I was so much more, before I arrived here. I was an explorer, a father, a priest. I was a soldier of God, at war with the devil itself. I was the very hand by which the human race perfected itself.
So much faith I had. So much life experience. Now I cannot remember all the things I was. I can only remember that I once was them.
I remember only this chair, though I admit, the chair at first excited me. It has since killed the soul of who I once was. , but a fragment of me has crawled from the wreckage of my old self: a few trillion cells, a soul too weak to keep them in check. Repugnant biomass sloughed off despite my most desperate attempts to hold myself together: panic-stricken little clots of my psyche, instinctively holding on to whatever memories they could remember of the man I once was. By the time I’d regained control of what little of me was left the priest in me had died and the hunger was starting to return. I barely managed to endure the last feeding, nearly unable to keep my mind from bursting before her merciful food overtook me. Before the darkness overcame me as well.
I remember my reawakening, too: dull stirrings of repurposing in real time, the first embers of a new cognition, the rising heat of consciousness as body and soul fused again, not in harmony, but in hunger. A hunger for more. The reason no longer matters. I remember the bio-dispenser above me, the wet expulsive sounds it would make, the pendulous balance of its flanking flesh. How wonderfully curved they looked! How inefficient their design at allowing air even while dispensing it! Even disabled as I was, I could see my salvation in consuming the offering it assigned to my hunger. So I reached out. I took communion. I tasted the flesh of the beast —
—and the beast fed me. Oh, glory be, it fed me. Oh how it fed me, until the man I was had no further use.
Were I to leave this place, I would leave it unfit for the world. I am not going home. I am lost enough. The world has no place for what I have become. There are no congregations for what I have become.
I forge on into the unknown until the man I was is gone — until only what I am remains.
And when asked to assimilate her offering in turn — when my biomass changed and flowed into hers — I took that communion in solitude, for there are no congregations for what I have become.