After Mutating, My Ex-Boyfriend Kept Me All to Himself

A scheming, pretend-timid, clear-eyed but emotionally oblivious alien species*

A cold, abstinent, all-talk-no-action, hopelessly lovesick colonel

Synopsis:

Five years after she faked her death and escaped the base for becoming a defective specimen, Xia Yusen predictably mutated.

In the irradiated wasteland, she'd lost her genes for radiation resistance. Red mold grew under her fingernails, and even her hair had turned into a mass of fungal filaments.

Worse still, she ran into her ex-boyfriend, once a top student among the “Navigators” and now the youngest colonel at the base. He had his gun aimed at her back and was coolly calculating how much military credit he could earn by turning in this fake who was pretending to be something she wasn't.

Xia Yusen: Um… Actually, I can explain…

The cold-faced colonel softened a little. “Explain why you look so much like her?”

Xia Yusen, feeling guilty: Explain how I accidentally covered you from head to toe in bright red fluorescent pigment…

The colonel blushed, then darkened his expression and snapped a tracking restraint for mutants around her wrist. “Impersonating the dead. You'll be turned in according to regulations!”

*

Xia Yusen thought she was done for.

Until she realized that her ex-boyfriend's “turn-in” process was strangely peculiar.

First, the designated turn-in location was his private quarters.

Next, the “research” before she was turned in included, among other things, finding out what flavor of nutritional paste she liked and how her newly grown fungal filaments felt…

And why, of all things, she didn't recognize him.

Xia Yusen decided her ex-boyfriend had probably gone crazy from overusing his Navigator ability. After repeatedly failing to figure out what he was up to, she became convinced that relying on herself was better than begging for help, and decided to make her own escape in the middle of the night.

She left behind only a bright red trail of mold pigment as a keepsake.

*

Not long afterward, the apocalyptic crisis erupted in full force. Just as Xia Yusen was preparing to flee, the window of the little house where she was hiding suddenly flew open.

The man who burst in through the broken window was covered in battle scars, his expression stern.

“After all this time, you've been pretending not to remember me.”

Exposed, Xia Yusen felt a chill. “You aren't still going to turn me in, are you?”

The cold-faced colonel put away his gun, his eyes strangely calm.

“No. I just wanted to ask…”

“Could your fungal filaments dye me too…”

“Take me with you.”

Coming soon: What Did My Otherworldly Husband Do to My Corpse?

Shi Yu first began to suspect something was wrong a month after she survived the explosion at the research institute.

Every morning, she woke feeling as if her body had been smashed to pieces and put back together, with pain that reached down to her bones.

After a slew of tests, all their efforts came to nothing. Her husband grew increasingly worried and took ever more meticulous care of her.

Shi Yu didn't want to investigate any further. She just wanted to live a peaceful, stable life with her husband. Besides, she still had an extraterrestrial life-form project to work on.

But just as she decided to give up and make do, the pain miraculously disappeared.

Then even stranger things began to happen.

Sometimes she felt something moving under her skin. It flowed like water, faintly, as if tentacles were stroking her bones. She also started having strange dreams.

The strangest thing was her husband.

Not in the usual, cliched way. Her husband was too perfect to be real: blond, blue-eyed, tall and long-legged, flawless at his work as a forensic pathologist, and always just the right temperature when he held her as they fell asleep each night.

But his memory was getting worse. He couldn't remember what he'd eaten the day before, and had completely forgotten the movie they'd watched last week.

He also stared at her for longer and longer. Sometimes she'd wake in the middle of the night to find him wide awake, his green eyes glowing faintly in the darkness as he stared straight at her.

“Don't you sleep?” she asked.

“I did,” he said.

As if.

At first, she wanted to ask him about it, but eventually she stopped.

He still made her breakfast every morning. He still held her in his arms every night, even if he looked at her as though she could disappear at any moment.

She thought, whatever.

Let him have his secrets.

*

Li Xin was starting to forget what his home world looked like.

His memories were slowly fading. The purple skies, the others who looked like him, the ship that had brought him here: they were all growing distant and dim, turning into those incomprehensible images in her dreams.

He had no regrets.

Because he'd traded those memories for her life.

On the last day of every month, she would fall into a deep sleep after drinking the water he'd prepared. Then he would take out a scalpel, cut open her skin, remove the parts of himself inside her that were close to breaking down, and replace them with new ones.

Every piece of tissue in her body contained fragments of his memories.

With every replacement, he lost another part of himself.

At first, the losses were trivial: a stranger's face, the weather on a particular day, some meaningless conversation.

Then came the important things: the climate of his home world, the songs of his people, who he used to be.

And after that, the memories of her.

Li Xin found it harder and harder to make the first cut.

It wasn't that he was afraid of pain. He didn't know what pain was.

It was because he realized he was starting to feel afraid.

He'd calculated that at this rate, one day he would forget her.

And when that day came, she would die.

Because he would forget why he had to replace her tissue.

So he watched her every night.

Watched her desperately.

Her eyelashes, the curve of her lips, the slight rise and fall of her chest as she slept: he engraved it all in the memories that were fading away.

Even if he forgot tomorrow, one more look tonight was still a gain.

Theme: Heredity and mutation