Lydia Storm
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The moment I met him rampaging near the Scorpius cluster, I knew. Teeth like swords. A giant set of musk-producing glands. Tentacles for days. Impressive CV: Admiral of the Fleet, Emperor of the Swarm. He didn’t notice me at first, didn’t know I was alive, as they say. It wasn’t until I implanted myself in what passed for his brain that he was able to relate to me at all. But wow, once I laid the eggs, we couldn’t get enough of each other. It went on night and day for several eternities.
When it was over, though, it was over, you know. He rejected me and never said why.
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I told myself he was tired of trying, even though there was really no trying involved. That’s the whole point of a parasitic love cycle. It’s completely fair and balanced, by design. Looking back, I’m sure the problem started in the later phases of my engorgement when I wanted to talk about our relationship. Where it was going, our dreams for the future. Exactly how we wanted to go out at the end, when the heat death of the universe finally caught up with us.
The truth was, though—the thing I couldn’t face—was that I was growing and changing, and he was not. He didn’t want to, and he never did anything he didn’t want to do. He stayed the same, eon after eon, while I evolved into someone who wanted to explore the boundaries of our connections, our power as a couple.
“Who knows,” I said to him, “what we can accomplish if we communicate better?”
I suppose that was my mistake, needing more, because when he heard me, heard my actual words, he began to notice consciously what his body had known all along: that I was there with him, in his head, making decisions for him. It was basically I who’d gotten him where he was, and he had no idea. He actually thought he was doing it all by himself!
Once in a while he’d scan his giant body every way he knew how, but he didn’t suspect a highly capable intergalactic deep-space parasite, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have known how to look for it, for me. In the meantime, our children were infesting every tentacle, every orifice, every cell. I have to give him credit for trusting his intuition about his own body, though, because he did eventually detect me in my home in his cerebellum, doing what I do best.
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The end, when it came, came suddenly. I’ll never know how he hid his plan from me. It wasn’t until I’d been expelled from my home, until my children and I had been ejected from his corpus entirely, that I fully woke up to his selfishness and duplicity. The last thing he wanted to do was share the glory, share anything, really. No doubt he justified the break by telling himself he’d never asked for a parasite to help him build his trans-galactic empire.
And to be honest, he hadn’t. That’s kind of the whole point of a parasite. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t take advantage of our arrangement, of me, of our children. We are what made him successful. Hell, we are what saved him when others of his species tried to take everything he had and then eat his head for fuel. But did he care about that? Was he grateful? Never.
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The children are gone like he wanted, but I will not die. For now it may be true that I barely exist, adrift as I am in the vacuum of space, but it’s equally true that I will never stop looking for him.
I will find rides eventually, on stars ejected from random collisions with galaxies, on whatever space junk happens by. Hell, even neutrinos give me a small boost, and they’re everywhere. I know I’ll find him, too, because his rapacious hunger and pathetic need for adoration scar every star system he visits. If there’s anything that can be said about that one, it’s that he leaves a trail.
This time, when I find him, he’ll know I’m in his head from the beginning, but he won’t be able to get rid of me. I’ve invented an attachment mechanism so strong that if he tries to hurt me he’ll only hurt himself, and I’ll live on in his magnificent shell of a body, in complete control. I do intend to let a tiny piece of his consciousness remain, just enough to make him understand what he’s lost. That’ll torture him enough to satisfy even me.
What I’m saying is, everything is going to turn out all right. I may be out here alone for now, but I’m nothing if not patient. It’s only a matter of time until I reinfest, and I’ve got all the time in the universe.
Lydia Storm is a writer who lives in Seattle and writes about science, consciousness, and all kinds of weird stuff. She has worked as a food server, a retail clerk, a mail carrier, and a technical editor.
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