Good science takes time – unless you get lucky or happen to be born a thousand years ago. All the low hanging fruit has been picked, and there are no more groundbreaking discoveries to be made that don’t also involve highly sensitive equipment, statistical analysis, supercomputer modeling, or a combination of the above. 

Honestly, it’s kind of unfair. All that Galileo needed to gain a better understanding of gravity in the 17th century was an inclined plane. Discovering and confirming the Grand Unified Theory a millennium later required a five-decade effort, a hundred thousand scientists and engineers, and involved tracking a perfect 100kg beryllium sphere traveling at exactly 0.1c to the accuracy of a micrometer. But it was well worth the effort. We actually got that long-theorized Antimatter Phase Reversal out of it (after another twenty years of research) and while it wasn’t the literal free energy we were promised, with seven orders of magnitude better than fusion it might as well have been. It was still expensive in absolute terms to produce antiproton fuel, but the cost of interstellar travel had gone suddenly down from ‘global effort’ to ‘your local bank might offer you a loan to afford it’. And so, after a literal millennium of diminishing returns, humanity had finally managed to break through the wall that was leaving their home planet. 

It was crazy how things work out sometimes. What had started with a man from Pisa rolling a cannonball down a piece of wood had led to humankind flinging itself through space at ninety-nine point nine-eight percent the speed of light and Maddie Spencer getting infected by a mind-controlling worm.

All that Galileo got was house arrest by the catholic church and a 1970s rock song.

Sometimes you have to put into perspective how lucky you actually are.

Weeks had passed since Day X. Weeks spent fulfilling my barely reduced quotas, travelling across sectors and biomes, checking boxes, delivering results, slowly filling the bucket of humanity’s understanding of Parker-Three’s ecology. Back on some far-away server, maybe even on Terra, neural networks were being trained and updated every day, churning away on petabytes of data, modeling the unfathomably complex interactions between flora, fauna, geology, and climate – until the Ecology Confidence Margin was met. Then the exploitation – I mean, ‘full colonization’ – could begin.

But we weren’t there yet. Not even close. I had years or even decades of time to study my brethren and to figure out a way for them to infect others without raising suspicion. 

God, I hoped that it wouldn’t take decades. I might go mad if I had to wait that long before I saw another mind enslaved like mine.

I mean, not enslaved. Changed. Altered. Infected. Made beautiful. You know what I mean. I know it’s bad to take away part of someone’s free will like that – theoretically, But it just feels so fucking good to be infected. I know that I have no choice but to love it, but that doesn’t change anything. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t know how good it is to become a host. 

Okay, maybe the part of me that used to be nothing but a mindless parasite thinks it’s really hot to force this on someone. It’s sex, after all – but that doesn’t mean that all of the above isn’t true.

Actually, you know what? I don’t have to justify this. It’s fucking hot, and I love it, and they’re all going to love it, too. They’ll be hosts, and they’ll want nothing else. And that’s that.

I was going to make it happen. I had to make it happen. I had to infect them. Turn them into hosts. Maybe not all costs, and definitely not prematurely, but at any opportunity I could get, as soon as possible, and as many as possible. 

Work was slow however. I did have some allotted time to spend on my chosen research focus of course, but those 2 days a week felt agonizingly sparse and far-between when all I wanted to do was spend every waking moment with my beautiful little siblings and niblings (I quickly determined that they are sexless). Being around them was intoxicating. Nothing could come close to the blissful feeling of serenity I had experienced in the cave, but even in the presence of just a few of them I could feel the soft sway of Swarm against my mind, like the gentlest of breezes tickling the back of my neck. When I was among them, I was among family.

The first time I killed one of them I nearly threw up.

I knew that it was necessary. I had to test the limits of their adaptability, and that included exposure to toxins and extreme environmental conditions. I had to know what they could survive. I had to know what they were capable of.

But when one of my family died, I felt the Swarm screech like a broken violin, all of its strings out of tune after one of them had broken, recoiling from the shock of that sudden severance.

In the grand scheme of things it was nothing big. Just a tiny scream among a cacophonous universe indifferent to suffering and pain. Every second of every minute of every hour, trillions of lives ended across billions of planets, without notice, without fanfare, and without anyone to remember. Another death meant nothing. 

Unless there was a thinking mind there to witness it.

And in that moment, that thinking mind had been me. I had been there to press my ear against the wall of the universe and hear the almost imperceptible scream and the silence that followed, and in my ears it had rung as loud as a thousand bells. I knew that the worms weren’t capable of conceiving of their own mortality, or anything even remotely that complex. They were simply too small to fit the necessary amount of neurons or neuron-analogues. They didn’t know they were alive. They didn’t know they could die. They simply lived, and instinctually did what evolution had programmed them to do to avoid death.

But I knew. And when my little sibling stopped glowing and started to dissociate in the alkaline solution I had dropped it into, some infinitesimally small of me died along with it.

After that, it got easier. Just like Socaliae were programmed by evolution to survive, so was I, and as the result of the much more complex survival strategies I had been born with, I… got used to it. Like you do. The first one hurts the most. The next one is easier, and the next one after that is easier still, and soon you have fully adapted, and it’s become normal. 

Speaking of what was normal, there were of course other aspects of my life that had to remain that way. Dinner talks. Shared data reviews. Card games in the mess. Decompression walks at sunset. Listening to music while cooking. Leaving sticky notes with silly faces. Arguing over who had to go to town to get recycled cellulose boxes, and then all going together. Sharing funny videos over direct messages. Answering two hours late in the group chat. All of that, and a thousand other little aspects of life that seemed at once so incredibly familiar and at the same time unfathomably complex and alien. It all kept going – had to keep going. If any of my behavior changed too much, the others might get suspicious.

I’m making it sound like a much bigger deal than it actually is, of course. I’m as much Maddie as I can possibly be, and acting like her is as natural as the desire to fuck and infect – but still I can’t help but overthink things like that now. It’s at once a tense masquerade and the most easygoing thing in the world. It’s fun to relax and be human, after all. It’s nice to hang out with friends and colleagues. Even if they’re not swarm, yet.

And besides, even if everyone else were already infected and there was no need to act human and we could openly mate and breed and spread every minute of every day, I wouldn’t even want that. Why would I want that? You can’t live just for work and reproduction after all. What kind of empty life would that be? There was so much more to experience in this wonderful universe. 

For instance, tonight was movie night.

And it almost went uneventfully.

We were two hours deep into the shared evening when my skull seemed to burst with sudden pain.

"Ugh!" 

“Damn, Maddie, you alright?”

I nodded and smiled. Fuck. I hadn’t been able to keep myself from wincing. “Yeah. Just those headaches again,” I said. There was no point in lying.  This one was much worse than the ones before, though.

“Still having those then,” said Kamal. 

I immediately went tense. “It’s not a big deal, right Doc? You said that this might happen. It was only my cortisol and blood pressure that used to be weird, and they are still normal.”

Kamal raised her eyebrows – and I shot a sidelong glance at Lisa, looking for support. She didn’t look like she knew what to say when put on the spot however, so I turned back to Kamal. “I mean, sorry if I sounded slightly desperate there, I just really don’t want you to think it’s that bad when it isn’t. Just normal post-concussive shit. I’ll take my anti-migraine pills right now. Be right back.”

I stood up and went to leave the room without waiting for an answer.

“Relax, Maddie,” came Kamal’s voice. “I’m not gonna put you on ice for that.”

“I’m still going to take the meds if you don’t mind,” I said, “Can you pause the thing?”

“Already did!” said Damian, a smirk on his lips. "I got a notification from the orbital compute cluster to check out anyway, so take your time."

“Hey! If I'm not allowed to check work messages on my personal, neither are you,” said Lisa with a pout. God, she was so fucking cute.

Damian rolled his eyes and turned off the display of his personal screen. "Okay, okay. Sure. What the hell Maddie, why are you still here? We're all waiting on you!"

I smiled, turned around, and gave him the finger as I made for the small hallway to the sleep module of the habitat. "You're an idiot!" I called out, and heard some muffled response or other. A playful jab or a bad joke. I couldn't care right now. My head was killing me.

I opened the door to my quarters, stepped inside, and my expression of pain and amused annoyance relaxed into calm neutral. If anyone had been watching me, I probably would have looked like a psychopath dropping her mask. But no one was going to see me, and why spend a couple of minutes taking deep breaths when you can just tell your heartbeat to slow and instead use that time to think?

I took the pill and dry-swallowed it while assessing the situation. I had overreacted, obviously, but that was entirely reasonable (or at least, entirely unreasonable in a way that was distinctly human). I had never made a secret about how much I hated medical suspension, even before I had become a host. Kamal understood that, and sympathized. She had said as much. And even if she didn’t, there wasn’t any medical reason to send me away. If a colony wasn’t able to treat post-concussion syndrome on their own, then there would be bigger problems to worry about.

Still, I had to be careful. The headaches were real, and much more of a reason to worry than Kamal knew. Technically speaking, there was something extremely wrong with my brain after all, and Socaliae Laurensis had never adapted to infect biology that didn’t originate on Parker. God knew what kind of unexpected side effects I might still develop. It was a miracle that it had worked at all.

There was the sampling bias in the room of course: Parker had been colonized exactly because it was biocompatible with Terran life, so by definition it had to go the other direction, too. But still, just because all my amino acids happened to turn the right way didn’t mean that there might not be more issues cropping up with my own small-scale colonization effort.

I sighed, and shook off the unhelpful line of thinking. There was nothing that I could do right now except that. More science needed to be done before I could know what the problem was or if there even was a problem – and good science (as previously mentioned) takes time. 

I didn’t have a lot of time for science right now. People were waiting for me to return to the common room. Better be quick, then.

I opened my workstation, accessed my personal encrypted files, and opened up the spreadsheet that I used to track my own physical condition. I could see that this was the third bout of headaches in two weeks, and the eighth case overall since Day X. I noted down the time and the subjective level and nature of pain (throbbing, back of the head), plus a number of other variables that might correlate. It was a lot of factors and it was going to make the analysis much harder, but it seemed exceedingly prudent to be very thorough when dealing with a convolution of alien biology and human neurology; there might be systems that are more complex than the one I was researching, but you’d have to give me a minute to come up with one.

I typed quickly and fought the impulse to immediately analyze any of it. I was only supposed to take my pills. I had already been gone for two minutes.

As if on cue, I heard Damian’s voice from outside. “We're gonna continue with out you Maddie! Five, four, three-”

“I'm coming! I'm coming! Sorry!”

I locked my screen and went back to the common room, finally allowing myself to turn down the pain through the dark pathways of my host’s nervous system – at least a little bit. Doing so was effortless by now, but I had decided quite a while back not to mess with my pain response when anyone else was around. It wasn’t worth the risk; what if someone tripped and dropped something on my foot or spilled boiling coffee on me, and I didn’t react in time? I might be able to fake a natural flinch reflex, but I’d rather not be in that kind of situation in the first place.

“Anyone want anything from the kitchen since I’m already on my feet?” I asked.

“Just sit your ass back down, Spencer,” said Kamal with a smile, and I did. Damian used his personal screen as a remote to put the big screen back on play, and we kept watching the fantasy thing that he had put on. I had seen it before, maybe even with Lisa back when we’d been studying together on Terra – but I had forgotten most of the plot. It was an early exocolonial era production called ‘Lord of the Rings’, a serial remake of some ancient early-CGI movie. I’d never seen the original, but apparently it was really good. It made me think back to my days in university when I had briefly dated a guy named Maurice who was really into films and always put on stuff like Casablanca and Speed Racer and stuff like that. He’d even had physical copies of some of them that required their own dedicated playback device, which was wild, and he had never missed a chance to share interesting trivia about the movie (or even the physical copy) we were watching.

It hadn’t worked out between us for various reasons, but his absolute nerding out over his interests hadn’t been one of them. I had always appreciated that about him. It reminded me of Lisa, actually. Hey, don’t judge me, I’m allowed to have a type. 

Speaking of types… the second set of reproductive organs crawling in my brain was currently giving me urgent reminders that my type was ‘anything that can be infected’. I was back on the couch next to Lisa, my knees up to my chest and a blanket over my legs, and as I felt the warm embrace of fabric around me in the dim light of the screen glow I suddenly could think about nothing else than their physical presence. I was completely overcome with the thought of it: Their bodies. Their holes. Their insides. I swear that I could smell them. Damian. Lisa. Kamal. So close to me. So relaxed. So… fertile. All I had to do was to… take them.

A wonderful shiver of arousal rolled through my body. Hot damn. I silently scoffed to myself at the notion. If anyone saw me smile, they wouldn’t think anything of it, but I could only imagine how they would react if they knew how much I thought about fucking them all. I was used to being constantly horny by now, but it was still crazy sometimes – and tonight felt like it might be the horniest I've ever been. It was incredible. This pure animal instinct, aimless and undefined, deeply sexual and primal, like the urge to simply touch and be close and be naked. 

I mean, I’m not a behavioral psychologist, but I've got to wonder: How do animals even know how to fuck? They just do, right? They just know that they want to spread their legs, and they just know that they want to put themselves into that wet hole and do what feels so right.

"Maddie, what are you doing?" came a quiet voice from right next to me, whispering in my ear.

"Nothing" I said, suddenly mortified, and stopped rubbing myself under the blanket. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

I glanced over at Lisa, unable to come up with anything to say – and I felt my mouth watering. I could smell her! She was so close! So warm! So hot!

I kissed her

– and immediately pulled back.

But it was too late. I had actually done it.

"I'm sorry, I–" I stammered, but Lisa had already turned herself away from me, lips tight, her cheeks flushed with utter shock and embarrassment. She sat pressed into the back of the sofa like an orbital pilot at launch, her body tense and her expression one of complete dissociation as she pointedly watched the screen in front of her and avoided any eye contact. Fuck! Had anyone else seen it? Had they noticed? My eyes darted around the darkened room, past the mortified face next to me, to check for reactions from Kamal and Damian – but by some sort of miracle it looked like they had actually been too caught up in the show to register what had just happened – or they had decided to tactfully ignore it. I felt the tiniest amount of relief possible.

I turned my gaze back to Lisa, who was still busy looking anywhere but my direction. She was almost imperceptibly nodding her head now, and she had started nervously biting her lower lip. She looked so vulnerable. So pretty. So hot. So–

No! Stop it, Maddie! 

This time I caught myself. I took a deep breath, and turned the desperate need between my legs down to a gentle whisper. Fuck. I had lost control, and I needed to get it back. I hated it when I had to suppress my instincts, but even now I could feel the heat rising again and my mouth watering like never before – and no matter how right it felt and no matter how much I knew that there was nothing better and nothing more important than to infect Lisa's body and take over her mind, this shit had to stop right the fuck now. Parasite-induced horniness, meet parasite-enhanced self-control. 

It happened quickly. My pulse slowed, the throbbing heat in my pussy subsided, and the tension in my nipples relaxed. I didn’t turn it down all the way, of course. I was never going to do that. It was too sacred. Too wonderful. I wasn’t going to fully deprive myself of that. 

When I felt calm enough to be safe, I glanced back at Lisa. I caught a brief glimpse of her looking back at me, but as soon as it happened she nervously returned her gaze to the screen and took a sip of water. I could only imagine how badly her mind must be racing right now – but at least she wasn't making a scene. It was a huge relief. I felt so fucking bad, but having to explain myself in front of everyone was almost too much to even consider even if I was able to artificially keep myself from panicking. Thank God it hadn't come to that.

Time kept passing like molasses, but as we kept watching the rest of the episode I sensed Lisa relaxing bit by bit. She still looked tense and restless, but not nearly as tense and panicked as in the moment after I had forced myself on her. For a few moments I even managed to let myself get distracted by the images on the screen in front of me. I couldn't really focus on the story with everything that had just happened, but it was enough to let my mind drift away from the immediate awkwardness of it all and ponder the fact how crazy it was to even be capable of experiencing this mortifying discomfort. There were so many lifeless planets, and even more cold and empty space between them, and here we were, despite all odds, thinking and breathing and watching images produced by people we would never meet, on a planet light years from home, feeling emotions because of what we were seeing and empathizing with moving pixels.

Also, there were village-baked cookies. Butter and flour and sugar and baking soda and chocolate, all of which were miracles of agriculture and chemical engineering in their own right, assembled and carefully processed into a sum greater than its parts, an ideoform with its own plethora of societal and historical connotations. And then there was the taste; I could picture it: sweet and salty and crunchy on the outside and doughy on the inside, pieces of chocolate giving it texture and subtle bitterness, perfected through cultural evolution to hit every point on the checklist of what biological evolution had programmed our bodies to crave.

Obviously, I was distracting myself and avoiding the painful thoughts gnawing at the back of my mind. That much was as human as anything.

I caught another glance from Lisa, who seemed to have actually calmed down to levels where she would be able to avoid being called out by the others once the lights went back on. She quickly looked away as soon as she noticed me looking back at her, but our eyes had met for a noticeably longer amount of time than before, and she didn't even look angry. Just... uncomfortable.

I could live with that. I wasn't going to like it, of course – but I could live with it.

Fuck. Why did I have to do that? Why did I have to lose control like that? The moment was replaying itself in my mind like a scene from a horror movie, and some childlike part of me wanted to just close its eyes and wish it away and somehow make it never have happened. I had too much going on already, and this was going to make things even harder. Except that wasn't how things worked. It had happened. It couldn't be undone. What was Lisa going to do now? Just ignore it? Keep it silent and bottled up, and pretend like it never happened? Or was she going to tell the others when I wasn't there? Tell Kamal and Damian? Fuck, was she going to report me to Corporate?!

No. She wouldn't do that. Even in the worst case she wasn't going to do that. She was my friend. She liked me. A single stolen kiss wasn't going to ruin years of trust and friendship. She had no reason to assume that it had been anything other than human impulsiveness. She knew that I was into girls, that much wouldn't surprise her. She just hadn't known that I was into her. 

I looked around the room. Kamal was eating a Cookie, and Damian was idly fidgeting with the turned-off personal screen in his lap. Lisa was avoiding my gaze as ever. On the media screen, tree-men called Ents were overthrowing the evil wizard, and the scene cut to a mountain fortress besieged by orcs and goblins, a proud king standing on the ramparts, gravely declaring that the battle was about to begin. 

Credits rolled, and everyone snapped back to real life.

“Another episode?” asked Damian.

“Nah, I’m beat,” said Kamal.

“Come on, doc!” said Damian with a smirk. “It’s the last in the second book.”

“Yes, and the second book has an open ending,” said Kamal, raising her eyebrows. “We can keep on watching in two weeks, right?”

She looked around, looking for reactions. Damian was rolling his eyes. Lisa wasn’t saying anything, so Kamal’s gaze met mine instead, obviously expecting an answer out of me.

“Yes, let's call it for tonight” I said, rather hurriedly. “It’s really good, though! I wanna see what happens to the little guys and that Faramir dude. How bout you, Lisa?”

I winced inwardly. It had been blind impulse to address her, but it really seemed like we had silently agreed to ignore what had happened for now. And as such, I couldn't just pretend like she wasn't there in front of the others. That would have drawn attention.

Lisa shrugged, seemingly coming to the same conclusion. “Sure,” she said.

“Okay,” said Damian. “I shall bend to the majority opinion then.” He turned off the streaming interface and shut down the screen. “Do you want me to get cookies again next time, too?”

“Yes, please,” said Kamal. “They’re really good. Did the locals want anything for them?”

“Not really, just two blister packs of acetaminophen,” said Damian.

“WHAT?!” Kamal gasped. “Two whole packs?”

“Joking. Joking!” said Damian. “They were free. But…” and with that he pointedly turned to me, wearing a shit-eating grin. “Mara Greenberg says hi – and she specifically wants to know if you’re coming to New Moon’s.”

A warm shiver went through me, and I could feel myself blush. 

“Shut up,” I said. “She didn’t.”

He tilted his head and rolled his eyes. “I mean– not in those words. But she asked if any of us were coming, and when I said that I wasn’t going to go and that Lisa definitely wasn’t going to–”

“-I never said—” Lisa interjected, suddenly agitated, then cut herself off. “No. Actually, good read,” she finished in a small voice.

Damian looked at Lisa with a smirk, then turned back to me.

“As I was saying, then she specifically asked ‘What about Madeline, I mean Doctor Spencer?’”

Before I could say anything, I caught Kamal’s stern glare, and I knew what it meant – not that I had ever needed to be told. I gave her a look in acknowledgement, then turned back to Damian. “Dude, I’m not going to go against Company policy no matter how bad you want us to hook up. I’m not into her. Never have been.”

“Come on – if there’s one policy that gets broken all the time, it’s the one against fraternization! People always look the other way. It’s just there for the paperwork and to keep them from getting sued for child support – which wouldn’t be an issue in your case anyway, right?”

“You’re an ass,” I said, doing my best to suppress my urge to look at Lisa for a reaction.

“Let’s just drop it, okay?” said Kamal. “This isn’t appropriate talk among colleagues.”

This time, I did look at Lisa. She met my eyes briefly, then looked into the middle distance.

“Oh come on, we’re more than just colleagues,” said Damian. “I’ve washed your underwear, and you’ve washed mine.”

“Then cut it out because we’re more than colleagues and I asked you nicely, how about that?”

Damian looked taken aback for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, sorry. Yeah. I see your point. Sorry, Maddie. I just thought it was really cute. Didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“She is kind of cute,” said Lisa timidly, and for a brief moment she looked me dead in the eye before turning her gaze away again, her cheeks blushed deep red.

Wait, what?

"ANYWAYS..." Kamal said, noisily picking up a handful of cups before anyone else could say anything. “I’m going to bed. Can you help me with the dishes?”

We all took the hint, and let it drop. It was late, there were always quotas to fill and science to be done, and at least two out of four people wanted to get the hell out of the situation anyway. And so we got up, helped with the cleanup, said goodnight, and went to bed. I caught another glance of Lisa before she retreated to the privacy of her personal quarters, but she did not meet my eyes that time, nor had she said anything to me. Whatever had happened between us was going to be cleared up (or ignored to death) another time. Until then, I was going to have even more nerve-wracking social tightropes to be worried about. Yay!

...

Remember when I said that movie night went almost uneventfully? Well... scientific consensus on the meaning of 'almost' has yet to be reached.

The door to my quarters clicked shut behind me, and I switched the room lighting from overhead to bedside, undressed, and lay down in my bunk. I was finally alone. I could finally give in. I could finally give in!

I released the artificial restraints around my hormones, and was immediately flooded with all of blistering arousal I had suppressed after tasting Lisa's lips. My body came alive, skin prickling, nipples hardening, hips bucking with the wonderful familiar fantasies that had been quietly boiling at the back of my mind for hours. The parasite-infested nervous system of Maddie Spencer was screaming for release, and I was desperate to feel this body and rub my fingers against that famished desire. I took off my panties, and felt how soaked they were as I slipped them over my ankles and tossed them off the bed. Holy shit, I needed it so bad. They had been so close. I had smelled her. Touched her. Kissed her! Lisa! Yes!

I pushed my fingers into my folds and stifled a moan as my fantasies overwhelmed me. I closed my eyes and imagined her naked body, covered in tiny worms, writhing with pleasure, writhing with the bliss of swarm as her beautiful mind was invaded, as her beautiful body was invaded. I imagined her, shivering and confused as she was infected, two minds in her head as she was being taken over – and then finally, touching herself with the ecstasy of becoming host and taking control. I imagined her, holding down Damian. Holding down Kamal. Fucking them. Infecting them. And then I imagined it the other way around. I didn't care who got infected first! I imagined Lisa, helplessly pinned beneath Damian, being fucked into submission. Into enslavement! Into willing participation! She was crawling with worms, smiling with wondrous ecstasy, her mind no longer her own – and the fantasy of her turned into a fantasy of Kamal, wearing the same expression, just as naked, just as infected, just as utterly taken over and made to breed and spread and infect! Her holes! Her body! Her mind! All of it! Serving as host! Infected! Subjugated! Defeated! Yes! Yes!!! Yesss!!!

My body went into spasms of obliterating pleasure, and my hand nearly cramped as I pushed hard into my sopping pussy, holding down the bursting release as I came for what felt like a full minute. It was so hard not to scream, and my throat felt like it was about to crush itself as I choked down on the impulse to let it all out in an inhuman moan – and all that came out was a trembling and utterly desperate whimper.

When I finally relaxed, it felt like dropping the weight of a car. My entire body was trembling and prickling with relief. I lay there, panting, smiling, both hands between my legs, as waves of warm satisfaction still slowly rolled away through my limbs and chest.

And then, finally, I realized what I had been getting myself off to, and despite it all I couldn’t help but feel a little bit disgusted at myself. I had just imagined raping my friends. Holding them down. Watching them squirm, trying to resist and failing as I had my way with them – as the worms had their way with them. And it had felt so fucking good. So fucking hot.

Or maybe it hadn’t been that. I had imagined them being happy at the end of it, so surely that must have been the part of it that had felt the most satisfying, right? Not the imposition, but the realization that they wanted it more than anything. The sacred joy that only being infected would ever give them.

Whatever. I closed my eyes and calmed myself down. I was overreacting again. Overthinking again. It had only been a dirty fantasy, nothing more. Of course it wasn’t going to go down like that. I was going to make sure that it was discreet and quick and peaceful.

But even if it were true, and I was going to physically hold them down and infect them against their will as they were struggling, it would still be worth it. Becoming host was worth it. It was nothing to be afraid of. I was still myself, and I loved it – and they were going to love it, too. I knew that. So what if I had some fantasies of rubbing myself all over them and infesting them with worms? I wasn’t going to do that. If at all possible, they wouldn’t even notice it until they were already taken over. That was the safest way, and the only humane way. 

And it was going to be so fucking hot when it finally happened.

Anyways, I had to clean myself off. I wasn’t about to go to sleep with a seeping crotch and no panties, no matter how satisfied and relaxed I was. I got out of bed and used my sink and a hand towel to clean myself, which wasn’t very dignified but definitely beat getting dressed and walking to the showers. When that was done, I grabbed a new pair of panties, put it on, and picked up my soaked pair from the floor to toss it in the hamper.

And then I noticed the wiggling and the glow.

My heart jumped in my chest, and I nearly squealed with joyous surprise. I instantly knew what I was looking at. There was no moment of confusion. No mental pause to assess the situation. I immediately knew my brood, down from the bottom of my heart, and it was the most wonderful feeling in the world. Endorphins rushed my system, and I did nothing to hold them back.

“Hi there, little guys,” I whispered with gleeful delight, utterly struck by the beauty of them. “You’re– oh, shit!”

I realized the problem. This was so wonderful – but if anyone saw this, I was fucking toast. And if there were worms in my panties (pardon that particularly nasty phrase) there might be others elsewhere, and I had to find them immediately before they could crawl away and get lost. I stepped over to my bed, eyes wide, looking for more of my offspring – and sure enough there were two more of them on my mattress, crawling around the small wet spot that I had left behind, gently glowing with the magnificent shade of bioluminescence I had grown to know so well. My chest warmed with affection and love, and some part of me just wanted to lie down and get myself off again – but instead, I carefully picked them up and cupped them in my hand along with their siblings while I turned over the sheets and scoured over the rest of my bed to make absolutely sure that I hadn’t missed any of them. I found no others, neither on the bed nor on the floor, and finally got around to taking in the full scope of the situation. Damn, I had not seen that coming, but holy shit, this was amazing! There were so many questions popping up in my head, and so many tests I immediately wanted to do! 

But right now I had to prioritize. One thing at a time. 

I emptied out the cup with my toothbrush, rinsed it out ten times, and finally dropped my handful of Socaliae into it. They liked cold water, and were actually quite resistant to variations in pH and most trace chemicals. Even if there were still some tiny amounts of fluoride in the cup, they were going to be fine – and definitely better off than in dry air.

With my children temporarily taken care of, I decided to check my room once again, going as far as lifting my mattress out of the frame and pulling off the sheets. I had to make sure. It looked like my room was clean, however, and I allowed myself a moment of calm before moving on to the next step. There was one more place to look, after all.

Yeah. I’m not too proud of the next part. 

I looked down at myself with a resigned sigh and reached between my legs, spread myself apart, and pushed in, probing with my fingers like the universe’s most badly trained gynecologist. I must have looked utterly stupid and pathetic, one hand still irrationally holding on to a pair of dirty panties as I used my other hand to dig between my thighs as I was first standing with spread legs and then finally thinking better of it and deciding to sit down on my bunk instead. This was crazy. A few minutes ago I had been lost in utter fantasy, and now here I was, dealing with the messy reality of it all, knuckle-deep in my own body, checking if I had produced any more parasites.

And then I felt one, and then another. It was unmistakable, and I swear I could feel a small surge of excitement and alarm that wasn’t my own. There were more of them inside me, trying to get out and find the potential hosts that they knew were so close. The ones I had been fucking. The ones whose bodies had been naked and receptive and so close to us. Or at least, that was what they thought.

A hypothesis assembled itself in my brain almost fully formed right then. My children had been the reason why I’d been extra horny, and masturbating had drawn them out. Some part of me even believed that they might have sensed my thoughts and fantasies as if I’d actually managed to mate with Lisa and Damian and Kamal, and that this connection had been what had prompted them to emerge from my body.

As always, I would have to perform lots of tests to falsify or confirm those hypotheses – but in this instance, the process was probably going to be a lot more fun than that kind of work usually tended to be. Before I could think of anything like that, however, I had to deal with the situation at hand and make sure that I wasn’t at the risk of dropping worms out of my pants in front of my friends and colleagues. 

Getting those last two specimens out was like fishing wet grains of rice out of a test tube, but I eventually managed to do it. They joined their brethren in their little plastic cup, counting eleven in total after all was said and done and my pants were back on. I would say that my heart would still be beating quickly if I hadn’t gotten so good at nipping that kind of unhelpful excitement in the bud. Instead I could once again calmly focus on the important next steps. Thankfully, everyone else was asleep, so it wasn’t actually very hard to sneak out of my room and transfer my new specimens to the lab without being seen or heard. It was important to stay on edge and remain very careful, but it wasn’t like the others had any reason to be suspicious of me. Even if anyone noticed me, they would just think that I was out to use the toilet.

When I returned to my room I finally relaxed all the way. There was nothing else that I could think of that needed doing right now, and so I let every bit of artificial control over my host’s body lapse after holding it together the entire evening. It was a familiar pathway by now and I always made a point of doing this every night to check in and listen to my actual natural condition. It might be useful to pave over pain or exhaustion for a few hours or even days, but it seemed like a very bad idea to lose touch with what this magnificent machine was actually designed and calibrated to do. Who knew what kind of damage I could do if I ignored its warning signals?

The first thing I felt was a wave of excitement and nervous tension, which made me realize how close all of this had actually been. Damn. I had been too focused on the tasks at hand to worry about what would have happened if a specimen of Laurensis had come crawling out of me when I was sitting on the couch next to the others. It was irrational to worry after the fact – but just barely. What if they had come out of my mouth instead of my pussy? I had kissed Lisa! I could have infected her right there and then!

The mortifying feeling of shame and embarrassment and close-call adrenaline was almost enough to suppress the geyser of arousal that erupted between my legs when the notion of actually-for-real infecting Lisa licked across my mind. 

The arousal didn't last long however, because the next thing that I felt was the violent return of the throbbing pain in my head. It had been there the whole time, but I had pushed it down far enough to where I had been able to completely tune it out without thinking about it. 

But now it was back with a vengeance.

Fuck. This wasn’t good. This didn't feel normal. Not at all. This wasn't a normal headache! Was this my body? My worm body? Was I doing this to Maddie's brain? Was I... eating her? Oh God. I had been sure that I wasn’t feeding on her brain tissue until today, but right now, with my offspring being born and my genetic material thus successfully propagated, that hypothesis seemed much less far-fetched. As far as evolution was concerned, this host body’s purpose had now been fulfilled. It didn’t care about survival of individuals – only the survival of the lineage. The rational part of myself could list a half-dozen reasons why evolution might select for longer host lifespan and just as many reasons what else could be causing my head to throb with pain – but the human (and indeed the parasite) part of me was extremely fucking worried. This felt wrong. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Except – How could I know that? How could I know that this wasn’t exactly how my lifecycle should go? Infect, procreate, die. I was a parasite, and that was what parasites did.

Except for the fact that it just felt… wrong. My every instinct screamed in denial of it – and not the instincts of the human called Maddie whose body I had taken over. No. I had learned to tell that difference before I had even become conscious. Those were my own instincts, telling me that this wasn’t how this was supposed to work. I wasn’t meant to use up this creature I had inhabited like a single-use incubation chamber; I was supposed to live as it. Breed as it. Over and over. That was what felt right.

I scoffed at myself, frustrated by my own irrational confidence while at the same time utterly unable to get over it. But honestly, what else was I supposed to believe? The alternative would mean that there was no point to any of this, and that was a shitty way to think no matter if it was true or not. 

Yeah, fuck that. The only reasonable way to proceed was to assume that I was right. If I was indeed eating my own brain I was going to find out the hard way soon – and in that case, it would be a good thing that I never got around to infecting the others with deadly brainworms. It would still be a tragedy if that were the way things turned out to be, but since when has nature cared about things like that? Trillions of organisms die senselessly every day. I would be in very good company.

On the other hand, if there was anything less-than-strictly-lethal causing those headaches, I was sure that I could eventually discover that cause, do something about it, and keep this miracle going. I might not be a pharmacologist, but I did have six hours of mandatory training on our lab’s universal chemical synthesizer – and there were plenty of advanced textbooks available on the subnet. How hard can it be to figure out how to create drugs that work on human and xenozoological biology at the same time?

Sorry. Please excuse my sarcasm while I’m trying to stumble into another miracle – because that’s what it was going to require to solve this on my own. Modern science simply isn’t done by individual renaissance men (or women, or ascended brain worms). It’s done by concerted efforts of hundreds of highly specialized collaborators, and it takes time and advanced math and computer science and highly specialized hardware.

Alternatively, it takes a miracle – and until one such miracle happened to manifest itself I had no choice but to work under the assumption that good science could be rushed if you really, really cared.

…

I had a breakthrough the very next day.