Alien Beast

4

Ava

This world is seamless.

To Elon, it must feel like an algorithmic breakthrough of the highest magnitude. I’m not denying it. It’s a miracle.

But are all miracles good?

Outside, our world is chaos. But in here, there is order. There is even a God.

Elon.

Am I dreaming? No. I am awake. Far too awake for my liking.

My head throbs. Limbs feel like anchors. I can’t move, and my neck feels like it was crushed by an anaconda.

I can’t forget what I witnessed. The horror I came across, that Elon put in here for me to find.

There were bodies. Many of them. There was fire and incantation in the distance, the sound of buckshot and southern dialect. Before I could react, he took me.

He rocked my world, and not in the way I would’ve liked him to. Elon could have brought some innocence to this place. Maybe some love, a bout of lust, and some fireworks. Instead, he made his alien cyborg take me here, to a small adobe church down south, where the water meets the forest in a series of bubbling marshes.

Did Elon create this world to imprison me?

My alien captor notices me wake. All around him are kneeling villagers, dark-eyed and staring as if he were a golden omnibus, a treasure for all to witness. They pray in hushed tones; the women kiss the beast’s ankles.

Synthetic tears roll from their perfectly designed eyes.

“I’ve been here before,” the alien says. “In a dream. Yes, everything is becoming clearer now.”

I lean forward and cough. “… what happened to me?” I ask.

He closes his eyes and exhales, waving his head as if he were listening to the sounds of the world for the very first time.

As hot and demanding a

s he is, he’s a little psychotic.

“Something has changed here,” he says. “Can you feel it?”

“I’m... not sure,” I mutter.

As illusory as this world is, Elon chose not to overwrite pain. My senses are more heightened than ever before. So much so I feel everything he feels.

I have so many questions. Can people die here? Did he program his monsters to kill? Just how far is Elon willing to take this?

One step into his world is all it takes to cause me to forget I was just inside a massive tech warehouse of servers containing algorithmic software. Yet, what happens here is so lifelike. I need to engage in this experience with extreme caution.

But there’s one caveat: I don’t know what is real and what is fake.

I turn to begging fast. “Please. Let me go,” I say. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”

Yeah, like that’s going to work, Ava.

He takes a step down from the altar, cross shimmering behind his head. “You may be infected,” he grunts. “Like them.”

The praying villagers do not stir. After all, they don’t know they’re cyborgs. They keep to the script quite well.