My name is Tom. The Yeerk in my head is named Tem.
It happened on a Friday. It started with a totally normal morning. Although "normal" meant something different to me than it used to. It meant something different to me than it did to my family.
I saw my dad first. I woke up and went downstairs just in time to see him heading out the door. We greeted each other and I casually wished him a good day at work. My dad's a doctor. A pediatrician. His usual day involved giving little kids check-ups, examining their heads. Examining their ears.
How would he react if he knew my right eardrum had been damaged by the alien that burrowed a path into my head? I had no idea how I would explain that away during my next physical.
I went to the kitchen and saw my mom next. As I made myself breakfast, I asked her if I could borrow her car tonight. I knew she'd be fine with it, but even if she said no, I could just use my bike or something. All that mattered was being allowed to leave the house. When my mom asked where I was going, I told her that club I joined, The Sharing, was having another meeting.
This was a flat-out lie. I actually needed to sneak away to the Yeerks' hidden spaceship so Tem could have his feeding. Mom said yes without having any idea it was a life or death situation.
My little brother Jake was the last one awake, as usual. He started breakfast just as I finished. I only said a quick "good morning" to him before I headed back upstairs. Jake's gaze lingered on me for a bit. He didn't say anything, but I felt like he wanted to tell me something - unless I was just being paranoid.
Did Jake ever get paranoid? Had I ever, unknowingly, dropped some sort of clue that I wasn't human anymore? Yeah, technically, I was still human. But "I" was only half of the whole "me".
This was basically my life. I acted same as always on the outside, but inside there was this world-changing secret always on my mind - Literally, on my brain. I could physically feel the tiny bit of extra pressure inside my skull. It didn't hurt, but it was there - And the people around me were completely unaware. It felt like I was hiding a placard under my shirt and daring people to notice.
I felt bad lying to my parents. And I felt bad for treating my best friend like a dirty secret. But at the same time, deep down, I kinda loved it. Our group were the only ones on Earth who knew about aliens and I loved how special that made me. Tem was fine with staying hidden. Although he felt a little awkward getting to know my family so well when they didn't know him. But he understood my feelings in a way no one else could. He understood why I couldn't tell them.
Except, the thing was, I could tell them. The other Yeerk-hosts gave me permission the very first day. I could let my family in on the secret whenever I wanted . . . But come on. How could I possibly say, "There's a gastropod from outer space living in my head and we can hear each other's thoughts. No, I'm not crazy. Look, I'm pulling Tem out of my ear to prove it. See? Mom, please stop screaming."
How could I tell my family that, when I haven't even worked up the guts to tell them I quit the basketball team yet?!
(Thinking of it, I really do need to tell them about the basketball thing . . .)
.
It was a normal day at school. Which is to say it was dull and, basically, awful.
I trudged along through my classes. In Math, I pretended to trudge along instead of having a mathematical genius in my brain. In History, Tem learned more about humanity and was slightly horrified. In English, I tried to keep my head down but Mr. Tidwell-plus-Illim were unforgivingly hard on me. Well, he was hard on everyone, but still.
I used to be a pretty popular guy. I'm not saying I was King of the School or anything, but being on a sports team got me a decent amount of attention. Now there was a distance between me and everyone else. The same distance between me and my family.
I walked down the halls and watched the crowds around me. All of them got so worked up over games and cliques and parties and looking cool. Not that long ago, all that stuff was important to me too. But now it just didn't matter anymore. Maybe that meant I wasn't a kid anymore . . . Or maybe I had turned into a space alien after all.
Most people knew me as the Basketball Guy. The team hadn't played their next game yet, so I don't think everyone realized I wasn't on it anymore. But the word was gradually spreading.
"Hey, Tom. Is it true you got kicked off the basketball team?" asked some girl who walked up to my locker who literally never spoke to me before.
"I wasn't kicked off. I quit," I said casually.
"Why would you do that?"
I didn't tell her it was because I lost interest, and instead said, "Because I wanted to focus on my grades more, and I wanted to do more volunteer work with The Sharing. I just didn't have time for basketball practice anymore."
She left without another word. That was actually one of the more polite reactions I've gotten.
I was getting sick of having to explain why I quit over and over. I had naively thought giving some excuses to the coach would be a one-and-done deal.
As for my former teammates - Even when I was on the team, we weren't super close. I mean, we liked each other, sure. We always cheered each other on. Hugged after a good game. But we were just teammates, you know? Then when I left with no warning, I became Benedict Arnold to them. They stopped talking to me completely. Whenever we passed in the halls they glared at me like I ran over their dog.
It bothered me a little. But at the same time, it was so ridiculous and stupid that I actually found it funny. Meanwhile Tem felt a little bad for me, but mostly he was indifferent to all the teenage drama. I mean, Tem and I stared down flesh-eating Taxxons. We survived an attack from an inter-dimensional madman and a plant monster. This was just high school stuff - Who cares?
Popularity didn't matter to me anymore. Between the five human hosts, the five Yeerks bonded to them, and the dozens of Yeerks in the pool, not to mention Melissa, I wasn't exactly starving for someone to talk to.
.
I went to the pool in the evening. Tem just barely started feeling hunger pains about half an hour before we arrived.
To get to the Yeerk pool I drove to the national park, got out of the car, walked through the woods, found the clearing, pressed my palm on the hidden hand print scanner, and walked down the steps into the partially-buried-underground spaceship. I was making this trip almost every day. As much as I loved our headquarters, I hated how out-of-the-way it was.
The pool itself was a vat about four feet tall and eight feet wide. It held a lukewarm liquid and exactly 86 Yeerks, not counting the 5 with hosts. I leaned over and Tem slipped out of my ear. He dropped into the pool with a "plop", temporarily bringing the count up to 87.
I couldn't hear Tem's thoughts anymore. I couldn't physically feel him either. I was alone in my head again.
That was supposed to be "normal" for a human. But after living in symbiosis all these weeks, it felt like the opposite. I had gotten so used to Tem's presence that being separated felt like there was empty space in my head, both physically and mentally. Not that I would ever stop Tem from separating.
Yeerks can't get the energy they need when they're bonded to a host. Every time Tem left the pool, it started a three-day countdown to his death. (The exact limit is closer to 74 hours, but still coincidentally close to Earth's rotation.) Before the timer hit zero, Tem had to separate from me and return here to absorb the nutrients he needed, especially Kandrona rays. It took about half an hour to become fully charged again.
I read somewhere that humans can survive up to three days without water. I don't know how precise that is. But imagine that the only drinkable water on the entire planet was in one ship buried in the woods that's a good 20 minutes away from your house, and no, you can't take any home with you. The host-less Yeerks living in the pool didn't have eyes, ears, hands, legs, or very much to do, but at least they never had to worry about starving.
We've been trying to build a second Kandrona generator. Scavenging the right parts was an agonizingly slow process.
Eva-plus-Edriss was there in the ship with us. She wasn't there for a feeding, just routine computer work. There wasn't anything she needed my help with, so I just did homework while waiting for Tem.
Eventually, it was time to signal him. Then I carefully lowered my head until my right ear was submerged in the red-brown liquid. I always had the irrational fear that the wrong Yeerk would sneak in, but I trusted the system.
Something wet and fleshy touched my ear. After all these weeks of doing it, this first second still felt gross. Then there was the familiar and almost comfortable pressure moving through my ear canal. Inside my skull, the Yeerk body stretched impossibly thin and sank into the crevices of my brain. After a few moments, I sensed his thoughts and emotions and immediately confirmed it was Tem after all. We were one again.
Whenever Tem swam in the pool, he found a couple other Yeerks and communicated by touching palp-to-palp. As I dried my head with a towel, I searched through his recent memories and caught up on the gossip from the last three days.
Carger was their usual jerk self. They were all like "why can't you find more hosts by now? You should be trying harder". Fermat - who, by strange coincidence, had the same name as a human mathematician, and thus got interested in proving Fermat's Last Theorem - sadly, hadn't made any progress. They were thinking about giving up and searching for a new hobby. (Frankly I was amazed Fermat got as far as they did, considering they did all the math work in their mind instead of looking at paper. But maybe that's ableist of me.)
In short, that Friday was just a normal day. More than that, it was quiet. It'd been over a week since aliens passed through our system. Eva and I were just about to leave the ship together. It was starting to get dark, and while we all knew the path intimately, it was nice not to be alone walking through the woods at night.
That's when it happened.
The computer made a beeping alert. We went back to the main monitor, Eva sitting down at the keyboard while I looked over her shoulder. "A zero-space corridor is about to open up," Eva announced.
Zero-space, or anti-space, is another dimension where faster-than-light travel is possible. It's what allows people to travel across the universe without taking hundreds of years. A corridor appearing meant an alien ship was about to re-enter normal space.
Eva turned our ship's scanners to full sensitivity. I went to another terminal to help. Working side by side, we took the information the computer gathered and cross-referenced it with our databases.
The corridor was forming slowly. Then suddenly, it opened and closed all at once to spit out a single ship extremely close to Earth. Not within the atmosphere, but close enough that we were obviously their destination. The energy signature was faint and vague, but the physical shape immediately found a match in our files.
My body froze. Tem's fear was like a splash of water, and I soaked it up like a paper towel.
I looked over to Eva. Could we be wrong? But she looked over the numbers, and then turned to me. Her expression was the same as mine.
"That ship . . . It's Andalite."
The Andalites. A warrior race obsessed with driving the Yeerks to extinction. And they've been known to kill any Yeerk-sympathizer who gets in their way.
What I had thought was a normal day was actually Judgment Day. This was the day the Yeerks had been dreading ever since they arrived on Earth.
Their executioners had found them.
Tem was scared, but I was angry. These Andalites were so obsessed with their genocide plan that they searched across eighty-two light years instead of just, you know, stopping.
We all quickly got back to work. We had to act fast, because they were moving fast. Their ship fell towards Earth like a meteor. We scanned everything we could learn about the ship. They weren't cloaked - they weren't trying to hide.
"Our cloak is fine, right?" I asked Eva. "There's no chance they're scanning us?"
"They can't track us unless we send them a message," Eva said. "I learned my lesson from the Taxxons."
We had to assume they already guessed our refugee ship was somewhere on Earth. But as long as they didn't know the pool's exact location, it wasn't the worst case scenario yet.
The Andalite ship was heading right for this city. But that could still be a coincidence. Chapman once explained that the Time Matrix, hidden somewhere in our town, drew in zero-space corridors like a magnet. Traveling aliens had no idea why, they just noticed zero-space traffic to this particular city on this particular planet was quick and easy and they kept showing up. I loved meeting friendly aliens, but we kept finding jerks too. And now Andalites. I wished Chapman would tell us where the Time Matrix was so we could throw it into the sun or something.
[It'd probably blow up the sun,] Tem reminded me.
[Because nothing can ever be easy!] I thought.
I used the computer to plot their trajectory course. Tem calculated and narrowed down the numbers until we knew exactly where they'd land. "They're heading . . . for that abandoned construction site next to the mall," I announced. I winced. "They're gonna touch down in less than three minutes!"
It actually wasn't a bad spot. Much better than a more populated area. But if they weren't cloaked, it wouldn't be long before the human authorities showed up, and then it'd quickly become a disaster - and we had almost no time to stop it.
"I'm calling the others." Eva grabbed the cell phone we kept in the ship. (We once tried finding a way for the ship's communication system to hack into the human telephone network, but it was technically illegal, and Alison pointed out it'd be simpler to just buy another phone.)
"What's the plan?" I asked.
"Same as any other hostile encounter," she said firmly as the phone on her ear rang. "We negotiate. Convince them to leave. And if that doesn't work, we stand our ground."
But if we couldn't call them with the communication array, the only other way to confront them was in person.
As Eva relayed the situation to Chapman, I went to the weapons cabinet to get a Dracon rifle. Tem used my mouth to say, "Do you happen to have some sort of special, anti-Andalite weapon I don't know about?"
"Afraid not," Eva answered.
"Not even a little one?" I added.
"Sorry."
I was frustrated, feeling hot-headed, and bracing myself for a big fight. Tem was a lot more nervous than usual, trying not to panic. Between the two of us, we were doing a really bad job at keeping my body calm. [It's only one ship,] I reminded us. [We've repelled worse attacks than this.] I tried telling ourselves that this battle would be no different.
But Tem knew I was lying to myself. This was different. The hostile aliens were fought before were pirates and scavengers. Just greedy trouble-makers looking out for themselves. Even the cosmic-scale Quantum Kindred was ultimately just a nut who only cared about himself. But the Andalites weren't like that.
The Andalites were coming for us.
