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It’s just past eight o’clock on a Saturday night, and Eddie Brock has already eaten three people and one pepperoni hot pocket.
Well, not quite. Eddie himself doesn’t do the eating exactly, but he might as well have. Two racketeers, one arsonist - an unusually high head count for a single evening, but hey, things are weird for everyone nowadays, aren’t they? The racketeers, Venom finds in a local Ukrainian imports shop, a family-owned place. From deep inside the creature, enveloped in its sticky black membrane, Eddie watches the extortionists’ headless bodies stumble for a moment before falling backwards into the nearest plywood shelf. He watches glass jars of pickled beets and cans of chicken kiev roll across the linoleum floor, and doesn’t feel too bad about it. Venom is fed, and Eddie himself is content with the hot pocket from half an hour earlier. The arsonist, Venom finds in a vacant apartment block around the corner: a young man by the look of him, barely out of his teens, maybe with malicious intent...or maybe just bored. Eddie hesitates for a moment. He’s not in the habit of endorsing murder, especially not the murder of listless young people trying to get over their latest breakup. But then again - people can die in these fires, and neither Venom nor Eddie is sated enough to be feeling charitable.
Two cans of chicken kiev later, they sit on Eddie’s couch watching Ridley Scott’s Alien.
STOP CHEWING WITH YOUR MOUTH OPEN. WE CAN’T HEAR THE MOVIE.
Eddie crumples up the empty bag of potato chips between two fists and chucks it over his left shoulder for good luck. He reaches for a new bag. “Say, you ever met a thing like that?”
LIKE WHAT ?
Eddie shrugs in the direction of the xenomorph onscreen. “Other aliens. Y’know, on your travels?”
OUR TRAVELS ?
Eddie fumbles for more potato chips and succeeds only in dropping the TV remote into the chip bag. “Around space.”
The silence that follows feels thick somehow, and uncharacteristic of either of them. If Eddie didn’t know better, he’d think his question has made Venom uncomfortable. Eddie Brock The Person doesn’t enjoy making anyone uncomfortable. Eddie Brock The Investigative Journalist lives for it - and now, he latches onto Venom’s apparent discomfort with a singular zeal.
“What’s your home planet like?” Eddie ventures. His fingers itch - for a tablet keyboard, a microphone, a notepad and pencil even. But if a device capable of recording the voice inside his head exists, Eddie sure as hell can’t afford it.
ANAEROBIC.
Eddie has to stifle a laugh. “Yeah, I bet, but I meant - y’know - how’s the scenery?”
THE SCENERY IS ANAEROBIC.
“Can I get you to elaborate on that, buddy?”
IF WE DIDN’T KNOW BETTER, WE’D THINK YOU WERE TRYING TO INTERVIEW US, EDDIE.
“What if I am?”
OUR HOME WORLD IS SEMI-TERRESTRIAL. IT IS COMPOSED PRIMARILY OF SURFACE PLASMA ENCASING AN IGNEOUS CORE.
There is something...odd in the detached way Venom describes its home planet. Eddie has never heard it sound so clinical before, so impartial. Venom’s voice does not vary overmuch in tone or timbre, but instantly Eddie recognizes the sound of someone - something - trying to maintain a veneer of apathy, trying not to lose any emotional ground.
“Okay,” says Eddie slowly, fishing the remote out of the potato chip bag. He turns down the volume on the television set before tossing the remote into the veritable no-man’s-land that is the opposite end of the couch. “What else is it like?”
IT ORBITS A RED DWARF STAR APPROXIMATELY THIRTY-NINE LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM THIS PLACE.
Hm. “Hold on a sec, that can’t be right.” Eddie’s no mathematician, but he knows enough about space travel to give him pause. “Wouldn’t it take decades and decades for a rocket to make it that deep into space? You can’t have been that far from Earth if you were discovered by the Life Foundation - their expedition only lasted ten years, round trip.”
This is a fact; Eddie remembers when Carlton Drake launched the expedition just over a decade prior. Eddie had been an undergrad at the time. Drake’s first expedition had made global news. Dimly Eddie recalls being asked, during the week leading up to the launch, to interview a handful of the engineering faculty at his college about their hopes for the future of space travel. This was shortly before he was fired by the university newspaper and dropped out to pursue a lucrative career in being a professional nuisance - a career which grew inevitably into the former Eddie Brock Show.
WE WERE ON A DIFFERENT PLANET AT THE TIME OF OUR EXTRACTION. A CLOSER PLANET.
“What, all by yourself?” Eddie finds he has run out of potato chips again, and instinctively tosses the crumpled-up bag over his shoulder once more. Double good luck. He extends an arm in the direction of the coffee table, and instantly a black membrane begins to ooze up through his pores. The membrane crawls along his forearm, making its way to his fingertips, where it joins together, unites itself, grows into a tendril and wordlessly retrieves a bag of snack-sized pretzels from the coffee table.
Eddie doesn’t even have to ask it to do that - this is just how they are these days. How they function. They are becoming a well-oiled machine, an amalgamation of man and creature. Communication is so swift it’s barely audible, barely tactile, barely anything at all: smooth and seamless. Venom knows what Eddie wants, and Venom knows how to get it.
Presently, they return to the topic at hand. “You were out there in space all by yourself?”
WITH OUR TEAM. WE WERE USING ‘WE’ IN THE PLURAL.
Eddie doesn’t know how to break it to Venom that the English language doesn’t include a singular ‘we’ to begin with. Wisely, he decides to drop matters of grammar and move on. “And this was Riot’s team, yeah? The one you left your planet with. What were all of you doing so close to Earth?”
CORRECT.
“What was the purpose of this team - solicitation? Like door-to-door salesmen, but operating on a much bigger scale?”
From somewhere deep inside Eddie, just beside his sternum, he feels Venom rumble with unhinged glee. GALACTIC CONQUEST !
“Right, right. Should have figured.” Eddie feels the corners of his mouth tugging upward. “And here I thought you were going from solar system to solar system, selling those weird little plastic tubes the infomercials are always going on about.”
CONQUEST IS FUN. EARTH IS MORE FUN.
“Right, thanks for the reassurance, bud. Much appreciated.” Eddie reshuffles his thoughts. He dips into the well of standard alien archetypes he’s compiled from too many afternoons spent in unemployment, watching daytime science fiction flicks to burn time. “So what made you decide to leave home? Oh, wait, let me guess - you didn’t get a choice?” Eddie’s getting ahead of himself here, but he’s mostly joking. Naturally, when he feels Venom bristle defensively inside him, he’s compelled to keep pushing it. “Does free will exist where you’re from, or were you born just to follow orders?”
SHUT UP, DUMBASS.
“Are we talking Invasion of the Body Snatchers type stuff here, or what?”
WE DID NOT RECEIVE ORDERS TO GO. WE WERE VOLUNTOLD.
Eddie nearly chokes on his pretzels. The thought of Venom being forcibly volunteered to do anything is beyond reasonable comprehension. Eddie doubles over laughing, giving himself a coughing fit in the process. He tries and fails to imagine Venom pushing paperwork in some corporate office somewhere, or its alien equivalent. Do aliens have bureaucracy? Human bureaucracy is bad enough, as far as Eddie is concerned, but it’s comforting to know that extraterrestrials and people might struggle with similar existential challenges. Voluntold. That’s disgruntled employee slang, desk jockey slang, Eddie thinks. Who taught it that?
YOU DID.
“Of course,” Eddie wheezes. “My mistake.”
DO YOU ROUTINELY CHOKE ON PRETZELS DURING EVERY INTERVIEW ?
“Just the important ones. The really high-profile cases. It’s my best technique.” Eddie has given up his search for the TV remote by now. “So did you or did you not?”
DID WE NOT WHAT ?
“See another alien. While you were slithering around space with your team.”
WE DO NOT SLITHER.
“You absolutely slither.”
NEVER ! NEVER HAVE WE SLITHERED !
“Oh yeah? What do you call that then - that way you move when you’re outside your host?”
While Venom grapples silently with the thousands of human verbs available to it, Eddie makes his way across the room to where a cold beer awaits him, neatly tucked into the door of the refrigerator. Finally, Venom gives up.
OUR LOCOMOTION IS FACILITATED BY MILLIONS OF MOTILE CILIA.
“Uh huh. Whatever you say. Looks like slithering to me, pal.”
DO NOT INSULT OUR CILIA ! A̷̯̺̘̟P̵̬͑̐O̶̹̼͑L̴̹̿͜O̴̢̜̦̮̕G̴̬̼̤̠͕͊͒̀̑Ȋ̴̛̙͑̒͐Z̵͍̿̐̄̂͗E̴͕̚
“You didn’t answer the question. That’s what us journalists call an evasive maneuver.”
YOU ARE THE FIRST ALIEN WE ENCOUNTERED - AFTER THOSE ASTRONAUTS WHO EXTRACTED US. AND THE HUMANS IN THE LABORATORY.
Eddie pulls a face. “I’m not an alien.”
YOU ARE TO US.
“Huh. I’m not sure how to feel about that.”
A TERM OF ENDEARMENT.
“Aw, shucks. Don’t get cute on me.”
WE ARE ALWAYS C̶̝͓̖̣̣͒̚U̵̫̜͆T̶͓̹̘̍̂̋̓E̵̘̱̍͗
Eddie grins and knocks back another mouthful of beer. Onscreen, the movie is still playing. A female astronaut’s mouth splits in a silent scream. Sigourney Weaver creeps down a darkened hallway. There is an explosion. There is another explosion.
“So you never met another extraterrestrial, huh?” He muses aloud. “That’s a little wild, bro. I would’a thought otherwise.”
THE UNIVERSE IS VAST, is all Venom says in reply. Its voice warms the hollow of Eddie’s throat, not unpleasantly.
Eddie leans back, puts his feet up on the coffee table, and wonders. The universe sure is vast. Vast as hell, Eddie thinks. He tries to visualize a universe with only people and parasites - all the inky black expanse, populated only by pinpricks of light. It feels lonely, so Eddie decides to put the thought away for now. He leaves it at the back of his brain, to turn over later.
“So now you know how a proper interview goes,” he says, unable to tolerate silence after so many weeks living with a new world inside his head.
YES. YOU CHOKE ON PRETZELS. THE INTERVIEWEE IMMEDIATELY GIVES UP THEIR SECRETS. SIGOURNEY WEAVER IS THERE.
“Exactly.”
Eddie remembers how Venom asked him to chew more quietly, even though Eddie has seen this film dozens of times - which means Venom, by default, has also seen it dozens of times. Venom knows everything Eddie does...and yet? And yet.
Maybe this is why the parasite seems so fascinated by monster movies, by comic books, by sci-fi features. The creature is fixated on how humans see aliens, Eddie realizes in a rare moment of insight, because it has never met one before.
“Venom,” Eddie says, heaving himself up off the couch to better access the manual controls on the side of the television.
WHAT N O W ?
“Do you want me to turn the sound back on? I can rewind it too, since we talked through the last couple scenes.”
The creature growls inwardly for a moment; Eddie can sense its contemplation--and then--
WE WOULD LIKE THAT.
Eddie smiles. An astronaut’s mouth splits in a scream. An actress creeps down a darkened hallway. There is an explosion. Host and parasite settle down to watch a movie, for real this time.