Chapter 3

The interior of the Bug warrens had been disturbing and creepy and icky, the first time Lou had come into them.

Now?

Now they were just deeply, deeply sad.

Walking through the narrow tunnels, holding his com before him with the light turned to maximum, Lou perked his ears, trying to hear any sounds of movement, any hint that there was life down here. But when his ... spouse had left, she had left. Even the things that he hadn’t thought were part of her hive mind were gone. The tiny little glow-worms that had writhed through the subcutaneous material that lined the walls underneath the hardened carapace that made up most of the tunnels support structure? They were gone. The tiny scuttling beetles that had been about the size of a quarter were gone. The distant breathing sounds that he had thought were a natural byproduct of the tunnels shape and the winds of Charon? That was gone too.

It was desolate and haunting and made him feel more panicky and nervous than coming down here the first time had.

But he pressed on, his jaw clenched.

His studies in popular culture had ended somewhere in the mid 20th century – past that, media and culture had (according to his lectures and tutors) fallen to the two great perils. The first had been an cannibalistic repetition made endemic by late stage capitalism and the second had been due to the ‘coarsening effect of utopia.’ Without the rarefied needs of high culture – and the complex web of etiquette and politeness that had been that had come with it – humanity had devolved into a bunch of...

Well.

Lou actually kind of liked GF. But the man’s full name was God Fucker and he had thought that an appropriate joke on first meeting with someone he had never met was to start cracking on about harems.

But of all the culture that he had studied – from the Chinese poets of Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu to the works of William Shakespeare to the songlines of the Aboriginal peoples (such as had survived) – the only myth that came to mind to succor him in this moment of great personal dread ... was Orpheus. Except it was inverted – he was behind Eurydice, hoping that she’d look back and see him. Lou clenched his jaw and kept walking forward, even as the caves grew narrower and more winding and the feeling of depressing emptiness became replaced by a creeping dread.

Anything could be in the darkness, without his spouse in it.

But still, he pressed on.

And, at last.

Lou stepped up and into a familiar looking chamber – the same gestation room that his spouse had taken to him to before. He swept his com around and found the light spilling over a large, seamed mound of black, rubbery flesh. It throbbed slowly, swelling and then seeping backwards, and as his light shone onto it, he found that the rubbery material was partially transparent – and inside, he could faintly see the quasihumanoid form that his spouse had begun to gestate to serve as her ... he wasn’t sure what to call it. She was a hive mind intelligence spread across three solar systems. Could it really be said that anything was her focal point?

And yet, she had needed to take breaks from talking to him. It had been tiring for her to understand and grasp the singular viewpoint and to listen to his singular voice. He sighed, then sat down beside the egg, breathing in slowly.

“Now we wait,” he said.

Time passed and Lou thought through everything he was going to say – and he thought he knew how best to handle things. When he checked the clock on his com, he saw that about thirty minutes had passed. With his speech prepared and his plan settled in his mind, he settled down to wait. And to wait. And to wait. And to wait.

After what his com claimed was two hours, but to him felt like a greater time than the entire history of the human race, the egg quivered. Lou, whose attention had been wandering, jerked upwards a bit, then tensed, readying himself as the figure that he could faintly see inside of the egg wriggled, then reached outwards. The egg unfolded itself with a glistening, ripping, tearing noise. The head of his spouse’s newest bioform emerged first. Her head had white fur that looked like hair, bristling from around a delicate, feminine face. The additions that he had requested, to make the face more humanoid, were there: A small nose, slender lips, and eyes that were ... well ... she had tried. They weren’t compound eyes, like before, but they were decidedly alien looking: All black, save for two glowing blue irises. Her furred shoulders came free next, with her two upper arms. Then her breasts, her lower arms, her curved thighs, her dainty feet, and then she was sliding down the egg and onto the ground before him, dripping with egg slime.

Lou flushed, wanting to look away – she was ... naked. And...

Well.

A lot more...

A lot more ... ah...

But this was his wife. It was okay for him to see her naked – and as he blushed, he saw that she was scrambling to her feet, turning and spreading her delicate wings.

“Wait!” Lou stood.

“No!” She said, but he grabbed her lower right arm, tugging her around. Her feet dug into the ground as she strained to get away from him, shaking her head. “No no no no no! I’m a monster!”

Lou ... regretted teaching her that word. A lot. Right now. It hadn’t even been a word she had taken much notice of, during their long exchange of words and definitions. But he grabbed her other hand, holding her tightly.

“No! You’re not!” he said, his voice firm.

Her eyes closed and she ducked her head forward. “Three hundred twenty eight thousand one hundred and ninety humans! A-And then ... if human subunits are humans, and not subunits, if they were all like me, then ... then so were the others! Sixty eight million seven hundred thirty two thousand five hundred and ninety two, five hundred million, ninety eight thousand, five hundred and six! All! Consumed! Consumed, I...” She closed her eyes and screamed. “I killed them all! I KILLED THEM!” And she let out another horrible keening noise – a sound that Lou had never wanted hear again.

He cupped her cheeks – she had gone limp, no longer trying to run. “You didn’t know-”

She shook her head, brushing at his hands, trying to shove them away, but weakly. “No no no no...” She whispered. “No. No.” Lou pressed his forehead against hers, his hands sliding from her cheeks to her neck, marveling at the incredibly sleek, smooth feeling of her. His fingers sank into the soft fuzz that crested her shoulders, his fingertips almost touching the edges of her wings. He drew her in and her hands pressed against his chest – twenty points of contacts at the ends of four hands. All her fingers.

Lou gripped her, drawing her close. Her hands slid, more by accident than design, around him. Her fingers traced along his back. “W ... What is?” she whispered, her voice a trembling quavering sound. She had no tears – but of course she didn’t. Why would a bug ever need to cry? “W-What ... what what what-”

“It’s forgiveness,” Lou whispered. He had tears. And he shed them, burying his face against her neck. “A ... And a hug.”

“Hug...” his wife whispered. Her hands, gingerly, tightened, two low, two high, holding him. “You said ... forgiveness is what you give, when you recognize someone has done wrong, but ... but you know they’re ... going to be better?”

“Yeah.”

She whispered. “I don’t ... I don’t ... I don’t get forgiveness. I do not ... made it out of...” She was groping for words, and Lou guessed.

“You don’t ... deserve it?” He snorted, quietly. “My wife, if you deserved forgiveness, you’d never need it.” He felt her knees quivering and he laughed, quietly, marveling that there was a similar ... reaction in her, as there would have been in his body. He drew her down onto his lap, and she was so very light. Like a feather, she settled there, her wings buzzing in nervous little jitters. His hands caressed along her back, drawing her in close. His voice was soft.

“I ... my wife...” He said, the words feeling awkward on his tongue, not smooth and easy like he had imagined them. “I want to tell you a story.”

“Why?”

“Humans sometimes use stories to explain ideas,” he said, quietly. “You feel ... bad because you killed the Procyians and the Lupens and humans.”

“You know their names? And that they existed?” she asked, blinking at him, her antennas twitching and ... Lou gently petted her antennas – reflexively. They bent backwards, then jounced back upwards to their original positions. It was the most adorable thing that he had ever seen. “I liked that. Do it again.” She said, simply, and so, Lou continued to pet her as he explained.

“Yeah, um ... we knew.” Lou sighed. “And those are just names we gave them. The Procyians had launched a simple space probe before ... it was remarkably similar to one that we humans launched – Voyager. It had their language, some images, a message we think translated to ... from our star, to yours, we greet you.” He shook his head. “The Lupens, which is our name for the aliens that had lived in the Wolf 359 system, are more vague. We only caught the, uh, radio bubble that came away from their world as we approached it. Twelve years, approximately, and then...” He paused. He didn’t want to mention the nightmares that the reconstructed Last Broadcast had given him, during his education on the Bug War.

The Lupens hadn’t been humanoid.

But their ... screams had...

He closed his eyes. It was almost impossible to combine the image of the hellgaunts and the waves of bio-organic drop-pods falling onto human colonies and the last screams of those long dead aliens with the gentle soul he held in his arms. So, he simply didn’t. He focused, instead, on the story.

“When we were still confined to one world, there were two men who killed four billion people,” he said, simply. “Humans. Who killed other humans.”

His wife drew back, her antennas rubbing together, a chittering sound emerging from her throat. “Why? Was it a mistake? Did they-”

“No,” he said. “Their names were Charles and Fredrick Koch. They had a great deal of power because they controlled access to a resource called oil. You know how ... when ... biological life dies and is compressed by heat and pressure under the ground and becomes coal and oil and such?”

“Oh, yes, I regularly harvest it,” his spouse said, nodding. “You need to be careful, though. It causes planets to retain heat – among other side effects.”

My wife is older than the biological concept of sexual reproduction, Lou thought for the second time. It still sounded like a bad joke in his head – not real, not something concrete. But hearing her casually mentioning that she regularly harvested fossil fuels that she produced ... not synthesized like humans could with nanofabrication and other chemical processes, but rather, via geoengineering on a time scale that made the Imperial Egyptians look like toddlers building sand castles. It ... made him shiver to his core. But he pressed on.

“The Kochs had access to this resource and, through it, a great deal of power. They became aware, as did others, that releasing carbon into the atmosphere would cause a destructive effect on the environment that we all needed to survive. And ... they used a great deal of their power and their position in society to crush that knowledge. They paid liars to tell people everything would be fine. They convinced entire generations of humans that the entire idea was a hoax-”

“How?” His wife sounded completely baffled. “The effect is so rapid, it happens in a...” She stopped. “You ... do not have new subunits to sustain your minds once old subunits become unable to serve and are recycled.” She sat up. “Lou! We have to-”

Lou put his finger upon her lips. They were very ... very soft. Very sleek. Very slippery. Very warm. And for a moment, looking into her eyes, feeling the slight dampness of her mouth, the alien chill of her breath, looking into her black/blue eyes, Lou felt as if his heart was racing a million miles an hour. His voice was husky. “Let me finish the story.”

She bobbed her head, then laid it down against his chest. His hand began to pet her antennas again. “The Kochs knew that there was going to be a disaster. But they didn’t care – they kept things as they were, until the point where easy changes were impossible. Then, when there were ten billion people on the planet, everything began to collapse. Droughts, storms, flooding, famines, everything all hammered at the same time. It was ... like an exponential curve had been hit.” Lou sighed, quietly. “Four billion people died. Just so that some ... old men could cling to power.”

His finger caught her chin, lifting her so that he could look into her eyes.

“You did what you did because you didn’t understand. It ... was horrible. But in a universe of horrors ... y-you’re actually ... fine.” He blushed. He had had a more suave ending – but looking into her eyes had caused his brain to short circuit.

She blinked at him.

“So ... don’t go...” Lou said, cupping her cheek. “Lets work to make this better. Okay?”

She looked away. Her antennas twitched.

“What happened to the Koch brothers?” she asked.

“They died of old age and their children spent most of the 21st century in a fortified arcology protected by a legion of slaves,” Lou said, sighing. “Then, eventually, their kids ... well...” He shrugged. “That’s getting into the Meme War and the founding of the UHP. Which is even more complicated...”

“I want to learn all of it,” she said, softly. Then her eyes closed. “I am bringing my subunits back. I ... I simply did not want to see humans, or talk to humans. It ... I felt...”

“It’s okay.” Lou stood, groaning as his back twinged and his legs started to throb as blood started to flow into bits of his body that had been lacking for a while too long. His wife remained in his arms, as light weight and easy to carry as a feather. He carried her towards the exit, and she allowed him to do it, her eyes closed as she thought – or more likely, as she began to realign her bodies and her subunits off to do everything that they had stopped doing in her moment of panic. As he walked, though, he noticed that the glow-worms were coming back. He smiled.

They emerged into the twin suns of Charon – and before an armored wall of heavily equipped combat troopers in power carapace, his father and GF and Amy standing at the forefront. GF had a combat unitard on and one of the heavy duty combat rifles preferred by AnCom, while Father had his pistol and sword combination – and from the vids that Lou had seen, they weren’t merely for decoration. The Bugs had, over the war, engaged in melee combat often enough that having a sword had gone from affectation to absolutely necessary for any front line ground combat.

“My son,” Father said, frowning. “What...”

Lou blushed, holding the naked body of his wife protectively. “C-Can we get some clothes for her.”

“Yes!” Amy hurried forward, then stood before him and the rest of the soldiers. “Give them some privacy – it’s not like none of you have seen hot moth ladies before. Come on! Turn around, turn around!”

GF, before he turned, gave Lou the biggest thumbs up.

Proxima Centauri hurt to behold.

Not for the reasons that most stars did – the brightness, the hard radiation, the sheer immensity that made them hard for human scale minds to grasp. No. By those standards, Proxima was fairly easy to hold in the mind and the eye both. It was, for one thing, significantly smaller than it had been. It had started as a red dwarf, about an eighth the size of Sol, and what had happened to it during the Bug War had only shrunk it further. It was now barely the size of mountain – five, six kilometers at the length. Easily graspable in human terms. It was significantly less radiant. No longer did it put out a searing red light. No longer did it crackle with the fusion-fury that had burned in its hydrogen belly.

Instead, Proxima throbbed with a sickly color that was somewhere between purple and the synesthetic sensation of tasting the sound of a woman screaming at the top of her lungs as she was being tortured to death. Its surface was a single color, without mottling or distortion. It should have looked like a poorly rendered image from the early days of computer animation – but instead, the longer Colonel Admiral Bosch looked at it, the more that he was certain that he could see subtle striations and distinctive lines. They squirreled across the surface of the former star like lightning bolts, jagged and straight and crackling, but they were never quite there when he focused upon them. It was more like his mind was throwing chaos into a perfect simplicity that his monkey brain refused to accept in its totality.

But that wasn’t the worst thing about Proxima.

It was the stars around it, visible thanks to the bridge lights on the FSS Invisible Hand being set to their lowest setting. They were beginning to distort, as if he was looking at the bubble of twisted light that surrounded a black hole. But the distortion was not immediate or obvious – it was a slow, insidious twisting of light, which grew more and more pronounced the longer that he looked at Proxima.

“Sir?”

Bosch tore his eyes from Proxima, his head pounding.

“Sir, respectfully...” one of the bridge officers – a sleek, blond haired woman that had served on the Hand for the past ten years and yet, had never been skilled enough for her name to move past the outer fringe of Bosch’s memories and into the part that actually lasted. “Is that wise?”

“Exposure to Proxima is only dangerous at significantly closer ranges than this, Lieutenant,” Bosch snapped. “It will take more than a spatial anomaly to cause me any trouble.”

The woman nodded, looking frightened. Her eyes flicked down and Bosch tasted iron on his lips. His fingers lifted and he touched his nose – which was bleeding. He glared at the woman, then turned his back to her and to the window, striding away as he pinched his nostril shut with one hand, trying to stem the flowing blood. As he strode past the firing consoles, where serving crew members were wedded with the control systems by an intricate series of tiny wires and cyber-jacks. Most of them were from the penitentiary system, considering the effect on the nervous system that top of the line fire control computers had. But the Federated States had a simple rule when it came to going into the justice system: If you weren’t guilty, you wouldn’t be up before a judge in the first place.

So, anything that the criminal scum got was what they had coming.

By the time Bosch arrived at the science lab that had been attached to his beloved battleship, his nose wasn’t bleeding and he had cleaned off his hands. The scientists here were mostly Federal – but he had heard from his spies that they were all essentially subordinate to Listens-Deeply-And-Considers-All. The fucking dolphin knew it too. Bosch tried to control his sneer as he watched the sleek cetacean walk around inside of its wetsuit, on four little mechanical legs, with a harness of attached grippers that it controlled via its cyberjack. Those grippers were currently holding a stylus, which Listens Deeply was using to scrawl some ferociously complex mathematics equations on the screen that the scientists had set aside for long-form calculation.

“Dr. All,” the Federal scientist standing next to the Upkin said. “Are you sure that wave-function form won’t collapse?”

“There’s only one way to find out, really,” Listens Deeply said, his voice chirruping from his collar. He turned his beady little black eye to Bosch. “Admiral. You are here to breathe down our blowholes again?”

Bosch frowned. “I carted you and this entire lab four light years and ate up ten years of my life back on Earth – I expected faster results. The farce is already going on down on Charon.”

“The farce. Hah!” Listens Deeply chittered. “I wonder, will he take pleasure in the creature? Humans are able to make a fetish out of anything, given time and inclination.”

“Humans don’t,” Bosch said, his frown deepening. “Degenerates do.”

“And what does this make me, Admiral?”

A useful pawn, Bosch thought – and he was fairly certain the Upkin saw him in the exact same light. The mutual loathing the Upkin felt for the Federated States – and the same loathing that the Federated States felt for the Upkin – could only be eclipsed by one thing. That one thing was what he brought up: “A useful ally against the Bugs, of course.”

“Ha ha. I need a new woman,” Listens Deeply said, casually. “The current one bores me.”

Bosch repressed a disgusted sigh. “Of course. But only...” he reached down and took the stylus from Listens Deeply’s gripper. “If you tell me that Project Etemenanki is close to some kind of break through. You’ve had a year out of cryo and two months in orbit around Proxima. I want. Results.”

Listens Deeply chittered – and the collar turned it into a laugh. “Results you shall have. Admiral.”

Bosch nodded.

“Bring out ... Echo 3...” Listens Deeply said and one of the doctors hurried out – showing more deference to an Upkin than Bosch liked to see. But soon, the doctor had returned, flanked by two of the members of FSMC that had been assigned to the ship. Between the two men in their power carapace was a struggling, kicking ... thing. They weren’t quite a woman, they weren’t quite a man – they were, in other words, an AnCom deviant. They were still dripping with the suspension fluids of the cryotank they had been hauled from, and they were still coughing and hacking.

“What ... the fuck is going ... where...” she – Bosch was pretty certain that they were a she, after a second glance – said. “Feds? Feds? What? The ... this ... you fucking Nazi cosplaying fucks, I am going to sue the lot of you if you don’t let me go right now!” She snarled as Bosch smirked at her.

“I recognize you...” he said, nodding. “Your name is...” He sighed. “Righteous Zen...” He shook his head. “Absurd.”

“Fuck you!” Echo 3 snapped.

“Except that’s just it,” Bosch said, his voice gloating. “Righteous Zen, right now, is currently doing whatever it is she-”

“They. They them, you fucking fascist.”

“She,” Bosch said, with deliberate coldness. “Is currently doing whatever it is she is doing back on Earth. Because you are not Righteous Zen. You are a copy. Acquiring you was trivially easy – your cortical stack was accessed during your latest backup scan. We cloned the body you’re currently in based off your previous body – no need for you to have to readjust to everything. After all, your brain scans are going to be extremely important.”

“You...” her eyes widened. “You spliced me? You fucking ASSHOLE!”

“Prepare it for the probe,” Listens Deeply chittered.

“The probe?” Echo 3 asked, then kicked as the men dragged her towards the preparation table. A bone saw started to whir. “Hey! Hey! Whoa! Fucking whoa, killing a splice is still fucking murder! I’m still a person! I’m STILL A PERSON!”

The bone saw started to scream as the straps clicked home.

Bosch watched.

First, the procedure.

Then, three hours later, the oblong, torpedo like shape of the probe containing Echo-3, accelerating away from the Invisible Hand and towards Proxima. Beside him, Listens Deeply watched the readouts.

“Yes...” he murmured as the jagged lines symbolizing Echo 3’s brainwave started to warble and twist as she approached the perverted stars. “Yes! Project Etemenanki is ... as you Federals say ... a go.”

“What on Venus were you thinking?” Father asked, stomping back and forth in the small room. Lou watched him, his hands clasped in his lap. He felt an urge to get up, walk out of the room, down the corridor, and to the small bedroom where they had put his wife – but instead, he kept himself seated properly. In the roughly twenty four hours since he’d been at the human spaceport, the AnComs had done what AnComs did best: Fabricate. The spaceport had been expanded outwards, with additional habitation domes and even a few small mansions set up in the blistering fast, eclectic style of the most populous human polity. With nanomachines and the patterns for literally millions of different kinds rooms that could be ‘snapped together’ with a few quick button presses on a GUI, they were able to create fantastical structures that rivaled the palace that Lou had been born in.

The fact that these structures had been built in hours rather than months did tarnish the impression slightly, to him.

“Well, I was thinking I was married and that I should be honest to my wife,” Lou said, watching as Father paused in his pacing. He frowned as he looked square at Lou. Lou looked square back – and knew that Father knew that he knew that Father had been unfaithful with Mother. And with an AnCom too.

Father frowned. “Louis, I am glad that you recall the foundational principals of our Kingdom, but you must also remember the subtler lessons as well. The AnComs can be blunt. We, by definition, cannot.” He frowned harder. “You should have recalled that.”

“We were discussing what humans are,” Lou said, sticking out his chin. “That’s what my role was to be, wasn’t it?”

Father rubbed his hand along his square jaw, turning to face the window. “Yes. But it was never my plan for you to be left so ... bereft of guidance.” He shook his head. “I didn’t expect the Bugs to take you off like that.” He sighed. “I am sorry for that, Louis, I am. And I am sorry about how ... stressful this has been.”

“You don’t need to apologize, father,” Lou said, standing up. “I am your son – and a Prince of the Star Kingdom. I know what my duty is.”

“Your duty...” Father nodded. “You managed to draw the Bugs back from their little...” He waved his hand. “Panic attack?”

“I think so,” Lou said. “I ... she ... that is, they...” He paused. “We’re still trying to figure out exactly how...” He blushed, then coughed.

“You did call her a wife without thinking,” Father murmured.

Lou’s blush deepened. “Y-Yes, well, that was a touch presumptive. My spouse ... doesn’t understand this marriage. But that’s all right – she ... they ... will.” He nodded. “And maybe your plan will work, Father. Maybe we will have peace...” He licked his lips – and was tempted to ask about Amy, about the fact that Father had cheated on his wife. Instead, he said: “I believe I should speak to my spouse, again. She ... should be able to focus on me again.”

Father nodded.

The corridor leading down to the medical ward that held his spouse contained Amy and GF, who both moved to Lou’s sides. Amy spoke, first. “She’s fine,” she said, nodding. “Biologically, I mean. This is actually the first living bug specimen we’ve actually managed to study up close and personally, it’s really fascinating. Did you know-” she stopped, then closed her eyes. “I mean. Sorry. She’s fine. She’s good, even. She was actually talking to us.”

“Oh, good. Thank you for checking on her,” Lou said, nodding, while GF leaned in close, whispering to him.

“Your dad was furious,” he said.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Lou said. “I ... won’t lie, I did kind of stick my foot in my own throat.”

“What happened, exactly?” GF asked, his brow furrowing.

“I...” Lou bit his lip. “I told her that humans are singular beings.”

“ ... oh...” GF winced.

“I don’t get it, why would she freak about that?” Amy asked, cocking her head.

“She didn’t know that humans were singular beings,” Lou said, quietly.

“ ... oh...” Amy said, in the exact same tone of voice as GF.

They came to the door leading into the medical bay, which opened obligingly. Inside, laying in the bed, was ... well, Lou’s wife. That was the only thing that sprang to Lou’s mind when he looked at her delicate four armed, moth winged body. She was dressed in a simple white shift that protected her modesty, with four sleeves and two holes cut in the back for her wings. Her head was rested upon a pillow, and she was looking up at the ceiling. But when Lou stepped into the room, she sat up. Her lips lifted into a smile, while her antennas twitched up. “Lou!” she said, then blushed. “God Fucker. Amy. I ... those are the designations for you two?” She asked, pointing at GF and Amy.

“You got it!” Amy said, giving her a thumbs up, while GF nodded.

“I am glad I got it right,” she said – then grabbed onto Lou and dragged him into the bed. Lou yelped, blushed, and squirmed all at once as she pressed her entire body against him, wrapping her legs around his hips, her lower arms around his belly, her upper arms around his shoulders. Her wings buzzed and she buried her nose against his neck, breathing in. She spoke, her voice muffled. “I am hugging Lou. I enjoy the tactile sensation of touching my husband and I missed it while he was away.”

“Nice,” GF said.

“Awww!” Amy clapped her hands over her chest.

Lou wanted to die of pure mortification.

Amy drew up a chair and sat down beside the bed, grinning. “S-So, Lou was telling us about how ... you ... um, well...” She coughed. “You have my forgiveness too.”

“You can give forgiveness as well?” Lou’s wife asked, cocking her head. “That is not something only Lou can provide?”