Chapter 5: 2100 October 8th, Friday

So today in writing class my professor was talking about the diary option for the course-long assignment. They we reiterating how we should be extra detailed about anything we think other people might not know. Like, assume the reader can read and stuff but has otherwise lived in a cave away from society.

“Would someone understand your diary if they read it 100 years ago? What about 100 years from now? Go over anything you think they might not know.”, she said.

Seems kind of strange to be honest, and kind of targeted a bit towards us Zeniths cause we weren’t on this planet 100 years ago. But, whatever! I’ll just go into extra detail on anything, including biology.

Of course, since I don’t actually have to share this diary with anyone, including the professor, yeah, there’s no reason for me to do so, or write at all but, well, gotta respect the spirit of the assignment and all. Maybe, just maybe, I find this all a bit fun too.

So today classes overall weren’t too bad. I scheduled this semester to have my class load end as early as possible on Fridays just in case stuff was going on. Soaph was planning something Saturday so I knew not much would be happening today though.

Well, I got back to my dorm and not soon after I got a text from Nyrle asking to watch a movie. She also mentioned her mother sent her some more packages, which meant free snacks!

We live in the same dorm building, but she’s around a corner and a few doors down. This floor is Zenith-only for a variety of reasons, but to any Zenith who doesn’t like that, well, we get single room dorms always so that’s a plus to soften the situation. I bet Nyrle would like to live on the same floor with humans if she could. It’s best that she didn’t if you ask me.

So anyways, I slip off my flip-flops near the door. I take one step inside and immediately feel a squish.

“Fuck. Nyrle?!?”, I said. “Did you let them out or something?”

She was standing by some shelves, putting a plastic food container on one shelf near some hyper-dense micro-wave noodle packets.

“Not on purpose.” she said. “I opened the lid for a second and some got out.”

“And they didn’t immediately run to you?”

“Well they did, but I opened it on top of my dresser, so they kind of got excited and fell, then I just ignored them. It was like a couple minutes ago so they probably sensed you coming or something.”

She laughed, then moved towards the cardboard box on the nearby mini-kitchen counter. She reached into it and took out another container. Roughly the size of your standard plastic food storage container--like something you’d put a sandwich in--it had a plastic see-through body topped by a dark-red lid with very, very small holes in it for air. This one she just slid my way.

I didn’t waste much time. I popped the lid off and took in the sight. Oodles of naked humanoids gazed up at me in a mix of awe, admiration, and fear. Little ‘people’ with skin and hair colors more varied than a rainbow. All looking up at me in a fervor. Fully sentient minds scrambled atop one another to try, desperately, to crawl out of the container first. I remember thinking how desperate they were.

You know, just writing about this makes my mouth water haha. I guess before I continue I should follow my professor’s advice and explain gams. Part of me wants to write that you’d have to be living under a rock to not know about gams, but that’s exactly the kind of place you might find a bunch of them.

So humans are a sexually dimorphic species. The average woman is 5’4”, the average man a bit taller. Human women have less muscle mass, wider pelvis yada yada.

For us Zenith though, well, we do sexual dimorphic even better. We do most things better than humans come to think of it, but that’s besides the point.

So those tiny little guys writhing in a jam-packed plastic container are male Zenith! The average female Zenith is about 5’8”, and the average male is lucky to be about 30mm in height.

Of course, using the term “male Zenith” is pretty rare outside an introductory biology course: like, elementary stuff. Although technically correct, normally when one says “Zenith” they mean us females. We’re kind of the only ones that are relevant in any societal sense after all.

No, they are usually called “zoids” in academia. “Zoid” comes from a translation of our reference to them in Truespeak. Translating from Truespeak isn’t really an exact sort of thing though. That’s the more technical term for them, and the one they use most often in technical classes, formal writing and stuff like that.

However, almost everyone uses the colloquial term for them, “gams”. Ironically, it was humans who came up with the phrase. It really caught on among everyone pretty fast. It’s derived from the English word “gamete”, which means “sex cell”, sort of. It’s a somewhat fitting name to be honest.

Don’t get me wrong they aren’t just a big cell or something. That’d be gross! They are fully intelligent beings just like us female Zenith, or the humans. However, their purpose is to essentially spread their genetic information, then die. Most just manage the latter, and the former is always a packaged deal with death.

Ugh this stuff is kind of embarrassing to write about but whatever.

Gams typically live in the wild, often in big hordes or tribes and such. They love cozy homes under dirt, but also come out to forage on crumbs, insects and whatever they can get their hands on. Whenever it rains a bunch more come out, just like yesterday. Then they scatter across sidewalks en masse.

In fact, it’s super common to see them out and about because as much as they like hiding from danger and collecting food they absolutely cannot help themselves but to try and mate. They share some of our keen senses unfortunately, meaning they can easily seek us out and even the faintest bit of our pheromones can be picked up across a vast distance (for them at least).

Unfortunately for the little guys, their odds of that happening are abysmal. It’s pretty rare that we Zenith want to actually lay an egg, so the vast majority of the time that we spot them they end up under our feet or down our throats. Here it’s mostly the latter again, since our kind have such high metabolisms and all and, well, might as well do something useful with them right?

Now if that hypothetical reader my professor was talking about might be thinking to themselves “oh wow that’s horrible. They are intelligent, why treat them like that?”

It’s true they are intelligent. You can, and some people did and do, teach them stuff like how to read, math and whatever. In fact, when our kind first came here and humans learned about how zoids work and how our reproductive processes work, they were horrified! It was condemned by them and all that but, now, not so much.

There’s so many basic common sense reasons why they are treated like they are. For one, it’s natural! They theorize before our kind was civilized, it made sense to have a readily available food source. Even when we actually wanted to fertilize an egg, it made sense to consume them so we’d have more nutrients and stuff.

Secondly, there’s not much point in trying to integrate them into society. What’s the point in educating someone that some dumb human can just stomp on the way to work without even knowing? Like you can give one a college education but in the arduous adventure they take from one building to an immediate neighboring one, they have to contend with such deadly foes as stomping shoes, rain, or even a particularly large bug.

It’s really kind of funny to even think of this. I’m imagining one of them clad in graduation robes, walking along the rough terrain of a sidewalk, and then just getting flattened as my foot comes down. Like, it’s such a weird and funny thing to even consider.

Now despite that some humans did still call for their protection in the past. I remember learning in history classes how some were like “oh ok they can live in the wild in their villages and tribes but Zenith are killing them and stuff.”

They changed tune quick though. Here’s the other thing about gams, they are... plentiful to say the least.

For every female Zenith, there are about a hundred humans. Or, was it a 1000? Maybe more or less or between. I don’t think about it much to be honest.

However, for every one human, there are millions of Gams. Yes, millions. Just as we spread across the planet so too did they.

A hypothetical reader might be wondering how there are so many of them. I don’t want to get into too much detail here, but they are something of an unfortunate consequence of certain biological activities from us female Zenith. I’ll leave it at that for now, aside from saying humans have it worse when it comes to biology stuff like that. For example, imagine having a waste system like humans? Like, just use all your food. Such inefficient bodies. Also, what human women have to deal with with their bodies...

Anyways gams are annoying. They get everywhere and when we first landed they actually caused more ecological problems than us by a big margin. This was mostly before my time. Things have settled down by now, but I remember one time in history class quite some time ago, we had a guest teacher for the class during a segment on natural history. They were an elderly human woman, like, really old. She went on a tangent about how the gams wiped out these insects called ‘ants’.

‘Ants!’, I remember her saying with a fervor. ‘They made ants go extinct! We couldn’t believe it. The entire field of entomology was in disbelief and panic for quite some time.’

Ants were apparently some sort of colony-based insect. For what it’s worth, the less-fair sex of us are pretty good competitors in the wild. Gams can make simple tools, swarm their foes and all that. So, I’m not surprised they beat out ants, even if those little bugs seemed a bit more organized in their society than the gams.

So it’s easy to say “no don’t kill them!” when you don’t find a horde of them in your backyard, messing up the visual of your garden while trying to hunt a ladybug there or whatever.

That mentioned, they do stay away from crops generally, having learnt the hard way not to mess with that kind of stuff. They also typically go for crumbs rather than trying to raid a kitchen. But, they can’t help but get into harm’s way. Plus, humans have something of a history of hating bugs in their house and gams are small enough to be similar. Like, even if a bug isn’t harming anything or taking your food, you probably don’t want them scampering around your floor tiles.

So, just by numbers alone it’s not feasible to educate them. It’d be too expensive. There’s so many that if some die it’s really not a big deal too. They aren’t rare or endangered or anything. They get in enough places to be a pest and... what else.

Honestly I’m starting to feel like an encyclopedia typing all this out, but better to be thorough I guess.

The other thing is, they aren’t too good for much other than food and fun (and I guess reproduction when the time’s right of course). Like, they have amazing strength just like us... but it’s only for their size, and even then proportional to that size it’s less. With a bit of pheromones we Zenith can get them to (or at least try to) do anything for us, but there’s only so much they can accomplish. When feeling lazy I’ll get a horde of them to paint my nails for instance, or try and give a massage.

However, humans can’t do any of that stuff. Humans can’t emit pheromones, for starters. Also, gams can’t talk! They have mouths, but no vocal chords. They can make noises, but no human could hear them and it’s not really anything resembling speech. They can understand speech of course, but they can’t talk back.

Except for Truespeak of course! See, that’s why they can’t talk, there’s no need. They have telepathy just like us, so we can communicate with Truespeak. As you might imagine, talking to an uneducated horde of tiny horny people is... typically not the most stimulating thing. It exists more so we can boss them around to be honest, tell them what we want and things like that. Now, if we were to truespeak to them “climb in my mouth”, you might wonder why they would do such a deadly thing?

Pheromones! With these we can easily lull any lesser animal into a state of complicity. Yeah, even humans! Gams however are super sensitive to pheromones though, and thus easily bend to our whims. Even if they weren’t, I feel they would do anything we asked anyways just out of sheer reverence.

Oh, that’s another good reason why to avoid integrating them. You could educate a group of thousands, but then a single Zenith with a sadistic streak could walk up them, emit the slightest bit of a pheromone, then truespeak them into a single file line for her to gleefully flatten as she walks along the street.

Just doesn’t make sense!

Wow I really went off on a huge tangent there. I guess the only other thing to mention is more about what they look like. They are pretty small so humans usually need a magnifying glass since they lack our resolution of sight and stuff.

So, they look a lot like us Zenith or, I guess, how one would expect a male Zenith to look if they applied the human expectations of male versus female.

They have colorful skin and hair, which they can change at a whim (and they do sometimes to try and woo us). They also stick to simpler colors of skin generally, peachy whites and lighter tones of pink and blue and stuff. Their hair doesn’t glow, though, which kind of hints that they don't have lots of the useful traits we have. Yeah they are strong and fast for their size, but there’s no hair plugging or pheromones or anything like that. Their psionic index is pretty terrible, and telepathy is all they can do there but, yeah, that’s still better than the vast majority of humans, ha.

Like us, they are resistant to temperature, although they are way more fragile than we are even adjusting for size. They lose fights to big insects all the time. Like us they are mammals.

As far as size goes theirs can vary quite a bit. The smallest are around 10mm, whereas the largest gam someone has found has been almost 2cm! Now those are tiny sizes, not even an inch for the upper end of things. However, imagine if some humans (or female Zenith) could be 20 times the size of another?

To be fair, I guess we female Zenith are hundreds of times the size of the male Zenith, which is far more extreme, but it’s honestly hard to think of them as the same in any way most of the time.

Oh, I noticed in past biology classes long ago that when humans see up-close visuals of gams, they are often very amused to discover that they lack genitalia. They look like dolls down there. During reproduction they give us genetic material another way but, frankly, I’ve wrote enough about all this to start getting into really embarrassing stuff. If I think it’s relevant I guess I’ll write about gam stuff more, but only if relevant. This is a writing project no one is gonna look at, not some biology paper.

So, back on the topic of the movie time with Nyrle, yeah, I was salivating down at the gams flailing around the container. With a lick of my lips, I remember just dipping my fingers in and pinching up a whole bunch of them. I let them lose in my mouth and bounced them around with my tongue a bit (always a fun feeling) before I gulped them down.

At this point, they figured they were probably gonna die, but they still couldn’t help themselves. None tried to run from me. They kept trying to run towards me in fact, climbing out of the lid. By now a few had escaped. They moved in small clumps towards my exposed taut tummy (yeah I’m prideful so what). I licked my finger and dragged it across them, scooping up that little mass before they fell down where they’d be annoying to pick up.

I didn’t tell Nyrle it at the time, but I think she got the idea nonetheless. I was famished today. I went on a quick run around the campus a few times for fun earlier, and hadn’t eaten since. So, after sucking dozens of gams off my finger, I just lifted the entire container up towards my face.

There’s just something super fun about eating gams. I guess it’s evolution why we like them so much cause, hey, free food source yahoo. But, even beyond that there’s just this odd sort of appeal you know. When I held that container up to my lips and slowly opened my mouth, I couldn’t help but imagine what it must be like to be a gam.

Like, say you’re one gam atop the writhing collection. Imagine looking up at the face of a giant. No, a god. That’s what they treat us ladies like pretty much. Beings of sheer reverence, fear, and power. A being who you’d do anything for, would offer your life for, and she’s looking at you with hunger in her eyes.

My lips slowly part, strands of saliva breaking, my saliva. My breath washes over you and the other huddled masses. It roils around your body. It’s humid. My tongue extends, granting an even better view of the red and fleshy throat that awaits, glowing softly with my inner bioluminescence.

It could not be more obvious that I’m going to eat you and everyone around you.

Yet, you don’t try and run. You thought about it. A jolts of fear pulse through you and the rest of the mass at this obvious predatory display. But, I’m just too beautiful. Too massive. I’m super stimulus. Every feature of me seems flawless to you: divine. The appeal is irresistible. For all the stress in your mind there’s still pleasure chemicals percolating around. Normally you could overpower them if you were afraid enough. You try at first to scramble to the edge. But, with the tiniest bit of effort on my part, seconds earlier, I dispersed the tiniest bit of pheromones. Such a minute amount, but, from me at least, it’s enough to overwhelm you with the fewest of truewords.

Already your natural attraction to me is ramped up, already the sound of my breath is a delight. You and many others reach out with telepathy, truespeak. You try and send me messages but they are all ignored by my superior mind. I send you one though, and one to everyone else in the plastic container.

“Don’t leave the box.”, I truesay.

You are overwhelmed by the command. You can’t even imagine leaving the box now. My voice is divine in more ways than one. My superior psionic potential easily roars in your being. Like thunder. On top of that, the pheromones have made every trueword a delight. Honey. Ambrosia. Not only do you obey, you're grateful for the privilege, nodding with enthusiasm to be able to serve me so easily.

I dip the container towards my mouth, one hand beneath it and the other helping to stop any from falling out to the floor, instead funneling you all in.

You’re one of the first ones in. The moist and hot atmosphere of my mouth takes hold of you immediately. The presence of my breath inundates you. My tongue writes below you. You tumble into a strand of my saliva, mercifully getting stuck there for a few seconds. You spend that time watching many others slip down my gullet as I gulp. The noise wrings out, normally disturbing but with my pheromones dancing in your brain it’s just another lovely noise to be overpowered by your admiration for me.

They scream though, the pheromones are starting to wear off. I made mine short lasting. Your fear tolerance decreases significantly, right around the time that strand of saliva breaks. I felt it, not you, in my mouth and with a wiggle of my tongue I snapped it. All the while, the horde from the bin is going down my throat, gulp after gulp. It pushes you from behind.

You slip past my uvula. Slimy red throat flesh undulates and glows around you. Screams are all you hear. Your kind can’t make normal audible words, and truespeak to the others is ignored due to their obvious fearful preoccupations. Truespeak to me is ignored for its irrelevance.

Every pulse of peristalsis squeezes you against a bunch of other writhing gams. You hear cries of agony ring just softer than the cracks of broken bones. My throat is strong. My body is strong. The most automatic, thoughtless contraction of a muscle can break your kind. Up above, you hear the roar of the approaching masses. Hundreds strong. My food.

Yet, even the loudest scream is dwarfed by me. The squelch of my throat easily overpowers the horrified cacophony. The steady thump of my heart beats an omnipresent rhythmic reminder of my power. Each beat of it pounds over your small sounds as it pounds in my chest. I continue swallowing down your kind from the container, each gulp a loud guttural blaring noise through my gullet.

Loudest of all is the gurgles from my stomach. One rings out. A monstrous roar. The timbre is tinged with the wet sound of acids sloshing. I’m hungry, and you’re on the way. You and my body both know it. The disorienting, slimy trip in my throat is paradoxically too fast and too slow. Ahead you see a screaming mass, packed into a ball, slip through a glowing fleshy gate. You follow behind them, at the front of your own jam-packed writhing gam bolus. Lucky you.

You slip through. It’s a tight squeeze but my body gives just enough space. Soon as the mass of that gulp crosses the esophageal sphincter, you fall out. Everyone does without my throat to keep you all clumped up nice and easy. My stomach is lit up to. You’re going to see everything.

The red walls are wrinkled, undulating. Clean slime coats them. The smell is acrid. The heat this deep inside my body makes my mouth seem like a crisp fall evening. You fall quickly into a greenish puddle with dozens of others. Immediately you feel burning pain against your body. My digestive fluids get everywhere on you. When you open your mouth to scream, the liquid runs into your throat and starts burning your esophagus. You don’t even get to scream.

There’s no hope. Everything I ate is already liquid by now or close enough. My stomach acid can eat through metal, and fast. You don’t stand a chance. You move an arm to try and swim to the stomach walls, but the flesh sloughs off the bone the moment you bring the limb above the surface. The parts of you out from under the surface also have some of the fluid stuck to you. It’s not so easy to get off. You can feel it eat into the center of your bones.

Up above screams ring out as dozens more of you fall down. They fall atop of you, pushing you back under the agonizing ‘waters’. A gurgle rings out alongside the sound of flesh shifting. My stomach churned and those that can do cry out at the jostle. Dissolving bodies are moved aside with the motion, moved deeper to make room for more. You’re one of them, sinking even deeper in the acids within my gut. You don’t resurface. Your death is exceedingly painful, but relatively quick.

At least, in the end, you got inside me after all. Got to serve my body, even if the means isn’t exactly what you desired.

A couple more gulps and I’ve devoured almost everything that was in the container. In my messy style of eating, a dozen or so of your kind slipped out. They fell on the counter to the counter surface then scrambled back up. Taking the sight of my form again they are once again in a state of adoration. Stunned. Without even a glance I bring my hand down atop them all, flattening them. It’s a tiny bit messy but both our exteriors can self-clean so I’m not too worried. I wipe my hands and turn back to Nyrle.

...Wow that was pretty fun to write! I’m feeling a bit ‘flustered’ as the humans say haha. Like I said, there’s some evolutionary appeal to treating gams so meanly I guess.

That has me thinking of more gam stuff worth sharing (yeah, I know! It’s too much already)

It’s kind of funny though. But, gams seek out us females not just through smell or detecting any emitted pheromones, but also by sight of course. Like, they know what we look like, intuitively, even though we are orders of magnitude bigger than them. They know what a female is typically shaped like, the standard timbre for a voice, stuff like that.

Well, the thing is we Zenith have a lot in common with female humans appearance and voice wise: at least the younger ones. Older human women get all wrinkled and stuff later on, whereas we are biologically immortal pretty much.

Anyways, so as you can imagine, human women are often mistaken for female Zenith. Or, well, maybe ‘mistaken’ isn’t the right word. Yeah if all they see is the side of a foot from a hole in the dirt, they might actually mistake it for a Zenith’s or vice versa. No, it’s more accurate to say that as a process of how biological attraction works, they are mistakenly attracted to human women as well as Zenith females.

Thankfully, they aren’t aggressive maters like some wild animals are. If they were, trust me, they’d be extinct by now somehow. We’d make it happen. To be blunt, there’s no need to worry about them crawling in vaginas without consent.

Still, they will often climb up on counters or something to get a good look at a human woman prepping dinner or something if they happen to stumble into her home. If a pair of flip-floped feet seem feminine enough they will approach as well. They can logically know it’s a human and not a female Zenith, but they still find themselves intrigued.

Now this is part of why they are annoying to most, at least at times. But, they are also something of popular pets for some--mostly humans. You can buy little enclosures for them and stuff.

Also, I mentioned how there’s a certain joy to just crushing or devouring them. Well, humans don’t have an evolutionary reason for that, but you’d be surprised. I know for a fact that some humans are into doing weird, and even kinky, stuff with them. It’s more common than one would think if all the stuff online is to be believed. I’ve talked to some human women that do that kind of stuff in fact. I think some humans are just natural sadists. I think everyone has some tendencies for that stuff, or most everyone Zenith or otherwise. Veldel especially.

It seems to cross species barriers.

Other humans just think they make cute pets maybe.

Anyways, Nyrle looked at me, chided me for being a messy eater, and then the microwave dinged. The popcorn she was cooking was finished. She pulled out the bowl, then grabbed another container of gams. This time she opened it just a tad and sprinkled some of them over the popcorn.

Yeah, even kind-hearted Nyrle eats gams. Only humans and the weirdest of the Zenith refrain. Not all humans refrain of course! Curiosity strikes most at one point or another. They are so easy to accidentally kill after all, what’s the harm in trying just one, right? I imagine that’s how many humans thought before trying their first gams.

Nyrle sat down at the couch and popped a handful of ‘seasoned’ popcorn into her mouth before starting up the movie. I took another container out of the box and walked over myself. Eating gams like Nyrle was doing, or even cooking them, is quite popular. There’s a lot of recipes out there. Steamed gams is an old family recipe of mine in fact.

However, I always preferred them raw. But, as I sat next to Nyrle and she offered me the bowl, I still had a handful or two as we watched the flick. Popcorn is a bit more filling than a gam anyways. I just think it’s more fun to not chew them. I get a kick out of knowing they are wiggling down my throat. Chewing is kind of unavoidable when they are mixed in like that.

Some people thought about marketing the gams as food. However, processing them on a mass industrial-like line for slaughter seems a bit cruel even to me. Also, if we ever want gams we can just step outside and spread some pheromones around. They will come running. If humans want gams, they can go to a pet store and buy them cheap. No shop-keep will care they are used for food or whatever other stuff, no matter how depraved, the buyer might have in mind.

Of course, I can just stop by Nyrle’s dorm whenever I want some. Her mother keeps sending them. She’s worried about her daughter being underfed. I mean, not that any Zenith is ever chubby, our figures are considered top by human standards. Not exactly body builder tier, but more like a model who works out, I don’t know. I don’t keep up with human body standards all that much I suppose. I just know some human guys have said we always have really good bodies.

Anyways, I think part of the reason I’m writing about gams so much is cause I’m bored, and the movie was kind of bad. It was one of those new super hero movies, but it was made for a human audience. Like, how am I supposed to care about the suspense when I’m stronger than the super hero?

We ended up lowering the volume and just fondling one another till it was over. Once that was done, I asked if she wanted to come to the party tomorrow, but she said she had a project to finish over the weekend. Probably for the best, since it was Soaph’s place after all.

It was getting to be sunset so I decided to head back to my dorm room. I made sure to take a few containers of gams before I left though. One I’m saving to bring to Soaph’s place tomorrow for the party, the other I’m snacking on as I write this entry.

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