Chapter 1

I have no idea just how long I have been on this earth. I have always presented as a top life-form, or near the top, and if I was ever eaten, which I have been uncounted times I just assimilate and re-form into a preferred identity.

I think I may be older than life on earth it’s self, and I couldn’t have evolved before life existed, so I probably came from elsewhere, be that in time, space, or extra-dimensional I have no clue.

I was here for the first wave of life-forms, and have continued thanks to my shape-shifting longevity and will to live which scales right off the charts- I don’t really remember much about my time two miles below the crust at the bottom of the flash-steamed sea, but where life exists, there can I exist, portraying the existing life form but better, always instinctively deferred to.

I have so much practice at living that I am instantly accorded Alpha-Leader status in whatever population I inhabit, as I am a better X than all the other X’s, due to lots of practice. Just my assurance and ease of living in my form is somehow recognizable to others of my current species, and somehow I am recognized on some level as being above the rest as far as status goes, and even pack and herd leaders would give way in deference if I asserted. I didn’t without some cause, I preferred the less contentious life in the middle of the herd and I could do without constant challenges and watching my back as leader of the pack.

Effectively, I am reincarnation incarnate. My soul began as an infinitesimal i, a quiet i am, i exist. As I practiced living my lifes, (sometimes going backwards when eaten by scavengers rather than dominant life forms- one seldom is a prey organism for very long- that’s just by the nature of nature. As one girlfriend ignorantly once said, it’s a doggy dog world.) I got better at being me, more practiced at self. After a very very long time of being all myriad kinds of life and living countless lives and dying uncounted deaths, I am concentrated, double-distilled super enzymatic ME!

Accretion and self-organizing is the opposite of entropy, especially when it is more than knowledge memes and information recording methods which pass the accumulation down the generations. Since I am personally collecting and collating the ball of wax myself, there is no more erosion and loss than that caused by my memory errors. And I pride myself on keeping all the important ones. So, I was smarter than the average bear, which is also why I was a top mastodon bull, while not the boss Ma.

Communication has existed long eons before spoken language, even before vocalizations of the most primitive and rudimentary kind. Even slime lifeforms in deep caverns conduct negotiations and form partnerships and alliances, just as often as they war. I know this for a fact, since I had to wait out various extinction level cataclysms in just such deep caverns deep under the oceans, down below the crust where everything is hot and squeezy, and life is oozy.

Bullying and dominance have been around as one tactic of success for long before mammals or even vertebrates have existed. Codified communication, either spoken or recorded have outlined the mutual agreements which jointly create ‘civilization’, which exist in some form of socialization within all social groups of various species to some degree of refinement or other, even if only in the most base form of ‘I’m bigger so I make the rules’.