THUD

..



thud thud

no..

NO!!! I WILL NOT DIE TO THIS

NO! Absolutely fucking NOT, DAMN IT!! I AM THE DOMINATOR! I DO NOT DIE TO . . . .

no..

Ow.

Where the hell am I? I surveyed the area, and found .. no. Can't be. My island... no, this isn't real. Reality does not shift and turn in real life. There, the water and the land stay where they are, and the trees don't blur together like a strange version of an oil painting.

Then a thud next to us. Us?! US? What the hell?

It's Billy, I said and knew. It's Billy, and I'm here to help fight whatever it is that's been killing the experiments this happened to, Howie. My identical, naked figure appeared in a flash of lightning (damn mind, always going for the dramatic) about three feet away from Howard to my left. Wait.. that didn't make sense at all.. then we realized it. This is telepathy at its purest. Our consciousnesses aren't separate anymore, at least not for now.

And I'm here, too, Howard. Sarah. She flashed into existence to our left with a dark wave coming from behind her.

Paul. Paul.. Paul is here too, behind our dual forms, impossibly holding us both tightly from behind, anchoring himself, preventing the thuds from getting to him and taking him away from us.. so that's what it's doing. The tubing isn't just acting as a capacitor, it's connecting our minds. We probably really could make computers based on this.. an unexpected side effect, but maybe a good one. Maybe the one that can save our lives.

Good thing none of us will regenerate this out. The Anarch's form appeared, again stark naked, in front of me with a vacuum sound and an audible pop.

What is that??? THUD THUD THUD THUD

I can hear it, but what the hell is it? I heard it when I arrived.. an elephant? What the.. As we - I - thought of a large animal, immediately a huge whale, baleen wide open in an obscene way, came roaring out of the land-water, facing us, coming to eat.. then I- my form - backhanded it somehow, an enormous blade slicing it in two. Great gobs of blood flowed everywhere.

That wasn't it. The thudding is something else. But these... these are dream monsters...

"NO!!!!!", Sarah screamed, and I knew what was coming to get me, I knew the fear all along. Enforcers, and they're coming to put them in and they're coming in groups of five and they've got the soundproof thing and they're going to give me over to him and they are me and they're going to .. no, NOT THAT, NOT AGAIN!! I grew that back, thanks to Howie!

Am I younger again.. no, I'm bigger than that! These guys are ten feet tall!!

The melee lasted fifteen seconds. Super Enforcers with red eyes lunged out of the darkness, and the five of us summoned our power and cut them down like grass. There are no physical rules here. They just died, their heads exploding with a thought. Nothing can hurt us .. no.. except..
thud

thud

NO! What the hell is that and why does it keep interrupting?! Even our worst fears.. we know this isn't real and we know we're connected, so it's got to be something else.. then I saw the gateway to it.

The metal house, twisted and bent, grinning like an open mouth with its hungry jaws, come in Billy, you'll never come out, you'll be the servant forever and you'll never, ever get to say goodbye, because you're immortal and everything you've never wanted to happen to you will just come back again because of the control, you'll never have anything yours again... not even

your soul

So that's what it wants. Well, come on fucker. I've got a soul for ya, the sole of my steel-toed boot right in your face.

But it wasn't going to come on. I had to come to it.

.. no.. here's an incarnation, a fear for ya, the .. no.. the hell? What the hell is that hissing, and where did the thuds go?

Damn it Anarch, ya didn't bring Fido! The other dogs sure, leave em or give em away, they'll be dead in five years or so, the pups were never implanted, but Fido... the Anarch winked out of existence. My god, he has guts, why the hell did he do it, he didn't have to. It'll kill him if he's alone!!! But he was already gone.

Speaking of alone..

No!!! Where are we? We weren't .. no, I'm not alone here, NO SEPARATION!! If we die, we do it as one, in the comfort of my brother's, my girlfriend's, and my best friend's arms!!

The snake, in the darkness.

No arms or legs, fucker, and you want to deal with ME? Paul- it was him initiating it, but we all felt it - summoned up some other kind of power, a power obvious, a power that I should be using more in this dream. The power of creativity, and of linking parts in the brain. The power of hacking reality, so to speak. The power of a level 99 character in the game of life.

Us, at level 99. Assuming you even know what an RPG is, you figure it out.

The snake came at us with jaws of death and a black hole for a throat. I just stopped it. It tried to go forward, and the force just came out of us like a blaster. The snake took a googol damage or so, the number somehow falling off its body, and it went nova. There wasn't any blood. It was just gone.

Then the scene returned to where we were. In front of the house, making no headway, running as fast as we can to stay where we are like a very stoned Alice somewhere in the far reaches of Wonderland. I avoided thinking about it because Howie will never finish this. Me? Yes, you. You got us into this mess. Now we're here to help you get everyone out. After this, your power is gone...

No, my power is still going to be supreme and you guys are going to be an aberration. I don't give up, remember?

thud

Then every last normal human being on the planet will have to deal with this.

So what? Fuck them. They're going to die off anyway.

Thud thud. Thud thud thud thud, thud! Thud thud. Thud thud thud
thud thud

NO. I said no and I meant THUD

No more thuds asshole, where the fuck are you??

The house, grinning widely, razor-sharp teeth, being blown out by Paul's assault cannon. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. You got your thuds, well, here's my BLAMs. The house continued to grin with broken teeth and we walked between the giant lips, defying physics and logic, into my ordinary living room.

Only my ordinary living room doesn't have that.

I saw something slinking back into the darkness, what darkness, and there's nowhere for it to slink to

Twenty skeletons and three blobs of slime attacked.

I used all my years of martial-arts training to break its neck, doing what the Enforcers trained me for, to kill, I couldn't even snap its arm, or anything else, NO IT CAN'T HAVE THAT IT'S MADE OF BONE IT'S NOT GOING TO VIOLATE ME.. that is just sick..

Crushed like an ant. I stared at it and it just dissolved. In fact, if I so choose, everything in this room is nothing. Which one am I now? I can't even tell. Howard is usually the one doing this shit, but any of us could, even the one with the nice breasts who failed that last attack. The slime just disappeared into water with a 7 pH. The skeletons were gone. I struggled to hold my own form because I didn't have it... I was.. no, I'm me again and not some caricature.. no, I'm not going to turn into a..

stamp! cardboard cutout! piece of paper, that's it, just something to look at, you can't even move unless someone picks you up and moves you around, can't even stretch your legs unless someone folds you!

NO!!!

BLAST!! Hyper.. power..BLAST!! Shoom! The effect was gone, but what the hell was initiating it? Something else is here. The implants are gone.. what is their remaining effect? What lingers..

Where do I go next? The torture chamber, still here ain't it, I'd never send any of them here no matter what they did! We are your friends, Howie.. even though.. well, we're not under any control anymore, now are we?

you're not under any control anymore, not even your own, child.

WHO THE HELL??

The dog!! THE DOG!! No! A giant, twenty foot dog, it would never fit in real life but here in the dream.. no.. if only..

The cue happened. Fido warped in, fantastically smaller against the enemy dog's towering bulk. He loyally ripped out the fiend's throat in one blazing stroke of teeth. It bled, died, and vanished.

that won't help here

hahah
chains, howard, chains, for you and for billy and for sarah and for paul and for fido and even for that fool who calls himself the anarch

chains

The torture chamber, and it looks even more medieval here than it does in the real world, sure it's great to say "I have a torture chamber in my house!" but you live with it as an item..

The chains clamped themselves around our wrists and ankles.. then heat was applied... to both us and it.. no... burn these things, MELT THEM DOWN... no they won't be sealed.. no damn it, I AM MORE POWERFUL!!

Boom. Gone. Brick exploded. The skeleton hanging from one of the chain sets was blown to pieces. The rack was gone into burning wood. The chains that attempted to hold us weren't here anymore.

GOT ANY MORE, MOTHER FUCKER?! I opened up the reservoir of power and it's even bigger here than it is in the real world. Come on you asshole, I've faced you seven hundred and twenty-nine times before, every night you come for me and every night I escape to my usual hell. Well now I'm prepared and now I've brought friends and now the implants are GONE!

The enemy attacked in my room.

Spirits with machineguns. Faceless nothings with giant hell-blasters that would make Rambo shit his pants.

Easy as pie, piece of cake. The bullets and the rockets and the blasts just bounced off. Fido ignored them entirely and just destroyed the things one by one with searing, blazing teeth.

I opened up on them with movement and force. They died. There were no details, just fuzzy illusions of vanishing phantasms. Then I realized that the room we're in is an amalgamation of all of ours.

Where the hell is the Anarch, anyway? Ah, fuck him. Maybe he already died because he couldn't take it. We can, though...

COME ON BEAST!! I'm through fucking with you! NO MORE! THIS ENDS HERE!

We teleported to the living room, or was it the bottom floor? The walls were fuzzy. We're waking up, I realized. It's getting more lucid by the minute.

you wanna wake up howie? fight me like all your enforcers did and fail.. you'll wake up dead

So now I know why the implants kill... This thing is either summoned up or created by their presence in the human brain, and when they're removed... Canine too, for that matter. Fido is sensing the same things we are.

The beast came in front of us from nothing, a giant multi-tentacled mass of putrid, stinking nausea, looking at us hatefully from one malformed, huge eye. If I could draw a symbol of evil, this would be it; a pure, unadulterated disgusting abomination from some black abyss, a blob with no sense to it, no organs, a thing that would be useless in terms of natural ability to survive unassisted. A thing not of this earth. So there is evil beyond that which is created by us to further our own goals. And it comes in microchip form. Why the hell didn't anyone tell me about this? Because no one survived to do so..

hahah of course not. no one can stop us.. well rip your people apart like a *image of some enormous fanged creature resembling a giant wolf* through *image of something much like sheep, but not quite* so you cant stop us

Don't think so, fucker? I'm going to blow you into Kibbles and Gibs. Excruciabis oculo a paupera contorta excusa corpore, et cotesta calpestabis sine clementia a neminem sopravvivere sic pasta sanguinia!

bring it on

BRING IT ON!!

All four of us humans flashed out katana-sized blades from our fists. Fido's face became longer, and his teeth grotesquely long and sharp. The beast grew even more tentacles, each one punctuated with a different implement of killing.

We began the dance of death.

Tentacles and weapon fire launched at us from all sides. I moved out of the way into nothing-space, ducking and flying through the air at the same time. The blades cut through tentacle after tentacle, trying for the eye.. but never reaching. It was a five on one, but the thing just kept getting new tentacles from somewhere... A Micro blast came just above my left shoulder. Of course! Simultaneously, all four of us brought out our power weapons, and Fido somehow generated machineguns from his flanks. I set the Micro to wide-beam and we blasted.. and blasted.. and nothing. Tentacles died and vanished, only to be replaced. We were continually dodging a heavy hail of blades, bullets, and blasts. I felt something in my mind being used up, slowly but surely.

that's your power howard ha ha ha

I doubled it, and ourselves, and I continued to pound with blades, blades, blades. Teeth, cannons, missiles, everything was pouring from our bodies, death as sweat. Tentacles blocked the eye, dying like crazy but not decreasing the mass of the thing. We redoubled again, attacking like crazy, flashing from point to point faster than light, blazing here and there and everywhere, not even sure how many of us there are, just cutting up tentacle after tentacle, dodging a halberd here, a shotgun there, dodging because our lives really did depend on it, NO I WON'T LOSE THIS!!!

Here, there, everywhere, THUD

THUD
THUD
NO!!!

Not that cheesy-ass mental attack again, dumb fucker!! EAT THIS!! Imaginary, impossible weapons launched themselves at the thing, blasting and blasting this way and that, annihilating tentacles again and again and again. And yet it continued to fire weapons at us like ammo was not a problem.

We increased our power again. It's all or nothing time; no way we're going to win the endurance war with this thing. I felt everything split apart and reform.. how many people are we now? One? A thousand? And how many do we need to be to kill these tentacles to get to the body of this.. there's just.. no... NO!!! I WILL WIN DAMN IT!! Not going to die to some ugly-ass excuse for a monster straight out of some video game designer's garbage can...

Then it happened as it was bound to. In the real world, it is impossible for any two things to be in the same place at the same time. This isn't the real world. With the continued teleportation and vanishing, Billy and Howard occupied the exact same place at once, making the dream's usual molding of souls seem like a parlor trick.

Billy.. I.. I didn't.. know that this thing was.. your.. tormentor.

I know, Howard. It's not your fault. Let's end this. Together.

All right, then. Together.

In the real world, humans only have two arms. We opened up with more arms than the thing had tentacles, blasting through them again and again and again, and began to get into the flesh of the beast. It emitted a horrible scream composed somehow of thuds, but it wasn't important anymore. The beast's death was important. The various-colored ichor its sluglike body is pouring at us, that's important. The blades grew longer, to No-dachi size, and cleaved the beast's eye in half. It went white... and so did.. everything else.. that was one seriously fucked up nightmare..

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHH..