Imperiosus
They found the beast frozen in Siberia. The last of its kind.
It slept. It couldn’t remember a time when it didn’t sleep. There was such a time, eons before, when it didn’t sleep. When it walked the earth with its brethren. Sometimes it could faintly recall these days, like a half-remembered dream.
Then it wasn’t asleep. Something had found it. Creatures with greedy hands, and bright lights.
They wanted it. They’d awakened it. They’d made it their slave.
It couldn’t move. It’d been asleep for too long. Its limbs and muscles had forgotten how to. They brought it back, into a freezing cold world. They carried it away. It was a long journey. It was carried. Through blurry, half open eyes, it saw strange things; bright colors, odd shapes. It smelled the air, and felt sick, but it was too weak to cough. The strange odors and alien aromas tarnished its tongue, and stung its nostrils. And nowhere, in the harsh, bizarre mixture of smells, could it detect the scent of its own kind.
Dynamosaurus.
Though not a dinosaur, this creature did live at about the same time as them. This species was wiped out around the end of the Jurassic period. It appears as a gigantic lizard, with a long scaly body, four squat appendages, and a narrow snout, lined with jagged teeth.
At one-hundred-and-fifty-feet long from head to tail, it is of the largest land carnivores in the fossil record.
It didn’t know how long it had been asleep. Sometimes the world changed a little when you were asleep, sometimes a lot.
The only thing that remained was the vermin. It could feel them inside, moving under its back, and through its stomach. It was used to the vermin. They’d been there since it was born; the only thing left of its old world.
The greedy hands tried to take them away. It couldn’t fight. It couldn’t move. The greedy hands had won. There was nothing he could do.
They put something in its arms; strange colored liquids going into its veins. It became very sleepy after that. They fed it once a day.
It was alone.
The creature is infected with a parasite, codenamed Imperiosus. We believe it might have been born with it.
It’s one of the fastest and most powerful pathogens we’ve ever seen. It attacks the host’s nervous tissue, the brain, the spinal cord, and eats away at them. In a matter of minutes, the host is immobilized. In a matter of hours, the host’s nervous system is destroyed, and it dies.
And yet, it doesn’t seem to kill Dynamosaurus. That is because of the animal’s unique immune cells, which transform themselves to mimic the structure and appearance of nerve cells. The parasite mistakes them for nerve cells, and the parasite eats them instead, leaving the real nerve cells alone.
We hope to study these parasites, and perhaps weaponize them. We’ve been taking samples from the animal, and while regularly administering it with drugs to keep it sedated.
One day, the creature found it wasn’t sleepy. No strange liquid pumped into its arms. It stood up, and looked around. It was inside somewhere. But it wasn’t a cave. It was very cold. The floor and the walls were whiter than snow. There was hardly any dirt at all. The creature didn’t like this place.
It walked outside, and found an area covered in a smooth gray rock with yellow and white lines, that he’d never seen before.
The creatures with greedy hands were there. Only they weren’t moving. They were all lying on the ground. They were all dead. Blood dripped from their eyes and ears.
He ate a few to satisfy his hunger, and then walked into the forest. The new world awaited him.
