The Nightmare Technician

B&B Story #1

Christ In Limbo, 1575, Oil on wood, by Hieronymus Bosch

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Is there a set of syllables that I could compose that would instill within you the belief in a proposition for which you erstwhile thought the conceptionings ineffable? To render the inscrutable into scrutability. A terrible and enigmatic assault on rationality transmuted into the understanding of a plain irrefutable fact. Herein lies a vainglorious attempt at just that. Elocutions expressing that which inside speech can transcend the seemingly natural boundaries of existence. Tearing apart the universe. Stripping away everything natural that a sagacious mind would readily accept, and laying bare the true schizoid logic of existence–for there can be no acceptance without understanding, and there can be no understanding without breaking apart the illusions that have governed our lives. For I have seen the truth of what existence is. The void that underscores being. The real reality peeking from a crack in the cosmos and staring out with bored indifference at our vastly wasted potential.

I am a man of science, or at least there was once a version of me that was. A technician at the particle accelerator outside of Geneva. It was the day when the sacchariferous fruits of our labors were meant to ripen and drip the ambrosial nectars of unadulterated apprehension into our ravenous skulls. At the time I thought the experiment was simple and elegant. With the advantage of hindsight, it seems naive and crude. I won’t bore you with too many of the details only to say that we smashed together various particles and measured their weight and heat at different pressures. A thousand years of our greatest minds building off of each other until the pinnacles of empiricism led us full circle to the neanderthalian impulse to bash two rocks together and call the results progress. We are a pathetic species, but I’ll get to that later.

That morning, when I awoke, the repercussions of our hubris were already reverberating backwards through our version of time. Or rather, “already” is a bit of a misnomer. More accurate to say that the morning was within the temporal proximity for which our literal contretemps had influence. This caused a series of phenomena that were, at the time, completely devoid of explanation. A two-headed calf born on the outskirts of town. An uptick in heart failure and hallucinations (the seeds of which would grow into a minor plague of lunacy). Flocks of birds falling dead from the sky, like warm and twitching hailstones–and most importantly of all: the nightmares.

I for one awoke from a dream in which a 6-armed ashen creature sat at a machine that seemed to be constructed entirely out of reddish gray bones. The creature pulled out one of its 9 eyes and placed it in a round receptacle in the center of the device. After a moment it moved that eye to a second receptacle, then a third. Then it put the eye into its mouth and slowly masticated with a pensive look on its unearthly face. Its throat undulated softly as it swallowed and a new eye grew into the empty socket–starting with a small rectangular pupil and filling out from behind–as it stared unblinking.

Its curious face shifted into a glower. It sat there for several moments mulling over its actions. Then, slowly, deliberately, it turned its head towards me. It opened its mouth in a single, prolonged movement–showing off its scores of small rounded teeth, and the forked tongue that was too squat and meaty to be called serpentine. And just as the mouth had opened to its zenith a low pitch scream ejaculated from its gullet.

#

I awoke. Diaphoresis dripping from my flesh and leaving me clammy. Fists clenched so tightly I could see the indentations of nails in my palms. Heart pounding zealously in my chest. Gasping. Struggling to pull more breath into my lungs. Greedily inhaling as if the air was thin and devoid of oxygen and each lungful was only enough to withstand asphyxiation for the briefest of moments. Until slowly my heart and lungs began to rest, but all of existence still felt uneasy and wrong. I could hear the bellow echoing through my skull, and somehow I knew exactly what it meant, in spite of the fact that the stygian language was unknown to me.

“You shouldn’t be here. This is not for you to see.”

I looked at the clock. It was 6:30. I didn’t need to be awake for another hour, but I knew if I stayed in bed I wouldn’t be sleeping. The idea of lounging alone in the darkness left a mangled stone in my stomach. I stood up and walked to the restroom. I looked in the mirror. My face was pale. My eyes were dilated by fear, and puffy from the absence of sleep.

I stepped into the shower. I let the hot water splash against my face and cleanse the sweat from my shaking body. I stood there trying not to think as the steam welled around me. The hot water burnt my skin, but the pain was a welcome distraction. Even so. Every time I closed my eyes I was nearly overwhelmed by the glimpses of it staring at me from behind my firmly fastened eyelids. The creature at his machine. The very image of an infernal technician, like some Mephistophelean doppelganger wandering around my mind and by proxy my very skull. Surrounded by an alien hellscape. Machines of bone. Walls of bone and pulsing flesh. Everything red-gray and awful, but organic and full of the most vile life.

Had the hadean beast been swallowed by something even more necrotic than itself? Was it a parasite living in the bowls of an incomprehensible leviathan? Making its home next to the organs and bathing, perhaps, in stomach acid; just as I presently bathed in scalding fluids. And what was it doing? What kind of technician could it be? For it was a technician. Even then, somehow I knew that, but what information could it gleam from such a barbaric practice–to my horror I imagined how the wet popping of its sight organ would feel if it had happened in my own mouth–then, after the popping was the crunching of the occipital lens. I shuddered and lied to myself and said it was just a dream.

I slapped my face, and told myself to get it together. Get it together. Goddamn it, control yourself man. Then I stepped out of the shower. That day was meant to be a materialist triumph of scientific endeavorment, and there I was cowering like a school child lost in fears of afrits and banshees, but the dream creature was nothing as pedestrian as a demon or any other metaphysical bugaboo. In fact, though I hadn’t realized it yet, what I had seen was flesh and blood in a more real sense than any other creature that I’d ever come in contact with–but I’ll get to that later.

I shaved slowly so as not to nick my chin with my shaking hands. Carefully drawing the blade over the stubble on my neck and cheeks. Then I washed the remaining foam off my face. I took that moment to hazard another look in the mirror. Still pale, but at least partially presentable. I dressed myself in a white collared shirt, with black pants and a black tie. My shaking hands were finally beginning to firm up, and I was able to knot the tie on only my second attempt. I pulled a comb through my thinning hair then I put on my round wire spectacles and made my way into the kitchen. There I put on a pot of coffee and began to fix myself a morning meal. I went to the cupboard and pulled out a carton of eggs. I put a pan onto the stovetop and scooped a knob of butter onto the heating metal. Once the butter had melted I cracked an egg into the pan and then froze. The egg sizzled in the pan and its edges instantly turned white, but my eye fixated on the center. Inside the yoke there was a dollop of blood floating to the top in a line. Like a red rectangular pupil, staring up at me.

Quickly I tossed it into the garbage. It’s nothing, I told myself. It’s nothing. Stay calm. Just breathe. Then I cracked another egg into the pan, and saw another thick red line staring up at me. I cracked another egg. This time not even bothering to do so into the pan. Smashing it straight onto the counter. And there was blood there too. I cracked another and another until I’d worked my way through a dozen bloody eggs, leaving my kitchen covered in viscous sludge, and all the while I could feel the eyes on me. I couldn’t take it any longer. Using my thumb I popped each of the yokes one by one, until all of the eyes were gouged out, but even that didn’t work. I could still feel its stare drilling into me, and now I could hear its voice in my head. That low ephemeral yowling, that couldn’t really be described as speech and yet was so pregnant with meaning.

“This is not for you to see, child. No good will come from you knowing the secrets of the universe. End your searching. Suffice yourself with what’s around you. Let that be enough. Find love and joy in your side of existence.”

I put my hands to my ears trying to block out the deafening scream; rubbing yoke all over my freshly cleaned face. Every syllable hurt to hear and threatened to burst my eardrums, and yet I couldn’t help myself. I fell to my knees screaming back, “but what are you?”

“I am small, and yet I am far beyond you. That’s all you need to know.”

Then I was left again in silence. I don’t know how long I stayed there on my knees, but I was brought back to my senses by the shrill ring of the fire alarm. I hadn’t turned off the stove and one of the bloody eggs was left in the pan. It had turned black and was billowing smoke. My knees hurt as I pulled myself back into a standing position. The pan sizzled as I put it into the sink. I opened a window to let the smoke out of the room. I may have heeded the creature’s warning if it had been less boisterous, but I couldn’t stay in that apartment, not after what I’d felt and seen.

After the smoke had dissipated, I quickly wiped the yoke off my face. I filled a thermos with coffee and went to my car. I had to get out of there. I had to be anywhere else. I just started to drive, not thinking about where I was going. I turned on the radio and the announcer spoke in a generic affable voice, but what it said was anything but generic and affable.

“I have seen visions in the night. Rejoice for he comes! Bringing with him glad tidings of our cosmic insignificance. Give him praise, for we are unworthy to be in his presence. He has built our universe with his mad machines and beckons us back into his many uncaring arms. The absent father of our universe, returned at long last from his trip to the corner store in the next nebula over. Finally he is back with the pack of smokes he said it would only take him a moment to get, and in his vast and endless plans it was only a moment. He swears it! Get down on your knees and praise–”

I changed the channel at that point, only to hear a news broadcast. It was raining fire in Russia, feral llamas were running amuck in Argentina, and the American President had died of a heart attack the night before. Then I flipped the channels again until I found a public radio station. They were playing Glenn Gould’s rendition of the Goldberg Variations. Finally my mind was left empty as it drifted across the subtle counterpoint. I drove and looked out at the mist that was gliding halfheartedly across lake Geneva. The music seemed to flood over the distant mountains and the arpeggios punctuated each wave. I drove thoughtlessly, at a reckless speed.

I was safe until I closed my eyes for just a moment and all of those rectangular pupils were staring back. I slammed the brakes and had to swerve to keep from careening out of control. My heart beating. Gould’s frenetic humming accentuating each musical phrase, and as I righted myself my car seemed to know where to go. I mindlessly drove until I found myself sitting in the parking lot in front of the lab hyperventilating to the final notes of the composition.

As the last tones faded away, I got out of my car as if in a trance. I went inside the building and put on my lab coat. Wherein I found myself standing next to Dr. Willhem Knoche, the lead researcher on the project. His beady eyes worked their way up and down my body.

“You’re late,” he said, “and look at the state of you! It’s as if you don’t even care that we’re here to make history.”

The way he spoke was filled with confidence as if there was nothing wrong with the universe, and for a moment it filled me with hope that nothing was wrong. That what I’d experienced had been a purely epiphenomenal delusion, and I might say there was some evidence to support this supposition. I would later figure out that I was the only one who had heard the radio announcer’s tirade, and that the news broadcast had been incorrect, at least in our version of reality.

I apologized profusely, and wiped away a small bit of yoke that I’d missed earlier. “I’m sorry, Herr Knoche. I’ve had quite a morning, but I’m here now and ready to operate the machine.” And so I was. Until that moment I hadn’t been sure, but deep down I knew that I was so close to understanding the universe. To understanding everything. If I wasn’t close, then the universe wouldn’t be trying so hard to fuck with me. So I stood there and blocked out all of the incongruities. Pushed all of the eyes out of my skull. Deafened the voice that even at that moment was billowing into my head.

“You still have time to stop, but this is your final warning. Heed it. Live in ignorance. Keep that small bit of bliss that your actions now will surely obliterate.”

A drop of blood fell from my ear and traced the boundaries where the yoke had been. This too I wiped away, and walked over to my position beside the machine. I inputted the necessary prerequisites for the experiment, and with only a minor hesitation, I pressed the button.

The machine whizzed as beams of protons sped through the tube, and collided in a miniscule explosion. The results appeared on my monitor. The analysis showed nothing remarkable.

“Run it again,” said Dr Knoche.

I raised my hand towards the button but as I did my finger felt heavy, and I saw a vision of the ashen creature with 6 arms, staring at me with its many eyes and shaking its head.

“What the hell is taking you so long? Push the damned button!” said Dr Knoche without a shred of compassion in his voice.

I shook my head until the images left my eyes, and used every bit of force I could muster to raise my heavy hand and push my finger towards the button. There was a small click as my flesh made contact with the instrument. The machine began to wiz and for a moment the universe seemed normal, and then the particles made contact and everything went black.

In the next moment I was back again staring at my machine. Except it wasn’t my machine. It was red-grey and skeletal and the walls around me were pulsing, and I was not myself. I could feel the fingers moving on my half-dozen hands touching each part of my unfamiliar body. Moving against my rough skin as I stared out with nona-ocular vision. I was the creature and I could see everything in its mind. Its wants. Its needs. Its ambitions. Its failures. In its psyche there were multitudes. So many voices.

And then I understood.

I grabbed one of my eyes and began to pull. It slid out far too easily. It felt wet and tacky in my hand. I placed it in one receptacle, and then the next. It slid perfectly into the holes. After a moment it began to softly glow pink. A delectable and forbidden fruit so close at hand. I grabbed it and held it up to my face. I let both prongs of my forked tongue slide delicately over its surface. It tasted strangely sweet like a mixture of cardamom and fennel. Visions of a universe, not unlike our own, floated through my head. I tossed it into my mouth greedily. As the membrane popped the liquid leaked out and burned my tongue, but as it was destroyed it was copied whole cloth into my skull. Atom for atom. A universe not unlike our own. Space and void and stars and planets. Many teeming with life. Trillions of minds destroyed, copied, cataloged, and given the privilege of living eternally inside my skull. No, not my skull. His skull, and yet I felt the bliss that he felt. It was our skull in that instant, and I was the blackguard twin of George Berkeley’s God, and I craved more. Every fiber of my being wanted to use the machine again. To taste just one more universe, but he stopped my hand.

“No,” he said. “These ones are mine.”

Then I opened my eyes and I was back at the lab.

#

“...What the hell is wrong with you? Are you even listening to me?” Said Dr. Knoche.

It took me a moment to respond. I was still getting used to seeing out of only two eyes.

“I’m sorry, Herr Knoche. Just a dizzy spell. What did you say?”

“I said it looks like there’s a sensor issue. I’m detecting something in there that doesn’t make any sense. I’m going to need you to open it up.”

I nodded and walked over to the maintenance hatch near the collision site. I unscrewed the bolts and climbed into the tube. It was dark, but less dark then it should have been. I looked over to where the collision had happened. There on the ground was a glowing pink orb with a small rectangle on its side. I scurried into the tube, and scooped it into my hand, then licked it before sliding it into my mouth and slowly chewing.

It tasted like cardamom and fennel.