Chapter Text
Dys is most of the way asleep when Solane sits up and announces, “I’m bored.”
“…So go to sleep.”
“I’m bored of that, too,” they say darkly. “It’s always the same.”
Ah. Okay. So it’s going to be one of those nights.
Dys rubs his eyes, sits up on his elbows. “You’re bored,” he echoes. Still trying to wake himself up.
Solane nods.
“With… me?”
“No, no. Of course not with you.” They fall silent for a moment, thinking. “Or. Maybe a little? More just with everything. I just… I think I really really need to see something new.”
Right. The memories have been wearing on them lately. Dys isn’t great at reading people, but even he can tell that Solane’s felt far away. Dissociated, distant. They’ll disappear into the wild alone for days on end, or just into themself, in the middle of a crowded room. Not listening, not seeing. Talking on reflex, like they’re reading off a script.
…Something new, huh? “Did I ever take you to—“
“Don’t say the lake,” Sol bursts out. “Oh, stars, if you say the lake I think I’m really going to lose it.”
Well. That’s straightforward enough. “You’ve dated me a bunch, huh.”
“They can’t seem to stay away,” Sym chimes in, leaning forward to rest his chin on Solane’s shoulder. He’s been awake the whole time, of course—he doesn’t need sleep, just enjoys it. He especially enjoys curling up in a pile with all three of them, like a litter of hopeyes. It’s sort of like being in the vat, he said once, but “with all the inimitable pleasures of the flesh.”
(“Please don’t say that in front of anyone,” Solane told him at the time, very fondly.
“My favorite part is the circulatory constriction! The tingling sensation is most invigorating.”
“Sure, sure. Pins and needles are a real crowd-pleaser.”
“Like you’re one to talk,” Dys muttered, working the blood back into his arm. Solane’s always slept like a vriki, all squeezing clinging limbs.)
Dys shakes off the memory, grounds himself in the present. “Okay. So no lakes. Probably nothing else I’d think of, either. ‘Cause if I would, I already would’ve.”
Sol nods grimly.
“It’s the same for the whole colony?”
Another, faster nod.
“Okay,” he says again. It’s sort of a puzzle, but he doesn’t hate those. “Well… I mean, this is just an idea, but. If you’re really sick of everything… why not become a Gardener?” It’s a loaded question, what with Sol’s feelings on his own Gardener daydreams. But he doesn’t censor himself around Sol. That would just be weird.
Solane flings a wrist across their brow, theatrically exhausted. “I’ve done that! We both have. And I’m sorry, Dys, but honestly, it’s even more boring than this.”
“Why are you apologizing to me?” With a pointed look for the actual Gardener draped between them.
“No, they’re quite right!” Sym agrees, beaming. “It is horribly boring! Do you know, I once spent several hundred years as a vriki trunk? Not even for an assignment! Just to pass the time.”
“Did it work?” Dys can’t help asking.
“At the time? Assuredly so! It was the most stimulating century I’d known in eons. Now, though?” Sym’s eyes twinkle. “Now I can think of little more dull. I simply lacked any point of reference.”
“And I’ve got too many!” Sol groans. “I’ve got, like, every point of reference. A million lifetimes of perspective. If my mind was any more open, my brain would spill out. And I can say that, because I literally know how it feels.”
Dys decides not to look too closely at that one. Of course he knows death is part of life—the cycle of birth and rebirth, working as intended—but he doesn’t love thinking about all the times Sol’s been eviscerated, or immolated, or had their skull shattered to pulpy shards. Death comes for everyone, obviously. But most people don’t have to live with it afterwards.
All at once, Solane goes limp, like just talking and breathing and blinking is too boring to bear.
“It’s okay,” they sigh, tugging him back onto the pillow so they can more comfortably fidget with his hair. “You don’t have to fix it. I don’t think it’s fixable. I just have to… oh, I don’t know. Get a hobby. Or a lobotomy or something.”
“Yeah, let’s maybe start with the hobby.”
###
In Sym’s estimation, Aspartame—‘Tammy’—is an exemplar of her species. Emotionally open, resolutely empathetic. She’s all careful, attentive affection, untainted by ego or envy. And she makes an exceptional curry.
Before moving into the colony, Symbiosis feared that Solane’s humans might find his presence discomfiting, even destabilizing. Aspartame, in particular, is ill at ease with the unknown. Yet she has never made him feel anything but welcome. She is a marvel, a living testament to the human resolve to overcome the loneliness of subjectivity. As such, when confronted with a human problem, Sym turns to Tammy for the appropriately human solution.
Once he’s said his piece, Tammy looks at him with dismay. “Sol’s having a midlife crisis?”
“Oh,” he hums. “Hmm.” He’s encountered the concept in human media, though he would not have thought to apply it to Solane’s present difficulties. Likely because ‘mid’ assumes a concrete, bounded timespan, with a beginning and an end. “Perhaps? I suppose they might be, yes.”
Tammy nods, understanding. As Solane’s sole confidant in the years Dysthymia spent away, she’s one of the few humans entrusted with the truth behind their unique prescience. “They’re bored, right? From all the, um, repeating?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
She brightens. “I’ll bet they need a vacation!”
“A ‘vacation?’”
“You know,” Tammy says firmly, and also fallaciously: Gardeners have no such concept. “Some time away from their day-to-day. Somewhere they don’t already know about… well, everything they know about.”
“Yes,” Sym says slowly, “I see.” Then he seizes both her hands in his. “Yes, I see! You possess admirable intuition, Aspartame. An exemplary eye for the human condition.”
“Ehehe,” Tammy giggles. “It’s not like it’s hard! I just pay attention to people, is all.”
“As do I!” Sym counters. “Yet you’ve clearly mastered the craft. You watch far less clinically, and far more effectively.”
“Aw, I don’t—”
“You do! Truly! You needn’t deride your own skills!”
“Ehe! Oh, well. I suppose if you insist.”
###
“So you can’t just, I dunno… get into something new?” Rex scratches at one ear, then grins when Solane reaches up to get the other. “I could teach you how to mix drinks!”
“I know how to mix drinks,” Sol says miserably. They haven’t even touched the one he made them, a frosted pint of oversweet blep. “I ran this bar for 40 years.”
“What!” he chortles, trying for offended but too amused to pull it off. “My bar? What was I up to? Don’t tell me you put me out of a job.”
“No, no. You tagged in some nights, for events and stuff. Mostly you helped out in the creche.”
“Aw, that sounds really sweet, actually.” He hesitates. “You don’t think I liked it more than this, do you?”
Solane gives him a dry look. “Rex. You still help out in the creche.”
“All the time!” Nomi agrees, nodding so vigorously that their hair flops into their eyes. “All the live-long day! That’s why no one’s fallen into the reservoir or wandered into the spongecake marsh or anything. You’re the creche herder! Guardian of the creche!”
“Sheepdog’s gotta dog sheep,” Rex says sagely, and flicks Nomi’s hair out of their face. “Guess I oughta be good at it by now. I had plenty of practice keeping you from falling into the engine room.”
“Rex!!!” they sputter. “I would not have fallen in!!!”
“Because…?”
Nomi flops forward in exaggerated defeat. “Because you would’ve caught me.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Sol smiles a little, listening. But it’s quick to fade. Of course they love Rex and Nomi. They always love Rex and Nomi. Rex and Nomi are easy to love, always. Because they always act like this.
Nomi takes one look at Sol’s expression and flips into Focus Mode: both elbows braced against the table, fingers steepled seriously. “So it can’t be something you’d do, ‘cause then you’d already have done it. And it can’t be something we’d do, ‘cause then you’d have done it with us. Or at least hung out while we did it.” They chew their lip, frowning. “You don’t normally tell us about all this weird time stuff, though, right?”
Solane nods. They weren’t planning to tell anyone this time, either—other than Sym, obviously, but Sym doesn’t count; he always already knows. But that was before they pissed Dys off so bad that he left the colony entirely, and then stayed gone, for years and years and miserable, mind-numbing years. Not having any humans to talk to was boring holes through their skull. So just this once, they opted to experiment with honesty. (Not that they’ve never tried that. They’ve tried plenty, early on, especially when they were born without the memory of how totally fucking pointless it would be. But they always gave up long before their 15th birthday).
Weirdly, it went… pretty well? Sort of unexpectedly well. Tammy might not understand, but she trusts them. Nomi can’t take their situation entirely seriously, but distilling reality down to tropes and archetypes is how Nomi relates to everything, so that’s alright. And Rex is Rex. Even if he didn’t believe them, he’s never known how to be anything but supportive.
“So that’s our secret weapon, maybe,” Nomi goes on. “Rule One of time loops: it’s not the looping that breaks you, it’s looping alone. And the looping too, obviously. But you only go really crazy if everyone else keeps doing the same stuff, like characters in a story, and you’re the only one who’s read the book.”
“It’s not exactly the same,” Sol mumbles.
“Right, right,” they say impatiently (while in the background, Rex moves their drink out of range of their emphatically flapping hands). “But it’s like—it’s like—it’s like we’re all trains, and we can go down different tracks? But mostly the same tracks, ‘cause we’re always facing the same way, and also we didn’t even know we were trains. Now that we know, we can derail the train right off the tracks! Or, or! Or jump off the train entirely! Into a lake under the rail bridge, and then swim off into the sunset where trains can’t even go!” They tap at their temple with one finger, closing one eye in a long, knowing wink. “Once you’re in on the meta, you can flip the whole script!”
“I don’t want you to drown, though,” Solane says dolefully. “Or die in a train accident. Or, you know. Live your life in a way you don’t want to, just because I’m bored.”
“There’s gotta be a middle ground,” Rex points out.
“Yeah!!!” Nomi agrees. “Like, I could write you a story!”
Solane sighs. “You always—”
“A new story,” Nomi says firmly. “You can tell me what I normally write, and I can write something not-that. A whole new genre or something. I bet it’d good for me! Writing something totally-not-Nomi, all the way off the edge of the map. All uncharted territory, Here-There-Be-Dragons. Except not dragons, obviously. ‘Cause I’ve definitely wrote about dragons.”
Sol chews their lip. “I don’t want to tell you what to write…”
“So don’t!! Just tell me what I normally write! And, and I can still write that stuff, obviously, whenever I want. You’re not the boss of me.”
Not in this lifetime, no. “Well… I guess we could try that. You mostly write spec-fic, I guess. Sci fi and fantasy… a lot of power-of-friendship, love-conquers-all type adventures…”
Nomi pinches their tongue between their teeth, note-taking furiously. “Any archetypes I never go for? Grimdark stuff, or edgy antiheroes, or—”
“Your third-wave stuff is all disillusionment and trope subversion,” Sol cuts in. “But… well. I guess I’ve never seen you write a tragedy.”
Abruptly the door to the bar bangs open and Symbiosis clatters through it, more noisily than Solane’s ever seen him move.
“Oh, good!” he shouts, at the sight of them. “I did hope I’d find you here. I come bearing good news!”
“Yeah?” Sol says dubiously.
“Indeed! I believe that I—or, rather, Aspartame—may have found the solution to your problem!”
“Is that right.”
“It may very well be,” Sym says, with gleeful self-satisfaction. “We propose that you need a vacation.”
###
There are a few hurdles to clear before the pitch can cohere into a Plan. Negotiations with the Overseer, mostly. The human experiment was approved under the strict condition that humanity confine their movements to an allotted area, to forestall the destructive short-sightedness so common to their species. But Solane has negotiated peace with the Gardeners in the vast majority of their lifetimes. They have walked every inch of this valley. To be freed from the familiar, they must set out for the wild unknown.
Fortuitously, the Overseer has what might, in a lesser species, be called a ‘soft spot’ for Solane. Precious few singular organics can comprehend the depth and breadth of the Overseer’s vantage. Perhaps there were none, before Sol.
Slowly, the terms take shape. If Sol is to stray beyond human territories, they may bring no foreign contaminants: no nanoprinted textiles, no alloys nor polymers; not so much as a synthesized nutrient. And no other humans, of course.
“May they receive visitors?” Symbiosis asks humbly.
When the crush of the Overseer’s attention swings toward him, he’s fascinated to feel himself flinch. That didn’t happen the last time he communed with the boss. It’s an entirely new physical instinct, likely resultant of his increased attunement with this vessel. It’s always so interesting, arguing with the rest of you.
“Humans are a social species,” Sym explains, and pairs it with a few illustrative memories: a squeaking nest of hopeyes; a blurred millennium in a vriki hive. “Starved of contact, their will atrophies and dies.”
“Know your place,” Noctilucent snaps.
When Solane requested an audience with the Overseer, it enlisted the presence of two of its singular aspects, positioned in opposition. (All-knowing as it is, of course the Overseer understands the limits of its omniscience. Singular questions are best unraveled by singular listeners).
“Obfuscation cannot obscure the truth,” Noctilucent says coldly. “The alien’s grasp exceeds its worth. The enclosures of invasive species are bounded for a reason. One exception is already too many. To demand more is beyond arrogance, it’s violence.”
“I didn’t ask, though,” Solane points out.
The Overseer’s consciousness shimmers iridescent-harmonic. “They did not.”
“Even so,” Noctilucent sniffs. “Unchecked exception begets expectation.”
“For sure,” Solane says amiably. “I totally get you. What checks would you suggest?”
Eventually, they come to an agreement. Solane may receive one visitation per season; visitors must arrive by air, without trampling protected soil, and any alien synthetics they bring must leave with them. When Solane departs, they will enter the wilds naked and unarmed, save a rudimentary communications device to ensure the expedient arrival—and departure—of those visitors. If they starve, they starve. If they die, they die.
"This is our thanks for your contributions toward harmonious relations," the Overseer buzzes into the shared consciousness of the vat. "And to your many eons of contributions across the morass of time. We offer our trust in recompense for yours."
“Should you betray that trust, you will be exterminated,” Noctilucent puts in. “There will be no more exceptions.”
It’s only after Solane and Symbiosis have extracted themselves from the Array that Sol turns to him, beaming. “I thought that went well!”
Sym opens his mouth to say, Yes.
He says, “I never feared my own kind till I knew you.”
Solane studies him carefully. “Is that okay? Or… do you regret it?”
“No,” he says immediately. Speaking before thinking. That’s another thing he learned from humans. But it’s true: he regrets none of it. He couldn’t. “You showed me something new—made me something new. To return the favor is, I think, the very least that I can do.”
###
Solane doesn’t throw a going-away party. The going-away party is thrown not for them so much as at them, as if from a trebuchet.
Friends gather at the bar. Friends hug them and cry about gratitude, about how much Sol will be missed. Solane watches their own arms mirror the motions and thinks, I’ve heard this before. On my eighteenth birthday. You throw me a party, you always do, and half the time I run away because I’m too tired to pretend. Half the time I can’t even love you for loving me, because you always do. And because I’m so tired.
“I think I might actually miss you, you know?” Marz teases, and Sol forces a smile.
“I’ll miss you, too.” I wish I remembered how to miss you.
So that’s that. Solane’s felt everything they could feel; there’s nothing left for them here. It’s time to look for something new.