Memory time again.

I crouch in the darkness behind the weak protection of a scrubby creosote bush, sweating out all the water left in my body. It’s been fifteen minutes since the car left the garage. No lights have come on. The arcadia door is open two inches, letting the swamp cooler do its job. I can imagine the feel of the moist, cool air blowing through the screen.

As I referenced last time, little knowledge of how the hellstates function, so I’ll just assume this is accurate. People really need to stop using water so much, though.

She’s starving, but even more importantly, so is the kid hidden somewhere else, who’s either her brother or some kid she adopted.

I really hope they are going out for a night on the town. I think it’s Friday. They keep our habits so perfectly, it’s hard to see any difference. Which is how they won in the first place.

It seems the brainslugs really do copy their host behavior to an amazing degree.

Which I guess also explains why they don’t seem to have done stuff like move away from the hellstates so they’re not putting so much pressure on the environment.

This is an element I really like, but only if there’s obvious dissonance to it. Just straight up being the same ends up being lazy. So, they continue to act just like people even though they’ve won. But presumably, minus the wars and stuff. Okay, so, how are things different? They’re obviously not utilitarian because she says there’s no dog as if dogs are still a species that exists instead of getting wiped out as useless. They still have houses that are far away from other houses for some reason. I don’t think there’s been any sign of money, but there must be some way they’re divvying up resources given they seem to have kept our consumerist tendencies.

I pull the canvas bag from my shoulder and start with the refrigerator. There is a moment of anxiety as the light comes on when the door opens, but I find the button and hold it down with my toe. My eyes are blind. I don’t have time to let them adjust. I go by feel.

This book is really impressing me with the writing. It’s not very polished or anything, but it’s got details, and not ones that trip me up every second by being stupid. She’s snuck into this house and can’t even let the refrigerator light show in case a brainslug sees.

Milk, cheese slices, leftovers in a plastic bowl. I hope it’s the chicken-and-rice thing I watched him cooking for dinner. We’ll eat this tonight.
Juice, a bag of apples. Baby carrots. These will stay good till morning.
I hurry to the pantry. I need things that will keep longer.

So they’re still eating meat and keeping large numbers of livestock.

Even if it’s possible to do this ethically and without overburdening the environment, it’s only been a few years since they took over. They should be busy moving resources to improve the lives of people in crappier countries right now, and then trying to reduce environmental load. For everyone on the planet to live like Americans, we’d need another four earths.

(Which gets back to the issue that I’d really, really like to see how things are different, because harmony stuff would change a lot more than just making people polite at each other.)

The issue of food keeping makes me wonder why she hasn’t tried moving north for places food doesn’t spoil so fast. I’m not sure where she is, so maybe it’s simply that it’d involve crossing too much empty space.

Anyway, with this done, she fills her canteen and then drinks water straight from the faucet. Oddly, she hasn’t eaten anything while she’s there, so either she thinks filling up on water is a better idea or she has some other reason not to want to carry any of the food in her stomach.

I start to feel panicked now that my job is done. I want to be out of here. Civilization is deadly.

Basically this is what I wanted from the kids in Unwind.

Anyway, she’s then attacked by a guy. She tells him to kill her because I don’t want to be a filthy parasite!” which is kind of weird phrasing if you think about it, since the whole point of being a parasite is that you don’t transform hosts into you, you parasitize them. He rambles about how this is a seeker trick, she kicks him a bit, he says “Feisty for a peace-loving body snatcher, aren’t you?” so I guess they’re peaceful enough even their enemies admit they’re pretty damn peaceful.

Suddenly he realizes that she’s not brainslug possessed.

“I can’t believe it,” he whispers. “You’re still human.”
His hands grab my face from both sides, and before I can pull free, his lips come down hard on mine.

Uh.

You know what’s disturbing here? I can really, really see this. And I can hear the explanation for it is that he’s overwhelmed by being so happy to find another human, missing that there’s other stuff you do when you’re happy to see a person. Abruptly hugging her would keep the shock aspect without rushing into sexual territory, but this is the last man and woman on earth fantasy – that if there’s only one woman left, she’s yours.

I’m frozen for half a second. No one has ever kissed me in my life. Not a real kiss. Just my parents’ pecks on the cheek or forehead, so many years ago. This is something I thought I would never feel. I’m not sure exactly what it feels like, though. There’s too much panic, too much terror, too much adrenaline.

The book is more ambivalent about it all.

She doesn’t really have room to talk about being kissed by a stranger here, because it’s too caught up in her thinking about her own lack of romantic prospects and the fact she’s already terrified for other reasons.

That said, she knees him and runs off, so, doing pretty okay so far.

She tells us she’s a great runner, but turns out he’s faster. I realize that yeah, plot requires it, but it’s really annoying. Having her be a great runner but too loaded down to run as fast as usual would have been fine.

“I’m sorry I kissed you! That was stupid! I’ve just been alone so long!”

The thing here is, that’s not entirely an excuse.

Chasing her down now? Understandable, he’s alone and he’s seeing the only other person like him leaving. Kissing is…more deliberate.

I guess the simplest way of looking at it is that inappropriate behavior from suddenly meeting someone would be exaggerated familiarity. Kissing is a special subtype of behavior that you don’t do just because you’re familiar with someone.

So when he’s apologizing here, it seems to me like the issue is he went too fast, not that it’s possible kissing would never be on the table regardless of how slowly he built up to it.

Anyway, he tackles her and manages to hold on long enough to shine his flashlight into his eyes.

His eyes, clear liquid sienna in the illumination, shine with no more than human reflection.

Book. In order for the eyes themselves to look different, the brain slug would need part of its body in there. And the optic nerve is not the same thing as the eye itself. It’s a thing that connects the eye to the brain.

If you want to do this, say they enter in through the eyes and skip the neck thing.

“Why won’t you show me your neck?”
“Because I have a scar there,” he admits.
I try to squirm out from under him again, and his hand pins my shoulder.
“It’s self-inflicted,” he explains. “I think I did a pretty good job, though it hurt like hell.I don’t have all that pretty hair to cover my neck. The scar helps me blend in.”

You know, do we ever have male protagonists have to deal with this? The use of pretty just does not seem good here.

I remember this being done well in Z for Zachariah, where the female character has to decide what to do when a guy arrives in her oasis of livable land. She’s also terribly lonely and thinking she might be the last one alive, but her response to a stranger is to hide because she’s scared of what he might do to her.

He’s not overtly hostile right now, but it’s pretty obvious his interest goes beyond pure loneliness.

I don’t move. I know he can catch me if I try to run.

And after what’s happened, it’s clear that if he doesn’t want to take no for an answer, there’s nothing she can do. She’s reliant on his good will. So far, he’s had decent reason for trying to stop her from running away, but that says nothing about what he might do for less good reasons.

He introduces himself and claims it’s been a mere two years since he last talked to a human. I don’t believe we’ve heard about the exact timeline, and it’s likely he didn’t lose all contact until sometime after the brainslugs took over. Knowing the timeline would really help here, though – it could mean anything from that he took off and ran at the first announcement to that he was part of a group fighting them until the rest were wiped out very late in the occupation.

Either way, two years seems rather short to be acting this badly or convinced no other humans exist.

He introduces himself as Jared Howe and she introduces herself as plain Melanie, no last name.

He says he wants to go back and get his own bag of food.

“Do you really think I’m going to let you disappear? I’ll follow you even if you tell me not to.”
I don’t want to disappear from him.

Very, very lucky on her part.

At the same time, she’s hesitant about telling him she’s not the only human, but realizes she should: We’re family–both part of the brotherhood of extinction. and tells him about the kid.

Jamie is waiting.”
“You’re not alone,” he realizes. His expression shows uncertainty for the first time.
“My brother. He’s just nine, and he’s so frightened when I’m away.
…
Jared’s smile is back, brighter than before.

Man, this guy is not coming off good here. I hope he’s not endgame love interest. He seems perfectly realistic in all this, I just don’t like it.

Anyway, he explains he’s got a car and can take her wherever she likes.

He is still holding my hand. He lets go slowly, his eyes not leaving mine. He takes a step
backward, then pauses.
“Please don’t kick me,” he pleads, leaning forward and grabbing my chin. He kisses me again, and this time I feel it. His lips are softer than his hands, and hot, even in the warm desert night. A flock of butterflies riots in my stomach and steals my breath.

Well, at least she’s into him, allowing us to dodge the question of what would happen if she wasn’t.

Anyway, what you see here is inevitable within the framework we’re struck with. Women can’t display initiative or else they’re terrible whores who’ll never get proper married and have babies. Men do things to them, and if they wanted those things done to them, it’s a romance. Even something as basic as him asking if he could kiss her is off limits. This right here is the exact limits of consent – he says something that references what he’s about to do obliquely and moves in to do it, giving her a short window to object/pull away if she understands him but where it’s just as possible she doesn’t realize what he’s about to do and so doesn’t make a choice.

Anyway, she brushes the back of his neck as they kiss and feels the scar on his neck, then screams. Then wakes up. A dream, apparently. I’m not sure if that means the ending was what happened or not, but since she’s identifying it as a memory I guess so. So Melanie is kind of dumb because he just said he carved up his neck.

Also apparently he did a shitty job because real insertions don’t leave a big scar but then why would he think a big scar was a good idea? Surely he knows the brainslugs have scarred neck thingies by seeing them.

A new dream, but in essence so much the same as the many others that had plagued me in the past months.

We’re not really sure what purpose sleeping has, so no way to know how the brainslugs function there, but we do know what brain activity looks like when humans sleep and it’s not clear memories, so why would a brainslug get those and not actual dreams? Maybe the brain slug is sleeping too, and its version of sleep is poking through precise memories.

Anyway, she angsts because she misses Jared.

How did anyone survive this world, with these bodies whose memories wouldn’t stay in the past where they should? With these emotions that were so strong I couldn’t tell what I felt anymore?

It’s a dream. Did the other species not have memory dream thingies? The strong emotion is probably because of loneliness, which is a thing for people and apparently extra a thing for people in this book. Surely other sapient species felt loneliness.

So she goes over to the computer to report about the existence of Melanie’s brother, who by now much be thirteen or so. So, around four years ago, and she’s in her early twenties, so there’s a good chance the guy in er memories was making out with a seventeen year old. She’s impressed that Melanie kept it a secret for so long.

They were living in a temporary camp, and I believe it was north of the town of Cave Creek, in Arizona. That was several years ago, though. Still, you could compare a map to the lines I remembered before.

So yeah, seems she was trapped at the time by having to stay in the general vicinity of civilization for food. Also seems pretty obvious this info is useless, because the memory concludes with her being wowed by her new boyfriend’s truck, and presumably they take off. Even if they did stay around that camp a while, we know they left to go with her when she was trying to contact her cousin, so they’d have to have returned and you’d think everyone would know that if someone’s caught, the brainslugs will know your locations and to go somewhere new.

Even still, Melanie screams at this.

Her voice in my head was as clear as my own spoken aloud. I shuddered in horror.
Even as I struggled with the fear of what was happening, I was gripped with the insane desire
to e-mail the Seeker again and apologize for sending her my crazy dreams. To tell her I was half
asleep and to pay no attention to the silly message I’d sent.
The desire was not my own.

The brainslugs really suck at the subtle side of control, don’t they? They seem to be able to puppet around the body fine, but their own feelings are tenuous. I guess that makes sense given we already know they seem to get a ton of bleedthrough from hosts under normal circumstances and rely on the host’s brain for language and stuff.

When the brainslug doesn’t, Melanie says she hates her and the brainslug says, aloud, that if she does then Melanie should leave, which is just further confirming that on the mental level, the brainslug can’t keep up – she can’t even manage to communicate in thought form back. Melanie’s ghost is intangible and working in ways she can’t understand.

Apparently this hasn’t been happening – since last chapter, she’s been silent. But our brainslug protagonist is certain she’s getting stronger. Apparently, the dreams are getting worse too.

And there was no question about it; I was going to have to visit my Comforter tomorrow. Tears of disappointment and humiliation welled in my eyes at the thought.

For a protagonist introduced as a badass she really isn’t living up to it at all.