Episode 8 - Symbiosis

  Chapter 75 - Operation: Baise (2)

  We take nearly half an hour to pass through the ruins. As the bodies of the lichen holobionts grow denser, there are parts of our journey where we are climbing over them - the road and rubble structures lost beneath their desiccated husks. At first, every step had my heart in my throat, worried we would see something move beneath our hooves, but nothing shifted except the streaming spores spilling from the fruiting bodies.

  It is nonstop. They saturate the air with their seeds. If the holobionts were intelligent, I might wonder if it is an intentional engineering of the environment, rendering our world toxic to anything but their own offspring. Instead, they are without higher-order function, and it is little more than survival. While the parents wait for the rain to come again, they spread their seed on the wind, hoping for moisture somewhere else.

  Then, when the rain must fall, it knocks the spores from the air to mix with the soil - to be washed on the floods somewhere new until they find everything they need to grow again, and meet up with their parents once more.

  It is almost more depressing that we have lost our world to an unthinking biology rather than an intentional enemy that left us trapped in our own environmentally engineered bubbles. Or more likely, we destroyed the world enough that only these creatures could live - giving them the opportunity to seize dominance in the gaps we left behind. If we were freer, maybe things could be different for everyone. But, there is so little left - even if these creatures did not roam our ruins, I doubt a human could make a life out here. Moreau’s team seem to barely survive.

  I wonder what they were like when we retreated.

  My hosts were not scientists. I do not have those memories.

  I update my tablet with the location of a fallen building that has blocked the road that was not marked and check the time. The convoy must be hitting the other side of the town now to begin their scavenging - breaking down the uncovered doors I passed. We need to get further ahead to maintain the watch for rain. Pooka needs no prompting, nimbly leaping down from the pile of rubble we’ve climbed.

  What did the mothers of my bloodline do? I ask.

  I can hear Pooka’s hesitation as he struggles with words. They were treated like queens and respected elders, as those can invite should be, organizing themselves in a guild of their own kind. Blessings from the conduits were prizes for humanity: calling the weather, filling gaps in industry and innovation, supplementing your technological development. When your kind were stronger, the greatest of us would awaken again and again.

  An odd thought passes through my mind as we wander by another open door, the empty spaces within already looted for scraps. I can even see where the walls have been peeled open to pull the wiring and plumbing out. Do you know who responded to my mother’s invite?

  Know is a slippery term.

  It cannot just be you who has followed my bloodline. Mother and grandmother and even great grandmother could sometimes all live at the same time. There must be others who have come to the women you’ve followed.

  Yes.

  So, who were they?

  Creatures like myself.

  Other cryptids?

  Yes, that is what you call us.

  Other Tenebrosus pooka? We turn a corner onto the main street again, beginning a gallop towards the far edge of the city to continue our search for the rain.

  No. I am the only one like me.

  You are not very good at providing answers.

  I am not good at explaining what I don’t have words for. You humans like to classify and sort and order and insist upon naming things. It is not a trait of my kind. We exist, in the hollow or separate from it. Some parts of us remember and some parts of us do not. Most of my kind exist as nothing more than the ghosts that wander in the darker places, flowing from place to place with the currents, and that your kind have insisted on dragging to the light where they do nothing more than labor as fragments separated from a greater they were never meant to leave.

  You do not do any of that.

  No. I remember what it is like to live. It is hard to forget.

  And somewhere, I think I do, too. Not just in Pooka’s memories. I yearned for things I didn’t understand before I met him. Rough textures, bright lights, noises in my ears. Anything to break up the smooth, sterile surfaces of the engineered environments in urban spaces. Anything to feel… real.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  A flash of bright red catches my eye, and I tap Pooka’s neck. In the rubble, something is glowing an angry, almost electronic vermillion, deep beneath the rubble. I slide down from Pooka’s back and bend underneath a fallen concrete wall, cracked open to reveal its rebar skeleton, to peer into the darkness.

  It is not electronic. The color seems too intense somehow. Wait here.

  But Pooka does not listen, fading to his Hyaenid form to crawl on his belly at my side as I crawl deeper after the strange red glow. I can feel the dirt grind against my flat palms and knees as I crawl into darkness, trusting only the vibrant red as my guide.

  I push aside a brick… and take a small shocked breath when I realize the red is a glowing rune carved into dark, solid metal.

  It’s a fucking manifestation platform!

  “Fuck!” I gasp aloud, bumping my head against the back of the rubble behind me in my shock.

  I test pushing aside some of the larger pieces of rubble with my shoulder, but nothing will budge under this pile. Spotting some rusting rebar, I use one piece to pull myself along my belly so I’m within touching distance of the rune-covered metal. I rub one rubber-gloved thumb over the texture of the runes, feeling their indented surfaces and watching the red light waver as it gets covered by my hand.

  Can you clear us some space?

  Command the metal on your own.

  Don’t be stubborn; just help me out.

  The weight above my head shifts, the concrete rubble lifting where it still clings to the rebar that responds to Pooka’s call. Several pieces groan and rumble, the ground shaking as something larger must roll free above our heads. Soon, there is enough room around me for me to sit up, then shortly later to stand, and finally heavy-grey light from above streams in again to illuminate the platform, the red losing its vibrancy in actual sunlight. The platform is cracked.

  The solid metal disc, tarnished bronze laced with green and black, has a huge fissure across its face, splitting the entire surface into two. One side is twisted, jutting upwards from the ground. As I study it, I realize it is not a flat disc, but that more metal must continue downwards into the ground, like we are viewing only the surface of a much larger structure.

  The glowing runes on the edges are undamaged, except where the crack passes through a few on each side. Where they are broken, they are dull and lifeless. I don’t know if it affects the magic of the whole to have a few interrupted.

  I massage my healing hand with my good hand, pursing my lips as I look across the structure. What would happen if I touched it with my bare hand? What would happen if I bled on it?

  I open my eyes, and look upon a young woman with eyes of warm sienna. She stretches a palm towards me, and lands it upon my muzzle. It feels warm and wet, and I smell the metallic tang of her bleeding palm where she has sliced the meat of her muscles deeply to let the water inside her flood out.

  An older human male stands off beside her, holding a torch in his hands above his head that casts a scattered illumination on the clearing around the metal of the energy pin. At his side, a dark-eyed sister waits, standing on her hind-legs with a long, wrinkled pink face and a great golden mane of hair around her face and down her neck. There is green grass, runners climbing to the metal and stretching across its surface. Beyond, only the dark of night.

  I breathe deeply, letting the smell of blood fill my nostrils, and examine this host. Her hands shake as she moves her fingers down my face, streaking my hide with her blood.

  “Stain the platform deeply,” says the old man. “Forge the connection with the hollow. Your innate talents have invited your symbiont here, and it has chosen as suits its own nature. But you must solidify your bond with the hollow to strengthen your connection with the energies there, so that you may be a true conduit.”

  I exhale, blowing the hair from my host's face. She bites her trembling lower lip and withdraws her hand from me. Then she bends, and I lower my muzzle with her to follow the smell of the sweet blood. As she crouches, she swipes her hand across the surface of the metal, drawing a dark streak of her own liquid in an arc before my hooves. Where she rubs her blood into the grass, it stains the blades like rust.

  My fingers have unconsciously undone the buckle around my wrist that snaps tight the cuffs of my gloves against the long sleeves of my environmental suit. I suck in a breath as I catch myself, digging a nail under the next strap.

  We give only a drop of blood when we manifest. That’s what HR tells us to do. But every part of Pooka’s memories have told me they have co-opted the process from how conduits used to do it to something that is now mass-reproduced for all humans to keep drawing out symbionts from the hollow for their magic, to fill the energy gaps in our desperate survival. I may have given blood more than once if something in my mother when she manifested counted as my own blood. But could I give this platform more and learn something deeper about what I am in doing so? Or does the fact that this one is broken make it useless to me?

  The raindrop lands on my face shield, shocking me with a start. It dribbles down my visor as my movement shakes its surface tension, drawing a long trail across the clear plastic and dripping off my face onto my environmental suit where it pools in the crevice of my elbow.

  I look at it stunned for a moment longer. Then a second falls on my head. I can feel the patter of it through the rubber of the hood drawn tight around my face to the edges of my mask. Then another lands on the back of my hand.

  The ones that fall on the dormant lichen holobiont near us darken the surface with a bloom of moisture that is quickly wicked below the surface. Before my very eyes, the dried creases of its flesh swell, plumping up the exterior and darkening its sickly pallor to vibrant laurel greens and enriched coral reds and orange.

  This could be my only chance. It might take me only a few moments to test what would happen if I touched my skin to that metal and let a little of my blood drain onto its surface.

  And those few moments could be all that stands between me causing another death to someone who did not deserve my selfish, impulsive mistakes. I twist the buckle back over my wrist, tightening my cuff again. I cannot stay; I have work to do. The rain is here, and someone needs to carry the warning.