pink & all

Pink plants cascaded down the walls like streamers, all glinting like balloons in a midday sun, but these were lit by a massive yellow halogen lamp overhead, and a sparkling clung to everything, and to the walls' red, and his nostrils were slammed by the scent of freshly machined plastic mixed with deep genuine pine wood freshly cut. Iceland frowned as he crept through the bloodred hallway, because this was all a bit odd, then the lights flickered off.

He stood there, shivering, in waves of darkness. The void rolled over him like concentric waves, like an electrical throbbing machine; he peered for patterns in the wallpaper, but couldn't find them. He reached out, yearning, froze; felt nothing.

Then the lights swelled back on, and Iceland blinked. His hands were by his sides again. He raised a grimy hand to touch his cheek, feeling the stubble rash that sat upon his ice-pale skin. His handsome jaw worked; his thick black eyebrows furrowed. His eyes snapped away from the crimson wall, stared at one of the pink plant fronds, at a gentle layer of pinprick-thin needles upon it, like minute translucent hairs. His pupils had shrunk, one right after the other, and he felt them as he stood frozen midway through a stainless-steel doorway. This doorway was an off-path from the major colonial ship corridor; the room before him had the red wallpaper. The corridor behind him led back to the cryo-pods, from which Icey had been routinely awoken.

Over-active imagination, right? He flicked his eyes around, and there was a faint pink afterimage of that fuzzy fuchsia leaf. Iceland felt disoriented. This whole thing gave him a sense of déjà-vu.

It felt like this one time he’d played with a lighter, back on Earth, back by the mud, back in his run-down house at his carved, dark wooden table, and flicked it open, and watched the white spectre dance. He’d stared at this for a while, chewing at the gum of his cheek, as his irises narrowed.

Then, lightning cracked out the window, and Iceland looked away. But that flame’s seared-image had burned itself into his retina, and remained there for a while, even as the storm outside rampaged. As he waited for the afterimage to fade, Iceland clacked his tongue against his teeth, cracka-boom! went the thunder, and he licked the ridges of the roof of his mouth, swung the front door wide, and stepped out into the storm, into the thunder, and felt the rain coat his skin.

As he’d walked through the earth, he felt every ridge on the roof of his tongue, felt every last one of them, and felt uncomfortable.

Iceland rubbed his hands down his face, felt the bones underneath them. Disoriented. His fingers caught on his skin, like a cat’s tongue on velcro. Long cryo-sleep will do that to you, right, man? He gritted his gleaming teeth. Those sort of brain-calming simulations they put you through must really fuck it all up in there, in the mushy old cerebrum. Then, the cryo-fluid in your blood vessels really fucks things up, Jesus.

But it didn’t matter now. Iceland blinked heavily. I have a ship to reorient. Bizarre hallucinations be damned. I have a job to do. A comet’s path to avoid. He rubbed his cheeks. That directive had come from the ship's directives upon revival: Comet trajectory intersects Starship Elia's pathway. Orient ship's pathway to avoid comet pathway; re-orient to resume journey to destination.

Iceland peered off, past the feathery pink plantlife. But first, this queer room.

Iceland stepped fully past the stainless steel doorway and into the room, and saw it properly.

Before him stood an indoor pool surrounded by more of the pink plantlife. He clenched his teeth, and they reflected the sight of two bloodshot, distended human eyes sunken mid-depth into pink, bubbled fluid that filled the pool. The eyes were motionless, looking at nothing, neuron bundles corded all the way back to the human brain sitting in the centre of the chasm.

“What the hell are you?” Iceland Black yelped, pressed his hands on to hips, sank tight into his regulation blue shipgarb. Iceland’s engineer brain recognized immediately, and incongruously, a few things about the sight that sat before him as he began to pace. His oil-blackened fingertips he now shoved in his pristine pants; he chewed on his cheek as he maneuvered.

This net of human neural mass, receptory structures, nerve, ganglion bundles and wiring to the brain sitting suspended in the pool could have been scalped of its eyes, of its olfactory neurons, of its tongue, but it had not been, likely because that human brain would protest their absence. Iceland noted that the eyes were likely removed out of laziness, in a way; but a laziness that fit to form and function. The human brain was used to that sort of input, visual, gustatory, olfactory, and other sensory, and it was damned easier to leave those input intact, even if the bisected human was now looking at nothing, feeling only gel, nourished by that pink gelatinous ooze of a trillion enzymes and nanomachines.

No, this was more familiar, and kept the brain at ease. It was easier to leave the eyes in, and it made the brain more comfortable, and so that was done. No need for excess pseudo-wiring to plug in. The eyes stared at the pool wall, at a centre point of the tiling.

“By God,” Iceland whispered. “Someone’s made a wire-man.” He squatted down by the poolside, peering about the room. The whole room was perfused with that bubblegum-pink plantlife, arising from long patches of potting soil on either side of the pool and spiraling off like a wedding gown. The pool floor’s gleaming white tiles were overgrown, like a jungle.

“But why?” he cried. “And why here?” He frowned, chewed his tongue, and leaned back, peering up at a harsh halogen light. “Why on this ship?” He chewed the cud. “Lilac-Ronderosity was a ways off, still. Perhaps a trajectory calculation was necessary for which the shipboard computers would be insufficient? Perhaps my own arousal is redundant." He clicked his tongue against the ridges lining his upper palate; they were irregular, grainy. "I should check the gauges. Perhaps we were low on fuel. Did someone realize that we were dangerously low on fuel? Was this monstrosity generated to rewire the ship to a human mind, to more efficiently extend the journey? Perhaps human circuitry is electrically cheaper.” He racked his brain. “Perhaps there was an emergency.”

Iceland chewed at nothing, pacing. “But who? Now, Doctor Prasinos- would he do that to a man?” He could just see the Doctor’s pristine gloved fingers doing such a thing, freeing neural fibres from their sheathing. “No, no, that would be out of order. But who the hell else on this God-damned colonial ship would rouse himself early to do this sort of nonsense?”

He peered down at the massive, gelatinous pool. “Now, who the hell are you?”

“Well, I’m you,” the massive pink pool replied suddenly; but it didn’t really say it, because dissected vocal cords didn’t work without a wet human throat. No, somewhere down in the receding depths of a pool, four rounded speakers were vibrating the sound back, rippling the gel in regular patterns. But Iceland could damn well see that thing in there, and could deduce that it was the one signaling for the sound to arise.

Iceland stared at the nervous system tree, and at how its eyes peered ahead, not at him. The spinal cord, and every single off-branching nerve that had been carefully rerouted out of tissues, through vertebrae that were carefully bisected along with the rest of the body, pulled out of hemispheres of bone that formed old tunnels for the selfsame nerves; this all lay splayed before him.

Iceland stared back down at the eyes. Iceland wondered where the body’d gone. Was the brain-cord lowered as the hunk of flesh was peeled away? That disemboweled body’s brain still sparked. The eyes looked at nothing but pink fluid, suspended with glittering bubbles. The brain was active. The eyes stared at the centre point in the tiling. It’s harder to keep a human brain calm when it’s constantly screaming.

“Really,” the pool said in Iceland’s silence, “I’m you.”

Iceland blew out his cheeks. “Now, man, what do you mean by that?”

“I’m you, Iceland. I'm running the ship now.” As if to demonstrate, the pool sparked with a vibrant pink current. Iceland observed every plant around the poolside, every one of the many, gleaming golden corpuscles and emerald snares clung to pink fronds and ochre fruit and everything else with butterflies and that arose, ripen, swell, glisten, spew spores and pollen and suspend them in the air. Iceland stood, captivated. Small pink vine-tendrils uncurled at the edges of leaves and writhed outwards towards him as if signaling for his attention.

“Good God!” Iceland cried.

“The pseudospinal fluid my nervous system sits suspended within also circulates through the pipeworks of the ship. I keep all systems running through hormonal and ionic signaling. My human-derived signal waves are converted through electronic conduits into sine-wave signals that the ship’s computers can read. It’s all elementary, Iceland.”

Iceland-in-corpus outside the pool closed his eyes, and imagined nervous-system extensions being deftly, yet manually routed through the ship’s mechanics by some scientist, down to the control panels, through the electrical nervous system of the ship. “But why?” Iceland cried. “Why would someone do a thing like that?”

Silence.

“Tell me, man,” Iceland snapped.

Silence.

Iceland peered down at the brain-in-the-pool and squinted, ducked under waggling plant-life as it veered towards him in anticipation. He dipped a finger into the pool. The pool churned with enzymatic activity where the man-in-body touched the gelatinous mass.

“No shit.” Iceland licked a finger. Salty. He reached in again, flicked the pink, and the jello rippled.

“Please don’t do that,” Pool-Iceland-the-bisected-man whined, and Iceland-in-corpora laughed, jumping back as threaded vines wriggled at him.

“Are you really me!” Iceland cried, laughing. “A clone? Or something?”

“Yes, man! To the exact!”

“That process turned you into a whiner, didn’t it,” Iceland-in-corpus taunted. “Clones must not be created all the same. I’d never beg like that, not for anyone.”

“It takes energy from the ship’s life-systems to run my artificial immune system,” Iceland-in-the-pool complained. “You’re hurting yourself, man, and hurting all of you. I’m begging for your own safety.”

“Wah-wah,” Iceland-II snapped. “You’re definitely not me.”

“Yes, I am. And, sure, there’s some clonal variance. But, more importantly, I have new directives. New incentives.”

Iceland frowned. “Suppose I believe you. Which, for the record, I don’t.” He leaned dangerously far over the pool, stared at his distorted reflection. “How’d this all come to be, then?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” The rippling of the pool briefly contorted human-Iceland into a kaleidoscope. The eyes in the pool peered dead-ahead.

Iceland chewed his cheek. “You sure?”

Silence.

"Alright, then." He reached towards the pink again.

“Fine!” brain-Iceland shrilled. "We made contact with something approximately two hours ago."

The colonyship hurtled through the stars. Iceland-II stared at the pool. He clenched his jaw. “What?”

"At 04:03, Colonial Starship Elia passed through a region of space adjacent to a carbon-based, wrinkled, pseudo-organic mass. According to ship data, the mass was structurally not unlike pink, fungal work on a petri dish. The mass had taken the scale of a planet."

Iceland scratched his stubble. “A disembodied brain in the stars, huh. Like you. Huh? Could be.”

“Maybe. Homologous structures often arise in Earth-life. But this is not Earth. And it is not quite like me."

"Go on."

"Whatever the case, about two hours before your arrival to this room, pseudo-organic mass made its way into the byway ship. Do you remember the dark-flash?”

"Yes, I do." He frowned, and Iceland felt waves of darkness roll over him, like a mechanically beating heart.

“Iceland in the dark-flash frowned, stared up, and the moment the darkness arose to him, he felt it. A thousand small prickles, as pseudo-organics entered his pores, scanned his tissues, surged through him, system by system, organ by organ. As he shuddered in place, pseudo-tissue intertwined with every single of his own human tissues, pseudo-tissue invaded between gap junctions and tight fusions, wriggled into every single cell of his body."

Iceland felt one pupil contract, but the other one didn’t. He. Shaking, Iceland-by-the-pool pushed to his feet, quivered, and as pink leaves brushed against him, he stepped back out of the stainless steel doorway, snagged on the carpet, and began to run.

"After only moments, the pseudo-tissue retracted from Iceland, and he stood, frozen, quivering.

Something's horribly, deathly wrong. Iceland scampered, stumbled, boots snaring again in the carpet, and howled, crying out, tumbling to the carpet. He felt unstable, new to life, like a chick cracked from an egg, born fresh to the Earth. Need to get back to the cryo-pod. God, God!

Beside Iceland-1, a new Iceland was printed in place. A model organism. A cheap-o, a knockoff. The porous membrane of his face, for example, was an interlacing of thin, tenuous sinews, thin layers of lines of cells interwoven like cheesecloth. A value brand man. Iceland-2 was carted off for tissue-studies.”

“Fuck off!” Iceland cried. He stumbled, coughing, dragged at his scratchy stubble, raced down the curve of the ship’s spiraling corridor. His body reflecting huge then shranking down along the length of the bubbleglass viewport to the stars.

“There’s plenty more of you,” Iceland-in-the-pool taunted, “if you’re willing to look. Check the other labs, man.”

Iceland froze at a doorway to a lab and stared through steel paneled walls at another Iceland cut entirely in half at the waist, entrails, bones, and muscles flopping free, crucified. He turned slowly ahead, and ran in slow-motion, in jello.

“The original Iceland was carried, shuddering, to a lab, and sliced into extremely thin sections. Iceland-3 was used in radiological study, Iceland-4 in nutritional study, Iceland-5 in prosthetics, Iceland-6 in embryology. If the pseudo-mass was a brain, a homologue to human consciousness, then it wanted to understand. Though we may have arrived at the same end-point, we perused different pathways throughout evolution, and require different mechanisms to survive. The pink and all strove to understand."

Iceland slammed to a halt at his own cryopod, stared into his reflection. His pupils were small. He reached up to his reflection, touched the sweaty ridges of his own-face. He felt the thin, manufactured striations.

He remembered what it was like to stand, rainslicked, in the storm.

He remembered bellowing with laughter, holding himself, cackling as lightning fractured the sky, but still that afterimage, that pink, pulsing frond filled his image, and he was laughing.

And he remembered sinking to the earth, curling in on himself like a ball in a muddy black puddle, coiled fetally, and sobbing.

Iceland gripped himself and propelled to his feet, stumbled from the mechanical coffin from which he arose, which had once replaced his blood with cryodine, his air with gel, and slammed the button to OPEN! the cryopod cover. The cover, which was a thick, translucent material dome not unlike plexiglass, began to rise; a cold steam outgassed.

"I am Iceland-19, and I may now more efficiently run this ship. We may now travel to and colonize the Rondurosity more effectively."

Iceland tugged at the lid, yanking, straining, Faster, Damn it! Faster!, and at the rim of the pod his finger began to tear apart. He stared at the thin, sinewy, spongy, porous connective tissue linking the tip of his ring finger to the rest of him. He was built of fucking Swiss cheese. Icey cried out, dizzy, vision blurring, and slammed to his knees. Still hooked to the pod, his arm tore free, hanging on only by strands of cheap muscle and connective tissue, the veins and vessels still intact, looping between chunks of flesh like wiring, like bulging, churning pipes, small smooth muscle pumps still intact.

One half of his arm stuck in the rim of the cryopod, the other half stuck to his body like blue, he stared into the pod and cursed at a copy of himself that was already sitting inside, poorly manufactured, almost skeletal in its striated tissues, the blue slowly fading from its lips.

“Your colonial target-planet will be learned, like we have learned the materials of you. Your colonial target will be scanned, like you.”

Iceland gripped himself and propelled to his feet, slammed to the floor, and his arm continued to stretch. On his knees, Iceland stared out into the front viewport, crawled towards it, across the tiny prickling plastic fibres shooting up from a carpet he could only semi-efficiently feel, only a third of the receptors in place, crawling, dragging himself with poorly printed, half-spiraled fingerprints, mismatched pupils half-blown, half-staring.

“You are an endurance-testing copy, Iceland-21. Welcome to life.”

Iceland’s left eye stopped responding. He stared at a pink Rondurosity in the distance as the pseudo-brain’s wire-thin tendrils reached towards it, yearning.

Iceland blinked nauseously.

He stared into the flame, and it danced like a spectre, whorling left and right, yellow and white flume with whorling fingers and arms and legs dancing, dancing, dancing in impenetrable darkness, and his imperfect pupils narrowed.

A laugh, like the devil’s, infinite and prolonged, and false, and manufactured, and strummed upon his heartstrings.

“You’re forgetting something,” Iceland coughed, vocal cords tearing.

“What?” the speakers asked dangerously.

Iceland began to laugh, a desperate, yawning relief. “You didn't interpret everything properly. Did any of us reorient the ship?" His lungs were stirring, stretching. “You forgot to change the ship’s pathway,” Iceland howled, “We’re about to make the collision.”

The comet approached.

A pure white flame erupted.

“What?” repeated the pool.

And then a comet slammed into the side of the ship, and all went dark.

It all erupted into effluvia.