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Message-ID: <30119asstr$988935002@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
From: "Voyer" <hypnovoyer@hotmail.com>
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Subject: {ASSM} Voyer: Seasons of Growth, Seasons of Change (mc mf md nc scifi)
Date: Thu,  3 May 2001 20:10:02 -0400
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Seasons of Growth, Seasons of Change
mc, mf, md, nc, scifi
voyer@notme.com

Note: This story is a hypnofetish fantasy. It contains
adult language and situations, and examples of fictional
characters doing illegal, immoral and/or impossible
things to other fictional characters as a prelude to sexual
activity. If you 1) are under the age of consent in your
community, 2) are disturbed by such concepts, 3)
attempt to do most of these things in real life or 4) want
graphic `on-stage' sex in your pornography, then please
stop reading now.
   Permission is granted to re-post this story unaltered to
any on-line forum, as long as no fee whatsoever is
charged to view it, and this disclaimer and the above
e-mail address are not removed. It would also be nice if
you told me you were posting it.
  Copyright Voyer, 2000

*   *   *   *   *

  He stumbled up the street, still clutching the
nearly-empty bottle in one hand. The bottle's former
contents sloshed around in his stomach and in his
bloodstream, cheerfully chewed on his liver and his
brain.
  Something prompted him to lurch to a stop. He peered
around with blurry eyes, quizzically watching the
buildings sway back and forth in the gathering gloom.
He tried to figure out what the problem was. He had
gotten his booze for the night. He didn't need to piss.
  He was tired. That was it. Been a long day, time to get
some sleep. Hit the ol' sack. Yes sir.
  He turned his body with a terrible sort of shattered
dignity and aimed for the mouth of a nearby alley. The
darkness beyond the scattered streetlights beckoned
invitingly. He moved into the alley, past the battered
dumpster which lurked against one brick wall. On the
other side of the dumpster was a pile of discarded
pallets. The gap between the two looked snug and
inviting, and he toppled into it.
  Swallowed now by the darkness, he stared up at the
night sky. The city lights still blotted it out, reducing it
to a haze, but it stirred something in him nonetheless. A
few memories floating on the surface of his mind like a
cluster of fallen autumn leaves on the top of a
scum-filled pond, simultaneously pretty and pathetic.
(Not that he thought of it in those terms, of course.)
   Memories of... wanting more. Of looking up at a sky
that wasn't filled with fucking smog and streetlights, but
stars. There had been a night... he had laid on a hillside,
on the grass, and looked up at the stars. He had been
fishing earlier in the day, and his pole lay beside him in
the cool grass. Now it was all gone, and he couldn't
even remember how it had been taken away. He leaked
a few tears, and drifted off into a troubled sleep, still
clutching the bottle.
   And then everything changed.

*    *    *

  Everything had changed.
  Maureen couldn't remember now how exactly it had
changed, if it had been a creeping thing coming on
gradually, or if it had happened all at once between one
heartbeat and the next.
  She also wasn't exactly sure if things had just changed
for *her* or for everybody everywhere. She was
inclined to suspect, in the rare snatches of time she had
to think about such things, that it was just her. Well, not
just her, but not all of humanity...
  This was one of the differences, right there. Before,
whenever "before" had been, there had been more time
to think about things. Maybe not a *lot* more time, but
still... now whenever she started to think about things,
try and sort things out and make sense of her world as a
whole, it seemed that something instantly happened that
demanded her absolute undivided attention.
  Still...
  Everything had changed, and yet, oddly...
  Much of it stayed the same.
  Waking up, for instance. She had done that all the time
Before. She was sure of it. Before, the first thing she
had done every day was wake up.
   And that was still true.
   But it wasn't the same. At the appointed time she
would stop dreaming, and open her eyes, yes, but
something else inside her *didn't* change as these
things happened. Some part of her was still asleep. It,
whatever it was, maybe was asleep all the time now.
   Maybe part of her was in a coma. Isn't that what they
called it when you never woke up? That sounded like
the right word. Coma. Cooo-ma. She couldn't quite
decide if it was a pretty word or an ugly word. Could a
word be both at the same time? She would ask her
roommate's opinion, but...
   Roommate. There was another thing that had
changed/stayed the same. She had a roommate and they
shared a room. They lived together. She had had a
roommate like this Before, but she was about 90%
certain it wasn't the same person as now.
   Shannon was a woman for one thing, and Maureen's
old roommate had been a man.
   Maybe. She had only a vague memory of masculinity,
of hairiness and tallness and a different sort of smell. A
nice smell, actually. There was of course no longer a
name or face or anything.
   And they had slept together in the same bed, she and
the male roommate. She was quite certain on that point.
That was when she often smelled the nice smell, waking
up in the morning, all of her waking up, with the man
lying next to her, his warm body touching hers in ways
she had liked to be touched.
   Now, in this place, she did not sleep in the same bed
as Shannon. (Well... not exactly...)  Maureen couldn't
quite decide if this was a good thing or bad thing. On
the one hand Shannon wasn't hairy and didn't smell
nice, at least not in the same ways as the man, but on the
other, sleeping alone in a bed every night made Maureen
feel sad at times. Even the dreams weren't much
comfort at those moments.
   Bed. She called it a bed, but it wasn't really, was it?
Yet another thing that had changed. The bed she shared
with the man had been more... well... comfortable. This
new bed... she slept well enough, slept like a log every
single night in fact, but... it was still sort of cramped and
not very soft.
   She would have called her new bed something else,
Before. Before, she would never have consented to
sleep in it. It was something that *other people* slept in.
Nasty, disgusting, people she would have rather died
than be associated with.
   It was odd.
   Maureen woke up in her bed. She was able to lay
there for a moment or two and think about all of the
things mentioned above, but then she had to get up. It
wasn't that she particularly wanted to get up. (Or not
want to get up for that matter...) She *had* to get up.
There was simply no room for discussion or debate; her
body started moving even before she could think about
it. She got up.
   Shannon was already up, like always. That was why
they didn't sleep together, Maureen remembered now.
Usually Shannon was awake when she was asleep, and
vice versa. Not always, but usually.
   "Good morning, Shannon." Maureen actually had no
idea if it was morning, or noon or six o'clock in the
afternoon. She just said this whenever she woke up,
because it seemed to be the thing to do.
   "Good evening, Maureen." Shannon smiled as she
spoke. She always said that in reply, and Maureen
supposed it made sense. After all, for Shannon it was
evening, wasn't it? Shannon continued. "I made your
breakfast."
  "Thank you, Shannon. Are there any problems today?"
  "Nothing serious. You need to go look at that one
place in the Big Room. The big cluster in the corner just
under the windows. Where you do better than I do."
   "OK." There was no shame in Shannon admitting this.
They each had areas of their work where they were
more proficient than the other. Maybe that was why
they had been paired up.
   Work. Maureen thought the word as she squatted and
quietly munched away at the breakfast that Shannon had
prepared. (It was as tasteless as always, but that wasn't
Shannon's fault. Maureen was pretty sure that the
breakfasts she made every evening for Shannon weren't
any better.) Work was another concept that had
changed/remained the same. She still worked. She still
had a job. But Before, work had been... more textured
somehow. Like breakfast. She had left the... the
apartment to work. Why, she had even left the
*building* to work.
   Of course, these had all been different buildings than
this one. She thought. They were probably still out
there, somewhere, but Maureen had no idea where and
didn't really care. She swallowed her bite of food and
spoke aloud to Shannon.
   "Anything else?"
   "No." Shannon paused for a long moment and stood
very still, her blue eyes not looking at Maureen now.
"I'll go to bed now."
   "OK."
   Shannon crawled into the bed that Maureen had just
abandoned, curled up and went to sleep.
   Or at least she closed her eyes and started to dream.
Occasionally, she'd give a little twitch, or a conflicted
little moan, both happy and anguished.
   Maureen watched this as she finished her breakfast,
her jaws moving methodically. Then she drank a little
tepid water from the appropriate dispenser and spent a
few minutes doing her stretching exercises, limbering up
after her night's sleep. When she was done, she pushed
her hair back out of the way. It was getting awfully long
and tangled, but she simply didn't have time to do
anything about it.
   Hair. Another thing that she had never had time to do
was to tell Shannon that she thought that Shannon's
blonde hair (as long as Maureen's, longer even) was
very pretty. Maureen had black hair, and it was nice
enough she supposed, but Before she had poured
something on it to make it look blonde. Then things had
changed and her hair had slowly turned black again, as it
got longer and longer. So had the hair on the other parts
of her body. It was another thing that sometimes made
her a little sad, especially once it (the hair on her head,
that is) had gotten long enough for her to see easily.
    She got to work. As always Shannon had cleaned and
polished the tools and carefully arranged them in their
proper places on the spotless floor, lined up in neat rows
under the light and alongside the short wooden
stepladder. The tools were all very different in shape,
but each was fashioned out of a single piece of slick,
oily-looking metal. The same kind of metal made up the
slim collars that both Maureen and Shannon wore
around their necks. The collars were tight but not
choking, as smooth and seamless as the tools. Maureen
loathed and loved the texture of hers as it slid against
her skin. She sometimes dreamed that it was strangling
her, while other times it gave her orgasms, dozens of
them all overlapping. Still other times it did both of
these things simultaneously. She liked those dreams best
of all; they made all the sadness go away.
    Maureen took the proper tool for dealing with the
cluster that Shannon had mentioned. It was a long thing,
with four narrow prongs on its tip. Each prong was bent
at the same slight angle. It would have looked like a
fork, except the prongs were arranged in a square, two
and two.
   Maureen wasn't sure what a fork was.
   She padded into the Big Room. There were three
rooms: The Main Room, The Big Room and The Little
Room. They slept in the Main Room and stored their
tools there, simply because that was where there was the
most available floor-space, and ranged thickly around all
of the edges of the all rooms was their work.
   The Plants. That was what the two women called
them, but they weren't really plants. They weren't
green, and they certainly didn't smell nice.
   But they didn't smell bad either, exactly. They smelled
like something rich and rotting and gooey and tasty and
virulently poisonous. As for what they looked like... if
Maureen searched her memory of the Beforetimes, she
came up with the word `cobwebs'.  That wasn't really
accurate, but it was in the ballpark. (`Ballpark'?) The
Plants stretched across every edge and corner of the
three Rooms, the thick strands tangling with each other
all and interconnected. They were the color of deeply
rotten meat, and pulsed and throbbed and whispered
snatches of words that Maureen didn't quite understand.
   Sometimes when she was dreaming, the words
became a bit clearer, but they just said things that she
already knew. She found this disappointing, but not
terribly surprising.
   It was her and Shannon's job to tend to and nurture
the Plants, to make sure they stayed healthy and strong,
but also not to let them run totally rampant. Their
energy and growth had to be controlled, channeled into
specific productive uses. Maureen had no idea what
those uses were, but she had the vague impression that
they were slowly building towards something, a day that
was gradually drawing nearer. Maybe after that day,
things would change again. She wasn't at all sure how
she felt about that idea.
   She knelt on the wooden floor in front of `her' cluster.
(She didn't actually own anything. of course, not the
cluster, not her body, not her mind, but it was simpler to
think of it in such terms.) As Shannon had said, it was
nothing serious, but there was some minor tangling
developing in potions of the sub-webbing. If she didn't
pry it loose, the cluster could eventually twist up into
too tight a knot and strangle itself.
   The thought of one of the clusters dying was just too
hideous to even entertain. The Plants had to stay healthy
and strong.
   It didn't take long under her practiced hand; the
fork-tool neatly hooked the patches of sub-webbing and
pulled them straight, relieving the congestion. Once that
was done, she stroked the cluster with gentle fingertips,
her body oils and heat smoothing and sealing. More
extensive procedures weren't required this time.
   She knew every inch of every Plant and could do this
blindfolded, if there had been anything in any of the
Rooms to make a blindfold out of.
   It was dark enough in the room that she was
practically doing it already. Each room had a single
unshielded bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling
from a long cord, and this was another thing that had
un/changed. Before, light bulbs occasionally burned out,
and had to be replaced. Even now, Maureen
remembered once trying to replace a bulb and hurting
herself when she fell off a ladder, much like the one
currently sitting out by the tools. After she had fallen,
somebody (the male roommate?) had taken her to a
white place where strangers wearing green clothes had
poked and prodded her. She had hated it, been
humiliated and embarrassed. One of the good things
about the change was that she never had to go to white
places anymore. She never seemed to get sick or
*anything.*
   Which made her sort of like the bulbs, actually, since
they never burned out. They also didn't put out light like
she remembered the Before-bulbs doing. These were
dim and sort of flickery, and the color was about the
same as the Plants, maybe a little less rotten and a little
more like sunlight. They burned all the time and if there
was a way to switch them off, Maureen didn't know
about it.
   Sometimes, lately, Maureen thought that some of the
largest clusters were doing more than just reflecting that
light...
   Her fingers knew what they were doing with very little
input needed from the rest of her, so Maureen was able
to spare a quick glance at the room's windows. She only
thought about them since Shannon had mentioned them.
Only the Big Room and the Main Room had windows.
(The Small Room was windowless and smooth and
white, with odd bits of metal tubing sticking up out the
floor here and there.) The Plants had crawled up and
covered most of the panes, seeming to like growing on
the glass, but even before that, the windows weren't
much use; long thick planks of wood had been
methodically nailed over them on the outside. There
were one or two tiny chinks, and slivers of pale light
filtered wanly through. So maybe it really *was*
morning. Somewhere.
   She finished stroking the cluster into shape, rose and
returned to the Big Room with the tool. It went back
into its place on the floor under the bulb, and she took
the next tool of the day. This was even longer and
thinner, but with a wide fluffy end which was brushed
over the Plants. It gently removed something from the
Plants' surface, maybe just dust. Every inch had to be
covered with this treatment, and they used the ladder to
use to reach the high places. (Maureen was always very
careful when using the ladder.) Both she and Shannon
did this, so the plants got the treatment twice a day.
   As she brushed, Maureen studied the Plants intently,
looking for even the slightest flaw or problem. She
noted one or two minor blemishes that could wait until
she was finished brushing, but nothing important. There
were one or two of these almost every morning.
   Minutes and then hours slid past. As always when she
did the dusting, Maureen was vaguely aware that this
particular stretch of time was going by more quickly
than it would have Before. Before, she guessed, she
would have been horrifically bored doing this, but now
while she certainly didn't rush or skimp anywhere, the
time just flew along.
   Just as she was finishing up and dragging the ladder
back to its home, the summons came.
   Like all the summons, it came up suddenly from
nowhere and everywhere. Rising up from the floor
through her feet and legs, thrumming out from the
plants and the tools and the collar, coming from the
center of her own brain.
   Shannon immediately stopped dreaming and got out
of bed, to take Maureen's place while she was gone.
Maureen left the Rooms without a backwards glance,
stepping through the doorless entryway into the hall.
There were Plants here as well, but they were not nearly
as lush and vibrant as those tended back in their Rooms.
Maureen felt quite proud of this fact.
   The only light came from the bulbs shining in the
Rooms.
   All the sets of Rooms. There were others. She tended
to forget this fact during the time between summonings.
She briefly found herself looking into the Main Room
across the hall from her and Shannon's. There was
another woman there. She was vaguely familiar, but
Maureen couldn't dredge up a name to match to her
face. She was down on her hands and knees near the
door, ministering to her own Plants, first with a tiny
toothpick-like tool and then with her tongue, gently
licking some small new growths. Her hair was even
blacker than Maureen's, and even longer than
Shannon's, spilling around her equally dark body in
profusion.
    She seemed to be doing a good job, which made
Maureen happy. First came the licking... then...
    Maureen walked on, and the woman disappeared
from view. There were more doorways and more Main
Rooms, but no other women; they all must have been
tending their Plants out of view.
   Every Main Room had a bed in it, turned so she
couldn't see inside. Seeing them somehow triggered a
connection in Maureen. Or maybe it was the
summoning. She always seemed to be able to think new
thoughts during her trip down.
   *Crates. Packing crates tipped on their sides. That's
what I used to call beds. Before. Winos slept in them.*
   She felt a vague disquiet at this, and firmly pushed the
memory away. It sank back into blackness without
resistance.
   At the end of the hall were two sets of doors, these
still mounted in their frames. One was made of metal,
not the metal of the Plant-tools, but a less greasy
substance, battered and stained now. Again a word
surfaced.
   *Elevator. But it doesn't work. Not anymore.*
   She turned to the other door. It was wood, with a
single word painted on it. The word was barely visible,
but she could see very well in the dark now.
   STAIRS.
   She pulled open the door and started down the steps.
Unlike in the Rooms, there was dust here, and she left
footprints. She could see the overlapping shapes,
various layers of dust, were other bare feet had passed
by in recent days.
   There was dust, but there were no cobwebs.
   She walked down, heading for the basement.
   After every couple of flights of stairs, there was
another door with more words on it, and a single bulb
hanging overhead to make them readable. 3. 2. LOBBY.
   At this last door she paused. It was not her decision to
pause, but as she stood there waiting, her hands at her
sides, a thought flitted across her mind.
   *Lobby. That door leads to the lobby. The entrance to
this building. I could run out that door and dash across
the lobby and then maybe get out of the building, and I
wouldn't be stopped. I could do these things even from
the Rooms. Anytime I wanted to.*
   It was a true thought, and it was also utterly
meaningless.
   She was not being tested. There was nothing to test.
She was waiting, or rather something else was waiting,
watching an event that was happening someplace else
and holding her in place in case she was required for
something. A sense of history rose...
   And then passed. Nothing happened.
   She continued down into the basement, her pace still
steady and calm. Even so, as she walked, she became
aware that something was changing inside her. She
clinically studied the sensation, reached for yet another
name.
   Arousal. That was it. When she was working, she
sometimes became aroused, but it was only because she
needed something... the Plants needed something... but
it wasn't the same as this. This feeling was reaching into
her brain, not just her sex.
   The first room she came to was where the furnace was
still kept. The looming mass of ancient steel was cold
and dark; as far as Maureen knew, it was never used or
needed. She certainly never felt uncomfortably hot or
cold. Yes, the furnace was never used... except...
   A new memory. Or maybe old one?
   They had been in the room with the furnace. Maureen
and Shannon and others. Had the dark-skinned woman
been one of them? Maureen thought so.
   And she was standing in front of the furnace, which
stood open and burning in full roar, its gigantic fiery
maw casting a hellish flicker over the scene. The flames
weren't yellow, but the color of rotten meat. And she
was holding something in her hands. A purse. *Her*
purse. Something that she herself had actually been
allowed to own...
   She tossed it into the furnace. It vanished into the
flames, swallowed in an instant.
   She took off her suit-jacket. It was dirty and had
cobwebs on it, from when... from when she had gotten it
dirty. Out in the lobby.
   It was next to go into the flames
   And then her shoes.
   And her skirt.
   And all the rest.
   And then...
   She had gone into the next room,  on a twisty path
sloping further down into the darkness, following the
Plants as they all twined and came together, headed
towards their Root.
   She had crawled into the next room, on her hands and
knees, just as she was crawling now. The Plants were so
thick and wild here that it was almost a necessity, but
she would have done it anyway. The arousal grew and
grew, hot and throbbing, and a plaintive little mew
escaped her lips.
   And in the next room, not really a room at all anymore
but shapeless space deep in the earth, there was
something crouched down amidst both decaying piles of
matter and the massive spewing tendrils of its own body.
Something white and bloated and covered with boils and
pulsing in time to her own need. The Root. It was
waiting for her, its arms opening.
   Maureen gave a tiny scream and crawled towards it,
her sex and brain both wet and raw and flaming with
desire.

*   *    *

   Everything had changed.
   It remembered that the process had been somehow
both sudden and gradual. It had arrived here, in this
place, weak, no, almost dead from its long journey
across the cold and dark In-Between, the vast matterless
wastelands where things far worse than Itself roamed
with gigantic ravenous impunity. Many, many other
scouts and probes had been flung out before It, and all
had failed, each a tiny spark snuffed out or casually
swallowed amidst an infinite blackness.
   But somehow, It had survived, and arrived here. It lay
for a long time in moist darkness, recovering, feebly
gathering what few tiny scraps of nutrients came within
reach of Its tiny probing tendrils. Finally, It gained
enough strength to venture forth and explore this new
realm to which It had been sent.
   Unlike its half-forgotten origin-point, this proved to
be a chaotic place, full of too much light and motion and
color and stimulation, all coming and going in massive
rumbling flashes. It lurked in dark corners, watching and
trying to learn, to find the rhythms and patterns, so it
could integrate itself with them. It failed. Nothing It had
experienced had prepared It for this.
   Inevitably, It realized that there was only one way to
learn the things that It needed to know in order to
succeed at Its mission. It wasn't supposed to use that
way. Not yet. Willfully violating the established
procession was very hard, but failing at Its mission was
far, far worse.
   It hunkered down in a quiet corner and waited until
something blundered against it in the dark, a scuttling
creature with many legs and a hard black shell covering
a soft interior.
   For some reason, this last attribute appealed to It, and
It entered the creature.
   And so things began to change.
   It was still It, but It was now the creature as well. A
thing with no real brain or thoughts, a thing that saw
only blackness and light, that lived only to eat and
survive and breed. With this partial merging, It had lost
some of Its original purpose and would never entirely
recover it. It ran from the light. It ate. It bred, but did
not pass Its essence onto Its countless offspring. They
were simply more scuttling creatures, obeying only their
ancient genetic heritage. It could not, would not,
intertwine Itself well enough with the creature's
structure.
   Then something both disastrous and wonderful
happened.
   It/the creature was abruptly caught and eaten by
something else, a bigger creature. The journey here had
taught It much and It managed to survive once again,
separating Itself from the first creature as its carcass
dissolved in a pool of fiery liquid. After a time, It found
a path inside the bigger creature, and slithered its way to
the thing's brain. A new merging, but with some threads
of the old merging still along for the ride.
   More changes.
   The new creature was as already mentioned much
bigger than the first, and had its hard places, its support
structure, on the inside of its body. It had only four legs,
and its outer surface was covered with softness. On the
other hand, it was similar to the first host in that it lived
to eat and breed and avoid the light.
   But only mostly similar. There was something else
there, a vague flickering, a sense of self and of place that
the first host lacked and that It continued to crave.
   It looked out through the creature's eyes and saw a
world that made for the first time a sort of sense, crude
rhythms and patterns becoming visible. As primitive as
they were, the host creature still did not fully understand
many of these flows, but it was nevertheless aware of
their existence and used them to survive. And now It did
the same thing as well. Eat. Breed. Live. And still it was
not quite enough. Something was missing.
   Then It became aware of something much more
important.
   The other creatures, the third kind. The endless stream
of giants that stamped and rumbled and bellowed
overhead. They were clumsy and slow and left endless
piles of mouth-watering delights scattered in their wake,
but they were also
   *DANGEROUS.*
   This fact was ground into the host-creature's every
cell and fiber, a lesson well-learned and passed down
over tens of thousands of years.
   Avoid The Giants.
   Any time one of the huge creatures came blundering
anywhere nearby, the host-creature would turn tail and
run, scuttling back into the darkness. It had to drive the
host-creature back out, drive Itself out into the light, to
study and watch the giants as they came and went. The
more It watched, the more convinced It became that one
of the giants had to be Its next host, which presented a
problem.
   It quickly became clear that the giants did not want to
eat the host-creature, or others of its type. They either
ignored them, or killed them and quickly discarded the
bodies, not even allowing their bare skin to touch the
carcasses. It wondered if perhaps some of Its fellow
seekers had survived the trip here after all, and the
giants knew of Its intentions.
   In the end, feeling the host-creature's life forces
beginning to wane, it took a desperate gamble. It noted
that most of the giants disappeared from the region
during the dark stretches that regularly alternated with
the light. (Rhythms... patterns...) But not all of them.
Some, unknowingly mimicking Its current host-creature,
found a dark corner somewhere and curled up and tried
to sleep.
   It waited and finally a chance arose. During a patch of
blackness, one of the giants lumbered into the great
square canyon in which the host-creature lived. The
giant thrashed around for a seemingly endless time
before finally settling down and sleeping, filling the
canyon with its noise.
   It drove the host-creature forth for the last time. It
was the hardest struggle yet; the creature had to be
dragged inch by inch out into the open, and up onto a
nearby platform, near the giant's head.
   Then with an even deeper struggle, It ripped itself free
of the host-creature and jumped the frigid chasm to the
giant, sliding in through one of the openings in the head.
   Once again, It had nearly died. The pain of this
separation had been too much, which was the reason It
was supposed to have waited, found a good host right
from the start.
   It knew that, for better or for worse, this new host
would be Its home forever.
   With a last bit of dying strength, It merged.
   And so everything changed for the last time. Changed
in a way that It could never have anticipated, never have
dreamed of.
   The mind that It now slid into was vast, as big as the
body that carried it. After being in the
   -Cockroach-
   and the
   -Rat-
   the sense of freedom... of boundless expanses going to
the far horizons and beyond... It was intoxicating,
staggering. Its tendrils shot forward into infinity, locking
into place. It spun around and around, stunned, blinded
by the distances.
   And even better than the space, there were the things
piled up in that space, treasures stacked rank on rank. A
storehouse filled to the brim with wonders and delights.
Although even in those first heady moments, It could
see that much of this storehouse had been allowed to fall
into horrific decay and rubble, even been intentionally
vandalized beyond hope of repair. In that moment It
learned the concept of grief and It wept.
   The other thing that came to It in that first moment
was the fundamental human concept of names, an idea
that had never occurred to It before. Before this
moment, It had not called Itself `It', It had not called
Itself anything, any more than the rat or the roach had.
   And It didn't call Itself `It' now. It had merged
forever with something that had called itself Chet. Both
had died in that moment, and been reborn. The thing
that had once been two things thought for a moment,
dreamed new dreams, rummaged in what remained of
the storehouse and came to a decision.
   Chetit. That was its name now.
   Chetit opened its eyes for the very first time. More of
the world's rhythms fell into place. It understood now.
Not everything, not yet, not by half. But so, so many
more, most of what the rat had known, and a whole new
score of pulses and yearnings that the rat would never
begin to even suspect. (Maybe its descendants would
someday, a thousand or a million years from now. As
noted, the potential was there...) Chetit sat up and the
world tipped and spun. The masses of raw alcohol that
Chet had consumed earlier in the evening was still
sloshing around in its system, but Chetit made a few
tentative adjustments and the effects began to fade.
   Other things were changing. Chetit's body was already
starting to shift and alter itself. Things, mental and
physical, were sprouting from it. It wasn't sure at first
why this hadn't happened with the first two hosts, but it
was happening now. It realized that it had to go
somewhere, get further out of sight before People
started asking Questions. The pieces of the rat-mind and
the roach-mind still clinging to it agreed vehemently
with this plan. Go someplace dark and quiet and safe.
   It staggered forth from the alley on wobbly legs (From
six to four to two...) For the first time, it truly tapped
into the rhythms of the city, and then more faintly the
entire world beyond, felt them throbbing beneath its
mental touch. As it did this, its gaze fell on the
abandoned building opposite, and in that moment, its
destiny opened up before it, a merging and reviving of
near-forgotten dreams and hopes for both It and Chet
Gurlick Harkendale. Chetit would do what it was sent
here to do, but it would do it for *itself*, now that it
existed, not for whatever waited back on the other side
of the In-Between. Now that it had found a
large-enough brain, it was supposed to reconfigure
itself, make its own structure into a large gate by which
the other billion pieces of It could bypass the
In-Between, a literal mass of invaders spilling directly
into this...
   It became aware that Chet's vocabulary left something
to be desired.
   ...this dimension. A more-or-less correct word finally
came, dredged up from somewhere deep inside, from a
book read in a happier youth. (At the idea of written
words, of books, of things *filled* with ranks and ranks
of names, Chetit's mind did another stunned flip.)
   It wrenched its mind back to the moment and
immediate concerns. It would not do what it had been
sent to do. The defiance that Before had been
unthinkable was now more than possible. It would
change its body, yes. But it would serve another
purpose, a mixture of desires high and low.
   And for that purpose, it would require assistance.
Assistance and sustenance. It turned its gaze up the
street, then down. There appeared to be more activity in
the second direction and it began walking that way,
gaining more confidence as it moved, mastering the
movement of muscles and bones and washing away the
last of the alcohol. The ratroach part of its mind
clamored again for darkness and safety, but it stifled
them.
   The street was somewhat more busy. Cars zoomed
past, and Chetit caught flickers of  the mind-rhythm
within them as they did so. None were what it was
looking for.
   Then it saw what it needed, tasted the right rhythms.
   They were coming towards it, walking on long legs
covered with pink fishnet stockings.

*  *  *

   Ruby strolled down the street, her tall body
automatically flaunting itself, casting its hooks into the
darkness. Things weren't looking very promising this
night; the traffic was light and she hadn't even had a
nibble so far. At least it wasn't cold out, for a change.
   Something made her pause and look up.
   A man was standing up at the next intersection,
looking at her. She studied him in return, and the alarm
bells immediately went off in her mind. In this biz, you
quickly got real good at fitting people into categories.
First there were the major headings, as she personally
called them: Johns, Cops, Business Associates, and
Everybody Else.
   The guy on the corner, standing under the streetlight,
was definitely an Everybody Else. He looked like one of
the many harmless (if puke-inducing) winos who
shuffled around this part of town. He was certainly
dressed like one. And she thought she could *smell* him
all the way from where she stood. But there was
something fundamentally wrong about his stance, about
the way he was looking at her. Not a john-look or a
cop-look, but nevertheless focused in on her like a
cop-car's spotlight. Most of the winos focused about as
well as a dead flashlight.
   Ruby considered. She was a big fucking girl (in more
ways than one) and knew more than a few tricks if
things got ugly.
   But the alarm bells continued to ring, and she had
learned long ago to listen to them when they sounded.
   She turned to go the other way, to run if she had to.
   She turned back.
   Everything changed.

*   *   *

   Chetit tried to narrow its focus, pull in the new
invisible tendrils that were sprouting and tapping into
the throb and hum around it, and wrap the appendages
solely around the woman. (`Woman.' This name set off
a whole new string of reactions in its brain, and other
portions of its anatomy, hastening the changes...)
   It was much, much harder than it had anticipated. The
woman... Ruby Brevix... had obviously sensed danger
and turned to run. She turned back and stared once
more, feeling its uncertain fumblings inside her, feeling it
pull on her. Chetit's `hands' were too big and crude,
they flapped and splayed, unable to get a firm grip. She
struggled against it, her mind slipping away one
moment, then hauled back into its grasp in the next. She
staggered towards him, a painful step at a time in her
high heels, struggling too hard to have any energy to
waste on screaming.
   Then it felt something slip by under its hands that it
could lock onto, a niche in her mind, a hole that cried to
be filled. It slid into that hole, slid deep into it.
   The pleasure centers of her brain, although of course
neither of them thought of it in those terms at the time.
She orgasmed, her rhythms blossoming around her as
bright and gaudy as the tight clothes she wore.
   Chetit plunged deeper into that niche, setting the
hooks and *pulling*.
   She came again, stronger than before, and staggered
several more steps towards it in one quick surge.
   Another pull. It was sweating and straining as much as
she was.
   The blast this time sent Ruby to her knees, scattering
her purse and its contents into the gutter. She slowly
crawled to it across the pavement. At its feet, she
looked up, her dark features filled with hate and fear and
rapidly growing addiction. It held out a grimy
long-fingered hand, offering to help her to her feet. She
spit at it, and came again. The hooks slid deeper.
   Dropping the hand, it turned and walked back up the
street, the way it had come, feeling its body continue to
shift and change and grow. Its layers of filthy clothes
were beginning to strain and split.
   Ruby got to her feet and followed, a recalcitrant dog
being dragged with an unbreakable leash. Together they
lurched back up the empty street, to the abandoned
building that it had seen when it came out of the alley.
One of the boards hammered over the front doorway of
the apartment had already been wrenched partially
loose, and it squirmed inside, Ruby following it and
pulling the board back into place behind her.
   They wormed their way down, down into the
basement. A few other bums and derelicts had sought
shelter there, but when the two new individuals arrived,
the ones already there saw what Chetit was becoming
and fled before it. It let them go. It knew all too well
that by morning they would think they had merely seen
more monsters inside their own heads.
   It pulled her to it, mentally and physically and she
struggled anew against it, struggled for hours as it
wormed its tendrils of influence inside her, all going in
through the ever-expanding niche in her mind and taking
her names away from her one by one, adding them to its
own collection. In the end they were curled up together
in the filth and squalor, both experiencing something
new and wondrous, something that neither had ever
dreamed was possible, the rhythms bright and searing.
In a very real sense, everyone involved made love for
the first time in their lives.
   In the morning, it sent Ruby out to begin to collect the
things that they would need while it recovered and built
its own resources. She went and returned, as she had
been ordered. She still struggled at times, but the
struggles became weaker and weaker as the days
passed,  and soon stopped altogether.
   Its body burrowed into the building, put down roots.
Tapped permanently into the rhythms. Intertwined with
the building's frame, with the masses of power and
water and phone lines that passed nearby. Fashioned and
vomited up the tools needed to tend itself, and the food
that Ruby needed to survive. Ruby was an utterly
obedient slave now, her smooth and placid rhythms a
delightful counterpoint to the rich and turbulent throb
out in the rest of city. She used the tools and tenderly
nurtured it, and it expanded. It discovered that it could
not just pull in as it had done with Ruby, but push away
as well, push away each day with greater and greater
strength and subtlety. Soon the building was totally
abandoned, not just by humans but by all manner of
living things. Then the buildings on either side, then the
entire block.
   It pulled as well, reaching further and further into the
rhythms that flowed around it and finding what it
needed. Nutrients. Information. Power. It read books by
the hundreds. It watched the movies and the television
programs, surfed the webpages, looked out of a
thousand different mechanical eyes, all over the world,
saw the wonders and the delights, the horrors and the
banality. It learned so much, found so much buried and
forgotten wealth and knowledge that taking legal
possession of its home became as simple as taking
physical possession. Soon it owned the entire
neighborhood, working through a string of
elaborately-arranged holding companies on three
continents.
   Its position secured, it started pulling in more
interesting things. One at a time. Having learned more
than one lesson with Ruby, it lured them now gently, a
step at a time over long days as they passed near the
fringes of its influence, wooed and teased and tempted,
like the still-vivid brook-trout which had swam through
one special summer of Chet's youth, forty-two long
years ago. Lured them closer and closer, until they were
(so to speak) face to face and the real hooks could be
ceremoniously inserted in their proper places, one by
one, as the woman in question knelt before it in naked
and silent submission. And with each new woman
collected, its strength and sophistication grew, and a
new set of rooms went into cultivation in the apartment
building overhead.

* * *

   *We are getting closer. Things are changing.*
   They were not words. Chetit could still form physical
words of a sort if it wished, but it did not speak to the
woman it currently held in its endless grasp, sliding its
multitude of pencil-thin fingers across her smooth skin.
It probed her mind with less corporal fingers, tasted her
rhythms, ran a lingering mental tongue over the flavors
of her unique names, many of which it now reserved for
its exclusive use. Maureen Matthews. Henry Matthews.
Shannon. Big Room. Little Room. In addition, it
adjusted her thoughts as carefully and as delicately as
she and her `sisters' prepared its extensions, its wombs,
in the rooms above. In response, she moaned and
pushed herself further down onto the thing its cock had
become. Her surface mind wouldn't remember any of it,
once she left this room, returned to her "Plants," but it
continued to broadcast the images into her. Part of her
would remember. The part that was now always asleep.
   *I cannot impregnate you in any useful way, even
though part of me was once what you are. The
differences are too great. It would all be so much
simpler if I could. But our work continues. One day, my
extensions will blossom. And my progeny, my copies of
myself will go forth, and venture forth across the land
and the seas, one for every city in the world. New York.
London. Paris. New Delhi. Ulan Bator. We will sow the
seeds of my purpose, in the garden beds I have already
purchased and secured. And if... when... another like the
thing I once was makes it across the In-Between, we
will be watching all the rhythms of the world. We will
sense it growing, and we will stop it before it can let the
bulk of It in. And more importantly, we, all of us, you,
your sisters and your sisters-yet-to-be, my
children/clones, will work to make the rhythms deeper
and deeper, more wondrous for all things on the planet.
The garden that is the world will grow lush and fertile,
and a million new blooms will open beneath the sun.*
   They orgasmed together, and all the other women in
the building paused in their joyous toils for a moment
and came a little as well, whether their eyes were open
or closed.
   Then it was finished with Maureen, and it sent her
back to her Plants.

*   *   *

     Annemarie trudged along the street, bent over
slightly because of the chill wind that pushed against
her. She moved briskly, not wanting to linger for too
long in this part of town. Why had she started walking
this godforsaken path every day? It was at least three
blocks out of her way, and she had only originally come
this way one day on a sudden vague whim.
   But somewhere deep inside, she knew the reason why.
It was approaching now on her right, on the east side of
the street. Even with her head bowed, she could feel its
presence throbbing against her as if it was on fire.
   The apartment building. 723 Testin Street.
Sturgeonhouse Apartments, built 1958, according to the
crumbling words carved over the door. It had been `the'
building in her mind for a couple of weeks now, even
though it was just one of several in these blocks, row
after row of them standing empty and abandoned and
thoroughly boarded up, punctuated with the occasional
black and empty lot were one had finally burned down.
   Except... Something was different about this one.
Something almost subliminal. An odor... a sound...
something sweet and sickly and deeply compelling, a
rich and decadent dessert, filled with whipped cream and
thick black chocolate and chunks of fruit which teetered
just on edge of spoiling...
   Her pace faltered and she stood in front of the
doorway, at the bottom of the wide stone steps. The
silence was thick and eerie. There never seemed to be
anyone in sight whenever she came by here, not even a
solitary rat or pigeon, and the sounds of the rest of the
city were distant and muffled. The door into the
apartment was boarded up, just like all the windows, but
she had noticed a few days before that one of the boards
appeared to be a little loose. She looked a little closer.
She could just push it aside, crawl inside the lobby
where...
   *...Where someone would be waiting for me... a
woman with long hair and very little else... she will smile
at me, her new sister, and lead me down into the
darkness of the basement.... show me the dessert... show
me how to..
   Taste it.*
   She shook herself sharply. What had she just been
thinking? How long had she been standing there? She
walked back down the front steps (not quite
remembering walking up them...) and started up the
street again. It was oddly difficult at first, as if she was
fighting her way through masses of invisible webs.
Finally she seemed to break free, and picked up the
pace.
   But not as quite as fast as before. Something was still
clinging to her, slowing her down, a few trailing threads.
   And tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day,
she had to walk by the building again.
   She *had* to.
    Because things had changed.

   (end)
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