Taking over Scion 4

By the fifth year the mass of the shards I'd subsumed would have covered North America, even though they were much more widely distributed than that in small clumps no larger than towns and cities spread out across a quarter of the globe.

I was a good portion of Scion's sensor grid in the North American quadrant too; I could have allowed a meteor to kill us, and Scion wouldn't have noticed until the atmosphere lit on fire. I didn't, both because of the risk of paradox and because I was fairly certain Scion would be able to survive a meteor the size of the one that destroyed the dinosaurs.

It was slow, methodical boring work, being a cancer, and I found myself having to cut myself away from everything I'd known before. A human being would have been destroyed by the unrelenting sameness followed by unrelenting moments of terror. I became emotionless to deal with it, and in some ways my mind began to shut down except for those parts I needed to do my job.

Eventually everything started to blur together. I lost track of time; on Scion's world there was nothing to mark its passage. There was no changing of the leaves on the trees, no birds flying south for the winter. There was only the shortening and the lengthening of the days, and I'd stopped paying attention to that after the ninth year. If the days were warmer or cooler I couldn't tell. There was no rain because every ocean was covered in flesh.

***

Alien