You go take your morning shower. 
You go eat your breakfast. 

You go through your commute. 

You go work at your job. 

You go back home to watch the news. 


You go to sleep. 


Night 1 


| wake up in front of something unfathomable. It's staring 
at me, like the sun on a cloudless night. In the pitch 
black, it bleeds in and out of my vision without stirring, 
glowing without giving off any light. It demands my 
attention and strains my eyeballs. 


It's too big. It doesn't fit in with the suffocating darkness 
and murk that I've been floating in, the rough stone that 
encases my extremities. It's bulging out, yet it's blurring 
in. I'm staring at its maw, and its throat, but | can't tell 
where the well ends and where it begins. 


| think it's a snake. It has two bulbous spots that might 
just be eyes, staring at me unblinking. Its scales blend 
with the surrounding brick, shadowy gray melting into 
vivid green. 


I'm snapped out of my trance by a lurching noise. My 
limbs are scraping against the rim of this pit. | feel them 
tensing under the pressure. 


Pressure. 


I'm being squeezed into the mouth of this thing. The 
numb pain at the back of my eye sockets grows as it 
takes up more of my vision. 


That's when | get close enough to see its teeth. 


They're too sharp and too close and too many and 
they're too much as I'm pulled in as they press against 
my skin and 


Day 2 


You wake up. It's a laborious task, as always. Sunlight is 
streaming through your window and onto your face, an 
unwelcome but useful incentive to get up. You have work 
today, and the commute is never kind. Your mind is 
groggy, but free from the terrors of the night before. 


You get up from bed and shower. The water flows over 
you, but you inhale deeply. A nice hot shower is one the 
few things in life that you wake up for. You linger a bit. 
Honestly, you wake up a bit early just to savor some 
extra time in here. You glance toward the window. At 
first, the idea of having a portal to the outside world next 
to your naked body seemed a bit silly, but the gentle 
sunlight streaming through eventually wooed you over. 
Frankly, as you admire the masonry and stretch out your 
body, you don't think you'll ever be able to abandon 
walk-in showers. 


You go eat your breakfast. 

You go through your commute. 

You go work at your job. 

You go back home and watch the news. 
You go to sleep. 

Night 2 


| don't wake up. That would require a shift in position, an 
opening of eyelids, a dawning of consciousness. 


| just, am, floating down and down. 


The darkness has been replaced by an all-consuming 
gray that isn't light and isn't dark. The pain that was at 
the back of my eyes has been replaced by a numb 
coolness. The same cannot be said for the rest of my 
body. 


It's not quite pain. It's a slightly acidic warmth. The 
feeling is touching every inch of my being, penetrating 
into my core. It's enough to make my skin crawl, even 
though | can't feel my skin. 


Somehow, I'm still boxed in. At the edge of my 
awareness, there's a pricking pain. Not a pin prick, but 


rather a long, drawn out cut, pointed upwards. It isn't in a 
singular point, but rather, a radius all around me. It feels 
like I'm being dragged through a tunnel of needles. 


| try to exert some force, any. The cutting gets worse, 
transforming from needles to daggers as | struggle. 


| resign myself, and drift. 

The cutting slowly fades. 

It's smoother over here. 

| find myself almost at ease. 

The grayness is disturbed. | see something. 


| try to focus. A tunnel shape reemerges in my senses. 
The portion ahead of me is physical, a break from the 
void. The tunnel is disgusting, some grimy shade of gray, 
brown, black, and orange. 


I'm forced into it. | focus again to see embedded in the 
walls things that aren't people but have the shape of 
people and if | try to focus anymore | can see faces that 
don't have 


Day 3 


You wake up. It's a laborious task, as always. Sunlight is 
streaming through your window and onto your face, an 
unwelcome but useful incentive to get up. You have work 
today, and the commute is never kind. Your mind is 
groggy, but free from the terrors of the night before. 


You get up from bed and shower. The water flows over 
you, but you inhale deeply. A nice hot shower is one the 
few things in life that you wake up for. You linger bit. 
Honestly, you wake up a bit early just to savor some 
extra time in here. You glance toward the window. At 
first, the idea of having a portal to the outside world next 
to your naked body seemed a bit silly, but the gentle 


sunlight streaming through eventually wooed you over. 
Frankly, as you admire the masonry and stretch out your 
body, you don't think you'll ever be able to abandon 
walk-in showers. 


You stick your utensils into your platter of breakfast. 
Leftovers. Not glamorous, but quick and filling. Anything 
is edible if you stick it the microwave long enough. 
Downside is that that a takes a decent portion of your 
willpower to not just skip the ordeal. Your fork goes 
scritch-scratch as it hits the plate. Unlike most people, 
you consider it a pleasant sound: it signifies that you've 
fulfilled the obligations imposed upon you by your body. 


You go through your commute. 

You go work at your job. 

You go back home and watch the news. 
You go to sleep. 

Night 3 


I'm alive. My body has reconstituted, my limbs are 
unbound. In spite of everything I'm alive to think and 
breath and move. 


| don't want to move, | don't want to breath. 


I'm entombed with the dead. The walls around me are 
adorned with corpses, the air is putrid. 


| shrink back, to avoid brushing their desiccated forms. A 
few cadavers jut out in awkward positions. | can't avoid 
being touched as my descent into hell continues. 


A few of these cadavers are fresh. Their faces pale and 
emotionless. Dumb, even. However they died, they didn't 
understand that it was happening. 


| avoid looking too hard or breathing in too deeply as | go 


deeper and deeper. 

The air gets thicker and thicker. 

There's a haze and in it figures and before me lies the 
Day 4 


You wake up. It's a laborious task, as always. Sunlight is 
streaming through your window and onto your face, an 
unwelcome but useful incentive to get up. You have work 
today, and the commute is never kind. Your mind is 
groggy, but free from the terrors of the night before. 


You get up from bed and shower. The water flows over 
you, but you inhale deeply. A nice hot shower is one the 
few things in life that you wake up for. You linger bit. 
Honestly, you wake up a bit early just to savor some 
extra time in here. You glance toward the window. At 
first, the idea of having a portal to the outside world next 
to your naked body seemed a bit silly, but the gentle 
sunlight streaming through eventually wooed you over. 
Frankly, as you admire the masonry and stretch out your 
body, you don't think you'll ever be able to abandon 
walk-in showers. 


You stick your utensils into your platter of breakfast. 
Leftovers. Not glamorous, but quick and filling. Anything 
is edible if you stick it the microwave long enough. 
Downside is that that a takes a decent portion of your 
willpower to not just skip the ordeal. Your fork goes 
scritch-scratch as it hits the plate. Unlike most people, 
you consider it a pleasant sound: it signifies that you've 
fulfilled the obligations imposed upon you by your body. 


You enter your car and traffic. Traffic. You always felt the 
proverb should have been "Death and Traffic". Gridlocks 
like the one you've just entered have a special way of 
getting on the nerves. You just want to turn your brain 
off, but you know there needs to be some level of 
attention in order to preserve the flow. In your boredom, 


you gaze at your fellow prisoners-in-transport. All just as 
listless as you are, assuming that you can even see their 
faces through the glass. 


You go work at your job. 

You go back home and watch the news. 
You go to sleep. 

Night 4 


I'm being bombarded. My senses have mixed into a 
slurry and it's hard to tell what feeling belongs to which 
stimuli. 


The haze has expanded. It's no longer just a fog of 
grime, it's a light that blinds my eyes, an emotion that 
perverts my tongue, a note that rings throughout my 
entire being. It's all mixing together, a taste at the back of 
my eyes, an intonation that strokes my skin, a smell that 
makes its way in into my mind through my throat. 


It tells a story. Many stories, yet all one. A tapestry of a 
single thread. A pool of many paints, stirred and mixed 
unevenly. A multicolored wheel that flashes new images 
as its revolution waxes and wanes. A Rorschach test 
where every angle reveals a new inky appendage. 


A thought, no, a voice races across my mind: 

"This is the story of the world of its people." 

Out of this, | see innumerable figures, shapes, dots of 
being, arise. They move and shudder and live and breath 
and do and be and die. 


Something goes wrong. 


I'm not sure what it is. A part of me says a hand. 
Another, a pencil. Yet another sees a cursor, or a sword, 
or a flame. It goes in. The quilt twists, the paint mixes 


30 degrees for Y-axis motion) and zoom (to a maximum 
of 2.3x optical zoom). Investigation of seven of the eight 
cameras revealed nothing; however, a previously unseen 
figure was observed slumped against a distant wall of 
the hallway observed by camera 2-6. This hallway is not 
known to be part of the existing complex. The figure 
appears to be a dark-skinned male, wearing a hospital 
gown similar to those worn by subjects viewed on the 
group-1 monitors, though distance and image quality has 
hampered further investigation. 


Log-977-A-5 

Date: / / 

Limited interaction with the cameras transmitting to the 
group-1 cameras was achieved. Catheters are observed 
protruding from the veins in each subject's right arm; 
however, the apparatus to which these are connected 
cannot be observed from this angle. 


Log-977-A-6 

Date: / / 

Movement is observed on monitor 2-11, observing a 
hallway. A figure was observed to walk slowly across the 
far end of the corridor around a corner, although image 
quality is too low for detailed observation. No other 
movements were recorded on this date. 


Log-977-A-8 

Date: / / 

Interaction with subjects observed through group-1 
monitors was achieved. A random identification key was 
entered in the command console, causing an unidentified 
white male to be displayed on all group-1 monitors. After 
a series of subsequent commands, the subject was 
awakened from unconsciousness. 


The following is a log of the subject's activity in the hours 
following awakening: 


a 


into a gray slurry, the wheel's spokes collide onto each 
other, the ink blot collapses into a single point. 


This is wrong. It's too much. It's all too much and | try to 
block it out, but the voice is incessant: 


"You are here to 


Day 5 
You 
You You 
You 
You 

You 
You You 

You You 

You 
You 
You 
You 
You 
You You 
You You You 
You 
You 
You 
You You 
You You 
You You You 
You 


You You 


You 


You 
You 


You You 


You 

You 
You 
You go to sleep. 


Night 5 


Day 6 


"Good morning!" 


The booming startles you awake. 


You 


You 


You 


You You 
You 


You 


You are not in your bed. That would have been 
acceptable, considering that you fell asleep on your 
couch last night while watching the news. Problem is, 


you are not in your house. 


You are in a Library, and in front of you is the Head 


Librarian. 


"Oh, did | startle you? Good! Sleeping is poor bibliothetic 


ettiquete." 


The serpent in front of you was so massive that both 
your mind and the narrative give up on trying to 
comprehend it, and instead opt to consider it merely 
planet sized, the length of its body extending endlessly 
into the pit before you. Its plumage is garish, with a hue 
of parrot green being the predominant color. Atop the 
bridge of its snout is a pair of reading glasses. 


In between all the curses you spit out, you manage to 
ask it— rather impolitely— what it is. 


"I'm the head librarian of this fine establishment. If you 
want anything more than that, | expect you to rinse your 
mouth some before you ask again." 


You've run out of breath, on account of the screaming 
and cursing, so you mumble out the question again, 
more pleadingly. 


"lam the Serpent of Knowledge draped upon the Tree of 
Life. Suitably cryptic, no?" 


You're quickly transitioning from shocked to exasperated. 


After taking a moment (several, actually, but the serpent 
remains patient) to recompose yourself, you ask a 
deluge of questions. 


Where are you? 


"A library. The Library. The Wanderer's Library. Before 
you ask, we are far away from what used to be your 
home." 


You're not sure what to make of that. 
Who are you? 


"| have many epithets. Nahash, J6rmunganar, 
Quetzalcoatl, Archon, Satan. Ananteshesha." 


It drops that last name on you with a certain weight, as if 


it expected you to recognize it. The message is lost on 
you, but it doesn't matter: you're not the intended 
audience. 


How did you get here? 
"Think back to your dreams. Therein lies your passage." 


A dawning awareness of the past five nights dawns upon 
you. You'd rather not recall your experiences, not for the 
moment. 


Why are you here? 


"To be saved from burning Tashkent. | was able to 
preserve you and your mind, up until the point where | 
had to pull out and spit you out here." 


You don't want to ponder how literal that figure of speech 
was. 


Burning Tashkent? 


"Think back to the waking day. Tell me, was there 
anything out of place?" 


Oh. Oh. It occurs to you that something wasn't right. 
Many things were wrong. 


What, what happened? 


"Reality as you know it was thrown into a pot and stirred. 
Subsequently, the divine peas mixed in with the memetic 
mashed potatoes and the extra-universal gravy. The 
gods waged war, physics broke down, and the 
noosphere turned in on itself. We will be at leisure to talk 
about it later." 


Is something wrong? 


"Yes. A new shipment of books came in from Universe 
Branch 9g55-yO8w-P.. I'll need to sort that out." 


What are you supposed to do now? 


"Stay here and rest. | have my plans for you, but I'd 
rather not inundate you any moreso than | already have. 
Read some books to pass the time, you're in a library 
after all." 


You sleep well that night. 


The Thing That Hates 


On a primordial beach a slimy thing climbs up onto the shore. It has 
abandoned its spawn-brothers, leaving them to the Great Beasts of 
the sea. It opens its new lungs, relishing in the sweet flavors of the 
new air contained within the sky that had never before been seen by 
another. It opens the round things that serve for its eyes and spies a 
shape on the horizon. The shape shakes and rocks, frothing and 
hateful, just emerged from an egg made of chaos and impossible 
things. The First Land Thing approaches this new shape, and is 
consumed by The Thing That Hates. 


An ape-man searches across a barren tundra where the monuments 
of his people once stood proud and tall against the world. Now he is 
alone, and cold, fleeing from some horror that he cannot begin to 
describe. There is no one left for him to describe it to. The ape-man 
runs, hearing the panting of the great beast behind him, fearing for 
his life as he had feared for the lives of his kin. The Last Ape-Man 
stares in horror at what lays before him, and is consumed by The 
Beast That Hates.