Nobody Left Behind 7 (Patreon)

The workers plan to be done today! We're getting our house back! I'm so excited.

Here's a continuation from yesterday. Sarsuk sees Siki again when she returns in the morning. Some new stuff, some old.

Also, I've noticed that a recent change in Patreon is causing any italics to go away when I paste scenes in here. That's very disappointing. If that annoys you like it does me, scroll down to the bottom and use the reviewer's link to see the text as I intended it.

Nobody Left Behind 1
Nobody Left Behind 2
Nobody Left Behind 3
Nobody Left Behind 4
Nobody Left Behind 5
Nobody Left Behind 6

———

The geroo returned in the morning, shuffling about like a groggy teen who’d yet to learn the value of a good night’s sleep. She ignored Sarsuk’s cheerful—albeit forced—”Good morning!” and headed straight for the javea maker.

He really hated this predicament he found himself in. His role—every krakun’s role, frankly—was to tell the lesser species what to do and focus instead on the bigger problems in life. It only made sense. Big creatures, big problems. Little creatures, little problems—like cooking, cleaning, growing food, making stuff, and all the little-creature-things that went along with them.

Krakun were natural managers. They could easily remember a thousand different workers and the tasks he’d assigned them. Could a tiny geroo brain do that? No, of course not.

Yesterday, when Siki dropped the bomb on him and told him that she was his only conduit to … well, to everything frankly, he’d been too shell-shocked to react. He wasn’t supposed to be dependent on a mammal. He was supposed to keep them in line, keep them doing their work, and to crush them if they failed to be useful. But now? Now, he couldn’t crush anyone unless they were foolish enough to stand beneath his chin.

Bleah. That would be awful. If he crushed someone with his chin, he couldn’t exactly wash off the gore afterwards. His virtual body shuddered at the mess and stink he’d have to live with until it all finished putrefying.

But now, he was stuck, dependent. He had no choice, no options. He needed to keep his anger in check, or Siki was liable to walk out on him like Nokevti did. He waited for her to take her usual place on her usual stool, cradling and sipping from her mug before he quietly asked, “Sleep okay?”

At this, the geroo only shrugged, her attention still on the warmth and nutty aromas drifting from her wake-me-up. “So, yesterday,” she mumbled, “you were telling me about the cleaning crew in your dorm room—”

“Actually,” the krakun said quietly, “I have a few questions of my own, if you wouldn’t mind…”

She languidly waved one paw for him to continue while she sipped her beverage.

“Well, I know this is a stupid question, but considering how important it is to me, I hope you’ll understand,” he said. “How certain are we that I don’t have a body anymore?”

“One hundred percent,” said Siki, no expression apparent on her ears.

The commissioner frowned and looked back at the wall he was hanging from. “But I mean, have you actually been in the room next to this one? Are you—”

“Yes, I’ve been in there. It’s just a bunch of machines.”

He frowned harder. “And you’re sure my body—”

“I think I’d have noticed a krakun body, Mr. Sarsuk,” she said with a smile on her ears. “That’s not the sort of thing you misplace in a drawer.”

“Yeah, I get that,” he said. “It’s just that I can still feel. I can move around. My body’s still in my apartment somehow. I can open the refrigerator, put my claws in the freezer, and touch the ice cubes in the tray. They’re so cold.”

“It’s a trick to keep you comfortable. When your frozen head arrived here, your severed spinal cord was just sitting there out in the open,” she explained. “I saw photos of Palani hooking up a bunch of wires to it.

“Everything you’re feeling from your neck down … it’s all just electrical impulses.” Siki looked at her palm and ran a thumb across her other pads. She explained, “Well, I guess that’s true of all of us really, except your signals are coming from a computer, not a body.”

Feeling annoyed, he raised an eyebrow ridge. “And they’re simulating my living room? What a crock,” he scoffed.

“More or less, yeah.”

“No, what you’re saying is impossible! In a krakun nerve stem, there’s gotta be hundreds or thousands of nerves. And it’s not like a bunch of color-coded wires in a cable! There’s no way even a krakun scientist could tell them all apart.” He paced his living room, stomping with each step. Though he could feel the vibrations in his legs, he couldn’t hear them. “They’d have to figure them all out experimentally. There’d be months where they’d be trying stuff, and I’d be all, ‘No, that’s my left arm, not my right leg.”

He glared down at the tiny geroo. “And how did they create a simulation of my apartment? How could anyone on Liotec possibly know what was in there?”

“Costaruna!” said the geroo, a hint of warning in her voice.

“Costa… What?” he asked, shaken from his train of thought.

“The planet you’re on right now,” said Siki. “The planet’s name is Costaruna, not Liotec. Your hosts are from Costaruna. You should learn that and stop being so imperialist and offensive.”

“My hosts?” he scoffed. “My captors, you mean. It’s not like I can leave.”

Her ears spread slightly. “You’re free to go. Go.”

“Cute,” he sneered. “I’m so glad you can take enjoyment from my pain.”

Siki rolled her eyes. “So, you don’t think this is possible, even though you’re living it right now?”

“I know it’s impossible, and if you’d just—”

Siki waved her paws in the air, stopping the krakun’s tirade before it could really get rolling once more. “I’m just a college intern, remember? I don’t know any of this stuff. I’m only here because I know your language.”

He took a deep breath and let it slowly out. “Okay, sure, that’s fair,” he finally conceded. “Would you be willing to translate some questions for me to the doctor?”

“Yeah, okay,” she said, setting down her mug. “I’ll ask if he has a moment.” She shuffled to the far end of the lab and spoke with the lio at length. She waited by his side for him to get to a stopping place before he returned with her.

“If you could, please,” said Sarsuk, back at his peak possible politeness, “ask Doctor Palani how it is that my body is in my living room. I’m not an expert in these things like he must be, but it’s my understanding that computer modelling and nerve stimulation is incapable of replicating the sense of touch. But yet, I can! I can feel my living room with perfect fidelity. Every last detail of my apartment is absolutely correct.”

Siki nodded and spoke with the larger male for some time. Eventually, he explained something back, and Sarsuk waited, beating his fists on his knees, rocking back and forth on his sofa in anticipation before the geroo finally translated any of it, “He said that they aren’t simulating your living room, that all of that is simply in your mind.”

“No, that’s impossible.”

“He said that when we are cubs, we explore the world with our paws, our mouths… We learn the world through the sense of touch.” She listened a bit more. “But then we grow up and the mass majority of what we sense by touch is really just memories.”

Sarsuk blinked. His mouth opened, and a moment later, he managed, “Is it?”

“Doctor Palani is explaining that we wash our paws, and we have an expectation of what the water will feel like. We touch the sheets, a lover’s mane, a cub’s face… None of it is new. Your paws merely confirm your expectations. Yes, the water is hot. Yes, the sheets are soft. Yes, his face is wet with tears.

“We get only the briefest moments where anything we touch is not how we expect. No, the shower is cold. No, the cub has a fever. No, the holiday garland that looks so soft and warm is actually cold and prickly.” She listened a while longer. “And then, our brains light up with excitement as they rectify our world view, but it only lasts a moment, and our sense of touch draws on a corrected set of memories—cold shower, feverish cub, prickly garland.”

Sarsuk ran his palms over his face while he contemplated this. He wanted it to be a lie, but yet…

“It would be very hard to simulate your apartment. I doubt we could ever do it, he’s explaining, but it’s trivially easy to confirm all of your expectations,” she translated. “You tell your body to touch the couch, and you already know what it will feel like. We just send a signal into your brainstem that says, ‘Yes, that’s what it feels like.’

“With everything you touch, we just confirm it, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ This is very easy because krakun brains are so big. They remember all the details. We’re not simulating your apartment, you are. We’re merely confirming what you already imagine.”

Sarsuk laid back in his imaginary couch, contemplating, but only for a moment before he sat back up. “No, that’s not right,” he said. He ran his claws over each other, over and over, as if he were washing them under a tap. The krakun explained, “I had an accident once and lost one of my claws, leaving my forearm ending in a stump. I remember exactly how it felt, and I’m visualizing that now, but still, I feel my claw is there. If your computers are just injecting ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ signals into my brain, then I would feel that bloody stump again. I would feel my missing claw, but I don’t.”

Siki turned back to the lio and relayed Sarsuk’s words. She even mimed what he explained by washing one paw over the other as she spoke. Eventually, the scientist replied and spoke at length.

Sarsuk waited and waited and waited, but still, the little female didn’t turn back to him, didn’t translate what Doctor Palani said.

“Well?” hissed Sarsuk when he could wait no longer.

“He says, ‘No,’” she replied over her shoulder, not turning back toward the gigantic head.

“What do you mean, ‘No’?” he coughed. “He’s obviously explaining more than that!”

Siki sighed and looked back to Sarsuk’s head. “He is, but I don’t … get any of it. It’s all too technical.”

Sarsuk groaned. “You don’t have to understand it. Just translate the words—”

“I can’t!” she growled, staring him down once more. Her fur stood on end, her ears low and angry. She held clenched fists at her sides. “I can’t translate it because I don’t know what those words mean.”

“Oh, okay, okay, I’m sorry,” said Sarsuk worriedly, realizing he’d gone too far.

“That makes sense, I guess. You’re a college intern, and he’s been studying this stuff for”—he almost said, “millennia” out of habit, but caught himself—“years. I can’t expect you to know any of the jargon.”

Sarsuk tried his best to smile, to act subservient despite his concealed anger. “Please thank Doctor Palani for me. I really appreciate him taking the time to explain it and for you taking the time to translate for me.”

After the lio left, Siki sat slumped on her stool for a long while, brooding. But when she finally spoke, her words surprised him, “You’re angry at me.”

He blinked. He wasn’t expecting her to act this way, to be … remorseful?

Fear? He’d grown accustomed to that geroo reaction. Remorse perhaps, but only because they feared the punishment they anticipated, but not this, not true disappointment for letting him down.

He quickly cleared his throat. “At myself, only,” he lied. “I could have learned to speak Lio ages ago, but I never did. I wish I had. I’d have loved to hear that explanation. But you were great, Siki. I couldn’t have asked for more from you.”

At that, her ears raised slightly into a smile, and he breathed a breath of relief.

But it was all lies, he told himself. There’s no way this mess is just confirming what I want to experience. That could never explain why I woke up back on the couch, could never explain why my communicator reset to an unbroken state.

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13O6_b8_brDF1NAnI-g6odG72gG6U5Zac2RUxoq2tkCE/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?