Hive Minds Give Good Hugs

Okay. Okay! Things are progressing nicely! Evelyn Bork has managed to catch a decent amount of food with which to get her impending sister, Evelyn Bork 2, quickly up to speed. Then, I'll see how the pair of them do against the weasels plaguing my home. Evelyn Experimental continues to get me a steady supply of fish and Evelyn Tinkerbell is just really fun to be. I'm not totally sure how having ten more of that body is going to feel, but I guess I'll just—

AaaAaAaAAAAAaaaaaaGaGaaaagh!

Everything suddenly goes dizzy, all of my selves falling to the ground as ten more brains simultaneously enter my collective consciousness, nearly quadrupling my prior number. The original Evelyn Tinkerbell falls out of the sky and lands in the river. I barely manage to fight through the disorientation and save myself with EE as my mind sputters like an old car trying to re-fire the ignition. Yet second by second, my mind starts to take stock. One, two, three, four… all accounted for.

And just like that, things start running smoothly again.

My mind, in essence, is now something like a fourteen-core parallel processor. Not all of those cores are the same size or strength, but they are nonetheless legion. Despite breaking out of ten different eggs in ten different ways mere seconds after expanding my consciousness to absurd levels, things just feel natural. No strain, no distraction, just a whole lot of me. If anything, my thoughts seem clearer, easier to call on.

After a lifetime of struggling with serious mental issues, simply thinking that and being able to believe it almost makes me cry.

All ten of my new ETBs step out of my eggshells and look at each other. They're all completely identical, which is kind of weird, but they’re also all me so I guess it makes sense. It's not like I'm going to confuse who is who. All of my selves blow raspberries at each other, thumbs to their temples and fingers wiggling. My larger selves all giggle. I may be a terrifying monster, but at least I'm a fun monster! As soon as I've eaten enough food and baked in the sun long enough to dry off, it's time to take my squad to the air.

"All wings!" I announce to the sky, "Report in!"

"Evelyn Ten, standing by!"

"Evelyn Seven, standing by!"

"Evelyn Three, standing by!"

"Evelyn Six, standing by!"

"Evelyn Nine, standing by!"

"Evelyn Two, standing by!"

"Evelyn Eleven, standing by!"

"Evelyn Five, standing by!"

"Lock S-Foils in attack position! Reewwwww!"

Flying is awesome. When I first started flying I was afraid I'd eventually tire of it, but it turns out that eleven of me flying at once, in formation, is just eleven times as awesome. It's the kind of thing that has so much subtlety and nuance to how I do it that I doubt I'll ever truly master the experience, even with a thousand bodies. Each wing beat is a hundred micro-decisions on breadth, angle, force… and I'm flapping almost two thousand times a minute! The wind is at my back as the fearsome and courageous Squad Evelyn sally forth, cackling wildly while I do flips and barrel rolls and loop-de-loops.

At some point I decide I should probably do something productive and fly up as high as I can go, really get a bird's eye view of the place, so to speak. I would have done so earlier, but I was afraid of screwing something up and falling to my death. With this many of me, however, I could now probably catch myself. Not that I expect I'll screw up the flight.

I shoot Evelyn Five upwards (it has to be number five, she’s the main character) and it starts getting very cold, very fast. Thanks to my incredibly detailed control over my own internal systems, I have an innate ability to regulate body temperature... but a tiny insect body simply can't generate heat faster than I start to lose it. Still, I can get a pretty good gander of the local geography at a comfortable altitude.

The mountains to the north are breathtaking. They're a pale white where vegetation doesn't cover them, even below the snow-capped tips. Dark sections of various sizes dot the cliffs—holes, I realize. Massive chasms and chambers snaking through the interior of the mountains. Great natural bridges span between some of the lower peaks, hanging stalactites in the open air. Even back when I was looking at them through the trees of the forest, they struck me as frighteningly similar to a massive skeleton. The resemblance is even more uncanny now that I see them in full, which quickly starts a mild panic attack. There's no way. Right? A megafauna of that size would be very, very impossible. As I continue to stare, I slowly start to calm down to reassure myself no, this isn't actually a skeleton the size of a mountain. There's no discernible anatomy from peak to peak, just a series of huge white chunks of rock, some of which are incidentally hollowed out like skulls or rib cages which cross through the island.

Incidentally, I do indeed seem to be on an island. Either that or a peninsula; I cannot see past the mountain range, but to the east, west, and south I see a body of water which must be the ocean. At least… I sure hope it's water. Maybe it's just the distance, but from up here the liquid seems kind of… purply.

To the west, the trees seem to get darker, thicker, and much, much taller. A far greater variety of plant life is obvious even at a distance. They're so far away, yet I can still clearly see how much taller they get than the trees nearby. They must be truly massive. The sense of distance and scale is awe-inspiring.

There isn't much of interest to the south. The forest seems to get thicker, but none of the giant super-trees seem to grow in that direction. To the east, though, to the place the glow of the night comes from, I see color. Color and clouds. A light fog rolls upwards from the ground, a translucent barrier which looks like a waterfall in reverse. Beyond it, vibrant purples, yellows, blues, and greens cover the sparse patches of ground I glimpse between twisting, net-like branches and vines, like a dark web cast over the ground. Within the heart of the web, barely visible in the daylight, something glows. Something… alien.

I drift downward to rejoin my other selves, and pain explodes through my senses. I feel my body snap, a jolt of impossibly fast movement crashing into me. Out of the corner of many of my eyes I watch a streak of movement crash to the ground, and the next thing I know I am pinned on my back. The pain in my injured body's legs suddenly goes numb.

Looking up from and down at the scene of the impact, I see myself at the mercy of one of the dome-headed fuzzy flying creatures I saw by the river. Covered in poofy fur, its bat-like wings are stretched outward for balance, its full wingspan longer than EP is tall. Meanwhile my pinned body is barely the size of EP’s thumb, completely trapped underneath its talons. On either side of the dark, hairless dome it has in place of a neck or head, pointy, fuzzy ears adorm its shoulders, sticking upwards. The monster’s mouth is on its chest, and I watch in a split second of painless horror as it pulls my tiny leg off with its free foot before dropping it down its gullet.

My leg is gone. It ate my leg.

Panic overwhelms me instantly, all of my selves frozen for a fraction of a second that stretches to forever. Then, I start to scream, and the bird immediately responds by kicking me in the face. I feel it, instant by instant. The chitin cracking, smashing into tiny shards. The force carries through, vibrating my brain in disoriating eternity before my exoskeletal faux skull bursts like a raspberry and I die.

I fucking die.

Contact with the body is lost. My legs had been paralyzed but my head was not so lucky. It hurt unlike anything I had experienced, an immortal memory of agony to haunt me, soon joined by the sight of the bird peeling apart my shattered face to crunch down bits and pieces at a time.

It’s quite easy to recognize the organs it pulls out. After all, I designed them. Yet as I take in the macabre show, terror and shock flowing through me like blood, a little prickle in the back of my mind finds a voice, one of my flying selves speaking up.

“...Am I just going to let it mutilate me until there’s nothing left for a funeral?”

Many sets of eyes narrow at that. Adrenaline is already pumping through me, and I encourage it. Shape it. Start to think. No. No, I don’t think I will let it do anything of the sort. I am not planning to let this planet keep kicking my shit around forever. May as well take that first step today.

As EB, I burst into action, dashing my deadly dog-body towards the scene as fast as I’m able. I’d been out hunting and my new EB hasn’t quite hatched yet, taking much more time to form than I don’t want to just sit and wait for myself to catch up, however. Even with all ten of my Tinkerbell bodies combined, it far outclasses me by weight. But if I can just gang up on and injure a single wing, the fight is over. I’m mad all of a sudden, a rare emotion for me. I want to recover that body! I am not for eating!

“I am the one that eats!” I squeak-roar, blitzing the murderer from all sides as adrenaline flows through me.

Then pain smashes into me again, almost immediately. A second dome-headed bat crashes into another one of my bodies, killing one of me instantly by smashing it against the trunk of the tree, flattened organs popping out the sides of my tiny torso like a blood-filled piñata. Two more bodies are blown off course by the wind of the creature's passing alone, my original target taking flight and focusing on the swarm of mes, air pumping from its wings too powerful for me to safely strike through.

Then it falls with predatory purpose, catching me despite my attempts to scatter. Yet another one of me is pinned underneath it.

This was a mistake. I want to kill them! It hurts, holy shit it hurts so much. But it hurt me. Which means it is strong. It will be delicious! My mind races. How do I fight it? Head, not vulnerable. Legs, dangerous. Assumption: bones are hollow and weak like Earth birds. Irrelevant; ETB bodies lack the force necessary to deal blunt trauma to bones. Wings. Frail bits of skin, stretched between stronger structures. Bite the wings, tear holes in the wings. Win condition. How to approach?

Target is superior in the air, impossible to catch during flight. Air displacement causes more force than ETB bodies are capable of outputting safely. Remove assumption: safe output. Air displacement still too great. No leverage. Pinned body, mostly undamaged. Leverage possible. Insufficient. Attack when distracted. Flank. Wait for...

Heuristic calculations fly behind the eyes of my many bodies, though none of them distract from the stark reality in front of me. If anything, they make my situation feel even more helpless. There is almost nothing I can see happening that delays my third death— all within thirty seconds— long enough to avert it. EB can beat these birds but that part of me isn’t here. Death stares down at me, all mouth and no eyes. There's no beak on this space bird, just a gaping, toothy maw dripping saliva down to splatter on my tiny face. At least the spit isn’t acidic. I got cocky, didn't I? What was I even thinking?

The terror creeps back in, chasing away the foreign fury and confidence of before. I'm not some kind of super-powerful god monster, I'm just Evelyn. A stupid girl crying alone on an alien planet with unknown deaths around every corner. And so, for my hubris, I will die.

Again.

Really, now that I think about it, should I truly be this afraid? I just died twice and I'm still… well, alive. Yet nonetheless terror fills me. How stupid. I could just shut off my sense of pain, close my eyes, and pretend it's not even happening. I could deactivate my body in advance, poison my own brain and be dead before it can stab me. And I will live on. EB is approaching as fast as I can. EP is still resting on top of Mr. Mooshi. EE is fishing. And my other Tinkerbells are watching, calculating the ever-dropping odds of victory, one slapdash mental simulation at a time.

Yet it is still scary, because it should be scary. I will not wipe this fear away. Death matters. It's significant. And I do not want to die.

So fuck dying.

My Tinkerbells are the only body that use pneumatic musculature, due to their exceptionally small size. It lacks a lot of the advantages of traditional musculature, and of course it requires a certain amount of accessible fluid to function, which my body can only hold so much of. Furthermore, if my 'muscles' are punctured, they will fail to work entirely as they leak that fluid. With all my tiny bug strength, I try to push this massive bird foot off of me, all of that fluid compressing and straining inside me. Yet it's just not enough. I can't generate enough pressure, not without cracking.

So I crack on purpose.

I shut off my ability to feel pain, but not because I intend to accept my fate. The internal musculature of my left arm shatters, pumping leaked fluid into the rest of my body as I contract and squeeze the surviving organs. A series of impromptu vascular networks fly together by my will, comprised of swollen and fusing tissue, orders to heal myself being corrupted to change my body from within. I pump the extra fluid from one end of my body to the other, overfilling my muscles to dangerous degrees.

Hold together. I begin systematically hardening the cells of my other muscles with plant-like walls.

Hold together. I pump an excessive amount of oxygen into each one of those cells, disrupting delicate internal balances that I have to compensate for on the fly. Even then, they won't survive long.

Hold together! Chemicals fill the empty spaces, reacting with each other and forming an epoxy-like molecular glue. If not of oxidation, then my muscular walls will surely die of suffocation in less than a minute.

But by then I'd be digested, so there's no relative loss. I know exactly where my EB self is and how fast I am running. The math is intuitive. The results are clear. It is right to fear death, but fearing pain, fearing consequences, is foolish. They are already known, and I have already chosen. That is all there is. Act, or die.

And fuck dying!

Straining my tiny limbs, I shift the foot of a predator over forty times my weight. It squawks in indignant surprise, pressing harder to try and pin me once more. A Herculean feat of strength. I will not die here, not again. I refuse, with all my might and all my being.

But not everything in the world revolves around my meager will.

Seconds pass. My cells burst, individually at first, but then in the dozens, hundreds, the thousands, the millions. By any measure, I have accomplished the impossible for something of my size. I wonder how many kilopascals I'm holding right now. A hundred? A thousand? A hundred thousand? And I'm accomplishing this with… with a bug! With the body of a tiny dragonfly! This is my power!

Quickly it becomes clear, though, that it's not enough. As I start to tear EB's muscles in an effort to get here as soon as possible, the bird presses down with its foot even harder. My cells break. My muscles fail. Relieved at the end to the brief surprise, the bird lifts its other foot and squashes me. Like a bug. A third body's senses vanish from my awareness like a blown-out birthday candle.

My other bug bodies vibrate with barely-contained frustration. That was genius. That was the best I had! I did an impromptu modification on the internal structure of my own organ systems in a matter of seconds while under deathly duress, implementing drastic (if temporary) improvements to my original design! And it still wasn't enough!

"A bit arrogant to be disappointed that you can't punch forty times your weight class, isn't it?" Mr. Mooshi grumbles.

"I'm just stressed from dying," I defend. "Okay? I just… I just fucking died!"

Although did I really? Honestly, I lost the equivalent of a few fucking fingers. Regrowable fingers! Entire bodies that looked like me, had faces, had silly Mickey Mouse voices, spent hours playing in the sky and hunting bugs… fingers. That's it. A hand at most. I can replace and double their number in an afternoon, so why should I care?

"What the fuck am I, Mr. Mooshi?" I hiss.

"You're Evelyn, last time I checked," he answers.

Which means what, exactly? I’m not even surprised by this. It almost feels like some part of me, some little bit in the back of my brain knew I wouldn’t die all along, and had never been afraid of from the start. Of course I can try again and again, fail as much as I want, and eventually come out on top. That’s only natural. I get extra lives. It’s like a game. So whatever put me here… they must expect me to win.

That, more than even the deaths, frightens me to the core.

When Evelyn Bork finally arrives on scene, stalking close to the murderous avians and whipping out my tongue is enough to catch the first and end its life in my jaws. The second is much trickier, flying off at its first opportunity, but I follow easily enough, catching and killing it as well after it lands an hour later. That is what humans do to animals that eat us, after all.

I get some very nice adaptations out of it, I have to admit. Keratin-based external growths optimized in shape and thickness for heat insulation, also known as fur. Very fuzzy. A working bat wing structure, which will probably be invaluable. The black dome that it had in place of the head is actually a giant eye optimized for detecting light differences and movement, though its depth perception is so bad the creature also evolved sonic detection systems. It is, all in all, an incredible find.

The ecstasy of eating them was somewhat dampened, however, by having many of my own corpses litter the dinner table. It is only well after it's too late that I realize one of them was on my metaphorical plate.

I've already eaten myself before I realize what I'm doing. I can't even pretend it's an accident, the brutally methodical method of devouring my prey dissected the stomach in pieces, pulling out my broken corpse and deliberately dropping it down my throat. My own flesh. My own body. I try to retch, but no vomit comes. My stomach is too efficient.

Immediately afterwards, I start feeling the temptation to eat the rest. I need to get rid of the bodies. I have to. I can't leave them. Eating them would be the easiest way, practical and efficient. Instead of doing that, I grab what's left of my corpses and flee from the scene in disgust.

It's not the only thing I do, though. That would be a waste of time. Two of my ETBs continue onward, because the whole point coming out this way is to investigate that light and I will be damned before I'm going to just give up on that. My two Tinkerbells ride together on Evelyn Bork, not risking another aerial assault. It's almost dark by the time I reach the rising fog cloud that obscures what appears to be marshlands beyond. The trees of the forest start to become sparse and soon and entirely as the ground gets wetter, squishier, and stinkier. The air smells like farts.

It's not enough to dull the beauty of the rising cloud that acts almost like an artificial barrier between the two zones. Honestly, I hope in my heart of hearts that it is artificial, that it is the product of some advanced species. But even on close investigation, I see no clear sign of technology or intent. It is beautiful enough to be art, but it is a natural sort of beauty. A happy coincidence of conflicting air patterns, likely caused by convection currents in the atmosphere that for whatever reason are consistent enough in this area to form clouds on the ground and pull them into the sky. It is nothing like anything I have seen on Earth, but there is no reason it has to be artificial or magical. Just more dead, thoughtless nature.

Hesitantly, I fly through the cloud and die for a fourth time.

Not because of any air currents, not because of any predator, but because I simply take a breath. The cloud is poison, a wretched stench of rotten eggs that fills what passes for a bloodstream in my insectoid body with something I simply cannot metabolize fast enough to purge. I can recognize the chemical, though not identify it. It's very often inside my body. But instantly, I can feel it is far too much. I shoot backwards into fresher air, catch myself with my second ETB, but it is already too late. Today I have died for the first and fourth time, and I have officially had enough.

Returning to the river in defeat, furious and numb, I form Fort Mooshi once again and collapse into sleep.