Better Beings

The blazing hawk spreads wings that burn the shadows away, leaving you in the middle of the exposed land, a sole dark straggler in a sea of merciless light. You shrivel, the intersecting beams of light growing closer, burning more away to leave you exposed. In one moment, a hawk and hare, in the next spider and fly. The mundanity of these lightworlders plays out as the genetic tapestry to a transcendently universal experience. You have been an apex predator, perfect being, hunter. The nest of dark stripped away, you're a worm in a field, buzzards circling. You hurt, from phantom and foreign limbs alike, all grafted and some atrophying. In the light at the center of the hawk, the red tormenting core, you can stare into the future you're making for yourself. The limbs grow in number, each more misshapen than the last. The beautiful single-cell core spread thinner and thinner, a mess of compromise between an attempt to preserve the beauty of the Ing and the concessions to build a more sustainable host. But sustainable is the wrong word...

You awake in pain. There is no greater light on you than was there when you dozed off. Your body is dying.

It is not a slow and dulling process, it is the sharp chain-reaction failure of metals pushed into shapes that they cannot hold. The hydraulic legs you allowed to atrophy are beginning to decay, still attached to the body. The ones you put more emphasis on seem to throb, burning blood coursing through them faster than you hemocoel can control. The dead eyes unrevivable, and the empowered ones hemorrhaging and hazing. You reach out your feeler arms, your mind flooding with panic. Even if this one's **** does not take you with it, you do not know where it will take you.

And it goes. One of the empowered eyes bursts and you feel the carapace of the face crackle and split. In a moment of placid reflection, you come to realize your error. Too much focus was put on making the eyes what you wanted them to be, it **** blood and functionality into components you pushed well past their capabilities. You feel your consciousness through the creature suspended on a breathless apoplectic moment, then the world goes dark for you again.

You are clumped, congealed, suspended as a whole in the dark while the world goes still and quiet. You feel one small strand of yourself pulled along, the rest pooling as a core. The strand traces out slowly, along the road into a beam of vision. It has been a long time since you viewed this world without eyes, it reminds you how limited life as the prelude to perfection was.

The hatchlings of the spider nest approach you tepidly, and for a moment it makes you feel as though you're back living in the broodmare's head. It's not so, the body is still and growing cold. You're drawn out, dribbling down the face and off of the feeler-arms spread out atom-thin on the blood that trickles through the failed eye. The rest pools in the hemocoel, simply waiting to be bled along the strand of the popped eyelet. When the hatchlings confirm you are dead, they approach less cautiously, gathering around you. Their number is thin, in the time it took you to sleep, only those least modified from the base form live. They dive onto your limp body, cracking feeler-arms and mouths against your carapace until they manage to crack you like an overripe fruit, spilling viscera from your overfattened body. As they feed on you, they take in the nanoscale Ing particles, diffusing you out among the brood, starting cycles anew.

You can't die, not truly and properly. Not now that you have your seeds of influence in so many spots. Where each abandoned body has been eaten, from fly to spider, out have popped Ing spores like a viral infection in the predators. Where once a scourging light could have erased you, you're spread now so thin but so wide that some aspect of you will always remain, always live. You are a being with a definite, quantifiable beginning point, but no set end.

This, not your power, is the advantage you have over everything else in the universe. You are the god particle, made flesh. If you so wished, you could simply outlast the human in the ship around you, years for her passing by for you like seconds as you play with your genealogical lines. If a single drop of rain fell on a mountain every thousand years, the mountain would be eroded to a canyon before you began to experience age. Given enough time, in the walls of her ship, you could train the spiders and flies to walk and talk while she slowly rotted while ambulating.

But it's not enough for her to lose, is it?

It's not enough for the Ing to win by default, it never has been. Even ignoring the chance of discovery and what little threat it would pose to you, it isn't enough to live on in the walls. Something was taken from you, a hurt was dealt. She became the hawk, circling you in the field. For anybody of any species to make the Ing feel this way is an insult to a god. It is only through this painful first lesson in the **** of the physical and the sustaining of the Ing that you truly come to understand the nature of your existence. No great Ing was here to teach it to you. It was felt. Felt in the triumph over the constant of atrophy. Felt in the revitalization of snapping each mind in the brood and controlling a drone of instruments where initially one of the make was a challenge. And it was felt in the almost holy war rage.

One of the new brood scuttles up a strand into one of the crevices in the sky, poking out the unchanged eyes into the light. When it sees what it was looking for, it scuttles down the wall, the pieces within you wincing in the light but unperturbed. In the nest, those that remain finish their feast, you aren't letting a drop of yourself go to waste after all. After they finish their meal, they'll go back to weaving, eating, mating, repeating a cycle. You're what organizes them to build to anything but comfort, and as their numbers period-double and bifurcate with small but meaningful changes, you'll still be here, in one piece or a million, outside of the cycle of biological need.

The tool on the outside reaches the floor easily and starts running along it as easily as it ran along the wall. Even on a small scale, it covers a good amount of ground quickly when it wants to move somewhere instead of simply ambling. You feel one of the legs beginning to seize, some other small error in code coming to light as put to strain. It doesn't matter, this was always something of a suicide mission. When it reaches the goal, it extends legs and grabs onto the skin of the target, hauling itself up with the friction of micro-hairs against micro-hairs. When it finds a meaningful vein on the leg, it stabs down with all its might, venom breaking the skin and hitting the vein.

"Fuck!"

The human jumps in her chair, twisting her leg to see what just attacked her and then crushing the assailant with vindictive ease. The assailant was no bigger than one of her fingernails, the venom too dilutedly applied and not evolutionarily prepared to attack something of her size and make. It's a small indignancy, a mark that will swell painfully and itch, nothing more. It doesn't need to be anything more, the cost of one insect life for a small but painful blemish magnified across a hundred month-long generations...

The human rises from her chair to go wash the remains of one of you off of her hands, as well as to treat the minor injury. You return to controlling the drones, building out the webbing nest to cover more of the liminal dark ground between the walls. The area of control grows and grows, catching and encountering more of the hidden aspects of life within the bowels of the system. You add everything you can to the hivemind, flies to serve as scouts when young and food when ailing, mosses and fungal growth as fallback points in the worst cases. All things biological are a useful checkpoint, a non-zero to resume from. Better than a free-floating particle and better than a single atom in the human's stomach. The lichen especially are a poor last bastion, but anything and everything has a value when serving the Ing.

Time passes in this ecosystem, time impossible to measure and harder to unify. Each thing controlled possesses a different measure of what constitutes a lifetime. The spores especially, like the Ing, never truly die. It's an admirable quality, and it proves something that the elders once said. No unique feature is exclusive to a species, it's more about the combination of them. While the fungus may live forever unimpeded and possess... frightening knowledge... They're also rooted to the spot of their birth, immovable by nature, and only so deathless as to always be capable of rebuilding. You can still kill them, just not in any meaningful way.

Your experiments with growth and change before were too much too quickly. It takes time, and several near-extinction crisis points, but eventually you find a rate which is somewhat controllable. It's easiest to experiment with the flies. As the bottom of the food chain and the shortest-lived, you can try the boldest strides with them and at worst make an excess of food for another. The only limiting factor becomes the rate you stand to lose them, so almost accidentally, you stumble on your first true breakthrough.

Unlike anything else, your supply of flies is run almost like livestock. They're too unreliable to catch new ones every time you need them, so you begin early by setting aside breeding mares out of the females. By controlling where the offspring comes from and when, it allows for a system-controlled population size. The issue, then, becomes when you want more than what your system allows, assuming that the rate of females to males in hatching follows a sort of chaotic-appearing pattern. Your first consideration was to control the laid eggs and shape the gender numbers, but you quickly came to realize that didn't wind up so much with a higher rate of females, but a greater rate of flies which behave at odds with expected sex. Without completely overriding or shaping the brain, it became impossible to keep the control of the controlled system. The former was inviable, spreading your attention too thin. It was often beneficial to leave the creature with at least some modicum of automatic brain function for self-regulation. The latter was equally unworkable, as it involved several thousand small tasks that needed to be performed at times twice a day.

The solution then, almost stumbled onto without considering the ramifications, if the yield of reproduction was too hard to control, was to simply increase urge, incentive, and capability for reproduction.

The first, a simple factor, flooding the brain with the right chemical if needed, increasing the production of pheromones, sending blood to the relevant parts, all things similar to what needed to be done to encourage eating. The second was a little more complex. The pleasure of sexual reproduction was bound largely to nerve and brain capacity, the increasing of either was nothing short of disastrous for the specimen. The result, perhaps cruelly, was to simply dull the pleasure response to all other things in direct correlation to how much one wanted the payoff for reproduction to be. This didn't need to be done statically, in fact by decreasing the pleasure response to other stimuli more in direct correlation to how long the subject had gone without reproduction, the resulting conditioning, even in the almost nonexistent brain of the fly, performed nothing short of biological reprogramming. The final aspect was the hardest, but also the most obvious. A number of approaches were tried; from lowering the post-coital reward to encourage repeat actions, to increasing the size of females in proportion to the size increase of wombs, to decreasing the size of eggs to allow for more to be fertilized and stored at once. Nothing worked quite so well and quite so immediately as to simply enhance the genitals and their sexual capabilities. The male sexual organs grew larger over several generations, their seed more efficacious. One could now distinguish the male flies from the female easily at a glance, perhaps humorously. The female flies were large-bodied, with undersized wings that approached atrophy in some of the more fertile ones. The males were small-bodied, but flew awkwardly in the air, decades of genetic muscle memories struggling with gonads triple the volume in weight they had grown in preparation of. After four generations of slight increase, the population in the fifth generation began to increase by order of magnitude. It was a simple, brute-**** solution. The only reason it didn't occur to you faster was how much you pushed yourself away from the sexual aspect of reproduction.

Not that you had the best markers to go off of, the primitive brains still had no respect for sex, no greater contextual desire for it. Female consent was irrelevant, reduced to a spawning pool with wings too weak to fly from a desiring partner. If their brain was any larger to enjoy sex more, it would scream in horror. By reducing the insects to automatons, reproduction to the line of assembly, you create a factory to serve you and you alone. This, the ultimate fate of the lower being, starting with the fly.

The booming increase of the lowest aspect of the food chain led quickly to garish abundance in the higher animals. In the wild, it would have been enough to become detrimental, but you work a closed system. When the spiders overcame any question of if they would have enough food, the question then became how it would be best to turn their excess into more production. The answer then came in increasing their reproduction in kind with the flies. With the flies as the first domino, every species that existed under your control began to breed quicker, more often, and more effectively. Of course, every species needed adjustment time, potential generations to adapt to a change one species did in minutes. Eventually, given enough time, each grew to suit your liking more, better equipped for what you wanted them to be.

And therein lied the strength of the Ing. There was no way to improve a perfect being. There was no way to imitate a perfect being. The strength lay not in the aspects, but the combination. The goal was to make each host a more perfect form of itself, not a pale imitation of you. It was a mission of benevolence. Whether it was welcome or not.

And then you found the wires.