(a short story about a species that amalgamates others, not unlike the Borg)

The last thing I remember was the ship overtaking us.

I call it a ship but it was the size of a continent. Asymmetrical and biological. Crusted with horns and glowing holes. The closer it got, the more our ship started to shudder. I don’t know what kind of field, energy, or radiation would do that through the nothing of space but it got to a point where I felt like my teeth were going to rattle out of my head. The whole crew, now bathed in the glare of the red alert lights, clutched the sides of their helmets in panic.

It had appeared above us in an instant and then started closing the distance. If it was an attack, we’d already lost.

We were in a deep part of the sector, far from a base. Nothing like this thing had ever been reported. It didn’t look like we would have a chance to get to be the first. We could barely hear each other shouting over the noise. Our distress calls would bounce off a few antennae in a decade or two but the object came up too suddenly for logs to be recorded to supralight. Some passing freighter might accidentally pass through the waves of our basic broadcast feeds. They might see us screaming over the racket and hear the sound of our entire craft stressing to the breaking point. But space is big and that could be in thousands of years.

Or never.

There are always disappearances and tall tales about what happened. Later, when the wreckage is found and analyzed, it’s almost always obvious piracy or mechanical/pilot error. Whatever was happening here was new to us.

It floated over us, making our research vessel into a quaking little speck near its hull. I say hull but it felt more correct to call it skin. On my viewscreen, it looked like a scab under a microscope. Like we were a dust mite getting close to a face.

I remember feeling a pop inside my skull. Not painful but definitely alarming. I feel like I could see clear space through a crack developing in the hull but I wasn’t feeling the pull of vacuum. There was a brief feeling of weightlessness as the gravity turned off. We all floated up a few inches with our papers and tools. There was a brief whirlwind and then blackness.

I awoke in a haze on a bed. I didn’t know how long I’d been out. I couldn’t move. I felt heavy. The ceiling above me was far away. I couldn’t see a light source but the room seemed bright. The air was layered and foggy. A few streaks of the fog had colours drifting in them. That couldn’t be healthy but I seemed to be breathing fine.

“This one’s awake.” I heard a voice say to my right.

I could feel the bed motor buzzing as it became more a recliner and adjusted my body into a sitting position.

I couldn’t identify the being in front of me now. Presumably the owner of the voice.

Part mantis shrimp, part boa constrictor, part octopus, part lionfish. Copious technology jammed into it at odd angles here and there. Was that a respirator? Ski goggles? A bright stripe of fur over the crest of this odd collision of flesh and plastic like a roman centurion’s mohawk except the hair had glowing tips like optic fiber. Lights blinked like monitors in the crevasses of its flesh. Iridescent crystals jutted out at several points, glinting. Were those a few tubes of neon? Long, thick, bird legs jutted down to the floor ending in rugged, nimble, ten-toed feet like tree roots come to life. The legs were banded with color that kept changing and mottling in no apparent pattern that I could detect. First, they’d be zebra stripes and then they’d look like ink spilled on a page. The many tentacles of the creature poked out between the fur, scales, and nooks of its body and drooped down to its knees.

I realized I was assigning it earth creature archetypes as a mental layover to parse what I was seeing but I honestly couldn’t grasp the biological chaos I was looking at.

“It sees itself” said the voice again. It wasn’t the creature in front of me who was talking.

I turned to the right, towards the sound of the voice and saw another creature identical to the one I had been looking at.

Then I pivoted one of my many eyes over and noticed the creature in front of me had turned its head towards the sound of the voice as well and that’s when I realized it was a mirror.

That bizarre freak show was me.

“He’s not imprinting. He’s going to thrash. Get a team in here.” I heard the voice say as I started to try to scream. It came out as a thin, soft dog whine. Evidently, I was still under some sort of anesthetic. I strained with all my might to move and could start to feel the tips of all my tentacles and fins and claws. I was the organic menagerie I’d seen in the mirror.

I felt a pinprick and more darkness.

That was eighteen months ago.

I’m more at home in this body than I was a year ago but I can’t think I’ll ever get used to it. Two of my crew committed suicide. The other ten seem to be adjusting slowly like me. Only Alison seems to be thriving in this new form.

We’re part of the Church of the Galactic Average now.

This race started as “research biologist priests” on a quest to find the perfect xenobiological form. They had developed a religion stating that once they could mix every intelligent life form into one, they would find the form of God. They’ve been doing it for sixty of our human millennia so far. They’re on their eighteenth galaxy. Which, if you know much about galaxies, means that they’re still about 200 billion galaxies short of their goal. Luckily one of the perks of the upgrades is near immortality.

Voluntary death keeps the numbers manageable. It’s not an easy gig after a few thousand years and people get tired. The ship can bud more quarters as necessary with the waxing and waning of the population.

They only need a small sampling of a race’s genome. They’re satisfied with the cross-section of humanity collected from our ship so that’s humanity off the hook. I’m lucky I had a pretty diverse crew. I’m not sure they all see it that way.

Forced converts. Considering the crusades on old Earth, this feels like humanity got off lightly. We are the sacrifice and they’ll leave the rest alone.

The one that woke me up I called Peggy. Her actual name is a collection of scents, squeaks, and sparks I can’t write down, much like the name that’s been assigned to me. They call that form of communication True Talk but they let us speak our own language through translators until we’re ready to transition away from our form of speaking. Like we’re being weaned off of who we were.

Peggy actually told me that I was lucky that humans were so close to the galactic biological mean. A nervous system, multilimbed, visual and auditory sensors. She was actually surprised that I noticed that much of a difference between my original form and what I saw in the mirror. Once I started to take a look through their astonishing library of previous converts, I could see why. Last year I wouldn’t have been able to see what Peggy meant but now I see.

Imagine being the size of ten whales and then being crammed into something roughly the size of a human. Imagine being an insect first. Or a gas cloud. Or completely silicate before being introduced the smelly wetness of biology. Or a being that takes a year between thoughts having to be brought up to our speed.

Echoes of all of them are in me in some small percentage.

The first change is the hardest, they say.

Whenever a race is absorbed, updates waterfall through the entire collective. We’re all an extension of the ship. Our sleeping cocoons update us as more beings are noticed and introduced. Since we’ve been here, they’ve grabbed and disseminated 26 species. They grabbed the locations of the six known intelligent species we humans have discovered from our records. I honestly can’t say I’ve noticed too much of a change except for some of the gas composition in the air we breathe and a slight flutter of expansion in the spectrum of colours available to my sight. And I taste mint when I get sad. That’s new.

But that first change, yes. That’s the hardest.

I’m a little less clear on the role of the ship itself. Is it a manifestation of all gods made flesh? Do we worship it or does it serve us? Is it a tool, a mere form of transport and library, or are we the ants and the colony itself is the point of all this? I’m still not clear on whether or not the quest itself is the church or if this living ship is the cathedral. Conversations down that pathway can quickly get out of my philosophical depth so I’ve stopped having them for now.

I’ve been a little bitter because of the cures they could offer the known universe. I think of the friends of mine who died from diseases we still can’t fix. They could change all that. What they do with biology is magical.

But they don’t. It’s not part of the quest. All inquiries to that effect are directed to what appears to be a FAQ list they’ve prepared. Not an uncommon query, apparently.

Surprisingly, the Church of the Galactic Average wasn’t very interested in our entertainment media or history. The culture of the races they absorb isn’t part of the quest. To them, the biology IS the culture.
There’s a section of the library devoted to it but it’s not very big compared to the rest. I spend a lot of time there, looking at the plays and shows of the cultures that had such things. The ones uploaded from our ship weren’t comprehensive at all. Just what we had downloaded before the trip. Probably the same with these other ones. That seems a shame to me, to not have that as a similar priority.

They’re a fascinating people.

Them. I still think of the people of this ship as a separate race. I need to start saying we.

Because, after all, I am now one of the most average people in the universe.





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He cracked as he moved, sounding like a fireplace. Popping softly, brittle matches stuffed into every joint. Each step brought him closer to me. I was handcuffed to the radiator. I didn’t know where I was or how such a frail old man had the strength to capture me like this. The room was old and looked abandoned. Piles of newspapers gathered in the corners, rustling with mice. One of my eyes was swollen shut and the other one was blurry. I looked up at the old man as he came closer. He held a tray of tea which he placed just out of my reach and sat down with painful, slow effort.

“Hello Jeremy” he sighed. “Do I look familiar?”

I’d been testing the strength of the handcuffs. Either my enhanced strength wasn’t working or the radiator’s mooring was reinforced. I looked at him with my good eye and snarled, trying to give him the sense of a dangerous animal.

He laughed. “Oh, very good, Jeremy. Very good.”

I was worried that he kept calling me Jeremy. That wasn’t my name. Mentally I reached for my name and found nothing.

A shot of panic rustled through me when I realized that most of my memory was a void.

“Yes, yes, by now you’re realizing that you’re not altogether altogether, are you? You’re here but you’re not really here, eh?” He laughed softly. “Yes, well, that sort of combat will do it to you. Tea?”

I lashed out with my foot at the old man’s tea set but came up short. Something gave way in my shoulder and I shrieked with pain like an animal. I immediately felt embarrassed at crying out.

“Jeremy, Jeremy, listen. Look. You almost spilled the tea there. It’s going to take weeks for your memory to come back. All you need to know right now is that I’m your friend. We’ve trained you and sent you out into combat and now you’re back. No one will find you here.”

I glared at him. I was more scared than before but I found the sound of his voice comforting. My instincts were all I had right now. I didn’t trust him but I did think that he was an ally. I’d never been in a situation like this before.

He stood to leave with the sound of toothpicks being broken, muffled popcorn, and twisting celery.

“I was like you, Jeremy. And you’ll get through this.” He nudged the tea closer. “You better drink this before it gets cold.”

He walked towards the door. Just before he left, he turned back to me.

“We won, you know. We won because of you. No one’ll ever know but I wanted to tell you that.”

He shuffled off down the hall until I couldn’t see him anymore.

I stared at the tea, debating whether to drink any.




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I will not rest.

I will not rest until each grief-drenched heartsick blue-shift disappointment is shoved shivering and begging out of my mind. I will not rest until every imperfection I perceive is strengthened into a scar, a medal, a proof of hardship, a key that provides entry into the future. I will not rest until footfalls from dark rooms in hidden pasts stop scaring my light-hearted daytimes with stories woven from languages that only the fear-stricken understand. I will not rest until I feel the tightened watch-works in this cage wind down from panic into victory.

I will forget to bow my head. I will forget to kneel. I will forget to think in terms of defeat.

I will not rest until I call the tune that moves the dance of battle. I will not rest until each hemisphere of hatred in my head is diluted by love. I will not rest until each earthquake warning alarm clock morning makes me smile in welcome for the day’s trials instead of cowering with a sigh. I will not rest until the stink of my soul’s decay sublimates into a perfume of renewed birth and glorious futures fanning out like Vegas blackjack wins. I will not rest until I pierce the blast doors below my own Cheshire cat flamethrower smile and set the passion free.

I will forget to lose. I will forget to think in degrees of compromise. I will forget my state of slavery.

I will blur the movement of language into a map of the coming decades that shines in the darkness. I will scare the lightning with my speed and mountains will envy my stoicism.





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It’s the red wafer of circuitry that snuggles up the blue glowing wires in my wrist that give me my memories.

It’s one of 8 chips. Ankles, wrists, head, neck and two in the torso. It’s a dispersal pattern of memchips that, according to stats, gives the best chance of full retrieval in the event of dismemberment.

Real comforting. The little rectangle dust covers mark me out as an operative. Any enemy worth their wires is going to make sure no part of me survives. I’m sure the guys in the glass towers and germ-free labs are the smartest people living but they suck at predicting field-work parameters.

Currently, I’m ducked down behind a cold, burned out shell of a car and snow is falling. I’m on the outskirts of the giant graveyard that used to be Detroit. I’m cradling the warm carapace of a fully-charged hot-plasma sniper rifle. It’ll be twenty more minutes until my quarry steps into a target radius.

Updates in the shape of red triangles and gridlines dance through the metal in my head.

I could pass for human for naked visuals. Anything beyond that and I’m a dead giveaway. I remember asking my boss for maybe the tenth time if that could be my codename this time around. Dead Giveaway. I mean, I’m out in the open, not fooling anyone, and completely expendable.

I’m a good shot. Right now the uplink is stable and I’m recording real-time to the safe at HQ but who knows? Maybe they’ll have a scrambler. Maybe the target’s Defensive Operatives know exactly where I am and they’re just laughing at me on long-cam footage and taking bets on when I’ll try to desert my post before they shred me.

1. Good thing about being a digitized human: being human lets me control the field of battle in my head and make calm decisions. Computers still can’t beat a human with training. They’ve tried. The time is coming, don’t get me wrong, but for now, stuffing a human into a human-shaped battle construct is more efficient that just sending out an artificial or a remote. Even a hundredth-of-a-second lag can cause defeat.

2. Bad thing about being a digitized human: imagination. I’m here, alone, in mutant country, and I have an hour to kill. My nerves mix with the threat assessment counters and keep me scanning, thinking of ways I could fail, ways I could be caught. There are a lot of ways that this could go wrong and only one way for it to go right. Not for the first time, I wonder if signing up was my best option.

The snow keeps falling. It settles on me but turns to steam on my gun. I do my best impression of a rock when I hear a helicopter in the distance.

Not my mark but it’s headed in this direction.

My hands tighten on my weapon and I will my breathing to slow down.

I’m thinking about the child that I lost in Paraguay when the fox walks out from behind the building and stops to look at me.

I stare back at this animal. I thought foxes were extinct. It might as well be a unicorn. I am still with wonder.

We stand and stare for two minutes while the snow falls and the helicopter sound veers away from us, leaving us in silence.

My proximity-sensor beeps a positive signal to me in the supersonic range. The fox’s ears flatten and it skips away into the shadows. The last thing I see of it is a swish of its red, cartoon-cliché, white-tipped tail.

The back of my head tells the gun to warm up its sights. The part of the mission that needs me to be me is rapidly approaching.

I shift my wait and sigh. There was a time when the thought of the upcoming battle would have made me nervous. I don’t know if it’s me losing my youth to experience or if it’s just too much time spent haunting machines rubbing off on me.

I count to six and settle into position.




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There’s a shudder through my inboards and I register two spider bites on the side of my hull. On my damage scan, I can see the red vectors of a virus blooming out from the skinmetal like red dye dropped into water.

They’re getting smarter.

I’m too big for the conventional weaponry that He hurls at me. If He had space folders, I’d be in trouble, but He only has primitive atom burners that arc out from his surface towards me. I use the N-Dime to crush most of the missiles away into another ‘verse shadow. The ones that I don’t bother with make craters in my shields that time will heal. None of my sensors were hit so I considered the loss acceptable.

I see now that His point wasn’t to cause me damage but rather to poke a hole in the skin of my protection to give his small autono-units time to inject a damaging virulent synthesis. My selfstations are getting wrapped up in the impossible problem in the injected program and shunting the question deeper and deeper into my systems.

I charge up and turn His tiny invaders clinging to the outside into ash.

I didn’t give Him credit. I haven’t met a member of The Game this far out on The Arms before. I figured he’d be easy fodder. He still hasn’t responded to hails, even during battle. If He wants to fight dirty, I thought, then that’s alright by me. That, or he’s damaged to the point that he can’t talk. Either way, there are no refs out here to check on us so the battle was on.

His tiny sentients are considerably more resourceful than I thought.

I’m thinking too much but a solution isn’t presenting itself to me. I can see the red lines eating through my systems. Soon they’ll hit cores and scanners and I’ll be blind and dumb.

That’s when He gets in contact. His voice shudders through me.

“I am Terra. My sentients are killing you. That was good battle. I have run from The Game. You can’t be allowed to broadcast my position. My sentients will use your systems to advance their own technology. Die. Be silent. Fly, my monkeys.”

I’m fading. I don’t know what He meant by monkeys. He is a sphere, the easiest shape to maintain. My systems are shutting down. I am becoming a second moon for Him.

I lose.

My nervous system registered a strong palm-print between my shoulder blades just before I was shoved hard towards the ground. I landed face-first amongst a scatter of hot shell casings and a reek of spent gunpowder.

I heard bullets whine and snap into the thin wall where I had been standing. I rolled onto my back in time to see a larger piece of artillery that would have torn me in half rip a hole through the shuddering slum gyprock.

Dust rained down into my eyes, turning me the same ashen colour of my dead mates. My dead fellow officers.

It wasn’t going well. This was a small apartment building in a slum. The most these kids should have had was bottles and bricks and maybe some home-made pop guns.

High caliber slugs stitched their way up the floor towards my wrist. I yanked my fist over to my chest but not quite in time. A few of my fingers flipped up into the air, suddenly free of my hand. One of them had my wedding ring on it.

I made a mewling sound like a kitten. Maybe two seconds had passed since I had been pushed down.

I looked up to see who had saved my life.

She stood like a warrior from a completely different and much better movie.

Underneath the minimal armour and ordnance was the scarred, thick frame of a 40-year-old bodybuilder. Her face was warped with rage as she emptied a gun that would have looked more at home on the front of a tank.

I realized that her body had scars that matched the lines of her muscles at the same time as I saw her take six bullets in the chest and two in her face.

Her head barely snapped back as a shower of sparks from her forehead lit up the hallway. Her body actually slid back on her heels a couple of inches from the stuttering impact of the torso hits.

With an animal roar, she fired back. The gun whirred down to a series of clicks after a few deafening sweeps of the hallway.

Cries of the wounded echoed back to me from down the hall. Profanities of rioters who had taken decent cover came back as well. The clicks of weapons being reloaded. A preparation for more battle.

She tossed aside the weapon. It landed like an engine block beside her. I noticed that some of the holes in her skin weren’t created by bullets. They seemed to be engineered and shallowly inset into her muscles.

I wondered how much of what I was looking at was still human.

She threw her head back and yelled at the ceiling. I saw little blue lights warm up in the crevasses of the inset muscle plugs. With a body wide spasm, they strobed a blinding pulse out that sent the whole building into darkness.

The biologically generated EMP caused the militants down at the other end to shout and then whisper amongst themselves. I heard the word ‘surrender’ followed by a gunshot.

There was a change in the air pressure next to me and then the sound of bare feet on dusty ground padding softly down the hall. It sounded like the feet of a ballerina or a young child. So fast and so quiet.

There was a moment of stillness when it occurred to me that I should start crawling towards the doorway to the stairs for medical help or decent cover until backup arrived.

That’s when the screaming began down the hall. It sounded like a slaughterhouse. In amongst the gunfire, I could hear the sounds of metal on bone and see occasional flashes of blue taser fire.

This riot was over.

I surprised myself by how quickly I crawled out and down the stairs.


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We had created a society free of disease and violence. We had a society that was centered on fun and learning. We had a society that knew the difference between entertainment and education. We had cross-bred to the point that there were only a handful of pure blooded ‘races’ left.

We had a peaceful empire that spanned three systems and an average individual life expectancy of five hundred and eight. We were still waiting to hear from any other alien life but there was a commonly accepted theory that we weren’t ready yet and that they’d contact us at that time.

Human beings have always thought of each point in their history as their most advanced. It’s like there’s a temporal egotism that says This, Right Here, Is the Best We’ve Ever Been stamped into everyone’s brain.

I suppose that’s what screwed us up as well. They say pride goeth before a fall.

We should never have woken them up.

There was a system-wide ‘awakening’ party that had been organized for a decade. Everyone that had ever been put into cryogenic storage was taken out, cured, cloned, re-canted, simmed or given a construct and brought back to life on the same day.

It was joyous. Great¹⁵ grandchildren met with ancestors for the first time. Wet, happy eyes looked at historical figures live and breathe. Great learned minds were brought to us intact. It was seen as a heartfelt victory of the soul for all of humanity.

It was the stupidest thing we’d ever done. Remember, we looked at warfare like witch-burning; an embarrassing footnote on our race’s way to glory. We hadn’t had a war in six centuries. We had no idea.

War takes no time to spread. With our long life spans and peace-loving ways, it didn’t take long for the Cryos to band together for familiar company. After they bound together, it didn’t take long for them to have a problem with us and demand space for themselves and only themselves. We gave it to them.

They wanted more. They called it a ghetto.

They attacked. Some of us died, bewildered. The reports came out from Earth with bloodstained shock. After hundreds of years of political recaps and human interest stories, there was actually a battle to report on. Reporters openly wept when reading back the details from the teleprompter.

Reporter Anna Requine uttered her famous last words at gunpoint on system-wide live telecast after being captured on the border before she was shot in the head and the screen went to static. We had to refer to our nets to look up the meanings of new words like ‘border’ ‘money’ and ‘oppressed’. A dead vocabulary sprang back to life. Sparks were lit in distant recesses of the collective unconscious.

Horrified people on Earth, people we thought of ‘us’, were angry. A human thirst for revenge, long dead, awakened in dormant parts of the brainstem. Suddenly, there was a ‘them’ and it was invasive. Protection was the only answer.

Some of ‘us’ surprisingly sided with the Cryos. A few of the Cryos sided with ‘us’. Battles became frequent and even more disturbing was the fact that we all sat glued to our seats on all sixteen planets and watched, wide eyed and panting, at the carnage.

It changed us. That was the beginning of the war. It took seven years.

In the end, the Cryos were exterminated in a final solution reminiscent of an ancient political party known as the Nazis. So were the people that helped them. And the friends of the people suspected of helping them. Even the Cryos that had sided with us were put to death as well for the good of us all. It was too late.

A division grew amongst us at the gory repercussions of our murderous bloodthirsty decision. First political battles broke out, then actual physical ones. Earth01 demanded to secede from the union. Then Saturn’s Moons and archipelagos. Korthos followed suit.

Lines were drawn. Sides were chosen. Tempers were high.

We lost Mars altogether in that first flashpoint attack. We have a larger asteroid belt now in the Sol system where that planet used to be.

That was the end of peace. We run and gun now. There are factions upon factions upon factions. The battles are never-ending. The sleeper has awakened. We reload our weapons, look back and shake our heads. We should have let sleeping dogs lie.



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