Slow Decay

boyfriend. There’s got to be some kind of payback for that.’

‘I said full physical health. She’s under psychiatric supervision. I doubt she’ll ever come to terms with what she did.’

‘Hmm.’ She didn’t sound convinced. ‘I know Toshiko will survive,’ she said eventually, ‘but what about Owen? He took that thing with Marianne pretty hard.’

‘He always does. He’ll get over it.’ Jack looked sideways at Gwen. ‘And what about you? We haven’t seen you around for a while?’

‘You haven’t texted me.’

Jack grinned. ‘I mislaid the number. Everything OK at home?’

Gwen nodded. ‘Everything’s fine. Well, as fine as it’ll ever be. After I got the police to raid that factory and arrest the gang members, we went away for a few days. Rhys wanted to go to Portmeirion, but I held out for Shrewsbury.’

‘Very nice.’ He paused, weighing up whether to continue. ‘You know,’ he said eventually, ‘those diet pills weren’t the answer. They just address the symptom, not the cause. Changing your body isn’t the point. You have to change the behaviour that’s changing your body.’

‘Very wise,’ she said. ‘You should go on TV. Maybe write a book. Change Your Tack With Captain Jack. You’d sell a million.’

‘Too much like setting up a religion, and I’m not going that route again.’ He noticed Gwen shiver. ‘Cold?’

‘Getting that way. Shall we go back?’

‘Let’s.’ On a whim, Jack slipped his greatcoat off and placed it around Gwen’s shoulders.

‘What’s that for?’ she asked, surprised.

‘Because you earned it,’ he said.

All of the alien tech was safely in storage back in the Hub, sitting in boxes in the Archive, but Toshiko couldn’t stop thinking about them. Not about the devices per se, but about the information they contained. The images. The story.

Sitting cross-legged on the futon in her flat, candles burning on shelves and tables, Toshiko laid out the nine photographs in a line on the tatami mat in front of her, moving them around until they were in the order she wanted.

The image on the left showed the alien — the designer, as she thought of it — at what she guessed was its youngest age. The skin, from what she could make out, was unlined, the eyes bright and firm. As she looked from left to right, the alien got older. Its skin became more wrinkled, more pachydermous, and the hammerhead-like extrusions which housed its eyes began to droop. In the last but one image, it looked sad and old.

Hidden within the devices it had made, had been the story of its life; of how it had grown, developed and aged. Perhaps it had happened a few decades ago, perhaps a few million years, but the story was as real as if it had happened yesterday.

The last image of all was different. It had come from one of the pieces of tech found at the scene of an alien spaceship crash near Mynach Hengoed. It had also, coincidentally, been the last one Toshiko had examined.

It was a long shot, showing the designer from head to toe, if those concepts had any meaning. Toshiko found it difficult to tell, but she thought it had three massive legs and two arms that emerged from either side of a thick neck. She didn’t know where in the sequence the picture came, except that the designer looked neither young nor old. Middle-aged, perhaps.

What made the image unique was the other alien with the designer: a smaller version, with deer-thin legs and eye-extensions that pointed upwards, like a ‘Y’.

A son? A daughter? Something for which there was no word in any Earth language, perhaps, but Toshiko got the impression that it was an offspring of some kind. And that the designer was very proud.

In the end, she thought, the slow decay of the body didn’t matter. We all continue on, renewing ourselves, through our offspring.

They are what matter.

They are what survive.