When people talk about the Mandela Effect, they usually mean a small change to a logo or something in pop culture. I have distinct memories of my old timeline being destroyed by parasites.
It would have been more merciful for them to just kill us. What they did was far more malicious.
The invasion was traced back to the Moon landing. When Neil Armstrong and his companions landed on the Moon, they brought back hitchhikers. Microscopic aliens that thrived in small colonies, taking over the minds and bodies of the infected, essentially killing them. Their bodies were piloted by colonies of millions of spores, completely unaware that they were long dead from brain rot.
One minute there was a corpse clawing at my window while muttering incoherently, the next my roommate was asking me if I wanted some coffee.
It was a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When we landed on the Moon, they saw it as an opportunity. They knew a good thing when they saw it. They lay dormant there for who knows how long.
We were the perfect victims for the invasion. The economy was thriving, and the parasites found a foothold in our society. They made themselves right at home. It took decades for anyone to realize that something was wrong.
They incubated their eggs in asbestos, infecting millions of people in schools and businesses. To them it was a perfect way to hide in plain sight since asbestos was used in insulation everywhere. Nobody was the wiser until these buildings began to be torn down.
Erratic behavior as people aged was the first sign that something was wrong. “They’re from a different time.” “It’s just how they were raised.” Something more sinister was below the surface, and nobody was the wiser.
Then came the incident with the urban explorer.
A man in his early 20s was exploring an abandoned elementary school with some friends when the ceiling collapsed, pouring dust and old insulation into a classroom he was photographing. He had removed his mask to drink from his water bottle just before, and he got a lungful of spores.
His wife found him later that night staring out a window, swaying and humming. He turned to her and said, “They’re hungry.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” she asked. “Who’s hungry?”
“The colony must feed. They’re hungry.”
“It’s 3 am. Quit being silly and come back to bed.”
He smiled. That was when she noticed the gun he was holding. He lifted it to his temple and pulled the trigger.
As time passed, the younger generations were less susceptible to the madness. They fought it off, and it destroyed many of them in different, more sinister ways. People spread it to their kids like a generational curse. However, the aliens were not prepared for how little interest some people took took in their own children. Many would not even speak to their kids, let alone hug them. This made growing the colony much more difficult, and as a result they began to die off.
The colony fed on brain matter, taking up permanent residence in the brain of the host. While the host could continue living for quite some time with the colony running the show, eventually their bodies aged and died. In some cases the colony had died off too, but in others they were able to continue piloting the corpse of the deceased. The host was not the same though, and even their families knew something was wrong.
Eventually, they drained us dry. That’s when things got worse.
The colony itself went mad. Without an adequate food supply, they couldn’t control their hunger or their hosts. More and more incidents started happening.
The infected were essentially zombies, some of them long deceased, lumbering around with the remnants of a once thriving colony of spores piloting their piles of mush brains.
Reports of the elderly clawing at windows in middle of the night started occurring. The reports were always the same. The intruder seemed disoriented and confused, and they almost always attacked.
One infected man wandered into a grocery store and stared blankly at the stocked shelves until an employee cautiously approached him. He tackled the employee and pinned her to the ground. The man bit off two of the fingers a customer who tried to help, making an unearthly shrieking sound the entire time. The employee luckily survived.
Another report was of an elderly woman standing outside the kitchen window of a young couple, staring in. The young woman who lived there was startled by the pair of eyes glaring at her at 3 a.m. The elderly woman started scratching at the window, a sneer on her face. “Is anyone going to let me in? Huh? Is anyone going to let me in?” The woman was gone by the time the police arrived.
The most horrifying was the incident at the retirement home, where a group of elderly turned on the staff. The scene was kicked off when an elderly man stabbed a nurse with a fork after telling her, “You dress like a slut.” Three nurses and five residents died before the situation was brought under control. A witness said it was a bloodbath of clawing and biting, kicking and screaming.
More attacks happened, and chaos broke out. People panicked and began hoarding essential items, hiding inside their homes. Streets were filled with boarded up windows, residents attempting to keep out the rogue lumbering zombies that passed through their neighborhoods. Those who ventured out were careful to remain in the shadows and hide if they saw one of Them in the distance.
The infected muttered to themselves as they walked, so it was difficult for them to sneak up on anyone. They could be anywhere though, and they often caught people by surprise. By then it was too late.
This had become the new normal. People were still being infected and getting attacked. More and more infected invaded the streets, trying to find ways into strangers’ homes at night when victims could not be found outside. Stores stopped opening.
Not all of them behaved violently, but their deception was their strength once their bodies started to rot along with their minds. They could take the form of an elderly woman claiming to be lost. “Won’t you give your Granny a hug?” Spores were spread, and the madness continued.
Autopsies were performed on some of the infected dead, and scientists attempted to create a vaccine. But any cure would kill the host, and the research was eventually abandoned. One scientist became infected during his research, spread the spores to his colleagues, and together they destroyed their lab before jumping out of their 10 story window. Nobody knows what exactly happened that day.
There was no end in sight. The destruction could not be stopped. Some believed that eventually the infected would die off on their own once the spores inside their heads no longer had any brain material left to eat. Nobody knew how long this would take, or what would be needed to restore order. Hope had all but been lost.
Then, like it was all a bad dream, I was launched back into normalcy. Everyone I knew who had been infected was magically unharmed. Everything was the way it has always been, except a few minor differences that only a few people seemed to notice. No one knew what I was talking about when I asked about the invasion. I eventually stopped asking out of fear that I’d land myself a grippy socks vacation.
I hope they never find this timeline.