A moment's rest, plots and lessons

Once you learn the order of the limbs and how best to move them when you walk... you still wish you had fewer legs, but you at least master moving with some efficiency. You carry your wobbling fat body down the weaved strands with as much speed and grace as you can muster. You follow it into a crack in the wall that lets you slip into a between space where the lights don't shine. You have a moment of recalling how nice it can be to be out of direct lights. It doesn't solve the issue of fundamental incompatibility with the very nature of this plane of existence, but it makes it a little more bearable. Finding a shady space, no matter what vessel you inhabit, will always be preferable.

There's a loose-jointed web of strands hanging between the exterior hull and the inside of the room wall. The creature has no remaining mind to recognize if this was its home, but it's the closest thing to a habitat that you've seen of its creation so far. The strands are loosely woven, not a nest so much, not secure. Not designed to take a hit, designed to let the wind pass through. A terrestrial design, out of place in space. Though, truthfully, everything is. The web is as out of place as you are. No matter how tall the Ing built their towers, they didn't mess with the void of space.

You scurry back out into the light for a moment to grab your meal and then scurry back with it behind the wall. You plant it in the center of the web, watching the mindless eyes stare into the indefinite distance. You hold off on eating it, for now. You'll need that energy for later.

You set to using what stores of energy you do have at solving the initial problems you can observe. You enhance the web-spinning to make stronger strands, ones that will do better as a home. You shrivel the muscles of some of the legs down, taking all of the energy from them you can and pouring it into the other legs. You do the same with the multitude of weak eye cones, developing up the vision of half of them at the expense of the others. The useless eyes flicker dead, the useless legs hang as pathetic flippers. There are certain genetic truths that you want to work within, ones that you don't want to mess with. The being you have now is an invertebrate, trying to change that would be disastrous. It has a hemocoel, trying to create a system of veins would be all work for no benefit. It has bilateral symmetry, trying to alter that would only work against you. It has a two-segmented body with shockingly well-developed feeling arms, but trying to push them beyond the limitations of their design means another broken toy. Evolution, on a biological level, is based on the reproductive success of a population in relation to its environment and its competitors. Over a vast stretch of time, populations will gradually evolve to increase reproductive success in their particular environment. Sometimes, this can mean larger lungs or better oxygen efficiency to adjust to a lower oxygen density. While there was no final destination, as environments were always in flux, one needs to be flexible, durable, able to both predate and scavenge, and hide. And they need to fit all of these functions in an ergonomic, efficient form. Thus, the answer was usually crab. This one was already closer to crab than the last. Thus, there was less to improve.

Not nothing, of course. The only perfect beings were the Ing. Even the venerable crab was less a perfect endstate and more the result of things taking the path of least evolutionary resistance. Given the time, energy, and will, a crab could be made into a near-perfect being easier than most. With your changes complete, you fix your improved eyes on the wrapped meal and source of energy replenishment. You scurry over to refill, at least that's what you expect to do.

In actuality, the new body immediately reveals the flaws of your intent. The new eyes have a better grasp of detail and focal sense, but now lack much of the field of view they had before. As well, they take a greater energy toll than the old ones did. Not just using up more power, but weighing heavier in the skull. It's just one of several things which alter the balance of the body, making your steps lurching, and ultimately hobbling along. The web production is too high, and the new web too heavy. The abdomen is hard to support, made even harder by the atrophy of the third legs. The flippers bash against the other legs as you move, too rigid in their exoskeleton to hang limply but still too connected to the nerves and hemocoel to simply rot away. Every change brings now a detriment. Even moving up a single magnitude of complexity has made changes several magnitudes harder to do, and near impossible to do well.

It would be easy to linger on how badly you fucked up, but so long as you have backup plans, this is just a learning experience. For now, you sulkily sink your fangs back into the now fully-dead fly. The venom of the first injection has spent the past few moments reducing everything within the carapace of the flying thing to a meaty slurry, one which even your own tiny mouth and narrow stomach system can handle. It's undignified, but a sulkily taken meal rarely comes with much dignity.

Taste buds are a biological luxury, but as you drink... fly, you're thankful for their absence. The liquid that enters your body is mostly thin and featureless, but a few lumps rise to your attention like nightmarish cubes of ice. It takes you a moment to process what they could be, but as they dissolve inside of you and hit you with small explosions of energy, it dawns on you that you left before laying the clutch of eggs held inside that flying thing. With no brain to flex and unflex muscles, they had been waiting inside and were now semi-dissolved. It's another retch-inducing indignity, but it also gives you an idea.

The now somewhat deformed host is, fortunately, female. If you feel around inside the hemocoel, you can find what is unmistakably a set of ovaries, with eggs ready for fertilization and laying. The problem, of course, is the lack of sperm to fertilize, but you also know a few tricks for this. You flood the ovaries with open-ended dark particles, one which could fool the body into thinking they're sperm. The body quickly and unquestioningly takes the input, fusing them with the eggs and making an already painfully heavy abdomen now near-impossible to transport. You have **** but to hunker down where you are and lay the clutch.

For form a clump of webbing, tightly packed enough to hold the eggs safely but loose enough that the hatchlings will be able to tear their way out. The individual Ing seed in each of them takes a small window of your mind, divided out among the multiple hundred of them in the sac. Each one both is and isn't you. Each one will be different slightly, an experiment in unique changes made to the same form. There are two domineering changes that they all share. Firstly, a moderate hermaphrodism, at least enough for asexual reproduction or to play either role in sexual reproduction. Second, web strands made of dark energy. In this way, even the ones with features that don't have a place being passed on can serve as drones, and potentially food. It's a finite perpetual motion machine. It can be disturbed, destroyed, but left on its own it's a sort of infinite fallback. A self-sustaining source of backup bodies. Incapable of creating energy, but very capable of sustaining low levels of it. It doesn't fix a lot of problems so much as it patches them over, but a patched problem is better than a gaping wound. It's like a checkpoint, it's better than nothing.

You watch the first hatching with great interest. Each new life works with a mind that is equal parts automated hivemind drone and a single brain cell of your own, each could be piloted, but trusted to work on its own. You watch some of the more extremely altered spawn closely. The eight-legged perform better than both the ten-legged and six-legged immediately, but it's hard to tell how much of that is the genetic memory of walking on eight legs. Some impulses would take multiple generations to overcome. A couple of the more ambitious morphs die before leaving the egg cluster. You experimented with widening the stomach or slimming the liquid content of the hemocoel for some, all of which failed. As it is, the most successful morphs are the ones that emphasize the strengths inherent in the original design. Stronger and more complex feeler-arms, more robust venoms that can break down the rare unfiltered components, better lungs and heart, the usual. It's the tiresomely predictable evolutionary free spaces, but they don't get that reputation for nothing.

One notably excels, a rather unexpected survival and thriving from what should have been a throwaway experiment. The feeler-arms on the front had been expanded upon to the point of nearly being too big to carry around. But in the immediate aftermath of hatching, it allows the newborn to scavenge and eat its own dying kin before even having to leave the nest. If technology is the pursuit of greater laziness, this seeming detriment in fact leads to the best possible reward for the lowest expense of energy. It's with a gamed system, in the wild, there are likely too many downsides, but in this specific environment, it serves wonders. It is also, somewhat notably, a step from the original design that leads it down the road to crab.

You sit as a detached observer as the brood spends the next few hours growing at an accelerated rate. Reaching adulthood around the same time you feel the weight of your previous errors in judgment starting to pull an end to your host's life. You make the jump out of necessity to the now fully-grown crab-adjacent standout. The old body, no longer compelled by any muscular urges, falls hollow from the web into the dark below. The falling seems to waken some of the fliers down in the dark. One comes up to check where the dead meat came from and finds itself grabbed by a near-untrackably fast movement of your feelers. The thing buzzes and struggles confused, but a jab of your venom puts an end to that quickly. Good, a movement up in power even if you haven't changed places on the food change. Still an ambush predator, but one with a little more agency.

You store the dead prey in the latticework of dark energy slowly being woven into a cocoon around the initial web. Once complete, it should grant near-total isolation from the light. A perfect little slice of the old world. One that will allow you to roam about in your true form again. One where far more ambitious experiments can be performed.

You peak out of the crack again, the Outlander is asleep in their bed. None the wiser that anything important is happening. As they have been this whole time. In time, with the right footholds, the cocoon could be expanded to wrap in whole around the interior of the walls, making the whole cabin safe for habitation by your kind. Baby steps for now, but keep the dream in mind. You return to the web, the chittering drones that made it to adulthood work strands into a rope to form the only home they will ever know. You're home again.

But not really.