“I think it all must of started during the cruise”, Jack stated as he swung upside down. “She seemed to like me well enough before then.” He tried to shrug his shoulders to show his weariness about, well, everything… about the woman, about the cruise, about how his life had become a slow, meandering, meaningless thing but his shoulders couldn’t complete the motion. “The dinner was elegant and the crab bisque was simply sublime, you must try it...well, if you have a chance.”
The spider crooned yellow.
“Hah! I know.” It wasn’t often that he had such a captive audience. Wait, that didn’t feel quite right, he was still dazed from the crash and whatever drugs the medical staff had injected into his still sore arm. A cocoon of sticky web surrounded him. Warmth was his first impression and he still held it. First impressions are important.
“I don’t think the chef is still around though.” He paused again. The spider’s size was impressive. Almost eye too many eyes even though he was hanging a fair amount off the ground. Six or seven feet would be his rough approximation.
“I’m going to call you Betsy if that is alright?” He asked the spider. She, and he had a strong impression that was the correct gender, gave a reluctant nod.
“You see, Betsy,” using the name to form a connection, “I have one of those mutations you always hear about on the vidweb.” He closed his eyes then, “I know, I know, monsters each and every one of them but I’m different.” He peeked out from under half closed eyelids. Betsy had tilted her head slightly, the four eyes bright with interest, the tufts of blue hair waving as if in a slight breeze.
“I’m different because it is a reverse mutation, see. Most of the mutations you watch on the vidweb are selfish. Like that guy with x-ray vision. It only benefited him until they caught him, what was it, after the six or seventh Xenon-6 poker championship one of the competitors had a private eye track down his records. ‘Mutant!’ ‘Cheater!’ they exclaimed, you remember, right? Anyways, he had my sympathy of course. We can only play the cards we are dealt, hah! Get it, Betsy?”
She huffed then and expelled rancid breath into his face. Impolite if you asked Jack but he wasn’t one to stand on propriety and he understood what she was getting at.
“Ah, right. You don’t have webvid down here.” He craned his neck and saw the still burning fuselage? Exterior of the engine? As the captain, he supposed he should have remembered what it was called. ‘The Indubitable’ was painted in reassuring blue lettering. It should have had ‘luxury cruise liner’ painted underneath but that part had broken off during the crash. Or more like this part had broken off as it was all that he could see. He laughed.
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“Hell of a drug they gave me. I can barely think straight.”
The spider crooned orange.
“Ok, ok. Hold onto your deep space beetle, you rapscallion.” He grinned at her and thought the angle of her fangs looked like a return smile. Still got it, you old dog. “The mutation. What I have is called reverse empathy. Or maybe empathy projection. When I talk to someone it sort of forces whoever I’m talking to feel my perspective.” He gave her his level stare. “It sounds great. I guess it really is. At least in the beginning. The problem,” and he felt genuinely sad now, must be the drugs, “is that.. Well, let’s not get into that yet.”
Betsy sat back on her hind legs and waited.
“All the good things in my life, you know the really great things are a result of my mutation. Team captain of my interstellar bleet ball team the Hairy Toads, I came up with that name by the way, my admission to the Qazar Alliance, dating the Furgon princess, even my recent captaincy of The Indubitable. The problem isn’t that it isn’t real. Hozin’s Nebula! I’m fine with it. The problem,” he reached for a word,”is that it is all so ephemeral, you know?”
The spider crooned blue.
“It is sad. Don’t think I can’t hear the sarcastic tone.” Betsy looked suitably chastised. “What I mean to say is that, what if my perspective isn’t that captivating? It only takes a few weeks and then the people that I have been projecting my empathy on, they kind of start looking at me with disgust. Like they dove into a really exciting pool of water, wow, metaphors aren’t really my thing. Anyways, they dove into a really exciting pool of water, but then they made it to the floor too quickly and couldn’t find anything else to do.”
Betsy’s fangs tilted downward in anguish.
“What really makes it tough and don’t tell any reporters this,” Jack winked at her, “is that I actually do have a smaller empathy mutation. When the disgust hits, I literally can feel it and that’s brutal.”
He took a deep breath. “What really gets me is that this planet isn’t supposed to be here. Not from the charts. Sure, the navigator told me about an anomaly but those are things that don’t happen, right. If they did happen then they wouldn’t be anomalies.” Jack laughed. The spider laughed. “So when we phase jumped into the planet’s surface, that smaller empathy mutation really started acting up. The fear, the pain, the suffering. It all hit me. You can feel it now coming off of me in waves. I’d turn it off for you sweetheart, if I only could.” The spider sighed deeply.
“Hell of a drug those quacks gave me. Say, how about you cut me down and we go find a webvid, there has to be an intact one somewhere in all that wreckage. What do you say?”
The spider crooned green and her fangs started to cut through the web around Jack’s neck.