Lydia had been running since daybreak, although the concept of 'day' was a suggestion at best in these woods. The trees were as wide as the houses back in Gmelin, and the fog was so heavy she could barely make out the shape of her guide--a pile of countless raincoats that presumably had a person at their core. The two were running to no visible destination, but even without a guide, Lydia could feel the weight of what lied ahead, a sideways gravity beckoning her forward.
Somewhere up ahead, the ocean was coming to meet them.
The Single Sea was rising quickly, gaining velocity, up toward their side of the torus-shaped planet. On the opposite hemisphere, folks would've said the waters were receding, taking with them the overbearing humidity and the ocean giants, leaving salty sand and helpless little fish behind. The languid moon was bright overhead, gently outpaced by the planet's rotation, lapped one more time and positioned once again directly above the ocean, pulling it skyward with as much gravitational might as it could muster.
The raincoats had warned Lydia of this, that the fog would only grow thicker as the two of them descended closer to the planet's inner ring, where the ocean oscillated like a bubble in a level. The fog was a creature in its own right, a separate beast that chased and was chased by the sea. It snapped at Lydia's feet as she passed it by. She was sure that something solid was tripping her, but when she turned around, there was nothing in her path but warm, sludgy earth.
"Hey. Eyes ahead," the raincoats scolded. They were running in easy strides, head dipped and capes rippling like they were slipping through gaps in the tectonic fog. Their robes lost opacity as the fog condensed into a drizzle. The slick, oil-rainbow material was hard to spot amidst the trees and brush around them.
Lydia fell behind, the disturbances becoming more frequent, shaking her into a stumble. She still saw nothing in her way.
"Oh. Creatures," the raincoats said simply. They slowed down with heavy footsteps, like an aircraft landing. The raincoats were easier to see while standing still, so Lydia could avoid crashing into them when they stopped.
"You see them?"
"No," the raincoats scoffed. "Do you see bluegills when you look at a lake?"
"No, sirs."
"No. But they're here. Anaphibious."
"Like frogs?"
"More like tadpoles. Big ones."
"How big?" Before setting out, she hadn't bothered asking whether this trip would be dangerous. Of course it was. She had just expected the danger to wait until they were closer to the volatile sea. 'Drowning' had been a much more present concern for Lydia than 'big tadpoles'.
"They're vegetarian. Don't worry." The raincoats twisted, the blunted point of their cone-shaped body tilting to the side. "Unless algae counts as animal. Or are they fungi? Can veggies eat fungi?" They forgot about the big hurry they were in, the reason they'd pushed Lydia to run for five uninterrupted hours. This was an interesting conundrum, and they were almost disturbed that they hadn't ever thought about it.
"I think so," Lydia offered.
"You don't know," the raincoats dismissed. "I'll check when we get back. Interesting."
An invisible force smacked Lydia in the shoulder. Judging from where it'd hit her, she worried that these things were no longer tripping-hazard-sized. "That...felt much bigger than a normal tadpole."
"Because it was," the raincoats said matter-of-factly. "Average size varies from year to year. Biggest I've caught was about bus-sized. We should keep moving."
"H-how, how are they so large?" Lydia panted as they continued running. "And how have I never s-seen them before?"
"They're usually dormant. The fog around the ocean's edge is their natural habitat." Once they were tricked into talking about their field of research, the raincoats got much more chatty, Lydia noticed. "They're stuck somewhere between lungs and gills, so their metabolism is super specific. Usually it sucks, but in the right climate, pow."
"Pow, sirs?"
"They grow like crazy. Those little guys you were tripping over? Probably German Shepherd-sized now."
"Oh gods," Lydia exclaimed.
"It's cool. Means we're almost there."
That consolation turned out to be unnecessary, when just a few strides later Lydia found herself running through an inch of standing water. As she stood and watched, the water rose to her ankles. Behind her, the ground softened, then surrendered under a film of inabsorbable liquid.
The flood-in-progress did little to slow the raincoats down. Calculations that Lydia would've found incomprehensible were processed somewhere behind the many layers of water-resistant material, and the raincoats were back to running along the edge of the encroaching water, where it had soaked but not yet supersaturated the forest floor.
Lydia followed in a daze. She started to ask what the raincoats were looking for, but that would've been a silly question. Lydia recognized their target immediately. She fell backwards into the water, eyes wide with awe. "Sirs, this is..."
"It's algae," the raincoats said. They stood casually amidst the green blob spreading over the surface of the water.
"How did they get here? So far from the city?"
"It's algae," the raincoats repeated. "It grows wherever it can. And the conditions here are perfect."
Lydia backed a safe distance away from the indeterminate shape. It was moving--growing?--quickly for an organism of its size, but not quickly enough to catch her. Lydia watched its advances carefully, but it seemed to have no final form or destination. It was just filling as much space as it could, like the water it floated atop.
"Is...this really algae?" Lydia asked quietly, afraid the algae would hear her.
"I said so."
"Then, the tadpoles eat this? Can they really do that? Shouldn't we do something?"
"We are." The raincoats crumpled into a pile. Their winglike appendages withdrew test tubes and surgical implements from their pockets. Their outer layer of coats, it seemed, was about 90% pocket.
"How can we stop them if we can't see them?"
"We're not stopping anything."
"But, but...back home, the oracles would never permit-"
"These aren't your oracles," the raincoats said impatiently. With their body as a guidepost, Lydia could see the speed at which the algae was growing, advancing in waves until the raincoats were sitting in a reverse puddle of holy green slime. The algae was giving the raincoats a wide berth, but it had no problem reaching the edges of Lydia's shoes.
Lydia backed away from the algae, reverent and terrified.
"What's wrong?" the raincoats asked. From the side of their vision, they saw Lydia splashing, making an unnecessary fuss. "Touch it."
"I, I..." Lydia looked shamefully at her unmarked skin. "I've never hosted an oracle myself."
"You were born in Gmelin, right? You have enough." The raincoats filled a few vials with algae. They barely had to do anything. Set the open vials on the water's surface and the algae went right inside. The tricky part was grabbing the vial before the algae could shy away from them.
Held between the raincoats' mitteny hands, the algae within the vial quaked into itself, shrinking from the sides of the container, ramming against the vial's cap to escape.
As the microscopic creatures struggled, fruitlessly, the raincoats waited. They'd prepared these vials with small transmitters, and the algae would be activating theirs shortly. Old, clunky things, these transmitters. One of their first inventions, before the raincoats. They used to have a matching earpiece, but now it was built directly into their suit. Easier to keep dry that way.
Crackling sounds like a broken radio sputtered through the earpiece until the transmitter in the test tube calibrated itself. LIFE. TOO MUCH. STARVING. DROWNING. DEATH. DEATH IS COMING. WE MUST LIVE.
"Calm down." The raincoats stood up, and, before Lydia could protest, pulled her by the wrist into the algae. She winced as countless green lives were crushed beneath her clumsy feet, but no divine lightning came down to smite her. That had never happened before, but then, to Lydia's knowledge, no one had ever stepped on God before.
The algae didn't mind. The few hundred neurons and receptors those organisms had hosted were instantly replenished a millionfold as the algae advanced up Lydia's hand. It wouldn't approach Lydia's wrist, where the raincoats' hand still held her steady.
"I'm letting go now," the raincoats informed her.
"I," Lydia sobbed, "I am honored to be chosen as a host-"
The raincoats let go, and the algae pulled Lydia down into a many-textured embrace.
Lydia's skin scarred where the algae shot through her arms, toward her brain, like the lightning strike she had imagined for her apostasy. The raincoats' innermost suit provided an artificial blink, and then the algae was gone from Lydia's body, leaving only the scars.
"Protists," Lydia said, in her own voice but steadied now by consoling voices only she could hear. "Algae aren't animals, you shriveled beast."
"Ugh. Sorry, whatever."
"So cold. So dry." Lydia shook her head. "And to think, we were lovers once."
"No," the raincoats sneered. "You ate her."
"A growing pain. We took what we could not yet comprehend. We--or I, as you might say--know individuality now. We do not partake, but we know."
"And the girl you're in now?"
"She is still acclimating. We could cede control, but we know you aren't well-suited for managing emotional crises."
The raincoats groaned in resignation. The same argument, iterated through each ward they brought here, whenever the moon was at its apex and the algae evolved enough to became self-aware for a few dangerous minutes. It was unpredictable, in the throes of death, without an experienced member to teach it.
The unhosted algae around them ceased growing as though a switch had been flipped. Above them, the moon started falling behind again, imperceptible to the naked eye. The unnatural humidity hung in the air a second longer, and was then sucked back to the source by a piercing dry wind. The sounds of a stampede flew by them like a storm, shaking the earth underneath invisible feet.
The raincoats could not feel the change in the air, but they could read the discomfort on Lydia's face. The slick green carpet surrounding them turned to a coarse brown dust, eating from the edges inward, until there was no speck of green to be seen.
Lydia rubbed some dust out of her eye, but wasn't particularly affected. Her biggest concern was keeping her hair from blowing in her face.
The algae--oracles, gods, whatever--held mastery over rhetoric. It remembered how to sweet-talk, to make dangerously compelling arguments. But there was always a give, something that reminded the raincoats what this creature really was. And it was this: a lucky few symbiotes unabashedly picking unlucky corpses of itself out of its eyes.
"Shouldn't you finish collecting your samples so we can go home?" Lydia suggested.
"Don't tell me what to do. You're a baby. You are ten seconds old."
"That's a selfish mindset. You were kind enough to deliver one of our ancestors' hosts, and our new generation can share the fruits of their labor."
"Coolio."
Lydia pursed her lips. "You have rescued our colony from degradation over many generations, so we will ignore your sarcasm."
"I should let you rot. With the rest of them."
"And yet you don't. Because we ask so nicely."
"Let me be pissed. I have half a year's worth of rage to vent, and half a day of travel to vent it."
"As we continue to remind you, this is an unnecessary trial." Lydia placed her hands on the raincoats' shoulders. They caught her wincing at the contact, but she kept her hands there regardless. "The coats. The rage. Let them go"
"You have your old memories. Don't you learn? Or is that not the whole fucking point?"
"From our point of view, you are the one who should learn. This could all be so much simpler, yet you whither away."
"You can't have everything."
"We only want to erase these painful thoughts. We will not hurt you."
"Right. Uh-huh," the raincoats shook unnaturally. This ordeal would be much easier if the algae was cruel, but it had never been the duplicitous alien life form that was unanimously cheered against in sci-fi movies. It had saved Gmelin from destroying itself, not of its own will, but because the raincoats had asked. The algae loved them, and by extension, their community. No matter how ruthlessly the raincoats wielded their grudge against it, the algae had never wavered in its devotion.
"You let Lydia go. The moment she's ready."
"Of course," Lydia nodded. "And you let me know when you've overcome these senseless delusions. Whenever you're ready."
The raincoats were absent from the rejuvenation ceremony. The pilgrimage was holier if it was believed to be a self-guided soul quest, and not a hands-on field trip with an old, bitter scientist. Everyone else in the city would be there to welcome back the ward, and the celebration would last long enough for the new batch of algae to network through the residents, revitalizing the latent colonies standing watch behind every set of eyes. Another half-year of peace and prosperity, thanks to the oracle's kiss, or the algae's subtle manipulation. Whichever you preferred.
The raincoats' home looked more like a laboratory, and it still was one, although their studies had cummulated and subsequently stagnated with the algae. The airlocked entrance and chemical shower were still functional and very much in use, along with other, newer devices to keep outside contaminants outside.
Devices only made possible, the raincoats hated to remind themself, by the algae, and its communal scientific prowess. Unlike the humans they lurked in, they never tired, they thought and worked and problem-solved day and night. The oracle granted its visions via dreams to those who were blessed, or just whoever was most convenient.
After an hour of washing, drying, undressing, and washing again, the raincoats were whittled down to a single, form-fitting suit, and could enter their home proper.
"Welcome home, dear," said the only test subject left in the laboratory. Pigeon was used to the sight of her partner's vacuum-sealed body, kept only as moist as strictly necessary by their bio-support suit. Their skin was permanently pruned, muscles hanging loosely from lonely, brittle bones. The robotic limbs supporting their nonfunctioning human ones were laid bare. Pistons and joints worked silently to bring them to the couch, where Pigeon already laid an arm, ready to embrace them.
The raincoats, now merely the body, surveyed the room. From the inside looking out, the walls were transparent, and they could watch the rejuvenation ceremony taking place around them. These one-way walls were also courtesy of the algae, like flowers purchased by a cheating husband.
"You've done it again," Pigeon sighed dreamily, snuggling as close as possible to the body's chest, which had only its transparent, skintight support suit to protect it. The support suit, like every other protective suit the body had designed, was specially made to repel the algae. But that effect was mitigated when the algae had a human host, and the algae was a very committed actor.
"I've been thinking," Pigeon spoke up while she and the body watched the celebration in mutual silence. "Your trust isn't binary. If you really thought I wasn't me, why would you risk living here, without all the protection you use out there?" Pigeon nodded toward the crowd outside, where the body never ventured unless strictly necessary, and where Pigeon never ventured at all anymore.
The body didn't overlook Pigeon's natural use of the singular pronoun. They hadn't caught Pigeon slipping up in years, ever since the algae claimed to have rebuilt her mind to the neuron and vacated her body completely, another bouquet of roses for their lover and savior.
"I do trust you," the body answered, without a hint of doubt.
Pigeon traced a finger over the body's sunken chest. "Then take this silly thing off. I miss you, Eddy."
"I miss you, too," the body muttered. Scientifically speaking, they hadn't been able to prove the woman next to them wasn't Pigeon, but behind the suits and chemicals and catheters, there was a doubt they couldn't shake. A resemblance to the algae that the body couldn't deny.
Before any of this, they had spent equally as much time with Pigeon as they had in their lab, with the algae. Maybe it they hadn't gotten so engulfed in their work, they could've known Pigeon better, and been able to conclusively identify her now. But they had spent so much time studying and communicating with the algae, before and after it had fully awoken. They hadn't worn nearly enough protection back then, not according to what they knew now. They had to take the algae's word for it that Pigeon had been their first host. The body couldn't trust itself when it said it was only a body.
They remembered their last exchange with the algae on their latest trip back, before the ward had left for her joyful welcome and the body had scurried back to their sanctuary.
"I won't let you change me."
"Oh darling. Haven't we already?"