Reader advisory: This story was written for a horror-themed issue of the sci-fi e-magazine Tevun-Krus; it contains ghoulish, gory imagery. The author offers apologies for the ick factor. 🤢🙈

Discordant chittering; high-pitched screeches on the edge of human hearing; and deeper vibrations: a bone-penetrating hum in humid air ripe with flowers and composting vegetation.

Rana Vanko stepped out into the purple and blue jungle of Harmony Station's famous 'symphonic' research garden, heard and unheard frequencies raising every gray hair on her shorn scalp.

Alien plants grew both upward from indigo lunar soil and downward from a vast dome of what looked like solidified mucus, a structure strong enough to hold against the vacuum of space. The oozy, pearlescent substance covered nearly everything. It dripped in long strings from trumpet-shaped flowers, necessitating the transparent umbrella she held, and it budded under her jumpsuit's orange slip-on boots. Where only barren moon rock had once lain, moist patches of azure moss undulated in time with the skin-crawling, multi-frequency shrieks.

"Bleedin' angels weep." Rana curled her lip, uncaring that the spherical media drone hovering beside her captured her disgust and fed it to the VIPs in the station lounge she'd just escaped. At fifty-eight, she was old enough—and had worked in ship reclamation long enough—to have lost a decent whack of her hearing, but fifteen seconds into the alien–human PR farce she'd been dragged into, she was praying for total hearing loss. The high-collared, self-impressed scientists and dignitaries gathered for this oh-so 'significant' occasion had called the racket "a heartfelt requiem" and "a demonstration of emotionally rich sentience." Well, she called bilge shite on that. It was just noise: thermals shifting air and leaves; the vibration of moving fluids; and basic cavitation—gas bubbles collapsing within extraterrestrial plant veins.

Not that anyone gave a solitary fek what she thought. Harmony Station's PR team might've forked out thousands of credits to fly her halfway across the galaxy for this "most poignant and historic event," but no one on the research moon was there to see her.

Fisting her free hand, she eyed the alien ooze sliming her umbrella, a substance that contained all the nutrients a human needed to survive—so the experts said. The sticky goo smelled like vanilla and hazelnuts but should've stank of rotten politics. The media called the shrieking weeds a "transformative xenobotanical miracle"; she called them "vote grease."

The Spirabilis Donum, or 'Spira'; a multi-organism cooperative that could apparently think, feel, and create 'music' and, more importantly, arable biomass and breathable air. On the month-long flight from her home base-ship, she'd heard all about the miracle plants. And it didn't take no genius to figure why the Terran government had 'partnered' with the weeds on various projects, nor why the deep-pocketed suits would do anything to keep the oozy creepers happy—including dragging an old woman from her self-pitying, alcoholic stupor.

According to the boffins, the Spira could grow near anywhere and grown near anything given the right starter medium. And with ninety percent of humanity living in cramped squalor on failed, rundown, colonization ships, terraforming research got politicians votes.

They wouldn't be getting hers.

Rana sneered. Aware of the many eyes watching her through the media drone, she made a thorough production of adjusting the saggy seat of her jumpsuit—the grease-stained, orange onesie that was her scrapper's uniform. She'd refused to change into the poncey pants suit offered to her. Fek, there was no prettying her up.

Nor the occasion that'd brought her to this screeching snot garden.

"Ms. Vanko." A cool feminine voice slid into her ear, transmitted via a top-of-the-line audio bud: Ambassador Mettah Odo of the Terran Diplomatic Service. "Might I impress upon you once more the historic nature of this occasion and its gravity?"

Rana adjusted the crotch of her suit this time, tugging on a whole handful of grimy fabric. "Ain't my fault all this 'heartfelt' alien music gives me a rash in me pants. Some of them deeper notes crawl right up a person's—"

"Ah-hmm."  Odo cleared her throat. "Let me take this opportunity to remind you all coms are being recorded for posterity and scientific research. Please keep that in mind, along with the solemnity of these proceedings."

"Ms. Odo." Rana pressed a hand to her heart, feigning shock. "I thought you was in the diplomatic service, but just now, it sounded like you were telling a grieving mother—for all 'posterity'—to take the funeral of her son a tad more seriously."

"Ms. Vanko..." What might've been a wince sounded over the com link. "I would never presume to tell a mother how to grieve, and everyone present today is cognizant of the tragedy that has led you here. I simply wish to impress upon you that these proceedings, while personal to you, carry great economic and political gravity. All respect must be shown to our botanical hosts."

"I can't see no bunch of weeds giving a flying shite what itch I scratch, Odo."

"You'd be mistaken," Odo countered smoothly. "The Spira have demonstrated an acute awareness of human emotion and body language. They readily factor it into their communications with us. We believe this is enhanced by their acoustic and electromagnetic talents. They're able to intricately map entire neuronal structures to decode behaviors and personality traits highly specific to individuals. However, your brain is new to them, and right this second, our instruments are picking up alterations in the Spira's song that indicate confusion."

"They're in good company then."

"You're not confused, Ms. Vanko," Odo drawled. "What you are is well briefed. I know, because I spent every day of the four weeks it took to travel here educating you on your estranged son's achievements. You know the importance of his work and the partnership he formed with the Spira. Because of his thoughtful, visionary work, humanity will not only be able to terraform and colonize new worlds, but we might finally heal our own."

Rana snorted. "And it only took us five hundred years to see that last a priority." Humanity's best, brightest, and richest had left the ruins of Earth hoping to colonize new, unspoiled worlds, rather than stay and fix what they'd broken. But it turned out, the planet best suited to supporting an organism's unique biology and psychology was the gad-darn planet it first evolved on. Who'd of thought? Rana rolled her eyes. And them early explorers had thought themselves right regular geniuses. "These alien moon sprouts got more wits."

"Please remain respectful," Odo requested dryly. "Again, I must impress upon you—"

"Oh, you've 'impressed' me no end, Ambassador. 'Impressed' upon me nonstop how my wishes, when it comes to me clever but very dead son, ain't worth spit next to those of a bunch of screechy photosynthesizers."

"Ms. Vanko, I understand this situation is difficult—"

"Difficult?" Rana curled her lip. "What's difficult exactly? That my son got killed in a habitat decompression implosion thanks to shite government manufacturing regulations? That his remains were claimed, not by family, but by a bunch of musical weeds? Or that you government stiffs saw fit to drag me across lightyears, wasting months of my life, just to humor the dirt and twigs that composted my boy without anyone's permission? Where's the body I can kiss goodbye? What's on this blighted rock that I can grieve? You should've left me in my bunk, curled around my bilge-brewed whiskey."

"Ms. Vanko, as painful as this is, this is what your son would've—"

Rana tapped the audio bud in her ear, silencing it. For a moment, all she could hear was the aliens' so-called "requiem." To her ears, it was meaningless noise; to her flesh, it was an itch fated to drive her mad. The notion anyone could understand it, and the sentience behind it, seemed gobshite mad.

But it'd been her boy's work. His pride and joy.

The project that'd stolen him from her for fifteen years.

And wasn't that nothing but more nonsense. Rana straightened. When she'd agreed to this infernal trip, she'd promised herself no more self-pitying twaddle—no more lies. It hadn't been alien weeds that'd stopped her boy calling home for a decade and a half. When her Zane had slammed the door of their domicile pod at age twenty and stalked off to worlds unknown, he'd known nothing of the Spira—hadn't yet discovered them under some dusty dang moon rock. Her boy, so full of anger, resentment, and potential, hadn't yet found his passion translating the sounds and chemical emissions of xenobotanic banshees.

All her boy had known at that painful time was that he had to get away from her.

Rana's breath locked, grief a fist around her throat. She'd never claimed to be a good mother; why was she trying to pretend to be one now? Her aim as a parent had only ever been to be a better one than her father. And she'd been that. She'd never laid a hard hand on her boy.

But she'd not spared him the hard words. She'd not spared him the sight of her demons and poor choices—ones that'd left her bruised, bloodied, and stinking drunk on the floor more nights than not.

Eyeing the oozing, purple-blue jungle rising around her, she willed steel into her spine as multifrequency alien voices scraped her eardrums and shivered through her flesh. It might be too little too late, but just this once, she'd not let this moment be about her. That was the least she could do for her boy.

The last thing.

Releasing a shuddering breath, she avoided the multi-lens stare of the media drone and forced herself forward. Dense growth crowded her: flower-laden trees and twisting broad-leafed vines. A constant, slow-motion rain of viscous nectar and sap fell. But despite that, the trail ahead was starkly clear and unobstructed.

A path the aliens had supposedly created for her and her alone.

Rana sneered. Dozens of scientists watched the drone vid feeds, all salivating over every screech and twitchy branch, but she—someone who gave exactly zero shites—was the first to walk this weird, moist ground that'd once been moon dust. According to Odo, the garden had spontaneously budded off a whole new protective dome to enclose the failed habitat site after the accident, and the weeds hadn't allowed anyone in. Until now, all sensor and recording devices had been met by an impenetrable wall of vegetation.

A wet hiss sounded to her left, almost lost amongst the garden's 'song' and the heavy patter of ooze striking leaves and her umbrella.

Rana glanced sideways; smirked as the media drone released another series of cleansing jets to rid its cameras of alien slime. The rate of the garden's discharge had increased. Every leaf and stem now lay under a coating of alien ooze.

Wrinkling her nose, Rana continued on under that oppressive rain. Purple-blue foliage began to transition to fuchsia shades. Soft structures resembling fungi appeared amongst the now pink-colored moss underfoot, and either side of her, other pale, ductile-looking growths started to emerge—thick creepers that wove through crisper, brighter vegetation. Amongst them, fine russet fibers, possibly aerial roots, appeared. Then strange fleshy, pod-like flowers, their closed petals red veined and weeping ruby nectar. 

A prickle of nerves walked up Rana's back. Within a dozen meters, the vegetation completely transitioned from purple hues to more muted, ruddier shades. Stems and vines, once woody and firm, now gleamed slick and soft, a tangle of fat tubes and finer, red threads. The larger tubes bulged with dark fluid, pulsing in time with the lower, throbbing frequencies in the garden's song, a chaotic, ear-scraping symphony that'd only strengthened.

Rana came to a stop, her heart thudding. Turning slowly on the spot, she processed the changes around her. Moist, pulsating growths crowded the path, forming tangled walls. Overhead, more hung in loose coils ... looking way too much like unraveled animal viscera. If she hadn't known better, she'd have thought herself in some abattoir's offal pit. The graceful trumpet-like flowers she'd first sneered at were gone, replaced by those meatier-looking pods that dripped arterial red. They'd turned the rain a disturbing crimson, a color that seemed to be deepening.

Shuddering, Rana pressed her earbud back on. "Odo, are you seeing this shite?"

A cough—a clear reprimand—sounded as the diplomat's voice returned to her ear. "Yes, we are. It's absolutely fascinating, isn't it? We're analyzing the visuals now. We think this is some kind of living memorial—humanity's organic truth reflected in vegetational form."

"You fekking with me?" Rana stared at the media drone. Had alien slime smeared the visual feeds to shite or had Odo necked too much high-end alcohol?

"I understand you're startled," Odo drawled. "But again, please keep the discourse respectful."

Rana gestured to a flower that looked eerily similar to a human liver. "Is this fekking respectful? Shite, woman. When you dragged my ass here you said the banshee weeds wanted to honor my son by giving me—'the soil' that grew him—a gift of appreciation. If this here's what they think a funeral bouquet looks like, I'm out."

"Ms. Vanko, it is best not to interpret alien behavior through a purely human lens. We pick flowers and think them pretty. The Spira have likely found beauty in the structures of the human form and are celebrating them. Your son was very dear to the organisms in this garden."

"Hell's infernal stars, woman! Stop trying to turn a bloody forest of internals into a bed of daisies. That ain't happening. And I ain't staying." Rana turned on heel to head back to the lounge and its open bar—

And found the path gone, replaced by a ruddy, slithery wall of vines.

"What the devil?" Rana jerked back. "Odo, what are your creeper friends playing at?"

The diplomat hummed in thought over coms. "The song in your immediate vicinity seems to be elevating tonal sequences we've come to associate with dense rock substrates—which linguistically can be also interpreted as 'certainty' or 'unchangeability.' Given that fact... Yes, my advice would be to continue forward and accept the tribute being offered."

Gaze piercing the now blood-red rain dripping off her umbrella, Rana snarled at the media drone. "Well, my advice to you is to take that suggestion and shove it up—"

"Ms. Vanko," Odo cut in cooly, "those tonal sequences I mentioned are strengthening. Whatever your feelings on the matter, cooperation is likely your quickest path out of this section of the garden."

"You saying the weeds ain't letting me out 'til they've had their fun? Well, that a right laugh, ain't it?" Teeth gritted, Rana swung back to the open end of the path. Under dripping, red ooze, the way ahead glistened like an open gut wound: coiled, pulsing tubes and fleshy lumps. "Fek, I'm going to need a flagon of your high-shelf hooch after this shite—and there'll be no prissy nagging about me emptying the bottle, you hear me?"

"Your fortitude and cooperation are appreciated, Ms. Vanko."

"Bite me, Odo."

Rana gripped her umbrella with both hands and moved deeper into the aliens' memorial, a 'gift' she'd throw straight into alcohol's black void first chance she got. With every step she took, the glossy vegetation either side of her looked less and less like plant matter and more and more like animal internals. All flowers now looked like 'organ buds': slick livers; fluid-filled pouches reminiscent of stomachs; and hearts that seemed to beat with the garden's strengthening song. Bile crawled up her throat as she realized the pale, fungus-like growths that had appeared in the moss at her feet had started to resemble human fingers—multi-jointed, tipped with fingernails. In a few more meters, she spotted what looked to be actual hands growing up from the wrist ... macabre flowers, their digital petals pinched together to form buds.

Buds that opened as she shakily stepped passed—a ghoulish blooming.

When the path ended in a kind of clearing, she was almost prepared for what rose from the glistening, red ground.

Almost wasn't enough.

Her knees gave way, her grip on the umbrella nearly lost with them. The canapés she'd eaten in the station's lounge surged up. Only decades of ship reclamation work gave her the gastronomic steel to swallow pâté and pastry back down.

She'd seen corpses—and pieces of them—before: the floating and frozen victims of war, accident, and broken life-support systems. But what grew before her took those grim nightmares and amped them to the next level.

A sea of flesh, spiked with a forest of pale limbs. Arranged in concentric circles, human arms and legs pointed fingers and toes towards the dome roof; grotesque pillars under red, oozing rain. Amongst them in ruby pools, beds of smaller body parts flourished: plump, pumping organs, some within the bony arches of ribs; and familiar external structures—noses, ears, and eyes.

The latter stared wide and unblinking, every iris a vivid blue.

Horror ripped the air from her lungs. Zane's eyes had been blue. Zane's skin tone had been pale like that of the limbs growing around her. 

Catching sight of a clump of coppery fibers drifting in a red pool, she had to choke back more regurgitated hors d'oeuvres. Hair—that was fekking hair, the color of her boy's. By the godless stars, why? Why had the Spira created such atrocities? And how could they have invited her to witness them? Odo had said the alien weeds could map and interpret human brains, that they understood them. And yet ... this?

"Odo," Rana croaked, only just finding voice. "What the hell is this?"

For a moment, only the alien's nightmare song shrieked and throbbed, the audio-bud in her ear offering silence as hollow as the void. Fear trickled down her spine as she realized the scientists and diplomats on the other end of her coms, all of them experts in their fields, saw what she saw ... and had no answers.

"We, ah..." Odo's voice finally emerged from the ringing void. "We think it's a monument. A show of, um ... respect. Much like when we humans create statues to honor a person."

Hand fisting around the handle of her umbrella, Rana slowly pushed back to her feet. It took every nanoparticle of control to not demand a flamethrower to 'honor' the aliens' gift. A monument? A show of respect?

Fury rose in a cold wave, overriding revulsion. Jaw locked, Rana moved forward—not because she felt she had no choice, but because she'd glimpsed what awaited her at the center of the limbs: something those watching through the media drone needed to see.

So, they'd let her burn this monstrous tribute down.

Soft growths gave underfoot. Other, harder structures crunched. Her gut clutched as the forest of limbs reacted to her shaky but determined passage through them, the unnatural things apparently supporting crude nervous systems. Toes, red with rain, twitched. Stained hands groped towards her.

The Spira's song grew stronger. Its base notes vibrated through her and the ruddy liquid at her feet—pools she kept her gaze fixed on, because what lay ahead...

Heart hammering, she angled her body through the last circle of upright limbs, braced herself, and lifted her gaze—

To come face to face—literally—with a nightmare.

A tree of viscera that'd fruited human skulls: some bare bone; some covered in meaty, pink threads of muscle; and others...

Her son's face stared out at her from multiple branches.

In her ear, she heard Odo lose her diplomatic poise and her allocation of canapés.

Hearing the other woman's raw, graceless reaction, Rana felt slightly more in control—until the closest 'skull fruit' baring her son's likeness dropped its jaw to spew gore.

A wail escaped next, a sound that stopped her heart. 

Not an alien screech. Human.

An infant's desperate cry.

Rana staggered back, horror tumbling through disbelief. Decades of reclamation work couldn't save her from following Odo's lead. She doubled over, ejecting everything inside her onto ground that hungrily absorbed the semi-digested muck. After five violent intestinal contractions, she could only dry heave and spit out sour strings of saliva. Gasping, her vision blurred and reeling, she turned to leave—to run, to crawl, to tear her way free of the nightmare.

Only to have the ground collapse under her in a gruesome cascade of flesh and blood.

For a second, the heart-stopping sensation of freefall wiped her mind clean.

Then moist walls caught her; clamped around her. Sanity tumbled from her grasp as undulating darkness engulfed her. She struggled to move, to think, to breathe, as alien tissue rolled and retracted, rolled and retracted, working her further—deeper—into lightless, airless hell. A horrifying notion spun through her: This was what it was to be unborn.

Then she was falling into humid black again, umbrella flying from her grip. Before she could snatch breath, she hit what felt like a mesh of ropy flesh. Fighting terror—the knowledge she was trapped underground, within some alien construct—she groped about blindly. Wet, warm, rubbery things met her fingertips. Her pulse drowned her breaths as she tried to find the walls of her prison but only found more slick tubes and warm liquid—then something that felt too much like a human hand.

She jolted back, tumbling onto her rear.

Faint illumination bloomed above her, piercing a star of long, intersecting cracks in the unseen roof. Then light burst forth, overwhelming the darkness, petals of alien tissue peeling open to expose the tangled, weeping dome of the garden above. She got her first sight of the chamber she'd been delivered into. Fleshy walls curved up around her. Intestine-like roots crisscrossed bleeding ground—a dense web that began to writhe.

In a whipping scramble, the roots withdrew into the chamber's walls to expose—

A body—just an arm's length away—long and pale, but quickly turning red under the dome's rain. A human male with hair the color of—

Rana's breath stopped. Her heart stuttered.

She knew that body. She'd watched it grow from chubby and toothless to hard, lean, and angry.

For a moment, she couldn't think, couldn't react—until instinct took over. Hands shaking, she reached for the monstrous, perfect thing the Spira had grown. Her son—no, a cruel facsimile. A memorial made in his image. Now, she understood the garden of limbs and organs above. The Spira had worked to hone and perfect their gift.

Cradling the head of their terrible creation, she brushed gore-damp hair from features that echoed her own. "Oh, my poor boy." As the aliens' song rose in painful waves, she curled over and around their bloody tribute, wanting to add her voice to their screams.

This wasn't her boy. But at least, she had something to hold.

Movement within her arms—an unmistakable intake of breath.

She jerked back; stared as eyelashes fluttered then lifted to reveal vivid blue.

Bloody lips moved, but barely. "Mum..."

"No." Even as the denial left her, she was wrapping her arms around the living, breathing horror the Spira had created. "You're not him. You're not my Zane. You're..." Something grown from the shattered body the aliens had stolen from her.

"Clone." A whispered word, delivered with a grimace and a familiar dimple. "But imperfect neuro-replication. I—he'd been off world. The imprint used ... a month prior to death. Never be one hundred percent him, but they couldn't let me—him—go."

Rana trembled as hands slippery with alien gore lifted to grip her arms. Neuro-replication? This thing had her boy's memories? All but a month's worth? And it was still holding her like this, not pushing her away?

Her senses whirled; her hold tightened. Nearly blinded by the garden's red rain, and her ears weeping under the force of the aliens' lament, she shuddered as a scream-filled memory of her own rose: the brutal, bloody battle she'd fought decades ago to bring her boy into the universe. Ten hours of pain, and near everything torn below the waist.

A choking laugh broke free of her. That personal horror show, this chamber, this grisly, hellish garden... Shite. Life, at its most primitive, was never pretty.

But it was beautiful.

Curling around the tissue and bone that was her boy's second chance to explore that beauty, and her second chance to share the journey, she closed her eyes and let the Spira's defiant song wash through her. If this was alien grief, it needed no polite, diplomatic translation; just her embrace.