Mystery Fridge

‘See, that wasn’t so bad,’ the Salesman said. ‘Phase 3 is right around the corner, and I bet that you’re just brimming with excitement to find out what it is!’ Trace was not brimming with excitement. The loudspeaker clicked off. Trace stood up. No sound, save for his own breathing.

The screen on the wall wound down like a haunted carousel after a night of ceaseless operation. Each scene of the final frameset might have been wrapped in tin-foil; empty echoes flashing across a faded backdrop of yellow etched plaster. Trace stood up, looked at his hands, still feeling as though they were maimed. Nothing. No blood, no bones, and no bruises. Even as the nightmare lingered in the back of his mind, he clenched his hands into fists and they felt perfectly normal, ligaments and tendons retracting with mechanical precision. He wondered if his blood was still filled with robots. How the fuck did she know? Was it part of the test?

Dead fluorescent waves of a surgical lamplight, teal glass tubes filled with black orchids atop  a stainless steel workbench, mounds of flesh, limbs, and prosthetic organs sitting in a lumpy pile in a dark corner. The body parts were used to keep test subjects functional. A placard mounted to a thin strip of whitewashed concrete between the particleboard ceiling and a clear plastic shower curtain acting as a doorway read ‘Zombie Factory.’ Her face was wrapped in a black surgical mask, hair was dark and pulled back tight, eyes hurt like burning chrome behind tinted lenses, severe and fierce as she slammed the syringe into the base of his skull. Green LEDs from a scantron screen flickered with sensory data, vital signs, and a beeping that reminded Trace of a fastfood restaurant. Then came the robots. Blindness. A soothing voice that was barely discernible amid the electric hum of an old LG refrigerator.

‘Don’t fucking move, it will kill you,’ as the lights dimmed from the voltage drain caused by her electroscalpel. More work being done. This was mad science. Traces’ head was pressed into what looked to be a repurposed toiletseat to keep him stable. Sanitary was pointless. This wasn’t a hospital. It might have been a black-market organ trade, or a dump for failed medical experiments.

She was displeased by his movement. Frayed leather belts found themselves around his numb body, strapping him tight against the gurney. His nervous system was flooded with a powerful inhibitor that caused him to hallucinate for the next thirty-six hours. The procedure was enough to make a butcher red. ‘Sixty-three types of mutant blood,’ she said, wide-grinned, ‘and you get to try them all. I think this mixture will be utterly effective. Lucky you.’  

The Fuck is a Rototiller?

Trace swept away a thin film of grease and sweat off his forehead. A few cuts and bruises remained, but his organs and sanity were mostly intact. Mostly.

Nothing was as he remembered it. Faint memories of a homeless man who’d tried to sell him bullet-proof rocks glanced his mind, and his face had been so faded. Then he thought of the lady who’d injected miniature robots into his bloodstream. What was her name? She’d claimed to be an artist. The robots had been cubical silver boxes gleaming fiercely under a surgical lamplight. Memories after that point were a blur, a corruption, like a sector of bad data on a scratched bootdisk. He failed to recall how he got here, but he knew that he had been somehow captured and dropped into a testing facility. The first things he saw were a series of segmented rooms that stretched out like the caverns of a salt mine. The place felt gutted, ancient, and the surrounding décor reminded him of the rusted innards of dead cruise-ship. It felt like a prison. Trace could see the shadows of others moving behind opaque glass windows in the rafters high above him, watching him. They belonged to faceless people conducting experiments and testing the results of his progress. He was not alone.

‘Oh my goodness!’  the Salesman’s faceless voice boomed. Trace could not tell where it was coming from. ‘What a show, kiddo, and you made it out unscathed. Kudos for you, my friend. Phase 2 is in the bag!’ The condescending creep of his tone sunk into Trace’s mind and stuck there like stale paint. ‘Boys, can we get a replay on that?’ he said. The sound of mechanical background noises could be heard over the intercom. An old rotary projector kicked in, like the ones they use in drive-ins. A silver screen blanketed an entire wall. When the picture kicked in, he could see himself huddled in a corner with blood on his face. He rested his strained body against the wet concrete and watched.

The room was stagnant, stuffy, and it looked like a cell. The walls were closing in on all sides. Trace was sitting in a corner of the room next to a fallen nightstand of stained red-oak and the remains of a shattered porcelain vase.  The floor was an uneven grid of sun-bleached cedar planks that squealed as the dead-white walls scraped across it. ‘This can’t be hell.’ he said to himself, keeping his gaze fixed on the swaying spotlamp in the middle of the room. The polished silver lamp was not suspended by a cable or mounted to a fixture. No mechanism in sight seemed to be holding it up. Floating in mid-air? Trace shielded his eyes from its violent glare as the room grew even smaller. A wretched stab of frozen panic hit his gut. He flailed at the walls and beat them with his fists until he could hear the snapping of bone amidst the squealing walls. He looked down, and his hands were a mangled mess. Fragments of bone had torn through his flesh and blood leaked all over, but he felt nothing. He said nothing. The room threatened to crush his body like a carton in a trash compactor. Struggling was useless. He could not escape. In one swift motion he closed his eyes and looked up towards the swaying light. His retinas burned from the strain, but he continued to stare. ‘Just one light,’ he whispered, his voice barely audible against the sound of the screaming walls. Then the light went dead, the bulb shattered, and the glass fell into his eyes, shredding them apart. He could feel the edges of the jagged pieces behind his eye-sockets and against the base of his brain, but still he felt nothing. The blood from his hands was pouring out onto the small square of remaining floor beneath his feet. The wood turned into sawdust, mounds of it. A fine-powder sand-castle beneath his feet. Suddenly, the wretched wood buckled beneath his feet like rotten tree-trunk being split by a chainsaw. With all four walls pressing against him, his head threatening to pop from the stress, he slipped through the busted floor and entered a pitch-black chamber of zero-gravity. The room imploded into a small cube of pure black. Cruel barbed chains sprung from the stygian void, snaking around the cube, crushing it some more, and sealing it forever, never to be seen again. Trace had no control over his weightless body. The adrenaline in his bloodstream reached a final peak, causing him to black out.

The robots… his blood… now he knew. 

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.