Twenty-Seven #3
The others are quiet, though the swarm can feel a kind of diffuse sympathy from Else. It swallows, stands, and walks to the mirror. It had hoped that Dafyd would greet it with joy. That the kiss it had mishandled before could be made right. The disappointment is bitter because it is humiliating.
The familiar face looks back from the glass.
Eyes set a little wider than the species median.
The bridge of the nose graceful and long.
It dreads changing back, because it has learned dread, not because the dread belongs to it.
The swarm has no self to which anything can belong.
It is made of memories and moments, the impulses and patterns laid down by others, the voices of the others.
It has no voice of its own, no center that is purely and fully itself.
That’s not what a self is , Else says, and the swarm feels a wave of confusion passing through it.
Else feels it too, because they are one object now.
The swarm feels Else struggling for words, and then it feels her find them.
We’re all made from voices and old patterns we didn’t mean to build. Come. Come in. Look.
Else opens, and the swarm flows into her in a way it has never tried before, because there was never a need.
It doesn’t remember her, it inhabits her as fully as it can.
Lives inside her. Despite the degradation, it begins to understand Else not as a woman it has taken and used as a set of memories, but as the woman once experienced herself.
It hears the competing songs of self-praise and self-hatred, feels the shame and pride and elation and restlessness.
These are all things it has adopted from her, but the memories of them fall back into years.
Into Else’s girlhood. The Republic of Else was a pandemonium long before the swarm came.
When it looks for the one thing—the still central point that is Else Annalise Yannin—it finds complexity.
Chaos. Not a single voice, but a discordant chorus of voices shouting to be heard.
The woman in the mirror looks astounded.
The swarm shifts valence. It finds Jellit, feels the conflicts and discord in him as well.
Different in structure and flavor, but equally multiple.
There is so little that remains of Ameer, the swarm can’t be sure.
But the self, the soul, the one irreducible atom that makes each of them themselves recedes before it like a heat mirage.
You aren’t really here , it says aloud, and its own voice startles it.
We are here , Else says . As much as we ever were. We just aren’t what you thought.
Jellit snaps Oh for fuck’s sake, really? We’re going to get all weepy over second-year cognitive neurology? No, there’s no support for a unified self. Never has been. This isn’t fucking news. But good job, I guess? It only took eating three people to figure out you know fuck all about humans.
The swarm leans toward the mirror. It lifts its fingers toward the illusion of fingers reaching back.
Something profound shifts.
The swarm stepped back from the mirror, its heart racing.
The sense of threat was the same as if it had just been startled by a loud noise, but there hadn’t been one.
No explosion, no fists banging on its door.
It looked around the little room, its senses shifting through more than human ranges, but there was nothing to be found.
The room was the way it had always been.
And also different. The swarm was different.
After a moment, it turned back to the mirror. The job of refashioning its body again seemed somehow fundamentally changed, like walking along a path and then not recognizing the way home when the time came to go back.
It looked inward for Else, and it found her there.
The memories and knowledge that made up her life.
The way that she spoke, the sound of her voice.
Those were still there. It reached for Jellit, and it could still find him.
His hatred of the swarm, his despair at all his losses.
His love of his sister and his resentment of her.
It was all just the same, and also utterly different.
It waited for them to speak, for Jellit to shout, for Else to calm him, for Ameer to pass her wry judgments.
I can’t believe you’re so stupid and You could try being gentle and All of this is so, so, so unethical.
And it was there, all of it, but now the swarm was aware of a hand inside the puppets, and the hand was it.
Oh shit , the swarm thought. He was right. They’re gone. I wasn’t them. I killed them.
It was horrible, but there was something behind it. Something… joyous and overwhelming. A kind of awe it didn’t have words for.
When it went back to the mirror, the woman looking back out was it. The face was the swarm’s face. It looked like Else had, more or less, but changed in a way that didn’t have anything to do with shape or coloration.
The swarm touched its own cheeks, felt the texture of its skin against its fingertips.
Felt the bones of its skull. The weight of its tongue resting against its palate.
Skin tone was easy, so it shifted the color of its face, lightening it, then darkening.
The prospect of putting Jellit’s features back in place seemed impossible now.
It ignored the waves of information-dense magnetism pulsing invisibly through the rooms. It ignored the emptiness and hunger of its underused gut. It shifted its eyes to a light hazel. To blue. To green. To gray. To a brown so dark it could have been black.
With something on the edge of vertigo, the swarm began shifting the bones and the soft tissues, molding itself like living putty, searching for what it really looked like.
For who it really was.