Chapter Text
"The brain glue is unhooked, scurry away now," the entity says inside Gracerocky. "Keep the change, tip twenty percent for being good children. Come back when your planets develop ⧮⧲, and until then we wish you a pleasant flight!"
Ryland sucks in a breath. His eye's throbbing, his head feels like it's been constricted with wire, and his whole body shivers with muscle fatigue.
He is, however, in his own body, and not in Rocky's, or in both simultaneously. Sometimes you have to take the small victories.
He rolls onto his side and his stomach flips. Oh, not good, very very bad. He's never had a migraine but he imagines it's something like this; a headache mixed with travel sickness mixed with getting beaten with a metal pipe.
Across the barrier, huddled in a shadowy heap on the floor, Rocky makes a low miserable whistle.
"Rocky…?"
"No talking," Rocky whines, his legs stuttering from trying to get enough pressure to speak. "Owwwwww."
"Ngf." Ryland taps the ground, and then when that tells him absolutely nothing he forces his painful eyes and shaking hands to investigate. He seems physically okay apart from the cut on his forehead; most of the pain is from his nervous system, which he guesses makes sense because some kind of thing just took it for a joyride. "Was that an alien?"
Rocky taps the ground, flinches, and then slides a finger over the ground to listen to the ship as quietly as possible. "Everything I said about humans I take back. Every one of the several hundred liquids you generate are beautiful to me. I hope every other alien in the universe is made of meat tubes instead of being—" he pitches his voice to carry, "—a mind-hopping parasite who can go rotate on my whole hand!"
Rocky's voice squeaks out from low pressure, and he cringes into a ball. "Owww."
"Maybe we don't threaten it!" Ryland runs his fingers over the tacky blood on his face, wincing at the sound of his own voice.
"Not threatening," Rocky says an octave lower, still balled up. "Informing. If it can hear me and it has a body then it can rotate it on my hand repeatedly for doing all of that for no reason. Two hands. I'm never coming to space again."
Ryland swallows, and the motion sets off a chain reaction of frayed-nerve twinges across his jaw and eyes. The ceiling lights are trying to drill a path into his brain. "Mary, lab lights to night mode."
The lab darkens. "Night mode activated."
Rocky makes a skittery groan; if Ryland pays attention, he can hear the individual gas bladder valves whining from the effort needed to speak. "Mary, ship volume to five." He waits expectantly, and then says, "Oh."
"Mary, ship volume down to five," Ryland translates. Almost inaudible, Mary replies, "Volume reduced," and Rocky sags in relief.
"Thank."
"Mm," Ryland says. He rolls his tongue around his mouth, trying to get used to it again. "I guess the radiation was kind of a symptom more than the cause—"
"—Yes, theorise now, I've always wanted to challenge myself to understand new physics concepts while trying not to throw up, fun game."
"Goddd, fine."
They stay there in silence a while, and Ryland takes stock of himself slowly. Rocky's a cheek-biter, it seems; there's a whole bunch of ragged scar tissue on the inside of his mouth. There are a few aches and pains on his side, presumably from where they fell over after the alien had blanked out their motor controls for a moment. His body's trembling like it's recovering from flu. His head is killing, his eyes are trying to evict themselves from his skull, and his nerves are all jangly like he's got pins and needles. Otherwise, he seems… okay. He seems like him.
On the other side of the barrier, he can see Rocky doing the same; rolling his shoulder joints, flexing his hands, tapping across his body gingerly. Eventually he slowly rights himself, walks-limps across the room, and digs through the cube that holds the first-aid kit. He lifts out a long clear tube with a bromine-brown liquid inside.
"Would apologise for doing in front of you," Rocky grumble-whirrs at a volume that's borderline inaudible to his weak human ears, "but…"
Rocky makes a half-hearted sound, a 'you get it' trill.
Ryland limply waves his hand from the floor in what he hopes comes across as 'who cares anymore'.
Rocky tiredly lines up the tube with his underside, taps the tube a few times until the resonance helps open his ventral orifice, and then he pushes it a half-inch inside himself. He pulls a tab near the bottom, and the liquid starts boiling. Dark, unpleasant smoke flows up the tube and into Rocky.
"Painkiller?" Ryland mumbles.
Rocky flips a hand around in a 'don't talk to me right now' motion, before whale-noise-sighing. "Yes."
Ryland considers the odyssey between the lab and Armando, watching Rocky's painkiller smoke jealously. Eventually, the sweet promise of vicodin wins out. He manages to roll himself onto hands and knees. He has to close his eyes and breathe deeply against the nausea, but eventually he's okay to start crawling.
He pauses just before the hatch. He crawls to the window and takes in the universe through painful eyes. The grey-brown swirl of the Milky Way and the static pinprick shine of hundreds of visible stars flow into him. It's an uncomfortably silent experience: for months, he's perceived the world from hearing where he is in relation to it. It feels mildly unreal, and it takes a few minutes of watching the universe go by before it feels comforting again.
If Ryland ever finds himself in a position to consult on future spaceship designs, he's putting a line through any that involve anything that even resembles a ladder, but he makes it down and he's only made to jump about five hoops of well-intentioned medical restrictions before he has a cup of water and a pill. He puts the pill in his mouth and drinks the water, and then takes a few seconds to remember that he has to consciously swallow again.
He drags himself up onto his bed and stares at the ammonia-filled side of the bedroom he's been living in for the last few months. Man, he did leave it kind of a mess. Rocky's kept his side immaculate.
He takes a deep breath, trying to listen for Rocky and failing. It's disconcerting after months of being able to thoughtlessly place his friend anywhere on the ship to be alone in a room and have no idea where Rocky is.
He focuses hard, trying to listen for Rocky, the sound of his legs on the floor, the ship surrounding him, the… ship surrounding him…?
Briefly and nauseatingly, the Hail Mary buzzes to life. They flail on the bed and on the laboratory floor, nearly knocking out the painkiller tube inside them.
He flinches back and he's back in a lit and silent room, alone. He can hear a distant thudding above him, like someone knocking over a table. He sits up, wide-eyed, staring at the ceiling.
"Rocky?"
There's a pause, and then a sense of something pushing for space inside his nervous system. The ceiling lights hum to sound-light again, and he can see himself and the lab and the hull of the ship and himself again— the other himself— and the clock reading five-past-two.
Gracerocky raise their hand to their face-carapace.
Rocky pushes, an appalled reflexive test of the limits that almost immediately makes the human body fade from Grace's sensation. Grace pushes back, no, come on, don't get us stuck again, and Rocky pulls away, sorry sorry sorry, and then Ryland's sitting on his bed with a palm flat to his face.
He groans and lies on the bed, closing his eyes against the fresh wave of his headache.
Rocky climbs slowly down and flops onto the xenonite structure above him.
"It said 'keep the change, tip twenty percent'," Ryland says slowly. "Which in Earth culture is like you're being generous about giving something, or letting someone keep something, to thank them. Did you hear what it said the same way?"
"Literal words were 'the thrum will repeat your song three days'," Rocky says, anxious-tapping the xenonite. "Means the same thing."
Ryland takes a deep, luxuriant, human-lung breath, and finally capitalises on being able to speak English again.
"Oh, fuck this!"
He'd not noticed until he got his body back yesterday, but Rocky drew some pretty graphic doodles of the Hail Mary blowing up on the whiteboard. They're pretty well done, for someone new to the concept of 2D graphic representation, but because he doesn't know any of the maxims of cartoons or art he's tried to draw it out like a CAD diagram: weirdly flat and technical. Rocky then added an inconceivable squiggle he's labelled 'Grace' and a lot of strange overlapping flat planes he's labelled 'Rocky' and then put at the top 'ROCKY DEATH CANNON 1'. He's somehow written the letters in wobbly, painstaking, but recognisable Courier font.
"Very good, right?"
Ryland squints. "Why do we look like that?"
"I tried to show all features, but too many are visible from a single direction."
He really wants to figure out what that means but they've got bigger things to tackle. He wipes the drawings off so they have room to think, and flips a marker between his hands.
"Okay," he says, writing BRAIN PRISON in big letters and then underlining it. "What did it mean?"
Rocky raises the light gun, then tilts, and then pushes at Ryland's consciousness. Gracerocky read the whiteboard, and then Grace grimaces and shakes Rocky off.
"Hey, no, not until we know what's going on. What if it's cumulatively deadly?"
"We know as much as we're ever going to know," Rocky says pointedly. "No sensors change. No tests do anything. That's been the same since it swapped us. And we know already it's not doing anything we can sense or understand with our knowledge of science."
"There's still the radiation."
"Changing the radiation changed the fear. It didn't change us. The radiation stopped last night and we're still like this. Not radiation. New thing. New thing we both don't know, like Erid doesn't know radiation."
Ryland taps the whiteboard with the cap of his pen. "At least go with me on this, okay? It called it a brain prison for planet fighting. Does it do this to keep aliens off their patch or to keep them on their patch?"
"Told us to leave," Rocky hums. "So off."
"Okay, maybe. But that felt a whole lot like it was doing us a favor. Why have a prison if you're letting all the prisoners out? And why swap people around? Sure, it's freaky, and it was doing something extra with the radiation to give us space anxiety about it, but it's not impossible to live with."
"Trap," Rocky says. "Prison. Both temporary meanings. Not to hold forever. It said fence. It surrounds the entity. Conclusion: you cannot get close to it without experiencing the mind change, and the mind change is intended to slow down, not stop."
"'Cause if you can mess with peoples' brains that easily, you could just fry out all their neurons at once and call it a day," Ryland says with a frown. He writes PERIMETER and TEMPORARY next to BRAIN PRISON, and then writes as his next line, WHY DIDN'T IT KILL US?
Rocky, mercifully, uses the light gun this time. He rubs an arm thoughtfully.
"It did call us mice," Ryland says, not liking what it means.
"Word?"
"Like a, uh… pest. A small animal that gets where you don't want it to get. It gets in your house and eats your food. What'd it call us to you?"
"[***]," Rocky says with a harsh buzz. "An Eridian internal parasite. It can lodge in the stomach and consume some of your food. Either you take medicine to confuse it into dropping out, or in older times, you would open the stomach valve—" Rocky opens the fingers of one hand wide, before crooking the finger of another and pretending to delve towards the other hand, "—and kill it with a hook so the body digests it."
Ryland suppresses the nausea this creates. "Okay, in my one it called us friendly mice."
"Also heard friendly," Rocky says. "Made less sense in Eridian."
"So we're… vermin mice parasites getting up in their home or body." Ryland sighs. "Mice only get caught in mousetraps because they're too dumb not to figure out the bait's surrounded by a trap."
"Grace Rocky too stupid to avoid trap fence? No sign until it happened."
"Maybe we're too stupid to see that too. Maybe we're not even advanced enough as a species to see the bait."
Rocky shudders. "We have the technology to travel as fast as any object can between any place in the universe. Fuel that can harness all the energy our planet can make. It called us children."
Ryland scrawls WE'RE BUGS TO THEM on the whiteboard. "Okay, so that kind of leads to the big one."
He writes, in a new marker colour, WHY GIVE US THIS?
"We know they wanted to thank us for being good kids or whatever," Ryland says. "But why this?"
"Only thing we know about it is that it can live in brains," Rocky says. "Use them like you see light and I hear sound. If humans were given echolocation, or Eridians were given sight, it would be a gift."
"To an alien that mind melds brains, every brain is a hammer in need of a mind meld," Ryland mumbles.
"What?"
"Never mind." Ryland writes BRAIN ALIENS = BRAIN GIFTS on the board.
Then Rocky makes a realising kind of noise, and says, "We are too stupid to see the bait. So we are too stupid to be its prey. It did not care about us after seeing inside us."
"...Okay?"
"Purpose of trap," Rocky says, like he's explained everything. Ryland shrugs helplessly.
Rocky pushes again, and Grace allows him, and Gracerocky write on the whiteboard together, dread rising as Rocky shares the thoughts and the fear.
LIVE IN BRAIN = NEED BRAIN TO LIVE IN.
INTELLIGENT LIFE = NEED INTELLIGENT BRAIN.
Rocky retreats, and Ryland rubs the back of his head anxiously.
"Bright side," Rocky suggests.
Ryland sighs. "Okay, lay it on me, 'cause right now I'm seeing a lot of 'our brains are permanently fused together' kinds of bad stuff and not exactly a whole lot of good. What's the upside to us only barely escaping from a superintelligent alien species' mind-melting glue trap because our brains aren't roomy enough to use as a condo?"
"It does not require water to live," Rocky says.
Ryland replaces the marker in the whiteboard's magnetic cup. Then he puts his head in his hands and screams as loud as he can.