Written by Patrick D. McNamara
October 17, 2024
12:30 PM
Author’s Note: I wrote this story during lunch breaks and shuttle rides to and from set on a hidden camera TV show I worked on in the fall of 2024. I was an Audio Production Assistant on this set, a big step up from the general Production Assistant work I was used to on big shows. The challenge I set for myself was to finish the story before the 2-week shoot was over, and I accomplished my goal!
The sensation of spinning backwards coupled with a feeling of full-body electrocution. He was falling fast through membranes of what felt like gelatin. It was inside his throat, ears, and nose, but he was still able to breathe through it
“Do you understand yet, Peter?”
His surroundings looked like a liquid light show. Colors and shapes would whiz by, only to be replaced by more foreign sights at high speed.
“Do you see it now?”
Everything came to a sudden stop. Peter could make out some shapes through the mucusy material he was suspended in. They vibrated in place subtly, with transparent bodies and black eyes resembling fish embryos.
“There are worlds beyond your own. Life of unrecognizable forms.”
Something shifted in the entities before him. The black eyes were now locked onto him. A series of antennae sprouted from their spinal columns. They were each tipped with what looked like scarlet and gray flowers. Color rippled down the length of their bodies like aggravated cephalopods.
The entities started spraying a green liquid at Peter’s vessel. It penetrated the fluid and hardened immediately in a forked pattern pointed straight at him, narrowly stopping short of actual contact. The mucus had some sort of built-in coagulating chemical protection.
“The hubris of humanity. Depicting aliens in their art with the same bipedal forms. The multiverse is not so simple.”
The gel contracted and chafed painfully against Peter’s skin. The fish egg creatures and their surroundings wiped away, replaced by fast-moving ribbons of color.
“You don’t remember, but you’ve occupied many different bodies. Every lifetime is a recycled journey.”
Once again, there was a jarring halt to the movement. The inertia was mostly absorbed by the fluid around him, though that didn’t stop him from bouncing in place.
Looking out through the transparent vessel, he saw light being distorted in a hemisphere, like he was looking out of the eye of a giant. He was carried forward in a gallop, not unlike that of a horse. A sea of ungulates surrounded him on all sides.
Peter had no control over the movement of the head he was inside of. He was facing 45° left of his direction of movement, where he had a full view of the quadruped directly next to him. It looked over and caught his gaze.
The creature’s face was disturbing. It resembled that of a deer, but it had rows of eyes leading from its crown to its lower neck. Multiple nostrils between the eyes expanded and relaxed in synchrony.
“Their instinct is to run, to roam freely, never staying put for too long. Consciousness moves in the same way. Never satisfied, never quite content.”
What Peter could only assume was an eyelid shut for a moment.
“Your world is an illusion constructed by your flawed human senses. Reality is richer than you can possibly imagine.”
The eyelid opened again, and the spectrum of color he was used to was replaced with something completely new. It registered to Peter as something intuitive but completely foreign at the same time, like infrared in the way it was superimposed over the sight of the herd.
Wisps of ectoplasmic clouds were now visible, flowing through the many sensory orifices in the creatures’ heads. They moved synergistically with the rolling sea of mammalian fur.
“What are they?” Peter spoke into the gel, his words reverberating with a tinny echo.
“Symbiotes extending the consciousness of the group, in exchange for incubation. It’s not uncommon in your world. Wolves, dolphins, birds, any being operating in a collective. Instinct has deep roots in the planes that you cannot see.”
The gel twisted harshly, causing Peter great pain once again. He grasped unsuccessfully for anything to hold onto as his surroundings warped into chaos.
Swirls of fractals churned and split apart until the spaces of black between them expanded, filling Peter’s view. There was now nothing in sight. Then, after a moment of confusion, light poured outward from the center of the gel. Specks of detritus passed through the orb of illumination around him. He was disoriented, not knowing which ways were up and down.
With speed that spooked Peter, a circle of gray grew beneath him and then stabilized in size a meter and a half away. It was the ground, he was sure of it. It looked like sand with clouds of haze emanating from it. It bent in response to the movement of the vessel in such a way that informed Peter that he was underwater.
“Life is stubborn. It exists and operates for its own sake.”
A large form emerged from the murky distance. Something massive. Once enough light stretched across its surface, it appeared to be the carcass of a leviathan. The light illuminated a dense cluster of fungi sprouting from the dead marine mammal. Like with crinoline stinkhorn, hexagonal chain webs sprouted from their caps, except the shapes they assumed were spiraled and complex. It resembled the shape of an exceptionally elegant sea shell.
“Death supplies the ancillary ingredients for life.”
A spot of light emerged from the right. It was a mass of fuzzy bristles coming off of a beige mass of flesh. It slithered forward in Peter’s direction, the bristles pushing it along, until they grazed past the top of the cube. It was much longer than the carcass, but it didn’t seem interested in him. The worm trudged past and spiraled around a smoking geothermal vent to his right. It fed on the bubbly emissions belching out of the hole in the sand.
“And sunlight is but a luxury. You may not experience a gaseous atmosphere for many lifetimes.”
The gel pulled Peter along the ocean floor into the dark. Eventually, a strange shape was illuminated before him. Peter recognized the giant dead mollusk on the sand as something he might see on Earth, but he was unfamiliar with the structure protruding through the shell several dozen feet upward. It had an ancient frayed white shaft, with a wrinkled brown cap swaying in the current. The entire tube contracted and its tip faced Peter, opening to reveal circular rows of teeth extending down the inside of its mouth.
He squirmed vigorously, terrified of his fate inside the belly of the creature, but the suction was too strong. He couldn’t control the movement of his vessel. Within seconds, Peter was swallowed.
His journey through its internal anatomy was quite visible with the ongoing light, and the farther he progressed, the rougher the inner tubing looked. Bits of crustacean shells and fish bones were stuck along the inner wall.
There was a bottleneck of tissue where the gel was momentarily stuck. Peter turned his body to prevent himself from going through the opening, but the walls squeezed his entire unit through to the next chamber. He slipped down the tube before splashing down in foul-smelling liquid. It was rust orange and dark green in a heterogenous mixture.
“Nature is amoral. Life has no sanctity in the eyes of a predator.”
The vessel sank slowly into the stomach acid, bubbling profusely where it was making contact, until Peter was completely submerged. The light started to dim, not that he could see through the fizzing anyway.
“Am I going to die?” Peter’s tinny voice was almost fully drowned out by the chemical reaction around him.
“Your value to us is sustained, for now. Your expiration has not been approved yet.”
The light died out completely, and the sound of digestion seemed farther and farther away. The gel inside Peter started to become harder, so much so that he began choking on it. He felt like he was drowning in the dark, his lungs screaming for air. It was a horrible sensation that only increased in discomfort. He was sure that he wouldn’t survive, contrary to what the voice in his head had said.
The pain in his lungs reached an apex, and the lack of visible surroundings only made things more terrifying. His consciousness slipped away, just long enough for him to hear the voice one last time:
“We will be in contact again soon.”
⛧ ⛤ ⛧