Assimilation
A bronze ring of laurels encasing a crimson disk sat on Adam’s blazer like a pustule. It celebrated “Extraordinary Sacrifice in Service of Earth-2.” Rodrigo had watched the awards ceremony online.
An acid-green bracelet gripped Adam’s right wrist, continually transmitting vitals and GPS to Pentagon-2. Looking at it made Rodrigo wince.
While Rodrigo drove, Adam radiated nervous energy. His gaze flicked between the rearview mirror, the dashboard, and the coral sands outside.
The hiss of anxious tension issuing into the car was almost audible.
Fuck it, Rodrigo had to say something. “So…two years on the moon!” he tried. “Could’ve written, man!”
Adam’s eyes darted to him. His tongue flicked, moistening his lips.
There was the dude Rodrigo knew—
“We’re permitted little communication,” Adam replied. His hands twitched in his lap.
—and there went the dude Rodrigo knew. The accent, the inflection, these Rodrigo recognized. But his best friend would never have constructed that sentence. Rodrigo wanted to hit something.
Adam turned away and resumed his jittery examination of the car.
The desert between the airport and New Boston was peppered with rest stops resembling homey log-cabins. Rodrigo hated the ersatz nostalgia.
Silence inflated the car like a balloon, pressing against the two, pushing them apart.
Rodrigo switched on the radio; the song playing nearly made him swerve. Adam had spent the last night before his deployment trying to teach Rodrigo that song. “So we’re connected through music, no matter where I am,” Adam had said.
Rodrigo switched off the radio.
†
Frank ignored the phone. It was probably for Shalini.
The potatoes weren’t right.
Frank had been known for his mashed potatoes back on Old Earth. Golden. Buttery. Melt-in-your-mouth. Dehydrated potato flakes did not achieve the same effect. He fingered his mixing spoon, as though the wood grain held the culinary secrets he needed.
“Adam’s coming!!”
Aisha’s voice shattered the silence like radio static. She sprinted into the kitchen, twirling—her thick plait nearly knocking over the salt—and rushed back out.
Aisha was unique, part of the first generation to be born off-Earth-1. It didn’t make raising her any easier.
Frank returned to his mash with vengeance.
When Shalini announced herself with a knock, Frank didn’t acknowledge it.
“Rodrigo says they’re on their way,” Shalini announced.
Frank tasted the potatoes.
“It'll be nice for them to catch up," she continued. 'They used to be inseparable!" The forced cheeriness of her voice did not escape Frank.
He shrugged, adding another tablespoon of TruButter.
“I’m going to tell Aisha,” she continued.
Frank put down his spoon.
“Frank, she has a right to know—”
Frank turned to his wife. Her hair was disheveled, he noticed. “She’s a child.”
“It’s the first time she’s seeing her brother in two years,” Shalini insisted. “And he’s not a criminal that she needs to be shielded from. He made a sacrifice. He’s a war-hero! I don’t want him to become some sort of…stranger.”
Frank turned to the window. Synthetic sunshine bleached away the kitchen’s color and emotion.
“He is a stranger,” Frank said softly. “Why does no one else see that?”
†
Adam’s room hadn’t changed.
“Familiar?” Rodrigo asked, gesturing around. “Adam’s—your memories are intact, right?”
His smile slipped at the blank expression Adam gave the wall-mounted guitar.
Adam approached the instrument and fingered the strings. Plink-Plink-Plink.
“Assimilation is not perfect,” he said, looking up.
Rodrigo wanted to yank the guitar out of Adam’s hands, wanted to force him to play their song. He dumped Adam’s bag on the bed. The bedsprings squealed.
Adam’s body jerked, as though struck by lightning. His eyes widened. He turned to Rodrigo with a curious expression. “That sound…I remember…bacon and cannabis—”
Shalini’s voice from downstairs cut in. “Boys! Dinner!”
Whatever breakthrough Adam had experienced dissolved. He licked his lips, fidgeted his fingers. His eyes were panicky.
Rodrigo couldn’t help it. Despite everything. “Adam! Look at me?”
Adam did.
His eyes were still black, black, black. “Caught in my event horizon?” he’d joked that night as Rodrigo had stared into them.
He stared again, this time searching for what lay behind those eyes, for the networked bacterial floc that had taken over his best friend’s brain, had seized his sentience. That had somehow driven him and a legion of soldiers to a desperate victory at the battle of Zagreus II, that had earned him a fucking medal even though—
“Boys!”
Rodrigo coughed. “Look, you’ll get through this, okay?”
†
“Potatoes?” Shalini offered.
Frank grunted as Adam accepted a spoonful of greasy starch. Aisha eyed them warily from across the table.
“So have you met any nice girls at Pentagon-2?” Shalini joked. “Must be many smart women up there!”
Adam shot a beseeching look at Rodrigo, who merely squirmed. “We’re not allowed,” Adam began, “sexual relationships are—”
“Hey!” Frank scowled at Adam and gestured towards his sister. Shalini hastily offered Frank some beans.
Adam looked bewildered.
“Why aren’t you eating, Adam?” Aisha chirped.
Shalini gave her a worried look.
“Err…We have to control our lipid intake,” Adam ventured. “To regulate neural myelination. It’s essential for optimal Assimilation—”
His sister interrupted him. "Is it because of the funny thing in your head?”
Frank stood up in a clatter of cutlery, glaring at Shalini. “I’m going upstairs.”
“Frank!” Shalini cried. “You haven’t seen your son in two years!”
“That’s not my son. Adam was killed by an alien two years ago.”
Rodrigo swallowed his potatoes with difficulty.
†
Plink-Plink-Plink
Adam’s face scrunched up in concentration.
Rodrigo sat next to him on the bed, hugging his knees. He wanted to grab the guitar, wanted to get it away from whoever this was that didn’t know how to play it.
Adam stopped strumming. “I did not choose this,” he said quietly.
“Huh?”
Adam's eyes were moist. “I did not choose Assimilation.”
“How much of Adam is left? How much is the alien?” Rodrigo could feel the hoarseness in his own voice.
Adam bowed his head. “I don’t know,” he whispered, gripping the neck of the guitar so tightly that his knuckles went white.
Rodrigo uncurled himself. “Hey, man, I’m sorry…” he began but Adam looked up and Rodrigo was caught in the event horizon.
“Rodrigo,” Adam intoned, tasting the word in his mouth, feeling the shape his lips made around it: Rod-REE-go.
It was the first time Adam had spoken his name since his arrival.
“Rodrigo,” Adam repeated, “I remember…”
Something wrung out Rodrigo’s stomach, squeezed his windpipe, hammered his heart— because Rodrigo remembered too.
The midnight snack. The joints. How’d he’d got too high to learn the song, how the bedsprings had squealed—
“You tasted of bacon and cannabis,” Adam said, “and something else I can’t describe...”
Rodrigo swallowed.
He looked at the man who had once been his best friend, a man who was now this new creature lost in a world that he was supposed to know but could never really belong to, who was at once intensely familiar and utterly alien.
“Hey.” He shuffled over and placed his hands over Adam’s fingers. “Want me to teach you how to play that? A friend once told me that music connects us, no matter who we are.”
© 2021 Sharang Biswas
About the Author
Sharang Biswas is a writer, artist, and award-winning game designer. He has won IndieCade and IGDN awards for his games and has showcased interactive works at numerous galleries, museums, and festivals, including Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. His nonfiction writing has appeared in publications such as Dicebreaker, Eurogamer, Unwinnable, First Person Scholar, and more, while his fiction has been published by or is forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Sub-Q Magazine, and Neon Hemlock Press. He is the co-editor of Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games (Pelgrane Press, 2020) and Strange Lusts / Strange Loves: An Anthology of Erotic Interactive Fiction (Strange Horizons, 2021). Find him on Twitter at @SharangBiswas.