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His daemons name was Silére and she took the form of a snow monkey. She was outspoken, for a daemon. It was rare for a daemon to address anyone other than their own person, but Gordon Freeman’s snow monkey would often interject into the middle of conversation to share her thoughts. It was impossible to stop her. Freeman had tried, without success - it was a genuine problem.
And when they first met the security guard, his snow monkey swung herself up onto his shoulder to whisper in Gordon’s ear.
“Hey - I can't see her. Where’s his fucking - where is she? What is she?”
The snow monkey was, of course, talking about the security guard’s daemon. Or rather, lack of. He didn’t have one. Of course she could’ve been in the form of an insect, and riding along in a pocket somewhere - but insect daemons usually preferred to ride out in the open, on their person’s shoulder, unless that person worked a very physically dangerous job, and even those people would have them in a little case around their neck. A daemon always sat somewhere obvious, somewhere to say ‘I’m not a zombie, or a spirit, or inhuman’. A person without a daemon was half a person, like someone without a head, but this security guard, Benrey-
He had no soul.
But no, he had to have one. Because when Benrey needled Freeman about his company ID, or his passport, or whatever, there was nothing zombie-like about his manner of speech. He acted perfectly alert, and alive. So he had to have a daemon somewhere - perhaps it was just shy? - hiding in a pocket, or so small so as to be invisible at a glance. A tick. A waterbear. A flea. It was creepy, and rude, but not impossible.
And then the security guard turned to Gordon Freeman and said he wasn’t human.
And while Gordon Freeman took this in stride, slotting it in as a perfectly reasonable explanation for Benrey's inhuman lack, his snow monkey could not accept it: and she chattered and clung to his back like a fretful child, terribly and instinctively afraid.
The snow monkey is a terrestrial Old World monkey species that is native to Japan. They are so named so because some live in areas where snow covers the ground for months each year. No other non-human primate lives in a colder climate. They have brownish grey fur, pinkish red faces, and short tails. They are intelligent animals, very adaptable, and perhaps best known for their tendency to bathe together in hot springs.
There’s this quantum physics theory - maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called the ‘Many Worlds’ theory, and the basic idea of it is that everything happens somewhere.
There’s our universe. And then, a step sideways into another dimension, there’s another universe - just a little bit different from ours. And step sideways from that universe, there’s another one again. And another after that. Like when you put two mirrors to face each other, and you see reflections stretching off into infinity, getting greener the further the curve goes. There could be a universe where time moves backwards. There could be a universe where there are only two dimensions, as flat as a sheet of paper.
There could even be a universe where people keep their souls inside them, instead of by their side in spirit form, as daemons.
Bubby’s daemon was a crab. Not a head-crab, not an alien, but rather an actual Earth-type crustacean, such as lived underwater and whatnot. It was a small specimen of a large arthropod - a spider crab, to be precise - but as a daemon, it was nowhere near the size of the actual animal. It rode along on Bubby’s shoulder, comfortably regarding the world. With crabs, it is naturally hard to tell whether the crustacean is a boy or a girl, and his spider crab was in no rush to clarify the issue. It rarely spoke to anybody but Bubby, not even the others daemons. And whenever Gordon’s snow monkey tried to ask, it simply flicked its beady little eyes at her in placid amusement, and didn’t answer.
In myth, monkeys and crabs are sometimes enemies. Certainly Bubby’s spider crab and Silére didn’t get along, and not for her lack of effort. She would attempt to start a conversation, and Bubby’s crab daemon would just stare at her, silently. It might even reach out and pinch her if she annoyed it too much, making her yelp and run back to Gordon. She would then, from the safety of his arms, make a rude gesture across the room. And Bubby’s crab daemon would slowly, slowly raise a claw high into the air as if about to wave back, and give her a very deliberate little ‘snap!’ as a reply.
But Bubby actually got on pretty well with Doctor Coomer, however, and so at one point Gordon asked about it. “What is it - Bubby’s daemon, I mean?”
“A spider crab, Gordon! Also known as the ‘tall legs crab’ it is reported to have a gentle disposition despite its fearsome appearance! It has the largest leg span of any arthropod…”
And while Coomer yattered on, Gordon’s snow monkey swung herself forward on her knuckles and sought out the scientist’s cat daemon. Silére liked Coomer’s cat - whenever the cat daemon batted at the ‘ropes’ the snow monkey was always there to quickly yank her away while Gordon did the same thing for her scientist. She quietly asked her the same question, and later, told Gordon what she’d discovered.
“She said the same thing Coomer did. Something something, gentle disposition, fearsome appearance.”
“Gentle disposition? Really? That little monster?”
His snow monkey swung herself up onto Gordon’s shoulder at that point, and whispered hesitantly in his ear. “Gordon, I think those two are - the crab and the cat, I mean - I think they might be…”
“No way. I mean, Bubby and Coomer get along, sure, but.”
“I’m telling you man, it’s never pinched her. Not once. And I think she tried to give it a bath when we stopped back there for a second. You know, like cats do. She’s never done that for me - and I actually have fur.”
Gordon's snow monkey and Bubby’s spider crab would only really get along after they found Bubby back in his tube (with the spider crab in a seperate partition, for some sad reason). It would take standing on the gates of the final teleportation portal for Gordon and Bubby to find a middle ground.
It was on the floating island with the volcanic vents. Wild spider crabs actually made their homes in vents deep beneath the sea, and perhaps some memory of that wild instinct existed within the spirit-daemon yet, for while they were talking, Bubby’s spider crab made itself comfortable inside one of those alien vents and could not be persuaded to leave. Silére actually had to reach in and pull it out, gingerly, so they could all go and fight the final boss. And the thing was? When she did, Bubby’s crab didn’t even pinch her.
Too hard.
The Bubby prototypes did not have daemons. Whether they’d been created without them, or whether they’d been severed, Gordon didn’t want to know. He just pointed and fired mindlessly, and his snow monkey clung to his back and hid her face on his shoulder.
Daimonic: from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (that anyone from Black Mesa can edit):
The idea of the daimonic typically means quite a few things: from befitting a demon and fiendish, to be motivated by a spiritual force or genius and inspired. As a psychological term, it has come to represent an elemental force which contains an irrepressible drive towards individuation. As a literary term, it can also mean the dynamic unrest that exists in us all that forces us into the unknown, leading to self-destruction and/or self-discovery.
The term is derived from Greek "δαίμων" (daimon, gen. daimonos): "lesser god, guiding spirit, tutelary deity", by way of Latin—dæmon: "spirit”, which originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daemons of ancient Greek religion and mythology...
Tommy’s daemon was a small brown unassuming bird. It was only later that Freeman would discover he was the son of a witch - and an inter-dimensional government agent - which was why his daemon had assumed that form, because of course all witches had bird daemons.
In being the son of a witch, however, rather than a daughter, he had but a mortal lifespan. And like all mortals, his daemon could not fly too far from him at all.
She - Tommy's daemon - didn’t seem to mind that the security guard was inhuman. She would flutter around Benrey’s head hopefully, from time to time, as if wishing to play with the daemon he didn’t have. She would never touch, of course. Never land on him, because it was the greatest possible intimacy for a person to touch another person’s daemon, and a complete taboo between all but the closest of lovers or worst enemies. But Benrey would sing something with his Black Mesa Sweet Voice, and Tommy’s little daemon would dip through the colourful balls playfully, and so in this way the two of them were good friends.
Freeman actually didn’t think much of Tommy’s daemon, to be honest - at least until he got his arm cut off. It was a small brown bird of some indeterminate woodland species, like you might see a thousand variations of on the street. Very dull in appearance. And Freeman let appearances deceive him, and his snow monkey was only ever politely friendly to the small bird-daemon.
At least until the time his arm was cut off by the soldiers. And when he woke up in the pile of trash, with Silere chattering mindlessly and pawing at the stump of his arm, running in circles, directionless, it was Tommy’s bird daemon that he heard in the distance, that he followed. He made his way through the desert. He climbed through the pipes. He followed that sound of that sweet high birdsong through the pipes, until he found Tommy standing in that room with the radioactive vats.
The beautiful trilling warble came up out of the darkness, out of the deep tunnels and through the pipes. The sweetest piercing birdsong, trilling like a bolt of bright lightning in the darkness. With every lapse in the song came a thunder-deep fear, that this was the end of it, that it had stopped for good. But always after a little pause, it would come again, that warble drifting on the air, speaking of green hills blowing in the cool breeze, of sunlight across rippling grass, of release, of nature and new growth. The powerful sound was like the sun coming through clouds. It was so out of place, both in the desert and in the concrete-metal halls of the facility. ‘It’s morning!’ the invisible bird was whistling. ‘I am here, there is no danger!’ Freeman could no sooner have ignored gravity than ignored that sound. He followed it without even realising, only knowing that wherever that bird was - that other place, that bursting world of creativity and life - wherever that bird was, that was where he wanted to be.
He followed it through the desert, through the pipes, and back into the deep tunnels and the darkness. And he found it - the source of that piercing birdsong, the tiny little nightingale singing its damn heart out.
‘I am here!’ The nightingale’s song seemed to say. ‘There is no threat - I am alive - I am going to eat insects!’
Yet as soon as it saw Freeman, the bird daemon peeped a small alarm and fell silent, watching.
When his arm was cut off by the soldiers, his snow monkey clung to his back like a child the whole time he was dealing with that shit. It was only afterwards, when Gordon Freeman was a little safer, that his soul was able to crawl out and come to him with an apology, her little monkey arms thrown around his neck in a hug, her teeth chattering still. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” That was all she was able to say, all she could offer to explain the way she’d gone completely to pieces, and been completely useless.
It was Tommy’s nightingale daemon, the little brown bird, that led Freeman through that worst couple of hours. Besides being beautiful singers, nightingales also represented a lot of creative endeavours, because of the songs, poetry, and fairytales that their beautiful songs inspired.
Silére was always very respectful towards Tommy's daemon, afterwards. And the brown little bird was only politely friendly in return, just the same as she had always been.
A person without a daemon was a zombie, or a spirit, or something inhuman. Benrey definitely ticked all three boxes.
He had this thing he would do to rile Freeman up, however, where he’d pretend something weird or inanimate was his daemon. The first couple of times Gordon actually believed him. Because it was true, wasn’t it, that witches daemons could fly far away from them? Who’s to say the same could not be true of this soulless security guard?
But the first couple of times he did it, he would point at things deliberately to unnerve Freeman. “that’s my daemon,” Benrey would say, pointing at a pigeon, or a head-crab, or a terrible giant beast. And for a moment Gordon would look at him sideways and almost believe him, even though there was no possible way anybody could mistake an animal for a daemon, or vice versa. And then Benrey would shoot the pigeon, or the head-crab, and Gordon would feel this terrible little rush of horror because - as Silere would whisper in his ear, panicked - ‘what if it is his daemon? what if it is?’
At a certain point, the joke got old. All the thousands of head-crabs and pigeons probably weren’t his daemon, and neither was it the one time he’d found a wind-up frog, and made the little toy hop across a scientists desk with the promise ‘that’s my daemon’. That one time was a particularly horrible prank. It got to the point where if Benrey said ‘that’s my daemon’, and pointed, Freeman would shoot it first just to get the punchline over with.
It never was, anyway. He didn’t have one.
In the end Gordon came up with his own personal little theory. There were certain animals - armoured bears - that made for themselves armour out of fallen meteors. They made their souls out of inanimate metal, they put time and effort into the creation of it. And so Gordon reasoned that perhaps Benrey’s ‘daemon’ - for want of a better word, his soul, his spirit - was in actuality his passport.
This theory was the most horrible of them all, of course. But it was also the one that he believed to be true, because in the end, only when they destroyed all the passports, only then was Benrey finally defeated.
And yet a part of him couldn’t help but wonder, that whole time when they were running through Black Mesa. His snow monkey would keep her distance from the security guard, sit up on two legs, and sort of look him up and down, searching. She couldn’t help it. She was looking for the thing that wasn’t there - perhaps it was in a pocket or something - the thing that proved Benrey wasn’t a zombie, or a spirit, or something inhuman. His soul. Even at the end, she couldn’t believe he didn’t have one. A person without a daemon was half a person, after all. And no matter how much Gordon tried to assure her otherwise, his daemon couldn’t give up on the idea that Benrey had a human soul: something, somewhere, secret.
Even in a place this crazy, however, Black Mesa was nevertheless home to a host of perfectly normal daemons.
Darnold, for example, had a beautifully intelligent octopus that he kept in a portable aquarium beside his desk. When the science team came into the Lambda Lab, she put a thoughtful tentacle out of the top of her tank, and watched them with interest: as if they were the ones behind the glass, the zoo animals: as if they were an interesting little show put on just for her.
There was a moment in the Lambda Lab where Darnold suggested he’d join their adventures. Gordon looked at the octopus aquarium, unsure, for it would take only a single bullet to break the glass, and what would become of her then? But as it turned out, it didn’t matter. Darnold put all the potions together. He gathered all his scientific materials, all his bottles and containers and technology, and he piled it all up on the little portable aquarium with its squeaky little wheels, ready to trek. The octopus herself also seemed adventurous, and even stuck her head out of the top of the water in order to better see the path ahead. And then Darnold wheeled the whole contraption maybe - a metre? Two metres - barely a little way down the hall, and immediately decided, “No, no this is too far for us, Doctor Freeman. It’s too much.” And his octopus daemon shrunk down in her tank and took on the colour of the sandy bed, as if she too were only just realising what a phenomenally bad idea it would’ve been.
And as for Forzen, when he first attacked the group, it appeared for a moment as though he were severed, or a spirit, or something. But it turned out that this was only because his daemon was extremely small.
Forzen’s daemon took the form of a horse-fly, a march-fly, one of those terrible biting flies that strike and retreat and drive you to madness on a hot summer day outdoors. Naturally, being a daemon, it was bigger than the actual insect. And to make matters worse it would fly around their faces, making that terrible buzzing noise, and they couldn’t even swat at it, they couldn’t move at all, for fear of - ugh - touching another person’s daemon, even one that was threatening to bite them. It was annoying as all hell, and whenever it wasn’t driving them to madness, it would crawl over Forzen’s forehead, or into his ear, or somewhere equally horrible.
Because of course it was the greatest taboo for humans to touch another person’s daemon, unless between the most ardent of lovers, or the worst of enemies. It was something impossibly intimate, like sex - it was literally somebody's soul, in animal form. To allow it would be the greatest vulnerability. Like handing someone your heart, and saying 'here, I trust you with this, I trust you not to kill me'.
Because you could kill a person by killing their daemon. And so while Forzen's biting fly flew close, buzzing, threatening, it never bit anybody: and whenever they waved it away, gingerly, carefully, it would fly out of range in a blink, in an instant, for fear of that most horrible death.
Doctor Coomer’s daemon took the form of a cat.
There were a thousand cat-daemons out there - even Silére, before she had settled, had switched into cat-form occasionally. One time when they were very young, she’d gotten her claws stuck in Gordon's pants, and she’d panicked so badly that she’d forgotten how to change. So both of them had endured thirty ridiculous seconds of mutual panic and pain, her screaming, stuck on the bottom of his leg, and him screaming and trying to get her free. No, his Silére was not suited to cat-form at all, and it was a relief to both of them when she settled as a snow monkey.
But Coomer’s cat was a different beast altogether. Long grey fur, which was sometimes perfectly smooth and luxurious, and at other times like that of an old man, whiskers out and fur in all in all directions, crazy and rabid and completely batshit insane. She had these truly fantastic whiskers. A true mad scientist. She wore a majestic expression, as most cats did, and regarded the world in a dainty kind of way. And then - there was this thing that would happen sometimes - where Coomer would get a little way up ahead. And his daemon would stutter to catch up, as if she could go further from him than she was letting on.
The thought was horrible - what if he left her behind? And yet, sometimes in dark hallways Gordon would see a daemonic flash past in the corner of his vision, even though he was completely alone. And he might glimpse out of the corner of his eye those two shining discs, the tapetum lucidum, watching, the cat daemon's eyes in the dark.
The Coomer clones had mostly scientific daemons. Birds and amphibians and rodents - curious animals, intelligent animals. Pigs, sometimes. A sheep. And whenever they died their daemons disappeared, as daemons did, and Coomer’s cat would get a little - brighter. A little bigger. A little more real.
Gordon would only discover the truth of Benrey’s daemon afterwards, in an indeterminate pocket of reality, in dark blue security room.
The room was dark, and one whole wall was floor-to-ceiling security screens, mostly static, mostly fuzz. The blue glow in the dark room gave everything the air of a cool storm, as if the sound of white noise was rain coming down, and the static screens were windows onto a rain of soft snow. The blue glow hit Benrey’s face side-on, that sickly grey pallor, and gave his cheekbones unsettling angles. Bad geometry. Bad polygons, a bad fit, badly rendered. The room itself didn’t exist, or maybe it did, but not yet. Not in this reality, not in the canon so far. It didn’t exist yet, but it would.
And afterwards, in this strange blue security room, Benrey would beckon Gordon close.
“shh,” he would stage-whisper.
“I didn’t-“
“shh!”
“But I didn’t-“
“shush your mouth and look your eyes.”
“I didn’t even say anything.” Gordon would mutter, peeved.
“shh!”
And in this strange security room, lit by the blue glow of a dozen static screens, Benrey would take off his security helmet. And from underneath, gently, he would take out something small with eight legs, that Gordon needed only to glance at to know immediately, down in his soul, that this was Benrey’s daemon. You could tell at a glance, even in the dark, even if the animal itself wasn’t completely clear. You always knew when looking at it, if something was a daemon. You always knew.
Silere would leap forward at once, sitting up, eyes wide with attention, craning her head to peer better into Benrey’s cupped hands. And Benrey would kneel down to show her, and sit cross—legged on the cold concrete floor, and Gordon would pretend he wasn’t curious. But of course he couldn’t pretend, Silere was betraying him, because if there was anything that monkeys were known for, it was their curiosity and intelligence.
“I always knew you had a soul.” Silére whispered to the many-legged thing in the dark cage of Benrey’s hands.
“Silere,” Gordon would say, warningly but he’d never been able to silence his daemon before, so of course she ignored him. It was a real problem, the things she would say. He had no control over her, honestly.
“I always felt it. Can I hold her?”
And Benrey would pass across his little daemon, the little scuttling, creeping thing, and Silere would take it gently in curious hands with her back to Gordon. He tried to pretend he wasn’t curious, that he didn’t care. But she was betraying him, and he could feel the tenderness coming from her, even as he walked as far away from it as he could and stood there on the other side of the room, arms folded and scowling.
Benrey came to stand next to him. “aren’t you uhh gonna ask? what she is named?”
“What?” Gordon snorted. “No. I hope we pull her legs off.”
“try it. dare ya. we're vemenous.”
“Whatever. It suits you, you know, a creepy little thing like that. So what, it just lives on top of your head, under your helmet? This whole time, that’s where your daemon has been?”
“p much. just like ratatouille, 2007-”
“Oh you fucking wish-”
And Gordon would gasp suddenly, as from across the room he felt the heart-stutter of something his snow monkey was doing to Benrey’s daemon, or the daemon was doing to her, and which hit him like his heart missing a beat. A sudden flutter in the aorta, and lurch, like a missed step. And Benrey would also twitch as whatever it was - whatever had happened - he felt it too.
“Suits you.” Gordon would say, a bit breathless, pretending nothing had changed.
“huh?”
“The little - whatever. Your daemon’s creepy; you’re creepy. It’s an enigma. You’re an enigma. It’s scary, and you’re - yeah, I’m scared of you, I’ll admit that. Yeah. It suits you.”
“s not why.”
“What?”
“thas not why.”
“Well, why? Why then?”
And then, finally, he would deny his curiosity no longer.
“What is it?”
And in response, Freeman's snow monkey would get up and run across the room to climb his back. She would offer her hand down in front of his face to show him the little creature. The little daemon. Benrey. It would scuttle across her palm to look up at him with glittering eyes, and the shiny carapace would glint blackly in the blue glow of the fuzzing screens, and Gordon would flinch back instinctively from the venomous little form: curled like a terrible question mark in the heart of the snow monkey’s paw.
“Ah.” Gordon would say.
“mm.”
“Oh.”
“mmhm.”
“That makes sense.”
Benrey’s daemon looked up at him quietly, expressionless.
It wasn’t a spider. He’d thought it a spider, at first, all those legs and the tiny segmented body. But it wasn’t a spider.
The thing about scorpions, as a general rule of thumb, is that the bigger the tail, the more dangerous the scorpion. Big pincers, little tail - basically harmless. Big tail, little pincers - death. It was the venom glands in the sting, that was what you had to watch out for. And this scorpion - Benrey’s daemon, the quiet, glittering little creature - this scorpion had a very little sting indeed.
“She dances.” Silere would say, as she poured the daemon from one hand into the other.
“She what?”
Benrey jerked. “no, no we don’t. do not. listen. you’r daemons a liar, we got no footwork whatsoever, no idea whatsoever, what you uhh talking-”
“She danced for me.”
“What’s this about dancing, why shouldn’t-“
It would hit him then: and Gordon would remember that scorpions sometimes do a certain dance. The tiny partners lock pincers and walk back and forth in a miniature waltz. A mating dance. He blusters, flustered.
“Silére, shut up.”
“She fucking pinched my hand, and she did this little waltz thing-“
“Shut up, oh my god.” And Gordon will drag a hand down his face to hide the heat he can feel building there, and Benrey won't be able able meet his gaze at all.
They won’t talk about it, afterwards.
Benrey will put his scorpion daemon back under his helmet, like in Ratatouille (2007), and they’ll both pretend the moment never happened. It’s a moment that only exists in that one pocket of time, in that one room, in a reality that might or might not be real. But there’s a thousand realities, all stretching away like two mirrors held opposite each other, and in one of them the moment will always exist: when Gordon found out the truth of Benrey’s soul. That he had one. And that deep down, even if he kept it hidden most of the time to freak everybody out - the security guard was a human, after all.
There’s this quantum physics theory - maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called the ‘Many Worlds’ theory, and the basic idea of it is that everything happens somewhere.
There’s our universe. And then, a step sideways into another dimension, there’s another universe - just a little bit different from ours. And step sideways from that universe, there’s another one again. And another after that. Like when you put two mirrors to face each other, and you see reflections stretching off into infinity, getting greener the further the curve goes. There could be a universe where time moves backwards. There could be a universe where there are only two dimensions, as flat as a sheet of paper.
There could even be a universe where, perhaps, Benrey and Gordon Freeman might have touched each other’s daemons.
But that one is a very slim possibility, because after all, for a person to touch another’s daemon is like sex, almost: something unbearably intimate, only done between the worst of enemies or the most ardent of lovers. And with everything between Gordon and Benrey, it’s a slim chance, a very slim chance indeed, that either of them got over themselves for long enough to do it. To open up to each other. To bare souls, be vulnerable, be completely honest.
Oh, there’s still a chance it happened, in some reality. Who knows? It was almost impossible, sure enough, but there was a chance, nevertheless. That maybe Benrey poured his soul into Gordon’s cupped hands, and maybe Gordon didn’t crush it, and maybe it didn’t sting him, and maybe his soul reached out in return...
It didn’t happen here. But who knows? Maybe it happened somewhere.
After all, everything does.