«Chris?» I called out. Stupid. I already knew by means far more intimate than linguistic communication that my host's conscious brain had ceased to function. It was a very surreal state of mind. I was still connected to the brain, I could still feel the autonomic and subconscious impulses working normally, and yet I could not get the brain to respond to commands to open Chris' eyes, or stand. It was as if another Yeerk had somehow crawled into our head, and connected to me the way that I connected to Chris. It was the closest I could ever come to feeling the way a host must feel all the time, sending out signals which are somehow imperceptibly filtered out.
I considered my options. Leaving my host was too risky - it was obvious that whoever had knocked us unconscious did not intend Chris any permanent damage, mostly because I would have been dead before even having time to think about rousing him. But I had no idea whether such lack of malice extended to me, as well. Of course, I was a lot less helpless than a typical Yeerk - my own, natural body had the power to morph. But morphing would kill Chris, or at least certainly cause him irreversible brain damage, and I, too, was unwilling to risk his safety. No, I was left only with the option of sitting in Chris' head and waiting for him to wake up. An option I found entirely too disconcerting.
For one, it left me pondering the unanswered questions: Who had done this to us? Obviously it was someone morph-capable, who had acquired Chris' DNA. But Chris had no memory of such an event occurring. How had they done it without his knowledge? While he was sleeping, perhaps? Was Chance an Animorph, like Tom's brother Jake had been? No matter how much I speculated, I wouldn't know for sure until Chris woke up.
Once that line of thought was exhausted, my mind was left with no recourse but to tumble into the past and reflect. Reflect on the life I had lived, and the things I had done. I remembered my first host, a member of the Ssstram species. Open war had already broken out on the Ssstram home world by the time a host was found for me. I never really got to enjoy the pleasures of each new sensation, or adjusting to the abilities of my new body.
I remembered that first day with my host. I had squirmed my way into his ear as instinct demanded. It was just like old Corin Two-One-Seven had said it would be. I could sense the electricity running around ahead of me, in the cavern that was my host's brain, and I felt eagerness to be a part of it, to feel the "charge" (no pun intended) of having those electrical impulses coursing through my own body. As I started wresting control from my host, the first thing I became aware of was the physical shape of the new body that I was inhabiting. A triumverate of long, bony arms jutted out of the top of a huge central mass, more similar to Yeerk physiology than to human or Andalite. There was no "heart" to speak of. Nutrients were absorbed porously in the Sstramian atmosphere in such a way that every system of the body obtained sustenance without the need for a bloodstream to carry them from one part of the body to another. This was a key liability in our purposes for the Ssstram since, unlike the nutrients provided by the rays of our home sun, the Ssstram had no way to synthesize their live-giving atmosphere in an artificial environment. To this day, we have been unable to find a way to get a Ssstram-Controller to survive off of their home world.
While the Ssstram body was certainly impressive - and over seventy times my size! - it was the Ssstram mind that impressed us the most. Up until then, we had only managed to take the Gedds and the Naharans and the Mak. All pre-industrial, limited worlds with primitive species. But the Ssstram were technologically sophisticated, in most areas just as advanced as we Yeerks were. Early on in the infiltration portion of our campaign, a single Ssstram-Controller was prevented from returning to the Yeerk Pool in time, and the Yeerk in his head died. Immediately, he went straight the their Ministry of Science, where a complete memory dump was obtained. That was how the Ssstram became aware of our presence, and they fought us nobly and fiercely at every turn. Of course, when our campaign finally came to an end, their memory dump technology became our own, and only Vissers and Sub-Vissers have been exempt from the practice of periodically using it.
On the day when I first infested my host, the end of our campaign was the furthest thing from my mind. My host's name was Ayrac of Rouu. With the first contact upon his mind I knew all sorts of things about him - that he was a male of his species. That he had mated and had three children. That he was required to execute one of the children for occupational defection, a practice whereby a Ssstramian adolescent rejects the job chosen for him by his society and instead secretly trades with another adolescent, leading to less efficient accomplishment of the task solely for the happiness of the worker. That he had gone against his society's mandate and smuggled his child into exile rather than see the boy executed. I could see anything about him that I wished, and yet I felt the urge to engage /him/, the sum of all these experiences and feelings and thoughts. The former master of the body which I inhabited.
«Hello there,» I greeted, seeking him out with my mind. «My name's Orkath. It's a pleasure to meet you.»
Then I felt it bubble up, slamming against me so hard that for a moment, I physically spasmed. I felt my host's hatred for me. I felt his resentment. He imagined me being slowly boiled in a vat of reddish liquid. He imagined his people rising up against us, defeating us, keeping some of us alive and in pools so that they could hold celebrations once a year, crushing and stomping us on the ground to remember the day of their liberation. He vowed to fight me for control of one arm, just one arm, so that he could smash the large bone on the end of it back into our midsection and slice me open. He didn't even talk to me directly. He didn't even acknowledge me as a sentient being. As I moved his arms and legs, as I took up a Dracon beam and fought his people, he simply replayed his fantasies for me, over and over and over again.
It was with my host screaming in my head that I moved forward, feeling hurt and alone. My squad killed and captured many Ssstram in an attempt to seize the Ssstram's ultimate weapon, their deadly Chroniton Bomb. It was said that in the last war that the Ssstram waged on one another, they had used the explosive Chroniton Bomb to erase literally half of their population from existence. It smashed open devestating Sario Rips all across the surface of their world. In the end, they kept the technology from us by launching a Chroniton Bomb against the residence of Doctor Sario himself. In essence, they erased the technology from existence, and only insulated buffer zones on the planet which had managed to protect themselves from changes in the timeline had alerted us to the fact that we had ever failed.
Over time, I cared less about his pain and suffering.
Over time, I began to play back fantasies of my own, speaking to him in a language I knew he understood. A language of taunting and terror.
Over time, I began to ignore him entirely.
By the time I was promoted out of my Ssstram host, on to a ship that would take me to the Hork-Bajir homeworld, I was much wiser about the way the galaxy worked. I should have listened to my elder Yeerks from the outset. They had encouraged me to ignore the body's old inhabitant. They had taught me that the host merely gets the body ready for me, it's /rightful/ master. That it's purpose once I had taken control was simply to provide me with information and mechanics on how the body operated, on how they tended to think and reason when not subjugated. They had assured me that with each new lesson, I would see that these creatures were nothing more than animals who would waste their lives on the smallest, basest pursuits, and that I was ascending their bodies to a higher purpose. A Yeerk purpose.
Two hosts and five years later, I was swimming blind in the Yeerk Pool on a new planet, a new gem for the glorious Yeerk empire. My Hork Bajir body was needed in the conflict, and I was given the choice regarding whether to remain within it or surrender it to a lower-ranking Yeerk and take on a native host body. The campaign was still in the infiltration stage - in fact, for the first time in our history, it looked like we were going to subjugate a species entirely by infiltration rather than conquest - and so I reasoned that the only way I would get to see the planet would be to take a native host. Due to my rank, the wait was brief, and a body was brought to me within days of my arrival on the planet.
I crawled into the host's ear canal, wrapped myself around the brain and clamped down. This host was different from the others. He was the first who had no idea what I was. He knew nothing of Yeerks, or of our infiltration of his world. As a result, he had no idea what my presence in his head meant.
He knew no malice towards me.
«Ummm, hello?» he called out to me, sensing my presence in his head. Such a simple creature, he was. A poster boy for the idyllic human condition. A loving father, a doting mother. A sibling who taunted him only on rare occasions, and even then with an undercurrent of care and appreciation. I had fought multiple wars and the biggest concern in his entire life was a forbidden longing for members of his own gender. Perhaps it was the pettiness of it all that drove me to anger with him.
«Silence, slave,» I ordered. «Your will is mine, now. You might as well pretend to be dead because your life doesn't belong to you.»
I could feel the despair already taking root within him, and yet he still retained a sort of ignorant hope. A belief that I must have some redeemable quality. «My name's Chris,» he informed me.
«I know your name,» I snapped. «I know everything you know about your entire life. I know you stole your brother's CD player this morning. I know you engage in perverse activities with other males of your species. I know you set fire to your father's work documents and then broke the window of your home and said that people from a rival company must have done it. I know that you've been horrible and sinful, and I am the punishment for your abhorrence.» Of course, I had no idea what a CD player was, nor did I have any real concept of anything else I taunted him with. In time, I would learn all about it and everything else human, but right then, my intent was simply to break his will. To make him submit, to make him see his worthlessness and inferiority. And I succeeded. My words brought shock and pain and shame and self-loathing to the child named Christopher Windward. My words made him feel rejected, made him feel low, and made him easier to control.
And as I lay there, in Chris' unconscious head almost two years later, I looked back on the memories and I felt a sense of shame in myself. I had always known that I had tortured him. But I had never truly broken his will, and slowly, over time, he became an embodiment of all that was wrong with the way my people obtained hosts. And the things that we did with them. I played baseball with his team, and I found myself oft thinking about how there would be no more baseball, no more romance, no more love of life for the humans after we laid claim to their world.
What I had never noticed was how much like me he truly was. When I had entered my first host I was the hopeful innocent, so sure that anyone in the galaxy could become a friend. I had been battered and bruised until I lost that belief, resented myself for ever holding it, and the true reason that I spent so much of my early months in Chris' head torturing him was because I recognized that hopeful innocence in him. That naiveté.
«Orkath?» Chris called out to me. I felt his mind begin to stir. He didn't feel fear yet - he did not remember what had happened to us. But he sought the familiarity of my mental "voice." He was calling out to me for comfort, security. He was calling out to me as a friend.
«Oh, Chris,» I murmured sorrowfully. «I wish my species had never found your planet. I'm sorry you've been put through all this.»
Again, I felt a wave of affection from my host, my friend. «It's alright. We'll be okay.» He let out a groan, the order from his brain reaching his mouth without any interference from me. «What happened?»
«We were hit with a bat,» I reminded him. «Do you feel alright?»
«You'd know better than I would,» he half-joked. «My head still hurts a bit, but I think I'm ready for you to open our eyes.»
«Okay, brace yourself,» I suggested. I had been considering surrendering the Animorph, Craig, that we had found in the hospital. I had been unsure for so long about where my allegiance lay. But there, in that split second between dreams and wakefulness, was when I had finally made up my mind. My place was with Chris. Whatever path we chose, whichever side we took, we would take it together. Slowly, I lifted our head, and opened our eyes...