“You want to put down the world, Shadiran. You argue that it is mortally wounded. I’ll agree that it bleeds. I am a vampire, dear sister: I drool anticoagulants. I, better than no one, know the world aches. But the bat doesn’t bleed out the cattle it feeds from.”
—The Second Envisioned to his sister.
Doratev called for Dirofil to come into the laboratory. He had not been a particularly active participant of the funeral, despite having been a good friend of Parvov, back in the early days of the Corship. Parvov wouldn’t have wanted him to take unnecessary risks. But he would have condoned him working tirelessly to craft a tail. The best tail The Doctor had ever assembled. A combination of L and D models, carefully fabricated with the alloy used in the latter. Doratev considered such creation a work of art, flawlessly implementing caudal autotomy and a sharpened tip into the extensible, highly prehensile tail that resembled the one Dirofil had once had. Combining the extensible segments with the metameric nature of Leptos tail had been a challenge, but who better than someone with three elbows to apply some grease? Someone with four, five or six, Doratev immediately thought.
Dirofil arrived with a disheartened wobble in his walk.
“Are you tired, Dirofil?”
“No, I just lack a good reason to be all tidy and proper around you. The melancholic atmosphere that settled upon the ship doesn’t help either.” He sat on the floor with crossed legs, and after examining his own feet for a couple moments, he whisked his eyes to the top of his head to look into Doratev’s. “Why did you call?”
Doratev stepped to a side and presented the shining tail upon his work table, gesturing at it with his three arms extended and his eyes closed in a simile of a mouthless smile. “A little gift for my favorite cavy!”
“Since when am I your lab rat?” Dirofil asked in an amused tone.
“Since I decided to work on this project without telling you. Seeing your broken tail inspired me to create the LDE model!”
“Leptos, Dirofil and…”
Doratev raised one digit slowly, as someone who is about to reveal a genius-level idea. “Explosives!”
Dirofil remained silent.
“They are on the house, really,” The Doctor insisted, knocking twice on the tail to show how solid it was. “I rigged a Puggum-Pointerine system —Two-P or PP system moving forward— to explode seconds after the tail is autotomized or ripped off. Located inside the distal end, of course.”
Dirofil’s head dipped backwards, his eyes never leaving the Doctor’s. “No. I refuse to walk with a ticking bomb attached to my rear end.”
“The yodeler’s powers,” Doratev pointed out, holding the tail as if it were a beautiful boa.
“That’s attached near my forward end and mostly under my control,” The Original argued, standing just to poke the tail with an exploratory finger. “We have little of value in our heads, besides the eyes, ears and voicebox.”
“Indeed, they are a vestige of the creator’s figure, an atavistic mimesis. We suppose they had a head, and that it was as important as they are in a cavy. Or a Chihuahua. After all, you often aim for the head when killing dogs. Have you wondered why?”
“Because a vital organ is hosted there.”
Doratev dropped the tail on his working bench, and steepled the fingers of his upper hands. “No. The question is how would you know that without prior knowledge, or without studying the dogs?”
“I wouldn’t,” Dirofil answered in all earnest, scratching the place where a human would have a cheek with disinterest. “Your point?”
“Well, I have been thinking that maybe dogs created us and deliberately excluded most of their weaknesses from our ontology. Think about the bauplans of our family. Despite having a proliferation of limbs, each arm and leg of most models — Babesi and Lyssav notwithstanding— resembles a dog’s leg. We have a single element in the stylopod, two parallel elements in the zeugopod, and then a multitude of smaller carpal/tarsal elements and phalanxes in the autopods. Furthermore, the dogs in our world are incomplete. They don’t perform functions of the dogs in the world of the creators and—.”
Dirofil grunted as he drummed the floor with his talons. He described circles in the air with his hand, signaling Doratev to wrap his idea up.
“—I think the dogs in our world may be paedomorphic as an attempt to hide the true form of the creators. This enforced larval state is likely unstable and causes the aberration,” he proudly explained.
Stolen novel; please report.
Dirofil tilted his head whilst he analyzed the expression of his Splinter. The Doctor was serious. “Eutherians have direct development. I’d agree that we were likely created by a vertebrate entity and that domestication seems to have rippled through different clades of mammals and plants. We see the cities: the tall doors, the colorful billboards, Doratev. We know dogs are colorblind to red and green. Yet I can see green, I can see red! Hell, Lyssav is the embodiment of red, and Morbilliv of green. How could they create us to see colors they couldn’t? We weren’t created by some… canines without arrested development.” Dirofil crossed his arms and straightened his back. “Besides, your leaps of logic to reach that conclusion were atrocious.”
“I am just bouncing ideas off of you to work through them. Consider it a payment for this little tail I made for you. And you raise a valid point, but in our memories dogs are often found in these cities and even in the more... bucolic dwellings. I like to think of them as infants. That’s why they are leashed, so their parents don’t lose them.”
“I like to think of them as some of the creator’s domestic animals,” Dirofil answered just as the lights went out and the Reaper alarms began blaring. He immediately checked the eye on his hand. It remained closed. “That accursed thing won’t leave us be until we murder it.”
In the encroaching dark Doratev let the light of his soul shine bright and unashamed. It was evident that he was allotting a substantial amount of time to meditation. Perhaps, even, a bit too much.
“You are hoarding energy while some Splinters exert their cores, why? you never see battle.”
“My services are valuable, and thus I am allotted some privileges and allowances. Absurd ones, even. For example, I have calculated how long it would take for a perfect population of bacteria-dogs that weight one picogram each and reproduce every twenty minutes, without constraints and starting with a single individual, to outweigh the supermassive black hole in the center of the creator’s galaxy. About fifty-seven hours and forty minutes.”
Dirofil decided it would be counterproductive to ask why, and instead proceeded to state what he considered a harsh truth. “You do get bored in here. Way too bored.”
“Yes. And boredom depresses me. In my spare time I think about how we are not alive, unlike bacteria, unlike dogs. Yet we say we live: we dare use that word, Dirofil. Nobody replaces one of us when said one stops thinking, nobody can. Our population dwindles with each thoughtend and there’s no way to restore it. Yet we tout that word of hope. Parvov being gone, and Jadimar being gone, are two less cores in the world, irreplaceable. An ever shrinking number. And before that number reaches zero, I want to know what the ones who created us looked like. And until my own core sputters off, I will wish that we were a bit more like bacteria, Dirofil.” Doratev looked down and examined the phalanxes of his hands, considered the transparency of his flesh. “Can you imagine it? if we could create new Thinkers? Maybe we could avoid the end. Maybe you would have no reason to euthanize the world.”
Dirofil thought about embracing his Splinter, but resisted the urge to do so. “I am sorry, Doratev. I sometimes forget the world is not easy on any of us. Ways to cope, a thousand. Effective, none.” A movement of the head let his interlocutor know about the object of his attention. “May I assimilate the tail?”
Doratev stepped to the side to allow the Original to reach for the appendage. “Attach. I’d use the word attach. It’s not a part of a gone Splinter, it has no previous owner.”
Dirofil held the tail aloft, a dead metallic snake unfurled before him. He stared into it, and one could swear, through it. Would this thing explode on him on a moment of need? “Only severe damage can trigger it, right? It has safety measures in place?”
“It won’t blow up randomly, no. You could even use it to club dog heads all day and it wouldn’t explode.”
“What do you want me to do in exchange for it. Which experiments do you need me to partake in?”
The Doctor joined his three hands, making sure one of the left ones cupped the upper side of the right hand, and the other the lower side. “Just give me a report of your usage of the tail in, say, seven or eight tides from now.”
Dirofil sent a signal for Leptos’ tail to detach from his lower back, from the socket on the base of his ochre spine, and drop onto the ship’s darkened floor, where the viscid flesh abandoned the appendage and crawled back into Dirofil’s leg, joining once more with the body it belonged to. “That tail is Leptos’. Repair it, if you would be so kind.”
Without major fanfare, Dirofil inserted the base of the new tail in the socket. He refused to run a bomb through his core to assimilate it faster, and would simply let his essence and slime bathe the lump of dead materials until, like his cape, they obeyed him without question.
A click, a soft grunt, and then like an outdated representation of a heavy theropod the Thinker lumbered around, clawed feet, dragged tail. “It’s quite the heavy thing.”
“You may have gotten used to having half a tail. Its density is based on the Dirofil model, the planes of caudal autotomy don’t add material, and the length at rest is barely increased. Try extending it.”
Dirofil got down on all five and sent pulses of his will into the tail. Waves flowed through it, making it curl up and down as the light of Dirofil’s core glistened off of the tail’s slick surface.
And as he tested his new toy, the screams reached through both the hitherto silent walls and the mental links.
The Chihuahuas broke through the hull! A Splinter of Babesi communicated, the thought drenched in distress. And there’s something among them! It got Filbaros! I cannot see, I cannot see!
More and more calls began flooding the channels. Scared Splinters of everyone but Lyssav falling prey to panic as they described what had happened to the Splinter of Parvov.
Dirofil and his Splinter crossed stares of eyes wide open, and then, spoke in unison. “Murkhound.”
He considered the eye on his right hand for a second. But he couldn’t open it. The Reaper was close. He would need to battle the invisible threat without aid from his power.
“Hurt it, Dirofil! Hurt it and the Splinters of Lyssav will be able to spot it,” Doratev ordered.
“What do you mean? Aren’t the eyes of Babesi the best ones?”
“It’s not with the eyes that they sense the pain of others as if body heat it was.”
Dirofil stopped his march towards the door. “They do that? It’s new information for me. Useful.”
“Lyssav never told you? the Splinters were eager to share that little piece of trivia with me.”
Dirofil shook his head as he exited the laboratory. Carefully, always aiming to preserve his own life, he would try to pinpoint the location of the Murkhound. And this time, he wouldn’t let the thing burn.