There was once a piece of art that had touched something beyond human comprehension and there was once a piece of prose that had touched something beyond human understanding.
The person who created the piece of art was soon devoured by it. The painting’s physicality distorted. The paint on the easel flowed down their arms, at first like molasses but soon it moved faster than a river. Up their arms, up their shoulders, coating their head in a paint that only existed to those who had seen the painting. The unperceivable paint drowned its artist. The world would soon be submerged under an endless sea of paint if not for the odd rules it followed.
The paint was a fluid that functioned off a foreign set of rules compared to something like water. It flows in seemingly any direction it fancied without any logic to it. It does however move actively towards the direction of any who viewed the painting. And then it will quickly make its way into their lungs, suffocating the viewer. After that an increase in paint will occur as if feeding off the body.
How it does this is unknown, it leaves the bodies mostly untouched aside from the paint making its way out of their bodies, coating the corpses in said paint. This paint covering the bodies results in the odd effect of no one perceiving a myriad of dead bodies in various states of decomposition. Though that’s not all it does, it temporarily makes them “unperceivable”. Not forgotten per se but moreso mentally blocked out or avoided by those they know. Meaning that no one will remember the victims of the painting until they’re nothing but rotten mush. And the second their friends, family or even police come looking for them, they too will be claimed by the painting.
The paint leftover after a corpse has decomposed fully will return to the painting. Adding a new element to the painting. Those new elements being those who were drowned by the paint, in an neverending state of suffocation. Some of the new denizens of the painting beg to be freed, others beg to die and all beg for even a single gulp of fresh air. However, none of that will ever happen. Instead, new people will find the painting and suffer a similar fate to them, over and over again.
Though if you truly think about it, this is a small mercy compared to what the paint could have been or perhaps could have done. Imagine if it had no such rules binding it to only kill those who perceived it, what if it killed anyone related to those who’d seen it? After all, it could affect those people merely by coating a dead body in paint. What if the paint expanded its volume endlessly, flooding every part of the world in paint? Virtually result in the end of all life as we know it.
No, instead it acts like an ambush predator, using its former prey as traps to lure in future prey. And for that we should be happy.
The person who created the piece of prose, unintentionally created an autopoietic piece of text. A self-sufficient system composed of text that could be viewed as a textual prokaryote, a simple thing. This prose was trapped in two mediums, the mind of the writer and a crumpled-up piece of paper in the writer’s bin. Thrown into the bin due to the writer not finding it to be up to snuff as well as because they were pissed off, they had a headache you see. So into the bin the paper went. And in a week the bin reeked of ink and every object in it was covered in strange letters that seemed to be akin to the roman alphabet yet…irregular.
The writer did not seem to notice this as they were in the throes of that headache from earlier; it had been going for days. Abstract ideas had been filling up their head, filling up their memories, filling up their dreams. They floated ambivalently by in there, the textual prokaryotes born from a scrapped piece of writing that is. They were rather peaceful, no intent on doing much other than floating by in the writer’s head. Occasionally though these little conceptual critters composed of ideas would fly too close to the sun. The mind was directly influenced and this would result in a rejection of these nonsensical ideas. Just as the immune system rejects and tries to eject any nasty little microbe. It was a horrid environment for such creatures like them, an environment that was allowed for their existences but not for their persistence. They couldn’t grow too big before being culled or evolve in a manner that made them perfect in such an environment. The mind was too elastic for them; it was changing and shifting things in a way that didn’t fit their needs. The most harm they could do to the human was cause an endless headache and render them virtually immobile for most of the day. No physiological changes at all.
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However, the writer did leave their room to eat, to consume as much food as they could before they’d return to bed to shiver at the displeasure of rogue beings bumping into your thoughts. It’d seem to be a comfort for them, to have a semblance of control with such a routine. A result caused by the presence of the prose in their head but not purely because of it.
However, there were other things who’d experience the effects of the prose. The trash bin for example. However, it felt no such displeasure though the bugs in said trash can did. Those bugs being some cockroaches, flies and a spider did feel such discomfort. Although it wasn’t as suitable as medium for the prose compared to paper or paper-like materials, things the bin had a plentiful supply of. Whether it be other pieces of paper, tissues, muffin wrappers, plastic wrappers and etc. So it slowly began to use these mediums to spread itself.
The prose engraved on various pieces of trash in the bin was merely a start and the cockroaches were the next step. The prose could engrave itself onto them just via a simple glance; they had no means of processing such data in a way a human or a sapient being could. No mind to keep the prose occupied and unable to significantly alter/destroy their bodies. The sensory organs of the simple cockroaches, their antennae picking up the odd smell of the ink and the hair on the legs, the things that allowed them to perceive their environment and flourish in their environments became their downfall. The biological coding in them to seek out food such as the muffin wrappers with bits of muffin still remaining, damned them. Brushing up to muffin wrappers covered in illegible symbols were the most common ways for the cockroaches to come in contact with the prose. Its effects were quick, and they were severe.
Having their simple insect nervous system and bodies turned into a medium for the prose to spread. Of the roughly 28 adult cockroaches that went in the bin, only three survived. The first survivor wasn’t heavily altered, just having a few aspects of its nervous system warped to house a symbol of the prose; however this rendered it unable to move yet no longer needing food as well. The second had its body completely absorbed into the symbols of the prose. The third became a scavenger of letters, carving out individual letters from books, letters, magazines, dvd covers, pill bottles and more to bring back to the can.
Most flies succumbed to a similar fate to the rest of the 25 cockroaches, being bent and broken beyond their limits. Becoming corpses who'd be covered by the prose’s ink for all eternity possibly. Some of the flies or more specifically their larvae survived however. The flies that birthed them saw the prose, and this broke their nervous system as they tried to comprehend things beyond them, symbols grew on their bodies. Altering the eggs as well but in a less deleterious way than what happened to their biological parents. Many of the eggs were fused together and as they grew, forcefully making their way out of their deceased mothers’ bodies, odd mutations appeared. Eyes grew on these larvae yet they never reached adulthood. Instead of endlessly seeking out food, mating and ultimately dying, their new biological imperative is to view the endlessly expanding prose without end.
The spider was unaffected for a while as it was making its web on the rim of the bin. This however was the first misstep since its prey was letter scavengers that descended from the cockroach who became a servant of the prose. The spider would weave them into its web for safe-keeping and eventual eating but at the same time leaving the scraps of paper they’d brought. Leaving the most susceptible medium of the prose, paper, inside its web. Though most of the letter scavenger cockroaches had no marks on them, no means of transmitting the prose and the spider’s bad eyesight meant that it wouldn’t see the symbols below it from its web either.
Eventually though a cockroach with the symbol of the prose came along. Compared to the symbols on the bottom of the bin it was barely infectious. A glance at the symbols on it merely caused a mild hiccup in its sensory systems. The glance merely primed the spider, inoculating it to the prose. In an hour the symbol on the cockroach jumped to a scrap of paper stuck in the spider’s web. Ink started to drip from it and that ink would spread through the web. The pieces of paper the ink would touch would become new vectors of infection for prose. The spider was clueless to this, however; it was too busy focusing on expanding its web down the sides of the bin. So when it returned to the top layer it saw the glory of the prose and quickly became an agent of the prose. It wove the symbols on the pieces of paper onto its web with a fervor and letter scavengers now seemed willingly letting themselves be placed into the web.
The web now dripped with a black viscous ink that fell into the recesses of the bin.
And this is the current fate of those inflicted with the curse the prose brings. The luckiest having their bodies warped in such a manner that they can still live and even possibly thrive. And the others endure an endless hell with no escape in sight.
But for now it is contained, slow expansion is the prose’s nature.
No one will come for the writer, no friends, no family. The house they lived in is completely paid off and in a more ruralish area. So for now humanity and the rest of the living world is safe.