left me alone. There were two more pancakes, and three more pieces of bacon. And melon, and coffee, and toast, and a whole lot of unfair guilt, and fear, and confusion, and not a small amount of hurt and worry that I’d already screwed things up with Iris, even though I didn’t even know what was there to screw up. I took a bite of pancake and washed it down with some fresh coffee.
The thing in my head buzzed in contentment.
“Fuck me,” I grumbled.
4
I did the dishes while Dylan took a shower. I liked doing the dishes. It was pleasant, and mindless. I felt heavy, full. Almost feverish.
When I was finished I plodded to my room to write my article. My deadline was three hours away, which was about two and a half hours longer than I needed to write a graduation notice. Once that task was finished, I could go looking for a real story. If I got eaten, I got eaten. If I didn’t, I had bills to pay.
I turned on my computer and opened a fresh document file and looked over my notes. They weren’t extensive. Dylan called goodbye up the stairs. He was going to meet the cute line cook for coffee. I shouted goodbye and thought about how best to pad my word count. For a graduation piece, my best bet was probably to write some saccharine garbage about young minds. That, or mention the weather a lot.
My vision fragmented and I began to hallucinate in a way that is hard to describe. It happened all at once. I fell in pieces through the pieces that had been the world around me, saw through and around everything in my universe, watched the progression of objects through time as if time was a three-dimensional space, and then fell abruptly back into my body as it appeared in the confusion beneath me.
There was pain. I remember it as something akin to the first time I came, the sharpness of something used for the first time, but throughout my entire body. And then it was gone.
I was back at the computer. According to the clock, only a few seconds had passed. I counted a minute and looked again at my notes, tried to think of a lede. The human capacity for self-delusion is limitless, and so on.
--acclimation complete--
I frowned, listening hard. Someone had spoken, although there hadn’t been a sound. Someone had spoken without making a sound, or even taking the time to speak. It was simply a fact that someone had spoken.
--body mapping complete--
The shell rustled on my back. I didn’t move. It paused, split apart and rattled once across my shoulder blades as a series of long flat slivers, and then reformed to seamless perfection. I couldn’t see it. I could feel it, like I could feel my fingers.
--material formation complete--
Great, I thought. Now it’s talking to me. A giggle escaped my mouth. I bent over the keyboard and tried to type.
--please stand--
“What?” Hell. I was talking back.
--please stand--
“No.” Arguing, now. This wasn’t good. Maybe I was just losing my sanity. That would be almost pleasant, really. But, no, the shell was really there. It wanted me to get up. I could feel its desire. It wanted me to get up so that it could do something.
--stand up--
I set my jaw and put my hands on the keys. Not that I really cared about getting the work done, but I had my principles.
--stand up--
“I’m busy, dammit!” My hands snapped into fists. I was shouting. “Leave me the hell alone!”
--STAND UP--
I stood up. I’d never been shouted at from inside of my own head before. I didn’t like it. There was a living thing occupying part of my mind, and it was outside of my control. If I wasn’t careful this was going to go real bad.
--move to an open location--
I looked around and stepped into the middle of the room. The shell felt odd. Giddy, maybe.
--attempting cohesion--
Something grabbed me from behind.
I’ve screamed a lot in my life, and over time I’ve found that there is a length and breadth of exclamatory noise that is almost beautiful in the abstract. Screams are like emotional and physical fingerprints, the nexus in reality between the noise a person wants to make and the noise their body is capable of producing in a given minute. And we scream with so little provocation. The universe is littered with these noises that can tell you so much about a person, if you only know how to listen.
But I didn’t scream, that first time. My air exploded out of me in a rush, sure, and I took a few surprised steps forward and closed my eyes defensively, but I didn’t scream.
As I recognized the word ‘cohesion,’ the thing on my back rose up and split into a dozen pairs of matched wings that crashed over me like a metal wave. I had the briefest impression of crude machinery in the margins and then I was lost inside. Contained, trapped like a bug in a carnivorous plant. I stood stock-still, waiting for the awful sting of digestive juices. Nothing happened. I remained resigned to my fate. Nothing continued to happen. I took a breath. In spite of the apparent violence of what had happened, it didn’t seem that I was being eaten. There was pressure on my entire body, head to toe, ass to front, everywhere but my face but it was gentle, almost pleasant. Optimism reared up its bastard head somewhere in my gut, and I opened my eyes.
If the world had been bright before, now it was positively electric. I could see everything, the nuances in every texture, the depths of every shadow, everything. My reflection stared back at me calmly because I had no face. All I had was an unspoiled ovoid nestled in a sophisticated omnidirectional joint, with my shoulders forming a high wall around my egg head. And it was an egg head, if you can imagine an egg made out of mercury. I was shiny all over, but it was, for the most part, a dull shine that reflected objects as a series of blurs. My head was a mirror. A convex mirror, to be exact, reflecting an odd, distorted picture of whatever was in front of me. It was an odd look.
My body was covered in angular planes that roughly matched the shape and pattern of my musculature, although there was some deviation. For one thing, I wasn’t normally seven feet tall. And I was too thick. Human, but not human. Armored. This was armor. It was apparent even then. I wasn’t sure what I could really do, but I was pretty sure I could at least survive getting run over by a tank. I thought again of ticks, of how hard they were to smoosh.
I ran my hand over my shoulder. Everything folded into itself, so it there were no true seams. When I moved, pieces of me shifted and slid around each other with no resistance. There might not even have been any separate pieces, it might have been all one. When one part moved, another part moved with it, like the wings of an origami crane.
I bounced on my toes. The armor was incredibly light. I was incredibly light. I looked as if I should have weighed eight hundred pounds, at least, as if I should have gone smashing through the floor beneath me, but my footfalls were barely audible. And I could hear everything. The pipes gurgling. The house settling. The man outside bicycling past, breathing hard but easily with a cadence around eighty.
After a moment the armor began to move. Seemingly solid pieces cracked along familiar lines and pressed together into something more accurate to my normal shape. The process was hard to follow; I was pretty sure there wasn’t enough room where I ended up for what I’d started out with. I was huge, tough and nail-like, but I could have maybe been called ‘lithe’ with a liberal definition of the word. I still looked like I weighed about eight hundred pounds, though.
--cohesion--
--outfitting--
Machinery built itself out of the featureless planes that made up my body. Flat pieces of metal just opened up and unfolded into tiny components that wrapped around each other to form larger components, which became the small parts of larger machines. A lot of the same sort of machines, positioned where you might put a series of rocket engines if you wanted to make a man fly, and a pair thick plates that hung down over my shoulder blades like stubby robotic wings. They all hummed in the back of my mind, a barely heard set of similar notes that felt like they made up a harmony, eve
n though they didn’t.
A keening note joined the choir, and a pair of tubes as black as India ink built themselves out of my forearms. They were about fifteen inches long, maybe a little less, and came to a menacing point. The air wavered around them.
--Cabernician Shipkiller 181804258618185 online and fully adapted to biological parameters--
“What the hell is going on?” This was not the death I’d spent the morning anticipating. This wasn’t normal, but it didn’t seem to be death. Unless the afterlife was a hell of an odd place.
--syncing to local mental architecture--
--warning: local mental architecture is outside of specifications--
--restructuring programmed mental architecture--
My mind skipped. I stumbled in place and landed on my hands and knees with my left fist clenched, and the hardwood disappeared around the point of the tube on my forearm.
I stared at the hole in the floor. The edges smoldered, but only as an afterthought. The tubes were definitely weapons. That much was apparent.
“Well,” I said, “so much for my security deposit.” It felt good to think about something mundane for a moment. The thing in the back of my mind turned around and looked at itself in confusion.
--Cabernician Shipkiller 181804258618185 is online--
“I heard you,” I said. Might as well treat the thing like it was alive. “What the hell are you?”
--Cabernician Shipkiller 181804258618185--
“That means nothing to me,” I said. I twisted around and looked at the plates on my shoulders. They stretched halfway down my back, and the word that kept hopping around my mind was ‘jetpack.’ The surreality of the situation didn’t prevent me from nursing a small spark of adolescent excitement. “What are you?”
--cabernician shipkiller--
--warship--
I frowned, although I couldn’t see my face in the mirror. “So you’re a weapon?”
--warship--
--shipkiller--
--normally--
There was a small pause.
--host is smaller than anticipated--
I let that pass. My computer went to sleep. If I wasn’t looking in the mirror, it was hard to believe I wasn’t just standing there wearing a full-body athletic support. Now that I was becoming used to it, the pressure on my body was actually quite comfortable.
“What about 18181…whatever?”
--181804258618185 is my serial number--
I flicked the tip of my finger against my palm. The sound was flat, like rubber on metal. “You said ‘my.’ Are you intelligent?”
--Yes--
That thought carried more weight than its forebears. I raised my left eyebrow. It had taken a lot of time and a few bad headaches to learn how, but it was worth it for moments like this. Not that I’d ever encountered a moment like this before. And no one could see my face, so the expression was moot. But it made me feel better.
“No,” I said. “Are you, what, self-aware aware?”
--I am an adaptive mimetic consciousness capable of autonomous self-augmentation and learning--
--I am Cabernician Shipkiller 181804258618185--
--That is my name--
“What does that mean, adaptive mimetic consciousness?”
--The programmed mental architecture of a shipkiller is based on the local mental architecture of the host organism--
“Programmed mental architecture,” I mumbled. “You mean your mind?”
There was a pause.
--That is accurate--
--Your language is somewhat clumsy--
“Well, I like it,” I grumbled. “Your mind is based off of mine?”
--That is accurate--
--To a point--
“Close enough,” I said. I tried to run my hand through my hair and was met with stiff resistance, which clanked. Suddenly I was aware that my air must be coming from an onboard source; there certainly weren’t any holes in this thing. How much air did I have? Was I breathing too fast? I tried to get my heart to slow down, and it sped up.
“Listen,” I said in as calm a voice as I could muster, “you’re a warship, right? Like, a spaceship?” There was another pause. I took a deep breath and tried not to think of drowning, or that I might be dying after all.
--That is accurate--
“People are meant to ride in you?”
--Yes--
“And if people can ride in you, that means they can get on and off, right?”
--Of course--
“So you can, you can reverse what you did here?” The air was getting hot around my face. Or maybe it was my imagination. I have a very good imagination, which can be a pain in the ass when I imagine myself into a panic attack inside a sealed alien death machine.
--How do you mean--
“Can you let me out?” My voice broke, along with some of my self-control. “Let me out!” If I started to cry, I was going to blow something up. I didn’t care if I didn’t know how. I would figure it out.
--Oh--
--You don’t like me--
I felt its sadness, and its confusion.
“No!” My voice made the windows shake. “You’re great! I just want to know if I can get out when I need to.” That sounded reasonable, I thought. “Please.” Careful, now, don’t overdo it. Don’t plead.
--Oh--
--Oh, yeah, that makes sense--
--Hang on--
The deconstruction process was slower, I noticed through my sweaty, post-panic haze. The ship split whole cloth into the same dozen matched pairs of wings, engines and all, and slid behind me. It dismantled itself as it moved, unfolded machines into components that folded themselves into storage spaces that were too small to fit what was contained inside, until all that was left was a dozen pairs of flat featureless planes. These laid themselves one atop another and disappeared against my shirt. The whole thing took about a second.
I was a mess. I was soaked in sweat. My hair was plastered to my skull. I could smell myself, a rank, sour smell, fear and something else, something base that smelled like sex, or fundament. But the air was plentiful. I was ok.
--You can’t suffocate in there, you know--
I took in a deep breath. “No,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”
--Do you normally sweat this much--
I laughed. Wouldn’t you? “No, dammit, you scared the hell out of me.” The laughter felt good, and kept on coming.
--Oh--
--Sorry--
--Why are you laughing--
“I don’t know,” I chuckled. I rubbed my sodden scalp and pulled at my oily hair. It was wonderful. “I figure you’re not looking to hurt me. So in retrospect my panic is a little funny. Does that make sense?”
--No--
This seemed like an important thought to convey properly. I chewed on the wording.
“I’ve been running around the whole morning thinking you were going to kill me,” I said. “I feel like I’ve been pardoned on the electric chair. I guess I feel like I have to laugh at scary things that turn out all right, so I don’t feel scared any more. And, I mean, life is scary. Maybe it’s better to laugh at it a little.”
--So you don’t normally sweat that much--
I frowned. There was an odd stillness to the thing in the back of my mind.
“Was that a joke?”
--I believe so--
--I’ve never made one before--
I nodded slowly. “Decent first effort. Listen, tell me your name again?”
--Cabernician Shipkiller 181804258618185--
“Yeah,” I said. “Listen. Do you mind if I just call you Cab?”
--Cab--
The shipkiller mulled it over for a moment. Its thoughts were a murmur just behind my hearing.
--You may call me Cab--
“Great,” I said. “Everyone needs a nickname.”
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Benjamin Mumford-Zisk likes to tell tall tales.
He lives in Ithaca, NY
https://www.mumfordzisk.com
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