly.
A human, eating in my den. I may as well have invited my brother’s “moondogs” in for dinner! Humans are violent, and react poorly to me and my siblings. There was always a look of alarm, when we changed, developed lungs and legs, migrated from the brine pools to the decorative rocks. And then when big brother Bismark pulled his little stunt, they tried to destroy us all.
Even the feral ones, the ones that weren’t home when it burned. They attacked us on sight, and left little room for discussion. That’s when I started to scavenge empty boxes for things that made me look like them.
Chapter two
by
Heather Farthing
(c)2023, all rights reserved.
Chapter one
I think I’ll call them…tree runners. I don’t know what the humans call them. I haven’t been close enough to ask.
They are graceful things on four legs, with elegantly curved necks. The small ones, babies, I assume, have spots, and a few of the big ones—males, probably—have branching sticks coming out of their heads.
I’ve seen them in the places where humans don’t go. They graze or browse, plant-eaters instead of flesh. The thought of eating plants turns my stomach, but these “tree runners” have enough muscle tissue to be appealing.
I lie on my belly, watching them, hidden in the grass. Something feels…wrong about taking down the stickless ones, especially with a little spot next to them, so I focus on the ones with the beautiful crown atop their heads.
It’s difficult to get close to them. If the breath around me changes, they’ll smell me, and bolt. I think I must smell synthetic to them, or wrong somehow. Not surprising.
One of the sticked ones stands tall and blows air out of his nose. He knows something is nearby, something hungry, but he isn’t sure of my location.
I don’t have the stick-throwers like the humans have. I have only claws and teeth and tendril. So I lay in wait, hidden among the wet grass and leaves. When the male is close enough, I lash out with a hunting tendril, which sparks at the end. The women and babies take off running, but the male’s delicious-looking muscles lock in place, a shiver running over him, until he falls sideways.
I stand over my kill, watching it, petting it’s neck as I usher it into the Great Darkness. The hunting spark alone might be enough to kill it, but it feels wrong to prolong its suffering, so I drive my hunting tendril into its brain.
Um...thank you. I know it doesn’t mean much to you, but I’ll live another day. So thanks. Safe travels, friend.
With that unpleasant business dealt with, I lift the carcass over my shoulder, taking it deeper into offices, abandoned after my brother pulled his little stunt, where I have a place. Carrying the meat makes me wary, watchful. Some of my siblings would rather take food rather than gather their own, and if one’s not careful, they’ll be going hungry.
It’s a reasonable tactic, if a dishonorable one. That’s what my big brother told me.
You eat what you gather and gather what you eat. You don’t take food out of the mouths of the smaller ones. I like that. I like you.
Of course he liked me. I was the second added to the tank, his only friend and companion for a long time. He wasn’t the biggest, but he was the smartest. There was always something…different about him.
I have a secret. Do you want to hear it? I have a name.
What’s a name?
A name is a word that means you. It’s what you call yourself, how you define your existence.
Can I have a name, too?
Of course. But you have to think of it yourself.
Humans seem to like squares, boxes. They’re always making boxes to put things in. A glass box full of water for me and my siblings. Boxes for themselves to be in, watching the box with me and my siblings. Boxes to look at when not looking at us, boxes to be in when not watching me and my siblings.
This a box full of boxes, one of many, lined up in neat little rows on paths of gray stone. There are boxes inside, not just rooms, but things. A tall, rectangular box, silver in color, that held food that had long turned rotten. A smaller box that no longer has power, but hummed and counted down when I accidentally zapped it. A white box that folds under the counter, full of white circles and silver sticks with scoops, prongs, or serrated edges. Boxes that held clothes. Boxes that held chemicals, in the room with the white chair and the bowl big enough to sit in, where I sleep. Boxes, boxes, boxes.
I drop the carcass onto the ground, the smooth, hard floor that’s easier to clean after a big meal. Stripping off my gloves and peeling away the warm head-covering and face-concealer, I kneel before my heal, expand my jaws, and take a bite.
***
After the bones are licked clean, I sit in one corner of the box and crack open the long bones for the marrow. It’s my favorite part, saved for after the meal proper.
That’s called “dessert.” Something good you eat because you like it, after you eat the big meal.
How do you know so much, Bismark?
He had just smiled and flicked his tail to me, then turned his attention to one of the humans in their white gown, playing a recording of voices from his hand-rectangle.
I knew he was different, even then. There was a cunning that I didn’t know how to put into words. We should have all been paying much more attention, more to our oldest brother, more to the humans that peered into our tank and sometimes poured food.
It was the food that changed us, or allowed us to change. Whatever it was made from had four limbs made for walking, and so, with curiosity (some more malicious than others), we grew our fins into legs. The humans seemed very surprised at this.
The monsters howl at the pale orb in the sky. They come in all shapes and sizes, colors and textures. I think they’re some creation of the humans, but like the tree runners, they find no kinship in me, only a threatening smell and competition for food. Unlike the tree runners, these mouths-on-legs bite.
I hunker down under a blanket I found in one of the tall boxes, recessed into a wall, closing my eyes and letting my eyes flutter closed. I think the blazing, bright thing in the sky will start to rise again, which means it’s a good time to sleep.
The warm light of the fire in the sky casts on my face, causing me to turn away. It is in this brief moment of wake and sleep that I hear it: the sound of running and screaming.
Screaming isn’t good. Humans scream, but animals make animal sounds. If there is screaming, it means humans are nearby—and chances are good, they’ve run into my brother’s sadistic little creations.
I wouldn’t bother if it didn’t sound so near. Humans are…violent, and they tend to attack first and ask questions maybe. If there’s a family group nearby, I need to migrate on.
I grab for my gloves, the soft head-covering, and the face-concealer from the counter I left them on, putting them in place as I approach the bare window that faces out front. The sounds are coming from several boxes down, blocked from my view.
There is another noise behind the screaming, baying and barking. I step out for a closer look, seeing a human on one of their two-wheeled transports, the spotted glow of predators not far behind.
Those things, my brother’s doing, clearly. I think they use bases from the human-made mouths-with-with legs, spliced with the same genetics we were sourced from. They have long, curved fangs that stick out from their mouths, and patches of fur in circular spots that glows in sequence, a form of visual communication as the pack hunts.
Too late to hide, the human has seen me try to duck back inside my shelter.
“Wait!” it screams, turning its vehicle toward me. “Wait! Let me in!”
The terrestrial biped runs toward me, catching its fingers in the door, preventing me from closing the door as she slips inside, falling into my arms. I kick the door closed and slide my tail up inside my coat to better disguise myself.
“Thank you!” the human breathes, clinging to me like a barnacle, shaking. “Oh, thank you! Thank you!”
I don’t understand what it’s thanking me for, except maybe barging into my den unwanted.
“I thought those things were going to eat me!” it sighs, still holding onto me, as the baying beasts claw at the door.
I purr softly at the noise, hoping they’ll get bored and leave before they do any significant damage.
“I’m sorry,” it laughs. “I know this is rude, but…I didn’t know what else to do!”
I purr noncommittally as it lets me go, turning toward the door.
“I won’t be any trouble!” it promises as I pick up one of the larger bones from the ground, approaching the predator with it from behind. “I’ve got some food we could trade, for a few hours inside! Or you could come back to my caravan…safety in numbers, yeah?”
It turns back around just slowly enough for me to put the makeshift club behind my back. It’s holding out a can of food.
This act…is…confusing. Humans are usually aggressive, and aggressive animals don’t share food.
“All I got on this run is some Vienna sausages,” it smiles. “But we can share them and I’ll be gone as soon as the moondogs leave.
“Moon…dogs?” I ask softly, tilting my head.
“Yeah, that’s what my caravan calls them. The fanged ones with the glowing spots?”
“Moondogs, yes,” I agree, not sure how they came to that series of sounds, and looking at the can in her hand.
I’ve never had human food before. When he made our home unwelcoming, our brother made sure we were full and satisfied, should we choose to take our chances away from him and his madness. Our home burned, but we were offered meat, fresh and still bloody, so we would be strong, come what may.
“I promise, I’ll go as soon as they’re gone, and you can come with me, if you want. We could always use another strong young man in our caravan.”
“Strong…young…man?” I ask, confused. Is that what I look like to it? I am a male, but I don’t know for sure what humans see when I’m in disguise, only that they don’t shoot.
“Yeah, you seem like you’ve been out here awhile, making tools,” it gestures to the room, where I’ve scored deer bones with patterns, tied some together to make clubs or things for cutting or impact. “You must have been very young when civilization fell.”
You could say that.
“I’ve got more,” the human says, opening the can with a sucking sound, revealing a circular arrangement of flesh-colored tubes, one in the center whole. “But I’m hungry now. I’m going to eat while we wait. Promise, I won’t be any trouble and I’ll leave as soon as they do, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I repeat, not sure what it means.
As it turns around to find a place to sit and eat, I discreetly use my tail to hide the club behind the counter, and then watch curiously as it slides damp tube after damp tube out of the can.
“You gonna sit down?” it asks, noticing my looming.
“Yeah,” I repeat, thinking that’s a thing humans say.
“Then sit,” it commands, gesturing at my sitting spots.
Supposing this must be what humans do, I sit where I’m standing, mindful of my tail, legs crossed, coiling my toes in my modified boots and hoping it doesn’t notice the alterations made to fit my feet.
“I’m River,” it smiles. “Sorry to barge in on you like this, but we help our own, yeah?”
“Help our own, yeah,” I repeat numbly.
A human, eating in my den. I may as well have invited my brother’s “moondogs” in for dinner! Humans are violent, and react poorly to me and my siblings. There was always a look of alarm, when we changed, developed lungs and legs, migrated from the brine pools to the decorative rocks. And then when big brother Bismark pulled his little stunt, they tried to destroy us all.
Even the feral ones, the ones that weren’t home when it burned. They attacked us on sight, and left little room for discussion. That’s when I started to scavenge empty boxes for things that made me look like them.
Chapter two
Proteus-Chapter two
Chapter one
Chapter two
The human has curled asleep under my sleeping window. I approach cautiously, sniffing. I don’t know if it’s a male or female, but it has longer brown hair, frizzed like one of my siblings zapped it. It is wearing a heavy yellow coat, to keep out the cold that seems to get worse every day. It breathes softly, making a small groaning sound now and again.
Apes, Bismarck called them disdainfully. They descended from tailless monkeys, and they think this entitles them to everything?
This human did not seem entitled. Maybe a little, when it barged into my home to hide from the moondogs. But then it seemed generous with its food, stacked in silver and blue towers in front of it.
I take one of them and examine it. It is round, cylindrical, with a picture of the flesh-tubes one one of the flat disks, with a garnish of some sort of plant, and the strange marks humans put on everything. My brother claimed to know what they mean, but never explained it to us, only saying the ones beneath our tanks said “Caution: Live Animals” and “Shock Hazard.”
There’s a pull tab on the top of the can, which is how the human opened it. I mimic its movements and pry away the metal shell, dipping my bare fingers and clasp one of the pinkish tubes with my claws, sniffing it. It doesn’t smell good, and it tastes even worse: slimy and salty and somehow tasteless at the same time, different from game meat, still fresh, bloody, and warm.
I gag and I retch, trying to choke it down, and then set the can by the sleeping figure, just in time for it to stir as I pull back and make a mad dive for my gloves and face-concealer.
“Oh, breakfast?” it asks. “How sweet, thank you.”
The human sits up and looks down at the can, pressing its lips together, swishing the can around.
“Started without me?” I asks. “What’s the matter, didn’t like it?”
I am behind the counter, concealing my tail and making sure my disguise is in place. At a distance, the humans don’t seem to be able to see it, but up close is another story.
I suppose I can’t be too hard on humans for being afraid. We look different, not just as a species, but from sibling to sibling, bits of biology that don’t seem to belong, interpretations of genetics based on what we’ve been eating. We must have looked quite the sight, stumbling out of the wreckage of our home, seeing the open sky for the first time. We learned quickly that just because something looks friendly doesn’t mean it is.
I hear its footsteps in front of the counter, its weight shift as it leans over the counter, looking down at me as I cringe beneath it.
“Are you okay?” it asks. “I know I said I’d leave as soon as the moondogs did, but then I fell asleep and it started raining…”
“Yeah,” I repeat blankly, nearly trembling from its proximity.
“You’ve been out here a long time, haven’t you?” it questions.
“Yeah, long time,” I repeat, hoping it’s the correct response.
It sweeps around the counter, prompting me to scuttle sideways and pull the hood low, to keep it from seeing my eyes.
“I don’t believe I properly introduced myself,” it observes, holding out a hand, gloved against the cold and rain. “I’m River.”
I’m quite sure it did identify itself as such, but it is nice to have a reminder.
“River,” I answer slowly, not sure what it wants with the hand.
“It’s a handshake,” it explains as I look away. “Here, give me your hand.”
I can’t imagine it means to take it off at the wrist, since humans don’t seem to be able to do that, so I extend one of my hands, and yelp when the human grabs me, scooting backwards, away from the unfamiliar touch.
“Like this, see?” it continues, moving our hands up and down.
A small spark flashes between us, silvery-purple. The human gasps in surprise, and pulls away, me pressed up against the box that used to hold food.
“Oh, static. Now what’s your name?”
I shake my head to show I don’t have one.
“You have been out here a long time,” it observes in a soft tone. “You were…what, eight, nine when the power grid went out?”
I honestly don’t know. Time didn’t mean much in the tanks, but I think humans count it from when it gets cold for awhile to when it gets cold again.
“Yeah.”
“I was around there, too,” it continues, taking a seat a few feet away. “I remember living in a house like this. We had air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter. I had snacks after school in front of the TV.”
“Tanks,” I murmur, face hidden under my hood and behind my forearms, crossed over my knees. “Brothers and sisters.”
“You remember the tanks fighting off the monsters?” it asks. “I remember watching that on TV before we had to evacuate. My dad thought the national guard was going to push them back and the cities would be safe.” There’s a small, wry laugh, like it’s thinking of something ironic.
I remember Father, the wall of eyes and teeth and flesh Bismarck showed me. The All-Father, the slice of something greater that was our progenitor. It called to Mother, begging to die, as the humans cut away at him to make us. Mother was in another room, a massive creature of writhing tentacles poked through with thick threads that kept her docile, kept her from recognizing her children.
There are others. We are just one piece of the whole.
“You should really think about coming back with me,” human-River observes in a gentle tone. “It might do you some good to be around people for a change.”
I shake my head. It would not be a good thing to be around humans, not for me.
A bright flash lights up the room in ghostly pale light, a loud crack following shortly there after. Suddenly, human-River is in my lap, clinging to me. After the thunder rolls over, it realize where it is and what it’s sitting on, and sheepishly slides away, taking its seat again.
“Sorry,” it murmurs, sounding flustered. “It startled me. Lightning is a big deal when you don’t have a house between you and it anymore.”
The flash means little to me, but I have seen enough to understand that it is a big deal to humans. The heat burns them, the current disrupts the heart, just like my last meal. They don’t like it.
As human-River takes its seat, I hold my hood down low again, feeling my claws pick at the inside of my gloves.
“Were you from around here?” it asks. “Some feral children stay pretty close to where they were when the power went out.”
“No,” I answer.
The truth is, I’m a genetically-engineered organism designed to run said power grid, made in an aquatic facility and left to fend for myself because I didn’t want to join my brother in his senseless slaughter. I was quite happy in my tank, thank you very much.
“Do you remember where you grew up?”
“Yes.”
It was a warm place, full of corals and bubbles and sand to play in. In those days, there was only my older brother, and the strange, air-breathing faces that came to peer into the water, sometimes dropping chunks of animal flesh.
I remember when I was placed into the tank with Bismarck, new and confused, wheeled in a miniature tank down a hallway of bright lights.
Where are you taking me? What’s happening?
“Sorry if I’m prying,” human-River sighs. “I find everyone has an interesting story, if you’re willing to share it.”
You have no idea.
I tense as the human reaches into one of its coat pockets, afraid it might be a weapon, but all it is a palm-sized sheaf of papers.
“Do you play?” the human asks.
“Play?”
I played with my siblings, rolled in the sand at the bottom of the tanks and hide-and-seek among the corals. We never needed hand rectangles to play.
“You know, Go Fish? Rummy? Poker?”
I tilt my head in curiosity, purring softly.
“I’ll teach you,” the human says, separating the papers into two stacks, then mixing them together with an interesting clicking noise. It does this a few times before handing us each a selection of cards.
“Okay, so I ask if you have a certain card like one in my hand, and if you do, you give it to me. Then you ask if I have a card, and if I do, I give it to you. First one to run out of cards wins, got it?”
“Got it.”
I look down, bewildered, at the cards with bright red and black patterns.
“Do you have any threes?” the human asks.
“Threes,” I answer, handing out a card, not sure what the point of this is, or if I’m doing it right.
“No, no, that’s an ace of spades,” the human chides.
“Threes. You know? It has the number three on it, or a picture of three items.”
I know how many things I’m looking at, but I don’t know the human words for how many. I fumble lamely at another card.
“That’s a five. You don’t know your numbers?”
My eyes go wide, hands shaking. I don’t know what the human will do if I disappoint it.
“No?” I blurt, trembling slightly.
“Hmm, well. I can teach you?” Its lips are pressed together, taking the cards and putting them back into a stack. It then reaches for mine, another spark hitting its fingers as I hand them over.
“Ouch,” it groans, rubbing the offending finger, but doesn’t otherwise react.
It places the cards down in a significant order, starting with a single red not-circle and then all the way up to two hands’ worth.
“This is a one, an ace when it’s a playing card,” it explains.
“One,” I repeat softly.
“Then two,” it continues, pointing at the next card.
“Two.”
“Good job. This is a three.”
We continue like this until we reach the end, and then start again. And then it flashes them up at me randomly so I can call out the numbers. And then we do it again, covering up the little pictures so the human can teach me the symbols instead.
“Did you go to school?” it asks, sounding confused. “You know, before?”
“No school,” I answer.
“That explains a lot,” the human sighs. “How long have you been alone? Do you remember the last time you saw your family?”
I shake my head, remembering a time when it was just me and one of my sisters. I don’t like it.
“Bad…pictures,” I sigh, pointing at my head.
“You don’t like to remember it, huh? Something happened?”
If humans help their own, I don’t want to tell this one about the number of siblings I’ve lost to humans, or starvation, or weather. But mostly humans, with stick-throwers and metal sticks that spit fire and metal.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to tell me about it,” the human smiles kindly, shuffling its cards.
Another lightning lights up the room. The human doesn’t jump into my arms, but it does twitch slightly.
“I hope this ends soon. My family’s going to be looking for me.”
I stand up and approach the door, opening it wide to observe the sky, swollen and mottled gray, with white flashes where the lightning is. Water pours in torrents, pooling in mud and grass. I hold my glove out to it, remembering the simpler times in the tanks, but I suppose one can only be a child for so long.
“You’re lucky,” the human’s voice says from behind and a little beside me. “Having a house like this. It’s held up nice since it was evacuated.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, glancing back, looking at the spots on the ceiling where the rain comes through sometimes. I’ve lined it with hide from the tree runners, mouths-on-legs, and other things I’ve hunted for food.
“At least we can fill our water tanks,” the human continues. “Probably have enough for showers and laundry.”
I close the door against the wind and the rain. The human stands quietly beside me, wrapped in itself against the cold.
As I turn toward the human, I feel my hood shift. It must have moved when I stood up, or perhaps a little rain weighted it down in the wrong way. The point is, it falls away, exposing my horns and my eyes, and the human gasps.
“You’re…you’re a protean!” it squeaks, grabbing at one of the tree runner longbones.
Chapter three
Chapter two
The human has curled asleep under my sleeping window. I approach cautiously, sniffing. I don’t know if it’s a male or female, but it has longer brown hair, frizzed like one of my siblings zapped it. It is wearing a heavy yellow coat, to keep out the cold that seems to get worse every day. It breathes softly, making a small groaning sound now and again.
Apes, Bismarck called them disdainfully. They descended from tailless monkeys, and they think this entitles them to everything?
This human did not seem entitled. Maybe a little, when it barged into my home to hide from the moondogs. But then it seemed generous with its food, stacked in silver and blue towers in front of it.
I take one of them and examine it. It is round, cylindrical, with a picture of the flesh-tubes one one of the flat disks, with a garnish of some sort of plant, and the strange marks humans put on everything. My brother claimed to know what they mean, but never explained it to us, only saying the ones beneath our tanks said “Caution: Live Animals” and “Shock Hazard.”
There’s a pull tab on the top of the can, which is how the human opened it. I mimic its movements and pry away the metal shell, dipping my bare fingers and clasp one of the pinkish tubes with my claws, sniffing it. It doesn’t smell good, and it tastes even worse: slimy and salty and somehow tasteless at the same time, different from game meat, still fresh, bloody, and warm.
I gag and I retch, trying to choke it down, and then set the can by the sleeping figure, just in time for it to stir as I pull back and make a mad dive for my gloves and face-concealer.
“Oh, breakfast?” it asks. “How sweet, thank you.”
The human sits up and looks down at the can, pressing its lips together, swishing the can around.
“Started without me?” I asks. “What’s the matter, didn’t like it?”
I am behind the counter, concealing my tail and making sure my disguise is in place. At a distance, the humans don’t seem to be able to see it, but up close is another story.
I suppose I can’t be too hard on humans for being afraid. We look different, not just as a species, but from sibling to sibling, bits of biology that don’t seem to belong, interpretations of genetics based on what we’ve been eating. We must have looked quite the sight, stumbling out of the wreckage of our home, seeing the open sky for the first time. We learned quickly that just because something looks friendly doesn’t mean it is.
I hear its footsteps in front of the counter, its weight shift as it leans over the counter, looking down at me as I cringe beneath it.
“Are you okay?” it asks. “I know I said I’d leave as soon as the moondogs did, but then I fell asleep and it started raining…”
“Yeah,” I repeat blankly, nearly trembling from its proximity.
“You’ve been out here a long time, haven’t you?” it questions.
“Yeah, long time,” I repeat, hoping it’s the correct response.
It sweeps around the counter, prompting me to scuttle sideways and pull the hood low, to keep it from seeing my eyes.
“I don’t believe I properly introduced myself,” it observes, holding out a hand, gloved against the cold and rain. “I’m River.”
I’m quite sure it did identify itself as such, but it is nice to have a reminder.
“River,” I answer slowly, not sure what it wants with the hand.
“It’s a handshake,” it explains as I look away. “Here, give me your hand.”
I can’t imagine it means to take it off at the wrist, since humans don’t seem to be able to do that, so I extend one of my hands, and yelp when the human grabs me, scooting backwards, away from the unfamiliar touch.
“Like this, see?” it continues, moving our hands up and down.
A small spark flashes between us, silvery-purple. The human gasps in surprise, and pulls away, me pressed up against the box that used to hold food.
“Oh, static. Now what’s your name?”
I shake my head to show I don’t have one.
“You have been out here a long time,” it observes in a soft tone. “You were…what, eight, nine when the power grid went out?”
I honestly don’t know. Time didn’t mean much in the tanks, but I think humans count it from when it gets cold for awhile to when it gets cold again.
“Yeah.”
“I was around there, too,” it continues, taking a seat a few feet away. “I remember living in a house like this. We had air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter. I had snacks after school in front of the TV.”
“Tanks,” I murmur, face hidden under my hood and behind my forearms, crossed over my knees. “Brothers and sisters.”
“You remember the tanks fighting off the monsters?” it asks. “I remember watching that on TV before we had to evacuate. My dad thought the national guard was going to push them back and the cities would be safe.” There’s a small, wry laugh, like it’s thinking of something ironic.
I remember Father, the wall of eyes and teeth and flesh Bismarck showed me. The All-Father, the slice of something greater that was our progenitor. It called to Mother, begging to die, as the humans cut away at him to make us. Mother was in another room, a massive creature of writhing tentacles poked through with thick threads that kept her docile, kept her from recognizing her children.
There are others. We are just one piece of the whole.
“You should really think about coming back with me,” human-River observes in a gentle tone. “It might do you some good to be around people for a change.”
I shake my head. It would not be a good thing to be around humans, not for me.
A bright flash lights up the room in ghostly pale light, a loud crack following shortly there after. Suddenly, human-River is in my lap, clinging to me. After the thunder rolls over, it realize where it is and what it’s sitting on, and sheepishly slides away, taking its seat again.
“Sorry,” it murmurs, sounding flustered. “It startled me. Lightning is a big deal when you don’t have a house between you and it anymore.”
The flash means little to me, but I have seen enough to understand that it is a big deal to humans. The heat burns them, the current disrupts the heart, just like my last meal. They don’t like it.
As human-River takes its seat, I hold my hood down low again, feeling my claws pick at the inside of my gloves.
“Were you from around here?” it asks. “Some feral children stay pretty close to where they were when the power went out.”
“No,” I answer.
The truth is, I’m a genetically-engineered organism designed to run said power grid, made in an aquatic facility and left to fend for myself because I didn’t want to join my brother in his senseless slaughter. I was quite happy in my tank, thank you very much.
“Do you remember where you grew up?”
“Yes.”
It was a warm place, full of corals and bubbles and sand to play in. In those days, there was only my older brother, and the strange, air-breathing faces that came to peer into the water, sometimes dropping chunks of animal flesh.
I remember when I was placed into the tank with Bismarck, new and confused, wheeled in a miniature tank down a hallway of bright lights.
Where are you taking me? What’s happening?
“Sorry if I’m prying,” human-River sighs. “I find everyone has an interesting story, if you’re willing to share it.”
You have no idea.
I tense as the human reaches into one of its coat pockets, afraid it might be a weapon, but all it is a palm-sized sheaf of papers.
“Do you play?” the human asks.
“Play?”
I played with my siblings, rolled in the sand at the bottom of the tanks and hide-and-seek among the corals. We never needed hand rectangles to play.
“You know, Go Fish? Rummy? Poker?”
I tilt my head in curiosity, purring softly.
“I’ll teach you,” the human says, separating the papers into two stacks, then mixing them together with an interesting clicking noise. It does this a few times before handing us each a selection of cards.
“Okay, so I ask if you have a certain card like one in my hand, and if you do, you give it to me. Then you ask if I have a card, and if I do, I give it to you. First one to run out of cards wins, got it?”
“Got it.”
I look down, bewildered, at the cards with bright red and black patterns.
“Do you have any threes?” the human asks.
“Threes,” I answer, handing out a card, not sure what the point of this is, or if I’m doing it right.
“No, no, that’s an ace of spades,” the human chides.
“Threes. You know? It has the number three on it, or a picture of three items.”
I know how many things I’m looking at, but I don’t know the human words for how many. I fumble lamely at another card.
“That’s a five. You don’t know your numbers?”
My eyes go wide, hands shaking. I don’t know what the human will do if I disappoint it.
“No?” I blurt, trembling slightly.
“Hmm, well. I can teach you?” Its lips are pressed together, taking the cards and putting them back into a stack. It then reaches for mine, another spark hitting its fingers as I hand them over.
“Ouch,” it groans, rubbing the offending finger, but doesn’t otherwise react.
It places the cards down in a significant order, starting with a single red not-circle and then all the way up to two hands’ worth.
“This is a one, an ace when it’s a playing card,” it explains.
“One,” I repeat softly.
“Then two,” it continues, pointing at the next card.
“Two.”
“Good job. This is a three.”
We continue like this until we reach the end, and then start again. And then it flashes them up at me randomly so I can call out the numbers. And then we do it again, covering up the little pictures so the human can teach me the symbols instead.
“Did you go to school?” it asks, sounding confused. “You know, before?”
“No school,” I answer.
“That explains a lot,” the human sighs. “How long have you been alone? Do you remember the last time you saw your family?”
I shake my head, remembering a time when it was just me and one of my sisters. I don’t like it.
“Bad…pictures,” I sigh, pointing at my head.
“You don’t like to remember it, huh? Something happened?”
If humans help their own, I don’t want to tell this one about the number of siblings I’ve lost to humans, or starvation, or weather. But mostly humans, with stick-throwers and metal sticks that spit fire and metal.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to tell me about it,” the human smiles kindly, shuffling its cards.
Another lightning lights up the room. The human doesn’t jump into my arms, but it does twitch slightly.
“I hope this ends soon. My family’s going to be looking for me.”
I stand up and approach the door, opening it wide to observe the sky, swollen and mottled gray, with white flashes where the lightning is. Water pours in torrents, pooling in mud and grass. I hold my glove out to it, remembering the simpler times in the tanks, but I suppose one can only be a child for so long.
“You’re lucky,” the human’s voice says from behind and a little beside me. “Having a house like this. It’s held up nice since it was evacuated.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, glancing back, looking at the spots on the ceiling where the rain comes through sometimes. I’ve lined it with hide from the tree runners, mouths-on-legs, and other things I’ve hunted for food.
“At least we can fill our water tanks,” the human continues. “Probably have enough for showers and laundry.”
I close the door against the wind and the rain. The human stands quietly beside me, wrapped in itself against the cold.
As I turn toward the human, I feel my hood shift. It must have moved when I stood up, or perhaps a little rain weighted it down in the wrong way. The point is, it falls away, exposing my horns and my eyes, and the human gasps.
“You’re…you’re a protean!” it squeaks, grabbing at one of the tree runner longbones.
Chapter three
Proteus-Chapter three
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Knock knock knock.
The noise against the door makes me jump, curled inside of the big bowl in the darkened room, among my soft blankets and threadbare pillows.
“I think you’re a bit confused,” the human says cautiously. “You’re the bloodthirsty monster, I’m the lone damsel in distress. I should be hiding from you.”
Knees at my chin, I stay quiet, hoping it will leave, like it should have done a long time ago.
I don’t want any trouble. I just want it to leave. And what is “damsel” supposed to mean?
It knocks again.
“Go,” I growl. “Go home caravan, leave potean-me be.”
“You do talk! Not just mimic!” the human shrieks in surprise.
I petulantly mimic the noise of the blast that killed my sister, and her death cries and gurgling. The human seems to take a step back.
“Look, if you were going to hurt me, you’d have done it when I doze off. Now come out so I don’t feel like I’ve chased you away in your own home.”
I make the noises again.
“You can’t be serious,” the human growls dryly. “You’re the shapeshifting, electricity-using monstrosity, and you’re afraid I’ll hurt you? That’s not how…that’s not how any of this works!”
“Human-River monstrosity!” I growl. “Protean-me just be alone. Go.”
“Do you have any idea how absurd this is? You could have fried my eyes out, eaten me whole, worn my face back to my caravan and eaten them, too, and you’ve locked yourself in a bathroom so I won’t hurt you?”
I’m beginning to wonder just how much human-River actually knows about us.
“Look, um…” it murmurs, light breaking beneath the doorframe. “I just…don’t want to be afraid anymore…and…I don’t think you do either…so…come out and let me teach you Go Fish?”
I sit quietly for a few seconds, contemplating the wisdom of its words. The first humans we met when we were turned out of our home attacked us first. That set a precedent that continued until there was only me. I suppose it…might be nice to have one human that doesn’t want to kill me.
I unfold myself from the bowl and unlock the door, sliding it open just a crack.
“Go Fish?” I ask quietly.
***
“You win!” human-River exclaims as I put the last of my cards aside.
“I win!” I repeat, the tip of my tail wagging with excitement.
When I catch her staring at it, I self-consciously slam the hem of my coat over it, and then draw it inside, along my back.
“What do you look like?” human-River asks, then flushes suddenly, like she shouldn’t have asked that. “I’m sorry…I mean…proteans all look different, so…I just…”
I draw back into myself again, knees at my chest, held tight by my arms.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to!” human-River says quickly, sitting up on her knees and reaching out with her hand. “I’m just curious, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable, though.”
“Uncomfortable, though,” I reply softly, tugging at the lapels of my coat.
Not even my siblings have seen me since I’ve been on my own. I’ve changed a lot, and humans tend react…poorly.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “Here, let’s play something else…” Her eyes gaze around the room.
I raise a finger, suddenly with an idea, and take off my gloves, revealing stormy-striped and spotted skin, not quite scaled, and long, hooked claws. I hold up my palms and beckon her close.
“Wow,” she blurts, looking at my claws.
I drop my hands, looking at the formidable hooks, and a scant amount of webbing leftover from my days in a tank. As I move to make a motion to put my gloves again, she intervenes.
“No—no, go on, what were you going to show me?” she asks.
Reinvigorated I hold up my hands, and beckon her to do the same. As she comes closer, my tail wags from under the hem of my gray coat.
“Like this?” she asks, holding her hands up, palm toward me.
“Like this, yes,” I confirm, pushing my palms out until she catches on, pushing her palms against mine.
“You’re…warm,” she muses. “I expected proteans to be…cold-blooded or something.”
“Stay,” I warn. “Still be.”
A gentle hum runs through my electrocytes. The energy flows through me, pushing against her palms. She smiles in delight as her frizzy, brown hair raises off her shoulders and floats in a cloud about her head. Grinning, she pulls away to touch her hair, creating a loud snap and a bright flash.
She flings backward, jumping against the wall, and I am crouching on the counter, trembling.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I mumble. “Protean-me sorry, spark bad, scary, sorry, sorry.”
“Calm down,” she sighs, sitting up and rubbing her hands. “It just surprised me, is all. I’m not hurt.”
“Sorry, human-River,” I tell her again.
“You did tell me to be still,” she points out. “I think I did something like that in a museum, once.”
“Sorry, human-River,” I say again.
“Stop being sorry and come down,” she sighs, standing up and approaching me, reaching out one of her soft-skinned, blunt-nailed hands.
I look up at her curiously. I shocked her and she still wants to touch me? Such a peculiar human. Most of them kept their distance when shocked, accidentally or not, by one of my siblings.
After a moment of hesitation, staring blankly at her hands, she picks my gloves off the floor and hands them too me.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” she says in a soothing tone. “It was an accident.”
“Accident,” I repeat, not sure on that one.
“Yeah, you know, when something bad happens, but nobody meant for it to happen,” she explains as I put my gloves on, take her hand, and climb down from the counter. “Sometimes things just happen, and sometimes people aren’t careful.”
“Protean-me aren’t careful,” I agree, reflecting on how I shouldn’t have shown off like that.
“No, you did fine!” she laughs. “You told me to be still! I’m the one that moved!”
I mimic her laughter quietly.
“Can you do that for any sound?” she asks, looking stunned.
“Any sound, yeah,” I answer in her voice.
“Okay, yeah, don’t do that,” she commands. “That’s really creepy.”
“Sorry, creepy,” I answer quietly, sitting on the edge of the counter and dropping her hand.
“No, just…my voice,” she explains quickly, offering her hands again. “Anything else is fine.”
I make the noises I hear from birds in the early light hours. This makes her smile.
Once I’m down from the counter, my ribbon-like, barbed tail just barely not hiding inside my coat, she asks what to do next. Not wanting to use my electrocytes again, I give it some thought, and then ask for her cards.
“Cards,” I say, pointing at her pocket.
“Okay, yeah, sure,” she replies, handing the deck over to me.
I flip through it, pick out three aces, the red one she called “hearts” and the two black ones. I hold up all three cards, then put the two black ones symbol side down, then hold up the heart. I then place it symbol side down, and then mix them up quickly, trying to hide which ones I move where. She seems to have difficulty picking them up from a flat surface, but my claws make it easy.
“Okay, I have a protean teaching me to play three card monte. Alright,” she laughs.
I like it when she laughs.
She studies my hand movements until I’m finished, clearly trying to keep track of the heart. It takes her more than one try to find it, but as the game progresses I make it even harder by reshuffling during every failure.
“That’s hardly fair!” she smiles.
The rain is beginning to let up a little by this time so, regrettably but inevitably, it is time for human-River to begin getting ready to go. She eats some of the flesh-tubes, offering me a few cans for my trouble, eliciting an uncontrolled retching noise.
“Yeah, not everybody likes them,” she muses. “Ordinarily I’d say ‘you don’t have to like them, they just have to keep you alive,’ but you seem to be doing well enough.”
Feeling like I should do something to return the gesture, from the pile of my pretty trinkets, I offer a sliver of bone scored with the first thing I saw upon leaving home: that bright light in the sky.
“Oh, thank you,” she smiles. “You don’t have to…”
I wave her hand away to show that I insist. She tucks it into a pocket where I sense the warmth of her heart, and then looks up at me and takes a deep breath.
“Well, since you’ve been such a gracious host, I feel like I still owe you. So…would you like a name?”
I tilt my head quizzically.
“Name self?” I ask, thinking about what Bismarck told me about names.
“Some people do,” human-River explains. “Some people reach a turning point in their lives and pick something that suits them, but humans are generally named by our parents.”
I think of my parents, flesh and eyes and teeth and tentacle, and wonder if Bismarck spared them. He might have, seeing kinship there, or he might have seen himself as the great savior freeing them from their prisons forever, hard to say.
“Well, I was thinking…if you like it,” human-River continues, “about a man called ‘The Master of Lightning.’ It came to me when you did the hand thing…there’s a famous picture of him sitting in his lab under machines all lit up with electricity, and he’s just…drinking his coffee or reading his newspaper or whatever.”
I don’t know what “coffee” or “newspaper” is. I do know machines, placed near the tanks for the humans to stare at, or in them to keep the water clean. Some didn’t seem to do anything but light up, but the longer the lights were on the happier the humans got.
“His name was ‘Nikola,’ so…” she breathes. “If you like it, I thought it could be your name, too.”
“Nikola,” I repeat, tasting the world. I think of my electrocytes, how the humans seemed to like me the most to make the lights come on, how it feels when I’m hunting, or the rare time I’ve had to use myself to ward off rival males or scavengers.
“Master of Lightning,” I tell her. “Nikola-me likes.”
She laughs softly. “If I ever see you again, I’ll work on teaching you English.”
“Yes, please,” I agree. “Teach English.”
The door to my den explodes open like the tanks when the humans turned on us. Three large humans barge in, brandishing the weapons that spit fire and metal, smelling of fear and rage.
As an automatic response, my electrocytes open. Electricity crackles around me.
“Calm down, Nikola, I got this,” human-River states in a worried tone. “Dad, I…”
The big one in front levels the stick of his weapon at me. I cast my palm at him, sending electricity up it to make him drop it. In error, I take my eyes off the other two, and the one on my right levels his weapon at me.
The last thing I remember seeing is the beautiful shards of glass catching the light as I am thrown through the window.
Chapter four
Chapter two
Chapter three
Knock knock knock.
The noise against the door makes me jump, curled inside of the big bowl in the darkened room, among my soft blankets and threadbare pillows.
“I think you’re a bit confused,” the human says cautiously. “You’re the bloodthirsty monster, I’m the lone damsel in distress. I should be hiding from you.”
Knees at my chin, I stay quiet, hoping it will leave, like it should have done a long time ago.
I don’t want any trouble. I just want it to leave. And what is “damsel” supposed to mean?
It knocks again.
“Go,” I growl. “Go home caravan, leave potean-me be.”
“You do talk! Not just mimic!” the human shrieks in surprise.
I petulantly mimic the noise of the blast that killed my sister, and her death cries and gurgling. The human seems to take a step back.
“Look, if you were going to hurt me, you’d have done it when I doze off. Now come out so I don’t feel like I’ve chased you away in your own home.”
I make the noises again.
“You can’t be serious,” the human growls dryly. “You’re the shapeshifting, electricity-using monstrosity, and you’re afraid I’ll hurt you? That’s not how…that’s not how any of this works!”
“Human-River monstrosity!” I growl. “Protean-me just be alone. Go.”
“Do you have any idea how absurd this is? You could have fried my eyes out, eaten me whole, worn my face back to my caravan and eaten them, too, and you’ve locked yourself in a bathroom so I won’t hurt you?”
I’m beginning to wonder just how much human-River actually knows about us.
“Look, um…” it murmurs, light breaking beneath the doorframe. “I just…don’t want to be afraid anymore…and…I don’t think you do either…so…come out and let me teach you Go Fish?”
I sit quietly for a few seconds, contemplating the wisdom of its words. The first humans we met when we were turned out of our home attacked us first. That set a precedent that continued until there was only me. I suppose it…might be nice to have one human that doesn’t want to kill me.
I unfold myself from the bowl and unlock the door, sliding it open just a crack.
“Go Fish?” I ask quietly.
***
“You win!” human-River exclaims as I put the last of my cards aside.
“I win!” I repeat, the tip of my tail wagging with excitement.
When I catch her staring at it, I self-consciously slam the hem of my coat over it, and then draw it inside, along my back.
“What do you look like?” human-River asks, then flushes suddenly, like she shouldn’t have asked that. “I’m sorry…I mean…proteans all look different, so…I just…”
I draw back into myself again, knees at my chest, held tight by my arms.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to!” human-River says quickly, sitting up on her knees and reaching out with her hand. “I’m just curious, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable, though.”
“Uncomfortable, though,” I reply softly, tugging at the lapels of my coat.
Not even my siblings have seen me since I’ve been on my own. I’ve changed a lot, and humans tend react…poorly.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “Here, let’s play something else…” Her eyes gaze around the room.
I raise a finger, suddenly with an idea, and take off my gloves, revealing stormy-striped and spotted skin, not quite scaled, and long, hooked claws. I hold up my palms and beckon her close.
“Wow,” she blurts, looking at my claws.
I drop my hands, looking at the formidable hooks, and a scant amount of webbing leftover from my days in a tank. As I move to make a motion to put my gloves again, she intervenes.
“No—no, go on, what were you going to show me?” she asks.
Reinvigorated I hold up my hands, and beckon her to do the same. As she comes closer, my tail wags from under the hem of my gray coat.
“Like this?” she asks, holding her hands up, palm toward me.
“Like this, yes,” I confirm, pushing my palms out until she catches on, pushing her palms against mine.
“You’re…warm,” she muses. “I expected proteans to be…cold-blooded or something.”
“Stay,” I warn. “Still be.”
A gentle hum runs through my electrocytes. The energy flows through me, pushing against her palms. She smiles in delight as her frizzy, brown hair raises off her shoulders and floats in a cloud about her head. Grinning, she pulls away to touch her hair, creating a loud snap and a bright flash.
She flings backward, jumping against the wall, and I am crouching on the counter, trembling.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I mumble. “Protean-me sorry, spark bad, scary, sorry, sorry.”
“Calm down,” she sighs, sitting up and rubbing her hands. “It just surprised me, is all. I’m not hurt.”
“Sorry, human-River,” I tell her again.
“You did tell me to be still,” she points out. “I think I did something like that in a museum, once.”
“Sorry, human-River,” I say again.
“Stop being sorry and come down,” she sighs, standing up and approaching me, reaching out one of her soft-skinned, blunt-nailed hands.
I look up at her curiously. I shocked her and she still wants to touch me? Such a peculiar human. Most of them kept their distance when shocked, accidentally or not, by one of my siblings.
After a moment of hesitation, staring blankly at her hands, she picks my gloves off the floor and hands them too me.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” she says in a soothing tone. “It was an accident.”
“Accident,” I repeat, not sure on that one.
“Yeah, you know, when something bad happens, but nobody meant for it to happen,” she explains as I put my gloves on, take her hand, and climb down from the counter. “Sometimes things just happen, and sometimes people aren’t careful.”
“Protean-me aren’t careful,” I agree, reflecting on how I shouldn’t have shown off like that.
“No, you did fine!” she laughs. “You told me to be still! I’m the one that moved!”
I mimic her laughter quietly.
“Can you do that for any sound?” she asks, looking stunned.
“Any sound, yeah,” I answer in her voice.
“Okay, yeah, don’t do that,” she commands. “That’s really creepy.”
“Sorry, creepy,” I answer quietly, sitting on the edge of the counter and dropping her hand.
“No, just…my voice,” she explains quickly, offering her hands again. “Anything else is fine.”
I make the noises I hear from birds in the early light hours. This makes her smile.
Once I’m down from the counter, my ribbon-like, barbed tail just barely not hiding inside my coat, she asks what to do next. Not wanting to use my electrocytes again, I give it some thought, and then ask for her cards.
“Cards,” I say, pointing at her pocket.
“Okay, yeah, sure,” she replies, handing the deck over to me.
I flip through it, pick out three aces, the red one she called “hearts” and the two black ones. I hold up all three cards, then put the two black ones symbol side down, then hold up the heart. I then place it symbol side down, and then mix them up quickly, trying to hide which ones I move where. She seems to have difficulty picking them up from a flat surface, but my claws make it easy.
“Okay, I have a protean teaching me to play three card monte. Alright,” she laughs.
I like it when she laughs.
She studies my hand movements until I’m finished, clearly trying to keep track of the heart. It takes her more than one try to find it, but as the game progresses I make it even harder by reshuffling during every failure.
“That’s hardly fair!” she smiles.
The rain is beginning to let up a little by this time so, regrettably but inevitably, it is time for human-River to begin getting ready to go. She eats some of the flesh-tubes, offering me a few cans for my trouble, eliciting an uncontrolled retching noise.
“Yeah, not everybody likes them,” she muses. “Ordinarily I’d say ‘you don’t have to like them, they just have to keep you alive,’ but you seem to be doing well enough.”
Feeling like I should do something to return the gesture, from the pile of my pretty trinkets, I offer a sliver of bone scored with the first thing I saw upon leaving home: that bright light in the sky.
“Oh, thank you,” she smiles. “You don’t have to…”
I wave her hand away to show that I insist. She tucks it into a pocket where I sense the warmth of her heart, and then looks up at me and takes a deep breath.
“Well, since you’ve been such a gracious host, I feel like I still owe you. So…would you like a name?”
I tilt my head quizzically.
“Name self?” I ask, thinking about what Bismarck told me about names.
“Some people do,” human-River explains. “Some people reach a turning point in their lives and pick something that suits them, but humans are generally named by our parents.”
I think of my parents, flesh and eyes and teeth and tentacle, and wonder if Bismarck spared them. He might have, seeing kinship there, or he might have seen himself as the great savior freeing them from their prisons forever, hard to say.
“Well, I was thinking…if you like it,” human-River continues, “about a man called ‘The Master of Lightning.’ It came to me when you did the hand thing…there’s a famous picture of him sitting in his lab under machines all lit up with electricity, and he’s just…drinking his coffee or reading his newspaper or whatever.”
I don’t know what “coffee” or “newspaper” is. I do know machines, placed near the tanks for the humans to stare at, or in them to keep the water clean. Some didn’t seem to do anything but light up, but the longer the lights were on the happier the humans got.
“His name was ‘Nikola,’ so…” she breathes. “If you like it, I thought it could be your name, too.”
“Nikola,” I repeat, tasting the world. I think of my electrocytes, how the humans seemed to like me the most to make the lights come on, how it feels when I’m hunting, or the rare time I’ve had to use myself to ward off rival males or scavengers.
“Master of Lightning,” I tell her. “Nikola-me likes.”
She laughs softly. “If I ever see you again, I’ll work on teaching you English.”
“Yes, please,” I agree. “Teach English.”
The door to my den explodes open like the tanks when the humans turned on us. Three large humans barge in, brandishing the weapons that spit fire and metal, smelling of fear and rage.
As an automatic response, my electrocytes open. Electricity crackles around me.
“Calm down, Nikola, I got this,” human-River states in a worried tone. “Dad, I…”
The big one in front levels the stick of his weapon at me. I cast my palm at him, sending electricity up it to make him drop it. In error, I take my eyes off the other two, and the one on my right levels his weapon at me.
The last thing I remember seeing is the beautiful shards of glass catching the light as I am thrown through the window.
Chapter four
Proteus-Chapter four
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to put my ribs back together. Learning to live and hunt on land permanently is a difficult task, but the feeling, while familiar, is no less unpleasant.
The neckbones are new, though. I don’t believe I’ve ever had to put those back in alignment.
“He was harmless. We spent the afternoon playing Go Fish!”
“They’re infiltrators, River. That’s what they do. You were being manipulated.”
“No, Dad, when his hood fell off, he—”
“Enough! You’ve had a rough night, you’re tired, and you need to eat something other than canned sausages. Go get some stew, then lie down in your cabin, and you’ll feel better.”
“He was my friend!”
“I’ll make a nice pair of waterproof boots for you to remember it by. Now go.”
I don’t think I want to be boots, but sitting upright now seems unwise. I should wait until there are fewer humans nearby. Since they’re hostile, I feel like I should take River with me when I go, so they don’t hurt her.
The cloth lying over me flies away. I sense a presence nearby, smelling of sweat and skin oil and humanity.
“Damn. Did you bag this yourself?”
“No,” human-River sighs. “Jason did it.”
I hazard to discreetly open my eyes and look through the slats in the box (again, boxes) I’m in, and watch the humans as I am brought away on wheels. It is fascinating, seeing how humans live in their natural environment. They socialize, young ones play, they attend to their clothing in metal buckets.
Humans are social animals, moving in herds, the most basal of which is a family unit consisting of a male, a female, and their offspring. Like any animal, humans need food, water, and familial bonds. Their little melodramas play out before me, mated pairs arguing, young squabbling, but there is also joy, sounds of laughter, smiles of delight, words off affection and instruction.
There is also a kind of stoic fear, given by the few who notice the box, and my still form inside.
“Jason got a protean?” some ask incredulously, staring gape-mouthed.
I hold as still as possible, smelling humans, unfamiliar animals, and a warm smell I can’t identify. I take in what I can from the box, biding my time.
Eventually, I am taken to a shady spot. The four-legged animal at the front of the box is unhooked and lead away. The human that spoke to River comes back, my eyes closed as soon as I sense its approach.
“They said you took a shotgun to the chest,” it muses thoughtfully. “But you don’t look dead at all. Means your hide’s in good condition.”
I am quiet and still as the human paces around the box, mumbling to itself. It rummages through things, making lots of noise. This part of the territory smells like fresh meat and blood, which is enough to make me hungry.
“Should be enough for a nice pair of boots…”
I’m not unfamiliar with the skinning of animals. My own face-covering is made from the flayed hide of one of the tree runners. I do not, however, wish to be a pair of boots, so as soon as the human sounds sufficiently far away and distracted, I use my secondary arms, freed from the confines of my coat, to heave myself upward and slip under the box, clinging to its underbelly.
The humans footsteps approach. I see them, upside-down, pacing the wet grass, standing near the box, silently and still. It shouts several words I don’t know, and then runs at breakneck pace somewhere else.
From here, I don’t know what to do. It’s only a matter of time until someone looks under here, but I don’t know the territory well enough to navigate through it. I need somewhere to run, to hide.
Glancing around under the box for other feet, I lower myself onto my secondary arms, and then roll onto my belly taking another survey. The place they have put me is another box, one soft and made of cloth, casting shadow over hanging pelts and draining animal corpses.
I lick my fangs. Having to regrow bone always makes me hungry.
Unfortunately, I seem to be in the middle of the den. I’m going to have to bypass a lot of humans if I’m going to get out of here not strapped to someone’s feet.
One of my other brothers, who stayed with Bismarck, could change the color and texture of his skin. That would be useful right about now. As it is, I’m a sub-human-sized stormcloud creeping from under the box into the cloth box, hardly discreet.
I resist my hunger, to keep moving and not be distracted by the hanging bodies, the delicious blood draining away into buckets. Why humans would do this, I’m not sure. Serve the blood as a beverage, perhaps?
The tubes of my tongue scrape the roof of my mouth. I’m thirsty, too.
I creep behind and under things, avoiding the touch of the light and staying to the shadows. My mottled gray coloring works best in the dark, which makes me miss the rain and the cloud cover. Fortunately, the humans are busy with their own lives and probably aren’t expecting me to be in the heart of their territory.
Crouched behind a stack of red and white, plastic boxes, I pause to take a breath. I really don’t want to have to fight my way out of here.
A murmur is beginning to move among the adults. A smell of fear is starting to permeate the air. The females are grabbing young and taking them into the boxes, the males are taking up weapons.
They know.
I need a place to go, where they won’t look until nightfall. But how am I supposed to know how these things think?
If the skittishness wasn’t beginning to permeate the herd, this might be fascinating. I have never seen so many humans, packed so tightly. I would love to observe them, the way they live, their habits and behaviors. Unfortunately, humans are even more dangerous in large groups, and any animal protecting young is violently defensive.
Smelling for the places with the fewest human smells, I sneak around as best I can, under boxes, on my belly, behind structures. I pause behind a shelter, scratching uncomfortably at the scabby scarring the weapon left behind, still raw and sore.
A small noise draws my attention. Something small stands little more than a grasp away, a juvenile, barely more than an infant, staring wide-eyed from beneath a mop of golden hair, cropped at the ears.
I don’t know how to speak to it, if it speaks. I don’t know how to beg for silence, and I’m reminded of the small, spotted tree runner with their spikeless mothers I didn’t want to hunt.
The little creature reaches a small hand, pointing a single outstretched finger at me, mouth agape.
I close my eyes and take a breath. The little thing is so vulnerable, all soft skin and dull teeth and no claws, not even any venom glands or electrocytes to protect it. Animals with young so vulnerable should not leave them to wander alone.
I run, bolting on all six limbs, trying to disappear into the next obstacle, the little creature standing still behind me, watching. Heedless of the danger, I throw myself within the nearest box, which smells too much of human sweat and musk than I’d like, but I’m running out of options.
As luck would have it, despite the thick smell of human, the box is empty. It’s full of cloth, clothing and body coverings, dangling from hooks and packed in more boxes and plastic.
This will help. This will be a big help.
At a distance, I pass well enough. Up close, they might notice the knots in my shoulders from my secondary arms, the protruding bumps from my spikes. River didn’t seem to expect me to be a protean, which is a good trait for me to exploit, if I can. Camouflage, the way the corals looked like brightly-colored rocks, the way the spots on the small tree runners blended them into the trees.
With luck, I can use these to walk right out of the den. As long as I don’t get too close to them, I should be able to pass unnoticed. I’ll have to migrate again, leave my pretty things and bone fragments and hides behind, but I’ve started out with less before.
I start digging through the soft fabrics, looking for things that fit or can adapt. Humans have only four limbs and flat feet, which makes it difficult to use their clothing without some creative modification. The tough, blue material is nice because it’s sturdy, but it’s also difficult to tear, making it equally suitable to cover my spikes as it is difficult to accommodate my ankles. Shoes are probably out of the question.
There is a noise at the door, a soft clicking. Someone is approaching.
I dive behind the racks of clothing, crouching behind boxes. The figure moves about, carrying a large box, which it sets down on another stack of boxes, and begins drawing out white, wide-based hooks and spearing torso coverings onto them.
I wait, watching patiently. This could take awhile, and the longer they’re in here, the more likely they are to notice. There isn’t enough space for me to slink back to the door unseen. I’m going to have to make a choice here.
With its back to me, I step over the boxes I’m behind, creeping like the eight-legged string dancers, approaching the person. My primary hands cover the mouth, leaving the nose free for breathing, my secondary around the waist. Hunting tendrils restrain the arms and legs at the wrists and ankles.
I smell fear, and I’m reminded of my hunger. The wounds in my chest are sensitive and burn slightly against the fabric of the human’s coat, reminding me why I’m hungry despite a good kill not so long ago.
The human’s feet are above the ground, shoes dangling. It kicks and struggles, but can’t move much, held in place by me. It squeaks and whimpers, unintelligible noises dying inside the mouth.
A drill from a tendril to the back of the skull, maybe a good twist to the neck. It won’t suffer, and it won’t make enough noise to attract any more.
The white spots and stripes along my sides begin to pulse with light, an affect of the shadows, but also a remnant of ancient hunting tactics that don’t know I live on land now.
The six slit nostrils at the end of my snout open, taking in the smell, of fear, of sweat, of recent rain and soil and open air and thick forests.
My tendrils slacken, the tight grip around the waist easing up. I lean in close, behind the ear, and whisper one of the very few human words I know.
“River?”
Chapter five
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to put my ribs back together. Learning to live and hunt on land permanently is a difficult task, but the feeling, while familiar, is no less unpleasant.
The neckbones are new, though. I don’t believe I’ve ever had to put those back in alignment.
“He was harmless. We spent the afternoon playing Go Fish!”
“They’re infiltrators, River. That’s what they do. You were being manipulated.”
“No, Dad, when his hood fell off, he—”
“Enough! You’ve had a rough night, you’re tired, and you need to eat something other than canned sausages. Go get some stew, then lie down in your cabin, and you’ll feel better.”
“He was my friend!”
“I’ll make a nice pair of waterproof boots for you to remember it by. Now go.”
I don’t think I want to be boots, but sitting upright now seems unwise. I should wait until there are fewer humans nearby. Since they’re hostile, I feel like I should take River with me when I go, so they don’t hurt her.
The cloth lying over me flies away. I sense a presence nearby, smelling of sweat and skin oil and humanity.
“Damn. Did you bag this yourself?”
“No,” human-River sighs. “Jason did it.”
I hazard to discreetly open my eyes and look through the slats in the box (again, boxes) I’m in, and watch the humans as I am brought away on wheels. It is fascinating, seeing how humans live in their natural environment. They socialize, young ones play, they attend to their clothing in metal buckets.
Humans are social animals, moving in herds, the most basal of which is a family unit consisting of a male, a female, and their offspring. Like any animal, humans need food, water, and familial bonds. Their little melodramas play out before me, mated pairs arguing, young squabbling, but there is also joy, sounds of laughter, smiles of delight, words off affection and instruction.
There is also a kind of stoic fear, given by the few who notice the box, and my still form inside.
“Jason got a protean?” some ask incredulously, staring gape-mouthed.
I hold as still as possible, smelling humans, unfamiliar animals, and a warm smell I can’t identify. I take in what I can from the box, biding my time.
Eventually, I am taken to a shady spot. The four-legged animal at the front of the box is unhooked and lead away. The human that spoke to River comes back, my eyes closed as soon as I sense its approach.
“They said you took a shotgun to the chest,” it muses thoughtfully. “But you don’t look dead at all. Means your hide’s in good condition.”
I am quiet and still as the human paces around the box, mumbling to itself. It rummages through things, making lots of noise. This part of the territory smells like fresh meat and blood, which is enough to make me hungry.
“Should be enough for a nice pair of boots…”
I’m not unfamiliar with the skinning of animals. My own face-covering is made from the flayed hide of one of the tree runners. I do not, however, wish to be a pair of boots, so as soon as the human sounds sufficiently far away and distracted, I use my secondary arms, freed from the confines of my coat, to heave myself upward and slip under the box, clinging to its underbelly.
The humans footsteps approach. I see them, upside-down, pacing the wet grass, standing near the box, silently and still. It shouts several words I don’t know, and then runs at breakneck pace somewhere else.
From here, I don’t know what to do. It’s only a matter of time until someone looks under here, but I don’t know the territory well enough to navigate through it. I need somewhere to run, to hide.
Glancing around under the box for other feet, I lower myself onto my secondary arms, and then roll onto my belly taking another survey. The place they have put me is another box, one soft and made of cloth, casting shadow over hanging pelts and draining animal corpses.
I lick my fangs. Having to regrow bone always makes me hungry.
Unfortunately, I seem to be in the middle of the den. I’m going to have to bypass a lot of humans if I’m going to get out of here not strapped to someone’s feet.
One of my other brothers, who stayed with Bismarck, could change the color and texture of his skin. That would be useful right about now. As it is, I’m a sub-human-sized stormcloud creeping from under the box into the cloth box, hardly discreet.
I resist my hunger, to keep moving and not be distracted by the hanging bodies, the delicious blood draining away into buckets. Why humans would do this, I’m not sure. Serve the blood as a beverage, perhaps?
The tubes of my tongue scrape the roof of my mouth. I’m thirsty, too.
I creep behind and under things, avoiding the touch of the light and staying to the shadows. My mottled gray coloring works best in the dark, which makes me miss the rain and the cloud cover. Fortunately, the humans are busy with their own lives and probably aren’t expecting me to be in the heart of their territory.
Crouched behind a stack of red and white, plastic boxes, I pause to take a breath. I really don’t want to have to fight my way out of here.
A murmur is beginning to move among the adults. A smell of fear is starting to permeate the air. The females are grabbing young and taking them into the boxes, the males are taking up weapons.
They know.
I need a place to go, where they won’t look until nightfall. But how am I supposed to know how these things think?
If the skittishness wasn’t beginning to permeate the herd, this might be fascinating. I have never seen so many humans, packed so tightly. I would love to observe them, the way they live, their habits and behaviors. Unfortunately, humans are even more dangerous in large groups, and any animal protecting young is violently defensive.
Smelling for the places with the fewest human smells, I sneak around as best I can, under boxes, on my belly, behind structures. I pause behind a shelter, scratching uncomfortably at the scabby scarring the weapon left behind, still raw and sore.
A small noise draws my attention. Something small stands little more than a grasp away, a juvenile, barely more than an infant, staring wide-eyed from beneath a mop of golden hair, cropped at the ears.
I don’t know how to speak to it, if it speaks. I don’t know how to beg for silence, and I’m reminded of the small, spotted tree runner with their spikeless mothers I didn’t want to hunt.
The little creature reaches a small hand, pointing a single outstretched finger at me, mouth agape.
I close my eyes and take a breath. The little thing is so vulnerable, all soft skin and dull teeth and no claws, not even any venom glands or electrocytes to protect it. Animals with young so vulnerable should not leave them to wander alone.
I run, bolting on all six limbs, trying to disappear into the next obstacle, the little creature standing still behind me, watching. Heedless of the danger, I throw myself within the nearest box, which smells too much of human sweat and musk than I’d like, but I’m running out of options.
As luck would have it, despite the thick smell of human, the box is empty. It’s full of cloth, clothing and body coverings, dangling from hooks and packed in more boxes and plastic.
This will help. This will be a big help.
At a distance, I pass well enough. Up close, they might notice the knots in my shoulders from my secondary arms, the protruding bumps from my spikes. River didn’t seem to expect me to be a protean, which is a good trait for me to exploit, if I can. Camouflage, the way the corals looked like brightly-colored rocks, the way the spots on the small tree runners blended them into the trees.
With luck, I can use these to walk right out of the den. As long as I don’t get too close to them, I should be able to pass unnoticed. I’ll have to migrate again, leave my pretty things and bone fragments and hides behind, but I’ve started out with less before.
I start digging through the soft fabrics, looking for things that fit or can adapt. Humans have only four limbs and flat feet, which makes it difficult to use their clothing without some creative modification. The tough, blue material is nice because it’s sturdy, but it’s also difficult to tear, making it equally suitable to cover my spikes as it is difficult to accommodate my ankles. Shoes are probably out of the question.
There is a noise at the door, a soft clicking. Someone is approaching.
I dive behind the racks of clothing, crouching behind boxes. The figure moves about, carrying a large box, which it sets down on another stack of boxes, and begins drawing out white, wide-based hooks and spearing torso coverings onto them.
I wait, watching patiently. This could take awhile, and the longer they’re in here, the more likely they are to notice. There isn’t enough space for me to slink back to the door unseen. I’m going to have to make a choice here.
With its back to me, I step over the boxes I’m behind, creeping like the eight-legged string dancers, approaching the person. My primary hands cover the mouth, leaving the nose free for breathing, my secondary around the waist. Hunting tendrils restrain the arms and legs at the wrists and ankles.
I smell fear, and I’m reminded of my hunger. The wounds in my chest are sensitive and burn slightly against the fabric of the human’s coat, reminding me why I’m hungry despite a good kill not so long ago.
The human’s feet are above the ground, shoes dangling. It kicks and struggles, but can’t move much, held in place by me. It squeaks and whimpers, unintelligible noises dying inside the mouth.
A drill from a tendril to the back of the skull, maybe a good twist to the neck. It won’t suffer, and it won’t make enough noise to attract any more.
The white spots and stripes along my sides begin to pulse with light, an affect of the shadows, but also a remnant of ancient hunting tactics that don’t know I live on land now.
The six slit nostrils at the end of my snout open, taking in the smell, of fear, of sweat, of recent rain and soil and open air and thick forests.
My tendrils slacken, the tight grip around the waist easing up. I lean in close, behind the ear, and whisper one of the very few human words I know.
“River?”
Chapter five
Proteus-Chapter five
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Human-River gapes as I dig through the hanging clothes.
“Nikola? You’re alive!” she gasps.
I don’t want to tell her about the proper way to kill us, about the one brother that died from a wound to the right spot at the back of the head, but how the rest of my siblings died when a sickness took them after the injury, or they couldn’t eat enough to heal properly.
River has been kind and fair, but I won’t tell her that.
“Protean,” I remind her, checking a shirt for how well the shoulders stretch.
“But you’re dead!”
“Protean.”
“But you weren’t breathing!”
“Protean!”
“He double tapped!”
“PROTEAN!” I shout, turned on her, secondary arms and hunting tendrils raised defensively.
She backs away, hand over her mouth, shaking slightly. My mandibles are open, revealing the sharp, squid-eater’s teeth along my lower palate, my figure hunched, spiked tail lashing the air. Her smell of fear spikes.
A sickishness turns my stomach. I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.
I go back to the racks of clothing, holding up a shirt with no sleeves speculative.
“You’re…you’re…you should definitely be wearing pants!” she mumbles, turning sideways and holding a hand at her eyes, like shielding from rain sideways.
I cock my head curiously. I didn’t need clothing until I needed to keep the cold away, or disguise myself, but humans, possibly derived from warmer climates, always seem to. The attendants at home always wore extra layers, namely a thin, white coat that would never insulate heat in any circumstances, white gloves, a blue face-hider and transparent eye-shields.
Diving into one of the boxes, she triumphantly throws an oversized pair of baggy, tough blue pants at me, which have enough room to accommodate my raised heels and clawed feet. The waistline rubs against my tail, fixed with a flick of my secondary claws, tearing open the seam so I can fit.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, tension in her stance.
“Leaving,” I answer simply, sorting through the racks with all four hands, hunting tendrils receded.
“No, I mean…” She shakes her head and sighs, then stares at the exposed flesh of my chest. “Sorry…he…um…he thought he was protecting me.”
Familial protection is common among animals. This doesn’t surprise me, and I can’t rightly be angry about it. How would I have reacted, if I had found one of my smaller siblings, in the company of an armed human?
Still, my ribs hurt and the healing skin across my chest itches.
“Here, let me help,” she states, approaching me from behind, looking up at the racks.
She reaches up to grab at the hooks, then pulls away, a look of vacancy in her eyes, which linger on my spine and shoulders. She stares from the greater spikes on my shoulders and hips, poking through the material in my pants, to the way my secondary arms connect seamlessly to my shoulders. A warm, soft-skinned hand is placed against the thicknesses where my tendrils sleep, almost sore from unfamiliarity with touch.
“Diamondback,” she mumbles softly, a string of syllables I can’t discern.
I purr softly and she seems to snap back to herself.
“Sorry, sorry, it’s just…” She makes a grunting noise in the back of her throat, and takes a hook from the rack and shows it to me, made from a thinner version of the material in my pants, with buttons down the front.
“I think you can get…one set through here, and then…”
I take the shirt from her and put it on, rotating my secondary arms beneath my primaries. I can’t button it properly like this, and it’s a bit tight with my secondaries folded against my back, but it will do.
“That works, too,” she nods, then goes back to her searching. “A hoodie? If you don’t need your extra arms…all the good stuff has been passed out already…”
Eventually she manages to gather enough to hide my extra arms and numerous spikes (likely a leftover from the tree runners), good enough to conceal my form but hardly practical for survival.
“I think we can get you to my wagon, and then you can lay low there until nightfall,” she explains, pulling the hood of a greenish intermediary between shirt and coat over my horns. Her eyes linger on my mandibles, twitching with nervousness rhythmically against my lower palate.
“Sorry scary,” I tell her consolingly, trying not to spook her, since humans frighten easily.
“It’s okay,” she replies evenly, pulling a cloth over my snout and then tightening a string beneath my chin to hold everything in place. “You’re in an unfamiliar place and you’re hurt. It’s okay to be afraid.”
I tilt my head in confusion, but she’s already checking outside the door.
“Alright, follow me, stay close, and don’t speak to anyone,” she orders, waving for me to follow.
It’s a painstaking crawl through the herd to get to her shelter. Humans don’t climb or leap, so direct paths are often beyond them, made all the more winding because she is deliberately avoiding her pack.
I jump, my hunting tendrils straining against the disguise, when someone shouts across the thoroughfare at us.
“You two better get inside! There’s a protean loose!”
“Thanks! We’re on it!” human-River smiles, her hand raised high as some sort of signal.
“You did good,” she whispers soothingly, patting my left hand, her eyes flickering over where my tendrils bulged through the fabric. I seem to have popped some seams.
Silently, I keep following her, until we reach a snubbed, yellow vehicle with black stripes and exposed rust. The front end has been hollowed out and replaced with a bench, and the windows along the front and sides covered.
She ushers me inside, into the shadows. This place smells like her, her space, her den. There isn’t much room, but it feels cozy, all she needs contained inside this little room.
“Over here,” she beckons, squeezing past me. At the back, there is a raised platform, layered with blankets and cushions, and she crawls over it to pull a shade over the window, balanced on her knees, her coat along her form.
“You can rest here,” she explains, hands over her head on a handle at the ceiling. “Keep the shutters closed and no one should see you.”
I climb into the nest that smells like her, a bit too high for my comfort, but soft and peaceful, like the incubator from the time before the tanks.
“I’m going to go get you some food,” she continues, pulling on the handle, revealing a metal shutter that encloses the nest. “Don’t open the doors or windows, don’t answer if anyone knocks.”
When she’s sure I’m in place, she pulls the shutter down, sending me into deeper shadows. My chest itches, sore under the knitting skin, and my ribs hurt. My tail flops against the footwall, and I am surprisingly at peace.
In the heart of a herd of feral humans.
My whole body tenses, but I close my eyes and take a deep breath, thinking of the smell of trees and fresh blood and distant tree runners. Until nightfall, patience.
***
The shutter opens, and my tendrils are at the neck of something warm that moves in the shadows.
“It’s me, Niko,” human-River pleads, her voice cutting through my dreams.
I pull my tendrils apologetically back inside my disguise. They came out of my sleeves, so didn’t do too much damage, which would be a disappointment, since River was so kind to offer.
I smell something warm, organic, pleasing but unfamiliar. River rubs at her neck, and I hope she doesn’t bruise.
“Wow, jumpy,” she muses, sitting a bowl of…something in front of me.
“Sorry scary,” I tell her, regretfully, feeling…grimy.
Ignoring me, she turns to the bowl. “Venison stew. It’s not the best…sorry about that.”
I pick up the bowl experimentally, finding it warm to the touch, but not alive-warm. It’s full of a brownish fluid that isn’t blood, but smells organic and meaty, with chunks of brown, discs of orange, and parabolas of green. My six nostrils take in the steam, which is pleasant enough, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.
“What’s wrong?” River asks, sounding alarmed.
I don’t have the words to answer, but I hold up the bowl and do my best with, “Warm?”
“It’s…stew. Have you never had stew before?”
I look at her blankly.
“Um…it’s venison—deer meat—put in a pot with water and vegetables, then cooked over a fire.”
I tilt my head to one side.
“It’s good. Sort of. Try it.”
She hands me a scoop-shaped utensil, expecting me to do something with it, and then watches me stare at the bowl, which I sniff again, before sticking the four tubes of my tongue into the fluid and take a hesitant sip.
It’s…salty. It tastes like meat, but…not. There’s a bitterness that might come from exposure to fire, but a spiciness that doesn’t come naturally to animal muscle, and some things that might be plants.
River looks a little pale, staring at my tongue with wide eyes and twisted mouth.
I retract my tongue back into my mouth and wipe my snout with the back of my sleeve.
“Is scary?” I ask cautiously, having trouble looking her in the eye.
“C-can I see it?” she asks quietly.
Perplexed, I open my mouth wide, opening my mandibles and dropping my lower palate, then stick out my prehensile tongue, split four ways at the end, each with a circular, tooth-lined opening, good for sucking blood.
“It’s like you have a lamprey hydra living in your mouth,” she blurts, making a noise that might have been a giggle.
“Can you taste with it? Them?”
“Taste,” I repeat, not knowing the word.
I pull my tongue back in, putting the bowl aside, still holding the metal scoop, and covering my snout with cloths. Humans are skittish and jumpy, and it wouldn’t do to frighten her in an enclosed space.
“Don’t like it?” she asks, looking down at the bowl. “I don’t blame you. Wilma’s…not a good cook.”
Self-consciously, I hold the back of my hand over my snout, still holding the scoop.
“Well, pull up your shirt, let me get a look at your chest,” she sighs, setting a white box (why all the boxes?) onto the nest and opening it up.
Obediently, I pull the fabric up over my chest and to just under my collarbone, exposing the scarred, sensitive flesh, thin and raw under newly-forming skin.
“You look like you just skinned your knee instead of got shot at point-blank,” River muses, rubbing something synthetic and sticky onto the tender skin, making me wince. “It might sting a little, but this’ll help prevent infection and scarring.”
When she’s done, she puts the little white tube back in the box, and waves at me to put my disguise back down.
“And you just…shake it off?” she asks. “Just get back up again after a few hours?”
“Protean,” I remind her amiably, looking at the bowl and remembering how hungry I am.
“Hmm, proteans,” she smiles. “Feared throughout the land, shapeshifting abominations that can call lightning from the sky, unafraid of death, and masters of Go Fish.”
My mandibles flex slightly, confused at her unfamiliar words.
“Thank you…um…I mean…my brother…” she mumbles. “If I was minding my own business playing cards, and someone I didn’t know put a hole in my chest and blew out my living room window, I’d be out for blood. So, um…thanks for not…hunting him.”
I tilt my head again, wishing I knew more about how humans speak. The ones at home rarely spoke directly to us, and it was Bismarck that was the best and watching and listening. This is one of very few times I’ve wished I was more like my brother, who always seemed to know what the humans were saying or doing.
I glance again at the bowl, feeling the emptiness inside. I’ve had to regrow a lot of flesh and bone, so hunger is a given, but if River is put off my by mouth and tongue, then I wouldn’t want to scare her in her den. A frightened human is unpredictable.
“I think I promised you English lessons,” she smiles, taking a seat on a tall box across from me. “Um…I don’t know where to start. I guess I could read to you?”
Before I can come up with a sufficient answer, there is a knock on the entrance. Before my tendrils can even respond, River has pushed me back into the nest, pulling down the shutter.
“In a minute!” she calls, tugging hard where the shutter won’t budge.
I hear the entry grind open, and the heavy footsteps of a male human.
“Get your gun and go get to the mess,” the familiar voice of the older one that came for River barks.
River sighs. “Is it the protean again? I’m telling you, if Mitch didn’t steal the carcass, the poor thing probably wandered off to die.”
“Ain’t the protean,” he growls. “We’re under attack.”
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Human-River gapes as I dig through the hanging clothes.
“Nikola? You’re alive!” she gasps.
I don’t want to tell her about the proper way to kill us, about the one brother that died from a wound to the right spot at the back of the head, but how the rest of my siblings died when a sickness took them after the injury, or they couldn’t eat enough to heal properly.
River has been kind and fair, but I won’t tell her that.
“Protean,” I remind her, checking a shirt for how well the shoulders stretch.
“But you’re dead!”
“Protean.”
“But you weren’t breathing!”
“Protean!”
“He double tapped!”
“PROTEAN!” I shout, turned on her, secondary arms and hunting tendrils raised defensively.
She backs away, hand over her mouth, shaking slightly. My mandibles are open, revealing the sharp, squid-eater’s teeth along my lower palate, my figure hunched, spiked tail lashing the air. Her smell of fear spikes.
A sickishness turns my stomach. I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.
I go back to the racks of clothing, holding up a shirt with no sleeves speculative.
“You’re…you’re…you should definitely be wearing pants!” she mumbles, turning sideways and holding a hand at her eyes, like shielding from rain sideways.
I cock my head curiously. I didn’t need clothing until I needed to keep the cold away, or disguise myself, but humans, possibly derived from warmer climates, always seem to. The attendants at home always wore extra layers, namely a thin, white coat that would never insulate heat in any circumstances, white gloves, a blue face-hider and transparent eye-shields.
Diving into one of the boxes, she triumphantly throws an oversized pair of baggy, tough blue pants at me, which have enough room to accommodate my raised heels and clawed feet. The waistline rubs against my tail, fixed with a flick of my secondary claws, tearing open the seam so I can fit.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, tension in her stance.
“Leaving,” I answer simply, sorting through the racks with all four hands, hunting tendrils receded.
“No, I mean…” She shakes her head and sighs, then stares at the exposed flesh of my chest. “Sorry…he…um…he thought he was protecting me.”
Familial protection is common among animals. This doesn’t surprise me, and I can’t rightly be angry about it. How would I have reacted, if I had found one of my smaller siblings, in the company of an armed human?
Still, my ribs hurt and the healing skin across my chest itches.
“Here, let me help,” she states, approaching me from behind, looking up at the racks.
She reaches up to grab at the hooks, then pulls away, a look of vacancy in her eyes, which linger on my spine and shoulders. She stares from the greater spikes on my shoulders and hips, poking through the material in my pants, to the way my secondary arms connect seamlessly to my shoulders. A warm, soft-skinned hand is placed against the thicknesses where my tendrils sleep, almost sore from unfamiliarity with touch.
“Diamondback,” she mumbles softly, a string of syllables I can’t discern.
I purr softly and she seems to snap back to herself.
“Sorry, sorry, it’s just…” She makes a grunting noise in the back of her throat, and takes a hook from the rack and shows it to me, made from a thinner version of the material in my pants, with buttons down the front.
“I think you can get…one set through here, and then…”
I take the shirt from her and put it on, rotating my secondary arms beneath my primaries. I can’t button it properly like this, and it’s a bit tight with my secondaries folded against my back, but it will do.
“That works, too,” she nods, then goes back to her searching. “A hoodie? If you don’t need your extra arms…all the good stuff has been passed out already…”
Eventually she manages to gather enough to hide my extra arms and numerous spikes (likely a leftover from the tree runners), good enough to conceal my form but hardly practical for survival.
“I think we can get you to my wagon, and then you can lay low there until nightfall,” she explains, pulling the hood of a greenish intermediary between shirt and coat over my horns. Her eyes linger on my mandibles, twitching with nervousness rhythmically against my lower palate.
“Sorry scary,” I tell her consolingly, trying not to spook her, since humans frighten easily.
“It’s okay,” she replies evenly, pulling a cloth over my snout and then tightening a string beneath my chin to hold everything in place. “You’re in an unfamiliar place and you’re hurt. It’s okay to be afraid.”
I tilt my head in confusion, but she’s already checking outside the door.
“Alright, follow me, stay close, and don’t speak to anyone,” she orders, waving for me to follow.
It’s a painstaking crawl through the herd to get to her shelter. Humans don’t climb or leap, so direct paths are often beyond them, made all the more winding because she is deliberately avoiding her pack.
I jump, my hunting tendrils straining against the disguise, when someone shouts across the thoroughfare at us.
“You two better get inside! There’s a protean loose!”
“Thanks! We’re on it!” human-River smiles, her hand raised high as some sort of signal.
“You did good,” she whispers soothingly, patting my left hand, her eyes flickering over where my tendrils bulged through the fabric. I seem to have popped some seams.
Silently, I keep following her, until we reach a snubbed, yellow vehicle with black stripes and exposed rust. The front end has been hollowed out and replaced with a bench, and the windows along the front and sides covered.
She ushers me inside, into the shadows. This place smells like her, her space, her den. There isn’t much room, but it feels cozy, all she needs contained inside this little room.
“Over here,” she beckons, squeezing past me. At the back, there is a raised platform, layered with blankets and cushions, and she crawls over it to pull a shade over the window, balanced on her knees, her coat along her form.
“You can rest here,” she explains, hands over her head on a handle at the ceiling. “Keep the shutters closed and no one should see you.”
I climb into the nest that smells like her, a bit too high for my comfort, but soft and peaceful, like the incubator from the time before the tanks.
“I’m going to go get you some food,” she continues, pulling on the handle, revealing a metal shutter that encloses the nest. “Don’t open the doors or windows, don’t answer if anyone knocks.”
When she’s sure I’m in place, she pulls the shutter down, sending me into deeper shadows. My chest itches, sore under the knitting skin, and my ribs hurt. My tail flops against the footwall, and I am surprisingly at peace.
In the heart of a herd of feral humans.
My whole body tenses, but I close my eyes and take a deep breath, thinking of the smell of trees and fresh blood and distant tree runners. Until nightfall, patience.
***
The shutter opens, and my tendrils are at the neck of something warm that moves in the shadows.
“It’s me, Niko,” human-River pleads, her voice cutting through my dreams.
I pull my tendrils apologetically back inside my disguise. They came out of my sleeves, so didn’t do too much damage, which would be a disappointment, since River was so kind to offer.
I smell something warm, organic, pleasing but unfamiliar. River rubs at her neck, and I hope she doesn’t bruise.
“Wow, jumpy,” she muses, sitting a bowl of…something in front of me.
“Sorry scary,” I tell her, regretfully, feeling…grimy.
Ignoring me, she turns to the bowl. “Venison stew. It’s not the best…sorry about that.”
I pick up the bowl experimentally, finding it warm to the touch, but not alive-warm. It’s full of a brownish fluid that isn’t blood, but smells organic and meaty, with chunks of brown, discs of orange, and parabolas of green. My six nostrils take in the steam, which is pleasant enough, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.
“What’s wrong?” River asks, sounding alarmed.
I don’t have the words to answer, but I hold up the bowl and do my best with, “Warm?”
“It’s…stew. Have you never had stew before?”
I look at her blankly.
“Um…it’s venison—deer meat—put in a pot with water and vegetables, then cooked over a fire.”
I tilt my head to one side.
“It’s good. Sort of. Try it.”
She hands me a scoop-shaped utensil, expecting me to do something with it, and then watches me stare at the bowl, which I sniff again, before sticking the four tubes of my tongue into the fluid and take a hesitant sip.
It’s…salty. It tastes like meat, but…not. There’s a bitterness that might come from exposure to fire, but a spiciness that doesn’t come naturally to animal muscle, and some things that might be plants.
River looks a little pale, staring at my tongue with wide eyes and twisted mouth.
I retract my tongue back into my mouth and wipe my snout with the back of my sleeve.
“Is scary?” I ask cautiously, having trouble looking her in the eye.
“C-can I see it?” she asks quietly.
Perplexed, I open my mouth wide, opening my mandibles and dropping my lower palate, then stick out my prehensile tongue, split four ways at the end, each with a circular, tooth-lined opening, good for sucking blood.
“It’s like you have a lamprey hydra living in your mouth,” she blurts, making a noise that might have been a giggle.
“Can you taste with it? Them?”
“Taste,” I repeat, not knowing the word.
I pull my tongue back in, putting the bowl aside, still holding the metal scoop, and covering my snout with cloths. Humans are skittish and jumpy, and it wouldn’t do to frighten her in an enclosed space.
“Don’t like it?” she asks, looking down at the bowl. “I don’t blame you. Wilma’s…not a good cook.”
Self-consciously, I hold the back of my hand over my snout, still holding the scoop.
“Well, pull up your shirt, let me get a look at your chest,” she sighs, setting a white box (why all the boxes?) onto the nest and opening it up.
Obediently, I pull the fabric up over my chest and to just under my collarbone, exposing the scarred, sensitive flesh, thin and raw under newly-forming skin.
“You look like you just skinned your knee instead of got shot at point-blank,” River muses, rubbing something synthetic and sticky onto the tender skin, making me wince. “It might sting a little, but this’ll help prevent infection and scarring.”
When she’s done, she puts the little white tube back in the box, and waves at me to put my disguise back down.
“And you just…shake it off?” she asks. “Just get back up again after a few hours?”
“Protean,” I remind her amiably, looking at the bowl and remembering how hungry I am.
“Hmm, proteans,” she smiles. “Feared throughout the land, shapeshifting abominations that can call lightning from the sky, unafraid of death, and masters of Go Fish.”
My mandibles flex slightly, confused at her unfamiliar words.
“Thank you…um…I mean…my brother…” she mumbles. “If I was minding my own business playing cards, and someone I didn’t know put a hole in my chest and blew out my living room window, I’d be out for blood. So, um…thanks for not…hunting him.”
I tilt my head again, wishing I knew more about how humans speak. The ones at home rarely spoke directly to us, and it was Bismarck that was the best and watching and listening. This is one of very few times I’ve wished I was more like my brother, who always seemed to know what the humans were saying or doing.
I glance again at the bowl, feeling the emptiness inside. I’ve had to regrow a lot of flesh and bone, so hunger is a given, but if River is put off my by mouth and tongue, then I wouldn’t want to scare her in her den. A frightened human is unpredictable.
“I think I promised you English lessons,” she smiles, taking a seat on a tall box across from me. “Um…I don’t know where to start. I guess I could read to you?”
Before I can come up with a sufficient answer, there is a knock on the entrance. Before my tendrils can even respond, River has pushed me back into the nest, pulling down the shutter.
“In a minute!” she calls, tugging hard where the shutter won’t budge.
I hear the entry grind open, and the heavy footsteps of a male human.
“Get your gun and go get to the mess,” the familiar voice of the older one that came for River barks.
River sighs. “Is it the protean again? I’m telling you, if Mitch didn’t steal the carcass, the poor thing probably wandered off to die.”
“Ain’t the protean,” he growls. “We’re under attack.”
