“Ohm…”

“Ohm…”

“Ohm…”

Dr. Daniels was in the lotus position, doing his best to clear his mind, trawling through his thoughts and feelings. Every time he caught a bit of foreign matter, he scooped it out and tossed it into his mind-basket.

Eight hundred years after he ate Chicago for being rude, he was still picking a bit of jaggoff out of his brain every now and then.

As it turns out, eating people and absorbing their memory did make you crazy. So he had turned his attention to mastering his own mind. He needed mental control on an industrial scale, so he sought out the last remaining masters of Zen meditation…and ate them.

That hadn’t helped as much as he hoped it would.

Still, in the following eight hundred years, he’d become very proficient in isolating and containing stray bits of other people. He did it by cobbling pieces together into functional people and then turning them off, making them go dormant inside him.

Dr. D had the distinct impression Kuragor had wanted him to fail spectacularly and turn into a mindless mass of shifting flesh which the god would then add to his mass. There was no evidence for it, just a gut feeling about what lay at the end of the path for him if he went on a rampage and consumed planets willy-nilly.

God wants to watch me crash and burn? Wants to eat me? I’ll eat him back. I’ll attain humility, spiritual-ness, and Omnipresent Supergalactic Oneness just to spite him. That’ll show the fucker.

He wasn’t really going to eat Kuragor, though. It didn’t escape his notice how similar the two were already, and there was every possibility that, upon consuming the deity, he would become him, which would be the height of stupidity.

I ain’t nobody’s paradox bitch!

He Z-snapped.

Huh, there’s another chunk from a black woman…feels young. I’ll add it to Shayan.

Basket full, Dr. Daniels closed his eyes and entered his Mind-Warehouse, far less snobby than a Mind-Palace.

He stepped into the darkness of his Mind-Warehouse and flicked the light switch next to the door. They popped on with the sound that high powered industrial lights make, the kind you see at a Costco or a professional pot-growing operation.

The pale light revealed row upon row of people standing in formation with their eyes closed, in varying states of opacity. Most of the people in the back were completely solid, and the ones toward the front were mostly transparent. Thousands of them

Shayan, the sassy young black girl he’d been building from spare parts was closer to the front, but mostly solid, since he’d found a lot of pieces for her recently. She was standing between Gary, the stupid, compensating, middle aged white man with a pedo mustache and an enormous beer gut, and Marianne, the slutty, slutty, frog-faced woman with a strange pear shape.

Dr. Daniels pulled the z-snap out of his mind-basket, filled with bits and pieces of people he’d eaten, and put the little nub of Z-snap to Shayan’s chest. The piece sank in, and she got a little bit more solid.

In my head, playing with my dolls again, Dr. Daniels thought to himself, taking a step back and putting his hands on his hips, surveyed the tens of thousands of minds in his collection.

It’s all coming together. He got back to putting together his people, plucking traits and beliefs and experiences out of his basket and putting them where they fit. In the beginning he’d made bimbos, sex kittens, chiseled super-heroes, and dashing rogues, but it had gotten stale quickly. Nowadays he liked putting a lot of detail and craftsmanship into his lifelike creations, editing and fitting disparate memories and thoughts together as seamlessly as possible, such that they could operate independently if they had to, with no inkling that they were artificial.

Suddenly Dr. Daniels was wrenched out of his creative glow when he felt Kuragor ping him through another Apostle. Damn union rules.

I am bored. The voice rang through his mind like thunder, violently shaking his Mind-warehouse and causing the lights in the ceiling to swing around precariously.

His puppet’s faces alternated between light and shadow as the lamps swung above them, making their features seem like they were writhing back and forth, changing, shifting…

As one, their eyes opened and fixed on Dr. Daniels.

“I thought I told you never to call me on this line.”

“Garth.” They spoke as one, sending a wave of formless energy through him.

“Ayup.”

“I am bored. I do not care if you plan to oppose me or not, but do something already.”

Dr. Daniels glanced around the warehouse and checked his basket. Seems clean enough. He could probably stand to consume another army or two, since he’d mostly finished digesting the previous handful.

“You gonna try to eat me?”

“Only if you spiral out of control. It is one of a god’s tasks, to keep our followers in check.”

“Huh. And you’re absolutely, definitely, not a future version of me that got catapulted into the past or anything are you?”

“I cherish your imagination, Garth.”

“I noticed a distinct lack of denial.”

“The west has become a Powder keg. I wish to see it ignited.”

“Of course you do.” Guess I could say hi to Leanne and see how the kids are doing while I accidentally a war.

“How about, as a totally chaotic, random thing, I go and defuse aforementioned powder keg?”

“Jim and Dragus will be humiliated.”

“Oh. Well, why didn’t you say so?” Dr. Daniels said, rolling up his sleeves. “Transform and roll out.”

***Tibet***

Neil Yao carried Master Fuk Mi’s chamber pot back from where he’d tossed the contents and scrubbed it fresh for the new day. The icy wind outside had ripped away any Zen that he might have cultivated, leading to a hurried scraping of the poop-water followed by a quick rinse before he jumped back inside the monastery, his nipples aching from the cold.

Once he was back inside, he slowed down to a serene walk, constantly trying to temper his mind. Constant awareness, especially of yourself, was what the master taught, guiding generation after generation of students to enlightenment.

It was rumored that the man was old beyond words, as the most aged of the master’s disciples would often mention anecdotes from their predecessors going back at least a hundred years. In all that time, the Master hadn’t aged a day.

Not to say he wasn’t ancient.

Neil glanced over at the Master, in a perfect lotus, contemplating the universe. His deep, resonating voice washed over the other students and instilled a sense of tranquility as he chanted.

One day, I will find the peace that these men have achieved, Neil thought to himself. His parents had fled to the West before the influence of the Mississippi empire reached the coast, seeking shelter from their tyranny across the ocean.

His mother and Neil had dived into the culture head first, but his father refused to learn more than the bare minimum to live in their new home, and often spoke English at home, making Neil one of the few people in the monastery who could speak it.

This fact had never been an issue before today.

The ancient, gnarled Master, Fuk Mi sat motionless in the lotus position in the center of the room, surrounded by his pupils who hung on every word of his timeless wisdom.

As Neil was passing by, moving to the next elder’s bedroom, the Master’s steady chant changed, drawing the attention of every one of his devoted pupils.

Fuk Mi began to writhe in place, his voice becoming a shrill wail, sending a lance of panic through Neil and everyone present. Startled, his followers crowded around him, looking for any way they could help. The old man clutched his head and gave out pained, full throated screams.

“Master! What is wrong?” one of the elder monks spoke.

They saw the old man shiver and swallow back another scream…

“My children…I have one final piece of wisdom to impart on you…come closer.” He panted, groaning in pain.

The disciples crowded even closer around him.

“Get everyone, everyone gather around.”

A runner went off to get the rest of the monks who were off cooking, doing laundry, etc.

In a matter of minutes the entire monastery was gathered around Master Fuk Mi, all thirty-six members holding back their tears, eagerly awaiting their master’s wisdom and at the same time dreading the last time they would ever hear him speak.

“Everyone’s here,” he said, panting as he glanced around. “Good, then these are my final words for you.”

He drew a wheezing, shuddering breath and held out his hand, extending his gnarled, bony, trembling index finger.

“Pull my finger.”

The elders seemed confused, but one of the younger monks did as he said, popping the ancient man's knuckle.

Fuk Mi’s skin turned translucent for an instant, revealing something squirming around inside him.

In front of the stunned monks, the gnarled master distended outward, then exploded in a tangle of viscera, coating each and every one of them in a bucketful of skin, blood and guts.

Neil reeled back and spat, then began to panic as the blood began squirming out of his mouth, dripping to the floor with a mind of its own.

By all the gods! Neil thought with his dad’s favorite exclamation, retching on the floor.

The shouting got stronger, and Neil glanced over to see people climbing out of Fuk mi’s chest, all the while the Master’s head howled with a sound that set the hairs on Neil’s neck straight up.

He and the other monks scrambled backward, their bulging eyes the only part of their faces that weren’t

First was a curvaceous woman wearing a confident smile followed by a man a bigger cock, more muscle than Neil’d ever seen in his life, and a chiseled jaw. Then there was a series of dozens of women with extremely exaggerated features and balloon-like breasts jiggling in front of them, running the gamut of every race Neil knew of, and some he didn’t. then there was a procession of more and more alien creatures, some far larger than the master himself, tearing their way out of his body with blades that jutted out of their many limbs.

Then the sexy aliens started climbing out of the old man, in a discernable gradient. Warped creatures made of armor and muscle gradually twisting into shiny black, ribbed beings with pale milky breasts, then worm-like creatures that slithered along on nipple-legs jutting out of hundreds of breasts that ran down the creature’s length.

Then there were four-segmented, black, chitinous..things that seemed like nothing more than women’s hips stacked on top of each other.

The wild and creative became eldritch and bizarre, to downright stomach turning, eventually leading Neil to lose his meager breakfast of flatbread and rice as they marched through the slowly rising tide of blood.

“What’s going on?” Someone said in English, causing Neil to raise his head.

After the series of monsters parading out of Fuk Mi, came seemingly normal people, aware of their surroundings, looking around and speaking, unlike the single-minded creatures that came before.

“Why can’t I stop walking?”

“Somebody help me!”

“What’s happening to me!?”

“Mommy!”

Despite their apparent sense of self, they couldn’t stop their forward march as they looked around in sheer terror, and that made Neil’s heart feel like it was going to fall out of his chest. He needed to escape, but his limbs wouldn’t support a ghost, let alone himself.

Finally, after a few minutes of people streaming out, a pale man of average height, brown hair and blue eyes tugged himself loose from Fuk Mi’s chest. He was the only creature wearing any clothes at all, wearing only a parted, pale leather overcoat that Neil knew was made from human skin.

The man surveyed the carnage and the shivering, blood covered monks, nodded to himself, and followed the stream of abominations out the massive double doors leading into the snowy mountain peaks.

Once outside, the stranger turned and closed the monastery's massive double doors, giving them a sardonic grin.

Once the door was shut, the silence was complete, and all that was left of the temple’s master was a shredded husk of skin.

“Fuck me.” Neil breathed one of his father’s favorite swears.