Artist: Imaginary Flesh
Song: Tau Ceti f
Recorded at The Tranzac – Main Hall ("Somewhere There Creative Music Festival" – Show 5), February 22, 2015.
Imaginary Flesh - Tau Ceti fCedrixx Ten-Lui Caplan felt different. Seven haab out of Xi Boötis on this third-rate cargo transport, and that much longer to go before making planetfall, the ship felt a little smaller every cycle. When he'd signed on, Cedrixx hadn't been told that the crew were mostly Beta Kapteynoids — and they kept to their own kind, spending their hours off worktime huddled over their hyperpolytopes in their incomprehensible gambling matches, giving him cut-eye koolik glances when he passed them by.
Left to his own devices, Cedrixx tried to keep his nose clean, watching all the visies in the ship's library and exercising in the molby hammocks, but by this stage of the voyage, he was bored. He'd even taken to popping cincomeodimeths off-shift, but after he tried to disable a leak in a hallucinatory bulkhead, he'd been given an adminwarn — and given that the 2i/c was a real dzuuy-taat, another one could cost him a whole quarter-tzolkin's wages.
Exasperated, Cedrixx found himself hanging out with the quartermaster, an otherwise repulsive Proteidaen who kept an illegal still and had access to a variety of mildly illicit products. After spending nearly a full haab winning the quartermaster's friendship, he offered Cedrixx a beat-up old eroholodizer, explaining that he had lovingly restored it himself.
"The gropies?" Cedrixx asked. "Do you think I've sunk that low?"
The quartermaster croaked noncommittally and threw in some holotapes to seal the deal.
Cedrixx was unsure at first, and used the machine sparingly, feeling a little eek'hachk'as after. But it wasn't too long before he spent all his working hours reliving the scenerios, and soon he was sifting through the yáabóol-kahal looking for new holos. The quartermaster sold him a shunt through the network's sinfilters, and after fumbling around, he found a pathway to a darknet nahil with a whole datasilo of every imaginable erotosit. He even dug out his old nanowelding textbook to amp up the strength of the device's neural connectors.
Needing stronger stimulation, Cedrixx was soon trying everything he could get his hands on. The chiich-me'ex holo left him shaken for several cycles, but he was strangely attracted to the chelonaphil series he found. It went on and on, with Cedrixx drifting through each cycle, anxious during worktime, plugged into the eroholodizer otherwise when not searching for new, obscure kicks.
A tzoltik thread led him to a new datasilo in an especially dark corner of the yáabóol-kahal, and some of the wares on offer shook even Cedrixx — but he still grabbed several of them. The most innocuous of the new bunch was entitled Imaginary Flesh, and its specs demanded an even stronger boost to the neural connectors. It took two cycles to get the hardware aligned, but finally, he settled into his k'aan as he patched it in. As the visual receptors synced, a warning was scrolling by.
"What was that about irreversible effects?" Cedrixx thought to himself has he jabbed at the backscan toggle, but the holo only played on. As an abstract image began to drift into his vizfield, he felt a stabbing burst of heat and pain at the back of his skull. The neural connectors! Cedrixx tried to reach around in realspace to pull the p'ok off his head, but his arms would not respond.
Every nerve in his body seemed to be firing now, as if he were being pulled apart through obscure dimensions. His vision — no, all his senses — were hyper-acute. Something was changing, something was being shedded — as if a carapace was being pulled from his body. His ability to sense discrete ideas and objects was slipping away. As Cedrixx was pulled into unity-state, his last half-coherent word-thoughts were: give me don't give meee imaginary flessshhhhhhhh!
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