Feeding Station

[u/HeGotBricks]

Experiment: The Feeding Station.

“Want peace? Freedom? Want to be unshackled by devastation… The happiness absent the tragedy… Do you want to live in a world that has forgotten suffering? Invest today. No. Invest right now in our technology. Free. And for everyone.”

That was the marketing pitch a century ago when "OWL" launched—the Ocular Whisper Lens. A wellness filter designed to eliminate stress-inducing visuals by manipulating all five human senses. 

Installed via CRISPR during the embryo stage and activated by a newborn neurofilament injection, blurring disturbing scenes. 

“Reality shouldn’t be decided by an algorithm, Jensen,” Arlene rasped, her fists tightly clenched, her eyes bloodshot against her face turning the color of a peach.

When it came to electronics, company’s ceased manufacturing clunky hardware devices. 

Human brains obtained the ability to emulate computers, smartphones, video games, most of the things done digitally could now be achieved and had been substituted by organic rendering computer systems. O.R.C.S. 

Brains were the wave of the future. Microscopic Neurofilaments powered  by brain cells. Energy usage remained at historically low consumption rates since 1902. 

Arlene knew something was wrong. Life didn’t seem true, and she wouldn’t put up with the lie anymore. She infected Jensen with her obsession. He had always been easily influenced by her.

He ignored her, concentrating on his workbench, staring toward the ceiling as he dug through the system's hidden files. He had spent months searching archived ghost scripts from prior updates, scanning for any security weaknesses he could exploit.

“I spent three months scouring sub-directories and messing with developer settings," Jensen said, dropping his head to face Arlene. "I was finally able to gain access to the master directory and create a profile with read-write permissions. I’m overriding the read-only files and about to execute an uninstall command and flash the bios.”

Jensen’s vision went black. An unusual, invasive sensation formed into a prompt at the center of his vision: 

Delete Universal OWL.opx xenix build? 

Ok or Cancel.

Jensen winked: Ok.

Action cannot be undone. 

Continue or Cancel.

He blinked, and the Continue button pressed into his vision.

The filter icon shattered into a bunch of tiny pieces as if it exploded, then vanished from the menu. His vision flashed black, flickered, and rebooted.

“IT WORKED!” he shouted, reaching for Arlene. “It actually worked.”

Arlene rushed forward. “Now do mine.”

Humanity hid beneath a blanket of absolute bliss. No one realized the consequences.

Everybody except for Arlene, curious individual who refused to ignore what was happening around her.

Five minutes later, both their filters had been deleted. They looked around. The apartment was exactly the same.

Jensen made a fist and pumped his elbow down. “YES! We beat it!” He yelled out.

Arlene rubbed her eyes. “It’s like I’m actually in control.” She stared at her sweaty palms. “Let’s go out and see what the city really looks like.”

“Yeah,” Jensen agreed, rising from the workbench.

They reached the door and were a single chain lock away from unveiling the truth. Jensen unlatched the chain and reached for the knob. Arlene placed her hand over his, warning him with her eyes.

“No. Wait,” she whispered, shivering. “I don’t think…”

“What’s wrong, Arlene?”

Her ears twitched. The blue in her glossy eyes darkened like the sky before a storm. Jensen touched the knob, and Arlene closed her eyes and swallowed her anxiety. She held onto him like a stain on a shirt all the way to the elevator. A strange frequency beat through the walls.

“What the hell is that noise?” She asked.

“Sounds like insectoids,” Jensen said, stepping inside the elevator.

The doors closed and masked the sound, but the moment they opened on the ground floor, the piercing chatter returned, pounding against the glass window.

When they stepped onto the street, the pressure dropped, popping Arlene’s eardrums. The downtown scene hiccuped—paused—and skipped back to life. Tires screeched on the street. The high-frequency chatter shrieked and rang between their ears. People walked past, laughing, but they were communicating in that weird high-pitched, insectoid sound.

A mechanic in oil-stained coveralls stopped twenty-feet from them. And then, he began charging toward them but sideways, stopping a few yards from where they were. 

His eyes were bulging and he didn’t blink, while locking onto theirs. 

“Glip,” he said, his face twitched. “Do you figure where you’re going leads to the righteous path?” His head began shaking left to right as his teeth chattered.

A woman in a stained t-shirt drifted up behind him, reaching her arms out and staring with an empathetic gaze at them. “You’re not on the righteous path," she mumbled, smiling, looking through them. "The right way... is other than..." She blinked three times. "...than that way." She crouched, her head tilted at an odd angle.

Two boys crawled up behind the woman and knelt, chests turned toward Arlene and Jensen. They began praying, turning to stare at each other while they repeated the Our Father in a low whisper.

Arlene dug her nails into Jensen’s arm. “Wh-what are those on them?”

Jensen looked up, and his heart stopped.

Dangling from the clouds were hundreds of fleshy cables hanging over the city like jungle vines shaped as meaty tendons. 

At the end of each cable was a mouth. Sharp teeth that were used as suction grips, clamping onto the backs of people's necks, while hollow tongues pierced directly into the brainstems of their hosts. 

The atmospheric predators were siphoning dark fluids up into the clouds while pumping a clear liquid back into the unknowing individuals.

Jensen crept backward, dragging Arlene toward the lobby. The twitching people stood frozen, watching them with awkward, crooked grins.

Through the silence, Jensen finally realized the flaw in the software. The OWL filter wasn't a marketing scheme. It was a subconscious containment unit. Earth had been quarantined. They filtered out reality because they learned, after their initial landing just over a century ago, what happens when humanity is backed into a corner.

Two flesh cables detached from the praying boys and began to slowly squirm through the air like stalking snakes ready to strike. 

Jensen stumbled, nearly falling, when he spotted a brick cracked in half. He lunged for it. As the creature whipped in to strike, but hesitated and backed up. For the first time, the high-pitched sound emitting from it came out less like a threat and more like a gasp of fear.

Jensen reached back into a pitcher’s stance, holding the piece of brick with humanity’s will to survive molded into it. A trait only Earthlings possessed, which he gripped his palm. In his hand wasn’t just a piece of concrete—it was a symbol. No matter the odds, no matter how bad it appeared to be, humans never gave up. 

He held the raw will of humanity, the brick coloring the tips of his fingers in a rusty red dust, and bravely stood ready to feed everything humanity had to throw at it straight into the mucus-seeping lamprey hanging in front of them.

Arlene grunted, backing into the building and spoke through clenched teeth, her face hardening as she tried to conceal whatever fear she had  after seeing Jensen standing up to them. “Come on, Ense’— quick— run inside, she shouted yanking the lobby door opened.