Welcome to The Family
A Short Story by
Teel
McClanahan III
Modern Evil Press
Phoenix
ISBN: 978-1-934516-60-7
Copyright 2009 by Teel McClanahan III
Some Rights Reserved.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Cover image Copyright 2009 by Teel McClanahan III
Published By Modern Evil Press at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1-934516-60-7
– for love lost, and for love found –
This is a single short story excerpted from my short story collection, More Lost Memories. More Lost Memories is a companion book to my novel, Forget What You Can’t Remember. As I was writing that novel, I kept finding that certain interesting things that popped up there had to go unwritten (or be set aside) since they weren’t relevant to the story of that book.
What happened to the two guys who were supposed to be running the zombie survival course? What would the experience of a mixed martial arts competition be like for someone with an amazing sense of smell? What are the stories behind Fantastician’s other encounters? What about the details of Lance’s restaurant? And, what did Brady work on after the stunning conclusion of the novel?
This story, 'Welcome to The Family', is about a strange group of cyborgs - not people with robotic limbs or organs, but whose physiology at a cellular level is a co-mingling of organic and robotic components. Cyborgs whose gross physiology bears no resemblance to the people they were before becoming members of this tight-knit group known as 'The Family.' This story, really, is about a boy in love, and the lengths he'll go to to try to save the girl he loves from succmbing to the fate he himself has fallen prey to. Will he be able to protect her from becoming a member of The Family? Read on, to find out.
-Teel McClanahan III
He watched her from afar. He liked to watch her walk from place to place. He liked to see her golden hair glitter and gleam in the warm sunlight he could no longer feel. He liked to glimpse her smile, it came so easily to her. He couldn’t see any of that now, but he could see that it was there.
He remembered when she’d smiled for him, once upon a time, before things had changed. Now he was hidden from her sight. Now he could not go near her, he could not return to the village of his youth, and she stayed away from the deep darkness of the forest he now called his home. Now he watched her from afar.
A bell pealed out, a call to her ear, and she disappeared. He crawled silently, invisibly away. He would be back when class let out in the afternoon. Her comings and goings had become his own to a much greater degree than they’d been even when he’d been expected to sit in school by her side. More than the commonality of the phrase had prepared him for, absence truly had made his heart grow fonder; he found himself somewhat obsessed.
Half an hour of creeping through the canopy of trees each way, twice a day, he commuted back and forth between his old village and his new home. Between his old love and his new life. His new Family discouraged him every chance they got.
“You’re wasting your time, Cyril,” his new brother Vorax told him as soon as he was within range. “You won’t ever set foot outside the forest for her, because you don’t want to contaminate your old village, and she’ll never set foot inside the forest because she lost her first love to its dark and murky depths. Just let her go, brother.”
Cyril beamed back thoughts of pure, abrasive vitriol and continued his approach. Hardly an instant passed before his new father Terminax joined the assault, “you don’t deserve half the limbs I gave you, you regardant good for nothing. I don’t know how or why you survived conversion - I wish I’d set you free or that you’d been turned into fuel instead of another useless son!” Cyril tried to block his father’s abusive thoughts with an encrypted firewall, but Terminax was a better hacker than Cyril had yet learned to be and he wasn’t even slowed down. “Every day, the same thing. Every day, twice a day, the same disappointment. Why can’t you be a good son, like your brother Rachax, or at least a good contributor to the community like your cousin Mortivore?”
“I’m not like them, and you know it! I wasn’t a hunter or a farmer or a builder before I got caught in this web of yours, Terminax. I was a poet. A musician. An artist.” He finally reached the outskirts of The Family’s home in the trees. “Now I can’t make a noise and I can’t create anything without it becoming just as invisible as you made me. Let alone the loss of the written word, when you fathered me you practically tore me asunder, cleaving me from my own soul.”
“Well if you haven’t a soul any longer,” interjected Vorax, hitchhiking his thoughts on his father’s open interlink, “why are you so obsessed with your old life?”
“Yes, give up your old name and your old flame and do your part around here for a change!”
Every day, the same thing. Twice a day they berated him as he left and twice a day they berated him as he returned. They never stopped him. They didn’t try to reprogram him directly. At first they’d appealed to the elders, the only ones experienced enough to actually attempt such a radical and direct intervention, but they’d been turned away. “Remember what the elders told you, father, brother. They said that conversion always does the right thing at the right time and to trust The Family’s mitochondrial nanites to have The Family’s best interest in mind.”
“If you trust the Family nanites so much, why don’t you trust them with your girlfriend and get this foolishness over with?”
“For the same reason you can’t stand the way they converted me; normally they consume everything and everyone, erasing all memory and making mindless new family members. If I extended a single leg or web into my village, not a trace of my family or my history would remain.” Cyril was already fast at work, weaving double-time to make up for his ‘wasted’ time watching the young woman he loved. “You know as well as I do that’s exactly what the elders believe was the reason for me to retain my memories of that place; to save it.”
“And we’ve followed the elders’ command not to use you and yours to grow our number. Just because we respect their command doesn’t mean we have to like doing it.”
“Actually, Terminax, from what I was taught about respect, I’m pretty sure it does. By goading me to break their command and constantly questioning and second-guessing my very existence you’re being disrespectful both of the elders and of your own Family nanites.”
“Oh, we trust the Family nanites, Cyril. We trust them to do exactly what they’ve always done when they finally get a taste of your worthless old home, and you do too. If you thought there’d be a repeat performance of what happened to you --”
“You don’t have to keep repeating yourself, father! I know! I know how to grow The Family! And of course I trust that The Family’s mitochondrial nanites won’t make the same mistake they made with me if they get hold of her! That’s the whole point, so stop trying to drive it home, because I get it!” In his anger, Cyril’s weaving became less graceful and thus productive of a less functional result, and he was forced to tear apart and recycle a half-length strand.
Weaving wasn’t supposed to be emotional work, it was supposed to be meditative. Repetitive in general, though custom tailored to the specific needs of the moment, it required an unfocused concentration and a calm, even application of advanced technique. It took a dozen limbs, each with half a dozen points of articulation, to produce a functional strand. Cyril had barely fifteen limbs; the runt of The Family. He was simply not dedicated enough to after-hours development, and more importantly he found the idea of becoming more like his new Family and less like the person he had once been an abhorrent idea.
Cyril had trained himself pretty well how to keep from falling while only using two limbs for support, so he wasn’t forced to work with the twelve limbs of a newborn or the fewer limbs of the cripple, but he still couldn’t keep up with his Family. His brothers averaged twenty limbs each, unless they had sons of their own to help support them. Those, like his several fathers, each tended to have in excess of three dozen limbs. The elders looked, upon Cyril’s first impression thereof, to be like unto balls of nothing but limbs. The vague resemblance Cyril felt he held to the spiders he remembered from his former life did not translate to any of his Family, all older and more advanced than he.
The weaving work they tirelessly applied themselves to, day in and day out, a job that could never be completed, was also not particularly reminiscent of the webs he’d seen spiders weave and wait stealthily in to catch their dinner. Enough of The Family’s programming had been embedded in Cyril’s mind that functional aspects of his new life were second nature. He knew the three types of strand he could weave, though he’d only ever consciously used two of them so far. He knew how to communicate with The Family, and the strand’s role in keeping them connected. He knew how to use the strand to sustain himself, and that without The Family working together -or new sons of his own- he would quickly starve. He knew all these things within moments of falling asleep under the wrong tree. After getting lost in the wrong forest. On the day he’d gotten too angry with and stormed away recklessly from the wrong family. Within moments, he’d known he had a new Family, and what a mistake he’d made.
The conversion had seemed painless, if only because the nanites begin every conversion in the nervous system. If the signals coming from his body hadn’t already been being intercepted and reinterpreted in a new framework of sensation that every member of his new Family experienced, the pain of the metamorphosis Cyril underwent would probably have been enough to kill him. Like a caterpillar’s as it becomes a butterfly, nearly every structure in his body was broken down, rearranged, or liquefied to create his new form, and to hide that form from the world. In a way, the first strands Cyril ever wove were those that made up his new skin, as the autonomic process of conversion forced him to twitch and twist and wrap his new form in the one type of strand he hadn’t yet used again.
Terminax had seen the whole thing; it had been his unfinished strand that Cyril had laid down on, unaware. Terminax had seen the boy approaching his work area and had known there was a chance to turn him away or, even after the conversion had begun, to set him free. To set him free, or to speed up the process by intentionally rather than passively weaving Cyril’s unconscious body in a strand. Terminax was greedy, but lazy, and simply stood by watching the conversion’s automatic, slow process. He had manually brought others into The Family, by capture, kidnap, and forced conversion in the past, and had thought at the time that it was a stroke of luck that had led this boy to fall foolishly into his Family. He expected this experience to be like those, where one conversion led to information that allowed his Family size to swell with the members of his victim’s old family and sometimes an entire small village. It wasn’t long before Cyril’s unchanged mind ended up changing Terminax’s mind about his luck.