The Cubus learned later that its neutrinos had reached a saturation point. All it knew at the moment of awareness was that it was separate from its human host, a thing apart. It could choose what it became within that human’s brain: a mammal, an insect, a sea creature, a garden plant, and it could hold that form outside the human’s fantasies. It could disagree with its human and ponder possibilities beyond the human’s narrow focus.
The Cubus preferred the human form and tried out all types: baby, child, teen (quickly abandoned), young person, old person, ancient person. It tried out sexes. It tried out appearances, from large to slender, from sedentary to active.
Cubi can always appear beautiful. The Cubus tried “not beautiful.” It tried “diseased.” It tried bodies with limitations.
The Cubus settled on a male body and then, eventually, on a particular look: approximately 1.7 meters, pale skin, green eyes, reddish hair.
And then the Cubus got restless. He “escaped” his current human—he learned later that Cubi never admitted to “escaping” those who fed them—and began to hunt for experiences. He traveled between human cities. He visited museums. He hiked to the tops of mountains, not that he had to exert himself but he forced himself not to simply reach the destination in a human’s head.
He gave himself a name, Lider, though some Cubi preached against taking names. Many of the same Cubi also preached against tagging a human, against being registered. Why give up the freedom of constant change and altering self-expression?
Lider thought these Cubi were tedious. Committing to a physical form was a challenge. He wasn’t afraid he would get bored once he became corporeal. He would learn to eat and sleep and get to places on his own. He would grow old. He would eventually die.
He wanted to move on to the next stage. But he didn’t want to waste the opportunity. Humans arrived on Earth through birth and with genetic codes, many of their interests and abilities and proclivities already determined. They had free will (though some Cubi debated that point) but they weren’t let loose on the world unfettered and ungrounded.
What am I? Lider thought. What’s my code?
* * *
Aside than other Cubi, of course. Lider and Will had a mutually respectful if somewhat formal relationship.
Lider should already be corporeal, but he had helped exorcise a demon over a year ago and lost himself. A set-back. Yet Rhys claimed that he and others on the Mars Space Station could see the outline of Lider now.
The video call didn’t pick up on Lider’s form. Technology and Cubi were still not entirely compatible. But Frankie could hear him faintly with the sound enhanced.
“Norton Priory was the first dig I attended,” Lider said. “It became a hobby—me traveling with a human to places and watching people investigate stuff. Troy. Wine cellars in Judea. Göbekli Tepe.”
“Mars,” Rhys said and grinned.
Rhys was sitting further back from the monitor to prevent his voice booming across the speakers. Current technology could compensate for variations in voice strength, but Lider and Rhys were on the Mars Space Station and using whatever communications technology was available. The call was specially arranged. It helped to have friends in high places, and it helped that a member of Frankie’s Congregation was still on the station.
The image was steady at least, and the sound reasonably good. Frankie caught a faint murmur and guessed that Lider had turned to speak to Rhys, who laughed.
A striking couple, Will called them, and Frankie could imagine them together. In her dream, Lider had looked about twenty-six, an Irish lad evincing a combination of cheekiness and gravity. Rhys was near forty, olive-skinned with high cheekbones and a constant air of skeptical, reserved amusement, rather like Will.
He was less gregarious than Will. More edgy. But then, as Will pointed out before Frankie started the call, Lider and Will had entered the in-between stage—no intimate contact in dreams or in the corporeal world until Lider became fully corporeal. Some Cubi and their humans gave up at this stage, but Rhys and Lider wanted Lider to become fully corporeal.
Not like me and Will, where I don’t know what I want from him, and he seems to mostly want his own ends.
Or like Xaiver and Phillipe, where one member was pushing full steam ahead on a relationship the other didn’t even admit to.
Frankie would envy Lider and Rhys if she wanted her life to be a series of constant negotiations.
She didn’t. But she didn’t think she and Will could keep circling each other like wary roommates.
She said, “Do you recollect what was retrieved during the initial excavations? Any relics?”
Cubi did have impressive memory recall. That recall enabled them to form exact images in dreams and to accrue forms to themselves. Still—at the distance of two hundred years, Lider could be allowed some forgetfulness.
“Not a particular container or reliquary. But the human I was with—” his voice drifted as if he had turned to address the man behind him.
Rhys shook his head, his half-smile fond. He raised his eyes to the camera.
“Not a human that Lider tagged,” Rhys said to Frankie.
“Sorry,” Lider said, his voice audible. “I was speaking to Rhys. Yeah, not a human I tagged. But that human, he, uh, took things home. I protested. In his dreams, at least. I suppose I shouldn’t besmirch his reputation now—”
“I suppose. Walter Farage. He was a volunteer. Nineteen. Young,” Lider added, agreeing with a murmured word from Rhys. “But old enough to know better. The head archaeologists were clear about the importance of recording finds in situ. Walter wasn’t stealing—I mean, not actively stealing. That is, he was really. But he didn’t see it that way. It was more a sense of entitlement. I’m helping out. I get to carry bits and pieces away with me.”
“I gave him nightmares,” Lider said. “Is Will there? Tell him, I know nightmare-causation isn’t allowed, and I was ashamed. But it was like watching a body be dismantled. I left, accompanied a different human to a dig in France.”
Frankie said, “Where did Walter Farage live?”
“Nice house in the area. He was local. And the family had ties to various businesses. I never—I didn’t check back. Once I left, I didn’t think about Norton Priory that much again at all.”
Rhys said to Frankie’s left, the spot from which Lider’s voice emanated, “Do you do that? Fret about what you should have done, didn’t do, did wrong when you were recently sentient, a young Cubus?”
Frankie didn’t hear Lider’s reply. Rhys’s expression eased slightly. One corner of his mouth turned up.
He said, “I’m not sure worrying is the only definition of sentience.”
His next comment was far too low for Frankie to make out. But Lider must have responded because Rhys laughed, eyes crinkling.
Suffused with humor, Lider’s voice reached Frankie. “I didn’t go looking for absolution until years later. Got my own priest and everything.”
Frankie allowed herself a smirk at the pair: one visible, one not quite.
“Thank you for the information,” she said and waited until Lider said, “You’re welcome. If I remember more, I’ll contact you.”
The screen snapped to black. Frankie leaned back and sighed.
Will was not, in fact, present. “I don’t want a Cubi interpreter,” she’d told Will. “Not if I can actually hear Lider,” and Will acquiesced.
Boundaries. Lines in the sand. If Will was going to parcel out information, so could Frankie.
She couldn’t function with “what ifs.” She had to stick to concrete actions, to rejoinders and information based on relevant questions and topics. She couldn’t be treated like a Cubus, practically invisible except when Will wanted to engage.
Justin and Victor and Phillipe would arrive at Norton Priory in a few days. She and her people could confer about Walter Farage and the possible stolen relics and what to do next. They knew what Frankie knew. She knew what they told her. If they learned more, it would be through the same methods that Frankie used.
Frankie would never blame them for what they didn’t know. She couldn’t begin to list the things she didn’t know, the people she couldn’t reach, the sources she couldn’t track down.
She was fair. They were fair. That was the point.
Communication failed, perhaps. Phillipe insisted on his perspective. Justin handed over data without explanations. Victor tried to see everyone’s point of view without providing his own. But they strove to meet each other half-way.
Not Will. Will wanted to lurk, to be involved only to a point, to use Frankie’s investigation for his own ends. Will had been waiting for something—for Bettelin, for the wolf child?
Will he leave now he has the answers he sought?
Maybe that’s best. If he stays, something has to change. I can’t help but confide, but I can’t keep confiding without receiving confidences, freely offered, in return.
Lider defined sentience by regrets: what one didn’t do, what one forgot, what one did piecemeal, what one did half-assed.
Frankie could totally relate.
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