Jordan Krall - Blow Up the Outside World

Every day was the same: cigarette smoke and movies. Cheap vodka and even cheaper pornography. Andy Oswald was nearing forty years old and his life hadn’t changed for ten years. It was like an eternal bad day.

At times he felt like someone was watching him and that maybe his life was only an experiment performed by a higher power be it God, a group of gods, or some sort of abstract energy force that held up the universe. He didn’t know if that made him feel better or worse but it was something to think about. Pretending to be a philosopher gave him a distraction from being late on his rent or not having gotten laid in three years.

He wasn’t completely alone, though. His friend Potter was an occasional companion but they mostly just saw movies together and that prevented any real conversation. That was okay with Andy. He didn’t like to talk much anyway.

So Andy woke up on that Wednesday morning and began his day like any other. He smoked. He drank. He drearily jerked off to porn. Another bad day in a long line of bad days. By the afternoon he was tired as hell and fell into bed, expecting to experience nothing but drunken dreams. He would be unpleasantly surprised.

As his head hit the pillow, Andy felt his body go limp. He thought maybe he had drunk too much vodka and spent too much of his semen into his crusty handkerchief. Maybe his body was giving up for the night. He stared at the wall, watching the neon lights from across the street flicker into shapes resembling fishhooks, mushrooms, and cigars.

Yeah, he had drunk too much vodka. His head was on fire and his body was sinking into the bed. The neon shapes intensified until they covered his room. They combined with dark red tendrils and crept up the walls.

Soon he felt like a fish in a tank. His walls were shimmering glass and the air around him became thick fluid. He still couldn’t move his body but he continued to blame it on the vodka. Andy learned a long time ago to always blame his problems on alcohol and this time he decided he was justified in doing so.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

(Incoming Transmission)

Andrew Oswald lives in a large glass terrarium. He is a productive, well-hung adult human of about forty years. He shares his cage with five females: two pure bred humans, two sub-terrestrials, and an android Oswald refers to as ‘the body beneath’. He prefers his native flesh or metal but will reproduce with any member of his harem without coercion.

He only kisses ‘the body beneath’.

He only beats the blond haired human. She is tall and lanky and resembles a past mate from his adolescent years.

He builds small, complex pieces of art with the spare time allowed to him, and hoards these pieces from the rest of the subjects.

He is a fascinating study.

Everything about them hinted at an ageless and twisted biology. They wore few clothes, displaying their odd deformities with pride. They clanked and slurped at the unbreakable glass of Oswald’s cage, phallic eyes bulging when he fucked the women they threw at him. The women were ghastly ones, females with no attributes of beauty but still: Oswald fucked them.

He learned to tolerate his new life as a sort of oversexed lab rat. He could tolerate a lot… just not their watching him. That was close to unbearable.

His finished beating Sarah and walked across the terrarium to his bombs. It was still surprising to him how a culture as advanced as the Valdrott couldn’t even recognize a simple cluster bomb. The body beneath, the Lifeless One, had let him borrow her parts, and he would miss her the most.

We will continue to study the groups of collected humans over the next several life cycles. In roughly five years we will introduce a stronger male into Oswald’s group which will establish----

(Transmission Error)

Large, bulbous sacs of blue milk grew on the walls of Potter’s cage. He poked them every morning though he didn’t know what he expected to happen or how it would help his situation. Maybe deep down Potter hoped the sacs would burst open and send a cascade of milky salvation over his body. Then he could stare at the liquid as it dried and cracked like the paint on the walls of the movie theatre he used to go to back when he was on earth. Unfortunately, the sacs were never close to bursting; their tough membranes acted like impenetrable walls around a fluorescent-blue liquid fortress.

Through the frenzied haze of captivity, he imagined the sacs as enlarged breasts that looked like they had been bruised and battered during a violent bout of sex. These milk mounds soon morphed into giant blue testicles that jiggled with each poke of Potter’s finger. He got close to them and sniffed. They had no scent.

Shouldn’t they have some aroma? Potter expected a sour milk or crotch smell. He dug his chin into his chest, raised his arm, and sniffed his armpit. The stench of his body odor was potent enough to convince Potter it wasn’t his olfactory sense that was failing.

Potter wanted the sacs to smell, wanted them to smell like anything just so he’d know they were something natural, something based in his old reality. He would have been happy for them to smell like anything but preferred if they possessed the aroma of a woman. He was honest with himself and admitted if they had that musky scent, he would’ve attempted to make love to the sacs in hopes of penetrating the membrane and burying his cock deep into the blue milk. His eyes fluttered while his mind spat out freeze-frame images.

An ejaculation into blue wetness. Sperm mixing with milk. Membrane stretched and broken like deflated balloon. Glass melting from scrotal heat exploding into a sour orgasm.

Hours later, Potter came to his senses. He looked down at himself and saw that his stomach had become one of the sacs: a translucent membrane surrounding blue milk that swished with every one of his breaths. The round glob of gel that was formerly his belly button jiggled as Potter inspected it.

What had the Valdrott done to him? Were they expecting him to go insane? If so, he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. He’d rather live out his short, captive life with this monstrosity of a stomach than to give them any sort of contentment. Their experiments would not be successful if he had any say in the matter.

Potter continued poking at his belly, somewhat enjoying the movement, the milk swishing like polluted ocean waves. He thought it was getting bigger though he hadn’t eaten a thing in days. Perhaps that was why he had tried poking the sacs open, to eat what was inside. It would give him sustenance or it would kill him. Either way, he had to try.

The membrane on his belly seemed weaker than the membranes on the sacs. He poked his finger into his gut, pushing his fingernail into it until he was convinced it would pop open, spilling the contents all over. Potter wanted to drink what was inside. His thirst and hunger were now overwhelming him. The sight of his swollen abdomen made his mouth water. He kept poking and poking until he heard the Valdrott outside of his cage.

They were ready for him again.

(Potter’s Transmission)

They gave me another exam: four rods inserted into my brain that made me see sparks of bright colors that looked like scratchy Technicolor on a torn up movie screen. I was swept up in them and couldn’t escape their blinding effects for days. My stomach is giving me hell. It won’t let me inside but I keep trying as I am now immune to self-inflicted pain. I want to eat and drink. I am starving. I am beginning to think the Valdrott have won. I am beginning to think that even though they are more advanced than us, they are nothing more than bloodthirsty butchers.