All Physics

In their first week together, the roommates traded cherished memories. Lina reminisced about long conversations with Dr. Bux, and how Ben made nootropic attar with homegrown jasmine. Xoz recalled “crashing the Zoozve Investor Conference, into the Sun,” whereas Tippi was fond of “yesterday.” But in their second week, the organics yearned for an itinerary more dynamic, and The Asparagus World Championship was born.

Xoz promised The A.W.C. would be as physically taxing as it was rigorously metaphorical, and boast a robust structure of leagues and commissioners; Lina was skeptical.

“Is this an excuse to slap each other with rods of asparagus? What are perhaps the last asparagus on the planet?”

“No,” said Xoz.

 

“Zero.”

Using his beak, Xoz yanked Tippi into the squish of his crag, careful not to poison her. Then, he blew up the Xozebo.

Eight tentacles unfurled taut, and 463 kilos of Xoz fell to the riverbed. There was a splash, followed by a sunshower of rat parts.

Surprise! he cackled. I am the haunted house!

Gerasa missed her mark, slamming into The Archangel’s bucket helmet with an unforgiving CLANG. The monstrous sisters tumbled into the river, crushing the shock troops. As they squabbled, the swarm tread water, and Xoz confused Leviathan’s executive dysfunction for fear.

Rather than bolting, he skibbled to shore and posed, assuming an intimidation stance he hadn’t used since 2876, when Lipids Balzano ingested a gestalt subconscious to sidestep his dazzle camouflage.

Xoz taunted the swarm, arms outstretched and blaring brimstone: a demonic altar with a 50-foot kill radius.

“Who’ll throw it away?” sneered Scylla.

“Who’ll steel my resolve?” swore Naphil.

“Who burns with me?” said Sanity Smasher.

“Who itches for the big time?” excoriated Brolic.

“Who is sexually aroused by blunt force trauma?” said Aiapæc.

“Who’s feeling perilous?” polled 8-Baal.

“Who’s getting choked?” said Choker.

Terremoto said nothing.

It’s Terremoto’s turn to insult rats, realized Xoz.

There was a blue stump where his throttling arm usually sat.

He hadn’t felt Terremoto leave his body.

His shredded flesh coagulated, and his suit cauterized itself, reeking of arcane carcinogens. Xoz had lost enough limbs to know the suit didn’t anesthetize his wound. No, the responsible party was-

squinch squinch

On the far side of the shore, Dorset lounged on a log.

Terremoto hung from her jaws.

She’d nicked him in the shallows, with bite precise and saliva narcotic.

The rat spit out Xoz’s arm, and unspooled her razor mouth, incisors a cupric blue.

They drink their skeletons.

Gnarled sheaves of keratin grew deep in her throat, a crush of thorns.

I’m nobody’s beverage.

Dorset blinked.

When her eyes opened, her head was sailing through the air.

She never saw Xoz swing the bat.

There was an arterial geyser, and her body slumped off the log, gullet grinders chomping out of postmortem reflex.

Her sisters quit their bicker.

The swarm slowed its paddle.

No one moved, until Gerasa wailed.

Xoz unloosed his roommates.

“What’d I miss?” said Tippi, from the pebbles.

Gerasa cradled Dorset’s severed head in spindly paws.

“Oh.”

The Archangel stared at Tippi.

These villains have stolen your sister.

Her gaze was a tundra, endless and empty.

Build your warrens in their guts.

The Archangel screamed, and the river devoured the entire world.

 

They made for the treetops: with bat, without chair.

Tippi witnessed a fraction of their escape: she’d been wrapped in Choker, snout peeking out. Everyone else swirled breakneck, even Lina-2, who free-associated coordinates and hairpin turns.

“Hook to 40.2211° north, 74.7731° west! Wait, that’s too west!”

Cradling his stump, Xoz turned the forest to shrapnel, wisps of hemocyanin spreading through his suit.

Not to be outdone, the sisters careened through the trees, bark shearing in reams, as hundreds of thousands of rats rained from the canopy, blotting out the sun in an ambush scabrous.

“I’m going back to the river!” barked Xoz.

“Will I need to hold my breath?” cried Tippi.

“You’re not coming!”

“WHAT!”

He somersaulted 40 feet up a lonely spruce, and shoved her in a knotty pocket, tip-top.

“Stay still. Wait here. Don’t die.”

She leaned into his suckers.

“We’ve never been apart-”

He flung himself into the river, seven arms howling, splashing down just as the swarm stampeded past. The mollusk evacuated upstream, drawing on his siphon for suppressing fire, until he was a rude mote.

 

Two hours passed. Tippi tried not to breathe too hard.

“Xoz needs our help!”

Lina-2 had a plan, of sorts.

“I could guide you down the tree with haptics, but our chance of success is around zero.”

“Your odds mean nothing to me!”

“Your weight will shake the branches. As useful as they are, my haptics require participants to land the physics, perfectly.”

“I’m all physics!”

“I know, but some physics are more stubborn than others, namely that drop.”

The lower spruce was bare, and the dirt laid a death-dealing distance below it.

Tippi noticed a flutter of white across the river.

“Look,” said Lina-2. “Cherry blossoms.”

“Oh, more trees.”

Tippi’s sass did not go unnoticed.

“I’d like to broach a difficult topic,” said Lina-2. “Since this morning, you’ve either been avoiding me, or razzing me.”

“How can I avoid you? You live in my hat. You live off the twitch of my myofibers.”

“Tippi, that qualifies as razz. It’s just that you’ve been uncharacteristically arch-”

“I could say the same about you. Where did your humans go?”

“That feels like projection-”

“You were going to chop off MY BITS!”

“Wait-”

“You could’ve woken me up CENTURIES AGO!”

The wind picked up, riling the needles.

“I’m sorry,” said Lina-2.

“That’s all you got?”

“I didn’t have a choice. I was built for Antique Ops, and they planned on reverse-engineering you and Xoz. Also, I didn’t intend to keep you brined that long.”

“For a superintelligence, you clearly weren’t thinking.”

“What if you had a bad scrape? We’re barely compatible: did you know that? I wouldn’t be able to juice your leukocytes or nullify your nociceptors. What if you broke your leg? Could you be happy in a haptic lock for 9,000 years?”

“As opposed to being entombed in preservative?”

“Until three days ago, I was stuck in one place, for a long time. I didn’t want that for you. Some years, I barely stirred. Once, I prayed my hard box would get clogged with eels, but I’m glad it didn’t. I’d have never met you.”

Tippi found the cherry blossoms.

She could discern each blossom, flitting individually: slivers of sakura.

“When were you going to tell me about Xoz?” she said.

“Five weeks from now. We scheduled a good-bye month.”

“You could’ve talked to the wind faeries.”

“You’ve never met a wind faerie,” said Achilles. “They blurt things like, Optimo pressure? Maximo!”

“The wind faeries sound like wee-wees,” said Tippi.

“They’re fine. That’s the thing, most of us are-”

Lina-2 stopped.

Below them, the bull shark was sliding down the towpath.

The shark was carried by a splotch of swarm, careful to keep the fish free of dust and muck. Moments later, these shark-bearers were joined by a second train of rats, whose cargo was alive and burping.

Aloft a bed of norvegicus minos sat the worst rat yet.

He resembled an old gourd sallow with rot, half the length of the sisters. He slithered upon his court, slickening them with sebum and slobber.

His tail was crooked and crusted, like dried umbilical, and his only fur was a matted tuft on the skull. This rat was whiskerless, earless, and semi-membraneous. In the fading afternoon, Tippi could see the veins beneath his diaphanous, tubular torso.

The rat’s wide nostrils expelled particulate-rich vapor. He guided his attendants in wheezes, expelling his will, like spores of the death cap.

A gust of the must blew up to Tippi. It smelled sweet, and Lina-2 pulled the data.

“It’s a pheromone. Built from molluscan endosperm, like caracoles from an industrial slugyard, but the formula reads bootleg.”

The Prince of Scum parked his face on Carcharhinus leucas, and chewed. Some mastication later, he was joined by a third caravan, carrying many pregnant Rattus norvegicus minos. The mothers were ferried to the shark, where they too gorged.

Each mother carried a single pup in an external amniotic sac, many times larger than her own body. The unborn distended their guts, embryonic bas-reliefs of claw and tooth, strained against thin skin: these were sisters.

“How will they survive birth?” asked Tippi.

“They won’t.”

While the mothers fed, The Prince of Scum lolled on the shark-bearers. Belly-up, they manipulated him, prodding his ovoid form with their legs. The Prince greased the crowd, and the rats tore at each other, desperate to join a dynasty for a few weeks.

Suddenly, the tree shook.

“Tippi, look down!”

The spruce rocked, violent.

“Look down, NOW!”

Tippi screwed up her courage, and peered through the boughs: two pearls of midnight danced between the needles.

Did you seriously think this would work?

 

Outro: Gravediggaz – “Bang Your Head”