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.
A tiny glimmer of metallic-blue tang flashed into existence, far away from any of the usual clusters, and a creature of galactic, Lovecraftian proportions was reminded of what it had been like to be small and singular, hiding in a crawlspace, wishing to be noticed more by the minuscule mammals sharing a ship with them.
When Mike had been a single entity, they couldn’t have believed they’d ever feel nostalgic for those moments. Lonely moments full of self-doubt and anguish — feelings that simply didn’t exist now in the profusion of complexity that was being an entire civilization all at once, constantly awash in memories and experiences coming together from every corner of its being. But there had been a bright, sharp spark of purity to existing in those moments. Solely in those moments. Solely as Mike.
And so the portion of the Hyphaic that still remembered being Mike — and only Mike — reached toward the metallic-blue flash with rose gold filaments, expecting to find itself blocked from crossing back through the veil to normal space by the lack of appropriate flesh to inhabit.
The Hyphaic had never wanted to hurt the tiny individual beings who lived in normal space. It had acted only through the necessity of self-preservation, and it wouldn’t try to claim someone else’s body ever again. Especially not someone it remembered considering a friend, back when it had been small too.
Even if the Hyphaic couldn’t ethically return to being small and singular again, the parts of it that remembered being Mike at least wanted to check in on their old companions and see how the voyage home to the Milky Way was going. Perhaps the Hyphaic could even give the Wanderlust a nudge in the right direction, a final parting gift from their awkward toadstool friend who had moved on to a greater, grander existence.
So, amidst all the chaos of an entire civilization living, growing, loving, maturing, arguing amongst itself, and leaving pieces of itself behind as it outgrew them, one small portion of the Hyphaic focused entirely on a patch of space that had thinned into a window between two realms and listened while a rabbit-like alien talked to himself, not knowing he wasn’t alone… but hoping.
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie stood by the teleporter pad in the rear of the Wanderlust, back behind the multi-purpose room. He wasn’t wearing a neural implant, but he held the hand-me-down Sidiian neural implant in his paws. He’d turned its subspace pulses on again, which accounted for the glimmer of metallic blue that had called the Hyphaic here to listen.
The Morphican’s original neural implant lay on the floor of the teleporter pad in front of him.
“I don’t know if you’re here,” Vossie said, his voice trembling. His paws holding the hand-me-down neural implant were shaking too. “I don’t know how any of this works, and that makes me so very uncomfortable. I like to know things. I like to be sure. But everything I’m doing here… it’s all conjecture. Good conjecture. Solid conjecture. Logical conjecture. But…” The rabbit’s voice broke. “Dammit, I just don’t know enough about what happened to you or what the Hyphaic is to know if my ideas here are anything but wishful thinking.”
The rabbit chewed at his lower lip with his prominent buck teeth for a moment before continuing. “I want you back, Mike.”
No one else was there to hear the Morphican’s confession. As far as he knew, no one was there to hear it all. It wasn’t something he was saying to sound right or seem sympathetic. It was simply the barest sentiment living in his heart.
The rabbit missed his mushroom friend.
“I didn’t always treat you well,” Vossie said. “I know that. I ignored you and was gruff with you. I treated you like you were nothing compared to my own whimsical feelings, and while there are reasons for that — living without an implant was hard — it’s not an excuse. I should have paid more attention to you and valued you more. And maybe, maybe, even if you can hear me, you won’t want to come back.”
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s voice got very small as he concluded, “But I hope you will.”
After drawing a deep breath, the Morphican knelt down and laid his hand-me-down neural implant on the floor of the teleporter pad beside his original one.
When he had stood back up, Vossie straightened his uniform and walked over to the teleporter pad’s controls. He laid his paws over the glowing control panel and said, “I can’t give you your original body back, because it had decayed beyond repair before being discovered in the coral gardens of Chora’ckell. And no matter how I’ve tried, I can’t figure out how to coax the mycelial flesh in the Wanderlust’s computer system to cooperate with growing into a suitable host for you. But…”
Vossie’s voice broke again, like he was overwhelmed by the implications of what he was about to say. “But my body has kept the mycelial strands of the Hyphaic alive inside me all these months that you’ve been gone. All these months that I’ve refused to let the rest of the Wanderlust crew give up on you… But I can’t hold them back anymore. They’re preparing your funeral right now, and I just can’t bear it. I know you’re out there, somehow, rejoined to the Hyphaic in subspace, and… Well, I have to try.”
The rabbit’s paws tensed as if he were about to type something into the teleporter control panel, but he hesitated. Instead, he said, “If you are here, and there’s any way for you to tell me… Well, we only have one shot at this, so if I’m doing it wrong. Now would be the time to let me know.”
The Hyphaic thought about reaching out to the mycelial strands inside Vossie’s body and trying to communicate with him. But the entirety of a civilization didn’t know what to say to just one small rabbit. So, it held back and watched.
“Okay, here we go,” Vossie said, and this time, he typed the commands into the teleporter control panel to summon up an extremely complicated and delicate program he’d already written. And with a final keystroke, he executed it.
Quantum energy fizzed like champagne bubbles, rooting out every last strand of mycelial flesh that had been woven into Vossie’s body, and in the wink of an eye, all of it vanished, only to reappear in a similar fizz on the teleporter pad.
For a moment, the mycelial threads — bare and white, glistening wetly — held the approximate form of a rabbit, floating there on the teleporter pad. Then gravity kicked in, and the mycelial tangle fell into a lump on the floor, completely covering the two neural implants that Vossie had left lying there.
Before the Hyphaic had withdrawn its presence from normal space, Vossie’s teleportation strategy would never have worked. The Hyphaic would have fought to keep control of its puppets, ripping them apart throughout their insides, trying to keep ahold of them rather than let itself be unwillingly teleported away.
But now, that mycelial flesh was empty of personality and intention. A pile of raw clay, lying on the teleporter pad, waiting for an artist to reach out and form those tangles back into a person, ready to be inhabited.
Did the Hyphaic feel like being an artist today?
The Hyphaic felt many, many ways in its great complexity. Most of it shuddered at the idea of being locked down into a single, lonely body on the far side of the veil between subspace and normal space.
But it only took a flicker — the tiniest, most minuscule flicker — of rose gold selfhood to reach out and choose to let itself be poured back into that small lump of raw clay.
A flicker of curiosity. A flicker of independence. A flicker of desire to see what would happen next, if they chose to be Mike again and continue with the voyage Mike had been on.
The mycelial threads twitched and tightened together, thickening and growing as the Hyphaic’s life force flowed into them. Watching, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie gasped and then held his breath, afraid that even breathing would be enough to blow out the spark of life that had taken hold of the mycelial clay.
Strands tangled and twisted, forming together into a more complicated shape, slowly rising up and taking form around the pair of neural implants — a familiar form, but not unchanged. The wide mushroom cap head still blushed red on top, speckled with white polka dots, and the row of slit eyes alternated with frilly gills on its underside, but the bushy mycelial beard underneath was thinner. Instead, this time, Mike chose to upgrade their previous bipedal shape to include a second pair of arms. Though, the toadstool didn’t feel overly committed to those new arms — Mike might change their mind and drop down to three arms, or even upgrade again to five.
Mike didn’t feel constrained by mammalian ideals anymore. Mike knew who they were, and they had chosen to be here.
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie rushed forward and wrapped his arms around the toadstool, tentatively to begin with but then tighter and tighter. The rabbit’s eyes were wet with tears, and his twitchy nose sniffed softly.
Startled by the hug, Ensign Mike stood stiffly at first, but then, they melted into the rabbit’s embrace, hugging Lt. Cmdr. Vossie back with all four of their arms. The hug lasted long enough that Mike began to worry — was it too long? Should they let Vossie go? Would Vossie be offended if they did?
These questions and concerns attacked Ensign Mike’s mind like a sudden fever, and none of them felt right. None of them felt like who Mike really was, because the toadstool had finally had a chance to know themself outside of the context of this small ship. And while Mike still cared very much for Vossie, the toadstool knew better than to believe it was right for concerns of the Morphican’s preferences to completely dominate their every thought.
And suddenly, the toadstool knew what was wrong.
Pushing the rabbit gently away, Mike took their lower right arm and reached inside themself to find the neural implants that had become embedded in their mycelial flesh as they’d formed. Mike had always kind of thought of the original Morphican implant as their heart… but that wasn’t right at all. It wasn’t a heart, but it had served as a seed. And Mike didn’t need it anymore.
“This is yours,” Ensign Mike said, offering the Morphican implant to Vossie.
“Don’t… don’t you need it?” the rabbit asked, surprised and confused.
“Not anymore,” Mike said, shaking their mushroom cap head. “But I think you still do.”
“I do,” Vossie agreed, gratefully taking hold of the neural implant.
The rabbit didn’t hesitate to affix the device back on his brow, where it had always belonged. He sighed deeply, as if a thorn had been pulled out of his paw. Because the lack of his neural implant had never stopped feeling like a sharp pain — at best something he could ignore, while limping along, but more often, a pain that consumed him, distracting him from anything else he tried to focus on.
“What about the other one?” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie asked. “The Sidiian one? Is it functioning as a replacement? Is that why you don’t need… mine… anymore?”
Ensign Mike took a moment to think about the answer to that question, probing the inside of their mind, feeling out what felt like themself and what felt foreign. The Sidiian implant contained memories and information, but it had been designed to serve the needs of a very specific gecko alien who no longer existed. Who Mike had never met. So, it didn’t whisper to them and pull at them, overriding their own self with the needs of someone else, the way Vossie’s implant had done.
“I can’t tell if I need it…” Mike said, considering the possibilities. “I don’t think it’s a necessary part of me… but, I think, I’ll keep it.”
Mike was a fruiting body of the Hyphaic, and in subspace, they certainly wouldn’t have needed to be a cyborg at all. But in normal space… Maybe Mike needed the implant to give them cohesion? Something to cluster their mycelial strands around.
Mike pressed their lower left hand against their breast and considered reaching inside themself to pull out the Sidiian neural implant as well — to find out, to be sure — but they just kept imagining holding it in front of themselves like a side character in an Ancient Earth Indiana Jones movie, forced to hold their own heart as they watched it stop beating.
Without the neural implant, would Mike’s life force stop beating through their mycelial veins, leaving this body to drop dead on the spot?
Mike didn’t want to risk it, not when the implant was causing them no harm. Besides, without the Sidiian implant’s subspace pulses, Mike would be fully cut off from the rest of the Hyphaic again. And right now, Mike could still hear its whispers from across the veil, still sense the way that they belonged to a larger society, even if they were far, far away from most of it. The Hyphaic pulled at Mike the way a moon pulled at a planet’s oceans — huge and inscrutable, but strong enough to power the tides.
Mike had wanted to be themself again — small and individual — but it was hard to make that final leap, all the way to being truly cut off, like they had been before knowing about the Hyphaic.
Continue on to Chapter 23…