Gap Stories #7

[Fox In Socks]

Log Date: 6/10/12764

Data Sources: Ethena Security System

Event Log: 6/10/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Panic Room

10:41pm SGT

Filter life: 0%. Filter change required. Contaminant buildup is inhibiting airflow.

Reserve oxygen remaining: 11 minutes. Replace oxygen tank.

The light from the screen, and the readings it carries, gleams against the young man’s glasses. The panic room is dark, since it’s currently on the night cycle; the only light comes from the screens at the desk, most of which display the feeds from the security cameras in the house above. Sitting on the floor next to the panic room’s vault door, the young man with a breathing mask on leans back from the screen that’s affixed to the portion of the wall that holds the air filtration unit. After a moment, he turns around, and leans back against the wall.

“I’m almost out of oxygen.” he states to the empty room.

On one of the screens, there is movement. In the living room, a Symbiote in a thin carapace of biomass armor sits up from where she had been lying on the couch. She looks towards the camera in that room, though the helm — a segmented shell of chitin underlaid by something that might be described as spongy fungus — reveals nothing of the face that must lie beneath.

“I have heard that suffocating is an… unpleasant way to go.” Her voice is muted by the helm, and by her distance from the camera.

“I’ve heard the same.” the young man sighs, looking down at the coilgun pistol in his hand. “I suppose I have a choice to make.”

“Yes.” the Symbiote agrees quietly. Sitting now, with her hands folded almost primly in her lap, staring at the coffee table and its trite accoutrements. But the way she condenses herself — armored legs pressed together, shoulders tensed — betrays a certain uneasiness.

There is quiet for a moment or two, as if waiting for something more to be said, before the young man speaks. “You’re not going to try and talk me into opening the door?”

“I don’t want to… risk saying something that might convince you to go the other way instead.” The words are hesitant, as if the mere mention of the idea might make the idea a reality.

The young man takes a deep breath, then remembers the limited oxygen remaining. He was reluctant now to follow through with it, even though the gun was there in his hand. It would be easy, short, and simple, and hopefully painless; though if he botched it, he dreaded those probable few moments of agonizing awareness before his damaged brain finally kicked the bucket. Asphyxiation, while a viable, surefire alternative, was not an appealing one; if he had to embrace death, he would prefer to do so painlessly.

And yet he hesitated. The fact that the Symbiote did not want him to die, and was consciously trying to avoid say anything that would push him in that direction, made him feel guilty. Even if she had not stated as much, he knew that if he died, she would be upset. And try as he might, that simply did not sit well with him.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks. “I’m just one out of millions. Whether I live or die should be inconsequential to the Collective.”

“Every life has value to us. We do not want you to die underground, locked in a dark room, all alone. No one should have to die that way.”

“I can think of some individuals that deserve to die that way.”

“You are not one of them.”

The reply silences the young man. The silence stretches into seconds, then into a minute. At length, he speaks again.

“I’m scared.” he says quietly.

On the screen, the helm of the Symbiote turns towards the camera, then away again. “I know.” she says. “It’s okay to be scared.”

The young man lets out a long exhale, then turns his head to the side. The oxygen reserve was now showing six minutes. It did feel like five minutes had passed; he had gotten his money’s worth out of those five minutes. But he had a new appreciation for how small five minutes was, and how quickly it could go. And he now had only six minutes, which was just slightly more than five minutes. Not very long at all.

Staring back across the room at the screens on the wall, he began to reflect on where this all started, at the edge of a decision that would mean the end of something, one way or another.

Event Log: 5/11/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Family House

10:01am SGT

If he had to guess, it likely began on Saturday, during his weekend grocery run.

Nothing seemed abnormal then. He’d gotten up early and rolled out, like he always did, to avoid the morning rush at the grocery store. He’d done his circuit of the store with his earbuds in, as he always did; debated whether or not to get honey ham or smoked ham for his lunch sandwiches; saw a good deal on assorted chocolates and decided to get a couple boxes for his mother. At the counter, he made small talk while being checked out; then left the store, got in the car, and headed up to the family house so he could do his laundry. The apartment he was living in didn’t have laundry services, so he always came back to the family house to do laundry. Returning to the ‘nest’, as he liked to call it — he still considered the family house home, even though he was only there two days of the week.

Upon arriving, he got his laundry started, and put the things in the fridge that needed to be refrigerated. His parents were gone; they usually left the house early on the weekends to go on hikes or other activities. They would be back later, usually sometime in the afternoon. After getting everything put away, he pulled out his slate, dug his phone out of his pocket, and started pulling up spreadsheets so he could tally his finances from the previous week.

He found himself unpleasantly surprised as both devices started emitting the deafening emergency broadcast tone at the same time.

He’d winced and pushed both devices away from himself. If it was just one, then it would’ve been bearable, but having two do it at the same time was headsplitting. After a moment, he tucked the slate under a couch pillow to muffle it, then picked up his phone to study the alert. It was a planetwide defense alert, ordering the mobilization of all military reserves and sheltering orders for all civilians.

The broadcast tone only lasted for a minute before going silent, though the message on his phone remained. Once he had control of his phone again, he opened up the news; there were stories about recent economic contractions, sightings of Songbird and other Challengers across the galaxy, and breaking news alerts from a couple major local news organizations about a large number of unidentified objects dropping through Mokasha’s atmosphere. Tapping on the one whose coverage he trusted more, he was greeted by a running feed of updates and a livestream from the breaking news desk. The images playing across the sidescreen showed views from Mokasha’s major cities, of which Amnia was one; images of isolated plumes of smoke rising from between buildings; wide-angle shots of the sky showing unidentified objects leaving trails of fire through the clouds upon entry to the atmosphere.

It was all very… surreal. Something you expected to see being broadcast from another system, not the world you were living on.

It was as he was scrolling through the updates that he felt a dull boom shiver the house; it wasn’t loud or startling. You felt it more than you actually heard it; a shockwave of compressed air that sent a faint shiver through the walls and counters. It was actually a familiar sensation; his family once lived near a planetguard base, so the sound of a sonic boom and its effect on the surrounding neighborhoods was familiar — almost comforting, sometimes. But Amnia was not a military hub, and such sounds were unfamiliar in these suburbs.

And the abruptness of a large projectile decimating the house across the street was very much not the sort of thing Lalli was accustomed to.

He didn’t actually see it hit. He’d heard the rumbling, and then the explosion, at once deafening and yet muted by the walls of the house. His head had immediately snapped towards the direction the sound came from, gazing through from the kitchen to the front living room, where through the window, where he could see that the neighbor’s house had been entirely obliterated, as if it had been exploded from the inside out. Drywall and timber were still raining down on the surrounding houses; he could hear some of the debris placking against the roof of his house. Rather than fire or smoke, the remains of the house across the street were splattered and doused with what looked like a steaming liquid, as if a giant water ballon had been chucked down from on high. Visible past the destroyed walls of the house was the limp, misshapen outline of what could only be described as a giant, turnip-shaped egg sac.

And though he had never seen something like this in person before, Lalli knew — deep down inside, on some primordial, instinctual level — that the Collective had come to Mokasha.

He left the kitchen and moved through the living room, towards the windows, trying to make sense of what happened. Was it an attack? If it was, it seemed rather arbitrary; there were plenty of military targets across Mokasha, and decimating a random house out in the suburbs served no apparent goal. Reaching the window, he peered through it at the lingering core of the massive projectile that had fallen from the sky — the exposed parts of the interior resembled a pomegranate, filled with clustered sacs separated by veins of tougher, rubbery organic material. Each sac seemed to contain a dark ball at the center, though the longer he stared, the more he realized that that those balls were actually bodies curled up into a fetal position.

But any inspection beyond that was distracted as another such projectile slammed into the suburbs further out, a couple streets over. And in raising his eyes, Lalli saw that there were dozens — no, hundreds — of such pods leaving trails of smoke through the sky as they burned through the atmosphere, falling far and wide afield across the entire region.

There are moments you remember forever; moments in which your entire paradigm shifts. For Lalli, this was one of them — though the gravity of the moment came not from fire or fury or any outstanding chaos. No, what he remembered about this moment — and what would always return to him thereafter — was how quiet it was. Even as thousands of pods slowly tracked through the atmosphere, leaving trails of smoke behind, the house was still quiet. The suburbs were still quiet. The sirens had not yet begun wailing, and the whole scene was jarringly peaceful.

But then the sacs in the pod across the street began breaching, and people began climbing out of them, Symbiotes in biomass armor of varying densities. There was the roar of strike fighters overhead, far lower than they would normally fly, as they tried to intercept the falling pods with what few missiles they had at their disposal. And the peace was gone as the sounds of war started to fill the gaps, Amnia’s sirens starting to sound as his phone and data slate began to emit the emergency broadcast sound once again.

He would back away from the window as he saw the Symbiotes start to fan out from the wreckage of the neighbor’s house. Both his phone and data slate were grabbed and hastily stuffed into his backpack, and he would seize his half-full grocery bag, going to the pantry and raiding it for as many healthy essentials as he could fit in there. His clothes were still in the wash; there was nothing he could do about those. Once he filled his grocery bag, he peered around the pantry door to check outside the windows again; two Symbiotes were crossing the street, both carrying rifles. Other Symbiotes were likewise spreading out down the length of the street, moving with military purpose.

He had grabbed the grocery bag at that point, and with his pack on his back, rushed to the stairwell in the house that led downstairs. He nearly fell trying to get down those stairs, and at the vaulted door at the bottom, he had to pause to unlock his phone, and pull up the code to the panic room that his father had given him. He had never memorized it, since he had never thought he’d need it, but now he was dreading that he had not done so. Every second now mattered, and here he was, fumbling to enter a code that he had never bothered to memorize, when Symbiotes could be coming through the front door at any moment.

He would never take such things for granted again, or scoff at his father’s paranoia.

Once the code was entered, the bolts on the door retracted. It did not open as easily as he thought it would; the door was several inches of solid steel, and quite heavy as a result. He had to set down the grocery bag to pull the vault door open with both hands — something made all the more urgent as the distant booms of more pods crashing into the suburbs met his ears. Hauling the grocery bag into the panic room, he grabbed the door with both hands, and pulled it shut. He remembered the last light from the stairwell, fading to nothing as the vault door closed, sealing and bolting itself afterwards.

That would be the last gleam of natural light that he saw for weeks.

Event Log: 5/14/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Panic Room

10:21am SGT

That room would become his world over the coming days.

Even years after it had been built, Lalli was still not entirely sure why his father had it built in the first place. It wasn’t clear whether it was motivated by a specific fear, or a more generalized fear. He was still a teenager when his father had it built, and at the time, he had figured that it was a safe place to hide from robbers or burglars; and then realized later, in college, that if a robber was already in the house, running from your bedroom to the panic room would probably require putting yourself in danger just to get to the safe place.

At some point, he would arrive at the conclusion that the panic room’s existence was spurred on by a more generalized sense of fear. It was not a practical countermeasure in the event of a home invasion, and so it must’ve been intended for threats which you could see coming — a plague, planetary invasion, large-scale events. Even then, it did not seem like a practical answer to such threats — the idea, nearest that Lalli could figure it, was that you could hide in the panic room long enough to wait out the catastrophe, and then emerge alive once it was over. But if the catastrophe dragged on, eventually you’d be forced to leave the panic room when you ran out of supplies.

All in all, the panic room had never made much sense to him, and he had eventually settled on the conclusion that the panic room existed not for the sake of being used, but for providing peace of mind. The fact that it was there and that it existed was enough to calm his father’s fears about whatever threats might come to their world. It didn’t matter that the strategy of a panic room might be questionable at best; what mattered was that the option was there and available in case it was ever needed. It was an expensive way to buy some peace of mind, but his father was a military contractor, and money was not in short supply.

These were all thoughts he revisited in those first few days in the panic room, watching the house, and the world outside, through the constellation of cameras that been set up in and around the house. Though the panic room had started off simple when it was first built — just a reinforced, underground room, with supplies, ventilation, and running water — his father had, over the years, further upgraded and equipped it for handling a variety of longevity and security concerns. The vault door had come first, to prevent forced entry into the panic room; after that, a bathroom had been added, and then an air filtration system in the event that chemical or biological warfare was deployed outside. Next after that was a reinforcement of the walls so that they were to the same standard as the vault door; and last, and most recent, was the security camera setup integrated into the desktop computer stationed in the panic room. Each upgrade had always struck Lalli as an escalation of overkill; by the time the security cams had been set up, the family would joke that the panic room was now a war room on par with what Mokasha’s leaders would have in the event of a global catastrophe. His father, thankfully, always took it in good humor.

But now his father’s fears had been realized, and the panic room had transformed from a point of ridicule into the entirety of Lalli’s existence. This room was now his whole world: the reinforced walls, the lights set to brighten and dim in accordance with Mokasha’s day/night cycle, the screens that formed his only connection with the outside world. Solitary confinement of the self-imposed kind; a portrait of life within a space that was little more than three hundred square feet, if you counted the footage for the bathroom and some of the closets.

And truly, it was solitary — because as far as he could tell, his parents had never returned after the first day of the invasion.

He somehow had it in his head — as most people would, when operating on adrenaline and fear — that they would come back to the house and shelter with him in the panic room. It was the thing that simply made sense at the time; his father had built the panic room to be a safe place specifically for this kind of scenario, and it was logical to expect him to come back and use it, precisely for this scenario. And on that first day of the invasion, after he had gotten settled into the panic room and made sure that the door was secured, and everything was in working order, the first thing Lalli had done was send a text to his parents to check on them, and let them know what was happening.

There was no response, but that was to be expected; after all, his parents were hiking out in the mountains, and there was little to no reception out there. He expected he would have a response eventually, and so he busied himself with other matters, like checking the pantry and the rations in the panic room, and the gun locker adjacent to it. After that, he got onto the desktop, and tried to access the galaxynet, only to find he was unable to do so. Only websites that were hosted by servers on Mokasha were still up, and over the next couple of days, those would gradually be cut off as well. His parents never replied to his text message, and cut off from social media by the comms blackout, he was unable to reach any of his friends online.

He was alone, and isolated, in a way that he’d never really experienced before.

He eventually realized that if his parents had survived the first wave of the invasion, they likely would not return to an area contested or claimed by the Collective — which the suburbs of Amnia presently were. The pod that had decimated the house across the street had begun to form the epicenter of a spreading network of biomass that was creeping over the surviving walls and across the lawn, while the pod itself was starting to grow and take root. Symbiote soldiers were frequently visible around it, coming and going, as if it was a checkpoint or a safehouse. Through the security cameras installed on the family house and the lawn, he could see that in the hours immediately after the pod landed, the neighbors had all packed up and driven off — where to was unclear.

And so, unable to communicate with the rest of the galaxy, or anyone else on his planet,  with no response from his parents, and with the neighbors having fled on the first day, Lalli found himself alone in nearly every sense of the word. Unable to venture outside because of the Collective spores which were now present in the air, and detected in the filter that kept the panic room supplied with fresh air from outside. Waiting for a rescue that he knew was increasingly unlikely to ever arrive.

But he would not be alone for long.

Event Log: 5/15/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Panic Room

11:29am SGT

She arrived on the fourth day.

By that time, the Collective seemed to have firmly cemented their control over the suburbs. The only people he’d seen through the security system’s cameras were Symbiote soldiers, nearly always suited up in their biomass armor; there was the occasional roar of strike fighters tearing by overhead, and the occasional and distant thunder of ordnance being deployed. But those sounds had grown less and less frequent as time had gone on — a likely indication that the Collective was smothering resistance where they encountered it, as they always did when they invaded worlds.

The Symbiotes that he saw through the cameras typically ignored the houses in the neighborhood, preferring to visit the biomass structure that was starting to take shape across the street. So it came as a surprise when, on the fourth day after the invasion started, one of them stopped on the street outside of his house, stared at it for a long moment… and then started walking up the driveway.

At the time that this occurred, he was seated at the desk, feet kicked up on its edge as he watched the camera feeds, and idly doodling on the large sketchpad in his lap. When he noticed one of the Symbiotes paused outside his house, he’d stopped to watch them. When she started to walk up the driveway, he’d stared for a single moment, then practically fell out of his chair in the scramble to get to the vault door and check it to make sure it was firmly bolted and sealed.

After determining that the only way into the panic room was secured, he rushed back to the desk. There he could see the Symbiote coming up the porch, and peering in the windows. After this cursory examination, she came to the door and knocked on it, then stepped back and waited. The motions were surprisingly… human; even when covered in a protective layer of biomass and chitin plating, he could recognize something reminiscent of awkwardness in the way she waited in front of the door, looked around, rocked a little on the soles of her biomass boots while waiting.

She waited perhaps a minute more, then knocked again; and as she did so, Lalli took a seat at the desk, checking the other cameras. It didn’t appear to be a diversion; there were no other Symbiotes sneaking up on the house from other quarters. The ones that he could see were going about their business out on the street, without regard for what this particular Symbiote was doing at his house. While he had heard many things about the Collective, the exhibition of this kind of behavior was not one of them. He was under the impression that soldiers in occupied territory attained entry to buildings as they liked — not that they stopped to knock and wait for someone to answer.

After another minute or so of clearly receiving no response, she reached down to try the door, and found it opened. Lalli recalled, with dread, that when he had first fled to the panic room, he did not stop to lock the front door in the process. For which he couldn’t really be blamed; after all, a locked door wasn’t much of an obstacle to soldiers which typically carried acid rifles. But still, he was practically kicking himself as he now watched a Symbiote walk into the family house without encountering any resistance.

The camera coverage of the house was fairly comprehensive; most of the house was monitored in this manner, and his father had only excluded the bedrooms and bathrooms — places where one would naturally expect to have privacy. But the halls, living room, kitchen, stairwell, the study, and other ancillary rooms — these were all monitored. It made it easy to track an individual that was making their way through the house; you could follow them seamlessly from one camera feed to the next, with very few blind spots for a potential intruder to hide behind.

It was in this manner that Lalli followed the Symbiote’s progress through his house. She moved mincingly, tentatively, like a wild animal exploring a new place; her steps were slow, and paused often to glance around corners or peer through doorways. It seemed she had entered with the expectation of resistance or occupation, and moved cautiously, as if she might suddenly come upon a resident that had not yet vacated the premises. This caution, perhaps, also hinged upon her apparent lack of armament — unlike the Symbiotes outside, she did not carry a pistol or a rifle, and had nothing in the way of equipment beyond her armor.

So through the house she went, little by little, searching room by room. From the kitchen, to the front living room, and then the back living room; the porch, the garage, the master bedroom, then the upstairs. The bedrooms up there; the playroom, the laundry room, and then the attic as well. And finally, down the stairs to the door of the panic room, which she stood in front of, and studied for a while before knocking on it.

Lalli did not answer, not that she would’ve heard him even if he had. When there was no response, she spoke instead, the first time that she had spoken since she had entered the house. “Hello.” she had asked in a voice muffled by the spongy layer of fungus and the plates of chitin covering it. “Are you in there?”

There was an intercom system installed along with the cameras, but even if Lalli could use it, he did not. The obvious reason was that if he did, the Symbiote would know he was there, and she could then call over other Symbiotes that had more specialized equipment for breaking into fortified structures like the one he was currently in. So he stayed silent, because if they did not know he was here, they could not get at him, and he would be safe from being assimilated, at least until his food ran out.

Eventually, when there was no response to her enquiry, she turned and started back up the stairs. He had relaxed a bit at that, his mind immediately rushing to believe that she had concluded there was no one in the panic room, and therefore there was nothing to worry about. He also knew that was likely not the case, but he wanted to believe it very badly, because if it was true, his safety was secured for at least a little while more.

It was a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, he might escape this ordeal.

Event Log: 5/18/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Panic Room

5:14pm SGT

One must observe, however, that a glimmer is not a full beam; and that the Symbiote, far from leaving the house, actually took up residence there.

Lalli very soon came to realize this when she remained in the house and continued her explorations. She did not depart when the sun went down, and actually went to one of the upstairs bedrooms, and presumably slept there. The following morning, she was up and about not long after Lalli woke; back to exploring the house as she had done the day prior.

And Lalli, with his wall of surveillance screens, at once found this the most nervewracking and boring television he ever watched.

As he refused to give away his presence by communicating with her, he could only guess at her motives as she explored the house over the following days. A visit to the kitchen? Perhaps she was hungry. Or was she noticing how the pantry was ransacked in a rush? If she did notice that, would she come to the conclusion that the residents had fled? Or take it as a sign that perhaps someone was in the panic room? Impossible to say. He could only read from her body language, since she was encased with her biomass armor, and her head was covered by that chitin helm, providing no facial cues that could grant insight.

But those next few days revealed some things that made her less alien, despite the very alien sight of a Symbiote soldier loitering in his house. She demonstrated curiosity, idly poking through cabinets and drawers; she demonstrated boredom, sometimes flopping on the couch and studying the ceiling as she waited for something, though what she was waiting for was unclear. She exhibited hunger, quite plainly raiding the kitchen for food, and yet always ate it out of sight — presumably she had to regress her helm to eat, which would reveal the face of whatever was beneath that chitinous armor, but she always took food up to the bedrooms and ate there.

Ostensibly because she had noticed there were cameras in the house, and did seem to be aware that someone might be watching her.

That brought up the matter of intelligence, as she was clearly intelligent, or at least observant enough to have noticed the cameras. And the deliberate evasion of the cameras while she was eating spoke to… something, he was not sure what. Perhaps self-consciousness? Self-awareness? The fact that she knew someone might be watching her, and was taking steps to avoid revealing her identity while eating, spoke to something, something subjective and individualized. The motive could be any number of things, really; perhaps she was hiding her identity out of fear of retaliation. Or perhaps it was because of shame, the shame of invading another person’s house and eating their food and sleeping in their beds. Was it maybe because of embarrassment? Perhaps she did not consider herself attractive and so went to lengths to hide her appearance beneath her armor? But that would be rather juvenile, wouldn’t it? Juvenile, but not entirely implausible, right?

All questions which, though they nagged and nibbled and nipped at the edges of Lalli’s mind, went unanswered simply because he was not willing to confirm his presence to the other occupant of house, and possibly condemn himself by doing so.

Yet despite his lack of interaction, she did not leave. He began to suspect that she knew he was here; after all, there were better things for a Symbiote soldier to be doing during the invasion and assimilation of a world. Loitering in a residence for three days straight and not contributing to the invasion going on outside could only mean one thing: there was something in this house that she, or the Collective, wanted.

And they were willing to wait to get at it.

His suspicions were confirmed in part on the seventh day after the invasion began, when she found a data slate and turned it on. After messing with it for the better part of an hour, she went digging through one of the closets, found a small stepladder, and pulled it over to corner of the living room, where the camera was mounted. Then, climbing onto the stepladder, she held the slate up to the camera. A word processor was opened on the data slate, the font size set to large and a sentence typed across the new document.

CAN YOU SEE THIS?

It froze his heart. Despite being seated at the desk, doing nothing altogether strenuous, he broke out into a sweat. It was a paralyzing fear, one that would’ve robbed him of motion if he wasn’t already standing still. He didn’t know how to react, and even though he could not prove that she knew he was there, he could not banish that deep and abiding dread, the fear that she knew he was there.

She kept that slate held up to the camera for a long while, shifting every now and again when her arms got tired. He chose not to respond, hoping that she would eventually give up and accept the lack of response as a sign that there was nobody there. She eventually lowered the slate, and at first he thought that she had given up. But it was only so she could type out another message on the slate, and hold it back up to the camera.

I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE, LALLI.

That was even more jarring than the first message. Lalli felt his heart stammer in his chest as he pushed back from the desk.

Not only did she know he was there, but she knew his name.

At this point there was no avoiding it, no escaping it. She knew he was in the panic room; there was no point in remaining quiet in a bid to pretend like that was not the case. Reaching forward, he turned on the intercom, taking a deep breath. “How do you know my name?”

She lowered the slate, erasing what she had written and writing more. Then she held the slate up to the camera again.

YOUR PARENTS HAVE BEEN ASSIMILATED. THEY ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE NOW. THEY WANTED ME TO MAKE SURE YOU WERE SAFE.

Lalli leaned back, his chair creaking audibly. It was almost like falling back against the chair in defeat, a motion of shock followed by a slump of defeat. He stared at the words on the slate, reading them over and over again, and forgetting entirely that the intercom was still on. After a minute more, she lowered the slate, erasing what she had written and typing out another message before holding it up again.

I’M SORRY.

Lalli stared at the words, trying to process them, trying to process what all this meant for him. He was alone now. There would be no offworld reunion at a refugee camp, and he was now the sole survivor of his family. Trapped, with no way to escape the infestation now spreading across the Amnia suburbs.

“So you were sent here to make sure I got assimilated as well.” he said quietly.

She took the slate down, holding it up moments later.

NO. I CAME HERE TO MAKE SURE YOU WERE OKAY.

He stared at the words, fighting back the bitterness within. “Oh really. And why’s that?”

Down went the slate for a few moments. He noticed, as she was typing on it, that she paused several times to erase what she typed, and retype it, before holding it up to the camera once again.

THE COLLECTIVE DOES NOT WANT YOU TO DIE. YOUR LIFE HAS VALUE.

“I’m sure it does.” he’d said drily, taking off his glasses. “You want it that bad, come get it. I won’t go down without a fight.”

With that he’d reached out and turned off the intercom, then got up and walked away from the desk. As he took his repose on the bed, the Symbiote lowered the slate and typed another message on it, before holding it up to the camera.

But Lalli, with his back turned to the screens, did not see it.

And when she received no response after several minutes, she slowly lowered the slate, then stepped down the stepladder, and left the living room.

Event Log: 5/23/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Panic Room

10:58pm SGT

Grieving was a process, one which took time.

Many studies had found that for most well-adjusted individuals, the assimilation of a friend or family member was just as traumatic as a death event, even though the assimilated individual was still alive. But one did not need science to know that, because everyone in the galaxy knew what being assimilated by the Collective meant. It meant you were forever removed from social spheres outside the Collective. It meant the death of your old life; it meant losing everything, and becoming part of the Collective’s hivemind. You were good as dead to everyone outside the Collective, and moreover, you were viewed as an enemy by the militaries and powers once sworn to protect you.

Finding out that his parents had been assimilated was a traumatic event, and one that Lalli dealt with over the next few days. It wasn’t just the loss of his parents, but the loss of everything he assumed they’d be a part of, the major life milestones that most children wanted their parents to be present for. They would not be there for those milestones — and those milestones might not even occur. Trapped in the panic room with the Collective’s hold growing on the planet around him, Lalli was coming to expect that the outcomes that he was hoping for were narrowing to a select few options as time dragged on and the invasion progressed.

After the first day spent grieving for the assimilation of his parents, he had forced himself to get up, to keep living, to keep taking care of himself. Now that it was clear that the Collective knew he was here, barricaded in the panic room, his attention turned to the locker in the wall where the weapons were stored. After all, no doomsday preparation would be complete without some sort of stockpile of weaponry, and his father had not been remiss in that regard. Just as the panic room came equipped with at least a couple months of food, the gun locker was equipped with enough firepower to arm a squad of soldiers. It was quite an arsenal; Mokasha had very lax gun laws, a vestige from its days as a border colony, where civilians had more need to be armed than citizens in a metropolitan system. Residents of Mokasha were allowed to own pretty much any firearm just short of a rocket launcher, and Lalli’s father had carried that permissiveness to its natural conclusion: in addition to rifles, the gun locker contained at least one rotary grenade launcher, grenades, pistols, shotguns, plasma cells of varying capacities and chemical blends, and power cells to fuel all of it.

Lalli, who had only fired guns a few times in his life and had a thorough dislike of Mokasha’s lax approach to lethal weapon regulation, found himself a little overwhelmed when he first opened the gun locker to take stock of its contents.

There was little need or reason to unload more than a fraction of the gun locker’s contents; in the end, he settled for the simple solution of taking out a pistol, a shotgun, a rifle, a grenade, and enough power and plasma cells for each of the firearms. Even then, that still felt like overkill; he found it unlikely that he’d need or even be capable of using all these weapons in quick succession, but it seemed prudent to have additional weapons on hand in case the one he was using ran dry, or malfunctioned. The shotgun would be good for close engagements; the rifle for long engagements; the grenade for clearing an area, and the pistol for everything else. He took the time to familiarize himself with each firearm; how long it took to charge it, where the safety switches were, how to unload and reload each one, and how each one weighed in his hands. The guns were, as they always are to those that rarely handle them, heavier than they appeared to be on first glance.

After that, they were placed at various points around the room. The shotgun next to the bed, the pistol and grenade on the desk, the rifle by the door; so that no matter where he was in the panic room, there was always a weapon within arm’s reach. Upon reflection, he knew it was all very silly; if the Collective managed to breach the panic room, he doubted he’d have time to get more than a couple shots off before he was killed or subdued. But it was the principle of the thing; if he was going down, he would go down fighting, even if the fight was feeble, futile, or short-lived.

Yet once that was said and done, it left him with nothing to do once more.

One could say that cracking open the gun locker was not actually for the purpose of preparing self-defense, but to give himself something to do to distract him from his grieving. Lalli was perfectly aware that if the Collective so desired, they could break into the panic room with relative ease. It was obvious, both from his general knowledge of them and from what he saw on the security cameras outside the house, that they had access to a preponderance of resources, material, and manpower. Any firepower that he could bring to bear would be little more than a speedbump to a determined group of Symbiotes looking to get into the panic room. Cracking open the gun locker would do little to affect the outcome of the situation he was in.

Indeed, the only reason he did so was to distract himself — and now that he had made his preparations, he was left with nothing to distract himself once more.

And so, as those grieving often do, he returned to the bed, and lay there listless for the next two days. Alternating between sleeping and staring emptily at the ceiling; deliberately avoiding looking at the screens and the camera feeds upon them. There was a part of him that did not want to confront the reality that lay outside the door of the panic room, and reasoned that if he did not look at it, he would not think about it.

Yet he thought about it even so, and unable to evade the reality of his situation, started gazing at the screens once more.

He did so idly at first, only a glance here and there. Disinterest and depression were powerful forces, with apathy as a natural consequence of the first two. But boredom is also a powerful force, and one that began to assert itself as time wore on. He found himself watching the screens more and more often, tracking the Symbiote’s movements through the house, watching as she continued to explore it, rearranging things here and there. He also noticed the gradual changes outside the house as the biomass structure across the street was continually expanding, growing and starting to exceed the boundaries of the house it had destroyed. Veins of fungal tendrils extended away from the base of the structure, stretching away towards other houses in the neighborhood as the infestation slowly spread, day after day.

It was just another sign that time was not on his side.

Still, there was little he could do about it, and he knew that well. The window for action had long since passed; the thunder of artillery and precision-guided munitions had all but disappeared these days. Amnia was under the control of the Collective, and the same could likely be said for other parts of Mokasha — he could only guess, cut off as he was from Mokasha’s internet.

And so he contented himself with watching the Symbiote in his house. Several times she tried to communicate with him, raising the data slate to various cameras with questions typed out upon it; he could find neither the will nor the desire to respond. Now that she knew he was here, he was not sure that there was any tactical advantage to be forfeited in refusing to talk to her, but he liked to think he was protecting himself by minimizing contact with her. He watched through the screens as she whiled away her time in his house, checking through drawers, pulling books off the shelves and reading them to pass time, raiding the kitchen, and meeting with other Symbiotes at the door of the house now and again. She even let the spiderdrone out to clean the house, and started talking to it, calling it cute little names and cooing to it like a pet.

It was not at all what he expected from a member of the most feared hivemind in the galaxy.

Things came to a head one night; unable to sleep, he had taken to the desk, slouched in the chair and morosely doodling in his sketchbook, watching the screens for the Symbiote’s movements. She was likewise awake, having spent much of the evening reading one of the hardcopies of the Challenger comic books that he kept in the bookshelves in his room. As he watched, she finished the current issue, then wandered to the kitchen, extracting some bread from the freezer. Over the next several minutes, she fumbled obliquely about the toaster; it was unclear whether she didn’t understand how it worked, or was truly having trouble operating it with the thicker fingers of her biomass suit. She managed to get two slices of bread into the slots in the top, but from there, the rest of the dials and levers seemed to have her at a loss.

And Lalli, who had hesitated several times, reached forward and hesitated one last time before he turned on the speaker in the kitchen and spoke into the mic.

“You need to plug it in first.”

The sudden voice had her jumping at least two feet in the air, like a startled cat. The toaster flipped on the counter, the frozen slices of bread sliding out of it, as she twisted around, the recessed eyes of her helm glowing a dim blue as she scanned the room. Claws had slid out of the fingers of her biomass suit, hooked and wicked sharp at the tips. Lalli made a mental note of it — even if she didn’t carry a gun, she was amply armed and dangerous.

It took her a few moments before her eyes settled on the camera and the speaker attached to it. Once she did, she started to relax, the claws starting to retreat back into the fingers of her suit. “You… you scared the shit out of me. Have you been watching the whole time?”

Lalli opened his mouth, then paused. Debating whether he should answer, and if he did answer, what he should answer. And in the end, he decided it did not matter. “Just for the last while.”

She straightened up, fidgeting as if she was regaining her composure, reaching back to grab the toaster and set it back upright, delicately poking the bread slices back into the slots. “So I just have to… plug it in?” she asks, leaning to the side slightly, trying to glance behind the toaster.

“It’s an antique toaster. They use wired connections instead of contact charge pads.” Lalli explained, watching as she pulled out the cord from behind the toaster. “The outlet is that nub sticking out from the wall. Just plug it in.”

“Oh.” she’d said, gingerly poking the plug at the outlet until it slid in and clicked into place. “I’ve never seen one like this before.”

“Most people haven’t.” he’d replied, watching as she started messing with the dials and levers on the toaster. “Why are you eating our food?”

She gave a bashful shrug as the toaster started toasting. “It’s just… easier. This way I don’t have to go to the distribution hub to get rations. And the rations are… they don’t taste as good.”

Lalli did not reply immediately. There was a lot to process there, but mostly it was just the fact that she was exhibiting individuality that caught his attention. His impression of the Collective was that the Symbiotes that were a part of it lost their individuality, but she was very much proving that this was not the case. The fact that she was exhibiting something resembling selfishness went entirely against what he though he knew about the Collective.

“Do you have enough food down there?” she asked when he did not reply right away.

Lalli had pursed his lips, even though he knew she couldn’t see it. “That’s none of your business.”

“Oh. Sorry.” She stood there, looking away from the camera, having nothing much to do or fidget with while the toast was toasting. “Well, if you do need food, tell me. I can pull something sealed out of the freezer and leave it in front of the vault door. If it’s sealed it won’t have spores in it.”

“The air will be filled with spores.” he’d pointed out.

“Yeah. I suppose so.” she’d said. “What will you do if you run out of food?”

He didn’t answer that. The same question had strayed across his mind more than a few times, looming large on the calendar. At some point, the panic room’s cache of comestibles would run out, and he would be faced with a choice: venture out to find food, or starve and die. He could drag it out by rationing his supplies, but sooner or later, he would run out. The panic room had never been intended for an indefinite siege — it was a place to wait out a disaster and wait for things to get better. But if things never got better…

“We’re really not that bad, you know.”

Her voice jerked him out of his ruminations. With his absence of reply, she had taken it upon herself to continue talking, fidgeting with her fingers as she did so.

“We used to be people like you. Many of us still are people like you. Normal people just trying to make ends meet and do our best in life. We don’t suddenly turn into monsters when we become part of the Collective. We still have wishes, hopes, dreams… problems, too. But in the Collective, people understand your problems. They’ll help you fix them. And then they’ll help you chase your dreams. And you can help other people chase their dreams too.”

It was strange, hearing that. He’d known, in a general sense, that the Collective viewed themselves as helping people, despite often assimilating entire populations against their will. But he had never heard that the Collective helped people chase their dreams. He thought that once you were part of the Collective, your overriding purpose was the greater good, the benefit of the many over the few. That personal desires were put aside in the service of the Collective’s glacial expansion. But if there was more than just mindless service to the hivemind…

At that moment the toaster dinged, breaking the silence. After a few seconds, Lalli set his sketchbook on the desk, laying his pencil beside it. “I have to go to bed now.” he’d said, before turning the speaker off. Even as he said the words, he’d questioned why he’d said them — why it would matter to the Symbiote that he was asleep, and why he felt obligated to tell her, as if he owed her something, which he told himself he did not.

“Oh. Okay.” the Symbiote had said. “Sleep well, Lalli.” With that, she had turned back to the counter, gingerly picking the toast from the toaster and laying it on the plate so she could start buttering it. Lalli eventually surrendered the desk and returned to the bed, settling in beneath the covers.

But even though he said he was going to sleep, he lay awake for quite a while, thinking of the short conversation they’d had.

Event Log: 5/27/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Panic Room

11:47pm SGT

That was the start of their occasional conversations.

Having spoken to her once, it was easier to do it the next time. It did not mean that they held conversations with regularity; Lalli still felt a vague sense of betrayal whenever he did so, as if he would be accused of fraternizing with the enemy if anyone ever found out. This kept their conversations to a minimum at first, as very few people enjoy the sensation of being a traitor.

But there were times and instances where it felt innocent and harmless to converse with her. Often these instances took place in the kitchen, whenever she struggled to operate one of the appliances. He would watch for a while, and if she was unable to figure it out after a few minutes, he would turn on the speaker and direct her, and that would often morph into a conversation out of that interaction. Sometimes the conversations were tense, with some topics never broached, but always looming in the background. It was to be expected, with the dynamic between a local civilian and an invading soldier.

But as the conversations started to add up, their interactions started to become more… relaxed was not the right word — perhaps it was better described as familiar. They started to become more familiar with each other, and that brought with it a certain ease in conversation. Without actually asking questions to that effect, they were able to come to know each other better, if only by the accrual of small things noticed and observed through conversation. Small details in answers, side comments sometimes tangential to an original question. That was not to say that they knew each other well — but they knew each other better than complete strangers.

Still, their conversations largely remained products of necessity. Lalli did not make a habit of speaking to her unless he felt he needed to, and those instances were only when she was struggling to operate some appliance within the house. It did not feel right to try and make small talk with her; she was always the one that went in that direction during their conversations, and he suspected this was deliberate. He was not naïve, and knew that her persistent presence within the house, and her attempts to engage him, were likely all in service to one goal: getting him to come out of the panic room and accept assimilation into the Collective.

It was not until late one night that he yielded to his curiosity and engaged her on something other than mere necessity. His confinement to the panic room had done a number on his sleep schedule, and he would often find himself awake well past the times that he would usually be asleep. The Symbiote seemed likewise unstable; he would often find her awake past midnight, reading or making food or roaming the house. On this particular late evening, so close to midnight, she was again reading through some of his comics, a growing pile of which were on the living room coffee table. After some time spent watching and doodling, he reached forward, turning on the speaker for the living room.

“Do you read those just because you’re bored, or because you actually like them?”

The sudden voice didn’t appear to startle her quite as much as it did that first time in the kitchen. She seemed to have grown used to it during their occasional interactions, and lowering the comic book, she looked up until she spotted the camera in the living room. “I like them. I like comics and manga, but I could never really afford the hard copies. The whole printing process is pretty pricey, so I could only ever afford the digital stuff.”

That gave him pause, and he thought about what he was about to say. Hesitating, not wanting to sound too friendly, and yet there were some things he was curious about. “Yeah. Print runs are kinda expensive. They don’t cost as much as other stuff, but the price tag’s a little steep when you’re in a lower income bracket.” He gave that a moment to settle before going on. “I guess you don’t get paid a lot.”

“In the Collective? I get paid decently.” she’d answered, letting the comic rest on her lap. “We have an economy. It’s a big, complicated one, but well-regulated and with strong protections for workers. But before the Collective, yeah. I was kinda… poor. I wasn’t starving but I could never get ahead.”

He again paused, as he so often did when talking to her. “How long have you been part of the Collective?”

“About half a year. I was on a passenger route between systems and the crew decided to try shaving travel time by trying to cut through Collective space.”

“Ah.” he’d said simply, quietly. “I see.”

“Yeah.” had been her simple answer, soon after lapsing into silence. After a moment, she lifted the book in her lap. “What about you? I guess if you’re buying print runs of comics, you’re pretty well-off.”

“I’m… okay, I guess.” he’d answered, leaning back in his chair. “A lot of the hard copies are gifts from my parents. I make enough money to pay the bills and save some afterwards. It’s not a lot of money, but… it’s enough to live on. Well, used to be enough to live on.” He rolled his pencil in his fingers, staring at it. “Don’t know what good that money will be now that Mokasha’s being assimilated. The bank will probably lock the accounts of every customer they have on this planet and seize the funds to keep it all from being withdrawn. Though I’m not even sure what good galactic credits are anymore. The Collective’s got an entirely separate economy. You all don’t even use the same money we do.”

“Credits are used for the transition period for a world that’s being assimilated. It makes things easier for the people being assimilated.” she’d answered. “The wealth of the rich is usually seized and reallocated to social and health services, or to projects needed to create reasonable living conditions for all members of the society. If you’re in the lower income brackets, they usually don’t touch your money.”

“That’s probably the only piece of good news I’ve heard in the last two weeks.” he’d sighed. “Don’t think my parents would be too happy about that, though.”

“Are your parents rich?”

“No. Just middle-class. Upper-ish, I think.”

“They’ll likely face a higher tax rate than they’re accustomed to.”

“Figured. Taxes on Mokasha are kinda nonexistent.” He’d paused for a moment to mull over the conversation at large. His world was falling apart around him, yet here he was talking finance and taxes with an invading soldier. Anything to avoid the hard topics, he supposed.

“Things will be better once Mokasha’s assimilated.” she’d said. “The people of this world will be given the rights they are owed, and a kinder, more responsible society will be created. It will take your people time to adjust; your world’s problems will require years and decades to be fixed. But they can be fixed through the wisdom of the Collective.”

He’d pursed his lips at that, even though she would not see the expression. “Rehearsing the party line?” he’d asked.

“It’s not an empty promise. We came here to fix your world. We’re going to make it a better place, like the Collective always does.” She’d paused, as if she was searching where to go from there. “You used to work in the service industries, right?”

Lalli’s answer was slower. Reluctant. “Yeah.”

“So you know what it’s like to deal with people. With customers.”

“You could say that.”

“You’ve had to deal with people that treat you like trash. You’ve had to put up with entitled middle-age pissants, or geriatrics that throw temper tantrums you’d expect from a spoiled preteen. You’ve had to deal with people shout at you for just for doing your goddamn job. Right?”

Lalli had felt his blood pressure rising just thinking about it. “Yeah.”

“We don’t have that in the Collective.”

It had taken him a moment to process those words. “You what?”

“That doesn’t exist in the Collective. Since we’re a hivemind, the distress of one individual ripples out to those around them. You will feel the unhappiness and stress that you cause others. The Collective is a truly civil society, because when you are unkind to your fellow Symbiotes, you must shoulder part of the burden you have placed upon them. It encourages people to be kinder to each other, more civil and patient and understanding.”

Lalli had simply sat for a long moment, trying to absorb that. “So in the Collective, customers are… nice to service employees?” he’d said hesitantly, as if the very concept of being treated civilly was foreign to him.

“Yes. People are more civil, period.” By this point she had closed the book so she could focus on their conversation. “Deaths by criminal act are almost nonexistent, because we can sense each other’s intent through the hivemind. Crime is likewise rare, because we sense the needs of our fellow Symbiotes, and move to assist them. The hivemind gives us empathy and compassion for our fellow Symbiotes, since we sense and share their suffering. To do harm to another Symbiote is to do harm to yourself, and the greater whole that we are part of. Injustice for one is injustice for all.”

This idea, this system, and its effects and consequences and how it worked, left him largely thunderstruck. “But in the Collective, you don’t have free will.” he’d started to point out. “There’s a hierarchy; genetically encoded command sequences that Symbiotes at certain ranks have—”

“There are, yes. But they’re rarely used in a normal Collective community.” she’d countered quickly. “Compulsion is only leveraged against Symbiotes who present a threat to themselves or the community, and those are typically the ones that have psychological abnormalities or trauma that has not yet been resolved. We also use it during assimilation campaigns, for freshly assimilated Symbiotes, but that’s also to prevent them from doing things that would harm themselves or others. It is used less and less often as a society is fully assimilated into the Collective, and restructured to be more just and equitable to all its members. In a fully normalized Collective society, the use of compulsion is passingly rare.”

“People should have the choice… they should have free will to choose their own actions.” was his protest, but it was not a forceful one, and more like repeating something that he had heard others repeat countless times.

“Do you really believe that?” she’d asked. “Is that what you’re telling yourself when some entitled bitch is screaming at you, demanding to see the manager — and over what? An expired coupon? An item that’s out of stock? A product that’s been slightly dented? Making you miserable over the most arbitrary, trite shit that is beyond your control? When that happens, are you telling yourself that people deserve their free will?”

He did not answer that. But he did not have to. Because he knew the answer, and she knew that he knew the answer.

“You aren’t telling yourself that.” she’d continued after a moment of silence. “Because you’re the victim of their free will. And if you could, you’d take away the ability for them to choose their own actions, because they’re using their free will to abuse you, and probably other people as well. Free will is not a right. It’s a privilege, earned by being a contributing, compassionate, civil member of society. And if you can’t be that kind of citizen, then you don’t deserve the privileges that come with being a part of society.” She’d paused at that point to let that sink in. “Tell me I’m wrong, Lalli.”

He was again silent. Within him, something struggled on principle; he had been raised in a society that had always championed the idea that free will was absolute and must always be inviolate. That individuality was somehow inextricable from freedom, and the Collective deprived a person of both. But the Symbiote in his house was a contradiction of that unproven dogma. And moreover, she was speaking to the truth of free will — not the idealized version that the Colloquium glamorized, but the ugly, raw, reality of free will:

That many people used it, and abused it, to do terrible, awful things, and to be terrible, awful people. Not just to their enemies, but to their fellow citizens, and sometimes even to their families and friends.

“Are you still there, Lalli?”

He realized that he had been silent during much of the Symbiote’s rant, unable to find the means to contradict her. “I’m here.” he’d said faintly.

“I didn’t mean to come on that strong.” she’d said. It sounded like an apology, even if there wasn’t one specifically stated. “I worked in customer-facing roles for pretty much my entire life until I was assimilated, so I…”

“I know.” he’d said, again quietly. “I have too. I know what you’re talking about.”

They both lapsed into silence. Though separated by walls and reinforced steel, and though they were not linked by the hivemind, each one knew what the other was thinking of, and feeling. It was the simmering, long-burning resentment that all too many service workers knew; the bubbling, suppressed rage that roiled beneath strained smiles and neutral, stony expressions. It was the fury of being treated like a second-class citizen or a servant, instead of with the dignity and respect deserved by all sapient creatures. It was the burning, ravenous hunger for revenge; to see their tormenters humbled and brought low and made to suffer humiliation for their cruelty and antagonism. And all this while being paid a wage of pittance, and being told by management that the suffering was simply part of the job.

And in that moment, presented with a version of society where the lower class no longer had to suffer the cruelty and abuse that was now endemic to the service industries, Lalli would’ve gladly thrown away the old order to embrace the promise of a better society offered by the Collective.

But still he hesitated, on the suspicion that there would still be a catch or two to being assimilated by the Collective. Even if he desperately craved the version of society where people like him could have their dignity back, where the entitled and inconsiderate were put in their place and taught things like basic decency — he still hesitated. He hesitated, not knowing what the Collective would demand of him in turn, and afraid that the price would be higher than he would like to pay.

“I should go to bed. It’s late.” he’d said eventually. The conversation had sputtered out; there was nothing left to discuss when they were both in accordance. He simply didn’t want to confess, out loud, that he agreed with her. Even though he suspected that she already knew.

“I should probably sleep too.” she’d concurred, setting aside the book in her lap and standing up. “Have a good night, Lalli.”

With that she had left the living room, headed back up the stairs to one of the bedrooms. Lalli watched her go on the screens, and when she was out of sight, he had gotten up from the desk and returned to his bed. But just as he had several nights before, he had simply lain there, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about the conversation that they’d had.

Thinking about the promise of a better, kinder society.

Event Log: 5/31/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Panic Room

10:10am SGT

After that day, their conversations became more frequent, and were initiated more often from a desire to talk, rather than a need to communicate for utilitarian purposes.

They spoke often in the mornings, after both of them had woken up, and sometimes in the afternoons, and often in the evenings, when both of them were bored. Sometimes it would be initiated from the Symbiote’s side, sometimes from Lalli’s side. When the Symbiote initiated, it was often to ask Lalli how he was doing, or to ask him where something in the kitchen was. When Lalli initiated, it usually because he had something on his mind, and he wanted the Symbiote to explain something about the Collective.

The difficult topics were often avoided — like the question of what Lalli would do when he ran out of food, or how the invasion of Mokasha was progressing. It wasn’t that either of them weren’t curious about these topics, but to discuss them might destabilize the uneasy acquaintance they had made with each other. As things stood, they were comfortable enough talking with each other; one might even say they were getting to the point of being friends. They knew enough about each other to make jokes, and in the course of talking with each other, found that they were not so different.

The Symbiote was, by her own admission, human, like Lalli was. She apparently kept her biomass armor on because she was required to; it was a matter of safety and anonymity, which was why she always ate upstairs in one of the bedrooms, away from the purview of the house’s security system. She was almost two years younger than Lalli, which had come as a surprise to him; he had expected she would be older, perhaps because of the way the helm distorted her voice. And just as he had, she had worked in the service industries, dealing with the gutterscum of galactic society, before being assimilated into the Collective.

For his part, Lalli had gradually opened up to her, more or less confirming his love of comics and anime, and admitting his hobby of doodling. Doodling, he called it, to downplay any expectation that what he produced was of any quality; but after repeated pressuring from the Symbiote, he eventually shared some images of his work to the holoarray in the living room. It became clear to her at that point that he’d downplayed his capabilities, and the ‘doodles’ very easily fell in the category of art, demonstrating an obvious command of the human form and stylistic elements that were drawn in part from seminal works in the fields of animation and sequential art. The decision to stick to physical media, rather than digital media, was a product of struggle to adapt to a frictionless drawing surface, he’d explained — he wished at times he’d tried harder to master digital drawing, but he’d just never been able to get past that frictionless sensation.

So it went, each of them getting to know each other through their little conversations, even as they bided their time, knowing that a decision point would eventually be reached. Lalli was all too aware of that; one morning he woke to the intermittent beeping of one of the panic room’s filtration systems, and after pulling back the panel and checking the interface, found that the air filter was reaching the end of its lifespan. The amount of foreign contaminants was slowing the airflow into the panic room, and if it wasn’t changed soon, it would eventually be clogged altogether — with Collective spores.

That first filter change brought home the realization that running out of food might not be the most pressing of his concerns. It was entirely possible that the food cache would outlast the spare filters — which were burning through their lifespans very quickly since the air outside was thick with Collective spores, dispensed by the spires that had cropped up across the landscape over the last two weeks.

This revelation forced a reconsideration of his priorities, now that death by suffocation looked like it would occur sooner than a death by starvation. How soon that would be, he wasn’t sure, but he couldn’t imagine he had more than two or three weeks of filter life among all of the spare filters in the utility closet — perhaps less, depending on whether the saturation of Collective spores in the air increased over the coming days. It didn’t much alter the end result — at the end of the day, it still boiled down to death or assimilation. The only thing that had really changed was the timetable.

And that timetable was slowly ticking by, both for Lalli and the Symbiote. He filled his time with sketching, while she filled hers with reading and exploring the house from time to time when she felt the need to stretch her legs. It was on the return from one such excursion that she returned with something from the upstairs room, and Lalli quickly took notice — and addressed it.

“Where’d you get that?” Though she’d heard his voice dozens of times by now, she noticed something in the tenor that she hadn’t heard for a while. It was tension, bordering on anger; a tone of voice that was polite but still communicated aggression. She’d turned around, searching the living room until she found the camera, then looked down at the mug she was holding in her hands.

“This?” she’d asked, holding up the mug. It was a curious little thing; bright orange on the exterior, cream-colored on the interior, and inside, the ceramic had been cast in the figure of a fox sitting at the bottom of the cup. If there was opaque liquid in the mug, the fox figurine would be hidden from view, slowly revealed as more and more of the drink was sipped away. “It was in a box upstairs.”

“Damn right it was. Go put it back. You’re not supposed to be rifling through that.” he’d demanded. Not that he could enforce it, as it would require him to leave the panic room; but she’d complied with a shrug, turning around and returning back up the stairs she’d just descended.

But instead of putting the mug back, she’d returned with the entire box — a standard-issue box mailer one would use for interstellar shipping, and that Lalli had been keeping in the corner of his room.

“Hey.” he’d protested over the speaker. “I told you to put the mug back.”

“I did put it back.” she’d answered, setting the box on the living room’s coffee table. “I put it back in the box. You didn’t tell me I couldn’t bring the box downstairs.”

“You weren’t— you can’t do that!” he’d continued to protest as she sat down on the couch and started thumbing through the box. “That’s my stuff, you can’t just go rifling through it!”

“Are you going to come out here and stop me?” she’d asked, lifting her chitin-helmed head and looking towards the camera.

He’s stared for a minute, then leaned back in his chair heavily, staring sulkily at the screen. When there was no answer, the Symbiote went back to picking through the box’s contents.

“This isn’t really your stuff, is it?” she’d asked, pulling out a little plush fox and looking it over. “You’ve never thrown a fit when I touched your books.”

For a moment he’d considered being difficult, but then gave up the impulse. It would’ve been for stubbornness and spite and nothing more, and there was no point to it. Making a big deal out of it would only make her more curious about it, so he’d sighed and picked up his sketchbook again. “It was a care package I was putting together for a friend.”

“That’s nice of you.” she’d observed, pulling out what looked like a box of fox-shaped candies. “Does your friend like foxes?”

“Are you really asking me that question?” he’d asked in return, picking up his mechanical pencil and checking the graphite lead.

“It does seem rather obvious, doesn’t it.” she’d said, holding up what looked like a pair of thigh-high fox-themed kneesocks. “…oo la la. She must really love foxes.”

Even though the Symbiote couldn’t see him, Lalli had still hunched his shoulders defensively, heat rising to his face in the cold air of the panic room. “Those were supposed to be a joke.” he’d muttered, his pencil scratching furiously at his sketchbook. “Something about how she’s a fox in socks. Or. Something. Like that.” His muttering got progressively quieter, almost inaudible by the end.

“Cute.” she’d remarked, setting the socks aside. “Seems like she’s an important friend to you.”

“She is. Was.” he’d muttered.

“Was?”

“It’s complicated.” he’d said. The pace of his shading had slowed somewhat at that point.

“Is she not your friend any more?” the Symbiote had asked, pausing in her excavation of the box’s contents.

Lalli had not answered right away, though his shading slowed as he considered the question and searched for an answer. “I don’t know.” he’d said quietly. “She doesn’t respond to my messages anymore. I don’t know if it was something I said, or if I was too annoying, or if she’s got other people she likes hanging out with more than me. Maybe I’m just not… interesting. Which is… okay, I guess. People don’t always stay friends forever. But if that’s the case, I just wish she would tell me, so I can move on. It’s hard, not knowing. Just hanging in limbo.”

The Symbiote did not reply right away. When she did, her words were pointed, though still phrased delicately. “Seems like she is… more than a friend.”

“We’ve known each other for a while.” he’d answered, his eyes fixed on his sketchbook, rather than the screens in the panic room. “I realized at some point that… I don’t know. Sometimes you just realize you like someone, and you don’t know why. It can be a lot of little things all coming together at once, or over time. And I think she liked me at one point as well, though I don’t know if that’s the case anymore.”

“But you were putting together a care package for her.” the Symbiote had pointed out.

“Yeah. I do one every year. It’s how I show I care about her. I tell others it’s just because she’s a friend, but…” He’d paused to size up his sketch, flipping his pencil around to the eraser end so that he could start rubbing away some stray lines. “I wanted to bring her out here. To see Mokasha, meet her in person, get to know her. I was saving up money for it; I was going to pay for her tunnelspace ticket, take a week off work, have her stay with us while showing her around Amnia. I had a whole list of things we could’ve done.”

“What sort of things?”

“All sorts of things.” he’d replied, brushing eraser shavings off his sketchbook. “A lot of them were outdoor things, hikes. Amnia sits at the foot of a mountain range. There’s lots of hikes and slot canyons you can do. There’s even one with a river running through it in the spring, and you can rappel down through a series of four waterfalls in the canyon — that one’s really nice. There’s also a lake around here, I figured she might like paddleboarding there — that’s not as intense as waterfall rappelling. And there were a ton of places I wanted to take her to eat — there’s a creperie in Amnia that makes the best crepes you’ve ever had, both savory and sweet. And there’s this Moksan noodlehouse I like going to on weekends, and then there’s a sushi restaurant that I visit twice a year…”

He’d trailed off at that point, going quiet. Coming to the realization, perhaps, that this was a pointless list, considering the present state of Mokasha. “Suppose it doesn’t matter now.” he’d said softly. “I’m trapped down here, and besides, she hasn’t replied to my messages or chatted with me in months. With everything that’s happened, it’s kind of a moot point; I’ll probably never see or talk to her again. Maybe that’s for the best.”

“For the best?” the Symbiote had asked. “How do you figure?”

“I wouldn’t want her to feel guilty or sad about my situation.” he’d said, returning to doodling in his sketchbook. “She ought to be able to get on with her life without worrying about me. Even if she ghosted me, I’d want her to have peace of mind. It’s one of the few things you can’t buy in this galaxy, and withholding that from someone else is a dick move.”

“You’re a lot more forgiving than other people would’ve been.”

He’d shrugged, even though he knew she couldn’t see it. “Living with hate is a heavy burden. Sometimes you just have to learn to… let things go. Even if they’ve hurt you. Life isn’t fair, but it still goes on, and all that.”

“Yeah. I suppose it does.” she’d said, starting to put the items back in the box. Though the mood had started out playful, it had turned melancholy over the course of their conversation. Lalli watched her putting the gifts away, and after a minute, spoke again.

“You can have the candies, if you want.” he’d said quietly. “Obviously I’m never going to get to send the package to her, and I wouldn’t want them to go to waste. Figure it’d be a welcome change of pace from the rations you get at the distribution center.”

“Really?” she’d asked, with the box of fox-shaped candies in hand. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. It’s okay.”

“Well… thank you.” she’d said, setting them aside. “Do you want me to put the box outside the door the the panic room? Just in case you want to have it to yourself.”

“It’ll be covered in spores.” he’d pointed out. At this point, he wasn’t sure if she was trying to pull a fast one on him, or if she’d sincerely forgotten that her kind exhaled assimilation spores with every breath. Not a lot of them, and a single breath wouldn’t be enough to infect someone that had been vaccinated, but she’d been in the house for over two weeks now. The air was probably saturated with her spores at this point, to say nothing of the spire across the street that was continually pumping spores into the atmosphere.

“Oh… true.” she’d said, looking around after picking up the box. “I’ll just put it on the kitchen table here, then.”

She’d gone to do exactly that, and Lalli said nothing to it. The conversation was largely over by that point; he had nothing left to say after that, and she didn’t really know where to pick up from there. In the end, he had gone back to doodling, which she had gone to the living room to sit on the couch, and stare out the front window, watching the spire that had consumed the ruins of the neighbor’s house across the street. Into their silence they fell once more, left to their own thoughts as each one contemplated what had been discussed, and reflected upon their lives and the opportunities that had been taken from them by events far bigger than themselves.

Wondering, and pondering, whether those lost chances had been lost due to happenings bigger than themselves, or if that was just something they told themselves to shift the blame from their own flaws and deficiencies.

Event Log: 6/6/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Panic Room

2:19am SGT

In the days that followed, nothing much of substance was discussed. There was a sense, between both of them, that they were each growing tired of their environs; Lalli was growing weary of being confined to a single room for weeks, while the Symbiote seemed to be getting restless. She had explored the house several times now, and seemed to be discovering less and less on each exploration; aside from the panic room itself, there wasn’t a single nook or cranny of it that she hadn’t explored. The food in the kitchen had either been eaten or gone bad, and what had gone bad, she had thrown out. Specifically, she had thrown it outside, where the mat of fungal biomass creeping across the neighborhood had quickly grown over it, decomposing it to use as fuel to further its spread. With the kitchen cleaned out, all that was left was the food in the freezer, which was quickly being depleted as well. It wouldn’t be long until she was back to relying solely on the rations from the Collective distribution center.

The world outside had changed in the meantime. It would soon be a month since the invasion began, and the change on the skyline outside was considerable. Biomass had started spreading through the suburbs of Amnia, coating buildings in a fungal layer, with some buildings being used as the foundation for larger, fungal structures growing on top of them. Hallmarks of a Collective community were beginning to manifest out of this fungal network, as different outgrowths started to diverge and specialize into specific organs and structures. The spread wasn’t just horizontal, but vertical as well; the network of fungal tendrils had started to venture downward. As the Collective typically did when entrenching itself on a world, it was starting to create the beginnings of a subterranean infrastructure that could house and protect a population in the event of an orbital bombardment. It would be decades before such a project reached full fruition, but all the more reason for the fungal network to get it started now.

There had been some instances of people returning to the neighborhood; cars that had departed in the first hours of invasion could occasionally be seen returning to their house, their occupants now members of the Collective. For when fleeing had failed and one had inevitably been assimilated, what else was left but to return home? After being assimilated, many would return to their homes; out of shock, out of loss, out of fear, out of a need to be somewhere that felt safe while they acclimated to the new reality of the hivemind they were part of, and the mass trauma that they were experiencing in realtime with the rest of their planet.

It of course begged the question of why Lalli’s parents had not returned yet, something he had asked himself as he watched many of the neighbors’ cars trickle back into the neighborhood over the course of weeks. He could only see so much of the street outside through the house’s security cameras, but all too often, he would watch the road intently from the porch cameras, wishing, waiting, and hoping that he would see his father’s truck cruising down the road to their driveway. He did not know why he hoped for this, knowing that his parents had been assimilated; but deep down, he sensed that he did not want to die, but wanted someone he trusted to come back, and give him the push he needed to finally give up and join the Collective. All his life he had been conditioned to fear the Collective, and with good reason. He could not throw away that fear now even if he wanted to; it was something that had been ingrained into him from the moment he could talk, just the same as it was ingrained into nearly every galactic citizen outside the Collective. Being freed from the grasp of that fear would require years of deconstructing a worldview that had been relentlessly pounded into his head by government institutions and popular media alike.

Looming over it all was the dwindling supply of air filters, which were now only lasting a few days at best. Every time he pulled one out to change it, the filter screen would be covered with a thick, dull blue mat of accumulated spores on the intake side. He had learned quickly that filter changes had to be handled with the utmost care; the first time he had changed the filter, he had almost dropped it, and a puff of spore dust went swirling into the air.

He’d almost panicked; Collective spores were typically so small that they could not be seen by the naked eye. Being able to see them meant that you were dealing with an extremely concentrated dose; he’d instantly jerked his head way, holding his breath and carefully setting the filter down before twisting around and scrambling to the closet to grab the vacuum. Returning with a shirt tightly tied over his mouth and nose, he’d finished changing the filter, put the old one in a bag, sealed it up, and proceed to thoroughly vacuum the filter assembly, along with everything in the general vicinity of the assembly, and the air itself. He’d imagined he’d looked fairly stupid, waving the vacuum hose around in the air trying to suck up spores that were more or less invisible when dispersed, but the alternative was to let those spores disseminate through the panic room. He didn’t know how much would be required for the spores to infect him, but he did know that with a high-enough dosage, or prolonged exposure, even a vaccinated individual would fall prey to the assimilation spores.

Every filter change after that had been carefully planned and executed, making sure to turn off all sources of air movement he could control, and carefully handling and bagging the expired filters with gloves and a filtration mask, then vacuuming the filter assembly before pushing it back into the wall. These frequent and nervewracking filter changes forced a consideration of what alternatives were available if the filtration assembly failed, and they were passingly few; there was a couple small tanks of oxygen, and a breathing mask one could attach to them. That was all that he was able to find within the supply closet, and presumably it would not last him more than a day, if that.

With that, the shape of the end had become clear; once he ran out of filters, he would be forced to resort to the oxygen tanks, and after that… it was either yield to assimilation, or suffocate to death. It didn’t really come as a surprise; he’d known for weeks now that his fate was all but sealed. The endpoint had been vague, but largely because he’d avoided thinking about it; but now it was more or less unambiguous. He would either die of asphyxiation after using up all the filters and exhausting the oxygen tanks, or he would finally give in and yield to assimilation.

It was an understandably depressing way to end a monthlong standoff.

The mind, of course, revolts against such things in most cases. Especially when one has been nurtured and raised on tales of resistance at all costs and unlikely victories. Something inside Lalli simply did not want to accept the probable outcome; something wanted and needed to believe that there was a way out of this. Something in him needed to have hope, because all sapient things needed hope, needed something to look forward to, a reason to keep living.

But hope, or rather the need for it, can be corrupted by desperation, just like any other emotion.

It was why, one night, he found himself checking and charging the plasma pistol he’d pulled out of the gun locker. Persistent thoughts had kept him awake well past midnight; improbable schemes of leaving the panic room, going up into the house, getting the car from the garage, and driving to the starport and trying to escape Mokasha. He had gone back and forth several times about whether the plan was executable; with the arsenal in the gun locker, it seemed feasible that he might have enough firepower to make it that far. Getting the bulk of that arsenal upstairs would require several trips, however, and doing that without alerting the Symbiote would be impossible.

And so the possibility that he might have to kill her had entered his mind.

It was not that he wanted to, but rather that it was a necessary step to achieving a certain outcome. It seemed obvious to him that if he left the panic room and attempted to leave the house, fully armed, she would move to prevent that. And he understood that she would be moved to act not necessarily because she wanted to, but because she was obligated to as a soldier in the service of the Collective’s army. Neither of them would be acting as a result of animus towards each other, but in service to some further goal or obligation.

At least, that was what he told himself as he strapped on the oxygen mask and, for the first time in almost a month, opened the door to the panic room.

He was quick to slip out and close the door behind him, knowing that the air outside the panic room was diffused with Collective spores, and the longer the door was left open, the more spores would get into the panic room. Once the door was closed, he’d made his way up the stairs, moving quietly. The breathing mask was tightly strapped around his face, the oxygen tank riding in a carrying harness slung across his back; it was an ungainly arrangement, but it was the best he could do with what he presently had.

Though he’d been watching the house through the cameras over the last month, it wasn’t the same as seeing it in person; the colors, muted by the night, were still more vivid than they were on the screens. It was unusual, being able to see the house beyond the fixed angles that he could only ever see from the cameras; almost refreshing. But the rejuvenated perspective hadn’t slowed him on his way to the living room, where the Symbiote had fallen asleep reading another one of his comic books on the couch.

She was sprawled out lengthwise across it in the way that implied she’d been sitting up at one point, but had slowly slumped to the side, eventually curling up on the couch with one of the pillows tucked beneath her head and the comic book half-closed in one of her hands. This was the first time he’d gotten a look at her up close and in person; he could clearly see the rugged texture of the chitin plating covering most of her exterior, and the decidedly softer, almost rubbery appearance of the fungal layer of the suit beneath it. He could catch glimpses of blue veins between the gaps in the chitin, and realized that the biomass armor must be a living organism unto itself — something akin to a full-body symbiote, very like bioengineered by Collective geneweavers.

And it was at this point that he realized that — at least while she was in the suit — she definitely had more mass and strength than he did. And that if she stood up, she’d be just as tall as he was — possibly even taller. The reason he hadn’t come to this conclusion earlier was because in the vast majority of instances, the security cameras were mounted on the ceilings or in the corners of rooms, so the view through the panic room screens was always from a general height advantage. Seeing her up close and in person made it clear that she was equipped for combat, even if she’d spent the last few weeks loitering around the house.

He’d turned the plasma pistol in his hand, checking the light along the side indicating that it was powered on, and flicked the safety nub to the off position. The nub’s position was stiffer than he’d expected; protagonists in the holos usually flicked it so easily, like flicking a light switch, but the real thing was different. It took him a couple tries to turn the safety off, and once he had, he noticed that the Symbiote had woken up, and was staring at him.

Prior to this, he’d only ever seen the blue membrane that made up the recessed eyeholes of her helm. Through the security cameras they had seemed opaque, and so he thought it would be impossible to see through them. But now, in person, he could see that the blue membranes were transparent; none of the lights in the living room were on, so there was no glare reflecting off the membranes. As a result, he could see her actual eyes behind the membranes, watching as he stood over her with a gun in hand.

Both of them remained very still, staring at each other. Neither of them said anything; they were both silent. A conversation could be happening; questions could be asked; but no one was saying anything. If someone said something, it would start something that would pick up momentum, sweeping them both along to a conclusion, one way or another, for better or for worse.

And so they were quiet, the moment stretching out longer and longer. Perhaps the conversation was being had without words. Perhaps she was waiting to see if he would do it, if the talks they’d had up to that point meant nothing when you boiled things down to the fact that she was a Symbiote and he was a human desperate to avoid being assimilated. Perhaps he was weighing those same thoughts, asking himself if he was really going to kill someone he had gotten to know over the last three weeks. Perhaps he was asking himself what she had done to him personally to deserve this, and perhaps he was coming up empty for an answer.

Eventually, her eyes moved down to the plasma pistol in his hand, then back up to his face. She stared at him for a long moment, then slowly closed her eyes behind the membranes of her helm, as if resigning herself to what may come. It was a natural consequence, she reasoned, of being part of an invasion fleet; one of the risks she had accepted in coming here.

For his part, Lalli had tilted the gun away from the floor and in her direction, and yet he hesitated. It was not a question of whether he could do it; he knew he could do it, and also knew he was perfectly capable of talking himself into doing it if he needed to. There was something else holding him back, something that his irrational need for an alternate resolution had buried, but could not keep buried indefinitely.

It was the knowledge that doing this would not change the outcome.

It was something which he had always known, even if he’d tried to block it out. He knew that it was always going to end in either death or assimilation, and the only thing that this course would change was whether it happened here, in the house, or out there, on the road to the starport, in a half-baked, desperate attempt to get out nearly a month after the window of opportunity had closed. Nobody was going to tell the story of how he’d almost escaped, and even if he went down shooting, taking Symbiotes with him, nobody would be around to tell that story either. The idea of a noble death against overwhelming odds was just a fantasy, a blip of resistance that wouldn’t even register against the vastness of the Collective. To those outside Mokasha, he would just be another number in a fatality statistic; to the Collective itself, he would just be an anomaly, one of the few holdouts that would end up snuffed out after a few hours and some very minor losses. If he went this way, he would kill someone that had kept him company, and kept him sane over the last month, and for no reason, because it would not change the outcome.

It would be death without purpose, killing without meaning.

There had been a soft clunk as he’d set the pistol down on the coffee table. The Symbiote had opened her eyes again to see that he was now folded to his knees beside the couch, shoulders slumped and eyes closed, tears leaking from their corners. It was the posture of a man that knew his fate, and did not grieve so much over the fate itself, but more at the injustice of being unable to change it. A man that did not weep because he knew he was going to die, but because there was nothing he could do to change it.

A man broken not because of his choices, but because his choices did not matter.

She had reached out to touch his face, but he flinched away the moment her chitin-tipped fingers grazed his cheek. This had prompted a pause in turn, and after a moment, the chitin plates on her hand started to divide, the fungal layers beneath peeling back, furling around her wrist like the petals of an open flower. It left her hand exposed — a human hand.

She’d reached out to touch his face again, and though he still flinched, she persisted, her fingers brushing over his cheek. He did not pull away at the feeling of skin against his, and she used her thumb to wipe away some of his tears. After that, she had gently run her fingers through his hair, brushing it into order before returning to gently stroking his cheek.

That had calmed him somewhat, but he departed anyway, bracing himself on the coffee table and rising to his feet with his eyes still closed. He’d turned away, leaving the living room and heading back into the hall leading to the panic room, his footsteps eventually fading down the stairs. She could hear the door of the panic room hiss and open, then quickly clunk shut and seal once more, and all was silent again. The living room was almost exactly as it was before their encounter, with one exception:

He’d left the plasma pistol behind, lying on the coffee table.

Event Log: 6/10/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Panic Room

10:41pm SGT

Filter life: 0%. Filter change required. Contaminant buildup is inhibiting airflow.

Reserve oxygen remaining: 11 minutes. Replace oxygen tank.

The light from the screen, and the readings it carries, gleams against the Lalli’s glasses. The panic room is dark, since it’s currently on the night cycle; the only light comes from the screens at the desk, most of which display the feeds from the security cameras in the house above. Sitting on the floor next to the panic room’s vault door, Lalli leans back from the screen that’s affixed to the portion of the wall that holds the air filtration unit. After a moment, he turns around, and leans back against the wall.

“I’m almost out of oxygen.” he states to the empty room.

On one of the screens, there is movement. In the living room, a Symbiote sits up from where she had been lying on the couch. She looks towards the camera, though her helm reveals nothing of the face that must lie beneath.

“I have heard that suffocating is an… unpleasant way to go.” she observes carefully.

“I’ve heard the same.” Lalli sighs, looking down at the coilgun pistol in his hand. “I suppose I have a choice to make.”

“Yes.” she agrees quietly. Sitting now, with her hands folded almost primly in her lap, staring at the coffee table and its trite accoutrements. But the way she condenses herself — armored legs pressed together, shoulders tensed — betrays a certain uneasiness.

There is quiet for a moment or two, as if waiting for something more to be said, before the Lalli speaks. “You’re not going to try and talk me into opening the door?”

“I don’t want to… risk saying something that might convince you to go the other way instead.” The words are hesitant, as if the mere mention of the idea might make the idea a reality.

Lalli takes a deep breath, then remembers the limited oxygen remaining. He was reluctant now to follow through with it, even though the gun was there in his hand. It would be easy, short, and simple, and hopefully painless; though if he botched it, he dreaded those probable few moments of agonizing awareness before his damaged brain finally kicked the bucket. Asphyxiation, while a viable, surefire alternative, was not an appealing one; if he had to embrace death, he would prefer to do so painlessly.

And yet he hesitated. The fact that the Symbiote did not want him to die, and was consciously trying to avoid say anything that would push him in that direction, made him feel guilty. Even if she had not stated as much, he knew that if he died, she would be upset. And try as he might, that simply did not sit well with him.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks. “I’m just one out of millions. Whether I live or die should be inconsequential to the Collective.”

“Every life has value to us. We do not want you to die underground, locked in a dark room, all alone. No one should have to die that way.”

“I can think of some individuals that deserve to die that way.”

“You are not one of them.”

The reply silences him. The silence stretches into seconds, then into a minute. At length, he speaks again.

“I’m scared.” he says quietly.

On the screen, her helm turns towards the camera, then away again. “I know.” she says. “It’s okay to be scared.”

Lalli lets out a long exhale, then turns his head to the side. The oxygen reserve was now showing six minutes. It did feel like five minutes had passed; he had gotten his money’s worth out of those five minutes. But he had a new appreciation for how small five minutes was, and how quickly it could go. And he now had only six minutes, which was just slightly more than five minutes. If he waited til the last minute, he would risk passing out on his last dregs of oxygen while he opened the vault door or turned on the air filtration system.

Taking a deep breath of his last uncontaminated air, he sets the coilgun pistol aside, and reaches over, pulls the spore-caked filter out of the filtration assembly. Setting it on the ground beside him, he pushes the assembly back into the wall, turning it on.

The unit gives him a warning that there is no filter installed, but he just clicks past it, the fan within the assembly softly humming to life once again. Air from the system starts flowing into the panic room again, drawn from the intake vents outside, and this time, there is no filter to screen out the spores. After a few minutes, he reaches up, taking the breathing mask off his face, and setting it on the ground beside himself.

“You know,” he says quietly. “I can’t say I loved her, because we never had the chance to get to that point. But I liked her. And I wish I’d had the chance to see if we could’ve been something.”

The Symbiote doesn’t respond right away. “Is that your last regret? The fox in socks?”

“I suppose so.” he answers. “We often regret the things we didn’t do or didn’t get the chance to do, after all.”

“If she had gotten the chance to come out here, what would you have told her?”

Lalli thinks about that, staring at the vents in the panic room and knowing that spore-laden air is slowly being circulated into his bastion. Depending on how fast the infection took hold, these might be his last hours or last days with his own private thoughts and feelings. One would imagine that they would like to enjoy that privacy while it lasted, but having someone to talk to provided a sense of finalistic calm and comfort.

“Don’t imagine I would’ve told her anything I wouldn’t have told her during a video chat.” he answers eventually. “I would’ve treated her like a friend, because that’s what we were. It would’ve been kinda skeezy to fly her out here to try and pull the moves on her, so I would’ve just tried to… make it a nice vacation for her. Get around. See the sights. Eat some good food, have some fun. I would’ve wanted her to relax and enjoy herself. Even though, deep down, I’ll admit that I would’ve wanted to ask her if she wanted to date. Again.”

“Again?”

“I asked her before. She turned me down, which was… rough, but nobody’s obligated like you. I don’t blame her. That’s just how life is sometimes, you know?”

“So you would’ve wanted to ask her, but you wouldn’t ask her? Why?”

“She was my friend. It’s more important to be a good friend. That means respecting her decision. If she’s not interested in me that way, that’s just the way it is.”

“You sound sad.”

He’s quiet as he considers how to respond to that. “Sometimes it’s hard to be alone.”

On the screen, he can see her shift slightly where she’s leaning on her knees. “In the Collective, you’re never alone.”

“Yeah. But that’s not the kind of not-alone-ness I’m talking about. The Collective can’t replace that need for a specific type of emotional connection with another single person.”

“Maybe not. But the hivemind can make it easier to find the person you click with.”

“Have you found that person?” he asks.

Her helm turns towards the camera, then looks away again. “Not yet.”

Lalli doesn’t answer, and they both remain silent for a while. After some time spent reflecting in their own thoughts, she speaks again.

“It’s been more than five minutes.”

He glances at the time on one of the screens. “Yeah.”

“Your oxygen has run out by now, but you’re still talking.”

He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t feel he needs to. She seems to have arrived at the conclusion on her own, without needing help from him.

“Lalli?”

“…yeah?”

“I’m glad you decided to stay.”

For a moment, he almost thinks he hears a waver in her voice, as if she was emotional. It’s hard to tell, with how her voice is distorted by her helm. It’s also hard to confront the idea that he has admitted defeat, and that he is letting the inevitable happen — but it is happening, and it was better to meet it, instead of averting his gaze.

“How long will it take?” he asks softly.

He can see her shift and fidget on the screens. “Unvaccinated, less than a day or two. If you have been vaccinated, it will take a few days. If you have received a booster shot recently, between a week or two.”

“I procrastinated my booster shot.” he admits quietly. “I never liked the boosters. They always knocked me down for a day or two, and I usually had to call off work.”

“A strong response to the boosters usually indicates a robust immune system.” It was recited, almost like a factoid, rather than something intended to further a conversation. “You’re probably looking at three to five days for complete assimilation.”

“How bad is it going to be?”

“How bad?”

“It’s going to be changing my biology, right? Rewriting my genetics? I assume that’ll make me feel pretty sick.”

“That comes later, and happens over a longer period of time. The first phase is the Symbiote mycelium integrating into your body and linking you to the hivemind. You will feel sick, most likely with fever and headaches as it establishes itself along your spine and brain stem, then spreads to your cortex from there. It will be a rough few days, and you will probably be sweating a lot, so you’ll need to make sure you hydrate.”

That was a lot to take in, and the thought that something would be growing along his spine and brain stem was admittedly unsettling. “You said you were assimilated six months ago?”

“Yes. That’s what it was like for me and most of the people that were on the ship with me.”

“Will it be easier if I sleep through the first part of it?” he asks, staring at the time on one of the desk’s screens.

“Sleep through it? Like…?” she’d asked, sounding at once concerned and confused.

“Like, if I go to bed right now. It’s getting close to midnight.”

“Oh. I thought you meant pounding sleeping pills and trying to sleep through it.”

“I mean, if that would make it less miserable…”

“I would have to consult the doctors, but I don’t think that’d be a good idea.”

“Okay.”

“But if you want to go to bed now to try and make your assimilation go faster, I’ll leave you alone so you can do that.”

Lalli looked aside at the oxygen tank and the breathing mask sitting on the floor beside him. Even though he knew the air flowing into the panic room was now laden with Collective spores, breathing it didn’t feel any different than the air he’d been breathing in the weeks prior to this. “Yeah. I think I’d like to try that.”

“Alright. Sleep well, Lalli. I’ll be here if you need anything.”

Hearing her say his name again brought something to mind as he stands up, and he pauses on his way to the bed. “You told me at the beginning that my parents had been assimilated, and so they’ve been part of the Collective for a few weeks now, right?”

“Yes, they have. They have been acclimating as well as can be expected, given the circumstances.”

“And the reason you knew my name was because you got it from my parents, right?”

“That’s right.”

“If you were able to pry my name out of them, why didn’t you get the access code to the vault door as well?”

“We didn’t pry your name out of them. They gave it to us willingly when we promised not to hurt you. When you did not respond in the first few days after I arrived here, your father gave me the access code, along with a general rundown of the panic room systems, so I could check the panic room for your body if you did not respond within seven days of my arrival.”

It takes him a moment to absorb and process that. “You’ve had… the access code this entire time?”

“Yes.”

Lalli stares at the vault door. The last few weeks, he had viewed the door as his only protection, the only barrier between him and the Collective. He’d thought it was the only thing keeping him safe from assimilation, but if the Symbiote had the access code the entire time, the vault door was no more an obstacle than any other unlocked door. The only reason he hadn’t been assimilated was because she had chosen not to open the door.

“Why didn’t you open the door?” he asks, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Because that was your choice to make. Not mine.”

That floors him, and it comes with so much in the way of implications that he doesn’t have anything to say right away. The Symbiote, knowing this, turns and stretches out on the couch, starting to get comfortable. “It’s late. You should get some sleep. If you need me, I’ll be here.” Though it didn’t feel like it needed to be said, she still says it anyway.

“Okay.” he says softly, slowly moving to the bed and lying down. “I’ll see you in the morning, I guess.”

But even though he lay down and settled beneath the covers, he stayed awake for hours more, rewinding those words through his head.

Because that was your choice to make. Not mine.

Event Log: 6/16/12764

Amnia Suburbs: Ethena Panic Room

10:43am SGT

The next days were every bit as miserable as she’d promised.

The headaches came before the fever, though if he was being honest, it was less a series of headaches and more a single prolonged headache that rose and fell to varying intensities. It started at the back of his neck, and made its way up to his head, and while not necessarily debilitating, it certainly impacted his willingness to move or do much of anything. The fever likewise made life generally unpleasant, and prompted the liberal abuse of the panic room’s environmental controls on Lalli’s part.

The Symbiote remained on hand to answer any questions he had, which generally involved asking what medications he was allowed to take to abate the symptoms. She largely restricted him to anti-inflammatories and common painkillers, which helped lessen his headache to some degree. The temptation to take other medications was there, since the medikits in the supply closet were decently well-stocked, but she had warned him that taking other medications may prolong the assimilation process, or worsen his symptoms. The idea was to try and get the first phase of assimilation over with as quickly as possible; an idea that was counterintuitive to everything he’d been taught and had absorbed from shows and movies over the years, where prolonging the assimilation process meant buying more time to search for a miracle cure or procedure for the infected.

But he followed her advice, even if instinct persistently pushed him to go against it. Reason won out; logic and practicality knowing that this far into the invasion, if there was no continued conflict, it meant that the Collective had successfully captured Mokasha, and there would be no rescue forthcoming. In the choice between death and assimilation, he had chosen assimilation: his parents were still alive, and the Collective had promised changes to society that might make things better. Perhaps it would be worth it; he could give it a try and see where it would take them as a society. And if it wasn’t worth it…

Well, death would still be an option. Hopefully.

The days were long, as they typically were when one was sick and miserable. His answer to this was to try and sleep his way through it; the simple arithmetic of trying to reduce the amount of time spent conscious while miserable. This meant frequent naps, and sleeping whenever possible, which often did not go as well as intended. Sometimes he simply ended up laying horizontal, tossing back and forth as he battled between fever and headache, just wishing he could pass out, and wake up with a broken fever.

That did eventually happen, but not before the whispers began.

At first he thought that his fever had gotten too high and he was starting to hallucinate, and it took him an embarrassingly long time to realize that it was not hallucinations, but the creeping edges of the hivemind. The first voices he heard were the ones that he would later realize were the loudest; the echoes of the powerful figures within the Collective that were tasked with command of vast swathes of Symbiotes. Despite this, not many of those voices stood out to him, aside from the voice of Harbinger, which was singular in its surety, purpose, and clarity. The voice of Harbinger was unlike the other loud voices in the Collective — Harbinger’s voice was as a woman speaking at the head of a chorus, with many other voices echoing her words after she spoke them.

Or thought them? Because in the hivemind, nothing was spoken, persay — these were all thoughts, feelings, sensed and felt within one’s mind. One might argue one could speak in the mind just as easily as they might speak audibly; that it was merely a turn of phrase. The bottom line was that speaking and projecting one’s thoughts more or less worked to the same effect: as a means to express oneself and communicate with other members of one’s community.

And as Lalli’s connection to hivemind started to mature and deepen, he realized that the community was a very robust one. He had no experience he could compare it to, and the only way he had to describe it was that he could feel everything. The small mercy was that proximity and intensity seemed to have a proportionate relationship within the hivemind; the feelings and public thoughts of faraway Symbiotes sounded or felt more distant than nearby Symbiotes. With a few exceptions, such as Harbinger and other leaders within the Collective, you could generally determine how far away a Symbiote was based on how loud their public thoughts seemed, or how strong their emotions felt.

But it was the sheer volume and scale of the hivemind that Lalli struggled with more than anything.

There was never a point at which things were ever truly quiet in his head. During the day, he could feel the echoes of the thoughts and feelings of all the Symbiotes in Amnia and the suburbs surrounding it. During the night, those echoes quieted down, but he could sense, distantly, the thoughts and feelings of other Symbiotes on the other side of Mokasha, where it was day. And he could frequently sense the minds of the Symbiotes who where aboard the ships in orbit, and the great tension as they squared off with the Confederacy fleet sent in response to the invasion. And then further beyond that, like the background hum of an old light, there were the distant murmurs of the other branches of the Collective across the galaxy.

No matter where he was or what time of day it was, it was never silent.

This was difficult to adjust to. There was always something to listen to, something to be curious about. Many conversations between Symbiotes were quiet affairs between two or a few individuals in close proximity, and so it was harder to sense what was being exchanged between them. But some thoughts or feelings were exchanged between individuals at vast distances, things you could sometimes listen in on if you focused hard enough. Vast amounts of information flowed through the hivemind between individuals in the form of memories, thoughts, commands, and feelings.

It made it hard to sleep, and sometimes it even made it hard to think, to focus. He would be thinking about something, then find himself distracted by something else he had sensed within in the hivemind, and find that he had completely forgotten what he’d been thinking about before. There were constant distractions everywhere; it was like being in an infinite room that contained an infinite number of holoscreens, each one carrying its own channel, endlessly churning out content.

Just overwhelming.

The Symbiote upstairs had sensed his distress, which, on the latter end of his assimilation, was starting to replace his fever and headaches. Once he was part of the hivemind, she provided him a warm presence within it that he could focus on as she guided him through it, teaching him how to filter through the noise, and tune out the static so he could hear himself think. It wasn’t easy, and it would be a work in progress for a while yet, but she gave him the basics, which were enough to get his metaphorical feet underneath him, enough to be functional.

And now, waking up on the sixth day, he realized that there was no longer any reason for him to remain in the panic room.

He was a Symbiote now, a part of the Collective. The panic room no longer protected him from that; it no longer boxed him off from the vast community he had tried to stay separate from. There was no point in staying down here; it was finally time to leave, go back to the world above, and see what he was a part of now.

So he’d gotten up, and set about cleaning up the room, tidying it up as much as he could after his monthlong occupation. He’d gotten a shower, picked out a fresh pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and gotten dressed. The firearms were put back in the gun locker; the bed was made. He checked himself once in the mirror, just to make sure he looked generally presentable, and he could not ignore the blue iridescence that had started to creep across his irises, or the thin, faint network of sapphire veins winding through the skin around his eyes. It was the only outward indication that he was now part of the Collective, and even then it was so faint that it was hardly noticeable.

And now he was standing in front of the vault door, preparing to leave the panic room.

Raising a hand, he enters the code to the door, the bolts shortly clunking out of their lock position. The door’s still as heavy as it was when he first entered; it takes him some effort to push it open, and in doing this, he realizes how weak he still is after his recent bout of sickness from the first phase of his assimilation. But when he does eventually get the door open, and when it does, natural light spills into the room — the first natural daylight that he had seen or felt in over a month.

Sighing in relief, he starts staggering up the stairs to the world above.

The stairs likewise take more out of him than he was expecting, but waiting at the top is the Symbiote. She reaches out and catches him when his foot hooks on the last step, causing him to pitch forward. He hangs onto her for balance, and she pulls him up, allowing him to lean on her as he makes his way to the living room. From there, he heads to the window, to stare out across the neighborhood and the skyline of Amnia, slowly being overtaken by the biomass of the Collective. Mokasha’s cities are gradually losing their geometric harshness in favor of softer, more organic outlines that are noticeably more colorful than the typical silver and grey of skyscrapers. But beyond the buildings there was still a blue sky and white clouds, vivid and fresh antidotes to being trapped underground for a month.

After taking his fill of the view, he turns around to look at the Symbiote, who’s still watching from the threshold of the living room. “You don’t have to keep wearing that armor, do you? Now that I’m part of the Collective, I’m no longer a threat to you.”

“I don’t have to wear it, no.” she answers hesitantly.

“Why don’t you take it off, then?” he asks.

She shifts nervously, her chitin-tipped fingers tangling together. “I’m… not wearing anything underneath it. Because our combat suits are organic, we don’t wear additional layers underneath them.”

“Oh. Right.” Now he felt very much awkward, realizing that he’d basically asked her to strip in front of him. It was very much not the first impression he wanted to convey to a new acquaintance, and he scrambled for a way to recover. “You can… borrow some of my clothes, if you want? Or my mum’s clothes, if those would fit you better…”

“You’re asking because you want to see who I am.” she deduces. “I’m not sure you want to do that.”

“Why not?” he asks, his mind trawling through the various explanations. Perhaps she was not really human beneath the armor? Perhaps she was self-conscious of her looks? But neither of those seemed quite right; they were too arbitrary, inconsequential in the bigger picture of the Collective.

She does not answer, though it does not seem like it’s for lack of trying. She fidgets, her eyes darting behind the blue membranes of her helm, but that’s not what gives it away. Rather, he senses it through the hivemind; a concern, a fear, a worry that she can’t quite conceal, that seeps into the collective connection that they all share.

“You’re someone I know.” he realizes softly.

The plated shoulders of her suit rise as if she was taking a deep breath. The worry morphs into resignation as she leaves the doorway, crossing the living room to stand a few feet from him. The chitin plates of her helm start to divide, and underneath, seams running through the fungal layer start to appear. Just like the hand of her suit did over a week ago, the helm starts to peel open in petals, like a blooming flower, folding back from her head and regressing down to her neck. And to Lalli, the faint freckles and the russet hair are all too familiar.

“Bet you weren’t expecting a fox in socks.” she says nervously, lifting a hand and wiggling her chitin-clawed fingers in an uneasy wave.

For a long moment, Lalli’s unable to speak, struggling to process this. “Rusalka?”

Rusalka nods. “Yeah. It’s… me. I didn’t mean to ghost you all those months ago, but my ship was interdicted by the Collective, and… you know.” She gestures vaguely to her biomass armor, as if it spoke for itself. “I had access to my stuff, but… I didn’t want to tell you what had happened to me. I thought you would block me if you found out I’d been assimilated by the Collective. Then when I heard that they were prepping a fleet to Mokasha, I volunteered because I wanted to help you get offworld if you survived the initial invasion.”

Lalli takes a deep breath, trying to keep himself calm. “Why didn’t you? You knew I was here, you could've helped get me offworld!”

“I wanted to, but I got here too late.” she explains, her fingers curling tightly. “I found out your parents had been assimilated. I didn’t want to separate you from them. I… didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if you were the type of person that would leave their family behind to escape the Collective. And you weren’t responding when I tried to communicate with you, so I didn’t even know if you were actually in the panic room until you started talking to me while I was in the kitchen, and that was days later…”

She pauses to swallow hard, and Lalli can feel his mounting anger start to ebb as he senses the swirling mix of emotions coming from her. There’d been hope that she could get him offworld, fear as she tried to make her way to Amnia from her original drop zone, confusion when she realized his parents were assimilated, and uncertainty and helplessness for days when she found the house empty. He could feel that she’d wanted to help, to do the right thing even if it meant never getting to talk to him again — and he could feel her frustration when everything she’d wanted to do had fallen apart, and instead of saving him, she realized that he would end up assimilated just like she had been. Nothing had gone the way she wanted or needed it to.

“But you still came for me.” he says after a moment of both of them standing in silence.

“I’m sorry.” she sniffs, wiping at her eyes and looking away. “I tried, it just… nothing went the way it was supposed to…”

He watched her for a few seconds, the tension slowly bleeding from his shoulders as he realized how hard all of this must’ve been. Even after being assimilated, she still crossed the galaxy to try and help him escape, knowing she might never talk to him again if she succeeded. That was the kind of friend she was.

“It’s okay.” he says, crossing the gap between them and raising his arms, gingerly putting them around her. The edges of the chitin plates are rough, and they dig into his skin a little, but he still does his best to hug her. “You tried. It wasn’t your fault it didn’t work.”

Rusalka swallows hard, blinking away tears as she brings up her arms, then carefully wraps them around Lalli’s back, her chitin claws resting lightly on his shoulderblades. “Can we still… go waterfall rappelling? And paddleboarding?” she whispers. “And all those other things you said you wanted to show me?”

“Yeah.” he says, patting her back. “We can still do those things. The mountains and the lakes aren’t going anywhere.”

She lets out a breathless little laugh at that, a sound of pent-up anxiety being released into relief. Hugging him a little tighter, she leans her head against his. “Thank you. For not being mad at me.”

“You’re my friend, and you tried to save me, even though you were part of the Collective.” he answers, slowly loosening his hug. “I’ve never had a friend that would do that for me.”

“Well. You were worth it.” she says, letting go of him and wiping her nose again. “The care package was sweet of you. You didn’t have to do that.”

He shrugs at that. “You were worth it.” he says, repeating her words back to her.

Rusalka smiles at that, wiping the corners of her eyes. “Even if one of your gifts was kinda pervy, Mr. Kneesocks.”

“Hey, look…” he protests, rubbing the back of his neck. “…it was supposed to be a joke, you know? Fox in socks, so I got you fox kneesocks!”

“You can’t just send clothes to a girl like that. We’re obligated to try them on and take pictures.”

“I didn’t know that!”

“What would your parents think, sending foxy kneesocks to girls on the galaxynet?”

“Oh my god, if you tell them…”

“I’m just playing with you. C’mon, let’s go outside — you haven’t seen the sun in over a month. You can meet some of the other Symbiotes, and I can explain the Collective to you, and what’s going on across Mokasha now…”