Fall 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 4

When the boy with a cybernetic implant in his temple developed a massive hulk of malignant cells in his stomach, I finally gave up on human bodies.

After half a century of exploring hosts, I, naively optimistic about human ingenuity, believed just as the enthusiastic scientists in their little papers and press conferences did, that cybernetics could be the solution to bodily dysfunction that we’d all been awaiting, me and humans both. Cybernetics could correct fluctuations in the body and brain; it could regulate and control the bodily functions that would inevitably break down with time, age, and effort.

Until the boy developed his death knell tumor, his body had been a near-perfect host. Athletic, but not so much that he was prone to injury. Young, but with a fully developed frontal cortex. Occasional headaches from overwork at the laboratory on Balthen Station, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a swallow of water and an anti-inflammatory.

But then, inevitably, just past his thirty-fifth birthday, his guts began to twist in agonizing new formations – I knew long before he did that he would die. I left his body before I could die with him.

My last host had been optimized for perfect health, too. A former soldier with cropped hair and tattoos of far-away galaxies swirling up her arms. She was still alive, somewhere, as far as I knew, with piercing pain in the back of her skull when she thought too hard or moved too much. I left when her vision started swirling, purple spots in the corners of her eyes that wouldn’t disappear no matter how much she scrubbed at them, because the colors came from her brain and not her eyeballs.

No matter how expert I believed myself to be in choosing a host body, I still wound up wrong and resentfully searching for another form. At first, I wondered if my presence in the back recesses of their brains, inaccessible to them in their limited mortal forms, caused a quickening of body decay, but I put this theory to rest early in my experimentation. Now I knew that their bodies would fail just as easily if I had never come to their tiny, insignificant little planet.

Before the soldier, I had a stint of Earth-bound bodies, working from a conjecture that humans who chose to traverse space wear their bodies down more quickly than the sedentary citizens of the planet who had no desire to journey across the galaxies and find creatures like me.

Wrong, of course. A man for whom a viral infection spelled constant hacking and chest stuttering. A woman who developed a fear of transportation so intense that she locked herself in her house and breathed into her toilet for weeks on end. A teenager whose facial blemishes were so painful that they tried to scratch them off with sharpened nails.

I tried to inhabit children; their bodies were malleable and could often bounce back from injury in days. I flitted from child to child for a short time, never lingering in case my presence altered their brain chemistry too significantly at such an influential age. I had just started to get comfortable in my routine when a speeding vehicle struck my tiny host, and I escaped the clutches of their desperate, howling mind, barely in time to jump into the mind of an adult on the scene. The child died in agony within the day.

Before the children, I had tried athletes’ bodies on for size, but quickly realized that even the bodies with the greatest physiques were susceptible to grievous injury. A woman tore a ligament, and her leg creaked with effort for even the slightest movements; a man received several blows to the head and his brain fractured into a soupy mess.

My experiments had been precipitated by my prolonged recovery from the mind of a barely-adult girl whose sadness had been so overwhelming that I felt stuck in her mind with no chance of departure – even though I am physically able to leave and enter bodies as I wish. The girl couldn’t escape herself, though, and I didn’t want to leave her alone entirely inside her mausoleum of a mind. We struggled together with the uncertainty and fear until neither of us could take it any longer. I jumped into the body of a swimmer who would lose his hearing, and she died in the snow in midwinter after inhaling something toxic.

She was not the first of my hosts that I revered with care, but her mind haunted me. I never wanted to stay that long in a single human form again, where her pain and my pain became intermingled as one.

The girl’s body was my first earthbound experience; before her, I had lived at Balthen Station for many years, inhabiting scientists and researchers, soldiers and starship captains. A botanist’s throat prickled with acid; a chemical engineer’s genitals burned every time she had a sexual encounter, or even just used the restroom.

In my closest call, a pilot’s heart gave out on him alone in a shuttle, and I had no recourse for escape. I wavered, trapped in an unconscious body that I knew would fail before the day ended, my only option to become incorporeal again, a flickering light in a galaxy of flickering lights. No guarantee that I could reinhabit a human host. I still did not know how I possessed a human body in the first place – but I did not want to give up being alive. I did not want to simply exist with no conception of future and past, of an interconnected web of being.

I have come across other lifeforms in this galaxy; humans may have bodies that fail, but they have minds that experience life in a way that non-biological entities cannot begin to dream about. I do not recall having dreams at all before I encountered human bodies.

I escaped the shuttlecraft before the man died; a passing ship rescued me without realizing I was ever there. I slid into a new body, my first encounter with a cybernetic arm. It was still the early days of cybernetics, with kinks to work out – I was confident that human intelligence would work out the correct system someday, even as this woman’s arm began to malfunction with a virus that infected her bloodstream.

Maybe someday, cybernetics will save humans from the pain their bodies endure. Today, with my host body slowly disintegrating from the influence of his cancerous cells, I am unsure where to go next, if there is even a host body in existence that would be suitable for me, where I would feel no more of the human agonies of their day-to-day existence.

I caught a shuttle ride back to Earth in the body of a researcher whose lower half screamed two months out from giving birth. I intended to visit the body I still, half a human century after I had first discovered biological life, remembered best.

Second Lieutenant Mackenzie Liston – who I understood had been promoted to an honorary captaincy after decades of service, but who to me will always be Second Lieutenant – had once been alive for twenty-eight rotations of the sun, with a quick mind, a strong heart, and a call deep in his bones toward the adventure of the stars.

An adventure that led him to a chance encounter with me.

Mac, whose body had now circled through seventy-eight rotations of the sun, recognized me for myself when I sat across from him on his workbench, inside a barn whose outside peeled red paint and whose inside smelled of manure. I had traveled through the deep swells of the yellow countryside. My vessel for this journey was the body of a traveling vagrant with a mind slippery and easy to prod in the right direction.

“It’s you,” Mac acknowledged, grey eyes flickering up toward my human host, but we both knew to whom he addressed his greeting. He continued to rub sandpaper across the leg of a small wooden table, his beard and moustache grey-white like his hair. It had been many years since Mac and I shared a body, and we had never before locked eyes, me as a separate entity from him. His eyes were grey, deep, and old.

“Hello, Mac,” I used the woman’s mouth to clumsily form my words. I did not usually take control in such an obvious way. I did not usually have humans who I wished to converse with as myself. “It has been a very long time. I have missed you.”

“Have you, now?” Mac chuckled, setting down his sandpaper to turn his full attention to me. “You haven’t found new and improved deep space pilots out there in the grand old universe? Surely, they’ve improved leaps and bounds over little old me.”

“You are the first human I encountered,” I reminded him. “You made a very strong impression.”

“I’m quite the yardstick to manage humanity by,” Mac said, rueful, and gestured for me to sit down on the opposite side of his workbench. I do, bending the woman’s knees to carry me down with her.

“How did you recognize me?”

Mac frowned. “I suppose I was just waiting for you to come back. I don’t have much longer left on this planet, you know, or any planet. I thought you might come to say goodbye.”

“Are you dying?” I asked, finding myself upset at the notion.

“I wish,” Mac rolled his eyes. It was curious to be watching him rather than experiencing him from the inside out. I could not inhabit his thoughts, know his moods, understand the history of the years that separated us. He was, in some ways, a mystery to me.

“You should not wish to die, Mac,” I said with more severity than I intended. “You are a very valuable member of society. You hold the record for longest solo space flight. You discovered a new species. Surely you have more you wish to do.”

If I had learned one thing about humans, it was their fervent desire to do and to be – something, anything, important. And Mac, more so than most, had lived an important life.

He did not seem to think so, if his bark of laughter was anything to go by. “Yes, well. That was a long time ago. And you are the only being in this galaxy who knows about my discovery of a new species. I have not shared the secret of you.”

I nodded, to show my appreciation for his accurate claim. When I entered his brain in the depths of deep space, I’d barely known what I was doing. I had never met a corporeal being, and in trying to interact, I had somehow merged with him. He’d recognized the intrusion of his brain; we had worked together, two beings in one mind, to ascertain what exactly had occurred and its momentousness in the history of human space travel.

Second Lieutenant Mackenzie Liston promised me that he would not tell his superiors of my existence; they would want to poke and prod and dissect and he would not let them harm our mind or his body. I would have remained with Mac for longer if only I believed his mind could handle our merge, our slow integration into one being, but I understood his body well enough to know that I could not remain inside of it if his personality were to remain intact.

He’d understood why my departure was necessary, and I learned how to lurk in the human mind, to skate and dance across the surface, to let their mind lead and let my being simply follow.

“I have lived in many human bodies,” I told Mac, unsure of exactly what I wished to communicate but feeling that I must, somehow, impart my wisdom to him. “But yours is the only one I have missed. The rest have been…subpar. They have not operated properly.”

“What, because my body is the prime physical form?” Mac gestured at himself with incredulity. “Come now. My brain was the problem, still is the problem. You wouldn’t believe what the doctors tell me about my brain.”

“What do the doctors tell you, Mac?” He must think I could not understand human doctors, but I understand better than most. I’ve lived inside of more bodies than most. I have experienced the breakdown of matter in a myriad of ways.

“I’m fucked in the head from deep space,” Mac rolls his head to one side, and his neck cracks with the effort. His neck has grown thicker with age, like his middle. “Abnormal in every way that counts.”

“I suppose that is my fault,” I acknowledged with a prickle of guilt. “I was too much a part of you. I try not to do that anymore. I do not usually take human bodies for joyrides. I simply did not know an easier way to contact you.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re here,” Mac said. “It’s been lonely up here in my brain, with only me for company. My wife and my brother did their very best, but she’s been gone a year and he’s been gone for five. Not sure what I’m living for these days. I won’t ever go back to Belthan Station, won’t ever pilot a shuttle again. I’ll never meet another thing like you. I’m at the end of my life and you’re the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Mac said each word very mildly, matter-of-factly. He did not sound as though he felt anger toward me or blamed me for his current predicament. I had generally avoided older bodies on principle, understanding that they were more likely to experience weakness, decay, and disease.

But this was Mac, my introduction to humanity, the reason that I loved humanity the way that I did. The reason I sought them out over and over again, even as their bodies crumpled and failed and died. Without him, I would be a being floating in space, aware of my own existence but not much else. I would never have been a part of something greater than myself.

“Mac,” I asked him, the woman I’m wearing’s voice quavering, and it felt like her voice could be my voice. “I don’t mind dying if we can do it together. Do you think….could I come home?”

Mac looked at me, the lines in his face creasing with recognition and warmth. “It would be nice to have the company.”

Relieved, I let the woman go, and I joined my friend.