by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Prodigy of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
Lys’s confession of telepathy significantly distracted everyone from Ensign Mike’s situation. The Norwegian Forest cat captain and the golden-mantled squirrel commander spent several hours debriefing the caterpillar regarding her unexpected capabilities and the effects they might have had on the crew over the last year in the privacy of the captain’s quarters.
Meanwhile, Mike moved into their new quarters, claiming one of the previously empty cots in Barracks Room A. It wasn’t a difficult move, physically speaking. It’s not like the mushroom had any belongings hidden away in the crawlspace. Or any belongings at all. Everyone aboard the Wanderlust had been traveling light when this voyage had begun, so none of them had very many belongings. But most of them had at least a few trinkets or some casual changes of clothes for when they weren’t on duty and thus wearing a uniform. And bedding.
Mike’s new cot came with a pillow and blanket that had been tucked away in a drawer under it. Once Mike placed them on the bed, the drawer was available for any belongings the toadstool might acquire.
Mike had never slept with a pillow and blanket before. So, once the toadstool had properly made up their new bed, they decided to try it out. While everyone else aboard was whispering with each other about Lys’s telepathy and what signs each of them might have missed regarding it, Mike laid down on their cot, mushroom-cap head on the strangely soft pillow and thin blanket pulled over their bushy mycelial beard.
Mike didn’t like it. They didn’t like it at all.
Mike missed the firm walls of the crawlway hugging close around them. A thin piece of fabric over their body was no substitute for the solid walls of a crawlspace. The cot felt far too exposed in the openness of the barracks room.
Mike was far too aware of the fact that Vossie, Werik, and Korvax would be able to see them sleeping. However, Mike noticed that the hedgehog’s cot had a different kind of blanket on it than the regulation one — thicker and quilted. From what Mike recalled, Korvax hadn’t really brought anything with him from his previous life when he’d come aboard, so it must have been a blanket that the hedgehog had synthesized specifically, probably because his quills would’ve ripped one of these thin little regulation blankets into shreds.
Synthesizing a specialized blanket was a good idea.
Fortunately, Ensign Mike rarely used their synthesizer rations, since the toadstool actually liked Korvax’s cooking. So, Mike had a lot of rations saved up and was able to synthesize a blanket to supplement the regulation one that was basically just a thin layer of cotton.
Mike chose a synthesizer design for a weighted blanket.
When Mike pulled the weighted blanket all the way up to where it covered their row of slit-eyes on the bottom of their mushroom-cap head, it still allowed enough of their gills — which were longer than their eyes — to stay exposed for them to breathe okay, while also letting them feel completely hidden away from the world. It would have to do. It was all that Mike was allowed now that the rest of the crew was on alert to notice if the toadstool tried slipping away to sleep in the crawlway again.
This was the end of an era for Mike. The toadstool thought that they should feel grateful for finally being acknowledged as a full member of the crew, deserving a barracks assignment. But mostly, they felt embarrassed that the rest of the crew knew they’d been creeping around the ship’s crawlways like some kind of Phantom of the Opera but without the musical talent.
When Lys’s debriefing was over, the conclusion was anticlimactic — the caterpillar would refrain from using her telepathy to influence anyone in the crew, and she’d consult with the captain before using her telepathy on anyone outside of the crew. Of course, there was no way for the Norwegian Forest cat captain to actually control the caterpillar’s use of telepathy, no matter how much she wanted to. Captain Carroway couldn’t oversee Lys’s use of her powers without the caterpillar willingly letting her.
But what else was the captain to do? Lys had been a part of the Wanderlust’s crew since nearly the beginning of this voyage. And if the captain had wanted to take a more severe stance on Lys’s powers… well… the caterpillar could’ve just nudged the cat into changing her mind, couldn’t she?
But Lys wouldn’t do that. The caterpillar swore she wouldn’t do that, and the crew would have to take her at her word. There simply weren’t a lot of alternatives.
Mike was keenly grateful that Lys had chosen this moment to reveal her extra level of difference from the rest of the crew. Today, compared to a telepathic caterpillar, Mike was a downright regular kind of officer. Sure, they looked like a mushroom, and if any of the other crewmembers thought too hard about the things they’d seen Mike do, they’d realize that the mushroom’s mycelial nature also made them something of a shapeshifter. But Mike couldn’t read their minds. And Mike couldn’t affect their emotions in ways they didn’t understand.
As the days and weeks passed, traveling through this part of the Tetra Galaxy, Mike slowly grew accustomed to sharing a room with Vossie, Werik, and Korvax. The two Morphicans had grown quite chilly to each other, ever since Vossie had thrown aside Werik’s meditation training in favor of a new neural implant. But Korvax was more than up to filling a chilly room with warmth.
After the initial shock of losing their privacy in the crawlway wore off, the toadstool actually found they liked sleeping in a room with other officers coming and going. Mike slept deeply enough under the weight of their specially synthesized blanket — more deeply than they were used to, in fact — that the others rarely woke them. Even Korvax knew how to be quiet when someone was sleeping. And it could be quite pleasant to wake and find one or the other of their roommates quietly sitting and reading on their cot, ready to wish Mike a good morning.
Cmdr. Chestnut had always allowed Mike to schedule therapy sessions in his private quarters, when the golden-mantled squirrel himself was on duty and not using them. And when Mike confided in Chestnut how much they missed the privacy of their crawlway sleeping space, the squirrel encouraged the toadstool to begin working a few minutes of privacy into their therapy schedule, both before and after sessions. Chestnut called it time to prepare and decompress, and that wasn’t entirely inaccurate. But also, it wasn’t something Mike had felt the need for, back when the toadstool had slept alone in a crawlway.
The best part of the transition, though, for Mike was that sharing a room with Vossie seemed to have revitalized the friendship they’d had in the early days of Mike’s life. Back then, Vossie had missed his implant too much to turn up his twitchy nose at any sort of substitute. Over time, that sense of loss had grown into resentment.
But now that Vossie had a replacement neural implant, his resentment was gone. Evaporated like morning dew on a hot day. The toadstool and cyborg-rabbit were bosom brothers again, and Mike couldn’t have been happier about that. Sometimes, it almost seemed like Vossie and Mike could fulfill the standard cliché and finish each other’s sentences. But then, Mike had lived inside Vossie’s mind for so very long before fully becoming themself, was it any surprise that the two of them would think in similar ways? Even if one of them was a mammalian rabbit-like alien and the other one was a cyborg mushroom… was it really so strange?
But then, Vossie started showing troubling symptoms. Sleep-walking. Getting muddled and confused in the middle of conversations, forgetting what he was doing… The changes were small at first. Easy to miss or explain away. The rabbit was stressed about the particular region of space they were flying through, closer to outbreaks of the Hyphaic plague than the Wanderlust had risked before. Or he’d had a bad night of sleep, leaving him cranky and distracted by a sore shoulder. Even with a neural implant, these sorts of things happened. A properly medicated brain is still subject to the whims of life.
But even so, Mike began to worry.
Mike was good at worrying about Vossie. It had been their entire job as an implant. And Mike had a computer’s perfect memory, being composed of mycelial flesh that had originally been used as computer memory combined with an actual computerized neural implant. So, Mike was able to actually measure the rate at which Lt. Cmdr. Vossie became more forgetful, more flustered, more easily confused.
And the rate was increasing. The rate was no longer covered by the numerical blur of rounding down insignificant figures.
Even though Vossie could still brush off his problems — something the cyborg-rabbit was desperate to do, because he knew that if he had real problems, Captain Carroway might insist he revert to being a normal non-cyborg rabbit again — Mike knew, measurably, that the problems were real. The problem was significant.
Vossie was sick.
As the ship’s doctor, Ensign Mike had dealt with various minor injuries sustained on away missions, the most extreme being when Lt. Lee had managed to break his leg while trying to learn about hunting from Lt. Diaz. Mike had also handled a whole range of physical symptoms resulting from the stress of their situation, ranging from headaches and upset stomachs to mild insomnia.
The toadstool had never dealt with anything truly difficult — they’d never had to diagnose an unidentified illness with an unknown cause. And that was clearly what Lt. Cmdr. Vossie was facing. The most likely cause, certainly, was the rabbit’s new implant, but… how? The brain is a complicated organ, and neural implants affect brains in a variety of ways. Clearly, the implant was working very well in many ways, or Lt. Cmdr. Vossie would have begun struggling immediately after beginning to use it, instead of weeks later.
Would removing the implant fix the problem? Or simply introduce more variables? Could Ensign Mike persuade Lt. Cmdr. Vossie — or go over his long ears and persuade Captain Carroway — that the evidence of the rabbit’s increasing illness was strong enough to warrant removing the neural device?
Mike documented everything assiduously. No matter how close the toadstool felt to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, they’d be a fool to forget how the two of them had grown apart during the year when the rabbit had needed to struggle by without an implant. Just because all the walls between them seemed to have melted away again… That didn’t mean Mike couldn’t be unpleasantly surprised by the rabbit turning suddenly cold and distant again.
Besides when Mike really thought about it, Vossie had never talked to them about the situation with the crawlway. Lys had. Korvax had. Commander Chestnut had.
Actually, when Mike reviewed their memories of the time since moving into Barracks Room A, it seemed that everyone in the crew had expressed some sort of — at least cursory — sympathy or concern regarding the fact that they’d all missed Mike being treated like a second-class citizen, not worthy of a barracks assignment, and that the toadstool had been creeping around, sleeping in the crawlways… except for Vossie.
Lt. Diaz had taken to jokingly telling the toadstool, “Stay out of my crawlways,” any time they came into the engine room, as if the Xolo-Lupinian owned the crawlways herself, just because she’d become the chief engineer.
Even Captain Carroway had forced herself to grumble out an official apology for her “oversight.”
Only Vossie hadn’t said a word about Mike’s changed situation. The toadstool wasn’t sure how to feel about that… Maybe it just meant that the two of them were so close, they didn’t need to talk about everything. Companionable silence and all that.
But the more Mike sifted through their memories, the more apparent it became that every time the rabbit and toadstool talked together, all they talked about were Vossie’s interests. Mike shared some of those interests. But…
Did Vossie ever express interest in Mike, separate from in the ways that the toadstool could serve as a sort of external memory hard-drive who’d also been there for his childhood, youth, and Tri-Galactic Union career leading up to this fateful voyage? Vossie liked reminiscing about the past, before Mike had fully existed as a separate person, but did he actually care at all about the person Mike had become?
Mike could find no record in their memories of such an interest. Perhaps their memories were faulty? Corrupted somehow? Mike liked to think of themself as having a perfect computerized memory, but maybe it wasn’t true? Perhaps their brain was so completely formed by Vossie that moments of true connection with the rabbit overloaded their senses, and so those memories didn’t get stored properly… Did that make any sense?
It didn’t make sense.
Did it?
Mike wasn’t sure what to think. Either something was wrong with the toadstool’s memory, or their best friend and bosom brother… showed less interest in their well-being than even the coldest, most indifferent members of the Wanderlust crew.
Captain Carroway clearly disliked the mushroom, but the Norwegian Forest cat still forced herself to ask them occasionally how the new rooming situation was going.
Ensign Werik’s entire life philosophy was opposed to neural implants and the Tri-Galactic Union, and Mike was half composed from a neural implant and half composed from a Tri-Galactic Union computer. Even so, the former Anti-Ra rabbit still made a point of politely asking how Mike had been sleeping and if there were anything he could do to make the mushroom more comfortable in their new quarters.
That wasn’t a high bar to clear.
Why wasn’t Vossie clearing it?
Maybe it was ridiculous to care about such persnickety pleasantries. For really, what is the point of empty politeness between two people who already know how deeply they care about each other?
Except, Mike was beginning to wonder if Vossie actually did care about them. The toadstool was beginning to wonder if their relationship was profoundly one-sided, and they simply hadn’t noticed.
Regardless of the internal loop of doubt that Mike’s analysis had sent them on, the toadstool knew one thing for sure: Vossie was sick.
And that meant Mike needed to take their findings to the captain. No matter what outcome her involvement might lead to, Mike had a responsibility as a Tri-Galactic Union officer, as the ship’s doctor, as Vossie’s friend, and even just as a decent sentient being.
Continue on to Chapter 13…