I know who I am. My name is Alyssa.
Alyssa knows everything.
This is her walking on her street to her home. This is her walking into the dome, stepping over corpses of fools and innocents, slipping, regaining her footing, slipping again.
This is high, high, above the clouds, on board the space station, opening hatches, preparing and charging weapons to strike down enemies.
This is a homeless man called Anthony Salerno in London being dissected by an entity he will never comprehend.
This is Alyssa cold inside the dome, unperturbed, looking for the paths to the deeper parts of the alien.
This is Rosewater full of people like her, Homians with human skins, happy, fulfilled, living again, contemplating renaming Earth.
This is the roll-up coiled in the ground, pining after her dead mate. She will be dead in a month from the grief, worms will eat her, and her stench will cause genteel noses to protest, but such magnificence deserves a last unsubtle hurrah, and the people must endure and even celebrate her putrefaction.
This is Alyssa fucking a surprised Mark.
This is Alyssa being told to dial the power down, to be more circumspect, to avoid alarming the humans, to be measured in her implementations. She says, “I refuse.”
This is Alyssa walking down a dark hole inside Wormwood, climbing, stumbling, skinning her knees.
On a rowboat, on muddy brown water, Aminat says, “The reason we get floods is the sky god, Olorun, did not take permission from the god of the waters, Olokun, before letting Obatala create land. In her anger she tries to wash all the land away.”
Inside Wormwood, there is a level of dead floaters, all hanging in the air by their bladders, looking like seahorses. Alyssa goes deeper still, where everything is moist and rotten, and the miasma is not breathable, and darkness prevails.
This is Alyssa irritated at the inequality of life.
This is Alyssa in the regeneration chamber, with the dead and half-formed Anthonys. Here is the penultimate Anthony, where he came to die. Here is the last Anthony, dead aborning. He has no skin. All of him is a skeleton embedded in the flesh of Wormwood, a few ligaments stringing one bone to another, and some drying mucus. Beyond this chamber is the place for the first Anthony. Withered, shrunken in flexion like a burn victim, with an open skull and nervous tissue stretching from his brain to the walls and beyond. A few of the connections have detached. Alyssa knows that this connection is not functional, but is more symbolic of the bond between man and alien. All the connections needed can be made through the xenosphere.
“Here I am,” says Alyssa. “More Homian than human. Let’s do this thing.”
Here is Alyssa on Home, before it died, cataloguing empty cities and villages on her home continent. It is interesting to her that she now identifies as female, an adjustment to Earth, and that she now identifies as Alyssa, an adjustment to humanity. On Home she did not wish to live in space and was one of the last. She likes to think she was the last, but there is no way of knowing.
This is Alyssa receiving the first neuro-tentacle from Wormwood. The pain is unlike anything she has ever experienced, except maybe childbirth. The electrocution pulls at her individual nerve fibres, flowing to her spine, then rising into her brain where it explodes. And yet it is brief, because as soon as it hits the brain, Wormwood switches off her sensory cortex, and she feels nothing. The alien remembers the last time it had to do this, knows it hurts, and does not wish to cause suffering.
I know you now, says Wormwood. Welcome.
“I’m happy to be here,” says Alyssa. Her voice echoes in the chamber.
Do you want to rebuild the dome?
“There will be no dome, my friend. Follow my lead. I can see everything. Oh, this is good, this is fantastic.”
Anthony would—
“I am not Anthony, my friend. I am different.”
Alyssa sees the full xenosphere for the first time, and the battle at the heart of it. She sees a giant, a fairy, a dog and a gryphon fighting Wormwood’s nemesis, and losing. Here is her friend Aminat, on the outside, contacting another. Here is salvation from space, striking down the evil plant in an instant.
This is Alyssa in an ecstasy of power, all the restraint removed with the plant.
“So much more… it’s impossible…”
First, there are intruders in the sky and on land. She should warn them, but she chooses not to. She splits and expands the north and south ganglia, spreads them out all over the city, a network, then she protrudes new pylons, dozens, hundreds.
This is Alyssa playing with her child. Mark takes a plastic toy out of the oven where the child has deposited it. They laugh, all three of them.
This is the destruction of the invaders of Rosewater. She wants them out of her city, and they stand out, smelling like dead rats, running like cockroaches. She drops all of the drones and they fall like perverse rain, blackened. The planes fall harder, burn longer.