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 and slammed into The Archangel’s bucket helmet with an unforgiving CLANG.

The monstrous sisters tumbled into the river, crushing their shock troops with each swipe. As they squabbled, the swarm tread water, and Xoz confused Leviathan’s executive dysfunction for fear.

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

Tentacles outstretched and blaring brimstone, Xoz challenged Leviathan, like 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.

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

They drink their skeletons.

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

I’m nobody’s beverage.

Dorset blinked.

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

She never saw Xoz approach, or swing his bat.

With an arterial geyser, Dorset’s decapitated corpse slumped off the log, her gullet grinders chomping out of postmortem reflex.

Her sisters quit their bicker.

The swarm slowed its paddle.

No one moved, until Gerasa wailed, and Tippi fell out of Xoz.

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

Gerasa cradled Dorset’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, and the river devoured the entire world.

 

Tippi was in a tree.

She was atop a thin spruce, sandwiched between bough and trunk. She was fine, as long as she didn’t move.

When Leviathan attacked, they made for the treetops: with the bat, without the 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, to keep them marginally en route.

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

Unloosing an occult tangle of octopus profanity, Xoz turned the forest into shrapnel. 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.

Even airborne, Xoz cradled his stump.

“I’m going back to the river!” he said.

Azure wisps of hemocyanin spread through his suit.

“I’ll go underwater: lure ’em and lose ’em!”

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

“You’re not coming!”

“WHAT!”

Xoz located a lonely spruce, isolated by the river. Somersaulting up it, he shoved Tippi into a knotty pocket tip-top.

“Stay still. Wait for me. 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, vengeance in their step.

The mollusk evacuated upstream, drawing on his siphon for suppressing fire, until he was a rude mote, and beyond the 10-mile range of Tippi’s diadem.

 

Two hours passed.

The day grew low, and Tippi tried not to breathe too hard.

“Xoz needs our help!” she snuffled.

Lina-2 had a plan, of sorts.

“I could guide you down the tree in a haptic lock, 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 the 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.”

“Good, more trees.”

Her 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.”

Lina-2’s chipper mien cracked.

“Tippi, that’s razz. You’ve been uncharacteristically arch as of late-”

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

“That feels like projection, Tip-”

“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, Tippi.”

“That’s all you got?”

“I didn’t have a choice. I was built for Antique Ops, and they were going to reverse-engineer you and Xoz. Also, I didn’t intend to keep you brined that long, I did what I thought was best for you.”

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

“What if you had a bad scrape?” said Lina-2. “Tippi, 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? Would you hobble 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, and I didn’t want that for you. Some years, I barely stirred. Once, 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. She could discern each blossom, flitting individually, slivers of sakura.

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

“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. They say things like, Optimo pressure? Maximo!”

“The wind faeries sound like wee-wees.”

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

Lina-2 stopped, because, below them, the bull shark was sliding down the towpath.

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

Aloft a bed of norvegicus minos sat the worst rat yet. He resembled an old gourd, sallow with rot.

This rat was half the length of the sisters. He rode upon his attendants, rolling and slithering, slickening all with slobber and sebum.

The hierarch’s tail was crooked and crusted, like dried umbilical. His only fur was a matted tuft on his skull, and he was whiskerless, earless, and semi-membraneous. In the fading afternoon light, Tippi could see the vascular lattice beneath his diaphanous and tubular torso.

The rat’s strangest feature was its wide nostrils, which expelled particulate-rich vapor. He guided the swarm with these wheezes, expelling his will like death cap spores.

A gust of the crud blew up to the spruce, smelling sweeter than its source, and Lina-2 pulled the data from Tippi’s own nostrils.

“It’s a pheromone, built from modded mollusk endosperm. Like caracoles from an industrial slugyard, but the formula’s bootleg.”

The Prince of Scum greeted Carcharhinus leucas with a gaseous groan, and parked his face on her corpse.

But the fish wasn’t his feast alone. Some bored chewing later, a third caravan emerged, carrying many pregnant Rattus norvegicus minos.

The mothers were ferried to the shark, where they too gorged. Each carried a single pup in an external amniotic sac, many times larger than her own body.

Bas-reliefs of gestating claw and tooth, the unborn pups distended the mothers’ guts. Embryonic outlines strained against thin skin, prenatal yet preternatural.

This was where the sisters came from.

“How do they survive birth?” asked Tippi.

“They won’t.”

While the mothers fed, The Prince of Scum lolled atop the shark-bearers. Belly-up, they manipulated him, prodding his ovoid form with their legs. The Prince greased the crowd, rewarding the faithful with a womb-o’-demon, and the would-be mothers tore at each other, desperate to join a dynasty for a few weeks.

Suddenly, the tree shook.

“Tippi, look down!”

The spruce rocked, violently.

“Look down, NOW!”

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

Two pearls of midnight danced between the needles.

Gerasa scoffed.

Did you seriously think this would work?

 

Outro: Gravediggaz – “Bang Your Head”