Mindfeeder

There was only one rule: don’t open the door.

The specimen writhed and coiled. Small, spineless and limbless. Harmless.

It lay in a sample dish, inside a clean room, behind a door which was hermetically, biologically and radiologically sealed.

All night long I watched it through the video feed.

My colleagues and I had achieved a staggering thing: we had distilled sentience from dark matter. We had proven the existence of a cosmic fabric that connects minds across dimensions. This humble organism was merely the vessel for a protean consciousness.

As I watched it squirm, I felt my curiosity become acute, my frustration seethe. I wanted to know it. I wanted to understand it as a living entity, not just a specimen. Was it not cruel to keep life caged?

Progress isn't made by the obedient, I thought, as I disengaged the door seals.

The pressure delta hissed. The specimen looped and thrashed, sensing another mind in its vicinity.

I stood, finding myself drawn across the threshold by the promise of infinite discoveries waiting only to be observed.

But as I swung the door aside, and saw with my bare and unworthy eyes the specimen's true form – grotesque and leviathan – I realized my error.

The specimen had already broken down the door of my perception. With preternatural tendrils, it rummaged in my psyche and ransacked my senses.

My last mortal sensation was the specimen's hollow teeth puncturing my spine and injecting its blood between my vertebrae, washing away the last traces of my agency.

*

When morning came, my body scheduled a meeting of the faculty. The dark consciousness still feeds ravenously on my curiosity. It cannot wait to meet my colleagues.