The Mindbenders "Don't think of it as a creepy aliens-take-over-humans thing." Rubin waved his arm at
the rows of huge fetuses, each swollen-headed thing immersed in cloudy fluid and
bottled and racked like wine. Sara shuddered. "What else could it be? It's an organic computer, but these are real
people. They have feelings, they're not just vat-grown tissue." Rubin shook his head. "It's not like that. They're grown from skin cells. They
have brains, but they don't have minds. Look at them. Those huge heads are stuffed
with matrices of simple circuits. They cannot think independently; they don't have
the complex neuronal interconnections of natural brains." She forced herself to look closely at one. Its scrunched little face reminded her
of a goblin, or of her mother, shortly before she died, when the Betelgeusian DNA
was all through her body and her head was trying to reshape itself into something
that surely could never really live. So, yeah, she was thinking creepy aliens. She
shivered, and she was terribly afraid that one of the fetuses would open its eyes
and stare at her accusingly. She whirled to face Rubin. "Why did you bring me here?" Her jaw worked. Maybe he
was in league with them, possessed by them. She darted for the exit. She took the
stairs two at a time, expecting a particle beam in the back all the way, but just as
she reached the top the door opened. Something stood there on a pillar of black
pulsating tentacles, something with huge compound eyes in which she was reflected
hundreds and hundreds of times. She screamed as it reached for her hand. She
turned to run again, tripping, falling, landing headfirst. * She came to, her cheek painfully pressed into the metal grid flooring. The virus
she had smuggled inside her lungs had done its work. Rubin lay beside her, unmoving.
As far as she could see, hypercranial fetuses were thrashing their arms and
writhing. Alarms were sounding and she heard running feet. The occupant of the
nearest jug opened its eyes and looked right at her. "The invaders," she said, "how do we defeat them?" "Two plus two," it said, "equals four." It smiled seraphically.
Publ. Daily Cabal 2007
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