The Machine
An abstract short on how a man becomes a machine.
Features:
ca. 1K words
Human to cyborg-chimera
SFW
Experimental | Abstract
Inspired by Unexpect's insane songs Chromatic Chimera and Mechanical Phoenix (warning: heavy. loud, avangarde-metal - google on your own risk!) and their wonderful feverishly mad lyrics, this short represents my entry for Fakeman's 1000 word TF contest.
I have a thing for surreal, experimental narratives as it is and this vignette gave me the opportunity of delving into this genre a bit - and on top actually make my education useful for TF writing for once as well (hence why the whole thing and especially the last sentence will be a rather amusing quirk for any engineers or physicists in the audience as well....). Therefore: consume at your own risk, as this is an highly experimental work and I will fullly admit I likely wanted a little bit too much and it may come off as pretentious as fuck.
Then again, I'd lie if I said the mere act of trying to put the alien abstraction of a machine, the surrealism of an equation or the sheer insane beauty of a mechanism into words wasn't a load of fun in itself as well.... :)
The Machine
by Apsidalmosaic (http://www.furaffinity.net/user/apsidalmosaic/) Dated: 30.10.2016
The assembly-line stands ready for me
A curious thing, made to turn me. Made to sequence my flesh into parts, fuse it with metal, with exotic tissue and endow with ability it not yet possessed. I look at my body, devoid of hair already, naked and slim. Human now, but soon in a form more befit to serve the masters.
The line beckons. Three stations to give what must be given.
My body. My mind. My soul.
***
The first station is one of the body, one of crimson pain and sepia-coloured loss. I'm placed under a robot. The only sounds the faint whirring of a saw-blade and the droning hiss of metallic forms closing in. An injection. Opiates bind to receptors, dull my vision, my perception before the first of many cuts hits. Momentary anguish, until a quick incision disconnects my brain from my body; Abruptly turns it into a non-entity. A mere inanimate collection of matter, I can conceive through never-blinking eyes. My limbs are removed and blood gushes forward angrily in ruby waterfalls of escaping humanity.
I recall how they felt with a strange nostalgia.
A hand, lovingly placed onto my lovers hip. A muscle, tense from hard work. A face, lighting up at the sight of dusks embrace.
Some distant nerves tingle. I can almost feel them again. Remembrance cast in dim, blurry lights, somewhere deep inside of me. But on the outside, there is nothing.
Even as my face is split in two and my jaw ripped out with brutal, precise motions. Even as my teeth are pulled violently and I almost suffocate from encroaching nothingness. Even as my eyes are torched and my ocular cavities abraded for further processing.
The only thing left are dull sensations of a body rocking forward from metal being grafted onto it, from nanites tearing it apart and from clandestine growths building foreign frameworks on its ruins.
It takes time. I do not remember how long.
***
The second station is one of the mind, one of cerulean sensations and moss-covered instinct. My form is altered beyond recognition. A metallic mosaic. Alien, and animalistic, I understand when a surge of current penetrates my mind.
Activates something. Me. With impossible realizations.
My face has been distorted with a conical beak. Brass geometry, that curves up strangely in front of me as signals rush from detectors inside of what may or may not be my eyes. Realigned couplings and unseen cogs grip somewhere, giving torque to a strange new appendix. Tubular and pointed, extruded alloy tries to mimic a lizard. I'm quadrupedal now, my body a massive, metallurgic construct, layered with organic estrangement. Twisted manifolds with alien metrics. My teeth are rust. Iron oxide flakes away with each slash of a tongue of corrugated metal. But I still can taste. Traces of ferromagnetic shrapnel, polar, alcoholic solvents and faint hints of cyclic aldehydes, sensed by electronic tunnelling currents, arriving somewhere through fibreglass connections and optical computing components, exotic dendrites and uncharted synaptic clefts. There is also blood, rushing, pouring and streaming in vivid laminar flows behind chitinous scales, fleshy strata and bony peripheries. My limbs are silver and gold, a lion, lustrous like the sun, even as powerful ungulae bury themselves angrily in the concrete underneath.
Abstraction overcomes me. Instinctual denial. Panic. As archaic and ancient as the beast I resemble. My frame lumbers, clacks, hisses. Strains against mountings, screw-holdings, cable-tethers, leashes and harnesses. I scream, emit a chirped pulse of longitudinal excitations into the molecular environment that surrounds me.
A screech, like tormented bird of prey. A whine, like a dog paralyzed in fear. A buzz, like an angry hornet ready to strike.
The handlers come. Pet my hide. A mixture of carbon nanotubes, metallic filigree and horse-hair. My ears twitch nervously. Fox ears. Organic, scarlet-red, rotating like a waveguide-assembly receiving signals on low-energy scales, microwaves, radio-signals. No. Only the strange familiarity of sound. I calm, grit my impossible teeth. I'm not human anymore but a mere animal instead, trapped inside instinct and the surrealism of dysmorphia.
***
The third station is one of the soul, one of absurd knowledge and golden transcendence. I breathe heavily. Fans rotate harshly to fill my huge lungs while my tail flicks anxiously. The priests stand around me. A hand is placed on my distorted skull and an entrance made through an egress. Into a network. Into divinity.
I'm superimposed. Not one but many now. They say, information is the currency of the soul, arranged in stacks, in tables, in pages, but those are books, zetabytes stored on magnetic layers, racetrack memory domains, in quantum states, limit cycles and cooperative phenomena. Infinitely linked clusters. Non-converging sums. Divergent integrals. Singularities.
I fall into isotropy. Self-similarity of units scattered among inertial systems all over the planet. The universe. We are connected. Highly correlated. An infinite superposition. Markovianity hits. A critical opalescence. Fluctuations on all scales. I threaten to forget. Lose myself in infinite transients and trajectories. Yet I'm caught by decoherence, by disorder, localization effects, topological invariants and order parameters that keep me sane.
Well-defined.
The vacuum of it all still boils in the back of my mind. A sea of particle-antiparticle pairs. Zero point energy fluctuations. Thermal fluctuations. Coloured noise spectra.
Unimportant. I know my mission. I know my capabilities.
I urge my body to distort, hips straining, clacking and whirring mechanically as my robotic behind shifts and my stance distorts into something digigrade again. Something vaguely human yet decidedly different. "I'm ready", I say, currents readily manipulated into the speech processor below my beak.
Finally complete. I'm the machine and the machine is me.
And yet, wasn't I always?
I smile, analogues of lips behind the metal distorting, signalling my shining bill to strain just so slightly upwards, plotting data points of amusement on my new form and on the thousand reflections beyond the veil that is me also.
Some things remain invariant under transformations.