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Splosh, splosh.
Eeeeek!
More sploshing.
I’ve been listening to the sounds of the last remaining Yeerk pool for nearly three hours, have seen many containers of animals being transported to the surface, and shamelessly gloated at so far eight yeerks who have been tricked into copying rat DNA and then getting eaten by their former taxxon hosts.
Apparently, the taxxons weren’t always happy with their so-called symbiotic connection, either.
I am filling out yet another sheet for the World Wildlife Fund, this one about a pair of gorillas that would soon be transported to an African rainforest. The two animals, back when they’d been their previous disgusting slug selves, had argued they’d seen a movie about Dian Fossey and wished to continue her mission by adding to the number of apes in the wild. One of them also shared that if they were to ever encounter poachers in their new homes they would know how to use a hunting riffle against them. Oh, this I’m sure about. Yeerks know how to kill.
The zoo’s truck rolls towards the newly cut exit of the Pool with the transport cage of the still sedated ‘donor’ apes. The two new primates are sitting in the former volunteer host zone, solving the crossword of yesterday’s newspaper, passing the pen between each other with clumsy fingers. I can imagine how weird it must feel when a few days ago you were piloting a helpless human and now you have gorilla-sized hands.
My own Noorle-125 was flushed out into orbit in my absence and I would sooner die before I shed a tear for him. But I understand there’s a bigger picture, and objectively, repurposing yeerks as endangered animals is a good idea - much better than pushing war and vengeance at all costs. These slugs have never in their lives belonged to Earth and their need for artificial Kandrona rays made them vulnerable. Trust me when I say a yeerk hates being vulnerable more than he hates Visser One, and that really is saying something.
I check the time : one hour and two minutes are left before the gorilla pair’s new body becomes final. Great.
When I turn back to my own desk, a man is standing in front of me, with a thick beard and long hair, both full of gray lines. A bit on the thin side, but not underweight. His backpack drops to the floor with a loud thud; it looks like he’s just interrupted his two-months camping trip to visit us down here under Santa Barbara.
“G’d aftern’n,” he says, “I’m looking f’r Leep-510. I’ve been t’ld to bother you unt’l you show me to him.”
Well, that was one introduction. “Leep-five...?”
“Five-ten,” he says, as if urging me. “Programming specialist. Has his way of com’ng off as rude at times. Greenish, a bit darker th’n your average slug. His upper left ant’na is dented...”
“Dented!?” The girl next to me interrupts. I remember her, she was a voluntary host. Other than that all I know about her is that she’s fond of horses.
The man with the backpack seems to blush under that thick beard of his. “Yeah, I dropped h’m once.”
Great. An escaped voluntary host wants to check on his former Yeerk.
I pull the keyboard closer and type in the tiny abomination’s name. For a moment I hope the search will yield a result like ‘unknown location’ or ‘lost in transport’ (this would be out euphemism for the seventeen thousand flushed down like used toilet paper.) Maybe ‘deceased’ or even better, ‘killed’ or ‘missing in action’.
Instead the computer tells me that Leep-510, without a host for the past year and a half, is in storage tank four, AKA, our death row barrel.
“Alive for now,” I tell the stranger. “Refused to take an animal form.”
“I know,” he says.
If this guy turns out to uphold a telepathic bond with his parasite, I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s something fundamentally wrong with how he talks about that piece of living slime. Even if he was a voluntary body at some point in their shared past.
I lead him to the back, to two barrels still in use. Before I could point out which one, he whistles some stupid melody, steps to the barrel, and scoops out a dark green yeerk with his bare hands. It looks almost like a teardrop rolled into that beard.
“’M back f’r you,” he mutters.
The yeerk, with one antenna standing significantly sideways, nearly climbs onto his nose. (Can they infest through a nostril?) The man is openly crying by now. “Missed you too, Leeplet.” Then he goes oddly placid, like all he cared about was this tiny piece of green slime in his palm.
“Sir, please be careful, these all have been primed with the Escafil cube before we began filtering them by their choice of zoo animals.”
He doesn’t seem to hear me, and only then do I realize what I’ve just seen. That little thing by the name Five-Hundred-Whatever has acquired Mr. Beard-Guy’s DNA and is about to become his exact copy.
Sure enough, the slug begins to turn paler and a bit more defined. It starts growing, right in the man’s palm, and at only one handspan tall I can already see he’ll have the same black hair with the same silver-gray lines.
As he’s gaining matter from alien-space, the man can no longer hold him as easily. First he puts the rapidly morphing creature on his left shoulder, then they attempt a few wildly unnatural poses, and somehow they end up both sitting on my chair. “Leep, you’re heavy!” the host remarks.
The slimy beast is looking almost cute by now. His face is clean, his eyes are large and unlidded for now. His broken antenna is hanging from the tip of his tiny nose, and he needs all four limbs to stay upright.
“Here, I brought you the st’rter pack.”
The former host unzips his backpack and offers him a pair of underpants, although the former yeerk is too small for those right now. I can’t help but notice their footwear: the real human’s boots are muddy and worn, but he’d brought a pair of pristine, elegant leather shoes for his former parasite. With a joint effort, they put a white, neatly pressed shirt on the little alien, and he confidently starts buttoning it for himself. He seems to have too few fingers for it, but he keeps trying until his thumbs grow in and he succeeds soon afterwards.
I have seen a few thousand yeerk and taxxon transformations today, but this one is the sickest of them all. Leep-Whatever is still green in asymmetric patches, the size of a pre-schooler, wearing the clothes of a businessman, and his host is now smearing tears all over his bearded face.
There’s no sign of a beard on the yeerk, though. Perhaps these biological twins would be possible to tell apart, at least for now. His lispy, younger voice asks, as soon as his mouth forms, “Did everyone get away?”
“I haven’t heard of an’one from the old team, but that’s a g’d thing consider’ng all the massacre Visser Three did.”
“We should try Espo’s workplace,” the yeerk suggests. “Call her on a public radio frequency?” Even with his teeth only forming now, his speech is clearer than his former host’s. His lisp is near unnoticeable in the background noise.
“’ll get you a new rad’o, or maybe a new ship if you just win the lottery f’r me,” the former host says. “You’ll do all m’ntenance without me, Leeplet.”
Now I’m all ears. I have heard about two yeerks by the name ‘Espo’, neither of whom were involved in any sort of ‘getting away.’ But then, Visser One (then Three) and his whole army had been sufficiently busy with all the chaos Elfangor had unleashed on him, so maybe a few controllers did indeed escape. I wonder how many and when. Anyway, this particular yeerk had been left behind.
Before long, Leep the not-yeerk steps to the other side of my desk, looking like a businessman straight out of his office. I’d estimate him between forty and forty-five, his smooth face making him look younger than the man he’s copied.
“Thanks for your patience,” he smiles at me softly. “What documents do I need? I’d prefer to keep my name and birth data... I guess those would be needed for my driver's licence.”
“Citizenship,” his former host adds from behind him.
“Yes, I’ll apply for citizenship too. Health insurance, job, taxes, all that. Maybe a Smith & Wesson?”
I grimace at the thought of a yeerk buying a human-made gun. Sharing technology with them is what started the whole problem, but from the legal point of view, I doubt we have any law prohibiting a slug from buying firearms if he has the money.
I print out his data from the computer in three copies, and he signs all three sheets with his host and me as the two witnesses.
“Do you have a place to stay?” the girl next to me asks.
“Sure,” the bearded man says and gives his own address. “Don’t I need to be mentioned somewhere? We’re each other’s next of kin.” His eyes are gleaming with pride now.
I scribble his name and address to our copy of Leep-510’s, let’s call it, birth certificate. The bearded one, Tony, swears he doesn’t have a phone ‘for practical reasons’ but the not yeerk promises he’ll stay in touch anyway.
I check the clock again. Barely down to fifty minutes with the gorilla duo. Has it been only twelve minutes since this Tony guy popped up?
“Well, for protocol, I think you should stay down here until your new form sticks,” I remind them.
“Sure, I’ll catch up with the gossip, then,” the beardless not-a-man says.
“For one, Portal has a sequel!” His former host grins. “You’ll love it.”
“Aww! What else have I missed?”
They sit down in the former voluntary host area, ‘just like the good old days,” and chatter through the next two hours until Leep-510 the yeerk officially turns into Leep-510 the human.
I’m still not sure how I feel about them, but those two are the happiest men I’ve ever known.