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“Don’t look so defeated,” Alberto the blob says. “Listen, I know that the news about an impending apocalypse is hard to wrap your tiny mind around. However, despite how unbearable and loathsome you are, the universe still tolerates the burden of your existence. Don’t forget that.”

I narrow my eyes at the wall-wide, gooey scrotum of fate.

“What I don’t forget,” I retort in a ragged voice, “is that the universe lacks sentience, and therefore can’t give two shits about me or you for that matter. Otherwise it could choose not to implode in a fit of self-annihilation. But thank you, Blubberass, for your manipulative attempt to console me.”

The blob lets out a wet chuckle. I shake my head.

“I’m so glad that I can make even an ectoplasmic wall of pus crack up,” I grumble.

“Oh, quit your bellyaching. All it takes for greatness is the right kind of unhinged. Now that we’re balls deep in the cosmic stew, that’s exactly what we need: a freak among freaks.”

I lower my head as my fingers dig into the fabric of my shirt.

“I don’t even like human beings.” I struggle to push more words past the knot in my throat. “I shouldn’t be the one to save them.”

The putrescent heap of slime gurgles a sloshing sigh.

“Tough titties, pal. You don’t have to like ’em, you just have to save ’em.”

I envision a fire-breathing serpent coiled around the throat of the universe. I force a breath deep into my lungs, then exhale slowly.

“Can we cut the bullshit and get to the point? How in Arachne’s name, pray tell, am I supposed to fix a dying universe? These gaping wounds in the fabric of reality… How can they be stitched back up? What’s your grand plan, Oh Mighty Overlord of the Dark?”

“I’m glad you finally asked!” Alberto proclaims with theatrical flourish. “It’s not like we have been trying to explain the problem to you for weeks. But, you know, no rush. The universe is just on the brink of annihilation.”

My eyelids twitch.

“Get on with it, Blubberball!”

“Alright, alright. No need to feel guilty for your cognitive deficiencies. As a humble servant of the greater good, I will lay out a plan for you: destroy the professor’s machine. As in physically wreck it.”

“If that machine is a nexus of energies, a conduit between dimensions, then once it’s smashed to bits, the energies tapping into it would still exist and the tears in reality would continue to grow. Wouldn’t they?”

Alberto’s gooey form undulates irritably like a fleshy ocean current.

“Leire, you have the intellectual capacity of a walnut, and I’m merely a messenger. I don’t know jack shit about how that machine works. The professor has assured us that his invention should be demolished, so that’s what I’m conveying to you, the only one who can act on this information. Grow some humongous cojones and obliterate the magnum opus of a genius. Hopefully then the tears in space-time will shrink to a pinprick, preventing further entities from slipping through.”

“How am I supposed to smash a bunny machine that taps into the multiverse?”

“Have you forgotten that you’re insane? Have confidence in your mad skills.”

I glance down at my chest, but my breasts aren’t equipped to wield artillery cannons or nuclear missiles.

I shrug.

“Well, I’m a pro at ruining stuff, so I’ll figure it out. Where is this doomsday device located?”

“You’ll come across it, and once you do, you will recognize it immediately.”

My eyebrows knit together in frustration as my temper flares.

“Could you be any vaguer, you mucus-clogged imbecile?!”

“Just shut your cakehole, keep your fucking eyes as well as that interdimensional fuckhole of a brain open, and learn to pay attention to your surroundings.”

“Should a quest to get me interested in the world require universe-ending stakes?!”

“Apparently so, Leire. Apparently so. I mean, it always has to be something grandiose with you. Nevermind the little things, like good hygiene or treating your former co-workers with decency; universe-ending stakes or nothing. And to be honest, after however long I’ve been forced to listen to your babbling, which has turned my mind into a sewer, I feel that the universe ending may be a blessing.”

I rub my hands down my face. My muscles have tensed up with adrenaline, and a headache is gnawing at my skull like a starved rat.

“Is that all you came to convey?” I ask in a weary voice. “I have a pressing appointment with my amatory goddess, so before I hurry to cram in mommy goo by the spoonful, do you intend to bother me with further pieces of invaluable advice?”

“Just remember that you’re our emissary on this plane, all we’ve got, as sickening as the notion may be. We’re cheering for you. One of us is, anyway. I’m realistically pessimistic about your chances.”

I let out a bitter laugh. Sluggish, I shamble back to Jacqueline’s chair and flop down on it. The chair creaks as if complaining.

“Alright, well… I better get going and save the universe or whatever. Let’s keep this shitty world spinning, even though its sentient inhabitants have done little to deserve the ride. As for you, return to your home in the sewerage pipes of hell.”

“Yeah, fuck off, Leire. Enjoy the rest of your depraved existence.”

A smile creeps onto my face.

“You bet I will, Blubberboy.”

The blob makes a rumbling noise like a tuba full of turds. His gelatinous bulk starts convulsing, wobbling and rippling. As dozens of eyeballs shake and bounce against each other, viscous ropes of goo flail out, undulating like inky anacondas. Alberto’s volume is shrinking with a fleshy slurp as if a drain had opened in the wall and were sucking him down.

The puddles and splotches of black goo that have sullied the carpet are stretching dozens of tiny arms. Those wriggling strands, dark vines that grow in fast motion, are pulling themselves from the fabric as they reach out toward the wall. Blackened tissues, with which I had wiped my face after Alberto spat at me, roll up the inner wall of my wastebasket, then tumble across the carpet to meet the interdimensional drain that is pulling in every droplet of tarry putrescence.

A myriad of melon-sized eyeballs pop out from the dwindling mass of slime, dropping onto the carpeted floor with a series of thuds before rolling around like slick marbles. As they come to a halt, they blur, start hissing, and one by one they dissolve into effervescent mists of pollutants that carry a bitter, metallic scent.

With a glug, the last gob of ooze is sucked down into the void. Black and greasy smears remain, like spills of crude oil, but as the rain lashes against the office windowpanes, the stains begin to fade.

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Author’s note: the songs for today are “Fat Lip” by Sum 41, and “See You at Your Funeral” by PUP.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel so far. A hundred and sixty-one videos. Check them out.

Enjoy some amateur theatre with AI-generated voices by listening to the audiochapter of this chapter. Check it out.

Thus concludes the saga of Alberto the blob, that started back in chapter 80, during November of last year. This last sequence has been the longest of the novel by a significant margin, with about 25,000 words. You can hear the entirety of this sequence as audiochapters through this link.

The next chapter will kick off a new sequence titled “Miraculous Milk,” throughout which I’ll proceed to lose what little remains of my audience.

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“As wretched as you’ve considered your life to be,” Alberto the blob says somberly, “the worst is yet to come. The professor’s machine borrowed its reality-altering powers from other dimensions, which are now bleeding in to balance the mess out. Consequently, our reality is thinning down and fraying, and the leaks in space-time are increasing in number and size. Picture the eldritch horrors that will crawl out of those tears as whole alien ecosystems merge with ours. And the same way your presumably sentient self invaded the Ice Age, this planet will face intrusions from otherworldly intelligences.”

I’m engulfed in a vision of Arachne’s shimmering cosmic loom, interstellar strands pulsating with starlight, an intricate tapestry that has linked the grit beneath our feet to the nebulous edges of Her domain. In the end of the warp attached to Earth, rips have been torn open like jagged gashes in a dishcloth, each a yawning gateway to other realms, allowing the worst of the Thread Weaver’s servants to intrude in our world.

The buildings of Donostia are engrafted with throbbing fleshlike growths that ooze a corrosive slurry. Ground-sloth-sized, amoebic monsters, their blubbery forms slick with a glistening sheen, slink down the streets, gobbling up pedestrians in a cacophony of screams and squelches. The highways, those ribbons of tarmac, writhe with tentacles that reach out and snatch at speeding cars and trucks. I smell air thick with sea salt; the oceans are churning into a foaming, swirling turmoil as gargantuan blurs shift under the waves: leviathans rising from the deepest trenches of the cosmos. The blanket of blue above is pockmarked with wormholes that vomit forth winged nightmares. As their inky bodies spread across the sky, they cast long shadows on the world below, a world being devoured and digested.

A shiver slithers down my spine, and its icy tendrils wind their way into the pit of my stomach.

“That looks about right for what is about to happen,” the blob says, his words oozing out of his putrid, gelatinous bulk. “Once the dimensional planes sync up, this planet getting a lot of dicks stuffed in it all of a sudden is the intermediate step, a pit stop on the highway to oblivion. According to the professor, eventually the universe will unravel and collapse. Forget about those large beasts from the Ice Age, the wooly mammoths and sabertooths that once roamed the earth: our species, with its knowledge, artworks, cultures, and history, will disappear. Every species that has braved the many extinctions in our planet will be wiped out as if they never existed. We’re facing the end of everything.”

I swipe away the layer of sweat that has accumulated on my forehead.

“Shouldn’t you be, you know, fucking pissed at the bunnyman? After all, his gadget set off the final countdown.”

The gooey mass heaves as if shrugging.

“Maybe I am angry about this reality unravelling thing, but not enough to shit on the professor for achieving something brilliant.”

“He turned you into a slime-dripping slug that wallows in poisonous waste!”

“Unlike you, I don’t blame others for my psychological problems. I was warned not to mess with the machine twice, but I got greedy and ended up sneaking in for more. Hell, its own creator couldn’t keep away, even though he understood the dangers. And honestly, I wasn’t too thrilled about my existence in this dimension. All the excitement I experienced in my youth was gone like an amputated limb. Now I don’t need to feel trapped by the walls of this office.”

Although I raise an eyebrow at the blob, I’d love to be freed from the bane of my existence. One of these days I will ask Jacqueline to pay my bills.

“I can see the appeal of never having to work again. Maybe you were meant to become a wet heap of organic garbage.”

“Anyway,” the blob gurgles, “now that you’re in possession of the relevant facts, you should understand your purpose, your role to play in the grand tapestry of existence: your unhinged self must prevent humanity’s extinction, along with the universe’s collapse into eternal nothingness.”

His words hang in the air like a noose I’m expected to slip my neck into. I rub my clammy palms up and down the sleeves of my shirt.

“Save humanity?” I echo in a hollow voice. “Save the universe?”

Does this filthy species deserve to be saved?

Most of my interactions with people have been detrimental to my sanity. The cutting remarks, the dismissive glances, the never-ending ridicule; a tide whose bitter taste has always lingered in my mouth. Even as a child, I wanted to disappear from the mind of everyone who knew me, to live isolated in some mountain sanctuary, a fortress of solitude where I could escape from a world that was nothing but cruel to me. What stake do I have in humanity’s salvation? Why should I care about a universe hell-bent on tearing itself apart?

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin, and “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout the novel so far. A hundred and sixty songs. Check them out.

Sometimes all it takes is an audiochapter to lift your mood. Check out the audiochapter for this one.

This chapter is shorter than usual, but I have been halving my writing time because I have to study for an upcoming exam that will determine if they’ll keep calling me for work. It’s not like these chapters will correspond one-to-one with the structure of the final novel, whenever I get around to self-publish it.

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The blob sloshes his bulk like a tar-black wave of putrefaction coming in on a beach, sending ripples of oozing flesh and eyeballs across his gelatinous mass.

“Here’s the gist: a big fuck-off apocalypse is approaching.”

“Oh, another end-of-days scenario.” I sigh. “The Old Gods must be back in business after a long absence, during which they watched us monkeys clamber through the mud in a voyage toward self-destruction. By Arachne’s glorious breast! We’re doomed to be swept off the stage, to end as a stain of entropy, once the Mother of Spiders finishes consuming this universe.”

“Please, stop spewing horseshit and listen. This mess started because the professor designed a revolutionary…”

“Wait, what professor?” I demand to know, irked. “Are you one of those cretins who mention third parties as if their interlocutor were in the know? Have a modicum of respect for the laws of communication, you slobbering slimeball!”

“You met him, idiot.” The blob pulsates with a sloshy squelch. Across his bulk, coconut-sized growths bulge as if they were about to shoot out, pushing eyeballs away and making them bump into other eyeballs. The growths sink back under the rippling goo. “I can’t mime for shit in this form. Nevermind; it’s the bunny guy.”

I’m seated in the first row of my mind theatre when it projects a portrait of the bunnyman’s furry, piss-soiled head sticking out of a toilet: close-set, pointy ears; bulging, gunmetal-gray eyes; a pair of overgrown incisors dripping with drool; almond-or-whiskey-colored fur matted with filth, splotched with gunky crusts.

My guts curdle as a wave of revulsion sweeps through me. I stagger backwards.

“Professor… bunnyman?” I ask in a cracked voice.

“Yes, the bunny-brained professor.”

“Th-that pervert with a torpedo-sized dick?!”

“Healthy self-esteem, I’d say.”

My temples throb with a dull pain.

“You hang out with a cacodemon who pours his own semen on pancakes and force-feeds them to his guests?!”

The blob huffs a blast of fetid air.

“Leire, you’re the kind of woman who would stab her partner because they cheated in a dream. I’m glad I haven’t shared a horizontal position with you.”

“Your loss. I’m a ravenous pussy-eater.”

“Anyway, let me illustrate the problem in terms you may understand: the professor’s contraption ripped reality a fresh vagina, and ever since, it has been oozing fluids from the darkness inside.”

My mind replaces the sight of the wall-wide mass of goo with that of a corundum-hard cock as thick as a stick of salami. Pulsating veins snake under stretched skin that threatens to rip open. The crimson cockhead, glistening with pre-ejaculate, draws nearer and nearer to my wide-open pussy.

A shudder of vertigo wrecks me. My legs go limp; I drop to the carpet. As I clasp my hands to my temples and shut my eyes tight, I rock back and forth.

“Get out of my brain, you giant fuckpole made of twisted, purple veins!”

“Quit your histrionics!” Alberto barks out. “Can’t you stay lucid for five fucking minutes?”

I grit my teeth. After I wipe sweat from my forehead, I lift my gaze to glower at the insolent blob and his legion of glazed eyeballs.

“Wh-why did you have to mention a vagina in such close proximity to that bunnyman bastard?” I demand to know, my voice strained.

The blob heaves and ripples as if he were containing laughter.

“I was trying to relate to your go-to frame of reference. Should I have mentioned penises instead?”

How could I defend my honor? I’ve been known to draw pencil sketches of cocks to visualize data structures.

“I keep glancing away from your greasy thoughts,” Alberto continues. “Oh, did I tell you that I can see them? They emanate from your head as psychedelic steam mirages, constant reminders of your depravity. If they could, they would smell of musty socks.”

I want to sob and curl into a fetal position, but instead I let out a guttural noise and rise from my kneeling position, jerking to my feet. Heat crawls up my cheeks.

“Says the dickbag who stinks like a cesspool filled with rotting corpses. You have thoroughly and blatantly invaded my privacy, so you may as well violate the sanctity of my mental space.”

“Now, could you clarify how come a child has been popping up in your thoughts? There she is again. Anything seedy you’d like to share, you dirty cunt?”

“Are her eyes squinty?” I ask in a calm voice.

“Uh… Yes, she’s Asian.”

I jab my forefinger at the blob.

“Then that’s my new daughter you’re talking about, you jizz-filled, brain-dead bastard. Have some respect!”

The blob’s bulk wobbles, making his myriad eyes quiver.

“Wait, you’re serious. Why would you suddenly have a child? How?”

“Jacqueline and I adopted a little girl that I found in the Ice Age, and she’s the cutest bundle of joy to ever warm my heart. Name’s Nairu.”

“Care to explain rationally how you acquired an Asian kid?”

I cross my arms and tilt my head.

“Rationality is for pussies who believe they need to justify themselves. I merely walked into the trap that you, or that so-called professor of yours, laid out for me.”

“Leire,” the blob growls, “I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Please tell me you didn’t steal some random girl!”

“Relax, you poxy shit. I’ll explain the origin story. One recent night, after the last round of sex, Jacqueline wrapped me in her arms, pressing her bountiful breasts against my back. Sheltered by mommy’s warmth and heady scent, I started slipping into dreamland. I visualized Jacqueline and I in our old age, curled up together under the covers, sharing a cigarette. By Arachne’s nipples, I was flooded with gratitude for the woman whose light had seeped through the cracks in my battered mind to extinguish the lonely part. As a child, before I became the target of harassment by interdimensional creeps, whenever I pictured my future, I saw myself stumbling around in a labyrinth of corridors lined with funhouse mirrors. I sobbed and sobbed, terrified of that appearance that kept warping, knowing that soon enough I would lose the only image of myself that I understood.”

“Move on with your story!”

I let out an exasperated sigh as I brush strands of hair from my forehead.

“You interrupt me at such an emotionally charged moment? What a disrespect for the art of storytelling!”

“My interruption was driven by a desperate desire not to hear more about your problems. Just get to the part where you nabbed the kid!”

“Fine, I’ll provide a streamlined version, you blobulous mound of pus. In the morning, I got up from mommy’s bed and I walked naked to the bathroom. When I reached out to turn on the lights, a crackle of energy ran through me. Next thing I knew, I was standing on the muddy pebbles of a riverbank, and an icy wind was blowing against my bare tits. I won’t bore you with my initial freak-out. Anyway, I met the girl in that boreal forest. I also ended up annoying a ground sloth as it was drinking from the river. That long-extinct beast nearly performed extensive surgery on my face with its twenty-centimeter-long claws. Are you getting the close-up of that magnificent mofo from my thoughts? What a gigantic, shambling mass of meat!”

“Oh shit.”

“I wish I could have ridden that goddamn goliath, whose claws were created to rend and gouge, to pull down trees and reap lives. Just so you know, it was probably the largest mammal to ever exist, larger even than the bunnyman’s cock!”

“Leire, none of us opened that rip in space-time,” the blob says gravely as he shifts his bulk. “They will keep appearing spontaneously near you, because your insanity makes you a conduit. It’s a miracle that you returned to the present.”

“You’re telling me. I only had to walk backwards, though. To be fair, I fell on my ass back to the hallway of Jacqueline’s privileged apartment in the hills, to then find out that I had dragged along a filthy, confused child who was unaware that parquet flooring existed.”

“So, in a way, you did kidnap that girl.”

“The authorities might see it that way.”

“I guess it couldn’t be helped. No way to un-kidnap her now.”

“Perhaps I pulled off the greatest scam in the history of interpersonal relations.”

Alberto’s amorphous form shudders, sending waves rolling across the gelatinous mass. His glossy eyeballs, fixated beyond me and beyond the windows, are catching the light from the ceiling fixtures in a somber dance.

“Oh man,” the blob mumbles. “This is terrible.”

A pang of shame forces me to look down.

“You know, I thought so back then, wrapped up in a blanket, chafing my arms through the sleeves of my wool pajamas, near hallucinating due to shock and hypothermia. ‘This is terrible.’ What the hell was I supposed to do with the kid that I snatched from her home? But Jacqueline embraced that little girl like a gift from the universe, and when her angelic giggles fill the apartment, I catch myself smiling. You should see her drawings. She’s so eager to express her uniqueness, like I used to be before my parents shredded my psyche. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those ancient cave paintings belonged to her. But… being raised by me is like getting injected with poison.”

“I meant the rips in space-time. Still, a living child from thousands of years ago is mind-blowing.”

“At least about 11,500 years, which is when the Younger Dryas ended.”

“If the press got ahold of this story, the scientific community would want to lock that girl up in a lab.”

I picture a gaggle of white coats gathered around Nairu as they dazzle her with bright lights. The medical staff will take her temperature, make her pee into a cup, pry open her mouth and reach down her throat to study her lungs, inject her with syringes full of strange fluids, cut away strips of flesh to check her DNA, and open her skull to peer inside the brain.

A sickening ache squeezes my heart, and I clasp a trembling hand over my breast. The urge to murder those butchers sears through me with the fervor of an ancient beast’s drive to dominate and breed.

“I’m sure many scoundrels would love to run their greasy hands all over my sudden daughter,” I say in a cold voice, “but none will, because no non-monstrous person will find out that I kidnapped her from the Ice Age, as well as from her bearded, hunter-gatherer father. In due time, Jacqueline and I will relocate to some remote wilderness, where we’ll survive by farming, raising poultry and livestock, and staging highway robberies at gunpoint. So don’t you go spilling our little secret, you blubbery ectoplasm. In fact, restrain yourself from talking to anyone else; they will run away in terror.”

“Well, in any case, do the world a favor and don’t raise that innocent soul as a pervert.”

I chuckle.

“Nah, she’s fucked. Both of her moms are freaks.”

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “Angel From Montgomery” by John Prine, and “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve.

I keep a playlist with all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and fifty-eight songs so far. Check them out.

Leire met that bunnyman bastard back in chapter 59, during the sequence titled “That Bunnyman Bastard.” She ended up in the Ice Age back in chapter 63, during the sequence titled “A Gift From the Ice Age.” You can check out all the chapters in this page.

How about audiochapters? Do you enjoy them? I do, which is why I spend hours putting each of these together. Here’s the audiochapter for this chapter.

You know how I know that I will never become a professional author, other than the fact that I need to write stuff that virtually nobody else wants to read? I got a sales report from last month; someone has bought both of the books I self-published in Spanish back in 2017 or so. I got paranoid and wondered who was trying to fuck with me.

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The mound of sentient ooze pulses with a sloshing noise, as if it were gulping down foodstuff to fuel its bloat-bound brain.

“Leire, you need to stop having a meltdown every few minutes.”

I take a deep breath as I wipe away my tears with the pad of my thumb.

“What I need to do,” I start in a slow drawl, “is grab the spare umbrella and head home, and by home I mean mommy’s apartment in the hills. The trip back there is going to feel like a journey to another galaxy, but the hot tongue of my petite amie will purge my memories of slimy, eyeball-studded freaks. After having been so thoroughly humiliated by a gelatinous mass of putrid flesh, I need to be hugged and fucked by mommy to keep the dark thoughts at bay. You can return to your realm of rotting slime, and leave me the fuck alone.”

A gloopy chuckle slurps through the blob’s bulk.

“Oh no, we ain’t done yet.”

“Sure we are.”

“You want a repeat of this evening, more hours of wasted overtime at the office, filled instead with you and I arguing? Why not? After all, you don’t care if you get fired.”

My eyelids twitch.

“By all means, please keep pestering me until I slit my wrists.”

“I’m going to force you into a lucid state by any means necessary,” the blob assures me acidly, “and I swear that we will sort this shit out before you leave tonight, because I have dealt with you as much as I can handle.”

“Why don’t you come over here and shove your ‘any means necessary’ up my ass, you quivering wad of phlegm?”

“I’m not going to punish a masochist like you with a good time. Now, I can’t expect someone who has lived a lifetime as a pile of garbage to change overnight, but I will get you to hear me out and learn the true scope of our problem.”

I groan, then run my fingers through my hair. For a second I fear that my hand will come away sticky with black ooze.

“Fuck me with a spiked dildo,” I grumble. I crack my neck, I loosen my shoulders. “You want to share a part of your universe with me?” I extend both arms, palms up, toward the interdimensional intruder, and make beckoning motions by curling my fingers. “Alright, spit it out!”

The office light fixtures are casting their cold glow on the blob’s putrid sludge and his dozens of eyeballs, that stare blankly as they bob like corks. The drumming of raindrops against the windows, along with the low rumble of thunder, have given way to an oppresive silence interrupted only by sloshing and slurping noises emanating from the bulk.

“Earth to cum monster!” I shout.

Alberto harrumphs, and a glob of slime, airborne debris that resembles a greasy pebble, splats into a puddle.

“Are you truly willing to hear me out, or are you going to pull out a fork and stab yourself in the neck again?”

An electric echo crawls up my spine. I remember that drive to dig my carotid artery, and the agony that sewed my mouth shut. It makes me shudder. I rub whatever remains of the four-holed wound from when I attempted to kill a rotten bitch.

“Of course you witnessed that as well, you unmitigated fuck-weasel. Yes, I’ve had my share of stabbings and forkings and plenty of other shit I prefer to keep to myself. I committed atrocious acts when I had to. Regardless, I will listen, as long as you have something intriguing to tell! Then I’m gone. I intend to finish off what’s left of the evening sucking on mommy’s nipples like a starved infant.”

“Can you care about anything other than yourself and your buxom lover?” the blob asks, his voice tinged with irritation.

I huff.

“I’m telling you, dude, some of the stuff that went down in this sorry excuse for a planet is, in fact, rather enticing! Do you know about the Younger Dryas cataclysm?”

“What? The Younger-what?”

“Picture this scenario: we’re in the Late Pleistocene, a period when much of North America, from the Canadian arctic down to Missouri, was buried under three-kilometers-thick glaciers. Back then, woolly mammoths, dire wolves, sabre-toothed tigers and ground sloths inhabited the frigid wilderness. They didn’t bother to build cities or write stories or any of that shit: they enjoyed the great outdoors, as well as the pleasures of eating, drinking, swimming in freshwater ponds, rolling in a mound of fresh dung to warm up, and fucking each other senseless, for thousands of generations. That megafauna may have taken delight in some of the most liberal sex positions ever practiced by the animal kingdom. They also suffered, mourned, and remembered their friends and family. Imagine these beasts in the frozen wastes of Alaska and the Yukon territory, their skulls buried in so-called ‘muck’ deposits that nowadays you can excavate from tundra and glacial soil. In the skull fragments, scientists discovered impact-related microspherules, tiny beads formed in the heat of a cosmic impact.” I take a deep breath while my heart pounds against my ribcage. “What evil force snatched such magnificent creatures from life, from our realm, leaving behind nothing but the smear of their existence? The answer lies beyond our planet, in the vast reaches of Arachne’s web, that binds the universe together. An alien spacecraft approached Earth, carrying some interstellar creep, a demigod of destruction whose mission was to crash his ship into our planet as revenge. JK, just joking, as humans like to say. A large short-period comet must have fragmented within the inner solar system. Drawn by Earth’s gravitational pull, flaming chunks of rock from another world bombarded ours. The sky flashes. The ground trembles with the shockwaves of titanic impacts, enough energy released to blast your shitpile through a hundred walls. Bursts of rocks and ash plume over hundreds of kilometers. The ice sheets melt, turning the oceans into a bloodbath of brine and slurry. Massive firestorms rage across forests and savannas and grasslands, burning ten percent of the world’s biomass to soot, while a blanket of atmospheric dust blots out the sun. In the chaos that ensued, a lone entity escaped the wreckage of his spaceship: a deity with eyes like liquid flame, with tentacles for hair. The incarnation of despair, a malevolent force from beyond time and space.” I gulp down the knot in my throat. “The region where these fossils were found, known as Beringia, was part of the largest circumarctic landmass to remain unglaciated, a refuge for Plio-Pleistocene tundra-grassland plant species, and the now-extinct megafauna. So we can assume that those noble beasts went extinct both from a cosmic bombardment and from an alien tentacle god with an egotistical cunt’s idea of fun. A fascinating albeit chilling story, don’t you think, dear Blobbert? I’m an authority on the Late Pleistocene, as I visited it briefly.”

A guttural groan reverberates from deep within the putrid bulk of ooze.

“What the hell are you prattling on about?!”

“Did I strike a nerve? I shared my knowledge of the Younger Dryas cataclysm, born from a comet and an intergalactic god-monster, as a gift to you. Imagine all the contemporary species larger than a goat, then kill off sixty-fucking-five percent of them; that’s how many of the mighty Ice Age megafauna disappeared forever. And the global sea level rose by a hundred and twenty meters. Can you comprehend such catastrophe, how much misery it brought? Can I make you, a gooey puddle of sewage, listen to the screams of the victims as they suffocated in a sludge of melted glaciers? The Younger Dryas cataclysm happened, in the grand scheme of things, yesterday. You were spawned in the post-apocalypse! Your genes are scarred with the fear that the sky will fall on your head.”

“Are you kidding me? I don’t give a flying fuck about your pet rocks and your tentacle-haired cunt god!”

I narrow my eyes. I’m getting fed up with this monstrous ignoramus.

“In Arachne’s name, I swear you must have fished your brain out of a lake filled with cat poop.”

“Your morbid obsessions are completely irrelevant to what I’m struggling to convey to you.”

I rub the bridge of my nose and sigh. I picture my right hand clenching around the handle of the office door, about to pull myself out of this hellscape. The sooner the better.

I glower at the blob as I spread my arms wide.

“Then spit it out already, sludge-for-brains! Here I am, ready and willing. Tell your story or perish!”

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “The Same Old Rock” by Roy Harper, and “Waitin’ Around to Die” by The Be Good Tanyas.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and fifty-six songs so far. Check them out.

Leire didn’t pull the stuff about the Ice Age (entirely) out of her ass. I recently came across this scientific paper. In addition, my protagonist attempted to kill a rotten bitch back in chapter 14, as the climax of the sequence titled “I’m Killing a Rotten Bitch.”

Do you want to hear this chilling chapter acted out by AI-generated voices? Check it out.

So, a hundred chapters of this shit, huh? I started the story back in October of 2021, attempting to pump out a novella after I abandoned my previous two ones. I’m not sure how it ballooned to such an extent. Anyway, I know that a few souls out there have followed this story from the beginning, probably out of morbid curiosity. Thank you. I won’t say that I couldn’t do this without you, because I was doing this alone until I started posting my crap on the internet a few years ago.

Still fifteen or so chapters to go.

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A bolt of lightning slashes the darkness, throwing the office into harsh relief. Alberto the blob, a viscous and putrid mural of shuddering goo, glistens wetly under the harsh light, and his myriad of eyeballs reflect my own dreadful image back at me.

“I wish I were riding your current high,” I say, “burning with self-righteousness, able to discharge your pent-up anger against someone else. I’d prefer, though, if you had chosen a target who did something worthy of your ire: an actual asshole.”

“You think that people can only get angry at what you do? Is that why you keep busy playing with yourself while ignoring your responsibilities, including your job and your basic needs? Your inaction can ruin lives.”

My stomach knots tighter.

“Don’t try to make me responsible for others,” I plead. “I can’t even take care of myself.”

The blob ripples like a sea of black slime and eyeballs.

“Unfortunately, the responsibility only falls on you, a weirdo who would rather be miserable than improve. You’re the one who can listen to what needs to be done, the sole person suited to stop a cosmic shitstorm. Isn’t it fitting, though? We need an aberration to beat another.”

I hunch over, and as I rub my eyelids, I seek a mental refuge from this deluge of insanity. I see her face, the glowing visage of Jacqueline, my all-encompassing muse, a pearl beyond price. Her ivory-white skin is framed by a raven-black cascade of lustrous hair. Her cobalt-blues are locked into my eyes without disgust. The rosy, wet cavity of her mouth tempts me like a fountain of potable water in a scorching day. Please come and save me from myself.

“Wh-why do I have to be the one?” I complain weakly. “Jacqueline also worked with you, for much longer, and she isn’t as eager to forget human beings as I am. She would try to understand you and help you cope. Hell, she even believes me when I open up about the otherworldly stalkers by whom I’m routinely harassed, although she’s never suffered the misfortune of gazing upon your abominable forms.”

“Sure, your girlfriend slash mommy would have done a bang-up job, if only for reminding me of the most carnal pleasures of my former world.” The blob snickers. “But nope, we are stuck with a self-defeating sack of shit, a pathetic wreck with more anxiety attacks than brain cells, who can barely accomplish the most basic of tasks, who’s never had the guts to start living, who can’t see farther than her own disgusting orifices. The perfect package for a universe on its last leg!”

I gulp down bitter acid, then take a lungful of stinging toxins.

“Again, why me?”

“Because your mind was open and ready for a trip through the cosmic craphole, Leire. What, you want me to make it simpler? You’re a walking heap of psychological garbage. In the old days, you’d have been locked up in an asylum. I had the inkling that you wouldn’t go crazier even when contacted by sentient abominations, but you still surprised me by taking the visits in stride, as if some people just happened to be accosted by teleporting horses.”

I grind my teeth.

“I’ve done nothing but rage against you fuckers.”

The blob’s legion of eyeballs catch the erratic flicker of lightning, shimmering like tiny stars caught in a sea of filth.

“Hey, cheer up, girlie! In these enlightened times, you can become the champion of interdimensional gods, which is what I’ve fancied myself to be since I escaped your realm of rot and decay.”

“If people actually worshipped you,” I grumble, “I would understand if they also persecuted anybody who depicted your image.”

The blob chokes on a chuckle, glugging noisily. My gaze wanders from my former coworker’s grotesque bulk to the black screen of my computer. Leire the Demented Seer, the Chosen Paladin of Interdimensional Gods. Sounds better than being a struggling office worker that has to curb her intrusive thoughts about shoving random penis-shaped objects into her orifices.

“Enough bullshit,” the blob barks out. “You’re going to wake up right now. You’re going to open your eyes and start taking life seriously. Time has been running out for everyone since you disregarded my warning back in your defunct car.”

I cross my arms over my chest.

“You creeps have done an atrocious job of convincing me that these supposed warnings were urgent. Perhaps you left your brains behind in some other dimension, where you should have stayed for all I care. Besides, I can’t shake the feeling that you’re lying about a cosmic threat, that you just want to fuck with me.”

The wall-wide mucus-and-eyeball-ridden monstrosity stirs like an organic tide.

“Look here, you clit-loving lunatic,” the blob snaps back in a wet gurgle. He coughs up a glob of tar onto the carpet. “An impossible message flashing across your Renault Laguna’s dashboard would have disturbed any other human being into lucidity.”

“Didn’t we discuss that already? No, we ended up arguing about my car’s supernatural powers. What did you write across the dashboard, then? ‘A horse with a dick for a head will fuck you before you die’? Such a warning might have sent me running to the psych ward.”

Gooey innards ripple and slosh in the gelatinous bulk.

“‘We’re fucked,’ damn you!”

“What was that?”

“The message I wrote on your dashboard, which you ignored as if it were junk mail, was ‘We’re fucked’!”

I grimace.

“That’s all the fuck you wrote?”

“How much clearer could I be?” he snarls. “It means that you’re fucked, that I’m fucked, that the universe is fucked!”

A knot expands in my throat, and I lower my gaze to the puddles of black goo seeping into the carpet. The slanted rain is drumming on the windows. Thunder crackles. The absurdity of it all bubbles up inside me, shoots up my esophagus, and bursts out into laughter that ricochets off the office walls. Mine is a despairing laughter tinged with madness, the sole human sound amidst the rainstorm and the blob’s otherworldly gurgles.

“Do you recall that message, then?” Alberto asks impatiently.

I raise my gaze to meet the wall-wide mass of putrid slime. His countless eyeballs are scrutinizing me like a cop eyeing a perp.

“Nope,” I say in a strained voice, “you may as well have made it up.”

The blob heaves as if I had punched his gut.

“Again with your self-imposed amnesia?!”

“Doesn’t matter. I get your point: we’re fucked.” I slide my palm down my face as the back of my eyeballs grows hotter. “That’s what you wretched snot-fondler sent as a message of utmost urgency? As eloquent as a dead rat’s turd. Of course we’re fucked, you oversized cum-sack! That much I understood since I crawled out of the womb broken, since my parents failed to behave towards each other like human beings, let alone raise a functional, healthy child. Billions of people born to struggle daily in this cesspool only to be rewarded with decrepitude and death. How many are loved along the way?” Tears well up, hot and stinging, but I press on. “I don’t need some interdimensional pus-clown to remind me of the achingly obvious fact that we’re all fucked. We never stood a fucking chance.”

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “Karma Police” by Radiohead, “Game of Pricks” by Guided by Voices, “The Plan” by Built to Spill, and “Miss Misery” by Elliott Smith.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and fifty-four songs so far. Check them out.

Were you looking forward to the audiochapter for this entry? Well, I was. Check it out.

It took me ages to work through this chapter. I’ve been distracted programming, and my mood has been let’s say quite low. Anyway, GPT-4’s API has been broken for days, who knows why, so I’ll likely write more prose than code in the coming days.