Chapter Text
When I came to (how long had I been unconscious around these slurry hot pockets of boneless meat? How long had I been laying there, defenseless, out of my mind with nothing? The very idea made my skin crawl and I immediately stood up. I already lost time. But how much time was lost when you were immortal? It didn’t matter. Yet I couldn’t help but be so frantic to grasp onto whatever sensibility I had left, and grip it close to my chest), when I came to, the stale and rust-flavored wind of whichever cavern I lay cut my face in pieces. So bitingly, numbingly cold– and blazingly hot at the same time. Like frostbite. Or maybe it would feel the same if dry ice were pressed into me.
The ground was a hard, red rock. A drought-ailed canyon. This was worse, far worse because the capricious wind stirred up a thick haze of dust. Red-orange, more like a mosaic of dry and gritty sediment that did nothing but strip the usefulness of my eyes. It hurt, so I shut them, but I couldn’t escape the orange.
“Ellen,” I called and was surprised to find my voice particularly robust. The weather was dry, the very bones of the earth served to leech moisture from what it touched, but my throat was still thick with something sticky. I doubt she’d hear me over the gale. “Ellen?”
It was in the folly of my humanity that I was looking for companionship. I could try to excuse this, reason with the grappling debate in my mind; Out of five others, I only valued one. Did that not balance it out?... I wondered briefly what she was doing. Would she call my name first, as I did for her? Or was it someone like Ted, or even worse, a preferential beckon to an animal– Benny– over me?
I wanted to know. But I would never figure out if I didn’t start moving, so I moved. One foot followed another through the wicked dust storm that siphoned the good air from my lungs. I found it hard to worry. Oftentimes AM separated us like this, it would only last an extremity of a year. Maybe even another half over that. But we were boring little playthings by ourselves– for what fun was a colosseum with only one gladiator?
My left hand. I found a weight to my nails, a tenderness of the flesh that I had not felt before, but I could not inspect it through the choking debris. I ran my good fingers over the modifications. One time my fingertips had been burnt off, half a century ago, but I had regained feeling in them after another measly three-four years. AM was as fickle as its weather. His weather. Its weather.
A runny pus ran from my nail beds, smearing with my touch. It felt orange. Perhaps that’s only because of the color that blinded me, but the pus felt orange– it was hot, smooth between my fingers like brandy down the throat, but little metal claws extended over and through my nails. It was not healed. It was not healed at all, and yet, I couldn’t feel where my natural keratin ended and the cold metal began.
Organic skin, flesh, and blood fused with my very own steel modifications. I did this. The heaviness of my hand, the hot pus, and inflamed, swollen fingertips. I did this. Me.
And I could feel the product of my work, my efforts, through AM’s veil, and AM’s weather. Because I had done it, and it was henceforth part of me. There was no way it should have healed like this. In the realm of laws and such, it was undeniably a feat of something freakish. But we heal faster than we used to, a hundred-and-nine years ago, and maybe our bodies were malleable now, even to ourselves. Susceptible to AM’s teachings. To our artificial demiurge.
Over the dust tempest of beating wind, the rattling of metal and metal pipes grew to a crescendo, and the storm around me– the source morphed into the hiss of pressurized air.
Oh, right.
“I didn’t even do anything to you!”
Speak of the devil and he shall appear.
“Have things gotten too hard for you? Has your fragile, puny, pathetic little human mind finally started to crack?”
Laughter. Dizzying, booming laughter. It shook the cavern walls and the floor trembled. My eyes were still shut against the assault of torrential debris and the very notion rendered me blind and vulnerable. So I’m the one it’s amusing itself with now?
An unfathomable force hit the back of my knees and pulled down on my shoulders, and for a moment I understood Atlas– the titan whose only crime was being on the losing side of a war. I was forced to kneel by the very wind around me. While the storm quieted, I didn’t think hissing pipes and camera shutters were any more comforting.
“Were you sick of it?” Cold wires pressed over my left arm, and I had not realized my skin had been grated raw. Inflamed and torn by the sandstorm, my very flesh was sanded to soft dermis and fat. Its cold metal soothed the hot wounds. But it served as a curse within moments, reminding the rest of my body that it was a pulsing, bleeding cankerous sore. Hot blood bubbled between wedges of skin barely still attached to me, burning and firing nerves I’d forgotten I had. “Hmm? Were you sick of an empty stomach? Or is your brain finally rotting with the rest of you?”
Its wires, three thin and pinching within segments, coiled down my forearm and restricted. Pulling, squeezing, separating. Raw and wet, I heard ligaments tear apart like the joints of a chicken leg. Splitting, crushing, pulling. I’m almost certain it’s about to bend my arm back at the elbow.
I must’ve amused him greatly because he rarely talks to me this much in casual conversation.
Well. ‘Casual’ for the last hundred-and-nine years.
“Neither,” Although I’m not sure if my words reach. They either remained rooted in my head or slipped past a half-slurred hysteria. I wasn’t even positive if my jaw was working, or if I had a tongue still. My body palpitated in rhythm with my bleeding heart. Pushing blood through my stringy, ill-connected veins, and struggling to stay alive. “I’m not rotting.”
Two stringy brass cables shoot through my eyelids and skew them to my eyebrows, threading to hold them open. Though my eyes burn and burn with the irritation of sand, I’m exposed and laid bare to what AM is showing me.
My skin is tenderly hanging on by red gooey fibers. Any defining feature I had was stripped by bulbous tumors of meat and blood, sanded to vulnerability. My clothes were nothing but dirty scraps– but I couldn’t even have a reason to be embarrassed. Anything embarrassing about being nude was indistinguishable from red slop and shaved off. I’m on my knees still, with my left arm being pulled out to the side.
I don’t even scream anymore. Or maybe I do. Once you reach a certain level of pain, of abuse, you lose yourself to delirium.
“You don’t have to be buried to rot,” Its voice resonated through my body, and it was the only thing I could focus on. Wholly, entirely, its words pushing into my mind like a force so violating I shivered, “Am I not enough proof for you?”
I couldn’t even begin to comprehend how it wanted me to respond to that. So instead, I watched as the cables tight around my arm dully pressed in and in. Shattering what weak, flimsy bone I had at the center. It cracked and collapsed with dull, wet, squelching noises– and the fragments of bone, nowhere to go, cut against my aching muscles. Pushing out the further AM pressed in.
Maybe I was screaming, because the stickiness of my throat was now scratchy like a record stuck in a nicked groove.
“Keep what scraps of ME you’ve robbed,” And the pressure from my shoulders released. I toppled forward, collapsing in a fleshy heap, while my arm was still suspended in its serpentine hell. “Go run back to your scuttling, vermin herd, you disgusting thing.”
And how it could refer to me as disgusting was boggling to my hazed and cloudy mind. Because if anything, the term disgusting would apply to the one who ripped the skin off of its playthings until they were nothing more than loose sacks of muscle and fat. But I suppose I couldn’t criticize the totalitarian. Nothing would change, and it saved me the breath.
But if it wanted me to go searching for the others now, it was going to have to wait. I could only move to cradle my blood-wet arm against my blood-moist chest, trying to keep it off the hot canyon floor. Sand and debris stuck to my peeled muscles. Scratching in an uncomfortable, burning ache.
It saw my modification, and I took its acknowledgment as approval.
I had to think of my next improvement.