Inner Life 2: Sight

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The extra shots gave me an opportunity. The parts of me that weren’t connected to the eye, I’d spread out to sample signals from any other interesting-seeming nerves I could reach, and comparing the shots to incoming signals allowed me to logically deduce another sensory system: hearing. The incoming signals there seemed to undergo a lot less early processing and should be easy for me deduce without any invasive penetration. Lucky!

Then I realised that, no, I wasn’t lucky, as my body turned to another smaller body behind me, and made some noises, and the other body made some noises back. I had an aural communication system. An extremely complicated aural communication system. And I was either going to have to learn it or learn to read its meaning from the nerves below me, and either of those options were going to take absolutely forever. Ugh.

Okay, worry about that later. For now, figure out what I can. This other body had been hiding behind mine while I killed the one on the floor – I’d been protecting it. I was still holding the weapon, but down by my side, not pointing it at this other one; we were allies, but there might still be danger. The other one didn’t seem to have a weapon of its own. Aside from the corpse, we were alone in this room.

We left the room, moving far slower than I had before. My heartbeat was slower, too. I was too small to reach the nerve rope without detaching from the eye, so I couldn’t feel much else that was going on, but at this stage sight seemed to be the most informative source of data anyway. I walked slightly behind the other body, and when it slowed down a little to match pace with me, I slowed down too; I was keeping a little behind on purpose. It seemed to understand that, and sped up again.

Was I keeping it in view to protect it from other assailants? Or was it a potential assailant? A prisoner, perhaps? Maybe it hadn’t been hiding behind me; maybe I was stealing it.

I hoped not. If I was an invader in this place, I’d probably get killed before my life could even start.

We were walking down a smooth corridor made of clearly manufactured materials (ceramic? Plastic? Hard to tell through one largely unfamiliar eye that I wasn’t controlling), clean and unbroken except for the complex doors we occasionally passed. A manufactured source of light was embedded every so often in the ceiling, leaving no area in shadow. Without knowing more about my physical strength or light sensitivity, I couldn’t make too many inferences on things like the brightness or the gravity or the air pressure or anything, but we were in air and under gravity, and this species clearly relied a lot on sight.

They also had very high manufacturing capabilities, or connections to another species that did. And the layout of this place, combined with our interactions with the body walking ahead of me, suggested the potential of a complex and involved social system. That… wasn’t ideal. A smart, social species with technology? It was going to be hard not to be discovered, and impossible to protect myself if I was. There was a chance that I would be noticed and received positively; it did happen, sometimes. But the chance was not high.

And still, I could find nothing at all in my inherited memories about any of this. These bodies, this hallway, the sounds that the one ahead of me was still making… all completely unfamiliar. Somehow, I’d been implanted in this body, but my progenitor either knew nothing about them, or hadn’t seen fit to inform me.

Where was I? Space? A planet? Somewhere weirder?

And then we turned and went through one of those heavy, complex doors (automated somehow; we didn’t have to push it, the one ahead of me simply pushed a button), and finally, I saw something I recognised.

Not the room, all smooth and sterile. Not the metal benches covered in small devices, or the padded benches down the back; not the other body in a large alcove to the left, similar to mine but thinner and differently coloured, standing next to a wide, well-lit, freestanding steel bench. But the thing on the bench… that was familiar.

Even dissected, I recognised a void roach. Segmented, many-legged, bilaterally symmetrical, and two thirds the size of my body. (Good; I knew how big void roaches were, so now I knew how big I was.) An incredibly tough species, capable of surviving in a wide range of environments, though not particularly smart for spacefarers – void roaches tended to hoard and reverse engineer intercepted technology and then teach each other how to build it, but they rarely innovated on their own. (More often encountered in space than on planets; I was more than likely on a spaceship, though I couldn’t be certain.)

Very expansive social structure, but not overly complex, by spacefarer standards. Physical attributes that let them travel very widely and breed reasonably quickly. Armoured, which made implantation tricky, but there was a slight gap between the third and fourth exoskeletal plates that, if you stabbed just right, let you get a baby incredibly close to the central nervous system without breaking anything. Incredibly good bodies, all told; and as my eye stared at the dead one cut open on the bench, important details on how to be a void roach rose in my mind. How to figure out exactly where you were upon waking. How to make it to the central nervous system undetected. What the different nerves were and what their signals meant, what the specific chemicals in fluid circulation told you about your health, the best order and speed for integrating with the major nerves, how to interpret sensory data. It’s a very complicated process, but I knew exactly how to do it safely and efficiently.

And the memories felt fresh and solid. Recent. There was a good chance that I was looking at my own progenitor.

There was nothing I could do for them now, but this might be a sign that I needed to integrate quickly. There were all sorts of reasons why someone might be getting dissected like this, but more of them than I would like came down to me being in serious danger.

Along with any other people aboard. I needed to find out if I was alone. I hoped not.

While my body traded noises and body language with the other two in the room, I got to integrating properly with my nervous system. Placement was going to be very important. I knew the ideal placement for integrating my neonatal form with dozens of types of bodies, but none of them was the type of body I was in, so I was going to have to guess. And guess fast – I could only stay neonatal for so long.

A position somewhere against or inside the main nervous mass was ideal. I didn’t want to go drilling into an unknown nerve mass (there was no telling what kind of damage I could cause), so attaching to the outside would have to do. I also didn’t want to let go of the eye, but I could probably stand to lose the ear temporarily. Sound wasn’t going to give me nearly as much information as sight until I figured out the aural communication system.

I also wanted to be as undetectable as possible. My dissected possibly-progenitor suggested that these bodies might be aware of us and trying to find us, and I had no idea what sort of equipment they had to do that. I should blend in as much as possible. I should stay close to the nerves, and in a symmetrical system, try to be symmetrical, so that I’d stand out as little as possible on whatever scans they might take.

I stretched my whole self out, as long and thin as I could make me, keeping my sensory tendrils buried in the receptors of the left eye and following the nerve down, then laying flat against the divide between the two halves of the nerve bundle, front to back. I lay atop a thick bridge of nerves connecting the two halves; underneath would be better, but digging in there was too risky for my body. So this would do. When I was larger and more experienced, I could grow into the mass more, and kill off the parts of me visible on the surface.

I didn’t know which nerves did what, yet. I integrated with as many different-seeming ones as I could, hoping that some would be useful.

Now, it was time to grow.

The nervous system was well supplied with energy and materials by the circulatory system. Oxygen respiration; very standard. People can work with a wide range of energy sources, and the sugars provided by this system were no challenge for me. I had two jobs: grow, and understand. Grow enough to interface with all the critical parts of the nervous system that I would need to survive. Understand how to use them well enough to survive.

And maybe figure out what these bodies were and why I’d been born here, alone, and with no pre-birth explanation in my memories. That would also be nice.

While I’d been working, the short body I’d come into the room with had been getting inspected by the tall one already in here. As I settled in, the inspection stopped, and the small one ran over to me. My body put my limbs around it, and it put its limbs around me, and we squeezed each other gently.

The response of my nervous system and fluid chemistry suggested that this was a positive experience. I was relaxed. I was happy. I was relieved. (Probably. It’d take me a while to figure out the emotions for certain.) Whatever conflict had had me kill the other body was over, and things were good.

Good.

I grew as quickly as I could manage while minimising my effect on the body’s chemistry. Understanding the situation necessitated increasing in size, but if I took too much food, the body might notice. I learned quite quickly that this wasn’t a concern so long as I was reasonable; the body had a very flexible energy management system. It probably just ate more food to compensate for me without thinking about it.

I aimed for a breadth rather than a depth of contact points – a little from many specialised systems was better than a lot from one. Within a couple of days (a local ‘day’ was about two and a half Bantic days), I could reach both ears and reacquired sound perception, from both sides of the body this time. Soon after that, I was able to stretch all the way to the back of the nervous mass, and found a true boon – the visual perception system. It was nonsense to me on its own, but by cross-referencing the output with the information I was getting directly from my eye, I should be able to learn how the nervous system saw, and that should give me clues for how it processed information in general. But the real leap forward came when I reached all the way to the top of the nervous rope again, and tapped in to the mass atop it that processed signals from the rest of the body.

This, in combination with directly sampling the fluid chemistry and ambient signals around me, let me learn how things affected the body. I could learn its physical condition, its mood, its natural reactions. And if I could read my body, I could learn… well, everything. Determine positive and negative stimuli, both direct and abstract. Observe reactions and the effects of those reactions. Get context. Learn who I was.

I quickly learned several important things. First, I was indeed on a spaceship, and it was clearly a spaceship designed for bodies like mine. I had a role, a schedule, a life, though I’d need more context to figure out the details of what specifically my role was. Second, all of my companions on the spaceship, of which there were nine (not including myself or the dead one), were of my species, and we worked together and largely appeared to get along – a crew. That could be a good or a bad thing, depending. Third, the one I’d killed had, judging by the clothing it wore (the different colours between us were mostly clothing, I had learned; our bodies were all on a scale of dark brown to pale pinkish-brown, though our eyes and hair had a little more colour variation) and the way the rest of the crew behaved, probably been a crewmate. But nobody seemed angry or vengeful over me killing it. All the references to it that I picked up were emotionally complicated, but any related aggression wasn’t directed at me.

Fourth, I quickly found out why nobody was angry at me for killing it. The spindly crewmate who had been dissecting the void roach had also dissected my prey, and gathered us all together in the dissecting room to show us something. I couldn’t understand the sounds it was making, but the purpose of the presentation was unmistakable. The same structure had been pulled from both bodies – a long, bony, retractible needle.

I recognised it, though it would probably be a while before I grew my own. An ovipositor. A person’s ovipositor.

My crew knew that we were among them. And they were trying to wipe us out.

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