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The Art of Self-Destruction
    By Douglas Shoback
     
     
    Copyright 2014 Douglas Shoback
     
    Published by Douglas Shoback at Smashwords
     
     
     
    Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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    Table of Contents
    The Rooms
    Glitch in the Program
    Desiccated Sock
    We Don't Make Mistakes
    The Heart Wants What the
Heart
    The Machine Stops
    Red Paper Lanterns
    There's No Place Like 127.0.0.1
    µ
    The Sky Above the
Harbor
    About the Author
    Contact the Author
     
     
The Rooms

     
    What is truly disturbing about the rooms is
not their construction-they're only as big as a walk-in closet,
minus the clothes and shelves and racks-but what is held within
them. Most rooms hold a presence, a feeling of past inhabitants:
their feelings seeping into brightly painted walls or bubbled
wallpaper stippled with floral patterns. Dreams, pieces of lives
gone by. A reality forced into empty space, humanity becoming a
piece of plaster, laminated wood, wainscoting, perhaps the carpet,
if there is any. These rooms don't have plaster or wood or carpet.
They do not hold a presence. They hold a scream.
    At first glance, each room looked normal.
Tiny spaces that served no purpose outside of existing. Lined side
by side, rooms extended down an alleyway, metal doors scored and
matte in the buzzing lights overhead, each one the same. Step
inside a room though and it took over. It enveloped you, sucked you
into darkness and pumped the air from your lungs until the faint
light from overhead ventilation faded and faded and the door itself
became another wall, not a means of escape; a barrier to pound and
scream against as your lungs further compressed, your eyes faded,
pupils pinpointed, and a gentle laughter overtook your ears as your
fists slowly, slowly pounded against the door, each strike growing
longer in time, until you finally gave up and fell to the ground,
stared to the ceiling, legs folded fetal style- the room
controlling your body, forcing it into this position-and you
descend into the darkness around you, become a part of the room
itself not just a presence. Your body becoming nothing but another
brick in the wall, next to another brick that was once another
body. Body upon body, building walls but never growing.
     
    But this is only a feeling. This does not
really happen. It's only a room.
     
    Yet the rooms of this place dripped. The
walls are plastered with hooked razors coated in dried blood of the
unreal. Physically, the walls are painted black. They have to be.
Otherwise the programs wouldn't be as believable. But they still
felt hooked, violence everywhere, dried blood from countless
bodies. Infinite screams from infinite nobodies. Death hidden
underneath the sheen of black metal. The blood in the thread
disappearing once the door is opened, flickering light once again
bathing the space as it is shown to the world-normal, nothing, a
room. Empty.
    Men have entered these rooms dressed in
myriad of clothing, from business suits to rags. All with the same
intention. All with the same buried instinct, primitively
civilized, masked underneath eons of enlightenment. And here, in
these rooms, the human emerged, flowing streams of viscous fluid
dripping to the hard floor, pooling like gel, dark eyes gleaming
red, teeth bared, nails scratching across stone, breaking and
splintering. The walls exploded in blood, gore, flesh-faith became
nothing, belief dissipated with the clothes, replaced with pure
fury and yellowed teeth. He was what he is and nothing more.
    The room folded in on