I’ll never again be thirsty, I realize.
This isn’t the end of the world.
It’s the beginning.
My body trembles with hidden promise. I know I’ve got a place in this new world.
Towering things with shadow-bright wings descend to squat about me, staring with clusters of glazed eyes as I crumple…shiver…evolve.
I raise my blossoming face to the storm and screech my joy across the face of the world.
His world.
Cthuuuuulhuuuuu…
Spreading black wings, I take to the sky.
The Embrace of Elder Things
Momma always said they’d come for me one day. She did everything she could to make me seem like a normal kid. It wasn’t her fault what happened. She used to tell me “Take responsibility for your actions.” So I’ll take all the responsibility for what happened to her.
The Lunar Police came to our pod at four in the morning. Someone had heard Momma screaming and reported it. Officers pounded on our door until I opened it, then they poured through the doorway with plasma rifles pointed at my head. The first one who found Momma threw up all over the carpet. The next one came at me like he wanted to stomp my head in. He grabbed me by the throat, which he should not have done. So he got what Momma got.
When the officers saw what I could do to one of their own, they had no more questions about what happened to Momma. I cried about losing her, but I was too angry to cry for the officer. I hadn’t meant to kill either one of them. It was the ants running around in my brain. Momma always said they were only emotions, but they were a lot more than that.
I had an ant-farm once, and I used to watch them crawling through their tunnels and running errands that I couldn’t understand. When she asked me about my tantrums, I told her there were ants running through tunnels inside my head. “My brain is an ant-farm,” I said more than once. She used to hold me close and tell me it was all in my imagination. “They’re just runaway emotions,” she said. She told me not to tell anybody else about the ants, or the accidents they caused. Whenever they began to squirm and dance inside my head, things usually got out of control. I had shattered plates, broken windows, and destroyed video screens without meaning to.
A new squad officers came to the pod wearing shielded helmets. I couldn’t read their thoughts through the headgear. They surrounded me like I was some kind of wild animal, and they escorted me across the city to the Institute. I walked between them, two in front, two behind, while the city-dome sparkled with stars above our heads. The ants in my brain were sleeping by that time.
As we walked through the city, I watched Earth sparkling above the dome: A huge blue sphere with swirls of white clouds. “It used to be green and blue,” Momma would tell me as we watched it together. “It used to be so beautiful before the floods.” I couldn’t imagine Earth looking any other way. I knew there was not much land down there anymore, but to me it was still beautiful.
At the Institute they stripped my bloodstained clothes off, made me take a shower, and gave me a tiny room to sleep in. It felt like a prison cell, but I had never seen a real prison. Everyone who attended me wore the same kind of helmets, so I couldn’t find any of their surface thoughts. The ants in my brain were still sleeping when the guards brought me to Dr. Silo’s lab.
Dr. Silo was older than anyone I’d ever seen. Momma told me once that he was an original founder of the Luna Colony, which means he was over a hundred years old. I asked her how he lived for so long, and she said it was his clever science. “You will be a great scientist one day too,” she told me. I didn’t bother to tell her that I had no interest in science.
“Hello, Jarden,” Dr. Silo greeted me with a big smile. “How are you feeling today?” His teeth were impossibly white, and his bald head was covered in brown spots and wrinkles. He did not wear a helmet, but I couldn’t sense his surface thoughts either. I had no idea why.
“You’re not wearing a helmet,” I said.
He smiled at me again. “I am not afraid of you,” he said. “And I want us to be friends.”
I looked across his cluttered laboratory and out the big window. I could only see the western hemisphere of Earth from this vantage point, and there were no island chains in view — just the endless blue of Earth’s single ocean. “There used to be seven oceans,” Momma had told me. “But one day they all flowed together and drowned the cities of man. Now there’s only one ocean.”
“Why do you want to be my friend?” I asked the doctor. Most kids and adults hated to be around me. A side effect of knowing what everyone was thinking. People didn’t like me for that reason. So eventually I learned to stay in the pod with Momma. I’d see other kids playing outside, running through the hydroponic gardens or playing tag near the dome’s edge.
Dr. Silo chuckled. “Well, because you’re a very unique person. Are you aware of that?”
“I’m different,” I said. “I know that. Can I have something to drink?”
He ordered a fruit juice for me, tapping on a holographic display linked to his office pantry. It came in a cup of black plastic, but tasted cool and sweet.
“Jarden,” he spoke my name again, “Can you tell me what happened to your mother?”
I was glad he asked. I needed to talk about what had happened. To explain it.
“We had an argument,” I said. “I wanted to go outside. Just for a while. She kept telling me that it wasn’t a good idea. ‘Wait until you’re seventeen’ she always said. That’s still three years away…”
“So, you hurt her…because she wouldn’t let you leave the pod?”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” I said. “I heard what she was thinking. I read her thoughts, like I read everybody’s thoughts. I can’t help it most of the time. And the ants in my head started buzzing. They were angry. It was their fault, not mine.” I didn’t know if that was true, but I wanted to believe it. I started to cry, wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. “Only babies cry,” she used to say.
“You read thoughts?” Dr. Silo asked. “We call that Advanced Psychic Ability.”
I nodded and sipped the juice.
“What did you see in your mother’s mind?” he asked. “What made your ants so angry?”
“Hate,” I said. “She hated me. She wished that I had never been born. Can you imagine that? Your own mother wishing you’d never been born?”
“Then what happened?”
“I accused her, but she denied it. I saw the raw hate in her mind, and how she lied even to herself about it. The ants stomped around in my head, and then they started screaming. Before I knew it, I was screaming too. Then…. Then…”
Dr. Silo gave me a moment. A wall of digital displays blinked and flashed behind his head, and I scooted my chair to stare out the window again. The blue waters of Earth looked calm and warm against the cold stars.
“What happened, Jarden?” Silo asked.
“She died,” I said. “The screaming ants in my brain killed her.”
Dr. Silo sat quiet for a while, letting me weep in peace.
“I understand,” he said eventually. “It was only an accident. You didn’t mean to hurt her, did you?”
I said nothing. I couldn’t stop the tears. I drank the juice until it was empty. Wiped the snot running from my nose on the sleeve of my shirt.
“No,” I said. “Yes. I don’t know…”
“It was an accident,” Dr. Silo said again. He smiled at me like he had when he first saw me. “The same thing that happened to Officer Skeller. You didn’t mean to do that either.”
“Is he dead too?” I asked.