Chapter 33: The Archivist's Memory is Laced with Blood and Candy
I was still a little floaty-headed when I hauled myself upright in search of something vaguely food-shaped. Just in case I passed out mid-waddle, I clutched Crystal's hand — mostly for balance, partly because holding hands with your seven-foot-tall galactic horror-wife is good for morale.
It's always slightly disorienting walking beside her. She's tall in a way that feels... threatening. Graceful, yes, but very "might open her thorax and shoot acid if I say something dumb." I didn't mind it. And even if I did mind, I could override my own aesthetics with a sneeze and redesign myself into a golden god-thing with a thirty-pack and literal lightning for veins. But then she'd get competitive and turn herself into something that blotted out the sun, and really, who had the energy?
When we reached the cold biomass chamber — which honestly sounded more like a cryo-coffin than a food storage locker — Crystal perked up.
"I have a minor indulgence prepared for you, beloved Irvine," she said, and her voice purred like an engine made of silk and teeth. "Your devoted Crystal had a few of my bioforms transport several crates of the prey's 'pre-packaged foods' from the surface. You have commented before that while our biomass feeds you efficiently, it lacks... aesthetic pleasure."
That was putting it mildly. Eating biomass was like chewing a wet anxiety dream.
When the door opened, I stopped dead.
An entire corner of the room had become a fortress of crates. Towers of them, stacked at least fifteen meters high, like a bizarre cathedral to industrial packaging. Just looking at it made my stomach growl and my inner goblin scream.
I lunged forward like a man possessed and tore open the nearest crate with all the subtlety of a raccoon discovering a trash buffet. Inside were silver packets — vacuum-sealed, probably, and gleaming with promise. I didn't even pretend to read the label. I ripped one open, peered inside, and found little crunchy balls — maybe a centimeter wide, slightly glossy, suspiciously spherical.
I grabbed a handful and dumped them into my maw.
The first bite detonated like a fireworks display made entirely out of sugar, nostalgia, and industrial-grade dopamine.
"FUCK. ME."
My voice echoed in the cold room like a gospel.
Crunchy on the outside, soft in the middle. It was like someone took every dessert from Earth, turned it into cereal, and then injected it with heroin. I think I saw God. She was wearing a hairnet.
"I don't care what these are," I gasped, already cramming more into my mouth. "I would worship them in a cult. I would build shrines. I would sell my blood to fund research into their origin. This is it. This is the top of Maslow's hierarchy."
Behind me, Crystal was meditating — or more accurately, performing that weird stillness thing she does when she's trying not to break reality by feeling too hard. She wasn't paying much attention to my snacking, since food was just biomass to her. Texture? Flavour? Mere distractions. She processed calories like an efficient war engine.
So when I blurted out "fuck me," she almost impaled me with a tail-blade on reflex — interpreting the declaration as a mating request. Her tail snapped in the air like a scorpion about to ask consensually? but she managed to still herself just in time.
By the time I finished devouring half a crate, I collapsed backwards against the nearest stack and sighed like I'd just made peace with God. My stomach, now grotesquely swollen in a cartoonish arc, looked like I'd swallowed a small moon. My enhanced digestive system meant it would all break down in under an hour, but for now, I looked like an overfed mascot at a junk food convention.
The amount of sugar I'd just consumed could have murdered a medium-sized city.
Crystal slithered over and coiled around me like a particularly affectionate python. Her bioluminescent skin glowed a little warmer as she pressed close.
"You gluttonous mind-reader," I teased, arms around her cool, powerful body. "Come to steal my sugar high?"
"I required your low ambient body temperature for thermal regulation," she replied smoothly, nestling in. "Also, you are soft and smell of caramelized starch."
She ran a claw gently across my engorged belly and tilted her head. "I have never witnessed you consume so much. Even my freethinkers cannot metabolize that level of intake. It is as though you possess a bottomless biomass chamber."
"I contain multitudes," I wheezed. "Mostly candy multitudes."
She chuckled, then her fingers lingered on my stomach with a strange reverence. "It reminds me," she said thoughtfully, "of one of my more regrettable experiments."
I raised an eyebrow, thrilled. "Wait. You failed an experiment? Crystal the Unknowable? Mistress of Multiplexed Genetic Mastery?"
She didn't even pretend to be offended. Instead, her eyes glowed with nostalgia.
"It was nearly six centuries ago, during the brief war with the now-extinct species known as the Raghul. You might call them slavers. The Hive called them... wasted calories."
"Charming."
"They harvested only the young from their conquests," she continued. "Adults were culled. Only the spawn were kept — ritualistically, as an offering to their so-called deity."
"Why just the kids?"
She blinked. "From what I skimmed while digesting their surface memories: their warrior faith demanded the enslavement of progeny. It earned divine favor. Their 'god,' incidentally, was merely a psionic minor — edible, but chewy. I remember the flavor distinctly."
She licked her lips absently, then noticed my expression.
"Right. The story. So, during a failed assault, one of our nestships was boarded. Most of our eggs were either destroyed or still inside the drones when they were slaughtered. Only one egg remained."
Let me guess.
"They took it," I muttered.
"They did. They placed it among the captured spawn — unaware that severed bioforms are granted full mutation autonomy. Alone and cut off, that drone egg rewrote its own purpose: it evolved to incubate."
That word sent a shiver down my spine.
"Days passed. One of the Raghul-spawn got too curious. It approached the egg, which by then was slick with mutation-fluid and exuded a scent designed to provoke hunger responses. The child reached over—"
"Please don't say—"
"—and the drone hatched mid-motion, launching itself down the spawn's throat."
My brain flashed an image, something half-remembered. A scene from a movie? A nightmare? No — this felt too visceral, too real. Like memory carried over from some other life. I shoved it aside.
"The spawn passed out," Crystal said, her tone calm as a surgeon. "When it woke, it was intact — externally. But inside, the drone was restructuring."
"Jesus," I muttered.
She tilted her head. "He was not involved."
"Right. Sorry. Go on."
"As the drone grew, it numbed the host with analgesics. The child felt no pain. When its body began to fail, the drone took motor control, lured another spawn into a secluded corner... and transitioned."
I winced. "Chestburster?"
"Precisely. It leapt from the dying host and into the next. Iterative evolution followed."
She paused again — digging through ancient memories like someone shuffling corrupted data files.
"The process continued. The drone moved from child to child, growing, learning. Eventually, it grew large enough to attempt its true form: an apex predator. When next the Raghul came to feed the pens, the drone struck."
"The fucker survived?"
"More than that," she said with a quiet smile. "It evolved into a Raghul-killer. Custom-built. Perfectly tailored."
"Wait. But you said your entire fleet lost to the Raghul. How did one rogue drone manage to do what thousands couldn't?"
Crystal grinned — the kind of grin that came just before revelations or explosions.
"Ah, yes," she purred. "That… is where the story becomes interesting."