The Traditional Sacrifice

I never knew my mother. She left when I was very young. My family told me stories about her. They told me she loved me, but they would not tell my why she left. That truth came when I became an adult. It came after I was married, after I had a child of my own. My life was supposed to be normal until then, as normal as it could be under the circumstances. My people needed me to be normal. They needed me to have children. They needed me to love and to feel loved. It was a necessary part of the tradition.

When I turned twenty eight I learned my mother's fate. Mother had gone to live inside the Kraken. It was a monster that lived in the sea. It was the queen of the monsters. She was the largest and strongest of her kind and ruled over her brood, her many children. They were massive beasts that stood taller than our tallest skyscrapers. They came in the thousands devouring everything in their path. They came to destroy us with fire, ice, and lightning. We had tried to stop them with conventional weaponry, but our atom bombs were more damaging to us than they were to the monsters.

So we hid like rats. We survived. We rebuilt our civilization, and our scientists came up with a new strategy. They called it the traditional sacrifice. There would be no more bombs, no more missiles, no more guns. Instead we would sway the Kraken's heart with love and compassion. This new technology set the fate of my grandmother and her mother and my mother and my children. They would sacrifice me to the beast, implant my love for my son in the Kraken's mind and in her heart, and all the people of earth would become her children.

So I went willingly to meet my mother, catapulted across the sky in a translucent sphere, the zenith of our technology. It was a ship, an orb filled with a living mucus in which I floated. Ailerons on the hull guided my craft through the air ensuring a direct hit. I would enter through her nose, a pair of massive holes on the front of her flat face. I was so tiny in comparison it was almost impossible to miss. But I was blind to all of these things. Operating the craft was not my job. I was just a passenger. I was just a piece of the machine.

I was sucked in as the Kraken prepared her next roar. Inside her head my ship dispensed with its little wings as it flexed and tumbled along the beasts inner membranes. Long thin claws grew in their place, tearing at the creatures flesh to halt my momentum. I heard them popping and stretching and breaking and hooking again until I came to a stop.

It was dark now. I am not a scientist at all, but I was aware of how the sphere worked. It began stealing nutrients from my host to sustain me. It would grow legs like a spider and begin the journey up into the brain. I felt the beast clawing at her nose though I was sure my little craft was causing her little pain. My ship was designed to invade her skull, not kill her or torture her. This was a surgical operation designed to reach her grey matter.

When the hull contacted her brain I could feel her rage transmitting through the ship's mucus into my mind. But this connection was a two way street. I was a psychic infection, and she could feel me. I came here to tell her about a baby boy living in the city she was about to destroy. But I didn't come to talk, I came to make her feel what I felt. I felt her love for her children, and she felt mine. Our love became one, and we decided to let my people live another day. We called her children back to the sea and saved my world from destruction.

My society would live another day, perhaps another decade or longer until the antibodies in the beast's brain ate their way through my ship's hull. Then the Kraken would forget my love for my son and return for the next sacrifice. But by then maybe my son would be a man with his own children. And perhaps on that day the beast will discover this same love in his heart.