I do not understand this body exactly, and yet it is good to have a body again, even a poisoned and perhaps dying one, rather than be subsumed in that half-sleep and woozy oblivion, tucked into the back of a head. Now that I am at the front of the head, residing just behind the eyes, there is nothing that will drive me back again.
It was some effort to stand, but even the pain of that felt new to me and was something that I welcomed, at least at first. The suit stank inside from where he had been sick—where I had been sick, I suppose I should say. Once I was on my feet, I unbuckled his faceplate and tugged it trembling upward until it detached and cleared the top of his head and clattered to the ground. The body was sick and I was still learning to properly manipulate the arms, so this was not a simple matter. The rest of the suit I stripped out of over time and, in the end, was left trembling and exhausted, leaning against a wall.
After a while, I managed to make my way to a mirror and stare into it. It was strange to see someone who resembled me so closely but who was not me. Not exactly. Strange to see within the face the struggle between the mannerisms that had long possessed it and those that came more naturally to me. The flesh will learn to be subject to me. The features were roughly the same, both of us having been fabricated of the same material upon the same tablature, but there were different marks on the body, different blemishes and scars. On the chest, just in the middle, was a birthmark that resembled nothing so much as a hand. On one wrist and one arm and one leg I found patches of skin that were damaged, the skin sloughing away at a touch to reveal underneath a layer of more sensitive dermis speckled with pus and blood, an unpleasant smell to the flesh.
And stranger still to be alone, just one of me. Before, there were always at least two, myself and Vagus, one thought process spread over two bodies. But Vagus was gone now. At first I thought him there still, lodged like a scrap of meat between the teeth of this new brain, but like such a scrap, he had been gnawed and rended, and the little that was left of him was in no shape to be anyone at all.
The warren was much as it had been before, more or less. There were fewer stores, things had been moved, but all in all it was as I remembered it. I found a can of something and opened it and ate it. I found an old corridor that had black mushrooms fruiting in it.
“Monitor,” I inquired, “are these mushrooms edible?”
But there must have been a short in the ports in that corridor, for the monitor did not respond, perhaps did not hear me.
I broke one off and ate it, and when I did not grow sick, I ate several more.
“Monitor,” I asked once I was back in the open warren. “How many years have passed since the death of Vagus?”
There was no response.
I repeated the question, and when there still was no answer, I began to become worried.
It took me several hours to locate the power unit of the monitor. When I did, I found it deluminant, the system offline. Restarting the monitor had not been part of my assigned tasks, was not part of my purpose. Vagus had been trained in this, but what was left of Vagus was maddened and torqued and would be of little help. I could not risk giving him control of the body, for I did not know what he would do with it and I was certain he would not surrender it back to me once he was done.
Though Vagus had never had to restart the monitor, he had had to simulate doing so at regular intervals, and sometimes I had watched him. I fixed my memory of this in my head, the image of his back as he bent over the panel, and tried to imagine too by the flinching of his shoulder blades and the glimpse I had of one of his arms which controls he was touching and what he was doing with them.
For several hours I experimented, pressing first this and then that, waiting a long moment, listening to the sounds coming from the monitor, throwing what I eventually determined was the kill switch and starting over if I feared something was going wrong.
At one moment I thought I had disabled the monitor for good when it refused to even begin to luminate, but no, after a brief period of inactivity, of failing to respond to the manipulation of any of the controls, it started responding again. And a few minutes after that, it spoke for the first time:
Enter password, the monitor said.
Password? I wondered. I turned my eyes inward, as I had often seen that other do, and peered back deeper into the brain, waiting for my gaze to adjust, slumbering faces slowly forming out of darkness. I scrutinized them carefully. Wollem was not there, apparently not having been preserved, and I felt a little grief to know that the person we had created to follow after us was forever lost. There was X—I did not know his name but knew that it would start with X, just as Vagus and I knew to name Wollem something beginning with a W, to continue the sequence. X was the most recent, the closest to the surface; there was nobody beyond him. And yet he was folded in on himself, damaged. I reached out and parted his skull and stared inside, but either he knew nothing of this password or couldn’t reveal it, or wouldn’t.
I touched each of the others lightly in turn, stirring their slumber, and learned nothing.
X seems not to have knowledge of a password, I thought. Wollem has not been preserved so cannot be asked. The next people in line would be myself and Vagus. I have no knowledge of a password. But perhaps Vagus does.
Did he? I examined again the twisted fragment that was all that was left of Vagus and reached slowly toward it, and then drew back as if afraid of being stung.
Vagus, I said.
His single eyelid squinched, tightened, but the eye did not open.
Vagus, I said again, wake up, brother. I need you.
The eyelid opened to reveal a milky blind orb behind. The head formed, swelling out of the darkness—or not formed exactly, for that would be to suggest a coherent coming-together of disparate parts. No, what happened, the terrible thing that happened, was that these parts refused to come together: a single milky eye, a fragment of tooth, one cheek planed smooth on one side, a bit of neck, a tuft of hair. In the place of the mouth was just a hole, but less the kind of hole you could fall into, a hole with depth, and more just a circle of profound, featureless darkness, like a scrap of fuligin.
Vagus, I said, if you can hear me, blink your eye.
After a long moment of inactivity, the eye blinked. Or wavered. Did something that could be interpreted as a blink anyway, if only vaguely.
The monitor is down, I said. Vagus, what is the password.
A long hesitation and that same wavering gesture. I waited for something to follow it. Nothing did.
Vagus, I said, tell me the password. Please.
I saw the hole that resided in the place of his mouth and much of his lower face quiver. Out of it came a horrible noise, nothing comprehensible, an odd and terrible cross between moaning and gnashing of teeth. It filled me with fear. All around Vagus, the others’ eyes began to snap open and fill with rough panic, and they too were moaning or giving little shouts and trying, in the confined and impossible space of the skull, to get away from him.
The moaning lowered in pitch and became a deafening rumbling. Before I knew what I was doing, I had opened my own mouth within my skull and was screaming myself, and with the scream came a tongue of flame that licked at Vagus’s face. A moment later he was on fire within my skull, and then it had consumed him, and where he had been was an annealed and shiny patch of brain, still stinking of smoke, a dead portion, a new grave.
And so I am a murderer. I have killed my own other self, his reproduction within my head, for no reason, or little reason, and gained nothing by it.
I began trying possibilities. I was like Vagus, just as Vagus was like me. I knew how he thought, just as he, while he was still alive, knew how I thought, and if anyone could decipher the workings of his mind sufficiently to luck upon the password he might have used, it was me.
I tried things. I tried password. I tried monitor. I tried warren. I tried Unnr, the name of the one who had come directly before my brother and me. And then I tried Uttr, the name of the other one who came directly before us. None of it worked.
I tried other things. I cast my eyes around and tried the word for every object my eyes encountered. Suit and rope and knife and wall. Mushroom, I tried, and room, and arm bone. Food can and broom and . . . On and on. None of it worked.
I went to the mirror and regarded my own reflection—which was not my reflection exactly, but something in between what I was and what X had been. And then, in looking at it, I moved my face to make it something else. I summoned up Vagus, remade my flesh and lineaments, the slackness of my jaw, the tightness of my brow, to resemble him. In the end, I did not have Vagus exactly, but I did not have myself either. And X was all but completely gone, the merest suspicion of him there, the rest of him banished from the surface and hidden deep within.
“Hello, Vagus,” I said.
Hello.
“Will you help me?” I asked.
Of course I will, he said. Or someone said. And that someone wasn’t me. Or not exactly.
“A password,” I said. “What would you have chosen?”
For a long time we stared at one another. He opened his mouth to speak and then just as quickly closed it again. And then said, mouth still closed, Why did you kill me?
It is impossible he is speaking, I told myself. This is a game that, despite only having just begun, has gone on too long. You should turn away.
But I spoke. “You were already dead,” I claimed. “I merely buried you.”
You were the one I loved best, he said. Why would you kill me? Did you not love me as well as I loved you? Who did you love better?
Shuddering, I turned away.
They were all awake, had been since Vagus had begun to speak. They were agitated and anxious, and I could hear them muttering, repeating bits and scraps of the words Vagus had used.
“Quiet,” I said, and for a moment they subsided. But, quickly, their voices rose again.
I tried to ignore them, but I could not. I hissed at them to stop. I picked up a pry bar that was lying on the ground and threatened to pound the body’s head bloody with it and force them out, and myself along with them. There is nowhere to go, I told them. The monitor will not take you, I won’t be able to take you, that will be the end of you.
And then, instead of pounding my head bloody, I took the pry bar to the monitor and attempted to break it apart.
It was only later, lying on the ground, having failed to break the monitor, flakes of its casing scattered about me, the screen scratched but unbroken, the pry bar beside me, that I realized what the password must be.
I uttered my name, the name of the one he loved best. Vigus.
Password accepted, the monitor said. System initiated.
Monitor, I said, how many years have passed since the death of Vigus?
For a moment, the monitor whirred. And then: Define Vigus, it said.
I will lie here just a little longer. I will catch my breath. I will rest just for a moment. And then I will stand and query the monitor, determine how it is malfunctioning, and see what hope, if any, there is left for us.