Knowledge of Bugs

I am stood on a hill, a hill of duvet. Something alien glows beneath my feet. It moves. I run and hide in a fold of duvet.

The alien runs across me. It is a robotic, metallic spider, about the size of a sheep. It senses my breath somehow, the CO2, and begins to cut through the layers of duvet to get to me. I struggle with it. I think it wants to dissect my brain. It talks to me.

‘I need your right eye’, said the Spiderbot.

‘Sorry, but I’m using it right now, you can’t have it.’ Said I.

‘The machine needs it to see the world, I promise it won’t hurt’, said the Spiderbot.

Warily, I nod agreement. Spiderbot produces a metal disk on a wire, exactly like my piezoelectric pick up I got from Knowledge of Bugs.

He painlessly removes my right eye, and attaches it first to himself, for a quick test, and then onto a larger metal structure, some kind of spaceship I think. Spiderbot wanders along with me as we stroll along a path. We pass other people, who look at me with concern. I’m worried about how I look with my missing eye.

‘I worry all the time about how people see me,’ says Spiderbot.

I catch my reflection. My right eye socket is empty, hollow, and where my eye was thousands of tiny gold threads line this hollow and flow out onto my face. The machine sees through me, and I can see through the machine.

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