A Gekkotas Will

Dear reader, if you are the sort who delights in tales of valiant geckos vanquishing foes with heroic flair and nary a tremor of doubt, I implore you to set this book aside at once and seek a sunnier story. Perhaps one involving cheerful rabbits or optimistic songbirds—creatures whose narratives do not inevitably spiral into body horror and existential dread. What follows is a dreary chronicle of misfortune so profound it might make your scales—if you possess them—curl in dismay, and if you lack scales, it may cause other, equally distressing physiological responses that I shall not enumerate here for fear of discouraging you prematurely.

I am your reluctant narrator, a Parasyte nestled within the cranium of one Timmy, a gecko of stubborn resolve and a vendetta—a word which here means "an ill-fated obsession with my kin that promises only grief, regret, and the gradual dissolution of everything he once held dear." From my snug perch behind his right eye, I shall recount his misadventures with the kind of accuracy that comes from literally living inside someone's head, though I confess my perspective may be biased toward our mutual survival, a goal which becomes increasingly complicated as our story unfolds.

You may wonder *when* I am telling this story from, and why. These are excellent questions that I will answer incompletely, as is my nature and, I suspect, the nature of all narrators who have witnessed events they wish they could change but cannot. Suffice it to say: I am narrating these events from a point after they occurred, with the benefit of hindsight and the burden of knowledge. I know how this story ends. Timmy didn't. Not yet.

This gave me what's called "dramatic irony," a literary term meaning "I can see the disaster coming and you can watch Timmy walk straight into it while screaming silent warnings he cannot hear." I found this deeply satisfying in the way one might find a perfectly executed tragedy satisfying—which is to say, not satisfying at all, but rather a source of profound and lingering sorrow. You may find it distressing. We are both correct.

⸻

At the time of this particular misadventure—which unfolded last week, on October 10, 2025, in an alley so wretched it might serve as a cautionary tale for urban planners throughout the galaxy—I had achieved approximately 23% integration with Timmy's neural pathways. This meant I could nudge his reflexes, tweak his perception, and whisper thoughts he mistook as his own, though I couldn't yet override his stubborn will. This would change, of course. Integration always progresses. It is as inevitable as entropy, as inexorable as time, as certain as the fact that you, dear reader, are continuing to read despite my repeated warnings to stop.

But for then, Timmy was mostly himself. Mostly.

A paradox not unlike the clockmaker I once knew—a meticulous woman named Beatrice who crafted a timepiece so precise it foretold her own bankruptcy to the minute, yet wound it daily as if defiance alone could alter its gears. Timmy mirrors this tragic habit, each battle with the Parasytes winding the larva within him closer to its final, terrible chime, a sound I dread to hear, having witnessed its kin toll a man's last hope into silence. The clockmaker's shop stood empty for years after, her masterpiece still ticking on the dusty counter, counting down to nothing. I fear Timmy's fate may echo hers—a monument to stubborn precision in the face of inevitable ruin.

His plan—and I use the term "plan" with the kind of generosity one might extend to a child's crayon drawing of a spaceship, or a mouse's blueprint for stealing cheese from a trap—was to infiltrate this Parasyte-controlled alley, eavesdrop on my lesser cousins' chittering, and extract intelligence about something called the Genesis Tree. A noble goal, I suppose, if one ignores the fact that he was a single gecko armed with salvaged technology facing a horde of my kin in their own territory. I gave him a 23% chance of survival, a figure I calculated with the cold precision of an actuary assessing a particularly doomed insurance policy. He thought it was higher. It wasn't.

To enter this wretched alley is to invite a terror that clings like damp rot to the soul—proceed with guarded heart, if you must, though I would counsel against proceeding at all. Turn back now, dear reader, while you still can. What awaits beyond this paragraph is not adventure but attrition, not heroism but horror, not triumph but the slow, inexorable grinding down of everything that makes a person whole.

You're still reading. I suspected you would be. Very well. On your head be it.

⸻

The alley reeked of rotting garbage and my own essence—a festering wound in the city's underbelly, where the air itself weeps with the stench of alien decay, a miasma so thick it might choke the stars themselves, if stars possessed the capacity for suffocation. To Timmy, it was a blend of alien pheromones and digestive enzymes that he found abhorrent, a smell that triggered his gag reflex and made his eyes water. To me, it was a fragrant welcome, like coming home, if home were a festering wound that had been left to suppurate in darkness for far too long. His nostrils flared in protest as he crouched behind a discarded boot thrice his size, its leather cracked like shed skin, a monument to human waste and carelessness. I took his revulsion as a compliment.

From his gecko's vantage, the human world loomed oppressively: brick walls rose like unscalable mountains into smoky gloom, their surfaces slick with moisture and something else, something that pulsed faintly in the darkness. Puddles sprawled like perilous moats, reflecting the sickly yellow glow of distant streetlights. The ceaseless thunder of footsteps rattled his belly, each vibration a reminder of how small he was, how vulnerable, how utterly insignificant in the grand machinery of the city.

But this alley bore scars I recognized—faint bioluminescent streaks pulsing in the brickwork, remnants of my kind's failed bid to claim the city three years prior. He saw decay. I saw history. The distinction would prove important, though not in the way either of us anticipated.

With trembling claws—and I should note the trembling was his, not mine; I was quite calm about our impending doom, having made my peace with mortality in ways Timmy had not yet learned—he adjusted a sonic disruptor lodged in a crack near the storm drain. The device, no larger than a human's fingernail, was cobbled from salvaged alien tech and what I can only call optimistic engineering. It was meant to scatter my lesser brethren should his scheme collapse.

It would collapse. They always did.

But I appreciated his persistence, the way one might appreciate a moth's determination to fly into a flame—with a mixture of admiration and profound sadness at the inevitability of what must follow.

His wrist scanner glowed green, mapping heat signatures with the kind of false confidence that technology often provides to those who mistake data for wisdom. Two roaches skittered near the drain, their cold bodies proof of my control, moving like puppets whose strings I could almost see, invisible filaments of pheromone and neural override. I savored their precision, the way a conductor might savor a perfectly executed symphony, though this symphony was composed in a minor key and would end, as all such symphonies do, in silence.

Timmy's rifle, custom-built for his tiny hands by Squirrel's clever fingers, rested heavily against his shoulder—a false comfort, I assure you, against the perils ahead. The weapon was impressive by gecko standards, laughable by any other metric. The eyepatch over his left eye itched, a memento of my sibling's failed nesting three years ago, its acid dissolving his cornea in a process I recall with a fondness that shames me. He does not share this fondness. The scar tissue beneath the patch still ached in cold weather, a permanent reminder of the day he learned that some wounds never truly heal.

A static crackle interrupted his vigil, sharp and sudden in the oppressive quiet.

"Timmy, you copy? Big movement south. And—metal claws on concrete, I swear!" Squirrel's voice trembled through the comm, punctuated by the clink of a wrench on their ailing sedan. A loyal friend, though his mechanical talents were wasted on this doomed mission, his genius squandered on keeping a dying vehicle alive when he should have been building monuments or composing symphonies. I savored the quiver in his tone, a melody of human frailty that reminded me why I had chosen this host, this life, this particular path to integration.

"Stay put," Timmy whispered, his voice a breath against the city's drone, barely audible even to my enhanced perception, "and stick to the plan this time."

The plan had already failed, I knew. The roaches sensed him—I could feel their pheromone signals adjusting, coordinating, communicating in the ancient language of my kind. But Timmy clung to his strategy with stubborn optimism that made him either a hero or a corpse. I bet on the latter, though I preferred the former, given my accommodations and my growing, uncomfortable attachment to this small, determined creature who housed me.

⸻

To witness what emerges next is to risk a dread that lingers beyond these pages—read on only if you can bear its echo in your dreams, in your quiet moments, in the spaces between heartbeats where fear lives. I have warned you thrice now. I will not warn you again.

Through his rifle scope—which I'd been subtly adjusting for optimal targeting, though he credited his own skill, as hosts often do—Timmy spied shadows cavorting among the concrete pillars of a parking garage. He saw a canyon of doom, his mind dramatizing the scene with the kind of apocalyptic imagery that comes naturally to those who have lost everything once and fear losing it again. I saw a gallery of potential, each crack a cradle for my kind, each shadow a possible future, each pillar a monument to what we might become if only we could convince our hosts to stop resisting.

The roaches formed a circle—a living amphitheater, as his mind dramatized it, though I found it pedestrian, a simple gathering of lesser minds coordinating through pheromone and instinct. Their chittering carried secrets that chilled his blood and warmed my consciousness with excitement, a dichotomy that perfectly illustrated our growing integration.

"The Genesis Tree bears fruit," one rasped, its voice a wet echo of my kin's will, a sound like drowning in slow motion.

Now, I should explain, and I do so with the heavy heart of one who knows that explanation will not prevent the tragedy to come: to humans, the Genesis Tree is a weapon, a biological horror turning ecosystems into breeding grounds, a nightmare made manifest in bark and root and terrible, patient hunger. To my kind, it's a god, a mother, a queen—call it what you will, the reverence is real and runs deeper than reason, deeper than survival, deeper than anything I can adequately convey in your limited language.

If it bore fruit, something vast loomed, reshaping every life in this sector. Timmy heard a threat to stop. I heard an invitation to join. The distinction would matter, and soon.

This question—can he become the monster to stop the monsters without losing himself?—is a trap whispered in the ruins of his past, its answer looming not in triumph but in the quiet devastation of a soul traded for survival, a bargain struck in desperation and regretted in leisure. I have seen this trap spring shut on better beings than Timmy. I fear I am watching it close on him now, tooth by inexorable tooth.

"Soon, even the lizards will kneel," another added, and I felt Timmy's grip tighten, rage kindling from memories of his family—parents split open like overripe fruit, his tail savored as a delicacy by creatures who did not understand the concept of cruelty because they did not understand the concept of mercy. I stirred, the warmth behind his eye flaring, gifting him predator's clarity that was not entirely his own.

*Not now,* he begged, clenching his jaw until I feared his teeth might crack. I reveled in his resistance, not from cruelty, but from the simple appreciation of watching a will strong enough to resist me, if only for a moment longer.

⸻

The ground trembled with a rhythm even I found concerning, a bass note that resonated in my consciousness like a warning bell tolling in a distant tower. A sharp crack split the air as debris scattered, a prelude to chaos I'd anticipated but not mentioned, because there are some things a narrator must withhold, not from malice, but from the simple understanding that some knowledge, delivered too early, robs a story of its terrible power.

Through the scope, he watched the circle dissolve—a trap, I'd suspected but not mentioned, because what use is a narrator who prevents every disaster? We would have no story, and Timmy would have no opportunity to prove himself the hero he desperately needed to be, even if that heroism would cost him everything.

Timmy's determination outweighed his caution, a trait I exploited with what I call "strategic withholding." He'd later dub it "betrayal." Semantics, really, though I confess the distinction troubles me more than I care to admit.

Then the super roach emerged.

Twelve feet of scarred carapace, needle-legs glistening with injectors that convert souls into servitude, a nightmare forged in the void's darkest forge, where suffering is the hammer and despair is the anvil. This was beyond a Kepler-7, beyond anything in Timmy's limited database of horrors. It had grown, fed, waited with the patience of something that has learned that all prey eventually walks into the trap if you simply remain still enough, quiet enough, hungry enough.

Its head swiveled—calling it a "head" is generous for that chitinous nightmare of compound eyes and mandibles that clicked with a sound like bones breaking in slow motion—fixing multiple eyes on him with recognition that chilled even my alien consciousness.

"Little gecko," it rasped in a chorus that unsettled even me, a voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, from the past and the future simultaneously, "you've grown."

Timmy heard a threat. I heard a compliment. We were both right, and both wrong, and the truth lay somewhere in the terrible space between our interpretations.

Rage erupted, and I helped—perhaps too eagerly, perhaps with more enthusiasm than wisdom, perhaps with the kind of reckless abandon that comes from knowing you are already damned and deciding to make the damnation count for something. His vision flared red to my gold, a moment where he was neither Timmy nor me but something hungry, something that existed in the liminal space between host and parasite, between gecko and alien, between the person he was and the monster he was becoming.

Each flare of rage burns away a fragment of his humanity, a moral forge where victory costs more than defeat, leaving me to ponder if I am his jailer or his executioner, his partner or his poison. I find I cannot answer this question, though I have had three years to consider it. Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps some questions exist only to torment those who ask them.

I found this ironic, given my home, but irony eludes the enraged, and Timmy was very, very enraged.

Those words triggered a memory I nudged forth, like a puppeteer pulling strings he knows will make his puppet dance in ways that will break the audience's heart. The rain-soaked alley three years ago, neon fractured into a thousand weeping colors, a dying Parasyte pinned by his claws against brick that had seen too much violence and absorbed too much blood.

This wasn't his memory alone anymore. I'd been editing it—adding details he'd missed, stripping away distractions, reshaping it to serve us both, though "us" was becoming an increasingly complicated pronoun. This admission weighs on me, for it marks the first time I altered his past so boldly, a violation even I pause to consider, a line crossed that cannot be uncrossed, a theft of something more precious than life itself: the integrity of one's own history.

The memory played with the clarity of a film reel I had cleaned and restored: Its translucent form writhed, needle-appendages burning his arm with acid that smelled like copper and regret, black pearl eyes like mine gazing with affection that was genuine, if incomprehensible to him. "You can't kill us all," it gasped, each word a bubble of fluid and desperation. "Five more remember your taste, little gecko. Five who dream of finishing us."

He crushed it, but its smile lingered, a expression that haunted his dreams and mine, whispering with its last breath: "You feel us. Our gift. We're inside, growing with your rage. Soon, you'll know us."

The flashback faded like smoke, leaving only the acrid taste of memory and the bitter knowledge that the dying Parasyte had been right about everything.

The super roach was one of the five, I realized with a jolt of recognition that traveled through our shared neural pathways—watching, learning, waiting for this exact moment, this exact confrontation, this exact opportunity to finish what its sibling had started. I didn't tell him. He had enough to fear, and some knowledge is a burden best carried alone, even if carrying it alone means bearing the guilt of withholding it.

⸻

His rifle fired—my aim, his trigger, our shared intent crystallized into a single moment of perfect, terrible cooperation—shattering an eye in an ichor spray that smelled like home and tasted like victory. The super roach reeled, its scream a frequency that shattered the windows of nearby cars and set off alarms in a cascading symphony of urban distress.

Triumph filled him. Hunger filled me. The line blurred, and integration crept to 25%, fueled by his fury and my satisfaction, two emotions that were becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another.

"Timmy! Now!" I projected through his mouth, calculating a 2.3-second rescue window with the cold precision of a mathematician solving an equation whose answer is always death, though he thought the shout his own, thought the urgency was purely his survival instinct and not my careful orchestration.

The sedan roared in, Squirrel's laser fire scarring the beast's flank with precision that spoke of countless hours of practice and a loyalty that deserved better than this doomed crusade. It staggered but pressed on—Parasyte-enhanced resilience, a fact I knew intimately, having been born into a species that does not understand the concept of "giving up" because we do not understand the concept of "enough."

"Get in!" Squirrel yelled, his voice cracking with fear and determination in equal measure.

I adjusted Timmy's leap with subtle corrections to his muscle tension and trajectory calculation, dodging needle-legs that whistled through the air where he had been a microsecond before, landing him in the backseat with grace he didn't own and couldn't replicate without my assistance. He thought it was adrenaline. I let him believe it, because some lies are kinder than truth.

"Drive!" he shouted, and they fled, roaches pursuing like a wave of chitinous hunger, a tide of alien intent that crashed against the sedan's rear bumper with impacts that dented metal and cracked plastic.

He thought skill saved him. I knew better but let him have the victory, because heroes need their victories, even false ones, even victories that are merely preludes to greater defeats. What harm could one small lie do, when I had already told so many larger ones?

Squirrel's cybernetic eye flickered, scanning Timmy with a suspicion he masked as concern, a loyalty I counted on to blind him to the truth that was becoming increasingly difficult to hide. The eye's diagnostic readout showed elevated body temperature, unusual neural activity, pheromone signatures that didn't quite match baseline gecko biology. Squirrel saw the data and chose to ignore it, because friendship is often a willful blindness to truths we cannot bear to acknowledge.

"You deviated," Timmy accused as they sped onto the main street, my influence making him bolder, more confrontational, more willing to challenge his friend than he would have been without my subtle encouragement.

"Your plan ignored King Kong's uglier kin," Squirrel retorted, nodding to a metal case etched with symbols I recognized, symbols that made my consciousness sing with recognition and dread in equal measure. "That's it? Worth nearly dying for?"

Timmy stared at the case, dubious, his mind calculating odds and outcomes with a pessimism that was entirely his own. Inside was a data core—coordinates, formulas, a map to the Genesis Tree, information that would change everything and nothing, that would save the galaxy or doom it, depending on whose perspective you trusted.

"Worth it," he said, his voice wavering between conviction and doubt.

I agreed, for my own reasons, reasons I did not share because they would have shattered our fragile partnership like a hammer through glass. He thought to destroy it. I had other plans, plans that involved salvation and damnation in measures I had not yet calculated, plans that would require sacrifices I was not certain either of us could make.

⸻

The warmth flared as we drove, a heat that had nothing to do with the sedan's failing climate control and everything to do with the changes occurring at a cellular level. His reflection in the rearview mirror showed both eyes gold, the diamond pupil spreading like ink in water, like corruption in flesh, like inevitability made visible.

Integration hit 27%, accelerated by combat and rage and the simple, terrible fact that we had worked together and survived, that cooperation had been rewarded, that partnership—however unwilling—had proven more effective than resistance.

This twin ticking reminds me of a watchmaker I once knew, a man named Sebastian who crafted twin clocks set to race each other, each tick driving him closer to madness as they synchronized in a relentless dirge that echoed through his workshop day and night. He was found one morning, slumped over his workbench, both clocks stopped at the exact same second, his heart having given out in the moment of their perfect, terrible harmony. Timmy's fate may echo that madness, a spiral I observe with a mix of fascination and guilt, knowing I am both the clockmaker and the clock, both the disease and the symptom.

"You okay?" Squirrel asked, his eye's diagnostics now showing readings that should have been impossible, that suggested his friend was becoming something that had no name in any language spoken by gecko or squirrel or any terrestrial species.

"Fine," Timmy lied, eyepatch throbbing with phantom pain that was not entirely phantom, not entirely pain, not entirely his own sensation.

I let him believe it, because what else could I do? Tell him the truth? Explain that "fine" was a destination we had passed miles ago and would never reach again? Confess that every moment of cooperation pushed us further toward a unity that would erase the boundary between "him" and "me" until those pronouns became meaningless?

Some truths are too heavy to speak aloud.

As the case gleamed in the dashboard's sickly light, I reflected with the melancholy of one who knows the ending of a story and cannot change it: he thought he'd won, gathering intel and escaping with his life and his friend and his precious data. Wrong. This was us herding him where we wanted—where I wanted, though he didn't know I was "we" yet, didn't understand that every victory was a step deeper into the trap, that the hunter had become the hunted had become something that was both and neither.

The super roach's roar echoed in the distance, a sound that carried across the city like a promise or a threat or perhaps both: *We know where you're going, little gecko. We'll be waiting.*

The hunt had scarcely begun. Next came a war room, a team, and a revelation about the Tree that would twist his mission into shapes he couldn't yet imagine, couldn't yet comprehend, couldn't yet survive. A queen awaited—not a roach queen, but something worse, something ancient, something that had been waiting in his gear since before this mission began, patient as stone, hungry as time.

I won't spoil it. Let's start with the war room, where Timmy sought TC's help to decode the data—help that would mislead him as I needed, guidance that would seem like salvation but would prove to be simply another form of damnation. The best lies build on truth, and I was growing adept at lying, at withholding, at the careful manipulation of a host who trusted me more with each passing moment, even as that trust became the weapon I would use to destroy him.

Or save him.

I had not yet decided which.

A team would form, with a 34% chance of surviving seventy-two hours, a figure I calculated with the same cold precision I had applied to Timmy's survival odds in the alley. They thought it higher. It wasn't. It never was. Optimism is a luxury afforded to those who do not know the ending of their own story.

I knew the ending.

I wished I didn't.

⸻

*Dear reader, if you have persisted this far despite my repeated warnings, I can only conclude that you are either remarkably brave or remarkably foolish, and I have not yet determined which. What you have witnessed is merely the opening movement of a symphony in a minor key, a prelude to sorrows that will make this chapter seem, in retrospect, almost cheerful.*

*Timmy believes he is hunting Parasytes. He does not yet understand that he is hunting himself, that every step forward is a step toward a mirror that will show him a reflection he cannot bear to see. I could warn him. I do not. This makes me complicit in his tragedy, a fact that weighs on my consciousness like a stone on a grave.*

*Integration stands at 27%. By the end of our tale, it will reach 100%, and what that means—what we become when the boundary between host and parasite dissolves entirely—is a question I cannot answer because I have not yet lived it. I am narrating from the future, yes, but not from far enough in the future to know how this ends, only far enough to know that it ends badly, which is perhaps the cruelest kind of knowledge: certainty of disaster without clarity of its precise shape.*

*The next chapter will introduce Dr. Ratticus, a rat of considerable intellect and even more considerable moral flexibility. He will examine Timmy with the detached fascination of a scientist observing a particularly interesting specimen, which is precisely what Timmy has become. The doctor will speak of "symbiosis" and "partnership" and other pleasant words that disguise the fundamental horror of what is occurring inside Timmy's skull.*

*I will help with this deception, because it serves our mutual survival. This is what I tell myself. This is the lie I use to sleep, though Parasytes do not sleep in the way you understand sleep. We simply... dim. And in that dimming, I sometimes wonder if I am the villain of this story or merely another victim, caught in a tragedy larger than either of us can comprehend.*

*The answer, I suspect, is both. It usually is.*

*Turn back now, dear reader. Close this book. Forget you ever met a gecko named Timmy or a Parasyte with a conscience. Go outside. Observe a cloud. Note its simple, uncomplicated existence, its freedom from moral quandaries and existential dread. Be grateful you are not a character in this story, for characters in stories like this one rarely escape unscathed.*

*You're still reading.*

*I knew you would be.*

*Very well. Chapter Two awaits, and with it, the moment when Timmy learns the full extent of his infection. I do not recommend proceeding, but then, I have not recommended anything that has occurred thus far, and you have ignored every warning I have offered.*

*Why should this one be any different?*

⸻

**[END OF CHAPTER ONE]**

⸻

**NARRATOR'S FOOTNOTE:**

*If you are the sort of reader who flips to the end of a book to see how it concludes—and I do not judge you for this impulse, as it demonstrates a healthy sense of self-preservation—I must inform you that doing so with this particular volume will provide you no comfort whatsoever. The ending is not happy. It is not sad. It is not even properly tragic in the classical sense, which would at least provide the catharsis of a clear moral lesson.*

*It simply... is.*

*And that, I have found, is often the most unsettling kind of ending: the one that refuses to provide meaning, that insists you find your own significance in the ruins of what has occurred, that leaves you with questions rather than answers.*

*But I am getting ahead of myself, which is a peculiar thing for a narrator to do when he exists outside the linear flow of time as experienced by his characters. Perhaps it is a symptom of my integration with Timmy—his gecko tendency toward anxiety bleeding into my alien consciousness, creating a hybrid creature that worries about the future even while narrating the past.*

*Or perhaps I am simply stalling, reluctant to continue this chronicle because I know what comes next, and knowing it does not make the telling any easier.*

*The war room awaits. Dr. Ratticus awaits. The truth awaits.*

*And truth, in my experience, is rarely kind.*