All Physics

In their first week together, the roommates exchanged cherished memories. Lina reminisced about long conversations with Dr. Bux, and how Ben made nootropic attar with homegrown jasmine. For Xoz, it was “crashing the Zoozve Investor Conference, into the Sun,” whereas Tippi was fond of “yesterday.”

But into 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 Tippi with rods of asparagus? What are perhaps the last asparagus on the planet?”

“No,” said Xoz.

 

“Zero,” said the beak.

In a matter of milliseconds, the mollusk executed a slew of maneuvers, all predicated on the assumption the rats didn’t know the Xozebo was alive.

Using his beak, he 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 mollusk fell into the riverbed.

Surprise! he cackled. I am the haunted house!

There was a splash, followed by a sunshower of rat parts.

Target in crag, Gerasa slammed into The Archangel. The younger rat clung to the older, banging her bucket helmet like timpani. The monstrous sisters tumbled, their spat crushing swarm with each swipe.

As the sisters squabbled, Leviathan tread water, and Xoz mistook executive dysfunction for fear. Instead of bolting, he skibbled to shore, and assumed an intimidation stance he hadn’t used since 2877, when Lipids Balzano ingested a gestalt subconscious to undermine the mollusk’s dazzle.

Xoz whipped his arms, securing a 50-foot kill radius. His tentacles beckoned outstretched, flaring brimstone, like a demonic altar.

“Who throws it away?” sneered Scylla.

“Who steels my resolve?” swore Naphil.

“Who burns with me?” said Sanity Smasher.

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

“Who loves blunt force trauma?” said Aiapæc.

“Who perspires at my perils?” polled 8-Baal.

“Who’s getting choked?” said Choker.

Terremoto said nothing.

It’s Terremoto’s turn to insult rats.

Xoz saw a blue stump where his throttling arm usually sat.

He hadn’t felt his limb leave his body.

His shredded flesh coagulated, as his suit cauterized itself shut, reeking of arcane carcinogens.

Xoz had lost enough limbs to know his suit didn’t anesthetize the wound. No, the responsible one was-

squinch squinch

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

His arm hung from her jaws.

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

The giant rat spit out Terremoto, unspooling her razor mouth. She flashed an array of incisors, stained cupric blue. Deep in her throat were gnarled sheaves of keratin, like a crush of thorns.

They drink their skeletons.

Xoz knew this was a distraction, but he was a doomsday device, and nobody’s beverage.

Dorset blinked.

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

She never saw Xoz approach, or swing the bat.

Her head hit the ground, and her essence sizzled off.

The rest of Dorset slumped off the log, gullet grinders chomping at an arterial geyser out of postmortem reflex.

Her sisters quit bickering.

The swarm slowed its paddle.

No one moved, until Gerasa wailed with such despair that Xoz prolapsed, plopping Tippi upon the pebbles.

“What’d we miss?” she said.

Gerasa cradled her sister’s severed head in spindly paws.

“Oh.”

Tippi accidentally made eye contact with The Archangel.

These villains have stolen your sister.

Her gaze was a tundra, endless and empty.

Build your warrens in their guts.

The Archangel screamed: the river devoured the land.

 

Tippi was in a tree with Lina-2.

Xoz had left them atop a tall spruce, isolated by the river and looming over the towpath. Tippi was sandwiched between bough and trunk: she was fine, as long as she didn’t move.

When Leviathan attacked, Xoz scooped her up and made for the treetops: with bat, without chair. Tippi didn’t witness much of their escape. She’d been wrapped in Choker, snout peeking out. Everyone else swirled breakneck; even Lina-2, who free-associated global coordinates and hairpin turns, in hopes of keeping them marginally en route.

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

Unloosing an untranslatable tangle of octopus profanity, Xoz sundered the woods like a meteor. Not to be outdone, the sisters careened through the trees, bark shearing off in shrapnel. Rats rained from the canopy in an ambush scabrous, gnashing their way down.

Even airborne, Xoz cradled his stump.

“I’m going back to the river!” he shouted. “I’ll go underwater, lure ’em and lose ’em!”

Wisps of blue blood spread through his suit, drenching him in hemocyanin.

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

“You’re not coming.”

“What!”

Xoz broke for a clear glade, somersaulted up the lonely spruce, and shoved Tippi into the knotty pocket tip-top.

“Wait for me: be still, do not die.”

She leaned into his suckers.

“But we’ve never been apart-”

Xoz flung himself into the river: 40 feet down, seven arms howling.

He splashed down, just as the swarm stampeded past the spruce.

Tippi watched, as the sisters and swarm chased Xoz from the towpath, vengeance in their step. The mollusk evacuated upstream, expressing his siphon, until he was a rude mote on the horizon.

Soon, he was out of diadem range.

 

Two hours passed: the sun grew orange and low, and Tippi grew impatient.

“Xoz needs our help!” she snuffled, careful not to respire too vigorously.

Lina-2 had a plan, of sorts.

“I could guide you down in a haptic lock, but an escape would require you to tumble across the boughs, with zero hesitation, or chance of success.”

“Your odds mean nothing to me!”

“Your weight will disrupt the branches, so each of your steps must be perfect and fearless. As useful as my haptics are, they require an unflinching participant to land the physics.”

“I’m all physics!”

“We all are, but some physics hit harder than others, namely that drop.”

The spruce’s lower half was bare and woody, and the dirt laid a death-dealing distance below.

“Let’s put aside the slim chance the two of us can execute a controlled fall. If we leave the tree, we’ll have to find Xoz, and it’ll be dark soon. I understand my veto is qualified, but I believe it’s prudent for us to wait.”

Anxiety stung Tippi. Xoz was alone, and she was arguing with a supercomputer about how to break her own neck. Across the river, she caught a flutter of white.

“Look,” tried Lina. “Cherry blossoms.”

“More trees,” grumbled Tippi.

Her sass did not go unnoticed.

“Tippi, I’d like to broach a difficult topic. Since this morning, I believe you’ve been avoiding me-”

“Lina-2, how can I avoid you? You live in my hat, and off the twitch of my myofibers.”

“It’s just that you’ve been uncharacteristically arch as of late-”

“Funny, I could say the same about you.”

A hesitation flavored Lina-2’s chipper utilitarianism.

“That feels like a projection, Tippi-”

“You were going to chop off MY BITS!”

“Wait-”

“I could’ve woken up CENTURIES AGO!”

“Did Xoz-”

“You owe me 10,000 BRINEDAY PRESENTS!”

The wind picked up, riling the needles. Once the spruce ceased its sway, Lina-2 spoke.

“I’m sorry, Tippi.”

“That’s all you got?”

“I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Just as you were stuck in the brine, I was built for my users. The Lenapewihittuk Institute purchased you and Xoz to reverse-engineer your genetic secrets. It wasn’t my intent to keep you brined so long, I did what I thought was best for you.”

“For all your computational brilliance, you clearly didn’t think it through.”

“Tippi, what if you had a bad scrape that got infected? We’re barely compatible as is, I wouldn’t be able to juice your leukocytes or nullify your nociceptors. What if you stumbled and broke your leg? What was I going to do, keep you hobbling around in a haptic lock for 9,000 years?”

“As opposed to entombing me in a psychedelic food preservative?”

“Until three days ago, I was stuck in one place, for a very long time: I didn’t want it for you.”

Lina-2’s tenor drooped.

“I can’t even protect you now. We’re stuck in this tree, while Xoz risks a scheme even he knew was strategically bereft.”

Tippi tempered her rage.

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

“Five weeks from now. We’d scheduled an entire good-bye month. He clearly felt the need to accelerate that calendar, given the circumstance. Tippi, I know it seems hard to believe, but most centuries I felt as stuck as you feel, in this tree, right now. I was by myself, discerning my purpose in pure absence. I could look back, but never ahead. Some years I barely stirred, just so I didn’t have to deal with it. I prayed my million-ton 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 again. Outside of the century shelter, she could discern each branch, flitting individually, slivers of sakura.

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

Lina-2 chuckled, soft.

“You’ve never met a wind faerie. They’re all ‘1-2-3-4 VERTEXTUAL!’ this and ‘optimo-presh-MAXIMO!‘ that.”

Tippi snorfed.

“The wind faeries sound like wee-wees.”

“They’re fine,” said Lina-2 “That’s thing about life, most of us are-”

Achilles stopped, because the bull shark was sliding down the towpath.

The magnificent fish was carried by a fraction of the swarm, the rats careful to keep the meat free of dust and muck.

Moments later, a second train of rats ambled out of the forest, and joined the grim procession of shark-bearers.

The new rats’ cargo was very much alive. In fact, it was burping.

Gamboling aloft on a bed of Rattus norvegicus minos, Tippi witnessed the worst rat yet.

His limbs appeared ornamental. His tail was crooked and crusted, like a dried umbilical cord. This creature resembled an old gourd, sallowed with rot.

This tubular rat was half the length of the sisters. He didn’t walk, but rolled and slithered, atop a raft of rodents, all bodies slickened with slobber and sebum. It took hundreds of supplicants to lug this hierarch around.

Tippi squinted at the grotesquery. The rat barely looked like Rattus norvegicus minos, or even Gerasa or The Queen. His only fur was a matted tuft clinging to his skull. He was earless and whiskerless, and his skin was a thin membrane. In the fading afternoon light, Tippi could see a vascular lattice underneath diaphanous gonads and gut.

The strangest feature was his nose; it was barely there, but somehow dominated the rat’s whole face.

The rat’s hairless rhinarium and jaw were squashed concave, sliding his profile into its nostrils. He guided his chauffeurs in labored wheezes, expelling a particulate-rich vapor with every exhalation, like the spores of a death cap.

A gust of the crud whorled its way to the spruce, smelling far sweeter than its source.

“What’s coming out of its nose?” whispered Tippi.

Lina-2 pulled the data from Tippi’s nostrils:

“It’s a pheromone, heavily modded aerosolized mollusk endosperm.”

“Like caracoles?”

“Yes,” said Lina. “But not like the ‘coles from an industrial slugyard. This organism is producing it independently.”

Tippi had never seen a slug, but she’d seen potatoes, and this rat looked like a potato.

The Prince of Scum greeted his brood with a gaseous groan, and keeled over his combined court. He parked his face on the shark, finding nothing but tedium in bounty.

But Carcharhinus leucas wasn’t his feast alone. After some bored chewing, a third caravan of rats emerged.

“The poverty of their methods!” spat Lina-2.

The sight that broke the clone was a dozen or so pregnant Rattus norvegicus minos.

The mothers were ferried to The King, where they too gorged. Each mother carried a single pup within an external amniotic sac, many times larger than their own bodies.

The unborn pups distended their mothers’ surplus guts, bas-reliefs of gestating bone and tooth. Tippi could see embryonic outlines flail and strain against thin skin, prenatal yet preternatural.

This was where the sisters came from.

“How will they survive the birth?” wondered Tippi.

“They won’t.”

While the mothers fed, The Prince of Scum lolled atop the mess of shark-bearers. The rug of rats laid belly-up, manipulating him with their legs, and prodding his ovoid form. The Prince chortled as he greased the crowd, rewarding the faithful with a womb-o’-demon.

The least fortunate were those at the edge of the heap. Anyone rat wasn’t in his vicinity was prey for opportunists. The would-be mothers tore at each other, desperate to join a dynasty but for a few weeks.

Suddenly, the tree shook.

“Tippi, look down!” cried Lina-2.

Something was climbing it.

Bio-magnetics secure, said the rote voice the memory crown.

The spruce rocked.

“Look down, NOW!”

Tippi screwed up her courage, and peered through the boughs.

Two pearls of midnight wove between the needles.

Did you seriously think this would work?

 

Outro: Gravediggaz – “Bang Your Head”