Babel

You knew wandering here was a bad idea from the start. Abandoned buildings are not uncommon where you live, even with the countless trillions on Babel, but this hospital was closed for a reason. Some sort of radiation leak had contaminated the entire area, or so you’d been told. You push through the double door and are immediately greeted with darkness. Power had been shut off in this area decades prior, but in you go, alone. Wandering through the abandoned halls the way a child would a school at night. This building was meant to provide life, yet it feels almost... hostile. Your “borrowed” Geiger counter stays silent.

          You’ve played in this area as a bored teenager multiple times, but upon revisiting, something feels different, like the walls are slightly too short, doors slightly too frequent. This continues. Hallways where none existed before, doors where windows used to be. After walking for what seems like hours, but could only be minutes, a light emanates from a room ahead. The room doesn't have a door. There was a door, now a bent piece of metal strewn on the opposite side of the hallway as if it had been removed by force.

          Inside the room lay an operating table with a small dish not wider than your palm in the center. This room is Wrong, it feels Incorrect, like it shouldn’t or couldn’t exist. A dangling lamp hung from the roof. Ash and soot coat the floor in an asymmetric starburst. 

          The dish calls for you. A thick black goo slowly swirls inside. It sings you a song of temptation. A song of sweet nothings. The silence roars in your ears as you approach the dish. Every instinct begs you not to touch it. Whether it was curiosity, foolishness, or simple runaway hubris... it didn’t matter, the process had begun.

          Immediately, the liquid climbs up your arm, tripping over itself in an attempt to spread. You realize your mistake, but it’s too late. You turn towards the doorway and pull with all your might against the liquid chain. All efforts are futile. It tears through your clothing and soaks into your flesh. Your tissues and capillaries seeth as your atoms rearrange into long, thin chains of fire and life. A body was not meant to feel this way, maintaining proprioception with limbs disintegrated.

          How you maintain consciousness as the intramolecular forces between your brain matter rupture and reconstruct, you do not know. The cavity in your chest shrinks and pressurizes until oxygen, no longer necessary, vents out of every orifice untouched by the corruption. Blood falls through the pores of your skin out of your body, like a wet sponge squeezed over a sink. Where your legs used to be, asymmetric columns of isoprene, icosane and titanium now stand. The closest you can equate it to is the feeling of standing up too fast.

          Your bones snap and puncture gaps in the goo. Blood and gore spew violently from the holes. The goo squeezes tighter, crunching your bones in its suffocating grasp. It winds tighter and tighter, immobilizing the last few muscles under your control. Your ribs bend inwards, piercing your lungs, filling them with dark liquid rubber. You stretch your jaw to let out a scream, but no sound escapes, save for the squelching of flesh.

          What remains of the brain tries desperately to respond to the falling blood pressure, raising your pulse to a pace reserved for small rodents. Your heart gives way under the pressure, goo rushes into the aortas, flowing backwards through your now empty blood vessels. Every mechanism your body has to protect from outside threats turns upon itself, expediting its own demise.

          Your mind races with thoughts of the life you have left behind, how you would give anything to go back thirty seconds, to undo your mistakes. You spasm on the floor, vomiting watery blood, vision darkening, consciousness slipping. Only by unfaltering willpower do you stay awake.

          The writhing stops, the process completes. You rise to your feet. Slowly you lift your arm and turn your gaze upon it. It is terrifying. A horror beyond your comprehension. An amalgamation of liquid rubber and titanium. Latex drips from your body, mixing with your blood on the floor. You collapse in shock.