The door slammed. She didn’t think Ava would go like that, after all they’d been through. But Heather couldn’t run anymore, that was the truth, she was bone tired. She’d taken on this thing and here they were, she didn’t have anything left. Ava was still running, Lennox had his new family. Heather had nothing except Sandy’s ‘unfinished business’.
She turned and looked through the bathroom door at Sandy. They’d put on a light display while she and Ava argued. Heather presumed Sandy understood. They were telepathic, had shown the other two an alien world. Heather remembered something from a childhood reading Arthur C. Clarke, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. Sandy seemed like magic.
She wondered if Sandy knew what Heather was thinking, could map her mind with infinite precision, could sense her hopes and dreams, loss and heartbreak, grief and resignation. The cancer eating away at her every minute. But the tumour was part of her. She hated the military terminology that people used around cancer: ‘She lost her brave battle with cancer.’ The cancer was part of you, you created it from nothing, so that language meant you were fighting yourself. Turning everything into a battlefield was a masculine, wrong-headed way of looking at things.
She was sure Sandy didn’t think like that. But how can we ever know what another being is thinking? How can we comprehend what anyone else is going through? But that was the point of humanity, a search for empathy, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. It seemed futile though. She thought she understood Ava and Lennox at the start of this, but she was wrong. She thought she understood Paul when she married him, Rosie when she was born. But we can’t know other people, never enough.
She walked over to Sandy in the bath. Looked into their eyes for something – optimism, knowledge, kindness. The flashes across their body changed from pulsing aquamarine to dark purple, sweeps of orange through it. Two of Sandy’s tentacles lifted and swayed close to her face.
She swallowed and held the tentacles, felt the suckers stick to her skin. Her head spun, making her stagger and slump to the floor. Then suddenly she was in an ocean of indescribable blue, moving like an Olympic athlete through the water but much faster, at home in an alien place. She looked down at her hands and was unsurprised to see tentacles pushing water aside. It was magical to be alive in this moment, no worries about who she was or what the world thought of her. Only this moment. Shivers of delight swept through her body, light flashed across her skin. It was beautiful and unique, but also it could be shared with anyone, the barriers between herself and her surroundings were broken down. She imagined the water passing through her as she moved, microbes, tiny fish, bacteria inside her, all a biodome, a collective of organisms working together. And she felt part of something bigger too, she was a bacterium in the organism of the ocean, of the moon, an insignificant piece of an infinite jigsaw, but vital too, without her the picture wouldn’t be complete.
She fell out of the ocean and landed back in her body on the bathroom floor. Sandy was in her lap. Heather still held two of their tentacles, while a third wavered at her ear.
<Do we have your permission?>
She flinched at the voice in her head but it was what she’d wanted all along. It felt so right to have this wonderful thing inside her mind. She wished she’d had the same with her loved ones over the years. But then she imagined sharing Rosie’s pain and sorrow during her final days. She pictured her life amplified a billion times and felt sick.
She almost spoke in answer, then stopped herself, tried to think.
<Permission for what?>
<Sandy-Heather partial is inefficient.>
Heather stared into Sandy’s eyes. They changed from brown to golden, tightening to ovals for a moment then back to circles. She liked that Sandy had referred to the two of them together but was confused about the rest.
<Inefficient?>
The tentacle near her ear went over her head and gently touched the back of her skull. Heather’s stomach turned to stone. It was the location of her tumour.
<Sandy-Heather partial neural network has cellular inefficiency. Neural network not functioning to capacity of Sandy-Ava or Sandy-Lennox.>
<It’s a brain tumour.>
A moment of silence as Sandy flashed maroon then grey.
<Sandy-Heather partial would like increased efficiency?>
‘What do you mean?’ She realised she’d spoken that. <What do you mean?>
<We can delete inefficiency in Sandy-Heather neural network.>
Heather swallowed. <You mean cure my tumour?>
<Cellular restructure.>
Heather squeezed Sandy’s tentacles tight but stayed silent.
<But what about the strokes, all the other stuff?>
Sandy’s tentacles rippled maroon and orange. <Strokes?>
<When you came here, Ava, Lennox and I had strokes. Some others died. And the guy on the beach, he died too. But not Michael. Why?>
Sandy’s head elongated a little, ridges across the middle rose up and disappeared. Their skin pulsed light and dark. <Communication signal. Too strong. Calibrated for future connection. Bad mistake.>
<But some recovered. Our strokes disappeared. Why us?> It was a question she’d asked herself since the start of all this. Was it because they had no one else?
<Neural chemistry.>
<What does that mean?>
Sandy shivered a little and two tentacles slid across her hands. <Some humans are more open to communication because of different neural pathways.>
Heather liked the idea of being more open to things.
Sandy’s tentacle raised to the side of Heather’s head. <Do we have your permission?>
Heather closed her eyes and pictured Rosie in her hospital bed, bald head, wasting away. <Yes.>
The tentacle went into her ear then it seemed to penetrate her whole head. She knew that was impossible but that’s what it felt like. She felt information travelling along nerves to her brain, spreading across the surface and soaking beneath the membranes, powering her own synapses to change, telling them how to cure themselves, instructing the cancerous cells to modify. Through her whole body as well, signals to nerves in her fingers and toes that tingled with life. She felt like Frankenstein’s monster on the table, charged with power, a new form of energy she couldn’t have imagined in a million lifetimes. And it was nothing to Sandy, second nature, the ability to inform parts of yourself how to behave for the efficiency of the organism.
Heather leaned her head against the wall and succumbed. She lost all sense of self, then regained it instantaneously. It felt like Sandy had scrubbed her soul clean and she cried.
She felt the tentacle come out of her ear. She sat there, senses tingling, feet and hands fizzing, the smell of instant coffee from the table across the room, the suckers of Sandy’s tentacles still touching her skin, a taste of metal in her mouth and she realised she’d bitten the inside of her cheek. She knew it had worked. She had faith.
She opened her eyes and looked at Sandy in her lap for a long time. <Thank you.>
A little ripple of light down Sandy’s tentacles. <Sandy-Heather partial now efficient.>
She laughed through tears.
She heard a noise outside the window and remembered there was a real world out there. She shifted to her knees, Sandy sliding from her lap. She got up, felt her bones ache in a good way, her body somehow new. She wondered if this was what evangelicals felt like when reborn. She went to the window and saw Ava standing with two large bikers, Michael walking away, shouting at her. She realised she didn’t want Ava to go, not now, not ever, and headed for the door.