10010 words, novelette
Symbiotic
El detonated the EMP against the feeder’s sensor, a delicate organ that he had only seen in fragments, suspended in cytology slides the shape of dominoes.
The lab just days ago had been inundated with new specimens, washed up on the long white beaches after the storm. The bodies had rotted so quickly that they had barely gathered enough samples. There was the stench, first of all, like old seaweed and ammonia, and the way the skins had fallen apart when they tried to carry them away on cots. As they doused the stretchers with brine, A.A. had suggested that they conserve the sensors alone. El had sensed his distaste for the operation through the neural link that tethered them both: the slight revulsion behind the call for efficiency. It was a squeamishness that never failed to make El laugh. Even then, A.A. had scowled back at him, a distinct tint of disapproval that had colored the tether like dye in water.
In the end El had plucked the sensors from the heads of the creatures and immersed them in bags of saline. The lab results suggested the presence of an electromagnetic feedback loop for detection. More of the samples were parasitized specimens than not, and were more fungus than fish. He and A.A. had watched the modeling video for the altered sensor together in their bunk a few nights ago. They had pointed out discrepancies in neural structure for hours, arguing with each other over every labeled particle on the cell wall reconstruction.
Now, two days later, with the ocean and the hold and the dead ship around him, that was the thought that came to El. It was the equilibrium that mattered. The whole of them, or the one. And he had pulled the detonator from his suit.
The feeder was turned away from him, caressing the eggs that hung in strings from the ceiling of the cargo hold. A SYMBIOTIC partner by training, El had spent a summer on the Mater base working on a series of painted vignettes. The lead artist, Willa, had been trained in impressionism, then in neural coordination. She wore glasses heavy enough that they had left almost permanent impressions on the bridge of her nose, which she seemed not to mind, or perhaps not to notice.
Her attention to detail was otherwise punitive. They had run through the entire collection of old tapes in storage, picking out reels that had captured, in a synaptic second, what life had been like so long ago. Brassy savanna. Clouds of blue powder over faces, festivals, dances, sticks dangling from mouths that blew persisting clouds of smoke, and the people. So many separate people. Lulled to imagination, El would always startle when she’d pause the videos to squint close at the screen. She used her left hand to sketch. Then her right. Then both together, drawing figures from corner to corner. El had attempted to mimic her, only to find himself frozen. Where to start? Right or left? Willa had let him doodle around, before taking the pen from his grip.
“Let the pen tell you to decide,” she said.
The pen in his hand; the release on the detonator. The creature was turning around, a limb still curled around a string of luminous eggs. Its fins had furled up over its trunk, and he could almost imagine its hackles rising. God. The crew. The base. A.A. would have to guess at what happened. There would only be so much evidence left in the diving suit. The emergency ping would go off. The comm in El’s helmet whispered: Large creature ahead. Origin: Hadal depth. CAUTION. CAUTION. CAUTION. This would finally be it, then. For them. For him. His head-torch flickered in the gloom, and the feeder moved around him, towards him: the trunk of the mantle a slow undulation in the cargo hold, the sensory feelers reaching blindly forwards, as if in communion. The feeder had no eyes. It did not see. Then the membrane lighted against his arm like a touch and El let go of the release and the EMP erupted like an explosion across the water.
Astonishing, the depths of human recall.
The detonation of the EMP grenade produced an electrical field with a strength of about 125.3 Volts per meter, traveling in peaks and troughs that separated themselves, then grew wide. Baseline factors: how an EMP attenuates with distance, and how far away the feeder’s sensors had been to the grenade, and how close to El. Contraction, discomfort, mild neurological effects—in all of this they were equal. But focus now. Consider the neural feedback mechanism core to both organisms. The electroreceptors of the feeder were attuned to detect gentle fields of nano-volts over a moderate distance—faint signals produced by dying, or disoriented creatures—with a sensitivity within the same order of magnitude as the neural tether embedded in El’s cortex and cerebellum. That was how it had found him. That was how he and A.A. had paired with each other. Very well—compatibility considered. Considered, also: how this value of sensitivity was far exceeded by the magnitude of the EMP blast that the grenade unleashed. The difference—how much was it? He remembered: a factor of ten billion.
The feeder’s sensors spasmed. Its body convulsed, then went loose. El had half-expected a crackle of lightning, like one of the cartoons on the tapes, followed by the snap-snap-snap of electricity—the bones showing through the flesh—but no. The feeder collapsed in on itself, deflating like a great balloon. Its colorless mantle turned a livid red, and its bulk floated to the top of the hold, the gentle ascent arrested by the ceiling above it. It hung among its eggs without moving. It made no sound.
The detonator fell from El’s hand and sank to the bottom of the hold. His suit sputtered. Around him, the broken ship seemed to move—in and out, vision tests, neurology tests, the physician on the base moving the marker back and forth. Can you see this? Can you feel this? El, with his eyes closed, A.A. next to him, peevish. Yes. Of course, El said. What color is that?
His breathing rattled through the mask. No emergency air supply flooded in. The bubbles left the mouthpiece of his suit in a frothing stream, burning through oxygen, but El could not slow his gasps. The EMP blast had shattered the neural tether—the shock flashing like lightning around the thread-like wires in the cortex, the hippocampus, the guilty and yielding medulla. The connection was dead. He had no impulse to revive it. He was operating on instinct alone, like a goby fish, or a Portuguese man-o-war.
El had grown up on The Prodigal Son, an off-shoot generation ship specialized for protection and preservation, before being shunted off to the SYMBIOTIC program.
How he had fought the assignment. How could anyone bear to leave? The galleries like antiquated wings, the detritus of plates, spoons goblets; paintings, figurines, daguerreotypes; records, recordings, vinyl; pictures, photographs, and his mother, bending over the vases, precious ceramic and porcelain, cleaning the surfaces with a toothbrush, teasing out the dust hidden beneath. The Prodigal Son revolved in the outer orbit—they had to work with lamps, or by the shortened day.
One day, a scientist came to port. He was dressed in white as well—a short coat that only reached to where his fingers brushed at his sides. They had run tests on everyone in the ship, and El, at age fourteen, had walked into the clinic, itching at the interruption to his day. The doctor took samples of his spinal fluid. Examinations in the clinic. Questions on his psychological health. The scanner slid over him like a blanket, womb-like in its intimacy, then spat him back out and the doctor looked at the results. He had looked at them again.
“There’s a match,” he said, and the humming had grown louder in El’s skull, to singing.
That was how strong the tether had been, even before they’d met. As the detonation had surged through the water, the tether had been a chorus in along his spine. “A.A,” he tried to say, but nothing came out. Strange, not to hear the comings and goings of thoughts. Strange not to feel the body that was also your body.
But was that correct?
No, no—El had once been twenty-two. Twenty-two at the SYMBIOTIC training grounds, crawling through the blasts of wind on a foreign desert. A.A. had been crumpled beside him on the ground, groaning as their tether stretched. A storm had come down in the scant few minutes before they’d reached the target flag, and this was a test they were going to fail. Of course, he did not know this at the time. He did not know that they were slated to be a middle-grade match. El had shoved his mask over his face and dragged A.A. up through the tether at the very moment of collapse. A faint neural struggle—and then the giving of ways, one side to the other. They staggered up: they were thinking of the researchers who studied them through the drones, reading the signals humming through the bases of their skulls. Breaks of activity. Troughs. Valleys. Their comms spitting out coils of negative data.
After El had spent two hours slogging them both across the simulation, A.A. had gone to the lockers afterwards and punched him, a sweet sharp hit to the mouth. The doors shone around them: metal strips with side slats, black-eye turning knobs. El rubbed his teeth. “I could make you not do that,” he said.
“You piece of shit,” A.A. said.
“It’s our job,” El had said. A.A. had tried to punch him again, and his fist had stopped midair, his muscles flexing, A.A. trembling. El’s tether hummed. The fist slowly lowered on its own. A.A. stood with his hands at his sides.
Proud of that trick?
El held up his hands. The feeling in his chest was clenching, too hot to ignore, and the tether buzzed behind his skull, surging with foreign synaptic churn.
Self-protection, he said.
Then the call system sounded. MUSTER IN FIVE. ALPHA-ECHO, MUSTER IN FIVE.
A.A. raised his head, looking up at the keening speakers. A wash of disgust filtered through the tether, screened through El’s own careful sheen of ambivalence.
Just don’t fucking touch me, A.A. said.
The hold. He had to get out of the hold. For a moment, El stayed there, floating. He was going to die—and he pushed his foot against the water, a flailing, impotent kick of his fins, and the strings of eggs moved within the water like curtains.
The tether sputtered in his head. RECONNECT. RECONNECT. Around him, the cargo room turned like a carousel, the red spiral corpse of the feeder plastered on the ceiling above. The door was a blue mouth that he wasn’t trying to reach. For a moment before the darkness, he could imagine it: his body stretched out in the water, as if diving to catch, his hands clasped around the door jamb, hauling himself out, reattaching himself to the guideline, weighed down by tank and fins and the crevasse now gaping in his mind. A.A. would feel it, too. A.A. would know.
How many years had they practiced the same knowing? Two years, perhaps, passing each other coffees on the command deck as they cut through the ocean, listening to radio from the base, trading thoughts back and forth. The dull red emergency light hung above them. Surveillance screens flickered and shone across the walls: tiles of the surface and the air and the sea.
The effect of two minds is multiplicative; one plus one is more than two. This morning, as the data came in, they’d pieced the shipwreck together, and A.A. took quick, careful notes on the back of his hand, alphabets and numerical code alike.
The Cassandra was a downed military ship. The sub had scanned the structure of the corpse. Fuselage here, reactor here. Agricultural stock here, command deck here. Detonate the EMP across the electrical core, find the records, find the data, get out and go, go, go. The ship had been at the bottom of Oceanus for a decade now. El had put a hand to his brow and squinted at the third-left screen.
Should we look for signs of life?
He felt a ballpoint tip ghost against his own wrist. Just be thorough, El.
Fine. Got it.
Still smarting, El had pulled up his concept of the descent as they disembarked. The map had located Cassandra on the lip of an atoll. The waters were shallow, warm—they could expect the timid daytime species only, and swim down lightly equipped. Simple steps, simple plan. They went together, as they always did, and split at the helm of the ship.
The feeder had come upon him an hour into the dive, on the sunken command deck, after the first, faraway EMP had dismantled the remaining systems. El had been crossing the bridge, arm hooked around the guideline, when the water had moved behind him. His comm had gone off, a high sharp beep, and he’d twisted around, awkward and slow, and said something regular, like Hey. Or, Fancy seeing you here. Or, Come to grab something? And then he’d seen the feeder and realized, with a singular, constricting horror, that there was a creature between him and the rest of the ship.
What? Said A.A.. El, what’s wrong? El had let go of the guideline and tried to kick away, upwards, to the broken skylight. But the creature moved and spread itself over the opening above him, its dark bulk cutting down the sun. It followed him as he swam. He kicked frantically away, again, and the first coil went around his leg like a compression cuff. His leg, jerking; the guideline, shivering. The vise of the grip tightened, cutting off blood, and El bent over and tried to pry the coil apart. The feeder drew close and curled around his waist. His ribs.
El? A.A. said.
He’d thrashed, pushed, scrabbled. A black beak prodded through the undulations, and around him, sensory bulbs blinked, inching closer to the nape of his neck, to the thread that went up his cervical spine. It was inspecting him. The link.
Three days ago: slicing through the paraffin blocks in cytology lab, slotting the pieces under microscopes. Steel dissection slabs; fans roaring in the background. An electromagnetic sensory loop, they’d decided. A.A. had been modeling the organ systems in the other room.
Benthic, El had said, turning a slide over. Maybe even Hadal in origin.
Then why come up to the surface in the first place?
To eat, maybe, or to die. Kaput.
The coil was crushing him. He could not breathe. El saw his remaining free arm let go of the guideline and strike out, reaching for the sensitive bulbs, but they darted away, tucking themselves back into the feeder’s flesh. Another constriction. More bubbles through his mouth. Crushing pressure across his ribs. A.A. was saying something in his head, words that faded and jostled themselves in his panic. In the program, SYMBIOTIC recruits were taught to think in straight lines: point A to point B, no conjectures, no impressions, no anger, no hope, no fear.
But for them: the salt on both their tongues. The slight metallic hint of oxygen stored in weighted tanks. The crush of the feeder’s coil. How much would A.A. feel? Go, El said. Go go go!
Confusion on the other end, bright bewilderment. The feeder had drawn him in, like an embrace. His attention came in flashes. The command deck, blanketed in gentle green algae. The tiny schools darting in and out overhead, filtered through the limbs of ghostly flesh. The world distorted through the globe of his mask, the warnings blazing red on the side of his interface, his own rasps quieting down. A.A. was demanding something, or asking for it. What did he want? El couldn’t hear. He saw himself as if far away, frozen in place, a straitjacket of water around him, and the bulb of his helmet tipped back. He had to get out. He had to say something. Another constriction; a burst of bubbles through the mask, and he thrashed once, twice, and then went still.
On the other side of the Cassandra, some three hundred and eight yards away, A.A. hunched over the lever, was examining the ship’s core for damage. Beside him, a fish that was not a fish had stopped its flight to peck at a raft of closed clam. The clams had made a home along the seams of a latch, now levered and flung away, and the clams had gone with it. Now they lay stubborn on the floor, soft flesh tucked inside.
The core itself was startlingly heavy—in jerking it out of the wall, A.A. thought he’d dented it—but the black-box system was intact. Chances were that some critical pieces of code were still floating around. Still, he had to check.
He was five minutes into the full inspection when the tether had flooded with a clear wash of fear. Then, a pulse of pressure flashed along the ribs and vanished in the next instant. The guideline next to him shuddered.
Streams of fish darted as A.A. scrambled up in the water. Darkness clouded along his vision—his hand moved on its own as if to block something from his sight, or hold a falling object back. Across the room, a nudibranch inched its skeleton below the ruins of a storage tank. Broken shells drifted across the floor.
A.A.’s hand clenched, then went limp by itself. The tether was a sharp ache at the back of his skull—his comms going off, numbers reeling in great columns across the field of his helmet. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Oxygen saturation. Cortisol. A.A. heard himself speak, as if announcing something:
El?
El had met Cora on the second day of training at SYMBIOTIC, a decade ago, when he still remembered being soft. They had been so similar to each other that everyone thought that they’d been tethered to the wrong person—him to A.A., her to her roommate, who had ribbed them so thoroughly, so consistently, that El had one day told her to please, stop, which had soured the jokes thereafter. He and Cora had lasted five years. In the fifth year, Cora had been drafted to the Northern Belt. She had died after the airlock failed to close in her pod.
Disorientation. Asphyxiation. Her tether had died with her, too, and the two bunks had sat empty in the base for just three days before the program had shuffled the rosters again, and slotted El away from her empty quarters. Her belongings had gone back to her pod on Terra Nova. He saw her family for the first time at the funeral. They were three people, willowy and soulful, just like her, but El hadn’t stayed to greet them. He’d gone out to a drinking hole nearby and bought a small bottle of gin, then downed it with a chase of sparkling water. The tenderness of the lights; the coaxing floor beneath. Cora had called him soft. Hopeless. It was a lack of air that killed her. Or a lack of care.
The liquid cleansed him, made him loose and agreeable and convinced that nothing was ever hard or difficult to do. A.A. found him just before they were meant to disembark again. El had a glass of water in his hand, his throat sour, mouth fuzzed, when A.A. sat down before him and waited.
Going to make me get up? El said. Go on. You can’t.
A.A. had stood. If you’re going to be like that.
No. No, God, no I’m not. I’m—the glass, cold under his hand. Cora in space, colder and blue and drifting. I’m—
Come on, El. Let’s go.
He’d thought himself clear, but the worst of it had hit him when they were halfway to the ship. A.A. had caught him as he’d vomited over the side of the bridge, then stood aside as El put his head in his arms over the rails.
“Nothing to worry about,” A.A. told the attendants on the bridge. “He’s just got a cold, that’s all. Towels, please.”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s for everyone else’s sake, Echo.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Alright,” A.A. said. “Go on, then, make your way down. Don’t fall.”
The hangar’s lights blared down. El had straightened up and wiped his mouth, and said, very carefully: I don’t give a shit.
But A.A. had already left, following the line of stairs down to the waiting ship.
Afterwards El had stumbled through the protocols, been taken aside and talked with, talked to, talked about. The blur of the descent. The blur of the docking. But late at night, back at the Oceanus base, El had woken up gasping so hard, he could’ve been sick, and A.A. had gotten up from his bunk and fetched a drink of water and a bucket. The former was welcome; the latter, El blissfully hadn’t used. Neither of them spoke. El merely sat there and wept into his hand, and A.A. lay opposite to him and listened to him weep. Later in the morning, when A.A. had put a coffee down before him during mess, El had asked, sullen, in agony:
What is it, anyways?
“Hmm?”
Your name.
A.A. looked down and plucked at the initials stitched into his shirt. Alcoholics Anonymous, he said.
El smiled grimly. Later he would check the catalogs, folders, and tags for A.A.’s registration, only to give up and find himself sitting consistently beside the man at lecture instead. A.A. turned to him the first time it happened, as if about to raise a question, but El gazed straight ahead at the auditorium, across the seats that sloped down to where the head researcher spoke.
“Corpus callosotomy is a last-resort surgical procedure,” the researcher was saying. “Used only in emergencies to prevent the spread of seizures from one side of the brain to the other.”
In the minutes after the attack, the feeder turned El over and drew him down the stairs, one limb hooking forward, and the Others curled around his body. It tipped him headfirst. His arms floated at his sides.
Sunlight drifted through the shattered glass above. Broken piping; deadened screens. All this was evidence of a crew gone to sleep on impact, swaddled in the ocean, and amongst them, himself, drifting in the dark. The last time he had drifted like this, in total peace, was when they’d first installed the tether in his head. He’d been in the blank white sorting room, passing by trainees with blurred faces, walking through, searching, waiting. “It’ll be like the click of a magnet,” the instructor had said. “This is your first test. Find your partner.”
The ceilings rolled from glass to steel. The angle of his descent deepened, his safety spool rolling out from his waist. Then, a sharp tug, and El’s head knocked against a step, and he realized that he could think.
Absurd: to make your last thought a color.
I N D I G O
The feeder stopped in place. It unfurled around him, and a bulb pressed to the back of El’s head. A bright, buzzing shock, then a loud silence.
Three hundred and eight yards away, at the bottom of the ship, A.A.’s hands convulsed.
El, A.A. said. El, answer me. ALPHA-ECHO 241. This is Alpha. This is Alpha. Come in.
His grip was locked onto the banister of the stairs. The sensors indicated El’s breathing: Elevated, then a spike in the pulse rate, surging epinephrine and oxides. But the tether was silent. Not like sleep, but the deeper silence of the deadened consciousness. A.A. pinged the sub, evac sequence initiated, and tried to let go of the banister.
How to describe a duality? The tether itself came to A.A. as colors or foreign impulses—a hand raised when he wasn’t paying attention, or a green-tinged hunger when he had just finished a meal. One time, in swim training, when El had dove into the water, A.A. had pitched forward on the rim of the pool as well. The laughter from the cohort had been tempered by sharp and weighted looks.
A.A.’s grip spasmed again. Convulsions wracked his body. He sucked in air. The tether was online, but still stuttering, and then, like a banner:
I N D I G O
A.A. coughed. A surge of acid roiled up, and the fear was like an owl claw over his heart. The claw gripped tight. His peripherals went dark, as if he’d stepped out of the sun and back into the cool of the sub. Mayday, he thought. Then he kicked the alarm.
MAYDAY. MAYDAY. MAYDAY.
Fish flashed like handfuls of nickels. Shrimp scampered across the floor. Six hundred feet, on the surface of the water, the sub’s navigation began to turn.
Some two years ago, El remembered, after the training program, after the butchered exam, and after they’d been shoved into each other’s minds, each other’s bodies, like two peas in a pod—old saying, no? The director had laughed—but before A.A. had thought of resigning himself to the nightmares, the tastes, the foreign twitches of his limbs—they came to Oceanus.
Neurally, psychologically, and anatomically paired, compatible in every way possible. That was the announcement that had been given out to the staff before the landing pod had left the station without them.
The reality was more like this:
Them, working on opposite sides of the base. El surveying dive sites, A.A. reviewing specimens and chewing lemon peels until his jaw ached. Complete silence as they worked. The taste of black coffee flooded A.A.’s mouth as the surveillance screens flicked across his vision. The cold of ice cubes burrowed into his hands. Eventually the door opened one day to the lab’s meeting room, as he was writing out his lettering.
Just stop it, El said.
Stop what.
He had taken a scalpel last night, and ran the edge of it along the back of his wrist.
El said, I can feel it, you know. You’re not subtle. It’s not just your body.
My body? A.A. said. He stopped writing. My body?
Yeah. And if you’re going to cut it up, or eat the worst shit imaginable, El said—a glance at the lemon rinds—lemons? Really?
A.A. pinched the bridge of his nose. The taste of stale cream and citrus curdled in El’s mouth.
You have no idea what it’s like, A.A. said.
I am the only one who knows what it’s like, El said.
A.A. set down the pen. He got up and walked out of the meeting room, not looking back, and headed to the showers by the diving pool. And when A.A. swung open the door, El saw that there was no one in the racks of stalls: only the rows of clouded plastic dividers, with shower heads craning over the spaces like lampposts. Without taking his clothes off, A.A. stepped into the first shower and turned it as cold as it could go. By the time he got out, he was shuddering, a headache brewing like weather against both their skulls. He put his forehead against the plastic wall.
Two floors away in the base, El poured both their coffees down the sink. The cold had seeped through them both, irretrievably, but then again so had the ache in A.A.’s mouth. El worked his jaw against the old acid, then picked up a piece of lemon peel, put in his mouth, and chewed.
He was floating now. He was listening to the rain. El remembered: it was their first mission out, and they’d been preparing to dive before the clouds had burst open above them. As he got out on the roof, El had found himself washed clean of the salt and the cold iron smell of the sub.
Crazy out here, he said.
Below him, A.A. was putting his hair back with quick decisive movements. A diving mask gleamed yellow around his neck. You’re soaked.
Not like we’ll be getting any dryer. He climbed down the ladder and didn’t wipe himself down—no point with the suit—but a murmur had begun behind his ears. You don’t want to see?
The rain, thundering over the top of the sub, grew stronger. Faint blue lights flickered over them from the console, and A.A. looked up at the hatch, where the sky and rain were coming through in a column of cold light.
We should start, he said.
Another sound had joined the thunder—a high beeping noise. Their console had gone black. A.A. said something else, with a different, more cutting tone—get going?—but El hadn’t strapped on his mask yet. His head was a thundercloud of pain. What was the rush?
Go. Go.
Why? Why go? They had told him not to move. Hands at your sides. Wait for the scan to complete. His head was aching, and something, someone, was pulling him forward, a hand tugging him gently away from the console of the sub. El tried to resist but the grip was firm around his wrist. His leg.
The sub’s alarm was shrieking. Leave me alone, El wanted to say. The air in his lungs grew thick and syrupy. Bubbles floated up from his mask, forming a shining, shifting mirror on the ceiling above, breaking apart between the clusters of eggs.
The tether. The alarm. The slow, tingling spread through his mouth that leached into his neck, and bled into the stark pain over his ribs. A.A. had kicked the alarm. A.A. was not here.
Every breath, a brace of pain. The feeder, a colorless extension of the water, had been moving alongside him, or around him, or under him. It was inspecting the sleeping eggs. Even so, El could feel the faint movements in the water—the drift of feelers around him, curling over his face, tugging at his hands.
MAYDAY.
A spasm through his system. The unremitting agony of his ribs; the rain-washed agony of his head.
MAYDAY.
The sensory bulbs around him recoiled. They were fleeing from the strength of the signal. Synapses in his head fired, their gates opening and closing. He was gasping. He was trying to move.
MAYDAY.
A.A. always hesitated before a dive. El could see those pale hands now, clenched over the yellow air mask. The scrawl of indigo ink over those wrists, and A.A.’s fingers always trying to fix the angle of the goggles over the helmet just in case. El remembered sitting on the metal railings of the sub, the tops of his feet hooked over the bottom bar, like a child in a jungle gym. The weight of the tank threatened to roll him back, all the way down to the ocean and to the Cassandra.
I’ll go first?
A.A. glanced up. Alright, he said. Just don’t hit your head.
So much noise. The brays of the alarm, the bubbles frothing up, his own breaths whooshing in and out. A backwards crash into the waves. A.A. peered down and was looking at him through the surface of the water. El pressed a hand to his own ribs—there was a thick, orienting bloom of pain. He gasped. The alarm system fired.
He opened his eyes.
The feeder and the Others had begun to check on the embryos. The former was not aware of the latter. Or perhaps it had been, once, when the Others were merely individuals and not the collective, the massed, the superseding they. The feeder therefore had a dual consciousness. It moved because it wanted to move. It ate because the Others wished for it to eat.
That was why they had taken the thing earlier on, from the deck. At the end of its life cycle, the feeder had thought only of nourishment, and hiding, and spawn. But the Others preferred shallow, warm waters. And thus the feeder had gone to the ship.
So far successful. The small thing behind them was moving, though only in the short, aborted movements of the deathly injured. But the noise that had begun. The feeder could not stand that. It was higher and more pitched, and it came at right angles, sharp as blood in the water. Together, the feeder and the Others recognized this sound as a cousin to the noise that had irritated them before. The Arrival was soon. The noise would not do.
The feeder and the Others brushed over the casings one more time and then stretched forth towards the noise, blindly. They did this not so much out of love for the eggs, but out of a sullen curiosity, and they were reaching out, understanding the movement in the water before they knew it, before they truly felt it, when El let go of the lever and the pulse exploded in his hand.
After.
They never needed to say it. After the tethering. After Oceanus. After each other.
After an eye exam had been performed with the operation, along with a spinal fluid sample, and after the result had come up late. After the program’s physician had sat down and explained it to them together.
The immune system had attacked the myelinated sheaths of the neurons. It was a reaction to the tethering surgery itself. This was, as the physician said, nothing to worry about, beyond the program requirements, which would, perhaps, prove difficult to complete.
They stayed there after the doctor left. No need to move their mouths. There was no viable separation available. Two whole minds, split to uneven halves, would remain uneven forever. Both of them remembered sitting and listening to the news, one of them on the cot, tangle of IVs, and the other one standing beside the hospital bed, parade rest, at attention. They were not thinking of what-ifs then, the same way they thought of what-ifs later on which is to say—constantly, without speaking of it. One of them was thinking of a very simple solution. The other one already knew.
El leaned against the windowsill. The hospital overlooked a long line of trees, green as the ones had been on Terra. Don’t you dare, he said.
Would you stop me? A.A. asked placidly. Tell me you won’t and perhaps we can leave it at that.
The neural carapace pressed lightly against the napes of both their necks. Already their worlds had started to overlap: sight upon sight, sound upon sound, sensations echoing off of each other the same way a whisper could bounce off walls. Both of them were pressing their backs to the windowpane. Both of them had the hospital sheets pulled halfway down the cot.
El said, You’d rather die.
I would.
El pulled up a chair by the bed. They saw themselves doubled over—looking at each other, looking at each other again. Two profiles, pallid from their time in the sea, two sets of eyes, two thoughts. Or no. Just one thought.
I’ll get you out, El said. Listen to me. The mechanism works like this—
Down the corridors. To the left. Through the command deck, where the signal had been released. Halfway up the guideline, A.A. passed where the main body of the ship had been, the emptied and shattered cryopods, crowned with glass, playing hosts to the figures inside that had not woken up in time, and never would. Why look? When the ending was already known? He turned, shone the flashlight through storms of silt. Fish darted in the cold. An eel that was not an eel blinked back, opening its mouth wide and slow, watching him. Moving on. Moving on. Check the gas supply. Place the line marker on the guideline, indicating the exit. Attach the safety spool. Oh. But there. The other safety spool, the white one, leading into the depths of the ship. The door of the cargo hold dark like a mouth. There. There. There.
The figure in the black and orange diving suit was suspended just inside the dark of the cargo hold. Alright. He had only fallen asleep. The room was choked with silt, and A.A. felt his own breath rushing in and out, like tidewater. He took the figure in the suit by the shoulder. The shell of the grenade rolled gently across the floor.
El, A.A. said. Bad place to be.
There was no response.
He swam around, tied off the safety spool, and put his hands on El’s helmet. Closed eyes. The soft slack mouth. No no no.
“Comm, run TETHER ECHO diagnostics.”
Just this morning, El had crouched down to fiddle at the wires in the satellite room, his goggles pushed up to his head. He’d lifted up the sub-router with one hand to check the crossovers beneath. You’d think they’d pay us more for electrical work, he said.
They don’t pay us anything, El, he’d said.
Exactly my point.
Even while sitting at the console, A.A. had felt the faint impulse to stand as El got up from the panel. He’d been able to taste the coffee from that morning, too, full of powder, and he’d had to work against the lingering draw to let El move for them both. El had taken the coffee black on a dare. He’d always been easily riled, and so the faint tang of caffeine and dismay had followed A.A. around on the Cassandra for the last couple hours at least. But now—
Diagnostics complete.
He had moved through the ship so freely, so easily, so quickly. Perhaps it was panic and adrenaline. But no. El was gripping something in his hand. The lever to the EMP shell. The peripherals of A.A.’s vision were gone. There was no taste of coffee. Tether disconnected, the comm whispered.
Reconnect. Reconnect.
How to count the number of births? Are the births made with the Others counted as births, or are the births always made within the feeder, the giver, the given? The feeder had no concept of the Others. There is no understanding between a host and its parasite. But had the feeder ever protested? Had it ever fought back?
The feeder’s biological imperative had instructed it to make a home out of the shelf, to mate and lay eggs and produce itself out of itself. The Others had not woken until late in the cycle. The feeder was already gravid, but the constellation of foreign cells had spread, and coaxed the feeder into its shallow and secluded habitat. There they had waited and grown.
Now, the Others felt the shell withering around them. The delicate stems and lobes of its brain were blinking out. Precious little remained save for the memory lobe, which was sparking—only faintly—to bring the feeder memories of the high tide, and the feeling of moving into cool and deep places, and the eggs. The countless eggs.
The Others did not share a memory with the feeder, of course. They had separate programming, after all. The Others, if they had memory—that is, beyond the ancient memory that one may call “reflex” or “instinct”—would recall the first moment of breach, where they had been drawn into the depths of the shell of flesh. Though they would have been wrong to call it a shell, then. It had been a partner. A giver. A home.
A parasite eats its prey in units of less than one. Observe: the feeder dying while curled against the ceiling, above its curtains of eggs. Observe the imprudence of parasite transmission, driven to emergency: the sped-up killing of the host, the hurrying along of a rapturous rupture. Some intermediate rate of kill maximizes the chance of transmission; kill too quickly, and the host will have too few propagules in the moment of death.
For the Others, it was only a matter of process. They did not meditate, ruminate, contemplate on their loss which was also gain. They had no need for communication—they scattered across the feeder’s body, divided, and began to eat in their own ways.
For example, some of the Others began with the spinal cord, or the gastrointestinal tract. The rest began trying to break the skin.
The buoyancy device had burst. Its seams had popped from pressure. Oxygen tank intact, connector intact, mask sealed, suit mechanics dead. But they didn’t need the suit anyways. Just the tank. Just the fins. Hands hooked under arms, ascend slowly to avoid decompression, pony tank oxygen on the way up. The sub was turning into position. Why hesitate? Why not move?
Just over a third of the reserve oxygen left from his own tank. A.A.’s lips were growing numb. El’s head was lolled backwards, the rest of his body loosened on the cargo floor, as if asleep. The ship itself seemed to sway, caving in around them, twisting again. A.A.’s hands skated over El’s mask.
No, no, you can’t.
But he knew. Weeks after A.A. had got enough hope up to hate himself, after they’d avoided each other as much as they could avoid each other—skirting the topic in their minds, alternating shifts, A.A. lying in the bunk, holding his hand up before his face: clench and release, over and over—El had walked into the lab room and said, simply, Catch.
Of course he had listened. Of course he had opened his hands, and caught the pen that came spinning through the air. It was a fine ink-tip. An antique.
From the Prodigal?
El shrugged. A.A. peeled off the thick yellow lab gloves and uncapped the top. He drew a thin, careful line over the inside of his wrist. The dark blue ink spotted and bled into the folds of his skin.
I meant it, El said. I’ll get you out.
The Others made their way from room to room within the feeder. The nerves died under their predation. A delicate liquid had begun seeping into the water—the proteins and lipids that exited the shell of that-which-was, a companion of the many shy indicators of death that the Others remembered as a distinct part of their own living—and how beneficial that familiar death was. How relieving.
The Others had prepared themselves. As they ate, they had split and split apart, and now the skin of the feeder was bloated with the weight of them—the swim bladder engorged, the feelers peeling at the ends, the epidermis set to erupt. The Others’ consciousness, cleaved from its host-self, had begun to germinate. They began to consider things their business.
Below the feeder, shedding tissue drifted down in microscopic flakes, and the flaking, along with the body and the death and the splitting apart, was part of this new business. Some other things that were the Others’ business: the fish, pecking through the necklaces of eggs. The eggs themselves, naturally. But also the faint disturbances of the water, coming from the agitated creature and its dead partner below.
After the diagnosis, A.A. had sat in the lab after dark and attempted to draw with both hands at the same time. Numbers with the left, sketches with the right, his fist aching, his jaw smarting from his own hit, the echo of El’s bruise against his own cheek. He’d considered killing himself. He’d gotten so far as to chart out a route from the SYMBIOTIC station, into the cold white desert—no protection, no suit, no nothing. Just him. It’d be quick. He’d die of exposure, El wouldn’t feel anything but a hint of numbness, perhaps—so A.A. waited until everyone had gone to sleep, then went out into the snow.
It was beautiful out there. The mountains lay waiting in freezing drifts, and the snow came down in a steady sweep, gathered itself, then whirled away again. The cold pressed down on him like slumber, or like silence. He kept walking, and when he finally decided to lie down, the snow had been soft and warm underneath his aching body. He hadn’t realized he’d fallen asleep until someone had yanked him back up. A thick, padded grip around his waist, his arm locked around the back of a bright yellow snowsuit. The familiar cold around him, and then searing water melted against his back, soaking in.
He shook uncontrollably. El held him by the shoulders, under the warm spray of the shower.
Don’t fucking try that again.
I’ll do whatever, A.A. had slurred. It had been embarrassing to be cleaned off; embarrassingly easy for El to walk him back to the bunk, and for the weeks after his recovery, his limbs stinging, El’s presence vigilant in the tether, day and night, A.A. had thought: I tasted it.
The feeling of being alone. The feeling of having his body to himself—the sixteen years he’d lived before they’d been connected, before he’d been pressed into SYMBIOTIC at all. Before being told he was physically, psychologically, neurologically made for the program. They had come to him as he’d starved in a storage room in the Ionia mining belt station, and told him to consent. Before food, rooms, warmth. Before the neurologists had said things like bilateral compensation, and the diseased half to the whole, or before El had begun pulling his body around like a magnet, before A.A.’s senses had started to blur. Taste. Touch. Sight. Smell. Sound.
Absurd: to think of this now. To think of El wiping the water from his space, speaking over the rush of water: Next time you do that, I’m going with you.
Don’t be stupid.
We’re together. That’s the whole deal.
And A.A., saying: I would have left you there.
I would have left you there.
In the gloom of the cargo hold, A.A. pressed his fingers to the nape of El’s suit. Tether disconnected, the comm whispered. Reconnect. Reconnect. The system was mending itself even as it spoke. The sub floated just above them. There was just enough oxygen left, but El’s face was peaceful, drifting, blue—then A.A. remembered, like lightning:
Cora, dying in the depths of space. El, standing up at the news. The two empty bunks. Cora’s roommate hadn’t been discharged. They had found her bunk still full of clothes, masks, and bundled-up socks. She’d escaped, the rumors had said. She’d left as soon as Cora’s tether had died.
The eggs shivered in their cases. The liquid that seeped from the feeder’s corpse, filled with transmitters, had kicked off a chemical cascade within their shells. Inside, the embryos had begun to squirm—the neural plate erupting and curving in on itself, cells turned to meat turned to organs, and the heart blooming in the body, and beginning to beat.
The feeder’s corpse turned. The Others had sensed the exponential progression of the eggs, but far more interesting now were the new concepts of home, belonging, and leave-taking. There was nothing left of its current residence but the casing. It would be simple to depart the remains. Logical. The Others no longer needed the feeder—or the giver—as a means of survival. At last they were themselves, unencumbered, unconstrained, and therefore free, free, free.
A.A. stood slowly up and swayed in the dark water. El seemed almost asleep, save the faint stream of bubbles that issued from the mask, and the reluctant darkness in his vision had begun to fade. The taste of coffee, too, was gone.
He reached back and clasped at the edge of the door. The algae slid against his touch, flaking into the water. He couldn’t get a hard grip.
Reconnect, the comm said in his head.
There was no reason to panic now. Or feel anything else. He had to swim. Open the hatch of the sub. Climb in, take off the suit, and dial the base, which would greet him with its familiar voice. He would tell them what had happened. Throw all the lemon peels away.
And El would lie here asleep. More a part of the ship than a part of him.
Something in his throat had closed up. This was himself, too, now. He could leave. They had shaken on it, and El had gripped too hard—A.A. remembered grimacing, and El dropping his hand at once.
Again now. Remember it.
Inside the lab, A.A. shook the pen and capped it again, and tossed it back over. El caught and pocketed it with one hand.
What if you’re wrong? A.A. asked.
Humor me, El said. Are we the same people, you and me?
No. Of course not.
I didn’t think so either, El said. A.A. had expected a tinge of humor at least, or even a suggestion of pity. But there was none.
You’re not really a part of me, El continued, leaning against the lab table, and I’m not really a part of you. We’re hemispheres, actually. The injured and the whole, or the defective and the complete.
Defective, hm.
Only in theory.
A.A. looked at El, then said, evenly, formally, “Don’t pretend to joke.”
“I’m not.” El held out his hand and A.A.’s own hand followed. They shook and the feeling crossed on both sides: calluses, palms, thumbs, bone.
“I said hear me out,” El said. The grip tightened. “Whatever I do, you need to resist. Fight against it. Practice. And when the time is right, I want you to be able to go.”
The Others had never broken from their cycle before. It was transgressive to entertain the thought. The invasive to the invaded. The feeder to the fed-upon.
They could see how it would be done, from the orifices and then into the stream of fluids inside. In its lone stage, when there had merely been one Other, it was necessary to learn the desire to swim, and the paths that were open to it within the feeder. The lymphatic system. The circlets of blood. The clear fluid that bathed the nerves.
The Other, at the very first breach—from the stomach and into the lymph—had felt a jolt of pleasure right when the soft walls of the organs had given way.
This was the natural jumping stage in a life of stymied growth. Currently the first and foremost of the Others were pushed up against the thin membrane of the feeder’s mantle. They were filling up the skin like a balloon. All they needed was a leak.
Weeks before the dive, the sub had touched down on a coastal island, one of the few that temporarily broke the surface when the tides receded, and left rings of coral behind. El had taken first maintenance duty on the sub. A.A. had taken a bucket for samples, and a sack, and made his way to the center of the atoll. A lost pod had landed at its core, glinting in the distance like a gem.
By the time he arrived after the swim, A.A. was tired enough that he’d had to sit down before heading up the gentle sand slope. The pod stood like a house he did not remember, and as he caught his breath, the wind came with the smell of ice. Winter would come soon, and the seas would be broken with floes once more. He took a moment to gather himself, then made his way up.
The pilots were dead inside. The water pooled in the crater around the ship. A.A. sorted through the dead passengers’ stash, tucking away proofs of insignia; data cores; repair, electrical, and medical supply kits; survival packs, carafes of water. When he was done he headed down the other side of the sand slope, towards the waiting sub, which was when he saw the pools the tide had left on the beach, and the fish swimming inside. The storm that had killed the pilots had washed the fish ashore, too. The water in the pools was about ankle deep.
A., El said. What’s up?
A.A. didn’t answer. He only stayed a moment over the pools. The fish darted from his shadow in the nearest one. The sun was going up. The water would dry out. The conclusion was obvious for the fish- they would die- but look: his hands moving, the bucket dumping out its contents, scooping up water and flashing bodies. A.A. watched himself walk down the long slope to the water below, and tip the bucket into the shallows. The fish zipped out in countless arrow-lines, then vanished into nothing. He went back for more.
The fish leaped from the bucket. The trips slid from one to the other. He only noticed how late it was when his fingers had loosened by accident, and the bucket had spilled out all over the sand, and the fish had flipped their way into the sea.
A.A. sat down on the sand and put a hand over his eyes. El was working the control panel, he knew. The ridges of the dials dug faintly into the pads of both their fingertips. His own grip was stamped with the handle of the bucket. The coral stretched out in rings to the distance, and the beach on both sides glimmered with the pools he had yet to reach, all of which would dry entirely within the day.
And yet.
A.A. stayed sitting there, the bucket beside him with its water empty. The sun seeped through his wetsuit, drying him off, and El’s companionable silence was in his ear. It would not last. He got up and walked to the beach and began to swim.
By the time he was at the last mound of coral between him and the sub, the tang of El’s coffee had risen in his mouth again.
On your marks, El said.
A.A shook the water from his mask. The coral dug into his feet, even through the flippers. Far away, like a promise, the dark shape of the sub drew close over the water.
The eggs would hatch when the situation called for it. The EMP had stimulated the delicate vagal nerves that had grown along the limbs and bodies, and now the first of the cohort was prodding the membrane wrapped around it, testing the give. The factors for hatching had to be in precise sequence, or all at once. The feeder in the first egg made its choice. It began delving forward, and made its bid for the outside.
Departure, as the Others grasped, was more impulse than imperative. A final push towards the starting-finish line. But how to explain the memory, then, of the cold coral shelves rising up before it, the smoke from the tube-like vents, the feelings from limbs that were never truly its own? It had only ever been a part of something else, something larger, until now.
Where did one half begin? Where did the other half end? Below them, the living creature was attempting to move the dead one forward.
The membrane pulled at the edges. Soon now, the Others thought. All departures were arrivals; all endings could be beginnings.
He is not the kind to stay.
The mechanism works like this—
Look: his hand is letting go of the edge of the door. The sub is pinging its sequence. Columns of data roll down his mask. Disrupted signal pathways. Power failure. A hard reboot is required.
The neurological damage is irreversible.
The shining pools of fish. He is standing under the shower, or slumping down, and a slow, careful explanation is threading its way out. The fish are sliding free.
But if—if a specific region of the brain, or even the entire hemisphere—
He is walking out to the deep white cold. His body is still his. He can write alphabets with one hand, and numbers with the other. The lines do not blur together. They are not indistinguishable. Those same hands now are propping the figure up against the wall of the hold, checking over the diagnostics once more, moving fast. Faster.
—was injured or destroyed—
Diagnostics chirps again. Imminent danger. He imagines putting his hand down when El raises his. No coffee, no lemons. He imagines leaving Oceanus, flying up to the sky, the planet behind him, a lovely and shrinking blue marble.
—its functions can—at times, with enough training, between me and you—
Initial concepts can be discarded. Think of the things that are left. The empty showers. The coffee cups waiting in sinks. The long-held dream of saying, so long! So long! And the ship carrying him away, away, away, from all the wrecks, from all that freezing ice, the rockets firing in concert, working against the rope of gravity.
—be overridden by the same region in the other hemisphere.
In the data room, the clams had opened their shells. A lobster, scuttling backwards, was either hiding, or biding its time. The eggs shifted and moved. The membrane was giving way.
They were all moving quickly now. Out of excitement. Out of something new.
“You’re putting in too much work,” Willa said. She smiled. “Try again.”
El looked down at the photograph in his hand. The dark and quiet of the Mater’s studio enveloped him, and a single bird known as an albatross stared out at him through the window of plastic. It was caught before flight.
El took his seat and uncapped his pen. He drew out the mournful eyes on the sketchpad. Behind him, someone had turned on old music: the song was murmuring to him from a distance far away. The door to the art room opened.
“I’m sorry,” El said, without turning his head. “Did you need this spot?”
The person began to walk into the hall of the room. The single lamp had brightened into a glare. Their steps echoed, and the paintings around them gazed down, as if astonished that there would be sound at all. The ink from the pen had begun to leak. El held up his sketchbook, alarmed, but the dark liquid had gone down the spine. He looked up, helpless, embarrassed, because the man was now before him. He looked as if he was trying to memorize El’s face.
“I’m,” El said. He was growing incredibly tired. “You’re—”
Then—a snap. The man’s face bloomed into clarity, and the lights dimmed in a sudden swing into darkness. A humming had begun in his head, as familiar as his own voice. Or, not his own voice. Before him, a mask wavered in the water, hard and yellow-rimmed and mirrored. He saw his own face reflected in the mask, and then himself, looking through the mask again. His mouth tasted like caffeine and something else. The tang of lemon peels. He felt his hand rise, as if asking a question. It was met with A.A’s hard grip around his wrist.
Tether reconnected, his comm murmured.
Come on, they said together. Time to go.
The two creatures were leaving in synchronized movements. One could have been leading the other, or the other way around: reversed, or in mirroring, it was impossible to say which.
The membrane had broken. The Others drifted, spreading through the water, and the first of the hatchlings darted out from the eggs and jetted themselves forward. The Others felt themselves respond—giving off some scent, some indication—that they were now not able to control. The feeders arrived by following the scent. The full mechanisms of their bodies were working in tandem, and their beaks closed, and began to tug, and as the Others were drawn slowly forward and apart, they were overcome with an enormous sense of ecstasy.
They would not be going anywhere now. But this was not a bad thing. Likely they would end up precisely where they belonged. And all things deserved to be in a place where they could belong.
Carolyn Zhao is a speculative fiction writer and retired English major based in NYC and Chicago. Her work has been published in Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons. She loves her dog almost as much as her dog loves her.
