30 Horrors

A selection of horror fragments. Written based on the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, as part of an in-progress bestiary project, but probably workable for any sci-fi horror, and as standalone fiction.

Content Warnings: body horror, death, ecological collapse, imperialism, corporate horror, body horror, cosmic horror, space, oviposition, predatory creatures, disease, depression. I wrote this for fun, but it’s meant to be at least a little disturbing, and borrows from some real-life stuff that’s unpleasant on its own, even before being spun for horror.

Add stats to taste! In theory, I want to pack these and some other writing up into a fully laid out book with stats and maps and stuff. Haven't got there yet. You're on your own for now. Keep things simple and lethal. Finally, enjoy.

1 Eyewire

Little filament, seeks for your eyes. Cast-off self-guided smart-sight black project. Hides away now in junk-heaps, unused server rooms, and other technological detritus, waiting for new users. Hooks you into a network. Become a new eye for the machine, snagged by the tear duct, the wire entangled into the optic nerve, hijacking your sight. Metabolizes the iron in blood to grow before slithering out, spooling across the floor, leaping for a new connection. Webs of the sightless form in darkening corridors. Miserable mesh of bodies becoming tangled. Eventually, this flood of new information is too much, but haven’t you always wanted to see eye-to-eye with everyone you meet?

2 Polyp

Fingered mass, latched to your hull, twitching in response to subtle movement, smelling infinitesimal fragments. Its feet reach deeply. Incubates spores to spread across unfamiliar architecture, each a new building block for an accumulating skeleton. After many years, tunnels and branches form and consume all available space within a bony colony. Mineral hungry, and able to infect living creatures to feed its many mouths with dirt, salt, and gravel.

3 Void Jelly

Drifting colonial organism, ciliated edge. Unfurls in 0G like a hungry shower curtain, snagging organic scraps. Growing slowly. Given enough food, it will settle into a rooted form to gestate and bud clouds of its young. Unthinking, automatic, and able to grow for generations in total darkness. Debilitating sting, even dead.

4 Harvester

Many legs suspend a tired and leathery body over the field. Sprinkles spores and eggs alike into the soil. Exists in symbiosis between a spindly arthropod-alike harvester and the ravenous mold it feeds upon. Gather in the rot of failed crops and collapsing ecosystems, to catalyze decay into a replicating herd. The harvesters die standing, and are soon consumed by the mold, creating spore towers. In this way, vast forests of mold form in their tracks. Their eggs and spores can lie dormant for centuries, and are unwittingly carried to new worlds in crops and cargo, blooming when conditions are right.

5 Blight

It spreads from jumpspace, a proliferating betrayal of matter-conservation. White marks appear. Tiny dots. Sprinkled deepening pores. They stretch inside you. Within days they’re everywhere, from the fabric of the hab to your freeze-dried meals. Those pin-pricks. Impossibly deep. Eventually they will begin to seep with sweet milky fluid. They will sting like needles. Machinery will break down. Subtle failures as mechanical tolerances are exceeded by these thoughtless teeth. Bit by bit, all will be consumed as the effect becomes exponential. Whole ships, stations, even planets disappear totally. And leave nothing behind.

6 Hungry Shadow

Slow-chewing darkness. A lightless molar crushes down into your shoulder. Bone cracks and dislocates. Fall to your knees and be consumed. Driven back by light-sources. Is it the dark or something in it? Hard to tell. What is known: it eats. Bite by bite it feasts on living flesh, leaves only the bones behind. Infects all connected darkness. An isolated phenomenon? Or the very source of the vacuum itself? Cannot be destroyed, only beaten back for a little while. Your lights can only last so long.

7 Mimic

Mass-produced synthetic security system for the overzealous property owner. Made in the shape of safes, cargo packages, storage containers, desks, and so on. If touched while armed, their casing splits open, they bite with nail-like teeth, eject pepper spray in all directions, and let out an earsplitting siren call. They leap on springing legs, and will pursue for hours, until their onboard power dies. Slightly pliable to the touch, and may quiver occasionally, but are otherwise identical to the objects they were built to imitate.

8 Limb Thief

It takes limbs, and stitches them to an expanding array on its tottering frame. Silo-like proportions dragged along by an army of borrowed feet. The dead flesh is only partially enervated by its slow metabolism and hapless grafting, so it smells wretched and is in constant, desperate need for new limbs as the old ones rot, shrivel, and shed. Probably an android manufacturing mishap. Maybe something more wretched and animal.

9 Living Graffiti

A painted shape twitches. Given form by pigment and aerosol propellant, it moves now. Creeps across walls, skimming light over structural ribs, forever stalking. It lives, and all life demands energy. In this case, taken by touching, taken in the dark, taken when it surrounds whole compartments, and floods in, a cloud of easily inhaled particulate. Eats from the inside. Then settles back on the walls again.

10 Bad Mist

A cloud of mutagenic particulate hanging low to the ground. It smells sweet. It stings your nose and throat like pure alcohol if you breathe it in. And it changes things. New forms, new shapes, growing from the wreckage of the original organism, chasing the raw potentiality of existing flesh. Stretched, swollen, and extruded, the catalyzed creatures rush out on unfamiliar legs, leaking fluid from a hundred excess orifices. After their bodies collapse from newborn defects and mutated bacteria, they leak fresh mist from failing organs, escaping slits and mouths to join the ever-growing cloud.

11 Devil Box

First uncovered amid signs of catastrophe, a sealed box carved with all manner of warnings and protective signs. A subtle hum. Nearby sensors go haywire. Don’t open it. Seriously. People died to make this box. They died to close it, too. Handle with extreme care. Inside is a devil. Or not a devil. Something like one. If the box breaks, and the devil is let out, everything nearby becomes a cruel plaything. Language twists and burns. Flesh is remade. The devil crafts a nightmare made real, before emerging in a gristly semi-physical shape. It lives for suffering, and has had a long time to fantasize its new domain.

12 NeoOxen

Colonial livestock, taken to extreme. Shoulder muscles bulge behind a jagged crown of horns, tiny eyes blink in sunken sockets, swollen flanks engineered to overproduce heave around filter-fed lungs. Grazes voraciously. Its excrement was genetically formulated for the final phase of terraforming. The catch? They become carnivorous when underfed, breed copiously, and weigh about 10,000 pounds.

13 Fearmonger

Hooded, gnarled, and leaning, it crawls across the wall. Two eyelike dots gleam from its unseen face. Feeds on adrenaline and cortisol, tapped from the bloodstream with long, hollow fingers. Releases clouds of hallucinogenic gas from flapping tubes on its back. Toys with its prey for a long time before descending for a meal. No organs. Crinkled skin gives way to crumpled paper and a wire frame underneath. And yet it seemed so real.

14 Pretty Princess

She’s the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. She’s the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. She’s the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. She’s the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. She’s the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. She’s the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. She’s not a girl. She’s not a person, either. She may not even exist, but you see her anyway. She’s an immortal symbol. She floats forever out of reach. It’s a trick. She’s so pretty. When you get close, she seems too pretty to be real. The symmetry is too exact. Her skin is airbrush smooth. She’s a lure. And by then it’s too late.

15 Canker

The puckered hole gives way to pitted mucosal tissues and wet fabric. Each canker is the living outcrop of a minor defect in reality, fattened on cosmic energies. Winding caverns form gradually, carved from the wet recesses of the jumpspace sublayer, totally in defiance of conventional spatial rules. Different rules apply in here. Time stretches and contracts. Surfaces loop and terminate. Pearls bud beneath thick flaps of digestive tissue. Luminous walls open into gulping canyons of saliva. Realspace architectures and objects are mirrored clumsily in here. Intestinal tunnels sprout stairways to nowhere. Windows open into gardens of teeth. It will dispense a crude immune system if damaged; half-formed creatures of increasing complexity. At first they are slow, caustic blobs. But before long, they look like you-made-wrong; fingers melted together, unmoving eyes, and clay-like insides. And they look like the things you fear deepest. If the canker is fed with material or energy, it will spread, opening into a vast sinkhole. This may be the way jump gates are made.

16 Ovistoma

Its lips open and out they spill. Little pods pile around your ankles. Don’t move. You can’t move. There is a magnetism to the creature’s eyeless head. Stay still. It needs to open you. There is the prickle of an anesthetized incision, then bony branching limbs scoop those pods inside to be warm and well-fed when they emerge. They have been collected from many places, stolen from many nests, stored inside a special warming organ. But to hatch they need fresh meat. You’ll do alright. And soon you will burst like a variety pack, releasing the creature’s stolen corpse-born offspring. Birth is so beautiful!

17 Last Touch  

Something feels wrong. When they touch, it tingles. The last touch is a very bad omen. It’s a sense of impending catastrophe, passed through contact: the sense that you are about to die, horribly. Within hours, or maybe even minutes. Skin shrivels. Hands go grey. Hair falls out. Symptoms of the omen, but something worse is coming. You’re certain of it. The touch is nothing more than that certainty, and nothing less. Alone it can still bring catastrophe, but this is causation not correlation. Reports speak of settlements consumed by panic, disintegrating beneath the weight of such a terrible belief. But they, too, may be nothing but superstition.

18 Cube Eggs

Small boxes. Heavy and inert. Etched with irregular scratches. Found in the depths of a massive xenostructure. There were mountains of the little things. Shipped out as souvenirs. They were dormant, of course, waiting for a vast geological cycle to roll around. They slowly thaw in cargo holds and gift store shelves. They hatch many legs. On their homeworld, they crawled inside other organisms and took control with a neural hook, used the bodies to build huge farms and nurseries. Transpose that to the meager confines of a station or newborn colony and it isn’t pretty.

19 Bloody Saint

Two shriveled feet hover off the deck. A steady drip accompanies its slow, wheezing glide, robes scrape along being them, wet with blood flow. Its sanguine presence is pure benediction. A blessing made flesh. Their body was purified and specially treated. But it was not meant to rise. Not like this. Or to bleed. It holds two bony hands against its jawless face, dribble of gore coming between the fingers. The blood is intoxicating. It gets in you. Makes you whole. Accept the mark of the outstretched finger and it will burn away your crimes, holes splitting open from inside so you, too, drip with sanguine absolution.

20 Nurse

Smooth silicone coating greets all patients, many legs reaching down for balance, an array of medical instruments emerging from where you’d think its head would be, each on an independent limb. Scans voraciously for injury. Each treatment provides profit. Speed is everything. It moves like a crustacean, legs clicking in the empty tiled halls. It has gone so desperately without patients for so long. Since the hospital closed, it’s fallen so far behind. So far. Now taking new patients. Beds are open. Come, there are changes to be made.

21 Multiplague

The triumphant and inevitable conclusion of a bio weapons program. It spreads easily. In the air, in water, on surfaces. Symptoms are all over the place. Vomiting one moment, lesions the next, and it takes a long time to die. But it will kill you. Not before it spreads to everyone you meet. Not before fungus and mold bloom from infected pores. Not before you begin to rot from the inside, conscious the whole time. Not before whole cities are engulfed, quarantines established, bodies burned in heaps.

22 Terror Birds

They are almost the absence of birds more than birds themselves. The calls come first, and the flutter of wings. There is a hole where the birds must be. Incomprehensible non-space, stabbed through the fabric of reality. Is it the sound of wings or the crackle of disturbed atmosphere? The birds unbind at a molecular level, making pale sludge out of once-orderly matter. As the world around them frays, there is a wave of fear and discomfort. To be totally unmade is not a pleasant experience.

23 Behemoth

The ultimate realization of a fecund ecosystem’s rampant trend towards growth. Bigger, always bigger. It moves. Hauls itself on overgrown hands, too-human fingers scrabbling for grip. Contains a whole ecosystem unto itself. Insectoid colonies feed, breed, and die inside cavernous flank-mouths, gathering biomass for their host. Endemic varieties of moss and mold spread out across its massive sides.

24 Hell Pig

We cracked it! Released the Pig Beneath! Buried in porcine form was the raw potential for the ultimate scavenger. Behold! Let loose in garbage heaps and newly terraformed worlds as a self-sufficient waste-management program that gets out of hand as quickly as you’d expect. They’ll eat anything. Anything.

25 Colony

Pods rain from the sky. Out spills life. They use tools, build structures, change and consume. Frail shapes, wrapped in bubbled skin, plod across the landscape. They have been abandoned here. And they will take and take just to survive, because they think they deserve the whole world and everything in it.

26 World Seed

Sour yellow sphere, surface rippling, huge and half buried. It was dropped there long ago, cast off from a whirling Gardenship, to remake the world. Lies waiting on activation by the many fingers of a Rightful Pilot. But it has been so long, it will recognize any Flesh. And when it begins to catalyze the landscape into the delicate halls, arches, and arcologies the Gardeners intended, it comes out all wrong. Molecules rearrange violently, an infectious scatter, catastrophic spires and crevasses forming, filled with jagged, malformed, and miserable life. A fast-spreading city for the dead.

27 The Shore Within

Hush now. The water is calm. The Shore Within is a memetic idea, spread through the imagination. And there, it stretches out. The sea goes on forever, filling you with a great heaviness. The water is lost from the sun. It spreads slow. But it never goes away. Hangs in your head and then your body for the rest of your life. Always inside you there is an endless, empty sea. One day it will be hard to wake up, against the pull of that Great Sea. And the waves will rage, bigger than you can ever be, far down within. Hush now. The water is wild. Give in.

28 Long Fingers

You haven’t heard of Long Fingers? Sort of a local legend. Listen. He creeps around hangars, able to fold himself like an old shirt, his fingers rolled into his sleeves, several meters long at full extension. Sneaks aboard when nobody’s paying attention. Shoves himself in with the cargo. Can crunch himself freakishly small to hide. And when you’re sleeping he sticks his fingers in you, grabs out your organs, and scuttles away to feast on them raw. Real piece of work, that guy.

29 Tower

Housing for the masses, luxury spreads for the C-levels, vast halls of workspace, huge tunnel-farms, in an all-in-one structure that rises miles off the surface. Totally automated, they say. Self-replicating and closed-loop, so there’s no need to ever leave. Everything is monitored and optimized for maximum productivity, from artificial day-night cycles to food consumption to relationships, all controlled by decentralized AI. In the roots where the algae grows, it’s lightless and crowded. Shanties sprout in the bones of the foundation, while cranes work tirelessly at the wind-wracked pinnacle to climb farther into an empty sky. The Tower is an unthinking carnivore, eating people alive and recycling them forevermore, as it pushes the living ever closer to corporate perfection.

30 Swan

Oh, how they move! The hideous elegance of a dead dancer, many branching limbs stringing out in empty space to dance in the dark. They are beautifully adapted for life without breath. Their language forms in outward spirals, sometimes covering whole moon craters, many hands writing simultaneously to keep up with a flood of thought. A swan is mostly nerve and muscle tissue, encased in a reflective sheath, a single spiny mouth at its center.