Episode 8 - Symbiosis

  Chapter 70 - Beyond the Dome

  The blue double-door groans as the motor kicks to life. The doors are thick, like they are insulated, and each parts by rolling along a track mounted to the roof of the warehouse.

  A second chamber is revealed, not as large as the warehouse we came through, but still large enough for some of the heaviest train engines. Wesley’s Cervus trots forward, the small cart behind him wobbling on its uneven wheels. Wesley gives his mask a final check, then punches a red button, which sends the door-gears grinding again as they shut behind us and begins a series of large fans that hum ominously in the empty warehouse. As the rolling doors close again, we are left in darkness.

  By my memory of the warehouse district we came through, we are currently within the dome wall here. This must be a manual lock. It’s so strange to me that it is hidden away like this. Even more curious is that the smuggler crews have their secretive access. Someone high up permits them to operate then.

  “Opening the door, last deep breath!” warns Wesley.

  I do as suggested, filling my lungs with the dome air. I never much paid attention to the air I breathed. Through my mask, all I smell is the plastic whiff of silicone. Pooka stands at my side, his skin trembling, his ears pricked forward as he waits in anticipation. I can feel his anxious fear; he’s so scared of what he might see when the door opens. I’ve never felt him be scared before. My heart races in time with his, and I stare into the black, waiting to see what will happen next.

  As the doors on the other side of the lock part, I am blinded at first by the crack of white light. As the beam crosses the room and widens, white fog rolls in across the floor. Pooka flattens his ears and watches it cross the warehouse towards us, curling around his hooves. He stamps one foot curiously, and I watch it eddy around his fetlocks.

  Rhett is the first through the door, avoiding us as best he can and disappearing into the light as a black shadow. Wesley follows. Pooka and I go last.

  I take my first step into the outside world, placing my hands on either side of my mask to feel the seal despite Wesley’s reassurances that the respirator will keep me safe. I can’t tell if the slight breathlessness I’m already feeling is what he warned me about for the air out here, or just my own nerves and racing heart. As the door opens further, I can finally see outside clearly, and a gust of wind blows.

  My stomach drops. I’d seen it from the train, but something feels different about walking it in person for the first time.

  The ground is bare. Naked soil stretches before us broken only by rocks. When I take my first step off the concrete pad of the dome lock, the friable dust rises in small puffs around my feet and mingles with the fog. The white fog is thin, I can see it moving in the wind and gathering in the crevices of the rocks like it is indeed a very fine powder. Not fog then, haze.

  The air is dry when I breath in, there is no moisture in it. The sunlight is strong, stronger than I’ve ever experienced - even with the protective layer of the haze around us. I can already feel myself warming uncomfortably under its gaze.

  I bend and run one rubber-gloved finger through the soil, watching it part. I expected to see something out here at least, but as I look up all I can see are rocks disappearing into the hazy distance. In some ways, I’m glad for the haze obscuring the distance. I think I would be terrified if I could see too far. Contracts in open domes with uninterrupted spaces already unsettle me - like my eyes might just get lost in a horizon and my mind with them.

  My mind scatters to memories of green wild places, juxtapositioning with the barren world before me. In one moment, I see shadows shifting on green grass, a creek coiling between the tree roots. The next… flat, dead earth.

  Pooka steps forward, lowering his nose to sniff a rock. I can see the white fog puff and eddy around his twitching nostrils as he nudges the rock. He lifts his head, mane tumbling in front of his eyes, and looks out upon the world just as I do.

  She is truly dead. There is no life left here.

  Compared with his previous lives, this must be shocking. Pooka kicks over the rock with a forehoof, tumbling it across the ground with another puff of dust. The surface of the ground is cracked where the soil must have once been a wet slurry, fissures forming as it dried and contracted into a network of shattered mud plates that crumble with the slightest touch. Pooka takes a few more steps, ears spinning around his head as he absorbs everything out here.

  “Short walk,” reassures Wesley, walking behind his cart that takes off into the barrens. “We’re camped a little distance from the dome. Don’t want the bubblers seeing us.”

  There is a rut through the dirt in the direction the Cervus and Rhett are already walking, and several footprints. I lay one hand on Pooka’s shoulder, and turn to look back at Apex city.

  Cased within the shield of the dome and beyond the initial concrete rim, I can see buildings towering into the distance. There is a faint yellow tint to the air within the globe, homogenizing an ugly matrix of concrete and steel and rust and wires that used to be the only human habitat I’d known. Pooka lifts his ears, nudging me with his nose. I pat the bridge ?with the flat of my hand and turn around to follow Wesley and Rhett.

  We can see the caravan of vehicles well before we get close to it. There are several huge multi-trailer road trains, each arranged in a large circle around the camp. Several smaller cars are also scattered among them. People walk around between the vehicles, in similar environmental suits to the ones we are wearing.

  Our short walk has left me feeling winded already. The sun beats down relentlessly, and I’m sweating in the heavy protective environmental suit. I need better underlayers, something to wick the moisture off my skin. I can already feel a rash developing where my sweat irritates my skin against the cuffs of my wrists. I’m too nervous I’ll do something wrong if I adjust my mask, but I can feel sweat pooling on the rubber seal.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  All the vehicles have the tongues used for strapping symbionts to their fores lowered, harnesses for symbionts empty. Instead, in a circle out of the way of the humans and marked with some reflective cones, they are gathered, blinking and waving their tails in the white haze - colored ribbons tied to them all. Three are Rangifers, another pair are Bos. One is a gorgeous Tragelaphus with coiling horns stretching back from his head and a dark beard of hair spilling from his neck. Between them, several long-legged avian symbionts walk, including two Grus with pure white bodies, dark wings, and red skullcaps. I count the people I see and symbionts almost out of habit. There are almost as many symbionts as humans; there must be very few small invertebrates out here at a guess.

  Walking just ahead of us, Rhett turns back to call out to Wesley. “I thought you said Captain Rattakul was here?”

  “She is,” replies Wesley coolly.

  “I don’t see her gondola?”

  Pooka turns his ears behind us. I follow them, looking back at nothing, and then a huge shadow passes overhead. I lift my gaze, and my stomach truly drops out of the bottom of my gut.

  Wings larger than anything I have seen stretch across the sky above us. Larger than many buildings, even. My knees tremble as a wave of awe washes over me, making every muscle in my body feel weak and tiny.

  The creature is vaguely shaped like an Aquila based on the outline, but thousands of times larger. The absolutely massive symbiont clutches a strange metal building between its claws - lit beneath its shadow with white and red strobing lights. With flaps of its wings that buffet us as it passes overhead, it continues past the camp, and the massive Aquila - it can’t be an Aquila - draws closer to the ground, stirring up a hurricane of dust around its wings as it hovers in position to lower the building, which I can now see has two sleigh like footings, onto the ground.

  From underneath, the symbiont appeared dark brown, viewed only in shadow. From the side and at a distance, I can see it is instead a warm buff, almost gold all over, with dramatic white striations across its chest and a crest of feathers on the back of its skull that it raises as it lowers its head and clicks its beak. Its eyes are molten gold, almost glowing like Pooka’s do. As I see the first people emerge from the building to secure ropes and tie-downs, the scale continues to defy rationality. Its talons are longer than a person is tall, its eye alone is probably larger than I am.

  It is beautiful. It is the most beautiful symbiont I have ever seen. My mouth hangs open. In this vast, barren place, it is mythic in its singular magnificence - as if with its beauty alone I might find hope for life out here. And no one here can see it. They’ve reduced it to carrying their home across the empty sky.

  From behind us, Rhett takes off at a jog with his bag slung over his shoulder, heading for the flurry of activity at the giant symbiont’s feet.

  Pooka stands perfectly still, his ears strained and neck arched in the giant symbiont's direction. I dig my fingers into his harness. Don’t change shape. We can’t let them know what you are. I remind him. Do you know what it is?

  Never in my life have I seen such a brother.

  The gigantic symbiont lifts its head and looks across the caravans, then… it looks at us. I don’t know how I can tell where it looks from the unmarked, polished surface of its deep-set eyes - like orbs of liquid metal. But I know it looks at me. Pooka almost trembles, his neck is stretched and his lips chewing nervously as he watches. The golden symbiont is unnaturally still as it waits, then it seems distracted by something else, talons loosening and gripping again as it shuffles while changing position. The entire building beneath its feet shudders when it shakes its shoulders as it settles its wings, several folks calling warnings I can just hear at this distance.

  Pooka’s mind-voice in my head feels like a child's. Do you think the brother can see me?

  You’re wearing a visibility harness for people, so it can see you. I guess it depends on what its host can do if it can ‘see’ you.

  Pooka harrumphs deep in his throat, and I pat the side of his neck. Do you wish you could interact with your brothers?

  I could once. When we only came on invitation to conduits, they granted us their eyes and ears for our own kind.

  I hum thoughtfully at that information. I wonder if that was another reason for breeding out the conduits then, keeping us all blind and deaf from one another. I wonder if Pooka is lonely.

  We have each other.

  But we both know that is often not enough.

  “It gives you a shock the first time you see it.”

  I start, blinking as I turn to look at Wesley. “What-”

  “A big ol’ building just floating through the sky like that scared the shit out of me the first time I saw it.”

  “Oh. Yes. How?”

  Wesley lifts a hand and points at the base of the building, a huge metal arch rising over it like the handle on a bag. The giant golden symbiont is still perched there, holding onto the structure as it did in flight. It’s looking down now, watching the people underneath it with its piercing golden gaze. “Captain Rattakul’s symbiont can carry the whole structure - such a large symbiont is incredibly dangerous - if you see her team marking off any parts of the camps with cones or safety ribbons, keep well clear of it. We are the Lupine Company, named for our cryptid, and they are the Garuda Crew for theirs.”

  Garuda. The genus sparks a faint memory for the rare texts I read on cryptids when I stumbled into them between working on actual study. I cannot imagine a single corporate use for such a large symbiont except this. I wonder what kind of person this Captain Rattakul is, and how her bond must be for her to host such a creature. With a wave of sudden anxiety, I realize I might actually meet the first humans that might be full conduits like I am, if their cryptid symbionts are anything to go by. I swallow. The sweat on the bridge of my nose makes my mask itchy, and I blink as I remember I can’t scratch it.

  “Let me introduce you to the rest of the crew,” says Wesley, slapping the back of his Cervus to urge it onwards to the caravan.

  Rangifer is the genus that contains reindeer. It means reindeer. Bos is cows. It means cow.

  Tragelaphus is a genus of antelope that are gorgeous animals. The one described is inspired by male Nyala. The scientific name here a combination of the greek words for goat and deer. Very creative! I guess antelopes kind of are goat-deers.

  Grus are cranes! It means crane.

  Garuda. It is a made up genus just taking the name from the mythological creature this symbiont is derived from. I personally was most inspired by the Indonesian iteration of this creature (as opposed to Hindu or Buddhist lore), especially the version that features on their coat of arms and the Javanese eagle (hence this one featuring a crest). Google Javanese hawk-eagles, they are so cool! Originally I was looking for a creature something like Roc for Rattakul's symbiont (hence it drawing some elements from that as well), but Roc just doesn't sound as cool as Garuda! They may have had a connected origin lost in to time, one inspiring the other or potentially drawing inspiration from a connected origin.