Survival Of The Fittest

Prii listened as Amy explained the situation, growing more discomfited by the moment. The fact Josh had just grabbed her and locked her inside, then apparently also got up in her personal space, was absolutely rancid vibes without even getting into the murdering. Prii had sort of got into the murdering a little bit already but they'd known that to begin with and this was new so—alright they were officially going at too many miles per hour. Wow, Amy suddenly vanishing like that had got them a lot more tightly wound than they realised. What if Josh had been in the mood for more killing, instead of just acting strange? Amy could have been killed right under Prii's nose, and it would have been their fault. Such a failure and they hadn't even—

They rubbed their face again, but this time it morphed into a hard knuckle against their forehead halfway through. Calm. They needed to calm down. Nothing had happened. Nothing. Had happened. It was weird, it was unsettling, and it was definitely dangerous, but Amy was unharmed and that was what counted. Prii could beat themself up later.

Prii nodded slowly and started back up the steps so that they could join Amy in the building.

"Sounds like he was being pretty creepy, but so long as you're okay."

They stopped walking and pinched the bridge of their nose, hard. After a second, their eyes drifted down to the gun in their hand. Damn thing. They weren't sure if they felt safer with it so much as less horribly unsafe, but any comfort was stolen away by the reminder of just what it was securing them against.

"I don't know," Prii shook their head. "I get that a person might flip and fire a gun without thinking—" for a second, they almost mentioned Quentin, but then they decided against bringing him up. Amy was the one who got shot. Not a nice thing to mention. "—but strangling? That's deliberate effort."

"Yeah," she said, and it was weird how people get so overbearing over her, how they pay so much attention sometimes, with fascination and lust and worry and fear, and it felt odd knowing that she could ever inspire that in people. Like it wasn't impossible for them to ever actually care about her in any shape or form, one way or another, the way that she pretended and/or acted and/or believed. She just wanted to be alone for a little while, but then she'd starve or freeze or get killed. And she'd die.

Amy had this problem where she gave people the impression that she liked them a lot just because she was nice. And she didn't dislike Prii, or Josh, or anyone she met here by any means. She was sort of incapable of hatred. But she was also really just apathetic to relationships to other people, and just because she smiled and said hello and please and thank you didn't mean she was handing out an invitation to be friends, and people just never got that. She was thankful, really, to Prii and Maria for keeping her safe. She really was.

"I don't... I don't know. I'd like to give a benefit of the doubt, but, yeah..."

First strangling, and then the thing with the scarves... what was with the neck as a source of focus for him?

"Do you remember the exact words used for his- actually, whatever."

Prii really wanted to give the benefit of the doubt too.

Admiration wasn't the right word for how they felt about Amy's willingness to even consider extending that amount of goodwill. They weren't quite sure how to describe the feeling. There was a certani amount of wistfulness, yeah, but also a whole layer of cynicism. Was Amy being a good person by believing, even a little, that Josh could have killed by happenstance, or was she just naive?

Prii didn't think they'd ever once put that amount of faith in other people, and they weren't sure if that was canny of them or mistrustful.

Ugh. Enough, they were going in circles.

Amy cut off her question and Prii was glad. They didn't want to think about the announcements any more than absolutely necessary. Instead they just nodded and moved along, taking a glance around the office. Even if not all that well-appointed, it was functional enough.

"We could stay here if you like. Maybe even overnight. I definitely don't want to risk getting caught late in the cold."

"Sure..."

The cold hurt when she focused on it, and when she wasn't it was still a dull background throb, present but layered a bit deeper into the unconscious like blinking and breathing. The moment she started to think about it, it gets worse.

Truth is, she doesn't... She was so viscerally uncomfortable that she immediately chastised herself for thinking bad of him because she was always a sensitive, cocoon-ed soul. So maybe it was her fault.

She needed to believe that people and the world are Good. She needed it, that inherent trust of life that was instilled in her as a baby, she needed it to survive!!! How was it so hard to comprehend? The world has to be kind because she spent her entire life basing herself on that fact, that just as she bends to everything around her elements of it bends around her, it's about accomodations and about love and about everything. Every time she tries to talk about it she gets so overwhelmed, because why would people want this, this cruelty, this deliberate indifference to suffering? How are people not more like her, with their soft voices and willingness to help? How dare they?

Josh couldn't. He couldn't be, even when he trapped her with his body, even when he grabbed at her and locked her in here. It'll be proof against this vision of the world she has built up and that would break her. For her whole life she's made excuses for people's cruelty. That they had to do it to survive, that they were 't right in the head, that they've had a bad day. When she was shot, she thought that it was her fault. She shouldn't have approached. She should've stayed there and acted nice and quiet and said goodbye and then went on her merry way. It was self defense. She was threatening to them. They were high strung. It wasn't their fault. Her classmates would never be this cruel. That kind of inhumanity was reserved for newspapers and television screens.

She couldn't acknowledge it. And if she didn't, it seemed less real. She was a master of self delusion like that.

Alright. She was done.

"I agree."

She took a step closer to them, and craned her neck so that she could meet them in the eye. "Should we... Should we find Maria"

Ah. Mariya.

Prii tried to stop their face from falling for a second, but then let it happen. They had everything and more to handle right now, and didn't need to tack on pretending that everything was a-okay. Honest answer was that they were worried. They hadn't properly discussed splitting up, it'd just been some overall very bad timing. Prii didn't think that Mariya had just decided to ditch them both, not deliberately, and that left her out there... somewhere. Which was no kind of where, end of the day.

They nodded. "We should try. Hopefully she won't have gone too far and she'll find her way here. Otherwise, we'll see if we can find her." Left unspoken was the danger she could be in, out there by herself. There were plenty more Joshes around.

Prii glanced at their gun again. How much help would it be if they and Amy ran into someone with ill intentions? How much help would Prii be?

Some littlest, most embarassing, scariest part of Amy inside herself said that maybe she should be... left alone? But that was too cruel to say, and even crueler to act on.

"I hope she's alright," she said. (I think she's alright, she thought.) (Amy was kind of bad at predicting the future but she was good at making up scenarios in her head.)

"But... where do we start?" There's a vast world out there beyond the confines of this little cabin. Her mind drifted. She wondered who else was also here. Who else was close. Who else was further away but dangerous just the same. Who were hurting and who were hurt.

"That's a difficult one."

No sense sugarcoating it. It was getting to be a while since they'd been around her.

"I think probably we retrace our steps a little, but otherwise we'll just have to keep our eyes and ears open. If we meet anyone else, we can ask."

And hopefully they'd be on less of a hair trigger than Quentin, and less shifty than Hector, and less murderous than Josh.

The track record wasn't great, was it?

Back when Amy was a kid, like, a really tiny little kid, she had a mouse friend. Her name was Matilda, and she was also really tiny. Matilda was brown and she liked eating pieces of fruit and crackers that Amy left out in front of the door for her. She was pretty sure that Matilda never knew it was her who kept her alive, but it didn't really matter to her that she would scurry away every time she came near. Just the fact that she helped her was enough.

Try as she might've (when she was younger,) Amy never kept any human friends. Human interaction is exhausting, because it is equal and two sided and complex in the way that caring for a little critter wasn't. There were things like social cues. Looking at them in the eyes, minding her posture, paying attention to the tone of voice. There was so much deception and puzzles that it became exhausting. And you have to actively maintain it. You have to set playdates and stuff. It became some kind of chore, because people liked to make things into an exchange.

What Amy really wanted was someone who she didn't have to pay attention to. She could just leave the raccoons and the possums alone for a few weeks, and they'd still return for the food. She didn't have to use her time. She didn't have to care. Maybe that seems incredibly selfish, but in most relationships she's had, they are all give and no take. So why wasn't she like this with them? With Mariya? Why did she suddenly feel the tiredness in her bones and the fog in her head?

Wasn't that so selfish?


(Ussiliators are silicon-based colonial conglomerate life-forms made of colonies of diatoms held together by a single, polysiloxane neural core, and encased in an organosilicon membrane studded with element 330. The tendrils extending from the neural core act as whiskers that detect radiation and physical touch, the two senses which ussilators rely on to traverse their rocky, flat planet-)


"Re-trace... Back to the road?"

She wasn't sure what to call it. "Let's go, then. We should probably be fast. Um. Yeah."

Amy sent out a hand, another invitation of sorts. Let's go together. Let's keep each other warm.

Prii was surprised for the offered hand. After a brief moment, they took it, and gave her a tight smile.

"Alright, let's go."

((continued elsewhere))

The creature floated, and then swam, across the loose, webbed channels. It would struggle. It would die. And its descendents, linked by DNA and pheremones and brains too small to comprehend love and family, would struggle, too, and die and work and fuck, not in that exact order. This would go on for thirty-million years. It would develop sentience, first, and then sapience, though they were too late to know those that coined the word. They would communicate through chemicals and travel through the stars with more enthusiastic zeal and existential pondering than those fossilized hairless monkeys could even comprehend.

And then, they'd meet a friend.

Ussiliators are silicon-based colonial life-forms, clumped together diatoms and spun together cells apomorphized from their Hydrozoan ancestors, held together by a single, polysiloxane neural core, and encased in an organosilicon membrane studded with element 330. The tendrils extending from the neural core act as whiskers that detect radiation and physical touch, the two senses which ussilators rely on to traverse their rocky, flat planet. They also sent the first waves picked up by earth. It simply said, "hello," emitted over eighty thousand times, once a decade, by lonely, abandoned machines twirling their way through space.

And of course, all things would end. The sun grew too hot, and the new planets weren't good enough. Terraforming only angered Those Above. They died out not with a bang, but not with a whimper either, thousands of species and eons of work and planets upon moons and planets all littered with proof of their life. Tall, spiraling structures, and short, squat ones, and underground, too. Glass and flesh and isotopes that never belonged on the planets they belonged to sang to no audience in particular. There was a wind chime, still tinkling without the roaring solar flares and the atmosphere. Every few milliniums, something would whiz by, and the sound it made was just as beautiful and as broken as the claws that made it when two objects collide. Lockets with names inside them still sat in rotting drawers.

And yet, there was still life. The concept of a soul persists, in these giant systems made of stars and spacedust, orbital and celestial bodies replacing cells and organs, forming together a network almost like the human brain these parts drift, aimlessly, sending messages of electromagnetic pulses between themselves every few centuries, encountering another system of their kind in once a few trillion years, where the stars would brush up to each other, sparks and space rock flying as they collide in attempts to navigate. But the universe was expanding too fast now, planets and suns drifting apart from each other faster than the wave got across.

Eventually, sentience takes its last, shuddering breath, and closes its eyes.

It's cold now. And it would stay cold, maybe, until even the black holes burn out. Until light winks again, and, on something resembling a planet in the far-off, expanding corners of the universe, a lump of atoms wakes up.








Amy tried to smile back, but she was already smiling.

(This carbon based machine continued in...)