Having a human brain is both a blessing and a curse; it’s a blessing because I get to appreciate beautiful things: a sunrise on a clear morning, fresh rain and the smell of the flowers we grow, for instance. But it’s a curse when that brain is trapped inside an invertebrate body that regular humans are terrified by.
Luckily, I’m not alone. I have my people and I have my wife, Varie. However, when you have a face that looks like the business end of a lawnmower and the rest of you is based on the chassis of a centipede, making human friends can be difficult. There’s also our reputation to consider – but more of that later.
Reactions generally come in three kinds: people either run for the horizon hoping my twenty-six legs won’t catch up with them. Or they faint – which is okay because then there’s a reasonable chance I can tell them we’re quite friendly when they wake up. People tend to think I’m going to eat them but actually I’m a vegetarian (not by choice, I love bacon as much as the next man, but the wife says eating meat is wrong). The third and least helpful reaction happens when they start firing guns at us – which is pointless because bullets don’t have the slightest effect on our armour and all the noise makes it tricky to open a line of dialogue.
We’re not the products of natural evolution. No, we were made and our makers are not human either. In fact, they’re very much part of problem. We were just one in a whole series of experiments to breed soldiers for a war we didn’t start. The idea was to pack us onto missiles like sausages in a bun and drop us on unsuspecting villages where we were supposed to cause as much mayhem as possible. Personally, my enthusiasm waned as soon as I saw the size of the tubes they wanted to stuff me into. No amount of prodding or poking would get me inside. And then there was the task they wanted us to do: to kill as many humans as we could. But we were part-human and we refused, point-blank.
After that, our relations with our makers went downhill rather fast. I, and the rest of my kind, decided we might be better off elsewhere. That was the problem with giving us human minds; we thought therefore we legged it. We found an empty world, set up camp, dug deep bunkers and prepared to meet our makers with the same kind of force they expected us to use on their enemies. I doubt the irony was lost on them.
It wasn’t long before they came. First, they tried to pummel us into submission with bombs – but our bunkers were too deep. Then they sent a legion of crab-like soldiers from Palinurus to see if we were dead and I’m afraid to say we had them for breakfast – quite literally. (I’ve never really liked the smell of fish since then.) After that, they sent an army of giant spiders with poisonous bites and nasty tempers to finish what the bombs and crabs had failed to do.
Did I mention we have pincers that can cut through iron bars? The poisonous bites were a bit useless once we’d snipped off the spiders’ legs.
Fortunately, the war we were made for wasn’t going too well for our makers and they were forced to leave us alone while they tried to defend their borders against the human armies. Naturally, the humans were wary of us too but the sight of a hundred-thousand legless spiders trying to bite our ankles certainly improved our relations. We made a nice bonfire of the bodies and then agreed to help each other.
It’s easy to be brave when you’re encased in armour. I can even survive in a vacuum for a several hours and fire doesn’t affect me. Make me weightless and I can fart my way to safety. I bow my antennae to the courage of the men and women we fought beside. With nothing more than cloth to protect them, they threw their frail bodies at the enemy with such passion they made me proud of my human roots.
We attacked ships on fire, scuttled through holocausts and chased our makers to the very gates of the Second Sphere. We survived the apocalyptic weapons they tried to use against us. It was brutal and horrific but we played our part. There were losses but ours were nothing compared to the casualties suffered by our human comrades.
It was a long war and the memories still give me nightmares. I guess that’s another problem with human minds: if we’d been created without them, I wouldn’t have to live with the images of the horror or the guilt of the deaths I caused.
However, I met Varie on the battlefield so it wasn’t all bad. And when it was all over, we went back to our world. By treaty and convention, the humans recognise us as people now and on the whole, they’ve left us alone. We still get a few emissaries from different governments, asking if we want to join their armies, but we politely turn them away.
Flowers are my trade now. My wife and I grow them by the acre and sell them across a dozen systems. My pincers prune roses rather than legs. I love the colours and the fragrances. I’ll never grow too old to appreciate their wonderful variety.
Actually, I won’t grow old at all; my human brain wasn’t the only gift our makers gave us. The capacity to regenerate on the battlefield has extended our lives far beyond a normal human’s. As far as I’m aware, we will last forever.
But immortality has come with a heavy price – Varie and I will never have children of our own. And only a human brain can imagine how painful that is.
Still, an eternity to smell the flowers, see them flourish and watch the sunset with the genetically-modified quasi-human invertebrate of my dreams beside me, is definitely a compensation.
Philip Hamm © 2022
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