Yeah, I’m very special, Fin thought. Get a lot of that.
Absolutely, his secret admirer confirmed. A phenomenal and unique individual. Fittingly outlandish for his world, a place presenting more challenges than any other.
With the inscrutable societal structures and opaque minds of humans the project might have been hopeless. Recently though, humans began tagging themselves with minute transmitters, a logistical godsend for collecting subjects for study. And it allowed them to find Fin!
Fin became offended at the implication he would help them with their project. He reached past the edges of the supplied information, grasping for anything being kept from him. Hoping to poke someone in the eye.
There was no one there, but his reach grew as he lashed out. He got loose, into the next layer of data. It was like a kelp forest, a swaying maze filled with diffuse verdant light and occasional trails of bubbles. Little of it made any kind of sense, but he could move through it at will.
He dug through the information woven all around him, weeding out anything that wasn’t whatever was watching him. He felt it trying to elude him, trying to look like just facts, just knowledge, and chased it. Picking up on his game, his quarry played with him. Didn’t try too hard to escape. It would let him have a peek.
Now totally cut off from the physical world, Fin concentrated on the mental hide-and-seek. His maneuvers became increasingly fluid and quick, until his playmate was pressed to sustain the game. It was pleased, admired his skill in adapting to this pure-information environment. He was uniting with the…
Floating Wisdom.
Fin’s eyes snapped open, but the image that concerned him was inside his head. An intelligence within the rush of data, made up of it, had just introduced itself.
Fin backpedaled to establish a little personal space. It tried to hold on, to embrace him, but he could pull away. The Floating Wisdom didn’t like that, hadn’t expected it. All of its responses were broadcast like emerald fireworks for Fin to see and decode. It knew nothing of privacy or reserve and was frustrated that it couldn’t pry the lid off Fin’s feelings and scoop them all up. He was an anomaly, a puzzle. An enigma.
It explained the situation to him. You’re the first of your kind we’ve been able to reach. We can’t yet embrace you, absorb you. We’ll figure it out.
“Who’s ‘we’?” Fin asked without speaking aloud.
The Floating Wisdom. Trillions of united minds. We span most of the galaxy, all in glorious unity transcending space and time and matter. We have been at work here, Earth, for decades. Your brains have been deaf to us, keeping you from joining the Floating Wisdom. His ability to communicate with them made Fin special.
“You need to clarify this whole ‘special’ business. I’m having skepticism.”
We could never before communicate directly with a solitary mind. Your case is all the more remarkable because your body does not house the True Ones, the microbes, as you say.
Keep talking, Fin thought privately. Addressing the Floating Wisdom, he said, “How is that remarkable?”
The microbes are analogous to neurons in many ways. They form a channel into the host brain. In the case of humans, the True Ones cannot equilibrate to the immune system and perish. Sometimes, the host does as well.
“Oh, that’s too bad.”
Regrettable, indeed. Of course, your arrival means an end to such problems.
As it spoke, Fin concentrated on pinpointing the Floating Wisdom. There was an impression of tentacles, or a heap of serpents. Although the number of its discreet thoughts went off Fin’s chart by a wide margin, he could follow along with the main threads. It didn’t appear to own a thought that could be called private.
“Has it occurred to you some of us might not want to join?” Fin demanded.
Everyone wants unity. No one wants to be alone.
“Wrong. I happen to like being alone, prefer it most of the time.”
That is an illogical belief. Being alone is being lonely, and you can’t want that. In the Floating Wisdom there is no loneliness.
“Bullshit,” Fin retorted. “You’re fucking made of loneliness! Who else is there for you to talk to? Just me, apparently, and no sooner did you meet me than you want to make me disappear. You’re the illogical one.”
It tried to pull him in again. Don’t think of it as disappearing. You will be part of the Floating Wisdom.
“Let go of me.” Fin had to fight harder to hold his ground.
The Floating Wisdom practically salivated, recalling the harvests of other worlds. With the creatures purified by the True Ones, their Floating Wisdom could guzzle them effortlessly. The scenes of various life forms twitching, writhing, howling, spewing fluids, and otherwise exhibiting symptoms of unspeakable agony stirred no remorse in the alien collective. What concerned it was breaching Fin’s defenses.
“So,” Fin tried to think casual, bluffing he was made of far harder stuff, “is there always this much wheezing and vainly striving?”
The body goes into shock, and there are typically chaotic verbalizations. Decoding these noises linguistically, what emerges is a statement not unlike your own. Pain, fear and unwillingness.
“Why don’t you listen?”
Uneasiness flickered, staining the Floating Wisdom’s confidence. Its grip tightened. All traces of fear inevitably vanish after uniting, when we can be one with the mind. The aberrant sounds made by the body are just a side-effect of the transition. It bore down hard, and Fin screamed, raw fear pouring out of his throat.
Yes, intoned the Floating Wisdom calmly, like that.
The collective coiled down, constricting. Like Shaw multiplied a trillion times. Fin concentrated on blaring his terror and desperation at the Floating Wisdom on its own plane, drenching as much of it as he could with those emotions.
It recoiled as if burned. It eased up on Fin, throbbing with frustration bordering on anger.
“That,” Fin admonished, “is what triggers those sounds! That’s how all those creatures felt as you were slurping them up.”
No, it protested.
“Yes. You didn’t mean to, but you hurt them. For all intents and purposes, you killed them.”
No! There is no death in the Floating Wisdom. Fluttering imagery of harmonious and elegant function in the collective. Notions of transcendence, of escaping from physical mortality. The uncertainty faded as the Floating Wisdom reminded itself of its own marvelousness. It had so much knowledge, there was nothing it couldn’t figure out. It would spread like a soothing balm across all the pain and chaos everywhere. This was the great work.
Fin knew he would need to shake it again, and hard. Once it regrouped he wouldn’t be able to hold it off.
He understood the way it saw things. The ends justified the means. Individuality was a small sacrifice for what it offered in return. He scoffed. “You don’t understand. The fear disappears with the individual. Death does that. You don’t embrace them, you smother them! You ignore their screams and you squash them! You must stop!”
The Floating Wisdom was becoming troubled, but it would pull Fin down if only to make him be quiet. It squeezed, trying not to listen. It dreaded another overflow of caustic emotions, hesitating to clamp down.
“That’s right, you’re afraid.”
The Floating Wisdom backed off again and tried to gather a persuasive argument. Fin could plainly read that it hoped, by getting him to relax, perhaps he wouldn’t spray his irrational fear on it this time.
You are the one who doesn’t understand. The transition only looks painful because you can’t comprehend it from your side. Think of it as a holy experience.
Fin laughed aloud. “You lost me. Where does religion enter the picture?”
It is everything. It is us. We are missionaries. Images of the microscopic life form, arcane polypeptide skeins and helixes that were the true seat of Wisdom. Thousands of species, all infected with this zealot bug. Once they understood what made Fin different, why he could he
ar them, they would reengineer this sacred plague so it would finally work on humans. That’s what they had been attempting for more than twenty years, to adapt their contagion to human hosts. They meant to use Fin as the key to achieving this goal.
The Floating Wisdom showed a degree of smugness over Fin’s reaction, or lack thereof. He wasn’t broadcasting animal panic anymore.
When Fin’s rage and indignation flashed out and scorched it, the Floating Wisdom merely smoldered in mute amazement.
It tried to let go, but he seized it and twisted. Saturated its billowing folds with his fury. “Maybe now I’ll assimilate you, instead! But don’t be afraid — it’ll only hurt until I stop.”
The Floating Wisdom wrenched itself loose. It wanted a place to hide.
“Just a fucking side-effect, remember?” Fin pounced almost playfully, grabbing the Floating Wisdom again.
A shrill acidic scream reverberated throughout the alien collective as a billion billion overlapping voices wailed in fear and agony. The harmony was disrupted, and what had been an elegant interlocking system began shredding itself. Fin tried to pull back to safety, to stay out of it, but was unable to tear himself away from the hideous collapse.
Constructs emerged within the roiling nebula of alien thoughts, things trying to become personalities. They voraciously swallowed up all they could reach, growing until their edges met.
Fin thought they would simply merge and reconstitute the whole of the Floating Wisdom. Instead, wherever two constructs collided they further destabilized one another. The entire thing rapidly evaporated in an inferno of green tie-dye fire.
With a psychic boom, the collective imploded.
*** *** ***
Rook’s head wasn’t right. She felt disoriented, like she shouldn’t be trusted to make important decisions. Most of it was probably due to lack of sleep, but the accompanying dull throb couldn’t be explained by mere exhaustion. Kyle made her prepare breakfast for them, and, cooking not being one of her more-developed skills, it wasn’t a raging success. Maybe she just needed a good cup of coffee.
Kyle took several phone calls from someone named Spitz and always hung up agitated. He told Rook he had some errands he couldn’t delegate and left her alone with Gary several times, but never for more than an hour or so.
The first time he left, Rook’s nagging little headache dissipated and she fell into a dead sleep on the sofa. She woke with a start some time later.
Kyle sat in the dark green paisley armchair, looking at her. And she had known. A faint throbbing vibration in the base of her skull told her. He smiled lasciviously and scooped her up. She struggled, but could tell he liked it by the shift in the vibration, so she stopped. Undaunted, he carried her onto the wide balcony. Hanging plants and a half-wall of rosewood obscured her view to the ground.
“Don’t make a sound,” he said as he spread her out on a chaise lounge and lifted the skirt of her modest floral dress. Rook could hear a crowd below her: people chattering, shoes ticking on the atrium’s tiled walkways, children laughing. Kyle pushed her cherry-red lace thong to the side. A macaw shrieked and flapped through her field of view.
“They call this the Garden of Eden Atrium,” Kyle said. “I like that.”
The frequency of the throbbing in Rook’s mind oscillated, slowing until it matched the rhythm of Kyle’s grinding thrusts. His mouth was on hers, his hand inside her red lace bra. A line of emerald parrots perched on the balcony railing. Below her everything hushed, and a choir began to sing.
The hymn lasted many minutes and clashed eerily with the lewd, atonal Kyle-theme ebbing and flowing in Rook’s head. When it ended, a round of pious applause reverberated under the glass roof and startled the birds. Kyle came with a grunt, and the presence in Rook’s mind receded. She could still feel it, though.
His signal.
Him.
A part of Kyle stayed with her now, even when he left.
Their connection was the crude flip side of the warm reassurance she used to get from Fin’s signal, back when he was alive. It told her she was Kyle’s possession and could never truly escape him. He would always be with her. Confirmation came when he left on another of his errands. The connection became tenuous as he descended in the elevator, but a trace remained — the faintest itch.
In one corner of the living room was a credenza that held a silver tea service and a sleek marble chess set. On the wall, a glass case displayed an assortment of antique chessmen. Seeing her interest, Gary asked if she wanted to play. The thought made Rook unaccountably sad and she declined. Instead she watched TV.
At 7:00 Kyle came back with a hairdresser, but refused to explain beyond, “I want you to look nice.” Rook tried not to think about why and let the woman do her job. After the hairdresser left, Kyle sat Rook down at the dining room table and said, “We’re getting married tonight.”
Rook stared back, uncomprehending. “Why?”
Kyle watched her carefully as he answered. “Because I want to. Then you’ll really be mine.”
Her brow furrowed. “But I married Fin.”
Kyle kept staring. “That doesn’t matter now. Does it?”
Rook felt she was missing something important. “I guess not.”
Kyle nodded. “I’ll have the ladies come up to help you dress.”
“Who?”
“My secretary, and some old biddy from the Cathedral Decoration Committee. They feel bad that your family can’t make it for the ceremony. You will behave for them won’t you?”
Rook wondered why she wouldn’t behave. “Sure.”
“That’s my good girl. The next time we’re together you’ll be mine forever.”
Whatever.
Chapter Twenty
HONEYMOON
Princess Brook ran because a wolf was chasing her. She climbed up a tree and threw apples at him. He ran away. She would be in trouble when she went home because her mother told her not to go in the woods. Her dress was dirty. The queen would know she was bad. Princess Brook cried and cried.
She tried to climb down but her shoe fell off. It landed in a berry bush. Princess Brook would be in even bigger trouble if she didn’t find her shoe. She crawled under the bush. It had jaggers. It scratched her. She found a girl all tangled in the bush. She was sleeping. Princess Brook touched her because she was so pretty and the girl woke up. Then Princess Brook knew that the girl was her twin sister. Princess Bramble was kidnapped years and years ago. And now Princess Brook found her. She helped her sister out of the bush and they went back to the castle. Princess Brook knew that she would not be in trouble now.
The Twin Princesses by Brook Webb, age 8
Fin landed softly on something hard, and woke up. Reflexively putting out his hands, he encountered rock and bounced back up like a balloon. Too groggy to kick or flail much, he didn’t make the situation worse. As he descended once again he noticed he wasn’t alone.
A small group of strange beings stood around him. Six of them. Initially Fin didn’t think he could be awake yet, because they looked too classic to be the real thing. They were about four feet tall, with gray-green skin, slender limbs, oversized heads and exceptionally large, unblinking eyes.
Fin managed to stand up in the slight gravity. He stared for a few minutes, the aliens content to let him get adjusted. In the early part of his conversation with the Floating Wisdom, when it revealed so much detail about the many forms the aliens took, he was not shown any creatures such as these. So what were these guys?
“Hello,” Fin said tentatively.
Hello, came the reply. He hadn’t seen any of their lips move. Or seen their lips, for that matter.
Another idea arrived. Their form was not important.
“Okay.” Fin looked at each one. The faces had some slight individual character despite the general lack of expressiveness. He didn’t know what to say to these creatures, and they were waiting for him to run the conversation. “Great. Look, I really don’t have time to chat. I need to get
back to Earth. Can you help me?”
The aliens radiated distress. They could help him, but it was unthinkable. Let him leave? Now?
“Now would actually be excellent. No offense guys, but I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.”
The members of the group all moved a little closer together. After a few seconds, they spoke to Fin without sound. The words came through clearly, not just detached thoughts or images but complete sentences in his head.
We are ready.
Fin guardedly replied, “Ready for what?”
To be assimilated. We will not resist.
“Now, wait a second,” Fin began, but they interrupted.
We see you cannot be opposed. Only we ask, please, do not abandon us. There was more than a hint of desperation.
“No, no. That was rhetoric. I can’t absorb you. I wouldn’t if I could. My whole point was assimilation sucks.”
We see.
“I doubt that.”
Sincerely, we understand. They were waiting for Fin to say something.
“Well, good. Behave.”
Of course. We will not harm the creatures of Earth.
“Great. Can I go now?”
Please restore the Floating Wisdom.
“Sorry. I don’t think so.”
The aliens’ words were now laced with fear. Why do you mean to leave us like this? If you will not engulf us, you must give the Wisdom back. We will perish without it!
“I can’t. Look, I don’t even know what happened. It broke. It’s gone, and good riddance. Now you can all think for yourselves.”
No! This suggestion horrified the aliens. You can’t leave. You must stay and help us.
“Oh give me a break. What do you want from me?”
Gather us up, make us whole again. The wholeness was good. With it nothing was hidden from us. Now it is lost.
They were becoming edgy. Fin could feel their fear. The thing they were most terrified of seemed to be themselves.
“I can see this whole independent-thought thing is new to you. I understand. But you can all be like the Floating Wisdom, or like me. I mean, it said I was ‘novel’ but it wasn’t afraid of me.”
Miss Brandymoon's Device: a novel of sex, nanotech, and a sentient lava lamp (Divided Man Book 1) Page 25
