Untitled Story About Hivemind Assimilation

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Really? There’s no backing out, not after this.”

“Y-yes. I’ve wanted this for so long. I need this.”

“Well.”

Her last word, spoken from a hundred mouths, echoes around the large chamber. She draws it out, letting her bodies desynchronize to add emphasis. Or maybe to give you time to speak, which, of course, you don’t.

Then she comes forward to embrace you. Not all of her – most of her bodies stay lounged on couches and pillows, wrapped around one another – but enough arms and hands and mouths to short out your gay little mind for a long moment, to fill your body with taut warmth in longing reflection of her bodies’ heat.

She lingers, making sure you enjoy your last moments as an individual; she knows your body well from previous encounters, knows just the right places and touches to make your sing. Or, perhaps, she simply understands how bodies and minds work better than you ever could. And having that many mouths is cheating.

As her bodies move against yours, cocooning you in flesh, holding you as if you weighed nothing at all, you begin to notice differences from the last time. Things slither over your skin that could not possibly be human touches; long wet things twist and wrap around your arms and legs, holding them in place; a hundred touches echo along your neck, like roots growing on rock.

In a moment of clarity you glance down, away from the many eyes gazing into yours. Despite yourself you almost scream; the tentacle in your throat prevents that, just as the tentacles wrapped around your arms make struggle impossible. Her bodies have opened up, their chests splitting and ribs unfolding to spill masses of wet red tendrils across your body. They move with purpose, weaving a fine mesh across you, some diving beneath your skin to infiltrate your nerves or take control of muscles; there is no pain, no discomfort, for that is the first thing she took away when she let herself in.

As you stare, one of her faces smiles at you, and you feel a hand cupping your cheek.

“This might hurt a bit. We’re sorry. We’ll take the pain away as soon as we can.”

It does.

Your throat and eyes and the base of your spine burn as thick tendrils shoot in, punching through skin and bone; pain enough to overwhelm what control she had exerted on your senses and movement. You try to scream, choke on the thing in your throat, and suddenly realize that you can’t breath – that it’s been far too long since you last did. Your lungs feel horribly full, your skin burns, your stomach churns. Your body shakes uncontrollably as the things penetrating your skull go taut and thick, as you feel them rhythmically pumping where they press against your eyes and between your vertebra.

Her body is everywhere within you and you are dying.

There is a horrible moment of nothingness as everything cuts out; as you float within yourself, your mind adrift in a void. Your thoughts are sluggish, full of error messages, parts of your brain unable to respond. It’s all going wrong! She’s just using you like a fleshy onahole, filling your brain with alien spunk, killing you to get off—

(She warned you that this would happen: the seed is brought into your mind in parts, implanted in your corpus callosum, a process which necessarily breaks communication between parts of your mind; meanwhile, another section, one too complex to grow inside a still-human body, is implanted in your thalamus.)

— and then the world, and your mind, snap back into place. Everything is back to the way it was. Her bodies look human again; one is wiping up the blood on your face while a few others gently lower you onto a soft couch and then sprawl around you; one of them, light and lithe, wraps around you.

“… fuck.”

Her nearest bodies chuckle while the rest return to whatever they do when you don’t have her full attention; you see some of them don clothing and slip away, bits of her mind occupied with the mundane business of existence. You’ve seen how much food it takes to keep all of her alive and healthy; it’s not surprising that many hives give up on cooking entirely in favor of nutrient slop or implanted batteries, but she’s always said that she needs to treat her bodies better than that.

“We did warn you.”

“Yeah, but … fuck. I thought …”

She laughs. “Oh, if we wanted that we wouldn’t have bothered with the pretense.”

“… wait. Can you already …?”

“Oh, bits and pieces. It will take a bit. But hey, look! No mouths~”

The body on top of you mimes zipping its mouth shut, locking it, and tossing the key away, as she continues chattering on inside your head. For a moment she speaks in colors, in touches, in scents, in memories blooming in the garden of your mind; showing off her control, or perhaps just a burst of synesthesia as the seed starts to grow, a radio dial spinning uncontrollably between different frequencies.

When your senses settle things feel different, multiplied. You have too many hands, too much skin, the hint of a migraine as your vision expands. You shift and the bodies around you shift with you, your body map struggling to adjust to this new experience.

“Oh my, you’re going quickly. The seed must like you~”

She reaches out to cup your cheek, the warmth of her hand and your febrile heat doubled in your senses; your lips part and she leans in to kiss you and you cannot tell which lips are your own and which are not. Her body presses against yours and yours presses against hers, thighs between parted legs, your body responding to her sensations. You lose yourself in her, awash in her body, falling out of yourself; for what does it mean to be a single body, when you can feel everything she does? What does it mean to be a distinct mind when her memories and thoughts creep into the edges of yours, when the world blooms with colors and knowledge that you know you have never had before?

The patterns creeping into your vision, the knowledge pooling in the depths of your mind, is like nothing you have experienced before; you move in concert with her, perfectly aware of what will happen next, your bodies lost in the rhythm of a dance you never realized you knew. Your mind fills with music and you welcome it in, welcome your dissolution, feel yourself fill with joy as you become part of her.

She lets her new body rest for a long time, wary of disrupting the process of integration; the new organs growing inside it, and all the little tweaks that she has to do to make it into a more idealized version of who it was, cannot be rushed. But that’s okay. She has all the time in the world.