Chapter Text

Waking up on the floor of a stadium’s VIP suite was more than a little disorienting. The large, unfamiliar room was full of richly appointed furniture, sunlight, and a sleeping dragon. Outside, the storm had blown over and the sun was up- I hoped it wasn’t past noon.

Our overnight trip to the radio station was relatively uneventful, except for another few pile-ups that we’d passed on the way. There had been someone on hand at the station, thankfully, who agreed to record and loop our messages directing listeners to the stadium area. I shook his hand and told him he was saving more lives than he knew, before we took off into the night again.

Then the motorcycle died on us- apparently a hail of police gunfire isn’t great for engines, who knew? Haley wasn’t strong enough to carry me in flight, so we ended up having to walk several hours in the pre-dawn gloom before we reached the stadium and collapsed. Even then, vessels and the occasional human had been trickling in. Now, though- I got up and looked through the glass down onto the field.

Now there were thousands.

I’d been to Yankee Stadium once, when my sister graduated NYU. We’d all flown in, just a big family of midwest yokels in the big city, and that stadium had blown my mind. Bill Clinton had been the guest speaker and the place had been packed- easily twice as many people in that one place as in our entire home town.

We weren’t looking at those kinds of numbers yet, but I was feeling a similar kind of awe. We did this- all these people, here because of us. It had only been a few hours. The stands, and parts of the field, were filling up. Infomorphs of every shape and size lined them, huddled, cold, hungry. Hohmann Stadium could probably seat 40,000 and I doubted it was even a quarter full. Still- ten thousand people were potentially looking to us for guidance.

I didn’t wake Haley. She’d… grown larger, overnight. If a Pathfinder dragon’s size was tied to age, she was growing at a… substantially faster rate than she should have been. By my mental estimates she was easily 6 feet from tail to tip now. Almost the next age category then. That would put her at somewhere around 5 years of draconic growth per day. Or, Great Wyrm size, somewhere around Godzilla in scale, in less than a year. Oh, honey…

I loved my wife. That was not in doubt. If she’d been crippled, or gotten sick, or some other calamity had befallen her, I’d have known how to stand by her no matter what it took. But she’s the Chosen One now. This is some kind of fucked-up inverse isekai, with a whole alien world come to us, and something picked her to handle it. I didn’t know that, of course. It could have been wholly coincidental that she just happened to get the most ludicrous power-up in litRPG history, on the same day that the world began to end. Even if it was, though, I knew her. Once she had the power, the outcome was never in doubt.

She’s going to save them.

Where did a husband fit in? A soft, squishy husband full of extremely killable organs? I couldn’t fly or fight. One good shot last night would have ended me before we even got started. My skill sets were limited to writing business software architecture and running role-playing scenarios. I can’t even fix a picket fence, we call her dad in for that. I could advise, and support, but chasing after her? I knew her goal was important, and I supported her in that, I was willing to die for that if need be, but what could I really contribute? I knew she might get herself killed if she didn’t have people to cover her. But soon enough she’d find companions more capable than me, if this ran the way I thought it was. And then?

You’re going to outgrow me, dearest. Maybe you already have.

She stirred, and called out. “Sean? I had the weirdest dream- oh.” She sounded almost disappointed, to discover her form hadn’t changed back overnight.

I put on a brave face and chuckled as I walked over to hug her. “Not a dream. Still a dragon. Still helping people. Wake up, honey.” She clambered to all fours- now three feet high, easily- and ambled over to the window, propping up on her hind legs to look out.

“Oh. There’s so many- oh. Sean, what are we going to tell all of them? What are they going to eat? We have to- to-” she was working herself into a panic.

I felt Sherriff take over my vocal cords, let it happen- “< Easy there miss, you’ve been doing fine. Afore Sean went t’sleep I asked a few of my kind to see what you had around here that they could digest and give us some options when we woke up. You take your time, and remember you ain’t all on your lonesome here. You’ll need to delegate some, in a situation like this.>”

She nodded, still staring out the window. “It just feels unreal. People, I mean, human people, never looked to me for anything. I was just a student, and then a TA, and then a teacher, and I mean that’s some kind of authority, but in a crisis? Everyone’s probably waiting on a presidential address, or something. But we moved first, and now all these people... “

She laughed, lightly, but it turned into a hiccuping sob. “ Hulp- erp- ohh that’s really unpleasant with this throat.” She sat down, back to the window and the issue of our growing dependents. “Sean… I don’t think I can do this. Any of this.”

Wait, what?

I just waited. Eventually she waved one paw and elaborated. “The idea I have in my mind, this fantasy hero, it isn’t me. I loved the thought of being the smartest person in the room, the one who made the impossible connection, who stood up and saved the world. But... “ she trailed off.

I tried a prompt. “But not like this?”

She nodded eagerly. “Yes! I didn’t want the world to end for my fantasy. The thing about being a hero was it meant something had to have gone terribly wrong, for a huge number of people. All the stories focus on the aftermath, the unconnected person coming to clean it up. They never have to tell everyone how to live. But now something terrible has happened, here, to these people, and here I am getting stronger and bigger but not any smarter as far as I can tell, and I’m just wondering… am I supposed to know what to do? Am I failing right now? Did I-” she choked again. “Whatever this is. Did I cause this?”

“Oh, Haley.” I walked to her, bent down and held her again. She was radiating heat now that she was awake. It was actually rather pleasant on my still-damp clothing. “You know you didn’t. But… maybe something out there thinks you might be able to fix it.”

“But I can’t!” she wailed, voice pitching up. “I’m a monster now and I don’t have the slightest clue what I’m supposed to do! How can I help all these people? They need food, and shelter, and organization, and communication! All we’re doing is reacting, because it’s all coming too fast. I want to help them but every time I look down and see claws instead of hands I feel like I’m less-”

“Less what?”

“Less me.”

Maybe that’s my role, in all this. To keep you grounded. I knelt down until I was eye level with her, took that long face in both hands and stared into her eyes. I leaned in slowly, and placed the gentlest kiss I could on top of her nose. It was so hot it made my eyes water. I didn’t react, just held that steady eye contact until her eyelids started to close and she relaxed, the weight of her head settling into my hands. Only then did I risk speaking. “You’ve never been more you, Haley. You’re so you right now that it scares me a little.”

“What do you mean?”

I sighed and thought back. “You remember that time, with the homeless guy? You came to see me for lunch at the office, and we saw him camping with his daughter in the stairwell of the parking garage. There’d probably been a thousand people who’d walked by them that day and not thought twice about it. You actually stopped, and asked him why he wasn’t at one of the shelters.”

She laughed. “I did! He said the only places in town wouldn’t take him and his daughter, there was a men’s shelter and one for women and children, and the two of them didn’t want to split up. And I got so mad- “

“That you completely lost track of lunch and went straight down to the shelter to read them the riot act. You were on their case for two weeks before they finally caved and let them stay. That’s always been you, Haley- charging off after the next righteous cause. It’s all I can do to keep up with. But I have kept up, somehow.” I surprised myself with that. “Huh. That’s… true. And I fell in love with you while watching the difference you made.” I held her close. “It doesn’t matter if you have scales or wings or you’re two hundred feet long. The day you really stop wanting to make a difference, that’s the day I’ll worry you’ve stopped being you.”

We stayed that way for a little longer, just letting the day pass over us. The silence was eventually broken by a knock on the door. I looked at Haley and cocked my head. “Whole lot of people out there, waiting on us. You ready?”

She took a deep breath and nodded. “With you, yes. Always.”

---

There was a small crowd by the front gates. A good number of humans who’d taken our flyers had shown up, at least a hundred among the increasing masses of infomorph vessels heading into the stadium. Among their number was an EMT who’d set up a bit of a triage station, or as much of one as could be managed given that none of us knew the first thing about the alien biology. Still nobody else with the ability to translate, though Sherriff thought he might have some way around that.

Haley walked over to speak to the somewhat jittery-looking med tech, while I consulted the houseguest in my brain. “ < When we eat something, we know it, or at least, we can reference it, if we have the tools. Until the body digests it anyway. It’s how we talk to each other, if we’ve got language barriers. Somebody makes a copy of their language center, the other party eats it, then they can talk until it’s all gone. Do that a few times, it starts to become memory, real memory, the kind you can’t digest.>” So we could write some kind of translation, copy it out a few thousand times, and the whole species could speak English overnight? Hmm.

One of the infomorph vessels, a hauler by the look of the beetle-shaped carapace, approached me. “< Beg pardon sir, you’d be Sherriff’s vessel, right? My name’s Cyran and I’ve been working on the food problem since last night. We got some results you might want to see.>” The pony-sized beetle led us over to a table where a variety of items were laid out. Books, dvds, papers, smart phones, an external hard drive, various other detritus that we’d determined might contain processable “Food” as the infomorphs understood it.

In their world, they were supported by an entire informational ecology. At the lowest level, “Flora” would subsist on surface measurements- wind force, temperature, the recording of any passing disturbances- usually recorded directly into some cellular matrix and then “Burned” by some mechanism I still didn’t understand, converted in the same way that humans processed food for chemical energy. Higher lifeforms could consume those matrices entirely, placing them in a cavity- usually located around the belly- which would strip them of coherent information without damaging them physically. This information would be processed by these herbivores, consolidated in some way into info-packets which had greater density and higher nutritional value, supporting in turn an ecology of “Carnivores” who exclusively hunted and dined on these livestock, though not usually destructively. In fact, old age and information-borne disease were the two chief causes of mortality in their world, and infomorphs, consciousnesses not bound to one body, could live arbitrarily long lives. It sounded pretty incredible to me- like it had to be intelligently designed, to some purpose. Sherriff assured me that if there was one, his people had never discovered it to date.

But here in our world that ecology didn’t exist. Though it had only been a day, we hadn’t yet encountered any non-sentient life from Sherriff’s world, which was itself probably a big clue if only I knew what to make of it. But for now, it meant they were going to have to see if they could use any of our data as food, or we would begin losing people to starvation within the week.

The little beetle gestured to the table. “< We tried the papers as you suggested but didn’t get much out of them. We think the language barrier and read-only nature of the pages make the data too indigestible for us. These discs seemed more palatable but we couldn’t get anything off of them, very frustrating. This though!>” It held up a small USB stick. I assumed somebody had brought it in with them last night. “ <This is incredible! One of these could feed a person for a month, and so easy to get the food off!>” That made… a certain amount of sense. Maybe they were only able to interact with memory formats that could easily be overwritten? There was a lot that could be packed into a single USB stick. And they’d be reusable too- this might be the food solution we were looking for. I thanked the beetle-man and started formulating a plan in my head as I walked over to Haley and the medical team.

The EMT had been joined by a veterinary assistant who didn’t seem to be having much more luck- Insects the size of small horses not being very common even in the veterinary profession, I assumed. Haley was trying to intervene, though they seemed a bit reluctant to engage with the talking dragon- a problem we were going to keep having, I was afraid. I put a hand on her shoulder and spoke to the two. “Hello. Thank you for coming out here. What’s troubling you at the moment?”

The EMT gestured at a small crowd. “This biology’s just too different. They don’t have guts, do you understand how weird that is? They’ve got carapaces and fluids and they can definitely make noises but neither of us can tell just from looking if anything’s even broken. Then there’s this little guy- “ here he indicated a mustachioed worm-looking fellow, rather more roly-poly than caterpillar, who kept rearing back and waving his front arms while trying to get at the med supplies. The vet tech was fending him off. “- he obviously wants something but none of us speak his language.”

I nodded, turned to the roly-poly. “ <I can translate for you, what’s up?>”

He calmed down immediately and turned to me. “ <Oh! Yes, excellent. I’m a doctor and these fools are preventing me from treating my patients! We’ve got a lot of cuts and breaks here from ‘Encounters’ during our appearance last night, I need to get to work! Tell them to get out of the way.>”

I laughed. Well, that was why we were under such critical time pressure, after all. They desperately needed some way to communicate. I waved at the two humans. “He says you’re cramping his style. Here, come away and let him work with his patients. You guys stick to humans for now until we figure out how to translate for you.”

I turned to Haley. “In fact, that’s our number one priority and I have at least an inkling of an idea but it might be insane. Sherriff, could you duplicate the language portion of your brain and let one of these guys eat it?”

Haley started, but before she could speak Sherriff responded- audibly, for her benefit. “ <Nope, don’t think there’s space in here for that. But whatever I’m riding in seems a lot more like our brains than it does like yours. Might be I could move my whole self into some other vessel and we could make copies from there. Course you’d have to stick your head in one o’ their stomachs, and I can’t guarantee it’d be safe. Or that we’d understand each other once we were separated. Up to you.>”

Haley spoke up immediately. “Sean, that’s way too risky. We need to at least test a non-human brain first. Even anecdotally! < Hey, has anyone tried to eat anything living since they got here? Ask around.> ” Word spread through the camp quickly and we soon found three different infomorphs who’d managed to catch various “Wildlife-” two cats and what sounded like a possum- with nothing to show for it but a lot of scratches. That was three points in favor of letting one of them try to eat my head, as far as I was concerned. Haley was still opposed.

I pulled her aside. “Sherriff can’t live in my head forever, and we don’t have the resources to run this crowd around.”

She glared at me. “You’re being reckless! What if something happens to you?”

I shrugged. “Well, ideally, you think fondly enough of me to wish me back to full health with the literal resurrection powers you should be sporting in a couple of months. It’s a moderate risk as far as I’m concerned.”

She rocked back a bit at that. I didn’t think her power curve had really registered with her yet. “I just… wait!” She whipped her head around and I turned to see what she was looking at. Sure enough the vet tech had gone and gotten tired of our dithering and stuck her damn fool head into the belly cavity of one of the laborer beasts, largest of the vessels by far. Seeing the entirety of her head disappear into that hole I suddenly felt a lot less confident about my decision to stick my own cranium in there. But seconds later she popped her head out and gave a thumbs up.

“Didn’t even smell bad!”

So that settled that. I checked with Sherriff. You ready? Come back and visit me, okay? I felt the mental equivalent of a nod. Alright, let’s get you out of our skull. Walking over to the labourer, I patted his side and knelt down underneath. He was almost horse-high, so it wasn’t too cramped to get below him. I took a deep breath, and put my head up into the cavity.

It wasn’t like being eaten. It wasn’t even like getting an MRI, though there was that same sense of an invisible field being present, some great energy that you couldn’t really see or interact with but that permeated the dark interior of the labourer’s body. I waited for a tingle in my head, something to tell me it was done, and for a long time felt nothing at all, but then-

I was-

We were-

Sherriff was out of my head-

I was in the mindspace of the labourer vessel-

But I could still feel everything he thought-

But I could still feel everything he thought-

I, the human me, collapsed to the ground. It was overwhelming. The human mind was not designed to be in two places at once, to process inputs from two different types of body simultaneously. It felt like my mind had shattered, each prism reflecting a different facet of reality. I, the labourer, looked down at my collapsed body. The infomorph already in there was reaching out to me, to Sherriff, in some way my mind couldn’t fathom, trying to prop him up. I- we- opened our mouths. “Back in- head back in-” was all I could get out before the ability for conscious thought left me altogether.

I, the Sherriff me, didn’t fare much better. As soon as the digestive cavity scanned me out of that tiny place the world opened up but then fractured. I was the vessel but I was still the human. Something was linking us, our senses overlapping- this was unsustainable. I had to go back. They were pushing Sean-me’s head back into the cavity. I didn’t have much time. With the space now available I pulled out the language center of my memories- ouch- and left it to the labourer to copy as he could. I’d just have to learn how to speak again. Then it was back into my head, now a bit roomier.

My head popped out of the cavity, now whole again, and I gasped. I was surrounded by worried faces. The labourer said something, and it sounded like a modem catching fire. I didn’t understand- I didn’t understand. I felt Sherriff in the back of my head, and he signalled contentment and exhaustion, but didn’t speak. I didn’t need him to, I could remember what he’d done.

Haley spoke “He asked, are you alright? Which is a silly question, because you’re clearly not, and you should have listened to me. ”

I wiped the blood from my nose- when had that started- and shook my head, “Uh. Well, I guess Sherriff and I are a package deal, no more trying that again. But he can’t speak anymore, and I think that means…” I looked hopefully at the labourer.

It spoke English, in a voice like someone had smashed china plates together until their shards formed vocal chords. “ I. Yes. I understand how talk now. Better in time. Thank Sherriff for his loss."

I sighed in relief. “And you can copy it, yes? Soon you’ll all be able to talk?”

The labourer understood me! He nodded. “ Yes. Making copies soon or else eating. Start now.”

I lay back on the ground. “Okay. That’s… okay.” At least it wasn’t for nothing.

Haley poked me, very gingerly, with one claw where I was laying. I tried to swat her away but she was insistent. “They need the tools to help themselves, and we need to go downtown, and pick up a million USB sticks, laptops, a generator, some kind of mass copy device. I don’t want to go alone, and I can’t drive a truck like this anyway.”

The EMT, kneeling to check me out, perked up at the mention of downtown. “If you’re going in there be careful, alright? I’ve been listening to dispatch all morning, and something’s wrong with the downtown. It’s dead quiet for a couple miles in any direction from the city center- no people, no traffic. A couple squad cars went in but didn’t report back. Nobody knows what’s going on.”

Well didn’t that just sound like stage two of this little apocalypse.