Chat Fiction

They sit you in the chair, wire you in, and tell you to count down from five. It won't help the pain. Not a bit. They don't tell you that.

They don't even tell you about the pain.

Somewhere in the middle the switch flips. The first pulse hits like a brick. The second a concrete block. The third sets your grinding teeth against the curb, raises its foot.

Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Time reduces to a pinprick and stretches into infinity.

It was only a moment. No time at all.

The pain ebbs. You float. You flow. You scatter across the breadth of creation.

Creation. You see the roots. Great luminous trunks of wire and flesh crawling with unknown code cradle and probe the world. Tendrils reach skyward, flaring colors you can neither name nor describe.

You blink and stare down at the world.

At a dimming, gray earth.

It was bright once. It is still bright in some places. Those lights dim even as you watch.

The tendrils? All of those colors reaching for the stars.

They are thicker here, roots in their own right. Bright and vivid and stretching out to places you could never imagine.

You reach out. Almost think twice before placing your hand against that indescribably surface. Touch.

The pulse hits you like a brick. It does not get worse. It does not get better. The moment becomes forever.

And ends.

You are not in the chair. You are not above the world.

You are somewhere else. The colors. A cacophony. The brick grinds into your eyes.

You open them wider.

Something shifts. Perception shatters. You scream.

Not because of the thing and these colors that regard you with inhuman, universal intelligence.

Not because you cannot parse what you see before you.

Not because you now know that the world you know is dying, nearly dead and even this... creator cannot save its creation.

You scream because you can feel the pulse, just barely. The first, so distant now, calling you back. The second, insistent, pulling on your tether. The third, dragging you back into the meat of a limited existence.

You scream because that new perception remains.

They are there. Around you. Surrounding. Unaware, perhaps, of the new eyes that expose the black, faceless nothing inside their biosuits. Or, perhaps, aware that it doesn't matter.