The Trash Heap of the TV Tropes Forum.

...well, what about Black Metal?

You called?

...maybe...

No like...you literally just summoned me.

IM BORED

*SMASHES THINGS*

I recently got into metal, but the lighter stuff, not death metal.

One of the things was my ability to understand what people mean when they say "you called?"

But then you said maybe lolol

...point taken.

Anyway, do your thing.

What thing? I have a thing?

...oh, that's right, Solip's not here.

So, what to talk about?

I dunno. I'm eating food before I go to sleep.

I hope my neck doesn't get any more fucked.

SUDDENLY A THING

There's a stretching sensation, bordering on pain but not reaching it, and then I'm no longer the man under the lights, sterile figures silently moving over his body. He's below; his face is visible, though obscured by an oxygen mask and a hairnet, and—despite floating around the ceiling of an operating theater—the unsettling thing is how unfamiliar the body looks. How ugly. How old. He's only thirty, yet...

Well, whatever. This isn't surprising. Before the surgery, they mentioned that out-of-body experiences aren't uncommon.

"Hell," one nurse, a stocky woman in her sixties, said, "back in the thirties, there was a man shot in the head. If the stories are true, he never came back to his body again. Floating around near the ceiling for the rest of his life—He couldn't actually see anything out of his eyesight, of course, but his brain filled in the gaps like the blind spot in your eyes; everything looked completely real to him."

"...That's not a common occurrence, is it?"

She laughed. Her bedside manner wasn't stellar. It was hard to tell if she'd even noticed any discomfort—she could have been laughing it up at her weekly bridge game for all the concern shown. "Oh, no! He's literally the only recorded case of that. You'll be fine, Anton."

Anton will be fine.

Anton's heart stops.

It only takes a second for the quick-thinking, well-paid surgeon to shut the machine up, and nobody bats an eyelash. It's mind-blowing how calmly they can subvert a man's nervous system from the ground up for use as a glorified motherboard. Anton's brain will be strictly RAM, now—He's going to be thinking all over the world, his thoughts being traded between supercomputer arrays depending on what's cheapest at any given moment. His emotions and personality traits—mostly dampened, but a few of them are actually useful, like determination and loyalty—will be handled mostly in-house, since his identity is his most valuable trait. His long-term memories will be stored in orbit: Chinese satellites where maximum-security storage is rented at a premium—less risk of tampering, ironically.

Poor fucker.

They're turning him into a robot. They're replacing his brain with silicon and little metal bugs that'll crawl around inside him and make him tick from now on. They're scraping out every bit of the one organ that used to medically define life—the brain is where the self is housed, after all—and he's not even awake to watch them murder him.

Maybe that's a good thing. He did agree to this.

He's been a facilitator for over a decade now—he's killed, and more importantly, he's killed people who'd made peace with their fate—or thought they had. He's seen a handful of men go stoically into the woods ahead of him, knowing that there was nothing they could do to stop him, no bribe they could offer that would turn him from his cause—and each of them, each of those calm men who had "made his peace", fell apart—crying, begging, pissing himself (before Anton put a bullet in his brain, that is).

And as sure as he was that he wanted this, when he signed the contracts, who's to say he wouldn't have balked at the last second, had he been conscious?

Well. It's a bit pointless to think about that now. He's made his decision, if not his peace, and the bowl of grey matter next to the operating table says pretty clearly, There's no going back now.

The surgeon takes a step back.

He sighs—in relief?

"That's it."

He sets down an unrecognizable tool, dripping with blood, and flips a switch.

The floor rises up.

Eight hours later, Anton wakes up—half the man I used to be, almost literally.

Suddenly supplemental info

For those who are curious, the exercise that this chapter came from was (paraphrased from the source): Write a 600-word story (for the sticklers among you, my final count was 633—I started with around 700, so I think I trimmed it pretty damn well) from a first-person perspective, but use first-person pronouns only twice. The first-person perspective should be important to the story, not an incidental detail. Do not make it a surprise or twist that the story is in first-person.

And yes, this is relevant to Teh Storeh. As I mentioned in Random Thoughts, there is no guarantee that any of these exercises will actually be part of the story, but they are all relevant. Maybe in multiple continuities.

...Or maybe the story, and the Tree, are constructing themselves through this haphazard assortment of story segments. Maybe there will never be a single, coherent novel—but there will be the Tree, experiencing itself through these stories.

What the fuck ever. idk man. Just read it—or don't I don't give a FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK IT'S THE TRASH HEAP YO

edited 20th Jul '15 10:21:33 PM by SolipSchism

good job solip wait is this still the Darker and Edgier of this thread?

edited 20th Jul '15 11:19:08 PM by SmartGirl333

idk man I don't give a FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

Well I kind of do because I rely on other people for my self-esteem welcome to 2015

idk it's pretty Dark and Edgy

I mean fuck the main character is a contract-killer-turned-cyborg-private-investigator-contract-killer

And this chapter is about that one wacky misadventure where a surgeon scraped out his brain and replaced it with an artificial array of nanomachines and wireless connections to supercomputers basically making him a walking, talking, breathing, food-digesting thinking-by-proxy computer-man who kills people

So that's pretty fucking dark

No, Imean is this still the story based on the thread

So, after reading that, there's one question I have: Who's Anton?

It's not Lior, is it?

Anton is the mysterious cyborg-assassin from the story.

And yes Smarty

Answer the full question Solly.

The last small bit is very important.

Is he also a theologian and a music doctorate?

Anton, I believe, is our protagonist.

Is he also a Satanist?

Inb4 this gets interpreted as character practice...

...

"Satanist"

Unless you're referring to Anton Long, then that's a completely different story but you probably aren't.

edited 21st Jul '15 8:42:03 AM by death_vlk

wtf guys

The cyborg assassin is me

It's me

Oh my God you guys are asking the weirdest questions

Read between the lines plox

This is the third chapter thing

They all tie together

Nanomachines, computer brain

It's obvs the same guy

They're not weird questions. You just fail at naming association.