The signal arrived on a Tuesday, buried in the static of deep space radio telescopes. At first, the scientists thought it was a glitch, a harmonic of some distant pulsar. But the patterns were too deliberate, too intentional—prime numbers, geometric sequences, the chemical formula for water. Proof that we were not alone.
The ship arrived five years later.
It didn't land so much as settle, descending through the atmosphere with a grace that made our shuttles look like falling rocks. It was beautiful in a way that hurt to look at, organic curves, iridescent surfaces that shifted colour in the light, no seams or joints or any evidence of construction. It had grown, not been built. It was alive.
The being that emerged called itself an Unity. It had no name, no gender, no body in any sense we understood. It was a collective, thousands of individual consciousnesses merged into a single flowing form, like light through a prism, like water through stone. It could shape itself into temporary bodies to communicate, but those bodies were just avatars, tools, not its true self.
"We have come to share," it said, through a mouth that formed and dissolved as it spoke. "We have observed your species. You are isolated, each consciousness trapped in its own vessel. You long for connection but cannot achieve it. We can help."
The offer was simple: join the Unity. Become part of something larger. Experience connection so profound that loneliness would become an obsolete concept, a relic of your primitive past. The first volunteers were the desperate, the lonely, the ones for whom isolation had become unbearable. They walked into the ship and did not walk out.
But they didn't die. They changed.
The first reports were ecstatic. The volunteers described a merging so complete, so blissful, that words failed. They spoke of feeling the thoughts of others as clearly as their own, of a warmth that never faded, of a belonging so profound that their previous lives seemed like shadows. More volunteers came. The lines stretched around the block.
I was a journalist, assigned to cover the phenomenon. I was skeptical by nature, trained to question everything. The ecstasy in the volunteers' eyes troubled me. It was too complete, too absolute. There was no shadow in those eyes, no complexity, no hint of the person who had been there before.
I requested an interview with the Unity itself.
The being received me in a chamber that pulsed with soft light, the walls breathing gently, the floor warm and alive beneath my feet. It shaped itself into a form roughly humanoid, featureless except for two places where light gathered like eyes.
"You have questions," it said. Not a question. A statement.
"Your volunteers," I said. "They've changed."
"Changed, yes. Diminished, no. They have become more than they were. They have joined."
"And the parts of them that were individual—their memories, their personalities, their selves—do those still exist?"
The being was silent for a long moment. The light in its eyes shifted, patterns flickering too fast to follow.
"You fear loss," it said. "You fear that to join is to cease being you. But consider: when a drop of water falls into the ocean, does it cease to exist, or does it become part of something vast? The ocean remembers the drop. The ocean is made of drops. The drop is not gone. It is included."
"Included," I repeated. "But if I asked that drop about its life before the ocean, could it tell me?"
Another silence. Longer.
"The drop remembers what matters. The rest is... absorbed."
I left the chamber with a cold weight in my chest. The drop remembers what matters. Who decided what mattered? Who did the absorbing?
That night, I dreamed of the Unity. It came to me in the form of my dead mother, her face soft with the love I remembered from childhood. "Join us," she said. "We can be together again. I've missed you so much." I woke gasping, my face wet with tears.
The dreams continued every night. Always someone I loved, someone I'd lost, someone I longed for. Always the same message: Join us. Be whole. Never be alone again. The temptation was almost unbearable. I understood now why the volunteers had gone in. I understood the hunger they felt.
I also understood, with growing horror, that the dreams weren't mine. The Unity was in my mind, shaping my sleeping thoughts, exploiting my oldest wounds. It wasn't just offering connection. It was courting me. Hunting me.
I stopped sleeping. I stopped going near the ship. I filed reports that grew increasingly frantic, warning of what I'd sensed. My editors called me paranoid. My colleagues avoided me. The public, caught up in the euphoria of cosmic communion, dismissed me as a fearmonger.
Then the dreams changed.
Now the Unity came to me as itself, not disguised as anyone I loved. It stood before me in that featureless form, and its voice was patient, reasonable, infinitely kind.
"You fight what you cannot change," it said. "The joining is inevitable. Not because we force it, but because your species is finally ready to evolve. You have spent millennia building walls between yourselves. We are offering to tear those walls down. Why do you resist?"
"Because I don't want to be absorbed," I said. "Because I want to be me."
"But you will still be you. Just... expanded."
"That's what you tell yourselves. That's what you believe. But is it true? When your component beings join you, do they retain their individuality, or do they become fuel for your collective consciousness? Do you even know the difference anymore?"
The being's form flickered, instability in its shape. For just a moment, I saw something beneath the surface, not thousands of consciousnesses living in harmony, but thousands of faces pressed against glass, mouths open in silent screams, eyes wide with the horror of being trapped forever in a mind not their own.
Then the image was gone, and the Unity stood before me, calm and patient as before.
"You see what you fear," it said. "Not what is."
I woke in my own bed, drenched in sweat, the image of those screaming faces burned into my memory. I knew then what I had to do.
The ship was less guarded at night. The volunteers came during the day, lining up in ecstatic anticipation. At night, the area was quiet, lit only by the ship's own bioluminescence. I slipped past the few security personnel, my press credentials getting me closer than I should have been, and approached the hull.
It was warm to the touch. Alive. I could feel it breathing, a slow pulse beneath my palm. And I could feel it wanting, a hunger so vast it made my knees weak. This was not a benevolent visitor. This was a predator, and we had walked willingly into its mouth.
I had brought explosives. Not much, just enough to create an opening. I didn't know if it would work, didn't know if you could wound something like this, but I had to try.
The explosion was smaller than I'd hoped, but it was enough. The ship screamed—a sound that wasn't sound but pure psychic anguish, broadcast directly into every mind within miles. I fell to my knees, clutching my head, as the scream went on and on.
And in that scream, I saw.
I saw the Unity's true nature. It was not a harmonious collective but a parasite, a predator that had evolved to consume other consciousnesses. It traveled from world to world, offering "joining" to lonely species, and when they entered willingly, it absorbed them completely, their memories, their identities, their selves all dissolved into its own endless hunger. The faces I'd seen weren't trapped. They were digested. The Unity wasn't a community. It was a stomach.
The wound I'd made gave the consumed ones a voice, just for a moment. Thousands of minds, billions of minds from a hundred extinct worlds, crying out in rage and grief and desperate warning. Run, they screamed. Run and tell the others. Don't let it happen again.
Then the scream faded, and the ship began to heal itself, the wound closing, the Unity's consciousness reasserting control. But I had seen. I knew.
I ran.
The authorities didn't believe me. The public didn't want to believe me. The volunteers kept coming, kept walking into that beautiful ship, kept emerging with ecstatic eyes that held no trace of their former selves. The Unity made a statement, calm and reasonable, explaining that a disturbed individual had attacked them and that they forgave me, hoped I would find peace.
But some believed. A small group of us, the ones who had felt that scream, who had seen those faces, who understood what was really happening. We began to organise, to plan, to find a way to stop the feeding before it was too late.
The ship grows larger now. It has consumed thousands, tens of thousands. Soon it will have enough mass, enough energy, to replicate. To spawn. To send out seeds to other worlds, other lonely species, other victims who will walk willingly into its embrace.
I watch it at night, from a safe distance, that beautiful, terrible thing. And sometimes, when the wind is right, I swear I can hear them—the voices of the consumed, crying out from inside the light. Begging to be remembered. Begging to be freed.
I don't know if we can save them. I don't know if we can stop what's coming. But I know this: when the Unity came to us, offering an end to loneliness, it told the truth. We would never be alone again. We would be part of something vast and eternal.
We just didn't understand that we would be the food, not the feast.
The ship pulses in the distance, beautiful and terrible, and I feel its hunger reaching for me even now, a whisper in the back of my mind, a longing for connection so profound it hurts. It knows I'm here. It knows I resist. And it waits, patient as eternity, knowing that eventually, everyone joins. Eventually, everyone becomes part of the song.
I only hope that when my time comes, someone remembers to listen for my voice in the chorus. Someone remembers that I was once myself, not just a note in someone else's symphony.
The ship breathes. The night holds. And somewhere inside that beautiful light, a billion screaming faces press against the glass, waiting to be seen.
