After escaping the slug invasion at the town hall the colony of Dale Cannon is in chaos.
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The next few days were chaotic as the town began its reinforcement process to protect itself from future slug attacks. Every night the colonists consolidated themselves to only a few houses with volunteer guards taking watches a few hours at a time.
During the days Rystole went out to various farms to help families. They always traveled in a group hoping that it would protect them from a slug attack.
Rystole didn’t think numbers would matter if facing the slugs again. But at least in a large group there’d be time to flee or carry the bodies home.
School was still required by Speaker Grisham. He insisted that knowledge about the technologies used was absolutely necessary or else they could lose contact with the Central System in a few generations.
Rystole wasn’t convinced that knowledge of how to communicate was necessary if there was an army of slugs that could make them all unconscious and useless to the Central System. But the speaker never asked his opinion. So he silently cut class to help the traveling ranchers. None seemed to mind his truancy or having a well-experienced young man helping out.
Rystole occasionally had the chance to sneak into the town hall. Getting past Grisham, who was always eager to shoo him out of the building, was difficult but not impossible.
He often found Bert working on documentation for the weapon he’d created. Sending it out to the Central System was of utmost importance, according to the speaker.
Otherwise, Rystoled knew he could find his friend with Doctor Yu.
On those days both of them would have their heads down analyzing the living slug that crawled around in a sealed glass tank.
There was never a way for Rystole to get in a word or question. He hardly had time to catch up and understand what they were studying.
So when Rystole went to visit after dinner one night and he found the two of them hovering over the captured slug’s tank and a new contraption in Bert’s hand he was interested but unhopeful he’d get any answers.
“What are y’all doing?” Rystole asked.
It startled both Bert and Dr. Yu and they immediately made a hand gesture indicating he should be quiet.
Rystole approached the wheeled table that held the slug’s glass tank. The brown blob crept around the tank apparently recovered from whatever damage the gun had done on the night of the invasion.
The edges of its body moved like waves on a lake. The motion propelled it forward and left a thin layer of slime behind it.
Based on the cloudy residue on the glass it seemed like this slug had covered most of the walls and floor in the goop leaving a dried mess behind.
The more interesting, and less disgusting, object in the room was the new contraption Bert held. It was a mishmash of radio dials and antennas along with some electronic parts Rystole recognized from the gun, specifically the purple submitter crystal embedded in the center of the circuit board.
Bert’s hands moved constantly but carefully over the device as he tweaked dials and stretched wires.
With one of Bert’s changes, the device’s microphone erupted with static.
Dr. Yu and Bert became visibly excited leaving Rystole confused. It was as if he’d just walked into a dining room to find the table attached to the ceiling and everyone centered around it waiting for him to begin the meal.
“Why’s there static?” Rystole asked.
With the crystal in the center, Rystole assumed this design was based on a submitter radio. And those radios didn’t get static like old analog ones.
The pair ignored his question and continued to adjust the radio. He watched Bert’s hands move delicately across the dials as he adjusted parts of the contraption. And then out of nowhere, the static stopped.
“Undo it, undo it!” the doctor said frantically.
Bert was already retracing his steps. He had to reverse more than one of the tweaks he’d made to the dials but eventually the static returned.
“What’s sending that?” Rystole asked. A submatter radio would only play static if something was transmitting it. He had a guess but he wasn’t sure wanted to be right.
“From what we can tell, it’s coming from the slug,” Bert said. His face didn’t reveal that he was making a joke. Even if it was sometimes hard to tell with Bert.
“Yeah right,” Rystole said. “It’s more likely you busted something in there and it’s messing with the speaker.”
“That’s what I said,” the doctor replied. “But then I did this.”
The doctor took a scalpel off the operating table and carefully lifted the heavy glass lid off of the slug’s tank.
He sliced at the slug with a gloved hand. As he cut through the slug’s skin the static on the radio became less chaotic and organized itself into a chorus of chilling screams.
The doctor stopped and the static returned. The slug’s skin that the doctor cut through sealed as if he’d never cut it.
“It’s—” Rystole found a chair and sat down. “That’s not possible.”
The pair shrugged as if they couldn’t disagree.
“Is it a robot or an android or something?” Rystole asked.
Rystole would sooner believe that rogue scientists in the Central System built these before he believed the ridiculous alternative. There was no way these primitive slugs could transmit on humanity’s radio frequencies.
“Based on what I dissected,” the doctor said, “these slugs are biological. There are no DNA markers indicating it’s genetically manufactured. And if there’s a chip in there it’s too small for me to find.”
Bert was quiet on the matter. He seemed to be processing something on his own and making notes on the settings of his circuit as it continued to play frustrating static in the background.
Rystole tapped his foot in the chair. He was having a hard time getting a grip on the situation. “Are there any other creatures that can—“
He was cut off by the sound of someone asking “Why’s there static?”
Then the doctor said, “Undo it, undo it.”
The trio looked around among themselves seeing no one else in the room.
Rystole’s stomach dropped as he realized the static had stopped.
“It’s using the radio,” Bert finally said. The words sounded like they were being dragged out of him.
“That is correct. We are using the radio,” and the voice sounded like a room full of people speaking in tandem.
“No. This is a prank,” Rystole said. “Don’t you two have anything better to do?”
As he looked at the doctor and his friend their expressions showed they were as terrified as him.
“This is not a prank,” the chorus of voices replied.
Rystole got out of the chair and approached the glass tank. Once he got close enough he could tell the voice came from the radio.
“We are the slug,” it said. The voices coming out of the radio were eerie. They made him uncomfortable.
“Turn it off,” Rystole pleaded.
“That’s not going to stop us from hearing you,” the chorus replied. “Please. Speak with us.”
The voices were almost singing. It would’ve been soothing from anything but an alien killer.
“Why would we?” Rystole said. “You’ve done nothing but attack us.”
Before Rystole could get on a roll with a rant describing his mother and the other towns folk the slugs had hurt Dr. Yu rested his hand on Rystole’s shoulder.
“Let’s hear them out,” the doctor said.
“Thank you,” the chorus said. “We only attacked because you attacked first. Since you first arrived here we’ve been plagued by interference and our reach has been forced to dwindle.”
“Bert and I only hunted you after you attacked my mother,” Rystole corrected the slug.
“You’ve been hurting us far longer,” the chorus said. “Although it seems you didn’t notice. There has been interference in our—“ static cut them off “—and it has been hard to maintain the sustenance needed.”
“When we shot you with the gun in the forest, is that the interference you’re talking about?” Bert asked.
“I have not been able to reconnect with the limb you approached in the forest yet,” the voices replied.
“What do you mean reconnect?” Dr. Yu asked, glancing over at the case the dissected slug was stored in.
“We are connected to all slugs. Each slug contributes to the tribe and all slugs are controlled together.”
“Do you have a queen?” Dr. Yu asked.
“We have no ruler, our tribe is vast and all are equal. But your interference has made it difficult to connect with some of our members.”
“How many members do you have in your tribe?” The doctor asked.
Rystole was unnerved seeing one of the most intelligent men on the planet take this entire conversation seriously. It still felt unreal to Rystole, he was talking to a genuinely alien species. One that they had no defense against and could knock them out with a touch.
“We once had connections to enough limbs that we wrapped around the world.”
“How did you discover submatter communication?” Bert asked.
Rystole was glad his friend asked the question that burned in Rystole’s mind because as far as anyone had seen the slugs had no technology.
There was a pause before the chorus of voices responded, “We have always connected in this way. Figuring out how to connect with you has been harder. At first, it was like connecting with a tree. Impossible. But after we were attacked in the forest we found that you did have this open connection. But I will say communicating with you is slow and uncomfortable.”
“How do you speak Common Tongue,” Rystole asked unsure how it knew the language of the Central System.
“We have listened intently for years trying to communicate. We felt your vibrations and realized it was how you connect with others of your tribe.”
“Pretty smart for a bug,” Rystole said with a grunt.
“Our intelligence comes from our numbers, not our individuals. Without connection to the whole, a slug will become unpredictable, blind, and eventually die after a few months without access to sustenance.”
“You’ve injured our people. Are you aware of this?” Dr. Yu asked.
“We are. We are sorry. But it was the only way we knew of to communicate what you were doing to us. We needed your attention.”
“So they’re no better than my little brother who punches people for attention,” Rystole said, disgusted.
“We weren’t doing much better,” Bert pointed out, “we killed a sentient being without knowing it.”
“More like dismembering one,” the chorus of voices interjected. “We suspected we would not be able to reconnect with that limb ever again.”
“I’m sorry,” Bert said and he sounded more genuine than Rystole felt. But Bert hadn’t lost his mom to the beasts.
“We did not attack with the intent to kill,” the chorus continued. “We only wanted to disconnect you like you disconnected us.”
Rystole hated the idea that he was merely disconnected from his mother. It was too simple. Too impersonal. Like he’d simply hung up the radio. She wasn’t living a life independently without him, she was unresponsive and in a coma.
“We have a way to reconnect you,” the chorus continued, “but we need you to stop the interference.”
“What’s causing the interference?” Rystole asked.
“It’s the comms tower,” Bert answered. His tone was familiar, it was the same voice he used when in school when he realized the right answer after turning in a test.
“It can’t be,” Rystole protested. “They’re slugs, they don’t have any advanced technology like this.”
“Evolution will do some tricky things,” Yu explained, “like insects attracted to old incandescent light bulbs.”
“There’s not actually any electronics at the heart of the submatter communications systems,” Bert explained. “All the electronics are used to translate data we understand to the crystal. The crystal itself is just a complex set of chemicals that resonate with other submatter crystals.”
“But we’d be able to find a crystal in the slug we dissected and we didn’t,” Rystole said as if he was the only one bringing logic to this conversation.
“I found a lot of things I didn’t understand,” Yu said, “and if it’s complex chemicals there could be a chance it’s not solid like a crystal but more organic, like a spleen.”
“The organ we use to connect to others of our kind is our,” static cut in, “gland and it’s located in the back left quadrant about two-thirds of the way towards our rear.”
Yu made a note on his hand terminal and then asked, “The ability to reseal your skin which gland manages—”
Rystole cut the doctor off. There were more important things to discuss. ”You said there’s a way to reconnect us with those you’ve attacked?“ Rystole asked.
“We can generate a compound that will reverse the effects of the original neurotoxin,” the chorus of voices explained. “Each one is uniquely tailored to its subject, but we would be willing to reconnect you with one as a sign of good faith. Simply place this slug on the body of one of the patients you want reconnected and we’ll do the rest.”
The group was hesitant and Dr. Yu asked several questions mostly focused on how to safely transport the slug without getting knocked out himself.
Once the doctor was comfortable they wheeled the table that held the glass tank to the infirmary. The doctor carefully moved the slug from the case onto Mr. Montgomery. Slowly the man came back to consciousness.
Rystole stood next to his mother holding her unresponsive hand. He wished Dr. Yu would wake her up. But Montgomery had been out the longest and Yu wasn’t taking input on how to do his job.
But now they had a cure for the comas. They’d just need to convince the town to take the submatter comms tower offline. Which should be an easy bargain since the town as a whole didn’t use it that often.
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