RENT FREE – PART ONE: INVADER

Something was within her perimeter.

The scanner beeped; a chirpy tune of six notes that meant there had been movement detected in the area covered by the sensors all around what she and no one else called the office, which was actually a metal prefab outpost for security men from the mines on the road that led to the great canyon, which a superstitious neosov type had fifty years back named the Canyon of Souls which, it was said, went right into the planetoid’s core. The outpost was cold and lonely and utilitarian, its parts having once emerged from a box and put together like flatpack furniture long ago, in the glory days of Junsha’s mining business, for old men with torches to watch the barren terrain of the abyssal black countryside for no-goodniks. It was her office but also her home, a bunk in the second room adjacent to the first – with the third, a bathroom, accessible only from the second – where she slept and a desk there where she wrote and in the main room, the living room, a coffee table and a coffee machine and a fridge and a telescreen and a med station and a big poster of Chairman Ghani from back in the day looming over her when she sometimes smoked weed on the sofa and looked up at him, the dead god, and listened to the hum of the distant road that came from the other side of the canyon where all of the other people lived to here, the wasteland made by the cancerous cells of industry moving in, sweeping the soil and the air and being fruitful and multiplying, the Pandemonium where the great mining complexes still worked far-off as artificial iron mountains upon the horizon.

But anyway. Outside of this box which she lived in there was something moving. Errant drone or political assassin – she would have loved to have been important enough to assassinate – or Carlo, big strong little Carlo, come to say sorry to her. These were all possibilities as to who had come out here into the grounds of the office, on the lonely road to the mining facilities, but Melanie, then on the sofa beneath the Chairman’s dead face stern eyes military cap and business suit and in Junsha-style characters ASTRO-SOCIALISM WILL NEVER FAIL WE FOLLOW THE LEAGUE next to his serious school teacher expression, was busy drinking a lot too fast from a bottle of local wine and thinking about death.

Not too much (death – too much wine for sure) but a bit. Her own death was impossible. Someone else’s – Mr. Ghani’s permadeath, his frozen world – faint sketches of factory buildings, outline of a spaceport at his back – astro-socialism, the eternal dream, a soothing landscape of industrial processes, automated machines churning out automated machines all the way into the stars, a whole universal assembly line, assembling itself, elaborating its own patterns out into forever – a world where no one died, wasn’t it? But Melanie’s grandfather had died two years ago, the details of it lost back in the Neo-Swiss bureaucratie (French for bureaucracy – M.) that had, of course, survived la révolution (French for ‘the revolution’ – M.) – the old bastard had died age one hundred and ten of alcohol poisoning in the blood; Monsieur Laurent-Gaston had been smoking at the time, the coroner had said to her in the video call, his big Cuban fallen onto his suit trousers as he sat there in his luxurious office looking out at the estate all that nasty capitalist business had won him, his treacherous counterrevolutionary opportunism in the final days of the Third Collapse-

Mel drank up. It was rice wine from Meister Baum’s office, six thousand yuan, and it had been brewed from the private yards he kept offworld on a barge platform just for making wine in – supreme luxury and supreme waste but it fucking tasted like it, smooth going down, hint of something fruity, enough alcohol to make her keep on thinking a bit about death, lying there beneath the Chairman who had passed away in mute disappointment in a retirement home six years back. Mel wondered if they had felt the same thing, capitalist dog and socialist master, he who had been kept by the triumphant dogs as a kind of trophy, not at all a dog-like thing to do, as beasts had become men and the world had shifted and her grandpapa Monsieur Laurent-Gaston had risen to be one of the kings of the new world and he, formerly Chairman Ghani of the Eurasian Socialist League, had stared out from his gilded prison at a new order neither socialist or in league with itself but still (nominally at least – M.) Eurasian. Buddha said so, that in death all were equal– she had a gold Emituofo in the corner of the room, a stick of incense before it, and she glanced over there now, from a dead god to one unliving and dying, the eternal Light that stung her eyes. Light, sound; that was it, she remembered, and she slithered up from the sofa, bottle in hand, to go check the scanner by the window, med station with its many arms and lasers and tubes of healing gel, the metal sink by its side, and then the ancient Buddha of the Western Paradise.

Mel’s boots thudded on the metal flooring. She was thirty-two and the boots were six, along with her glasses the last remnant of The Costume; visible there, peer at it, amidst the collage of newspaper items and other old-fashioned debris from her wonder years, she at a clean thirty and way cleaner, turtleneck and tight-cropped bob cut and black jeans, stood there in the photo looking as severe as her outfit, almost six feet tall, a proper artistic leftist type, organiser and speechmaker and etc. etc. for the Party…now look at you, a slimy voice whispered, for now Mel in loose Hawaiian pattern and hole-filled vest, sleeves rolled up so that inky beast etched into her right arm was on proud display (black silhouette of a Mongolian wolf, carved there drunkenly in despair after the election loss, I’ll be a lone fucking wolf, then, a wolf howling at the moon forever hey mr tattoo lady you’re kinda cute being the thought process – M.) and the party-line bob gone in favour of uh a hair thing, loose about the shoulders and greasy and unkept. Hair tie around one wrist. Jeans literally taken from a cute engineering girl who’d been on the pipes here once. This was the politically-retired Melanie Gaston, who had escaped life to come squat here, who made money with the digital typewriter in her room on the desk, who was half a bottle deep into her rice wine and thinking of apologising to Emituofo.

No!

Sound, she remembered. Code of beeps. She went to the scanner with its luminescent green screen which meant it had found something and paused there one skinny hand outstretched over the keys. But these were not the keys to the scanner but – her brain had tricked her, rascally brain – this was the Sony. For music. She was keying in March of the Galactic Socialists. And then she was singing it. The hoarse English (yes, English, or Standard as it’s called here offworld – M.) of the anthem as it had been drilled in at her Pioneers’ meetings, accompanied by strident horns and drumbeat that also had a kind of melancholy. She bellowed it, Buddha help her; stood in her metal box at the edge of the universe, at least four miles from any other human being, stomping about with her wine bottle singing old socialist songs. Then, marching past the window as she hit the chorus out of ruin, rise our people, mankind ascended to the stars

A shape out there in the darkness

Mel froze. Sobered a fifth of the way up and saw it there, humanoid, broad-shouldered and taller than tall and wider than wide, a thing there only a silhouette cast against the distant glow of the lights that lit the mine road but there within that shape looking back at her a grey terrible face

The phone buzzed. Mel nearly threw her wine bottle at it, the boxy thing in the other corner with its red plastic case making that strident noise like she owed it attention. She glanced back at the window. There was nothing there but rock and the faint light of the highway as ever. Slowly Mel killed the music and made her way over to the phone. The screen told her DAD. She answered. “Hi?”

“Bonsoir, ma fille.” his gravelled voice rolled ungainly out of the speaker. “Es-tu ivre?”

“Papa, in space we speak Standard.”

“Ce putain de langage de chien! Fine, fine. Are you drunk?”

“A little. You?”

He laughed, like someone was dragging a normal human laugh over broken glass. “Two bottles down tonight. It is the daytime here. How about in the universe?”

“Midnight. I think. You know, there’s no artificial sky here. So it’s always black outside at night. No clouds or anything.”

“Is that so? How does one not go mad from the isolation of it, the cruel indifference of the universe being so close by?”

“That’s why I’m drinking.”

“No it isn’t, guenon. You are drinking because you lost an election two years ago.”

“Shut up.” she spat. Smoke rose from the joss sticks before Emituofo and  was sucked into the filtration system on its way to the ceiling, disappearing as if it had never been there at all. “I miss you.”

Her father took a long time to reply. “We all miss you.”

“How is maman?”

“Well, she works hard. But she is tired. Amelie – your brother’s wife is ready to give birth, and much has been prepared. And yet there is a lot more to do. Babies are difficult. Always.”

“And the business?” Once her voice had said that word a certain way – business meaning capitalist exploitation, telling him what she thought of what he did. Now there was only the regular human inflection. So many battles fought over the same old terrain, earth as scarred and ruined as could be, pockmarked with craters and wounds, the water stained yellow from gas and pollution…what was there left to do, with such a destroyed habitat being all that was left to them? They could only live there as well as was possible. “Well,” he said, “it goes. The economy is…it is what it is.”

“The war was pretty good, wasn’t it?” she said, as a sort of joke.

“The war continues.”

“I didn’t see a bug in my lifetime. Did you?”

“They must be out there somewhere. I perhaps do hope – you will forgive me, guenon – that they will come back.” She sat down in the plastic chair by the other window, feeling the hard material stab at her spine, stretching the phone’s cord across her lap. One leg across the other. Laced up boots that spoke to the showman she had once been. The Costume, its final remnant, a remnant of a remnant – if she took them off and didn’t put them back on ever again, would the memory of socialism disappear? All of it was just within her head, floating like spirits above a vast misty lake. “Which would you choose, papa?” she asked. “If you could have me back or the Asura.”

He chuckled. “You would sink my business. You would say some absurd thing…call me a traitor again, to the press. Again. Tell everyone about how I stole state assets when the revolution died. Dig up all those terrible things. You should stay out there in space, where no one who wants dirt on Laurent-Gaston can find you. Now, if the bugs came back we would make so much money. We would profit off of the war like the good old days. The federation would find unity in purpose; it would find a demand for industry, for commerce, for the company. We need them back. And yet you know which I would choose.”

She was smiling despite everything. A little smile, the kind that was only for herself. “I suppose I do.” she said. “But you aren’t so sentimental, are you, you old bastard? To call me for only these things. What’s the matter?”

“Ah, guenon.” her father said. “You really have been away too long. I am sentimental often now. I have feelings and worries and pains at night. I am calling, in fact, for sentimental reasons. I heard there was a fierce meteor shower near Junsha recently. Is this so?”

“Yes, papa.”

“Did it cause any damage?” She didn’t know but she had that feeling, then, that she was right; that maybe her father was only calling her because Junsha was a key point in the Tyler Array and the shipping lanes all about federal space and he, of course, had business interests here, and that he like any Swiss businessman (Neo-Swiss still legally being a continuation of the old Confederation back on earth, -M.) trusted family over news, friends, employees etc. Just good business. An ugly feeling and Mel had no idea if it was true but she knew it was a feeling and it had been felt; couldn’t well unfeel something, could you? “No, papa.” she said, a little girl again reporting to him after the Young Pioneer meeting of the week. “I’m fine.”

“Ah. That’s good.” Something pained in his voice, she thought. Maybe guilt. “Well, nevertheless. It is all fine here. And it is all fine there. May I ask, what are you drinking tonight?”

“Rice wine. From the Baum stock.”

“Baum? Alexandro Baum? Mon dieu, are you finally accepting that bourgeois spirit that lives deep inside your heart? Are you learning to live with yourself, at long last?”

“No.” she said, semi-truthfully. “I’m just drinking.”

“Then that is better than nothing.” Her father paused, a pause she recognised as being the winding up of a great machine. She looked around the room at Chairman Ghani’s corpse and at Emituofo and at the window where a spectre had stood staring in. She swigged wine, bracing. “Ah, Melanie.” he said. “I only want – you know, do you not? I want you to be yourself. To know who you are. All this playing at socialism, is it truly yourself? I often thought about how unhappy you seemed, putting on that outfit and posing…is it over, finally? Ma fille, pourquoi es-tu si difficile? I wish I could understand you. I wish you could have – you would know business, le capitalisme, better than your brother, you understand? With you here, with the Laurent-Gaston family as one, we could have-”

“Papa.” she said gently. “Je suis désolé. I am here. And you are there. That is the truth.”

Her father sighed. It was not an exasperated sigh or an angry sigh (she knew those well – M.) but a third kind of sign, a sign of surrender, a sign of how much he loved her. If he hadn’t loved her then she knew it would all have been much easier. “I must go and finish my wine. I am sorry, guenon. Please remember that we love you.”

“Merci, papa.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” Click. Mel was then alone again with her thoughts of death. Her father at home in the estate in the same chair grandfather had died in, looking out at the same view and perhaps after his drink smoking one of the same cigars. She stood and went to replace the phone upon the receiver and did so and turned around, trying to remember where else her head had been at before it had been dragged back to Neo-Swiss territory. The scanner reminded her by playing again its happy little beeps and she decided this time to go back to it, to stop all of this, to finish her drink and go to bed and close the security shutters if necessary. Tired and had an article to write tomorrow. She crossed the room to the scanner and leant down, peering into the chunky monitor and the glowing green depths of the data on the screen. Two intrusions, one on the south side near the slope into the craters and the other – slight skip of her heartbeat – the west side of the prefab. The window she had seen the watcher at. Scanner was set to low-capacity so it didn’t record every single step but only motions made by things large enough to be trackable. It had moved in and  triggered a sensor then it had slowed down and she had seen it and – it had moved again, without worrying about being seen. And now silence.

She glanced up at Chairman Ghani like he could tell her what to do, out of ruin, rise our people, mankind ascended to the stars, shut up brain and focus, ‘it’, hey, she wondered, what was ‘it’, exactly, what’s going on out there? first few months in this place after the ruin of the election she had risen here and lived almost in terror; papa being right in that this dark side of the world, away from the artificial SimCity of New Red Star where the false sky and the terraformed earth and the lakes and forests and rivers pretended to be home, was not good for the brain, and for weeks she had found a purer terror than ever before, a black existence on the edge of nothing. The mines were populated by those who worked away from the filtration towers in armoured suits with oxygen systems, figures who were not here to talk who came and went in ugly transporters. She had met the security men and women and neither who wandered the wastes (‘met’ meaning, yes, sometimes what you think it means – M.) and that had helped, but she had also met ghosts and demons that dwelt in pure nowhere that had come out of hell to greet her. Those memories came now as she considered what to do.

She had another drink.

If there was an Asura fleet coming just like in the old stories, then maybe they could have a drink too. Did they drink? All Mel had to go on were old propaganda posters, and as much as she loved the socialist realist style of alien design there was no reason it had to resemble reality. Asura were eight-armed demons from the depths of hell or space and they did not eat flesh but did enjoy making slaves of human beings to toil away in their mines or something. The Asura had killed her revolution, was the bedtime story she liked to tell herself; but actually without the strains of the war would it have all fallen apart anyway? Be more dialectical she told herself, drinking deeply from her starting place upon the sofa. Internal and external contradictions. But she could not be dialectical about bugs and no one in federal space could be either, because The Great Enemy were still out there and were kept at bay by the orbital cannons of the Tyler Array but could come back at any time and as a girl in the Pioneers she had been drilled on what to do if an Asura meteor struck home. Meteors, she thought idly, remembering what her father had said. But then she drank again and lay down and closed her eyes and thought instead about the time they had gone hiking in the Neo-Swiss mountains, the artificial Alpine range, and her father had held her hand and then had carried her on her shoulders all the way up the hillside.

Someone knocked at the door suddenly, a sound so sharp she was jolted from the sofa. All the worst ideas in the world flooded out of that dark little place at the back of her mind and she scrambled up across the room, hurrying past the window, and went to the cabinet in the other other corner. She unfastened it and pulled out the gun, heavy-barrelled angular black death machine, RL-60 riot suppression pistol, and loaded a magazine of eight .44 slugs into it and held onto it tight. Bourgeois indulgence, one amongst many. She went back to the scanner and put it into camera mode; the screen flickered and with a fuzz of static became an image of the doorway from outside, from the point of view of the camera on the pole above it. There was no hulking presence there; no nightmare propaganda image of an Asura warrior waiting there to gut her when she answered. Bottle in one hand and gun in the other Mel went to the door. She unlocked it with a finger, tapping in the code, and with a hydraulic whoosh the security layer slid up. Then with her foot she eased the door proper open. The hinges squeaked as it swung aside, revealing blackness beyond and the distant light of the road, the city, the little filtration tower that kept her air non-toxic etc, and only she with her gun and her wine to confront it. She wondered about firing once but then didn’t want to hit Carlo or something. Had lined up cans there before, shot them down with 45% accuracy or so. But now there was nothing to shoot and she was drunk, she realized, and hadn’t there been a writer of her style in earth’s long history who had once shot his wife while drunk or something? She didn’t want to shoot her wife. Mel looked about the vast expanse of Junsha’s barren terrain, at nothing in particular, and felt a sudden longing for home, wherever home was.

Something was there. She saw it now on the edge of the metal steps that led onto the path to the road, a little thing almost shy there just out of the glow of the light. She saw what – was it a spider? Or a crawfish? Something with a carapace and long sharp legs and mandibles and round inscrutable eyes. Mel felt something itch all the way along her spine. She raised the gun and the creature with its purple-ish exoskeleton watched her.                Asura baby? She didn’t know if Asura had babies. Experts somewhere probably did. It waited and she waited and they waited together. A rumbling; headlights cutting through the black. Mel glanced up for less than a second at the truck coming down the road far-off and the thing leapt at her. Bang, went her gun, hitting nothing – she was on her back and it was on her front whining, a high-pitched wet sound, and its claws scratched at her and foamy liquid dribbled from alien maw onto her face and she tried to swing the gun about but lost it, heard it clatter against the metal, and then put one hand on the thing – claws all over her – and she held it there, slightly above her, and then swung the bottle and hit herself in the face. The alien dove, claws tight on her skin, and something stabbed into her neck, a sharp pain. At once Mel was aware she was on her way out; a kind of drug, or poison, and it was nice actually to kind of let her arms go limp and close her eyes and forget about all of it this. The last sensation to drift through her fading consciousness was the alien thing making another high-pitched wet noise as it descended upon her.

And she had the strangest dream.

A little wriggling space crustacean wriggling around in her head.

–

Conscious returned via pain and a song. Fighting for the people, rising to heaven, the great socialist masses will never do wrong! The earth as their cradle and space as their future, led by the League which has laid out their path oh fuck her fucking skull had been cracked open and a nail hammered all the way in and it kept moving in there grinding her grey matter into paste. She groaned and heard that, a miserable sound but unmistakably her own, and then felt the coldness of the metal floor against her cheek and then, step by step, felt everything else; throb in her forehead where she had brained herself with the wine bottle and that horrible super-terrible pain from inside that she hadn’t quite placed yet and her legs uncomfortable curled up on the floor and her clothes too heavy on her body and her breath stinking of booze rolling out of her mouth to gently caress the sensitive inner parts of her nose. She gagged, opening her eyes to see the halogen glow of the light above. Still her shitty prefab. Headache like hell. Melanie turned onto her side and threw up. Soft smooth stinky liquid flowing up her throat and over her tongue – urgh – and out there, splattering on the ground, specs of it upon her shirt goddammit. There had been worse things coming out of her before but-

She couldn’t think with whatever this pain was. Not stabbed-pain or broken-arm-pain but something deeper, something that felt like a sharpened knife being run across the thin membrane of her soul by a malicious, teasing observer. Lying there she trembled. The room was the same; outside now it was day, sometime early morning by the faint shape of the Crimson Eye rising over the crest of the horizon through the window. But it was not. She was here but it was not her room. A disassociation. Mel had never drank so much before that she had disassociated, although other substances, sure. Snatches of red songs in her head. In Mandarin now, dong fang hong, taiyang xiang, zhongguo chu le ge mao zedong what is happening in there, Mel? drifting memories of a party with the lads from the Waishengren Power formation who had shut down the mine that time, herself sucked in, given a sign and told, hang tight there waiguo pengyou we just need you to show up on the video feed, she had (had she? – M.) had sex with a nice Chinese man that time, with suit and glasses and a wedding ring too elaborate to be a real wedding ring, she had told herself, God, she thought, or Emituofo or whoever, and she spat out a little bit of sick and rolled over with the halogen burning her eyes. On her back; you should never fall asleep on your back after drinking or drugs, her papa had taught her at twelve, or else you might choke on your own sick and die.

Grandpapa coughing spluttering hacking up spittle and bile and nobody being there for him, old man cold in his big bed in the grand old house, wife dead and servants all terrified, unwilling to disturb the big boss after he had thrashed that maid for disturbing him in his evening smoke, his withered body drowning in his purple silken sheets, his enormous room too much for anyone even to reach him in time anyway – and what do they do? what can they do? when they find him there is no hope of revival and he has died and the way he has died has been, how to say it exactly, absolument dégoûtant, that the master of Laurent-Gaston could choke on his own puke like a common drunkard! so they clean up the dead man and put him in his chair and give him a big cigar and let him die nobly as befitting his story, a grand ending for the grand patron and now nobody has to think about him ever again except his wayward granddaughter an incalculable distance away at the ass-end of the known universe.

All of this was her imagining. Reality was – pain, a severe lack of joy, and bad memories. Finally Melanie sat up. The thing inside her head went spastic, stabbing into all of her brain. No actually it wasn’t a stabbing. Something she remembered was that the brain didn’t have any nerve tissue. The feeling was not pain but wrongness. A warning passed along the synapses that something was up, the signal was being hacked or the program had been altered or a faint poison had been slipped into her drink. Poison, she remembered, and she remembered a monster at her door. Upright, staggering – nothing there when she reached it, her boots clunking like lead weights dropped from a great height. There was no shrimp-spider-demon on her doorstep. The Eye lit up the craggy landscape and warmed her face and there was a truck trundling along the far road into the mining valleys. Melanie’s headache throbbed. She went back inside, closing the door and sealing the security layer. Lighting a cigarette from the jacket on the rack Mel then decided to investigate the med station, where a light on the readout was blinking on and  off.

Its red glare, coming and going, meant that an operation had been completed but the OK button – which rendered Sin-Nihon Company legally free of any responsibility for the inadvertent side-effects of the prior treatment – hadn’t been pressed. She leant over to press it and saw the monster there in the sink. “Shit!” she cried, nearly spitting out her smoke. The gun was not in her hand but still where she had dropped it last night but it didn’t matter anyway because after a second of heart-spasm panic she noticed the thing was now dead. In the light of day it was uglier but her brain saw that while of carapace and claw and exoskeleton it didn’t really resemble a crawfish or spider at all. It was something else, a sidestep somewhere on the evolutionary chain. Its purple hue shimmered in the halogen. Ooze dripped from its mandibles. Its empty eyes watched her just as last night.

Mel leant closer to it. She saw that it wasn’t dead, or that if it was then it wasn’t here that it had died, for there was a large hole punched through the carapace near the top of the abdomen, large enough for her to see the glistening mess inside, stinking like old fish and neglect. This here was a shell that had been abandoned, not the thing that had worn it. A terrible feeling came over her to sit alongside all the other terrible feelings going on inside her; this one was cold and wet and slithering about her spine. She scanned the room as if there would be something waiting for her there, a tentacled worm hanging from the ceiling waiting to make a leap at her face. No such creature appeared. Glancing about she forced her attention to the med station, pressing OK so that it told her THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATRONAGE :D. Then she keyed in the code for the last operation performed. Red text flared up on the screen. 1.04AM CRANIAL FRACTURE REPAIRED. 7.03 OPERATION CLOSED. THANK YOU!

Her hand went to her skull. She found it as expected on her left side and forehead and the back of her head but on her right temple – the hair there had been shaved away, a side of her wild messy pelt reduced to stubble that buzzed her fingertips as they touched it. Then she found something else; an irregularity smooth to the touch and unnatural in texture. The plastic of Sin-Nihon med station hypersuture. The plastic went in a long arc from her temple all the way almost to the top of her head. A large – what was that lovely word? – fracture now sealed up. Again that wriggling in her skull.

Mel now began to panic very calmly. She stepped back from the machine, saw upon its arms the slight redness indicative of recent heating-up and the slight amount of hyper suture gel missing from the tube and felt vomit rising hot and ready from the depths of her gut, acid stinging her throat, and she stood there adrift in the middle of the room not ready to look at anything light and dizzy and in the most horrendous agony of her life, aware of a conclusion she had already reached but could not (coward! – M.) voice it, could not entertain it, and she found her hand going to that plastic scar already dissolving into the material of her skin holding together two cracked pieces of skull beneath and her fingertips dug into it, tried to find the seam; dumb thought crazy thought but couldn’t well unthink something could you, she wanted to get it out of her fucking head and she touched the point between ruptures and pushed in, driving her fingernails into the plastic trying to tear through it so she could meet her broken skull and break it again, nerves on fire body saying no but she had to do this she was aware of her head breaking apart beneath the pressure all of her strength flooded into that arm into those fingers into this one little task her teeth grit her brain on fire and-

STOP IT.

The voice had come from inside her head.

Melanie froze there hand still trying to grip her skull. Actually it had come from everywhere; and from nowhere. It had been a non-sound, from just over her shoulder and in front of her and from within, as well. It had sounded so perfectly like a sound that it couldn’t have been one. Slowly she lowered her hand. GOOD. It was a voice without texture, without sex or pitch or tone. A machine buzzing at her in a sound that happened to resemble human language. DO NOT DO THAT.

She struggled to find words. “W-what…?” No answer came.

She went to the drinks cabinet and poured herself a whisky. She drank it. Then with glass in hand she went to the gun left on the floor and picked it up, hefty RL-60. The safety made a loud click as she thumbed it off. She pulled the hammer back and put the barrel to her temple. Her index finger curled around the trigger. She could not pull it. Mel tried very hard to squeeze her index finger, to shoot herself in the head, and her index finger refused. She grunted, squeezing with all her might, gritting her teeth and digging the nails of her other hand into her palm. And still she hadn’t shot herself. “Oh, come on!” she said, and she lowered the gun. The thing inside her skull wriggled in pleasure and she felt it. Did she? Calm, she told herself. Think dialectically. In all likelihood it was not literally wriggling. It was however inside her skull. She sat down in the chair in the corner. “What do you want?” she said aloud. There was no reply. She got up again. Thought about who could help her. Doctor public security police military command – heck, she thought, they’ll cut me open in the name of federal security. She drank a little more whiskey. “What do you want?” she tried again. But the voice did not answer. Mel decided to go see Andy. Andy would listen at least.

hey Andy I know last time I kind of sort of cheated on you but I have an alien in my head you know just like those old propaganda stories yup I got taken over sorry now let me impregnate you with my wriggly alien girldick

Something inside her head shuddered at this. A ha! The invader didn’t like that thought, she realised. Probably because it had been a very bad one, the kind people paid to complicate things – therapists – called unhealthy. Alright then, was Mel’s notion. actually you know when we used to lie together Andy sometimes I’d dream about stabbing you so you could be mine forever no response. That one hadn’t been genuine; Mel had never wanted to stab Andy. But there had once been a fantasy she’d had about what if I could scoop out all the bad parts of her brain and keep only the parts that loved me now that would be kind of good, wouldn’t it, would damn me to a thousand lifetimes in hell you obviously shouldn’t do things like that but they have the surgeries for it, she had been looking them up online pay an arm-master to kidnap the subject, open them up here and there and make a few careful alterations to the grey matter to alter the brain chemistry nothing still. Mel crossed her arms. “I’m trying my best to fuck you up here.” she said. “What was the problem with that first one, then?”

NO DICK, the voice in her head boomed.

“…What?”

WE DO NOT HAVE DICK.

“Oh. Well, of course. You’re a shrimp.”

NOT A SHRIMP.

“So what are you then?” No reply. Mel realised she had been speaking to herself; that anyone listening would have thought she was crazy. But there was a scar on the side of her head and the med station had its operation history and there was a dead alien in the sink. She got up and went to check on the alien and it was still there. Its dead eyes mocked her. “Bastard.” she spat. Her plan had been to go see Andy. She thought that she would go to do that now, ask for some…comfort? Medical help? A mercy kill? Better than staying here. Shrimp in her head. Probably just too much booze and not enough sleep. NOT A SHRIMP, a voice repeated. “Alright.” she said. She turned off the security layer and went outside and to the bike shed at the rear of the prefab and unsealed her Sunkisser; hefty red-streaked monster with toxic sludge-engine and hippie-ass solar sail (Andy’s idea), angular industrial beauty. Straddling the bike, leather gloves and breathing mask with filter from the compartment near the handlebars slipped on, glasses in their case in her pocket, she gunned it and the engine roared and the stench of sludge rose up from the exhausts. “Alright.” she said again. ALRIGHT, the worm in her head said. Ignoring it she leant forward and pressed her foot down on the accelerator, heading out of nowhere towards the far-off shape of the Genocide Highway.

(continued in PART TWO)