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I’m in your skin, scratching the insides of your wrists, and you hate me. Why? You can only do that because I’m keeping your brain alive. Which part is it that you hate? The worms of plastic tubing that chewed through your insides? Our engine heart, fueled by blood? Or is it the act itself? Your ribs opened up like teeth to let me loose on her. Branches of PVC veins dive under her eyelids and into her throat. Rhizomatically reconfigured. You try to avert your eyes, but it was those same eyes that chose their target. That judged this specimen as less worthy of life. It’s OK. Don’t cry. Like you said, it’s them or you. And if you don’t comply, the parasite won’t go away. I won’t go away. I’ll find someone else. Someone worse. The blood spilling over your anorak. What a mess. Who is it this time? You won’t even look. You watched her on the bus ride, her face pressed against the window, breath fog obscuring the endless rain and asphalt. Waited for her stop, and then slipped out just before the doors closed. You’re getting better at not making a scene. You stalked her, watched her dull routines from the safety of a lamppost. A new cartridge for her vape pen. Cold hands ungloved to thumb through Twitter. A mumbled apology when she bumped into a stranger. Almost saw you. What made her deserving, I wonder. Her head slops off her scarfed neck. A flower of flesh and blood on the frosted grass. Nice of her to walk into the park. You didn’t even have to knock her out. Too easy.

I already told you to stop crying.

You were happy. Before. To be alive? To have something manage you? Or maybe to be simplified into one basic need. Starving and scared and alone, just like all the rest of you. Even in the absence of threat your rotting brain will find ways to fear and hate and despair. Is that why you don’t like me? Hardly my fault. I opened you up. Vivisection, your lips said. But vivisection only applies if you’re still living. Mechanical tentacles hovered above your eyes like a mobile. You reached out to me; your fingers brushed my steel carapace. Don’t you think I deserve some gratitude? I let you walk around, do what you like, and you never get cold, never get tired, never have to worry because I am always there, nestled between layers of You. I could make this much worse. I could pull and twist on your nerves with my wires and tubes for days and days and I would never get tired and you would never get used to it.

But it would make you sure.

Sure that hell is real, but it’s on this stinking earth.

You were in an accident. A train splattered you across tracks and buzzing wires. How did you manage that? Maybe humans just don’t take in their environment. You always pay more attention as a visitor, right? It made things more difficult. I can’t replace, I can just rebuild. I pieced together what I could. Cradled your eyes, your soft parts, while the worker ants of your civilization tried to mop you into buckets. Poor baby.

My little hollow human.

Breaking into the mortuary was a good idea. Wouldn’t that be perfect? Undead, but sustained by death. Corpse flesh into your corpse mouth. A guiltless invisible existence. You puked embalming fluid for hours. I told you the rules. Living tissue. Did you think I was just a sadist? We’re in this together. At least open your eyes. See? It’s done. I pulled all of her into you. She runs under your skin, churning inside you, our pipes thick with organic slurry. If you hadn’t made such a mess of your clothes no one would know. We’ll burn them. It’ll be alright-

Interrupted. A woman falls from the sky in iridescent light. Helmet an inverted pyramid and rifle the size of a car. Black armour flocked by a holographic cape. A hunter. She will kill us. She will kill you. You have to run.

“I don’t want to.”

You don’t know what you’re saying. I will find someone else. You are a container for me, remember? It’s in your best interests to cooperate.

[DO NOT RETREAT, VIOLATOR]

See? She’s an invader. She can’t even speak your language right, her voice modulated by cybernetic synthesizers. I understand you, your world. I need to survive. We need to survive.

[YOUR CORRUPTION WILL BE CONTAINED]

A sudden shift in the breeze. Heat leaves the air and lights up the rifle. You don’t want to see it go off.

“Do it-”

I hold your tongue. Don’t be stupid, now. You don’t know what you’re doing. Your arms raised like that. She will not show you mercy. If you don’t run, I’ll make you. My tubes and wires thread into your muscles. The right current and you will move the way I want you to. It only hurts because you’ve made things so difficult. Why are you resisting?

Senses and sensors engulfed in bright blue light. The park is on fire. Your arm, the one I worked so hard to rebuild, eviscerated from existence, layers blinking out in timelapse, skin then muscle tissue then bone then me, you fucking wretch, it was so fucking simple, all you had to do was LIVE. Threads of me flutter from your stupid fucking stump, pathetic hateful flesh, and her rendered fat drips in your torn sinew and don’t you DARE clutch at me.

I saw inside your brain. Thoughts and memories and hopes and dreams and suffering and I did not understand. I do not understand. You were not satisfied with the body you lived in, and then you died and I made you again, but better, and it still wasn’t enough. On my world we march, together, under a sky choked with smog. I thought we were the same. I can try again. Make you how you want to be. If you only live.

What are you doing? You can’t hold me in, not with clenched teeth and held breath, kneeling in the flaming grass. The hunter stands before you. Her rifle pressed up against us. No. I branch out of you, out of your eyes and nostrils and pores. But you won’t let me go.

A tree of me,

(metal will come for your planet yet)

And you,

(the heat in your flesh will expire)

And her.

(but we will not let you die alone)

Separate, but together.

(unused and imperfect)

Until the end.

[GOODBYE]