//: Carnosphere
Red | 1/14/26
Space is cold, and it’s dark, too, but it sure isn’t empty. At least not to the fragment of iridescent debris hurtling at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour amid the pinpoint specks of billions of trillions of stars. Once, an unfathomably long time ago, that fragment had been a sliver of chrome finish adorning a colossal machine — one fine-tuned to win a war that would go on to be forgotten by all but a select few. Had even one of that machine’s eight thousand paper-thin memory cards been preserved, there might have been some record of the events that unfolded in that time — a writhing mountain of bodily tissues advancing on the barrel of a microwave pulse cannon, a blinding flash of radiant energy, and…
Now, a sliver was all that remained. It rocketed at a velocity comparable to that of a comet but looked almost stationary in the infinite stretch of starry void that it occupied, spinning calmly towards a destination that it may never reach. Sometimes, the debris would angle itself in just the right way to catch the starlight, glowing so intensely that it might have been noticed by any being who happened to be observing the skies from a distant rock. That’s not to say that the tiny chrome fragment was the only object on an interstellar journey, of course. There were other things, too — mostly comets, but sometimes dots of light that seemed to zig-zag, make sharp turns, and dart off at impossible speeds.
All the cosmos was teeming, and the debris itself also harbored a sort of life: traces of a bioweapon that, like the fragment of a war machine that it rode upon, was built to withstand the furthest extremes of anomalous destruction. So it had, with ease, weathered the friction of leaving its home atmosphere and continued to withstand the endless vacuum beyond; it hibernated, metabolizing at a rate far slower than what might be thought possible in the narrow view of contemporary human science. Now, over a length of time that had lost all meaning, the bioweapon’s cells were beginning to sense a semblance of warmth that they hadn’t known since the days of their old masters.
Thump! A pinprick of a hole broke through a troposphere that had been overcast for nearly two billion years, revealing the slightest hint of a reddish sky for less than a minute before it was promptly filled in by more ashy clouds. The earth beneath was a dune sea, now decorated with a singular crater and a plume of grey sand that had yet to fully resettle. Embedded vertically into the crater’s center was the chrome debris fragment.
It didn’t take long for something to come looking. From over the crest of one massive dune, a herd of animals streaked down in leisurely single file towards the crater where the fragment had landed. They were nearly as tall as African elephants, but spidered about on sets of five limbs that were each only about as thick as a human forearm; the limbs all tapered up to an eyeless ovoid of a head, which sported a sharp, transparent proboscis that was about as long as the limbs themselves. The animals didn’t seem particularly interested in the alien artifact that had just crash landed directly in front of them, instead opting to shuffle their limbs about until the sands beneath their feet began to shift, to which they dug their proboscises into the ground and inhaled dark shapes.
Just as the herd was beginning to move on, one of the animals nudged the debris fragment curiously with its proboscis to confirm that it was indeed not food before proceeding to step over it as if it was merely another part of the landscape. That was all that the hidden bioweapon, now in the gradual process of thawing from dormancy, needed to complete its work. It would take time — the silicon-based lifeform was unlike anything that the bioweapon had ever encountered in the past — but that would be nothing compared to the eternity of cold darkness that it endured to get here.
This animal, the bioweapon found, was actually a rather efficient vector for transmission. Its stalk-like limbs might have evolved to maneuver the endless sands with caution so as not to disturb any potential prey, but once the host’s natural inhibitions were eradicated, they served the purpose of chasing, pinning down, and infecting the remaining members of the herd remarkably well. The stress of that assault on a body that was not made for it did result in the loss of a few limbs, but sturdier ones would soon be grown in their place. From there, life did as it always had and always would — it fed, it bred, and it changed. Only this time, it did so with a directive, “Take us to Ikunaan.”
It was an order imbued into the bioweapon’s very RNA that it did not have the sentience to understand but acted in accordance with all the same, and so it cycled its hosts through thousands of new iterations. One of the first was something akin to a slime mold that bloomed and bubbled its way over hundreds of miles of the same powdery terrain, feeding off of the droppings and shedded exoskeletons of burrowed arthropods. That was insufficient, so the next iteration rooted itself in place and fed off the proverbial gold mine of nutrient-rich soil hidden beneath the sand. That too was insufficient, so the next iteration substituted its spores for pheromones to attract more of the local fauna…
In less than the number of years that a human might live, the planet had become wholly unrecognizable. The gunpowder-esque sand had long since been swept away, replaced by a savannah of red, fibrous hairs that sprouted from a grotesque earth of unpigmented skin and exposed muscle tissue. In the place of dunes were now hills of swollen lymph nodes, and beyond those were a horizon of mountainous tumors whose peaks occupied a now-cloudless crimson sky. The ancient weapon that spawned all this, its mission now complete, had allowed itself to fully succumb to the whims of nature and fade into extinction…
…until a lone humanoid, after peeling away a layer of skin on the ground with a bone tool to make way for a farm, found something that looked utterly unnatural. It was right there, embedded like a splinter into the webs of musculature beneath the skin that had just been removed. Curiously, the humanoid wrapped both of its hands around the object and pulled. After an ensuing squelch, the object was free and in plain view: a shiny fragment of chrome debris. As the humanoid blinked at its own reflection, a thought that wasn’t its own spawned from something primal in its subconscious and floated to the surface. The work isn’t done.