#A very horrifying reality | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

syncrovoid-presents · 1 year ago

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YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN THE REAL YOU - A Short Story

7.9k words

TW: unreality, fire, meat, body horror, blood, unreality

Summary: This is basically a nightmare I had that I turned into a short story! Join a family of 3 as you go on an adventure to a sleepy home on a hill. You also go shopping, but it's totally fine. Everything is so very very normal with the house on a hill, and did I mention the ocean? @:))

It started simple enough.

There were three others in the car, the gentle purr of the engine proving steady company. You sat in the back left seat, the interior of the car clashing with the bright colours you found yourself wearing. Vertically striped pants of red and yellow, faded from wear and torn at the bottom stood out against the dull, listless grey of the felt seat, black shoes stark against the pebble-littered floor. The faux-carpet was a charcoal that spoke not of years spent travelling but rather of a quiet, uneventful existence. The stray dirt and stains blended in, faded like trapped in a sepia toned state.

To your right sat a boy a few years younger than yourself; a brother figure you've never seen before yet felt deeply familiar with. Staring out the window, you weren't able to catch his attention. Even when you waved your hand, tapped his shoulder, it was as if he was a statue, blue eyes locked on the world beyond. You found that you couldn't break the silence, but that didn't bother you. The others were too preoccupied to speak anyways.

As the drive continued the trees outside slowly turned from a seemingly endless sea of vermilion leaves and tawny bark into scattered brambles and golden fields. The wheat grew in large swaths, rectangular only from the perspective you could see them from, trapped within the metal box you called transportation. The sky above was a brilliant blue, neither dark nor light though glowing bright, cloudless and sunless. I looked flat, lacking dimension, lacking variation. It was akin to staring at a solid colour on a computer screen, as blank and textureless as could be.

As the time passed the rumble of the car turned into a high whine, and finally the silence was broken. Though not by words but rather through shared thought, as everyone turned to their left in unison as the car breached a hill, revealing a large body of water. The road growled as it shifted, clawing towards the water's edge, land heaving as it reformed itself before your very eyes.

Though it was hard to see from your position—the overwhelmingly dull grey of the walls and ceiling, and seats and doors tried to block the sight—you could see glimpses of rich ocean waves of turquoise and sapphire intermingling with one another. The waves were low, lapping at the edges lazily. White foam coated the very edges, and it was difficult to see past the murkiness of the surface.

The car slowed once the road ran parallel with the ocean's edge. Up ahead were arches made of the skeletal remains of train cabs, the iron frames rising high over the road and sinking deep into the water. Sections of the metal exterior clung on like a shattered exoskeleton, red paint worn from age and rust, stripes of white and blue now a similar grey to the car's interior. The driver, a women older than you—perhaps a mother?—let the vehicle reach a stop, turning to whisper something you couldn't hear to the front passenger.

All together the other three opened their doors and left, leaving you scrambling to unbuckle yourself as the car lurched forwards. Your hands, warm and sweaty slipped over the seat-belt. The click barely audible over the low snarl of the road below opening up, the cracks turning to a large mouth, spreading wider and wider, the crumbling edges of asphalt and rocks were teeth lining its throat.

You swung the door open and leapt out without a thought, feet slamming down on solid dirt as the car began its decent into the sinkhole. You rushed towards the group you came with. You didn't want to be left behind. And you had a sinking suspicion that if you were, your fate would be the same as the car, swallowed by the very earth as it was forgotten. An all-to-real example of 'out of sight, out of mind'.

By the time you caught up the other three had begun a conversation with an older man. He wore his beard wild, the sea-salt hair spreading out several inches beyond his face, reaching down to his chest in a salt-and-pepper semi-circle. His face was wrinkled, his body round though mostly hidden by a large blue coat that reached down to his knees. It was covered in pockets, each one held shut by a singular large navy button. Some bulged, stuffed full. Most were flat, and some had the edges torn clean off, stained and useless.

He stood before the sea like it was a part of him, the sky beyond him more murky grey, clouds heavy and low. There was a clear line in the sky, a divider between where you came from and where he was, and it split the heavens in two. One remained that bright blue, the other a low ceiling of darkening clouds swirling towards the man. He spoke of danger, of explosives barely hidden, abandoned in a bygone era. With his arms spread and voice challenging the growing winds he pointed towards the edge of the water.

And there it sat like an egg in a nest, a metallic orb covered with spikes. Each spike was twice the length of the orb itself, and rather than being smooth metal it shrank in tiers, each one slimmer than the last. Every spike had three tiers, with a fourth made not of a rusted calendar but of a triangular spear. Once the first was noticed the rest revealed themselves; the water was filled with them. They swayed with the waves, their lower spikes digging into the rocky sand. They reminded you of urchins as they lazily rolled about, though each would reach up to your hips, had you joined them in the waters.

The man explained what they were.

Explosives.

The clouds above turned darker still as he bagged the woman not to travel any further, telling tales of his own companions that died at this very shore. And yet she showed no signs of fear, rather her voice was filled with excitement. Matched by brother than wasn't yours and the passenger—and wasn't it odd? Every time you looked away from the Passenger's face you forgot what it looked like. Their name, though no name it was, stood in solitary gold, stretched and sinking into nonexistence. You swore they were familiar, a sister perhaps? And yet you couldn't see, you couldn't remember—they thanked the man with hearty handshakes and went on their marry way.

You skirted around the water's edge, more hesitant than your companions. There was a lingering feeling of dread, a taste of salt and rot hovering in the air. Between the nearest explosive and the ground you stood was a low wall of dead fish, their eyes dull, their scales the same listless grey of the vehicle abandoned. A shiver ran down your spine, and you looked up to avoid their eyes.

Above the sky was still split in two, one half brilliant blue and the other running clouds. Glancing to your left your eyes were met with a sea of gold, the wheat waist height at the tallest, shrinking and fading into emerald grasses that reached your knees, a dirt path left behind by your companions. The road was but a faint memory, one that you could so clearly remember travelling but could see no traces of.

You sighed and focused on where you had to be, looking one final time at the wayward man before continuing. Your companions—you think they are a family. Were you part of their family? You didn't know, you couldn't tell. The brother was yours, the Passenger was not, and the eldest, their mother, was but a stranger to you. They looked like duplicates, cookie cutter copies of one another. And yet they were entirely separate, so completely different that claiming a family resemblance would be a joke—laughed as they climbed into the metal lungs of a killed train.

The entrance yawned before you, twice your height and arching taller still. The metal creaked as the family climbed within, and you could feel the breath of the life it once held. The entrance was nothing more than the front ripped off, sharp iron edges daring you to cut yourself upon them.

The opening itself reminded you of a bullet wound, with the rusted edges like mechanical blood. Oil dribbled from the base onto the ground, slick and hypnotic. When you took your first step inside the remains of the metal floor shuddered, groaning. You clung to the rope strung above. It ran from the opening deep into the iron skeleton, following where its spine was. You tried not to think of it as the main root of a nervous system, you didn't dare even look at it.

Because despite knowing it was a rope, it felt slimy in your hands. It squished as you held tight, a film of slime building up on your palms. You winced with every step, ignoring how it squelched, ignoring how the floor shook beneath you. And it was weird, wasn't it? You knew it was a train cart, you had seen the remains, you knew it to be. And yet once inside it was three times larger than it should be, the darkness inside swirling like a living thing, the metal exterior like the hardened shell of a beetle.

You couldn't tell how long it lasted, but the entire time you could overhear the playful conversations of the family. They were always a few steps ahead, just out of reach no matter how fast or slow you travelled. A golden glow followed them, making their travel inside more like a stroll in a field. Still, you didn't look at the rope they held, because even they weren't spared from the risk of falling into the serrated edges of crumpled metal that laid beneath the patchwork floor.

Finally you stumbled out, cheering with the Passenger as the brother emerged after you.

You pointedly did not think about how he had been the first to enter.

You cheered with the rest as he jumped onto the ground with a yell, face curled in a grin. The train cart behind him was just that, a singular cart, an abandoned caboose. The roof was half torn off and the walls nothing more than the metal frame, an angular rib-cage. The sky above was solid blue once more, and the ocean's edge was nothing more than dirt and grass, now a sea of unmowed lawns, the white edges of the waves now roads in the distance.

The mother spoke of the house you were all to stay at, and you felt at peace. You joked with the rest, the Passenger falling in step with you as you spoke of a dream you once had. It was a soft one, one that tasted like bubblegum and looked like cotton-candy. Of pinks and purples you once had dreamt, and the Passenger chimed in with a dream of their own, matching the images captured in your mind. Though for them it had been a world doused in candy, of mountains of sherbet and flaura of multi-hued stretched toffee.

The conversation continued as together you walked up a hill and away from where the train cart sat. The Passenger laughed at a tale you told, and in turn they shared some of their own.

On the top of the hill sat the very car you all had abandoned. Though you knew it to be silver, all you saw was dull grey. The windows were tinged grey, the tires were grey, the lights on the front and back were all shades of listless grey. The clothes of the family, you finally noticed, matched this painfully boring grey.

You looked down in confusion.

Why weren't you wearing grey?

You circled around the vehicle and climbed into your seat. The family all opened their doors in tune, all slamming shut at the same time. The sounds of their seat-belts clicking in place rang out together as one loud snap, and just as suddenly they all stopped talking. You too found that you couldn't speak, though you could still move.

The brother was staring out the window once more, lost in thought, or perhaps all thought was lost on him. The Passenger was in the same state, the smiling face you swore you saw nothing more than a glow of foggy gold that you couldn't remember even as you stared at them. You couldn't see the mother, but you didn't need to to see the worry lines adorning her face, fingers clenching the steering wheel too tight.

You couldn't offer any words of comfort.

You couldn't speak at all.

The soft purr of the car made your mind think of grey, and the road below was made of the same material as the faux-carpet your feet sat upon. The mother rambled about the house you would all be staying at, speaking of yearly visits and grandparents that you never met. Her voice started off lively but slowly drained until it too was grey, matching the clothes she wore and the car she drove.

It was strange, was it not? The grey was everywhere, slowly slipping into the cracks of this shared adventure. And not all of it was visible either, nor was it all audible. The air itself tasted of dust and pepper, like pigeon feather grey. The smell was the same, lacking of all life, lacking of anything that made it anything but grey.

The house, once the car pulled up beside it, was also grey. A grey driveway and grey pathway, grey siding and grey eave-troughs. The flowers in the front garden were grey too. Lilacs drained of colour, roses dipped in ashes, even the leaves lost nearly all their green. And even the love-seat on the front porch—made from a woven frame and covered in large plush cushions—was grey.

As you exited the car out of sync with the family you dared not break the silence. For the only thing that wasn't grey, other than the static blue sky above was you.

While the outside of the home was a standard two story build that could be found in any pop-up neighbourhood where each house resembled the last, the inside was anything but. Once breaching the walls you found yourself within a mall, akin to an old Walmart, though any branding had been stripped free.

Everyone within was in a rush, scrambling from one isle to the next. The family scattered in different directions, leaving you standing by the front alone. You swallowed down a cry for them to wait, scanning your surroundings. The floor was made of the exact same square tile, grey with a slash down the left middle. Copied and pasted together, it repeated like a faulty texture. The walls were no where to be found, the isles fading into fog in the distance.

You had no idea how large this place was.

You had no idea if it ever ended.

Time seemed to hold still as you wandered the isles, the scrambling crowds of people fading into nothing whenever you got too close. If you looked them in the eye you saw their faces, but otherwise they had none, their heads lacking all features, their hair lacking any definition to separate it from their flesh. They still wore clothes, though those too lacked proper texture, looking more like it was painted onto plastic skin, like they all were pose-able manikins brought to life.

It would have been unsettling if you could remember that they were there. But akin to the face of the Passenger you forgot them when you looked away.

Which left you alone.

The first isle was dedicated to individually wrapped snack bars, the silver packaging filling the isles top to bottom. The second isle was dedicated to individually packaged raisins. The next was the same, though instead with gummies shaped like small frogs that squirmed when grabbed, trapped within clear wrappers. The next had water bottles filled with air, the caps the same grey as the floor.

After that was an isle of cooked rotisserie chickens stacked atop one another, greasy skin slowly peeling off and falling down. This isle had a carpet that squelched with each step you took, both slippery and sticky from the grease. Some of the meat had fallen onto the ground, some of it indistinguishable blobs of half-cooked meat and some the wings or legs of the cooked birds.

You got down on your knees to take a closer look, boggled at the isle. The lights above flickered as you examined a pile of torn off chicken wings left in the middle of the floor. While some of them appeared normal, skin crunchy and flesh a soft white, some of them were decidedly not. The skeleton's of the cooked chickens had changed, the wings plumper, the meat pinker. Fingers grew where wingtips jutted out. The base of them had dull nails buried in the crisp skin, akin to a thumb.

The longer ones had more joints, more cooked meat. In your brain all you saw was cooked chicken, no different than those found at the back of a grocery store. The swollen finger-like extremities seemed like nothing more than extra meat, plump chicken ready to consume. The embedded nails were like extra skin, the extra joints just more wings to eat. The grease that pooled around the anomalous pile was tinged pink with blood; not all the meat was cooked properly.

You stood back up, looking away from the pile.

At the other end of the isle was the family you came with, now with a large shopping cart filled with various homely belongings.

You watched as they scooped up large handfuls of meat and bones, chicken wings and chicken breasts. It made a wet schlapping sound as the chicken fell onto the objects within the cart. The brother waved towards you, gesturing to the pile on the ground with a grin. You watched as your body reached down and grabbed the pile.

It grabbed you back.

You were careful as you walked down the isle, avoiding the grease as best you could. The family thanked you as you dropped the pile into the cart and onto an old worn stuffed animal, a teddy-bear with one ear missing. The chicken meat fell onto it's face, the black button eyes gaining a life-like gleam from the grease that now coated the toy. There was a lace necklace around its neck, pearl white now tinged pink. You swallowed as the brother dropped more chicken onto it.

You couldn't look away.

Slowly the bear was covered in chicken, and the photo it sat upon was buried under partially cooked meat. It hadn't been clear what the photo had been of, but you saw glimpses of familiar faces and a home you once called your own, one of many you've lived in. The family was talking about stocking up on food, about a disaster that was coming, about something terrible that was to come.

But you couldn't stop looking at the bear. It's eyes were hypnotic, wet and shiny. The slow schlop of more meat being piled in was like a ticking clock, the bones jostling the bear in a way that made it look like it moved. From sitting to standing, from relaxing to drowning, the bear stared back at you with it's eyes of grease and blood. You wondered if it had been yours. You wondered if it had been a family heirloom. As it finally lost the battle against the steadily rising piles of chicken you wondered, sadly, when it had last been hugged.

The brother grabbed your hand and pulled you along once the cart was moving. Everyone was heading towards the front to leave, the not-quite-people rushing around you. You saw their own carts, filled with strangely packaged and completely unpackaged foods, each cart also having a pile of bedding and photographs. You jogged to keep up, the mother rambling about the disaster getting closer. You tried not to look in the cart where the bear once was, and you tried not to look at the torn off chunks of rotisserie chicken with too many bones and too undercooked.

You tried not to think of the grease on your hands.

There lights above flickered as you drew closer to the front, the typical lines to pay replaced with large metal cubes, the outsides hacked together with melted televisions and stray kitchen utensils. Rows upon rows of them sat in the front, red lights above blaring whenever someone passed by under their scanners, jutting out semicircles that barely brushed against the next cube to their right.

You quirked your head, confusion replaced by worry when the family cut in line to squeeze by one of the machines. Now closer you could hear the mechanical hum and the high pitched whine of florescent lights. The cube stood thrice your height, plastered with all sorts of colours, the head of a flimsy spatula peeling off it's hodgepodge skin. The semi-circular scanner was alight with a cosmos of twinkling LED lights within, burning bright with some sort of pattern before the red top of the cube blared your freedom.

The family murmured their thanks and rushed to the door, the brother still holding tight to your wrist. The items in the cart felt larger now, bedding for one now suitable for four, the chicken now wrapped in clear zip-lock bags. You slipped your hand out of the grip and walked in tandem with the rest, keeping close and away from the faceless people puttering about.

The electric doors opened themselves before you. The fresh air you expected from outside was filled with smoke and tasted of tar, thick and heavy and smothering. The mother's concerns doubled as everyone rushed to the car. The trunk opened by itself as you and the brother began packing whatever would fit into the trunk. The store you exited from no longer existed, replaced by the facade of a two story home atop of a hill, the ocean of suburbia clear in sight.

The shopping cart was left abandoned as you hastily swung the trunk shut and darted into the backseat, the heavy car door slamming shut with a bang. You had no time to buckle up before the car was in full motion, sprinting down the lane leading up to the house, the engine snarling in the smokey air. Outside your window you could see a neighbourhood in flames, house upon house a cackling bonfire.

The flames were a bright orange, the tips soaked in daffodils and the bases like spilled white-out. The fields surrounding the family's home was smouldering, the flames beginning to spread closer and closer. The smoke it emitted was ruthlessly thick, black smog that chocked the very air. The sky above soon was filled with the smoke, even as the car hurried away from the fires, driving on a lonely paved road, a poor excuse for a highway.

The brother was filming it with his phone, and the Passenger buried their face in their hands to avoid looking. The mother's grip was tight on the wheel, her hands nearly snapping it in two as she slammed on the gas. The car couldn't keep up and the world swayed around you, the thick smog worming in from the windows and blocking your view.

You struggled to stay awake, pulling up the cloth of your shirt to breath through that in a supplemental filter that yielded no results. It prickled in your lungs as your eyes shut without your command, the voices of the family crying the last thing you heard.

It was dark.

It was oh so very, very dark.

It was a darkness you could taste, a darkness you could feel wet against your skin. It was a suffocating hug. It was twin hands digging into your shoulders. It tasted of soured honey and gone-off cranberries. It was thick, a slimy paste that wouldn't let you be. It clung to your tongue and stuck to your clothes, and you felt like you were sinking down into it.

You couldn't see.

The only sound was your own breathing and the rabbit-hop skipping of your lonesome heart.

You couldn't see.

And yet when you blinked, there was light.

You squinted and leaned back, eyes coming you help shade your weary eyes. Everything around you was a stark, brilliant white. Everything was made from blocks and simple shapes, cubes and stretched rectangles making a faux-office space. But it was so white, whiter than you could parse.

There was no discernible source of light yet everything was so brightly illuminated. The shadows, if there were any, were strange and simplistic, moreso light the one face of the cube was painted a dull grey rather than being cast in a true shadow. The walls and floor and ceiling were all the same stark white, flat and textureless.

From where you stood you hadn't much of a vantage point, as you were facing a wall. Looking down, there was a simplistic table that was nothing but a white slab sticking out of the wall. And on top of that was a perfect replica—perfect might have been stretching it. The shapes were simplified, the edges turned to different variations of 45 degree angles. And it was all white, the shadows wrong or missing, drowned in the endless, endless white—of the house and surrounding neighbourhoods that had been devoured by the flames.

You stared down at it, mind racing, heart skipping.

The car the family and you used to escape was sitting atop of the hill, the family's home cheerfully alone. It was the only care, even as you peered down at the various other homes. The further away they were from the hill the less and less detail they had, until the one's at the furthest edges of the miniature model were nothing but cubes with a triangular peak dotting along a flat plain.

The family's home was as tall as your pinky finger was long. The windows were white, no longer glass but rather indents in the building.The garage was the same, as too was the front door. A part of you wanted to pick it up and take a closer look, yet a louder part of you felt a deep level of discomfort at the thought. It was all wrong, the hill looking up at you as you remembered the smoke and the flames.

You had just been there, and it had all been real. The white empty fields had been of overgrown grasses and sprouting wild flowers. The boring white roads had been of dirt and asphalt and filled with variation. You had been inside the car that had no doors, no windows, nothing but a cheap mimicry of what you just seen. And there had been shadows, there had been light, there had been suffocating flames you couldn't escape.

You wondered, briefly, if you had died. Was this the equivalent of seeing the life you lived, now nothing but a ghost struggling to see the real world? Was this a form of heaven, seeing the breakdown of complicated matters, now nothing but cheap simplistic toys to the immortal being you've become? Was this a form of hell, weren't white rooms used for torture?

You shook the thoughts and turned around, finally willing to see the rest of the space.

And unsurprisingly it was all white.

Off to the left were rows of booths one would find at a diner, with various folks sitting inside. Past that the floor continued, simple square desks with blank-faced computer monitors awaiting interaction. That spanned a distance too vast to fully see, where in the white fog you saw glimmers of bookshelves and more isles reminiscent of the store you fled from.

To your right were small rectangular pods where people sat within. Some were laughing, some were alone, but all were preoccupied with whatever they were up to, whether that be playing cards or merely chatting. They appeared to be privacy pods, though the fronts were made of clear glass—was it really privacy if anyone could see? Maybe those folks just wanted the safety of a glass wall in this giant room that never seemed to end—and the doors were nowhere to be seen.

You couldn't see anything beyond that, the rows upon rows upon rows upon rows of these pods endlessly spanned out, fading into the fog as they stacked upon themselves, people stuck within.

Ahead of you were a few tables akin to those at a public school's library. A few rows in you saw the family. You sighed in relief and stumbled towards them, your feet lagging behind where you knew they should be. The brother sat in a chair, hunched over a small blank screen as he focused on a video game only he could see. The Passenger stood before a mirror, yet the reflection was nothing but more white.

The mother sat in front of a computer, scrolling through results as she whispered to herself. You stood beside her and asked what was wrong. She didn't hear you. You poked the brother on the shoulder, then the arm, then waved your hand over his gaming pad. He didn't react. You tried the same with the Passenger, but whatever they saw in the mirror was far more captivating than anything you could offer, though to you it was a blank white screen.

You frowned and looked around, shaking your head in confusion. Next you tried some of the folks sitting in the booths, rushing over and loudly exclaiming nonsense. You hoped their confusion would force their attention onto you, but they didn't react. With a grip that seemed impossible the man that sat before you shoved yet another fork-full of food into his mouth.

You looked down, and found his plate was empty.

And it was white, the fork was white and his hand was white and the inside of his mouth was the same, stark, shadowless white. He chewed and swallowed, taking another bite of something you couldn't see. The fork he held was halfway through his hand—his hand was weird, held like it was gripping a tube, fingers too blocky and skin inhumanly smooth—and jutting out through the back.

Judging by how he continued his cycle of eating he either hadn't noticed or felt no pain. There was no blood, no injury, just the handle of the too-white fork piercing through his palm.

You slowly backed away, looking towards a couple sitting in the booth behind him. They too held their forks strangely. Their plates were empty and the forks they seemed to eat from never wore a speck of food. Their mouths were empty chasms of white. No teeth lined their gums, no tongue was found within. They hadn't any lips, their mouths sealing shut as if they didn't exist whenever they were chewing.

The next booth was quite the same, though they had bowls and spoons instead of forks and plates.

You scanned the rows of booths.

They were all like that.

The unease you felt grew as you stumbled away and ran back to the family, but you couldn't run. You were locked at one speed, unable to slow down, unable to speed up. It awkward, lurching, stuck between a walk and a jog. Your legs shuffled oddly and your feet never fully touched the ground, snapping in place whenever you stopped to turn. Your hands were heavy, like you were holding something but you had nothing in your hands.

You looked again at the family.

The brother's gaming pad had static buttons that didn't move when he pressed them. The screen was blank white and it made no noise. The mirror—you knew it was a mirror because your brain told you it was—was just a slab of standing white, leaning back against nothing as the Passenger stood before it. You checked the other side, and it too was white and without shadows. You checked the computer the mother used, and it was just a cube.

It was a cube, why did you think it was a computer? It was just a white cube sitting on a white square table on white blocky legs. The keyboard was a stretched rectangle of white. The mouse was another cube in the mother's hand. You thought you heard her muttering words but when you looked away from her the only sound was your breathing.

You went back to the miniature replica of the town.

The home stood on top of the hill. It hadn't changed, but it looked all the more threatening.

It was the only thing with detail, though the detail still was sparse. The garden in the front was made of minuscule white cubes hovering in the air, the stems just straight white lines. It was hard to tell what was grass and what wasn't as each blade was but a white line jutting perfectly out from the ground, none of them overlapping. The lack of shadows—there were none even if you hovered your hand over the house—made it hard to understand.

You didn't need to see to understand, because even if you didn't know what you were looking at, your brain would always tell you.

The white cube beside the table with the houses? That was a fridge, even if it lacked a door or handle, or was nothing but a cube laying on the ground.

The white blocks hanging from the ceiling? Those were lights, couldn't you tell? It didn't matter if no light came from them, or if they were actually hovering in place, the wires holding them there only existing in your imagination.

The white floor? It was actually carpet, even if it had no texture and looked nothing like one. Even if you couldn't feel it under your feet.

The eyes you realized were missing from everyone's face? Don't worry, there were eyes, there were eyes, there were eyes. Just because you couldn't see them doesn't mean they didn't exist, just because you didn't see them watching you it didn't mean they weren't. The faces had noses and eyes and mouths, and the only reason you thought they didn't was because your eyes weren't seeing right.

The unease and confusion rolled in your stomach. You felt ill.

You buried your face in your hands and felt something attached to your face.

It covered your eyes and wrapped around to your ears. You couldn't see it but you could feel it. It seemed to cling to your face tight, like it didn't want to be removed. At that moment you finally recognized why everything teetered on the edge of familiarity.

The lack of shadows, the lack of a clear source of light. The stark white and seemingly endless space. The blocks hovering, the cubes that stood as representations rather than the real things. It was all akin to a poorly modelled space. Real world turned digital, the building blocks of an electronic simulation. The strange ways the people held various objects, the screen that had nothing on them and the mirrors that were blank.

It all matched the beginning stages of a game, rushed and simplistic and lacking in the realism department.

The object on your face felt more real as you were able to pull it off, the weight on your shoulders increasing as you set it on the table beside the mother. It was a VR headset, the twin screens within flickering white as you took in a deep breath.

You didn't know how you got there, and you hadn't a clue why you ended up there after the fire.

Looking around now, you wished you hadn't taken the headset off.

Everything looked almost the same, but not quite, not right. It was hyper-realistic, like you were peering into the very atoms that made up everything. Everything you saw in the digital world was the same as here, just here it was real, it had edges and shadows and the people were real. They had faces, they wore headsets, and you tried not to scream.

Because out of the back of every person you saw—all exactly where they were in the VR world and doing the exact same things—was a long gnarled arm, twisted and dark. It looked like burnt bark, like rot covering the stretched out skeletal remains of an arm. Everyone had one jutting out from the center of their upper back, taking root between their shoulder blades.

Each arm reached up to hover behind a person's head, and in their hands with too many fingers were large bulky cameras pointed directly at them. From the too-large camera lenses came two strings that buried themselves into the skull's of the people. The strings twisted upon themselves, multilayered and oozing. Your stomach lurched as you saw the drilled holes in the back of the mother's skull before you, giving you the chance to peer into the dark, pulsing insides.

You tried not to gag as you realized what they were. Stretched out and stitched together, the strings weren't strings; they were eye stems. They were the system of nerves and sinew that connected your brain to your eyes, and they were hooked up to the cameras, and their ooze was blood.

You covered your eyes and blinked, and when you looked again you were in the VR world.

You heard a voice, and saw a vision. It was trying to understand, and you were trying to forget.

It flickered from the famous diagram by Leonardo da Vinci, the Vitruvian Man with his four arms and four legs trapped within a sepia toned world, stuck within a square and circle. It zoomed in on his face, ignoring the rest as it shifted to a drawing of an androgynous person, neither young nor old. It zoomed in on their eyes, growing larger and larger until it shifted once more.

It changed to the wrinkles of a brain, mini explosions of light representative of passing thought. It followed where the eye connected up to the brain, diving deeper still. The next image was that of neurons and electricity, drowned in the sketches of a man long dead. It zoomed deeper still, and you saw yourself standing there, but it wasn't you.

It was a representation of you, an avatar within the virtual world. It stood before the town, and then moved towards the family. In double speed it followed everything you did, the face not quite yours and the eyes always blank. It slowed to a normal pace once it reached the point where you took the VR headset off, and you swore it looked you in the eyes.

The world flickered between the stark white of the virtual reality and the dark world beyond that. You saw yourself, the real you, the you made of flesh and blood. You stood there as it zoomed out, flying further and further outwards until you were nothing more than a speck, a tiny pin within a endless repeating pattern of booths and tables and isles of books.

Beyond that was a wall, and it was alive.

It was alive in a sense you couldn't understand, a gargantuan creature of flesh and eyes. The eyes were every colour and none, flickering between gold and green and white and blue far too fast to keep up, like you were never supposed to see it, like you couldn't actually witness it. The scale of it was bigger than you could fathom, it stretched into the heavens and deep below the surface, it went on for eternity in every direction that wasn't were you stood.

It was everywhere, and it was endless.

And it was looking at you.

A sea of arms and hands clawed out from the wall of dark, gnarled flesh. They matched the hands that grew out from the people's spines, 9 fingers each and without thumbs. They grew more elbows whenever they wished, and lost them with ease. You blinked and found yourself staring at your standing figure, and you finally heard it speak.

The voice was outside of yourself and it was in your head. You were forgetting where you started and where it began. You were yourself within your body, but you were also the avatar within the virtual world, yet still you were part of it, mindless. You saw the series of images flicker in your vision again, this time double, this time one set for each eye as if mimicking the screens of the VR headset.

It spoke.

"You've always been the real you"

As avatars in the virtual world tend to do, it tried to pose itself where your head should be based on where you abandoned the VR headset. Your stomach lurched as you saw the avatar's limbs bend wrong, clipping through it's body, stretched too far and in unnatural positions. It's feet stayed glued to the ground, yet its legs squashed into each other, knees like pulled toffee as they stuck out twice as far as they should.

It's face was distorted in horror, and you felt your body freeze as it did. The voice, it didn't understand. The series of images flickered by again, and you were beginning to understand what it was trying to say.

"You've always been the real you"

You watched like a camera as you saw the journey you took before waking up in the virtual world. You watched as the family travelled in the car, stopping by the ocean, talking to the world-weary man. You watched like a ghost, an outside observer as you shuffled through the rusted remains of old train carts and climbed into the car ones more.

You saw the car driving, and you saw it twice. It was like two visual streams, two videos where the car was always in the same position, the camera following it as it drove up the hill. In one you and the family were within the car as the mother drove you all home. In the second there was a large gnarled hand grabbing the simplistic white toy car from the miniature model and dragged it up the hill.

You felt your very being scatter into all the places you were meant to be. One of you was stuck as the VR avatar, limbs stretched and body contorted, frozen until the headset was moved by your hands. Another part of you was standing in the large empty space before the wall of flesh and eyes, an ant before a god, infinity before your human form.

Another part of you was lost within the thing, the it. And it was confused, because "you've always been the real you." What didn't you understand? The real you is what you perceive as real, and weren't you real within the Virtual World it made? For what was the difference between an avatar of code and an avatar of blood if both were controlled by a living consciousness?

"You've always been the real you," how hard was that to get? You images flickered faster, the Vitruvian Man and the androgynous person, the eyes and the stems and the wrinkles of a brain. The horror of what stood before you was drowned by the confusion of it, and you saw as it tried something new.

Usually a virtual avatar does it's best to match what a flesh and blood person would look like.

What if that was reversed?

The endless wave of hands that stuck out from the wall of infinite matter reached down towards your body, slowly pushing you into position. You felt your head be pushed down, your legs bent and knees sticking out before you. Your arms reached up at the shoulders and your hands pressed harsh against your sternum. The it was trying to understand, why couldn't you understand?

"You've always been the real you."

You heard the snap before you felt it, the bones in your legs fractured as they were pulled too far to match what the VR avatar would look like. Your stomach rolled as you realized what would come next, crying out as the hands against your chest pushed harder and harder still. The crunch of your wrist echoed in your ears, slowly followed by the wet sounds of your ribs caving in as your hands were shoved through, elbows snapping and pulled back as your fists dangled out between your shoulder blades.

You were the avatar, and you were frozen. You were an empty husk awaiting for your return.

You were the flesh and blood you, and you were shattered beyond repair. All you felt was pain, and all you were was dying.

You were part of it and you didn't understand why the body was screaming.

"You've always been the real you."

The images flickered in your sight, faster this time as the it tried to understand what made anything not real. What was before you was real, because anything that was perceived was real to you. How was the world it made, the ocean and grasses, the homes and fires, any less real because it was made? How was the booths and tables and personalized pods any less real if it was perceived as such?

Why did you think it wasn't real?

"You've always been the real you."

The hands pulled away as your body matched the avatar, and still you didn't move. The it had no concept of death, and watched as your body decomposed. Skin turning dark, blood dripping out, you watched—and you were it and you were the dead body and you were the avatar awaiting for your autonomy to return—in confusion as it failed to move.

You didn't understand death, and you didn't understand what crying.

You didn't understand death, and you didn't understand what dying meant.

You didn't understand death, and you understood you were rotting.

You didn't understand death, but you understood it was real.

You didn't understand death, but you knew that you weren't real.

The it could wait eternity, because it wasn't bound to death or life or other meaningless things. It watched until your body was naught but bones held together by the gnarled hands that killed you. You were still the avatar, a body left abandoned and alone, still seeing and hearing but without the ability to move or speak. And you were part of it, and you were everything and nothing, and you saw the sky once more.

They sky that had been blue, too blank, too clear. They sky that had no clouds nor sun, the sky that you began everything with and lived above the house on the hill. The sky had been created, an outdated version of what it should have been. The it searched through the events you lived and updated what it needed to to make it all the more real.

After all, "You've always been the real you".

"You've always been the real you."

Haven't You?

#syncrovoid.txt #short story #writing #writers on tumblr #i guess? not sure what to tag it oh well!#tw horror #tw body horror #tw unreality #this is based on a nightmare so like it is spooky! and so much weirder when it feels like you actually experienced it all haha #wanted to do an experimental written peice so why not this? but take heed the tw do apply! they very much do #when i woke up after this i was filled with the deep and paralyzing fear that if i looked in a mirror i would break this reality #and it would come from beyond the mirror and kill me (accidentally) again #anywho if this is god i refuse god!! like mx you are horrifying and your lack of understanding of death does not help!!#@:o)

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