This story has content warnings for: gore, corruption, sex with a chair, probably rape, not that gross but also sort of gross. Please take care. Contamination begins gently. A pinprick hole in the hazmat suit’s thick composite where she stumbles and falls against a forest of needles growing from one of the site’s walls. Most break. One finds the perfect angle. She doesn’t feel its touch on her sweaty skin. ...
You are dreaming. The oddity of recognizing this does not impede your progress forward into the dining hall’s elegant vastness. Nor does it permit you to deviate from the path the dreaming part of you—the part that weaves the world—has chosen for you. “Oh, you’re finally here!” There is a dining table, a perfectly formed slab of rock stretching impossibly across the hall’s floor, and at its head stands a prism-headed man in a hastily drawn suit. His layered voices sound exactly like him. ...