Page 5 of Butterfly Effects

Most cuckoos stop there, mature enough to grow up and consider themselves adults, a little bit evil and a little bit nasty and a whole lot manipulative. Some, though, strain themselves hard enough that they go through a third instar, one that leaves them a little bit scrambled for several years, but results in their inherent power level going up. As to why a species of assholes doesn’t pursue this greater power all the time, well. There’s no way to avoid the scrambled period, because each instar is marked by physical changes. They’re just internal ones, involving structures in the brain. We’re literally out of our minds following the third instar, because our brains are reshaping themselves. Not a good thing for a species of ambush predators.

So why do it at all? Well, I did it because I didn’t know it was a possibility. I’d been trying to save my cousin’s life, and I’d accidentally slammed the buttons that began the process to give me an upgrade. I could have stopped there and been happy, truly.

But third-instar cuckoos aren’t common, and those who try apparently have a nasty tendency not to survive the physical rearrangement of their minds when it happens with no one to take care of them. I’d been safe here in Ohio while my brain rebuilt itself, and when I’d felt well enough to leave, I’d returned to the world unaware of what had happened to me.

Only to get ambushed by my biological mother and her hive, who wanted to force me into my fourth instar in order to get themselves a fully adult cuckoo. Since we don’t need to reach the imago stage to reproduce, we generally don’t bother: we’re all content to stop after the second instar, safe and secure and not rebuilding ourselves when we don’t have to. But the equation that lets us rip holes in the barrier between dimensions is so large and needs so much power that only a queen can handle it.

Except even a queen can’t really handle it. It’s too big, and it’s hungry. When I had that equation in my mind, I felt like I was wrestling a greased dinosaur that wanted to bite my head off more than it had ever wanted anything else in its life. The equation is a predator. The cuckoos usually kept it contained by breaking it into pieces and storing it around the world, but that didn’t change the fact that it was a monstrous thing. An ender of worlds.

Completing the equation would have blown a chunk out of Earth big enough to destroy the planet. But what did the cuckoos care? We’d be somewhere else, and to them, that was what mattered. I was their groomed and chosen queen: I was going to set them free. And sure, I was going to melt my own brain in the process, but I got the feeling that for them, that was a side bonus. Get a new world to consume, and don’t get stuck with a pesky queen in the process.

I’ve always tried to be a good person. I’ve always tried to behave more like a human than a giant wasp in a woman suit. And none of that had mattered while the equation was chewing on my brain, trying to force me to end everything so it could be free. I might have done it, except for one small thing that set me apart from all the other cuckoos, even when I hadn’t been thinking about, even when I hadn’t fully understood the ramifications:

I was in love. Deeply, helplessly in love, and had been since I was a little girl. His name was Artie, and he had the most soothing mind I’d ever touched. Something about his thoughts was right, like slipping into a hot bath on a cold night, or a bed with pre-warmed sheets. I’d loved him almost as soon as I’d known him, and miracle of miracles, he’d loved me the same way. Really loved me, not been manipulated into loving me by telepathic tricks. He was a Price, and Prices are part Kairos, another human-looking species that isn’t, quite. Their Kairos heritage made them resistant if not immune to psychic manipulation, and while I could have forced my way into his mind, I couldn’t have done it unintentionally.

Cuckoos don’t do love, as a general rule. Hard to form those types of bonds when you’re constantly measuring the world around you the way a lion measures an antelope. So no one realized Artie might be able to break me out of the mathematical fugue that was supposed to consume me and make it possible for the equation to direct my choices until the world ended in a glorious, concussive boom. He’d pulled me loose, and together we’d come up with a plan to use the minds around me as distributed processing power, letting me keep my self intact despite everything I was going through.

Unfortunately, I’d still been convinced I was going to die, so even as I turned the equation to my own ends, I’d been preparing for my demise. In an effort to keep my allies from hurting more than they had to, the last thing I’d done before the equation finished resolving and we were transported to a different dimension was wipe myself from their memories.

Meaning I landed in a whole new reality surrounded by people who had no idea who I was or why they shouldn’t treat me like any other cuckoo. And one of them had been Artie, which hurt more than I ever imagined. To go from him loving me enough to pull me away from a mind-eating equation like it was no big deal to him looking at me like I was the enemy had been, well, bracing to say the least.

And then, when I was doing the math to get us the hell out of there and back to Earth, on the presumption that I’d done the math correctly the first time and not destroyed it on our way out the door, he’d touched me. Without his memories of growing up together, he hadn’t realized how dangerous that could be. I’d erased his mind during the moment of contact, leaving him a literal shell of the man I loved, and what was gone was gone: I couldn’t put it back. So I’d gathered all the memories I and his family had of him and used them to construct a new person in his place. A person who was almost him, but … not. People are made up of first-person experiences, not third-person memories.

And he—the new person, the one I’d constructed to occupy the empty shell of the man I loved—thought he loved me, because so many of the pieces I’d used to build him told him he did. I’d run away as fast as I could, unable to stand being anywhere near him. My father was a man who’d risen from the dead, but Artie was something new, and terrible, and entirely my fault.

One good thing had come from that whole situation: Isaac. My mother had been pregnant when she decided it was time for the cuckoos to get out of this dimension, and while she hadn’t survived our time together, he had. He was brand-new and perfect when I’d hauled my friends and allies back to Earth, and Angela had been willing to take on the task of raising him. She was one of the only people in the world to have successfully raised a cuckoo who didn’t start trying to murder everyone when she hit puberty—me—and we figured she had a decent shot at doing the same for him. All he needed was a suite of telepathic ethics and a little psychic surgery to remove that packet of ancestral memories before they could turn septic and explode all over his mind. No big deal, right?

Not for a family of telepathic wasps hiding in Columbus, Ohio, I guess.

The kitchen hasn’t really changed since the first time I’d seen it. Oh, they’d replaced the wallpaper right around the time I was finishing high school, and it was a new kitchen table, polished oak in place of the old walnut, but the fixtures and appliances were all the same. Dad’s never been the world’s biggest fan of avoidable change. He knows most of his kids are aging faster than he is, and he’ll have to bury Evie and Drew someday, and probably his grandkids too, and he understands the world won’t slow down to meet his sometimes-lumbering tempo, but he’s never asked it to. He just asks Mom to buy two toasters when she has to replace one, so he can extend the period before something wholly new has to enter his space.

The only major change was the people. Alex was at the stove where I would normally have expected Mom to be, flipping pancakes with one hand and cracking eggs with the other. Dad was in his usual spot. Charlotte and Isaac were across from him, Lottie with a bowl of cereal and some pancakes, Isaac with pancakes and a plate of scrambled eggs covered in so much ketchup that it looked like a murder scene and a smaller cup of what looked like cocktail sauce, which he was carefully dipping each bite of pancake in before he ate it.

They brightened when they saw me, their thoughts taking on an effervescent, bubbling edge, like mental champagne.

“Sarah!” chirped Lottie. “You’re still here!”

“Not f’long,” said Isaac, more glumly. His thoughts were sparkling, but his tone was dour.

I sat down at the end of the table, close enough that I could lean over and put my arm around his shoulders. “Hey, you. You know I have to go. I’m sorry I can’t be here all the time and always, but there are places I need to be, and people I’ve promised to visit. Do you want your auntie Verity to be all sad because I’m not coming to see her?”

“Auntie Verity’s already sad enough,” said Isaac. His eyes flashed briefly white as he raised them from his plate and looked at me. She’s always going to be sad, whether you’re with her or not. And when you go to see her, you come back sad, because of your hospital friend. I’d rather you stayed here, where you can be happy, and didn’t run away all the time.

“You know I can’t do that, Isaac,” I said. “Greg can’t be here with me, and I need Greg to be happy at all. If I stay here without him for too long, I’ll start having nightmares again. And when I have nightmares, the whole neighborhood has nightmares.”

It’s not fair.

“Neither is talking only in our heads, because not everyone can do it,” I said firmly. “Come on, buddy. Time for our outside voices, okay?”

He shot me a look, thoughts turning disgruntled. I shrugged, projecting neutrality in his direction.

Charlotte—Lottie to her family—was only a few months older than Isaac, and they’d grown up in each other’s pockets. Because she was a Price by blood, she had the protection from mental manipulation provided by her father’s Kairos ancestry. Even so, she could receive telepathic communication, and reply to them in kind. She and Isaac had both been slow to speak, not seeing the need for communicating with other people when they already had each other. Shelby had been briefly concerned she’d need to hold them back from starting formal schooling, since kids who sounded younger than their actual ages were likely to be the targets of bullying.

Alex hadn’t initially agreed that the threat of bullying was a good-enough reason to keep them home, but Shelby had looked at him, shrugged, and asked calmly how many kindergarteners would need to have their minds melted by Isaac for the crime of being mean to Lottie before it would be a good-enough reason.

He’d agreed with her after that. Apparently, that agreement had been enough to make both children start catching up with their peers. They’d been talking more or less normally by the end of the month, and had been able to start school on the expected schedule. Because they refused to be separated and Isaac’s official birthday was in November, they were both in second grade, and the only remaining trace of their delayed speech was in the way he would sometimes shorten words or create new contractions when he didn’t feel like talking.

Well, that, and the way he slipped into telepathic speech if he thought he could get away with it. He and Lottie both carried anti-telepathy charms to school to keep him from accidentally answering the teacher without opening his mouth, but sometimes I was still concerned about being one bad playground argument away from a Stephen King novel.