He cowered and shook and thought, Edwina was right about the death in the life force; I am being eaten alive.
Later, he heaved himself upright and went to the bathroom. He brought back a wet washcloth to clean Mimi up, but she wasn’t on the floor where he had left her.
He waited for a long time, but she never came back.
Eventually Tim returned to work. His old job was waiting for him; Edwina had told Nestor he’d been sick. “I hope you’re not contagious, Tim,” Nestor said.
“No,” said Tim.
He didn’t say thanks to Edwina. He didn’t say much of anything to anyone. He priced the products. He stocked the displays. Sometimes he filled in at checkout. It was easy. It was automatic. He could do it with his eyes closed.
One day he closed them. Behind his receptor shields were the burned-out white ghosts of the atoms he had seen. He watched them blooming and shrinking in the darkness, pulsing like the afterglow of the fluorescents. He shut down his auditory sensors, too, though he could still hear something, from a long way away, that might have been voices, or it might have been the pale whispers of blood in his body.
With one half of his brain, he slept; and with the other half, he inched forward, letting his bulges drift up and drift down, moving objects from the returns cart back onto the shelves. It did not feel like he was moving; it felt like parts of him were bobbing in the motions of the sea.
Some of the customers would follow Tim. When he put an item from his cart onto a shelf, they would wait respectfully for him to squelch down the aisle, and then they’d surge forward, shoving and jostling, till one of them managed to seize the prize he’d left behind. Nestor liked it. It was good for sales. Since Tim no longer cashed any paychecks, Nestor gave him a raise.
Once Edwina came in for a graveyard shift and saw Tim making his underwater progress through the humancare section, alone. She touched him and said his name, but the gluey burble of his breath did not change. He sagged over his cart, fumbled up a little plush puppet, a smiling doll for a human to wear on its hand, and dropped it softly into a bin with its fellows. Edwina took it and put it in her pocket. Later, she took it out again and tucked it into a pile of comforters.
Tim walked, and he slept, and the presences that he faintly sensed around him served him as dreams.
When Mimi ran away, she fled to the overgrown outskirts of the park, and the wild humans living there took her in. As she became sick and her stomach began to protrude, her companions recognized the signs and tried to explain things to her, showing her their own feral offspring. But her pregnancy progressed so quickly that it was clear that in her case something was different. Some of the humans thought she was magic, and they brought her offerings of half-eaten chocolate bars or the choicest crusts of bread they could scavenge.
In three months, the baby was born, and it was nothing anyone had ever seen before. An attempt was made on its life, but Mimi fought off the attackers with a rabidity that surprised her. After that, the infant was safe.
And really it was almost human, especially as it got older. Mimi’s DNA, though stagnant, still had the strength of millennia of reproduction, while the slime-mold genome had only recently evolved out of asexuality, and was relatively weak in passing on traits.
Nevertheless, the child was a new form of life. It was evolution. It grew up and mated with others. It was mad with passion! Its partners, both men and women, gave birth to rapid generations.
The humans awoke. They were very well rested.
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Copyright
Copyright (C) 2013 by Micaela Morrisette
Art copyright (C) 2013 by Sam Bosma
