We’re taking an awful risk, Geoffrey… this had better work.
…
Yes, yes, spare me the technical details. As long as you’re certain they won’t detect our interference?
…
One of the station’s orbital cameras finds a spot along the equatorial region of the planet, on the second island of an archipelago. Locked on, it zooms in until a tiny speck resolves into a certain, bulbously familiar ship, which has thus far been hovering just beyond the shore of the island, slowly and unsteadily scanning its way outward in search of the entrance to the underwater grotto.
They’re getting close now. It’s a good thing the fools were too sloshed to think of asking for directions, else we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.
…?
We’ve already voted, so if you’re ready, we’re ready. Our fate is in your hands now.
…
The camera zooms in even farther until one of the ship’s forward-mounted anti-material cannons is clearly centered in frame. Many long seconds pass while the camera’s automated lens struggles to maintain its focus on the stubby, constantly moving protrusion, but then, seemingly out of nowhere, a hole appears just to one side of the weapon’s external casing.
Bloody ‘struth, what a shot! Did you see that? Almost a perfect bullseye, too! Ha ha!
Geoffrey, my boy, you are a miracle with that popgun of yours. Who ever thought you could actually hit a live target from orbit with a benighted micro-debris deflector? Ha! Certainly not those two. Why, they wouldn’t believe us even if we showed them the footage!
…
Oh, don’t be so humble. We simply must work this into the finished documentary somewhere. Uh… heavily edited, of course. But you’ll know… and so will we. Right, lads?
< cheering >
Now, when our intrepid mercenaries go to fire that cannon, they’ll get a nice, blinking red light in their faces.
…?
Don’t be ridiculous, Timothy. Who would be stupid enough to override the damage warning on a forward weapons system? Especially after an atmospheric descent? Why, they’d risk blowing themselves to smithereens!
…
That’s… a fair point.
Tell you what, let’s prepare that transport just in case.
*
Naomi panted raggedly as she shoved hunk after desiccated hunk of flesh down her gullet, scarcely taking the time even to work moisture back into it before swallowing it whole. It should have tasted like ash. She wanted it to taste like ash.
But it did not.
This was a new thing. Fresh genetic material. As such, whatever algorithm was responsible for reshaping her body had made certain every ounce of the repulsive substance had the flavor of orgasm made solid. It was rich and heady, practically the finest cut of chilled carpaccio to ever cross her lips.
Tears streaked down her face unheeded as her own hands betrayed her over and over again, tearing and ripping their way through the once-sentient corpse. She was doing an awful… awful thing, so beyond anything kosher, the very idea was laughable. And Mike was witness to her crime!
But he was faring no better. If anything, the man was in an even worse state of emotional distress than she was. There was no hope of his comforting her through this… save as her partner in sin. She would lean on that. She would have to. It would bind the two of them even closer together.
Monsters, they might be. But monsters of a kind.
Then, the radiating waves of pleasure began spreading from her tongue to her belly… and then lower, transforming along the way into something beyond the realm of mere satisfaction. Into something… primal.
She knew what that meant.
“No,” she moaned, choking down one last delectable strip of flesh before the pleasure could overtake her fully. “Not yet! You didn’t even let us choose.”
She hated when it did that. Bad enough that she had been forced to eat this creature, but to also suffer whatever changes her computer had picked out? There was no telling what might happen now, what it might make her into without her to guide it. What if she came out the other end as some hideous gargoyle? What if Mike couldn’t bring himself to look at her?
Or worse, what if he wound up a repulsive mutant? After all, the alien mummy they had been eating didn’t have any visible sign of genitals, so who could say whether his penis would even survive?!
“No!” she wailed again, as her capacity for coherent thought began to fracture in transformative bliss.
“It’ll… be… alright, Naomi,” Mike just managed through his chattering teeth, somehow finding the will to comfort her despite everything, while his twitching body slowly collapsed to the ground. Her quaking heart surged with affection, knowing he had tried. “Just… resist… and it’ll… force us…”
Right! Of course.
He had been overcome by convulsions before he could finish his sentence, but she knew what he had been trying to say: it would force them together! They were going to become Tall. A monolithic union. Man and… whatever. It didn’t matter. Just together.
And that meant she had to fight… paradoxically, for what she very much did not want.
He was not her man. He was not the sexiest creature on Earth. She did not love—
She managed no more than that.
Before she was even fully aware of what had happened, she was on the floor, contorting in agony as every atom of her body violently rejected even the merest possibility of such thoughts. The sounds of retching mixed with ragged wails of despair erupted from her throat, and for some moments, she struggled even to breathe.
But slowly, a pleasant numbness replaced the despair. Then, some seconds… or minutes later, her mind began to clear. With clarity came a snort of disbelief.
What had she just been imagining? It was like she had just woken from a dream in which she had somehow found the mathematical proof of a squared circle.
He was… not… her man?
How patently absurd! She might as well have said she believed in honest politicians, or that lava was made of clown farts. Just putting the words ‘her’ and ‘man’ together almost made her eyes cross—as if there could be any other state of being.
Not the sexiest creature on Earth?
Laughable. No part of that was even vaguely coherent. What did sexiest mean, anyway? There was only one person she would ever describe as sexy, and that was Mike. So with no one else to compare against, the word had no real value. She supposed she could try to claim the title herself… which might be a fun argument to have sometime if only to tease him, but why had she brought Earth creatures into it?
And not love him?
Her body began to spasm with rejection again, just reassembling the concept. That it had come to her at all was a betrayal of everything she was.
If he was thirsty, she would scale mountains in search of the purest snow. If he was hungry, she would feed him her own arm before letting him suffer. If some creature dared scratch his face…
…her revenge would rend worlds asunder.
She would die the very instant he expired. Even planets apart. No one would have to tell her. She just would. She knew it in her bones.
Not love? Love itself! How could such a paltry concept even begin to describe her feelings?
Ha! What sort of fever dream had her transformation caused this time?
Relaxed now, she laid back to relish in what little remained of it. It annoyed her that she would have some ridiculous existential crisis amidst such a rare and precious moment, but what could she do? The mind did funny things when you started tinkering with it.
Did that mean something had been added to her brain this time? It was difficult to know while she was still twitching about, but she would definitely have to mention it to Mike once she could speak again.
Ugh… if only that silly interface would just communicate properly, they could avoid questions like this. Yes, it was irritating when it made choices for them, but sometimes they came across a thing it judged too important to cast aside. With hindsight, she could usually piece together its logic—after all, the visual abilities they had gained from that little cricket thing had been invaluable, but honestly! How difficult would it be for it to just explain itself?
Gradually, the waves of pleasure began to again coalesce into her center, heralding the inevitable climax of her metamorphosis, and she dragged her fingers down her flank, seeking to tease out even greater heights to the delicious torture before its end. Once she found her bared mons, she began to gently tease its sensitive peak while vigorously pumping what little she could reach of her opening. Then a second pair of hands found her breasts, and she eagerly arched her back into their caress.
“Mike…” she moaned in ecstasy.
His answering grunt of pleasure sounded from well off to her right…
…and her eyes snapped open in sudden confusion. For several seconds, left was right. Up was down. Cats lived together with dogs. If Mike was not touching her, then who was? What the hell was going on? Was she being molested by a ghost?!
But then she was coming…
Once more, thought became impossible. The swirling colors in her vision became symphonies in her ears. Once more, the world made sense. Chaos had been rendered into a beautiful monument within her own flesh. Once more, she was complete.
…and then it was done.
She came back to herself, but slowly, her chest still heaving with exertion. That… had been a big one, one she would remember for a long time. But then the confusion burbled back to the surface, cutting her afterglow unmercifully short.
For a moment, she struggled to rise. Her muscles were yet trembling with the fractious rebellion of too much excitement, forcing her to prop herself up with her arms.
What… had just happened? She had been… fondling herself. And then someone had…?
A hand rose to her bosom, as if seeking to cement the memory in reality. And she blinked uncertainly.
Off to one side of her vision, her interface had left a bit of a message for her:
Tall over Wide initiation complete.
Vitality Enhancement Nexus for Universal Survival systems status:
…fully integrated.
But she dismissed it quickly. It looked like just a bunch of technobabble for ‘job done,’ so her eyes glazed over before she even finished reading it. And anyway, she was far more concerned with the phantom sensation from earlier. There was a lingering… something about it that was still bothering her.
Fortunately, a quick glance downward confirmed that her pride as a woman had not been tarnished. Her breasts still rode high on her chest despite their size, her areolas yet retained their perfectly circular territories, and the stiffened bluffs that rose from them were begging for her mate’s attention just as they should be. No, there was nothing wrong there. So then…
She pulled her hand away from her chest and peered at it closely. Then, the other rose to join it.
But no matter how hard she stared, she couldn’t see anything unusual about them, either—nor could she say why she had thought there might have been. They still featured the same long, webbed fingers. She still had the sharp claws of a predator, yet with a delicate and feminine grace, hiding the power ready to be unleashed at a moment’s notice. They were good hands, and she was proud of them. But they were just her normal, everyday hands.
Except, if these were her hands… what was she propping herself up with?
In a flurry, she surged to her feet and whirled, fists held defensively in front of her, fully expecting some hidden entity about to spring upon her. But there was no one. Just her own fists.
Just her own…
For a moment, she thought she was seeing things, so she hastily squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. But when she opened them again, everything was just the same. There was nothing wrong with her eyes.
She had four fists!
She froze, eying the extra pair warily, as though these ghostly apparitions might somehow turn against her, but they held totally still, obeying her commands as if she had always had them. Two lefts, two right. Connected to four arms. Two on either side, traveling up to where they joined at her shoulders. Save for their number, they were otherwise completely mundane and identical in all respects.
Chest heaving with panic, she shouted, “Mike!”
“What?!” came the returning yell, and she spun to see him perform a near-textbook kip-up in his haste to respond to her call.
The sight of him hit her like a gong directly to the face, and her mind blanked. Without conscious thought, her back arched forward, as though her chest could feel the pull of his gravity, and the only recently stilled waters between her legs began to surge once more in the resulting tide swell. While she struggled to get her breathing back under control, a hip canted to one side, greedily taking advantage of her distraction to seek whatever stimulation it could.
Why had she been yelling? Right. The mutations. Mike had them too, she now realized. Not five seconds prior, she would have said it was impossible, but the additional appendages, each corded with enough muscle to nearly fill one of her legs, somehow made him even more sexy than he ever had been. Sexier!
She smiled slightly as the onetime head-scratcher so wonderfully came back around, proving her correct and incorrect in the same instant. The only person who could be more beautiful than Mike… was Mike!
“You’re the sexiest,” she purred.
His perfect brow furrowed in just the right about of confusion. Then, disgruntled, he crossed a pair of arms in front of his chest, placed a hand on his hip, and poked a finger at her. All at the same time. The combination made the whole of her body positively throb.
“No, you are,” he argued, like she had just said something completely illogical. Oh, she was going to love this game. “And don’t just yell for no reason. You almost gave me a heart attack.”
She shrugged without the slightest hint of repentance, allowing her eyes to drift down his body. Every inch of him was a delight to the senses, delicious in every sense of the word. He was even still erect from his transformation. “I’m sorry. Did I interrupt you before you could finish?”
Without waiting for a reply, she began to slink her way forward, closing the distance between them. As she circled their most recent meal, a distant part of her recalled it causing some mild trauma or other, but she could not remember why. It must not have been very important.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” he noted. “If anything, you saved me from finishing without you.”
Her sultry grin widened. Lucky her. “Oh, well. Girls versus boys, right?”
His head twitched to one side. “What?”
“You know,” she began. But then her grin faltered as she struggled to explain herself.
What had she meant? She knew what she had tried to say, but she was being led astray by her own language. Somehow. She reached up to nibble a claw while her other pair of arms circled her waist protectively. She was Naomi. And he was Mike. They were two halves of a unique pair. They couldn’t be categorically described with words like girl and boy… could they?
Certainly, she was female, and he, male. So, the words… kind of fit. Metaphorically. But she was almost certain even that level of disconnect had not been there before.
Finally, she went with, “I’m… different from you. I can climax without getting tired.”
“Oh.” He blinked a few times. “Well, yeah. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” she agreed.
There was an awkward moment of silence.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
“You have four arms,” he observed finally.
She clapped a pair of hands together. “Right! That’s why I was yelling.” She reached up with one of her unoccupied appendages to deliver a gentle swat to his chest. “You keep making me forget with all of your…” the last rose to gesture over the whole of his body, “…sexiest-ness.”
The dizzying array of body language she had just unleashed upon him had not been intentional. She had just done it, and as naturally as if she had always had four arms and always used them that way. Still, it was surreal once her brain caught up with what her hands were doing.
Something Mike seemed to be experiencing himself, as it was taking him a moment to register all of it. But when he did, his eyes flashed with exasperation. “I am not the sexiest, you freaking lunatic.”
Her skin flushed with excitement. “Then I must be positively insane,” she assured him, taking swift hold of his twitching lure… and cupping his balls with her right-most pair of hands. He gasped and lifted onto his toes as his body reacted to having his most sensitive area in the grasp of another, despite the implicit trust between them. “Because I simply cannot imagine someone more beautiful than you. And anyway, so do you.”
His groan of pleasure was mixed with a flutter of confusion. “Huh? So do I, what?”
“Have four arms, you goof,” she said, releasing him to draw her fingers down each of their lengths, then pulled his hands away and twisted him around in a playful little dance. “See?”
“Holy shit… you’re right.”
She giggled. “You were using them this whole time, and you didn’t even notice. I love it!”
“Well, I was distracted,” he said defensively… then quirked an eyebrow, “by your sexiest-ness.”
She twitched slightly, and her grin faltered. Now that she was on the receiving end of it, she did not like this game very much. There was just something axiomatically incorrect about it when he said it. But she could pretend to accept his praise if it made him feel better.
“Yes, yes. Bask in my radiance,” she crooned, striking an exotic pose with her arms tilted at various angles.
“Ah!” His clapped excitedly—though with four arms, that bordered on out-and-out applause. “You’re just like that snake woman from the 7th Voyage of Sinbad!”
She looked at him. On one hand, she felt very much like he had just compared her to an animal, which would have been insulting, save she knew beyond doubt he could never have meant it that way. But on another, she had a vague idea of what he was referring to.
After all, she was pretty sure she had seen that movie. Or pieces of it. It was one of those old stop-motion monster flicks from way before she was born. She hadn’t been all that interested, but her par…ents…
Her arms drifted down to hang at her sides as she struggled to reconcile what was with what must have been.
“Mike, something’s changed,” she murmured after a moment, then with the kind of listless inattention that comes with deep distraction, she reached up once more to tap at her head. “In here.”
“What do you mean?” Concerned, he stepped close and placed a comforting pair of hands over her shoulders.
Her eyes drifted up until they found his, and she gave him a searching look. “What species are we?”
She honestly could not think of an answer. As far as she knew, they were unique entities, meant to grow and evolve alongside one another until they had been utterly perfected. They had no need for things like a reproductive cycle—children could only ever stand in the way of their ascension—nor could they have ever been spawned by some lesser creature.
She knew these things as right and necessary. Absolute truths.
Yet… she had clear memories that contradicted every bit of that. Parents. Birthday parties. A childhood.
“Well, we’re…” he frowned, clearly coming up just as blank as she had, “…our species.”
He didn’t seem pleased by his own answer, but for herself, she could only sag with relief. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t just her. They were in this together. As it should be.
“The aliens changed us,” he realized. “Our perceptions of ourselves, I mean. We must have been…” His voice drifted away while he thought, and she watched his face twitch about while he wrestled through the tortured logic of their circumstances. Finally, he concluded, “I can only think we were… human?”
There was a moment of silence where they just stared into the middle distance, digesting the news. Then they shared a glance and grimaced with distaste.
“Ew… Mike, ew.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s weird. I don’t like that.” He shuddered.
“Never say that again.”
“Oh, man…” He started shaking his hands like he had just dipped them in something particularly vile. “I think I’m gonna be sick. I just remembered my porn stash!”
“Mike!” she gasped in disgust.
But then, she was inundated with images of herself alone, a favored ‘back massager’ in hand, and fantasies of a certain celebrity crush dancing through her head.
Bile shot into her mouth as though fired from a paintball gun. “Oh… God!”
She wanted to claw out her own brain and scrub it with a toothbrush. To have had such thoughts. To have done such things… She might as well have fantasized about fucking a goat! But realization soon dawned, and she froze, her eyes widening with abject horror.
She’d had… actual relations… with…
Trembling with revulsion and self-loathing, a choking cry escaped her lips, and she sank to her knees.
“You know,” Mike said shakily, somehow not noticing. He seemed preoccupied with trying to get his own breathing back under control and pacing about. “I’ve actually seen a little bestiality porn before. Not on purpose. It was an accident, I swear. But you know… the internet.”
“It’s all bestiality, Mike!” she wailed. “It’s like fapping to the National Geographic channel.”
His pacing quickened to the point where he might as well have been walking over hot coals. “I know… I know. Ah, man, there’s so much.” Suddenly, he whirled. “Wait a second. Didn’t you tell me—”
“No!” She threw herself at his ankles, where she clutched at him like a maddened beggar. “Don’t say it! I’m unclean!”
*
What are they doing? Has anybody been monitoring this? I know everyone’s a touch overwhelmed right now, but…
…?
The subjects. After consuming that… paycheck of a lifetime, they seem to be experiencing unusual levels of emotional distress.
< chuckling >
You’d almost think they had some understanding of what they’d done.
…?
Ah! I suppose you wouldn’t know. You see, if you study their faces, you can see trace amounts of saline—
< the quiet sound of a notification blips off to one side >
Hmm… looks like the mercs found the cave entrance. We’ll soon be seeing some fireworks, one way or another…
*
“Shh…” he whispered, rocking her gently. “It’ll be alright. We didn’t know any better.”
“Do you forgive me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
“Say you forgive me!”
“I forgive you! Geez.” He sighed. “Man, it’s like we’ve been infected with… racism or something.”
She jerked away, but only so she could glare at him, nose to nose. “It’s not racism. They’re animals. It’s gross and… and profane!”
“I said like. Like!” He held up a pair of hands in defense. “I don’t know what else to call it. Everything I’ve ever known is suddenly flipped over sideways in my head. I had posters—”
She turned to one side just in time to gag. “Stop talking about it!”
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Look, if anyone asks… we’ll just pretend it’s a thing we used to dabble in. You know, in college. Play it off.”
She looked up at him out of the corner of her eye. “Like I would ever admit to something like that. And anyway, who is it, exactly, that you imagine having this conversation with?”
His head wobbled with uncertainty for a moment before a weak smile twitched at his lips. “You, I guess. I can’t see many humans having an appreciation for just how… ick… they are.”
She sniffed.
Intellectually, she knew they had to be suffering from some delusion. After all, the evidence was irrefutable. She could easily recall how they had gotten to where they were, the steps involved, their abduction, and all the days before. She could even remember a time before knowing Mike—bleak and depressing a notion as that was.
But it was like explaining differential calculus to a hamster, a Neanderthal trying to hammer a square peg into solid rock. It did not matter what logic dictated—she was not human. She had never been human, and to argue otherwise was an assault on the very core of her being, a concept rejected by her id before her ego even entered the picture.
She was Naomi. Mike’s other half. Above and supreme to all others.
And anyway, the question was largely academic at this point. The likelihood of the aliens ever returning them home was a complete unknown, and her desire to even return had been all but nullified. Her connection to humanity had been all but severed, and those attachments that remained had dulled to the point where she was having honest difficulty remembering why she had ever cared about them in the first place.
She was pretty sure eating her parents would still upset her, though. Pretty sure.
“They would appreciate it if they ever got the chance to compare themselves to us,” she argued. “Even the sadly mistaken few who consider themselves good-looking.”
But Mike shook his head. “I doubt it even then. They’re still very close to us physically—”
She recoiled. “If you squint!”
“—so, I can see a lot of them at least taking their chances to hit on us if we ever got back.” It took a moment for the implications of that to hit home, and his eyes turned hard. “Especially you, knowing guys.”
“Ew… Mike! Gross.”
Despite her disgust, she knew he was right. But not about men. Her Mike was so innocent. So pure. He would be totally unprepared for the sheer number of giggling coeds that would crowd around him, fawning over his every word. Especially if he got into sports. Literally, any sport. Which one wouldn’t matter in the slightest.
She could see the headline now:
‘Why is Water Polo Suddenly Popular? A Retrospective’
The article would then be followed by another, noting the coincidental rise in the number cheerleader disappearances.
“You might as well suggest I make out with a bunch of… of chimps,” she exclaimed, then shot him a look, daring him to suggest she had ever done more. But when her own words registered, she had to grimace. “Okay, I’m hearing the racism now.”
Not that hearing it did her any good. Rational or not, she simply knew herself to be superior. Humans were… food.
Or pets!
She sighed with sudden relief as the world realigned into a comfortable new paradigm. If humans could be pets, then it was completely okay for her to have emotional attachments with them—kinky college misadventures aside. But more importantly, it meant she would not have to worry about harming someone she actually cared for.
After all, she already had human DNA. She could afford to be choosy when it came to acquiring more.
“Yeah, we should probably keep this between us,” Mike agreed, squinching one side of his face up in obvious discomfort—and her heart fluttered. He was so cute. She could have spent days just watching him ponder life’s deeper mysteries. “I realize that’s a very… gated-community kind of attitude, but… well, we don’t want to upset the neighbors.”
She inhaled sharply, then exhaled with quiet satisfaction. What a bunch of barn animals thought of her attitude was of no concern to her; all she had heard was that he was already envisioning them living together. Which… should have gone without saying, she realized with a passing frown, but it was good to know he was on the same page.
And it reminded her they had yet to consummate their relationship, post-transformation. She would have to rectify that.
“Mike, we’re beautiful four-armed giants who summon lightning when we get excited.” She was exaggerating a tad, she knew. There was no way of knowing whether the lightning would follow them out of this place, but the image provoked a certain romance… which was exactly her intention. She began peppering her words with soft kisses. “If anything… the monkeys… will worship us… like gods.”
“Maybe,” he agreed, “as long as you… remember not to… to call them that. And anyway, they’re much more… likely to—” He pulled away from her playful interruptions with a far more pensive expression than she would have liked, only to then glance at the floor. “That’s right. The lightning. Have you noticed? It isn’t reacting to us anymore.”
Her lips twisted to one side in irritation, less than pleased at her mate’s inability to stay focused on her, but she supposed there was a certain merit to at least one of them maintaining a situational awareness. And now that he mentioned it, she could not recall a single spark flaring up since they had consumed that alien.
She glanced down at the rubberized floor material curiously. Had the alien’s DNA somehow negated the ability they had gained from the electric roots in the entry hall? That had never happened before. She had never even seen an option for it. Mutations, yes, but never out-and-out negations. So most likely, the ability had simply been altered in some way.
If so, that alteration had to have been what their—
She paused, struggling to recall the name her computer had given itself. Something, something… Nexus? Whatever.
—had been so keen on acquiring… because there was no way it was the arms.
Not that she was complaining. Now that she’d had a chance to get used to them—and seen them on Mike—she absolutely adored her new pair of hands, but they did not seem so critical that it would need to force the adaptation. There had to be more to this puzzle than met the eye. Something… under the hood. In other words, Mike’s half of their evolutionary development.
But she kept that to herself. There was no need to assign blame, and besides, there was nothing he could have done about it. She just wished the Nexus could have forced what changes it needed without locking her out of her own choices.
The question, for now, was in figuring out what had changed.
Assuming that alien had been a member of the species that had built this place—not a given, but with its size and the simple fact of it having been stored here, it remained a distinct possibility—she could see why the Nexus might have been so insistent. After all, it made sense for a creature to tailor its environment to suit its unique physiology, and no sort of intelligent being would want its technology to react to its every random emotional outburst. They had to have had a more reliable means of controlling things. And if she was right, that meant she and Mike now did as well.
That was an exciting idea. To say nothing of having some extra control over the area, it would be nice to finally be able to look at her lover with the lights on… while they made love. And potentially find an escape hatch afterward. There were still a lot of animals out there she hadn’t tried, and if she was lucky, she might be able to find that sniper of theirs. She wouldn’t even eat him—he didn’t deserve that kind of honor. She just wanted his gun.
Eager now, she placed her palm on the floor, though she was uncertain of what she was hoping to accomplish. “Mike, you said you saw some kind of… pulse? When I was making the lightning react, I mean.”
He nodded. “Yeah, like a ripple in the air. But I didn’t see it, I perved it. You never got anything like that from me?”
“No, but your senses are stronger than mine,” she replied with a flirtatious quirk of her eyebrow. “Mr. Seeker Unit.”
He just grunted. “Seeker Unit… Makes me sound like a damned forager or something. And I suppose that would make you the Destroyer Unit, then?”
“The Nexus didn’t say. But I like the sound of it.” She did too. A lot.
“Nexus?”
“Right.” She tapped the blinking red light to show what she meant. Curiously, despite her limbs being virtually indistinguishable in every other way, the light itself had not spread with their recent duplication. “That’s what our computer is called. Uh… or part of it. It was one of those stupid names that someone obviously made up just to make an acronym work.”
“So it’s an acronym spelling out NEXUS?” he asked, clarifying.
“No…” she admitted. “Nexus was like the third… or fourth word in the acronym. I don’t actually remember the rest…”
He just looked at her.
“I woke up with four arms!” she exclaimed. “And two of them had been molesting me.”
That comment was enough to force most of the Ws across his face without him ever putting together a response. She would call it a win. But she would also need to rescue him before he gave himself an aneurysm.
“Now, tell me about this ripple,” she commanded with a distracting kiss.
“Uh-fu-we-wha…” he sputtered, then shook his head. “It was a, uh… ripply… kind of ripple?”
She glared at him.
“What else do you want me to say?” Somewhat frustrated—and probably still a bit confused—he lifted her from her perch on his lap, casually set her aside, and stood so he could fully clear his head. All of which she found monumentally hot. She would need to figure out this lightning business quickly so they could return to more urgent matters. “I’ve been assuming our perving sense has something to do with the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s how it feels to me, anyway. If that’s true, the pulse was probably some kind of magnetic wave.”
“Magnets can cause lightning?” she asked.
“Magnetic fields can. If they’re strong enough,” he clarified. “But I only ever took the one science course, and I almost flunked Intro to Circuits. So, I couldn’t tell you much about it.”
“Well, how do you make a magnetic field?” she pressed anyway, standing. Her own studies had focused more on botany and chemistry than physics, so her understanding of this area was fairly weak. “It’s something to do with copper coils, right?”
“Technically, anything carrying an electrical current produces a magnetic field…” He paused. “Yeah, I think that’s right. But you’re probably talking about an electromagnet. You just wrap a copper wire around like an iron nail or something.” He started spinning a pair of hands around one another to demonstrate… which instantly began warping the space in front of him in even her perving view. She took a hurried step back. “Then, attach either end of the wire to a battery,” he continued, apparently oblivious to the building maelstrom, “and blammo!”
He snapped his fingers.
Instantly, whatever energy he had been building up blasted out into the room. She had no time to react. Before she could even blink, a seemingly solid band of… something flashed over her. But she didn’t feel a thing. She almost wondered if she might have imagined it…
…until the room was engulfed in blinding white.
“Ack!” she squawked in surprise.
Shielding her eyes, each set of her lids fluttered back and forth almost at random as she instinctively tried to sort out which portion of the spectrum would be the least painful. But just as she was settling on the human visible, there was a distinctive rumble, and the floor beneath her gave a violent shake.
She squinted over at Mike. “Was that an explosion?!”