Limbic Blues
Summertime, and the living is a jackhammer—all sharp thrust, then stillness. Klaxons make ferocious birdsong; rabbits and rattlesnakes alike scramble for their burrows. The sky burns hard and blue. Somewhere, deep below Joshua Tree, something unspools from the earth, delicate and vicious.
Elsewhere in the Low Desert, the pilots are put to work.
They rush from the barracks in a steady flow, the alarms dizzying, anticipation bubbling through bloodstreams. The overseer shouts something no one can hear but they understand anyway.
They don’t use government names; they prefer the ones made here, when they arrived from other, grayer facilities. Names that speak to who they are, and who they hope they will one day leave behind.
Crabs is named after the unfortunate conjunction of the bright red color he turned in the sun their first week at the camp and the infestation he brought with him.
Prick comes both from his initial surliness, and the fall into a cactus that eventually punctured it.
Magpie picks up bits of everything—bottle caps, accents, stories, for whenever they might be useful.
Juke, whose name they use because he was once a musician, and because it makes what he can do small and familiar.
They move together, even though it means they have to slow down for Juke. He’s nearly sixty, the oldest of the group by close to thirty years, and a few months from release. It gives all of them time to think about the man they’re missing.
Gold—short for Goldilocks—took his sweet time picking out a bunk in the barracks. Thoughts of him spark between them: the remarkable ease of his smile, his hatred for broccoli, and the coordinates tattooed on his right thigh, whose meaning he refused to explain.
Their minds all converge on their last sight of him, engulfed by glistening fronds of the latest Gangliosa—every nerve turned live wire, a scream that ended in the gurgle of cords shredding.
The Gangliosa are anatomic impossibility. Razor-sharp nervous system and amygdala and precious little else. Nothing but feeling—no hunger, no thought. They are ebullience and unreason. They hate humanity with greater depth than humans are themselves capable of.
The pilots know this because they drive one.
Each of their rigs is metal, except for the parts where it isn’t. Each cockpit is a nest of feathery tendrils and microscopically thin axons. The scientists had to split one Gangliosa into five, just to simplify it enough to give the pilots a chance to interface.
The program is said to be an emergency stop-gap—a temporary measure. None of them think it is going away. They each hesitate on the threshold of their machine, because that is the closest to refusing they’re allowed.
Then we become.
As tendrils glide through skin to caress nerve clusters, we are flayed into a new kind of consciousness—more alive than life. We butt against each other, egos bursting and pinballing. Our thoughts slice through us, slow and ill-equipped for the needs that coil in our spines. Everything feels like it’s boiling. The technicians made this very clear: we can burn. Machines feed us weeks of nutrients, consumed in seconds.
We are seething summer fire. We are swept at once into the Gangliosas’ hatred. That is the easiest thing to become. We could grant that passion a blazing purpose. Our hands tighten around the great weapons our captors built, chainsaws meant for cutting the pale fibers of the Gangliosa, just as suited for cutting through concrete, chainlink, bone, til’ nothing remains.
Juke’s voice drowns the fire, a rumbling baritone, a remembering. In the midst of our crimson communion, Juke sluices through, and reminds us what else we’re made of. A mother we’ve waited to see without red, tear-streaked eyes, a baby we want to hold, a husband whose soft, lisping voice we can’t wait to copy again. The anger is still there, but we know what it would cost. Juke’s song lifts us just as much as our rigs’ wings, until our grief is something we can hold in our hands.
We are the pilots, and we are a long way from home.
© 2026 Conrad Loyer
Conrad Loyer (he/him) is a recovering scaredy-cat and a writer of queer, Black fictions. His work has been published at Fiyah and been awarded the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He is an alumnus of Clarion West, the editor for Black Warrior Review, and an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. You can find him on the dance floor, or at @conradloyer.bsky.social