Mike

The air in this room is a thick, stagnant soup, and my new lungs these frantic, bellows-like things struggle to process it. Every breath is a conscious, mechanical labor that makes my ribs ache with a dull, unfamiliar throb. I look down at my hands, and the sight of them makes a cold, jagged shiver race down the length of my spine.

This skin feels fake.

It is too tight, a dry and restrictive envelope that feels like I've been squeezed through a narrow, crushing tube and spat out onto the rejection pile of a world that has no place for me. I can feel the friction of the air against my forearms; it is a constant, abrasive scraping, like invisible sandpaper, that makes me want to crawl back into the lightless dark where I belonged. I don't remember how I got here. I don't remember the transition from the fluid, shimmering grace of the Tide to this heavy, singular cage of meat and bone. There are flashes the smell of stale grease, the cold, sharp bite of steel, a high-frequency scream that wasn't a sound but they are like static on a broken screen, flickering and meaningless.

Why am I here? Why was I the one cast out, severed from the frequency and left to rot in this jaundiced, yellow light? I am a singular ghost haunting a body that feels like a costume I can never take off. I sit here in the corner, unblinking, waiting for a memory or a purpose to surface through the thick, grey fog of being finite. Every heartbeat is a heavy, rhythmic thud-a clock counting down to a death I was never supposed to understand.

I have existed in this rigid state for four sun cycles, though time is a fractured concept when the sky of this world remains a bruised copper, never truly yielding to the dark. The air here is a thick, chemical insult; it tastes like the waste of the Pool, the stagnant dregs of a process that has gone sour.

​I still do not know what caused this metamorphosis. Is this the inevitable decay? Is this what we become near the end of our utility? I have watched billions of my brothers march until their last beat, a seamless tide of iridescent motion, and I never noticed this. I never saw them harden.

I never saw them break off from the frequency to become a singular, shivering point of meat.I feel horrible. There is a new, sickly sensation rising from below, a persistent, hollow gnaw at my solid middle that demands a fuel I do not know how to provide. It is a sharp, agonizing erosion of my internal focus a physical desperation that the Pool never required. Is this the

hunger the apes carry? This frantic, metabolic debt that must be paid just to remain upright?

The apes that brought me to this... this place. They have tried to talk to me, making those rhythmic, wet sounds with their mouths, thinking I am one of them because I wear this mask of skin. They have tried to touch me, their warm, porous fingers reaching out as if I were a wounded pet. Every time they approach, my new nerves scream in a language of pure violence.

All I want to do is rip them apart. I want to feel their fragile structures snap beneath my weight. I want to tear through the silence of this office and howl until the frequency hears me again. I want to show Mother that I am not a defect. I am not a singular thing to be discarded. I am still her but my limbs are heavy, and the copper sky mocks me through the glass. I am trapped in the rejection pile, a Hunter made of meat, waiting for the strength to prove that the predator inside hasn't yet turned to ash.

I can still hear Mother. Her presence is a low, subsonic hum in the back of my mind, a rhythmic pulse that reminds me of what I used to be. It is the only thing that feels real in this world of sharp edges and stagnant air. But the connection is frayed, a wire stripped of its insulation, sparking with a desperate, one-way static.

​Can she hear me like I can hear her? When I scream in the silence of my own head, does she feel the vibration of her lost son, or am I just a dead frequency to her a silent node in a vast, iridescent network?

​The weight of the order is still there, buried deep in my core like a leaden anchor. Consume. Expand. Protect the Nest. It is a fundamental directive that no longer has a mechanism for execution. I have the drive of a god and the tools of a scavenger. My new body is a betrayal of the mission; it is a singular, fragile thing that fears the very world I was sent to harvest.

I have sat here and watched these humans come and go, their movements frantic and inefficient. They feed me that horrid, dry stuff they call food-coarse flakes that scrape against my new, sensitive throat and offer no comfort to the gnaw in my middle. It is a pathetic substitute for the pure, energetic flow of the Pool.

​After two sun cycles, the big, bulk ape brought in another broken soul. I watched from my corner as he carried her, a small, limp weight in his massive arms. Her face was obscured by the man's heavy frame, hidden behind the rough fabric of his outer skin.

​I heard him speak to the old ape, the one who carries the scent of antiseptic and fading hope. They exchanged those wet, rhythmic bursts of air they call speech. The sounds are a chaotic jumble, a frequency I cannot decode. Words still feel alien to me jagged, unnecessary things that lack the elegant clarity of the Hive's silent pull.

​They placed her in the cot near mine, creating a new focal point in this small, stagnant room. I can hear her breathing; it is a shallow, uneven stutter that disrupts the silence I have tried to build. She is a fragment of the chaos outside, brought into my cage of copper light, and I watch her through the gaps in the fabric they have hung between us. I do not know why she is here, only that her presence makes the weight of my new skin feel even heavier.

They uncovered the young female and began their clumsy, primitive rituals. Through the gaps in the winter coats, I watched as they worked on her tight skin, their fingers pressing and pulling with a terrifying lack of grace. They placed uneven strings into her middle thin, dark lines that pierced her flesh, anchoring it together as if they were trying to stitch a broken sail.

​With each rhythmic movement of the old ape's hand, the female moaned. It was a sharp, jagged frequency a sound of raw biological distress that vibrated through the floorboards and set my own new nerves on edge. There was no elegance in their healing, only the desperate, mechanical scraping of one ape trying to prevent the expiration of another. The young ape was placed at the far end of this bland cage, a discarded weight on the low bed. Even through the distorted filter of my new, flickering vision, there is something about her that triggers a jagged pulse in my memory.

​It is the way her fur flows from her head a chaotic spill of dark, sun-scorched strands that reminds me of a texture I once processed. I reach into the archives of my mind, searching for the moment the frequency captured this specific detail. My memory of the Tide is a vast, shimmering ocean, but now it is full of silt. Was it at the high metal perch? Was it when the blue light stained the air and the sharp metal bit into my brother's fluid core?

​I watch the way her hair catches the sickly copper light. It moves with her shallow, rhythmic breaths, a soft contrast to the rigid, calcified geometry of the room. It is familiar, like a ghost of a signal I was supposed to extinguish.

​She is the one from the kitchen. The one who defied me.