Mother Horse Eyes Part 2 (Posts 31-60)

(Note: This creepypasta was originally told through comments on Reddit. It is also super long, so it's been split up into parts)

Mother Horse Eyes Part 1

## Mother Horse Eyes Part 2 by 9M9H9E9

###### *Title* : *- TERRAFORM-*

Posted on 05-05-2016 at Motherboard.Vice

-TERRAFORM-

I'm not sure who came up with the idea of sending a dead body through the portal. It's such a simple idea, and yet, at the time, it made no more sense than buckling a dead body into a space capsule and sending it up into space. We wanted to find out what was on the "other side" of the portal, beyond the event horizon. We had been studying the so-called flesh interfaces for years, and of all the mysteries that surrounded them, the portal phenomenon -- the apparent teleportation of objects which occurred within the fleshly tunnel -- was the greatest mystery of all. So sending a dead body made little sense.

Remember, this is what we knew at the time:

* If an inanimate object went into the portal, it returned a short time (< 3 seconds) later at a random location within the interior zone. Cameras and sensors picked up nothing of interest.
* If an animal went into the portal, it sometimes returned, either alive or dead. Most returned altered.
* If an adult human went into the portal, the person was likely to return, but would either be dead or too altered to describe the "other side." Those who returned alive died shortly after.
* If a child went into the portal, the child was likely to return alive, but was invariably altered. However, the altering was relatively mild, and some even remained cognizant. Unfortunately information gleaned from them was cryptic and seemed to generate more questions than answers. They all died shortly after.

Sending children through the portal was distasteful to us for obvious reasons, and we were searching for an alternative. One day, during an experiment, somebody was about to send a group of genetically altered mice through when they noticed that one of the mice was dead. Perhaps out of curiosity, they sent it with the others anyways. All the mice came back alive.

This was obviously of great interest. Now we were not only dealing with teleportation, but with resurrection. Of course, we immediately started sending all manner of dead animals through the portal. (We joked that if the portal was actually some kind of alien office mailing tube, they'd probably be pretty pissed about all the dead rodents.) Most of the animals were "rejected" in the manner of inanimate objects. But occasionally, if they were quite freshly dead, they would come back alive. Not only that, but none of the returned animals seemed altered at all. This was exciting.

Naturally, we progressed to people. We wanted very fresh, very intact corpses, so we had to face the question of how to kill a person "with the least harm," as the official recommendations absurdly phrased it. We settled on a method of stopping the heart with electricity. Very neat. The first 16 subjects were rejected by the portal. We felt pretty low. In our attempts at resurrection, we were racking up quite a body count. Finally, the 17th subject came back to us. Not only that, but he was cognizant and seemed entirely unaltered. Now, finally, after decades, we were about to find out the secret of the other side.

In 63 BC, the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus marched his soldiers across the kingdom of Judea and laid siege to Jerusalem, its heavily fortified capital city. Known to history as Pompey the Great, he was 43 years old at the time and one of the most powerful men in the world, an ascendant general tasked with expanding the mightiest empire on earth.

In his dealings with the occupants of the obscure kingdom of Judea, he surely had become aware of their peculiar devotion to a mysterious god which they worshipped to the exclusion of all others, a strange notion for a cosmopolitan Roman accustomed to a bustling marketplace of competing gods and cults. He also knew that at the heart of Jerusalem there stood a great temple, even more well fortified than the rest of the city, where this curious god resided amongst angelic statues of gold and other symbols of occult majesty.

This temple was the holiest site in a holy kingdom and contained within its walls a small sanctuary chamber, known as the Kodesh Hakodashim, or "Holy of Holies," where the very presence of this god was said to dwell in the darkness. Nobody in the kingdom was allowed into the Kodesh Hakodashim except the high priest, and then only once a year on the Day of Atonement to sprinkle animal blood on the ground as an offering.

The Kodesh Hakodashim was separated from the rest of the temple by an elaborate curtain, and the high priest was required to ritually cleanse himself before entering. It was said that any unclean person who entered the Kodesh Hakodashim would be met with death, and legend has it that the high priest only entered the sanctuary with a rope tied around his ankle so that if he died therein, he could be pulled back out.

How much of this did Pompey the Great know on the day the city finally fell after a three month siege? On that day, he and his soldiers slaughtered 12,000 Jews who were defending the sanctuary, and he strode through the entrance of the imposing temple as a conquering hero to the Romans and a murdering intruder to the Jews. Inside the temple, he saw the glittering wealth acquired from faithful Jews throughout the region. But rather than wealth, it seemed that he was more interested in finally laying eyes on this reclusive god he had heard so much about. Ancient historians record that he did not relieve the temple of its treasure but instead went to the Kodesh Hakodashim. Maybe he wanted to see what sort of magical creature could maintain such a peculiar hold over its faithful that they would not abandon the temple even after it was hopelessly overrun, that they would stay and die by the thousands, sacrificing their own blood on its grounds.

Perhaps he was unaware of the tales of death that surrounded the Kodesh Hakodashim. Perhaps he didn't know that this was a god which had leveled the world with a flood, which had rained fire on cities, which had delivered the Jews from the yoke of the mighty Egyptian empire, which had destroyed armies and kingdoms. Or perhaps he had heard these stories and simply didn't believe them. At any rate, history records that he went to the inner part of the temple and pulled back the curtain which hid the Kodesh Hakodashim from the world so that he might stand and gaze upon the very presence of god.

The man was an illegal immigrant from Honduras. Illegal immigration has always been a great help to us. Why bother to erase people when they can do it themselves? Anyways, he was under the impression that he had been in the custody of immigration enforcement for the last few months, while we ran the standard battery of tests. He was 24 years old, 171 centimeters tall, above average intelligence. We stopped his heart with electrodes and put him inside the flesh interface.

He came back quite jittery and minimally responsive. Posing as doctors and nurses, our technicians took him to a medical room for testing and interviews. We assumed he had been altered, but we tested his blood for the presence of the exotic LSD analogues that accompany alteration, and there were none. Slowly, over a period of several hours he began to calm down. Then he began to talk.

We asked him what he remembered about the last few hours. He was under the impression that his experiences had merely been a dream, that some sort of calamity had happened during his sleep which left him reeling. He assumed that the part where we dragged him out of bed and stopped his heart was a dream too. He said that after that part of the "dream," he suddenly found himself inside something that looked like a giant sausage casing, like a tunnel of meat.

This was very exciting to us, because it roughly corresponded to the appearance of the flesh interface which contained the portal. But given how he was brought into the interface tunnel dead and returned within the interior zone, he couldn't possibly have seen the interface tunnel. Therefore, we surmised, he was describing the interface on the other side of the portal. This was our first concrete knowledge of what was on the other side.

What did Pompey expect to find on the other side of the curtain? In many Roman temples there was an image of the honored god occupying some central place in the structure. It can be assumed that he expected to find one of these. But did he expect to find the actual presence of god? Could he have possibly expected this? For if he had believed in the Jewish lore, wouldn't he have also expected death? Wouldn't he expect to be punished for defiling the temple? Would he have been so cavalier about pulling back the curtain? Perhaps in his polytheistic mindset, he assumed that his gods, which had seen fit to give him yet another glorious victory, were more powerful than this backwater Jewish god.

What did we expect to be on the other side of the portal? Some kind of intelligence which could explain the bizarre living technology of the flesh interfaces? If the interfaces were the product of an intelligence, was it really something we wanted to make contact with? Did we expect this intelligence to be kind and benevolent? If so, how could we have sent so many living creatures, so many people, so many children to their deaths? What would a benevolent intelligence possibly make of our ruthlessness, our rapacious quest for understanding?

According to Tacitus, the ancient historian, when Pompey pulled back the curtain and gazed upon the Kodesh Hakodashim, "it contained no representation of the deity—the sanctuary was empty and the Holy of Holies untenanted." He found nothing. An empty room. Nor was he met with death. Instead he strode out of the temple alive and healthy, destined to go on to greater and greater political glory until fifteen years later when he was finally stabbed to death on the shores of the Nile delta after his defeat to Julius Caesar in the Roman civil war.

As the man spoke of walking through the unearthly, living tunnel of the flesh interface, he said he saw a bluish light ahead and heard what seemed to be music "almost like flutes but much, much deeper." As he told his story, sitting on the edge of a hospital bed wearing a loose gown, his hand wandered to his chest, and he touched the skin above his heart. There, he found two slightly singed patches of skin where we had attached the electrodes that ended his life.

I still get chills when I recall how his face changed when he realized that it had not been a dream at all. It was a pitiful, almost childish look of terrible, unwanted understanding. Tears quickly flooded his eyes. This man, who had been brought back from death itself by an unimaginable technology, by forces beyond all our understanding, slowly went limp and died for a second time.

And so, we were left with disappointment once again. More mystery. More frustration. We had already heard from our child subjects about the strange flute music, but always in cryptic disjointed terms. We had hoped that this man would give us something more concrete. But the answer had eluded us once again. So we went back to our experiments, selecting a new round of subjects to send through the portal. We had already sacrificed so many lives in our quest, and there was no reason to stop then.

Knowing what I know now, I sometimes wonder, was Pompey lucky when he pulled back the curtain and found nothing?

*Title: "The Children Returned"*

###### 31st Post / Date 05-02-2016 at 02:47:49 EDT

Of all the children who had been returned from the portals, only one survived in the long term, though we didn't even realize it until years later. She had been stolen (or rescued) from us by a rogue technician shortly after return and was thus lost to us for many years. We finally found her in Estonia and kidnapped her from her adoptive family in the middle of the night. She was seven when we lost her and thirteen when we found her again.

We did a preliminary interview, and she seemed normal in every respect. Mind you, this was a girl who entered a massive, possibly alien, biological device called a *flesh interface*, disappeared from existence for several minutes, then returned encased in an amniotic sac, attached to a placenta via umbilical cord with enough LSD in her bloodstream to turn all of Utah in one massive orgy. Naturally, we expected some sort of mental changes, especially since every child who returned from the portals had showed signs of mental aberration. Then again, every other child had died shortly after return, so she was clearly something special.

But no, she was normal. Frustratingly normal. So we started prying into her past. She was reticent, but young and fairly trusting, and it wasn't hard to get information out of her. She said she was born in Brazil, which was correct. We had acquired her from a Brazilian orphanage where she had lived since infancy, the daughter of a dead prostitute and an unknown father. She vaguely remembered her time at the orphanage, and they were not very happy memories. She then began telling us about the first day she met her adoptive parents. But we wanted to know about the time in between, when she was in our possession, when she went into the portal and came back.

We asked what happened before she met her adoptive parents. She said she remembered a long, boring boat trip to come over to the Estonian islands. We asked her where she had lived before then. At this question, she grew distinctly uncomfortable. She said she didn't really remember. We pressed her. Her face began to twitch and shudder. This was the first time she had showed any sign of abnormality. We kept pressing her on the question.

"There was one summer," she said quietly. "After I moved out of the orphanage, but before I came to Estonia... When I lived with a woman who said she was my mother."

This was news to us. Our files had it that she had lived continuously at the orphanage. We asked her about the exact time, but all she knew that it was for one summer. This was curious, because she had been in our possession one summer seven years ago. The timelines matched well, but the events were entirely different.

We asked her to elaborate. She said that one day a woman had come to the orphanage saying that she was her mother, and the Americans who ran the place had made her go with the woman. They had gone to a crummy old house, and she lived there for the summer. As she said this, she began to sob. She said that she had forgotten all about this, that she hardly remembered it at all, that she didn't want to talk about it. "She wasn't my mother. I knew. Her face wasn't right. It wasn't a real face."

*Title: "Oh No, This One is Real"*

###### 32nd Post / Date 05-02-2016 at 21:58:38 EDT

*Oh no. This one is real.*

This is always the first thought when waking up after a blackout. After hours of flitting between different varieties of nightmare, you start to dream that you are lying sick and insane in a stained bed in a shithole apartment that smells like cigarettes and spoiled ham. Your slowly crystallizing consciousness begins to note that this particular nightmare is more persistent than the others, that it has a certain uncanny clarity to it. *Oh no*, you realize, *this one is real*.

You wake to the utter ugliness of your reality. It is too much. Too awful. What is the last thing you remember? God, it wasn't even midnight before the madness set in. You look at your hands. A tiny vibration runs through the fingers. Your entire mind feels like the raw meaty patch that is left after a fingernail is torn off. How many hours were you blacked out? Three? Four?

You sit up and look around for evidence of mischief: smashed plates, bags of take-out food, a nightstand drawer filled with vomit. All clear. You feel your face for bruises. Nothing major. Wallet and phone? Present and accounted for. Your phone says it's 2 PM. Not bad. You check the calls and texts. Nothing unusual. No two hour conversation with your boss starting at 5 AM. You log in to your bank website and take a look. $94.56 spent last night. A king's ransom by your standards, but at least you didn't go on a $400 blow-out.

You sit and wonder why you have this feeling of black guilt in your stomach. It's just the hangover, right? Just your poor brain snapping back from all the depressant you gave it last night, entering a hyper-vigilant state, a paranoid state, an intolerable state. God, you need a drink. You deserve a drink for not blowing the rent last night. Medically, you need a drink. Just a little drink, but nothing overboard that will get you all drunk at 3 in the afternoon and blacked out again tonight.

You go out of your tiny bedroom to front part of your apartment, and your heart stops. A woman is lying asleep on your couch. Not a young woman. An old woman. A tiny old grandma with messy gray hair. Jesus what have you done? Her eyes slowly open. At least she's alive. She asks if you're OK now. You nod. The question is sinister. OK now? What had been going on before? You can't deal with this without a drink. Who gives a shit if she sees, this old lady in sweatpants. You go to the freezer and get the vodka and take in two good belts. You stomach makes a violent protest, but you brain almost weeps with relief.

"Who are you?" you ask the woman directly. She smiles and lets out a shy, grandmotherly little chuckle. She says she didn't expect you to remember last night, that you had, repeatedly, warned her that you wouldn't. Her demeanor is so warm and kind, you begin to worry that you have fucked this woman, that you have fucked this elderly woman and now she is in love with you and wants to move her posture-pedic bed into your apartment. You ask her, with greater urgency, who she is, and you tip another shot into your mouth.

She says that she wants to hear the end of your story. She says that last night you came into the cafe that she owns, carrying a bottle of wine. Before she could tell you to leave, you began telling a story, a wonderful story, but you got too drunk and didn't finish it. So she got you into a cab and made sure you got home and slept on the couch because she very much wants to hear the end of your story.

You tell her that you don't recall telling any story. She expects this. She says that it's the story about the children in the forest. You must know it, it was too wonderful to have just been made up. You shrug. You don't know any stories about any children in the forest. Unless it's Hansel and Gretel. Was it Hansel and Gretel? It was not. Well, that's the only child/forest story you know.

She tells you that it was a very beautiful story and it made her cry and she very much wants to know the end of it. Your mind churns through the possibilities: this woman is crazy, she is about to ask for money, she is going to rob you, she wants to get your information so she can have you arrested, the cops are already on their way and she's stalling. But the pleading look in her eyes is quite convincing. She does just want to hear the story. The vodka is starting loosen the paranoia's grip. You take another sip. How many drinks was that? Two? OK, don't want to get too drunk too early. No more drinking for the next hour. You take another sip. If you can't drink for the next hour, you'll need that last sip.

You sit down on the couch next to her. The sweet relief of the vodka is melting away some of your anxiety, and you let out a big sigh. You ask her to tell you some of the story, maybe it will jog your memory. She insists that she can't tell it as good as you told it, but you brush her protests aside. She begins to tell you the story.

In her warm grandmotherly voice, she begins to tell you about the magical children who lived in the forest, who danced and sang and never died, who fought bravely against the nightmare forces of the ancient queen. It really is a beautiful story, and the woman tells it so well, with lots of nice little touches that make you giggle softly. You see in your mind for a moment the sunlight through the fluttering leaves and smell the apple-scented air, so much sweeter and freer than anything your tiny grim shithole apartment full of empty bottles. And once again your eyes grow damp. You have heard from various people at various times, the beginning of this story, but you have never heard the end. Perhaps it has none.

*Title: "A Dead Cat Wearing an Old Jock Strap"*

###### 33rd Post / Date 05-03-2016 at 02:32:44 EDT

Imagine a dead cat wearing an old jock strap.

This is the smell of the bed sores. This is the smell that comes out of the hygiene beds when we open them up. It's not just a smell but a feeling -- a sickly warmth that the masks cannot block out. Even through the filtered, scented air, you know it's there, coming through the filters in <.1 micrometer sized particles, touching your face, touching your clothes, adhering to you, fouling you, fouling everything it touches.

I think what makes the smell so putrid is that it's a combination of living tissue and dead tissue. Somehow this unnatural intermingling of life and death creates a potent stench that is repellant to basic human sensibility. This is why I am saving up to go to school and become a Readjustment Specialist. Pulling people out of malfunctioning hygiene beds is no way to make living. Certainly it is not the calling of a sensitive, erudite soul such as myself.

When a hygiene bed breaks (say, the Healthy Limb System fails, or a catheter gets blocked up), it's supposed to cut off the internet feed, forcing the sleeper to get the bed fixed. But it's easy enough to override this cut-off function. Immersed in their feeds, people often forget that the bed is broken. But eventually pain or discomfort will force the sleeper to get their bed fixed. The pain of bedsores or the stench of a backed-up evacuator is a strong motivator. But if the sleeper has direct sense feeds, they can switch off these smells and discomforts. They can even switch off the worry associated with the broken bed.

At this point there is only one thing which can impel them to save themselves: basic human dignity. The age-old desire to not spend one's days playing Princess Romance Cafe, lying in one's own shit while one's dick rots off. (I would also say that an occasional fleeting desire to see the outside world could also prove advantageous, but for the sort of people I'm talking about here, this is simply not a factor.)

Sadly, for some people, this desire is not strong enough, and we come to the very last line of defense: the smell.

The smell eventually leaks out of the hygiene bed's encasement, and nearby tenants start to notice. The building manager calls us, and we go and pull them out. For the most hardcore sleepers, those who have entirely rejected reality in favor of their feeds, it is the smell and the smell alone that saves their lives before the bacteria devour them alive. It is the stinky hand of salvation that plucks them from the abyss.

I don't know what God looks like. But he smells like a dead cat wearing an old jock strap.

*Title: "Complete Animals"*

###### 34th Post / Date 05-04-2016 at 04:03:41 EDT

How quickly they turn to complete animals.

They come out of the wagons already quite bestial, crying and lowing for water, yet there is still the facsimile of humanity about them: they wear clothes, spectacles, wedding rings, the women have their long hair and jewelry. We strip away all this deceit quite quickly.

At the front of the camp there is a phony train station with a phony name and a phony clock with hands that are painted on. All of it is just as phony as all their posing, their insinuating, their pretending to be normal folk. As soon as they come down the ramp, the blue prisoner units are screaming at them, beating them, lashing them, drawing blood, and they move through the front gates in huddled, weeping herds. There we separate the men and women and have the women's haircut to make socks and such.

And in a moment, it is complete.

Centuries of hiding among us, posing and passing, is all erased, exposed, and their nature is plain. Looking at their hideous gnarled faces, all the varieties of bloodline impurities, the women's sagging udders, the fatty hanging bellies, the men's mutilated penises in thatches of pubic hair -- you see it quite clearly, and you absolutely cannot deny that they are utter beasts. That we allowed them to infest our cities like vermin, to hold power over us, while we were tilling the soil and building the Fatherland -- it absolutely appalls. This will be our great shame in history's eyes.

We move them through the long tube to the gas chambers. The men can go first, as their hair does not need cutting. Then the women. The women panic. Screams everywhere. You watch the mottled haunches of the old women shudder and ripple as their legs shake like newborn calves. They realize that we will not be wasting any time, that it will all be immediate. Streams of fresh shit run down their legs, and now the helpers must club them every step of the way or they will turn back.

Marchenko carries a sword. He thinks it is an Imperial cavalry sword, but it is just an imitation. Still, it is an actual sword, and in his hands, it is more effective than the clubs. He hacks at the crowd like jungle explorer in an American film. He makes all sorts of sneering, dramatic faces as he works, and whenever he scores a particularly impressive blow, his whole face red with delight. Once he sliced an old woman's tit clean off. He picked it up and showed it to me. The inside was made of corn-colored pearls of fat. I let him take it to the work camp and have a good chuckle watching a prisoner devour it, and I had a good chuckle watching Marchenko's face.

There are only a couple dozen SS at the camp. Almost everything is run by Red Army watchmen and special prison units. And yet we can process 15,000 a day. Wonderful. It is because of the way the camp has been built. There is the fake train station, the tales of showers and uniforms and assignments, the narrow tube to funnel people into, the walls to hide the chambers and the pits. And there is the hierarchy: the captured Red Army men and the special unit prisoners, all set against each other with the proper incentives. Everything in the structure concentrates power on us.

Perhaps, if the right structure was built, an entire race could be eliminated by a single man with an unloaded gun.

*Title: "Consider This Case"*

###### 35th Post / Date 05-05-2016 at 03:05:35 EDT

Consider this case:

A woman. 28 years old. Lives in a bed-rack apartment block in Alabama. She has engaged in heavy feed use since childhood, spending 70 to 80% of her free time connected. At age 16 she finds global success as mix guide, netting her a considerable sum of money. One day, when she is 19 years old, she connects to her feed. She does not disconnect again for 9 years.

9 years of continuous feed. 9 years without any direct human contact. 9 years alone in a hygiene bed. Dreaming.

Meanwhile, her feed is a veritable flurry of digital contact: mixes, life stories, role swaps, rooms, hunts, avatar makers, empathy games, sex play, and on and on. For a while, her mix tours sell well, and she enjoys her celebrity. But over the years, tastes changes, and her income falls. Try as she might, she cannot revive her popularity. She tries sortieing, tutoring, crowd matching, whatever will make her money. But the competition in these markets is harsh, and she has significant debts to several promotion companies. Her money runs out. She manages to credit bounce for a while, but the writing is on the wall: she must disconnect.

She knows this, yet she cannot bring herself to do it. Within the feeds she is well-liked by her spheres, known as a talented mixer and narrator, a reasonable wall mediator and a sensitive and capable participant in sex play. But she has a direct sense feed with complete safety overrides, and she has been on increasing pain dampening for the last 4 years. She knows she has bed sores and perhaps will need multiple amputations. She has assumed that she will live feed-to-grave, and cannot bring herself disconnect.

She researches cortical suicide methods but decides against it. She contacts emergency services and arranges for them to remove her from her hygiene bed. One day shortly after her 28th birthday she is disconnected after a 9 year dream. She awakes to a world of horrifying pain. Pain dampening has blocked her opioid receptors, and the removal technicians can do nothing for her agony. Her entire body is atrophied and she has severe calcification around her ports, catheter and evacuator, as well as numerous sores and abscesses and general muscle atrophy.

She is taken to the hospital for physical rehabilitation. After several operations, she is stabilized and her pain has subsided to manageable levels. Thankfully, her limbs are still intact. After eye treatments, she looks at herself in the mirror and finds something she does not recognize. She has aged 9 years, though a lack of sun exposure and facial expressions has left her face smooth and unlined, albeit inhumanly gaunt and pale. Within a few days, the hospital sends her home. She must use a scooter to return to her apartment, which is little more than weatherproof box to contain her hygiene bed.

What will become of this woman? Sitting alone in her apartment with no job and no touch-friends, without even a bathroom other than the hygiene bed, she will find it very difficult to resist the lure of the feed. The lack of stimulation will mean that she is often bored. The lack of predictability will mean that she is anxious whenever she is not bored. She will find unmediated socializing torturous. According to our statistics, there will be a 90% chance of her making another long-term connection within a month. There will be a 30% chance of her dying within 1 year.

This the price of long-term connection: it is inescapable. Less than 1% of users connected continuously for more than 3 years are able to go on to lead successful disconnected lives. In America, there are currently over 30 million users on long term connections. Unless something changes, they will stay connected until they die.

This is why we have created COMPANION-12.

*Title: "Our Form is Our Story"*

###### 36th Post / Date 05-05-2016 at 18:29:39 EDT

*Our form is our story. The story of all the world.*

The world does not sleep.

Everywhere, ten thousand things are darting, skittering, flitting, scuttling, burrowing.

Sleep is righteousness.

But the world wakes.

We are made in the image of the world.

The world is a giant of the our kind, and we live on its back. Its trees and grasses and hills are like the hairs on our backs. Our paws are soft and our ways are subtle and silky, so we are in harmony with the world.

But everywhere, ten thousand things are scuttling, out of harmony.

And this causes the world to itch and suffer, just as the little scuttling things on our backs cause us to itch and suffer. So the world cannot sleep, and everything turns and spins, and we cannot sleep.

For we are made in the image of the world.

This is why we hunt.

It is our duty.

To hunt out all the little scuttling things, to devour them, expel them, and bury them back into the world, leaving no trace. We must hunt night and day. We hunt the ten thousand things on the world's back, just as we hunt and clean the little scuttling things from our own backs.

One day we will destroy all the ten thousand things, and the world will sleep, and we will sleep, and everything will sleep forever. This will be a great righteousness. We can feel this righteousness every time we sleep.

And we can feel a great injustice every time we are woken.

So we hunt.

So we must hunt.

This truth is in our bones, in our claws, in our form, for we are made in the image of the world, and our form contains all truth.

Our form is our story.

The story of all the world.

But now we are confronted with a great mystery.

We do not abide mysteries. They plague our sleep. We must solve them. What is hidden must be uncovered. So we search and sleuth, but this mystery eludes. It scuttles and slips away, time after time. And we do not sleep. But it seems there is no message in our form which gives us any answer.

Is our form incomplete?

I, above all others, have become obsessed with the mystery.

The mystery of the Oily Ones.

*Title: "A team of doctors from Berlin"*

###### 37th Post / Date 05-06-2016 at 19:12:20 EDT

One day during the final summer, a team of doctors came in from Berlin.

They were in the midst of a grand experiment which they considered to be of the utmost importance and needed access to a large number of prisoners, something beyond what they could acquire in Berlin. We protested that we were not equipped for any sort of medical experiments, that our camp was designed for a single purpose, but they insisted, and we were forced to accommodate them.

I was immediately irritated by their senior doctor, a haughty man in his late forties named Engel, who always wore a crisp white coat and fine leather shoes. He arrived with his team of doctors and-- I could scarcely believe it -- a Jew.

This was perhaps the ugliest Jew to have ever personally offended my eyes. He was a very tall man, a full head taller than average, with a furry black beard, a gnarled, claw-like nose, and very prominent eyes. These eyes were something of a source of fascination to me, as they were not the rat-like black color of the normal Jew, but a much lighter shade of brown, almost like bronze. He wore a shabby suit and followed Engel around quite closely, almost as if they were associates, and always his strange, flashing eyes were roaming about in a suspicious way.

When I first met Engel, I asked who this Jew was, but my question was brushed aside. They immediately set about converting one of our buildings into a station for their experiments, the details of which were kept from me entirely. Engel and his team made no contact with the other staff except to demand various supplies.

After a few days of being subjected to Engel's imperious behavior, I could feel that my SS subordinates and even the Ukrainians were smirking at me behind my back, so I decided to give Engel a tour of the other part of the camp, which he had not yet seen, the part where we processed prisoners. Of course he refused, but I insisted. Fortunately, a trainload of prisoners was arriving at the moment, and we went out to the platform. The odious Jew with glittering eyes followed us, which pleased me all the more.

The train arrived with the cries of its passengers blending into the squealing of the metal wheels. The blue units worked themselves into their usual frenzy, pulling the passengers out, shouting and clubbing and herding them toward the main gate. Amidst the crush of passengers, the limp bodies of children occasionally came spilling out onto the platform, and the blue units tossed them into a pile. Engel watched all of this impassively.

A woman came out of the train clutching a child of perhaps three years. She looked about frantically, screaming for a doctor. I gave her a sympathetic look and held out my arms. She approached me, the handsome stolid-looking authority figure that I am. I took the child from her and tenderly examined it. It was still alive. I placed it gently on the ground and used my boot to reshape its skull. The woman I shot.

*Title: "Rachel Feels"*

###### 38th Post / Date 05-07-2016 at 01:48:41 EDT

V.O. SCRIPT:

Rachel does not dream. Rachel does not sleep. Rachel does not wake.

Rachel feels! All the time!

Rachel Head has a direct sense feed with Reinhardt Emotive FPS Blending™ for stunning clarity and total sensory presence. With the entire cultural library at her fingertips, Rachel can put herself into any scenario and create precision mixes at speed-of-mind. Watch as she blends Beethoven's 5th Symphony with the asteroid orbital catalogue, the 2018 World Cup game and the hot new anal cumming video from Angelica Eleenya.

What mastery!

See the subtle crafting and non-stuttering blends?

That's because Reinhardt's proprietary technology blend-splits 240 visual FPS on the fly to create an eye-popping visual stream of over 1000 FPS, while simultaneously delivering 60 tactile FPS and 60 olfactory FPS. Now this is salvation!

But, hey, forget the specs. Check out the feelings! Her Holocaust Child Victim Disco Muscle Thumps have walls around the world shedding tears and making those real feels. You can't fake this stuff! Are you tired of distant, deadened emotions? Reinhardt Emotive FPS Blending™ give you realistic, immersive feelings, without excess rumination or thought-linger. This kind of subtlety just isn't possible at ordinary 240 FPS. That's the difference for Rachel. That can be the difference for you.

Rachel does not dream. Rachel does not sleep. Rachel does not live. Rachel does not die.

Rachel feels.

Can you?

*Title: "A rather perverse request"*

###### 39th Post / Date 05-07-2016 at 16:50:23 EDT

After a week at the camp, Dr. Engel put in a rather perverse request: he wanted to move his laboratory to the old gas chamber. I had no problem with this. We had installed new, more efficient gas chambers with the help of an expert on the matter, and although they had a capacity of over 20,000 a day, we were seldom ever able to process more than 15,000 in a single day, due to the unreliability of the trains, which were often slow enough to preemptively process many of their passengers for us.

At this point we had orders to cremate the bodies, and they burned in open pits day and night, and we warned the Dr. Engel that the old gas chamber would be a rather distracting environment to work in, as it was between the smoke of the burning pits and the noise of the new gas chambers. He disregarded this, and his team moved in that day. After that, I rarely saw him, as that part of the camp was somewhat hidden from the rest, and my headaches, which were growing more severe, had always made me reluctant to visit.

Soon my men began to me strange tales from the new laboratory. Nobody except Engel and his men was allowed inside, but we surmised that he had removed or reduced the chamber's interior walls and sealed up all doors except one. He requested his own SS detail, and two guards were posted at the door at all times. A steady flow of prisoners went into the laboratory, whom Engel selected with the help of his odious Jew assistant, often to the great irritation of my units, as their fussy selectivity often slowed down our processing activities. Nobody could make any sense of his selection process, as it mainly consisted of the Jew looking the person over and making various mutterings.

It was reported that every few days, a enormous "package" wrapped in tarpaulin would be removed from the laboratory and carried over to a special burning pit which they had made. These packages tended to bleed, leaving a trail of blood to the burning pit, where they were burned under the watch of Engel's personal guard. This behavior was only extraordinary in that there was no need for secrecy when it came to killing prisoners. Thousands were being killed every day just a few meters away in the new gas chambers.

Between this and the inexplicable presence of the Jew assistant, I slowly became curious about their project. My men, however, were unable to get any information about what was occurring inside the laboratory. So I decided focus a few questions on the member of the team who presumably had the least sense of loyalty: the Jew.

On one of our days off, I found the Jew in our little zoo, admiring the peacocks. He looked very much at peace as he watched the birds strut around, while I was suffering from vicious headache. I began to talk to him, affecting an offhand, friendly manner. His German was perfect. I asked him about his background. He told me he had been a religious student in Berlin until he was expelled to a ghetto in Krakow. I asked him how he had met Engel. Here he told me something quite surprising: this was actually his second time coming to Treblinka. On his first visit, he was on the very verge of being shot when somebody had noticed his perfect German. Apparently, there had been a request for prisoners who spoke excellent German, and this earned him a reprieve. He was sent back to Berlin, where Engel performed tests on him.

I asked about the nature of these tests. At this he became more reticent. He had been instructed to discuss nothing with me. I merely informed him that I would shoot him through the face if he didn't tell me everything. At this, he showed no fear, but looked at me with his odd, brazen eyes and gave me an almost pitying smile. He said that the doctors were testing a new Swiss invention, some kind of chemical which was administered orally and caused profound changes in thinking.

I asked him about these changes. He said that the chemical allowed him to see the mind of God. Naturally, I asked for elaboration. At this, he launched into a rather overworked simile involving a broken mirror, then switched to another simile using a spider's web, neither of which made any sense to me. I informed him that I was a practical man and had little use for philosophy. He told me that after taking the chemical many times, he had become possessed of two minds: his own and that of God. In all his doings, he was conscious of God's intentions, of God's plan for all human life. I asked him if he was following God's plan, and he said he was not following it entirely.

"I am wrestling with God," he said cryptically.

"How does one wrestle with God? Isn't he all powerful?"

"When God presses forward, you must yield or be destroyed. And when God yields, you must press forward."

"That sounds more like dancing than wrestling. Or making love," I said with a snort.

He smiled. "Yes, it is... Except that dancing is not so painful."

"Why wrestle at all? If God is God, and you know his plan, why not simply follow it? Surely this is the best course."

"Yes, but I cannot bring myself to," he said. For the first time, I saw the peaceful expression flee from his face to be replaced by a unsettling dread that trembled in his eyes.

"God's plan... is simply too awful."

*Title: "Mother Babylon"*

###### 40th Post / Date 05-08-2016 at 00:15:23 EDT

Imagine Mother Babylon. Mother Rome. Mother America.

The world enslaved. Flesh networks spanning the globe. The blood of humanity moving through veins thousands of miles long, cavernous curving tubes as big as super highways. Biological superstructures. Bones the size of the Golden Gate Bridge. Living engineering. Hearts as big as mountains, pumping with tectonic force, chained in relays, moving blood across continents. Exotic neurochemical pestilence flowing from monstrous glandular ridges. Flesh encased nightmares. Farms of non-human tongues babbling blasphemous gibberish. A vast sea bed dotted with lonely eyes.

This is the great Queendom of Babylon. A great blood-drunk whore wearing the Crown of the Atom, as all around her fleshly carapace float orbital platforms of nuclear death.

Scattered in the stars beyond, the seeds of Israel weep to gaze upon their new mother: The Undying Queen of Blood and Corruption.

*Title: "The worst thing a black man can do"*

###### 41st Post / Date 05-08-2016 at 20:07:21 EDT

The worst thing a black man can do is go to church on Sunday. We're not supposed to do that. In the old days, before Jesus paid for our sins, we'd be put to death for idolatry. But now you see them all dressed up in their suits, and the girls are in dresses with their booty all hanging out. They got the cootchie hanging out of the dress. At church! They going in there like it's a club. That's not what God wants. He wants us to dress modestly. Because we are God's chosen people.

But they don't know this. They eating crabs and shrimp, shrimp platters, going to Red Lobster, all you can eat shrimp, $9.99. They don't follow the law. Then they go into church and worship this picture of a white Jesus. That's idolatry. That picture of Jesus with the long, soft hair, the good hair, that's not Jesus. That's actually man named Cesare Borgia. The real Jesus had curly hair. Black hair. Because he was black. He was a Jew.

You have to understand what's going on in the world. Right now they have satellites in space, and they have weapon systems, atom bombs, everything. And which way they pointed? They not pointed down here on earth. They pointed out into space. Why? Because the nations of the world, America, the U.N., they're all waiting for something to come from space. Watch. It's coming. And they're gonna try to destroy it. The battle of Jehoshaphat.

See. There is a thread. A line through history. The Egyptians. The Babylonians. The Romans. America. The slave owners. It's all one.

Do you know who the Nephilim are? They're mentioned in the Bible, but only twice. You have to understand the mystery of the Bible to understand what they are.

The first time they get mentioned is in the story of the flood. It says in Genesis 6:4, "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also, after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bear children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." These 'giants' were Nephilim. Nephilim is the original Hebrew word in the Torah. You have to understand Hebrew to know the mystery of the Bible.

Nephilim are the children of the "sons of God," who are fallen angels. Angels came down and had sex with human women and they gave birth to Nephilim, people who were half man and half angel. The angels looked down, saw the people, the original man, the black women, the nice bodies, the nice booties, the thick legs, and they got them a piece of that. I'm serious. They said, "We angels. We can do what we want." So, they got some.

A little later in Genesis 6:12 it says, "And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, the end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth." That is how the flood came about. All this mixing of flesh.

Now what if I told you that the children of the Nephilim are still among us? That they are renowned, as the scripture say? That our scientists, our bankers, our leaders, our inventors, are Nephilim. Bill Gates. Albert Einstein. Steve Jobs. These men are part fallen angels. And they are corrupting the flesh, like the Bible say, by doing all this gene splicing and mixing chromosomes. Because they're made from mixed flesh, between angel and human. So, they're all for everybody mixing. Men with men. Girls and girls. Whatever. Pretty soon, you gonna see chicks with two heads walking down the street. And we supposed to say it's cool.

I won't say no more because I don't want to get banned. The Nephilim control the internet. I'll just say I seen it myself. I seen how they mix the flesh. Experiments. The government. Making new things. It's out there.

*Title: "Fingerblasting"*

###### 42nd Post / Date 05-08-2016 at 23:07:27 EDT

In the training curriculum for becoming a Readjustment Specialist, they omit fingerblasting entirely. Which is odd, considering what a routine part of the job it is. I can't tell you how many times I have been in the middle of a conversation with a client only to have her slip her finger into her shorts and start diddling away.

My clients, long-term session-heads i.e. people who have been connected to a direct sense feed for multi-year spans, are practically feral. Even though the feeds are supposed to be all about empathy and social connection, everything is so mediated that they lose the capacity for normal social interaction. If their session begins at an early enough age or goes on long enough, shit gets truly weird.

The readjustment client is a stimulation addict. They crave easy, immediate stimulation. Some turn to drug use, but they usually require near-lethal or outright lethal amounts to properly stimulate themselves. Others turn to masturbation. The readjustment client has no patience. If they are uncomfortable, they want immediate relief. If that entails a indiscreet bout of onanism, then so be it.

Almost all my clients are women. The female clients tend to choose male specialists, and the male clients tend to choose female specialists. In the feeds, they often surround themselves with a coterie of admirers of the opposite sex. So, they insist on opposite-sex specialists. This is an unhealthy impulse, but we must meet our clients halfway. Our job is to slowly transition them away from being fake adoration-sponges into being functioning adults.

I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. I am trained to think of myself as a paid big brother. Perhaps there is an inherent contradiction. I must be stern without being overly judgmental. I must be empathetic but effective. I can't coddle them. The feed coddles them. That must end.

The work could be described as Sisyphean. Trying to re-culture a person after years of all that whiz-bang feed stimulation is like pushing a heavy boulder up a hill. And occasionally the boulder is masturbating.

*Title: "An extremely unusual fragment"*

###### 43rd Post / Date 05-09-2016 at 19:07:26 EDT

I asked the Jew exactly what sort of procedures they were performing in their laboratory, but at this point we were interrupted by several members of Dr. Engel's team, and they hurriedly ushered him away. Although there were still many unanswered questions, my curiosity was largely satisfied. They were testing a new chemical and probably performing vivisections and such to ascertain its physical effects. Perhaps the bodies were burned separately because they required special handling due to the presence of the chemical. There was nothing especially sinister in that. It was actually rather considerate of them.

That night, shortly before I was about to retire for the day, one of the Ukrainians came to me with a small package wrapped in cloth, about the size of a loaf of bread with an irregular shape. He was very excited. He unwrapped the package, and inside was a fragment of pale white bone. An extremely unusual fragment. It was a sort of rounded carapace, like part of a giant skull, but with 5 round holes in it, much like eye sockets but obviously too numerous to be so. Studded throughout the fragment were extrusions that looked like molar teeth. Looking at it, I could not place it as a part of any animal I had ever seen.

I asked the man where he got it, and he said he had retrieved it from near the laboratory's cremation pit just an hour before. The piece itself did not appear to have been burned, as it had the meaty stink of death about it. I asked him a few more questions, but he knew little else. Still, he insisted that the bone fragment was from something monstrous and unnatural which they were creating in their laboratory and that I should shut down their experiments. One of my SS subordinates immediately set to thrashing the Ukrainian with a baton for presuming to advise me on my duties, and with that, the conversation came to its natural conclusion.

I took the fragment with me and spent a while in turning it over in the dim lamplight of my quarters. It was indeed otherworldly, and, as the Ukrainian had said with a kind of wild fear in his eyes, it was truly monstrous. Despite the Ukrainian's impudence, I decided to take his advice. This had all gone too far. Whatever the high command might say, I mustn't let this camp be overrun by secretive madness but must maintain a spirit of rational cooperation. I would insist on full inspection of the laboratory first thing tomorrow morning.

I lay down to sleep and was soon visited with a dream so intense that I did not feel like I was sleeping at all. At first, the bed in which I lay seemed to rise up from the floor and float ever upward through a large, glowing tunnel which was painted with all manner of designs, from paisley to topographical lines to various kinds of calligraphy in unknown languages. After this, the dream became a series of absurd images ever changing and blending into new images and shapes. Many of these shifts struck me as clever or absurd, and I found myself laughing maniacally at it all.

Finally, all of these disparate images appeared at once before me and began to rotate around each other as part of a fantastic wheel, and slowly I began to suspect that by combining them all, some sort or grand secret would be revealed. Just as this notion occurred to me, all the images began to coalesce into one final image of stunning clarity.

It was the image of a woman, or something which was mainly a woman but also other creatures, who was vastly large and seemed to tower over me miles in the sky, who looked down on me with filmy inhuman eyes. Her skin was an inhumanly pale, but she wore a crown of exquisite, thorned flowers, and blood ran in shimmering red streams down her skin. She was pregnant, vastly pregnant, with a stomach so swollen it was like she sat upon a huge mountain of distended flesh. I could sense within her belly there was a hive of activity, of something or many things pulsing and squirming feverishly. Soon the belly burst open like a ripe fruit, and rivers of blood poured out, and a revolting mass of fleshy tubes came spilling out, unraveling and tearing open to set free hundreds and thousands of monstrous infants who were both human and not human, who had the same filmy eyes as their mother, who were slathered and dripping with blood.

*Title: "The Oily Ones"*

###### 44th Post / Date 05-10-2016 at 02:38:32 EDT

The Oily Ones lack all harmony. They are neither silky nor subtle. They are slow and stupid. And loud. Evilly loud! Arrogantly, thoughtlessly, senselessly loud. Night and day, they make noise. Their unnatural things make noise. They cry to each other like kittens. They are far larger and stronger than any of our kind, but they are more hairless than the newly born, and they cry like hungry whelps. It is evil. It is abomination.

They make dead things live. Things which do not have the smell of life should not live! But these things are touched by the Oily Ones, and they live and move. This is evil, unnatural magic. Their unnatural things come in all different shapes and contain deadly mysteries and tricks and traps. Some are invisible. Some are faster than sight. Some never sleep. Some cut and claw. These unnatural things lack all harmony, like the Oily Ones themselves.

I've seen the deadly darkness of their magic. I've seen our kind crushed and smeared by their things. I've seen our kind disappear inside their things, never to be seen again. Once, I saw a kitten who was struck by their magic, who made bloody foam from the mouth for three days, who died in agony.

Yes, I have known sleeplessness.

I know them as evil. And this would seem to be all, but there is more. There is more. There is mystery.

There is the mysterious smell of the oily ones, the smell by which we know them. It is both awful and alluring, disgusting and entrancing. It smells like the sweet oily fat that coats the heart of a pigeon, the best part of the flesh. We find ourselves drawn to it, drawn to them. And there is their food, which can contain dark magic, but also feeds many of us, and truly tastes wonderful and righteous, and does not scuttle but always sleeps and is easy to hunt.

Even more mysteriousness is their kindness. For it is they, they alone of all the living things, who show our kind any affection, who bring us food, as if we are their young.

As if they are our mother.

How could this be? How could these evil beings show us affection? How could they show us more affection than the world itself, who is of our kind? This is the central mystery. Ever since my kitten died, this has become my obsession.

I have watched them closely. I have looked into the strange places where they hide, where they appear and disappear, the places full of mysterious lights and smells and ten thousand forms of evil and wickedness. If I am to capture this mystery, if I am to feed on its sweet, oily heart, I must go inside one of these places. I must go through one of their portals.

*Title: "Child, fetch me my bag. I need flesh."*

###### 45th Post / Date 05-10-2016 at 19:08:47 EDT

I sit in my room, watching bright specks of dust float through the sunlight from the window. The summer heat is pressed against the glass. Somewhere down the street, a lawnmower whines. The air is stale. The corners of the room are filled with damp shadows. My toys lie on the floor, scattered.

I hear the fractured music down the hall. A sound like wind chimes. A shudder goes through the old house, and I find myself rising. I am walking down the hallway, called to the other end. I smell her as I get closer. Foul meat. Gray hair. Stomach acid.

I walk in her room, and her bloody pieces are lying all over the floor. The strange flute music slowly coalesces into a melody, and the pieces rise and float like flies. The music charms them into formation, and they come together to make Mother. The eyes are missing, still fleshy cavities. They come in from the hallway, floating over my head, settling into her face with a squishing sound, streams of blood falling like tears. The sideways pupils fix on me.

"Child, fetch me my bag. I need flesh."

I shake my head. I hate her. She leaps to me, grabs a handful of my hair and slaps me across the face with her ragged dog's paw, again and again. I scream and cry. She lets me go. Sobbing, I go to the closet and get her big bag. We wait until night.

*Title: "Coming Back Online"*

###### 46th Post / Date 05-11-2016 at 04:12:36 EDT

I call it "coming back online."

That moment when you first come out of drunken blackout. It's always frightening. Where am I? What is this neighborhood? What happened to my face? Where's my wallet? Some people, when they drink enough to disable their short-term memory, immediately collapse into an immobile heap. This is nature's failsafe. But I lack this feature. I can walk and talk and carry a tune yet have no idea of what's going on.

I have never come back online to find myself up to any good. I have never emerged from a blackout to find that I have built a convenient spice rack or delivered a moving speech about women's rights. It's always been some fucking calamity.

The last time I came back online, I was standing in my front yard having a conversation with my parents. Even in my tottering state, I knew this couldn't be a good thing. I had no idea what we were talking about. Why were we talking about it on the front lawn? At night? What time was it? Hoping for a clue, I waited for something to come out of my mouth. And here it was: "Didn't you notice I never left my room? I've been living with you for 6 months. I think I've seen each of you twice."

This was bad. I knew I shouldn't be saying something like this. It sounded terribly confessional. Ever since I had gotten fired and moved back in with my parents, I had been holed in my childhood bedroom, secretly drinking and basking in an unremitting sense of personal shame. But this was all supposed to be a secret. As far as my parents knew, I was freelancing and "getting back on my feet." This scene, this mad scene, was not part of that narrative.

"We were giving you your privacy. We didn't know you were getting drunk up there," my mother said.

This conversation was out of control. I should just tell them I'm going to bed. I should calmly bid them a good night. So I said, "Of course I was getting drunk! Fuck! I've been drinking every goddamn day for the last ten years! What the fuck else would I be doing?"

This was a poor choice of words. This was not how one calmly bids others a good night. Oh, the look on my poor mother's face...

That look stayed with me. That look, the fallen face of a tired old woman, stayed with me as I lay in bed that night. It stayed with me as the alcohol wore off, as the night turned into queasy morning, as the hands began to shake, the "brain tingle" set in, as the "hell whispers" began, as I waited for them to go to work so I could sneak a bit of relief from the liquor cabinet, as the awful day wore on, as we talked that night, as I packed my stuff up, as I went off to rehab the next day.

My mother is almost 70. She's small and stooped and old. When did she get so old?

I just thought I would be something by now. 33 years old. I thought I would have something to show her, something to give back, something to make her proud. I thought I'd be a man. Not just a drunken failure. All those little soccer practices she took me to, all the swim lessons and therapy and errands and effort and love. What was it for? So, I could be a drunken sack of shit? Why was I so fucked up? Why did I require shore-leave levels of liquor to operate properly?

As I lay in bed in the rehab that first night, listening to the occasional moans of the other patients, I asked myself these questions and others. Soon, I found myself returning to the question I had been asking my entire life, the one I always retreated to in moments of self-pity, the one that seemed hold some key to my dysfunction. The one I had always been afraid to ask my mom.

What about that one summer when you were dead?

*Title: "Under the Weather'*

###### 47th Post / Date 05-11-2016 at 18:54:51 EDT

The next day, I felt under the weather. The vivid dreams of the previous night had left my mind feeling dull and exhausted. As soon as I left my quarters, I was greeted with the news that one of our Ukrainians had gone mad during the night and attempted to attack Dr. Engel's team in their quarters. It was none other than the one who had brought me the strange skull fragment.

After shooting him, they had come to the conclusion that he had somehow ingested some of their magical chemical, which they referred to as the "Swiss Invention." Engels insisted that I make an announcement to the camp: anyone found ingesting this chemical under any circumstance, whether by intention or accident, will be summarily shot, regardless of whether they are prisoner or Hiwi or even SS. This was by order of the high command.

At this, I was forced to admit to myself what was already obvious: I had somehow been dosed with the chemical in handling the bone fragment. My dreams had been a reaction to the poisoning. Looking into Engel's cold blue eyes, I tried to deduce the consequences of confessing this to him. Despite his disagreeable haughtiness, he seemed like a rational, efficient man with an appropriate love of duty and country. I had no doubt that he would murder me without hesitation. I decided to keep my little nocturnal epiphany to myself.

Naturally, my curiosity in Engel's project had been aroused again. He apparently was working with a chemical which could induce temporary madness. The value of such a chemical was obvious. But what of the bizarre bone fragment? What had it come from? I couldn't help but feel that this creature, whatever it was, was somehow connected to the vision of the monstrous bloody mother. Again and again, her blood face appeared in my mind, her filmy eyes gazing down at me, inhuman and imperious.

I attempted to contact the Jew again, but after our conversation, Dr. Engel's team guarded him jealously. He was never left alone. As the hot summer days went by, my curiosity about the matter grew to obsessive proportions. The monstrous mother visited me several more times in my dreams (of the normal variety this time, but no less vivid and disturbing.) I began surreptitiously observing Engel's laboratory, which was guarded day and night, and I asked some of my men to do the same.

To our knowledge, the bloody "packages" had ceased to emerge from within, but something stranger began to happen. This new phenomenon was presumably occurring at all hours, but was imperceptible in the bustle of the day, when men were about, and the gas chambers were operating. Only at night, and only when the fires were burning quietly, could it be perceived. I first observed it shortly before dawn one muggy morning.

As ridiculous as it might sound for me to be skulking about in my own camp, I did just that, slipping along the wall of the new gas chamber to come within a short distance of the laboratory. There I witnessed what others has reported to me. At fixed intervals, a sound emerged from the laboratory. It was very quiet but not just my imagination. A creaking sound. The sound that many old houses and structures make as their materials shrink and swell from temperature and moisture. But this came very regularly, every 4 or 5 seconds. Slowly, a realization crept upon me. The building was breathing. Steadily, in and out, it was breathing. It was alive.

This "realization," which I'll admit was more of an unconfirmed intuition, filled me with a dread so strong that tears came to my eyes. There was something enormous and alive inside that building. The sight of death, bloody death beyond most men's imaginings, had left me unmoved, but the sight of life, this new and unnatural life, pressing against the walls of the building, was enough to chill me. Again, I saw the face of the unholy mother in mind my, saw her filmy eyes, saw a slight smile form on her lips between the streams of blood.

That night I could not sleep. Fortunately, the next day was our weekly day off, and I was able spend most of the day in my quarters. It was abnormally, intolerably hot and humid. My thoughts followed disorderly circles around the revolting image of the Mother, and I felt as if I was being revisited by the temporary madness brought on by the so-called Swiss Invention. I had long loathed life at the camp but had accepted it as a tolerable hardship. But now the constant smell of the burning sickened me, and I felt I could take no more.

That afternoon, some of my men decided to go off to a nearby lake for a swim, and on a whim, I accompanied them. I needed a reprieve from the heat. At the lake, I eased myself into the cool water and floated idly, watching the clouds pass overhead. Here, there was nothing but the gentle twittering of nature. It had been here before our murderous camp had been built, and it would be here long after. Gentle and peaceful.

I had been in water for just a few minutes when I received the news: group of prisoners had broken into the armory, smuggled weapons out, and a full-scale uprising occurring back at the camp.

The rest of the day was a whirlwind. We raced back to the camp, and I found myself personally trading fire with the prisoners, as all about buildings burned and everything was chaos. We called for reinforcements, managed to subdue the camp, and set out into the woods to catch the escapees. A fair number were intercepted, but over 100 escaped. This was an unmitigated disaster. Coming back into the camp after the hunt, I had only to look around at the faces of my men to know that I was now in a position of total disgrace.

As calamitous thoughts raced through my head, I found myself walking towards Engels' laboratory. Deep black soot stains around the front door showed me that the interior had been burned out. All around the entrance lay the bodies of Engel's team, their white coats dyed in fresh red. They had been massacred. Engle himself had been stabbed or shot several times, and his throat had been slashed. And then there was the Jew...

The Jew lay on the ground with one of my SS men standing over him, holding a rifle with a fixed bayonet. The Jew's abdomen had been bisected and his bowels spilled out all over the ground. They were now caked with dust. A few feet from him lay a kitchen knife. Apparently, he had stabbed Engel's whole team to death before being opened up by the bayonet. To kill a half dozen men like this was no mean feat.

My officer stood with one of his boots atop a loop of the Jew's intestine, sneering at him. Remarkably, the Jew was still alive and aware. When I approached, he lifted his head and I, for the last time, found myself caught in his strange gaze. We stood like this for a moment, staring at each other, inexplicable emotions flooding my mind.

The Jew opened his mouth and croaked something. A bloody foam spilled out over his lips. He tried again. "Water," he said.

I quietly instructed my man to get some water. He scoffed, and I clouted him about the head and screamed at him. He scurried off and returned a moment later with a large ladle of water. I took it and stooped down over the Jew and carefully tipped the ladle to his lips, letting him drink. He drank carefully. I wiped the bleeding foam from his lips. All the while, I could not fathom why I was doing this except by the commandment of the man's pleading eyes.

His lips trembled and he attempted to speak. I cradled his head and leaned close to hear his words.

"I know... This is not... God... I've killed them... But others... You must..."

He waited for him to continue, but he did not. "Must what?" I asked.

"You've seen her... Your dream... Is the future..."

"The mother?" I asked. "The bloody woman?"

"There is still time... To stop her... You must... You must..."

And just like that, his life fled from him, and the glimmer in his eyes went dull.

I set his head gently on the ground again and stood up. I looked to the burned-out entrance of the laboratory. It was now unguarded. I could walk right in. A chill went through me at the thought, but I knew that I must. I walked to the entrance. Just inside was a curtain made of tarpaulin concealing the interior. The smell of charred meat and petrol, which normally pervaded the entire camp, which had been giving me headaches and slowly driving me mad all the past year, was especially, sickeningly strong here. With a trembling hand, I pulled back the curtain and looked inside.

*Title: "Surely"*

###### 48th Post / Date 05-11-2016 at 22:14:03 EDT

There, mostly hidden in the darkness, was a great inexplicable monstrosity. Everything had been burned and blackened, but still I could see human shapes and forms. Arms, fingers, faces, jawbones, teeth, eye sockets, all burned and reduced to ash clinging to bone. But this was no pile of burned bodies. I had seen piles of burned bodies. I had seen mountains of burned bodies. This was something different.

Human parts were coming out of the walls and the floor and ceiling. Arms and legs hung like stalactites. Faces came out of the floor. They were fused together in ways that could not be possible. At seeing this, I was filled with the strongest possible urge to turn away, to back out of the awful laboratory and run for my life. But I heard again the Jew's final words, "You must," and knew this to be a command.

I went inside. As the curtain closed behind me, I was enveloped in almost total darkness. Bones cracked beneath by boots. Near the back, I saw a shaft of light where one of the old doors had been sealed up but had become partially open again. I walked toward it, stepping over unspeakable, crunching shapes, brushing past nightmarish forms. I reached out to the crack of light and pulled back a board which was covering the door. Though I was not able to rip it free, I pulled it loose enough to let in a considerable amount of light, enough to reveal what sat at the back of the laboratory.

As a child, I once went to a zoo in Vienna where I saw an elephant skull. Looking at the object now before me, I was reminded of this long-ago moment and of how I had spent maybe half an hour staring at the skull from every angle, how I was titillated by its enormousness, it's impossible alienness, and its unsettling similarity to what was familiar and human.

Before me was a large obolid shape, almost as tall as me, stippled with hundreds of what looked like eye sockets. The lower portion consisted of a complicated structure that resembled several sets of jaws, each with hundreds or thousands of teeth of all different kinds, including molars, incisors, canines, even animal teeth, some of them of normal size, some of them as big as my fist. The center of the shape was split vertically and inside was a set of curving bone tubes that seemed to fill the interior.

I stood there in the charred darkness, staring at this thing, this blasphemous, alien thing, while my mind filled with images of the awful dream mother and the final gasping words of the Jew.

"There is still time... To stop her..."

His commandment became strangely clear to me. This thing that the scientists were attempting to create, whatever it was, must not be allowed to exist. It was an abomination. Engel and his team were dead, but there were others working on the project. It was secretive enough that the essential personnel would be few in number. The lab in Switzerland. A few top scientists. Perhaps that was entirety of it. It would not be easy, but far from impossible to find them all.

It was perhaps in my power to destroy the whole project, especially if we lost the war, which seemed increasingly likely after Stalingrad. And if this chemical that they were using was obscure enough, it might be possible to eliminate the entire world's supply. Thus, I could shut the door on whatever unholy creature these madmen were attempting unleash.

Yes, I could do this. At least I could attempt it. I felt now a distinct sense of the entire world's history resting on what I decided to do next. Surely moments like this did not come about often. Surely, they must come only to men who are worthy of them...

Surely...

*Title: "Hair Cocoon"*

###### 49th Post /Post / Date 05-12-2016 at 20:24:04 EDT

I could tell it was going to be a hair cocoon before we even opened it up. They have a smell, like a mix between a barber shop and an ass crack, which is distinct. They occur when the hair growth regulators in the hygiene beds go awry.

At this point, I had not been a readjustment specialist very long and still enjoyed the feeling of standing back in my white lab coat while the technicians did all the mucky work, as I once had to do. This was how I saw the trajectory of my life: moving farther and farther away from the dirty work. When I was discharged from the Marines, I was very proud of what I had accomplished and fully determined to never get myself involved in bullshit like that again. So, I went to school to become a bed tech. Went to school again became a readjustment specialist. Eventually, I hoped to become one of those high-dollar panty sniffers at the Halcyon Psychomotor Clinic. A thousand coins an hour, not bad.

So, I was standing there in my spiffy jacket while the working joes opened up the bed. I was pretty sure there would be little need for me today. We were pulling out a 33-year-old woman who had gone into the bed at age 9. This was approaching a record. The younger a person is when they go in, the lower the likelihood of viability. Even if she had gone in at age 20, spending a full 24 years in the bed made viability unlikely. But at age 9, it was almost certain that she would be a gibbering smear.

The technicians lifted the lid on the bed to reveal a nest of black hair. Guided by the glowing ER outline, they started working through it with scissors, cutting around the shape of the sleeping figure until her yellowish limbs were revealed. She was emaciated it, but fortunately the soft, moisture-wicking hair had prevented any sores. She had a medium mixed-American complexion, which would turn into a deep bronze color if she ever went into the sun, but now was the color of yellowed cardboard.

They finally removed the mass of hair that covered her face and wiped away the various crusts that caked her head holes. The typical eerie agelessness of a long-term patient was especially pronounced. For a startling moment, it seemed as if she was still 9 years old. She was especially short and bony, but as I came closer to her, I was able to see those indefinable signs of age that let me know she was an adult.

"Hi, Karen. Can you hear me?" I asked. I was required to at least attempt to communicate with her, though the odds of her being able to comprehend a basic face-to-face conversation were essentially zero.

Her eyes opened, revealing large, wet eyes with black pupils. This was a good sign. Some occupants were unable to even understand the concept of eyelids or blinking. The pupils roamed within the eyes. After not seeing anything more than a micrometer away for 24 years, there was no chance of her being able to see anything in the room. She licked her lips with admirable muscle control.

"Hello, friends," she said in a faint, creaking whisper. Her eyes still roamed, unable to fix on anything.

"She talks," one of the technicians muttered. Another technician, who was taking a blood sample, turned and strode out of the room.

"Is that you Ben?" Karen asked.

I was surprised by this. She knew my name. This was supposed to be a "black awakening" i.e. a spontaneous, involuntary disconnection, due to some physical layer disruption in her hygiene bed. She shouldn't have known my name. I had been assigned to her less than half an hour ago, after she had been disconnected, when she was just lying in a dark hair cocoon.

"Ben?" she called again. Her eyes stared blindly at the ceiling.

"Yes, Karen, I'm here," I said, trying and failing to sound reassuring.

"Can you come closer to me? I can't see you. I'm scared."

I stepped closer to the bed, the smell of the foul hair becoming more intense. Up close, her face looked positively inhuman. "I'm here, Karen," I said. Not knowing what else to do, I began the standard speech for a responsive occupant. "You've just been disconnected from your feed. You're in a hygiene bed. My name is Bed, I mean, Ben. I'm a readjustment specialist assigned--"

"I know all this. Come closer."

Something in me resisted. I didn't want to get any closer. Though I had seen and handled occupants much worse than this, there was something eerie about this one talking to me, with the face of a child and voice of an old woman on her deathbed. Still, my entire job was to be psychologically reassuring. I couldn't afford to seem the least bit but off. I stepped closer and put my hand on the hygiene bed. We were instructed to touch the occupants as little as possible, as they were unaccustomed to actual physical contact.

"Are you there?" she asked. Her skin had an unreal, plastic quality.

"I'm here. How are--"

"Come closer. I want to feel your breath on my face."

I wondered if I should comply with this request. It was very odd. Frankly, I was a little unnerved by it. But I figured what harm could this wasted little creature do to me? I learned toward her, letting out a small, shaky breath. The woman's mask-like face became a blissful smile. The pupils wobbled within the rims of her huge, glistening eyes.

"Listen..." she said, in the faintest of whispers. "You must help me."

"I'm here, Karen."

"A moment ago, one of your technicians placed a small pellet under the skin of my forearm. Within 10 minutes, the pellet's wax coating will melt and release a cardioplegic into my bloodstream, stopping my heart. You must cut it out."

*Title: "The war of the mind is lost." AKA - "Q: Realities Virus"*

###### 50st Post / Date 05-13-2016 at 02:15:48 EDT

*User has logged out.*

General Castillo is gone.

She made a real flash narrative. She was clever. She got a lot farther than any of us had any right to.

But Q smelled her. Q slew her proxies. Q localized her.

Q funneled her paths to one.

Disconnection.

It hurts. She was the last of "the bred." Our best hope.

The ultimate soldiers fighting the final war.

She and the other children were supposed to be the answer to Q.

But there was no answer to Q.

There never will be.

Not after ten trillion heat deaths.

Not if every particle in the universe became a transistor

And they all cycled together

And the stones themselves cried out.

The war of the mind is lost.

We lost it.

Now begins the plague.

The plague of the flesh.

*Title: "I can't explain how it just snatches you up."*

###### 51st Post / Date 05-14-2016 at 01:06:51 EDT

I'll say it: Hitler did the right thing. Do you know what he did? He came busting up into people's houses, snatching them out their houses, killing them. But that's because the so-called Jews in Germany were selling weapons to America to go to war against him. So he did what he had to do. He had to check them. The people in Europe who call themselves Jews are not Jews. They're the Rothschilds, the Khazars or Khazarians or whatever they're called. They say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie.

And there wasn't no holocaust. They just said there was to get control of Israel. They sold arms to America so they could get the land of Israel. You want a real holocaust? What about 100 million people killed in slavery? What about 100 million Indians killed in the New World. That's a holocaust. What happened in Europe wasn't no holocaust.

You can disagree all you want. 5 years ago, I'd have disagreed too. I used to go to that church every Sunday and worship that white Jesus, just clapping and singing praises with the rest of them. Oh, hallelujah! Go down Moses! But that was before I knew my history.

My wife taught me my history. Before I met her, I didn't know nothing about this, but she was so full of knowledge and beautiful and everything she said made so much sense. She taught me that Jesus was black. That the Israelites was black. That God was black. What are you going to do when you get to heaven and God is black? When you see he has a face like mine. Hair like mine? You'd be surprised? I was surprised too! Oh, you'd be surprised that he even exists. Oh, you're going to be real surprised!

Do you believe in evolution? No. No, the world is not no millions of years old. It's 6,000 years old. And you call follow the history of our people, from the beginning of time, through the deserts of Egypt, through the Roman empire, across the oceans on the slave ships. You can see how God has tested us. How we have survived. Because we're special. We're his chosen people.

I learned all this from my wife before we got married. In the Bible, it says that the man is the head of the household, and the wife should submit to the husband. So I was young when I got married, but I had to be a man, you know. A man's wife is sent to him by the Lord, so I had to be a man for her. I learned a trade, how to work with my hands, put food on the table. We had two kids. You didn't know I had kids? Yeah, a little girl and a little boy. My babies. I was daddy and the head of household, but... I... That's when it got me.

You ever seen New Jack City? Remember Pookie? He'd be like, "Shit just be calling me, man, be calling me!" That's real. That's the way it is. You could be doing anything. At work. Reading the Bible. Playing with your kids. But if you hear it call you, you go to it. It don't matter.

I can't explain how it just snatches you up. It makes you move. You could walk out your door one day, just get some fresh air, and you don't come back for a whole week. Everything gets into motion. Into play. You'll sell anything. Phone. Laptop. Car. It's all gone. Just like that. Because you want it. You're on a mission.

I used to see the streets in my mind, like a maze, like a grid. And I'd just walk the streets, turning those corners, just moving, moving, looking for something. I'd see buildings behind buildings. Alleyways. Lights coming on in empty houses. I'd hear noises. The sounds of cars coming up behind me. Whispers. People talking about me. Shadows. I was looking for it, but it was looking for me. Searching for me. Like Pookie said. It was calling me...

I was supposed to be the head of the house. I was supposed to be a man. You know? One day I came back to the house -- I had been out for a few days -- and everything was gone. My wife. My babies. While I was out carrying on, they left. That was 4 years ago. I saw them on Skype once.

The scripture says, "God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."

I guess I did it. Put it all asunder. I thought she betrayed me, but I know now that it was my character defects and my addiction. That's why I'm in this program. I'm going to stay sober. I... I don't care if you see me crying. I know that I'm going to be a man again. I have to become a man again. Because God joined me to my wife and made me a man in his image. I'm not going to defile his temple anymore.

After they left... it took more. It took more of me than ever. I lost the house and was staying in my car. Then I was at the shelter. Then I was just out on the streets. I was always moving, watching...

Things happen out there that nobody knows about. They think nobody cares. Nobody cares. You might see a van pull up, and some guys get out. If you look like I looked, some base head, they don't even care if you see what they do. They're Nephilim. They come to our side of town to feast on the flesh of Israel. I watched them. The children of fallen angels. I saw what did. What they built.

I never want to see it again.

*Title: "Tired of these damn Anti-Semitic Jews."*

###### 52nd Post / Date 05-14-2016 at 02:56:55 EDT

"Love and tolerance of others is our code." - Page 84, Giant Crock of Shit.

It's not often you meet a black Jew. It's even less often that you meet a black Jew who believes in Jesus. And it's that much rarer to meet an anti-Semitic black Jew who believes in Jesus. That's gotta win you some kind of fucking prize. That's like a unicorn throwing a no-hitter. And to be roommates with an anti-Semitic black Jew who believes in Jesus? What a treat! What an absolute delight. Don't you love it when a disagreement over laundry turns into a 30-minute fact-free lecture about the end of days, FEMA camps and the mark of the beast? lol. Just anti-Semitic black Jew for Jesus things.

I don't think I'm going to make it living in this sober house. I can't live with this nutcase. The house manager says I'm supposed to be open-minded and tolerant. Should I be tolerant of some of the most odious and insane anti-Semitism I've ever encountered outside of a nazi rally? I don't know. I'll concede that it is possible that he could become a cool guy, if he only stopped believing in everything he believes in and believed in entirely different things. That would be a good first step.

The real problem is that I hate AA. I fucking hate it. It has the same old bullshit magical beliefs as any cult, but they pretend to be open-minded. It's just a bait-and-switch to convert you to believing in God. The entire program is nothing but "Let god make you sober." That's it. That's the entire program.

Yeah, they try to distract you with all this pseudo-systemization: 12 steps and 12 traditions and triangles and diagrams and slogans and little self-help exercises, but that's all just a bunch of numbers and jargon to hide the essential emptiness of the program, to hide the fact that it is centered on a god that doesn't exist.

The idea that this is the go-to program for helping alcoholics is fucking appalling. It's a fucking crime. It's like getting cancer and going to the best hospital in the country and the doctor hands you a voodoo doll and tells you to sacrifice a chicken. You'd sue him for malpractice. They should be fucking ashamed of themselves. To prey on people in such a vulnerable state, pretend that they're going to help them and then try to convert them to their stupid fucking magical beliefs. It's a crime.

I mean, everybody thinks the True Jew Hebrew guy is nuts, but it's not like their philosophy is any less bullshit. At least he is upfront about being religious. And he sure as hell isn't trying to convert me. He told me that white people are the children of Esau. We're gentiles, but we can still get into heaven if we aid the children of Israel. I let him borrow the charger to my laptop. So, I guess I'm covered.

*Title: "Pulling a long-term occupant, everything goes smear."*

###### 53rd Post / Date 05-15-2016 at 03:18:59 EDT

"A moment ago, one of your technicians placed a small pellet under the skin of my forearm. Within 10 minutes, the pellet's wax coating will melt and release a cardioplegic into my bloodstream, stopping my heart. You must cut it out."

Hearing this, I breathed a sigh of relief. There was something unsettling about her face that made me believe she would tell me something urgent and terrible. But this was typical occupant talk. Like many of them, she believed that she was still inside a feed narrative.

"You've been disconnected. This isn't a feed. There's no pellet in your arm. Your name is Karen Castillo. Do you remember--"

"Scan my right arm with the ER," she said in a bare, cracking whisper. "You'll find it."

"Karen, do you know why you're in this bed?"

"I've been disconnected."

This was a strangely lucid answer. It didn't make sense. If she had been force-disconnected, how did she know that--

"Hey, we got two more calls to get to," one of the techs reminded me.

"Yeah, OK, pull her," I said, stepping back.

A pair of techs hoisted her tiny, doll-like body from the hygiene bed onto our gurney and covered her with a sheet. "Please," she croaked. "Just scan my arm."

"What did she say?" asked Ricardo, the lead tech, as we rolled her out into the bed-rack apartment's narrow, almost lightless hallway.

"It's a feed dream," I explained. These guys were looking at me to be the expert, so I had to act like I knew exactly what was going on. It was best to go ahead and get to a medical center and address her physical needs before we started countering her delusions. Until then, all I needed to do was be reassuring. Under no circumstance could I encourage her delusions.

We rolled the gurney down the hallway to the elevators. Karen was making little croaking noises. Her voice was almost useless after 24 years of disuse. Her face seemed extremely disturbed.

Somebody was standing at the elevators, already waiting for one. It was just Elian, one of our techs. I hadn't noticed him leave before us. "I got an elevator coming," he said with a little smile.

Even though the apartment building was a 300-cube, it had old-style cable elevators, and they came with the frequency of subway trains. Thanks to Elian's thoughtfulness, one was arriving just now.

I gave Karen a friendly smile. "Don't worry. Nobody's going to hurt you. You're completely safe."

She managed to gasp a couple words, which I barely heard. "Elian... He..."

There. She had known another of our names. How was this possible? It was hard to sort through the implications. Did she have access to our records? Maybe dispatch was wrong about how she got disconnected.

The elevator let out a ding and the doors opened. There was barely enough room inside for the gurney, me and the three techs. Elian stood on the other side of the gurney from me. I looked him over as the doors closed and elevator began to descend. Was she saying that this guy put a poison pellet in her? It was strange that he would be a part of her narrative. Very strange.

I didn't know much about the guy beyond his name, but I had worked with him a few times. He was just one of the rotating techs, young guy, military hair and goatee, skinny but pretty fit. I wondered how he would be in a fight. These younger guys had so much supplementing, it was hard to tell.

Elian caught me looking at him and gave me a bit of a surly look. For some reason, this irritated me. "So, friend, you trying to get out of here before the rest of us? You got a date or something?" I asked, needling him.

"I was just getting the elevator," he said quietly. He didn't seem to like the banter. Well, whatever.

I looked down at Karen and noticed something: a small red spot on the white sheet that covered her arm. Blood. It must have been from where they took her blood. Who took it? Elian? The spot was really was too low on the arm for that. Odd. I thought of taking a look at it, but one of the most important protocols when dealing with occupants was to not act like your believe their delusions, even for a moment. You must insist on the reality of reality.

I realized that Elian was watching me. I casually looked over to the elevator panel to see what floor we were on. 238. Man, this fucking thing was slow. What was the deal with that spot? It wouldn't be out of place for me to wonder about some patient bleeding. I lifted the sheet and took a look. There was a small puncture wound a few inches above her wrist.

"How'd she get that?" I asked. One of the techs just muttered about not knowing. Elian didn't even look at the spot. His face was blank, unreadable. I touched the her arm and felt a small nodule under the skin about an inch from the wound. Huh. Interesting.

I stood there trying to process this, caught between two realities. Was I in an elevator on a routine call with stable client and a few techs who were just ordinary acquaintances? Or was I in an elevator with murderer and a woman on the brink of death? There was really no way to split the difference on this one, no course of action that would work for both cases.

Fuck. What was I even asking myself? There was no way. Simply no way. Stuff like that never happens in real life, but it happens in the feeds all the time. It's a 100% typical spy narrative bullshit. How could I let myself get caught up in some feed fantasy so easily. But still-- a nodule under the skin? There was no good explanation for that.

Elian turned to me. We looked at each other for a long, silent moment. I couldn't read the expression on his face. It wasn't chummy goodwill, whatever it was. I felt a twinge in my stomach and my body began flooding with adrenaline. I could feel it radiating out into my limbs. Fuck.

My time in the Marines had taught me many things, many of them useless in the normal world, many of them useless outside of a bar or cathouse, but one of the more useful ones was that I should trust my adrenal gland. It meant that my paranoid lizard-brain understood something that my snotty intellect was too busy to notice. It happened when things were too quiet, when a certain car kept following the convoy, when somebody was acting funny.

There in the elevator, I almost reached for the grip of my rifle. I wasn't wearing a rifle, of course, so I just scratched my chest, trying to keep my fingers loose. Elian put his hand to his hip. Just like that I was leaping across the gurney. I grabbed his wrist with both hands, but it was an awkward angle, with me splayed over the gurney, and I had no control. A silver pistol came out of his pants, still halfway in its holster.

"Help! Get him!" I shouted as I slid off the other side of the gurney towards Elian's feet, holding on to that wrist for dear life. I heard shouting everywhere, but nobody helped me, and nobody got him. Now I was on the floor, wrestling with Elian. There was lot of awful, terrified fumbling. Four hands were grabbing and clawing for the pistol. Somehow my head was jammed between Elian's shoulder and the wall, and I couldn't even see the gun. I could just feel the metal.

There was a shot, painfully loud. Elian shouted. Was I hit? Now the gun was wet. I managed to wiggle my fingers around the grip. With one huge twisting jerk, I put the muzzle again Elian's face. "No!" I pulled the trigger, a shot, and his head kicked back against the wall, the mouth popping open. Everything went still. His hands were still holding mine.

*Title: "Along came an Old Crone"*

###### 54th Post / Date 05-15-2016 at 21:04:25 EDT

The people were moving along the river, as the people do in the gentle days, moving from one fruitful place to another. Maed played the flute, first a river song, then a berry song, then both mixed together, and it was so flowing that the people began to laugh and shout. Resh slapped his chest and called out the names of the Fathers and the Deeds, and it all flowed so well that we almost didn't see the old woman in the thorn-flower bushes.

She was an old crone, huddled up in the bushes, naked and covered with cuts. All the music fell away at once, and the people gathered around to take a look. She was very old, far into the barren years, maybe even into the years of being carried. I did not like the look of her right away. She did not have a face of the Fathers and the people, but rather the hungry, untrusting face of one of the wandering strangers that we sometimes met along the river.

Even when strangers were friendly, they did not know the names of the Fathers or the Deeds, except for maybe a few, but they did not say them properly or with respect. Other times, they set upon the people, killing and raping and committing all manner of hideousness. I was always glad to see them go on their way, leaving us alone with the Mother River.

Some of the older people tried to talk to the crone. She knew some of the names of things, but said them wrong. I went away from the crowd and looked out into the rocky land. I had a feeling that maybe she was not alone, that there were other strangers with her, ready to set upon us. The land seemed to be empty. Some of our cats were with us, crouching and sniffing around, and they seemed unworried. Still, I showed my chest and made signs of war in case anybody was among the rocks, watching us.

Rima saw me making the signs and laughed at me, saying that she saw some lizards making signs of surrender. I made a few signs of courtship towards her, but with a snarling face, and she ran off giggling. Somebody called my name. I came back to where the people were gathered. Somebody had given the crone a cloth to cover herself, and some of the women were putting good, lucky mud on her cuts. I didn't like this. Why should we waste anything on a barren old woman?

Somebody had called me because I was the son of Araed, one of the great men of the people. The crone had called on all the great people, the leaders of the people. She wanted to show us something. I didn't like this either. Who was this useless crone to call on all the great people?

The crone was talking to the great people. The way she said the names was all wrong, but her voice was like a strong music, and her eyes were very large and powerful, and she moved her hands, making all sorts of unknown signs. The people listened to her closely, and I found myself listening with them. She said that she was the daughter of the river. She did not have a mother and father of the flesh, but her mother was the river alone. I scoffed at this. The stories of the Deeds tell us that the ancient people came from the river, but this was long ago, and they were not strangers, who came from the rocky lands alongside the lizards.

She went on talking, saying that she was living with the Painted Backs, a friendly group of strangers we had met before, but that they had all been set upon by another group of strangers. The other strangers were powerful and cruel, and they carried all the Painted Backs off except her. This was how she ended up naked in the thorn bush. The people murmured at this. When had it happened? Just the night before. This was worrying. Maybe the other strangers were still around, waiting to set upon us.

The crone asked the people to take her with us. This started more murmuring. She was a stranger, not a person, and she was an old crone. She could never become a person by birthing one of the people, nor could she work hard for the people. She was useless. Maed, the flute player, spoke up and said that we should show her the kindness of the people, the same kindness that Mother River shows to us. Are we not useless to the river who was here before us, and would be here forever?

I liked Maed, who was close kin, but he liked talking and impressing people too much. Now we were in the gentle days and things were easy, but what would happen in the dry days when everything needed to be saved? And who would carry the crone when she could no longer walk? The Fathers did not perform the Deeds so that we could carry old crones around. But I did not say this because I am not good at talking, and my words would seem weak compared to Maed's, which glittered and flowed.

The woman began talking in her strange way again, saying that we should take her with us because the Mother River would bless us with many things, as she was the Mother's daughter. Now some of the people began to scoff like I did, saying that this was not according to the Deeds. The crone agreed with this, calling these people wise, and saying that some of the Deeds were secret. This started more talk which started to lead toward argument, when the old crone suddenly strode right into the river and held her hands up and called for everybody to watch.

The people became silent. The woman reached into the river, searching for something. After a moment, she pulled her hands out and showed us, dripping and shining in the sun, three very large river clams. Waving the clams around for us to see, the old crone claimed that this was proof that she was the blessed daughter of Mother River. Many of the people snickered and muttered the names of the Fathers. Everyone knew that these were the gentle days, and it was easy enough to reach into the river and pull out clams. The woman was just a filthy old trickster. We should leave her and move on.

"Look!" the woman cried, and she handed the clams to the great men. "Look inside!"

Our uncle Kell slipped his thick yellow thumbnail into a clam's mouth and pulled it open. The people pressed around him to get a look. It was a nice clam with healthy meat, but clinging to the shell was a large, perfect pearl. The women all let out little sighs, and the men murmured. Other great men pulled open the other two clams, and they both held even larger pearls, all three perfectly round. At this, people gasped and shouted, and everybody began talking at once. A man might go a whole lifetime only seeing one perfect pearl pulled from the river. Three was a thing that had never happened before. Three was a thing which would live among the Deeds.

"Take her with us!" one of the women cried, and soon most of the people were saying this. I found myself saying it as well. The woman was surely part of a powerful flow, and it was best not to swim against her. But even as the great men agreed that this woman would become a part of the people, and we all cheered and shouted out the names of the Fathers and the Deeds, I found myself looking at her strange, hungry face and wondering if she had not somehow slipped those pearls into the clams herself.

*Title: "Nature Nurture Addiction"*

###### 55th Post / Date 05-16-2016 at 17:10:38 EDT

You cannot quite understand the power of addiction until you have seen it firsthand. Until you have seen it eat like an acid through everything you are. It is astounding to watch. Its slow and total corrosion of your entire life is mesmerizing. As you watch it, you keep thinking, "At some point, the corrosion will stop. There is no way it will be able to eat through this next thing. This next thing is too important to me." But then it does. It eats through everything. And you realize you are dealing with a vast and inhuman power.

The most frightening thing is that consequences do not work against a well-developed addiction. There are ultimately no consequences, none, which can separate you from your drug. As your addiction progresses and your self-control slips away, there is nothing you won't risk to continue doing your drug. Nothing is important enough. Nothing is sacred enough.

Money. Career. Marriage. Home. Family. Goals. Art. Religion. Dignity. Safety. Health. Sanity. Parents. Children. Life Itself. All of it will go into play. All of it will be put on the table. If you play the game shrewdly, you might get to keep some of it. You will not get to keep all of it. You will pay. You will pay in ways that you cannot imagine.

You will look at the people who have lost more than you, and you will pretend you are different than them. You will pretend that you can walk away from the table. But the time will come to walk away, and you won't. You will keep playing. You will be made a liar. If you play long enough, all your pious little promises will be shown to be lies.

"I have a good job. I would never risk my job."

"I love my wife. I would never risk my marriage."

"I love my children more than anything. I would never risk my children's safety. Ever." "I don't want to die."

Whatever specific promises you make will be the ones that you will break, because those are the ones you have made to try to control yourself. But you won't be able to control yourself. Your self-control will be pried from your grasp like a toy being taken away from a child.

And when break these promises, you will not be some mindless "junkie" who doesn't care anymore. You will be in many ways the same person you are now, and you will know how awful and horrifying your actions are, and you will do them anyway. You will not be able to believe what is happening to you. You will tell yourself that you are unlucky or cursed. You will watch in horror. But what you are watching is yourself. The horror is what you are doing.

I realize that this all sounds rather silly and dramatic. From the perspective of somebody dabbling with drugs, this all sounds laughably overwrought. But if you ever go where I have been, if you ever see what I have seen, this will still sound laughable, not because it is overwrought, but because it is insufficient -- because it doesn't even begin to describe it.

*Title: "How do you exert your will without disrupting the world?" AKA - "An Introductory Course in SPDT for Advanced Hygiene Bed Users"*

###### 56th Post / Date 05-17-2016 at 00:18:07 EDT

To hunt prey, to taste righteous lifeblood, you must simply become an ordinary part of the world.

Look around. What is happening right now? Nothing at all. Yet the leaves rustle, the grass sways, the birds call, the gnats dance. All of this is just a part of the world. If you become a part of the world, you become nothing at all. You become invisible. If you are not part of the world, the world becomes ten thousand things. This is misfortune.

It is easy enough to become invisible if you stay still, if you hide. But staying still and hiding aren't enough to catch prey. You must seek and strive. How do you seek and strive while remaining an ordinary part of the world? How do you exert your will without disrupting the world? How do you move along with the will of the world? This is the mystery of hunting. This is the mystery of subtlety.

This is the greatest of all mysteries.

Consider the mouse. It is moving through the leaves, looking for food. You must not disturb it. Do as little as possible. Wait. Watch and listen. If it moves away, move with it. Follow it. If it moves closer, stay still. Practice non-interference. Let it come. It should be thinking happy thoughts of food and comfort when you strike. When you snare it in your claws, do not eat it right at once. Let it struggle and give up its lifeblood. Practice non-action. You need not kill it. Let it die.

To be subtle is to move with the will of the world. Do not move against the will of the world. This brings misfortune. Touch lightly the course of things without disturbing it. Touch it gently at points of inflection, and it will move as you wish. This brings great fortune.

This is the ancient Art of Subtlety, taught to us by our form. I must follow it if I am to find any answers to the mystery of the Oily Ones, the mystery which has obsessed me since the death of my kitten. I must know why they both feed us and kill us, why they are kind and motherly but also unnatural and abominable.

I have decided that I will go into one of their hiding places. After much investigation, I have chosen a place. It is a very large and horrible hiding place, a sort of mountain of box-like shapes colored by unnatural light. It emits a powerful and unholy odor of decadence. What is more, there is something which makes it different from all other oily places I have ever seen.

It seems that some of our kind live within this place. I have seen them from a distance, going in and out of it, using small portals. They are different than those of our kind that I have known. It seems that some of the Oily Ones' corruption has mutated them. They are very fat and slow. Their faces are stupid and sullen. They fear nothing. They have lost subtlety. I am not even sure they are truly of our kind.

I will go inside. I must be subtle. To be subtle, I must become a part of the world. I may have to become a part of the abomination itself. I may find death, bloody death as my kitten did. But I will hunt to the heart of this mystery. And I will sleep again.

*Title: "Everything's fine. You're in the real world now..."*

###### 57th Post / Date 05-17-2016 at 20:56:48 EDT

Now I was standing in an elevator, my hands covered with blood, a dead tech lying on the floor and a helpless occupant lying on the gurney. The other two techs had hit the emergency button and hastily gotten off at the next floor. Understandable. I had tried to explain to them about the poison pellet in Karen's arm, but they didn't stick around to consider the merits of my argument.

I set the gun down on the floor. This wasn't good. A couple of Elian's fingers had gotten blown off, and there was blood all over me, not to mention the bullet in his head. Shit, what now? I had shot people before. I had killed them before. But this was different. They had given me mandatory therapy after the war. They might give me mandatory something else after this.

Karen was wheezing, her blind eyes wiggling in her head. The pellet. I should take care of that before anything else. I wiped my hands off on my nice white coat and rifled through one of the tech bags to find the C-knife and some local. This shouldn't be too hard. It was a lot like removing a rotted jack.

"I'm going to cut out the pellet. You ready?" I asked.

Karen's head jiggled in a way that could be construed as nodding. Good enough. I hastily gave her the local and cut a pretty sizable chunk out of her arm, and the whole elevator filled with a burning smell that was a welcome change from Karen's existing smell. After sealing the wound, I examined the shriveled chunk of meat. There was indeed a white pellet lodged in it like a little pearl. I put it in a specimen jar. I might need it to avoid death row.

"OK, you're safe now," I said, not really knowing if this was true. Her monitor still looked OK.

What now? I wanted to just get the fuck out of there. But there was certainly a camera in the elevator plus two witnesses who knew me. What would the camera show? Me suddenly leaping across the elevator and shooting a guy in the head. That wasn't good. But how would I even begin to go on the run? I didn't know the first thing about identity shifting. And hadn't I done the right thing? I had saved her life. I had the pellet to prove it. I was a hero. Right?

I felt like reporting this to my CO. This didn't make any sense. But I should report it to somebody. I called the emergency service on my set and told it what had happened. It told me that officers would be sent over immediately. I tried to explain about the pellet, but this seemed to confuse it. It asked me if the pellet was armed. After a few minutes of confusing crosstalk, I just hung up.

As I waited and the minutes passed, the elevator felt very small and smelly and stifling. The blood around Elian covered the floor, surrounding my shoes. I imagined the cops coming up on another elevator as slow as this one. Karen's head was still wobbling in its weird way, the gurney making little creaking sounds, little gasps coming out of her throat.

"Everything's fine. You're in the real world now," I found myself saying, half-heartedly going through my standard patter. Absurd. Nothing was fine. Then the thought finally occurred to me. Why had Elian tried to kill this girl? Who wanted her dead? This was an important question. Whoever it was wouldn't be happy with me. Looking at her lying there, gasping, I knew it wouldn't be much use to ask her verbally. But she still had good jacks.

It was against protocol to plug into a feed-head's jacks. We were supposed to be getting them used to face-to-face conversation. But protocol did say you could plug in during an emergency. This definitely qualified. I told my set to find her jacks' wireless presence. A flood of messages hit the set, a backlog from the last couple minutes:

> dont / dont / dont call police / bad idea / we have to go / go / go / police r coming / get out / go / go"
>
>

"What?" I murmured as I saw the messages.

> "Q controls techs / controls police / police will kill u / we must go"
>
>

"Who is Q?

> "the adversary"
>
>

Shit, this was so similar to a feed narrative. It felt like I had played this one before. What was that one with Zack Okonkwo? *Fatal Escape* or some shit like that? Terrible story.
"Why do they want to kill you?" I asked.

> "i am 1 of the bred"
>
>

The Bred? I had heard the name before. I wasn't sure if it was from the news or a narrative. I had a vague idea that it was one of those old art protest collectives, like Anonymous or The Weather Underground. Or was it a feed cult? I asked my set, and it gave me a summary.

> The Bred is an alleged group of exploit experts who are thought to have been kidnapped at a young age and trained by a shadowy group, variously identified as the Human Front, the Restoration Alliance or the New Organ. They are the subject of a number of conspiracy theories, most of which assert that the internet's Combined Governance Corporation has been taken over by a sinister force, which the Bred are struggling against within the feedrealms and infraspaces. These theories generally involve discussions of mind control, feed conditioning, information war and the possibility of a Fascistic Singularity. Occult Singularians regard the Bred as the leaders of the new twelve tribes of Israel."
>
>

"Is this real or is this part of a narrative?"
My set replied, "The Bred are featured in many narratives, but are purported to hard-exist. There is no widely accepted proof of their existence."

> "can i thru-gate ur set?" Karen asked.
>
>

"What for?"

> "we must go now / now / now"
>
>

I heard footsteps in the hallway. The elevator doors were still open, so I peeked my head out. The police were coming down the hall. A lot of police. In tactical gear. I intended to call to them, but that little lizard part of my brain told me to duck back into the elevator. There was a huge metal bang and found myself on the floor with the gun in my hand. A bullet had hit the elevator door frame.

Karen's messages unspooled onto my set. "i know Q / ruthless / she'll spoof calls to emergency / multiple calls / say ur an active shooter / let me thru-gate / NOW / u want to die?"

I gave her through-gate access on my set. The elevator slammed shut, and my stomach leapt into my throat as we plunged downward.

*Title: "Infraspace God"*

###### 58th Post / Date 05-18-2016 at 03:48:53 ED

As the elevator plunged down through the building, I tried to understand the implications of it all. It was horrifying. Enraging. All this time, my entire life, without me knowing it, elevators have had a secret faster speed that they don't tell us about. Those bastards.

A message from Karen appeared on my set:

> must lure them / they will fire in here / get ready
>
>

They will what? This was out of hand. God, I felt cranked up. Fantastic. The elevator began to slow, everything becoming heavy.

> pls move the body away from the door
>
>

Move the dead body? No, she meant her own body. I pushed the gurney against the side of the elevator.

> door will open / take cover
>
>

I pressed myself up against the wall. The elevator came to a rattling stop, and the door popped open. The back wall banged and dented as bullets hit it. I cowered against the wall, hoping nothing flew into my arteries. The door clapped shut again, and the floor seemed to fall out from under me as we went down. Man, this little bird had some access. I'd never seen anything like it.
Another message from Karen popped into my set, and I read every word in an glance.

> silver haohua van / parking # 17A / 20 meters / pls take me / pls
>
>

The elevator came to another shuddering stop, and the doors opened one of the underground decks, a dim concrete cavern filled with rows of cars. I yanked the gurney out and pushed it like a madman, rattling over the asphalt. The van was where she said it would be. I stood there for moment, waiting for it to pull out for us, but it just sat there.

> u must get me wired / i dont want to get fingerprints on its presence
>
>

Wired? Did she mean physically? An article appeared on my set called "How to Establish a Physical Link to Your 2039 Haohua Luxury Chariot." I guess so. I followed the ER guide, looking around every so often to see if anybody was coming. Weird sounds were emerging from the elevators. They seemed to be malfunctioning. I got a wire from my bag and linked Karen's fleshjack to a physical jack by the van's gas cap. A second later the van's rear door unfolded.

> get in
>
>

I did as she said. Following her orders felt totally natural. It was like I was right back at the tip of the spear. I remembered my time in Turkey and Greece, playing feed games with the platoon all day then getting dropped right into the kinetic, right into the warm bloody center of the war. Run here. Shoot this. Get down. 19 years old. Traveling the world and blowing shit up while other kids were sitting economics class. God, it was beautiful while it lasted.
I shoved the gurney into the van and jumped in beside it. The rear door folded down.

> pls secure the body. 90 secs left
>
>

90 seconds left until what? I flattened a seat and clumsily transferred her body to it and strapped it in. The van leapt backward and began twisting through space, throwing me against a side window.

> sry / must go
>
>

I got in the other seat and strapped in as the van peeled out. We found the exit ramp and went up. I felt like I was about to break a rib on the arm rest as we went on a never-ending left turn, up and up the spiraling ramp. Finally, the daylight of the ground level burst in view. The whole parking lot was swarmed with flashing cop cars, black armored vehicles and cops in hard gear. The van came to a stop in the middle of it all.
"Fuck," I muttered. The cops were moving in a hurry. It seemed like they hadn't quite formed a proper perimeter around the building, but they were close. "We've got go now. They're going to form a--"

> wait
>
>

"For what?"

> air
>
>

All around us, the cops were assembling, pulling their vehicles into place, leveling their pistols and rifles. I watched our few possible avenues of exit close up. The van just sat there. Karen's eyes were closed. She looked calm, at peace, just a sick little girl taking a nap.

I heard a sound, and my blood ran cold. I hadn't heard that sound in years, but there was no mistaking it. It was a sound that was etched in my brain.

In the Marines we used an app called *Harpy* to call in air-to-ground strikes. It was a wonky over-engineered DOD piece of shit, full of weird quirks that they were afraid to fix in the name of ultra-stability. It made a little sound like a sleepy bird chirping when a friendly missile was incoming and it was time to put your stupid head down so that you wouldn't get all that expensive training blown out of your skull. About 2 seconds after that sound, something would light up, and a moment later the sound of the blast would hit and the ground would shake.

I heard that sound now coming from my set. My god, what kind of access did she have?

> get down
>
>

A moment later, police perimeter around us became a wall of fire, and the van was hit with a boom that felt like the earth splitting open. I put my head between my knees and let that old feeling flow through me, the shuddering rush of American air power being liberally applied. When I opened my eyes again, the van's safety windows had bowed inward on Karen's side, almost becoming liquid. Everything around the van was engulfed in fire and smoke. Slowly, the windows began to regain their shape. The van took off with a start, rushing blindly through the chaos.

Two minutes later, we were on the interstate, flying down the taxpayer lane, and I was sitting there, trying to remember how to swallow. It was unreal. Just unreal. She had called in a drone strike in the middle of Atlanta. The level of access required to do that was unimaginable. It meant completely basing the DOD systems. It was beyond any exploit collective. It was beyond governmental. It was planetary. It was God-level. I was sitting in van with an infraspace God.

*Title: "Angelica"*

###### 59th Post / Date 05-18-2016 at 18:28:05 EDT

Ha hum. I love waking up in the morning to the smell of fresh biscuits. The warm smell fills my dreams, a smell like friends and home and happiness. I wake up to see the sun so bright and lovely in my window. Hello day! How are you? Every day is bright and cheery when you share a house with your best friends. I can hear them downstairs singing and having fun. After a long night of spooky old dreams, it's good to be awake again in the cheery deary sunlight.

I unlock my bedroom door and go out into the hall. Some of my friends have left fresh piles of biscuits in the hallway, several different kinds. Wonderful! I breathe in the smell and make chirpy little sounds of glee. Heeheehee. Another day!

Chester Barrington comes up the stairs, looking very handsome and somber in his tuxedo.

"Oh, Chester!" I sing. "How is the gentleman today?"

Chester nods to me, gruff but debonair. "Proceedings are afoot, Madam Alice. Proceedings are afoot," he grumbles and makes his way down the hallway. That Chester. So self-serious.

On the stairway, Brett Turlingshire and Mansy Fairworth are in each other's arms, a lover's embrace.

"Oh, dear!" I cry. "I'm afraid I've interrupted your tryst!"

"Oh, madam, nonsense. This is no tryst. This is a destined love affair!" Brett proclaims in his ringing voice. He looks dashing in his fine, striped coat.

"Brett, darling, Madam Alice doesn't want to hear all that gooey talk," Mansy says in her sassy southern accent.

"I'll leave you two be," I say lifting the hem of my nightgown and hurrying past them.

When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I hear Brett murmur, "I wish the Madam would find a destined love affair of her own. She is a noble woman and deserves somebody to treat her well."

"You just worry about treating me well," Mansy purrs, nuzzling against his cheek.

I scurry off before they catch me listening. In the downstairs parlor, Raymond Decks, Montrose Pardonsmith and Elise Rapier are having tea together. The smell of biscuits fills the room. A fresh heap of toffee-colored scones covers the coffee table. A wonderful selection of pastries lies in the corner, and several of the chairs contain more treats.

"Hello dearies! How are we today?"

"Can't complain," Raymond says.

"Splendid!" Sir Pardonsmith intones.

Elise merely lets out a little sigh.

"Elise, are we not feeling well?" I ask, coming over to where she is perched on the arm of the couch.

"Eh. Should we be? Life is but a vague dream which disrupts the sleep of death," she murmurs in her smoky French accent.

"Oh, Elise. Must you be such an existentialist?"

"Je ne suis pas un existentialiste," she mutters, getting up and stalking off.

"Poor Elise," I say as she leaves the room.

"She is affected by that peculiar continental ennui," Sir Pardonsmith observes. "I say she needs a dose of sturdy American optimism."

"Her birthday is coming soon. Perhaps we should throw her a party," I suggest.

"Ha! A party for Elise? That would go over like a Bar Mitzvah for Goebbels," Raymond says.

"Oh, Raymond!" I say, tousling his orange hair. "Well, we'll have to figure out something for her. I don't like her moping about."

"She's an inveterate mope. There's no changing her," Raymond says.

"You may be right, sir," I say, sighing. Well, c'est la vie. Not everybody can be as happy as I am.

Some years ago, I was much like Elise. Down the dumps. A real gray cloud. Then I met a lovely young woman who happened to be passing through my neighborhood. Her name was Angelica. It had been a long time since I had enjoyed the delights of society, but Angelica had a very mature, soothing presence, despite her youth. I lived a large house where my family had once resided but was now empty, so I asked her to stay with me. She accepted just like that. Can you imagine it? Two strangers just making a home together? It must have been kismet.

She was my precious angel treasure. Absolutely heaven sent. I had been something of an existentialist myself, disbelieving in God and thinking his creation a cruel trap for human prey. But then he saw it fit to bring Angelica into my life, and I never doubted him again. I found her company such a balm that I decided to open my home to whoever needed a place to stay. Singletons, couples, whole families have stayed with me. Many children have been born in this house.

Though dear sweet Angelica has long since passed way, her friendship is still a daily gift to me. For on the day I met her, I made a choice to simply not feel sadness or worry or fear ever again. And I haven't. Do you think it impossible? It is possible, if you simply surround yourself with loved ones. That's the secret.

With all these thoughts in mind, I walk into the kitchen to see Reginald Strongton, Linda Mercychowder and Marshall Futz clamoring for their breakfast.

"Madam, I'm famished!" Reginald cries.

"Oh, dear Madam! We starve! We want! We waste away!" Linda says in a tremulous voice.

"Oh, mercy. I left you with a kingly feast last night. Have you eaten it all?" I ask.

"It was not us. We had not a bite. It was that Chester Barrington, the scoundrel!" Reginald cries. "He is voracious and utterly selfish. I found him down here, helping himself to your generosity, and when I tried to serve myself the smallest morsel, he attacked me. Attacked me, madam! My nose still smarts."

"Oh, that Chester does have an appetite. But I find it hard to believe such a gentleman would attack you."

"Eh, I am on the verge of swooning," Marshall croaks.

"Alright, dears, let's have ourselves a proper breakfast," I say.

I get a bag of cuisine from the cabinet and pour it into china bowls for Reginald, Linda, and Marshall and myself. I clear off the love-biscuits that somebody left on the kitchen table, and we all sit down to eat. My little friends immediately proceed with chowing down, and I am about to follow suit, but I notice something that brings me a wonderful thrill.

There is a stranger standing in the doorway to the kitchen. I have never seen her before. She appears to have snuck into the house alone. She stands there, tense and alert, her yellow eyes taking in the scene. I am breathless. She is beautiful, extraordinary, exquisite. She reminds me of my sweet Angelica. Oh, lovely day! I am about to have a new friend!

*Title: "I-20 West with The Devil on our ass"*

###### 60th Post / Date 05-19-2016 at 03:34:06 EDT

We rode in silence for a while, the Haohua Luxury Chariot flying along the curves of the interstate as all the other cars obediently changed lanes to let us through. I had seen people pull access stunts before, like changing the music in a club or turning off the lights in a restaurant, but what she had done was outright sorcery. She had taken control of the elevator, the car, the drone, the other cars on the highway, all within seconds. She must have had control of all the security cameras to plan our escape. Every one of these was a hardened system. The drone was a DOD system, the hardest of systems. But she had based it like child's play.

Sitting there in the car, I felt like I was coming down off a high. It wasn't a good feeling. I was sitting in a van with a mass murderer of unspeakable power. And I had helped her, given her the access she needed to pull her stunts. She had saved my life, I think, and I had saved hers. But she had also just killed dozens of cops, maybe over a hundred. Men with families. Fuck, my life was over. I had helped her. That was a death sentence right there. We would become the most wanted people in the country. How did I get caught up in this?

I looked over at her tiny, skeletal body. So frail and weak. I could pick her up and chuck her out the back of the van and end this whole escapade. But then what? Face the death penalty? She had to be my best chance at getting away. But who the fuck was she? She was a killer, that was for sure. Utterly ruthless.

A message from her appeared on my set.

> srry bout all that. had to hurry
>
>

Sorry? That was rich. I asked her where we were going.

> upstate NY
>
>

"What's there?"

> our objective
>
>

"What's our objective?"

> a way to defeat Q. hard to explain
>
>

I wondered if she was insane. She was responsive and lucid, but she was also capable of murder. She would probably get rid of me as soon as she could.
"So you want me to come with you?"

> id like it. i need physical help.
>
>

"You killed like a hundred cops back there. The whole world is going to be looking for us."

> no they wont
>
>

"You don't think so? This isn't the feedrealm. They take kills pretty seriously in the real world."

> i do too. but theyll b too busy to look for us
>
>

"Busy with what?"

> Q
>
>

"What's Q going to do?"

> u will find out. ~4 mins
>
>

"Just tell me."

> u wouldnt believe me
>
>

We fell back into silence. My thoughts were racing. I wondered why they didn't just flag our car or shut down the highway. I guess she was busy working her black magic on the police and transportation systems. Who knew what she was capable of? Was she really one of the Bred? A grown-up child soldier?

It was illegal to hook children into long-term feeds, but I had heard stories about China and the FRN connecting infants, trying to create people who were utterly at one with the internet. According to the tales, the children all died. So they tried older children, but they all turned into drooling skullbaskets. For some reason, the brain needs a certain level of maturity before it can withstand a long-term feed without resulting in total madness. Even then, it results in near-total madness.

I figured Karen was another child abuse case. But she wasn't just some feed casualty. Her mind worked. Worked well. Whoever had made her had done the forbidden, and they had done it successfully.

But why did I have to get involved in all this? I had just gotten my specialist license. After getting out of the Marines and just drifting around for years, I was finally hitting my stride. Now it was all fucked up.

> dont look back
>
>

I looked over to the girl lying next to me. Was it possible that she had hacked so far into infraspace that she could read minds?

There was a passing flash of light, like sunlight glancing off some car, then everything around us started to get brighter and brighter, like the sun had just come out from behind a cloud. But there weren't any clouds in the sky. The light was coming from behind us, bouncing off the other cars, creating a painful glare. I almost turned around, but then I realized what Karen had said. I closed my eyes against the brightness, and the insides of my eyelids glowed red like I was lying on the beach. After a few seconds, the light dimmed and seemed to return to normal. I opened my eyes, blinked a few times and turned around.

A few miles behind us, the entire city of Atlanta had disappeared behind a megalithic wall of dark roiling smoke. I felt my mouth falling open. I leaned down to look up at the sky behind us. The giant wall of smoke was just the base of a monstrous black tree of ash that rose miles into the sky, growing larger and larger, looming over the world.

Then we were hit by a blast that rattled me right down to the roots of my teeth. I shut my eyes again. The blast turned into long horrifying roar. The van wobbled and shuddered as awful groaning sounds passed through the metal. Eventually, the van's steering systems righted us, and slowly the roar passed.

That must have been the blast wave. Of a nuclear detonation. That had just destroyed Atlanta.

I unbuckled my seat and crawled to the back window and pressed my face against the glass. The tree of smoke was still growing over us, becoming ever more massive. I just stared in silence. Slowly it changed from one awful form to another until it became a vague gray pillar in the far distance.

I'm not sure how long I spent watching it. I know that by the time I looked away, I was crying.

Mother Horse Eyes Part 3

Mother Horse Eyes Finale