15/11/2022 - Just a Stupid Soldier
Reading time: 4 min
At first, they diagnosed me with OCD, then, after what they called “the voices” started, with paranoid schizophrenia—quite common among space troopers—but when it became clear the medications were not working, I knew the doctors had made a horrible mistake.
Humans have the strange habit of missing the obvious. Our biases are so incredibly embedded in what we have already seen, what we already know, that is a miracle we discover anything new at all.
When Galileo looked at the moon with his telescope and saw craters on its surface, the other astronomers saw nothing. That’s how powerful their bias was. Now, I am the moon, but there’s no Galileo pointing a telescope at me.
The only language I have to express what’s happening to me is the medical language, as nobody else tried to describe it before, but it’s not appropriate, or at least not completely.
They called them intrusive thoughts. Unwanted ideas appearing in my mind with no warning. They started on the spaceship, and after all the psychological screening they did on Earth, it seemed quite bizarre they missed such a debilitating condition in one of their troopers.
So, they dug more.
That’s when the schizophrenia theory gained popularity.
One way in which I explained what was happening is that I didn’t think those thoughts. I didn’t feel those urges. Something else within me was.
I know of people who went nuts during their first trip beyond lower orbit. It’s the confinement, the limitations, the fear, the changes in what you must do to survive.
One of the physicians started hearing voices before we stationed on the Moon. They told her to leak hydrogen into the sleeping cabins and blow them up. A fellow trooper had the same problem. We found him in the decompressing chamber without a space suit; his blood boiled out of his skin. He was escaping from something inside his head.
That’s what I thought expected me. I believed I was seeing the future when I watched the miserable deaths of my companions, and yet, I knew something was off.
I didn’t “hear” voices. It was much subtler than that.
It was as if I was remotely controlled, like a vehicle, a robot, a drone. There was no conversation between me and this inscrutable force, just commands, executed outside of myself, to the point that I didn’t even realise I was obeying orders.
And yet, nobody thought of the obvious. Nobody thought of the reason I was on that spaceship.
We were not going to land anywhere. We were the third iteration of what the public creatively named “Zombie Research.” We were carrying all sorts of infectious diseases; bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites in a gravity-free environment. The general understanding was that interstellar travel would strengthen microorganisms in unpredictable ways; exactly the opposite of what happened to humans.
Nobody thought that someone could get infected with those super-bugs.
So, during our fuel stop on the Moon, they decided to leave me there—as I was too dangerous to be kept on the ship—and as soon as I stepped on the station, I felt that mysterious force within me cheering.
I eventually learned to know it. With a little bit of attention, it wasn’t hard to understand what it wanted.
It made me confident and impulsive. It made me crave for sexual intimacy in a way I had never experienced.
I kissed anyone who approached me; men and women alike. I said words I would have never been able to conjure by myself. I lost all regard for personal hygiene, I put myself in situations where spreading a disease would be so easy.
Now I understand.
This thing within me only wants to survive.
Parasites, even normal parasites, without the superpowers they acquire with interstellar journeys, can and do affect the behaviour of their host to maximise their chances of multiplying.
And that’s why I’m here, I suppose, in the central water purifier of this Moon station, bleeding myself to death inside what should be potable water.
Only one thing I wish I could grasp about this; how can such a simple organism, a parasite in my guts, have access to the intelligence and knowledge of an entire species?
After all, I had no idea of how the water system worked.
I was just a stupid soldier before It took over.
About this story
Prompt: no prompt.
Notes on the challenge
Each and every story published here has been written, reviewed, polished and published in less than 90 minutes. Which means you’re going to find spelling mistakes, ugly sentences and weird structures. I still hope you’ll enjoy them!
