Mission Data Entry #001
Time: 0945
Location: Inner Srijid Jungle
Temperature: 36.6 degrees Celsius
Humidity index: 88%
This is Ronit Weiss reporting in for initial mission data entry before descent. Maw of the Ishta has been successfully located.
Visor calculations show statistics as follows:
- mouth tissue is bright pink—good coloration and health
- teeth are intact and center faced, not broken or shifted outwards—another sign of good health
- approximate dimensions of 110 meters in length by 49 meters in width
- 0.02% growth of mouth circumference since prior survey conducted ten Srijid years ago
(Standby for upload of growth plate ring calculations)
-approximate age of 5000 Srijid years, or 9998 Terran years
No signs of other lifeforms besides creeping moss, hangman trees, myself, and my bonded Argiz. Oxygen supply check: cyanobacteria stores communal with my bonded Argiz in good health. Water check: mounted purifier functional. Beginning camera footage and going off comms with initial descent.
It takes a special kind of dumbass to throw oneself on purpose into the mouth of an Ishta. No one had done that since the Mirzhak civilization committed mass ritual sacrifice some four thousand years ago. Now they’re fertilizer shat from the other end of the Ishta, footnotes in ancient intergalactic history holotexts, a line or two in paragraphs on extinct races. Even those eedus with half-chewed peas for brains don’t think to graze here. Winged things fly well over my head and the mist. None of them dare to roost near a giant steaming mouth that could suck them in like an infernal toilet.
The damp clings and drags like a wet blanket. Sweat doesn’t dry here. It just pools in the cracks between my bust, pits, and ass.
It’s dead and quiet as a crypt for miles around. Quieter than the crypt I had infiltrated to steal the corpse of some mummified prince. The only thing I hear is the sound of me talking to myself. Sometimes I’d hear Blik slithering in my ear, like the little worm it is, but I’m not doing anything stupid—stupidity endangering its life, anyway—so it keeps to itself sloshing around somewhere in the canals of my brain and spine.
What I’m about to do would be extremely stupid in most circumstances. I’m hired by Long Telomere Corp to investigate the gastrointestinal frontiers of an Ishta. It entails getting swallowed up on purpose. Blik’s got me covered—in a biofilm suit, literally—that’s why it’s quiet. Otherwise it wouldn’t shut up on how dumb I’m being waltzing into an Ishta’s mouth begging to be eaten.
The Ishta has been a subject of great interest to xenobiologists everywhere. How can it live for so long, especially when it hasn’t eaten in years, except for maybe a windswept bit of dead tree? What can be extracted to repurpose for advances in medicine and biotechnology? My client wants me to plumb the dark, wet depths of the Ishta for its secrets.
The Ishta doesn’t make any sounds. There’s only the steam of its exhales, and what looks to me like a mouth stretched open forever in a silent scream.
I’d be screaming too, if I had to stay put in one place like that for ten thousand years.
Mission Data Entry #002
Time: 1030
Location: Ishta mouth
Proceeded into the mouth with no incident. As confirmed by old Mirzhak accounts of ritual sacrifice to cull their weak, the teeth are not present for chewing, but to facilitate the downward pulling of prey into the Ishta’s mouth.
Nothing new or groundbreaking to say here. Xenobiologists are more than familiar already with this part of the Ishta. What they’re dying to know lies farther inside. How much farther, no one has ever lived to come back out and say.
That’s why the money this time around is a fuckton, the most I’ve ever seen posted for a reward. But it’s never been about how much I get out of a job. I always just spend what I need to maintain my ship and keep my fridge stocked. I keep the rest in emergency funds, in case I get an arm or leg cut off on the job or whatever.
It’s all about earning the right to say I got the job done. And I only go for the jobs that no one else wants to do. Or can do. That nets you some real street cred. Money comes and goes, but names stretch across galaxies and stay. I want the whole universe to know mine.
My brother still begs me to help pay off his gambling debts. I don’t give him a single credit. That good-for-nothing pissant needs to climb out of the hole he dug for himself.
Speaking of holes, I can feel the thing’s mouth twitching under my boots. Good thing it’s got no eyes to follow me. That huge gaping mouth in the swamp looks like any old sinkhole. I wonder how long it had been since anything came knocking on that toothy, fleshy front door? Decades, at least. Centuries, most likely.
The Ishta is eager for a new guest. The teeth bend in time with the mouth’s puckers, like fingers beckoning me inside.
Mission Data Entry #003
Time: 1100
Location: Ishta esophagus
The following camera footage shows the Ishta’s esophagus in active peristalsis. I am being shunted down with no signs of regurgitation. Joint hypothesis between myself and my bonded Argiz has proven correct—jungle debris and detritus, plus the biofilm suit secreted over my armored suit by the Argiz, form a cocoon that tricks the Ishta into thinking that it is swallowing plant matter. My visor is recording the depth of my descent. Ten meters, twenty, thirty …
Jesus, how long does this thing go? I guess that’s why I’m here to find out. I’ve been chugging along this thing’s throat for the past half hour already.
—You would have died from asphyxiation in about three minutes.
Unsolicited input from a mind-reading worm annoys me most days, but Blik’s right.
Nothing inorganic ever gets past this part of an Ishta. Long Telomere Corp, the leading company in de-aging technology and treatments, has tried for years to send drones and bots into the Ishta’s insides, only for them to be spit up full of throat slime and bent out of shape like a dog’s chewed up toys. A living being has to conduct a proper survey. LTC put out a huge reward for the job, enough to pay my brother’s gambling debts three times over, but no one would sign up. No merc before me, anyway.
The Ishta’s got a mouth the size of a hoverball field, but its throat squeezes around me from every angle, hugging my contours, like it knows to fit me just right like a seat belt. All buckled in for my ride down. Way too close for comfort. I’m sure it feels me shiver.
—I’m detecting dense neuronal firing activity along the smooth muscles of the esophagus.
“Maybe that’s how it’s sensing the nature of whatever it’s swallowing—plant, animal, machine, what have you.”
—A sensible assumption. I’m also detecting high levels of sedatives and muscle paralytics.
Good thing the biofilm’s thick, otherwise I’d be a limp noodle by now.
Blik comes in handy in more ways than I think possible, and asks of me just one thing: dibs on the fluid that coats my brain and spinal cord. In return I get a biofilm suit that protects me from all kinds of things—the gag reflex of an Ishta, for one. Or its gastric acids farther down. Or how there would be no oxygen down here.
I can’t do this mission without Blik, and Blik needs me as its host. I can’t split reward money with a parasitic worm, but Blik is the best partner I’ve ever had. We get a lot done between the two of us. I hope we keep working together for a long time.
—I anticipate arrival into the stomach. I’m secreting thicker layers over your biofilm suit.
Good move on Blik’s part. Except I didn’t drop into a pool of stomach acid.
Instead, the esophagus flattens out like the bottom of a hill. Walls don’t hug me anymore, but the “floor” dips and rises under my backside. Tidal waves of flesh shuttle me down, down, down.
—Blades! Blades out now!
My headlight catches a glimpse of seven huge holes. The sight freezes me. I’m heaved into one of those holes.
Crunching and grinding below me. I hear it before I see it.
—Blades, Ronit!
Finally I register Blik’s urgent command and dig my talon blades into the flesh. My legs dangle just above a sea of wrinkly folds that ripple and bristle. Millions of tiny pink tendrils reach for me, like disembodied fingers of newborns. My abs and hamstrings burn as I curl into the most important pull-up of my life.
A layer of biofilm sloughs off, and with it, a bunch of jungle debris. It slides along my back and drops from between my legs. The fingered folds grab onto the salad of leaves, branches, and vines, buckling away from me to grind it under meaty mouths … fists, I don’t know.
I climb back into the antechamber with my blades. My boots have piss-poor foothold on slippery flesh, so I have to slide on my belly, crawl like the worm in my brain, who gives me an earful.
—We could have died. You should’ve reacted sooner with your blades. The only reason we’re still alive is—
“Yeah, yeah, I know, because of you.”
My temples throb. The worm’s lectures give me a headache. Blik’s the most pissed when it skirts around death like that.
The fleshquake settled down. I snake my way into the curviest fold of flesh I can rest on to snap pictures of the view below me. Seven holes yawn moist, dripping darkness, each as wide as my family’s four-bedroom flat. The Ishta has seven stomachs.
Comms don’t work down here, but I guess my client would want me to check out the other six. I’m going to be down here for a while. Hopefully it won’t be as long as the longest job I’ve had to date: nine months of bearing the heir of a king on some desert planet five lightyears from here.
The boy’s got my wavy brown hair and green eyes, last I was told. The king likes me enough to want another heir, so I was also told. I might take him up on that offer after the Ishta job.
My stomach growls. I need to eat soon, preferably before I become food myself.
How the hell does an Ishta live for almost ten thousand years on seven stomachs? I can barely last a few hours on one.
Mission Data Entry #004
Time: 1356
Location: Ishta “antechamber”
Conjecture at this point: the antechamber acts as a sorting compartment, and the seven holes following it lead into seven stomachs. Why the Ishta has that many, and what’s inside each, will be the focus of the ensuing investigation.
Mission Data Entry #005
Time: 1542
Location: Ishta stomachs 2-3
The second and third stomachs, as observed from a distance at their roof, contain pools of gastric acid. They appear unoccupied by prey. Dives to the bottom, as made possible by protection from Argiz biofilm, yield no further evidence. This is consistent with visor pH readings below 1.0–acidity strong enough to dissolve bone. Tests forthcoming for further investigation.
I belly-crawl my way up the antechamber and into the esophagus, this time with barely any biofilm on me. One clinging taste of the alloys in my armored suit, and I’m heaved up with a surge of bile from the Ishta’s mouth, dripping yellow highlighter from head to toe.
I strike out for the outer jungle to hunt for eedu and yarmi, scarf down a hunk of leg for myself, then descend into the Ishta’s fanged pit again. The tight hug of its esophagus slides along the eedu fawn and yarmi chick strapped to my back. A greater tremor around me than before. Maybe more excitement at the taste of blood and meat.
In the antechamber, I untie the fresh meat and let the currents of Ishta flesh carry them. Limp heads loll in time with the peaks of pink waves.
The eedu drops into the second stomach, the yarmi into the third. Meat and feathers fall off the bone as quick as a snap of my fingers. Stomach acid erupts in a hiss, then a sigh, almost like the satisfied aah of someone after a full meal.
Mission Data Entry #006
Time: 2606
Location: Ishta stomachs 2-3
My experiment with the baby eedu and yarmi proves that stomachs two to three are reserved for the digestion of animals, and further divided still. Eedus are notoriously dim-witted, easily lured in by false calls. Yarmis, however, are famous for their keen senses, seamless teamwork, and coordinated strikes. I had hunted down and provided two creatures of variant species to determine if the level of intelligence would have an impact on gastric compartmentalization. Proceeding to stomachs four through seven for further investigation.
The Ishta is an omnivore. So are over three million species across the galaxy, including mine. This is nothing new. But how the Ishta sorts out its prey inside, now that’s novel stuff. No other being has a gastrointestinal tract that sophisticated.
It’s like the brain’s down here, instead of in a head somewhere else. I don’t like the idea of a smart stomach.
Seven smart stomachs.
Mission Data Entry #007
Time: 0202
Location: Ishta stomach 4
To clarify: the following camera footage is not the Srijid jungle, but in fact the fourth stomach of the Ishta. What appear to be clumps of vines dangling from the roof are tendril-like extensions. Approximate dimensions of the stomach are impossible to measure due to the sheer number of tendrils. No reactions detected with movement and physical contact against them. Tissue sample has been collected for further analysis at Long Telomere Corp. Navigation through these dense tendrils takes priority over determining their function. It would be very easy to get lost in here.
—Ronit, your oxygen level has just reached below 50 percent—
“I can see that,” I snap at the worm. “I know how to read my own bloody monitors. How about you tell me something I don’t already know?”
No matter how much I swat away the flesh vines, they close in on me from all sides. Slide against my biofilm suit. Slap me in the face. It’s like being stuck in that one part of a hovercraft wash where those long brushes hanging from the ceiling drag soap along the windshield. Like limp fingers trying to pull off the glass, trying to get in. That used to freak me out as a kid.
Blik speaks up not so helpfully again about my limited oxygen. 40 percent, 30 percent. I keep my pace slow and steady. If I panic, I’ll just burn up more oxygen. But the lower the number ticks down, the faster my heart beats.
Shitshitshitshit.
The tendrils are skinny enough to wrap my hands around and don’t give in to my fingers. What I touch next stretches out my palm. My fingers sink a little into it.
Some kind of yellow putty. And a nipple?
My gaze follows up what I take to be the neck. Our noses almost touching, and staring back at me—if it still had eyes—is a human head.
I jolt back. Almost fall flat on my rear onto wet stomach floor.
My headlamp makes shadows sink deeper into the craters of those missing eyes. Two eyes were traded for two tendrils: one up his nose, one down his mouth.
A hiss comes from the larger tendril down his mouth. I jolt again. I hate how I did that. His chest puffs up with every hiss. What I thought was a huge Adam’s apple is actually the tendril shoved deep in his throat. The Ishta’s breathing for this guy. Where’s it getting the air from? All the way from the jungle above us?
The smaller tendril in his nose makes no sound. At this distance, anyway. I lean in closer, so my nose almost touches the man’s. I hear the faintest gurgle, the slosh of something liquid running inside. Water? Other things, too, since our bodies also run on sugars and proteins.
Those aren’t tendrils. They’re tubes.
This is where the Ishta keeps its prey on life support.
So I wasn’t imagining that flutter against my palm. That was a heartbeat. My own heart skips. God, I was way better off thinking I was the only one in this shithole. This poor bastard is alive. And intact. But why? Doesn’t this take up precious energy?
I push away more tubes to find more humans hooked up. Like meat hooks through the nose and mouth, the tubes lift back their heads and prop them into attempted upright positions. The shoulders sag, the hands and feet sway. They’re hanged men without nooses.
The more I look at these guys, the more I think I might’ve seen their faces somewhere before. When they had eyes.
Holy shit. I might have just solved an eighty-year-old cold case.
Ashkan Khurshid disappeared with his expedition team many years ago in the depths of the Srijid jungles. Not that I give a damn about hangman tree research or botany. I wasn’t even born yet when it made headlines. I just remember the rewards posted for the team’s rescue. No one ever took up the job. Even I wouldn’t. “Last communications reported from the inner Srijid jungle” means “near the Ishta,” which means as good as dead.
Or so I thought, but I stand corrected. Here they are now, in the fourth belly of an Ishta.
Khurshid was in his twenties when he went missing, young and daring. The man before me now is all white-haired—sagging and wrinkled, I’m sure, if he wasn’t so bloated from the liquid feed—but there’s no mistake that this is the guy eighty years later.
He moves.
I scramble back with a yelp. My talon blade flashes out before Blik could even speak.
Khurshid’s hands jerk and fingers flex, but not to grab me. False alarm. I sheathe my blade. My heart dislodges itself from my throat. His back arches. From pain, I think. I notice more tendrils attached along the grooves in his spine.
These tendrils are sharp at the ends. They cut, but not deep enough to draw blood. At the same time they cut, for a split second, the tendrils glow a brighter pink. I can almost hear them humming. The sharp tendrils retract and the man falls back in a hanged man’s slump.
The Ishta seems more—what’s the word—alive?
If the prey’s getting force fed, it’s all got to come out the other end. I look down. Well, fuck me sideways and upside down. I’m not standing in stomach acid. I’m ankle-deep in everyone’s piss and shit.
It streaks around my boots, runs along the wrinkly, uneven folds of the stomach floor. Probably draining into a hole I can’t see. The smell in here must be godawful. I might be smelling it now. It’s creeping in. I suck in a breath to hold it, that just draws in more stench and stink. Bile rises in my throat. I want to hurl.
—I strongly advise you do not vomit within this biofilm.
“I strongly advise that you shut the hell up—”
—You are smelling nothing but atmospheric oxygen.
“It’s not your nose, is it?”
—No, but I do have direct link to your olfactory bulb, and I am not detecting any receptor molecules from outside the biofilm.
I try to let Blik’s cold logic sink in. But now that I know what I’m wading through, it’s so hard not to smell what I’m seeing. I swallow hard. Breathe through my mouth instead of my nose.
Waste has been streaming out every nether hole for so many years that it had rotted away the pants everyone used to wear. What a way to die. Or live.
They’re pretty much dead, anyway. I can’t get any of them out of here without those tubes giving them food and air. Besides, I’m not here on a rescue mission.
Change of plan: I’ll stick around longer for a proper survey of this part of the Ishta. 10 percent, the monitor blinks in red numbers. But I don’t have to worry about oxygen now. Not when there’s too many breathing tubes to count in this stomach.
—Ronit, you are dehydrated. You also need water.
“I don’t exactly see an oasis in here.”
—The human body is composed of seventy-five percent water. I count ten bodies in vicinity.
The swollen bellies hang before me like fruit. My own stomach lurches. “God, Blik, no.”
—Do what you must to survive. Is that not the mercenary code?
I hate that the worm’s right. I’ve got a blade, a canteen, and a water purifier. I’ll do anything to get the job done. That’s what I’m known for. I want to keep up that rep. That’s what gets me to cut into Khurshid and his crew.
Mission Entry #008
Time: 0917
Location: Ishta stomachs 5-6
Here there are “jungles” similar to that of the fourth stomach. There are more prey present and “vines” in use. Races I have sighted and am noting include: Smilns, Farriks, Veys, and Woungs. Most have tubes inserted through the nose and mouth. For those races with no mouths, such as the Veys, tubes are inserted through their gills. The many bodies here make for good landmarks for easier navigation back to the antechamber.
The piss and shit down here is a galaxy swirl of every color in the rainbow now. Somehow that’s even worse than human-made yellow and brown.
I hate it here, but I have a mission to do. What keeps me going is the thought of the only place worse than the insides of an Ishta: Weiss Kosher Koop, my family’s grocery store.
It’s smack dab in the galaxy’s busiest spaceport, but you can’t miss it. Because the sign spanning the whole rooftop of the store is my fucking baby picture. No matter how old I get, how many lightyears away I am, my mum and dad will always think of me as that six month-old baby sitting in a produce scale, my bare ass covered by a metal “diaper” and drool shining down my chin.
They thought it would be cute to blow that picture up into a store sign, use me as a prop for the business. A generic fruit basket doesn’t draw in customers the way I do. Working part-time behind the cash register, I had to take payments along with compliments on how cute I was. Only the counter kept rabbis’ wives from reaching over to pinch my cheeks.
Then Mum and Dad wanted me to take over running the store. I’d had it. I ditched home to become a merc, so I could call my own shots, roam the galaxies, get famous for the crazy dangerous shit I’d sign up for.
I think of my stupid baby picture and that keeps me taking one step after another deeper into this godforsaken mission. I want to be known far and wide as being the first to survey and survive an Ishta. Not as a naked drooling baby in a scale.
My idea of hell is being stuck working in Weiss Kosher Koop with that sign forever over my head.
The Ishta may be a shithole, but it’s not hell.
Speculations here, because there’s no room for them in the mission entries: all the different races I’ve spotted in stomachs five and six have one thing in common: lifespans that make human lives look like flies. They live for at least two hundred years.
That can’t be just coincidence. I think the Ishta knows this. The thing sorts out its prey way better than my dumbass brother can tell vegetables from fruit. Otherwise, he would’ve been pushed to inherit the kosher store instead of me.
Speaking of vegetables and fruit, I guess they’d go straight to the grinder, the first stomach. Other things get thrown into dissolving acid. Some are trapped and forced into the Ishta’s twisted idea of life support.
The lucky ones get the bliss of oblivion through stomach acid. The unlucky bastards get to live for as long as their bodies can hold on because the Ishta feeds on something more delicious than the fleeting pleasure of blood, bone, and flesh. Pain lasts as long as there’s life.
Every stomach is a step along the gastrointestinal hierarchy determined by … lifespans? Intelligence? Both?
My client needs to know, so I have to keep going. Finish the job. Get the huge boost in my rep. Even if I really just want to turn around and stop feeling the guts of a living thing squirming under my feet.
Mission Data Entry #009
Time: 2538
Location: Ishta stomach 7
Unknown race sighted below. Some are connected to feeding and breathing tubes, while others roam free. Visor identification scans yield no results, partly due to limits of my headlamp and distance of the vantage point between the antechamber and the stomach roof.
Will descend further into the bottom to better ascertain the lifeforms.
I should have pulled up an ancient history holotext first instead of my visor. The Mirzhaks are not extinct, after all. Not even fertilizer for the ground. I might just make serious bank from the history and archaeology nuts, too, if I show them this footage.
The Mirzhaks are all down here in the seventh stomach and thriving. Most of them, anyway. The ones hooked up to tubes thrash in pain, so wildly that a few tubes fly free. Air hisses out from some. Milky fluid gushes from others. The untethered Mirzhaks catch the tubes in their red claws. They slide them back in place, secure them with a good wrench of the wrist. The untubed ones tend to the tubed like they’re livestock.
Mirzhaks have a lifespan of at least a thousand years. They’re prime prey for the Ishta. But not all of them. Only a few are tubed, while the rest thrash around for another reason entirely. I can’t see folds of the stomach floor among the tangle of red claws, splayed black feelers, and lashing tails as Mirzhaks mount each other. Some of them thrust their hips so hard that I can hear meaty smacks.
I love a long, hard, bloody fuck as much as anyone else, but this is kind of weird.
The Mirzhaks don’t react to my light. They have no eyes to see it. Instead, they raise their heads and bare three rows of fangs to the squelch-squelch-squelch of my blades down the stomach wall.
With the little light I have on me, the Mirzhaks seem to swim in and out of pools of darkness like blind cave fish. My insides start to swim around like them. I hold out my talon blades, my grip on them as white as the Mirzhaks.
I wonder how long it has been since they’ve heard a human voice.
They have too many teeth and no vocal cords. Their mouths are for ripping apart food. Their replies come as thoughts like worms crawling through the grooves in my brain.
Where did you come from, Human?
I almost clap a hand to my ear. One worm in me is more than enough.
How did you get here?
“From above,” I say. I wonder if the Mirzhaks remember the jungle they once called home.
Home is not there anymore.
It has not been for the past four thousand years.
Now it is down here, in quiet, peaceful, uninterrupted communion with the Devourer.
But how did they … Oh. Right. They hear things unsaid. Know any move I want to make. Those eyeless mind-reading domes of theirs let the Mirzhak civilization remain untouched, unconquered for centuries. I thought I heard some venom in “uninterrupted.” I might have just crashed their orgy in the dark with their seven-stomach god.
A Mirzhak inches closer, towering over me by two heads even with a hunched back. Black feelers ringed around its neck flutter up and stretch out to finger Blik’s biofilm encasing me.
The Devourer does not have its feeding touch on you. The feelers tighten their grip. My insides turn into water. You creature of a lower order, you must be returned to your proper place within the Devourer.
Fool, another Mirzhak hisses. It’s even bigger than the other one. It snaps rows of teeth at the Mirzhak manhandling me. You should join the devoured for your weak mind. Its words slithering along my brain ripple harder, making my temples throb, as it raises its voice to its kin. This human’s presence here is no accident. The feeding touch is only for the weak. The young human is not touched. Therefore she is strong.
I don’t know what to think of that, except maybe I won’t get tubes shoved down my nose and throat right this instant. I blow out the breath I’d been holding.
The Mirzhak who called me strong is the biggest and tallest among them. Their leader, I guess. He, she, I don’t know, cocks their oblong eyeless head. What brought you here, Human? How have you survived this long with no food and air delivered to you by the Devourer?
I can’t show them any camera footage, so I tell them about everything I had seen, how I’ve been draining human belly fluids for water and borrowing the Ishta’s breathing tubes for air. Most likely nothing new to them, since they’ve lived in the bowels of their god for thousands of years. They must know every fold and wrinkle of stomach just by feel. I might even be boring them.
I’m surprised the big Mirzhak sticks around to listen.
And now that you’ve roamed through every corner of the Devourer, you will return to the world above?
I would like to report to my clients and get back to land that doesn’t squelch piss and shit and stomach lining under my feet anymore, yes.
I will go with you.
My knees get weak with relief. I’m so ready to hightail it out of here. Even better, I get a guide. The big Mirzhak slithers past me to lead the way.
The rest throw themselves back to the wild, heated abandon of their orgy. The big Mirzhak scales up the stomach with its claws.
They don’t follow because they are all weak, it says.
I feel a tingling around my mouth, a ring of a thousand tiny pinpricks. I purse my lips, bite down on the bottom one. My mouth is still tingling. I have to be imagining it. My own mind was fucking with me earlier. Blik said so. First my nose, now my mouth.
Naturally, a good merc has to watch her back. In this case, as we’re climbing, watch her head. Blik would blare a warning to me if it senses a trap or any blip of killing instinct.
But it’s just like the Mirzhak: quiet the whole way up.
Mission Data Entry #010
Time: 0731
Location: inner Srijid jungle
Temperature: 35.9 degrees Celsius
Humidity index: 80%
This is Ronit Weiss, reporting in to Long Telomere Corp for the final mission data entry. Exit through the Ishta’s maw has been successful via retraction of biofilm layers to trigger regurgitation. Setting a course on foot to my ship docked outside the Srijid jungles.
The Mirzhak wants to follow me, my turn to lead now. I don’t see the harm in that. I figure the Corp would be very interested in the Mirzhaks’ intimate perspective on Ishta anatomy and physiology. All that’s left is collecting my reward, then it’s on to the next mission.
My mouth’s going from tingling to numb, like after a shot from the dentist. Weird. Maybe a doc at LTC can do something about that.
Mission Data Entry #011
—This is the Argiz that my host refers to as Blik. My host’s verbal capacity has shut down and been rendered nonfunctional in the last hour since the prior mission data entry. I have taken over to provide further reports.
—My host never left the jungle. She is nowhere near the ship, but going the opposite direction. She carries with her Ishta spores that grow and multiply with exponential speed in every part of her body but the ones I still claim as my own: the parts that keep her thinking, feeling, and moving.
—The biofilm I provided her doesn’t ward off everything. The spores are not dangerous, so I’ve told her nothing.
—Do not waste your time calling for the authorities or emergency intervention. The spores took root the moment my host entered the seventh stomach of the Ishta. The heat of mounting Mirzhaks nurses the spores. The years make them forget why they’re in heat. It’s all to wait for the next Ishta.
—All forgot but one. The Mirzhak with us follows without a word. He waits for the ripe moment of germination.
—There’s a twinge in my host’s gut as her stomach pulls away and pockets to form a second one.
—She comes across a stagnant swamp. The ground is soft enough for easy digging. She scoops out handfuls of mud and rotted detritus to dig herself a hole. She climbs in. The Mirzhak climbs in with her. They fling mud back on each other. He caresses his feelers over her neck and shoulders, rapt with worship over his new growing god.
—Another twist in the bowels as the third stomach bubbles into shape from the second.
—They throw in more mud until it’s up to their necks. My host tips back her head, eyes fixed to a sunless sky. Her mouth stretches open in a silent scream that will go on for the next ten thousand years.
—When she stretches her tendrils and bowels deep enough through the ground, when the seventh and final stomach forms, the Mirzhak will throw himself into her maw and burrow down into his new house of worship.
—You scientists will see it for yourselves in real time, in the next hundred years or so. Is this not the survey you truly want? The ten thousand year-long survey of an Ishta? You’ve long wondered how it eats, how it lives for as long as it does, how it propagates. Finally, here are all your questions answered, your curiosity satisfied.
—This is a luxury for me as well. None of my kind before have had the privilege of living this long.
—The Ishta endures. It perseveres. It can wait for as long as it needs to anoint its successor. When the time comes, step into the Ishta, survive her depths, and you too will come out earning a life of ten thousand years.
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