The Shift, Part Two

<<THANK>> It had said. But it wasn’t an it, it was a them.

The voice that spoke to me belonged to the multitudes that now inhabit me.

What I thought was a single speaker was the amalgamation of their will, transmitted to my auditory cortex through the biomechanical symbiote transplanted into my ear drum.

I had felt the disruption of my ear drum but was not conscious of it burrowing into my brain.

I thought it was a headache at the time, one due to the stress of first contact.

A headache that started in my ear and spread inward.

I know, I know, I should have known.

It lives there now. Thrives, really.

Warmed by my homeostatic mechanisms and fed by glucose in my blood stream, the symbiote was a bioengineered lesser lifeform from their planet; an implantable biological translation program.

Cool right? Well… not cool. It still makes my skin crawl, but I gotta appreciate the ingenuity. Only thing keeping me sane is intellectualizing all this shit.

While they had no plans of releasing me, they didn’t have a problem with me learning about them. Data, it seemed, belonged to all, even lesser life forms, like humans. As a result, I learned a lot about them in the two weeks after they infested my gastrointestinal tract.

They had considered many modalities to introduce themselves into my anatomy.

First, was intravenous injection. Which, even to me, makes the most sense.

They are microscopic organisms, somewhat larger than red blood cells. They are carbon based, metabolize sugars, but generate their own oxygen, therefore can survive in my circulatory system without parasitizing hemoglobin. Blood seemed to be the best option.

But they didn’t expect a primitive race to have evolved a means to prevent-supramolecular transport from the blood into the brain.

They were impressed, but not discouraged.

They had considered direct transmission through the ear drum, like the symbiote. But after their initial experiments, they realized the brain made excellent substrate for reproduction—they would reserve that for when they were ready to disseminate.

So, they tested their last route, and the one they ended up going with—introduction through the GI tract.

Now, this isn’t the route anyone would’ve predicted an alien parasite would’ve taken to infest humans.

Gastric acid is noxious stuff, capable of dismantling all biological matter to its molecular components. So why didn’t it digest the aliens?

They had the luck of evolving in a highly acidic environment, though they eventually developed tech to reduce its effect on them so they could devote more energy to intellectual, sociological, and technological advancement.

The gastro-intestinal tract was not just “home-y” it also ended up being the most practical option—direct access to nutrients, consistent blood flow to maintain temperature compatible with their metabolism, and, most importantly, the gut-brain axis.

If the scientific community had fully embraced the connection between the GI tract and the central nervous system, it’s possible they would’ve invented ways to prevent biohacking through the gut. But they didn’t, and the Collective discovered it’s potential first.

Turns out, they didn’t need to be inside my brain to control it.

Lucky me.

So that brings me to why I am still “here.”

Turns out what they thought of as solitary consciousness, aka a human being, was of extreme interest to them.

They didn’t need to keep me aware, but they wanted to, sick buggers.

Once they realized that I was more similar than dissimilar to them, what with being a multi-cellular being with a unified consciousness, they investigated what made us so war-like. Where they lived in collective harmony, we fought each other consistently throughout our history.

Turns out emotions are what separate the Collective and humanity. Yeah, that’s right, emotions are what drive us to war. Surprising, isn’t it…

So, they took a deep dive into my emotions, primarily fear. That interested them the most, though that’s probably because it was the first emotion they encountered when they infested me.

They had discovered the limbic system and the pre-frontal cortex through prior experiments during scouting missions but didn’t waste time on infestation as they were still developing the tech for that.

Until I stupidly wandered into the world-ship, they had no clue what these structures did.

It was only after they were inside me that they got their first taste of cortisol. Turns out they thrive on it.

As I was absolutely out of my mind with terror and in pain, my system was flush with cortisol. They could sense the effect of it in my gut and wanted to know more.

There was no blood-gut barrier that kept them from accessing the blood stream, but they decided to poke me with needles anyways to more easily access hormonal regulation.

Again, they are sick, sick buggers.

They then tracked cortisol back to the adrenals and then from the sympathetics to the brain, or just before the brain.

The one saving grace of the human nervous system is that retrograde transmission rarely works, especially for something as large as the Collective. Otherwise they would’ve use the brain as a pool and the blood stream as a slip n’ slide.

As it turns out, the two-neuron pathway or “freeway” from viscera to brain makes for an amazing joy-ride. It’s almost like we were a playground evolved for their enjoyment.

From there, they opened my skull, inserted electrodes (which were antennae of another lesser creature from their home world) and found the amygdala.

They then had—what I can only imagine was—an absolute blast, triggering emotions through my pre-frontal cortex, and joy riding cortisol throughout my body.

Unfortunately for them, they abused this process to the extent that I nearly lost my mind (this time figuratively) and the level of stress they provoked nearly killed me from Takitsubo’s cardiomyopathy, an unseen byproduct of a near constant stress state.

Since then, they took a step back and have been working on my hippocampus.

Memories are almost as interesting as emotions and fear to them.

Which takes us to now.

I am a shell, or as good as one. They have accessed my memories, catalogued them, and are using them in what I’m calling “strategy meetings” on the best way to take over the planet.

Up to this point my body and mind have been a source of entertainment and a wealth of data to mine.

Next stage is for them to use me like a mobile-home/transformer—their trial run for acting human.

I can’t wait.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed part two, check out part three below.

The Shift, Part Three