MSTB ATE MY FRIEND: An Aldrich Horror
A sapphic dark academia cosmic parasite horror comedy novella.
A UCI physics student infected by a cosmic parasite gets hungry.
11k words | print & ebook | 5/29
HELEN HERNANDEZ. An undergraduate physics student set for grad school- until her friend, Emmy Yuasa, goes missing. Dragged away by the eldritch horror beneath Aldrich. Zot, zot, zot. The strings are starving.
"
I sat alone in Aldrich Park. Griffiths Electrodynamics in one hand. A cryptozoologist's Field Guide to Cryptids in the other. Black painted nails and a big bottle of alcohol between my knees. Laughing to myself in the shade of a billowy tree as mud mucked my slacks...
"
"
The answer was obvious. Trivial even. This was something different. Something inconceivable. Something confined to the grounds of the University of California, Irvine. And to stop it I had to kill the thing inside the walls of MSTB.
"
Content warnings include swearing, alcohol, death, violence, blood, gore, body horror, psychological horror, cannibalism, cults, and parasitic infection.
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SAMPLE
CHAPTER 1
DRINK. DERIVE. DESECRATE.
The key to being a successful physicist, or whatever the devil doeth. As remarked by Goodstein in States of Matter, Boltzmann and Ehrenfest died doing physics. It is only logical that I follow suit.
I sat alone in Aldrich Park. Griffiths Electrodynamics in one hand. A cryptozoologist's Field Guide to Cryptids in the other. Black painted nails and a big bottle of alcohol between my knees. Laughing to myself in the shade of a billowy tree as mud mucked my slacks.
Like any good pupil of the physical sciences, I spent my free time drunk and skimming through the chapters. Week old tequila staining the pages, ink bleeding and weeping like runny mascara. Alcohol was the choice barbiturate amongst physics students. It eased the brain and, as it turns out, made solutions come easier. But this time I couldn't focus. She was on my mind.
Emmy Yuasa. Missing since the beginning of winter quarter. My closest friend and other half.
I shut the book and took a swig. Spilled even more over that rancid blue cover. Fellow undergrads passed by without so much as a second glance. It was midterm season after all.
The things I said to her.
Things I couldn't take back.
I got down to the last drop. Said goodbye to my Pink Whitney. Swayed to my feet. Took to the inner ring road. Thinking and drifting.
No. Whatever it was, it wasn't a kraken. You need water for that. And the walls of MSTB were drier than linear algebra at eight in the morning.
Winter quarter. Your typical lab session for the 52 series. Genius physics majors that couldn't figure out how to build a simple RC circuit. The professor let us stay after class. Pitch black outside the window. I wonder if he pitied us. Girls who had no clue what they were doing. Seniors retaking classes we did shit in.
We established ground and were trying to get a reading when the signal on the oscilloscope boxes went haywire. Fritzing and stretching to thousands of kilovolts on the screen. Now, I am stupid, but that shouldn't have been possible. Nothing got fried.
Emmy looked up from a dusty old book she'd found in one of the drawers. Searching for relics. All she found was a ledger full of names. Probably cursed by the tears of previous lab students. A resigned look and a pout on her lips. "C'mon Helen. Maybe we should just go home."
I gave a short laugh. Feeling foolish myself. I thought I'd prepared enough ahead of lab time, but thirty minutes had turned into an hour and neither of us knew what the hell we were doing. We were let downs. I was a let down. "No! Come on. We can do this. Maybe we just plugged it in wrong."
Emmy scoffed. "What if we plug it up Wight's-"
A crack. From the floor. I glanced down. UCI and its shitty buildings-
Tendrils.
Bursting upwards.
Thick ropes of thousands of twisted and fraying threads. Gnarled and snaggled like roots or hair. Strings that writhed as though alive. Clear and flickering like the lights above.
They snapped around Emmy's neck. Strangled her. The dendrite feelers hooking into her skin. She couldn't even scream.
I don't think any web trainings could have prepared me for this.
I lunged for the first thing I could get my hands on. Dragged an air track from its station on the table, a long metal beam with the frictionless gliders still stuck to it. Swung.
The air track passed right through it. Clattered heavy on the floor.
One lab session and I'm pretty sure we just disproved the laws of physics.
I thought of slamming some radioactive sources down its throat. But the tendrils had no mouth, no eyes. Only strings. Strings twisting together under one mind.
Emmy rasped. Blood weeping from the tiny holes pricked into her neck. I met her eyes. Whispered the words I could never take back.
She softened. The way she often did entering a final exam when we knew it would be the end of us. And her limbs went limp.
I threw one last oscilloscope before the tendrils dragged her into the floors of MSTB. Passing straight through as though she were made of nothing but light. Swallowed alive.
A final scream for my name. Helen. Helen Hernandez, the girl who failed to save anyone.
I don't even remember what I did. I came to with my knees aching over the sticky floor. Nails clawed raw. The floor before me streaked red.
We were supposed to get boba.
Of course it didn't have to make any sense at all. Professor Wight, on the phone right outside the door, didn't see a thing. Didn't hear us scream.
I did everything I could. Didn't sleep, didn't eat. I demanded a search of the building. Begged the police department to take it seriously. They didn't.
Spring rolled around. I could have graduated by now. But Emmy was still missing and we were supposed to be in this together.
I took matters into my own hands. Broke into the same exact room to search for clues.
The moment the smell hit I remembered everything.
The string-like tentacles bursting from the waxy floor.
The book. In the drawer.
I tore through every station in the room, threw open the cupboards. That ledger, near empty yet full of names. But just like Emmy and everything else touched by Irvine Company it was gone. Gone in an instant.
And I was next.
It was a terrible feeling. The kind that makes you sick to the point of vomiting. Sludge sinking from your throat to your stomach until your palms got wet from all the trembling and feverishness and cold shock sweat. The ache in my chest knowing that I had let her down. I had let Emmy down.
The shadows lengthened. I came to. Booked it the hell out of there.
Now, my training in physics left me with a great deal of trust in textbooks and literature. But a tortured student knows when to give up. Reading that book of cryptids, I knew. The answer was obvious. Trivial even. This was something different. Something inconceivable. Something confined to the grounds of the University of California, Irvine. And to stop it I had to kill the thing inside the walls of MSTB.
A hand on my shoulder. Tight and demanding.
"Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior-"
I slapped him in the face and he yelped. "Ow!"
At that point I could have strangled him. "Lo! What the hell? I thought you were one of those cultists-"
Lilo Bal put his hands up in surrender, a grin on his face. "Chill…"
There was a red plastic cup in his hand. Coffee. SPS coffee specifically. Brewed from our very own second hand coffee machine sitting and weeping in the Society of Physics Students study lounge. The one that no one ever bothered to clean.
I raised a brow but kept my judgement to that. "Where's Mathson?"
"Uhh, probably already inside."
A shout behind us.
"Helen! Lo!"
Density Val, struggling up the hill after a long trek from the Anteater Parking Structure. Their Dunkin drink in hand as usual.
"Duude…" They wheezed and leaned on one knee, holding out a hand for rescue. "I'm so hungry I would kill for a seafood boil right now."
I couldn't help but grunt in agreement. We were all starving. Looking as though we'd just rolled out of bed. Indeed, some of us had.
Three of us gathered in front of the Phoenix Food Court.
The other three missing.
And 61A was about to start.
I tried not to think about Emmy. "Jobert and Mathson are probably inside already." I said. And they were. Jobert Long in the back of the lecture hall with some other friends. Mathson Anderson saving seats. Professor Willis Wight glaring straight into us. Greasy hair and an unkempt shave. Just our luck that he was teaching another class this quarter. Physics 61A. Modern Physics.
"Miss Destiny." Prof. Wight said, pronouncing Density's name horribly wrong. We stopped in our tracks. He had turned away from his slides on the relativistic conservation of momentum. Leaving everyone else in the lecture hall to stare.
Density took off her headphones. "Uh… yeah?"
Prof. Wight stared with his dead eyes. "What does it mean for a quantity to be invariant?"
They thought for a moment. "It… doesn't change."
"So." A clearing of his throat. Phlegm and lethargy. "Is energy invariant?"
"Um." Density blinked. "The energy of a system doesn't change. So…" She narrowed her eyes. "No?"
"Incorrect." Prof. Wight smiled. He didn't elaborate. Instead he returned to his station to growl heavily over the mic. "Since you all feel yourselves to be above sitting through lecture- Put your notes away."
Under her breath Density cursed Wight's bloodline and Lo groaned. "Oh shit… is there a quiz today?"
"Pop quiz," Mathson chirped.
Jobert dropped his phone behind us. Offered up some cold fries. We snagged some. "I didn't even do the homework."
I was debating whether or not to walk out. I didn't get any of this relativity stuff. Time dilation and length contraction. Emmy was my study partner and without her my habits fell apart. The train is moving at light speed. I hope it runs me over.
Twenty minutes. I stared down at my paper. No formula sheets. No notes. Physics majors have shit memory but maybe just maybe something would click. Scribbling down whatever bullshit I could think of. Proper length and proper time. Was the frame from the observed length or the proper length? Was v on top or was c on top? Was this actually a general relativity problem? Am I cooked?
Emmy would've known what to do.
"Why are you here."
I glanced up. Professor Wight was right over my shoulder. A stutter. Had I been looking around too much? Did he think I was cheating?
"Um. I'm taking the quiz." I said. Like a dumbass.
Wight didn't blink. Just repeated, in his laborious, breathless slur. Blank eyed and heaving. "Why are you here."
"I'm taking the quiz." I said again. Louder. But he didn't seem to hear. Glazed with sweaty palms. He walked right on past. No one around me seemed to notice.
Strange. My friends were trained to snicker at the slightest of twitches. This included severe laughing fits during the classical mechanics final. Jobert had sneezed and Emmy couldn't stop giggling.
I picked up my pen again and returned to my paper. Not that I could write anything though. My mind was long gone at this point. Gone with the lightspeed train.
Wight's voice crackled from the speakers.
"Pens down."
He stood at the front of the lecture hall with his usual pained expression. Eyes skimming right over me. We got in our last prayers and passed our papers up. Clocked out for the rest of the lecture. Took a trip.
The second floor of the science library. Our own stretch of table and a whiteboard to boot. Light filtering in through the big open windows. The lagrangian representation of a coupled harmonic oscillator was still up on the board, from last quarter's finals prep. That alone drew quite a few looks of pity and disturbance.
But we weren't focused on that at the moment. Enough time out of our day had been taken to discuss physics. Unless you're Mathson you get tired of it. Instead we coped. Slumping at our seats around the table.
Density broke the unspoken vigil of silence being held for all of our grades. "Dude. That was actually so bad."
I had a headache. Probably from the SPS coffee I drank that morning. Still I managed to laugh. "Diabolical."
"Bombed that," Lo said. Laying flat across the table.
"Same." Density shook her head. "I don't think I should have ended up with a negative length."
"I mean, that wasn't so bad," Mathson said. "Or, not as bad as I thought it would be. I think I did better than I did last time." He had the solutions sketched out in his notebook already. We crowded over them.
"Welp." Jobert chuckled in a way that meant he was in danger. "I hope I pass."
Emmy sat across from me.
I blinked.
She smiled. Mouth forming a perfect sine wave from pi to two pi at half amplitude.
Lo gave the whiteboard a small kick. It skeetered off to the side. "Goatchoa would never pull this shit."
"Deadass. I am so done." Density pulled out a bag of xxtra hot cheetos to cope. Offered me some. I didn't move. They didn't notice.
No one noticed.
Jobert raised his hands. "As long as I pass, I'm good."
"Good luck with that." Lo bit a cheeto. "The curve for this class is, like, completely flat. We're cooked."
Density tried not to think about their GPA. "No way I'm bombing this class again."
Mathson chuckled. "That'd be nice but no. And it's so stupid too. I mean, like, come on. We're trying to get into grad school and the dude is just over here trashing our chances. If it were up to me, I'd invest more into actually learning. That is to say, I have learned absolutely nothing in this class."
Emmy's face didn't move. Only her eyes. Darting. Locking onto Jobert.
"Maybe some of us just aren't cut out for it." Jobert shrugged. Dished out some chewy candies. "Only the biggest dogs."
"Big." Density said.
"Silence, engineer." Lo said.
"Hey!" Jobert put his hands together. "I'm Applied."
"You're about to be unemployed,"
I couldn't hear them. Instead my words came out a croak. "Can you guys see her?"
No response.
Emmy's sine mouth cracked open. Tasting the air.
"It's almost parasitic," Mathson mused. "The system needs us but also wants us to suffer. Like, oh, I could give you this position and have you contribute to science, but, actually, fuck you. Fuck everyone. Fuck science."
Density sighed and leaned back. "I don't want to give up on my dreams. I want to do cool shit and look at cool shit." A frown. "If I have to sell my soul to Irvine and work my ass off to the bone, I'll fuckin do it I guess."
"If you think about it." Jobert tipped back and almost fell out of his chair. "What are the chances that one of us even discovers anything or does anything big? Maybe there's no point to it. Like, we all know academia was fucked to begin with. Maybe industry is the only way out for us."
Emmy chirped. No one heard it.
"That's looking at the utility of it. The short term means. Science is so much more than that." Mathson said. "Even if I don't come out with anything, I will still have contributed. I will die knowing I did what makes me happy. No clue what I'd be doing with my life otherwise."
Density shook her head. "I want to make something of myself. All this blood sweat and tears and pulling triple my weight. I ain't stopping for no one."
"Seriously." Mathson scoffed. "And science is great. Do they not want people doing science?? Quantum."
"What if I give up physics and become a monk or something." Lo said.
Silence. Everyone stared at him.
They didn't see her. Emmy. The missing girl. Living again.
Lo looked around. "I'm serious. We know, like, wayy less than half of everything. Maybe we need to step back and look inside ourselves."
"But I don't give a fuck about that. I want to look at things on a quantum level. That's cooler." Mathson joked. "Qubits."
"Going from physics to religious asceticism is crazy." Density said. "I might need some of that."
"Shit… If you put it like that. Might be the way to go." Jobert yawned. "I'm cooked anyways." A shrug. "Be right back." He got up. Headed for the bathroom. Emmy followed.
I stared after her. Turned to my friends. "You guys notice anything off about Emmy?"
Mathson shrugged. Lo stretched an arm.
"No. Why?"
Density nodded and took a moment to respond. "I mean, she seemed a little distant."
I blinked.
So they did see her.
And they didn't seem at all surprised that she was back.
That was enough validation. I got to my feet. "I'll go check on her."
Her shadow swept around the corner. Past the bathrooms and up the stairs. I found myself amongst the old wood shelves, peeking into each and every aisle. Hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Made it all the way to the end of the library.
I turned around. Trudged back. But then I heard a whisper. Sharp and unintelligible.
Carefully I wandered. Stepped into a corridor between two looming bookcases. My eyes, drawn towards the right. One book. One spine. Leather bound, scratched and worn by time. Wedged into the very end of the shelf.
I removed the tome from its mausoleum. Read the inscription on the cover. A seal branded in fire. Mori Scire Tantum Brevitas.
This.
This was the book.
This was the book that had been left behind in the lab room.
The last thing Emmy ever touched.
I flipped it open. Scanned the names. The signatures lining the pages dated all the way back to 1960.
I snapped it shut. Dust winking in the frigid air.
Then I saw her.
Emmy.
Crouching.
Her silhouette shaking like it was crying.
As her hair fell away I saw the weeping holes in her neck had transformed. Coagulated into a mark of scars. A spiral, tight and winding. Sunken into her skin like a cattle brand.
The shape beneath her had arms and legs and shoes and a gray UCI hoodie.
Jobert.
She was stooping over Jobert.
Face buried in his chest cavity.
The crunch of wet bones snapping.
Like she was eating him.
And she could smell me. Opening her mouth to taste the little pulses of my heartbeat.
She snapped her neck around and leered. Crimson death dripping from her gums. Still she looked as gorgeous as always. Skin eggshell soft and cream like the pages of Taylor's Classical Mechanics.
I shoved the bookcase, toppled it and ran. Students peeking from out their decrepit little cubicles, half awake.
A glance over my shoulder and Emmy had thrown the bookshelf off her back like it was nothing more than a shrug on. Clawed after me on her knees before ratcheting up into a sprint. Limbs limp and flopping as though they had no blood nor bones.
Objects at a distance appear to move in slow motion because the angular speed is smaller. And I'd watched her, slow, thinking I'd put good distance between the two of us. Seeing her through the window on the other side of the library.
In a blink Emmy was right behind me. Breath over my neck.
So close I could smell her. Petrichor and blood.
The strings squirmed under her skin like ink derivatives and gradients for some bastardized lagrangian.
She crushed me against the wall. Teeth hovering over my neck.
I scrabbled, held her back by the shoulders.
The idea of getting married at UCI is stupid. Having a troop of Zot Bots carry flowers down the aisle, reeking CS majors clomping on by. But as she pinned me against the wall that was all I could think of.
Incisors grazed my skin. Her hard body fit perfectly into mine. I held still. Squeaked.
"Emmy."
A pause. Breathing heavy over my ear. The hand around my throat slipped. She jerked back. Tore away from me. Bolted until she shot through the window, the pieces suspended behind her.
I dove over the edge. Peered down below. Swallowed tightly, heart pacing. Emmy Yuasa. Lying flat on the ground. Crumpled in the shards of glass. Twitching.
Vision blurring I tumbled down the stairs. Ignored the shouting.
The clearing was empty. Emmy wasn't there.
I glanced up. Caught a glimpse of her. Running out into the outer ring road amongst the biology buildings.
I ran. I ran and ran and ran and chased the shadow onto the horizon because despite everything I could still see her trapped inside it and I knew I needed her with all my heart no matter how much she wanted to eat me out from the inside.
I made it to the inner ring, the circle around Aldrich Park. Wind gusting in my eyes.
Over the hill clustered a herd of students. Screaming and running.
A Petr drop.
A Petr sticker drop had swallowed Emmy whole.
Dozens hoping to get their hands on a Petr G Money exclusive holographic sticker.
She disappeared into the crowd and I lost her. In the bustle of sprinting students I had lost her. My head spun and the ground gurgled red beneath me. My second chance and I had lost Emmy all over again.
A blow to the head. I squeaked. Crashed into the muddied dirt path.
Words swam before my eyes.
High Winds.
Beware of falling branches.
With one last zot I faded. And as I faded the realization dawned, like a change in coordinates from cartesian to polar.
I did recognize one of the names in that book.
Jemison.
Professor Kristen Jemison.