I'm Not Me Anymore - Part 2: Integration
- By: Wooga.
- Genre: Sci-Fi / Spiritual.
- Alien Nine © Hitoshi Tomizawa.
Isn't it true what they say- that it always goes haywire before the final act?
That's an Earth expression, isn't it?Isn't hay the word for dead grass? And then she laughed at herself. I don't think anyone gets it.
Not even an earthling.
Sometimes I think I'm talking to herself. I might as well be. I'm entirely fused, but my Borg isn't even visible from the surface. It has settled under my skin, replacing most of my muscle and bone with hard, tapering coils. But an even more important factor of the drill clan, the one that had made it the one most favored by the testers on Earth, was a process known as 'chemical memory'. The brains of the borg were strands of protein and other minerals that created a pattern another part of the brain could read. This meant that the memories of the Borg- and its connected host- lived on, even after death. This along with a cell- replicating chemical called Cell Gel,meant that a human could live forever. As long as the memory fibers ramained intact, and one cell of their body remained, they could be recreated over and over. Maybe they wouldn't be the same person exactly, but it was as close as humanity could come to true immortality.
But the weapons were nice, too. All the symbiotes that other aliens had transported to earth had wonderful defenses. The angelic, winglike projections of the Borg were actually more similar to legs, or maybe the fins of a devil ray. Somehow, they became incredible weapons, filled with sharp, flexible drills- perhaps the result of some inconceivably desperate evolutionary arms race, millions of years ago, millions of miles away, on some now-unheard of planet.
And the Borgs asked so little in return, at least until fusion ocurred. They got most of their nutrients from the sun, and the gases in the air, collected by tiny receptor cells in their 'wings'. But they also collected nutrients from their host, sweat for the most part, with maybe a few nail parings, stray strands of hair, waste matter, blood if it's shed accidentally.
But like I said, fusion. It starts with one tiny drill, boring into your spine and connecting with the spinal cord. It doesn't hurt, of course...the Borg waits until you are in deep sleep, and secretes a kind of anaesthesia from its mouth first...but it doesnt matter. You're never the same again. You have to share your body with another mind, another memory bank, until slowly - it's so subtle!- you sort of blend into one mind, and some of your memories kind of fade. You don't notice it until it's too late.
I don't want Yuri to know what it's like. The human part of me wants to protect her. (I can still differentiate between human and borg, but a voice deep inside me warns me it won't last.) Part of me has memories I can't understand.
It's funny because they aren't the memories of my Borg. They're the chemical memories of my old Borg before it died, transfered into this Borg. No..that's still not right. These memories...they begin with darkness, nothingness. Then... pushing feebly against thick wet walls, with new wings cracking the walls apart, I gasp and cough from the wet, thick goo sticking to my body. Light shines from between the vanes of enomous leaves in a lush, dark forest. I crawl out of the crunched eggshells, a weak and helpless baby Borg. I clumsily walk over the dead leaves of the nest.(the human part of me is reminded of that forest of spaceships.) I try to fuse with everything I see: a rock, a tree stump, a round fruit similar to Earth's coconut. I come upon a fat, slow herbivore. It doesn't even seem to notice me when I attach myself to his head (Nothing happens when I do. Borgs can only fuse with intelligent life- something that knows how to care for a borg in return.) I remember alien hands picking me up, transporting me to a ship, bringing me to earth. No, these weren't my borg's memories-they're genetic. They could have been ten ,a hundred, even thousands of generations ago! But it's still as vivid as if it had happened yesterday, thanks to the borg's memory- as intact as a song saved on a computer. And now these strands of memory weave with my own. A frog and a human dance, hands holding coiled drills, and together they create of sort of balance, sometimes frightening, sometimes sad. Yes, even sometimes there can be happiness.
Four drills in each arm, five reach to each leg, and three act as support pillars for my trunk (as my skeleton is gone- destroyed and never regenerated) makes twenty-two in all. I'm what they like to call a heavy user. I've fused too much, let the Borg take too much of my human body until I no longer have human functionality. I can never have children- and I suppose I shouldn't, since I was too weak to hold on to myself. Natural Selection.
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