Chapter 9
Evie
Tee hee. He’s so little. And so angry. The way he waves all four of his arms at once looks adorable from all the way up here. I remember when I used to be smaller than him, and the things he used to do to me then.
I have an intellectual yearning to feel them again. I can’t want them in this body. This body was not made to want. It cannot experience desire, so it cannot yearn. But it can imagine and it can think.
They are arguing down there, about me, I think. Their voices are distant and small and their concerns seem petty to me by merit of how little they are. I could lift one of my leviathan fingers and squish them both in one go.
I don’t, of course. I feel a deep affection for Arkon. He has a very earnest way about him, very brave and very kind in his own way. He tried to look after me, even when I was very hard to look after.
As for the other one, Drak. He gave me this body.
He let me see the universe in ways I never would have otherwise seen it.
He showed me what near ultimate power feels like.
And then he reeled me back in like a fish on an invisible line, and now he is climbing up my face with a little black bag of tools. I wonder what they are for…
* * *
I open my eyes.
I am in the alien sick bay. I am not a creature thousands of miles long with feet big enough to smash small cities.
I am a human woman in a human woman’s body.
I can feel a slight ache in my lower back.
I can sense my ankles. My neck feels as though I did something wrong, though I have no memory of such wrongdoing.
A wave of emotion crashes through me and for a moment it scares the fuck out of me because I’ve managed to forget what feelings feel like. Were they always this intense? Did they always involve so many things squishing about inside me?
Water is running down my face. My nose feels stuffy. My head aches. I am weak and I am limited, and I could not be happier for it.
“Be careful with her!” a strong, feminine voice intones. “Don’t grab at her. She’s fragile.”
I turn toward the voice and see that I am not alone in this room. The doctor is here, and for that I am very glad because I feel absolutely overwhelmed with physical sensations.
I try to make sense of what is happening.
I must have been drugged. There could have been something wild in that drink Drak gave me.
I must have been vividly hallucinating, or in a coma, or something.
I’m going to be in so much trouble for taking in alien food.
I was warned not to and I trusted Drak anyway.
He was probably trying to get me fired. He’s never really been a big fan of mine.
He’s always thought I was simple and stupid and human—and not in a good way.
The important thing is, none of it was real. I didn’t run rampant through the universe and set off a small war on the planet I love the most. I didn’t fail to deliver on the one promise I made to my boss before I left. I didn’t take the internet down for millions of people…
“Evie? I’m here.” Arkon’s deep voice emanates from beside me. He moves into my field of vision, his big, four-armed body rippling with something like relief. “You’re okay,” he says.
I look at him and I feel my eyes mist with tears. It feels like it has been a long time since I last saw him. I wonder how long I was sick for. I wonder how scared he was.
“I’m sorry,” I whimper. “Am I in trouble?”
“No, baby, you’re not in trouble,” he says, dipping into a very human form of speech. His calling me baby is the most intimate thing I think he has ever done with me. It makes me feel warm all the way to the very core of my being.
“Oh, my god!” I sit up and grasp for him. “Thank god that was all a dream.”
Arkon wraps me in all four arms with the most tender and sweet of embraces, kissing the top of my head, which does make it ache suspiciously. The pain is not too bad, but there’s not usually any pain at all, so I wonder…
“It was not all a dream,” he says gently. “We had to capture you, destroy the machine, and retrieve your brain to return it to your body.”
“There’s some light scarring, but that should go away in the not too distant future,” the doctor says.
“I was actually in the machine? He actually took my brain out?”
“He did, but it wasn’t your fault. He had engineered the interface to lower your perceptiveness and thinking. He thought that if he gave you a technical lobotomy, you wouldn’t have free will.”
“And that didn’t work out,” I say, my eyes filling with tears.
“It, uh, well. Things happen. It’s not your fault,” Arkon says.
“It is my fault! I drank the drink that made me agree to have my head chopped open.”
“Sweetness, he was going to chop your head open one way or another,” Arkon says. “That’s what men like him do. They manipulate.”
“I could have been more careful.”
“You didn’t do any damage,” Arkon reassures me. “It was a mess, but humanity is always in a mess one way or another. Some of the tech was sheared from the robot in their explosions though.”
My eyes widen.
I did it.
I did what I said I’d do.
“So there’s illicit alien tech on Earth now?”
“Yes,” Arkon sighs. “There is. Humanity has access to potentially build very high thermal panels, if they can reverse engineer what they have.”
“Oh, I bet they can,” I grin, clapping my hands together.
“I bet they can too,” he says. “But there’s one other thing you need to know. It’s important. And you need to stay calm when you hear it.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re pregnant.”
I stare at him blankly.
“You’re going to have a baby,” he says. “My baby. Our baby.”
“Was I pregnant before I got put in the robot, or…”
“Yes,” he says. “You’re very early on, but you are pregnant.”
There is one thing to do with this news: pass out about it.
* * *
When I wake up again, I am lying down on the bed, there is a cold cloth on my head, and my feet are elevated.
“She just fainted,” the doctor is saying. “It’s understandable, given all she has gone through. Give her a moment and some air. You’re going to have to get used to handling a tender woman now. There will be many more months of this, and she will only become more vulnerable.”
“I’m awake,” I say. “You can stop talking about me as if I am an endangered penguin now. Besides, I’ve not been here that long. I can only be a few weeks pregnant max. That’s barely anything.”
“It’s enough to have hormonal swings,” the doctor says. “And having been through two major surgeries, not to mention having experienced the universe through the body of a mechanical being is enough that I’m going to say you have to rest.”
* * *
Arkon
The relief I feel at seeing her sitting up, talking, experiencing reality in her own body, cannot be understated. It can’t be stated at all. I was so afraid Drak would not be good to his word, and instead do something to harm her.
But he kept his end of the bargain, and so, in the end, did I.
“You are going to rest,” I tell her. “You are going to let yourself heal. You are going to…”
She’s smirking at me.
The surgery must have been good.
“How is she like this so soon after…”
“We have technology that allows us to repair human flesh as if it had never been sundered in the first place,” the doctor explains. “She probably does feel quite well in herself. Not a reason not to rest, though. There will probably be effects we can’t quite predict.”
* * *
Evie
I feel amazing. I don’t feel sick at all. I don’t think the human body is really made to deal with the brain being taken out and put back in, so it is actually pretty chill about it. Also, medical science here is clearly so far in advance of Earth that there’s no way to even compare the two things.
But that doesn’t mean they’re not the same about medical advice. I have been in bed for three days with my brain perfectly attached to my body and I keep getting treated like I have some kind of horrible condition.
They’re making me stay in the med bay in case anything happens, when it’s pretty obvious to me that absolutely nothing is going to happen. I am fine. I’ve literally never felt better.
I decide to get out of bed while Arkon is out being busy. There’s a lot of work to be done on the goddess, the Fematrix, my second body, whatever you want to call her. I feel a pang when I think about how it was to inhabit those metal bones and feel the universe shrink around me. I was so big then.
I am back to being small now, and it is not fun.
I potter about the room a bit, just getting used to feeling like a human again. It was so odd to not have any of the biofeedback of a body. Odd, but freeing, but odd. I think, given enough time it would have driven me fully insane. Fortunately for all of us, I am only part insane right now.
While I meander about, the med bay door opens, and I find myself being stared at by my big, mad, alien boss.
“What are you doing?”
I grin shamefacedly. “Well, I thought I would…”
“No,” he growls firmly, striding toward me and picking me up in his arms.
I know immediately that I am in trouble, even before he confirms it for me.
“I am going to spank this ass so damn hard you never think about disobeying me again,” he declares.
“Yeah? Good luck with that. I know what it feels like to be bigger than a planet.”
“Good. And now you will remember what it feels like to be small, and sore, and sorry.”
He takes me to the bed, whips up my medical dress, yanks down my underwear and reaches for an infernal lash that he’s not used on me before. It has a grippy handle and a leathery protrusion that feels like hell when he plies it across both my bared cheeks.
“Ow!” I complain. “You jerk!”
The pain sucks, but it’s the indignity I react to first. I wail and I try to escape, but there’s no escaping a three-hand grip of a much larger alien.
I’ve accepted punishment in the past because I knew I deserved it, and maybe I deserve it now, but also fuck that. Fuck being spanked like a bratty little human when I have experienced so much and been so many things, and…