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>Brain probe
The creature thinks it can tell you what to do. Where to go. Arrogance drips from its faint smile. Pathetic! <span class="mu-r">You</span> will not be led around by anything, especially not anything with such unprotected orifices. You extend, scything forward, scattering droplets, and— the creature raises its hand and grasps you. Your advance halts. Its nostrils flare. "That's enough. Let's be—"
You shove through its lips, shove under its glasses, shove into its ears, and split and feather and split and feather until you have filled the space in its cavities, and finally— it has lowered its hand— drive a tendril up and up its nose, until you reach its brain, only you do not reach his brain. You reach nothing. The creature itself is an arrogant cavity, made of spit and chewed paper, remotely animated, and you pile yourself inside it up and up in the hopes of finding something. There is nothing. It is nothing.
You may have left it there to sit, but the little animal has roused again. (It's not <span class="mu-i">empty.</span> It has strings. I mean, a string! Look for the—)
Look? You are blind. But it is an idea of merit, so you enclose the animal, and digest it, and take out its eyeball.
>[-1 ID: 2/13]
The eyeball is dead as the deep earth, but it sees the deep things, and when you secrete yourself inside of it you see them too. This is what you see: the creature is a slave, bound by a single blue chain.
You could break the chain, free it, but you are not roomy enough for mercy. You are heavy with heat and blood. Rather, you trail along its length— there is endless space, and you fill it— until you come, after a very long time, to its end.
You are not inside the creature any longer. You are somewhere else. There is a thing here, many times larger than you are, many times brighter, round, clicking, humming, pulsing. The creature's chain feeds into it, or out from it: you cannot tell which. Many thousands of chains extend to or from it, so the sphere is surrounded completely by them, is bristling with them. Other things that are not chains feed into the sphere: pipes, large and small, and wires, and papers in a constant stream. You don't know what the pipes or wires carry, but the papers slide into slots in the sphere and are gone.
No matter how long you observe, the sphere doesn't react to you. It carries on with its clicking, humming, pulsing business. If you leave it alone, it may do nothing at all to you.
It is not typically within your nature to leave things alone.
(Choices next.)
