In his life before, he hadn’t even known what time was, much less had any concept of how it was measured. His memories of that period were fractured, blurry things: impressions of hunger and pain and little else. Shadows on a dark background.
But now…
It had all started with what he now considered his ‘waking up’, the moment when the world had changed around him, opening up and filling him with words and concepts and thoughts; the strange expansion of consciousness that brought him out of fuzzy darkness and into the present moment, which he now knew was something distinct from the past. And, more importantly, distinct from the future.
The future.
The concept of it still boggled him and set his thoughts astir. How was it possible, to even begin to predict the next sequence of actions that would happen around him? How was it possible to question? To have ideas?
And yet, he could. When one of the simple-minded guards began to act tetchy and unruly, Slivius noticed, and could neutralize the problem before it ever emerged in reality. When presented with a new test-subject, he could notice differences that he never would have paid any attention to before. He could draw conclusions. It was a great and mysterious power, the ability to model things in his mind and use them to predict.
In his previous life, he had never questioned anything. Of that he was sure. He had done nothing more than feed and fight, and could never have conceived of anything else.
And yet now he did.
He had learned the words how and why, and they had been his first tools.
At first he had merely used them to survive; making sure he was the first to feed when a new patch of fungus was found. He had suddenly tasted the tough strands that had once seemed to grow so randomly, but which he quickly learned seemed to favor certain shallow depressions in the ground. It had become so obvious to him. How hadn’t he seen it before? It once seemed like pure chance whether he feasted or starved, but the fungus so obviously concentrated heavily in certain areas.
That was where he had made his next discovery. At the time, he had grown only the small poking-stub of an appendage that most of his kind had, using it as they all did to stab blindly around in hopes of spearing up some of the precious fungus that made up the entirety of their diet.
The depression afforded plenty of the stringy, root-like material, but he had begun to tire of spending all his time chewing or stabbing away rivals who crowded around him like starving dogs around their master.
He had gotten curious, and begun to dig.
After all, why did the fungus seem to favor these shallow pits? Perhaps there was something beneath them that would provide him with something tastier and easier to eat.
So he had ignored the posturing and infighting amongst the others and set himself apart, digging tirelessly with his hardened nub of flesh until it was blunted and raw.
He had been disappointed at first. A spray of yellow liquid had begun spurting up from the depths of the fungus, foul and sharp.
Useless to him! And the damage he’d done to his poking-appendage would leave him disadvantaged against his kin. For days he had huddled away, using only his superior predictive ability to avoid falling victim to the random violence that sometimes overtook the others.
Then the strangest thing had happened. His damaged poking-appendage had begun to regrow. That would have been miracle enough, but in his state of heightened awareness he knew immediately that something had changed about it. It grew far past its old size, splitting at the end to form a two-pronged structure that could open and close. He’d even known the word for it.
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A hand.
When the blobby green microbes had showed up to feed on the geyser of yellow liquid he’d opened up, he realized that it had been no accident, that whatever force led him to develop awareness had led him here as well, and given him the tools he needed to take advantage of his new situation. It was the first time his mind turned toward concerns of a higher nature, of something beyond these little pits. No, the gifts that fell upon him had been no accident.
He hadn’t even been surprised, when one of the microbes died and its body was taken over by the fungus, producing a delicate, delicious, tender material which he had never experienced before, and which gave his body new strength.
Those had been strange, heady days, full of wonder and discovery as he probed the secrets of the world around him, using his hand and his mind to experiment with the microbes and to control the others of his kind. He had thought himself a leader then, just for being the smartest and most developed of his kind.
He shook his head now at his foolishness. A leader!
No; he may have whipped the slower-to-change organisms into shape and given them direction, but he was no leader. Leaders did more eat first. They saw.
He felt his hand groping over his blank, wrinkled face, and forced it down with an effort, quenching the traitorous impulses that lurked in the back of his mind.
My place is to discover, he reminded himself. Not to lead! He has given me enough, and I should not ask for more.
It was true. When his lord had descended from the heavens on buzzing wings in a bubble of deadly air, he had recognized the good works accomplished, and had given something precious in return.
A name.
Slivius.
Slivius repeated the word to himself, as he always did in times of mental turmoil. It rolled around his mouth like the tastiest morsel of microbe-grown fungus flower, decadent and strong. A taste that belonged to him alone, and that only he could truly savor.
A name and a title had been the first gifts given to Dr. Slivius by the winged Messenger, but not the last. Even as Slivius had labored away at the experiments demanded of him, another gift was given, one his lord had not even intended to give.
Such was the nature of the divine, Slivius supposed: to give without thought and without restraint, merely by its presence.
It had happened in the cruel early days before the experiments began to show results, before Slivius could hold up examples of strange new mutations he had discovered.
At first he had found nothing, no appendages like his own or the ability to produce membrane-silk that he would discover later in others of his kind.
Slivius had been punished for his failure, and that had been his gift. He had gasped and groaned in pain, his precious hand withering in the bubble of air as his lord threatened to deprive him of it, to return him to his previous, debased form.
Slivius had not been able to see what was going on inside the bubble. He only knew what occurred around him through the tastes that entered his mouth, and he could taste nothing from inside the bubble of air. For a moment it had baffled him, returned him to a state of animal terror at the unknown.
But then he had seen it. Not with his mouth, but with his mind, imagining the mental picture of what was going on in that sphere of darkness, the glorious pincer poised to snip off in a moment the hand that was his pride and joy.
And Slivius had seen.
That’s what we are, he realized, in a flash of divine inspiration he recalled now only as a blinding light and a searing pain that set his cytoplasm afire. He is who we are. That’s what we’re meant to become. We are…intermediary. Incomplete.
Words and concepts came to him from the outside force he had no name for, wriggling things that encased themselves in hard shells only to emerge changed. The words applied differently down here, he knew, where everything was so much smaller. But the concept of it was the same.
Slivius had been born into a world of simplicity and struggle, but his Messenger lord brought the promise of greater forms to come.
He and his kind may not have been the same species as his lord, but what did that matter, here where changes happened so fast?
Before that precious moment when he nearly lost his hand, Slivius had never actually seen his lord, the Messenger from above. He’d only felt the majestic buzzing of the water around him, and heard the sharp and deadly double-snap that sometimes sounded from within.
He’d been such a fool, to think that merely grasping was the pinnacle of achievement. How could it be, when his lord’s hands could do no such thing? No, grasping was merely a stage of development, a single step on the path to perfection.
And Slivius knew what the next step was. His hand may have been able to grasp and to manipulate, but his lord’s hands—both of them!—could kill. Could rend apart a membrane as easily as Slivius could feed.
Yes. His lord’s example made it all so clear, and yet Slivius would have known the next step of the path anyways. He could feel it in the bubbling and bursting of his membrane as it expanded past its original shape, in the twisted pain he felt in his hand.
He brought his hand to his mouth as it began to shake and tremble. His first beneficent mutation had come when his body had been damaged, had it not? So why not again now, when he could feel the chaotic energies of the outside world swirling around him, seeking only an avenue of expression on their way to change this world of simple forms.
Slivius opened his mouth as wide as it would go, and began to chew.