Symbiosis (1 of 3)
Threads of Light and Longing
Note: This is a repost of a story originally published on April 8, 2025. It’s now being serialized in parts for easier reading and better pacing.
I wanted to explore what happens when alien biology starts to influence human minds—not with horror, but with connection. Symbiosis began with a question: what if a telepathic algae could link people together, not just biologically, but emotionally? It became a love story touched with longing, intuition, and something just shy of erotica.
Fever Dream
Iris awoke, covered in sweat, her whole body humming as if she’d been tangled in a lover’s embrace for hours. The dream was gone—slipped through her fingers like water—but the feelings lingered, sharp and relentless: skin on skin, a heartbeat thundering against hers, the taste of salt and something deeper.
“Damn,” she muttered, dragging herself out of bed. Her legs trembled as she stood, the cool floor of her research lab a shock against her flushed skin. Her breath hitched, ragged and unsteady, as her body hummed with an ache she couldn’t place. It had been years since anything like that had happened in real life—since anyone had touched her with that kind of heat.
She stumbled to the window, pressing her forehead against the glass. The ocean stretched endless beyond the station, its surface glinting with faint bioluminescent streaks, produced by the algae she’d been studying for months. She’d named it Symbios lumora, a fragile, glowing thing that floated on the planet’s vast oceans.
"I need a shower," she said to no one.
She made her bed and pressed the button to retract it into the wall, clearing space for the lab. She grabbed fresh clothes and headed off to the showers. It was early, and she was grateful to be the only one there.
She began with a cool shower, letting it reset her body thermostat and lowering her heart and respiration rates until she began to shiver slightly, at which point she turned up the heat, and cleaned herself off, feeling an inexplicable need to linger when she washed between her thighs.
"That must have been some dream," she muttered.
She toweled off, dressed, turned to pick up her pajamas, and stopped, staring at the shower drain.
Did something just glow?
She stood back in the shower, bent down, and swiped her finger around the drain, and then turned the lights off. After a few moments she could barely see a glow on her fingertip.
"Shit," she said. She turned the lights back on and washed her hands in the sink.
She grabbed a bottle of bleach from the storage cabinet, returned to the shower, and emptied the jug onto the floor, letting it run down the drain. For safe measure, she stepped into the decontamination chamber and waited ten minutes for it to complete its cycle, feeling the prickles all over her skin.
She hated the chamber. Did it really need to run for ten minutes? It was not an enjoyable experience. At about eight minutes, she had about all she could stand but had to endure it through the end of the cycle. She didn't have a choice. Once you were inside, you couldn't get out until the cycle was completed.
She then ran a decontamination cycle inside the lab itself, bathing the area with a red glow of infrared radiation known to kill the algae.
Back in her lab, she made a journal entry.
Journal Entry – June 30, 2314. Possible contact with Symbios lumora. Immediate decontamination protocols initiated, including personal scrub, environmental flush, and infrared purge. No symptoms observed at this time. Will monitor.
The next morning, Iris awoke feeling warm and comfortable, snuggling into her bed. It reminded her of living on Tellarius years ago when she had met her first lover. How he would spoon her in the mornings, his body pressed up against hers as they shared warmth. Sometimes it would lead to more things, depending on his state when he awoke, and sometimes not. As she lay there reminiscing, she felt his hand slide across her hip. It gave her chills. It was going to be one of the more fun mornings.
Suddenly, Iris jumped from the bed, looking around. Someone had touched her. Someone's fingers had been tracing their way to her most intimate parts.
But no one was there.
She was alone in her lab.
In the afternoon, she felt as if someone were blowing softly across her neck, and she raised her hand to feel the little hairs standing at attention. She shivered, but not from the cold. Again, there was nothing in the lab to explain it. She was not under a vent, but it felt for all the world as if the warm breath of a man had washed over her neck.
After work, when the lab had been converted to more of a living chamber, bed out, test instruments stowed, sofa lifted from the floor, she lounged on the sofa, reading a novel she hadn't touched in months. It was a trashy romance—a guilty pleasure—and for some reason, she was feeling the need to read it. She read the book for a half hour before she realized she was running her fingers over the back of her neck, back to that spot where she had felt breath earlier.
What are you doing?
She jumped up, dropping the book, and looked around.
"Who's there?" she demanded.
She walked out into the hallway, saw no one, returned to her lab, and locked the door. She climbed into her bed, shivering.
Iris.
"What?" she sat up, wild-eyed, staring around the room.
Iris, relax. There's no one there. It's just me.
"Stop! Stop!" she shouted.
Ok.
Iris pulled the blanket tighter around herself, her breath shallow, eyes darting to every shadow in the lab. The voice—soft, low, familiar in a way that clawed at her—had stopped. But the silence wasn’t empty. It pressed against her, heavy with something she couldn’t name. She slid out of bed, bare feet hitting the floor, and flicked on every light in the room. The sterile glow chased the shadows but not the feeling.
“Symbios,” she muttered, pacing to her terminal. Her hands shook as she pulled up the algae data. The infrared purge should’ve killed any trace of it in the lab. The decontamination chamber should’ve scrubbed it from her skin. But that glow in the drain—faint, stubborn—nagged at her. She scrolled through the logs: no anomalies, no breaches. Yet here she was, hearing voices, feeling hands.
She typed a new entry, fingers hesitant:
Journal Entry – July 1, 2314. Auditory and tactile hallucinations reported. Possible residual effects of Symbios lumora exposure. No detectable contamination in lab or person. Psychological evaluation recommended. Monitoring continues. May be related to earlier reports of sleep interruption and/or hallucination.
She slammed the terminal shut and rubbed her temples. “Get it together, Iris,” she whispered. But the memory of that touch—warm, deliberate, sliding over her hip—felt too real to be a trick of her mind. And that voice… it wasn’t threatening. It was tender, like it knew her.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.
Happy to be the first comment, Stephen!
There have been a few interesting treatments of this theme, notably in Oblivion. I didn't think that either the book or the film quite worked, but I appreciated what they were going for.
I think you've painted an inviting picture. I'm interested enough that I'll check out part 2. I don't think you need her speech in the first half of the text. It distracts from an otherwise interesting flow of events. The strength of this is in the internal conversation and her behavior, rather than what she says to herself when it's just her. Nice work.