Narrator (0:00)

What's up guys? We're doing a little something different here. This is a story called Mother Horse Eyes. I heard it on Creepcast with Wendigoon and Meat Canyon. This is like the entire dramatic reading. I cut it into two segments. So check it out. Enjoy it. Maybe me and David will cover it soon. I don't know, we'll see. But yeah, it's a long one. Buckle up. In the MK Ultra experiments, the CIA dosed unwitting subjects with LSD to see how they would react. What has not yet come to light is that MK Alter was an intra agency project. The CIA created new departments within the CIA and fed them steady doses of LSD and other psychoactives to see how the departments would diverge and mutate away from normal departments. Whole projects and hierarchies were created with everybody involved being more or less unwittingly under the influences of lsd. This is how the restraint bed portals and flesh interfaces were created, that is from a heavy psycho mutated hierarchy. The entire thing had to be eliminated. But the technology it created has been revolutionary. In Vietnam, the US government tried to pacify the country village by village using the Strategic Hamlet project, basically creating villages where there was no or little Viet Cong influence. They tried more extreme experiments where they completely isolated villages or groups of villages, allowing absolutely nobody to enter or exit for periods of up to four years. In some of the villages, people simply starved to death. In other, more self sufficient villages, the people managed to scrape by. It was noted that in many of the villages where this technique was tried, messianic or millenarian movements sprang up. In 16 separate incidences, villages were able to independently invent flesh interfaces and non electrical portals. And it was surmised that these villages were being collectively dosed with LSD for long periods of time. And their intellectual mutations allowed for these advances. The flesh interfaces were eventually destroyed by the North Vietnamese army at a terrible cost in life. I'm surprised they used nuclear subs in the Falklands, considering the battle's proximity to the undersea incident zone surrounding the so called Artigas portal. As I understand it, the portal was opened because of experiments taking place in the CIA's Antarctic station in the early 80s. And Falklands quickly became a center for portal research. Being underwater, the portal had an enormous incident zone and segmented whales and other undersea debris would regularly wash up on the island's shores. They found one whale that had been segmented cleanly in half by an incident zone disturbance, proving a perfect cross section of the creature they Also found hundreds of lechitinous cruciform creatures, certainly non terrestrial in origin. Anyways, if a nuclear sub had wandered into the incident zone, it would have been disastrous, but I guess they considered the risk acceptable. The Soviets designed large portions of the Ukraine's countryside as harvest populations. Basically their food and water supplies were dosed with LSD until they had achieved what the Soviets called integration. This meant that the local populations had independently invented flesh interfaces. The Soviet army would then quarantine the area and try to remove the flesh interfaces for their own use. This was usually without success and with great loss of life. Many of the soldiers and scientists were segmented, as often happens in an incident zone. So they ended up with people missing limbs, cut in half, etc. What's interesting is that the people could live for quite some time despite segmentation. This is what led the Soviets to believe that their missing body parts still existed, albeit in some unknown place. So one of the leading theories of the time was interdimensionality. Quite mistaken. Dubai probably has the highest rate of free floating non interface incidents of any major metropolitan area in the world. In one incident, a large group of migrant workers was segmented in an underground facility. Perfect cross sectional segmentation along the frontal plane. You could see their lungs working, food being digested, blood pumping on the inside of the heart, everything. They lived for almost five months in this condition. Absolutely fascinating to see in person. There is also a group of school children who were very slightly segmented. Just ends of fingers and bits, bits of the calves and such. Hardly fatal wounds, yet they all died within two months. Some showed signs of intellectual mutation. There are no known flesh interfaces in Dubai. However, it is surmised that the architecture is actually based on interface geometry and carries some latent interface like power. Mass segmentations remain one of the most mysterious aspects of the interfaces. They seem to show that the interface do indeed concentrate on flesh, living up to their name. We look at Elizabeth Bathory as an example of pre LSD enlightenment. That is somebody seeming to attempt to build a flesh interface before the invention of lsd. How can this be explained? Perhaps she ingested some ergot or some other naturally occurring psychotropic chemical. Or perhaps her mind was simply attuned to whatever intellectual processes need to occur to invent a flesh interface. The Book of Revelations is also considered to be a description of a flesh interface, especially the description of New Jerusalem. My problem with this is that it's all speculative. It's like when modern psychologists diagnose historical figures. I'm uncomfortable with this level of speculation I will always regard the first instance of a flesh interface to have occurred in Tribletna 1944. The geologic disturbances, partial tunnels, so called interdimensionality and wealth of clearly segmented bodies leave no doubt of its existence. The Soviets have documented this. Basically, when you look at the stories of Elizabeth Bathory's behavior, it seems like she is trying to build a flesh interface. But it is known that in order to invent a flesh interface, one must be under the influence of LSD for extended periods. As LSD hadn't been invented during her life, it probably is just a coincidence. Still a tantalizing theory though. Obviously I can't define a flesh interface in terms of purpose or composition or mechanism. I can only list the various phenomena which are related to them. Chief among these is the creation of an incident zone wherein the objects are spontaneously segmented. That is parts of the objects simply disappear, yet the objects continue to behave as if the missing parts are still present. Also you see complex tunnels created in the earth. These have been termed ant farms. In undersea interfaces you get chitinous cruciform organisms. These sui generis organisms are thought to be the result on evolutionary processes which took place in an environment other than Earth. This is speculation, but in this case I agree with it. Then there have been the giant metallic cylinders which appear and experience continuous spontaneous segmentation. These are usually at least 10 meters in diameter and can get much larger and only occur in very large interfaces, I.e. portals. Beyond this, the phenomena are too various to mention and different for each interface. Many people think that a portal is simply a large flesh interface. This is true, a portal is a large flesh interface. But it is also more than that. A portal is, as the name implies, a way of sending objects between the portal's site and wherever the various locations that have been found beyond the portals are located. That is the so called alien sister cities. Portals are usually but not always accompanied by the large fluctuating metallic cylinders. The largest above water portal that I know of occurred in Novaya Zemla and existed for several weeks before it was destroyed by the Russian so called Tsar Bomba. In this case, the metallic cylinders were miles high and covered with features rarely seen on other cylinders. Blinking lights, nodules, so called antenna. They took on a very artificial appearance, that is they seemed to be constructed technology rather than naturally occurring phenomena. Are the cylinders themselves artifacts being sent through the portals? Or are they phenomena created by the flesh interfaces in the way a mushroom cloud is created by a nuclear explosion? This is unclear I wish I could show you guys the pictures of the Novaya Zemla cylinders. They truly were beautiful. Rising miles into the clear Arctic sky like great alien towers, tinged blue by the vastness of the distance involved. Though it was certainly necessary to destroy them. And we owe the Soviets a great debt for their tireless efforts to collapse the interface. I sometimes wish they were still there. At least then there'd be something. Some evidence. In response to what the CIA had accomplished with their Antarctic station in Artigas, the Soviets built a larger station in Novaya Zemla in the Arctic. 30,000 prisoners and an exceptionally pure gas concentration created a flesh interface which went through all seven stages in less than 13 minutes and became a full fledged portal. Within a day. The typical fluctuating metallic cylinders were visible and within three days they were extending miles into the sky. And the Soviets quickly realized that the portal was growing out of control. In previous instances, they had simply bombed the site from the air. But in this case, the enormous cylinders and attendant incident zone extending into the edge of space prevented this. As well as missile strikes, there was also an exceptionally large lateral incident zone around the portal, with segmentation occurring miles out from the site. Alarmed by the zone's uncontrolled growth and the growing underground tunnels, AKA ant farms, the Soviets worked feverishly to construct a hydrogen bomb of unprecedented power, which could be detonated from outside the incident zone and still collapse the portal. The steady rate of growth in the incident zone provided them with an exact deadline, which they managed to meet with only two hours to spare. Any later and the bomb could not have been placed so as to collapse the interface. In short, the world came within two hours, being subjected to an uncontrolled flesh interface and perhaps the end of civilization as we know it. Before the portal was collapsed, however, the Soviets gained first hand knowledge of one of the so called sister cities. In other words, somebody had gone into the portal and come back. I've always found Lisa's dreams to be a good starting place when trying to understand the psychological effects of travel. Lisa was a nine year old girl sent through the Groom lake interface in 1975. The Groomlake interface connects to the so called sister city technically persistent locusts known as the hanging temples. She stayed there for five days of normal time, but only 48 seconds of beyond time, a marked discrepancy. Upon returning, she did not recall anything beyond becoming drowsy for a moment. She slept well that night and in the morning she recounted a dream to the doctors before dying later in the day. A direct transcript of the audio from her interview. It was spring and it had been raining all day. But the rain stopped just before it was going to be sunset. So all the clouds were purpley and the sky was really orange and the grass was all wet with rain. And there were fireflies all around, like all in the sky, way up in the sky, big ones. And me and my grandma went out to these hills, Way out past the edge of town and under the hills there were people sleeping. Not in caves, they were buried under the hills. The people were asleep, but they were hugging each other. Families like moms and dads and little kids just passed. It would be easy to say the Soviets discovered the secrets of survivable travel because they were more ruthless, more willing to sacrifice innocent lives. But there was really no lack of ruthlessness on the part of the CIA. It was really just a matter of approach. The Soviets approached the mystery of the flesh interfaces the same way they approached their space program. The first humans in space, the so called lost cosmonauts who were never officially acknowledged, were just ordinary people culled from the gulags, with no more control over their mission than Laika the dog. The Americans, on the other hand, started with professional men, usually from the military. Likewise, when it was discovered that objects and even animals which entered the flesh interfaces occasionally returned unharmed, the Americans began training men to enter the interfaces. Because they culled their men from certain military ranks, they were all of similar ages. The Soviets, however, used prisoners who had a much wider age range. And so they were able to discover the essential correlation. The younger the person was, the more likely they were to survive travel, the longer they would survive. After travel, they discovered that 20 somethings were much more likely to survive, albeit in a horribly altered state, than older people. They discovered that people in their early 20s fared better than those in their late 20s. Teenagers fared even better. So despite all moral compunction, it was really all a matter of time before they sent a child. And it was only after the first round of children went through that they gained any idea of what was on the other side. Until we found the village, we had suspected that the detectors were just props, just toys given to us by the CIA guys to reassure us. Nobody trusted the spooks. Three days through the jungle and these detectors had not detected a fucking thing. But before we even saw the first hut, the needles on the detectors started moving in unison. If they were phony toys, it was a cool little special effect. The needles swayed back and forth and all the little metal boxes let out this spooky sound, all in unison, like a school choir. Very weird. We turned them off as instructed. We treated every Vietnamese as combatants and killed them all. There wasn't any resistance, though. A few had weapons, but most were unarmed. None fought back. They didn't even run. They were just sitting around lazing in the sun. And we shot them where we found them. Grim work and very weird. That probably spooked us out more than the detectors. It was like they were waiting to die. After clearing the village, we didn't know what to do. So we turned on one of the detectors and wandered around to see what was up. The detector started going nuts all around one of the bigger huts in the middle of the village. We had already cleared it, but we went in again. There was a big altar inside with candles and Buddhas and gold signs with dink writing and shit. We figured that maybe one of the Buddha statues was setting the detectors off. But no. The hut was very hot and muggy, even by the incredibly humid standards of Vietnam. It was incredibly, incredibly humid in there. Even the Buddha statues were sweating. Their faces were literally coated with drops of moisture. Everybody noticed that there was something weird going with the air. There was something off about the pressure. So we just tossed everything, picked all the shit up and tossed it out the hut. Sure enough, we picked up the big platform that held the altar. There was something. Under was a pit made of flesh, maybe 5ft across and going down about 20ft before curving out of sight. When I say made of flesh, I mean it looked like the inside of somebody's throat. Wet, reddish flesh looking stuff. We had heard of them building tunnels, but this was. We really couldn't even understand what we were looking at. I was just breathing. The flesh kind of rippled and this hot air came out and it felt and smelled like somebody breathing right on your face and enough to make you sick. They told us we would know it when we saw it. Well, we saw it and we knowed it. We radioed in the coordinates and got the fuck out of there. Encasement was certainly not something we were expecting. It really changed our whole perspective on what exactly was occurring. We thought that the flesh interfaces were just like pipes that went from one location to another, perhaps extra dimensionally or by some other magic. But when the first subject came back encased, we realized that. Well, I'm not sure what we realized. We realized for the thousandth time in our dealings with the flesh interfaces that we were dealing with something really beyond us. That's why I called it magic. They were so far beyond Our understanding it was basically like meddling with some kind of Black Magic. The first subject to come back encased was an 8 year old girl we had named Jingles. We started naming the kids dog names to try to depersonalize them, to assuage the guilt. This was done by the recommendation of the CIA psychiatrist, but it didn't work very well. We all still felt like shit, but what choice did we have? Couldn't we just ignore the flesh interfaces and not study them? Perhaps, but you must realize that the Soviets were also studying them. That changed the whole equation. If they. Well, the ethical issues have been debated to death. What's done is done. We dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, we gave those blankets to the Indians and we sent those kids through those portals. Now it's all just a part of history. Anyways, we sent Jingles into the flesh interface and an object returned two minutes later. Which is a pretty long time for an interface. It was a large organic sac lined with veins vaguely resembling a human lung, about 4ft long. We x rayed it and sawed the skeleton inside and cut it open. Sure enough, Jingles was inside, naked and covered with blood, with no hair on her head. There was an umbilical cord attached to her belly button which was attached to some sort of placenta. We had a problem with the surgeons trying to harm her. It was later realized that her blood, its blood, the blood from the sack, had high concentrations of an exotic LSD analog. It was getting absorbed through the skin. The placenta was like an LSD factory pumping out millions of doses. This particular blend made people pretty violent, so we had to put on containment suits. Jingle's skin was flawless, like newborns. No wrinkles on the back of her neck, no wrinkles on her palms, except the major ones. She had the form of an eight year old girl, but seemed a lot newer. We did MRIs on her bone plates and found that they were highly underdeveloped, as if she was a newborn. We wondered is this really Jingles or some kind of clone? What sort of apparatus could have possibly produced this clone? And why? After a day of observation, she awoke. We weren't sure if her mind was still there. Perhaps she had been wiped clean. So we waited, asking her questions. At first her behavior was like that of an infant, just smiling and gurgling and clasping her hands. It was pretty eerie seeing that kind of behavior from an eight year old girl. Really it was pretty eerie looking at her at all. Her skin was so pure and glowing. She looked like an absolute angel. I we well, anyways, after a while she started babbling, saying little phrases. In a matter of hours she seemed to progress through the various stages of development, her sentence structure and awareness becoming more and more sophisticated. As soon as she could understand sentences, we started questioning her again. Who was she? She said her name. She knew her past. This wasn't just a blank clone. This may or may not have been the original girl, but she seemed to have the same mind as the original. So then we asked her the question that we wanted to know. The question that had plagued us for years. The question that had led us, in the face of all humanity and morality, to send a child into a living apparatus of death. What did you see? What's on the other side? Her expression grew thoughtful. She was such a thoughtful, bright girl. We chose her for her intelligence. So young and bright. We just threw her. Anyways, she thought about the question and it seemed then that we would finally get an answer. A real answer. I remember the sense of anticipation in the room. It was like nothing I've ever felt before or since. Remember, I quit the program that day. I was never able to question another subject. Anyways, she said to us inside the chamber, I started to feel drowsy. Then everything changed. And I knew what I saw. I had seen it before. I said to myself, this is like the room in Grammys house. The quiet room. We asked her what she meant by this. She replied with these words, her final words. Before she simply stopped living and sat there dead with her eyes still on us. She said, come unto these yellow sands. In explaining our cruelty, which I admit was quite beyond the scope of all humanity, I feel I must remind you of how we lost the war. We lost the war in the cruelest way imaginable. Island after island fell and the enemy drew closer and closer. More and more bombs fell on our cities. Food grew more and more scarce. People starved. House burned. People burned. Children burned. We were punished by our own sense of dignity, by her own inability to admit inevitable and total defeat. It was like watching a sword slowly being sunk into your chest, millimeter by millimeter. But you refused to cry out, refuse to whimper or beg for mercy. And there is nothing you can do but watch the metal disappear into your weeping flesh. By the end of 1944, it was clear that both Japan and Germany were doomed, barring some divine intervention. Yet the stories we knew from childhood told us that we had been saved by divine intervention before, when the fleets of Kublai Khan were at our shores, moving from island to island, conquering and raping Until a miraculous typhoon sent their ships to the bottom of the ocean. Though we were modern men and trained in Western science, we still believed that there was some sacred destiny in store for the Japanese people. And we kept an eye out for something, anything, which hinted of the divine. Two intriguing pieces of news had come to us via Germany develops which suggested that perhaps the tide of war could turn suddenly. However, both were ominous. One was that America was developing a superweapon, a bomb which could level entire cities, which used the latent power of the atom, unleashing the very forces which held existence together. We assured ourselves that this was American propaganda, that no such weapon actually existed. But our scientists acknowledged that it was theoretically possible. The second piece of the news was more puzzling. It was said that a Swiss scientist had synthesized a chemical which, like the American nuclear technology, could unleash latent forces, this time the forces of the mind. This chemical was said to fuse the various disparate areas of the mind and allow for incredible insights. Apparently, teams working under the influence of this chemical for long periods of time were capable of inventing techniques and devices previously unheard of. By the end of 1944, various high ranking Germans were slipping out of Germany like rats from a sinking ship, often trying to fund their escapes by selling various pieces of artwork, technology, intelligence, etc. It was from one of these that we obtained an enormous supply of this wonder chemical, lsd, which was supposed to be secret even from Germany's allies. Along with a chemical, we were given a piece of news which was positively tantalizing, given the position we were in. According to our contact, experiments with LSD had been conducted at the Treblinka extermination camp. A group of prisoners was given the drugs for a period of several months. And the results were so impressive that somehow the prisoners were able to convince the camp leaders to take the drug as well. Soon the entire camp hierarchy was taking the drug and working together on a new device that was some sort of destructive radar which could bring down planes as easily as ordinary radar found them. It was said to be powerful enough to slice bombers right in half. Of course, we found this news hard to believe. Nazi death camp commanders working side by side with Jewish prisoners to invent a magical radar. It was utterly fantastical. Our good sense told us to ignore it, and yet how could we? The Americans had already taken back the Philippines. Soon they would take Iwo Jima and then Okinawa and all the home islands. We were facing the end of the Japanese as a free race, perhaps the end of all Japanese existence. The Germans would have it easy compared to us. Many Americans were German and ordered origin. There is a blood affinity between the two countries. This did not exist for us. The Americans would burn our cities and rape our women and enslave us, make us servants like their nigiro. We would be bred with the whites until we had become some degenerate half caste. Japanese culture would crumble. The stories of our childhoods would be forgotten. We were watching a sword disappear into our hearts and we were desperate for some kind of divine intervention. So in late 1944, a glass jar of LSD crystals, enough for several million doses, was taken aboard a submarine and slipped under the COVID of the sea back to the home islands. We were looking for divine grace. What we found was a hell beyond our darkest dreams of destruction. Hello friends. Thank you for your interest in my post. I wanted to apologize to the community at large for posting them to threads whose relationship to their content is at best tangential. I simply had nowhere else to post my information where anybody would read it. Previously, I was operating a website wherein my information laid out in a rather straightforward manner. I was quite convinced that the undeniable truth of this information would attract attention on its own accord. I was quite sure that somehow this grand truth would shine out as a beacon and resonate with receptive people and quickly become widespread. As I recall, my best month brought about 400 visitors and a total of 4 non spam comments. 75% of these recommended psychiatric intervention. So here we find ourselves. I am attempting to use the techniques of fiction and suspense to hopefully generate interest in this information. Your subreddit furthers the same, and I sincerely thank you for creating it. I should clarify that this information is not fiction, nor is it true. It is a mix of things which happened and things which almost happened, things which were and things which could have been. You must understand that the present moment in which we exist is simply a nexus from which trillions of possible past and possible futures branch out. The important thing to realize is that these unreal past and unrealized futures are related to each other. By examining what might have been, we can come to understand what might come to be. I am writing about what has never been and what must never be. Unfortunately, our generation has been given a special burden. We are doomed, as the apocryphal Chinese curse has it, to live in interesting times. Soon technological advances in the field of information technology and bioengineering will fundamentally reshape human existence. There are a number of possible outcomes, and I believe that most of them will result in the human race entering unending era of absolute slavery. As a free species, we have seen totalitarianism before, we have destroyed it. But when it arises again, aided by advanced information and biological technology, it will have a new and unprecedented ability to envelop the entire Earth and place humanity in an unalterable state of total mental and physical slavery that will last for uncounted millennia till the Earth becomes uninhabitable. Not only do I believe that this outcome is possible, I believe that it is overwhelmingly likely. Out of all the trillions of possible futures arrayed before us, 99.9999% of them result in this outcome. As Christ said, wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it, but narrow is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. We must find and enter the narrow gate, but it will not be easy. In order to find it, we must sort through the many possible pasts to find the few possible futures which result in a humanity free to live and die as humans and not as an unholy agglomeration of of mindless flesh. Unfortunately, as we fight against the forces of slavery and death, it will be precisely our instincts towards the preservation of freedom and life that will lead us to destruction. In short, we live in precarious times. I want to make clear that while this post shows clear and appalling signs of megalomania, I am actually aware that I am not a prophet or an expert. I am a 30 something American male without the benefit of a college education or stable job. Sadly, I have spent most of my life drunk. My posts will contain a number of historical errors, both intentional and unintentional, as well as bad spelling, bad grammar and laughably overwrought prosecutor. Readers with a proper education will easily see through my attempts erudition. In short, I have no proper formal qualifications for the task I have set out for myself, but I have personally experienced the intellectual mutations of which I write. Through repeated self experimentation I have fractured the time state of my brain and now it exists in an ever shifting state between various pasts which didn't happen. As such, I have been given what I believe is a special insight into our possible futures. They are dark. The shadows of past atrocities pass and overlap with the shadows of future atrocities. Time is short. Recently I have been beset with a persistent creativity that seems to grow stronger as the days go by. I fear this state is unsustainable. Perhaps eventually this productive mania will turn into an unproductive psychosis. And soon, on a larger scale, mankind's productivity will turn into its own sort of psychosis. Billions of years ago, the so called primordial soup arranged itself into a self replicating form which multiplied and flourished and divaricated into countless species. From our vantage point in the present, this singular moment of origin has become lost in the mists of time. Equally obscure to us is the future singularity towards which we are heading. The endpoint which all the countless species are once again reintegrated into a new and singular form. A new abomination. We are on the verge, all of us. Times are dire. We are about to be gathered again into the arms of the mother to become one flesh with her. The mother who gathers lost children. The mother I have seen in dark spaces since I was a little child, Back when I called her the mother with horse eyes. We are about to meet her again. We are about to be unborn. When you're hanging out with a tribe of Nazi acid heads, magical space pussy doesn't even register on the weirdo meter. I mean, they talk about so much weird shit and so much of it was total bullshit that I didn't pay any fucking attention to was the 60s. Talking about magical space pussies was like asking somebody how their day went. It was just conversation to me, but to them it wasn't. That was a strange time in my life. I had spent the last six months going from commune to commune, just checking them out. They were all bullshit. Every one of them was just some guy on a power trip and a bunch of women who had grown up with bad fathers hanging on his every word, hoping he would solve all their problems. That's the only way the commune system worked. The guy got control of the women and the women attracted a few guys to the manual labor. But in the end, it was basically just a new system of pimping. I mean, I'm from Brooklyn, I've seen pimping. These chicks had tried to escape society and just gotten themselves pimped out. It was tragic, but not too tragic for me to give a shit about it. So I went out to Death Valley. Why did I go there? Why does anybody. Because it has a cool name. If it was called some Scorpions and a bunch of fucking rocks, which is what it actually is, nobody would go. I had decided I was done with counterculture. I was done with the regular culture. I was done with it all. I would go where no one would bother me and just try to figure myself out, get A little peace and quiet. A month later, the Mason family moved in next door. For a while it was just a nice little guy named Paul and some girls living a few miles from my little shack seemed harmless. Then the whole family came in. Charlie too. They had already committed the murders. At this point it was big news. But nobody knew who did it. I surely didn't connect it to the band of weirdos next door. They seemed too stupid to pull off anything newsworthy. Just another bullshit commune. Once Charlie got there, the family seemed to spend most of their time driving their dune buggies around, pretending to be the fucking Africa Corps. I mean, Charlie would put a helmet on with a swastika and lead them in maneuvers. I had never met a racist Nazi hippie before. There was a first time for everything. Some of them even talked about Uncle Adolf and how he knew the score, how he should have won the war. I was a mechanic in the army, so I helped him out with the buggies and got to know them a little slowly. Their little philosophy trickled down onto me. They thought America was on the verge of an apocalyptic race war. Blacks on white, Helter skelter, the Watts riot in every city. That part actually seemed pretty plausible. I mean, you have to understand, in 1969, the country had been getting weirder and weirder, more and more violent every year. Nobody was quite sure when it would end. Nobody knew that in the 70s the counterculture would just kinda Peter into a bunch of fucking James Taylor albums. They said that they had come to the desert to find a hideout so they would be safe while the Helter Skelter race war was going on. They said that somewhere out in the desert there was a bottomless pit full of wonders and treasures. In the Bible, Revelation speaks of the tree of Life, which bears 12 kinds of fruit, one for every month. They said this tree was growing inside the bottomless pit and would give them all the food they wanted while they waited out the war. When it was over, they said they would emerge and Charlie would rule the world as the new Christ. So that part was a little less plausible. And then I started hearing about the magical space vagina. I had become friends with Paul, who was actually a nice guy who just wanted to fuck the girls and get stoned and didn't really get into the whole Nazi thing. He said that they were searching for the entrance to the bottomless pit. He said that entrance would be made of flesh growing out of the rocks like a giant pussy, so big you could stroll right in. I told him. He thought about pussy Way too much. But he was serious. He said that the technology to turn rocks into flesh was from outer space, and its secrets had been taught to Charlie by Uncle Adolf. Until then, I thought that Uncle Adolf was their name for Hitler. Slowly I learned more. I started to realize that they were talking about somebody who was still alive. Somebody they actually knew. They told me he was coming soon. This kind of psychological mirroring was exploited in the design of the flesh interfaces. When a human body is embedded in an interface, the independent, I.e. non human interface glands produce massive amounts of LSD, which cause intellectual mutations I.e. time fracturing along several dozen axes. Meanwhile, independent hormone regulators produce an emotional oscillation between two euphoria and terror. Thus, we have the typical sound of an interface altering waves of giggling and screaming that move through the interface population running along the length of the interface. As the hormones travel along the independent conduits, these successive waves of giggling and screaming create a steady rhythm that washes over the traveler as they move through the interface. Neutral empathetic responses Mirroring Prepare the traveler's body for the process of embrace. When I was little, they took Mommy away, put me with new mommy in a smelly dark house. They said she was a real person, but I knew she wasn't. They had made her. Her face was made from pieces of animal. Pig cheeks, hairy goat jaw, old horse eyes. They sewed her together badly and the seams were crusty. I hated her. Real mommy called me from underground. I opened the attic window at sundown and let the spring breeze flow in. I heard her song floating on the cool air, Soft singing from the grave. Watching the flesh interface process known as embrace is kind of like watching those Japanese subway groping videos. That was honestly the first thing I thought of when I watched it. But of course I wasn't going to put that in the official report. You ever seen those videos? Oh, you wouldn't admit it if you had, right? It's a whole genre over there. Not the most progressive stuff in terms of gender equality, but compelling nonetheless. The video starts with a woman standing in the subway, minding her own business. When some guy starts feeling her up, she protests demeanorily and attempts to deflect his roaming hands. He persists. Other men on the subway, perhaps sensing her weakness, join in the groping. A sort of group madness takes over the subway occupants. The men are transformed from ordinary travelers into agglomerated masses of arms and hands and fingers, grabbing every part of the woman's body. The woman's attempts at protecting her personal space are always Absurdly ineffectual. And soon she is divested of her clothing. Depending on the video subgenre, a variety of acts ensues, most of which surely violate local transportation. Statues embrace is kind of like that. That combined with a school of piranha stripping a live cow of its fl. Lying in the hold listening to the bombardment. There is no sleep. The booming of the guns travel through the shivering metal of the ship. Our hour after hour without end. The arsenal of democracy rains down on the tiny island. What could it be like for the Japs huddled in their bunkers, surrounded, doomed. Do they know they have no hope? Do they expect death? Do they wish for death? The island is death, waiting for them. Ancient, waiting since before they were born. Thousands of young men have crossed the vast oceans to come to her, following paths they could have never foreseen. Thousands of young lives will converge on her shores. Convergence an end. After three days of round the clock bombardment, a clear and bright morning whispers through the hold about problems with the shells. Many of them never exploded, disappeared in the air. There have been stories of bombers being cut in half, of bomb crews emerging limbless from their planes. What is on the island? Some new kind of weapon, Something the Japanese have been saving until now. Just talk. The men feel the death out there, waiting on the island. The landing vehicles ride through the waves and the marines climb out onto the beaches of ash. An alien surface crumbling under their boots. There is no fire. No sound but the motors and the clinking of gear. And the sergeant shouting, urging them on. No movement from the interior. Then screams. Bloody stumps. Men cut in half. But still no fire. How is there no fire? More men screaming. Groups of men on the ground, howling. Bright red lumps where limbs have been. How? No signs of the Japs. No fire, no shells. More vehicles land. The beaches become a crowded, screaming nightmare. There's something here. Something beyond their understanding. Invisible. Killing at will. Is it the island itself? A few men managed to advance up the steep beaches and across the rocks. But soon they were cut apart as well. Other men follow and advance farther. They have been trained to advance. Take the beach forward, always forward. Slowly the men find their way farther and farther into the island interior. Through horrible trial and error, they begin to understand. They don't speak of their discovery, they don't believe it. But their overwhelming will to go forward and their overwhelming fear of death teach them what their minds cannot accept. Teach them a lesson about the island. They notice tracks through the ash and rock where there is no grass. These tracks are not foot trails, but Deep tracks carved at strange angles, striated like dry streams. Places where it seems the ground is simply missing. They realize they must avoid these tracks. If they step onto them or let any part of themselves pass over them, that part will disappear, whether it is their fingers or feet or limbs or even their heads. Sometimes parts of their bodies disappear, even when they don't cross the tracks. And they realize that there are unseen tracks through the air, invisible boundaries they must not cross. If they lose a part of their bodies, the blood does not flow. But there is pain. Pain beyond flames or knives or bullets. Pain unbearable, unholy, inhuman. There are screams all around them of men who have accidentally run afoul of the invisible power. There is no time to understand this, to reason it out. They simply adapt, moving carefully, holding out blades of wild grass or shirts or gear, probing, waiting for part of the object to disappear, then stopping, testing for a way forward. Sometimes they find it. Sometimes they are forced to turn back. In less than an hour, they have forgotten entirely about the artillery and snipers and bayonets. There are no soldiers, only entrances to empty bunkers, abandoned pieces of artillery, some cut in half, but no enemy. They are playing a new game now, taught to them by some unseen teacher. Playing it with total concentration. Playing and winning. The Marine wounded with their strange, unbleeding wounds are taken away. Their screams fade. Orders from command are unchanged. Take the island. So they move forward, up towards Mount Suribachi. The mountain is shaped like a bull, a dead volcano. They approach by various paths, each man following another. Like a narrow path of safety. Makeshift markers are set up to show their boundaries. A Marine turns and sees, floating like a butterfly, a severed human arm. It turns and floats away and disappears altogether. Minutes later, a disembodied pair of legs scramble past. The Marines curse and speculate and even giggle, but keep moving forward. There is no time to understand, they explain, Expected to spend weeks taking the island. Now it seems they could have it in a couple of hours. A shot rings out. The first shot sends the confusion of the landing. A Marine is firing at the mountain. Others peer through their binoculars and spy a man sitting on the rim of the mountain, Simply sitting alone. J Just a vague shape. Snipers are called in, and they fire on him. But the island's air seems to swallow the bullets. The man is untouched. They press forward. The deadly tracks wind around them, growing more numerous. Some of the men find themselves at dead ends. One Marine slips and disappears entirely. Not so much as a shout. They come to the foot of the mountain. It is small, but Rugged and steep, and the lone man sits over them, looking down on them. They hear the sounds now, coming from the other side of the ridge, coming from within the giant bowl of the mountain. Human voices, many of them, thousands. The sounds of laughter, giggling, cackling and howling. Laughter like a wonderful party where somebody is telling a hilarious story. The Marines listen to it, dumbfounded. Slowly, laughter fades. There is a new sound, strange rushing roar that quickly it breaks apart into discreet sounds. Screams, shouts, gasps, weeping. Terror. A sound rises and rises, and the Marines shudder. This too, fades, and the laughter returns. So these two sounds trade places, over and over, fading in and out above the sounds of the waves. A Marine trains his binoculars on the mountain again. The man is still sitting there, Japanese, wearing a uniform. His head is floating several feet above his body. The body is in several pieces, with lines of sunshine between them. His face, sweat dripping over the smooth eyelids, shows no emotion. Slowly he raises his hand as if to wave to them, and his fingers float away from his palm. They crawl up the mountain, bare hands on sharp volcanic rock. The sun beats down on them. It's a grueling test. The island has a secret that it doesn't want to reveal. They draw close to the man at the top of the mountain, keeping their guns trained on him. He has no weapons. His body is fragmented, like an image in a broken mirror. Various pieces floating without connection. The brightness of the sky shining between them. The blood of his insides bright red. His head is like a balloon, floating several feet over the rest of him. Hello, America. The head calls, breaking into a sickly smile. The whites of the eyes are clustered with red hemorrhages. Sweat rolls down the face. The Marines don't know how to respond. They ask if he's armed. The question strikes one of them as funny, and he giggles. A tide of giggling comes from the other side of the ridge. Behind the fragmented man, the giggling turns to screaming. What's going on here? You alone? A Marine asks. The man doesn't seem to understand. One of the Marines tries. His basic Japanese man makes a sour face. No, Nippon. Korea. Korea person, the man says, and a disembodied hand points to a nearby fragment of his chest. I Christian, the man says. He pulls a necklace out of his shirt. On the end of it is a small metal cross. A tiny suffering Jesus gleams in the sun. The Marine tries English again. What's happening here? The devil came here. What? The soldiers had built a gate. The child with the command. I don't understand. A wide smile splits the Korea man's face. He lets out a laugh and the smile flees and suddenly he is weeping. His emotions seem to follow the giggles and screams that come from inside the mountain. The Marines feel it too, a strange urge to laugh, followed by a harrowing fear. The sound beyond the ridge rises, the screams becoming higher and louder. A wave of manic giggling joins the screaming so that both sounds fill the air at once. An electric feeling touches the skin on the Marines arms. They find their minds filling with strange dark thoughts. Somewhere in a castle in Japan lies a mad God Emperor who has sent his men across the ocean to defend his glorious empire with their blood. On the other side of the world lies a great humming factory called America, the heart of an empire of commerce which once forced Japan to join the world in trade. Machines and flesh now flow along tendril like courses, delivering goods and death ensnaring the globe. The sun goes dark like a light switch turning off. The Marines instinctively duck, then look up and gasp. Above them, extending miles into the sky, is an enormous metallic cylinder filling the sky, blocking out the sun. It spins slowly above them, pieces of it flickering and disappearing like the image in a broken movie projector. In a day filled with madness, they find themselves confronted with something wholly beyond their capacity for surprise. They simply mutter soft curses and get closer to the ground. The earth seems to tremble with the sound of the screaming and laughing, which swirls like a storm all around them. Somewhere near the beach, a Marine pats another Marine on the back, interrupting a stunned gawking, and shouts something into his ear. A second Marine pats the man in front of him and the message goes up the line like this until it reaches the Marine talking to the fractured man. Pull back. They are to withdraw from the island. The men do not question the order for a moment. They turn and crawl away from the Korean. Below them, the ashen island flashes with pieces of sunlight that manage to slip through the flickering cylinder. When they are almost at the foot of the mountain again, the man stands up and shouts something over the hideous screaming. The Marines cannot hear it and would not understand it anyway. The rough translation being the devil took Jesus went to the mountain to show him all the kingdoms of the world. Glory if you fall down and worship me, saying I will give it all to you. Many people believe that Michael Jackson died to Propofol. Not so. He was murdered. He had actually been taking Propofol nightly since around 1980, not in order to make himself sleep, but to suppress REM sleep. After several months of REM sleep suppression, the user becomes receptive. In other words, they enter the same state achieved by prolonged continuous immersion in aerosol lsd. The brain can physically restructure itself simply through thought. By reordering the thought, one can physically reorder the brain. LSD or long term Propofol use makes the brain's neural structure malleable. High energy rays from outer space are able to penetrate the body. And these can lead to random mutations and cancers. And sometimes they lead to changes that are not random at all. Changes which have been intentionally programmed changes designed to bring about civilization level transformations. Michael Jackson was unaware of all of this. He, he merely knew that Propofol allowed him to enter a sort of waking dream state of heightened creativity. The side effects were horrifying paranoia and obsession. But he felt that he was strong enough to endure these side effects. The success of Thriller seemed to vindicate his theories about Propofol. And unfortunately he was damned by his own success. So how did he die? Through the lyrics of another part of me and the vegetable part of wannabe Startin something. It was quite clear that he had become receptive. And Nero altered in line with Master Design 9. But he was considered to be minimal threat and even perhaps an asset until his mounting financial problems made him a liability. He was terminated, though I'm not sure of the exact means. I suppose it's time to tell you what happened inside the magical space pussy. You can believe me or not, what do I care? I'm the guy who's been inside the magical space pussy. My life has been pretty much downhill since then. I mean fuck Neil Armstrong, what did he see? Bunch of gray rocks, big fucking deal. I saw Cooch growing out of the side of a canyon top that NASA ya tang drinking cocksuckers. Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah, Uncle Adolf. So I was living in Death Valley, hanging out with the Manson family and Charlie kept mentioning this guy, Uncle Adolf. And I figure he's talking about Hitler because he's sort of into this white supremacy thing. But then I started realizing that he's talking about a guy who's still alive. Then one day the guy showed up. They asked me to come over to their cabin and this old guy was sitting there. White hair, deep tan, lined face, pale eyes. He introduced himself as Adolf and he's got a German accent. He made no secret of the fact that he was an ex Nazi. This made me nervous. That's kind of something you keep under your hat. And he said he found Charlie at Berkeley, that Charlie was perfect for my purpose. I asked what his purpose was. He said testing I kinda shrugged because I didn't really give a shit about his little coy answer. And I got up to leave when this mongoloid motherfucker they called Clem punched me straight in the face. And suddenly I was on my ass. There were a couple girls there, and they jumped on me and held me down and tied my hands behind my back. If I had known what they had done to Sharon Tate, I would have been unspeakably terrified. But as it was, I was merely really, really scared. They tossed me into the back of the dune buggy and drove out into the desert. It was midday and the sky was just one giant glare. They drove for over an hour, and eventually they got me out and hauled me down into this deep, sandy aurora and they started marching me down it. They had put wooden stakes under the ground at various points. And when we came to them, they seemed to be really careful to always stay in between the stakes. Later, they had chains tied between the stakes. And we all had to go under the chains like some kind of obstacle. Of course, I didn't know what to make of it. I had a lot to process at the time. I started to notice that the rock walls of the Uroya were abnormal. There were strange strations through the rock and what looked like the cross sections of giant insect tunnels. I had never seen rocks like that. The whole thing was just very alien. Then I started to hear the screaming up ahead. I could hear people's voices. Thousands of voices, all of them screaming and howling at once. Slowly, incredibly, the screaming changed into a kind of laughter and insane laughter. Giggles and chuckles and titters. I wondered if it was in my head if I was so scared that my mind had cracked or. Or if they had dosed me with LSD or something. Finally, we went around a bend in the arroyo and, well, there it was. They said it would be a pussy. And I guess it kind of looked like one. Maybe after some kind of drastic dildo mishap. It was just flesh, wrinkled, lobbed, flabby flesh growing out of the rock like mold or something. It had hair and pores and freckles. Some of it was pale, some of it was black. It was taller than me, and in the center there was an opening. Pink and wet, just like a vagina. The kraut told me he wanted me to see its level of development. He took a revolver from one of the girls and pointed it at my face, told me to walk inside. So it was either get shot or go into the big mangled pussy. It was honestly a tough choice. There was something really fucked up, completely not right about that thing. Something in my bones told me not to go into it, not to go near it, to just take the bullet in the head. But I figured maybe I could go in just a little bit and then wait for them to leave and get the hell out of there. Not a great plan, but the best I could come up with. So I went in. The entrance was just barely wide enough to slip into it. All I could see was glistening pink flesh ahead. There was a sound like laughter and then screaming and then laughter that was coming from deep inside. The walls were blood warm on my shoulders and the smell was, well, what you might expect. Not great. Let's just say it was not. I pushed forward and the walls kind of gave way and found myself moving through this slimy, suffocating flesh. And I'm starting to panic because my hands are still tied behind my back. And I'm feeling like I'm about to choke on this stuff. And the walls are moving, like, pulsating. I feel like I'm being digested. Then suddenly I'm pushed through into this kind of chamber. Talk about the frying pan. And into the fryer. The chamber was just a nightmare. I mean, I never. I've just never seen that. It was unholy. There were faces and heads and legs all kind of fused together. The walls were just all these crawling limbs and these terrified faces and fusions of teeth and cheeks and hair and fingers coming out of knees. Just they. All those people, were they still people? Had they ever been people? Had they been made a part of that thing? I started to scream. Everything around me was screaming. All the mouths on the walls were screaming. And I was screaming, too. Then I was laughing. I felt hands and mouth all over my body and they were tickling me, touching me all over. Then I was screaming again. I had to get out of there. I had to get out of the way. Nightmare. I started pushing back towards the entrance, but the hands were all over me. I felt something bite into my hip. A mouth was biting me. I screamed at the sharp pain and moved away from it. I started to think that maybe I could get one of the mouths to bite through my ropes and then I would at least have my hands on free. I struggled to turn around and move the ropes towards the mouth, but just when I got in position, the mouth bit right into my finger instead. The pain was incredible. But I was giggling, just laughing and laughing. The mouth pulled the flesh from my finger like it was a chicken wing. Another mouth bit into My shoulder. I was chuckling away at this point. The hands were grabbing me, pulling on me, pulling me apart. Tearing my arms right out of their sockets. Fingers were digging in between my ribs. I was slathered in blood and screaming. Screaming as the fingers dug into my eyes. Eyes. Well, I guess at this point you're probably wondering how I, your interpreted narrator, managed to escape the bottomless pit. How I managed to survive to tell you this tale. I simply didn't. I never escaped the bottomless pit. I am the bottomless pit. I am a tree of life. The North Korea situation 1980s was unique. As most North Korean situations are, they built something we haven't seen before or since. An independent flesh interface of enormous size and power. Power, but within a contained incident zone and no metallic cylinders. We detected it via the cosmic ray information signature which was concentrated on a secure shielded facility outside the Wang prison camp. This was a huge underground facility which they had been constructing for over a decade. We anticipated that they would construct a portal level interface and we were fully prepared to bomb it before it became uncontained. What we didn't expect is that it would achieve level 7 cosmic transmission rates without all the other normal signs of full fledged portal. We considered bombing it anyways or using our Brilliant Pebbles kinetic orbital strike system. But instead we managed to get two agents into the facility to take a look at it. They achieved high level security clearance and found that the Koreans were using the flesh interface as an information processing facility. This was quite novel as we had always considered it to be a potential weapons system. Our curiosity was truly piqued. Clearly the NORCs knew something we didn't. Unfortunately, our agents weren't able to access the enormous mainframe chamber which actually housed the interface. All they knew was that it was in a huge chamber full of temperature regulated water. We instructed them to breach the chamber and get a look at it, then send us the data by satellite. We knew full well that it would probably cost them their lives, but we pumped them up with a lot of do it for the planet rhetoric. So one night they put on dive suits and went into the chamber. It was basically like a huge lake contained within a massive darkened steel box. Imagine a flooded warehouse with endless rows of dim ceiling lights shining down on rippling black water. They jumped into the water pretty quickly. They picked up on some pretty interesting audio signals with varying frequencies. A kind of squeaking mewling sound. They recognized the sound for what it was right away, but had a hard time believing it. Whale songs. The chamber contains several adult humpback whales. How do I explain Mother? What is she? The translation from Greek to English states great Babylon, the mother of prostitutes and the abominations of the earth. I used to lie in my bed, the blinds pulled against the summer sunlight, listening to the sounds of other kids playing outside. I lay there for hours, not sleeping, wondering who had made Mother. She was made from all different sorts of animal parts. One of her feet was a big heavy hoof. The other was a tiny little kitten paw. I could hear her clumping around downstairs. Her smell. The smell of cigarettes and disease. It was everywhere in the house, pooling in the darkness. Slowly, night would come and I would imagine floating out of my window, floating up into the deep, starry blue. Looking down at all the houses shrinking into tiny boxes. A clean breeze blowing on my face. How I would cry in my little bed. I was very young when Mother first came. I had another mom before her, a good one who wore pearls and had a voice like music. Then one day I got sick. A fever. I was crying all day and it went on for weeks. I guess my first mom couldn't take it anymore. One night she left forever. When I came down for breakfast the next morning, this new thing was waiting for me in the kitchen. At least, I think that's what happened. Mother never talked. She just snorted and made hoarse sounds. Awful. Her parts were sewn together with yarn and there were patches of wet burlap. I didn't see her eyes until she had been there for almost a year. Have you ever seen a horse's eyes close up? They're like goat's eyes. They have a sideways pupil. I would come home after school and there would be kids sitting at the breakfast table. She gave them medicine, so they did whatever she wanted them to and made them just sit there staring and shaking. Then she would take them down in the basement and make them into things. She tried to make me do it, too, but I didn't want to. I realized she was afraid of the Bible. I realized it had power. Blood power. When I read it to her, her different pieces would shudder and pull apart. And she would howl like a wolf. Woof. And blood would run from her segments. The Bible brought transmissions from the cross that floated in the red summer sky. Everything in time is arranged around the epicenter wherein the nail drove into Christ's hand. Lines of possibilities radiate outward from it. Kingdoms rise and fall. Men grow and die like flowers in a field. Revelations 17:8. The beast that you saw was and is not, and is about to come up out of the abyss and go to destruction. So two of our agents had breached the underwater chamber Containing the North Korean flesh interface and found nothing but several humpback whales. Now, this was a head scratcher. We knew it was a flesh interface because it was receiving information rich rays coming from outer space. Yet how could it be taking the form of humpback whales? All previous interfaces had taken on a decidedly less conventional form. Well, our agents decided to get a closer look. There were three whales, two adults and a calf. They appeared normal in every aspect, Though it was difficult to get a close look at them. They seemed to be in quite a bit of distress. They though the agents were not biologists and had a limited understanding of what whale distress looks like. The agents noticed some very loud, low frequency percussive sounds Coming from the bottom of the chamber, which was entirely hidden in darkness. So they headed down towards the bottom, a distance of several stories. There they shine their lights around, Made a fairly alarming discovery. Bones. Enormous curving rib bones and jawbones and vertebrae. They were apparently whale bones. They also noticed a large circular gate on the floor of the chamber, which was closed at the time. At this point, one of the agents began to pull panic. He had come to the conclusion that the whales were not the interface itself, but merely food for the interface, which was perhaps being held in another chamber below this one. There were some problems with this theory. Why use whales, A fairly rare and very difficult animal to corral, when they could just use a large amount of smaller fish? Well, it's all just speculation. The agents quickly swam out of the chamber and never found out what was behind the gate. If anything. Later, they gave us some very valuable information on the facility's information processing capabilities, which were staggering and quite appalling to imagine in the hands of such a regime such as the dp. Since there was no incident zone and segmentation wasn't an issue, we were able to solve the problem quite neatly by releasing a nerve agent into the water chamber. The cosmic ray download stopped shortly thereafter, indicating success, Though it did result in the loss of both agents and a major loss of life at the facility overall. Anyways, that was our first encounter with an MBIs massive biological information system, and a near encounter with what we would later come to call a skinship. Its destruction has allowed for the continued validity of prime number based encryption systems, Though some of the secrets uncovered by the DPRK during that time. It forced us into the unpleasant position of supporting the regime. Blackmail, basically. Last night I dreamt I was a dog. I lived on A small family farm somewhere on the American frontier, back in a time of plow mules and butter churns. It was one of those long dreams that feels like an entire lifetime. I remember the end of the dream with awful clarity. But the beginning seems like something that happened many years ago. The first images are vivid but disjointed. I recall the shape of my master walking against the sunlight overhead. The smell of his leather boots. The shadows at the edge of the forest. A little pig tailed girl hugging me. Fresh mud in the spring, warm floorboards in the winter. Everything had a peaceful, storybook quality to it, except one thing. Sometimes, late at night, I heard singing. It came from outside, out there in the far distance. From somewhere in the deep forest beyond the boundaries of my world. Some nights it was one voice, but usually it was many, singing a strange, aching song. It sounded like a haunting cry. When I was little, I had whimpered and cried like this to my mother. But who was crying out there in the night? What kind of dark mother was listening? When I first heard the singing, I was filled with a blood dread. The hair on my back bristled and I growled and barked at the darkness. Even after the night finally went silent, I trotted around for hours in vigilant anger. Later, as I heard it more often, I learned to accept it with a sullen unease. Of course, the singing was the sound of wolves howling, but I didn't know this in the dream. In the dream, I'd never seen a wolf in my life. One winter, I began to see them prowling in the woods. To me they were ghost dogs, shadows sneaking between trees, eyes glinting in the twilight. I growled and barked at them, but didn't pursue. For several months, they never encroached on my world. They finally came on a late winter's evening. The sun had sunk into an orange glow beyond the edge of the world. The family was in the cabin and I was out trotting through the snow, anxious to get back to them because I knew food would be coming soon. Then, atop a small hill by the apple tree, an apparition. My body snapped to attention. I growled, the hairs on my back standing on end. It was a woof just a stone's throw away from me, its silvery coat half lit in the dying light of day. It came toward me in a sleek, soundless jaunt. I barked and snapped at the air. It slowed and stopped just beyond my lunging distance. Now, crazed with fear and anger, I saw that it was a large female, healthy, well fed, with a gorgeous coat. Misty gray, the color of snow seen at a winter's distance. Its smell was alien, confusing, but laced with a clear and potent confidence, a supreme assuredness. Indeed, it did not seem to be afraid of me at all, nor did it threaten. Its mouth hung slack and steam issued from its muzzle in steady, happy puffs. This calmed me for a moment and in the next moment redoubled my anger. I growled from the deepest, most murderous part of my dog's self. It spoke to me. Its mouth didn't move and there was no sound. But by the logic of the dream, it spoke to me in a clear, dignified voice. Hello, child, I snarled at took another step forward, and its eyes caught the last of the sunlight, glowing in a fantastic array of yellows. Those eyes, rimmed in jet black like mascara, projected a powerful allure, an otherworldly glamour. You bark and snarl, but look at my face. Am I not your kind? It asked. I could not answer. I could only growl softly. Is my face not like your mother's? Do you remember hers? A sudden scent of distant memory came to me, and I felt a pang of loneliness. I had not seen my mother or any other dogs since I was small. Since I'd come to the farm. My only family had been the people I lived with and a few of the more tolerant pigs. I searched now for dim, fragrant memories of my mother. I felt her huge, bristled muzzle licking at my face. I saw her giant, sweeping legs as I followed them through the high fields. She had seemed taller than a horse then. I remember the softness of her teats, feeding from them with my brothers and sisters. What had become of my family? I had spent every day with them. And then one day, all gone. The wolf paced back and forth now, keeping a small distance from me, its eyes ranging over the farm. Again. I saw some strange, haunting glamour in them, something that glittered with secret, distant power. The people in that house, they're not your family. We are. We share ancient blood, it said, its voice deep and resounding with the rhythm of wisdom. My master had a voice like this, but it didn't have the total authority of this alpha females. I saw with alarm two dark shapes come over the hill by the apple tree. More wolves, moving, silent, with heads lowered. I barked at them. You hate us and love them. But do they love you? What are you to them? Aren't you the lowest of the low, always getting the last of the food, the smallest scraps. Imagine living differently. Imagine taking your own food, killing, drinking lifeblood, being master over others. The two other Wolves slunk down the hill. The skin on my back tightened again. But the strange hypnotic power of the alpha wolf held me still. You could leave this house and come with us. We range the forest. We've seen rivers wider than this whole valley. Mountains that go up into the clouds. Lakes with no end but the end of the world. Places with no houses or men at all. You could be with us. We could be your brothers and sisters. The other two wolves came closer. They were unmistakably female, both young and well muscled. Their confidence was not as absolute as the alpha wolfs, but they showed no fear. As they came to me. I smelled on them a strange longing. A deep winter's desire for warmth. The alpha wolf stepped closer, close enough that her steaming breath tickled my nose. Her eyes danced with cold, burning light. And she spoke in a voice that made my blood humor. Outside your life waits everything you've never known, she said. There are worlds, child. There are ecstasies. Then I recognized the allure that lit her eyes, the unspeakable longing that glimmered in their depths. It had seemed this whole time to be some fantastic alien desire reaching out to me from a distant world. Perhaps it truly was. But more simply than this, it was hunger. Plain hunger. That ancient, unsleeping hunger, older than the first furred thing that ever gave rise to the races of dogs and wolves and men. Hunger had brought this wolf across rivers and mountains and endless frozen plains to meet me. In that moment. I can still see her face. The final image of the dream before the other wolves tore into me and I died and I awoke. Her face with eyes that spoke of open loneliness. Her face so noble and gentle and motherly. Her face as beautiful and ancient as the stars. What do you do when a child who bleeds and sweats and pees LSD suddenly goes missing? Well, conduct a massive search. As massive as we could manage. Almost every mentally elevated CIA department was involved. We didn't trust anybody else. We never trusted anybody else. Shit, we didn't even trust ourselves. Considering that it was one of our own who had taken the child. We searched for about two months but never really turned up any leads. Since every other returned child had died within a few days of being freed from her animonic sack. We scaled the search down pretty quickly. It's one thing to search for somebody like bin Laden when everybody knows you're looking for him. It's another thing to search for somebody you would just work quite hard to erase from official existence so you would be free to perform Tests on her. We felt that the search itself was more of a security risk than the missing child. Since she was almost certainly dead. There was also a feeling that maybe it was for the best. Maybe she would survive. Maybe she would have a happy life. Maybe it was best not to know her fate. But then, about seven years later, we learned what happened. It was. If you'll allow me to wax philosophical for a moment, I'd like to quote a poem from Aeschylus that I've actually never read. Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. While I'm no literary scholar, I believe this means learning can hurt sometimes. So she had survived. Her genes came up in our program to collect a global genetic snapshot. A total boondoggle, by the way. So where was she being worshipped as a God by some doomsday cult like Johnny 2? Floating through space in a bubble to Jupiter and beyond. Estonia. She was found in Estonia, in a Swedish speaking village on the island of Hyema. She was living a normal life. Apparently the issue with the bio LSD had resolved itself after detachment from the placenta. Otherwise anybody who got a kiss from her would have found themselves going on a very strange journey. She was about 13 years old at this point and had survived travel far longer than any other child. This meant she was an asset we absolutely had to obtain. She contained the secret to survivable travel, something that had eluded us for years. It would have been convenient if she was living a life of abuse and drudgery in some orphanage somewhere. We could have simply considered her a victim of fortune. But she was actually living in some quaint little village on the edge of a forest with an old couple who had been given some phony story by our former agent. It was a nice life. Quiet, maybe a little boring, but a nice one. We took her in the middle of the night back to our facility in Colorado. In the end, she wasn't a victim of fortune. She was a victim of us. That's interesting. When I was working for the CIA, we found that animals could often survive travel through the flesh interfaces much better than humans could. We regularly had success sending dogs and cats through. Somebody hit upon the idea of sending some hill Menya, a type of bird, through the interface. Because they are adept at imitating sounds, this was the next best thing to sending a tape recorder. The interfaces did not accept non living objects. We worked on grafting a tape recorder to a turtle, but this was unsuccessful on several levels. We sent the birds through and they returned unencased, but covered with the typical fluids. Those of us who subscribed to the alien theory had high hopes that they would record alien speech instead. Or indeed they came back imitating a strange flute like speech. Music. The music was quite interesting, though having all the birds sing at once created distinctly unpleasant effects. Somebody in the department ended up killing all the birds, though we never found out who. After the orbital arrays incinerated the city, they dropped our platoon in to take a look around. We had seen it before. An endless graveyard. Everything ashes, ash buildings, ash people. For six days we trudged through the dead city before finding the first sign of life on the edge of the blast zone. Before frozen winter fields, a small flowering bush. Perhaps the heat of the bombardment had tricked it into blooming early. We all looked at it for a silent moment, quickly moved on. We were young and tired, just miles from the rendezvous. Yet sometimes at night, that silent moment returns. I see them fluttering again in the cold, uncaring wind. Doomed flowers, soft and pale. 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 all of the mysteries that surrounded them. The portal phenomenon, the apparent teleportation of objects which occurred within the fleshy 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 through the portal, it returned a short time, three seconds or so 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 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, someone 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 other ones. Anyway, 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 joke that if the portal was actually some kind of alien office mailing to, 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 worshiped 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 his 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 Hakodashem, or Holy of Holies, where the very presence of this God was said to dwell in darkness. Nobody in the kingdom was allowed in the Kodesh Hakadashim 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 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 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 the 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. 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 such sacrificing their own blood on its grounds. Perhaps he was unaware of the tales of death that surround 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 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 had 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, 171cm 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 analogs that accompanied 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 conditions 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, what would a benevolent intelligence possibly make of our ruthlessness? A rapacious quest for understanding. According to Tacitus, the ancient historian, when Pompey pulled back the curtain and gazed upon the Kodesh Hakkadashem, 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 the greater and Greater political glory until 15 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 El's 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 Pompeii lucky when he pulled back the curtain and found not? 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 the of middle. Middle of the night. She was seven when we lost her, and 13 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 the Flesh interface disappeared from existence for several minutes, then returned encased in an amniotic sack attached to a placenta via umbilical cord, with enough LSD in her bloodstream to turn all of Utah into one massive orgy. Naturally, we expected some sort of mental changes, especially since every child who returned from the portals had shown 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 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 was 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 back 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 a summer. As she said this, she began to sob. She said that she had forgotten all about this and 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. Oh, no. This one is real. This is always the first thought when waking up after a blackout. After hours of flighting between different varieties of nightmare, you start to dream that you're 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. It has a certain uncanny clarity to it. Oh, no. You realize this one is real. You wake up to the utter ugliness of your reality. It's 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? 3? 4? You sit up and look around for evidence of mischief. Smash plates, bags of takeout 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 2pm not bad. You check the calls and text. Nothing unusual. No two hour conversation with your boss starting at 5am you log into 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 blowout. You sit and wonder why you have this feeling of black guilt in your stomach. It's just a 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 one. But nothing overboard that might get you drunk at three in the afternoon and black out again tonight. You go out of your tiny bedroom to the 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 okay now. You nod. The question is sinister. Okay 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. Your stomach makes a violent protest, but your 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 wants to move her Posturepedic 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 last night that 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 wanted to hear the end of your story. You tell her that you don't recall any story. She expects this. She says that it's the story about the children in the forest you must know was too good 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's about to ask for money. She's 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 to loosen the paranoia's grip. You take another sip. How many drinks was that? Two. Okay. 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 will need that last sip. You sit down on the couch next to her. Sweet relief of the vodka is melting away some of your anxiety. She 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 protest 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. 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 sunlight through the fluttering leaves and the smell of 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. Imagine a dead cat wearing an old jockstrap. 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 mask cannot block out even through the filters. Scented air, you know it's there, coming through the filters in less than 0.1 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 repellent to basic human sensibility. This is why I'm saving up to go to school and become a readjustment specialist. Pulling people out of malfunctioning hygiene beds is no way to make a 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 easily enough to override this cutoff 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 beds fixed. The pain of bed sores or the stench of a backed up evacuator is a strong motivator. But if the sleeper has direct sense feeds, they can switch off the 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 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 beds 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 smelly 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 jockstrap. 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 phony clock with hands that are painted on. All of it is just as phony as all. They're posing, they're insinuating, they're 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 hair cut 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 bloodlet divine impurities, the women's sagging udders, the fatty hanging bellies, the men's mutilated penises and thatches of pubic hair, you see it quite clearly, and you absolutely cannot deny that they are utter beasts, that we allow them to infest our cities like vermin told 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 lung 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. 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 club's. He hacks at the crowd like a jungle explorer in an American film. He Makes all sorts of sneering, dramatic faces as he works, 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. 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 a fake train station. 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. 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 Mick's 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 nine years. Nine years of continuous feed. Nine years without any direct human contact. Nine 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 mixed tour sell well and she enjoys her celebrity. But over the years, taste 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 feed, 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 four 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 to 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 nine year dream, she wakes 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, an 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, finds something she doesn't recognize. She is aged nine 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 a 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 that hygiene bed, she will find it very difficult to resist the lure of the feed. 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 one year. This is the price of long term connection. It is inescapable. Less than 1% of users connected continuously for more than three 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. Our form is our story. The story of all the world. The world does not sleep. Everywhere, 10,000 things are darting, skittering, flitting, scudding, burrowing. Sleep is righteousness. But the world wakes. We are made in the image of the world. The world is a giant of 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, 10,000 things are scuttling out of harmony. And this causes the world to itch and suffer. Just as little scuttling things are not. 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 10,000 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 10,000 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 awoken. 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. 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 are no messages in our form which gives us any answer. Is our form incomplete? I, above all others, have become obsessed with mystery. The mystery of the oily ones.