Imagination and A Monster (Draft One) Chapter 4.2

Looting around the young man’s brain is a chore. While his years are few - at least compared to the creature’s - there’s still a lot of information in there that’s trivial at best and a waste of space at worst. The damn thing also won’t shut up, whenever he snaps out of his feeling of being spread out too thin in order to scrounge up a bit of awareness to tell the creature to get out of its body. He’ll get tired, though, eventually. 

What the creature gleans from the young man is that aside from what it’s pieced together, there have actually been more studies into the Meteor Event of December 2020, as the humans have come to call it. Recent data has shown that a good chunk of the population that lived in areas in or close to the meteor events have had an increase in highly specific and similar nightmares. Coverage of the Meteor Event has been in full swing since the return of electricity and, while the attention to it has dwindled over the years, public consciousness of it hasn’t.

There’s a whole week of observing the event, for fuck’s sake. 

The books in the young man’s tiny apartment corroborate the memories. There are autobiographies written by some of the event witnesses who then proceeded to have the nightmares, books collecting studies held by universities, and one hefty tome titled A World Without Power detailing the struggle of the world (the author’s particular place in the world, the creature thought, because what a self-important little shit - ) when the lights went out, and how everyone who’d seen the meteors started to realize what was happening with their dreams. 

A quick skim through the young man’s memories gets the creature a short version of how to use his computer, and although it fumbles with it for an hour and nearly hurls the laptop at a wall in frustration, it gets the thing working enough to look up updates on what the humans have figured out about the situation. 

It reads everything it can find until the laptop’s battery dies, at which point it tries to get it to turn back on for an hour, nearly smash it again, before searching through the man’s brain and learning that it just has to be charged. While the stupid thing charges, it reads through all the books relating to the meteor event, particularly the ones that list out testimonies from different people who’ve seen the meteors, or were in places that were hit by them. 

It takes note of the names, and the faces, if there are pictures. It takes note of the cities, and when the laptop’s charged enough, looks up a map to see if the world’s changed any since it was last here. It has. 

There is a complete list of places that have been reported to have been struck by the meteors online, so it clicks on that and memorizes every single address, before plotting out how far away that would be from its current location. It’s going to have to figure out how to travel while posing as a human and see just how much human transportation has changed, but it can wait. It won’t take too long, it’ll just need to be patient while it relearns its way around the world. 

It won’t be hard. Some of the places that were stuck are practically advertising that they’d been hit by the meteors and are selling themselves as destination spots for other humans to flock to. And it has names and faces it can track down. The humans wouldn’t have been dead already. It’s only been, what, fifteen years since the meteors, if the calendar in this room is correct?

The creature may have been split, but it’s not like that hasn’t happened before. And every time, it’s always been able to fold every piece back into itself. It should still be the same case now, even if it’s been split apart into so many pieces that some of them might be too small to even sense. 

It just needed to find everything that all the pieces of it have fallen into and pick them back up again, the way it did when it slunk into maggots and moved into ants before gathering all of itself up into a deer. 

And then, when it’s done, maybe it could even find everyone else born with it at the beginning - the many of the universe - and split them all apart, piece by piece by piece. See how they like it. Wouldn’t that be funny?

The creature reads straight into the morning, learning everything it can, even after the human it’s stolen the body from cries itself into unconsciousness. And it continues on, guiltless, even after the sun rises.