3 Genetic Memories

It was a dream, but at the same time, it wasn't. It was more realistic, more engaging, and much more lucid than anything you could ever imagine.

It was as if I was reliving my whole life again, or in this case, other lives, perpetuated ad infinitum.

The first time, I was swimming in a river or lake, something which wouldn't be unusual if it wasn't for the fact that I wasn't human. No, I was a serpentine creature waggling through the waters with my tail, like a fish.

I could feel and recollect the coolness of the water on my scaly skin, how my muscles tensed and stretched as I swam and even how I breathed in the water.

It was insane, the sheer amount of detail, associated with this. I had full access to the sensory perception and feelings of this body and it was...uncanny.

It was like I was it and it was me, and I would've completely believed it was reality if I could control 'my' body, but I couldn't. Like I said earlier, I was reliving a whole life again, only it wasn't exactly my life.

It was odd what I was experiencing but in a fascinating way, it felt normal, like it was just as it should be.

I watched or experienced 'myself,' swimming, hunting for food, battling for territory, and defending it against creatures such as myself or members of 'my race,' feasting on my dead kin after a battle, and a whole slew of other things.

I could feel all the emotions associated with them also: the joy, hunger, anger, everything. I was an animal through and through, guided and fueled only by the instincts passed down from generations to generations, and it was disturbing.

I experienced countless lifetimes in this form, more than thousands, and in each lifetime, it was always the same pattern. Eat, fight, sleep, and explore. There was nothing more, nothing else.

I was an animal, a beast of nature, and after a while, I started enjoying it. The monotony was... fun. Then suddenly, it all changed, my perspective shifted.

This time around I was inside an anthropomorphic lifeform. A being tall, strong, fierce, and intelligent, my body wrapped around its spine, our minds and consciousness linked together.

With that came a whole new level of sensations and emotions that I or this body had never before encountered. The new bodies we had changed everything.

Due to the access of information we were privy to from the host, we adapted to it quickly and with that same speed, adopted its culture, language, and behavior, adding it to our own.

We then termed ourselves as the 'Goa'uld,' which meant 'Children of the Gods' in our new tongue, and our hosts as 'Unas,' which meant 'The First Ones.'

I watched and experienced as we formed tribes or clans, waged wars against each other for territory and resources, and used the defeated or conquered unblended Unas as our slaves.

We experienced the pleasures and advantages of using hosts and became addicted to it, suppressing the host's original consciousness as we felt reluctant to share something that wasn't ours.

Immediately, using the reproductive features of our hosts, we began fertilizing our queens so that the next generation would find it easier to blend and use these new bodies.

We learned more about our environment and our new world or nature, and with time, we learned to manipulate and use our surroundings to suit our wishes, creating things to make our lives and work easier.

We discovered a fascinating device after a period of gradual learning and exploration of our world. A large ring-shaped device made out of 'Quadah,' the objects or rocks we mined and used to make our crude weapons and devices.

Believing it was left on our world by powerful gods, our curiosity got the best of us, and we began to study it in order to unlock its divine secrets.

After countless generations, our knowledge and wisdom passed down perfectly to each one, we finally discovered a way to use the Ring of the Gods.

It gave us access to whole new worlds, showed us that there was something out there much greater than we initially believed, and increased our understanding of what we came to know later on as our universe and existence.

And we wanted to have it all. From that point on, we didn't rest.

We formed a loose alliance or coalition of tribes, united under the leadership, under the strongest and most fierce Alpha Male called Atok and using our superior weapons and technology as well as slave armies of unblended ones, we began to explore the new domains opened up for us.

Through our travels and exploration, we learned more about the gods who we now called the Ancestors or The Ring Builders and stole their wisdom and technology, incorporating it into our own.

We built more sophisticated weapons, powerful starships to sail across the void between the stars, and other powerful technologies using the Quadah or Naquadah, leaving our homeworld to create an empire, spreading our people to other worlds.

We saved our homeworld as a breeding ground for our Unas hosts who lived in fear and oppression under our feet and power.

We met some other races, beings vastly different from our hosts and us, during these great and profound ages of exploration.

Under Atok's leadership, we traveled and conquered many worlds, discovering more of the Ancestors' technology and knowledge, and settled into an age of scientific and technological prosperity.

After a time, we became fed up with what we had. We had learned enough. We were no longer satisfied with our meager domains and wanted to use our increased knowledge and technology to conquer new worlds and increase our domains.

There was a whole galaxy out there for us to subjugate, full of untold riches and spoils that would just rot and fade away into oblivion if we didn't acquire them.

But Atok didn't think like that. He was content and didn't see the need for us to bite off more than we could chew.

This created discontent among the individual tribes, leading to petty squabbles that were slowly weakening the integrity of the empire and would have in time crumbled and divided it, creating an era of civil war.

Apep, eldest and physically superior son of Atok, sensing this and dissatisfied with his father's rule, challenged him for his position as leader of the Goa'uld.

They fought in public fashion, and Apep, proving his superiority, killed his father brutally in front of all the Goa'uld, gaining the right and the power to lead all Goa'uld.

It was within his right as chieftain to claim all the forces of his father as his own, but instead, he divided it equally amongst the strongest tribal leaders, soliciting their stewardship.

He declared them as his brothers and sisters in rulership, though still remaining firmly in control. The underlords, Ra, Thoth, and Nut, and their servants, Osiris, Isis, and Bastet, pledged their loyalty to him and the Goa'uld united under one firm and ambitious leadership.

Finally united, the Goa'uld swept across the galaxy like a plague, conquering more and more worlds, encountering and subjugating new races as their numbers swelled, thus creating a golden age for the Goa'uld.

But then, out of the blue, one minor Goa'uld named Anubis rose through the ranks with unforeseen momentum and became Apep's most trusted underlord and advisor.

Despite the repeated warnings from Ra and the rest of his stewards,

Apep trusted Anubis completely, coming to love and adore him as a son, giving him more power than his beloved brothers and sisters.

Crazed for power, Anubis schemed behind Apep's back, using the immense power afforded to him for nefarious purposes and in time, managed to drive Apep mad using the Sarcophagus, an unstable healing device created by Thoth, based on a device invented by the Ancestors.

Then after manipulating the mentally unstable Apep to discover a hidden cache of Ancient technology, he used it to create a superweapon and murdered Apep in cold blood, devouring his symbiote before all the Goa'uld and claimed his dominion for himself.

Outraged and heartbroken at the death of their brother Apep, Ra and the rest of the Underlords united and waged war against Anubis and his forces.

Planets and entire solar systems were destroyed in this brutal war of revenge, untold and incalculable lives lost in its wake. After centuries of bitter war, Ra and his forces triumphed and dismantled Anubis' superweapon, banishing him to the outer edge of the galaxy.

The empire fractured and suffering, the Goa'uld Ra instituted himself as the ruler of the Goa'uld, dividing the crystals that constituted Anubis' superweapon to his most loyal servants, knowing our race's bickering would never allow anyone to create the weapon again.

He fashioned a new hierarchy, appointing some of the Goa'uld as rulers to help him govern our race, terming them System Lords.

It wasn't easy for him. There were rebellions and betrayals from Goa'uld like Sokar, depleted Unas stock, and a myriad of complications. Still, he succeeded in coming out on top each and every time, continuing his reign as the Supreme System Lord of the Goa'uld.

His reign led to a long prosperous period of exploration, expansion, and conquest that led to us finding more deposits of Naquadah which were used to further advance our race and empire.

It didn't take long before we discovered the Asgard and the Furlings, races more advanced and powerful than us. Arrogant, we provoked an attack, and this almost led to our downfall.

Flying in their terrifying hammerhead ships, the Asgard with the aid of the Furlings crushed and bullied the mighty fleets of the Goa'uld, killing so many of us that we had to retreat embarrassingly to lick our wounds and recuperate.

Desperate and running out of resources since our Unas stock had been nearly wiped due to the conflict and we had lost many of our important planets, we launched a daring surprise attack after long years of fragile peace and landed a crushing blow on the Asgard-Furling alliance, destroying the world they used as the base of their alliance, allowing us to gain what we had lost and more.

But we came to regret this in the years that followed. They attacked us with such vengeance and intensity that we were almost wiped out, only surviving because they weren't cruel enough to exterminate us and underestimated us, not believing us to be a threat anymore due to the beating they'd given us.

This was the darkest period of our history, something we couldn't and would never forget. From that day, we began to fear the Asgard and their fearsome hammerhead ships, and we made sure that fear was passed down to the successive generations so they'd learn from our mistakes and never provoke the Asgard, lest we once again earn their wrath.

It was during this period that Ra, who had somehow managed to steal the body of an Asgard but was slowly dying due to the Asgard physiology being incompatible with that of a Goa'uld symbiote, stumbled upon an undiscovered and alien star system.

There he found a lush and untamed world. A world occupied by a primitive race of bipedal creatures who bowed at his majesty, proclaiming him due to his technology.

Intrigued by their fragile and unique body, and with no other choice, he decided to blend with one of them and that was all it took for another revolution to take place.

It was incredible, the sensations he experienced in this new host. Sound, taste, smell, sight, everything was so vivid it was almost hypnotic to the Goa'uld.

Their bodies were beautiful, living works of art, incredibly easy to repair and use, and they were so compatible with the symbiote that it was a miracle.

They were the perfect race. The race most suitable and ideal for the Goa'uld. The race that would solve all of our problems and elevate them once more on the galactic stage.

Quickly, Ra seized control of the world and enslaved the population.

Now possessing the solution to our race's dilemma and the key to our survival, he shared this amazing discovery.

Fascinated, most immediately abandoned the now unappealing bodies of the Unas and blended with the beings who they referred to as the Tauri, later calling them humans.

Ra then divided the planet and shared the human race with his brethren to gain more of their support and loyalty, each spearheading an age of myth and legend created to deify us in a way that instilled the most fervent loyalty and worship from them.

From there we seeded the new slaves across the galaxy and our domains, using the Tauri as our slaves, warriors, builders, incubators for our young, etc., creating a new dawn for our civilization and empire.

But there were downsides to everything in this universe. Our new hosts made us more powerful, but it also made us more decadent due to the myriad number of pleasures we were now capable of enjoying and experiencing.

With our positive emotions and sensations heightened beyond our wildest dreams, so was our dark side and imaginations.

With our lust, greed, wrath, envy, pride, sloth, and gluttony intensified, we engaged and pleasured ourselves in all sorts of ways, ways we never even dreamed of.

We tortured the human slaves we owned in all manner of ways, exploring and experimenting to find out the best ways to make their screams of pain and agony the more pleasing and enjoyable to our ears.

We slaughtered and eradicated whole planets filled with millions of humans who only existed to worship us and do our bidding, when we felt bored or slighted in any way at all, watching the destruction from our flagships in space with content and wide smiles on our faces.

We engaged in all manner of sexual relations, using hordes of human slaves as pleasure toys, willingly or unwillingly, to drown ourselves in the addictive pleasures of the flesh, continuously finding out more sick ways to make it even more pleasurable.

We made them sacrifice their young in our names, infants even, just to see how far our subjects would go and to satisfy our egos.

We made sport of them, watching them kill themselves in arenas or games, promising the victors untold riches and salvation, while laughing behind their backs at their foolishness and ignorance.

We made them dig our naquadah, gold, silver, and diamond mines, among others, in harsh deplorable conditions, giving them no help whatsoever when we could easily do so, just because we wanted to use and exploit them to their limits, our parasitic sides fully exposing themselves.

We did a whole lot of horrifying and evil things to them, things we knew were wrong since we inherited the human sense of morality. Things that made us clash with the Asgard again.

Still, we did it anyway and enjoyed it with all our hearts, with not even an ounce of remorse, since we believed in our own lies, convincing ourselves that we were truly Gods, all-powerful and all-knowing Gods, who had every right to do what we wanted.

And I saw, felt, and remembered it all as if I did all of them just last Tuesday. I had experienced, no, lived through tens of thousands of years worth of Goa'uld history, history and memories stored in the genetic memory of Orion.

I had everything. All their knowledge, all their wisdom, all their experiences, every single thing. I had inherited it all and as I opened my eyes in the darkness of the escape pod, after reliving all this, I knew.

...I knew, I just knew, that there was no way I was ever going to be the same again...