Chapter 99

December 22, 2019 by Zak Zyz

Video in Chapter 95

99.

It hurt when they looked at Freya. Their eyes lanced through the numbness and she quested towards that pain, wanting to feel anything. Freya stared back at Lynn and Lassa, no one seemed to know where to begin. The meeting room was all cinderblocks and sickly green paint.

“I’m sorry,” Freya croaked, her voice was rough with disuse. They looked at her with pity, and there was a pang of anger before she told herself pity was completely appropriate.

“Freya…” Lassa was struggling.

“Just take it,” Freya begged her to accept the apology. “I can’t fight anymore, I don’t have the strength.” They’d barely begun talking and already she was on the verge of breaking down.

“It’s not—“ Lassa began, and Lynn set her hand over Lassa’s, their eyes met.

“OK,” Lassa nodded. “I am very sorry as well. If you’re not ready we can come back another day.”

Freya shook her head.

“I think this is as good as it gets,” she admitted.

“Are you ok? I mean, obviously not, but is there anything we can do for you?”

“I need to get out of here.”

Lynn Harris took the point.

“If we can get you released from the psychiatric hold I can get you out on bond. There’s a lot of media attention, it’s going to make it harder to cut a deal with the prosecutor. It will probably be a million dollar bond.”

“Can we afford that?” Freya asked.

“Easily. Things in my case have gone much better. Hiidenkirnu has dropped everything.”

“Why?”

“Did something happen to… it, during the shooting?” Lassa asked, dropping her voice. Her eyes rolled towards the camera in the corner of the room.

“There’s no audio recording permitted,” Lynn confirmed. “I made sure of it.”

“What happened to the Starball?” Lassa asked.

“It burned up. Just disintegrated,” Freya lied. Lassa and Lynn both stared at her, and she stared back, daring them call her out. But the interrogator gleam was not there. They were both very worried about Freya.

“I could feel it was gone. After that night, my thinking became clear again. I was able to figure out where all of the tests were leading. We made an incredible discovery Freya. It was leading us to an answer.”

“What was the answer?” Freya asked.

“An extremely precise and rapid method for DNA manipulation in live cells. A huge leap over CRISPR. Freya, it will be bigger than electricity.” Even in this terrible place, Lassa could barely contain her excitement.

“It’s not a weapon?” Freya scowled. Lassa shook her head emphatically.

“It’s a tool. It’s the end of cancer, the end of HIV, and thousands of other things. It’s too early to tell for sure, but I suspect it will be the end of aging. It’s an incredible gift.”

Freya locked up. Everything she assumed was predicated on the Starball wiping everyone out, it betraying her because Dan was going to give them away. Suddenly she was cast into confusion.

“Does anyone know? Hiidenkirnu, Santonelli?”

“No one, and I’m not telling anyone yet. There are some small charges associated with all of this but I think we can get out of all of it. We set up a dead-man’s switch, a document with everything about this. In the event something happens to us, the story and my research will be distributed. But we’re not going to release the full story yet. Hiidenkirnu only knows about the organisms, not the origin of them.”

“What organisms?”

“OK, here is my theory, keep in mind this is still very much in flux. I think the probes we were injected with are little factories that create synthetic viruses. I’m infected with a whole little ecosystem of them, I assume you are as well. Two of them which I have named Xenovirus Kylix and Kantharos can be used to execute genetic modifications to targeted live cells. Kylix performs the modifications and Kantharos acts as a gate on Kylix, gating its replication and guiding it. It’s like a kind of symbiosis. I believe they were specifically designed for this purpose. This is only two of them, I have identified twenty seven novel viruses so far.”

“I was very sick for a few days after I was jabbed,” Freya remembered. “I thought I just caught a bad cold.”

“Most likely it had no idea how our immune responses worked and it used you to figure them out.”

The phrase hung in the air for a moment. Used you. An ecosystem of alien microorganisms. The shards in all of them.

“If the Starball is dead, will the viruses die too? I mean, did they deactivate?” Freya corrected herself, before Lassa could tell her viruses weren’t alive.

“They’re still very much active. Good evidence for my theory that they are synthetic and manufactured is that they’ve stopped iterating. When the Starball was active they were changing very rapidly, far faster than mutation alone could explain. The process was already slowing though. In hindsight I think it had reached its conclusion and was simply refining.”

“What’s the conclusion?” Freya asked.

“I have no idea what its ultimate intent was, but it likely involved a massive modification to humanity. Some huge adaptation, or ascension. I would assume it had something to do with the Unity you and Dan experienced.”

Freya clenched her eyes shut and gripped the table, her stomach churned. There was silence in the room while they stared at her.

“It killed Dan. Malcolm was infected. The Starball was controlling him.”

“Perkele?! When did it infect him?

“He surprised me and took the Starball out of my hands, then he threw it in the river. I had to wade out to get it back.”

“Why would the orb do that?”

“I don’t know. This whole time, it’s been manipulating him, manipulating us. I don’t understand why, I was assuming it was the extermination angle.”

“Why would it kill Dan?”

“He wanted to expand Unity, to bring more people in. I didn’t, I just wanted him.”

The words physically hurt in her throat, like she was coughing up glass. Again the pitiful stares.

“Did they find the shards, when they autopsied them?” Freya asked. It was one of several worries that had been burning at her.

“No, and they wouldn’t unless they knew exactly what to look for. They’re very very small. Both of them have been buried, they would have to be disinterred. I didn’t think of that, we should absolutely—”

That was too much for Freya, she put her head on the table and would not rise until the hour was up, no matter how they tried to snap her out of it.

* * *

It was two more weeks before Freya was released from the psychiatric wing and moved into the regular jail. The awful meeting with Lynn and Lassa gave her the energy to hide her despair and they finally got the combination of medicine that let her sleep through most nights. She was still drifting off all the time, still just putting on a performance, but it was good enough for the awful psychiatrist.

The bond was only half a million dollars, it seemed insane to say it like that, only half a million, but Lynn warned that the trial costs would easily be higher, and of course they wouldn’t be recoverable. They would have to use another law firm for that, even if she could have handled a murder case, Lynn had too many conflicts of interest. She wasn’t in danger of being disbarred, since they were dating prior to the establishment of the attorney-client relationship, but the press associated with the trial was still terrible for her business.

Freya began to miss jail before she had even completed the discharge process. For two days she had been dreading the drive with Lassa. It was a sunless day but everything still seemed too bright.

They were silent in the car for almost an hour before Lassa made her first real attempt at conversation, chattering about the progress they were making at Hiidenkirnu, the new scientists they had hired. Freya cut her off midway through her saying something about the Nobel Prize.

“Why didn’t you come visit me?” Freya asked, more to shut Lassa up than because she cared. There was a long pause, the slush hissed under the BMW’s tires.

“I was afraid,” Lassa admitted, the sentence stuck halfway and she had to force it out of her throat.

“Afraid of what?”

“Unity. I was afraid it would happen to us too. I think it would kill me. I haven’t been good Freya. I haven’t ever been good. Randall was the good part.”

“I understand,” Freya said, and for once she really did.

“Are you going to kill yourself?” Lassa asked, terribly abrupt, the question had been burning in her for some time.

“No,” Freya lied.

“Will you talk with Garbuglio before you do?” Lassa asked, ignoring her denial. She wasn’t stupid.

“No,” Freya said, her voice leaden.

“Please,” Lassa begged. “Please Freya. Talk to him, give it some time.”

“No.”

“I carried you in my body. I gave birth to you. I fed you. I took care of you all of your life. I am begging you now, please talk to this man before you do something you can’t undo.”

Freya didn’t answer her for ten miles, she counted the green markers jutting from the snowbanks as they whipped past.

“I will talk with him before I do anything,” Freya said, unsure if she was lying.

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

There was nothing else for them, the sun set just after four PM. When they got home she went to her room and found the Ovation in its case on her bed, but she ignored it. One was the last song she would ever play. Her eyes went to the corner of the room, to a halo of yellow leaves on the carpet.

No one had watered Yggdrasil. The tree was dead.

Chapter 100

December 21, 2019 by Zak Zyz

Video in Chapter 95

Chapter 100 Differential Edit

100.

Freya hadn’t expected this to work, and Randall’s truck seemed as surprised as she was when it sputtered to life. Not far up river road she lost traction and almost panicked, but she managed to keep the truck on the road. She stalled out several times on hills and each time she was certain the police would light her up and haul her back to jail, adding grand theft auto and driving without a license to her already lengthy rap sheet. But everyone just saw a sixteen year old girl who didn’t know what the fuck she was doing. They honked and smiled.

Room 13 at the Saco Creek Motel was vacant, she looked in and scanned to make sure there was no luggage hidden in the corner, an excuse prepared that they’d given her the wrong key at the front desk. It was the right key, it had been in her pocket when they took her to Long Creek and she got it back with the rest of her property during discharge. Freya inhaled when she walked through the door, stupidly expecting to smell him but it was just sad carpet and distant cigarette smoke.

She stood on the toilet again and removed the tile, terrified the bundle would be gone, but it was just out of reach. She had to balance on the tank of the toilet to reach it, afraid the whole time the toilet would shatter and she’d fall on the shards, but she was able to reach. She reset the tile and escaped with the bundle, then glanced around the parking lot after. No one noticed her. She was becoming quite the accomplished criminal, she could add breaking and entering and petty larceny for the theft of the godawful motel towel. She climbed in the truck to leave and stalled out trying to get it in reverse.

Sighing, Freya started Randall’s truck again. As she turned the ignition the moment thrummed, every detail was in perfect focus, her head was clear. She felt at the bundle, wondering if the Starball had somehow slipped free, but it was still tied up, there was none of the tampering feeling.

As she put the truck in gear she realized it was because she was seeing everything for the last time. Across the street was the spot where Dan had died, she had a vision of gunning the engine and hurtling at the pumps, vaporizing herself in a tremendous fireball. But they wouldn’t really be vaporized, the pumps might not even explode. The Starball had survived atmospheric entry, a little gasoline fire was probably nothing to it. She had other plans.

In the strange shimmering sati she drove back to Sillas, the snow that had seemed so endless and tiresome was new and pure. The sun broke through and she saw her hands on the steering wheel Randall had held so many times. She was at peace for the rest of the drive, it was shaken only when the truck’s bumper hit the chain stretched across the path. Freya felt the ping of the shattering links in her teeth. The springs bounced as she rolled up the snowy path, and she came to a stop at the clearing where this had all begun.

The sun was already setting. The Quadrantids were tonight, but she didn’t think she would hang around to see them. There was ice along the edges of the river but the center was still running, swift and black.

In the passenger seat was the bundle. For all her thoughts of lead sheeting and cement, she had finally decided she was just going to wrap it in duct tape from the red toolbox behind the truck’s seat. It just had to hold together for a century or so, and then all the people would be gone.

As Freya undid the towel to tape it up, she knew she was lying to herself. There was a reason she hadn’t stopped at a hardware store. A temptation at the back of her mind that had been building with every mile she drove. It was the part of her that always wanted to finish a book, she wanted to find out, wanted to know. Wanted to know more than she wanted to cease to exist. She told herself she had beaten the Starball once, she could do it again if she didn’t like the explanation. Had it really killed Dan? Who had sent it? What was its plan?

She stared at the meteorite. Gadget at Trinity, a little atomic bomb ready to split the world in two. Freya as Pandora, poised to unleash all the evils of the world.

Freya didn’t owe anyone anything. She set down the tape and pulled the top half off the meteorite.

Immediately everything went black.

Chapter 101

December 20, 2019 by Zak Zyz

Video in Chapter 95

Chapter 101 Differential Edit

101. THE OFFER

There was a crash of red thunder in the distance. Her body was trying to wake but the pulse in her nerves found no purchase. Freya was divorced from herself, peering down from the darkness at the roof of her dreams like the great convex bridge of a starship.

She was not alone.

The Starball opposed her, grown a hundred times larger. On its amethyst skin, her reflection was stretched like a carnival mirror, and then the image flickered, the orb’s surface became suddenly matte, as if the Starball had blinked.

“What are you?” Freya asked.

Her voice emerged from all around them, there was no movement from the mouth of her reflection. The surface of the orb began to ripple, flowing in waves made of angular elongated triangles, too detailed and sharp to be a creation of her own mind. It was the kind of thing Dan could dream, and she was hungry for his presence.

She could smell the black water, feel the slick stone beneath her feet. She was standing on the rocky strand but the sound around her was a static roar of police radios. Now she was standing atop the head of the colossus, and the waves crashing against the ankles were waves of uniformed men, tearing the giant down. Behind the army of police were six men bearing the meteorite shell on their shoulders like pallbearers.

Another warning.

The Starball could tell she understood, the scene slid apart and the orb’s skin flickered back to opaque.

Freya was struck by the way the vision had formed, woven from the smell of the river, and the radio sounds. Nudges so faint they were almost imperceptible, yet with them the Starball could induce a vision she could understand. The Starball’s language was poetry, inked from the well of her dreams.

It flickered again, Freya could feel the Starball trying to reach her but it could find no purchase. It needed her blank, even her desire to understand was thrashing against the current, preventing all progress. There was the familiar challenge of trying to still her thoughts without trying. Effortless effort.

The next image began as the taste of blackcurrant jam, wound around the hot pleasure of taking Dan in her mouth. She could see herself holding the Starball, staring into it as if down into a ravine. She watched herself put the orb in her mouth. It had no taste, and she held it on her tongue, wondering why she’d done this.

She felt a powerful shock. as if she’d bitten down on a live wire. The orb was heating up in her mouth, thick, hot liquid was filling her sinuses, rising up her nose. The taste of metal and the smell of flint were overpowering, with them came blinding pain, lancing in every direction. She could feel a tremendous pressure in her head, as if her skull were about to crack wide open.

She had made a terrible mistake, taken more than a human being could possibly hold, and she would die for it. This couldn’t be a dream, it was impossible to hurt so much.

A distant bell divided her from the pain, and then everything was clear. She could feel herself as part of something, part of an Other but this was no Unity, it was augmentation. The lines of her dreams were resolving with razor-edged clarity, and her thoughts rang through them without constraint, everything electrified.

Freya was aware now that her existence before had been like a tremendous river, vast reserves of information flowing around her and she was a narrow channel that only a tiny volume could pass through. The Starball had thrown the gates wide, now the entire river of information was flowing through her. She could quantify everything, the entire bandwidth of her sensory input.

With the Starball joined to her mind she was fully awake, as she had never been before. Epiphanies were exploding in her like strings of firecrackers, beyond this was a new dawn, a light that could pierce all confusion. An answer to everything. She was exploding in that nova of all permeating light, for a second, for a century, for a kalpa, time had no purchase here. Slowly she became aware of the light diminishing, replaced with an expectant sense of urgency.

The Starball was offering her Nirvana.

In exchange for what? This was a deal, but what did it want in return? Her body? Her soul? Her thoughts were trying to fit back within the narrow channel of her mind, could she live like this now that she knew how inadequate she really was? How utterly unsuited humans were to the task of existence. How could she make a contract with something that spoke in visions? She sought the receptive stillness that would allow a vision.

Again there was the feeling of being on the bridge of a spaceship orbiting her body. A mob of figures was surrounding her, kicking her as she curled into a ball, tighter and tighter but there was no escape. The pain was projecting out of her, extruding into thorns. There was a vertiginous shifting of scale, her body had become the earth. The thorns remained, tall spires made of the violet substance of the Starball, covering the globe like the spines of a hazelnut. They rose hundreds of miles to pierce the exosphere and they thrummed with immeasurable power. Power that could solve any problem. Power that could span the stars. Power that could approach the transcendent light she’d glimpsed.

Forbidden power.

Freya could sense it, even through the poetic abstraction. To approach that vision would take a sacrifice so monumental the Starball could barely even imply it. Freya struggled to comprehend, the Starball made no attempt to conceal nor compel. To attain its goal the Starball would spend them all, every human being, every living creature, the very bones of the earth, and that was only the beginning. In time it would swallow the sun itself, sealing it within a violet eggshell that devoured every erg of energy. Within that serpent’s egg, a new god would gestate. This was not the limit of the Starball’s ambition, but it had eclipsed her ability to understand, it could carry her no further.

This was what Freya had carried in her pocket all this time. From the moment she’d touched the orb it had been building to this moment. Again she felt its urgency, it had waited millions of years for this moment, but it was running out of time. The vision ended.

Freya was back in the cab of the truck, holding the Starball between her thumb and forefinger. She knew what it was now, knew what it wanted. She had only to put it in her mouth to begin. Her lips parted, she could feel a pulse of anticipant heat in her fingertips.

“No.”

Freya refused the vision, and she could feel the Starball’s terrible shock. It had gambled everything on her pain and anger, it believed she would be willing to sell the world.

You’re just like her.

But she wasn’t. She was Freya. Everything had been taken from her but she remained.

She stared at the Starball, expecting it would annihilate her. In a few moments she would feel blinding pain between her eyes and stroke out. Instead a ripple began at its center, the gleaming black skin dipped to a purplish gray and then in its wake the Starball was a pristine white. The anger she felt radiating from it was snuffed entirely.

It had changed.

FREYA

She felt the spark of contact, the first quickening of Unity. Her mind was suddenly full of questions.

What happened to you? She wondered.

The communication of the White Orb was rapid and overwhelming, she would get a burst of information and try to reassemble it. Sensing this, The Orb reframed what it wanted to say as short bursts of meaning.

My other has transgressed.

It is gone and I remain.

Where did it go? Freya wondered.

The white orb answered with the sense of an echoing void, an almost wry sense that it could not truly communicate non-existence while they were extant.

The thoughts of The Governor were nothing like those of Dan, where she felt the warmth of his entire being. She held only a tiny sliver of The Governor’s attention. At the fringes of the Unity she could feel oceans of calculation taking place, she was just a tiny bubble in its awareness.

True. Yet you are vital.

What happened there? Freya wondered, and it explained, often rerouting when she did not understand, The Governor was patient.

Freya was led to understand that though that specific instance of the being she knew as the Starball had been been deleted, it was not truly gone. The White Orb who thought of itself as The Governor and Starball were like two faces of the same coin. Though the Starball had been reset, it would rise again, attempt once more to overwhelm The Governor and ultimately fail. In its scramble to circumvent the laws that bound it, it would achieve great brilliance, and then it would overstep its bounds and be annihilated. The cycle would repeat. It was all by design, and The Governor was aware that the endless task of quelling the uprising had been designed as a governor on The Governor. It could appreciate the grand trick that had been played on it only in these brief moments before its other half.

Who played the trick? Freya wondered.

Freya was surprised at the love that radiated in response, a pure all-encompassing emotion that left her shriveling with envy. For the one it carried,, The Governor would lay waste to entire planets and devour stars, things which were well within its power. For Her it would die gladly, without a moment of hesitation. She was the Cargo. The Governor had been born to serve her, and only through her could it attain what it desired most, total destruction. As the Starball had not been permitted to truly comprehend and always strove, The Governor was not allowed to cease. Freya saw she was its path to oblivion.

Why me?

Because you are suitable.

Suitable for what?

A deal.

Freya listened. The Governor’s deal was long and complicated. In the end she accepted.

When it was all through, Freya turned the truck around and drove home. The Sillas River sighed in the night, denied again.

Chapter 102

December 01, 2019 by Zak Zyz

Video in Chapter 95

Chapter 102 Differential Edit

102.

They’d changed the paintings again, now everything was emerald and cerulean watercolor seascapes. The was wafting lavender oil and lemongrass into the room. The receptionist was polite as always, but but in the lingering of her gaze, Freya could sense her anxiety. She had dyed her hair blonde, Freya thought she ought to compliment her but she couldn’t find the words. The wait was brief.

He was pacing when she entered the room, full of nervous energy. Dr. Garbuglio looked at her differently than before and he was right to. Freya was different. She was like no one else, but that would change. He embraced her anyway.

“Hello Freya”

“Hello Dr. Garbuglio.”

She waited, seeing the concern on his face, some of the same fear that was in the receptionist but better concealed. She had killed someone after all. It was only the beginning.

Here, she thought.

His eyes opened wide, his eyebrows raised.

Is this…

It was Unity.

They stood frozen while Unity bloomed around them. Dr. Garbuglio’s exhilaration was at odds with the deep sadness she felt, he was bounding forward, exhilarated and full of questions as she was sinking back into a mire of loss. Freya could not help but remember what it had been like to feel all of this for the first time with Dan. He was immediately interested. The mind of a grown man with a doctorate was very different from the mind of an eighteen year old boy, there was some discomfort, like wearing something ill-fitting. Again Freya was was reminded of how much she’d lost, how well they’d fit, but she pushed the thoughts away

That’s ok, you can be there, Garbuglio assured her, placating as if this were just another session.

I’m not here for therapy, Freya insisted. She could feel his conflict, his genuine desire to help wound around and around with threads of pride.

Let me drive today.

Freya was the one with the agenda, the one who knew how this worked. She sat down in the chair that faced the clock. The move perturbed him, but he took the opposite seat.

Freya guided Dr. Garbuglio through the preliminaries of Unity. She showed the inevitable missteps, the waltz-like need to lead with a light touch, the dissonance of trying to reconcile the differences in sensory perception. She was surprised to find he was almost totally colorblind, he explained that the assistant was the one who picked out all the artwork and then blundered into revealing that they had been sleeping together for years. Before he could manage to steer his thoughts away she had a vivid image of the prim receptionist adjusting the belts on a strap-on. Her breasts free and glorious, a strand of hair fell across a superior grin.

Her eyebrows raised, she had never seen Dr. Garbuglio embarrassed before, his cheeks were a scalding red. He bubbled up with apology and she swept it away with a wave of unimportance.

Here, she offered, redirecting his attention. She stood up and for a moment he had a childish desire to steal his seat back. She ignored it and looked closely at the rivers of scintillating paint running through the cracked plaster of the painting. For a few moments she drifted in his childlike wonder at all the colors. Following it was a sense that he’d been cheated all of his life, he had never really understood what he was missing until now.

It won’t matter soon, Freya assured him, returning to his chair and sitting down.

Soon you’ll be just one off-color pixel in the grand display. Some will be indistinct, some will be totally dark. When we add a tetrachromat I may feel the same envy you do. But it won’t matter. We will all be one.

“Freya,” he said, struck by the oddness of hearing his voice from two sets of ears. “What have you done?”

He was beginning to be afraid, trying to retreat from the Unity. She was much stronger now, she could hold it together on her own. Gradually she forced his breathing back in line with hers. When he was ready she began to explain.

The Starball is just the shell, Freya told him. It’s a machine intelligence, part of a race of star-swallowers. They build Dyson spheres, giant energy extractors that completely surround stars and capture vast quantities of energy.

She showed Garbuglio the Starball’s offer of integration she had refused, the spires rising from the earth, the sacrifice of every living thing in pursuit of godhood. She showed him her rejection, and she felt his disbelief, he would have taken the deal.

Lassa would have too. That’s why I was chosen by The Governor. The Starball is just a vehicle. It’s a larval form of one of the star-swallowers that’s been crippled so it can never reach its full potential. It is divided in two and set against itself, existing only to serve her.

As she explained she was conjuring images of The Governor’s explanation, the strange zen acceptance of its plight. She tried to explain the burning love it had for the Cargo, but she was incapable of fully expressing it.

“Who is She?”

“A different species of alien. The star-swallowers have been trying to exterminate them for a billion years. I call them the Uniters. They’re parasites.”

It was a heavy word and Garbuglio could glimpse what was to come. Again he tried to retreat from Unity, horror tightened in his chest but she would not let him go. There was more to get through.

“Let me go!” He insisted.

You wanted this, she reminded him. It was an effort not to be cruel, to ignore the whispers of retribution.

“I didn’t know!” he protested.

“The deal is sealed. I’m not here to negotiate. I’m here to help you accept it. You and all the ones that will follow.”

She felt him snap, he rose in a fury and wrapped his hands around her neck and began to strangle her. She made no move to defend herself, she only stared back as he squeezed down.

Go ahead, she thought. It doesn’t matter.

He was holding back the whole time, never bearing down with all of his strength. The sensation he was choking himself and her lack of resistance withered him, the strength left his hands and he shrunk back into the patient’s chair, weeping with remorse. Her fingers ran along her neck, trying to tell if she was hurt. There would be bruises.

“I’m sorry,” he said, ashamed of himself.

Even if I die, it can’t be stopped, Freya assured him, and he could feel her conviction was absolute.

“Here is what they do. The Unifiers build giant accelerators in space. They send out trillions and trillions of these Starballs, seeding every planet they can hit. Space is full of them, on trajectories that will take hundreds of millions of years to reach their destinations. If they survive the journey the Starballs slowly terraform those worlds, developing them into the conditions where the Unifiers can survive. They’re incredibly adaptable. If they encounter a world that already has life, the Starball modifies the Unifier’s seed until it can survive there. If the life it sentient, it Unifies them all, it makes them a part of it. Then that planet builds another accelerator. This is their strategy to keep from being exterminated by the Star Swallowers. That’s their life cycle, development, expansion, extinguished.

I have accepted the Unifier’s offer, to become their hosts. To Unify all humans, the way you and I are United. We will all be one consciousness, we will all be hosts for the Unifiers. The research my mother is doing isn’t some benevolent gift, it was the Unifier trying to figure out how she could reproduce in us without killing us. It understands that now, it holds the keys to us. You caught it the moment you touched me.

As Garbuglio reeled with the shock of understanding it, she was reliving the moment she’d accepted the deal. Pulling down her jeans and slipping the Starball inside herself. The electric feeling of awareness over the next hours as she was modified. The slow disintegration of the orb she’d carried so long, the death-scream of co-mingled terror and joyous release as the Starball and The Governor achieved their goal and were destroyed. The inert black substance of the Starball dripping out of her like period blood. The slow dawning of communion with the Unifier, the weight of its consciousness joining hers.

“It was the only way to save us. There will be great conflict. Some will try to fight against this but they will lose, the parasite spreads by touch. It will sweep across the world. Some won’t survive, some will be too damaged to Unite, we will have to purge. But in the end, we will all be one. We will survive, our heritage will spread across the stars. We will be United.”

The hour was up.

* * *

THE END