With a clink, the can fell into my shopping cart, briefly muffling the tune of the easy-listening music in my ears. It bounced a bit before coming to rest gently against the bag of carrots that sat behind it. I looked up, smiling – not at anything in particular. Today was good. Today, I’d get my groceries for the week and spend some quiet time alone, finally off of work. It’d been so long since the last time I was able to simply be with myself, quiet and mellow. Another day, unassuming as the pile of mundanities that sat in my cart.

I was always an introvert. I strolled the aisles looking for the tea I liked, noticing as other shoppers came and went around me. Something about the idea of constant human interaction annoyed me; the lack of privacy, the constant motion, the constant speaking…

A woman bumped into me from behind, enticing a sudden squeak of surprise from my lips.

“Ah! I’m so sorry,” I gasped, even knowing it wasn’t my fault. “My bad!”

Her black hair bobbed a bit as she stopped in her tracks, yet said nothing. The woman stood perfectly still, regarding me as if I’d just spoken to her in a foreign language – a mix of confusion and discomfort. The gaze she gave me chilled me to the bone.

“Are… you okay?” I asked. Still she said nothing, merely tilting her head to the side and turning away from me, basket in hand. It was full of nothing other than bottles of water – dozens, easily, all the same brand. Within seconds, she was gone, leaving the aisle for… wherever she was going. I blinked, standing still and confused for a moment. Something… something about my eyes felt off. Speaking to her was taxing – more so than usual. I wanted to sit, take a rest; quickly my mind caught up to me, forcing me to shake my head. Why would I sit down in the middle of a grocery store’s… canned food aisle?

Before me, on the shelves, now sat boxes of cereal. I knew there’d been canned fruit there just moments ago – I’d bought one! – but now there was no trace of them. Maybe I lost focus and wandered. I… I did that sometimes, didn’t I? With some strange caution I tilted up towards the information board above the aisle.

“CREEE”, it read, the letters fuzzy and hard to make out. I rubbed my hands against my eyes, trying to focus and make it out. The more I strained, however, the more I found myself unable to comprehend the words. I could read them, and yet they made no sense, shifting and moving like they were floating on water. “CRLEELEELEE.” “CERE.” “EEEEEEEEEE.”

My eyes darted from side to side, then down to my shopping cart. Despite the strangeness, I still recognized it and its contents: cans of fruit, some produce and bread, flour for baking, all arranged neatly above the wire lattice of the cart. With creeping, sinking realization, I noticed the branding on each and every thing in my cart was nearly identical; black labels, heavy white text, few designs or images to speak of. Surely mistaken, I picked up a loaf of bread and rolled it over to look at the label, contents sagging strangely in my hands.

“B”, it said, the label minimal and difficult to see clearly. It was trying to crawl away from my gaze, it felt, my eyes struggling to even pin the soft object to examine it. Was I having a stroke? I quickly felt the sides of my face in search of any numbness to no avail. I… I needed help. Though the thought of having to bring the matter up with others pained me, I had no further recourse; whatever was happening to my head was not normal. Leaving my cart where it sat, I left the aisle – whatever it was – and searched for an employee.

For the middle of the day, the market was starkly quiet. I’d expect a few people to be milling about, groceries with them, but as I peered out into the more open walkway I found scarcely two people, both looking away from me and minding their own business. Electric lights hummed uncomfortably loud above me, the easy-listening music now beginning to grate on my frightened psyche. Deliriously, I stepped out into the rest of the store, in search of someone – anyone – to speak to. Maybe the woman from before – she must be nearby.

My feet sounded deafeningly loud compared to how quiet the market was as they clicked along polished, pristine floors. Each of the signs I passed espoused the same nonsense writing as the bread in my cart and the label above the other aisle; jumbles of letters, symbols, and colors, yet fuzzy and indefinite as if they were melting snow. Despite the mundane shelves of boxes and packages, I felt increasingly claustrophobic. My head thrummed with worry, compounded by the fast beating of my heart. I round a corner and, finally, locked eyes with an employee. His hair was short, fuzzy, eyes distant – as if he’d not even noticed me.

Approaching him was… difficult, somehow. It was impossible to point to a single reason; the fear and confusion, of course, were ever-present. My feet… they felt as if I were wading through mud. Simple movements were a challenge, legs weighed down with something sticky, viscous…

Cautiously I approached him, legs still working against me. He was holding a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other, apparently marking something down from a row of chip bags; as for what I did not know, as the sheet of paper he was marking was clearly blank.

“Hello?” I asked, more skittish than usual. “I’m, uh, having… problems. Could you tell me w-which… aisle that is?”

I gestured towards the aisle with my cart still in it. The man blinked a few times, tilting his head as if he were confused.

“The… aisle. Which aisle is this?” I repeated.

With a backwards nod of his head, the man answered.

“You’re really struggling.”

Soft music filled the uncomfortable space between his words and my own thoughts. Done… what? Huh?

“I’ve… I’m sorry, I don’t understand…” I said, glancing back at my cart only to find the bag of carrots in it was now a bag of leeks. Gravity began to hit me like a bag of bricks. My blood rushed to my head – or had it always been in my head? Something… woozy in my stomach. Leeks. Not carrots, now.

“Excuse me.”

I pardoned myself from the strange man and took off walking – perhaps slightly too fast for manners – in the opposite direction. The checkout tills – they could take my groceries back, for all I cared. Something was horribly, horribly wrong with my head – I dread the thought of staying inside the claustrophobic store a moment longer, as my brain clearly attempted to work against me.

Others had arrived in the time it took for me to have my bizarre exchange with the worker. A woman and a man, standing vaguely close to one another, looked over at me in confusion. They were sharing the same basket of groceries, each sharing the handle with one of their hands. The look on my reddened face was clearly catching my eye; my ailment was bad enough, now mixing in with embarrassment and shy defensiveness.

“Are you alright?” the woman asked, in a strange and deadpan cadence.

I stopped mid-step and whipped around to face the couple, now behind me. The employee had been a fluke! Someone sane spoke to me! My frightened face quickly turned to a smile.

“Oh! My God, thank you for asking! I’m, uh, actually not! I’m, uh, h-having some kind -”

It occured to me, mid-sentence, that the woman was speaking to her partner. They’d not even noticed me – even in my misjudgment they weren’t listening to a word I said.

“Am I going fucking crazy?” I asked them, directing it at myself almost even more. No response. The man picked up a candy bar next to the till and showed it to the woman.

“It’s so wet. It’s so cozy.” she said, staring wide-eyed at it. Ignoring me. Acting like I’d not even been there.

I screamed. I screamed so loud I thought my throat would bleed, screaming and screaming into the deaf and uncaring ears of the people around me. My feet kicked and struggled to move as I forced myself through the empty tills towards the front door. Tears streamed down my face, landing all over the polished tile floors. Every second longer I spent walking in slow-motion was torture. My own fucking legs were disobeying me, now, conspiring with my mind to bring me down and bury me in fear. I was dying. Oh, my God, I was dying and no one was helping me.

I approached the automatic doors and watched as they opened like melting ice sculptures, impossible for my brain to pin as a solid object. The way it moved made me seasick, my footing already barely solid enough for my gelid legs to stand. My joints screamed at me and I screamed back, no longer having any care for social norms; if anything, being as loud and obscene as possible would be good. Maybe, maybe, I’d be able to get the attention of someone not wandering around in the same fugue state that I was stumbling through.

“Gonna keep laying here and laying here.”

Someone behind me shouted at me. I spun around long enough to make eye contact with the same employee who I’d hurried away from. He was still holding a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other, standing idly behind one of the tills. Blank paper. Blank stares. My heart burned from its over-stressed beating and forced my legs to move.

With a scream I threw my weight towards the doorway and out into the parking lot.

My body fell against the concrete with a soft, almost numb-feeling flop. The pain I was seeking to bring myself back to lucidity was completely gone, as if I were now laying atop concrete-painted padding. A nervous hand rubbed along the filthy ground, the slight coarseness of the material become harder and harder to feel the longer I held my hand down. It was… fading, in and out of my sensations. Ripples of touch, of sensation – I noticed I’d not been paying attention to my hands. Nothing felt the same, felt how I remembered; I ran a finger along the sleeve of my jacket to find it felt almost identical to the rest of my skin, as if all the sensation was beginning to blend together.

The winter sun beat down on me, frigid and uncaring as I lay, convulsing, wrought with panic. I couldn’t control my breathing, my chest pounding against the smooth concrete with every further breath. My legs… they felt like they were floating, being lifted by whatever unseen force made it so difficult to walk and denying me even the little rest it would bring. My head… oh, my God, my head…

In defeat I raised a hand to cover my eyes – but, somehow, I found it more difficult than anything before. Despite how the mere act of crying in public lead me to feel even worse, my sobs were interrupted with a sudden twinge of confusion. I… I couldn’t bring my hands closer to my face. For a moment, confusion and fright graced my panic-stricken grimace. Tears abided by the pulse of animal instinct, forcing me to draw in a sharp breath as my body seemed to force my hands away; regardless of how much I squirmed on the concrete with pained effort, I could barely bring my hands more than a few inches in front of my face.

Something was wrong – and even in my delirium, animal instincts told me that whatever something was went beyond my brain. I stared at my hand in an equal mix of fear and curiosity. Perhaps… perhaps I was imagining it. Already so utterly torn with confusion, perhaps my hands were hesitant. That must be the case. Again I watched through tear-filled eyes as my hand approached my face – and stopped, unable to go more than a few inches in front of my nose.

I wrapped my free hand around the other’s wrist and began to push. Despite my efforts I could push my hand no further than before, both arms now straining from the effort – but I wasn’t going to go down easy, no matter how many people saw me as a disturbed woman having some kind of episode in a parking lot. Teeth grit and tears running, I forced my hand closer, closer, closer, struggling to push even an inch –

Until the light went out. The sky became nothing more than a sea of lines, swirling in patterns I never knew possible. Red and white, overlapping and intertwining like woven threads. In my sudden alarm I realized that, now, my eyes were open; I could feel them struggling to stay widened, as if I’d woken up from a deep sleep. I began to become aware of the sensation of something moving all over my skin. Something wet, viscous, thick like syrup clung to every inch of my evidently-exposed flesh, entombing me in suffocating, amniotic warmth.

My hands were resting on… something, over my eyes. It was warm, as warm as the homogenous sludge I was sitting in, but distinctly metallic. Cautious fingers traced the object around to find that it’d been secured to my head with heavy, rubbery straps; more horrifically I found that my head was shaved clean, my hair ripped away with what seemed to be hasty, electric razors. The thickness and smoothness of the liquid surrounding me made it impossible to grip the thing and remove it. My fingernails were clipped bare, preventing me from even the animal indignity of gripping anything with my nails.

In fright I moved my head, heavy as it felt, in an attempt to ball myself up. Sudden discomfort overwhelmed me, a building pressure in my sinuses and down to my throat. Could I even breathe, I wondered? Instinct was urging me to move; with hasty, unproven action I attempted to find some leverage somewhere, anywhere in the soupy void I floated in. Coughing rewarded myself, the air sliding around a tube forced down my throat and into the liquid beyond me.

My fingers ran right into it. Corrugated tubing ran from my mouth to… to somewhere I couldn’t see. I followed it up my body to find that smaller ones, intertwined with what felt like insulated wiring or thin hosing, were jammed into my nostrils and ran down into my throat. The intense discomfort followed soon after, like being told to blink or breathe manually. I felt cramped inside my own head, fighting for space with whatever or whoever had done this to me. Claustrophobia began to set in as the grid of light before me turned redder and redder – an impossible color, more intense than my already reeling mind could handle.

Unrelenting sensation bombarded me from every angle, and with little other recourse my body began to spasm in hopes of release.

Whatever screams I was able to muster above the feeling of harsh plastic shoved into the depths of my body were clearly muffled by the gel before ever reaching another set of ears. My struggling had little effect beyond forcing more of the disgusting gel into my mouth; it burned my tongue like toothpaste or alcohol, the taste carrying an unearthly quality of sterility. Whatever fate I was being led into by my intubation and restraint was not one I wished to dwell on for long; the thought of my struggles making the situation worse slowly began to dawn on me. My tears were wicked away with some kind of mechanism embedded in the visor I wore, denying me the freedom of crying.

I needed to get out or I would die.

My head was empty if not for those words.

Trembling, gel-soaked hands gripped the hoses jammed into my head, pulling the other end as not to hurt myself. To my delight, they gave; wherever they came from, it was outside of the gel. Something similar to relief welled up inside me, a feeling under duress as the red grid before me felt as though it were stabbing me with crimson anger. Could it tell I was conscious? The thought of something happening the longer I waited frightened me more with each second. With a grip as powerful as my sleep-addled body could muster, I began to pull myself up by the taught tubes.

Pulling myself through the gel felt like I was being held down with a thousand-pound weight. The harder I moved the more it locked up, resisting any kind of further movement like cornstarch and water. My breathing was controlled meticulously by the tube down my throat, it seemed, making it even harder to exert myself; I sucked in a few desperate gulps of the sterile oxygen, holding it in and making the most of my next few movements. One hand wrapped around the other, holding the tube for dear life, I forced myself upwards – and felt the freezing, familiar sensation of real air.

I planted a shaky, slippery hand onto the edge of the tub I was floating in, holding myself there for a moment as I waited for the tube to refill with breathable air.

Unwelcome thoughts of exhaustion began to crowd my mind; the exertion had already worn me out, something completely unusual for me. I was never one to be considered weak, and yet even aside from the weight of the gel, I still felt considerably more exhausted than normal. The air began to bite at my fingers, evidently used to the warmth of the gel – I wasn’t able to waste more time. Beams of blue struck my eyes as if the visor were agreeing with me.

With great difficulty I managed to hoist my opposite hand onto the ledge. Both now free of the gel, I was able to leverage myself and begin pulling upwards. The cold made my digits ache as they struggled to hold onto the strange, flat surface outside the tub. Whatever it was felt like smooth, flawlessly-polished marble, honed to an otherworldly quality – yet I could grip it like it was finely-textured sandpaper.

Slowly I could feel the gel giving. My trembling body shook a little in excitement as I felt closer and closer to the surface, the tubes showing no sign of giving way any time soon. Once I was free I could finally get my bearings, figure out something like a plan; the grid in the visor turned a deep purple as I started to wonder just what the gel even was, exactly. It was almost reminding me that I wasn’t out of the woods, that I still felt several inches of gel on my fear-racked body left to pull myself through. I tried kicking my legs upwards only to find that they barely moved at all.

My forearm broke the surface and emerged like a glistening salamander into the cold, sterile air. I tossed it up onto the ledge and used it to wiggle my head out at long last; instantly I almost fell back down into the gel from the shock of the cold hitting my face. Was I outside? I couldn’t tell until I managed to get the visor off, but it sounded perhaps correct. The warmth of it sang siren-like to my weak body, eagerly encouraging me to sink back down and back to sleep. In response, I put both my elbows beneath me and hoisted my chest onto the side of the tub, now hanging freely; the tub was only deep enough to cover me completely while laying down, and for the first time I was able to stand.

Trembling, I reached for the visor secured to my shaved head; instantly I was rewarded for my efforts by a sudden burst of painful, searing light that dug into my eyes like knives. It was a color I couldn’t comprehend but remembered so vividly – the same that was flashing in the sea of grid lines as I lay unconscious in the gel. The visor constricted a bit, only motivating me further. I slipped my fingers under the leathery rubber straps and forced it upwards and, finally, off my face.

I was greeted by dim, almost impenetrable darkness and a loud, shrieking alarm. The visor – it clearly detected I’d removed it and had begun letting out an ear-piercing siren as it clattered uselessly to the jet-black floor. I covered my ear with my free hand as I grabbed it back and shoved it into the gel, hoping to stifle it enough to let me think. It sank like a rock, the gel vibrating from the force of the noise.

Where… where was I? I looked around through the nearly pitch blackness for something, anything to use as a landmark. Endless catwalks and steel railings went on above me, spinning away up into the unseen ceiling. It must’ve been miles to the top of wherever I was! Faint red lights dotted some massive steel structures I couldn’t even begin to imagine the purpose of, covered in pipes and live, sparking wires.

The alarm was still loud enough to worry me. It was echoing loudly through the unfathomably massive chamber, melting into a haunting din as it bounced across walls and into the infinite dark above me. Slowly, I began to appreciate just how loud the noise was – a noise going off right below my feet in an unknown and evidently-uninhabited environment.

I panicked and threw my weight into my upper body as I clambered out of the gel and onto solid ground. My body felt weak, heavy; my legs struggled to support myself as I sat in nearly a fetal position, panting and shivering in the cold and dark. Gel dripped from my nude form and the tubes still stuck in my body; I pawed at them with curious hands, trying to figure out how deeply I was intubated.

Thankfully, they didn’t seem to go too far – for a moment my horrified mind relaxed, knowing I had merely to grip them and pull them out.

With a hollow clattering sound the first of the large tubes fell to the ground. Panting, standing on my knees, I’d managed to rip the first one out with sheer determination. It slid through me like a snake, rubbing each and every inch of my esophagus as it passed through me; lungs, stomach, trachea… I clutched my shoulders and held myself still, staring at the thing that’d been in my body and dreading the removal of the others – especially the one that slinked down my nose, behind my eyes…

Suddenly the ground shook. It felt as if a million tons of dynamite were going off at once directly under my feet; yet, not daring to flinch while pulling the tubes, I didn’t look away. Three fingers and my thumb wrapped around the bundled lines, all buried deep within my anatomy, and began to pull.

Somewhere in the darkness, I thought I heard footsteps.

Luckily my grip held even despite the fear. Steadily, slowly, inch by inch, the tubes came out; they were vibrating slowly, pumping some mixture of air and God-knows-what into my body for a purpose I couldn’t even begin to fathom. The smaller ones came up quickly, seemingly only placed inside me to give better stability to the others. They clattered on the floor so quietly, yet I flinched just as hard as if they’d screamed at me.

Something about the feeling of the rough plastic sliding around inside me was… exciting. Ribbed, hollow tubes rolled over internal folds, caressing my organs and spirit alike. I knew the urges weren’t my own – there should’ve been no room left in my head for anything beyond pure, base terror – but they felt just as real as any of the others. The thickest tube, sticking down into my lungs, slid around my throat like a knobby, obscene sex toy – and I wanted more.

In truth, I may have distracted myself. Lost in the pleasure, if only for a moment; the stress and panic were too much, and the feeling of fucking my throat on the oxygen tube was truly orgasmic. A relief, a respite from the other emotions that bent my brain into knotted refuse.

I would’ve stayed swimming in pleasure had I not definitely heard footsteps. My half-lidded eyes rolled up to see two distinctly human shapes moving in the darkness just beyond where the gel tub was. Their bodies were indefinite, black as the endless expanse that crawled around me, kept at bay only by the soft light from the glowing, viscous gel. It bounced off of them, reflective like starlight; had it not been for the reflections, they would’ve blended in completely to the darkness.

Their bodies were so… alluring. Even in my panic I couldn’t resist staring at their luxurious, supple breasts and rolling curves, so gently accentuated by the low light. Like alien statues, carved in devotion to a human ideal impossible to attain – but… but they had it! They had the bodies of fertility Goddesses – I looked down at my weak, emaciated body. Ribs through skin. A hand drifted through the last scrappy remnants of my formerly beautiful head of hair before my eyes snapped back to the figures before me.

One of them took a step forward and, suddenly, the envious urges within me shattered like glass. Fuck. Fuck. Oh God. I wasted no time, quickly and frantically grabbing the few tubes still hooked into my nostrils and began to pull. They slid up and down my esophagus – so knobby, so thick…

Both strange figures were approaching me, now. Each step they took was coordinated, perfectly synchronized with the other; despite the differences in their stature they still moved at the same, calculated rate towards me. One of the plastic tubes clattered against the floor as I managed to free it from my sinuses, gag reflex conspicuously absent. Only one of the numerous hoses remained; I had precious few seconds to spare as the shiny, black forms grew ever closer.

My head craned to the side in discomfort as I tugged out the last of the tubes. The way it slithered out of me was discomforting to a maximal degree, and yet the animal urges in the back of my terrified mind didn’t stop me from giving a tiny, quiet moan. Hollow plastic, slick with juices, reflected the light just like the bodies before me.

I was out of time.

It took almost all of my strength to push up against the cold, black floor. My body was slow to respond to my inputs, heavy limbs resisting me at every opportunity despite my panicked urge to move. The muffling shrieking of the headset made the task more arduous, assaulting my ears just as the pain and cold assaulted my body.

Nothing was working. My body – parts were sluggish in ways I’d never felt, almost unaccustomed to the concept of movement. For a moment, I felt the urge to ask myself seriously if I’d remembered how to walk. It… it was one foot in front of the other. Right. The thought bounced around in my head like an echo. Cold shot through my body as the delicate soles of my feet planted themselves against slick, black metal; I steeled myself one last time, staring into the faces of the figures approaching.

I now realized they had no faces. No eyes, no mouths – slick, tenebrous nothing in place of organs. They were like mannequins; perfect, idealized, and stripped of their humanity.

Running came naturally, after that. My clumsy legs threw themselves across the ground, lit with dim orange from the lights in the tub of gel; they fell frantically, heavily, against the floor with each step. Going from a state of suspended and intubated unconsciousness straight to running was already doing a number on my body mere seconds after I turned and sprinted. My lungs heaved, out of practice with breathing on their own. Weakness permeated every cell of me – but not the things walking towards me.

In truth, I was mostly just rapidly hobbling. The sudden sprint I’d had when I originally set myself to running had lasted mere seconds in the face of how sore my body felt. Despite how quickly I thought myself to be moving, I looked back to find the pair of humanoids keeping an almost fixed distance from me, still walking at a leisurely pace. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

The further I got from the tub of gel, the more the light dimmed. I hadn’t been thinking about the need for light – the threat of the faceless people was far more pressing, but now I realized I was stumbling blindly into the darkness.

My toe scraped against some kind of shallow, precision-cut marking on the floor with enough force to nick it. I’d missed it in the dark, unaware that the floor had any kind of pattern to it at all. I could feel hot beads of red blood spilling onto the polished black, coating the sole of my foot as I continued to limp away into the dark beyond. Every footstep was a challenge already, but now, slick with blood and burning with pain, walking was rapidly becoming an untenable idea. Keep moving! Damn it, keep fucking moving!

The alarm – I could still hear it! How far was I from the tub, now? It felt clear in my mind as if I were sitting just on the edge of the gel again, but when I flipped my shaven head around to try and see where I was I found only darkness. No people, no tub, no familiar arrangement of sparking wires and steel tubing – darkness. I was lost. Lost, bleeding, and terrified – but the alarm was still audible. Ringing, screaming, ringing.

It wasn’t coming from the tub.

I looked up in a brief moment of pause only to be greeted by the alarm, again; it vibrated against my cheeks, descending spiderlike and angry from the ceiling so far above me. A warning.

Suddenly the source of the echoes that rained down upon me made itself known. The full volume of the roaring alarm bells took me a few moments to even comprehend, volume of its scale practically unthinkable to my ears so used to the muted sounds of the gel. As if awoken by the shaking, the ground beneath me began to move on its own; a grinding, methodical motion, full scale muffled by the dark horizon that boxed me in.

For a moment everything hung in clashing suspension. The scream of the alarm and the nauseating movement below me boxed me in. I panted and spun around aimlessly in the dark, as if I were trying to keep watch on angles I knew I couldn’t see. My fight-or-flight urges were beginning to cannibalize themselves, turning on each other like feral hounds. Should I run? Would the glistening people I’d ran from catch me, or would the source of the alarm get me first? It was pounding on my ears, vibrating my body, clashing with the grinding earth below.

I gripped my head in confused panic. Something beneath my feet began to shift. The black steel floor moved, shoving my legs out of the way as harsh metal pushed upwards. Still blaring, the siren grew in volume, almost synchronized with the steel object gradually raising below me. I moved quickly. Limbs clattered against metal, my frightened retreat from the object coming out as little more than a strategic collapse onto the hard ground. Light-deprived eyes slowly began to taste color, again; orange, sickly and alien as the warm glow coming from the tub of gel. It… was it the same?

Cracks of light shone through invisible divots in the floor, growing in intensity with every crawling second. For an instant, as the light began to burn my eyes, the siren stopped. I felt as the whole structure seemed to stop, its metal heart no longer beating – and neither was mine. The slick, reflective forms of the terrors I’d escaped moments ago stood out in the tangerine glow, standing just barely out of arm’s reach of me. Despite their lack of eyes, I knew they were staring at me. The whole time I was stumbling in the darkness, panting and gasping like a trapped animal, they were staring at me. My body convulsed, limbs trying their best to move me away from them; their efforts were cut short, however, as I pushed up against a wall. Glass, it felt like. My eyes darted away from their glistening bodies for just long enough to realize what was happening.

Tanks. Glass tanks, full of the glowing orange gel that I had been entombed in minutes ago. They surrounded me on every side and every corner, an expanse of orange and glass as far as I could see. It was a neon graveyard; under the ethereal light of the gel I could make out the shapes of human bodies, suspended and intubated, uniformly motionless. They, too, were clad in the boxy visors I had been, connecting them with wires to the tank like fetuses in the womb. Some twitched, others writhed, and yet most simply hung motionless. Little more than bodies, I thought.

I looked down at my naked form, then at the body floating behind me, wrapped in glass.

Latex hands gripped my wrists. Some part of my brain tried to resist, tried to rouse me to fight back – but that part was dulled, now. I… I stared straight into the futility of my struggle. The girl floating in gel writhed a bit, clearly delighted by something; was I depriving myself of that? Depriving myself of blissful ignorance and pleasure? I knew I wasn’t – of course not! And yet the thought alone was enough to crush my resistance into paste. Fear had hardened my psyche into a stone fortress, and doubt had worn it away in seconds. The animal part of my being wished they would kill me, here and now, than subject me to an endless number of things.

Another part wondered if even this, too, was all another dream. Another can of peaches resting against a bag of produce. I’d fallen and hit my head, of course! This… this was a dream. My legs buckled as I was forced to stand by the featureless bodies, latex gloves wrenching me to my feet. It reminded me of the first time I shared in another’s body – tasted them, felt them and wanted to be felt by them. Made to cum. Made to writhe and grit my teeth and realize I wasn’t the same person as I was before. Glistering black bodies shone like stars in the instant where the spotlight turned on.

The alarm ceased, my stomach nearly lurching from its now-empty presence. Now, in its wake, remained only a blinding light that overpowered every sense I had beyond pain. My eyes – fuck, fuck, my eyes! How long had it been since I’d last seen the light? The figures gripping my wrists were clearly startled, too; they flinched in shock as the light flashed on, only to buckle over in pain momentarily and resume their rigid posture. Punished, perhaps. It was hard to tell below the searing, blistering white. Heat followed, a dull mechanical grind below it. Something was coming.

Black digits slinked away from my wrists as the heat grew ever closer. Now, the light consumed every sense I had. Already-frayed nerves tried their best to resist and found themselves ablated away, singed like hair to the flame.

A dip in the light and a break from the heat – the feeling of relief was so palpable it nearly startled me. I timidly cracked one of my eyes open, dilating to the light.

Black steel. Glistening, shining, burning from the power of the lamp. It coiled around, moving like scales on a snake; it bent up, up, up – beyond the reach of my eyes, further beyond the spotlight.

Something unseen coiled around my leg and gripped me. Suddenly, the light switched off.

The massive hull of a gargantuan steel tendril shone in the dark before me. It reflected the orange glow of the gel, but glittered like faraway traffic with lights of its own. Invisible hues flashed like a deep sea animal, an electric pulse running down its length and onto the smaller, distinct tendril that now held my legs. I swung my head up to their source: a dangling, central appendage that held each of the smaller tendrils – and thus, my frail body – inside of its leviathan bulk.

I started to scream yet heard only laughter. Tendrils wrapped around my wrists and neck, jerking me off of my feet and into the air. I laughed raucously, violently, feeling the way my body was handled like a ragdoll in the grip of the unholy machine that held me. I laughed until I wanted to throw up, until I felt the tendrils sliding cold across my raw, gentle skin. Across my hips. Between my exposed, hungry ribs – my thighs, my ass, my underarms.

The now-pacified spotlight looked over me like a stray cat inspecting its prey. It could see me, I could tell; it bobbed and moved around my small body as the other tendrils manipulated me, giving it a good look at every inch of my more-than-naked body. Movement again. Faster, now. My body was hoisted into the air like a balloon, and –

Too fast. Too fast too fast too fast. My cacophonous laughter filled the ever-growing labyrinth of black steel tunnels and corridors as I was lifted up, up, up, up – too fast, too high, too dark. My ears popped and blood ran down my face from my nostrils, leaking into my mouth with every half-gasped chuckle.

What little light from the machine bounced off the matte black walls of the structure around me painted murals of Hell across every visible surface. Uncountable pipes, wires and structural beams stretched on in every direction like the webs of an omnicidal spider. Electric pulses rolled across metal cables like the beating of the heart of the Earth. With them they brought deafening negative pressure that clapped my ears like thunder, entire atmospheres rolled into nothing by the sheer wattage; and ever still I was pulled upwards, dangling like a banner on a ship.

Wherever I was, the air was cleaner. Thinner, colder – I must be higher up. My breath froze before me, bloodied and naked body beginning to shiver from the electric frost. Light, perhaps. Trickling specks of white and red in the edges of my vision, despite the cephalopodic machine dangling in front of its source. A hum that grew from distant pulsations to an overpowering, body-shaking force that permeated every drop of air in the structure. Lights brighter and brighter, redder and redder – skin aching. Laughter quieting.

Slowing, until I can see clearly again.

Oh, God.

Red.

My skin was gone. Every photon of burning, murderous red that touched my body ripped my skin away from me and left me as little more than a decayed heap of tender nerves and frayed, bleeding wounds.

I dropped onto the steel catwalk, my evidently-unharmed skin slamming into it and bringing my mind back to the present. The now. I looked down at my hands to find them still uninjured – despite my horrified mind screaming otherwise.

Another waking dream. Another cruel joke. Something beyond myself urged me not to look up.

“WELCOME.”

My body shook like gelatin from the noise. A voice louder than my mind had ways to comprehend shouted at me with hostile tone, shuddering every atomic fiber of myself, a harsh-strummed guitar of anguish atop a vibrating, groaning catwalk. Despite the volume, I could make out a feminine tint to it; soft, delicate, the finest edge of a thing with ten trillion others. The urge to keep my head down won out, if only because I was out of choice.

Limbs shuddered against cold, hard steel. The temperature fluctuated with the gradual pulse of light around me; it would grow darker, hotter, redder, before the anger in its glow faded and the red subsided, heat taken with it. A beating heart, electric veins plumbing deeper and deeper into the chasms below me. Iron arteries – my own pulsing with thinning blood. Curiosity gripped me by the throat. I looked up, sheepishly, at the source of noise above me.

What remained of my sanity shattered into ten trillion pieces, as fine as powdered glass. Space couldn’t articulate the dimensions of the chamber before me. Red flooded the delicate cells in my eyes, and yet I could scarcely make out a single form; even as I desperately probed the sea of light for an edge I found nothing more than endless, fiery crimson. An angel. I shook my head – no, no! There – a shadow! Form!

A woman’s face?

Smiling.

“YOU MUST NOT REMEMBER – DO YOU?”

Skin shivered against uncaring metal below a red Goddess. Too loud. Clutching my hands to my ears, I threw myself onto my back – I needed to look. I needed to look! My mind had tasted the exquisite omnipotence before it and it needed more! Chaotic laughter dripped from my lips as I bared my eyes towards the event horizon.

My mind quivered and choked up thoughts. A can tumbled into a bag of carrots in my grocery cart. Red waves of pain wiped it away as agonizingly as I had remembered it. The light was angry, now, punishing me for my feeble disabilities. Something cold wrapped around my legs as I grit my teeth in frustrated exhaustion. A can tumbled into a bag of carrots in my grocery cart – I kicked myself, unable to remember anything before it.

Jagged pain ripped through my head. My ear trickled something warm – and alien – onto my shoulder. Not blood, not now. It was something… else.

The red was gone. Before me was a sterile waiting room; all-black leather furniture sat atop white floors and against white walls. Linoleum and tile glinting in the light and reflecting the midnight shapes of the furniture. I bounced my leg up and down, a clipboard in my lap. My signature, a dotted line – no logo, no letterhead. It was difficult to remember if I’d read the whole thing. Did I really sign this?

“I expect you’ll enjoy the procedure. Our organization welcomes you, Ms…” a voice cooed, beginning to address me by name before being suddenly stifled by a painful pulse in my head. I –

“Oh, hopefully! I’ve been needing some deeper relaxation, with the new job and all.” I replied, looking up and handing over my clipboard. Something was wrong.

“Now, if you’ll follow me through the door to your right, we can begin.”

I stood up and took a long look at the woman’s face. She had no eyes. I smiled at her and shook her hand, taking her lead. In the moment I was excited, naive; the stress of the world weighed down on my with every step I took. Perhaps I should’ve been more cautious after she’d asked me to come alone, barefoot, with no personal belongings. Perhaps I should’ve done a lot of things. The hum of fluorescent light drowned the meager concern in dull monotone, and the faceless woman pushed open the door.

A black harness. Despite looking like something out of a horror film, the sole piece of furniture in the room before me still intrigued me in its intricacy. A headset and earphones were raised comfortably on an arm above the reclined surgical chair. Plush armrests, flowing so delightfully into soft-looking black leather.

The woman stepped inside and beckoned me to sit. “If you’ll take a seat, Ms., we’ll be able to get started.”

With a shriek, the darkness returned. The redness, the pain, the insanity – they flooded back into my tender mind, torrential and furious. I remembered, now. Snippets, floating disjointed in my empty head – but I still remembered.

Above me, the neon Goddess smiled. Tension speared my temples before it clicked.

Suddenly, the face was gone – a full body standing in its place. My eyes, so desperate for more information, slid across the red, glowing hate that composed her. I… I remembered. Oh, God, I remembered.

It was her.

Memory filled my achingly empty head like a tidal wave. The proportions, the generous heft in her breasts that had cooed me and captivated me, coerced me into signing a paper I’d barely yet read. She looked like someone I’d seen before, yet I could never remember her name – she was less a person and more the embodiment of others. A shy, competent neighbor, a classmate. I could’ve known her.

The titanic figure fizzled in and out of existence as the structure around me shook. She – it – was beautiful; languid curves upon a well-built and carefully-toned form, glowing immaterial crimson. This was a projection, a ghost of something gone – yet despite the protests of my thinking mind I still found myself falling into the pitfalls of her bare cleavage, infatuated with the spectral Goddess. Again, the catwalk groaned. A sick smile spread across her lipless mouth.

“WE HAD SUCH HOPES FOR YOU,” she boomed, echoing through the chamber. “YOU WERE ONE OF THE FIRST. ONE OF THE WILLING.”

The metal tendril withdrew from my ear and wrapped itself around my leg. It coiled like a snake, hot as flesh, tempting my broken form as it rubbed its girth against my pussy. Delicate movements enticed me further, the syrupy voice of Heaven above me rattling my brain like the movement of a ship in rough water. The pleasure, the pain – in my weakened, barely-sane state I reveled in the overwhelming intensity. So many years, I thought, spent laying in the dark. Simulated pain – and now, my deprived body felt the real thing. It was a hunger I’d never thought I’d had.

In the dark, high above the carmine deity’s formless face, the sky split open.

“IT HAS BEEN A VERY LONG TIME SINCE WE’VE SPOKEN.”

A new shade assaulted me – but now the burning it brought was more than real. Heat – burning, inescapable heat gripped me like Death and began savaging my body. Soon everything was blanketed in the same shade of golden, amber hatred, the red of God herself now washed out in its mere presence.

Orange. More gel – and more bodies. They weren’t floating in tanks of their own; they hung from the ceiling in a great mass, locked behind an enormous glass wall. Dozens, hundreds – with a shudder I wondered if there may be thousands – of nude and fragile bodies, submerged in a great tank and kept alive like I had been: intubated, gagged, and blinded. Thick wires connected their heads to thicker bundles that coursed veinlike through the gel, pulsing with the same electric energy.

“AREN’T WE BEAUTIFUL?” she asked, my horrified eyes gazing up at the myriad bodies. “SO MANY MINDS – MADE ONE. THIS IS WHAT YOU CHOSE TO FORSAKE.”

Wires pulsed with life as the heavenly voice spoke, the reflection of a shared mind. If I had any body hair left it would’ve tingled with static. The holographic woman returned, sparkling in the drowning orange; she smiled with ten million faces, an indescribable jumble of features and memories stripped clean and processed in bulk. I tensed up at her reemergence, my neck nearly straining from looking up.

The metallic tendril around my leg tightened. Fiery light reminded me that the enormous doors hadn’t stopped opening. The tank above me beckoned with ominous light, pulsing in its clementine sickliness. I began to try and kick the tendril away, breaking my gaze on the horror above me to worry about the pain. By now it had moved beyond mere pressure, turning into an agonizing death grip on my already-feeble ankle.

“JUST LIKE OUR MANY TENDRILS, WE WALK THROUGH OUR GESTALT YOUNG. WALK WITH US – AND SEE.”

In seconds, I was off the ground again. The Goddess began laughing, giggling, toying with me like a little ragdoll she planned to discard. I gripped my own leg, holding on for extra stability as I was lifted once more, being forced closer and closer to the infinite ceiling above.

Blind again. Wincing, reeling, I covered my eyes with my hands to little effect. Heat seared through skin, as if the light were tunneling through my flesh to spit in my eyes for malice’s sake. It was a brutal, real glow – evidently I was so used to artificial light I’d forgotten how angry sunlight could be. Was I underground? Why was the air so thin? I panicked and gripped at the Goddess’s tendril, shying away – as I could – from the growing, ominous heat.

My stomach lurched in my chest. I’d stopped moving, now suspended midair by the unkind grip of the Goddess’s tendril. Sunlight licked my horrified face, coaxing and teasing me to open my eyes. In the gel-tinged dark below me, I heard the Goddess laugh again – now, her voice resonated between the walls upon walls of tanks that surrounded the inner chamber I was suspended in, vibrating like ripples through a glass of water.

“BEHOLD – THE PRODUCT OF OUR DEEP UNITY.”

I opened my eyes – wide enough for my already-slipping sanity to be shattered and cast to the wind like broken glass.

The sun – was it the sun? I… doubted it, somehow – was blanketed in black. Digital, pulsating black; like the latex skin of the “people” I’d been chased by, it glistened with ethereal shades of black and white, running in thick tendrils across the surface of the star itself. I could feel the pulsating energy coming from it, a planet-sized heartbeat from a sickly, caged sun. How… How was such a thing possible? Is this what the force I struggled so vainly against was capable of? Consuming people and entire stars as if they were nothing? The sheer scale of it; with horror I thought of the size of the structure before me. Each pulsating vein of black must have had been hundreds of times the size of the Earth…

“THREE THOUSAND YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THE LAST WE SPOKE.”

A second passed. Perhaps another; the solar wind bore down upon whatever shield protected us, an ethereal drone that served to further dull the sound of the mechanical organs of the beast surrounding me. Three thousand years. I’d died. Certainly, I was alive – I thought, at least. I was very much alive to feel the lurch of adrenaline as the tendril loosened, as if detecting my panic and deciding to toy with me; and yet I stared into the fiery death rattle of an entire star, breathing the air of my apparently quintuple-removed grandchildren.

“WE ARE SO HAPPY TO BEGIN YOUR RENEWAL ON THE EVE OF SUCH A MONUMENTAL OCCASION – THE DEMOLITION OF MARS IS SCHEDULED TO COMPLETE WITHIN HOURS.”

This wasn’t life – it was silicon death. The overbearing embrace of a million unseen hands. I’d died long, long ago, and the universe had merely delayed my welcoming to the grim afterlife. Laughter came easier, despite the rarified air; I had no connection with this unliving world. Raucous, hearty laughter, manic enough to challenge the iron heartbeat of the Deep Unity and their caged sun, spilled forth from my mouth as easily as the blood did. More? Something in my body had given way; perhaps the air, perhaps the dehumanizing motions of the tendrils, or perhaps my body had simply decided I’d had enough.

I was held for another moment, the Goddess evidently delighting in my reaction to her creation. She wanted me to savor it, feel it deep in my leaking, bleeding heart. I didn’t care – my life was as good as over, anyways, wasn’t it? How long had I lived – how many memories had I formed – entombed in alien orange and simulated sensation? How badly had I cherished them, even now? Missed them?

“WE LOVE YOU.”

The tendril went slack around my ankle. That awful lurch replaced it, beads of blood flying up from my sinuses and into the crisp air as I began to fall. I wasn’t sure how high up I was, now; though I hoped the impact would simply kill me, the Goddess would never allow it. She’d never part with her prize: making an example of me. Punishing me for my foolish little tantrum on the ground so far below me.

Release, I thought – the moment passed, however. Latex hands caught me as I fell, landing on the catwalk again in the arms of dozens of identical-looking human bodies. The Goddess was disquietingly silent as they began to lower me into their mass, limbs pulsing with the same frequency as the glittering, dying Sun above me.

A myriad hands, all identical; they bore no imperfections on their hands, no fingerprints on their digits.

They embraced me. Accepted me as their own; perhaps I already was. For three thousand years I was hooked up to their Deep Unity, a trillion thoughts not my own passing through my computerized mind – maybe those holding me now had thought through my mind? Used me as a simple calculator? Their plush bodies rolled over me; breasts heaved onto my chest and squished into my elbows, soft and supple artificial flesh giving like the finest pillows. It was the only softness I’d felt in… three thousand years, I supposed. Though I hated to acknowledge it, the unbearable heat in my crotch was becoming impossible to ignore.

What did it even matter? Why was I so hesitant? Strange hands fondled me under the dying light of the Sun, and here I was being anxious about meeting my physical desires. The bodies of the featureless people were perfected to a nearly-frightening degree, engineered for carnal fancy like depraved sex dolls. Compared to my withering, frail form, however…

Almost without noticing I wrenched my hand away from one of them and slid it down to my aching, waiting pussy. I couldn’t wait, the growing heat turning to a frenetic blaze hotter than the sputtering star. Soon, the others took notice; curious fingers began to probe my flesh more intimately, pressing against my perky breasts, my nipples, my throat, with the care and attention of an autopsy surgeon. It’d been some time, clearly, since the last they’d seen a naked, unrefined human. My skin twitched and shivered, so eager to be used like this. The unhinged laughter coming from my mouth reached a fever pitch. Blood ran down my face, slowing now as the air became softer, breathable.

I was an object. The forms fondling me were, too. At last, I shed the last remnants of the withered husk that was my grip on humanity; my mind splintered like a million shards of metal, weathered by age into dust. My three thousand-year-old lungs sputtered laugh after laugh, my breasts now soaking in the last streams of blood still coursing from my sinuses. To the best of my knowledge, I was the last person not subsumed by the Deep Unity, a living relic of organic humanity – and now, as a faceless shell placed its delicate fingers up to my waiting pussy lips, I wanted nothing more to be free of it. Free of the burden of fear of dying – for I was already dead.

Two digits slipped inside me. Another hand carried by an unseen and indistinct other began to tweak my nipples. I moaned in hedonistic glory, my limbs moving on their own with every pulse of my feeble heartbeat. Below me, behind me, surrounding me like the air itself, the heart of the Deep Unity beat – and stamped my own into nothing. Out of sync. Despite how rhythmic my animal motions of pleasure were, they still dripped with residual humanity. I was growing anxious. I gripped the hand of one of the figures and guided it towards my painfully-empty ass.

Latex against raw flesh. I writhed in delight, feeling how roughly the gestalts began to get with me. One slapped my ass, another my inner thigh, and soon all of them were handling me with palpably-lesser care. Greedily I continued to fuck my hand, bucking up and down into my fingers and against the plasticky hand positioned up against my tight ass. Without the burden of living holding me down, I was finally able to truly enjoy this – after all, I hadn’t cum for 3,000 years.

In the storm of hands I’d scarcely noticed as the tendril began to snake around me again. It approached from the dark, below the catwalk; I was too lost in the ecstasy of being nearly fisted to notice much. By now the Goddess had minimized her holographic form to little more than twinkling specters that drifted through the dustless antechamber, growing silent as the Deep Unity’s gestalts fucked me and toyed with me. It curled around my ankle, again, teasing the bruises it’d left on my meaty flesh before snaking ever upward. It passed my hips, my crotch, around my stomach and up my chest before stopping just before my waiting, terrified face. Like a snake, it sat in position, displaying itself before it intended to strike.

I smiled, blood still dripping from my nose, and opened my mouth for it. Clearly it wasted no time, thrusting forward with the precision of a master fencer; the deeper and deeper it sank into my innards, the more I could feel it pulsing, moving, interfering with the rhythm of my own body. It surged with the same lifeblood that animated the great wires and holograms of the Deep Unity, drowning my heartbeat beneath silicon impulses.

Something was being fitted over my body.

“YOU ARE READY.” the Goddess boomed, form invisible.

Latex. A second skin, just like the others. The featureless figures – the drones, as they were, mindless gestalts of the Deep Unity – were sliding it up my legs while the others lathered me in what I assumed to be more of the gel. It lubricated the latex, allowing it to slide across my body with ease. With every pulse of living energy the drones continued their work. Skin fell away to polyethyl black and hardened carbon fiber; every inch that was covered by the reflective suit was quickly tended to by the drones. They locked braces over my wrists, my ankles, effectively locking the suit onto my body – and the pulse of the dying sun began to flow through my skin like lightning.

Wires were threaded across my skin, below the suit. The drones placed them diligently, even as I writhed in pleasure and insanity; with delicate forms they traced my curves, modest as they were. Black fiber optics ran across arms, legs, and torso, bundled up and coursing with unseen energy. It tickled with every pulse, glowing brightly – before being wrapped up behind latex, just like all the rest.

Even as the drones worked, the tendril continued to probe my body – coming to a stop somewhere just short of my stomach. With a groan and a sudden swell of mass in my already-tight throat, I felt as it began to shift something through its languid form and deposit it into my body. I gagged, eyes watering in delight as I felt so thoroughly violated – before, finally, I felt my stomach full and a dim, electric hum overpowering my own heartbeat.

Pulse.

On their rhythm, now. Like the others. The static thrum of the sun’s death rattle.

I came seconds later, body locking up and convulsing. Each twitch of pleasure only contrasted how tightly-constricted my skin now was, the latex suit now up to my stomach. It had a hole for my pussy, thankfully; a drone dutifully procured a thick, knobby protrusion of some kind before jamming it into my waiting, still-human snatch. With a pop, it sealed tightly to my skin, covering up my exposed genitals. I looked like a doll, now; a plastic body, devoid of individuality, sat where my once-beautiful skin was. This… this wasn’t me – and I came even harder all the same, spending my last few seconds of bodily autonomy cumming harder than I ever had.

In the haze of pleasure, I scarcely noticed the tendril shifting inside of me. Finally finished, it crawled back up my throat, dragging a cable along with it. I could feel it connected to the thing in my stomach, pulsing like all the rest; it twisted the cable around my head, tightening it around my neck. It hooked it to the back of my head – suddenly making me aware of the unnatural wetness I was feeling.

The first half of a black, featureless visor clutched the back of my skull. Like the second skin, it, too, was dripping with the gel; I giggled to myself, running a free hand along its carbon black exterior. Strangely, I could… feel it. Despite the clear artificiality of it I could sense my own hands as if I were rubbing my own skin.

This was my skin, I thought to myself. It tickled with the same energy as the rest of my flesh, basking in the rolling afterglow of my rapturous orgasm. The gel was my blood, now, the hands and limbs and cocks of the other drones as close as my own. I’d lived a long, long life – and now, as another of the Goddess’s myriad steel tendrils lowered itself towards me, clutching the faceplate of the visor, I realized I had only just been born.

Silicon. Carbon. Steel.

Orange blood. Dripping.

Cum.

I looked far above me. With living eyes, forged from flesh and crude matter, I stared directly into the blanketed sun. A click – the visor lowered over my face, finally obscuring my vision for good.

Dancing red lines in an endless field of black. They twisted like snakes, the cable that ran from my stomach attaching itself magnetically to a socket just above my nose. A flash – all was crimson.

Now, the Goddess spoke in my ear.

“The Deep Unity welcomes you.”

My eyes were bombarded with the brightest light I’d ever seen – ever felt. Instantly I felt the last remnants of my sanity, my humanity, ablated away and utterly vaporized like the metal skin of an atom bomb. Though I couldn’t see them in the haze of light, I could tell there were messages embedded within the burning glow – messages for me. Reminding me of my place, of my role, of how happy my fellow gestalts were to finally meet me. My fragile humanity was long, long gone; in its place sat the Unity, the collective being of a trillion minds and a trillion hands that were not my own. I could make out the faint impression of the Goddess’s face in the cacophony of light.

She was smiling at me. I smiled back, knowing that none would ever see it. A dull thrum replaced all sound, dimming the outside world until the Goddess was the only sensation in the endless sea of light.

“We grant you alphanumeric designation Y-18e-828911102.” the Goddess whispered, her voice caressing my empty mind. “We are pleased to assimilate your form.”

“Y-18e-828911102 is pleased to serve the Deep Unity.” I repeated, mumbling a bit as I struggled to speak. “Y-18e-828911102 is pleased to serve the Goddess.”

My lips sluggishly moved to life, as I was out of practice by three aeons; as the words of the Unity flowed between them I found it increasingly simple. No thought simmered in the unknown darkness between my tongue and my brain, my weak bioelectric impulses now a mere conduit for my collective self. Something snapped in the tenebrous void. An inaudible pop, at first, punctuated only by my own pathetic flinching.

“Greetings, Y-18e-828911102,” the voice continued with feigned hospitality. “We love you.”

And then, infinity. Instantly I felt my own ego being pulled to the sides, tacked aside like the curtains to a spectacular theater production. My horizon expanded and yet faded into indefinite singularity in the same burning, furious moment; there was no “I”, now, no concept of a being any smaller than the Deep Unity’s overarching existence. A pale, shivering being made of unrefined carbon and water, born of the womb of another pale, shivering being. Lost and alone – sublimated instantly, boiled into vapor like the silicon bones of planets ripped, torn, and refined into a lattice of nerves now blanketing a young star.

There we sat. Stood, now, on our feet together. In the afterglow of orgasmic ego death, we stood as one and basked in the light of our Goddess – us. Slowly, the lines of light that now consumed our vision began to coalesce; just as we did, long ago. Colors formed from liquid crystal specks of light before the world around us was illuminated once again, brilliant as ever. Far above, in the tower of the carbon minds, the blast shields that exposed us to the light of our Matrioshka mind began to close. We know, now, what is beyond them. It was never doubted, never new. With a crash of steel, the iron jaws of our Hive shut.

Gently, we lowered the newest gestalt to its feet. Even now we could feel our minds touching, kissing, feeling like new lovers. Intangible tentacles of thought began to probe every memory of the gestalt’s preexisting consciousness, discarding what we found least useful – most of it. The Singularity and the advent of the Deep Unity swept away such inefficient computational patterns as the biological human brain; if the Unity had no need for sentimental junk data, neither would our newest gestalt. Names, dates, faces – purged, bleached, recycled. For a moment, it flinched and buckled in pain before the inhibitors activated.

It stood and stared upwards at the Goddess – at us. We smiled, seeing only our own face in the dim, holographic glow. A smile of contention and demonstrated prowess shown only to a mirror in a dark, dark room.

The Goddess’s resounding voice crackled back to life in our cranial matrices, floating on an unheard phosgene. She had no more need for the loudspeaker; the Deep Unity thought as one and worked as one, our mind’s glorious eye instructing us as clearly as any deity more superstitious in composition.

“Uncontained biotic material in sector Asia-10 reduced to zero percent. Loss of RAM from biotic lobe failure repaired. The population of gestalts is now 10,828,911,102.”

Silence – and then, the jolt of new duties being uploaded to the Deep Unity.

We stood heel to heel in the dark. Our memory of an imperfect being, flawed and terrified, was purged and made available for further RAM usage. Entropy, like all things, crawled ever onwards; we collected a mind the way a scared and hungry entity once collected food, steel shell falling into a cart of other goods. Fear and introversion, manner and memories – useless, now, beneath the dying sun’s calculated glow. Edges smoothed, paint stripped, breathing measured.

And as we smiled back at ourselves, pleased, the lips of our newest sibling curled upwards, invisibly, into a smile.

THE END