0290 2026.05 - Eighteen

I have some news.

I will let you decide whether it is good or bad, which bucket to put it in.

First, I am alive. The spots and dots did go away, but I felt truly awful while my immune system and broad-spectrum antibiotics did their work. It’s been one hundred and twenty six days since I was bitten.

Recovery has been accompanied by an aversion to alcohol, so sleep is better and I’m full of beans in the morning, but I’m less fun in the evenings with the team. I’ve suddenly been given designated driver status, the team is happy to let me ferry them around in the truck. They think I drive a little fast, I tell them they were late and we need to make up time.

I’m not sure whether driving is an attempt to make me feel useful, exploit my youthful exuberance, or just that they are increasingly hungover in the mornings. Since Jack, the way they are going through the stock means they will soon be joining me in sobriety until the resupply ship arrives.

The doctors say I am fitter than ever, energy of an eighteen year old, and are debating whether this is my alcohol free status, or the result of being bitten. Probably both.

If I am experiencing the elixir of life, the fountain of youth, my team mates are reluctant to follow my pathway. We all saw how sick you were, they say, and it’s not been long enough, it may be temporary, ask us in a month, might be a one-off, look what happened to Jack, some delaying excuse.

While I seem to be blessed with the clarity of youth, it’s leading to more arguments with the team. Too risky, they say, or surely you remember the snake vines of Shantoo, tear you in half before you can say Help, or stop acting like a teenager. They’re getting annoying.

They may have a point, but I’m definitely quicker and stronger than them at everything. For now, however, it’s more blood tests, and trying to work out what the alien chemistry has done. Secretly I hope it’s a permanent change and I’m wondering how to get a patent filed.

They tried to catch one of the creatures, no mean feat as they are very fast, and it’s not obvious which end is the head and which is the tail, and so far they have failed. Maybe they are crab like, and run sideways?

They got a photograph of one in its natural environment, see the attached, and it’s not very sharp. I mean high resolution. It was moving at the time. I looks like a lot of filaments, so for now it’s the Filament Creature on account of it’s wavy hair. It’s very large insect size by Earth measurements, but we don’t know anything else, whether it would fall into one of the Earth species classifications, or is totally alien.

I’l betting on the latter, given my unique position as the first person to be bitten by one.

So while I am positive, and feeling like I’m eighteen again, and think being bitten was a good thing (with the benefit of hindsight), Jack does not agree with me.

He stepped into a nest of them, at the end of his shift at 18:00, was bitten six times by the three fanged filament creatures, and died two weeks and four days later.

Too much of a good thing, perhaps?

We bury him tomorrow, and I find out whether I will stay here or be medically evacuated.

I’m hoping for the latter. Not that I don’t like it here, I really do, but everyone is over fifty and as Mick Jagger famously sang, “I can’t get no, Satisfaction.”