The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Games and stories.
Post Reply
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

I've occassionally contemplated doing a rewrite fic of this certain schlocky movie on account of I actually really liked the first movie and felt seriously let down by the sequel, originally I had in mind some ambitious novel-length thing but I'm way not invested in this enough for that, but I got the idea for a short fic this morning so I figured eh, why not?

I'll probably post part II later today or tomorrow, I'm not sure whether it's going to have two or three parts.

It has some somewhat icky body horror stuff (nothing beyond the boundaries of decent taste, I think, but hey, consider the franchise it's based on) so if you have a weak stomach for that kind of thing be warned.

------

Part I: Larva

He was not as strong as his brother. That saved him. He slipped quietly into the darkness. His brother had less fear of the big, awkward thing that stank of sweat and fear. His brother stayed where he was, on the ledge, and continued to feed, increasing his advantage, adding to his strength.

His brother sensed the threat in the thing, but also that it was weak, slow, afraid, that its senses were dim. His brother lashed out at the thing.

His brother challenged the things, standing above them, flesh almost finished shifting from mimicry to aggressive display, a spider-like thing of spindly limbs and a broad crowned head, almost beautiful in the firelight, like something from a Javanese shadow puppet play.

His brother fell, screaming agony in his mind, cloaked in fire, covered in burning jelly, amorphous tissue melting and blackening, organs failing, cooking.

Screams in his mind, loud and ugly, anger and grief, obscurely complex to the mind of a little animal not ten minutes old, running on instinct, not able to understand all the emotions of a mother who has just watched her son being burned to death, heard/felt his pain in her mind, but the anger and pain was clear enough. An ugly symphony of obscure complexity, cutting off with shocking abruptness, no pain. No time for pain, in the time it takes a bullet to pass from the surface of the skin to the center of the brain; a bullet is faster than pain, the brain became fragmented unthinking mush before it could feel, let alone process.

He lay still and quiet, claws dug into the rock, crouched in a crevasse, while the blundering creatures retreated. There were no words in his mind yet, he could not have articulated loneliness and loss, but he felt them. She was gone. He was gone. If he had words he would have felt little need for further articulation, his world as yet contained one she, one he, one I. After that, there were things.

No clumsy two-legged things returned. He moved. He fed, ate rats, pieces of the flesh of his mother and brother. He followed his nose toward fresher air, though he did not recognize it as such, merely as something he should follow. Eventually he emerged into night, moonlight, starlight, the light of street lamps. He hid.

At first he hid, looking for food only when no-one was around. He couldn’t get anywhere near enough food that way. His body knew enough to throttle back on its manic growth – closer to bamboo than human – when no fuel and raw materials were available, but it also protested. But things got better. Words and concepts started to bang around in his mind. He was in a city, those things were people, he knew if he could get some clothes he could make them see him as one of them. Sometimes he picked up words from watching people, but mostly it seemed that he remembered things.

Sometimes it seemed he remembered more than things about what he saw, but it was never clear when he was awake. They surfaced mostly in dreams. Sometimes he dreamed of people, the city, a train, a glass cage, it seemed he was a different person. Sometimes he had much stranger dreams, of a deep dark ocean where things swam. He was afraid of that place, but he also felt like he belonged there. He didn’t remember his dreams very well when he was awake.

He found clothes in garbage bins. He learned to use some food he’d picked out of a bin to draw pigeons to an alley where nobody could see him, and then he’d snatch the pigeons out of the air and swallow them. It was easy, they were slow and complacent birds. It wasn’t that he wasn’t hungry anymore, he was always hungry, but he had enough food to drive the hunger back a bit. He grew. He had to keep finding new clothes because the old ones got too small.

The hunger started to get worse anyway. He had the feeling he should look for some place where nobody would find him. The night found some place that felt right he woke up and saw something moving under the skin of his arm. It broke the skin, wiggling, wormlike, a red worm. Other red worms joined it, wiggling outward, long, like tentacles, like roots. He didn’t know what was happening and was very frightened. Instinct had little to say to him, except that he must not draw attention to himself. He sobbed, but he did not scream, as the red worms twisted around a pipe and pulled him up and seemed to form a cage around him. Then there was nothing but darkness, and bad dreams.

When he broke out again it was dark, he didn’t know whether it was the same night or days had passed. He fell onto the ground, coughing convulsively and gasping in air. He looked in a pool of water and saw a young man with long blond hair and blue eyes, tall, handsome. He was relieved. He had been afraid something much worse was happening to him.

After he found something to eat he stopped being hungry. That had never happened to him before.

That night, he had new dreams; frightening, wonderful dreams.

The next morning he called out. He sang a symphony of purpose, need, loneliness, longing, and self-aggrandizement. It was not a work of art – no more than the flashing patterns of squid or the plumage of a bird of paradise is art, it was a thing of nature, not culture – but to one like him, it would have been beautiful. No human could have heard the song, though with a radio one might have detected it – but one like him could not have missed it unless she was over the horizon.

Silence. Not even an answering note of rejection. Simply emptiness, absorbing the song with bland non-reaction.

He had not expected an answer. He had called out before, from simple aloneness, for help and company. There had never been an answer.

It did not occur to him that, if his creators had seen him now, they would have thought it a pity there was nobody to hear and understand the song. It had a novelty they would have appreciated. Creatures in their lightless ocean rarely had reason to ask to be told that they were not the only member of their kind in all the world. Once in a while, something lost and stupid might sing something like that. But one rarely heard it in the middle of a request for sex.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

Re: The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

Part II: Alex and Rosa

Three days later, he met Rosa.

She was carrying heavy bags. One of them tore and spilled groceries at his feet. He could hear her say something, he didn’t understand it, it was angry, soft. He helped her pick up the groceries and carried two of her bags up the stairs for her.

Days passed. Helping her became a ritual. She would smile at him, thank him, talk to him, and he liked that. It was nice to be smiled at, talked to nicely.

He had never seen what his mother looked like while trying to look like a normal person, but he sensed Rosa looked nothing like her. She was small, brown, everything dark, hair black, eyes almost black, face and body dark brown, plain, not ugly but not beautiful, hands rough and dry from washing too many dishes with strong soap. But somehow, she reminded him of mother. Maybe it was just because she was a woman, and was nice to him.

She gave him a name. She gave him a name by asking for his; it was the first time he had needed one. He told her his name was Alex.

Many days passed. He lost count. They talked. They became comfortable with each other; friends. He learned all about her life. Those conversations were minefields; he knew enough about the world of people to know better than to tell the truth, but he did not know enough to make detailed and convincing lies. He did not know it, but more by luck than deliberate effort he managed to give her the impression of being a child abuse victim, and she decided not to push very hard to get him to talk about his past, thinking that in trying to draw him out she had been probing wounds.

The impression of motherliness was not imaginary. Rosa did not think she was a more than average people-reader, but some highly paid people would have been rather embarrassed to find a thirty-two year old woman with no college was arguably doing a better job of dealing with a nonhuman intelligent creature than they had. Of course, she did this by having no idea that it was a nonhuman creature, and sensing some very human-shaped holes.

Alex didn’t really know what to make of her little ritual of inspecting his arms for needle-marks, or a lot of the advice she gave him. But the content didn’t matter. It was enough that somebody was worried about him. It was delicious that somebody was worried about him.

One day she offered to let him move in with her. Alex did not think he suffered by not living in a box of walls, but she insisted, and he agreed because he didn’t want to do anything that might make her mad.

Alex did his best to make himself useful by the only way he could think of; housework. It took him a little while to figure out everything, especially cooking. The first morning she caught him eating eggs, whole and raw, the shells crunching as he chewed them. She was too much of a traditionalist to find the whole thing completely appropriate, and occasionally said things about “my wife” that went completely over Alex’s head but he pretended to find a little funny, like she seemed to. But he also sensed her genuine appreciation. She had two jobs, she worked hard. Alex had noticed, early on, that he hardly ever saw her in anything but variations of the same outfit; white shirt, knee-length black skirt, stockings and high heels. It was her waitress outfit. She was often tired when she came home, and Alex felt her quiet appreciation of being able to rest afterward.

She taught him Spanish. He picked it up very quickly. He pretended to be slower than he really was, when he sensed she thought it was strange how quickly he picked it up. Soon they talked in it all the time, and he could speak it almost as well as she could. She said she thought he might be able to do something with how good he was at learning languages, find some sort of good job.

Alex tried to figure out how to ask Rosa to have a baby with him.

He had a feeling that if she were like him he would have had a much easier time with this. He might have been rejected, or killed (he had quite a lot of sex dreams, and they ended with him dying a lot), but he would not have had this confusion, this having no idea what to do, what to say to her. But people, those awkward, soft, hive-like, chattering creatures … with them, everything was complicated.

It took three months for him to find the right words. To tell her that he loved her.

Rosa did not take it very seriously at first, she thought it was just teenage hormones and poor socialization, something that would pass, but she didn’t have the heart to shoot it down. Months went by, and it didn’t pass, and she started to take it more seriously. He hardly seemed the type she would want to spend her life with, but … maybe for a little while.

She made those terms clear to him. He said he understood, agreed, and he really did. He really did like Rosa, and if she did not want to be with him, he did not want to make her unhappy. Besides, he only needed her for a little while.

When the baby came, then he wouldn’t be alone anymore.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

Re: The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

Warning: some discussion of sex and sexuality in this part, thought I should give people the heads-up.

On a different note, "in-universe" Rosa's diary would be mostly written in Spanish (well, Spanglish anyway). Some of the diary entries might read a little weird if you don't know this ("why are these random quotes 'English exercises'?"), text that would be in English in the "real" diary I have put in italics. And no, I don't speak Spanish, so I have no idea what the "real" text would look like.

----------

Part III: Excerpt from Rosa Martinez’s diary


8/4

Dear Diary

Alex ate a cockroach yesterday! I saw it crawling around next to the hot plate and pointed it out and he scooped it up and ate it! Yuck! I told him he shouldn’t eat insects, they’re dirty, and made him brush his teeth.

Juana down the hall was working the cash register at the drug store when I bought condoms today. I was a little embarrassed.


8/5

Dear Diary

Today is my birthday!

I got a few presents from my relatives. Mostly clothes, a nice sweater and shoes, some money. It’s not much, but it’s nice, and it helps. I spent some of the money on some nicer than usual take-out and put the rest in the savings box.

Alex didn’t know what birthdays are! I had to explain it to him! Now he’s really guilty he can’t get me a present. I told him it’s not his fault he has no money!


8/6

Dear Diary

I told Cora about my problem writing and she said I should try writing a little something every day. What do you think, should I write to you every day? Maybe it would be a good idea, but I think I would just fill you up with me saying nothing interesting happened today.


8/7

Dear Diary

Pedro’s dog almost bit Alex today. She really went crazy. Pedro said it was like she’d gotten a smell of something she really didn’t like. Dogs really don’t seem to like Alex for some reason.


8/8

Dear Diary

English writing, memorization.

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
Lao Tzu


Looked it up, no mistakes.


8/9

Dear Diary

Alex didn’t know about masturbation! We were going to have sex last night and I said maybe we could do something different this time, and I said maybe he’d let me watch him. He didn’t know what I was talking about! I had to explain the idea of masturbation to him! It took a while for me to realize the problem wasn’t vocabulary, he didn’t have the idea!

Random thought, me and Alex had sex with each other for the first time on July 9, does that make this some kind of anniversary?


8/10

Dear Diary

It sucks to work 7 days a week sometimes! I’m really tired today, wish I can have a day off! Hope I’ll feel better tomorrow.


8/11

Dear Diary

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
Lao Tzu


Writing this down because I feel tired and depressed and maybe I’ll feel better if I stop thinking of how things could be better and just let reality be reality and take what comes.

Alex can tell I’m depressed and is trying to make me feel better. It makes me guilty because now he’s sad because I’m sad, but it makes me feel better to have somebody around the house who cares about me. It used to be my apartment could be lonely because the only people I could really talk to were friends from work and some of the neighbors, now it isn’t that way, which is nice. My apartment feels like a nicer place now.


8/12

Dear Diary

I was talking to Cora at work today, we talked about some books she was reading and then about her new boyfriend and then she asked me about Alex, and I told her about that thing that happened a few days ago when I found out he didn’t know about masturbation, and she said if we were into that kind of thing she might have something for me. Work was over and we were standing around her car, and she opened the trunk of her car and got something out of this box of junk in the back, and it was this model penis (there’s a word for those things but I don’t remember exactly what it is, dildo I think), and she said she didn’t use it anymore and it was just taking up space and would I like it?

Really I thought the whole thing was a little yucky and embarrassing, but I didn’t want to be rude so I took it.

I showed it to Alex when he came back from buying the groceries and he didn’t realize what it was. I had to explain it to him, and he says oh he sees it now, but it doesn’t look like his, why is that? And I said it was because it was circumcised and he wasn’t circumcised, and then he didn’t know what that was and I had to explain it to him, and he said wouldn’t that hurt, and I said I guess probably but they usually do it when you’re a baby so you don’t remember it.

I told Alex to wash it really really well with the strong cleaning fluid and then wrap it in some newspaper and put it in my clothes and things box.


8/13

Dear Diary

Writing in English.

If you meet a disputant in action,
A powerful man, superior to you,
Fold your arms, bend your back,
To flout him will not make him agree with you.
Make little of his evil speech
By not opposing him while he’s in action;
He will be called an ignoramus,
Your self-control will match his little pile (of words)

If you meet a disputant in action
Who is your equal, on your level
You will make your worth exceed his by silence,
While he is speaking evilly,
There will be much talk by the hearers,
Your name will be good in the mind of the magistrates.

If you meet a disputant in action,
A poor man, not your equal,
Do not attack him because he is weak,
Let him alone, he will confute himself.
Do not answer him to relieve your heart,
Wretched is he who injures a poor man,

Instructions to Ptahhotep, Ancient Egyptian Middle Kingdom


This is a good one for today because today at work I got in a fight with Jennie and she complained to the boss and the boss took her side, and then when I came home I caught Alex eating something yucky again and I said hurtful things to him because I was in a bad mood. I’m sorry! I said I was sorry and I took it all back to Alex and gave him a big hug, and I’ll say I’m sorry to Jennie and the boss tomorrow.


8/14

Dear Diary

Said I’m sorry for what I did to start the fight and for fighting with her to Jennie and said I’m sorry for talking back to him to the boss this morning. Feel better now.

Heart feels better now, but stomach doesn’t feel so good. Constipation.


8/15

Dear Diary

Stomach problem gone today. I feel good.


8/16

Dear Diary

Is it weird that I get turned on imagining Alex with other women?

I told Cora about this and she said she thought maybe I’m a little bisexual. I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think imagining kissing a woman really turns me on and thinking about having sex with a woman is kind of yucky to me because I think women’s bottoms are gross. One of the things I find weirdest about men is it seems like they really like our sex parts instead of just putting up with them.

I think maybe it’s an anxiety thing. He’s seriously hot, I mean physically, and I’m plain, and I get the feeling he knows he’s hotter than me and doesn’t really care, but the little jealous woman inside me has trouble believing that. And also, I feel guilty, like I’ve cheated him, because I think he could do better than a woman who is plain and poor. Really, that’s part of the reason why I don’t want anything permanent with him, I think to myself, I will teach him not to behave as if he was raised by an alley cat (by parents who neglected him?) and then I will break up with him and he will be able to go and find and attract a prettier and richer woman than me, which is right because otherwise I’d be cheating him out of being with that woman and I’d be cheating that woman out of being with him and I’d be making them both worse off so I could be better off. So I think part of it is when I imagine him with prettier women I feel happy for him, and part of it is I like to imagine being with a prettier woman won’t change the way he feels about me.

Also, I think it’s because I have this thing where being jealous of sexier women can turn me on, because it makes me want to show that I can be sexy too, and I don’t think I’m very sexy but when I get into that I try to act sexy anyway, and this makes me think sexy and feel sexy, kind of a mind over matter thing.

I wish I’d thought of this while I was talking to Cora.


8/17

Dear Diary

I talked about some of the things I wrote in you last night to Cora today. She said maybe me and Alex should try talking about these kinds of fantasies as a sex play thing.

Sometimes I wish I had somebody else I could talk to about this kind of thing besides Cora and Alex, Cora is nice but she’s too open about sex things to me. I want to talk to her about my feelings yes, but not my sex.


8/18

Dear Diary

Me and Alex tried what Cora said we might do last night, it was really fun! It was therapeutic, I could talk to Alex about him getting turned on by other women and hear him say that, yes, that happened, but he was happy with me and with only having sex with me. It helped that Alex really didn’t seem uncomfortable when I told him about my fantasies about other men. I said to him he seemed really comfortable with that, and he said oh, he just imagines it happening while I’m already pregnant, then he feels happy for me and not jealous. And then he saw the look on my face and he got that look he gets when I catch him eating something yucky. I told him it’s OK, I get turned on by some weird things too, I think a lot of people are probably a little bit weird when it comes to what turns them on!


8/19

Dear Diary

Not really much of an English exercise, just writing down another quote I found that I like.

“To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime; to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognize, and yet when it comes to the greatest crime – waging war on another state – they praise it!”

“If a man on seeing a little black were to say it is black, but on seeing a lot of black were to say it is white, it would be clear that such a man could not distinguish black and white!”

Chinese philosopher Mozi, fifth century BC



8/20

Dear Diary

There was an interesting program on TV last night about that mummy they found in the Alps. I feel kind of sorry for him, not a very dignified way for your body to end up, as this sort of icky thing that is kept in a museum and every once in a while people stick things in and take pieces out of.


8/21

Dear Diary

Saw a pigeon with something wrong with its wing while on the way to work today. Felt sorry for it.


8/22

Dear Diary

Nothing happened today, I went to work, dinner, I watched TV, I listened to the radio. Life boring really.

And there’s my English exercise. Back to writing in Spanish now.
Really, my life isn’t bad. Not much happens, but I’m not an adventurous person. Boring is an unfair way to say it, I don’t really feel that way.

I think Cora is right and my problem with writing and writing English is confidence. I have the words to say that last sentence in English.


8/23

Dear Diary

There was an interesting program on the Incas on TV tonight.


8/24

Dear Diary

Hot today.

I’m sorry, I don’t think I can do this! My life just isn’t interesting enough to have something to write about every day! I’m going back to just writing for days when something happens.


8/27

Dear Diary

Money short. Me and Alex will eat lentils and tap water until my next paycheck arrives.


9/1

Dear Diary

Alex really scratched my back last night! Ow! I have five serious cuts on my back now, I feel like I got clawed by an animal! It hurts!

He’s very guilty about it, I feel sorry for him. What’s strange is he has short nails, I can’t see how it happened! I wouldn’t have been able to cut myself that badly with most of my knives unless I really tried! And he didn’t even scratch me hard, he just ran his hand over my back while I was going down on him and suddenly it was like my back got sliced with a sharp knife! How did that happen?


9/3

Dear Diary

Found some drawings Alex made today. He’s a good drawer! He says he learned from watching a program on TV about how to draw.

They’re kind of interesting. Some of them are of me, and some of them are of this other woman, I’ve never seen her. There’s one drawing of me in a wedding dress, and another of the other woman in a wedding dress, and a couple of each of us pregnant, some of us holding and nursing a baby, some of us walking with baby carriages, some of us walking with little children. Alex is in a few of them, there’s one of him and me kissing with him in a suit and me in a wedding dress, in some of the drawings of me and of the other woman walking in a park or on the street with a child he’s there walking along too, and there’s one of him and me hugging and I have grey hair. There’s one drawing where there’s both me and the other woman, we’re walking along and Alex is there with us and there are two little children, a little boy with dark hair like me and a little girl who I think is supposed to be blonde like the other woman.

I wonder who the other woman is. She looks a lot like Alex, they could be brother and sister. Actually that’s not such a good thought, I’ve wondered sometimes if Alex may be an incest survivor, he says I’m the first woman he’s ever slept with and that feels true, but, maybe he doesn’t like to think of what he does with me as the same as, you know, I don’t really want to talk about that OK?

But really, the pictures are sweet even if they are a little weird. They’re happy pictures, everyone is always smiling in them. I asked Alex about them, he said they’re pictures of lives he’d like to have but can’t. A different man in a situation like ours I think I’d get mad at him over these pictures, but with Alex I don’t. I asked Alex who the other woman was, he said she was a friend who died who he dreams about a lot.

Now that I have the idea, it’s kind of nice to imagine marrying Alex and having children with him, just as a fantasy. If she gets his looks I bet our daughter wouldn’t be living alone and have no children at 32!


9/5

Dear Diary

Getting really sick of lentils. This sucks! I love Alex, he never complains about anything but feels sorry for me about everything I whine about!


9/8

Dear Diary

My paycheck arrived! We can have good food again! I am writing up the shopping list and cooking instructions for Alex right now and I am so looking forward to dinner tonight!


9/20

Dear Diary

Carrie down the hall went completely crazy today. I was in the laundry room doing the wash and she asked me for money. I said I didn’t have any and she kept bothering me and I’d had a hard day and was tired and in a bad mood and I said something I shouldn’t have, I said I knew she was a junkie, I could see the needle-marks all over her arm, and the only reason she didn’t have any money was that she spent it all on drugs and I wasn’t going to give her drug money.

She got really mad and started calling me names, I tried to ignore her and just do the laundry, I really should have just left but I was kind of mad at her too and didn’t want to take home wet laundry just because she had a tantrum. I think this made her really mad, she grabs my face and goes look at me when I’m talking to you you wannabe yuppie wetback bitch, and then all of a sudden her hand was off my face and I turn around and there’s Alex pushing her up against the wall. And that’s when she really went completely crazy.

She gets this look on her face all of a sudden, like she’s seen the Devil, and she starts screaming. Alex lets her go and she’s backing away and holding that little cross she wears around on her up at him, like he’s a vampire, and screaming and praying and saying something about the Devil, and she looks at me and she says something about his back was to you, you couldn’t see it when it showed itself, and she starts screaming about that Alex is possessed by a demon or something and I should run away from him, and she kept backing up holding the cross up until she got to the door and ran.

A little while later I heard shouting and there’s Carrie with the manager, and she’s waving a gun around and screaming at him about how he’s got a demon living in his building and she’s not staying in it another hour and if that means he has to kiss this month’s rent bye that’s too bad and no that gun is not leaving her hand while she’s in sight of the demon, and she got in her car and drove off really fast. I was really scared she might do something with the gun!

The manager came and talked to us and we told him what happened. Alex says he heard what was happening and came to see if I needed help and saw Carrie grab me and tried to get her away from me. I hope this isn’t going to mean any trouble with the manager or the police. I’m a little worried about Carrie too, somebody crazy who knows what they might do. I hope everything will be OK.


10/3

Dear Diary

Alex asked if we could have sex without a condom yesterday. I told him only if he got tested for STDs, and me too, he shouldn’t be stupid and assume I didn’t have any! I think the free clinic does that, I’ll look into it.
Last edited by Somes J on Thu Nov 08, 2012 5:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

Re: The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

Next part, rather minimalistic this one. This is the beginning of an experiment in writing technique I'm trying; writing the story in first-person narratives that switch between the perspective of different characters.

(N)SFW note: contains some references to sex, sexuality, and bodily functions, some of it squicky (but nothing that I would think crosses the NSFW content line).

-------

Part IV: Conception

Rosa’s perspective

Blanco’s meowing in his box. I’m glad Juana gave me that box to put him in. Does watching people have sex do anything to cats? I don’t know, I’ve heard sometimes it does things to dogs, they don’t know what’s going on and think somebody’s trying to hurt their owner. I’d think cats are tougher animals that way. Better safe than sorry though. Besides, it’d be kind of embarrassing giving him back to Juana knowing he’d seen me naked and having sex.

“You have way too much energy,” I say to Alex.

“I’m sorry,” he says. Adorable guilt. Would be annoying if it wasn’t so cute. Cute because it’s direct and simple, I know I did something wrong, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, it’s OK if you’re mad but please just be mad for a while and not forever. Finger stroking my hair, guilty blue eyes, guilty, pretty blue eyes. Naked, white, vulnerable.

Anybody else I’d hate this. But his world really is full of things nobody bothers to tell him are wrong because they just assume. Like eating an insect. Like eating raw cookie dough, and raw eggs, and raw meat, and drinking curdled milk. Like eating spaghetti with his hands. Like peeing in the kitchen sink. Oh I got really mad at him for that one, and made him clean it really well. Silly really, isn’t urine sterile?

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I say. Pretty blue eyes, not guilty anymore. World of reassurance in that sentence. This is how we talk, a lot. Short, stock phrases that mean a lot between us. “It was fun, it was just exhausting,” I say.

“Oh, sorry,” he says. The oh means he understands. The sorry isn’t the guilty sorry, it’s the oh I see what you mean sorry. Not sorry I did something wrong, but sorry life is messy, sorry pleasure is messy, sorry love is messy.

Do all couples, all intimate relationships, have these secret languages? I suppose I have something a little like them with my parents, my brother, my sisters, my lovers, some of my friends. But it goes farther with me and Alex. He talks the way I write. It’s easier if we can say a lot to each other with only a few words.

“Did you like it better without the condoms and the dental dam?” I ask. “Yes,” he says. The serious yes that says something means a lot to him. And he strokes my hair.

A minute, maybe two. “I’m going to wash my mouth,” I say. I get up, stretch. “You should wash yours too.”

“I washed my mouth after dinner,” Alex says.

“You had something yucky in it after that,” I say.

“Yucky like insect yucky or yucky like cold shrimp yucky?” he says. Acceptable thing I don’t like or unacceptable?

I make a little shrug. “Yucky like cold shrimp yucky,” I say. Acceptable thing I don’t like. If he wants to go to sleep with the taste of my sex in his mouth, he’s the one who’ll have to put up with it until the morning.

Blanco meows while I pass his box. “I think he wants us to feed him,” Alex says. Alex gets along better with cats than dogs. Cats don’t like him at first either, but after a while they get used to him. Wonder if that means anything. “After I wash my mouth” I say. “I’ll feed him,” Alex says.

I flip the switch. There's an ugly white light, the bathroom light. The ventilator hums. Disturbing the peace. The bathroom doesn’t have a window, only the ventilator and the ugly white light. I turn the light off, I leave the door open, enough light to see coming in from the other room. Soft light, not so brutal light, eating light, relaxing light, sex light. I brush my teeth, wash my mouth with water. I look at my teeth in the mirror. Alex has good teeth. I don’t have good teeth. My mouth tastes better. Still dry. I pee. I don’t close the door. Alex doesn’t know what embarrassment is and hardly knows what disgust is and knows what my bottom looks like, why hide from him that I pee? I fill a glass with water, drink it. Mouth feels better.

Blanco’s little box is open. Alex is putting some of Juana’s cat food in his little bowl. I lie down, throw a cover over myself. Modesty. Modesty on a hot night. Modesty in front of my lover and a cat. Stupid.

Alex is turning off the lights. Dark now. Not real dark. Never real dark in the city. There are streetlights. There are curtains, the curtains are down, of course the curtains are down, but curtains aren’t walls. And there is the light of the clock. Telling me it’s two in the morning. Telling me I’ve stayed awake too long. Telling me I’ve got to get up in six hours. Telling me I’m going to be tired at work tomorrow. Shut up. Alex is sitting on the bed, and his head turns when I say that. I wonder whether I whispered it instead of just thinking it. He reaches out and turns the clock so I can’t see it.

OW! Something’s bitten me on the lower stomach. Alex turns the light on. He must have heard my little gasp. I sit up and drop the sheet and look at my stomach, but there’s nothing there. The infection scars, that’s all. The infection scars that embarrass me when I have to say I got them from being bitten by rats. Alex doesn’t have any scars. He knows all of my scars. The scars on my stomach. The little scars from the other infection, the other embarrassing one, that I kept getting because the bug lived in my nose and I would pick my nose and scratch my skin. The big scar on my leg where I whacked myself with a sickle when I was a child. The little burns on my legs and my arms and my body from hot water and oil from accidents on my jobs.

“Are you OK?” Alex asks. He’s sitting next to me on the bed, legs in a lotus, and Blanco is in his lap. He must trust that animal. He’s naked. If he felt like it Blanco could scratch his legs, or his stomach, or his sex. Strange. Dogs hate him, but he trusts that cat, and the cat sits in his bare lap and doesn’t scratch him.

“I thought I felt a pain right here, like something bit me,” I say, my hand rubbing the spot on my lower stomach. It didn’t really feel like a bite, did it? It did, in a way, but it felt like something bit me from inside me. Alex leans his face into my neck, I hear him sniffing, sniffing at me like a dog, and he grabs me and he hugs me tight. He’s happy, I can tell, he’s very happy about something. He pulls back and he’s smiling.

“Alex, what is it?” I ask.

“It’s started,” he says. He’s excited. “It’s started, didn’t you feel it?” I just look at him and he says “you really can’t tell? You can’t feel it? I can smell it.”

“Alex, smell what? What’s started?” I say.

He puts his hand on my lower stomach. Gentle pressure, caressing. “Life.”

“What do you mean, life?” I say. “Alex, you’re really seriously creeping me out now, OK.”

I’ve seen that look on him once. I was watching him masturbate and asked if he was fantasizing about anyone I didn’t know about, and he said his mom, and then he saw the look on my face and it looked like he realized he’d said something very wrong but didn’t really know what.

“Nothing,” Alex says. “I’m just tired. Are you OK?”

“I think so,” I say. “I don’t feel anything now. I guess it was just a thing that lasted a second.”

“OK,” Alex says. He helps me down into the bed and pulls the sheet over me. “Go to sleep. Sweet dreams.” He turns the light off.

“Sweet dreams,” I say. Alex is sitting on the bed and Blanco is in his lap. There’s movement and I realize Alex is stroking Blanco’s back.

I’m trying to fall asleep.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

Re: The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

(N)SFW Warning: this post contains references to sex, sexuality, nudity. Also, if Kane's death (the chestbuster scene) in Alien makes you uncomfortable there's a part you might want to skip.

-------

Part V: Confusions Of Pleasure

Rosa’s perspective

The dervishes are dancing in the TV with their tall hats. I’ve heard that when a dervish dances he puts one hand up to take from God and one hand down to give to the earth. God is big, the earth is big, the hard part must be getting God through the person, who is small. Maybe that’s my problem. I’m too small for God to fit inside me.

Cora said her professor told her a story once. Some dervishes were dancing and there was the call to prayer. A man came and he said, come to prayer. And one of the dervishes said we are praying, we are praying.

I like the music they picked for this program.

I’m thirsty. I get up to get a glass of water. I might as well turn the Virgin Mary now. I go to her shelf and turn her around. She never sees what I do with Alex. I taped a little picture of some pretty hills I cut out of a newspaper on the wall behind her, so she has something to look at when I turn her around. Silly. If she’s watching she doesn’t need the statue’s eyes to see us. Sin of idolatry, thinking of her as a little statue. I think. Is it idolatry if it’s not God? I don’t know, but it must be some kind of wrong. Anyway, she could still hear us, she’d know what I’m doing. But it feels like we’re being polite to each other. I don’t make her watch my sin. And she isn’t watching me with her little eyes while I do my sin.

The phone’s ringing. I think about not answering. I better answer. I think it’s just Cora, but it might be something important. I wish Cora wouldn’t call me after ten. Doesn’t she have other friends to bug? Isn’t she living with her boyfriend now? Can’t she bug him?


Alex’s perspective

Rosa smells embarrassed. I wonder what that feels like. I know the smells but I’ve never felt that way. I guess it feels sort of like how I feel when Rosa catches me doing something yucky. But when that happens mostly I’m just scared, cause I have to make the normal people think I’m a normal person, and I’m scared if I do something really wrong or lots of little wrong things Rosa might stop liking me. Rosa doesn’t smell scared. She smells happy, and her face and her body say she’s happy too.

I think they’re talking about me. I wish I could hear what Cora was saying. I hope she isn’t saying anything bad about me. I wonder if Cora likes me. A lot of people Rosa knows don’t like me. I’m not good at pretending to be a normal person. What’s bishi mean?

I should put Blanco in his box now. I like Blanco. He isn’t complicated like people. I smell Blanco and I know what he’s thinking.


Rosa’s perspective

It’s awkward to kiss Alex when we’re both standing. I’m too short for him, he has to bend down to kiss me. But I kind of like that he’s tall, it makes me feel like a woman.

Cora doesn’t like it when I tell her things like I like it when men make me feel small. She says think like that’s because you’ve internalized patriarchal gender standards. I really don’t like that about her. I really get the feeling she thinks, because I’m a woman and I grew up in a village in the country and I’m brown I’m a victim and she needs to help me. I don’t think it’s a race thing, I talked to Maggie about it and she’s white and Cora does the same thing to her. It’s that she thinks there’s a way to like men and a way to like sex that isn’t really OK, I mean she doesn’t come out and say that but I know she thinks it. Well, sorry Cora, I’m not going to self-critique that I like that Alex is tall and really strong, and I get turned on thinking here I’m alone with this big and strong person who wants to do things to me and it’s nice that I trust him enough I’m comfortable with that. Maybe if I put it like that she’d get it, I think she’d get the trust thing, I think it’s partly my fault too, I’m not good with words and talking about these things embarrass me so I never really explain well to her why I like what I like.

It’s strange, Alex doesn’t look like he’d be really strong. He’s tall, and he’s got a little muscle, but he’s skinny, looking at him you’d think maybe he was a runner or a cyclist or something, not somebody who’d be that strong. You only know he’s that strong when you see him lift something heavy. He can pick me up with one hand!

Maybe Yolanda’s right, there is something a little not normal about that. And maybe there are some other things not normal about Alex, things only a person who gets as close to him as me can tell. When I touch his face I feel like I’m touching a child’s face, I can’t remember ever touching it and feeling the beard starting to grow even a little bit. And there’s something a little not normal about his body, it reminds me of something I saw on a program once about how they take pictures of models and with the computer take little veins and things off the picture, the skin on his body looks like that, there’s no little veins or birth marks or anything, very little hair, I mean yes of course he has hair on his head and yes of course he has underarm hair and pubic hair, but I mean other than that. Sometimes that makes me uncomfortable, it reminds me of a child’s body and that’s really not a good association when you’re having sex with a person, and there’s another reason it makes me a little uncomfortable.

I tried to explain this to Cora on the phone tonight and she laughed at me and she said the Japanese have a word for this, bishonen, and she explained what that meant, and she said you poor people obviously you’re not into those kinds of men. But that’s not really what it is. There’s something about it that makes me think not finished. I get this crazy thought that maybe Alex’s skin is really just something painted on, and the artist didn’t really know what people looked like very well, or was scared to get it wrong. I notice Alex’s face and hands don’t have this look as much, I mean he has really good skin but on the face and hands it isn’t that creepy good, and I think if the artist was working from people on the street, he would have seen a lot of faces and hands, and not so much bodies, so he did better with the face and hands. Or maybe the artist tried harder with the faces and hands because he knew that’s what people would see. And the hair on his face, well, the artist would have seen a lot of men who shaved their faces, so maybe he would have gone OK, I guess most men don’t have hair there.

Oh, I think I turned myself off! I’m not feeling sexy now! And I can tell Alex can tell, he’s really, really good at knowing what I’m feeling without me having to say it. It’s crazy! I think maybe it’s an anxiety thing, maybe it’s just that I want something to be wrong with him, because it makes me insecure that he’s a hot guy and I’m a plain woman, and if there’s something wrong with him I won’t have to worry so much about how he’s better looking than me. Come on, even if I have to think there’s something wrong with him isn’t the way he acts enough? I’m with a guy I have to tell it’s a bad idea to eat cockroaches and chew and swallow eggshells, and I worry I’m not pretty enough for him!

Come on, just keep going and don’t think about those crazy things, you’ll get back in the mood. You’re making out with a guy who can be Playgirl centerfold of the year. Does Playgirl have centerfolds? Do they have centerfolds of the year? Never mind about that, he’s way hotter than anybody I’ve got any right to take home. He doesn’t have any clothes on right now. If I can’t get back in the mood with that there’s something wrong with me.

He doesn’t smell normal. It’s not a strong smell, I only smell it when I have my face right up next to him, but it’s not a normal person smell. It’s like worms, maybe. Or dirt. It makes me think of insects. With some fish in it, maybe.

That’s not helping!


Alex’s perspective

My eyes are closed and I’m pushing my nose into Rosa’s hair and sniffing. A very nice thing about sex is this is the only time I can get away with doing this, except when she worries that she smells bad, and then I can only do it for a few seconds.

The first few times Rosa asked that I was worried she felt sick, because I thought by did she smell bad she meant did she smell sick. She got a little mad at me once when I said she didn’t smell bad and she went to work without taking a shower and somebody there said she smelled. That was when I figured out that by smell bad she meant smell strongly like sweat.

People are weird. The chemical-smelling stuff they put on themselves to make themselves smell better smells a lot worse than sweat to me. I’m glad Rosa doesn’t use that stuff much, she just smells of soap and toothpaste, and that’s not so bad. I don’t know why people wash so much. I like it better when Rosa hasn’t washed in a while, so I can really smell her.

A lot of the time I wish I could be a normal person, but I don’t like the idea of giving up smelling Rosa. It’s like if I couldn’t ever see her face again, ever. I can smell what she’s wearing, what she’s been splashed with, what’s going on in her body, what she’s eaten, what she’s feeling, I know so much about her from the way she smells! I can tell a lot about people from smell, I could tell Carrie was sick with something really bad.

I wonder if people would be happier if they could smell each other like I can smell them. I’m good at knowing what people feel because I can smell it. That really helps me with Rosa.

I like doing this, just kissing and touching with Rosa and smelling her. I can smell her when we really have sex but then there’s too much going on with my body to really pay attention to her smell like I’m doing now. I can smell that she’s sweaty, I can smell what she washed in, I can smell what she had her hands in, I can smell what she ate, I can smell what’s happening in her stomach. I can smell that she’s turned on and that she’s pregnant, and under all Rosa’s smells I can smell something like what I smell like, and that’s the smell of our daughter.

I can smell that animals are made out of meat and it’s just the way they are. I can smell that men are made out of meat and it’s just the way they are. I can smell that women are made out of meat and it’s very interesting. It happens even when I can’t smell them, when I see women, especially pretty women, on TV I think about how they’re made out of meat. They talk and I think about that their mouths are wet or dry and warm and they have have little bits of food in the teeth and the gums and rotting teeth. I even think about that just hearing a woman’s voice. They do things with their hands and I think about how their hands are soft or hard or dry and what it’d feel like for their hands to touch me. They wear pants or nylons or a skirt and I think about whether it’s tight around their stomach and how it feels on their skin and then I think about what’s happening in their stomachs. They dance or do acrobatics and I think about how it feels for them to stretch their limbs like that. I wonder if that happens with normal people. That was the third thing that was really different when I came out of the cocoon, after I stopped being hungry all the time and after nobody answered me, I started feeling that way about women.

I wonder how those clothes feel to Rosa. That shirt doesn’t feel like something I’d like having on. Her skirt feels like it might be a little tight around her stomach. She says it doesn’t feel good but she’s used to it. I guess if it really bothered her she’d have changed already, she says the high heels she has to wear to work hurt her feet and as soon as she doesn’t have anywhere to go she takes them off and puts on her bunny slippers.

I open Rosa’s skirt and pull it down. We have to work together to let me pull it away from around her feet. I fold it and put it away. I unbutton her shirt. I like undressing Rosa when she’s in her work clothes. It reminds me of her birthday presents, I think of that she’s this little brown person in nice black and white packaging, and I have to open the package without tearing the wrapping.

I’m standing behind Rosa. I put my hands on her stomach. I think about my daughter inside Rosa. Rosa’s stomach doesn’t feel any different yet, but I know she’s there. I can smell her on Rosa, I can taste her when I kiss Rosa.

It’s nice that Juana lets me use her computer while I’m babysitting Blanco at her place during her day shift. I found out a lot about pregnancy through her computer. Maybe with my daughter it’ll be different, but it’s nice to know how it goes with normal people so it’s not totally like when I went into the cocoon and I was really scared because I didn’t know what was going to happen. It’s nice I could find out it’s OK to still have sex with Rosa while she’s pregnant because I was a little worried about that.

As long as your pregnancy is proceeding normally, you can have sex as often as you like — but you might not always want to.

Your developing baby is protected by the amniotic fluid in your uterus, as well as the strong muscles of the uterus itself. Sexual activity won't affect your baby.

Yes, it most certainly is okay to have sex during pregnancy.

The good news -- or bad news, depending on how you look at it -- is that “sex during pregnancy is extremely safe for most women with uncomplicated, low-risk pregnancies,” says Dayna Salasche, MD, an associate professor of obstetrics/gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and an obstetrician at Northwestern Specialists for Women, both in Chicago. “Some people feel like they enjoy sex during pregnancy more and others enjoy it less,” she tells WebMD.

If the dad-to-be is nervous about having sex with his increasingly pregnant partner, “we tell them that their baby is well protected. It is an egg surrounded by a pillow and another pillow and that there is no way they will hurt the baby, and that usually makes them feel much better,” Salasche says.

Most women who are having a normal pregnancy may continue to have sex right up until their water breaks or they go into labor. You won't hurt the baby by making love. The amniotic sac and the strong muscles of the uterus protect your baby, and the thick mucus plug that seals the cervix helps guard against infection.


Strong muscles of the uterus. I like the way that sounds. I wonder if she feels at home in Rosa. They smell very different. It’s OK, I’m sure she’ll give you what you need.

It’s nice that we can still have sex. It’s nicer now that Rosa’s pregnant. I was always a little frustrated when she wasn’t pregnant. Now I’m not frustrated anymore. I can just enjoy it. And I like it better without the condoms and the dental dam.

I pull of Rosa’s shirt and put it away for next morning. I rub her sides and tickle the hair under her armpits. Rosa says a lot of American women shave the hair under their armpits and she thinks that’s weird, it’s a lot easier to just wear shirts with sleeves. She says that’s not even the weirdest thing, she found out some of them shave their pubic hair, she thought that was really funny, almost nobody would ever see that! I don’t know why that’s weird but having to wash every day and not being able to eat spaghetti with your hands and then wash them isn’t. You have to wash the fork and knife and spoon anyway. I don’t tell her that.


Rosa’s perspective

Alex puts the glass in my hands. I drink. It’s nice and cool. I give it back to him and lie back. He puts my glass down on the sink and turns off the lights.

Maybe I should ask for more water. There’s a funny taste in my mouth. Fishy-dirty. Reminds me of Alex’s smell somehow. Maybe I got it from kissing him, but that never happened before.

I hear and feel him getting into bed behind my back. I don’t turn around. He rubs my back. That always feels nice. He stops and kisses my face and snuggles up to me. He puts his hand on my stomach, strokes it a couple of times, leaves it there. I wonder if he’s asleep.

My stomach doesn’t feel so good.


Alex’s perspective

Rosa’s moving in bed. It woke me up. I think she’s not feeling good. She smells funny. The smell of my daughter’s a lot stronger on her now. I almost can’t smell Rosa through it.

She gets up and starts walking to the bathroom. She doesn’t turn on the light. Her hands are out, feeling for things in the dark.

She turns around and leans against the door of the bathroom. Her stomach’s swollen, huge. She puts a hand on it. She knows something’s wrong, she’s afraid.

She jerks. Blood sprays out of her mouth. More blood comes out of her mouth.

I want to help her. I can’t move. My body won’t move, I can’t get up, I can’t yell for help.

Something, a little black claw, pushes out through the skin of her stomach, moves down, opening the skin, splitting the swelling. Something falls out of it, moves.

I scream. I can scream.

Rosa isn’t there. The door of the bathroom’s empty. Rosa’s lying on the bed, sitting up. I was dreaming. I was dreaming. I woke her up when I screamed. Maybe I woke up half the neighbors.

“Alex, are you OK?” she says. I can smell concern, fear, and I can see it on her face.

“Sorry,” I say. “I had a bad dream. I’m OK.”

“You never screamed like that before,” she says. She’s sitting up now, holding me. “I think you probably woke up half the building.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“It’s nothing to be sorry for,” she says. She’s stroking my hair. “Are you OK? You’re sure you’re OK?”

“I’m OK, I’m sure I’m OK,” I say.

“Can I do anything?” she says.

There’s meowing. “I think you woke up Blanco,” Rosa says.

“I’ll take care of him,” I say. “I’m OK. I’m really OK. I don’t need anything. You can sleep.”

“OK,” she says. “You’re sure?”

I nod. “I’m sure.”

“OK,” she says again. I help her lie back down. For a few seconds I touch her stomach. It feels the same way it did when we went to sleep. She smells like herself. I can smell our daughter, but Rosa smells a lot stronger.

I get up. I don’t turn on the light. I can see OK with the lights out. Mostly I just turn on the light when I do things at night because I don’t want Rosa to know I can see in the dark like this, I know it’s not normal. She doesn’t look like she’s watching me, but I pretend to feel around in the dark, just in case. I open Blanco’s door and let him out. I put some water and dry cat food in his bowls. He drinks some of the water, doesn’t touch the food. I want Rosa to think I’m OK, but I want to hold something. I hold Blanco. It’s nice to hold him. I like Blanco.

I read on Juana’s computer cats have a good sense of smell and can see in the dark. I guess in that way you and me have more in common than me and Rosa, don’t we Blanco?

You know I’m not normal, don’t you? If you’re like me you must be able to smell that. Dogs have a good sense of smell and I can’t pretend to be normal to dogs, they smell me and they hate me. But you’re OK with me, aren’t you, Blanco? You know I’m not normal and you’re OK with me.

-------

In the interests of proper attribution, the block of italicized copypasta on whether it's OK to have sex while pregnant was taken from here, here, here, and here.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

Re: The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

Interlude: From the personal correspondence of Davis and Kondraki

To: Director Davis

You asked for a quick and dirty summary re divergences from human baseline caused by alteration of fertilized ova with ‘alien’ DNA.

- Skeletal abnormalities: we noticed these from X-rays of SIL-1 while it was still alive. Now that we’ve actually gotten a chance to dissect what’s left of it we’ve got a pretty solid idea what they are. Mostly, they seem to be concealed weaponry: retractable claws, sharp retractable teeth (the normal human teeth retract when they come out), and retractable bone spikes. We’ve also found out what that weird fan of bones in the shoulder is for – they fit together to form the “crown”, which attaches to the skull, when outside the mimic state.

- Musculature abnormalities: the muscle tissue is dense, with an unusual structure, and a high ratio of muscle tissue to body fat. We believe this allows for significantly enhanced strength. There are also numerous small muscles that ordinary humans do not have. These muscles do not appear to serve a mobility function, they seem more analogous to the muscles that create human facial expression. We think they are part of the mimic system, in the mimic state they pull the tissues into a shape appropriate for appearing to be a normal human, outside the mimic state they pull the tissues into a shape appropriate for the non-mimic (“true form”?) configuration.

- Organ abnormalities: organs were relatively normal except for significant abnormalities of the digestive and reproductive systems, we think these may be to accommodate life cycle differences (fast reproduction, less discriminating diet, faster digestion to aid rapid growth). The digestive tract included what appears to be a sort of gizzard with teeth, consistent with report that SIL-2 swallowed food whole.
We’ve also found out what the ‘snakes’ are. One of them appears to be a very long and powerful second tongue, normally kept in the esophagus, report indicates SIL-2 using this in a manner similar to lizards with similar organs. There are also similar organs inside the organ cavity, the ‘tentacles’, reports indicate they may have a defensive function.

- Skin abnormalities: the skin contains chromatophores, which nicely accounts for its ability to change from a normal human appearance to white-gray. The chromatophore system does not seem very sophisticated, it is most likely specialized for its role in the human mimic system, although in SIL-2 there are also underdeveloped chromatophores with bright pigments and it seems likely there is also the capability for bioluminescence, though underdeveloped, SIL-1 does not have those features. Given the sex difference we speculate that may play a role in some kind of mating display, a hypothesis consistent with the underdevelopment, as such a system would presumably not become functional until puberty.
We succeeded in getting pieces of skin to revert to being apparently human ‘hair’ and ‘fingernails’. Given that such ‘hair’ and ‘fingernails’ likely would not grow, we speculate their length may be regulated by conscious or subconscious assessment of what appearance is likely to facilitate effective human mimicry. We also recovered a piece of a transparent membrane that, under the same procedure, reverted to the appearance of a blue human eye, except with a window of clear tissue where the pupil would be. We speculate this forms a cap over the eyeball.

- Biochemical abnormalities: SIL-1 and SIL-2 had a significant percentage of abnormal proteins and other body chemicals. Many of the abnormal proteins are similar to ones found in thermophilic bacteria, and we speculate they play a role in heat resistance. We speculate that compared to human baseline SIL-1 and SIL-2 would have had a considerably enhanced resilience to injury and adverse environmental conditions.

- Cancers and teratomas: we’ve confirmed that SIL-1 suffered from teratoma tumors, and SIL-2 appeared to as well, but we think they may actually have a function. We think they may represent a system similar to shark’s teeth, if a minor body part (like a finger or an eye) is lost one of the teratoma tumors is moved up to replace it. There are structures associated with the tumors (channels, small muscles) that are consistent with this, and we think we caught SIL-1 in the process of generating a new spare to replace the one used to replace the presumably amputated finger we found in the car wreck. Note that none of the teratomas is very big so really serious injuries like amputation of a whole limb would presumably be at least temporarily crippling, regained function having to await more normal regeneration.
SIL-1 also apparently suffered from a significant load of ‘vanilla’ cancer tumors, as well as teratomas that did not appear consistent with the ‘spare parts’ system, such as what appeared to be human fingernails growing in one of the kidneys. SIL-2 did not have any such tumors. We speculate this may be a product of SIL-1’s rapid pre-adult growth rate. It seems likely SIL-1 would not have had a long natural lifespan.

- Hybridogenesis: SIL-2 had the same percentage of altered (‘alien’) DNA as SIL-1, though naturally it was all on the maternal chromosomes. Analysis of ova recovered from one of SIL-1’s ovaries shows all tested ova to contain the same amount of altered DNA as SIL-1’s full genome. It appears that altered humans form a hybridogenic species, with altered DNA perpetuated by segregation distorters and presumable destruction of gametes containing only unaltered human DNA. This has significant implications for population dynamics if Sil-1’s descendants were allowed to reproduce freely; they would not have to establish or maintain a viable breeding population of their own in order for their ‘species’ to exist indefinitely, and hybridogenic reproduction with H.S.S. would more readily facilitate eventual assimilation of H.S.S. if altered humans were to have some selective advantage. Speaking of which, going on a limb here, this really isn’t my field, but I will note that as I remember some hybridogenic organisms are actually preferred as mates by members of one of the origin species, a phenomenon possibly originating from hybrid vigor. Unfortunately, what’s left of our specimens isn’t particularly good for facial symmetry and related tests, so I can’t confirm that this might be a factor, except to note that SIL-1 in human mimic state was described by surviving witnesses as attractive.


Basically what we’re dealing with:
At the basic physiological and structural level it’s not THAT different from us, if it was it could not have babies with us, at bottom it’s a normal animal, it has a skeleton, musculature, nervous system etc. like a normal animal, it has the same basic needs as a normal animal, THAT SAID:
- Pretty much a 1-200 pound pit-bull with hands and a big brain
- Literally grows like bamboo, maybe faster*
- Reproduces in its first year of life
- Could probably walk off abuse that would put you and me in the hospital
- Can pass for human, thanks to a skeleton and musculature that looks like one of those transformers toys.
* Calculations based off the assumption that SIL-1 didn’t sit around gestating for a good long while in V-7’s room are CRAZY. Bet you’d need a whole alternate proteome of heat-resistant proteins and a serious cooling system just so the offspring doesn’t literally cook itself with its body heat. No, that’s not a scientific opinion, I haven’t actually crunched the numbers on that.

A free population of these things could be a nasty problem, especially if one got somewhere with little organized authority, e.g. worse parts of Africa.

You will get a much more detailed and properly scientific version of this when I finish my official report.

Re: traces of DNA of a second individual related to SIL-1 and V-7 in SIL-1’s reproductive system – I would remind you that many human pregnancies end in early-term miscarriages, the absorption of one embryo by another etc.. That said, it’s not a bad idea to keep an eye out for anything interesting. If SIL-1’s behavior is any indication, we won’t have to wait long for the trail of skullfucked corpses to start showing up in the event there is something to worry about.

PS, making sure nothing bites us in the back would be a lot easier if we dropped the whole “keep it super-sekrit!” thing. Personally, if I knew there were possibly hostile aliens living around a brown dwarf less than a light year away, keeping everything super-secret from our own public wouldn’t be my top priority. And just how long do you think you can keep the lid on this anyway? Especially if anything further does develop? The real world isn’t Stargate, leaks happen.

Dr. Kondraki
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

Re: The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

Part VI: Night Episodes

It is two in the morning. The room is dark. Rosa and Alex are sleeping. Blanco is awake and cleaning his paws.

Alex is having a bad dream. If Rosa was awake, she would recognize the twitches and shivers, and she would wake him up, but she is deeply asleep. She is dreaming, she has gone back to twenty five years ago and a little village in Guatemala and the body of an eight year old girl, and she does not realize that there is a hand lying against her stomach and a body pressed against her back, and that hand and body is twitching and shivering.

Things start to move under Alex’s skin. If Rosa were awake, she might think it looked as if little worms were moving quickly under his skin. Rosa is a little girl in Guatemala and does not know this is happening. Blanco is busy licking his paws and does not know this is happening.

It starts with the arm first. It usually starts with the arm. The skin changes color, the claws come out. Claws tap lightly against the skin of Rosa’s stomach. The change follows its usual pattern. It moves up the arm, to the chest and the upper back, then up to the face. The skin turns grey. Bone spikes come out of their hiding places. Little muscles move and pull the flesh of half the face in new directions. The change pauses where it usually does. One of the arms and half the face and upper body no longer resembles a human being. The boundary between the two sides is unstable, shifting, as if they are fighting each other, or as if the creature cannot decide whether or not it wants to look like a human being.

Blanco can see this happening. He can smell the smells that are associated with it. He stops licking his paws and watches. This is not the first time he has seen one of these night episodes. He is used to them now.

Time passes. Alex’s smell changes, the side that does not look like a human being goes away. A person who walked into the room and turned on the light now would see nothing strange.

Blanco relaxes and goes back to licking his paws.

Blanco can smell that Alex is not like the other creatures that give him food and water and rub his back and belly. At first he was afraid of this new creature that looked like a human being but did not smell like one, but it did not attack him or his other suppliers of food, water, and back and belly rubs, and it would give him food and water and rub his back and belly. Eventually Blanco accepted the new creature, for the same reason he accepted humans; the fact it does not attack him or the creatures that give him food and water and rub his back and belly makes its presence tolerable, and the fact it gives him food, water, and back and belly rubs makes it nice to have around.

A dog would not be so coolly pragmatic. Dogs like their human companions and want to protect them. One does not watch a friend lie in the arms of a horror and remain calm. Trust comes hard with something that literally reeks of threat. But Blanco does not trust anything, except in the way a human being trusts that a tree will not fall over and crush him, and Blanco does not like Juana and Rosa; Blanco thinks Juana and Rosa are nice things to have around because they do things for him.

After a while, Blanco stops liking his paws. Alex is having another nightmare, he is twitching and shivering again, but Blanco pays little attention. Blanco goes to sleep, and dreams about hunting birds.

When Alex wakes up he thinks of holding Blanco a little, but decides not to. He can smell that Blanco is having what for cats is a good dream and doesn’t want to wake him. Blanco smells of the joy of hunting and killing.

Blanco is asleep and dreaming about killing birds when, in the morning, Rosa notices a small cut on her belly where one of the claws has opened her skin, and wonders how she got it.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

Re: The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

N(SFW) Warning: references to nudity, sex and sexuality, the usual, also freaky alienoid deformagrotesquitude sex and implied incest.

------

Part VII: Mother Issues

Alex’s perspective

I’m awake. The door opening woke me up. I sit up, I turn on one of the lights.

It’s not Rosa. How … the quiet, the quiet in my head, the bang in my ears and the quiet in my head.

She smiles. The smile says I know what you’re thinking.

She drops the key in her purse and closes and locks the door. I wonder how she got Rosa’s key. I don’t think I’m thinking very well. My head is too full of her smell.

She wants me, I can smell that she wants me. Nicest thing I’ve ever smelled, the smell of her wanting me. I get up. Me and Rosa had sex last night so I’m not wearing anything.

She pulls her shirt out of her skirt. She’s wearing something a lot like Rosa’s work clothes. She opens the buttons, takes it off. She reaches behind her, undoes the clasp on her bra, takes it off. She opens her belt and pulls down her skirt, her skirt and her panties and her nylons, she grabs them all and pulls them down into a pile of clothes around her feet and she steps out of her shoes and out of the pile. She isn’t wearing anything.

She walks up to me. She kisses me. My head is full of her smell and her taste, the nicest things in the world.

Alex is not thinking in words anymore. The human parts of the brain are shutting down, dimming. Deeper, in the older, animal areas, closer to the spinal cord, something not really human at all stirs, reaches out, takes control. There are no words but there are still human thoughts, feelings, desires. The changing of the guard is rarely total. Usually the human parts, the thing that thinks of itself as Alex instead of being simply itself, have control, move the limbs, move the mouth, while the deeper, not really human thing watches quietly from behind it, waiting to reach up, to take the wheel, when the right stimulus prompts it. Now the not really human thing is in control, and the human parts are sidelined, observers, feeling, watching, but out of the control loop.

Alex does not perceive the discontinuity, the power shift. The world simply becomes simpler, wordless, the sensations more intense, movements easier and quicker. Some things stop mattering, registering but not impelling action. Some things that were disgusting or frightening become good and beautiful. The thing in his arms no longer resembles a human being, it has become a monster of his nightmares, but this does not bother him. Now he no longer finds it frightening, he no longer thinks of it as a monster. Now he finds it beautiful and desirable.

He is aware of this. He remembers that when he goes back to thinking in words and remembers times like this the memories often frighten him. But like much of what happens when he is thinking in words, this does not really seem to matter now.

Alex glows, bright with bioluminescence, flames of bright blue and red and fire orange, dancing across him in complex patterns. The thing in his arms is drab by comparison, grey, it cannot glow. Alex remembers Rosa explaining to him what a stripper was, and thinks that these colors are like a striptease. He wonders if Rosa might find them beautiful. It occurs to him that she would probably find him frightening if she could see him now, a thing with claws and spikes and yellow eyes and sharp teeth that does not look like a human being.

Something is shaking him. “Alex, time to wake up.”

Rosa’s voice. I was asleep. I was dreaming. I open my eyes, roll over.

Rosa’s leaning over me. She’s wearing her bathrobe. Old thing, faded, lots of holes. She must have taken a shower. She really smells of soap. “Time to wake up,” she says. “Are you OK? You’re usually so good with waking up before I do.”

“Sorry,” I say. I pull the sheet off me.

She smiles, she thinks something’s funny. “You had a good dream, did you?” She points at my sex parts. I’m not wearing anything and I’m still big from the dream and she can see that. She looks at the clock. “I have a little time,” she says. She pushes a finger into my chest. With the other hand she undoes the belt on her robe and opens it. She’s smiling, the smile that looks like part of her thinks she shouldn’t smile. She smells happy and turned on. “How about you lie back, close your eyes, and I help you finish that dream? That sound good?”

It was kind of a scary and icky dream. But I don’t want to tell her that. I smile and nod and lie back down and close my eyes.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

Re: The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

Part VIII: Morning Sickness

Cora’s perspective

I’m tired. Working two jobs and having classes sucks. I spent until two o’clock in the morning last night finishing up that paper, then I have to come here at nine, then I get to look forward to a night class tonight. It’s a good thing I’m good at getting in the mode of basically being a drone that eats, works, and sleeps, and has pretty much no need for pleasure time at all. I’m the ideal capitalist citizen yessir. No, that’s not true, to be the ideal capitalist citizen I’d have to love buying things that I then never get to enjoy because all the time I’m not sleeping, eating, or in the bathroom I’m busy trying to get more money to buy more things that I’ll never get to enjoy. Also I’d have to actually believe in this bullshit instead of just be better than a lot of people at putting up with it. I think it’s genes. I can’t think of anywhere I picked up a good work ethic, a horrible soul-crushing routine just doesn’t bother me that much.

“Was it nice to be with your family?” Rosa asks.

“Not really,” I say. I stop for a second to put the dish on the counter and pick up a dirty one and put it under the faucet. “Let’s just leave it at my family has, uh, issues, with me dating non-white men.”

“Oh,” Rosa says. She scratches at a stubborn bit of burned cheese. “That sucks.” She puts the dish on the counter and reaches for another one. “How are you and Daniel?”

“He handled the whole thing pretty well,” I say. “He’s actually a lot more tolerant of those chucklefucks than I am.” He likes to say that old people like them are involuntary immigrants from the foreign country of the past, and I should be more tolerant of the foreigners.

Rosa nods. “I think he’s a good influence on you. You should listen to him.”

I take a second out from washing the dishes to put my hands on my hips, all dramatic-like. “What do you mean a good influence?” I say.

Rosa wipes off a plate and reaches up to put it in the rack. “You’re a nice person Cora but you, you, you think in every person different from you there’s a little person like you trying to get out.”

“You’re snippy today,” I say.

Rosa closes her eyes and leans over the sink. “I’m sorry, Cora, I didn’t mean to be mean, I don’t feel well and I’m tired, I didn’t sleep much last night.”

I shrug. “You apologize too much, I know you know me well enough by now to know I don’t want to hang around people who agree with me cause they’re afraid of hurting my precious little feelings.”

“No, I think you want people who agree with you because they really think everything you think is right,” Rosa says. She turns to me and flashes a big smile. “Better? But really I don’t like to talk that way. I don’t like to be mean.”

“Yes, we women certainly are encouraged to think that way,” I say. It’s an old argument.

“There you are again,” Rosa says. “I can’t really feel this way, there must be a little you in me that wants to get out.” She takes another plate and starts half-heartedly washing it. “Can we not argue, please?”

I shrug, “OK.” Now that I’m paying more attention I notice she really doesn’t look good. She’s leaning over the sink and moving slowly and keeps closing her eyes. “Are you OK?” I ask.

She nods, “I think it might be some stomach bug. I’ve had it a few days now. I really haven’t been feeling well.”

“Maybe you should go to a doctor,” I say. “Make sure it isn’t anything, and maybe they could give you something for it.”

Rosa nods, “I’m thinking of seeing if the free clinic will take me,” she says.

“Have you talked to anybody about this?” I say.

Rosa shrugs. “I told a neighbor about it. And Alex is being my nurse when I’m not working. It’s pretty sweet. I feel a little guilty, I don’t do anything around the house now.”

“You should go to the clinic right after work,” I say. “I’ll take you. Look, I don’t want to worry you, but you really seem, uh, pretty under the weather.”

“I’ll be OK,” Rosa says. “It’s worse in the mornings, it’ll get better in a little while, good enough I can work better.”

“OK,” I say. I don’t hide that I’m a bit skeptical. “You handle it as you think is best, I guess.”

A few minutes pass. I finish with the plates and start in on the dirty cups. Rosa’s way behind me. If the boss sees her moving this slowly he’ll be mad. Well, fuck him, I’ll tell him she’s sick and if he doesn’t like that he can go eat a donkey’s balls. He’s a creeper anyway, with that Philippina mail-order bride who’s like half his age. God that makes my skin crawl. Creepster pretty much openly came out and said he thought American women were too uppity, and I had to smile and nod and pretend to be all understanding cause he’s just the sort of bastard who’d find some excuse to fire you if you got him mad. Yeah, I’m sure it’s totally cause American women are spoiled and egotistical, and not at all cause you’re a creepy fatass with a massive entitlement complex. Have you MRA douchebags ever considered that maybe us women don’t want to be with you because you’re giant assholes? I hope his mail-order bride leaves him in a year and takes half his money. It’s probably the smartest thing she could do, no way that kind of asshole actually treats any woman decently.

“When’s Daniel coming back?” Rosa asks.

“He says in a couple of days,” I say. “Honestly I’m getting a little impatient. It must be kind of nice in a way to have a boyfriend who’s always around the house when you need him.”

“If it’s something simple maybe I can ask Alex to do it,” Rosa says. “He does some housework for our neighbor.”

I giggle.

“What’s funny?” Rosa says.

“I was talking about sex, not housework,” I say.

Rosa puts her hand over her mouth. Her embarrassed laugh. “Oh, you mean that,” she says. She stops a second to get another stubborn spot of dirt off a plate. “If it makes you feel better, I haven’t been doing any of that last few days either, since I started to not feel very well. With the way I feel I really don’t feel like being touched that way.”

I giggle again. “Maybe you should lend me your boyfriend.”

“You get mad about that,” Rosa says.

“About what?” I say.

“That men need sex that way,” Rosa says.

I shrug. “It’s OK if they aren’t douchebags about it. Where it starts to get problematic is that Dark Age mentality that it’s OK for them to do it but not OK for you to do it. Daniel and me are actually for serious in agreement to not holding each other to that bullshit you can only have sex with one person in your entire life or it’s a huge betrayal standard, and we both think the world would probably be a lot better off if more people thought like we did.”

Rosa shrugs. “I don’t know about this stuff anymore.”

We wash quietly for a few minutes. I’m done. I take some stuff from Rosa’s pile. “Hey,” I say, “would you and Alex mind helping me out with my project? You’d just have to do an anonymous interview with me and fill out an anonymous questionnaire. I’d like some people who aren’t college students, you know, more diverse sample and all that.”

Rosa shrugs. “Maybe,” she says. She puts down the glass she’s washing, just stands there for a few seconds. “I think I have to throw up,” she says, and she runs to the bathroom and leans over the toilet and vomits.

She’s leaning over the toilet, coughing. I walk up to her, put my hand on her back. “You OK?” I ask.

I help her stand straight again. I notice something dark running down her nylons. I point to it, “uh, you’ve got something running down your leg.”

She looks down, notices it, touches the dark streak. She reaches up, touches herself between her legs, her hand comes away smeared with fluid, blood maybe, but it looks wrong, very dark, almost black, with streaks of something green.

“Little lady, you are going to the doctor right now!” I say.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

Re: The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

Part IX: Shopping

Alex’s perspective

Now that Rosa knows she’s pregnant I can tell her why she should eat better food than me. She should let me have the lentils and the ramen. She should eat the meat and the milk and the eggs and the fruit and the sweets. She doesn’t really like it but now that she doesn’t have much money again she says yes, the person carrying the baby should get the healthy food. That thing where some black stuff came out of her scared her, she says the doctor-lady was worried about it, the doctor-lady didn’t know what it was but everything seemed to be OK.

I want to help Rosa eat. I want to hold something in my hand, like rice or eggs, and she’d eat it out of my hand, and she’d lick the food off my hand and I’d put my fingers in her mouth and she’d suck the food off them. I want to open one of those big gallon bottles of milk and lift it up to her mouth and she’d drink and drink and drink. I want to open that cup of chicken livers and put them in her mouth and she’d lick the blood off my fingers and then I’d lift up the cup to her mouth and she’d drink the blood and some of it would go running down her chin and down her neck and between her breasts. I want to take milk in my mouth and spit it into hers, like the TV says birds do with their babies. I want to help her eat a lot of food like that until she’s really full and she’ll have blood and food around her mouth and running down her chin and I’ll lick that off and spit it in her mouth.

I wonder if normal people think about things like that. Rosa says raw meat is yucky. I’m yucky. I want to do yucky things.

The pregnant lady’s checking something in her purse. She takes her hand out and closes her purse and goes back to having both hands under her stomach. She’s carrying her stomach like it’s too heavy and she needs to hold it up. She’s got her baby in her hands. Her baby’s in her stomach and in her hands. I wish I could type “pregnancy” into Wikipedia and Google and read all about what’s going to happen with my baby, like normal people can.

I’m beautiful in my way
Cause God makes no mistakes
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way


I want to move. Music makes me want to move. I like shopping at this store, they play music loud. I don’t move cause the other people aren’t moving. The girl standing in front of me looks bored.

American Apparel. A black and white picture of a pretty girl, Asian, I can see her underpants, she’s standing in a way that says look at my bottom. I want to touch her bottom. I want to hug her and cuddle her and have sex with her.

They’re small a lot. The girl in front of me, she’s like that. If I moved a little bit up she could put her head against my body, our heads wouldn’t touch. She could stand against my back and I could put my arms around her and push out. I’d be having sex with her back. I’d have to bend down to touch her bottom.

I wonder if she thinks these kinds of things about me. I wonder if they think these kinds of things about me. I wonder if normal people think these kinds of thoughts. I think a lot the things I feel have to be different from the things they feel, cause they don’t have to pretend, everyone’s like them, so the way they do things has to be the way they like to do things. The music makes me want to move and that woman makes me want to hug and cuddle her and touch her and make her turned-on and have sex with her, but I can’t do that cause they don’t, if I moved they might think I’m weird and if I started touching that woman like that now she’d be mad at me and everyone else would be mad at me too, they don’t have to pretend so it has to be they don’t want to move and they don’t want to touch each other.

“Hello,” the cashier says, and smiles. She’s got big teeth. She’s small and dark, dark brown body, black hair, dark eyes. She has hands a little like Rosa’s, thinner, thin dry brown fingers, like little twigs. She smells of deodorant and shampoo and food and the smells of person and the smells of woman. She isn’t on birth control, she’s at the best part of her cycle for getting pregnant, she’s a little bit turned on, like Rosa sometimes gets when she says she’s bored and daydreaming. “How’s your girlfriend?” she says. I’ve seen Rosa talking to her a few times when she bought the food. “I hope everything’s going OK with the baby. Is she feeling better?”

“Uh-huh, she’s feeling a lot better,” I say.

“That’s great!” she says. She puts the eggs under the scanner and puts them on the side and leans toward me. She’s smiling with those big teeth. “I remember when my mom was pregnant, she was miserable for a while too but it went away.”

Her smell says this is the best time to have sex with me and I want to have sex. Her mouth smells of sardines and coffee and chocolate. I think about the inside of her mouth. I think about pulling her hair. I think about the smell of pregnancy on her, her holding a big stomach like the pregnant lady in the line ahead of me.

The milk and the meat goes under the scanner. The meat makes me think of bad dreams. No, Rosa will be OK. What I want to do to women isn’t bad. Sometimes I want to do icky things, but I don’t want to do bad things. I’m not a bad thing. I’m not a bad thing. I’m an icky thing, I’m not a bad thing. I want to make this person feel good, I don’t want to do anything that’ll hurt them, I don’t want to do anything bad to them. Having a baby doesn’t hurt people, sometimes something goes wrong and they’re hurt but not, not, it’s something they do to themselves, it’s something they want to do to themselves.

“Uh, are you OK?” the cashier says. She’s rung up everything. She was waiting for me to pay. “Sorry,” I say. I get Rosa’s money out and give it to her.

She counts it up. “Thank you,” she says. “And be sure to tell your girlfriend I wish her good health!” After a little bit she says “and good luck!”

“Thanks, I’ll tell her,” I say.

Rosa didn’t want to have a baby. She says she’s going to have it now that it’s in her but she didn’t want it.

She talked about having an abortion and I didn’t know that word and I asked her what it meant and when she said what it meant my hand changed and I didn’t know her name anymore and I didn’t know who she was anymore, I knew she had my baby and she was going to hurt her.

I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything, I’m not a bad thing, I knew who she was again and I didn’t do anything, I’m not a bad thing I’m not a bad thing I’m not a bad thing.

The cashier smiles I want to hold her tight against me her little self I want to do things that feel good I want to make her feel good I don’t do anything because she doesn’t want to and I care what she wants maybe I care what she wants because I’m scared if we were the only people in the world I’m bigger and stronger than she is would I care what she wants yes I’d care what she wants yes I’d care what she wants I’m not a bad thing I’m not a bad thing I’m not a bad thing.

I’m looking at her and she’s noticed and she’s looking back at me. Please help me please help me I don’t know what I want I don’t know what you can do I want to talk to somebody I want to not be all by myself I want to not be in a city full of people and be all by myself. I don’t want to lie anymore but I’m so scared of not lying.

I want to cry. I haven’t cried ever. I want to go up to the cashier and hug her tight and put my head on her shoulder and cry and scream. I don’t know what I’d say I don’t know if I really want to say anything really maybe I just want to scream and scream and scream.

Oh God oh God will God listen to me if he’s there he made men in his image I’m not in his image I’m not a human being that means I must be an animal like a shark or a cow does God listen to a cow praying. Rosa says sometimes it helps just to talk to have someone always there to talk to. God if you’re there and you care about animals and you listen to animals please I’ll only ask one thing please don’t have made me a bad thing, amen.

They’re playing that song again.

It doesn’t matter if you love him or capital H-I-M
Just put your paws up
Cause you were born this way, baby

My mama told me when I was young
We are all born superstars
She rolled my hair and put my lipstick on
In the glass of her boudoir

There’s nothing wrong with loving who you are
She said, cause He made you perfect, babe
So hold your head up, girl and you’ll go far
Listen to me when I say

I’m beautiful in my way
Cause God makes no mistakes
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way

Don’t hide yourself in regret
Just love yourself and you’re set
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way, born this way


I pretend to read a poster and stand with my back to the store and move my wrists a little, where people can’t see them. It’s a little dance, I can dance, I can dance a little, I can dance a little but it’s not nothing, I don’t have to pretend I don’t want to move.

I’m OK, I’m OK, I can do this, I can pick up these bags and I can walk to the bus and I can get on the bus and pay for the bus and I can go home and I can cook dinner before Rosa comes back. Then I’ll think about the next thing.

-------
The song referred to here is Born This Way by Lady Gaga (lyrics).

Fun fact: the "I want to help Rosa eat" paragraph was originally a lot more blatantly sexual and alien and gross, but I decided it was getting too far into gross porn territory and turned it down a lot.
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
User avatar
Somes J
Posts: 377
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:04 am
Location: Berkeley, California

Re: The Boy Child (short Species II rewrite fic)

Post by Somes J »

Guys, I've been thinking...

I feel like this story suffers from what I expect might be a common problem with fanfiction: my ideas on the story I want to tell have evolved as I was writing, but because of the episodic nature of the publishing process a lot of the stuff I now wish I could change is locked in.

Example: "Sil [and by extension Alex] acting according to some hardwired reproductive instinct is totally misreading what's happening" is an issue the story should have grasped with long before this point.

I feel like the story as is spends most of its time kind of playing around the periphery of its actual point without really getting to it, and pisses away most of its potential to be interesting. And if I did try to improve it just by adding more stuff to it now, it would have awful pacing.

I'm thinking of doing something a bit radical here: start over. Start a new thread and pick up the story as a newer, better version, more in line with what I now want to write than what exists here.

Do you people think that would be a good idea? It's hard to get a sense of what people think when nobody comments...
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
Samuel Anders, nBSG, Daybreak, Part 2.
Post Reply