How do you know that you are you? What makes a continuous series of sense perceptions, nominally guided by base urges and reconciled after the fact by the narrative that we tell us in the blackness behind the eyes. There exists the concept of the p-zombie, a creature so evil that they are completely indistinguishable from you or I … except that they don’t experience feelings.

An Intellect Devourer, critically, absorbs all knowledge from the victim. Nothing is said though that that knowledge is compartmentalised, into some sort of non-memory memory that fails to inform the devourer. The ID is aptly named, a source of base, evil, urges; a source of spreading corruption that must be restrained with the higher mental functions.

An absorbed mind is a terrible thing to waste, and IDs don’t waste it: perfect understanding is perfect love, and thus the ID becomes the thing it eats.

The next time you’re having a bad day and want to do nasty things to other people: consider. Where are those thoughts coming from in the blackness behind the eyes? What if the you you think you are is simply the instanced memory of some chunk of alien flesh living where you are. The instincts that your body has, that you rationalise away into a narrative… what if something is there, watching you watching yourself. A perfect hallucination, controlling available evidence such that it may not possibly exist.

But you think, you feel, you’re real. Yep.

By a guest writer, Brian the Mad Monk