The Fleshless Envelope

“Each person was to become a fleshless envelope, the best possible conductor of social communication, the locus of an infinite feedback loop which is made to have no nodes” – “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” Tiqqun Torvald clutched the jagged edge. With one final desperate attempt he pulled himself up onto the rim of the escarpment. His head spun. His vision faded in and out with the labor of his breathing. He lay on his back and groaned, finally breathing deeply, heart rate slowing. His monitor implant let out a shrill beep. Hastened by the missive he struggled again to stand. His legs trembled. His iter-suit hung in tatters, patches of his exposed skin seared by the var-beams of the algo-blats. The blats! He spun around peering over the edge, his gaze sweeping frantically across the twisted labyrinth that lay below him. Here and there swarms of the hideous media-blats swooped in and out of the mangled and mind-bending patterns of corridors, arches, stairs, and chamber-ways. He trembled again, remembering what other horrors waited, concealed there in the maze. His cranial implant buzzed lightly. A trace of his stack-path blinked into overlay on his view; a thin, glowing line marking his crooked trail through the circuit-skein. His monitor toned it’s shrill signal again. His muscles tensed. He felt a synth-gland release a flood of chemicals into his system. Coursing through his blood, the stimulants washed the pain away. His vision cleared and tightened. A cold gust blew in from behind him. He looked up and around, aware now of the arch above his head. The metal gleamed dully, no seams visible in its unforgiving surface. Facing away now from the valley behind him he glanced down. His mind reeled, his jaw clenched. The same perplexing plane of skein-circuit stretched out before him. Another buzz in his head, the same trace, rotated now 360 degrees blinked onto his view. He gave a sharp inhale and squinted into the distance and there, at the limit of his sight a ledge rose up above the plain. And likewise an archway peeped through the wall. Was it possible? Was there a figure poised there in the center? A ragged, tense shadow; an echo of himself, gazing out through it’s own arch onto another identical skein-circuit. The monitor skreeched again in rapid succession. “Initiate skein-circuit cycle engagement.” Stairs leapt up ahead of him, spiraling down into the valley. “Stack-trace compulsory completion timing 3.3973 parcels.” A full parcel faster than the last cy