The first brain I ate tasted like chicken. That's not a joke – it actually did. My rotting taste buds picked up notes of umami and salt beneath the metallic tang of blood. A distant memory stirred: Sunday dinner with Mom, her signature roast perfectly done. The thought vanished like smoke.
I found her in a convenience store, crouched behind a fortress of toppled shelves. My fingers, gray and peeling, scrabbled at the barricade. Bags of chips crinkled. Cans clattered. The woman's thumbs danced across her phone screen, tears cutting clean tracks through the grime on her face. The sight meant nothing to me then – just prey, trapped.
But after... after was different. Synapses crackled to life like jumper cables on a dead battery. Random neurons fired in corrupt patterns: my name (Ted), the taste of Mountain Dew, the muscle memory of typing on a keyboard. The woman had been a librarian. Now fragments of her knowledge surfaced in my consciousness: the Dewey Decimal System, the smell of old books, a thesis on cognitive development gathering dust on a shelf.
I caught the chemistry teacher trying to MacGyver something in his garage. His hands trembled as he measured powder into a beaker. I watched through the window, my movements more purposeful now. When he saw me, his eyes went wide. "The concentration," he whispered, "it's not right." The beaker slipped. In the aftermath, as I processed his neural tissue, molecular structures assembled themselves in my mind like Lego bricks snapping together.
My deteriorating body still shambled, but my mind... my mind soared. Each victim's knowledge didn't just add to mine – it multiplied, compounded, grew exponentially. I found myself scratching equations into dirt, muttering proofs under my breath. My fingers left bloody theorems on walls.
The university professor had built herself a fortress in the biochemistry lab. Smart. But not smart enough. I traced the ventilation system's path on the building blueprints, my decaying fingers leaving smudges on the paper. The professor's expertise in cellular decay merged with my growing understanding. I caught my reflection in a broken window: patches of fresh pink tissue were beginning to grow alongside the necrotic gray.
The military officer's tactical knowledge helped me find the software engineer. The engineer's logical frameworks helped me understand the theoretical physicist. Each brain consumed was a step up an infinite ladder.
I found the neuroscientist in her home laboratory, surrounded by monitors displaying brain wave patterns. She didn't scream when I entered. Instead, her eyes narrowed, clinical interest warring with terror.
"Fascinating," she breathed, backing away. "Your frontal lobe activity... it's impossible."
I adjusted my torn sleeve. "Impossible is a moving target." My voice rasped like sandpaper on rust.
"The neural integration," she continued, bumping into her desk. Papers scattered. "It shouldn't work. The tissue rejection alone—"
"Should be catastrophic?" I finished, gesturing to the patches of fresh growth among my decay. "Reality begs to differ."
Her hand found a scalpel. "What do you want?"
"Want?" The word felt strange. Did I want anything beyond the next meal, the next upgrade? "I want to understand. To grow. To transcend." My lips struggled to form the words – they weren't designed for philosophy.
"You're not just consuming," she whispered. "You're... evolving."
I picked up a brain scan from the floor. "Speaking of consumption..."
Later, as I approached the semiconductor fabrication facility, I processed her final contribution. Her expertise had been... illuminating. My stolen lab coat still smelled of formaldehyde. The guard at the gate barely glanced at my ID badge, his average brain nevertheless holding one crucial piece of information: the security code.
The airlock hissed open. Soon, clean room protocols would begin. Soon, silicon would replace gray matter. Soon...