They grew in and out of the walls in a deranged, pulsating anatomical puzzle, something that was part machine and part living tissue, a terrible excrescence of fleshy hoses and bone pipes and convoluted networks of tissue and gears and ribbed projections, jutting bones and limbs and agonized faces with hollow-socketed eyes. A nightmare, industrialized fusion welded into a common whole, horribly alive and functioning in some dire symbiosis. Faces were distorted into screaming fright masks, huge crater-like carbuncles giving birth to coiling arrow worms and the fluttering tentacles of anemones. Sea lice crawled in drifting kelp-like mops of hair, bodies rife with barnacles and mussels like the hulls of sunken ships.

Everything seemed to slowly pulsate and crawl, vibrate and tremble with a horrendous rhythm.

Hubbs heard a wild, shrieking cry like that of a hyena and he realized it was coming from inside his own head. He tried to blink away what he was seeing, but its reality was unimpeachable. The tunnel was a great, corkscrewing biomechanical machine, empty eyes creeping with tiny crustaceans staring out at him, hundreds of mouths opening and closing like those of deep-sea fish.

No, no, no…I don’t want this. Please let me go…just let…me…go.

He was being pulled deeper and deeper into it. His Exosuit would not respond. The controls were dead. The city wanted him to become part of it and he could feel that to his core. What he was seeing was secret and ancient and unknown. The desire to be part of it surged inside him.

As the laughter of the many mouths continued to echo in his skull, he realized how easy it would be. All he had to do was activate the emergency release and jettison the suit and he would be free, a shining pearl ejected from an oyster, a baby bird bursting from an egg. Yes, yes, yes! the voices cried. They screeched like rusty hinges and crackled like static discharges until he could not think rationally.

Yet, through the chaotic, incomprehensible babble of voices and the forking lightning of impulse and the ice-cold implosions of fear in his chest and belly, his own voice called out, No, you fucking idiot! If you release the suit you’ll die! You’ll drown! Suffocate! And as he thought that, he realized that something was happening inside the suit…he was being colonized. Crawling, dripping things like weeds and sponges, sea cucumbers and plaits of red algae were consuming him. They were dissolving his flesh, adhering to his skeleton, burrowing and infesting and if he didn’t jettison the suit, there would be nothing left of him.