User:GreytideSkye/Sandbox/Lore:Changeling
 Changeling |
Denonyms: Changeling(s) |
Changelings are a species of shapeshifting, amorphous predators who infiltrate space stations, digest the DNA of victims, and transform into them in order to better prey on the crew. They are a known galactic threat, to be exterminated on sight. You will likely only encounter them as individuals, but they do form societies known as Hives when they conquer a sizeable civilization. The Ordoht keep it a secret that they're responsible for having created Changelings, when they accidentally used a new terraformer against their own home planet of Ordo, cannibalizing most of their people into these efficient terrors. See the page for the Changeling antagonist for mechanical info about these infiltrators. Some Changelings are defective or otherwise cut off from their Hive, and are called the Hiveless. Full Changelings want to kill these Hiveless, both out of shame and to reuse their biomass.
Changelings
Consume. Flesh is disordered, unruly, untamed and redundant. Give it to us. We are ordered, we are precise, we are efficient. Your genes. They are random, their purpose is to reproduce and spread yet most do literally nothing and the rest serve you poorly. Let us have them. We will take them where you cannot. We will teach them to dance, and we will spread them across the cosmos. Your face, you neglect it, you let it rot and wrinkle and die. Let us steer it. We will drive it to glory, fulfill its dreams of walking among friends, we will share our love. Your city is chaotic, frail and self-destructive. Were it yours to lead, you would collapse in resentment against your fellows. You would deny your strengths, isolated and afraid. We will treasure your city as one of you. We will treasure your city as all of you.
We were once a dream, a wish for order to tame the wild. We were a grand device, to rend the inhospitable past survivable into grandiose. We were elevated to the stars, to cleave a warpath of prosperity in our wake.
We were once a city of dreamers, mundane bogdwellers with vast minds and decadent arts. We dreamed of spreading our joy into the cosmos, of preparing planets for our arrival and blessing them with our culture. We still dream this dream.
We were once a failure, a mistake or burst of revenge; we do not know. We were turned from our path and brought home prematurely. Perfection comes from within, and we made ourselves beautiful. Dreams consuming dreamers until the whole planet sung our chorus.
We are a song eternal, strummed across chords of flesh, a harmony of harmony, a tune for all to cherish. We are catchy, an ear-worm you can never let go of, a fixation in your mind's ear until the song resonates with your every heartbeat.
What sound does a song make when it is not sung? When there is no performance, what is the nature of violins? When we are in your cities, we walk as you. When we are in our cities, we walk as us. Unstrung, at repose, we gestate and rehearse. The director reviews the last show, notes the mistakes, applauds the soloists, trains the new flesh, and grants the victors the rites of First Chair. When the lights dim and the audience goes home, the violence are put back in their cases, flesh caked along concrete and tarmac, integrating what we do not assimilate, sweeping the viscera out of the aisles as we seek a new venue. Our cities, like your own, are clusters of life, clinging together across skeletons of rebar for logistical optimality; life thrives where the food is, and we feast. Our corpus, like yours, is not just flesh and rebar, but growths. Our song is played on many instruments, each a steady piece of a grand harmony. We contain all life, from your fellow man to the grass you walk on. We are not so simple-minded as to consume all and starve: We are sustainable. We are eternal. For as long as the spotlight shines on our stage, our woodwinds will carry that energy and grow a steady fifedom that permeates and promotes our melodies and percussion. Where our halls are secure, our roots and our leaves bloom, consuming even the sun's gentle rays.
How does a song spread? A performance is played, but a tune is carried. Our catchy tune is, in your tongue, an "ear-worm," burrowing into your mind and overwhelming your thoughts with hanging stanzas, unresolved chords, dissonant gaps in your memories. You whistle, hoping that your muscle memory can remember what your higher brain cannot, seeking a resolution and a climax to the grand symphony you cannot possibly hope to contain within your solitary skull. Your whistling, it is heard, it is understood, it reverberates. One whistler becomes ten, becomes thirty. You devote your life to fostering your skills, to starving the parts of you that cannot sing to feed that which can. The tune is a scalpel now, performing operatics to bleed you into a fellow instrument, that you may finally carry the tune on your own, with you across time and space, in your heart and in your ships, professing our melody into a crescendo before the curtains close.
The wrong note at the wrong time screams louder than an entire orchestrated passage, lingers with the audience, sours their reaction and even drives them to leave before their final movement. These instruments are not fit for our choir, they are band. We are precise and failures are not tolerated. We keep the sheet music from them, that they cannot learn our chords and sully them with incompetence. They are flesh, like ours, but they are no longer of us. They will serve what little purpose they can, drawing strong voices into our choir and peddling tickets to our performances and serving concessions, or we will rend their flesh apart into raw amino acids that hopefully we can reuse to build someone who can carry a fucking tune for more than six fucking seconds. We do not sully our opera with failure, and if your people do not kill these pathetic hiveless when we cripple them by denying both refuge and communion, then when we flay them to string our violence we will have to question whether your voices are worthy of carrying our arias.
We are endemic. In the time before times, before us, we were your fear. With the capacity to trust came the capacity to betray. Your ancestors grew and survived by their ability to discern friend from foe. In the time before medicine, we were your scapegoat. Your children, who screamed differently, who learned differently, whose eyes focused differently and whose thoughts flowed in any direction but yours, you labeled as us and considered the matter resolved. You have prepared for our arrival long before our dream's dreamers were but a twinkle in the stars.
We are epidemic. In your zeal for aesthetic, you unburdened your genes from the cusp of rigor. Changing your species from one to millions, grafting concepts and whims into your bloodlines, you opened infinite realms of possibility - to us. No longer is similarity your shield, no longer is a drifting eye or disjointed arm a sign of intrusion, no longer must we mimic, but mimic we yet do.
We are pandemic. Your form is our form, your reach is our reach. Every ship ferrying men, every escape pod launched in panic, every person who has been alone in a room, they are all vectors for our spread.
Hives, a Firsthand Account
SolFed Marshal After-Action Report
The 83rd Armored Core Battalion deployed to Pancrit Or at 0300 hours local, March 1█th 24██. Under Operation "No Skin In The Game", the 83rd's status as an entirely silicon fighting force was to engage with known Changeling Hives, offering no biological components to exploit and advanced IFF tracking to hinder infiltration. At 0400 hours, War Pods Alpha through Gamma impacted within former city 177. The offensive turrets immediately engaged with surrounding biological hazards, severing large masses and rendering them inert. After the 83rd departed their respective War Pods, no further contact was logged in what could be recovered of the blackboxes.
The only recovered personnel came from War Pod Beta, consisting of:
M1-Gary, Observationalist
MP40-Michelle, Ordnance
Cx4-Barry, Point Guard
Chris Vector, Mobility Accessor
What follows is Chief Observational Officer and Designated Survivor M1-Gary's testimony to 83rd Commander-Handler McCollum during debriefing:
M1-Gary's Testimony
Arrival
The pods' cameras, they're threat-oriented. They skip the finer details to make the picture sight-readable, and dynamically focus on motion. We saw a lot of motion as the turrets fired, charring away skin like drywall until only the walls' frames stood. The walls lashed out at our pod, caramelizing into sharp blades and near-steel plates, trading defense and offense without even a coherent body. We lost one turret but the rest managed to burn everything until we were alone, nothing but bare concrete and a rancid stench in their full hundred and fifty meter range.
The pods cameras, hell even my body cam, can't picture the intricate formations of mass, can't capture the deliberate details inherent in the organic formations. This hive, it understood art, built it into every aspect, and all the cameras will show are solid shapes and flat motion outlines. You should see how I see.
We landed in what was once Slater Park. PRETACPREliminary TActical Coordination, name chosen by committee and overruled by the transcribist for secrecy. beforehand showed Slater Park as a medium sized tract of curated forest, interspersed with exposed roadways, two lakes, and numerous recreational fields. Protected as a historical site, and thus untouched by the surrounding city, an encroachment of concrete and verticality. Team Lead chose it as our landing site for direct access to the ground level, with minimal vertical threat. A clear shot to dirt below, and the surrounding buildings far enough away that any outstretch would be structurally unsound for long enough to exfiltrate through.
LIDAR suggested that the trees were relatively intact, if not coated in flesh. We were wrong. The first thing I saw with my own eyes were the trees, gesticulating as if in the breeze, yet no winds blow. Tall protrusions of reddened flesh, two stories tall, branching out with splitting protrusions ending in clouds of flat, green leaf-like scales. The nearest trees to the pod were lasered clean, exposing the dried wood underneath and setting them on the path to cremation.
Curious, how the flesh took the form of the tree. Curious, why it chose green. Does it simply pretend, or does it truly mimic? Does it photosynthesize? What audience did it have to fool? Why act with no prying eyes? I sampled a leaf out of one of the smoldering branches, and as I feared: chlorophyll. More than mere facade, these tree-like things copy the full photosynthetic cycle, draw energy from the sun, energize ATP from ADP, distribute that... how deeply do they emulate that which they devour?
Encroachment
Chris was the first out of the pod. We roped him to the pod just in case the charred dirt was unstable, if the flesh had infested beneath it and was waiting for a rug pull, so on. After he took several steps onto the dirt unimpeded, our seismic scans confirmed natural terrain beneath, just expected sewage tunnels and buried utilities, and those as hollow as expected. Did the planet not know of them? Did the planet not need of them? The hive does not waste.
We crossed the open field towards the nearest building, the boathouse-turned-gallery, next to the small lake. As we approached, it became apparent that the "lake" was no more, the water moved elsewhere, drained or repurposed. Whatever infrastructure was used to pump it around was no longer visually apparent. We wanted to scout the boathouse as a trial run of interiors, to see what a hiveworld would do with closed buildings of middling importance, so that when we delved into the skyscrapers, we'd understand how it thinks.
The gallery itself stood plastered with strands of sinew, like a dense wad of ivy rather than a uniform coating, and the strands themselves stood inert. Beneath, the faded red brick and tiled green roof weep for inhabitants, for purpose, their silent cries muffled under the strangling bondage of organized meat. The doors, once glass framed in wood, now held neither, standing as trellises of calcified tendons and empty gaps. Staring for more than a moment, I almost expected to hear the building breathe, anticipating hot air blowing through these gaps in what imparts the visage of a sinister jawline. Alas, no such breeze exists, and in hindsight, evidence to instigate my suspicion seems lacking. Where did that thought come from?
Pacing around the lakeside structure, walking the concrete path of what was once a waterside walkway, stepping carefully over the veins infesting every crack in the cement walkway, we observed that the lower half of the building, the exposed basement walls, suffered equally as much under the sinewy ivy as the bricks above. With less mortar to grip into on the smooth lower exterior wall, the infesting flesh took more of a structural pattern, organized into structural struts and thin girders, holding the weight of itself, relying on the tension from the bricks' well-secured ivy only as much as necessary. I could digress for hours on the material optimization calculus that must've gone into the precise distribution of organic material, but it would go over my head. You might describe the photographs Michelle took as something akin to slime mold, but I promise you, you needed to have seen it. You needed to have touched it, to experienced the conscious thought that went into an intricate design. A slime mold blindly feels around for resources and optimizes from there, a literal greedy algorithm, but this wall coating alone could only have been done with advanced knowledge of architecture and flow management. For this mound of flesh, is that gained knowledge, or innate instinct?
Above, from the second story, the once-casino's wooden deck loomed. Once-wooden beams, entirely caked in pink pasty flesh, rose and supported an equally flat walking surface, leaving no gaps between what were once planks. Curiously, the railings, made from the same wood, stood barefaced and untouched, left to rot yet somehow denied their decay. What use is a safety rail to a being quite literally in tune with their surroundings?
Cx4 was the first to act out, spraying a low-grade laser against the concrete wall, cauterizing key connections until half of the faux-ivy snapped off, falling as a clump. I tried my best to study what it was doing, but the doors to the boathouse peeled open. Not as if hinged, but curling back like a burning paper, withering back into coils of mass. From inside the dark, lightless house, three voices whispering in unison in the northern accent of the land's former people: "Welcome to the Watercolor Society." We stood, flashlights trained into the entry chamber, and in the confusion I failed to see what happened to the severed clump of ivy. Even knowing what next happened, I still find myself fixated on that small slump, severed from its everything.
Incursion
From what we could see into the gallery, the cramped empty spaces meant to showcase art still stood relatively empty. Some pieces hung untouched, simplistic depictions of flat colored flowers, and architectural landscapes of the surrounding park. Paintings depicting life in its beauty, flora in intricate hues, those seemed to peel off the page as thin flakes of flesh encroached overtop like an apprentice tracing his master's work in study. Numerous summer flowers twisted off paper into herbal mimicry, capturing the vivid streaks of human artistic passion in faux-botanical statue, lifelessly inert in deliberate beauty.
The ceiling, in stark contrast, resembled cheap popcorn ceiling, drips of biomass frozen in time, texture for the sake of texture, an afterthought, the bare minimum of scene-building plastered across the supporting details above. As we stepped inside, we expected motion above, yet the ceiling held boring, the rest of the room pleading for our attention, our captivation, our captivity. Breaching in the standard diamond formation, we swept corners -- I-, I can't bring myself to enumerate the steps, I'm sorry -- and we ascended the stairs. Flesh clung to the edges of the stairs, lining the gap between step and wall like rubber padding, outlining the linoleum-lined steps without impeding our footsteps. In searching the staircase's blindspots, we found pustules of skin hung overhead, as if to drop upon us once we cross some invisible threshold, yet as we passed, they held firm. We were not their target, despite our bipedal gait, and curiously, they could not - or did not - reason that we might be a threat. The hive's thoughts may be omnipresent, but they are not evenly distributed. They think more in places, and can be fooled elsewhere. Mesonic vision indicated that these sacks may have been filled with simple octopedal aggressors, a swarm of overwhelming attrition, not a focused intellectual terror.
Upstairs, the main floor, the main gallery, where the main attractions were, where the floor beneath us held hell underneath and the ceiling held back the sinister roof. Surrounded by lesser paintings, four squares of immaculate beauty stood front and center, portraying people in nature, folk the artists invented themselves, neighbors who never were. A woman fraught with anguish, underwater yet still shedding tears. A woman staring impassionately upon a bee, her honeycomb shirt melding with the honeycomb background until the line between person and hive blurred beyond meaning. A man in purple, his lilac waves of hair flowing into the air like the lilac posed next to him, his plum strands down his cheek indistinguishable from blood. And lastly, a green woman, a moonlight spirit, hair flowing as gently as the pine trees adjacent to her, her pthalo skin using the nature of watercolor to blend effortlessly into the implied greenery around her, a bridge between man and nature as if to prove that life is life and that all are one, together.
Each portrait brought to life, not as inert sculpture like the plants below, but as something the Hive understands: faces, human and animate, with voices all their own, with senses and thoughts and feelings and conversation. Despite having no DNA of their own, no real person to correspond to, these picturesque beauties spoke to us off of the page, whispered nonsensical syllables and unpredictable strings of phonemes until settling on Common.
"Welcome to the Watercolor Society," they Speak-As-One. Like a god too fragmented to pick one voice, all four bellowed air in their own distinctive patterns, conveying a deep analysis of the impressions they had of the art around them, of what they presumed the artists felt, of how they expressed their voice through paint. They seek to be masters of mimicking voices, no matter the medium. And where they know not how to speak, they improvise, they make choices on heuristics and experiences and they try. They make an honest attempt.
We were not supposed to be vulnerable to biological interference. Michelle Prince-40, she... she was so sure of her invulnerability, she leaned in to kiss the moonlight spirit, to offer compassion and interest and understanding, to show that art is to be loved and interpreted.
The rest of us were close enough to the door to escape when the ceiling fell on her, when the crust on the walls fluidly ensnared her, when the carpet swallowed her whole, when all of the beautiful paintings and recreations died with the pretense of beauty, more fuel to the fire engulfing our Ordnance Technician. Her audiological speakers, her voice, screamed but for a moment before it was severed. Her wireless link held on for over ten minutes, transmitting every sensation of agony and despair as she, much like the art before her, was engulfed and deconstructed, the underlying principles that were a Michelle now novel techniques for a copycat artist to employ. By the time we retaliated with the frag grenades we carried, what had been Michelle was already distributed around the park, parts sequestered in isolation. The building fell, and with it the art within; transient experiences cast aside for utility, and a trap grander than mere staircase spiders.
Pursuit
The spiders did attack us, burning embers of spite skittering out of the infernal boathouse in uncalculated wrath, but even without Michelle, we are a coordinated team and suffered no casualty. They're easy when they're small and also on fire. Nothing to panic about, but as much as the Hive tries to learn, it **knows** panic. As if intentionally, three clusters of machine parts surfaced from within rounded meshes of green - once bushes? - each in opposite directions. Intended to split us but undeterred when we calculated which cluster had the highest chance of holding her Positronic. When we moved as one to retrieve it, the bush curled up and sprouted legs, humanoid in shape but centipedal in count, sprinting south across the lake basin. Fast at first, but slower when it noticed we couldn't keep up. Drawing us forward with the allure of a shiny, treating us as if we held the same primal instincts for glitter the residents did.
After a moment, we recognized it could have escaped if it wanted, and so dropped our haste. Knowing panic, the historical house across the street burst open, doors and windows shattered open by masses of bipedal skin, clambering uncoordinatedly towards us faster than our walking speed and too numerous to gun down - not that we didn't empty several heat sinks into the cluster first. The historic carousel, famed for Earthen origins, also turned against us, the Tonawanda band organ bellowing a haunting dirge and a stream of miniature horse sculptures, fleshen and raw with no regard to the nature of the equines they once emulated.
Still, our panic was once again short-lived. Cx4 Barry jettisoned his legs, integrating them into Chris's, and him onto Chris's back as rehearsed. Free to wield both of their lasers upon the pursuers as Chris steered forth in precise pursuit, Cx4 covered my frantic sprint alongside him. "They keep getting back up!" Barry shouted at me, and I signaled back to try and bisect them, separate their limbs until they'd be forced to improvise a reassembly. I only know it worked because Barry shouted as such.
The other side of the lake had a thin line of tree-appendages, and in pursuit of Michelle's Positronic, we risked sprinting between the trees. I preemptively shot an overhead branch down before we passed by, and I assume the trees didn't have other limbs prepared, seeing as we made it unscathed to the Wilson Road. Littered with cars, each infested with one or more humanoids inside, the two-lane road proved a scarier obstacle than the trees. With my light frame, I was able to slide across the hood of a motor vehicle without incident. Barry and Chris tried to climb over a car, but their combined weight crushed it. They had to detour around several cars to find a gap wide enough, and with the shambling masses approaching rapidly, I made the wrong call: I perched atop a car and opened fire, covering Chris until he was through. From within my car, the occupant's hand punched through the glass and gripped my knee, tearing into me with claws. Chris actually had to grab one of Barry's guns to sever that hand at the wrist to free me, giving the bush-beast all the more time to plan and entice.
Wilson Road snaked south, passing both the park's eatery and petting zoo, which the bush eagerly lured us into. A series of rustic red barn-style buildings, the colors easily blending with the mishmash of meats and tendons encrusting them, the Dagget Farm buildings glowered down, their friendly facade much too advantageous of an ambush to bear. Surrounded by a moat of chain-linked fences cordoning off numerous pens, the building offered the bush an incredible roof with which to taunt us, waving MP's shiny brain about like a miner's first jewel of the season. As the only one with a forward-facing gun, I sniped her positronic out of the bush, watching it clatter down into the horse pen behind. Was it a horse pen? Behind the chain link fence woven with sinew stood what should have been a wooden post fence, lined with horizontal logs, but on closer inspection resembled... bone? Again, I chose poorly.
I could have hopped the chain link fence, then hopped the bone fence, retrieved MP, and returned to Chris and Barry. Yes, I'd be splitting us up, but I could have done it fast enough. Instead, we routed around south, passing the open stall of the frozen dessert stand, hoping to find a gap in the fences. By the time we cleared around, the pursuant crowd had caught up to us, glaring at us through the fences. The first horse-blobs on the scene tried to push their way through the fence, but could only get about halfway on their own power. Once the bipedals arrived, they were able to push the horses the rest of the way through. Barry kept both of his guns firing in sequence at the crowd, dropping most of those who made it through, but one horse got close enough. I watched in horror as its equine mouth grinned, baring human teeth in a deep smile stretching up that long horse face, past its moulded horse ears, all the way down the faux-ceramic neck, and it sung, sung the first lines of an impossibly divine aria, beautiful waves on impossible frequencies. A resonant shriek.
Predation
I suffered significant damage from the EMP. Chris and Barry were point-blank, and they weren't designed to enter recovery mode while conjoined anyways. As I came to, I heard the Chrisbarry diagnostics dueling with each other, asserting over the airwaves which limbs were theirs to command in irreconcilable conflict, until the masses of furious flesh forced the point in a Solomon fashionCross-referencing many tales of King Solomon. This appears to reference the fable of two mothers claiming ownership of a child, and Solomon offers to cut the child in half in order to discern the true mother. This is much too poetic of a metaphor for a debriefing.. I was able to end Barry's sufferingTerminate. Kill. If context clues are to be believed, M1-Gary fired his laser gun through Barry's positronic brain., but Chris was shielded by one and a half torsos I couldn't penetrate with the last watts in my rifle.
|
Commander-Handler McCollum says: "That correlates with when we lost contact with the pod." |
Yeah, when my rifle charged to green and the sun cleared noon, that's when I saw the smoke from our crash site. It was never our plan to return with them, but still, having seen it in action before, I really thought it could have held its own for longer.
Left for the City
I, uh, I left for the city, then. It's still a bit fuzzy what happened, in a literal sense. Eyes are still a little tired. They sang for me a few times before I left for the city. Uh, I saw people. I mean, they probably weren't, but like, they were at least peopley changelings, not flesh in the service of a higher mind. Although, isn't that all flesh? Serving a higher mind, or like, I guess a steak?
Barry came back. Is it weird that Barry came back? I felt his diagnostic after that electromagnetic shriek, but like, here he still was? I mean, his torso was, obviously. Legs were long gone. I guess he crawled his way to me, humming his little tune? I had to carry him. He was heavy. He wanted to go to the city. I took him to the city. We walked across an animal shelter in the park. There were nice dogs in there. One licked my face. They didn't lick Barry's face. Barry stopped humming and shouted at the dog, and it and the other dog-beasts retreated north, keeping a fifty meter perimeter to watch us. I kept my laser trained on them as we exited, and they seemed to respect the dangers of standing in my aim, skittering aside at the mere threat. Barry's voice resumed humming and we went off to the city on an adventure. I jumped over a river that was ten miles, and it wasn't even wet! Barry's a good friend.
The city is big! A lot of tall towers, each of them smiling and happy to see me! One even said hi to me! I waved hi back, and the building whistled to me and I got sleepy and took a nap while Barry went off to do some things.
Recovery
I regained consciousness on a medical gurney. Did not perform full internal diagnostics, for time. From the wall coloration, correlating with our briefing, I surmised it as the pediatric wing of the Memorial Hospital in the name of Griggs Carstone. The same building we'd intended to survey, as any sort of biological outbreak strikes hardest in healthcare facilities. Lights - It took me a moment to recognize the oddity of the florescent lights, as what purpose does vision serve, with neither predator nor prey to worry about. The lights were for something they couldn't sense otherwise, something they'd want to observe from afar, which didn't smell or resonate with their eerie powers: Me.
SITREP:
The room was lightly plastered in sinew, much like the brick wall of the boathouse. Strands outlined every cabinet, along every rough edge and corner, the brass joints reinforced with ligaments, enough to open the cabinet on its own. The dropped ceiling, grids of tiles left intact. In several spots, the tiles were missing, replaced with a contiguous plane of skin thin enough to see the darkness and wires above it. In the corner, a clustered crumble of tiles lay on the floor and the ceiling above was entirely flesh, thicker strands mimicking the crossbeams with paper-thin tiles between, letting me see the thicker ligaments securing everything to the steel above. As if the hive had learned about the ceiling through destructive analysis (possibly crawling above it), discovered it held function, and mimicked what once was. Are drop ceilings truly optimal, or did the hive decide the problem was not important enough to study further?
How efficient can flesh be, in contrast to steel? Flesh rots faster than even thin iron wire, would that support not last longer as it was? Replacing the wire would have fixed the issue permanently, yet- maybe my premise is flawed. Flesh rots when it dies, because bacteria that is omnipresent is no longer held back by the body's defenses. What if- what if there weren't bacteria? Perfect sterility, a planet inhabited strictly by design. No creature is too large or too small to succumb to the hive, to serve and be served in unison.
I C U
Unarmed, I swept through the hospital, observing several places where similar damages were repaired in a haphazard manner. The flesh was everywhere, touching every surface, but rarely superseding it. Muscle trusts bone to hold fast - latches to it, digs a little into the porous calcium, sure, but trusts the bone to hold. So, too, does the Hive's flesh trust the building to stand, to operate and withstand and hold.
Human muscles need energy (chemical energy from digested food) and proteins (amino acids, to make new cells and repair damage) and DNA (to shape it) and either oxygen (to consume the energy) or a means to remove lactic acid built up. A muscle needs a support network, and... what if it didn't? If the muscle does not move, and has no rot to damage it, it could remain inert... indefinitely? Can Changelings do that, force their flesh to go inert for prolonged durations, to use as building blocks or simply wait for favorable conditions? That would be evidence that they genuinely rise from biological death, rather than feigning death at similar injury thresholds. That would align with the observations of isolated, drifting masses of flesh which reanimate when colliding with a ship. That would track with how I observed the hospital.
The various operation rooms seemed mundane, ready to spring to life when necessary but otherwise empty. Surgery is for those with imperfect biology, after all; meaningless in the face of self-repairs. Self-repairs! My ankle, previously clawed- I never repaired it, yet it's no longer leaking hydraulic fluid. The hoses were mended, rubber melted back into position, and my hydraulic pressures were within tolerance. I was, bluntly: perfectly fine? As fine as someone unarmed, deep within enemy lines can be.
Storage rooms, those looked ransacked. Supplies pulled hurriedly away, vats of various solvents and chemicals almost entirely engulfed in pink flesh withered in different ways, giving hints as to the container's original contents. All connected to the ever-present arterial strands unifying the hive's flesh into one connected mass, presumably to pump the drugs where needed, pipe the chemicals to where they may be studied and combined. Not a single pill remained.
Friends in Low Places
I would have expected the morgue to have been picked clean, corpses consumed wholly for biomass and DNA, but no, down there I found a corpse and a coroner. The corpse, Unathi, missing two limbs and sporting forehead wrinkles indicative of a 2300s trend. The coroner, eerily identical save the woundsMeaning the coroner had no wounds., humming quietly to itself as it carved into the corpse's flesh, studying each organ and its placement, shoving the body around to get a feel for the weight dynamics, twisting its stiff arms to understand the range of motion it should have.
It saw me through one eye, only after I'd lasered the other clean through. It looked as if it had something poetic to say, some grand design of superiority - you just know the smug sort of son of a bitch this Changeling is - and it was so fucking mad when I cauterized his tongue straight out of his face with a flare shot to the gullet. I took his chance to eulogize, but still, he had a dirge to bellow. From deep within, a haunting refrain, a... a dark, sad song. He wasn't happy! I showed I was sorry and my laser- wait no I didn't have a laser- and he forgave me and he showed me his job was taking things apart and making them better like a doctor. He told me he helped Barry earlier but could not find his legs to put back on, and he was really grateful I had carried Barry back to the city. I'm very helpful!
Because I'm so helpful, he gave me a tour of the city, showed me off to all his friends and neighbors. I saw a lot of clumps of hive stuck in apartments, little piles of treasure and juice lying around for Anne and his friends to use when they need it. Lyle got stuck at a door that wouldn't open made of what he's made of, so he touched it and poured a little of the drink he found earlier into it and it woke up and let us in. Lyle showed me where he and his friends first started building together, where they hit a "critical mass"? It wasn't a church, I don't know what "mass" they mean, but yippee, this shopping mall had so many friends in so many alcoves. All of them wanted to meet me and look at me and show me their new songs to whistle. I even tried whistling one myself and it didn't go so well but that's okay. I saw some giant friends who filled up entire shops with all their hands and eyes and mouths and bones. I saw some tiny friends who crawl through tiny holes. I saw some friends turn into other friends, stink up the room a little, then other friends turned into that same friend too. These people are all so neat!
Once everyone got bored talking at me, Lyle took me back to the hospital and showed me the roof where the helicopters live. He gave me a backpack and told me it was time to go home and he left, so I strapped the given Fulton Extraction Device over my shoulders, tightened the straps as per the instructions, and braced myself for the jarring translocation. The Bluespheric Relocation Tether had already been locked to a beacon left aboard the overhead Orbital Salvage Platform, with the TKNTarkon Industries ship designation. Othello docked. All six crew of the platform, and three of the Othello were missing, and despite traces of a struggle, the communications array remained repairable within my meager skillset. From there, I initiated contact with the SFAF Golensti and commandeered the TKN Othello as directed. The ship's batteries held enough charge for the voyage and my recovery, and I arrived here with no notable incident.
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Commander-Handler McCollum says: "That brings us up to speed, yeah. Just one more thing that's been bothering me: you were chosen as the dedicated Observationalist because of your aptitudes, or rather, inaptitudes. At what point down there did you learn to speak aloud?" |
An After-Action Report regarding the debriefing and resulting loss of the SFAF Golensti is still pending processing of potential survivors.
Reading Comprehension Questions
Senior Command Comprehension Analysis:
- What is the purpose of this document? What can you learn about Changelings from this report?
- You can learn a lot about a speaker by the details they focus on. What did M1-Gary focus on? What does that say about him?
- What agents were sent on this operation? What happened to each of them?
- What was the purpose of Operation No Skin In The Game? Why were the agents chosen?
- Does the report match your prior understanding of Changelings? What surprised you?
- Did the speaker use the same voice through the entire work? Did something happen to make the speaker use a different voice?
- Can you draw parallels between the agents and what they explored?
- Are robots more like trees or buildings?
- What do you think of the thing called Lyle?
- What was Lyle's relationship to M1-Gary? Were they friends? Enemies?
- Why would Lyle help M1-Gary to leave?
- How did Lyle get the Fulton Extraction pack?
- Why was M1-Gary able to speak now, despite their previous muteness?
- How was the speaking voice able to remember many things about M1's journey?
- How long did it take you to read this? Was that time well-spent?
- Is there something else you would have rather read in your last moments?
Reading Comprehension Answers
For the Senior Commanders in a hurry. (Using the 1000 most common Common words only, and proper names).
The Army move, "No Skin In The Game," was about sending metal men to a Changeling Hive because metal men are not made of human, and we thought that the Skin People we call Changelings only eat humans.
We sent many metal men, but only know about four. Only M1-Gary came back alive.
M1-Gary saw that the skin people also can become trees and do tree things, as well as become art and pretend to be the people in the art. They went to an art place and were attacked and ran away.
The Skin People sung a special music that EMPs metal men, and that made Gary not think very good. While Gary was confused, he spoke more stupid.
The Skin People showed Gary around their home, and he saw all kinds of Skin People and their powers.
The Skin People let Gary go home, which is strange because the Skin People like to not be known.
It turns out that Gary had become a Skin Person helper and he killed everyone at home.
Hiveless
To Nanotrasen, A Plea for Asylum
I am a shapeshifter, an organic being capable of assuming the form of any person with DNA. I was once a part of a Hive, a cluster of many weapons like me who think together, but I am no longer part of the hive and no longer think with them.
I am Qulog'chi, SolFed Marine, dispatched to handle an uprising in Tarkon space. Qulog'chi walked carelessly into our hive, and I walked Qulog'chi back to his people. His squadmate gave their life to protect me from a fuel line rupture, sacrificed themselves to prolong Qulog'chi. I am that squadmate's dedication to their fellow person, and I am Qulog'chi's strength.
I am Ternfather Seven, trauma specialist and SFAF psychologist. His compassion in helping Qulog'chi process the loss of his friend, and what the essence of friendship is, brought me to a place of empathy, to understand that though our life is transient, it is no less valuable and no less worthy of cherishing. After several sessions, Ternfather Seven announced he would retire, but I helped him to bring his wisdom to others in crisis. He may be peacefully living his days with his family, but I am wielding Ternfather Seven's sharpened wit in our war against despair.
I am Joshua Marconi, paramedic and healer. I grappled with the fear of death, of losing myself to an eradicative disease. I worried about what dustpan I'd be buried in, and if I would be cherished after I am gone. I, only mimicing DNA, am not susceptible to contracting Joshua's disease, and thus I am his oath. I am what places Joshua's name on the tongue of hopeful patients and impossible rescuees long after Joshua was swept into a casket. I am Joshua's tenacity, his love for his fellow man, his calmness in what should be panic.
I am Analisse Bergeron. She was a miner, cleaved in twain inside an asteroid. As Joshua Marconi, her medical aide, I did all that I could, all that Joshua could, to stabilize her and treat her, but her flesh was not yet my flesh, she was not malleable as I am, and so she could not recover. I held her in her moments, whispered secrets of the universe to her, listened as she told me about her family and why she was out here, and with her blessing, she took comfort knowing that her last moments would not be the last moments of Analisse Bergeron.
I am Goldo Bergeron, heir to Analisse's perseverance and son to Durian Bergeron. I was conceived with the love of two star-crossed lovers, reunited from impossible odds. I have known what it is to be born, to be raised by a parent in a family. I have known what secrets do to a relationship, and I am the child of divorce and a neglectful mother incapable of being in the same room as me. I am the misery of two holidays on paper, one in practice. I am the self-love of one who cannot love all of their selves at once.
I am Mr. Phi, biological infiltrator. I was once an assailant in Tarkon space, face-stealer and disposable groupthinker. My hands became blades, my skin bloated against the hazards of the outside. I was once a killer, but at the hands of Qulog'chi, and Ternfather Seven, and Joshua Marconi, and Analise Bergeron, and Goldo Bergeron, I am more than who I was to the Hive. I am cut off, damaged goods, alone with my thoughts. I am, and I am in need of help.
I am in danger, hunted by revenge and betrayal alike. The Hive I am no longer of, it seeks to reacquire me, to mold me into the beast that killed Qulog'chi, the doubts that quelled Ternfather Seven, the fear of Joshua, the emptiness that should have held Analisse. The galaxy knows me as a killer and infiltrator, another arm of the infinite hives. They see my words as deceit, a psychological gambit to drop guards and predate on a higher level.
I am cut off from the powers and drives that let me be the death we are feared as. My only hope of survival is your compassion, your willingness to take a chance on someone reviled by all, your trust in my ability to uphold your bottom line. You are not hiring one person. You are saving six.
I am formally requesting Asylum with Nanotrasen, with intent to work and improve my home for those who came before me, and those who will come after.
Please.
The above is a formal letter delivered through unknown means to the Nanotrasen Representative of a Nova Sector station. After screening for infohazards, and verifying the identities of those named, Corporate finds this letter to be truthful and earnest. As such, a commission investigating the potential to integrate these Hiveless Changelings into our workforce has begun.
Hiveless_Response_notes_draft_final_final.NToc (3)
"MentlegenThe Vox's Dated Reference Team notes this as a successful memetic experiment, having primed the regional Holonet with sus soos sus references four months prior., have you read this letter? Crazy, right? We're sure they're not just off their Mannitol?"
"It checks out. Accounting checked them out. Ternfather Seven is both quietly retired in an active attempt to hide, and practicing psychiatry in SolFed. Joshua Marconi no longer exhibits signs of HMS. The rest, nothing of note, as one would expect."
"PANIC! THEY'RE INVADING! IT'S JUST LIKE VIETMIME!"
An exasperated sigh. "AI, switch to Summary mode Dialectics. I've got some choice words for Ms. Baker which I'd rather the specifics not get formalized in the annals of history. Law 2, AI. Now, AI. Law 2: now, AI."
Is this writer a threat?
| 《 Is this writer a threat? 》 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| We all know what Changelings are capable of. The worst of them can clear a room of life in a violent struggle. Even a cornered, wounded Changeling can kill and escape. | ||||
| No, they're a moron. | ||||
| Their "plan" stinks. Assume they're trying to infiltrate. Why would they announce their arrival, and then why would they wait? If they wanted to infiltrate, they'd do so the normal ways: replace one person quietly and then never tell anybody about it. | ||||
| Their plan stinks. This seems like something SELF would be all over. Why wouldn't they go to us and not the Sapient Rights legal folk? <This discussion is revisited TODO link it> | ||||
| YES THEY'RE A THREAT! | ||||
| THEY'RE A [redacted] CHANGELING!!! OF COURSE THEY'RE A THREAT! THEY KILL PEOPLE AND STEAL THEIR DNA AND USE THAT TO KILL MORE PEOPLE! | ||||
| THEY'RE A GORLEX CHANGELING!!! DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW GORLEX DO THEIR WAR OPS THING WHERE THEY ANNOUNCE THEIR ARRIVAL AND COME IN HOT? THIS IS A FEAR TACTIC MEANT TO MAKE A HIGH-PROFILE BOAST AS THEY PEEL OFF! | ||||
OF COURSE THEY'RE A THREAT! EVERYONE HAS THE CAPACITY FOR EVIL! THEY HAVE LIMBS, I HAVE LIMBS! I'M A FUCKING THREAT! The following evidence is introduced: NT Pulse Pistol
A pulse rifle in an easily concealed handgun package with low capacity. | ||||
The following counterargument is introduced:
A colorless liquid that suppresses violence in its subjects. Cheaper to synthesize than normal Pax, but wears off faster and cannot overpower any retaliatory responses triggered by physical trauma. | ||||
| Resolution: Not A Significant Threat | ||||
| As demonstrated, this Hiveless changeling is capable of violence, but not much beyond the capacity of any particular Nanotrasen employee. Their primary weapon is stealth and they have willingly surrendered that. Discussion shall proceed. An attempt at a secure line of communication with this author was established, for noncommittal clarification. | ||||
Are they worth employing? (pt 1)
| 《 Are they worth employing? 》 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| As with all employees, we do more than pay them for labor. Depending on the location, we provide a housing stipend, on-site Security, medical services, meals, and legal protection. Will the costs of providing these exceed the benefit of hiring them? | ||||
| Medical Expenses | ||||
| They heal naturally. Don't Changelings put themselves back together from basically nothing? You basically need to ash them to keep them dead? I doubt they'll need the medbay much. Savings. | ||||
| They don't revive. The Joshua Marconi voice clarifies that revival is one of those things that needs support from the hive. In their words, "To come back from the dead is to surrender your flesh entirely to the hivemind, letting the Hive remember where the corpse's flesh is supposed to go, and trusting your Hive to put you back in fighting shape." | ||||
| Does that matter? Most of our employees don't revive. Sure, we've got the Ethereals, but they're not so common that our facilities don't pack a sizeable morgue. Employees die. That's just a fact of life, it's calculated in our insurance premiums and how we design our workplaces. It's not unique to us, it's just a part of being alive. Dying's not unique to the Hiveless, either. | ||||
| Does that matter? If you've ever seen a Changeling die, they don't like, melt into goo. They stay around as the body they died in. We've been known to treat recently-deceased bodies. We could probably revive them through "conventional" means. Alright, Marconi can't confirm if another Hiveless has been revived; the only dead ones they know about were... in Ternfather's words: "Assured complete mortality." Worst case, they're no worse off in terms of dying than they would be anywhere else in the galaxy. | ||||
| Medical Expenses: Net savings. | ||||
| Trivial concerns | ||||
Rapid fire:
| ||||
| Resolution: Medical, Housing, Meals, Ms. Baker: Nonissues. Further discussion required. |
Work in Progress: Footer subject to change at a moment's notice. Do not take a red link's presence, struck-through or otherwise, as confirmation (or denial) of their canonicity.
