PERFORATION 6.16 (Patreon)

Wowie, homies! We got two whole videogame mediums in one this round here in MEAT, who'd have thunk it? That's me, an innovator, always pushing the envelope, motherfuckers!

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ALERT ALERT ALERT

THREAT DETECTED

PRESENCE OF PRIMARY THREAT DETERMINED.

THREAT STATE: MOBILE, IMMOBILE, INANIMATE, ANIMALIA

THREAT CLASSIFICATION: BAHAMUT (97% CERTAINTY). 

THREAT RESPONSE RECOMMENDED: TARTARUS  ERROR. RESPONSE METRIC NOT MET. THREAT RESPONSE RECOMMENDED: PURGATORY 

SCALE: ALPHA BETA

ERROR

SIGNIFICANT SIGNAL DEGRADATION DETECTED. SIGNIFICANT DISTORTION DETECTED. DISTORTION SOURCE UNCONFIRMED. POSSIBLE ACTI

DISTORTION SOURCE UNCONFIRMED

THREAT LOCATION DETERMINED

NORTHWEST QUADRANT SECTION S-J413

ALERT ALERT ALERT

IMMEDIATE MOBILIZATION RECOMMENDED

–Automated alert in unknown system, intercepted by M3 $1LLY H4H4 H111!!

_______________________________________________________________

The walking simulator breaks. That’s the only way I have to describe it. 

One moment, I have a fully functional system, albeit one I’m not familiar with. Made simpler than any other games I’ve experienced so far, it transformed my Skills into items, gave me a “Sadness” meter, and otherwise just restricted me into a more familiar form, made for walking. If there’s anything to find here, it’s asking to be found without violence, with only the places I can walk to and the things I can see or touch to guide me. 

Dick has decided that that’s not how he wants to play things. 

Every single flap of skin on every single tree of the bone forest suddenly opens eyelids that were not there before, revealing eyes that were not there before. They swivel to stare at me, thousands of them at once, eyes rolling and bright and flat all at once, shark eyes, doll eyes, trying to stare into me.

I feel the shell dissolving around me, the mechanics of this particular part of the “videogame” coming apart under the pressure of something new. I can see the little swimmers in my eyes spasming and flailing, turning to static mess instead of offering me a clear character sheet, and I feel the way that the eyes stare at me getting worse.

They see me. They see me. They see me and know me and tear me apart from within, break me down into smaller and smaller pieces, tell me that each individual piece matters more than the whole, that every singular facet can be quantified and calculated and–

It’s too much, completely overwhelming me. If not for my experience with GLIMPSE BEYOND and this sort of information overload before, I’d have already blacked out, been at his fucking mercy. 

As it is, I have just another moment. 

INTERPRETIVE CRAFTSMANSHIP and SCULPTOR OF FLESH cooperate in perfect tandem, like they were meant to, like one budded free from the other to even exist in the first place, and as I crouch down and grab a flap of skin, reality distorts itself to fit the mechanics I’ve been offered. I tear up the material on the ground in meaty strips, the scab-gravel replaced with something softer by the gravesite, and then to something almost like a plastic tarp by this latest influence entering this place. 

In an instant, I’ve cast it over myself, my intention carrying through into the material as two warring game mediums try and hold supremacy over this place. I feel the fluttering pages of an art book right alongside the pages of an exercise manual, neither of which is real, both of which are inside me and in my hands at once, and I have too many hands again, enough to hold all of it. 

SYMBIONT CREATED

UNDERDEVELOPED CAUL

The material wraps around me, contorted into something almost like skin, something almost like a film of ooze, and immediately the pressure of the eyes diminishes. Still there, but what was a screaming voice in my head, telling me outright that I am nothing, that I am numbers, becomes merely a babbling whisper instead. 

And just like that, I’m running. 

I don’t know his capabilities, don’t know if I can hurt him, don’t know if I can survive whatever he can do to me in return. I came here equipped with what I thought would be enough to deal with the relatively smaller manifestation that is Brian’s grief and necromancy, not this. 

So I’m running. 

I would log out right here, but I don’t want to leave him in this place with my avatar. More than that, I don’t want to leave him here inside Brian’s manifestation.

I can barely see past the “caul”, a flickering mess of almost-things that is already coming apart. The eyes stare at it and enforce rules upon it, judging it, breaking it down to its different components and pointing out the quantitative flaws therein. 

But it’s a shield, and I’m running, and it’s holding up enough. 

I stumble into one tree, then another, and the “walking simulator” tries to enforce that I can’t break it, but the flesh beneath the shell imposed on me is stronger now as reality trembles. A Greater Fleshling, imbued with additional fungal flesh, additional limbs, additional armor, tears past the tree, partially ripping open the caul. 

I don’t care. I keep running in a straight line, booking it straight backwards and away from the center of this place as fast as I can go. No dodging and weaving, no hiding, nothing. I just keep sprinting, hoping to get out before–

The space outside my Caul trembles. Through the tear, I see something go wrong, go sideways, transform in some kind of way I can’t quite describe or understand–

And suddenly forest is gone. 

I trip and fall as the ground beneath me turns from almost-soil into almost-plastic, and the improvised Symbiont tears. 

Beneath it, I am once again the Fleshling. Any semblance of a human shell wrapped around me is gone, and I’m returned fully to the augmented avatar I created for MEAT. 

The forest has not turned back to the meat-lands. The valleys and hills of hair and scab-gravel are just as gone now as they were amidst the bone-trees beneath the grave marker. 

Instead, I am surrounded by tall pillars, out of which spawn messy, branch-like structures of wire fencing. 

I’m on the ground, lying on something almost like a plastic mat, slightly padded like for wrestling or martial arts. About half of the trees have vanished, disappearing entirely as if they were never there, and what’s replaced them look sort of like signposts, but without signs atop them. Instead, seemingly random “branches” and sheets of wire fencing grow out of them, making strange, almost labyrinthine tunnels to go between them. 

Atop each signpost is a camera. Inside where their lenses should be are large, wet pupils, the gelatin of the eyes shining and glowing strangely as electricity dances behind them. 

And I can see where they’re looking. 

The glowing from the electrical energy buzzing into and behind the eyeballs forms strange, sweeping beams of light, showing where the eyes are looking, painting swathes of the dark space in brighter colors. The sky above is muted, muffled, covered as if by some sort of smog, making those eyeballs the biggest source of light I can see. 

Before I have time to process, one of the eye-beams starts turning towards me. 

I scramble back and out of the way, only for one of my additional limbs to touch one of the branching curtains of fencing-wire.

Instantly, a dozen eyes turn to me at once, and the light from them is–

I blink, and I’m somewhere else. 

I’m whole. I’m alive. That sensation, like being turned to words that then get rewritten, fades in a flash. 

My first instinct is to start hyperventilating. Flashbacks to getting my arm torn apart, to getting my pieces taken away from me and bleeding out from it, fill me with the sort of anxiety that comes only with ptsd. 

And then I suppress it, and check my character sheet. 

{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}

GENUS: ESURIATIO AUTONOMIA 

SPECIES: GREATER FLESHLING

STATS: 

ADAPTATION

🔺🔺🔺

CANALISATION

🔺🔺🔺🔺

EVOLUTION

🔺

SYNCHRONICITY

🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺

ORGANS: 

CUTANEOUS

GREATER FLESHLING SKIN

SKELETAL

FLESHLING BONE

MUSCLE

GREATER FLESHLING MUSCLE

GREATER FLESHLING TENDON

CIRCULATION

FLESHLING CIRCULATION

GREATER FLESHLING PUMP

RESPIRIUM

FLESHLING LUNGS

GLANDULAR

FLESHLING LIVER

FLESHLING ADRENAL

NEUROLOGOS

GREATER FLESHLING BRAIN

PARASITIC INFESTORICA

SENSORIA

FLESHLING SENSORIA

DEGUSTATION

GREATER CYCLIAL DIGESTER

SKILLS: 

GLIMPSE BEYOND ⦽⦽⦽

INTERPRATIVE CRAFTSMANSHIP ⦽⦽⦽⦽

SCULPTOR OF FLESH ⦽

MUTATIONS:

EXTRASPATIAL SENSITIVITY

Multilimbed

SYMBIONTS: 

DIVINE BLOODLING VII

THE GLOVE

TERATOMIC CONJUNCTION

Writhing Limbs

Refined Bonespear

Writhing Blades

Dermal Cloak

Fungal Tissue (Leg, Arm, Torso)

Alright. Back to normal. Back to–

The sheet abruptly stops, and the swimmers in my eyes burst like a soap-bubble on my eye. What’s left forms an entirely new shape. 

{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}

STATUS: UNDETECTED

ITEMS: 

VISION-LENSES: ⦽⦽⦽

DESIGN MODULE: ⦽⦽⦽⦽

ANATOMICAL MANIPULATOR: ⦽

SPATIAL MAP

METASURGICAL GAUNTLET

BIOMECHANICAL ARMOR SUITE

RESOURCES: 

EMERGENCY BIOTRANSFERS: 5 REMAINING

PERSONAL DIMENSIONAL SHUNT: EMPTY

Fuck. Fuck. Of course it’s a new thing. 

The fucker put me into a goddamn stealth mission. 

Or, more precisely, he tried to beam me out of existence with his weird number-eyes, and whatever gives me my powers is fighting back. It’s turning it into a game, yet again.

Ok. Translate. Fast. 

I’m still in the maze, so I crouch down, low to the ground, to do my best to avoid the hanging wire fencing. None of the eyes are looking at me– if anything, it looks like they’re pointing off in the distance, towards a point where a dozen others have turned like spotlights to a single spot. 

Inside that light, I see myself. 

More specifically, I see a Greater Fleshling, modified the same way I’ve modified my avatar– except it’s made of ash. Even as I watch, it’s dissolving, vanishing into nothing but a fine powder, which seems to sort of escape the light and turn to nothing.

Translate.

Vision lenses are obvious: that’s GLIMPSE BEYOND. The Design Module and Anatomical Manipulator: INTERPRETIVE CRAFTSMANSHIP and SCULPTOR OF FLESH. Spatial map is my EXTRASPATIAL SENSITIVITY, the gauntlet is probably the GLOVE, but…

Emergency Biotransfers. By the name alone, that’s what transported me away. 5 remaining. 

The Bloodlings. Seven total, one exhausted when I got here, one exhausted just now.

He fucking killed me. If not for the Bloodlings operating as extra lives, I would be dead, though whether that’s dead here or dead in the real world, I don’t know. 

I ignore the last one. I don’t have to translate it. It’s empty. It doesn’t matter.

Bit of a rude thing to say, boss!

The text scrolls across my screen, emerging from a previously hidden icon shaped like a box with–

A woman. Only one eye. Her features too misshaped to be anything but the basic shape of a face. 

No. I’m not– I’m not thinking about you, no, I’m sorry I’m sorry–

Focus up, roomie! We’ve gotta be on our toes and moving if we’re gonna extract from this mission.

What the fuck does that mean? What the absolute–

Focus up, roomie! We’ve gotta– wow. I just said that, didn’t I? This is weird. It’s like we’re talking, but it’s sort of small. Like I’m in a box!

D4RN R1GH7, FR13ND0! 1'V3 G07 Y0UR 84[K, 8UD$! 4NY FR13ND 0F MY FR13ND 1$ 4 FR13ND 0F M1N3!

Wha– Friend computer? How the fuck are you both here!

Focus up, roomie! We–

Don’t call me that. Please, please, please–

1 7H1NK 0UR FR13ND N33D$ $0M3 $UPP0R7, 8UD! M4Y83 W3 [4N H3LP GU1D3 H3R 0U7 0F 7H1$ P1[KL3 $H3'$ 1N! H4, 7H47'$ FUNNY. P1[KL3. 4$ 1F 7H47'$ $0M37H1NG 7H47 Y0U [4N 83 1N$1D3 0F. P1[KL3$ 4R3 $M4LL!

Focus up to you too, operator! We can’t be keeping her confused with all this chatting! Let’s keep these messages mission-critical, huh?

[4N D0! Y0U'R3 7H3 3XP3R7, N3W813, |'M ]U$7 H3R3 F0R 73[H $UPP0R7!

You’re all talking so fucking much, can we please stop for like a second?

To my surprise, they immediately do as I ask, going silent. 

The eyes have started to drift away from that spotlight where I was, where some part of me or version of me just got fucking obliterated. They’re moving slowly, carefully, and I can sense from them a weird sort of… glow?

As I focus on them, symbols start to float above them. A symbol so instantly recognizable to me that I can immediately tell what it means.

A closed eye hovers over the bio-mechanical cameras, its glow slightly blue-ish, like the blue of veins or of a right cornea. As one of the beams approaches me, the eye-symbol starts to open above it, slowly, gradually turning to a bile-like yellow. 

Ok. Ok. GLIMPSE BEYOND pulling its weight, yet again. 

I start crawling, using my additional limbs to move steadily and balance myself. Some of the fencing jingles and clinks as the cameras move, shifting back and forth alongside them, but they always leave gaps, little patterns I can follow and trace. 

I look behind me, checking for any additional cameras turning towards me, and notice a red trail behind me, glowing faintly and fading the further from me it goes. 

Yeah. Couldn’t be as easy as escaping a maze of panopticon meat-cameras, could it? Of course there’s a trail. 

Careful, boss! If you get detected, you’ll end up getting blasted just like last time!

It sounds so fake. So painfully cheery. It sounds less like a person speaking and more like a damn character, reading through their lines. 

Is it because she isn’t real? Is it because I built her back wrong? What have I fucking done to her? I–

Keep it together, boss! Plenty of time to get existentially spooked later. Right now, we gotta make sure to extract you from the mission zone!

She’s right. She’s right, and I hate that so much, but at least she’s talking now. At least it’s not the horrific beam of concentrated omniscienceI get when I usually think about her. At least she’s as real as friend-computer. 

Fuck it. Let’s go. 

I look up at the sky, trying to get my bearings. I don’t know which direction I should head in, what with the sky being covered by that weird smog-smoke, but there is one thing I can see. 

Behind me, the graveyard. It’s shaped like a building, now, but still in the shape of a tombstone, made of concrete and built into the shape of a sort of pillar. It’s recognizable as what came before, but transformed, as if by force, into something new. 

And yet, even as I watch, it sort of trembles. It flickers, briefly becoming that impossible, massive monolith again. 

And then it’s a building again.

Another flicker. Longer, harsher. 

I feel it, deep inside, behind my eyes. This is temporary. He can’t hold it forever. If he could, he would’ve started with this move to begin with. 

So long as I’m here, he can’t afford to let this manifestation end. He hasn’t found me, but it’s obvious that, as the cameras keep panning back and forth, he knows I’m still here, or that something is still here. The longer I stay, the more he’ll have to drain himself to keep this up. 

…

Fuck you. 

I scream it inside my head, blasting it out of me at the idea of Dick.

FUCK. YOU.

I might not be able to fight him head on, not without gambling against the likelihood that this sociopathic rich piece of shit doesn’t have more moves to throw at me, but fuck it if I can’t force him to waste himself. 

Instead of moving out, I start moving in. 

If I can make it to the edge, so that I have more chances to escape if I have to, but stay in the space, then I can force him to exhaust himself. And maybe, just maybe, use that exhaustion to free Brian’s grief from him.

N0W 7H47 $0UND$ L1K3 4 FUN G4M3, FR13ND!

For once, I’m in almost complete agreement with the crazy machine.