For the first time I can remember- No.

For the first time
>>we
can remember

I don't know where I am.

It's a dream. But… I am… Dead.

We never dream when we're dead. We dream when we sleep.

So what… What is this?

I try to pull the buzzing swarm that is my insane mind back together.

I see… Hordes rushing to me. Misty. Indistinct.

Hundreds. Thousands, maybe.

All me. All… Past mes. Me's?

I?

Am I now the beast with a thousand Is, maybe?

It's so bizarre.

I see dozens of… Baseline, Human me. Wispy and indestinct. They look more and more haggard and worn. I see more with torn gashes in their bodies and faces that bear marks of being twisted in expressions of such horror that… Our faces tore, a little.

I see hundreds of me with marked skin, partially shaven scalps, filthy with grease and soot and blood, teeth chipped sharp, then… Metal teeth. Some near the end of that group with bits of scrap twisted and pounded into crude shapes, rived straight through meat to bolt into bone.

Mixed in with them are more of me. Slashed and bleeding. Some have ghostly limbs- More ghostly limbs? Ghosted ghosts? They are more ephemeral, but underneath I can see the crude loops of metal hammered into the bone where they took my limbs away.

Many of these have ghostly jaws and throats.

Some have blackened, charred skin.

And then… And then the hookers, ragged and gaunt and starved insane, shins and forearms burned down to blackened stumps where we hammered in hooks. The ship was dying, only tiny patches of intact deck were left after the Ganger war made it all collapse. Twisted trusses and chains criss-crossed the gaping, yawning, smoke-filled interior.

Our feet and our hands were the tools of our sins, of course. Better to burn them away and hope that whatever Gods we offended would see we were repentant.

They never answered, of course.

My hooks… I stole a full set of four from the cargo cranes. The only crude part were the sharpened spikes to fit between my charred bones.

Over and over and over, every iteration of them honed to a razor edge from iteration after iteration sliding and swinging from the bones of a nearly dead ship.

I had been so smart, remembering where I fell, running back to steal them from the one who had killed me.

But over the hooks, they had ghostly hands and feet.

And their eyes, nowhere near as lunatic as I remember.

They dance hand in hand with the versions of me that tried to escape to the islands of deckplate, some that made it, many that didn't, gaping from ragged wounds of hooks.

They swirl around me, prancing and cavorting, a timeline of me, over and over. From The Hit to The Panic to the Gangs to The Hookers, and then to that tiny glimmer of hope from when The Islands became The Decks again, before so many gaunt and drawn versions of me from The Starving.

Dancing and laughing together, even the battered and worn versions of Me that laboured and died under the whip and chain of the few Me that managed to fight our way to the catwalk, head high in the stink of shit and piss and rotting meat, tilling any who fell down into the new soil, fighting off The Machine's scavenger bots trying to reclaim the matter we used to feed ourselves, frantic to steal it back so it could print out more gaunt, starving Us-es.

Singing and dancing and laughing, swirling their hips, tiny skirts around barrel-wide waists and faint hips, black sweaters cropped high to proudly shake and flaunt tiny, sagging breasts.

… Or maybe we've diverted so far from baseline, for so long, we can't see where we started from, what we exaggerated and reshaped into what we consider Normal now.

I see Herders, I see battered cows, I see the wax and wanes of starvation and plenty, some showing where they were carved for meat, some with bellies sagging from where new life briefly swelled and then torn out, all to bloat our breasts with milk but prevent new mouths from demanding their fill.

There is one of me. When I was Cow.

I had no arms, but I had my legs.

The first to have four breasts, when we first learned to shape bodies.

This one is shiny, healthy, but ghostly pale from living in darkness. Her long hair lovingly combed and curled. Her chest proud and high, hips full and waist small, legs long…

I remember that was their mistake.

Arms or not, those legs ran VERY well.

Everything freezes. She locks eyes with me, and smiles.

>>Par… Ker. Pen… Ny.

The parade doesn't resume, really, it's as if it didn't pause at all. But it's faster now, swirling and blurring, all the happy prancing me in our silly little costumes, blurring into a vortex that coalesces into…

A point. A point I am experiencing all this from. Seeing and hearing it from, but it is only a point, the eye of the storm, the tip of the tornado.

Thousands and thousands of me swirl in tight, watching as I slowly trended… Taller, but all in legs. Hips slowly widening, waists narrowing, breasts growing larger and rounder, eyes and lips bigger while noses shrank.

The ugly stench of sweat and shit and piss that we never realized hung around us as humans, that oppressive stench that hung around us when we farmed ourselves and ploughed our corpses into the ground, it's blown away by a sudden swirl of fruity scents before settling on my familiar cherry smell.

I don't think any of us want to ever remember those smells again.

I watch the blur of me's, their rapid flicker across my perception. Their iterative tiny tweaks a slow, steady progression, as we pull ourselves from the horror times, distancing ourselves from being human, turning ourselves into… Well.

Peak Bimbo.

I fear it going too far, progressing to disconnected hovering tits and lips and hair floating above just long legs and ass rounded off where a waist should start.

Instead, it settles into a groove for a moment, until it blasts into a chaotic flurry of wildly varying shapes, sizes and colors, flicking by so fast it's like the grey fuzz when a monitor isn't connected.

The last of the line slams into the brightly glowing point in the fog, a misty halo swirling, spinning, an accretion disk of all that was me.

I hear my own voice. Singsong and silly, chanting that stupid song, slow and drawn out.

"Heeaads off, asses uuup. Thaaaaat's the waaay we liiiike to fuuuck. Heeeaaaads off, asses up…"

Thirty of me. Ivory white. Legs on the razor edge of too long, hips too wide, waists too tiny, breasts impossibly round and bouncy. All our collective fantasy ideals hovering on the razor edge, a hair's breadth from toppling headlong into freakish.

Our black sweaters soaked and shiny, bouncing breasts slicked across their tops with rivulets of blood. We bounce and carouse, carrying our laughing heads in our hands, tossing them back and forth in high arcs, trailing gouts of blood, giggling with glee.

They come closer, and with happy sighs, their misty forms swirl away into the spiral of fog, faster and faster, the point brighter and brighter as everything collects.

With a bang, and a blinding wash of white light that I have no eyes to see, no eyelids to clench shut, We explode into being.

I have a mouth to yelp with, arms to wave for balance, pompons rustling over my hands. I fall to my knees, gasping for air, a gargle and burble as I feel, taste blood in my mouth, see it sputter past my face, spray outward in a disk of fine red mist.

I stay on my knees on the soft grass, breathing slowly, forcing my heart to slow down.

I shake off one of my poms, glancing down at my chest, rising and falling.

My tits are ivory white with a sheen and rivulets of red blood flowing down.

I reach up, touch the bloodsoaked collar of my not-really-a-sweater. Feel my neck.

Feel where it ends.

Curious, I feel my jaw. I turn my head, my neck. It seems to work.

I wave my hand through the two inch empty gap. Hot blood splashes around my fingers. Two thick fountains up, two down.

I breathe deep. In and out. A current of air around my fingers, up and down in my bisected windpipe.

… Wwwwhatthefuck.

My mind swirls for an instant-
>>shink-shunk
Well my voice certainly works. My whole body convulses and I let out a happy wail, smelling cherries sputtered between my thighs, spritzing fans of blood in a halo from my neck as I try to slow my ragged breathing.

Holy fuck. Holy FUCK we really did that.

I giggle softly, legs shaky as I lean against the tree. The tree that is there because I leaned against it. I stand on the soft grass that was there because I needed something to fall to my knees on.

I slow my breathing again, slow the spray of my blood from my gasping breaths.

I start lifting my eyes.

I look, and more and more fills in because I need something to see.

Rolling grassy hills play themselves out before me, mountains beside water far in the distance. A darkened red sun is starting to set in a purple-wine sky.

My fingers on the bark of the tree make me notice countless more, row by row, space by space, not ruler straight but meandering with the hills.

I leave my tree and walk a bit, smelling the grass, smelling the fruit on the trees.

Cherries.

Then smoke.

And the stench of a million unburied corpses.

Over the rise I see the smouldering rubble of a city.

There are no individual fires, scattered about. It glows like the dying embers of a half-burnt log.

I realize I have never seen wood burned, on the ship.

I glance to one side.

I see myself. My first self. Raw baseline human.

My arms are raised, my feet well off the blood-soaked grass.

I hang from the nails driven through my wrists.

My eyes are glazed, face sallow. I have been here for a while.

My head is slumped to one side because my throat wasn't slashed by someone taking care with their blade. It's ragged and lopsided and ugly.

Careless.
>>wE'rE sUpPoSeD tO bE sCaReD, nOt CrItIqUiNg OuR mUrDeReR's KnIfEpLaY.

My once-pink sweater is torn open. I see my ribs, dark and dried, my breasts nailed to the tree on either side of my head.

I recognize panties around one ankle, stained yellow and brown.

Silly things. They just get in the way.

I sigh. It's supposed to be horrific, I know.

All I feel is pity, that I had such a sloppy-handed killer.

… I feel chill and sick suddenly. Realization.

This isn't The Club.

None of this would bring an ounce of joy.

All of it, pain and fear.

I have to look away.

The Red Lady is standing there.

Almost, but not.

She has her red leather boots and gloves. She has her fantastic body entwined with the red leather harness. But she has covered herself in a long red robe.

She wears no mask, but a red veil over her hair.

I recognize she is styled like a Nun without knowing what they are.

Her eyes have no mask, but they have many tears.

"You came so, so close," she whispers. "But see what you may unleash."

She raises her long arm and points. I turn and look.

The roiling angry red and black cloud of The Great Burning flashes over us and now I am not.

——

The Machine pukes me out on the floor. I think it turned me upside down a couple times and dumped me out head-first, along with all the fluids it didn't drain.

I flail a bit, feeling the metal plating under me, the fine mesh letting the thick goo percolate through.

I shivver, chilled as I look around. I don't know why I'm scared. Last I know I was a severed head, stacked with the heads of the rest of my dumb bimbo slut friends, getting facefuls of cum as our tiny brains cooled.

>> … wOw. LoOk i HaD hOoKs FoR hAnDs aNd EvEn I dOn'T tEaR mYsElF dOwN lIkE tHaT.

A strong arm suddenly wraps around my waist and hoists me off the floor. My arms and legs dangle as I'm thumped onto a huge, muscled hip.

It's covered in a silky brown fur. Long, strong legs take fast strides. Two broad hooves clomp against the deck, while long silken white hairs swirl around her ankles.

I want to appreciate the sculpting work on this exotic, but I can feel that whoever she is, she's not happy with me.

I look around, across to her other hip.

Marion is clutched over her other hip, dangling like me. She' s still in Black Lady, like me.

She gives me a nervous grin, wiggles her fingers, then just looks worried.

I look up. Giant brown-furred breasts bounce against each other, but when they part…

I get a glimpse of an inhuman face. Not horrible. An artful representation of an animal. A young horse's face, styled to be cartoonishly feminine and aesthetically pleasing.

The hat atop her now creamy hair helps me recognize Kaugurl pretty quick.

The angry glare down at me makes me cringe.

Nadine is sitting on Kau's broad shoulder. She is her cow self again, I can see.

She has her working clothes on. A cream blouse tailored loose and billowy to hide her six breasts, a black skirt around her legs to mid-shin, tight enough to not be twirly but not tight enough to be peel-off-this-wrapper sexy.

Her arms are crossed above her top breasts and she is FURIOUS. She's glaring dead ahead because she's too angry to look down at me.

I look back at Marion.

"I think I fucked up somewhere."