Face-plants Imminent

You weren’t hard to find. You reek of probes.

The giant rat wound up the wood.

You took my sister.

The spruce spun: Tippi craned wiggly.

When Dorset was born, her name was Mulch. As an aspirant, Mulch was assigned a trial: be the first to catch a bird. Instead of spending days chasing the rare jay, she snooped the river, and killed a kingfisher in its hole. She earned her title canny, and her peers were culled. I am telling you this, so you know what you’ve cost me.

Two pearls of midnight locked on Tippi.

I am Gerasa; I was born Neck. This is how I earned my title.

 

Tippi’s mind went muddy. She was awash in memories: of fur and blood, of the exhausted exhilaration of clawing oneself from a heap of bodies. Mangled failures and spent vessels, who had the utter fucking audacity to-

Assume an upright posture!

She was ripped back to reality by her memory crown.

Bio-magnetics failing!

She’d fallen a third of the way down, her back legs locked around a limp branch.

Her hat was peeling off.

Tippi arched her back, from a dead hang.

“Your optic nerve is absolutely pulsating!” cried Lina-2. “It’s almost like-”

“When I look at Xoz too long!”

“Yes! If caracoles are in the wild, then-”

“Dazzle camouflage?”

“Another quarterly stretch goal, loose in the gene pool!”

Tippi swung, upside down, desperate to cinch a branch with her front legs, and-

Found you.

Two black orbs spun below.

What an odd little seedpod!

Tippi’s back hooves were slipping.

“Remember the plan you suggested?” she said.

“The haptic one?” said Lina-2. “The bad one?”

“Let’s go.”

“We’re absolutely positive this thing will kill us?”

My sister’s death is my humiliation. Only your entrails can satisfy my shame.

“Seems so,” surmised Tippi.

“Then our plan’s live: with one major difference.”

Gerasa was upon them.

“That’s our way down.”

Be helpless.

“I love you, wax bean.”

Be worthless!

Tippi let go of the branch.

Facing the lost horrors of the genetic age, she aimed for the face.

 

“Do you think sapiens would’ve found our lives interesting?”

The roommates were discussing the dragonflyesque dreadfuls of the order Meganisoptera, and Tippi was insecure about her 0-inch wingspan.

“Our existence would make for a limited narrative,” said Lina. “We live in low to no light, and none of us communicate through vocalizations outside of you, randomly. To your average human, our daily routine would be tantamount to a living death, albeit one with more conversations about droppings.”

“Humans needed it salacious,” explained Xoz. “It was all Eros and Thanatos with that lot, and that was before machines wrote their scripture.”

“I see,” said Tippi, who did not.

Later that day, she lingered on Sub-basement 4, sniffing for hints of story wax.

 

As Tippi fell from a tree and into a nightmare, an invisible vigor coursed through her: Lina-2’s haptic lock, washing over her muscles.

Around Wee Sheol, the weirdest haptic sensation was the adrenal tweak; it was uncommon, and reserved for face-plants imminent.

The full lock was something else: Tippi felt the wind grace her every pore, as Lina-2 drafted and discarded flight choreography, between the brewing seconds.

“NOW!”

With a quicksilver chomp, Tippi bit a branch, curling her legs up and in.

“NOW!”

She registered the sting of whiskers, and kicked.

Her hoof sliced open the rat’s bulbous black eye.

From the keratin crush in her throat, Gerasa emitted a clinking noise: shrill, yet crystalline.

With forepaws frenetic, the rat clung to the spruce, slapping at her perforated sclera.

“NOW!”

Tippi launched herself at her opponent, ricocheting off Gerasa’s back with a crunching thwack.

You piss-soaked imp!

The rat regained her vision in a fuzzy instant, but it was too late: Tippi had her by the tail.

You meddling emerod!

Tippi dug her teeth into the tail, until she tasted the ventral caudal nerve, and the twitching tail went leaden.

You absurd crumb of a maniac!

Pulling from an ancient knowledge of Rattus anatomy, Lina-2 had sketched out a promenade of pain.

I will shuck out your eyes!

The rat slid down the tree, slashing at Tippi with her back claws.

I will shit out your skull!

Iron in her spit, Tippi glared back.

“I was excited to meet YOU!”

Frothing, Gerasa lost her grip.

She crashed through the boughs, and hit the ground with a wet slap.

 

An ordinary beach day would be punctuated by the boardwalk’s beeps, squawking gulls, and the thrum of the frigates, alighting far off at Terminal Avalon. But it was a Wednesday in mid-October, and the crowds were gone. The seabirds were elsewhere, probably plucking their fortunes from a garbage barge. The spacecraft had dwindled down to the occasional export skiff.

Tippi had heard something about a trade embargo, but could barely induce herself to recollect the vagaries of Olympian realpolitik. After all, she was napping under an umbrella.

 

Tippi awoke, curled in greasy fur.

She’d been napping on top of the rat.

She took a step, only to plunk back down.

She’d lost the memory crown in the drop.

Tippi considered the fall: what could Lina have done with fresh tech and 4,000 humans?

What could Lina have done, if Lina wasn’t Lina?

These were questions that would have to wait, because Gerasa was breathing.

The rat’s ribs rose, tremulous.

what. are. you.

“I’m everyone’s favorite pig,” Tippi sputtered.

Gerasa mistook this for a victor’s gloating.

heh. your title. yes.

“I suppose.”

what. do you. want.

“I don’t understand.”

you said. you wanted. to meet. me.

“Is this a trick?”

heh.

Gerasa managed a liquid cough.

no trick. real. what do. you want.

Tippi stared into the rat’s dimming eye.

“I want my friends to live.”

no.

“I want to feel the sunshine.”

trick.

“I want to see Antares.”

real.

Two pearls of midnight retracted in deliberation, and Gerasa’s broken form tensed with decorum.

it took so much to get. here. can’t be for nothing.

“What? What can’t be for nothing?”

you. are. interrupting.

“Sorry,” said Tippi.

fine. all fine.

The pearls were losing their luster.

breathe.

A pustule on the rat’s neck ruptured.

breathe.

A whorl of mist wafted up Tippi’s snout. It smelled of the rain.

mark of freehold.

She understood: this was a rare and weird gift.

Tippi blinked, and sprouted millions of eyes, telescoping high on fleshy turrets. Her eyestalks dove underground, rooting themselves in every tunnel and den. She knew the totality of the world’s hidden places, visiting The Valley of The Kings and the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang. She saw platyhelminthes fence with their penises. All soil was hers, to sift and sculpt.

And then, she went deeper.

 

Outro: Primal Scream – “Higher Than The Sun (American Spring Remix)”