By Akis Linardos
“We are not alone. We are outnumbered.”
– Paul de Kruif, microbiologist.
* * *
Our host, the girl, walks down heaps of junk, broken toys crushing beneath her leather boots. Toys she brought and smashed in this forsaken sector of the Academy. When she was still trying to resist our pull.
In her left hand, the girl holds a hose that splits in two—one end attached to a vacuum, one end squeezed through her mouth. In the tip of the hose there is a needle, finger-thick.
The girl steps over the man lost in delirium, muttering praise to his Lord of the Deep. She then stoops over the pale woman lying on the tarpaulin, redolent with the wonderful scent of decay. A smile worms on the girl’s face as she eyes the sweet vein trailing the woman’s neck.
She sticks the needle in and begins sucking blood.
* * *
When we first found the girl, she was still a fetus curled up inside her mother’s belly, who was in turn an infantile student in the Womb of Kingsport—an academy dedicated to the research of things the rest of humanity cowered from looking into. Of creatures that lurked in the deep. It was this institution through which we first made it into this world. A portal between our realms.
Her mother was too frail to carry at the time, sick with the clammy vapors that clung to this academy. The girl would not make it. The father, a student three years senior to the mother, had already decided she was not worth the risk. The mother thought otherwise. We know, because we were already there, inside the mother’s brain.
We were still young then, entombed in the white noise of spiking neurons and the warm liquid thickness of rushing blood, struggling to form thought patterns across our many entangled cells. The motifs of this plane of existence were akin to our own. It was what made the portal compatible, even if we had to collapse our ten dimensions into three.
We are a hyperintelligent species, knowing an infinity of things. We learn by unlearning. Like searching oysters in a shore of infinite sand, we scoop away redundant knowledge to focus on the information of necessity. The specific rules of the universe we invade. We soon uncovered the nuances of biology and chemistry formed by the limitations of this universe, then scavenged what we could. Our amoeba bodies molded with the axons of the mother neurons, our tendrils squeezed through the lipids and enwrapped natrium-calcium channels. We absorbed them into our own cell walls, forming our own action potentials. Our own networks.
We scrutinized the mother-brain, eventually replicated her firing patterns like we’d been born for that alone. First, speech comprehension. We did not need that to communicate with each other—we had far quicker methods for that—but understanding the world outside the cranium was important to sustain our liquid universe within.
It was also important for us to protect our future home, one that we already knew would be compatible, the offspring-brain. Like mother, like daughter, or so the humans say.
By the time we had grown simple enough to understand human speech, we had also realized that the father had to be eliminated.
* * *
Without a way to interact with the outer world yet, experimentation was necessary.
We copied patterns from fractals of the mother-brain. When we replicated olfactory senses, we learned the sweet and fruity odor of the glucose, and the saltiness of electrolytes in the cerebrospinal soup. When we formed clusters of light-sensitive cells and visual maps, we witnessed the neuron dendrites, branching throughout the sea of delicate brain matter.
We took note of the areas heating up with electric sparks every time a mother-arm moved, or a mother-leg, or the mother-neck. And soon we had duplicated the patterns of motor control, which we verified by forming a tiny limb-formation within the space between cranial cavity and cerebral cortex. Half as thin as a finger and quarter as long, shaped entirely of lipids we had absorbed. It pained the woman for weeks, a migraine that baffled the ignorant physicians of the Womb but for one: the worshiper of our Perverted Mother. The one who made the portal—whom we labeled Unpuppet, since we needed apply no chemical strings within his brain to use him.
Experiment successful, we made contact with an ally, Unpuppet, using this finger formed within the cranium to signify our presence. The medicine he gave her were pills hosting nutrients that crossed the brain-blood barrier, ripe for us to devour and grow stronger. Soon our grip on the mother-brain was absolute. Move left, we commanded, and the mother-body moved left. Move right. It moved right.
We had supplanted her motor control—yanking away her cells to add our own in cerebral cortex, the cerebellum, and basal ganglia. When we moved her arm, and her legs, and even twisted her neck, that was when we also learned how the amygdala works. And what human dread tastes like.
* * *
When we killed the father, we also learned what deep depression is. The mother was a great teacher to us. Revulsion, shock, regret. And we learned about a figure called God.
It was because the mother would not stop asking for forgiveness from this figure. We wondered where this figure was. We had made sure we were alone in that room. We ascertained all the doors were locked, the father fastened to the bed, his screams muffled with a gag. We knew no organism with echolocation present in the tunnels below. We had scrutinized the neocortex for all relevant information of the bunker inhabitants.
But the mother still believed someone was watching. It was a feeling akin to our adoration for the All-mother, and for a moment we felt sorrow, reflecting on how empty we would feel had our Perverted Mother not been omnipresent to answer our prayers.
We saw no value in unlearning to unearth further knowledge of this behavior. That is until her brain lashed out violently, going into psychosis, paralyzing parts of our connection with her. She had not regained control, but we partially lost it—the body was spasming on its own like there was a third occupant trying to strangle itself.
We acted fast to reverse the amygdala’s overwhelming effect. It was not only unbearable to her, it was unbearable to us. How her blood rushed quicker, suffocating some of us, how the electric sparks thundered and whooshed across the cranium.
In the verbal collection of her thoughts, we found the closest thing to describe the situation was a storm. And since lifeboats were not an option, we had to eliminate the source of the storm, which unlike human sailors, we had the capacity to do. We silenced parts of the amygdala and their connectors—everything that composed the patterns of her delusion, covering her fear that necessitated it as well. Apparently, delusion had been a defense mechanism for sanity preservation that had backfired.
Calm and docile now, the mother dragged the husband by the leg, pulled him up on the surgery table he had once used for his research on aquatic biology.
Without realizing, we had expanded to some parts of the mother’s temporal lobes, enough to hear the frogs squeaking against their glass prisons as we had now entered a lab. Here the father had conducted experiments on amphibians, hoping to replicate their nature of regenerating lost limbs. A gift we will happily provide to our hosts eventually.
There followed the grinding sounds of bonesaw as the mother chopped the father’s legs. One by one she placed them in polypropylene buckets of hydrofluoric acid, whose pungent, irritating odor speared through her nostrils. Until it entirely fried her olfactory senses.
This was a shame, because we had just gotten used to detecting scents of the human world, but since we planned to migrate to another host when the mother gave birth, it was not a substantial problem.
After she was done, the mother lay down in bed, for the first time after so many years alone. Relief in the quiet solitude of her bedsheets, the mother caressed her belly, and sleep came to her easily under our manipulation of the amygdala.
During the deepest parts of her slumber, however, tears leaked from her eyes. We supposed it was because we had ignored parts of her subconscious.
* * *
Unfortunately, we were not adept at covering our tracks as we lacked substantial understanding of the outer world. Our host, the mother, was arrested for crimes against the Womb, and was to be judged within the fortnight.
During the trials of the mother, we came to know the reason behind the naming of this institution. Unpuppet, our ally, defended her actions, accusing the father of hiding results from the society. In his speech, he presented the fundamentals that held their organization together. That the Womb of Kingsport was named thus because of its holy quest to uncover forbidden knowledge on cross-species reproduction. That the frogs were precious specimens gathered in the bay of Dagon, and the father had sought to defile them to create super-humans through transhumanist doctrine rather than furthering the understanding behind the mating of human and merfolk. Unpuppet made claims of a higher power that wanted equal procreation between those species rather than blatant theft of biological secrets from one side, which he accused the father of. His candor and emotional patterns were akin to how the mother thought of the godfigure, but there was no psychosis in him. We understood that what he thought as godfigure deep down was something he had witnessed with proof. It made sense that he was referring to our Perverted Mother, even if it was spoken in ambiguous ways that could easily mislead his listeners.
The Unpuppet was himself a puppetmaster among his own. One who used no chemistry manipulation but words alone to bend minds. A very useful ally for us, but although his rhetoric freed our host, it was not enough to rescue the mother. The fumes she’d ingested when she melted the father had fried more than her nostrils. Her lungs withered like roots within scorched earth.
* * *
By the time her heart gave in, we had migrated to her womb. A small colony of us had planted roots, and the rest of us followed. Before she died, we had used her hands to write instructions to Unpuppet. To discard the body not in the academy’s morgue, but upon the shoreline, near salt water. The Womb of Kingsport was built in the mountain of an island, and there was no shortage of cavernous bays that fit the purpose.
Unpuppet discarded the mother-body into a cave, tucked tight between a ridge, a river flowing through it and vanishing deep underground. He placed it vertical to this current, laying her feet within the water, per our instructions.
The umbilical cord was fully under our control, directing nutrients to the girl, but also spanning tumor-like appendages on the mother-legs as we willed. As crowds of tiny fish swarmed in and nibbled at the legs, we bulged the flesh from the feet soles, sprouting small tentacles that grabbed and absorbed them. We also sucked proteins, lipids, and all the ingredients of life from the upper part of the mother, the abandoned brain, the shrunken chest, deflating her to skeletal remains then picked calcium off the bone as well.
The corpse was headless by the time it gave birth to the girl.
* * *
The girl pushed upward from the mother-womb and burst through the atrophied chest before devouring the umbilical cord—untethering herself from the death that birthed her. Her mental functions advanced to that of a ten-year old child by the time she was ten minutes old. Although we had considered our grip on her solidified within the womb, the escalation of mental faculties our influence granted sparked rebellious machinations on the neural patterns where our touch had been neglected. It was a fine balance that we had to sustain, lest we lose control of her entirely, unlikely as that seemed then.
We fabricated a lie to enforce that, using what we had learned of God from her mother. We disembodied our own voice in her mind and claimed to be a figure that had chosen her for a grand purpose. Her purpose was indeed grand. She was to be the spark that causes a divine avalanche, but in the final design, she would remain as insignificant as a fleck of snow. That last part we kept secret.
* * *
For the coming days, the girl fed on the schools of fish, snatching them off the waters with reflexes more feline than human. When Unpuppet returned, he prostrated himself before her, singing hymns in rapturous piety before her pale form. This is when we realized that despite his usefulness, Unpuppet had been misled. His songs praised the being Dagon, whose offspring merfolk had been the study of this Womb institution. We had assumed Unpuppet a cunning spy working for the Perverted Mother, but he was a zealot of another covenant that accidentally stumbled on our deity without realizing.
With the girl’s baby-voice, we requested pen and paper. With her baby-hands we crudely scribbled instructions but omitted to explain that at the height of his intelligence, he committed hubris as he messed with things beyond his capacity. Part of us pitied him, an emotion we had learned in our time studying humans, but he was too useful to discard yet.
Unpuppet found us a foster mother, a docile maid to the institution, faithful to Dagon and craving a child as much as the appreciation of the Lord of the Deep. She was happy to worship and caretake the girl, which Unpuppet presented as the Avatar of Dagon.
By the time the girl reached her five years of age, she had learned enough of the world to surmise our true intentions and her own irrelevance. Rippling with existential dread, she smashed all her toys, the gifts the maid brought her, as she grasped her own temples, scratching her skin hoping against hope to kick us out. We made ourselves invisible for a while, fooling her that it worked, until we eased her dopamine receptors, to accept our presence as a positive.
By the time the girl reached her tenth year of age, she had the intellect and wisdom of fifteen sages. Wise enough to know the struggle to resist our pull was pointless. We are the Perverted Mother’s children. Our will is absolute.
As she grew to accept this, we finally named her: Puppet One.
#
Unpuppet granted her entry to all of his labs. A prominent researcher and instructor of the Womb, but above all, eager to follow our every command. Having understood how humans crave to fill the gap in their brain with conjurings of god, we wondered if his infatuation was not with Dagon but with the very idea of divinity, and that should we come to instruct him on the Perverted Mother, he’d embrace Her with equal rapture. Such musings remained imaginings, as we had no real interest in performing this experiment. The way he glorified Dagon had sullied the taste of his piety, and should our assumption hold true, he’d be nothing more than a whore of worship, sticking to whatever superior being glanced his way.
We focused on using him then, gaining access to the devices he had put together to dissect merfolk matter, with his crown jewel being the womb of a mer-mother. What we required was the vessel that hosted this merfolk womb: a broad tube-shaped tank to fit organic matter while sustaining its biological function. We bid him modify it, so that with a few months of working out our blueprints, we had a device that could house multiple brains to host us, and tube appendages from which we would flow in and out of the device. It would be our machine of proliferation, to infect other living creatures with.
One by one, we isolated his students, drugged them using potions they themselves taught us. We guided the girl’s hand at surgery, taught her to slice skin delicately, drill holes in the skull, and excise the content as delicate as removing yolk from egg without breaking it. Those brains in turn would be moved into the vessel.
We thought the girl acted as a puppet, and that our control over her was complete, but we soon discovered that her amygdala was inactive even without our repression. The dopamine receptors were thriving. The truth was puzzling, but it was impossible to deny.
The girl was enjoying this with the wholeness of her soul.
* * *
We realized our control was waning when the girl rejected the numbered name we gave her and called herself Paledoll. She didn’t mind our control but refused to be insignificant.
It was an interesting occurrence, how she had come to untether parts of herself from us. In the culmination of knowledge we had imparted to her, there was a permutation of wisdom that still eluded us at the time: She simply did not care for our control.
In not caring, the neurons of worry we had learned to rely on atrophied. It was unlike human behavior we had examined before. She did not deviate from our desires, and we allowed her to indulge her own dark urges, as it served our purposes equally. She drank the blood of our victims as if it was finely aged wine. The girl had acquired a taste for the liquid of life from her time in the cave, and her thirst had only grown since then.
We were uncertain if, in our manipulation of the mother, we had inadvertently affected the genotype of the daughter in a way that caused these divergences. Or that perhaps the currents of chance that control creation played a trick at everyone.
Whatever the case, the girl was devout to the Perverted Mother. She created the device as we instructed:
A host tank with six brains for some of us to migrate and multiply. A set of flexible tubes with needles through which to pierce skin and infect living tissue.
We had reinforced the girl’s muscle so she could carry the machine with straps over her chest. Her appetite for murder combined with her rickety loyalty would allow us to distribute and multiply in a steady manner.
The only error on our part: we still underestimated how deep her craving for blood was.
* * *
By the time the girl stops siphoning blood, the woman is a corpse as shriveled as a raisin. With the liquid of life on her lips, she whispers in the air, “Witness me, Perverted Mother.”
The girl does not resist our pull. She doesn’t have to. We learned this the hard way. Parts of us scatter out of the woman, retreat to the pipe the girl is sucking from to rejoin us.
Another vessel the girl couldn’t resist sucking to death, making it useless to us. But she is insatiable and soon will find more.
She strays her gaze to the man she skipped over: the Unpuppet lies in delirium some feet besides the broken toys—still deluded that he sacrifices himself for a purpose his Lord had meant for him. Our grip on him will soon be absolute, and he’ll forget the Dagon. This underwater deity who never cared to answer this fool’s prayers.
Unlike him, the girl, Paledoll, is blessed to be special. She will plant our seeds across the Womb and turn it into the birthplace of our divine pestilence.
For once, this institution will earn its name.
* * *
In a cove of a Greek island, Akis was born a rather peculiar infant and has only grown stranger every year. By day, he’s a researcher of biomedical AI and ethics, hoping there’s something less dystopian to come from this technology. His words have wormed their way into Apex Magazine, Gamut, Strange Horizons, Flame Tree, and Uncharted, among others. Visit his website for updates on his dreadful machinations: https://linktr.ee/akislinardos