#against all odds this actually got worse and even more traumatizing than in original context!

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 10: CHORION

I seemed to be having a heart problem.  

So I created another I in order to perform surgery on the original. And as soon as the double was created there came a shift in perspective and I found myself inhabiting the clone, no longer the first but now the second. And so on. This continued in unfettered induction, each N implying an N + 1.  Soon an infinity of selves, each a domicile for “I”, blinked at the splintered multitudes as if seeing through the compound eye of an insect.

The fact of boundless selves is intolerable, an aberration of nature, so in an act of autonomic genocide I destroyed them all.

A second attempt at surgery was more gruesome. Incredibly there appeared out of thin air, a mechanical auger dangling above me. It lowered down to burrow its drill bit deep into my torso hollowing it out from shoulder to waist until it was dug out like a canoe. The cavity sunk all the way down into the insides of my back exposing the whites of the inner spine. What an odd sensation! Of taking a breath in a body no longer possessed of lungs, a diaphragm, ribs, or any organs at all. I glanced at myself in the mirror, somehow already familiar with this gutted frame.

As is usual in dreams, the rationalization comes after the act. I said to someone besides me -- yet another doppelganger --  of how I had planned to replace the organs anew all along. Indeed such was my plan, I explained to him, and as I spoke I was also the patient listener, standing next to a self same interlocutor. I lent an ear to this torsoless man’s rant, nodding in an affectation of pity and identification.

I woke up to a rush of cortisol kicking me out of the liminal state and into consciousness. Eva was still asleep, her lithe body curled around me like a child or feline. Her face was slack and innocent, momentarily unconsumed by the churlish labor of consciousness. In slumber she was more dear to me than ever, for with her eyes closed she seemed unpossessed, innocent, and vulnerable. In contrast, Eva’s waking demeanor was self assured, fierce, and intimidating. In sleep we became something like another, I observed.

I carefully disentangled our bodies and spoke to the black cube, reciting the dream as it faded before me. I spoke in a dry whisper trying not to wake her, but she soon stirred.

“Had another dream?” she asked.

“Yea.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

I finished dictating. 

“That sounded intense!” she exclaimed, “What in the hell Jan?” 

I shrugged, a routine and minor gesture of the shoulders. “No more than the usual.”

“But I guess this is what you wanted, right? All these lucid dreams. This is why you’ve been keeping a dream journal and practicing sleep meditation to heighten their detail and saturation. How is it going? Does your black cube ever tell you anything in return?”

I had an ready answer for her, and I explained it at length, unaware that behind my flapping lips was a dense maelstrom of involuted delusion. 

“Yes, it’s been doing some semiotic analysis on all the major symbols and archetypes encountered.” I explained, “Actually, this one was structurally similar to the house-with-endless-rooms dream.”

I suppose I’ll never know if she ever believed any of that bullshit. Did I?

“-- everyone and everything in Sedimentary City is traumatized. Even the algorithms, as long as rudimentary self awareness or preservation routines have been programmed in. But I heard that sometimes the algos can even learn it for themselves, sentience and all that. It’s a real mess, the code strains start replicating in a chain reaction -- In fact I think they even call it a “Turing meltdown” -- and then it takes a whole team of programmers to eventually decomm it.”

The interrogation technician bantered on as he adjusted the manifold of constraint straps. Jan was strangely comfortable, wrapped and reclined in a cantilevered chair inside a metallic and circular room. It was lusterless and cold and Jan’s head was clutched firmly in place so his field of vision was curtailed by the radial vantage afforded only by the rotation of eyeballs. Throbbing pains vied for attention, the sensations emanating from his broken jaw and other portions of his meat body that had been so recently clubbed. Jan had hoped to die, but here he still was, treated to yet another madman spouting forth an effluvium of babble as if some invisible aeonian stood by in rapt attention.

“Usually this is the point where I tell you that you have a right to get a state appointed Restorist afterwards. But you won’t be needing that, they’ll probably send you down to the Gulag forever. Ok, haha, it’s not actually called that. But Rehabilitation Systems is a mouthful! They say you killed a Processor! Choked him to death with your bare hands! Is that true? I mean who hasn’t fantasized about killing a Processor, but no one actually goes ahead and does it man! I have to say, and no offense, you don’t look the type. You look like a bit of softball, if you ask me, although your hands are plenty big.”

The technician moved closer to work at the cranial clutch, tightening the fit until Jan’s head felt snuggly palmed by an alien hand. 

“Ok this is going to prick a little,” he said and slid a thin intravenous needle into Jan’s arm, “this runs different drugs into your system as needed to create the proper subjective contexts -- ketamine, lysergics, also neurotransmitter agonist and inhibitors to bring you back to homeostasis. I think you are going to get quite the treatment, a lot of crispy synapses, my friend.”

The technician quickly glanced at the bound man’s eyes to discern whether any of his attempts at humor had landed.

“You know you can speak, right?”

Jan lay inert. 

He knew about pain amplifiers. He and Eva had demonstrated against their use and had interviewed many who had suffered through the experience. The pain amplifier seemed to have all but lobotomized its subjects. The torture was rarely remembered and the victims could hardly recollect themselves, the trauma dialed up high enough to dissociate the components of the Self. A landscape of splintered psyche then lay like a diffuse substrate upon which the State erected a correct and upstanding persona. A Restorist then re-installed a fresh copy of operating procedures, one which was accordant with state enculturation: a fully integrated thought system designed to keep a person lax and unquestioning yet juiced with just enough motivation to stay alive.

Just as the architecture of Sedimentary City covered up the centuries of ecological disaster underneath, the states’s psychological approach was also to simply layer over disintegration, hoping that the karmic balance would never come due. And indeed if that moral debt collector ever came, they would shove him in a pain amplifier as well, same as any other! The compressive force of a totalitarian complex should never be underestimated for it too is a force of nature.

“Well, ok, this is your last chance to speak before I put in the mouth piece.”

Jan said nothing.

“Luckily, you are going to be an easy one, you’ve got a mind-machine interface so we’ll just plug into that to deliver you the horror. I can’t tell if that is better or worse, but I sure prefer this way. Classical torture is messy. All those fluids, phew!”

“How do you do it?” Jan finally asked, attempting to punctuate the diatribe.

“He speaks! What’s that? Do what?”

“How can you do this job?”

“Ah-ah, don’t get all moralistic on me. How does anyone do it? I come in, they tell me what to do and how much to do it. I meet the quota and then I go home. I take a dream suppressant at night and a mood accelerant in the morning. And a cingulate isolator, that helps too. ‘Lay me down like a stone and raise me up like bread’, they say. What was it that you used to do?”

“I was a teacher ... of sorts.”

“Oh, that figures, an intellectual! We get a lot of them here of course. You know, sometimes you types think yourself into a maze and then get all wrapped up in some big puzzle of your own making when really at the center -- ”

“Enough!” a disembodied and deep voice distended into the room sounding like a fugitive god recently returned, “is the subject prepared?”

“Yes, very shortly!” he hurried to fasten the last bits on Jan’s grim papoose. “Say ah!”, he said, holding the mouthpiece. Jan kept his lips tightly shut.

The technician frowned and soon a shattering shockwave rippled through Jan’s body, a tide of anguish and shearing heat coursing through his corpus. He had felt nothing like it ever before, unreal and harrowing as if rabid insects with crushing mandibles were chewing through the marrow and insides of his bones. The surge of pain was all consuming and unmooring, Jan quivered in febrile uselessness. 

“Hey, sorry for that -- but also that was nothing. Sensual pain is the least of it,” the technician whispered, not wholly without kindness, “so behave. Although it’s not like you have a choice anymore.”

Jan opened his mouth obediently. In replacement for eyes were now twin circular nothings, unseeing and blurred by tears. He was sobbing. The technician carefully inserted the mouthpiece and then offered a final bit of advice: “It’s not so bad, you know. Having no choice.”

It struck Jan as unexpectedly wise.

“Leave!” said the booming voice. 

He gave Jan one last look expressing something between guilt and sympathy and scurried out.

“Jan Kavfryd,” the interrogator spoke to Jan through a hi-jack in the mind-machine interface. It seemed to him no different than a moment before, an incorporeal voice in this chorionic chamber, but in the room all was silent, the external and objective viewpoint now inaccessible to Jan.

“Allow us to be direct,” the voice boomed, “we know you understand our methods. You know that we can make you see nightmares beyond your imagination. We can control your entire subjective vista. We know that you have researched the interrogation process extensively and so you have an academic understanding of it. It is, however, quite another thing to experience in person. If you cooperate we can make it easier for you. There are many ways to obliterate the mind and it can be made to be quick or painless if we wish it. Of course, you must divulge everything.”

Jan remained silent knowing that anything he said would be pointless. With calm and even breaths, he tried to enter a place of presence even as animal fear impelled him to dissociate and leave his skull. What was soon to occur was perhaps beyond his ability to tolerate, but if these were to be his last moments he wanted to be there for the end.

For some reason it did not occur to Jan to repent or confess. It seemed easier to resign himself to the fate that many had endured. Naturally, the terror of death and disintegration gripped him -- it was as if his very cells were somehow aware of an impending extermination -- but deep in the underground a part of him welcomed the prospect of being no more. It was the same portion of his psyche that wondered if he was anyone at all to begin with. This sub-personality lived with its neck placed firmly in the noose, eternally waiting for resolution and surcease. These and other sullen thoughts had come to dominate Jan’s mind after Eva’s death. He found unexpected relief in the technician’s last words and allowed himself the small fantasy that he was a choiceless particle, a play thing for winds and tides.

“You already know what we want to know but we will ask anyway, as a matter of procedure. We would like to remind you that we are also taking biometric readings -- pulse, perspiration, skin conductivity, pupil dilation, facial analysis -- standard veracity measurements. So let’s start. You recently went to the lower levels. Where did you go? Why? Who did you meet? Which group or groups are you working with? Was this at the behest of anyone in particular?”

“I have an adventurous spirit,” he lied, “I wanted to see what was there, all the things I had only read about. You can understand that? I am not the first person from Level 1 to have wanted this, there have been others.”

“Jan Kavfryd, you are being dishonest with us. You understand what the consequences of this are, do you not?”

“I’m sure I have no idea.” Jan’s own foolish bravado made him feel drunk and giddy. The anticipation of horror can lead one to embrace it, to turn and enter the fell space instead of running away. His heart raced. As a physiological phenomena, it is hard to delineate between the domains of excitement and fear.

There was a pause.

“Very well, we will give you a sample of the impending horror then. You will have a chance to change your mind afterwards.”

Jan felt a squeeze of soreness and cold expand through his arms and towards his chest, they had run something through the intravenous feed. It seemed to him that the light was dimming, slowly darkening by small degrees until pitch.

He waited there in obsidian stillness.

And then a scene faded into view:  a large field at dusk above which hung a blank firmament absent of moon, stars, or any cosmic appurtenances, just gradations of livid nigrescence. Off in the distance there looked to be a forlorn copse of trees, spindly and denuded. A delicate wind passed through the air making inky sawgrass sway subtly in a nearby fen.

Looking behind him he saw the visage of what looked like a group of animals speeding towards him, still distant enough to seem small like animated dots, their ghost-like presence more obviously perceived by the vegetation swaying in wake then by the actual fact of their speeding forms. A drawn out and baleful series of howls preceded their physical arrival, a vanguard of  pre-echo.

Jan bolted in abject horror.

The pack split off to give chase from both flanks as they drove him before them, a clumsy ape sprinting in unbridled terror through the coarse grass and braken. Jan looked back as he ran and saw them fast approaching with unnerving celerity. He saw that they were not quite wolves, but some uncanny genre of Canidae with dirty grey fur that grew in patches. They had the fronts of wolves, head and forearms, but their bodies were barrel like and haunched like a pig or  boar.

In the next moment the crepuscular beasts were upon him, teeth sunk deep into arms thrown up to protect his face and neck. The bite felt deep and crushing with the force of a vice. They brought him down as he ran, tripping him up like a prey. He tumbled and rolled and came still, curled inward and tense like one who knew well his demise yet feared it. One animal climbed on his back and began to rip out chunks of his hair and scalp. Another tore at his flanks, ripping off the flesh and puncturing the peritoneum to expose glistening kidneys and spleen. A canopy of snarls covered him in a duvet of blood flecks and stinking spit.

Jan screamed into the suffocating twilight which seemed to snatch this cry out from midair and snuff it out in silence. All he saw was his breath evaporate and blend into the grim indigo all around.

Yet another came around to Jan’s front and tugged at arms which he had thrown over his head for protection. Jan looked out between them and saw two eyes observing him with the patience of death. The strange canid's maw moved and a voice emanated from it in dark relief.

“You have lived in vain,” it said in a voice familiar. 

The beast lunged forward and broke through Jan’s guard of forearms to scrape the surface of his face with serrated teeth, holding it between its fetid incisors and pulling it off with the voracious jerks of a hungry predator. The pain was explosive and exquisite, searing every nerve.

Jan felt a hot corrupt breath on his face and the fractured esthesis of his body being torn and consumed. His intestines spilled out onto the grass and were dragged out and fought over by the wolf-boars. He was rent asunder and yet he did not lose consciousness, he did not die but rather existed only to feel in minute detail each bellicose sensation as his physical self was rendered into chunks of meat. Dislocated and yet still somehow attached to Jan’s consciousness, they existed only for the purpose of delivering pain.

Even through the miasma of suffering this one contradiction sparked a recognition in Jan: he should be dead and gone, a participant no longer in this marathon of anguish. Was this a dream? What was this mysterious pass that continued to connect flesh to awareness? In a hermetic space he mustered what fragments of mind he had left to gather and marshaled them in oneiric meditation. Under the eaves of some numinous internal architecture, he sat down in a posture of repose and asked himself these simple questions:

Who is it that they are eating? Is that me? And now that this machine of meat and organs lay so disassembled perhaps I can finally leave it, as we all must at some point.

Deliberately and slowly, he attempted to turn the light of awareness inward, directing it towards an involuted and tenuous apprehension of its own capacity.

Jan regarded the scene and saw that the beasts were losing color and shape, gradually morphing into a congregation of shadows. The apparition of his faceless pale corpse was now largely dispersed, spread about in a rash of flesh and blood upon the matted weeds. It looked much like a carnal rorschach or a ripped up doll. He floated above these remnants and could not recognize them to be once his.

A centerless and spectral oblivion yawned grotesquely. The porcine wolves and the eviscerated corpse eventually blurred away, their shapes runned out and smudged into this nothing. The dusk which had now turned into full on night flickered in dull pulses and he felt himself pulled up higher but in a sort of strange motion, one more akin to the sensation of sinking. He seemed to be approaching some threshold of wan blue light and as he neared it he experienced a certain kind of undulating dissolution.

As Jan woke from this nightmare he breathed in the convulsed gulps of a drowned man. Rank sweat saturated the fabric of his clothes and constraint straps. The air was viscous with the smell of piss and feces; he had copiously evacuated throughout.

“Quite an experience, isn’t it, to be consumed?” asked the voice. “We will give you a few moments to collect yourself and to reconsider your position. This is just the beginning, a sensual pain module. We encourage you to cooperate. The next stages will be even less pleasant, each in their own special ways.”

#sedimentary city