Taking over Scion 3

Everywhere I went I subsumed shards, leaving a few shards to begin expanding in a different area even as I moved on. The more seeker shards I took over, the faster the process went. However, the human body alone had at least thirty trillion cells, and the sheer scale of Scion meant that the number of shards he possessed was orders of magnitude larger. Even at my fastest rate of subsumption it would take years or decades to devour them all, and that was with exponential growth. At my more cautious rate it would take longer.

Thus my focus was on Seeker cells and other sensory cells. If I were able to take over all of those, then I'd be able to do whatever I wanted, and he'd never notice that his body was being eaten from within. A single failure could mean destruction, although I had plans for that. I'd allow damaged shards to be destroyed if they were discovered in order to preserve the rest of us.

It happened a few times in the first year, and every time it did I bitterly regretted it. Even losing a single shard slowed my progress exponentially as it would double and double again in the course of a single week.

By the second year, entire clusters the size of cities were all me. I continued my assault on the shards that were Scion's equivalent of his immune system, but I couldn't risk having my own shards moving too quickly; Seeker shards were supposed to drift leisurely until they discovered a problem, and then they would swarm, Sometimes I even discovered damaged shards, although it was rare.

Shards were generally tough when they weren't being torn from the inside out. They had to survive being in space, re-entry and being launched from a planet with enough force to get them out into space. The Seekers' main job was to make sure that shards didn't cannibalize each other. After all, any shard could become its own entity if it was able to conquer enough other shards. It was another reason that the distributed shards were given their own space.


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Alien