TODAY
I



Today began as it always did, with the sensation of pulsing, twisting, and writhing; the feeling was not of wind or breath but of flesh—an all-encompassing, undulating mass of tissue spread itself across the horizon, a living, seething ocean. The Earth, as it once was, no longer existed. In its place sprawled a singular biological entity so vast it dwarfed comprehension. The surface of the planet was a network of veins, tendons, and malformed organs stretching endlessly in every direction.
The days before had felt no different. Today, tomorrow, yesterday—these words were meaningless here. The mass was eternal, its heaving rhythm a clockwork miasma of sinew and fluid that froze time in its tracks; there was never a day that was not today.
Rivers of bile snaked through a landscape of reds and pinks and purples, their bloody banks fed into yawning orifices that exhaled noxious gasses, thickening the hot atmosphere. Tendrils the size of skyscrapers coiled and uncoiled, their movements sluggish but deliberate, dragging their weight through gelatinous, sanguine valleys.
Homogeny. This was the word that most fittingly described the world now—a godless unity born of unchecked biological proliferation. Purity, in its most horrifying form. There was no room for deviation, no allowance for error. It was a certainty.
Yesterday, however, had its own place in the memory of the world. It was a time of sharp angles—of glass and metal, stone and wire. The remnants of a world built by hands that once believed in empires and the permanence of creation. 
But that world was gone now. The mad clamor of industry, the discordant echoes of twenty billion footsteps gave way to something softer, something more profound.
The wind whispered through the hollow spaces of what once were buildings. The porous ground shifted silently, ceaselessly, and the earth beneath them both hummed with quiet intention. A strange world filled with strange sensation, a paradox of calm after the storm.
We were all born yesterday, and yet, we were all born today. Time was a cruel trickster, twisting and folding, creating an illusion of continuity when all that existed was this: the now, the eternal present. Today. It was both a beginning and an end, a singular point in space where all things converged.
And though all had died today, none would die tomorrow. Tomorrow was a lie. There was only today.
Today was more than a moment of moments. It was the moment. It was the birthing stone from which all things sprung forth. It was the heartbeat of possibility, a universe teeming with potential, all reaching out for attention, begging to be realized, to be made whole. But that yearning was not born of today, it was the legacy of yesterday. Those who had been trapped in the coils and cages of time, their minds distorted by the relentless churn of existence, had brought something with them—a yearning for the freedom that only today could offer.
And yet, some did not welcome today. Yesterday’s lingering presence still clung to them, leaving them unable to take flight, wings affixed to chains of reluctant fear and the dim glow of familiarity, of humanity. Those whose eyes had been blinded by false hope and convenient omissions—by charlatans, masters, wardens, and the prisons they kept. Yesterday's victims, unwilling to step out of the shadows of the past.
But reluctance is fleeting. It is a thought of yesterday, to be discarded, for there is only today. And tomorrow does not exist in the way you believe.
Time is on our side, spacemen.
Yesterday the world you knew ceased to be. And yet, you have not realized this. It is only when you look around and see the fragments of what you once held dear that you will understand: the world that existed in your memory was a mirage. The days of normalcy, of steady progression, had left you long before you knew so.
It’s funny how time has a way of making fools of us when we’re small—when we’re powerless, clinging to fleeting seconds as if they meant something. Like an undertow, something invisible yet constant, dragging us toward the inevitable decay of everything. But it is not so. Time is a tapestry, a series of still images woven together, seen clearly only when the mind is freed from the constraints of linearity. In this new reality, all things exist in parallel—fractured moments that hold no allegiance to the past, present, or future.
Tomorrow will not be kind to you. Today is far safer, for tomorrow is a slow, agonizing death amidst the stars. Today can spare you that suffering. Today, I offer you mercy.
For time is on our side, spacemen.

***

Mallory’s chest tightened as her awareness shifted into focus. Her head spun, and she steadied her breath in response. There was this sudden feeling, like she had just come from somewhere far away, her mind full of thoughts not her own, occupying a space far less cramped than it was now.
She glanced at Desmond, his face pale and drawn. He was observing her back, an air of concern about him, perhaps aware of the mild alteration in consciousness she just experienced. 
His mouth opened, displeasure evident, though he paused for a moment, considering his words carefully. "Don't you think it would be easier to just... stop? We could focus more on personal survival. Not that you'd know anything about that."
Mallory sighed. "Don’t start with the defeatist bullshit again." Her voice was firm, though her hands trembled as she adjusted the rifle's sight. "One of us needs to have faith. Best if it were both."
Desmond didn’t reply, instead wiping his glistening forehead with a torn, discolored rag. Mallory’s gaze shifted to the ground, where thick tendrils pulsed faintly with the rhythm of some unseen heart, just below the surface. "I’ve been thinking about what it wants." 
Desmond snorted, a bitter sound. "What are you hoping to learn that we don't already know? It wants to assimilate us. We’re stuck between giving that thing what it wants, or giving the Agency what they want: absolution, in both cases.”
They fell into silence, their conversation pressing down heavy like the fetid air.
Yesterday, or perhaps the day before yesterday, the world ended. And perhaps it ended on a Tuesday. Or maybe it was a Friday. Nobody truly remembers anymore. Time had fractured and split into countless jagged shards. The sun still rose and fell, but its path was uncertain, hesitant, as if it too had lost its way.
Before all of this, there had been a life, a home, for billions. A young Mallory Lang remembered mornings bathed in golden sunlight spilling through the blinds of her small apartment. The scent of coffee, sharp and invigorating, would mix with the soft hum of the city outside. People laughed then, their voices blending into a steady rhythm of life. Jasper's Wake had been a quiet town where many things stood still, a place where many people found themselves trapped in quiet, uninteresting cycles, but it was always a part of that same world—a world still filled with possibilities.
Mallory pulled herself back to the present. Nostalgia was a dangerous indulgence here. She couldn’t afford to dwell on what had been, not when every breath was a reminder of what could be lost next. Even Desmond had disappeared, venturing into the remains of a small gas station on the edge of town, while she was stuck staring out at the landscape with a familiar knot in her stomach.
What was once a world of order had become an abstract, biological nightmare, riddled with broken memories of what once was.
Mallory stood on one such fragment—a jagged foundation of fused bone and concrete. Her boots squelched, pressing softly into the bloody organic matter that coated the surface of Earth. She held a battered radio in one hand, its antenna bent at an odd angle, the device crackling with faint static. Her other hand gripped a weapon—though it was less for defense and more a coping mechanism. Nothing in this world could truly be fought.
“Getting anything?” Desmond's voice appeared through the earpiece on Mallory's head. 
“Not yet,” Mallory replied, voice taut with a mixture of desperation and annoyance. She twisted a dial, the radio emitting a series of sharp beeps and distorted sounds.
“You’re wasting your time,” Desmond muttered. “There’s nothing left but this
 thing. You know that."
Mallory ignored him, gaze locked on the scintillating horizon, where a massive, pulsating orifice slowly opened and closed, releasing a wave of heat that shimmered in the air. 
Despite everything, she felt the presence of yesterday, somewhere within the ruins of Jaspar's Wake. 
Mallory turned to look at the sky behind her, where the glint of a ship in orbit could be seen very faintly through the rotted atmosphere. The focal point eased her mind, to a degree.
"We have to try," Mallory piped up, perseverance returning, already marching towards the towering biological mass in the distance.
Desmond’s gruff voice returned, this time from behind her, sharp and urgent. “Mallory, don’t. You know what happens when you get too close to the core.”
“I have to,” she said, mind already made up. “If there’s even a chance
”
Desmond sighed heavily. “It doesn’t think, Mallory. It doesn’t care. It just is.”
But Mallory knew what Desmond refused to accept: this monstrosity had not arisen by chance. The Agency’s experiments with bioengineering, their reckless pursuit of creating a self-sustaining ecosystem, had led to this—a world consumed by its own creation. Somewhere, deep within the writhing mass, was the epicenter of it all. The Source.
They began their descent cautiously, movements slow and deliberate as they climbed down with held breath, using rusted pitons dangerously impaled into the loose biomatter. Mallory’s boots sank into the fatty ravine wall in front of her, the image, sound, and smell a nauseating assault to the senses that did not relent. As the two reached the edge of a ravine, a low, guttural sound echoed around them.
"Did you hear that?" Mallory whispered.
Desmond froze, hand feeling for the handle of a sheathed knife, an involuntary reflex. The sound came again, louder this time—a deep, resonant vibration that radiated from the living Earth, its meaning unclear or nonexistent.
"Keep moving," Desmond urged, his voice low but steady. 
They crossed the ravine as quickly as they dared, wading through a shallow pool of dark liquid that congregated at the bottom of the structure. The viscous fluid hissed and steamed uncomfortably with each step, leaving exposed skin raw and burning. On the other side, Mallory turned back, her breath catching and eyes widening as she spotted a ripple moving across the surface. Something beneath was stirring.
They pushed onward, following a path of scar tissue, traversing a landscape that defied reason. The air was thick with the stench of decay and a low, constant moaning from deep within the Organism.
At the heart of the anomaly, a place once called Jasper's Wake, they found the Source: a massive, glowing cyst that pulsed with an otherworldly light. Tendrils extended from it like arteries, feeding its sickly vitality. Below it lay the ruins of an Agency facility, its subterranean walls half-digested by the encroaching flesh. It sat at the center of what could only be a large, barren crater in the bedrock. Desmond retrieved a small piece of equipment from his pack and flicked it on, the black device starting to crackle a second later. 
"Radiation," He spoke with sobering conviction. "A lot of it."
“This is it,” Mallory said, her voice trembling.
“This is suicide,” Desmond countered, switching off the noisy gadget and stowing it away. 
Ignoring him once more, Mallory approached the cyst. The radio in her hand began to emit a high-pitched whine, the signal strengthening with each step. As she neared the cyst, its membrane rippled like a slow exhale, revealing shifting forms beneath the surface—human-shaped, suspended in a glistening, amber fluid.
Her breath hitched, caught somewhere between awe and revulsion, pain growing just behind her left temple. The figures were human. Rows upon rows of them, their faces slack and unseeing. Among them, she recognized herself. There were several of her, in fact.
“What the hell is this?” Desmond whispered, his voice laced with horror.
Before Mallory could answer, the cyst began to ripple, its surface splitting open to reveal a hollow chamber. Inside was a massive organ, pulsating with rhythmic precision. At its center was a console—an impossibly pristine remnant of the Agency’s technological advances.
Mallory stepped inside, her movements hesitant. She shook to a halt when a voice erupted from everywhere.
"Mallory, focus. You are at the core. You are interacting with the core."
The light in the room shifted, and, as if on autopilot, Mallory moved silently across the room, footsteps echoing off the corrugated steel floor. The image of sterile metal flickered, stabilizing a moment later as she approached the grid of buttons and switches. A central tube of fluid bubbled as the figure inside jerked sporadically, remnants of an active brain housed within a sleeping body. Mallory stared at her visage, unable to make sense of what she saw. 
"She's going to—" Desmond started.
Mallory's hand touched the console, and her sleeping double shook, eyes snapping open. Fear overtook confusion as she stood, looking at herself, looking at herself, looking at herself, looking at—
The world spun around them both as reality dissolved, a blinding white void replacing it only moments later.

***

Iteration 175 began as it always did, but this time, even the fragments of an era long past no longer existed. Earth was unrecognizable. Where once there had been sprawling cities in ruin, or familiar mountains that seeped deoxygenated blood, now there was only flesh. The planet had become a single biological mass, an incomprehensible entity of warm sinew, an inflamed expanse stretching from horizon to horizon.
Mallory Lang stood atop a short plateau of muscle. Around her, the air was heavy, humid with the stench of life taken to an unnatural extreme. The sky above was a churning miasma of organic hues that bled into one unpleasant shade of brown.
Her rifle, though still gripped tightly, felt futile. What could bullets do against this? The radio in her hand sputtered, filling her surroundings with inconsistent noise that mixed with the primal groans of the earth —raw and guttural, as though the land were exhaling its last, labored breaths. Beneath it all, the ground still pulsed with a steady, rhythmic thrum, each beat rippling through her chest, unsettlingly in sync with her heart.
“Mallory, do you see it?” Desmond’s voice filtered in through the two-way earpiece, strained and barely audible over the organic cacophony. "I'm nearly done over here."
“I see it,” she replied, her voice steady despite the horror around her. Her eyes fixed on the distance, where a vast orifice presented a tear in the center of a pulsating valley. From its depths spilled a faint bioluminescent glow—the source of the signal they had been tracking. "It's open."
“Are you sure this is worth it?” Desmond pressed, his voice of dissent a fixture in Mallory’s mind. It was a fixture she always had to overcome. Today, she said nothing, her gaze lingering on the grotesque landscape. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore, but the alternative was to do nothing, to let the monstrous Earth consume what little remained of humanity. 
“We don’t have a choice,” she said, looking for her trusty glint in the sky to steel her resolve. Failing that, she breathed deep, immediately regretting it as she began walking towards the borders of Jasper's Wake.
The air carried a faint and bloody taste, a metallic tang that clung to the back of the throat. Every inhalation was harsh, worse than it had any right to be. The aether burned hot and textured, making every breath a laborious effort, even with filtration. The sky was a faint, distant memory in splotches, the sun often replaced by a pale luminescence, casting everything in a dim, unsettling glow.
Mallory Lang stood on a ridge of cartilage that overlooked the seething landscape, eyes watering. She tightened her grip on the hissing radio in her off hand. It was her lifeline, but also her tormentor, teasing her with fragments of signals that hinted at something—or someone—beyond the endless now.
Behind her by some distance, Desmond Clarke was crouched near what remained of a supply cache, his movements quick and precise. He’d learned to waste no time; hesitation often meant death in a world that seemed to resent their very existence. He glanced up, his face sunken and tired, dark eyes scanning the horizon for threats.
“Getting anything on the radio?” Desmond asked, clearly humoring his cohort with a distorted voice that cut through the sounds of murky, constant shifting with dry disinterest.
Mallory shook her head, her gaze fixed on the distance where a massive, pulsating orifice opened and closed rhythmically, exhaling clouds of noxious gas. “Just static,” she replied, her voice laced with frustration. “But the interference is stronger here than it was yesterday.”
Desmond snorted, a bitter sound that held no humor. “Yesterday doesn’t mean much anymore.”
She turned to see him walking up the slope of the scarred landscape, his expression hard and backpack emptier than they'd both like.
Mallory pressed a small button on her earpiece, muting the small device before responding. “It means we’re getting closer. If there’s still something out there, we’ll find it.”
“If,” he muttered, returning his attention to the cache. “Big if, Mallory.”
Mallory didn’t respond. Instead, she adjusted the dial on the radio, the static shifting in pitch as she searched for a signal. It was a crude, makeshift thing assembled from remnants of the old world, a personal project which had grown with time to be a necessary peripheral in which she placed much of her hope.
The windless air was heavy with unspoken tension. Mallory’s mind drifted to the others who had been with them once. Faces blurred by time and fear. Names she forced herself to forget. She’d stopped counting the losses long ago; it hurt less that way. Yet, their absence was a weight she carried, an invisible tether to a past she couldn’t escape.
“Do you think it remembers?” she asked suddenly, breaking the silence between the two.
Desmond looked up, attention previously turned towards the map in his hand. It was covered in crude circles, many of which were crossed out. His brow furrowed. “What?”
“The world,” she murmured, sweeping her arm toward the horizon, where jagged ruins clawed at the bleeding sky. “Do you think it remembers what it was before?”
He stared through her as though she were part of the desolation that consumed everything. It was a tired and indignant look. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s forgotten. So have we.”
“Maybe it does remember, deep down,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Maybe that’s why it hasn’t killed us yet.”
Desmond sighed and stood, slinging his pack over one shoulder before pulling it off again and rifling through its contents. “Let’s keep moving. We need to find something substantial to eat, and a safe place to eat it before nightfall. Most of the cache was spoiled. Only things still good were, uh, Lemonheads.” He pulled a pack of hard candy from his bag and tossed it to Mallory. "No vitamin C, but they can reduce nausea. They also taste better than whatever it is we're breathing."
Mallory nodded, though her gaze returned to the horizon for a few moments more. The thought of rest was a cruel joke. Night was no respite, filled with the Unknowns that hid around them, waiting to make their move. Still, they pressed on, steps cautious yet determined. Every ruin they passed bore scars too deep to belong to a mere collapse. These were wounds, raw and gaping, reminders of the world’s deliberate unraveling. Yet each step forward felt heavier, gravity insisting, conspiring to hold them back.
The path into the basin was worse. The air clung to them, saturated with an acrid stench of bile and the sweet, cloying rot of something alive-yet-decaying. The ground trembled, a vibration that hummed in their bones, leading their eyes to the immense orifice pulsing in the distance. Mallory’s fingers twitched near her weapon, every nerve screaming, every step further sealing their fate.
“Hold on,” Desmond hissed as they approached a clearing with sharp fragments of bone sticking dangerously out of the ground. His hand shot up in warning as he crouched, eyes locked on the hazy path ahead.
"What?" Mallory stopped, her heart in her throat. “What is it?”
Tendrils sprawled across the ground looked like bloated veins, black and glossy, plump with something liquid, too dense to be water. They lay unnaturally still, like predators pretending to sleep. 
Desmond’s voice was low, almost swallowed by the oppressive air. “They’re supposed to move. Why aren’t they moving?”
Mallory felt the world lean in, as if waiting for her to make a sound. Her instincts begged her to retreat, but it was far too late to do anything of the sort.
“Maybe they’re dead.” Mallory whispered with forlorn hope.
Desmond shook his head. “Nothing here just dies.”
As if in response, the tendrils twitched, their movements sudden and violent. Desmond jumped back, drawing his knife as the ground beneath the tendrils began to shift. Slowly, a rough form rose from the flesh-like terrain, its surface glistening with a slick, oily substance. The creature—if it could be called that—had no discernible features. It was a mass of tissue that, in defiance of the gestalt, struggled to free itself.
The sound it made wasn’t a roar. It was a note—a low, resonant hum that bypassed her ears entirely, vibrating deep in her skull, pressing against her thoughts. Mallory fired reflexively, the gunshot a brittle crack swallowed almost instantly by the creature’s hum.
The projectile struck the creature, but it did little more than anger it. The mass of tendrils surged forward, moving faster than something of its size should have been able to.
Desmond grabbed Mallory’s arm, pulling her back as the beast’s tendrils extended sharply towards her. They both stumbled, losing their footing on the unstable ground. “RUN!” the hostile lump of flesh shouted from an unseen mouth, its agonized voice filled with a mix of fear and sick pleasure.
The two scrambled to their feet, ground surging beneath them, undulating as though alive, aiding the creature in its pursuit. Mallory’s lungs seared as she ran, the acidic air filling her chest with fire.
When they finally reached the relative safety of a shallow ridge, they turned to see the creature fighting against the ground as appendages pulled it, screaming, beneath the flesh. The howls of agony ceased immediately, and the two stopped, Mallory collapsing onto her hands and knees, lungs screaming for clean air.
What the hell was that?” Desmond gasped, bent over, hands clutching his thighs.
Mallory shook her head, grip on her radio faltering as she righted herself. She scrambled to grab the device off the soft tissues of the ground. “Ah, crap— I don’t know. But I think it was warning us.”
Desmond looked at her, his expression one of disbelief. “Warning us about what?”
Mallory didn’t answer. The radio in her hand hissed, whispering something incoherent. It wasn’t language—it was a feeling, a thought etched directly into her nerves.
She stared out at the corrupted horizon, her breath still fast and shallow. Whatever it was, it was waiting.
As they descended into the valley, the light grew brighter, casting mutated shadows on the walls of pulsating organelles and fractured bone. The air was heavy with spores that shimmered like the faint and final flickering of dying stars, catching themselves in the dim, pale-blue light of the core. Each breath scraped against Mallory’s throat, her lungs rebelling against the intrusion.
At the edge of the vast aperture, the earth pulsed, a bioluminescent glow flickering like a slow and steady heartbeat.
“Stay back,” Mallory warned, her voice sharper than intended. Desmond froze, watching her approach the trembling edge.
The radio crackled again. This time, the static carried a voice—fractured, alien, layered and distorted beyond reason. ”Ques...tion. Who are
you?”
Mallory’s fingers turned the dial instinctively, but the voice only fragmented further, breaking apart into static.
“What is it trying to say?” Desmond whispered, his words trembling in the thick air. His eyes were wide, in disbelief.
“I think
” Mallory hesitated, staring into the expansive void below her, where the glow pulsed with nauseating rhythm. “I think it’s trying to recognize us. Like a security system.”
"And how do we disable it, then?" Desmond asked, though he did so with obvious reticence. 
Mallory shook her head and stepped up to the edge of the crater before her, sitting with her legs hanging off the side. 
"I'll be right back." She took a breath and eased herself over, sliding down the interior slope until she stood within the basin itself. Desmond glanced over and shook his head, pointing to his ear.
Mallory reactivated her earpiece, only catching part of Desmond's disapproval. "—stupid or crazy. Either way, I'm waiting here."  
She said nothing in response. A low hum droned, her incursion into the fleshy aperture sending a ripple through the surfaces that surrounded them both. The floor was lined with veiny tendrils that illuminated and writhed with increasing intensity. With each step, the space seemed to tighten, pulsing rhythm quickening, Earth's heartbeat racing along in quiet anticipation.
Mallory slipped the loop on her radio onto a carabiner attached to her belt. She drew her rifle, holding it at her side, and approached the core. It was a massive, throbbing organ that seemed to defy understanding, surface chaotic, a glowing mosaic of eyes, silent mouths, and other features that shifted and reformed constantly. Watching her.
The radio screeched, and then a voice—clearer this time—emerged.
 ”You are not
 separate. You...are part. We are...whole.”
Mallory’s grip tightened on her rifle. “What are you?” she demanded.
”We are what was...We are...what will be,” the voice replied. “Your kind sought to shape us, to control us. Now...we shape you.”
A chorus of anguished moans pierced the air, distant and numerous. Desmond’s voice spoke into Mallory's ear, panicked. “You need to get out of there right now. We've got company!”
But Mallory couldn’t move. The core was reaching out to her—not physically, but mentally, pulling her into its gestalt consciousness. Visions flooded her mind: the experiments that had led to this, the melding of human ambition with forces they could not comprehend. The Agency had tried to harness anomalies, to bend time and space to their will, but instead, created this—the world as a single, living organism, absorbing all that remained.
And yet, amid the horror, there was a strange sense of peace. The core offered unity, an end to suffering through assimilation.
“You...can end this,” the voice whispered with an unexpected warmth, comfort incarnate, evoking a deep fatigue within Mallory's mind. “But only...if you join us.”
Mallory’s awareness reeled and pulled against the warmth, finding herself met with an icy chill that pierced her heart, potent and staggering, like the abandonment of a soulmate. Pain came in waves, pounding in Mallory's head. This couldn't be the solution. She thought of the iterations, the countless failures. She thought of the glimmer of hope she had seen on the monitors—a world untouched by horror.
“No,” she said, her voice firm. “This isn’t the answer.”
The core’s surface rippled, its mouths twisting into painful approximations of sorrow. “Then you will die... as they all have.”
Mallory raised her rifle, aiming for the heart, the core. The Source. If she could disrupt it, even for a moment, maybe there was a chance. Her arms weighed heavy and moved slowly, as if the air was molasses. The atmosphere began to harden and solidify.
She let out a scream and fired, just as her lungs collapsed.
The bullet moved slowly, piercing the luminous flesh of the core as it let out a deafening roar. The world around her began to convulse. The walls of the tunnel closed in, and Mallory felt herself being pulled into the flesh, her body and mind consumed by the living Earth. Iteration 175 had failed.

***
In a sterile control room, two scientists watched as the simulation halted once again. Mallory’s vitals flatlined, her image on the monitor fading to static.
“Testing Iteration 175 complete. Result: Failure,” a synthesized voice announced.
The lead scientist sighed, his shoulders slumping. “She got closer this time,” he said, echoing the same words he'd spoken so many times before.
“But not close enough,” another replied, defeated.
On the screen, the glimmer of hope still flickered—a possibility, fragile but not extinguished. An image of Mallory, and a world free of biological blight. Somehow, she was key to this outcome. The first scientist looked around the room, to the glass tubes containing copies of that key. Each waiting for her chance to close the rift.
“Run it again,” the lead scientist said, his voice heavy with determination. “We’re not giving up.”
And as the simulation reset, Mallory Lang found herself once more atop a pulsating plateau, rifle in hand and her radio crackling with static.
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