The others looked shell shocked. Luther projectile vomited on the floor. Puke stained his beard, even after he tried to wipe it off.

  “Come on,” Lululu spoke softly, “let’s get out of here.”

  She helped Luther to his feet, but struggled momentarily. Yuna, too, lended a hand… but maybe “lending” a “hand” was a bad way to phrase that. Anya, too, felt sick, but sick with hunger that had not gone away. Lululu and Yuna transferred Luther to Yuna and Peter’s shoulders as Lululu began casting levitation on the pillar of light in between them.

  They exited the room and Luther began walking on his own. The handlings were thick like a carpet, but parted for the light sword, making a buffer some five by five feet around. As they proceeded deeper into the base a necrite appeared in front of them. It did not seek Anya’s flesh nor could it pierce the divine light of the heavenly sword. It merely stood there, bleeding. The skinless face smiled through white teeth, not for happiness but for lack of skin to cover them. Its hands had been severed at the wrist and a tide of blood flowed out, dripping, slowly dripping, always dripping, dripping past the point the body should have contained nothing but air. Blood flowing from within despite lacking it.

  “What will we find there, Peter?” Chris dared ask. His voice sounded like bees from afar. Peter didn’t answer him.

  “Madness!” Yuna exclaimed.

  “Yes, we will find madness.” Lululu affirmed.

  “And what is this so-called “madness?”” Chris asked, voice still distant and swarming.

  “You’ll see when we get there.” She said.

  “Do you even know?” Yuna asked.

  “I don’t, but I have a good idea of what we’re about to find.”

  “Tell me!” Yuna exclaimed. Lululu did not respond.

  Blood began to pool beneath Anya’s feet as she stood some feet outside the barrier of the sword’s protection. It was only a millimeter, but the whole floor— already meat— was now covered in a thin film of blood. It did not stain Anya’s white booted foot.

  “You don’t want to know,” Luther began, “Oh the horror. Oh the exquisite and excruciating horror!”

  He burst out laughing.

  “It’ll be something like “We’re already dead and in hell. This is a punishment God has sent from on high as judgement for our sin in killing our neighbors.” forgetting that we never even saw the front line out here in the middle of nowhere.” He was not serious in tone.

  “Spooky.” Yuna said.

  “...Anya, what happened in the last loop?” Chris buzzed an inch from Anya’s ear. She jumped in fright, as did Yuna and Luther. Peter and Lululu Lululululu did not react.

  “The sun started bleeding and a pair of thirteen-fingered hands tore out, pulling a body bigger than the star into the sky.”

  “It sounds like a bad joke.” Luther interjected.

  “It is.” Anya agreed. “But I’m not done.”

  “Please by all means, continue.” He musically intoned.

  “It recited a long rant about how it wanted to kill us for stealing its organs or something. It said it would turn us all into statues as punishment for our hubris in thinking we could kill it.”

  Luther laughed long and deeply.

  “The sun is accusing us of stealing its organs? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? We took a scalpel and extracted the heart of a star? With our little baby-knife?” He was going mad just like Jessica had. Who could blame him?

  “Luther you’ve gotta hold it together man.” Yuna said. “We’re not even halfway to the madness room yet and you’re a good eighty or ninety percent of the way there.”

  “Well what else am I supposed to do? Be all somber about the fact the *sun* is threatening us? In a form bigger than a star? In a time loop where we’ll come back every time it kills us?”

  “Oh yeah,” Anya began, “I forgot to mention, the big avatar thing was made of eyeless tongueless bodies.”

  “How the fuck did you even see that Anya?” Luther objected. “You saw that this thing bigger than the sun is composed of tiny little people, and that these tiny little people don’t have tongues?”

  “Yes Luther.”

  “Were you on drugs?”

  “No Luther.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Luther, she’s stronger than I am.” Lululu objected. “She has the full power of the emperor’s mandate and whatever other augmentation is turning her into… that.” She gestured at Anya.

  “Besides, she also fired Pleroma, which granted her a direct connection to the heart of the star.”

  “What exactly did that do?” Anya asked.

  “Peter told you already, didn’t he? It chained the katechon. It tore open the eyes of the star that was always there. It awakened something that was already awake.”

  “Lulu, please, speak standard.” Anya said.

  “Just… see for yourself. It’s hard to explain. You’ll understand eventually.”

  “No!” Luther objected, “You keep saying that. Just fucking tell us. We’re being threatened with death by the sun. By the fucking sun! I don’t think you understand how terrifying that is. How aren’t you shaking with fear? How are you still standing?”

  “Luther,” Anya said, “Calm down.”

  “Luther,” Lululu said, “even if I told you it wouldn’t make any sense. You’d have to get a crash course in archontic philosophy to even broach the first 1000th of a percent of the operational mechanism.”

  “Oh?” He replied, “Is that why you were sent here? To do this? To kill us all a thousand times? To explore how many times a body can die before something breaks?”

  “No Luther, the answer is three.” Peter said, speaking for the first time in a while, silent perhaps because of his bleeding shoulder.

  “Fucking Peter man…” Luther mumbled, trailing off.

  “No, I will explain since you want to know so much.” Peter said. “First the body dies, then the spirit, then the brain. All hope is lost and the subject ceases to think rationally.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  “And how did you come to this determination Peter?” Lulu asked in a wry voice.

  “By observing Luther of course!” He said, letting out a chuckle but gripping his shoulder tighter.

  “Peter, you're an asshole.” Yuna said.

  “Better to think about me than this.”

  The hands grew larger and the necrites grew more numerous. The bubble pushed forward, parting them like a sea. The blood beneath their feet grew deeper, drowning Anya’s foot to the ankle, though the inside of the bubble remained free of blood excessive to the footsteps on bare flesh (and the blood stuck to and absorbed by the outer layer of not-skin, of course).

  They came upon the doors. Two knives hung limply by near-broken chains, the rust caked on as though they had been here for a thousand years. As though they were unaffected by everything else, caked in dirt and dying. The already-dead amongst the dying watching panic from a position of perfect sameness.

  Peter stabbed the one and Anya stabbed the other. The metalic door opened.

  The bodies lay there, limply on the floor. They did not move. They did not dance or shake or play-pretend at life. The necrites did not enter, they did not distract.

  Inside the room were fourteen bodies.

  Their organs had been removed.

  The silver-metallic dog-tags held only first names:

  Dio,

  Alex,

  Alissa,

  Jessica,

  Yuna,

  Peter,

  Henry,

  Luther,

  Lulu,

  Chris,

  Will,

  Jesús,

  Melissa,

  Raethor.

  The bodies were old, their skin wrinkled and their flesh turgid, stiff. They were in good condition save for the long surgical scar that ran the length of every chest from upper sternum to lower abdomen. Every organ in the torso had been pulled out, as had their tongues, eyes, and brain. They were not stitched shut, but there was no blood on the white-marble tiled floor. The blood stopped at the doorstep, but that changed quickly when the footsteps of live boots tracked it in.

  “Peter…” Anya began, but stopped. He looked so thin there, so cold, so broken.

  “We’re still here, Anya.” The living body said. Anya looked between him and the corpse. Luther looked sick. Yuna looked sick. Chris’ face was hidden behind a spartan helmet. Lululululululu did not outwardly react.

  “Are you… alive?” She asked.

  “Yes Anya.” Anya was staring at the corpse. Its face was covered in short stubble, its fingernails outgrown, the hair disheveled.

  “You’re not a ghost, are you?”

  “No Anya.”

  “Then what is this?!” Luther finally shouted. “Why is my body dead on the floor!?”

  “Think, Luther.”

  “No Peter, tell me what the fuck is going on! My dead body is over there, I’d really like to know why!”

  “Is it even real?” Yuna asked.

  “Yes.” Peter answered. “You can taste it if you like.”

  “Peter!” Lululu chided in an excited voice. “The experiment succeeded?”

  “Yes Lulu.”

  “What experiment are you referring to?” Chris startled, voice buzzing in the inner ear.

  “The new man.” — realization settled in Anya’s chest with the force of a bomb.

  “You… you set out to create golem out of new flesh?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you used our bodies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s the new man?”

  There was no response. There didn’t need to be.

  “David?”

  “...”

  “Peter, what good is it to come here if you don’t answer my questions?!”

  “It’s either you or him.”

  Anya was shaking, either her or David was a false being, a construction, a life created from nothing with no value. No value? With no concrete history. But she had a concrete history. She had a life. How could that be a nothing? A lie? Her life? Everything she was and had ever known?

  She thought back to her youth in the fields of Ancora, starving and alone. Her parents had been absent, dead or abandoning her for some purpose or another. It was a common backstory for the orphans she met in the years after being picked up by the military-police. At first it had been peaceful there, peaceful and miserable. No one had bullied her, but no one had to when they were all starving. A punch to the gut was just as painful as any delivered elsewhere. Their little wooden shack had been a place of cold starvation and yet she remembered the little kindnesses before the tribulation, too.

  Sharing a half-loaf of bread with a small blonde-haired boy named Phil that had stolen it from town— this was before the days of mechanization, back when food was scarce— his stomach had rumbled when they finished but he smiled softly at her. She remembered the somber expression on his face then, and she’d thought he might cry. His face was beginning to sink in, but he smiled anyway and told her to stay strong.

  “The world needs people like you.”

  She’d thought he meant the brave and strong, but it had become clear he meant the weak and starving. The people he could protect in a war. It had been common to idealize the soldiers in that era, back when battle was done with swords and valor was won in single-combat. Even the wars were simpler, smaller. One strong man with a sword or two-handed cleaver could swing it around and keep a whole part of a line distant. One good cavalry charge could change the tide of a battle.

  But then the war came, looming on the horizon, and things began to change. They discovered how to harness the power of flesh and the farmers were replaced. At first the ones implanted with organs took to the fields and died in a few short years. Some of them still worked like that at present, and most farmers remain implanted or take an equivalent quantity of pills that grant death at a young age, but most of the outdoor grunt-work has since been replaced. They chopped off the arms of the recently-deceased and innervated them in a line of spinal-columns connected to a central body of hearts and brains.

  All the organs were replaced in time, and though the body of the combine ran thickly with blood it wasn’t really accurate to call it alive… or so they had said. She had never interacted with one. It was the mental image of the thing that stuck with her as it had been described: a bucket made of human arms attached with loose nerves to a literal backbone of welded spines all connected to a car filled with hearts and brains, too, wired together loosely. Most cars were of similar construction— a carriage of spines and femurs— but these required excess power for all the hands to collect the harvest and plant the seeds of whatever was being cultivated at the time. Sometimes, on the richer farms, they degloved the hands of one carriage and sharpened the finger-bones to make them into small scythes, then ran a second combine behind the first one to collect the reaped crop.

  It was horrifying to imagine, and they had been made of loose organs welded together with new flesh. It was said anyone who dared walk too close to the blades of a reaper-harvester would find themselves slashed, but it wasn’t like Anya knew why. Now she did. Now she understood the carriages had no tongues, only blades with which to speak. It was the same reason cars were prone to killing you if your hands were taken off the wheel.

  She remembered being there, in the days after the war broke out, in the city. They had abducted her from her first orphanage and put her to work in the forges where she remained until maturity. At first she delivered the organs in wicker bags lined in some expensive non volatile material or another, but as the war raged on and the linings decayed they eventually decided it wasn’t worth enclosing the organs inside. At first she had carried the bags and called them heavy, but caring just a single heart in your hand was a far heavier experience. Even dead, the heart was warm, soft, squishy, palpably wet, and oh so very heavy.

  As the war raged on they began moving women around, placing them in more laborious positions than simple scalping of the dead. Anya’s first job had been spontaneous. The “nurse,” as they were called, handed her a “scalpel” (really a large paring knife) and told her “get to work!”

  She’d grabbed Anya by the shoulders and dragged her over to a screaming man with a wood rod between his teeth. He hadn’t been dead but they’d called him a corpse. The nurse gripped Anya’s hand tightly and dragged the knife across his skin, carving a pretty red line from the lower neck down through the bottom of the torso. The nurse then told her again: “get to work!”, pointing at the next body.

  There were no more adults from that point. Anya had been ten years old on that day, but calling her “ten” was a gross mischaracterization. Calling her a child from that point on would be a lie. How many children could describe what the inside of a person looked like?

  The organs had been soft but she’d pulled them out with a firm hand, thinking of that boy— Phil— who had shared his bread with her, certainly fighting for her sake at that moment. In hindsight, Anya desperately hoped he hadn’t been a participant in combat. He would have been fourteen or so, old enough to maybe be handed a gun, but… if he had been there was no chance of survival. All the boys and men unlucky enough to experience those first days of the autorepeater… They were the ones who prompted the development of the necrosis bomb and of the current project. They were the reason the empire felt backed into a corner and the reason this base was here now.

  All these memories flooded Anya’s brain— they couldn’t be a lie.

  “David is the new man.” she said at last.