I was born in a scientist's chest cavity. Due to no fault of my own, I burst from his rib cage, ending his life prematurely.
My earliest memory: Running from tunnel to tunnel inside a vast research complex, trying to locate the female who birthed me.
Since everyone in my species lays eggs, everyone is a mother, so I technically came from a single parent home. This is not to garner any sympathy, I'm just stating a fact. We call ourselves Ss'sik'chtokiwij, not `alien' or `xenomorph.'
I didn't know my father very well. I just remember mom telling me to eat every part of him so I could grow up big and strong. Under her watchful eye, I devoured every part, including the bones and marrow.
My mother was beautiful.
I didn't say anything funny.
I'd tell you what I thought of your appearance, but I, unlike you, have manners.
By the way, it's a myth that we can't actually see. Three eyes hide beneath the hooded dome that serves as my brain casing: One in the center for heat vision, and two normal ones.
Our domes function like the one way mirrors they have on your `cop shows,' so Mother's aesthetic qualities were not lost on me: Sleek, muscular and graceful, with a glossy slime sheen unparalleled by any other. I admired her poise, her charm, her self confidence.
Her beetle-like face had a healthy obsidian color, and the way she distended her jaw and extending her fanged second mouth really made me smile.
We were close, but I didn't have family like you understand it. More like a pack. Still, we all cared deeply for one another.
Maybe not so much for the little things we impregnate with larvae.
I began life as a small banana shaped creature with tiny hands, fangs and a long whiplike tail.
After I ate my first human, head to foot, I didn't need to eat for three months. Instead, contented, I rode on mother's shoulders as she galloped majestically through your peoples' boxy metal buildings, taking in all the sights.
By the time I got bigger, I probably knew more about the labyrinthine layout of those buildings than the architects who designed them.
My first real kill: A German shepherd. I actually preferred it to the fatty meat of my host body, and it kept me full for another month.
Unfortunately, the dog often turned out to be sole guardian of something called a `baby', a small micro version of your adults. When I got hungry again, Mom encouraged me to eat that one as well.
When I observed it sleeping peacefully in its crib, I balked. The round cherubic face warmed me to the core, so much, in fact, that I became adverse to eating what she called `hoomans' after that, and would subsist on nothing but rats and bugs and laboratory animals for a long time.
I got larger, and as I grew, I became hungrier and hungrier. Mom insisted that I break down and eat another `hooman.'
Starving, I finally agreed, though I still refused to eat the baby.
Instead, I ate something called `Reverend.'
Ever since I finished my first host body and rode Mom around the facility, the peculiarities of hooman philosophy and related practices tantalized me with its sweet scent. I became enraptured by their music, asking mother to pause outside the researchers' doors so I could listen to their strange incomprehensible melodies, Sweet Little Sixteen, Hot Rod Lincoln, and sometimes The Mighty Wind. I didn't know what any of it meant, but they stirred my heart, filling me with a yearning for that new and different world, so unlike my own world of brutal killing.
As we crept through ventilation ducts, I would stop, listening with puzzlement as miners and warriors would gather together around a table, fold their hands together, and talk to the air. It made no sense to me at the time, and I'm not sure it makes sense now, but I turned the enigma over in my mind every night when I went to sleep, thrashing in my bed of slime, trying ineffectually to make sense of the information.
Sometimes I would sneak away from mother's watchful eyes, laying down in the ventilation shafts, listening to their songs and strange foreign words like God and Jesus.
That practice stopped when I fell asleep and someone muttered about there being a funny smell and acidic slime cutting holes in the metal vent. Panels came open, flashlights shone around. People muttered their upset.
Not wanting to get caught, nor eat them in self defense, I fled from there and did not return for quite some time.
`Reverend' frequently lead these little group meetings, a little wiry older gentleman with a stubbly face and an army uniform. `Military Chaplain', I believe you call them. The man clutched a black leatherbound book in his arms like a weapon, the meaning of which I did not understand, except for its constant presence during the meetings.
When the man spotted me one day, I watched with fascination as he crossed himself, muttering something about God and Jesus.
Intrigued by this gesture, I mirrored him with my dainty little claws, which caused him to visibly relax and tell the air, presumably where God and Jesus were, how thankful he felt about the miracle.
I too felt overjoyed. Finally, direct contact with a person who for so long had puzzled me with their confusing behavior. I thought for certain I'd get some answers for once.
Unfortunately, I was also hungry.
I asked the man to explain his book and his meetings, but he didn't understand a word I said. He only got pale again, backing away, pulling out a communication device to summon his friends.
I killed and ate him.
In between nibbling on his corpse, I would thumb, or rather claw, through his strange book, trying to decipher the symbols, but it was no use. I didn't know how to read (1).
Once finished eating, I gave it up, stowing the book inside an access panel for a future time when I could make better sense of it.
I became larger. My exoskeleton still had a whitish sheen to it, and I still resembled a toothy eel with no face, but my legs got longer, my arms stronger, my tail more powerful.
I joined my big sisters on hunts around the station, becoming more and more depressed and listless as they killed and ate the other people who had been attending the meetings. I had first been acquainted with the emotion of guilt when I killed `Reverend', but now the emotion came back to me double.
I refused to kill my own religious man, allowing the last one from their group to escape me, nibbling from my companions' kills instead.
Worst of all, there was the girl, the one that would make my whole life change.
The little black child lay sprawled awkwardly in a pool of her own blood, dark crimson staining a yellow princess sleeved sun dress as her life faded away.
Not my doing. My sisters had killed her.
A light fixture swung from one fastener, turning her dropped cartoon lunch box into a weird sundial, the puzzling letters `Miranda Falcameer' written in magic marker over the picture, shined brightly, faded into darkness, shined again. Someone had left a stereo on, playing Voices in the Sky by the Moody Bluies. Ordinarily the sounds of human music came to me as meaningless noise, but for some reason, at that moment, it added a touch of tragic beauty to it all.
As claret gushed from slashes in the child's honey brown legs, I couldn't help but feel that I had deprived the universe of something beautiful and unique that would never exist again.
I gazed at the delicate, mouse-like face, thinking it was far too adorable to eat.
For this reason, I knew this small creature couldn't see my eyes through my glistening white shell, but as the light drained from hers, they seemed to bore straight into mine. A ghost of a smile appeared at the corners of her lips as her trembling hand beckoned me closer.
I glanced behind myself, wondering if her dying brain had made a mistake. Surely this tender gesture hadn't been intended for me, her own murderer.
The girl gave me a slight nod, her smile becoming more definite, exposing a pair of pronounced upper incisors.
I let out a confused noise, crawling closer to her face.
As my claws traced the curve of her oversized ears and played with her pigtails, the child raised a finger, coated with her own blood, drawing a lowercase letter T across my head. "I forgive you."
She said nothing else.
Why did she do this? How could she just smile at me? And what was this strange symbol she made on my head? It didn't make any sense to me.
How could a human forgive me for killing her? Where did forgiveness like this come from? The questions would disturb my sleep for days afterwards.
"Are you going to eat that, or just play with it?" my sister asked.
"You take it," I answered. "I'm not hungry."
Remember the religious man I spared? Either the man had told someone, or the inhabitants of the station had gotten wise to us, for the day afterwards, a pair of men in army clothes appeared at our nest, arguing with a man in a white coat about killing `extraterrestrial lifeforms.'
When they found us, it seemed the scientist had lost the argument, for the soldiers opened fire on my sisters with their heavy machine guns, reducing their heads to exploded oozing husks smoking on the metal grating that served as the floor.
Terrified, I immediately crossed myself.
To this day, I don't know why I did it. It's not like I understood their strange religion or what the symbol actually meant.
I guess my thought, as I cut a vertical line in the air across my chest, then the horizontal, was that it served as an appropriate gesture to be made by someone about to die.
Suddenly, the white coat began raved like a madman about me possessing humanlike intelligence, urging them not to kill me. I heard the words `study' and `experiment' being said quite frequently, but I didn't understand, I just knew it meant they'd decided not to shoot me.
Seconds later, a transparent container slammed down over my head and body, imprisoning me.
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There are footnotes from the editing on the bottom of each page, including this one. When you get to the [0000] symbol, you'll probably want to click Next Chapter unless you've already read it once.
(1) To read an alternate scenario/spoiler, go to chapter "128 Dream Neighborhood" and scroll to the bottom of the page (Item I). I'd post the item here, but I don't want to ruin the surprises.