Techmology - is it good, or is it wack?

It wasn’t working. He needed it and it wasn’t working.

Martin stared at the screen and all the little muscles in his body twitched. There was no sound, no light, no space or form coming through. All the things he listened to and watched and played and read to make him feel like a human being had drained away, because it simply was not working.

He drummed his fingers on the desk, then his knuckles, then his fists, making noise. Building up a head of steam. His teeth ground together, his breaths grew short and fast. He was no longer aware of his body, or the basement room, or even the desk, but only of the blank screen as the object of his rage. It had no right to go on strike - he would have rationalised, had he been capable of it at that moment. It had no right to trick him and leave him in the lurch. It was a traitor, a betrayer, a socialist, an evildoer. DAMN YOU - erupted from his unfelt lips. It was the sound of a spring being wound up tight.

And then it released and his fist was through the fucking screen, and his arm was filled with splinters of black glass. The blood flowed between his knuckles and down the palm of his hand and down to his elbow and dripped on the floor drop by filthy drop and he wasn’t angry any more because it hurt but he couldn’t shriek because there was something else, mingled with the blood.

The liquid internet, released from its prison, dribbled and oozed from the wounded screen. It stained his arm, and the keyboard, and his trousers and the neglected carpet, grey rivulets running in every direction. It was what Martin had hungered for and he plunged his bloodied fingers into his mouth for it, to taste its burning-dust taste (coppery with haemoglobin). Pornography danced between him and his brutalised computer. His hearing was obliterated in a cacophony of sound-effects. His features were caving in as the internet consumed the flesh beneath, but he didn’t feel it. He didn’t notice as the grey matter poured up through the walls, through cracks in the ceiling, digitising everything. He was rushing through bullshit and humorous animal pictures at a thousand miles an hour as the rising tide engulfed him. All he knew how to do was communicate. It was a revelation of Nirvana. All the cheesy names of features of websites were clear and distinct ideas before him. He was the all-consuming god of a two-dimensional world.

What was left of Martin now? His limbs were liquefied, his organs outsourced. His testicles were linked by a single strand of nerve fibre, where once he had a spine, to his atrophied brain. Slowly he sank through the murky muck that issued forth from the breached computer, until he folded up, on the floor, in a corner of the room, totally inert.

In the kitchen above, his mother hummed and pottered. A recipe book was open, revealing a golden-brown chicken pie. The worktop was dusted with flour, prepared for the packet of pastry in her hand. Under the table, Peanuts the cat licked himself privately. He had no concept of ‘internet’.

But it had a concept of him. A greasy bulb of it emerged at the grout nexus of four tiles, swelling and quivering until it burst. In all directions across the floor the watery, contaminated stuff ran, moistening first the legs of chairs and then those of the oblivious Peanuts. It slithered, anaesthetic, between his hairs, just above the skin, until his fur was entirely soaked.

Sarah felt a splash at her ankle. She turned around and her blissful ignorance was shattered - for the floor itself was quavering, dissolving, where the bleb of fluid had risen. Faint images, banal, violent, obscene, played across the liquid’s surface. The pastry carton fell from her hand and she tried to run but it held her, and as she watched the table keeled over sideways, its legs sinking through the disintegrating floor with a sad sucking sound. And from beneath the table crawled Peanuts, and from his mouth came words.

Within the cat’s throat, the internet was doing its business. His larynx was putty in its hands. It forced its way through the back of his nasal cavity and into his skull, and there it set in motion thoughts and desires he could never have imagined before. The agony in his head was eclipsed by his newfound capacity to wonder, and he looked more soulfully than he ever had into the eyes of his owner. And he asked, like an alien explorer on first contact with a race far wiser and more ancient than his own, the question burning at the bottom of his heart.

Sarah’s jaw dropped. She gripped the countertop and tried to heave herself away but the internet was there, too, lapping between her fingers, bubbling up from the sink. MARTIN - she screamed, and tried to take a step, but she had no feet. Her blood was mingling with the stuff, dissolving into pixels, as it rushed up her veins and into her heart. She could no longer feel. An unknown world opened before her and she was in it, jumping on magazines and old movies like lifeboats, her memory of the kitchen, of Peanuts, of Martin, washing away. All that was left of her was a foetal husk to match her son’s.

The internet flowed under the door and into the street.