Michael Siemsen - Exigency

Minnie didn’t want to sleep, but her body needed the healing time after each day’s rigorous exercise regime. She’d charted out the whole program, rotating between muscle groups, allowing certain areas more time to heal than others. Build maximum strength in minimal time. She’d tried to help John do the same, even sending him his own chart, but he didn’t have her discipline or resolve. He refused to push his body, and as a result, progressed slower than her.

In other news, he’d already passed two BMs, and Minnie hadn’t defecated once. For some reason, this was John’s favorite topic.

Her body definitely seemed to want it. Rolling onto her side, she could feel it in her transverse colon, high in the abdomen and painful, unmoving. Earlier, John had told her it wasn’t happening because she didn’t want it to happen. She’d replied that if he continued commenting on her lack of movements, he’d soon find one waiting for him in his survival bag. He finally shut up.

There were good days and bad between them—mainly her fault, she knew—but sometimes she just couldn’t stomach his voice. Sometimes the little clock looming high atop her fone would remind her how much time had passed since evac. Aether up there, Minnie stuck in this damned cell with tunnels that led nowhere and a mocking rope dangling over the sinkhole, and a man that seemed to lovingly nurture the very worst in her, able to trigger her wrath with only a few words or even the most innocuous of sounds.

Earth’s original space programs called it “irrational antagonism” when otherwise great friends, isolated together for an extended period, would grow increasingly irritable, previously nonexistent pet peeves festering into rage-worthy obsessions. Some orbiting Russians even came to blows.

But John was not a great friend to begin with, and he was intentionally annoying, and his sleeping sounds would surely inspire murderous ire in the most angelic of grandmas!

Minnie smiled, rolled onto her back, and closed her eyes. The tent’s orange hue remained as a ghost vision behind her eyelids. Like some kind of self-hypnosis, she advised herself that despite John’s obnoxious breathing, sleep would come with the fading of the orange. With the last bits of orange, she’d fall into a deep, deep—

Well, that’s weird.

John was still asleep outside the tent, but his usual exhale sounds were different. In fact, instead of the familiar straining noises she’d come to expect, he sounded strangely content—moaning pleasantly as if he were receiving a foot massage or having a sex dream. Minnie rolled back onto her side and flipped her optics to thermal, curious if any regions would appear warmer than the rest of him. Maybe he’d dozed off while watching some pervy old vid of Aether that he’d never in a million years admit to having.

What the hell?

His temperature was all over the place—a strange glob of yellow/orange warmth around his side, another concentration around his left thigh, one at his neck, each region surrounded by drastically cooler blue rings. Circulation? Was he ill?

She sat up for a better perspective, counting four of the hotspots. John continued moaning appreciatively. Maybe his survival bag only had him half covered, one leg thrown over the top to cool. The bag was practically invisible through therm, so she switched to biomag.

“No! Oh, crap, John!”

Minnie scrambled out of the tent with a virtual full-light view of the cave, biomag’s surreal colorizing casting the place and John’s body in embellished tones. He remained asleep despite her yelling, a little smile curled into his cheeks as he sighed with pleasure. But on the left side of his neck, from the edge of his jaw to the armpit, lay a flat, parasitic lifeform apparently feeding on him. A larger one was on his opposite side, stretched out along his ribcage, down to the hipbone. His left thigh bore a smaller creature about the size of her hand, and the last was attached to his right calf. She couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing, but it mustn’t hurt too much, she imagined, or John would’ve woken up.

Minnie scanned around the cave in search of others. Indeed, there were many, many more, though only a couple centimeters each, and all over the walls. On the ground around John’s mat, several of the tiny worms were making their way to him. This would be happening to her if John hadn’t traded, “gallantly” opting to sleep outside the tent. At the time, she’d thought it silly, perhaps a bit sexist or martyrish of him.

She crouched down and slapped his cheek. “John. Wake up. Hey.” He licked his lips, sucked in a deep breath, and released a longer satisfied moan. “John,” she said louder. “Hey, wake up. Bit of an emergency here! Hello!” She slapped him harder. Poked his chest.

Finally, John stirred and opened a single groggy eye. “Yeah?” He wore a dumb, drunken smile.

“Listen carefully. You have some sort of platyzoa attached to your skin.”

“Platyzoa?” he slurred, squeezing his eyes shut and rising up onto his elbows. “I think it’s fine. Go ahead.”

“John, do you understand what I’m saying? We need to get these parasites off of your body. I don’t know what kind of damage they’re doing.”

John displayed a clownish pout and deepened his voice, mocking, “That sounds pretty serious.” He rolled onto his left side, pulled the bag up over his shoulder, and nestled back in to sleep. He murmured, “Go away, Minernie. ”

The parasites must have been releasing some sort of drug into his bloodstream, Minnie surmised, something with a narcotic effect.

He doesn’t feel them.

She pulled the top of the bag off his shoulder to examine the large specimen on his ribs, wondering if a type of dermal numbing agent was also at work.

He doesn’t feel—

Alarmed anew, Minnie hastily scanned her own body for foreign creatures. Wearing only a tank and undershorts, she ran her hands over every body part she could reach: arms, neck, face, ears, scalp, shoulder blades, armpits, all the way down to her ankles, where she discovered what felt like an old bandage. Hyperaware of the dangerous ground and perhaps even ceiling, Minnie fled into the tent, zipped the door shut, surveyed the place for intruders, and then sat down, examining the tiny thing attached to her ankle. She scratched at its edges with a fingernail, watched it partially detach. It peeled back with surprising ease, writhing like a disturbed slug. She pinched the body between thumb and forefinger, pulling it off the rest of the way, and set it on her palm, inspecting the underside through a series of optics. Magnification exposed rows of tiny cilia, some secreting a viscous fluid, while other extremities appeared to be for absorption. Around the edges she found little articulated hooks searching for something to grab.

She plucked a small container from her kit and deposited the creature inside. Her focus returned to her ankle. The small oval of skin appeared burnt and moist, as if injured and then coated in salve. Still no pain. She was afraid to touch it, but also worried that the parasite’s acidic mucous could still be breaking down her skin. After a few swipes with an alkaline medipad, Minnie began to sense the little wound—raw, like the skin beneath a freshly picked scab. She hurriedly finished with an antiseptic cream and slapped a dermal over it.

She needed to rip those things off of John immediately. Who knew how long they’d been on him, or how rapidly they were consuming him? His drugged state suggested they could ingest an entire body without the victim putting up a fight. A brilliant, terrifying design.

Fully suited up, and with the tent closed behind her, Minnie stepped beside John, bent over, and unzipped his survival bag all the way to his feet. With their limited attire, she didn’t want to ruin his one pair of enviropants. She tugged them down from his waist with several yanks.