Freed, Named, Cracked

Jeb’s a nicer jailer than Jared was and offers to let her out of the tiny hole she’s been kept in.

Ironically, considering my week of maddening silence, I wasn’t in the mood for company.

Which is, of course, not how people act, and supposedly souls are more social than humans, not less. It’s obviously happening because the author enjoyed wallowing in the misery and doesn’t want the brainslug to mess that up. So he chats while she mutes at him.

“This space here we usually use for storage. Now, when Jared and the guys get back, we’re going to need someplace to put all the stuff they bring home with them. So we might as well find a new place for you now. Something a little bigger, maybe? Something with a bed?” He smiled again as he dangled the carrot in front of me. I waited for him to snatch it away, to tell me he was joking.
Instead, his eyes–the color of faded blue jeans–became very, very gentle. Something about the expression in them brought the lump back to my throat.
“You don’t have to go back in that hole, honey. The worst part’s over.”
I found that I couldn’t doubt the earnest look on his face. For the second time in an hour, I put my face in my hands and cried.

Ah, and now we’re in the part where it’s a big deal someone’s no longer being quite as terrible.

We learn they’re growing carrots and spinach and corn. I would expect raddishes and potatoes, but whatever. It’s not clear how much farming area they have, so maybe diversity’s worth it. Also, there’s a rec room, because all desert hideouts need one.

There was more water here, a tiny, noxiously sulfurous spring that Jeb said they sometimes used as a second latrine because it was no good for drinking.

Wouldn’t that be good to water with? Not only do plants like sulfur, but desert soils tend to be extremely alkaline and generally plants prefer mildly acidic. Certainly carrots, spinach and corn do. You wouldn’t want too much, but it seems it’d be pretty useful in moderation.

Melanie tells her brainslug to pay more attention to her uncle’s explanations for everything. I can only hear and see what you hear and see, Wanderer, she told me. which means she’s not even getting direct sensory information, I guess? I’m really not seeing how that’s possible, the info is coming in to both of them and the brainslug is just paying attention to different things.

She freaks out when she realizes she’s at the doctor’s place, but they insist it’s just part of the tour, because they only kill people they don’t know. Also, turns out it’s really hard to get medicine because the brainslugs threw out all our medicines, which apparently involved some very careful disposal and not throwing it out where anyone could grab the stuff. They want to know how the brainslug stuff works, but she’s useless because only healers know healing, because that sure isn’t a job you’d want as many people as possible to know the basics of. It’s just like how among humans, as long as there are hospitals no one needs to know first aid!

“Your kind didn’t change too much of what we left behind,” Jeb said thoughtfully after a moment. “Just the medical stuff, and the spaceships instead of planes. Other than that, life seems to go on just the same as ever… on the surface.”
“We come to experience, not to change,” I whispered. “Health takes priority over that philosophy, though.”

That’s right, it takes a human to finally tell us what post-brainslug human society actually looks like.

It’s interesting, but it’d be more so if it seemed a real philosophy. I suspect the author, who mentions the seeker has a smartphone but doesn’t have the main character even have a cellphone, just doesn’t realize that there’s a lot of other innovations that have actual practical use. What happens when the next earthquake hits? We’ve had two devastating tsunamis in recent years. Are those health or philosophy? And how do they handle the stuff that was currently in the process of changing – I mean, they’ve shown up during an extinction event. Are they going to supertechnology away the fungus wiping out frogs? What are they doing about the cats eating endangered birds? The missing glaciers? Do they just put the brakes on and try to pause everything at this moment, or do they let it keep happening because it would be changing things to stop it? Do they try to fix it but only in ways that we were already doing? Are they still manufacturing the smartphones and the rest of their consumer culture in horribly detrimental ways and if so, what poor souls did are they making work in sweatshops?

Finally, the tour ends and Jeb leaves Jamie on guard duty with a gun, which makes the brainslug finally switch from her endless whispers to shouts as she says a kid shouldn’t have a gun or be involved, and Jeb tells her to shut her dumb woman mouth Jamie’s a man now and that means being handed a gun to accidentally blow his head off with. It’s sort of like the Walking Dead.

They chat about aliens.

I told him all about the See Weeds’ waterlogged planet. I told him about the two suns, the elliptical orbit, the gray waters, the unmoving permanence of roots, the stunning vistas of a thousand eyes, the endless conversations of a million soundless voices that all could hear.
…
I told him about the Bats on the Singing World–how it was to live in musical blindness, how it was to fly. I told him about the Mists Planet–how it felt to have thick white fur and four hearts to keep warm, how to give claw beasts a wide berth.

Maybe you could actually spend some time on that properly, book. God knows you aren’t concerned about wordiness here.

Jamie wants to know if any of them are the little green men of Roswell.

“Nope, not us.”
“Was it all fake?”
“I don’t know–maybe, maybe not. It’s a big universe, and there’s a lot of company out there.”

What? You damn well do, you brainslugged the people who would know!

I really hate when books try to avoid taking a side on some stupid issue that in universe should have a clear answer.

Also, considering the brainslugs are conquering everything in their path, if there’s another spacefaring race that should be a big concern to them, because those could learn of them in advance and attack them.

As to how her kind arrived here:

I told him about the Spiders–a fascinating species. Brilliant, the most incredible minds we’d ever come across, and each Spider had three of them. Three brains, one in each section of their segmented bodies. We’d yet to find a problem they couldn’t solve for us. And yet they were so coldly analytical that they rarely came up with a problem they were curious enough to solve for themselves. Of all our hosts, the Spiders welcomed our occupation the most. They barely noticed the difference, and when they did, they seemed to appreciate the direction we provided. The few souls who had walked on the surface of the Spiders’ planet before implantation told us that it was cold and gray–no wonder the Spiders only saw in black and white and had a limited sense of temperature. The Spiders lived short lives, but the young were born knowing everything their parent had, so no knowledge was lost.

Putting aside the question of how something could evolve super problem solving without the drive to use it, the rest of this doesn’t make much sense either. Are the brainslugs piling up three in one spider, or controlling all three, or just in one? Why does it matter they have three brains instead of one brain triple the size? Why are they being talked about as partners with their own desires when apparently there being anything left of the original mind in a host is unprecedented?

I’d lived out one of the short life terms of the species and then left with no desire to return. The amazing clarity of my thoughts, the easy answers that came to any question almost without effort, the march and dance of numbers were no substitute for emotion and color, which I could only vaguely understand when inside that body. I wondered how any soul could be content there, but the planet had been self-sufficient for thousands of Earth years. It was still open for settling only because the Spiders reproduced so quickly–great sacs of eggs.

And how does this make sense? There’s only so much space. The fact they’re reproducing quickly just means they’d have hit max population and plateaued faster thn usual. If the death rate is so fast that there’s higher turnover that’d be one thing, but apparently souls usually stay on the same planet for good, so it’s not like the rapid lives make the souls any more likely to leave and free up a spot.

I started to tell Jamie how the offensive had been launched here. The Spiders were our best engineers–the ships they made for us danced nimbly and undetectably through the stars. The Spiders’ bodies were almost as useful as their minds: four long legs to each segment–from which they’d earned their nickname on this planet–and twelve-fingered hands on each leg. These six-jointed fingers were as slender and strong as steel threads, capable of the most delicate procedures.

Wait. They have three body segments with four legs each for a total of twelve, and each of those ends in twelve more super long fingers, and they’re called spiders, not centipedes?

About the mass of a cow, but short and lean, the Spiders had no trouble with the first insertions. They were stronger than humans, smarter than humans, and prepared, which the humans were not…

Which causes Jamie to freak out and end storytime, but let’s face it, we probably wouldn’t have gotten an explanation for how they figured out human language either way. Let’s just assume the spiders learned it and act as the go-betweens for all other host communications.

I saw the crystalline sparkle on Jamie’s cheek. He was staring straight ahead at nothing, his lips pressed in a tight line. A large drop of salt water rolled slowly down the cheek closest to me.

That’s right, a single crystalline tear.

It was instinctive, the desire to lean forward and wipe that tear away. I tried at first to ignore it; I was not Melanie. But the tear hung there, motionless, as if it would never fall. Jamie’s eyes stayed fixed on the blank wall, and his lips trembled.
He wasn’t far from me. I stretched my arm out to brush my fingers against his cheek; the tear spread thin across his skin and disappeared. Acting on instinct again, I left my hand against his warm cheek, cradling his face.

That’s her, not Melanie. You’d think this would be a moment of syncing in that case, but nope, Melanie’s only there to occasionally point out the obvious now.

Jeb returns and they learn her name, Wanderer.

But it’s kind of a mouthful, don’t you think? Wanderer?”
I stared at him.
“Mind if I call you Wanda, for short? It flows easier.”
He waited this time for a response. Finally, I shrugged. It didn’t matter to me whether he called me “kid” or some strange human nickname. I believed it was meant kindly.
“Okay, then, Wanda.” He smiled, pleased at his invention. “It’s nice to have a handle on you. Makes me feel like we’re old friends.”

Oh christ so now she’s been named by two men. And this is explicitly a good thing by the author because the evil seeker said that she expected our brainslug to pick a name for herself while she was being an evil seeker and our brainslug slapped her down.

Jeb then says he sure liked her stories and he was always wondering about how they did the whole capture and brainmurder thing. Somehow he’s actually seen an insertion before, although there’s no explanation how. Also, he’s figured out she’s really there because she just loves them so much and wants to be their friend.

He does say some interesting stuff when he did.

“Spent a lot of time watching your kind. I was always waiting for them to change, you know, when they didn’t have to act like us anymore, because there was no one to act for. I kept on watching and waiting, but they just kept on actin’ like humans. Staying with their bodies’ families, going out for picnics in good weather, plantin’ flowers and paintin’ pictures and all the rest of it.

Okay, but see, that’s creepy.

They’re doing stuff that doesn’t have a point. The point of staying with your family is that it’s people you know, not people who look like people you know with strangers in their heads. Even the comforter at least had an explanation for why she was together with the body’s husband – they’d been colleagues in a dangerous situation for a long time. She knew him as a person from that. But apparently, if for some reason he did decide to leave the body and go to a new planet, she’d stay married to whatever new brainslug was popped in

Similarly, the point of cheetos is to make money for stockholders. The point of cashiers is to keep you from stealing. The point of bottled water is a distrust of your government’s ability to provide for you and an absurd trust in a private company to do a better job. And at least 90% of the point of living in the non-city parts of the hellstates is isolation which is a thing humans can like but apparently no brainslug wants to that.

Continuing to do something without the reason behind it is inherently creepy. It’s like…

Okay, imagine you see a factory that’s there to bottle some drink. Only there’s nothing to bottle, it’s just machines going through the motions of pouring nonexistent fluid into nonexistent bottles and twisting nonexistent caps on top of them in a huge, empty building. Isn’t that creepy? This is like an entire planet of people doing that.

I read a short story where the machines had gone rogue and humans had to avoid the cities and stuff. This guy goes into one for some reason and is arrested by the autonomous police bots, and it’s so much more horrible after locking him up they bring him a tray with an empty dish and an empty glass than if they just threw people into the cells and left them there to starve.

I’ve been wondering if you all aren’t turning sort of human.

Is about the only thing to not make it horrifying, because it means the original reasons are still there. But he doesn’t seem to think that the fact they act like the people they used to be means there’s any sort of real fusion between the two. He assumes it’s a clear division and all he wonders is if the person’s entirely gone or still there but unable to do anything.

Plainly, your memories and behaviors, all that is left behind. But your consciousness…

…is not that distinct from the first two.

I mean, we know that experiencing the same things doesn’t mean people have the same personality, so it’s believable that you could have a personality core in the brainslug that’s then slotted into the memories but doesn’t behave the same in response to that background. But you add in behaviors, and it’s getting to be a much stickier issue. If I remember having pet cats but “I” don’t want any, I’m a different person than the one with the memories. If I also behave the same way about cats, then what’s the difference?

You can make a distinction between types of behaviors, of course. If I’m just mechanically repeating an action because it’s what I did in the past but don’t have any emotional investment, then that’s not me. But he’s clearly saying they feel the same emotions behind the behaviors, since he’s also got a story about an old couple in love.

I think the only thing that’s actually comparable is a short story I read where they put chips in your head to back up your brain, then scooped up your actual brain before it starts to decline. The two are supposed to be in perfect sync by the time of the brain-scooping, but the narrator discovers a few days before that he’s no longer in control of his body. In that case, they’re pretty much the same person, but with two distinct consciousnesses. Similarly, if a brainslug in a host is the host’s mind + the brainslug, and there’s also the original mind in there at the same time, it’s two different consciousnesses. But whatever’s going on with the brainslugs seems nowhere near that level from what we’ve seen – but then, from what we’ve seen what he’s saying about them staying in the exact same families doesn’t fit that either.

Anyway, he then intuits that the consciousness remaining is just a matter of being a fighter or not, and therefore he just knows Melanie is still there.

In response the brainslug says fucking nothing because she’s stupid. And while he just said Melanie’s a fighter, it turns out she really isn’t, she was just that awful woman stereotype who can lift a car off her baby but is otherwise a weak demure little thing.

She’d been very quiet lately, absent almost half the time. It wasn’t as easy for her to concentrate when she was relatively happy. She’d won her big fight. She’d gotten us here. Her secrets were no longer in jeopardy; Jared and Jamie could never be betrayed by her memories. With the fight taken out of her, it was harder for her to find the will to speak, even to me.

She was only doing all that for the menfolk. Her own survival is so meaningless that even when she’s within finger’s reach of it, she’s fine giving up.

But who cares about her, the man wants to know more. We learn the spiders also had twelve eyes placed at each juncture of the leg and the body and then he asks lots of questions about the Spiders’ looks, their behaviors, and how they’d handled Earth. He didn’t flinch away from the invasion details; on the contrary, he almost seemed to enjoy that part more than the rest. none of which we get to hear. And apparently the plant world is the prettiest, and the dragons mentioned are made of jelly and fly/swim though the air that’s also jelly and spit acid.

She says that teaching was her job, and Jeb says they need one because right now they have Sharon teaching, which is a girl job, but her speciality is math, which isn’t, so okay, I won’t hate the book there. She says she doesn’t know human history, but he decides they need to learn the conquerer’s history anyway.

And she explains her name:

“Well, the way it usually works is that a soul will try out a planet or two–two’s the average–and then they’ll settle in their favorite place. They just move to new hosts in the same species on the same planet when their body gets close to death. It’s very disorienting moving from one kind of body to the next. Most souls really hate that. Some never move from the planet they are born on. Occasionally, someone has a hard time finding a good fit. They may try three planets. I met a soul once who’d been to five before he’d settled with the Bats.

So then why on earth are they so expansionist. It can hardly be people like her driving things. She’s lived on eight before this, and we learn that there’s another four total. So, brainslug planets are fifteen in total.

I could feel how intensely aware she was of the hand in mine. There was an emotion slowly building in her that I didn’t recognize. Something on the edge of anger, with a hint of desire and a portion of despair.
Jealousy, she enlightened me.

But apparently seeing the brainslug living her life with her family isn’t a valid motivation to keep her going.

Then the doctor comes for guard duty.

“Now, now,” Jeb said in a soothing voice. “I asked Doc if he minded taking a shift. You don’t need to worry about anything. Doc’s an honorable man.”
The doctor smiled a sleepy smile. “I’m not going to hurt you… Wanda, is it? I promise. I’ll just keep watch while you sleep.”
I bit my lip, and the quivering didn’t stop.
Jeb seemed to think everything was settled, though. “Night, Wanda. Night, Doc,” he said as he started back down the hall.

Okay, there’s no reason for this other than kink at this point. I’m not sure we have a name for this, but it’s definitely there.