8. Living With Yourself (Patreon)

"Blubie!" I chastise, lifting the huge bug from the terrarium I scrounged together for it. Mr. Bubbles wasn't happy I took her big tank, but she is never happy so she can deal.

"Blubie, you can't eat that much, you'll get sick! Give those back!"

Blubie is profoundly uninterested in giving anything back. The huge, beetle-like arachnid immediately devours everything I put in its tank, so long as it is small enough to fit in the fat bug's mouth. A lot of creatures will eat far too much if able to, potentially making themselves very sick, and I'm not about to make the rookie mistake of overfeeding the scientific discovery of the century.

…Okay, sure, so I maybe made the rookie mistake of taking it home instead of recording it in the wild but it's just so cuuuuuuute!  Eeeeeeeee!

I can't help but pick Blubie up and admire it more. This creature is just so docile... I suppose it can afford to be. It's a lot heavier than it looks, and it is both small and sturdy. I doubt many animals can reliably crack it open to eat... with the exception of one pretty major predator that makes me wonder how this thing can exist at all.

Raptors. Big, carnivorous birds, especially eagles, would absolutely genocide this species. The clever things would just grab poor Blubie, fly a couple hundred feet up, and drop it. Crack! Blubie is heavy, but if I can lift it without trouble an eagle sure as hell can too.  They do the same thing with turtles, and unlike turtles Blubie sticks out like a neon sign in a cavern. Raptors couldn't not see this cutie, and once they watch it crawling around for long enough they would definitely want to see what is inside. Even if Blubie is deathly poisonous like its coloration suggests, many kinds of birds learn to eat around poisonous glands and ignore that defense entirely. It's little wonder to me how a creature this beautiful and obvious could go unknown for so long; the question is how the heck one managed to survive at all.

I leave Blubie to crawl on my arm for a bit, and notice Mr. Bubbles looks kind of jealous. I grab her too, letting her clamber about my other arm. She hisses at Blubie again, so I give her a little poke to shut her up. Such a rude little spider.

I'm so caught up in the joy of my big buggy family that I don't even register the knock on my door until the person behind it calls out to me.

"Yo!  Eve! You in there? You weren't in class today so I was worried you might be sick!"

Oh yeah, class.

"No, I'm fine!" I say. "Come on in, it's unlocked!"

"Oh, you're okay? Really? I figured you'd never ditch— FUCKINCHRIST!"

My maybe-friend and classmate Samantha jumps about twelve feet into the air as I walk out of my room with a massive spider crawling on my face. Oh, right, she's not a fan of Mr. Bubbles. I blow on my favorite buggo a bit and she scurries off my head and back down my arm, where I hold her more firmly so she can't pull any shenanigans.

"Hey, Sam! Sorry about that, I just found this super cool bug and—"

"Cool bug!? Eve, you have a fucking Pokémon on your shoulder!" She backs away further. "Can you please put those back in their cages?"

"Terrariums," I correct, pouting a little. "'Cage' makes it sound like I'm keeping them behind bars. Which would be dumb, because Mr. Bubbles would just crawl right through them and end up in my bed or something."

"Oh my god, please don't say that ever again."

I return to my room and begin securing my nonhuman friends as Sam follows behind at a cautious distance, curly black hair bouncing as her fight-or-flight response dies down. Sam is pretty cool. My tendency to hang out with the dark-skinned girl just kind of happened. Both of us came to school from out of town and had no other friends, so we started relying on each other for study groups. Since I'm getting a biology major and she's going premed, we ended up in a lot of the same science classes. She's very nice and doesn't try to bring anyone else into our study group, which is great for my anxiety.

She does not like bugs, but I forgive her.

"What even is that thing?" she asks. "It looks like a crab fucked a beetle."

"That's Blubie!" I helpfully inform her. "I found him this morning. Some kind of new species, I think. I've never seen or heard of anything like it!"

Samantha blinks in disbelief.

"Wait, seriously? Isn't that like, an ultra-super huge deal?"

"Yeah, kinda. I've set up my camera and stuff so I can record everything Blubie does. We won't know everything since I can't really observe it in the wild, but… honestly I don't think it would have lasted very long out there. There are too many birds around."

And that's not just what I'm telling myself to justify capturing a potentially endangered species.

"Besides, I'll make sure Blubie loves it here!" I continue.

"Well, okay, enjoy your weird bug I guess," Sam says, ever the supportive person. "I just came by to give you a copy of my notes. Are you gonna be here all day?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, then I'm gonna… not be here. But let me know if you want to hang out somewhere without any insects."

"Well, technically Blubie and Mr. Bubbles are both probably arachnids, so—"

"Okay that's great buh-bye!"

Sam drops off her notes and swiftly absconds. Oh, well. I get it, not many people like bugs as much as I do. Or at all, really.

"Sam's nice, Blubie, I promise. I just wish I could talk with her about stuff I like, you know?"

"Klu...lie," Blubie hisses back.

Hold on, back that one up. What?

"Uh, Blubie?" I ask, leaning over to get a good look. Blubie's mouth twitches, clacking together to imitate the sounds as best it can.

"Klukie," the mystery bug says.

"Uh... yeah.  You're Blubie," I say, pointing to the incredible creature, my eyes as wide as saucers. Then I point to myself. "And I'm Evelyn."

"Klukie," the creature repeats.

Then, carefully and deliberately, it points a single claw towards me.

"Hevelan," it hisses.

Oh.  Oh, holy shit.

…

I wake up, yawning as I hug my pillow a little tighter. Something seems to squeeze me as I do, so I try to adjust my body only to find my pillow suddenly squirming! Eyes shooting open, I look myself in the face and scream in stereo, my two bodies leaping backward and scrambling to opposite walls of the cave. The day before rushes back to the forefront of my mind, and I slowly review it while I spend the next ten minutes coming down from my panic attack.

This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of me!

Mr. Mooshi trundles down into the cave, pawing at me with his feeding tendrils to make sure I'm okay. I give him as big a hug as I am able, which is pretty big now that I have four total arms. Well, six if you count my tentacles, which is even better! Having tentacles is a bit ultra fucking weird but I can’t think of a better use for them than Mooshi hugs! Clearly, I should be expanding myself as much as possible so I can supply the optimal hugging surface area.

...Huh. I meant that as a joke, but immediately my mind starts spinning about possible new ideas for a body. I really want to make one! …Why do I want to make one? The first time around was horrific and terrifying and now there's two mes and I have no fucking clue what to do with any of this knowledge. Holy shit, what do I do now? That's… actually an extremely valid question. I have water, I have food, I have shelter. So now what? I filled the bottom layer of that hierarchy of needs, so I guess I need a new goal! What is the biggest problem I face right now?

"You're lonely," Mr. Mooshi reminds me.

He's right. I am so fucking lonely. I walk out of the cave and check the sky, noting that the sun is on the complete other side of the sky from yesterday afternoon. I guess I slept right through the sunset and the sunrise after. I've barely been here three days now, but I'm already so homesick I can barely stand it. Perhaps it's the knowledge of where I am, the dread that I may never get home, certainly not at any point in the foreseeable future. I may not have been alone for long, but the sheer scale of how absurdly, impossibly alone I currently am crushes down with a weight far greater than time. I am in fucking space. I have no chance of rescue. Odds are incredibly high that there isn't another sapient species on this planet, other than possibly whatever entity put me here. I don't know what such an entity would want with me, but if they're kidnapping me and dropping me on alien planets I'm not sure I want anything to do with them either. What did I hear that voice say in my dream? "I'll see you in a year?" Jesus Christ, if I have to stay here alone for a year I will absolutely go mad.

If that's the case, I have to believe I can find other people here. Maybe there is intelligent life other than myself, and maybe I can make friends with them. I have to try. I remember seeing glowing lights at night to the east, so… maybe that's where I should look first? Seems as good of a clue as any.

Okay, so if that's the case, should I be making more bodies in order to explore better? I could cover more ground if there is more of me, but something about rapidly evolving into something progressively less and less human pings my sci-fi danger sense. I feel like that's a real steep slippery slope towards actually becoming the Zerg. Or the Sequids. Or the Tyranids.  Or the Buggers. Or the Xenomorphs.  Or the Scourge. Or the Borg. Or the Flood.  Or the Rachni. Or the Bohrok. Or the Aparoids.

All of which are evil.

This is how they get you! Absolute power corrupts absolutely! One minute I'm going to be making perfectly reasonable judgments about modest quantities of me to put in the world, and the next minute I'm eating planets! I refuse to eat a planet! I am a biologist, a conservationist, and a pacifist! Not to mention, I don't even know how my body works yet! I need to be very, very careful with— ooh, what's that?

Wandering next to my pit trap, I notice a tiny movement at the bottom! Wow, I never expected this thing to actually work! I haven't even covered up the top yet. I head over and look down. There is indeed a small creature in there, but it looks more confused than trapped. I don't even think it fell in there; based on the fact that most of its body is inside a tunnel of its own making, I'm pretty sure it dug its way into my hole.

It's an odd creature, long and flat against the ground, made of armored segments. It sort of reminds me of a centipede in that way, but instead of a quintillion legs it only has four. In addition to those legs, it has two claw-like forelimbs, as well as long, thin tendrils protruding in a manner that reminds me of a mustache. Like the acid dripping beast of my nightmares, it's body has no apparent head or eyes, but its mustache frames a fairly obvious mouth. It's relatively small, about the size of a weasel, and I can probably just reach down there and grab it.

…I'm not going to do that, though. I have a much better idea. After all, I'm a human, and humans use tools. Well, okay, I'm not actually a human anymore, but I'm still me.

I have to be.

Anyway, I keep an eye on the creature with EE, moving with Evelyn Prime to grab a big 'ol rock, sized nicely for the hole. I notice now that the weird trilobite weasel thing has a bunch of smaller whiskers to complement its... tentacle mustache. It wiggles them curiously at me, making no moves to advance or retreat. Which works for me, I guess! Evelyn Prime finally returns with the rock and I give it a solid chuck right on down there. Face the evolutionary revolution that pushed my species to dominate the Earth, pathetic alien! Throwing!

A sickening crunch echoes through the clearing as the rock hits home. The crack of the exoskeleton, followed so closely by a squish of the soft internals it is smashed into a single sound. On the low chance that the curious creature survived that, it won't be pleasant or for long.

I rub the regrowing chitin on the back of my neck. No doubt I can probably get killed just as easily. What will happen to me if one of my bodies dies? I guess plan A is to not find out, and plan B is to excessively panic when I ultimately do.

But hey, I can be existential later. God knows I will be. For now, I want food! I retrieve the rock from its hole, revealing dinner underneath. One of the creatures legs twitches in death throes, causing me to shriek and toss the rock again. The second time I dig it out, the animal is motionless.

Dead in my hands, I will myself to look the creature over instead of instantly succumbing to voracious hunger. The claws on its forelimbs are shaped to function as shovels. Combined with its lack of apparent eyesight and long whiskers, I'm pretty confident this thing spends most of its time underground. It actually has a lot of whiskers on its butt as well, growing out of the segmented chitinous shell and possibly aiding it in traveling backwards through tight tunnel networks. Or maybe they detect dangers from behind? I'm not sure, maybe both. The shell looks sturdy but also a lot more flexible than mine, allowing the creature to curve and bend in every which way without sacrificing too much protection. The rock shattered a fair chunk of these segments near the middle, of course, a cloudy liquid oozing out of the cracks. Barring the wounds I inflicted on it, it's honestly a pretty cute little thing, at least for people like me who think bugs are cute. I could see myself owning one as a pet.

"…Not that I'd ever replace you, Mr. Mooshi," I reassure him.

"You couldn't, with that thing," Mr. Mooshi insists. I've moved my EP body to hide behind him, so as to better simulate his voice. "Without me, you'd be dead within the hour."

"I wish I could say you were wrong, Mr. Mooshi, but you're probably not."

I turned back to my meal with my EE body as EP jumps on Mr. Mooshi from behind, legs kicking in the air as I lie on my stomach and hug his back. Mr. Mooshi is not sure what to do with my rambunctious antics, so he eats some grass.

Well, cuddles aside, I suppose I'm not getting any less hungry. I may as well eat this corpse I made. I start to chomp it down, anticipating the glorious flavor. In some ways, this is the most delicious one yet. In others, it is by far the worst. Because this time, I'm watching myself do it.

I'm a monster.

Of course I knew that, intellectually. I literally just listed all the evil hive minds I could think of off the top of my head, and I'm certain there are countless more in all sorts of stories I've never read. Fiction aside, I am a terrifying, rapidly evolving bio-monster. I got to this planet three days ago, killed a major river predator more or less by accident, then scoured its flesh from its bones in order to create a superior version of it, yet I never felt scary until right now. I guess it just never really sunk in.

I watch as my lips twist into a sick smile, revealing my waiting teeth. Before I even take the first bite I look like an impending horror flick, but once it begins…

I'm not sure what I expected myself to look like. Animalistic, maybe? Like a scavenger picking at a carcass. Or possibly something insane? Bestial and wild, a frenzy of hunger and blood. Yet I am none of those things. I watch with one body as my instincts take over the other completely, and those instincts are cold. Exact. Calculating. I don't tear the creature apart with my fangs, I peel it, layer by layer, sinew by sinew, organ by organ, savoring each bite with a rapturous look of pleasure. In a detached sense, it is utterly horrifying. In any other situation, I know that watching something like this would fill me with such primal revulsion that I wouldn't be able to breathe.

But not here. Because here, as I lay in silent horror of the monster, I am the monster. I am feeling it, experiencing it, so I cannot truly fear the smile on my face. Fear is of the unknown, and there is no question about why I look like I've found heaven. I am in it! Each bite is filled with an endless complexity of flavors and experiences combined into a perfect, harmonious whole. This creature is even better than the eel. Oh, better by a longshot.

Out of all its organs, I have to say my favorite is the brain. It's drastically more complex than the whip eel's, which was pretty flat and somewhat bland. This brain is a neural network folded, layered, and sectioned to a level of complexity I still feel myself trying to unpack and understand. The creature really is blind, to my amazement, but its whiskers are incredibly refined and complicated sensory organs, capable of scent, echolocation, vibration mapping, and so much more! It all seems to be optimized for confined tunnels, still somewhat useful aboveground but definitely fuzzier on the details. I immediately fall in love with its flexible, multilayered chitin which I consider a flat upgrade to my current configuration. The mustache thing is also almost like a better version of the whip eel's prehensile tendrils! Although the whip eel's are of course faster and stronger, this creature's tendrils split at the ends into smaller, soft finger-like structures for fine manipulation. I can probably combine the two without much issue and create a version superior to both.  Too bad that EE has already hatched.

But that's not even the best part! This meal had quite the spicy component: an organ near this creature's mouth generates acid. It doesn't seem to be as strong as the acid from the nightmare sloth, but it still had quite a bit of kick when I chomped it down. Based on my understanding of the creature, it is probably used for melting packed dirt or stone, allowing the creatures to make tunnels in areas no other animal could.

Still... acid?  I'm becoming more like a xenomorph by the hour, aren't I?  I hate acid.

I lick the last of the blood off my fingers and face. There isn’t much, because I didn't spill. Mr. Mooshi suddenly snorts at the me on his back. Huh? Oh.  That body is shivering.

Thank goodness part of me still feels afraid after all.