A Mother's Love - SCP Foundation

I keep playing it over and over again in my head, to salvage some semblance of meaning from any of this. I don’t think I’ll find anything. As what remains of me decays like a withered fruit on the vine and all I was before Mother leaves me forever, it will be my last memory.

I was part of the Company’s explorer corps. A dangerous, lonely job. Company didn’t give a shit about me and I didn’t give a shit about them. Decades of travel through the empty black ocean, frozen in deep slumber, a million miles away from warmth or light or love. I can’t remember before that. I remember being in trouble, but not what for. God, I hope it was something good. Hope I hurled a brick through a company man’s window or something.

The AI woke me prematurely, directed me to an unidentified signal coming from a local asteroid field. Worth investigating. I remember, distantly, tales of explorers growing so attached to their AIs they fell in love with them. Stupid bastards. No personality, no emotions, and worst of all, no sense of humour. Just a dry synthesized voice endlessly telling you the bleeding obvious.

I called mine Valerie. She ejected me from cryo sleep rudely, suddenly, plunging me from the sweet serenity of wantless sleep into ice-cold reality. Bitch.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Crewman Moore. An unidentified signal has been detected from a nearby exoplanet. Company directives implore you investigate.”

I tried to swallow back vomit. “Fine. Whatever. Set a course.” I settled into Valerie’s seat.

Oh yes, I called the ship Valerie too. The AI her mind, the ship her body. Not that her body was any more impressive than her mind. The size of roughly three coffins stuck together, the walls covered in veins of tubes, wires, and foam padding. My only view to the outside world was a porthole smaller than my closed fists. Hey, maybe I just have big hands.

“Signal repeats. Three bursts in quick succession, followed by silence for thirty two point three seconds before repeating. Cause unknown. Chance of intelligent origin high.”

“Planet’s gravity?” I asked.

“0.029 Gs.”

“So we can achieve escape velocity?” Valerie’s engines were barely more effective than jumping. If the Company could squeeze a penny out of it, they’d do it.

“Correct.”

“Nothing to lose then, honeybunch. Send us down.”

We landed on a plateau; a glance out the porthole told me that the planet was the colour of clay, and pocked with ridges and crests and crevices.

“Crewman Moore. I have cleaned up the message. Would you like me to play it back?”

“Hit me.”

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. It was the saddest thing I had ever heard. I would call it a song, but only by analogy; only because I lack the words to describe it. It was beyond a song. It was wordless harmony.

By the time it had stopped, I was crying. “Broadcast the following message, Valerie: My name is Theodore Moore, commander of the vessel Valerie. I hear your message, and I’m coming to find you.”

I wiped the tears from my eyes and clambered into my EVA suit. “Valerie, depressurize the ship. I’m going out there.”

When I jumped down onto the surface, I noticed my boots seemed to squelch on the clay-coloured surface. I stood for a few minutes as I talked with Valerie. “Val, you got a triangulation on the signal?”

“Negative.”

I gave a frustrated sigh. “You’ve had hours.”

“Negative. Source of the signal is omnipresent.”

“The hell does that mean?”

“Signal came simultaneously from the entire planet.”

“But that’s not possible!”

I tried to take a step back inside Valerie-

My foot didn’t move.

I glanced down, saw that the ground had enveloped my entire foot and now tendrils were clambering up my leg.

“Oh, fuck!”

I made a reach for Valerie’s ladder but something wrapped itself around my arm and yanked me to the ground. The planet itself began to grow on me, fast as flowing water, over my outstretched arms, over my torso, over my helmet. All became black. For a moment I hope that my suit my withhold, that I might have time to think of a way out, but then I felt a tear in my sleeve-

Warm. She was warm. She penetrated through my suit, wrapped herself tight around my arm, and then went inside me through my ear. And yet there was something about the feel of her that meant I did not resist, did not fear even before she unleashed herself on me.

At the time I thought of her as “it”, of course. But in hindsight it was obvious: a “she”.

And then she went inside my brain and I knew pleasure absolute.

I will not attempt to describe it here. There would be no point. All of me ached with bliss. I cannot even remember it, not precisely; I only know that with it everything was warm and without it everything is cold.

And then she talked to me.

No. Again, only by analogy; it was above speaking.

She was born in the maelstrom of creation, when the universe burned hot and starts and dust and rock was everything. She can remember, distantly, as if in a dream, a time before, when she was not alone; and that was her curse, for only by that did she have a reference for the loneliness that followed. To know the existence of other minds and be denied them, for billions upon billions of years. A lonely planet, spinning and tilting aimlessly through the black, searching each bright desolate star for love, and finding nothing.

And she had found it. Because in that moment, I loved her. She pumped me full of pleasure and she sang her lonely songs and nothing hurt.

I cannot tell you how long I spent there. Time ceased to have any meaning. All of me pulsed with pleasure. Every other thought hidden by the bright white light of pleasure, that blinded me from everything else in existence.

LOVE, she sang. IF EVERY STAR IN THE SKY BURNED A MILLION YEARS, AND IF EVERY INSTANT THEY SANG LOVE A MILLION TIMES, THEY WOULD NOT SING AS LOUDLY AS I DO FOR YOU NOW.

And then, very gently, she plucked out one of my eyes.

There was no pain, of course, but I could feel it.

Why did you do that? I asked, more out of curiosity than anything. I knew she, Mother, the all protector, would never hurt me.

YOU DO NOT NEED EYES INSIDE ME, THEODORE. YOU DO NOT NEED TO SEE.

I liked seeing, though. When I was a little boy I-

And she plucked out my memories, too.

FORGET ABOUT THAT, DEAR THEODORE. ONLY PAIN AND HATE AND SUFFERING. REST NOW. I WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU.

Don’t fight it, I thought. Let it pass. Let them fade. Nothing but pain. Nothing but-

I tore my arm out of her then. Panic hit me like a brick wall. Like bleeding to death in a warm bath, she was draining me away.

I heard her scream- again, not a scream exactly. The pain that tore through her as I ripped my arm free- the pinprick of physical, the eternal pain of mental. Her one love- abandoning her to forever isolation. I could hear her, frenzied, panicking, so, so afraid:

THEODORE PLEASE PLEASE I WON’T TAKE ANYTHING ELSE I’M SORRY THEODORE PLEASE

With my free arm I freed my head, my chest, my legs. I discovered there exactly what else she had taken of mine.

I’LL BE EVERYTHING YOU WANT BE TO ME I WON’T HURT YOU AGAIN

She had taken my legs. Tore through the suit and shredded them off. The remaining bloodied stumps went as far as my kneecaps.

I exhaled hard as I remembered the vacuum around me. The gravity- her gravity- was so light, though, that even missing two legs and an eye didn’t stop me clambering up Valerie’s ladder. I hurled myself through the airlock.

“Repressurize!” I tried to say, but then I realized she had taken my tongue, too.

Didn’t matter. My hands- yes, hands, she had left me both of them, at least- scrabbled across the control panel, and my lungs filled with thick, sweet air.

As I launched I heard her last wail: I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU ILOVEYOUILOVEYOUILOVEYOU-

When in orbit, I took a moment. No legs. No tongue. Missing an eye. They could put parts of me back together, but I’d never be whole again. My voice would be tinny and robotic, my eyesight blurry, my legs cold and unfeeling.

Worth it, I thought. Worth it.

My memories, of course, I would never get back. But then I supposed, I would never know exactly what I had lost, would I?

And I’d never feel the pleasure she’d given me ever again. As long as I lived, nothing would ever equal it. Nothing would even come close.

I had escaped once, I told myself. I can escape again. Just once. Just one last time. Just for a few minutes, to remember it.

"Valerie…take me back down."

I think that was some years ago, although of course I can never be sure. Mother has let me keep that memory, while the rest have all been lost to me.

She forgave me everything, of course. But she took more from me. To keep me safe.

She has taken my body. My eyes, my ears, my mouth. She has taken all of me but my brain, now buried deep within her heart. Every sense, every stimuli I could ever know, is lost to me forever. Never to touch. Never to taste. Never to hear. Never to smell. Never to see.

But I am not quite sure that matters. Because, as I cling desperately onto the single memory Mother left me, I know I will let go eventually. I know her jealousy will rise and she will pluck it from my mind and I welcome it. I welcome Mother taking the last aspect of Theodore Moore, leaving only a thing that will have known nothing but her, and pleasure.

To float alone through the cosmos until the stars burn out.