Archive for the ‘David Kopaska-Merkel’ Category
Marcie’s Day
Friday, November 16th, 2007
Only the bulkhead now between Marcie and what remained of the rest of the crew, which had expanded to fill three quarters of the ship, and it oozing under doors, through vents, and through the tiniest holes.
Seventeen people she’d worked with for months, amalgamated as a malignant mass, a composite entity retaining no visible trace of humanity, its exterior a palimpsest of colors that shifted and transformed ceaselessly: vermilion, gold, a myriad shades of green and blue.
Why had Lon drunk the liquid they’d found in the stoppered flask? Yes, the characters they’d decoded had referred to a miracle cure, yes, he was facing a painful death from the infection he’d picked up on the abandoned station and yes, Federation mediine could do nothing for him, so perhaps he’d thought he had nothing to lose. Well.
The bulkhead creaked, forcing her back to the present, as a voice vibrated through the decking, calling her name.
*
She wrung her hands, stared wildly around the hold. Spacesuits: no; escape pod: ditto. She had nothing to work with, nothing, nada, zilch, etc. Suddenly her eye was drawn to the probability generator. How could she have forgotten? Dangerous, yes, but she’d nothing to lose either. She raced to the machine, removed the lock they had bolted down over the control panel. The bulkhead screamed and polychromatic gel flowed out around it and dripped in globs onto the floor. The scent of lemons mingled with chocolate (or was it burnt roast?). She grabbed the probability dial and gave it a strong twist. Wheels spun and clacked, lights flashed, and peripheral vision overwhelmed her sight. It was more distracting than being blind. She couldn’t actually see anything, but she couldn’t ignore anything either.
A moment later she could see again. She could see, but for some reason, she could not take a step. She looked down, then, at the glistening multicolored sausage that had been her legs; at the squirming polyps that were ballooning from her flesh like chewing gum bubbles, separating, and drifting away, tendrils waving au revoir, on the stiffening breeze; and at the roots that her fused limbs were sending out through the quivering ground at ever-increasing speed. She shook her head, smiled, and extended her arms, which burst into bud. She stood at the center of a rapidly Marcifying plain. It was going to be a good day.
The Mindbenders
Thursday, November 8th, 2007
“Don’t think of it as a creepy aliens-take-over-humans thing.” Rubin waved his arm at the rows of huge fetuses, each swollen-headed thing immersed in cloudy fluid and bottled and racked like wine.
Sara shuddered. “What else could it be? It’s an organic computer, but these are real people. They have feelings, they’re not just vat-grown tissue.”
Rubin shook his head. “It’s not like that. They’re grown from skin cells. They have brains, but they don’t have minds. Look at them. Those huge heads are stuffed with matrices of simple circuits. They cannot think independently; they don’t have the complex neuronal interconnections of natural brains.”
She forced herself to look closely at one. Its scrunched little face reminded her of a goblin, or of her mother, shortly before she died, when the Betelgeusian DNA was all through her body and her head was trying to reshape itself into something that surely could never really live. So, yeah, she was thinking creepy aliens. She shivered, and she was terribly afraid that one of the fetuses would open its eyes and stare at her accusingly.
She whirled to face Rubin. “Why did you bring me here?” Her jaw worked. Maybe he was in league with them, possessed by them. She darted for the exit. She took the stairs two at a time, expecting a particle beam in the back all the way, but just as she reached the top the door opened. Something stood there on a pillar of black pulsating tentacles, something with huge compound eyes in which she was reflected hundreds and hundreds of times. She screamed as it reached for her hand. She turned to run again, tripping, falling, landing headfirst.
*
She came to, her cheek painfully pressed into the metal grid flooring. The virus she had smuggled inside her lungs had done its work. Rubin lay beside her, unmoving. As far as she could see, hypercranial fetuses were thrashing their arms and writhing. Alarms were sounding and she heard running feet. The occupant of the nearest jug opened its eyes and looked right at her.
“The invaders,” she said, “how do we defeat them?”
“Two plus two,” it said, “equals four.” It smiled seraphically.