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This is the beginning to a story I have been working on for awhile. I hope anyone who stumbles accidentally onto this blog will take the time to read and comment. Enjoy :)

He came back to our home, but it was no longer our home. Long had it been deserted by us, long ago had we picked up all we had and left all we knew. Now there it was, emptied of us, and of everything familiar. It was being mined; slowly taken away to other parts of the galaxy to where we were now living, where it could be put to better use. Conflicts were common in the new frontier we had forged for ourselves among the stars. How we thought we would be any better there is a mystery to be solved. The only place that seemed to remain untouched by the wars that raged in the galaxy was Earth. Nobody wanted it. All that came from Earth was rock, rock and bone.

Why he came to Earth was a mystery to me, but then again, I really wasn’t on a need to know basis. I worked on the mining outpost, there was only one mining outpost and it spanned the entire globe, slowly eating away at Earth’s few remaining resources. Enshrouded in a thick dark cloud and intense heat that would have seemed otherworldly to me had I lived two millennia ago. The lights of the mine’s massive equipment illuminated the clouds, changing them from a dark grey to a luminescent purple. This was Earth, this is what we did to it.

I watched him walk through the heavy outer doors and into the security bay. I have to admit I was curious. What could he have done to get sent here? It wasn’t very often that we got anyone new to the outpost, and especially anybody that looked like him, clean shaven and healthy, unlike the usual riff-raff that usually shuffled through those doors, and he was alone. He was on a mission and I knew it, but what kind of mission would bring him here among us? Others would tell me I was paranoid, but I knew that wasn’t it, I knew there was something else going on. It took my constant inquiring but we were soon told by the chairman that he was here serving time for grand larceny and that he had had experience mining on another planet and that was why he was here but I could tell that this was just a cover. That was my take on the situation. Maybe I was just imagining it. Maybe I was just longing for some excitement after being stuck on the outpost my whole life. I had my doubts at times, but deep down I knew something was out of place.

He mostly kept to himself for the first few days, only coming out to eat, and then going back to who knew where or what. This confused me, although not that much as I suspected that there was something else going on anyway, but most of the workers on the mine worked with many others and he was always working by himself. It shouldn’t be this way, that is what I kept telling myself.

I don’t know why, but for some reason the guys were wary of him, they weren’t usually afraid of anything but something about him didn’t seem right to them. I used this as a chance to assert my own theories on the matter, but the guys wouldn’t take to them.

After about three months I learned his name, a process that normally takes about a half hour. This only further confirmed my suspicions. He had a task to complete, and I was going to find out what it was.

fin

Rated PG-13 for scary images and intense, perilous situations and for ickyness

This was filling up my head one day after an hour long afternoon nap. It's kind of experimental

I was part of an elite military team that had achieved near celebrity status in the New Frontier known as Space. The need for militaristic might had suddenly become more urgent than ever with the advent of the worms. They were everywhere now, threatening the existence of new settlements everywhere. As the worms became more and more of a threat in the early part of the 32'nd century, more and more elite teams of soldiers began sprouting up everywhere and I was on the best team of all. There were four of us, and we were stars, giving demonstrations and appearing in ads more often that we were on our missions. They feared we were getting rusty, so they sent us back out. The bombing of the worm moons where the pests lived had yielded little results and the consensus among the so called "professionals" was that we needed to infiltrate the hives in small tactical groups... this was our job. After a long absence from the reality of battle, we were heading back into the fight. The colony's saw us off with announcements and hopes for our good fortune and we left as heroes, even though the job was far from over.

Nobody knew exactly how an infiltration would fare... nobody had ever attempted it before. The worm nests appeared as big red hills as we approached them. We thought that they were mindless and would not notice us coming, they only did what they had to survive and everything they had was purely biological and none of it seemed very advanced technologically. we landed our small craft near a circular opening in the top of one of the hills and climbed off of our ship. we soon learned that the worms got around in their home worlds in much the same manner as our esophagus gets food to our stomachs, a biological tube that pushed anything that touched it into whatever chamber it was connected to at the other end. We grabbed out gear and stepped into the tube, which we labeled a Transport Biotube on the spot. Once inside, we took a minute to examine our surroundings. The worms seemed unaware of our presence and we were optimistic that our mission would be met with success. We were supposed to locate and eliminate whatever the worms fed off of, they're source of nutrition. We were told to just follow the veins in the structures and that would lead us to the nutritional source. It turned out to be much harder than we had anticipated; worms we had not encountered on previous exploits inhabited the bowels of the structures. White worms hung from the ceiling, if we touched them, they put a poison on us that slowly numbed our feeling.

It was here that we came across him. A man, bleached blond wearing a white T-shirt that was stained with blood and dirt. His green pants had holes it the knees and he had yellow goggles on his face and an AR strapped to his back. He said he had been part of an earlier expedition that had attempted to penetrate through the dense nests of creatures that were clinging to the ceiling overhead. The rest of his crew were dead and had since been devoured by the cretins, leaving behind gear and weaponry. Strangely, he didn't seem to be too emotional about the whole ordeal but we allowed him to guide us through the mazes, since he knew them better and seemed to want revenge on the worms.

The ordeal was relatively uneventful until we picked up Simon, that was his name, and our weapons began to come into play more and more frequently. We began running into creatures we had a hard time killing and we began to run out of ammunition but we pressed on anyway, hoping that we would soon reach our target and destroy the vermin forever. Simon began to act funny, he would appear to lose his balance at times, we all figured it was from dehydration or fatigue. Had we known what was going on inside of his head we would have put him out of his misery as soon as we found him, but we didn't. We followed him, none of us even dreaming that Simon had plans that were vastly different than ours.

He led us into a Transport Biotube where, one by one, our team disappeared inside. We came out at the other end and discovered it was a dead end, and it was also infested with hanging worms. We were nervous, but Simon took charge and instructed us to spread out against the walls. I noticed him twitch, then it hit me, but it was too late. Simon made a mad dash for the Biotube and dove inside. We rushed to the tube, but it sealed up.

We were trapped and low on ammo. We would die in there, and simon would live on to do the same thing to the next squad of soldiers that came along to save humanity. I don't know how we didn't see it before, Simon had been infected with the worm... and it controlled him, and told him to destroy us, wich he had. We would not escape, and with the worm sensing our fear and isolation, we would soon be destroyed.