“I don’t like them.”
“Is it?–”
“–I pity them.”
Dommik crouched in the corner and watched her. His arms settled over his bent knees. “Why?”Pity the most evolved and interesting creature in the universe?
“You have them stuck in here against their will.”
“Roaches don’t have a will.”
“Everything has a will. Why else would they eat and breed? And seek out places that protect them from humans? They evolve because they have no other way to survive.”
“I thought you didn’t like them?” he smirked.
“I don’t. They carry disease.” She stood before the tubular glass that contained the largest species he owned.
“Not all of them do, in fact, roaches can survive a week without its head. They can be submerged underwater for over thirty minutes and not die. They are the Cyborgs of the bug species. There are, in fact, Cyborg roaches spying and crawling around Earth, each its own intelligent creation of mankind.
Kat turned toward his crouched form. “You can survive without a head?”
“Absolutely. If I upload myself into another tech source first.”
“And breathe underwater for that length of time?”
“Not me, personally, but other Cyborgs can survive weeks underwater,” Dommik answered as she walked out of his line of sight and was obscured by a hundred twitching bugs. Even amongst the obstruction of the critters and the curved glass, her emerald eyes glittered like beacons and her copper curls reflected off the clear surfaces.
She looked at him through the curved glass, her features disrupted, ugly, and appealing all at once. “So. You’re telling me that you’re more roach than human? And why? Expecting me to be disgusted by that?” Her lips turned down in thought. Kat looked at the bugs with glass-filtered beady eyes. “I don’t even know you. Why do you think I would care?”
But she wants to know me. You’re obvious, Katalina, you just don’t realize it.Dommik thought about that because in it’s grim way, he was doing the same thing, and he was being more obvious than her.
Her head popped out at the side. “Why do some of these have colors? Are bigger? I’ve never known a species of roach that had a blue antenna.” She looked away from him and back at the cases. “I’ve never seen roaches look like any of these before...except those,” she pointed to the last case in line. “Those look like the ones I’d see in my grandma’s garden.”
Dommik got up and walked over to her, pleased with himself and for her observation. Girls don’t like to know about bugs, but she knew enough to know that the ones before her were not entirely right.
There were six enclosures in total and he started with the one she stood in front of. Theprettyones. With the blue appendages. “It’s because these aren’t from Earth.” He indicted them. “I found this species on Elyria when out on a mission. I didn’t think much of it at the time but as I continued to hunt, I realized something.”
There was a pause before she asked.“What?”
“That I had seen something like it before. I was almost gored that day, fuck, it took over my processors until I captured my prey and sealed it on the ship. I went out to look for the bug. Three days of searching before I found it again. I brought it aboard to run a series of tests. Do you know what I found?”
“That it was a roach?”
“It shared enough DNA that, for the first time, I couldn’t logically find an answer. Within myself or within the network.”
“What if humans brought it to Elyria on accident and the environment changed it?”
“I thought of that but no, enough of it was different that it wouldn’t have been possible to evolve in such a way in such a short amount of time.”
“Radiation?” she asked him, her eyes trained on the bugs.
“Did you grow up on cartoons?” They glared at each other before he continued. “I found more and kept them to study and compare. It wasn’t until several years later on a mission to Taggert, to fight back the monsters that tried to break open the prison that I found these,” he indicated the second enclosure closest to the door in the room. A roach that was small and beige, light and sandy in its color, designed to blend into the wastes of that world. “I captured a handful and brought them aboard. They shared DNA with the roaches from Earth and Elyria.”
Kat cocked her head and studied the new roaches with interest. “That’s not possible,” she whispered after a time.
“Is it?”
She looked up at him and threaded the hair back from her face. Dommik’s internal mech ground against each other. The inhuman parts of him wanted to take over and unleash on the girl that gazed at him. No matter what he told himself, he knew he was no better than Gunner or any other man. It had nothing to do with his urges but more to do with his restraint which had never been tested as such since his youth.
