Levi Fussell (he/him)about 3,900 words

4606 Woodlawn Ave N,

Seattle, WA, 98103

levwilfus@gmail.com

Gruf, Graf, and Alone

by Levi Fussell

It was a standard business, a trawl through the next three-hundred planets, scan, strip, find anything, which was always nothing. They had finished with the final planet, and everything they found was, of course, nothing. Hux drew a thick black line through its name on the list – the three-hundredth one – happy to wipe it from existence.

“More graf?” she did not even look up when she spoke, instead she started to go over the next journey, the next list of planets. Maybe there would at least be a cafe they could stop on that one.

Mrif hauled his weight against the lever of Chamber A, dumping the doors, pouring down a rain of graf and gruf. It was important, for reasons both moral and theoretical, to keep apart the materials of different planets. This was a silly rule according to the gruf handler. When every planet had the same grey, wet, silicon-ridden and a tad ferrous, makeup, it was time wasted to keep it all apart.

“Yeeoup,” said Mrif, and he looked at their collection of graf and gruf behind the glass. Where it had flowed out and pushed against the glass, the trash looked like the cross section of dirty minced brain. Mrif smiled, spat nothing, then spun on his heels and marched up to the front of the ship. Hux was busy find the shortest route to a cup of Ozzik Mugh on the next route map.

“What pains,” said Mrif, “what pains, eh.” Neither Mrif nor Hux used their eyes for anything beyond graf and gruf identification – even the planet routes they didn’t look at any more. They had stopped looking at each other many spins of the galaxy ago, instead reverting to a language of sound, twitches, and perturbances. Good morning, was a stain on the kitchen sink, Any news from home?, a dust ball set loose in the corner, or – for more immediate messages – a foot pattern played out on the steel tiles. By habit they still spoke, but their minds had such great models of how the lips and flesh of the other stretched, sprung, that they no longer needed to look to see the other speak.

Hux had a great model of Mrif in his mind which was located in his stomach. Mrif had a perfect model of Hux which was distributed through her eleven legs. Mrif’s model predicted Hux would say nothing, frown instead. Hux’s model said of Mrif: he will talk no matter what I say.

Between TezzleT-9 and Qquabber Hue, Hux marked a red dot on the route map, frowned. Mrif filled the air with personal messages to himself: “All this wonderful, fine, machine.” He ran a hand over the wonderful fine machine – buttons, dials, screens, “– technology in all our holes and ten more.” He twiddled his ears, his noses, his eyes, which were all plugged with nice tech indeed. “Advanced beyond belief.” And to show how advanced they were, Hux walked over to the wall where there was a deep hole and stuck in one of his arms all the way up to the shoulder. “Yet how can we be so alone here in it all. But us, all of it graf and gruf – as if the creator was suddenly afflicted with a case of chronic colour blindness and a bout of the type of artistic insanity that is useless.” Hux removed his arm and it was now a very different shape, a cleave at the end gave it two functional hands instead of one.

Mrif was very busy not listening to Hux’s monologue. Her brain knew the song by the note. Instead, she continued to frown at her red dot. The Geddley Guice-Jump had no Ozzik Mugh on its menu. Mrif considered, perhaps, looking between Ferz and O-9-O, which were two planets tied together by reams of red gas. But was it worth the effort? This last loop had been a real gruf-sucker. Her mind was a total fog. She decided to reduce Hux’s audience size from one to zero by retiring to the central galley.

The central galley entrance had a sign that Mrif nailed lazily on it after their first haul they ever did: The Gruf Caboose: It’s All Urs. Inside Hux found the freshest looking pot of purple urs on the counter, scooped some onto her legs. The urs oozed, and then after a moment, her mind fog lifted like it was a mere sea breeze. She had brought with her the map, and now reconsidered the Ferz region with great passion, her eyelids unable to close from sheer wonderful awareness.

After a couple hours the graf from the last pickup had solidified. Back at the chamber, Hrux and Mrif pulled two levers in unison on a console, and precisely two-point-one litres of Huggles poured out from a vent above. Mouths adorned with teeth of curated Bismuth shards, stomachs hot as suns, the Huggle swarm performed a digestive symphony on the trash pile, and before you could trade an arm for an eye the Huggles had transformed all the graf and gruf into an ionic puddle. A magnet which cast a croissant-shaped shadow from the LED lights above it descended and collected the puddle.

Hrux and Mrif both signed the journey report with their tongues and then found their way to the central galley to scoop urz. They massaged their brains into a darkness for a few hours.

A song awoke them, first Hux who then had to shake Mrif who maybe had over-urzed. The song was terrible, built of a single, blinking red note and it went like this: breep, breep, breep.

Mrif, miffed, said of the alarm, “Arggh. Why, why, why.”

“Why, who?” said Hux who was up already with his boot and gloves on.

“Why do we still have these stupid, annoying alarms.”

“Ah, yes,” said Hux, who thought about it, frowned, and then went over to the wall and pushed a button that silenced the grating musical piece. “I’m not sure. Such primitive tech.” He left his contribution to Mrif’s statement at that, and went off to find the front of the ship. Mrif remained seated, desperately trying to warm her brains up before she could embark on the complicated task of locomotion. She slapped and shook each of her legs one by one until, warmed, she gloved and booted and ran to the other side of the ship.

“Anything?” Mrif arrived fast behind Hux who was deeply involved with a single button at the ship’s console. The button, when pushed, read the entire contents of the pusher’s mind, parsing for the prevalence of questions and, if found, translated these for the cognotron-88 that congested, computed, and spoke an answer in a vibrato.

The vibrato was laconic, felt silky purple: “Wakey, wakey, good to see you Hux and Mrif. Hope you had the urziest of dreams.”

“Can we just –“ Mrif started, but Hux raised his two-handed arm to cut her off. “Just wait, it’s standard intro stuff.”

The cognotron-88 continued, “Yes, yes, I see, yes, you are in a hurry so I will get to it. May I just say though, I simply adore your latest augmentation, Hux. Such charm in an arm with two hands, such charm.”

Hux smiled and looked at his hands, pleased. Mrif used the wall to absorb the fumes of her impatience.

“Yes, yes, I’ll get on with it. So, what have we here. Ah yes, yes, you are most curious about that little diddy that awoke you today. It was, yes – well, what did you think of it?”

Hux’s mind model informed him of Mrif’s wish to disassemble the cognotron-88 into its constituent atoms. He quickly pushed the button a few times to try to move the conversation forward. The button made a blunk sound and the cognotron-88 whirred. The velveteen vocal undulations came on strong:

“Wakey, wakey, good to see you Hux and Mrif. Hope you had the most urziest of dreams. Yes, yes, ah, yes, I see you are in a hurry. You are most curious about the little, skipping tune played for you this morning. Let’s see here.” The cognotron-88 then made a series of pops and whirls, speckled with a drill or two. It was not mechanical by far – entirely made of wet-wire and organics, but it was comforting for its listeners to hear tencho dribble when it was idle.

“Okay, it would appear, yes, yes, it is clear, you have a breach. A br – “

“A breach!” Mrif spun on the spot and ran off to the chambers, trip, tap, her ten legs rang on the steel loud and round. Hux almost called after her to just wait one moment and let us gather the full picture.

“– each. Yes, yes, but no cause for concern, here. It seemed it was sealed by whatever automation you’ve installed, yes. This did not raise the alarm, in fact, yes, yes. No, yes, it did not raise it, yes, yes.”

“Ok. Well, then what did?” said Hux in his mind, with his finger still on the button.

“And what did? Yes, yes, and what? Hmm. It seems what did it was an – Oh.”

“Oh?”

“An Oh. Yes.”

“What?” said Hux.

“No, no, Hux. Not a ‘What.’ An ‘Oh’. You have one inside of your ship, it would appear.” The cognotron-88 blopped and made a sound like a screw drop.

“I don’t know,” thought Hux, “what an ‘Oh’ is at all. At all.” Hux pushed the button a few more times, but the cognitron-88 was unable to provide more details on the ‘Oh’.

“Hux!” and it was Mrif calling from the other side of the ship. Hux left the violet notes of the cognitron-88 to drabble on about Oh’s and all that.

Hrux found Mrif at Chamber A. Only a few hours ago had two-point-one litres of bismuth mites devoured one-thousand tons of grey planet gruf as fast as Mrif could blink her five eyes. Mrif was almost flat to the glass when Hrux came in. Hux took a spot next to her and peered in with only two eyes. Something was in the middle of the chamber, so small they had missed it before, but large enough that the Huggles should have digested it.

“Oh,” said Hrux.

Mrif turned to Hux, “What?”

“I believe,” Hux said, “that’s an ‘Oh.’”

Mrif squeezed her face back onto the glass, “Oh.”

They had the Oh on the white marble counter, sealed on all sides by a glass vacuum, but with access holes with gloves attached to them so they could still prod it safely. How they had moved it to the central galley was very carefully, and with the help of their team of self-aware auto-scooters. It was now very easy to see what the Oh was, this close, if you were familiar with the sort of thing the Oh was, which, unfortunately, Mrif and Hux were not the sort of species familiar with Oh-like entities.

The Oh was a pastry – in fact, a mince pasty – in the shape of a half moon, quilted at the seams. For a pasty it had a dough ridge of master-class; evenly-spaced rivets, a brown pigment that only one adept at navigating the space between underdone and overcooked could execute. And it simply swelled with filling. In fact, it was a Cornwall mince pasty, which is an adjective used to describe a food product from a small southern town on an island on a blue planet in a solar system comprised of eight or nine planets (depending on your preferred planet categorization). In fact, it was a Kevin Murzy’s Cornwall mince pasty, which was the name of the man who’s hand had rolled the dough and diced the stuffing, who worked at a bakery parked by the seaside of the town of Cornwall on the island on a blue planet in the eight or nine planet solar system.

But, to know this you had to be of Cornwall origin, and neither Hux nor Mrif knew of anything but a gruf and graf universe. Rather, to them, it was something quite unknown and frightfully organic in nature.

“It is undeniably non-graf, non-gruf,” said Hux. “Unbelievable.”

“We must report this finding immediately,” said Mrif. She had a hand in one of the glove slots of the container and held a metal rod no longer than a fingernail, tamed on the Oh. A very fine laser shone from it, green and mean, and drew a range of interesting chaotic patterns across the Oh’s surface.

Nothing happened.

Mrif set the device down now, “Yes, we must report this now.” The glove had not finished sagging down by the time Mrif was at a screen with three buttons and a microphone stuck from the side.

“Wait,” said Hux, a little urgent, a little quiet – but never looking at Mrif. “Yes, you are right, we must. But think what they will do when we tell them?” Hux walked up to the Oh’s glass tomb. “This is the most interesting thing that has happened to our civilization since we started wrangling the suns and moving them where we pleased. They’ll come so quick at the news, we won’t even have a chance to enjoy it ourselves. The Oh, well, they’ll take it from us, and that will be that. Back to the same, droll, graf and gruf scooping.”

And for the first time since their first haul, Hux put his eyes somewhere they had not been: upon Mrif. He spoke, “Back to more grey and drab hauls.”

Mrif hesitated, her hand on two of the buttons. She did not meet Hux’s gaze and she did not push the third button. Rather, she channelled the energy of the would-be third button push into her head, which she nodded. Finally she let her hands drop and turned back to the Oh, so small and crusty on the table. “Okay fine. But by the next spin of the galactic arm, we tell them.”

“Of course,” said Hux, “Of course.”

“And I want a cup of Ozzik Mugh, first.”

The things they put the Oh through, well, they could be enumerated on not even a hand with a thousand fingers. They zipped it, chipped it, took some atoms from the top with a fine knife, garbled the electron signals at least twelve times, checked for acoustic properties of the Six Essential Frequencies, masked it under ultraviolet light, irradiated it with their plutonium supply, sent it various messages encoded in X-rays – parsing the replies through their cache of intergalactic decryptors, sent it a second round of messages via an organic bridge made from a fresh cell culture sampled from its surface, and finally – desperately – took it apart by the atom, ordered them along a two axis system, and printed this on a two-tone laser printer, and then put the Oh all back together again perfectly. But none of this produced anything extraordinary. It was, their tests told them, a very simple mixture, made almost entirely of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, with a dust of a few other lesser elements. Nothing was interesting about it, except its construction that is, which was clearly not made by the random crash and bash of the universe at play.

“Hmph,” said Hux, exhausted and disappointed. He began to rub some urz around his cognition regions. Mrif was less spent, her distributed mind allowing her to micro-nap during work like this.

“What if,” said Mrif, “we put it on the cognotron-88.” She looked at the Oh in way that a seagull might look upon a clam to calculate the dropping height to crack it open.

Hux thought he did not hear Mrif right. “Did I hear you right?” as he slapped a big green streak of urz about his ears. “That’s for cognitive beings. There is zero cognition within ten solar orbits of this thing, I’m sure.”

“Yes, but,” Mrif thought for a moment, “what if – perhaps its cognition is beyond our own.”

Despite the mounds of urz, Hux’s face became as dark as the space around their ship, “Then we would be dealing with something beyond our understanding and we are not the ones to be dealing with – ”

But Mrif was gone before you could count the urz buckets of a Tralok haul, Hux caught by surprise – his mind failing to predict this irrational action by Mrif. The glass container and the Oh were suddenly gone, Hux ran after them, waving his arms and sqwaking various noises of his species that had little information content.

The one button of the cognotron-88 was blue and warm to the touch, made of a very fine mesh of carbon beaded with cellular tissue. The cells kissed any organic surfaces they came in contact with with its toolbox of chemicals. They were kissing now, kissing a soft, doughy bottom of a Kevin Murzy’s Cornwall mince pasty. It lowered the button only slightly, so light it was. Mrif watched on.

The voice of the cognotron-88 sprung to life, hazy, the great plummy tones coming out, “Ah, yes, yes. And who am I talking to here, this is new, yes. Yes. Oh, moo.”

Mrif jolted her head at that, her legs went all hot quick – full cognition ready to think fast. Because of the cognotron-88’s interface, she could not intervene, could only listen.

“Ah, yes, moo, moo. Moo, too? What a dialect – a concept – I am intrigued. To moo, that is what you ask of me?”

Hux had heard the voice of the cognotron-88 alive as he wobbled screaming through the doorway, still drowsy from not having finished his urzing. He crashed into Mrif, producing various noises like: “Graraghg!” “Get it off!” “Grrrgogogooogle!” “Stop it!” But Mrif’s many legs were quick, held them both to the floor.

“Mrif! This is insane. Dangerous! Get it off there at once.” But the many-legged Mrif did not release Hux.

And it transformed, the voice of the cognotron-88, to notes less purple, more saturated in tone. Whiter, lighter, but speckled with dark patches.

“Yes, yes, moo. I see, yes. Moo. Moo, moo, moo. And you? Moo? Moo – Moo moo, moo – M-m-moo, Moo. Moo? Moo, moo, moo.”

Mrif whispered to the smothered Hux, “Cognotron-88 has learned its language.” Hux moaned.

“But what is it,” and Mrif spoke that as the she listened to a complete phase transition in the once-silky disposition of the cognotron-88. It bellowed in a way that shook the very walls of the ship:

“Moo! Moo – Moo! Moo, moo, moo. Mooooo! MOO!”

“Mrif,” Hux managed to let out. Hux saw now that the Oh on the button was no longer on the button, but around it, swallowing it. But Mrif could not hear Hux, such was the cacophony of moos in the room. And then Mrif also saw what Hux had seen: the Oh had grown. Up to the control panel, the screen, it had expanded to tenfold its size and more, and the space left for Mrif and Hux was almost none. Mrif let out a noise, but the mooing pastry blanket entirely filled any air that might have been useful for letting Mrif’s sound travel.

Mot applied his tenth big red scoop of urz for the day. Each application he chose a different armpit, each application he felt the fog clear, sprang back into another couple hours of work. He leaned back in his chair made of recycled graf, sipped a cup of Ozzik Mugh carefully, and closed his eyes as he waited for the urz to diffuse through him.

When he opened his eyes – the urz setting his corticals aflame, aware – he looked at the sky above. It was evening, and the entire galaxy was a blue slip in the sky. He looked upon it all and could not believe that, as the graffers kept saying, it was gruf and graf and no more. His ten spins of the galaxy stationed on this asteroid felt purposeless – if it was all so gruffy and grey, why have him sit here and listen to the empty echoes of a grey universe?

A blinking star caught his attention. It would pass the time to count its orbital speed. One, two, three. But on four he saw this was no blinking star, but a reflection of the glass. Mot looked down at console to see it doing something it had never done since it was wired and welded together aeons ago: it blinked.

At first, Mot scowled, completely confused. He considered it a glitch, an annoyance to his day. He pushed the blinking button to try to stop it. And like a marble in a ditch his mind then settled on the full landscape of the situation. His eyes grew, to the size of moons and he jumped to his feet faster than urz could ooze. He performed on that console a great concert, which involved buttons, microphones, dials, and nozzles. He had the whole asteroid belt awake, the system alive, and abuzz. More alive than any oozing urz had ever made any of them.

“What is it? Do you see anything? Do you see anything?” came one voice through the audio channel, cut apart by a few tinny bad signals.

Mot had been looking all around the sky for the last hour, “No, nothing. Not a thing.”

“Huh, I don’t see – Oh my Gushness! Gush – “

“What?” Mot almost tore the microphone from the console. The voice never came back. “What? Hello?”

“I’ve lost contact with Orgo Blue too,” said a new voice.

“I’ll try channel six and – “

“And?” said Mot. He had started such a sweat some of his red urz was running off.

“Gush! – ” And the new voice died in fuzz. Mot shook. He looked down at the console, buttoning in channel after channel of contact. All of them returning fizzes and pops. And with each channel Mot tried, the room grew darker and darker, a shadow cast over him and the entire console. Only once he could hardly see his hands to push the buttons did Mot freeze, stiff. He sent a-hundred words of encouragement to the muscles in his eyes, asking of them to lift. They performed his request only in small degrees.

Mot’s gaze met the final thing it would ever see: the size of planet, white as a moon, but speckled with black, light-consuming voids. It was abnormal, non-spherical, and its surface almost rippled. This was no ship, no sun. It had various asymmetric protrusions, one long and thin with a thistle of needles on the end, four slightly thicker ones with hard rock on the ends. The largest extension was swollen thick and it gaped. But it was what was upon this largest extension that ruined Mot’s mind, for it just could comprehend. Mot shaked and shook, and emptied like a shell – it came towards him, swallowed him. What was on this mass were holes, many of them, two of them wet and glinted like orbs of the great beyond.

Two eyes.

Mot had no air to scream, for the glass of his station was shattered by a great sound that echoed through space on solar flares. It was the very first syllables of the creator, this sound, riding the ripples of the universe’s moment of birth.

The sound was thus: moo.

Fussell / Gruf / 12