The Symbiosis Strain Thanos Kalamidas The SymbioSiS STrain Sagas of Prime Assemble Thanos Kalamidas Ovi ebooks are available in Ovi/Ovi eBookshelves pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C The Symbiosis Strain The Symbiosis Strain Thanos Kalamidas Sagas of Prime Assemble Thanos Kalamidas An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C The Symbiosis Strain T hey named it Eos , after the Titan goddess of the dawn. Because that’s what they thought it was, a new beginning. Poetic instincts have always betrayed the human race at just the right mo- ment. Eos was no bigger than a sneeze particle. And just as unstoppable. It arrived Earthside in a Martian fragment that tore through the atmosphere like a meteorized sermon. It struck the Northwest Territo- ries with the emotional impact of a meteorite and the physical one of a soggy shoe. No blast. No crater. Just a splatter of red dust and a faint smell of ammonia where the rock cracked open and bled its legacy into the tundra. Thanos Kalamidas A seventeen-year-old with braces and too much time on his hands, Trevor Pike, a self-described “as- tro-hobbyist” and unlicensed TikTok theorist, picked it up two days later. He was stargazing and wearing ski boots. The rock was warm. He filmed it melting under his portable field scope. The video went viral before he remembered to tell his parents. He called it “MarsFungus420.” Ten million views in twelve hours. Eos had already infected him by the fourth. Within forty-eight hours, Trevor was lecturing theoretical astrophysics in livestreams to baffled MIT professors. On the third day, he deconstructed the Fermi Paradox using only a child’s Etch-a-Sketch and a low drawl that made him sound suspiciously like Morgan Freeman. On the fourth, he went silent. Later, they’d find he’d taken apart his father’s genera- tor and rebuilt it into what experts still refer to as “an insultingly simple fusion engine.” Then came the scientists. The real ones. Dr. Mina Ellison among them, an astrovirologist with four advanced degrees and the posture of someone who always expected a lecture, even from her coffee ma- chine. “The pathogen,” she said to the press with surgical calm, “is not lethal. It’s... additive.” The Symbiosis Strain Reporters blinked. She elaborated. “It doesn’t kill you. It adds to you. Enhances cognition. Multiplies synaptic bridges. Increases cortical fluidity. Think of it as an upgrade you didn’t ask for but are unable to uninstall.” The press latched onto that. Upgrade. HumanOS v2.0. And for a while, it was just that. By the end of the month, the infected were outper- forming AI. A chess prodigy in Lagos solved three Millennium Prize Problems before breakfast. A dys- lexic mechanic in Hanoi reprogrammed his own DNA to fix his asthma. Bach was reinvented in Den- mark, as a twelve-year-old composed a mathemat- ically perfect canon capable of making listeners cry for no reason they could explain. The Pope called it a “blessing of gnosis.” Elon Musk offered to swallow it live on TV. But then the voices began. Not voices, exactly. That was the first mistake—as- suming the alien mind would speak like ours. It was more like a current of presence. A crowded echo. Thoughts that didn’t originate in your skull, swim- Thanos Kalamidas ming there like they’d paid rent. A collective murmur under the hum of your own inner monologue. Mina noticed it first. She was in Geneva, explaining to a military think tank why her former field was now obsolete. “We’re not studying infection,” she said. “We’re studying in- vitation.” That night, in her hotel room overlooking the Rhone, she heard it: a thought that didn’t come from her but felt close enough to trick her hippocampus into ownership. Like déjà vu but with intent. Meet. Speak. She wrote it down on the back of a Swiss chocolate wrapper. By morning, there were hundreds like her. En- hanced. Cognitively accelerated. Hearing the Choir, as Mina would later call it. Because that’s what it felt like, something ancient and harmonic trying to re- member how to sing through broken instruments. And all the voices said the same thing: Meet. Speak. Meet whom? The Symbiosis Strain “Each other?” someone suggested on a Reddit fo- rum that had become a global hub for the infected, now called the Synthetics. “Or them?” And what followed was chaos disguised as policy. Governments panicked, of course. Anything they can’t weaponize, they outlaw. Quarantine zones sprang up like mushrooms in the damp of uncertain- ty. Canada built its own wall for the first time. Brazil legalized neurotracking chips overnight. The Vatican reversed its blessing and reclassified Eos as “an invis- ible serpent whispering Babel into the minds of Eve’s children.” And still, more were infected. Not all took it well. The human brain wasn’t de- signed to be a receiver tower for galactic choir prac- tice. Some cracked. Others ascended. A few explod- ed, figuratively and once, allegedly, literally. Meanwhile, the tech sector tried to monetize it. MetaMind offered premium neural filters. “Keep your thoughts your own, for only 12.99/month.” Neuralink offered sync stabilization. Apple released an implant called the iSee. “Think Different™” took on a darker hue when it turned out some users start- ed dreaming equations no one could solve. Thanos Kalamidas And then there was Bruno Cortez. Fourteen years old. Chilean. Orphaned. Diag- nosed with early-stage schizophrenia. They found him sitting cross-legged on a rooftop in Valparaíso, gazing into the Pacific with a smile that would have unnerved Buddha. He said three words to the journalists who swarmed him. Not in Spanish. Not in English. Something else. Yet everyone understood. “They want audience.” Those words were broadcast, translated, analyzed. A thousand linguists wept into their lexicons. It was Mina who gave them context. “This is not an invasion,” she told the U.N. sub- committee on bio-integrity. “This is a broadcast. We are the receiver. And now they want feedback.” Someone from the Russian delegation muttered, “We never asked for this.” Mina turned slowly. “Neither did they.” Silence followed. The Symbiosis Strain And in that silence, the Choir sang. Softly. Beneath the surface of every mind that had wel- comed the seed of Eos, something stirred. Some- thing impossibly old, frighteningly patient, and very much aware. “Meet,” it said. “Speak,” it added. And now, for better or worse, humanity had a voice. And it was not alone in the room anymore. * * * * * * * They chose the White Sea because it was forgotten. Not geographically, maps remembered it well enough. But spiritually. It was a pocket of quiet, a hemispheric hush where nobody looked too closely anymore. The Soviets had once used it for subma- rine tests, nuclear dumping, and experimental sonar projects that hummed at frequencies no mammal should’ve ever heard. It was haunted water, radioac- tively polite. Thanos Kalamidas Now it would host the first Contact. It was called the Listening Summit, though no one planned to speak. Mina Ellison, who had gone three weeks without sleep and now radiated a sort of laser-eyed lucid- ity, stood aboard the deep-sea station Eurydice as it hissed into the brine. Her breathing was shallow. Her fingertips twitched against the control console. Around her, the crew adjusted equipment not meant for diplomacy. She looked across the steel deck to Bruno Cortez, who sat like he always did: folded inwards, as if con- serving dimensional weight. He didn’t blink often anymore. His eyes were like pressure domes on an alien world, reflecting more than they revealed. “You feel them?” Mina asked softly. “They’re not far,” Bruno said. “They’re not close ei- ther.” Cryptic was his new default. The boy who once played marbles in alleys now translated the syntax of cosmic radio static into human caution. The descent continued. Down past currents that The Symbiosis Strain moaned against the station’s hull like ancient an- imals in heat. The pressure rose. The hull creaked. Something about this meeting had been inevitable from the moment Eos touched Earth but inevitabili- ty didn’t mean readiness. On the surface, twenty-seven nations watched from satellites and encrypted uplinks. No president had come. No general dared appear in person. This wasn’t a mission; it was a test of metaphysical waters. If it failed, Earth could pretend it never happened. If it succeeded... Earth might never feel familiar again. Below them, in the depths, the Choir stirred. * * * * * * * “Do you know what they look like?” Mina asked Bruno, as the docking arms extended toward the anomaly. The signal had no visual form, no thermal mass, but it was real. Pulsing. A presence in the sonar field like an idea with weight. “They don’t look,” Bruno replied. “They assem- ble. Through us. They use our forms to understand themselves.” Thanos Kalamidas “How postmodern of them.” Bruno gave her the ghost of a smile. “They’re old. Older than metaphor. Language rusts against them.” “And yet here we are,” Mina said. “Using words like matches in a coal mine.” The station shook. Not violently. But with certain- ty. Like the sea itself had drawn a breath. The lights dimmed. Not due to power failure, but hesitation, something older than circuits. Then the voice came. Not through speakers. Not through pressure mod- ulations. It came through the bones. Hello. It was not English. But it was English. Mina dropped to one knee, overwhelmed not by pain but sheer density of presence. Bruno sat abso- lutely still, his eyes wide open, pupils dilated into nothing. He was speaking. But not aloud. The Symbiosis Strain We hear you. Mina blinked tears she hadn’t intended. She stood slowly, steadying herself on a rail. “You wanted audience,” she said aloud, not to the boy but to the thing behind him. A pause. No. We wanted acknowledgment. She felt the correction like a slap on the soul. “We didn’t consent,” she said. You consented the moment you opened your minds. “That wasn’t consent. That was... infection.” You were alone. We filled that space. “Why now?” Because you are just capable enough to matter. And just reckless enough to listen. There was silence then. Internal and external. A stillness in the sea. Thanos Kalamidas Bruno turned. But it was not him behind the eyes now. You evolve by accident. You reach by compulsion. But what you lack is unity. “And you’re offering that?” No. We are offering clarity. You may refuse. “What happens if we accept?” Your minds will change. Fully. You will think in chorus. You will become more than you intended. Less than you imagined. “And if we decline?” The voice paused. Not in threat. In thought. Then we wait. Another century. Another carrier. Mina stared at Bruno, at what was inside him. And in that moment, she knew two things: One, humanity had been noticed. Two, there would be no going back. She breathed out. The Symbiosis Strain “We’re not ready,” she said. We agree. The lights came back. Slowly. One by one. The sta- tion stopped creaking. Bruno slumped to the deck, breathing shallow and human again. “Are they gone?” one of the technicians asked. “No,” Mina whispered. “They’ve just stepped back.” She turned to the console and tapped the uplink. The surface team demanded a verdict. Her words were broadcast to every major city still awake. “Contact made. No threat. No offer. No ultima- tum. Just awareness. They’re not gods. They’re not demons. They are... observers. Architects of silence. For now, they leave us to decide what we become.” There was a long pause. Then the screen flickered once. And Bruno said, very softly, “They left something.” “What?” He held up his hand. Thanos Kalamidas A ring of light hovered above his palm. Spinning. “Seed,” he said. “For when we’re ready to try again.” Above the White Sea, satellites flickered as if blink- ing. Below, the world held its breath. And far, far out beyond the edges of mapped space, something watched. And waited. Waiting, always, for someone willing to listen. The enD The Symbiosis Strain The Symbiosis Strain Sagas of Prime Assemble Thanos Kalamidas Ovi eBook Publishing 2025 Ovi magazine Design: Thanos Ovi ebooks are available in Ovi/Ovi eBookshelves pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Thanos Kalamidas Thanos Kalamidas The SymbioSiS STrain Sagas of Prime Assemble Thanos Kalamidas , a multipublished writer, cartoonist and illustrator; born and grew up in a picturesque neighbourhood on the moun- tainside of Hymettus in Athens, Greece. Then his life took him to Berlin, Germany and to London, UK for studies. After a brief stay in Yorkshire he moved his life to Paris, France while working in Tokyo, Japan and in Cape Town, South Africa. In the last 25 years he became a permanent Scandinavian resident and recently, in his glorious sixth de- cade, he moved to a scenic village in the Växjö area.