I think I need some help, read what I have to say and see what you think.
I’m a college student attending UCI, majoring in biology. I was out on a field trip for one of my classes recently, we were cataloging the local flora and fauna... And I found a most peculiar thing: a jar with all but one dead insect in it, with some kind of symbol etched on the outside. It was unreadable, weathered from being exposed to the elements for so long, I guess. Anyway, this still living bug was like nothing I’d ever encountered before, so I took it home with me to see if I could figure out what it was.
I consulted various entomology books, like the Kaufman Field Guide and the National Wildlife Federation Field Guide. Nothing. I checked insect related subreddits and consulted google with a reverse image search of a photo I took, but again turned up nothing. I even showed it to my professors, they were stumped as well.
Everything else about it looked like an ordinary grub worm, six legged with a fat oblong abdomen, only it was a sickly shade of purple, and seemed to have a faint glow. Another odd thing about it was the smell. Ordinarily grubs don’t give off a smell, unless you crush them. This one though, smelled sweet, like an apple. Too sweet even, and eerily inviting, like you couldn’t get enough of the aroma. I chalked all this up to to some genetic mutation, a quirk of nature. Very unusual. It unnerves me to think about it now, but at the time I was too enamored by the idea of having discovered a new species to pay heed to the warning in my gut. I had to keep it for further study. These odd traits weren’t even the most interesting thing about this worm. That I would learn later.
Thinking this grub was like other grubs with its diet, I fed it leftover vegetable and fruit scraps from my refrigerator and pantry. This seemed to go well for a while. The bug continued to look healthy even for the unusual specimen that it was.
No sooner than I had started feeding it did strange things start to happen in my life, uncanny and remarkably convenient coincidences cropped up almost everywhere I went. I found winning scratch off lottery tickets, not just once, but on several occasions, just lying on the street or tucked in books I checked out from the library. There were even winning sweepstakes letters and phone calls from the likes of the CDC and Monsanto looking to hire, all for prizes or positions that I never sought out in the first place. Also, a rival for the grant program I applied to last semester suddenly fell ill and withdrew from the program and I qualified in their stead! It was surprising. Fortune seem to turn in my favor.
The weirdness didn’t stop there, it grew in intensity very quickly, transforming into something much more than repeat favorable happenstance. I found I could make things happen. The first time I noticed this change in me was during a lab session for my thesis work on improving silica absorption in plants to increase crop yields.
I’ll spare you from the more minute details of the work I do, but basically my colleagues and I work with the seeds of various crops, corn, wheat, potato, rice, etc. It is my job in this project to use a microscope to take pictures of the cell matrices of genetically modified seeds to see how well they absorb calcium from their environment. It was during one of these photo taking sessions that I noticed something strange. Well, two somethings. First, the treacle smell of fruit. And second, I observed the usual behavior of silicon moving through the cell walls, but unlike so many times before, what appeared inside the cells was markedly different. It was calcium! Somehow in traveling through the cell membranes the silicon had transmuted into calcium before my eyes, something that is supposed to be utterly impossible at the low energy scales involved in biology.
Needless to say, I repeated my observations to confirm this was not a fluke, and time and again the same result appeared under my microscope, silicon transmuting into calcium. Now I needed independent confirmation, so I had one of my colleagues on the project see if they could also observe these changes, and it turns out they could not, not even once. Unusual, it only occured when I observed the cell matrices. What was going on here? Somehow I remember the previous week or so of sudden good fortune and put two and two together. I was the cause of the transmutation! Astounding.
Unfortunately, before I could capitalize on this “ability,” things rapidly turned sour for me. Academically, socially, financially, and personally. My colleague, the one I asked for help from, got me booted from the program for “evidence tampering.” Friends and faculty stopped talking to me, I became a social leper. The money I won and the job offers, all of it went up in smoke. The winning tickets were suddenly and mysteriously invalid, and I owed the lottery money for anything I had spent. Any attempt to call back the companies that offered me positions with them previous, now did not even know who I was, that I was never even considered. The worst of it was the personal stuff.
With all that had happened, my relationship with my girlfriend went completely upended, fights over money, my growing depression from my academic, social, and financial losses, and my inadequacies as a partner. I was no longer good enough for her, so she too left me worse off. I didn’t understand why any of this was happening to me, until at my lowest point, with a gun in my hand pointed at my temple, ready to give into hopelessness, I smelled the distinct scent of apples. Only now it was more bitter and sour than sickly sweet. That thing. That was the cause of the fortunes and the compounding miseries. Hatred replaced despair, and I went to where I kept the grubby little shit, then proceeded to beat my fist into it until it was a gooey pulpy mess of purple glowing goo. The fruity aroma was gone. I thought that was the end of it. I was wrong.
I felt a sense of relief thinking the source of my present dilemma was finally gone. All the bullshit and pain I’d dealt with up until then seemed to dissipate, granting me a reprieve. I crashed. Hard. Right into unconsciousness. At first, anyway.
I was dreaming of nothing, floating in empty space, too exhausted even in my mental landscape to conjure up fanciful sights and sounds, when the familiar and intoxicating smell of too sweet apples returned. And with it, a most awful vision. A massive grub worm, an over-sized replica of the one I previously smashed to bits was all consuming of my perceptions. The chittering sound emanating from its mandibles permeated every corner of my mind, filling me up with a most oppressive inescapable feeling of doom. Its ugly black head menacingly large and growing ever larger, as if to consume me whole. It communicated with me in this way, with feelings and nightmarish sights and sounds. It was raging, infuriated, dissatisfied. Eventually, I understood. What I did wrong. I awoke, the oppressive grasp of the worm still ever present. I knew… I know what I must do.
I hid the remains of the worm and its container off the north side of the Inner Ring Road of Aldrich Park in the shrubbery with magenta flowers next to a lamp post. Maybe one of you will have better luck than I did.
Submitted October 03, 2016 at 06:43AM by Polar_Starburst http://ift.tt/2dCyARg nosleep
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