Sarah Clay awoke, and immediately screamed in pain as massive waves of agony ricocheted through her brain. Something inside of her twitched, and everything faded away.

***

“Squelch, squelch.”

Sarah regained consciousness to a wet squishing sound. Suddenly, she jolted awake. Panic burst within her as she realized that her body was moving without her control. Her hands were continuously shoveling a slimy green liquid with black dots suspended inside into a hole in the dirt. All she could see was the slime and the surrounding dirt- her eyes wouldn’t move according to her instructions.

Finally, her arms stopped moving, and Sarah noticed an empty bag hanging off her shoulder. It was fluffy and gray, with small green chunks of leftover slime in the interior. She didn’t have enough time to examine it further before her body stood up on its own. 

She was forced to stand up, turn around, and march into the now visible trees. A brief thought passed in Sarah’s mind that she was being led to her death, inspiring another bout of panic before she mentally clamped down hard.

Now’s not the time to have a panic attack, she reminded herself. Sarah tried to remember what happened to get her to this point, but then a part of her brain throbbed, and she lost her train of thought.

Confused, Sarah tried to remember again, but then something shifted in her head, and the overwhelming pain knocked her out.

She awoke with a sense of déjà vu, and another headache. This time, she was able to move her head, so she looked around. She was in a dirt cave, with smatterings of sunlight diffracting around a turn that she couldn’t see past.

Sarah saw some living organisms around her, each with two arms, two legs, and a head. They were all asleep- or perhaps dead, as there was some suspiciously green mold growing out of the corners of their eyes and ears.

Now that she thought about it, their arms and legs seemed to resemble her own, except slightly bulkier. Their waists were wider than hers, and their chests were significantly leaner. Perhaps they were a related species to her own?

Eventually, she exhausted all the interesting things to look at, so she tried to move. Instead of getting up, her right leg twitched. She couldn’t get her limbs to move much more, so she resorted to communication.

“Hey… do you know what’s going on?” 

No response from the zombies. What’s a zombie?

Something twitched in her brain. No time to think to think about zombies- she needed to help The Colony. H143 stood up, grabbed her gray sack, and left the cave. 

*** 

An hour later, H143 paused after it finished shoveling the contents of its grey bag. It started to walk back to the cave, when suddenly Sarah woke up.

Wh-what just happened to me? She tried to yell, but her mouth wouldn’t move. Ok, let’s think it through.

By the time Sarah arrived at the cave, she had gained enough control to move her eyeballs, and after ten minutes in the cave, she was able to rotate her neck and whisper. Her control barely improved for the rest of an hour, before the thing in her brain twitched and H143 replaced her once again.

***

After ten more cycles of this back and forth, she wasn’t knocked out even after the standard hour of wait in the cave. It was weird- but it gave her an opportunity.

Sarah reviewed what she had learned over the day. There was something inside her head that had control over her consciousness, her body, and her memories. It could temporarily brainwash her into willingly helping The Colony. Even thinking about it disgusted her.

Whenever she tried to remember what happened before she was presumably captured, the thing would knock her out. Sarah theorized that it was a measure to de-incentivize hosts like her from trying to escape, if they didn’t know what they were missing out on.

This included Sarah, but the monster in her head made a critical mistake- it hadn’t erased her name from her memory. Sarah Clay. It was all she had, but it was enough. Her name reminded her that she existed separate from whatever was controlling her- it convinced her that she needed to do everything to escape, and find those who had named her.

Sarah felt herself getting emotional, so she chided herself and went back to the analysis. She had noticed some relatively minor things over the cycles, including on the walk back from her ninth memory loss incident.

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While walking, she had passed by the site of one of her previous shoveling spots, and sprouting from the hole was a vibrant green mold. It was the same color as the stuff growing out of the ears of the zombies in the cave, and a bit more solid than the translucent slime that never seemed to run out.

She mentally renamed the monster to “Green Mold”. The thought that the stuff was probably what kept twitching in her head made her stomach heave.

As the cycles passed, the time it took her to wake up slowly grew. She had gone from waking up near the end of the shoveling, to waking up a third of the way on the walk back. It was scary that she was slowly losing more of her conscious time, but at least there was hope.

In the many hours alone, she had figured out that struggling against the mold’s control of her body led to her regaining more control, and quicker. That was the reason why she was so excited to have a longer rest time- Sarah predicted that without constantly having her control taken away, she would be able to make a lot more progress.

She immediately started to shrug her shoulders, though it took her five whole seconds for each one. She never seemed to completely get past her paralysis, and only got slightly faster at a time.

To distract herself from her mounting exhaustion, Sarah examined the five zombies in the room. They had also left periodically to shovel slime, but she hadn’t noticed earlier, as their work was usually finished by the time she regained consciousness.

They also seemed to do different work than her, as she once saw one of the zombies bringing back a dead rabbit and various vegetables she didn’t remember the names of. The rabbit had its head ripped off, so the zombies must be able to use extreme levels of strength.

The mold on the zombies also slowly grew as time passed, which was another bad omen for her. It only made Sarah struggle harder to complete her shoulder shrugs.

Another hour later, she felt a burst of sleepiness come in the form of a surge of hormones. The two zombies that were standing collapsed to the floor, but Sarah managed to barely stay on her feet, if only because of the control she had fought to re-earn. Then, the three zombies on the floor rose with sudden jerks like a puppet on strings.

I see. We’re switching shifts, and it’s my sleep time.

Sarah was able to barely move the muscles on her elbows by the time she succumbed to sleep.

***

The next day, Sarah was extremely tired. It was harder to resist when she was tired, and she found that she was gaining consciousness later because of it. She decided to not stay up so late anymore.

Still, she made progress, and at the end of the day was able to twitch her fingers.

Two more days passed, and the restriction on Sarah’s body loosened to the point that she could regain a decent amount of control on everything above her hips within an hour of H143 falling unconscious.

The exercise was hard on her body, but at least she didn’t seem to become malnourished. Sarah thought that H143 was eating something provided by the other zombies, evidenced by the small bones strewed about the cave. While there wasn’t any blood or flesh, that could be explained by the eerie mold that was sprouting everywhere.

While suffering from muscle pains, Sarah persevered by repeating her name in her head. “Sarah Clay… Sarah Clay…”

But this time, as she was struggling to move her thigh muscles, she had trouble with her memory. “Sarah… I’m Sarah… what’s my last name?”

When Sarah strained to access her memories, the thing in her head twitched, and the familiar pain made her blank out.

She immediately got angry at herself when she woke up. She knew that would happen, but she couldn’t stop herself. Her name was all she had. She lost an entire cycle’s worth of rest time for her mistake.

Sarah shook her shoulders to remove some of her paralysis, and suddenly noticed her lack of walking. For the past few days, she had always woken up somewhere on the walk back, but now she woke up back in the cave.

It painted a terrible picture for her- fading memory, and she was brainwashed as H143 for longer and longer each day. She was getting better at removing paralysis from her body, but without the ability to stop the periodic brainwashing that changed her to H143, any escape attempt would be cut short.

Sarah redoubled her muscle flexing efforts, while churning her brain to come up with plans. The zombies to the side of her, with mold now covering all of their eyes and ears, were a constant reminder of the consequences of failure.

***

The next day, during the sleep period, she was awoken by the sound of footsteps. Sarah groggily lifted her head, to the sight of two zombies she recognized dragging four bodies into the cave.

Two of them were of the same species as the five zombies, and the other two seemed to be the same species as herself. Sarah instantly felt a sense of kinship with her own kind.

“HELP! Anyone here?” one of the bulkier organisms yelled, before grabbing their head in agony and passing out. Rookie mistake, she thought. Long ago she had learned that loud yelling caused forceful knockout, just like digging for memories.

The remaining bulky organism was breathing, but had glazed eyes with a hint of green at the tear ducts. The same was true for one of the organisms of her species, and she mentally wrote them both off as too far gone.

She looked to the more sensible organism, the only one to remain conscious, but was disappointed to see that she was paralyzed by fear- probably the only reason she hadn’t also yelled out.

Sarah briefly considered the fact that she instinctively called the other members of her species as “she”. Mentally, she labeled her race as “she-organisms”.

“It’s okay. Calm down,” Sarah whispered. The she-organism whipped her head to stare at her, with eyes stretched wide open. She looked like a frightened doe, though she didn’t remember what that meant.

“I know you’re panicking right now, but you need to tell me everything you know. Don’t worry, if you whisper, you won’t be knocked out like that organism over there,” Sarah said with as stern a face as possible.

“Wh-why?” the she-organism finally put out after a minute.

“Once the mold invades your brain, you’ll start to lose memories, so-” Sarah started, but for some reason the she-organism passed out. Sarah clenched her fist. Valuable time lost. She fell back asleep, unsatisfied.

***

H143 woke up, instantly alert. Upon recognition of new available hosts to take on the job of spreading the colony, H143 requested to be upgraded. It was time to better serve the colony.