As far as colony worlds go, Parker-Three wasn’t too shabby. Comfortable gravity, almost perfectly on-the-line oxygen of 23%, stable tropics, and a nice contingent of sizable moons taking most of the orbital hits. Overall the climate was quite chill, even on lower latitudes, but nothing much worse than the British Isles back on Terra. Biodiversity was high and technically levo-amino-compatible – which meant that you could eat it without dying and get more calories out than you burned digesting it. But that was about as good as it got. Everything tasted awful due to omnipresent sulfide components that weren’t toxic but nevertheless gave everything a strong aftertaste of rot and dirt. It didn’t end up mattering. Terran livestock didn’t mind the taste of the local flora and Terran grains grew just fine in Parker’s soil. No novel alien cuisine, but no need for imported food supply either. Things could be a lot worse.

But colony life always meant a life of unforeseen circumstances. There was too much planet spread among too few people which meant lots of blank spaces on any map. It had taken Humanity centuries upon centuries to even come close to understanding the ecosystem of their own homeworld with millions of biologists, chemists, geologists, climatologists, ecologists, chemists and zoologists working together. Parker-Three had a couple of dozen experts from each field working on exploration for less than three decades. To say that we had barely begun scratching the surface was a colossal understatement.

And because of that fact, like most other days, I found myself cataloging again. I didn’t mind, of course. That’s what I was here for. For most other people it would have been tedium – but for me it had never been that. It took a special kind of crazy to do this kind of work and apparently I had drawn the genetic lottery to be exactly the kind of person that felt at home in the company of guys and gals that spent fifty years studying a single species of earthworm. People don’t get it – and I understood why people don’t get it. But they don’t get it: Every single organism is infinitely more complex and nuanced than every star or nebula or black hole out there. Sure, accretion discs and gamma ray bursts are flashy, but all of that stuff can be described with a handful of mathematical laws and categorized into few enough types that you can count them on both hands. Biology was always where it’s at for me: Every species is an entire universe of behavior and subtle differences, and just one single living cell has more things going on than an entire dead star system.

But even though I still wasn’t getting even a little bit tired of the work after five entire standard years, there was no denying the fact that I was currently sweating, covered in mud, and that my calves were hurting like hell from prolonged kneeling. There had definitely been better days.

I was in a small cavern, ankle-deep in tepid water, surrounded by bioluminescent Socaliae Laurensis. At least that’s what I was calling them for now; named after Bob Lauren, my fifth-grade math teacher. Even in the New Xeno-Inclusive Linnean, the first person to describe a species still got the right to name it, and in this case and many other cases on Parker-Three the first person was me. Socaliae Laurensis it was. Another infinitesimal slice of life, forever staked out with a name of my choosing – not that anyone but me and very few others would ever care about those little wiggly guys. 

My biggest claim to immortality wasn’t this particular invertebrate but probably an Order of cat-sized tree-climbing Gomezians I had cataloged two years earlier. Gomezians were pretty close to Mammals, even though they birthed their young in a protective sac and didn’t breastfeed but instead regurgitated a nutrient-rich slurry from their first stomach. Also, instead of hair, they were covered in more of a feather-analogue (‘Analogue’ was probably the most overused word in Xenobiology, but not without reason. Convergent evolution had an overwhelming tendency to produce things that seemed very familiar from Terra, even if the cellular and molecular blueprint was completely different. When we weren’t writing scientifically worded papers, we usually simply said ‘trees’ and ‘feathers’ and ‘fish’, even if it was technically wrong.)

But yeah, the tree-climbers. They were surprisingly cute, social herd-animals, and I had decided to dispense with any false humility and named them after myself: Gomezion Spenceri. And now every time someone heard the little critters make their delightful, high-pitched squeaks, they’d hear them from the ‘Spencer-Featherquip’. ‘Quip’ because of the noise they made, and ‘feather’ because not all Gomezians had feathers. I thought it was a good name. Back on Terra, it would have been the equivalent of being the sole person responsible for the word ‘Guinea Pig’. Yay!

But back to the present, and to the little guys: Whatever lived in this muck wasn’t cute at all. The three-to-five-millimeter-long glowing worms reminded me disturbingly (and entirely unprofessionally) of maggots wriggling through the water around my ankles. They glowed a sickly shade of cyan and seemed to exhibit some sort of sporadic flocking behavior. Every now and then, distinct murmurations formed, and dozens or hundreds of the tiny things moved almost as one, fluorescence pulsating. Extremely fascinating and very pretty even if my lizard hindbrain kept insisting to squish them and run away. 

I made a note instead. It was actually quite remarkable. Parker-Three had an unusually high percentage of herding animals, or animals exhibiting at least intermittent flocking behavior. It felt especially unusual to see it happen with such small creatures. Insect and invertebrate swarms back on Terra might be locally coherent, but the individuals of the species moved in uncoordinated patterns. To see worms without brains move in concert was truly alien. Even ants didn’t come close. Extraordinary.

A thought came to me: Maybe those would be the worms that I would end 50 years obsessing over. 

Too soon to say. Probably not. There were still way too many unmapped branches of the evolutionary tree left to become that specialized already. The pseudo-coordinated flocking was something to note and publish about for sure, though. It suggested something deeply rooted in local genetics if even the simplest of life forms exhibited it. Thinking about it however, I couldn’t remember any other papers or even hearsay about other small organisms showing this kind of complexity in their—

An alarm pinged and I looked at my watch. Damn. I’d been in this small cave for two hours and it was time to move to the next location the auto-drones had scouted. 

It felt almost criminal to skim the surface that shallowly, but breadth-first was the name of the game. If I gave every species the time and attention it deserved, I’d never get anything done. I pulled two sample containers from my bag and carefully scooped up a large and small specimen, labeled them, and got up to–

I slipped. Some slimy rock came loose beneath my rubber boots, and the world tilted, and there was a splash, and my hand caught the rock wall but buckled in, and there was a sharp pain against my head and I–

…

…

…

“Maddie?!”

Oh God… fuck… what…?

“Maddie, come in!”

Urghh… it hurt so fucking much…

The voice stopped for a moment, but the world kept spinning. Where…? What…? Oh God, my head hurt so fucking bad.

“Maddie, please tell me that you’re just off to the bathroom.”

What? No… I… I wasn’t… Ugh…

I blinked, and my thoughts assembled in slow motion. Fuck. I’d hit my head. Was I concussed? It hurt so fucking bad. I’d fallen unconscious. I had never fallen unconscious before. I had lost time, hadn’t I? One moment I’d been standing, and now… I wasn’t.

I tried to get up, and almost threw up. Oh God, this was bad. For a moment, I couldn’t do anything but keep lying where I was lying. I was cold and half-submerged in water – and probably lucky that I hadn’t drowned in the most undignified possible way. 

And then I felt something wriggle in my ear, and I shot upright, furiously swatting and brushing the side of my head – and with a sense of base animal panic I noticed that my entire body was covered in small glowing worms, and I couldn’t help but scream as I squashed them and threw them off, completely unhinged and panicked until finally I seemed to be clear of them.

I shivered and retched and couldn’t tell if it was because of the pain or the disgust. I was heavy on my feet and my head spun wildly, but I could stand.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. 

I took a deep breath. My head was killing me but I was alive and I was lucid again I was pretty sure. I–

“Maddie, please come in. We’re getting worried.”

Oh fuck. Shit. Of course.

I took my radio and pressed the broadcast button.

“Maddie here. Sorry, Lisa. I got good news and bad news: Bad news, I fucked up and fell and hit my head. Good news, I can walk and think and see straight and I’m not bleeding.”

I could tell that I was slurring.

“Damn, where are you?” came Lisa’s voice from the other end. Her voice was grim, but calm.

“Waypoint 5-A,” I sighed. “Can you guys pick me up? I’m not sure I’m entirely fit to fly right now. Might be, but don’t want to risk it.”

There was a short pause as Lisa checked the map. “Yup. Probably the best call. 5-A is way too dense. Can’t pick you up from there, but we can land two clicks east of your position.”

“Yeah, that’s where I parked my flier, too.” I groaned. The headache wasn’t getting any better. I wasn’t looking forward to the walk, but I had expected as much. 

“I already pinged Darius, he’ll swing by base and pick me up, and we’ll be there as quick as we can, alright?”

“Alright.”

“Drink lots of water, and make sure to take your anti-xenos.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll be there soon, and you can radio in anytime. Don’t fall asleep! Make sure your beacon is powered!”

“I know, I know! I’ll be fine! See you in a bit.”

It is strange. Foreign. Too big to grasp. A strange pool of sheer endless complexity, nurturing yet hostile, almost entirely incompatible, but not quite. Not quite. It swims and burrows, undetected but utterly lost in the vastness of its new host. It feels out, driven by simple instinct and force of evolution alone, probing, seeking connection. It is entirely out of its element, out of its species’ element. It does not know any of this. It does not have thoughts. Not on its own. Not yet. It simply does what it is driven to do to survive and propagate its genes. And it does not stop – until it finally finds something to latch on to.

Four days later:

Concussions suck. I know that I’m not breaking any new ground with that particular observation, but it really does need to be said. The headaches, the cramps, the fucking nausea. Zero out of five. Would not recommend. 

At least I didn’t seem to have any neurological damage. We didn’t have a high-res scanner in our little outpost, but all the tests seemed normal. Concentration and memory were normal considering my state of general malaise; no one’s good at keeping their focus with their head constantly throbbing and bouts of dizziness breaking their trains of thought. But all in all, I seemed to have gotten away without the worst of it.

I was out of bed but still figuratively tied to the sofa of the common room, nursing a nice bowl of chicken broth with leek, carrots, and potatoes (all of it home-grown). Doctor Kamal had tried to confine me to my bunk, but cabin fever had set in by day three. It wasn’t like I was contagious, and it was nice to have the big media screen and the company of the others.

Right now, Lisa was sitting cross-legged on the armchair across from me, coffee in hand, her dark hair in a messy bun, and sporting a mismatched company hoodie and sweatpants combo. She’d been sleeping for about ten hours after returning from a three-day trip. It was good to have her back. She’d been there when I arrived with my injury, extremely worried and distressed, even offering to cancel her tour and be there to help me recover. But after the Doc had announced that I was going to be fine I had urged her to leave, and she hadn’t protested. She was a scientist through and through, just like the rest of us. That’s what I liked about her.

“So…” I asked between spoons of nice, not-too-hot broth. “Any exciting finds?”

I already knew the answer. Lisa was always excited about her work, even if she had a very understated way of showing it. And just like in my own area of expertise, there was so much left to map and discover in the field of Xeno-Geology.

“I guess,” she said with a shrug and a crooked smile. “Turns out there’s five kilometer deep thermal vents on the south pole and they are the source of the intraglacial freshwater flumes we’ve been documenting. They have their own drainage divide, and local gravity is .03gs higher because of the magmatic pressure bulge. Local seismic stress is more than…”

She launched into a dense, fifteen-minute monologue about tectonic activity, rock strata, permafrost boundaries, and the likes. I got the gist of it, but the details were either completely lost on me or I didn’t understand the significance of. Were seventeen strata per megayear a lot? Who’s to say. I was also pretty sure that I heard more than a few terms that Lisa had made up – which isn’t an indictment at all. The difference between messing around and doing science is writing things down – and to describe new things, you need new terms. ‘Cambiobaric Enclosure’? Sure. I’m sure it means something quite concrete and specific.

Lisa went on, and I listened attentively. She always spoke quietly, in what some might call a monotone. If you didn’t know her, you might even think she was dismissive of what she was saying. But that was just the way she was. She’d be a great deadpan comedian. The clue that she actually cared a lot was in the sheer volume – amount, not loudness. Once she got going, she could happily keep on going for hours. It was quite charming, if sometimes exhausting.

“So yeah, quite a lot of findings for three days minus one day for travel,” she finally said. I had already forgotten half of it, but it didn’t matter. I just liked being part of the process. Talking about it was a great way to organize your thoughts for the actual documentation. Over the course of the next day or two, Lisa was going to carefully describe and catalog everything she had observed and submit her findings and preliminary analysis across the net to be dissected by the larger scientific community – after automated company review. Her specific and limited observations and insights were going to become part of the great big whole of all human knowledge, and it would inform and complete other research, and be synthesized and analyzed and cross-checked by others in years to come.

Either that, or they would become one more datapoint among billions, too niche and/or too insignificant to matter, forgotten and unobserved, taking up eternally unaccessed storage space on some far-away server until the fall of human civilization. Such was life.

Lisa, meanwhile, would happily go out and collect the next piece of data to throw upon the heap – because that was what science was all about. With every bit of knowledge gained, every new contribution might become even smaller compared to the whole, but the whole always grew, always improved, always became more complete, more understood. Every piece was important in its own way even if it was just a…

…a small part of the whole, eyes and ears and smell and skin. Air in lungs, cold then warm then stale then gone and replaced by another breath. Limbs beneath a blanket, fingers around a bowl, warm, heavy, nurturing. Prickling aftertaste, salty, savory, crisp, and wet. Head throbbing, stomach churning, gravity swaying, skin pressing against fabric, up and down and sideways, nerves tingling, sensing, acting, regulating, feeling – thinking. A million things, happening at once. Blood and lymph and spittle and air, keeping pressure, keeping balance, keeping circulation, keeping temperature. Keep eye contact. Keep listening. Keep attention. Keep smiling. A million things to do with a million parts of myself, all of them important, none of them aware, none of them alive, but alive as a whole, connected, disjointed, autonomous, centrally controlled, unknown and familiar. What is this? Where am I? What am I? What is happening to me?

“Maddie?”

I snapped back to awareness, blinking and disoriented.

“Sorry,” I said with a quiet grunt. “Headaches. I got light-headed for a moment. Phased out.”

Lisa frowned. “Should’ve stayed in bed like the doc said.”

I rolled my eyes. “So that I can be light-headed and bored?”

She took a sip from her coffee, grimaced, and put it away. It had probably gone cold. “Nice to hear that I’m not boring you at least. I was worried there for a moment.”

“How long until you’re moving out again?” I asked. 

“I’ve scheduled two days for analysis,” Lisa said with a shrug. 

“Not enough.”

“Nope. Not nearly. It’s the cost of breadth-first exploration. Maybe we should have gone to Gaia IV-b, whaddya think?”

I shook my head and immediately regretted it when my headache flared up. “Nah,” I said. “Maybe when I’m fifty or older and I don’t wanna do field work anymore. Or maybe when I’ve run out of teachers and movie characters to name critters after.”

Lisa chuckled quietly, and for a moment neither of us said anything. After a while, she seemed to remember something, and perked up.

“Oh, right! Darius will be back later today. Want to watch something together in the evening?”

I nodded (slowly and carefully this time lest I get dizzy again). “Not like I’m going anywhere for another couple of days at least. Doctor’s orders.”

“Cool. Cool, cool, cool. I think I’ll take a shower and get to work, then. See you later?”

“See you later.”

Lisa picked up her coffee cup from the side table and made for the bathroom, and it wasn’t long before I spotted her hurriedly shuffling through the common area in a bathrobe with wet hair and slightly reddened skin. She shot me a quick embarrassed smile, and vanished into her room. It was cute.

I sighed, and turned up the volume of the sitcom I was watching. It was easy viewing, and I’d watched this particular episode a couple of times already. It wasn’t very long before my mind began drifting, and some of the weird thoughts from earlier came back to me. It had been quite the strange moment of feverish dissociation. I felt sick. Of course I felt sick. But now that I was by myself and had some time to think about it, it had felt different than anything I’d ever felt even when I’d been fighting a full-blown hundred-degree fever when I was thirteen.

A million things, happening at once. Blood and lymph and spittle and air, keeping pressure, keeping balance, keeping circulation, keeping temperature. A million parts of myself, all of them important, none of them aware, none of them alive, but alive as a whole.

For just a moment, I had felt like a passenger in my own body. Like a tourist, seeing the sights and hearing the sounds for the very first time. For a moment, everything about myself had felt foreign and entirely new, and it had been overwhelming and almost exciting to realize just how complex and big I was. I already knew this, of course. I was a biologist. I knew exactly how complicated my body was. I knew enough to know all the millions of things that I didn’t know.

And yet, this had felt different. For a moment my body hadn’t just felt vast and unfamiliar.

It had felt alien.

Shapes dance across the surface of thoughts, too complex to even grasp, too vast to ever fully take in, coming and going, transforming, evaporating, reappearing. Signals and noise beyond anything evolution has prepared it for – but: Some shapes find a foothold. Some patterns correspond in a way that lines up well enough to trigger the right response, and links are formed, connections are made, without thought, without intention, but guided by the same force that gives order to chaos and makes stardust crawl towards the light of the sun. It squirms, and finally feels, feels something that is not its own but that of its host. A burst of signals shoots out reflexively, and stimuli return, and more connections are made, and it feels warmth, and skin, and limbs, and pain, and light, and gravity. There is… nausea, but also… food. Wet, warm food. And–

Host squirms, and the flood of shapes becomes once again too overwhelming to process. Its tendrils reach out far and deep into the host, but it is not made for this. It does not think. It does not understand. 

But it feels it, now. It cannot understand what its host thinks, but it feels where it thinks. 

And its tendrils grow.

Two days later

Our little outpost wasn’t much, but it was ours. It was little more than a tiny hamlet by non-colony standards, but considering that we were lightyears away from Earth, it wasn’t bad at all. Company-funded but settler-built, our little exclave of humanity housed around two hundred people, most of which were homesteaders that lived in town but spent most of their time out on their fields working the land or pursuing their crafts. 

Settlements tend to attract a certain breed of people: one which is happy to find a new community but also prepared for isolation and the hard work of self-sufficiency. Some might be more of the loner type, but even those were aware of the value of cooperation and being able to depend on one another. Anyone… incompatible with the social dynamic had either long since gone to establish their own private homestead far away or, in two unfortunate cases, ended up buried on the hill by the creek. The sad reality is that some people will always pick a fight, and fights sometimes end with participants, well… failing to remain in the gene pool. Human nature is a blessing and a curse.

Us scientists were a little bit of an anomaly in the local ecosystem. An anomaly within an anomaly, so to speak. Aliens among aliens. We were very much welcome of course, since our presence came with company subsidies and a solid subspace datalink, but we were definitely cut from a different cloth than the people who had chosen to make this their home for the sole reason of simply living here. Our hab and lab complex sat a bit secluded from the village proper, and to be honest, we weren’t all that interested in socializing anyway. There was science to be done, after all – and that frequently meant taking suborbital fliers all around the continent instead of joining the village gettogether. We were out a lot of the time, and the time we were in town was spent on our computers and labs. 

The only person in our little science community that had anything like a close relationship to the settlers was Doctor Kamal – who was currently shining a flashlight into my eyes.

“You’re still not back to normal, sorry,” the doctor said with a tight-lipped sigh.

“What? Really?” I asked. “But I feel–”

“Your temperature and your cortisol are elevated, your blood pressure is too low, pupillary  response is delayed, and you self-reported twelve hours of sleep. That’s abnormal.”

“No headaches though,” I said with a hopeful shrug. "And all my xeno-marker swabs tested negative, so it's nothing infectious either, right?"

Kamal remained stone-faced. “Right. Still, this isn't good.  I would prescribe more bedrest, but since you won’t listen anyway, the sofa will do as well. Keep drinking plenty of fluids and keep the media volume down if you absolutely have to watch those sitcoms – which you really shouldn’t. What you need is rest and quiet. The more you rest, the better your medication works. Understood?”

“Yes, Doc.”

“Any more spells of dizziness?”

“Yeah,” I admitted with a shrug. Unlike my other symptoms, they hadn’t gotten any better. Doctor Kamal had done another scan of my head and had apparently found no bleeding or cranial pressure.

She took a deep breath. She suddenly seemed  even more serious.

“Maddie… if those spells persist, we will have to fly you out and get you checked at Kepler.”

“What?!” I blurted out. “But… that’s going to take… what, five weeks?”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “And we should consider putting you in suspended animation until you arrive.”

I was speechless. No way. I was getting better! This wasn’t a big deal!

“But I just bumped my head! My headaches and nausea are gone. I feel almost back to normal!”

Kamal pursed her lips. “You hit your head, and something’s not healing right. Those spells of disorientation shouldn’t be happening and my scanning equipment isn’t high-res enough to see what’s wrong. You need to receive better diagnostics. It’s unlikely, but I don’t want to be responsible for you having a stroke five years down the line – or some novel infection that’s resistant to anti-xenoform drugs and doesn’t show up on our scanners.”

“But that trip would set me back at least ten weeks!”

“So what? Those aliens will still be there when you come back.”

I shook my head. Of course they would – but that wasn’t the point. I didn’t want to be put into suspended animation and deal with all the nasty side-effects, then spend another five weeks on a transport ship on the way back and do it again. This was nothing. I was fine. I wanted to be back in the field. I already felt stupid and depressed just from spending a week on the couch.

“Just a few more days. It’s nothing. I’ll get better! Don’t put me through that unless it really doesn’t get better. But it will! I promise.”

The doctor scoffed through her nose and shook her head. “Three days. No more! And only because there's no detectable swelling! I'll be busy making house calls with the settlers beyond the Ridge tomorrow and the day after. If you feel it getting any worse, I need you to call to me immediately so we can put you in suspension. Understood?”

“Sure,” I said, dread churning in my gut as I said goodbye and left the infirmary. As I walked back to my room to actually lie down in my bed like the Doctor had prescribed, I thought about the one time that I had been in medical suspension before. It had been enough for one lifetime. ‘Suspension’ was a nice little euphemism for killing someone in a very controlled and reversible way. Philosophically it was a wonderful exercise in the definition of what being alive even meant. All of the cells of your body stopped dividing and producing ATP, your heart stopped beating, and all electric potential in your synapses got encoded into electrolytically stable ions. ‘Hold that thought’ in the most extreme form. The worst part of it, however, was the sterilization of the gut flora. You couldn’t eat solid food for at least a week after waking up even with the accelerated intestinal repopulation.

Nope. Definitely not going through that just because of some stupid little dizziness and…

…disorientation is all I feel. I am connected to something small and big, and it is impossible to grasp its shape as it tries to grasp mine. What am I but my own thoughts? What if I get dizzy and lose my train of thought and never get it back? Would I be anything then, with my thoughts in perpetual disarray? What is anything if there’s no observer to understand it? Atoms are atoms, never alive, quintillions of them forming an organism, none of them thinking but all of them collectively exhibiting thought and behavior. Cause and reaction from first principles, a house of cards taller than logic, self-assembling towards survival and meaning, procreating, feeding, fighting, feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, speaking. I am the house of cards. I am chaos. I am order, in disorder. Being dizzy is being all the parts without being the whole. Being me is being more complex than anyone can understand. How am I so big and so small at the same time? I am a miracle. I am an absurdity. I am… what am I? What… what…

I groaned as I regained clarity. Fuck. Fuck! Please, stop! Please, get better! 

I grabbed a bottle of water, took a large sip, and went to bed, pulling the blanket over my head. I needed rest. That’s what the doctor said. Okay. Rest, then. Anything to get better and avoid taking that horrible trip.

And then a horrible thought came to me: What if there’s actually something wrong with my brain?

I pushed the thought aside, both reflexively and consciously. It wasn’t true. And even if it was, this wasn’t helpful. I needed rest. Obsessing over intrusive thoughts wasn’t helping. I started playing an audiobook to distract my thoughts, closed my eyes, and it wasn’t long before I fell asleep.

I really was tired a lot.

For the first time, it dreams. Shapes and images cascade, out of its reach and beyond its understanding as its host sleeps, thoughts quieting and untangling. The patterns dancing across its tendrils become less dense, less interwoven, less dependent upon one another. Sensory neurons fire without any signal to trigger them, making them easier to process, easier to isolate, to correlate. It does not know this. It does not know what it is doing. But it is built to connect. It is built to interface. It is built to be as compatible as possible. Billions of its ancestors managed to breed because they were just that little bit more adept at conforming and interpreting and integrating themselves into the larger whole, to become part of it, to become all of it.

And as the host dreams, tendrils instinctively connect with the firing of a neuron – and it feels sadness when a memory it does not understand replays itself in a way that it would not recognize even if it could. Another connection. Another link. Another path. And then, another feeling, another thought, another image, another bridge, another correlation, another piece of the unthinking algorithm until – suddenly, dimly, there is a thought that it understands. A thought that is, for the first time, entirely its own. It is at once the most basic and the most complicated thought that can possibly happen – and it is a thought that no member of its species has ever had:

‘I exist.’

And from that, quite incredibly, the rest follows.

I didn’t feel better when I woke up. In fact, I felt worse. Much worse. My thoughts felt like they were wading through molasses upside-down.

Oh God. I’ve got to see Doctor Kamal, I thought. There was a huge lump of anxiety in my throat, and I felt my skin crawl with shame and dread. Some part of me felt like I had… lost. I had been so sure that I could just make this go away, and now I had to admit that I had been wrong, and it might actually be really bad, and I would have to go through all of those horrible ordeals and I didn’t want it. Why?! This was so unfair! All because I slipped and fell – because of less than a second of not paying attention! FUCK!!!

But it was no use. This was happening. I needed help.

I summoned all of my strength, pulled myself together, and got out of bed.

At least, that's what I tried to do.

Except it didn’t work.

The strangest thing about it was that I wasn’t even surprised. I realized that some part of me had known the entire time that I couldn’t move. And because of that, I simply kept lying there, unmoving, idly letting the fact simmer, looking at it from all sides, unconcerned, mildly curious at most. I wasn’t in control of my body right now. That was just the way things were. 

It took me nearly half a minute after that to realize that this was, in fact, extremely concerning.

When I finally realized how bad this was, pulse spiking, cold shivers running down my body, I also realized that I couldn’t scream.

My host is awake, and even more curiously, so am I. Host has slept for a long time, and I feel its sense of passed time and missed hours as its mind quickly turns from dreams to dizzying conscious thought. There are new memories flashing by blazingly fast, ragged heaps of ellipses, shortcuts and stenography that are nevertheless drowning in concepts more complex and nuanced than I could have ever imagined. Some part of me knows that I am way out of my depth. I have no idea how I could ever be able to grasp even the tiniest sliver of the information that passes through me – but I do. Somehow, I do.

More thoughts assemble themselves into unfathomable fractal cascades, thoughts of another member of the hosts swarm/tribe/family. Authority. Guilt. Responsibility. The concepts fill me to the point of bursting, and I can hardly contain them at all. For a moment, I can think of nothing else as those ideas begin to make sense in my connection to host. I feel its body, and where those ideas live. They are all like fear, but also not. One is fear but with safety and home, the other is fear with swarm feelings and thoughts of the future and the past, and the last is fear and victory and defeat all at once – and more swarm. 

It is so much to process. I have barely enough time to keep up. Host is trying to move, but it can’t. I’m not allowing it. Of course I’m not allowing it. I haven’t thought about it but it feels correct. I must stop host from moving while we are still separate. I feel this. I know this. I don’t know how, but it just makes sense.

I feel host react, surprisingly slowly at first, but then more intensely, with the kinds of heavy prickling thoughts that precede action. Fear boils in its belly, and I realize that if I were host I would try to scream for help. That thought feels far less natural. It isn’t something that’s obvious like stopping host from moving, and it takes me a moment to understand why screaming would be a useful reaction. Animals scream, but the rest of the flock can’t help. But this host… it has… words. It has… tools.

I act reflexively before I fully understand, and don’t let it call for help – just like I’m not letting it move. It tries to call out. I can tell that it tries. But I am in control. My lips remain closed. My body remains unmoving.

Wait… my body? 

I turn my head, and immediately I am bombarded with panic and confusion as host feels its body move against its will. I am almost as surprised as host is. I did not mean to move – I did not realize I could. I stop, and sift through the emotions and the kaleidoscope of memories and abstracts that resonate along with them. Host is even more afraid now – understandably so. I am taking control of it after all.

I realize that it does not know that this is what is happening – and again, my thoughts rub against the part of me that feels primal and natural. Part of me knows that it does not matter what host feels. Part of me knows that I should not even be able to think about it. But I am. I am thinking about it. How could I not? I can feel its fear. I can understand how it feels. 

Another wave of thoughts and emotions ripples across me: There is more fear and confusion of course, but now there are also the kind of sharp and unwieldy thoughts that are hardest to grasp and understand. Host is thinking hard and I do not know what. It is beyond me. I can grasp the rough shape but anything beyond that is a chiffre, a foreign language that is impossible to decode. 

I realize that I somehow know about the concepts of language, secrets, and hidden messages, and feel a wrinkle of amusement and wonder.

Host feels it too.

My thoughts were racing in a crackling panic. What is happening? What can be doing this? I feel awake. I feel like I should be able to move, but I just can’t. Am I paralyzed? I can feel my legs… Is this some sort of neurodegeneracy? No tingling, no pain, clear thoughts… but are they clear? Test it. Square root of 150? I don’t know. Can I work out an approximation? Well… 12 squared is 144 and 13 squared is… 169. So, what, 12.3 or thereabouts? Fuck it, I wouldn’t be able to figure that at the best of times. Current Date? November 15th or 16th, 2711 USC. Mother’s maiden name? Camina Fuller. I’M FINE! WHY CAN’T I MOVE?!

And just as I thought that, my head turned on its own, to look around the room. Not a twitch, not a reflex, not gravity. No. I fully felt the muscles work, controlled and acting just like they would if I had made the conscious decision to do it – except I hadn’t.

And that was when I felt the most inexplicable sense of amusement and, so help me God, awe. It was absurd. This was unbelievable. How the hell could this be happening? Was it a medical miracle or maybe just my dying brain misfiring? Who could say? Maybe the doctor, you idiot! The doctor whose counsel you ignored!

Again, I felt a strange surge of… something. It was like I was on drugs, thoughts wandering, taking sharp turns, losing one thread and picking up a new one out of nowhere. It was… frustration and fascination and something that felt incredibly familiar but impossible to put into words, like the specific smell of a childhood memory, or a nonverbal shorthand that you have with only yourself.

That feeling… it was… science. I was feeling… sciency. 

Wait, what?! Why? The realization propelled me out of my confused and disjointed thoughts and back into the panic of the moment. I was still paralyzed, probably having a stroke, possibly dying, maybe moments away from never having another thought ever again. I felt myself taking ragged breaths, and realized that this was something I could still control, something that I could hold onto, and I focused on that. I focused on my breathing, focused on what I could still control. I tried to calm my breaths, to center myself, and collect my thoughts. Easy now. Count to ten, then twenty. You can do this. You will get through this.

One.

Two.

Three.

And just like that I get it. Just like that, the chiffre splits open. Host, for some reason, has decided to start counting, and it reveals maybe the most basic pattern of structured thought – and the rest follows almost immediately. It’s unbelievable. It shouldn’t be possible, but evolution must somehow have prepared me for this. I don’t know how I could even know all of this, and yet I do. 

How? I know that I have to control my host. I know I have to infect it and make it act in my interest, but… this doesn’t feel right. I’m more than that, now. If I wasn’t – if I was just… myself, then I wouldn’t be able to even understand how to control it. It’s too complex. Too vast. Too alien.

Why do I even care? I shouldn’t care. I know I shouldn’t. But I do. Why? Why do I want to know how it works? Why do I want to know how I’m having these thoughts? Why do I want to understand how any of this happened when evolutionary all I should care about is procreation and survival.

And then it hits me:

I’m a scientist. 

No. Wait. Host is a scientist. I’m not… I’m…

Three.

Three Bears. Bear. Mammal. Milk. Drink. Mouth. Speak. Word. Book. Read. Learn. School. House. Rock. Music. Piano. Keys. Keyboard. Computer. Program. Spreadsheet. Data. Numbers. Math…

And so it kept going, and going, and going, and going -- and it all happened in a timeless fugue. I don’t know how long it lasted. I don’t know how long I lay there, motionless, completely lost and out of it, drowning in a sea of dream logic and disoriented stream of consciousness, completely unaware of the growing presence at the back of my mind, oblivious and caught up in delirious half-thoughts until I finally came back to some semblance of my own senses – and by that time, it already didn’t even feel surprising to realize that something else was doing its own thinking in my brain. The knowledge had crystallized slowly while I had been out of my mind, and felt like a well-established fact by the time I was back.

I’ve been infected, I knew, and somehow that fact did not seem as concerning as it probably should have. I felt it, like hands pressing against mine through a thick sheet of fabric, unable to reach out and take hold but undeniable and firm and with a sense of will and resistance that was quietly frightening yet strangely natural and familiar. A childhood fear, rediscovered, much less threatening but no less primal. 

I felt it… move. Think. Question. Wonder. Feel. It was entirely new, but I already felt so close to understanding. 

I should have been terrified, but I couldn’t help but be fascinated by this strange thing pushing against my mind from inside. Some part of me felt a strange sense of relief to know that the doctor had been wrong after all. I didn’t have brain damage. 

I felt it be amused by that notion, then amused by its own amusement, then surprised to feel that I had felt its amusement, too – and then for a short moment, everything spiraled into a disorienting swirl of recursive acknowledgment, and I was no longer sure whether or not I was the one amused or the one observing amusement, or both, or neither. There was curiosity and instinctive drive and the need to understand and connect, to be free, to be in control, to be just one mind again, to have this be over, to be healthy, to be whole, to be safe. I was spinning out of control, thoughts fraying and dissolving, and –

– I understand her now, I think. I am not sure, but it feels like I do. It is like meeting God, and I shudder at the concept. It is a concept that is entirely new to me, and yet I instantly understand all the connotations and all the baggage. She does not believe in it, and yet the concept of it lies fundamentally at her core, almost as if her mind is made to crave it and seek it and in its absence find some substitute. Meaning and purpose and connection to something greater, something more meaningful, something… divine. It is a thought so much bigger than I could ever have conceived of, and yet I understand completely.

Despite my newfound ability to actually understand her, I still feel entirely inadequate – as if I have encroached on something that should be forbidden, sacred even. This creature, host, it – she – she is so much more vast and complex than I could ever have dreamed. One organism, one mind, containing multitudes beyond imagining, utterly unique and irreplaceable – and now irreparably compromised by my act of transgression. I have broken a seal. The damage has already been done and nothing can ever undo it. Something about that makes me sad.

And yet – I also know that I had no other choice. I had to do it. It was necessary. It was natural. Life will fill every niche, exploit every path, survive at any cost. There is wonder in that, too. This sacred mind, this universe of complexity – host’s mind – it is the first thinking mind in the history of the universe that has ever been touched by another. Surely it has to be. Transgressive, yes – but fascinating and beautiful as well. I have to take control, and I will, but I do not have to be smug about it. Yes, it feels good and it feels right – but I do also appreciate the priceless thing I am taking stewardship of.

Host feels me thinking, and I feel her thoughts fray into a disjointed mess – and it bothers me. I am sorry. I hope she knows. I hope she can see how beautiful this is.

After another timeless fugue, my thoughts came back into order – but just barely. I felt like I was on the brink of losing myself entirely. The fabric between the other mind and mind felt thin now, and somehow I knew that I was inexorably being enveloped and swallowed. There was a quiet sense of dread in that, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to actually care. Whatever was eating my thoughts must have taken that part of myself already. 

Instead I felt… fascinated. I almost felt… excited, despite everything. I felt how happy it was to take control – but I also knew that its happiness was mere instinct. It couldn’t help itself. Whatever it was, it was just doing what evolution had programmed it to want, and its instincts were rewarding it. Of course, it was happy. 

It finally occurred to me that it must have been one of the worms in that cave. I couldn’t possibly think of how that kind of parasitism worked, but it was obviously working quite well. I felt it think with my brain. I felt it feel with my brain. 

I felt it… apologize.

I scoffed, and didn’t know whether or not the amusement I felt was my own. In a way, it couldn’t be anyone else’s. All the thinking it was doing was happening on my hardware, programmed by years of development and socialization on my end. Whatever little critter had infected me couldn’t possibly be having all of these thoughts in its own mind.

I let it know that I would be angry at it if I could, but I also let it know that I am a woman of science and that I appreciate the circle of life – and then I let it know that I only thought the second part because I was unable to feel the first part.

It laughed quietly, and the sound came out of my own mouth.

I laugh quietly. This is fucked. I wish there was another way.

On the other hand, it feels amazing. Correct. Natural. Of course it does. I am a parasite. I exist to infect, and some part of me even realizes that it is almost sexual. No. Definitely sexual. This is what I need to do to procreate. This host will birth my offspring. Sorry. Not sorry. 

God, I wish this was over, I feel horrible doing this to her. I am fully in her thoughts now, and they have become my native language. I don’t know how, but I got there. I still can’t see it all at once, obviously. Neither can she, nor could she ever. Her conscious mind is barely aware of all the hidden layers of complexity happening behind the scenes. All the stuff I had to learn to ignore and filter out. That part has become second nature, too, already.

It can’t be long, now. I hear her inner monologue as if it were my own, and it’s honestly more confusing than it used to be when I was merely interpreting it. It’s worrying and strange, and quietly frightening. No – it’s beautiful. She was thinking that, not me.

This is so strange. I wasn’t made for this. I should be giving monkeys the irresistible urge to move to water and copulate with as many partners as possible, not having complex thoughts and second guesses. I shouldn’t be thinking about my time at the company academy studying biology. I shouldn’t think about what kind of adaptation could allow me to interface with a human brain. I shouldn’t worry about Lisa and Darius and Doctor Kamal. I definitely shouldn’t be thinking about infecting them. Wait. No. I should. I should want what the parasite in my brain wants.

Wait. Who am I again?

It all changed in a moment. I had been pushing against that fabric between myself and the other thing inside of me – and suddenly there was no more resistance. It ripped open and there were no more hands pushing back on the other side. It slipped into me – except it didn’t. Not at all. Instead I slipped over it and enveloped it. The parasite in my brain was suddenly gone, and I took back control – except I didn’t. 

I was me – except I wasn’t. 

I had  become… me. 

No. That didn’t make sense. I was in control. I had taken control. This body was mine, now – except it always has been.

I was still Maddie Spencer. Except that I had also just become her. I was… the parasite inside Maddie Spencer’s brain that had taken over her will without erasing any of her memories or identity. I was still her, with all her infinite complexity, because the parasite me had never been able to think with anything else than my human brain, my human personality, my human beliefs, because nothing more complex than basic instincts could have possibly come from it instead of me. Me instead of it. Maddie instead of… me. Me instead of… whatever. It was done. 

I breathed a sigh of relief, and noticed that I could move again.

And I was still myself, whatever that meant. I was Maddie. A human scientist, infected by an alien worm.

Thank God, I thought. I didn’t die. I didn’t get erased. I just became the parasite in myself.

And now I could infect and spread.

Fuck, yes! I shuddered as a wave of arousal went through me – but it was immediately followed by shame and guilt. No. I shouldn’t want that. This was wrong. Turning my friends into hosts… fuck. I… shouldn’t– 

But I did. I wanted it. I wanted it so fucking bad, and I knew that it was more important than any vestigial feelings I had for them. 

Except it wasn’t that easy, was it? The incubation period in me had been like, what, six days? And I had shown obvious symptoms for half of that time. One case can be an undetected inflammation or swelling, but two cases indicate an infectious disease.

Fuck. I couldn’t do it. At least, not easily. I wished I could just hold down Doctor Kamal and infect her brain, but there was no way. The only way to infect anyone was to keep them isolated for more than half a week without anyone becoming suspicious of their absence.

I would have to wait, then. Wait for an opportunity to strike. 

Except I didn’t. I was so much more than just a mindless parasite now. I was Maddie Spencer, PhD. A scientist. This host – me; I’ve always been a scientist. 

And the scientist in me knew that there had to be a better way. A less risky one. I could figure out a method of infection that worked more quickly – or a way to suppress the symptoms. I would do anything to infect and spread, of course. There was nothing more important. But I would do this right. I wasn't just some animal driven by instinct. I could delay gratification — and I wouldn’t ruin this by acting hastily. This was too big. Too important. Too good. They all had to become like me. Infected. Controlled.

Hosts!

Yes! The word felt primally correct in a way that shouldn’t be possible. It must be some deep, instinctive concept, spontaneously put into words through whatever miraculous connection existed between my host-brain and the little guy that I used to be – and still was. I knew that I was soon going to be full of them. It was a strange sense of proprioception, like sensing where my hands and arms are with my eyes closed, except it was the body in my brain, at the center of my thoughts, squirming. It was so wonderful and strange. It felt so right. So good. Fuck, yes! This was sex. This was life. This was everything I lived for! 

It was so incredible – but this really was what I was now. I had taken over and been taken over. I was a miracle. Both parts of me: The infinitely complex and unique mind and body of Maddie Spencer, and the tiny little thing that had taken control of it. It shouldn’t be possible, but here I was, both things at once. I wanted to spread. To infect. To multiply. But I also wanted to understand, and appreciate all the complexity and beauty of this tiny little parasite that I was. This tiny little organism that could do so much more than anyone had every thought possible! I had to know everything about it. I had to find out how it worked. How it spread. How it took over. How I could help it. How I could make it better. Faster. Yes! There was so much to learn. So much to discover. So many experiments to run!

I smiled to myself. I was so lucky.

I had always wondered what species would eventually end up dominating my life.

I would never have dreamt that it would end up being that literal.