We Are the Parasites

by SarahWeaver6

With all the world's death. With all the world's death new world begins. The death of stars burning bright tonight, the universe feels that much emptier. Yet for I wandering alone in the dark, I hunt the rats. I hunt the roaches, and comb out the lice from unkempt hair.

This is the countdown to another life. The tale of a tomb unfilled, the story of a corpse brought back from the dead. This isn't the story of teen romance, or the story of girls having their tap dance at pretentious. The story of the invisible one, playing with cards like others do video games. At least until the Southern army invaded my homeland, hope becoming fainter, and life thinning out. I had been a sickly child, whose mother died of radiation poisoning. I barely knew my father, like others in my circles of trust. Yet now as I have no eyes to see, and no ears to hear, I feel only dust. The cave was dark and damp, this I knew quite well. I never liked caves growing up, yet now as I wander into the endless darkness it is almost like being home again.

See into the mind of my remote pathology.

The pathology of the dead.

With two antenna, I route the coordinates. Mental noise, colors of what I once knew as red, green, and blue. Perhaps these might be telling me the coordinates to avoid. I am told there is a community of others like myself. Yet this hope is something I choose not to acknowledge. In the cave of the spider, in the cave of artificial light. In the cave of creatures destroyed by man's might. The room of men brainwashed to cleanse them of their guilt for their seven sins. These sins, a product of maniacal religion. The product of men with power complexes. The men who lop off the heads of heretics in times of old, the same sin that taunts the young. And breaks the bones of the olden. As the world bows toward its King.

I sense another voice, a voice of someone familiar. Someone who seems to have kept her humanity intact. I wish I could see her, I wonder what the world looks like. The world feels wet, the sounds permanently silent. I feel around the cave floor in order to reach the outside world, a land of desert briefly terraformed by the original colonists that seeded our ancestors, the original humans. The original humans who fled from Earth, at first in order to expand to the farthest reaches of the stars. I live in a world where radioactive rain burns my skin, yet my ability to regenerate has increased manifold since the time that I have been alive.

The world of mutated wolves.

The world of malfunctioning air vaults. And artificial oceans gradually becoming more shallow every thousands of years, at least until the world was swept under us by the great virus.

The virus' effects were initially subtle, and nothing like what you might imagine in zombie-holocaust novels. Our intelligence remained, while our energy was drained little by little. Until eventually we developed a new kind of energy, for sake of comparison it is like comparing matter to anti-matter. Our energy a new kind of anti-energy, motivated by some unknown family bond that bound us together. And yet there I was in the darkness, with no eyes to see. I wasn't sure what I was wearing. I was unsure of whether I was still wearing my dress. Rather the sound of groaning in the darkness, there was the sound of buzzing, buzzing, and more buzzing. The sound could drive one mad, until one got used to the communication.

The Civil War has created US. A war that split apart the original familial bond between Adam and Eve, the original cyborgs first resurrected and their limbs automated for the false-flag alien invasion on Earth. The King and the Queen, the Popette and her mistress King Adam. Black triangles filled the air of the second Earth, and I remembered as Samantha, me, and Susie tried to save as many people as we could from the infection, yet it was no use.

It was a new kind of self-abuse.

One would gradually be eaten alive by the virus. But then eventually one began to control the virus, and turn into a new breed of underground humanity. The humans that could survive radioactive sickness, and travel in the darkness. No longer was it the time of Guillotine Guns and beheading women on the spot. Now it was the world of perpetual fermentation of the self.

I reached the world of the outside, having not been to the outside world in so long. Within this world of radioactive rain, I follow a sense of someone that I had once known before. She was the one that had purchased me a flute, back when I lived in the orphanage and my mistress snapped my inherited flute in half. I had played the flute too loudly on that particular night. While the mistress was not one for collective punishment, she jerked the flute out of my hand.

And now as I reach her, she wonders what has happened to me. She comes over and hugs me. We embrace. I sense a man beside her.

-- Do you remember me?

-- Samantha, thank you for the flute.

-- What happened to your face, you look like a bug.

And behold, I put my hands on my face. I had no eyes, my fingers had suction cups. I traveled by sonar.

I was a Parasite.

-- Do you recognize this man? Samantha whispered into my antenna.

-- I cannot see him, yet I can sense him. He has a sinister presence, I said.

-- He is who you remember, and yet he cannot even remember his name. He doesn't remember anything at all.

The man who had become so tainted by greed, yet still had the softness of sympathy for our Queen Eve, had been reduced to the mind of a child. The person with no memory of their past.

He had undergone his own trial. The trial of the seven sins.

He was Silhouette Man.

Somewhere in the world of a more peaceful planet, there are civilizations not like our own. They have managed to achieve a peaceful civilization. Yet between us, we have become a new kind of entity. Not quite dead, not quite alive. A different realm of experience altogether.

The parasites of Sauna-Creek. Let this be a warning to those who wish to venture off into the stars: that the world is not for humanity. For when you stare into the universe, sometimes the universe consumes you, and turns you into a shadow of your former self. The shadow of what was once humanity.

We are the parasites.