04/16/20 – Needing a Host

Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, April 16, 2020.

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I feel like a plain button-up shirt might go well with the symbiont.

11 Comments

  1. Pibbles

    “We went to space to chase after bobble-headed, parent-snatching, murderous puppy aliens and you are questioning a talking sweater?

    Back me up talking coyote….oh wait, thats right, we left him with the Talking Storage.” >:|

  2. Rikard

    So many innuendos (and innuendon’ts!) about Tesfay, the symbiont and going to bed.

    Just imagine the possible conversations his shipmates can overhear from his bedroom. Or bathroom. Or trying to remove it: “This is where I get you off!”

    Ba-dum-tish.

  3. Pete Rogan

    SYMBIONT SYMBIONT SYMBIONT SYMBIONT SYMBIONT SYMBIONT— I’m sorry, it’s a reflex.

    This thing is already in Tesfay’s nervous system. I don’t know what else it might be feeding on, but what symbionts usually want from their host is transportation. This thing is trying to get someplace else. For whatever purpose, it’s keeping to itself. Makes me wonder what it came here for, and what it got when it did. And how it managed to separate itself from its host. Because I bet the host didn’t have much to say about the matter, and may have been happy to see it gone.

    Heaven help us if it’s after something the puppy-people want or need. That will tend to rush things for reasons we’re not likely to discover… not before something awful happens.

    1. Pete Rogan

      There are three levels of symbiosis: Mutual benefit, commensalism (where one benefits but the other neither gains nor loses) and parasitism. Given that two of the three are at best neutral to the host, I do not see a great deal of hope here. The situation is not helped by the symbiont being sentient. I presume that the symbiont in that case knows what it wants and why, and why it should conceal what it’s getting from the arrangement until it has it. Notice that the symbiont has said not a word about what it might want, nor the cost to the host. Therefore I treat it like a gun to the back, something you can’t ignore but you’d better be aware of where it’s steering you and what it says, because you might not get anything else out of it until it’s prize time — for it, not for the host.

      Is this relationship clownfish-sea anemone? Shark-remora? Or more aphid-Buchnera? Note that for that last, parasitism is a given, only it’s not between the two species. Stranger things, Horatio, much stranger.

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