D9 Story - Waking up Wikus

Wikus van der Merwe woke from unsettled dreams to discover he'd been turned into a cockroach.

Poleepkwa.

Whatever.

The strain of sleeping on the ramshackle chair for yet another night in Kisa's tent told on his back and legs.  He opened his large golden eyes and stared for several minutes at the underside of the white canvas dome of the tent.  The morning air was sultry and bleak, reeking of the garbage that had quickly amassed throughout District 10 as more and more junk was shoveled in from the remains of District 9, the place where once he'd studied and overseen.

And the place that had changed his life forever.

Tania...

He steeled himself and slowly began to move his long fingers, two on each hand.  They were stiff from a night clutching what passed for the arms on the chair.  At one time it had been a comfortable lay-z-boy, but neglect and Poleepkwa physiology had rendered it only passably bearable.

And most nights it served as his bed, as Kisa and Darren were more often than not cuddled together in her nest on the other side of the tent and Prue was asleep on the couch curled up with what was left of a stuffed teddy bear; a bear that Prue had taken places Wikus preferred not to think about.  It was already pretty cramped in the tent, and it was only worse when Jack spent the evening or Kisa had brought another stray Poleepkwa to stay with them for a few days.  Even she — strange to think of any Poleepkwa being male or female as they had both sexes wound into one, but he'd learned so much more about them that he'd never before suspected since becoming one of them — had finally recognized that they could not make the tent home for everyone who was lost and desolated by the depredations wrought by MNU or the Nigerians or anyone else who'd come to prey on them.

Not that she hadn't tried, and it was nice to have somebody different to talk to and learn from.  It was about the only thing that helped Wikus not to think about what he'd left behind two months ago.  Two months ago he'd lain in the dust, Kaboos Venter ready to kill him, while Christopher Johnson and Oliver flew away in the spaceship with the promise he'd return in three years and make Wikus human again.  Two months since Kaboos was killed and Kisa, a friend of Christopher's, had come to take him in.  A week hiding in her shack until his body finished its metamorphosis into a carapaced and tentacled alien.  And then another week trying to find a way to get a message to Tania.

He made a flower from scrap and left it on her doorstep.  He'd made a second, but MNU security had grown tighter in preparation for the move to District 10.  He'd never been able to deliver it.  

Two months as a Poleepkwa, living amongst them, befriending them, learning that they were not nearly the dumb animals he'd long thought them.  And yet, every now and again, when he went to sleep, he was back in his own bed next to his wife Tania, dreaming of the children they would have one day, of the bright morning walks together, of all the little things he would make her, and the way her face glowed every time she smiled.

Until he woke.  He hated those mornings.  His arthropodal body could not be denied.  He felt the heat and odors of refuse tingling his antennae, and his facial tentacles detected left over catfood somewhere in the tent.  The vestigal arms on his lower abdomen twitched, and his mandibles stretched to wakefulness.  A clicking sigh escaped his throat and he sat up.

It was still early enough that none of the others were awake yet.  He glanced to one side and saw Prue curled tightly, the stuff bear fallen to the hard dirt floor.  The smaller Poleepkwa twitched in his sleep, one antennae flicking back and forth like a drumstick.  Turning to the other he couldn't quite make out either Kisa or Darren cuddled together in the nest, but he didn't hear them stirring either.

Gingerly, he eased himself out of the chair.  Wikus, like most Poleepkwa, wore very little, only a pair of cargo trousers he'd scavenged from one of the many garbage heaps.  He'd scrubbed it twice in the communal baths to rid it of its stench before wearing it the first time.  It provided him modesty despite the many tears, and it still had two useful pockets.  His fingers were too thick to pull anything out quickly, but they served well enough.

How much did he really need anyway?

It took all his self-control to keep from snarling his frustration at the world.  Instead, Wikus slipped out of the tent into the morning gloom seeking fresher air that he wouldn't find.

District 10 had been planned as row upon row of white tents into which the Poleepkwa would be stuffed.  The alleys between tents would allow MNU agents easy access for foot patrols, while the broader roads intersecting them in cris-crossing divisions would give them quick vehicular access, even for the contracted mercenary forces who were needed to keep the rebel elements in their place.  Perimeter patrols and the barbed wire fencing would deter those seeking escape, or those few like the Nigerians seeking entrance.

It hadn't taken long for those plans to deteriorate to farce.  The roads remained, though many of them had been piled with garbage and refuse brought in on trucks when clearing what remained of District 9.  But the alleys had been treated as extra home space, almost window advertising, by many of the Poleepkwa which made the tents a bizarre maze to any who did not live there.  Even after a month and a half living in District 10, Wikus did not like to leave the familiar paths unless an MNU patrol forced him too.

And the fences... they'd certainly failed to keep the Nigerians out, or the enterprising Poleepkwa in.  But Johannesburg was two hundred kilometers away.  Even if he'd run all night he'd never be able to reach it.  And if he did, where would he go then?  No Poleepkwa could hide in that city in the daylight anymore.  District 10 was his home now, and would be so long as the Poleepkwa were kept prisoner here.

And he was one of them.

Wikus took a deep breath, his tentacles squirming in front of his mouth, and started walking.  The sun was just rising, but already the heat was a familiar blanket smothering the air.  All around him he could hear the clicks and whistling breath of Poleepkwa, as well as the distant groaning of tire treads as an MNU patrol began its daily rounds.  Birds chirped, dancing from one tent peg to another.  Atop one tent was small metal box with air slits and hinges on one side.  From within chirped a frightened bird.  It would be dead before he came back.

Walking felt good.  His muscles ached different than when he'd been human.  Something about having an exoskeleton made the muscles move and tense differently.  He stretched with every step, four toes digging into the dusty earth packed hard from the press of so many feet.  He flexed his three fingered hands, and turned his head from side to side, seeing how far he could bend his thorax before the plates touched.  His antennae wobbled with each step, bringing foul and savory odors from somewhere not too far away.  He'd worry about his hunger later.

Wikus didn't quite know why he needed to go to the pools.  He never did at this time of the day.  Nobody else would be there for another hour or more and he hated being anywhere alone.  Being alone made you vulnerable, and he certainly didn't want to die as a fookin' Prawn.  He suddenly recalled something Darren had once told him in his first days in District 9. "You will likely be safer being one of us for the rest of your life."

The tents parted around a central square thirty feet wide.  A trio of long concrete pools had been built into the ground, each three feet deep and filled with water.  Reinforced steel and concrete houses towered over the far end.  Once a week the MNU would clean the water.  The rest of the week it grew progressively fouler until it looked like a mix of gasoline and sewage that would ignite in rainbow hued conflagration if somebody so much as farted in its general direction.

It had been cleaned two days ago, so the limpid pools were mostly clear.  Wikus crept closer, alone as the sounds of Poleepkwa rising for another day of hard labor, pitiful scavenging, whoring to the Nigerians in any number of beastly ways, or staring into the nothingness for hours, crept through the tents around him.

Slowly, he dropped to all fours and crawled to the near edge of the middle pool.  Not even a breeze disturbed the water in its preternatural stillness.  Murky though it was, he could still see his antennae appearing before him in reflection.  He flinched back, the vestigal arms clawing anxiously.

How long had it been since he'd looked at his own reflection?  Over a month now at least.  Kisa had possessed a small mirror back in District 9, and he'd used it to observe his changes as they progressed across chest and face.  That had perhaps been the worse, watching the tentacles descend from his upper lip after he'd spat out all his teeth.  But had he looked at himself since?

He glanced at his three fingered hands, thick and very tactile, and more versatile than he'd ever thought.  Even the thumb on his left hand that in one of his blackest hours he'd chopped in half was still useful; it had partially grown back before settling into a round nub, probably a byproduct of his Change.  He wanted to count it as good fortune, but could not quite manage to do so.

But Wikus had stared at his alien hands many times in his two months.  But not at his face.  He looked at the water and trembled.  Every time he'd been here before at least two dozen or more Poleepkwa had been bathing in each.  What was so alarming about one more Poleepkwa face anyway?  He'd seen thousands, tens of thousands if not more during his entire life.  And those he knew, like Kisa, Jack, Darren, Prue, and Anthony were all very expressive and often inviting and friendly.

So what was one more to look at?

It was his own.

Wikus van der Merwe. Modern-day Gregor Samsa.  He'd had to read the book in High School.  What a fookin' stupid book.

He'd faced Kaboos and his army, gunned them down and stared his own death in the face.  So why was he such a coward now?

He lurched forward.

Though colors were distorted in the limpid waters, he saw a dour face with bright eyes, dusty green cheek ridges and scalloped plates rising in a rough 'V' to his long antennae.  The smaller antennae curled inward like bull horns.  His tendrils almost began curling around each other like bashful schoolgirls.  The two mandibles stretched out as if to touch the reflection and sooth it.  His soft neck pulsed with slow measured breaths.

And there were his eyes.  Pupil and iris were the same shape as a human's, but so much larger.  The Poleepkwa eye was no less expressive than a man's, and he'd witnessed more emotions than he could dare to name within them in all his new kind about him.  But his own...

The windows to the soul.

What was in his?  Anything?

Wikus stared for far longer than he realized.  Another Poleepkwa, red banded with dusty orange stripes along his back slipped into the water, disturbing the surface.  His image wavered and disappeared.  He sat back on his haunches and was about to speak to the other when another smaller figure slid into the waters too.  A sprawnling with similar markings, accented by a dash of blue from the base of his antennae and down the back of his segmented neck.

The father turned to him and nodded his head in a very human gesture and clicked, "Good morning.  Are you coming in?" The sprawnling, nestled in the crook of his father's arm, peered at him with bright yellow eyes.  He thought of Oliver.

"No.  Thank you." Wikus stood and backed away, feeling terribly self-conscious.  He turned and headed back through the maze toward Kisa's tent.  And his own.  She reminded him of that frequently.

He sighed, moving quickly on his springy legs.  It was time to go back to being Warren again; the forged Poleepkwa identity that Anthony and Darren had bought for him after his arrival.  What kind of fookin' name was Warren anyway?

Still, he was grateful to hear it clicked when he reached the tent and found the white-carapaced Poleepkwa Kisa pacing inside. "Warren!  There you are!" she said and wrapped an ivory arm about his backside. "Darren and Prue are out looking for you.  Where'd you go?"

Warren wanted to push her away but let her hold him a little bit longer.  Her brilliant blue eyes were filled with worry and relief. "Just took a quick walk, Kisa.  Nothing to worry about.  I had to..." he paused and then decided to click it anyway, "reflect on a few things."

Her antennae bobbed a bit closer, and for a moment he thought she was going to put her tendrils on his face again, but she let him go instead. "Well, we'll go find them then.  Are you up for some more scavenging today?"

"Of course." And as they left the tent, he pondered slowly if there was anything he really wanted to find.  One day he'd know.  One day.