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  That was the last thing she needed right now.

  So, she formatted it into a sample taker with a thought and waited for the nanoscopic machines to do their work, constructing the sample taker from the brick of carbon in the belly of her hazard suit. As she waited and tried to ignore the worrying smell of ozone and the crackling heat that always came when the tentacle’s maker got to work, Sarah took a moment to look at the jungle. And for just a moment, she felt her heart beginning to break. Her grandparents had been from Brazil, before they had become changefugees and rushed northward in the Troubles. Somewhere along the way, they’d settled into the sline quarters of the northern megacities and acquired a Germanic surname, a penchant for swearing in Farsi, and new corporate citizenship from EduTech.

  But they’d never lost the stories of those last days before the Dieback. They told them to a young Sarah.

  Deep in her bones, she loved the biological world. Billions of years and billions of moments of presapient decision making crafted an ecosystem. While each individual actor in such a system carried amazingly little weight, the totality of their existence created something beyond marvelous. She could have studied Trappist-1a’s ecosystem and its interrelationships for centuries and would still be finding new, and amazing interactions. As it was, seeing the very tip of the trashberg felt painful.

  But…

  She needed that raise.

  She needed that job on Earth. If she got a job on Earth, she could see her parents again. Sarah sighed, a longing feeling stirring in her gut at the memory of Dad’s cooking, or Mom’s block wide parties, where the slines could get together and see what fun they could have without buying a single thing from the corporate stores. Citizenship could be ignored in the sline sectors, if you didn’t mind relying entirely on black market and universal credit. For at least a little bit. And...maybe she could meet someone.

  One of the problems with crewing on a survey ship was that the crews changed every few months, when they returned from distant solar systems with new data and new product, or when people quit the corporation and bought new citizenship. That, combined with the fact that she was a chubby dork kind of made it a little tricky to actually get a frigging date. But if she was back on Earth, she’d not only have a stable population to meet, but also a significantly larger one. One that would maybe include someone who’d like a chubby dork? Eh? Eh!

  Okay, she felt like a total moron for even thinking that. So, uh, instead of that, she could get put into one of the enclave projects. That thought hit her with nearly the same nostalgic force as thinking of her parents’ house. Imagine getting to rebuild the Earth’s ecosystem in those enclosed enclaves? The idea was that once the enclaves had proved they could reconstitute an ecosystem, they’d begin to spread them outwards. This would lower the price eventually to the point where even slines could get in!

  “A rising tide lifts all boats, right?” she muttered. “All I need-”

  Her eyes stopped their slow scanning of the jungle environments as she realized that the sleek, dark shape that had been concealed by her hazard suit’s shadow was now growing closer with a slow, predatory grace. Sarah froze. Her eyes widened and her mouth went dry as she realized it was one of the very aggressive alien predators. Up close, it was even scarier than it looked in the security briefing holograms. It was, after all, the size of a fucking horse. It’s skin was purple and covered with thick, armored slabs of chitinous plates. It had huge, sharp claws that thrust from its forelegs, like the talons of the velociraptor, but...you know. They had four each. Its muzzle was narrow and triangular and had a pair of curved tusks that thrust out to either side like the protective grid of a footballer’s helmet, angling inwards and tipped with gleaming beads of acidic venom.

  Her proximity alert chimed as its nose bumped against the belly of her hazard suit.

  [Kappel]: C&C. Come in.

  Nothing.

  Sarah gulped.

  Her security bot finally realized something was going on and turned its angular body around to bring the heavy machine guns to bear. Both started to hammer . Even inside of the hazard suit, the noise was overwhelming. Sarah had never heard anything so loud – her ears rang and she wished she could clap her hands over them. Instead, she simply had to grit her teeth and step back and away from the xeno as it exploded like an overripe melon being struck with a hammer, the armor plates peeling apart and the guts bursting against her camera. She clapped her tentacles against the body of her suit, crying out as if she had been the one splattered. “Ugh, ugh, ugh, guh!” She stepped backwards and stumbled into something that suddenly shifted and moved aside. The proximity alert chimed again – then again and again – and she heard the machine guns start for a stuttering moment before a squealing, screeching sound filled her ears. She wiped the last bit of the cameras off and saw that the security bot was being torn limb from limb by three of the bitey xenos.

  They had taken advantage, by pure animal instinct, of the bot’s distraction to leap onto its back. Their claws skittered along armor plating, leaving behind weals of silvery metal as they gouged chunks free. But then their claws found the weak points and started to jab in, severing electrical wires, slicing through pneumatic cables, even tearing out tufts of fibrous synthetic muscle. One had even clamped its jaws around the barrel of a machine gun and was levering it up and away, so that its stuttering gunfire shot into the air harmlessly.

  Almost like it... knew.

  Sarah turned and sprinted away. Well. Waddled.

  It felt like one of those nightmares, where something is chasing you, and never quite manages to catch up, but you never quite manage to get away. For Sarah, those dreams had always been set inside the sewer sections right underneath her home – recalling the time she had fallen through some rusting grating plates and dropped into a river of gray water. If someone hadn’t heard her screaming and rescued her, she’d have been washed right into the reprocessing center. Ever after, her nightmares had been narrow corridors and hideous stinks.

  Well.

  Now her nightmares would be jungles. Jungles and growling beasts that flanked her to the left and to the right, that rushed forward and made her veer hastily away to avoid their claws. Assuming, of course, she ever had nightmares in the future. Sarah wanted to vomit, but instead, she clenched her jaw, kept plodding forward, and kept frantically trying to signal C&C. But the radar jamming trees kept filling her ears with a hideous static. And through the panic, a cold, analytic part of her mind was tapping its fingers on a table and asking: What’s taking them so long? Get this over with.

  “Shut up shut up shut-” She stumbled through a set of trees and gaped.

  She was standing before a mountain. That was the first insane thought that bubbled through her head. But under the dull red light of Trappist 1a’s star – which loomed overhead, dominating the sky with its cold closeness - the thing she was looking at resolved into an animal. A massive animal. It had six trunk-like legs, each one as big around as her hazard suit’s entire frame, and they reached up towards a body that was somewhere between a beetle and an elephant. It had two huge wings that fanned to either side, iridescent and glowing with brilliant red veins. They looked pathetically small compared to its bulk, and the shape of the body was all wrong for fling. Sarah, normally, would have been fascinated, wondering at the evolutionary track that had produced it, wondering at the biological needs those wings filled.

  Instead, she was slightly more focused on the massive, hinged tusks that were mounted on either side of the perpendicular, narrow head. Six eyes sat in the center point of those tusks, protected by the curved bone, which sharpened to two wicked points. The tusks fanned outwards as the three smaller xenos that had been hounding her sprang forward and smashed into her back. She fell onto her hazard suit’s knees and nearly rolled forward onto the egg shaped belly.

  “Oh no no no no!” she shouted.

  The tusks swung forward, clapping shut, so that the two points crashed into either side of the h
azard suit. Metal squealed and alarms blared and her HUD dropped her connection with a spray of static. She felt a moment of utter disorientation – and then she was sprawled on purple grass. Her face prickled and her eyes widened as she sucked in a startled gasp. Immediately, she tasted alien scents. Sickly sweet decay. The thick musk of the animals around her. And the pollen. Oh. Yeah. The pollen. Her throat tightened up and her nose suddenly closed. Her face went puffy as she clutched at her throat, her brain sending up panicking signals: You cannot breathe!

  Her HUD was just as helpful, filling her vision with: Warning! Anaphylactic Shock. Warning!

  She wheezed. Then the three animals to either side of her rushed forward. Their jaws closed around her arms. Their teeth didn’t sink in, though. Instead, they gently lifted her to her feet. Their breath was warm against her wrists and she shuddered as they started to walk forward. She put foot ahead of foot, her throat still tight and closed. Her eyes were half closed, and around the gathering darkness, she saw them pushing her towards the biopits.

  In the muzzy, half awareness of the moment, a thought rushed through her head: Huh. They’re not animals. They’re not animals at all.

  They proved it by pushing her to her knees before the pit. One put a claw on the edge of her neck, the hard bone rasping against her skin. Sarah sank forward, her face mashing against the grass as her lungs screamed for air – and then she tried to make a noise of protest as the claw hooked on her undersuit and then started to rip down. What had torn metal was more than good enough against cheap maker printed cloth – and her undersuit came apart like she was a fruit, being peeled by an uncaring god. Noses bumped against her skin, pushing at the tatters of her clothes. Sarah made weak whimpering sounds as she was rolled away from the two halves of her undersuit.

  She was utterly naked under an alien sky, sprawled right next to a biopit.

  The huge beast that had ripped open her hazard suit looked down at her with six, pitiless eyes, while the three smaller xenos stood around her, watching her. She reached out, towards the dull glow. As her vision went blacker and blacker, the glow of Trappist looked more and more like the warm yellow light of her home sun, as seen through the haze of pollution that tended to cluster over the sline sector. Her lungs were still screaming fitfully for air, and she felt the horrible, muffling sensation of closure every time she tried to choke something in or out past the puffiness that filled her. "

  I...guess I...always wanted to know what the biopits did…

  The xenos were waiting. Watching. She swore she could feel them telling her she had to take the next leap.

  Weakly, Sarah pushed against the ground.

  Rolled.

  Fell.

  The aliens stood around the biopit for a long moment. Crackling radio transmissions – barely heard over the distant cree cree cree of insects that filled the jungle – escaped from the ruined hulk of the hazard suit: “Dr. Kappel? Dr. Kappel, do you read us? We received a fragment...” Static. “Dr. Kappel?” Static. There was no chance for another transmission. The sleek xenos instead crawled onto the hazard suit and began to tear out the radio. Once it was silenced, they systemically began to rip chunks off the hazard suit while the biggest xeno scraped out holes in the dirt with a massive foot.

  Soon, the suit’s fragments – and the fragments of the droid, abandoned almost two miles back – were buried. Then, stolidly, the xenos walked into the pit, tumbling head first in without fear or hesitation, to be consumed. Turned into raw material for the great project.

  And the jungle was silent again.

  Chapter Two: Sarah Gets A Makeover

  Sarah’s eyes snapped open into utter darkness. Her mouth opened and she sucked in liquid. Her lungs clenched and her drowning reflexes kicked on – and then soothed away. It was as if someone had taken a warm wet rag and just wiped along her brain, pushing aside all those panicky thoughts. It was nearly as alarming as literally just...drowning, to have her thoughts wiped away like that. And just as soon as she had that alarming realization, her alarm at that alarm was wiped away. Her eyes hooded slowly and she breathed in another lungful of liquid. It flowed through her body like slow, sluggish air...but her brain was no longer screaming for oxygen…

  That was an improvement?

  Mmm…

  She started to slide her hands along her body in the liquid, hoping to find her survival packs. Instead, her palms rubbed along perfectly smooth skin – her skin. She felt the faint creases and rises of her chubby belly, the fullness of her breasts, her achingly hard nipples. God. This felt nice. This warm bath of fluid, surrounding her every body. She knew she should have been alarmed about how the alarm at not being alarmed had been wiped away – but she somehow couldn’t seem to muster up any more levels of meta-alarm. Instead, she just idly played with her nipples, as if she was laying in bed and in a randy mood. They were getting more sensitive by the moment, and as she teased and tweaked them, her lips split into a warm smile.

  Then…

  Light.

  Light began to grow before her. It was dull amber, as if shining through a mass of honey. It was growing ahead of her, and as she watched, it brightened and brightened, until she could see herself and her surroundings. She was inside of a pod, roughly two meters in diameter and three meters tall, giving her plenty of space while still being relatively small. The walls were smooth and rubbery looking, and faintly transparent. The light was coming from beyond it, from a single point that did not move. A lamp? She drew her hands away from her breasts, sheepish at being caught playing with herself. She started to try and swim towards the edge of the pod – her body moving sluggishly through the thick liquid. Tiny bubbles of air moved in it as she swept her hands. They didn’t rush to the top but instead remained in the place that her motions had put them, so she felt as if she was swimming through a constellation of stars.

  After what felt like an eternity, she came to the edge of the pod. Her palms touched it and she flashed on memories of touching her uncle’s pet pig. It was the same living, smooth skin. Not metal or plastic. Her eyes widened – and then the light from beyond grew brighter as the skin turned transparent.

  It wasn’t a light.

  It was an eye.

  No.

  Not an eye.

  It was the Eye. It was an Eye that eclipsed and transcended all others – massive and staring and perfect. It never blinked, never twitched, never showed the little wobbling that human eyes needed. The iris was black and circular and it focused in on her body. Sarah screamed. Or, well. Tried too. Bubbling air rushed from her lungs, flowing into the thick liquid as she kicked and flailed her legs, trying to get away. Instead, it was like the nightmare again. She was stuck, unable to move as that thing kept looking at her. And she felt a prickling awareness rushing along her skin. Her nerves burned with shame as she realized it could see her every imperfect. Her chubby belly, her chunky thighs, the discolorations from the cheap subdermal hair removal service she had gotten when she had thought maybe it was her armpit hair that had scared off her boyfriend in a fit of depressive illogic. She tried to cover herself – but the Eye could still see so much of her.

  Acceptable clay.

  She hadn’t thought those words.

  Was…

  Was it hacking her HUD?

  Except that she hadn’t felt the tell tale buzz in her jaw that normally came when the implant triggered a sound effect. The effects weren’t created by tapping directly into her brain, after all, she wasn't made of money . It came through a small speaker attached to her inner ear, and because it was cheap even for such an old model, it buzzed whenever it turned on. Instead, that voice had come from inside her head like the voices of a god.

  Not a God.

  Sarah wanted to scream – but she was too terrified. Then the walls of the pod puckered. Small holes opened and sleek shapes started to emerge. Four of them were large, four were small. But each, she realized, was a tentacle. The small ones looked like tiny wires with bulbous tips, while
the larger ones were more muscular and sturdy looking. A large tentacle bumped against her shoulder – and the point of contact flared with a heat that made her shudder – in pleasure and disgust. She opened her mouth, then closed it hurriedly as another larger tentacle pressed to her cheek, then rubbed along her lips. Her lips tingled and…

  A memory. Mika Gordon, the guy she’d been dating in college. His cock, rubbing against her face. His voice, whiny: Come on baby, we’ve been dating three weeks-

  She turned her head aside. The tentacle had tasted far better than the bitter, sharp taste of Mika. But, like Mika, the tentacle followed her head and pressed to her again. This time, not only did the fine smearing of liquid against her lips taste good, but it also made her head spin. Her mouth opened of its own curious accord and before she could stop herself, her tongue had darted along the edge of the tentacle’s tip. Was it just her imagination, or was the tentacle more phallic than it had been? She closed her mouth so tightly and so hard that she nearly bit it. The tentacle jerked backwards, as if offended.

  One of the smaller tentacles darted forward.

  It plunged into her ear.

  Sarah’s mouth opened and she froze, her body trembling. There was no pain from the penetration. Instead...it...it felt…

  Good .

  She could feel the tentacle inside her brain. She knew it should have been horrifying, but instead, she was more amazed by the tiny twitches, the slow pushing. The pressure increased and the tentacle pushed another few inches into her head. She could track it by the warmth buzzing through her gray matter. It was behind her left eye now, and she felt a throbbing pleasure, emanating from her ear, buzzing along her jaw. She trembled, her left eye twitching shut as she made a soft ‘hnnnh’ noise. Then the tentacle drew back and she felt a faint pressure...and then a pop as it came free.

  And she came.

  She came inside the pod, her thighs pressing together, her sex clenching on nothing. Her mouth fluttered open and her eyes snapped shut as she let out a soft: “Hoofuck.”