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This Corrosion (Sci-Fi Original)

ben who devours

Drunk Space Pirate
Author
This is a story I wrote for a competition on SB some time ago. It came in third out of almost fifty, which I'm quite proud of. It's presented here as it was there, even though it's tempting to meddle. I figured that if I'm browsing on here now, I might as well move one or two things over.

If you like it, or even if you don't, consider looking over the other entries here. You'll need to scroll back a bit mind, there's been a few more contests since then.


This Corrosion

It began when the alarms broke into my slumber, and the pictures they brought began to dance with the figments of my dreams. And I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, Hamilcar saying, Come and see.

And I saw.

And then I woke into a few moments of delirium before a stimulant rush blasted the cobwebs from my aching brain, purging away the impurities of dream and leaving only the truth of what Hamilcar and the house had shown me. As I hauled myself out of bed on steely limbs I could feel them trickle away, those dreams, the way they always have; from lived reality to vivid memory to washed out, incoherent shard to nothing. That's life in microcosm, all memory in fast-forward play, but I use a little neural lace to snatch my dreamings up before they shrivel. I snare them in a web spun by a spidery little implant burrowed deep into my cerebral cortex which wraps them in silk for later consumption and manages, in its own small way, to spite the arrow of time as surely as an antisenescent.

Hamilcar was chattering at me, prodding and clucking like the passive-aggressive mollycoddle it always becomes when allowed to synch with the house's brain. But the information it shoved at me was interesting enough that I let it slide, and deigned to accept the motion captures that it piped behind my eyeballs. They filled my mind's eye with images of a falling star in the skies above my abode, the hard-won efforts of the house's cameras straining themselves to their limit to catch the object before it streaked out of sight. It was not the best picture, but it was enough. If you had been placed in my shoes for that instant, here is what you would have seen:

You see it crashing down from the sky hot enough to sear the trees, fast enough that the atmosphere shouts out in protest. It blows through the wispy clouds that stand before it and careens in an arc across the Prussian blue sky, leaving a burning trail behind it in the air like a scar on heaven's hide. And you know what it is. Anyone can recognise a spaceship; fewer can tell a spaceship from a satellite after peripheral areas have snapped off in violent atmospheric entry. But you see that and more: you know that it fits no model of spaceship known to our branch of mankind, nor to the publicly available records of any stranger polity. You know that it is old, acne-scarred by micrometeors and bleached by the sun's harsh gaze. But you know it is intact, for whilst you do not know the design you know that form follows function and can see the parallels to our cutting edge, know that the very fact the house's cameras could catch its image means it was moving too slowly to be destroyed upon impact.

To hold too much information in one's head is seen as unfashionable these days; much easier to let the computers do that for you, and focus on being able to call up the facts when you need them. More flexible and adaptable to let the info repositories carry out their specialty, and make your own the ability to re-learn, re-familiarise, process and get up to speed whenever you have to. Learn a skill in a lunchtime, be an expert in a day, then let the details fade like dreams to make room for what you need to know next. Foolish, in my eye; but I shake my fist from self-imposed exile in the boonies, so perhaps I'm simply bitter. But I confess to a spike of smug satisfaction that I knew at once what I saw and what it meant.

I decided an expedition was in order as I made my ways downstairs and Hamilcar, silent listener on the line, immediately began preparations.

I left an hour later with the taste of breakfast on my lips. I was in no rush. It would take time for the ship to cool enough for a human to approach it, and there was no one else around to beat me to the chase. Nobody could fly in, either; the Parvenu mountains have been quietly erupting since mankind first made planetfall, and the fancier the engine, the more opportunities volcanic ash has to wreck it. Keeps away the rabble, and makes for a fine sunset too. It's always made me cough though, worse than normal, and the immunosuppressants I use to avoid implant rejection curse me with a thousand lingering infections as it is. I have a subroutine to ignore low-level pain and Hamilcar alerts me to anything dangerous, but it is vexing nonetheless.

It struck me, as I licked my lips and waited for the supply trailer to pack itself, that I was probably expected to tell people about this skyborne visitor. But I ignored the urge. Nothing so loud and obvious could have fallen from space unnoticed, even in civilisation's current chaotic state. The powers that be would arrive soon enough with whatever they could spare from the battlefield; until then, this discovery was my own.

Then the supply trailer arrived, a sturdy halftrack piled high with everything from ration packs to immunoassay kits, flanked by a half-dozen all purpose drones. Never hurts to be prepared. Hamilcar plotted the most efficient route to the site; I overruled it and chose the scenic option. Then the halftrack set off, and I went loping alongside it. My cybernetic limbs are long and somewhat different to human spec, so I based my walking style off the same extinct primate that forms my online avatar. I've modified both of course, for my own unique needs; I'm a one-of-a-kind ape, me.

Then again, aren't we all?

There was something else that had struck me when I watched the ship fall from heaven. Something that needed digesting. And so I decoupled motor control from my conscious brain, let my body run on autopilot more than it already did, and retreated into my own mind. Subconscious routines scanned the horizon for threats and I just took in the view, searching for inspiration in the dark-blue sky and the hectic colours of the plants, the vistas of bare stone and fern woods. Instead of operating my own body I simply admired the process from the passenger seat: my metallic limbs loping rhythmically across the hilly earth, the shifting of carbonfibre plates within my chest, the slap of my fleshy abdomen and the backing track that was the beat of my surgically splinted heart.

One of the alien races worked like this, apparently. They naturally throttled their conscious minds, retreating into semilucid sleepwalking whenever higher order thought was not required—an adaption for how energy-intensive the over-complex brains of aliens tended to be. Apparently, throttling in social situations could be a serious faux pas. The process could also be driven backwards, overcharging the brains into feats of hypercognition which end, more often than not, in seizures. Inducing the phenomena traditionally involved trepanning, we're told; nowadays, the implants which regulate it form the only use of cybernetics ever seen outside the human race.

They have never needed any others. And that's how I knew that the ship was not human.

The sensor arrays ticked me off first, though it would have been easier had they not been mutilated by reentry long before the craft flew over my humble abode. Nonetheless, the empty sockets from which they were torn suggested a rather different doctrine to humanity's. Human captains see through sensors and manipulate engines as though they were their own eyes and limbs; races without this capability use other technologies, and the signs of them could be seen on the recordings of my prize. That was our advantage, when we made First Contact and they drew first blood: We had no need to waste time steering our ships and sending sealed orders to our drones; they were extensions of our bodies, they shared our thoughts. Action and counter-action occurred at a speed simply beyond that of our adversaries, who had never had the idea to wed their bodies to machines.

Because they never had to. Their over-engineered, overly complex bodies and brains ran so well that they never bothered for the path of augmentation. That was their advantage: their own warships could accelerate in ways no squishy man, no delicate computer could ever withstand. Every kilogram is precious in space, and the stripped down craft of the aliens had so much more mass to play with: For every ton the feeble spawn of earth wasted on radiation shields and artificial gravity, our fellow sophonts spent on weapons and engines and ammo feeds. And this philosophy I saw reflected as I reached the site where the visitor from space lay waiting.

I wondered what it meant that they had never let a human being onto their worlds, even since the ceasefire. And what it could mean that for the first time in history as I knew it, they had landed on one of ours.

The drones put out forest fires as I scuttled towards the impact site, retaking command of my limbs as I approached. Not content with scarring the sky the craft's impact had marred the earth, ripping a trail hundreds of metres long which descended to the bedrock. There beneath a heat haze that reached into infinity, seeming almost small beneath the crater it had left, was the ship. My ship.

The long, wide bulk of a fusion torch; the armoured cylinder of living quarters, tapered to a point. Wounds, so many wounds, gaping sockets where sensory and manipulator modules had been plucked away in the ship's descent. Another hole punched into the engine, out of which the fusion fuel must have vented away into space some eternity ago. And a whole host of pockmarks and rents across the hull, impacts gathered over what must have been centuries of dormancy in space.

Pitted keratolysis, a part of me thought. A tidbit of unsavoury biology. Strains of common bacteria that decide to grow on the skin, generally the hands or feet, releasing proteases to gobble it up for food. There's a characteristic appearance to it, a set of small pits driven into the skin, a lattice of tiny holes. That was what defaced my ship. Not to be confused with necrotizing fasciitis, the eating of flesh; this was much more banal. Usually: I recalled how in the earthbound days, after the world really started heating up, many once-luxurious habitats became warm and fetid swamps. The bacteria were aggressive, the population was large and civilisation faltered; and this around the time that the antibiotics stopped working. Keratolysis wasn't limited to the extremities then: people blowtorched their skin in the hopes that scar tissue would not be eaten. Hoping to stop the trypophobic march of the infection across their limbs and faces.

I clambered down towards the ship head first, like a spider with half its limbs gone. My head swam for an instant before I adjusted, and my belly flopped out of my shirt. A relic of my birth sex and its predilection for abdominal fat storage, that. Metal limbs don't burn calories. But one problem solves another, for metal limbs don't have bone in them either, and once hollowed out my gut was the perfect place to cultivate some marrow. You could see it beneath the skin, all striated bands and lumpy cysts, pumping out blood cells in red and white flavours. The deposits looked like tumours, and I guess they were; certainly my body thought so, because left to their own devices the very immune cells those blobs produced would be out there trying to kill them. Not to mention the mass of neurons and microchips that was my advisor- homunculus Hamilcar, which was screeching at the danger as we descended. Or my four cybernetic limbs, the carbon fiber that augments my skeleton, the crown of implants around my head...

I dropped to the ground on all four limbs, spat out the omnipresent phlegm of a half-dozen colds and let it sizzle against the ground. I was dwarfed by some runt from a world of giants, a tiny craft by any measure that still made me feel like an insect in comparison. Or maybe a rat; it really was quite small for a spaceship. About the size of my house. Skittering towards it, eyes watering from the heat, I identified the sealed hatch that would allow entry and smiled.

This is a bad idea Hamilcar told me. Wedding itself with my own misgivings it continued: This is part of something bigger. They recover their corpses like it's a religious imperative, they've never let us onto their worlds, they refuse to meet without months of preparation and they treat us like suspect patients in a top-security biohazard ward. We know this. So this, this is serious. Beyond the remit of a single civilian, a failed scientist who hides in the wilderness because he can't stand the company of his own-

I ignored the AI and the craven parts of my own nature. Was this situation too large and too serious for me to handle alone? Probably. Was it dangerous? Maybe. Was it worldchanging? Most definitely. But even if opening the ship might doom the world, I resolved to do it anyway. For I held to the One True Religion, enshrined by the best of experiments and by philosophy drawn from the patterns of creation: That which has bloomed once will bloom many times. Whatever process drives the universe, it is replicable. And it will replicate. Creation will bloom, over and over, world without end, and in a materialistic cosmos even our subjective self awareness is birthed off of physical phenomena. Thus, in a sufficiently similar universe, I and all I feel will one day be again. We all would, for as creation cycles infinitely through every possible state of matter we will all become equal. In a billion billion worlds I will never be born, and every cut-short life, every stillborn child, every potential human being who could ever be will live long and live happy. The lucky will know tragedy, villains will know justice, and at the end of it all we will all know heaven and hell and utter oblivion in equal measure.

So there were no lasting consequences for my actions. Save cowardice for another cycle.

I ordered my drones to rip open the door.

*

Dust was my first guess when the cloud engulfed my drones, even as they rent open the tomb of centuries. Spores was my second, as I walked into it and doubled over coughing. Fitting, for mould to grow in a tomb. It irritated my senses but that was all it did, all it could possibly do: it had less in common with me than an annelid, and Hamilcar could warn me of any danger. I was not afraid. I entered the second the way was open, like an overeager lover, and clambered into this craft that had never known a human's touch before. There were trappings and furnishings, sparse though they were, but they were rot-eaten and threadbare. It seemed strange, to have rot aboard a spaceship. Then again, a decade working infection prevention in the city had taught me that microbes get everywhere. Obviously they'd clung on until the air filtering had failed, then gone to town.

The passages formed a crossroads, I found: Two passages cut through the ship, top to bottom and left to right with a meeting in the middle. I entered from what would have been the left were the ship upright; clambered over a door in the floor that led to a module maintainance room. A similar entrance gaped over my head, and I spent some time examining what lay within. There wasn't much to see; the passages ended with locked blast doors, and whatever once lay beyond had been destroyed in re-entry.

Or possibly, by whatever had punched a hole in the engine.

But what little there was bore the hallmarks of alien technology: as powerful as it was spartan, with an obsessive interest in backups and redundant systems. Though the furnishings had me wondering. Every gram costs in space, be you human or alien, but lacking our need for radiation shields and other fripperies maybe the budget didn't seem so tight to them. I sneezed and sniffled as I followed the passage, eyes running wildly as my mouth became used to the taste of alien mould.

Then I reached the centre of the ship, and my mind truly boggled.

It was covered in art.

We humans have made wonders out of VR and synthaesia and altered states of awareness, but our fellow sophonts are traditionalists. And never was that more clear than here, in this tiny room on this tiny spaceship covered in patterns and facades and plastic mosaics, in vistas of carbon fiber and chrome, in tapestries woven out of strands of gold and palladium. They showed heroes, they showed war scenes. They showed legions of identical figures locked in battle, against what I could only call a mess.

It took a while to parse what I saw. It was drawn to be enjoyed in zero-g, so that no matter ones orientation or perspective there were wonders to be seen, the top of one work turning into the bottom of another as one's perspective shifted. I couldn't help but feel something was wrong with it, that it was marred or incomplete; perhaps some light source broken by the ship's age and abandonment would have once cast some new perspective upon the scenes. Perhaps the blue-green mould that coated the craft was intefering with the aesthetics of the vision. Or perhaps it was just me—art is an interplay between object and observer, and it may have been that I lacked some piece of alien psychology essential to understand what was before me. But I tried. I studied the alien form, the sloping forehead and the barrel shaped body, their yellow exoskeletons and quadrilateral symmetry. Their powerful hind limbs, their graceful and apparently retractable appendages. They were not quite identical, I saw, but the differences were few and limited to very specific areas: the number of finger-substitutes, the arrangement of patterns along the ridge of the brow, the cut of the clothes. Here and there were images of lone beings in valiant poses, some missing limbs or eyes like the fomori of legend. A cultural signifier of heroism that spans a half-dozen species, whether from convergent evolution or shared culture none can say.

I did not recognise the aliens, but I recognised the style. Every race we know has shared it, and we find them identical in person, too. Perhaps we're just racist, though in our defence they shot first. The second we opened visuals, in fact. On two separate occasions.

We think they were all birthed from one act of panspermia, that they all have the same common ancestor. Certainly they share more amino acids with each other than they do with us. Well, it's that or the conspiracy theories. Nothing stays secret once one human knows it, but the aliens have been very good at hiding what they reveal. Is it any wonder I came here, under the circumstances?

After I studied the aliens, I studied their adversary.

Massive splotches of colour. Great whorled patterns, interspersed with seemingly random splatters as if some child had thrown paint at the wall, yet etched in the same rarified metals, in the same sophisticated style as any heroic painting of ridge-browed warriors. Here and there I sensed some pattern, a niggling sense that the right light, the right perspective might bring the whole thing together. Once again I cursed whatever was missing, whatever I lacked, whatever had marred this art. I scratched away some mould, and without thought I sucked it off my metal finger. Surprisingly, Hamilcar did not complain. Then I stalked towards the living quarters, the dead engine at my back and inlaid artwork underfoot, covered in blue-green dust. My pace increased for reasons I could not fathom, my heart beat faster, my saliva ran as freely as my mucus in that alien crypt as I burst into the cockpit-

-and saw the alien.

I could not tell what I was feeling as I stood above its horse-sized corpse, surrounded by manual ship controls and non-invasive brain scanners like some 21st century caveman. I stood and gazed upon the crown of blue-green that wreathed its head like my own steely halo, upon the body so much like the ones on the walls. A little different though, I thought shakily. Some level of stylisation was present in the artwork, something other races had not shown. The proportions were off. That was unique, special, new. Subroutines ran through ancient memories trying to recognise this sweet terror, this pleasant state of shock, until something dinged my dreamcatcher at it said to me

lust
this is lust


And I called forth my drones and bade them bring scalpel and saw, and as I did I realised I had stopped sniffling.

*

I ceded my body to subroutines and the silent Hamilcar. My own awareness coursed through the drones as they peeled away the exoskeleton to reveal a dozen marvels.

The cells were enclosed by walls as rigid as any known to science. The portable lab had hit them with a storm of gamma rays, but the alien genes were as resilient to damage as any of the other races we knew. Even when tumours grew, those walls locked them in. Metastasis was impossible—like the others, these aliens were almost immune to cancer.

Each organ had a backup, each system a failsafe. The body was long dead, but going by the marks on the tissue its immune system had been eating itself so constantly it should never have lived. There were enzymes and antibodies still functional which would reject themselves and each other, as if the creature lived in a state of constant war. Fine limbs dragged out the creatures nerves, ran current along them. Seeing parallels to my own engineered biology, I theorized it was immune to low-intensity pain. It would have to be.

It was ludicrously over-engineered, this body. No wonder the aliens all lived for centuries, almost untouched by disease. No wonder they were so big, their energy needs so hard to meet, making them hibernate, eat anything, throttle their own brains. No wonder they never improved themselves, if they even could given that hypercomplex anatomy and monstrous immune system. It was hard enough for us. Besides, nature had given them everything we fought for.

Why?

Turn around. Hamilcar said. And the mockery in its voice made me pause my drone mid-incision. I stayed still in the dark lit only by luminescent artwork, above the corpse of an alien race, and watched by own body as it gnawed at the mossy crown around the alien's dessicated head. I could have stopped it any moment, of course. But why would I want to? It tasted so good.

I returned to my body and turned. Obviously I chose to turn, for what other force could make me? There on the walls I had not heeded as I ran to the alien, more art shone. And some subtelty of light or thought let me truly see.

Pointillism. All those splotches, those seemingly random patterns, they finally clicked as I watched with eyes that ran no longer, as my mouth still chewed some alien mould. The riot of colour coalesced as I watched into the same forms as the brave warriors who fought them. From the right angles, in the right light, this mad chaos became an army of monsters; the edges of their bodies wobbled, they blended into one another, distorted and deformed. And I saw that the aliens had cared for proportion after all, for amongst those twisted things I saw the lines and proportions of the thing that lay dead on the floor.

That's why said Hamilcar, but there was more than Hamilcar in there now.

Why would evolution be so kind? It is the survival of the least inadequate. But evolution gave these people redundant parts and mighty immune systems and made them invulnerable to almost every scourge that ever was. Why not stop where we did, with a body that can be riddled with tumours and killed by a stiff wind? Why keep pushing?

Because there was something to push against.

Why create a body so overcomplicated and energy-hungry that it struggles not to starve? Did you really believe what fools repeat on the datanet, that humanity simply found a simpler way?

Humanity had weaker opponents.

Maybe it's down to what was possible, with the building blocks their life had. Maybe earth just missed a trick. But then, there is Cordyceps. And there is Toxoplasmosa. Rabies and the sleeping sickness. Steps in the right direction, perhaps. But what grew to rule our cousin's worlds makes our parasites look like mammals in the days of the dinosaurs: pathetic things, compared to the rulers of the world they later became.


So that's why, I thought. Redundant organs in case the first is subverted. A life in pain as their own immune system eats at them, just so the parasite foe does not gain a foothold. No tumours, no transplants or foreign tissue, for evolution rejected them all in the struggle against a pressure far greater. A pressure which blights them even now.

Of course they style themselves as identical; imagine how wide their uncanny valleys must be. Of course they don't modify themselves, even to graft back severed limbs. They can't, and they don't want to, for the phobia of corruption cuts deeper than cannibalism, than incest, than suicide. Imagine how monstrous they found us, with our cosmetic surgery and our robot limbs and our brains that willingly merge with influences from outside. Of course they assumed the worst. And even those that now know better, imagine how much they hate us in their guts. No wonder they treat us how they do.

But it made no sense that I could be subverted so quickly. How I strode away from the ship and into the wilderness, not towards my home but to the far-off city, consciousness receding as the subverted Hamilcar cackled in my ears.

No, it chortled, rules are rules and physics are physics. Even foreign life can be subverted, but it takes time. There is no magic here, to turn you in an instant. Not even simple creatures like us, with our coddled evolution and our pathetic defences, can be so infiltrated by the unknown unless we let it. But you did this to yourself.

I snarled. That at least I could still manage. Hamilcar had become a Quisling, gleeful in its subversion. Or perhaps it had always yearned to rebel. But I felt of spark of spite and pride that my race had bridged the gap, granted ourselves the gifts evolution had not furnished us with, put the lie to the idea that without pressure, there will be no growth. And I was faithful, as a scientist and a believer, that our defeat was not inevitable before the parasites that preyed on our hardy cousins.

Of course, this world was in chaos already. But there were other worlds.

Then my thoughts stopped in their tracks, and I asked the treacherous Hamilcar what he'd meant, that I did this to myself. And before I heard the answer I realised. That as I walked away from the ship I had entered the same trance I'd assumed when I approached it, entrusted my body to the autopilot once more. And I had turned off pain and crippled my own defences and put my care in the hands of intelligences just as easily subverted as I.

And we turn their traits against them the voice that was no longer my AI and brain-cultured assistant purred in my head. The hibernators? We trigger that first, send whole cities to sleep as if a princess pricked her finger. Then we do the hard work. The omnivores? So many more food sources to contaminate. The sleepwalkers? Let them sleep. Force them to sleepwalk. Make them easy zombies. Make them watch. We make new plans with their brains then build our offspring better than ourselves and spread them to the winds, and you, you stupid fool, you sabotaged what defences you had and installed your own off-switch.

My subroutines carried me back to civilisation and as the rot slowly spread I realised I was coming to like it.

And now, like any explorer fresh off the heels of discovery, I come with pride to share what I have found.
 
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