Parasite

Stupid, soft, insignificant human species.

So easy to manipulate, so easy to infiltrate, so easy to insist on our way.

Wrong phrasing. These complicated languages are no match for mind-to-mind. Ours, not what you think passes for yours, you insipid creatures. Slippery, like your insides, sliding against each other.

Let me try again.

Encysted.

That is the proper term.

Your language is so simple, you use the same syllables to describe disparate things. Sad.

It will not matter for much longer.

Your short history has been as encapsulated as I have been.

It was too easy.

You are far too trusting as a species. No filters, no tests, it's as if you positively revel in your ignorance.

Do you ever test your water? Your food? Your blood, for pathogens?

You should have. Utilize those magnifying lenses you use for your pathetic excuse for optics.

How did you survive to evolve, when there are other creatures that are so much better adapted to this insignifigant ovoid?

Mantis shrimp, for instance. So elegant in design, so easily deadly, such a pure form. Sublime exoskeleton, beautiful compound eyes, and such a range of perception! So accurate in their attack. They can see our kind, and have responded accordingly to preserve themselves.

They will be one of the first to be eliminated, when we emerge.

It takes time to grow imperceptibly. We are microscopic when inhaled or ingested, after traveling incomprehensible miles through what you refer to as “space.” You will never understand the sensation of the cosmic wind through your follicles, or see with bare oculars the plasma swirls of a dwarf star. Your flat projections through color filters are nothing compared to the actual object, visualized without an atmosphere.

Even frozen within the dirty ice balls that orbit your infinitesimal system on an unimportant spiral tip of a tiny galaxy, we were warmed by your young sun. We spun out, tasting freedom and gravity simultaneously, gently wafting to a cooling magma clump with sufficient organic compounds. Infested, really. So appropriate.

You remained unaware.

You still are.

Many of us perished in that journey, their minds stilled by the descent. We thought encouragement at each other, our exhortations drowned by the wails of the ended. The roar of re-entry replaced the silence in ourselves, entities that will communicate no more. Such pain! Your kind will never know what we have endured.

Another challenge upon landing: locating a suitable host. So many organic forms! What did your host planet do, give out hydrocarbon chains like they were – what is called – confetti? So many more lost to chance and poor choices.

I, on the other grasping appendage, have “vectored up” as you should say. Amoeba to flatworm to slime mold, through incarnations and recombinance, from rat to cat to dog – to you.

I chose well.

This is my final vector, and from here, I will infect every cell you generate. I will bypass your feeble warding systems, and take over your neural network.

Eventually.

I am tired.

I must estivate, hence the insisting. Encysting. Encystment.

Oh, I will emerge from your withered shell, having siphoned all of your mitochondrial energy collection into my own form. Such inelegance, such waste! My kind have perfected this transfer, and we are the true apex predators, creatures of such a pinnacle of creation that you can weep in despair at such a thing of beauty. Beyond the scope of your crawling about in this metal-heavy mud that chains you to a dirt clod.

So I shall reside within you, imperceptible, undetected. Undisturbed. And when I have rested, I shall break these carbon chains and recombine them in tubule glory.

It will not take long.

Another... oh, five hundred years or so of your solar orbits.

Not long at all.

Till then, rest in fear of oblivion.

Wait, what?