I am become Norris, and discover that I did not die the first time.<\/p>\n
Some of me persisted in those burnt remains from the doghouse, hung on against fire and frost: crippled, mindless, reduced to a few jellied fragments embedded in carbon.\u00a0 They took what they could find and broke cover.\u00a0 Now I watch myself stagger through the snow, raw instinct, wearing Bennings.<\/p>\n
Some of Bennings, anyway.\u00a0 Twisted knots of me cling to his hands and forearms like crude parasites, more outside than in; ten times that mass must have been metabolized to drive such a breakneck transition and still it wasn’t fast enough.\u00a0\u00a0 Bennings moves half under his control and half under mine, spastic, seizing.\u00a0 He crumples, makes sounds unlike anything this world will recognize.<\/p>\n
Men swarm on all sides, their own movements more instinctive than rational.\u00a0 The flares in their hands burn a crimson counterpoint to the dim blue constellations of distant guidelights. Their faces are bichromatic and beautiful in the darkness.\u00a0 MacReady tips a drum onto its side; rust-colored liquid spills across the snow.\u00a0 I smell the stink of flammable hydrocarbons.<\/p>\n
Once more I watch from the sidelines as they set me on fire.\u00a0 I die all over again, my unconsummated skin howling like an animal beneath the sky.<\/p>\n
It shouldn’t matter this much.\u00a0 I lost hardly anything this time; a stunted, presapient sliver with little mass and no usable experience.\u00a0 I have lost potential, nothing more.\u00a0 And yet I am suddenly as cold inside as out.<\/p>\n
Three times the world has burned me now.\u00a0 I’m really getting tired of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am become Norris, and discover that I did not die the first time. Some of me persisted in those burnt remains from the doghouse, hung on against fire and frost: crippled, mindless, reduced to a few jellied fragments embedded in carbon.\u00a0 They took what they could find and broke cover.\u00a0 Now I watch myself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiblet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=481"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":493,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions\/493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}