meltdown 3/4 (faculty, casey/zeke)
Title: Meltdown 3/4
Author: Cesare almostnever
Fandom: The Faculty
Pairing/Characters: Casey/Zeke
Rating: Adult
Notes: Happy Josh Hartnett Day! There's a lot of science in this part; apologies if I got it wrong. Written for fandom_mashup, using the works of sophinisba.
sophinisba fics used: Incense (one character eavesdrops on two others). Blue Genes (Casey makes an aggressive pass at Zeke; discussion of genetics). Getting Kinda Used To It (Stokely taken over by the aliens). Limitless Oceans (tentacles). Trekkie Sci-Fi Freak Who's Been Right So Far (holed up away from the rest of the world). A Brief Adventure (characters behind bars).
*
Stokely lies on the locker room floor, the concrete cool under her cheek.
Eventually Zeke says in his low deadpan, "I guess that takes care of the sexual tension."
"For now." Casey brushes at his stomach, semen peeling off in translucent scales.
They smell like drying sweat. Stokely can barely lick her lips.
"Your friend's playing possum out there to try to draw us out."
"Shit. She's okay, isn't she?"
"Don't know, don't care. Here's the new and improved plan. You pull the bolt, you run for my car and you lock yourself in. Drive if they see you. If you can, come back to the gym door and pick me up. If you can't, just fucking drive for DC. I'll meet you."
"No."
"Casey. We have to do something."
"What's the rush? If you can put off the big plan for a fuck, you can wait til we come up with something better, genius."
"You get pretty fuckin' mouthy after sex," Zeke says.
"I'm always mouthy," Casey says, "it's just usually no one listens. I try to tell them aliens are taking over the school, they just give me shit about how the only alien around here is me."
"Fine, I'm listening," Zeke rolls his eyes elaborately.
"We've been in here at least half an hour. This whole time, all we've got is Stokes standing guard. Why haven't the rest of them come yet? I mean. Listen."
They're quiet, briefly. Stokely slumps irretrievably on the floor, looking at the concentration, the silent communion between the two of them.
"Hear anything?"
Zeke shakes his head.
"Which is weird. The whole town was at the football game. Shouldn't we be hearing the aliens attacking people out there, spreading the parasites? Where are they?"
"Maybe they're busy taking over the world."
"Right. Just really, really quietly."
"Maybe. Fuck, for all we know we're the last two real humans." Zeke grabs the red mesh of the ball cage and shakes it, the metallic shimmy echoing in the locker room. "They'll leave us in this cage and build a zoo around us. We won't even be able to perpetuate the species."
"You never know," Casey says. "Maybe they have alien technology that'll make it so you can bear my blue-eyed babies."
Zeke snorts so hard that it sounds painful. "I'm going to have your kids?"
"What, are you scared?" Casey's almost smirking. "Can't handle it?"
Zeke laughs. Stokely's never heard him laugh out loud before like that.
Casey looks pleased for a moment before his expression shifts, growing thoughtful. "They reproduce asexually, we saw that in Furlong's class. The worm split into two identical worms. Fission."
"Yeah, I remember. Hot worm-on-worm action. So?"
"You saw Marybeth's real body. She was huge. At the end she shot a bunch of the worms at me. She must generate them, or incubate them, carry them somehow. But they don't need her; they can reproduce anywhere."
"Anywhere wet."
"Right. But just think. How would they evolve like that? Why does the species need Marybeth? In insect colonies where there's a queen, the queen's responsible for laying eggs. She's basically the only really fertile female. But the worms don't need Marybeth for reproduction. They do that on their own."
"They need her for heterogamy."
"Huh?"
"The worms that reproduce asexually are genetically identical." Zeke leans in toward Casey, the opposite of the laid-back smartass act he always puts on in class, on those rare occasions that he bothers to participate at all. He's interested now, watching Casey closely to make sure he's following along. "Asexual reproduction's fast, good for populating a new planet in a hurry. But bad for long-term survival-- if all the worms were genetically identical, then any virus or bacteria that killed one of them would be able to wipe them all out. Complex organisms need to undergo meiosis so the entire population can maintain enough genetic variation to handle whatever the environment throws at them."
Casey looks at him blankly for a moment, but soon he's nodding, "Right-- they need to mix up their genetic material to keep from getting too inbred."
"Well, we're not talking about Billy-Bob worm marrying Daisy-Sue worm and making little fucked up worm babies, here."
"Shut up, you know what I mean. You're thinking the purpose of the queen is mating, to introduce new genetic variations into the population. But that doesn't explain why she's so big. I mean, why can't the worms just mate themselves, sometimes? Why do they have this huge-ass queen just for that?"
Zeke narrows his eyes. "You obviously have a theory, so let's hear it."
"I think she controlled them. Like... psychically. We were hoping everyone who got infected would be normal once she was dead. That didn't work out. But they're not like before, either, when she was directing them. Look at Stokely. She hasn't moved since I killed Marybeth. She's only outside the ball cage now because you pushed her."
"So you think they can't do shit without Marybeth ordering them around? I guess that explains why I had to pry Stokes off you earlier."
"Stokely's last order from Marybeth was to attack us and keep us in place. I think she's still stuck on that last command. They're all stuck like that, doing whatever they were last told to do. I mean, come on, those worms are this big," Casey holds his fingers two inches apart. "You didn't even see a brain when you dissected one, just ganglia."
"They're parasites, they don't need brains of their own when they can just attach into a host." Zeke scratches the back of his head. "Look, Case, if you were right, that'd be a profoundly stupid system. What kind of hive mind would evolve to be totally helpless once you killed the queen?"
"Temporarily helpless," Casey says. "What happens in a bee colony when the queen dies? Some of the worker bees start developing the ability to lay eggs, right?"
"Right... the queen's pheremones wear off and the workers can reproduce. But that still fucks up the hive, because their eggs aren't fertilized, so they're all drones. Eventually the hive dies off."
Casey hesitates, but then he shakes his head. "Okay, so they don't recover. So what? It happens. Bees evolved in a way that they get fucked up without a queen."
"They evolved so that the workers try to keep things going in a fucked-up way after a disaster kills the queen plus all their backups. There should be backup queens to take over for Marybeth, or else the aliens' system sucks."
"Maybe it sucks, then. Nothing evolves to be perfect or we wouldn't have an appendix."
"Or maybe we're not looking at the right model. Forget the hive mind shit for now." Zeke stands up and paces the length of the cage. "They don't look like bees, they look like worms. Annelids. "
"Like leeches. They have teeth like leeches, that one in the aquarium bit Mr. Furlong."
"Yeah, the head's pretty developed. But they've got those tendril things to hook into the host. That's like polychaetes, marine worms. So how the fuck do marine worms reproduce?" Zeke snaps his fingers impatiently. "Fuck, I know this. I know everything."
"And modest, too."
"Shut up. Where's the one we killed in here, is it smashed?" Zeke practically plants his face against the concrete floor, squinting.
"It's over here." Casey crawls along the ground to find it, handling it carefully as he brings it back to Zeke.
"Dried up," Zeke mutters. "But you can kind of see... look." Their heads are almost together, bent over the mummified form. "When I cut the other one apart, I didn't see a reproductive system. I thought that was because they reproduce through fission. But see this, the two sections? The front part is all business, it's got the head, the tentacles, everything. So what's the back segment for?"
"What was in it when you dissected it?"
"It was just circulatory stuff and some undifferentiated body mass. I figured it was something to do with how they control their hosts. But maybe not. A lot of marine worms, when it's time to reproduce, they develop a gender. They separate into two segments, the epitoke and the atoke. The epitoke detaches and reproduces sexually. So... shit. These things could reproduce by fission when they have a queen, and leave the sexual reproduction up to her. If she dies they can develop epitokes and get in some meiosis that way. They could keep going without her."
"But they can't think without her," Casey insists. "Look at Stokely!"
They both finally focus on her; Zeke's lip curls, but Casey pales.
"Oh, fuck," he breathes, moving close to the cage wall.
Zeke catches his arm, holding him back. "You could be wrong. She could be faking."
"If she could hurt us she would've done it while we were distracted. Stokes. Are you okay?"
"Sure. Great," Stokely rasps.
"Fuck." Casey kneels to look more closely; Stokely stares back, dry-eyed. "She's dehydrating. That thing's sucking all the water out of her."
"Guess that supports your idea. She could've hauled ass to the pool to tank up, but she hasn't moved."
"Fuck my idea, who gives a shit. What if it kills her?"
"It doesn't make any sense for the parasite to kill the host by leeching it dry instead of just steering the host to the nearest source of water."
"Wait." Casey sits up and turns to Zeke. "She said something to me, Marybeth. She was talking about where she came from. She said it was all oceans."
Zeke's eyes skip down to Casey's mouth; his pupils dilate. He looks away, shaking off the reaction, but Stokely saw it. His pupils are reacting normally again. The drugs are wearing off.
The atoke rises to the back of her throat, ready to fly and bite and burrow as soon as any patch of bare skin comes close enough.
"These things evolved for an underwater environment," Casey says. "So say everything's underwater and the queen dies. All the infected hosts just float in the water. The parasites don't care, they can just keep reproducing in the hosts, right?"
"Possibly. Sure, why not."
"But eventually the hosts start dehydrating because they've got so many parasites leeching moisture from their bloodstreams faster than they can replace it. So what would the parasites do? Leave the host. Since they're in the water, that solves their dehydration problem. Plus, once they're out in the water, they can mate. Like you said... they split off pieces that can reproduce. It's just that they need a queen to organize anything more complicated than eating and mating."
"In a bee colony, you need a queen to produce a queen," says Zeke.
"Yeah, but that's because the queen bees are the only ones who can lay fertilized eggs, right? An unfertilized egg only gets you a drone. But with these things, the etokes...?"
"Epitokes."
"Okay, the epitokes. They reproduce sexually, so they've got fertilized eggs. All their offspring could potentially be queens."
"It only works if they're underwater," Zeke realizes. "But then it works out. The parasites are asexual til the queen dies. The host stops moving, the parasites go out into the water, start interacting, develop their epitokes and mate. Then there's probably a showdown between all the potential baby queens. Like the virgin queens in a beehive, they'd kill or be killed til there's only one queen left. She takes command of the atokes and they all start infesting hosts again." He snorts. "Fuckin' circle of life, man."
"But what we need to figure out is, does it kill the host? We can't just let Stokely die."
Zeke looks out at her; there's only curiosity in his eyes, no mercy.
That's all right. She doesn't need mercy. Curiosity's better if it brings him close enough to take the atoke.
She'll spit it right at his fucking eye.
*
Next.
Author: Cesare almostnever
Fandom: The Faculty
Pairing/Characters: Casey/Zeke
Rating: Adult
Notes: Happy Josh Hartnett Day! There's a lot of science in this part; apologies if I got it wrong. Written for fandom_mashup, using the works of sophinisba.
sophinisba fics used: Incense (one character eavesdrops on two others). Blue Genes (Casey makes an aggressive pass at Zeke; discussion of genetics). Getting Kinda Used To It (Stokely taken over by the aliens). Limitless Oceans (tentacles). Trekkie Sci-Fi Freak Who's Been Right So Far (holed up away from the rest of the world). A Brief Adventure (characters behind bars).
*
Stokely lies on the locker room floor, the concrete cool under her cheek.
Eventually Zeke says in his low deadpan, "I guess that takes care of the sexual tension."
"For now." Casey brushes at his stomach, semen peeling off in translucent scales.
They smell like drying sweat. Stokely can barely lick her lips.
"Your friend's playing possum out there to try to draw us out."
"Shit. She's okay, isn't she?"
"Don't know, don't care. Here's the new and improved plan. You pull the bolt, you run for my car and you lock yourself in. Drive if they see you. If you can, come back to the gym door and pick me up. If you can't, just fucking drive for DC. I'll meet you."
"No."
"Casey. We have to do something."
"What's the rush? If you can put off the big plan for a fuck, you can wait til we come up with something better, genius."
"You get pretty fuckin' mouthy after sex," Zeke says.
"I'm always mouthy," Casey says, "it's just usually no one listens. I try to tell them aliens are taking over the school, they just give me shit about how the only alien around here is me."
"Fine, I'm listening," Zeke rolls his eyes elaborately.
"We've been in here at least half an hour. This whole time, all we've got is Stokes standing guard. Why haven't the rest of them come yet? I mean. Listen."
They're quiet, briefly. Stokely slumps irretrievably on the floor, looking at the concentration, the silent communion between the two of them.
"Hear anything?"
Zeke shakes his head.
"Which is weird. The whole town was at the football game. Shouldn't we be hearing the aliens attacking people out there, spreading the parasites? Where are they?"
"Maybe they're busy taking over the world."
"Right. Just really, really quietly."
"Maybe. Fuck, for all we know we're the last two real humans." Zeke grabs the red mesh of the ball cage and shakes it, the metallic shimmy echoing in the locker room. "They'll leave us in this cage and build a zoo around us. We won't even be able to perpetuate the species."
"You never know," Casey says. "Maybe they have alien technology that'll make it so you can bear my blue-eyed babies."
Zeke snorts so hard that it sounds painful. "I'm going to have your kids?"
"What, are you scared?" Casey's almost smirking. "Can't handle it?"
Zeke laughs. Stokely's never heard him laugh out loud before like that.
Casey looks pleased for a moment before his expression shifts, growing thoughtful. "They reproduce asexually, we saw that in Furlong's class. The worm split into two identical worms. Fission."
"Yeah, I remember. Hot worm-on-worm action. So?"
"You saw Marybeth's real body. She was huge. At the end she shot a bunch of the worms at me. She must generate them, or incubate them, carry them somehow. But they don't need her; they can reproduce anywhere."
"Anywhere wet."
"Right. But just think. How would they evolve like that? Why does the species need Marybeth? In insect colonies where there's a queen, the queen's responsible for laying eggs. She's basically the only really fertile female. But the worms don't need Marybeth for reproduction. They do that on their own."
"They need her for heterogamy."
"Huh?"
"The worms that reproduce asexually are genetically identical." Zeke leans in toward Casey, the opposite of the laid-back smartass act he always puts on in class, on those rare occasions that he bothers to participate at all. He's interested now, watching Casey closely to make sure he's following along. "Asexual reproduction's fast, good for populating a new planet in a hurry. But bad for long-term survival-- if all the worms were genetically identical, then any virus or bacteria that killed one of them would be able to wipe them all out. Complex organisms need to undergo meiosis so the entire population can maintain enough genetic variation to handle whatever the environment throws at them."
Casey looks at him blankly for a moment, but soon he's nodding, "Right-- they need to mix up their genetic material to keep from getting too inbred."
"Well, we're not talking about Billy-Bob worm marrying Daisy-Sue worm and making little fucked up worm babies, here."
"Shut up, you know what I mean. You're thinking the purpose of the queen is mating, to introduce new genetic variations into the population. But that doesn't explain why she's so big. I mean, why can't the worms just mate themselves, sometimes? Why do they have this huge-ass queen just for that?"
Zeke narrows his eyes. "You obviously have a theory, so let's hear it."
"I think she controlled them. Like... psychically. We were hoping everyone who got infected would be normal once she was dead. That didn't work out. But they're not like before, either, when she was directing them. Look at Stokely. She hasn't moved since I killed Marybeth. She's only outside the ball cage now because you pushed her."
"So you think they can't do shit without Marybeth ordering them around? I guess that explains why I had to pry Stokes off you earlier."
"Stokely's last order from Marybeth was to attack us and keep us in place. I think she's still stuck on that last command. They're all stuck like that, doing whatever they were last told to do. I mean, come on, those worms are this big," Casey holds his fingers two inches apart. "You didn't even see a brain when you dissected one, just ganglia."
"They're parasites, they don't need brains of their own when they can just attach into a host." Zeke scratches the back of his head. "Look, Case, if you were right, that'd be a profoundly stupid system. What kind of hive mind would evolve to be totally helpless once you killed the queen?"
"Temporarily helpless," Casey says. "What happens in a bee colony when the queen dies? Some of the worker bees start developing the ability to lay eggs, right?"
"Right... the queen's pheremones wear off and the workers can reproduce. But that still fucks up the hive, because their eggs aren't fertilized, so they're all drones. Eventually the hive dies off."
Casey hesitates, but then he shakes his head. "Okay, so they don't recover. So what? It happens. Bees evolved in a way that they get fucked up without a queen."
"They evolved so that the workers try to keep things going in a fucked-up way after a disaster kills the queen plus all their backups. There should be backup queens to take over for Marybeth, or else the aliens' system sucks."
"Maybe it sucks, then. Nothing evolves to be perfect or we wouldn't have an appendix."
"Or maybe we're not looking at the right model. Forget the hive mind shit for now." Zeke stands up and paces the length of the cage. "They don't look like bees, they look like worms. Annelids. "
"Like leeches. They have teeth like leeches, that one in the aquarium bit Mr. Furlong."
"Yeah, the head's pretty developed. But they've got those tendril things to hook into the host. That's like polychaetes, marine worms. So how the fuck do marine worms reproduce?" Zeke snaps his fingers impatiently. "Fuck, I know this. I know everything."
"And modest, too."
"Shut up. Where's the one we killed in here, is it smashed?" Zeke practically plants his face against the concrete floor, squinting.
"It's over here." Casey crawls along the ground to find it, handling it carefully as he brings it back to Zeke.
"Dried up," Zeke mutters. "But you can kind of see... look." Their heads are almost together, bent over the mummified form. "When I cut the other one apart, I didn't see a reproductive system. I thought that was because they reproduce through fission. But see this, the two sections? The front part is all business, it's got the head, the tentacles, everything. So what's the back segment for?"
"What was in it when you dissected it?"
"It was just circulatory stuff and some undifferentiated body mass. I figured it was something to do with how they control their hosts. But maybe not. A lot of marine worms, when it's time to reproduce, they develop a gender. They separate into two segments, the epitoke and the atoke. The epitoke detaches and reproduces sexually. So... shit. These things could reproduce by fission when they have a queen, and leave the sexual reproduction up to her. If she dies they can develop epitokes and get in some meiosis that way. They could keep going without her."
"But they can't think without her," Casey insists. "Look at Stokely!"
They both finally focus on her; Zeke's lip curls, but Casey pales.
"Oh, fuck," he breathes, moving close to the cage wall.
Zeke catches his arm, holding him back. "You could be wrong. She could be faking."
"If she could hurt us she would've done it while we were distracted. Stokes. Are you okay?"
"Sure. Great," Stokely rasps.
"Fuck." Casey kneels to look more closely; Stokely stares back, dry-eyed. "She's dehydrating. That thing's sucking all the water out of her."
"Guess that supports your idea. She could've hauled ass to the pool to tank up, but she hasn't moved."
"Fuck my idea, who gives a shit. What if it kills her?"
"It doesn't make any sense for the parasite to kill the host by leeching it dry instead of just steering the host to the nearest source of water."
"Wait." Casey sits up and turns to Zeke. "She said something to me, Marybeth. She was talking about where she came from. She said it was all oceans."
Zeke's eyes skip down to Casey's mouth; his pupils dilate. He looks away, shaking off the reaction, but Stokely saw it. His pupils are reacting normally again. The drugs are wearing off.
The atoke rises to the back of her throat, ready to fly and bite and burrow as soon as any patch of bare skin comes close enough.
"These things evolved for an underwater environment," Casey says. "So say everything's underwater and the queen dies. All the infected hosts just float in the water. The parasites don't care, they can just keep reproducing in the hosts, right?"
"Possibly. Sure, why not."
"But eventually the hosts start dehydrating because they've got so many parasites leeching moisture from their bloodstreams faster than they can replace it. So what would the parasites do? Leave the host. Since they're in the water, that solves their dehydration problem. Plus, once they're out in the water, they can mate. Like you said... they split off pieces that can reproduce. It's just that they need a queen to organize anything more complicated than eating and mating."
"In a bee colony, you need a queen to produce a queen," says Zeke.
"Yeah, but that's because the queen bees are the only ones who can lay fertilized eggs, right? An unfertilized egg only gets you a drone. But with these things, the etokes...?"
"Epitokes."
"Okay, the epitokes. They reproduce sexually, so they've got fertilized eggs. All their offspring could potentially be queens."
"It only works if they're underwater," Zeke realizes. "But then it works out. The parasites are asexual til the queen dies. The host stops moving, the parasites go out into the water, start interacting, develop their epitokes and mate. Then there's probably a showdown between all the potential baby queens. Like the virgin queens in a beehive, they'd kill or be killed til there's only one queen left. She takes command of the atokes and they all start infesting hosts again." He snorts. "Fuckin' circle of life, man."
"But what we need to figure out is, does it kill the host? We can't just let Stokely die."
Zeke looks out at her; there's only curiosity in his eyes, no mercy.
That's all right. She doesn't need mercy. Curiosity's better if it brings him close enough to take the atoke.
She'll spit it right at his fucking eye.
*
Next.