I’m remembering that dream that I had and I want to make a short story from it. It’s the one where I was in a concrete jungle as an operator of this large vat that was feeding blue fluid to convicts through tubes going into their backs. Gigantic ass tank thing, something like the Halo vehicle that carried an entire fleet of people.

The aesthetic was that of 90s, where there was this peculiar dull or drab feeling, especially in the projects/poor areas. Sepia-laden concrete shithole, people left to their scraps. Hardly any greenery whatsoever, everything is some form of steel, concrete, or asphalt. Blood and gore on these materials is especially striking in a way that makes the visceral registers deeply uncomfortable. There’s nowhere that’s really safe since the space was designed for machines and not people. There was a thread of dehumanization, of not knowing what’s really going on spun throughout it. The further you go back in time, the more experimental and less certain things seems. Think of when doctors thought smoking was beneficial or at least not harmful. There’s a naivety in new technology with a smaller knowledge substrate to work from. That’s exactly what this blue fluid was: an experiment and a last ditch effort to siphon off manpower resources by sacrificing those who they saw as not even human.

Surrounded by jaundiced lighting, the linoleum walls peel around me. My perception is foggy and shrouded in shadows, as if I’ve taken a third-person perspective atop my existence, an out of body narration. It’s unclear to me if I’m dreaming or if I’ve been in a loop for so long that it merely seems like a dream.

“The first time she hit me, a barrier collapsed, a large barrier which had been invisible and unspoken, but which kept my torment safer for it was at a purely emotional level. That changed when the boundaries were crushed. The safety wasn’t coming back. I remember that there was a feeling of shock that made my eyes widen and my blood run cold. It’s not as if she was an affectionate woman before, but the idea that the one who had chosen to give me life wanted to hurt me struggled to take shape in my young brain. Things stopped making sense. There was nowhere else to go; the outside was hostile, the inside desolate. Outside of my home, they’d abuse me because of the way I looked. And then at home, I’d have my teeth broken for simply existing and taking up space. As one would expect, my mind went from sadness to anger and then to pure bitterhatred for everything that walked. But it wasn’t obvious at first. It was a monster of my own, slowly birthing itself in the innermost depths of my vessel. When it became too large to ignore, it had already fused itself with me. We were conjoined. It was then that I realized the universal human experience of soul-rot. We begin life in a state of purity, but then, at some point in the relentless forward momentum of time, an accursed hand lays itself upon our heart. The decomposition begins. It just so happened that the hand laid upon my face by my own mother would one day result in me laying my hand upon the entirety of all life. In my trauma logic, it is all who ever was and all who ever will be who must pay for my loss of innocence. And by their sacrifice, no innocence shall be lost again.”

A vast mechanized system. Intricacies span the bounds like a network of veins. Both organic flesh and synthetic steel coexist here, licking each others wounds and imperfections like hounds. Veils of sonorous waves enmesh the embryo of the innermost corridors of the processor. Distorted clanks, steam hisses, expanding circuitry squealing.

The somagenics were a line representing my own unfluctuating hope.

With each vessel made anew, with the screeches of pain following the transformation of metal to flesh, glimpses of the inevitable and untimely decay of my children invaded me, shattered my own bones.