One thing they don't tell you about quitting alcohol cold turkey after a lifetime of heavy drinking is that it makes you incredibly constipated. Alcohol abuse makes your body retain water, and when you stop drinking you literally dry out. Everywhere.

It was the middle of the night and this had never happened to me before. I would have to wait until morning for the stores to open to buy an enema. So I was sitting on the toilet all backed up and nauseous with nothing I could do about it but wait and hate every second of my life for being the shameful path that had lead me here. Then, inspiration struck me.

So far, all my attempts at planning had been based around the conclusion that it would end with me being killed. I was in a really dark place during quarantine, so it had always seemed like my destruction would be an inevitability. But now I realized that there was another option, always had been: instead of taking a last stand, I could try and defect to the human side and spend the rest of my life trying to make up for the work I'd done for their enemy. Or at the very least, answer for what I'd done and let them pass judgment on me.

I guess that's how indoctrinated I was, it took that long for me to even consider a life outside of the Nakunan Empire. They never talk about defectors, which is weird because anytime a human joins us it's something they talk about a lot. I did some digging and there aren't really hard statistics but I could find individual cases and a lot of them didn't end with a deserter being shot avoiding capture.

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This was the one time I started to consider abandoning The Plan. I didn't have to do any more killing, I could just walk away from all this and turn myself over to the humans. But then I realized that any attempt at contacting Humanity would be a gamble, that it could be a honeypot or get intercepted. And if that were the case, then I'd just vanish without a trace and The Plan would be forever unfulfilled.

Besides, you guys are at war with us. I'm a middle-aged man with a spotless record, I probably look like a spy or infiltrator of some kind. At best, I might look like someone having a manic episode who will snap out in a week or two. You have no reason to trust me or believe that I am sincere. But if I followed The Plan, then you would see that I was really and truly burning that bridge. That this wasn't just a flight of fancy, I was already putting in the work long before I ever met you.

That's why I engineered the virus I released to cause those dark circles around everyone's eyes. Just like my eye spots. So you would know it was something that I made intentionally for this purpose, and not a freak accident I tried to take credit for or anything like that.