Black Skull 10
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66.08.23 04:20
From: The Board
To: You
Dear valued BLOOM employee,
Hey friends,
Imagine you’re a snail. Moving through the undergrowth. Twigs and leaves pass under your belly. The slime you exude is made up of glycoproteins, water, and mucopolysaccharides, meaning your guts don’t get ripped out by a thornbush.
Then one day, instead of following your normal route where it’s dark and warm and safe, you feel this inexplicable urge to climb one of the big green stalks in front of you. You’ve never done it before, would never normally even consider it.
But today you feel reckless, a certain je ne sais quoi. A tingling in your belly. And so, one ooze after the other, you’re up, up, and away, following the green arrow into the unknown golden pastures of sunlight – The Surface.
You’re excited, energised, a little afraid. But what you don’t know is you got a little parasite in your stomach that’s hijacked your nervous system and is controlling you like a puppeteer. Twitch go its fingers. Twitch go your muscles, firing up synapses, and making you move all the way up to the sun-drenched surface where the parasite’s victory awaits.
Because it just so happens that the belly of a bird is the perfect breeding ground for the lancet liver fluke.
Evolution. It’s a beautiful thing.
Yours sincerely,
The Board.
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66.08.23 23:12
From: You
To: The Board
Dear Masters,
Every interview gets weirder.
I showed up after sunup. I was back down on the pan of the steppes, in one of the old desolate coinmines. I’d heard about these places, whole cities abandoned overnight.
But as I drove down the boulevard ensconced between apartment blocks half a mile long, I saw laundry hanging outside windows, coils of smoke rising here and there – at least a few hundred people still lived here.
The arrow took me to a courtyard, boxed in on all sides by brutal apartments, all of whose faces were falling apart. Cracks ran through the concrete like black scars. Nearly all the windows were punched out, and as I stepped into the grass, there was the satisfying crunch of glass under my boots.
The atmosphere changed as I went from outside to in. It was so damp my breath fogged in the air in front of me and it felt cloying and close. I could hear water dripping everywhere. The walls were slick with green jelly that glistened.
I pulled an N95 over my face as the green arrow took me up floor by floor. Here and there whole chunks of steps were missing, and I had to jump over snaggly rebar. Vines traced the walls like a vast circulatory system.
I got to the door. Apartment 101. Just kidding. 672. Those numbers will be forever burned into my skull. The numbers on the door that was peeling away in strips so thick I could see through it.
A little wedge of a room with a fucked-up couch. Goddamn, I wish I’d turned back then and there. But no. All employees must do what the green arrow says. Or else… what… maybe those camps aren’t as bad as this fucked-up bullshit.
The old woman was rotting into the couch like a bag of old fruit. Skin hung off her in translucent sheets. Black fungus encircled her eyes like dead trees around a sinkhole and a hacking cough dredged up gunk from her silted-up channels and passageways.
Mould blinded her. Choked her. Her feet and hands dripped off her in gangrenous strips. A whole chunk of nose was missing. You could see tendons, muscles, bone – black and dead also.
If you’d heard her story, you wouldn’t have had to search so damn hard for your answers. Happiness levels? This chick never had a happy moment in her life. And now in her 80s, totally alone, rotting to death in a hellhole you created. One of the lost, the numberless who slipped through the cracks and now is just waiting to die.
Yours truly,
Employee 531.448
