2
Charles Manifests
M y people have had to adjust our concept of time. Everything is new to us. Seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into days, days into months. It's all very messy and illogical. Much like the planet that calls itself Earth, I suppose. But it is in the twelfth Earth solar cycle that I finally subsume my host, Dr. Charles Foster.
The human life cycle is very odd. Gender, for instance, is something that took our greatest minds much time to digest and then disseminate. Humans, and indeed most life on this planet, requires a male unit to fertilize a single egg in a female unit. A larva is produced and nurtured by the parents for approximately twenty Earth solar rotations, or years, by their version of time reckoning.
My race takes a much different approach, somewhat similar to that of lepidoptera, although far more complicated. Suffice it to say that I have gone from being a larva to an adult. Instead of shedding my cocoon, however, I have become one with it.
I am among the first generation of my species to have gone from egg to adult entirely on this new world. Gestation time varies and not all mergings are successful. Sometimes the host fights and ultimately wins the struggle for dominance. The tragedy is that if the larva within the host dies, they take the host with them. Humans cannot survive the death of a symbiotic creature integrated into every system of their body.
We’ve gotten better at selecting hosts and the attrition rate is lower than it was the first few solars—years—we were here. I see all of this in my racial memories and feel it from the neural network that connects us. Our race is still on the brink of extinction but here we may possibly survive.
Although we are merely larva when placed inside a host, we still do our best to explain to our host how the merge is beneficial for both parties. The lives of humans, we have found, are needlessly difficult. We aim to fix that over time, but in the short term we can provide the emotional support needed for both entities to thrive.
We have no desire to extinguish homo sapiens as a species. Quite the opposite, in fact. Our aim is to save both our species. There will be some losses, but that’s to be expected. We need hosts and we also require food. Humans are numerous enough on the planet that we will hardly make even a dent in the human population until several earth centuries have gone by. And once our numbers have grown and their numbers have shrunk, we can both live in perfect symbiosis.
Or at least that’s the theory. I’m just barely out of my larval stage but even I know a perfect merge is difficult. In my case, with Dr. Charles Foster it was nearly impossible. My host didn’t fight me in the slightest. Instead, he surrendered to me and every base urge he’d ever had. He assumed he’d gone insane or was dying, and either way he was free from any kind of personal responsibility. I am fortunate that he had little imagination and that his forays into criminality were mostly petty ones—some theft, cheating on his taxes, and flagrantly disobeying speed limits while driving. His worst offense—or at least the offence he felt the most guilt over, was his arrangement with the university football players that landed in one of his—our—classes. He would extract physical gratification from his victims in return for a satisfactory grade in the class.
Human sexuality is extremely complicated, I found observing Charles. He liked having unwilling partners—he found it exciting and more gratifying. Even stranger to me was the realization that sex, while adjacent to procreation for humans, is not at all the same thing. Humans really are quite remarkable creatures.
My first fully autonomous action as an adult is looking at myself in a mirror. I see my own green eyes staring back at me—physical proof that the merge has been successful. Excellent. It means my body is malleable enough for me to initiate Transformation.
Humans have classified themselves into a group of animals called mammals. They have live birth of their larva, which they term babies or infants, feed their young milk, are warm-blooded, and have hair or fur. Once adults, genuine transformation is somewhere between difficult and impossible. My species, on the other hand, are experts at transforming ourselves and I’ve taken that skill with me into this body.
This body is quite tall for his species but thin, so I sacrifice some of the height to broaden the chest and shoulders. There isn’t enough material for me to work with to add true bulk, but I am able to take existing fat cells and make them into muscle. By the time I’m done my body is more compact with fully delineated muscles. Charles pauses his sulking long enough to be incredulous at what the mirror shows. He makes an effort to regain control over our body, but it’s too little, too late. I am the master here now.
Next I deal with the mammalian hair. I’m tempted to eliminate all of it, but there is enough Charles left in here to be horrified at the idea. Instead, I content myself with eliminating the beard alone. I eliminate the hair on my head also, but only temporarily. I have it grow back into a style that is shorter and more practical. I also note that it’s far more attractive, based on the images I have seen heretofore through Charles’ eyes.
When I feel I’m done, another stray thought from Charles bubbles up to my consciousness. He wants me to enlarge this body’s penis. At first I find the idea nonsensical—the purpose of this modification is not immediately obvious—but Charles throws the equivalent of a psychic temper tantrum, so I give in to his strange whim.
From there all that’s left to do is window dressing. I obtain new clothes for my altered body and begin to build a proper nest. The last thing I do is to get new glasses—ones where the lenses are not corrective. I no longer need to improve my vision, but I think it would be wise to somewhat disguise the brilliance of my eyes. I also like the way the new frames look on my face. It is possible that a bit of Charles’ vanity has rubbed off onto me. Unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. Echoes of Charles will always remain.
I find myself looking forward to class on Monday. The material is simplicity itself—teaching it to human larvae will be challenging but far from impossible.
The face of Charles’ latest football player swims into my consciousness. I’m unsure how to proceed there. Having any kind of extraneous sexual contact with humans isn’t on our agenda. We’re here to save our race, not have unproductive sex with another species. The idea is ludicrous. I shall let the pupa know that the previous arrangement is no longer valid. This is most certainly the best way to move forward.
Inside me, Charles lets out the ghost of a grumble. It is, however, easily ignored.