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Bug Parts

rainbow oil reflections on puddle in asphalt

Drin turns his head and looks at Emma, who rests her head on her arm on the open door of the Jeep. “You need a break?” he asks her.

She sighs, and rubs her eyes. She’s never going to be able to wipe away the vision of broken spiny bits and ichor splattered all over the men who lived to tell about it.

She’s never going to be able to turn off the brisk observer part of her brain which took notes on everything it saw, either.

That annoying part of her mind keeps coming back to the main circulation desk in her head and holding up notes, exclaiming about things. The precise way in which the various skeletal-looking bits broke suggests all kinds of interesting failures in design of the stress points and breaking strength of whatever material makes up the mechaskeletal bits that more or less parasitize the human victims.

She’s fairly sure it’s not made of chiton, like the exoskeleton of insects. This monster bug’s mechoskeleton bits may be modeled after much smaller creatures, but it’s not just chiton. She’s been told chiton just isn’t strong enough material to scale it up to these kinds of demands, unlike internal skeletons built of good sturdy things like calcium and potassium-based bone. She’s willing to bet that mammal-centric damn fools have been telling generations that same thing, whether or not it’s actually true.

If you added some stiffening structures and stress-spreading information to a design–say, things like the arcane honeycomb structures lining the inside of those odd-colored spines and bumps–you might be surprised. You might find quite soft material was reinforced enough to drive it through car doors.  Or that sharp impacts could induce odd changes in the oils and organics getting pumped through all that armor, providing surprise stiffening.

That bug’s arms didn’t just leave scars in the metal of the other car.  The bug had flailed around hard enough to pierce a suggestive rack of holes in the door skin and partially cave in the door panel, as if a stuttering machine gun had sprayed across it.

She’s sure that there will be, in one multiverse or another, lectures by self-assured academics explaining all of it with pictures and diagrams. Acutely detailed pictures, in some cases, by excited people who never had to live through it, jabbering about the details of how powerful the bug boys are.  Bragging how one of those pathetic, mangled abortions of the lab could just start eating your head off like a frozen lollie on a stick, munch-munch-much.

She’s not sure why she thinks that, and she’s not sure she wants to remember it much better, either. She does remember enduring puerile young college freshmen gleefully talking about T. rex teeth chomping some poor innocent duck-beaked Diplodocus in half like a whole row of steak knives.  If she is forced to exist in that universe and to sit through such a bloody stupid lecture, however, she may start screaming at them. Quite a lot, probably.

Rubbing her eyes doesn’t make the images stop processing. The academic waving the notes at the main desk in her brain keeps commenting on how the greenish ichor color fades out into odd interference-film colors varied around bile yellow and gray, as it was diluting, draining across the pearly bluish-gray material of the broken mandibles. Heavy long-chain organic compounds.

It still amazes her that the darker man–and a man who’s not all that huge, either–actually managed to grab those jaws and bloody well break them.

Emma scrubs her fingers back into her wet, silty hair, blinks, and looks at Drin. “I’m fine,” she says. Meaning, I’m alive, I’m upright, and I’m not in immediately need of blood transfusions. What more could a girl ask for, under the circs?

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newer google docs collaboration, edited from an earlier chunk of “No Good Deed goes Unpunished”

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