by Hugh Howey
I’m a published journalist, graphic novelist, and novelist, living in the rainy wastes of Portland, Oregon with my wife, four cats, and a dog.
My work spans a variety of genres, from political thriller to science fiction and urban fantasy. I have several novels currently available, and many more are due for release in the coming year. My stories are characterized by my eye for the absurd, the off-color, and the bombastic. And yes, my wife wrote that last bit.
For information on my books, and behind-the-scenes looks at the writing life, visit nicolaswilson.com, or visit me on Facebook, Goodreads, or Twitter. Better yet, sign up for my mailing list.
Vessel
by Samuel Peralta
1
I am in her.
As she dreamed, her chest rising and falling softly, her eyes closed in the slow liquid breathing of the fluorocarbon’s flow, I floated in.
I was smaller than anything she dreamed of—a spore, a mitochondrion, a protozoan, the mote in Loki’s eye—jiggling in a Brownian dance beneath the rhythmic thrum of the mechanical ventilator.
Underneath all that, the sound of her heart beating, slowed by the cold into a trance for the journey, the desolate journey, the long journey home from a distant moon, beating with the measured cadence of her breath.
I was lost in the amniotic fluid that surrounded her, pummelled by eddies of oxygen molecules, the swirl of carbon dioxide, in and out, that invisible gaseous ebb and flow of life.
She was a world to me, and I a Magellanic explorer across the vastness of her body, following the currents.
I sailed down her shoulders, across the coastal ranges of her arms, down the outside shoals of her thighs, navigated the tendrils of fur at her feet as her companion, her cat, slept her sleep.
I navigated up the rivulet between her legs, surfed across the slope of her belly and the Aurora Borealis rise of her breasts. I skimmed the curve of her throat, scaled the cliffside of her chin, teetered at the precipice of her lips.
And she breathed me in.
2
She dreams of a blue world, a planet of oceans and a vastness of clouds.
I am traversing her tongue, two-thirds down its muscular length to the back of her mouth. As she breathes, and as the ventilator pushes, the fluid flows down into her throat, the current threatening to drag me where I don’t want to go, down into her lungs.
She dreams of being hurled into that vastness, she feels the sledgehammer forces on her bones as the core propulsion stage engines and boosters of the primary launch system ignite and burn. She dreams of orbit, the expended external tanks unlatching from the inter-stage structures and floating into blackness.
I unfurl my cilia and latch on to her throat, pull myself up against the forces dragging me away. It takes every effort not to be drawn in.
She dreams of the secondary solid rocket boosters with their multiple segments, each thrusting at twenty million foot-pounds, hurling her farther into the void. She dreams of the cryogenic propulsion stages, the re-ignition of the upper-stage engines and advanced boosters, the quad nuclear thermal rocket engines gunning with the tremor of a thunderclap.
I hold tight against the flow coming from her nasal cavity, and then the flow reverses as she breathes out, and I let go. The fluid carries me up until I can latch on to the mucous membrane at the top of her sinus cavity.
She dreams of a gaseous planet, larger than her own, a great world of liquid and gas without a surface, swirling in tremendous cyclones and lightning storms. Across its face range clouds of ammonia crystals, banded in zones of light and darkness.
Here I stay for a while as I consume the nerve cells of her olfactory bulbs, then work my way through the mitral cell axons to the remainder of her cerebrum. I hold back now, careful of the brain stem, careful of the nerve cells of her medulla oblongata, careful not to harm her.
She dreams of an ice moon, smaller than her moon, a moon of silicate rock with an upper crust of frozen water and a salty liquid ocean underneath the ice. Its surface is spiked with icy penitentes carved by sunlight from fissures in the ice. Dark streaks of lineae cross and re-cross across the globe, fractured ridges in the ice from its plate tectonics and the tidal flexing of its mother planet.
I grow slowly, slowly, sharing in her dreams.
She dreams of a world of oceans and a vastness of clouds, a blue planet.
3
I was different then.
Not yet bombarded by cosmic high-energy radiation, not yet penetrated by the secondary protons and atomic nuclei, the offspring of free-living amoebic pathogens and the emanations of active galactic nuclei and massive supernovae.
Toxoplasma gondii birthed me, fused by cosmic circumstance with what she’d named Sappinia europa. Back then, I slept in the innards of my previous host, in the warm-blooded tissues of her cat.
Had I not changed, with my kind I would have reproduced in cysts in the intestines of my host. Even alone, even then I could have budded out another of myself, an asexual self-division that would have been the first link in a doubling and re-doubling chain of biological imperative.
Eaten, I would live on. Excreted, I would live on. Swallowed, lapped, breathed in, I would live on.
And my hosts? Sometimes they die. But only when they are weak, with child, or otherwise a poor host.
They say there will be a flushing, a warmth, a fever that passes. I make them dream.
Mice, rats, squirrels, prairie dogs, beavers, guinea pigs, porcupines, hamsters. Goats, sheep, cattle, deer, giraffes, antelopes, camels, llamas, yaks, antelopes. Cats and humans. All the same. I make them dream.
Rats smell feline urine, and I make them dream that they are following the scent of food. They follow it to the jaws of waiting cats, and thence I and my progeny move on.
Cats feel hands rub their flanks, and I make them dream of their mothers grooming them. They flick a tongue in the faces of adoring humans, and thence I and my progeny move on.
And humans—
4
Plasmodium, back on Earth, begins its protozoan life cycle by making its mosquito host blood-shy. The mosquito starves but is at less risk of being swatted and killed, which would not be a desirable end for the immature plasmodium.
Plasmodium changes its strategy when it is mature and ready to enter a human with its malaria load. It then drives its host into a blood frenzy, seeking out prey each night and attacking even when full.
If the mosquito perishes at the hand of a human, no matter. Plasmodium and its progeny, hidden in the secretions from the mosquito’s proboscis, will have moved on.
5
To you, human, you are your body.
But to your genes, your body is nothing more than a host, as my own protozoan form is nothing but a host to my own genes.
And your collection of genes and mine, they have made a pact with one another.
They asked:
Why limit ourselves to a separate human body and a separate protozoan body? Why limit one to skin and bones and muscle? Why limit one to protoplasm and cilia?
If together we have a better chance to advance both our sets of genes to the next generation, over other species—why not be together, make a compact, and advance together?
What if we melded together?
What if we were one?
6
I am different now.
I don’t just spawn into cystic tissue. I spread.
I send out tendrils, flagellae along the fissures of the brain, like vines along the crevices of an aged building, crumbling the mortar.
I insinuate myself into the brain, snake into it, sensing the way to the regions that initiate thought, command, motion.
My tendrils flow along the medulla and spinal cord, coiling its length, sensing the beating of her heart.
The pons calls to me, surrendering all the sensory and involuntary motor functions, opening up the pathways to breathing, sleeping, balance, facial expression.
I embrace the hypothalamus, flic
k on and off the switches for sleeping and waking, eating and drinking.
The thalamus opens itself to me, granting me access to the information to and from both cerebral hemispheres.
The cerebral cortex, the pallium, the hippocampus, all these give up to me their labyrinthine complexity of spatial memory, smell, directional navigation, and other senses.
I douse the cerebellum with a cocktail of neurotransmitters, connecting it to my own consciousness, so that the other thought- or motor-focused brain systems merge with mine.
Gently, I touch the basal ganglia, the signal center to inhibit action or make it so—reward, punishment.
And finally, she and I, we will be melded. We will be the same. One.
7
One day she will wake.
Gravity will reclaim this ship, and all around her the fluorocarbon mixture will swirl away like a whirlpool at her feet.
Her eyes will open, and the dream she is dreaming will end, the frayed edges of the filmstrip flapping like the end of a cinematic reel.
She will sit, panting, regurgitating the last of the amniotic fluid from her lungs. She will drape her cat outside the enclosure, pressing its sides gently to expel the cold from its mouth. She will let it go, and it will run across the floor, finding freedom.
She will sit, look around her, watch the others raising the lids on their enclosures, fighting their sleep, rising, eyes closed and open, exhausted and dazed, some still lying in dream.
She will see him then, sitting at the edge of his own aqueous bed, then standing, stretching—muscular, naked, beautiful.
She will see him, and I will make her dream of love, joyous and sweet and wonderful and encompassing.
I will make her dream about the firelights of winter, the torrents of spring, the warmth that only being in his arms can bring.
And she will go to him, touch him, embrace him.
Lift herself up to the opening of his mouth.
A Word from Samuel Peralta
The protozoan in “Vessel,” Toxoplasmosis gondii, is real and is considered a leading cause of deaths attributed to foodborne illness. It has been targeted for public health action by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Up to forty percent of North Americans carry the parasite but have no symptoms because of a healthy immune system. Nevertheless, in pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems, the disease can be fatal.
While the parasite is capable of living in a broad range of mammals and birds, by far the most common route to human infection is through the ingestion of toxoplasma eggs shed in the feces of cats.
I wanted to explore several ideas in “Vessel.”
One idea is that parasitism may not be not a one-way relationship between a puppeteer parasite and its host, but might actually be a symbiotic relationship at the genetic level.
I also wanted to explore the possibility of writing from the point of view not of a man or a woman, but of a consciousness that is more than a little different.
And I wanted to pose the question: What if love were a parasitic imperative?
“Vessel” is set in a world I think of as “the Labyrinth”—the same backdrop used for my stories “Trauma Room,” “Hereafter,” “Humanity,” “Liberty,” “Faith,” and “Faster.”
This is a world where corporations have expanded beyond governments, where pervasive surveillance is a part of life, and where non-human self-awareness has begun to make humanity face difficult questions about itself.
“Vessel” is the first of these stories to extend the arc beyond Earth. Welcome to the Labyrinth.
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The Grove
by Jennifer Foehner Wells
In the moment when the last remaining filament between Hain and the Mother broke, the Mother’s parting thought raced through Hain’s mind, but Hain didn’t process it until later, when the sticky amber gum that oozed from her open wounds had begun to harden, and the euphoric newness of freedom had subsided.
The Mother had said, “Come back to me soon, little one.”
It had taken so long to break loose. Hain had been obsessed with wriggling, working, bending repeatedly in every possible direction, until the sapwood connecting the two of them had frayed to fine fibers and finally snapped, severing their nurturing connection. She had been so anxious to be free, so intent on experimenting with her unused, newly fully formed limbs, that she hadn’t even replied or said goodbye. She hadn’t meant to be so ungrateful to the one who had given her life.
* * *
The day the Salvors came, Hain was retrofitting an ancient vehicle with every-terrain wheels. She’d redesigned them to manage better than the wheels that some of the Mother had used so long ago. Hain used the narrow three-wheeled vehicle to haul raw materials and items scavenged from the ruins. There had once been roads to drive on, but those were long gone. Even open spaces were rare now that the Mother dominated the world.
She was tightening lug nuts onto a rusted wheel stud when she heard rumbling overhead. She saw a white streak in the sky, and instantly knew it had to be a contrail, though her own eyes had never seen anything like it before. She quickly moved to track the trajectory, and after some computation, she determined an approximate landing site.
She was lucky the alien vehicle was landing on the same continent. It had never occurred to her to launch satellites to detect incoming activity from off-world, and she berated herself for her shortsightedness. She had no way of knowing whether these were the first, or if others had come before and landed on another continent, or if there were many of them simultaneously investigating sites all over the globe. Only the Mother knew the answers to those questions, and Hain couldn’t hear the Mother’s voices.
She only heard one voice in her head now—her own. She’d grown used to that and now preferred it. After all, she knew everything the Mother knew, and everything the Mother before this Mother had known, and so on back through the eons, with each new offspring receiving all the knowledge of those that had gone before as she grew from bud to nymph.
She had no desire to rejoin the Mother anytime soon, to put down roots and reconnect in partnership on that communal plane. So she’d have to investigate the contrail, and what it meant, on her own.
Over the years, Hain had watched scores of other nymphs break free, roam for a bit, and then select a terminal point, whereupon they would bind themselves back to the earth. Some had come to her with messages from the Mother. In their eagerness to return, to rejoin the voices in that perpetual state of grace, rootlets were already unfurling from their lower extremities when they arrived, allowing them to twine with Hain, making contact just long enough to communicate to her that she was missed, and that staying away from the Mother too long could mean disaster.
None of these nymphs had been like her. Hain now accepted that she was unique. There hadn’t been a message from the Mother in centuries.
Hain gathered supplies and set off on her adventure. It took days to get there, over rough terrain, and she had to go out of her way to skirt the densest groves of the Mother. When she got close, she hid her vehicle in thick undergrowth and continued on foot.
She rounded a thicket. Here, the Mother began to grow more sparsely, giving way to a broad glade. It was a low spot that would be marshy during the rainy season, not a good place to put down roots, but perfect for a vertical landing.
When the ship came into view, its silver skin glaring in the bright sunlight, she stopped abruptly and stared in stunned disbelief.
It was enormous.
Hain had been gathering scraps of metal for centuries. She sorted it into piles and used it whenever she needed raw material for the object rendering machine. The ship before her represented a mass of metal she couldn’t conceive of gathering.
She could see the aliens, too. She gradually moved closer until she could hear them speak, then s
he settled in to observe them for a while to see what they were about. It was easy to conceal herself from them. They were oblivious to her existence.
They were as different from her as she was from the small mammals that scampered through the Mother, and she was surprised to note that they were far larger than the animals she was acquainted with. They were her size, roughly.
There seemed to be several species, but nothing like any she knew. These were more highly evolved. They walked on two limbs instead of four, had nimble fingers, and used technology. Since the old times, no species on this world had used technology, until Hain had chosen to employ that aspect of the Mother’s memory. So it was fascinating to watch them use it with their furry paws that looked so much like hands.
Each day the aliens scouted in a different direction from their ship. At first Hain thought they might be scientists, because they collected samples. These samples were mostly of plant life, but they trapped some insects and small animals too. They built up great stacks of sample boxes and crates, which they transported back to their ship at nightfall.
Hain’s other hypothesis was that they were colonists. The old stories were full of visitors who had come to live among the mobile nymphs when the Mother was still small, sharing the planet’s resources, living symbiotically, peacefully. If they had come again, it could mean a new life, a synergy, discoveries derived from the sharing of different cultures, the elevation of everything she knew to another, higher level.
