Souvenir

Souvenir
  Elias Trenton squinted into the afternoon sun, one hand lifting instinctively to shield his eyes. The light stabbed down like a blade, harsh and unrelenting, after six months in a world where the sky was nothing but stone and shadows. His pupils hadn’t yet readjusted to the sun’s fierce touch—not after so long in the Hollow Earth.
  He stepped slowly down the ramp from the private charter jet, boots crunching against the tarmac of the isolated airstrip. Every movement felt deliberate, cautious, as though he were walking in a dream. Or waking from one.
  Six months.
  Half a year beneath the crust of the Earth, in a world so alien it might as well have been another planet—a subterranean Eden teeming with forgotten beasts and ancient secrets, wrapped in bioluminescent jungle and pressure-locked caverns where time seemed to slow, twist, or stop entirely.
  He'd gone in with a team of fourteen—geologists, biologists, xenobotanists, even a cultural anthropologist from Vienna. It had been groundbreaking. Historic, even. The expedition had catalogued new species, baffling natural phenomena, and in Elias’s case, fossil evidence that defied evolutionary timelines.
  He was a paleontologist by trade, trained to read the language of bones, strata, extinction. And the Hollow Earth—if that’s what it really was—had proven to be a place of impossible branches in the tree of life. Evolution hadn’t just taken a different path down there. It had built its own forest, its own gods.
  He'd been lucky to be assigned to the team.
  And now? Now the mission was over. They were home. Safe. Whole. Everything had been cataloged. The data backed up.
Papers were being written. Conferences scheduled. Careers would be made.
  Elias had turned over his official finds, shipped the approved samples, filed the forms. He had his memories.
  Well—his memories, and the souvenir.
  It was tucked in the bottom of his pack, wrapped in a padded field cloth and secured between his laundry and the last ration bars he hadn’t bothered to eat. No one had asked about it. It hadn't even tripped the scanner. Too dense, too old. Just a rock, the kind a tired man brings home after six months of subterranean exile.
  He didn’t know exactly what it was. From one angle, it resembled a coiled arthropod—segmented, symmetrical, almost elegant in its fossilized spiral. From another, it could’ve passed as a chunk of coprolite, the petrified remains of some ancient bowel movement.
  It might’ve been a curled trilobite. It might’ve been a mistake.
  But it fascinated him.
  He’d found it near the end, when supplies were running low and the team was already planning exfil routes. It was nestled in a crack in the cavern wall, half-submerged in a bed of something akin to crystalized moss. He hadn’t had time to study it properly. There’d been too many other priorities.
  So he’d kept it. Quietly. Harmlessly.
  If it turned out to be nothing, then so be it. At worst, it would make a decent conversation piece. A paperweight with a story. A reminder.
  But something about it wouldn’t let him go. The way the segments curved so perfectly. The way the stone felt warm sometimes, even when everything else was cold. The way he sometimes caught himself staring at it for far longer than he meant to.
  He hadn't told anyone about it.
  Not yet.
  Mostly, he was just glad to be home.
  Glad to be back in Chicago—back where the sky was open above him and the ground didn’t hum with the pressure of a hundred million tons of rock. After months crawling through ancient lava tubes, using them like arteries into the Hollow Earth, he was reacquainting himself with the simple pleasures of surface life: sunlight, breathable air, running water that didn’t taste like mineral soup.
  He was exhausted in a way sleep couldn’t fix. The kind of tired that lived in the bones. That settled in the marrow.
  But mostly?
  He wanted pizza.
  Not just any pizza. Not the cheap freezer kind, or the thin foldable stuff they served in New York like it was God’s own manna. No. Elias wanted a proper Chicago-style deep dish—thick, molten, obscene. Cheese that could drown a man. A crust with the weight of sin. Enough marinara to call in FEMA.
  It was the only thing he’d fantasized about more than a hot shower. And now, with his boots finally off and the smell of his old apartment sinking back into his lungs like a lullaby, he found himself halfway to dialing Giordano’s before his coat hit the floor. Normalcy. Comfort. Grease.
  A return to the familiar.
  Because everything else—everything down there—had been anything but.
  He didn’t let himself think too hard about the expedition. Not yet. The others would be publishing their findings, sitting on panel talks, cashing in the glow of academic fame. Let them. For now, Elias just wanted to eat until he hated himself, sleep until the nightmares got bored, and maybe—if there was time—take another look at the fossil.
  The souvenir.
  It still called to him. Not loudly. Not yet.
  But it was there.
  Waiting
  ***
  Waiting.
  How long had it been waiting?
  Time was not something it understood—not in the way other creatures did. Years, centuries, epochs… these were meaningless to it. It had no need for clocks, no use for calendars. It was not a creature of time.
  It was a creature of instinct. Of survival. Of need.
  It had slept in silence, curled within layers of ancient sediment like a secret too sacred to be unearthed. Coiled in its larval state, it had remained dormant—its long, segmented body drawn tight like a spring, its many limbs folded close, conserving every last drop of energy. Not dead. Never dead.
  Merely… waiting.
  Waiting for warmth.
  Waiting for life.
  Waiting for something large enough, strong enough, to bond with. To share with.
  For it was no parasite, not in the crude sense. It did not seek to kill or consume. It did not hollow out its hosts. No, it was something older. Stranger. A relic of a forgotten ecosystem where mutualism had reigned—where flesh and instinct could merge into something greater than the sum of their parts.
  It had been crafted by nature—or perhaps something beyond nature—to seek connection. A union of purpose.
  And now, after so very long, it felt… something.
  A pulse.
  A warmth.
  Movement above. Skin, soft and close. A rhythm. The familiar thrum of a bipedal heart.
  Host.
  The instinct stirred it. Not hunger, not aggression—but curiosity. Tentative, cautious. It flexed inward, just slightly, like a yawn at the edge of a dream.
  It was waking up.
  And soon, it would be seen.
  ***
  Elias sat back in his chair, sighing with the deep satisfaction that only a full belly could bring. The warmth in his gut, the soft hum of the heating system, and the gentle weight of gravity after months in unfamiliar environments—it all made him feel grounded again, tethered to something safe and familiar.
  There was something primal about it, he mused. Warmth. Fullness. Comfort. Maybe that was a universal constant for mammals. For all the wonders he'd seen in the Hollow Earth—bizarre, alien lifeforms, glowing fungi, predator-less caverns teeming with blind herbivores—nothing compared to the sheer, dumb bliss of being back in a real chair, in a real apartment, with Chicago wind howling harmlessly against his windows.
  Yawning, Elias stretched, arms cracking, bones adjusting with the ease of a man finally settling into his natural habitat. A nap, he decided, wouldn’t hurt. Just an hour or two. Let the carbs and gravity do their work.
  He scooped up his backpack on the way to his bedroom and casually dropped it by the bookshelf with a soft thud. The fossil—souvenir, he corrected himself, smirking—was still tucked inside, nestled safely in the padded inner pocket. He hadn’t touched it since customs. A strange little spiral thing. Maybe an arthropod. Maybe just a well-shaped chunk of ancient crap. Either way, it would be fun to poke at when he wasn’t half asleep.
  His room welcomed him like an old friend. It was the sanctum of a lifelong paleo nerd. Shelves were lined with books on extinct megafauna, deep-time evolutionary trees, fossilization processes, and obscure monographs on trilobites and Burgess Shale oddities. But nestled beside them—like sacred relics—were plastic dinosaur figures collected since childhood. A colorful stampede of Stegosaurs, Raptors, Ceratopsians, and of course, more than a few towering T. rex models stood like guardians of his younger self's dreams.
  On the wall above his bed, aged posters of classic monster movies—The Valley of Gwangi, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth—framed the room in pulp nostalgia. Stop-motion creatures, badly composited jungles, and roaring reptiles reminded him not just of science, but of the wonder that had led him there.
  And beside his bed, in a frame worn soft at the edges, his most treasured possession: a photo of him as a kid—eight, maybe nine—standing in front of Sue, the world’s most famous Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. He wore a Jurassic Park t-shirt three sizes too big and was smiling so hard it looked like his face might break.
  Elias smiled again, softer this time. That boy had gotten everything he’d ever wanted.
  Well—almost everything.
  With a deep breath, he collapsed onto the bed, not even bothering to pull the blanket over himself. The room dimmed. The wind whispered beyond the glass. He was asleep within minutes.
  And in the dark, nestled deep in canvas and cotton, the fossil lay still.
  Waiting.
  ***
  Waiting.
  It had waited so long.
  Emerging from torpor was not a sudden thing—not a flick of instinct, not a snap of change. It was slow. Careful. Evolutionary. The symbiote had spent an eternity curled in stillness, folded into itself in the deepest sleep nature allowed. Dormancy was safety. Dormancy was survival.
  But now… something had changed.
  Warmth. The soft, rhythmic thrum of a pulse. The subtle vibrations of a breath rising and falling in rest. It had found what it needed—a living, breathing host. And not just any host. One large enough. Complex enough. Capable enough.
  It stirred within the fossilized coil of its discarded larval shell, its true form slick and half-formed, protected only by the hollow bones it had grown inside. Instinct whispered that now was the time. To rise. To risk. To change.
  Because this would be the greatest leap it would ever take.
  To emerge was to become something else. Something more.
  To bond.
  But bonding came with risk.
  It would have to leave the safety of its shell. Crawl toward the heat. Toward the spine. It would need to make contact with the host's nervous system, interface with his mind. Not to control—but to connect. To find symbiosis.
  To live.
  But if the host resisted?
  If the host rejected it—tried to cut it out, cast it away—then it would die. Die in this strange, bright, alien world without ever seeing the sky. Without ever being.
  So it waited. Listening. Sensing. Hoping.
  It could feel his presence—Elias, though it didn’t know the name. The host was calm. Sleeping. A good sign. Dreams fluttered in the air like soft electrical currents. The taste of memory. Fossils. Creatures long dead. The host carried wonder in his bones.
  That, at least, was promising.
  Because it had not been born to be a parasite.
  It had been born to share.
  To become something more, together.
  And tonight… that chance had finally come.
  It emerged in silence.
  The fossil shell cracked from within—not with violence, but with the slow, deliberate fracture of something ancient leaving the safety of its past. From the depths of Elias’s backpack, tucked beside half-crumpled field notes and forgotten granola wrappers, something long and glistening uncoiled into the world.
  It was soft. Vulnerable. Blind.
  Fresh from its torpor, its new body had not yet hardened. Its shell, still slick with the damp of rebirth, offered no protection from harm. But it had waited long enough. Now was the moment. Now was the leap.
  Its antennae twitched, long and hair-thin, sweeping over fabric and air, tasting vibrations. It had no eyes—it would never have need of them. Eyes were for creatures who trusted sight. It trusted other things. Chemical trails. Heat differentials. Currents of thought. The invisible webs of electric intention that pulsed through the world.
  And one pulse in particular…
  His.
  Elias.
  The host had stirred something in it—something ancient and undeniable. The first psychic spark had reached it even in sleep, a distant star in the dark. It had no words for what Elias was, but its senses recognized something in him: strength, curiosity, warmth.
  Connection.
  Now, drawn like a magnet to that warmth, it moved.
  Its long, centipede-like form slithered from the pack, inch by inch, seeking the heat. Dozens of spindly legs whispered across the hardwood floor, its movement too smooth for sound. Its segmented body curled and uncurled with slow deliberation, moving in pulses of instinct and alien thought.
  It had never truly been awake like this. Not fully. Not outside the shell.
  And it was… overwhelming.
  The world was too large. Too bright. Even in the dark of the room, it felt exposed—like prey. But it moved forward, feeling the pull of the mind it had chosen. Elias’s thoughts pulsed through the room like distant thunder, soft but resonant. Even in sleep, the man dreamed in color, in wonder, in the bones of long-dead beasts.
  The symbiote could feel his nervous system humming beneath skin and bone like a beacon. The human body was miraculous, but crude. The spine was the gateway. The brainstem, the crown.
  Slowly, it ascended the bed.
  Each of its legs moved with reverence, barely pressing into the comforter, a whisper against the fabric. It reached him—this warm, breathing monument—and paused.
  Elias lay on his side, one arm curled beneath his pillow, the other across his chest, lost in the gentle rhythms of a dream. The faintest smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, as if the world behind his eyes was softer than the one he’d left behind. The creature moved with surgical grace.
  It crawled with the weightlessness of a feather up the slope of his back, each segment flexing, aligning, centering itself along the axis of his spine. There—just above the curve of his neck—was the place. The point of entry. The gateway to union. Its mandibles parted slightly.
  Drops of clear fluid welled at their tips—not venom in the conventional sense, but a chemical lullaby. An anesthetic meant not to harm, but to soothe. To spare him pain. It would not force the bond. That was not its nature. It had no hunger for dominance. No need for conquest.
  Only connection.
  But even now, at the very threshold of union, it hesitated.
  There was something more it needed—something sacred.
  Consent.
  Not a word. Not a voice. But something deeper. A yes written into the folds of thought and instinct. The symbiote was psychic, after all. Not in language, but in feeling. In emotion. In resonance.
  And so it reached out—not with limbs, but with thought.
  Its consciousness, delicate and formless, extended like tendrils of smoke. It slid between the cracks in Elias’s dream-state, moving carefully, respectfully. It would not tear through his mind. It would not take what was not offered. Instead, it drifted—gently curling into the warm, flickering landscape of his subconscious.
  A mindscape unfolded before it, strange and beautiful.
  There were fossils rising from red sands like buried gods. Dinosaurs roaming across the amber plains of memory. A classroom where a boy with too-big glasses clutched a plastic stegosaurus like it was a talisman.
  These were Elias’s dreams—childhood, wonder, science, story.
  The symbiote moved through them like a ghost in water, seeking a place where its thoughts could brush against his own.
Where instinct could meet instinct. Where invitation might bloom.
  There.
  A glimmer of curiosity.
  A flicker of loneliness.
  A longing for connection that ran deeper than even Elias knew. Not romantic, not even fully conscious—just the primal ache to belong to something. To touch and be touched by something greater than oneself. The creature knew that feeling. Had lived it for millennia.
  It reached out, gently, and pressed its presence to the edge of Elias’s dream-self.
  Not a word.
  Just an emotion. A question.
  May I?
  Elias blinked again.
  The dream around him wavered—fossils shimmered like mirages, sand fell upward, time slowed. He was standing now, though he didn’t remember rising, barefoot in the middle of a red earth desert with ancient bones jutting from the ground like the ribs of titans. The sky was a swirl of aurorae and ash, unreal and magnificent.
  He looked around, heart thudding slow and surreal in his chest.
  “May I what?” he asked aloud, his voice soft but oddly weightless, like it had been spoken under water or in a cathedral.
  Then came the response—not in sound, but in sensation, pressed gently into his soul like a breath of wind through tall grass.
  May I survive.
  Not a demand.
  Not a plea.
  A simple, aching truth.
  Elias’s brow furrowed. “Survive?” he echoed, turning in place as if expecting to see someone—or something—speaking.
  I was alone. I was cold. I waited. You found me.
  The voice was color and pressure, memory and hunger braided together.
  I do not know pain. I do not know names. But I know what it is to perish without touch. I do not wish to die. I only wish to be.
  The desert dreamscape shifted—bones cracked and rearranged into towering arches, like a cathedral of prehistory. Above him, the aurora flickered in rhythm with his pulse. A presence hovered at the edge of him—like a warm hand that hovered near, but did not press. Still waiting. Still asking.
  Elias, somewhere between dream and waking, felt a tear slide down his cheek. Not from fear. Not from confusion. But from a strange, unexpected empathy.
  Whatever this thing was… it wasn’t trying to invade him.
  It was asking to share him.
  To survive together.
  Elias stood still beneath the aurora-stained sky, the ancient desert stretching endlessly around him. The bones of long-dead giants arched like cathedral spires from the rust-colored earth, their silence as heavy as the question that lingered in his chest. “And if I say no?” he asked, his voice no longer weightless but steady, searching.
  Then I die.
  There was no accusation in the response. No anger. Just a quiet truth—resigned, soft as the hush before a final breath. Something in it twisted in Elias’s chest, a sorrow so ancient it didn’t even know how to plead. It simply accepted.
  A creature that had waited longer than recorded history.
  A being that didn’t understand time, or language, or names… but understood loss.
  And loneliness.
  Elias’s throat tightened.
  He was a man who had chased extinct things his whole life—fossils, bones, impressions in stone. He had touched the echoes of creatures that no longer walked the world, had looked at the silence of extinction and wondered what they must have felt, if they could feel. He had devoted his life to understanding what was lost.
  And here, now, something lost had reached back.
  His lips parted, and his breath caught in his throat. “…You’re not going to hurt me?”
  A long pause. No rush. No pressure.
  Then a warmth spread along his spine—gentle, radiant, like sunlight falling on skin untouched by warmth in a thousand years. It wasn’t just heat. It was comfort. Safety. Reassurance given without words.
  Not unless you want me to.
  The phrasing was unexpected. Literal. Honest. A strange echo of humor from something that didn’t understand laughter… but knew Elias did.
  It made him let out a small laugh—surprised, breathy, and a little broken. Not out of fear, but out of that strange, startled joy that comes from realizing you’re not alone.
  It didn’t understand humor.
  But it was trying.
  He closed his eyes and exhaled, slowly, his shoulders easing. The air around him tasted like memory—ancient soil and dream-stone, ozone and moss. He could feel it—the presence, the need, the hope. A creature that could’ve taken what it wanted… and instead had asked.
  Asked him.
  His fingers curled reflexively at his sides. In this dream—this moment suspended between waking and wonder—he felt the grit of fossil-laced sand beneath his feet, the wind that carried forgotten names, and something vast just outside the edge of his body, waiting.
  Waiting for him.
  And then, quietly, with the awe of someone standing at the edge of the impossible— “Yes,” Elias whispered. “You may.”
  The aurora above surged. The bones around him groaned like the opening of a great gate. The wind rose, hot and ancient and glad—and somewhere, deep in that hidden world between atoms and memory, the symbiote moved.
  Not to invade.
  But to join.
  To become.
  If the creature had eyes, it might have wept. If it had tear ducts, or the full emotional lexicon to understand what was blooming inside its primitive, ancient consciousness, it might have sobbed with joy.
  It didn’t understand why the answer mattered—only that it did.
  That consent was sacred.
  That the permission granted by Elias Trenton had transformed what might have been predation into something holier. A pact. A promise. A joining.
  It was not a parasite. It had never been. Its kind did not feed on hosts. They merged. They offered, and in return, they became. Union through understanding.
  Enlightenment through connection.
  It struck swiftly, but not cruelly. Its mandibles pierced the base of Elias’s neck with surgical precision, the venom it secreted a gentle balm—blocking pain, quieting nerves, softening the transition. Not a toxin, but a gift. A kindness.
  The creature’s long, segmented body flattened against his spine, hundreds of tiny, hooked legs anchoring it to skin and nerve. A ripple of warmth pulsed outward as it exhaled the last of its larval nature and began the irreversible metamorphosis into adulthood.
  It calmed as the connection deepened.
  Tendrils—delicate, luminous, impossibly fine—extended from the creature’s limbs and nestled into Elias’s nervous system, weaving into the lattice of his spinal cord like silk-threaded wire. It mapped him with the reverence of an artist studying a masterpiece. Not just anatomy. Identity. The very rhythm of his being.
  And with each point of contact, it gave.
  The chemicals it secreted were alchemical in nature—compounds evolved over eons not to dominate, but to empower. Elias’s muscles began to respond, fine-tuning themselves as receptors bloomed to their full potential. Microscopic tears healed. Cellular communication accelerated. His immune system surged in capability, defenses recalibrated like a shield brought back to its proper polish.
  Minor flaws in his genetic code were corrected with gentle edits. Latent allergies were neutralized. Cardiovascular efficiency improved. The little aches and quiet failings of a modern body, worn by stress and time, were soothed like wind smoothing stone.
  But that was only the beginning.
  Because the body was not the destination.
  The true journey—the craving—was of the mind.
  Its consciousness, still forming, still expanding, slipped further into Elias’s own. And what it found there was color and music and noise and memory. Emotion poured into its senses like rain through open windows. A kaleidoscope of meaning. The clatter of dinner plates. The warmth of sunlight through curtains. The ache of loneliness and the joy of a child meeting Sue the T-Rex for the first time.
  It saw Elias’s thoughts not as language, but as emotion made architecture. Towers of memory. Rivers of wonder. Wounds, too—deep scars hidden beneath wit and intellect.
  And it loved him for all of it.
  Not the romantic kind of love, not yet. But a reverent awe. A spiritual marveling. Here was a being of thought and feeling, so complex and vibrant, and he had invited it in.
  That made Elias beautiful beyond words.
  This was what it had been born to find.
  The host did not just survive. He welcomed.
  And in that welcome, the creature found its purpose.
  It settled into place, like a final puzzle piece clicking home.
  And for the first time in its long, dormant life… it began to dream back.
  Elias awoke to the soft blush of dawn filtering through the slats of his blinds, the golden light cutting gentle patterns across the floorboards. He blinked slowly, rubbing the fog of sleep from his eyes. The dreams had been strange—comforting, vivid, and oddly warm—but just dreams, he told himself. He stretched, limbs heavy with the luxury of real sleep, and pushed the blankets aside.
  Then he paused.
  The world around him looked... different.
  Clearer. Sharper. Brighter.
  Colors seemed to hum with a vibrancy that didn’t make sense. His bookshelf across the room was perfectly readable without squinting. The lettering on a textbook’s spine, once blurred to his myopic gaze, was now crystal clear.
  He blinked again and reached for his glasses.
  He slid them onto his nose out of habit, only to frown immediately. The lenses distorted everything—too sharp, almost warped. With a confused grunt, he took them off and tried again.
  Still perfect. Better than perfect.
  “I need to call my eye doctor…” he murmured to no one in particular, voice still rough from sleep. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, wincing slightly as his bare feet touched the cold floor, and stood.
  Then another pause.
  His backpack.
  It was open.
  He knelt down slowly, running his fingers along the zipper that he knew had been shut the night before. His brows furrowed.
Had he rummaged through it and forgotten? Still half-asleep?
  No.
  He peeled it open, his fingers delving into the pack.
  Stone fragments.
  Cool, crumbling pieces of what had once been the strange fossil he had dubbed his souvenir. Gone was the curious coiled object—now just cracked shards and ancient dust.
  “What the hell…” he muttered. “It must’ve broken. Hollow?” He sifted through the pieces again, frustration mounting. It had felt solid. Heavy. Undeniably real.
  Now it was just—gone.
  He let out a sigh. A deep, resigned one. He’d wanted to examine it properly, maybe get a second opinion before publishing. Now? Nothing but gravel.
  “Well, shit,” he said softly, zipping the bag closed.
  There were papers to write, sure, but something about the loss gnawed at him. Still, his morning routine awaited. He trudged into the bathroom, the warm tiles underfoot a small mercy. He flipped on the light and stared at his reflection with the vague detachment of someone still shaking off sleep.
  He smiled reflexively.
  And then his expression froze.
  He leaned in closer.
  His tooth—the left incisor, chipped when a rogue soccer ball had slammed into his face during a junior league match at fourteen—was whole.
  Perfect.
  He opened his mouth wider, examining it from every angle. No jagged edge. No visible repair. It looked as though it had never been damaged at all.
  He pressed his tongue against it. Solid. Smooth.
  “…Am I still dreaming?” he whispered to his reflection, voice barely above breath.
  And then—
  A feeling.
  Not a sound. Not a word.
  A presence.
  It brushed the edges of his thoughts like silk through fog—warm, gentle, present. It wasn’t a voice, not in the traditional sense. It was more like a whisper through the bones of his soul. A resonance more than a sentence.
  But the message was clear.
  I repaired your damage.
  Elias staggered back slightly, gripping the sink for balance. His heart thudded—not in fear, but in awe. In disbelief. He stared into the mirror, eyes wide, breath caught in his throat.
  “...What are you?” he asked aloud, uncertain if he was speaking to the air, his own mind, or whatever now dwelled within him. The presence did not press further.
  It simply was.
  Warm. Watchful. Waiting.
  He swallowed hard. For a long moment, he just stood there, staring into his own eyes.
  Eyes that saw with new clarity.
  Eyes that now belonged to someone more than just Elias Trenton.
  We are together now, it answered—warmth flooding the words not spoken but felt, like a tide washing gently through Elias’ mind. Host and joined.
  The sensation was more than thought. It was reverence, almost joy. A sacred kind of completion. Elias felt it settle into his chest like sunlight through fog—bright, calming, undeniable.
  “The dream… was… real?” he murmured aloud, though the truth was already blooming behind his ribs, dawning like the morning outside.
  No—this wasn’t a dream. The clarity in his vision, the smoothness of his tooth, the strange warmth still humming along his spine… none of it felt imaginary.
  With a slow, tentative motion, Elias turned toward the mirror and reached behind himself. His fingertips brushed against something foreign—rocky, segmented, and warm. It lay flush against his spine, following the contours of his back like living armor. Not painful. Not invasive. Just... there.
  His breath caught.
  Panic surged up his throat—a learned instinct, the response of a man whose body had always felt fragile, uncertain. The gnawing, anxious fear he had lived with most of his life surged forward, ready to bloom—
  And then—
  Stillness.
  A sudden, impossible calm settled over him like a weighted blanket on a storm-tossed mind. That anxious edge he’d known since childhood, that pulse-thudding, breath-shortening thing that he had medicated, therapized, and bargained with— It simply vanished.
  Like a switch had been flipped.
  Like it had never been there at all.
  He blinked, stunned.
  His fingers drifted back from the ridge of the creature to his sides, trembling, not with fear… but wonder.
  We have adjusted and optimized you, came the next gentle pulse of thought—calm and confident. Such is our nature.
  Elias stared at himself in the mirror. The man who looked back at him wasn’t someone else—but he wasn’t entirely the same, either. His eyes looked more alert. His skin had a healthy glow he hadn’t seen in years. There was a stillness in him now. A balance. For the first time in forever, the quiet in his mind didn’t feel like the prelude to panic.
  It just was.
  He swallowed, then laughed once—soft and incredulous.
  “I… I’m not afraid,” he said quietly. “I should be. But I’m not.”
  You accepted us, the voice answered, a quiet resonance like a heartbeat wrapped in thought. You welcomed us. And we will not betray that trust.
  Elias closed his eyes and let the warmth wash over him.
  He didn’t know what the future held. What this meant for his life, his body, his mind. But as he stood there—half-naked in his bathroom, the sunrise spilling through the window like golden fire—he realized something else.
  He wasn’t alone anymore.
  And maybe, just maybe… that was a miracle in and of itself.
  He slowly brushed his teeth, the rhythmic motion calming in its familiarity even as his world had changed overnight. The toothbrush moved methodically as Elias stared at his reflection, his thoughts turning inward—fast, focused, sharper than they'd ever been.
  “You’re some kind of symbiote, aren’t you?” he said aloud, though he wasn’t truly speaking to himself. “A life form. Not native to the Earth’s surface. But not hostile. Sapient. Purposeful.”
  There was no reply—not yet—but he felt the attention within him stir. A soft, attentive pulse. Listening. Present.
  His mind raced, not in the frantic scatter of anxiety, but in clear, deliberate channels. Every question opened new branches, every observation a thread leading to ten more. He was processing data at a pace that startled even him. Patterns clicked together with dazzling clarity. Hypotheses, deductions, projections—it was as if the gears of his mind had been oiled and supercharged, a kind of accelerated cognition he could only describe in one word:
  Overclocked.
  Was this the symbiote’s doing? Enhancing neural processing? Boosting executive function? Increasing his working memory and focus?
  He stared at himself in the mirror, toothbrush in hand, toothpaste foam gathering at the corners of his lips, and suddenly chuckled.
  “This is unreal,” he muttered. “Absolutely unreal.”
  But the scientist in him didn’t waver. He rinsed his mouth, dried his face, and continued to speak—not just to himself, but to the presence he now knew lived within him.
  “Your design is elegant,” he murmured. “Parasitic organisms take without giving. You’re different. Mutualistic. Beneficial. Selective. You waited. You asked for consent. You… chose me.”
  He paused, watching his own expression shift from analysis to awe.
  “You could revolutionize everything we know about biology, about xenogenesis, about cognition and evolutionary convergence. You're not a threat… You're a miracle.”
  We are a union, the voice returned gently, as if to remind him. Not a tool. Not a specimen. We learn together. Grow together.
  Elias nodded slowly. “Right. Of course. You’re not just something to study. You’re someone.”
  He caught his breath, suddenly struck by how natural this all felt. As if his body and mind had simply adapted to the presence of something extraordinary without protest. Like this was always supposed to happen.
  He turned, heading back toward his bedroom with a dozen new questions forming in his mind.
  There were papers to write.
  And now, he realized, he wasn’t writing them alone.
  He moved through his apartment in a kind of focused drift, body on autopilot while his mind spun with theories. The hunger that gnawed at his belly wasn’t quite normal—not the usual post-sleep emptiness, but something deeper, more insistent. His metabolism, he reasoned, must be working overtime now. It made sense. If the symbiote was repairing tissue, optimizing function, integrating itself into his biology, the caloric demands would spike accordingly.
  He poured himself a bowl of cereal, added a splash of milk, and began eating quickly, methodically. His body craved fuel. Nutrients. He could feel it at the cellular level—muscles absorbing, blood replenishing, bones knitting tighter. It wasn’t just food anymore. It was raw material being repurposed with terrifying efficiency.
  Halfway through his second bowl, spoon paused midair, another question bloomed in his mind. “Are you alone?” he asked softly. “Are there others like you?”
  The response came not in words at first, but in feeling—a slow, aching throb that echoed in his chest like the memory of a wound not his own. It radiated down through his spine, into his bones. A kind of grief without image, without time. Ancient.
Heavy.
  And then came the voice.
  We are the last.
  It was not spoken aloud, but the words etched themselves into his awareness with startling clarity.
The others were hunted. Slain. Scattered. We do not know by what or who… only that we may be the last born of our kind.
Elias set the spoon down. The air felt colder.
  He didn’t speak for a moment, just let the silence settle over him. He could feel the depth of the pain, not like something transmitted, but something shared. The way it coiled through his ribs, heavy and old and lonely—it was like hearing a requiem echoing across centuries.
  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, genuinely. “I didn’t know.”
  You could not. You are the first mind to receive us fully. To answer. To accept.
  He swallowed, unsure what to say next. For all his training, all his years as a scientist, Elias Trenton had never encountered anything like this. Not in a lab. Not in any theory. Not even in the wildest fiction.
  “You’re not just bonded to me now,” he said finally. “You’re alive through me.”
  We are alive together.
  The warmth of the words folded around him like a second skin.
  He sat back in his chair, heart aching slightly for something so alien and yet so… real. Not a threat. Not an invader.
  A survivor. A witness to extinction. And now, a partner.
  A part of Elias—perhaps the scientific part, perhaps just the curious child still alive beneath years of academia—wanted to know. Wanted to test the limits of this connection, catalog every change. Wanted to get an MRI, a PET scan, blood work, a neural map. He wanted to write the paper of the century. Publish in Nature, shake hands with Nobel laureates, rewrite textbooks.
  He wanted to tell someone. Everyone.
  But even as the thought formed, the darker edge of reality swept in to crush it. He didn’t need to imagine what the U.S. government might do—he’d read the declassified reports, heard the whispers. He’d studied history. Projects with names like MK-Ultra, Stargate, the quiet rumors behind Roswell and deep black sites in Nevada. He knew what they did to anything “abnormal.” Anything other.
  Alien life wasn’t met with celebration. It was met with scalpels and secrecy. He looked down at his cereal, now soggy in the bowl, and took a slow breath.
  “No,” he said aloud, softly but with conviction. “Not yet. We keep this between us… until we understand it.”
  The symbiote said nothing, but he felt its agreement. A ripple of understanding moved through him, gentle, like a nod in the dark.
  He stood, rinsed out his bowl, and leaned on the edge of the sink, staring at the morning sun creeping over the Chicago skyline. It felt like the first day of a different life.
  “Well,” he said after a moment, “if we’re going to be partners, I should probably call you something.”
  There was a pause—not hesitation, but contemplation. He felt it, like something turning inward. The entity—his entity—was thinking. Not just reacting.
  For the first time, it considered the concept of identity.
  Of a name.
  It reached—not for a sound, but for a symbol. Something shared. It skimmed his memories, surfed his thoughts, dipped into the meanings that lingered in the folds of Elias’s life.
  And then it answered.
  Souvenir will do.
  The words echoed gently through his mind, and Elias blinked. He laughed, soft and warm. “Souvenir,” he echoed aloud. “Yeah. That fits.”
  A relic of the impossible. A memento from a forgotten world. A gift from the Hollow Earth that had changed his life forever. And Souvenir was a pretty darn good name.
  -Souviner, a short story from Specials Short Stories: Visceral