Myrio had been retrieved and promptly returned to his little hole by the centipede only minutes after escaping the den. Venom was not needed this time. He did not fight back and allowed his limp body to be carried back underground.
Two days had passed since he had awoken in his pod. He had awoken then in a flurry of instinct, running on a fight or flight response through day and night. But now he was out of fuel. He could not fight for survival anymore. What point was there to surviving? There was nothing for him in this desolate world. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do but exist and contemplate his tragic fate. Death seemed like the inevitable outcome of this situation, but he could not think of any way to end his life while he remained contained as he was. Even if he could think of a method, he had no energy to carry it out. All that was left was to lay and wait to die. In the meantime he tried to sleep as much as he could. His experience over the third day in this hellish new world was an ordeal. He faded in and out of consciousness, every time waking to the ache of his withering egg-stuffed body. When he was conscious, he was left alone with his thoughts without even a sense of sight in the pitch black den to distract him. Feverish thoughts crowded his mind. He thought of the old world and how it might have ended. He thought of the destroyed and empty pods he’d left behind. He thought of his mother and childhood friends. He tried to imagine their faces and was disturbed when he could not recall certain features. How did her nose curved exactly? Had he had dimples or not? He thought of the moon and the sun and the stars, drifting overhead as they had done for billions of years. For them, the birth and death of his human race had passed by in the blink of an eye. It was almost comforting to think about his situation from the perspective of the great celestial bodies. To them he was nothing more than a microscopic creature whose life and death meant nothing at all. The images of saturn and neptune faded in and out of view, first at the corners of vision, then gradually overtaking the darkness. Swirling and warping in the darkness of above him. The moon became a human face and then melted into a pool of water, out of the pool emerged the billowing flames of a mushroom cloud and born from it was an infestation of centipedes, crawling across all corners of the darkness.
The only thing that brought him back to reality from his drifting hallucinations was the coming and going of the den’s chief inhabitant. The centipede left the den frequently. Sometimes for mere minutes, sometimes for hours. It always returned hissing and clicking loudly to itself. It would lay dormant for a bit longer before again leaving. Myrio wondered if it was hunting, but it never seemed to return with prey. It did however eventually return with something. Myrio was alerted to the sound of it returning through the entrance tunnel, followed by several dull thuds in the dirt as it dropped some unknown objects. Myrio thought it had returned with the body of some unlucky creature, until several basketball shaped objects were pushed into his little chamber. One of them rolled onto his belly, disturbing the eggs within him and plunging a stab of pain into his spine. He wheezed and grabbed the thing, feeling it’s bumpy hard exterior. He had no idea what the objects were until he heard a hollow splitting sound from the centipede. It reminded him of a watermelon being cut open. Perhaps these were fruit of some kind? The centipede began to slurp and suck at the thing with its terrible mouthparts, and Myrio figured it must be food. He assumed the centipede would consume them all and so he set the strange plants outside his hole and tried to return to sleep.
However, minutes later, the fruit was rolled back in. He picked up the pair and set them back outside again and again they were rolled back to him. The centipede even pierced a hole into one before sending it back to him. Curiosity got the best of him and Myrio stuck his fingers into the hole. He felt wet pulp and then in the center he felt the sloshing coolness of liquid. Immediately, his mouth felt unbearably dry. He knew that drinking would only prolong the release of death, but there was no fighting his body’s irristeble instinct urge to drink. Reflexively, he brought fruit to his mouth and drank. The liquid inside was in fact water. Just water, but it was sweeter than anything he’d ever tasted. He hungrily gulped it down, gargled moans escaped him as it poured down his throat, dripping out of the corners of his lips and onto his chest. He did not remove the fruit from his mouth until it was emptied. He whimpered and reached for the other, his fingers struggling to pierce the thick flesh. He managed to rip out a chunk and drank again, filling his belly with trembling hands. When he was finished, he bit into the flesh as he heard the centipede doing and found that it was edible. It was hard and bland with a flavor like celery crossed with raw potato, but at a time like this, it tasted amazing. The simple carnal pleasure of eating filled him as he crushed the pulp between his teeth.
He ate voraciously, moaning impulsively as he did, completely focused on the food in his hands. He continued like this until a burst of hissing and clicks interrupted him. They sounded closer than usual, right outside his little hole actually. And then he realized, it was watching him. He could feel its gaze on him and knew it was watching him eat. For a moment, he almost felt gratitude to the thing for bringing him sustenance. But of course, he was just an egg sack that needed occasional feeding. Still though, this behavior of the centipede was… strangely intelligent? How could a dumb bug know to bring these to him? That he would need water and food to survive? He tried to focus again on the last few pieces of shell he had to eat, but the question of the centipede’s behavior stuck in his mind.
It continued to watch him eat. He could hear its strange noises a mere foot or so from himself. He had no choice but to listen to the creature. As he did, he noticed something that made his heart beat fast and his mind race. He couldn’t be sure, but the centipede’s hisses and clicks seemed to occur...in a pattern. It was not the random noises of a dumb animal, but seemed to follow a pattern and cadence characteristic of… language? It was an idea he could not believe, but he was forced to consider it now. Could this beastly alien thing be sentient? There was no way. He was only imagining things in his delirious state. He told himself it couldn’t possibly be true. But in the darkness, all he could do was listen and the more he listened, the more the pattern stood out. He even isolated a few phrases, short strings of hisses and clicks that were repeated several times. He could not ignore it any longer. It became an unbearable question in his mind: was he holed up with an unthinking predator? Or could it possibly be an intelligent thinking being?
It was an impulse that he tried it, an experiment he hardly expected to yield results. He repeated a phrase he thought he’d heard the centipede say. A low hiss followed by two rapid clicks. He replicated the sounds as best he could by sucking through his teeth and clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. As soon as he made the noise the centipede fell silent. There was a very long moment full of tension as he stared into the darkness and felt the darkness stare back. Two creatures shocked into silence by the discovery of another mind.
The silence was broken by the centipede, who simply repeated back the same phrase: one low hiss, two rapid clicks. Myrio was stunned. In such a simple interaction, everything had changed. His mind reeled at the implications of this discovery. He repeated the phrase and once again it was repeated back to him again.
A long stretch of silence occurred as each of the den’s inhabitants pondered the other. Eventually, Myrio returned to eating the last bits of his fruit, but did not take his eyes off the darkness where his captor lay. For the rest of that night, there would be silence. But with the realization he had made would have to be addressed again. He did not know what to think at the moment. There was too much to consider. But as he drifted into sleep again, one thing was certain: the ache of existential loneliness was, somehow, just a little bit duller.
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