And Darkness created me. The little beast came out vicious, but interesting.
From the diary of the Prince of Darkness.
I hate stairs and filthy people!
Why? For the simple reason that, in my 'black puddle' form, I possessed not only sight but also touch, thoroughly mixed with taste receptors—or whatever replaced them for me. Had I mentioned that the basement was badly fouled? No? Well, it was!
I tried to switch off those taste receptors and the entire tactile-olfactory component of the torture, but my success was perfectly consistent with the condition of the space around me: everything worked through the ass. As for the way I flowed up the staircase, one could write a separate book about it. More precisely, a book consisting entirely of the epithets I wanted to hurl at the world and at every bastard who allowed a building to fall into such a state.
Oh, how I wanted to kill. How selflessly and sincerely I hated all living things with a cold, rational hatred supported by an overwhelming body of sensory evidence! But all things end eventually, and so did that damned climb.
For the first time, I saw the light of my new world. The world greeted me from the exit into some church utility room attached to the very bell tower in question, with a fine drizzling rain, mud, and absolute silence.
I understood nothing. Where was the whistle of the wind, the hum of the highway—at least the sound of the rain itself? Had the Symbiote gone deaf after that bell concert upstairs?
The idea seemed idiotic, to put it mildly, but I had no other explanation for the absence of sound. Deciding to leave the matter for later, I began implementing the first item in my plan for world domination: obtaining a body.
In the cartoon, the living black suit stumbled across Eddie Brock entirely by chance while flowing down into the bell tower, where Brock happened to be only minutes after a stressed and not especially sentimental Peter Parker had tied him up. Which was what he deserved for obsessively getting on the nerves of a guy whose life was already bad and who was currently going through a black streak in every sense of the phrase. If you thought about it, Brock was lucky Peter merely wrapped him in webbing that dissolved by itself after a couple of hours instead of snapping his neck.
Unfortunately, in my newly acquired memories, the Symbiote had flowed down the outside wall of the bell tower, and there were no Eddie Brocks left anywhere nearby. Personally, I did not care. At first, any random individual would do.
Fortunately, luck favored me. The aforementioned individual was walking toward me on his own.
Judging by his appearance, he was an ordinary homeless man seeking shelter from the weather in the church—or perhaps directly in my basement. I watched the approaching figure and thought.
Something serious had happened to my psyche. The fact that I was preparing, in essence, to devour a sapient being whose species I myself had belonged to only recently did not trouble me at all. I was far more interested in how, exactly, I was supposed to do it.
No useful knowledge about enslaving humans rushed to the surface of Venom's memory. There was only a strangely confident sense that it was possible.
The Symbiote's memories and knowledge were generally peculiar. How could I explain its certainty that a host could be completely suppressed when it remembered in detail how it had failed to suppress Parker? And, for that matter... it had barely tried. I clearly remembered its attempts to remain in Peter's body, to resist being torn away even while the bells hammered through it—but any attempt to dominate his personality? Nothing.
Damn it, why had I not awakened next to an operating manual for symbiotes?
Meanwhile, the homeless man successfully reached the basement entrance and managed to step directly on me.
My body acted by itself. Thin tendrils erupted from the puddle and wrapped the poor man from head to toe, forming a black cocoon. I felt my body penetrate his nervous system and flow into his muscles, modifying tissue while simultaneously taking an imprint of his genetic code.
The sound of rain struck my ears. The smell of filth assaulted my nose. The body was dirty and itched savagely.
Well. The material was low quality. The host's shell had suffered extensive damage and would not have remained functional for more than six months on its own.
Wait. What the hell?
My thoughts seemed to split. On one side, I was disoriented by the sudden return of hearing and smell—and the stench was truly impressive. On the other, something inside me was carrying out a long-established algorithm, bonding with the man while analyzing his condition and capabilities.
I was not allowed to reflect properly. One minute earlier, the alcoholic had been standing at the edge of an abyss—metaphorically, although in the literal sense he had indeed been standing at the top of the basement stairs. Now he took a great step forward... and promptly fell down the staircase, counting every step with our ribs.
That hurt!
No. Absolutely not. Once I became ruler of the world, my very first decree would replace every damned staircase with... hm... ramps! Self-cleaning magical ramps! If I was in a cartoon universe, they ought to be possible.
Things only grew worse. I developed a burning desire to drink and smoke. A filthy hand entered an equally filthy pocket and pulled out a battered flask, which I greedily pressed to my lips. Some vile-tasting swill flooded my mouth, but it contained alcohol, and that was all that mattered.
"Heh. Lucky me... fell from that height and didn't even get scratched! This must be my day. Find something to eat and it'll be perfect," a hoarse, smoke-roughened voice sounded in the basement silence.
Well, damn.
So when a host's emotions and desires weave themselves into your thoughts, it is not harmless at all. At this rate, who was going to subjugate whom?
Right. Something had to be done about this. But what—and, more importantly, how? I could not yet control the body. All I could do was... begin a detailed inspection of the movable property I had acquired.
Yes... any neurosurgeon would sell their soul without hesitation for the ability to work through a Symbiote. Bioscanners, microscopes, diagnostic systems—all of that and much more was contained within one modest quantity of black slime.
And the 'interface' could not have been friendlier. The instant I wished to know how, say, the host's liver worked, I received not only a comprehensive answer concerning the organ's function, structure, and condition, but several variants for improvement and optimization. If I wanted, I could even implement some of my own ideas, though I understood that last possibility only vaguely and chose not to experiment with it yet.
At the same time, I tried to understand the Symbiote's own structure, but that ended in complete failure. Either I lacked the knowledge to formulate the request correctly, or it simply was not designed to analyze itself. The result was the same: I learned nothing. Tragic.
The homeless man, however, yielded an enormous amount of information. I effectively learned everything about him: who he was, how he had lived, his new physical condition, and, perhaps most importantly, information about the world into which I had been transported.
It was an exceptionally interesting world, and extraordinarily valuable for collecting genetic data. Various mutants were almost an ordinary part of life here. Rumors of vampires and werewolves circulated through the city. Members of the lower social classes avoided certain districts for fear of participating in clandestine experiments conducted by the powerful.
A charming little world, in other words. Things might be different in other countries, but the host had taken no interest in geopolitics or the general state of the world. Why would that be interesting, after all?
While I occupied myself with introspection—in the literal sense—my unwashed friend settled onto a filthy mat in the corner and began snoring with complete dedication, already enjoying his tenth dream. Judging by the brain emissions, however, it was only his eighth.
Hm. This might work. No—it had to work.
I had been observing my host's sleep for several hours when a very interesting idea occurred to me. I could control a sleeping body—I had experimented a little while studying the carcass—so why not keep the host permanently asleep? It would be pleasant for him, and he would not interfere with me.
Yes, saying it was much easier than doing it. I could read his biological data. I could alter his organs, though only within finite limits—temporarily, I hoped. Try sometime to build the word 'happiness' using only three blocks marked A, S and S, or perform heart surgery with a spoon and a copy of 'Medicine for Dummies,' and you will understand what I was facing.
But I had to solve the problem somehow. Becoming an appendage to a ruined vagrant and rescuing him from cirrhosis was not part of my plans. Therefore, by crowbar and profanity, by dancing with a tambourine, or by any other means, I needed to remove his mind reliably from control of the body.
Obviously, this was easier said than done. But doing nothing and waiting for him to wake would produce even less of a result. So, spoon and manual or axe and brute force, we were going to try.
I hoped he would not die in the process. Otherwise, I would have to climb those stairs again as a puddle, then crawl through the rain in search of another victim. I really did not want to do that.
Three hours later.
Yes! I did it! I succeeded!
We shall omit which attempt worked and how many times the unfortunate Symbiote had to drag the host back from the edge of death because of the clumsiness of the consciousness that had 'moved in.'
"Sweet dreams, drifter. Sleep well," the man on the stinking mat said, then winced slightly at the sound of his own hoarse, smoke-ruined voice.
Half the job was done. I now possessed a body of my own, which was certainly wonderful, but its appearance did not suit me in the slightest.
Fortunately, changing one's appearance posed no difficulty to a creature capable of healing a host almost instantly, altering its genetic structure, and simply growing additional organs. Nor did growing proper clothing. It was not difficult to retrieve the method from the foreign memories I had inherited.
I found a piece of soap in one of the rags' pockets—it lay beside a coil of rope, which suggested certain thoughts—discarded all the clothing, and went out to wash beneath the still-drizzling rain.
Brrr. Cold rain lost to a hot shower in every possible category, but I managed to get clean.
Now for the body.
A height of six feet one suited me well enough, almost matching my previous body. Everything else, however...
During my work, the automatic component of the Symbiote—its instincts, I supposed—had already generated several possible body models that could be produced from this specimen with minimal losses. I only had to choose one and settle on a face.
The old, alcohol-soaked version did not appeal to me, so I adjusted the transformation matrix toward something younger and healthier.
Why had the Symbiote never done anything similar before? The more I tried to understand what it was, the more I suspected it was some sophisticated biological weapon produced by an unknown species. Too many aspects of its behavior resembled a precise algorithm repeated again and again.
At last, sensing that the face had finished changing, I grew trousers and boots. Although they consisted of my own Symbiote cells, in that form and configuration they suffered no problems involving taste receptors. All unnecessary sensations simply switched off, naturally and effortlessly, like a deeply ingrained reflex.
Once again, this returned me to thoughts about the Symbiote's unnatural origin. I had genuinely tried to achieve the same result while climbing those stairs. I had tried with all my soul. It had accomplished nothing. Here, however, I had not even thought about how to do it. More precisely, the cells had done it themselves, through the same automatic mechanism that helped me study the body.
That was clearly not normal. Still, this was hardly the moment to complain. Licking the ground with every step was not what I wanted from life. In short, it had worked, and that was excellent. To see what exactly I had produced, I looked into the nearest puddle. The reflection pleased me and strongly reminded me of someone, but something was still missing. Smirking faintly, I altered the skin pigmentation just below the left shoulder.
There. Perfect.
I completed the image by growing a black turtleneck and a heavy coat of the same color, drew a full breath, and took the first step into this new world in a body that now belonged completely to me. The first objective had been accomplished—and accomplished quickly, which could not help but please me.