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.
Over the following days, the Wanderlust and Sojourner returned to their usual pace of travel with the baby world turtle following close behind the spaceship like a duckling following its mother. The crew, similarly, fell back into usual patterns, except for notably lifted spirits all around. Except for maybe Mike… still, it was hard for the toadstool to be sure how they felt, and it was certainly nice to see everyone else so happy and engaged with their lives, even if those lives were specifically built around escaping the situation they all lived in, day after day.
Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee both tended to go through cycles of manic excitement followed by depressive moping, depending on whether the Xolo-Lupinian and Papillon dog thought they could find a way to speed the ship’s trek home or whether they needed to resign themselves to the years of travel still ahead. And the visit to Spindle Reef had proven a veritable treasure trove of potential shortcuts, both technological and informational. So, the two canines were at least kept very busy.
Of course, that meant neither of the ship’s main engineers were available to spend any time on Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s new pet project — analyzing the alien neural implant that had become the rabbit’s prize possession. The way that the Morphican obsessed over the device during all of his free time nearly made Mike regret that they’d managed to acquire one.
But also, it was nice to see Vossie hopeful and happy again.
Ensign Melbourne synthesized a new pair of hearing aids and no longer relied on Mike to translate everything for him, which was a relief.
Captain Carroway and Cmdr. Chestnut were kept busy planning the ship’s route through the coming sectors, based on the maps and information that they’d acquired from Spindle Reef. The Norwegian Forest cat captain wanted to minimize stops, but the golden-mantled squirrel commander argued that the ship would be in this sector for a while, so it was important to build up good will and develop allies. Also, in spite of the crew’s objections based on wanting to get home quickly, it was actually healthier if the officers were forced to take occasional breaks like on Spindle Reef — seeing sights, experiencing new cultures, and connecting with people who they didn’t have to live with day after day without end.
When Lys added her plea for the ship to make a few extra stops at planets that could help her populate Sojourner’s back with a richer ecosystem of plants and insects like the ones she’d seen on Spindle Reef, that tipped the balance for Captain Carroway. Stops were added to their itinerary. Though, Captain Carroway and Cmdr. Chestnut had to rigorously examine all the data they could ascertain about those potential stops, making sure they’d be safe.
No one wanted a recurrence of what had happened in the previous sector of the Tetra Galaxy, where the Wanderlust had needed to constantly avoid aggressive attacks from the Zakonraptors. This time, they wanted to get it right: no enemies, just new allies. Though, based on the information they had about the sector, the main risk wouldn’t be collecting enemies; it would be the necessity of avoiding a mysterious plague that had been spreading through the region called the Hyphaic. Fortunately, it sounded like the illness — while currently incurable — was mostly limited to amphibious species, and none of the Wanderlust’s crew was amphibious.
Regardless, Captain Carroway made sure that their planned route would assiduously avoid the riskiest star systems.
Korvax was practically in heaven, working with the new ingredients he’d managed to acquire at Spindle Reef, cooking up a storm. Ensign Melbourne even begrudgingly granted that the hedgehog had figured out how to make a passable imitation of a tuna fish sandwich. Though, Mike’s favorite new dish involved layers of thick, fleshy leaves baked into a casserole. Lt. Lee thought it tasted a little like a cheese lasagna, but mostly, the officers all turned their noses up at it. So, Mike was able to feast on the faux-lasagna casserole to their mushroomy heart’s content.
One night — or at least, it was night according to Mike’s current shift rotation — the toadstool was enjoying an extra large serving of the casserole in the multi-purpose room, enjoying the quiet ambience, when Lt. Cmdr. Vossie came in, head bent over the alien neural implant.
The rabbit was frowning and muttering quietly to the implant, as if it might answer him back. Mike felt an odd sense of jealousy at the sight.
“Is something wrong?” Mike asked, companionably.
Vossie looked up, startled. Clearly, the rabbit hadn’t expected anyone else to be in the multi-purpose room, which was silly. Someone was almost always in the multi-purpose room with such a small ship. Maybe the Morphican had simply been lost so deeply in thought that anything outside of his own thoughts would have surprised him, no matter how predictable it was.
“Is something wrong?” Mike repeated, starting to worry. The toadstool worried so easily about their ex-ward. It was exhausting, but Mike didn’t know how to turn off that part of themself.
(Perhaps it would be possible to alter the parameters of the neural implant that was buried deep in Mike’s mycelial body, altering it to be less attuned to Vossie… but since Vossie’s old neural implant was such an integral part of the toadstool being, such an operation would be essentially akin to brain surgery.
And you don’t get brain surgery just because you care about someone too deeply and are struggling with the feeling not being reciprocal, no matter how tempting that might sound.)
To the toadstool’s surprise, the rabbit suddenly brightened. “Yes, actually,” Vossie said, tucking the arm that was holding the neural implant behind his back. “Yes, yes, I think I’m about to be doing very well indeed.”
“Really?” Mike asked, torn between deepening concern and delight at the rabbit’s suddenly apparent happiness. It was a rather concerning happiness, the toadstool mused. Even so, a profound weight lifted off the toadstool’s narrow shoulders at the idea of the rabbit being genuinely happy. “Is there a reason for this impending improvement?”
“The reptilian neural implant,” Vossie said, “I believe it can be made compatible with my own neural interface.”
Ensign Mike frowned. “I don’t see why that’s particularly good news.” The toadstool poked with a fork at their serving of faux-lasagna, suddenly not feeling hungry anymore. It was hard to eat when the world felt as unsettled as it suddenly felt. Even Mike was having a hard time denying what Vossie was clearly saying to them right now. “I mean, you can’t possibly think it’s a good idea to actually hook a completely alien neural implant directly into your brain. Even among the reptiles on Spindle Reef, these devices were carefully tuned to the individual, gatekept behind prescriptions. There’s no way that a random one, donated by the friend of a reptile who died, would happen to magically match your own needs.”
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s rabbit-like face turned stony. Behind the soft brown fur, he could’ve been a statue.
Ensign Mike began to feel frantic. “Surely, you can’t really be considering such a drastic, foolish possibility?”
The rabbit looked away, his face staying just as hard and ungiving.
Mike knew that if they could just say the right words, pronounced in exactly the right way — soft but firm, pleading but self-assured, comforting but unwavering — that Vossie would listen. Vossie had always listened to Mike.
But that was back when Mike was a neural implant.
Now Mike was a mushroom.
And the alien device in Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s paws was closer — in the rabbit’s eyes — to being the neural implant he missed so deeply than this bizarre cyborg mycelial-creature, wearing a Tri-Galactic Union uniform of their own and masquerading as a person.
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie lifted the reptilian neural implant toward his brow.
Mike couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Should they reach out? Knock the device out of Vossie’s paws? Start screaming like a tree falling in a forest? Run off and find the captain?
Instead, Mike stuttered the first words that they could manage to form in their panicking mind: “Why now?”
The rabbit hesitated, pondering the words.
Mike had known they could get through to Vossie. Mike had known. “You’ve been implant-free for more than a year, and you’ve only had a few days to study this alien device, all while the actual engineering experts on the ship had been too busy to help you…” The mushroom doubled down on the words that had broken through to their beloved rabbit friend: “Why now?”
Vossie lowered the neural implant from his brow and stared at it. His expression troubled, like the electronic device in his paws represented an infinitely complex, perhaps unsolvable problem. Temptation beyond words. The kind of temptation that entire mythologies are built upon. Foundational.
Vossie looked up from the device in his paws, and his eyes turned toward Mike, haunted and pleading. He wanted his old neural implant to give him permission to insert this new one.
But Mike couldn’t do that. No matter how much Vossie missed having an implant regulating his mind and emotions, this wasn’t a good answer.
“When Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee settle down from their excitement over the new technology and information from Spindle Reef,” Mike said, “then I’m sure they’ll find time to help you really analyze that device and see if it can be altered into something actually appropriate and safe for your brain. But you don’t want to use an unchecked, hand-me-down, prescription device for the brain of a deceased reptile you never even met, do you? Who knows what the previous owner’s brain was like and what kind of adjustments it needed — they might be nothing like yours at all.”
The toadstool reached out slowly and tried to gently take the neural device away from the rabbit, but Vossie snapped his paws away, clutching the device to his chest, rather than let the mushroom take it.
In retrospect, Mike realized that Vossie might see them — at some deep subconscious level — as a thief who had stolen his original neural implant. So, trying to take this new, alien neural implant… echoed badly.
“I’m sorry,” Mike said. “I’m not really trying to take it away.”
“I’m not a child,” Vossie snapped. “I don’t need you to lecture me and try to confiscate an object from me because you think it isn’t good for me.”
“I don’t know if it would be good for you,” Mike said, bewildered. There was so much fraught emotion here, between the two of them. Mike didn’t know how to navigate it. “But you don’t know if it would be good for you either.”
“It could be filled with useful, supplementary information about this sector of the galaxy,” Vossie pointed out. His voice sounded reasonable, but the argument didn’t. Not really.
Mike shrugged. “Anything’s possible, but Captain Carroway and Commander Chestnut already traded for a great deal of information about this sector. Strategic, tactical information. Whereas most likely, the information in that implant would be no more useful than reading a completely random reptile alien’s diary.”
Vossie’s narrow mouth almost quirked into a smile at the pithiness of Mike’s point. Almost. But the smile died before becoming fully formed, replaced with carefully repressed anger and bitterness.
“I think you just don’t want me to be happy,” Vossie said. “You’re jealous of the idea that I could find a way to be okay without you.”
How many times could this rabbit break a heart that Mike didn’t even have?
The toadstool’s voice grew quiet and wispy. “I want you to be happy,” they said.
“Do you?” Vossie asked. “Do you really? Or do you only want me to be happy if you’re in control of the way that I’m happy?”
The toadstool’s row of slit-eyes crinkled, and they bowed their mushroom-cap head low, shaking it slowly. “I don’t want to control you.” With a stroke of insight, they added, “But the captain might. Have you run this past her?”
The rabbit chewed at his whiskers with his buck teeth, troubled by the mushroom’s extremely reasonable question. “No,” he admitted, “but this is a personal choice, not something that falls under her purview. Ensign Melbourne didn’t ask her permission to gamble his hearing aids away or replace them afterwards. This is no different.”
“You know that’s not true,” Mike said with a voice like a falling leaf landing on a frozen puddle.
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie stared Ensign Mike down, but the mushroom wouldn’t fold.
“What would she say, if you asked her?” Mike pressed. “She’d tell you that we’re too small of a crew — too dependent on each other — for any individual to take such a significant risk when it’s not absolutely necessary.”
“But it is absolutely necessary,” the rabbit hissed between his teeth, his anger finally escaping containment. Now that his feelings were finally bubbling over, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie glared at Mike with burning eyes and said, “You don’t know what it’s been like inside my head since you left. You don’t know what it’s like inside of here–” He pounded a paw against the side of his head, long ears flopping wildly. “–without you. How dark, how gray, how pointless. You’ve never had to feel this way, because you still get to have you!”
“I’m right here,” Mike said, voice as small as a single green sprout in a frozen forest that misjudged the start of spring and is about to die from a sudden frost.
“No,” Vossie objected, his voice as hard and cold as an avalanche of snow. “Someone is right here, but the you that I remember is gone, mixed up and absorbed by something else.”
As if those words hadn’t been harsh enough, the rabbit added, “Someone I barely know at all but who presumes to know a lot about me.”
Even if Vossie completely discounted all the years that Mike had spent being a neural implant in his head, vicariously living his same life, the mushroom being had been his crewmate for more than a year now. The entirety of Mike’s life. And as far as the mushroom had known, the two of them were friends. Close friends. Nearly brothers. Maybe even closer than that.
But now…
Vossie disowned it all. Every moment they’d spent together on away missions; all the hours they’d spent working side by side. The reminiscing. The new experiences.
Mike had just been disowned by the only person they’d ever felt truly close to, and it felt like having their insides stripped away, leaving a hollow shell where a person should be.
But then, Mike didn’t know how to be a person, did they? So, why shouldn’t Vossie disown them?
“You’re right,” Mike said, feeling like an automaton, forced to keep moving forward, keep saying words, because something inside them had been wound up and programmed to respond, even though the spark of life and joy that felt like it was truly them… had been extinguished by the flood of anguish caused by the melting of Vossie’s deadly snowfall of words. “I don’t know you as well as I think, not anymore. You’re not the same, and I don’t know what you need.”
But inside the mushroom’s mind, a private voice fought back, fighting for Mike’s self to reignite, saying, “But Vossie doesn’t know you anymore either. You’re more than he thinks you are.”
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie nodded curtly, as if Ensign Mike had finally deigned to say what he needed to hear. Interpreting the mushroom’s exasperated resignation as permission — which the rabbit still strangely craved from this one-year-old, inferior officer — he lifted the neural implant to his brow again, and this time, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie plugged it in, straight into his own neural interface — a small indent at the base of his right ear that had lain empty for more than a year.
“This is what I need,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie said as the lights on the implant came alive, twinkling in ominous shades of red and orange. Only moments later, the rabbit’s eyes rolled back, and his knees faltered.
Vossie folded forward, falling, and would have crashed straight down to the floor if Mike hadn’t leapt up, shoving their half-forgotten plate of faux-lasagna aside, and managed to break the rabbit’s fall.
“Vossie!” Mike cried, letting their voice crack like a tree branch snapping, loud enough for others to hear — loud enough to summon help.
Continue on to Chapter 10…