Lair of the Silkworm (With Short Story)

More about Lair of the Silkworm (With Short Story)

LAIR OF THE SILKWORM
By P.V. Tims

They warned me things had gotten strange, down there on the planet Sylanth. They warned me I’d be seduced by the inexpressible beauty of it: entire landscapes sublimating into strands of coloured silk like some kind of magic trick. And most of all, they warned me not to stand still too long. I was to take samples and return to the ship for decontamination within seven Universal Standard Mynats. Of course, I didn’t listen.
When I stepped from the grey, brutalist cuboid of the landing craft, I stopped dead. The ground beneath my feet was soft and smooth and billowing: a sheet of silk. Two things that might, once have been trees rose up just ahead of me, each of comprised of a million threads of glimmering, polychromatic material. They didn’t just sway in the breeze, but undulated in it, as weightless as kites. In the distance, I could still see mountains that looked like stone, but even these were slowly being subsumed by the lovely, all-consuming silk.
Via the comms unit embedded in my ear, I could hear Commander Tulle shouting at me: “Report, Mr. Gossamer! Report at once!” He sounded distant; unimportant.
The reigning theory was that Sylanth was being converted, atom by atom, into silk by some sort of nanotech swarm designed to mimic the processes of a silkworm – something that got loose from a research lab a few systems over. Standing in it, right in the heart of the illusion-made-real, I knew that the reigning theory was wrong. Nothing merely physical could do this. I was walking in the footsteps of something… cosmic. Let us call it the Silkworm.
Tulle’s voice was becoming more urgent now. He was yelling something about time. Something about ‘critical exposure’. It still didn’t seem terribly important.
Not that he was wrong. I looked down at my body, then, and saw that my feet, sinking into the silken ground, were becoming silk themselves. I saw my legs beginning to come apart, dissolving into threads of coloured fabrics. The process is ongoing, even as I speak; even as I record this final message into the aetherlog. I go gladly, you see, for I have witnessed the impossible. I give myself over, wholly and entirely, to the Silkworm.