For two centuries, mankind has been at war with the Bugs: Ravening, horrid aliens from the depths of space, they have attacked humanity again and again. Only by working together has humanity held the line - and now, at last, victory is in sight: The Bugs have sued for peace, surrendering and ending the war.
For Prince Louis Benoit, the war has been there all his life. His father fought in it and he has trained for it. Now that it is over, he finds himself thrust into a new role...as peacemaker. His father has arranged for him to ensure that there will be a lasting, continual peace with the Bugs with the oldest, most traditional method that the human race has ever known.
With a royal wedding.
Now, whisked across space to neutral territory, Lou will need to come face to face with a ravenous hive mind that threatened the entire human race with extinction...and marry them.
Beneath the meter thick armor plating, visible through the augcrown that threaded against his temples, King Louis Benoit XI watched as Procyon III burned.
The saturation bombardment had begun nearly an hour before, but the death of a world could take a shocking amount of time, considering the amount of energies being discharged. It didn't help that Procyon III's atmosphere was a thick, methane rich soup. The shock waves from the matter/antimatter detonations rippled far, but the real killer – the firestorms and the radiation – were blunted. The exponential curve was hit by the time the killsats reached the 80th parallel. By then, the firestorms had caught, the atmosphere was burning, and the planet was truly dead.
By now, the flagship was beginning to activate the stabdrive – which would boost the ship to .9C and bring them away before the forward element of the Bugs got close enough to reinforce their doomed planet. For Louis, it felt like nothing more than a gentle pressure at the top of his head.
That pressure was what was left after the non-Newtonian fluid, the acceleration drugs, and the contragravitic fields were applied. It was a little staggering to think of the amount of energy being released now, not just on Procyon III and on the flagship, but also across the entire human fleet. Ninety eight stabdrives, each one creating a pulsed thread of quasi-real exhaust as their drives sucked energy from the most esoteric reaches of physics known to humanity and launched them at velocities that eclipsed some forms of subatomic particles.
Louis turned his attention inwards, focusing the augcrown's perceptions to the QHC who were still standing up under the acceleration. The QHC looked alarmingly similar to humans – most of them even spurned the name used by his people and preferred to simply be called...people. But it was hard to really think of them like that as they walked unaided through the corridors of the flagship without seeming to notice the overwhelming acceleration pressure that the stabdrive put out.
One of the QHC paused in her stride, then stepped over to the space that Louis' augmented reality self projected from. She looked into his eyes, her eyes whirring and clicking faintly. "King Louis, we're receiving a transmission," she said.
Louis forced down a tingle of fear. Had they left someone down there?
Procyon III had been an elegant trap, laid over the course of two decades – a culmination of nearly two centuries of unremitting warfare spanning three solar systems. First contact – a series of staggering atrocities in the Alpha Centauri system, culminating with the death of nearly five million human and human adjacent people in a single horrible afternoon – had led to war. At first, fumbling and awkward, with battles lasting months if not years. Then, elegant. Faster, Deadlier. The UPH and the Bugs both pushed their technology to the breaking point. Humanity had delved into previously restricted areas of scientific endeavor, including the creation of artificial life. The Bugs had weaponized space-time in a way that had driven several prominent human physicists irrevocably insane.
And now, at Procyon III, the hope had come that the turning point could be found.
The plan was brutally simple: Lay out a colony world that the Bugs would have to attack. Fight tooth and nail to keep their warfleets back – to encourage them to bring out their big guns. Their planet consuming swarms. Their biological ships the size of small moons. Their hive-nodes and their monstrosities that as of yet had no name in human lexicons. And once the Bugs were ensnared upon Procyon…
Burn the planet to the mantle.
"God rest their souls," he said, quietly. "I hope..." He shook his head, faintly, knowing that the QHC could see the augmented reality illusion that was being projected into the ship. "I hope they're AnComs at least – with backups?"
"No, sir, no," she said – and Louis felt his heart clench tighter. That meant they were his subjects. The Neopolitan Star Kingdom didn't use uploads or backups or ego-forking or any of the other more esoteric technologies that the AnCom Union or the Stubjacks did. Any of his citizens on that planet would be facing their final judgment in the form of compression waves and gamma radiation any second now.
"God rest their souls," he said, again.
"No, sir!" The QHC looked down at her tablet, brow furrowing. Louis was shocked that it was taking a QHC this long to read anything – they were supposed to be able to think many times faster than a baseline human like himself. "It's...from...the Bugs."
That stopped Louis in his mental tracks. He swore he nearly banged his actual, physical head against the inside of the acceleration tank.
"...what?"
"It's coming in along a laser-pulse frequency. Uh..." The QHC cocked her head. "I'm not sure, it's not a mathmatic code, and it's not using Anglec or Neo-Sino." The two chosen languages of the UPH Expeditionary Force.
"Let me hear," Louis said, frowning as she tapped at her console. A series of harsh beeps and bloops filled his ears – annoyingly loud, the QHC had clearly not taken into account the differences in their ears. Louis grit his mental teeth, focusing. For a few seconds, he sat there, trying to figure out what on Earth it could possibly mean. His brow furrowed even more.
"That's...Morse."
"Morse code?" The QHC asked. "That's nearly five hundred years out of date."
"They must have based it on old telescopic observations of Earth." Louis imagined he was licking his lips. In truth, he was still ensnared in the acceleration tank, only perceiving the world through the threaded nerve inputs of his augcrown. "W...E...S...U...R..." He paused, listening.
"No, what I'm wondering about is how the flying fuck do you know Morse code!" The QHC exclaimed. "I'm a hyper-intelligent trans android, you're a baseline human cosplaying as the King of France. How the fuck do you know Morse code and I don't?"
"We surrender," Louis said.
"Oh, so, the Neos are going to finally admit that AnCom was right and you should use nanofabricators?" the QHC asked, curiously.
"N-No," Louis said, barely even registering her snark. "No, no, that's the message. We Surrender."
The QHC blinked at his augmented reality presence. The entire ship had gone silent – every crewman was focused on him, even those in their acceleration tanks. He could feel the entangled communication devices that threaded the human fleet into one semi-harmonious whole were all kicking up, bringing his words and his simulated face to every human in every ship. "The Bugs...the Bugs have surrendered."
The QHC screamed at the top of her lungs, grabbed the augmented reality simulation of King Louis Benoit XI of the Neopolitian Star Kingdom, bent him down, and kissed him before he had time to think.
***
SOL
THIRTEEN YEARS LATER...
Some people thought being a prince was fun and games.
Wake up in the morning, get dressed by servants, maybe take a stroll around the Venusian palaces, enjoy some raptor rides in the jungles. Drop by the racketball court for a game with some smarmy robot butlers, then tottle off to your personal airship for an evening flying into the upper atmosphere and then riding your skyboard.
Hah.
What fun.
Prince Louis Benoit XII of the Neopolitian Star Kingdom, Heir to the Duchy of Venus, the Last and True Sovereign of the Human Race, Emperor of Titan and the Protector of India, badly wished that he lived the life people imagined he did.
"Parry high! Low! High!" Marc barked, stalking back and forth along the pathway as Lou's rapier snapped into position, his arm aching, sweat beading along the back of his neck. His fencing partner – a combat servitor that his father had purchased for him as some kind of sick practical joke on his birthday – moved with eerie precision, using its articulated arms to thrust back at him with its own foil. "Remember, light on your feet, Prince!"
Lou stepped backwards, his blade rattling as he caught the foil, locked hilts, shoved back. The servitor bobbed away on a gusting of air currents and a whirring contragravitic engine. Lou stumbled – yelped – then froze as a cold tip of a blade pressed to his cheek, mashing up against it. If he moved even an inch, he was certain the foil would cut into his skin. The servitor remained hovering in position for an agonizing three seconds before it drew its foil backwards and intoned, in its ludicrously archaic synthesized voice.
"One. Point. To. Me."
Lou rubbed at his cheek, scowling.
Marc shook his head, then stepped over. "Your stance is sloppy, if that was a real challenger, we'd be finding a new heir right about now." He shook his head again. "Do you know how long the Benoit line has ruled the Kingdom?"
"Thiteen ge-" Lou started to speak – already tired, already resigned.
"Thirteen generations!" Marc boomed. "For thirteen generations, ever since the foundation of the United Human Polities. For thirteen generations, the Benoit family has kept nobility itself alive. Do you think that the rest of the houses of the Star Kingdom would do half as good? Do you think the Macchi would?" He spat. "Those half-augmented bastards would turn us into an AnCom puppet state for a pleasure pod and a wink."
Lou bit back a scowl, a sarcastic comment and then stood up again. His palm rubbed against his cheek and he counted backwards from ten. Being angry was unbecoming of a royal. "I understand, instructor. I shall endeavor to do better."
Marc frowned, his mustache bristling on his ebony face. Ever so slowly, he nodded. "Aye, that you will, Prince. Now! " He turned, walking away. "High!"
Lou groaned internally as his arm lifted – his muscle already burning – as overhead, the moon floated by, glowing brilliantly even through the midmorning light. Several streaks of light burned themselves through the sky, like spokes expanding off a wheel. Stabdrives, kicking on as ships departed from the moon's launch bays.
It was going to be a long-ass day.
***
Fencing lessons.
Tutors on history.
Tutors on Kingdom politics.
Tutors on the UHP parliamentary politics.
Tutors on the Bug War.
Tutors on the battles fought by his father during the Bug War.
By the time Lou was sat down at the dinner table, he was starving, aching, and felt like his brain had been mashed with so much knowledge that he was sure his brain was dribbling out of his ear. Lou pushed his fork through his greens, watching them roll around on the plate as Mother sat at the far end of the table, reading from her news feed, her eyes darting left and right.
"Any beams from father?" Lou asked, biting his lip.
To Lou, his father was a mythic figure. Titanic. Literally, as the last thing Lou remembered of him was how tall he was, how gallant in his gold filigree and red sashed space suit, heading for the flagship of his part of the UHP fleet, the Victory. That had been...a long time ago. For Lou, it was a bit tricky, as he and his mother stayed on a partial rotation in the cryocrypts, to ensure that their timelines and his father's didn't get too distorted, considering the effects of relativistic time dilation on interstellar travel.
The calculations were complicated, but Lou had had them beaten into his head often enough to know that they were due for another decade-long stint in the crypts soon.
It was…
Unsettling.
Mother set down her fork and said: "None yet, honey."
Lou nodded, looking down at his plate. "So, I was thinking – since I'm due to go into the crypts soon, uh..." He coughed. "I was thinking maybe I could take a quick vacation? I hear Earth is very nice this time of year."
"Earth is nice every time of year, honey," she said, her voice dry. "They have enough weather control nano in the atmosphere that breathing practically makes you an augment."
"Right." Lou chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck. "It's just, the Star Kingdom is an ally of the AnComs, I figure, I should get to see them at least once. Right?"
"Of course, honey," Mother said. "Once you're King, you will be meeting with the AnComs every day."
Lou opened his mouth, then shut it. "Right." He looked down at his plate.
A servitor whirred into the room on its blanket of contragravitic energies, coming to a stop beside mother. "A priority one entangled communication wave from Geneva."
Mother nodded. "Put it on, if you'd be so kind." She dabbed at her lips with a napkin. The wall flickered – transforming from a replica of The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo to a feed of the AnCom ambassador from Geneva. Lou had, over the course of his life, seen a call from Geneva about twelve times, and over those twelve times, he had seen almost twenty different ambassadors. One had literally walked away from the call mid conversation while flipping his mother off and blowing raspberries, to be replaced by a different person two seconds later.
This one was a girl wearing a T-shirt that said LOOK AT MY BIG FA- and the rest of the words were cut off by the angle of the camera. Her hair was shaved almost to nothing save for the top of her head, which was left normal length. Her hair had been dyed a bright green, and her lips were painted in a checkerboard pattern of green and black. But unlike most AnCom ambassadors Lou had seen, she was beaming.
"Hey, Queenie!" She shouted. "You heard the good news?"
There was a raucous noise coming from behind her – Lou craned his head, his eyes widening as, for just a moment, he saw what was clearly a naked man dancing on a table before the filtering software blurred out any of the interesting details. Lou flushed a bit and wished he had glanced down sooner.
Mother sighed. "Is this a prank call?"
"No, man, it's real!" The girl leaned forward. "The Bugs fucking surrendered!"
Mother, who had picked up her glass, dropped it on the ground, her eyes bulging.
***
The flight to Earth was the most exciting moment in Lou's life. First, there was the shuttle ride up from Venus' surface to the moon, which allowed him to, for the first time in his life, see the whole vast, blue green sweep of his homeworld with his own eyes. Then on the moon, they were taken to the acceleration tanks on the stabdrive pinnace that would boost them to Earth orbit in just a few hours. The acceleration tank was an experience and a half – Lou squeaked and squirmed as the pipes and tubes connected to parts of his body he hadn't wanted anyone else to ever touch, and then yelped as the non-Newtonian liquid sludged into his veins.
Unlike the warriors on the main line battleships, he wasn't provided an augmented reality crown to wear while he lay in the sludge. Instead, he existed in a half-real, half-present fugue state created by the effect of the contragravitic fields on his nervous system. He knew the math behind the concept, even if he couldn't think of the actual crunch while in the tank: You couldn't reduce the force of gravity and inertia without changing how those two forces interacted. Which, itself, changed how light itself moved. If he hadn't been filled with a bunch of sophisticated drugs and put into a nearly freezing temperature state, the changes in basic reality would have killed him. As it was, it made his brain muddled and unfocused and confused.
But that did have the nice side effect of meaning the trip felt as if it took only a few seconds.
One second, he was in a deep mire.
The next, he was looking up at an AnCom greeter, who was leaning over him. "Eyyyyy!" he said, beaming at him. "Cuntboy! I didn't know they had any of you in the Boring Kingdom of Boring Losers."
Lou coughed as the breathing pipe slipped out of his throat. He sat up, hacked. "What?" he asked, completely befuddled.
"No, it's cool!" the AnCom said. He was pixie thin and had skin the color of cerulean skies. Floating clouds were projected around his body by a holographic harness of leather straps and glass projectors. "I didn't know that you guys were even acknowledging that, like, guys can kiss girls." He nodded. "So, are you he/him? They? Zir?"
"...what?" Lou blinked at him. Then he looked down at his crotch, which the AnCom had seen. His cheeks burned. "I was born biologically female-"
The AnCom winced.
"-but since the Kingdom needed a prince, I've...you know..." He coughed. "Mother said that the transition will be completed once I'm betrothed. Since, right now, having..." He blushed. "Y-You know, this is like, super private and, also, who are you?" He drew his leg up, trying to cover himself. "Also, I'm a Prince!"
The AnCom put his hands over his face. "Oh god. I'm. The. Worst. I'm so. So sorry, I just...sorry!" He put his hands over his eyes now. "Auhg. Fuck. My. Life. Oh god."
Lou flushed. "We can put it behind us...what's your name?"
The AnCom groaned. "God Fucker."
"...I beg...I beg your...pardon?"
God Fucker held out his hand. "God Fucker."
"...Prince Louis Benoit XII of the Neopolitian Star Kingdom, Heir to the Duchy of Venus, the Last and True Sovereign of the Human Race, Emperor of Titan and the Protector of India," Lou said, looking down at the offered hand. He frowned, then took it, expecting God Fucker to kneel properly. Instead, God Fucker shook his hand, making his arm wobble so much that Lou thought that his shoulder might dislocate.
"What do you protect India from?" God Fucker asked.
"I..." Lou blushed. "Clothes?"
"True, they do go- OH!"
A few seconds later, God Fucker had brought Lou's clothing and then turned his back once Lou had coughed several times. Lou dressed, buttoning up his undershirt, tugging on his hose, his belt, his cape, his gloves, and strapped his rapier on. He adjusted his collar a bit, then nodded. "You may turn around..." He paused. "God Fucker, is that your given name?"
"No," God Fucker said, turning. "We don't do given names – human beings aren't property you can just...name." He shook his head. "We get a string of nicknames from our parents, our friends, our new parents if we get them, culminating in getting a good and proper name. I chose mine three standard years ago." He grinned. "Pretty cool, huh?"
"It's..." Lou tried to think of a tactful thing to say. "Unique?"
"Yeaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!" God Fucker mimed firing off guns with both of his hands. "Come on – your Mom should be dressed too."
"Oh, no, she's got way more clothes than me," Lou said, then stood up taller. He blushed. "And we protect India's memory. As it was. That's what the Star Kingdom is about – ensuring our history remains. Not just...in data banks and libraries, but living." He nodded. "And, um...I..." He paused. "I suppose, using your terminology, I always identified as male? But even if I hadn't, the Star Kingdom would need a Prince."
"...so, like...they'd...electrocute you or something?"
Lou shook his head, smiling shyly. "No, no, no, not that bad. I'd just be married to an eligible male before I hit twenty one."
God Fucker shook his head slowly. "Are you sure that's history that's worth keeping alive, my dude?"
Lou opened his mouth, to correct him about the proper term of respect. Instead, he said: "Lou."
"Lou?"
Lou blushed. "I...if...I ever had friends, I...kind of thought I'd like to be called Lou."
"I dig!" God Fucker grinned at him. "Come on! Lets see if your mom's as hot in person as she is on the holos!"
***
Geneva itself was a wild forest – sprawling and beautiful, with trees growing along the hills. The ancient city that had been here, during the 21st century, was gone save for a few buildings that had been voted on by the Anarchist Commune as being worth preserving. Looking through the window of the spaceplane that slowly, gently arced through the atmosphere towards a landing pad that had been constructed in a meadow. "Where is everyone?" Lou asked, his brow furrowing as he pressed his face up against the glass. God Fucker, who was lounging in one of the comfortable chairs that dominated the main body of the space plane, laughed.
"Underground, mostly," he said, nodding. "In simspace, for most of them."
Lou nodded.
"Simspace," Mother said, shaking her head, slightly. She stepped over to the window, murmuring to Lou. "These people spend their entire lives in worlds that aren't even real. Remember that, honey. Remember this."
Lou nodded, but all he really had eyes for was the landing platform.
There were people waiting for them – and some of them were shining and chrome. As the spaceplane came in to land, Mother took his hand and walked with him to the gangplank. One of the chrome people came up and Lou looked at his first Quantum Human Computer. Superficially, she looked a lot like a human woman who was made out of gleaming chrome, with thin seams at her joints and her neck. But underneath her glowing blue eyes, Lou knew that her brain was actually a massively complex quantum computer that was able to actually...know itself. In the same way that he knew himself – she was self aware.
Of course, some days, Lou felt like everyone else knew himself better than he did.
He wondered if the QHC ever had the same thoughts.
"Prince Louis Benoit," she said, bowing. "I'm Amy – the quantum entangled duplicate of a QHC who is serving on the Victory." She coughed, not meeting Mother's eyes. "Your father told me to tell you that he's very proud of everything he received in your last beam – and that he's happy that he's going to be home soon. The initial peace negotiations are over and the Bug envoys are actually heading for Alpha Centauri for the in depth peace talks."
Lou nodded, excitedly. "S-So, father is coming home?"
"Not quite," Amy said, smiling. "Come on, let's get the speeches out of the way."
The landing pad had a small set of stairs that led itself to the forest, and here, under the trees, the United Human Polities held their meeting. There were technically five members of the UHP. In actuality, there were seven thousand eight hundred and ninety two. Or maybe it was the other way around? The Anarchist Commune, the Plurality Federation, the Federated States, the Neopolitian Star Kingdom and the Upkin were the five who had representatives. AnCom was the largest, but their representative was the least politically astute, as she had been chosen by random lottery (since, as far as Lou could tell, zero percent of the AnCom actually wanted to be involved in anything so governmental as interstellar politics.)
"Honestly, I'm just a fry cook," Drusilla said, cheerfully, looking entirely unconcerned with the fact that the UpKin and the Feds were all glaring at her. "When I got the ticket, I figured, hey, I'd get to shake hands with some pretty famous people. Never thought I'd actually have to give a speech. But here I am!" She nodded. "If you ask me, interstellar politics is a lot like a good stir fry..."
Mother sighed quietly from her seat, muttering behind her ornamental fan. "This is bad comedy."
The Upkin representative was next. Suspended in a float harness, the neo-cetacean spoke in chirrups and whistles that were translated by two bald headed, gray skinned, almost naked women whose very presence made Lou look directly into the neo-cetacean's blowhole rather than risk glancing at their chests. One of the women signed in the most common sign languages of the UHP – the other spoke in Neo-Sino, which Lou could follow tolerably well. "We do not forget the song that was silenced on Charon. We do not forget the millions of our pod who were struck down without mercy. But we recognize that we are the victors in this battle. We only hope that the rest of our race recognize this as well. The Bugs did not ask for peace! They threw up a white flag! They screamed their need for peace on las-coms! We must not forget this!"
Lou fidgeted in his seat.
The Upkin's speech kept going for ten more minutes.
The next to give a speech was from the Plurality. A woman, with five floating spheres, each containing a human brain surround by a nimbus of wires and cables, stood in the center of the meadow, her arms lifted as she spoke in a musical language called Memetiak, translated to Neo-Sino by the same gray skinned woman who had worked with the Upkin. Lou was more fascinated by the orbs floating around her head than her – she was a rather dumpy woman, all things considered.
However, the Plurality's speech was interrupted halfway through when she said: "And so, we shall work together to find a unity with our brothers from another star-" and jeering came from both the Upkin and the Feds. The Fed – a man dressed in a black great coat with ice cold blue eyes and hair the color of the setting sun – stood and shouted.
"This is a farce! We haven't agreed to any cessation of hostilities – the peace treaty hasn't even been signed yet!"
A creeping, horrified feeling hit Lou.
Was…
Did…
Was he going to actually have to give a speech?
Was that why he was here? He looked at Mother – but Mother was too busy watching the Federated State representative be held back by the AnCom representative, while one of the Upkin – a huge, furry, orange orangutan, shouted at the top of his lungs: "Civilization! Are we not a civilization? Order! Order!"
"I didn't fly all the way from Jove to listen to this jackbooted fascist!" One of the brains shouted, using their own internal speaker.
"How dare you!" The Federal representative jerked his gloves tighter. "Instantiate yourself into a physical body and say that again to me on the field of honor!"
"You're wearing literal jackboots!"
More shouting.
Amy, who had walked up onto the stage, stuck her metal fingers between chrome lips and blew. Hard. The whistle she sent up was piercing and shockingly loud and made Lou clap his hands over his ears. When the whistling stopped, Amy dropped her hand from her mouth. "So! Since we're all done giving speeches..." she said.
"I didn't get to-" The Fed started.
"You gave up your right when you tried to assault one of our members," Amy said, scowling at the Federated States Rep. "And besides – the UHPEF fleet has put together enough energy to punch a huge hole through space time and they're about to broadcast straight from King Louis Benoit XI himself – so, uh, if you want to waste the extravagant expenditure of exotic particles and making space time our collective bitch, feel free to keep interrupting me!"
Everyone quieted down.
Lou gulped - and Mother found his hand, squeezing it tightly, her breath catching.
Amy closed her eyes, then lifted her head. Her body trembled – and then...a subtle change came over her. It was a chance in stance. An alteration in how her mouth moved. The tone of her voice. Suddenly, she was not Amy, the QHC. She was King Louis Benoit XI himself, standing inside of her body through some combination of augmented reality synthesis and the quantum entanglement connection between the her that stood here and the her that was accelerating away from Procyon at stabdrive velocities.
Then a shimmering hologram shrouded her and the personage was replaced with a true image of…
"Father," Lou whispered, unable to stop himself.
His father looked nothing like him. He was square jawed and heroic and…
Classic.
Not like Lou at all.
"Greetings," Father said. "I am speaking to you from the bridge of the Victory – to tell you that the rumors you have heard, the initial reports you have read, are true. They are not merely true, but they are true in every detail: The Bugs have had enough!" He swung his hand wide. "They have, they say, consumed every other race they have met in their ten thousand years of history. First upon their world, then in their own home system, and then in two others. Never before have they met a race that they could not overcome and devour… until now." He slashed the flat of his hand into his palm, a fierce, chopping gesture. "Humanity is too tricky. Too tenacious. Too damn tough for them!"
Despite the rancor that had been stirred up earlier, this provoked a cheer. Even Drusilla looked as if she was caught up in Father's charisma. She thrust her hand into the air. "Fuck yeah!"
Father nodded. "We have agreed to begin deep negotiations with the Bugs on the world of Charon – the site where this very war began. And there, we shall ensure that this peace lasts not just for the reign of my son, but for the reign of his son, and his son beyond that – by ensuring that Bug and Human civilization are wedded together and driven into a future more glorious than anything that has gone before."
Lou nodded, smiling. This was exactly the kind of speech he had read about in his history books – and to hear it from his Father's own lips (well, through a robot lady quantum connected to another robot lady who was being puppeted by his father using an augmented reality interface) was another thing entirely. He nodded at Mother, who smiled back at him.
"Send your envoys to Alpha Centauri, to Charon," Father said, seriously. "I will be here – and I will be requesting that my son, Prince Louis Benoit XII, come as well. In a tradition as old as the human race, we shall end this war and bring our people together with a wedding."
"What?" Drusilla asked.
"What?" the Federated States representative asked.
"What?" Lou asked.
"I have pledged to the Bugs my son's hand in marriage – to ensure that our races will continue onward into the future together – as one family."
Lou gaped as the entire council meeting exploded into pandemonium – his ears ringing with the bellows, shouts, arguments, calls for order. God Fucker sprinted up behind him, threw an arm around his shoulder, and shouted. "Dude! You just got the fucking motherload of harems, the harem to end all harems! Fifteen trillion bugs - and all of them ready to go!"
***
"No," Lou said.
The interstellar envoy ship was utterly gorgeous. Nearly five kilometers long, it had a shape like a vast dagger made of pure blue-white steel. The steel color was actually hyper-compacted ice armor, designed to absorb any interstellar particles that escaped the ramscoop field that protected the ship as it flew. The majority of the ship was actually reaction massed– enough to shove the ship up to interstellar cruise speed. At those velocities, it was possible to activate the ramscoop to funnel interstellar hydrogen into the furnace of the main engine.
But the part of the ship that was most protected – the spinal column, surrounded by jacketed hyperice and composites – was where the crypts are located. A chunk of hull was shifted aside, making the ship look like a pyramidal tomb with a door open and yawning. Ahead of their ship, Lou could see the other ships that were moving in to dock, bearing the representatives from the other human polities.
"No," Lou said again. "No. No. No. No. No."
"Honey," Mother said, her voice gentle.
Lou spun to face her. "Mom! No! No, no, no, no, absolutely not, no, no, no!"
Mother put her hand upon his shoulder, gently. "It is your duty, as a Prince, and as a future King, to ensure the safety and peace of your realm-"
"My duty does not include marrying...Bugs!" Lou's voice almost broke at that last. "They're not even human. They're not even related to anything on our planet. They're not just aliens, they're more alien than even the Shavanti! And the Shavanti live in the photospheres of stars! But at least the Shavanti have the concept of individuality! The Bugs have a hive mind – they're a single gestalt intelligence made of billions of billions of bugs!"
Mother sighed. "Human marriages of state have rarely been love matches – you are lucky enough to know that you will be allowed concubines." She shook her head. "There is more involved here than just...your happiness. This match will ensure that we can keep the peace. Tell me: How many humans have died in this war?"
Lou looked away. "Two hundred and twenty eight million," he muttered, his voice soft.
Mother's eyes flashed. "Two hundred and twenty eight million human beings. Seven billion Bugs. Three planets have been reduced to rubble. Proxima Centauri is an unstable black hole now. This. War. Cannot. Continue." She leaned forward. "Against that nightmare, can you really say no?"
Lou opened his mouth. Closed it. "No." He breathed in, adjusted his shirt, then looked out the window at the growing envoy ship. "But...I...I don't...want...I just want to be in love...like you and Father."
Mother smiled, gently. "Not everyone can be the last Tzars or the Emperor Justinian and Theodora. Love matches are rare, even without the affairs of state getting involved. You must find a happiness in the good that you are going to do, honey."
Lou sighed. "Yeah."
The envoy ship's entrance loomed before him. Like an all consuming mouth – eating his future.
Mother walked with him to the cryocrpts on the interior of the ship. She held his hand as he was placed into the sarcophagi. As the tubes connected with his neck and he felt the numbing cold beginning to spread, she smiled at him, gently. "It will be okay, Louis. You will be just fine." Lou tried to nod, but the feeling of numbness was spreading – and with it, the deep chill as the crypt closed and he was sealed in darkness. Lou closed his eyes, trying to not feel the tube jammed down his throat – but instead, his skin began to crawl. He felt the tiny scuttling of small limbs, wriggling as they walked along his skin, brushed against his neck, crawled over his face.
He closed his eyes tighter – and hoped that this would be a sleep without dreams.
It wasn't.
***
ALPHA CENTAURI
FIVE YEARS LATER...
He was wrapped in a web – and the spider was crawling closer. It was horrible – all rubbery black and black chitin and glittering red eyes and a huge barbed stinger at the base of its bulbous thorax. He thrashed and he writhed, trying to kick his way free from the web. One leg drove free and smashed into the things belly, digging in deep. But that just made things worse. Rather than ichor and blood and guts, more spiders come out of it. They're small, yellow things, and they crawl up his leg and his chest and his neck and into his mouth. They crawl into his mouth, down his throat, into his eyes, past his ears-
"AHHHHHHHH!"
He sat up, gasping, his hand going to his chest. The woman made of silver who was snoring in the chair beside the window that looked out at a blue green planet screamed as she jerked up right and then fell out of the chair and onto the floor.
"Holy fuck!" She sat up, gasping, heavily, her blue-white hair tumbled around her ears.
"Who are you?" He asked.
"Amy," she said, blinking as she stands up. "That had to be some nightmare, holy shit."
He slowly cocked his head, looking at her with a half gaping expression – somewhere between confusion and shock. There is a strange half memory of a forest glade and a lot of shouting. His brow furrowed and he opened his mouth, trying to find his name, to give it back. Instead, all he remembers are the foggy remains of the nightmare, skittering away from him.
"W-Who am I?" he asked.
"Oh great." Amy sighed. "You're suffering from cryocrypt amnesia." She bit her lip. "Okay, uh, my name is Amy. Your name is Prince Louis Benoit XII. You're the heir to the Star Kingdom. The Neopolitans?" She nodded. "Any of that ringing a bell."
"Louis..." he said, slowly. "Lou. I...like being called Lou."
"Fhew," she said, wiping her hand along her forehead. "I was worried that we might have more problems – it looks like superficial memory loss. Normal ice damage to a human brain without nano." She frowned. "Why do you guys not use nanotechnology?"
"Mortality is meaningful." Lou said, without thinking. It popped out of his mouth, like he had it beaten into his brain past the threshold of conscious thought. "With neither a definite beginning or definite ending, individuality gets lost among a sea of chaos and history loses its point – and instead becomes nothing." He blinked. "Huh. I guess I...do remember some things." He looked out the window – clouds are parting on the planet below and he can see craters huge enough to be seen from space. Each one glitters, like a mirrored surface. "Good God!" he exclaimed, crossing himself. "What happened to Earth?"
"That's not Earth," Amy said, smiling. "That's Charon."
Relief mingled with more confusion. "Why am I in Alpha Centauri?" Lou asked.
Amy coughed. "So, uh...wow. Great. Uh. Your Dad...should...be here soon...heh."
"You look like you don't want to tell me," Lou said, frowning.
Amy stood, backing up, and she backed right up into the door, which opened behind her, meaning she walked into Father's hands. His hands rested on her shoulders and her cheeks actually blushed a coppery color. She stood stock still for a second – then leaped away from Father – and Lou knew his father. He smiled at him.
"Father," he said.
"Son," Father said, nodding. "Miss Amy, you may go."
"Right. Of course. L...S...i...go..." Amy coughed. "Bye." She almost fled from the room.
"Is she...all right?" Lou asked, his brow furrowing.
Father shrugged his broad shoulders, then looked down at his son. He frowned, slowly. "I see that your trip from SOL did not tax you overmuch – the doctors took the slow way to bring you out of cryo. It is the year of our lord 2589 and you are currently eighteen years and eleven months of age." He pursed his lips. "A mite young for a marriage – but these are remarkable times in which we live."
Lou nodded, slightly, putting the weird behavior of Amy out of his mind. Instead, he sat up, smiling at his father. "I...wait, marriage?"
"Yes," Father said. "Do you remember the war with the Bugs?"
"Yes," Lou said, nodding curtly – more memories were unspooling in his mind. Memories of fencing lessons. Memories of taking the first shot of testosterone when Mother and his doctor had agreed upon beginning to transition from being Princess Alexandriatta to being Prince Louis. "We've been fighting them for two hundred years, ever since they destroyed our first colony on Charon." Lou's hand rubbed against the back of his neck. "...what's going on Father?"
Father nodded.
And told him.
"Oh," Lou said, his voice soft, a loud roaring filling his ears as his fingernails dug into his thighs so hard that he thought he was drawing blood. "...that explains the nightmare." His voice sounded like he was being tightened in a vice.
The door opened and a cheerful looking AnCom with four arms, purple skin, and a floating halo of shimmering, ball shaped medical droids that bounced and warbled to one another as they floated around him like a collection of Jovian moons. The AnCom clapped all four of his hands, his tusks glittering as he beamed at the two of them. "Hello! I'm MedTech K'Jor! I hear someone needs a big dick?"
Lou's left eye began to twitch in time with his heart beat.
"I believe I shall leave you with this doctor," Father said, standing up.
"Oh, I'm not a doctor," K'Jor said.
Father fled.
Lou's eyebrow continued to twitch as K'Jor took the bedsheets and swept them off, while the drones whirred out and fired thin beams of red light, which swept back and forth, cutting off Lou's clothing in a flash of glittering light. Lou barely even cared that he was naked now – he was still processing the combination of two words: Marriage and Bugs. The drones clustered around him and K'Jor said: "So, I have to say, for a culture that eschews nanotechnological medicine, your top surgery is amazing. You can barely see the scars." He nodded. "Now, I know you Star Nobles are all stuffy and such – but let's cut through the BS. This is going to be your dick. Not mine. Not your Dad's. Not your Mom's. Yours. So, what matters most is how you feel about it."
He clapped his two lower hands together.
"Are you willing to accept medinano?"
"Uh..." Lou glances at the door, then at the medtech. "What if I say no?"
"Then we'll have to just use the best that the 22nd century could manage when it comes to phalloplasty. Which is good. But it's not nearly as good." He grinned, leaning in close, his voice soft. "I won't tell anyone. Doctor patient confidentiality."
"I thought you weren't a doctor," Lou said, chuckling despite himself.
"Fine, fine, medtech patient confidentiality," K'Jor said, chuckling. "So, do you want the nano and a dick that will be indistinguishable from one you're born with, or do you want-"
"I believe, since I am currently ensnared in a marriage with an entire species against my will, that I will take the one piece of my fate that is currently within my grasp," Lou said, his voice serious and fierce.
"...your dick?"
"I-I would put it less crassly and say my body, but..." Lou nodded. "Yes. My dick."
"All right, let's eliminate the stuff that's easy. Do you want a canid, equine or cetacean dick?" K'jor asked, curiously. "Those are the most popular across AnCom for the extremists. Canid has the advantage of protectivity when you're not aroused, thanks to the sheath, and a thick knot, which can 'tie' you to your lover, which some people find quite romantic. Equine has a certain intimidating air to it – very good if you want to make a cockshock. And the cet-"
"No!" Lou exclaimed. "Absolutely not!"
"Okay, do you want hemi-"
"No!"
"Do you even know what-"
"Yes! I know Latin and Anglic! I can figure it out!" Lou put his hands over his face, groaning. "Ugh. Okay. Uh. I want a human penis."
"Wow. You guys really are unfashionable," K'jor said, frowning. "Am I going to assume you don't want any interesting colors for the semen? So, no neon cum, no green cum, no glowing cum, no addictive cum, no feminizing cum..." He ticked the options off. "No smart-cum, that's cum that obeys instructions from your head-computer and can change flow uphill. No-" Lou cut him off by laughing, clutching at his stomach.
"Okay. I get it. Give the Neo a rise, that's hilarious!"
"...I wasn't joking," K'Jor said.
Lou choked.
K'Jor, shaking his head slowly, sighed. "Okay. Let's just do size then. And to make it easy, I'll just hold my hands apart and you say when. And know this? This is a no judgment zone. I have a quad testes, each with its own fucking flavor. So, you know, literally nothing you can go for is going to be a shock to me." He smiled, then held out his hands. He began to spread them. Then spread them. Then spread them. Lou, his cheeks burning, waited. Then he waited about three...four seconds beyond the moment he thought he should speak, waited until his heart hammered with excitement at the very idea. Then he nodded.
"Nice, middle of the road average. You're really restrained!" K'jor said, cheerfully.
Lou tried to imagine what sex must be like among the AnCom and felt faintly queasy. Then as K'jor began to program in the controls for his drones, Lou glanced around the room. There were no obvious listening devices, no clearly marked security cameras. It was a UHP trans-polity law that all recording devices had to be obvious and large enough to be visible from a distance. While there was a possibility that a convention breaking spy-cam was tucked behind a dust mote in his room, he doubted that anyone would risk that kind of thing here, on the eve of peace.
But he still checked twice before stammering.
"A-Also, I was thinking, uh..." He coughed. "C...Can my..." He blushed, then muttered. "Can my cum glow? Like...a little...oh god..." He put his hands over his face. "Oh godddddd!"
"Purple." It popped out of his mouth before he could stop himself.
"Royal, I love it," K'jor said. "Now, are you ready to get a big old dick, my man?"
"Don't I need...anesthetic?" Lou asked.
He does not!
He laid back in bed, looking down at the small tuft of his pubic hair and at his sex. The drones hovered down and he felt a faint tingling wash over him. The air distorted and he realized just how many nanomachines there had to be for them to be even faintly visible. He felt heat wash over his body – a warmth that felt quite comforting compared to the faintly sterile chill of the hospital room. His hips bucked and he gasped as he saw tiny mounds of glowing, brown-ish protrusions started around his mons, then around his labia. His eyes widened as the mounds swept upwards, merging together as the heat grew more intense. Tingling sensation buzzed through his body and he gasped in shock as pleasure spiked through him. His back arched as his cock, which had formed within a matter of moments, twitched and spurted.
Thick, glowing, purple cum splashed against his chest, shimmering and bright against his pale skin, while his testes throbbed between his legs – two large, firm balls. Actual fucking balls.
Lou collapsed back, gasping heavily, his eyes unfocused as his cock slapped against his muscular belly, laying there like a heavy, felled tree, the tip oozing with a thick dollop of glowing cum.
"H...Holy...fuck," he breathed. "I mean, I...b-beg your pardon for my language!"
K'Jor couldn't stop laughing for five minutes straight.
***
Showering in his private rooms, Lou restrained himself as he scrubbed. The Star Kingdom's religion was syncretic – a fusion of many different traditions. Some said it was a cynical construction to keep landed gentry extant in a world with both spaceships and nanotechnological fabrication. Some said that it was the purest expression of the human soul. Lou, himself, had no idea what he thought. He had sat through the lessons of Father Maqueni, listened to the stories of the Daughter, the Holy Ghost, the Flaming Chalice, the Ten Thousand Faces of God, and he had...felt…
Not quite nothing.
Rather, he had felt as if there were tiny flashes of beauty, peeking through a layer of heavy paint and gilt makeup. As if something deep and fundamental and true was trying to claw its way to him. But he had never really felt it, not really.
But where a Prince's faith might wander or even be absent entirely, his decorum and deportment was not left to chance. Tutors had instilled in him every attitude of a gentleman and a member of the aristocracy from the day he had chosen to transition. And one of those rules had been that a boy might be allowed to feel immense lust – and, in fact, that was entirely expected. But it was entirely unseemly and unmanly to act upon that lust.
To act upon lust was to demonstrate a lack of control in the face of the chaos of the universe.
To act upon lust was to show a lack of foresight, when energies should be conserved for danger.
To act upon lust was-
Lou acts upon his lusts 😔
Lou grabbed the shower door, swung it open, staggered dripping naked to the desk, then bent over it.
"Porn, now, hardcore!" Lou choked out, looking directly into the screen.
"Would you like gay or-" A computerized voice asked.
"Anything!" Lou panted, dropping, soaking wet into his chair, his immense cock throbbing as he gripped it.
The screen flickered and showed what was clearly amateur footage of an AnCom couple. The woman had blue skin and modest breasts, small and perky, her nipples a bright white against her skin. Her hair was long and white as well, framing a delicate, elfin face, while a pair of curled horns thrust from her forehead, giving her an almost daemonic look. She had a pair of cloven hooves, but her legs were bare of hair – muscular, curvy, and beautiful. Her thighs were spread wide and she had pinned herself into the lap of an immense, muscular fusion of a wolf and a human, whose muzzle poked over her shoulder and looked into the camera, lips curled back into a wicked grin.
His massive, bright red, entirely canid cock was buried into her pussy, and his knot bumped against her lips with every thrust. He fucked – and Lou pumped his cock in time with his fucking, watching the entire screen at once, letting his eyes go out of focus to take in the whole screen. He pumped his cock faster and faster, trembling as he felt his second orgasm of the day rip into his body. His balls clenched and he cried out – a single loud, sweet note that filled the air. He filled the air with something more too: Bright, purple, neon cum, which glowed as it spattered onto the desk, onto his lap, onto the floor.
He sagged back into his chair, his eyes unfocused.
"Okay..." he said, slowly, softly. "I did it once. Got it out of my system..." His eyes closed.
And then…
He realized he hadn't.
Not that he wanted to jerk off again instantly. No. It was something worse that had wriggled into the back of his brain. This wasn't the last time he was going to jerk off. It was the first time in a lifetime where the only real, intimate pleasure he was ever going to have was with himself. He was about to be married to Bugs. Not just to a Bug, but to billions of them. He tried to process what that would even mean as he looked past the screen, at the slowly rotating orb of Charon.
"Or...I could run," he whispered.
The idea that sprang into his head, almost whole formed, was not entirely impossible. The AnComs had extradition treaties with each of the other polities. He could throw himself onto their mercy, beg for them to take him in. Let his Father 'wed' the Bugs if he wanted to so badly. He could be on a stabdrive capable ship within a week. Then it would just be a quick snooze, then he'd be on Earth, with a massive dick, a weird name, and...well, that was all you really needed among the anarchists, wasn't it?
Wasn't it?
Charon's clouds slipped aside.
And there were the massive, shining craters that scarred Charon's northern continents.
Lou's blood ran cold as he looked at those craters, his lips pursing slightly. Those were each created by a matter/antimatter warhead, detonated in a desperate bid to stop the Bugs. The Bugs were blamed for the millions of deaths...but humans had thrown those switches, trying to slow the Bugs down as they swept over the machine gun turrets and past the laser defense grids. They had been the final seconds of millions of people: Terror as chittering, screeching monsters rained down upon them, claws glittering and mandibles clattering.
What if that happened again?
What if the Bugs were wrong about their ability to fight humanity? What if they had thrown in the towel early?
What if the next time humans cowered as Bugs swept down on them, they did so on Earth? Or Venus?
What if he could have stopped it?
He picked up a towel, then he started to clean up after himself. He dressed, slowly, carefully, and each button he fastens feels like another chain around his chest. When he was done, he emerged from his room and found that Amy was waiting for him. She was dressed in a beautiful looking Neo style gown, all in silver and gold lace – which he recognized as being a traditional bridesmaid outfit. She grinned at him.
"Are you going to be my bridesmaid? ...shouldn't you be my groom, since, I'm the husband?" Lou asked, his brow furrowing.
"I'm actually the Bug's bridesmaid!" she said, chuckling. "But the Bugs are down on the surface. So, I get to meet you first." She pauses. "Listen, I think I've got a pretty good sense of how you Neos work, right?" She nodded. "You just need to find some strange on the side. And it's not like there aren't going to be other humans and QHCs running around, right? So, you'll have plenty of chances to have fun, right?"
Leo's cheeks flushed. "I don't know what rumors you've heard, but...while our common citizens are free to engage in their affairs as they see fit, we of the aristocracy and the nobility must hold ourselves to a high moral standard. If we don't, if we allow ourselves to be misled by our own animal passions, then our entire future is called into question." He shook his head.
"...huh."
He looked at Amy, who was blushing hard again.
"...what?" Lou asked as they came to the airlock leading from the medical ward of the orbital station to the shuttle-bay. Amy touched the open switch on the airlock – then frowned as the airlock started to cycle. She touched the button faster and faster, pushing it harder as she did so. "Amy-"
"Okay, fine, stop hounding me, I fucked your Dad, okay!?" Amy exploded.
TO BE CONTINUED
Hey, Dragon Cobolt here! Hope you're enjoying Pax Multi. If you want to keep enjoying it for free, the next chapter will be up next monday! But if you want to read it all right now, you can buy it on Amazon! Thanks for reading! Leave comments, each comment is a gold coin in my dragon horde. ...hoard? Hoarde!
The shuttle from the orbital station to the meeting place extended sleek, filament wings, snap hardened them with a sweep of smart materials, and then began to drift down into the upper atmosphere of Charon. Heat began to gather on the wings – flames licking around them, sweeping along the edges, crawling like vines. Lou watched them grow and wondered what exactly had gone wrong with his life.
Well.
Obviously, the first mistake had been being born…
He glanced over at the only other occupants of the shuttle. There was his father, the priest, his mother, Amy, and…
He blinked.
"God Fucker?"
The gangly AnCom that he had expected to be four light years and subjective years in the past grinned at him. "Hey," he said, cheerfully, then clambered to his feet, walked over and sat down at the chair beside Lou.
"What...the...what are you...how did..." Lou spluttered.
"Dude," God Fucker said, shaking his head. "My weight on the lighthugger was, like, a rounding error in its mass capacity. I just polled the AnCom community, didn't get enough downvotes, and I was on." He smiled. "They agreed with my reasoning: You, my dude? You need a friend."
Lou blinked at him.
"...a friend."
"Yeah," God Fucker said, nodding to him, before reaching into his vest and tugging out a small packet of fruity snacks. He started to pop them into his mouth as the shuttle continued its glacially slow descent into the atmosphere – reducing turbulence by adding time.
"You want to be my friend?" Lou asked, still feeling as if he had just woke up into an incredibly surreal dream from an already surreal dream.
"Yeah," God Fucker said. "You seem chill – like, way more chill than you'd expect for a real for honest actually fucking solid gold prince."
Lou found himself smiling, despite everything. "I'm sorry, I'll try and stick a bigger stick up my rump...I don't want to, uh, miss you out of the chance to actually get the full princely experience."
God Fucker laughed. "That's the spirit – don't forget being spoiled. And vain!"
Lou grinned – but a tiny, sneaky, whispery part of his brain that he didn't like started muttering. It sounded a great deal like his fencing instructor, Marc: We Neopolitans enjoy thinking of the AnComs as a collection of useless layabouts and hedonistic fools – but they're more than capable of every kind of human interaction that we are. Sneaking, lying, disassembling, spying, espionage. Everything you could imagine from our noble houses, you can expect to see from the AnCom. But they will do so for reasons that will seem alien or confusing, and that is what makes them so...very...dangerous.
"Seriously, though, you're willing to blow...decades of life back on Earth to just be my friend for, what, the three days before I piss off my new wife and get eaten?" Lou asked.
God Fucker – Lou, unable to think of him like that anymore, started to shorten his name to GF – laughed. "Dude, I'm immortal. Ten years? Twenty years? Who cares – my medichines are going to keep me going until the sun burns out, and I've got a backup that I update every week. Worst comes to worst, I lose a few days if I croak out here, maybe a few months if things go really really really wrong and the entire human civilization out here gets toasted, I lose a few years. That's a big chunk of time to lose, but it's not eternity." He paused. "Besides...you...you got seriously hosed, dude. You're going to need a friend."
Lou blinked. He...suddenly wanted to cry. He looked out the window, at the wing again. More flames were streaking along the edges of the wing – clouds roiled past the windows. "It's not going to be that bad," he said – trying the words out and feeling how utterly false they were.
"Dude, you're getting married to the biggest mass murderer in the entire galaxy, as far as we know," GF said, shaking his head. "...also, like, how the fuck did your dad even convince the Bugs to go along with this? They're a hive mind, right?"
Lou nodded. "I...haven't asked."
"It all smells like a fucking set up," GF muttered. "I mean, I know you probably think that's just some paranoid AnCom bullshit..."
"That's not paranoid," Lou said, looking at GF. His voice was more controlled, his eyes weren't brimming with tears. "Thinking three, six, ten steps ahead is what we in the Neopolitian Star Kingdom do best." He frowned and mentally kicked himself – hard. He had been taught all the deep games and the complex strategies used by the great houses. He knew this. He just had to apply it to his own father and his own future. Which...he sighed. He hated it. But he had to do it.
"Oh?"
"Okay...think about it," Lou said, quietly. "How does the United Human Polities work? It's a compromise between all the factions, to keep the peace since the Meme War. That means that there are systems that keep even very small polities, like the Star Kingdom, relevant. Like, how we weight votes based on inverse populations. And the way that the biggest faction, the AnComs, allow their members to vote with other polities." He smirks, slightly. "Like, half of the Federal and Neopolitan power comes purely from manipulating AnCom votes."
GF nodded. "Yeah, I have a few mutuals and all they do is share feeds about the shit going on in the Federated States. It gets wild in their territory."
Lou nodded. "And I bet there are just as many who are fascinated by the marriages, the spying, the duels, the secret affairs..." His cheeks heated and his eyes flicked, quite without him meaning too, from GF to his parents, who were speaking quietly. "...all that stuff. Right?"
GF nodded again. "I mean, you do know the Duchess of Leone's sex tape leaked, right?"
"No, it didn't," Lou said, blushing. "It was leaked, I guarantee it."
"Okay, wait, Amy was telling me that you said that you royals had to be all...you know, chaste and shit."
Lou shook his head. "We're also taught about the power of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is one of the most potent human abilities in the galaxy."
"Holy shit, I thought some AnComs were fucking cynical..."
"The Star Kingdom isn't about ignoring the parts of the galaxy, about the parts of life, that we don't like," Lou said, his voice growing a bit heated. "We don't pack mortality into a box and pretend it doesn't exist, we don't edit our brains to get rid of stuff like guilt or doubt or jealousy. We...we just try to be." He blushed, slightly. "We try to use what humans are to our best advantage." He sighed, then sat up a bit in his seat, his mind whirling. "So. Problem: The Star Kingdom is on the downward spiral. Nobles and commoners alike drift to less demanding factions. Solution: Make sure that we remain relevant once the war is over and you no longer need a bunch of weirdos who spent their entire lives studying every single war humanity ever fought against itself out on the front lines, recreating Cannae and Dara. Nevermind." He said, before GF could even ask.
"So, this marriage shit is...a...publicity stunt?"
"Yeah, basically," Lou said, leaning against the wall. "Shit, it got you to fly across four light years just to get involved. How many social media followers do you think you're going to gain when you get home?"
"Dude, I'm already fifteen million up and-" GF stopped. "...oh."
"Even if the Bugs and I...even if none of this works, even if it's a literal farce, Dad can spin it as hard as he can in any direction he wants. Milk it for tragedy, make the Bugs into monsters, make me popular, whatever." He sighed, slowly. "And the Star Kingdom keeps getting a bunch of votes from AnComs in UHP politics and...the kingdom continues."
"That's...fucking cold."
Lou shrugged one shoulder. "It could be worse."
"How?"
Lou paused.
"I have no idea."
***
Charon had a nitrogen rich atmosphere and soil that had been fixed with nutrients and minerals over the millennia by the only real life form that had evolved on the planet before the arrival of humanity. Thus far, with about five solar systems really charted and a few dozen with flyby probes shot through them, humanity had determined that multicellular life was common, but the step beyond into complex organisms like plants and animals was considerably less so. On Charon, under the warmth of three suns (two, now that Proxima Centauri ...changed), life had never needed to go much further than single celled life forms. Due to the lack of large geographic separation points and plate tectonics, the planet's surface was very stable. Stability meant that sitting around and creating a few kinds of biochemicals and squirting out nitrogen was all that the lifeforms on Charon had needed to do.
That is, until humans arrived.
The first colonists had been renegades, separate from the United Human Polities. They had fled after the catastrophic ending of the Meme War, their original ideologies ripped apart in a haze of autophagic basilisk hacks and self replicating data destroying semi-sentient warprograms. They had arrived with a scattered, twisted version of history stored in their slow-boat computers, a taste for human flesh, and a decided lack of long term environmental planning in mind. That was why they had planted in the fresh, fertile soil of Charon...trees. Redwoods, oaks, yews, birch, a wild array of flora that hadn't even been intended to live near one another on Earth, let alone in the vast, untamed wilds of Charon.
The colonists had been wiped out by their own scarred culture – it turns out that ritualized cannibalism inculcated by a war criminal's idea of a practical joke was not the most stable foundation for a planetary religion. The scant few survivors after the initial civil war died off, one by one, in forests that didn't produce foods they could use. Various indigeinous and first nations peoples from Earth's past could have survived just fine. But the colonists hadn't had the foundational knowledge, the techniques, or the time to learn either.
And so, with the last human laying as nothing more than slowly desiccating bones, untouched by even the most indiscriminate Charon microbe, the forests had begun to work their own slow, spreading progress across the planet's surface. There had been deaths, crossbreeding, wild chaos. The cruel pressure of evolution had forced changes – but in the end, when the UHP had come to the world a century later, they had found a rudimentary terrestrial ecosystem. It had utterly destroyed the entire ecosystem that had been on Charon's relatively flat supercontinent (without natural barriers or many oceans to stop it, a century had been more than enough time for the trees to spread and consume.)
There had been a general feeling of unhappiness - the destruction of a native ecosystem to recreate Earth had been seen as merely repeating the worst crimes of the past.
Now, as Lou stood on the large, flash-constructed landing pad and looked out at the forests that surrounded the gleaming metal, he felt that same sense of unhappiness.
It felt as if he had been cheated. Four light years and a dip in a cryogenic tank, and the only thing that made him think he was anywhere but right back in Geneva was the fact he had to wear a breathing mask – and the two suns that he could see overhead, shining down on the planet. The breathing mask was relatively flimsy and wasn't even connected to a gas tank. All it had to do was filter out the excess nitrogen and increase the oxygen intake by drawing in extra air with every breath, using clever mechanical systems that he barely noticed.
"Nice place," GF said, cheerfully, while Dad and Mom got off the shuttle. That was when Lou noticed the heavily armed and armored combat QHC – they were housed into heavy, beetle-like combat bodies, their weaponry looking like sleek bumps and ripples in their forms. But Marc had taught Lou how to recognize railguns and heavy laser cannons and the missile tubes for seeker weapons. He pursed his lips, then looked around again, trying to spot...well...any sign of the Bugs.
"Son," Father said, walking over and nodding to him. Then he frowned, looking at GF. "Who is this?"
"This is...Godfrey," Lou said, nodding. "He's one of the AnComs who, uh, he was at the Geneva meeting and he has come along."
"Yup, that's me," GF said, cheerfully. "I've actually done a pretty comprehensive study of the Bug War and what we know about Bug biology." He nodded. "Your little trick around Wolf 359 was incredible, if you don't mind me saying."
"Yes, well..." Father chuckled. "I had a bit of advice from Belisarius."
Lou nodded. "What...where is..." he paused.
"Amy has been handling the interpersonal communication with the hive mind," Father said, nodding. "We've been learning a lot more about the actual workings of the hive mind – but teaching it how to speak more than the most rudimentary terms has been difficult."
"Does it even know what a wedding is?" Lou asked.
"It knows that rituals are important for us," Father said, nodding. "It knows that we are...singular. Though, I'm not sure how much of that it understands. That is part of why I organized this, you know." He leaned against the railing around the spaceport, looking out at the forests. "A single acorn, planted here centuries back, has created all of this. Even the war, even the antimatter, even the Bugs, haven't erased what that single action has done. You are going to be that acorn, Louis. You will, by example and gentle persuasion, teach the Bugs what it truly means to be human. Not just our guns and our tactics – but our warmth. Our compassion. Our love." He smiled.
Lou felt like he was two people at once. On the one hand, there was the Lou who wanted, desperately, to be that tiny acorn, planted underneath the soil, growing into some vast tree that would keep mankind safe for the future. But on the other, there was the Lou who knew that this smiling, charming man was as cold blooded as any king in history. All those ideals and speeches were so good. But…
He sighed. "I'll do my best, father."
"I know you will," Father said.
"Wow." GF said, quietly. "That was some heaping bullshit."
Father slowly turned, looking at GF. He frowned, ever so slightly.
"You want to teach the Bugs, get a team of xenoanthropologists and diplomatic specialists," GF said, crossing his arms over his chest. "This? This is bad comedy."
Lou opened his mouth to interject, but before either he or father could respond to GF's condemnation, a tree crashed down in the distance, with a rattling crackling spray of splinters and distorted rumbling sounds. Lou could see the movement in the woods – branches shifting, trees moving. The combat bots all shifted in their stances, turning to face – and then the first of the Bugs emerges from the woods. They were darting, fast, sleeking things that made Lou's eyes almost want to slide off them. It wasn't that they weren't obvious. They were. But each one was striped with brilliant white and black patterns, cleverly interlocked so that, as they moved together like a swarming blanket of chattering flesh, they created a wild confusion of colors and shapes. It began hard to figure out where one Bug began and the next ended.
The wave of creatures stopped as one, in a single, eerie demonstration of their coordination. Now that they weren't moving, Lou saw that they were what human infantry called hellgaunts: Sleek, doglike creatures with narrow triangular snouts and four limbs that they used for running and two that they used to grip weaponry to their chest. The weapons were also alive – wriggling, bony masses of flesh that the infantry had named wormguns.
Cause…
They fired worms.
More accurately, they fired bone tipped worms with complex biochemical reactions in their rectums, allowing them to propel themselves on streams of compressed, caustic chemicals that stung human flesh and eyes. On impact, the worms burrowed straight for the nearest vital organ, then exploded.
"Eesh..." GF whispered. "Does it all have to be so...glistening?"
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
The trees rumbled. Shook. And then four of them were shouldered out of the way by an immense, bipedal shape. "Oh fuck," GF whispered and Father crossed himself, reflexively. It was a Terror Talon, the Bug's version of a main battle tank. Bipedal, with immensely powerful digitigrade legs and a top land speed that matched most hovertanks, the creature bristled with biological weapons. The two massive hooked blades in the end of arms muscular enough to drive those blades through solid composite armor. The stumpy limbs with wormguns at their ends, aiming in every direction. The back mounted parasitic creature called the rocketvore, which was capable of breeding and launching guided biological munitions that could be anything from acid bombs to mind control pheromones.
The Terror Talon thumped past the swarm, which flowed away from its hoof-like feet moments before they touched the ground. The fact that none of the hellgaunts had to look at where they were moving, and that there was no jostling and no hesitation just made it creepier. Soon, the Terror Talon was standing right at the edge of the spaceport. It's face, inhuman and terrible, with six blinking insectoid eyes, craned down and a voice came from its abdomen, speaking past the armor plating like a man at the bottom of the well. "WE PRESENT."
Lou spent the rest of the ceremony in a kind of dissociative state.
The priest spoke of faith, of duty, of differences becoming one, of the better future that could come from this. The Bugs listened and Amy stood beside it and murmured quietly to it – if it had ears, she was speaking into one of them. But Lou wasn't entirely sure. He wasn't sure about a lot of things, for instance. Like, if he was going to live for the next few hours.
Then he heard the words.
"You may now kiss the bride, and under the eyes of the Chalice and the Holy Ghost, be married from now until death."
Everyone was looking at Lou. His mother and his father, seated at their comfortable chairs. The combat robots. The cameras in floating drone bodies. The curious AnComs who had come down to the surface. Even the hellgaunts. To his credit, the Priest was looking as if he was reconsidering what he had just said – as if he had done this kind of service so often, across so many years, that the words had just...popped out without him even noticing them. He was opening his mouth and closing it, but Lou hardened his own distaste, and instead turned to the massive Terror Talon. He wasn't precisely sure where to kiss it, and so, he tentatively held out his hand.
The Bug didn't move.
He touched the edge of one of the massive bladed arms that hung at the sides of the creature, then leaned forward and kissed the flat edge of the blade. It tasted faintly like licking a bone after you chewed off all the meat on it. He stood up again, then nodded.
"I...pronounce you man and wife," the priest said, and polite clapping came from the guests.
"WE LEAVE."
The massive Terror Talon turned and began to stomp away. Lou felt a moment of relief, knowing that it was fleeting, knowing that this was far from the hardest part. Then he noticed the tentacle looping around his belly. It was slimy. Of course it was slimy. He had enough time to sigh, and try to look composed before he was yanked off his feet and dragged away, swinging up and behind the Terror Talon. The last thing he saw of the rest of the wedding guests was GF holding up what looked like a communicator.
"Catch!" He shouted, and threw, and it landed among the hellgaunts. Then there was nothing to see but trees.
***
Lou found that even terror had its limits.
For about...ten eternities, he was terrified. For the next bit, he was apprehensive. Then he was bored. The Terror Talon that had a hold of him wasn't squeezing him hard, nor was it being particularly uncomfortable. Indeed, he was actually pretty comfortable, wrapped up tightly in a tentacle and kept in a kind of gimbaled grip that meant that every step of the creature's legs barely felt like anything more than a gentle swaying. But there was not much to see, beyond trees, then the large flat plains filled with crushing their way across a planet. This was because the planet had never been tectonically active enough to even have mountains or hills in the first place.
After what felt like an hour, Lou hit his limit.
"Where are we going?" he asked.
The Terror Talon did not slow in its running. "WE ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE," it said. "THE SUB-ENTITY KNOWN AS MY HUSBAND IS BEING MOVED TO A...PLACE..."
Lou's brow furrowed. "What do you mean we're not going anywhere?" he asked, craning his head to try and look the creature in the face. "I..." He stopped. "Right. You're not just this...Bug, you're...all..." he paused. "Okay, what should I call you?"
"WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS QUESTION."
The Terror Talon came to the edge of a forest, stepped through, and entered into something wondrous. Lou took a moment, simply gaping – at the colors, at the vibrancy, at the complexity that swept out before him. The main structure that caught his eyes were several immense crystalline latticeworks that looked as if they had been extruded straight out of the ground by vast biological engines, which rippled with bioluminescent colors. The engines themselves were rooted into the ground – and looked a bit like fingers, making the crystalline lattices look like the vast, intricate fingernails of a reclining goddess. Surrounding those crystals, filling the plain in every direction, were interlocking fields of luminous plants – vast flowers, curved mushrooms, rows of waving stalks that looked like soft, downy fuzz. They were intermixed in a pattern that defied easy understanding – and between them moved dozens of different kinds of bug worker that each lacked a name or term that Lou could think of. There were antlike creatures, and there were beetles, and there were spiders, and they were all working with one another in a harmony that almost hurt his brain to see.
It wasn't chaotic or wild or random. It was purposeful and directed.
"W...What is this?" Lou asked, his voice soft.
"SPEAK LOUDER. YOU ARE NOT SUFFICIENTLY CLOSE TO A UNIT THAT HAS-"
"What is this?" Lou shouted, louder – and laughed, despite himself. This...the Terror Talon, the horror that his people had been fighting for centuries, the big bad boss of every action video game made in the past ten decades was hard of hearing. That was just hilarious to him.
"THIS IS...WE..." the Bug paused. "WE DO NOT...KNOW HOW TO...DESCRIBE IT. IT IS WHERE...A PLACE OF...CREATION OF REDUCTION OF ENTROPY IN SUSTAINABLE MEANS VIA THE APPLICATION OF..."
"YES. WHY DOES YOUR LANGUAGE HAVE SO MANY WORDS TO DESCRIBE A TOTALITY?"
Lou chuckled. "It's half French, half English, half Cantonese. It's going to have that problem."
The Terror Talon began to stomp forward – moving through the fragile constructions of this place without disturbing a single thing. "WHAT IS FRENCH?"
"Ah..." Lou sighed. "Now that's a long story."
"WHAT IS STORY?"
Lou bit his lip, thinking. "Do you know how events are preceded by cause?" he asked. "A rock doesn't fall unless you push it over?"
"YES."
"A story is how humans understand events and causes – we organize them..." he gulped, hoping that he was making sense. "Then we tell them to one another and to ourselves, so that we know what happened and why."
The Terror Talon came to the massive crystalline structures. The tentacle holeint him extended out, pushing Lou past the huge pillars, and then setting him down in the center. There, he found himself standing in a hexagonal room that looked like an oversized beehive. There was a very crude approximation of what might have either been a bed, a bath, or a box of pollen, sitting off by one of the walls. There was a single doorway, which looked like it was actually living tissue, held together by the door.
Lou gulped, then walked over to the bed and sat down upon it, biting his lip. "Okay. This is my life now." He nodded to himself. On the whole, it was...less terrible than he thought. Yes, the Bugs were...weird. And he wasn't sure how long this was going to last. But...the hive mind, the Bug, whatever it was that he wanted to call his...spouse? His wife? His...farcical excuse for a life? Whatever they were, they seemed like they wanted to actually understand humans. He drew his legs up and sat back in the bed – then jerked his head over as he saw the door beginning to open. One of the beetle creatures came in, bearing a tray, with a large green globe that looked a bit like a soap-bubble, and a wriggling grub with a transparent skin and a body filled with a pale blue liquid. The beetle crouched down before the bed.
Lou looked down at it.
Silence.
The silence kept stretching.
"Are..." Lou paused. "Are you...my...wife?"
"Yes."
The voice that came from the beetle was hissing and sibilant, and it seemed to come from the antennas that thrust from its squat head. They shivered and shook again.
"We are all. This unit has brought you water and nutrients that, according to the sub-units we consumed, are enough to sustain bodily functions for twenty four hours."
Lou gulped. "Right." He paused. "...consumed?"
"Over the past nine microcycles, we have consumed three hundred and twenty eight thousand of your sub-units," the Bug said.
"Microcycle?"
"A cycle is We's chosen unit of time. We chose it based on observations of the sky during We's history." The antennas wriggled. "It remains consistent, even if We are in many different places. It is based on the rotation of rapidly rotating objects in the sky of incredible density, which circle around the..." The Bug paused. "...the many places that We share."
Lou bit his lip. "I have no idea what you're..." He blinked. "Wait. Wait, is a place like this planet? Is that what you mean?"
"No."
The Bug was silent after that single deceleration. Lou frowned. Okay. He'd have to keep trying, then. He nodded. "Is a place...a solar system? The planet and its suns and the asteroids and everything?"
"The speckdirtlifegiving does not have a sun," The Bug sounded, and Lou was certain that they were confused. There was a quizzical tone to their hissing voice and, again, he found himself almost laughing. "The sun instead is circled by speckdirtlifegiving – this is a Place."
Lou nodded. "So, a place is what we call a solar system. And...you..." he paused. "Wait, these, uh, these spinning, dense objects in the sky, are they pulsars? Like, neutron stars that are rotating rapidly?" He coughed, realizing he needed to be more specific, while also thanking God for his education. "A neutron star is a star core that has collapsed into the most dense kind of matter that exists naturally in the universe without the application of...understanding." He gulped, slightly, shifting on the bed. "That's what you're talking about?"
"Yes." The Bug, at least, didn't hesitate.
"Okay, are...are you telling me that you measure things in how long it takes the galaxy to rotate?" Lou asked. "The galaxy, the collection of stars that we live in?"
"Yes." The Bug said.
"How...how...how many cycles...have...you..." He paused. "How many cycles have there...been? For you?"
"Three," the Bug said.
Lou did some math in his head.
"...ah..." Lou's fingers clenched behind him, gripping onto the rubbery surface of whatever the bed was made of. He was married to a hive mind that was seven hundred and fifty million years old. If he remembered his geohistory right, then his wife was older than the concept of sexual fucking reproduction. "Holy Christ on his Cross."
"What is Christ on his Cross? What is his?"
Lou rubbed his neck. "Oh boy."
"What is oh boy?"
Lou sighed again.
***
Lou's stomach growled as he laid upon his back, looking up at the brilliant night sky. He rubbed at his breathing mask and wondered how safe it was to be here, without anything but the Bug around him. He heard the faint sound of buzzing wings. Some glittering, luminescent shapes shot by overhead. He sighed again. His night adapted eyes could see the room as nothing but vague shapes – the tiny wriggling grub he hadn't been brave enough to eat, and the tiny green sphere that he had also been too scared to touch.
"This isn't so bad..." he whispered. "I'm alone, on my wedding night. Married to a hive mind." He gulped. "A seven hundred fifty million year old hive mind that killed a hundred thousand people and it doesn't even know that it did something wrong." He paused. "...wait, no, I'm wrong. Killed and ate a few hundred thousand people."
The entire evening had been him defining terms – carefully and cautiously, trying to not confuse or anger the Bug. He had covered a wide ranging and scattered series of topics from pronouns to rocks, but the Bug still clearly hadn't quite...grasped what the idea of being a singular person was. By then, though, the sun was dipping and the Bug had announced, without warning: It is time for you to rest. I have been educated on the biological needs of your subunit.
And then it had left.
Lou closed his eyes. He wished he had his communication unit. He wondered if the rest of the delegation was panicking over his abduction.
Except, it wasn't an abduction, was it? This was what everyone had expected – hell, they were probably talking to the Bug at the same time he was, since it was able to coordinate its bodies across light years, let alone across a few hundred kilometers. He tossed, then turned, and then laid on his back, trying to close his eyes and just force himself to sleep. Instead, he felt his skin crawling – aware that there were so many bugs out there...
A faint whirring sound filled his ears. He opened his eyes and yelped as he saw something sleek and black drop into the room – then breathed out a slow sigh of relief. It was a drone, silvery white in color and with two ducted fans, rather than insectoid wings. It was carrying a communication unit, a small parcel, and a note. He took the note, squinting, then smacked his head. The communication unit had a light fixture and he shone it onto the paper.
Yo, Lou! This is GF and Amy. Your Dad is talking to the Bug, trying to get it to understand what you need. It told us that you've already told it what pulsars are. You're a fucking nerd, teach her how to make a sexy lady body for it to inhabit.
PS: This communicator should have a direct uplink and have all the normal apps.
PPS: There's food in the parcel, EAT IT.
PPPS: Amy told me what she told you, do you want me to tell your mom???
PPPPS: This writing shit is fun!!!!!!
Lou snorted. "We'll make a Neo out of you yet, GF," he said, his voice dry as he picked up the com unit. Since the dawn of the 21st century, communication units had gotten more and more sophisticated. They had begun as simple text broadcasters, then evolved into carrying voice, then regressed back to primarily carrying text again. But along the way, humanity had figured that you needed things in your pocket and if everyone was going to be carrying a small communication unit in their pocket, they might as well add additional functions. First, there had been little illumination units. Then entertainment programs and calculators and biomedical monitors and holographic projectors and laser weapons. This com had only the basic apps – which still meant that it had everything from a microfabricator to an atmospheric analysis suite.
Which was what Lou needed right now. He extended the sniffer, adjusted a touch screen dial, and read the result. This room had a perfectly mixed C/O2/N atmosphere. He tugged his mask off and breathed in slowly, his eyes closing as he enjoyed the freedom from the mask.
"Why did your subunit not eat your food and drink your water and why is it not sleeping?"
Lou screamed and leaped up and spun around. There was one of those antlike workers, perched on the corner of the wall of his room, looking down at him.
"Is that noise a greeting?" the ant-worker asked. Its voice was eerily human – emerging as it did so from a mandible that whired and clicked, obscuring a more complex mouthpart behind the articulated black chitin.
Lou was tempted to snap at the Bug – but instead, he closed his eyes. Counted to ten, backwards. "No," he said, quietly. "No, no, it was...I was startled."
"What is startled?"
"When...we..." He paused, then bit his lip. "When we're surprised by unexpected stimuli, we...react with...fright and fear and aversion. Because the stimuli might be dangerous."
"We have been startled fifty six times in our life," the Bug said, simply.
"You have nerves of-" Lou stopped himself, then sat down on the bed. He closed his eyes.
They're my wife. I should...make an effort. Right?
Gently, Lou patted the spot beside on him the bed with his hand, tensing slightly. "Tell me about them."
The ant-worker did not move despite his gesture. But it did speak: "The first time was a decicycle into our life. We...we had been...alive. And...we were..." The Bug paused. "We were. That is the only word. We were. And then, we were not. Many of our sub-units ceased and the skies grew dark and cold and the remaining sub-units struggled hard. We nearly...stopped. It was...it was not...a thing we wished to...have ever...occur again."
"What happened?" Lou asked, his voice soft, drawing his legs up onto the bed.
"We did not know for five microcycles – that is how long it took for the skies to clear and for We to study and learn. A large object fell from the sky and struck the equatorial ocean of our...planet. That is the word?"
Lou nodded. "Yes."
"It was startling," the Bug said, sounding emotionless. But...no. Not emotionless. There was a tiny tinge of fear in that voice – or maybe it was just Lou's imagination? Maybe it was something he just wanted to hear, in the dark, with this singular being. He gulped, slightly, then shifted a bit in the bed, drawing himself closer to the wall. He leaned against it. The Bug said. "There were ten more startling events, each every few centicycles. Some came in microcycles. Once, a subductive tension event released more ash than three combined asteroid impacts. We realized that so long as we were in one place, we would not be safe. And so, we tried to find out how to move beyond the place. This took time. But then, we came to other places and there, we spread, and it was good. There were some local...startling events, but they did nothing more than stop a negligible number of sub-units before we made them stop."
Lou's blood ran cold.
"H-How many...local...startling events were there?" He asked.
"Two," the Bug said, nodding. "But then we ran into the most startling event. A...something...that was in many places. And it made many subunits stop. It...it was...it was you." The ant-worker bobbed its head in an eerily similar way to Lou. "We did not understand. We tried to stop, to...remove...the danger? But...we never could. And we realized that in a nanocycle, or maybe two, we would not be. We would be...not." The Bug paused. "We only thought of not being once, when we were first startled, when we were in a single sub-sub-sub part of Place. Inside of a place measuring five by six kilometers, under the surface of the Place, we thought about what it would be to not be."
"And what did you think?" Lou asked.
"We...there is a...word...you used..." The Bug said, their voice even more quietly than before. They trailed off.
"Scared?" Lou asked.
"Scared. Afraid. Frightened. Not wanted. Un-wanted. No. No." The ant-worker began to shake from side to side – and a faint rustling filled the air. Lou's brow furrowed and he stood on the bed, peeking over the edge of the wall – and saw rippling shaking was filling the entire area. It was like every single body was shivering. He put his hand out – and then didn't quite touch the ant. He wanted to...squeeze them, to comfort them. But there was a nerve block, a hammering instinct roaring through him that said: BUG BUG BUG BUG BUG IT'S AN ICKY BUG.
His hand remained frozen in place.
"It's okay," he said, his voice tight.
"But we did not know what the danger was. We knew we would be gone. But We did not know what it was. It had subunits. But they did not act...nor...speak like We's units. And so, We thought. We tried to imagine what it would be to...speak...differently. Imagining this was difficult. But...then realizing that this was a...a thing that...that could be, we then, then, we began to notice what could be seen as speaking between the subunits. The easiest to learn was the kind using the waves below."
Waves below? Like...she has to be thinking about radio, Lou thought to himself.
"And then we...We spoke, using the waves below song that we found, echoing from Your space. We hoped that We could stop the stopping. And We did. But We are now confused and scared in a way that We did not even...that We have not ever before. What do We do in a world with others?"
Lou bit his lip. "You've never had to imagine a world with other people, have you?"
"No." The Bug started to shake. "We are going to go now. We...speaking to the subunit controlled by Husband is...it is...very...more...complex. We are...We need to...this is fatiguing. We leave."
The ant-worker turned and scuttled away. Lou sighed, then laid on his side. He closed his eyes.
But sleep didn't come for a long, long time.
***
The next morning, Lou finished off the parcel that he had been offered, read an E-mail from his father (congratulating him on the conversations he'd been having with the Bug) and an amusing anecdote from GF about the growing human encampment around the starport. But as he was reading, the door opened and his...wife entered into the room – one of the beetle bodies again. The antennas flittered. "I have brought you more food," the Bug said. "And then I shall begin to intercourse you."
"Sounds- what?" Lou blinked as the beetle shifted to the side, and let the tray slide off its broad back. Then it began to crawl towards the bed, legs clicking along the floor. "Uh, uh, uh, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait!" He lifted his hand. The Bug stopped, its antennas nearly brushing his ankles.
"We are confused."
"W-Who told you to..." Lou frowned. "Was it GF?"
"We do not know what GF is. It was a communication between subunits of...not Husband. They were speaking about intercourse. We have consumed life forms that have intercourse. We will choose one mode and We shall do so, as it seems that intercourse is required for being married."
Lou gulped. "What kind were you thinking?"
"I would begin by opening the ribcage of your subunit-"
"Okay, no, no, no!" Lou said, his voice forceful, panicky almost. "How could...you've consumed humans, how can you not know how we do...it..." He blushed, furiously.
"...your...subunits, when consumed, were often...heavily damaged due to...the stopping." By which they meant the killing. The war. Lou gulped, then put his hands over his face. "We do not wish the stopping to resume. We were told that this marriage was important. That without it, the stopping would resume. That-"
"It's..." Lou cut himself off. Imagine trying to explain politics and popularity to a Bug. Instead, he sighed. "Let's, let's start slow, okay? You...think back to when you first tried to leave your homeworld. You didn't immediately start traveling the stars, right? You had to learn how to leave, first?"
"Yes."
"So, this is like that. Intercourse is..." Lou's cheeks burned. "It is hard. We need to...we need to start with the basics."
"Very well. What basics shall we begin with?"
Lou sat there, drawing a complete blank. He had no idea. He had just been trying to keep a beetle shaped monstrosity from crawling onto the bed, cracking open his ribcage, and implanting larva into his chest. "H-How do you make subunits?" He asked.
Five minutes later, Lou was standing beside the beetle body, looking down into a vast trench, cut into the earth by some kind of immense amount of work – he couldn't even begin to imagine how many bodies had been set to work, digging and cutting and shifting the earth. In the trench, at the bottom, was a long scar of purple flesh, which itself was filled with a frothing green liquid. As he watched, a Terror Talon and fifty horrorgaunts walked casually to the edge of the pit, tipped over the edge, and dropped straight into the green slime. They splattered as they struck, the puddle clearly only a few inches deep. The sound was like fruit being stepped on. Lou winced with the impact and almost gagged at the gory ruin that the bodies left – then he did gag as he saw the green goop beginning to melt the organs and the chitin down.
"The biomatter is reprocessed, then fed into the egg chambers," his wife said. "The eggs then hatch into subunits, as directed by...We's will."
"Our will!" Lou said. "The pronoun you are looking for is our. A-And...are you just...one mind or many minds in communication?"
"We..." the bug paused. "We do not know. What is one? What is many? In this context?"
Lou chuckled. "Ooof, ask me an easy one. Um. Do you have many conflicting thoughts or just one?"
"We have many thoughts."
"Are they from different...parts...of..." Lou paused, thinking about how often he sometimes felt like he had more than one voice in his head – the parts of him that wanted to believe in the idealism of his father, versus the parts of him that knew his father was a cold, calculating bastard. He bit his lip. "You know what? I...think...it maybe should less be about...how many voices you have or how many thoughts you have. Let's, uh, lets try a different question: Do you want to be more like me or less like me?"
"We wish to be a good wife."
Lou felt a strange...twinge. It was right around his heart and it also pricked around his eyes. "I...why?" He asked, forgetting his original question entirely.
"Because if we are good wife, then we shall continue."
"Because the war won't restart?" Lou asked, feeling stupid for feeling anything. He looked away, guilt gnawing at him. "T-Then, uh, try using I. Me. My." He blushed. "I did this. I did that. My thing. My subunits. That kind of thing."
The beetle – which barely came up to his hip, even if it was nearly as long as he was tall – was silent for a time. It's antennas twitched uncertainty. "I...direct the eggs with thoughts. By telling them what to grow, I create sub-units, to then use to preform tasks?"
Lou blushed. "Did you like that?"
"I do not know. I will continue to try to speak and think of myself in this way." The bug paused. "But the eggs hatch many bodies. I have fifteen million seventeen thousand six hundred and two distinct bioforms, though many of them are highly similar to one another. They are adapted to situations. Some have not been hatched for a cycle, as the situation required has not returned."
Lou bit his lip. "How many are similar to humans? Bipedal, uh, vertically symmetrical, with a head, abdomen, arms, legs, and similar things like that?"
"Fifteen," the bug said.
"W-Well, uh...gestate some of them a-and we can...we can see what...we...see?" Lou asked, nervously. He knew that within the context that he had laid out, there could still be utter nightmares. But hey, the gestation would take some time. Time enough for him to think of how to maybe...escape? He didn't know.
"They will hatch now," the bug said, antennas quivering.
"How soon is now? Oh, uh, we have a time unit that we use call the minute, the hour, the day, the second..." Lou said, taking out his stopwatch function on his com unit and showing it to the beetle. The beetle, though, had no eyes. A few seconds later, a long legged, giraffe necked creature that seemed to be mostly eye walked over, then bent forward. It cast a long shadow and having its huge, gaping eyes near Lou made him feel like curling up in a ball and shivering. But once it had seen the seconds work, and Lou had explained how many seconds went into a minute and so on, the bugs all bobbed at once, each subunit that Lou could see in the entire area, even those calmly marching to their deaths.
It was a single, massive, hive-mind wide nod.
Lou shuddered all over again, even as the beetle said: "They will be done in fifteen seconds."
"What!?"
Lou barely had time to be shocked before the beetle began to walk forward, leading him towards a narrow cave that was cut into the ground – leading into the dark, dank space below. The air was humid and close and, with his day adapted vision, Lou saw nothing but the glistening shape of the beetle ahead of him. He could hear distant ripping and tearing noises – flesh being stripped away, egg material sloughing to the ground with wet splorts. He gulped as increasing nervousness burned along his spine. The urge to turn and to run grew more and more and more. But he focused instead on remembering fencing lessons – high parry, low parry, high parry, low parry.
The beetle and he came around the corner and they stepped into a low, dim room that was lit only by faint bioluminescence. He could see dark forms, horrible forms, lurking in the darkness. His voice squeaked as he stammered. "C-Can we...we...have...have more light?"
The bioluminescence started to grow brighter – but not in a generalized way. Instead, the light focused upon the first body to the left, which stepped forward to stand even more directly under the light. It was, technically, bipedal. It also had a hunched, low body and clawed fingers that looked nearly as long as Lou's forearms. It spoke in a gutteral snarl. "Is this acceptable for intercourse?"
"It...can go...onto...the maybe pile," Lou said, his voice tight, his hands clenching behind his back.
The light dimmed – which honestly made things way way way worse. But then the light brightened again and the next bipedal creature appeared. This one was mostly made of leg and arm – they were long enough that if it stood fully up, it would be able to touch the ceiling of the room and keep going for another meter and a half. It was spindly and sticklike and...well, the most Lou could say for it was that it was not actively terrifying.
"This form was created to handle activities in not planets. They construct lattices in orbit."
"Very well designed..." Lou gulped as he saw that each finger on those long, long arms ended with viciously hooked fingers, and each finger itself was covered with tiny spurs, so it would be able to cling to anything like a lamprey. "Uh, we'll...next? Can I see the next?"
"Yes. Why would I say no?"
Lou chuckled – then blinked as the light brightened.
"I must warn you, though, we are beginning to move away from the two arms, two legs, bipedal forms. I admit, I have needed to fudge the parameters."
"It's o-" Lou stopped dead. The figure that stood before him was almost feminine. Almost human. Yes, they had four arms, and they were slender, but they each ended in a small tuft of white...almost fur. Their shoulders had an almost cape like crest of fur and chitin , but rather than a cape, it was actually a set of mothlike wings, clasped behind them. They had long, narrow legs that came to fine points that looked almost as if they could not quite hold them. He blinked. "W-What...was this body made for?"
"This was a body created for exploration in places that are below nominal temperatures and with moderate to light gravities," the Bug said. "Do you...why do...you like it?"
Lou gulped. "Well, uh, aesthetically, it's..."
"What is aesthetic?"
Lou blinked. "It's...it is what humans find pleasing to look upon. They...make us happy." He blushed, then an idea struck him. "Can you read?"
"Read?"
"You know how we communicate with words and sounds. There are symbols that we, as a species, have learned to...to use to mean certain words and sounds. This way, you can learn and understand things that have come before. So, if you learn to read, then you can read books, and they can explain everything that I'm bad at explaining."
"You are good at explaining things. Are there anything you want to change in this bioform?"
He blinked. "Change?"
"This bioform is an empty shell. That is why it did not take long to gestate."
"Oh..." Lou gulped, looking at the figure. "I...is it okay if I...I mean...I don't want to...make you…uncomfortable."
"Why would I be uncomfortable?"
Lou blushed. "Well, um...do you know that, uh, some humans have, ah...glands. Around here?" He asked, gesturing around his chest. The Bug bobbed in a nod. "And they have, um...an organ around here...that's, ah, you know, um, that is a kind of...cavity that is protected by, uh..." He gestured around his crotch – which caused the Bug to bob again. "A-And, uh, having mouthparts like a human would be nice. A-And eyes like a human as well? Can you make that?"
The Bug bobbed once more.
"The body will be finished in two hours."
Lou nodded, then followed the beetle as it started to lead him out. The antennas twitched together and the Bug spoke: "My husband, I have a question. You...that is...your subunit, here, that is present in this place, what is its function?"
Lou blushed. "We...humans don't have subunits." He said, quietly. "I'm the only 'unit' of the being known as Louis Benoit XII."
They came out into the open air and the beetle slowed down in its walking, standing beside him. "I do not understand." The Bug said.
Lou felt as if he was dangerously close to thin ice. He rubbed the back of his neck – but honor demanded that he be honest with his wife. Besides, they needed to...it needed to...she? Needed too? He felt suddenly deeply uncertain about his requests on the body that he had asked for. But he pushed all of that aside, instead, focusing on what he needed to say. "Each human being is...like you. W-we don't have subunits, though. We simply have units. Each of us are..are...unique individuals." He blushed. "That's why we speak like this, using words, and radio and laser communications and such." He nodded. "We're not all subunits of..."
Lou trailed off.
There was a kind of deep, stunning silence in the area around him. It was a silence that made him actually stop and blink and look around himself. Every single body that had been moving around him, tending to the plants, digging at the dirt, or doing anything else that the Bugs seemed to need to get done at all times, all of them had stopped. He felt a dangerous chill slide along his spine. "Uh, so..."
"...are...all...humans this?"
Lou nodded. The antennas of the beetle were twitching – shimmering together, making a kind of low, whining violin noise. It was like the sound of a string being drawn by a bow, drawing out an increasingly high pitched note that made his skin crawl.
"A-All...subunits...of...previous...worlds...that...all..." the antennas were wriggling, unable to form words more than just sharp, jagged. "All...we...that...they...they...they...we...we WE WE WE THEY WE W-!"
The voice reached a high pitched scream and Lou stepped backwards, stammering. "I...y-you didn't know!" He said, desperately – but the Bug's antennas rubbed together with such a jagged, fierce, shrieking noise that made his ears ached.
"NO NO NO NO NO NO!" The Bug screamed. The beetle form turned and scuttled away – shooting off with every leg blurring, vanishing into the wheat like field that grew near the jagged rent in the earth. Lou looked around wildly – and he saw that flying bugs were shooting off, erratically, into every direction. Huge Terror Talons were sprinting away from him. Horrorgaunts, moving like carpets of jagged death, were flowing over the low hill and into the forests. Within a shockingly short time – maybe ten, maybe twenty seconds – Lou was left entirely alone in the whole Bug...settlement.
"...honey?" he called out, lamely, not knowing what else to call her. He jogged to the edge of the settlement, his footprints dusty in the ground behind him. But as he came near the edge, he started to feel a strange tightness in his chest and he stumbled backwards, coughing and gasping. Right. The atmosphere was nitrogen beyond the...whatever it was the Bug had done to make this area safe for him to breathe in. He stepped back and then sprinted for his home. There, he grabbed his mask and found his communicator was warbling and chiming .
Lou picked it up and saw that the call was from his dad.
He closed his eyes.
"Great. Fantastic. Great." Lou closed his eyes, then muttered. "Fuck." It was a good time to just...swear. It felt good. But it didn't abolish the horrible pit in his stomach, the awareness that he'd seriously fucked up.
He put his com unit to his ear. "Yes, Father?"
"What. Did. You. Do!?" Father almost roared. "Every single bug in the entire area just ran off as if they sniffed a glasser coming in!"
Lou closed his eyes, then leaned against the doorframe of his home. When he opened his eyes, he looked out into the vast, empty space that was left after his wife had gone. It was haunting. Like an entire city, abandoned by a single poorly chosen truth.
And then Lou realized...he knew how to fix this.
"Call you back."
"Don't you-"
Lou hung up.
TO BE CONTINUED...
Hey, Dragon Cobolt here! Hope you're enjoying Pax Multi. If you want to keep enjoying it for free, the next chapter will be up next monday! But if you want to read it all right now, you can buy it on Amazon! Thanks for reading! Leave comments, each comment is a gold coin in my dragon horde. ...hoard? Hoarde!
It's very hard to describe my reaction coherently beyond "wow, so good", but I'll try. The sheer multifacetedness of what you're doing here - genuinely inventive worldbuilding, compelling characters, what at least to me seemed like thematic nods to classical sci-fi, all blended together under the aegis of seemingly absurd premise that plays with cliche - it feels unique, man, and in a good way. As someone who doesn't care almost at all for erotica, I am still seriously considering dusting off my amazon account, feeding it my new shady UAE-based virtual Visa card (love being cut off from SWIFT), and buying it to read in one go.
The bits that I really liked were: Lou theorizing about his father's plans-within-plans, every scene with GF, and the serious look at how a hive mind might perceive the world and struggle with conceptualizing others like it/themself.
It's very hard to describe my reaction coherently beyond "wow, so good", but I'll try. The sheer multifacetedness of what you're doing here - genuinely inventive worldbuilding, compelling characters, what at least to me seemed like thematic nods to classical sci-fi, all blended together under the aegis of seemingly absurd premise that plays with cliche - it feels unique, man, and in a good way.
Now, as Lou stood on the large, flash-constructed landing pad and looked out at the forests that surrounded the gleaming metal, he felt that same sense of unhappiness.
Yo, Lou! This is GF and Amy. Your Dad is talking to the Bug, trying to get it to understand what you need. It told us that you've already told it what pulsars are. You're a fucking nerd, teach her how to make a sexy lady body for it to inhabit.
"It's o-" Lou stopped dead. The figure that stood before him was almost feminine. Almost human. Yes, they had four arms, and they were slender, but they each ended in a small tuft of white...almost fur. Their shoulders had an almost cape like crest of fur and chitin , but rather than a cape, it was actually a set of mothlike wings, clasped behind them. They had long, narrow legs that came to fine points that looked almost as if they could not quite hold them.
Oh hey isn't this just like Ender's Game where a hivemind thought it was fighting another hivemind then had a mental breakdown when it realized each "Drone" was actually an individual mind, culminating in an assisted suicide? Hopefully we don't end up at that last step.
The interior of the Bug warrens had been disturbing and creepy and icky before.
Now?
Now they were just deeply, deeply sad.
Walking through the narrow tunnels, holding his com before him with the light turned to maximum, Lou perked his ears, trying to hear any sounds of movement, any hint that there was life down here. But when his...spouse had left, she had left. Even the things that he hadn't thought were part of her hive mind were gone. The tiny little glow-worms that had writhed through the subcutaneous material that lined the walls underneath the hardened carapace that made up most of the tunnels support structure? They were gone. The tiny scuttling beetles that had been about the size of a quarter were gone. The distant breathing sounds that he had thought were a natural byproduct of the tunnels shape and the winds of Charon? That was gone too.
It was desolate and haunting and made him feel more panicky and nervous than coming down here the first time had.
But he pressed on, his jaw clenched.
His studies in popular culture had ended somewhere in the mid 20th century – past that, media and culture had (according to his lectures and tutors) fallen to the two great perils. The first had been an cannibalistic repetition made endemic by late stage capitalism and the second had been due to the 'coarsening effect of utopia.' Without the rarefied needs of high culture – and the complex web of etiquette and politeness that had been that had come with it – humanity had devolved into a bunch of…
Well.
Lou actually kind of liked GF. But the man's full name was God Fucker and he had thought that an appropriate joke on the first meeting with someone he had never met was to start cracking on about harems.
But of all the culture that he had studied – from the Chinese poets of Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu to the works of William Shakespeare to the songlines of the Aboriginal peoples (such as had survived) – the only myth that came to mind to succor him in this moment of great personal dread...was Orpheus. Except it was inverted – he was behind Eurydice, hoping that she'd look back and see him. Lou clenched his jaw and kept walking forward, even as the caves grew narrower and more winding and the feeling of depressing emptiness became replaced by a creeping dread.
Anything could be in the darkness, without his spouse in it.
But still, he pressed on.
And, at last.
Lou stepped up and into a familiar looking chamber – the same gestation room that his spouse had taken him to before. He swept his com around and found the light spilling over a large, seamed mound of black, rubbery flesh. It throbbed slowly, swelling and then seeping backwards, and as his light shone onto it, he found that the rubbery material was partially transparent – and inside, he could faintly see the quasihumanoid form that his spouse had begun to gestate to serve as her...he wasn't sure what to call it. She was a hive mind intelligence spread across three solar systems. Could it really be said that anything was her focal point?
And yet, she had needed to take breaks from talking to him. It had been tiring for her to understand and grasp the singular viewpoint and to listen to his singular voice. He sighed, then sat down beside the egg, breathing in slowly.
"Now we wait," he said.
Time passed and Lou thought through everything he was going to say – and he thought he knew how best to handle things. When he checked the clock on his com, he saw that about thirty minutes had passed. With his speech prepared and his plan settled in his mind, he settled down to wait. And to wait. And to wait. And to wait.
After what his com claimed was two hours, but to him felt like a greater time than the entire history of the human race, the egg quivered. Lou, whose attention had been wandering, jerked upwards a bit, then tensed, readying himself as the figure that he could faintly see inside of the egg wriggled, then reached outwards. The egg unfolded itself with a glistening, ripping, tearing noise. The head of his spouse's newest bioform emerged first. Her head had white fur that looked like hair, bristling from around a delicate, feminine face. The additions that he had requested, to make the face more humanoid, were there: A small nose, slender lips, and eyes that were...well...she had tried. They weren't compound eyes, like before, but they were decidedly alien looking: All black, save for two glowing blue irises. Her furred shoulders came free next, with her two upper arms. Then her breasts, her lower arms, her curved thighs, her dainty feet, and then she was sliding down the egg and onto the ground before him, dripping with egg slime.
Lou flushed, wanting to look away – she was...naked. And…
Well.
A lot more…
A lot more...ah…
But this was his wife. It was okay for him to see her naked – and as he blushed, he saw that she was scrambling to her feet, turning and spreading her delicate wings.
"Wait!" Lou stood.
"No!" She said, but he grabbed her lower right arm, tugging her around. Her feet dug into the ground as she strained to get away from him, shaking her head. "No no no no no! I'm a monster!"
Lou...regretted teaching her that word. A lot. Right now. It hadn't even been a word she had taken much notice of, during their long exchange of words and definitions. But he grabbed her other hand, holding her tightly.
"No! You're not!" he said, his voice firm.
Her eyes closed and she ducked her head forward. "Three hundred twenty eight thousand one hundred and ninety humans! A-And then...if human subunits are humans, and not subunits, if they were all like me, then...then so were the others! Sixty eight million seven hundred thirty two thousand five hundred and ninety two, five hundred million, ninety eight thousand, five hundred and six! All! Consumed! Consumed, I…" She closed her eyes and screamed. "I killed them all! I killed them!" And she let out another horrible keening noise – a sound that Lou had never wanted hear again.
He cupped her cheeks – she had gone limp, no longer trying to run. "You didn't know-"
She shook her head, brushing at his hands, trying to shove them away, but weakly. "No no no no…" She whispered. "No. No." Lou pressed his forehead against hers, his hands sliding from her cheeks to her neck, marveling at the incredibly sleek, smooth feeling of her. His fingers sank into the soft fuzz that crested her shoulders, his fingertips almost touching the edges of her wings. He drew her in and her hands pressed against his chest – twenty points of contacts at the ends of four hands. All her fingers.
Lou gripped her, drawing her close. Her hands slid, more by accident than design, around him. Her fingers traced along his back. "W...What is?" she whispered, her voice a trembling quavering sound. She had no tears – but of course she didn't. Why would a Bug ever need to cry? "W-What...what what what-"
"It's forgiveness," Lou whispered. He had tears. And he shed them, burying his face against her neck. "A...And a hug."
"Hug…" his wife whispered. Her hands, gingerly, tightened, two low, two high, holding him. "You said...forgiveness is what you give, when you recognize someone has done wrong, but...but you know they're...going to be better?"
"Yeah."
She whispered. "I don't...I don't...I don't get forgiveness. I do not...made it out of…" She was groping for words, and Lou guessed.
"You don't...deserve it?" He snorted, quietly. "My wife, if you deserved forgiveness, you'd never need it." He felt her knees quivering and he laughed, quietly, marveling that there was a similar...reaction in her, as there would have been in his body. He drew her down onto his lap, and she was so very light. Like a feather, she settled there, her wings buzzing in nervous little jitters. His hands caressed along her back, drawing her in close. His voice was soft.
"I...my wife…" He said, the words feeling awkward on his tongue, not smooth and easy like he had imagined them. "I want to tell you a story."
"Why?"
"Humans sometimes use stories to explain ideas," he said, quietly. "You feel...bad because you killed the Procyians and the Lupens and humans."
"You know their names? And that they existed?" she asked, blinking at him, her antennas twitching and...Lou gently petted her antennas – reflexively. They bent backwards, then jounced back upwards to their original positions. It was the most adorable thing that he had ever seen. "I liked that. Do it again." She said, simply, and so, Lou continued to pet her as he explained.
"Yeah, um...we knew." Lou sighed. "And those are just names we gave them. The Procyians had launched a simple space probe before...it was remarkably similar to one that we humans launched – Voyager. It had their language, some images, a message we think translated to...from our star, to yours, we greet you." He shook his head. "The Lupens, which is our name for the aliens that had lived in the Wolf 359 system, are more vague. We only caught the, uh, radio bubble that came away from their world as we approached it. Twelve years, approximately, and then…" He paused. He didn't want to mention the nightmares that the reconstructed Last Broadcast had given him, during his education on the Bug War.
The Lupens hadn't been humanoid.
But their...screams had…
He closed his eyes. It was almost impossible to combine the image of the hellgaunts and the waves of bio-organic drop-pods falling onto human colonies and the last screams of those long dead aliens with the gentle soul he held in his arms. So, he simply didn't. He focused, instead, on the story.
"When we were still confined to one world, there were two men who killed four billion people," he said, simply. "Humans. Who killed other humans."
His wife drew back, her antennas rubbing together, a chittering sound emerging from her throat. "Why? Was it a mistake? Did they-"
"No," he said. "Their names were Charles and Fredrick Koch. They had a great deal of power because they controlled access to a resource called oil. You know how...when...biological life dies and is compressed by heat and pressure under the ground and becomes coal and oil and such?"
"Oh, yes, I regularly harvest it," his spouse said, nodding. "You need to be careful, though. It causes planets to retain heat – among other side effects."
My wife is older than the biological concept of sexual reproduction, Lou thought for the second time. It still sounded like a bad joke in his head – not real, not something concrete. But hearing her casually mentioning that she regularly harvested fossil fuels that she produced...not synthesized like humans could with nanofabrication and other chemical processes, but rather, via geoengineering on a time scale that made the Imperial Egyptians look like toddlers building sand castles. It...made him shiver to his core. But he pressed on.
"The Kochs had access to this resource and, through it, a great deal of power. They became aware, as did others, that releasing carbon into the atmosphere would cause a destructive effect on the environment that we all needed to survive. And...they used a great deal of their power and their position in society to crush that knowledge. They paid liars to tell people everything would be fine. They convinced entire generations of humans that the entire idea was a hoax-"
"How?" His wife sounded completely baffled. "The effect is so rapid, it happens in a…" She stopped. "You...do not have new subunits to sustain your minds once old subunits become unable to serve and are recycled." She sat up. "Lou! We have to-"
Lou put his finger upon her lips. They were very...very soft. Very sleek. Very slippery. Very warm. And for a moment, looking into her eyes, feeling the slight dampness of her mouth, the alien chill of her breath, looking into her black/blue eyes, Lou felt as if his heart was racing a million miles an hour. His voice was husky. "Let me finish the story."
She bobbed her head, then laid it down against his chest. His hand began to pet her antennas again. "The Kochs knew that there was going to be a disaster. But they didn't care – they kept things as they were, until the point where easy changes were impossible. Then, when there were ten billion people on the planet, everything began to collapse. Droughts, storms, flooding, famines, everything all hammered at the same time. It was...like an exponential curve had been hit." Lou sighed, quietly. "Four billion people died. Just so that some...old men could cling to power."
His finger caught her chin, lifting her so that he could look into her eyes.
"You did what you did because you didn't understand. It...was horrible. But in a universe of horrors...y-you're actually...fine." He blushed. He had had a more suave ending – but looking into her eyes had caused his brain to short circuit.
She blinked at him.
"So...don't go…" Lou said, cupping her cheek. "Let's work to make this better. Okay?"
She looked away. Her antennas twitched.
"What happened to the Koch brothers?" she asked.
"They died of old age and their children spent most of the 21st century in a fortified arcology protected by a legion of slaves," Lou said, sighing. "Then, eventually, their kids...well…" He shrugged. "That's getting into the Meme War and the founding of the UHP. Which is even more complicated…"
"I want to learn all of it," she said, softly. Then her eyes closed. "I am bringing my subunits back. I...I simply did not want to see humans, or talk to humans. It...I felt…"
"It's okay." Lou stood, groaning as his back twinged and his legs started to throb as blood started to flow into bits of his body that had been lacking for a while too long. His wife remained in his arms, as lightweight and easy to carry as a feather. He carried her towards the exit, and she allowed him to do it, her eyes closed as she thought – or more likely, as she began to realign her bodies and her subunits off to do everything that they had stopped doing in her moment of panic. As he walked, though, he noticed that the glow-worms were coming back. He smiled.
They emerged into the twin suns of Charon – and before an armored wall of heavily equipped combat troopers in power carapace, his father and GF and Amy standing at the forefront. GF had a combat unitard on and one of the heavy duty combat rifles preferred by AnCom, while Father had his pistol and sword combination – and from the vids that Lou had seen, they weren't merely for decoration. The Bugs had, over the war, engaged in melee combat often enough that having a sword had gone from affectation to absolutely necessary for any front line ground combat.
"My son," Father said, frowning. "What…"
Lou blushed, holding the naked body of his wife protectively. "C-Can we get some clothes for her."
"Yes!" Amy hurried forward, then stood before him and the rest of the soldiers. "Give them some privacy – it's not like none of you have seen hot moth ladies before. Come on! Turn around, turn around!"
GF, before he turned, gave Lou the biggest thumbs up.
***
Proxima Centauri hurt to behold.
Not for the reasons that most stars did – the brightness, the hard radiation, the sheer immensity that made them hard for human scale minds to grasp. No. By those standards, Proxima was fairly easy to hold in the mind and the eye both. It was, for one thing, significantly smaller than it had been. It had started as a red dwarf, about an eighth the size of Sol, and what had happened to it during the Bug War had only shrunk it further. It was now barely the size of a mountain – five, six kilometers at the length. Easily graspable in human terms. It was significantly less radiant. No longer did it put out a searing red light. No longer did it crackle with the fusion-fury that had burned in its hydrogen belly.
Instead, Proxima throbbed with a sickly color that was somewhere between purple and the synesthetic sensation of tasting the sound of a woman screaming at the top of her lungs as she was being tortured to death. Its surface was a single color, without mottling or distortion. It should have looked like a poorly rendered image from the early days of computer animation – but instead, the longer Colonel Admiral Akin Bosch of the Federated States Navy looked at it, the more that he was certain that he could see subtle striations and distinctive lines. They squirreled across the surface of the former star like lightning bolts, jagged and straight and crackling, but they were never quite there when he focused upon them. It was more like his mind was throwing chaos into a perfect simplicity that his monkey brain refused to accept in its totality.
But that wasn't the worst thing about Proxima.
It was the stars around it, visible thanks to the bridge lights on the FSS Invisible Hand being set to their lowest setting. They were beginning to distort, as if he was looking at the bubble of twisted light that surrounded a black hole. But the distortion was not immediate or obvious – it was a slow, insidious twisting of light, which grew more and more pronounced the longer that he looked at Proxima.
"Sir?"
Bosch tore his eyes from Proxima, his head pounding.
"Sir, respectfully…" one of the bridge officers – a sleek, blond haired woman that had served on the Hand for the past ten years and yet, had never been skilled enough for her name to move past the outer fringe of Bosch's memories and into the part that actually lasted. "Is that wise?"
"Exposure to Proxima is only dangerous at significantly closer ranges than this, Lieutenant," Bosch snapped. "It will take more than a spatial anomaly to cause me any trouble."
The woman nodded, looking frightened. Her eyes flicked down and Bosch tasted iron on his lips. His fingers lifted and he touched his nose – which was bleeding. He glared at the woman, then turned his back to her and to the window, striding away as he pinched his nostril shut with one hand, trying to stem the flowing blood. As he strode past the firing consoles, where serving crew members were wedded with the control systems by an intricate series of tiny wires and cyber-jacks. Most of them were from the penitentiary system, considering the effect on the nervous system that top of the line fire control computers had. But the Federated States had a simple rule when it came to going into the justice system: If you weren't guilty, you wouldn't be up before a judge in the first place.
So, anything that the criminal scum got was what they had coming.
By the time Bosch arrived at the science lab that had been attached to his beloved battleship, his nose wasn't bleeding and he had cleaned off his hands. The scientists here were mostly Federal – but he had heard from his spies that they were all essentially subordinate to Listens-Deeply-And-Considers-All. The fucking dolphin knew it too. Bosch tried to control his sneer as he watched the sleek cetacean walk around inside of its wetsuit, on four little mechanical legs, with a harness of attached grippers that it controlled via its cyberjack. Those grippers were currently holding a stylus, which Listens Deeply was using to scrawl some ferociously complex mathematics equations on the screen that the scientists had set aside for long-form calculation.
"Dr. All," the Federal scientist standing next to the Upkin said. "Are you sure that wave-function form won't collapse?"
"There's only one way to find out, really," Listens Deeply said, his voice chirruping from his collar. He turned his beady little black eye to Bosch. "Admiral. You are here to breathe down our blowholes again?"
Bosch frowned. "I carted you and this entire lab four light years and ate up ten years of my life back on Earth – I expected faster results. The farce is already going on down on Charon."
"The farce. Hah!" Listens Deeply chittered. "I wonder, will he take pleasure in the creature? Humans are able to make a fetish out of anything, given time and inclination."
"Humans don't," Bosch said, his frown deepening. "Degenerates do."
"And what does this make me, Admiral?"
A useful pawn, Bosch thought – and he was fairly certain the Upkin saw him in the exact same light. The mutual loathing the Upkin felt for the Federated States – and the same loathing that the Federated States felt for the Upkin – could only be eclipsed by one thing. That one thing was what he brought up: "A useful ally against the Bugs, of course."
"Ha ha. I need a new woman," Listens Deeply said, casually. "The current one bores me."
Bosch repressed a disgusted sigh. "Of course. But only…" he reached down and took the stylus from Listens Deeply's gripper. "If you tell me that Project Etemenanki is close to some kind of breakthrough. You've had a year out of cryo and two months in orbit around Proxima. I want results."
Listens Deeply chittered – and the collar turned it into a laugh. "Results you shall have. Admiral."
Bosch nodded.
"Bring out...Echo 3…" Listens Deeply said and one of the doctors hurried out – showing more deference to an Upkin than Bosch liked to see. But soon, the doctor had returned, flanked by two of the members of FSMC that had been assigned to the ship. Between the two men in their power carapace was a struggling, kicking...thing. They weren't quite a woman, they weren't quite a man – they were, in other words, an AnCom deviant. They were still dripping with the suspension fluids of the cryotank they had been hauled from, and they were still coughing and hacking.
"What...the fuck is going...where…" she – Bosch was pretty certain that they were a she, after a second glance – said. "Feds? Feds? What? The...this...you fucking Nazi cosplaying fucks, I am going to sue the lot of you if you don't let me go right now!" She snarled as Bosch smirked at her.
"I recognize you…" he said, nodding. "Your name is…" He sighed. "Righteous Zen…" He shook his head. "Absurd."
"Fuck you!" Echo 3 snapped.
"Except that's just it," Bosch said, his voice gloating. "Righteous Zen, right now, is currently doing whatever it is she-"
"They. They them, you fucking fascist."
"She," Bosch said, with deliberate coldness. "Is currently doing whatever it is she is doing back on Earth. Because you are not Righteous Zen. You are a copy. Acquiring you was trivially easy – your cortical stack was accessed during your latest backup scan. We cloned the body you're currently in based on your previous body – no need for you to have to readjust to everything. After all, your brain scans are going to be extremely important."
"You…" her eyes widened. "You spliced me? You fucking asshole!"
"Prepare it for the probe," Listens Deeply chittered.
"The probe?" Echo 3 asked, then kicked as the men dragged her towards the preparation table. A bone saw started to whir. "Hey! Hey! Whoa! Fucking whoa, killing a splice is still fucking murder! I'm still a person! I'm still a person!"
The bone saw started to scream as the straps clicked home.
Bosch watched.
First, the procedure.
Then, three hours later, the oblong, torpedo-like shape of the probe containing Echo-3, accelerating away from the Invisible Hand and towards Proxima. Beside him, Listens Deeply watched the readouts.
"Yes…" he murmured as the jagged lines symbolizing Echo 3's brainwave started to warble and twist as she approached the perverted stars. "Yes! Project Etemenanki is...as you Federals say...a go."
***
"What on Venus were you thinking?" Father asked, stomping back and forth in the small room. Lou watched him, his hands clasped in his lap. He felt an urge to get up, walk out of the room, down the corridor, and to the small bedroom where they had put his wife – but instead, he kept himself seated properly. In the roughly twenty four hours since he'd been at the human spaceport, the AnComs had done what AnComs did best: Fabricate. The spaceport had been expanded outwards, with additional habitation domes and even a few small mansions set up in the blistering fast, eclectic style of the most populous human polity. With nanomachines and the patterns for literally millions of different kinds of rooms that could be 'snapped together' with a few quick button presses on a GUI, they were able to create fantastical structures that rivaled the palace that Lou had been born in.
The fact that these structures had been built in hours rather than months did tarnish the impression slightly, to him.
"Well, I was thinking I was married and that I should be honest to my wife," Lou said, watching as Father paused in his pacing. He frowned as he looked square at Lou. Lou looked square back – and knew that Father knew that he knew that Father had been unfaithful with Mother. And with an AnCom too.
Father frowned. "Louis, I am glad that you recall the foundational principles of our Kingdom, but you must also remember the subtler lessons as well. The AnComs can be blunt. We, by definition, cannot." He frowned harder. "You should have recalled that."
"We were discussing what humans are," Lou said, sticking out his chin. "That's what my role was to be, wasn't it?"
Father rubbed his hand along his square jaw, turning to face the window. "Yes. But it was never my plan for you to be left so, ahem, bereft of guidance." He shook his head. "I didn't expect the Bugs to take you off like that." He sighed. "I am sorry for that, Louis, I am. And I am sorry about how...stressful this has been."
"You don't need to apologize, father," Lou said, standing up. "I am your son – and a Prince of the Star Kingdom. I know what my duty is."
"Your duty…" Father nodded. "You managed to draw the Bugs back from their little…" He waved his hand. "Panic attack?"
"I think so," Lou said. "I...she...that is, they…" He paused. "We're still trying to figure out exactly how…" He blushed, then coughed.
"You did call her a wife without thinking," Father murmured.
Lou's blush deepened. "Y-Yes, well, that was a touch presumptive. My spouse...doesn't understand this marriage. But that's all right – she...they...will." He nodded. "And maybe your plan will work, Father. Maybe we will have peace…" He licked his lips – and was tempted to ask about Amy, about the fact that Father had cheated on his wife. Instead, he said: "I believe I should speak to my spouse, again. She...should be able to focus on me again."
Father nodded.
The corridor leading down to the medical ward that held his spouse contained Amy and GF, who both moved to Lou's sides. Amy spoke, first. "She's fine," she said, nodding. "Biologically, I mean. This is actually the first living bug specimen we've actually managed to study up close and personally, it's really fascinating. Did you know-" she stopped, then closed her eyes. "I mean. Sorry. She's fine. She's good, even. She was actually talking to us."
"Oh, good. Thank you for checking on her," Lou said, nodding, while GF leaned in close, whispering to him.
"Your dad was furious," he said.
"Yeah, I noticed," Lou said. "I...won't lie, I did kind of stick my foot in my own throat."
"What happened, exactly?" GF asked, his brow furrowing.
"I…" Lou bit his lip. "I told her that humans are singular beings."
"...oh…" GF winced.
"I don't get it, why would she freak about that?" Amy asked, cocking her head.
"She didn't know that humans were singular beings," Lou said, quietly.
"...oh…" Amy said, in the exact same tone of voice as GF.
They came to the door leading into the medical bay, which opened obligingly. Inside, laying in the bed, was...well, Lou's wife. That was the only thing that sprang to Lou's mind when he looked at her delicate four armed, moth winged body. She was dressed in a simple white shift that protected her modesty, with four sleeves and two holes cut in the back for her wings. Her head was rested upon a pillow, and she was looking up at the ceiling. But when Lou stepped into the room, she sat up. Her lips lifted into a smile, while her antennas twitched up. "Lou!" she said, then blushed. "God Fucker. Amy. I...those are the designations for you two?" She asked, pointing at GF and Amy.
"You got it!" Amy said, giving her a thumbs up, while GF nodded.
"I am glad I got it right," she said – then grabbed onto Lou and dragged him into the bed. Lou yelped, blushed, and squirmed all at once as she pressed her entire body against him, wrapping her legs around his hips, her lower arms around his belly, her upper arms around his shoulders. Her wings buzzed and she buried her nose against his neck, breathing in. She spoke, her voice muffled. "I am hugging Lou. I enjoy the tactile sensation of touching my husband and I missed it while he was away."
"Nice," GF said.
"Awww!" Amy clapped her hands over her chest.
Lou wanted to die of pure mortification.
Amy drew up a chair and sat down beside the bed, grinning. "S-So, Lou was telling us about how...you...um, well…" She coughed. "You have my forgiveness too."
"You can give forgiveness as well?" Lou's wife asked, cocking her head. "That is not something only Lou can provide?"
"Of course I can!" Amy laughed. "Lou's a pretty swell guy, but he's not Jesus."
"What is Jesus?" Lou's face was going beat red now as he felt his wife's hands slide along his chest, her nose rubbing up against his neck. She was very soft and fluffy, at least, around the shoulders and head. No. No. Don't think about how soft she was. Think of a way to get out of her hug before she did anything more embarrassing.
"T-The Neopolitan Church isn't, uh, big on evangelism!" Lou stammered.
"Define Church and the meaning of evangelism?" his wife asked.
Lou shot a death glare at GF, who was looking as if he was having the best fucking time. "Out! Now!" He said, pointing at the door. Amy, laughing, stood and grabbed GF's arm.
"We'll be back!" GF called out.
The door shut and Lou groaned as his wife wriggled around, buzzing her wings to actually hop herself over his head before thumping down onto his lap. There, she settled, then began to stick her nose up against his neck. She breathed in, then sniffed down to his chest. Lou didn't even need to ask: "I find there are many scents that are pleasurable. Yours are located here, mostly." She stuck her nose up against his armpit, breathing in. "I like this scent."
"I, uh, why do you like things?" Lou asked – the question popping into his head before anything else. "I mean, humans like things because of...well, because it helps us make decisions…" He said, quoting some well worn sentience research. His wife drew back, her antennas twitching.
"This is why I like things," she said, nodding. "Not all things, but many things. I have learned, for instance, that my enjoyment of certain chemicals released by volcanic vents can, over a few thousand years, produce deleterious effects on the atmosphere of any planet I am on." She smiled, shyly. "S-So, I limit myself to...only a few centuries of exposure, as a treat."
Lou blinked at her.
"Now, my question," she said, biting her lip. "Why is Amy made of not flesh?"
"S-She's a...she's a machine that we humans made – but since she thinks like a human, she is human," Lou said, trying to keep things simple.
She nodded again.
Lou felt as if there were more important things to discuss. Their future. Their wedding, what it meant, what it meant for the two of them. But the only thing that burned through him was an urge to keep as far away from weighty topics like that. And so, he leaned back in the bed, drawing his wife back with him, so she laid atop him. His hand petted her antennas gently, cocking around awkwardly, but he didn't care how cockeyed his shoulder and spine got, he was going to pet his wife.
"Okay, my question: You're seven hundred and fifty million years old," he said, the words still feeling like half joke.
"This is not a question, Lou."
"I'm getting there!" He laughed. "Okay. But if you're seven hundred and fifty million years old, if you've been aware that you need to settle other solar systems for almost five hundred million of those years, why haven't you colonized the entire galaxy? Even limited to below the speed of light, you should have colonized everywhere, right?"
She cocked her head. "I...did not leap immediately from realization to actualization. How long did it take humans to reach space?"
"The time between the first man landing on the moon and the first man setting foot on another star is two centuries," Lou said.
She sat up, twirled around, and looked right into his eyes, her antennas buzzing. "A single microcycle? That's all it took? But…" She shook her head. "But you are singular. Of course…" She laid her head down and stuck her nose right into his armpit – and tried to speak, which meant her voice was muffled entirely. The feeling of her mouthparts moving against his skin made him squirm, laugh, and push at her head.
"Don't talk with your...nose full!"
She drew back, blinking. "Oh, sorry. I forgot I have no other bioforms nearby that could speak for me." She rubbed at her nose, then twitched her antennas again. "My initial state required communication between bioforms, which was handled via the use of sound waves propagated through the atmosphere. But once my bioforms became more common and spread beyond the valley that I initially...came...to be...in? They needed more. And so, I modified bioforms, seeking to find a way to communicate more effectively. It took almost half a cycle of...testing?"
"Experimentation?" Lou suggested.
"Yes!" She nodded. "Half a cycle and then I made a bioform that communicated with...they are...waves and particles?"
"Light?"
She shook her head. "Not of the kind that you see. The kind below!"
"...radio?"
"Yes!" She bobbed her head happily, a dazzling smile spreading across her features.
"I practiced with Amy. My bioforms with radio communication allowed me to spread across the world, which was my initial thought after my startling events. But after I was on the entire world, I learned, startling events can cause problems across an entire planet. But traveling beyond a planet meant the delay from radio waves traveling caused my mind to slow. I determined this would make my mind unable to spread the distance between stars." She sighed. "Fortunately, I was able to experiment far, far, far more. Rather than a few hundred thousand experimentational bioforms, I was able to breed them by the billions. And so, it only took half a cycle to discover the means by which I could instantly communicate."
"Quantum entangled communication…" Lou said, nodding. "This...is actually a huge deal. Meeting the...meeting you is how we humans actually learned how to make the first practicable quantum communicators. It was a theory before we met you, but studying you showed us how to, uh…" He trailed off and shook his head. "But our xenobiologists thought it had to have been a natural evolution – the basis for your hive mind."
"It did make my thinking far faster," she said. "But then, once I could, I had to reach new worlds. Then, I had to make them safe. I began by collecting up asteroids, then I bled off tectonic energies to prevent super-volcanic eruptions. Some worlds had to be entirely remade, or pushed away from stars. This was very difficult – it takes many many many applications of force, usually via the breeding of specific bioforms that can survive harsh landscapes and produce thrusts. T...There were mistakes…" Her antennas drooped. "Some worlds were rent apart, before I realized how pressures worked…a-and that is not even including…"
Lou blinked, then took her hand, speaking quickly to distract her from memories of the Lupens and the Procyians. "You spent millions of years...tidying?"
She nodded her head. "Yes!"
"And you never got bored?" He asked, caressing his hand along her head.
She shook her head. "No. My perception of time is...I think...very different from yours. When the work is long, when my focus is...broad...then time goes very quickly." She laid her head upon his chest, breathing in. "When I am with you, time stands still."
Lou felt as if he had been punched in the heart.
His hand slowly rested against the small of her back.
I think...I love my wife, he thought. And it was the most wondrous thought in the galaxy – more beautiful than the stars, and more precious than diamonds.
***
"Pull!"
The catapult chuffed and a sphere of white plastic shot into the air. A second later, several .75 caliber mass reactive self propelled armor piercing minirockets slammed into it and turned it into many small fragments.
GF lowered the immense firearm he had fabricated. "Aaha, got it!"
Lou, who was sitting on the picnic blanket that he had laid out with his wife, furrowed his brow. "This is the most dangerous game?" He had been invited to join Amy and GF for it once his wife had said she was ready to experience more 'singular' experiences. She had told him that...it was a bit like focusing very hard on a single small dot. It could be tricky, but she was certain she could handle two other singulars around.
"GF calls everything that," Amy said.
"That's cause everything's dangerous with me, baby," GF said.
Lou's wife cocked her head, to the side. "This is...a projectile weapon?"
"Yeah," GF said, then coughed. "B-But it's only used recreationally. We never used these to fight."
Lou's wife's antennas drooped and Amy grabbed the ungainly firearm and chucked it, underhanded, into the spider legged mobile nanofabricator that followed her like a helpful dog. As the weapon was dissolved into goop, GF shrugged. "That's a fair cop," he muttered. "Oh! I know! We can have a movie night."
"It is currently day and you and Amy and Lou are all in constant movement," Lou's wife said. Then, hurriedly, she added. "I like and appreciate your movement, Lou."
"I...you mean my breathing?" Lou asked.
"And your blinking," she said, then smiled and blinked at him.
Lou took one of her hands, squeezing. "Thanks," he said.
"Come onnn movie night!" GF said. "Your...okay, we also need to pick a name for you. We can't just call you Lou's wife for all eternity."
"Beatrice!" Amy said, immediately.
"No," Lou said, flatly.
"What is Beatrice?" his wife asked.
"It's a name! It comes from a name that comes from a name that means, in the original language, 'she who makes happy'," Amy said cheerfully. "But, far more importantly, a Bee, which is the first sound in the name, is also the name for a kind of insect!" She held out her phone and projected a holographic image of a honey bee.
Lou's wife's antennas literally became straight, snapping up in her excitement. "Lou! Lou! Lou!" She grabbed his hand, then grabbed his head with her two upper hands, swinging his head around, so he had to look at the rotating holo. "Look! It is a high efficiency pollinator with a rudimentary melee weapon and incredibly efficient wings and it has the same kind of camouflage pattern as some of my bioforms! It is the most perfect name to have ever existed, for I too, wish to make you happy!"
"I-" Lou flushed. "I…" He blinked. "Really?"
"Yes," she said, nodding.
"...really, though, Beatrice?" Lou asked. "I mean, isn't it-"
"Beatrice! Beatrice! Beatrice!" Amy chanted, GF joining in. Soon, his wife was joining in as well, uncertainty, then with more confidence. "Beatrice! Beatrice! Beatrice."
Lou, perforce, capitulated utterly.
Not wanting to expose Beatrice (Lou still felt like he had whiplash from how fast the name had been adopted) to what two AnComs thought internal decorating should be, Lou put his foot down and demanded that the movie night take place inside of the modest country home that his parents had fabricated. They were able to choose a room for the theater, which Amy set up with a haze of nanofabrication and some alarming power tools ("Don't worry!" she had said, "I'll repair any damage.") The end result was that Amy was lounged on the floor in front of a large cushy sofa, while GF had taken a reclining chair, and Lou and Bea were both settled onto the sofa itself.
"Popcorn me!" GF said to the nanofabricator, which whirred and spat out a bowl of heavily buttered and salted popcorn.
"What is this?" Bea asked.
Lou nodded. "It's a form of sustenance."
"It seems entirely inadequate based on the nutritional guidelines I had been given on human biology," she said, her antennas curling up a bit as Lou caressed her belly and held her close and tried to not just marvel at how pleasant it was to hold his wife.
"Dude, we don't just eat for sustenance!" GF said, grinning. "We also eat cause shit tastes good. And popcorn is one of those things. Does this body need to eat?"
"Yes. In twelve hours, it will have to be either recycled or fed," Bea said, nodding. "But my digestive systems are designed for the feeding systems back at the hive, which involves feeder bugs injecting the nutrients into my belly with thin stingers."
"...yeah...next body, make sure to have taste buds. Use medical textbooks to guide you," GF said, nodding. "You are going to want to try human food. Human food is fucking amazing." He popped a popcorn kernel into his mouth. "Plus, you're going to need it for the oral."
"Oral?" Bea asked.
"So! What are we watching? Shakespeare?" Lou said, hurriedly. "Dominique Guérin's rendition from 2201 is really the exemplar, his, ah, Much Ado About Nothing, which I think is quite appropriate, yes?"
Amy craned her head back. "Dude, we can't watch Shakespeare while on Alpha Centauri's only life bearing planet and a freaking alien cuddling with you?" She laughed. "We're starting. The year is 1966, baby, and we're watching the Man Trap!" She snapped her fingers.
"The what?" Lou asked as a voice spoke from the screen.
"Space...the final frontier…"
Lou gaped. "That spaceship is utterly-"
"SHHHHH!"
***
The movie night ran into problems with a movie adaptation of a novel that Lou had never even heard of. It was some military-science fiction piece from the 2050s – and the reason why it had come up was the most AnCom reason in the universe.
"Why aren't we watching more Star Trek?" Lou asked.
"Two episodes is almost one movie, ergo, we start a new movie," Amy said, cheerfully.
"That's-"
"Also, there's a limit to how much 60s cheese is safe to be exposed to modern audiences."
"What is cheese?" Bea whispered, quietly, into Lou's ear. He squirmed at the tickling feeling of her breath against his skin. He blushed – but before he could answer, GF grinned and provided the punchline.
"Shatner's acting!"
"What is Shatner?" Bea whispered, then paused and sniffed at Lou's ear.
"He's Kirk."
"I thought Kirk was the captain of the human starship," Beatrice said, frowning. "Also, humans are capable of traveling faster than the speed of light?"
"Oh, no, these are all fictional stories," Amy said, hurriedly.
"But Lou said that stories are how humans understand the universe, and tell truths? Fiction means it is not true?" She cocked her head.
"What is truth?" GF murmured.
"You do not know either?" Bea asked.
"Godfucker!" Amy said, her voice serious. "Don't throw the dead frenchmen at the poor buggo!" She turned and leaned against the sofa. "Okay, so, humans like to discuss and understand complicated and esoteric concepts via stories – and stories are also told because they're entertaining!" She grinned. "Are you not entertained?"
"Yes!" Bea declared. "I enjoy stories a great deal."
"Okay!" Amy rubbed her hands together. "Next movie up?"
"Old Man's War – it's my favorite," GF said, nodding. "Also, it's got some really great action scenes and...you know, you can see the positive side of our war." He smiled at Bea. "There were generations, generations I say, of humans who were excited to finally meet bug aliens to fight."
"I...is this good?" Bea asked as the film started.
"Yeah!" GF said, cheerfully.
Lou wasn't sure if he agreed with GF – and he felt a bit nervous. The film began with the premise – an Earth where the elderly are recruited to fight in wars against alien empires, transferring their consciousness from their old, worn out bodies to genetically engineered combat bodies. Lou could see why GF and Amy would like that plot point, considering how GF was likely on his third or even fifth body. Beatrice didn't seem upset by the movie as she watched.
Until the scene.
The main character was fighting aliens, it was very intense, very action packed. It was all a bit much for Lou, who was used to battles being suggested as happening off screen, or being a few men on a stage crossing swords and slashing at one another. Beatrice remained intent, though she murmured. "This is clearly fake – I can see many ways that this is inaccurate, based on my experiences battling humans. I-"
"Shh!" Amy hissed.
Beatrice nodded, closing her mouth.
Then the main character came upon where the aliens had kept the humans – and the film revealed the fictional aliens...ate people. They found them delicious. There was a lingering shot of a dismembered human body. The gleaming meat cleavers. The half eaten flesh. Lou felt Bea tensing up.
"They ate us...like cattle…"
Consumed. That was the word she had used, describing the human subunits that she had…
Beatrice slowly shrank in on herself, drawing her legs up, tucking her face down against her knees – an instinctive, shockingly human reaction. Her antennas rubbed together, making that soft keeping noise.
"Shut it off," Lou said, his voice flat.
"But-" GF started.
"Shut it off now!" He shouted and Amy scrambled to turn off the screen. He wrapped his arms around Beatrice, who was trembling slightly, whispering.
"I do not wish to watch stories anymore," she said, and Lou, his cheeks burning, stood up, nodded to the two of his guests.
"Thank you for the movie night, goodnight," he said, his voice all stiff formality, and then he turned and strode up the stairs, heading straight for his room – whipping past two servitors, past his mother, who was walking down the corridor. She opened her mouth, but then blinked as Lou simply ignored her.
He came to his room, stepped sideways inside, and found that the interior was exactly the same as the room he had had back on Venus. The subtle difference in gravity and light through the window was the only hint that he hadn't stepped four light years in a second. He kicked the door shut, then laid Bea down. He stood – and then yelped as Bea grabbed him and dragged him down into the bed.
"Don't go," she said, her voice soft.
His palms were planted to either side of her, careful to not touch her wings. He looked down into her eyes, then blinked as Bea leaned up and mashed her mouth against his mouth. It was awkward and confusing and was not helped by the fact that Lou had no idea what he was doing either. It was clear Bea was trying to do what she had seen on the screen. She didn't know to use her tongue – and Lou found himself gently sliding his tongue into her mouth. He met hers, finding it was...oddly rough and dry. Her tongue pressed to his, curiously, and she made a very soft little churring noise at the base of her throat, which buzzed into his mouth. Her antennas rubbed together – and then she drew back. She was breathing slightly.
"I...I...I…" she whispered. "I…good."
She nodded, her antennas rubbing even faster together. The songlike noise it made was cheerful and high.
Lou smiled, slightly. "Thanks…" he whispered, biting his lip. His pocket buzzed. His brow furrowed and sat back, pulling out his communicator. It was his father. He held up his finger to Beatrice, his cheeks burning, his heart hammering as he spoke into it. "Yes?"
"What is going on?" Father asked, sounding stern. "The hellgaunts at our perimeter are…" he paused. "Crooning."
"Crooning?" Lou looked at Bea, his brow furrowing.
She blinked. "Should they not?"
"One second," Lou said, his cheeks burning. He lowered the phone. "C-Can you move every single bioform of yours five kilometers away from humans."
"I...y-yes…" she said, looking so crestfallen that Lou felt as if he had kicked a small, exceptionally happy puppy. Then she started to stand, her head almost bumping into the low hanging roof of the four poster bed. He grabbed her hand.
"Except this one!" he said.
Her delight was so intense and so obvious, her antennas uncurling and slapping against the panel that made up the bed's roof with a hollow thumping sound. "Oh! I am very glad you don't want this bioform five kilometers away." She smiled at him.
"It would make...kissing you again very hard," he said, his voice soft.
"You...want to kiss me again?" she asked, kneeling down.
"Yes...a lot," Lou said.
"I regret...a great deal that the wedding took place before I had learned of human kissing," she said, her voice soft as her upper hands settled upon his shoulders. Lou's com buzzed again and he picked it up, biting back an angry growl.
"Louis-"
"She's a hive mind, Father, and...we're married." His voice dropped to a hiss. "Do you require me to place more pieces before you, sir, or do you understand me?"
Father's response was a choked. "A-Ah. Y...Yes! I understand, my apologies."
The com clicked off and Lou tossed it into the corner of the room without a thought, then slowly leaned his wife down, kissing her deeply. Her antennas curled up in delight as her four hands slid along his back, caressing him. Her mouth and his met and their tongues played together and then she was pushing him away, panting, her eyes unfocused. "L-Lou, my husband, I am feeling...extremely unusual." She gulped. "I...am…" She opened her mouth, then closed it again, then blinked. "I believe that I am...excited? I have been excited before, but...but...but not so...fast or…" She trailed off.
"What excited you before?" Lou asked, leaning down. He experimentally kissed where her antenna met her head, his nose rustling her furry hair. She actually arched her back slightly, one of her dainty feet kicking out as she fluttered a wing against his belly. Two of her hands pressed against his belly.
"C-Coming to new solar systems! S-Seeing ecosystems grow…"
"Things that take months at the shortest, centuries at the longest…" Lou leaned down, kissing the small hole that she used for hearing. "This takes moments, my...wife." He licked her, experimentally and she let out a tiny whining noise.
"I...I…" She trembled a bit, then closed her eyes, drawing in a short, sharp gasp. "I...I...am...feeling! Feeling!" She grabbed at his head, with one of her hands, drawing him down and kissing him. This time, it was her tongue that swept into his mouth as she clung to him, her body writhing against his, her wings making a staccato rattling noise against the sheets as she drummed them down. Her teeth actually nipped at his lower lip as she drew back, panting heavily. "More! I want to feel it more! I want to feel it more more more more!" She nodded.
Lou drew back, then blushed. "Y...Yes. My husbandly duties require it." He gulped, then reached down.
Lou performs his husbandly duties with great aplomb
He started to undo the buttons of the top she had fabricated in the nanofabricator – rather than the medical shift she had worn before. He revealed the small, blue-black mounds of her breasts, her nipples tiny ice blue points. He leaned slowly down, then kissed one of her nipples, gently. He took her between his lips and sucked.
"I...am confused…" she said, blinking. "I...t-that feels, but, not more?"
Lou's cheeks burned. He drew back – and forced down his first and immediate reaction, which was humiliating levels of pure shame. He...after the way she had reacted, he had expected that even this little gesture would curl her toes and bring out cries of pleasure. But no. She was an alien. He was a virgin. There were going to be road-bumps. And so, he smiled and asked her. "Well, in human bodies, ah...these are erogen...that is, they are areas that feel...pleasure."
"Oh." She blinked. "I have no nerve endings there."
"...what about here?" Lou asked, his fingers pointing down to the join of her legs.
She shook her head. "No. Why would I?"
Lou felt a faint, sinking feeling in his breast...but then he hardened his resolve. She didn't have normal, human erogenous zones. And so, it was his duty to find hers and to bring her pleasure. That was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant he wasn't going to...well...he had lived nearly two decades without...entering a woman. He could stand to live a day or two while it took Beatrice to make a new body. And so, he drew her up into a sitting position. He held her around her belly as her arms reached back to caress him as he kissed her neck, licked, nibbled. This provoked a tiny, confused 'muh?' noise from her. Then he licked from her neck to her ear. His hand caressed her antenna and this caused her to tremble and squirm.
"T-This is...the new context I...this is making me...see...white flashes and…" She panted slowly. "M-My...I...really enjoy this but bioforms across several planets are now…" She kicked out one of her legs. "It's...hard to...keep them...ah…"
"Don't think about them," Lou murmured. "Right now, this is about you."
"They are me and I'm them and we're all...all...all!" Her eyes widened and her back arched as he clenched her antenna, just a bit tighter, then bit down on her neck, provoking a loud: "Ahh!" From her. Her body spasmed, her wings fluttering against his back as her two lower arms gripped his knees, clenching him as she gasped heavily, her breasts heaving as she collapsed back against him, her eyes going drooped.
"How was that?" Lou chuckled, quietly.
"Mmmmmm! Hmm...MMM!" She nodded. "M...I...am...so...my entire...we...buzzing…" She laughed, sounding giddy. "I...singularity is...v-very...I…I need rest…"
"Okay. I'll be here once you're back." Lou whispered, drawing her close as her body went limp – her mind spreading outwards once more, to settle into the higher realm that she remained in when she was freed from focusing upon her. When time began to move again. His hands slid along her body, marveling, and he tried to ignore the aching pressure of his member against his pants. He...closed his eyes and he thought, instead, of holding his wife. Of the wonder in her voice as she felt...what he thought...was her first orgasm.
"I love you," he whispered, softly, and wondered if she could hear him where she was.
***
Godfucker whistled to himself as he walked out onto the grounds, humming. "Nothing like banging robo-ass," he said, cheerfully. "Nothing like tapping on that quantum c-"
A hideous horrifying monstrosity – of the same breed that had killed more humans in combat than some weapon systems made by human beings. It was a hellgaunt: Sleek, with a greyhound's anatomy and the black and white dazzle camo chitin that made them so hard to track in a swarm. The only thing that it lacked was the wormgun that they normally carried and fired acid bore worms at enemies. It stood before Godfucker.
"Godfucker." It growled.
"AHHHHHHH!" Godfucker sprang backwards, lifting up his hands, already aware that he was…then his brain clicked back into movement again. "Oh. Oh!" He said, blinking. "Oh, hey Bea. Uh, why...are…"
"I did not wish to be observed speaking to you. Lou is currently in his rest cycle," the hellgaunt hissed and chittered, green slime dripping past its jagged teeth.
"Makes sense," Godfucker said, nodding. "What's up, my Bea?"
The hellgaunt craned its head upwards, peering up with pitiless black eyes. "An artificial dome that contains an oxygen atmosphere that humans need to breathe-"
Godfucker chuckled. "No, no, I mean, what do you need?" he asked. "What is it you want to ask me that Lou can't...right, he's asleep."
"Ah. Yes. This is my query: Humans enjoy minor startlements that are pleasurable surprises rather than unpleasant ones? Correct?" The hellgaunt nodded its whole body like an excited puppy. It was even wagging its tail. Godfucker grinned.
"You got it. What do you want to surprise Lou with?" Godfucker asked, kneeling down so that the hellgaunt could look into his eyes more easily. The hellgaunt hissed and drooled more green slime, then leaned in close, whispering very softly.
"Last night, Lou...made...good feelings. That I have only felt before, but, during good things! But, they were far faster! In seconds! Seconds, not decades! All at once!"
"Niiiiiiiiice," Godfucker murmured, rubbing his palms together.
"It was!" Bea said, earnestly. "What pleasant minor startlement shall I arrange for Lou? It must be quick – he shall awaken in less than four hours, maybe five. It is uncertain."
Godfucker rubbed his chin. "Well. If he got you off…"
"He did not get me anywhere. He in fact asked me to stay."
Godfucker put his hand onto his face. "Okay. You know, one of these days, I am going to learn to just...okay. He made you orgasm. Do you want to help him to orgasm?" He leaned in close, then whispered into her ear – his voice husky and soft. The hellgaunt cocked its head, absorbing the words slowly as Godfucker nodded, then added a bit more flourishes. Then he smacked his head, took out his phone, and brought up a hologram. He showed it to her, and as the sweet music of the AnCom pornography filled the small meadow clearing, the hellgaunt watched with beady, black eyes, its claws clicking in mute thought.
Once Godfucker was done, the hellgaunt bobbed. "This is what wives do?"
"Yeah! And-" Godfucker stopped himself before he started trying to over-explain. In even this incredibly short time, he had really figured that Lou was way better at explaining this stuff than he was. "And yeah, yeah, you got it, buggo."
The hellgaunt chittered and hissed, then bumped its head against Godfucker's shoulder. "You have my thanks, Godfucker."
The hellgaunt turned and thumped off.
Godfucker stood, beamed, and nodded to himself. "You owe me, Lou."
He walked off, whistling cheerfully.
TO BE CONTINUED!
Hey, Dragon Cobolt here! Hope you're enjoying Pax Multi. If you want to keep enjoying it for free, the next chapter will be up next monday! But if you want to read it all right now, you can buy it on Amazon! Thanks for reading! Leave comments, each comment is a gold coin in my dragon horde. ...hoard? Hoarde!
The Anarchist Commune, the Neopolitan Star Kingdom, the Federated States, the Upkin Collective and the Plurality of Jupiter.
But by population, it's like...80%, 5%, 5%, 5%, 5%, most humans are in the AnCom (technically the AnCom is many, many, many polities, forming, collapsing, reforming, but outside of the AC, it's hard to really track it.)
Her eyes closed and she ducked her head forward. "Three hundred twenty eight thousand one hundred and ninety humans! A-And then...if human subunits are humans, and not subunits, if they were all like me, then...then so were the others! Sixty eight million seven hundred thirty two thousand five hundred and ninety two, five hundred million, ninety eight thousand, five hundred and six! All! Consumed! Consumed, I…" She closed her eyes and screamed. "I killed them all! I killed them!" And she let out another horrible keening noise – a sound that Lou had never wanted hear again.
Having read the story a couple of times, this scene always gets me!
Both in this and Dream of the Sky you do a really good job of writing characters having absolutely gut wrenching breakdowns over world altering (for them) revelations.
This is a bit odd, because although she didn't know that the two sapient species she 'met' before were not hive minds, and she may not have had a concept of them as sapient for that matter, she did know that they were confined to a singular solar system. Something that was a formative trauma and turning point in her own development. By consuming basically all biomass on their planets, she should have known she was killing something comparable to her even if she thought she was killing 'one' instead of 'several hundred million' or 'a few billion'.
And I appreciate that, but can't comment on why it is apt for reasons. We shall just have to bask in the unspoken shared meme-age held by the majority of readers.
