Page 7 of Abyss

"Please carry me there," I whispered.

"I would love to!" he said, his voice radiating happiness as he leaned forward and scooped me up in his arms. He rose to his feet without any issue, and I lay there as he began to walk, pressed up against his warm chest as my head leaned back and I watched the ceiling pass by overhead. It felt like I was floating.

"Thank you for letting me take care of you, Carla," he said.

"I should be thanking you," I replied, feeling the soft sway of my hand in the open air where I dangled it down. "I don't know why I'm like this."

"I shouldn't be alive at all," he said. "I am a creature made up of the torn-up lives of others. My entire existence has been one horror after another, but for the very first time, I am free to choose what I do, and I have chosen to take care of you. Being able to take care of another being instead of killing them is a gift I never thought I would receive. Though I acknowledge that it is important to you, it doesn't matter to me why you're like this. Without someone to care for, I wouldn't have an option to prove to myself that I am different from the monster I was forced to be. I am simply grateful that you exist at all."

Frankenstein didn't care about me at all.

His taking care of me wasn't about me, wasn't actions begrudgingly taken out of a sense of obligation, or pity. He wasn't doing this because he felt like he had to.

He was happy that I was like this because it gave him an opportunity to prove himself.

His taking care of me was entirely, utterly selfish.

How wonderful.

That selfishness took all the pressure off of me. I didn’t have to worry about him or his emotional needs. I didn’t have to care about him or worry about disappointing him when I didn’t have anything to give back. I could just take whatever he offered and not spend even a fraction of a second considering him in the slightest.

For the first time in a long, long time, something happened.

I smiled.

FOUR

FRANKENSTEIN

Carla was smiling.

I could just see the edges of it as her head lulled back, turned away from me as she hung loose in my arms, her body limp as she let me just carry her, without the slightest bit of tenseness in her muscles, like she was completely relaxed without a care in the world.

She trusted me.

The thought hit me like a neurofilament through hull plating, smashing through defenses I didn't even know I had. I had been her enemy. It had never been my job to collect dross and bring them to processing, but I had done far worse when my orders required it. I had been a part of teams that went down to the surfaces of planets and collected specimens. My cluster had been involved in attacking explorers who had made the mistake of venturing too close to the edges of Calicium territory. I had unloaded tribute packages from the few worlds left intact within our territory, planets whose populations did the work for us, destroying their ecosystems and ravaging their own surfaces for minerals to feed our ever-growing army, planets that wouldeventually be utterly consumed when they had run the limits of their ability to self-harvest themselves.

Nothing I had ever done, in the entire history of my awareness, was worthy of trust.

Yet she gave it to me with the relaxation of her body, with the smile that curled on the edges of her lips.

She was broken in a way the other humans couldn't repair. That was clear the moment I came upon her, lying down on the ground in the middle of the hallway. Her body was weak, but she was still capable of movement. What was stopping her was whatever was going on in her mind.

I had absolutely no idea what to do about that.

At the same time, I didn't need to do anything about it either. Self-repair was an individual's responsibility. My task wasn't to fix her; it was to care for her. If she managed to fix herself, or communicate what was required to do so, then I would assist her with her task of self-repair. In the meantime, I would provide whatever she needed to the best of my abilities.

Right now, she needed somewhere better to lie down.

The location provided by the system was deeper into the ship, in a section I didn't recognize. Since the ship was free, it was likely reorganizing, changing itself to suit whatever goals it decided to pursue, one of which was hopefully getting as far away from Calicium territory as possible. I could see evidence of those changes as I carried her. The hallways were being torn apart, paneling removed to expose the bare neurofilaments underneath, shifting and moving against one another like a pile of snakes, the long white tendrils still holding the soft pink tinge of all Calicium enslaved Vaurelcar. The wild ones all had stark white neurofilaments. It was a known issue that the wild ones were stronger, and the pink was a sign of ill health, but so far, none of the Plexus clusters that had Vaurelcar ships had been able to identify the issue.

The hallway narrowed, but not in size, just in available walking space. More and more of the neurofilaments were exposed. I walked on a narrow walkway of metal floor plating, careful not to step off the bridge. If I did that, the Vaurelcar would feel me, and they didn't like to be touched. The exposure of this many neurofilaments was a product of it rearranging itself, not because it wanted to leave large sections of its body exposed to the smaller creatures crawling around inside of it. The metal that made up the inner hallways of the ship was its protection, its clothing that prevented it from having to taste the details of our existence. It would still be able to see or hear me if it had optical or visual sensors nearby, but those were artificial contraptions that the species adapted as it ventured out into space. Vaurelcars, in their basic existence, perceived the world primarily through touch.

So I was very careful not to touch it.

It might look like it was trusting me, assuming I would stay on the narrow walkway of metal and not stomp all over it, but I knew that it was more likely a test. If I acted like I would have if I still had a control chip embedded in my skull, I would have taken the shortest possible path, even if it included cutting corners and stepping off the walkway.

"What is that stuff?" Carla asked, moving her hand to point at the neurofilaments.