Chapter 1 #2
Part of this is because we’re actually a form of insect.
Surprise! We look like a species of goths, but we’re closer to being giant, wingless wasps.
The collagen in our skins is not human-identical, although it feels the same, and that keeps us from visibly aging in the same fashion after we reach our twenties.
Angela could still go clubbing with college kids without it seeming creepy, if she’d had any interest in clubbing.
Isaac and I would be able to do the same someday, once he was old enough to care about things other than Pokémon cards and chess.
We don’t get sick, and we don’t get old, and we don’t play nicely.
We have no hearts. Literally. Instead, our circulatory system is decentralized, and works via a series of muscular pulses.
That would still be a problem, if we had blood in the human sense, but fortunately for us, we don’t.
Instead, we have a form of advanced hemolymph that keeps us oxygenated and moving.
It has antibiotic properties, and we’re rare enough that I don’t know of anything Earth-based that’s developed a resistance to it yet. So that part’s neat at least.
Instars are insect life stages, the progression from nymph to imago, or full adult.
Cuckoos have lost our exoskeletons, so we don’t molt like normal insects, but we still change.
The first instar is universal—the larval stage of our species, infants and children indistinguishable from the host species we’re hiding among.
The second is also universal. Isaac will reach it one day, and when he does, I’ll be on hand to make sure he doesn’t kill everyone in the house.
(The second instar tends to cause temporary psychosis brought on by the sudden release of excessive quantities of ancestral memory, which tell the kid in question that humans are nothing more than meat to be farmed. Like I said, we suck.)
Most cuckoos stop there, mature enough to grow up and consider themselves adults, a little bit evil and a little bit nasty and a whole lot manipulative.
Some, though, strain themselves hard enough that they go through a third instar, one that leaves them a little bit scrambled for several years, but results in their inherent power level going up.
As to why a species of assholes doesn’t pursue this greater power all the time, well.
There’s no way to avoid the scrambled period, because each instar is marked by physical changes.
They’re just internal ones, involving structures in the brain.
We’re literally out of our minds following the third instar, because our brains are reshaping themselves.
Not a good thing for a species of ambush predators.
So why do it at all? Well, I did it because I didn’t know it was a possibility. I’d been trying to save my cousin’s life, and I’d accidentally slammed the buttons that began the process to give me an upgrade. I could have stopped there and been happy, truly.
But third-instar cuckoos aren’t common, and those who try apparently have a nasty tendency not to survive the physical rearrangement of their minds when it happens with no one to take care of them.
I’d been safe here in Ohio while my brain rebuilt itself, and when I’d felt well enough to leave, I’d returned to the world unaware of what had happened to me.
Only to get ambushed by my biological mother and her hive, who wanted to force me into my fourth instar in order to get themselves a fully adult cuckoo.
Since we don’t need to reach the imago stage to reproduce, we generally don’t bother: we’re all content to stop after the second instar, safe and secure and not rebuilding ourselves when we don’t have to.
But the equation that lets us rip holes in the barrier between dimensions is so large and needs so much power that only a queen can handle it.
Except even a queen can’t really handle it.
It’s too big, and it’s hungry. When I had that equation in my mind, I felt like I was wrestling a greased dinosaur that wanted to bite my head off more than it had ever wanted anything else in its life.
The equation is a predator. The cuckoos usually kept it contained by breaking it into pieces and storing it around the world, but that didn’t change the fact that it was a monstrous thing. An ender of worlds.
Completing the equation would have blown a chunk out of Earth big enough to destroy the planet.
But what did the cuckoos care? We’d be somewhere else, and to them, that was what mattered.
I was their groomed and chosen queen: I was going to set them free.
And sure, I was going to melt my own brain in the process, but I got the feeling that for them, that was a side bonus.
Get a new world to consume, and don’t get stuck with a pesky queen in the process.
I’ve always tried to be a good person. I’ve always tried to behave more like a human than a giant wasp in a woman suit.
And none of that had mattered while the equation was chewing on my brain, trying to force me to end everything so it could be free.
I might have done it, except for one small thing that set me apart from all the other cuckoos, even when I hadn’t been thinking about, even when I hadn’t fully understood the ramifications:
I was in love. Deeply, helplessly in love, and had been since I was a little girl.
His name was Artie, and he had the most soothing mind I’d ever touched.
Something about his thoughts was right, like slipping into a hot bath on a cold night, or a bed with pre-warmed sheets.
I’d loved him almost as soon as I’d known him, and miracle of miracles, he’d loved me the same way.
Really loved me, not been manipulated into loving me by telepathic tricks.
He was a Price, and Prices are part Kairos, another human-looking species that isn’t, quite.
Their Kairos heritage made them resistant if not immune to psychic manipulation, and while I could have forced my way into his mind, I couldn’t have done it unintentionally.
Cuckoos don’t do love, as a general rule.
Hard to form those types of bonds when you’re constantly measuring the world around you the way a lion measures an antelope.
So no one realized Artie might be able to break me out of the mathematical fugue that was supposed to consume me and make it possible for the equation to direct my choices until the world ended in a glorious, concussive boom.
He’d pulled me loose, and together we’d come up with a plan to use the minds around me as distributed processing power, letting me keep my self intact despite everything I was going through.
Unfortunately, I’d still been convinced I was going to die, so even as I turned the equation to my own ends, I’d been preparing for my demise.
In an effort to keep my allies from hurting more than they had to, the last thing I’d done before the equation finished resolving and we were transported to a different dimension was wipe myself from their memories.
Meaning I landed in a whole new reality surrounded by people who had no idea who I was or why they shouldn’t treat me like any other cuckoo.
And one of them had been Artie, which hurt more than I ever imagined.
To go from him loving me enough to pull me away from a mind-eating equation like it was no big deal to him looking at me like I was the enemy had been, well, bracing to say the least.
And then, when I was doing the math to get us the hell out of there and back to Earth, on the presumption that I’d done the math correctly the first time and not destroyed it on our way out the door, he’d touched me.
Without his memories of growing up together, he hadn’t realized how dangerous that could be.
I’d erased his mind during the moment of contact, leaving him a literal shell of the man I loved, and what was gone was gone: I couldn’t put it back.
So I’d gathered all the memories I and his family had of him and used them to construct a new person in his place.
A person who was almost him, but … not. People are made up of first-person experiences, not third-person memories.
And he—the new person, the one I’d constructed to occupy the empty shell of the man I loved—thought he loved me, because so many of the pieces I’d used to build him told him he did.
I’d run away as fast as I could, unable to stand being anywhere near him.
My father was a man who’d risen from the dead, but Artie was something new, and terrible, and entirely my fault.
One good thing had come from that whole situation: Isaac.
My mother had been pregnant when she decided it was time for the cuckoos to get out of this dimension, and while she hadn’t survived our time together, he had.
He was brand-new and perfect when I’d hauled my friends and allies back to Earth, and Angela had been willing to take on the task of raising him.
She was one of the only people in the world to have successfully raised a cuckoo who didn’t start trying to murder everyone when she hit puberty—me—and we figured she had a decent shot at doing the same for him.
All he needed was a suite of telepathic ethics and a little psychic surgery to remove that packet of ancestral memories before they could turn septic and explode all over his mind. No big deal, right?
Not for a family of telepathic wasps hiding in Columbus, Ohio, I guess.