Rodrigo’s new car has new leather seats.
Adam can smell the leather: real, cured animal skins, imported via climate-controlled freight from Earth-1. He is aware, in a fuzzy, forgotten kind of way, that he would probably not have been able to smell the disinfected, processed-for-spaceflight leather before his senses sharpened, before Assimilation. But today, it smells like—
Alien fruit trees—burning. Particle cannons—humming. Projectile weapons—hammering. Adam lay facedown, nose pressed into a fallen log. He couldn’t move his limbs because he did not know how to. His pain centers weren’t firing yet, despite the holes carved into his torso by enemy guns. He was a newborn. His freshly Assimilated brain did not yet know how to work the striated muscles of this human body.
—it smells like that.
During therapy sessions at Pentagon-2, Dr. Jayanti always tells him not to focus on Adam’s memories of violence (she specifically says “Adam’s memories,” not “your” memories). “Think positive thoughts” is her motto.
So he turns his attention to the music Rodrigo has picked. It sounds like—
A boy with shoulder-length hair and eyes hazy like a nebula Adam’s studied in class. He laughed while manhandling a guitar. “I’m never going to get it!” the boy—Rodrigo—said, giggling.
“I expect to see you fronting a fucking band by the end of summer,” Adam growled. “I’ll show you the chord again.”
—it sounds like that.
“Did I teach you how to play this song?” Adam asks. When an alien parasite takes over one’s dying brain in the midst of battle, one doesn’t get to pick which of one’s memories are preserved and which get muddied—or even jettisoned.
He is certain that particular memory is from the night before his deployment, before Assimilation. But he knows Rodrigo doesn’t like talking about that night.
Rodrigo glances at him before turning back to the road. His mouth quirks. “Yeah, man, you did. You like it?”
Rodrigo no longer says “Adam’s memories”; he says “your memories” now.
Adam nods.
His father still says “Adam’s memories.” He still can’t decide if Adam is his son or someone entirely different wearing his son’s face.
Adam doesn’t blame him. Some days—when his fingers spasm too much, when a face tickles his memory but doesn’t quite hit the mark, when he can’t remember how to get somewhere he’s been a thousand times before—Adam asks himself the same question.
Because Dr. Jayanti advises that he should articulate his feelings more, he says, “My emotional state is like toothpaste, Rodrigo.” Then he says, “Rod-REE-go,” because he likes the shape his lips make around his best friend’s name.
“Toothpaste?”
“Yes.”
“Dude, you need to explain. I’m not in your head.” Saying this, Rodrigo pauses, as though testing his next thought. Then, measuring out his words as though from the mercury dispenser in his garage, he says, “You already have enough people in there.”
A few months back, Rodrigo would not have made that joke.
Adam tries to find the words, but . . . how can he describe the strata of feelings stacked in his chest, without sounding utterly inhuman? How can he talk about the bright, all-too-transparent layer of excitement that gives way to a dense, solid core of anxiety . . . how can he say all that and still sound like the Adam that Rodrigo remembers?
Adam’s tongue flicks out to moisten his lips. “I can’t really explain it . . .”
Rodrigo waits.
Adam has to say something. “On Pentagon-2, some of our close-combat training exercises model near-extreme gravity conditions . . . and when I want to express how I feel, it sometimes feels like that. Like my words are caught by an event horizon.”
Rodrigo’s neck whips around to look at him so fast, Adam is afraid they’ll have an accident. But the car’s autonomous systems can compensate for sudden movements.
“Rodrigo?”
Slowly, Rodrigo turns his attention back to the road. “Sorry . . .” he mutters. “It’s just that . . . you used to say that. Something like that, before . . . before, well . . .”
Adam knows that Rodrigo has been trying very hard to accept him as the Adam he used to know, as his best friend. Now that the Congress of United Planets has officially recognized the Assimilated as “full citizens of the world, with all the ensuing rights and privileges,” Adam is no longer considered a security threat. He no longer has to wear a tracking transceiver. And he gets to use his military leave time on the planet’s surface; Rodrigo makes sure to pop by Adam’s parents’ house each time Adam is back, even though it must be painful for him.
“Assimilation is not perfect,” is all Adam feels he can say.
“Yeah, you’ve mentioned.”
“Rodrigo, why didn’t you bring Katie to the wedding instead of me? She’s your girlfriend. Girrrllllllllfffffrrrrriend. RRRLLLFFFRRR.” The consonant cluster ripples through Adam’s tongue.
Rodrigo begins to tap on the steering wheel. The rhythm is at odds with the radio.
“I don’t think it’s going to work out with her. I just . . . I don’t think we’re compatible that way.”
Adam wants to say something about that night, that night with bacon, blunts, and badly played guitar.
Instead, he glances out the window. They’re nearly at the Atlas Bridge, which connects the mainland to Prometheus Island. He wonders if he’s in any way like that bridge, forever straddling the gulf that separates “humanity” and “something else,” or “Adam before Assimilation” and “Adam now.”
Dr. Jayanti would not call that a positive thought.
“Dude, weren’t we talking about your feelings?” Rodrigo asks. “Didn’t you tell me your therapist wanted you to be more expressive and stuff?”
Adam clenches his fingers to stop them from fidgeting. It’s a physical impulse that manifested after the fateful battle on Zagreus II, after Assimilation.
“Rodrigo, I’m very grateful that you’re bringing me to this wedding . . . but what if they don’t like me? What if your—our friends Cam and Jules and Fro-Yo and all the rest, what if they don’t recognize me—as Adam? What if they don’t think I’m human?”
Adam feels his breath pick up speed. He worries he’s going to dissociate. Though rare, that has happened to some of the Assimilated soldiers. It leads to immediate brain death.
They’re on the hover bridge now, above the Nereid Sea. Around them, tall, jellyfish-like bulbs of pink coral thrust out of the water on spindly lichen stilts, creating uneven patches of shadow.
Rodrigo flicks a switch on his steering wheel: the car’s AI hums in response. He unbuckles his seatbelt and turns bodily towards Adam. “Hey! Adam, look at me?”
Adam lifts his head, and the swirling purple of Rodrigo’s irradiated eyes are centripetal, pulling him towards a grounded core.
“Adam, you’re just panicking. You’ve got this, okay? The wedding will be awesome and everyone will love you! You used to be a party animal! Just tap into those memories.”
“Assimilation is—”
“Not perfect, yeah I know,” Rodrigo interrupts wryly. “Look, if I can get over my best friend’s brain being rewired by an alien virus, so can everyone else, okay? And if anyone gives you shit, lemme know and I’ll deal with them.”
Adam licks his lips nervously, but he unclenches his fingers. They remain still.
“Okay, Rodrigo.”
Satisfied, Rodrigo turns back to the steering wheel. “It’s gonna be a blast! Jules and Fro-Yo throw the best parties, and this is their fucking wedding!”
Adam nods, but he knows that all Rodrigo has done is thicken the translucent layer on top of his feelings. The anxiety remains underneath, bright, white, and waiting.
“Rodrigo?”
“Hmm?”
“It isn’t a virus. It’s a networked bacterial floc.”
“Shut up, Adam.”
• • •
Jules and Fro-Yo are celebrating their nuptials at the ArcEyeVE, the first observatory built on Earth-2, now repurposed as a commune run by hippies who are happy to rent the space out for a wedding-rave.
The designated parking lot—a little hollow shaded by a colonnade of waxy, treelike insect hives reaching towards the sky like fingers—is packed with cars. Adam and Rodrigo are greeted by Cam. Glowing fiber-optic threads twine through Cam’s braids, and an enormous, green fur coat envelops his hulking frame. He radiates charisma like a supernova.
“About time, my man!” he roars, encircling Rodrigo in a tight hug. “We were worried you were gonna no-show!”
Rodrigo’s face has split into a huge grin. “As if,” he says, struggling out of the hug and punching Cam in the arm.
Adam waits by the car, tight fists stuffed into his pockets.
Cam shifts his attention to Adam—that’s what it feels like, a spotlight of burning attention shifting towards him. “Yo! The war hero of Zagreus II made it!” Cam booms. “D’you remember me?” He clasps Adam’s shoulder. It feels like—
The excitement was almost enough to counteract the cold biting into Adam’s bare skin. “Fuuuuck!” Rodrigo cried, careening across the snow like an out-of-control satellite. “Why in all the hells did we think this was a good idea?”
An exquisitely nude Cam thumped his chest as he sped forward. “We’re gonna be MEN after this!”
“Speak for yourself!” Jules screamed as her and Fro-Yo’s shared sled skidded down the hillside.
Adam’s own sled veered out of control. The pendulum of his emotions swung wildly between terror and elation. He was going to crash. Was the ecstasy worth the impact?
—it feels like that. He can’t tell if he’s scared of or magnetically drawn to Cam.
“I remember you named Cecil ‘Fro-Yo,’” Adam says, “because you said his penis smelled like yogurt.”
Cam’s laugh is like an exploding mortar. He pulls Adam into a crushing hug, and Adam can’t breathe.
“Dude, I didn’t know that!” he hears Rodrigo say.
• • •
Adam supposes that the ceremony is lovely. The couple clasps hands as the officiant winds a rope of flowers around them. The best man—in a cream suit and a tie the color of the surface of the sea, more formally dressed than anyone else there—can’t stop tears from trailing down his face. Even the food is good, and Adam allows himself to deviate ever so slightly from the strict diet he’s ordered to maintain, both as a soldier and as an Assimilated.
But Adam can’t get himself to feel what he’s supposed to feel. No warmth pulses through him as the couple kisses. He tries to whoop along with Rodrigo but it feels artificial, forced, an emotion painted in thin, greasy pigment onto one of those blank combat dummies he trains with.
A couple in multicolored kaftans asks Adam how he’s coping with “the new guy in his head” and he doesn’t know what to say. An older lady frosted with diamonds tells him that he should “settle for a nice, young lady who won’t mind being married to two people at once,” and he nearly sprints away from her. When a bearded man in what appears to be an ancient suit of armor from Earth-1 tells him he “looks normal for a dude infected by an alien bug,” Adam wants to scream and tear into his own skull, to pull out whatever pulp is in there, to run it all through an ultrafine separation mesh and yell, “Look! I’ve removed the parasite! I’m me, I’m Adam!” He mostly believes that.
He wants to find Rodrigo, but Rodrigo has been seduced away by eager hands brandishing tantalizing morsels of nostalgia and reminiscence.
His fingers twitch madly.
Dr. Jayanti told him that in situations like this, he should look for someplace calm and focus on his body. He finds a little back stair that leads to a balcony filled with small, antique optical telescopes.
He presses his palms onto the railing and closes his eyes. Everything is cold. The metal. The night air. The tears running down his cheeks. It feels like—
Handcuffs—biting. Chair—hard. Lights—harsh. His interrogator sat across from him, fingers laced together.
“We appreciate your help in this victory, Alien,” she said, voice hardening on that last word, “but you are still a security threat. All of you have refused to relinquish control of the bodies you’re controlling. You have enslaved the corpses of our people.”
Adam wanted to scream, “You don’t understand, it’s not like that! This is my body! We are—I am—one person! I’m alive!” But the Broca’s area of his brain had not yet been fully Assimilated, and he could produce nothing more than a croak.
His interrogator’s eyes had remained cold and hard.
—it feels like that.
“My man, catching a breather too?” Cam’s voice interrupts.
Adam opens his eyes. Cam, still in the fur coat, swaggers over to lean against the railing next to him. He seems different now. Where he was once a beacon, drawing all attention towards himself, he’s now merely a glowing presence.
Adam realizes he’s been leaning forward rather far over the railing. He pulls himself back.
Cam is smoking something thick and eye-watering. Adam can smell a mixture of herbs, flowers, and artificial depressants.
“Did the asshole-in-the-armor uncle get you down?” Cam asks.
Adam lets go of the railing, sliding his hands into the warmth of his pockets before speaking. “He told me that he does not fully trust Assimilated. He said, ‘What if the bugs have their own agenda?’ but then he said that I looked human.”
“Don’t let that fucker get to you,” Cam says, taking a long drag. “Fro-Yo only invited him because he’s a cousin or some shit. I heard he ditched two wives and four kids back on Earth-1.”
“I thought everyone knew by now that the bacterial floc was nonsentient. It cannot have an agenda. This was discovered last year.”
“Really? Nah, all the alien stuff is top secret. None of us know shit. Might be kinda why everyone’s all over you.”
That’s news to Adam. He thought everyone learned the same things he did at Pentagon-2. He wonders why Rodrigo hasn’t asked him any questions. The thought confuses him, so he falls back on familiar things.
“The parasite is a species of flocculating microbe found on the surfaces of grasses and other low-lying plants indigenous to Zagreus II,” he parrots, “structurally similar to Earth Prime bacteria. It isn’t intelligent. When we fell in battle, it entered our bodies, initiating Assimilation. It interfaced with brain tissue, reignited and reconfigured neural processes leading to shifts in personality—”
“What’s it like being a war hero?” Cam interrupts.
“What?” Adam asks. The sudden shift has thrown him off.
“You saved all our lives on Zagreus II, didn’t you? How does that feel?”
Adam has never actually been asked this question. He’s been told plenty of times that he’s a hero. He’s been thanked. He’s been paraded around with a medal, but no one has asked him about it.
“I don’t feel very heroic,” he says. Despite everything he’s been taught at Pentagon-2, he’s beginning to think that war isn’t where heroes are found.
“Nah, man, the rebels outnumbered us, what, two to one? If you hadn’t come back from the dead, if you hadn’t refilled the ranks, that life support centre would’ve been a goner for sure.”
“I did not choose Assimilation, Cam. My body was simply infected by a parasite. The Xenobiology unit doesn’t know why it even happened. I don’t think I’m a hero.”
Cam takes another drag. He wears a strange expression on his face, one that Adam can’t puzzle out. Social nuances still escape him sometimes.
“You remember saving my life?” Cam asks. His tone is light, as though he were talking about the weather, or how charming the wedding was.
Adam can’t pull up the memory. He shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”
“No biggie. You did, when we were sixteen. You took the razor blade out of my hands. Made fun of me for using the shower instead of a bathtub, and when I said there were no bathtubs in the colony, you said, ‘Guess you can’t kill yourself then, loser.’ Then you made me a sandwich, played me a song you’d started to write, and told me that if I died, I’d never get to hear the last verse.” He blows a ring of smoke into the night. Fluorescent light leaking up from the party below tinges it magenta.
Adam wants to remember. But Assimilation isn’t perfect. He wants to draw out the memory and stretch it between the two of them, wants to connect with this man who was once a friend, wants to—
“I don’t know what you’re going through with the fucking flocculating microbe in your head and all,” Cam continues, “but I promise it beats being dead.” He fishes in his pocket and pulls something out. “Here, maybe you need this more than I do.”
In his palm sits a yellow capsule the size of the middle segment of his little finger. A tiny, multiheaded insect quivers within the yellow gel.
“What is that?” Adam asks.
“A way to feel alive. Open wide, my man!”
• • •
“Adam, you doing okay?” Rodrigo asks from across the dining table. The best man—Yakov—has just finished his speech but Adam spent the entirety of it staring into the syrupy, pink-stained light seeping out of their table lantern.
Adam smiles vaguely at Rodrigo. Pinpricks of sensation shiver up his skin. It feels nice. It feels like—
Like—
Like—
“Can we dance?” Adam asks as the music starts up. Fro-Yo and Jules have made it to the dance floor, their first time as a married couple. The crowd whoops.
“Adam, are you—” Rodrigo begins, then glances around before lowering his voice. “Did you take anything?” he hisses.
“I feel tingly and wooly,” Adam replies. “Not like toothpaste anymore.”
“Shit, was it Cam? I’m gonna kill him . . .”
“Let’s dance!” Adam cries, getting up. The music has picked up.
Rodrigo grabs his shoulder and pulls him back down. “Nope. You’re gonna sit here while I look for Cam. We need to know what he’s given you, and whether it’ll affect your brain. Fucking Cam, doping up an Assimilated!”
Adam does not remember Rodrigo leaving, but he’s suddenly alone at the table. The music has begun to thump; he feels it echo within his teeth, feels it strum the soles of his feet.
He looks around. The lights are pink, blue, green, purple, popping up everywhere like little mushrooms. He should follow them, shouldn’t he?
The dance floor is energy, momentum, and laughter. Hands reach for the sky. Hair swishes into his face. Feet surge.
A floral garland is looped around his neck. Arms clasp him and fall away. A hand encircles his waist and spins him out into a pool of fluorescent light.
And the music! He can’t remember ever hearing anything like the melodic electric whines the DJ coaxes out of his machines, but then, he can’t remember anything much at all. Adam is here right now, and no Adam from before can pull him out of this moment.
He feels a warm, glowing pulse on his shoulder. He turns. He has to look up because Yakov the Best Man is very tall. He’s still in his suit but his hair is free of its bun and spills over his shoulders like smoke.
“Hey!” Yakov shouts. “Adam, right? The Assimilated dude?”
“Yes!” Adam exults, because he has never felt more Adam.
“Wanna dance with me?”
In answer, Adam takes Yakov’s hand, attempts to twirl him, and trips into his arms, laughter bubbling up to his throat like champagne. Yakov’s warmth presses into his back.
“I don’t think I dance very well,” Adam manages between giggles.
Yakov pushes him upright. “That’s okay, I do!” He raises the hand that links them and Adam is suddenly spinning on the spot. The rush of it swirls through his head.
“Woah!”
Yakov bends down. “Are you rolling right now?” he asks in Adam’s ear.
Adam gives him a blank look, but his expression must betray something because Yakov nods and grins. “Do you wanna dance more closely? It’ll feel good with the drugs!”
Adam takes Yakov’s tie—green like spring longing—and pulls himself into the other man. Hips collide. Fingers settle on his waist and in his hair and begin to move. It feels like cartwheeling among stars.
He may have just let out a moan.
“Told you,” Yakov says, words chased by a chuckle.
Adam doesn’t know how long he dances with Yakov, only that a buzzing energy within him doesn’t let him stop. He finds that Yakov’s waistcoat is no longer buttoned, that his shirt has come undone, that Adam’s own fingers are digging into the bare, sweaty skin of Yakov’s back.
He thinks he’s coming back to himself. His brain feels a little less fizzy.
“Oh!” he stammers, starting to pull his hands back. “I’m sorry—”
Yakov’s grin glitters. “It’s okay. I like being touched. Can’t say I’ve ever done anything like this with a man, though . . .”
Adam looks up into wide, dark eyes. Whatever Cam gave him must be wearing off because he knows that he has done this sort of thing with a man before, once. Only, it had just been him and Rodrigo and then they had—
“I kinda get the feeling you want to make out?” Yakov asks.
Adam swallows. “I . . .”
“No pressure. Could be fun, though. I guess you’re into dudes?”
The music pulses. Adam is aware that they’re still pressed together, that his hands are still on Yakov, that he doesn’t want to let go.
Adam can feel himself blushing. “Err . . . I don’t know?” he says, because “We aren’t allowed sexual relations on Pentagon-2” doesn’t feel quite right.
The music pulses and Yakov . . . Yakov begins to grind his hips against Adam, in sync with the pulse. He does dance well. “I’m not sure either,” he whispers into Adam’s ear, “but you’re fucking hot and the music is great, and we only live once, so . . . can I lick the inside of your mouth?”
Adam is so hard he might burst. It feels like—
No. Nothing from before. It feels like right now.
He nods.
Yakov’s lips smash into his. His hands snake down to Adam’s butt and Adam feels himself lifted off the ground. Reflexively, his legs lock around Yakov’s waist and his hands move up to grip his hair.
Yakov’s mouth is delightfully insistent. He kisses like he’s hungry, like his tongue is ardently searching for something. The rhythm of the song is long gone; heartbeat is the only tempo Adam needs.
They break away and Adam gulps down a breath. Yakov’s mouth glistens, his eyes shimmer.
“Yeah?” Yakov asks.
“Yes,” Adam says and when Yakov bites his neck, Adam knows what it’s like to feel human, to feel alive.
• • •
The next day is pain.
Adam has to ask Rodrigo to switch off the radio. His skull feels like a dozen buzzing, eusocial insects have taken up residence inside it. Today, the smell of the leather is almost overwhelming.
“So . . .” Rodrigo says, fingers drumming against the steering wheel, “you wanna talk about last night?”
“I am . . . in considerable discomfort, Rodrigo,” Adam croaks from inside the cave of arms and jacket he’s made.
“Man, Cam didn’t warn you about the next-day drop?”
Adam starts to shake his head, but then groans.
“. . . and you don’t want to talk about sucking face with the best man?”
Adam peeks out of his cave. “You saw that?”
Rodrigo’s grin threatens to cleave his face in two. “Dude, you were dry humping him in the middle of the dance floor. Then he hoisted you up so you could eat his entire face. Everyone saw that. I think I heard Jules’s mom make a comment about ‘strong thighs.’”
Curling up in his seat, Adam groans. “I’m sorry if I was inappropriate in front of all your friends . . .”
“Nah, man, I think everyone was thrilled you had a blast. Sign of a good wedding, am I right?”
Adam grunts.
“You did have a nice time, though? Making out with him and stuff? Or do you still feel like . . . like toothpaste?”
Adam pauses to think.
“I had a fantastic time, Rodrigo!” he says, lifting himself up. It’s true, he realizes, as his jacket tumbles off him. Despite the headache, Adam feels alive in a way he can’t quite remember feeling before.
“Did you two, like, bang in secret somewhere?”
“No . . .”
Rodrigo nods but says nothing.
They’re on Atlas Bridge again, driving through the vast gulf that separates island from mainland. Rodrigo’s fingers play out a beat only he can hear.
“You’re gonna keep in touch with—what’s his name—Yakov? Gonna wanna, I dunno, go further? Date?”
Adam has sharper senses since Assimilation. He hears it, the slight crack in Rodrigo’s voice.
Rodrigo doesn’t like talking about the night before Adam’s deployment. He doesn’t like talking about how their bacon-stained lips and guitar-raw fingers met on Adam’s bed, how the bedsprings groaned under their weight, how their final night could have become a first night had Adam’s brain—life, world—not completely changed the following week.
Adam from yesterday morning would have hesitated at this point. Maybe he would have asked if Rodrigo was okay. Adam from yesterday would have clenched his fingers tight.
But there is no longer an Adam from yesterday morning. There is no longer an Adam from before Assimilation, no longer an Adam that “used to be” or one that has memories he never quite lived through.
There is only an Adam here, an Adam now. And that Adam is always experiencing, growing, changing, and learning. That Adam is an Adam who braves the crowds at a wedding, who gets high and dances his butt off, and who makes out with the fucking best man because it’s fun.
And that Adam asks, “Rodrigo, do you want to kiss me?”
• • •
Author note: This story is a standalone sequel to “Assimilation,” published in Baffling Magazine Issue 6—January 2022.