This is an old revision of the document!
Ve identified the emotions ve was currently feeling - the vestiges of an uncomfortable sense of responsibility, a mildly irritated flavour of concern. Ve was dithering whether to let it dictate ver actions - ve had already quelled the urge in the convert to shout. The dog's whimpering was unnecessary noise, but as long as he was whining in a ditch somewhere, what did it matter? Whatever madness befell it might prove a threat to ver at some point, should it bite if approached. This was a problem only for those parts not part of ver yet, of course - the others already knew.
But there was a sense of duty that ve could not shake. Neptune's leash was well out of grasp of ver capable members. Retrieving the dog was less of an effort than pushing the overwrite ahead, at least at this time a day. Were more of Townsville awake, priorities might be different. It would not be the most questionable decision ve had made so far, in awakening, in extending ver embrace. Monster. Ver heartbeat stung through her skull, a moment's discomfort. Ve dismissed the disruptive thought, forgiving verself the self-deprecation. There were secondary benefits to the explortation of Castle Hill: It was a point of overview. Perhaps someone was there, or multiple someones. The chance was slim, but it was enough to tip ver decision in favour. And at the very least, it would drive the mutt out of harm's way for a while. A lovely dog. He's scared of what you've become.
The discord in ver psyche would take a while to heal. As long as ve accepted it was part of the transition - and ve did - it need not pose a problem. Ve had been raised on principles that would take time to deconstruct without leaving behind a vegetable, made only more difficult as some of them were still imperative. The wider ver embrace became, the less these things would shake ver. The wrench in the works would lessen as more of ver was present to grant ver calm and understanding.
By tomorrow night, ve thought, ve would no longer be prone to such fits of irrationality, in any part. Certainly not in this one.
*
He jogged up along the path to Castle Hill at a leisurely pace. The volume of the sound of the gravel and dust under the soles of his feet were a frustrating side effect of the pace. He entertained, briefly, the notion of setting the whole hill on fire to smoke out the dog, but that would be a concession of defeat on many levels. His touch whispered across more distant bushes, hoping to spook the lost pet out of hiding. His attention was to two thirds hearing, hoping to catch a whine, whimper or the sound of the dragging leash. Neurons favoured the analysis of those small vibrations and completely discarded smell and non-essential touch.
Pure rationality was nothing he could afford, but it was moments like these that he had to resist the urge to succumb to it. If he did, he would cripple himself. Without intuition and empathy, he would soon encounter problems too complex to compute. He could not afford to do away with those traits. It would take time to find the right balance. For now, this had to play out, even if he was undecided, even as a whole, what would happen to the dog if he came upon it. Assuming it could be reasoned with, in the most abstract sense of the word, would it belong to the singular convert it had run away from, or the all of them? Assuming it could not, could it be restrained until the transition of its previous master had progressed enough to accept its death? Mourning was nothing Greg had experience with - and wished no experience with. The anthropomorphisation of animals, strong in the one that had lost Neptune, would make its death feel like murder as long as it persisted. He was too close right now to be as unsympathetic as the more distant parts. He hoped it could be reasoned with.
*
Near the top of his winding footpath, he paused. The dog was gone. If he'd come this far up the hill that it had bounded toward and up without as much as a sign of it, he wouldn't find it without a thorough sweep. Those were resources he was unwilling to invest.
He balanced his perception and took a moment for himself. His gaze crept back along the landscape, until he was presented with Townsville twinkling through the trees. He took in the view without judgement or deeper thought, simply enjoying the terrestrial equivalent of the night sky aesthetically.
Then he glanced upwards and continued along the path, flexing his cold fingers in instinctive worry about his blood circulation, pondering more sapient prey.
*
By the time a silhouette of someone sitting on the railing near the outlook point begins to blot out the stars selectively, he's almost there. Perhaps he wouldn't have noticed him without the brief blink of a blueish sheen touching the edge of the dark blob, dispelling the illusion that the figure could be anything else, at any particular distance. His first guess would have been the top of a tree, had he paid enough attention to the visual clues to spot the feature by itself.
For a long moment, Greg stood and stared. The railing was an unfortunate obstacle and difficult to uproot. He could try to handle the character directly, but from the current distance it was like trying to hold onto a writhing fish with oiled hands. Perhaps this was the time to try approaching the lone human conversationally. There were enough things to light on fire if it went awry, after all. He was fairly confident in his ability to contain his find, just uncertain of the cost of such intervention.
He slid his arms behind his back, clasping one hand across the back of the other. Slowly, he walked toward the stairs. There was no clever way for him to approach this stranger, really. If the stranger was aware of the extending embrace and his attitude about it similary grim, approaching him without a weapon in hand would almost surely identify him as a convert. Sneaking across to him could be as detrimental as calling a greeting. There was no precedent for this and he was ill prepared for this particular approach.
First time for everything - most of his life experience was out of range, after all.
Most of the way up the stairs, he calls across the breeze, his voice bewilderingly human: “Are you all right up there?”
'Know your local terrain in all conditions before any disaster breaks out. It is no use having a high vantage point if you can't tell what is on fire,' Ethan mentally composed. Perhaps a note about setting up a long range radio antenna? He could see and video many distant blazes but that wasn't translating into escape routes for those caught amongst them.
'Know the call signatures for all local towers, and all prominant local ham radio operators' was already on his blog but his phone wasn't picking up the signals very well. He should have brought a seperate radio and spare batteries. It was something to grab the next time he passed home.
The voice startled him. Startled was generous. Actually, the voice made him jump so badly he fell off the railing he was perched on and nearly slipped and fell on his arse. Two new blog posts immediately begin unfurling in his mind: 'How not to get startled by sneaky zombies', because the idea of being bitten because he'd brained himself on a rock was just embarassing. And 'How to tell if someone is infected', because this human looked perfectly normal.
If it was really a human they should probably look panicked, unless they'd somehow missed the (alarmingly subdued) chaos of Townsville below.
Ethan scrambled for a firmer footing and swung so his path was to the other path. “I'm fine, what are you doing here?” If he was really lucky it'd be someone who'd fallen asleep in their car and was a fellow survivor trying to work out what was happening.
Greg paused, glancing across to the startled figure, illuminated almost purely by starlight. He was close enough to engage him as he had others. He could subdue him with some effort - but the human might hurt himself. His lips disappeared for a moment, pressed to a thin line, the subtlety of expression practically invisible at this distance. Then he thawed out of his thought processes - not much more than an arduous second later - and called across: “I was going to ask you the same thing.” He let a moment pass for Ethan to parse those words, then hurried forward in an almost bounding motion, for a moment invisible from Ethan's vantage point, hidden by the angle of approach. Then he's resurfaced, an anonymous shadow with starlit outlines describing a generic face, striding slowly along the platform, sauntering toward Ethan. “My dog's gotten spooked,” he explains, raising his left arm to thumb blindly at the view of Townsville as the source of the canine's upset. “He ran up here. Don't think I've got much of a chance of finding him any more, unfortunately.”
That is a surprisingly plausible excuse. He hadn't seen a dog running past but he hadn't seen a person approaching either, despite people being much less stealthy than animals. If the dog was fleeing it had more sense than the rest of them.
Okay, so probable-human. Ethan's thumb still hovered over his phone just in case. He wasn't sure what he could do with it should the human try to mug him for supplies or something nefarious, but something was probably in his subconscious and would occur to him.
“Locating fires,” he offers as his only explaination to the returned question. Several tense seconds pass in silence before Ethan finally asks: “What sort of dog?” They seemed strangely unconcerned. Maybe it was something like a kelpie and they fully expected it to be able to find its way home once it calmed down?
It took some conscious effort and gauging of memories on Greg's part to determine what the right distance was that he could get away with being and stay there. The urge to bridge the final approximate metre throbbed in his skull, its intensity lodged somewhere between the urge to breathe and the urge to eat when moderately hungry. He could suppress it for a while, easily even, but the longer he kept it contained, the more it would nag at him. Here was a mind that was mostly silent when queried, offering only hazy approximations, and a part of him begged for it to be peeled open, to be made accessible. The human is scared. Greg's gaze touched the phone briefly, amusing himself that body language was entirely sufficient to convey that much. A useless fragment of trivia at best.
“Labrador; in love with the ocean. We called him Neptune,” he explains. “Though surely the mythological Neptune smelled different,” he comments, amusement encoded in his tone. For someone looking for their dog, of course, he's definitely awfully unconcerned with looking through the landscape for signs of it. The details come too easily as that they're likely to be an outright lie, but he's staring at Ethan with what even the dim light up here suggests is an unusual curiosity. “You wouldn't happen to know what's going on, would you?” he asks, thumbing to Townsville again in a lazy gesture. Just take him down. This is a waste of time. Invisibly, he gently bit on his tongue, restraining himself.
✘ IN PROGRESS