“Do you know that the naked mole rat is matriarchal? That they are a hive society, like insects? Apart from a few breeding males, all other mole rats in the colony are infertile. They serve the queen as drones. By any chance, do you find anything like this behavior in your own society? Do you have a female leader, some kind of matriarch?”
Chocky tried to talk and his jaw hung open. Words cracked in his throat.
“Do you have an answer? This is the major question of my thesis. The darkness, the sounders, the violence. Your genes, perhaps. There is a connection.”
“You thought about it more than I have, spaceman.”
“Excuse me.” The tourist drifted near him, clacking and buzzing. “You seem aggravated. I hope that I have not offended you.”
“Don’t know what you mean.” Chocky whispered now. The moment demanded silence. The wound in his cheek bled profusely, filling his mouth. He swallowed it. They came to a place that was unmapped. Secret. Chocky found a touch panel and entered a code by feel. The door that they entered through hummed shut. The tunnel twisted away, and the tourist would not be able to see that it ended in bare rock past a series of sharp breaks.
“Longest trip of my life,” Chocky said. “We didn’t know if we’d survive. That’s what most don’t talk about. We waited to die for six years. And the changes, the therapy. Pain that never ended.”
“You are referring to the settlement?”
“Worth it. Worth every sacrifice. Know why?”
The tourist stopped, close and blessedly silent, for a time. “You were there. But—I assumed that you were younger.”
“Talk like that,” said Chocky, his hands shaking, “is what we wanted to get away from. Put words in someone’s head and you can control their thoughts. Images, too. You think you’re smart. All those words. But the words think for you. Keep you locked away.”
“You were human,” the tourist said. Something like fear, or awe, in its voice.
“Not human. Never. Not a fucking mole either.” He reached in his pocket and removed the glass ball. He felt the liquid swirl inside.
The tourist began a sentence with the words, “If I may,” and then Chocky smashed the glass ball against its visor. The suit’s hands leapt up to defend its passenger. It was faster than Chocky, much faster. It hit him with a burst of electricity and sent him flying.
The liquid inside the glass splattered against the suit: visor, carapace, arms, and fingers. It hissed and spat and spewed acrid smoke where it touched. The suit turned and rushed for the door, following its programming to defend its passenger, to return it to the surface in the event of any emergency. Its hands grasped the door and pulled at its useless handle, buckling the metal.
Corrosive acid ate at the suit and its visor. Chocky’s senses returned and he heard the tourist’s screams. He choked on acrid vapor that wafted from the corrosion.
The materials of the suit weakened and groaned. The suit thrashed around the enclosure, clumsy and vicious, slamming around Chocky in the dark. It tried different doors, hammered against rock with its fists.
Then the acid melted through the visor. A microscopic puncture. The suit decompressed with a pop that rang in Chocky’s ears. It kept moving, the empty shell. It moved no differently than before, with the same sense of life and purpose, but Chocky knew that the tourist was dead.
Then he pulled the short rod from his pocket and gripped it tightly. He leapt at the suit, extending the long tip of the prod. With one hand he found the hole burned in the visor, the acid cool against his skin. The suit struck him in the chest and he felt the crack of it. He plunged the prod into the visor, dug it into what was the tourist’s face, and triggered it. The suit sparked and trembled and stilled, burned from the inside out.
Chocky drifted away, his eyes full of the light of the electric flash, clutching his chest, unable to breathe. He knew the pain of broken ribs. But where the acid touched him, where it ate gaping, scorched holes in his skin, he felt no pain at all.
His shoulder knocked against a mineral crag and he held on to it, pressed himself against it. He felt the pulses: the machines of the company, all around him. There were sounders nearby, and their drums were potent.
Chocky gave the suit to a gang of salvagers and booked an elevator home to his den. He found the virgin half-dead, feral and babbling, writhing tangled in the dense netting of the room. The stink of her filled the air and made it heavy. Chocky ran his hands along the walls. Urine and excrement splattered every surface, dried and caked under his fingers.
She murmured her made-up non-language, lost in a long and lonely madness.
He kicked off and soared through the netting, hands skipping through knots and cords, a maze that he knew because it was his home. He found her by her vibrations, the thrashing motion of her. She was caught in the netting that she could never find her way through, even though it was her home, also. He found her and grabbed her, pulled her close though she fought his touch fiercely. She clawed and bit and scratched at him, ravenous and afraid. He felt her breath and her fingers and her tongue. In one hand she held a blade, dull but still cutting, and she raked it across his eyes, lips, chest. The pain of his bruised ribs was excruciating. Blood sprayed from his wounds and he heard it drip and scatter against the clutter of the den.
He felt no anger for her. He thought about the face he had seen in the tourist’s visor, that pale and ghostly thing, flesh hanging loose, a sheath of skin over bones. Small black eyes under thick folds of skin. It meant something to him, that image. It meant that she, having been made from him, may be as beautiful as he thought himself to be. It mattered, even though he had no desire to see her as she was.
It was enough to imagine the pure and holy whiteness of her skin.
He pulled the knife from her fingers and hurled it away, heard it clatter. He returned to her at last, the virgin, the mute homunculus cloned from his cells, the only joy in his life in the tunnels. She clung to him, weeping wordlessly, at last too tired to fight him. In her touch he felt her breath, her heartbeat, come into sync with his own. His life he gave to her. An unbreakable bond. Together, to the end, they would live free. The tourist’s words troubled him no more. His blood soaked them both as they hung, breathless, in the dark.
About the Author
Alex Sherman grew up in rural Virginia with a lovely view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A Brooklyn resident for the past decade, he has earned a degree in digital arts from the Pratt Institute and an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program. He mostly works in video post-production. He lives with his partner, his dog, and her cat. You can sign up for email updates here.
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