Long time. No see no hear no speak.

Dearest reader,
It has been far too many months since I have typed into this small text-entry box. However many years ago, I had dreamt of these days, the days at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, to be filled with the drunken lights of fame and fortune. But dreams are only for those who refuse to rise from sleep.
It was never my intention for the last half-year to pass as it did. To be truly honest with you, it was only though the manifestation of my deepest nightmares that I have been unable to return to this place.
So instead of asking for forgiveness (because that is something I wish never to do), I will explain my story from beginning to end. It is a hard story for me to relive, and one who’s book I have only recently closed, so it may be… rough on the edges. Please try your best to navigate.

This is how my story goes:

* * *

I remember November far too well considering how long ago that month was. The snow had just begun to fall in Connecticut and the threat of late midterms loomed over the campus. But I was more than content. Outside my window I saw a white sea void of footprints. A sea waiting to be tread upon and marked with beauty.
I remember this well because it is the last fully conscious memory I have. In my mind, the six months following are void of touch and smell. The colors are dulled like an old, instant photograph, and the sounds are blended together.
At first, my nightmare began with a common cold. I wasn’t concerned though. Finals were approaching and everyone was getting the exam flu. My running nose progressed into an annoying cough that ground my throat raw. I took to bed, the most accessible remedy to college students, not realizing that I was standing at the edge of a hurricane, already slipping into the chaos that defines its existence.
The next few weeks are only a blur. I was somehow able to stumble through finals exams and projects. I somehow got onto the plane to my parents’ house where things only got worse.
I remember stepping into my parents’ home with a vicious urge in my gut. My body craved a substance I was very familiar with, but couldn’t name. I climbed up the stairs and slid under the covers of my bed. I remember fire. So much fire. With my sheets drenched in sweat I watched demons, riding chariots lead by eight-headed dragons, pull the sun and the moon up and down three times. A cephalopod from the pits of hell found its way into the damp darkness underneath my bed and would torture me with its toothed tentacles, slowly nibbling at my sheets, getting closer and closer and ever closer to my flesh. When I cried for help no sound was made. No one came but a turquoise, humanoid fox who looked like Anubis. He sat at my desk and watched me with eyes that spoke novels. He told me of the expansive things he has seen: The unimaginable strength of an exploding star, the extinction of the dinosaurs; the deterioration of a brain with Alzheimer’s.
Then I awoke.
Still in my bed, but fine. I could breath normally; I could speak normally; there were no more tentacles and the Anubis creature had left.
But there were crumbs.
Crumbs everywhere. Covering the sheets, in between the folds, in the pillows, my hair, my ears… It was like waking up on the beach, except instead of sand you’re covered in reprocessed cardboard and you just feel obese.
My first thought was one of anger towards my parents. What had fueled them to pull such a massive prank on me in my state of delirium? I got up to pull a prank of similar caliber on them. I was thinking of something along the lines of pissing on their wet laundry so that the piss would get dried into their clothes. But as soon as I rose I realized my parents had no hand in what was going on. A quick glance across my room would make any CEO of McDonald’s cringe a little.
It was covered in In N Out bags. I looked like winter, it was so white.
I felt like puking. I did puke. Vomit had never tasted so delicious in my life. The sweat aroma of true meat mixed with special sauce and crisp fries put my mind into a trance. I was swept away into dreams of riding wish dragons to Cybertron. When I opened my eyes I was sitting at a table in front of an In N Out with a double double and animal fries in front of me. The food glistened and egged me like an Amsterdaniam window prostitute.
I slapped the wretched dish across the restaurant. The thin blooded, mindless Californians who had all sold their soul to the evil company looked at me with alarm. I was too angry to notice. “How could they have done this!? How did they win!? When did I sell my body to the doomsday device that is In N Out Burger!?” I yelled the questions inside myself, searching for answers that I had no way of knowing.
One of the servers, those rotten people, came to me. With a horrible, Joker’s smile he said, “Hey dude, are you like-” Before he could finish chanting his arcane magic I punched him in the face. I leapt over the table and ran as fast as I could.

Three days in bed, living off nothing but In N Out, had wrecked my body. I limped back to my parents’ house confused and scared, wondering what had happened. I traced back to final exams, study sessions, late night games of Starcraft… nothing made sense. There is no In N Out in the safety of New England. How could they have infested my body with an uncontrollable addiction to their nanobot-soaked foods?
By the time I reached my parents house my head was spinning. My depth perception was nearly gone and bright colors floated aimlessly across my vision. I swallowed the urge to vomit and began researching on my bat-computer. I took a snot sample and found it overflowing with nanobots; nanobots that were weeks old. I realized that whoever was behind this must have been in Connecticut with me. They had to have been close enough to me to sneak large quantities of nanobots into my food, but spread it out so that I wouldn’t notice. The cause of my sickness: My immune system was fighting the nanobots; but loosing.
Suddenly, my phone rang. It was an unidentified number. I usually don’t pick those up, but I was desperate. For what? I still wonder.
Hello? I asked, not sure what to expect.
“Hey man, what’s up?”
The voice sounded familiar. Not much, I said. I knew it was someone from school. I told them that I was just hanging out and asked how their break was going.
“It’s great. Where you at right now?”
I told them at my house. They hung up.
I had made a mistake.
Instantly, I activated the self-destruct system on my computer. I got up to tell my parents to run, when I realized that the house was silent. Too silent. In my fatigue, I had failed to notice the obvious signs of an ambush.
A wire wrapped itself around my neck. Someone was behind me, pulling the wire, trying to choke me. The assassins of In N Out are some of the best in the country. They arm themselves with poisonous dart guns, daggers carved from the bones of tigers and studded with diamonds, and their battle suits are equipped with state of the art body hydration systems. Another assassin dropped from the ceiling in the hallway in front of my room. As soon as he landed, he charged at me with his dagger already drawn.
I threw my head back, hitting the assassin in his goggles, setting him off balance. I dropped down, taking his dagger from him. I stood up, stabbing the blade into his naval and ripping it all the way up to his throat. I spun around and threw it into the charging assassin’s faceplate.
Knowing that more assassins were already on the way I jumped into the bathroom’s emergency escape tunnel. I didn’t have time to take anything with me and everything was lost when the house exploded, hopefully taking a few of those In N Out bastards with it.

Skip another three days and my body struggles just to breath. I had a fever and was having trouble with fine motor skills. The nanobots probably had a fail-safe trigger system programmed in them in case something went wrong. When I slept I had nightmares of them swarming my spleen and disintegrating it with tiny laser beams.
At this time, I was just past the border. I had decided to flee to Tijuana and lay low until my body could recover. During my time squatting in an abandoned burrito vendor’s stand I put the whole thing together.
In N Out had acquired some of my Californian “friends” into its ranks of spies. The big-wigs had decided it was time to expand In N Out into the far reaches of America, starting with New England. As a native Bostonian and once very vocal opposition to In N Out, who would be better than me as the figurehead of the New England branch? The Californian spies brought tens of dozens of pounds of nanobots with them to Connecticut over Thanksgiving break. I ate with at least one of them almost every day. They didn’t even have to try. I was like a baby in a cannon, waiting to be shot into a brick wall.
But my luck had run out. Before I even had a chance to get better, In N Out agents found me hiding under the worn tent of Papito’s Burritos. They took my arm and jabbed it with a syringe. In minutes my stomach was growling. No… it was howling for the flesh of a freshly killed cow wedged between a slice of lettuce, tomato, onion, and two toasted buns sprinkled with sesame seeds.
I blacked out.

When I awoke, my hands were tied in LAN cables. The cables were wrapped around a dieing tree. Below me there was nothing. Nothing but the gaping maw of a volcano. It’s red innards swished and bubbled like my stomach as I chewed on French fries. To my horror, that horrible character of Anubis rose from the depths of the lava. He floated up to me. Slowly. Like snow falling up.
He stopped when we were at eye level. He told me to look up at the LAN cables. They were slowly breaking. He told me I had thirty minutes before they would snap. If I pulled too hard on them, they would instantly break and I would fall into the lava. If I did nothing for five minutes, he would cut them himself.
(Now, I’ve never seen a Saw movie, but I could tell he was definitely infringing on some copyright laws.)
I didn’t ask him why. He scared me more than anything I’ve ever experienced in my life and I didn’t want to risk pissing him off. At first I tried to swing. I figured I’d get enough momentum to wrap my legs around the tree, then I’d just break the LAN cables and get out of the Anubis character’s sick trap. But the tree was too far away and I only pulled on the LAN cables. The Anubis character laughed at my futility. He began to tell me more horrible stories with his eyes. They distracted me.
He told me things of zombie babies eating their fetae siblings, then eating their way out of mothers. He told me things of mad doctors who tear their patients’ limbs off and attach the limbs of animals; then watch as the patient’s body rejects the new limb and begins to eat away at the patient’s open wound. He told me of governments forcing their people to dig monumental trenches until their shovels disintegrated, and once those shovels were gone, the people had to use their nails, until those would end up overturned and dull, so then they would have to use their teeth, until those were shaved down to gooey stubs, and then the government would impregnate them with more zombie babies!
I couldn’t take anymore of his words. I pulled on the LAN cables myself, dropping away towards the abyss. But before I hit that hot lava I awoke. It was only another dream.
I sat up to find out where I was. This time there were no crumbs. No In N Out bags. I was on a cold, linoleum floor. I was in the middle of a hallway. The hallway expanded straight in both directions until there was nothing. I began to walk.
At first I counted seconds. After ten minutes of counting I stopped. It was becoming too depressing to know how long I would spend aimlessly traveling down a never-ending corridor. I imagined stopping, turning around and seeing if there was anything on the other side of the hallway. But I had come so far...
Just as my legs were beginning to go numb I saw something in the distance. It was short and covered in shadow. I didn’t care if it could kill me. I didn’t care if it could save me. I was filled with joy that I had found something in this place. That I was no longer alone.
With new life in my body, I ran to it. But as I approached, my happiness turned to fear. Then absolute horror.
It was the Anubis character.
He sat quietly. He had been waiting.
He stood. He began to tell me more stories. More horrible things. Things of Pocky sticks being inserted into urethra’s. A woman’s uterus being pulled inside out and fed to piranhas. The entire screenplay of the live action Mario Brother’s movie.
I turned and ran. His visions echoed in my mind. I could hear every sound he told me and feel every emotion he uttered. There was no freedom. No happiness. Nothing but misery. I passed out.
Each time that I awoke I was put into another horrid situation where it was only me and the Anubis character. He would tell me more things and I would listen. I would try to stop them. I would try to stop him. I’d try to kill myself. I tried to destroy the world. Nothing worked. Before the end I would always pass out, only to wake up to that hell again.
Eventually I noticed a re-occurrence in his visions. At first it was only a yellow glow in the background. It slowly came into focus as a reverse seven. The mad scientists and the dark leaders of these horrible visions all wore this reverse seven on their uniforms. As innocent people were tortured this yellow icon loomed overhead. I began to listen to the character’s stories in a new way. I stopped viewing them as my own personal torture, but as a possible future. I future ruled by In N Out. A future where there was no hope for happiness because no one ever stood against evil.
When I awoke for the last time it was in a laboratory. Three people stood over me, behind a dentist lamp aimed at my face. They all wore the reverse seven. One of the people, the doctor, leaned towards me. She parted her red lips and with a smile said, “hey, I’m hungry. Lets go get a bite.”
I was exhausted. I couldn’t feel my body. My mouth felt numb but I was able to say, okay. “Where should we go?” She asked. “Let’s get some,” I chose my next words very carefully, “clam chow-dah.” The doctor slapped me. She turned to the two other people, shouting. “He’s useless!” She screamed. “We’ve wasted our time on him!”
They all nodded and turned out the light.

When I awoke I was sprawled in a cardboard shack on the streets of Oosaka with a bad case of geketsu. I spent nights dancing for pocket change which went to fast food and the beauty that is Suntory Whiskey. I spent my days in a drunken daze, sleeping in cardboard boxes and chatting with Japanese school children about Augmented Reality.
I had given up hope.
So what if In N Out will one day rule the world, I thought. I tried to stop them and all that did was give me geketsu. If it weren’t for the whiskey I would have been in a world of emo despair. I would have wondered what, on this planet, could defeat the machine that is In N Out? Who could ever save the millions brainwashed by their nanobots?
One day, while peeing on a Pepsi vending machine, the Anubis character came to me. I tried pissing on him, but the liquid passed through his body. He grabbed me around the neck and glared into my eyes. Once again he showed me the world where no one had stood against In N Out. He showed me the tortured, the broken, and the hopeless. A world where everything was divided into option 1 and option 2. But I pointed to today. Except for the zombie babies, how is that world different than the one we live in today? Are there not people who have no chances? Are there not broken souls who were given a bad hand in life? Is there anyone who truly has the power to order food that doesn’t exist on the menu of life? He agreed and loosened his grip on my throat.
He said he was disappointed in me. He had come because he thought I could stand against them. I told him that he could not guilt trip me. I do not regret things. He said he understood, but he wanted to show me one more image. Something more general.
He looked into my eyes one more time, and I understood.
I looked up. Above the skyscrapers and the neon lights and the stars. I looked out, beyond the streets and the mountains and the oceans. I slammed my whiskey bottle into the ground and watched as glass and liquid glittered.
Everything was beautiful.

* * *

So now it is for you, dearest reader, who I write for. It is you who I stand for and it is you who I will fall for if it so comes to that. Alone, if naught for Brian, but steadfast with a heart more unbreakable than diamond.
I will not let this world fall into the gray, hapless pit that is silence. I will not let this world loose art.

Sincerely
Teck no Z