Experiments (I)

In the large underground cave that housed the nest of the Spear Spiders, behind the thick forest of metallic crystals growing at its bottom, the hidden halls of the Spider Queen were silent.

A single question, uttered in the small, crescent moon-shaped clearing that surrounded Maath’s silken burrow, had managed to still any sound coming from the small cluster of Thinkers that had been busy chittering between themselves and their wounded ruler.

“What will you do if I won’t be able to heal you?”

The question, spoken in the language of the matriarch, had come from the only guest of the colony, the glowing human girl that was Alice Desare.

It had taken her a long time to formulate the phrase itself, working around the many words she had yet to learn, to form the somewhat complex question she wanted to ask.

Now she stood there, her only hand clenched to stymie the tremor of her fingers as she stared straight into the eyes of the titanic arachnid that was the Queen, her jaw set as she waited for an answer.

The giant spider looked at her for many long instants before a ripple shook her carapace, a deep, clicking chuckle leaving her maw as she placed her leg on the cord, making it vibrate as she usually did to communicate to her tiny guest.

A single word was produced, breaking the silence of the glade.

“Die”.

As the many daughters of the Queen clicked and hissed at the unexpected response, Alice wavered for an instant, taken aback by the obvious joke before sending a glare at the tittering ruler.

“And what will happen to me? What will you do if I’m not good enough?” she shouted, her voice cracking as the panic she had felt upon witnessing the state of the Queen’s body reared up its ugly head once again.

Maath stood silent for a long while, the pedipalps in front of her maw rhythmically cleaning her huge fangs as she seemed to think.

Alice was preparing to ask one more time when the spider’s leg resumed its movement along the wire, its sounds turning into words.

“For a cure, you □︎⧫︎⧫︎♏︎■︎♏︎⬧︎⧫︎♓︎ protection. For failure, you will leave the nest. If you wish to remain, you will work for the colony ♐︎♓︎■︎♍︎♒︎➔︎ you leave.” Maath finally answered.

Alice’s shoulders slumped, a wave of relief untying the painful knot of fear burrowed in her stomach as the Queen went on.

“Will you cure me, Alice?” she now asked her.

Alice stared at the immobile shape of the Spider Queen, resting in her silken lair with her suppurating stumps and the blackened veins on her carapace, in pain. She finally averted her eyes.

“I’ll do it. I will try. It might take time and you will have to tell me everything.” She answered, signing what few words the Queen couldn’t understand “The illness is spreading. Getting worse. But not incredibly fast. I’ll need to do some tests before even trying to heal you. Do you understand?”

“Yes” the Queen immediately answered before turning to the silent Thinkers in her presence and clicking to them in their own language, obtaining a host of affirmative sounds.

“You ◻︎□︎⧫︎❒︎♋︎♓︎ ask my Daughters for any of your needs” she finally said before starting to eat another one of her meals.

Alice narrowed her eyes at the sight, her mind coming back to the state of her intestine and the way the infection ate away most of the nutrients passing through. She shook her head and moved towards the clutter of silvery spiders, silently murmuring to herself.

“First the experiments, I need to be sure”.

At once, the board of Thinkers turned towards her, staring with far too many eyes for her comfort. Her step slightly stilted, she stopped a couple of meters away from them and started her greetings.

“Hi Elean.. Chillushrith” she corrected herself at the last moment, ignoring the hiss coming her way from the hulking female “Hi Skitter, Eisor, Ricee, Qhevi…er”

“Olush” Maath helpfully added from her resting spot.

“Right, Olush.” She continued.

“Maath has told me you all have a role in the colony… in time I’ll ask to look around to see if there is anything helpful for the cure” she cautiously signed, aided by the time she had spent talking with Skitter back in the upper system.

“In the meanwhile, I’ll need other creatures from you Qhevi, and help from Chillushrith for protection, and Skitter to help me talk to you all” she concluded, earning a smattering of affirmative sounds and hisses from her public.

Not horrifying at all… absolutely not.

A last nod and the young woman woodenly turned around and walked away, heading towards the leashed form of Specimen H, busy leaving trails of drying slime on the reflective floor of the cave.

“Time to feel horrible once again.” she said to herself, going into her tent and, after a bit of rummaging, emerging with a pair of the metallic spikes she had harvested from the dead Spear Spiders a couple of weeks before.

Leaving the slug in its spot, she rushed back to the Thinkers and, after placing the objects in from of them, she started explaining her request to the confused creatures. Finally, after a couple of very long and frustrating minutes, Eisor moved forward and placed a single limb on one of the spikes. Her silvery carapace lightly warped as small wavelets ran down its length and entered the inert spike which, after a few seconds, lost its hardness and shine, its shape growing longer and thinner, the tip now more similar to the blade of a scalpel.

“Thank you!” Alice exclaimed as the overseer finished modifying the second spike, taking her time to admire her new tools.

Another idea came to the girl’s mind and she quickly inquired to the dispersing board.

“What happens to the spiders that die?” She awkwardly signed.

This time it was Qhevi who replied with the brisk gesture for eating and food.

“Well, that makes it easier. Thank you” she said before moving away once more, the two bistouries held in her hand like a pair of very deadly chopsticks.

As the rest of the clutter slowly streamed out of the glade, Alice was left alone with Chillushrith, Skitter and obviously the Queen, still resting after her meal.

Alice gave a brief look at the small spider beside her before gently asking him to paralyze her slimy test subject once again.

As the male did so, she directed her attention to the much larger female.

“Right now we are okay Chillushrith, I’ll need you in the next ones probably” she said, the soldier Thinker hissing briefly before moving away from her and dropping on the ground.

“Always a pleasure.” She stated, her tone dripping sarcasm.

“Now for the scary part.” She muttered.

The night before, while her body slept, her detached consciousness had spent most of its time in the void room thinking about the tests she wanted to perform. As the time passed in the small, inky room; Alice had found herself being repeatedly hindered by the problem of contagion. Even if touching the healthy carapace of the Queen wasn’t hazardous, the infected parts would probably be highly contagious. Whatever that illness was, she definitely didn’t want to catch it.

She had just thought of a way to partially solve her problem.

She quickly awoke the Queen from her nap and started signing and translating until, after ineffectually trying to explain the process for far too long, she sighed in exasperation and used her last resource in matters of translation.

She quickly disrobed herself of the sturdy but comfortable carapace she had recently crafted, and concentrated on flat surface that was her belly, her cheeks slightly flushed at the thought of what she was doing.

She carefully controlled her skin cells’ luminescence, using them as a sort of drawing tool, making them flare or dim as she had done only one time before.

After a couple of failures, on her belly finally appeared the image of what she had meant to describe, Maath silently staring at it for a few minutes before clicking in assent while Alice batted away a poking leg from a curious Skitter.

An instant later, the Queen’s spike planted itself in the floor, the metal shivering as a small, circular wave shook it. The silvery alloy around the paralyzed slug twisted and rose around it to form an oval bowl with fairly thin walls that was soon cut off from the ground, rocking slightly as Alice pushed its smooth side.

“Nice.” She said, giving a thumbs up at the monstrous arachnid, “you’ll need to close it when I’m done. I’ll finally start now.” she said as she bent down to grasp the two scalpels she had left on the ground.

The girl walked towards the matriarch, ignoring the clicks of the two spiders behind her as she clambered up on the soft silk of her nest, using the sharp tools in her hand for extra support while climbing.

When she got up, Alice walked gingerly on the unstable silk, until she found herself standing less than a meter away from the titanic body of the Spider Queen.

The young woman walked in front of Maath’s monstrous head, shivering at the sight of her envenomed fangs and the strange mouth behind them.

The young woman walked past it, reaching her left side and, despite being prepared for the wound, suddenly faltering at the sight of her abdomen. The injury was horrifying to her real eyes as it had been to her magic.

Alice gasped at the huge, round puncture in her flank. The borehole was so massive she would have probably been able to fit her dad’s car inside of it. The biomancer took a deep, shivering breath and started walking towards it.

The closer she got, the more scared she was. Already she could smell the putrid, musty smell emanating from the giant suppurating wounds, a sludge of foul and congealed blood spewing out of the puncture every time the Queen moved around.

Up close, she could perfectly see the rotting crevice ooze its dark-brown pus and the blackened metal around the cavity shed dry flakes of degraded chitin that mixed with the foul fluid and accumulated on the ground in rotting mounds.

Despite having numbed her olfactory receptors, a wave of nausea hit her like a power hammer; she retched, feeling the burning contents of her stomach climb her esophagus and fill her mouth. Alice puked, warm tears running down her face as she heaved and retched until she couldn’t.

She spit on the ground, wiping her mouth with her arm and finally advancing once more after leaving one of the two scalpels on a clean part of the silk. She was now only a few centimeters away from the wound.

She gingerly placed the bistoury on the wound and, after a brief and silent prayer, she cut through one of the infectious growths and extracted a small, stamp-sized piece of infected tissue, letting it fall on the ground and scrambling back as the metal on the monster’s exoskeleton rippled and shivered.

She grasped the second chopstick and went back to get the sample, holding it like the world’s worst nigirizushi and quickly but gingerly taking it towards the paralyzed slug.

Ever so carefully, she placed the small piece deep into one of the open wounds caused by Skitter’s fangs, before taking a few steps back and delving deep inside herself, attentively scouring the entirety of her body— starting from her respiratory system and left hand— to confirm nothing had breached into her system, only then taking a sigh of relief.

Next time I’ll get a mask. The fact that I’ve spent an entire year under quarantine and still forgot about them, shows my abysmal level of intelligence.

A few minutes later, as soon as she was done with her own checkup, she quickly walked towards the slug once again and re-placed her digit on the part of the body that was the farthest from the infected spot before moving in once more.

What she saw wasn’t particularly good.

Underneath the mantle of the slug, inside its strangely rotated internal organs, the substance she had inserted was already spreading.

It started by attaching itself to the living cells in direct contact with the foreign object, the small, rounded particles it shed quickly sticking onto the tissue and connecting to it with their tiny roots.

Thirty minutes later, the infection started growing, each particle eagerly consuming the cell it had attached itself to and starting to reproduce. Thirty more minutes later, their numbers had doubled.

Within four hours, the first of the malign particles broke through the slug’s stomach lining and started flowing through the creature’s digestive tract, connecting to its tissues and starting to gestate once more.

It’s so fast. It’s gonna die within hours… she thought as she observed the spreading of the illness. The body of the mollusk had barely any time to mobilize against the invasion, its fate already sealed.

Alice kept on watching the creature’s cells ineffectively trying to envelop and digest the invaders, following how the organs started to fail, at least until a small movement under her finger made her freeze.

The slug’s body had consumed the paralytic venom.

Feeling the world around her going on a standstill, she watched in horror as the body of the gastropod suddenly convulsed and twisted, a dark sludge oozing out of its toothless mouth as its upper part left the ground.

The slug used the muscles of its body to rise like a cobra, its small mouth attempting to reach the hand Alice was already trying to retract.

The mouth snapped close, missing the tip of the fingers by mere inches, the creature dropping down in the bowl once again before starting to slide on its smooth rounded surface, moving towards the top, only inhibited by its quickly degrading body.

“Close it! CLOSE IT!” she shouted in a panic, waving her arm at the Queen who immediately sent another ripple through the metal, the bowl’s sides extending further until they finally connected at the top, enclosing the maddened gastropod in a silvery egg, slightly rocking in place.

Adrenaline coursed through her body, her muscles twitched and shivered as she walked around, hyperventilating and unable to stop.

Unseen, a smaller vessel rose from the ground beside her, enclosing the contaminated tools she had dropped on the floor in her panic.

“Too fucking close.” She breathlessly gasped when she finally stopped, laying with her back on the soft futon she had left in front of the Queen’s burrow, trying to calm her hammering heart.

“At least now I’m pretty sure it does something to the feeling of hunger” she murmured before closing her eyes.

“Tomorrow I’ll look further into it.” she finally promised herself.

*****

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