Random Access Memory

I panicked and threw my weight into my upper body as I clambered out of the gel and onto solid ground. My body felt weak, heavy; my legs struggled to support myself as I sat in nearly a fetal position, panting and shivering in the cold and dark. Gel dripped from my nude form and the tubes still stuck in my body; I pawed at them with curious hands, trying to figure out how deeply I was intubated.

Thankfully, they didn't seem to go too far - for a moment my horrified mind relaxed, knowing I had merely to grip them and pull them out.

With a hollow clattering sound the first of the large tubes fell to the ground. Panting, standing on my knees, I'd managed to rip the first one out with sheer determination. It slid through me like a snake, rubbing each and every inch of my esophagus as it passed through me; lungs, stomach, trachea... I clutched my shoulders and held myself still, staring at the thing that'd been in my body and dreading the removal of the others - especially the one that slinked down my nose, behind my eyes...

Suddenly the ground shook. It felt as if a million tons of dynamite were going off at once directly under my feet; yet, not daring to flinch while pulling the tubes, I didn't look away. Three fingers and my thumb wrapped around the bundled lines, all buried deep within my anatomy, and began to pull.

Somewhere in the darkness, I thought I heard footsteps.

Luckily my grip held even despite the fear. Steadily, slowly, inch by inch, the tubes came out; they were vibrating slowly, pumping some mixture of air and God-knows-what into my body for a purpose I couldn't even begin to fathom. The smaller ones came up quickly, seemingly only placed inside me to give better stability to the others. They clattered on the floor so quietly, yet I flinched just as hard as if they'd screamed at me.

Something about the feeling of the rough plastic sliding around inside me was... exciting. Ribbed, hollow tubes rolled over internal folds, caressing my organs and spirit alike. I knew the urges weren't my own - there should've been no room left in my head for anything beyond pure, base terror - but they felt just as real as any of the others. The thickest tube, sticking down into my lungs, slid around my throat like a knobby, obscene sex toy - and I wanted more.

In truth, I may have distracted myself. Lost in the pleasure, if only for a moment; the stress and panic were too much, and the feeling of fucking my throat on the oxygen tube was truly orgasmic. A relief, a respite from the other emotions that bent my brain into knotted refuse.

I would've stayed swimming in pleasure had I not definitely heard footsteps. My half-lidded eyes rolled up to see two distinctly human shapes moving in the darkness just beyond where the gel tub was. Their bodies were indefinite, black as the endless expanse that crawled around me, kept at bay only by the soft light from the glowing, viscous gel. It bounced off of them, reflective like starlight; had it not been for the reflections, they would've blended in completely to the darkness.

Their bodies were so... alluring. Even in my panic I couldn't resist staring at their luxurious, supple breasts and rolling curves, so gently accentuated by the low light. Like alien statues, carved in devotion to a human ideal impossible to attain - but... but they had it! They had the bodies of fertility Goddesses - I looked down at my weak, emaciated body. Ribs through skin. A hand drifted through the last scrappy remnants of my formerly beautiful head of hair before my eyes snapped back to the figures before me.

One of them took a step forward and, suddenly, the envious urges within me shattered like glass. Fuck. Fuck. Oh God. I wasted no time, quickly and frantically grabbing the few tubes still hooked into my nostrils and began to pull. They slid up and down my esophagus - so knobby, so thick...

Both strange figures were approaching me, now. Each step they took was coordinated, perfectly synchronized with the other; despite the differences in their stature they still moved at the same, calculated rate towards me. One of the plastic tubes clattered against the floor as I managed to free it from my sinuses, gag reflex conspicuously absent. Only one of the numerous hoses remained; I had precious few seconds to spare as the shiny, black forms grew ever closer.

My head craned to the side in discomfort as I tugged out the last of the tubes. The way it slithered out of me was discomforting to a maximal degree, and yet the animal urges in the back of my terrified mind didn't stop me from giving a tiny, quiet moan. Hollow plastic, slick with juices, reflected the light just like the bodies before me.

I was out of time.

It took almost all of my strength to push up against the cold, black floor. My body was slow to respond to my inputs, heavy limbs resisting me at every opportunity despite my panicked urge to move. The muffling shrieking of the headset made the task more arduous, assaulting my ears just as the pain and cold assaulted my body.

Nothing was working. My body - parts were sluggish in ways I'd never felt, almost unaccustomed to the concept of movement. For a moment, I felt the urge to ask myself seriously if I'd remembered how to walk. It... it was one foot in front of the other. Right. The thought bounced around in my head like an echo. Cold shot through my body as the delicate soles of my feet planted themselves against slick, black metal; I steeled myself one last time, staring into the faces of the figures approaching.

I now realized they had no faces. No eyes, no mouths - slick, tenebrous nothing in place of organs. They were like mannequins; perfect, idealized, and stripped of their humanity.

Running came naturally, after that. My clumsy legs threw themselves across the ground, lit with dim orange from the lights in the tub of gel; they fell frantically, heavily, against the floor with each step. Going from a state of suspended and intubated unconsciousness straight to running was already doing a number on my body mere seconds after I turned and sprinted. My lungs heaved, out of practice with breathing on their own. Weakness permeated every cell of me - but not the things walking towards me.

In truth, I was mostly just rapidly hobbling. The sudden sprint I'd had when I originally set myself to running had lasted mere seconds in the face of how sore my body felt. Despite how quickly I thought myself to be moving, I looked back to find the pair of humanoids keeping an almost fixed distance from me, still walking at a leisurely pace. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

The further I got from the tub of gel, the more the light dimmed. I hadn't been thinking about the need for light - the threat of the faceless people was far more pressing, but now I realized I was stumbling blindly into the darkness.

My toe scraped against some kind of shallow, precision-cut marking on the floor with enough force to nick it. I'd missed it in the dark, unaware that the floor had any kind of pattern to it at all. I could feel hot beads of red blood spilling onto the polished black, coating the sole of my foot as I continued to limp away into the dark beyond. Every footstep was a challenge already, but now, slick with blood and burning with pain, walking was rapidly becoming an untenable idea. Keep moving! Damn it, keep fucking moving!

The alarm - I could still hear it! How far was I from the tub, now? It felt clear in my mind as if I were sitting just on the edge of the gel again, but when I flipped my shaven head around to try and see where I was I found only darkness. No people, no tub, no familiar arrangement of sparking wires and steel tubing - darkness. I was lost. Lost, bleeding, and terrified - but the alarm was still audible. Ringing, screaming, ringing.

It wasn't coming from the tub.

I looked up in a brief moment of pause only to be greeted by the alarm, again; it vibrated against my cheeks, descending spiderlike and angry from the ceiling so far above me. A warning.

Suddenly the source of the echoes that rained down upon me made itself known. The full volume of the roaring alarm bells took me a few moments to even comprehend, volume of its scale practically unthinkable to my ears so used to the muted sounds of the gel. As if awoken by the shaking, the ground beneath me began to move on its own; a grinding, methodical motion, full scale muffled by the dark horizon that boxed me in.

For a moment everything hung in clashing suspension. The scream of the alarm and the nauseating movement below me boxed me in. I panted and spun around aimlessly in the dark, as if I were trying to keep watch on angles I knew I couldn't see. My fight-or-flight urges were beginning to cannibalize themselves, turning on each other like feral hounds. Should I run? Would the glistening people I'd ran from catch me, or would the source of the alarm get me first? It was pounding on my ears, vibrating my body, clashing with the grinding earth below.

I gripped my head in confused panic. Something beneath my feet began to shift. The black steel floor moved, shoving my legs out of the way as harsh metal pushed upwards. Still blaring, the siren grew in volume, almost synchronized with the steel object gradually raising below me. I moved quickly. Limbs clattered against metal, my frightened retreat from the object coming out as little more than a strategic collapse onto the hard ground. Light-deprived eyes slowly began to taste color, again; orange, sickly and alien as the warm glow coming from the tub of gel. It... was it the same?

Cracks of light shone through invisible divots in the floor, growing in intensity with every crawling second. For an instant, as the light began to burn my eyes, the siren stopped. I felt as the whole structure seemed to stop, its metal heart no longer beating - and neither was mine. The slick, reflective forms of the terrors I'd escaped moments ago stood out in the tangerine glow, standing just barely out of arm's reach of me. Despite their lack of eyes, I knew they were staring at me. The whole time I was stumbling in the darkness, panting and gasping like a trapped animal, they were staring at me. My body convulsed, limbs trying their best to move me away from them; their efforts were cut short, however, as I pushed up against a wall. Glass, it felt like. My eyes darted away from their glistening bodies for just long enough to realize what was happening.

Tanks. Glass tanks, full of the glowing orange gel that I had been entombed in minutes ago. They surrounded me on every side and every corner, an expanse of orange and glass as far as I could see. It was a neon graveyard; under the ethereal light of the gel I could make out the shapes of human bodies, suspended and intubated, uniformly motionless. They, too, were clad in the boxy visors I had been, connecting them with wires to the tank like fetuses in the womb. Some twitched, others writhed, and yet most simply hung motionless. Little more than bodies, I thought.

I looked down at my naked form, then at the body floating behind me, wrapped in glass.

Latex hands gripped my wrists. Some part of my brain tried to resist, tried to rouse me to fight back - but that part was dulled, now. I... I stared straight into the futility of my struggle. The girl floating in gel writhed a bit, clearly delighted by something; was I depriving myself of that? Depriving myself of blissful ignorance and pleasure? I knew I wasn't - of course not! And yet the thought alone was enough to crush my resistance into paste. Fear had hardened my psyche into a stone fortress, and doubt had worn it away in seconds. The animal part of my being wished they would kill me, here and now, than subject me to an endless number of things.

Another part wondered if even this, too, was all another dream. Another can of peaches resting against a bag of produce. I'd fallen and hit my head, of course! This... this was a dream. My legs buckled as I was forced to stand by the featureless bodies, latex gloves wrenching me to my feet. It reminded me of the first time I shared in another's body - tasted them, felt them and wanted to be felt by them. Made to cum. Made to writhe and grit my teeth and realize I wasn't the same person as I was before. Glistering black bodies shone like stars in the instant where the spotlight turned on.

The alarm ceased, my stomach nearly lurching from its now-empty presence. Now, in its wake, remained only a blinding light that overpowered every sense I had beyond pain. My eyes - fuck, fuck, my eyes! How long had it been since I'd last seen the light? The figures gripping my wrists were clearly startled, too; they flinched in shock as the light flashed on, only to buckle over in pain momentarily and resume their rigid posture. Punished, perhaps. It was hard to tell below the searing, blistering white. Heat followed, a dull mechanical grind below it. Something was coming.

Black digits slinked away from my wrists as the heat grew ever closer. Now, the light consumed every sense I had. Already-frayed nerves tried their best to resist and found themselves ablated away, singed like hair to the flame.

A dip in the light and a break from the heat - the feeling of relief was so palpable it nearly startled me. I timidly cracked one of my eyes open, dilating to the light.

Black steel. Glistening, shining, burning from the power of the lamp. It coiled around, moving like scales on a snake; it bent up, up, up - beyond the reach of my eyes, further beyond the spotlight.

Something unseen coiled around my leg and gripped me. Suddenly, the light switched off.

The massive hull of a gargantuan steel tendril shone in the dark before me. It reflected the orange glow of the gel, but glittered like faraway traffic with lights of its own. Invisible hues flashed like a deep sea animal, an electric pulse running down its length and onto the smaller, distinct tendril that now held my legs. I swung my head up to their source: a dangling, central appendage that held each of the smaller tendrils - and thus, my frail body - inside of its leviathan bulk.

I started to scream yet heard only laughter. Tendrils wrapped around my wrists and neck, jerking me off of my feet and into the air. I laughed raucously, violently, feeling the way my body was handled like a ragdoll in the grip of the unholy machine that held me. I laughed until I wanted to throw up, until I felt the tendrils sliding cold across my raw, gentle skin. Across my hips. Between my exposed, hungry ribs - my thighs, my ass, my underarms.

The now-pacified spotlight looked over me like a stray cat inspecting its prey. It could see me, I could tell; it bobbed and moved around my small body as the other tendrils manipulated me, giving it a good look at every inch of my more-than-naked body. Movement again. Faster, now. My body was hoisted into the air like a balloon, and -

Too fast. Too fast too fast too fast. My cacophonous laughter filled the ever-growing labyrinth of black steel tunnels and corridors as I was lifted up, up, up, up - too fast, too high, too dark. My ears popped and blood ran down my face from my nostrils, leaking into my mouth with every half-gasped chuckle.

What little light from the machine bounced off the matte black walls of the structure around me painted murals of Hell across every visible surface. Uncountable pipes, wires and structural beams stretched on in every direction like the webs of an omnicidal spider. Electric pulses rolled across metal cables like the beating of the heart of the Earth. With them they brought deafening negative pressure that clapped my ears like thunder, entire atmospheres rolled into nothing by the sheer wattage; and ever still I was pulled upwards, dangling like a banner on a ship.

Wherever I was, the air was cleaner. Thinner, colder - I must be higher up. My breath froze before me, bloodied and naked body beginning to shiver from the electric frost. Light, perhaps. Trickling specks of white and red in the edges of my vision, despite the cephalopodic machine dangling in front of its source. A hum that grew from distant pulsations to an overpowering, body-shaking force that permeated every drop of air in the structure. Lights brighter and brighter, redder and redder - skin aching. Laughter quieting.

Slowing, until I can see clearly again.

Oh, God.

Red.

My skin was gone. Every photon of burning, murderous red that touched my body ripped my skin away from me and left me as little more than a decayed heap of tender nerves and frayed, bleeding wounds.

I dropped onto the steel catwalk, my evidently-unharmed skin slamming into it and bringing my mind back to the present. The now. I looked down at my hands to find them still uninjured - despite my horrified mind screaming otherwise.

Another waking dream. Another cruel joke. Something beyond myself urged me not to look up.

"WELCOME."

My body shook like gelatin from the noise. A voice louder than my mind had ways to comprehend shouted at me with hostile tone, shuddering every atomic fiber of myself, a harsh-strummed guitar of anguish atop a vibrating, groaning catwalk. Despite the volume, I could make out a feminine tint to it; soft, delicate, the finest edge of a thing with ten trillion others. The urge to keep my head down won out, if only because I was out of choice.

Limbs shuddered against cold, hard steel. The temperature fluctuated with the gradual pulse of light around me; it would grow darker, hotter, redder, before the anger in its glow faded and the red subsided, heat taken with it. A beating heart, electric veins plumbing deeper and deeper into the chasms below me. Iron arteries - my own pulsing with thinning blood. Curiosity gripped me by the throat. I looked up, sheepishly, at the source of noise above me.

What remained of my sanity shattered into ten trillion pieces, as fine as powdered glass. Space couldn't articulate the dimensions of the chamber before me. Red flooded the delicate cells in my eyes, and yet I could scarcely make out a single form; even as I desperately probed the sea of light for an edge I found nothing more than endless, fiery crimson. An angel. I shook my head - no, no! There - a shadow! Form!

A woman's face?

Smiling.

"YOU MUST NOT REMEMBER - DO YOU?"

Skin shivered against uncaring metal below a red Goddess. Too loud. Clutching my hands to my ears, I threw myself onto my back - I needed to look. I needed to look! My mind had tasted the exquisite omnipotence before it and it needed more! Chaotic laughter dripped from my lips as I bared my eyes towards the event horizon.

My mind quivered and choked up thoughts. A can tumbled into a bag of carrots in my grocery cart. Red waves of pain wiped it away as agonizingly as I had remembered it. The light was angry, now, punishing me for my feeble disabilities. Something cold wrapped around my legs as I grit my teeth in frustrated exhaustion. A can tumbled into a bag of carrots in my grocery cart - I kicked myself, unable to remember anything before it.

Jagged pain ripped through my head. My ear trickled something warm - and alien - onto my shoulder. Not blood, not now. It was something... else.

The red was gone. Before me was a sterile waiting room; all-black leather furniture sat atop white floors and against white walls. Linoleum and tile glinting in the light and reflecting the midnight shapes of the furniture. I bounced my leg up and down, a clipboard in my lap. My signature, a dotted line - no logo, no letterhead. It was difficult to remember if I'd read the whole thing. Did I really sign this?

"I expect you'll enjoy the procedure. Our organization welcomes you, Ms..." a voice cooed, beginning to address me by name before being suddenly stifled by a painful pulse in my head. I -

"Oh, hopefully! I've been needing some deeper relaxation, with the new job and all." I replied, looking up and handing over my clipboard. Something was wrong.