Skin/Bone (Patreon)

You dream of completion behind acid-etched glass, the water cloudy with disintegrating matter shed during your rehab. Something went wrong when you were Iterated back from Muscida. You've been floating here ever since while smeared faces and muffled voices circle you.

Locked joints quiver beneath baggy skin and coils of atrophied muscle. Tendons creak and beads of white-hot pain crawl up your wrists as your fingers twitch for the first time in -- weeks? months?

Machines chime in the gloom outside your tank. Harsh buzz of a printer laboring.

You press your palm against the glass, particulate matter swirling around you. Signal sigils flash where your skin flattens against the curved surface and for an instant you glimpse your WarSelf, pre-Iteration. A scream tears itself loose from your clogged lungs.

Throbbing starmeat caged in sizzling flesh and burning bone. How it felt to carry Death inside your lead-lined rib cage, to endure the endless surgeries to fish out clots of cancerous cell failure and replace burnt-out coolant arteries made from artificial tissue.

Sweating clouds of nanite gas sucked through breathing apparati into helpless flesh, rewriting lines of genetic code with keysmash garbage until stack overflow hits and cascading organ failure transforms kidneys into quivering hand grenades and blood slaps against the walls.

Your nose deforms against the tank as you try to push yourself into the flickering static of your own reflection. Your lips trail over the cold, smooth surface of the glass like leeches questing for some hot and living thing.

"She's ready to decant," says a watery voice.

Suction at your feet. Vomit coming up in a dark bloom as you're whisked away, elbowing knocking against something firm but pliable, chin clocked hard enough to make you bite your tongue. You hit cold tile on your hands and knees, hacking up nutrient sludge.

A woman with seafoam hair and a class 1 med license tattooed on her collarbone crouches in front of you. There are privacy curtains but you can hear vomiting, coughing. Other quick and dirty rebirths.

"How are you feeling, Soli?" she asks. Psych barcode under her med line.

"Not great," you answer, your voice thick. Snot drools from your mouth and nostrils.

"You're in the veterans' decantery in Ultan Hami City," she says and you can feel her eyes sliding over your scarred and naked skin, hunting for something, and you think with a sudden nauseous lurch that maybe they've wired you. "You had a rough Iteration home, Soli."

You remember a pink-washed HUD flooded with thumb-sized hunter killer vespidae and particle wash from C-beams lancing through the atmosphere. Biomagi chanting life out of the corpse-choked battlefield in lurching clots of death and ichor, lumbering golems made of shredded meat.

Can it be over? Can it?

You realize suddenly that the heartbeat in your ears is a thready echo of your fissile, crackling thub-a-dub. You put a shaking palm against your breast, little teacup tits and a scar where a crysbolt pierced you front to back, and feel only a murmur.

She tells you about a treaty and a hab-stack where the fighting went room to room up thirteen hundred stories and an imperial commendation from the archons on Mars, but it's not really clear what happened. Maybe it's the drugs burning in your veins, or the static flashback haze.

A pair of orderlies help you up and start to scrape the slime off of your skin with funny little plastic strigils. They're talking to the nurse, who's still asking you questions, and after a while they bring you a synthskin singlet and you fumble your way into it.

Then there is a dark, soothing room where images of the spiral oceans of Centauri VI murmur endlessly in slow, hypnotic circles and the nurse asks you things, and you answer her or else stare silently into the dark, deep churn.

"Have you ever spared an enemy combatant's life?"

"Did you attend daily to the health and morale of your squad?"

"Have you ever coupled with or digitally penetrated a psychic of Monarch-level conditioning or higher?"

"Did you find the Institute's rules of engagement logical and easy to follow?"

"Are you in any discomfort?"

You're tongue-tied, caught off guard. The last thing you remember is beating a ghoulform colonist's skull in with a jagged chunk of instacrete and now an hour with a therapist is making you sweat. Almost like war is a daydream.

"What are your plans for civilian life?"

You squirm. "I thought maybe I'd be an artist."

She quirks a glossy eyebrow and makes a note on her wrist where she has some kind of derm-comp softwired to record pen strokes. The walls shift to a loop of coriolis storms scouring a Martian desert.

"I'm sure you'll figure something out," she says, obviously indulging you.

She just smiles and makes another note. You think suddenly of a perfect girl who trained with you at the Institute branch on Muscida and whose lips deformed against yours in a pink-tinged soma haze during a live fire exercise when you were all tweaked out of your minds.

You think of all the perfect girls who've touched you the same way they'd touch a souped up repulsor hotrod or handle a plasma rifle with live arcs crackling between its magnetic focusing strips. 

The dead stumps of your weapons systems quiver in your new, ill-fitting body.

“I'm demi-doctor Rull," says the nurse. "I'm going to be your caseworker and liaison while you reintegrate, and during your outprocess into society. We'll meet weekly at first so I can see whether you're venting your sexual frustration healthily, adjusting at a reasonable rate."

Another note. You don't like the way she pulls these wisps of breath into solidity. You don't like being bound to your own babbling like a harpooned leviathan.

The walls flicker. Dandelion seeds, huge and pixelated, drifting on the wind. You itch yourself through your singlet.

Reconditioning takes thirty days. You lose your temper with Rull and cry, ugly and snotty, eyes swollen and sinuses burning, and you guess they keep you for an extra week because of that. You give up on being an artist because you've never drawn anything and you have no ideas.

You sleep in a therapeutic gel bath and they tell you that you have complex bio-PTSD with special condition Sigil and one morning you wake up and your entire uppermost layer of skin is sloughing off like a lizard's in big satisfying flakes, and you scratch at it until the pink skin underneath is raw and beads of blood well under your nostrils and at your groin and armpit and afterward it hurts to jerk off for the next four or five days. Then they give you a laminated schedule and a duffel you don't recognize and tell you you're leaving Ultan Hami.

The transitional apartment is one bare room and a sump slot where you have to shit standing up and there's no toilet paper but the disinfectant jets hit so hard you're forced against the walls where you cringe and blubber like a baby.

Outside is Low Thrungal, the Cloacal City.

End of Part I

Day 44 in Low Thrungal. You wake up in your filthy apartment to slap a crawlfly sucking at your upper thigh. Blood and pus squirt through your fingers. You sit up as your clogged sinuses start to auto-purge. Purplish slime soaks the carpet before you can get to the sump slot.

You mop up some of the snot with recycled paper tissues from the automat on the corner. The rest dries to a spiky bluish crust. You start to cry.

In two hours you have an appointment with demi-doctor Slyna Rull up-hab in Ultan Hami City. You need refills on most of your meds.

You kick waxed paper containers still sticky with fabflesh automat takeout and fuzzy with mold into the sump. The carpet underneath is veined with sticky trails of frozen snot. Med capsules stamped with your misspelled name. Dirtied hypos. 

Crawlflies flee your thudding steps.

When the sump is full you force the narrow door tight shut and yank the incinerator chain. Smoke puffs in a thin wisp out of the gap between door and frame. The smell of burning mold.

You remember the smashed crawlfly still stuck to your thigh and claw at it frantically.

You fumble through your capsules on the sill of your one narrow, grimy window until you find most of what you're supposed to be on. Blue exogenous estrog, liquefied wormwood, frogspawn tincture. Everything you need to smooth the pathways of your Iterated brain into pacific quiet.

Except you're fucking nothing. Bloody sputum hacked up by a war ten billion light years away where your body was huge and perfect and invulnerable, eleven feet tall and made of blue synthsteel laced with biotic sensory pathways. You lean against the sill and wish you were dead.

Peel off your stained panties and wriggle into leggings, thighs like flabby noodles pushing at the shrunken black synthskin. You thrifted them but they're too tight now and they make you feel like sausage paste coming out of a meat grinder. Fuckfuckfuckfuck. Struggle into your tattered black shrinkshirt and snort as it compresses you into a better shape, a shape that's more like your real one that only you can see and that you imagine digging out of the excess you've grown trying not to kill yourself in Low Thrungal, like a sculpture out of marble.

Out the door into the blistering hablight, which has been misaligned for weeks now, cracked sunglasses protecting your watery pupils, and you tug at the writhing mess of your cock to slip it back between your thighs, snap your leggings and tug them up behind to hold it there.

Your dealer is another TrashSelf waste of Iterated meat, tumors crawling in a deformed ridge up from her chin to push her lips into a cauliflower clutch of coral-like growths at one corner of her mouth. She's smoking Glaze in a rented tomb-bed six blocks over on Hucrant-12 Ave.

She takes the Glaze pipe from her mouth and wipes drool from her deformed chin. "If you want to fuck you can just ask."

You sweat and shiver but it's too much effort to demur so you wriggle into the pod and start clawing at her clothes, peeling things away from the scarred and Iteration-mutated body underneath. You can see the nubs of cartilage where her armor was mounted before they scrapped her.

They move under her skin like fingers trying to break the surface tension of blown bubblegum from inside, powerless against its infinite fragility for the few seconds it exists. You lick one, taste the trace acids excreted through her pores. Cystic barnacle acne cuts your tongue.

She grinds against you in a mindless, jerking frenzy, her half-soft cock stuck to her thigh by sweat. It feels slick and nauseating and you're so fucking hungry for it. Her four-fingered hand and the stub of the fifth against the back of your neck, dragging you down for a kiss.

Afterward  you fall sleep together in a horny, shivering haze broken by a hundred hypervigilant flutters as your gummed eyes crack against the slanting daylight outside of her pod. You press torn bills into her hand and leave with something you think you need. It's probably okay.

You jam cracked capsules into your pockets and scuttle down the burning street through crowds of vendors and bleary-eyed workers leaving the captcha stacks where their job is to teach machines how to recognize them and read the errant flickers of emotion they can't hide.

At Ganunti Station you jump a barbed turnstile clumsily, skinning a knee and tearing your leggings, and force your way into a packed vertcar just before it lurches upward, stubby caterpillar legs scrabbling at the silk cable of the vertway. Bodies push against you. Staring faces.

God the sweating awful stinking mass of them, the lines of scorn and raw disgust pulling taut between you and the others. Ebb and flow of breath and flesh at every stop. Stale air flooding out and new stench blowing in. Hyperventilating crushed up in a stained corner seat, peering out at them through your fingers, knowing they can see the vestiges of what you were and what that means, see the menace growing in their eyes and-

-sitting in Rull's waiting room, other patients sightMuted to fuzzy silhouettes (to discourage emotional entanglement) around you.

A door slides open in the far wall. An automated voices mangles your name. You stand up, thoughts scudding smoothly over glassy water, and step into the aromatic haze of incense smoke. You lie face-down on the table and stay still as Rull drapes a canvas veil over your head.

You hear Rull take her seat, which creaks slightly. "Are you taking your medication consistently?"

"Are you sexually active?"

"Do you eat a balanced diet?"

"Do you think of harming yourself or others?"

"Do you experience phantom memories of infinite power and divine cruelty?"

"Did the vat technicians who first decanted you touch your body inappropriately or in violation of imperial regulations?"

"Do you dream of a chain of cold white fire binding your soul to your body?"

"Do you know who the enemy is?"

You can hear her making notes as you sob through the hole in the table, your own misery echoing back at you from the narrow band of tiled floor you can see at the end of the tunnel of your therapy veil. Tears spatter the stonework, fat and hot. Your nose is clogged again.

Vat techs fishing rotted-out monstrosities from the nutrient soup around you. Squalling, buried in wet failures until a QualCheck cyborg picks you up and nurtures you for 123 minutes, the longest in your life you've ever felt love. You reached clinical adulthood 13 minutes later.

Wet dreams of smashing Rull's sleek face against the wall and fucking her bloody ear hole while she kneels. Wake up sticky on your thighs and broken inside like there's a pit at the bottom of your stomach and everything you've ever felt has drained down into it.

A white chain piercing your tongue and binding something that flaps and jerks at its far end, shedding clouds of pesticide and chlorine gas and crystalline feathers that cut flesh like butter. A huge mad thing as delicate as porcelain and stupid, fucking stupid, ugly.

"I want to bring your bufoxotin dosage up," says Rull. "I can arrange a second interview at the warehouse, help you find some structure, but you need to be on time. Can you commit to that?"

"Yes," you sob, drooling more snot. You were half an hour late to this appointment and you're already writhing at the thought of being pinned down to an interview slot, but agreeing is the only thing that makes the hurting stop. The incense is starting to burn your mouth.

"I want you to imagine that you're on a warm, sandy beach," says Rull, beginning the only guided meditation exercise she's ever used with you. It's boring and tacky but sometimes it calms you down. You shift on the table, restless and itchy, leggings cutting off your circulation.

In your fantasy Rull is veiled and tied to the table. Honey drips from her stiff nipples and the gag in her mouth stifles her whispers about the beach and its warm sand, but not the little gasps and grunts she lets out as you finger her, or her moan when you tighten the ropes.

Or she's straddling your face and telling you how disgusting you are, how pasty and fat and useless your body is, how the quivering worm between your legs makes her sick. She spits in your mouth and some of it spatters across your nose and upper lip and you lick it off like nectar.

Or you live together with two decanted children and one of them has a learning disability but Rull's so good with him and you come home every day and think how lucky you are and also in this dream you are a man and you want to scream until you aneurysm and your brain dies.

"...surf lapping gently at your toes," Rull concludes. She has no imagination. Fucking her would be boring, you think, though you're hard against the table's worn and scratched-at padding. 

"You're out of emotional labor credits, Soli. This is our last session for a while."

After leaving you find an emotery and scan your service animal (human) tat at the back of the kiosk. A stall opens and you slip in out of the warm drizzle falling from the next city up, which you've heard has real plants. Gel floods the stall, forcing your face up to a fitted hole looking in on a booth.

A woman comes dripping wet and fussing with her bag through the privacy curtain a few minutes later. She's up-hab, her pretty BioSelf dabbed with tasteful touches of cosmetics. She's crying. She says her lover won't look in her eyes when they're together.

You make sympathetic noises as she tells you about how her children hold everything against her, about how the four-year-old is incapable of understanding her moods, unwilling to understand her needs. You reassure her that she's doing the right thing by locking it in a closet.

For the next week you log as much time there as you can. UpHabbers ask you to validate their opinions on gender and sexuality, want you to weigh in on their petty arguments, want your approval as they give their children eating disorders and split their polycules with games of overwrought telephone they pretend they carry out in the interest of fairness. They nuzzle the plushly maternal synthflesh body from which your face protrudes and lap at your bland words of encouragement, your statements that it must be hard, it must be so hard, to have to feel/think/say that all alone. And then one night a woman tells you tearfully that her boyfriend is getting himself refabbed and is it so awful if she's sad about it, if she has feelings, god forbid she should be a human with her own reactions, and you hawk, squishing your chin down into the gel seal, and spit at her.

It hits her square between the eyes and for an instant you feel vindicated, powerful, an exotic insect stinging something many times its size and relishing the great beast's terrified convulsions. Then she gets up, perfect teeth bared, and stabs you in the cheek with a pen.

She drags the dull point through your flesh, screaming obscenities, trying to hook her fingernails into your scalp as the gel sphincter pushes you back from the booth into your stall, submerging you for a moment in suffocating velvet folds of olive-colored softness.

A hiss. A click. A white wave of pain breaks over you. Servo laser cutting through your tat. The gel's grip loosens and you stagger out into the rain, sobbing as you clutch your smoking arm against your breast. You'll never earn chits this way again.

You snatch a napkin from a vendor's cart and stuff part of it into the bleeding pen-hole in your face. Who cares? Who gives a fuck? Your face is trash. Your skin is cast-off reject cancerous diarrhea slime. You needed a service tag and therapy like you need a colostomy bag.

You lift a can of something sweet and fizzy from another cart and chug it as you weave in and out of street markets and outlet stores and the fringes of the mall-clades where store managers lurk with their gangs and retainers in opulent back offices overlooking the sales floors.

You still have part of your disability in your pocket and suddenly everything you see is the most important thing you've ever seen. You have to have it, own it, eat it, lick it,

Plowing into the first fuck shop you find, babbling at the merchant with blood running down your chin to stain your shirt as the other customers stare at you turning dead plastic and radioactive crystal over in your sticky hands. "Fuck," you whisper over and over, like a prayer.

"Fuck."

Two-pronged tentacle dildo that injects stimulants into your taint while you ride it.

"Fuck."

Ball gag with an esophageal probe to stimulate your gag reflex.

"Fuck."

Iron riding crop that turns as soft as eiderdown with a squeeze on the grip.

"Fuck, fuck, FUCK."

You wake up in your apartment with a splitting headache and a mouthful of dried blood. Your thoughts jump in frantic inner conflict, ricocheting off of one another, unable to come to rest. Something up your asshole, needle stuck between your legs, hot pulse of stims inside you.

End of Part II

Bright smear of procedurally generated porn (two women fuck in a coffin on a desert island and discover as the lid locks that they're sisters, smotherfucking, gasping) and vape cartridges and hysterical sharp-edged laughter and sometimes there are TASTES. You write on the walls.

What is the internet? A hole you can never stop falling down. Candy-colored girls with your exact face and big stupid eyes staring at each other in a featureless red room. One moves and slides apart as monofilament wires cut through her flesh. You scream in terrified glee.

Crawlfly bites discolor huge blotches of your skin, puffy and inflamed, joining to form island chains of hot red flesh. You're getting thinner. Bones jutting against failing skin. Little rags of it hang limp from your lips and the backs of your knees and your armpits.

You go outside naked and no one important sees you but the sunburn hurts, it hurts, it hurts so bad you seal yourself up inside your body and you can't stop screeching and whining and the neighbors complain and you bite the social worker who comes to investigate.

Inpatient. Warrens of unlocked rooms. People sneak into your slot at night to breathe your smell and lie beside you and whimper their life stories in your ear as you try to sleep through the grey sludge of overmedicated anhedonia that is your life now. One day. Two. A hundred?

Pretty girl. Girlsmell of her. Long fingers cupping the parts of you the medication pumps full of soft yellow fat so that the stretch marks on your hips and just above your flat ass darken and grow like flooding waterways. 

Swie Urati. Girlsmell cuntheat holding on in terror.

Your pod. Her pod. Pushing her against the shower wall where the cameras don't reach and the surveillance beetles get confused by water crashing against white tile. Long blond hair, sagging tits, loose skin at the nadir of her belly and a white rat king of scars above her mound.

Lick her skin clean. Drool, kisses hungry, fumbling, teeth clicking as she tells you "You have a cunt. Between your legs is a cunt. I'm calling it a cunt because it is one and if you call it that you'll feel it too" and you sob "I love you" into the dark crescent of her shoulder.

She takes greedy handfuls of you when the orderlies aren't looking. The long, scarred lines of her coil serpentine around you. Arms around you. Teeth chewing at spit-flecked nape of neck. Group and veiling and the hot, sizzling throb of slapdash meds taken erratically.

"My girl my baby my sweet thing my sister we come from the same womb we'll go back there together when I sink my teeth into your throat and crush your spine between my jaws and shake you like a dolly while your limbs flop limp and useless and the light goes out of your eyes."

Crushing a surveillance bug and sharing its hallucinogenic organs, fingers slicked with phosphorescent jizz as you kiss and trade mouthfuls of half-chewed bugflesh, pulling each other apart, skin stretching like taffy, eyes drooping as sockets fall back into wet skulls.

"On Muscida," you whisper into the cavern of her ear, watching the fine hairs clinging to the waxy skin within shiver in the wind of your voice, "I had a WarSelf, and she fought the enemy. She had crucifix pupils and blue hair and a nuclear heart that burned her from the inside."

"It was just after the AutoBan, after we found out that the enemy had downloaded their archive and they were spamming bot soldiers through all the Iteration facilities in the system. Everything collapsed and there were only six of us left. We were incredibly heroic."

"We went into space and activated a Twitch satellite and got enough upvotes to fire its orbital laser and destroy the sublight-speed invasion fleet, but my two girlfriends died when the laser's accelerators jammed and they volunteered to trip them manually."

"After that I got a meaningful scar and cut my hair and the empire's reinforcements Iterated through from a secondary hub and the enemy fused a parallel Muscida to ours with dark matter and we all had to fight our evil copies who had perfect lives and spoke to their families."

"I killed my copy and downloaded her memories and her iTunes playlists and I relived her childhood and listened to her favorite K-Pop bands and I really feel like we connected, which was difficult because I'd just murdered her, and then I got beheaded by a technomantis dominatrix."

Swie's mouth drops off of the bottom of her crumbling face and speaks from the floor of the cramped, dirty closet.

"I am the saddest woman in the entire world and my tear ducts are cosmically linked to an infinite sea of misery so if I cried for long enough we'd drown in here."

Her fingers push through your skin and find the stubs of your perfect WarSelf which cried sapphire tears without any expression whenever something really tragic happened. 

"I was born UpHab and I have fucked up everything I've ever touched, which is why I'm here with you."

"I want to crawl into you and wrap myself in your entrails and lick filth off of your lungs and help you breathe better. I want to be your mommy and give birth to you from the inside out. I want our circulatory systems to flow through each other in an endless red tangle of love."

You kiss, mouths tangling, teeth creeping out of swollen gums to march down throats into the glistening cathedrals of each others' bodies as your lips melt together and your features bloom and mutually engulf, eyes connecting, joining aqueous spheres like a face submerging in its reflection.

It feels good.

End of Part III

Transitional housing. Suffocating nest of mingled girlstink in a pink-facaded walkup in Cloac, under Low Thrungal. It's Swie's turn to go grocery shopping but she's still asleep. Your stomach roils angrily. You have to be at work soon.

Green-white hiss of frustrated anxiety.

"Swie," you whisper in her ear, kneeling on the futon to touch her shoulder. "Baby you have to get groceries. We have to go to work."

She jerks away from you, twisting the sheets around herself. A long leg stretched out on the mattress vanishes up into her sweat-stained cocoon.

"I said I'd work an extra shift today," she says with stiff, brittle anger, as though you made her do it. "I have to go."

You start to cry.

"So I have to remember everything and it's my fault if I forget one tiny thing? It's my fault you can't believe I have good intentions?" Her eyes look like dead black stones. "Why don't I quit work and go get groceries and then *you* can try supporting both of us."

You sink down to the floor and start to sob, guilt throbbing hard in your throat. It's true your paychecks have been getting thinner. Your disability and benefits ran out and you have some kind of urinary infection so you can't sell plasma or serotonin or a kidney or stem cells.

You work cleaning a bathhouse in Low Thrungal and you've gotten mugged a few times and you have a lot of panic attacks so your super's always threatening to fire you. She's cut your pay twice. Sometimes she docks you a few dollars when you show up late or cry too much on the job.

Swie stands, throwing off the bedding, and gets dressed in stormy silence, ignoring you. She doesn't kiss you before leaving. She doesn't touch you. She doesn't say "You're perfect" or "I love you" or "I'll see you tonight and everything will be okay. I'm sorry."

She stands in the doorway in her green uniform. She works at a local mall clade and her manager relies on her. "Go ahead and tell everyone what a bitch I am. Fucking tweet about it. I should be alone with no one because oh boo-hoo poor Soli, I made her cry."

She slams the door.

You sniffle for a while, lying half-dressed on the mattress as you work to push the rotten tide of your hurt and resentment back into the overloaded sewer of your subconscious. After a while you plug in the laptop and sync the camera to the teardrop implant under your left eye.

Baffled chatrooms and private servers password locked, secret partition and reactive facial censoring so Swie never runs across some grainy rip of your contorting nakedness when she's watching her cooking webcasts (she doesn't like to cook) and gender-critical lectures.

You get a group together and convulse for them, pretending to be electrocuted as the teardrop stiffens your cock and makes your skin look smoother. The framerate is lossy and people drift out of the private chat. A few e-coins left behind like pigeon feed.

Another group.

Another fantasy, choking on cock or pissing yourself or hoping your dad doesn't walk in while you're showing your little brother what you learned in the Red Room. Desperate voices begging you to spread it wider, push it deeper. You wonder if they know how pitiful they sound.

Finally some locked account sends you a fat chunk of crypto and you log off shaky and sick and dehydrated and dissociate for a few hours, leaning your forehead against the cool toilet bowl, inhaling antiseptic and black mold.

The money makes you stupid so you call the bathhouse and tell your super that you're quitting. You wanted to scream at her. Instead your mouth turns dry and you mumble something about a medical emergency and a bunch of nothing-speak so maybe she'll hire you back if you need it.

You get dressed, picking through your closet for the things that make you feel the least horrible about your strange and ever-shifting bumps and rolls. Compression clothes make you too crazy now so it's mostly baggy hoodies and torn leggings. 

You go out.

Down the narrow, creaking stairwell past your second-story neighbors who are arguing again about the zilika flitters they breed illegally and whether or not their toddler's been eating the eggs and then the abandoned first floor unit with trash spilling out into the hall.

The BioSelf women drinking on the porch shoot nasty looks as you shuffle past with your hood up and your makeup hastily wiped off. Torrents of garbage spill through citysphincters from uphab into Cloac like waterfalls. Whole blocks are buried in it. Drifts as high as skyscrapers.

The economy runs on trash down here and the verts run only sometimes, except for the worker expresses, so work in Cloac means hooking, farming fungus or fighting over salvage rights with one of the brutal sanitation gangs. 

You imagine your WarSelf leveling the whole dump.

Recipes don't really stick in your head and your phone's dead so you can't look anything up, but you find a bio-bodega and buy and fab things not quite at random until you think you can probably do something. 

Back to the apartment. Crush. Slice. Chiffonade? Is that a thing?

Spicy plantain soup with leeks and potatoes. The tortillas you made are weird and irregular like survey maps of volcanic islands, but they smell right. 

Swie comes home two hours late. She's expressionless. You go still. You go very still in a way that feels like love to you. “I made dinner,” you say.

"I didn't ask you to," she says. "Honestly it's kind of overwhelming to come home to this kind of expectation. I had to stay later to help Nilmin repulse a raid by a rival department store today and I haven't had any time to myself to just process my feelings in weeks."

"My mother used to surprise me with food," she continues.

You feel ashamed for being so thoughtless. She talks for a while longer then gives a frustrated sigh and goes into the room. She closes the door behind her.

The apartment feels like a waiting room. You feel like you're about to be told you have an inoperable tumor because of something you forgot to do that would have been easy to get ahead of if you'd cared. Your weapon stubs ache and tremble and for an instant it almost seems like you could reactivate some of them if you really focused.

You curl up in the kitchen around the empty knot of your stomach and think about what it was like to deploy your armaments against the swarming tides of forumspawn, to cut them down by the hundreds while your point-defense laser follicles incinerated flak and incoming fire.

You hated it. You miss it. You know Swie has gone through so much reconciling her politics with the kind of life you've led but you can't let go of that hot core of miserable, corrosive power and the way it felt when your arm came apart into its component sections and hot arcs of bioregulated plasma cracked between them and then leveled hillsides and blackened the skies. The way it felt to launch flechettes into oncoming waves of enemy bots and see them pop in goopy red explosions like rubies liquefied under impossible pressure.

And there's nothing left of any of it.

In the morning Swie wakes you up gently, kissing your cheek, and leaves a cup of coffee next to you as she slips out of the apartment. There's a note there in her spiky handwriting about how much she loves you and how good you are for her, how safe she feels with you.

You tweet a picture of the note to your namelocked followers and watch as strangers confirm what you know: that you are loved and everything is good and that you don't need to tell anyone about the other things because if it were really bad they'd be able to tell no matter what.

You stay in bed and sleep until the sweltering green afternoon tilts soupily toward evening. You dream of being Iterated, your flesh reduced to janky open-source code and sent hurtling through space by ansible to be decrypted into a civilian drudge riddled with unfixable bugs.

You dream of kissing a dying Chanterelle (pink braid spattered with blood, half her mouth shredded by crysbolt splinterfire so your tongue pushes between missing teeth) on the solar wind-swept satellite over Muscida, the planet's muddy whorls of red and brown laid out below you.

The laser's killing light pulses blue and white as it strobes, carving a gigantic heart emoji into Muscida's northernmost continent. The destruction down there must be unimaginable but to you it's just mood lighting. Your hair sticks to your bloody lips and throat.

Chanterelle burps up a bubble of blood and dies in your arms and you hold her close and kiss her hair as below Muscida starts to come apart along its burning fault lines like a gumball cracked between gigantic teeth. This wasn't the end, but in your dream it is, and you know that if Chantarelle who you haven't thought about in two and a half years and who you weren't especially close to and just hooked up with sometimes had lived that you would have been happy together and she never would have screamed at you for forgetting to do the dishes and you wouldn't have this stomachache all the time or worry about her finding out that you're hooking to make rent because she'd be really cool and neo-sex-positive about it if she did.

And then you wake up.

THE END