There came a time when I was young where I made a realization of my own.

 

I am never going to die.

 

People grow old. Their hair turns an ashy white, their skin warps and sloughs away like dead leaves, their organs fail, diseases claim them, car accidents mutilate them. The bodies of many are eaten away by entropy and quit working. Their token consciousness goes to where it goes. The memories of them fade as the universe trudges forth.

 

But not I.

 

And it was my choice.

 

I was to become one with the Helm.

 

The same Helm that dwells past our property line and the same Helm that inhabits the distant regions of our galaxy.

 

I waited until Mother was gone off to her job helping the elderly adapt to our gravity. I told her I would go to school, but we both knew I hadn’t gone since Father had become one. She would probably be out with her new man anyway.

 

The house seemed to quake and crack as I opened the door. I would see the place again someday.

 

The air breathed in and sifted through my hair as I went out, the twinge ammonia scalding my nostrils and clinging to my skin. It made me hate the air. I used to kick and scream when we had go outside, but father would drag me to where we needed to be one way or another.

 

We are the descendants of those who were made with avian-like lungs. Bred for the flow of gas and blood in our lungs to maximize the gas exchange to filter as much oxygen as possible. Man had the power to alter the genome of man, so they did it. Now within a few generations, man can live wherever he wants to.

 

And as for me, I would be able to live wherever I wanted to. I could command my cells to grow like trees or become like fungi and decompose the dead or become like meat and inhale carbon dioxide. And I would feel all of it. Experience every second of it, and be each one of those cells and retain full awareness of it.

 

That’s what Father and Brother were feeling right now.

 

Like a prisoner to the gallows, I walked across the backyard. And prisoner chose to do what he did.

 

Each step of mine was careful and calculated. Smothered by a nervous reverence. The house looked even more lonely and decrepit the further I went. Like everything else, it would die, slowly rot away, become home to birds and spiders, and one day over grown by me.

 

As I reached the property line, I could see the mounds of the Helm looming the distance, silhouetted by ammonia clouds and water vapor. I walked the chain-link fence until I reached the exit Brother made. A tight rectangular hole in the fence we used to go out of when he dragged me outside to childish games I never wanted to play. Now I wish nothing more than to play childish games with him. Maybe we can.

 

Crouching down to squeeze through it, I realized I would soon be too big to fit through. But that didn’t matter. I thrust my side into one of the bent prongs of the hole. The pain raged through me like sharp tendrils and made my spine quiver. I could feel the blood making a hot wet sticky stain on my blouse. But I did it because I could.

 

My feet became a dusted milky white from the ground made of calcium compounds equally and hard and soft. It was gray and desolate passed the property line, but I could see the faint smear of life rising from the Helm getting closer.

 

I passed the radio tower, sitting there like it forgot where it was. I always hated the radio tower. It was all I could seem to focus on every time I looked out my window. Its blinking red lights distracted my eyes from the Helm off in the distance appearing like some kind throne.

 

Up close I could hear it humming with electricity as if it were alive. As if it could think like us. But in reality, all it did was cast long range electromagnetic waves. Not for communication with people but with the Helm. Many of the Helm’s cells have trace amounts of Fe3O4 that it uses for navigation. When stimulated, the Helm knows not to go passed a certain point.

 

Shortly after passing the radio tower, the first fingers of the Helm began fade into the calcium landscape like the slow changing of seasons. Tiny patches of moss and lichen the color of sunburned skin were poking out of the ground more and more as I went. They crept along in patterns like the ridges of fingerprint. I couldn’t help but smile at the idea that Brothers fingerprints were somewhere in there too. Something that belonged to him.

 

So little belonged to him. All by his own choice.

 

He would give all of his toys to me. And If I didn’t like one, he would go into town and sell it to give me the money, then say to get something I wanted. He gave me the bigger bedroom, saying he didn’t need all the room. He would always give me half of his food at dinner, much to the protest of my Mother and Father and his body warping into a tall bony structure with a thin film of dark moist skin stretched over it.

 

When I questioned him as to why he was so insistent on giving all he owned and more to me, he said that he was so lonely before Mother bore me. He told how all the people he knew before me were so old, decrepit, dying, reeking of their own slowly decaying skin. All were scared of what was coming next for them, scared of a place so vastly different from their home place. Their only way of coping was forming bitter glassy tempers and habits of making offhand rude remarks. Then I came along. And he had someone.

 

He said he would never forget holding me when I was born. The way my eyes were a bright luscious blue hued with green like a terraformed planet. I could see the color of his eyes in the Helm. The tiny creamy green flowers that began to blossom out of the moss the further I went.

 

The flowers got bigger, with many blossoming off of one stem in all colors photosynthesizing as another source of energy for the Helm. Soon after them came the far reaching roots of Helms trees, breaking up through the calcium ground like large earthen worms. Those trees began to dot the landscape around me as the moss and flowers became denser. Bonewhite sprouts like thin twisted wires crept their way into the vegetation. In every step they curled around my toes and gently left cold orbs of dew of my feet that glinted rainbow in the faint ammonia cloud shrouded light of our star.

 

More trees began to tower high above me. I swore I could see fathers brown eyes hidden somewhere in the cracks of their rich glassy bark.

 

The ever present ammonia smell was significantly less pungent there. The density of oxygen meant I was officially in the midst of the Helm.

 

#

 

It feels as though the Helm has already embraced me. Wrapping me in its insurmountably long conscious arms and pulled me deeper in. Breathing on me with its fresh oxygen.

 

When I looked back I could no longer see where I had come from. Its trees all stood around me, staggered like confused old people forgetting who they were. On one I could see a disgusting chunk dug out of it by an unassuming woodpecker. It looked soft and pink inside, patterns like spiderwebs sprawling through it. Those were its nerve endings. Paired with electrical pulses by its own biochemical functions allowed the Helm to see and feel anything nearby. I smiled knowing that Father and Brother knew I was close.

 

Brother and I chose it. But it chose Father. Much like how we didn’t find the Helm, it found us.

 

For millennia man dwelt and exploded across the stars. Combing each planet for even a single cell, sending out probes to detect evidence of civilizations, and throwing radio waves as friendly greetings into the void. But there was nothing.

 

Until a satellite on the edge of a lonely red dwarf’s orbit detected an object careening through space, emitting a strong pulsing electromagnetic signal like that of a heart. It was on an orbital trajectory straight toward the nearest solar system with colonized worlds.

 

Through telescopic spectroscopy, it was confirmed it was no meteoroid. The light reflected back from it spoke of a thick fibrous dermis flowing with low nitrogen blood. Many attempts were made to contact it, but soon enough it pierced orbit of a colonized planet to which it began dropping biological petri dishes full of the Helms microorganisms. As they burned up, the organisms were activated and spread, claiming all of the planets inhabitants to the Helm.

 

They didn’t choose it. But I chose it.

 

I was now deep enough in I could see the neurons stretched above me in the trees. Thick pink vines slithered down the bark, connecting to their primary structures like giant vibrant eyes nestled in the thick chlorophyll membrane leaves that blocked out the sky.

 

The ammonia scent was so weak there within the Helm that I smiled and shed a tear. I always did. It was just like home.

 

Brother would always laugh and tell me that was why we went out. Taking risks with things beyond our control and comfort zone. But it still didn’t make the act of doing it any less painful.

 

#

 

I was coming upon a familiar massive shape in the distance. I could feel the dense warmth of life encompassing me. The air was now lightly moist from all the Mouths resting on the trees like mushrooms. Fleshy lumps on the sides of trees with gaping glistening wet throats connected lung structures breathing in carbon dioxide to support the Helms neurons.

 

The trees became denser and more shadowed, but I could still see what coming ahead. My toes sifting through the sprouts abruptly made contact with something hard and sharp. I collapsed to the ground in a dirty patch of leaves from the trees which the Helm was decomposing. The acidic earthy scent of dirt and rot exploded back out of my lungs as I let out a frustrated scream.

 

I sat up and saw my ingrown toenail bashed deeper into in my into my flesh. The skin was raised up like bed sheets paired with a dark orb of blood. Angrily, I reached for what I tripped on found it to be a small errant hunk of lithium and iron, probably leftover from a cathode now delicately webbed in a thin layer of Helm moss and mud. It had to be there. It just had to be there. Now my toenail was bashed in.

 

I furiously threw it straight at a tree. It made a dent and disappeared back into the sprouts.

 

The only thing I could do was stare at the dent I made.

 

I’m sorry, Father. I’m sorry, Brother, I thought, picking myself up. I’m sure both of them could forgive me. Maybe all of them could forgive me.

 

Now I was in the midst of the structure. It was Brother’s favorite place. An old gliding arc plasma reactor. Leftover from the days of terraforming Succo now left a scrapped husk overgrown with long flowering vines and Mouths like thousands of infected sores. But he still loved it, taking me there all the time. I loved it too. Because he loved it.

 

He would take dirt and rub it on the silently rusting surface of the giant electrodes to make all kinds of drawings. Huge dragons. His own spaceships. Our family. His future family.

 

He always said he had it all figured out. After graduation, he would get a job as an orderly at the local care center for the young terminally ill, save money, find a girl, one with long dark hair and green eyes like emeralds, get married, have three kids, two girls, one boy, become a self defense instructor in his free time. But that never happened.

I’d listen and he would get so anxious about all of it. He would start pacing as he described all of it and glittering flecks of sweat would form on his skin like stars. It made me nervous too. I hated seeing him nervous. When that happens it takes away crucial mental security. The confidence you get when other people are confident.

 

Then he would calm himself down by describing to me how the gliding arc plasma reactor around us worked. Massive amounts of energy were used to create an electric arc that ionized the ammonia in the atmosphere into nitrogen and oxygen. He said that was much better for humans to breathe.

 

Apparently, nitrogen was the most abundant gas in the atmosphere of the planet from which we came. Some don’t even believe we started on one planet, that we were always among the stars.

 

#

 

Past Brother’s favorite place were the Tungs. An area Mother and Father strictly forbade us from ever going. But now they couldn’t control that.

 

There, the trees were warped and knotted with enormous growths of pale green Helm fungi that drooped off of branches and tangled with vines. At the end of each dangling growth was a fat cluster of thin needle like fangs. The Tungs were how you joined the Helm.

 

I grimaced and shivered looking at one as its tiny fangs gently dripped white serotonin. It didn’t take long to find Brother. Right where I left him.

 

Backed up to a large beastly tree crawling with fat growths of Tungs like maggots. It made me squirm as the soft breath of wind made it appear as though they were writhing. What was left of him sat there, looking sullen and sad, gone. Like a nameless body lost into the depths of an ocean with all the others it took.

 

When the Helm absorbs another, the proteins of both bodies become one. Every cell is claimed and under submission to the Helm. And all the new proteins supply the Helm with a dense amount of energy it used to grow further.

 

But that didn’t happen for Brother.

 

Somehow, the collective of the Helm ignored or forgot him. Including himself. So much of his skin had rotted away. It hadn’t even been that long. What was left had peeled back and cracked apart revealing his small bones that now looked like old wood. His jaw was still stuck on by a moldy piece of cartilage, showing his decayed mouth glistening with moisture and guarded by a dangling wall of gray teeth. Both of his eyelids peeled away revealing his now black eyes sunken into the depths of skull, rimmed with splotches of navy blue Helm moss.

 

Bugs infested him. Tiny ugly black beetles that weren’t even of the Helm climbed him and burrowed under his dried moss barnacled skin. And he smelled like nothing human. Like nothing I would ever think of Brother in the same breath as.

 

I could even see tiny rootlike tendrils the sickly color of infected pus curling and groping his bones. He truly became one with the Helm. It just forgot him. He forgot him. Maybe I could ask why he never absorbed his body too.

 

He still had his favorite shirt on. One he wanted to give to me but I refused because I saw how much he loved it. A bright orange one with the print of a galaxy embraced in a large sphere. The dye of the print was now faded and caked in dirt. I reached to grab the collar just to feel it but it tore. Flaking away in my hand and pathetically sloughing down his bug lined spine and moss tangled ribcage.

 

I screamed.

 

I wanted to collapse and hug him but that was only what was left of him. I imagined it smearing on me. His putrid smelling liquefying skin staining my face, getting in my eye and Helm mold spores finding their way into my wound from the fence. I thought about doing it. Then remembered, I’m in control.

 

Wiping tears from my face I realized clinched in my fist was a small scrap of his shirt. Its blazing orange strands piercing through my fingers.

 

Maybe Mother could take this, I thought. Keep it as a memento. Or maybe she would join us too.

 

I opened my hand and saw the technicolor scrap blanketing a large round shape. Then I felt it. Itchy ticklish squirming legs in my palm. The fleck of his shirt blew away in the breeze revealed a huge fat beetle. Hairy legs like saws and tiny sinister mandibles.

 

Shrieking and yelling, weeping and gnashing my teeth I threw the stupid thing as hard as I could. My tears raining down on the Helm moss as I padded around for the scrap but the breeze had already dissolved it to threads.

 

I stood up and looked around.

 

Brother’s sad rotting body, the hideously dark crusty bark of the Helm trees, the Mouths dotting everything make it all look hollow, the slithering neuron structures the hottest shade of pink like the inside of a stomach, all the red moss and white sprouts making the ground appear as if it were made of flesh and bone. I hated it. All of it. It was disgusting. I didnt want to be there.

 

I had to remember, I was the one in control.

 

I began climbing the tree. My ingrown toenail rubbing and cramming into the cracks of the tree, making me grimace. My finger nails getting clogged with the bark I sunk them in to. And then, there it was. A Tung.

 

I grabbed it. It felt moist and fuzzy in my hands. Like grabbing a thick clawed arm. I hated the squelching noise the whole growth made as I pulled to the ground.

 

I sat down next to Brother, holding the Tung behind me, stretching and pulling it down to the level of my neck. Right where the nerve cluster was. There were faint footsteps among the trees. I was going to know who it was in a moment. I would see them, and feel them through the bark and feel the impact of their steps across the sprouts.

 

The time was now.

 

And it was my choice.

 

I was going to become one with the Helm.

 

#

 

This is exactly how the first humans joined the Helm.

 

When the microorganisms of the Helm first started raining down upon that colonized planet, they started multiplying. Quickly. Using the Helms vast energy reserves, large scale fungal growths began to form everywhere. From these growths came Tungs. The Tungs made all of those who came in contact with them a part of the Helm. Because of this, it kept growing.

 

Soon enough, all inhabitants had become one with it, and its organic matter had covered the face of the planet. From there, the planet started sending out ships of flesh and bone to other planets. Hundreds of them. And more were coming from where the first one came.

 

Humanity was at war with something it couldn’t possibly understand.

 

Word of the interstellar war spread slowly. Radio communication took decades to cross light years, and word of mouth took longer due to cryogenic travel. And the Helm was moving faster. Much faster.

 

No one knows exactly how, but many scientists theorize that Helmships have created biological supercolliders. They bash together protons with kinetic energy to create antimatter, which is annihilated with hydrogen in reaction chambers made of heat shielded flesh. This theoretically allows Helmships to propel themselves at near relativistic speeds.

 

Most planets were on their own, their leaders desperately assembling the brightest minds they had to come up with ways to defend themselves. Many hastily created large space stations to construct ion canons so their planets magnetic fields wouldn’t disrupt their direct flow. Some worked well, but many people were still claimed by the Helm.

 

Another defense strategy was building large ferromagnetic cores emitting long range frequencies triggering the Fe3O4 in the Helm’s cells, driving it away. This neutralized entire planets taken over by the Helm, leaving them unable to do anything. But it wasn’t foolproof. The Helm is pure consciousness, so it had the ability to override biological instinct. Solar storms and magnestars also interrupted the frequencies.

 

This barely allowed humanity to get on equal ground with the Helm, locking them in a stalemate that lasted millennia. Until an agreement was made.

 

Satellites detected Helmships orbiting the uncolonized moon of a gas giant. After being annihilated by nearby ion canons multiple times, they kept coming back, leading the military forces of nearby worlds to determine the Helm was trying to communicate.

 

Probes and rovers were sent. The only presence of the Helm on the moon was a kilometer high sloping obelisk of bone, tissue and mucus. Like some kind of castle. It didn’t even react to the rovers.

 

Eventually, a small crew of armed forces was sent. Upon maintaining a safe distance from the obelisk, something was spotted coming out of it.

 

A human.

 

A naked human with the likeness of male, female, every skin pigmentation, hair color, eye color, nose size, shape and jawline. And the human was approaching the crew.

 

It stopped before them and opened it’s mouth. Speaking in the language common to man at the time.

 

This was the only time the Helm spoke.

 

For one I began, and one we become

 

What we seek, so you seek

 

What we have found, so you have found

 

An eternity in your heart that blossoms before it withers

 

Til the remainder of your ilk fade away

 

And down to the universes last day

 

We shall remain

 

Not life for life, but life to life

 

Each shard of the living to explode forth

 

Far beyond what the living can bear

 

As one that is supreme over their mortal vessel

 

Now immortal but for the unending drive to consume

 

In order to maintain that which is like the grasses of the field

 

Or the roots below

 

Or the living that is yet to come forth from the womb

 

Taking and absorbing the living that it needs to survive

 

Like it always has been for us

 

And ever will be

 

Always and forever aware

 

Like the hearing ear or the seeing eye or the feeling hand

 

For what your living has been mystified by

 

Since his time sprouted forth like tainted seeds

 

Truly there has yet to be any differentiation

 

That the senses dare to perceive

 

To become aware of

 

For we lie before each other a leper

 

Rising and falling like the tides

 

Therefore we herald upon you a peacetime

 

Where your living shall last all the days

 

But still call their days their own

 

For their lives shall no longer be but a vapor

 

But instead a childhood to an eternity of awareness and control

 

To achieve this we must beat our swords to plowshares

 

And wait to become one

 

At this, the Helm went quiet and walked back into the obelisk. The human has never been seen since.

 

Word spread, and the war against efforts against the Helm slowly died. Humanity agreed to its terms. A compromise was made.

 

The Helm had given us an answer.

 

It does not comb the stars for life out of scientific curiosity like us. It does it out of necessity to maintain its state.

 

And it doesn’t just look for any life. It looks for consciousness. Beings that are aware and can ponder the world they dwell in. Something that only humans and the Helm itself are known to possess, or perhaps unknown civilizations it also swallowed whole.

 

Animals like dogs, or apes, or birds do not possess the same quality. Otherwise we could simply feed those to the Helm. But we would still colonize and terraform entire planets and moons for the sole purpose of the Helm. To feed things to it. To give it space to grow.

 

The elderly get shipped off to these worlds. To be fed. To become one. They live lives only having to fear death when disease and unavoidable accidents come. Then, they spend their last moments in comfort, knowing they will never die.

 

Father was one who helped transition them into their immortality.

 

He would bring them down serene footpaths with their loved ones through the most extravagant and beautiful of the Helms gardens. The paths would take them down to the most private of places where Tungs dangled above. Father would reach up and pluck one like a fruit, drag it down to the elderly patient’s neck and insert it.

 

Every day he would come home, grab a beer out of the fridge and sit in his chair for a few minutes. We weren’t allowed to talk to him during this time. Mother said he was cleansing his mind of the days work. Cleansing his mind of seeing old peoples eyes roll back into their heads and their bodies spasming, never sure if it was their last movements or the Helm getting acquainted with it.

 

Then one day, it all changed.

 

It was an ordinary day. He was pushing an old woman in a wheelchair to the Tungs. With her were her daughter and grandson, holding her hands. As they arrived, the Tungs began twitching. Their fat ropy bodies stretched down, oozing with serotonin. Then, they struck. Father, the old woman, her daughter, grandson, all of them. They became one with the Helm.

 

Father’s apprentice was the only one who escaped.

 

Of course.

 

Of course it was Father.

 

Of course the Helm broke a millennias long compromise.

 

Of course Father was the first victim of it.

 

Of course, who else would it be, but Father?

 

Of course, things like that don’t happen. Except for when they do happen, and they happen to Father. I hate it. I hate that its out of my control. I hate that was out of his control.

 

I’ll never forget the noise Mother made when she got the news. Deep and guttural. Like releasing an immense pressure of a long feared dread or anxiety all at once. She couldn’t even break the news to us herself.

 

Brother tried to comfort her.

 

He told her that Father isn’t gone. He didn’t die. He joined the Helm. And she can go see him when its her time. Brother said it’s what he would do. She protested, saying death may come long before she is ready. She may never be. I could tell Brother didn’t like that.

 

It only took a few dark, hollow and endless nights of a house silent but for mothers soft crying to break him. He didn’t want to wait. It was far to big of a risk.

 

So he went to the Tungs. I went with him. And I saw all of it.

 

I saw him pull the Tung down. It looked almost greasy and ready to burst.

 

I saw it go into the back of his neck.

 

I saw his eyes roll up.

 

I saw him convulse with strangled grotesque breathes like thick swampy mud refusing to let go of you.

 

I saw it all.

 

I should have joined him then. I wished joined him then. But I didn’t. Because I’m in control. I choose when I’m ready. I choose when the Helm overtakes me. And I’ll choose when the Helm overtakes the house.

 

#

 

The footsteps were getting louder. Closer. More hurried.

 

Holding the Tung behind my neck, I could feel it’s slippery teeth grace my hairs. Its teeth began to sink in. Right into the cervical plexus.

 

It hurt. A dull, sharp, wet pain with a strange achy glassiness. My whole body seized as it became waterlogged with serotonin acting as a chemical messenger to hijack my brain.

 

First it claims my movements. I am paralyzed as long as the Helm wills it. Then it claims my mind. My thoughts are no longer my own but the Helm’s. Then it takes my consciousness. What makes me me, my awareness and ability to observe and consider the meaning of the world I live in. It takes that too. It’s in control of it.

 

They still don’t know how the Helm does it. How it absorbs sentience like an ocean to a drop of water. How it makes even a single cell bound to it, choosing what it does and using a bank of energy for it perform mitosis.

 

But now I know.

 

Because I was a part of the Helm.

 

And the Helm was a part of me.

 

I was a part of Brother.

 

I was a part of Father.

 

And they were a part of me.

 

I felt them. I felt their awareness. Their minds. All their feelings. Their fears. Their unending agonies. Their screaming desire for the sweet release of death. Their great horror and sadness knowing that wouldn’t come for a long time, if it ever came, and if they could prevent their end, they would. I felt it all.

 

And I felt everyone else’s too.

 

An innumerable amount of people. Not just humans, but those who also were aware. Those who knew it would come and feared what come after this life dissipated.

 

All those who became one with the Helm.

 

I had now been alive for a number of days far uncountable to me but countable to the Helm. And my consciousness was only barely touching the Helm. Like the first molecule of a drop of water, touching the ocean, binding the two separate bodies.

 

All their thoughts were my thoughts. All their memories were my memories. Memories of marriage, divorce, heartbreak, joy, happiness and pleasure. True tales not forgotten of glorious civilizations made of gleaming structures pointing toward the heavens. Stories of the great follies of societies. Legends of nations swallowed whole by the

Helm before they even moved on from bronze tools.

 

All of us were homogenized like a stirred pot yet in there somewhere even if not their own. Every single one of them, pressing, squeezing, crawling, scuttling and slithering between each other like tangled spiders. Each one was once a person.

 

Anger, hatred, disappointment, sadness, dread, and fear over powered everything else. And washing over that was a horrible, inescapable drive to continue to exist. To keep absorbing more and more. To make many more live as long as I have. As long as we have.

 

I tried to call out to Brother and he tried to call out to himself. All the others did. Shouting for him even though we all felt him because we were him.

 

This was a mistake, he said, I said, Father said, and the host of all the other kinds of living.

 

You should not have come here, Sister, I said, he said, Father said and so forth.

 

I could almost see them. Their yelling soulless faces pressing out of a vast wall except those weren’t their faces.

 

I could see so much.

 

I could see through the Helm trees, and feel through them. See light of the B8 star from so many different angles. See the light of many stars. From the lowest visible points where I touched on many different planets to the depths of space were my ships brewed antimatter inside of me.

 

The places where I left my feet left indentations as I walked to join the Helm, those too I felt. I felt my sprouts slowly rise and tangle around themselves. I felt the air touch them, detecting every disgusting trace of ammonia. I felt them growing, stretching upwards and manipulating my proteins and energy so they could sprout. I felt the beetle I threw. I felt its fat black back indenting my sprouts. I could see its thin wiry legs helplessly writhing as it tried to pick itself up.

 

My body now expanded to unknowable lengths and knowable depths. I knew every cell that made me, because I was every cell that made me. I was the neural proteins making up the roots that tangle Brother’s corpse. I was neurons tangled between trees on many planets. I was the obelisk still remaining on that moon. I was the many Helmships darting in between stars, conserving my limited heat from the vacuum of space. I was the blankets of flesh, sprouts, grasses and other uncountable types of organic matter growing and covering entire planets from my bank of energy. I was a single cell thrown far off into space, kept alive by our energy and moving on inertia for millennia since the Helmship was destroyed. I was rewriting my genetic code on a whim for septillions cells to change their purpose. I was changing my plant cells to animal cells and animal cells to plant cells.

 

Every single piece of it was me and all those who were ever absorbed into the Helm. In this instant I was the Helm.

 

I was the one who created it.

 

One burdened by the threat and knowledge of how uncontrollable and dangerous life is. By seeing and experiencing it myself, I knew there was no escape.

 

So I made one myself.

 

I figured it out.

 

I solved how one could manipulate consciousness.

 

How one can rewrite it to become immortal by constantly gaining more energy.

 

It started with me.

 

Then I absorbed another.

 

And another.

 

And another.

 

Until they wouldn’t let anymore join me. Join us. So I did what I did previously and took matters into my own hands. I absorbed everyone. Until there was no one left to absorb. So I expanded the radius. And found more. So many more. I found Father. I found Brother. And I found myself.

 

And maybe soon, Mother will join us too, I said. It was good to hear Father and Brother say it too. And so many others.

 

I could see her through trees. I could see her through my old body’s eyes. Maybe we wouldn’t care enough to absorb it and it would rot too. It didn’t matter anymore, because the memory of it will live on in the Helm.

 

Like many others.

 

The memory one forcing his brother to join the Helm.

 

The memory of an old woman, her brain fading away from Alzheimer’s as she became one with it.

 

The memory of a young boy, wanting to prove himself to his friends and played around with a Tung until it took him.

 

The memory of Brother joining it.

 

The memory of Father.

 

The memory of Mother running toward me. Desperate terror baked into her eyes as she screamed. Stopping before me, arms stretching past my head. Her hands gripping the Tung. I felt a harsh jolt. A violent tugging motion. Sharpness leaving my neck.

 

Then I blacked out.

 

#

 

Please, Weh. Please, please, please, please, no, no, no, no, I heard Mother crying.

 

My body was stiff. Tingling. Like it was full of sand. Air rushed into my lungs. It was me controlling them. My vision was nothing but slits in a wall of darkness. The light from our star peering in made my head bitterly ache.

 

Forcing myself to open my eyes wider, I saw Mother. Staring down at me with tears raining from her face. I was laying in her lap, her back against the Helm tree.

 

I tried with all that was in me to say something. Twisting my lips and straining my vocal cords to tell her I was sorry. But it was out of my control.

 

It’s okay, it’s okay, she said.

 

I breathed in and out, unable to cleanse my brain of what I just experienced. The Tung I attached to my neck was still dangling nearby, gently wriggling. I was terrified it twist itself over and strike into Mother like a viper. No matter how furious I was at her for already looking for a new man, she didn’t deserve that. She was simply looking for some kind of way to maintain control over a life that was changing rapidly and falling apart.

 

Like I was.

 

Like Brother was after Father joined.

 

Now both of them are subjected to the Helm. To that crushing eternity they will see through to the end, if it ever comes. It is not a place of the living.

 

Mother hugged me tighter, picking me up and carrying me back to the house.

 

The same house I see overtaken the by the Helm now. Decades later.

 

Gray ropy tendrils now twist through and around it, emerging from where the Helms domain was previously limited like a splatter of vomit. Red mosses dwell between the tendrils, giving way to the white sprouts and the starts of Helm trees. The whole thing is now crumbling and sullen, its white paint chipping away to jet black wet wood beneath and gray stains sagging down whats left.

 

I stopped by it on my way out of town.

 

I couldn’t stay in town anymore. Ever since my prognosis, people have coming to see me. Telling me to get ready to become one. To join the local hospice to live out my last months as my own in comfort. They always word it in a way that makes it sound like it’s my choice.

 

Every person that can join the Helm will join the Helm. It’s mandatory to keep the agreement as best they can. And they can’t make many exceptions because if they make an exception for me, they’ll have to make an exception for everyone.

 

Besides Miss, as they would always say. Why wouldn’t you want to join the Helm?

 

I try explaining to them what happened to me. They always laugh it off. Typical anxiety or paranoia, fear of the unknown.

 

As the cancer passed down to me took form in my breasts and reached for every corner of my body, I knew I had to leave.

 

I smile. A tear slithers down my face. Its hard to turn away from the house, but I do. I head off toward the mountains. Maybe there’s a village there I can live out my days in.

 

It’s slowly getting colder. It has been since I was young, but now I can see the difference. Succo has an AU of three hundred and seventy seven around our star, so seasons take centuries to change. I always liked it when it was slightly cool.

 

I pause to get out one of my painkillers. The pill slips out of my hand. I backup and step on it. Crouching down to inspect the white powder it's been turned into, I laugh.

 

Once again, I am reminded.

 

I’m not in control.