Chapter Text
The din of Erid was so commonplace that departing from the planet completely equated to being cut off from—from—
They didn’t have a word for it, on Erid.
The One had come to use foreign words to describe the specific sort of wound departing from Erid caused them and the rest of their crew. It was like a knife cutting through Grace’s odd, ribbed cording that connected him to the Hail Mary when they went fishing. It was like the odd metal lever-wielding contraption Grace used to cut off the flat, carapace-like buds on the tips of his feeble fingers.
It was like an umbilical cord being cut—forcibly disconnecting a squishy, dripping child from the body of the mother who reared it, who wove its being out of cells, who created a writhing bundle of squealing and feces out of basically nothing.
The human body, Grace liked to remind The One, was unreasonably warm compared to the rest of Earth’s surfaces. Water froze over—frequently—and a decent chunk of it refused to melt come summer. Of course, the worst of that cooling was due to the astrophage problem ravaging Sol—but Grace’s face crinkled oddly, pleasantly, into a smile when he recounted the days he’d spent playing in the frozen water falling from the sky.
The regular temperature for a room on Earth was roughly thirty degrees cooler than the human body—so for a child to be forced out of a body so feverish compared to the rest of the world, to be forced to maintain its own body heat and heartbeat and breathing for the very first time?
That—that odd, alien occurrence of a body-birth into coldness followed by cutting—was the only feeling The One could feasibly use to describe being cut off from Erid for the very first time.
On Erid, when The One reached out with their senses as far as they could go, from their home with their mate, they could feel the rhythmic thrum of the rest of the planet working—Eridian fingers deftly weaving cloth or xenonite with equal ease, melodies wafting in from the outer reaches of the city, the slow, cool rubbing of groundwater being removed from where it rested miles below.
The One was well-known for their hearing—for their eavesdropping, rather.
But that was why they’d been sent on the mission to rescue Eric’s star. They could hear the wind rustle through a millimeter of disconnected panelling from two miles away—and they’d been nosy enough to venture out to random strangers’ dens on more than one occasion to fix the problem.
The One was well-known for their relentless desire to fix things—but when the cord of sound and sensation connecting them to the rest of Erid was cut, they were forced to recognize the fact they couldn’t fix shit.
He’d forced down a wail the moment they’d recognized they could only feel the dearth of the world, of the permanence of the bodies and breathing and beauty he’d felt before. The rest of the crew were not so careful with their bodies’ sounds as he was—and he’d run off to their workshop as fast as they could, forcing down the feeling that the bodies before him were overwhelmingly, concerningly fleeting.
The sickness started fast.
The astrophage-powered engines were directly responsible for providing heat for the ship—and, of course, there was a decent chunk of room that separated the crew’s rooms from the potentially explosive engines.
That fact didn’t matter for very long.
Space was so very cold—and so very, dismally quiet.
It wore the crew down to the fragile recesses of their beings, to the degree their bodies felt too-smooth despite the fact they could still feel the markings written into their carapaces. They followed each other relentlessly—physically, or, for The One, by sound. They followed the footsteps down, down, down, closer and closer to the engines day by day, to the heat roving off of the roaring metal drives—beckoning, coaxing the One with odder and odder voices, the sounds rattling and wet and sickly and sweet.
They missed him. They desired his company. They desired his song, the sounds bubbling beyond rhythmic, to comfort them. They desired comfort when they slept.
The One, unfortunately, fundamentally despised the decrepit workmanship of the engine, and fucking refused to sleep besides that death trap.
The complete degree of delusion required for the ship’s first engineer to cuddle up only a few feet from the “certain death if breathed on too roughly device” was what clued The One in to the fact that something was very very wrong.
Because, fucking please—the first engineer was the one who’d designed the metal death machine, and he, the second engineer, was the one who’d rushed to construct the body of the ship in a way that defended the crew from the potential bomb ready to go off. They were both fully conscious of the fact the machine-work was a workplace safety violation ready to wrench them down under the water the second debris bumped it wrong.
They were both personally responsible for making sure the engines wouldn’t kill them before they reached Tau Ceti—so when the sickness started, and the First Engineer wobbled to The One’s room, singing sweetly of bodies draped over bodies and the cut-like drop-off into sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep—
Well, when they wobbled up to his door, completely delirious, The One began to feel very very concerned. They basically forced the First Engineer to come into their room, then closed the door, and began to search their body for things to fix.
The ship’s first doctor was downstairs, clinging to the rest of the crew’s bodies, singing a warped, wordless ode so blithe and simple it made his body want to split open and retch out his meal before he digested it. The sound made his vents shudder weirdly—the sound, so casually benign it felt like a complete reduction of The First Doctor’s intelligence.
The ship’s second doctor was, of course, sleeping that day. They’d slept for double what they usually did, but very few of the crew seemed concerned. The warmth was so droll, so calming that concern barely registered in their brains.
The First Engineer’s brain seemed fogged over, from what The One could comprehend. They babbled relentlessly, of course retaining the basic clarity of their dignity—but the comfort of the roaring sounds of the engine was the only subject that they could focus on for very long. The sounds reminded them of their mate’s purr—a soft droning, mimicked by the rest of the crew in chorus when they mentioned it a few weeks later.
They were sporting a few odd burns on their carapace—a fact that sent The One into a fever of panic and demands for the rest of the crew to stop sleeping by the engines.
The crew refused to observe his request to sleep elsewhere.
The One refused to come down to the room besides the engines, and continued to sleep in his workshop, cradled by the vats of astrophage, listening to the daily sound of the fluid containing the fuel flow down through the ships’s pipes to the digestive belly of the engines. He watched the crew from a distance, from behind the dozens upon dozens of walls separating them; he watched them sleep for odder and odder durations of time, and only rested when the First Engineer bobbled back to the workshop he’d been residing in to watch him sleep.
Months went by before the rest of the symptoms began to show.
Eridian memory was objectively flawless—but, for whatever reason, the First Engineer’s memories were dropping from their mind, dripping out of their body like mercury.
Eridian fiction revolved around memory. If something false was to be created, to be made real through words, whoever received the created-reality deserved words constructed to be flawless, words deserving of being recorded forever. Due to the collective consciousness created by constant, repeated thrums, stories were only very rarely forgotten—only when the death of the writer or recipient went down before the story could be shared.
Forgetting, of course, was only understood on the most obscure level by Eridians. The Eridian word for forgetting boiled down to “death before sharing;” forgetting was the device the dead wielded to force the rest of Erid to do their best to complete and re-complete the shared record, constantly, repeatedly, before death claimed them too.
Of course, scientifically, Erid had been forced to reckon with the question of where memories came from, and why consciousness formed, and why the collective record existed—but the experiments following those questions to their conclusion were forcibly removed from the record, scientists killed or forced to undergo vows of secrecy.
Of course, all of Erid was forced to reckon with the conclusions of the “forgetting” experiments, to reckon with the fact that the collective record was far, far more fragile than any of them could’ve dreamed—but the methodology, the actions, the force wielded to remove memories from the body’s record were completely wiped from the collective consciousness.
Because, of course—to force an Eridian to forget was to fucking kill them.
The One recognized the fact that the First Engineer was forgetting things—that the rest of the crew were forgetting things—but he was completely fucking out of his depth, completely fuckin devoid of the capacity to fix their decaying bodies and brains. All he could do was replace their memories with his version of their memories—or to replace objects they’d lost, whether by finding them or recreating them.
The rest of the crew were reduced to the capacity of children—singing, dancing, sleeping, babbling, rambling, relentlessly, relentlessly, relentlessly—recollection wrenched from their bodies, replaced by the diseased, deficient calm of the engines and their radiating sounds.
The months that followed were fetid—full of dripping, crippled bodies, chirping despondently, repeating sounds too warped for real comprehension. Their mouths drooped open, without closing, mercury drooling onto the floor, waste dripping onto their bedfellows’ bodies; their carapaces warped into weird shapes, softened by the disgusting heat of the engines.
The One forced them to rest in the room besides his workshop, and watched them sleep from outside of the door. It was a basic, feeble quarantine procedure—the only fucking thing the One could do to comfort the dying and continue to be safe.
The din of the weird, clumsy babbling and singing faded so slowly that the One only recognized the fact it stopped a few weeks following the deaths of all of the crew.
Death was so, so very rare on Erid.
Eridians were so deeply collective a species that death rattled the collective to their core whenever it happened—which meant that the collective fought for millennia to remove death from their world completely.
Medicine was revered as a field; whole species of microbes were wiped out forever to prevent disease, and species that served as vectors of disease were hunted down completely for a wide radius around population centers. The biological sciences were rapidly beginning to discern ways to re-construct a better body for a dying Eridian—but the science was only just beginning to bud. The research had been conducted on the fish dwelling down in the oceans of Erid—creatures who were comprised of cells simpler to reach, warp, or rebuild than the worker cells buried deep in Eridian bodies.
Religiously, there were whispers of dead voices dancing up from the depths of the oceans during mourning thrums—energy, refusing to be destroyed or removed from the collective, created, recreated, forever—coercing the planet’s dwellers closer and closer to the depths where the dead were dropped into, to the only place where they couldn’t be reached by the collective, physically.
It was wrong to watch the dead sleep—wrong to force one of the Collective to continue watching the dead—wrong to bother the dead when they’d been forcibly removed from the collective’s reach by the divine.
But the whispers still roved up from the ocean, and the Collective continued to watch and whisper for the dead to return, and the whispers only danced up more fervently.
To be simple—the Collective were so very, very close to defeating death completely—but then the astrophage began to devour the sun, and the planet began to become deathly cold, and death started dancing so very, very close to the futures of the planet’s dwellers.
But death found the crew—death warped the crew’s bodies—death forced the sole survivor to deposit the corpses into the relentless ocean of space, and to wait forever for the whispers to resume.
Birth. Eridian bodies dripping fluid and wheedling cries like badly constructed, badly designed human babies.
Death. Death. Death.
Bodies, reduced to childlike despondence and delight for weeks—before the din was cut off, before the body was cut down, before forty-six years of silence followed.