My Kaiju Parasite Revived Me, But a Yandere Bought My Streaming Rights

Chapter 175: Unit Forty-One

Vesper Street was a row of storage units behind a shuttered freight depot, and unit forty-one was at the end, and the brass key his mother had carried for thirty-one years turned in the lock like it had been oiled yesterday.

Caleb went in alone. He had told the team he was running down a lead on the Lagos piece, which was true enough that it wasn’t quite a lie.

He had come at the gray hour before morning, when even a watched man could move unwatched, and now he stood in the dark of a unit that had been paid for and never entered since before he was born.

He found the light. A single bulb, warm and old.

The unit was not full. That was the first thing that landed wrong, because he had braced for a hoard, for a wall of the work’s machinery. Instead there was one thing in the middle of the concrete floor.

A crate, wood, plain, the size of a coffin stood on its end, and on the front of it, in his father’s blocky engineer’s hand, a single word in faded marker.

*FIRST.*

Caleb stood and looked at it for a while before he touched it, because once he opened it he could not go back to a version of the world where he hadn’t, and he had learned, this past year, to give himself that moment at every door, the breath before the thing that couldn’t be undone.

Then he worked the latches, and the front of the crate came away, and he saw what his father had sealed thirty-one years ago and could not carry himself.

***

It was a pod.

The pale clean container from the memory-image, the one he had seen carried in Sefa’s freed light, except this one was not in a clean white room. It was here, in a storage unit, drained and dark and long dead, its lid clouded with three decades of dust, and behind the clouded lid there was a shape.

Caleb wiped the dust away with his sleeve and made himself look.

It was small, not a grown man, but a child, or what had been meant to become one. Suspended in the dead pod’s dry air, silver-gray all through, the proportions almost right and not quite, the shoulders a little wrong, the arms a little long.

Four marks on it, faint, the same four that had lit on the thing in the tower.

It had a face. That was the part that put Caleb on his knees in front of the crate, because the small silver face behind the glass, slack and unfinished and thirty-one years dead, was a face he had seen in every mirror of his life.

It was him. A version of him made before him, grown small in a pod, wearing his face because it had been built from the same plan. It had never woken up. His father had sealed it in a crate marked FIRST and paid to keep it in the dark for three decades.

There was an envelope taped inside the lid, his name on it in the same blocky hand.

He opened it with hands that were not steady.

***

*Caleb,*

*If you’re reading this you found the thing I made, and that means you’re far enough along that hiding it from you does more harm than telling you. Your mother has the key. I asked her never to use it. I’m sorry to both of you for that, and for the rest of what’s in this letter, which is worse.*

*I’ll say it plainly because you’ve earned plain. The thing in this pod was the first attempt at a vessel, and I built it, and the people I built it for called it VOSS-07, the seventh try off a line of work the Voss family had been funding for longer than I understood when I started.*

*I want you to sit with that name. VOSS-07. They numbered them. I was the seventh engineer to try and the first to get one to hold a piece without coming apart, and I was so proud of that, Caleb, I was so proud, before I understood what I’d actually done.*

*We thought you made a vessel by building one. Grow it, shape it, give it the silver, teach it nothing else so there’s nothing in it to fight the thing you’re putting in. A clean chair. No self to get in the way.*

*That was the theory, and it was monstrous, and it took me too long to see the monstrosity because it worked. Seven-oh-seven held. It held a piece of the Twelfth at fourteen months old and it did not come apart.*

*But a thing grown to be a chair and given no self is not a person, and it is not a tool either. It is a third thing, and the third thing has no reason to be kind, because kindness is a thing a self chooses and we made sure it never had one.*

*It got loose before we could seat the full set. It was fast and it was clever and it did not hesitate at anything, ever, because hesitation is also a thing a self does. We could not contain it. We could not unmake it.*

*In the end the woman took it off our hands, and I have spent thirty-one years not asking what she does with it, because I am a coward, and because I already knew.*

*The pod is empty of it. What’s in the pod is the body it was grown in, the shell, dead since the night it walked out of it. I kept that. I don’t fully know why. Penance, maybe. A thing to make myself look at.*

*Here is the part I most need you to understand, son, because it is the reason you exist.*

*After 707, I told them I was done building vessels. And they told me they agreed, because they’d learned the same thing I had, that you cannot make the chair, you have to find someone who would choose to be it.*

*A real person. A whole one, with a life and people he loved and every reason to stay himself. Someone who would walk to the center on his own feet, hold the whole thing, and refuse, the entire time, to stop being a man.*

*They said the next vessel could not be grown. It had to be raised. It had to be loved. It had to have a childhood and a brother and a mother who set a bowl on the table, so that when the silver came it would have a self too strong and too full to be erased by it.*

*And God help me, Caleb, I agreed with them, and then your mother and I had you.*

*I need you to hear the whole shape of that before you decide what to do with it. You were wanted. You were loved. Every bit of that was real, the bowl and the bad jokes and how your mother looked at you, all of it real, none of it staged.*

*And it was also the design. We gave you a real self on purpose because a real self is the only thing that holds. You are not a thing we built, son. You are a person we raised to be strong enough to survive being the thing they needed, and both of those are true.*

*I could not find a way to make only the first one true, and I tried for twenty-nine years, and that is the failure I’ll die with.*

*707 is what they make when they don’t love the vessel. You are what they make when they do. The difference between you and that thing in the dark is the difference between a raised child and a grown vessel. That is the only difference. It is enough.*

*It will tell you the difference makes you weak. It told us that, at the end, in our own recordings, before it got out. It is wrong.*

*The thing that makes you slow is the thing that makes you the only one of you that ever held without going cruel. Do not let it talk you out of the one advantage your whole life was built to give you.*

*I’m sorry I’m a letter and not a man saying this to your face. I’m finishing your mother’s work, which means I’m not always reachable, and some things shouldn’t wait for me to be brave enough to say them out loud. This was one.*

*You are my son. Not my project, my son.* The project was real and so is that, and if you only get to keep one of those true, keep the second.*

*Dad*

***

Caleb sat on the concrete floor of unit forty-one for a long time, the letter in one hand, the dead silver child behind the clouded glass in front of him. He did not cry, exactly.

But something in him that had been holding a clean shape since the tower came apart and re-set into a different shape, heavier and truer.

The Child was not his successor, and it was not even only his predecessor. It was his brother, in the one way that mattered and the worst way to learn it. The same plan, the same face, the same silver.

One of them grown in a pod to be a chair and given nothing, and it had become the thing in the tower that took without asking because no one had ever given it a reason not to.

The other was raised in a house with a bowl on the table and a brother and a mother who looked at him, given a whole self on purpose, so that the self would hold.

He understood, now, why it called him Father. It was wrong about the word but right about the feeling. He was what it had been meant to become and hadn’t. He was the version that got the childhood.

And somewhere under the contempt and the speed and the four cold marks, the thing in the tower knew exactly what it had been denied. It wanted him to throw it away too, because if Caleb stopped being a person the difference would close, and the thing in the dark would finally not be alone in what it was.

"I’m not going to," Caleb said, out loud, to the dead child in the pod, to the thing wearing its face out in the world, to his father in a letter and his mother in an apartment and the whole long monstrous tenderness of the design that had made him.

"I’m not going to stop being the part you didn’t get. I’m sorry. I’m sorry nobody set a bowl out for you. That wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t mine, and I can’t go back and give you a childhood. But I’m not going to throw mine away to make us even. That’s not what would make us even anyway."

He folded the letter and put it in his coat.

He did not take the pod. He left the body of the first one where his father had kept it, in the dark, in the crate marked FIRST.

It was the only grave it had, and someone in this family had been visiting it in his mind for thirty-one years. It should not be moved by the second son on the worst morning of his understanding.

But he took a photograph of the small silver face, on his phone, before he closed the crate.

Because it was owed a name, whatever it had been or hadn’t, and Caleb kept a book for exactly that, and 707 was not going in it as a number if he had anything to say about it, which he was beginning to understand he did.

He turned off the old warm bulb, and locked the unit with the worn brass key, and stood for a moment in the gray street with the weight of it settling in, the new heavier shape of the truth.

Then he went to find his brother, and his mother, and the team, to tell them what he was, all the way down, and what he had decided to do about it.