The sun hung half-heartedly over the northwestern section of the wandering world just enough to illuminate the tiny souls of insects and things fluttering aimlessly in the slight breeze from the wind creeping through the holes and cracks here and there in the walls of this old house. I crowbarred my eyes open further and an avalanche of the crumbling remnants of the previous night fell from my heavy lids, burying me in a pile of painful sobriety. The seemingly cheerful chirps of the so-called birds banged on my eardrums to the constant beat of torment and surveillance. With the birds, the first inhale of morning consciousness was always polluted by the sing-song reminder that their cold, lifeless eyes are perpetually present, ready to report to the rest of their kind at any moment. All at once I decided to dig myself out of the avalanche and fly off my mattress to slam the window shut and pull the curtains tight, shunning out the outside world, as if doing so could wipe it all from my mind as well.

In standing up so fast, my stomach and eyes began to turn inside out. I fumbled out of my room in the light-headed darkness and spilled down the hallway to the bathroom to release the toxins that strangled and deformed my body. I purged into the empty pail patiently awaiting me, and felt right-side-in once again. Such were the effects of my frequent overindulgence in Q-lop. Opening the bathroom curtain to light the room more, I stared into my jagged reflection in the broken mirror, dipping my hands into the almost-empty water pail and kneading the rough dough stretched over my face and cleaning out the orifices. After I felt satisfied with my consistency and taste, I ritualistically picked up both pails and trekked down the narrow, winding staircase to the first floor and outside. Just east of the house, I dumped my sickness by a bush and washed both pails in the river.

The idea of fresh air was only something I had read of in old books, nothing like the gaseous corruption that seemingly existed everywhere, even all the way out here, an hour or so by car from the nearest town. I’ve lived, if you can call it that, in virtually every dark and dusty corner across this Earth, if you can call it that, and the tingling smell of faint destruction has never escaped my nose. They can’t smell it though. The so-called birds can’t, and neither can the so-called people that deploy them. They transgress the earth going about their carefully concocted merry way as if their perfectly hardwired order wasn’t crumbling beneath a blanket of illusion. Despite their unbridled ignorance, I still don’t hold an ounce of sympathy for them or their society, as they are incapable of holding the same for me, or any of the dwindling numbers of real human beings left. Let them choke on their own self-inflicted wounds; I will have no part in it.

While my mind churned the madness, I suddenly felt the presence of eyes, indicated by all the tiny yipping attack dogs on the back of my neck that began to stand. I immediately saw the generic-type bird pinpointing me with the accuracy of years of training on its genetic algorithms. Whispering careful cautions in my ear, the attack dogs told me to lose the bird and seek the indoors, so I followed suit, bolting for the house. I slammed the door behind me, locking it fast and exchanging coughs of smog with breaths of air. We didn’t have running water or electricity, such were the luxuries of the so-called humans and those that were fooled by their game, but we did have an air filter, as was necessary.

“Birds huh?” Felix called out, slightly chuckling, from his room.

“Birds.” I replied between heavy breaths.

Felix’s entirety amassed on the tiny cot-sized mattress raised from the floor by piles of books. The crinkly, translucent paper wrapper coating over the bones and veins of his hands shakily gripped a green hardback I could not discern the title of from the front door, but he seemed very fixated on its contents, not looking up for another moment. Existing longer than any of us, Felix was the large oak tree, and every other plant known to human beings. He stepped outside, and every sense within him knew the state of the soil and the shrubs and the trees. Without his knowledge, we were but desecrations of the surrounding nothingness.

I left Felix to his world and travelled the steps to return to mine. As I returned the pails, a slice of light opened up down the hallway and wide blue eyes behind a bushel of black frazzled hair peered through. KJ—she was a nomad like me, but also like me, had perhaps found comfort in the safety of this house and had stayed beyond any other precedent time unit. Her eyes flicked an invitation, and in response I slid quietly into her room.

“Galvin, I have these wonderful berries I picked this morning with your name on it” she bribed, each word slowly sliding out like the rhythmic drip of water after the rain. Her slight figure only in a fraying button-up shirt and underwear, she tiptoed towards me with a small handful of the aforementioned morsels of red, purple, and blue and popped one in my mouth. The tiny raspberry capsules burst between enamel and flesh and the creature inside my empty stomach yearned for more, but I had nothing to offer.

“I did the last of my Q,” I confessed, “I’m going into the town tonight.”

“Let me come with you,” she softly pressed.

I carefully pulled all of her hair behind her face, avoiding the beckoning in her large eyes.

“No.”

“And why not?”

“You know it’s dangerous, and I’m the only one from the house with enough experience to be safe.”

She knew, along with everyone else under the roof of the house, of my familiarity with the nuances of civilization, as I haven’t always lived outside of it like they have. I was raised in a household of wealth wielding a cast iron sword of obedience just as sharp as the disdain I held for my so-called parents. Just like the rest of the parasites sleep-walking the planet, they were robots. Their kind doesn’t believe in truth, they believe only in cost-benefit analysis, so that’s likely why they never told me I was a true human being adopted to the circuit-infested.

My hands still around her head, KJ spoke in silence, pulling my waist into hers. She began to entangle her being with mine, sliding her tiny taste bud laden pink serpent into tendrils of no return. Our hands traversed the landscapes of necks, waists, hips, and all in-between. I traveled deep inside of her, into every nook and cranny of flesh and existence. A thousand caterpillars made way across our skin and through our veins. And then we sprawled together, a pile of limbs breathing heavily and consuming the fruits of her labor, and spoke about the world.

We’re human beings, animals, we’re meant to eat, and fuck, and feel close to our kind, not sit crouched before a screen jabbing keyboard strokes into our souls. We aren’t the cogs in the machine that they are, constantly whirling and turning with each rising and setting sun, living out a pre-programmed purpose with no meaningful end. We aren’t worker bee drones set out to do our conglomerate hive mind’s bidding. We aren’t clay, doomed from the pressure and the heat, to harden into our parents.

We spoke, and in her own way, KJ convinced me to lead her into apocalypse. We waited for sun down and prepared to go into town.

I scooped the keys, the jingling in my hand perking up the tiny attack dogs on the nape of my neck once again, but now in anticipation. She and I climbed down the spiraling stairs and shook hands with the front door to be greeted with a smoggy night sky and crisp winter air. We swung around the house and landed in the van that I’ve had since the day my so-called parents kicked me out of their household, the first real day of my life.

I twisted the ignition and drove the van down the winding gravel road until we reached the only main road for miles and turned west onto it. As the car hurtled into the night, glimpses of trees on either side reflected back from the headlights, like a dark green blur of the same copy-pasted tree over and over again.

“So how do you get it, anyway?” KJ asked, over the low humming of the van speeding down the highway, “The Q-lop?”

“From this guy that goes by Arrow and lives just on the outside of town.” Where it’s still relatively safe, I thought to myself.

“What’s he like?”

“I— I’m not sure,” I realized, “every time I’ve met we’ve tried the new batch of Q together and just been super lopped. I just have these hazy ideas of experiences I’ve had, presumably with some version of him.”

KJ paused, swimming around her mind in search of the words to encapsulate her thoughts.

“It’s like he’s one of those people you’ve only ever met it in your dreams at night, but you wake up feeling as if you know these vague memories of figments of your imagination better than you could ever know half of the people out there…”

“Yeah, something like that.”

Our minds wandered silently, overlapping here and there, as we barreled assuredly onward towards Arrow and our crystal shards of escapism. The smog grew heavier as we delved deeper into their cave, as if they were trying to cut out all light from entering or escaping, obscuring any idea that a life outside this society could possibly exist.

Eventually, we arrived at the cabin, only twenty minutes outside of the town that I trekked to on occasion for only the most essential supplies. I had always wondered how Arrow could live in such proximity to one of their disgusting hives. Wasn’t the tireless buzzing of his neighbors enough to drive him mad? How did he uphold his operation amongst their constant prying eyes? The so-called people had strict laws against any and all things and expressions that broke the cycle, that threw you outside of their incessant loop, that released the frequency lock on your mind and allowed you to traverse all wavelengths, vibrations, and modes of thought. Q-lop and all substances of its kind were dangerously illegal, punishable by the law that I chose to live outside of ever since I took my first curious inhale of liberation. That was the day my so-called parents proclaimed me unfit to live in their household, in their world, because I had finally seen through the relentless smoke in the air and into the true nature of their non-being. It was the only time they had ever been so accidentally right.

A crumpled up ball of sleeping KJ rested on the passenger seat side until the opening of my car door jostled her awake.

“Hey, we’re here, let’s go,” I half-whispered.

Bleary-eyed, KJ arrived back into consciousness and crawled out of the van. We swiftly walked up his front porch through the chilly haze and I sent five knocks into his cabin door in the agreed upon pattern, hoping that he was home. Reliably private, remote communications have long been a thing of the past, if they were really ever private to start. There was no way to contact anyone without the robots scanning for any blips in their perfect system to quickly and quietly correct. Their kind had liquid peering eyes that seeped into every crack, every mistake, until they overflowed and drowned you from the inside.

All we could do was hope Arrow was home, or hunker down in the van until he arrived. But we were in luck tonight; Arrow swung open the door, the warm lighting of the inside of his cabin illuminating our faces.

“Galvin-boy!” he greeted cheerfully, his eyes smiling like tiny crescent moons, “And who’s this little miss lady?”

He was clearly already a little lopped, which sent a small pack of ants crawling down my spine, but hopefully he was functional.

“I’m KJ,” she answered, “I’m one of Galvin’s housemates.”

“One of? You’re the first one I’ve met! He’s a secretive little shit ain’t he?” Arrow flashed me a toothy grin, chuckling and poking me in the ribs.

“Anyway, call me Arrow, I can’t wait to meet you. And come inside for crying out loud!”

He closed the door behind us twisting the lock, adding one more comforting barrier between us and the wasteland outside. As Arrow scurried over to his living room and beckoned us to follow, my eyes fixated on the open window curtains across the hall.

“Wait…” I called, “the curtains are wide open. The birds…”

“Ah yes the birds of course!” Arrow cut me off mid sentence, “Oh silly old me, I’d forgotten about those pesky birds.”

He frolicked about, twirling the curtains shut haphazardly.

“Are we all good and comfortable now? Great! Now it’s time you kiddos caught up with me.”

Arrow motioned us to his coffee table scattered with bits of Q-lop and adorned with an intricate glass blown pipe that I vaguely recall him saying he had made himself. He plopped down into the cushions, sinking deeper and deeper into another plane of reality. KJ cast me an amused glance but didn’t hesitate to delicately inspect the tubes and textures of his Q-lop apparatus in her long, boney fingers. Bits of Q floated from the table and loaded into the pipe by way of her hands and a flash of fire and a gust of breath sent the smoke travelling through the chambers and tubes, all culminating deep into her yearning lungs, veins, being. She lowered the pipe, handing it to me, her head bowing backwards into the ecstasy of the initial rush. The pipe familiar in my hands, I quickly joined her.

Liquid warmth with the consistency of honey began pouring from the ceiling, oozing down my face and enveloping every part of my body. The little wormy protrusions from the carpeting were spinning, growing upwards and wrapping around my welcoming feet, pulsating waves of pleasure throughout my veins. KJ was wriggling about, her limbs losing all structure and liquefying into a coating around what was once the couch but now formed into a orange-pink octopus-like creature holding Arrow in it’s tentacles. I could feel the Q revitalizing my body, coursing through all my internal tubing, just like the intricate pipe before me on the coffee table. The table noticed me staring and became shy, lifting its wooden legs and swimming through the currents of spiraling wormy carpeting and waves of rugs with colorful flashing geometric patterns. I wanted the table to return, all the knowledge it must hold, being once a tree, probably hundreds of years ago. What could the Earth have been like then? What were the secrets enclosed between each wiggling tree ring? What has it witnessed? What objects have been atop it? I slapped the octopus creature into action, and it began to slice its huge tentacles into the worms that had grown even higher, carrying my body and taking KJ’s puddle and Arrow with me to the table. But that dastardly table darted out into the wide-open seas, daring me to try and catch it. I commanded the octopus to swim with all its might, catch that table! Catch it! Catch it, I needed to know! But the table expertly wove through the worms at a speed I would never think possible until it was small form of brown in the distance. It was hopeless, the table was nowhere in sight. The worms began to grow at an alarming rate, swallowing me and the octopus into the depths of a different realm entirely, beyond the worms. Sea kelp spurt up and around me, enclosing me in its clutches, closing in tighter and tighter until it vacuumed sealed to my body and face. Everything was pitch black, dark and cold. Air… where was the air? This sea kelp wouldn’t let me breathe! I tried to rip it off of me, but the more I struggled, the more the kelp constricted, bending my limbs over and balling me up into a tight mass, choking me, killing me, until…

The slight smell of sterile alcohol. The steady beeping of a machine. The jab of an IV drip in my wrist. The flow of oxygen from tubes in my nose. The light, comforting touch of… my mother.

“Mom!” I exclaimed with disbelief, shooting my eyes open all at once.

My delirious excitement had vanished just as fast as it had sparked and was quickly replaced by absolute terror. This was not my mother, but an android, kneading my strapped-in hand in the way that she used to.

“Everything is going to be O.K.” its computer voice spoke mockingly, “Your friends and family love you. Everything is going to be O.K.”

I jerked my head towards the blinding fluorescent lights, screaming my soul of out of my body, and thrashing for dear life, trying to break free from the straps around my wrists and ankles. The heart rate monitor went rampant, reverberating through every corner of my mind. The robot responded, wielding a needle and slamming it down into my leg as I screeched in agony. The injected contents slid swiftly into my bloodstream.

“It’s time to go back to sleep, Galvin,” it taunted,

“Remember, everything is going to be O.K.”