NOVEL NEXT 1.24 Interlude: Ritual
Interlude-Ritual
Daniel was in pieces. He’d lost count how many. The number kept changing.
Half the trouble was each piece of him was only partially aware; of both itself and any others. Being inside another person’s head was… disorienting.
The division inside his own thoughts felt like someone had taken cogent lines of thinking, cut them up, and interspersed them with each other, like solved jigsaw puzzles cut apart and made to fit into chunks from other completely different puzzles.
He felt most whole when directly interacting with Caleb. The human exchange helped remind him of each of the different pieces scattered throughout this corner of Caleb’s mind. All the pieces of himself responded the same way, and for the briefest moments, Daniel felt like he was on the same page as himself.
It never lasted though, and if Caleb had something to focus on, the pieces that Daniel could still keep track of drifted a bit further.
How many pieces of himself had he already lost?
Pieces kept breaking off with increasing frequency. The abstract monster Caleb had built was learning how to take Daniel apart.
Depending on how Daniel visualized his situation, the monster looked different.
Right now, while the real truck idled outside a series of metal fences and trenches, Daniel was perceiving in a rough parallel.
Caleb sat in the driver’s seat, Daniel sat in the back, and the monster took the shape of the combination radio-digital console in the middle of the dashboard. There was a little ominous glowing eye on the screen, and it followed Daniel’s imaginary self wherever he moved.
It wasn’t always a car, but the mental landscape was usually at least tangentially related.
Against Courser’s dog it had been a zoo enclosure.
Before that? It was a bit harder to remember. There might have been a manhunt, or maybe a hospital room?
Little by little, Daniel could feel himself being ground away. Even in the quietest moments, when the damage was slowest and most bearable, it still progressed however slowly.
Even when Caleb’s mind slept, the phantom was eager to keep pulling Daniel’s many loose threads.
Daniel didn’t sleep. Or couldn’t. His running theory was that sleep was a physical state of the body, and he didn’t have a real body right now, ergo no sleep. He stayed aware, if not very active. But if he had been capable of sleeping, thinking about the pieces of himself he couldn’t remember anymore would have driven off any chance he had at sleep.
The relationship between Caleb’s body and Daniel’s lack of one was odd to him. It didn’t work consistently.
He was wired into Caleb’s body, but the sensations weren’t perfect. They were delayed, filtered, muted, amplified, and displaced all at random, sometimes even all at once.
But he had some impression of his own body in the mental environment too. Daniel didn’t particularly like psychology, even if his grade had been outstanding. It was the terminology that irked him.
Phrases like ‘self-concept’, or the iceberg metaphor for consciousness. They didn’t feel scientific.
So he was fairly frustrated because vague, abstract ideas were all he had to describe his experiences.
The only way that he’d found to put his sensations into words was using that same iceberg analogy. Daniel felt like he was floating on his side in the water, one eye above the surface and the other below.
Different pieces of Daniel were close to the surface, where Caleb’s consciousness was supporting them both.
If Daniel relaxed—no easy feat—and tried to tune out the erratic cacophony of sensations that washed over Caleb…
He began to feel what might have been his body.
It wasn’t of course. He’d seen his body.
But if he considered all the factors, that corpse might be in better condition that whatever ‘body’ he had inside Caleb’s head. Daniel’s mental ‘body’ no longer had a left arm or leg. They’d been… eaten by Caleb’s phantom.
That might be putting it melodramatically, but Daniel was a disembodied ghost currently stuck inside the head of the person who’d killed him. A little melodrama wasn’t so out of place.
The truck in reality had been sitting still for close to ten minutes now, and Caleb snapped his fingers absently under the tarp.
A shooting electric sensation fired up the left arm Daniel didn’t have. He didn’t have the eyes or facial muscles to flinch at the sensation, but that’s what he imagined himself doing anyway.
Those small ‘physical’ expressions were part of what still kept him whole.
There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to what sensation Caleb encountered that would get overblown or warped, and Daniel wasn’t even sure if he could relay the information to Caleb at all. The piece of him that understood the incongruity wasn’t connected to the one able to talk with Caleb.
The question sharpened Daniel’s cohesion, dragging pieces of himself closer together, drawing their attention together like a spotlight for the audience to follow.
Half-a-dozen possibilities rapidly went through Daniel, each one of them ideas or thoughts, but in his current state they were more like physical sensations to all his pieces.
From Caleb posing the question, it took Daniel less than a heartbeat to pick his preferred answer. But there were a few pieces of him that had only partially committed to answering the question. Those pieces worried that the rest of them, since a question had been offered, were incapable of paying attention to anything else.
It almost felt coerced.
Despite his creeping fear that he was becoming physically (physically? Could it be physical, if he didn’t have a body?) incapable of avoiding what Caleb pointed him at, he was mostly nonchalant for the moment.
Caleb’s exhaustion bled into Daniel, and it was almost certainly a reciprocal interaction.
They were waiting for whatever allies Tasser and Nemuleki had here to let them in. Caleb fully intended to collapse as soon as possible, and Daniel mirrored the sentiment.
The mental landscape version of the truck faded with time, and slowly changed into a doctor’s waiting room. Caleb and he were both struggling to stay awake in chairs while the phantom was a very mean receptionist glaring at Daniel, daring him to disrupt the quiet.
It was frustrating to feel the pull of sleep while being physically incapable of it.
Daniel wracked his memories trying to recall what Caleb sleeping had been like just a few days ago. A few days ago… he wasn’t sure if they had been on this planet yet.
The answer felt like ‘yes’… Daniel was tempted to ballpark that they’d been on this planet a week or two now. But a few of his most distant pieces quietly objected.
He really was falling apart.
Did Caleb already know that? It was getting hard to track.
The minutes dragged on, and the sun dipped further toward the horizon. But after a while, Caleb caught sight of Nai walking back toward the truck.
The Farnata had been ushered inside immediately, presumably to talk with someone in charge to allow the rest of them in.
The metal gate slid below ground, allowing Nai to beckon the truck inside the boundary. The alien leapt into the back of the truck, and stayed standing even as they drew closer to the massive complex of buildings within the fortifications.
The base as a whole sat right on the edge of a massive body of water. It had been invisible when they’d first seen civilization in the distance. Even now, Caleb didn’t have a proper view of it, but they could smell the salt in the air as they drew closer.
A colossally wide, tapered cylinder rose up from the far side of the complex, dominating the profile of the skyline. Caleb’s first glance mistook it for a building, but the sides of it were completely unadorned.
In the day’s fading light, it was harder to make out more detail. But the smaller industrial buildings adjacent to the towering cylinder were illuminated.
As Nemuleki drove the truck forward, other Casti came into view. Most of them wore cargo suits in varying shades of grey, black, or yellow. But several more wore black ponchos like Tasser’s.
Nai stayed standing in the back of the truck as they rolled between a few of the buildings. The Farnata drew the gazes of nearly all of them.
Caleb’s notice fell upon Nai’s neck and Daniel’s was dragged along. The Faranata was still wearing the tattered remains of their own black poncho.
Daniel mused,
Further observations about the facility were cut short when Nemuleki turned the truck into a vehicle bay. Nai shouted something to the Casti soldiers just outside and they dropped a metal slatted garage door down behind the truck.
Tasser finally indicated for Caleb to get up from the truck. Keeping the tarp wrapped around his head and torso, Caleb followed where Tasser led, deep into the structure.
These buildings weren’t like the stacked prefabricated units that the mining facility had. The building was meant to last, and it had. The walls showed subtle signs of wear and age; slight discoloration near the floor, the odd cracked floor tile.
If Caleb hadn’t noticed those details, Daniel never would have. Caleb was quickly picking up more and more detail, faster and faster too. It was like his mind just drank in any new information.
It was an exercise of intent too. He wasn’t doing this absently. It was something he was actively practicing and improving. It didn’t feel like a natural behavior.
Someone in his life must have given him advice to get in the habit.
Daniel wondered who.
Tasser and Nai both filed through a transparent sliding door, directing Caleb toward…
“Oh come on. ” Caleb complained out loud.
In the center of the room was a transparent plastic box, except it wasn’t even a box. It was a cubical frame with plastic lining stretched over each side.
A tube was attached to one wall, running toward a small machine to the side. Air circulation, probably.
This whole thing was another quarantine box.
Caleb gave Tasser a seething look. But Daniel was relieved when he didn’t argue further. They opened the zipper like flap that marked the entrance and Caleb climbed in with a scowl.
·····
Caleb continued trying to pantomime a shower to Tasser.
“Nuto.” Caleb said to Tasser, wiggling his fingers above his head. “Nuto!”
Daniel couldn’t help but laugh. If talking to Caleb made him feel sharp, laughing with (or at) Caleb was the only thing that might give him a little life back.
There was no forcing the sensation, but watching Caleb fail to pantomime for the aliens was quickly becoming the most hilarious part of their abductions.
Caleb had been, and continued to be, surprised by how expressive their thought-speech was, or at least how intuitive it was to express themselves.
Daniel was reticent to share everything he suspected about their thought-speech.
The more Caleb seemed to perceive and comprehend whatever the aberrant creation in his head was, the more ground it seemed to take over Daniel. Daniel’s tentative hold on himself grew weaker the more Caleb dove into the alien phenomenon in his mind.
The first few hours Daniel had realized the interaction he’d spiraled with the implications of it. That, more than anything else, had convinced him that there was only room for one person in Caleb’s mind.
Daniel was ashamed to admit he’d thought about trying to take over, to survive.
But it just hadn’t been possible to sustain the idea for long. Sharing a head with Caleb made it impossible to ignore just how fervent Caleb was to look out for both of them. Seeing how ready Caleb was to risk himself to help Daniel, it had just been out of the question to try usurping him.
What little Daniel remembered about his parents right now, he remembered his grandfather’s advice about impulses.
‘Everyone has those sudden impulses, nieto . It’s how the devil whispers to you. What matters is what you choose to do, not what you’re tempted with.’
Caleb was an Iron Giant fan; he would have quoted ‘You are who you choose to be’. Then he probably would have said ‘Superman’ out loud and garnered a set of odd looks from the aliens.
Caleb might have killed him, but Daniel liked Caleb. He didn’t want to kill someone he liked, just for a chance to survive all alone.
Daniel’s decision had been reinforced a few hours later when he’d woken up to Caleb fighting another otter. The sensation of Caleb’s mind in fight-or-flight mode made it painfully obvious how outmatched Daniel would have been.
This was ultimately Caleb’s head. Any attempt Daniel had made to encroach would have been like a mouse trying to take on an anthill. At first glance, it had seemed like it wasn’t so impossible. But any harm Daniel took was permanent. In this metaphor, the mouse needed to eat, and there was no food but the ants. And it would only take one wrong move for Caleb’s living, adaptive, intricately complex anthill to completely overwhelm and drown Daniel.
The only reason Daniel was still in one piece was that neither he nor Caleb had attempted to stamp the other out. And it didn’t matter who started it; either way would end with Daniel eradicated.
Caleb wasn’t even in control of it, no more than he was his own heartbeat, or immune system.
That was actually a very apt parallel. An immune system.
Was that what was devouring Daniel, piece by inevitable piece? Why would someone’s consciousness have a defense mechanism like this?
He didn’t particularly expect to stumble onto an answer in time for it to help him, which made it all the more surprising when most of his pieces suddenly lit up, each one making exactly the connection it needed for just a split second.
A series of realizations struck Daniel so quickly, he faltered his control for a moment and the unfathomable phantom in Caleb’s mind reacted to his excitement.
What Daniel needed to do was akin to holding his breath, but with his own thoughts. He needed to think absolutely nothing, but how could he? If he was right, this was a breakthrough!
He felt several pieces of himself wink out, vanishing from his awareness. Some of the same pieces that had been so critical in… whatever he’d figured out. Caleb’s creation had ground them away. Every piece had a few memories of his. Which ones had he just lost?
Pieces of his realization were already slipping through the cracks before he could voice them to Caleb. Daniel struggled to not react to the feeling of his own existence being ground down. The more he struggled, the faster it went.
He gave up trying to hold onto all of it, Caleb would only need one of the pieces to figure it out himself.
They already knew why Caleb had this phantom in his head; he’d imagined it up himself while half out of his mind. So the real question is why had Caleb imagined up a phantom immune system for his consciousness?
Daniel’s thoughts sharpened in response to the connection, and he spent a critical few seconds redefining the boundaries of his pieces, trying to shore them up without irritating Caleb’s creation too much.
Daniel felt Caleb’s concern and confusion suffuse his mind. Caleb could tell that Daniel wasn’t dissipated, but…
He rushed as much as he could, leaving too many pieces vulnerable, but if he didn’t say anything Caleb would worry more which would only make the monster move faster.
He’d let himself get lost in his thoughts a bit. Tasser had apparently come through.
The Casti had found an empty plastic storage bin of some kind. He slipped it through the flap in the quarantine box.
Daniel made a bit of a mental frown. It wasn’t much of a quarantine if they were going to just pass things in and out.
Caleb mimicked the observation,
Tasser wasn’t done helping out though. There was a sink and tap on one wall of the room, too far away from the quarantine box to be useful. Except Tasser found some plastic tubing and fed it through the flap, setting the other end in the sink.
The sink filled with water and Tasser finagled the tube so water was siphoned up over the edge. It was just a trickle, but Caleb’s reaction was physical.
he thought, < I’m finally getting cleaned up.>
Daniel deliberated for a moment whether Caleb was being literal.
He ultimately decided against it. Caleb didn’t seem to follow up the phrase, so he must have made the right call.
Only one or two pieces of Daniel were aware of how the imbalance of Caleb’s mental resources went between them. Most of the time Daniel was simply far less sensitive to who was using what at any one time.
The truly odd part was that he felt somewhat aware that he didn’t know.
When Caleb had really needed his help against the panther-hound, one of Daniel’s pieces had recognized the interaction and how to exploit it. It had done so without the other pieces. Looking back on it, Daniel thought the sensation was comparable to a hand or limb moving all on its own.
Right now, Caleb was taking up more and more certainty. It wasn’t a radical shift in thinking, but it was certainly the beginning of one. Daniel had to remind himself that he was the one to push Caleb into being so prepared for a future alone with the aliens. In the hours since, Caleb was showing signs of using capabilities of his mind that had since gone monopolized by Daniel.
And Daniel, lacking Caleb’s awareness of that balancing act, had no idea.
But some pieces of him knew that he had no idea.
Things were getting more and more disorienting for him. He would be lucky to last another few days.
Daniel tried to shake the thoughts out of himself. He wanted to stay positive, even if it wasn’t easy. It took more focus than he expected, and he forced his thoughts to go perfectly still when he felt the phantom grow restless.
Go with the flow.
That was how he could get as much time as possible.
Caleb was splashing water on his face and hair, starting to scrub at the days of grease, dirt, blood, and grime that had built up.
While the plastic crate was still filling with water, something from home stirred up in Daniel’s memories.
Soap.
They didn’t have any of the stuff, but between the two occupants of Caleb’s head, they had some pretty advanced scientific knowledge for their age.
If Caleb could weave a flashbang into existence midair, surely, they could make some baking soda or lye.
Caleb processed that for a second. He’d breathed fine in the first room they’d isolated him in, but this setup was even flimsier than the first. Was the air in this one regulated too?
Daniel flinched. Like microphone feedback, things like that made the phantom more active. He felt pair of pieces winked out of existence. He was avoiding trying to quantify how much of himself was still left.
Caleb did check with Tasser though, who gave the proverbial thumbs up.
<…I hadn’t thought about that. I mean, it has to be possible right? But how much do you want to experiment with this? I want to get cleaned up, but I don’t have the energy to tinker all night.>
Daniel focused as much as he could on the physical world around Caleb. Even when Caleb made things without his help, the phantom took it as a signal to devour more of him.
Conjuring soap felt like it didn’t merit the risk.
Caleb picked up on Daniel’s reticence. Had Daniel let some of his thoughts leak out? It didn’t seem like any of his pieces were gone… but he couldn’t remember how much he’d already lost.
The words stirred pieces of Daniel closer together. He felt a compulsion within himself, not to blindly follow Caleb’s lead, but the opposite.
For a split second he felt the overwhelming need to reassure himself he was still in control of his faculties.
Caleb could make things without Daniel, but the reverse was also true.
Daniel mustered every piece of himself into one cohesive whole long enough to picture a single, infinitesimal point in space, repeated upon itself countless times.
Atoms, coming together.
A fine white powder crackled into existence a few inches above the crate of water. It dissolved almost instantly in the liquid.
Caleb stuck his hand under the water and concentrated. Feeling Caleb’s mind really get moving reminded Daniel just how outmatched he would have been if he tried to get hostile.
The phantom was a tiny piece of Caleb’s mind.
If everything Daniel perceived was a single living room in a house, then Caleb’s mind moved more than just that house. It was like an earthquake rocked the whole fucking neighborhood. The entire mental landscape Daniel was imagining crumbled as Caleb focused on the pattern his creation needed to follow.
For a second, Daniel saw between the cracks, and caught an unfiltered impression of Caleb’s mind.
If he’d had blood, it would have gone cold.
The phantom wasn’t just a tiny addition Caleb’s mind had created; it was just a tiny piece of what he’d built. He saw how the phantom emerged from the mental creation, this engine , and he saw where Caleb’s own mind touched the engine, hewn it from nothing but thought.
Daniel’s flash of surprise was unexpected, and he couldn’t figure out quite why before events marched onward.
The next second the glimpse was gone, and Daniel’s memory along with it.
The sky of the mental landscape lit up in a million supernovae as Caleb tried to create a molecule he didn’t understand.
Oils and fats were organic molecules, far more complicated than simple salt chemistry, even for people who knew what they were doing. Caleb hadn’t taken any O-Chem. He was flying completely blind.
But he seemed to be succeeding, more or less.
“
Daniel realized he’d put his hand in the water for the purpose of texture. Daniel hadn’t really been thinking when he’d added the lye to the water, usually soap was mixed beforehand.
But picturing it already in the water was how Caleb managed to make a few globs of what looked like lard.
Even with the crate less than a quarter filled with water, they probably weren’t making more than a tablespoon of soap for a gallon of water.
But the results were downright cathartic.
A few suds and bubbles marked their success and Caleb immediately pulled off his hoodie, three layers of shirts, and dunked his head into the water.
Even through the warped physical sensations Daniel received from Caleb’s body, it was unbelievable.
The water was ice cold, there were barely any suds, and in just a few seconds the crate became a filthy stained cesspit for the grime that had accumulated on Caleb’s body over the past few days.
But it was so, so, so refreshing.
Caleb quickly cannibalized one of the shirts he had to use as a towel. He scrubbed at his head and face that Daniel felt the skin go raw. He dunked his head into the water so much, he must have been getting it dirty again from the scum that was accumulating, but none of that diminished the sheer joy both of them took in getting themselves cleaned up.
Bathing was a behavior that had to exist in some form for the other species, Caleb and Daniel both had no doubt. Sanitation simply had too many advantages. Some other species had stumbled upon the same idea.
If Otters tamed panther-hounds, then aliens bathed. No question.
Despite how utterly un-unique it was, that was precisely why even Daniel drew so much enjoyment from it. It was a fundamental habit ingrained in them, that up until now, circumstances had not allowed.
Sorry excuse for actual cleanliness this was, Daniel could tell how satisfied Caleb was with not having to smell himself after days on the road.
Caleb pinched a strand of his hair, squeezing on it between his fingers.
“
Daniel knew that creating the soap had taken its toll on him, but the little rituals from home were just too damn appealing to pass up.
Worth it.