PERFORATION 6.05 (Patreon)

Woah. Surprise chappie.

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“I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone. 

-Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

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“Hey. Hey hey hey. You’re ok. It’s alright, you’re ok. You’re ok. It’ll be alright.”

The woman whose name I can’t remember tries to speak, but her lungs are only barely enough to keep herself alive. They only barely draw in air that only barely circulates through a barely functioning heart. Nothing is falling apart but everything is precarious, incapable of operating at its “normal” levels.

Even if her throat didn’t have that weird divot from the parts I couldn’t find, there’s not enough air in her system to talk.

“Don’t- don’t try to talk. Don’t make too much noise. You’ve… you’ve been in an accident. Ok? Something went really wrong, and you’re still healing. If you talk, you might hurt yourself. Just… just stay still, alright?”

Her mouth flaps open and shut. It’s too wet, and the movement is discombobulated, it doesn’t work because it doesn’t have the muscles and the quality of what it does have is low, it’s teratoma meat not actual meat, not anything well designed.

I want to laugh at the thought of the human body being “well designed”, but I can’t because if I start laughing I might start crying and she does not need that right now. There’s only so far behind the glass I can go for this, and that means I have to manage myself very actively.

“Listen, don’t… don’t move. You need to be careful. I promise I’m working on this as hard as I can, but the more you move, the more you’ll hurt yourself. Some of your… of your stitches might pull apart, and we can’t have that. Are you in any pain? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

Her eyelids aren’t much more stable than the rest of her, but at least if they come off the world doesn’t end. She won’t die from losing her eyelids. She won’t…

Blink blink.

Slow. Uncomfortable. One eye blinks before the other does, out of sync.

“No pain. No pain, ok. Can you…”

I freeze for a second, trying to think of a question that wouldn’t be horrifying or devastating.

“Do you remember where you are?”

Not entirely a success.

Blink.

“Ok. That is… maybe not good, but a good sign. Ok. Do you remember who I am?”

Blink.

“Ok. My name is Ilia. Can you… can you remember yours?”

Bli-

A pause. Partway through the action. The lids move wetly across her one eye and one missing chunk of skull. 

I see the moment that her lungs try to start pushing again. The way that her flesh, too soft and poorly made, tries to start shaking and instead only ends up trembling.

“It’s alright, it’s alright! Don’t panic. I… can you feel it if I touch you? Is it ok if I try?”

Blink.

Faster. Desperate.

I take her hand, ignoring how thin it is, how the skin slides around over muscles that have missing. I give it the slightest little squeeze, trying not to harm it, not to make anything go wrong. 

The wheezing of her lungs and the little holes they’re breathing through gets louder. I don’t know if she’d felt her body. Maybe holding her hand was the wrong call. Maybe… no. Human touch is important and it’s the only thing I can offer.

“I’ve got you,” I tell her. “I’ve got you. You’re safe right now. You’re hurt but you’re safe, and I’m here. Just… just let some time pass. Just take some time. I’ll be here.”

I babble. I keep just talking. Filling the empty space with sound, making sure that she gets constant input that isn’t the horrors of her current existence. 

I’m… I’m trying not to regret this. I can fix her. I can fix this, and I need to take responsibility for it, so I can’t just drop this. It’s my fault, and I have the power to make it better. It’s already better. At least she’s whole now. At least she’s in one piece, and…

I’m behind the glass enough that she doesn’t start saying my thoughts out loud, but I have to catch myself. 

I refocus, and notice that the woman on the teratoma is blinking.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

It stops as she sees that she’s grabbed my attention. 

“Oh! Are you… is it ok if I ask more questions?”

Blink blink.

“That’s- yeah, no worries. I… I can get a whiteboard, maybe, and we can do blinks for letters? That-”

A slight pressure on my hand. A tiny little squeeze from two out of her four fingers pressing into my palm.

“That works. Do you have questions to ask me?”

Blink Blink.

“Ok. No new questions. Do you want to just talk?”

Blink Blink.

That throws me a bit. I pause, trying to think my way through what this might mean.

“Do you… want to go back to something?”

Blink.

“Alright. Is it… what I asked before? About your name?”

Blink.

The fingers in my palm tremble, trying to move.

Immediately, I loosen my fingers, letting her have some space.

The two fingers that move are the two that I had the most pieces for- index and middle. The thumb is also functional, but the ring finger is only shaped as itself, not properly filled out, and the pinky is just missing. 

It’s enough. Enough for her to be able to move, to grant her some agency. 

Slowly, she curves out a little shape on my hand. 

J

A

…

The third shape never quite makes it to be anything. She seems tired, like the effort’s taken something out of her, but I can tell from her eyes that writing that much was still a victory. 

And it is a victory. J and A. Jane? Jackie? Janice? Only so many J-A names out there, and that’s already more than I had for her before.

She’s real. She had a name. Here’s proof. Here’s existence. 

The simple act of writing out this little piece of her name for me already reaffirms everything, including her. It’s like she becomes the tiniest bit more real with the act, like the pieces that were barely holding together bind just that littlest bit tighter.

“Ok, that’s amazing. That’s perfect. I’m going to go through some names, ok? Is it Jane?”

Blink.

Ah. That was easy, then.

Again, she feels that slightest bit more real.

“Alright Jane. It’s alright. You went into the headset, ok? That’s the clearest explanation I’ve got. It’s weird and it’s got weird stuff in it, and that’s affected you, and now you’re here. It’s changed you, but I managed to pull you back together. You’re not healed, but I think I can pull you back together. I just need more materials. You’re… I can’t remove you from it. Not yet. It’s part of you, or… maybe you’re part of it. But I can fix this. I…”

No point holding anything back now. 

I lift my right hand, letting all seven fingers open and stretch out their tools and sharpness. From the way Jane’s eye widens, I can tell she has no problem seeing it, no memetic block holding her back from fully getting what it is. 

“I have stuff like this. I can make stuff, break things down if I want to, and I’ve got some other weird shit going on. Right now, I’ve used everything I had available to put you back together, I don’t have any other stray materials. I brought in basically nothing to work with, and even still, I’ve managed to pull you back together. So if I can find the right stuff, I should be able to fix everything going on. It’s… it’s my fault. Alright? It’s my fault, I left my shit out, and you couldn’t have known this would happen. I’m going to fix it.”

Blink.

And… what now?

I look at her. She’s so afraid. Her name is Jane, and she was a normal person, and now she’s this, and I notice when I try to move my hand away from her the way that she flinches, her whole body shivering out of sync with itself. 

I… I didn’t bring materials. All I had left were the ones I used for Wormy, my first-ever construct, and that’s just done. There can’t- I can’t imagine that there’s anything else here in the space that I can pull from, because technically, somehow, this entire space is also this single ball of teratoma with a woman in it. Even if I could, I need fresh materials, new input, not recycling what’s already here. Leveling INTERPRETIVE CRAFTSMANSHIP twice is sign enough that I’ve pushed incredibly hard as it is, and even touching the skill, feeling out how its shape has changed inside me, doesn’t give me any kind of impression that it might work with what I have.

I have to leave. I have to leave this place.

And time is weird here. Maybe faster or slower or just sideways, and I don’t know exactly how that works, and she’ll be alone here.

I don’t regret this. I can’t. It’s my responsibility and I have to make it better. 

But I just don’t have the-

Materials.

I look at my hands.

I look down at my body.

She needs new input. Fresh meat. 

What could I find out in town? More roadkill? Cuts from the butcher shop at the supermarket? 

Human flesh would work better.

I…

It’ll hurt. It’ll hurt so bad. And I need my flesh, so I don’t die. She won’t die in here. I don’t know how I know that, but I know that, my otherness tells me it directly. My skills put her back together, and they put me back together in a way where she’ll survive, because that’s what I pushed to happen, what I forced and changed and made to happen. 

She’ll just be alone. Like this. And I’ll be fine.

Even though it’s my responsibility. Because it is. 

I can do this. I just need to go further back. Further behind the glass. It’ll hurt, but the hurt won’t matter. And it doesn’t matter, I already know that. I’m just a coward. I deserve this, worse than this, for letting this happen to someone.

Her name is Jane. She’s real. Even with those two incontrovertible facts, I don’t remember anything about her. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know who she is and I don’t even know if that’s because of some weird retroactive erasure like her name or if I just never knew her.

Maybe she was just someone in my house.

Does that make this better or worse? Would anything?

I’m a coward. I’m delaying. 

“I… I’m going to fix it. I just need materials.”

My voice feels too loud. Too unsteady. The space doesn’t want it, and I don’t either, but the words do as I intended them to, locking my mind into place.

“Fuck. This is going to hurt.”

Blink Blink.

“It’s alright. It’s my fault, and I can fix it later once we’re out of here.”

Blink Blink.

She doesn’t want me to hurt myself.

I leave that fact outside of the space behind the glass where I am where I’m me.

I turn the glove towards my gut. I have some extra fat there, some space before the stomach lining, and I can reach down and up around the ribs. Keep two functioning legs and two functioning arms, though I can pull some muscle from all of the above, walk and run a little worse for extra fibers to work with.

Blood comes out of me and onto the floor. 

My heart beats.

It soaks into the barely-real MEAT of this place as I BLEED.

The room shudders, and I have to stop digging out a piece of myself for a moment for fear of stabbing into something important. 

It hurts. 

The room pulses, the coloration going from a sickly off-white and not-yellow and un-brown into something with striations of pinkish tissue. 

Jane opens her mouth, the holes in her lungs pulling in a big burst of air.

Something in my eyes squirm, loud, obfuscating the vision of the slit in my side and my own hand slowly sinking into it, and all of a sudden all I can see is words.

SYMBIONT CREATED

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED: EXTRASPATIAL SENSITIVITY

SYMBIONT ACQUIRED: TERATOMIC CONJUNCTION

The world shrinks and gets larger at the same time.

All of a sudden, I feel the tunnels. I know the exact path I took to get here through the hallways, I know every path that could’ve brought me here. I know the soft parts of the walls and how damp the air is and the temperature of this place, and it’s less like it’s bombarding me with new information and more like I’ve just remembered. I know the route to the exit, I know the turns and shortcuts I could take to cut down the time to get from it to this heart to minutes instead of hours. I know how slow and fast and weird the time is and I still don’t know what that even means.

And I can feel the edges. Where the space ends. The vision that GLIMPSE BEYOND blasted into my mind, of a place outside other places but still somehow connected, suddenly makes sense. Not enough to understand, but enough that thinking about doesn’t make me feel like my eyes are going to start bleeding.

I stare at the words for as long as it takes for them to fade, turning back to just squiggles in my eyes that drift out of my line of sight.

Symbiont created.

No.

No.

That’s-

That can’t be it. That can’t be it. That’s not what-

I didn’t want this.

I know, down to the most minute detail, every part of how Jane’s body works and doesn’t work. I know every single thing I got wrong, and I know how it feels inside her, and-

The way that I just know how to use the Glove, just know what every part of it does, the way I can feel every part of my blood intuitively when the Bloodling is awake. The way that I knew how every part of the Twitching Digits moved inside of MEAT, how I knew exactly what they were doing and didn’t have to re-learn how to use hands. 

I wanted to fix it. It’s-

She’s my responsibility. She’s my responsibility! I was trying to make things better and this-

Maybe it is. Maybe I-

Shut the fuck up.

I can’t think like that. I can’t. I refuse. She’s a person. She’s a person. She’s not part of me. She’s not. Even if I know more about her body than my own, even if I understand every piece of it on a level that feels wrong, that feels heavy. I didn’t want this. I-

Two fingers slap weakly against my thigh.

I exhale, a sharp thing full of pain and confusion and anger and grief. Full of my own stupid reactions to my own fucking stupidity. 

Jane is staring at me. 

The Teratomic Conjunction is staring at me. Her single intact eye is facing me, cornea and optical nerve sub-optimally reattached, leaving parts of it fuzzy, while her other eye is diluted and spread out over thirteen meters of extraneous skin and too-slick fats and can’t face anything. 

JANE is staring at me.

Blink Blink.

Does she…

Blink.

…

Can you hear me? I think.

Blink.

Can you… can you talk?

No. But she wants to. I know that, deeper than I know my own desires, more easily than I understand my own thought process. 

She understands that I understand that. She understands me and what I want and how she’s-

Don’t think about it. 

She’s her own person. Independent. She’s real.

I don’t have anything left in my stomach to vomit up, and I don’t have enough strength in me to heave enough to try. 

She doesn’t want me to hurt myself. She can endure this. Now that she’s not alone, now that she can feel like this, she’s not alone. I can leave and she still won’t be alone. She can hang on. This is better. This is better than before, even if before, she didn’t know enough to hurt and be afraid, because her brain was-

About 96% of her brain is back in her skull. The rest of it I missed, and it’s spread out, connected to the rest of it through the missing piece of the back of her skull that’s still attached to the central mass.

-all spread out, and now it’s not. It’s better. She doesn’t want me to hurt myself. 

I could understand. I could know exactly how and why and in what ways she’s ok with it and not. 

That’s hers. That’s not mine.

She’s grateful.

I don’t want to know that.

I don’t think about our connection. I don’t focus on it. I don’t let any details into my mind, keeping a distance, as best as I can, from my own mind’s understanding. 

I need materials.

She knows that, and she’s concerned that using materials from me might have further unintended weirdness, and she’s scared.

That’s important, and excellent communication, and I don’t want to know that. Not like this.

She knows that. She knows it was an accident.

I don’t want to know that she knows.

The nausea is so bad I can feel it in my lungs. In the back of my throat. Behind my liver. None of which I understand or feel or know better than I know the wall right next to me and every individual part of it.

Symbiont acquired.

Fuck. 

I’m not going to find new materials in here. I can feel that, I know that on a level as fundamental as knowing whether or not my hand has moved or knowing that I exist. I have to leave. 

I feel sick.

She is concerned for me, and scared, and trying to ignore the sensation of her own body, my understanding reflecting to her and back because according to whatever bullshit my powers are, we’re the same thing, two systems in conjunction.

Fuck.

I don’t say goodbye. I don’t know how it would matter, and the words feel like poison on my tongue.

She understands. I wish she didn’t. 

I start walking, taking the short path out of this place and back to the real world.