I have another log entry for you from my alter ego, Wifelier Docht, over at The Collective SF’s blog. This latest installment is a bit grim and may just qualify as sci-fi-horror. You be the judge of that:

Skin-Deep

Will I ever escape? Do I dare think this? How many times over the 300 years have my thoughts drifted to fleeing this hell…

I fear I will forever be tethered to this ageless thing. I am doomed to scribe history until the machine has sucked me dry and disposes of me.

No…not disposes of. Recycle. I chronicle history with a bio-quill on parchment. Parchment made of skin taken from dead scribes.

The God-Machine recycles everything. I’ve seen what happens to the bodies when they die, when even the Embrosis can’t force the heart muscle to move and the brain at last withers and die.

Metallic tentacles snake from within the living walls and encircle the lifeless scribe, unplugging him, lifting him gently from his workstation. The walls open up and the tentacles disappear through the dark crevice, carrying the dead scribe with them, and melt together again as if it never opened.

At the beginning, so many years ago, shortly after I had been absorbed into the machine but before I became tethered, I found myself in a chamber not unlike a slaughter pit. Dead bodies of men and women were stacked on top of one another in piles. More hung from chains in dozens of rows. The foul stench of decay overpowered my senses and I fell to my knees and became sick on the metal floor. No doubt adding more fetor to the many other smells competing for dominance in that hellish place.

At the centre of the chamber, two creatures I did not recognise, not even from lore or fables or fantasy tales I grew up with, were butchering the body of a man, flaying skin from flesh like you would a deer or a rabbit…

Please read the rest of the entry over on The Collective SF’s blog. Go on, it’ll be fun and this being Halloween and all, why not?

Woelf