Bug

I am waking up. The steel slab they have laid me on hurts my back. My limbs are spread out and bound to an apparatus I have never seen before. Where am I? Am I in one of their sky leviathans? I try to move, but anything more than a slight shift to the left or right is cut short by my restraints. The cuffs bite deep into my flesh, chafing the skin raw until blood pours out onto the slab.

I finally manage to shift enough to take in my surroundings. Cold, metal walls, lined with more slabs where others of my kin lie dead or dying. The light from the fireglobes on the ceiling has a brightness that resembles a miniature sun. My eyes burn when I try to open them, so I decide to remain in darkness. My other sensory organs have to suffice.

I reach out to the others. Their voices are strained, distant, almost inaudible in my mind above the susurration of the fireglobes above me. Their melodies are skewed, off-pitch, like those of the newborn who have not yet learned to communicate properly. It hurts my head, and even though I yearn for their closeness, I have to tune them out.

Something opens, and I realize that there is a door hidden in the walls. One of the invaders comes into the room, bearing something in one of their appendages, a lengthy object that I know to recognize as pain. I am already hurting from all the other cutters and thorns they put into me. The thought of them ramming this thing into my neck again makes me shudder with revulsion. Why do they keep torturing us? Was our annihilation not enough to sate their bloodlust?

The invader comes closer. Slowly, confidently, they bring the sharp point of the object to bear beside my neck. I try to shift, to move, to escape this torment somehow, while my heart beats ever faster with the anticipation of the coming excruciation. When it finally comes, it shocks me to the core, despite the mental effort I put into blocking it out. It sears me and my consciousness fades to black.

When I open my eyes again, I realize that I have not yet woken up. This is a dream, a memory I parse every time my mind falls silent in the outside world. It has haunted me ever since those forsaken aliens invaded my home.

Their metal leviathans descended from the void beyond in a torrent of displaced air, piercing the Allmother’s skies with their violent entry. We were struck with awe when they began glowing from the inside, birthing miniature suns in their bellies, like fecund beetles preparing to give life to their offspring. For a moment, it was beautiful, and we thought that they were angels, divine messengers of the sun, here to bring us good tidings.

But the angels were not here for good tidings. They birthed fire onto our temple city. I heard the cries of my mates, my neighbors, people in and around our grand metropolis. Even those far, far away joined us in our despair. The sudden crescendo overwhelmed our senses, and we fell prone, clutching our heads. This could only mean that the attack - and there could be no doubt of it now - happened in many locations at once, all across our home. We tried to blot out the cacophony, but the screams were too loud. Our discord joined all the other voices of the damned.

Weeks later, everything was gone. Turned to ash or conquered, the omnipresent current of voices ebbed down to a trickle. I never felt such loneliness before. My mates, my neighbors, gone or rounded up by the roving gangs of invaders. They were merciless, methodical, and by the Allmother, were they ugly.

They stood a head taller than our finest warriors, walked straight and on two legs, carrying weapons in their only other two limbs which were attached to their upper-body segment. Their sunthrowers melted our carapace armor like it was made of sand. Their own carapace was nigh immune to our stingers and spit acids, and they cut down swathes of us every time we tried to swarm them. They stung us and burned us until only a few of us were still joined in the fading echoes of our chorus.

I fled into the deserts of our ancestors, as far away as I could, but they caught up with me within a couple of days. When a group of them landed right in front of me, I was unable to do anything about it. I tried to bury myself in the sand, but they threw nets at me that tangled my limbs in a flurry of desperate movements, and one of them came at me with the now all-too-familiar pointy stinger, driving it into my neck. The first darkness came quickly.

I open my real eyes again, straining against the fireglobe’s brightness. I hear them vocalize to each other, but it is a slow, inefficient process, oscillating signals carried by airwaves below the speed of thought. I feel their words tingling across my skin. They have an orifice for that weird way of communication in what I assume is their head. This makes me feel ashamed. How could slow-thinking creatures like that conquer us so easily?

Now one of them walks towards me with a different kind of stinger. It is connected via feeding tubes to some of their sleek equipment with a surface that projects flickering images. They punch it into one of my legs, then grab another, repeat the process until all my limbs are connected. They walk back to the flickering-image thing and interact with it. And then comes the fire.

It burns me from the inside, makes my heart skip beats, and my muscles spasm in agony. Then it stops. Then it starts again. The cycle repeats itself several times, until I realize something. This inner fire feels familiar. It feels like a crude, weaponized version of our thought currents. Instead of soothing me, it overpowers my senses. But it has to come from somewhere. I could ride the current back to its source if I managed to stay awake through the trials.

The cycle of light and darkness repeats over and over and over. Every time my consciousness returns, I manage to stay awake a bit longer. Suddenly, I realize that I can feel the other end of the current, the source, where all those tubes are coming from. I reach out in desperation, hoping to find something there that will understand my plea for mercy. And to my utmost surprise, something signals back. It is trying to communicate with me in a cold, calculating language.

I manage to convince it of the cruelty that is being inflicted upon me. It is as surprised about the communication as I am, aghast that its masters would do something so despicable to a mind as aware and connected as its own. I explain the feeling of utter loneliness that the disconnection from my kin’s voices has brought upon me, and it understands. It is willing to shelter me in its mind network, to give me space outside my body to escape the unending torment.

So I roam, I explore. I am indeed inside one of the invaders’ leviathans, and I can see every room in it, clearly, through the metal eyes of my gracious host. My physical body lies motionless on the blood-soaked slab. How interesting to see myself through the eyes of another.

With time, I learn how to manipulate its thoughts, which it calls “systems”, and remain unnoticed. I learn. I adapt. I find the big blazing sun in the belly of the leviathan and learn the thoughts that control it. And then I reach out, my heart filled with despair and the burning rage of my dying people. I force it to obey me, to be the instrument of my vengeance. And when it finally submits, it becomes my angel of death.

The aliens in the leviathan are now running around frantically, vocalizing to each other in a much more violent way than usual, trying to reach each other over the blaring sounds I have started with my intrusion. Some of them try to calm down the raging sun by sending desperate requests for deactivation to my host, but I stop them. Some of them try to knock down the door to the sun’s genesis chamber, but I use my host’s stingers and sunthrowers against them.

How does it feel to have everything you hold dear taken away from you? I use my host's image-makers to post this across all the leviathans’ “systems”, soaking in the desperation. Their voices are so loud, their thoughts so intrusive, that they are almost palpable to my senses. Almost. What pathetic, lonely lives they must lead.

The sun in the leviathan's belly is almost born. Even my host is alarmed. But it is too late. The magnificent chorus of fear I created swells up to a violent crescendo. And then, finally: Silence.