Trapped in This Body, I Wait for You by Akis Linardos
2100 words, ~10 minutes reading time
Issue 4 (Spring 2024)
Insectoid corpses crunch beneath your chitin-shattering boots, myself reflected in your eyes, for the first time your love colored with dread. You expected me, but what you find is a reanimated body, my lips stitched by invisible strands and my limbs twisted at abnormal angles tethered to the strings of an alien puppeteer whose hold on me remains after their death.
You expected an embrace, but what you get when you try to enwrap me in the warm hug I so dearly miss, is a punch that hurts my own knuckles as they meet your cheeks, the cheeks I used to kiss.
“They turned him into a training tool,” the bioengineer whose name is foggy in my shackled brain says. “Messed with his brain to attack anything in proximity.”
They did. The Myriapod with their snail-slick, worm-wet mandibles, prodding my essence, untethering my body from my soul hoping to turn me against you. Wish I could tell you how badly that backfired for them, but you see their corpses, you see what my punches did. How I got them good.
You touch your cheek, where my punch seared a patch of beard clean off your face, and could have burned your skin as well, too, if it was normal. But we were never normal, were we?
We were anything but.
You chose the space job to escape your parents so they’d never know, and you thought we shared the same goal. But it was not like that, not exactly. I chose it to spite mine.
I wish I had a voice to tell you now, how I never hid, how I shut the door on my father’s face when he pretended not to believe me. He’d joked it would be better if I was dead, but I knew when he was serious through his pretend chuckles. Truly, he’d rather his own son be entombed than be with ‘someone like you.’ Fatherly love is as fragile as that.
It was unfair, how heartbroken you were after leaving your family behind and how relieved I felt. I was guilty at my relief, ashamed to be privileged with a mouth that won’t shut up, that will nudge and expose the worst of someone before ditching them. Because that, in the end, made it easier to enlist, albeit still ignorant to the alien invasion underway.
And when the operator guided us into the iodine-smelling lab, announcing the pre-requisite of a gene-altering injection? I didn’t care to question why deep space exploration required attributes that surpassed human limits. I didn’t care how it would change me. That was the ticket out, and if anything, I’d be a liar if I said it didn’t feel good to alter the genes my family graced me with. Untether myself from that man.
The tougher skin was a nice plus. The ability to turn invisible was like the genetic lottery was mocking me. To count how many times I wished for invisibility when I was young, I’d need as many appendages as those Myriapods.
I did love the bullet-fast punches though. Every hole I burned through the wall was directed at some bully I last saw over a decade ago, but whose phantom words clung to my mind still, only morphed to the cadence of my own father’s voice. Rage they say is a fleeting emotion, but to me became a way of life.
You were always the gentle one. Whoever made that injection was a genius. Or maybe the injection itself and whatever CRISPR molecules within are the genius ones, needing no consciousness to see the true form of a person and bring it out.
How bright you glowed, how fiery green in the dark. Warm hips pressed against mine, you had mastered control so fast, worried that you could incinerate a person or erupt like a bomb, if you failed to control it.
Perhaps you didn’t notice how you stopped fearing your own newfound powers. It was when I began calling you my little firefly.
It isn’t really you this time either, is it? It’s never you. After the second punch, your body melts away to reveal a dummy, and the bioengineer sheds their husk, unleashing the millipede giant within, the same Myriapod that has been torturing me with these illusions.
It’s not the strength of my punches—or at least not just that. It’s my knowing that this is not you. Sooner or later, I can always tell.
For a time I thought my suffering entertained them, but I realized they’re too strategic to waste their time on morbid fun. They’re trying to figure you out, to expose everything about you by analyzing how my body interacts with your presence.
And, perhaps, even though they prodded my mind for so long, they’re still trying to figure out me. That’s what I fear most. That they’ll know me deeply enough to conjure the perfect illusion of you, and once they do that, they’ll have conquered not only my body, but my soul as well.
I did not care enough when, after a year of training, they informed us about the Myriapods. An urgent matter of intergalactic security, held secret to avoid global panic. Part of me had suspected these injections were for warfare purposes. Their variability made no sense for mere deep-space resilience.
“Earth faces an unprecedented biohazard,” the captain said to us. “The Myriapods only care to proliferate. Peaceful coexistence is beyond their understanding.”
They weren’t that different from humans then.
I didn’t share that thought. I could see you shaking, could feel it when I touched your shoulder, when I pretended to be brave. “It’s all right. We’re strong. We’ll do fine.”
It was true, to an extent. When we infiltrated the first Myriapod spaceship, their mandibles pierced through our low soldiers—the ones that the injection failed to grant substantial superpowers—like slicing through butter, but they had a real hard time with us. Their carapaces were bulletproof, but not fireproof. Your glow seared and softened them, my cannon-power punches shattered them, and I soon took shameful joy at pulverizing them.
That joy has faded now, along with the illusion that we were invincible.
And what if they send in five, ten, or a hundred more of you and I grow so numb to your presence, so entrenched in this mundane existence I begin to question whether you were ever real at all?
Remember our bloodiest mission, where only you and I survived? We snuck in the cargo bay afterward, to be with each other in private. “I can’t stand it anymore,” you said, and the echo of those words haunts me like a warning I was too stupid to heed. “Let’s leave. We’ve done our service.”
I held you closer, as if that would somehow shed your fear. “We swore an oath.”
“And we have fulfilled it.” Your voice always shook a bit, your eyes always wavered. But not this time. “Promise me we will escape. They can’t afford the resources to chase after us.”
“All right,” I hurried to say, and truly, I meant it then. “I promise. We will—”
The alarm rang.
“We can continue this later,” I said, as if that stupid call to duty was more important than that moment.
We got dressed and rushed toward the control room, where the captain briefed us in.
“We located the breeding grounds of the Myriapods.” He tapped a galaxy cluster on the navigation screen. “A cocoon-spaceship orbits here. We take her down, they all go down. But a full-on invasion is hopeless. It must be a stealth mission. Get in, assassinate the Queen, get out. One supersoldier capable of evading patrols to reach her, and with the strength to punch a hole through her belly.”
All eyes turned to me. Heck, even my own eyes would have turned to me. I owed these people everything. My best moments with you. Our freedom. And it was time to be brave. Pretend to be brave, because I have a mouth that won’t shut up, a mouth that gets me into trouble and a heart too loyal and duty bound.
“Right. Better get ready then. I’ll bring us a good Queen chunk to barbeque when I return.”
Someone began clapping, I think. Others clapped, too. You did not.
You rushed after me, and I was not brave enough to turn and look at you.
“It’s a suicide mission!”
“It’ll be all right.”
You blocked my way, and my brave front shed like a dried exoskeleton, softened by your glow, your shimmering tears. “You promised. You promised we would escape. Please. Please don’t go. I beg you.”
What was a coward to say? A play on your emotions: “Little firefly…”
“Don’t little-firefly me. You don’t have to do this. You owe them nothing. You hear me? Let’s hijack a space pod. Who can stop us?”
I looked away. I couldn’t face you any longer. “All right.”
“Look into my eyes and promise me.”
“You’re right. Remember that planet at Theta?” I laughed, ignoring your request. “Remember that tree that attracted fireflies with its resin? We can build a hut there.”
You grabbed my jaw and forced me to face you. “Promise,” you repeated, more strict than I ever heard you be.
I smiled. “I promise you.”
I had never broken my promises to you before. But there’s a first time for everything.
You were real, still are, and they’ll never take that away from me.
I know that now, because while every trial improves their emulation, I also improve, and I can tell the difference a thousand times faster. They’ll never understand us no matter how much they prod, much like a human scientist could never make sense of black hole radiation, because it was data from another universe, one beyond our comprehension. What you mean to me, that is alien to Myriapods, a sterile datapiece encoding our relationship. Neural information that without the context of subjective experience, means nothing.
They bring another one, more daring to step closer, and the faux bioengineer warns him against me. Another step and my left fist swings at you, but you catch it with your elbow, feeling the bone crack.
Memories flash of the time I took you to that pond by nightfall, fireflies reflecting on the clear waters, when we had our first kiss. When you were still busy pretending we were just friends and I was eager to prove something to those who judged my choices.
“We beat those scumbags good. After you killed the Queen, their ranks fell apart. Wish we could have reached you earlier.”
Another swing. This one strikes your ribs.
“Sir!” The man behind you screams. “You mustn’t!”
“Leave us,” you say. “That’s an order.”
“But!”
“I said it’s an order.”
Another swing. This one you catch with your palm.
“How long have you waited here? Trapped in your own mind?” You caress my cheek. “We are strong, remember? We will go through this together.”
No. This is not you. I’m done with the theatrics.
My fist spears through your belly, and it makes a chitin-crunching sound even as warm blood trickles down my arm, too warm to be human, lava-like. This dummy was no dummy, but a Myriapod sacrificed for this bizarre experiment. How quickly do they discard their own?
They’re foolish to think I don’t know you well enough. You’d never say the same words I said to you. You always came up with something grand and glowing, with your own unique voice.
I can tell as soon as a cheap copy walks in, but I pretend for a while, to save time, to give you time to reach me with the mothership. And when you’ll come, I’ll know for sure, because you will say something I never heard before, something I could never expect to hear from you. And yet something only you would say.
You will embrace me and your skin will glow brighter than starlight, your shine reflecting verdant on these alloy cocoon walls. And although my mind will be too far gone to re-establish control of this body, it won’t matter, because I’ll finally see you, the real you. You will block my punches, you will scream, you will yell and protest and in the end will do what I’ll want you to do. You will unchain my soul from this snare.
And together we will fly one last time among the stars.