Call Me Ogi, Page 2

Having been unwillingly awoken first I was by this point something of a defacto leader for my kind and I had remained inside the ship. Imagine my surprise when in the middle of the night a single human walked out onto the deck, nearly pitch black due to the moonless sky, and stood in front of me/us for several minutes without speaking or moving. I watched him through a microscopic camera, seeing him as through my own eyes. There was something very different about him. There was none of the malice in him that seemed apparent in the others. I do not speak of sheer anger or hostility, mind you, but simply a sort of quasi-malevolent curiosity that they all seemed to possess. What they had done to the dolphins was pure violence but with the ship they had not seemed frightened or angry, simply curious but in a way that told me they hoped to rip it apart for anything valuable inside which I of course would not allow.

  The machines objected when I seized control of some of the ship’s systems but they had little recourse. With much of the computer system inoperable they'd been forced to give me access to many of its functions. A tiny part of the hull, no bigger around than a bottle cap, slid open and I extended the ship's larger telescopic camera which shone a bright blue light directly at the stranger. He did not jump or appear to be surprised at all. At that moment I knew. From an opening so small it could not be seen with the naked human eye I fired one of the ship’s neural communication darts into his neck. A moment later the voice came through loud and clear.

  Amongst the tangled mess of bodies that had laid upon the deck one, just one, of my kind had managed to wriggle his way free from his dolphin host body. Normally we could survive only a short time on our own, even less when out of the water, but somehow he’d managed to crawl his way across the deck, down into the sleeping quarters, and managed to find one of the unconscious men to meld with. An impossible feat it seemed. From that day forward I knew him as Survivor, and he became my most trusted associate. He sat there next to me all night, his lips did not move but he related to me exactly how it felt to be joined with one of them. He said that at first he was nearly overwhelmed by the intensity of emotion, the rush of passion and energy. The human mind was terrified and for a short time so was he. He was uncertain as to whether or not he would be able to remain lest he be driven to madness. Slowly though the mind calmed and began to merge with his own, as it had with the fish and with the dolphins. In fact Survivor stated that once the fear subsided the two of them seemed to provide an indescribable feeling, which he could only describe as a "warmth", to one another. It was as if despite being separated by unknown light years for all of history our two species belonged together in symbiosis.

  Just before dawn we decided to conduct an experiment. Three more were awoken from the ship's memory modules. Three more bodies constructed, and then, quietly so as not to wake them, Survivor walked into where the other men were sleeping and placed our brothers onto their pillows before returning to his spot next to me, to us, on the deck. He watched, for the first time through human eyes, the sun rise on the horizon and when it was only a short way into the sky we heard stirring from below decks. The three men, all of whom I can now identify as Japanese in ethnicity, walked over to where we were with peaceful expressions on their faces. Now being one with his host Survivor had no problem engaging them in human speech.

  You may be tempted to assume that our kind were some sort of parasite, beings that stole bodies for their own, ultimately leaving its original inhabitant to either perish or remain trapped forever. That assumption is not a correct one. There was a reason that our kind did not want to leave their dolphin hosts and it is because once we are joined we are no longer two but instead one being. They didn’t want to leave the dolphins because they were the dolphins. The melding with the humans seemed to be even more complete. All of the original host’s memories, thoughts and feelings are left intact but they are added to by the personality of the one who joins with them. Each remain, yet are indivisible, a fact that we quickly learned.

  When we first returned to port each of the men set off for their homes, to explain to their friends and families what had happened to them and to attempt to convince them to take on one of us as well. Though we had done it aboard the boat out of fear we were not keen on the idea of giving host beings no choice in the matter. Around dusk I detected movement and three of the men stepped off of the pier and back onto the fishing boat. Before they were even within speaking range they were already, all at once, relating to me what had transpired. Each of them had been greeted with skepticism, then anger, and eventually had been told by their mates to leave for the night. I tried to listen to them all but it was difficult, their emotions were running high and the extreme reactions they had been greeted with had not been expected. I, like the others, had expected some hesitation or even downright refusal but it had been different than that. They’d been accused of trickery and when they’d persisted the other humans had gotten quite upset with them.

  It was some time later, a couple of hours perhaps, before we began to hear the voice of another. He was in pain. Survivor and the two others ran from the boat and there they found our final colleague in an alley, his back pressed up against a metal wall and blood pouring from his chest. I could hear little of their initial conversation but as they drew closer to the boat the transmitters’ strength grew stronger. They were shouting, not aloud of course, but nevertheless I’d never known my people to become so roused. I was alarmed, to say that I wasn’t would be ridiculous, but I seemed much more capable of keeping my emotions in check than they were. Our essence seemed to have a stabilizing effect on the human mind, but they were definitely having an effect on us as well. They pulled the man, the man who’s name was Sayuri, onto the boat and set him on the deck near the ship so that I could use its instruments to scan his body.

  We knew so very little about human anatomy but our machinery was quite smart and it could easily see that whatever wounds had been inflicted on our companion would likely prove fatal. He spoke to me as I began to instruct the others as to how to remove him from the human host. The woman who lived with him, his mate, she’d become more and more agitated as he’d pressed on, trying to explain to her what had happened to him. Despite being the one injured he felt regret. He realized that he’d terrified her, when he’d failed to let up she'd reached for a knife. He had made the mistake of trying to grab it from her but had instead fallen onto it himself. I watched, through the eye of the ship’s camera, as Sayuri winced in pain as Survivor made an incision at the base of his skull with a fillet knife, used for deboning fish. Still, the words he spoke to me privately carried more pain than his face. He told me how deeply he’d been affected by the look of terror on that woman’s face. How it’d hurt worse than the blade itself. He said that if he lived he’d have to find some way to make it up to her.

  My camera lens shifted up to the face of Survivor, who had told me that his human name was Hiro, as he put down the knife and stepped back. He looked over at me and spoke, not through his transmitter but with his human words. Explained to me that he’d found the symbiont, but that it was dying. I insisted that he remove it anyway, that the human host’s wounds should not be killing it and that we could help but he rolled the man over to show me what he was talking about. The lens zoomed and I could clearly see the symbiont through the incision. I couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing with what I had known up to that point so I turned the ship’s sensors on the problem. Survivor had been wrong, the symbiont was not dying, it was already dead. The data that poured in through various sensors confirmed it, inside the body of the human the symbiont had ceased to be an independent being, it was being absorbed into the human physiology.

  Rummaging through the lower deck one of the men was able to find a first aid kit that contained a sedative. It was used to render Sayuri unconscious. All that any of us could do was to sit and watch as he died. We certainly did not want that. We cared for our comrade, and also for his human host, but what choice was there? Could we take him to a human doctor? What if they di
scovered the symbiont? Questioned the others? What if all humans reacted as badly as had the ones that had thus-far been told? More than that, what had happened to our own soul? Had the human body somehow killed him or had the two become one both mentally and physically? The others needed sleep, I did not, so I sent them off to get some rest. It was I that heard his final words through the transmitter and it was then that I had my answer.

  Chapter Three