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On such an enormous ship with only three mobile beings aboard, interaction was easy to avoid. A few days ago, Nai would have said “three mobile people” but that was before discovering the room containing Tessla and Rem’s vase of red geraniums. So Rem had known the entire time that Tessla was there, in pieces in tanks, alive, and so Rem could not be a person after all. Because a true person with true “humanity” would never allow something like that to happen.
It was shocking, utterly galling, that they would name themselves Humanity and then name the trait of kindness and compassion the exact same word. As if only humans were capable of acts of altruism or empathy. As if the many well-documented instances of care and tenderness among–and between– the thousands of other earth species had never occurred at all.
No, the defining trait of humanity–the one that should be held as emblematic above all else–should be their self-centeredness. Their willingness to dehumanize anything or anyone that could be exploited, or got in their way, or was different from them. Humanity’s history was an endless series of wars, where they killed each other for resources, or boundary lines drawn on maps, or differences of skin pigmentation or religious practices. Wars were responsible for much of their technological developments, inspiring them to find better and better ways to slaughter one another. Without these conflicts, it might have taken humanity hundreds more years (if ever) to reach the necessary level of advancement for space travel.
And in all the time that had passed, they hadn’t changed. They hadn’t gotten any better, even if their rhetoric had. Because they had seen a Plant in the feeble shape of a human child–a form that, according to their own research into their own biology, was meant to elicit feelings of care and protectiveness–and had wasted no time in dehumanizing her. Reduced her to…to…not even a Dependent Plant, as if that were somehow lesser. They didn’t grasp the sentience of Dependents. They weren’t collaborators with the Dependents, nor even their stewards. In humanity’s eyes there was only Human and Thing. And all Plants were Things, no matter how human-shaped they may be. Things that could be pulled apart in any way that struck their fancy and then discarded when their interest or usefulness was through.
Rem was a stupid idealist, or a liar, or both. And she was easy to avoid, with her loud footsteps and her breathing and her heartbeat. Besides, Nai knew where she would be: with Vash. Vash was refusing to eat or rouse from bed. He usually loved eating, running all over the ship, playing games in the geodome and zero-G chamber, and greeting the sleeping humans in the cryohold. But he hadn’t done any of that in days. He was taking the discovery out on himself for some reason. He just lay there, getting weaker from inactivity and lack of food. Letting Rem hover over him. If he got too weak, Rem could just scoop him up and take him to a lab and he wouldn’t be able to fight her. She could choose to wake any of the other humans from cryosleep any time she chose. Soon they could find themselves hopelessly outnumbered.
Nai’s own profile had been in a separate folder, but Vash’s had been sorted right next to her’s. What did that mean? Did that mean Vash had been singled out for further study, or that Nai had?
He might never know, and it didn’t matter because he wouldn’t let it matter. Vash wasn’t strong enough to handle the hard things that needed to be done, so Nai would shoulder the responsibility for both of them. He was the one who didn’t need to eat or sleep, after all. His design had granted him long unsupervised hours to do what needed doing while Rem slept.
Nai walked down the hall to Tessla’s room. It seemed to warp and stretch as he looked down it to the door at the end; simultaneously eons longer than it should have been and far too short. His tongue felt stuck to the roof of his mouth. When he held his hand up to type the combination into the keypad, he noticed it shaking slightly.
Nai watched his own hand in fascination, as if from far away, as it input the code with wobbly jabs of his index finger. The door slid open.
He had not been back since that day. Not since Rem had galloped in and swept them both up in her arms. She had pressed their faces into herself, like she could keep them from seeing anything. From having seen anything. Seeing her.
Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to look them in the eyes, there in that room with her horrible secret laid bare. Nai wondered what he might have seen in her face in that moment. Rem herself had been the one to teach them that there was a difference between feeling sorry for your actions and feeling sorry that you got caught.
The room was just as they had first found it. The tanks had been slid back into their recesses, once again neatly hidden from view. The slender vase, which Nai remembered had been knocked over in the commotion, had been righted. A fresh geranium had been placed inside.
What a stupid gesture. Tessla couldn’t even see it. I hope it assuages your guilt, Rem, Nai thought snidely as he crossed the room to the control panel. He was aware of his mouth pulling in a wobbly sneer as his fingertips woke up the panel.
The screen lit up in familiar blue. It was foolish to assume the access code would be the same but…Nai entered it anyway.
And it unlocked.
A laugh tumbled out of his mouth, and it echoed strangely in the sepulchral little room. Rem hadn’t bothered to change the password? She’d just assumed they wouldn’t come back in here?
At least, probably Vash wouldn’t–not without holding her hand–so that made her fifty percent correct. Nai snorted and shook his head. But her naïveté, like her sleep habits, would only work in his favor.
He sobered when his fingers drew up the command to raise the tanks. Nervousness made his ears buzz strangely, but when he focused beyond that he heard nothing amiss. Rem’s heartbeat was too far off in the ship to discern. There was no time like now. He took a breath. He hit the button.
The tanks raised, and Tessla was revealed to him for the second time in all her horror. ALIVE the screen still read, antithetical to the many splayed pieces scattered across as many tanks. Something within him withered at the sight, even as rage bubbled like magma deep in his gut. And an analytical piece of his mind noted and identified the contents within the tanks, comparing them to his lessons on anatomy: intestinal tract, lungs, liver…was that a kidney or a spleen? The mounds of tumors made it difficult to tell.
He had to dig through the controls to find the commands that unlocked the tanks. He could manifest a jut of metal through his Gate to rupture a tank, but it would be loud, and messy, and would risk spearing through a piece of Tessla’s body. His control over his generated materials wasn’t as refined as he wanted it to be. Not yet.
He hit the open command for a tank at random, and its lid rose with a pneumatic hiss. It was one of the larger ones, containing the unspooling tangles of Tessla’s intestines.
Nai stared at them through the murky liquid of the tank. It should have been a clear blue, but lack of upkeep had allowed it to discolor to a sickly green. In places it was hard to tell where the tumors ended and the mold began. Organs that should have been a healthy pink were cast a dark and rotted brown in the foggy depths.
It had probably been a long time since any part of Tessla had looked healthy. Far longer than Nai had been alive.
Humans had meters and meters of intestines coiled efficiently within them. Unconfined by a body, Tessla’s drifted loosely in the tank. To look at, it seemed impossible that they had ever fit within a child’s frame. The stench wafted out of the open lid and hit Nai like a slap.
A whine slunk out of him even as his hand came up instinctively to cover his mouth and nose. His chin ducked down to his chest as if the stink was a projectile he could dodge. With his free hand he jabbed the close command on the screen. The lid lowered and resealed with a thunk and another hiss.
Nai kept his hand over his face, breathing through his fingers. His eyes burned with tears and the points alongside his spine through which he accessed his Gate wavered.
He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t do this. It was too much. It was all too much and it smelled and he didn’t even know if what he wanted to do would work–
He wished Vash were here with him. He wouldn’t feel so frightened if they were doing this together.
But Vash was bedridden, crying and starving, unable to access his Gate and powerless. Nai had to do this alone. He had to be strong enough for both of them. For all three of them.
He forced his hand away from his face and took a deep, shuddering inhale through his nose. He made his eyes scan the tanks, looking critically. He could start with something small. Something more doable.
There. In one tank floated her eyes, somehow plucked from their sockets, the optic nerves dangling. Nai glanced furtively around the room, half expecting to see her face removed like an empty mask, ready to be placed over the next waiting skull. Dark empty holes where the eyes should have been. Just the molded suggestion of lips, unable to open, unable to scream.
The tears finally fell from his burning eyes and Nai wiped them angrily away. Don’t be stupid, he scolded himself. He was only frightening himself with spooky stories the way Vash loved to do, repeating scary tales from the book records with relish before falling asleep, leaving Nai to jump at ghosts around every dark corner during the long nighttime hours alone.
It took him a few tries to find the release for that specific tank, and each time one opened it released more of the putrid stink of flesh and Plant solution gone bad. Nai’s eyes burned now from the sort of tears that came when Rem chopped onions for dinner. He bit his lower lip to keep it from wobbling.
Finally, with the tank containing her eyes opened, Nai stepped out from behind the control panel to approach it. The top of it was far too tall for him to reach. He glanced around, but there was no conveniently-placed ladder propped against a wall. Did he dare backtrack to try and find one? He might sprint out of here and never find the courage to come back again.
That was unacceptable. He would not leave her here. If being dismembered hadn’t killed her, then maybe nothing would. He would not leave Tessla to this Hell, nor would he potentially consign her to another without first exhausting all his options.
You’re a Plant, stupid, he reminded himself. He had a Gate. He didn’t need ladders.
Nai took a couple steps back and focused. He accessed his Gate and felt the cool-water ripple of power extend down his spine. Four lengths of beta titanium alloy snaked around his shoulders. Metals were easiest for him to produce, and this particular alloy was his current favorite.
He split the ends of each length out in fractals and flattened them, then arranged them in ascending order up to the edge of the tank as a rudimentary staircase. He placed a tentative foot on the first step and was bizarrely aware of the sensation from both sides.
Nai climbed his staircase carefully until he reached the lip of the tank. The release mechanism had only cracked the lid a couple inches, so he pushed it the rest of the way open and stared down into the depths.
Tessla’s eyes wavered nightmarishly in the contaminated solution like two misshapen tadpoles. Nai did not want to put his hands in there. He had never wanted to do anything less. Had his control over his Gate been more exact, he could have fashioned something to scoop the eyes out. As it was, he didn’t want to risk damaging Tessla any further.
He turned his head away from the tank to take a deep breath, held it, and then plunged one hand into the solution.
He had expected it to be cold, kept frigid like the tanks of his Dependent sisters. It was cool, but not nearly cold enough. He should have known when he saw the mold. He fished around with his hand, but the way light refracted off the Plant solution meant that Tessla’s eyes weren’t quite where they appeared to be.
The first one slipped through his fingers, small and slimy. He fumbled back for it and managed to trap it in a loose cage of his fingers. He raised his hand from the tank like a claw machine game from old Earth media. Thick green solution dropped from his arm in globs. Nai carefully transferred the eye into his other hand before giving into the urge to shake out his arm over the tank. Even as he watched the solution drip oozily from his skin, he knew it was pointless. He was far from finished.
But for the moment he turned his attention to the singular eye cradled in his palm. The optic nerve clung to his wrist and dripped a thin chartreuse trail towards the crook of his elbow. The sclera was still a healthy white, with the shimmer of Plant markings barely visible against the light. The iris was the exact same shade of blue as Vash’s eyes.
Nai’s stomach lurched. He had seen Vash not thirty minutes ago. He had both his eyes. He was fine.
Whatever Tessla had looked like in life–real life, before they took her apart–hadn’t been done justice by the thumbnail photo in her file. The color of her hair had been an obvious similarity, but how much resemblance did they really share? Maybe, with their similar coloring, she would have looked like more of a twin to Vash than even Nai. What did Rem see every time she looked at them? Children or lab mice?
He realized his hand was shaking. He forced himself to breathe. He had acclimatized to the stink of the tanks and only noted it as a slight burn in the back of his throat as he took in deep gulps of air.
Ok, now focus, Nai. You can do it. Figure it out.
His body defaulted to a particular schema: the shape of a rapidly-growing human child. Ten fingers, ten toes, all with a little keratin nail at the end. His somewhat amelanistic coloring. A complete set of standard human organs, including a functioning but redundant digestive system.
But this schema was–or at least he felt that it was–plastic. Mutable. When he had asked if Vash felt the same way, Vash had given him an odd look and shook his head. But then, Vash hadn’t figured out how to access his Gate yet, so maybe he really couldn’t feel the way his form could surpass the mold it has been poured into.
When Rem had taught them that humans shared more than fifty percent of their genes with bananas, he and Vash had laughed and laughed. It was a simplified explanation of genome sequencing, the complex interplay of amino acids and proteins, but it had been a sufficient entry point into the topic. Humans and their great ape “cousins” were far more closely related. Compared to that, every human was practically identical to one another. Compared to the sprawling genetic diversity of the human race, every Plant–Dependent and Independent–may as well have been the same single organism. Rem didn’t know if their Plant mother had birthed them or sprouted them asexually, like the “eyes” that grew on the potatoes in the kitchen.
On a genetic level, on a molecular level, there was virtually no distinction between the pieces of Tessla’s body and his own. They were the same. Only the arrangement of atoms kept them separate, and atoms could be shifted. When Vash microwaved food, the particles moved faster.
Nai’s palm grew warm, then hot. The optic nerve along his wrist was a thin strip of heat and as he looked at it, it just–melted away. Dissolved into the pale patterned skin of his wrist like sugar granules in hot tea.
As he blinked, there was a brief flash wherein he swore he looked up at himself. The angle was strange–practically staring straight up his own nose. And then it was gone.
Tessla’s eye sunk into the flesh of his palm and vanished from view. For a moment, he swore he could feel it settle into place between two of his metacarpals, like a marble between the sofa cushions or a bit of food between his teeth–ugh! He curled his hand into a fist and it moved normally, without discomfort. Nothing distended its usual shape. Nai flipped his hand back and forth in front of his face, as if he were trying to suss out how a magician had slipped a card between his fingers and vanished it down his sleeve. But it was his own hand. There had been no trick.
He held still for another moment, searching within himself. Trying to notice if he felt any different. He was wet, smelly, and nauseous, but otherwise he felt the same. Which meant it was time to do it again. Results were only significant if they were reproducible.
He thought hard about research validity measures as he steeled himself to reach back into the tank for Tessla’s second eye. He wanted something–anything–else to focus on.
He plunged his arm back in and fished for the eye. It slipped maddeningly between his fingers once—twice—and then he caught it. Another flash of heat in his palm, another horrible wedged sensation of something stuck where it shouldn’t be, a bright flash of green that momentarily overtook his vision, and then it was gone.
A few bubbles followed his hand up out of the tank, empty and sloughing green goo.
Nai held his empty palm up and looked at it again, still searching for the magician’s trick he had somehow pulled. He tried to feel for the eyes he’d subsumed. He watched his hand shake in front of his face from nerves for a long moment and then, like an ocean creature rising to the surface, one of the eyes emerged to stare back at him. It was lidless and unblinking, perfectly circular white with Vash’s vibrant blue iris.
For a second he saw his own face, pale and drawn in horror, and he forgot to keep part of his focus on manifesting from his Gate. His staircase vanished in an instant, and there was an awful lurch in his stomach as he fell through the air.
He landed hard on his back and knocked all the air from his lungs.
Everything he needed to sustain himself he drew from his Gate, but he was used to breathing. This was scary. It hurt.
When his body was finally able to stop hitching and draw in a gasp, he immediately burst into startled tears.
He held his hand above his face, blotting out the stark fluorescent overhead light. It was just his palm again. But in there, lurking, whether in reality or his imagination, was the potential for Tessla’s eye to resurface once again.
I can’t do this, I can’t do this, he thought again, his back aching, the fluid stink burning his nose. His hand hovered over his face, blocking the light, and again there was a flash wherein he saw himself. Damp hair stuck to his forehead, eyes puffy and face blotchy with tears, his nose running, he looked utterly pathetic. Just like the one-year-old baby he didn’t want to be.
Rem was always griping that they were growing up too fast, but to Nai it had felt like ages. He wasn’t a helpless little human infant.
That galvanized him to push himself back to his feet.
He was doing this. He had figured it out. Time to do it again. He limped back to the control panel and hit the first tank release his finger landed on. It unlocked the lid of a tank that contained one of her arms, severed neatly at the shoulder and bulbous with tumors. His stomach roiled again and his throat locked around some hiccuping sound.
No, he still needed to be methodical about this. Only what was necessary. What was necessary…?
Behind the tank that contained only–horrifyingly, perplexingly–her severed tongue, was a tank that held just her brain and spinal cord. It hung in the green Plant fluid like a quarter note with the stem pointing down. How had they gotten it out of her all in a piece? Nai imagined someone reaching a hand into the back of her neck and yanking her spine free in one swift tug, dripping wet and noodly.
His brain felt like a glass jar with cracks in it. His composure threatened to break for the nth time.
He fiddled with the panel until he found the release for the correct tank. The opening and closing of the lids hissed and thunked, hissed and thunked in terrible chorus, a background to the single repeating quarter note of Tessla’s suspended brain. He was never going to be able to entirely wash the rotten stench off himself.
He repeated his same staircase trick with his Gate and walked up to the edge of the tank like a cowboy being led to the gallows. The gunslinging buckaroos in those old Earth movies were always cool and composed, even in the face of danger and death. He wanted to be like that. He could be like that.
Staring down at it, corpse-gray and sickly green, Tessla’s brain looked much bigger than her eyes. A stupid useless tear rolled down the side of his nose and plopped into the tank. It rippled the surface just slightly.
Nai breathed in deep, braced his stomach against the edge of the tank, and reached in with both hands.
He had to reach in far, past his elbows, and his face got way too close to the fetid surface of the fluid. He held his breath as his eyes burned and his nose dripped.
The texture of her brain, when his hands finally closed around it, was like nothing he had ever felt before. He instinctively started to recoil and nearly dropped it but managed to keep his grip.
He stood up straight, raising his arms from the tank, hefting Tessla’s brain aloft like Hamlet with the skull of Yorick. The spinal cord still hung down into the liquid and the whole thing dripped tank solution. Globs fell back down with little gloop noises.
Nai ignored the voice in his mind that screamed that what he wanted to do was impossible: the brain was too big. Where would it go? It was possible. He had already done it.
His fingertips sunk into the slippery whorls of her brain as heat built in his skin again and—
—and—
Alone in a cold, wet, smelly lab, Nai lived out an entire short and tortured lifespan in an instant. But he had the context that Tessla had lacked (been denied) and so he understood the words that were spoken over her/his head. He knew what some of the medical machines did. He understood that they were trying to study her/him.
Tessla mind was a cesspit of confusion, loneliness, and fear, sprinkled with a few instances of genuine kindness or connection from the humans that only served to paint the rest of her baffled misery in sharper contrast. Nai watched it all from behind her eyes. Even as their repeated scanning caused her body to erupt in tumors like the fruiting bodies of fungi. Even as they amputated what bits of her they thought they could or couldn’t spare. Even as her world faded into a cold and unchanging blue, he watched.
When it was over, he sat up to find himself back on the floor, his manifested staircase having abandoned him again. His tailbone and back throbbed from his fall and he was tacky with green slime, but that was nothing in comparison to what he’d just seen. What he had just lived through.
He sat in a sodden heap, his diaphragm hitching but his eyes wide and dry. He couldn’t cry, because his eyes had been separated from his tear ducts, except, no, they hadn’t. He looked down at his arms and legs, all in a piece and unmarred by tumors. Rem had never done anything more invasive to him and Vash than basic medical and dental checkups, and she always made them wear that heavy smock when the little X-ray machine came out.
He was running his hands over his arms, feeling their smoothness and wholeness over and over, without even remembering that he had started. His breathing was high, fast, and whiny. The more he noticed it and tried to will it back to normal the faster and shallower it seemed to become.
He didn’t know how to stop. He drummed the soles of his feet on the floor in panic. He tried not to remember the sight—the feeling—of his veins going varicose, of the tumors pushing their way up and out between the muscles of his legs, the ache of the surgical sites where they were removed.
Tessla didn’t understand why it always had to hurt. Even when they anesthetized her first, she woke up to new pains hidden under crisp sterile bandages that she wasn’t allowed to touch and never knew why.
Nai couldn’t breathe. This was worse than falling and knocking out his air. Spots rushed around the corners of his vision.
He was going to pass out or he was going to die, but neither of those things happened. He just kept failing to suck in enough air, for a moment that seemed to stretch on into infinity.
Rem knew just how to rub his back when he was worked up. Sometimes she ran her finger gently down his forehead to the tip of his nose, over and over in a way that never failed to soothe him. “Rem!” his traitor mouth tried to scream. “Rem!”
No! I don’t need her! She’s a liar and a killer! There must be something so wrong with him, to still want Rem after everything he’d just seen.
She’d been in Tessla’s memories too, mouth and brows drawn down in displeasure. Resting her hand atop Tessla’s head or shoulder and smiling bland, fake smiles of reassurance. Liar.
He ran a finger down his own forehead but it was wet with slime. He shivered in disgust and that made him sob harder. He wiped his hand on his tunic, swiped his face angrily on his sleeve, and tried it again.
Eventually the rhythmic smoothing sensation down the bridge of his nose did its work, like it always did.
He felt wrung out like a damp rag once his fit passed. Some unnameable feeling sat heavy in his gut like a stone. And there was a strange knot in his shoulder, twitching as though from a muscle spasm, and an odd tingling in his extremities.
That was when Nai finally noticed that Tessla’s brain had done the same vanishing act. He hadn’t dropped it when he fell. It was gone.
No, it wasn’t gone. It was here. It was him. Law of Conservation of Mass, of course. That extra mass needed somewhere to go and it was trying to bust out of him any which way, starting with a knot in his shoulder. He should have predicted something like that.
What should he do with it? He started working to disperse it evenly between his bones and muscles, and then quickly aborted that process when the all-over ache of sudden growing pains hit him. He and Vash had enough of that as it was, growing so much in such a short time.
What else, what else? He needed something harmless, something that wouldn’t warp him too much out of his typical shape.
Oh! His hair! He and Vash always needed trims because it grew out so quickly. Rem liked to joke that there were wigmakers back on Earth who were seething with envy.
Nai focused on channeling that extra mass towards the hair follicles on his head. After a moment he felt his scalp grow warm and tingly. In his periphery, he saw strands of pale blonde tumble down either side of his face.
The uncomfortable pressure in his shoulder vanished. His fingers and toes stopped tingling. He curled a lock of hair between his fingers. It had grown past his chin. That would work.
He hauled himself back to his feet, aching and exhausted. He wanted a hot shower and to curl up under his blankets–maybe forever–but that wasn’t an option. He wasn’t done yet. That lump of stone in his stomach hadn’t gone away. Maybe it never would. How could it, with Tessla’s memories swirling through his mind?
He opened all the tanks, and now he almost relished the awful stink of putrefaction they released. If it soaked into his skin and never went away, that would be fitting. Like he was a walking omen of death.
Which he was. He would be. The plan that had been bouncing around inside his head for the last few days began to solidify as he ascended his self-made steps to the next tank. As he reached his arms in for the next piece of his sister, this time without hesitation.
He towed each bit of Tessla’s body in, a fisherman hauling in his nets, a magician vanishing things hand-over-hand into the ether. His body churned around every new bit of material and synthesized it into more and more hair. His scalp felt itchy and hot from the rapid growth. He was Rumplestiltskin, spinning straw into gold. He was Rapunzel, growing a long rope of hair: the eventual means to her own freedom.
He was taking his sister into himself and setting her free. Only the faintest sense-memories washed over him with each new piece of her undertaken: most of her had been stored in her brain, but he would leave no piece of her behind. He was lifting her out of Hell, and soon he would do the same for the rest of his sisters. And his brother. And himself.
He wouldn’t let Rem wake the other humans. He wouldn’t give them a chance to hurt and exploit the Plants any more than they already had. The last few nights when Rem and Vash had been asleep, Nai had been exploring the fleet’s computer system. It was taking him a while to reverse-engineer the coding for the navigation system, but he didn’t think it would take him much longer.
Could he tell Vash? Would his brother want to help?
No, he didn’t think so. Vash was too sensitive. He might panic and tell Rem. Nai would just have to keep holding the hard things for both of them. Vash would understand.
When he was through absorbing Tessla, Nai’s hair tumbled past his feet in green-stained sheets. The room was a mess–slime dripped down the sides of the tanks and puddled on the floor. The front of Nai’s tunic was soaked. He surveyed the damage from the top of his staircase before descending carefully, hauling the long wet ropes of his hair out of his way so he didn’t trip.
He studied himself in the reflection of one of the tanks. His long pale hair changed the look of his face. He didn’t like it, he decided. It made him look like a ghost.
He searched for Tessla within himself and found her, integrated neatly into his cells. She wasn’t in his hair. It was just hair–a balancing act of physics.
He extended a single length of metal from around his spine and willed it carefully into a sharpened point. It melded into a beautiful, shining razor’s edge. He played with the shape for a bit, trying to get the hang of it. He felt strangely calm, compared to the state of awful panic he’d been in not long ago.
It felt good to have accomplished what he set out to do, and it felt good to have made up his mind about what to do next. The end of his beta titanium alloy shone like a cold sharp sliver of the moon. He manifested through his gate in four points, but he could split those off into branches. How many knives could he make? Just how deadly could he be?
He was about to be extremely deadly. Without any manifested metal knives at all. Nai gathered his hair together in one hand at the base of his neck and brought his length of metal carefully in. He sheared it off in careful chunks, trying to cut diagonally so as to match his previous asymmetrical haircut. It didn’t have to be perfect, just enough to sidestep suspicion. He’d tell Rem he’d had another growth spurt. It was even true, in a way.
He gathered up the large, slippery bundle of discarded hair and dumped it all into one of the empty tanks. It floated like a coiled white sea creature. He threw his soiled tunic in after it. He had a spare, and this one would only stink and drip through the hallways back to their living area.
He resealed and re-lowered all the tanks into the recesses in the floor. Then he found a maintenance closet a couple halls away, toweled himself off, and filled a mop bucket to bring back to the lab.
Nai mopped the floor and sprayed some cleaning chemical in the air to hopefully eat up the smell. The ship’s air filtration system would take care of the rest in time, assuming Rem didn’t visit this room again too soon.
The last thing Nai did was straighten the little vase with the geranium in it, placing it back where it had been once the floor had dried a bit. One of the flower’s petals was already beginning to wilt and dangle in preparation for its fall.
Hang on, little petal, Nai thought as he crossed the room to the door for the final time. Everything will be falling soon enough.