The wires

More rest, more bad dreams.

Fangs, blood, darkness. Talons, blood, darkness. Crushing, blood, darkness. A hundred thousand ways to terminate. No matter the being, no matter the palette of the destroyer, the same dreams. **** dreams, weakness dreams, prey dreams.

You had thought that another step taken up the totem pole, into the realm of the meat-eaters and out of the carrion would ease the fear. No such luck, each predator has a predator, each step up merely increases the vividity of the prey dreams as their rationality decreases. You are too small, forever. Perhaps the top of the food chain is the only species that can sleep without nightmares.

And yet, perhaps not. The root of the prey dream is ****, something even the top of the food chain fears. Outside of immortality, below it, the fear of the dark begins. From the germ to the leviathan, **** stalks, eating. It strikes a talon into a bundle of life and splits it, biting from the broken-off chunk. No, not broken, bundles, untangled by the unweaver. A single bundle becomes four, each of the quarters splits again into four, continuing down fractally. Ecosystems into communities, into organisms, into organs, and on.

Dangling, tucked in the bundles-in-bundles are the wires. Gossamer-thin and corpse grey, glinting with a light only you can see. Wires cast over the lid of something, bulging at the space unseen that they cross. It trails behind **** like a web. Each connection made up of interconnections. A chain as strong as the weakest link down to a sub-atomic level. But the wires cross, **** retreads paths over and over infinitely, each time leaving a strand behind until the strands form rope form bundles, all part of the atomic ecosystem of some larger preying ****. Each path downward in size sits opposite a road of increase. The bundles, the fragments of them, have never been the groupings. It was the wires, and the wires follow ****, powerful in conjoined post-measurable number. Bulging outward around fragments of life, surrounded by ****.

You awake, possessing no proper body of your own and simply floating from waking vessel to waking vessel. Thinly spread across the lower brain of a hundred thousand multi-species working drones, at some point, your sleep became your own. Through some lack of proper care and attention, you seem to have carried nightmares along as a spandrel.

A single, dying spider catches your attention.

Normally, not even the largest of the beings catches your attention on an individual level. Least of all, one in the throes of passing on, his genetic material already being prepared by the pitiless brothers around him for repurposing. This one is not even dying in any particularly gruesome way.

He is simply ailing in the low light of the nest. Even the dark of the light world is too bright for him.

You slip into him with ease. It's not for a desire to experience ****, you die a few thousand times each day with no great issue. But the moment your mind touches his, you understand your own interest.

You have felt this pain, when you walked on your own legs, it threatened once to kill you.

At some point in the control of their biology, you threatened always to cross a line. While you never tried to make your subjects Ing, every iota of their better bodies was built of Ingstuff. Each change, improvement, or dead-end, always brought them closer to you and farther from their starting point. This was something you accounted for long ago. In the flies, the least complex of the organisms, you found them to run into this problem without much overextension on your part. It was a natural reality of them, hence why you found yourself limited to changes as minor as you were with them. This is the first time a being as large as this pitifully undersized spider reached the same endpoint. A being so minute and weak as to have not been worth recording the subjugation of to your elders, now marks the furthest point forward in your path upward.

And out of his webspinner, a single strand of dappled grey wire dangles. Too weak and missing adhesive to capture prey, but as he pulls it across the web, trying to crawl to some nonexistent darkest point of the murky black, the trail he leaves seems to curdle the very air it touches. The web itself, more ingstuff than web, was never going to work to catch prey. But the ashy taint creeps from it. The taint, what little touches him, soothes his pain.

You overwhelm his brain, firing everything you can think of to wake him and **** more out of him. His weak, segmented legs spasm, his body too wrapped in hard carapace to bulge and flex from the rush of hormones. In a moment, his mind is broken, a snapped toy like the very first lightworlder you took hold of. His muscles, his functions, twisted by your influence, were always alien to him, but they're even more alien to you. A moment after his mind snaps, his body all but dies, all that remains working is the small trickle of energy which that single strand, still connected to a pool of necessary wire inside of him, produces.

The first of his hungry kindred approaches him and bites into his abdomen without mercy. No sooner has the tang of still-hot blood hit their mouth than their body tenses, legs curling underneath them as the fouled sustenance poisons them near-instantly. Even as the first predator drops dead, still more approach, brains too simple to make sense of what their feast will do to them, partly by your design.

For the first time in an amount of time you couldn't begin to guess at, you emerge from your hosts and step back into the light world. You instantly regret the choice, of course, but you ignore the pain. You're little more than the size of a fly, which means you've grown, but it still isn't something impressive. You float over to the strand and set yourself upon it. You weren't sure if you expected some immediate surge of energy, or to be transported instantly back out of the light world, but the result is that whichever part of your body touches it simply... hums.

Hums with a lack of pain brought about by the light, hums with a homely peace, hums with an impulse that whatever progress this represents, however little, it is real progress in a way that nothing before it has been.

A spider, suddenly massive enough to resemble the deathly orb weavers of your dreams, stumbles by clumsily on his way to the same lethal feast killing his siblings one after the other. He moves awkwardly, almost garishly oversized reproductive organs making it difficult to move about on the web. A creature adapted and evolved for an environment he doesn't live in, and may never. When one of his legs touches the wire, he jerks it back instantly and fearfully. A moment later, he scurries back to his breeding as more hungry mouths take the spot he would have at the **** feast. It's not pain, he isn't smart enough to feel real pain that could scare him out of his meal, his legs don't even have the nerve endings to tell him when he steps on something damaging to them. This is beyond that, a fundamental mismatch. A primal, supernatural understanding of something which is anti-him, something which poses a threat. No matter how Ingstuff sits inside of him, the line between light worlder and dark worlder is drawn.

A single, gossamer-thin wire, made by the only member of a dying evolutionary offshoot. By the standards of lightworld genetics, a complete dead end.

And it pushes you. Wrapping yourself in the wire you feel a comfort that has been missing all this time. These experiments of yours, these lightworld creatures. All of them temporary. You may have distracted yourself from what you are, where you came from, but most of all where you wish to go. You float passively for a moment, resetting your brain. You could swallow the wire whole, in doing so probably gaining more power over those few moments than the whole of your time from entering the ship to now, but that is a shortsighted gain. You let yourself get shortsighted before. These garish things you've created, hyper-normalized into the roles of breeding stock, to eat the wire would be to make yourself one of those. To spend the next few cycles forming inglets which burn in the light and producing just enough energy or dark matter each time to repeat the cycle an iota larger in scale.

The string is darkworld, pure and plain. Fabric, tissue, genes. It survives here and does not bleed. It is foundation. Anything you might use it for will be wasteful in some way. You need to make a hard choice. It has a value beyond measure.

And it is finite. Painfully, grievously finite. It's not so simple as feeding it to one of your things. No more than you could simply feed on one of them. Base incompatible. The eater either dies or wishes it had. You could feed a very small amount at a time, like you have with the Outlander, but even with the longest-lived of your creatures, it would go to waste before it could yield any real results. You can't just make more of the breed that made it either. The one thread of ingstuff wire was the dying gasp of one of them. How much of the breeding stock would you have to trade away just to make enough to wrap yourself in fully?

But you can work with what you have, just not in the form you have it now. You, humiliation of all humiliations, will have to re-learn how to weave reality. Like a worker drone, rolling a ball of sable matter into the pebble that will become the brick.

It's not as though you've ever stopped doing it. But before you wound atoms inside of lifeforms, shaping and guiding without rearranging. To truly use this string, you will have to take it apart and put it back together again. Any atom misplaced is a failure. You slip back into the hive-mind for a moment and bring over one of your spiders. Small as it may be, somewhere inside the rotten mouth lies a puncturing tooth. A knifelike, burrowing and cutting appendage used to peel and scrape and puncture. This spider as well accidentally touches the wire with one long, hairy leg and jerks that leg back just as quickly. The ****-fear that overtakes it when looking at the wire is so deep and primal that you snap the thing's mind. You **** the sucker-mouth forward and push aside the scream of pain, trying to slice the wire. The tooth breaks before it can cause harm, and you peel back and allow the wasted body to drop from the net into the scurrying, hungry dark below. You try two more of these things to no success before you surrender that notion. This isn't spider-stuff. This isn't biological web that can be worked by the clumsy spinarretes of lower beings. Especially not ones where you have spent so long so successfully specializing them as breeders.

You settle back on the wire, raw form and **** in the light again. You furrow your mind, focusing on the image of atoms spreading to either side, pulling away from each other and separating like a stream being parted by a stone. The stone moves upstream, deepening the rift until it dominates the whole of the stream's body. Finally, a small piece breaks away from the whole. No less absolute in its otherworldliness. You focus on the small breakaway. The microscopic components of it rising and falling, twisting and turning around itself. Each atom a wire, the whole a knot. You tuck, unturn, pull, and twist. Slowly, the knot unties until all that remains of the wire is component pieces and energy.

Something snaps, some wire crosses inside of another and cannot pass. The first atom fails, turning stone and dead in your grasp. Then, like the blow which shatters cracked glass, the failure cascades through the whole of the work and collapses it. It runs like sand through your hands down into the humming unwebbed mass of the innership.

A small but meaningful failure. Looking back at the rest of the wire, you have maybe three more failures you can make before you lose the specimen.

You divide another chunk and begin the slow process of unknotting again. This time, you reduce it fully to components. You step away for a moment to call a fly from the hive mind. The thing buzzes over on fat wings built up to compensate the disproportionate breeding tools. When you turn back to the unmade wire, it is already turned to meaningless sludge in your hands. While the matter remained, the energy crept away. It's a blob of molecules that could be recombined into anything. But it is no longer alive, nor does it contain the darkworld energy that gave it value. Another failure.

Precision is inherent given enough practice. Oftentimes the measure of skill is in the speed in which things can be done in a perfect manner. Focus. Slow down.

The measure twice, cut once mindset that was drilled into you from birth starts to creep back in. You look to the fly before you cut again. Neither would have worked even if you had done them perfectly. The cuts you were making were assuming for the fly's anatomy before alterations. Redo your calculations. This will be your last attempt. There will be a bit of chaff left over, either to be consumed or to be used on a smaller specimen. But smaller than a fly... it would almost be making no progress at all.

Unbind, pick apart. Pieces to be used, success. And then the fly, the unfortunate one in this. He has a hard task to bear.

By the time the dark matter touches his body, it's too late. That doesn't stop him from trying to flee, you've thought far enough in advance to have stuck him to the web. The thing winces and tries to pull back. For a moment, there's a mutual understanding, at least partially. You in the light world, this thing in as close to the dark world as you can inflict on it at the moment. The darkstuff gnaws at the tissue, replacing instead of destroying, sinking in on a level as to effectively be one with what came before. In a moment, the skin where the wire made contact is consumed by the dominant reality. A moment later, all the blood inside of it is laced thick with dark world energy. A final spasm of pain passes through it before the new mind wins out.

This new grotesquery is the most important step you've made. You watch it carefully over the next few days as it adjusts to its capabilities. When another fly challenges it for a mate the first time, the mouth alters into killing fangs which bite the foe to ****. Wasteful. The next time it is challenged, you nudge it in a more conductive direction. It subdues the other male with pheromones and breeds the female, then a moment later its anatomy shifts. It shudders and almost collapses, but bears it. A moment later, freed from subjugation, the other male accepts the now-female specimen and breeds it without complaint. In a matter of hours, it is both father and mother to a pair of corrupted broods. Most of them die the second they hit the air, but they are ingstuff enough to be used as the string was before.

On a larger scale of time, you nudge the broods into becoming the dominant genes, not hard to do when they can be both male and female even if more than half of each birthing clutch dies. In a few weeks, the entirety of the fly population has been replaced with the new, more adaptive hermaphroditic design. You take a generation of runts and failed experiments and rearrange them into enough material to start the process on the spiders. Over the course of a few more weeks, the modified army spreads throughout the inside of the ship. By both war and breeding, you conquer the kingdom of insects until the shell of the ship about the cabin hums with billions of pairs of judging eyes. All looking inward at the center, a being trapped in a cave of life it does not perceive, larger than anything you have worked on before but clueless to the new world slowly encroaching upon it. And all the while you continue amassing matter.

When the lightworld species are fully adapted, you begin work on your magnum opus. You pack wall to wall some strings at first like the guiding line of a web. Then it's a matter of winding and tying until the string becomes a web. Then the web becomes a box. Then the box is sealed on all sides. Each wall filled out with the repurposed tissue and matter of things like you not fit for this reality. And lastly you build a door with which to seal yourself in. Finally, you slide about in raw form, experiencing the gnawing pain of mismatched reality one last time before you climb into your box and close the door behind you. The dark surrounds you in full like seeping water, until you become one with it on every level. And bodies changed to shape the world into a papery hornet's nest of ingstuff, you sleep without prey dreams king of the small world you have seen fit to conquer.