Yes.
Yes sir. Yes. I understand, sir.
No sir, I do not.
I understand. I’ll keep things quiet. I still believe I would be better suited to pursue this on my own, sir. There’s a lot of factors to be bringing something new into this, and if the reading-
Yes. Yes. Yes sir. I under- yes.
Thank you sir. I’ll inform you as soon as I get an update.
Fucking prick.
* Intercepted call from a secure line, originating from northeastern Virginia and connecting with a mobile phone somewhere in Kansas, heading west.
It’s ever so dark, down in the deep. The only light is the carmine glow of the veins that warp their way into the walls on every side.
I don’t know how long I’ve been walking. An ADAPTATION procced earlier, something to do with my joints, and it’s taken the process of crawling through the dark from exhausting and agonizing to just uncomfortable- but it just keeps going. The incline is gentle, and the tunnel winds constantly, pulsing with something like a muscle spasm every few minutes- but at no point does it stop going down.
And at no point does the threat of death stop following me.
It would be comical if it wasn’t so fucking scary. It’s like watching a horror movie with a doll- one-on-one, anybody over the age of ten can pretty reliably beat the shit out a doll, but it’s the implied threat, the danger of it, the unknown, makes its presence a weight on one’s mind. It’s not about the one visible danger, it’s about all that it implies, everything it promises just out of sight- except the danger here is very much in sight.
A single orb of tightly coiled muscle rolls comfortably behind me, behind my pet blood cell, and makes sure to constantly remind me of just how many more there are imbedded in the walls all around- and just how easy it would be for them to wake up.
So I walk.
And eventually, things begin to change.
The transition is subtle, quiet enough that I actually don’t notice the change until it’s already come over the journey- but when I see it, it’s impossible not to notice it everywhere.
The ground has gotten harder.
Weird thing to notice, one might think- except for the fact that the tunnel is made out of dried blood and wet juices, always bordering on the hint of soft or slippery. When I step on what feels like a lego piece, something solid and unyielding, it’s noticeable.
I look down at it, straining my eyes and their new adaptation to see what it is I’ve stepped on. Part of me expects an old bone, some sort of proof of earlier victims of the tunnel- but no. No, it doesn’t look like bone at all.
It looks like a lego.
A dark green lego-piece, utterly alien in a world of white and red, sitting at an awkward angle as if overtaken by the growth of the tunnel in some bygone age and covered in grease and juices. It’s broken on one side, the plastic even more jagged than its points usually feel, and it looks… old.
The presence of the first one helps me to notice all the rest. Here and there, there are what look like pieces of plastic and metal, little bits and bobs that might, conceivably, once have been toys or bits of tech. The deeper in I go, the more mechanical they become- I notice the batteries of an rc car, a partially disassembled remote control with veins growing in and out of it, what looks like a speaker from an action figure hanging from the ceiling by a string of tendon. Pretty soon, the walls and floor of the tunnel have become almost as much inorganic material as they are meat, the number of muscle-balls diminishing bit by bit until I’m walking through a space that’s more wiring than sinew.
And then- light.
Not the bloody glow of veins and material, but something brighter, and somehow less organic. There’s something artificial about it, the harshness of LEDs lighting up the alien space- and not long after, I hear a hum, like an old television burning itself to produce an image.
Or a monitor.
I turn one last corner, blinking as my hyper-dilated eyes struggle to return to something approaching “normalcy”, and find the source of all the strange technological growth that has spread so far into the world.
It’s a computer.
Like, a regular one.
On the surface it just looks… normal. Old, definitely, but normal. It’s one of those home PCs, the ones from the early 90s, that you might see in an old sitcom maybe. The kind that needed AOL to boot up, and which could sometimes play flash games and LAN parties, linked up in a network of wires rather than free-running internet.
It’s sitting on a desk in… the room isn’t normal, per se, but it’s normal enough to be weird? There’s something familiar about the all-meat aesthetic, the ways in which everything around me has become almost normalized by the… fuck, nearly a day that I’ve been in here. Here, while the walls are still partially meat, they’re mostly wire and plastic, making a nest of black tubes leading to a central table. It’s no bigger than an office cubicle from the curve of the tunnel to the back wall, and the only sound is the noise that the fan of the modem makes beneath the desk, and the buzzing of the computer screen as it glows.
On the screen, there’s a black command prompt, glowing in a dramatically cheerful red rather than the traditional green.
I turn around, looking behind me at the meatball that’s followed me this whole way. It still just sits, casually threatening, in the middle of the tunnel, illuminated strangely by the glow of the monitor. My little blood cell circles around my feet, washing them in the heat of blood, but otherwise doesn’t offer any insight.
I take a deep breath, feeling the hot, ozone-charged air sting my nostrils as I drink it in.
Well. Not exactly like anything important’s changed. No way back, so just the way forward.
I turn to look at the computer, approaching the keyboard, and with large, awkward fingers, I click two letters.
‘Hi’.
The sound of the computer spins up louder, loud, enough that I worry about the fan over heating, and then-
The line breaks, centering itself in the center of the screen with a flicker and typing in a much larger font all of a sudden.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
H01!
I blink, staring at the screen. That…
Well shit, I was not expecting Yamblr’s leet-speak.
The sight of it sends me back to a very dark part of my life- namely, adolescence. In an attempt to be quirky, a bunch of teens on the internet decided to make up a bunch of different styles of writing, memes and terms and most of all whole alphabets of weirdness just to feel unique. In their defense, they kind of succeeded- words like “glomp” and “uwu” remain at least a little bit in the popular culture, and for some of us who have seen the writing of the old laws, it still sends us straight into a PTSD flashback of trying to figure out what in the hell someone is trying to say, as every other letter is replaced by a number or emoticon.
And here it is in the dark of a tunnel of flesh in an alien world, staring at me from a computer screen like an overeager adolescent.
H1 H1!!! U 7H3R3? I7’$ M3 UR FR13ND!!!! :0 <3
Translated- “Hi hi!!! U there? It’s me your friend!”, followed by a “surprised” emoji and a heart emoji.
This… this is going to be interesting.
I type back, slow and steady with my weird hands and the awkward velocity of the twitch-nerves trying to push me to go faster and faster.
Who are you?
17’S M3 Y0U KN0W M3 :(
I don’t think so. What’s your name?
1'M 7H3 [0MPU73R! 733 H33! U KN0 M3! 7H4NK Y0U F0R 4[[3P71NG MY 1NV174710N! 17’$ V3RY N1[3 70 $33 $0M30N3 N3W! 17’$ 833N 4 L0NG 71M3 :(! 1 W4$ L0N3LY!
Invitation?
MY 70Y$! 7H3Y R0LL R34L G00D, 8U7 1 M|$$ G1V1NG 7H1NG$ L3G$. $00N 1 [4N 4G41N! 7H47 W1LL 83 $0 FUN!
Why can you do it now but not before?
17 W4$N'7 71M3 Y37! 1 N33D3D MY FR13ND$ [L0$3R! 4ND N0W Y0U'R3 H3R3! 1 [4N'7 W417!
I take a deep breath. The conversation is going pretty slow- while the words on the monitor appear incredibly quickly, between my difficulty typing and the art of translating “leetspeak”, it’s not easy to keep up the dialogue. Whatever this thing is, it’s… friendly? Or under the impression that it should be friendly, maybe, like it’s operating under the assumption that we’re already friends.
But…
Are you trapped here?
1'M ]U$7 H1D1NG! $HHH! 17’$ H1D3 4ND $33K 4ND N0W 7H47 Y0U F0UND M3 4ND 1 F0UND Y0U 17’$ G01NG 70 83 $0 MU[H FUN!
D0 Y0U W4N7 70 PL4Y?
I choose my words carefully. It feels… it feels childish. It clearly knows… something about what’s going on, maybe, but it’s hard to tell exactly what, and it all seems to be filtered through the idea of being playful. The pieces of toys and technology wrapped into the walls all seem to indicate more of the same- either this thing chose those pieces, or it is those pieces, and either way, it’s important. Whatever this thing is, it’s buried here, playing “hide and seek”, seemingly in control of the “meatballs” that were wandering the outer prairie.
Is there something in charge of the sludgelings as well? Or are they “natural”, while the meatballs aren’t?
Either way, the computer, my “friend”, thinks that we’re playing a game. That could be my ticket… somewhere. If not out of here, than at least out to somewhere. Maybe it can give me something new, or something to do, or…
Something.
Either way, threatening it is only going to put me in further danger, and indulging it at least has a chance of going in a better direction.
I would love to play a game. But I’m very tired. I think I would like to go home and take a nap, and then we can play more later.
4WWW, 7H47'$ $4D! WHY $0 71R3D? W3 ]U$7 $74R73D! D0N'7 Y0U W4N7 70 F1ND 3V3RY0N3 3L$3?
1F Y0U D0N'7-
THEY’LL FIND YOU FIRST.
I blink, staring at the text.
It didn’t show up like the other ones did. The rest looks like it’s being typed almost as fast as possible, but the last line- it’s not just the leetspeak disappearing, it feels different. The words are typed out one letter at a time, as if by a force of tremendous will or focus.
They glow there, red and blocky, lit in pixelated format.
I look down at the little blood-cell at my feet, remembering the blocky 8-bit mound it crawled out of.
I look down at my hands, which are not my hands, and which number too many, and whose fingers are strange and worn over the real me, deep below.
I need to rest, I type. I’m tired and I’m scared.
Honesty.
4WWW, 0K! 17'$ 1MP0R74N7 70 G37 L07$ 0F R3$7 $0 W3 [4N H4V3 FUN L473R. ]U$7 M4K3 $UR3 Y0U D0N'7 $L33P 700 L0NG, 0R 7H3Y"LL G37 Y4!
I move to type- I need to know what they’re talking about, who they’re talking about- but before I can reach the keys, the screen has shut down, the sharpness of the hiss of electronics heralding a total darkness.
And then I hear the crunching.
It comes from behind me, from the direction of the meatball and the tunnel. The darkness has come to be near pitch-black, the glow of red fading- but then it begins to rise, louder, brighter, until everything is tinted crimson and vicious, until it’s like my eyes are bleeding.
And the bundle of meat behind me is breaking.
It has no bones to break, but the tearing and snapping sounds of the tendons are sharp enough that it sounds like crackling ceramics, like old bones breaking and crushing and changing. And it’s not the only one- from the tunnel behind it, illuminated in perfect scarlet, the sound of rolling comes, uneven surfaces falling down wet, slick surfaces as more and more of them come towards me, down to their point of origin.
And it’s not the only thing breaking.
The wires snap, copper somehow feeling wrong in this place, strange, alien and alien in a way I can’t describe- but they’re joined moments later by the cracking of plastic, the crunching of sharp glass and circuit boards in a drain disposal.
And through all of it, the glowing of the red of blood, the red of flesh, the red of warning lights and stop lights and screaming, torn-open machinery.
I step back, and my blood cell crawls up my leg, somehow swimming up the bloodflow it constantly emits to come up like a scared pup. It can’t make noise, but still it squishes and squelches against me, and despite my initial revulsion there’s no way I’m not going to hold the poor baby and keep it close.
In the hallway, the only exit, the meat continues to become something new.
Wires reach down and the humming bark of electricity joins the creaking of tendon, fragments of broken toys and old electronics clacking and cracking to form together into something. It grows and connects with the rest of the walls, the wires becoming clustered and turning to thicker pipelines of blood and electricity- leading back to the computer at the far end of the room.
And then… silence.
Slowly, something dangles down from the ceiling above, like a spider descending on a string of web.
The monitor comes back on, the command prompt in bright red illuminating the sight, and I see what has been born for what it is.
A headset.
I type a key- nothing. The prompt doesn’t respond.
No words appear.
The headset dangles there, limp on the wire.
…it said ok. “It’s important to get lots of rest”, it said. It’s… it’s trying to help. Right?
Considering the mess of wires, of black rubber and plastic and dripping red meat that currently blocks the only exit, it’s not like I have very much choice.
I reach for the headset.
My little blood-cell moves up to my waist, then to my shoulders, washing me in bright crimson- and then crawling onto my head, so that the fur and hair and feathers are washed and dripping with red. I don’t stop it. For all I know, it’ll help with the connection or some shit, and while I shudder as it moves, it is not the worst thing I have felt in the last day, not by a wide margin.
I feel the blood of my Divine Bloodling wash over me, and put on the headset.
The last thing I see before the black of the visor overtakes me is the command prompt, typing out just quickly enough to be seen before my vision is blocked.
Don’t Sleep Too Long.
And then there is a light, and I feel nothing.