Assimilation: Lost Colony, #2.1

By Robin Pond

They offered help. They helped themselves.

 

Time to Read: about 1 hour and 15 minutes

 

When a boy at school is converted into a VIM, a human consciousness merged with that of an interstellar refugee, Jennifer Baynes wants to make him feel welcome. She soon finds that the VIM's objectives aren't what they seem.

Lost Colony is a quarterly magazine of masterfully crafted mid-length (10,000 to 25,000 words) science fiction and fantasy in all of their varieties. This ebook edition includes an Editor's Note in which the editor explains why this story was chosen for publication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lost Colony Books
• Release date: Jan 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215443477

Book preview

Assimilation © 2023 Robin Pond

Editor’s Note © 2023 M.E. Pickett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the copyright holder, except for brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

Cover image by Quorthon via Shutterstock

Cover and interior design by M.E. Pickett

Lost Colony is a publication of Lost Colony Books, a division of Great Pond, LLC

www.lostcolonymagazine.com

www.lostcolonybooks.com

Lost Colony and its colophon are trademarks of Great Pond, LLC

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Volume 2, Issue 1

January 2023

Contents

About Lost Colony

Assimilation

About the Author

Editor’s Note

About the Editor

Support Lost Colony

About Lost Colony

Lost Colony publishes one masterfully crafted piece of mid-length (10,000-25,000 words) speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy in all of their manifestations) every quarter. Quarterly stories are published for free on our website (with ads) and for one or two dollars as an ebook (without ads). Once a year, all four of the stories that have appeared in the magazine are published in an annual anthology, both electronically and in print. If you buy the ebook of either the quarterly story or the annual anthology, or if you buy the print version of the annual anthology, you will also get editor’s notes that explain why each story was chosen for publication.

I started Lost Colony after I wrote a mid-length story and very quickly ran out of outlets to submit it to. I thought that the mid-length story should get more love, so I decided to launch this little publication.

I named it Lost Colony because I had moved to Roanoke, Virginia, shortly before launching it. Roanoke, Virginia, has nothing to do with the lost colony of Roanoke (which was in North Carolina), but it was the first thing that I thought of when I learned about the city, so it made sense to me. It also evokes a sense of mystery, the supernatural, or even the exploration of the cosmos, so it fits nicely with what I’m looking for in the stories that I publish (for more details on what I’m looking for, check out the Submission Guidelines).

Assimilation

by Robin Pond

We have been asked to write our major freshman composition on the topic of human evolution, and specifically to explain why it is both a necessary and a beneficial process. I believe humanity is, at the present time, going through a shockingly rapid evolutionary change and I have attempted to draw upon personal experience in examining this topic.

The major difference between our current evolutionary change and previous ones is the relative time frames: Profound change rarely occurs instantaneously, or even very quickly. For this reason, it is often difficult to mark the exact time or date when the change has even occurred. Our ancestors didn’t emerge from the sea one day, as if having tired from a long swim, to sun themselves on the beach. They didn’t shift in a single day from swinging through trees to walking upright in the grasslands, groaning as they stretched out their backs after being hunched over for far too long. These adaptations took years, centuries, possibly millennia.

Most evolution is a painstakingly slow process, with countless fits and starts and blind alleys, an agonizing struggle to become something else, a war waged one mutation at a time, a long chain of happenings propelling us from what we once were to what we next might be. And this imperceptibly slow pace of evolution is probably for the best. For when a change is so glaringly rapid and far-reaching as to be noticeable within individual lifetimes, our natural impulse is to pull back in horror from such a change. After all, such change brings with it the frightening uncertainty of a very altered future, veering into an uncharted new course through never-before dreamed of seas.

This may explain the initial human resistance to the VIM adaptation. It occurred with alarming rapidity. Although even in the case of the VIM, it started slowly enough, a trickling in of alien consciousness, a commingling of a few of theirs with a few of ours. It occurred first in a few near-death experiences, accident victims who emerged from induced comas different from before. These redeemed recipients were now more. They retained what they once were, in voice, in appearance, in at least some of their memories, yet they were also different, with additional memories and a different way of regarding their world. They even sounded detectably different even though their voices hadn’t changed. Now they had enhanced abilities. Now they had altered motivations.

But while the timing of the modifications to an entire species may be difficult to track with any precision, modifications to a single individual, or a single family, are easier to discern. That is why I have decided to focus my composition on my personal experiences with the VIM and how they have affected me and my family.

I must first acknowledge all the benefits the VIM have brought to me and my family and humanity at large. On a personal note, I am very grateful for the opportunity to study here at the North Dakota Free Human University. It would not have been possible for me to have a place here on the ND Human Nature Preserve or to attend such a fine, tuition-free institution, were it not for the VIM. Of course, there are still a few who are unhappy with the VIM incursion, but there are many others who have freely converted.

But my essay is not intended to be a discussion of the pros and cons of VIM consciousness, which I realize is a prohibited subject. Rather, my focus is upon outlining my own family’s personal adaptation to the VIM as a case study of a type of evolutionary change and of our reaction to such a change. I have identified twelve steps on my family’s progression to this next stage of human evolution. While the selection of these particular events is admittedly arbitrary, as I look back now, I consider these twelve incidents to be significant shifts, twelve facets of my family’s overall adaptation. Some of these steps were subtle, not even noticeable at the time, while others were more immediately life-altering. But all of