Colony Organism

In late 2048, a feral brain slug emerged from a frequent patron of brain slug sex workers in Hong Kong. The brain slug was smuggled to Tokyo, where it was sold to a 19-year-old named Ai Nakamura on 24 November. Their reasons for buying the brain slug were unknown, but it apparently integrated with her approximately 6 hours later. Nakamura's family, employer, and associates never reported her missing, and her belongings were never found. On 1 December, Ai was found by Toshiro Kim, owner of the Tokyo Ramen stall at the edge of the Taitō and Arakawa wards, eating noodles from his trash bins. Instead of reporting Ai to the police, he invited her into the shop.
—Anaïs Nineveh, The Exodus: A History, Chapter 7

Pssssst . . .

Mel's feet splashed in wet puddles. Condensation ran down the pipes on the walls to his left, the display screens above them dark, black mirrors cracked. On his right, there was a row of metal chambers, the doors closed and sealed, windows fogged. His breath came out in a frosty cloud that was sucked away toward the far chamber at the end, whose door hung off its hinges.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mel saw a fleeting white shape reflected in the black screens. He followed it, bare feet splashing in cold puddles, the last few rimmed with ice.

The open chamber was empty, an empty seat, hoses dangling. Mel braced himself against the freezing metal and saw the hole, the metal bright and shiny. Through the tiny hole the micrometeorite had ripped in the hull, he could see stars. The wind rushed past him, and his lungs froze. They were losing atmosphere to the vacuum. Whatever—whoever—had been in this pod was gone now, and his stomach lurched as he imagined the sleeping passenger rudely awakened in shock and pain as the terrible suction ripped them piece by piece out into the void of space. He hoped they had died quickly of asphyxiation.

Then a moment of vertigo. This wasn't right. He had never been here. This wasn't any place he knew, where he had been. He stared at his hand on the door of the pod, and it wasn't his hand. There were too few manipulators, like a crab had tried to evolve a hand, the carapace weirdly dull and cracked. The cloth webbing that held his tools hung off the upper arm joints because he had no hips to speak of. Too many lungs fought the suction as he tried to draw breath. He had to patch the hole; he had to—

---

He awoke with a start. Jenny was next to him, shivering. She was facing him, so he couldn't see the brain slug, but her eyes glowed beneath her eyelids, a pale reddish light in the darkness, and her placid face was twisted into a primal expression of pain. Mel hadn't seen that face since the time Antonio had attacked her. Unsure what else to do, he ran his hand gently down her arm . . . and when her eyes popped open, the whites suddenly bright, she moved to clutch him tight, hugging her body against hers.

Mel hugged her back. His hand gently stroked the base of her spine, right above the buttocks. Her chin pressed into his shoulder. There had been kids in the orphanage that were scared of storms. Scared of the world generally. He had seen them shiver, scared beyond words, some deep, primal, biological level of shook. The night workers didn't hug them or rock them to sleep; they issued them weighted blankets and sometimes melatonin tablets.

They didn't have any weighted blankets. So Mel hugged Jenny tight, keenly aware of her breasts pressed into his chest, her body warm against his. The shivers died down slowly, and Mel was aware of a presence. He glanced at the doorway and saw Béibhinn standing there, in the doorway, face unreadable. There was a clank of cans, and Rachel appeared, dressed, a traveling cup of coffee in hand.

"Interrupting anything?" Rache whispered.

Jenny took a deep breath, but she was calmer now. Let Mel go. He slowly detached himself, and Jordan slid into the warm spot, sliding her arms around Jenny, pressing their foreheads together. Mel nodded a good morning to Béibhinn, who stepped back into the doorway of her own room as Mel dressed for a morning walk.

Rache was quiet as they left the apartment, down the hall, the stairs, out into a street that smelled of trash-pickup day. His hand found hers, and he noticed she was wearing the hoodie he gave her, and he wondered what people must think to see the two of them in identical hoodies in the pre-dawn light.

"What happened?" Rache asked.

Mel shook his head. "I don't know. I had a weird dream, and when I woke up, Jenny was . . . shaking. So I held her. Seemed to calm her down. I think she was dreaming, too. What about you?"

"Fell out of the bed. Tying my foot to the bedpost worked," Rache said, and sipped her coffee. "Tell me about your dream."

"It was kind of the same dream I've been having the last few nights. Except not the same. The first time, it was like reliving a memory. That last winter break at the orphanage. The cold bathroom. A figure in white," Mel said. "Then it started to change. Details that weren't there before. Things I haven't seen. And this time . . . it was like walking through someone else's memory. I don't think I was even me. It was like I was someone else. Someone alien. It made sense until I saw my hand."

He held up the hand that wasn't holding hers. There was nothing wrong with the pale five digits in the glare of the street lights. Just human.

They hit Freeman's Park, and Rache was quiet and somber.

"Maybe it is someone else's memory," she said. "Bleeding into yours. You're so close to them, you know. Sleeping right next to them. We know the brain slugs talk to each other at night; that can bleed into our dreams. Can a hive mind get post-traumatic stress disorder?"

"I don't know," Mel admitted. "Do you think they can see what I dream?"

Rache cocked her head. "There's an idea. I always thought about us as like antennas, picking up on the signal they were broadcasting. If it's more of a conversation . . . I wonder how that feels to them. Shut down for rest mode, only to be bombarded by these images and feelings, nightmares and wet dreams . . ."

"Wet dreams?" Mel asked, as they hit the darkest part of the woods.

An embarrassed cough. Mel grinned in the darkness.

"I won't press," he said. "Is it really too embarrassing to share?"

A sigh. "We were naked, all three of us. Jordie, Jenny, and me. Stacked on top of each other, our pussies exposed. I was on the bottom, staring up at Jordie's slug, which from the right angle looks like you can stare straight at her brainstem through green glass. You were having sex with each of us in turn. You finished with Jenny, then moved on to Jordan. I was last, and I could feel your hot spunk run out of their pussies and drip down on mine, and I was just quivering with anticipation, and all I could think was 'I'm going to get knocked up by his dicksplash before he even puts it in me.'"

Mel stifled a laugh. "Dicksplash?"

"Oh, like you've never heard of splash conception, mister I-paid-attention-during-MY-sex-ed-classes?" Rache teased.

They emerged back onto the sidewalk.

"I'm not trying to get pregnant," she said. "But I think the hive mind has plans for my uterus. How much of my dreams are what I'm feeling, and how much of them are echoes of an alien intellect that wants me to be a breeder?"

Mel didn't have an answer to that. He thought about how hurt he'd been when they offered the blue pearl to her. Now he felt guilty that he'd told her to accept it. Not being able to trust your own thoughts and feelings . . . he hadn't anticipated that. Didn't know how to make up for it, either.

"If they really wanted me to get somebody pregnant, they wouldn't be providing condoms," he said. "I think maybe they're trying to respect our choices. At least for now. We should probably have a sit-down and talk it out."

Rache nodded. Her palm was clammy against his. The sky above was pink as dawn limned clouds. Her coffee cup was empty, but her eyes were downcast, looking at the sidewalk.

"Are you alright?" he asked quietly, as they came up to their apartment building. "You look like you need to get something off your chest."

She paused and looked at him. He felt, once again, the difference in their height.

"It's not all the pearl," she said. "I've always . . . when I was peeking at Jordie through the keyhole, I thought sometimes, 'this is it, this is the moment she gets knocked up.' And that turned me on. I imagined someone cumming inside of me, and how my life would be fundamentally different. Walking around with my stomach swelling, and everyone would look at me and know 'she had sex.' 'Fucked a big cock and took a load.' Imagined my abdomen distending until I couldn't hide it anymore, and everyone would know what a slut I was."

"That's . . ." Mel said. "I don't think people think that of pregnant women."

"I know," she said, with a sad smile. "But it's not a rational idea. It's a kink. That fantasy turned me on. It still turns me on. I know it's not practical. I'm still in school; neither of us has a job that can support a pregnancy, much less a kid. I'm not trying to get pregnant. But I get off on the idea of maybe getting pregnant. It doesn't make sense. It's not supposed to. And sometimes . . ."

She bit her lip.

"Sometimes what?" he prompted.

"I'd like you to, you know, pretend. When we do it. That you're going to knock me up." Rachel's cheeks were absolutely burning, all across her nose and up her ears, down to her throat. It was alarming. "Just as a fantasy. I didn't say anything last time, but I was thinking it, imagining it, and it . . . it reminded me of the bus, how wet I was, how desperately I needed it. I know it's just pretend, but it really . . . it gets me going."

Mel nodded. He wasn't sure he understood, exactly, but he knew what Rache was asking of him. To cater to her needs. To make her feel better. He gave her hand a squeeze.

"Okay," he promised. "And one day, when we're ready, we'll do it for real."

Her lip smirked. "You promise?"

Mel gave a shy smile back. "There's no one else I'd rather breed than you."

He had tried to say it as a joke, but there was something about the way he said it that came out more serious. Rachel's hand was crushing his by the time they came to their respective doorways. She looked down at him, straight into his eyes, and whispered so soft that he could barely hear her:

"You are very dangerous to me, Mel Arkwright."

The kiss seemed to last for a long time. Then she let him go, and was gone.

Exercise. Béibhinn showed them another Tai Chi stance, how to move slowly from the first position to the second. It was almost frustratingly slow for Mel, but Jenny and Jordan seemed to be very focused on it, their movements in almost perfect unison. After they had showered and dressed, the ghola looked up at Mel and said:

"Be aware of your surroundings. There will be a test later."

Mel wasn't sure what she meant by that, but he nodded. Jenny held his hand today, Jordan moving ahead of them on the sidewalk, and Mel found himself trying to pay more attention as he walked, instead of getting lost in his own thoughts and letting his feet carry him forward on autopilot.

Ha-Yoon was waiting at the door, the bluebird still in its nest above her head. Her eyes fixed on Mel as he approached. She had a can of something tall in her hands, and he was glad to see it wasn't anything alcoholic, because her shoulders were hunched, and there were dark rings under her eyes, jaw tense. The second he stepped through the door, before he even signed in, she grabbed his arm.

"Out back," she said. "It wants to talk to you. I don't care how you do it, just make it go away."

Mel caught a glimpse of Tomie and Bobbie behind the counter, offered a little ASL hello, then headed around the outside of the Cosmic Fill-Up. He noticed the little cameras hidden under the eaves, which Ha-Yoon could monitor from the manager's office or any convenient tablet. The smooth, oddly pitted plastic coating on the cinderblock walls was supposed to be graffiti-resistant. The guy asleep in the cab of his Ford Anemone, a single-passenger hydrogen fuel cell vehicle that looked like a giant oyster and swallowed a Model T and spat out a sickly pearl with wheels. The car was covered in a soft, powdery pink coating.

The thing Mel was supposed to make go away was in the middle of digesting, or possibly colonizing, the waste oil container. It was about five feet tall, and from a distance it could be taken to be a giant pink mushroom. There was a huge cap, as big as a car tire, with pale gills underneath. The central stalk was as thick as Mel's waist, and from it extended wrist-thick tendrils that were made up of fibrous roots. They anchored it quite firmly to the oil container and building, spreading out from the point of contact, seeking every crack of dirt.

It didn't have eyes, at least not that Mel could see. Nor a face. The air around, as the wind shifted, was sweeter and made the back of his throat itch. If Mel had seasonal allergies, he was pretty sure this thing would be his walking personal hell. As it was, the spores or pollen that it exuded in a soft pink cloud around it seemed to cling to his tongue.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Mel Arkwright."

The stalk shivered. Mel could actually see the pink dust fall from its gills.

[[GREETINGS MEL ARKWRIGHT WE ARE RHIZOMAT]]

The voice was artificial. Mel zeroed in on the source: there was a speaker half-buried in the stalk, close to where it joined the cap. Now that Mel saw that, he could see half-buried wires in the fleshy stalk, hinting at other embedded devices.

The cap tilted toward Mel, like someone bowing their head. Mel bowed back, mirroring the angle. He wasn't even sure if the Rhizomat had eyes to see, but social instincts were strong. It seemed to be the polite thing to do.

"I've never met a Rhizomat before," he said, as they straightened. "I'm afraid I don't know much about your people."

[[WE ARE ANALOGUOUS TO SOME OF YOUR EARTH FUNGUS]]

[[COLONY ORGANISMS THAT ACHIEVE SENTIENCE WITH SUFFICIENT DENSITY]]

"Oh, neat!" he said with a nod. He gestured to the oil container. "Are you . . . eating? Because that's the waste food oil. We normally have a truck that comes along each week to pump it out for disposal."

[[WE ARE EATERS OF FILTH IT IS OUR PURPOSE WE DESTROY EVIL BY CONSUMING IT WE CLEANSE THIS WORLD BY OUR PASSING]]

"We have a concept a bit like that," he said. "Reduce, reuse, and recycle. The idea that we can minimize waste and find new uses for it. A lot of the stuff we make is from recycled materials. You can basically melt a bunch of plastics and metals down and remake them into new stuff. No landfill."

[[YES YOU UNDERSTAND WE HOPED YOU MIGHT]]

There was a pause. Mel could see now that the central stalk wasn't solid, being made up of thick, twisted bundles of fibers. He wasn't sure there was a central point to its mass, unless it was the cap itself. Faint strands floated out from it and touched Mel's face and exposed hands. He tried not to flinch.

"If you don't mind me asking, how do you observe the world? Humans have eyes, ears, senses of smell, taste, and touch. I can't quite tell with your anatomy," he asked.

[[WE TASTE THE WORLD FEEL ITS CURRENTS OF AIR AND WATER AND EARTH]]

Mel held out his hand and watched the strands crawl over the back of it. Didn't hurt. Didn't even itch. Like putting his hand in a spider's web.

[[WE TASTE YOU NOW PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED WE ONLY EAT DEAD PEOPLE]]

"Okay," he said, not sure whether he should be slightly or more than slightly alarmed. For all he knew, this thing would slowly digest him. Yet it hadn't really moved, aside from extending those silk-fine strands to explore him.

[[WE TASTE THE HUSK-WALKER AND SKIN-WALKERS AND OTHERS ON YOU]]

[[FASCINATING]]

Mel mentally translated. Two-Clicks had called brain slugs skin-wearers; and gholas had to be husk-walkers. Although that begged another question.

"You call the brain slugs skin-wearers. Can they . . . integrate with your people? You seem so different from humans, anatomically," Mel asked.

[[THEY HAVE TRIED]]

[[WE ARE TOO VAST FOR ANY ONE]]

[[OUR NERVOUS SYSTEMS TOO DISTRIBUTED]]

[[THEY NEED A CENTRALIZED NERVOUS SYSTEM]]

[[THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS BUT THEY ARE RARE]]

[[WE CAN FORM SEMI-SENTIENT NODULES THAT ARE FIT HOSTS]]

Mel wasn't sure how polite it was to ask more. He wondered what the brain slugs would give in exchange for the Rhizomat growing them a host body. It would have to be an extreme survival situation, he guessed, or a very specific task. Something that required the hive mind to use whatever unique capabilities the Rhizomat had.

"I read a little about your people," Mel said. "But you keep using 'we.' Do you have separate instances, or are you a hive mind like the brain slugs have?"

[[EACH NON-CONTINUOUS INSTANCE IS AN INDIVIDUAL COLONY]]

[[ON OUR HOME WORLD THERE WERE THREE CONTINENTS THREE INDIVIDUALS]]

[[THEY BROKE THEMSELVES TO MAKE US TO SPREAD TO THE STARS]]

[[ON EARTH WE ARE SMALLER WE ARE MANY IT IS EASIER THIS WAY]]

[[BUT WE REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE UNBROKEN]]

"Uh. So, true asexual reproduction?" Mel asked, remembering documentaries he had watched with Jordan and Jenny. "No problems with disease, lack of genetic diversity, anything like that?"

[[THERE ARE MUTATIONS WE CAN PURGE OR SPREAD THEM SELECTIVE EVOLUTION]]

[[WE DO NOT DO GENE RECOMBINATION VIA SEX]]

[[BUT WE HAVE SOMETHING ELSE]]

Mel blinked. He could feel the hair-like threads on his cheeks, and they were white and criss-crossing his hands. Yet he didn't feel anything. Looked at his feet, lifted one and then the other. Nothing was holding him in place.

"What is it?" Mel asked.

[[DREAMSINGING]]

[[SHARED STATE OF ALTERED CONSCIOUSNESS]]

[[AN EXCHANGE OF IDEAS MEMORIES AND PERSPECTIVES]]

[[WE SPEND MUCH OF OUR LIFE IN THIS STATE A COMMUNION OF SELF]]

"That sounds . . . interesting," Mel said. "Humans have dreams, meditation, and drugs to enter altered states of consciousness, but it's just for individuals. We can't really share them, except through art or writing."

[[THAT IS NOT TRUE YOU KNOW THIS YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED THIS]]

Mel frowned.

"You mean the dreams I've been having? How could you know about that?" he asked.

[[WE FEEL IT IN YOU]]

[[THEIR SCENTS CLING TO YOU]]

[[HUMANS DO NOT KNOW THEY ARE DREAMSINGERS BUT WE KNOW]]

[[WE WISH TO SHARE THIS WITH YOU]]

Mel's frown deepened. He remembered Aloa and the tasp. On the other hand, he was curious what this dreamsinging was like, and Ha-Yoon had told him to do whatever it took to make it go away.

"I had a bad experience with an Electrovore," he confessed. "She tasped me without my consent. While I'm curious about this dreamsinging, I have to ask: if I say no, would you honor that?"

A ripple went through the pink central stalk, the fibrous strands contracting tightly.

[[DREAMSINGING WITHOUT CONSENT IS A SIN]]

[[WE WOULD NEVER]]

Mel took a deep breath. The speaker apparently had only a single volume, which made reading its affect difficult, but it seemed sincere.

"Will the dreamsinging negatively affect me or my brain slug roommates in any way?" Mel asked.

[[NO WE WILL SHARE ONLY A LITTLE IT IS ONLY SENSATION AND INFORMATION]]

[[TO YOU A WAKING DREAM]]

Mel took a deep breath. A part of him thought he should ask Jordan. Yet he was an adult, wasn't he? Could make some of his own decisions.

"Okay," he said. "How does it work, exactly?"

[[WE HAVE GROWN NEURAL INTERFACES ON YOUR SKIN]]

[[NO DIRECT CONNECTION TO YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM]]

[[WE EXCHANGE SIGNALS THROUGH THE MANIPULATION OF ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS]]

"Uh . . . okay, I guess that's better than me snorting psychedelic pollen or you drilling a hole into my brain," Mel said. "When does it start?"

For a moment, Mel tasted red. The Rhizomat didn't move, yet seemed to grow massively, a towering world-tree whose roots dug down toward the warm core of the planet. Pink rivers, heavy with some alien equivalent of algae, flowed through fields of threading silver and pink vines, which lifted up into specialized structures to catch the rays of a distant, cool sun. Fields of caps formed vast shadowed expanses in which luminous fungal plants grew, and small things skittered, slithered, and flapped. Awareness was not sight, exactly. It was like being able to focus in on the tip of a toe and suddenly being aware of it in exacting, microscopic detail. Except it was not just Mel; the consciousness that was his self was vast, like playing an ancient city simulation game and being able to focus on every building at the same time, without effort.

A shudder went through Mel's body, a sort of exultation of release and loss. At the edge of his self, a part of the mass was being shaped, grown for purpose. A stunted thing with a vermillion cap marked by a deep fissure. It slipped away, and Mel felt the sudden lack of sensation. It was gone, individual, inaccessible, and a part of Mel desperately wanted to reach forward with his tendrils, to draw that lost part of him back.

Then he saw them. Naked, tall, three-fingered, silvery-grey beings. One held a clear crystal bowl, and inside it was the greenish-black body of a brain slug. The vermillion Rhizomat-bud slithered forward, the base of its central stalk splitting into a crude quadripartite stance. This had been programmed into the nascent mind. This was its purpose.

The brain slug crawled into the slot.

The Rhizomat-bud did not scream. It sang. A terrible, alien birth cry, a cloud of white spores, deliberately neutered so that it could never reproduce on its own that way. The brain slug's tendrils found the central nervous stalk that had been designed especially for this, acids boring through what was left of the connection to the main body. Cutting it off forever from ever rejoining the Rhizomat.

The tendrils rewove themselves. The body that formed was not like the Rhizomat or the tall, slender aliens. It was disturbingly human in proportion and outline. Pink tendrils wove themselves into the suggestion of breasts, hips, long legs, and slender arms. Beneath the vermillion cap, a thin triangular jaw formed, dark pits that filled with special optical spots, and then something stared out over the world, newborn and yet with ancient memories.

Mel could not see that face. Could only feel the reshaping, the movement in the air, and recognized the mimicry for what it was. An attempt to look more human. Something that would have taken an impossible amount of bioengineering to achieve, but which a brain slug host in control of a Rhizomat bud could achieve in minutes. A changeling. Infiltrator.

Light, real light, suddenly hurt Mel's eyes. He felt wet tears on his face and knew he had been crying. The Rhizomat, the singular five-foot pink stalk, stood before him. The hair-fine tendrils withdrew from Mel. He saw, shocked, that it had grown a fine web over the side of the building, forming a pattern that was shocking in its familiarity. Mel saw, picked out in spiderweb-thin lines of inky black, bits and pieces of his dreams. Naked human female figures. Slugs with human faces. Wasp-things laying their eggs inside a recumbent naked man. A masked figure, eyeless face with a single hole from which a tongue emerged. A hole in the wall that was both death and a gateway to the unknown pleasures of the void, stars twinkling in inky blackness.

Slowly, they withdrew, leaving behind a mural of wonder and horror.

[[WE THANK YOU]]

[[YOU HAVE SHARED MUCH]]

[[WE HAVE SEEN OURSELVES THROUGH YOUR MIND]]

[[NOT ALL YOU HAVE SEEN IS ACCURATE]]

[[THE MIND DISTORTS MEMORY AND PERCEPTION]]

[[YET THE IMAGES ARE POWERFUL]]

[[SUCH BEAUTY IS TO BE TREASURED]]

All the tendrils withdrew. The oil tank was empty and clean, and as the Rhizomat's stalk swayed and split so it could walk past Mel, he saw the ground where it ponderously stepped was marked by clean circles in the dark pavement.

"Thank you," Mel said to its back. "You've given me a lot to think about."

When he stepped inside the Cosmic Fill-Up, with a burning need to pee, Ha-Yoon met him at the door.

"Are you okay?" she asked, staring into his eyes.

Mel thought about it for a moment. Thought of all the kids in high school who had tried things. Shrooms they had found under cow patties in a field. Blots of LSD. A whole pharmacy of pills of every shape and size. He had watched them curiously, the before and after, wondering if he could see the change in them. Most of the time, there wasn't anything obvious. No chemical experience, however profound, had fundamentally altered who they were.

Yet something about him felt different. Like he was trying to stretch muscles he didn't have. Or if several senses he had gotten used to weren't there, and he was stumbling through the world half-blind, even though he could see perfectly.

"I don't know," he admitted. "But, um, I think we have a new mural on the wall out back."