Step one: Get healthy

No matter how careful I had to be, there still wasn’t any time to lose. Some risks just had to be taken.

Risks such as blindly experimenting on my own brain, for example.

I sat in the infirmary (doors shut and all by my lonesome of course), hooked up to the vitals monitor, carefully watching the readout as I mentally receded into the deep dark place where the parasite me lived, trying to feel both my human body and the sense of physical presence that had grown in my brain that felt like a million strings and digits ready to be bent and pulled and nudged. I was in a dark forest, sensing endless life and depths around me, knowing that every step might crush a living thing or tangle me up in thorns or trip me into a black and rapid creek. Despite my alien instincts, I had no business doing this.

I had no choice. I couldn’t risk getting transferred to Kepler. A high-res scan would reveal my secret and prevent me from procreating, and the mere thought of never being able to spread and infect made me nauseous. It was death. 

I took a careful step into the dark of my brain, not even moving, just barely probing and shifting my weight, trying to feel out what I was pushing my new old body to do. At first, I didn’t notice any change, and pushed ever so slightly harder, and harder, until –

It all went wrong in an instant. I must have hit some kind of threshold. Some autonomous system whose input I had triggered instead of controlling the system itself. Whatever it was I had done, the world around me suddenly turned into suffocating ice, and the readings on the monitor spiked into the red. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything! I have to get out, I thought. Oh God, I fucked up!

I think I screamed. Either that or the monitor made enough noise to draw attention. Whatever it was, I was too panicked to notice. I was completely paralyzed with dread.

Before I had even realized what was happening the infirmary door flew open and Lisa came bursting in, her look of confusion and annoyance quickly turning into wide-eyed concern as she saw me bent over and hyperventilating on the gurney, red indicators flashing on the screen next to me.

“What’s going on?” she gasped.

Surprisingly, I knew the answer. Faced with a concrete question and forced to analyze, I finally realized what was happening. “I… I… I’m having a panic attack,” I stammered. My heart felt like it wanted to twist and wring itself out of my ribcage.

Lisa immediately closed the distance and laid her hands on my lower arms. “It’s alright,” she said. “I’m here with you.” 

She looked at the monitor, and muted the alarm. “This will pass, Maddie,” she said, calmly but firmly. “You know that. I know you do. Just breathe. Focus on your breathing.”

And I did. Both parts of me did. 

And as I did, I felt my body regulating itself with a sensation unlike anything I had ever experienced before – because the last time that this had happened I had still been a tiny worm taking over Maddie’s brain. But now I was Maddie, experiencing her own body with a fine-grain resolution that should by all rights be impossible. 

It was still way too much, of course. My mind wasn’t made for processing all of it. But part of me was now made to instinctively latch onto it – and I did.

I knew where my pulse and fear lived, now. 

And because of millions of years of evolutionary pressure on an unthinking parasite, that also meant that I was now able to control them at will. Neat.

“Just breathe.”

“Yes. I know,” I wheezed. I felt Lisa’s hand touching my shoulder, steadying me, and that made it even easier to focus on the newly-discovered clearing in the darkness of my being, and I commanded myself to slowly calm down. 

“I know,” I repeated, looking up from my own feet and into her eyes, feeling equal parts grateful, embarrassed, and anxious. Her expression was full of sincere concern, watchful and careful, betraying just the barest trace of exasperation and discomfort. I knew that this was stressing her out immensely.

“I know,” I said once again, my voice a bit calmer now. My pulse could have long since returned to normal if I had wanted it to, but I was carefully eying the monitor next to me, making sure that it didn’t slow down too fast. I deliberately kept my voice a bit unsteady, as well. It would be suspicious for me to return to baseline too quickly.

“It’s alright, Maddie” she said, managing a weak smile.

“I know.” I returned her smile, and some part of me was truly grateful to her. I’m not sure if I would have discovered what I had without her help. I might have, but there was no way to find out. This was an experiment I couldn’t repeat.

I looked at her as she stood near to me, less than an arm’s length away, close enough to listen to her breath and smell her deodorant, her hand still resting on my shoulder, warm and comforting, quietly looking back at me with careful eyes, perhaps trying to think of something to say, perhaps waiting for me to say something.

I wanted to kiss her.

I had to give my heart rate another firm push to keep it from spiking back up again as I discovered that fact about myself.

It wasn’t the only thing that I wanted to do. 

Not even close.

I had always kind of fancied Lisa, even before I became a parasite eager to reproduce by infecting others. She was prettier than she had any right to be (not that it should have even mattered, but sometimes we really are simple creatures), and as devoted and talented a person as I had ever come across. I had always been able to tell how full of ideas and drive she truly was – and she could tell that I could tell, unlike many others. 

That was why we had become friends at the academy even though we had studied different fields. That was why we had applied to be assigned on a joint mission. That was why we liked each other.

Well, I mean, at least that’s why I liked her. I couldn’t ever truly know her thoughts of course; I was never going to be able to look inside of her head except with a spin tomograph. Still, all evidence pointed toward her enjoying my company as well (including her telling me outright that she liked me), and the safe assumption was to conclude that she did in fact like me back. 

But never like that. That much was evident as well. If she was into girls I was pretty sure that something would have happened between us by sheer accident, but with our friendship being as platonic as it was, any kind of physicality simply hadn’t been part of the possibility space. Lisa had been a friend whose company I enjoyed immensely and who I sometimes caught myself staring at with a tiny pleasant tingling sensation in my lower stomach. But never more.

And now I wanted to kiss her.

And I wanted to fuck her.

And most importantly, I wanted to infect her.

I didn’t do it of course. 

I didn’t even know how to do it. (The powerful urge to undress and present my pussy gave me some points of strong inference, but more research would have to be done before I could draw any definitive conclusions in the matter.)

So instead of giving in to my impulses at the risk of permanently killing all my chances of fulfilling my purpose, I played my part of eventually calming down and coming up with a plausible-enough explanation for why the hell I was secretly sitting in the infirmary, testing my vitals all by myself. 

I was lucky. We were all trained (and indeed expected) to be able to handle most medical equipment by ourselves in case Doctor Kamal became incapacitated or wasn’t available in an emergency. Given that fact, I didn’t even have to lie about being nervous and stressed about my lingering symptoms and not wanting to be forced into suspended animation. It was a very human thing to be worried and irrational about.

Honestly, part of it was certainly the fact that Lisa was glad to be presented with an easy way out of this situation. She told me that she would be there for me no matter what, and I knew that she was being sincere – but I also knew her well enough to know that this was hard emotional labor for her.

And so, with my blessing, Lisa returned to (what else) her research, and I returned to the couch, to watch another rerun of another late-21st century sitcom, trying hard to resist the temptation to fiddle with my own mind, and trying even harder to resist the temptation to fiddle with my private parts while thinking about infecting Lisa.

I went back to the infirmary as soon as I dared.

In the end, it all worked out. I managed to contain my slip-ups to that first unfortunate incident, muting the monitor and gagging myself when I returned much later that night, armed with a bunch of notes and hypotheses from my first trial, ready to make sure that this stupid human body wasn’t going to betray its new master again.

And I did it. 

It took time, and effort, and more instinct and gut feeling than I would have liked, but I found what I was looking for and told my hindbrain to cut that shit out. I learned how to regulate my own blood pressure and pupillary action, and eventually managed to isolate the specific mental muscle that raised and lowered my cortisol levels (thank you for the detailed diagnosis, doctor Kamal). I spent an hour practicing and repeating the mental steps required to do so reliably, until I was certain that I could do it without a monitor to give me feedback, and that was it. I was symptom-free. I was safe.

All in a night’s work – albeit utterly exhausting and very probably quite lucky. I might just as well have encountered another catastrophic failure mode instead of achieving success, and in fact I actually got very close to that, almost making a huge noise when I gave myself vertigo and tumbled backwards off the gurney, just barely missing a stainless steel trolley full of glass containers and very clattery implements as I broke my fall. 

But that had been the only hiccup. The rest of it had actually gone how I had hoped, and I was slowly beginning to gain an understanding of how to control the tendrils in my brain (if there even were actual tendrils. It felt like a reasonable assumption, but my control of Maddie’s body might also work in a completely different way.)

I had only scratched the surface of course, but it was a monumental weight off my mind to have dealt with the immediate issue. I was safe. I had won. I could pass as myself without raising suspicion. 

But honestly, I was even more fascinated than relieved. 

Sure, everything depended on passing as healthy (and human!), but the fact that the little thing in my brain was able to give me root access to my own bodily functions was so fucking incredible that it almost made me forget about the reason I was doing it. It was so exciting to feel it work, and it made me appreciate on a truly visceral level that my body was a machine of sheer infinite complexity – tens of thousands of interconnected systems from mechanical to chemical to electrical, working in concert, falling like dominoes set up by the process of evolution. It was truly amazing. This body that I had taken over was amazing. I was amazing, and it felt amazing to be in control.

The only thing that truly, deeply sucked about all of it was that I couldn’t write any of it down – and it wasn’t even because of any concerns about secrecy. All our private files were well-encrypted, and after the fallout of the Corporate Wars of ‘79, there were no more backdoors in our private terminals either. I could have made notes on all of it, no problem, and be safe from prying eyes.

No. The problem was much more esoteric than that.

This wasn’t science.

It was art.

It was endlessly frustrating. I really wish that I could have just written it all down and cataloged every step I took to learn how to control my own autonomous nerve responses. But it was hopeless. My body’s responses lived in an impossible-to-define abstract space that metaphors of dark forests and other comparable attempts at poetry are entirely inadequate to fully describe – and it pissed me off to no end. 

It all came down to the infuriatingly unresolvable issue of qualia and subjective experience. I could invent all the terminology in the world, and it would never come close to describing the sheer amount of muscle memory and intuition involved. It would have been like writing down a detailed step-by-step documentation of how to play a piano – if I had the only piano in the world, and no one else had fingers.

And just like playing an Instrument, it required practice. It wasn’t an intellectual thing that I could think myself through. No. I had to feel it, and remember how it felt to do it in order to reliably repeat it. It was a real skill that had to be learned.

Some ambitious part of me immediately wanted to learn all of it and become a virtuoso out of sheer completionism, but I knew that – realistically –  it wasn’t actually worth the effort. There were definitely some things I would spend time learning that I had not yet mastered; It would probably come in handy to go beyond panic attacks and gain access to my actual fight-or-flight adrenal response (like in the anecdotes where mothers can lift cars to save their babies), and while I was at it, why not figure out how to stop myself from feeling cold and pain? Those sounded like useful skills to have if push came to shove. If not in an emergency, being able to suppress pain would come in handy at least once a month, when the rivers run red.

Speaking of my downstairs… holy hypersexuality, Batman! My sudden urge to do it with Lisa hadn’t been a one-off, and once the stress of being discovered was over I was truly able to appreciate just how constantly horny I was. I always knew that being taken over by this parasite was a sexual act, but I really felt it now. I was in a constant state of mild (and oftentimes not-so-mild) arousal, and found myself with the sudden desire to stick my tongue down the throat of the very next person I saw, be they Lisa or Darius or Mara Greenberg stopping by from her farm to deliver potatoes and insect protein. I wanted my body all over theirs.

I didn’t really mind, of course. I knew it was par for the course. My body was a host, and I couldn’t spread and infect without exchanging fluids. Fuck. It made me so hot to think about it: Wet warm penetration, mouths pressing against each other, tongues pushing, bodies close and intertwined and vulnerable, legs spreading and opening, begging to be filled, warm and wet and fertile and… nutritious. It felt so right. So good. So hot.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit ashamed. It felt amazing to be like this, but I knew that my new impulses and urges were simple animal instinct – and I definitely knew that I couldn’t just give in to them, no matter how much I wished I could. I had to be smarter than that. I even considered digging into my root access to find a way to dampen my own constant horniness. 

Nope. Definitely not.

Well, maybe – eventually. Until then, I was happy to get myself off to the irresistibly hot fact that my body was infected and that my mind had been taken over to find it hot. Thank God I was a woman. If I’d been a guy, someone might have noticed a sudden rise in paper tissue consumption.

Other than my overzealous libido, however, things got back to normal almost disturbingly fast. Doctor Kamal returned, and quickly cleared me to return to work – and to her credit she seemed as relieved about the whole thing as I was (well, probably not quite as relieved). 

And once I was cleared, I had no plausible reason not to return to my cataloging expeditions – and that’s exactly what I did. 

Step two: Get back to work

A big shared spreadsheet was waiting for me, dozens and hundreds of potential hot spots scouted by autoflyers and orbital imaging, all of them waiting for a human to set foot on them for the very first time. It was a huge and quite messy document (at least to untrained eyes), but scanning across it felt immediately familiar and comfortable, like coming home after vacation and finding that one empty wine bottle where you left it weeks ago.

Something that didn’t quite fit that metaphor was the week’s worth of updated and claimed assignments that had accumulated while I’d been quote-unquote ‘sick’. Lisa had been out taking samples in the southern mountain ranges, and Darius had apparently been granted submersible access for the week. He had left earlier that day, and was probably looking at uncountably many new fish-analogues right now. The science teams on continents Gamma and Epsilon were just as busy, and so were the geometers and meteorologists up in orbit. 

I smiled as I scrolled through the log entries. Some part of me deeply appreciated the fact that the wonderful machine of scientific discovery hadn’t slowed down in my absence at all. It made me proud, and honestly it was satisfying to think about just how much work there was to do out here. It reminded me of ancient stories from old Terra, of pre-industrialized fishermen telling tales of fishing grounds so plentiful that the fish literally jumped into their boats. I was feeling that feeling of endless plenty, even if I rationally knew that there was only a finite amount to discover (And unlike with extinct sea bass, running out things to discover only meant that you had accomplished full understanding and not that you had erased something out of existence).

But I was getting way ahead of myself. Right now, there were still several thousand lifetimes’ worth of things left to explore – and because I wasn’t just a parasite but also a curious creature with an appreciation of the universe I existed in, I was still going to do my part. I still loved being part of this (or maybe I had freshly discovered how much I loved being part of it). Infecting and spreading might be the best thing in the whole universe, but it wasn’t the only thing I wanted to do.

I looked over the unclaimed assignments marked with promising tags, and marked myself down for a good handful of them. I immediately got a ping on my handheld interface as the relevant data and coordinates got synchronized to it, complete with fuel calculations, weather forecasts, and a policy-compliant itinerary. The Company had gotten the logistics down pretty well by now; it rarely took them longer than fifty years to get the Ecology Confidence Margin up high enough for a planet to be approved for large-scale settlement efforts. Twenty-five, if they really cared.

I tried not to think about my corporate overlords too much these days. Sure, the ECM should be enough to understand and thus prevent potentially catastrophic feedback loops in the Xenosphere but that still didn’t change the fact that Humanity was an invasive species on an unthinkable magnitude, no matter how much effort they put into making sure they didn’t cause an immediate mass extinction upon their arrival. 

The most optimistic way of looking at it was probably that fact that it was in the company’s best financial and reputational interest to avoid any repeats of the absolute tragedy of Proxima-4. Keep the cute little critters alive and spare themselves from another global extinction PR nightmare. 

I often wished the company wasn’t the only game in town for xenobiology – but it really was. What were the alternatives? Messier Interstellar? FedGov academia? Private ventures? Forget it! I didn’t want to waste my life working for second-rate operations or with second-rate colleagues.

I looked at the names on the list, idly wondering how long each of them was going to be here before they were going to be voluntarily or involuntarily reassigned to another colony. I knew most of them even though I rarely had personal contact with anyone but Lisa, Damian, and Doctor Kamal. Some had even checked in via voice or text to ask how I was doing in my week out of the game. It felt good to know that they were out there, working on the same big project that I was working in. It made me feel like I was part of a little swarm of busy bees, buzzing all across the planet in the name of science.

I suddenly had to shiver. The thought of a swarm made my lower body swell with excitement and arousal. Yes. It would be so fucking good for all of them to be infected, all of them taken over like me, all of them thinking like me, all of them eager to spread and infect like me, all of them… oh God, yes… all of them…

…Hosts!!! 

I took a deep breath to calm myself down, but I could tell that my panties were wet again. I couldn’t help myself. It was just so fucking hot to think about. 

I put the terminal into standby and went to my bunk. Damn. I would definitely have to practice controlling my arousal response if I was going to get any work done. This was unproductive. Thank God that the others were out on expeditions. I was pretty sure I’d let out an audible moan.

I got myself off, changed underwear, and then finally went back to work. 

After booting up and priming the engines on my flier, I set a course for the first coordinates on my itinerary, and leaned back into the pilot seat, thoughts and body still glowing with the joy of what I had become. Such a strange and wonderful thing. 

Clouds drifted by and large expanses of tree-analogues slowly gave way to more sparsely vegetated highlands and occasional snow-topped mountains. It was beautiful, and quite serene, and the assisted navigation allowed my thoughts to wander and drift, and I caught myself thinking (not for the first time) about what I should do now that I was the lucky host to a mind-controlling parasite.

I thought about my friends and colleagues, and how they would react if they found out. I imagined them shocked, or crying, or curious and fascinated, or simply terrified and hostile. None of those felt like unreasonable reactions. I definitely wasn’t human anymore – and for all they would know, I could be a mindless puppet pretending to be their dead friend. 

And if that were true, I would never want to inflict the same thing on them; they were people with inner lives and dreams and ambitions and fears and hopes, and no base urge would ever convince me that it would be right to ignore all that and destroy their precious minds like that.

But I wasn’t any of those things. I was Maddie. The same Maddie. Almost. I just had that one extra thing about me – but that didn’t change who I was. If anything, it was me that changed the worm in my brain, and not the other way round. I infected it with all of my humanity and empathy and capacity for reason. It could never even think with anything but my own thought patterns. I made it human. I am human.

And that was the reason why I was absolutely going to infect them. 

Yes. They were going to be just like they were before, except they were going to be hosts, and spread more parasites like myself. Their bodies were going to be run through with them, nurturing and infectious and warm and wet, just like mine. But their minds would be the same, albeit controlled by a human parasite with their personality and memories instead of themselves. It made no actual difference. I knew this, because it had made no difference for me. It was less of a discontinuity than falling asleep and infinitely less of a death than going into suspended transport. Maddie had continued to exist. I had continued to exist. And now I was the parasite in myself, and I knew that it wasn’t bad at all. It was good. It was so fucking good.

I didn’t jerk off while operating a seven-ton antigraviton flyer, of course. That would have been irresponsible and reckless and stupid.

But I really wanted to.

Step three: Go home

Two more weeks passed before I was finally allowed to pull the trigger. But after fifteen days I woke up to discover that the automated approval process had granted me permission to commit company hours and resources into in-depth research of a species of my choosing – provided that I still met the quota provided by my employer.

You can guess three times which species I chose to research further.

Yep. And before you think I’m naive: I actually debated with myself whether or not to play my cards so openly, or if I would rather lie about what I was spending my time on and submit fake reports on another Genus or Family while researching the species I now belonged to in secret. That way, no one else would have been likely to look into my notes and come to their own conclusions about them being a possible infection hazard.

But in the end, I would have to cover up unaccounted-for materials, course deviations, and extra work hours, as well as fake plausible research on another organism – or at least explain why I wasn’t coming up with anything noteworthy to write down. I would have to physically hide samples, and juggle all kinds of lies and pretenses, both in person and on paper.

No. It would have been a recipe for disaster.

And really, who cares about worms anyway? No one was going to give my submissions a second look even if an actual human happened to lay eyes on them among the constant stream of automated review. This was definitely the less risky option to proceed.

As far as sharing my intentions with my colleagues on site, it really says a lot about the kind of people we are that they didn’t question my enthusiasm at all. All I had to mention was that they move in swarms and glow in the dark.

And so, after fifteen days of anxiously waiting to finally go back, it was finally time. I was officially approved to begin the work that would hopefully, if all went well, fingers crossed, lead to all of my friends and colleagues being nonconsensually infected by mind-controlling worms.

Hey! A girl can dream.

The cave seemed bigger than the last time I was there, which isn't saying much. It really wasn’t much more than the tight and narrow extension of a small ravine harboring a tepid and slow-moving creek that drizzled rather than flowed out of the sedimentary layers of the forested foothills that lay further north.

But to me it was obviously so much more, and as I waded into the darkness, water coming halfway up the calves of my waterproof pants, I had to put in some work to keep my heart from fluttering. This was so exciting! I was back! 

My pulse remained steady. I was keeping it that way. 

It felt much more natural to keep my emotions under active control by now, and I had actively been practicing it for at least an hour a day. I don’t think anyone was suspicious of me to be honest, but it nonetheless seemed like a prudent thing to be good at when you were an alien impostor trying to take over the minds of everyone else.

I rounded the corner, stepping deeper into the darkness – 

– and there they were.

My heart skipped a beat as I saw them, and my eyes started watering with tears of joy and relief.

Socaliae Laurensis.

“Hello, guys,” I said, voice unsteady. “I’m back.”

The deep end of the cave was alive with the shimmering glow of their luminescence, and in the water, circling and weaving like flocks of birds, were dozens, maybe hundreds of my brethren, shifting and moving as one, then scattering, then pulsating, then coalescing again, beautiful and silent and utterly overwhelming in their sheer… reality. Some part of me, I realized, had still felt that it must all have been a dream, that they would be gone, that what had happened to me had been too important – too precious – to be a repeatable event.

But here they were, still merrily swimming in circles, just like I left them.

Wait, I thought. This is actually remarkable. If they’re parasites, how do they survive in this environment? What do they eat when they’re not inside a host? 

…and what do they eat when they are inside a host?

I shook off the unnerving thought that I was slowly eating myself alive. I had already considered the possibility that my body was its food – but that hypothesis didn’t quite sit right with me. Infecting hosts didn’t feel like feeding at all when I thought about it (and I thought about it a lot), and there were plenty of parasites all over the settled sectors that kept their hosts alive, and even some that might better be described as symbiotes.

My immediate hypothesis was instead that Laurensis were able to absorb nutrients from a variety of environments and sources and simply preferred the utility and protection of a host body providing nutrients for them – which was evolutionary smart, if a bit scummy when looked at from a human perspective. 

There’s a reason that calling someone a parasite isn’t considered a compliment, but I didn’t really mind. Even before I had become Laurensis’s strongest proponent, I wouldn’t have judged them for it. Maddie me was a scientist, and I’ve always known that evolution doesn’t care about morality. It cares about your fitness to survive long enough to pass on your genes. The rest follows from that one singular premise. That was the beauty of it. All the colors, all the shapes, beaks and furs and nerves and flesh and eyes and brains, all manifestations of the same simple principle.

I waded forward, and the disturbance of my wake made the worms scatter into groups, separating around me, swirling, dancing, scared and curious and hungry and eager and–

…

…wait, how did I know those last bits?

Suddenly, I was feeling light-headed. The cave seemed so much more narrow now, and at the same time the swarm seemed so much bigger. They were swirling around me, and it felt dizzying to be in their midst, in the center of them, like a sun at the center of a star system, orbiting me, clustering, swarming, flocking, so close to me, so very–

–and that was when the swarm’s glow flared in one single shimmer, and they all moved as one.

And I moved with them. 

It was irresistible. It was utterly obvious, like shifting balance on a tilting floor. It was exactly what I had to do to be whole and safe and correct. The swarm had decided, and I had agreed and followed along, part of the whole, one with the rest, without thought or judgment or hesitation, and for a brief moment I had felt so completely and thoroughly connected and part of something unimaginably bigger. Something so… 

…beautiful.

And then it was over, and the swarm scattered again – much more calmly than before, their glow less frantic and less frequent now that they knew that I was one of them. 

For a moment I simply stood there as I slowly started to come to terms with what I had just experienced.

And then, all at once, I started crying.

My face was buried in my hands, so I didn’t see the swarm tighten around me. I didn’t see them glowing in time with my sobs, either. Nor did I see them slowly scatter and disperse as my breathing and heart rate finally calmed down. I didn’t see them do any of it.

I didn’t need to. 

Because I felt them. 

Step Four: Meet God.

Nothing could truly describe the experience of being part of the swarm for the first time. Imagine a thousand hugs from everyone you ever loved at once, while they forgive all your sins, and you realize that they have always known exactly who you were and accepted you for it.

And at the same time, it was total and utter submission. The dissolution of the self, to become part of something vast and fluid, free of responsibility, free of any burden, with only the collective to decide for you. No need to think at all. No need to judge at all. All you had to do was to submit to the shared will that you were now part of.

When people describe an experience as divine, this is what they mean. A glimpse of a beauty so perfect that it must lie beyond human imperfection and earthly restraints. A brief moment in which you are forced to believe in the hand of an all-wise and all-powerful creator, because there could be no other explanation for something so pure, so good, so unfathomably wonderful. 

That was what it felt like to be among my swarm.

And like all moments of divinity, it was doomed to end. No pure concept can survive the messy complexities of the universe we live in, and the bliss of belonging quickly frayed against the friction of the countless thoughts and feelings in my brain. I noticed my body, and my clothes, and my memories, and all the context I existed in –

– and I wasn’t part of the swarm any more. I was Maddie Spencer, standing knee-deep in tepid water, in a tiny damp cave, crying her eyes out.

Fuck. 

I hated how much sense it made. It was a fact that was as ironic as it was tragic: Any mind simple enough to be fully part of the swarm was too simple to appreciate it, and any mind sophisticated enough to appreciate it was too complex to be fully part of the swarm. 

I kept on sobbing for at least another five minutes before I finally calmed down.

I could have made my pulse grow steady. I could have kept my glands from flooding me with all the chemicals that were making my chest constrict and my eyes water and my hands tremble. But I didn’t want to. It would have felt wrong to erase the gravity of this moment. 

When my tears had finally dried, and I had wiped the snot from my face, sniffling, shaking my head with exhausted disbelief, there still remained that quiet sense of connection. 

I still felt them, swarming around me in blissful, mindless unity. I might not be able to be fully part of the swarm, but I still felt them, and it still felt comforting and warm and safe to be in their midst, still sensing their bliss and connection like a cozy fire on the other side of a room.

I looked down at them. They were pulsing, and murmurating, and my body swayed gently as they tried to make me murmurate along with them, unable to match their rhythm.

“Sorry guys,” I said. “I guess trying to connect with me must feel like trying to tango with a freight train. I wish I could dance with you, but I’m a lot bigger now. Also I have wheels, I guess. Not the best metaphor.”

I chuckled to myself, realizing the quiet absurdity talking to literal worms. “Okay. Listen closely, guys, this is important: A metaphor is when you use colorful language to illustrate your point – which I didn’t do, because I wasn’t actually using a metaphor. I was using a simile, which is like a metaphor, but different. Got it? Cool.”

The swarm kept circling around me in silence, without any sign of change.

I sighed.

“Tough crowd. Okay, if you’re gonna be like that, I’ll just have to go ahead and take charge here. Maybe we can talk again when you’ve got some hosts of your own.”

I unpacked my field kit and took out a sample container.

“What’s that?” I asked. “You want me to find you some hosts, because your evolutionary strategy consists solely of saturating local bodies of water and counting on clumsy idiots to fall into them? Well, okay… but only because my brain has been infected to want nothing else.”

I plunged the container beneath the surface, and strangely wasn’t surprised at all when five specimens of Laurensis swam straight into it all by themselves, as if they realized that was what I wanted.

I sealed the lid, carefully labelled the container with a waterproof pen, and gently stowed them away.

“We’re going to figure this out,” I muttered to myself. “I promise. We’re going to infect, and we’re going to procreate, and we’re going to be a swarm again. Somehow. Even if it means that we won’t be able to dance together like we used to.”

I paused as I realized what a terribly sad thing I had just said. For a moment I almost regretted it. But not quite.

Because what good is perfect unity if there was indeed no conscious mind to appreciate it? What good are a billion planets with breathtaking mountains and waterfalls and iridescent crystal sunsets if they lie barren and with no eyes to behold it? 

What good is divinity if there is no one there to worship it?

I am a scientist. And what a scientist values above all is not the elegance of maths or the beautiful complexity of nature, but the singular ability of the human mind to make sense of it all, through rigor and logic and care: 

Thought.

Thought is the thing that gives the universe meaning.

I looked down into the waters around my legs, feeling endless gratitude and love and connection, and in that moment I truly wished that there was another way. A way to have both. A way to be part of the mindless swarm and lose myself to the bliss of unity, and still be the miracle of complexity that is Maddie Spencer, PhD.

But there wasn’t. I had to make a choice – and in the end it wasn't a particularly difficult one.

And so I got to work.

I kept slaving away for hours, carefully cataloging and documenting every last square inch of the cave around me, taking sample after sample, making sure that I didn’t miss a single thing that could end up helping me accomplish the thing I had set out to do. Socaliae Laurensis were with me all of the way, murmurating around me like loyal fans crowding around a famous singer, pulsating with warmth and connection that I couldn’t quite get lost in even if I tried.

I hoped that they could feel how much I loved them, and I hoped that they would understand why I chose the way I did once they were able to. I felt their need to infect, and I was sure they were able to feel how much my body had been aching the entire time I had been with them. I was so fucking wet, and it took everything out of me not to undress myself and masturbate among them. The thought of infecting others was the most perfect and beautiful thing in the world. I wanted the same thing. Of course I did. My mind was fully controlled by a parasite!

But unlike them, that parasite was no longer mindless. No longer driven by pure instinct. 

Only a human mind could ever appreciate the beautiful divinity of being one with the swarm – and only a human mind could decide that there was something even more sacred than that.

I sealed my field kit and left with a heavy heart. It was getting dark, and I needed to go back to the hab.

“I’m sorry, guys.” I said. “I wish I didn’t have to take this from you. But you’ll understand. You’ll understand when you’re one of us.”

And with that, I left the swarm behind.

Some part of me already felt like I was discarding something sacred and irreplaceable. But the part of me that wasn’t a mindless worm knew that it had to be done. There was only one way all of us should be. Only one way for us to exist.

We had to become one with them. Become human. Become parasites. Become hosts of each other. Self-aware, intelligent hosts, eager to spread, until everyone was just like us, connected through that one singular appreciation. All must be infected.

I shivered and moaned with suppressed arousal as I stepped out of the shallow creek and made my way to my flier. Honestly, I don’t know how I managed to spend hours among other parasites without giving in to the overwhelming need to get myself off, and have more of them crawl into my wet, warm holes. I loved them so much. I wanted them to invade a human body so badly. The horny animal in me didn't even care that my body was already infected. It just wanted to see them crawl into me, and penetrate me, and never come out!

I took a deep breath to calm myself down.

No. This wasn’t their time.

Not yet.

I kept going, and felt the weight of the samples in my bag as I stepped over fallen logs and half-buried root fans, hearing the sounds of animals scattering in the brush, sounds no human had heard before, smelling the slightly spicy and sulfuric aroma of the forest as I made my way back. I was nearly at the landing site.

I thought about the parasites I was carrying, and the fact that three of them were eventually going to become Lisa and Damian and Doktor Kamal. They were going to infect them, and invade them, and take over their minds – and then they would no longer be simple parasites, but hosts to three infinitely complex identities, each of them containing larger multitudes than their entire swarm had ever done, their bodies aching and burning with the wonderful desire to spread and infect, and the ability to finally appreciate just how wonderful it was to want it. 

But it would also cost them that sacred connection. They would never be able to be part of the swarm again and never again lose themselves in that blissful, thoughtless divinity. 

I had reached my flier, and I sighed as I booted up the onboard systems and spooled up the engines.

I still had lots of time to think about this, and there was a definitive chance that I was being overly pessimistic. Maybe we would still find a way to feel that divine connection. Maybe we could still be a swarm, even within minds that were complex and chaotic enough to experience themselves. 

Maybe. 

But until then, the way forward was clear.

…

Step Five:

Kill God.