Twiceborn

by C. L. Kagmi

  The child’s expression is inscrutable.

  They follow the trail past dark cells which are, as far as Lily can tell, abandoned. Past workers who clatter blindly past the strangers with the glowing orb, as though they were not there.

  At a junction, two workers stand delicately tapping each other with antennae. Mandible-clicks without form or pattern pass between them.

  Kit creeps close—so close that Lily fights the urge to reach out and grab them. But the Ants confer only a moment longer before skittering apart, following different branches of the forking passage.

  Kit says something so softly that Lily can’t make it out. She walks to hover, protectively, over them.

  “What?” she whispers.

  “I said,” Kit snaps, “it’s as I thought.” Kit sounds—is that fear in their voice?

  “Insects on Earth—ones like this—communicated primarily through scent. There may be a sonic component to their language, but if so it’s only a modifier, like body language.”

  Lily’s heart soared to hear the Eternal repeat her conclusion. “Then you think they do have a language?”

  “They have a language,” Kit says with perfect calm. “There’s too much—” they frown—frustrated, Lily realises, by a lack of words to communicate with her. “The math,” they say, slowly, almost patronizingly, “is wrong. None of this would work without a language-forming mind.”

  “What makes you—”

  “The angles just don’t fit together right!”

  Kit says it so loudly that Lily reflexively gathers them close, looking over her shoulder for monsters. The Ants have never reacted to sound before, but old instincts die hard—and sometimes, Lily knows, that’s for the best.

  “Let’s go,” she whispers.

  Kit complies and Lily shepherds them toward the exit, lighting their way with her gold-green sphere.

  The words sit on Kit’s tongue like nausea, all the way back to Lily’s dome. Like the acid-fear of space-sickness. But much worse.

  They let them fall, finally, when they are standing in Lily’s kitchen. A comparatively white, angular space. Like home.

  “You’re going to have to Reshape me.”

  Lily actually drops the roots she was carrying in from the garden. Turns to stare at Kit. There’s something endearing about that stare, about those huge, mismatched animal eyes.

  “I need to be able to smell what the Ants can smell,” Kit begins, gritting their teeth. “You couldn’t do it—we’ll need my brain’s algorithms, and its processing power.”

  Lily has gone to one knee on the ground and is gathering up the roots, slowly.

  “I felt…” Kit struggles to articulate. Names of fractal patterns and mesh-webs will do her no good here. “I felt something big.” They remember the strange fluttering in their stomach as they watched the way the Ants moved—as they imagine the spread of their cave system through the mountains, carved with painstaking care.

  “I felt something conscious. Something alive. Something your people,” they rush to remind Lily, “would want to know about.”

  “How’s that? Are you psychic?”

  Kit hears the crossness in Lily’s voice, and understands it.

  “I’m mathematical. And perceptive. That’s why your overs sent for me. We can do things that you can’t, with our augments. But we can’t—engage—as you do.”

  “You mean,” Lily says softly, “that you haven’t studied the Reshaping of organic bodies.”

  Kit shrugs. “It has not seemed worthwhile to us.”

  “Is that why they sent you?” Lily asks suddenly.

  Kit stares. Bites their tongue.

  “A child. That’s why they sent a child, isn’t it? They knew you’d need an organic body, and one that was easy to modify.”

  “That’s not the only reason,” Kit blurts out. Lily’s words feel too much like an accusation—too much like a refusal—to stay silent.

  Lily waits.

  “I asked for a hard test. For my final exam. If I pass,” Kit hesitates. Are they baring too much to this near-stranger, not even one of their own people? “If I pass, if I solve the problem—I get to Graduate.”

  “I’m in the bottom cohort, among my creche,” Kit hears their voice go quiet as they say it, hates their own weakness in the face of the truth. “Not slated to Graduate. Not as it stands right now. So my overs thought they could—” they almost say risk me, but stop themselves in time.

  “They thought they could test me, to see what I can do when faced with a unique challenge. If I pass, I get a big brain. If not, creche duty.” Kit hears the contempt dripping from their own voice. Wonders if Lily knows that, among the Eternals, creche-keepers are the only ones to be denied the higher geometries, the only ones to grow old and die.

  Lily is staring at them with something like horror on her face. “You...Graduate,” she says the word carefully, knowing what it means, “so early?”

  That is the Reshaped’s concern?

  “Sooner is better,” Kit explains. “Organic bodies can die. Each passing year is a chance of data loss.”

  Lily looks away, as though she cannot bear to meet Kit’s eyes. Puts the basket of roots on the kitchen counter, pretends to be busy with them.

  “So if I don’t...change you,” Lily hesitates, “they’ll deny you your Graduation?”

  “Yes.” It’s simpler to say that than to explain the alternatives.

  “And you...want to graduate?”

  “More than anything.”

  Lily looks up, surprised at the emotion in Kit’s voice.

  Their eyes meet for an interminable moment. Kit can see that this goes against Lily’s conscience. Can feel, also, the pitiful pleading in their own eyes.

  You should not need this. Your logic should be enough to convince.

  Lily is an animal, Kit’s defenses kick in. Logic doesn’t work on animals.

  The moment stretches. Long, long. What if Lily refuses?

  “I’ll do it,” the Reshaped says, very softly.

  Relief floods Kit. Then terror. They won’t be like the rest of their people, after this. It may go wrong. Even if it goes right, they may fail.

  Kit shakes their head. They must not fail. They cannot afford to.

  Not at so high a price.

  Nothing in Eternal teachings technically forbid Reshaping. The flesh is a tool—an incubation chamber—to be shed as soon as possible. It is not sacred, and so there was no taboo around its alteration.

  But there is fear. Fear of damage. Fear of mistakes.

  In their incubation years, Eternals are vulnerable like they never will be again. Changes to the organic flesh could warp a mind while the patterns necessary for sentience are being laid down. The worst-case scenario, neurological destruction—what worse crime could there be, than to destroy a mind?

  To take alien flesh into their own—the flesh of a mere animal, not yet out of its species’ Stone Age—

  Kit actually shudders.

  But this is the only way.

  And beneath their terror, there’s a tiny grain of perverse pride.

  The danger makes this a hard test. The hardest, maybe, of their generation. If they do this thing and succeed, they will be a legend. They will be able to go wherever, to know and think anything...

  Their stomach turns a little as they think of the second part of their success.

  Translating the language of the Ants will be one triumph. Maybe an invaluable one. Though the views of organic life forms are generally considered negligible by the overs, as their brains have such limited capacities—there may be new algorithms here. New data.

  And that’s not all.

  Kit imagines they can feel the rare earth metals in this planet’s crust, singing beneath their feet. And that scares them, now, more than the Reshaping.

  Lily breathes deeply as she preps the syringe. This is not what she expected. To care for the child, yes. To ensure that the Kit remained in perfect health. To send them bac
k to their mysterious overs, intact and unharmed. Or risk repercussions.

  How do Eternals respond if you harm one of their own? Lily doesn’t know. She can’t remember ever hearing of such a thing. There is no overlap between the territory of the Reshaped and the Eternals; the Eternal adults slide between the stars, black and silent and impossibly aloof. The Reshaped live in forest groves and under oceans, traveling through the black of space only by necessity.

  Lily has never heard of anyone injuring an Eternal. Or having the opportunity.

  But now the child lays before her on an exam table, crystalline eyes staring up at the ceiling. They say they know what they’re doing. They say it matter-of-factly, as though their body were a machine and not the very fabric of their being.

  To Kit, Lily supposes, that is true. To them, their augments, the digital recorders of their organic thoughts, are what really matters. These are all that will survive their “Graduation.”

  “I need to be able to smell what they smell,” Kit said. “If I’m right, their words are all around us.”

  Lily had known to investigate for pheromones. She had known that there were certain macro-patterns to their movements corresponding to wind patterns and to chemical traces left on blades of grass.

  She had dared to hope that this might reach the level of a spoken language—that there might be sufficient variation to express thoughts, feelings, ideas. And Kit, and Eternal, had reached the same hypothesis on their own. There was a thrill in that.

  But the next step makes Lily question everything. Is this problem worth solving, at such a high cost?

  The Reshaped had sequenced the Ants’ genomes in the first days after the remote probes discovered them in their loving swoops over Inanna. Long before Lily had been assigned here, their chemical data had been sent to some smarter, sleeker scientists in some warm and welcoming Reshaped colony, in a forest or beneath a sea. Nothing had looked, obviously, like language.

  “But it wouldn’t.” Kit said, as Lily talked it over with them. “Do the genes for our eardrums specify that we speak? No. Pattern and meaning would be deciphered in the brain. Your people haven’t figured out how to extract neural growth patterns from DNA, yet. The targeting mechanisms are too complicated for you.”

  “My people…”

  “Mine have.” Kit had looked at her with milky, owl-like eyes. “If you reverse-engineer the human genome with the higher maths, you can extrapolate the chemical signals that underlie the competitive wiring of the human brain.”

  Lily understood about half of that.

  “I,” Kit said, “can do the same for the Ants. And replicate them. In here.” They tapped their head, the skull beneath pearl-white hair and the translucent sheath of skin. “But my olfactory bulbs need to have the receptors to hook the neural apparatus up to. That’s where you come in.”

  And so Kit now lay on the table, waiting for Lily to inject them with the virus that would rewrite their senses, and part of their nervous system.

  Lily threads the catheter carefully into the vein of Kit’s arm.

  “The odds of rejection,” she explains, trying to sound as calm as Kit seems, “are low. But do let me know if you begin to feel anything strange. You shouldn’t feel anything at all. Not yet.”

  And it occurs to Lily, as she compresses the plunger to push the solution into Kit’s arm, that Kit does not know what they’re doing.

  They know the risks. Lily has no doubt of that. But do they know what it will mean if they succeed?

  If Kit is right and there is meaning here—then the Ants represent a whole new way of being conscious. A way fundamentally different from the mammalian, individualistic paradigm that is all humanity has ever known.

  Kit would be discovering a whole new kind of people.

  In the Eternal view, access to the language would be access to just another data set. The presence or absence of the scent receptors was, to them, a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Do you have tools to perceive these chemicals, or don’t you? Do you have the tools to know what data they represent, or don’t you? All the data was going to the same place eventually—to the silent silicon brains between the stars. To the monoliths of thought—not experience.

  The Reshaped would have other ideas.

  To the Reshaped, the body was the self. What the Eternals regarded as a necessary evil they had not yet figured out how to replace, the Reshaped regarded as the purpose of life itself. The network of bone and nerve and muscle, the chemical interplay between them; cells could produce infinite variations of experience that silicon couldn’t.

  To the Eternals, experience was a means to the end of obtaining data. To the Reshaped, it was the other way around.

  Lily pictures her planet swarmed by Reshaped. Good, competent translators chosen or made for this work. Her planet would become a new frontier—no longer a place of exile or solace for a mistake like herself, a woman of no conscious design. It would become the place where a new branch of humanity grew, feeding on everything the Ants could offer, starving and explosive in their curiosity after millennia of beating feebly at the boundaries of the range of human experience.

  The people with the modification Lily is testing on Kit will smell differently, hear and see differently, think differently. They will be alien.

  If it works. Lily watches Kit’s breath come fast and ragged.

  “Are you alright?” Lily asks, glancing at her monitor. The Eternal’s heart rate is climbing.

  “Just—nervous.”

  “Just a few more minutes,” Lily promises, “until we’re done.”

  “That,” Kit says, “is what I’m scared of.”

  Kit sleeps as though dead. The changes to their brain give them strange and vivid dreams—nightmares of insectoid creatures, dragging them to a horrible fate.

  The insects become their overs. Leering, terrifying things. Threatening a brief and painful existence. Kit finds themself assuming that the Ants are going to eat them. But then—

  The Ants begin to speak.

  There are no words for the things they say. No words—only something like feelings. And the things they say are rich, deep, welcoming. The Ants in Kit’s dream accept them as the Eternals never did.

  You are Hive. You are Home.

  Kit knows, somewhere in their mind, that it is a dream.

  But it is a beautiful dream.

  When Kit awakens, the grassland has come alive with scent. It glows, and it sings.

  Kit’s brain reaches for other metaphors for the...color map? Symphony?

  The algorithms in their implants hum beyond the speed of conscious thought, and sensations take on emotional depths and nuances that she cannot describe.

  You are Hive. You are Home.

  That which appears empty and silent is not. The fields around Lily’s dome are like a canvas, painted anew each season for tens of thousands of years.

  Kit basks in the flow of information they do not yet know how to interpret. The way it comes to them—as sensation—is unsettling.

  What if I try these animal things, and like them? What will it be like to give them up?

  But at the end of it all will be a gold mine of new facts. That is worth any price.

  Deep inside their skull, Kit’s implant is learning. Tomorrow it will understand.

  For tonight Kit will lie with Lily in the garden, being held and fed sweet drinks that comfort their soft, animal body. Tonight they will listen to the grasslands, and watch Lily talk to the stars.

  This time, it’s Lily who follows Kit into the cave.

  The giant, eldritch things moving unnaturally around her are as terrifying as ever. More so today, now that Kit has taught her how to initiate contact. Real contact. How to be accepted as one of their own.

  She’s armed, of course. But what is a plasma pistol to a ton of armored insect with jaws like a harvester’s blades? She doubts the thing has a heart to stop, or that its body would stop coming if she took out its brain.

  The Ants igno
re them. As though they were part of the scenery, blades of grass.

  They are stopped, briefly, by a soldier. Its chitinous blade dips dangerously close to Kit’s shoulder, and Lily has her pistol armed, until—

  Until Kit does something—lowers their face to a soldier’s shell and stays there for a long, unearthly moment.

  After that moment the soldier returns to its routine patrol, as though Kit were just another worker.

  “To talk to them,” Kit told Lily, while they recovered in her arms this morning, “we must first be recognized as kin. They’d no more talk to us than you would to a stone. There are ways of indicating—of pretending—our membership in their tribe. Ways to add ourselves to the gene pool that they recognize.”

  “Are they...smart?” Lily asked.

  Kit thought for a moment. Nodded. “Yes. They think and feel very deeply.”

  And Lily’s heart began to race. Already she was hungering, craving the new vistas Kit must be feeling. But Kit told her she must wait.

  “You would be out of commission—for days—if your brain did what mine has. And it might not work on you. Better that we start them learning about us now.”

  So Lily did as Kit instructed—took samples of her own DNA, one from each side of her body. Amplified and purified until the source code to make Lily—both halves of her—was suspended thickly in pure water.

  “A new Queen is hatching.” Kit had sniffed the air cryptically. “Probably today. Go to her, and offer yourself. Offer what you took from them. DNA.”

  Now, Kit leads her through the Ant tunnels with a strange confidence. Moves as though following a drumbeat Lily can’t hear.

  It is dark. Kit warned her about that. The Ants would have no need for light to shed on the chemical roadmaps of their homes. So Lily brought light—her sphere that glows warm and penetrating, and a high-beam of cold white for sounding out distant objects.

  She steps over strange obstacles as they venture deeper. Rotting logs that must have been dragged in from a distant forest and inadvertently dropped; smooth, jointed limbs that must once have belonged to the dead or injured members of the colony. Lily follows, fitting into the spaces between the busy workers and the walls.