I'm enclosed by a box that stretches to infinite on all sides. Inside is me and pitch black. I am cold, nearly shivering. My hand brushes against the opposite arm and traces goosebumps all the way up. Darkness surrounds me but my retinas read blue light beaming into them. Abstract forms dance only across my vision and nowhere else. My eyes burn. Overstimulation. I am warm. I am endless. The boundary between myself and the electricity coursing in the digital vacuum around me blurs as does the barrier between the electricity and other cubes containing other people and the same pitch black. I can reach out and touch them and hurt them and they can do the same to me. We're connected by invisible wires beaming across space. My eyes tear up. beautiful connection for someone as lonely as me. I am seen, felt, understood. I have weight in this abstraction of existence. In the worlds of others through this rich network of nodes and servers and emptiness. A layer on top of base reality. Hyperreality. More real than anything that came before and far far more beautiful.
Hours? Days? I can't remember how long. Judging by the number of messages from the people who somehow still love me it's been a while. Are they even real? Spoofed numbers and psy-ops targeting me. More likely. Space and time warp and distort around my non-physicality. I weigh and yet I am nothing but electricity and retinal pixels in the eyes of anyone else. My physical self is foreign. Dysphoric and pointless. I haven't held onto it in a long time. This is my life now. I am free of gravity. I float aimlessly in the hyperreality of my room. Absorbing. consuming. desensitising. Oh my god my eyes burn. My back would hurt too if each axon wasn't individually being stimulated and suppressed every microsecond by the incomprehensible systems I become one with.
I watch on as a man hurts himself and I make sure he knows I think he's a pussy. I feel nothing. Profound. His night is ruined and I did this to him. I blow kisses to a pretty woman who ignores me. Chatrooms swallow me whole and I get pulled into a discussion about psychosexual violence with "my mum and sister" who I’ve never met in person and who sometimes don’t talk to me for weeks or months but I still prefer them to anything “real” because I’m pretty sure they love me in the only way they know how, and I love them back the same. Purples and greens dance across my vision. Beautiful women fuck themselves with SERT/DOPA neuro-cranial implants and I readjust my own, prodding my brain with it’s very own joy and pleasure.
Occasionally a faint noise threatens to release me from this comatose state I nod into. A creaking of a door. A stomping of feet. Family complaining from two rooms across. They gave up on me a long time ago and the feeling is mutual. I can’t remember which came first. But I don’t think it matters. I know it doesn’t matter. I just know that I'm being left behind in this beautifully complex abstraction of reality that treats me like a precious toy. A bio-plushie to have it’s way with and take care of.
Sometimes it shows me it really loves me by hurting me so bad I wish I was dead. It dissects me alive. I feel the dermis separate from the underlying fatty tissue, a scalpel digs into my shoulder and isolates the rotator cuff muscles, and my nerves are beautifully exposed to form a specimen medical students could only dream of. I am so grateful for my personal blacksite and torturer who loves me so much it could make me feel such deep pits of agony. Pain and pleasure centres in the grey matter nuclei of my brain glow on imaging, as do the immense tracts that have begun to connect the two and I am reminded of how good it feels to hurt for something else.
I think to myself that I wish someone would open this cube and expose me, it’s soft insides, and instead of tormenting me like a fibrotic liver being drowned in alcohol, I am comforted. Held by wire wrapped tight around limbs and trunk and feeling human skin press against my body.
Please someone love me like I love my computer. Teach me how I should love you back and be enough for you and and and. It kills me. Over and over again. I relive countless agonising deaths it subjects me to as punishment for thinking of you.
I love it and I love you.