I can no longer truly recall a time when I did not fear my flesh. Though I am aware there was a period in my life when I perceived my flesh and did not baulk and shiver and scratch at the skin that hung from me like a drooping pale ivory wax. When the thought of the softness of the meat and the malleability of the tissue I wore with the same discomfort as an ill fitted evening jacket did not fill me with a panic inducing terror which even to this day denies me the comfort of sleep.

Five years ago, after completing my education at the University of San Francisco I attained a much sought after position as a corporate counterintelligence agent at Mugen Heavy Industries west coast division. My young hopes, my dreams and expectations, of taking part in daring heists and illicitly exhilarating liaisons with my counterparts in the divisions of the other megacorporations were dashed and crushed like a misshapen, infantile skull repeatedly thrown against stone by the tediously mundane tasks that were assigned to me. My days were filled with the monotonous writing of reports, data analysis and the completion of requisition forms and my evenings were filled with cheap stall vendor teriyaki and the latest holopornography. What I truly craved was further advancement and the chance to prove that the talents I had cultivated during my education were both vast and practical, but such a chance always seemed to elude me. Now I cannot help but laugh at the naivety of my jaded complacency yet at the same time crave to return to the bosom embrace of that wondrous state of ignorance. 

With this said one can understand exactly why, when given the opportunity to take charge of an operation that while small was deeply personal to my direct superior I jumped at the chance. Said superior was - and to this day is - an individual of great import and influence in the west coast division, though I now realise he was little more than a minor bit player in the wider schemes and manipulations of the solar system spanning Mugen corporation. 

The operation itself was a simple one. My superior, Zacheriah Sakai, was in the somewhat unfortunate position of being a father. Even more unfortunately, he was the father of a deeply socially unorthodox daughter who took quite vigorously to everything that he opposed. Zacheriah was a deeply professional man of Japanese ancestry with short cropped black hair, he was perfectly clean shaven, and never seen without the most expensive and luxurious of suit jackets. He was also augmented with a suite of high grade, corporate level cybernetics that were contractually required for his position, and the exact details of which I am unfamiliar with. Though I am aware that these included upgraded eyes, lungs, a new heart and a direct connection into his frontal cerebellum. I include these details not because I admire him for them, in truth I think him to be an inflexible and protocol obsessed dullard, but to show the contrast with his daughter. 

Akari Sakai was a woman in her early twenties, who had taken to the outrageous fashion popular amongst the multitude of disaffected youth of our time; that is clothing which involved a great deal of garish, synthetic fabric, pulsing LED lights and gang affiliated logos. Her social circle included a great many individuals who considered themselves dangerous criminals, but who I am now aware after further investigation were in fact little more than vandals, street hackers and minor thugs with self inflated senses of self worth and ego. In her quest to contrast her father in all things she had coloured her hair akin to some great rainbow, but rejected any cybernetic augmentations out of hand, with the exception of a highly advanced prosthetic eye with a deep golden iris and a starkly red pupil. Located within this prosthetic eye was a homing beacon, one which had dropped completely off the grid. Over all, her flesh was almost completely untouched.

So when Akari went missing and a discreet operation was required to find and extract her from whichever designer drug den she had decided to languish within before a rival megacorporation could do so first and thereby acquire leverage over Zacheriah, I was most enthusiastic to take up the duty of saving the woman. 

My enthusiasm did not wane as I used my aforementioned practical talents to track Akari to the place which the very name of, if spoken aloud, will send convulsions of terror running through my muscles, sinew and marrow and which I hesitate to even record within this journal. The Narrows. 

The blighted, mournful sector of the City was conceived as a solution to a population crisis, one caused by the flocking of men, women and children to the City, like a horde of buzzing flies about manure in a blind search for prosperity. Affordable, high density housing was the goal of the sector’s developers, and a goal they admirably managed - albeit with some small deficiencies in regards to quality - but which was ruined by the ungrateful, seething multitude that washed over its streets in a wave that left behind only shattered, burnt out businesses and skulking gang members.

In construction, the Narrows was in fact somewhat similar to the megabuildings that dot the City, if those megabuildings were twice as tall and three times as wide. The main difference was that the Narrows was a single building, a crisscrossing sector of steel, duraplastic and wires that snaked through the City like some throbbing, diseased, neon lit vein. Its deepest recesses never saw the sun, were filled with smoking maintenance tunnels or abandoned living and commercial areas, and according to official, public surveys were completely uninhabited. I was soon to learn that this was a falsehood.

When I first arrived at the Narrows I was as suitably disgusted by the squalid living standards - mostly self inflicted in my opinion - of its inhabitants as any well adjusted member of society should be. It was a far cry from the clean, ordered safety of the corporate sectors that I had called my home since as long as I could remember. Refuse littered the concrete streets, drugged out junkies enjoyed their latest high amidst pissed stained plastic rubbish bags and toe nibbling throngs of corpulent rats, and the neon green of emergency lighting cast a sickly glow over the tightly enclosed, warren like streets of the Narrows. 

Accompanying the junkies were leering groups of hard edged youth with suspicious, distrustful gazes and ill taste in fashion conversing in a degenerated, mish mash language that seemed to consist of twisted loan words from six or seven different languages and which only served to further demonstrate their isolation from anything outwith the Narrows. The massive sector was a world unto its own, a world that knew no light or hope and which, although not officially, operates under its own rules and laws. 

I had wisely recruited the assistance of two Mugen military operatives in my investigations, and it was their stern gazes and heavy weaponry that ensured the thuggish gang members gave us a suitably wide berth as we made our way through their lairs. 

My source had made me aware of Akari’s last known location, a fetid little den hidden in the deep recesses of the Narrows, down creaking metal stairways and into the darkness where even the emergency lighting had since failed in the long, long years between the inspections of City employed maintenance crews. When we arrived at the address our flashlights barely lit up the expansive, yawning, metal cavern of a long abandoned recreational district, and the building Akari and her gang had repurposed as their home. The door proved an obstacle, and it was only after my two cybernetically augmented subordinates had beaten it down that we discovered that the door had been blocked from the inside by a pile of frantically placed furniture, and that the building had once been a pachinko parlour. I had one of the operatives dispatched to reroute power from the living quarters two floors above us and once activated the squawking, beeping gambling machines lit up a scene just as disgusting as the decrepit streets above us. Hyponeedles, quickinhalers, vomit, glass and faeces littered the floors, marred the peeling yellow wallpaper and filled the air with acrid fumes that made even the war hardened employee at my side gag and splutter. 

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I did not allow this to deter me in my investigation. There were clear signs that Akari had been there; empty vials of glitterpop, the drug of her choice, made up the majority of the hyponeedles within the room, a bright pink Louis Vuitton handbag with her initials stitched into the interior lay discarded in the revolting, graffiti covered bathroom, and upon close inspection I discovered that a gleaming strand of hair hued with all the colours of the rainbow was stuck to the edge of an open service tunnel in the side of the wall which stretched off into the darkness. 

It was with great displeasure that I speculated - given that the doors had been blocked from the inside - that Akari and her most recent gang of boytoys must have ventured through the vent in a drugged haze, crawling on their hands and knees in response to some drug induced paranoia.

I had no personal wish to enter that dark pit, but upon further investigation it became clear that neither of my underlings - as large as they were, with their augmented nano-weave muscular meshes, and bullet proof duraskin additions - would be able to fit, no matter their strength of body. The stomach turning surroundings reminded me of what fate I awaited if I was to fail in this task, Zacheriah would ensure that I was terminated from my position and with it the perks I had been afforded would be lost. Easy access to clean running water. Twelve hour work shifts. Twenty five minutes of private holonet browsing time a week. And most importantly, discounted access to Mugen’s subsidised red light district. The fear of losing such things forced me to my knees, my sharp dark grey Brioni suit pants and jacket squeezed up against the dripping edges of the vent. 

My only source of light was a little red LED flashlight I had buttoned to the lapel of my suit, and it barely illuminated a foot of distance before me. Slowly I shuffled, inch after inch, through the darkness of the claustrophobic vent. The light of the pachinko parlour disappeared into a swirling darkness behind me, though I am unsure of exactly when, for such was the cramped nature of the vent that simply turning my neck to cast my gaze at my place of departure was an act which required me to shove my arms beneath my chest, twist my chest to the side and strain my neck in a crane that made every one of my  muscles burn and quiver. 

Every onward I forced myself, like a wriggling worm forces itself through loose dirt, deeper and deeper into the heart of the Narrows. I began to lose all sense of time, all sense of self, and I was forced on only by the fact that I had no way to go back.

In a moment my entire world changed. I had inched myself forward too far and the flexing metal floor beneath me gave way to a slippery steel and aluminium slope that sent me sliding headfirst down into the dark recesses of the earth. We had already descended far into the Narrows, beneath the surface and into tunnels that lay below the city, but the time I spent in an uncontrollable slide - a time which felt as if it must have been hours, or even days -  before tumbling out of the vent and crumpling up upon the harsh, bruising firmness of stone sent convulsions of fear through my veins. Wherever I now lay, I realised, it must be so far beneath the crust of the world that not even the most advanced of mining outfits had reached it. 

At some indeterminable point during my descent the vent’s metal surface had been replaced with a rock face so perfectly sanded and smooth that it could not have been natural. My first instinct was to contact my two subordinates via our communication units, but such was my depth and such was the sheer amount of aggregated stone, dirt and metal that I received nothing more than static in reply. 

I remember the silence the most. It was something I had never heard before - the City knew no silence, no sleep, no calmness. No matter the hour, the dull hum of traffic filled the city, the glaring light of neon holoadvertisements filtered through windows and even what few religious centres remained constantly assaulted the senses with sermonising in an attempt to compete with the myriad of shallow entertainments at the tip of every citizen's fingers. Yet here was a silence so immense that it seemed to rest upon my shoulders like the weight of the Earth itself. 

Yet if I were to tell the truth, the silence scared me most of all because it left me alone with my own thoughts. Would I be stuck here forever? Would I wander the shadowy chambers until the LED light on my lapel spluttered and died, then I starved in turn? And if that did happen, it would have been in service to a corporation that would replace me in the next morning - perhaps with a moment of polite embarrassment at having to train a new hire from my colleagues, but with nothing else to mark that I had ever existed - and if that was the case, then had I spent my entire life in the pursuit of a false ideal that - fortunately, my disconcerting thoughts were interrupted by a faint little trilling sound. 

The sound came from the communicator that hung limply from my hand, and I was shocked to discover that it had picked up a signal. Specifically it had detected the signal of none other than Akari Sakai. My delight at this discovery overshadowed any logical apprehension of the caverns I had been dropped into and before I realised it I was sprinting into the darkened abyss, the sound of my dress shoes slapping against the ground echoing about around me. 

My delight soon turned sour however. The signal was no more than five hundred metres from me, and yet every time I thought I had discovered it I was confounded by sheer rock face or winding tunnels. At one point I discovered a tunnel that angled upwards so steeply that one would need to scramble up it on all fours, and the thought of a possible exit greatly tempted me. Yet the girl was so close now, and all I would need to do was bring her to her father - or his enemies within the corporation - to ensure my advancement. And so I turned back and ventured down one last passageway, it was the most foolish choice I have ever made in my life. 

 The mouth of the passage was a thin, jagged little break in the rock like a set of dry, crumbling lips pulled back over short canine-esque teeth. I had to twist and contort myself like a circus performer to squeeze through it, and one of the jutting pieces of rock tore at my suit jacket and forced me to abandon it. 

Once past this initial challenge the walls opened up like a great gullet, or the antechamber of a lavish apartment, before shrinking again in a mockingly uncomfortable imitation of a throat. My light cast a deep red glow about the claustrophobic, enclosed passageway and only served to further enforce the idea that I was slowly lowering myself into the stomach of some great beast. 

Steeling my nerves I forced myself to venture once more into darkness. My breath quickened as the passage grew tighter and I was forced to turn sideways with my arms held above my head to continue onward and my throat strained itself with a forced set of staccato swallows that I had no ability to control. I was mere feet from Akari, and yet it may as well have been ten thousand miles.

Cold sweat trickled down the small of my back and even the red light from my lapel could not dispel the crushing darkness that pushed and prodded at the edge of my vision. Then, just as I was on the edge of panic stricken madness, the throat opened up to the stomach. 

I fell to my hands and knees, the stress of it all filling my throat, my mouth, my nose with clogging vomit and evacuating it onto the ground. My gaze grew hazy, and it was only through great effort that I remained conscious.  

It was only after I had come to my senses that I realised my hands were not resting upon stone, but on something pliable, wet, and pulsing. When I started back in horror the extent of this squelching texture become apparent to me - the red light cast forth from my lapel had camouflaged it at first, but now that I could inspect it properly I saw that the floor, the walls, even the ceiling was coated with vein ridden, vomit inducing meat. Tendrils hung from the ceiling and from wall to wall, gurgling like the intestines they were. Patches of the wall drooped downward like gravidly over pregnant bellies. I could not move. Not until my gaze fixed above one of those sickeningly bloated patches and I met the gaze of an eye with a deep golden iris and a starkly red pupil. I will never forget that eye. It haunts me in my dreams and while I am waking. When I saw that eye, I saw the recognition of a living soul entrapped in a hellish prison of flesh. 

Of what happened next I can remember only flashes. Flashes of cramped tunnels, flashes of a pure animal instinct of fear, images of an ascent across steep rock so sharp that it made blood run from my palms, my knees and my feet. When I came to my senses I rested within the wondrous embrace of cold, hard, dead metal. Somehow I had found my way to the lowest levels of the Narrows, curled up into a ball, and sobbed myself into a broken haze. 

I vowed then that I would never enter that district again, that I would tell no one of what I had seen, and that I would never fall prey to the malleability of my flesh.