Time for our main character! Let’s see how long it takes for her to run into another female to chat with and get some Bechdel passing.

I knew it would begin with the end, and the end would look like death to these eyes. I had been warned.

But…hasn’t she been through a lot of these bodies? Are human bodies different and have to sorta die first for some reason, or is it that this particular body was so messed up before getting fixed? But a minute ago they were explaining that there was no way to tell her what was going on until they stuffed her into a body, which would seem to suggest she was warned about this as a general thing.

The soul/yeerk finds herself already using the human language, and finds it not that great compared to others but functional enough. And she explains that all of this – eyes, language, whole body – has now become her, so they really identify as the whole creature and aren’t just piloting around meat puppets.

I braced myself for the onslaught of the first memory, which would really be the last memory–the last moments this body had experienced, the memory of the end. I had been warned thoroughly of what would happen now. These human emotions would be stronger, more vital than the feelings of any other species I had been.

Still seems to be a bit confused about what’s typical. She’s talking about all of this like it’s unusual, but it seems like maybe it’s only a big deal because humans are super emotional? I guess no one’s tried out prey animals as hosts yet.

So, she’s braced for it, but it doesn’t do any good because holy shit sensation! Apparently scent is new because I guess it’s a really rare thing to evolve? Man, dogs would fry their little brainslug brains.

I’m really trying to figure that out. Scent is the most primitive sense, you know? I mean, it’s basically tasting tiny bits of food in the water and seeking the bigger bit they’re coming from. Bacteria do that. I guess on every other planet all non-water things just never evolved to handle air particles…but no, they would just be smelling through their mouths then, wouldn’t they? I can’t think of how you could really avoid smell while still having taste. And it’s just so useful!

Maybe…they don’t have any advanced chemical receptors, just the basic ones, and that’s the distinction. I’m still really not sure it’s feasible to dodge that in evolution, but I guess I could see it being lost, since it’s not like we have the greatest sense of smell and given how overemotional we apparently are, maybe we’re one of the more primitive hosts she’s been in and all the others ended up taking over that brainpower to be more rational about stuff. I know our own sense of smell is a pretty primitive sense that isn’t hooked up well to the rest of our brain, and people born without it aren’t at the same disadvantage as those who are blind or deaf or have no sense of touch.

Anyway, in the memory, she’s running in blind terror, thinking she’s failed. It’s cold enough to hurt, and she might also be injured further, it’s not clear.

The Seekers are calling. The sound of their voices twists my stomach. I’m going to be sick.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” one lies, trying to calm me, to slow me. Her voice is disturbed by the effort of her breathing.
“Be careful!” another shouts in warning.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” one of them pleads. A deep voice, full of concern.

This really does seem interesting! So, the souls seem to be sort of benevolent dictatory people, where they’re really concerned for the wellbeing of their meat puppets, but at the same time they seem to be totally erasing those people.

I guess it’s sort of like eating meat but not wanting the cow to feel pain, maybe?

Whatever it is, it’s not something the girl the brainslug’s taken over appreciates.

Heat shot through my veins, and a violent hatred nearly choked me.
I had never felt such an emotion as this in all my lives.

Huh. So we’re emotion crazed beast people. I guess that’s why they consider themselves souls.

Humans being primitive and violent isn’t exactly new ground in scifi, but the execution tends to be blah, so there’s still lots of room for a well done take on it.

There’s a loud noise in the memory.

Screaming,my body explained.You’re screaming.
I froze in shock, and the sound broke off abruptly.
This was not a memory.
My body–she was thinking! Speaking to me!

So they’re totally yeerks. Only apparently they’re normally total brainslugs and maybe our primitive brains just aren’t as controllable. That kind of makes sense, we’re a cobbled together mess but that means we’re pretty resilient to damage.

Anyway, I think that’s a Bechdel test pass there! Female human telling female brain slug about non-guy info. Surprisingly good so far, book.

The seekers plead with her to stop because there’s the hole of an empty elevator shaft, but she just flings herself toward it faster, hoping she can suicide.

The emptiness swallows me. My legs flail, useless. My hands grip the air, claw through it, searching for anything solid. Cold blows past me like tornado winds.
I hear the thud before I feel it… The wind is gone…
And then pain is everywhere

It wasn’t a long enough fall. That’s really horrible.

I guess that’s why they were talking about how badly hurt her body started off. But if that’s the reason she needed to brace herself for the wakeup, then it’s unique to the body, and we just spent last chapter hearing about how she couldn’t be warned in advance about the body.

Also, why was healer guy hating seekers last chapter? It sounds like they’re super nice in their own terrifying brain slug way. There is a lot of untapped creepiness here! Things that desperately beg you not to hurt yourself and super care about you but also want to erase your mind so they can take over your body? Awesome.

And it sure seems like getting info from the girl is important because apparently humans like to suicide rather than get caught and they don’t want them getting hurt, right? So why be so mad about that, either?

That memory ends with her blacking out, then suddenly there’s a face.

The face was as alien to me as the faceless serpentine tentacles of my last host body would be to this new body.

Sooo are we going to see any cthulhu brain slugs showing up? I mean, once you’ve taken over a place there’s no reason not to have alien bodies running around too, right?

Our brain slug narrator explains that she knows it from the images she saw before coming her, and then runs through how weird humans are – our faces are all almost identical in form, for one thing.

They actually are very similar, which is because humans are all very closely related, courtesy of a genetic bottleneck not too long ago. (Our tendency to wipe out competing groups may have also served to slow returning variation.) So perhaps most other species made it to sapience without a major bottleneck happening before the brain slugs arrived. Or perhaps again it’s a matter of us being primitive, and most other species became dominant for long enough for diversity to go into overdrive courtesy of the removal of much natural selection.

A collection of senses, all but touch, concentrated in one place.

It’s hard to say what alien life will look like, but it should be pointed out that there’s a reason we stuff all our senses in one place. If you look at the various forms of life on our planet, senses evolved several different times across branches of animals, but usually shared certain similarities in form. There’s two major issues.

First, the further a sense organ is from the brain, the longer the signal has to travel before the brain gets it. You wouldn’t think this makes a big deal given how fast nerves can send a signal, but it’s so significant we actually evolved workarounds for the parts of our body that need to be far from our brains, like our hands – touch something painful by accident, and the nerve signal only has to get to your elbow to trigger a response and jerk away.

Second, nervous tissue is expensive. Our eyes, for example, are sort of like a cable line to our brain compared to the puny dialup of a lot of our other nerves. Every inch you add there is an inch packed with a hell of a lot of nerve tissue. You want that as short as possible.

So, while there will be creatures where this isn’t a factor, the reason our faces are like that is because clustering senses is the best default setup.

For this to be unusual among the species they’ve encountered, we must have evolved some unusually backward system. But even with the handwavey possibilities that might resolve the issue of expense, it’s hard to believe there’s some good solution to the speed issue. Our nerves have a variety of speeds (this gets back into expense) but even the top speeds are slow enough that there’s a noticeable delay the more spread out they get.

Maybe all other species are using fiber optics. But in that case we should be flatly incompatible with the brain slugs. Their very existence suggests nervous systems are usually very similar across the galaxy.

In conclusion, biology is fun!

She also thinks it’s weird we have eyebrows, despite those being a practical thing and an awful lot of species have some sort of ridge thing above them.

Anyway, after explaining this she says that she would totally always recognize this face, I guess because she’s merging more with the girl,

In color it was a light golden brown. The hair was just a few shades darker than the skin, except where flaxen streaks lightened it

I wonder if this brown brown brown thing is after the flack she got for vampires all turning white. I’m pretty sure this guy is indeed another white guy, though, since if they were living together then presumably he’s also suntanned, and it also says he’s got lightish brown eyes and his face has line that were from smiling and squinting into sunlight.

But I guess it’s not fetishizing whiteness like the all vampires are white thing, so it is a pretty big step in the right direction.

Then it disappears and the girl tells the girl brainslug to knock it off because this is hers.

Again, I was frozen, stunned. There should have been no one here but me. And yet this thought was so strong and so aware!
Impossible. How was she still here? This was me now.
Mine, I rebuked her, the power and authority that belonged to me alone flowing through the word. Everything is mine.

We seem to be already losing the cute creepy benevolent dictator thing and heading into straight yeerk.

Still, even that’s pretty different for a protatonist. The overall writing of this book isn’t anything much, but it’s surprisingly original and we’ve already got all sorts of plotty stuff and no wandering around being a sullen idiot.