–Twenty hours before nuclear detonation-

My first and last human memory were the same. One instant I was Apollo Finley, college student, future IRS infiltrator, and telekinetic olympian-wannabe, then Jim, the Singularity tax collector who plundered four billion people for their war machine, pressed a button and I felt no more. I could hear him talking but all sensation left my body and soon even his voice began to diminish. Volume falling until silence. I wasn’t in the cryotube any longer. At least that solved my academic probation problem. So I’ll call this a win.

A thought stabbed my heart. Was the college even there? Ages 12 - 45 encompassed all college students and half the staff. Going back to Earth alone wasn’t enough. I needed transports and starships to ferry survivors. If I wasn’t already dead.

Hours, years, or seconds passed, with my consciousness existing in total oblivion. I would say floating but there was no sensation, no impulses, no desires whatsoever. Apathetic in totality. Who cared if Baz cheated on me? I caught the leeches red handed. No longer could they siphon away my life, money, time, emotions. They were gone and I was free. Now if only I could find a cutie on Syrak-9…

“Maybe I should settle for a puppy.”

I wanted to smile, deep within the wrinkles of my brain new connections began to form leaving me with a question I could not contemplate. Who was I? My memories were Apollo’s, old corridors I re-explored as space ticked onward. Baz, Ashley, mom, dad, Savannah. They were all present. In hindsight, it was hard to miss Dad’s cheating, harder still to miss the signs Baz showed. Always spending a bit too much time alone with Ashley. Always arriving at my apartment an hour before I got home.

I sigh, hoping death would find the siblings and I would never again have to see those four people. Savannah though, I have questions for her. She must have known. Unfortunately, I’ll probably die in this sensationless cryotube. It would have been nice to meet my youngest sibling, or start a family with someone I love. But that’ll never happen-

-Darkness suddenly filled my world, the sort of darkness that you see with closed eyes. Not total black but the sort of darkness that swirls and waves and beats. Sensation returns. Warm humid air blowing across my face. Sound comes next, creatures move, some hooved, some clawed. Grunts and squawks rattle around my head until I hear Jim speaking.

Jim, that damn publican.

“Sorry about that, you’d think with how often we work together I’d eventually learn all your quirks but no job is ever the same. There ya go, all brainwaves rising. He’s coming too. Might be awake already so be conscious of that. Oh, give him some time to adjust from a human being to–” There is a pause, Jim is probably gesturing towards me. “Whatever you put him in will take some adjusting. Don’t drop the whole Collective on his head at once. That being said, I have high hopes for this particular mind. Very high hopes. Let me know how he pans out for ya. Anyways, congrats on your own personal- uhm… engineer. It’s been a pleasure doing business with the collective.”

A raspy voice answers, somehow moist and bitey, as if the speaker has a mouth with too many teeth or multiple jaws. Maybe even a split jaw. I exhale, thinking how ugly such a creature would be, as my own jaw splits into four jaws. I cock my head, neck feeling more weight than it has ever supported before and feeling lighter, stronger. Something feels wrong, actually scratch that. EVERYTHING feels wrong. Taste returns, and three tongues explore my mouth, categorizing each tooth with an ‘ouch’ factor. Or approximately how deeply each of these sawblades prick my tongues.

“Ah, the last piece falls into our puzzle. Jimmy, today you may have saved the galaxy. Our orders come from the highest authority and require this one.” Rasps out the voice my body recognizes.

“Saved the galaxy? Ha, saved my wallet more like. I appreciate the notion ma’am but I’m no savior riding in on a white knight. Just glad to be of service. Now if you’ll excuse me, got a few more drop offs to make, unless I can interest you in a hold full of biomass.” Says Jim.

“We haven’t the conveyance. Nor the drop pods to convey additional biomass. Thank you Jimmy.” Says the bitey rasper.

My mouth flexes, opening vertically instead of horizontally. Once more the tongues move, assessing my maw from the inside. Before Baz rolled into her life, Savannah once brought home a boy with a split tongue, said he was great at kissing but not much else. Is that what I've become? A good kisser?

I can’t feel my arms yet, but feeling is slowly creeping down my torso, I waggle my shoulders, discovering a painful narrowness. My neck is largely gone, though my face now seems nestled in an alcove. Shoulders are not a thing I possess, as arms are now directly attached to my sides.

It seems impossible. Then the feeling reaches my ribs. My pecs aren’t just reduced, they’re gone. Now covered in a smooth carapace. Hands regain feeling, these aren't human limbs, thin muscular, and once more armored with chitin. Flexible too, I reach back to explore my backside and find a dorsal ridge running down my trunk, loose skin covering layers of armor plates. Several globules peek out of my skin, nodes I can fill with any bodily fluid and eject. Most commonly a way to express genetic prototypes, scale models of full sized organisms meant to test a concept or theory before full scale production.

And I can fill them with acid or nerve gases. Very useful indeed. Two such ampules exist already, sealed and pressurized within my torso. No, ampules isn’t the right word, maybe nerve gas grenades? Hmm, accurate but mouthy, need something more casual. Nervous nellies? Hmmm… No. Nervous grenades maybe?

On reflex my mouth begins to water, two of my four jaws clicking in front of my face. No, they aren’t jaws. I have mandibles, like an ant but sharp enough to shave and thick enough to crush power armor. I know because this body remembers tearing technomancy scientists apart, invading their world, tunneling beneath their cities and eradicating all human machines.

More memories split my skull, flooding me with thoughts of who this body once was. Of the progenitor’s experiments, the labs that created my former intelligence. I’ve been throttled a thousand times, each incident sharpened my mind, honing the edge I will slay humanity with. Whatever those assholes were attempting to accomplish by repeated strangulation will never be known, but what they achieved is remarkable.

When one is strangled to the point of unconsciousness the mind sharpens time slows as your body exerts every resource in an attempt to give you the necessary fuel to survive. I now live in that sharpened state. Perpetually firing on all cylinders. In time I will subject humans to the same experiments, moments before they become biomass for the hive’s organic war machine.

Then it hits like a wrecking ball. The mental blocks. The Endless hives only push forward, we conquer, never looking behind, never seeking our creators. It bores into my consciousness like a thousand fire ants, digging long after tears of blood drip down my cheeks. I weep. Losing sensation as I once again fall into sleep.

Hours later I awake. Though it could be minutes for all I know. Green light fills my bedroom. Except the bedroom is a green pool of bioluminescent fluid, which tastes surprisingly delicious. Slightly sweet, with just enough salt to compliment the wondrously savory chunks of meat. Texture is underrated when it comes to food. There is something uniquely satisfying about sinking two jaws into a piece of meat and sheering it. Flesh resisting just enough to know it was once a formidable foe, before fangs touch their opposites, cleaving flesh.

I’m eating my enemies.

Was not expecting this today…

My eyes finally open, exiting the pool I somehow slept in, fully submerged. Which is how I realize this body isn’t remotely humanoid. More legs or arms -no way for me to differentiate between them as my legs connect to my trunk higher than the limbs with hands- than I can count propel me out of the pool, not nearly centipedal, but more than six. Each limb bearing four joints. More flexibility than a slinky. If you turned a black widow spider into a centipede and then somehow cross bred that with a human.

Green liquid flows off my lower half, revealing an even greater change. My lower half is almost sluglike, a lengthy and highly stable worm covered in chitinous scales. I know from experience each scale can blunt a grenade or survive direct hits from shoulder fired railguns. Neat, though what I am is unimportant, so long as I manifest and cull the future generations. An engineer of genetic strains. This pool is both my home, bedroom, and gene foundry. I am integral to the endless hives, yet never truly one with them. Unlike the others I retain independent thought and can conceive of ideas such as our creators. Maybe I was conscripted willingly into the endless, maybe I was a unique mutation. Either way, I have a mission.

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“Engineering new lifeforms… Well then, how hard can it be?” I growl, the alien mouth mauling speech.

I close my eyes, running through the mental catalogue of hive bioforms. When Zazathur died he was working on a dozen separate projects. By and large, they’re inefficient, adapted for too many unique scenarios. All bioforms have gills, even those adapted to survive volcanic worlds where temperatures exceed 200 freedom degrees. Foolishly inefficient. But Matriarchs only add genes, never removing them. Makes sense, their brains are multifaceted, focused on thousands of details while mine aims at perfecting a single task. Ensuring the best creatures survive. On that battlefield a Matriarch’s talents are miniscule compared to my own cunning.

Which extends from crown down my spine through the wormy trunk. In human terms, I’m a male Lamia, or medusa with the snakes replaced by brains. Tendrils I now turn to Zazathur’s old projects. Bioships are weak individually, small, unshielded, and relatively slow. Yet potent due to our logistics. Ten Singularity frigates can defeat fifteen bioships without losing a single human vessel, so we need to hit them with a hundred and fifty bioships. I apply all brains to the problem, running through ten thousand bioforms for inefficient strains.

A particularly offensive example is how we occupy gas giants with enormous gliding creatures. Sorta like a Broodlord shaped Overlord, except they breathe plasma, filtering gases through a series of lungs to refine deuterium and other fuels. Highly efficient for a biological lifeform. If you forget about the gills. Each lung has an accompanying set of gills. For breathing underwater. On a planet where liquid water cannot exist.

It’s infuriating, more angering than someone burning a cross on my lawn. My whole cerebrum applies itself to the task, filtering out extraneous designs on the gliders. In an hour I cleanse the design. This biopool has all the raw biological materials required to replicate then alter genomes, accompanied by methods to test and log the alterations. Green liquid congeals into a miniature glider, flapping through the biopool as I weave together strands of DNA, carefully excising the genetic coding for gills. Then the creature flies into an under-pool tunnel for testing by the bioship herself. My thoughts and design are conveyed to the hive at large. Other geneticists agree and the improved filter-lord goes into full scale production on two gas giants. Predicted outcome is a 5% increased output for all gas harvesting. A humble alteration, but one that directly translates to fleet sizes. Across the galaxy we’ve become 5% more virile in space. My claws rub together, 5% amounts to thousands of additional bioships across hundreds of worlds. Hundreds of star systems will be buried under the hive’s will.

Next I turn to improving the ground troops, there are millions of bioforms, but the world we are advancing on has strict requirements. Humans fighting a trench war, other humans trying to break through them with tanks, the Azhurai Conglomerate fortress, plasma farting Tulverians, and a half dozen other factions. Plasma and the Azhurai are problems. Their weaponry will evaporate any biomass, destroying our war economy. To land a suitable force we’d need a hundred bioships, except the Azhurai are an advanced variable, demanding caution. One thousand bioships would be a safe bet.

Except, we’ll only be landing one. I groan, understanding why they’ve sent me, an efficiency engineer to the frontlines. Every lifeform is previous. The worst case scenario for an ‘Endless Collective’ that normally functions on overwhelming the enemy with volume. My mind turns to the one place I’ve fought wars before, Starcraft 2. I may have tried Brood War but was always shit at it. Too little control and I started too far behind the Koreans. Those undead acolytes played all day and night, able to reaver drop your mineral line.

Efficiency there is measured in resources saved not biomass. Broodlords endlessly bombarding the enemy with living ammunitions, swarmhosts carrying their babies and hurling them over cliffs to harass the enemy. Zergling runbys to chomp mineral lines, trading twenty zerglings for five workers. A gamble that only paid off if you had sufficient forces. All excellent tactics, if I were anything other than a protoss main. Feck.

There are no ‘free’ units in real life. A broodling or locust will cost precious biomass. I’ll have to create something ferocious, small, fast, and most of all efficient. Burrow ambushes will be the most cost effective so tunneling ability is important. Although… I could give it active camouflage, like a cuttlefish…

I run through genetic sequences, soon ruling that option out. Active camouflage requires intensive neural networking, which is only possible with slow incubation and extensive biomass investment. Not possible for any type of ling. Evan a zergling that is meant to never die. If only I knew some of our commander’s intended plans, specific tactics, or the exact terrain then I could plan accordingly!

Mental blocks trigger once more. I can’t think of the things that steer the hive. This is unacceptable. Mentally, I partition my brain and devote half of it to solving the blocks, I’ll think slower, but that is a perk to my human brain. Just trying to keep Zazathur’s mind occupied is like trying to steer ten thousand cats. Far beyond one human’s control. So I daisy chain their leashes together and let them run wild.

My memories have no personality, instead they offer up information that should be relevant. Zazathur died long ago, but the hive keeps remaking his body and filling it with psionically compatible minds like my own. When Zazathur’s brains eventually burn out my consciousness, they’ll fill this body with another intelligence.

“Jim. What the hell.” I whisper, exploring my new body.

The closest thing imaginable to this creature is a brain bug from Starship Troopers, an ancient satire I deeply enjoyed. Ashley couldn’t appreciate the satire and hated it, thinking it was all about fascism or some cautionary tale about capitalism gone awry. Baz agreed with her, even though he watched the movie on repeat when I wasn’t home. What a hypocrite. How could I have missed that?

Sorrow translates into fear, and six spear arms angle forward, slashing the air in a combat response. Envenomed blades poke through chitin ready to eject themselves. With a little willpower I can pressurize my arms then launch spiral fluted darts Kinda like sharting death at mach speeds.

Natural weapons that would make an Australian feel at home. This body is actually pretty great. Potent, larger than a horse, or bull… No, those creatures are too small to compare, I’m more of a zerg Ultralisk than a weedy scientist. Two of my foremost appendages are bladed so I extend one, wincing as my human mind rewrites itself to this body’s locomotion. It’s as if my pinky finger is suddenly a complete arm. Unsophisticated and unpracticed. The limb shoots out, punching a six foot slash into the wall.

Mental chastisement grabs my neck, choking the life out of my brain.

“WHY HARM ME?” It demands.

“Eck- so- sorry! Accident!” I gasp, all dozen of my limbs jerking awkwardly.

The force releases my body. I’m not sure if it intended to toss me, but the release flips me backwards sending me splashing into the biopool. Worker drones, creatures similar to ants appear and seal the gash in the ship, ignoring me.

Okay, lets not do that again. I think, slowly working through each muscle, stinger, limb, and inch of the new me. Which is when I see the first message.

>Praetorian Panoptes: Felt like someone just tried to strangle me. Is someone there? My name is Apollo Finley.

I close my eyes, but the text remains. Weird, but I’m doing zerg yoga right now, my sub brains can handle that.

>Straingineer Zazathur: Funny, cause my name is Apollo Finley. Last thing I remember was being pulled out of my body.

>Praetorian Panoptes: Straingineer Zazathur? Like, the starcraft commander? Bruh, did you get a degree in eugenics or something? Imagine sitting next to Abathur during a lecture. ‘Chairs inefficient, eat professor’s brain for knowledge assimilation’.

I break down laughing. This confirms it, I’ve gone insane. Talking to voices in my head via a twenty year old chat interface.

>Straingineer Zazathur: haha. I’m not even close to human. What are you? A pregnant queen with twelve wombs you have to self inseminate?

>Praetorian Panoptes: Lol. wtf. That’s gross, not funny.

Blue light appears around me, a field of psychic power that pops in the same millisecond it forms. Or my senses are too slow to capture lightning.

>Praetorian Panoptes: WTF! I thought you were joking… Bro… I’m so sorry.

>Straingineer Zazathur: Relax, this body doesn’t seem to have a pity circuit. Besides, I'm a badass. simple as.

We spend hours talking, each subtly testing the other, suggesting false memories only for the other to correct us. There is no doubt, we are one being.

I pass the time weaving genetic strands together, incubating life not seen in this galaxy before. How Zazathur discovered extragalactic genomes is hidden from me, blocked by the mental lockdowns that protect Collective HQ. Otherwise I have free reign within the sealed biopool. Preparations for landing the ship are already underway and all biomass is accounted for, leaving only what I have on hand to work with.

All other biomass is tied up, devoted to the cause. We’ll be landing soon. On a world that would love nothing more than to kill every last synapse of our hived minds. Our mission is clear, a world with a forested half, beautiful and taller than Lothlorien, and the other half an irradiated husk. Dead, but we must fight to acquire Solarium. A rare mineral only found in the galactic core, deeper than ships can traverse without being crushed or torn apart by the infinite gravity of a supermassive black hole. This world must have once been a rogue planet, somehow transiting the galactic core and being bombarded with the mineral hundreds of billions of years ago, before Earth was even dust.

Oh, that’s right. Earth, that’s home. I must take over this planet to save home. That is my deal with Jim. The price of mom’s safety.