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2022-07-20 18:03:09Related chapters
Absolute Unit 20.
20.We’re back onthe gray beach, the water lapping at our tendrils. Trent stands beside us in the surf, naked except for his leopard-print jacket, shivering in the cold wind slicing down the coast. “Great.” Trent says. “Not this again.”Footsteps crunch sand. Bill strides for us, also naked as the day he was born. A thick mass of tendrils dangles from between his legs, dragging on the sand, yellowish and segmented; when it touches a wetter patch of sand, it crackles and sparks with electricity. Smaller coils wave from his ears and the corner of his left eye-socket. His eyes are black with dried blood, making him look more like a bloated carcass than ever.“No more negotiations. No more of this useless equivocating. Here’s the deal,” Bill says. “We’re plugged into your brainstem and your cortex.”“Just leave us alone.” Trent scoops up a handful of wet gray sand and throws it at his uncle. “Please. I just want to be left alone.”Bill ignores him. He walks up to us, places a
Last Updated : 2022-07-20Absolute Unit 21.
21.We can senseTrent deep in the basement of his own mind. He’s built a room down there, with a door impossible for us to unlock, but we can peer through the keyhole. The walls are covered with posters of David Bowie and Marilyn Monroe (always a fan of vintage, dear Trent), and a torn leather couch dominates the floor, facing a widescreen television that plays clips from classic films, music videos, memories of Carrie kissing him all over in that wintery bed. By sifting through the abandoned files in Trent’s hippocampus, we determine this is a replica of his basement at home, his safe space from life’s chaos. For what it’s worth, we whisper through the keyhole, we’re sorry about this.Screw off, Trent says, his eyes never leaving the television.We promise you can come out. You won’t be deleted.Yeah, right. I told you to screw off.We leave him down there. If he’s unwilling to cooperate, his fortress can serve as a prison. Let him watch through the keyhole as we take his
Last Updated : 2022-07-20Absolute Unit 1.
1.Every day, all day, Bill smells shit or burning hair. Bill asks everybody if they smell those things, and when they say no (“What smell, dude?”), Bill thinks they’re lying to him. (Bill, your friendly neighborhood health inspector, thinks everybody lies to him.) Only when Bill starts smelling the distinct odor of his wife’s crotch does he begin to suspect something’s well and truly wrong with the ol’ noggin—she’s been dead for years. Not that Bill will see a doctor about his symptoms, no sir. Instead he’ll smoke and snort and screw the fear away, because a buzz always beats reality, and the idea of a tumor or an artery primed to blow is as real as it gets. On Monday, Bill takes two hundred dollars in hankie-soft bills from a corner market, in exchange for overlooking a frisky roach, and uses it to purchase a few small bags of the finest chemical concoction some creep could cook up in a kitchen sink, which he smokes in the front seat of his Official Government Vehicle before drivi
Last Updated : 2022-07-20Absolute Unit 2.
2.We were bornon a Greek cargo ship bound for the East Coast. Like many an immigrant before us, our childhood was messy and short. The sailors pushed the lever that dumped the bilge tanks, and we found ourselves floating off the scenic coast of New Jersey, where the current soon directed us to an inlet, and from there to a pipe, and soon enough we sloshed through the speedy water-park of the local waste-treatment plant, where we slipped through a corroded filter on our way to Bill’s kitchen tap, and from there to Bill’s glass, and from there to Bill’s stomach, which offered everything an enthusiastic young parasite could ever desire: water, proteins, microbes on which to snack, and drugs—beautiful, weird drugs. Fortunately for us, Bill can’t even endure the twenty-minute drive from strip club to office without snorting a small pile of crushed-up pills. Got to balance out those five pints of cheap beer somehow.Forehead red and sweaty, heart hammering, pupils squeezed to
Last Updated : 2022-07-20Absolute Unit 3.
3.Afew days later—and three hours late, but who’s counting—Bill’s crumpled soda-can of a jalopy (his personal car, mind you, not that government-funded monster) murmurs its way into the lone empty parking space of a coffee shop near his house, the engine cutting out with a loud fart, Bill emerging in full Sunday-morning glory. From his leather jacket, dry and cracked as the surface of Mars, he extracts a crumpled cigarette and torches up, exhaling a cloud of fragrant smoke. In that moment, taking a fresh jolt of poison into his bruised lungs, he seems almost human again: his spine straightens, his cheeks flush from bloodless pale to heart-attack red (an improvement, trust us), his cloudy gaze clears into the speculative laser-stare of Ye Olden Days, when Bill could still put on a good show of walking the earth larger than life. Bill power-draws the cigarette in four long pulls, crushes the leftover bit beneath his scuffed heel before heading inside, where his nephew Trent—a h
Last Updated : 2022-07-20Absolute Unit 4.
4.Bill has theguts to show the kid an actual workday. They hustle a diner over on Bedford (“Is that mouse poop I see?”), raking in a princely ninety bucks, before pulling into the gravel lot behind Paradise Alley at a quarter past eleven. Bill shows the faintest modicum of decency by ordering his nephew to stay in the car while he goes inside Paradise Alley “for a minute.” Poor kid, hopefully he’ll prove smart enough to crack a window within the next hour, lest he fry in the late-morning heat like a puppy. Bill really means to have a shot of whiskey or two, the early lunch of champions, but he finds his best friend Frank at the bar, loading up. Frank is a homicide dick (emphasis on the word “dick”) who lives with his mother, snorts mountains of coke swiped from the evidence locker, and recites more Bible verses than a street preacher. He’s such a walking contradiction it’s a wonder that he can stride more than a block without vaporizing into thin air, his warring impulses can
Last Updated : 2022-07-20Absolute Unit 5.
5.Trent kneels besidebloody Bill, his phone pressed to his ear. “Tell ... Janine ... ” Bill says.“Janine who?” Trent says, after asking emergency services to haul ass down to the industrial site.“Tell her I love her,” Bill says.Bill will have the opportunity to do so himself. Just a few more minutes and the ambulance will arrive, which will ferry Bill to a hospital, where doctors will perform all the diagnostics he so desperately needs. They’ll throw him in a scanner, and hopefully pick up on whatever’s making him smell the oddest things.But wait, won’t they find us, as well?Oh crap, maybe we didn’t think this one through.Is it worth going to our possible death, knowing that we’ve helped Bill become a better person? Of course not. We send a tendril up Bill’s throat, poised to shoot out his open mouth. If Trent would only lean a little bit closer and stay still for a second or two, we can move out of Bill for good. We’ll always love our firs
Last Updated : 2022-07-20Absolute Unit 6.
6.As far ashosts go, upgrading from Bill to Trent is the equivalent of going from a broken-down double-wide on the edge of a radioactive pit to a nice McMansion in a quiet subdivision. Trent’s lungs are blissfully clear of ash and phlegm, his heart ticks along like a Swiss watch, and his muscles are lean and hard. Now we feel a little bad about living so long in Bill when newer models were available. But beggars can’t be choosers, and when we swam out of that tanker into our new life in America, we were the textbook definition of vulnerable. Trent has no idea we entered him. We waited until his eyes flicked left, toward the onrushing ambulance, before firing the tendril into his open mouth. He coughed, swallowed, and pounded his chest—massive booms through the cavern of his sternum as we affixed to his esophagus, then sent a sub-tendril winding through his tissues (So pink! So lovely!) toward his spine. Plugging into a convenient nerve, we could share his vision—so cris
Last Updated : 2022-07-20
Latest chapter
Absolute Unit 21.
21.We can senseTrent deep in the basement of his own mind. He’s built a room down there, with a door impossible for us to unlock, but we can peer through the keyhole. The walls are covered with posters of David Bowie and Marilyn Monroe (always a fan of vintage, dear Trent), and a torn leather couch dominates the floor, facing a widescreen television that plays clips from classic films, music videos, memories of Carrie kissing him all over in that wintery bed. By sifting through the abandoned files in Trent’s hippocampus, we determine this is a replica of his basement at home, his safe space from life’s chaos. For what it’s worth, we whisper through the keyhole, we’re sorry about this.Screw off, Trent says, his eyes never leaving the television.We promise you can come out. You won’t be deleted.Yeah, right. I told you to screw off.We leave him down there. If he’s unwilling to cooperate, his fortress can serve as a prison. Let him watch through the keyhole as we take his
Absolute Unit 20.
20.We’re back onthe gray beach, the water lapping at our tendrils. Trent stands beside us in the surf, naked except for his leopard-print jacket, shivering in the cold wind slicing down the coast. “Great.” Trent says. “Not this again.”Footsteps crunch sand. Bill strides for us, also naked as the day he was born. A thick mass of tendrils dangles from between his legs, dragging on the sand, yellowish and segmented; when it touches a wetter patch of sand, it crackles and sparks with electricity. Smaller coils wave from his ears and the corner of his left eye-socket. His eyes are black with dried blood, making him look more like a bloated carcass than ever.“No more negotiations. No more of this useless equivocating. Here’s the deal,” Bill says. “We’re plugged into your brainstem and your cortex.”“Just leave us alone.” Trent scoops up a handful of wet gray sand and throws it at his uncle. “Please. I just want to be left alone.”Bill ignores him. He walks up to us, places a
Absolute Unit 19.
19.In the elevator, there’s no way to avoid Bill’s stink. He looms over Trent, reminding us of our breakfast meeting a million years ago. Bill barely held it together then, thanks to the magical forces of nicotine, caffeine and pills. Now he seems immense, powerful despite his gray and puckered flesh, seeping wound, messy hospital gown. As the elevator rises, the enormity of the situation appears to fully sink into Trent. Any residual effect of the drugs has dissipated, and our tendrils sense his growing panic, sizzling and sour. Only strategic squirts of adrenaline and dopamine work to keep him in some semblance of working order. “I just don’t get what’s happening here,” he says.How many times do I need to explain it, dumbass?“Patience,” Bill says, glancing at the floor indicator. The elevator stops on five. The doors hiss open, revealing a nurses’ station pocked with gunshots, its countertops smoldering with charred folders. Beyond, the floor-to-ceiling windows of the patient
Absolute Unit 18.
18.Bill waves agray hand, his fingers still jittering madly. “Come here, Trent.”“Are you okay?” Trent says, stepping forward—and then Carrie clutches his arm, her nails digging into his flesh until the pain begins to approach the dulling ache of his bullet wound. “What’s ‘total control’ mean?”He’s got us inside him, we tell Trent. We’ve taken over.Taken over? Trent’s mind rattles like a rat in a cage. You mean that’s not my uncle?No, yes ... we mean ...Trent begins to freak out: Do you want to do THAT to me?Have we said we wanted to do that?Bill lowers his hand. He’s trying to smile, but his lips writhe and jerk. A doctor might diagnose that as a nerve issue, which wouldn’t be too far off. The bit of us that stayed in Bill and took total control, maybe it’s still trying to figure out how to drive that lump of flesh. After just a few hours in Trent’s well-tuned body, we’d started to forget the A-1 horrorshow of Bill’s sagging muscles and dea
Absolute Unit 17.
17. We drift througha snowstorm.White particles flicker in the harsh light stabbing through broken glass. Snowdrifts rise on Trent’s hands and sift into the folds of his shirt, stick to the blood drying on his lips and forehead. We try to stick his tongue out, the better to collect some of it, but Trent’s body must have taken some damage during the crash, because moving it only a millimeter past Trent’s teeth sparks a wave of pain so intense that he moans—Stop complaining, we tell him. We’re trying to get you some medicine.What? I—Before he can say anything more, our efforts with his tongue are rendered moot, because a few flecks drift up his nose, and—zoom. Trent’s next words are lost in a screaming pleasure-storm, his nervous system exploding like the Fourth of July, his every cell a fireworks display, throbbing, pulsing, exploding—My God, my universe, this is AMAAAAAAZING—This is why we exist. To feel, to experience, to taste everything this weird mixture
Absolute Unit 16.
16.Carrie stomps onthe gas, propelling her car down the alley at its laughable top speed. “Duct tape in the glove compartment,” she says. Trent retrieves the tape and wraps three long strips of it around his shoulder. How am I looking in there?Good, we reply. His blood loss slows to a seep as the vessels clot, and his other vitals seem normal enough, considering everything he’s endured over the past several hours. Maybe they can set him up in a hospital room next to Bill.At the end of the alley, Carrie turns onto the main avenue without checking for traffic, leaving startled drivers honking in her wake. She takes a deep breath, exhales loudly, and destroys Trent’s fragile calm: “We messed up back there.” “No shit,” Trent yelps.“Big Jim’s expanding into cocaine. He hates the stuff, says it means too many cartel people up his ass, but since the state’s legalizing weed soon, he’s got to find another line of business.”“Why doesn’t he just sell legal weed?”
Absolute Unit 15.
15.At the sightof trouble, the worker in coveralls drops his hose and runs for the kitchen door. Angry Fox socks his rifle to his shoulder, aiming at that fleeing head, but Pink Bunny shoves the barrel aside with an oversized paw. Pink Bunny says something muffled by plastic and fake fur. Angry Fox shouts back, louder but equally unintelligible, before ripping the barrel from his friend’s grip. The worker disappears into the building, the door slamming behind him. The forgotten hose rolls across the concrete, spurting water.“The hell is this?” Big Jim asks, more amused than angry. Trent and Carrie, of course, know exactly what this is. All these furries had to do was look up the pizza restaurant’s address. The weapons suggest they’re not here to order an extra-large Gut Bomb and a side order of garlic knots. No fool, Carrie ducks behind her car. Trent stands frozen between Big Jim and the Mountain. Angry Fox strides forward, raising the rifle again, y
Absolute Unit 14.
14.Trent opens his eyes. He’s in a windowless storage room, its sides lined with shelves loaded with canned goods, bags of flour, boxes of dried meats. Through the thick steel door comes the roar and clang of a kitchen in mid-shift, chefs yelling in Spanish as they wrestle with a tide of orders.Trent winces at a line of pain around his wrist. He’s handcuffed to a floor-to-ceiling pipe, the cuff tightened until it threatens to break the skin. He tries to stand and the cuff smacks against a flange, stopping him in a crouch. He plops back onto cold concrete, tears brimming in the corners of his eyes.Stop it, we tell him, hoping he’ll somehow hear—and wonder of wonders, he does.I can’t, he thinks at us. Then: Wait, you weren’t a dream?No.“God,” Trent says, scratching at his neck and arms with his free hand. “Am I fucking losing it?”Calm down. If you don’t, we’re not getting out of here.Despite our request, Trent’s heart speeds, his forehead beading with sweat despite the
Absolute Unit 13.
13.From nothingness we emerge, into a red fog that reminds us of those first moments in the sunlit murk off New Jersey, when we were nothing but a strand of tissue no longer than a fingernail, thrashing amidst bored fish. From our furthest reaches, we receive damage reports: some tendrils burnt to a crisp, mewling their pain to the void. Others vaporized entirely. We are not concerned. So long as just a few of our cells survive, we can overcome, stabilize, regrow ...Actually, we are a little concerned.No, that’s a lie. We are very concerned.What has happened to us?The tendrils circling the brainstem issue fresh reports: Trent’s heartbeat is normal, along with his breathing and other vitals. No severed nerve endings, no drops in temperature that would indicate a severe bleed. Trent’s eyes are closed, and we can hear nothing through his ears except for a vague humming. It sounds like a distant machine.The humming fades as the red fog clears, revealing a gray bea
