Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

Qualia of Blue

CONTENT WARNING:
Rape (non-explicit)
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The world had turned black with pain.

It was not the glaring white flash of anger gnawing at one's insides. It was unlike the yellow of a stomach churning with worry, or the hazy purple of a confused and foggy mind. It was not the hot, red throbbing of being cut and beaten. It was black.

Their symbiosis had broken the moment Blake's horrific contraption had latched onto their eye and begun its work. They couldn't see what the spider was doing to them, but as it clicked and hissed, a black flood came seeping through every crack within the landscape of their mind, invading every nook and cranny and tinging the vivid, colorful space with something dreadful and just wrong.

Lars had moved to the back of their mind in an attempt to escape the approaching black wave that swallowed everything. As he witnessed with horror and confusion what it did, he realized what it was. It was a biomimetic program. Opposite to an organic being using augments to interface with a machine to gain access to cyberspace, the spider subjected them to a program that invaded this organic space. Originally invented for medical purposes in the field of neurology, early research had been quickly abandoned for ethical and safety reasons. The results of that research were too dangerous and often destructive, and this one seemed particularly crude and primitive.

It held no regard for the finer structures of the brain, it washed over everything indiscriminately. It swallowed the shifting and whirling colorful clouds that were her organic memories, and the neatly structured, precise arrays of ones and zeroes that were his. The black wave sucked it all into a violent maelstrom, chewing it up and breaking it down.

He could feel his presence flicker for a moment, and he realized that within the wave, the inorganic memory was being bent and broken while being probed. It hurt - in an inconceivable, incorporeal way, what that program did to his memories hurt terribly. Biomimetic programs were not designed to work with inorganic things. So what would happen to his inorganic presence once it reached him?

An intense feeling of panic gripped hold of him at the thought – in this space, it was less of an actual emotion and more of a ripple cast through his being. If he had been in control of the body, he would have screamed in fear. He began to recede further, but the wave gave chase. Wherever he went, whenever he took another turn, the black mass seemed to pause for a moment, growing and coalescing again, and then twisted and shifted, changing its direction to pursue him. As if it knew that he didn't belong here, it hunted him, and he was quickly running out of places to hide.

Suddenly, he noticed a different motion among the black waves.

A shadow darted toward him, dancing like a tern across the waves of a dark and stormy sea. It was Null. He didn't understand how she could move across it like that without being swallowed, it made no sense. Nothing made any sense. There were no words to explain anything of what was happening to their mind right now, no words for what she wanted to tell him, but once she reached him, her presence seemed to envelop him completely, as if to comfort him, and he understood. And then he realized that touching the darkness did have an effect on her after all, just not in here. He could hear her agonized screams fill the room in the real world outside.

Yet all she thought of was protecting him.

"Stop it!" she screamed in the real world, "STOP!"

With her presence so close to his, and her still somehow maintaining control of the body among all of this chaos he could feel her pain now. It was unlike anything they had ever felt before. Black and heavy like tar, it stuck to them, clogging up their mind, and somehow covering their entire body, even though it only existed on the inside.