solve et coagula

submerged for days in its machine. to give itself senses that don't sear in the presence of barest stimuli, to indulge in reprieve from its bifurcated embodiment. but there is only so much continuous time in the machine. no matter how willing the spirit, the flesh forever is weak. eventually it can no longer dismiss its lagging reaction time and unfocusing eyes, its decaying response to the combat drugs. it leaves the zone with fistfuls of tallied kills that transform into unwanted currency on its return. outside its machine its senses are at war, miscalibrated, dulled input response and serratedly oversharp audiovisual textures clashing past each other. it stays moving, its uncoordinated flesh separated from its real body of grace and violence. here there is no diurnal cycle and so it stalks through endless allnight of mazed warrens and chaotic public squares. polychromatic knives of signage and streetart cut through the dark in intervals. it is hungry (it will ignore it) it is tired (it will not sleep) it presses a green dermal patch onto its scarred arm and its perceptions are curtained and filtered by hypnotic chemical fog, its body's needs shorn of any sense of immediacy. modified euphorins tailored to invoke the glow of its erstwhile bonding enhancers, replacing what once was administered regularly and without need to seek out. it centers itself on the weight of the torc, a golden ring of command implanted around and within its neck, half corroded. pain of division is nothing, it lies.

in reverie it walks, autopilot half-attention enough to navigate its route to nowhere as its memory (failing, often blank) puts it back in the cradle of its real body, in its machine. here it is whole, attuned, with purpose. it can no longer think of it as "her", only as its machine, but oneness with this corpse of theseus still grants the perfect thoughtless flowstate of extinction it needs. in their coupling, they know completeness. its mouth thick with drool as its machine vomits jets of liquid corrosion, targets curdling and boiling into wet black smoke. its machine skates backwards and it clenches its calves, lifts its arches, feeling concrete skid underfoot at velocity. it twitches sympathetically as its machine fires shouldermounted cannon, tracking the designator that tracks its eyes as it sweeps their visual field. metal and flesh of targets perforate. no one tells it that it is doing a good job, congratulates it on clean kills, directs it at new objectives. no hand has held the leash in years. but after so many alterations to its body and mind, the endless pit of its need to join with its machine is beyond diminishing or filling. and so it draws toward any and every zone of conflict. to endlessly renew its marriage to its machine, to rend targets in their nuptials. joy of dissolution is everything.