PERFORATION 6.17 (Patreon)

Uuuuuuuugh. I hate hate hate hate hate that being in a bad mood is often one of the things that most motivates me to write. I mean being in a good mood also motivates me to write, but in a different way, and it definitely feels different. Bleh. On the other other hand, getting to take some of my misery / frustration / irritation and turn it into a genuinely fulfilling form of art and productivity is also a beautiful thing.

And y'all all get to enjoy it!

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"Hey, mate! Uh, listen, I already talked to your girl Monique, real fuckin doll, but I really do need to talk this shit through with you, alright? You’ve been making all these big calls lately, and honest to god, I know most of your shit checks out big time, but me and the investors, you know, we get worried! I mean, fuck it, you make us another few million of your little retail shit, I’ll kiss your fucking boots and shut right the hell up, but come on, man. What’s with all these new buys? You’ve got another few, what, hundred goddamn acres on the books now? All out in the middle of nowhere. No one’s gonna buy a condo out in the middle of bumfuck whatever the hell, man, and you and me both know that the investors aren’t into the kind of long-term shit that trying to build your own town takes.

“Just call me back, alright? I’m not trying to be a dickhead here, I mean you know I’ve always got your back. When you started this shit, I was on your side with the board the whole way, backed you 100%. But the amount you’re buying is… I mean it’s going buck fucking wild. I wouldn’t even be calling if you kept it personal, but you’ve got this on the company’s books and I have no clue why. Pretty sure this shit would be cheaper out of pocket, write it out of your fucking taxes later. What’s the plan, man?

“Gimme a call, alright? We’ll schedule another meeting. I’ll wait for next week if I have to, I know how you get with your little projects, but you and me, we both know that this shit’s better off cut off early, yeah?”

– Phone call to the personal line of Richard William Blake, CEO of Interface Solutions Inc.

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Everything is risk and reward. The potential gain versus the potential loss. I’ve been reckless, but in MEAT, I have good reason to be. In here, dying doesn’t matter. So long as the game’s mechanics are what kills me, I’m always fine, able to respawn seemingly at will. 

That’s no longer the case.

Maybe I’ll respawn if I lose all my lives, but the fact that I even have lives to lose implies otherwise. And even if it’s true, the loss of all of the bloodlings I just collected would negate pretty much any gains made here at all. And besides that, the last time he killed me, if indeed it was Richard that spawned in as the “other player”, he was wearing the mechanics of the game, playing as a big avatar full of symbionts and meat. Now, he’s exercising his own power, and whether or not that causes a more fundamental change is totally unknown. 

So the equation has changed rather dramatically. I can no longer afford to risk my life on a whim.

But with five more lives, five more Bloodlings that I can feel swimming about inside me like overeager puppies, that doesn’t mean I can’t risk it at all.

I keep low to the ground, using my additional limbs to basically scurry along. The dysphoric nightmare that is being a Fleshling (which is still better than my own body in many ways) is enhanced by my new fungal additions, making my avatar’s body bulge awkwardly in places and ensuring I’m pretty damn big, so crawling like this is the only way to get under the forest-maze of wire coming from the camera poles. There are gaps, some I might only need to crouch to get under, but I can move faster this way. 

My “biomechanical armor suite”, the way that this new game-overlap has assimilated most of my weaker Symbionts, works just fine in the new setup as it did in the rest of MEAT. I feel no strain, carrying the few hundred pounds of my avatar and its enhancements fluidly and easily. It feels just as natural and comfortable to skitter along as it does to walk around, which is more of a criticism of how unnatural and uncomfortable walking around is, but it works. 

The light from the semi-organic cameras, placed on the metal poles and turning back and forth to send beam-like gazes over the hazy space, illuminates my path towards the distant building. There, the marker of Brian’s grief, of a child’s grief, has been supplanted or overwhelmed by the horrifically minimalist corporate building of Dick’s manifestation, and keeping it to my left allows me to circle around it constantly without coming in too close.

I might not be in a position to take this bastard head on, but I’ve enough going on right now that I can kite his attention and force him to waste his resources on me. 

As if prompted by the thought (or by how easily I’m moving through the space, how much he’s failing to relocate me), I get a prompt.

Alarm Level Increased: Level 2

The prompt comes up on my stat-sheet level, swimming through the sclera of my eye to let me see it and letting me know that it’s another function of the game. The fucker’s got me trapped in a stealth mission with no quicksave function, and apparently he’s witting to commit to it. 

One of the metal poles in front of me, right in front of me, suddenly splits open like a seam, zipping open to reveal a slick interior– and a fucking cop. 

Or a security guard, technically. It isn’t wearing a badge or any of the traditional colors, but dressed in all black, androgynous, muscular, tall and missing a face. 

In place of where its head should be, there’s a blank face mask, the lenses of a camera just barely visible from behind that not-face. Where its skull should be is an empty cavity, hollowed out, with the slightest bits of basic camera circuitry hinted at where the faceplate connects to the neck, connecting to the all-black uniform. 

They fit the theme. Organic but not, machine but not, alive either way, but constantly neutered, existing only as a vessel for Richard’s fucking purpose. Everything I see about this motherfucker’s powers makes me hate him more, biased though I may be. 

Fuck a bias. 

I immediately shove myself to one side, almost hitting one of the wire-branches to get myself out of the way of the guard’s stare. Its head is stiff, awkward, but it turns to follow my movement, and just like the cameras above, an icon starts floating above its head, a symbol of a closed eye– opening slowly as its gaze tries to follow me. 

Fuck.

I skitter away again, leaving it behind me as fast as I can. It doesn’t have as clear of a “beam” effect on its line of sight as the cameras do, but the icon is opening slowly, and when in doubt, better to–

Fuck.

It’s not the only one.

Other poles have unzipped themselves, letting out more guards. As I leave that first one behind me, there’s already another shambling about, moving awkwardly and slowly but with purpose, its gaze panning back in forth in front of it. Its icon-eye is still closed, but unlike the cameras, it seems to notice any sounds I make, because as I approach, it starts to turn to face me, the icon turning slightly orange and widening just a bit. 

Fuck it. I have an idea. 

I keep moving, as quickly as I can, ignoring the volume issues for now, and dash up behind this thing. 

Almost immediately, my body stiffens, my “biomechanical armor suite” starting to move in a way that isn’t entirely conscious on my part. I don’t have to align everything properly, there’s just a sort of question in my mind, a tension in my frame. 

I say yes. 

My avatar leaps forward, getting up on two feet, my arms and the blades connected to them shooting forward. Two arms wrap around the guard-thing’s arms, two grab it by the neck and twist, and two stab into its guts from behind, letting out a gush of black fluid that paints my legs and the ground. 

The eye-icon over its head blinks off, and its body goes completely limp. Like a ragdoll, it slumps out of my hands, the way my avatar-body took over leaving me just as immediately as it came. 

The amalgamation of glass, plastic and wires on my arm lights up with a message. 

$734L7H K1LL!

I stand there for a moment. My hands stay in the position they moved into on their own. 

The black fluid on my legs is warm. It’s cooling fast, though. Going cold. 

Its skull was empty, missing, hollowed out. Just a camera on a body, just a vessel for observation and violence. 

But I felt the neck snap in my hands. 

I felt the resistance of flesh as my blades cut into it. 

I feel the cold fluid on my legs, over my feet as it spreads into a pool.

I’m snapped out of it by the light of one of the camera poles approaching, turning my way in its normal pattern. 

I get down on all eight, and start skittering away again. 

Killing that one offered me a little bit of open space to track things. The other guards, which fade into the mistyness of this space but are still visible by the icons floating over their heads in the murk, are walking in patterns. I see them doing small circuits around the poles that spawned them, moving about in stiff little circuits. An added level of difficulty, but not a back-breaking one. 

Still within acceptable risk levels. Still alright. 

Its neck snapped just like in the movies. I don’t know if it’s supposed to do that. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to feel different. But it turned, and cracked, and popped, and came loose. 

Would a person’s neck feel that way? A real person?

I skitter to the next post, keeping that corporate monolith to my left as I circle the center of this new space. I manage to keep out of sight for another minute or two, then three, but eventually, the patterns overlap. There’s two guards that circle close to each other, and the moment they’re far enough apart for me to feel confident, there’s a camera beam that sweeps through the space. 

So I have to kill again. 

There’s an opportunity. Right there for the taking. Like the game is asking me to do it, telling me that I should do it. Offering it up to me. 

I don’t know how sentient this place is. How conscious of me, specifically, or how capable of communicating it is. I don’t know how it interacts with the power that Dick is manifesting in this place, whether it’s all the same thing or two different things overlapping, whether one takes dominance over the other. But the game mechanics feel loud, here. Loud. 

It makes me wonder if there’s some sort of friction here. If MEAT is offering me something in exchange for Dick’s undue interference, his heavy-handed manifestation. Does it care? Can it? Would it do something like that if it did?

They’re real thoughts, really going through my real mind. They’re also distractions. Things I’m using to ignore the way my body moves automatically, a mixture of Symbionts and ingrained gamification blending together to pin the arms, stab the guts, and break the neck of the first guard.

$734L7H K1LL 7W0! N1[3 0N3!

Please shut up. Thank you. Shut up. It’s good not to be alone. I hate that someone sees me doing this. Sees me like this. 

I skitter past the space that its death leaves, ignoring the second one entirely, moving onward. 

He can’t keep this up forever. I can risk this for a little longer. I can hurt him a little more for this, for trying to kill me, for infecting people, for– 

Fuck. The rage comes and goes. It drowns in the fear and disgust and the pain of being here, of acting, of existing as this in this place, and then leaps right back out of the waves as loud and bright as ever the moment I think about this guy. I keep whiplashing between an overwhelming desire to run away and collapse into myself, to rest, and wanting to charge into the middle of this place, where I last knew Richard was, where he’s perverted and overtaken the manifestation of a child’s grief, and tearing him apart. 

I keep the balance for now. Keep the rhythm of it. I move from one place to another, and, in the distance, that monolith wrapped around the gravestone keeps flickering, becoming more and more intangible, less distinct. 

And then one of the beams behind me sweeps over the body of the guard I killed, and a mechanic I was really hoping wouldn’t come up rears its head. 

The icon above the camera flashes red, the eye symbol opening wide and the gelatin of the camera’s literal eye turning to match it. The red beam is brighter than all the others, highlighting the corpse lying in that pool of black liquid, and several other cameras around it go to a half-alert state. Bluish eye icons turn orange, closed eyes becoming lidded as their movements get faster.

Worse, all of the guards I can see break from their patrol routes and start to head towards the corpse, the branches of fence-wire opening to let them past. 

Which damn near guarantees that any possibility of me staying stealthy goes out the fucking window. 

Fuck me. 

I barely even have the chance to start moving before one of the guards turns its head, sees me, and screeches. The sound is like a klaxon, like a horrific alarm, something too real and not real enough, alive but in a way that’s so artificial it hurts.

A dozen eye-beams all turn to stare directly at me, and I am Seen, and Categorized, and come apart into a million different numbers to be used.

When I wake up again, my sheet is loud and clear in my eyes, already ready as I pull it up to know what I’m going to see.

{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}

STATUS: UNDETECTED

ITEMS: 

VISION-LENSES: ⦽⦽⦽

DESIGN MODULE: ⦽⦽⦽⦽

ANATOMICAL MANIPULATOR: ⦽

SPATIAL MAP

METASURGICAL GAUNTLET

BIOMECHANICAL ARMOR SUITE

RESOURCES: 

EMERGENCY BIOTRANSFERS: 4 REMAINING

PERSONAL DIMENSIONAL SHUNT: EMPTY

EMERGENCY BIOTRANSFERS: 4 REMAINING. One more Bloodling down. Rapidly approaching the point where this is no longer worthwhile, even as an act of spite against this fucker. 

But then the tower flickers again, and the gravestone returns. This time, when the corporate structure comes back, there’s a light on in it. Every window but one is coated in shadow, a darkness that seems like the dark of a bedroom at night, the dark of sleep and the sleep of death, gentle and horrible. That one window shines bright with an artificial LED blue light, pushing back the darkness, but now even in its dominated state, the quiet flesh of the grave encroaches on it. 

He probably isn’t spending everything to try and get me. Probably isn’t pulling out any major stops. But he is burning resources. He wants to wipe me out, I know that for a fucking fact, because he’s still here, even as he’s slowly losing ground. 

It hurts to die. To be Seen the way he sees the world. All numbers. But not like math. It’s numbers the same way that a hunt is biology. It’s numbers that reduce and devour and unmake, and being seen by them, made into them, is a horror.

It’s all horror here. 

I hate him so much in this moment. And all the hate I have for myself, all the hate that burns and screams in me and roils like worms trying to take me apart from the inside, all slips through the outlet it’s found. 

Like calls to like. 

‘Dick’ is an outlet. 

I almost laugh at that little innuendo. 

The part of me that screams in blissful rage, that allows me to put all the other things breaking me to rest for just a moment, wins out.

The rage comes over the waves and hits the shoreline.

No more games of hide and seek. No more circling around the middle, then. It’s the smart move and the spiteful move, but I’m just not feeling very smart right now.

This game has mechanics for murder. 

Richard is here. In the mechanics. Trapped here with me, because he decided he’d be better off trying to murder me first.

I start skittering on my many limbs towards the tower directly. Towards that single light, and the man I’m going to beat to death.