The Wyrms of &alon

174.1 - Pan Awakes Summer Marches In


Let me repeat: the flower aircraft thing was turning into a wyrm.

Yeah, I really didn't expect this one, either.

I spent a moment trying to piece together the implications, I focused on the circuits of magical energy running through the ship, powering its transformation.

I'd seen more than enough human transformees to recognize the signs of a Type Two case of &alon. It made me think back to the wyrmifying whale in the marina. It was common knowledge that dolphins and whales were among the most intelligent of all non-human animals, with the general scholarly consensus being that their minds were at roughly the level of a pre-pubescent human child—so, half to three-quarters of a Rayph.

As &alon had made painfully clear to me, she turned people into wyrms to serve as warehouses to store and care for the souls she stole from everyone else. So, if she felt it was necessary to turn a whale into a wyrm, I could only assume that meant that she felt whales had souls worth preserving, or at the very least, that that specific whale did.

Oh God.

&alon, I thought-said, if there are any human beings inside the wyrm whales—

"—No, they aren't," she said, yelling in my mind. "I'm not stupid!"

You know what?, I told myself, no, I'm not going back on my word.

"I don't want her help," I muttered. "I don't want her help. I don't want her help."

Jules stared at me. "Dad…?" Her question was a curlycue that rose through the air.

I shook my head in Jules' general direction. "I didn't mean you, honey."

Okay, so, if a creature's soul was worth preserving, &alon turned some of that creature's species into wyrms to have them oversee the preservation. Since the ship in front of me was becoming wyrmy, I guessed that meant the Scary-Shinies really were "alive", and that &alon was trying to steal their souls, too.

Was that a good thing in this context? A bad thing? I honestly didn't know.

Of course, just because &alon thought they had a soul worth saving, that didn't mean the machines actually had anything supernatural going on with their consciousness. There was always the possibility that they were just running some kind of highly advanced artificial intelligence. Still: an aircraft, turning into a wyrm?

Is this really what my life had come to?

"I believe spacecraft, or starfighter, would be the more accurate term," Suisei suggested.

Noted.

More questions proliferated.

How was this even possible?

Did all of the spacecraft have harvestable souls, or just the flower-starfighters?

Granted, I could be completely wrong about this, but…

—I sighed.

Speaking from both personal and professional experience, unless my understanding of the situation underwent a truly radical change, I sincerely doubted there was any amount of therapy that would make me okay with how &alon had duped and betrayed me.

I never would have guessed "doubting the underlying truth of anything I knew " would have joined my long list of insecurities. I mean, other than philosophers, who really spends that much time thinking about epistemology? For most of us, we just pick something that seems to work and carry on with our lives.

"Dad?" Jules asked. "What do you mean, 'the ship is turning into a wyrm'? This is kind of scaring me."

Without thinking about it, I'd sped up my thoughts to give myself some space and time to ponder things.

I turned to face my daughter. "Let's go back to the car. Your mother and brother should hear this, too."

Nodding, Jules walked off, not bothering to avoid stepping in the mud. By this point, dirty samue were the least of her worries.

As Jules got back into the car, I weaved my fishbowl plexus into place to keep my spores from spreading.

Pel and Jules had their windows lowered ever-so-slightly to let in the sound of my voice.

I glanced toward the ship.

"As I was just telling Jules, not only is that ship over there infected with the fungus, but… it's turning into a wyrm. It's a transformee, just like I was."

Rayph made a quiet, "Whoa…" though it soon dissolved into a brief coughing fit.

Pel coughed, too. She groaned when she finished, and leaned against the steering wheel, laying on her crossed arms. "How is that possible?"

"The ship must be alive in some way," I said. "And &alon is turning that whale into a wyrm, so… who's to say she couldn't do it to a spaceship, too?"

Jules closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. "Angel, does this mean we have to go back to the house to check if our toaster is getting wyrmy?"

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"At this point, anything's possible," I said.

"Whatcha gonna do now?" Rayph asked.

I looked at the ship. "Wyrms can link with one another," I said. "It can be done wirelessly through wyrmsong, or through direct physical contact."

"I know about that," Jules said, with a cough. "One of Verune's wyrms forcibly linked with Jessica back in the Melted Palace. She explained it to me."

"So, this linking business," Pel said, "you're going to try that with the ship."

I nodded. "Yes. Unlike the two aliens who came out of it, it doesn't look like the ship has an easy way to quickly kill itself, and even if it did, I know &alon wouldn't allow it."

"What do you mean?" Pel asked.

"She can take control of us at will," I explained. "The way Suisei explained it to me, my mind is like software running on my wyrm-body's hardware. And that hardware? It's 100% &alon. In that sense, I guess you could say that wyrms are renting our bodies from &alon, and she's free to evict us at any time. When that happens, a wyrm's eyes will change from their normal gold to a silver color." I pointed at my changed eyes to illustrate.

"Does that mean you'll go away forever when that happens?" Rayph asked.

I shook my head. "No. Whether or not &alon lets a silver-eyed wyrm control their own body gain is mostly up to her, but, knowing how much she cares about her wyrms and the souls stored inside them, she'd never delete a consciousness. For the same reason, I'd expect &alon to intervene to stop a wyrm from killing themselves."

"Angel's breath…" Pel muttered.

"Why link with the ship?" Jules asked.

"Because it breaks the language barrier, for one. If there's a way for me to communicate with the ship, I'll be able to do so through the link. And even if I can't communicate with it, as long as it has thoughts and memories, I'll be able to explore them. Maybe I'll learn something about this superweapon that they supposedly have. And if I can't convince them to refrain from using it or to get them to help the wyrms rebel against &alon, at the very least, I might be able to learn how to stop them from destroying us."

"But… what will happen to you?" Pel asked.

"I don't know. If it's similar to my previous experiences with linking, I should be fine."

"And if it isn't?"

"I don't think &alon would let me go through with it if that was the case," I said.

"How long will this take?" Jules asked.

"Not long. No more than an hour, I think."

There was a pause.

"No matter what happens," I said, "never forget that I love you, and that I'll find you, no matter how long it takes."

Then I turned away and slithered toward the ship.

Not gonna lie, I was definitely feeling jittery as I slithered onto the ship's boarding ramp. I slowed to a crawl when the interior came into view.

"Wow…" I muttered.

"High-tech" didn't even begin to describe it. I had to completely dampen my wyrmsight to keep myself from getting overwhelmed by all the threads and waveforms that sparkled within the structure. Energies radiated through the interior like clouds of glitter.

Nearly every inch of the interior was silvery and metallic, as if someone had taken a soft metal and cut through it with a knife to expose the inner sheen, and then covered it in irregularly sized panels in a design that was both smooth yet geometric. The ramp opened onto an antechamber whose walls were studded with storage units. Past a thin arch, the antechamber opened onto a central concourse. A countertop control panel ran along the edge of the opposite side of the room, roughly in the shape of an upside down U. Four side rooms branched off from the middle of the concourse, two to each side. Only one of the four rooms had a door. It looked especially formidable, as if to compensate for the doorlessness of the other three rooms. Benches of a sort rose from the concourse's center, along with some seats near the control panel.

I slithered ahead. To my surprise, the furnishings sank into the floor as I entered the concourse, merging with it.

The more I looked, the more I noticed. There was motion nearly everywhere. Clusters of geometry emerged in spots across the ceiling, poking out from the surface, only to sink back in with a nervous quiver

Was the ship's interior reacting to my presence?

As if to answer me, the side rooms suddenly pulled away from me, sinking into the walls. The control panels retracted, too.

Yeah, it was definitely spooked.

Even the curves in the walls and ceiling were panicking, smoothing themselves over, desperate to get away from me.

This ship was unlike any machine I'd ever known. With every additional detail, it became more and more difficult for me to keep thinking of it as a "machine". I couldn't escape the feeling that I'd broken into a living thing's guts. Murmurations rippled across surfaces whenever I passed by.

Simply bringing my hands close to the walls was enough to make them shiver in masses of undulating, hexagonal columns.

When a machine jams, it often continues to attempt to do whatever it was doing, creating a cyclic sound. I heard that struggle coming from the far side of the room, and, moving toward it, I discovered that one segment of the control panel was refusing to merge with the floor. It was trapped in a loop: sinking down, stopping, and rising back up, over and over again.

The cycle sped faster and faster as I slithered up to it. Silver walls rose up in front of me in pyrite habit, but I grabbed the top of one before it reached the ceiling and hoisted my front half over it, sliding forward even as the back half of my body continued to rise. Two more walls emerged from either side of the room.

"Oh no you don't…" I muttered.

I whipped up a plexus underneath me to give myself traction on the morphing floor. The protrusions shuddered under the weight of my psychokinesis. Then, with a crack that couldn't have been anything but painful, the rising wall fell apart into a dozen or so small bricks that sprouted insectoid legs and skittered away. The crawlers ran to the walls and melted into them.

Okay, this thing was definitely alive. That made me more confident than ever that linking with it was absolutely the right thing to do. At the same time, it hurt me to see how terrified it was of me, just like its crew had been.

What upset me wasn't that I blamed them for feeling as they did, but that I hadn't been able to explain away their fears.

Hopefully, I wouldn't be adding another failure to my scorecard.

The ship seemed to admit defeat. The rising wall that had been lifting up my tail suddenly gave up and sank into the ground, leaving me free to slither up to the jammed control panel, which had also stopped trying to flee.

Up close, I immediately understood what was wrong with that one segment of the control panel. From a distance, the discolorations on its surface had looked like some kind of text. However, now that I could get a good look at them, it was clear that these were bits and bobs of fungal tissue dappled over with the minute, unmistakable tiling of wyrm scales. The new growth extruded from the ship like weeds poking out from cracked rock. Before my eyes, the uncorrupted silvery-stuff pressing up against the wyrm growth was fracturing into tiny slivers. I could and did whisk them away with a stroke of a claw, revealing more fungal tissue wriggling into being directly underneath.

It was like unearthing a fossil. I used my claws to scrape away as much of the metallic stuff as I could. Ripples spread across the ground, indicating what I couldn't help but interpret as discomfort. Things moved much more quickly once it occurred to me to use the spores piled up at the base of my fishbowl to speed up the process. Dispelling my plexus, my spores spilled over the counter and floor, and I watched with equal parts disgust and fascination as the spores took root, initiating new waves of fungal growth. With their help, a couple of minutes later, enough of the silveriness had been cleared away and replaced with freshly seeded fungus to expose a crooked, but good-sized wyrmflesh root growing from within the damaged control panel.

"Now comes the moment of truth," I muttered.

Many of my spirits watched with bated breath as I reached out and gently squeezed the wyrmroot. A couple seconds later, the link kicked in. My hand quivered with the familiar tingling sensation of my body plunging haustoria into one of my fellow wyrms. Then there was a sense of falling—of the world passing away—followed by darkness, and then by the light that came in its wake.

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