1. HEATHER, THE CRADLE OF LIFE

2. Chapter 1


The lifestyle of a criminal isn’t for everyone. That axiom held true for most aspiring law breakers as the UNESF police was ruthlessly efficient, eliminating threats in Earth and its colonies almost as soon as they emerged. Most, but not all.

Until three months ago, Heather Nem belonged to that select minority. It was an era where crime was at its lowest ever, as technology had advanced so much that petty theft was unprofitable and even the most depraved crimes could be simulated with utmost realism. However, the few individuals, ambitious enough to reach the top of society, but unable to do so because they lacked the money or the power, had to resort to the most unscrupulous means to achieve their dreams. Weapon trafficking, ultra-drugs, illegal nanomachines, absolute murder (it really took a lot of effort to eliminate a person and all their brain backups), corruption of databanks, antimatter thievery… Heather had tried her hand at every crime imaginable, until she had overreached herself and became such a threat to the UNESF that she had been made to slip under the cracks of the legal system (just to ensure she didn’t have last minute tricks to avoid jail).

After twenty eight days of exhausting interrogation she had been presented with a choice. She could face the existential terror of oblivion, being executed and having all her backups erased, or volunteer herself to an experiment. In a time when people was practically immortal, being able to swap bodies and minds with incredible ease, a threat like that held a lot more weight than it used to in the distant past. On the other hand, the standards of experimentation had likewise become incredibly strict, with laws and regulations that ensured no harm came to the subjects. It was an easy choice, or so she thought.

Two months later, standing naked in a cave buried deep in an asteroid at the Kuiper belt, she was beating herself for being so stupid about that decision. A hovering sensor drone, its antigrav fins moving in a strange dance, bathed her in the light of its floodlights. It was the only physical companion she had been afforded although that didn’t mean another, more subtle company, couldn’t make itself present.

“Are you comfortable, Ms Nem? The temperature regulators should be working at full throttle” a male voice chimed in her ear, coming from a cochlear implant.

“What do you care?” she subvocalized, a microphone buried deep in her larynx sending the acid response to her handler at the other side of the line.

“It was a strange occurrence suddenly having a volunteer for this experiment. I did not expect such a famous young crime lady to willingly subject herself to it”

“I didn’t have much choice, you know that”

“It was a choice, after all. Much more than what you gave to some of your victims”

“Spare me the petty morals” she spat “You and your colleagues are no better than me. Couldn’t you have used a mindless clone and be done with it?”

“Been there, done that. Do you think we are that stupid? That creature just ate the clones and retreated to its cave. Only the female miners that were captured in the first place were kept alive inside it”

“And when you finally manage to rescue just one of them, she is a complete and utter mess. Have you gotten something coherent from her wrecked mind?”

“Not yet, sorry”

Heather decided to shut up. The conversation was bringing memories she really didn’t want to recall. After having arrived at the facility just yesterday, she had been informed in detail of what kind of experiment she had agreed to. The mining site at the asteroid she was now treading, by chance an all female operation, had gone suddenly silent. When the rescue teams had arrived here, they had found what could only be described as a lovecraftian nightmare. The workers had been abducted and partially assimilated into an organic mass resembling a titanic worm that was later confirmed as the first truly alien organism ever found.

Eleven of the twelve miners were beyond saving, having been so absorbed into the giant organism that couldn’t be really called human anymore. Of the lone survivor the marines had managed to separate from the alien, her body had been transformed to incredible degrees, and her mind no longer worked in the same “frequencies” as normal human beings. Her brain was still quite active, but the neural architecture and wave patterns had changed so much they were completely indecipherable by every software available.

The naked criminal shuddered involuntarily when she recalled the body of that woman floating in a liquid tank to keep her from falling apart. To think she was going to become like her, or even worse, made her nauseous and, to her infinite horror, a bit aroused. The purpose of the hideous mutations, as bizarre as they were, was undeniably sexual in nature, and decades upon decades of tentacle porn and gore gone mainstream had made an impact on the collective psyche of humanity.

She wasn’t a senseless sacrifice, though. Once the creature had been isolated inside its cave system and could be observed safely, scientists wanted to understand it as much as possible, maybe even communicate with it. The modifications of the body could be easily reversed because, in the worst case scenario, a new body could be made from scratch. The mind was another thing altogether. The current technology wasn’t able to translate, replicate or transfer the altered mental architecture of the unfortunate victim, and all the local backups had been mysteriously erased before the rescuers arrived. That was where she came in.

The advanced recording devices implanted in her brain would monitor in detail all the transformation steps and, hopefully, the scientists would be able to reverse engineer the process and translate those alien thought patterns into readable, human ones. It was not a sure thing, of course, that was why the government had sought an irredeemable convict like her to “volunteer”.

As things were, she was now waiting in the first of the tunnel systems claimed by the creature. The whole massive asteroid had been surrounded by a force field by the miners when the mining operation had started almost a year ago. The ensuing breathable atmosphere, artificial gravity and tolerable temperature allowed her to stand naked inside the space rock, a tempting bait for that titanic slug. It was theorized that those very life-enabling conditions had been what had awakened the alien from deep space cryostasis in the first place, and Heather wondered if the miners had fully understood the horror they had unleashed as one by one they disappeared and were consumed by the unholy creature, their tattered clothes, spread where they had fallen, being the only visible proof of the abductions.

“I’m getting interesting readings from your subconscious” said the unnamed doctor inside her head “It seems you are not so disgusted with this messy affair, despite what you said earlier”

“Get out of my mind, you creep!” she yelled, the echo reverberating towards the caverns ahead.

“No can do, my lecherous lady” he taunted her “that’s the whole point of this experiment, after all”

Heather was already regretting that uncontrolled outburst. It made her weakness so much more apparent, and she hated being weak. Lesser men had paid with their lives for just hinting at her weaknesses. Holding to the last shreds of her dignity and tired of waiting for the oversized worm to appear, she decided to take the initiative. It was her last act of free will, of defiance. If becoming food for alien slugs was her destiny, she would meet it head on, instead of hiding like a cornered rat.

The asteroid was pretty big, almost two kilometers deep from where she was. However, it was not a long walk, and the alien hiding deep in the tangle of tunnels would surely have noticed the echoes of her scream by now. The beautiful woman began walking into the cave system, with her hovering robotic companion whirring and buzzing behind her. The scientist didn’t even try to stop her, what was going to happen was inevitable either way.

It was hard to define beauty in that era. The advances in cosmetic technology and surgery made being exceedingly handsome the new basic standard. The naked woman walking to her doom was a tall blonde, with wavy locks that cascaded down the middle of her back. Her perfectly toned body rippled with enhanced muscles under an apparently soft, pale, and completely hairless skin.
Heather’s nervous breathing as she walked involuntarily enhanced her chest assets, which sported a perky pair of B cup sized tits, still winning their battle against gravity and crowned by two diamond hard nipples as red as her lips, with areolas measuring almost two inches in diameter.

Her azure eyes looked at every junction and corner like those of a frightened doe, though. Despite all her bravado earlier, she was just an unarmored woman in her birth suit, deep in the tunnels of an asteroid, looking for a multi-ton creature that would do unspeakable things to her.

As she went deeper and deeper, with the lights of her drone companion and the beacons placed by the miners as her guides, the sweat of her increasing fear mixed with a trickle from her cunt. She noticed it and moved her hand to her nethers, looking at the substance that coated her fingers in disbelief. To add insult to injury, her arousing was becoming physical!

Heather had a keen mind, and was an expert analyzing the minds of other people. It was a handy skill in her line of work, almost a must have for any aspiring crime lord. She had never needed to analyze herself; after all, she knew exactly what she wanted and why she wanted it. Now, though, circumstances were forcing her to reconsider those priorities.

It didn’t take long to reach an answer. Having been a dominant person all her life, the wills of her subordinates and enemies alike bending to her whims, being so utterly helpless was somehow liberating. Not having to care about ordering people here and there, and the pressure that managing an empire entailed, was empowering after a fashion. There she was, at the mercy of a creature so much powerful than the actual her, and there was absolutely nothing she could do, short of bashing her head against a rock. The thought of complete submission mixed with sexual fantasies buried deep inside her psyche was playing tricks with her body.

It couldn’t be just that, she thought, after turning at another intersection without seeing any trace of the worm. Surely the horror of what awaited her should have tempered that arousal.

Fear was a very powerful emotion, and it could override sexuality if handled in an incorrect manner. It was then when she noticed that the aseptic smell of human machinery had been slowly replaced by a musty aroma that, despite being so subtle she almost hadn’t noticed, managed to permeate every single surface of the cave. Feeling suddenly light headed, she placed a hand in the wall to steady herself.

“The creature is finally on the move. We are getting readings a hundred meters ahead of you” said the incorporeal voice inside her head while the drone moved up and down as if agreeing.

“Fuck you!” she hissed in defiance.

Now that she had been warned, Heather could feel the vibrations of the slithery creature reverberating through the entire tunnel. For a moment she toyed with the idea of turning back and fleeing. She imagined the laughter that that thought would have elicited in her handler and the brief escape plan died before even being born. There was no escape for her, sure death waited at her back while it was only almost certain on her front.

Ironically, it was her very human fellows who she had to fear instead of the alien abomination that had consumed and reduced the remains of the survivor woman to apparent insanity. As if on cue, far down the tunnel, the faint lights of the beacons began to dim as something very big gradually obscured them. At that distance, it looked as if the walls were closing in like a zipper.Having spotted the creature, the drone turned its main floodlight off. It was now unnecessary and they didn’t want to take any risk. Heather was plunged in the darkness, and her despair increased one more notch.

“We only have marginal information about what happens now, lady” said the nameless scientist “The security cameras only gathered shaky images, and the survivor is in no position to tell us. However, this time your drone will record everything as it happens”

“Hah, if you are trying to calm me, motherfucker, it isn’t working!” Heather screamed, her legs failing and bringing her to her knees.

“Listen, I have been patient with you out of politeness. I don’t fucking care what happens to you” he answered with a hint of anger for the first time “Either that thing absorbs you or it eats you. Both outcomes will give us valuable info. Think about all the lives you have ruined, all the crimes you have committed. To me, to everyone, you are dead anyway, so if we can use your corpse to advance science, so much the better”

Despite her inherent disregard for law or ethics, those harsh words stung her when at any other point in her life they wouldn’t have. Faced with what appeared to be her imminent demise, Heather Nem felt for the first time the load of mortality, and that load came weighted with all the sins she had darkened her soul with. Not that it mattered anymore; she was going to pay for them, with interests so high it wasn’t even funny as dark humor. Head lowered by shame, regret and fear, she waited for the beast to deliver her well earned punishment.

The tremors, that had increased as the creature advanced slowly towards her, stopped suddenly. Even with her gaze cast down, she could feel the looming mass of the creature in front and above her, the rumbling and hisses of the massive living body. After a few moments of impasse, curiosity trumped terror.

Despite her uncontrollable shivering, Heather raised her head and, like the prey she had become, looked at her hunter in abject defeat. The faint light of the miner’s beacons and the drone sensors wasn’t able to convey the whole image of the grotesque creature, but what was revealed was enough to make the hardened convict lose control of her bowels and piss herself.

The shape that loomed above her was undeniably some kind of bizarre wormlike being that, now that its prey had been cornered, had dropped the stealth and shone in a phosphorescent rosy light. That sudden luminescence gave Heather at last the chance to see its body, made of rings upon rings of muscular gray flesh, stretching as far as the sight went, visible thanks to the fact that the creature didn’t occupy the whole tunnel.

However, what threatened to shatter the last remains of her sanity were the wart-like protrusions that appeared interspersed between the rings at certain intervals, bubbles of pink translucent flesh buried deep in the sides of the worm that the scientists had assured her were the prolapsed uteri of the miners they hadn’t been able to rescue.

What seemed at first like it should have been a symmetric arrangement was marred with charred burns and partially healed scars in the places where the marines had attacked it. A gaping hole in its right side, where another of those warts should have been, marked the place where the lone survivor had been forcibly pulled from while she retained enough apparent humanity to warrant the effort.

Paralyzed by fear, with her heart on the verge of exploding, she kept raising her gaze, and finally looked at the “head” towering upon her prone body. The frontal appendage of the alien resembled the closed bud of a rose. It was a tightly packed collection of shiny crimson flesh folds looming over her, snaking back and forth, as if unsure of what to do with her.

Everything was eerily quiet, and even the chatty scientist had shut his mouth, maybe awed by the spectacle of the four meters thick alien worm. The only sounds heard in the pregnant silence were the organic gurgles of the creature and the soft mechanical whirring of the sensor drone.

Then, without even stopping to think about it, Heather’s hand moved to her right eye to clear an irritating drop of sweat. That innocent, automatic move seemed to prompt the creature into action.

Slowly but inexorably, the fleshy petals opened like a flower until the gaping hole that was the maw of the creature was fully exposed, blasting heather with a gust of wind loaded with the same smell she had detected earlier. Dozens of thin tentacles shot from inside the pink phosphorescent creature targeting Heather.
Like the last straw that broke the camel’s back, Heather regained her wits for a moment and tried to turn around to flee, her primal survival instinct kicking in full force to save her from the imposing predator. She was too late by a second but, more likely, she had been late since she had decided to become a crime lord.

Some of the tentacles grabbed her by the ankles, some by the wrists, and soon she was effortlessly lifted and suspended in the air in front of the deep circular opening, framed by the floral crown of flesh that passed as the mouth of the alien life form and lined with appendages of wicked form and unfathomable function.

Uselessly kicking and flailing, Heather screamed once again in absolute terror, the voice of the scientist trying to calm her all but unheard in her panic attack. As if annoyed with its victim, the worm launched one tentacle tipped by a vicious looking bony needle into her thigh, injecting something into her bloodstream that quickly relaxed all her muscles, making her body go limp and silencing the shrill scream.

“… Calm down! You have to calm down! …” echoed the frantic voice of the scientist inside her head “ … wait, what’s going on? … ” he said suddenly.

“I don’t know, doc. I suddenly feel very good” she answered groggily

“It seems to have injected you some kind of combination of anesthetic, muscle relaxant and mild euphoric. This is very interesting; it could explain why none of its victims fought back, despite having heavy mining equipment that could be easily weaponized”

“That thing is much uglier than I ever imagined, and I don’t care! What is happening to me?” Heather giggled in drugged stupor.

“It’s not an uncommon strategy of predatory species to drug their victims…” He said, to no one in particular “We are more interested in what is it going to do with you now”

While they talked, the rest of the feeler tentacles had decided to explore her spread out body, suspended in the air. The muscular appendages, surprisingly dry but silky smooth, moved with grace and dexterity leaving no inch of skin untouched. The gentle touch combined with the unnatural calm created by the chemicals was having an effect on her arousal once again and, despite herself, she found her body responding to the touch of the worm.

“Aaaand, this leaves out the alien eating you, miss. The clones we sent were disposed of very messily before this stage, you have been lucky”

“Oh, yes, very lucky indeed. I guess you could take my place”

“Haven’t I told you? Males don’t seem to be very different from clones for this guy”

“How do you know that?” she said raggedly, as one particularly adventurous tentacle was rubbing her crotch with delicious, albeit unintended, sensuality

“Politicians prefer dirtying their hands first with male convicts. Very old fashioned I suppose, although they themselves are very, very old”

“I should have known” she replied while more and more tentacles joined the fun and began covering her body “What happens now?” she added tiredly, resigned to her fate.

“We don’t really know. We will keep monitoring your brain and body while the equipment inside you endures. The drone will keep scanning you from the outside and acting as a backup relay for your internal sensors. Depending on what the creature does to you we will rescue you… or not”

“How sweet and chivalrous of you” Heather spat.

“You can take comfort on your life being used for the good of humanity, instead of being an ugly sore at the side of civilization”

Heather would have liked to use her drug fueled clarity of mind to inject some more retorts in the conversation, but a slightly thicker tentacle, maybe three inches in diameter, was probing at her asshole with tenacious determination. For better or worse, Heather was no stranger to anal sex (as well as many other mainstream sexual practices that fell well within what in the old twenty first century would have been called extremely deviant paraphilias) and, since her destiny was sealed anyway, she decided to make the most out of the situation, those scientists be damned.

Closing her eyes, she imagined being suspended in a particularly tight bondage harness, while a handsome stud plowed her ass without mercy. However, that imaginary stud wouldn’t have been able to hold a candle against the intruder that was actually penetrating her shit chute.

One of the most popular genemods in the market was the anal lubrication gland. It was thanks to that that Heather wasn’t suffering too much from the incredible friction of the tentacle inching its way inside her. Ever since her cunt had begun to lubricate in lurid fantasies a while ago, her ass had responded in kind and now it was easing the passage of the muscular appendage deep into her bowels. Because that thing didn’t look like it was fucking her, making piston motions or anything, it looked like it was spelunking.

It surely was a very bizarre experience, like a particularly nasty cramp that only kept increasing. Meter after meter of meat sausage were stuffed forcefully inside her innards, increasing the pressure exponentially. It wasn’t really painful (the innards are not quite profusely innervated as the skin and the anesthetic was still kicking full force) but, as everyone that had had to sprint to the bathroom for a very loaded number two could attest, it was not comfortable. If Heather had been pressed to describe that sensation, she would have said exactly that, but increased twelvefold and getting worse by the moment.

In a painfully short time she looked nine months pregnant, and could feel her abdominals ripping in places, which did hurt, a lot. Clenching her teeth, she opened her eyes and was treated to a very bizarre sight. Her toned abs, which she was very proud of, had been replaced by a hideous balloon of flesh decorated by innumerable crimson stretch marks, the signs of her skin giving the ghost in multiple places. Thankfully it wasn’t bleeding, yet. 

“Oh, god, make it stop!” she pleaded, the deal she had rejected for this seeming sweeter by the moment.

“The tentacle has passed the intestines now” her invisible companion said “It should have more room if it keeps going, although you could very well suffocate if it reaches your pharynx”

“Right now, that would be a blessing” Heather answered to no one through tight lips.

It looked like the creature was really intent on testing where did her hole ended, because the poor woman soon felt her stomach gurgling as the tentacle broke in, poking here and there in alien-like curiosity.

Heather began to retch uncontrollably from the reflexes triggered by the questing appendage. Adding the imperious need to vomit to the extreme need to poop was threatening to make her unconscious, but the tentacle didn’t care and kept coiling inside her stomach, looking for an exit. Only when the organ was filled to capacity it finally found it, the valve that opened the passage to her esophagus and then her mouth. That valve was designed as one way only but the alien was tenacious, if nothing else.

After much pushing, which made Heather very, very sick; the damned meat snake finally broke through. From there it was a matter of just forcing its way upwards, and Heather felt like a porn star making the biggest deepthroat ever, only in reverse. The vomiting spasms of her esophagus were only helping the tentacle go faster, making her neck bulge with the tip of the intruder.

Finally, after the last thunderous retch, she jerked her head backwards and the fat tentacle tip, stretching her jaw to the point of dislocation, emerged from her mouth in a shower of gastric juice.

Heather couldn’t breathe, she was asphyxiating quickly and even if she had been able to call for help, she knew help wouldn’t come. The perfect picture of an impalement, her throat was enlarged obscenely; her jaw, on the verge of breaking; her lips, stretched taut around the unyielding invader; her lungs on fire due to the lack of oxygen.

Before falling unconscious, Heather looked cross eyed one last time at the tip of the tentacle protruding from her mouth. It resembled a bud, like the head of the monster above her when it had been closed and, similarly, it began to unfold, sticking its fleshy petals all around her mouth until she looked like someone had glued a rose to her lower face.