📗Larval Haze | 8: Property of Royal Lotus Co.
Following the events of Strange Harvest, the honey must flow as life grinds on beneath the jungle's alien canopy...
This is Hanlon’s Reader, an independent author’s publication. Here you’ll find stories, books, essays, and other things. I’ll be tinkering away here for a while.
If you’re using a web browser to read, you can use these links to help find your way:
📗Short Stories | 📘Books | 📙Personal Essays | 💌Newsletter | ❓About | 🏡Home
App Users: the categorized Tag links above don’t work in-app, so you may find it easier to use the Content Calendar or direct links to story posts to navigate my publication.
📘 Twice a week (Tues & Thurs) I’ll post a chapter from this book.
📗 New Short Stories will be added to the Content Calendar as I post.
💌 Once a month (the final Wednesday) I’ll post an author’s newsletter.
📙 Every once in a while I’ll post Non-Fiction content like Personal Essays.
Enjoy, share, and please let me know your thoughts in the comments! 💚
📗 Part VIII: Property of Royal Lotus Co.
When Gaultmann fed the new grubs, the taste of pure lotus nectar nourished us unlike anything we had ever experienced. An intensely sweet, herbal rush coursed through us. Its life-giving energy held transformative power that thrilled us as we absorbed the rich nectar. We would thrive. That was worth every moment of pain and weakness.
Sharing that first drop through the connection I had with the grubs was the last thing I remembered before the urgency of their birth faded. Just as I had felt impending dread before, it began settling on my chest again—along with a sense of disposability and disconnection.
Whatever control the lotus wasp venom had on me abruptly slipped its hooks free. My mental sensory connection with the grubs immediately severed.
I collapsed into a drooling bag of fleshy confusion, incapable of human thought or comprehension. I felt… nothing, just a blank, empty void where something should have been. She had vanished, along with my sense of the newborn wasps. When I tried to slink down into that dark well within myself to bring their presence back, I grasped at emptiness.
Eventually someone came in and stuck me with a needle, but I barely noticed. I faded from nothing to nothing.
When I woke, hollowness consumed me. If I couldn’t control the wasps, I couldn’t get us lotus honey, and that meant I was useless. Dead weight.
For days, Gaultmann earnestly bothered me with updates on the grubs sent to my display lenses. Reports detailed their progress through the larval stage into pupation. Color-coded charts and graphs showed their vital signs—as well as my own—and a hundred other things I should have cared about but couldn’t focus on. My gaze just slid right past it all.
The man had made a full slide presentation detailing his plan to protect the local hives by wiping out the central octopider swarm with these toxic mushrooms.
If we didn’t do this, the octopider swarms would wipe out the hives around here and we’d have nothing to harvest with our newborn hatchling queens… the assumption being I could still establish any sort of connection or control over them.
This was an assumption I wasn’t about to correct.
But I knew the grubs didn’t need me anymore. I’d served my part and been tossed aside—a ruined vessel. I felt so stupid, to think I could be connected to them beyond my purpose as a broodslave, as meat. To think they would need me to care for them… they were supposed to eat me from the inside out and use my corpse like a warm, rotten blanket.
Distance and numbness overrode everything else. From what Gaultmann’s little presentation had said, I’d have maybe another ten days before the lotus wasps emerged from their cocoons and everyone found out I had nothing to offer anymore.
Life had spun far out of my control and I just couldn’t bring myself to give a fuck about anything. Wouldn’t it have been easier if Goldwater had never found me? If I’d just been left alone there, curled up in the underground roots? Then I wouldn’t have to feel all of this, trapped in this nightmare world, this disgusting new form.
At least I was at peace then. Blissfully paralyzed by the queen’s venom. I remembered the worker wasps and their rhythmic chittering, the gentle clicks of their mandibles in response to the sentinel wasp’s instructive, melodic trills.
I just stared absently and nodded at Gaultmann every once in a while, sometimes answering his questions with a one-word response, sometimes not. When I didn’t listen, he became persistent. At one point he thought I’d slipped into a coma, but I was always conscious… I just didn’t feel like talking.
Yes, I’m feeling myself again.
No, I’m not interested in seeing them.
No, I don’t want to talk about it.
The Dusters kept me in the lab, restrained on the same wheeled medical gurney I’d become so familiar with. It reeked of spilled blood and my unwashed body, and after several days of implacable apathy this became the first thing I truly complained about. The smell of myself sickened me.
Fasma and the twins had been saddled with the role of my caretakers. Once they were sure I wasn’t a threat anymore, they unstrapped me, set up a privacy curtain, then gave me some fresh bandages, a few washcloths, and a basin to bathe with. They also set up a second gurney with clean bedding they would transfer me to after I finished.
The vertical surgery wound above my navel started itching intensely once I washed near it, so I unwrapped the discolored bandages to take a look. When I got to the final couple of layers, I noticed a distinct trace of blue in the stains.
Peeling away the gauze packed on top, I felt a twinge of pain as it detached and peered underneath to see a thin, purplish-blue scab which looked oddly… crystallized. Parts had dried in little angular chunks, but other areas were still wet and gooey, sticking to the gauze in long strands that stretched thin before separating.
The sentinel wasp had secreted something into me back in the jungle before Goldwater found me, and I wondered if there was a connection. Or maybe this was another aspect of the control I’d been under? A way for me to heal faster and better protect the grubs?
Whatever the case, my skin had healed incredibly fast, with a smooth pink scar already clearly visible at the edges of the substance. I gave the area around it a gentle once-over with a cloth, but otherwise left it alone since it seemed to actually be helping.
I didn’t quite want to let myself feel hopeful, but could this be a silver lining? I’d have to speak with Gaultmann about it.
After washing, I put on some clean clothes Fasma loaned to me—a long-sleeved gray woven thermal and black pants. He and the twins helped me shimmy over to the clean gurney without hurting myself, but I actually didn’t have too much trouble. The lancing pain I’d expected never came.
Suddenly Gaultmann’s voice came in over the link in my ear, with an edge of panic. “Barkland, are you near your armor? Everyone needs to get safe.”
Fasma, Charana, and Rachana all looked up at each other in unison. He’d sent the message on the common channel, to everyone.
“Uh… we are safe. We’re inside,” Barkland replied, sounding tired and a bit confused. I realized I had no idea what time it was, and he must have been asleep.
“Octopiders. Couple of adults got past my sensors out there. I don’t know, maybe they came up from underneath somewhere, one of these underwater caves…” as Gaultmann trailed off, I saw him appear outside the long window in the lab looking extremely agitated. “But they are literally right outside. Just picked ‘em up. Barkland—”
“I’m up, I’m on it!” I could hear the adrenaline in his voice. “Fasma, help me prep the suit! They can’t get in, can they?”
“Probably not, but they are scary good with tight places, you know? Best not take the chance.” Gaultmann fed some night vision footage from the lab’s exterior security feed into my display lenses and I switched focus.
The grainy, monochromatic shades of green left stark outlines around a pair of prowling octopiders as they emerged from the water, still dripping. They moved low to the ground, their strong, segmented legs pushing off in cautious, start-stop bursts.
In front of the creatures, drooping from below their round, black eyes, thick tentacles wriggled with minds of their own, noticeably out of sync with the rest of their movements. They would probe and wrap around things, curling in under the main body where the mouth must have been. Always touching, tasting, smelling. And watching with those unblinking eyes.
This had to be a direct, live view from the cameras. Which meant if Gaultmann had given me security feed access…
Taking a chance, I quickly scanned through my available menus and found I was able to get into some new ones. Hopefully they’d be too distracted to notice me rooting around, and it’s not like I could do anything to help.
I kept an ear in the common channel while I searched for a way out. My heartbeat picked up as I felt the unfamiliar excitement of hope.
Popping open submenus and additional folders, I found Environmental Controls, Maintenance, Security Logs… there, Communications Systems. Users. User Activity. He really did just give me blanket access. Maybe just for now.
I wondered what everyone had been up to. Maybe I could dig in deep later, but all I needed was a way to get a message out.
And I knew just who I needed to send it to.
***
“Got two messages here for, uh… Labor General Goldwater.”
“Chavos, please tell them to stop making up stupid titles for me. I have absolutely had it with the titles. Once we actually win something, we’ll decide on something. Until then, just use my damn name. Now what is it?”
“Roger that, Major Grouchwater.”
“Report!”
“Sorry. First, one of our non-striking contacts still on active Hive Security is reporting fewer octopider intrusions than expected out near Hives Six and Four.”
“But the mass spawn this year was higher than average. Why aren’t we seeing more activity? They’re closest to the hotspots.”
“Could be disease, maybe lack of resources to feed on this year… but I think Dusters are thinning them out. Multiple octopiders got taken out as hunting pairs, by beam rifle fire, but it wasn’t any of us.”
“Hmm. That would be new behavior. What about the other message?”
“We’ve got a group of recruiters sympathetic to the strike who are thinking about joining as members. One of them came across a bunch more of those spammed applications from Wes Jackson.”
“So what? Wasn’t that us? Part of the strike action?”
“I thought so too, at first. But these ones had a geolocation pin out in the jungle near Hive Four. And a verified Royal Lotus access key requesting emergency pickup.”
📗Short Stories | 📘Books | 📙Personal Essays | 💌Newsletter | ❓About | 🏡Home
