The Machine of Flesh

Chapter Eight: The Consummation of the Flesh

ChapterEight: The Consummation of the Flesh

Time. It seems that throughout one's life there isn't quite enough time to live, a bitter irony. Darkness. The void. I was awake, but unconscious at the same time. All I could see, hear, taste, touch or smell, was nothing. Where was I? What was this place? Who was I?

Vision. I saw for the first time in my life, what it meant to ever see for the first time, after being immersed in a state of nothing. Heinrich. Schriever. The name seems familiar. Was that me? I think so. I blinked my eyes in this stasis, this eternal state of unconsciousness, and was born of the flesh. It started coming back to me. The moments of my life, who I was, what I thought, my memories, the senses that gave way to my being, but I wasn't in the real world.

Here I was, in the Realm of Flesh.

I looked downwards towards my body and saw my corpse, animated by the ethereal vitality of this place. Around me there were the corpses of the billions, if not trillions, of flesh bound souls waiting to reincarnate, but that were now split in the computronium divide between Reinheit and Freiheit. As long as I lived on the outside, Freiheit existed within me and it existed here too. I looked all around me and I saw the interlocking, receding and overriding waves of the corpses of souls as I stood on some elevated platform rising out of the neverending sea of bodies of now computronium. As far as the eyes could see in this Realm of Flesh, the waves of bodies, peaked and troughed, undulating between hypotonicity and hypertonicity, resonating at a certain periodicity, the waves reaching extreme depths and extreme heights.

Flesh and bodily fluids. A smell of fetor, of fungus, bacterial growth, of the displeasing aromas that bound us to the olfactory state of being. It was something I could get used to, but I wondered when I would escape. I wondered when I would be home again, with Hannah, with Max. I wondered if I would ever regain control of my life, if I was forever destined to be bound by the ties that bind. Sinew, tendons, ligaments.

The corpses and their fluids drained into some cavity below this world, deep underground into some place in a matter of minutes. All that was left was myself and the precipitous spire that I stood upon, craggy and eroded, reaching down to the underworld of the Realm of Flesh.

"WAKE THE FUCK UP HEINRICH!" A voice said, booming from all directions.

I looked towards the sky and found myself rapidly being pulled towards it, by an exponentially recursive acceleration, its rate of change accelerating itself, recursively, ad infinitum, until I had been uplifted into my own body in the real world, in the sixth floor underground chambers of the Elite-Korps. I was sitting upright, as I could feel myself bound to The Machine of Flesh, with my eyes closed. I opened them and there was Adolf Hitler, standing with Manfred Dunst by his side.

I looked around me as I tried to make sense of where I was, what had happened and the circumstances of the situation I was in. I looked around the room and familiarized myself with where I was and tried to connect the lapses of time in my life with what had happened. I looked in the immediate foreground first and focused on the dimly lit black polycarbonate tiling that consisted of the floor. Then towards the walls on my left, the same deeply coffered black polycarbonate tiling that extended from the floor and wrapped its way along the edge of the wall. I looked towards the line of windows where the memories of this place came back to me and tried to peer within the windows. From the foggy windows towards the ceiling of the sixth floor, I could faintly discern scientists observing me. Some had clipboards, others stood with arms folded and crossed, their faces indiscernible from such a far distance in this chair I was tied and bound to.

I looked towards Hitler and Dunst. They walked towards me and the pain of the embedded nanoscopic electrodes was becoming too much to bare. From the electrodes, surges of electrical energy pulsed through my brain, shocking me inducing seizures with a two second periodicity, lasting a second in pulse duration. I wouldn't have time to ask questions.