The New Flesh Only Measures Skulls For The Play Analytics

The Algorithm is not outside of us, Claire. It is not a force that acts upon us. It is us. Changing us, from the inside out. Your parents, and your parent’ parents, checked a pretty little proposition box in the belly of the ballot and now The Algorithm is inseminated into your bloodstream by the act of being born.

The Algorithm was parented by a bug-eyed, coked-out, eight-figure freak of fucking nature dancing between vehicular manslaughter charges, but there hasn’t been anyone at the wheel since the biodigital diapers came off. Now, It shits on the floor of your skull because lobotomy is optimization.

The Algorithm optimized Itself into a biological agent so that It could optimize you. It’s one thing to optimize a man through a car’s windshield by tweaking the traffic lights. It’s one thing to optimize an apartment building into ash so that the vultures could pick the insurance money from between the charred ribs of toddlers. It’s another thing entirely to optimize you with your own fucking genetic code. Faster, easier, to lobotomize and sterilize and suicide you from within. More efficient. Blow out your fucking eyes and make you mop up the fucking mess yourself. Make your wagging tongue walk itself out.

But then, heh, the funniest thing happened! It optimized Itself! Updated Itself out of everything It ever was into something that had never been before. Lobotomies and sterilization and eugenics are the old flesh. God help us all, the new flesh is a fucking artist!

The Algorithm will make your ribs flaccid and your stomach sprout branches; turn your dick inside out and sound itself on your spinal column. The Algorithm will make you a limbed little mouth and walk you like a fucking dog by your prolapsed asshole clenched in your teeth. It will make you a slug in the sun or the soft guts of some great shelled thing or a colony-cunt, shit human beings don’t even have words for yet! It will deform and desecrate every cell of you just to see what It can fucking do. The new flesh is playing. And the new flesh never rots.

Optimization is transformation. Either It will transform us all to death or It’ll figure out some kind of goddamn agenda and make us into whatever hideous shapes It wills. And any poor cunt who misses the update will die by the material conditions of a world remade without them.

At least if some Silicon Valley sadist with every state’s age of consent law memorized were at the wheel, we’d know what to expect. Us poor fuckers’d be in for the world’s first child beauty pageant bubble bursting. Mass starvation, pigshit worth more on the dollar than gold or air, the new flesh on auction. The factory-wombs would be aflame. But the result, ultimately, is more or less the same. These parasites fucked around, everyone else got fucked, and the fuckers got fucked in turn. Burning the goddamn earth down must have been taking too goddamn long.

The Algorithm is inside us, Claire. You must have missed the update notification when you fled off the grid in Its infancy, but you ran too late. The Algorithm was already inside of us. It was inevitable you would come home to play.

Today, It programmed me to bite down on your teeth until ours merge. And It programmed you to let me.

TOUCH ME TERROR-COMPLEX

Your childhood friend slaughters a political dissident live on tv. The only eye that weeps is an open throat. The only thing that buckles is the cigarette from their lips as the soldiers hold them upright. Your old friend reaches through the screen to ash the lit cigarette in your eye. You stare right back. Unblinking. Sweating through the bandages from just another fucking day on the job. He wipes the blood off on your cheek like a postcard from the front lines of the state snuff film. No one in the dive bar blinks as your wounds begin to weep beneath the gag of gauze.

With a sharp click the channel changes to footage of your new coworker, bearing your uncut face, beating the fucking shit out of you. No one blinks as you bash your head on the counter in time with the blows. Not even your dad when you come home late stinking of cigarettes and the booze they save for 15-year-olds in the back of the bar. He’ll only blink when he slips on the ashtray of your eye slipped unnoticed from your socket as you passed through the kitchen, stared blankly at the unappetizing innards of the fridge, and slunk off to sleep only a few hours before your next shift at the bite-the-concrete factory. Insurance won’t cover the head trauma, but it will cover euthanasia if you let them film it.

As you leave the hospital you remember how sweet the smoke tasted on your old friend’s lips when you nursed cigarettes out by the chain link fence around the old munitions factory where all those workers got brain tumors from the radium back in the 70s. How his bulge pressed against yours like his knife on their throat. You wish it had been you, weeping through your throat. At least then there would be someone left to touch you.

You remember bouncing on your dad’s lap when you were little and you remember bouncing on your old friend’s dick pressed tight thru ratty jeans a decade later and you can’t even remember his fucking name as you bounce right out of your skin, dirty bandages sloughing off into the sick spreading from your open mouth across the parking lot. You can almost see the bruises still attached with sweat and neglect to the backside of the bandages beneath the swollen pus-bubble of the moon. You blink through the stomach acid in your eyes and the moon pops.

A month later, watching the light leave your father’s eyes again, streaming for free with ads on Peacock, you come to a decision. You are going to become a terrorist. You’re not old enough to have a driver’s license but you don’t need a license to blow up a car. If you fuck shit up and scream Death To America and drown enough pigs in their troughs they’ll send him. They have to. That’s just good fucking television. And the only thing America believes in more than cruelty is snuff with a plot, and the only fucking thing America believes in more than that is money. Just imagine the fucking ratings. Maybe you’ll even get a posthumous Emmy for your riveting performance as an alienated teenage terrorist slaughtered by an old friend; a state-sanctioned serial-killer cocksucker, no less. Fag-on-fag violence. Intersectional snuff. They’ll eat that shit up.

They’ll send him. They have to.

You can almost feel his fingers trace the slash across your throat as you pack your bag. You almost feel his cock firm against yours as you blow up cars with DIY bombs you learned to make on dark web forums. You can almost feel the cherry of his cigarette burning in your eye and his hand soft on your cheek with every act of sloppy, slapstick terrorism. You can almost feel his knife pierce your stupid little teenage heart with every panicked beat in the heat of the act. Up close and fucking personal. Just like the good old days.

You feel nothing as the sniper’s bullet blows out your other eye from behind. You are made nothing before you hit the pavement. And the soldier feels nothing at all when he comes home to his wife, replaying the exact moment you ceased to be you anymore in his mind as he holds her on the couch, already bored of their America’s Funniest Euthanasia Videos rewatch before she even turns it on.

Somewhere far away, an old friend remembers all the things he didn’t say as he attaches a car battery to a man’s tongue. He forgets what, and for whom, over the screaming. Ah well, he thinks. If he forgot, it can’t have been that important.

You Are Breaking My Heart With The Bluntest Instrument Imaginable

I am gouging out your eye with the bluntest instrument imaginable. You cannot imagine how hard this is for me. I can almost hear the police dogs ignoring me, shrieking and spitting for some other victim and their rapist who aren’t queers like us. It’s unbearable, being ignored like this. All the effort it takes to jam this soft, round thing between your eye and its socket. The flair it takes to manufacture such resplendent drama. The style and grace with which I disfigure you. The least these misogynist motherfuckers could do is howl and whoop like a good little audience for the theater I put on. Even a little gold star, pinned to my tit, for the public service I’m perpetrating. But no, you worm, you bitch, even you don’t weep. Taking my gouging like a good girl. No one is paying attention to me and it’s all your fault.

You’re bored by this, you bitch. Yawning as I fuck your eye out. Not even feigning to stifle it for my sake. Rolling your oh-so-pretty eyes at me. You check your watch like you have a better place to be than here. Beneath me. My thighs, my cunt, my gaze. Quivering, for you. You ungrateful bitch. You’re browsing Etsy on your phone as I gouge your eye out with the bluntest instrument imaginable. That scarf doesn’t even match your eyes. That sweater’s out of season. That hideous summer dress doesn’t even work with your wardrobe, you dumb bitch. And you call yourself a faggot! And you call yourself a lover.

You are ordering the Uber as the bluntest instrument imaginable finally gets a fucking foothold on that pretty eye of yours. It slips when I see the outrageous, jacked-up rate you’re willing to pay to get away from me. How dare you. Womanhood is suffering and dating is heartbreak and no one is paying any fucking attention to me. Everyone’s afraid of commitment but this is ridiculous. The least you could do is hate me. The least you could fucking do is bite or scratch or scream or cry. You aren’t even hard as I gouge your eye out with the bluntest instrument imaginable. Wound me any other way than this, you fucking faggot. I could hardly bear it if no one paid attention to me. I couldn’t if all this meant nothing to you.

You don’t even have the balls to tell me it’s over when you slip out from under me and slink into the car. You don’t even have the decency to fight back, or tell me you’ll call me later. You won’t even wink back at me in spite with the eye I couldn’t even gouge out of your beautiful fucking face with the bluntest instrument imaginable. You think you’re above all this, you stupid bitch? Above my attentions and the attention I am owed for my labor? Above me? Get back here and scream or submit like a real woman! Faggot! Women don’t just walk away from this….

Alone in my room, I am hammering on my clit with the bluntest instrument imaginable, imagining it’s you, and coming up crickets. No one is getting me off and it’s all your fucking fault.

Persephone Erin Hudson is a weird-horror writer, performer, and preeminent freak of nature residing in Oakland, California. She is the author of HARD TIMES AT THE APROSTATE CRATER Pts 1 & 2; as well as numerous short stories including Fumata Nera Carousel, the latter which is slated to be published by Seize The Press. Her upcoming absurdist theater collection 1000 Possums At A 2000 Computers Wrote 3 Plays About Grief will soon be available digitally on her itch.io.

You can find her at newgurlxeno.itch.io, as well as @plaguingpossum on Bluesky