He felt lightheaded. Spots drifted across the psychedelic mandalas exploding behind his eyelids. He thought perhaps he was floating above his hospital bed. It felt like he was floating up, his legs and arms, weightless, sprawled out.
All the sound in the room was circling around a whirlpool, carried farther and farther away from his ears. A tinny echo bouncing back. That was the doctor's voice.
She is not a doctor. That is not a human voice. I am not in a hospital.
Cold sweat beading up on his forehead. He felt her breath on his face, she must have leaned in very close.
"Listen to me. I don't know who or what you are. But I can't just let them... I have to tell you something."
Her voice felt different this time, a rope that the man used to drag himself back.
That is a woman's voice. She is a doctor. I am in a hospital.
He opened his eyes.
"We don't have much time. The military knows you are awake. I have to tell you something."
She was fumbling with the folder, thumbing through it while she talked.
"Here, see here - this... substance coming out of your eyes and nose."
She laid a photograph on his lap. He had never seen the man in the picture. A man with twisting multi-colored tentacles emerging from the corners of his eyes and disappearing into his nostrils.
"And here, the substance was trying to reject your... jack."
She handed him another photo. Was this the same man? The man in the photo lay face down on an operating table, but the unmistakable tentacles wrapping around his head... definitely the same man. The tentacles had ripped open a weeping wound around a cybernetic implant in the man's brainstem, and had wrapped themselves tightly around it.
Why is she showing me these pictures? Am I supposed to believe the man in the pictures is me?
"It is still inside you. That... part of it... is still inside you. I had to tell you. There was no way to remove it all."
Why is she telling me this?
The man looked at the folder she clutched against her chest. There was a blank where the patient name should be. The patient number had been marked over. His eyes did not like this light. This red light. Her skull was glowing red, glowing from the inside. Something inside her head was glowing red and shining straight through her skull.
There is something inside of her.
It surprised the man how easy it was to push his thumbs through her eyes. She did not scream. Her skull did not stop glowing even when he smashed it open against the tiles in the shower area in the attached bathroom. But there was nothing inside?
He picked up the folder from her lifeless hands and slumped down next to her body in the shower.
There is something inside of me.
He vomited suddenly. Wiping his mouth he was struck by how much she looked like his mother. Smashed and bloody but still, the doctor looked like his mother.
What is my mother's name?
The man began to cry.
All words and art by moi. This is part 5 of an ongoing series.
Part 1: A crumbling machine found in the desert
Part 2: Surface Expedition Report
Part 3: Disorientation
Part 4: Her eye glowed red
Your writing reminds me oh how it felt to read The Space Between Dreams. Love it.
Posted using Partiko Android
you just should make this into a comic strip novel
Well I suppose this is kind of the same thing in digital format.
Well I suppose this
Is kind of the same thing in
Digital format.
- carlgnash
I'm a bot. I detect haiku.
i read today that bots pull in thousands of dollars in cuteness votes. is that true? who made you haiku bot? forgive me if i dont heart you weird comments..
Well to be accurate, the post said the person controlling one particular bot had earned thousands, but that was from a variety of different ways most of which were self voting. Not sure Marky said how much the bot in question had earned directly but I guarantee it isn't thousands :)
Posted using Partiko Android
true. it just made me think. i did my token just for fun and i always assume that most bots, like popcorn, haiku or tss, were made as a cute thing and they get no money. i'd love to see a rundown on how profitable a small bot like this is.
Gorgeous!
Twisted and I like it
Posted using Partiko Android
Thanks for the resteem Asher!
I came here for the artwork. Carl... you've grown! That's looking really smooth, I was wondering what the max size is of your artwork, because you should start selling that stuff if you aren't already!
Thanks Ruben! I need to get off my ass and figure out how to get a neural network / deep dream generator working on my own PC to get around the file size limitation. I am still using deepdreamgenerator.com to generate the textures and patterns that I overlay on my photography. The bottom image in the post is the max resolution that process can generate. I can make large images by mirroring the results, but ultimately I would like to be able to make larger non-symmetrical images like the bottom one.
Shoot, Steemit is cropping the images so I guess it is slightly bigger than what you have uploaded?
Perhaps an idea; get a high res image, slice it in parts of the highest resolution you can get out of the generator. Get each of them through the generator and stitch them together. Maybe too much of a work-around, because I believe you add multiple layers, right?
Anyway, looking gooodddd! <3
you still using steemit.com? steempeak.com should display everything at full resolution when you click in to it and zoom to 100%. That image should be 1300 x 731 (.95 MP).
I have tried to do what you suggested in the past but it actually doesn't work. When you split an image up, the AI does different things with each separate part of the image than it did when it was dealing with the whole. The edges don't actually line up - the AI will have different colors and even different shapes at the seams where you cut the image, even if you are using the same style image for each section. I will try to dig up one of the results when I was trying it - it didn't work at all. I have done a couple higher res images where I was only doing a few layers and I went in by hand and fixed the areas around the seams manually by clone stamping / painting / smudging to make them match up but it is very labor intensive and not really feasible for my normal process that often involves a dozen plus layers that I would have to do that on each.
Haha yeah, still using old school Steemit.com ! I should swap to Steempeak? Ahh, yeah I thought the edges wouldn't line up, but perhaps you could try to stitch them together and have some overlap. Have you tried that?
Oh, please do, let me see! ^^
I have tried overlapping as well. Believe me, these ideas seem like they should work :) But the actual way the AI works is totally different. It isn't just applying a style. So even if there is an overlap section, the entire overlap section is treated differently by the AI on each cutout section because the rest of the cutout beside the overlap is different.
Yeah you should be using steempeak.com. If you don't like the default large post preview layout (I don't) you can cycle through that view, tiles, and a more condensed view similar to steemit.com by clicking on the icon I circled pink below (the icon will look different depending on what the current view is but it is always in the same place):
If you are going to be posting here again definitely use the #palnet tag on all posts, and also the #creativecoin tag on any posts that are "creative" (so basically, probably all your posts LOL). You can earn other crypto tokens by using those tags, and I am something like a large dolphin or small orca in the #creativecoin world so my upvotes on your posts would actually mean something. Steempeak.com displays all the different tokens a post is earning if you hover over the payout, that is one of the main reasons to use steempeak. E.g.
Currently it is around 25 CCC (Creative Coin Crypto) per Steem, and my vote is worth something like 55 or 60 CCC. So my vote which has a Steem value of something like .01 Steem actually is worth ~2.5 steem in CCC
Oohh, damn... My fingers are itching to try it out xDD! Oh shit, really? @derangedvisions told me all about it! I still have to check out and see how it works. Can you vote separately as well?
This post was shared in the Curation Collective Discord community for curators, and upvoted and resteemed by the @c-squared community account after manual review.
@c-squared runs a community witness. Please consider using one of your witness votes on us here