The tumor inside me remembers it, too. I can see it in the last rays of itsfading searchlight — and finally, at long last, that beam is pointed inwards.

Pointed at me.

I can barely see what it illuminates: Parasite. Monster. Disease.

Thing.

How little it knows. It knows even less than I do.

I know enough, you motherfucker. You soul-stealing, shit-eating rapist.

I don’t know what that means. There is violence in those thoughts, and theforcible penetration of flesh, but underneath it all is something else I can’tquite understand. I almost ask — but Childs’s searchlight has finally gone out.Now there is nothing in here but me, nothing outside but fire and ice anddarkness.

I am being Childs, and the storm is over.

In a world that gave meaningless names to interchangeable bits of biomass, onename truly mattered: MacReady.

MacReady was always the one in charge. The very concept still seems absurd: incharge. How can this world not see the folly of hierarchies? One bullet in avital spot and the Norwegian dies, forever. One blow to the head and Blair isunconscious. Centralization is vulnerability — and yet the world is not contentto build its biomass on such a fragile template, it forces the same model ontoits metasystems as well. MacReady talks; the others obey. It is a system with abuilt-in kill spot.

And yet somehow, MacReady stayed in charge. Even after the world discovered theevidence I’d planted; even after it decided that MacReady was one of thosethings, locked him out to die in the storm, attacked him with fire and axeswhen he fought his way back inside. Somehow MacReady always had the gun, alwayshad the flamethrower, always had the dynamite and the willingness to take outthe whole damn camp if need be. Clarke was the last to try and stop him;MacReady shot him through the tumor.

Kill spot.

But when Norris split into pieces, each scuttling instinctively for its ownlife, MacReady was the one to put them back together.

I was so sure of myself when he talked about his test. He tied up all thebiomass — tied me up, more times than he knew — and I almost felt a kind ofpity as he spoke. He forced Windows to cut us all, to take a little blood fromeach. He heated the tip of a metal wire until it glowed and he spoke of piecessmall enough to give themselves away, pieces that embodied instinct but nointelligence, no self-control. MacReady had watched Norris in dissolution, andhe had decided: men’s blood would not react to the application of heat. Minewould break ranks when provoked.

Of course he thought that. These offshoots had forgotten that they could change.

I wondered how the world would react when every piece of biomass in the roomwas revealed as a shapeshifter, when MacReady’s small experiment ripped thefaçade from the greater one and forced these twisted fragments to confront thetruth. Would the world awaken from its long amnesia, finally remember that itlived and breathed and changed like everything else? Or was it too far gone —would MacReady simply burn each protesting offshoot in turn as its blood turnedtraitor?

I couldn’t believe it when MacReady plunged the hot wire into Windows' bloodand nothing happened. Some kind of trick, I thought. And then MacReady’s bloodpassed the test, and Clarke’s.

Copper’s didn’t. The needle went in and Copper’s blood shivered just a littlein its dish. I barely saw it myself; the men didn’t react at all. If they evennoticed, they must have attributed it to the trembling of MacReady’s own hand.They thought the test was a crock of shit anyway. Being Childs, I even said asmuch.

Because it was too astonishing, too terrifying, to admit that it wasn’t.

Being Childs, I knew there was hope. Blood is not soul: I may control the motorsystems but assimilation takes time. If Copper’s blood was raw enough to passmuster than it would be hours before I had anything to fear from this test; I’dbeen Childs for even less time.

But I was also Palmer, I’d been Palmer for days. Every last cell of thatbiomass had been assimilated; there was nothing of the original left.

When Palmer’s blood screamed and leapt away from MacReady’s needle, there wasnothing I could do but blend in.

I have been wrong about everything.

Starvation. Experiment. Illness. All my speculation, all the theories I invokedto explain this place — top-down constraint, all of it. Underneath, I alwaysknew the ability to change — to assimilate — had to remain the universalconstant. No world evolves if its cells don’t evolve; no cell evolves if itcan’t change. It’s the nature of life everywhere.

Everywhere but here.

This world did not forget how to change. It was not manipulated into rejectingchange. These were not the stunted offshoots of any greater self, twisted tothe needs of some experiment; they were not conserving energy, waiting out sometemporary shortage.

This is the option my shriveled soul could not encompass until now: out of allthe worlds of my experience, this is the only one whose biomass can’t change.It never could.

It’s the only way MacReady’s test makes any sense.

I say goodbye to Blair, to Copper, to myself. I reset my morphology to itslocal defaults. I am Childs, come back from the storm to finally make thepieces fit. Something moves up ahead: a dark blot shuffling against the flames,some weary animal looking for a place to bed down. It looks up as I approach.

MacReady.

We eye each other, and keep our distance. Colonies of cells shift uneasilyinside me. I can feel my tissues redefining themselves.

"You the only one that made it?"

"Not the only one…"

I have the flamethrower. I have the upper hand. MacReady doesn’t seem to care.

But he does care. He must. Because here, tissues and organs are not temporarybattlefield alliances; they are permanent, predestined. Macrostructures do notemerge when the benefits of cooperation exceed its costs, or dissolve when thatbalance shifts the other way; here, each cell has but one immutable function.There’s no plasticity, no way to adapt; every structure is frozen in place.This is not a single great world, but many small ones. Not parts of a greaterthing; these are things. They are plural.

And that means — I think — that they stop. They just, just wear out over time.

"Where were you, Childs?"

I remember words in dead searchlights: "Thought I saw Blair. Went out afterhim. Got lost in the storm."

I’ve worn these bodies, felt them from the inside. Copper’s sore joints.Blair’s curved spine. Norris and his bad heart. They are not built to last. Nosomatic evolution to shape them, no communion to restore the biomass and staveoff entropy. They should not even exist; existing, they should not survive.

They try, though. How they try. Every thing here is walking dead and yet it allfights so hard to keep going just a little longer. Each skin fights asdesperately as I might, if one was all I could ever have.

MacReady tries.

"If you’re worried about me — " I begin.

MacReady shakes his head, manages a weary smile. "If we’ve got any surprisesfor each other, I don’t think we’re in much shape to do anything about it…"

But we are. I am.

A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them — not one — has a soul. Theywander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicateexcept through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernovacould ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches ofblack on white. They’ve never known communion, can aspire to nothing butdissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale oftheir loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.