Even in the midst of the relief and soothing emptiness, Tane Bridges felt the Counsel's gentle probing of his mind. The Counsel was searching threads of memories. Tane had no idea what ones it was looking for. That no longer mattered. He felt the edges of reality begin to fade into opaque shadows. Colours merged and oozed into coagulated smudges. Around the edges of the blobs, light began to poke through. White dispersed into myriad shades and hues. He threw up on the floor, thankful that the Counsel's metallic hands propped him up so it all went onto the floor. ( Counsel lay him back down and removed all of the jacks from Tane's implants. Tane instinctively pulled back from Counsel's proffered hand offering to help him up from the bench. Tane sat up and swung his legs over the side, feet on the floor.

“How long, Counsel?”, Tane murmured.

“Four days.”, Counsel replied, its featureless face incapable of real interaction.

“And the verdict?”, Tane needed to know.

“The Judges concur. Not guilty.”, Counsel replied.

“I could have told you that.”, Tane rubbed his forehead as he slumped over his legs a little.

“Human testimony is so reliable.“, sarcasm from the bot made Tane look up.

“So...”

“You are released to go.”, the Counsel declared.

Tane Bridges stood up and walked through the station, officers and other staff paying him no attention at all. They had all been informed of the verdict before he was. Tane had not agreed with the seditious comments made on UrthNet. Thoughts were monitored and policed but there were still errors. Tane's latest four-day lock up was one of them. Tane let out a slow sigh as the station got smaller behind him. He only hoped that his cactus was alright.

Tane lived a klick or so from the station. His apartment was typical of the level in Tāmaki Makaurau. Cramped but comfortable. As he walked in he made a quick call to Uli, the owner of Grape Pizza Bar. Uli would have known what had happened to Tane. The Counsels always kept employers informed. It was family members who were not a priority for the law. Tane wanted to call Uli anyway. He was a good boss who deserved at least a call.

That done, a four-day stint with no solid food needed fixing. Tane re-hydrated a roast meal and wolfed it down. The tea rounded out the best meal Tane could remember in a long while.

After a night's sleep, Tane felt ready for the day and work. Starting late in the morning had its benefits. Uli, a large man, was just as expansive in his greeting when Tane walked through the rear door into the kitchen. Chefs were already prepping their stations and getting on with the first orders of the day.

“If you need time off, you can just ask me, huh?”, Uli shouted at Tane from across the kitchen.

“I'll remember that next time I need a break.”, Tane replied, a smile breaking through.

Uli moved with surprising speed for his size. He grabbed Tane in a bear hug.

“It's good you're back.”, Uli said, looking deep into Tane's eyes.

“It is.”, Tane nodded. “Work will do me good.”

“Help you watch those thoughts, hey, bro?”, Uli's eyebrow arched.

“You're right. Thinking is dangerous.”

“Only some thinking.”, Uli laughed as he returned to where he was working on something.

Tane got his own station ready with knives and boards. His role was cutter. He was responsible for keeping the chefs supplied with properly cut toppings for their creations. One of the things that made Grape Pizza Bar unique was that everything was hand-prepped or even handmade. That meant exorbitant prices on the menu. It also meant fairly decent wages for everyone. Tane would be earning three times what a usual kitchen hand might make out there.

A magnetic bar held all Tane's knives up on the wall before him as he started cutting the first requests from the chefs. His hand flew in a blur as he cut vegetables and cured meats, swapping knives and boards between each. Uli was fanatical about cross-contamination. Tane learnt fast – have more knives than you realistically need and you might have enough.

A few days of work reset Tane's routine and sense of balance. The work might not be the most mentally stimulating, but that was something Tane appreciated about it. Society as he knew it was not the place for excessive mental stimulation. He had become adept at switching his mind to his cactus if he started to free-wheel too much.

Tane had invested in some thought suppression implants against Uli's sage opinion. Nothing good came of mucking about with the biological, Uli always said. Tane did not see too many options. He had been struggling with ill-advised thought patterns for a few weeks and still felt no freer from the risk of the fuzz. The more he thought about not thinking about things, the more those very thoughts and ideas came to plague him. Implants seemed a logical option and these came from a legit source.

It was also when the dreams began. At first, they were just memories resurfacing, or so Tane thought. They took on more radical ideas, none that Tane remembered experiencing. After a third night running, he reached out to the vendor and asked them what was going on. He got nothing back from them. He left a few messages, not caring who was listening in to the company's message system.

Early on a Friday morning, they reached back. Tane was sleeping when someone made entirely of shadow materialised in his room. They wore flowing clothing that he had never seen before. There were two of them standing on the opposite side of his room, just watching him. He tried to move, but he was pinned down by a force that was unseen. Something held him fast. He should have panicked, but he his heard rate was normal and he was not sweating like he normally would have been.

“Go with it.”, one of the figures said.

As soon as Tane heard them, he felt his body merge into the substance that had been his bed. The walls of his room started folding in. Light began diffuse from within a centre, eventually breaking free from the material that no longer had any form. He submerged into the substrate of the reality that he had known and felt nothing of the fear that he knew he should have. The two figures were gone, but he could feel them there. Their presence was seeping into the blob and mist of the world that had once been.

The mist thinned. The concrete sense of being became a vapour. Tane was no longer a subject-for-itself. He could feel the eyes of the Subject on him. He was Other-in-Himself. He felt the disjointed remains of his selfness ripped from the anchors that had so long shored up his sense of being.

Then the Subject spoke. The echo of the voices rumbled through him. Each eddy of sound erupted in colour that washed through his mind. The boundaries of mind and soul dissolved. Other and Subject sank into each other. The two figures coallesced into a congealed sculpture of what the world was and what Tane interpreted it to be. Edges and lines lost their form as they permeated Tane's space, his Self.

As he struggled for the surface that emerged in an instant, Tane felt the hold fall away from his mind. A disruption carved a ravine between him and the presence that he had always felt. The presence that had always been there was now no more. His Other, now Self, emerged and swam for the shore that was a few hundred metres away.

Each grain of sand that Tane now lay upon vibrated with energy and life. As he peered closer, he perceived each as a thought. Each thought was free from all others and, most importantly, free from anything outside of him, the Other.

The beach receded as the light of dawn cracked over the horizon. As the light progressed, more and more of Tane's room was revealed. It was as he had remembered it. The two shadowy figures were gone. Tane looked about before arising. His mind was clear and there was no more sludge to his thoughts.

Tane almost smiled.

#SciFi #Experimental #MindPuke

No matter how far down he went, he could not find it. Sitting among the remains of incense sticks poking up like rotted reeds on the bank of a stagnant river, Ulthar Greigg tried to focus his mind on nothingness and the impermanence of the world around him. The solidity of his inability to delve deeper was a glaring argument against the doctrine. A friend had once suggested psychedelics, but Greigg was a purist. He might be a lot of things, but taking short cuts for immediate gains was not his style. His knees cracked as he unfolded himself from the lotus position. He almost gasped in relief as the blood flooded back into the old injuries sustained from a previous life. A previous career, really, of which Greigg still felt the very non-karmic results in his present. Another argument, though weaker, against the impermanence of things. Unless death was considered an end to all pain, Greigg chuckled to himself as he walked into his kitchenette to get a coffee.

The single, not-too-hard-on-the-eye architect had been searching for something deeper for a few years now. The delusion that his career was a fulfilling service to humanity only covered the truth for so long. After awhile, even good money could not conceal the fact that he was enabling the whims of society's richest to find form in concrete and glass. The realisation that his greatest works were symbolic representations of others' phallus' hit hard when it finally slammed into the desiccated remains of a soul sold long before.

With a black coffee in hand, Greigg strode into his office to check the last emails of the evening. Most of it was spam and general twaddle from colleagues. He sat at the modern desk sipping his drink and swiping emails into the trash or spam folders. He barely registered one whose subject was 'Appointment: During Third REM Cycle'. Into the spam it went.

Greigg could afford a huge bed for one and that was exactly what he got. He dumped his coffee mug into the washer and crawled into bed after cleaning his teeth. He slipped between the Egyptian cotton sheets and pulled his doona over himself. Snuggled into the warmth and comfort of fresh sheets, Greigg was soon slipping away.

Mr. Ulthar Griegg, I presume?, the deep, resonant voice came from behind him.

Greigg spun around to face a grey-skinned man of gigantic proportions bursting out of a woman's business suit. The man wore full make up and the size of his fingers belied the skill with which he tapped at his computer keyboard. The man smiled at Greigg. The yellow teeth did not bother him as much as the vertical eyelids that blinked at him.

Um...yeah., Greigg murmured in confusion.

Good. He will see you now.”, the grey man replied, gesturing at a door in the wall that Greigg had only just noticed.

As Greigg approached, the door opened by itself and then closed again when the architect had fully entered the office. It was on a high floor of a building that Greigg remembered as a project from his early days. He was standing on the seventy-fifth floor of Yumikon Tower facing a translucent facsimile of himself seated at a large desk that was the same as the one in his home office.

Ulthar!, blob cried as it lurched onto jelly-like appendages to approach him. The voice was that of his mother and father switching on alternate words.

Greigg could only stand rooted to the ground as the thing wrapped him in a warm, damp embrace. As it pulled away, its body slurped and slopped. Air rushed into the gaps opening between them. It motioned at sofa.

Come. Sit, love. A mother needs to talk to her son., the thing said.

Greigg found himself unable to do anything but follow it to the couch by the window outside. Unlike the view from the Yumikon Tower Greigg had helped design, the windows before him were shrouded in mists. The grey masses roiled and swirled along the glass. The facsimile noticed what he was looking at.

The Mists of Truth., it giggled and guffawed in alternation. A hideous sound.

Greigg was sitting on the sofa with the thing snuggled right next to him, its appendage, an arm, laying on his leg. In an unnerving caress, it started stroking Greigg's hair gently, just like he remembered his mother doing. He so desperately wanted to jerk his leg away, but something stopped him. It was more than terror. There was something deeper at work. Something plunged into the core of his own very self.

You look for truth. You want to find Truth. And you are dumb enough to think it is within you., the being said, almost kindly.

A single nod was all Greigg could manage.

Despite all the failure, you still want to find it.

Another nod.

Then it is yours., it declared as its arm snapped out and grabbed the back of Greigg's head.

He could not resist the force of the thing's arm as it shoved his face towards its chest. Waiting for him was a pearly, almost transparent breast, complete with a nipple. Underneath Greigg could see the blood vessels and the fluid pumping through them.

His face was shoved down so hard he could not help but open his mouth over the nipple. On contact, the thing cooed in motherly love. Greigg could feel the engorged breast vibrated with the force of liquid racing to the surface and into his waiting mouth. The warm, acrid liquid rushed in and washed his tongue, teeth and throat as he tried to swallow fast enough to keep up. Bitterness flooded into his body, the taste of the fluid a rancid staleness.

The nipple grew and softened as Greigg drank his fill and more. He felt his face ooze and slide into the nipple and then the breast. The cooing from the thing receded, like it was going down a tunnel. As he dove deeper, the warmth grew and he felt the damp clamminess of clinging jelly and stickiness. After a long while of having his body squeezed more and more by the jelly-like tunnel, Greigg was on a hill naked.

You tried to escape impermanence by understanding it. It should have been clear to you that no thing can be a key to escape from that thing. You cannot escape a prison by understanding the prison itself. You need something else, another item., a voice whispered.

Greigg jumped. The voice came from a foul-smelling mouth next to his ear. A homeless man who had not washed in months was spooning him. The man's face was exactly like Greigg's, except for the copious stains.

All that effort and you failed. Without impermanence, there can be no salvation. Impermanence is the very source of potentiality. Looking for it within yourself is delusion., the homeless Greigg continued.

What do you mean?, Greigg asked.

Impermanence is a good thing, plonker., the homeless man wheezed as he erupted into a coughing fit.

The spoon was broken. Greigg was laying on his bed covered in sweat. He could still taste the milk from that breast and smell the man. He shuddered and got up. There was no sleeping now. Emails and work awaited.

A smelly homeless man far away shook his head in disappointment. A blob-like thing lamented its wasted milk.

#Horror #MindPuke

Raymond was perplexed. Not just confused, but “question-the-very-foundation-of-your-life” bamboozled. As much as he tried to wrap his mind around it, any rational explanation that ended in “You're not off your rocker” eluded him. It eluded him for centuries. Raymond was not your most sophisticated Orator for the Diet of the Gathered Void, but even he should have worked this out by now. He even suspected that some of his so-called “friends” were having a go behind his back. The odd thing was that it had been so long that he had almost forgotten what had caused the issues in the first place. They say ignorance is bliss and Raymond was actually quite fine with that. That was until Paige “I-Rule-and-You're-a-Fool” Hudson breezed into the situation. His disdain for her could not be overstated. After millennia upon millennia, one would think the Rubik's Cube would have got a bit old by now. But, no. Some, like Paige, actually figured that they were legends in their own minds because of their “feats” of speed. In his more reflective moments, Raymond often wonder what Paige would look like with a Rubik's Cube jammed in her throat. Would you be able to see the cube shape stretching her skin over the corners as she gasped and choked for oxygen? Raymond chuckled.

People in the twentieth century used to say that they were too old for some sort of shit in their lives. At least, that is what the old movies told them. And that was when they were only sixty or a bit more. Imagine how they would feel at a thousand or two plus that sixty. Raymond was not perplexed by this.

Paige walked into his office, and even with the image of the Rubik's Cube jammed into her throat, his heart rate soared like an eagle on the up drafts of a strong wind. Well, at least how he imagined one would soar. None had been seen for about a millennia and a half, thanks to some ignorant pricks who destroyed their habitats. He never knew what to say to the gorgeous, cubically distorted, woman who breezed into his life every day. No relationship for a thousand or so will work on your mind. Hell, a virgin at forty is nothing.

Raymond was perplexed. He wondered if people in the twenty-first century had similar psychoses. Probably not. They were a tougher breed back then. Raymond feebly waved to Paige and imagined the cube in her throat. She had such a nice looking neck.

#SciFi #MindPuke

The resonating harmonies of All is Violent flowed from the stereo system that was worth three times as much as Greville's rusted, puke yellow 1974 Datsun 710. “Cartographers of Human Purpose” alternated between deep sonic wells and soaring highs of pulsating sound born on the fingers of master musicians. Greville drove the damp, glistening road, his headlights scintillating on the rough, black stone. His mind was divided between driving and watching his soul rise on the currents of meditative harmonies. The Seeking must go on. He was aware of this and always had been. The drive toward the inexorable fate and goal of his own mortality kept the Datsun moving, chugging and belching to itself as the old engine, poorly serviced, struggled to fulfil its purpose. The stereo was the only thing that worked properly, or anything close to the concept. The dashboard lights flickered as the battery and alternator fought furiously to keep the entire machine running. Each dimming of the light had long since fused into those before and after. Greville saw none of it and heard even less.

Thunderous, pounding violence reached out from the speakers, a fist from the sub-woofer grasping for Greville's heart and soul. Dark riffs punctuated the air like stark colons glittering through the windshield and night beyond. They reached higher and higher, vertiginous swirls swamping Greville's vision. The steering wheel warped and merged into the dark dashboard, taking his hands with it. Greville tried to scream. He thought he did, but no sound could overwhelm the guitars emanating from his speakers like the denizens of the Pleroma.

Looking down at his feet was a mistake. They too had vanished, consumed by the Datsun's lurking shadows and hidden recesses. Waves cascaded. Forces rolled. The winds of deepest Tartarus erupted from the speakers that were feeding Greville's mind and psyche. His entire head now filled with the crescendo of wild, unrestrained guitar solos of which no hint had been given at the start of the twelve minute song.

The great emptiness surged into the core of Greville's mind and he felt his own life and history vanish into the mists that followed. He did not hear it. He much less recognised what it was. “Memory Complete”, the last track of the EP, kicked into its own rhythm. Greville bowed out of his.

#Mindpuke #Horror #Surreal

Endnote: The music that I listened to while writing this was All is Violent, based in Melbourne, Australia. They can be found HERE.