Salvaged by Madeleine Roux

Author:Madeleine Roux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

24

Rayan was saying goodbye.

There were many things he still ached to do, but a goodbye seemed the best. The fire in the solar panel array had shocked him out of something, out of a deep and deceptive well of optimism that had kept his cruelest, darkest fears at bay. The salvaging crew arriving had been like a shaft of light piercing a leaden sky, but now he saw that beam of light for what it really was—a scouring flame. The lick of flames on startled skin before the real burning began.

All of his hard work lay before him. Not all of his work, but all of his work relevant to Foxfire. He had been the one to name it that, and it took. Oddly, he felt a pang of pride knowing even the alien consciousness inside him had also adopted the name.

Foxfire, then Mother.

It was from a phenomenon well known on Earth, bioluminescent fungus that grew on decaying wood. Sometimes the more whimsical called it fairy fire, but that didn’t seem right. No, Foxfire sounded appropriately volatile. Aggressive. This was no fantastical forest of dancing lights, but a slow descent into a separation of self, the ripping of the identity from the mind. His research had led him to find that this bioluminescence was the closest known thing to the molecular structure of what now infested the Brigantine and her crew.

Earth. The thought of it made him want to grieve. He had only experienced it at the state-of-the-art virtual reality Dome on Tokyo Bliss Station, spending hours and hours wandering through re-created stages of Earth’s history. He liked the 1980s best, a far, far distant time of new tech and synthesizers and cocaine. Parts of Tokyo Bliss Station reflected those neon sensibilities, the arcade district in particular, so maybe that was what made it all feel like home.

Sometimes he got nauseated from being in the VR for too long. It often gave him vertigo, but it was worth it. He visited his parents’ hometown, but only when it was still thriving and lively. If he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could still see the sunset making a riot of the mosaic tiles on the Wazir Khan Mosque. Once, he invited his mother to come along and experience it with him, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t.

“It was hard enough to leave,” she told him. “It would kill me to go back.”

For a while the virtual insides of that place had been his talisman against the Foxfire. He would fetch his mother’s prayer rug from his locker, kneel and go there, really go there, sit and listen to the chanting and find temporary reprieve.

He kept the rug close by while he studied the Foxfire samples he had collected from himself and the others and the interior of the ship. Of course, there were pure samples from the contaminated crate they picked up from CDAS, but he wanted variety. A broad sampling might let him see tiny changes, and track if the cellular structure changed once the fungus interacted with human tissue.

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