Ghola

Imagine everything a human fears. Pain. Loss. ****. A broken heart. Suffocation. Drowning. Starvation. Brain slugs share all of these primal fears. It is one of the great commonalities between both species. But brain slugs also fear something else.
—Slug Sutra, chapter 6

"Hello. My name is Mel Arkwright. And this is my testament."

Mel was naked beneath the robe. He felt that it was open in the back, the better to give access to his neck, his vertebrae. The small room was windowless, almost without furniture. Just the chair and the camera, which rested on a tripod, surrounded by a circle of light. He took a deep breath, strangely hard.

"This is the last step before I . . . I go under the slug," he said. Hands on his knees. The nervous knot in his stomach was a hard clench, like a cramp that wouldn't go away. He was hard, tenting the dark fabric of the robe. "I, um. I'm not suicidal. I'm not dying. No one **** me to be here. I'm an orphan. No one to miss me. I basically . . . I want a family. I want to belong."

The cold glare of the lens was empty. It gave no reaction. Mel stared into the lens and saw his own reflection there, inverted, and wondered who might watch this. Who might care? All the people he really cared about were already brain slug hosts except Rachel. Maybe Ha-Yoon. That was it.

He scratched the back of his neck. Despite the robe, he felt utterly naked.

"Is it . . . Is it weird that I wonder if it feels good? I mean, I know it'll probably hurt at first, when the skin dissolves, but then the tentacles go inside you and . . . and sometimes I just think it must be so freeing, to just let go, let someone else take over. Like maybe someone else would be able to do more with my life. Eat pussy better than I do. Make love better than I could."

Mel bit his lip. "Is it strange that I get hard at the thought of someone else using me to have sex with my girlfriends?"

The sound of the shower jolted Mel awake. He took three long, slow breaths, the dream weirdly clear in his mind. Then he rolled off, onto the floor, into push-up position. By the time he finished his first set, he realized that Jenny was watching him. She sat in the doorway, naked, cross-legged. The whites of her eyes phosphorescent in the darkness as he switched to crunches.

She watched him as he finished his exercises. Not judging. Not joining in. Just observed the muscles move beneath the skin, as the naked body moved through the basic movements. Eyes catching everything. Mel felt conscious of that attention, tried to keep his form on point. Keenly aware of the morning erection that would go down on its own, in time.

"**** and I have class starting next week," he said, after he was done. If only to fill the silence. "I know it'll take a while before I'm conversant, but I look forward to actually being able to talk to you, Jenny."

Her name sounded weird in his mouth. He hadn't said it aloud very often, and in his mind, Mel had often thought of her as Soong. Had made a point of trying to think of her like that, so he wouldn't default to Antonio's "Spicy Slug." Now that he'd seen her video, though, he realized he didn't know what to call her.

"Is it okay to call you Jenny?" he asked. "I mean, most of the time we've been calling you 'Soong,' I never really asked your preference before. I should have. Sorry."

Jenny unfolded herself and crawled on all fours across the floor. Her lips pressed gently against Mel's. No tongue. Just the cool lips. Then she climbed into his bed, her head on his pillow.

Jordan stuck her head around the doorframe, her hair wet and dripping. Mel got up for his time in the shower.

The skies were clear. They held hands. Dawn was at their backs as they stepped into the Cosmic Fill-Up. Ha-Yoon looked up as Mel checked in and held out a keycard.

"Here," she said. "Hold onto this until the end of your shift."

"Okay," Mel said, taking the blank off-white rectangle of plastic. "What's up?"

"It's the key to the beer fridge. Officially, we're restricting access because of shoplifting. Anyone who wants in asks for the key, and you unlock it for them. Locks automatically when they leave."

Mel frowned. "Has there been a lot of shoplifting?"

"No," Ha-Yoon said. "But if I ask you to open the beer fridge, you tell me no, okay?"

That's when he noticed the crushed soda cans in her trash can, the empty water bottles, the way her hands shook.

"You have a bad night?" he asked quietly.

"No. I mean, yes, but I didn't—" she took a deep breath. "I'm still sober. I didn't break my streak. But I had to go out last night with Autumn, and everybody else was drinking wine while I was there with my club soda and cranberry juice, and this morning I really, really want a beer and just need to avoid temptation. Okay?"

"Okay. Sure," Mel said, sticking the card in his pocket. "You can do this. You're doing great."

Ha-Yoon gave him a smile that looked a little too ****.

"You tap that slug pussy yet?" she asked.

Normally, Mel wouldn't kiss and tell. It was an invasion of privacy. But Ha-Yoon clearly needed a distraction.

"I watched this video on oral sex for beginners," he said. "The, uh, ladies have been letting me practice. I mean, I want to do a good job, you know? There haven't been any complaints so far, but I'm a little self-conscious of my lack of experience. How did you learn about it?"

The gold stars in Ha-Yoon's eyes seemed to twinkle. She decided that they needed to go service the grease traps, which, despite being utterly disgusting, was a good excuse for her to give him ten thousand words on growing up in a household where her aunt, or something like an aunt, taught human health and sexuality and always had these books lying around for Ha-Yoon and her sister to read.

"Ajumma didn't give us 'the talk' formally," Ha-Yoon said. "But if we got in trouble—and we always got in trouble—she'd give us these book reports to do, without allowance and dessert and electronics until we gave her two thousand words on genital warts, or the symptoms of menopause, or the advantages and disadvantages of shaving vs. waxing. Then she would grade them. Sometimes she made us grade each other. Or give oral reports. Mom was always at work and just said, 'Do what ajumma says,' and so we did. Anyway, so that was an education unto itself, and then I got into university and all these people like, they were trying to do all these things they'd seen in porn, and some of them were hurting themselves, it was absolutely ridiculous."

That was good until lunch, when Mel got to sit down with the other brain slug hosts. Tommie and Blair were on-shift today, and there was a new burrito flavor, which involved some kind of avocado-curry paste that Mel found piquant but probably not going to be his go-to.

Mel was just finishing his drink and getting ready to clean up when all three of the brain slug hosts suddenly stiffened and stood up at once. Not on the same wavelength, Mel got to his feet awkwardly a few seconds later and followed their gaze.

A short figure stood in the doorway, androgynous in outline, with a narrow face, no beard or moustache. Grey hoodie, with the hood up. Black jeans that looked greasy. Yet what caught Mel's attention was the skin, which had a waxy, unhealthy grey sheen to it, and strange eyes. It was like blue jade that had rotted to a kind of brown, and the whites were actually yellow, like rancid milk. Mel had seen a kid at the orphanage with jaundice once, and something about the eyes reminded him of that.

"Mr. Arkwright?" she said, and her voice sounded hoarse, like she had spent the night screaming. "MacElroy suggested we should talk. Perhaps outside?"

It was the breath that finally clocked it for Mel. It was the rancid meat-smell of bacterial action. The smell was subtle but pervasive, hanging about the figure like a cloud, but when she spoke, the smell projected outward. All of the brain slugs on their hosts' necks had gone pure black, contracted as small as they could, sensory tentacles retracted to nubs, and frozen in place.

"Yeah," Mel heard himself say as he stared at the unknown extraterrestrial. "Outside might be for the best."

Jordan grabbed his arm as he slipped past. She was stiff, yet her eyes were fixed on him.

"It'll be okay. Really," Mel told her, fighting the weird unease in his stomach as he followed the hoodie-wearing stranger outside.

There was a breeze. The hoodie-wearer gave a jerk of their head and walked downwind, around toward the back of the Cosmic Fill-Up. Mel felt the breeze at his back, carrying the scent away from him as the short woman stopped and looked at him.

"So, you know who I am," Mel said. "But who are you? And if you don't mind me asking, what are you?"

This close, Mel could see the wrinkles in the waxy skin, like crepe paper that had been smoothed a dozen times.

"You can call me Béibhinn," the grey-skinned woman said. "And your people call me a ghola."

Mel thought of Lovecraft's ghouls. Of those weird clone-things in Frank Herbert's Dune. A childhood of weird reading made him strangely conscious of words and their meanings.

"What is a ghola?" he asked after a too-long silence.

"A related species to brain slugs. Our lineage split off some single-digit number of millions of years ago. What do you know about the biological process of ****?" Béibhinn asked.

Mel frowned. "Heart stops, brain stops, cell ****—the body's systems stop, start to decay. Things feed on the corpse. Bacteria, scavengers."

"Good enough," Béibhinn said. "Brain slugs are symbionts. Connect with living hosts in a lifelong bond. Sometimes, things go wrong during integration. The host dies. Shock, immune response, critical brain damage—human childbirth has its dangers, too. Usually, the brain slug dies shortly after the host. With its foot dissolved, the brain slug is stuck with a rotting corpse, unable to escape, doomed to starve."

Béibhinn paused then, let that image sink in.

"I'm sensing a but," Mel said.

The grey woman nodded.

"**** isn't a hard on or off switch. Sometimes the brain can be destroyed, and the heart continues to beat for a while; the autonomic systems continue to function. Humans can stay on life support like that for years. Or maybe the heart stops, but cellular activity continues for a while even as the body's systems shut down. Sometimes, the brain slug kills the host slowly enough that if the slug is quick, they can still access the nervous system before everything stops. It's still ****, but it's a slower, uglier ****. Like a fetal heart still beating for a few minutes after a pregnant woman has been beheaded."

Mel frowned at the visual, instantly squicked out. There had been one kid at the orphanage who liked **** metal, and Mel would see him stare fixatedly at album covers of dead bodies. Not that the kid was actually into doing anything nasty, but he liked to squick people out with the art. When he graduated from high school, Mel was surprised to learn that he had received an art scholarship.

"Eventually, there was a lineage that developed mutations that specialized in surviving a bit longer in those edge cases. Evolution pushed my kind further. Our integration became faster, messier, and more violent; killing hosts during integration became normal. We feed off the host's body to speed integration. No attempt to retain the host's memories, just a push to control what is working; repair necessary damage, route around others. We also secrete chemicals that encourage cellular activity, even if that activity isn't normal. Anything to buy us time."

She showed teeth. Perfectly white, even teeth, which made Mel think of movie stars and dental work.

"Eventually, the species stabilized: ghola slugs are capable of bonding with the recently deceased. Preferably post brain-****, but before full cellular ****. We feed off the corpses to make them move again, so that we can make it far enough to move to the next corpse. It's a niche habitat. Hosts are generally damaged, and parts of them may be toxic, actively rotting. By comparison to brain slugs, our evolutionary lifecycle is quick and ugly. And we developed intraspecies predation practices that made our kin fear us."

A purple tongue showed between the teeth.

"In earlier centuries, we were their Eaters of the Dead. Cannibals who feasted on fallen brain slugs and other beings from our world, to claim rare nutrients. For hundreds of thousands of years, we were a cancer on the World Soul. Unintelligent, brain mass sacrificed to fuel growth, desperately trying to last long enough to procreate. Sometimes the others fled from us, sometimes they hunted us. The oldest of us grew cunning and finally wise enough to see that eking out a living on the edges of charnel pits and battlefields wasn't sustainable for the species."

She took a long breath, breathing in deliberately through her nose and holding it, then letting it out in a rush.

"A few thousand years ago, at the dawn of our recorded history, we negotiated a place in the World Soul. We weren't deathless, but our hosts are technically . . . expendable. That has a certain value. In human terms, we were scouts, explorers, suicide bombers, waste management, firefighters; high-risk occupations. When our planet came into touch with the starsfarers, we were some of those who spread outwards. And we were part of the Exodus that landed on this world. As with our cousins, we found your bodies quite acceptable hosts."

Mel chewed on that for a bit.

"Brain slug hosts can't talk. They use sign language. But you're eloquent," he said. "How is that?"

"Most of us ghola still have some trouble," the grey woman said. "I've learned, over several hosts, how to preserve the connections, manipulate the vocal cords, teeth, and tongue. Tricky things, tongues. My first human host, I accidentally chewed it off and swallowed it."

She waggled her purple tongue for emphasis.

"You've probably noticed the smell. Even with the freshest corpse, there are parts of the body too damaged to continue. Cells that have already expired. We can encourage new cellular activity—feed on the dead and dying cells to encourage mitosis, regeneration—but there are certain trade-offs. A robust microflora that feeds on the dead tissue. **** damage that never quite repairs. Muscles and skin tear and don't always regrow correctly. Microcancers. With care, our bodies can last for months, even years. Yet it is a constant battle of maintenance. Making do with functional limitations."

She pulled up the left sleeve to show a series of long, ragged gashes in the arm, tied together with heavy sutures.

"This one, obviously suicidal. Tried a couple of times. Finally succeeded. Left hand is still weak; she cut the tendons."

"So, this body—how did you get it?" he asked.

Béibhinn held up her left hand. There was a tattoo on the back of it. Blue-black ink.

JANE DOE
DOD
13/01/2054
SEAC GEN HOSP

"We have an agreement with your military. Separate from the government compact that covers brain slugs, as our needs are a bit different. The military is used to getting corpses for the purpose of testing munitions; a certain fraction of those are siphoned off for our use. Our numbers are small, but our needs are specific to be useful. Some people think their organs will go to save kids, be used for research, or teach medical students, and instead they become hosts for us," she said.

"You said several hosts," Mel said, and he tilted his head, trying to see her neck. Yet the hoodie hid it, and presumably the ghola slug.

She caught his gaze and seemed to understand what he wanted. Béibhinn turned around and lifted her hoodie to just below her breasts. Her jeans fell low, and there was a black thong slung low across her hips, but the spine—buried along the greying flesh was a long, pulsing, almost translucent ribbon of gelatinous alien flesh, through which the bones of the spine could be seen clearly. What Mel saw was at least thirty centimeters long, and he couldn't see the whole of it.

"How many have you had?" he asked, when he could speak again.

Béibhinn pulled the hoodie back down and turned to face him.

"Human? This is my ninth," Béibhinn said. "Before that—at least three different extraterrestrial species. Our life cycle is a bit different from brain slugs. Longer, in ideal conditions. But we don't gain sapience instantly. Our spawning stage is sub-sapient, little more than an animal. Typically consumes the first host's brain completely. We depend on our kin to care for us, to guide us toward new hosts when our first gives out. It's a bit like your childhood. Developmental stages. As we grow, we gain language. Better insight into how to connect and control our host bodies. And we can live, potentially, a very long time. This is something else the brain slug hosts fear about us."

Mel found himself nodding. He didn't blame them. Yet it made sense. These ghola were basically vampires and cannibals by brain slug standards. Hell, by human standards, they weren't far off.

"And do you have the same dietary requirements?" Mel asked. "I mean—"

"Do I need cum to survive?" Béibhinn crinkled her nose, and it was strange to Mel to think that she must have looked in the mirror and practiced that, maybe on different faces. "Yes. Although given the quirks of our appearance, it is more difficult to get dates. I have a position with a discreet brothel associated with the Seacouver National Guard. No one cares who's on the other side of a glory hole. I'd invite you to visit, but I doubt your roommates would appreciate that."

"No, probably not," Mel admitted. He thought about how much time this was taking. Ha-Yoon would want to know where he disappeared to. "This is really a lot to take in. I appreciate you taking the time to tell me about yourself and your people. I should probably ask you more questions, but I think my break time is almost up and—well, is there anything I can tell you? So far you've done most of the talking."

The grey woman nodded.

"A question for you," she asked. "Most humans experience deep disquiet when they meet a brain slug host. They sense something is wrong. Yet you socialized with your roommate, your fellow employees. You defended them. How did you overcome that?"

Mel paused. Her weird, rotten jade eyes stared at him as if he were a puzzle she was trying to pry the secret from.

"I don't know, exactly," he said honestly. "At first, Jordan weirded me out. And the others. But the longer I spent around them, the more I learned about them, the more they just seemed like people. Weird people, but people. Maybe it was because I didn't have anyone else. Humans do that. Bond with the people we're around. We're wired for it. Social animals."

The term came out of one of the documentaries that Mel and Jordan had watched. Yet it seemed to fit. Béibhinn searched his eyes, his face. He had the disconcerting feeling that she was better at it than Jordan. More experienced. Knew what to look for if he was lying or hiding something.

"Remarkable," she said. Then added: "I wish you had been my roommate."