The Craving: Wraith Ship #1

Scene 7: Madman

A tiny cut here. A sliver of skin, pared away with precision. So thin, transcendently translucent. Capillaries just visible under his remote vision. Rejoicing as the view slowly revolved around this flake of flesh he held with soft-tipped forceps.  Sier exulted in his holy enterprise.

Breath fouling the air, thin pale tongue licking chapped swollen lips. Sier placed the dissected flap on a transparent plate, smoothing out the wrinkles with an almost loving hand. The poor wretch he had taken this from had never appreciated the precision that was about to be applied to his remains. He was better dead. His mass now served a far greater purpose.

Sier giggled as he took a small dropper from its rack and applied two drops of the black substance within to the scrap of once-living meat. Watched it spread like an ebony spider web among the microscopic vessels and cell membranes. With a thought, he commanded his prime servant to come closer.

Shaper. At least that is what that horrible girl Vous called it. Crass, but fitting. For had not his greatest creation to date sliced away this so thin leaf at his command? A masterpiece of definitude, of infinite patience and design. His design. And yet itself merely a gateway to what was to come. A lone step on the upward staircase of his ascension to godhood.

He would become more. Always more. Spreading his presence throughout space, his eyes and ears, his mind and hands. Everywhere. Even now his sight was not in the misshapen head he had been cursed with at birth. He saw through another. He felt such a thrill at the disconnected omnipresence of his being. Loved the challenge of manipulating his instruments and performing his necrotic art while observing as if from a great distance. He felt his mind expanding even now.

"Fools. Idiots," he muttered as he watched himself program a nearby tissue scanner to check for anomalies. "Short-sighted imbeciles who cannot even begin to assimilate my techniques. Laughing and plotting behind my back. Well now, I have no back to plot behind! I see all."

There was a moment, the briefest of lapses, when he felt the press of the Nothing around him. Could almost hear the insane chittering, the muffled blasphemies from outside. The thing out there. The thing inside him. Wanting oneness. The life hunter that hated all. The hungry presence he aped.

A mere illusion, brought on by his expanding consciousness. Yes, that was it. The scans were negative. He removed the plate containing the tissue sample and placed over it the wafer of impregnated fusibond material he had constructed. A motion of his hand and the remote vision of Shaper crouched closer. A pulse of nerve commands and the sight magnified to show the interaction.

The cells were stimulated! Growing, reaching, clutching. Worming their way into the artificial substance, becoming one with them. Sinking down like roots into soil, like fungi into flesh. In turn, the altered fusibond reacted, laser etched circuits responding, drawing micro-currents from the machinery around it, animating the tissue that was now forever a part of it. Making it stronger, making it glorious.

A new form of life. Sier now knew godhood. He saw his future as clearly as if it had been etched into the stars themselves. This new existence, this fungous abnormality he had created: this was his future. Spreading through the cosmos, infecting and becoming. He would be no mere single body, but a host. A horde of existence, many yet one. Devouring all. Commanding all.

Vous could have been a part of that. Could have been a part of him. That pathetic toy that dared defy her creator. She was made of many, now one. She was to have been the prototype of his apotheosis. He would have made a goddess of her, a gorgeous fusion of all that was perfect in existence. But when told of her ultimate destiny, she had the sheer gall to say no. To him! The bitch. The black-hearted little scrap-heap of a harlot.