I don't know how long I was sick. It was a blur of heat, thirst, and a bone deep ache throughout my body.  My mother coaxed and encouraged me through the worst of it -- which was kind of disturbing as she was dead. I think that I knew I'd survive when I finally was able to ask her about her presence.

"I'm not really your mother."

"I know." And I did -- the voice was right and it looked like her, but even in that hot, achey place I KNEW that wasn't really my mother. "But you aren't me either."

That I wasn't so sure about. I thought maybe the fever had left me with brain damage and I was now crazy or something.

"No, I'm the virus really." She explained.

Suddenly I was enveloped in a flashback to someone else's life. The sky was a chaos of red and orange clouds threaded through with continual violet lightning. The world was remarkably lush from my point of view because I KNEW that the cloud cover was constant and I also knew that plants needed sunlight to grow.

"Not here." My mother murmered quietly. "These aren't plants as you know them."

Indeed, as I watched something very like a red and brown, two headed giraffe walked up to a "tree" with branches drooping towards the ground and tipped with flexible sacks. The giraffe sucked one of the sacks into one mouth and drained the contents.

"Water." my guide supplied. "The plant provides water."

And then the giraffe turned and dropped an unmistakable of pile of dung at the base of the tree. And the base of the tree rippled and the dung disappeared in moments.

"The tree extracts liquid from our atmosphere in return for nutrients from the mobile lifeforms. Photosynthesis wasn't possible on my world."

"Wasn't?" Don't ask me why I picked up on that, but it seemed enormously significant.

"It hasn't existed for eons of your time. A moon or large asteroid or comet -- some solid body was captured by the pull of our sun and put in an orbit around our system. Some of our finest thinkers realized that it was intersecting our planet's orbit by the effect it had on our system each time it passed close. We didn't have a technology like your planet -- we manipulated the structure of life to create what we needed. But the one who realized the danger had a plan."

Now I was in the center of a large crater, countless creatures all around me as another creature beside me spoke. No two were exactly alike. Some were bipedal, others centaurlike, and others were insectoid. There were tentacles and feelers, feathery looking appendages and flippers. It looked like the fevered imagination of a sci-fi/horror film special effects master.

"It will collide with us." The being next to me said firmly. It looked like a four armed, onyx humanoid. The two upper arms were powerful looking, the two lower, longer and with finer apendages. The triple eyes on its face were a solid gold except for a single oval pupil in the middle of each. "When it does, it will destroy our planet. It will be broken apart completely and all life will die."

"You can't know that." Shouted someone from the sides of the crater.

"I can. I have modeled the impact over and over -- we will all die."

"That was unthinkable. Our people lived unimaginably long lives by your standards. Our planet was subject to much radiation, the thick cloud layer was all that made life possible but even with that survival required all life on our planet to be very adaptive -- very hardy. Since we learned how to manipulate the basic structure of our bodies, very few had actually died -- and those were only through accidents. What Verdithyl described was unimaginable to many."

"But there is hope." Verdithyl added into the shocked silence.

"We created a tiny lifeform, similar to your own viruses and bacterias, which were encoded with our memories as people. All who believed Verdithyl did so, and we formed hard, dense shells filled with our creations, the dorman seeds of our civilization. These lifeforms were programmed to recreate our people when they landed in place with the right building blocks of life. It was a very long chance, but it was all we had."

"You are turning me into you?" I asked, horrified.

"No! Well -- I am now IN you. But we never thought that there would be other intelligent life anywhere. We weren't even sure there would be another planet to grow a new civilization on. But I have halted the virus in your system. You will not change any more."

"Anymore?"

"You are now different. Your --- cells have altered." I got the impression that my alter ego was finding the terms for this discussion directly from my own mind.

"Of course I am. We didn't speak like you do either."

I pushed myself to my feet, just now noticing that I was disgustingly dirty. Sweat matted my hair and while I was completely out of it my body had continued its natural functions without recourse to a toilet or shower. I was going to have to clean up soon or my skin would just crawl off of my body. The next thing I noticed was that Luke and Liz were gone. I hoped they were just out foraging for food.

I looked at my hand; the fingers were longer, the skin slightly pebbley and my arms also seemed thinner and finer -- but was that just weight loss from being ill? I turned to unearth the huge mirror my mother had stored in the garage several years ago. And my eyes teared up as I realized I'd never complain about Mom keeping everything under the sun again.

The mirror wasn't hard to find, it was just propped up against the wall and covered with a blanket. I took the blanket off and studied myself critically.

I was shocked to see how much thinner I was. I'd always been a little plump, and teased about it in school, but now my face was all angles and hollows. My hair at the temples was receding and something new seemed to be growing through, thin tubes or something. My skin was pale, but mottled with pale blue lines like countless veins crossing the skin. I looked somewhat like a cross between a cadaver and a zombie, but with a fine coating of filth. Why didn't any of the books I read ever mention the need to deal with bodily functions and cleanliness? I needed a shower -- really badly.