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Though most people envision them as noble predators of the air, the majestic eagle is, among other notable food chain termini such as lions and tyrannosaurus rexes, a scavenger at heart, not deigning to dirty a refined talon on the hunt but preferring to sate itself on dead or dying meat prepared by some other agent of death - wolves, congenital bad karma, divine retribution, disease or doctors.

Among monkeys and other simians there is a reflex to experience stark terror - the kind that closes your throat with a heartbeat and elicits screaming, howling noises truly suitable only for the lower primates - upon a few stimuli from our evolutionary past. Children will consistently rate snakes and spiders Least-Favored-Animal status in any zoo as a throwback to a fear of those animals on the savannah which would kill a large animal with an unnoticed bite without the need or even capability of consuming its prey. With age and experience many of us come to terms with sharing the Earth with those with eight legs and those with none, though we may float our tolerance in a boiling bath of a certain quantity of squeam. One shape which strikes hysteria into the hearts of all mothers and children alike, however, is the silhouette of a raptor's body eclipsing the sun, its feathered wingspan blocking the light in a shadow the shape of a rapidly-descending crucifix of avian appetite. This impulse of catastrophe goes further back than from man to ape, but verily from dirt to divine. We remember, in our heart of hearts, that birds are of the realm of sky-gods, retributive avatars of stern, cruel gods with unpronounceable (unspeakable? unnamable!) names, and that though we may feel charitable in sharing the fires with those less fortunate than us, come lunchtime it might as well be our eternal livers in the eyes of the punctual peregrine, perennially prepared for its feast of foie gras.

...

We named him Prometheus, Fire-Bearer, every time he entered the complex. It didn't matter that it wasn't his name (inevitably, Fate failed to be so literal) or that we would only be applying it for a few days; the moniker stuck. Upon entrance he would be concerned with a number of things - his accommodations (spare but adequate, as with the rest of us), his newfound inmates, and his conditions first physical, material (fingering the stitches nervously, as he always did, pondering scars which would never find time to arrive) and finally, ultimately (or were all other considerations merely aspects of this one?) spiritual. Was his spirit in good shape? Had he spoiled his Grace by allowing the removal of the large fatty lump from his abdomen? If his conditions worsened (if! if! of course, they never got the enlightening benefit of the empirical play both put on and witnessed by all of us, never realizing their walk-on roles) and (God forbid) death result, would ascension follow, to Heaven or Purgatory or some place better (read: less squalid) than here, this cesspool we called a place of God and defecated in nonetheless - or would his fate be determined by the floating liver, freed from his body and living on in a jar of nutritive solution a few thin walls' separation distance, bearing intense scrutiny? Would his Eternal Reward be co-opted by a forever as a disassociated phantom, doomed to haunt the crossroads where his hypothetically holy organ had parted ways from him?

It is true that his concerns tended to get more base as the day went on. This was viewed by some of the incarcerated as evidence of the liver's intrinsic link to the soul, as the chronological distance from its excision drove Prometheus' mental state further and further towards the banal, the base - but a much more scientific reasoning proposed by those of us who somehow managed to ignore the man's growing torment (and who somehow became a majority, growing complacent to his endless deaths) was his own growing realization that the discomfort he was experiencing was not going to get any less as time went on, and like mad butter all concerns for the future melted away, leaving a gleaming core of fear for the present - concern not where he go when he dies but merely if he die, and later, that he die, and soon.

We learned to measure these men as a sunset - high noon at arrival, and as the hours passed his complexion would darken and turn ever more jaundiced, as a flower losing moisture, as the moon passing behind a viscous mass of rich, frothy pollution or red, foaming tuberculotic sputum, as a man dying. His first meal would be sat at with great gusto, but by sundown he would be lying, enfeebled, on his hard mat and by daybreak the following morning the transition from mat to gurney would be complete - it was not unusual for his frame to be nothing but that, the picture pilfered, the contents snicker-snackered off to somewhere where they could warrant more appreciation than this abuse. There were a few hardy souls, giants among men who could tolerate the ravages for two days, occasionally three, but these men died alone and without sympathy, unlike the more typical one-nighters, as few among us could stomach the prolonged throes these stamina-cursed men would be put through, crying out to our Father above for the weakness to slip out without the Armageddon tearing through their guts, the Wormwood setting in their belly and turning one-third of the contents bitter. The fast dyers would die surrounded by friends but no one would talk to a man who had the audacity to live more than a day without a liver. These walking contradictions would retreat to their spare and Spartan chambers and eke out the remaining hours in solitude - none of us would visit him, and sometimes we would only learn of his death (a terrible tension being lifted from our otherwise equitably-stressed existence) by the subsequent arrival of his replacement, Prometheus, the following morning.

I move my lips, and though no words emerge, still do I lie. The psychopomps, escorts to the world of the dead, would always be near. In fact, often it seemed these doctor-priests accompanied the man's progress completely from beginning to end, and beyond. One imagined that the gap between death and interment was sufficient for a final evaluation of the meat the scientists had obtained - proportions, causes of death and of course the ultimate indiscernible spiritual value of such a mass of dead man. With a meat thermometer still sticking out of him he'd be weighed against the Feather of Truth, but the information never trickled back down to us as to the fate of his ka. I mix and confuddle my mythologies here, but assuredly everlasting flame is no less absurd an eternity than a monstrous Devourer composed of equal parts lion, crocodile and hippopotamus, seized with an abject appetite for souls of all flavours and especially those disdainful of the appropriate rituals.

Doubtless the presence of the psychopomps was somewhat of a subconscious reassurance to him, that his spiritual condition not be entirely neglected in his inevitable lack of concern for anything beyond the palpable thickening of his blood, and surely none of us would sleep if not for the morphine they slipped him at Communion, consumption of the flesh, blood and pharmaceuticals of Christ - not enough to sedate, but sufficient for a numbing purpose, that he experience a somewhat premature separation from his earthly meat, where he can retain his perceiving faculties, he can still bear witness to his own destruction but not shake the nagging fear of disassociation from the lump of flesh surrounding him rapidly losing all resemblance as it darkened and erupted in sores and bruises to anything he might recognize as a body belonging to him, let alone as a lump of clay belonging to someone else and only on loan. At times it seems he was aware of his position only in a sense of drowning in a mass of someone else's meat, in a cage of bones and veins wrapped in skin with no lid or opening through which to escape - consciousness neglecting the egresses nature provides all of us via the nose, mouth, rectum or navel. I always considered my soul's escape to be best accomplished in the forms of words, verbal communication, where my ideas could escape my frame and fill those of others. These men, however, dwelled entirely on transference of something apparently less concrete and physical than words and concepts. Their escape wanted to transcend the passage of air through the lips or of an image from a sheet of paper through the eyes - rather to enact a magic act, slipping from a padlocked and welded box "now-you-don't-see-it, now-you-still-don't"-style. Ladies and gentlemen, you may note I have no soul in my hat, no soul in my wand, and no soul up my sleeves...

What the purpose was of exposing the man to our company none of us could surmise. He didn't benefit from the surroundings as we nearly universally shunned him, perhaps occasionally extending a sympathetic gesture to one who looked least deserving of the grisly end awaiting him but in these new surroundings he was wary, and though signs of generosity were rare, when they were extended it served to tip the man off that not everything was as right as it seemed, that these were not actions of charity but of premature consolation. As a reminder to us that death was all around us and eternal his presence was superfluous, all of us already suffering from various maladies as results of our incomplete conditions. It certainly indicated the ubiquity of God only in the sense of that most stern and cruel interpretation of the deity - the Abraham-doctors would lead Prometheus up the hill daily, but nothing was swapped at the last minute - no mutton, bleats of the benign Lamb of God shrieking in ecstasy as it spurted great gobs of animal sacrifice all over the operating room table, sexual gratification to an S&M sexless Something Above, a cosmic cum-shot. The great Clockmaker may have created something marvelous when he set the universe in motion, but that this endless procession of meaningless men waking up with one foot in the grave could be called a ritual in his name nearly constituted proof of his non-existence.

Of course, my views are fairly radical. In my old life, back when I had a real name, back when my name was applied to parts of my body and not vice-versa, I was known to be an agitator, sugar in the gas tank of society. Not content with the questions left unanswered by both religion and science I demanded replies, I led masses of thousands to shout questions at the sky and the Computer-box, replies consisting only of silence and baffled errors of syntax. My voice triggered riots, orgies of nihilism where the two things that purportedly give our existence meaning, alternately choosing faith or proof as your dogma, were summarily rejected, vandalized, destroyed, or worst of all, ignored. If you pull the plug to an automated prayer machine society stops functioning, the populace crippled by the guilty realization not that they have to live with the ramifications of their actions, but that they might have to actually worse - after-live - with those same ramifications.

Most people here don't share these views. Many of my fellow inmates / intimates / initiates are here in a voluntary position, ostensibly the same circumstances as my participation except in that they chose to enter this vast complex in a removal from greater society for the greater good, whereas I chose a cleavage from the life of a political prisoner where there is no asylum from a theocracy for a man who speaks not against the state but against science and God, the pupil and the iris in the All-Seeing Eye. I sit here, a life of my own choosing not for the greater good, but for the greater knowledge, that I may learn of the horrors and revelations inside these colossal confines of the Human Soul Project. Religion and Science independently have failed to appease my curiosity - perhaps in this unique synthesis, this gargantuan test of metaphysical matters by Empirical Methods, I will become, if not privy to some answers, at least a part of one. The subject's learning experience is distinctly different from that of the observers, and I hope to confound the establishment in my enlightenment calling back to the query that how are we to know for sure that it is not the lab rats who are conducting frighteningly elegant experiments upon the researchers? I lobbied for answers from outside the system for years; now I have gone undercover, losing my voice to the outside and effectively taking a vow of silence, to be piously silent until I have answers to share with the masses, not merely more questions to agitate them with.

If things had been different I might be on yet another side of this hyperpuzzle - it is clear that among the researchers themselves burns a great curiosity and a lust for some answers... if only they could arrive at a consensus as to what the question should be! Over the years the mandate of this Project has grown and mutated like any one of the cancers which have landed yet another subclass of patient here, those who would otherwise have been incapable of enacting a required operation to remove a terminally diseased or cancerous body part. The removal was performed upon them au gratis in exchange for terms of observation - the premise being that life in here, under glass would be preferable to death out there in the free world. For many of us it was - removal of the left big toe, a nose or a kidney, though inconvenient, is still preferable to a painful death by cancer or gangrene. Many participants in this Project, however, unwittingly signed away their lives - confinements to wheelchairs for the losses of feet or legs, to dialysis machines for kidneys, to reduced levels of activity for the two who each signed away one lung, or to a painful series of deaths for Prometheus.

The fact that a human being cannot live without a liver compounded by the reality that science has no prosthetic or treatment capable of compensating for its loss unfortunately makes observation of the serial Promethei a vital part of the Project. With a definition of the soul as primitive as nothing necessarily more than the Spark of Life which allows bodies to remain more than clay, animated or sustaining of simple life functions, any organ which, when removed, results in fast death becomes a prime suspect for the physical seat of the less-than-physical soul, the location of which was the ultimate goal of the Human Soul Project.

The first dream; from God-box

I am standing, stark nude, in front of a classroom of young nuns who are all busy scribbling. The circular wooden platform on which I stand slowly rotates, at a rate of about five turns a minute. Light pours down on to me from a hole above in the ceiling, from a source unknown. I can see my own body from a vantage point inside the hole, but I only appear vaguely bored and frustrated as I try to move my head and eyes in vain, trying above all to look up and see where my perspective is, but something stops me and I remain as a statue.

One by one the girls stop drawing to look at me, freeze and turn grey, as if they were instantly petrified, and after a few dozen more spins only one remains in movement; her habit slowly reddens and I can perceive through her sketchbook that she is pregnant. I simultaneously experience the burning sensations of a building erection and the knee-melting indignation of anal dilation, as though something previously unseen in my rounds had snuck up behind (my behind, no less) and was worming its way up inside me.

In the hopes of uttering a few words of apology to temper my profound embarrassment (though it seems by her continued frenzy of activity that my rising excitement has gone completely unnoticed) I open my mouth but nothing comes out. A dry skittering noise, a crepitation goes across the room as simultaneously all of the motionless grey nuns turn white and dissolve into salt, scattering in a new wind blowing through the room. Their grains trace the patterns of whirlwinds and ultimately collect in a thin layer on the floor, looking like nothing so much as a white sand dune. I do not feel this wind across my bared skin and it does not so much as ruffle the paper which the red nun continues to attack (the sketchbooks and aisles of the other nuns have conveniently disappeared in the meantime).

Again I try to speak to the woman, now to ask to be shown what rendition of me she has made (my conspicuous tumescence still front and centre but forgotten in the surreality before me), but the noise that I make is heard in both ears as the overpowering sound of a hissing drop of water falling on a heated griddle. I am forced to clap my ears to my head to shut the noise out, and though I watch myself do so (my first successful movement so far) the volume of the sound is maintained steadily, undergoing a subtle change to the noise of pebbles falling down a slope one over the other, rattling all the way down to the turtle on the bottom.

The nun still does not seem to notice this painful noise at all, though she finishes some violent adjustments to her paper and tips her chair back, back so that she is now lying on the floor, head pointing away. Pulling her robes up around her hips the degree to which she is pregnant confronts me - a massive swelling to complement my own, and instantly my platform and the room exchange motions - I am standing stock still as this labour, for that is what it becomes as her breathing speeds and indicates a new arrival, spirals me warily.

Though I know nothing of such matters, I attempt to speak once more to offer assistance, but I am paralyzed by a forceful gag which turns into a series of dry heaves, each more violent than the last. My innards churn as though they were noodles being stirred (my perspective here is granted a close-up view of the surface of my belly, writhing as visible protuberances distend the surface, as though I were afflicted by all varieties of hernia simultaneously) and with a great triumphant hiss, sounding for all the world like a cross between a gas leak and a tambourine three-tenths of a second after having been struck, I begin vomiting up a colossal snake, anguis in corpus, some gargantuan species not found in nature which slowly undulates three, six, nine feet out of my mouth (here I experience a blocking of the airway; asphyxiation by reptile) and, still not fully emerged but stretched across the floor, it extends a fat crimson tongue, forked and wet, and begins licking between the nun's legs, smooth, hairless and unmarked as with the crotch of a tree.

At this point I see that perhaps the nun is a fellow inhabitant of the Project (though the official religious establishment here is segregated from the inmates, I remember through a haze,) for she seems to be lacking a vulva or any external sex organs whatsoever. There is no opening, no scar tissue with the familiar perforation marks of stitches, and I begin wondering exactly how the baby intends to exit her (though it is not until much later that I contemplate similarly the nature of her impregnation).

Though my body remains immobile it is at this point where I occupy another, identical body, to run to her aid - dropping from the ceiling, snake no, freedom of movement, erection yes (I find dwelling on other people's sexual dysfunctions so much more fulfilling - pontification of your own genitals is like a bastard offspring of masturbation, not even graced with the dignity of physical contact). I make great leaps to get to her side, though the rotating scenery ensures that I have to travel diagonally to a destination which lies straight before me.

Kneeling as I get to her (not feeling any of the relative motion which hampered me moments ago) I squeeze her hand in reassurance (she is now completely unclothed, save for the habit which is bleeding onto the salt/floor) and discover the mark of blood on my own palm from where I gripped her; a quick inspection reveals wounds forming in her palms and feet as a dozen various wounds and bruises form on the right side of her torso. Simultaneously, the creature in the womb begins expanding, the swelling bulges and inflates to unreal sizes - her body stretches in response and the new wounds and stigmata (I can't see the bruise of the cross on her shoulder or the whip lash marks on her back but I just know they're there) grow tight and start tearing open further to compensate for the growing mass inside of her.

To compound all of this a dove (having flown in through the hole in the ceiling perhaps?) is now sitting on the head of the giant snake (still dangling like a giant sinew from the mouth of my other body, you will recall) and is trying to peck out its eyes.

The mass inside the nun's belly (her pitched breathing and frantic cries - still completely oblivious to my presence - have fallen low now and her face is gently tilted to the left) has stopped swelling now and has stabilized at a size greater than any child has any right to be. I catch glimpses inside her body (which seems to be entirely filled with womb) through the widened cuts and wounds and am near-blinded by jets of light which come pouring out through the bleeding slits. The Truth inside her (for what else could possibly be so hard to bring to term?) begins shuddering and struggling to emerge from the striations which now constitute her body, and I know that without my assistance it will never succeed.

Standing up and back from the proceedings, I initiate a harsh and severe yawn, not resolving but instead gathering strength and a degree of openness the longer it continues until my mouth is open far enough for me to push inside my maw with a fist, grope around uvulae and epiglotti blindly before wrapping my fingers around the hilt of a long, dark knife at the front bottom of my throat, pulling it out without hesitation and wiping its bloody surface (blood not my own but from some previous, forgotten use) across the salt, which turns brown when it contacts the blood (this instantly, indeed, retroactively applies to the nun's blood as well, her now lying in a ring of brown, looking like nothing so much as a re-surfaced recent burial). At her side again I twirl the utensil idly.

Though the gigantic mass is clearly riding way high and occupying the space where her abdominal organs should be I come to the decision that it is important that the Truth be forced through the same birth canal as we all are intended to, that it doesn't emerge deformed and unrecognizable. Stabbing in and up, I strike a blow against the cesarean section, and carve the unresponsive woman a new point of egress. It is clear that a traditional opening won't be sufficient for the release of this tremendous payload, so I begin pulling, dragging the edge up, ripping an opening up the woman's middle. As I do so what is inside begins to shift and settle, and a vast gout of noxious fumes smelling like nothing so much as saliva begins to flatulate from the new opening I create. As the mass diminishes appropriately, the pressure of the gasses' emission increases to gale-force, and again it hisses tremendously as it howls past my ears.

The smaller the bulge becomes as the gas leaves her the more intense the winds grow, until as she approaches a girth of normalcy a small glowing mote is ejected from her bloody opening and instantly propelled behind me, into the salt wastes. The snake has long since been lifted up and thrown back like a peeled-off bandage (the fate of the dove unknown, not even a feather as evidence) and I am forced to grip the woman's bloody thighs and jam my face into the brown salt to avoid being swept away by the winds as well. Roofs of corrugated aluminum are torn off and livestock are tossed around like so many salads, but ultimately the gusts falter and cease, only occasional spurts of air from the new wound making themselves heard when the nun, now fully-clothed, takes a breath.

hsst

The expression on her face is one of tranquillity and fulfillment. She has given birth to truth, a honour historically reserved for men, and a lifetime of rest is her due reward for the task mankind demanded of her. Doubtless she will know seven crises in her life, terrible emergencies, but for the time being she lies and sleeps, a mysterious smile curled at her lips.

hsst

While pondering the fate of my knife (forgetting the snake, the dove, the other body all, even the surrounding salt which has disappeared, myself now standing, natch, lying on a floor) I feel a tickling at the back of my throat, where I know the blade has resumed its standby position of eternal diligence, and I lick my lips.

hsst

"lingus. lingus."

My lips are dry. I am on the floor of my cell. Cauda is calling me. It is not yet sunrise. In the darkness, I hope that Cauda has not noticed my still-raging erection.

I have such dreams often. There are some motes of truth behind them - the women's ward does of course exist, and though the inhabitants of it are of course all missing various organs, none of them are so severely mutilated as to result in such a complete tabula rasa, so to speak. Severe scarring is reduced by injections of tissue cells from fetuses, but to possess such an unmarked aftermath is strictly unorthodox. The pregnancy as well was of course impossible - strict segregation is enforced between the genders, but of course there are ways around those. Cauda, who is calling me, is familiar and most accomplished at most of these methods, though whether this is through his persistence or his inability to offend is unclear.

"hsst! lingus!"

My response is a rhythmic tapping against hard stone cobbles, spelling out a message in a code he neither knows nor cares to, but the gist of the communication is enacted - confirmation of my now awake state and receptiveness to further words from him.

The second dream; from God-box

I lie on a cloud, in a reclining position partially sitting, partially supine. The vaporous mass feels firm but yielding under my fingers, slick but hard to grasp, like upholstered furniture under coverings of thick plastic sheets. A fine breeze wafts by, and I can feel nodules moving beneath the misty surface of the mass on which I lie.

On cloudtop I see nothing but blue sky above and blinding sun, so I close my eyes and lie back, sinking back into an ever-shifting embrace of evaporated fingers. The sun persists, forcing me to screw my eyes tighter to avoid its glare and in relation to its increased heat on my body (nude and Adonis-like, rarer than it might seem considering the difference between dreams and fantasies) I feel an increasing itching on the back of my neck. I reach over with one hand and then another but can't quite reach its source, not even with the assistance of a backscrubber which momentarily appears in my grasp.

I have to sit up suddenly as it flares into a burning pain and simultaneously I can open my eyes as the sun becomes blocked by the obscured silhouette (difficult to tell with blinding sunlight pouring around its edges) of a Pope, hat, shepherd's crook and keychain distinct on this figure which stands at the edge of my cloud, my little piece of blue sky and begins approaching me. Though it's been decades since a Pope was last in power this one becomes more recognizable as it approaches, the pain at the base of my skull increasing proportionally to its distance.

Clicks and grinds become audible and I feel tracery down my body's contours; looking down I see that my distinguishing lines are now concealed beneath wires and fiber-optic cables, a colossal male power connection emerging from my groin. With a final glance I note that my fingertips are painted red where they scrambled at the back of my neck, and with a jolt I lose all sense of touch and all power of movement in a gasping shudder as Pope Joan opens her robes, revealing full breasts and a ripe belly, and slides her own crotch down and over the pronounced grounding cable connection protruding from my pelvis.

I am now a man of science, fully functional in every conceivable manner. Servomotors go to work in my hips, countering this Pope's bump with a responsive grind, meeting Her Eminence halfway and pop-up windows appear in my field of vision giving me a readout of her pulse and vital signs, different camera angles of our intercourse and an infrared display of where her body is emitting the most heat. We continue with the obscene industrial efficiency of a piston-engine but as she begins to climax I witness, a trapped and powerless witness in this copulating machine, a procession approaching from behind her.

A old, wise-looking grey-and-white-bearded man straight from the Sistine Chapel ceiling surrounded by angels and seraphim glides up before us in silence. Shaking his head in disapproval (of which of the dozen sexual covenants we are currently violating I am unsure - number thirty-six: Popes are not supposed to seek gratification in electrical appliances?) he extends an arm out, finger pointed at me and gives us the Spark of Life, which emerges in the form of a lightning bolt.

My sight momentarily wipes to black, then static, then readouts re-initialize and begin displaying again. Perhaps because she was grounded (?) the lightning coursed through Joan's body and out down to the ground, killing her in the process, according to her vital signs, though she still emits heat from her belly, where her child may yet live, and the top of her head. As a visual input kicks in, I can see that the Pope hat she was still wearing when she mounted me is on fire, smoking consistently like a stick of incense.

Back in control of my faculties I try to remove this charred corpse from my undamaged robotic body, but it seems fused on, attached permanently. Indignant I rise to my feet, the smoking corpse of this woman affixed to my pelvis like a colossal extension of my penis. Turning around, I note that I am no longer on a cloud, but am in the Project's communal eating area. Laying her down on a table surface, myself still in a fully standing position, I am made aware of agitating movements originating from her belly.

Her navel pulses outwards once, twice, and a small cloth-covered nub emerges, like a toe as seen through a sock. This is joined by a second nub, and the two of them slowly grow and push the navel further and further open until it becomes clear that they are hands, covered not in gloves but by small rough sacks, tied around the wrists. They extend to the elbow and then to the shoulder, and after some blind grasping they find the table surface and use it as leverage which allows the complete womb to open far enough to allow a small man to clamber out, no more than four feet tall. His face as well is hidden beneath a sack, and the appearance of what few inches of exposed skin there are (forearms, neck) lead me to believe that he is afflicted with leprosy. He looks at me (points his sack towards my head), rummages around in the front right pocket of a ragged vest, and removes a small electronic device, which he points at me and activates.

Incapable of movement once again, I stand frozen as he pulls two jumper cables from Pope Joan's womb and attaches them to nubs on the back of my neck, where the earlier burning was. He stands back and manipulates the device again. Instantly bent double from agony I hear him scamper off as my vision is completely dominated by a digital display counting down. Each second which is deducted from the total produces a small electronic noise, and it inevitably approaches zero. I am filled with a sense of encroaching dread.

squidge, schtup. squidge, schtup. squidge, schtup.

I am familiar with that noise. Tongue and neck throbbing from excitement, where the scar and microchip live, I am once again in my fleshy cage, lying on my mat in my cell. It is still the night, though it will soon be time to rise.

squidge, schtup. squidge, schtup. squidge, schtup.

These are the sounds of Cutis making his twice-daily rounds to a washbasin to remove excess quantities of serum from his body-enclosing latex blister. Cutis has no skin, but science has given him the next best thing. His body still hasn't quite accounted for the artificial protective layer around it, so every twelve hours he has to open a valve in his heel and, rubbing his whole body down, remove excess quantities of serum, a fluid conductive to healing, squirting it out like the last gasp of a toothpaste tube, without which attentions the latex vesicle he inhabits would burst and his entire body surface would be open to infection.

Distant dripping noises are perceived, and his subcutaneous fluid level sounds much more balanced upon his slow and careful walk (that he not accidentally catch his second skin on any exposed protrusion) back to his chambers, far down at the other end.

stu-it, stu-it. stu-it, stu-it. stu-it, stu-it.

The noises echo faintly even after he stops moving.

It is possible that all shared evidence of the soul is constituted in the forms of dreams - that only because of nocturnal flights of surreality did we ever begin to suspect that there was a part to us which was not chained down to the physical meat. Many survivors of comas and other near-death-experiences report the experiences of their souls' journeys as vividly as perfectly healthy sensory deprivation tank aficionados. Neither is a fundamentally spiritually rigorous activity, but it is in the distancing from the body and the concerns of the flesh that one becomes aware of consciousness outside the confines of one body.

Why is it that we do not consider people in a vegetative state, no functions operating but those of the lower brain, to be mystics on a convoluted journey? The further they go from their bodies the more their corporeal form behaves like that of a simple plant or blind worm. Do such creatures live wholly spiritual lives, while we only attain a proximity to such ecstasy when in trance states reverting to their level? In being the highest and most complex creature alive, are we become the furthest from access to the soul, only truly open to it while asleep and not overtly any more complicated than a fern or tree?

Confessional antics; from God-box

As for myself, I am capable of laughter yet I choose not to exercise that capability, that capacity. I fill myself with other things. People see it as a void, though, a vacancy, and try to fill me with their secrets. There are fully functional facilities for Confession within the Project, but large quantities of my fellows choose to confide in me rather than in their doctor or in an unblinking monitor - perhaps from a hesitancy brought over from their previous lives, fears of state informers in the ranks of the clergy, corruption in the religious bureaucracy. Don't do anything you're not proud of - that's part of my own philosophy - have pride in what you do and you won't regret it, but it is clear that I am a piddling minority. Upon every occasion, when we pass each other in halls, stand next to each other in lines, scrub ourselves down in the communal baths - harsh whispered apologies and rambling, fluid accounts find their way down my ears like tickling tongues, phrases of apology for things beyond their power; dreams, nightmares, impure thoughts, forbidden desires.

"In the middle of hymn number 86, I had a vision of Jesus Christ eating pork."

"Hyle he rasn't looking, I hot the lister on my hoot into Digit Tertius' oyne. He deserred it, though, hecause he harted hen he hat down. I know he's going to Hell, that he's not un uh the Elect, I can just tell, and sonetines I enthision hin roasting in the hlanes like a hig on a stit, hlesh cracking ohen and juices drihuhing into the enders. Does this nake ne a dad herson? Oh God, are these thoughts threatening ny own chances oth ritnessing Grace?"

(In his defense and mine, I only present the accounts here as they were conveyed to me - this particular item being the grievance of my close associate Labia, the lipless wonder, more colloquially referred to as "Smily.")

They ask me many questions, getting so wrapped up in their own spiritual hysteria that they forget completely my inability to respond. Sometimes custom dictates that I nod my head, prompting them to continue, and other times I pull out all the stops and have to pat grown men on the back while they bawl in halting gasps or alternately slap them in the face when their interpretation of sin becomes ludicrously convoluted.

"He started with the ribs and fleshy areas - legs, back, but saved the worst parts for last - the feet, the snout, and that curly, curly tail he sucked back as though it were a noodle. Don't you think he'd know better? The Son of God wasn't stupid... Now I'm feeling bad because I'm thinking maybe I made baby Jesus eat it in my own mind... is that possible?"

"What would you do if you were to suspect that us, the inhabitants of the Project, are the only soulful people remaining alive on the Earth, and that everyone outside of its confines was a soulless automaton, or worse, an agent of Satan? I have a few reasons for this belief, and I want you to tell me whether or not they're completely crackpot ideas..."

Some, like Caudua, actually confess pre-emptively, apologizing in advance for crimes they are going to break, sins they are about to entertain.

"And worst of all was the fact that it wasn't even cooked! Me dreaming of Our Savior getting trichinosis! Needless to say, for the past few days I've had a craving for bacon, and unless someone stops me, I'm afraid that I'm going to break into the pantry and seize some by force."

"In three days time I fear I shall commit onanism - the boiling in my testes and manroot are simply too overpowering - and spill my seed while contemplating the Mother of God - which may, I'm not sure, constitute urges of adultery as well, well, well, she was married but not to the father of her child, and in any event last time I did this I saw her face staring back at me from the puddle of sperm, nothing acceptable like a bloodstain or a cloud but an unholy mass of demon's dew!"

High Mass; from God-box

I bathe in the first shift this day, taking care to place myself in the second-from-front row, sitting on the edge of one of a vast gallery of stainless-steel pews, resembling most vividly some apparatus belonging in an abattoir. My transference from political prison to the Project had been contingent to some degree on an observed renewal in my religious enthusiasm, and though I have now been here for several years I take care not to demonstrate significant personality deviation; though St. Thomas Aquinas proposed that personality difference could be accounted for by a person going through several souls in one lifetime as a snake goes through skins, this is a medieval theory which has been considered quite porous (incapable of holding water) with the past few administrators of the complex and I don't particularly want to solicit the attention that threatens to be bore down on me should I begin exhibiting what might be considered "soulless" behavior.

We are not lit by direct sunlight but stained glass and rose windows are set alive as though on fire courtesy of fiber-optics, and a combination of amplification and distortion makes the 030 organ's baroque algorithm effective enough - the patterns are palpable if you search for them, but they do induce a religious state of mind regardless. Brother monks slowly filter in to this grand chamber, a vaulted ceiling at least seven stories up making one highly sensitive to proposed presences in the sky. Some of them shuffle in in haste, stopping at a votive candle to pay homage to a part of their old lives (frowned upon officially but tolerated) while others meander slowly, taking in the presence of the chamber which never fails to awe even myself, while yet others take their time in recovery from illicit fickey-fick in the baths, walking with a certain swagger depending on which role they played in the water sports.

The recorded tones of bells toll again in every nook of the Project and a few soaking brethren jog in, resentful of the lottery which placed them in the third shift, jeopardizing their High Mass attendance. The 030 delivers some blistering chords and a Surgeon-Priest emerges from the eaves, resplendent in his ornate facemask and stethoscope. Walking up to the pulpit, he twiddles some electronic knobs out of sight and the music builds to a climax, then subsides to background levels.

"I am honoured to be here before you once again, to lead this unique congregation in a contemplation and veneration of Our Lord and His Device. God is a force of nature - He has existed forever and will exist forever - but He needs our help, for we are His chosen, of all His creations we are the only ones He saw fit to give the powers to venerate him, to spread His word and gospel and to improve on His creations.

"As a craftsman the Lord is without compare; he brought Something from Nothing and made Something into the only Thing worth needing; he made it Everything. He created the worm, the amoeba, and allowed it to grow and evolve into the slimy fish, the proud frog, the humble lizard, the cunning rat, the clever monkey, and finally the rational human. As manufactured objects we are all impeccable - nulli secundus, second to none.

"And though these creations may have inspired our ancestors to praise His wisdom, only now can modern man truly appreciate the subtleties of His craft, for God was not merely a master craftsman but also the greatest scientist who ever existed! He did not create in a arbitrary manner, sloppy and undisciplined, but created a universe system where there were fitting laws and absolutes to regulate and account for everything. We are no simulation, but the machine the great Clockmaker set into motion has been running smoothly for millions of years now without cause for any adjustment.

"His plans were not merely wise, they were Truth, and Veritas numquam perit - Truth never dies. So it is fitting then that as his pinnacle of creation, we will continue his work of evolution by creating new forms of life, preventing the Truth from dying, instead of letting extinction claim genetic diversity and entropy putting his experiment to an end. We will carry on his work and at the same time carry on his Truth, working in no less meticulous a method than the Eternal Scientist himself.

"Semper fidelis, always faithful to his greatest children, He instilled inside each of us and all living things instructions ad litteram describing how we are made and how we can be changed. Furthermore, in His infinite wisdom, He has made the code one we are capable of comprehending and He has provided us with tools capable of breaking it apart and rearranging it. Annuit coeptis; He nods in approval.

"All of us here are helping to understand why He put us here. We are participating in the noblest scientific experiment ever enacted on this great Earth, and although ars longa, vita brevis; art is long, but life is short. We shall not let this destroy the experiment, though, for the art of empirical measurement and objective reasoning will carry us through many lifetimes. We may not have an answer by the end of this Project's mandate, but I am confident that Deo volente, we will in this lifetime at least come closer to the question, and that our descendants will ultimately succeed and reach ad astra per aspera.

"Dum spiro, spero. While I breathe, while I remain alive on this green Earth, I hope. I believe. I believe that I have a part to play in life and that part is to act as part of this Project. I believe that all of us here have a part to play in life and that part is to act as part of this Project.

"Love your God ex animo, from the heart, serve your God and continue serving Him by being true to your nature and acting as his soulful creations, his soulful servants and scientists ex animo, and God, that divine presence all around us, in the walls, the floors, and traveling even through us and through the air between us as unseen energy, the Deus ex machina, the God out of the machine, will love all of us in return, ex animo Deo.

"SI, if, si God gave us these abilities TUM, then, tum He meant for us to use them, to exercise them.

"SI we choose not to make use of these gifts, TUM they are being wasted, we are refusing to live up to the potential He infused into us with his breath of Life and his apple of Knowledge.

"SI this opportunity is not seized in all seriousness and passion, TUM it might be taken away from us, and we might become sub-human once again, without benefit of logic, rationality or empiricism.

"This is our opportunity to realize our evolutionary responsibility - working to build on the work of our Father, to more than meet Him halfway but to stand on His shoulders and see beyond creation itself. We will be great; we will be God ourselves. The secrets of the universe will lie open to us, and we owe it all to our Creator and his Methods, his Device. In Data speramus. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Binary Set.

"End of file. Amen."

"Amen."

As most of us rise to applaud I stand and tap out an addenda on the back of the single pew in front of me: tap tippita tap tap taptap tippitap tappiti tapta tatapat; Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione. Die dulce fruere.

(i'm not interested in your dopey religious cult.

have a nice day.)

 specimen jars

I am led down a side door from the chapel, one which I would not normally be permitted access to, and am brought through unfamiliar corridors that I might have once walked through upon my entrance to the Project. The floors here are covered in some form of continuous tile in stark contrast to the stone cobbles which we trip across daily, while the light is provided by fluorescent bulbs instead of the omnipresent candles whose illumination I feel slightly naked without.

A left, a right, two more lefts, and passage through an airlock constitute the remaining distance I'm taken by this small escort, a motorcade of holy rollers. The ground rules are laid before me again - no tapping on the glass, no attempting to manipulate the electronic controls (disabled, in any event), and no attempts to forcibly remain in the room once they come to retrieve me, in a few hours whenever the manpower can be spared. I nod in the appropriate spaces, take a deep breath as they open the airtight doors before me, close my eyes and step through.

The temperature is distinctly cooler - I close my robes and secure them as much as I can. As I open my eyes the doors close shut behind me with a noise that sounds like magnetic clamps gripping their prey and refusing to relinquish their treasure until they're powered-down for the last time. Steam hisses from the doorway - hydraulics - and instantly condenses on a nearby computer readout display.

My pupils contract and dilate, trying to find a comfortable mean wherewith to view this vast but poorly-lit gallery, eventually settling on a vaguely unfocused leer. I then peer to the limits of my vision, failing at about 10 metres. The ceiling is signifigantly higher than it needs to be, and I feel like a lone crate sitting in a warehouse waiting to be picked up.

All along both walls are shelves, racks, cubby-holes, each one occupied by jars, glass containers filled to the top with fluid and containing a small bit of flesh, swimming like a vestigial fish. Each glass container (these are all small ones but they get larger further on as do the organs contained in them) is mounted on a small electronic device - these seem to be monitoring each in turn as far as temperature of the interior of the jar, contents of the jar and some other readings which are meaningless to me as well as providing a certain subtle illumination to the contents of the jar.

This is a chamber we all assumed existed, though regular access to it is forbidden for inmates (not once in seven years have I heard anyone boast of gaining entry to it) but here I am, a favor enacted to me in exchange for my tip-off regarding the previous night's reproductive gymnastics. My typical confessional duties wouldn't merit any recompense, as confession can be just as easily done with a real priest, or a computer screen for that matter, but inside information is hard to come by.

Sin is ugly and the Project knows that it is present, but they need to have statistics - quantities and qualities. What kind of sin is it? This keeps the Project going as well as keeping the sin going too. Sin wants to be revealed, you see, its protection from the eye of morality whipped off like a scab, still soft, tender and barely-formed since its last unwilling exposure. Every time a crime which would otherwise go unnoticed and victimless is brought to the public eye, sanctions are applied against the perpetrator, and that is where the Project administration is satisfied. Once the perverse activities are injected into the popular subconscious, however, that prompts analysis, deconstruction, and repetition. Sin's exposure feeds sin as well, and according to this formula ultimately everyone is a sinner and the Project happy as a clam pointing out that no one is worse than anybody else. Sin will finally have stablilized and reached a plateau; that point from which things can not get any worse.

Everything near the entrance is quite small and unidentifiable by sight but eventually I realize that what flanks me along the wall on either side are bits of brain, small fatty lumps bobbing like a lump of butter in the broth. This stroll continues for quite some time before the jars get a little bit bigger and start containing things I have a chance of recognizing; toes, fingers, yes... as the jars grow it takes more footwork to cover a similar quantity of them, but soon I enter familiar territory, picking out organs belonging to those I am well-acquainted with.

A disembodied penis is quite a laughable sight, swimming in its tank like a hairy one-eyed fish. A new jar is ahead, the shape of the jar a little different from the old ones, and my God, the whole thing is full of small red particles as though it were a jug of bloody oatmeal; looking to the contents of the adjoining jars, I conclude that this must have at one point been the new Prometheus' liver, but to think that it could be deteriorated to such a degree is shocking, even given the degree to which we have all seen previous Promethei themselves deteriorate. Were their livers all in this fragile a condition?

I involuntarily flex my abdomenal muscles in shaky reassurance that my own liver is still there and still in its stable condition. And here we are now, this giant yellow balloon would be a stomach. This horny tube would be a trachea and here are all of the friends my next-door neighbour must miss. What would he give for even one tooth to scrape with, I wonder.

A tongue floating in a preservative and nutritive solution doesn't look noble like a heart or even identifiable like a foot; it looks like an over-salted slug. That this innocuous organ could make or break a vocation as a mover of men's minds and spirits seems unlikely, but we live with the proof. Martin Luther sermonized to crowds of thousands and tore the world in two with the benefit of this fleshy little scrap of meat.

I thought that I could use it to accomplish the reverse - to mend the world, to reconcile the wild divergences of science and religion, so that they could stop indivually making life more difficult for people and could start instead working in conjunction to solve problems instead of posing more questions. Religion and science are now on the same side, but only because they realized that they share a common enemy - the people. For a while I stirred the pot; I created a further demand for answers, though I didn't create any, but ultimately I saw that the third power I was forming existed simply as a protest vote - a question for which no answer will be provided is worse off than a question which is never asked - for those who chose to reject both of the two forces of the establishment but without knowing what there could possibly be to replace them.

When I had a tongue I asked new questions daily. The responses were never answers, only the outrage of silence I anticipated and hoped for. And now? Inside this complex I am faced with more quandaries of existence than I ever was outside of it, and yet still we arrive at no answers. But now I conduct research that I might entertain the possibility of arriving at one.

In the spirit of all great orators I would speak in long lines, bringing the audience with me in the present tense through the experience, reliving it in their presences rather than merely recounting a description of it to them. I would show them instead of simply telling them; I would bring them with me.

But I had nowhere to take them. Giving myself up, pleading no contest to the charges of blasphemy (against the church and microscope both) certainly didn't provide any answers, but at least it didn't give the appearance of leading to truths which didn't exist. If I wander in my metaphysical travellings now down the wrong path, I don't have to worry about the ramifications on thousands of the wrong kind of subjects, radicals who chose to affiliate themselves with me for purposes of nonconformity rather than through parallel conclusions arrived at through critical thinking. Science now has produced a nation of people eager to conduct the experiment, eager to write down its precise results, but a people most reluctant to draw up their own hypotheses and concoct original experiments to test them with.

This is an original experiment. This is one of the few original hypotheses enacted during my lifetime. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, and I've been a problem child long enough.

The sight of my tongue is depressing - a link to a past I've willingly forsaken but still it doesn't match my personal credo, of action without regret. I can still imagine some other, as-yet unseen option which might have opened up, which might have left me free to seek an answer without embracing a system which I knew would only produce skewed results.

I turn away, spinning with eyes half-shut through the gallery until I slip, overcome with vertigo, and collapse at the foot of a jar. Looking up I wait for it to stop spinning before noticing that it seems to be empty. Gripping both sides of the plexiglass firmly I lift myself up to the level of the fluid, where I observe that it does indeed appear to be as vacant as a fishtank being cleaned. I try approaching it from different angles, from the side, from above, thinking perhaps the distorting effects of the transparent container are preventing me from noticing what is inside of it, but after a few minutes of agitation I give up and look at the label.

Blank. Nothing shows up on the display, but there is a sticker beneath it bearing some handwriting: "Vat-grown. No navel removed; extra jar unneeded." Vat-grown? We do have among our ranks the first victim of the cloning chambers, it seems. Last I checked artificial womb technology was capable of bringing piglets to term but not human beings! Of course, of course that doesn't fully explain the process. A fetus, as it grows in the womb, feeds off of the bloody mass of the placenta, which is connected to the baby by the umbilicus, which upon birth is severed, its remainder shrivelling down to a small lump of scar tissue, falling off and disappearing one day and leaving a navel in its place. What did I initially suppose the tank might have contained, the scar tissue? You can't amputate a hole...

Perhaps in a case where the umbilicus was severed at an early phase of the gestation the navel would fail to form as scar tissue, the unique properties of fetal cell growth already remarked upon, but still an alternate source of sustainance for the fetus would be required. Better minds than mine could probably find a way around that (and did, evidently) but it's the ramifications, the symbolism that staggers me. We have now created an immaculate conception grown with no need for a mother and only one father - science.

In some mythologies when a woman becomes pregnant she loses half of her soul to the creature growing inside of her; for some months after birth both mother and child are possessed only of partial souls, slowly regrowing and replenishing, explaining their spiritual feebleness and susceptibility to psychic and physical ailments during this time. This has been used to account for SIDS as well as post-partum depression, but what someone raised in that culture would make of this situation frightens the hell out of me. Without need for a mother, without growing inside of one it recieves no soul, comes to term without one and is slowly raised and nurtured in a labrotory environment until it is old enough to function on its own in a larger controlled environment such as that of this Project.