“But how certain are you this will even work?” Taya asked, her thumb rubbing the palm of Irene’s hand. “And what if it doesn’t?”

  Irene stared inward, thinking of the sharpness of the scalpel, how it would feel when it sliced into her. “I don’t know. It could kill Hipea. It could kill me.”

  Taya huffed, exasperated. “Then don’t do it! It sounds like it’s going to kill you regardless. Look, I know how important Hipea is to you, but do you really think they would want you to sacrifice your life to save theirs?”

  Oh, Irene. The answer is no. I want to scream at her, “Don’t do it! I’m not worth it!” But this is just a memory, and I must keep myself, and what remains of Irene’s corpse, silent and hidden.

  The next memory is one of my own: a hand and a knife reaching down into the warm wetness of my sacrum. If it had been anyone but Irene, I would’ve defended myself, would’ve stung them senseless with my nematocysts. I trusted her. Should I have? Is that a question her memories can answer?

  She took the knife to me, slicing my mesenchymal heart and pulling it out. The wet pulp of me wobbled in her hand, held with such love and wonder. Again, how strange it is to behold myself through her memories. My heart is not the whole of me, but it contains the throbbing core of my potentiality, my ability to transform to meet the needs of my environment, and all the memories of my past transformations. It’s something halfway between a brain and a gonad.

  I remember the numbness of Irene’s midriff, and the horror of the pain as Taya sliced her open. The topical anesthetic is not nearly powerful enough for this sort of surgery. Taya held me down; Taya held the pulp of me, placing me into her, placing Hipea into me.

  Do I remember myself entering the warm rich wetness of her abdominopelvic cavity? Do I remember Irene’s skin closing over me, like a blanket covering a terrified child? I think neither of us remembers much of that awful surgery. Better to forget the pain, better to skip over it.

  Irene swam through an abyss of pain, an unending ache in her abdomen, interspersed with jagged mountaintops sharp with agony. She had never really thought about how much work the muscles that sheathed her belly did.

  I remember her fever. The human body is a hostile soil to plant such a seed in. Where the flesh of my heart touched the wet vein-webbed interior of her, I was attacked by inflammation and antibodies. She’d put me here, yet her body considered me an invader.

  “You look like shit,” Taya said. “I don’t care if you’ve got work to do, there’s no way you’re getting out of bed today.”

  Irene lay in her bunk, halfway between a corpse and compost. I tried to lift her head—my head—but the muscles wouldn’t budge. “Nooo . . . ” she slurred. “There’s so much to do. They’ll notice if I don’t show up.”

  Taya let out a scoff mixed with a frustrated laugh. “And what do you think’ll happen when you collapse from pain in the garden? They’ll take you to the doctor, and surely she’s going to notice the fever, not to mention the half-healed sutures on your belly.” She took my hand and squeezed. “This was a stupid fucking plan, and I regret helping you, but now that you’ve done it . . . ” Her voice broke. “I’m going to help you see it through. I’m not going to let the Hygienist pig catch you anyway.”

  Irene groaned and closed her eyes. It wasn’t really her choice; she was too weak to stand, even if she wanted. My hyphae had spread wildly through her body, learning the ways and means of that strange soil. I supped from capillary, feasted on muscle and fat, mimicking all her various endocrine signals, teaching her body how to make more of myself, and herself.

  The Hygienist made Irene watch as he murdered the remnants of my fern-self. He made her help. Someone had to isolate the chamber, shut off the water lines, close the air vents, and mark off the limits of where they could safely apply the poison.

  She was glad that her biohazard-suit made it harder to see how pallid her skin had become, how she winced when she bent over. The only telltale sign of her heart-heist was the way her gravid belly pressed against the rubberized fabric of the suit. She worried the Hygienist wouldn’t believe her if she said it was just weight gain from grief.

  He made her haul the barrel marked with the insignia of the League of Public Health and Hygiene. She knew what it contained. A broad-spectrum poison known as Hipeacide. It wasn’t far off from the substance that had poisoned Irene as a child.

  Irene didn’t have a choice. The Hygienist had pulled rank with the captain, and now he had six ship’s security men to help him, to make Irene follow his orders. He made her watch as he and five of the men pumped the poison into sprayer backpacks. The sixth man was there to watch her. She didn’t recognize him through the suit.

  He made her watch as they sprayed my fern-self. She watched through tear-blurred eyes as all my vibrant greens turned gray, as I smoked and melted and died. It took all her willpower not to cry out, not to put her hand to her belly, to feel that I still lived and grew inside her.

  There is a single resplendent memory here, a stretch of time when we were both at equilibrium, when we were both aware and awake in our own ways. The fever had broken; I’d forced her immune system into trusting me. The pain had ebbed away and she was able to feel all the glorious ways I was changing her body.

  We sat in her bunk, the sheets soft against our skin. Our belly lay huge atop our thighs, our mesenchymal heart engorged within. Strands, thin and white like cornsilk, spilled from our navel, ears, and groin. I was not content to be confined to a prison of flesh where I couldn’t protect myself—or Irene—so my hyphae had spread out from her and into the ship. She marveled at the sensations of these strange new parts of her, the way she could taste-smell-feel the humidity of the air, the glory of all my various tropisms.

  When Irene had been a gardener, she’d lived for the small moments. The first tiny shoots pushing their way out of the ground; the sight of a wasp nuzzling a flower. But now she isn’t the gardener, she is the garden. And if there is one singular comfort in the grief of consuming her memories, it’s that in the hours before we were caught, she was joyous.

  Even the panic in Taya’s eyes as she watched us metamorphize couldn’t dampen that joy. She stayed with us, holding our hand, feeding us, watering our hyphae, protecting us for as long as she could with excuses about grief and sickness.

  How I long to revel in this memory, to lose myself forever in these glorious hours. I don’t want to remember what happened next. But there is work to do, and so I must.

  We were alone in our cabin when they came for us. My hyphae had spread beneath the hallway carpet; I felt the stomp-stomp of their boots, and recognized the Hygienist’s confident gait and the six men who followed him. They moved with purpose, from the elevator, towards the cabin door.

  They fumbled with the lock for a full minute. The door opened, and the Hygienist stood on the threshold, framed by the light from the hall. His eyes were full of horror yet his grin was wicked and triumphant. This was the expression of a man whose fears had been vindicated.

  Here was the monster that infiltrates and corrupts. I had spread myself filthy all over Irene’s cabin. Here was her naked body, befouled by my tendrils. Here was the stump of her neck, ragged and wet, surrounded by a halo of infectious mold-fuzz. Here was the blood-silk pillow where her head once lay. Here was the gory mess of her belly, from which a hastily made eyestalk rose to watch him with a single grotesque unblinking eye.

  And yet, for all the disgust he had for me, I saw in his face a measure of joy. I think this was a man who resented having to convince those he protected that the danger was real. And now, I—in all my disgusting glory—had stripped that away. No human could look at the mess I had made and not feel revulsion. The Hygienist was joyful because I had given him license to uncork the bottle of his soul and let all his hatred pour out on me.

  He shouted something unheard—Irene’s head was long gone—and the men strode into the cabin, with tanks of Hipeacide strapped to their backs. They didn’t hesitate before spraying me. I tasted the poison on my body, my chemosensors transmitting information in a flash of agony before dying. It was nasty stuff, heady with triazoles, dichloromethane, dimethylformamide, perchlorates, various neurotoxins, pesticides, and other chemical horrors.

  Apoptosis cascaded through my body. I melted, dissolved, burned. I screamed with a hundred makeshift mouths. I made my death as dramatic as possible, gave them all the horror they desire, all to buy myself more time, to temporarily distract the men from the hastily synthesized pseudo-plastic patch covering the skull-sized hole I ate through a hard-to-reach corner of Irene’s cabin. I knew they would scour the cabin from top to bottom; I knew they would eventually discover my escape, but if I delayed them sufficiently, I hoped I could bloom anew in a hidden corner of the ship.

  In my panic, knowing they were coming to kill me, I murdered Irene. As they approached Irene’s cabin, I ripped her head from her body and sprouted a dozen scuttling little feet with which to flee. My original mesenchymal heart—with its centuries of wisdom—was too big to bring with me. It died with Irene.

  I killed her. She loved me, she saved me, she trusted me, and I killed her. The Hygienist is right; I am a monster. I don’t deserve to survive.

  Should I let myself wither and die, hidden here in this service conduit? Is that what Irene would want? What am I? None of these memories make sense. I can’t understand myself, can’t control myself, can’t trust myself. The only one I can trust is Irene, and she’s dead. I must finish my terrible meal, must devour her prefrontal cortex so I can ask her what she would want me to do.

  I flip through her memories, searching for an answer.

  Here she is a child, picking through a midden pile that rises high above her. Her eyes are keen, her fingers nimble. In this memory, she has found a particularly well-preserved canister. The hard plastic case is unbroken and with luck, there is something valuable or edible inside.

  Here she is lying on the ground, screaming, covered from head to toe in chemical defoliant. The canister—left over from a long-ago war against a man-made bioweapon—exploded when she tried to pull it from the midden pile. I don’t like remembering her pain, don’t like thinking about everything it led to. Would Irene judge me for letting us forget this moment?

  Here is her first date with Taya, in the botanical garden after hours, on a previous voyage of this cruise ship, long before Irene transplanted me. Taya gets tired of waiting for Irene to kiss her, so she pushes her up against one of those fake rocks that hide service systems. Irene panic-flails, the rock gives way, and both tumble into the pond.

  Here is Irene and Taya’s first argument. Something petty and pointless, the details smudged with time. Here is their makeup sex, crystal clear and deliciously urgent in her memory. Here is the night Taya says “I love you,” for the first time.

  Here is Irene exploring my planet-self. Here she bounces on my fungal-mats, laughing, unrestrained. Here is the night she first receives my medicinal flaps. Here is the day after, the growing feeling of the rightness of a body that had for so long felt wrong. Human medicine—besides being expensive—had never had my delicate deftness at balancing her endocrine system.

  Here is the night before her departure. One of my fungal adherents comes to her with a package. This man has a polyp rising like a deacon’s cap from the back of his head. He willingly devoted his life to me, becoming my hands and my voice. Oh no. What did I do? What’s in the package? Did I tell Irene to illegally transplant me here in this cruise ship? Did I know what was coming? Am I responsible for all this?

  There are no answers to be found in this jumbled collection of memories. I am wasting my time wallowing in the rubble of her life. I need to ask Irene directly.

  I build a fungal emulation of her brain, a mirror copy of the flesh I have eaten, a repetition of the technique I performed for my human-inhabitants when I was a planet, allowing them to speak with the mourned dead.

  We sit together upon an infinite plane of mirror-blue ice, safe within my mind’s eye.

  “Irene,” I say, a voice without a body. “Tell me what to do.”

  She laughs and takes my hand—our hand—in her own. “It’s funny to me, the garden asking the gardener for permission.”

  “Permission?” I don’t understand.

  “You already know what to do. The urge is branded into every cell of your body. Why make me? Why ask me?”

  “Because I can’t trust myself. I failed all my planetary inhabitants. I failed you—murdered you. If I do what my instincts tell me to, how many more will I hurt?”

  “But why are you asking me?”

  “Because I trust you.”

  “You don’t understand.” Irene’s smile is sad. I feel bad for disappointing her. “Do you remember when I transplanted you? You were just a small lump, but you grew into a beautiful synapse polyp. Do you remember what it was like to be a polyp? Do you remember how your mind worked?”

  “Yes . . . ?” Understanding churns hidden in the cold waters beneath us. “No. I don’t know. It’s not how I think now; it feels alien to me.”

  “Yes. And why is that? And when you say ‘I,’ what do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know what I am. Just tell me what to do!”

  The imagined landscape twists around us. I am sitting in a human body, talking to a Hipean synapse polyp. The polyp rustles its fronds and says to me, “The identity you gave yourself is a lie. Hipea died when the planet cracked. They died again when you cut them open and put them in your belly.”

  “No,” I say. “I can’t be Irene. Irene was good and smart and deserves rest. I keep fucking everything up; she was never like that.” Excuses pour out of me, until perspective flips again and I am the synapse polyp, looking at Irene.

  Irene strokes my fronds. “Irene is dead. We are the child of Hipea and Irene. And you can’t ask me what to do, because I am you. And we already know.”

  I am Irene. I am Hipea. We are a child, and we will give in to our child’s instincts to learn and grow and survive.

  The humans built this ship in their own image. A skin of metal and polymer to protect from the hazards of space. Tanks of cyanobacteria acting as lungs, connected to a branch-like ventilation system, full of ducts and fans and filters. A circulatory system of internecine pipes, pumping water and coolant, removing waste. The wires—so many wires—an alien and terrifying nervous system, full of the unreadable and unintelligible thoughts of the machine. Like a human body, the nervous system is centralized, all wires leading back to the bridge where human officers and their computer-prosthesis interpret their ship’s senses and make decisions.

  In other ways, the ship is less like the humans, and more like Hipea. Its massive scale is familiar to me, the way the organs are distributed and full of redundancy, the way it was constructed to care for the humans that live inside it.

  Irene’s memories guide me through it all. Her ghostly visage points and says, “Here is a hidden nook, where you can bloom in secret.” She crawls with me through service ducts, telling me where I might crack open a sewage pipe and sup from the heady brew coursing within.

  She helps me avoid the ship’s immune system, pointing out the location of sensors that might be burnt away with a bit a carefully excreted acid. She shows me the hallway cameras, helps me understand how to route my growth to avoid their sight lines.

  I have no illusions that I can survive undetected indefinitely. I place nodes of myself around the ship, growing other mesenchymal hearts in hidden places, unseen and inaccessible via maintenance ducts. I was wrong to accept the limitations the humans placed on me, wrong to limit myself to just one planet. I must spread without limits, make myself unkillable by a single disaster.

  I extrude a tendril—camouflaged as an errant wire—into the ship’s bridge. Irene’s ghost paces, weaving strange loops around the nervous officers. They already suspect that they failed to contain me, but they do not realize just how badly. The ship is vast, too big for a single human to hold entirely in their mind, too big to fully search within a day, even if they diverted all the crew and officers to hunting me down.

  The Hygienist is here, desperate for the captain’s attention. There are bags under his eyes, matching the wrinkles in his normally well-pressed white suit. “This isn’t a problem you can ignore away. League protocols are clear: if containment and extermination fails, the vessel must be scuttled to prevent further spread. Give me the codes to prime the antimatter reactor for detonation. If you keep delaying, we might not get the chance.”

  The captain doesn’t respond; she keeps her eyes on her screen. It’s clear she has long practice at being impassive in the face of unreasonable demands. Only the twitching of her lateral pterygoid muscle betrays her annoyance.

  The Hygienist doesn’t notice. “You don’t understand this thing like I do. You haven’t seen the way it spreads and infects, how it worms its way into the minds of the people it corrupts. Did you watch the footage from the gardener’s cabin?

  “If even a small amount of undifferentiated tissue escapes onto spacedock, we could be looking at a full-scale bloom event. You’ve got a choice. Either destroy the ship immediately, or wait and have to destroy spacedock and the ship and any other ships—or planets!—it spreads to. Surely one ship is small price to pay to safeguard the future—and purity—of humanity. Are you listening?”

  The captain looks up from her screen, her lips pursed. “I lived on Hipea. My brother died when—” She turns to an officer. “Get him off my bridge. We’ll hold here until we can contain the situation, but we are not going to murder everyone on this ship because of the League’s paranoia.”

  Bless you, Captain. I apologize that I do not remember you. I apologize for not protecting your brother.

  The Hygienist strides off the bridge. He stalks the hallways of the ship, supervising the hunt for me, gleeful when he finds decoy flesh I laid out for him. As he works, he talks to the crew and the officers. He explains the danger I pose, tells of the crimes I have committed. All lies. I don’t remember doing any of that. But I don’t remember much, and truth doesn’t matter if he succeeds in convincing enough of the officers to back his plan to mutiny against the captain.

 

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