PERFORATION 6.01 (Patreon)

GastroINTESTINAL PERFORATION.

Definition: a full-thickness breach of the Ontological intestinal wall, allowing air and/or Foreign Ontology gastrointestinal contents to enter the surrounding peritoneal cavity. Perforation may be caused by Trauma, bowel obstruction, diverticulitis, Vector Transference, stomach ulcers, Obsessive Malformation, cancer, Conceptual Breach, or infection.

Perforation results in sudden, severe abdominal pain at the site of perforation, which then spreads across the abdomen. The pain is intensified by Change movement. Nausea, vomiting, Spontaneous Evolution, hematemesis, Recursion, and increased heart rate are common early symptoms. Later symptoms include fever, Alteration Divine, and-or chills. On examination, the FLESH is rigid and tender.  After some time, the Manifestation bowel stops moving, and the Manifestation abdomen becomes silent and distended. 

A hole in the INTESTINAL intestinal tracts allows intestinal contents to enter the abdominal cavity. The entry of Foreign Life bacteria from the gastrointestinal tract into the abdomen results in peritonitis or in the formation of an Paracausal Abscess.

Manifestations Patients may develop sepsis, a life-threatening response to infection, which may appear as an increased heart rate, increased breathing rate, Recursion, fever, and confusion. This may progress to multi-level ORGAN dysfunction.

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When I dream, it’s of my house. 

The last several times I’ve slept, it’s been about this place, where I live, this… bland, corporatized condo, a place with nothing on the walls and no color and barely any shape to it. But in my dreams, it’s more. There are rooms and hallways and rooms, always and forever, and I never really notice if or when I go from one to another. 

And there’s skittering in the walls. 

I… I think I resolved that. Partially. But I really don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter right now.

I’m awake, and the house is more.

A woman who I am partially responsible for, whose name I don’t even remember, who I don’t even think I’ve interacted with more than, like, five or ten times since she arrived, lives with me. The door to her room is warm, is soft, and shivers to the touch.

And the headset, my connection to the impossible world of meat that dragged me into this mess, is missing. 

Seems like a pretty reasonable connection to make. 

I hear something behind me.

Turning, my whole body locked with adrenaline, and see-

My construct. The wormy little raccoon. 

It slithers across the floor, half-skittering, half-crawling, a shell of dense and inert tissue wrapped around the more complex, delicate internals. It… it’s actually sort of cute how it moves, like if a caterpillar could waddle a little bit. And was a weird totem made of  roadkill. 

It comes over to me, and in spite of what it is, in spite of how it feels when it touches me, I… don’t mind. 

If I let my mind slip back towards the GLIMPSE BEYOND, I can still see the city I’ve wrapped around the machinery of it, the life running through it in complex and intricate ways that I’m not entirely sure how I connected. It feels almost dry, a little ticklish, as it touches my foot, pajama shorts shivering as my body reacts to it. 

I turn to look at the too-warm, too-soft door.

Then I tap the Glove against my hip, twice. 

Click click, go the tines of what used to be my hand.

Skitter skitter, goes the critter I’ve created.

It crawls up over my body, obeying my wants and unvoiced orders as clearly as if I described them in detail. Not-quite-alive, not-quite-machine, it climbs my body almost weightlessly, barely tickling or pinching as it moves until it reaches up to my shoulder, perching with its main body wrapped around me to allow its head to rest against me.

It doesn’t breathe, but I can feel a presence beyond just weight. It’s a little warm, emitting a body heat I didn’t expect for something that, as far as I’m aware from the way I built it, doesn’t have a heart or much blood in it. 

I breathe in, hold the breath a while, then let it out. 

I knock on the door.

Knock knock knock.

It jiggles. 

There’s a flat plane of tissue, dense and sounding like wood, but it’s like it’s on a body with far too much body fat, moving a little too easily. I think I hear a gurgle in the way that it moves, but I can’t be sure. 

“Hello?” I ask, trying not to sound as nauseous as I am.

I very notably do not hear any response.

I knock again.

Knock knock knock.

This time, it feels more like wood. There’s less movement, more like the frame is moldy and soft rather than jiggly. 

Alright. Fuck that. 

I turn around, heading down to the kitchen. A minute later, I’m back in front of what’shername’s door, a knife in my hand, another in the waistband of my pajamas, a heavy bottle of water in a bag like a flail, and a roll of duct tape in my pocket. 

Might as well have something for if there’s wall meat going on.

I consider going back to my room to change clothes, but frankly, the way the door changed from one knock to the next, I’d rather hurry. It’s not like I have armor anyways, so what would it help with besides appearances? There’s more important shit to be focusing on. 

Just to be sure, I knock one last time.

Knock Knock Knock.

A little more forcefully than before. One last chance. Just to make sure. 

I feel so stupid doing it, but right now, I feel stupid doing anything. I wonder if, at some point, I’m going to start feeling like I know what I’m doing, or like I’m not woefully unprepared for any and every given fucking thing. 

The wood feels soft, but it feels like wood again. No jiggle. No fat-like softness. Just soft wood. 

For the third time in a row, there’s no sound of movement behind the door. No one coming over to answer. None of the nameless-

Nameless? Fucking rude thing to think. Is… I know her name. I’ve talked to her. I see her name every time she sends me her part of our rent, for fuck’s sake.

The part of my brain where GLIMPSE BEYOND lives tingles a little bit, and I take notice. It’s new, but there’s already an instinct forming- when the weird part of my brain wigs out at something, even a little bit, I pay attention. 

Why can’t I remember her name?

tingle

The wood is still soft. 

I grab the door handle and turn it, moving to walk inside-

It’s locked. 

Because of course it is. Idiot. Why should things be easy?

It’s one of those little pinhole locks on the doorknob itself, not an extra latch. Simple enough, and I could probably jimmy it open in a minute or two if I had a basic bobby pin, but quite frankly, I have something better. 

The Glove extends, still a bit more numb than with the Bloodling but awake enough for my purposes. One of its fingers opens, pieces of it widening or disconnecting like a blend between a cyborg’s tools and a biological stinger, until I have a long and slender bit of bone growing out past the rest of my “hand”. Tenderly, I thrust it into the little hole in the doorknob, feeling the contours of the inner mechanism as clearly as if it was skin going into it and not calcified tissue. 

It takes me a little less than ten seconds for me to hear a click, and to press and turn the lock into the right position. 

“Hey! I’m looking for my headset! I’m coming in!” I say, making sure my voice is conversational, not as panicked as I’d prefer it be. 

I turn the knob and open the door. 

Behind it is an empty room. 

There’s posters on the wall. There is clothing on the floor, and in an open closet. There’s a bed with sheets on it, and the sheets have designs, and they’re partially draped onto a chair. It has wheels, and there’s a desk there, and it looks real and like there are papers and a laptop and other things on it. 

There’s no person in there.

Tingling again. In the back of my brain. Behind my eyes. 

I do my best to look.

GLIMPSE BEYOND activates, and I see the room, and I see that it is blank. 

It is an empty room. 

There is nothing on the walls. There are no clothes. There is no bed, no desk, no chairs, nothing on the floor, not even a working light fixture. It’s just… blank. White. Like it was freshly painted, like someone just moved out and now there’s nothing in the space, like-

My eyes refocus, and I see everything as it was. All of the many details of the room, and all of my inability to really truly keep track of them. Everything feels superficial, surface-level, even as I look at them closely, tracking the details. 

I don’t touch anything. I don’t want to wipe off the paint and see the empty things beneath. 

There’s no person in here. 

My eyes hurt, strained by the skill, but I blink clear the tears and shake my head, turning to look around. 

Knife in hand, construct on my shoulder, Glove still extended out into a more dangerous formation, I start looking more carefully about the room.

The quick glimpse from my aptly-named skill still holds true. Everything feels empty, even though I know, for a fact, I felt that fleshiness in the doorway when I touched it. Something happened here, obviously, and even more obviously with the fact that the room is as empty as my recollection of L-

No. Didn’t start with an L. A K?

I don’t know. It’s not-

She was here. She’s my roommate. My headset is missing. Keep to the details. 

Moving the clothes feels like moving pages in a book, and I keep them close to each other, worried that if I move them too far they’ll… vanish? Go away? I don’t know. But the lack of color in what I saw with my skill feels like it carries through. A part of the skill is interpretive, obviously, but it also doesn’t just make things up- it shows me different layers or pieces of things, and lets me build a mindset out of that. 

The room is too empty. It’s full of things, but it’s too empty. 

But there’s something here.

In the back of my mind. Tingling in the back of my brain. 

My headset is missing. That door absolutely was soft, like flesh. 

My eyes still hurt, but I squint them shut anyways, and then open them as wide as they’ll go.

GLIMPSE BEYOND shows me the room as it is. 

Blank. Featureless. The architecture of a space, identical to all the rest of it, extending out of and into other parts of the house, but bereft of identity, bereft of any sign that it was ever lived in. Wiped clean. 

Licked clean.

The thought tingles. 

I pan my gaze back and forth, looking over the cream-colored walls and the absent spaces where things should be. Voids of meaning and function stand out to my eyes everywhere, where, in the real world, physical items remain, which helps a little when it comes to not bumping into things. 

The skull of my flesh-construct chitters in my ear as I slowly walk the room, but otherwise, everything is dead silent. 

I feel my eyes start to tear up, and the longer I hold them open, the more it feels like staring straight into a bright light, straining my vision like I’m at an optometrist getting a check-up. 

It’s all blank. White. My feet touch the clothes on the floor, my hip bumps painfully against the side of the desk and then into the chair beside it, but I don’t see any of it, just empty, blank- 

There. 

In the closet. 

Having stepped a bit further into the room, standing all the way upright, I can see around the corner a little better. Behind where the door slides open, there’s a glint of something red.

I tilt to look, eyes wide-

IT HURTS

I blink and I’m on the floor, my vision blurry, tears streaming down my face. I’m hyperventilating, the Glove is fully deployed and spasming, my legs are splayed out and twitching very slightly. 

Everything hurts. I can hear my breaths pumping through my lungs, my heart screaming with every beat. I feel terrified. I feel like I just got electrocuted. I feel like I just got burned. 

I squeeze my eyes shut as hard as I can and curl up into a ball.

The knife in my waistband digs into my back, but I don’t care. It doesn’t cut me and I don’t care. The Glove is still deployed and I don’t care. I will in a minute, but not right now.

It’s like when you touch a hot stovetop by accident, and everything goes blank for a moment. Animal panic, where you react before your conscious mind has time to form opinions, where the pain overrides the personhood for a heartbeat. 

I take a little while.

Eventually, my breath is steady enough that it doesn’t hurt my throat to breathe. 

Eventually, I open my eyes. 

My face is dripping wet. Most of its tears, but some of the fluid is a little pink when I touch it, when I look at how it’s dribbled from me onto the floor. Some of it is mixed with drool that came out and flecked from my lips with my panting. 

My head hurts.

In the closet. That thing.

Red. So red in a room almost too-white. Crimson - scarlet - carmine - salmon - maroon - vermillion - raspberry- 

So red. So much movement. Like looking into a living sun, but instead of plasma it’s all just-

It’s not even meat. There’s too much and it’s too strange to be anything so simple. All of it, packed into a tiny little thing no larger than a headset. 

Doesn’t take a genius to figure out what it was. As soon as my brain came back online I could take a guess. 

I wipe my face off on my shirt, ignore the mess it leaves, ignore the mess I leave when I get up off the ground where I was laying. 

Note to self: don’t use my magic “see-beyond-reality” power on the thing that takes me beyond reality. Or whatever the fuck it is that MEAT and BLEED have done to my headset and by extension my brain. Apparently, it has consequences.

My head hurts. My eyes hurt. My whole system is still violently flushed with adrenaline. 

I step around the desk to look into the closet. 

It’s right where I expected it to be. Smaller than when I saw it with my skill. Dull, now.

My headset. Fallen over, like it tipped backwards off of someone’s head. 

It’s laying on the ground, two cartridges still in the slots, next to the gloves and some of the pads of the haptic feedback system. 

I pull the closet door open wider and look to what it was hiding. 

Behind the clothing, in front of the headset, is a hole in the wall.

It doesn’t look like the hole in my wall. The hole in my wall is a crack in the plaster, wide enough and tall enough for me to see the meat of the house behind it. Or wall-meat. Or a portal or whatever the fuck that whole mess is. 

This is like an anthill, made sideways.

There’s a ring of matter that’s sort of congealed around a central hole, about the size of a human torso. Big enough for someone to crawl in from. Or crawl out from, in theory.

There’s no meat behind it. Just darkness. Just pitch black. 

I think I can feel a breeze. It’s warmer than I’d like, but still quite cold. It’s just… a bit too warm to be coming from outside.

Well. Alright then. That seems like something that’s my fault.

My head hurts. 

I pick up the headset and the pieces of the game system, put them on my roommate’s bed (the one who isn’t Sarah, whose name is… fuck, still nothing), and leave the room.

When I come back, I have shoes on.

I climb into the hole, and start to crawl.