Short story:
Trigger warning: Topics include: an exploration of the intersection between autonomy and community, vore, environmentalism, and biology.
The Daughters of Caydra
Nuclear war left the land damaged beyond recognition. Although most people died, scientists did what they could to salvage an injured world for those who remained. While there were still enough people and systems functioning, they cultivated a strain of fungus for bioremediation, hoping to clean up the world so that their progeny could rebuild. Along with the fungus to clean, the scientists bred a symbiotic strain of algae to work with the fungus. While the fungus sequestered toxins, the rapidly growing algae was designed to be a food source. The algae engaged in horizontal gene transfer that let it observe what amino acids and other building blocks that organisms in their environment would need in order to thrive. This algae would synthesize those building blocks from the fungus as the fungus took the constituent pieces from the earth.
These techniques came too late to save society. Without the maintenance of infrastructure, most information was lost, sending technology back to the stone age. Despite so much being lost, there was hope for the future in an unassuming microbe. Hydra already had a habit of consuming algae without breaking it down to cultivate internally. It was only a few small steps before they integrated the remediative fungus as well, making them even more resilient in an otherwise toxic environment.
The horizontal gene transfer system functioned properly most of the time, but also had errors. A human consumed the algae and a hydra with it. One of their gametes was damaged, pieces of hydra DNA spliced into the offspring they produced. Caydra was born, and began the cycle of life which would revitalize the planet.
Caydra looked mostly like any other human with only a few abnormalities. Her eyes were the brilliant green of the algae, cultivating it as an endosymbiote within her. Her face looked chubbier than her compatriots with a double chin despite being malnourished. She had two additional tongues nested in a pocket from below her chin up to her cheeks that could unfurl from her mouth like the tentacles of a hydra. Her proportions looked like a smaller adult instead of a child when she was born, her broken hydra system responding to aging in an abnormal way. She was heavily brain damaged and physically weak.
Despite Caydra’s challenges, she was beloved by the nomadic tribe she was born to. She had a limited self/other boundary in her mental framework, cultivating a very communal mindset that was far less individualistically driven than most people. She was able to effectively see when people were in need, helping in whatever simple ways she could. She was not smart enough to effectively participate in building shelter or scouting for algae in the wastes, but she kept morale high even through times of darkness and took on a therapeutic role in the tribe.
Unfortunately, hard times could get very hard out in the wastelands. Her tribe suffered from starvation, struggling to survive. An opportunistic mountain lion exploited this vulnerability, attacking the exhausted, malnourished tribe. Although they managed to fend it off, one of their strongest hunters was gravely injured in the process.
The hunter spluttered to breathe, bleeding out. Everyone was distraught at the impending loss of a vital member of the tribe. Food was already scarce, and if their main hunter died, so would the tribe. She wasn’t going to make it. and Caydra responded purely off of her intuition. She was hungry, and the huntress wasn’t going to live, it would be a waste to let more blood escape. She approached the huntress and opened her mouth inhumanly wide, flesh tearing as she craned her maw outward like a hydra, swallowing the huntress. This shocked her tribe.
The tribe deliberated about what to do with Caydra. She’d never shown any signs of aggression and people genuinely cared for her. After days of discussion it was decided that she was dangerous. The tribe reluctantly beheaded her, corpse slumping over as algae spilled from the stump of her neck.. Although she’d been killed for her cannibalism, the tribe was still starving and algae was the kind of nutrient dense food they needed to survive. The tribe ate the algae that spilled out, but felt too repulsed to actively carve any more from her flesh, leaving her corpse behind as they continued to search for food.
The next week was tough for the tribe. They had lost their best hunter and despite being a monster, Caydra had been beloved by everyone. People told stories around the fire about the lost hunter until one of them noticed something strange. People were telling stories about events they hadn’t witnessed, personal connections that had been hidden from others, and journeys that had been taken in isolation. These were the memories of the hunter spread among the tribe, each who had eaten of the algae having different pieces of what the hunter knew. They’d picked up parts of her personality traits, and despite her being gone through the amalgam of the tribe’s behaviors she was still present. The way one would snort when they laugh was her, the way another would panic if a spider came by was her, although she was lost she was still a part of the tribe.
The tribe was legitimately confused by this and decided to go back to where they left Caydra’s corpse in search of answers. When they found her body it was not as they had left it. Fungus and algae had broken down not only her flesh, but the very earth around her, cultivating an algal bloom which could feed the entire tribe for weeks. While the tribe collected algae they heard the startling cry of an infant!
The tribe dug through the fungus to find three very strange infants. One of them looked like the hunter they had lost, but like Caydra, proportioned like a very small adult instead of a child. Along with this infant, there were two that looked like Caydra, albeit with a little variation. One was a little taller, the other had a slightly more upturned nose, but overall they were very clearly her with that same characteristic double chin filled with extra tongues. The tribe decided to take care of these new lives.
The infants developed at an unnatural speed, the abundance of algae as food bringing them from mere children to adulthood in a single year. Although Caydra’s body had been lost, her memories were stored in the community itself. The daughters of Caydra were given the names Miracle and Sacred for what they brought to the community.
Miracle and Sacred lacked a lot of the autonomous, self oriented thinking that most humans had, similar to their mother. Miracle was able to hunt a little, with stronger tactical planning skills, while Sacred had stronger long term attention as an ear to listen and a shoulder to cry on.
On a hunt, Miracle and two others were injured by an aggressive boar. She had managed to get a spear into it, but it would surely get away, leaving the tribe hungry for the night. Sacred sat with Miracle to comfort and take her mind off her injuries. Intuitively, Miracle pulled Sacred close and belched in her face.
Miracle’s internal algae stimulated Sacred, bringing her hunting skills and setting a hormonal environment in her body to temporarily increase her strength and agility. The daughters of Caydra had internal hormonal regulation systems like their human family, but they also had more. As a group they could support each other’s capabilities by sharing the production of hormones communally. Miracle was able to produce more osteocalcin to trigger fight or flight in and shared it with Sacred so she could hunt more effectively. With this extra support, Sacred finished the hunt, returning with the boar to keep the tribe fed for the evening.
Miracle was incredibly resilient and would recover from the injuries, but the other two had gotten infections. Nobody in the tribe knew the medicines of the past, this was a death sentence.
Sacred, like Caydra before her acted on intuition, consuming her injured tribemates. Although Sacred had caught the boar to keep them all alive, murder couldn’t be tolerated within the tribe and she was executed for her actions. They waited by her corpse, ate of her algae and brought the memories of those who were lost back into the tribe. Like with the death of Caydra, infants emerged from the algae, two variants of Sacred and two children who were a mix of those who she had devoured. Miracle felt for the tribe, and knew that she and her nieces would one day consume others just as Sacred and Caydra had done before. She took the infants to form a new tribe of her own kind, the Daughters of Caydra.
Where the Daughters of Caydra now call their home, life cycles become dramatically faster, as those which are reborn after being devoured develop at incredible rates. They acquire pieces of previous minds to reach mental maturity swiftly, and copious amounts of food bring them to full size without the standard regulation of aging systems. They eat everything in their environment consistently, the apex predators of any biome. The algae and fungus left when they die eats away at earth beneath, converting unliving matter into edible biomass swiftly. This leads to massive booms in the population of all reborn creatures without the traditional population caps of reproductive development speed or food shortage.
Craterous cauldrons form where the algae and fungus has eaten deep into the earth in the locations where daughters of Caydra have died. That earth has been converted to a lake of life, population density resembling a hive that contains many sapient hybrids. These beings hold the aggregate memory of all those who came before, going all the way back to Caydra herself. As they continue to breed, they serve the original mission the algae was created for, cultivating biodiversity and an abundance of life wherever they go so all beings may be fed.