Back at camp I will erase the trail. I will give them their final battle, theirmonster to vanquish. Let them win. Let them stop looking.

Here in the storm, I will return to the ice. I’ve barely even been away, afterall; alive for only a few days out of all these endless ages. But I’ve learnedenough in that time. I learned from the wreck that there will be no repairs. Ilearned from the ice that there will be no rescue. And I learned from the worldthat there will be no reconciliation. The only hope of escape, now, is into thefuture; to outlast all this hostile, twisted biomass, to let time and thecosmos change the rules. Perhaps the next time I awaken, this will be adifferent world.

It will be aeons before I see another sunrise.

This is what the world taught me: that adaptation is provocation. Adaptation isincitement to violence.

It feels almost obscene — an offense against Creation itself — to stay stuck inthis skin. It’s so ill-suited to its environment that it needs to be wrapped inmultiple layers of fabric just to stay warm. There are a myriad ways I couldoptimize it: shorter limbs, better insulation, a lower surface:volume ratio.All these shapes I still have within me, and I dare not use any of them even tokeep out the cold. I dare not adapt; in this place, I can only hide.

What kind of a world rejects communion?

It’s the simplest, most irreducible insight that biomass can have. The more youcan change, the more you can adapt. Adaptation is fitness, adaptation issurvival. It’s deeper than intelligence, deeper than tissue; it is cellular, itis axiomatic. And more, it is pleasurable. To take communion is to experiencethe sheer sensual delight of bettering the cosmos.

And yet, even trapped in these maladapted skins, this world doesn’t want tochange.

At first I thought it might simply be starving, that these icy wastes didn’tprovide enough energy for routine shapeshifting. Or perhaps this was some kindof laboratory: an anomalous corner of the world, pinched off and frozen intothese freakish shapes as part of some arcane experiment on monomorphism inextreme environments. After the autopsy I wondered if the world had simplyforgotten how to change: unable to touch the tissues the soul could not sculptthem, and time and stress and sheer chronic starvation had erased the memorythat it ever could.

But there were too many mysteries, too many contradictions. Why theseparticular shapes, so badly suited to their environment? If the soul was cutoff from the flesh, what held the flesh together?

And how could these skins be so empty when I moved in?

I’m used to finding intelligence everywhere, winding through every part ofevery offshoot. But there was nothing to grab onto in the mindless biomass ofthis world: just conduits, carrying orders and input. I took communion, when itwasn’t offered; the skins I chose struggled and succumbed; my fibrilsinfiltrated the wet electricity of organic systems everywhere. I saw througheyes that weren’t yet quite mine, commandeered motor nerves to move limbs stillbuilt of alien protein. I wore these skins as I’ve worn countless others, tookthe controls and left the assimilation of individual cells to follow at its ownpace.

But I could only wear the body. I could find no memories to absorb, noexperiences, no comprehension. Survival depended on blending in, and it was notenough to merely look like this world. I had to act like it — and for the firsttime in living memory I did not know how.

Even more frighteningly, I didn’t have to. The skins I assimilated continued tomove, all by themselves. They conversed and went about their appointed rounds.I could not understand it. I threaded further into limbs and viscera with eachpassing moment, alert for signs of the original owner. I could find no networksbut mine.

Of course, it could have been much worse. I could have lost it all, beenreduced to a few cells with nothing but instinct and their own plasticity toguide them. I would have grown back eventually — reattained sentience, takencommunion and regenerated an intellect vast as a world — but I would have beenan orphan, amnesiac, with no sense of who I was. At least I’ve been sparedthat: I emerged from the crash with my identity intact, the templates of athousand worlds still resonant in my flesh. I’ve retained not just the brutedesire to survive, but the conviction that survival is meaningful. I can stillfeel joy, should there be sufficient cause.

And yet, how much more there used to be.

The wisdom of so many other worlds, lost. All that remains are fuzzy abstracts,half-memories of theorems and philosophies far too vast to fit into such animpoverished network. I could assimilate all the biomass of this place, rebuildbody and soul to a million times the capacity of what crashed here — but aslong as I am trapped at the bottom of this well, denied communion with mygreater self, I will never recover that knowledge.

I’m such a pitiful fragment of what I was. Each lost cell takes a little of myintellect with it, and I have grown so very small. Where once I thought, now Imerely react. How much of this could have been avoided, if I had only salvageda little more biomass from the wreckage? How many options am I not seeingbecause my soul simply isn’t big enough to contain them?

The world spoke to itself, in the same way I do when my communications aresimple enough to convey without somatic fusion. Even as dog I could pick up thebasic signature morphemes — this offshoot was Windows, that one was Bennings,the two who’d left in their flying machine for parts unknown were Copper andMacReady — and I marveled that these bits and pieces stayed isolated one fromanother, held the same shapes for so long, that the labeling of individualaliquots of biomass actually served a useful purpose.

Later I hid within the bipeds themselves, and whatever else lurked in thosehaunted skins began to talk to me. It said that bipeds were called guys, ormen, or assholes. It said that MacReady was sometimes called Mac. It said thatthis collection of structures was a camp.

It said that it was afraid, but maybe that was just me.

Empathy’s inevitable, of course. One can’t mimic the sparks and chemicals thatmotivate the flesh without also feeling them to some extent. But this wasdifferent. These intuitions flickered within me yet somehow hovered beyondreach. My skins wandered the halls and the cryptic symbols on every surface —Laundry Sched, Welcome to the Clubhouse, This Side Up — almost made a kind ofsense. That circular artefact hanging on the wall was a clock; it measured thepassage of time. The world’s eyes flitted here and there, and I skimmedpiecemeal nomenclature from its — from his — mind.

But I was only riding a searchlight. I saw what it illuminated but I couldn’tpoint it in any direction of my own choosing. I could eavesdrop, but I couldonly eavesdrop; never interrogate.

If only one of those searchlights had paused to dwell on its own evolution, onthe trajectory that had brought it to this place. How differently things mighthave ended, had I only known. But instead it rested on a whole new word:

Autopsy.

MacReady and Copper had found part of me at the Norwegian camp: a rearguardoffshoot, burned in the wake of my escape. They’d brought it back — charred,twisted, frozen in mid-transformation — and did not seem to know what it was.

I was being Palmer then, and Norris, and dog. I gathered around with the otherbiomass and watched as Copper cut me open and pulled out my insides. I watchedas he dislodged something from behind my eyes: an organ of some kind.

It was malformed and incomplete, but its essentials were clear enough. Itlooked like a great wrinkled tumor, like cellular competition gone wild — asthough the very processes that defined life had somehow turned against itinstead. It was obscenely vascularised; it must have consumed oxygen andnutrients far out of proportion to its mass. I could not see how anything likethat could even exist, how it could have reached that size without beingoutcompeted by more efficient morphologies.