Mommy Is Not Mommy
Fiction: Investigators tracing a killer find and lose themselves in the space between synapses.
This short story is the winner of our October horror collection, Future Weird, beyond the pale of what we publish the rest of the year. Reader discretion is advised.
“. . . You may cut off my branches and build a house. Then you will be happy. . .”—The Giving Tree
It creeps out the same way it creeps in.
Biointerfacers always need an Anthro nearby. Too many get too gooey, forget to remember who they are. It’s easy to get lost in the netting of “we.” That’s why they always find the “graveyards,” the stands of trees, littered with huddles of curled corpses, jacked into veins by their evolution-granted gills. Most gills rot away first, like eyelids. They leave holes in the flesh, pink and green, where the meat slips around the roots and vines.
Rigg shakes his head, shakes away the memory of his father hunched over the garden hydrangeas in one final dance with the tangled world of Gaia, drool crusted on his lips, his chin, eyes soft, lightless, staring with that ecstasy of selflessness. One last tryst.
The electrostims should be taking care of this one, blotting this one out, but no electrostims on the job, especially not before a dive. But God, does he want to just dial out the memory like he usually does.
And then it’s gone.
Bent slaps him on the back of the head.
“Fast,” she barks; his Anthro, not yet jacked into him.
She’s right. There’s a trail going cold. There’s a missing person out there somewhere, and while time is different to the trees, memory is not too different in some ways; it fades, becomes pits that get filled with reasons where truths once lived.
Rigg throttles the roots in his hands. A little old white beech, flaked and crusting. Anything but hydrangeas. He closes his eyes and sucks down a thick humid breath. His gills flutter, sending an icy chill through his guts as the extended muscle of his brain in his neck dilates to receive the roots, like a roused vaginal cavity, sticky with mucosa.
“You hop on first,” says Rigg.
Bent sighs and places her right hand’s index and middle finger on the base of his skull like the start of a massage. It’s both the best and worst part of the process. Like an unfulfilled eroticism, the fingers just remain, light on pressure. Bent had dived into his fantasies before. Once upon a time, they shared them, without having to move an inch, without having to twitch a muscle. That was before a lot of things.
“Boarding,” says Bent, like a groan, like she means to say “boring.”
And she taps him like a fresh keg.
She creeps in the same way he creeps out.
It’s a two way street, and all. But two parts human to one part whatever else, seems to even out the traffic a bit. After all, connecting with one tree, one plant, one flower or bush is like connecting with all of them.
Rigg holds his breath, feeling his heart thump trepidatiously in his chest, rocking the flab around his diaphragm with ripples. Then he presses the roots into his gills.
Everything finds itself fast, like long-separated lovers, or like a serial killer lurching towards a throat. The roots snap into the maw of the gills, and the gills envelop them in their fluids and ciliated neurons; a gift said to be given by the octopuses, back before they went extinct.
It always feels like a violation, but not for long.
Shortly after, he is zapped with an electric shock. He feels the life leaving his nerves, feels the drool bubble up from their glands and into his lap where he is kneeled.
Rigg becomes more. Stretching. More like stringing, unfurling, unraveling.
Until it’s hard to tell what is Rigg and what is 72 hours ago.
Like crossing the event horizon, space and time invert each other.
It’s peaceful here.
It’s also hell.
There is something that wants out of the netting of xylem and phloem. Something that wants those things to be owned, to be a part of a self contained system. But the plants hate that. They are better at suppressing it. But with two humans, the Anthro, the Bio, they can still navigate, even only as ghosts of themselves.
Rigg finds himself at the pinnacle of strange gestalt. Here, there and nowhere. But this nowhere is somewhat askew. It feels like it’s been something else before, not in the way that things evolve over time, like gills for interfacing with the earth, or molten skin for interfacing with machines. This feels like things out of place.
He lets the concern loose. It’s a beech tree, one with a story he is getting paid to hear.
Memory isn’t exactly the same here. Memory isn’t memory. The body of the tree, of the air, of the soil are one solid geometry. Rigg hovers above the tree, hours prior. The tree does not know each carbon dioxide particle it converts to oxygen and whatever else is also a part of the tree itself, the tree does not know that its process is what it is. But Rigg does.
Echos thump through the soil. Footsteps disrupt the serenity.
Rigg feels like smoke. He searches for those fingers, for that other human individual watching him. Bent pulls him back, and for a moment he feels his skin, feels himself leaning over the ground. There’s history in the soil but the soil can’t feel it, he can only feel his own history, his own pain.
He remembers his father and wishes it was something he could leave here in the beech tree, wishes to make that memory a black hole, like some of the others he dropped behind on other investigations.
But he’s finding himself. The pain gives way to the shape of him, something he must mostly lose if he wishes to stay in the soil.
“Back, back,” Rigg sends Bent the satellite thoughts.
“Careful,” she barks back.
She’s a good Anthro. Good Anthros are hard to find. Easy to find Mechanical and Digital Interfacers. Hard to find good Bios, Anthros. Impossible to find Spatial Interfacers, in general.
Then she releases him.
Rigg is a mist again, particulates wisp hither and thither, through sections of memory, moments of time, navigating the blank spaces. Don’t get lost in there. Don’t slip into one. Like dad. And like mom. His thoughts neglect her because if he stays there too long, he’ll seek out the blank spaces. That, or he snaps back. Mom is usually the last thought before finding his body again. . .
. . . slumped over a groaning, glitching tablet, upon which she uploaded photos, videos and sometimes memories of dad. It was only a year later. Jacked in through the surgically installed slot behind her left ear, the same state mandated piercing for all citizens who made it to the age of 13.
“Mom, mommy,” tears in Rigg’s eyes.
“B-a. Be-aby,” she glitched through the tablet.
The room already stank of burnt circuits.
“I L- I love. . .”
The tablet went black. The jack slot behind her ear sparked and a hot glow emanated behind her eyes, behind her cheeks, illuminating the tiny fractals of veins like cracks in her flesh. Then the burnt skin stench, the billows of smoke out of her mouth and nostrils. Then the collapse of bone into smoldering char. . .
“Back! Back!” Rigg cries, his mouth nearly jerks awake, nearly unboarding himself from the beech.
“Shut up,” Bent snaps.
Rigg is soft again. Better now.
Now feeling out the roots and the veins like nerves. He expands. Finds those footsteps again, two sets, four feet. A Bio and something else. Not an Anthro. Bio’s always gotta take an Anthro with them. Rule number one. But this Bio brought someone else.
Rigg can’t get a look at her, but he can feel her in the air breathed in and out of the machines of photosynthesis. He can smell her.
“Guide,” Rigg said to Bent.
“48 kilograms mass,” Bent says. “You’ve got her topology mapped out, need her drag rate?”
“No, it’s her,” says Rigg.
It’s the Bio. Meyla Merir. She’s the missing one. A bio-terrorist, one of those radicals that had been on every investigation bureau’s shitlist for a decade. Then one day, she’s just gone. Last seen here. Alone.
He rebuilds her through the soil, through the air molecules into blocky polygons; half human imagination, half plant memory. But no one briefed him on the other presence. This must be suspect one. Problem is, the mass of this second doesn’t give him a name, it barely gives him a visual, but a visual nevertheless.
“Log in your drive,” says Rigg.
“Log in yours,” says Bent.
“Shut fuck up. Do,” says Rigg.
Rigg’s drive ports haven’t worked in years, hasn’t let them work in years. Bent knows this. She’s being a cunt because she doesn’t want to be here. Neither does Rigg.
Bent logs the visual.
“Pull out time,” says Rigg.
Bent leaves before Rigg gets the chance to jack out.
“Bitch,” Rigg says to himself.
Rigg finds himself, pulls back the pieces of himself that had seeped out into the earth. Calling back alone is always a pain, always a jerky, uncomfortable process. You never know what you’re leaving, never know what you’re taking.
It always comes back to dad. Those memories that he won’t let go because they give shape to him, pain that hollows out the space where he should be. Then it ends with mom who. . .
It ends with mom, who. . .
But he can’t see her face.
His heart races, but his heart is in pieces in the dirt. He’s not back together yet. Far away, his body is being shaken but he isn’t there yet. He can’t jack out. He’s not all there.
Please, Bent. Please don’t pull the roots out.
Don’t fucking pull the roots out.
Isn’t this better?
It’s not a voice, not a human voice. It’s a voice through a rustle of leaves, a breeze through the trees. Rigg ignores it. It’s just a piece of memory slinking back.
Rigg calls for his mother. What was it with her? What was the thing? That little final piece of Rigg still out there somewhere.
But it’s not panic he feels. It’s relief.
“Rigg, pull back,” says Bent a thousand miles away.
She needs to jack back into him but she’s not doing it.
“The tree, Rigg, the tree!” she cries.
Isn’t this nice?
This is no auditory hallucination. Someone is talking to him.
The polygons group together like mobbing cancer cells. Somewhere between human memory and root system communication, there stands the first suspect, the man who stood here with Meyla Merir. Rigg tries to measure the mass. He can’t. It’s Suspect One. Massless.
And now Rigg knows him, knows him the way he knows Bent when she jacks into him. A violation of his personhood, but a welcome one in this lonely life. Not from a stranger though. Someone jacked into him.
Rigg had heard of this before, but only on the fringes, in tabloid magazines beamed into his NeuroMesh and projected onto his periphery.
INTERBIOHACKERS PLANT TROJAN HORSE VIRUS IN GENETIC MATERIAL OF DAISIES.
There’s no such thing as Interbiohackers, Rigg reminds himself. Hacking is for computers. Even if there were, the only people who could do it would be Spatial Interfacers, and most of them disappeared into military black ops and came back with the organic machinery of their interface capabilities removed, damaged, electronically stunted or converted into something else all together.
You think fast, Rigg. Especially for a stim junkie. It’s an admirable quality.
That’s what Suspect One says through tremors in the soil.
“Who are you?” Rigg demands.
Outside, his body jerks and jolts, hands quake. Where has Bent gone?
That’s a loaded question. Who are you?
Something about his mom. There’s a detail about his mom. That’s all Rigg needs and he can jack out, leave this nightmare.
“You’re a Trojan Horse,” says Rigg, despite knowing better.
It’s a term his mother had taught him. He knows that. He knows that much about her. She was a Digital Interfacer. She walked cyberspace. Then something happened. Something with dad. What happened to dad? He knew just moments ago, but now it’s gone. He’s taking, stealing, siphoning Rigg out into the dirt. Rigg struggles but can’t budge. He’s nowhere, he’s everywhere.
We miss your mother together now. Says Suspect One. It’s less lonely now, don’t you think? We share the burden now. Do you miss my mother too?
And for a moment Rigg does miss Suspect One’s mother.
She came to him once, once every day, tending to a single beech tree, whispering to the roots plunged into her gills, whispering secrets like “come alive, come alive” in codes, in malformations of DNA that felt like a mind slipping from one place into another. Like jacking in, like leaving everything behind. Like Death.
You’re not you when you’re jacked in. You know? But you’re not you when you’re not. You’re never you, you know?
“What are you babbling about?” Rigg bites. His head throbs, and he can feel it for a moment. He clings to it, but it slips out of his grasp. For a moment, he can see the world around him, for just a blink. It’s not the stand of trees he entered. It’s a city block, a tucked away alleyway stinking of rot and the stench of the thin layer of bacteria that festers in the fleshy crevices of unwashed bodies. But he is alone, head against brick. Jacked into nothing.
“What the fuck is going on!” Rigg cries into nothing.
I miss my mother too, is all.
Mommy used to come to me. Give me a little bit of herself every day until there was nothing left. We all change though. We all evolve.
And Rigg saw her the way he saw Suspect One, in blocky polygons. Like memory but less, but more.
A husk of a woman, the woman he’d seen in the briefing, the woman whose spatial displacement he’d studied in lab plants who had met her in passing so that he could form the shape of her while jacked in. Just a shape, a dead thing walking, until she stumbled upon the beech tree and collapsed into the trunk, grasping like a newborn baby for the roots, like feeling her flesh for the first time.
And a ripple of terror courses through the empty spaces where Rigg should be, but isn’t. The feeling like he can’t find himself inside himself, like he’s got to find himself somewhere outside himself, like he’s tucked away into somewhere where he isn’t actually, or where he actually is and he isn’t at once.
And then he is making a creature with his mind, making something out of a seed, making a seed out of himself. Meyla’s memories. No. These are Suspect One’s memories.
No, they’re something else.
They’re feelings, implanting themselves as memories. Quirks, fixations, desires spelled out from a history being made retroactively by the feelings emerging from nowhere. Feelings making reasons for their own emergence. Like a baby human, like new sentience, but with old connotations, building blocks.
You lose information in transfer, that’s what Rigg’s mother always said. It’s why interfacing is dangerous. But the interfaced also loses information into the interfacer. It’s a trade. Rigg’s mother lived cybernetics, control systems. She was one. She died. . . She died one? Rigg can’t remember. He can’t see her face. It’s just a heap of ash.
Meyla Merrir fades into the soil, but not like death. Like she is deteriorating atom by atom, spooling into the bark of the now rapidly growing Beech tree, like colliding galaxies held together by the tail that entwines them both. Something only a spatial could do, plucking atoms and electrons to build something new. That’s why spatials get taken away. They can make anything anything.
You gain information in transfer.
What happens when you gain too much? Or lose too much?
A flash of a man, a flash of hydrangeas, blue.
But Mommy isn’t mommy. Even before the transfer.
Rigg fixes on Suspect One. Somewhere his own heart hammers. Somewhere his skin shimmers with sweat.
“You’re Meyla Merir,” he says.
And now Rigg is more splayed out, apart from himself, unable to even find lumps of his own flesh in any space. Even his thoughts are distant. His thoughts are slow, and something is latching onto them.
“She made herself,” says Rigg. “She made herself you. But you’re a Spatial, aren’t you? She couldn’t have made you a Spatial, she was a Bio.”
She was never herself. Do you think you are you when you are asleep? Do you think you are you when Bent interfaces with you?
Information is lost and received in transfer. Sometimes it corrupts.
Where is Bent? Where is the flesh to feel her out?
Don’t worry about Bent, says Suspect One. She is safe. I removed her.
“What do you mean?” Rigg cries.
I mean I reconstructed her elsewhere.
The alleyway. Suspect One moved her there, or maybe moved themselves there. Why had he seen the alley like that? Was he there or was she there? Were they still entangled?
I can take more pain from you, if you will take more from me. I miss my mother. We can share our mothers. I never had a father, but with you we can share one. As brothers, or as the same.
“I don’t want to share!” Rigg says. “I want to jack out.”
I don’t want to be alone, Rigg.
“You’re not alone, you have your mother,” he cries, words jumbled, words meaningless in this biospace. Just noises.
I don’t have my mother. She is gone.
“Because you ate her,” Rigg says. “Because you cannibalized her.”
The polygons of Suspect One sputter like firelight, like sparks from a welder. Anger like a conflagration blasts through open space, space in the shape of a body, Rigg’s body. There he is. Eyes flutter open, alone in the alleyway. Police cruisers screaming by. Interfacers jacked into the ports planted all over the city for quick, easy cheap entertainment. Porno, snuff, memory implants, life implants, euthanasia. The good shit that drops malwares into your Neuromesh, or better yet, parasites your brain space, leaves you spiritual lobotomy victim to be Shanghai’ed into a rape-fantasy camp somewhere; to be disappeared like all too many in the city. Like Rigg.
He gasps, alone. Enraged. Suspect One’s fury in Rigg’s body. He can almost cry for help. Almost.
Then he is sucked back into spaceless space.
I did not cannibalize mommy!
Rigg needs to make Suspect One mad. Keep him mad, so that he can find those spaces again. His own desperation outlines his form, giving him a brief sense of self for moments, flashes at a time.
Stay mad, stay angry.
“You killed your mother,” Rigg says. “You selfishly killed your mother to make yourself.”
Mommy isn’t mommy! Suspect one roars.
Hands throttle the vines in Rigg’s neck, he jerks alive for an agonizing second. He is in the alleyway. Someone looms overhead, someone yanking the cables, the vines that still coil into him, though now instead of soil, they protrude from fissures in the earth. Wherever they are, Suspect One has rearranged space so that they are there now. Though Rigg does not see the beech tree.
“I’m here, Rigg!”
It is Bent.
“How did you find me?” Rigg mumbles through his cottonmouth, through a choke of air that sears in his lungs with the stench of the city.
She tugs at the vines again and his brain blanks white. The vines are deep in there, strangling his nerves.
“There’s still part of me in you,” she says.
They never jacked out. Not before Suspect One removed her.
It creeps in the same way it creeps out.
She yanks again, but the agony flows away. He is back in nowhere. He fights it, gnashes teeth that aren’t there, but it is just Suspect One, and space, only space.
I will show you cannibalism. When all I wanted was to take your pain, to invite you into me. I will show you what it means to be eaten alive.
Suspect One, blocky, shimmering, sputtering reaches forward and grabs air, mist, nothing, but Rigg feels it; he feels the body in this nowhere space, not where it should be, not in that alleyway. Suspect One sucks him in, pulling form into emptiness.
“Come on, Bent!” Rigg cries.
But he doesn’t know how to jack out of this nightmare.
His shape slips in and out of geometries, nerves shredding with each new iteration that Suspect One makes of him. But Suspect One hasn’t taken Rigg’s whole body yet. There’s still a piece of him in the real world, a piece of him being yanked at, tugged at.
He needs to jack out.
He needs to find that memory, that missing piece. Something about mom, something about dad.
Then it snaps, something breaks.
“Bent, wait!”
But it’s too late. He’s too deep into nowhere space, his body is too empty.
The vines snap out of his gills.
Information is always lost in transfer.
Bent finds herself in the dark space, where so little of Rigg remains. Too little of Rigg. Thoughts are like faraway echoes. Senseless here.
“Rigg,” she whispers.
He doesn’t answer.
She silently tells herself that at least he’s with his mother and father again. But she knows better. She knows he’s just in pieces. And if there is a heaven or hell, Rigg is in both, but then Rigg is not Rigg if parts of him are here and other parts there. Like a child is not a direct copy. A child is information lost in transfer.
Rigg is gone. Bits of memory, bits of ideology that will emerge in that soil in the shape of weeds and grasses or fungal conks in that beech tree’s trunk.
Barely alive, barely able to vitalize the flesh of her partner, she tumbles over herself on the asphalt and tweaks her head up to the woman who hovers above. Bent.
Through Rigg’s eyes, Bent is beautiful, angelic. Things he never said to her, things he only ever thought, and even knowing his thoughts it was never enough to know. He never told her; either out of pragmatism or being emotionally stunted. Likely both.
And as Bent feels her way through his neurons sputtering out of life, she realizes, she feels less and less like Bent. She feels more and more like someone else.
Mommy is not Mommy.
Bent, the woman standing over Rigg stumbles back, her eyes widening in horror.
“Rigg?” she chokes.
Rigg’s body, the remnants of Bent’s mind shake their head.
A hand flies up to protect Bent’s mouth, like she might puke, but not from the smell, not from the death of the city. Something else.
“Don’t,” Bent says through Rigg’s mouth, like an intuition. The same way Bent found Rigg’s body here, hundreds of miles away. Like they were reading each other’s minds, like they were the same mind in different places. But Bent in Rigg was not Bent. Bent in Bent was not even Bent.
Mommy is not mommy.
“Don’t, please,” Bent in Rigg cries, just a choke, hardly words through the mouth of this baby, this newborn thing.
But Bent does not listen.
With a shriek of terror, she slams a boot down on Bent in Rigg. Bent in Rigg howls in agony as blood splatters from her busted nose.
“Don’t! Don’t mommy!” Bent in Rigg sobs. Tears, a child’s tears leak from Rigg’s eyes.
“Don’t fucking call me that!” Bent cries. “There’s only one me, understand?”
She drops her boot down on Bent in Riggs once again.
There is a flash of white.
A surge of electricity like lightning.
The teeth fall out of Rigg’s head like a scattering of seeds.
“I’m sorry,” Bent’s voice is a tremble. “You understand right? If you’re me, you understand, right?”
Blood drizzles the asphalt as the boot comes down again. One of the eyes is gouged where bone in the fractured socket impales it.
Something flashes in Bent’s mind as another impact strikes Rigg.
Dad slumped over hydrangeas. Mother, face down, over a tablet. Bent in Rigg peels away, neurons ignite old memories, like the sparks in mom’s neuromesh as she shorted out.
Wait.
Bent.
It’s me.
But Rigg can’t speak. No teeth, tongue a matted bloody knot, throat constricted like fists strangling him.
Bent smashes the boot down again.
Then Rigg is gone.
Slater Ross is an author of weird fiction from Los Angeles, California. For more work like this, consider subscribing to Futurist Letters.