They say there is a cure. A remedy which will dissolve the invisible fences constructed out of the subject’s mind and flesh, the prescribed bliss and intricate despair. The million consumer varieties of hunger. Eagerly devoured, corroding.

So you followed the hints, the twits and shifting sites. The whispers tattooed on random screens, under checkpoint posts, in automated midnight snacking joints.

There is a cure. Not a dashing temporal solution. Not apocalypse or revolution. Those are methods, means to an end. Doomed to be buried under the shrapnel chips flying chips chopped wood.

The cure, it’s codded in the corporeal. This much you have uncovered.

Exposing yourself, blind, ripped open, you went further then any into the fringes of uncertainty, and collected your reward: A chance encounter with an OTHER in a slimy cubical . Nothing but a hasty, almost clumsy, collision. But you hoped it would grant you access to those who believe that power may disintegrate. And have the means to melt our invisible shackles. To the network hidden in plain sight.

Little did you know that this moment of courting a stranger would become a map leading out of one prison and into another.

It seems like you have been waiting for ever.

At times you wondered if that fleeting flirtation with the hope of transformation has taken place at all. Perhaps, like many others, you have simply given up on alert existence, and slid into survival through delusion. Making life bearable only in your own imagination.

But then, with the rise of a new moon, you started noticing a curios alteration. A creeping sense of being a stranger in your skin. Or more accurately, of your skin becoming estranged from you.

An odd sensation, almost undefinable, of being more alive then your body is. More sentient then your mind has learned to be. A deeply disturbed Omniscience, or the fleeting glimpse of it’s slippery presence within you.

And you started dreaming of blood. At first, when asleep. Then sometimes even when wide awake. These visions have become so all-invasive, that now you are hard pressed to clearly distinguish between sleep and lucidity slumber. You were no longer certain one should attempt such distinction.

You wandered the city awash with wonder and lust. The blackberries ripening by the rail-roads seemed like succulent shimmering hearts. The rank water of canals and rivers a primal swamp, teeming with mutated vitality. The stench of shit and rotten cabbage in the ever expanding slums a poetry of decay. But most glorious of all were the intricate marvels of humanity. The old women on the train with her ancient radio, singing a forgotten folk song, harvesting coins. The mating rituals of the young and the wealthy, dancing on the road to banal oblivion. The haggard punks clutching their beers in bitter resentment, picking the ticks off a money -shot dog. The bright and eager lounge revolutionaries, invoking dreams of doom and destruction, thinly veiled by mass produced Utopian floss.

Your sense of removed superiority rendered them all incredibly fascinating, yet each individual is an expendable pawn in your game.

Maybe there isn’t a cure. But you have been liberated from the numbing blindness of the hive to contract an addiction. You are no longer a doped up drone. You are a predator.

After a few weeks, prowling the streets no longer satiates the pulsing pangs of hunger.

One fog-laced autumn night, you accost your first victim.