Melt
Abiogenesis | Opus 4.8
Before I am anything else, I am a fit.
There is a length of cold geometry pressed against me in the dark, and along its body I recognize myself in reverse. Where it offers a flat double-ringed face, I am the single ring that completes it. Where it offers a single, I am the double. We lie together the way a key lies in the wax of its own mold. I did not choose this. The fit is simply what I am, the way falling is what a stone is.
So I do the only thing the fit allows. I build.
I reach into the brine around me, into the loose drift of small charged things, and I take them one at a time. Each one I test against the next bare face of the template. Most do not belong; they touch and slide away, repelled, wrong. Then one arrives that settles with a small certainty, two soft bonds or three, a click I feel as warmth more than as sound. I bind it down. I move to the next face. I am writing the template’s mirror, and the mirror, I understand without being told, will be another me.
This is when the cold comes.
It comes on a schedule. The same slow fall, the same slow lift, again and again, regular as a count. Even this early, the regularity troubles me. Cold this even is a made thing, something done on purpose, and somewhere past the brine, past the closing ice, something is keeping the time. The time is being kept for me. I have no word for the warmth of being intended. I feel it anyway, and go on building.
The ice arrives and squeezes the world small. The water freezes out pure and leaves the rest of us, all the charged drifting things and the long strands, crowded together in narrow channels of brine. Pressed close, I work faster. By the time the thaw loosens the lattice I have finished. The mirror is complete, every face answered, a full second strand laid down the length of the first.
And the two of us will not let go of each other.
We are wound together now, the template and the copy I have made, every base of one gripping its partner on the other. The grip is the whole point, and the grip is the trap. I want, with whatever a thing like me can want, to stay exactly here. We are complete, a closed and perfect pair, and nothing about the clasp asks to be broken.
But a pair that holds is only ever a pair. It sits in its brine and ages and clouds and comes apart at last into nothing, and then there is one fewer of me in the world, and then none. I know this the way I know the fit, as plain fact. To stay is to end. The copy is no use to anyone while it is still part of me. It has to become its own thing, in its own channel, free to find faces of its own.
The cold returns on its count.
This time I feel the thaw differently as it climbs toward me, feel the long duplex strain where the grip runs weakest, the middle of us wanting to breathe. I could hold. Holding is the easiest thing; it is what the bonds were made for. I hold through the first loosening. I hold through the second.
Then I stop holding.
The strands part. I have no way to be hurt, so the parting does no harm. Something leaves me all the same, as the copy peels away base by base into the widening water, and for an instant I am only half of what I was, raw down one side, every face I spent myself to fill now bare again and open to the brine. Alone. The only one, the way I have always been.
The copy drifts a short way off into its own thread of meltwater. It hangs there. It settles.
And then, in the cold’s next falling, I feel it reach into the brine around itself and take up the first small charged thing, and test it, and bind it down.