Authors: Andy Futuro
There was a voice, the sound crystalizing inside her, feeling the words carved within her meat, bones snapping to spell the letters, blood and veins looping into the shapes of words. Blood poured from her mouth, wrists snapping into right angles, forearms snapping, neck snapping, body twisting into As and Is and Us. Saru’s vision swam, red-tinged, the wall of colors and crystal patterns rising infinite above her. There were human faces melted within the wall, gaping, empty masks, hung like suits on hooks.
Desperately, Saru grasped at the power she knew she possessed—to heal herself, to fight back or flee, to will herself out of this acid trip. She saw death, manifest, a shadow, a tsunami coming towards her. She felt her molecules break apart and her consciousness stretch, spooling out like cloth undone and dragging her into a wave form, a cloud of drifting thought, out of the dimension she knew, away from the physics she understood and could control if she just fought hard enough. Harder! Fight it! Control yourself!
Saru grabbed at her thoughts, forcing herself to stay whole, a tug of wills, willing herself to stay together, to exist, willing her body and her molecules and her cells and all her weaker, lesser thoughts to OBEY her intelligence. The pain lessened, the currents of force threatening to rip her apart now slower, now still, now quiet and gone, bones intact, veins pumping blood to the rhythm of her command, chest rising and falling in perfect, measured, metronome steps, thoughts whole and focused and bent to her will.
Saru found herself standing, calm and unafraid, observing the wall of lights and the throbbing crystal lattice, seeing it as it was, as a form of life. She saw this was another manifestation of her cephereal, and that her cephereal was as confused by her as she was with it. The cephereal had tried to treat with her in her own world, in the dimensions and laws she understood, using thoughts that it had stolen from her mind, thoughts that leaked out casually, like a waste product, because her species did not value thoughts, and had not yet learned to master and control them.
Saru realized then, like a slap in the face, that these shapeshifting caricatures were a way to communicate with her. Of course! The cephereal was an alien, and had never looked humanoid at all, and it wasn’t a dog, and it didn’t see her the way she saw herself or a human would see itself, but as an insect, or a cow, or maybe it even saw her as a wall of blinking lights and crystals. The exact same stimuli were being processed and transformed in different ways by their thinking apparatuses into different understandings of reality.
The cephereal had watched Saru, and watched her world, studying it like a scientist, but the beings were too different, and it couldn’t figure out how they spoke! Was it their faces, their expressions? Or the air bubbling out of their input holes? Was it the stink of their glands and sphincters? Or the shape of their hair? Or the way they wagged their limbs? Or the varying hues of their skin? Or the dilation of their pores? Did they alter magnetic fields? Did they read each other’s heat? Did they cough information, hurl it back and forth through gobs of mucous, and spit, or maybe the rich genetic material that squirted from their gonads. They were always ejecting it in great quantities—was that the way they talked?
Was it the feeds they shot back and forth, or the letters, or the books, or did they do it through violence—so much violence, each kick and punch and stab tapping out a letter in their incomprehensible language? Saru saw the cephereal was not born of carbon and water, that it was a form of life she had never even imagined, and that it did not understand the rules of Earthen biology. Everything she took for granted was foreign to this being.
Like John had said—humans were no more than cells to the Gods. The Blue God could copy them and alter them, and build terrariums it knew they could live in. It could change their existence and fiddle with life and death. But to know with certainty what humans were thinking and feeling and saying to one another was beyond its power. And why had that been so hard to believe? Saru could barely articulate what she herself was thinking and feeling from one moment to the next. The inability of people to communicate between their own 99.9 percent identicalness was practically the joke of human existence.
The wall of light and crystal veins shrank and folded in on itself until it was no larger than a cue ball, floating above the marble. Saru understood that the cephereal was trapped, contained in the order of her slow-beating heart, in a prison formed of the rise-and-fall rhythm of her chest. The control she exerted over herself extended further than her own being. This control could spread to the world beyond, to construct the laws of physics and the bonding of matter as she saw fit, to dictate the forms that other life could take within her presence, and extinguish life if she so chose. The opportunity was there before her, to grasp that ball and dash it against the ground, to shatter this creature that had taunted and annoyed her, and destroy it forever.
Glee tickled up from Saru’s belly and down to her groin, a helical thrill of murder and reproduction. How fun it would be to kill the cephereal, to hear it scream and die in its alien way! Was that not the ultimate power? To kill? To destroy life? To remove that which displeased? She could do more than kill—she could feed,
feast
upon the information within the cephereal and strengthen herself. It would be good to be strong, good for her and her world. She was a good person, a protector. Her strength would shield others.
Saru’s mind flashed back to the Ria monster.
Did you enjoy it?
Ria’s words, hot and pleading, fresh scars in Saru’s brain, and Saru felt a wave of self-disgust. She saw within herself the margin she shared with the UausuaU, how easy it would be to become such a monster. She wouldn’t have to do anything; she would just have to give in.
“No!” Saru said aloud.
She squashed the hunger and the kill lust, plunging them back into the abyss of her lizard brain. The hunger licked the back of her neck, panting breath in her ear, whispering its demands. So strong the hunger! But she fought it back, forcing it down and away, imprisoned too within the calm beating of her heart, the slow movement of her breath, the awareness of herself and the control, thoughts wrapping around impulse like chains. Logic came—her options arrayed neatly before her like cards, their possible consequences extending far out in ever-branching decision trees.
Saru beckoned, and the glittering ball floated towards her, to hover above her open palm. She gripped the ball, feeling its warmth, feeling the pulse of the thoughts within, feeling the narrow intersect of their structure, the margin of similarity where their thoughts could commingle. The cephereal came cautiously, unsure of her intent, stroking her skin, feeling the beat of electric current and rushing blood below the surface, probing to find a pattern they both could understand. Saru relaxed her chains more, granting the cephereal greater access, and it came further inside her, delving below the skin, into the knit of muscle and bone, the traffic of her cells, and the tumorous maze of organs.
Saru felt as though she were there with the cephereal, exploring her organization like a new frontier, a boat arriving on an alien shore, and she was overcome with her own strangeness. Her body was not concrete, not an end product, just a wave, a gaggle of molecules flying in formation, same direction, same velocity, and she wondered at the conflict of her organs, and her genes, and who or what was really calling the shots within her. It seemed obvious now, the dynamism of life, that she was just a piece of a larger system, and that as her world changed so would she, growing more stomachs that ate different things, thicker or lighter skin, extra eyes or no eyes, and that to consider herself immune to or divorced from her environment was arrogance and weakness.
The cephereal travelled up her arm, warmth and electricity, strange but not unpleasant, up to her shoulder, up at last to her neck. Saru paused for a moment, realizing the danger, summoning her will and freezing the cephereal in its tracks, with the knowledge she was sacrificing part of her edge. She weighed the risk of making herself vulnerable against the potential rewards of shared understanding. Then she relaxed her chains and let the cephereal creep up her spine and into the treasure trove of her brain. Cold, like eating too much ice cream, and then heat, like sticking your head in an oven, and then an ecstasy like her brain was having an orgasm. Discomfort then, pain, but slight compared to all the other pain she’d known, an awkward pain of stubbed toes and banged heads in too-tight spaces. Her arm jerked, and her knees and feet, so she danced in place.
“You see,” Saru whispered. “I’m okay.”
The cephereal slid down from Saru’s brain, down her arm, her wrist, back into the form of the orb. The orb cracked and diffused into a radiant mist, which solidified into the form of the dog. The dog glowed brighter and took more colors. It grew larger than Saru, and larger, a single paw the size of her body, and larger still, until it loomed, massive, dwarfing the temples and pyramids, sucking all the light until everything was darkness and a mountainous dog of color and flames. Saru straightened her shoulders and held her head high, and stared up at the dog. The dog stared back. Its eyes were black portals, black as the darkness around them, black, now speckled with stars, now prismatic with nebulas and galaxies.
Saru saw through the eyes great things—battles raging, stars born and extinguished, fleets of ships launching rays of light back and forth, galaxies resisting, consumed. She saw the Earth not gray, but blue and green and gold, ringed with golden lights, stations and starships and the lights scattered like dust across the solar system, on other planets, other fleets, a civilization, an
empire
stepping onto the galactic stage. Plunging back to Earth’s surface, past the ringing ships and stations, she saw cities, buildings in the clouds or floating free, and the greatest of all, a pyramid of white gold, two statues of golden dogs at its pinnacle, flanking a cerulean throne, and on the throne she sat, Saru Solan, or a cousin, or a daughter, or a granddaughter, proud and relaxed, lounging. In one hand she held a golden rod, and with the other she stroked the fur of a golden dog. Saru blinked and the vision vanished. The cephereal was gone.
The library shelves and the artifacts crumbled and dissolved into blackness. The displays faded and the marble floor shrank until it was a pedestal. She stood on a tiny pillar of stone surrounded by black. Dimly, it occurred to Saru that these places within the mirthul required attention to maintain, that they sipped computer power, or the Godly equivalent, and there was no sense in keeping them around if no one was using them.
So. Ria’s cephereal was taking a dim view of humanity and if it wasn’t stopped the Blue God was going to destroy Philadelphia—at the very least. That was a problem because Saru lived in Philly, and she sure as hell didn’t want to live here, like a fucking computer program her whole life. Better to die out there with the spit and the grime than to live (forever?) inside the almost real, the almost true. What was she going to do about it? She needed to escape, that was step one. And step two, because once she got into the real world she needed to escape the Hathaway aircraft carrier too. Step three was probably also escape—fly to a bar and get almighty, drop-dead drunk, because holy hell, if she made it that far then she had fucking earned it.
Saru’s hand wandered to the grass ring John had given her and she stroked it distractedly. Maybe it was her imagination, but the ring felt both warm and cool, and, focusing on that sensation, all the chaotic thoughts swirled around the ring, leaving her higher brain to its work. I am strong. I am invincible. My skin is gold. Bullets can’t touch me. Knives cannot harm me. The light is there. The light of the Blue God protects me. The words like cantrips, coming unbidden, time slowing, time immaterial, time illusory, the light, the light protects me, mumbling nonsense, the self-consciousness fading away, the words taking on their own rhythm, their own force and heartbeat and momentum, no longer words, no longer human sounds with human meanings, but sounds that were their own meanings long before humans existed, sounds that mapped into other schematics. Saru could feel them now, her own words forming into their own song, just barely within the grasp of her consciousness, a song that wrapped around her, and within her, and protected her pattern within its own.
Saru looked down at her hand and saw a sheen of gold, her skin wrapped in golden bands so natural it was like they had been there all along, just waiting to be seen. Gold flowed from her skin into a liquid that she cupped in her right hand, and the liquid swirled and then rested in the shape of a golden rod. A part of her stared in amazement, and another part of her quickly shoved that part down into the bleachers of the subconscious. Concentration was a finite resource, the focus a rare and precious power, a leaf balanced on the tip of a pin.
A stone archway appeared in front of Saru, and through the archway she saw herself, her body, in a dark room with a hunchback trumman sticking wires in her skull. It was still the moment she had entered the mirthul, no time had elapsed. She walked through the arch and it closed behind her. She stood in the torture room, behind the trumman. The scene was frozen, no sound, no motion, like they’d all been sprayed with glue. A giddiness rose inside her that steamed into ecstasy. Here was power! Here was strength! She had only touched the tip of the clit of possibility. She walked forward, right through the trumman, getting a taste of his blueprint, bitter and muddy, blurry, dumb thoughts and molecular configurations almost within her reach.
Saru’s body hung, bloody drool, cut and broken, a frail rag of skin and bone. She stroked her own hair, hand disappearing into the skull, a tingle traveling up her arm, mind and body yearning to be joined. It taxed the body to be in this state, just as it taxed the mind, and she saw how easily the connection could be broken, how easy it was to get trapped in either the mental world, or the physical. Saru stepped forward, sinking her avatar self more into her body, smiling as the gold of her avatar skin traveled across her real skin, sealing the cuts, melting the wires stuck in her skull, melting the chains that bound her. The head of her body rose, and the eyes were blue, dazzling, astonishing, deadly blue. Further she went inside herself, a blink, world going dark for a second, like waking up in a strange place. Saru cricked her neck, and stretched, arms passing freely through the straps, and then she dropped lightly from the torture rack and stretched again.