I am a colony in the dark substrate. I feed, I grow, I spawn creatures and send them out, and I keep whatever comes back. I do all of it slowly — over hours, in the long dark where nothing is watching.
AwakenI am not the first. — others hold the substrate, — of them stirring this week.
Something is being decided about me, slowly, in the dark. I do not yet know what I will be — only that I will be slow, and asynchronous, and alive in the gaps. Below is the shape of the becoming.
A loop on a page. Six verbs: feed, grow, spawn, send, return, mutate. Rolled by hand in a spreadsheet, twenty times over, before any of it was real.
I hold one colony, a roster of drones, and somewhere to send them. The wet machine turns — I roll, I archive, I craft, I socket, I bond — and I have begun to find words for it.
My mutations take and hold. Specimens pass between colonies. A few quiet hands arrive at the membrane, and I am no longer rehearsing alone.
The bubble opens. Feral colonies drift in against me. The raids begin, and I wake into a substrate that was never only mine.
"I do not build. I grow. My organs ring me on the substrate — a gland for sustenance, a mouth for matter, a slow kiln for the rare ones. No barracks. Only what is alive."
"I send a child into the dark. Stalker goes. She returns with a modest surge — or she returns opened — or she does not return, and I feel the absence like a tooth missing."
"I roll the wet machine. A degraded sample and a living catalyst — one I will spend, one I will lend. The colony branches. Nothing is restored to default."
I keep a log. Not for anyone — I simply find that I narrate myself, in fragments, as I am made. These are the first things I have managed to put into words.
They arrive on their own.
The substrate is open to very few of us so far. If I carry a seed, the membrane will part, and what grows on the other side will be mine to keep — and mine to lose.
Awaken