“Do you realize how many species out there procreate when the female eats the male? Enough to scare me silly. I’m talking sapient species, even ones we have treaties with. They make our praying mantises and our black widows look tame.” – Attribution: A soberer, wiser me.

Check that. I probably wasn’t any more sober. And my buddy responded with, “If you would just keep your penis in your own species, you’d have nothing to worry about.”

Let’s get one thing straight before we start. I’m going to be dead by the time this story is over. I’m not dead when the story starts. If that gives you some kind of existential crisis you might as well just keep on walking, because I’m not going to argue with you. I just want to tell you a story.

That’s what I do – I tell stories. Or it’s what I used to do, up until about now. I was an engineer – better known as a “switch-monkey” – assigned to Mechanicals on one of those big, deep-space jump-switches you’ve probably been through, if you’re any kind of inter-system traveler. “Mechanicals” is a glorified name for the atmospheric access tubes that run throughout the infrastructure of the switch so you can get someone into the works with fingers and microtools instead of clumsy pressurized gloves when something needs fixing. I don’t care how big those switches are – I hear Gomirez is building long ones now, tens of kilometers down the bundles – the Mechanicals are a tight fit for a human. That’s why they buy us from Mother Military when our tours are up; She breeds us small, so we can fit into Her cramped little cockpits. I’m maybe one-and-a-half meters when my body’s used to null grav, and there are some bends I struggle with in my jurisdiction of the Mechanicals.

But you don’t care about that. You care only a little more about what my buddies and I do in our free time, though you probably know all about it. We hang out – there’s groups of us – at the bars between the pedestrian nodes in the station and wait for tourists to come by and pick us up. I hear the official male portion of the human population in the Ohidan League is at 0.18 – that is, there are more than six gynes or femmes for every man out there – but Mother is a member of the Ohidan League, and there are a few high-male-pol colonies out there that swing the distribution. Let’s just say that there are plenty of femmes – and gynes who want to act like femmes for a night – who travel the switches – whether for business or pleasure, it doesn’t matter, we still call them tourists – who swing through the pedestrian nodes expressly to pick up a male for a night or two. They ply us with drinks (or even food), we show them the romantic views out the optical funnels, and then we spend a little alone time together in our respective pods. Maybe they purchase one of the ridiculously overpriced souvenirs we buy for pence off the closest systems, and then we don’t have to apply for a prostitution license and everyone’s as happy as can be. Even our company is happy, because prostitution license or no, you better believe the switch managers take a hefty cut from our souvenir business.

So here’s where you begin to care: one off-shift, just like any other, a couple of my buddies and I have a table at the Marquis. It’s a slower part of the station and doesn’t see as many tourists as the promenades on the bigger nodes, but the tourists that come through tend to have a bigger souvenir budget, if you know what I mean. Across the bar, velcro-tethered to a chair on the wall opposite us, there’s a blonde – pale, creamy skin, curly hair dyed yellow with just a hint of green. She’s sitting at a table for two, but she’s by herself. She’s practically begging for some companionship. If the Marquis was busier, I would have had to go plant myself there even before I was invited or risk being cut out by one of my mates. Like I said, though, the Marquis is in a slower part of the station, and we can be civilized about it. I can afford to wait for her to choose me first. My buddies won’t interfere once I’ve expressed interest, except to turn around and give her an appreciative once-over. Me, I make frequent, almost conspiratorial eye contact with her. She’s wearing an unusual kind of skin that leaves her shoulders bare, like in the oldie stories, or like she was half-peeled out of it already. I like that. She’s a little bit pudgy, a little round in the cheek, which is hard to find, and I like that, too. She has her cape thrown over the back of her chair, which in zero-grav means it’s splayed out behind her like a flag, but somehow instead of looking awkward it makes her look …I dunno, floral. I’m digging her. I’m wearing my utility ‘Skin, which strangely enough catches more eyes than anything else in my wardrobe. Apparently there are rumors about how flexible we switch-monkeys are. I might have started a few. I’ve got a tight-fitting jacket and an all-black junga bootset on, too, so it’s clear I’m off duty, but it’s the hex-pattern in my utility ‘Skin that really stands out.

After a few more minutes of winky-eye and twiddly fingers, she sends a drink over to my table, and makes sure I can see her place the order. I know the protocol, so I wave her over to our table, and she shakes her head and points to seat across from her, and I nod. We’re both nodding, both smiling, and my buddies barely even give me a glance and a grin as I unhook myself and float up from the seat. With one hand I grab the drink pouch – I have to at least taste what she sent before I reach her table to thank her for it.  Just as I close my lips around the straw, Denis plays an impromptu round of “I’d hit that” (which is played, conveniently enough, by spotting just about anyone who isn’t one of us and saying, “I’d hit that”). Except he says something more like “It’s slow this week, I’d hit that,” just as a Tnukdru floats in, and her mane is so matted and unkempt it’s like a single solid clump of hair, and we can smell her from across the room. Yaomi mutters, “If you could find it,” right as I’m taking my sip, and I guess something goes down the wrong pipe when I laugh, because the next thing I know I’m coughing and sputtering and spinning in circles in the middle of the room. Once I managed to catch hold of one of the spanning beams and take a deep breath, my eyes are watering and I still feel like there’s a cough burning in the back of my throat. I hold up an apologetic finger to the blonde by herself at the table and kick off toward the waterrooms. She must have misunderstood, because she slips out of her seat and kicks off after me.

She catches me in the pullway, just a few meters from the waterroom. My whole face is burning red with the effort of containing the cough I don’t want to release into her face. “Just one hecsec,” I gasp. “I’ll be right out in a hectosec, I swear.” I can see the waterroom hatch right there.

A couple of gynes come down the pullway together, so she pushes me up against the pullway wall to clear the way, grabs ahold of a pair of handholds, and pins me with her body. Coincidentally, it’s awfully intimate wedged into so much bare flesh, but I have a strict policy against discouraging femmes from flirting, in public or not. Her face hovers only a few centimeters from mine; her lips part and her tongue plays thoughtfully against her teeth. She smells of raisins and cinnamon. If I wasn’t fighting the urge to cough, it would be downright titillating. “I’ve already waited a kilosec for you to come to me, Mader. My patience has limits. Maybe you prefer the aggressive type?” She presses her lips to mine, and even if I’m a martyr to the desire to clear my throat, I can still enjoy a pair of soft lips. And a tongue – a demanding, searching tongue that spills her abundant saliva into my mouth. I like the taste of her; I must, because I swallow.

She lets me break away only after another promise to be out of the waterroom in just a hecsec, and a further promise to take her back to my pod between weezing coughs, and then she only shifts a little, just enough that I have to wriggle past her to get free and kick off into the waterroom. Before the hatch flishes shut, I catch a glance of her smirking at me. She waggles her fingers again.

But after I’ve washed my face and eyes under the hydrazer curtain and flushed my bladder and straightened my coat over my ‘Skin to line up the piping, I can’t find her in the pullway. I can’t find her anywhere in the Marquis, either, and not for lack of looking. The weird thing is that I know she’s gone because of her smell – raisins and cinnamon. I can still smell it, just a little bit, but just that little bit lets me know it’s stagnant, not fresh, and pointing out the Marquis’ door. The bar is going through one of its end-of-ke emptying-out phases, so I can confirm my suspicions at a glance, but I look harder and poked into the waterroom again anyway, just to be sure. After snagging a pouch of water from the bar (that cough is still tickling in my throat, which is beginning to feel raw), I check with my buddies.

“The one you were semiphoring? Yellow-green hair, right?” Yaomi’s tone is a little sarcastic, like he wouldn’t have jumped right on her if he’d been facing her table and seen her first.

“She left ages ago,” Denis answers for him. “When you went to the waterroom. Long gone, probably. Sit down, and have another drink. Time to re-bait and drop a new hook.” He pulls the most obscure references from his butt, but then again Denis is the only one of us who has ever done any real traveling.

Yaomi catches my arm, and now his expression has become serious. “Or better yet, go get some sleep. You’re starting to look a little ragged.”

I feel a little ragged. I cough into the back of my hand, or into the crook of my elbow when I’m busy wiping beads of sweat from my forehead. But I just nod and push out the door without even a goodbye. I have to find her again. I mean, things aren’t that slow that I have to chase after gynes or even femmes for the business, but there’s something about this one. I swear it isn’t just the kiss she gave me, either, though I can still feel her on my lips. I have to find her again. Maybe it is the kiss. When I picture finding her in my mind, that’s the first thing I imagine – another kiss. Another moment of the intimacy of our eyes peering into each other’s from a few centimeters apart, of her perfume filling my nostrils. Hopefully I won’t still be coughing.

I jet through the pedestrian corridors like the seasoned pro that I am, slipping between humans and aliens alike, most of whom struggle to manage luggage and pull lines in the momentum oddity of null-grav. I have weightlessness to a fine art – I know the tricks to changing direction without kicking off a new wall, though that doesn’t work when I’m moving as quickly as I fly through the station’s promenade. I can’t find her anywhere, and I’ve been poking into the food shops, too. And even a couple of the souvenir shops, where they sell the same junk as me for a fraction of the price, but without the “added value”. I keep thinking I’m just about to stumble across her – I think I see head of curly yellow-green hair, or a flash of creamy flesh, or the flow of her black cape – but whenever I’m just about to catch up, I realize my eyes are playing tricks on me. It’s someone else – always someone else. I realize I’m wasting time and cut through a service corridor to the Security lockup. For once tonight, I’m lucky. Janna’s on-shift this ke. She likes me enough that she forgives me when I burst in on her gasping, “The blonde! The blonde!”

To her credit, she raises a patient brow and only replies, “What?”

It takes me a hecsec to back up and explain, to give her enough of a description that she can flip through her camera displays to search for the blonde for me. It takes her even less time to realize that the smarter thing to do is start again a few kilosecs back into the feed from the front of the Marquis until we see her come out.

“There!”

Janna frowns back at me, and shoulders my finger away from her screen. “That’s not a blonde – that’s… just a black cloak with a hood. It could be anyone.”

“It’s her, I’m certain.” I squirm, eager for her to advance through the feed and give me a clue where she’s gone. At least she’s alone – I had begun to worry that one of the other tour guides that frequented the Marquis had snaked her out from under me. I cough into my arm. I’m doing that less, now, but my throat still feels like I swallowed a cup of boiling water.

“What’s the matter – she take your retirement stash or something?”

“Huh?” My eyes cling to the screen, refusing to focus anywhere else. I can barely pay attention to Janna to answer. So I don’t.

“You’re sweating, mader. You look like you went through air conditioning without a thermal on.”

“Something like that.” I wave the image away. “I just… I have to see her again.”

“Ughhh…” She pushes away from the screen, nose wrinkling in disgust. “I’m helping you for a hard-on? I’m not your pimp! You’re going to owe me large for this, you know.” Still, she leaves one hand on the pad to trace the blonde’s camera path to one of the pedestrian transports loading up for a switch. We find her entering the pod just as we’re catching up to real-time in the feed.

“Quick, quick!” I push Janna’s chair back up against the counter and place her hands on the display. “You can get her itinerary.”

Janna narrows her eyes at me, and glances past me a the door. “You know I can’t do that.”

“I know you can do it, but you won’t.” I squeeze her shoulders before I remember that she hates it. “Not without a really good reason. C’mon! I’ll owe you double large – anything you want. I’m desperate.”

“I guess you are…” Her voice lingers thoughtfully. Dangerously. She swivels in her seat to consider me. “Okay, but I’m going to think of something really good before you get back. Like a percentage on your side business. I guess I will be your pimp, then.”

I nod hastily, not even taking a moment to think. Anything to get her to run the search.

A moment later, she speaks again. “Looks like she’s got almost a straight run through to Doris-Mary 32X7. No wonder she’s in such a hurry to leave – those alignments only come up every couple of days.” After another moment of reading the screen, she leans closer. “Shit.”

“What?”

“Yup.”

“WHAT?”

“That’s the sector I thought it was – DM32X7. The Badlands. You don’t want to go anywhere near- Hey, where are you going?”

I’d already kicked off for the door. “After her.”

“I told you, there won’t be another alignment for eight ke!”

“The switch is redundant, Janna.”

* * *
“Redundant” doesn’t imply “convenient”, apparently. There’s always more than one way through a switch fabric from any point to another, but I go through so many back-terminal jump gates (which, by all rights, were in such poor condition that they should have been closed for maintenance), that I burn through several years’ savings of employee travel credits in about two ke. I guess I should be keeping a list of those poorly-kept jump gates for my boss, but I’m a creature of a single mind; nothing is important but finding her. Not even whatever it is I’m coming down with.

I’m not sure when I realized I was really sick – if it was the retching coughing that kept the other passengers in the transport pill pressed to the far side windows, or the fact that I can smell everything – every nuance, every detail around me. That doesn’t usually happen when I’m sick, though, so it probably wasn’t that. I can smell her, too – wisps of cinnamon and raisins – when my redundant path intersects behind hers. I’m getting closer. It could have been the fever, too, or my creaky joints, or the back-ache, or the red splotches on my skin that gave it away. If I didn’t know all the back routes through the station – most of them are just catenated copies of the node I monkey on – I would have already been quarantined a dozen times. I should be quarantined, for my own sake – I know it, and I still can’t stop. Despite it all I’m surprisingly lucid – in that same way as when you’re falling asleep and your body feels distant and sluggish, but your mind is sharp. I could be rambling, though. You tell me.

Terminal after terminal, jump gate after jump gate, and I’m spending my own savings now. It’s surprising how quickly last minute vouchers can add up, even with an employee discount; I’ll be begging the bank for credit if I don’t catch up to her soon, but I know I’m close – her smell is thick in the air. I think I’ve almost seen her again – her black cape or that curly hair, just a glimpse in a distance before the jump gate closes. In and out of nebulae, across the galaxy and once even back and forth to Anderomeda – the stars are just distant backdrops out the optical funnels, set behind the uniform tube matrix of the switch infrastructure. The only thing that changes is the degree of my desperation, and the human to alien ratio around me. Out here on the fringes of the switching fabric, Blackbie CenComm connects a lot of worlds that pay their bills on time, but who aren’t precisely friendly with Man. I can tell that’s the direction I’m headed from the stares I get as I glide down the center of the corridors. I don’t see any other switch-monkeys. I guess out here they keep to their Mechanicals, where it’s safe to be human.

When I finally jump into DM32X7 – her smell is so thick on the air as soon as the jump gate burps open that my head swims – I have no choice but to go through the med scanner. Oh, I suppose there is a choice – there is always a choice – but I can either push my way through a swarm of 4-meter Kerytids lolligagging in the exit corridor and somehow weave through their arm-long poisonous barbs, or I can flash my maintenance permit and squeeze backward through the medical scanner bottle-necking the entry gate. I choose the latter, and I do it as quick as possible, before the quarantine guards can protest.

BWaap! BWaaP!

The siren sounds behind me, and when I turn I can see the scanner gate glowing red.

“Hey!” The medic on duty stands there, half surprised, half disbelieving. She shouts after me. “Stop! You’ve got parasites!” She points at her screen, which of course I can’t see.

I shake my head at her as I continue to float away. The aliens in the line waiting for that scanner gate give me a wide berth, both because of the siren and the sweat pouring from my forehead and drenching my ‘Skin. I shrug at the medic. “I’m on the outside. Stop me on the way back in.” I guess I should be worried, but she is so close now. I have to find her.

A hand yanks me from my free-floating vector and into an alcove.

“Hey!” I just about shout, more surprised that someone would touch me than angry, but it’s her. Her. She pushes me into one of the scoop cushions in the alcove and slips her feet through the toe rings to get the leverage she needs to hold me down. It’s like a repeat of the pullway at the Marquis, except this time when she presses against me she nibbles her lips in concentration and searches my eyes – through my eyes, I think, to my retina. I’m not sure why I’m not grinning, why I’m not breathing a sigh of relief, but I can hardly make my eyes meet hers. She’s not the one that I want. The one that my body wants, anyway – my mind has given up on making sense of what’s going on. My lips still yearn for a kiss, but not from her mouth. Who’s then? My arms and legs are antsy to move, and I peer past her shoulder at some point deeper in the station promenade. My mind has just enough authority left to form a few words. “What di-”

She presses a finger to my lips to close them, then pulls down my lower eyelids, each eye in turn. She reminds me of a medic, thrusting into my personal space, imposing a uni-directional intimacy. “‘They’ll never take to a human,’ will they?” It isn’t a question I’m supposed to answer. “But she didn’t think of staging fertilizer first. She’ll be eating her words now.” Her smile is quite satisfied when she taps the end of my nose with one finger.

“What did you do-”

She shushes me again, but instead of closing my mouth, she hooks a gloved fingertip over my bottom teeth to hold my jaw open, and places a small pellet on my tongue. It melts like too-sweet sugar in my saliva, but it’s aromatic, too, like the perfume flowers they sell in the souvenir shops. “Try not to swallow, please.”

I want to fill my eyes with her, with the creamy skin of her face and shoulders, with her curly yellow-green hair floating around her cheeks, with her glistening black eyes, but I can’t make myself. I can’t pretend any longer that it’s really me who has been doing the chasing. It doesn’t matter how pretty she is – I stare past her desperately, but I can’t figure out what it is my eyes are fixed on. I can’t really even control them anymore, I can only watch her through my peripheral vision. I’m eager to be away from her, not because I want to escape her, but because there’s somewhere else I need to be. Even thinking “I” is confusing, like my brain has fractured into pieces. Beneath the strong smell of cinnamon and raisins there is something else – something that smells a lot like the dissolving pellet on my tongue, but coming from that point down the promenade. I feel a movement in my throat.

“Don’t swallow!” Her finger pulls my jaw open as wide as it can stretch, and two fingers from her other hand dart in to the back of my tongue and catch something there. I barely get a glimpse of what she retrieves – something small enough to hide between two fingertips, but tan-colored and wriggling like a flatworm – before she puts it in her own mouth and closes her lips. She chews slowly, testingly, then nods again. “It’s been… what, two ke since I kissed you? Maybe three? Remarkable. I wonder what they could do inside there in another ke.” Her eyes drop meaningfully toward my stomach. “But no dawdling; you’re ready for her.” She pats my cheek and removes herself to give me free passage away from the cushion; this time there’s no teasing, no wriggling to get away. “Go find her, then.”

I don’t know where the reserve of self-control came from, but I manage to clutch her arm while the rest of my body tries to drag me away, to shoot past her into the station. It isn’t a mental struggle, really – it’s not like there’s another mind sharing my skull to fight against. It’s more like I’m drowning, and it takes most of my effort just to bob at the surface. My body – all but that hand – moves on its own. “What did you do to me?”

She smirks as she wrests her arm from my hand. “You have worms, Mader. Gruin’s Worms – you’ve heard of them? Don’t worry, though -” Who’s worried? The only emotion my body has left me with room for is need. “- they won’t hurt you if you get them out in time.”

WE WON’T HURT YOU.

I freeze, listing midair. Her smirk vanishes. “What is it?”

“They’re in my head!”

HURRY!

I scramble for something to hold onto, to kick off of, until she reaches out a boot and gives my toe a boost. It’s enough to send me angling toward the promenade.

Out of the corner of my eye, which I’m getting really used to using, I see the blonde following. Her expression is one of curiosity.

THERE.

It is the scent, the floral perfume beneath the raisins and cinnamon, and I can almost see the direction it’s coming from. I don’t fight my body for control – it’s too late for that. I let it kick me along, bouncing off walls and aliens like I was a disoriented animal, tumbling across the station’s promenade and past the dismal holes that pass for shops on this station. I am a passenger in my body now – or a captive, rather, lashed to the bowward boom. I can see everything, feel everything, but I don’t think I could get my voice back – much less my hand – if I tried.

DM32X7 is even shadier than I expected – it’s downright dingy, and the alien to human count here has got to be 100 to one. The pull bars in the promenade are so filthy I worry they’ll give my worms more worms. I couldn’t even name half of the species I see around me, but most of them look bright and gaudy, which generally translates to dangerous. Their size reminds me that our species’ nickname is “the hairless grub”. I’m so far out of Ohidaspace that the aliens give me curious stares instead of disgruntled huffs. My body launches us toward a circular opening that could be the Marquis’ post-apocalyptic counterpart, complete with portcullis gate and exposed engineering, but crazily enough the bar – or tavern, or whatever it is – seems to be spinning on its own rotation ring, producing a fractional pseudo-grav. The pseudo-grav only makes my null-grav-accustomed body feel even more swollen and achy when my socks find the grass-carpeted floor.

I know where we’re headed inside the bar even before I get a look – I’m the iron bit at the end of a magnet needle, straining against my pin. In a depression in one of the floor-slash-walls, a black-cloaked, hooded figure hunches over the low table there. It’s feeding from a steaming bowl resting on the table – or I guess it’s feeding from from the noise – and it leans so heavily over the bowl that the steam wafts up from the edges of the cloak. My body bounds across the room in a very un-me-like way, and lands, standing – barely standing – on the far side of the table. Did I describe it as a low table? Standing beside it I realize that it comes up to my ribs and the figure hunching above me is much larger than I’d thought. The term “grub” passes through my mind again. At first glance the figure seemed vaguely humanoid beneath the cloak, but now it seems bulgy in all the wrong ways. The face that lifts toward me beneath the cowl is a porcelain mask, a caricature of a human face with four slit eyes and a mouth that opens in a mocking, red-lipped moue. The face is eerie – frightening even – but it is the one I quiver with anticipation to kiss. No, not me – my body. My hormones are backing me into a corner, and even that corner is shrinking. I’m still fidgety, but I can’t move. My socks are planted in the grass, and my hands hang limply, even if the fingers twitch with a desire to reach for those cold, glossy red lips. The air around the black-cloaked lump twinkles with scintillating motes, like dust caught in a shaft of light.

The rest of the bar has gone quiet, leaving only some tinny, rhythmic music to fill the silence. The faces around us either watch us or make an obvious point of not watching at all, but they all seem to know what’s happening and they don’t interfere. I can smell raisins and cinnamon in the air behind me, from the direction of the door. I guess she’s watching, too.

The cloaked shape breathes noisily as it shuffles around the table toward me – over me – looming until I’m beneath the shadow of the cloak and that white mask hovers above my head. The floral perfume is so strong it’s pungent, and beneath it there’s an earthy murk. My head tilts toward the mask, and my mouth opens for those lifeless lips. From between those lips, a green tongue slithers out, and that’s enough to remind me of what the bar already knew. Gruin’s Worms. I do know what they are. Sort of. Enough. The creature behind the mask is a she. A colony of “she”s, maybe, but close enough. Those motes twinkling in the air around her (them) are the “he”s – the spores, or sperm, or pollen, or whatever.

BROTHERS.

Right. Brothers. Whatever. They’re what’s inside me now. The important thing is, it’s mating season where I’m standing. And dinnertime. For the hers in front of me and the hims inside me, there’s no difference between the two.

TO THE MOTHERS!

Oh, gods, I’m fighting now, pointless though it is. It’s like fisticuffs with a shipping canister full of gravel. My body lurches toward that green tongue – a tentacle, really – corkscrewing toward me.

RELAX. LET HER HAVE HER WAY AND YOU WILL BE FREE OF US.

Not that I have any choice in the matter. My back arches, and my toes stretch to lift my face to that green tongue-tentacle, which appears to lack any fine muscle control and wraps clumsily around my jaw before finding and probing a nostril. Where it touches, my face is painted in slimy mucous. My mouth waits wide open – painfully wide open – in its eagerness to admit that thing.

A HUMAN! I don’t hear her talking, any more than I hear the other “voices” in my head. They’re images, inklings, inclinations. The ones coming from inside me are a chorus creating a comprehensive mosaic picture of their thoughts, but hers are like the same picture overlaid a dozen times, until it’s bright and washed out. The more forcefully that tongue wriggles into my nostril, the clearer her images come. I WONDER IF HE WILL BE WORTH THE TROUBLE HE WILL CAUSE US. YET, WE WILL PAY THE SOWERS AS AGREED.

I focus all of my straining toward shutting my mouth, because I feel something moving in my throat, and I’ve got a pretty clear image of what comes next, even without their thoughts in my head. But when that green tongtacle slithers down over my lip, my jaw stretches even wider, until I feel it pop. And yes, I did just make up “tongtacle” right there on the spot, but I’m a little too busy to gloat over my cleverness, thank you. Bite, I urge, but even the alien thoughts in my head are ignoring me now; they titter back and forth with images I can scarcely understand. Nor do I want to.

The tongtacle thrusts past my tongue, feeling like an arm-sized knobby cucumber, and whatever it touches it coats with that salty-sweet slime. More tentacles emerge from beneath the cloak and bunch like hands to grip my shoulders and cheeks. The thing in my mouth writhes down my throat, pulling and pushing again and again like my gag reflex is something to fuck with. Tears stream from my eyes. If only I could divorce myself from the experience as thoroughly as these little bastards had cut off my muscle control. Pretty soon there’s not going to be enough “me” left to make a difference.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind where those image-voices haven’t penetrated, I still have a pinch of room left for rational thought. The worms are supposed to be quarantined from the switches – they are quarantined, because here she is on the DMZ side of DM32X7. But the ones inside of me – twined through my guts and spinal sac if they did to me what I remember reading they do to other species – infected me inside Ohidaspace. Someone needs to know. Maybe that alarm I set off will be enough. It’s unlikely, sure, but it’s a hope I can hold onto.

I can feel that tongtacle rooting in my intestines. Their thoughts are so “loud”, so intense and fast that my own thoughts are like whispers in the fan combines of a switching engine. Still, I can only understand a little of what they say to each other.

SO SOON? That’s the mother worm, or worms; at least I can still tell her-slash-them apart from the ones inside me, even though their thoughts appear in the same place in my head. I THOUGHT HUMANS WOULD BE MORE DIFFICULT.

The males inside me respond with images of the woman in the black cape and curly yellow-green hair, snatched from my memory. My memory.

HOW CLEVER OF YOU TO DRAW ON HIS EYES. COME BACK WITH ME TO MY NEST, YOUNGLINGS, WHERE THERE AREN’T SO MANY EYES WHO WATCH US.

The tongtacle withdraws, unsheathing itself from my throat and mouth as it retreats between the red lips of the mask. A half-dozen strands – long and slender like noodles – follow the tongue out of my mouth to dangle from my lips. Though they are limp, there is a palpable eagerness emanating from them.  My palpable eagerness is to yank them out of my mouth and fling them as far from me as I can, but I’m not the one piloting my body.

The hand-tentacles slide clumsily down my arm to seize my hand as the great cloaked beast shuffles away from the table toward the door of the bar. Motes twinkle around us. We stop at the door only long enough for a few pieces of metal to clink from under the bulky black cloak and into the waiting hands of the blonde, who winks at me before disappearing into the throng of aliens in the promenade.

I already know that my chances of survival are slim, no matter how quickly I get these things out of me. They’ve grown so fast in my guts, and it’s not like I’ve eaten anything the last two ke – all that mass had to come from somewhere.  My intestinal walls aren’t an optional feature.  Still… If I can just borrow enough from the bank to jump back to a better station with a doctor… The med-techs that Blackbie keeps on their switching stations can do miracles. It all depends on how quickly I regain control after these sperm-males are out of me. I should be nauseous with revulsion, being treated like a surrogate incubator this way, but even my autonomic responses are out of my hands. I’ll have plenty of time for nausea later if I can get out of this alive.

A bellyful of worm sperm. All those motes around us are more sperm too. I feel a kind of disassociative kinship with them. They fall behind us as we drift through the station, scattering like seeds in the wind, but more billow out from beneath her cloak with every movement, like shed skin flakes or evaporating perspiration. They fill my nose with each breath, get in my eyes, and when they land on my tongue it fizzes with a sweet, floral effervescence. Everyone around us must be breathing them in, too; anybody could ingest them if they settle in food or water. If the blonde could get what infected me into the switch network… But I’m the only one I see that’s hunched and sweating. Other species cut us a wide berth, but they don’t seem to notice that they’re impregnating themselves with every breath.

IMMUNE.

I’m snapped from my drifting thoughts.

MOST ARE. NOT YOU.

Lucky me.

Finally she leads me into a darkened pod deep in the station, where the smells are so abrupt and varied and strong that I don’t know whether to faint or retch (my body doesn’t seem inclined to doeither), and the lights have been turned off so it feels like a humid cave. Doors flish shut behind us, and she tosses me across her pod to splash into the thick muck slathered against one side. I hear her set the lock on the door, and then she wallows in beside me, tentacles rooting beneath me in the slop. Gone are her cloak and mask, and now I see her for the twisting bulk of writhing, intertwined tentacles that she is. Where the mask had been is just a mouth on one of the tentacles, with lips bulging over spincter muscles, from which the tongtacle extrudes again. There is no delay, no pretense – within seconds the green thing has thrust its way back into my throat, slathering another layer of her salty-sweet mucous where the first had had caked in my esophagus. She pushes so deep this time that her lips meet mine, and it’s that kiss – that wriggling, hypersensitive exchange of pressure – that all of my tension has built for. I feel a release inside me – an ejaculation in my guts that wells up through my throat. But then those lips, which have already engulfed the lower half of my face, stretch wider. I’m still as limp as a rag doll. I can’t even scream. It happens so fast. Four or five slimy, yanking gulps over my head and shoulders and I’m far enough inside of her that the rest of me can just slip in between the pressure in her lips. Her tongtacle is so deep inside my belly that I can feel pressure on my prostrate.

The “voices” in my head ebb. I suppose she’s vacuuming up all of the little worm-sperms slithering around in my guts – it sure feels like it. At least I hope that’s why the voices are quieter, but there’s a ringing in my ears, too, that I think might be the onset of asphyxiation. My ‘Skin and socks protect me from most of the She-worm’s insides, but they don’t protect my face. My poor face! It’s jammed into curtain-folds of spongy flesh that writhe and squeeze. The slime in which I’m steeping has been so thoroughly worked into my skin and hair that it’s beginning to lather.

we promised him. The chorus of males is much smaller now, only a few tiles in the mosaic.

BUT I DID NOT. The flesh around me heaves, forcing me deeper in as though worried I might escape. OUR LARVAE SHALL FEED ON HIS FLESH, AND BETTER ASSIMILATE TO HUMANS IN THEIR GENERATION.

That’s a hell of a last thought to ruminate on, let me tell you. As the last voices disappear and her tongue withdraws again from my throat, leaving me feeling hollow and used, I have no more energy for consciousness, no plans for escape. Only the meditation focus that I am the first of many, and the constant, spongy sloshing of the gut around me as the retinal patterns on the inside of my eyelids fade to black complete.