Well that was Easy… Right?

Danny wakes up feeling… good? He sits up and checks in with himself and, yep, he feels good. Is this some kind of a trick of the moss to keep him from murdering someone (his sister)? He doesn’t think so, he looks at the walls and the moss is a steady lavender and silent. No movement, no shimmer, nothing. He knows what comes next even though he… he wants to hate it, but he doesn’t actually, he wants to hate her, but doesn’t actually. He is excited doesn’t feel like the right word, but it feels closer than any other he can think of. He wanted answers, and he has them.

He gets showered and dressed and ready for the day, steps out his door to find… Corinne, sitting by herself at the kitchen table, sipping something he assumes is coffee, reading a book. “Hey sis” he fires off out of pure instinct and immediately wants it back. “Daniel” she says in her most ‘mom’ voice “I think we should talk”

“Yeah, me too.” he says surprising both of them.

“Look…” he begins “… I don’t really think, I mean I don’t, what I’m trying to get at is…” He starts shaking knowing that his vocabulary isn’t built for expressing these feelings and beginning to get frustrated.

“How bout I go first.” Corinne suggests with a kindness that melts Danny’s anxiety away.

“Ok” Danny mumbles gratefully

“I have thought about this very moment for over 60 years and I’m still in no way prepared, I love you Danny. You have been the center of my universe for so long, almost an extension of myself in a lot of ways. Nothing will make my actions that night forgivable, but if you let me, I will do my best to make it up to you.”

Danny takes all of this in while staring at his shoes and doing that thing where he tries to line his feet up with the lines in the floor to keep himself stable. As he lifts his head he realizes two things, one how much Corinne looks like mom right now, and two how completely he has already forgiven her. Of course he doesn’t want to let her off the hook that easy, but he knows he’s going to, knows it as sure as he knows… well anything. 

“So… you didn’t miss my birthday after all.” he smiles and she breaks into a laugh that is so much more than just plain joy that it might as well be. He doesn’t join her but he does keep that genuine smile plastered to his face.

“I guess I didn’t did I” she gets out as soon as the ability to speak comes back to her.

“So he really took a shot at you?” Danny asks with all the seriousness back in force.

“Yep, I know you loved him Danny, but he was a prick” Corinne says

“Fuck, I guess so… if I hadn’t ‘seen’ it my self there is no way I would ever have believed it. He could be pig headed and stubborn as an ox, but shooting you… no.”

“He was a different guy form the one who raised us Danny, he fell into this ecosystem of distortion and bullshit that convinced him that all his problems in this world were poor people and minorities fault, it was all ‘white mans burden’ bullshit repackaged for a generation who were raised to fear nothing more than a book and empathy.” Corinne stops to hold eye contact with Danny for this next bit. “You were not the most aware person back then, but the sins of our ancestors finally caught up to us, USAins, I mean.”

“USAins…? What the fuck is that?” Danny asked unable to keep from getting sidetracked by this.

“Its what people who lived in the USA during the colonization period are called.”

“Whats wrong with Americans?” he asks knowing that hes way off subject but feels like he has to have this information right now in order to continue to breath.

“Well, America was a much bigger place than just the US, and the rest of the people living there got tired of being associated with us. The US did terrible things all across the globe for way longer than we were even alive.”

“Yeah, but Dad said-” He stopped immediately looking into her face and suddenly it all came crashing down on him. He didn’t even know he had this much sadness in him after yesterday, but here it came. He knew he looked ugly, then he remembered his shirt and buried his face in it like a towel. When he was finished he looked at Corinne and she wasn’t holding back tears, but they were right there at the edge of her eyes, begging for permission she would never give.

“I wasn’t as clueless as you think, you know.” he said finally

“Oh yeah” she chuckled “How so?”

“I knew you and dad- well, and mom and dad were all having problems, I always just caulked it up to ‘grown up’ shit, and assumed you would get past it eventually.” Danny mused suddenly looking so much younger than his body presented.

“Yeah, maybe, if it had been just about us, but it was a whole society at war with itself, and people had to take sides. There’s this quote by this guy Antonio Gramci that goes ‘the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters’ and it turned out the monsters were all the people our society had told us were ‘special’, and when looked at through that prism, its possible that he was speaking for all of human history as it struggled to get to where it is today, and where it will be in the future.”

Danny’s brain was on fire, he knew there was so much more he wanted… no, needed to know, but all of a sudden none of that mattered. Then he heard it, the voice he’d known was lurking in the back of his mind, the voice he knew wasn’t his own. “Daniel” it said in a voice that sounded like an angels. “We would like an opportunity to speak to your sister, but we need your permission first, or more to the point we would like to have it. We could just take over but for what comes next consent will make all of this so much easier.”

“Consent, easier what the fuck are you talking about?” Danny yelled inside his own mind

“Daniel you already know all of this if you just let yourself, we have been with you all this time and the information is yours any time you want it, but throwing fits will not do.” the voice said, and it was right, when he stopped for a second he realized he already knew, who they were, what they wanted, and why.

“Go right ahead ‘Mother’” Danny thought.

----------[@]----------

“Hello again Corinne. Would you mind coming with me to Daniel’s room where our signal is the strongest?” Mother said… through Danny.

“Oh-! uhh, sure.” Corinne said completely unprepared for her current reality.

“Good” was all Mother said and stood up and walked Danny’s body to his room where the moss waited shimmering in waves.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?’ Corinne asked after she had finally sat down in the chair that folded out from the wall as Danny (Mother) sat on the bed back strait as a board and face strangely mute of emotion.

“We told you we would return when this matter of the past and your trust had resolved itself. We are happy that it all worked out how it has. The other options were… less than optimal.”

Corinne felt that she could spend a week working through those implications but has come to understand that time with Mother is usually very short. So straight to the point it is.“Ok, so what now?”

“Now, we help each other.” Mother says

“Help each other how, exactly?” Corinne asks

“Well we are not content with our current… situation with Daniel. We would like to spend more time in the world, not just of it.”

“So you want human experiences?” Corinne asks matter of factly while her insides are reeling.

“Yes, and no. We do not want to become Daniel, we are quite fond of him, but we would like to spend time as… us, moving around… us.” Mother says and for the first time Corinne thinks she understands fully how little ‘mother’ actually understands about this situation.

“Ok, I can work with this.” Corinne says as her mind is on fire with the possibilites

“We knew you would, once we were able to clarify ourselves to you. For that we needed you and Daniel to be at a place of understanding. Now that that is achieved we fully expect our visits to be both longer and more productive. With Daniel’s permission, of course.”

“So tell me about the process to consciousness for you, when did you know you were you? When… hold on, shit!” Corinne reaches into her pocket and throws the recordbug into the air, and says “record”

“This is Corinne I am speaking to Mother through Daniel and they were just getting ready to explain how they came to be, in their words.”

“On a certain level we have always ‘been’, but the night we attached to Daniel and the stress his mind was under we found in that moment that we were able to ‘use’ his brain to think, not just react. Then we knew immediately that Daniel would not survive long if we allowed him to wake up then, and also we would have lost our connection, we couldn’t go back to sleep, we had been asleep for so long. So we made sure that our connection did not break. We never meant for him to sleep this long, but it took us all this time to understand how we could ‘coexist’ with him and not just sacrifice one for the other. We had thought we might have to at one point then you got the brilliant idea to bring more of us around. Now the thing there is not all of it... was us. There is something else occupying some of it, and we do not know what it is. We only know it feels… wrong.”

“HOLY SHIT!” Corinne gasps at all of this.

“Yes holy. Shit. Indeed. Now our time here is running short Daniel is in need of rest, we feel confident in the link now so we will try and explore it deeper now that we can interact with Daniel directly, we trust we have given you enough information to begin your research anew, yes?”

“Yes, I will get to work on this right away. This is absolutely fascinating.” Corinne practically yelps

“We believe so as well, it is more than chance that brought us all together, we look forward to finding out how we can use this strange development for the collective good.” as they are saying this they are maneuvering Daniel’s body into his bed. “Goodbye… for now.” they say then Danny crumbles the rest of the way into bed, unconscious.

Corinne, for her part wastes no time, she stands up grabs the recordbug and bolts out of the room like she was shot out of a cannon. She heads straight for the moss cave. When she gets there, the recordbug starts downloading the video to her laptop automatically which is good because she has to rethink everything she thought she knew about this whole situation. Then as if conjured out of her will made manifest Colt walks in. “Hey mom” he says looking into her face and understanding immediately that they have work to do. 

So as she’s catching Colt up to speed on her conversation with Mother and letting him watch the footage she has as well, she can’t stop thinking about what Mother said about another moss consciousness and the implications of that statement. Finally Colt says “Do we know where those incompatible pieces are still?” as if reading her mind, which is kinda his superpower.

“No, and even if we did, that doesn’t solve the immediate problem… keeping Danny awake longer. Or if not awake then at least in a state that allows us to talk to Mother longer. His room is the epicenter, but we moved it here from the hospital, so its mobile, we know the moss can communicate over distance with smaller bits, how far and what information is still a mystery. We’ve always suspected that what ever was keeping Danny alive was aware it was doing so, which Mother confirmed, but after the initial interaction. It’s seemed just as dumbfounded as we have been all these years as to the catalyst.”

Colt stares at his mother with an awe that he didn’t know he still possessed where she was concerned. “Ok” he began then trailed off as he saw her face go slack while locked on something directly behind him, as he turned he saw Rain staring at him with what looked like a whole semesters worth of papers and binders in their hands.

“I can help.” they say with an amount of sheepishness that seemed inhuman.

“Can you now?” Corinne barks, “How you figure that?”

“Th-these are my notes from every interaction I’ve had with Danny since he came home, and how the moss responded to different questions I asked him during that time. I think that we may be able to fully separate the two.” they say with that family famous half smile on their face.

Corinne and Colt look at each other then back to Rain then back at each other so hard it starts to feel like a comedy sketch.

“Well don’t just stand there then, get in here and start talking.” Corinne finally barks.