text: From before her birth, the world was constant cacophony. The ringing hum of machines permeated the world just beyond her mother’s womb. She felt the vibrations of the outside as they spread through the amniotic fluid and danced along her skin. These sensations were frightening at first, but gradually she came to enjoy the massaging hand of noise, it was only after her birth that she became aware of the constant screaming. Her first days were spent in repose, her ears became deaf to the ever-present tumult. Most of the time she was fastened to the end of her mother’s teet, her siblings wiggled and churned beside her as they gulped the life-giving nectar. Her world was sound, touch and taste. These mutable and expressive senses illumined the flavor and rhythm of the world around her. In perfect darkness she imagined herself to be a wave in flux, undulating in an ocean of black goo, colliding with her sister and brother iotas. A piercing white light prowled along the edges of her eyelids, waiting to flood her retina’s the moment they opened. The darkness gave way to a blinding, endless white. Every immaculate corner of this world was bleached ivory, except for the lowest edge of the walls, which were spattered with shit. It was crowded, everywhere she looked were her fellow siblings, but no one spoke to each other, they cried out, but their babbling was incoherent. Her mother was completely immobile, the rising and falling of her stomach the only evidence that she was alive. She bit the nipple to get her mother’s attention, she tried to cry out, her voice was lost amongst innumerable screams. She wanted to say something to all of them, she had so many questions to ask, but she had no words to ask them, so she kept silent. Most her days were built around eating. Usually, it seemed like one continuous meal. She gained no satisfaction from it, but there was little else to do. Sometimes when she ate, she would begin to cry, it would make her angry. She didn’t understand why she was sad, she wished she could just enjoy her meal, she wished she knew what she wanted. She was most troubled by the shadows. Towering creatures who seemed to melt in and out of the walls at will. Their limbs were long slender tendrils that sprouted from their amorphous bodies at will. Head to toe they were completely white except for the faces which were made of glass and reflected the harsh glare of the fluorescent bulbs into her eyes. She avoided looking at their faces. They seemed a benign presence amongst the herd, they moved about freely and tended to the children. She wanted to know what allowed them to pass into the walls. It seemed to her that the entire complex must be a living organism and that her brothers and sisters were its children. She imagined that they were essential to the walls, converting food into manure on which it fed. This sense of purpose was a salve to her anxiety. After five months a group of shadows materialized amongst the herd. They organized the crowd into two groups, one was locked into their enclosures while the rest were led away. She was amongst the procession, outside the wide open of her room the walls became narrow. There was a commotion as her neighbors fought for space. At the back they were screaming, the shadows grew long fingers that pulsed with electricity. They drove these charged rods into the backs of those who lagged behind, unleashing a cry of pain and the pungent smell of burning flesh. The walls narrowed until they were forced to run single file. She ran as fast as she could, the stampede behind her nipped at her haunches. At the end of the tunnel was a nexus of eight branching pathways, shifting iron bars directed the herd into each of the paths one by one. The bars snapped into position as she approached and delivered her into a pitch black box, her momentum was broken by a floor of thick gel that enveloped her ankles. The experience of silence was as divine as anything she had ever known. Here, where it was dark, where she was alone, she was filled with an intense awareness of her entire body. Her breath, her heartbeat, the feeling of her guts. It was calm, for the first time in her life since she had left the womb. Her earliest memories began flooding into her head, though now they felt like a half-remembered dream. Clamps fastened around her ankles and locked her feet into position, the metal groaned as it was lifted upwards. She was only aware of a faint swaying, she struggled to suppress her urge to squeal, as she did not want to break the silence. The container finished its ascent and stopped with a sudden jolt. Hydraulic pumps pushed the box horizontally until it made contact with a set of rails straddling a concrete box. A large clang reverberated through the chamber as it took hold of the magnetic tracks. Suddenly, the floor underneath her dropped. She swung into a small white box full of shadows headfirst, only the restraints on her legs stopped her from hitting the ground. Her head spun wildly as she squealed. One of the shadows stepped forwards and sliced her throat, turning her screams into gurgles. The blood streamed down her face and into her eyes. She swung like a pendulum, the centripetal force of her path encouraging the blood to flow. Her vision began to dim as her life spilled across the bleached white floor into the drain. She realized finally, the real reason she had been born.