I should thrust a metal rod up his arse and roast him on a spit. But though I can conjure that image up mentally, I cannot project images into his mind, as he does to me. He has a rarer skill than I. I really think he is more beast than man.
And Kalen – Kalen doesn’t love me after all. I dream of her soft downy skin with its faint tint of orange. I dream of her body hairs, her sharp cutting teeth, her flickering tongue. But she is immune to my charms. My pheromones do not work on her. Instead, I have intoxicated and aroused myself. I have made myself obsessively in love with a fucking cat. How stupid is that? Very.
Shut up. Sorry.
And then there’s Flanagan.
Oh Flanagan.
Flanagan
When we reach Illyria we float the merchant Captain off in a lifepod. It seems a harmless enough act of charity. Then we carry on, for three more subjective years, until we reach Debatable Space. Our sanctuary.
No Corporation warships ever penetrate in here. They are too afraid, their spirit is sapped by the myth of the Bugs.
Lena is visibly nervous.
“You’re superstitious, aren’t you?” I say mockingly to her.
“I’m not.”
“Black cats. What do they symbolise to you?”
“Evil.”
“Would you stroke one?”
“Never.”
“Double stars. Would you live on a planet that circles a double star?”
“There are radiation issues.”
“Would you?”
“Double stars can split a personality. They can sunder your id from your ego, your psyche from your soul. No human born under a double star can ever be sexually faithful.”
“Rubbish.”
“It’s true.”
“Are you sexually faithful?”
“I was, once. But I’ve never lived under a double star.”
“You’re a baby. You’re spooked by Debatable Space. You don’t trust your son’s own scientists.”
“You fucking infant. You weren’t even alive when we found the Bugs.”
“They’re trapped. They’re encased in walls surrounded by walls surrounded by walls. But you’re scared, in case the bogeyman might creep out.”
“Walls can have holes. Some Bugs might escape.”
“Then they would escape all the way through Inhabited Space. You believe in auras, don’t you? You’re afraid the Bug Aura can reach out and touch your mind?”
“I do, in fact, believe in auras.”
“Tosh. There are no auras. Auras are bogus science, pure superstition. “
“If I am within ten feet of a person, that person’s soul can touch mine. It’s a documented fact.”
“It’s a discredited documented fact.”
“It’s a fact I believed in before it was discredited. Old opinions die hard!”
“You’re a victim of your stupid, ingrained, indelible fucking prejudices, aren’t you?”
“This place spooks me.”
“It’s where we live.”
Lena
I was in retirement on Earth, living in my son’s palace, and basking in my sixth century of life, when we first found the Bugs. I passed my days reading Dickens and Hammerfast and the collected works of Bjorn Ishil. Then a new Quantum Beacon was installed in the region of Epsilon Omega 5, and we were able to witness at first hand the experience of the colonists when Human first met Bug.
At first, we all thought it was a plague. All two thousand settlers developed fevers. Then they stopped speaking English. Then they cut holes in their spacecraft and floated through space stark naked, with no visible side effects.
By this time we were running the colony ship with the ten Doppelganger Robots we had in storage. Peter asked me to advise the Major Incident Team on how to manage the plague crisis. I watched as DRs attempted to subdue and incarcerate one of the human beings. The human waved a hand and the DR fell into two pieces.
Then the human looked at the vid camera. We watched on our screens as his eyes bulged. His cheeks inflated. Then he exploded. Every part of him shattered into the tiniest pieces. Until nothing was left. He was possessed by invisibility, and destroyed by nothing at all.
Soon after the ship melted. Every particle of it was transmuted into raw energy. Our nanoprobes were able to follow some of what happened next. The DRs now floated in space with the humans, as part of one vast colony. Out of seemingly nothing they constructed a vast net in space. And there, like spiders in a web, the humans and the DRs coexisted.
Then a new spaceship appeared out of nowhere. It was similar to the one that had melted, but bigger, and sleeker.
We had three more colony ships in the area. We gave them their instructions. They formed a triangular pattern around the galactic core. They activated their Quantum Beacons.
And we sealed off the whole region. A Quantumarity was created, a quantum-effect singularity which has no substance or energy but which allows nothing to penetrate its boundary. And thus, we contained the plague. And then we watched as the crew of the two colony ships – who were, of course, trapped inside the Quantumarity – died appalling deaths.
The second death we witnessed on camera was even more shocking. It was the ship’s doctor, a blonde woman, whose fevered eyes suddenly clouded black. A million tiny insects crawled out of her eyes her nose her eardrums her nostrils and every pore and bodily orifice. They swirled around her like flies. Then the insects ate her alive, until all that was left was a pillar of floating insect that formed the shadowy shimmering shape of a human being. Which then moved.
The insects swirled and vanished then reappeared. This time the human-shaped swarm was more fully developed. It had a nose, breasts, fully shaped limbs. The skin was still black and suppurating but this impersonation of a human being was uncannily accurate.
Then the insects swarmed again. And a letter appeared in the air. Followed by another, and another. And we read the chilling words, written by a swirling swarm and suspended in air:
By now, our scientists had fathomed that these insects could not be insects. They were much much smaller, the size of a microbe, or conceivably smaller still. But they were microbes that could swarm and form insect shapes that acted with a collective intelligence and purpose. And the insect shapes could swarm and form larger shapes. And could communicate with us by forming letters in the air…
It was, after all, a plague. A plague of intelligent Bugs that could possess and annihilate a human being in instants. These were Bugs that could learn the English language in a matter of days. They could eat a spaceship. They could build a new spaceship out of particles so small the human eye could not perceive them. They were tiny, they were evil, and we were their prey.
Someone leaked the story. And the world erupted into panic.
