Brain Rot

Laughter echoed through the glass walls and ricocheted like a bullet down the smooth hallway. She was laughing for no good reason and the techs knew as much. It was just another daydream of slitting her throat and spilling all those warm red secrets across the floor.

Did she have any secrets left? Ah, that was a difficult question when the organization outside these glass walls had peeled apart her thoughts and examined each one. They still couldn't figure out exactly how she worked though, so some secret must still be stored in her bones.

She laughed harder, twining thin arms around her hollow belly. The black cotton t-shirt and pants swayed along with her. She was loud. They hated the sound. She knew that much.

Purple mist floated out of the only sharp-looking objects in the room: a set of black metal speakers shoved in the back corners of the room set so far out of reach that their danger was laughable.

The mist was meant to calm her but it didn't work anymore.

She lept to the top of her mattress, gaining only an additional handful of inches, and inhaled as hard as she could. Someone somewhere grimaced as they watched her suck the vibrancy from the air.

It was a drug now. A new way to get a high.

The techs hadn't figured it out yet but they would. Just like everything, they would figure out how to dull her again. Unfortunately, the hunger was a persistent thing. No science, no drug, no dream could outpace it.

She settled herself back on the edge of the mattress.

It used to stretch her calves when she sat like this but that was when the memory of being brought here was fresh. Grey eyes swept over to the glass wall exposing the hallway.

All three walls exposed the hallway, she thought, but this one was how she could get out. The other two just connected her to the empty glass cages to either side of her. There were two rows, one on each side of the hallway. Every room was empty. All the walls were glass.

The only wall that was not glass was the one at the rear. It was solid black, looming behind her bed shedding a sullen atmosphere across the whole place like dog hair. As though this place needed the help. For as far as she could see to her left and right were glass cages the same as this one.

Thin. Easily broken. And somehow standing unscratched.

Blue light, pale with its own sickness, underlit rooms and ran the length of the hallway. It was the only source of light in this place. Glassy grey eyes reflected the long line running across the front of her room. It would have been a pretty color if it hadn't been blanched out and numb.

But that was the truth about the soul of this place.

It was heartless.

Weak ecstasy pulsed through her. The drug should have made her sleep but it didn't anymore. Pale eyelids covered in purple veins slid shut. The ruse. The all-important ruse.

If she betrayed the ruse, punishment would follow.

Punishment. It was never an overt thing. Never gross or unbearable. Just a simple shifting of chemicals until the mist coming out of the speakers made her pliant and fatigued. Quiet. The people running this place liked the quiet. Or maybe that wasn't quite right. They liked her quiet.

Maybe she did. Maybe she didn't.

But it would have been nice to figure it out.

It was a dustless place. Messless. A small pill dropped in from a narrow hole in the ceiling overhead each night when the primary lights shut off and dim, sporadic night lights came on. Two hours after by her count a pill fell to the floor with a dull tap. She drank it down with the silicone water nozzle too weak to do any damage to her skin sticking out of the wall beside her bed. And it silenced her hunger.

No food. No mess. No need for human interaction.

The lights went purple. Blue. Dark purple this time.

She stood.

This was an impossibility. Purple light licked up her throat, touching a handful of scars and turning them white like lightning. Sweat beaded along her temple. The coolness of the room could not compete with the heat of this fresh excitement.

Purple had never happened before. Not once. Now here it was, poisoning the color scheme.

The glass cracked.

One line became hundreds, all of them spidering across the clear surface. The purple light caught in all the minuscule gaps. They ran like rivers. More, more, more, more lines. She was transfixed. A hunger she had forgotten about surged within her stomach.

She could get out.

One step, then two, then six and she was in front of the breaking point, nose to nose with opportunity. A thin finger tapped once and the whole thing fell to pieces.

Eons warped in her mind. Invisible hands gripped her arms. She could feel each captor press themselves into her memory like asteroids, taking colossal chunks out of her identity until she was reduced to this.

Who was she before this place?

The answer sat in the unbreathed air of the hallway just on the other side of the shattered glass. She stepped across the marble-sized shards and into the hallway.

Cold black tiles pressed against her bare feet. One empty black hallway stretched off in each direction from her position. It was much taller than what she could see from her glass box stretching high enough up that she had to wonder how it could stand. The hallway cut through the black space like a wound.

One end of the cut was blank. Dead. The other was anything but. Situated neatly way down the hallway, was one single mirror.

It hooked its fingers in her belly and tugged. Driven by compulsion and nothing else, she padded lightly down the hallway, following the constricting focus of her vision. The mirror glinted purple. It whispered wicked thoughts through her head. Dangerous thoughts.

Blood slicked the tile behind her.

The glass had left its mark.

It was a long walk but she was disconnected from the movement. Each step was foreign and forgotten. She wanted the glass at the end. The candy dangling behind the medicine.

The mirror was a big thing, rectangular but without a frame. It was simply a slab of glass covering the width of the hallway. There were no doors. Just the mirror and rows of empty glass cages behind her. No chance of escape.

She noted it but didn't care. Her eyes were fixated on something far more interesting. Jutting from her scalp, glowing in the purple light, were ghostly blue worms. She stared at them, watching carefully how they seemed to move as though stuck in an invisible current.

"There are worms in my brain," she whispered, bringing one hand up to the squirming white thing jutting from the buzzed landscape of her dark hair.

It was cool against her finger and wet.

The thing coiled around her digit, prodded at her fingertip, and then recoiled. The purple light made it look ghostly. Sick. She met the steel of her gaze. There was necrosis in her blood. She could see it in the drugged pupils eating up the bleak grey irises of her eyes. The worms were feasting on the dying grey matter of her rationality, weren't they?

Her fingers pinched the base lightly. It squished but did not give much more.

There were dozens of them sprouting from her head. Each one seemed to defy gravity, floating in a twining sort of way toward the light beneath the mirror.

"It shouldn't be there," she mumbled.

The last she checked the only thing covering her head was her fuzzy hair, sticking up like freshly mowed grass and just as straight. Being in a glass container, there was no shortage of keeping her own company. She knew herself intimately by this point, familiar with each bump and groove in the surface of her skin all because of the glass. There were no worms or wormholes on her head. Not the last she checked.

"Mirrors aren't liars." Her voice was rough from disuse. "They can't lie."

It wasn't in their fundamental nature to lie that was what made funhouse mirrors so deceitful. Mirrors did not lie, they uncovered. They spoke in such clear truths that there was no way to even avoid them. Mirrors were like eyes. They were unable to lie.

She touched the cool glass with her other hand.

Pale blue worms wiggled in their holes, rising out of her head. They weren't very long, about the length of her fingers, but stout. Thick with nourishment. Full to the point of expansion.

"My mind is decomposing."

The worms were eating dead dreams. They were feasting on dead, decaying thoughts. She ran her finger down one of their wet bodies, soaking the pad of her finger in slime. They were eating her dreams. Maybe that was why she didn't have any anymore. They had all been meticulously devoured by the worms in her head.

Her hands shook. The tremble worked its way into her core.

"Hands, be still."

The tremble only worsened.

She pinched the base of the worm but its wiggling would not stop. It should have been impossible but in its thin body, she could feel a pulse. How perfectly it kept with the steady thumping rhythm of her heart. The grey eyes in the reflection flashed in the purple light and something died inside her chest.

The worms were feasting on the memories of her captors. Soon, she wouldn't recognize them. She would have no identifying information at all. The worms were stealing it from her. They were accelerating the rot.

"I struggle with the discovery of destruction," she said, her intonation dead as she repeated the words of an old doctor with unkind eyes. "So I imitate it."

The pale, white-blue worm squirmed between her fingertips. She stared for a moment at her reflection before sucking the worm down her throat.

This was the only way to escape.

She pinched another at its base and slowly extricated it from the tight, twisting tunnel weaving deep into her brain. Depositing it on her tongue, she slurped it down too. This was what predators do, she rationalized. They destroy the things standing in their way.

Pain sank its teeth into her head as she tugged on the third worm. Blood dribbled from the hole as she swallowed it. A hollow grey look had overcome her reflection.

She would rather die than endure the death of her thoughts.

Fingers steady now, she set to work. Six. Nine. Fifteen.

And lucky number nineteen.

It came loose easily but something else had dislodged. Blood, hot and sticky poured from the wormholes in her scalp. Frantic, panicked, afraid, she dropped the worm to the ground and started shoving her fingers in the holes, begging them to stop.

The thing curled around her ankle, growing in size and strength. She desperately sobbed, smearing blood across the reflection as she stumbled and fell. The blood wouldn't stop coming. Cold dizziness crept into her vision but it could not come soon enough.

Grey eyes slid south, slowed and fogged with blood loss.

A pinching mouth had formed on the worm. Half her leg already was in the worm's throat. The lights flickered and went off. Cold slime crept up to her thigh. A high-pitched scream tore from her, bouncing down the hallway and shattering all the glass.

The world exploded inside her. This was the end.

She woke with a gasp, sliding off her mattress onto the floor. Her chest heaved beneath the simple black cotton shirt. Copper from her bitten tongue filled her mouth and she could smell the hint of mint. Frantic eyes darted across the room and found a sickening sight.

Dark blue mist and red lights.

They had figured it out. They had figured out that the drugs weren't working.