For all parts of this story, check the Alpha vs Delta category.

I’m thinking that this is now part 3 of 6, and I hope that I can actually get my brain back into writing and finishing this. The previous two parts – and the whole thing – will need some revisions when I’m done. The 7th Son trilogy so far is complete, and there have been some revelations which make it plain to me that I’ve missed a few things. My brief characterization of Special(k) is totally bogus, for instance.

But, nonetheless, I forge ahead with Alpha vs Delta – Part III:

On the first day of invasion, trillions of Spores had rained down from the upper edges of the sky. Of those trillions, barely a hundred had made successful contact with poor Marten’s shambling form, as he had made way his home on yet another winter afternoon of early darkness. And of the hundred or so that had landed on Marten, most had succumbed to exposure or had simply fallen away as he’d walked.

For a lucky dozen, though, passage had been found into the warm interior of Marten’s coat. Some had fallen down the waist of his pants or under his scarf. Others had found lucky paths through small tears in fabric, or into his coat pockets to be ferried up into his sleeves on his wrists. Of those dozen Spores that had breached Marten’s armor against the wintry air, only seven had managed to further traverse the layers of clothing that had swaddled his body. While the others had lost their way in odd twists of fabric or had simply turned up dead on arrival, a miraculous seven Spores had touched down on bare human skin.

Upon successful landing, the seven siblings had immediately begun working. They’d sunk quickly through layers of skin, burrowing instinctively deeper into tissues. Had anyone been able to observe them, the Spores might have been mistaken for something merely microbial. But, upon closer inspection, their construction would have been found unusually simple and straight to the point. Pruned of any vestigial features left by a process of natural evolution, their design had clearly been the result of intelligence — a very determined and ambitious intelligence.

In small stages, the Spores had subverted Marten’s own cells. Their psuedo-genetic payloads were sparse and highly specific, targeted against the wealth of code already present in human DNA. Through precise and deft tweaks, the Spores’ machinery had spliced and rearranged sections of Marten’s genetic material like mashed up computer code. In short order, the Spores had assembled the alien biomechanical bootstraps they needed to progress to the next stage.

In the nuclei of freshly subverted cells, the rewritten genetic code had translated into novel proteins and nanoscale fragments spilling out of cell bodies. These had rapidly self-assembled into structures that — although obscenely foreign — had somehow managed to convince the local authorities that they were just part of the ancient human body plan. By the time visible large-scale construction had begun in earnest, many further iterations of genetic subversion had been achieved. Marten’s body had eagerly fed and helped shape the triangular forms resolving beneath his skin. As his craving for burgers and the worst side of the fast food menu had ramped up to provide energy and raw materials for construction, his body had given a warm welcome to the Triangles’ umbilical stalks wending deeper toward his gut, lungs, spine, and brain.

In the majority of hosts, the course of infection had flowed smoothly from incursion to control without mishap. The Spores had been built expertly to exploit the human genome to build the Triangles. The Triangles, in turn, had been expertly designed to exploit the human brain and body for information and growth — leaving nothing behind when they were done.

And, for the most part, Marten had been no exception as a host. The Spores’ tasks had gone without a hitch, and the parasitic fetal Triangles had firmly established themselves within Marten’s body. They’d begun stirring awake, alien synaptic networks sparking to life. Synthetic hormones and neurotransmitters had trickled into Marten’s bloodstream as the creatures stretched and oriented themselves. Calling out with plaintive voices encoded in chemical traces and nerve impulses, the Triangles had found each other and had collaboratively mapped out their respective locations and conditions throughout the host.

The seven had taken a poll measured in chemical concentrations leaked into the host’s bloodstream to find the Triangle nearest the head. They needed to gain definitive control over Marten’s mind, and proximity was essential. Luckily, one of them had been found embedded in the back of the neck. To become the group’s new proxy for control, the creature had extended its umbilical stalk up the spine, creeping carefully through soft tissues to tickle Marten’s brain stem. With host brain contact made, and communication established between the siblings, the first word the Triangles had stolen from Marten’s mind was…

(hungry)

The first sign of trouble, however, had come with an unexpected rush of excitement hormones. The odd mix of potent anxiety and joy had stunned them into quiet confusion, all of the children silent as they tried pulling the reason for it from the tentative connections they’d cast into Marten’s brain. To satisfy impulsive and impatient curiosity, the seventh sibling had driven further umbilical nerves deeper into Marten’s brain — almost too dangerously fast. The host’s mind had been so busy, words and ideas roaring through too fast for the Triangles to decode. He had been so energetic, drawing away even the Triangles’ own sustenance.

The second sign of trouble had come with an agonizing blast of complex electrical current and magnetic flux that had surged through Marten’s nerves, along with a strange wash of chemical signals sweeping through his arteries. The situation had outstripped all host environmental conditions expected by the Triangles, and had crashed through them all with hurricane force. They had quivered and lost contact with each other. They had squirmed and all consciousness flared out into white hot overload.

In the aftermath, after hours of darkness, instinct had taken hold. Umbilical stalks had thrust deep and branched repeatedly, forming calcium-laced barbs that slipped into soft tissues and anchored into bone. Bits of Marten’s own complete nervous and muscle tissues had been harvested and grafted into service in repairing the Triangles’ wounded minds and bodies.

Of the original seven Triangles that had found purchase within Marten’s body, six had found each other alive and well and reaching out once the flood had cleared. The seventh, however, had seemed somehow crippled: While it had seemed to respond weakly to its brethren’s queries, it hadn’t made much sense. Mournfully, another poll was taken, and the job of primary control had fallen to the Triangle stationed under Marten’s right clavicle. That sibling had withdrawn its umbilical from lungs and heart, had slowly rerouted it back along the spine toward the fallen seventh Triangle.

Passing along the route the seventh sibling had taken, the sixth had found the injured Triangle gibbering and twitching in a way that would irritate the host’s tissues. The sixth had tried to make contact, but without success. With resignation, the Triangles had attempted to secrete chemicals that would sedate the seventh. Continuing on, the sixth had reached out with umbilical nerve probes to replace the connections now unreachable through the seventh. Not quite as adventurous as the seventh had been — cowed by recent danger — the sixth had reached into Marten’s brain, but not quite as far.

As the Triangles had regained awareness of Marten’s mind, what they’d found was as strange and alarming as anything they’d yet experienced. In terror and confusion, they’d burned enormous amounts of calories and fat tissue from Marten’s body while he had finally slept — the Triangles had redoubled their efforts to grow and reach out to brethren beyond the host body.

For all parts of this story, check the Alpha vs Delta category.

Thus far, it still feels like 3 more parts of 5 left as far as my notes run and how the pacing and length feel. And in case it’s not obvious, this is written entirely from my own memory and interpretation as a listener of these two podcasts. So, blame me for any oddities or deviations from canon, etc. And, keep in mind that this is hot off the TextEdit — I’ve given it a quick once over, but won’t do any serious editing / revision until the very end. Don’t let that stop you from commenting with suggestions or criticism, though!

So with all that, I hope you enjoy Alpha vs Delta – Part II:

John Alpha yawned and stretched in his chair. He felt disgusting and itchy all over. He scratched under his beard and behind his neck, and he wondered just how long it had been since this body’s last shower. Oh yeah, he remembered: this morning. It hadn’t worked, apparently. Of course, the bachelor squalor in which Marten lived didn’t help.

But, it wasn’t the body or a clean apartment he was after here — it was Marten’s mind. John could put up with the accommodations if the mind lived up to its promise. Sure enough, as John reached out into his memory, he found plenty of interesting material for the taking. He considered a few analytical problems he’d memorized as a sort of diagnostic tool, and was frankly amazed at how swiftly and clearly solutions came to him.

This was going to be fun. He couldn’t quite bring himself to admit that Marten’s mind was sharper than his own native brain, but the kid was undoubtedly a raw genius. Young Marten did lack a bit in smarts, though: John had been able to manipulate him into psyjacking himself without much creativity at all. It had just taken a tiny bit of mystery, a shiny toy, and few softballs thrown to make him feel clever. He was particularly amused by the “READ ME” packet that had laid everything out so clearly.

It wasn’t all fun and games, though, as John had had to put some effort into obfuscating his trail while enticing Marten. Among other things, he’d used the Aleph moniker and intentionally garbled 7th Son terminology. He didn’t want the Betas — Kilroy 2.0 in particular — to unexpectedly wander off the trail and match any keywords in an accidental email archive somewhere to discover this particular lark. They were on their own custom-designed rides, and he planned to keep their arms and legs in their respective cars for the duration. John Alpha chuckled to himself at the thought.

But, back to work. And, of course, the first order of business was establishing a line of communication back to the Bona Fide. Marten had started the work for him already: The thumb drive and the “drivers” he’d installed were actually parts of the secure computing environment John liked to use when he was away from home. Marten had broadband DSL service, which was good: John would need the bandwidth to dump copies of Marten’s research and data out to his own hardened file servers back home.

More importantly, if this little project worked out as well as he hoped, he would be able to use some of Marten’s algorithms and the DSL bandwidth to send himself back home in a few days. At that point, John would have plenty of time to squeeze work out of Marten’s mind at his leisure. It could be a significant improvement to the state of his art overall — allowing not just one-time psyjack, but possibly safe retrieval and even memory totality merges. But, just in case it didn’t quite pan out, he wanted to spend the next few days getting the most from what Marten had on hand.

Marten was just heading into a week or so of winter break, so John would have him all to himself for awhile. He’d planned to visit family by the end of the next week for the holidays, but John should be done with him by then. Eventually, someone would find poor Marten, alone in his apartment, in whatever state John chose to discard him.

John turned to the main PC on Marten’s desk. There were a half-dozen computers and monitors set up around the room, all crunching away on various research tasks. But, they were all controlled from the workstation in front of him. So, John brought it out of the screen saver it was running, tapped in Marten’s password, and brought up the desktop. John’s secure computing environment was lurking dormant in sleeping system processes — to wake it, he struck a combination of control keys and rapped out a pre-determined rhythm on the space bar.

Suddenly superimposed over the desktop was a new user interface. John ran through a short set of challenge and response procedures to establish his authority over the system, and it was ready. Marten had a webcam, so John linked it into the system and opened a secure tunnel to phone home. After a second or two, the connection was established.

“Hello John,” said Special K, grinning brightly from Marten’s screen. “Nice to see you, whomever you are today! I’m afraid I don’t have much time to chit-chat, but I confirm that your connection integrity is green.” Special K was one of John’s little helpers, a subverted disciple who’d defected from the inner circle of the mad hacker of the Betas, Kilroy 2.0.

“Good,” replied John. “I know you’re busy with the Betas, so I just wanted to check in and report my status.”

“Excellent. We’re having a blast here,” Special K laughed. “How was your trip?”

“Not bad,” John said. “I slept all the way here in my little box, so it seemed quick to me. The seats are tiny, but this really is the only way to fly.”

“Cool. I was a little worried that this side-job would be a waste of psyjack hardware, but I’m glad to see I was wrong.”

“Really, K? I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

Special K laughed. “Don’t worry about me, Boss. I’m just here to follow orders and learn from the best. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a Beta clone to taunt.”

“I’ll be in touch. Have fun.”

“I will. You too, Boss.”

John closed the video chat, keeping the secure connection open and its tools ready. With Special K’s help, John had built quite an effective portable working environment. It was stronger than just about any corporate VPN package around, and harder to crack than anything the US government had. So, for things like this and daily IT oversight, he kept Special K in line with his own tailored cloud of flattery, geek in-jokes, and dot-com-style perks — but some day, he knew he’d have to cut him loose. After all, the only person John could really trust in the end was himself.

He paused for a moment, trying to remember where Marten kept his documents and notes. It came to him: They were synched and shared across the university network between his hard drives at home and servers on campus at his lab. Conveniently, he could get to everything from right here in Marten’s bedroom office.

John found the meticulously organized root folder on the desktop and dragged it into the file transfer funnel offered by the secure connection software. This was the low hanging fruit: The products and raw data generated by Marten’s work. It was a pretty large chunk of data, consisting not only of word processor files but also of massive data captures produced by Marten’s brain scans. The transfer started chugging along, eventually reporting an estimate of a day or two to complete.

It would take years of work to actually get anything useful out of those files without Marten’s help, but at least John would have the material. The next phase was more valuable: John planned to sit himself down and mentally compare notes with the remnants of Marten’s mind to see where his findings were directly applicable to John’s own technologies. The synthesis of the two would be the real payoff for this trip.

But, as he glanced at the system tray clock on the PC and yawned, he realized that it was well past two in the morning. Marten had sure taken his sweet time figuring out how to psyjack himself, and the trauma of the process must have left him more drained than he’d expected. Despite his misgivings about the mattress in the room, he knew any bedbugs were only temporary.

It wasn’t like he could catch anything.

He gave the file transfer one more check — still going strong — and turned off the monitor. The room darkened and his body found its way to the bed, falling into darkness as fast as the still-clothed body fell into the sheets. As he started to softly snore, his hand moved of its own accord. His fingernails clawed at the back of his neck, gouging at something that just shouldn’t be there.

The subjective experience of invading an already-occupied mind could fill volumes of study in its own right. Maybe someday, John Alpha would have a few selves with time to write memoirs from that perspective.

His dreams overnight were tortured, like a marathon domestic dispute. Alpha’s dominant totality filtered steadily, relentlessly into every nook and cranny of the brain that it hadn’t immediately overrun with the initial onslaught of the psyjack. There was never any doubt that John was ultimately in control, but that didn’t stop him getting a mind-full of Marten’s wailing subconscious. Throughout the night, Marten had reemerged in a myriad of aspects. At times, he came to John with calm logic and rational arguments, trying to talk John out of dissolving him into a more powerful psyche. At other times, he wailed with indignant rage, throwing parts of himself around the dreamscape with surreal violence.

But strangest of the episodes were Marten’s threads of juvenile persona, expressing pervasive curiosity and simple, demanding hunger. It seemed like this part of Marten was splintered: He presented as a group of child-like impulses, each of them grasping and asking and seeking. Of all Marten’s remnants, these seemed to be the only ones reaching for John himself, probing into his own thoughts and memories. Of course, he blocked every advance, but the sensation was unexpected and mildly disturbing.

John Alpha awoke to the glare of sun illuminating an unfamiliar pattern of veins through his eyelids. He’d tried imagining all the ways waking in a different body would be strange, but this was one he’d never considered. He opened his eyes, though not fully. He threw an arm over his face. The rays of sun speared straight at him, and he just wasn’t ready for that.

Suddenly, he sat bolt upright, startled: The window of Marten’s bedroom faced toward the southwest — sunlight didn’t enter this window until well into the afternoon. An alarm clock near the bed read 3:38. He’d slept for well over half the day, and yet he still felt drained. Something was wrong. He’d hoped to wake with a clearer head by morning, ready to throw himself into research — but he felt even more cloudy than the night before.

How rude: Leave it to Marten to catch the flu on the night he’d had company calling. John wiped at his face — and smelled copper. Blood? He drew his hand away from his face to find the fingers reddish-brown, neglected long-ish nails caked under with — what? Was that skin?

It was then that the pain from the back of his neck registered, like a nasty sunburn. He reached back, gingerly, and felt a series of shallow trenches back there — one for each finger. And, through the pain, it still itched. And his fingers, when he brought them back, were wet. He looked behind him at the pinkish pillow. Marten remembered it as a dirty off-white.

John Alpha swung his body’s legs over the side of the bed, feeling the plane of Earth’s gravity dip and sway treacherously. Pausing to re-calibrate, he tried standing up. After a third try, he’d adapted to the weakness in his muscles and the characteristics of the wobble the planet had developed while he’d slept. The body remembered its way to the bathroom, down a very short hallway and left around a corner.

(feed us. we’re hungry.)

He turned on the lights and saw a ghoul standing there. It occurred to him that he was looking into a mirror, but it felt like even the body itself didn’t recognize what he saw. Experimentally, he reached out — and the ghoul reached back.

(hungry. hungry. feed.)

He turned on the sink taps and washed his hands with the grimy half-bar of soap left there, red water and small chunks streaming down the drain. Next, he splashed the water on his face and neck through his beard — he couldn’t believe he was in a body with a yeti’s face-pelt. He hadn’t planned on wasting much time on hygiene, but this was going to drive him to distraction. And what the hell was wrong with his neck back there? And why was he so itchy in so many other places?

(you must must feed feed feed us we are hungry we are hungry)

Okay, he couldn’t keep ignoring that. The juvenile persona had followed him into waking awareness — that was bad. Was Marten at risk for schizophrenia, had the psyjack been a catalyst into a psychotic break? That was a nasty worst-case scenario if he expected to get any work done, and Marten was about the right age for it. Was this what Kilroy 2.0 had experienced? Or, had Marten, the imbecile, actually botched the psyjack? What the hell was wrong with him?

John needed to refocus: It didn’t happen often, but he’d been taken by surprise by whatever was going on here. Take one thing at a time, regain composure and control. First, check on his neck, then food, and finally a goddamn shower.

(no feed us now feed us now feed us no now now)

Neck first, then food, John thought. Go play in traffic, you little bastards.

(no feed us what is traffic play in?)

In the bathroom cabinet, John found some rudimentary first aid supplies: There was some gauze still in sterile packaging; a spool of medical tape; hydrogen peroxide in an old brown bottle; half a tube of anti-bacterial cream; some cotton swabs. There was a sound inside his head, like tennis balls running around the inside perimeter of his skull.

(traffic no play in.)

He grabbed a clean-ish washcloth from a towel rack behind him, wet it with hydrogen peroxide, and started blotting at the back of his neck. More tennis balls orbited around his brain. He scanned the under-sink cabinets for another mirror, something to let him take a look back there, but came up empty handed. He rinsed the pink wash cloth white again in the sink, reapplied the hydrogen peroxide, blotted some more, repeated until the wash cloth stopped turning pink. With another towel from the rack, he dried off the wound. Once dry, he smeared the rest of the anti-bacterial cream blind with his fingers, then taped a square of gauze over it positioned as best as he could.

(no feed in traffic play not now feed now now now.)

It was a rush job, but he was no longer in immediate pain. The anti-bacterial cream must have contained analgesics, as well. Stomach cramps and those incessant little creeps were pulling his body down the hall, toward the kitchen.

He remembered dinner from the night before, which sounded like a light snack at this point. Throwing open the fridge and a succession of cabinets, he lost hope for any food residing actually within the apartment. Searching Marten’s memory didn’t yield any good news, either. Lately, he’d been eating gradually more and larger meals from the fast food place up the road.

(yes yes yes we feed on triple cheeseburger extra large fries chocolate shake more again cheeseburger more more more!)

Well, that got their attention. And, he couldn’t really disagree with them: A massive quantity of what they’d claimed to be food from the grease shack sounded like the ideal remedy to this hunger. He didn’t feel like he was in any condition to leave the apartment, and hadn’t really planned to do so for the next week or two — but he knew they didn’t deliver. And, anyone who did deliver would take far too long. Marten usually walked there, which was an entirely unappealing notion in this weather.

Oh, but Marten did have a car outside! He just made a point of driving it sparingly for various confused conservation and money saving sentiments. To hell with that: Rookman oil was in that tank, it was time to go burn it up to fill his gut.

(food yes feed gut feed us yes burn.)

Back to the bedroom he went, to find some pants and his discarded shoes. His wallet was in yesterday’s pair, with about thirty bucks left. In the living room, he found his coat, a hat, and a scarf. The scarf covered his neck well enough. He bundled up, zipped up, and let himself out the front door. Closing it, but not bothering to lock it, he hustled down the hall toward the parking lot.

Marten’s neighbor, Laurel, was just opening the building’s outer door with her key as he pushed through. He almost bowled her over, but she sidestepped and pulled the door open for him.

“Whoa,” she yelped, toppling a bit and sliding backward on the icy walk outside. “Excuse me, I didn’t see you heading out!”

“Yeah, sorry,” he said.

(go go go go go go go.)

“Are you okay, Marten?” As he continued past her, she said, confused, “Oh, well I guess I’ll see you later.”

He half-walked and half-skated through the ice and salted slush on the way to Marten’s second-hand beater. Everything felt so much colder than usual, but he was on a mission. His keys were, luckily, in the coat pocket — he’d forgotten to check if he’d even had them before rushing out of the apartment. Distantly, it seemed like a bad idea to have gotten locked outside in this cold. No time for that now, though: He unlocked the car door, swung in, and after a few chugging false starts, got the thing sputtering to life. The tires spun and spun in the parking spot when he hit the gas, but finally they caught and he lurched out of the parking spot.

The drive from the parking lot and up Plymouth Road to the burger place was less driving and more like tobogganing. He was glad it was only about a block away, and he was sure that the few other drivers on the road would be happy to see him get back home and stop tailgating and nearly sideswiping them into each other. If Marten had had a sturdier car, that might’ve even been fun.

But, he managed to reach the drive-thru window without major mishap. Quickly, angrily, he scanned the menu. There were no pre-constructed mega value meals that would match this hunger. So, he just started ordering some of the biggest items from the board, ala carte. Three triple cheeseburgers, four extra large fries, two jumbo chocolate shakes, and an apple pie. Much more than that, and he would be out of money.

(yes yes yes yes more more more feed now we are hungry we are hungry.)

“You having a party, man?” asked the cashier as John pulled up. He looked to be around freshman age.

Impatiently, John thrust bills at him and replied, “Yeah, and they’re going to kill me if I don’t get back soon.”

(yes now now fries yes chocolate yes burger burger burger.)

With three bags full of his catch, John roughly piloted the car back to the apartment lot, stuffing wads of fries into his mouth the whole way. He managed to collect together all the bags, and the full drink carrier, in one hand. The treacherous slick on the way to the door threatened to spill him more than once, but at last he’d gotten into the hall and back into his apartment. He deposited the food on the living room coffee table and shed coat, hat, and scarf into the chair by the door. Unburdened of obstacles to his meal, he slumped into the threadbare couch across from the coffee table and began to feed.

(good we feed good good hungry good good good)

Part way through the third triple cheeseburger and the last fistful of fries, John Alpha felt the pressure and urgency begin to subside. Focus slowly returned, and he was deeply disturbed. This was most certainly not good: Whatever had gone wrong with him, be it insanity or bad psyjack, his mission was seriously endangered. His judgement was clearly askew — hearing and obeying voices in his head, wolfing down this disgusting fast food like it was ambrosia. He needed to contain this situation, and he couldn’t do it alone. He realized that he needed some help before his situation degraded any further.

It was long past time for Marten to pay a friendly visit to his lovely neighbor Laurel.

Remember the story pitches I posted? I got some comments from a pair of my favorite podcast authors. So, I started writing the 7th Son / Infection fanfic. I’ve got the plot outlined to pretty decent detail in notes, and I’ve worked out an ending. Let’s see how this comes together – here’s a first draft of part 1 of 5:

The snow crunched under Marten’s feet as he made his way home from work at the computer lab on North Campus. His shift at the help desk had ended around five o’clock, but shorter days toward the end of the year meant it was already dark out. He cut across the yards of student family housing on the way back to his apartment a half-mile or so away. There were sidewalks, which in theory might’ve been the faster way, but campus maintenance didn’t seem to do that great a job at keeping the paths shoveled up here. So, rather than do a slow shuffle all the way home on snow packed down into ice by a day’s worth of foot traffic, he opted to forge his own route through the fresh stuff.

Of course, by the time he got to crossing Plymouth Road toward his apartment complex, his jeans had gotten soaked up to his shins, his hiking boots were soggy, and he wondered if this had been such a great idea after all. With a break in traffic, he hustled across the street. Waiting for him there was dinner, in the form of a triple cheeseburger, extra large fries, and a jumbo chocolate shake from the fast food place on the corner. He warmed up a bit, at least, with the time it took to order and fetch his greasy feast. The time it took to walk the rest of the way from there to his apartment building, however, left him with frozen pant legs.

He checked his mailbox outside, which was empty, and let himself into the building. His place was the last door at the end of the short hallway, fourth on the right. As he was stamping off the snow, though, his neighbor Laurel emerged from door across the hall.

“You’re always coming when I’m going,” she said, smiling shyly as she locked the door behind her. She was pretty, though just a little gawky. She had green eyes, dark hair chopped at her jaw line, and a cascade of silver rings in each ear.

“Yeah,” said Marten, punctuated by a pull on his shake. He stared at the tattoo of a pentacle in the hollow of her neck and caught a haze of incense that followed her out into the hall.

There was a beat or two of shifty silence, broken when she gave a little laugh and said, “Well, I guess I’ll catch you later.”

“Yeah,” said Marten. Shrugging, Laurel bundled herself up her a coat and scarf, and slouched past him into the cold outside. He took another pull from the shake and sighed when she was out of earshot.

To himself, he said, “You’re a real ladies’ man, Marten.”

With that, he turned to his door — and noticed the package at his feet. With a little spike of excitement, he scooped it up and hurriedly let himself into the apartment. His dinner balanced precariously atop the box, he locked the door latch behind him with his elbow. Juggling things a bit and thankful he’d left the kitchen light on, he threw his coat and backpack off into a ratty recliner just inside. He never took his eyes off the address label on the box as he left a trail of slushy footprints back to the single bedroom.

He bumped the lights on with his shoulder and was greeted by a rumpled twin-sized bed, along with semi-permanent piles of random laundry — none of which smelled at all like Laurel’s incense. He swept past all of that though, because the important stuff was at the computer desk and attached workbench that filled up most of the tiny room. He carefully set the package and food down on the table top and, grimacing, was suddenly reminded of the condition of his pants and boots. He paused to untie, unlace, and kick off the footwear. Then, he stripped down to boxers and tossed the jeans aside. From a nearby pile, he produced a dry pair of jogging pants and pulled them on.

Finally, he parked himself in the office chair stationed at the center of the workspace. Winding down, he grabbed his cheeseburger and considered the package between bites. He scratched thoughtfully at the back of his neck and ate a few fries.

He couldn’t believe it was here — and now that it was, he was almost afraid to open it.

It had started a few weeks before, when Marten posted some ideas from his ongoing post-graduate work to an obscure computational neuroscience listserv. Dating from the early 70’s — the veritable days of networked antiquity — the email distribution list was populated by a lesser known cabal of PhDs and grad students. It was also rumored to have a number of government spooks quietly observing — the list had a rich history of folklore and in-jokes surrounding these lurkers.

Participants in the groups used aliases as often as real names, so the only things that really carried weight and granted reputation were verifiable ideas and consistency. Anything else resulted in cranky ridicule and an eventual boot from the list. This was something from which few ever returned, virtually speaking.

It was with that danger in mind that he declared being on the verge of extracting a complete human neural state vector, along with an algorithmic understanding of the brain’s in-built signal redundancy and error correction.

In other words, he was convinced that he was just a few steps away from downloading a copy of a human mind — memories, skills, personality, and all. Not only that, but in studying the brain as an information system, he’d uncovered some interesting natural structures and patterns. They pointed him toward ways in which damaged or missing portions of the system could be rebuilt and filled in from the whole of the remaining parts. He was probably getting ahead of himself, but he suspected that someday this stuff could be used to fix brain damage and cure senility, among other things.

His pronouncement had sparked a nasty debate on the list. On one hand, his alias had never been known as one of the crazies. He usually produced solid data and critical analysis. He took criticism well, calmly conceded points where he was wrong, and generally kept his ego out of the way.

But, the things he’d posted just came too far out of left field for most of the list subscribers. Worse yet was that Marten’s results were very difficult to reproduce: He’d developed a pile of custom equipment during his experiments, and it would take awhile before anyone else managed to follow in his footsteps. That is, if anyone even cared to do more than simply, sadly, dismiss yet another nutter from the list who’d succumbed to the pressure. Although he hadn’t been tarred and feathered quite yet, the sentiment on the list was that he was dangerously close to joining the ranks of John Titor, cold fusion scientists, and that Time Cube guy.

So, it was in midst of that textual firestorm that John Aleph contacted Marten privately off-list. At first, he thought Aleph was just screwing with him, because the first line of his initial message said:

“I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.”

Over the course of an extended email thread, though, it turned out that John Aleph took Marten’s claims seriously — he just had a peculiarly sardonic wit that Marten had trouble following. Half the time, Marten felt like he was the punch-line of a joke he hadn’t heard. Aleph also proved to be frustratingly vague and evasive about who he really was and what he really did. But, this intrigued him: Marten quickly came to assume that Aleph was one of the list’s mythical spooky-lurkers.

Aleph was the real deal, though: He shared notes and experimental results — signed and carefully encrypted — that followed tracks eerily parallel to Marten’s own. He could see that Aleph had access to tools with drastically better sensitivity and precision than his own. Yet, there were places where Marten had had better insights than Aleph’s analysts. They’d coined different terms — mental entirety versus neural state vector, for example — but it was clear that they were exploring the same terrain.

Eventually, Aleph suggested they do more than just share stale notes. While he remained cagey about any face-to-face meetings, he offered to ship Marten a few pieces of equipment. That way, they could combine the knack Marten had shown for discovering patterns with the data that Aleph’s equipment could so deftly extract.

With that, he was sold: Marten was undoubtedly a sucker for gadgets.

In theory, Marten knew what was in the box. According to Aleph, it was ultra-secret technology, astonishingly compact and powerful. Whereas Marten’s state vector capture equipment was a room-filling hack of an MRI machine with repurposed firmware and tweaked emitters, Aleph’s equipment fit in a small shipping box.

Carefully, Marten peeled away the packing tape that sealed the edges of the box top. Lifting open the flaps revealed a bubble-wrap cocoon filling the space within. Without realizing he was holding his breath, he gently lifted the bundle out and started unravelling the packaging. What emerged was a glossy black slab, about the size of a sub-notebook computer. Along with the slab was a large ziploc bag containing spooled wires, electrodes, and a manilla envelope hand-labeled “READ ME” in wide marker strokes.

He extracted the envelope, which contained a sheaf of printed instructions for operating the device. It described the placement of electrodes on a human skull. There was a wiring diagram for the electrodes, to be connected to discrete terminals along an edge of the slab. Communications and data offloading protocols were documented, presumably so that he could connect the device up to one of his PCs and interact with the data it captured.

Over the next few hours, Marten poured over the instructions twice. He hooked the slab up to the USB port on his primary PC, and installed some drivers that came on a small thumb drive — they were strangely hard to probe, but he forged ahead. He painstakingly connected each of the wires to the slab and a corresponding electrode, then seated each electrode onto its proper location around his head.

Finally, after rechecking every connection and reviewing every step detailed in the guide, it all came down to a pushing a button. It was more of a slight thumb-sized dimple in the surface of the otherwise featureless panel, really. His thumb hovered over the spot and he scratched at the back of his neck with his other hand, mulling it over.

This was the point of no return. Before, it had all been just an interesting email thread. But at that moment, with his thumb about to touch down, it occurred to him that he’d wired himself into a machine about which he didn’t really know that much. If he hadn’t been so excited by Aleph’s promises and impatient to just see it in action — and if he weren’t afraid that he’d never be able to put it back together again — he would’ve pried it open and tried reverse engineering it like every other gadget that fell into his hands.

But, no, not this time. He took a deep breath and pushed the button.

There was a quiet buzzing sound. Marten’s head snapped back and his spine arched away from the chair. In his head, a storm raged.

What the hell? You’re mine now. What? I’m moving in! Who are you? I’m John Alpha, and you’re mine now. Aleph? No, that was a bad joke on you. The device was meant to capture a state vector! This feels like the opposite! That’s right, you poor bastard. What’s happening to me? You’re going away, Marten. No, please, you can’t! I never thought— I don’t want— Too bad, Marten. You’re mine now.

As the buzz subsided and Marten’s body relaxed back into his seat, an unbidden and mostly unnoticed thought — belonging neither to Marten nor to John Alpha — whispered through their shared mind:

(we’re hungry. feed us.)