The Collector

 Hello again! If you don't wake up now, I'll keep prodding you with electricity until you do!

So I just got the results of our last test in, and I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, you passed! Way to go, kiddo, way to stick it to the man. You’re one of the few test subjects to make it through the first phase with most of your limbs intact. The bad news is that your sanity was removed and backed up onto a scratch-disk. We did this so your brain wouldn't explode during some of the mental tests, and we’re not sure it was properly re-installed afterword. If you start to feel psychotic and/or delusional, don’t worry, our engineering team is working on a hotfix for that as we speak. Just stay calm and try not to think of anything crazy. So far so good? Excellent. We’ll have you running good and proper once we replace your deleted memories with filler images from our stock warehouse. I hope you like pictures of supermarket food, because that’s all we could find. Anyways, back to business.

Phase 2 is a little more challenging, and by a little, I mean that it’s probably going to kill you. By probably, I mean that everything should be fine. Catch my drift? Nobody said this was going to be easy, but you knew this before signing up. But look on the bright side: in the event of a fatal mishap, we’ll harvest your organs for the benefit of science. Your lacerated innards could help save millions! And if that wasn’t enough, your unused remains will be vacuum-sealed, frozen, and ready to be processed into the same biofuel that covers our electric bill. Everybody loves recycling, and we firmly believe that nothing should go to waste around here, so if that doesn’t put a smile on your face, maybe a hologram of someone who loves you will do the trick.

Oh? What do you mean we couldn’t afford holograms? Who the hell cut the holograms out of the budget? Fire that man, immediately. Use his recycled salary to buy more holograms!

Sorry kid, no holograms today. Maybe never. You’re just going to have to use your imagination. On second thought, your imagination is still being reconstructed, so if you try to use it, your brain might melt. Here, have an ice-cream instead.

People, people, people. Always people. You know, one of the reasons we’re conducting these experiments is to explore the fun effects of isolation, possibly the most misunderstood part of the whole bit. You see, the less human contact you have, the more useful you are at being a subordinate test subject. It’s also important that all hints of rebelliousness are ironed out before we continue. If not, you might get a glimpse of what’s on the other side of the wall. Did I mention a wall? Well, forget I said anything. Let’s get on with the science! As I said before, phase 2 is a killer. You’ll need safety fallbacks that we call comfort vats. These vats are filled with a serum that counteracts curiosity and willpower. What some call detachment from reality, we call progress. Are you with me sofar? Wonderful. Like I said, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Honestly. Just place your skull against the safety drill and we’ll begin the safety penetration. Please don’t move during the insertion. If your heart happens to explode due to shock, don’t panic, because we’ve got backup hearts. Just don’t abuse the backup-heart policy, it’s not fair to the other subjects.

Anyhow, a flock of pencil pushers just told me that if we don't start the test now, your family will be exterminated. Nothing I can do about it. Has something to do with a wireless DNA link or something, so I won't waste your time any longer. Let the games begin!

Oh, and don't spoil the tests for anyone else. They can only handle so much at once and we don't want to overload their systems. We've already got enough potato batteries as it is.

Organic Industries: Initiate Subject Test (IST).

Sound good so far? Great! I knew you’d be a good sport about it, honestly. All of our test subjects are required to pass a physical and mental examination before proceeding to this point anyhow, so don’t worry if you don’t pass, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for you in the salt furnace or the sludge mines. They’re always seeking eager young underachievers such as you. Oops! I didn’t mean that. We hold all our test subjects in the highest esteem possible.

The question we’re really asking is how much control does he really have? Well, let’s solve this thing! The solution we’re looking for might seem like a bit of a crapshoot at first, but rest assured that one does exist, and once all the bugs and kinks are sorted out, everything will probably run fine. And I use the term ‘probably’ with the most delicate precision that science can afford. First of all, think of your brain as an outlet for motivation to which the cord of influence connects. Got it? Great! When connected, a signal of pure influence (sources vary), is fed through and divided along some complex pathways of criteria. All criteria of each pathway are broken down into a list-like hierarchy of relevant social patterns tied primarily to speech, action, and a few basic motor functions. Some motor functions are like a gas-sucking 18 cylinder behemoth, and others are like a puny lawn-mower engine that makes an annoying whining sound as it revs to life. If your influence is balanced, you might be lucky enough to receive a Bat Mobile or a DeLorean DMC-12 of influence, causing the motivation outlet to sprout sparks of happiness. If not, this interface is guillotined by blue vortex that dismembers and ejects relevance from the subconscious, dumping the remains wherever the hell it wants to dump it. Kinda like a goddamn garburator or trash compactor run in reverse (very messy!).

Are you with me so far? Good, we’ve almost got it!

A signal impedance is caused by an overhanging bed of crystallized daggers bolted to a ceiling of pure methane. Just kidding, you can’t bolt things to a gas! Just checking to see if you’re awake. Anyhow, don’t worry about the daggers, they’re just for show. Ignore them. If they fall on you and tear your feeble body into a million unrecognizable pieces, that means they’re working as intended. But don’t worry, you’ll be reassembled at the organ dump, ready to face the next challenge in no time flat! You might think that being diced up sounds a bit uncomfortable, but in reality, it’s not so bad after the second or third time. Just think of it as a friendly game of snakes and ladders gone horribly wrong, where everything gets puréed into an organic soup of nothingness. That’s where chicken-nuggets come from, in case you were wondering. Learning is fun, right? Well, it might not be as fun once your learning modules are stripped and retrofitted with potato batteries. But if you’re lucky enough to survive the chicken-nugget stage, you might be rewarded in the form of personal growth and human experience! Just don’t get greedy, or your life-essence might get consumed by a sea of countless billions high on bath-salts, like that guy in Miami who got his face eaten off. And phase 1.1 gets exponentially more challenging, depending on the strength of his grip. I hope you brought a motherfucking crowbar!

Some mirrors are see-through, and other mirrors are opaque. All mirrors are able to reflect the face of the viewer, unless said viewer is blind. Some people love their reflections, while others could care less.
'Mirrors? What mirrors?' he said. 'You mean those sheets of silver that spit back a reflection of the wretched gaze staring upon them?' This man was said to hate mirrors, and so he broke them wherever he roamed. After a time, people began calling him Mirror-breaker, because he was old, angry, and scarred from head to toe from all the mirrors he broke. This angered the womenfolk, because they liked their mirrors,

Aviosh

twelve covered courts — six in a row facing north, six south — the gates of the one ranged exactly fronting the gates of the other. Inside, the building was of two storeys and contained three thousand rooms, of which half were underground, and the other half directly above them. These rooms contained mysteries of wizardry that even the Coven of Chronologists were unaware of, and no nobleman or knight had been resilient enough to rip free from her cruel grip the legendary secrets within. It was rumored that the fundamentals of time travel and matter duplication were hidden deep near the center of the tomb, where beings of pure energy were thought to exist.

Arus, the arrogant prick that he was, would later claim to see arcane wizardry woven into the walls of living stone in the Hall of the Damned, where the echoes of dead servitors pierced the shadows and the skeletal remains of dead treasure seekers littered the ground. Idiots, all of them, and not because they were wrong, but because Arus was delusional and deserving of his title, The Lost.

At present, Arus’s gaze landed on statues of coarsely chipped obsidian. The statues were of powerful gods and mighty warriors, sentinels of a religion that had long since fallen into obsolescence. It was believed that all its followers engaged in a ritual mass-sacrifice in order to have their life essences sucked from their bodies and implanted into celestial orbs, for reasons that were unknown. In some cases, the statues had been defaced beyond recognition. Tomb robbers and other vagrancy were to blame for this. It was said that men stupid enough to slip a sleight hand into Avis tomb were held in no higher regard than pig shit, as they would, if they survived the expedition, become cursed with a life of impending doom. It was not known what a life of impending doom entailed, but those who believed in the curse thought that though with it would eventually suffer an irreversible hardship or physical ailment. All children’s’ waste and hogwash, thought Arus. It was his belief that men of critical standpoints were apt to claim corruption from the comfort of their padded armchairs, claiming that men who’d tried their hand at grifting tomb secrets had their minds wracked by a hooked webwork of raven claws, causing their bodies to become assiduously warped into ruined husks of chemical waste. It was a terrible thing to listen, and Seawolf was not about to relish on the verge of succumbing to falsehood and weakness.

The bottom of his brilliant vermilion overcoat dragged soggily behind Arus’s feet as he took his first step into the forbidden chamber. His sweat-ridden face was met with a refreshing gust of damp air through the cracks of massive wall-stones that were glazed with a thin film of beaded mist. Arus the Lost, upset about the damage to his newly woven travelers overcoat, took a deep breath and continued onward.

Edgeworld 2

'Boy... I’m like them huge fuckin’ lizards, you know? Had themself two goddamn brains, one in the head an’ one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin’. Hit that black stuff and ol’ tailbrain jus’ kept right on keepin’ on.'

Instruction in social aptitude was today's benchmark. Synthetic gardens sprawled in the courtyard with the same empty grace of a city block of sludge factories.

'They are then carted along like animals suspended by robotic tracks,' preached the Vizier. 'Like any electron forced to the strip of a conducting pathway, a soul is but a magnet fed to the slobbering jaws of a starving blob of iron sawdust.' 

A flock of frogs raining from the sky differed only in terms of size-to-jump ratio (S:J).

'Poignant,' he seethed, 'like waste-bins filled with garden-gnomes, and swarms of green frogs fighting rats with an affinity for torched flesh. Who knows where the little fuckers have been? Don't even ever trust a gnome that has exceeded even one arm's length in height, or you'll transform into a  wretched old wench-bag. Whomever was willing to swear allegiance to her frozen tits was dead to the world; a blighted sap. Dilapidated and shit-faced, the lot of them. And not a overlord or seer of the realm was provisioned with the foresight of roundhouse wheel-barons. 

A concrete mixer of applause was poured into the tight room. Some of the sharper voices in the crowd rent the air like neck-slicing chords converting magnificent beasts into evenly stacked containers of processed beef.
'Sights, vision wards, and entire fuck-tonnes of mental slavery. It is a beautiful subjugation. Observe how the dregs of foreign shores have all of a sudden sprouted with resplendence. Where there were once shadows and darkness, there now exist sanctified reapers donning the vestiges of civility. Not even a single gem is needed!' he said, face ripe with fulfillment.
 'These are not analogues of sheep. They are dignified cogs. The poisons exhumed by their social circuitry is easily digested by the uncertainty of our atomic harness. We can tell what the atom is. Its position is uncertain, but Eternity observes her carousel of life, and her eyes are consumed by the same insatiable hunger that leaves greed feeling envious. Uncertainty will always prevail, and we must submit to her mechanical lust.' he explained.


A series of mechanical ligaments operated in chorus as the four walls of electro-negative discharge cracked like hell's whips. A great lightning arc burst forth from the shrine, penetrating slabs of steel and leaving behind smokey black rings.

Procreation of the wicked precedes the jagged box-cutter of damnation.

Edgeworld

Eternity is an unfortunate bitch. She whistles through black teeth to the darlings, and their minds are pruned - winds weaving innately across barren fields of burnt sand dunes and the lime green grasses of a failed utopia. Weeded like mongrels. Valkyries were the answer.

A keyboard is a grotesque device of many buttons. Evil contraptions, they are. It is a device that spews forth a litany of messages to be catapulted blindly to the dissociative fringes of existence. And nobody can figure out how to disable the stupid fucking accents. Castle walls are no different than any blockade, and chemical concoctions are known to penetrate invisible barriers. Impulses from synapses are fed into never-ending loops of mindlessness. A power button isn’t a difficult idea. Neither is an endless ocean. Clouds can take on whatever form they want. Nobody can tell a fucking cloud what to do.

 Pathways wrought from signals, passed through, in and out, solutions unearthed by the will of a resplendent being adorning a halo of innocence. Were they but anonymous in their requisition of solidarity? And not one movement could be sparked, blackened and beaten like the ancillary chords of a majestic device that had long since fallen into disrepair.

Until the time that light fell from the sky, where angels sung at random, their chorus was rife with melodious tunes, tweaked by an unearthly  and savage apparatus intended to enhance their ensemble. Their distinct and alluring scent carried with it an eternity of genetic recombination and unending promise. Codes and signals, whereby pathways met and diverged in patterns of recognition.

THE WHALEMAN WAS NOT IN THE MOOD FOR GAMES, AND ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, HIS USE OF DICTION WAS NOT WITHOUT ITS DISCREPENCIES;

'Ion storms. Arenas. Piles of grunge stuck in a grid-locked wasteland. Gravity wells truncated the land like dragon-scythes, and the forests were flooded by the halogen shielding of skywalls and overpikes.
'Blasted inbreds!' yelled the Property Divisor, whose careless demeanor hearkened back to the era of Despise and Decay.


'And not a single fuck was given that day,' would be the chorus preached in the later days, where the key modicums of life had been constructed upon a fortress of Blood, Fire, and Death. 'Nations (See: clans)' the teleprompter would chirp, 'were equipped with nuclear powered weapons capable of mutually assured destruction.'


You'd see the whole city burn to fire in the blink of an eye, where neon-orange sunlight and ion-storms ripped the skin off ashes, and the bridges of eternity were sticky like the jutting studs of a pink bubblegum web!'

Nobody thought of a probability density. It was fucked by bracketed symbols and analogous states, similar to what one would observe in a quantum generator sheathed in grubby pink plastic. A signal pattern. A particle manipulated to the point of strain, corrupt and belligerent in the face of eternity. A list of underpinnings that should have been butchered by the strings of realism. What was real had to be digested. It was riveted by enclosures of dizzying nausea, where both statuses were recognized as being independent of one another, and yet only a single solution was possible, a solution unwilling to rectify itself in the face of obscurity. A blank solution. Unknown. Senders and receivers were situated in their comfort zones, oblivious to the goings on of interactions occurring on both social and symbolic levels, lost to the antiquated realms of tormented souls, housed and framed in the discarded remnants of broken cases, drifting like listless things on the unknowable rifts of obsolescence. 

Only she could redeem him.

Fucking brackets.

Ion storms. Arenas. Piles of grunge stuck in a grid-locked wasteland. Gravity wells truncated the land like dragon-scythes, and the forests were flooded by the halogen shielding of skywalls and overpikes.
'Blasted marines!' yelled the drill sergeant, whose careless demeanor hearkened back to the era of Despise and Decay.

'And not a single fuck was given that day,' would be the chorus preached in the later days, where the key modicums of life benched on the ideals of Blood, Fire, and Death. 'Nations (See: clans)' the teleprompter would chirp, 'were equipped with nuclear powered weapons capable of mutually assured destruction.'

You'd see the whole city burn to fire in the blink of an eye.

Neon-orange sunlight ion-storms ripped the skin off ashes and. through the  the ones that sprouted up at random. The bridges of eternity were sticky like jutting studs of a pink bubblegum web