I was born in a scientist's chest cavity. Due to no fault of my own, I burst from his rib cage, ending his life prematurely.

My earliest memory is one of running from tunnel to tunnel inside a vast research complex, trying to locate the female who birthed me.

Since everyone in my species is of the egg laying variety, everyone is a mother. Therefore, technically, I came from a single parent home. This is not to garner any sympathy. I do not expect any. I am just stating a fact.

I didn't know my father very well. I just remember mom telling me to eat every part of him so I can grow up big and strong. Under her watchful eye, I did what I was told. I devoured every part, including the bones and marrow.

My mother was beautiful.

I didn't say anything funny.

I'd tell you what I thought of your appearance, but I, unlike you, have manners.

By the way, it's a myth that I can't actually see. I see very well. Under the hooded dome that serves as my brain casing, I have three eyes: one in the center for heat vision, and two normal ones.

Our domes are not, in fact, opaque, but rather like the one way mirrors they have on your `cop shows.' So when I talk about beauty, I'm not just talking about smell or sound quality, though mom was pretty wonderful on that front, too.

My mom was sleek, muscular and graceful, with a glossy slime sheen unparalleled by any other. I admired her poise, her charm, her self confidence.

Her face was a healthy obsidian color, her features beetle-like, and she had a way of distending her jaw and extending her second mouth that really made me smile.

We were close, but I didn't have a family like you understand it. It was more like a pack. Still, we all cared deeply for one another.

Maybe not so much for the little things we impregnate with larvae.

When my life began, I wasn't much to look at, just a small banana shaped creature with tiny hands, fangs and a long whiplike tail.

After I ate my first human, head to foot, I didn't need to eat for three months. Instead, I just rode on mother's shoulders as she galloped majestically through the strange labyrinth of steel boxes your people called a building, taking in all the sights.

By the time I got bigger, I probably knew more about the layout of that building than the architects who designed it.

My first real kill was a German shepherd. I actually preferred eating it to the fatty meat of my host body, and it kept me full for another month.

It turned out the dog was often the sole guardian of something called a `baby', a small micro version of your adults, so when I got hungry again, mom encouraged me to eat that one as well.

When I saw it sleeping peacefully in its crib, I balked. The round cherubic face warmed me to the core, so much, in fact, that I became adverse to eating what she called `hoomans' after that, and would subsist on nothing but rats and bugs and laboratory animals for a long time.

During this time, I got larger, and as I grew, I became hungrier and hungrier, and mom insisted that I break down and eat another `hooman.'

As the hunger grew too great, I finally agreed with her, though I still refused to eat the baby.

Instead, I ate something called `Reverend.'

Ever since I had finished my first host body and rode mom around the facility, the peculiarities of hooman philosophy and related practices tantalized me with its sweet scent. I was enraptured by their music, and would make mother pause outside the researchers' doors so I could listen to their strange melodies with their seemingly incomprehensible subjects. I heard the song about the Sweet Little Sixteen, and the Hot Rod Lincoln, and sometimes The Mighty Wind. I didn't know what any of these things meant, but they stirred my heart and filled me with a yearning for that new and different world so unlike my own world of brutal killing.

As we crept through the ventilation ducts, I would stop, listening with puzzlement as some of the men in the building, mostly miners and warriors, would gather together around a table, fold their hands together, and talk to the air. It made no sense to me at the time, and I'm not sure it makes sense to me now, but it was an enigma that I would turn over in my mind every night when I went to sleep. I would thrash in my bed of slime, trying ineffectually to make sense of all the information.

Sometimes, I would sneak away from mother's watchful eyes and just lay down in the ventilation shaft, listening as they sang songs and said strange foreign words like God and Jesus.

That practice stopped, of course, when I fell asleep and someone muttered about there being a funny smell and acidic slime cutting holes in the metal vent. Panels came open, flashlights shone around, and I heard several mutters of upset.

Not wanting to get caught, nor eat them in self defense, I fled from there and did not return for quite some time.

"Reverend" frequently lead these little group meetings. A little wiry older gentleman with a stubbly face and an army uniform. `Military Chaplain', I believe you call them. The man clutched a book in his arms like a weapon, a black leatherbound book, the meaning of which I did not understand, except it was often present during the meetings.

When he saw me, I watched with fascination as he crossed himself, for reasons unknown to me, muttering something about God and Jesus.

Intrigued by this gesture, I mirrored him with my dainty little claws, which caused him to visibly relax and tell the air, presumably where God and Jesus were, how thankful he was about the miracle of something or another.

I too was overjoyed. I finally had direct contact with one of the people who for so long had puzzled me with their confusing behavior, and felt certain I'd get some answers for once.

But I was also hungry.

I asked the man about his book and what the meetings were about, but he didn't understand a word I said. He only got pale again and backed away, pulling out a communication device to summon his friends.

So I killed and ate him.

In between nibbling on his corpse, I would thumb, or rather claw, through his strange book, peering at the symbols and trying to decipher them, but it was all no use because I didn't know how to read (1).

When I finished eating, I gave it up, stowing it inside an access panel for a future time when I could make better sense of it.

I became larger, though my exoskeleton still had a whitish sheen to it, and I still resembled a toothy eel with no face. My legs got longer, my arms stronger, my tail more powerful.

I joined my big sisters on hunts around the station, becoming more and more depressed and listless as they killed and ate the other people who had been attending the meetings. I had first been acquainted with the emotion of guilt when I had killed `Reverend', but now the emotion came back to me double.

I refused to kill my own religious man, allowing the last one from their group to escape me, nibbling from my companions' kills instead.

At this point, it seemed the last man had told someone, or the inhabitants of the station had gotten wise to us, for the very next day afterwards, a pair of men in army clothes appeared, arguing with a man in a white coat about killing `extraterrestrial lifeforms.'

It seemed, when they saw us, that the scientist had lost the argument, for the moment they spotted us, the two soldiers opened fire on my sisters with their heavy machine guns, leaving their two heads nothing more than exploded oozing husks smoking on the metal grating that served as the floor.

These events so terrified me that I immediately crossed myself.

To this day, I don't know why I did it. It wasn't like I understood their strange religion or what the symbol actually meant.

I guess my thought, as I cut a vertical line in the air across my chest, then the horizontal, was that this was an appropriate gesture to be made by someone who was about to die.

Suddenly, the white coat began raving like a madman about me possessing humanlike intelligence, urging them not to kill me. I heard the words `study' and `experiment' being said quite frequently, but I didn't know what that meant, I just knew it meant they had decided not to shoot me.

A moment later, a transparent container slammed down over my head and body, imprisoning me.

[0000]

Note: I am in the process of making a new version of this story, so there are footnotes from the editing on the bottom of each page, including this one. When you get to the [0000] symbol, you'll probably want to click Next Chapter unless you've already read it once.

(1) To read an alternate scenario/spoiler, go to chapter "128 Dream Neighborhood" and scroll to the bottom of the page (Item I). I'd post the item here, but I don't want to ruin the surprises.