I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (38 page)
Read I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) Online
Authors: John Patrick Kennedy
It felt horrible being used…
But also it felt kind of great.
Because now that he wasn’t really human, he might be able to do it.
Onward to the rift.
Epilogue
T
he monster clung to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, a place the primary race rarely visited, and even then only on distant black boats that crawled over the surface of the water, a long, shimmering distance away. It grew tendrils through the coral canyons surrounding it and hid under the large, waving leaves of underwater plants. Fish crawled over it and through its tentacles.
It resisted the urge to consume them, to consume everything on the planet.
The monster had received a message from the part of itself that had been carried into outer space. The emissary from the primary race had encountered one of the Enemy and had helped destroy it.
The primary race of this planet might become an ally. It would be inopportune to destroy the entire ecosystem before it established whether the primary would be a help or a hindrance. With greater mass had come greater intelligence, and now that it had reproduced its core spores, it felt calmer, more able to reason.
The rift had grown to an appalling size, even larger than the one in its ancestral memory, galaxies away.
It had drained its other universe, then. Consumed it.
It was trying to bring the Dark City through.
The monster tried to communicate with the fish swimming in and out of its tentacles.
You should fear what is coming
, it told them, or tried to.
The fish didn’t answer.
It needed to learn how to communicate with the primary species. The plant-monster had stored the genetic codes of all the species it had consumed since it had been awakened; it had plenty of material from the primary species, but they seemed to be powerless, ignorant.
Terrified.
It wondered whether or not the primary species was, in fact, the primary. The plant-monster identified some of the material it had taken from the emissary, the one who had hurled most of its mass into space.
That one,
at least, would be worth communicating with.
The material was odd stuff, very similar to the material from the Enemy, yet fundamentally different—based on astral material rather than dark matter. The monster created a small, relatively stable pocket in its body, placed the emissary’s material inside, and then regenerated it. Some of the emissary’s memories had been destroyed, but it looked like the sample had remained, more or less, holographically intact.
The monster reawakened the material, setting its consciousness into motion, and studied it carefully. It appeared to communicate primarily via visual and auditory cues, assisted by verbal coding. Its memories were easiest to access; they appeared to be mainly visual. The plant-monster generated multiple eyespots and triggered the emissary’s material to begin reviewing its memories.
Pax blinked and the world changed.
The plant-monster watched everything, slowly beginning to understand what had been done to them: to the emissary and to itself.
It went through its own stored material and found the one member of the primary race that had not been terrified of it. A musician. It reawakened the material inside another pocket, recreating the place where it had been sitting, the table and ethanol next to it, and its instrument.
Play
, it said, testing out the new form of communication.
What do you want to hear?
the primary said.—The
man
. It was called a
man
.
Anything,
the monster responded.
Just play.
The man began strumming the instrument, and the monster’s tentacles moved with the ocean waves, as if it were dancing.
Bad day?
the man said.
Not as bad as it’s going to get.
Well, shit,
the man said and played on. It was almost pleasant.
Dear Reader
Thank you for reading I Am Titanium!
It was my honor and pleasure to write for you. I appreciate every moment that you spent with Pax, Scarlett, and yours truly. We hope to see you for book two — coming soon!
Also, if you’re so inclined, I’d love a review of I Am Titanium. Without your support and feed-back, my books would be lost under an avalanche of other books. A quick sentence will do fine and I’ll be forever grateful. I’ll even take a single word!
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