“Damn, this thing is huge.” Jack whispered, his voice echoing through the carcass.
“Gotta be some 700 feet long and 200 feet wide.” Nicole marveled, “Amazing that an animal can get this big and survive in space."
“Quiet. We've got company.” Gizzy said. The three of them shouldered their guns hid behind one of the ridges in a rib. They moved softly to the end of the circular hall and into what seemed to be a mess hall, dark and unused but still kinda clean.
“It’s like an abandoned starbucks.” Vicki whispered, peering over the counter at the black screens where menus would be. The glass was a lense into a world of nothing. The halls lead into an open area, some sort of tube shaped chamber with people lining the walls. There were what looked like carved dwellings, much like the mountain carved homes of Mesoamerica. However, these gradually wrapped around the circular carcass and meeting at a domed top. In the center, where the people were moving towards lethargically, was a central horror. A massive spiked ball, porous and petrified, like a virus or a pumas ball with dead trees for arms. There were connections between it and the walls in all sorts of directions.
“The hell is that thing? Some kind of statue for a cult?” Vicki asked.
“That’s the Thark’s heart. It’s made of bone and anchored to the ribs. The soft tissue inside has hardened after death, unless they harvested it as meat.” Gizzy explained. “These look like the living quarters.”
“Do we even wanna know what’s going on inside a 6 story bone heart?” Jack asked.
“Probably not.” Gizzy said. The group turned the other way towards the rear of the “ship”. The line between petrified black tendon and bone and metal scaffolding was sometimes difficult to tell apart. The central walkway was just a bundle of wires atop a spinal ridge with a loose corrugated metal top. No rails separated it from the 15 degree angled drop of spikes and I-beams. The spine was divided into segments where the circular ridges tightened, each one slightly brighter and more orange as they lead down to the engines. The two level paths merged around a center beam and inside another hollow chamber was a similarly grotesque sphere, this one significantly smaller. It was nothing but a honeycomb of white roots tangled into a spiked ball. Man made bridges lead into it and natural tendons suspended it, like the worst treehouse ever. The same orange glow lit the orb from within as a white industrial light strip illuminated it above.
“That would be the brain.” Gizzy nodded.
“Even the brain is made of bone?” Nicole asked. “That’s awesome.”
“Well, the squishy-thinky bits have rotten away, that’s just the cartilage holding it together. Again, unless they harvested it for meat.”
“There’s hundreds of people in here. They don’t seem to even notice us.” Vicki noted as someone walked within 30 feet and kept to himself. Humanoid, and seemingly primates. They followed the outskirts to avoid suspicion as they made their way to another section. The moment they entered it, Gizzy seemed to grow cold and disturbed.
“Oh my god.” Nicole cringed “What is that?” She asked as they pulled back into the shadows to avoid detection. She stared at something, easily the size of blue whale. It was white and pink, like bone with a bit of flesh stretched over it. The bare white skull, almost human if not for its size, had its eye sockets lit with orange light from tubes snaking in and out of it. 2 jaws were trapped in an eternal smile, and catfish-like whiskers emerged from the both sides of its face.
“That… is a baby thark on an industrial lift truck.”
“Is it dead?” Nicole asked.
“I’m… not really sure. It looks… uh, meaty and hydrated.” Gizzy said as the others cringed away from her. “What other words would you prefer? It’s slick and gooey but skeletal. You can see through the damn eye sockets to the lack of brain. I think it’s being grown but it’s not ‘alive’ like a thark fetus would be. I think they’re artificially growing it for a ship frame.”
“Oh, that’s just fucked.” Nicole said. “They’re growing a giant zombie centipede fetus inside the dead mother to build another ship?” She asked. Men in hazmat gear moved hoses to metal rings grafted to the sides where the legs should be.
“All aboard the space centipede abortion train.” Gizzy cringed. “As warped as it sounds, it does make sense. If you could grow the bones and the meat without brains and organs, you could have a fleet of thark ships without having to take down unstoppable tharks in the process. They’re probably using the mother’s frame as incubation. Industrial, artificial insemination for warship breeding.”
“God, the teeth on the fetus are bigger than my thigh.” Nicole marveled, both awed and horrified. They moved to the lower areas where the halls became redder and more ship-like. Turning the corner, Gizzy stopped. The others did the same while something stared them down silently. It wasn’t like the other primate workers, in the sense that it was covered in what looked like power armor. Although, it could've also been an exoskeleton. The buglike bipedal creature glared at them through red glowing skits, as if waiting for them to challenge or run. Gizzy lifted the gun and it turned its back as if unimpressed, nodding for them to follow. They all shrugged and simultaneously thought "Why not?" The creature led them past boiler rooms and reactors full of copper pipes and what looked like cryo pods.
...
The smoky air and foggy view made it hard to see the white glowing lights above. It was as if they were in some form of workshop or welding area. The floor below them was blue. A strange pool, covered on top by a thin clear film, was below that. Bodies stood in rows under the liquid, suspended by cables and separated by glass walls.
“Are they growing people, or dissolving them?” Jack asked.
“Hell if I know. Bug boy won’t slow down to say a word." They walked past a smaller lab room, half a dozen scientists in scrubs and masks with tools working on a lobster sized clear pink crustacean. The creature resembled a much cuter and less horrendous thark.
“They’re definitely growing them, but what they're doing to them is anyone’s guess.” Gizzy nodded as they were lead into a foggy grey room of nothing.
“Well, they're feeding it.” A voice emerged from the fog. Gizzy took aim at the figure. The haze became clearer as a strange floating man with a pirate's hat hovered closer. As he pierced the fog slowly, the metal clank of spindly limbs behind him protruding like wings disrupted the near silence. He walked on his wingtips and Gizzy realized that the hat was not a hat. Like 2 scythe blades separating from the center, the massive bonelike hammerhead skull protrusions hung ominously. The creature's humanoid body was dangling from the head, and the horrid arrow of horns was the anchor point for the walking limbs keeping its feet off the ground.
“The hell are you?”
“Thark, in soul and flesh.” It replied with a cold, emotionless face.
“Did you used to be human or are you heading that way from something else?” She asked.
“You are within my walls, foreign ones. Walking among the slaves.” It said hauntingly.
“I don’t understand. You’re not bounty hunters after us… you’re just parasites living in the dead Thark?”
“All Thark are home to life and death, those who crawl like the skin mites and eat the decay from within. You see the Thark as dead, but it is not. It is evolved.”
“Looks dead to me, with no brain and a petrified heart, and a small slave cult and engineering built inside its guts.”
“I assure you that while I may not breathe, I still live. They tried to kill me and weaponize my body, but they only made me stronger.”
“You think you’re the Thark… that you are… living inside?” Gizzy questioned.
“Who are you to question who I am, those of another body.”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
“He means the ship.” Gizzy whispered. “This thing either thinks he’s the Thark or that he’s telepathically linked to it.”
“How can be BE the Thark if he’s IN the Thark?” Nicole whispered back.
“Are you not inside yourself? A mind inside a house of bone, surrounded by skin and blood, a vessel to move you to where you must go?” It asked.
“Brain in a meat suit. Fair enough.” Gizzy shrugged “Especially since I’m modular and grow mine around a hunk of metal. Why did you fire on us?”
“I must feed my young. Your prisoner transports are quite the catch, and once they are part of the system, and I can see their minds, I can see how truly wretched they are. They don’t even send ships to rescue your leftovers, your throwaways.
“We’re not prisoners, or a prison transport. We’re just 5 people trying to go somewhere important.”
“Then you will be spared. 5 is not worth the effort to adjust to a new species, or several. You may not be ideally digestible.”
“That’s real kind of you. Harvesting slaves for food so you can breed/build more of whatever you are.” Nicole said boldly.
“Let it go, Nicole.” Gizzy said. “We’ll leave you to it. Just don’t fire on our asses or follow us and we’re chill.” Gizzy said darkly.
“Gizzy, we can’t just walk away.”
“No we’re gonna fly away.”
“Leaving hundreds of slaves to be worked and digested to death in this place? Without even trying to stop it?”
“Nicole…” Vicki said darkly. “I’m not much different, this is just a larger scale feeding for a larger predator.”
"Don’t tell me you two side with this monster?” Nicole asked in an astonished whisper.
“No, I just know when it’s not our fight and we have to move on.” Gizzy said as the hovering body stared coldly at them.
“I get it.” Vicki said, her eyes slightly red. “Everyone has to eat.”
“We’ll discuss this later, move to the shuttle.” Gizzy ordered. Nicole glared at the monster in an almost challenging manner, then turned and, reluctantly, left with the rest of the group. She fought with her emotions as they passed hundreds of humanoids in tubes, some digested to bones and some almost fresh.
...
They stepped back onto the ship, closing the shuttle bay doors and kicking the ship into Get-the-hell-out mode. Nicole passed and blocked Gizzy and Vicki as they tried to return to their normal places.
“Does the captain have any say anymore in the affairs of this crew?” She asked. Gizzy sighed and looked disappointed in her.
“Nicole, the universe is a place of death and survival. This is not our fight.”
“Hundreds of prisoners in there suffering and being digested alive and we’re gonna just pretend they’re not there?”
“Hundreds rot in prisons doing the same thing, and we don’t free them because they’re criminals and their justice is not our problem. We can’t fix the evil of the universe by setting a different evil free to spare it from another. Think about it. We’re doing the same thing, keeping two prisoners as food for Vicki, your friend. She needs to feed."
“And I don’t like that either, to be frank. I’m against the whole thing, but they have better conditions than before we smuggled them onto MY ship. Two prisoners to feed one person who can’t help her condition is a little less evil than hundreds of them being dissolved alive to feed one monster.”
“Wake up Nicole. Life is a monster. Even bunnies prey on plants, and eat the dead flesh of vegetation to live. Plants feed off the dead bodies of predators, predators eat the prey that eat the plants. Everything that lives eats something alive or once alive. Life doesn’t just happen, it just trades places. To have life, you consume life, That thing is eating the worst of a society people like us lock up to die anyway.”
“Are they all so evil that they deserve it? Every one of them? We have two, and I even question of one of those deserves to be food for someone else.”
“Just because big blue is docile and broken doesn’t make him less of a murderer. Nicole, you’re the only one on this ship that hasn’t killed to live. You’re the anomaly here, everyone else is a monster, and you just supplied the ship. You’re special, the universe likes you, and you’re unique and maybe the only one here with a soul, but you can’t single handedly take down that ship. Killing that ship would be taking a life that you decided in 5 minutes was worth less than the prisoners. It’s complicated, it’s layered, and it’s not our fight. We don’t understand the sides. So we move on and be glad we survived it.”
“Well, the Shitbird you like to abuse so much may be the scum of the universe who likes to burn children alive for fun, but before you lump Zhoren in with him, maybe you should check the security footage. I watched it just before we cut through that hull, you may wanna see how he talks to our robot.”
...
The cell doors opened and Gizzy sat down in a chair, as a groggy blue primate sat up in his bed and waited for a beating or a lesson on behavior.
“Rise and shine Zhoren. I see you’ve been talking to Dee.”
“She talked to me first, it’s only polite to respond.”
"She’s a dumbass toaster with tits who got in a cage with something that could kill her because she’s too stupid to be sentient. She’s a machine with a convincingly human programmed personality. You know that, and you sidestepped her logic code and got a keycard. And yet, you gave it back. Explain that. You could have walked right out of this cell and gone for a weapon’s locker and you just… didn’t.”
“This is where I belong.”
“Institutionalized so long you fear freedom. Happens to a lot of prisoners.”
“I don’t fear it, I simply don’t deserve it. The suffering I have caused is permanent, the lives lost are gone. What am I to be free as they were taken from their lives?” He asked, returning to his book.
“I’m talking to you Zhoren. You don’t seem like a guy who murders 70 innocent people and then decided, hmm, I guess that wasn’t okay after all.”
“Are you asking if I was framed? Am I an innocent man wrongfully imprisoned, No. Sorry. I did what I did, and I felt the regret of it, and my regret means nothing to the victims and their families.”
“You don’t believe in second chances?” She asked.
“Oh, quite the opposite. I deserve to die, and yet I am healthy and alive. I deserve to suffer 70 lifetimes of loss and after 20, I am on a soft bed with a book, and a warden who asks questions instead of giving daily beatings.”
“I shot you full of mutated bone marrow knowing you would probably die from it.”
“So we’re both monsters. You do what you believe is less evil, and I just accept my fate as the gods allow.”
“Honey, my gods killed my parents, and I killed my gods for it. I became a god, and there’s nothing divine about it. There’s just those with power and those with none, and what you use that power for matters. I use mine for a lot of good and some evil is inevitable, and that haunts me. I’ve been in prisons, exiled, even executed a few times. The gods had no part in it.”
“Well, we have very different gods, I guess. I’m sorry yours failed you and were a disappointment to your people. Mine have given me a second chance to preserve a life, and all I have to do is stay. The food is not bad, and the company is far more beautiful.”
“She’s married, and so am I, so don’t even go there, skippy.”
“I meant Dee. Why do you keep her a prisoner? What did she do wrong?”
“Nothing. She’s not alive. She’s an imitation of life. She doesn’t have feelings, or goals. Just programming.”
“Like you?” he asked. Upgrading your body with mechanical technology… are we all not just programmed?”
“There is a minimal amount of data that an organism needs to gain sentience, and we know that because we made her and her kind. They are far below the intelligence needed to question if they are alive, truly. They can’t evolve or grow smarter and more alive. My phone has more sophisticated AI software than she does, and it can't ask me why I never give it a name. She seems alive because she is very well made technology, that’s all. You and me, soul or not, can change our minds. We can make our own decisions, and we can feel emotions. Dee is just parroting them because she is built to be convincing, because the real Dee is a sex symbol on our world, for some reason, and lonely men who have no companions prefer delusion to solitude. Welcome to the club, you’re just another guy who thinks the stripper likes you. It’s her job to pretend to like you. But even strippers are people who can occasionally fall in love. She’s a toaster. If you set her free, she would run out of program and lock up, shut down and cease to function.”
“Like most of us.”
“You haven’t seen a woman in so long you wouldn't know one from a sexbot, and you just proved that. I can’t blame you. The rest of the women on the ship are married and two of them are kinda violent bitches anyway. Don’t fall in love with the vacuum cleaner. People do that all the time and it never ends well.”
“Does Nicole not love her ship? Do you not love your homeworld? Are they alive, do they love you back? Who are you to draw the line and say where programmed response becomes feeling?"
“I’m their god. I designed the line of robots and the codes they run according to federation and Osirian agreement on what the blurry line is for life. We stepped back far enough that the blurry line isn’t close enough to stumble over. By a wide margin of safety. She’s not fuckable, or marriage material. She can’t love anyone back. She’s just pretty to look at, like a photograph of a real person. And the real Dee knew that when she decided to sell companion software to make money. That’s the woman she’s modeled after."
“You don’t think I’ve seen my share of robots before. Yours has a soul. You just don’t have the scanners for that.”
“Your gods tell you that?”
“My heart does.” He smiled.
...
Vicki paced the room, turning her earbud volume up to drown out the voice.
“
Shut up, please.” She muttered,
“Don’t you miss me?” Said her own voice. “We were so good together.”
“Shut up! You’re not REAL!” She yelled as Jack opened the door.
“Are you okay?” He asked. “I heard yelling.”
“I’m fine. I’m just… emotionally stressed out and needed to yell.”
“Vicki, it’s okay to feed off them. It’s your life on the line, and they’re sentenced to death anyway. This is better than what they had before. Don’t beat yourself up over it.”
“So they deserve this?”
“Someone decided so, and you didn’t get any say in this.” He comforted.
“What about the people at the bar? Bounty hunters, maybe, the bartender, who knows, that girl’s mother in the alley. I should be in a cell too.”
“You’re sick, not evil.”
“Isn’t that what they say about the people in the insane asylums? They lock them up for safety too. Prisoners with better beds and medication. How am I any better then them? Why am I free?”
“Because you’re not insane, and we have your medication in those cells.”
“Please say that again…” She asked, hugging him.
“You’re not insane.” He whispered.
“I hope I can believe that, if you say it enough.” She sniffled.
“You won’t." Said Vicki’s voice in her own head. “And nobody can fix you.”