Thankfully, the monster didn’t need to chew its food. I still screamed the whole way down.

The crashes as I and the car landed on its tongue and bounced off the roof of its mouth were bone jarring but that beat having my body crushed and torn apart by those massive teeth. Unfortunately, between the damage done when the giant picked the ATV up and the impact from being dropped a couple hundred feet, the ATV was smashed so badly that I couldn’t get out. There just wasn’t enough room to pull out my legs anymore. Also I was still falling, screaming, flailing, and preparing to be digested so that was taking up a lot of my attention.

Being swallowed is a weird sensation. I don’t know if it’s like this with everything that has to be shoved down a throat but it’s not the constant feeling of falling downward that you would expect. Instead, it was more of an undulating, start and stop jerking, like it wasn’t sure if it wanted to keep me down or throw me back up.

Eventually however, there was a final heart stopping plummet and I made it to the stomach. One the bright side, there was no acid. Instead, there was a literal lake of nanobots.

I fell in with the car and basically fell through the collective substance like it was a cloud. No noticeable resistance until there was a very hard crash at the end. I tried to scream and say ‘ow’ at the same time but all that came out at that point was a moan.

I could barely see through the swarming nanobots but I could see well enough to watch the car literally disappear around me. I don’t think they actually ate it but I don’t know enough about how the little things work to really say for sure. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that they weren’t eating my suit as well.

“Euclid. You can stop trying crying. You’re fine,” Cyrus said in my ear, reminding me that he existed and that my life was a never ending stream of failures and bad decisions.

“I. Am not. Fine.”

“You’re relatively fine.”

“I am inside a giant Robot. LIZARD. I AM NOT FINE.”

“You are still alive and the badge you got from the ship back at the nest is keeping them from eating you. So stop freaking out and get it together.”

“Cyrus.”

“Yes?”

“When I get out of this, I am going to fly up to your pod and I am going to find a way to throw it into the sun.”

“See? That’s the spirit!”

“I hate you.”

“Not as good but I’ll take it. Also you should probably get out of there soon.”

“Why?” The nanobots had pretty much eaten the entire ATV at this point leaving me sitting on the floor. Or ground. Or the bottom of the stomach. I wasn’t really sure what exactly to call it.

“Because that big monster didn’t just cough up nanobots, remember?”

And that was when pairs of hands clamped down on my shoulders and started dragging me away. Per usual, I screamed. And then I flailed. But it didn’t do me much good. I broke free but I couldn’t see through the haze of nanobots and they just seized me again. After repeating this cycle several more times Cyrus let out an enormous sigh.

“Just let them take you out of here before that monster eats something else and drops it on your head.”

“No!”

“This whole thing probably isn’t full of the nanobots. If you let them take you out of the… stomach I guess, maybe you’ll be able to see enough to get away.”

“No!”

Cyrus sighed again. I screamed more. It didn’t really help and eventually the nano-zombies dragged me out of the stomach. Where I could see better. And I didn’t know which I was angrier about just then; being eaten by a giant robot or Cyrus being right.

Up close, the nano-zombies didn’t even look human. Corpses kind of don’t. You can tell that something is gone. And with these two, I knew something was gone. The nanobots had colonized them and metal clung to gaping holes where grievous wounds had been, or maybe where some animal had gnawed them open. But they still had their eyes. Those sightless, milky eyes were the worst part. There was still just enough color that it was impossible to see them and not know that once, a mind, a soul had been behind them.

I broke their grips again and, I guess now that it could see them, the suit activated its combat mode again. They swiped at me and chased me through what seemed to be a hallway on a particularly empty and well cleaned ship. But with the suit in combat mode they couldn’t lay a hand on me.

“You better hurry up. I doubt that they’re the only two of those things in here.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I yelled as one nearly got a hold of my ankle. There wasn’t much room to maneuver and less places to go.

“Hit them in the head?” Cyrus suggested.

“They’re half robots! What’s that going to do?”

“More than flopping about does.”

“Wait a second, I have stealth mode! Suit activate Stealth mode!”

The moment I said that the pair of nano-zombies just stopped. When they couldn’t see me, I’d expected them to go back to whatever they’d been doing before they came into the stomach to grab me. Maybe they had. They just stood there listlessly. I noticed that one of them still had a weathered name tag attached to what was left of his jumpsuit. It said Barry Fie something. Fields maybe? The edge of the name tag was so damaged I couldn’t read the rest of it. The other nanozombie had gold teeth, which seemed odd. I wondered if that was something he’d had in life or something that the nanobots had done to him. I could see copper wires in the back of his throat and through a hole in one eye that went all the way back to the back of his skull.

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“Kid? Best get moving.”

“Yeah. I just- I don’t know, they’re really creepy is all.”

“They are. And I don’t want you to be one. So get moving.”

“Right.”

I stood and walked as quietly as I could past the nanozombies. Barry and Goldy just stood there in almost exactly the same posture they’d been in when I had turned invisible. They could have been mannequins or just really weird statues. I shook my head and kept walking.

About thirty feet down the hall, the hall ended and another began. It didn’t turn or anything. But I could instantly tell I was in another, different hallway from the way the flooring, walls and ceiling changed. It was like a piece of a different ship had been grafted whole into the monster. And, when thirty feet later, the hallway changed again I had to consider the possibility that being grafted whole into the monstrosity was exactly what had happened.

“What the hell is this thing?” I asked. I didn’t even really mean to say it out loud.

“It’s a nano-kaiju.”

“A what? It has a name?”

“Yeah. Happens when nanobots take over a living creature. First step is like those poor bastards back there or at the nano-nest. The nanobots start installing different pieces of tech to get the body moving again, to take control of it. You’re lucky if you’re dead when they do it.”

I tried not to think of billions of swarming pinpoints of silver tearing my body apart and replacing pieces of it with metal.

“I can imagine.”

“Yeah. But the real kicker is that somewhere, whatever this thing started as, it’s still alive. ”

“What?”

“Yeah. Probably some poor damn lizard or something like one from the look of it. You saw the thing’s eyes didn’t you? That wasn’t like the nanozombies. That thing has emotion. There’s still a mind somewhere attached to all this.”

Now that was a horrifying thought. It was bad enough when these things were just taking over bodies. I couldn’t help thinking of the pain of a creature that was forced to live on, completely changed into something it was never meant to be, its mind lashed to a body of steel by tiny flies it might not even have the capacity to understand. I remembered its glowing red eyes. What if it blamed creatures like me for it’s predicament?

“We need to do something about this. We can’t just let this thing go on.”

“Yeah? What do you think we could do?” Cyrus asked, curious.

“Well, there’s no way to get it free from this.”

“Way too late for that.”

I walked in silence for a long time, the suit’s stealth mode preventing even my footsteps from making a sound. I wondered where these halls led. I could only think of one solution to the creature’s problem.

“Well, could we kill it?”

It was Cyrus’ turn to be silent. If only I could make him do that more often.

“That… could work. The thing’s brain has to be somewhere in here. If you could find somewhere to plug your suit in, maybe you could find it? What’s left of it, I mean. The brain.”

I came to a fork in the hallways, one that led up and another that led down.

“Guess I should go up.”

“Unless you want to get pooped.”

“Do you think this thing poops?”

“Probably not the way you do.”

As I walked upward I passed more nano-zombies. Most were just as still as the ones that had attacked me but here and there, they seemed to be doing repairs on the nano-kaiju’s insides. For example, a couple that I passed were welding a plate into place, one holding the plate, the other using a torch that seemed to be built into its hand to do the job.

“They’re like white blood cells.”

“Yeah, I guess they are. What’s that make us?”

“A virus?”

I expected a laugh from Cyrus at that. It came, but it was odd. A beat late and a little too much.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. It’s just a weird thought.”

I climbed and climbed. Walking inside the nano-kaiju just wasn’t easy. I had to constantly compensate for the movement of the entire creature and I had no way to know how it would move next. The nano-zombies didn’t seem to have the same trouble but I was guessing they were linked to the nano-kaiju in some way that let them deal with the floor constantly shifting beneath them because I never saw one of them trip or even wiggle.

I had to backtrack a lot as I went. The layout of the inside of the nano-kaiju just didn’t make much sense. But it also seemed like it had been taken apart and put together over and over again from the way nothing one thing inside it seemed to go together with anything it was attached to.

Besides getting lost there wasn’t much difficulty in moving inside the gigantic monster though. And that worried me. My life just wasn’t that easy. I knew something had to go very wrong and soon. That was just how it was.

I clambered through a passageway that seemed to have once belonged inside some sort of reactor from the clear glass windows that were left inside and on the other side I found myself in the biggest room that there had been since I’d fallen inside the robotic beast.

It still wasn’t enormous or expansive the way that the engineering room back in the Reliant had been. But most of the halls had been cramped, tight things. This room looked like… like the inside of a skull. And there, in the center was a terminal. There weren’t screens the way I would have expected, but then, why would there be? Who was going to be looking at them?

But there were a number of panels with buttons on them all wired around a central hub. The buttons weren’t labeled, and again, why would they be? Anything pressing buttons in here would be a part of the machine itself. I didn’t need my fingers labeled to use them.

But the station hadn’t been made from nothing. The nanobots or the nano-zombies had put the station together from the remnants of old computer hubs from the dozens of ships that it had consumed to make itself. And because of that, it had several input ports that I could plug into.

“That’s gotta be it right?” Cyrus asked.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“So get on with it. Plug in.”

“Yeah,” I said again. But I didn’t move. Something was wrong. Which was a completely ridiculous thing to say about being inside a giant robot lizard on a frozen planet that was mostly populated with yeti monsters. And yet, it was true. Some instinct was holding me back. Telling me that this was a terrible idea. Something was very wrong.

“Euclid. Do it.”

“Does something feel off to you about this?”

“Uh… yeah. You’re in a giant robot lizard. That seems pretty freaking off.”

“Not that.”

“Kid, just do it. Even once you kill this thing and get out of here you’re going to have so much work to do.”

He wasn’t wrong. I was gonna have to get all those batteries again. And that was hoping that they were still there and the damn giant robot lizard hadn’t eaten them all or something.

My eyes burned and my eyelids felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each. I just wanted to go to sleep. I wanted to talk to Ai. She’d know what was going on that I was missing. But I couldn’t do either of those things. I needed to act. And I needed to do it now.

I reached out towards the port and the suit’s sensors, picking up on my intention, extended a wire with the right kind of plug to slip into the port.

“There should be some kind of guard or something in here right?”

“Yeah. If someone had made this thing intentionally that would make sense. Look, if you can figure out how to drive this thing, we’ll put guards in, alright?”

That idea made me smile. I could be emperor Euclid in this thing. Wouldn’t have to worry about yetis anyway.

I put the plug in. A little screen popped up with a percentage bar. It filled up in just a couple seconds and I expected some sort of computer interface to pop up. That didn’t happen.

Instead my suit went berserk and echoing off the walls all around me I heard Cyrus say,

“You should have listened to your instincts.”