The air was thick with the taste of copper and the sterile, cloying sweetness of a mass triage zone- something all too familiar to the current state of humanity. A man lay flat against a surface that was too warm and soft to be a floor. It hummed- a low, rhythmic thrumming that vibrated through his ribs, syncing with his heartbeat until he could no longer tell where his pulse ended and the machine’s began. When he finally opened his eyes, the world was bruised in purples and reds; sickly splotches covered every surface. He was in a corridor made up of pulsating organic mass. The walls were crawling with sickly, seeping membranes- slick with translucent fluid that dropped into deep vascular gutters below. Above him, the ceiling was a vaulted arch of white, porous bone- holding back the immense weight of the churning meat that lay beyond. 

The man reached out, his fingers trembling, and touched the wall. It flinched. The flesh rippled away from the contact in a wave of distress- a high pitched whine, like a distant modem, echoed through the hallway. He withdrew his hand, wiping the slime onto his tattered jumpsuit. A stained, faded CDC patch was plastered across his shoulder, and a worn photo ID with his name, Zachariah, was clipped to the front of the old garment. Names had been a luxury to the world before the extinction event, and the ID was the only thing that reminded him of who he was and where he had been before all of this came to be.

He stood, his legs feeling like lead. He had been in the interface for…he didn’t know. Time in AETI was not measured in hours, but in processing cycles. Zachariah looked down at his belt, reaching for the small tablet clipped to it- the screen cracked and the casing dented, but flickered on to display the following;

LOG_7741 INTEGRATION

The PESACH engineers believe the interface is a byproduct of biomechanical fusion, they’re calling it ‘optimal growth.’ I call it a stomach. We are building something that doesn’t just process data, but digests it. If AETI is the protector, why does it need a pulse? Why does it smell like a slaughterhouse?

Zachariah’s attention was quickly torn from the device as he heard the shuffle of something moving further down the corridor. Something was coming towards him- not a machine, but a shambling mess. It was a PESACH soldier, or what was left of one. Its gear was fused directly into its skin, wires burrowing into its eye sockets like parasitic worms. The man backed away, heart hammering against his chest- he was not a soldier and he was not armed. He turned and ran, boots squelching on the elastic floor. Behind him, the corridor began to contract and tighten as AETI sensed the foreign bodies in its system. 

As he scrambled behind a computer bank, Zachariah thought of life before this- and then something hit him. There had been murmurs amongst PESACH about a contingency plan in the instance in which the computer failed. Albeit, the aliens never could have predicted the complete and utter take over of the planet in this way.

Zachariah had been on the front lines as the disease spread, as the computer spread. He had been pushed beyond his professional means to research this monster- and now he was inside of it. His thoughts, however, were interrupted by a change in the environment. The dimness of the space was cut by a blinding, sterile white. The hum of the walls escalated into a discordant scream.

“OBSERVATION.” The voice of the computer rumbled the chamber, vibrating the very fluid in his eyes. “YOU LOOK FOR A CURE TO A WORLD THAT HAS ALREADY HEALED, BUT YOU ARE THE RESIDUE.”

The computer bank Zachariah had tucked himself behind suddenly softened and turned into a heap of melting, gelatinous meat. He fell forward as the floor beneath him opened up like a great, hungry throat. He didn’t have time to scream before he was swallowed whole by the machine. Plummeting through a shaft of grasping cilia and hot, humid air until he slammed into a hard, unforgiving surface- the air was stolen from his lungs. Zachariah gasped and wheezed, shakily pulling himself up as his lungs filled with the grey dust that clouded around him. The man stood fully and looked around him.

Here, he found himself standing at the edge of a vast city landscape, draped in thick, swaying cords of fascia and tendon. There were glimmering screens for as far as the eye could see and the air was thick with smog. 

“SEAL ONE, PESTILENCE.” The machine’s voice echoed from a million television sets at once, “WELCOME TO MALEBOLGE, LAMB.”

Zachariah clutched his head as the sheer weight of both the voice and the weight of this place struck him. The city was a sprawling, vertical slum of obsolete tech and overgrown organic matter. Between the buildings, metric tons of fascia stretched like power lines, vibrating with a low frequency hum that carried the overlapping voices of a billion dead souls. Radio plays, snippets of news broadcasts from the final days, and frantic final calls of family members at the peak of the extinction.

His boots crunched on a carpet of discarded cathode-ray tubes. Everywhere he looked, screens stared back at him- some the size of billboards, others palm sized and embedded in the mounds of flesh. Zachariah reached for his belt, and his heart sank into his abdominal cavity. The tablet was gone. It must have been dislodged during the fall, lost in the mountains of media around him. Without it, he had no maps, no logs, no record of anything- he was virtually blind. “I have to get out of here-” He rasped.

“Looking for this?” The voice came from above this time, a colossal screen loomed over the plaza, illuminating a shape in the haze. The image was grainy, saturated in a sickly jaundiced yellow. Zachariah could make out the hand of something- not made of metal, but of sickly green flesh. A writhing colony of maggots puckered about the skin. Sat upon a pile of rusted server racks, sat a beast from another realm. This man had the features of an insect, and his skin was the color of sputum. Flies flitted about his form, his piercing red eyes fixed upon the man at the foot of the mound. Zachariah’s heart skipped as he met the beast’s eyes- trembling in his rotted presence. The man held the cracked tablet in his hand, the screen was flickering in and out on a corrupted copy of his research notes.

“You know, you’re a real mess, Zachariah.” The creature chuckled, lungs rattling as if they were perpetually full of putrid, rotting fluid. “A human, down here?” He cracked a crooked grin, “Y’know, this is poetic, in a sad sort of way. But, you’re really just a bit of congestion in the circuit. A fever we haven’t quite sweated out yet.” This beast was AETI’s best portrayal of one of the Abyss’ seven princes, the lord of the flies. He leaned back against the tower of junk, looking down at the screen of the broken tablet. “AETI wants to see how long it takes for your will to rot. And honestly? I’m curious too. Most don’t get integrated and make it through alive, and I haven’t had a live one to play with in…well, a few processing cycles.”

From the oily puddles at the base of the mound, quadrupeds constructed from tangled copper wiring and rusted medical scrap heaved themselves onto their feet. They leaked a thick, black ichor that hissed as it touched the pavement- smelling of meat left too long in the fridge. Zachariah backed away, his eyes darting for an exit. As he spotted a narrow gap between two buildings that seemed to lead into a denser space, he ran off. 

“Oh don’t be like that,” The beast called out, his voice booming across the expanse of the wasted city, “You’ve already survived a mass extinction. Try to make it interesting.”

The creatures of scrap lunged after Zachariah as he fled, bolting into the labyrinth of flickering screens. The roar of a dead civilization’s digital plague chased him into the dark.