The Daily Grind - Bonus Chapter 2 (Patreon)

This one fits between 123 and 124.

_____

Spire-Cast-Behind was having a lazy day.

There was likely a context where you could call it a strange day, but subjectively, it was no stranger than any other day she had experienced so far.  Though there was a foundational confusion that was always there, so maybe it would be better to say every day was somewhat strange.  For one thing, there were days at all.

As a camraconda, she had been created with an amount of distant academic knowledge that had slowly unpacked as it became relevant.  Days as governed by nature had never really come up, though she could have told you how long the standard workday was, and what overtime happened to be.  Which mostly meant that to her and to most of her species, days were eight and a half hours long.

Usually her people would sleep every third day or so, but there weren’t many functional clocks in the tower she’d awoken to true life in, so actually knowing if she was correct was impossible by now.  With no way to record it or actually keep time, it would just be a rough estimate, the truth of the matter fading into history.

Here, ‘outside’ of the biomes of cubicles and hard carpet, a day was twenty four hours.  So most people were expected to sleep and then also be active within a single day.   Despite Spire-Cast-Behind’s chosen name, this seemed far less of a good idea than simply having a dedicated sleep day, even if the math on how many hours you slept was the same.

But then, the humans and cats that ran this other world had apparently been required to contend with a very insistent overhead light source.  So she didn’t blame them too much.  The sun made the days, the days were what they’d built their society around, and so the sun was really the one in charge.

So she was having a day.

Some camracondas had begun a habit of watching the sun rise and set, taking the considerable effort to climb the drop down ladder to hang out on the roof of the building.  They would silently observe as the sky would change colors from brilliant oranges and reds to softer purples and pale blues before the sun stabilized overhead and the day really ‘began’.  Different groups for the morning and evening, but still a sizable chunk of their population wordlessly basking in the simple joy of a world that worked without something puppeting it.

Silence was sort of the default state for a camraconda.  They could hiss, and whine, and even scream a little bit.  But they had never really known how far the protection of their tower of cramped boxes had stretched, so loud noises weren’t something they’d ever gotten used to making.  And forming a language out of just the hiss was… perhaps possible.  Spire-Cast-Behind didn’t actually know.  She knew things like statistics about auto manufacturing and what species of owl lived in an Asia, whatever that was.  She didn’t know about linguistics, which would have actually been useful.

And now many of her species had another option to speak.  One of the invasive weapons of Officium Mundi, the name the humans gave her home, repurposed and turned to a boon and not a curse.  She herself wore a small tight harness with a pair of speakers connected to her mind through a long cord that didn’t match her own exterior color.  Not that fashion was something she cared for, it was just amusing.

Virgil had made it for her himself.  And now he was gone, along with her brother.  Spire-Cast-Behind didn’t know how to feel about it.  Angry seemed like a good selection, but anger didn’t come to her freely anymore, after the first day or two.  Instead she felt hollow when she thought of them.  Two more people lost to her.  And Cold-Wind-Friction had come all this way, only to die now.  It was… it hurt.  She thought she had been done hurting.

For so, so long she hadn’t let herself feel anything, to keep that hurt staved off.  And then when the Order had ripped away the chains of the old world and brought her here to a new one, she had felt gratitude.  Relief in a flood that threatened to overwhelm her entirely.  But they weren’t even done there, they gave gifts.  Speech was one, and she was meant to meet with someone later this week to discuss that further.  But there were more treasures shared.

Food.  Water.  Privacy, even in a limited form where you might need to share a room with a few other corded serpents.  But what rooms they were.  No edges that threatened to topple away from the whole of the structure, no hard corners that dug into the body when slithering across.  Instead they had blankets, bedding, and mattresses.

While she had previously been aware intellectually of what a bath was, and now was familiar with a bed, Spire-Cast-Behind was still a little fuzzy on what could possibly be ‘beyond’ those two, or how it tied into her shared room.  Shelves, maybe?  Whatever it was, it wasn’t really important, despite what James insisted.  What was, was that she had a king’s ransom worth of soft things that they could sleep in to their biomechanical heart’s content.

This was how she was spending the start of her day.  Not sleeping, exactly, but curled up with the end of her mouth resting on her own tail.  Camracondas, unlike ‘real’ snakes, didn’t really have what she’d heard some humans calling a snoot, since most of her head was centered around the rectangular living metal structure of the camera that was how she saw the world.  But that didn’t stop her from finding a comfortable position after having slithered loops to wind underneath two different soft fuzzy blankets, and laying her head down to rest.

She’d already slept.  And now she could lounge here, warm and free, and do nothing but think and feel.  Even if that thinking was painful sometimes, it was still worthwhile.

It was also a good time to practice her speech, since the several others that she shared this room with were either on the roof, or wandering the hallways of the Lair, or trying to find ways to make themselves useful.  Many camracondas would understand reveling in the newfound power of speech, but if they were trying to sleep, it could become irritating, so Spire-Cast-Behind enjoyed the time alone.

”Hello.”  The voice didn’t sound right.  It did exactly what it was supposed to, but it wasn’t right.  “Hello.”  Same tone, identical.  But still off.  “Hello, I am…”

She didn’t finish the sentence, and it didn’t so much trail off as it stopped dead.  Spire-Cast-Behind wasn’t simply forcing her thoughts into the speakers as voice, like they’d had to do at the start.  Instead, there was a program of some kind made with something from her home.  Again, it was from Virgil, in a way.  And it was so much easier.

Spire-Cast-Behind knew English.  Just like she knew about what hurricanes were and how to groom a dog.  The information had been in her head from her creation, just with no outlet.  And camracondas learned fast, so those with her that didn’t know the vernacular already were able to quickly pick it up.  But there was a difference between technically knowing the words, and having experience speaking it.  And what she was doing was one step removed from speaking, even.

Even now, she wasn’t sure she could practice sentence structure on her own.  Where the pronouns were supposed to go was hard to remember.  But that wasn’t what she was trying.  Instead, she was trying to get the rather confusing user interface of the program that was running on a small computer plugged into the back of her head to change a setting.

”Hello.”  The word was so simple.  Spire-Cast-Behind liked it quite a lot.  You only needed to say hello to new people, and for the first time in her several year long life, there were new people aplenty.  “Hello.”  She repeated out loud into the blankets covering her body.

Ah, there it was.  Whatever she had changed had worked.

”Hello.”  A third time, and she trembled with barely contained joy, closing her eye and simply letting herself sink back into her bed.  “Hello hello hello hello.”  Over and over, repeating the word.  And each time, hearing something different.

That little program Virgil had grown and modified, that let them streamline turning thoughts into words, to the point that it might be reflexive one day and not a mentally taxing task, allowed her something that no camraconda in any world had ever had before.  Each time she spoke that one word, it was different.  Contained within a range of resonance, articulation, tone, and volume.  Not uncontrolled, but with tiny variances inside her parameters that made her sound…

Not human.  But she wasn’t human.  Instead, it simply sounded like a voice.  Like her voice, now.

”Hello.”  Spire-Cast-Behind murmured, dialing down the volume as she writhed under the tangled mass of bedding.  “Yes.  Hello.  Yes, good.  Is good.  This is good.”  The new program even let her put emphasis on things, even casually.

Years ago, when the camracondas had first realized that they couldn’t leave the place that was both shelter and prison all at once, they hadn’t really understood at first.  They knew things, but they didn’t know what to do with that knowledge now that they weren’t being given orders.  Early on, they had realized that the things that were with them in the stacked cubicles they now resided in were all they were ever going to have.

That hadn’t stopped them from trying to make use of those things, though.  If anything, it meant they found meaning and expression in even small acts of artistic creation.  While she didn’t really feel like an artist at the time, Spire-Cast-Behind had, after a week of practicing the motions, had taken a single piece of paper.  And with a line of her own venom and a fang, had drawn a simple, slightly warped circle on it.

She wasn’t sure why she’d done it.  She’d been bored, maybe.  Searching for purpose, probably.  But something about the action had made her feel free in a way that she never had before.  She still had that piece of paper; the knights of the Order of Endless Rooms had brought it with them when they’d fled the Office.  It was sitting on a shelf in this very room.

While she hadn’t made art again, instead leaving the materials to the others who seemed more taken to it, the sensation hadn’t ever really faded.  It was the first thing she’d ever really done for herself, without a command she wasn’t allowed to disobey.  It was a kind of magic.

And now, that feeling of freedom, of an imprisoning force cracking and sloughing off of her like sliced cables, was bolstered by a twin moment of pure expression.  The sensation of having her own voice.  Her voice.

The camraconda didn’t know how long she spent there, nestled up in her bed alone, repeating simple words and phrases that vibrated a more natural semi-random cadence, reveling in how life changed.

For so, so long, life hadn’t changed.  And now she was in a place where changes came fast and light, like rain.

Oh, there was rain.  It was different from what Spire-Cast-Behind had thought it was going to be.  The concept of an ecosystem where water cycled through the environment made perfect sense to her, but she’d never actually touched water before coming here, so the way being wet felt was novel.  It was also a bizarre experience to feel differently about being wet in different contexts.  Rain, for example, felt annoying, while showers felt comforting, which didn’t make sense, since they were just big rain all at once.

Spire-Cast-Behind didn’t really know why she even felt those things, but it was interesting to explore them.

Speaking of exploring, there was some of that to be done today.  Somewhere in Spire-Cast-Behind’s thoughts, a small piece of a living idea resonated with its other pieces, and nudged her in a reminder that she couldn’t actually spend the whole day in bed.  It was polite enough to let her ignore it if she wanted, but she decided to follow the impulse anyway.

She could just stay here all day.  Spire-Cast-Behind was no stranger to spending hours at a time listlessly staring at a blank wall, lying motionless to conserve energy and wondering what the difference was between surviving and waiting for death.  But this was different.  She wasn’t hungry, the need for more orbs to keep operating replaced by a diet of food and water.  She wasn’t trapped, the door was rigged up to be easy for her to open and she could go anywhere she wanted.  And maybe that was the thing; she could stay here.  It was a choice that she could make, and that made it appealing.

But part of her thoughts were rather insistent, so she slithered herself upright, casting off the fuzzy blankets and toppling the arrangement of round stuffed animals that Taste-Of-Air enjoyed setting up.  Her day would probably still count as lazy, since she’d spent at least a few hours of it lounging, but she shouldn’t avoid speaking to the others forever.

Spire-Cast-Behind dropped down off the mattress to the area rug that dominated the floor.  The humans had been apologetic that the best they could do for the concrete room was to cover it with soft comfort, which… well, Spire-Cast-Behind did technically understand.  So much of her imprinted knowledge was about corporate etiquette, and how the display of wealth equated to status and soft power.  This room would never pass for a place to meet someone for a negotiation.  But it wasn’t really supposed to, and she’d pieced together on her own that she shouldn’t accept apologies for things that were not slights.

She liked her shared room.  Liked the shelves with all their art they’d brought along, liked the little low Japanese style table for making more art or having breakfast, liked the row of low hooks on the wall by the door that they could use to assist with getting dressed.

It wasn’t exactly a place made for her, and it might never be, but it was home.

Spire-Cast-Behind slithered herself up to one of those pairs of hooks, grabbing her favorite modified coat in her fangs and using deft movements of her head to drape it in the space.  Twisting lithely once it was in place, she maneuvered her body to let the garment curl around her side, and then a second twist connected the pieces of velcro so it would stay on.  And then she was ready to leave.

Not, the camraconda admitted as she used the lever to push her door open and made her way into the basement hall, that she actually had a problem being unclothed.  It was simply that she liked how it felt to have something of her own with her.

_____

Elevators were a problem for a camraconda, but not as much of a problem as stairs.  Technically, this was true for humans as well, so Spire-Cast-Behind didn’t really have that much of a problem with using her face to awkwardly press a button.  And eventually, she did get to the basement that was ‘sideways’ from the one she lived in.

Slithering into the open room that the people who studied her home used, it wasn’t too hard to find the person that she had promised to talk to today.  Mostly because she was in the process of arguing with Reed, and seemed to be adeptly wearing her opponent down.

”…absolutely, under no circumstances, ever, am I going to let you do that!”  Reed’s voice was a higher pitch than many other humans, but Spire-Cast-Behind found it comforting.  It sounded a lot like how she imagined a lot of her own people would sound if they had their own natural voices; constantly anxious about the state of flux their world was in.  Just a little overwhelmed, at all times.  She empathized with him.

In contrast, Momo’s voice was enthusiastic and ready for anything, which was a deception of the highest order.  But it was also aware of it, and so, funny.  Or at least, Spire-Cast-Behind thought so.  “What ifffff… I bribed you?”  Momo was saying as she sat on the edge of someone’s desk, feet clad in long black boots kicking in the air.

”Do you have any idea what James pays us?”  Reed asked rhetorically as he dismissed the offer.

”Not really.”  Momo admitted, taking it seriously.  “I figured I’d offer orbs or something.  Oh!  Or we could get one of the relationsticks from the Attic dungeon-“

”I thought we weren’t calling them that.”

“-and then I’ll owe you from whatever we end up sharing.”  Momo’s offer ignored Reed’s protest on naming conventions. Spire-Cast-Behind wasn’t sure why the humans seemed so hung up on titles and monikers sometimes.  As long as the point got across, information wasn’t lost, so what was the problem?  Momo continued as the camraconda approached closer.  “Bit of a gamble for a bribe, sure, but what if we end up sharing cuteness?  You could get all this for the low price of just… letting me… you know, have a cat.”

Reed pressed his face into his hands.  “That cannot be how they work.”  He groaned.  “Also that’s a terrible bribe.”

”Yes.”  Spire-Cast-Behind interjected herself into the conversation.  She was reasonably sure that this was okay, since she was supposed to be here, but she often struggled to find windows to start talking to people.  Most of the camracondas here did.  “Unneeded resource.”  She inclined her head toward Reed.

He pulled his head out of his hands and looked at her with a tired confusion, while Momo started laughing, and Spire-Cast-Behind rapidly began to worry that she’d said something wrong.  “Uh…” Reed titled his head to look at her.

”I think Spire’s flirting with you!”  Momo said between laughs.

Spire-Cast-Behind was not doing that.  Romance and sex were more of those things that were academic to her, but not yet experienced.  Some of the others of her nest had begun to let themselves feel and live both sides of that coin, but not her.  “Inaccurate.”  Spire-Cast-Behind settled on telling Momo.  “To be cute.  Not line up with job.  For Reed.”

”Oh!”  Momo gave a delighted gasp of laughter.  “I get it!  He’s not fitting, he’s delivering a burn powerful enough to barbeque your soul!”

”Souls aren’t real.”  Reed said, like it was a reflex.  “If they were, it would ruin a lot of theories, so they can’t be.”

Spire-Cast-Behind was reasonably certain that wasn’t how science worked.  She was also becoming increasingly frustrated with trying to convey her thoughts when she didn’t know how to put sentences together all the way, even if she fully understood the replies.  But she couldn’t fix that instantly.  What she could fix was Momo’s error.  “She.”  She told the girl sitting on the desk.

”Whu?”

”For myself.”  The camraconda reiterated.  “She.”

”Oh!  Sorry!”  Momo’s instant transition from a form of humor that Spire-Cast-Behind read as ironic, to sincere apology, was jarring.  But it was also welcome; it signaled a form of empathy that wasn’t new to the camracondas, but hadn’t ever had a chance to be spoken aloud.  Momo leaned forward to look at Spire-Cast-Behind with what was probably curiosity.  “How do you tell?”  She asked.

Reed shook his head, curly hair bobbing in the still air of the brightly cluttered concrete environment.  “Coloration, right?”

”incorrect.”  Spire-Cast-Behind hoped the word didn’t sound too harsh in her new voice.  “As for humans.  Aesthetic decision.”  She reminded them.

Momo stopped swinging her boots and cocked her head.  “Wait, what?”

”Spire, do you think… wait, what do you think pronouns are for?”  Reed asked with a growing confusion.  “No, hang on, Momo are pronouns an aesthetic thing?  You’d tell me if I needed to know this, right?”

”Sure wouldn’t.”  Momo lied to the Researcher as she tried to clarify for the camraconda.  “So, a lot of people use pronouns for, like… biological differences?  Actually, are camracondas dimorphic?”  She had to know.  It hadn’t come up, but Deb and Frequency-Of-Sunlight were dating or something, and Momo needed to know.

That was an easy question, one that Spire-Cast-Behind could answer without confusion.  “Yes.”  She nodded, and saw the humans start to nod.  “Sexual dimorphism.”  She added.  “And optional gender quadmorphism.”  That was probably a word.  Language played with words like that all the time anyway.

”…what?”  Reed looked so lost.  Maybe they wasn’t a word after all. Or perhaps he hadn’t had his coffee yet.  Humans needed coffee for certain higher order brain functions.

Momo was back to laughing.  “Wait, so, you guys use pronouns for style?  How do you tell what sex a camraconda is then?”  She said as she caught her breath.

”Examination.  How tell, humans?”  Now Spire-Cast-Behind was curious.  This wasn’t even remotely what she was here for, but this conversation was revealing in its own way.

”…I mean, I was gonna say pronouns, but that’s not even really always true is it?”  Reed muttered.  “Also Nikhail would get real mad at me if I said that.”

”So can you have kids?”  Momo asked suddenly.

The question confused Spire-Cast-Behind, until the imprinted knowledge in her lit up and began forming connections with the real world and the words she’d heard.  Meiosis, gestation, variances in how species gave birth, statistical and theoretical knowledge that had lingered untouched for years.  The broad strokes of the biology of an ecosystem.

And it was something that wasn’t for her.  Wasn’t for her people.  It was natural, in a way they would never be.  A whole method of existence, locked off from them, for a reason she couldn’t fathom and didn’t care to know.

It had been happening less recently, but every now and then, Spire-Cast-Behind ran into something that made her want to slither back into bed, and force herself asleep until the distress went away.  And now it happened again.

”Are you okay?”  Momo asked, and Spire-Cast-Behind realized she was silently staring at the floor, her posture drooping like a wilting vine.  “Spire?”

“Hello.”  Spire-Cast-Behind said on reflex as she snapped back to attention.  “Yes.  Will be.  Future okay.”  She hated the broken language that came out when she rushed.  And she was always rushing.  But it sounded more like her at least.

Reed stood slowly, like he didn’t want to startle her.  “Okay, I’m gonna… go do a thing.”  He said.  “Do either of you need anything while I’m still here?”

”Yes!  Let me pet the weird cat!”  Momo demanded, remembering why she’d stopped Reed in the first place.

Ah, there was a misunderstanding happening.  Spire-Cast-Behind could clear this up, and she was fairly certain she could pattern out the right words too.  “No.”  She admonished Momo.  “Cat is very large.  Would kill you.”  Ooh, she even pronounced the emphasis correctly.  Speaking was becoming even easier, Spire-Cast-Behind was quite proud of that.

For some reason, Reed started chuckling as he backed away.  ”Alright have fun, I need to go read more proposals for trying dumb things with orbs.”

Momo waved at him, and Spire-Cast-Behind tried to emulate the motion by bobbing her body.  After he was around a corner, Momo sighed and shook her head.  “You know I know the cat is huge, right?”  She asked.  “Like, I know you’re looking out for me, and I appreciate it, but I know the cat is huge.”

Spire-Cast-Behind hadn’t known that.  She tilted back, looking past Momo’s head and thinking as she watched a pair of humans walked by carrying an oversized microwave.  She decided they were supposed to be here, as Momo didn’t react, and refocused on the human woman.  “But it would kill you.”  She decided.

“It might not.”  Momo shrugged.  “I mean, like, why would it?  We feed it pretty well.  Maybe it’ll be grateful.”

”Puppet.”  Spire-Cast-Behind reminded her.  “Dangerous.  Violent to you.”

Momo frowned.  “Because it’s a green orb kinda life?”  She asked, and the camraconda nodded with a bob in reply.  “But so are you, right?  I mean, some of the paper people have different colors of orb, do you?”

That question hadn’t occurred to her.  “No.”  Spire-Cast-Behind said, her conviction in her knowledge cracking.  “I was puppet.  Previously.”  She mused out loud, letting her stray thoughts filter through the language program.  “Is that odd?”

”…girl you cannot ask me what’s odd and what’s not.”  Momo told her with a stare that probably meant something to the human, but the camraconda couldn’t make out the nuance of.  “Like, I wanted to talk to you today cause a million billion years ago, you said something about the totems I make, and I had a bunch of questions about turning glowing red golf balls into witchy devices that tell me how many boats there are in the city.  Odd was wayyyyyy back behind us at this point.”

”Because boats are odd.”  Spire-Cast-Behind looped her head around.  That, at least, made sense.  “Understand.”

Momo’s expression was readable enough that even the camracaond, new to the experience of reading humans, could figure out that she was having some kind of baffled thoughts.  “Boats are fine!  I’m talking about the magic!  Magic is new to me and I’m confused by it now tell me how to make totems!  Ahhhgh!”  The last thing wasn’t so much a word as a strangled noise that seemed to indicate distress.

Spire-Cast-Behind didn’t think that Momo had a healthy way to deal with her own emotions.  Not that she had any place to criticize, since her method had been to shut down and feel nothing.  But Momo seemed easily rattled.

“Connectors.”  Spire-Cast-Behind offered as helpfully as she could.

”Buh?”  Momo made another confused noise as she shoved her hair out of her face.

Spire-Cast-Behind tried to figure out how to word it.  “Small, many sharp legs.  They glow.  Connectors.  What makes them.”

”Oh, the iLipedes?  Yeah, that’s where I got the idea in the first place.  But they don’t really get creative with them!  And it’s really hard to get enough red orbs to get the ones we have down here to stop eating them and start making their webs.  Or connections, or whatever you said.  That thing you said, but pretend I got it right the first time.  I swear I’m paying attention, I’m just… I’m just tired.”  Momo’s voice broke slightly as she sagged down on her makeshift seat.

It seemed like many of the humans around here were often tired.  Spire-Cast-Behind could understand.  She felt tired a lot too.  But something Momo had said stood out to her.  “Are have connectors here?  Down here?”

“Eh?  Oh.  Yeah, sure.  A couple.  They sometimes want to come back with people.  We don’t kidnap them or anything.”  Momo shrugged as both of them watched someone awkwardly walk through the open space carrying a covered birdcage.  “…okay weird.”  Momo commented before shifting focus back.  “So you can’t help me build a totem that’ll force everyone within ten miles to know detailed statistics on stuff?”

”No.  Maybe.  Why?”  Spire-Cast-Behind had a lot of questions beyond why, but she would need time to put them together.  “What statistics?”

”I dunno, whatever I feel like.  Maybe something about carbon emissions or something, just to mess with people.”  Momo sighed.  “Thing is, I just don’t have enough red orbs to play with.  People bring some back, and I get some when I tag along on the delves, but it’s not like we copy them you know?”

Spire-Cast-Behind felt like she was overusing a single word, but it was coming in really useful for this conversation.  ”No.” She stated.  “Copy?”

Momo perked up.  “Oh yeah!  We’ve got a magic thing that duplicates stuff!  My vote was for bricks of gold, but we’re just using it for fancy magic items and teleporters instead which is probably fair.  It doesn’t have a lot of room, though.  Only, like.. what, a foot on each side I think?  And a little less than that tall.  So no one wants to waste it on my bullshit yet.”  She shrugged, scratching at the backs of her hands and clearly upset by it but not saying so.

That wasn’t large enough to copy many things.  Her own orb wouldn’t fit inside it, if she were to be harvested.  That had actually been a concern in the first few days, but it had faded with time and shared interactions within the Order.  It also certainly couldn’t have enough room to duplicate a camraconda, or a human.  But it might fit a connector - an iLipede, as Momo had called it.

Almost as soon as she’d had that thought, Spire-Cast-Behind dismissed it.  That wouldn’t help at all with the human’s investigation, if the bottleneck was orbs then having more creatures that fed on them wouldn’t solve anything.

Maybe they didn’t need to feed on orbs at all, though.  She hadn’t actually taken in what she’d thought was the only possible source of energy for… weeks?  Lots of days.  And she hadn’t died.  Was it possible iLipedes had a similar opportunity?  Spire-Cast-Behind hissed to get Momo’s attention away from the caged bird she was watching on the other side of the room, and asked her question.  “Could feed connectors?”  She felt a fire of embarrassment light up as she failed to properly articulate.  “Feed them food.  Not orbs.  Save orbs for project.”  Each word was painstakingly placed, but Spire-Cast-Behind managed to express herself.

”Can the lil guys eat things?”  Momo mused as she took in the suggestion.  “That would help cut down on how many orbs we go through.  And that would mean more for me!  Which, if I don’t scramble my own brain, I could probably do something cool with!”

”Worrying.”  The word slipped out, which was delightful.

Momo flapped a hand, not understanding how emotionally important an accidental piece of speech was.  “I’ll be fine.  No one can actually prove it’s brain damage.  What do you think iLipedes eat anyway?”

Spire-Cast-Behind wasn’t sure.  “Start small?”  She asked.  “An granola.  Or an cereal.  Small things.”

”Mmmh.  Yeah, that makes sense.  Maybe see if one of them wants one of those oatmeal cookies Nate foolishly left within my range of scavenging.”  Momo licked her lips, a clumsy tongue making an alien motion.  Placing a hand around her stomach, she looked down, then over at Spire-Cast-Behind.  “I’m hungry.  Wanna get lunch?”

At no point in her time here had Spire-Cast-Behind felt like her needs were neglected.  She didn’t actually know what the appropriate meal times were, and asking for food could often feel awkward, though.  So whenever a lunch was offered, she was eager to take anyone up on the offer.  “I accept.”  She declared as Momo hopped off the desk, and then spent a few seconds trying to reposition everything she’d shifted around while she’d been up there messing with someone else’s workstation.  “Lead please.” She instructed Momo.

The erratic girl might not have been someone Spire-Cast-Behind fully understood, and she certainly didn’t know half of what Momo was talking about as they waited for the elevator and the human started monologuing about sympathetic material uses and the frequency of triangles in totem design.  But, she was excellent at pushing elevator buttons, and carrying plates of food from the kitchen.

She also complimented Spire-Cast-Behind’s jacket as they ate, which placed her at the top of the list of humans that Spire-Cast-Behind would kill for if it ever came up again.

Lunch was something Momo called vegetarian stir fry.  Spire-Cast-Behind used her tongue and fangs to pick each individual piece out of her bowl, savoring the mix of sweet and salt that she’d spent her whole life not even knowing was an option.  Momo continued talking about her totem project while they ate, and Spire-Cast-Behind did her best to reply when she knew an answer or had something to offer.  She almost felt like they were on level ground for the conversation, since she was capable of speaking while eating, and Momo was…

Well, humans weren’t actually capable of articulating around mouthfuls of food.  But that didn’t stop her lunch companion from trying.

It was a lazy afternoon, and Spire-Cast-Behind was content with it.

____

Later that night, Spire-Cast-Behind caught up with a group of others.  Her own people.  Or maybe that was the wrong term to use now.  She had a lot of time to think throughout the long days, and she wasn’t quite sure what her people were every time it came up in her musings.

Were her people camracondas?  Or only these camracondas, that had survived their trial and been brought to an unpromised home?  Only her strain of camraconda, with this specific model of camera head, and the specific rounded shape of the tail?

Or was it even closer and more personal than that, and her people were the three others she shared a room with?  Or bigger, in the other direction, and ‘her people’ were the people who had been there for her when she needed them; everyone from the other cabled serpents that were slowly picking names and finding voices, to the humans and their mixed allies that had liberated them.

Spire-Cast-Behind liked that version.  She liked the idea that her people could include Momo, and James, and all the others that brought her here.

It did make it confusing to sort her own thoughts out though, when she wanted to mark a memory of having met with a group of camracondas that were part of her surviving family.  To share new knowledge and experiences, to revel in being able to communicate at all.

Outline-Of-Green had picked a name for himself, fascinated by the shapes and scents of the supposedly natural growth around them.  Color-Of-Dawn was still avoiding everyone, but had been coaxed out to make sure it knew about the update to the speaking programs.

Scent-Of-Rain and an unnamed sibling had been to the meeting the humans called a support group.  The idea was still a bit unfamiliar, but the point was to talk about their feelings, to make sure that everyone had an opportunity to self-express, and to validate the existence of emotions.  And even with their more limited communication option, both camracondas reported that they felt… not better.  But more whole.  Or like they could keep going forward easier than before.

For her own part, Spire-Cast-Behind demonstrated what she’d found the speech facilitation program capable of, and took her time to explain the process of making ‘her’ voice.  Not all of the others wanted to try that route, some insisting on learning to do it with no interface at all, which was a serious challenge.  It might take them days, or weeks, to figure it out on their own, and in that time the others would be growing more practiced with their voices.  But, the counterargument went, if they could do it with no help, the voice would actually be their own.

There was no right answer, only feelings on the matter, and a shared sense of exploration.  And so what if it took time?  The humans talked about things like ‘next year’ in real, concrete terms, and not as an abstract dream that they might die before it happened.  And now Spire-Cast-Behind could dare to think that way too.  To consider that she would be alive in a month, a year, a decade.

She was going to grow old here.  Better yet, she was going to learn if camracondas even grew old at all.  What was a month learning a language compared to that much time?

One of her siblings, filled with the long ago imprinted knowledge of what a fish was, wanted to learn more about that.  Another one wanted to learn what a spreadsheet was.  One wanted to know how to actually make the things that they used as bedding.  There was so much of this fantastic and bizarre world to know about, so many things that seemed alien and new and desirable.

They had so much time now.  To choose names and learn who they were, to open up to each other without wondering who would be the next to run out of life or be claimed by heat rot.  To be alive.

Spire-Cast-Behind would forever cherish the first pieces of art her people had made, those early expressions of freedom in a world that would rip away their very thoughts if they strayed outside their prison.  But while some of her siblings looked for ways to enshrine and honor their past, she saw something different.  She saw what was ahead of them.

She saw some of her kin with smaller knowledge imprints filling that gap with curiosity and fumbling creativity.  Making new art, with help from human hands, out of materials they’d never had before.  And in those little moments, there was the potential for an endless future alongside the people who had fought for them.

Communicating this was impossible.  She didn’t know the right way to pattern the words yet.  But Spire-Cast-Behind was nothing if not determined, and so she worked on the phrasing and syntax silently as the gathering ended and the variously colored camracondas split apart to return to their rooms or the common areas or the roof to watch the sky and the cars and the trees.

She was still working on it as she got back to her own room, using the hooks to doff her coat with a rip of velcro as she slithered to the bed.  Slithering into the blankets, and finding a warm spot already existing from where Taste-Of-Air was already sleeping.  Spire-Cast-Behind twisted cable muscles to roll herself up against her companion, pressing into the other camraconda’s back and curling up together as she felt exhaustion closing in.

Humans had long days.  And so, too, had she.

Composing an explanation would have to wait until tomorrow.  But she tried to sink her fangs into the memory of where certain words should go, and used that little mental nudge that was excellent for studying to remind herself what a definitive article was.

When she woke up, she might even remember some of it.