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Yes, let’s have animals in the Circus! Caine said.
It’ll be fun! Caine said.
But this? Getting mauled by a literal lion?
This is not fun.
Not one bit.
Being maimed by a five hundred and thirty-pound digital lion is one of those unique, once in a lifetime experiences that you really never forget, mainly because of trauma reasons. And pain reasons. Because the vivid sensation of razor-toothed jaws crunching down into your bones with a bite force of around 650 PSI is not something so easily lost.
There are little things more disconcerting than staring at your own guts. Horror movies often like to present the small intestines as a pinkish shade, but now that she’s gotten the chance to really look at them, Pomni knows that they’re actually a deep, reddish-pink color, closer to scarlet, if anything.
Also, they’re slippery.
Like, really slippery.
Pomni learns this the hard way when she feebly attempts to stuff them back into her stomach cavity, but those squishy, wormy ropes seem adamant on becoming outsides instead of insides, and they keep trying to slide out from the gaps between her fingers like curious snakes. She’s practically wrestling with her own entrails, and somehow, the entrails are winning. They’re coming undone, unraveling like a spool of thread, and Pomni can’t believe she’s actually getting frustrated because of her own evisceration.
Why does she even have organs in the first place? It’s been made abundantly clear that their bodily functions don’t work here, so what’s the point in having small intestines if they don’t properly absorb any of the food she ingests? Same goes with her large intestines, which are also attempting to flee the confines of her flesh and go out and get a job. It’s like her bowels actually do anything, so why have them? Are they just here for show? Is she some kind of anatomical diagram packed up in a cartoonish wrapping paper?
Because the thing is—she has a heartbeat. She needs to breathe (she knows this because of the amount of panic attacks she’s had that have almost made her suffocate to death). So her heart and her lungs, at the very least, have some kind of function. And she’s gotten the hiccups before, so that means her diaphragm is also working, too. And she can (at least somewhat) wrap her head around those things being present inside of her.
But her intestines? Her kidneys? Her liver? Her fucking gallbladder? What about her uterus? Why even bother putting those in her at all?
She doesn’t even know why she’s debating this with herself. Seeing her guts just brought the thought to her head. Maybe it’s just her mind’s way of attempting to distance itself from the brutality laid before her.
Because, yeah. Being maimed by a lion is pretty brutal.
The worst wound of them all is, of course, the giant gouge in her abdomen, created when the lion decided that her stomach was a gourmet, five-star buffet and dug its entire maw directly into her belly. But there are also bite marks and scars adorning what feels like every inch of her skin from when she was used as a jester-themed chew toy.
Oh, and her left foot got ripped off at some point.
So, that’s fun.
A sickly, oppressive heat presses against Pomni’s palms as she continues to manhandle her organs into submission. Amid the bay of blood soaking hot into her torn jester outfit, there is this flash of bilious yellow just barely peeking out of the upper lip of the wound. It’s her fat, she realizes, nubbly and thick. She hadn’t been expecting it to look like that if she’s being completely honest.
Blood stings the back of Pomni’s throat, and she does her best not to gag because when she does, she can visibly see her diaphragm and stomach contract. Her pyloric sphincter is quivering with tension, a hair’s breadth away from clamping itself shut so it can force the bile out.
None of this makes her nausea any better, of course.
Pomni takes a deep breath (or as deep of a breath as she can manage), and through these deep wounds that can only be described as caverns in her chest, which were created by the lion’s claws, she can slightly see into her thoracic cavity. She’s able to watch as her lungs swell outward with the gulp of air, then deflate again as she exhales, and doing so causes pain to spiral from her chest because the lion’s paws had broken her ribs, and the shards of bone are currently wedged inside of her lungs like pieces of shattered glass.
Pomni is very acutely aware that she isn’t dead. She knows that none of them can die here, not really, so having to function with such grievous injuries leaves her in this weird state of surreal lucidity. There’s no pain (not anymore, at least), and everything just looks red.
She’s actually surprised that it doesn’t hurt. It did hurt, you know, when the maiming took place. It really hurt. But now the pain is just…not there. Completely absent. Honestly, she feels uncomfortable more than anything, but not in agony.
Pomni’s consciousness is still intact, but her awareness is slipping away. She’s in this haze, a strange state of mind wherein the only reality she can perceive is that of warmth and red. She’s still there, her body’s just no longer a part of ‘her’ anymore.
This is all just…so odd.
She’s found, eventually—the exact opposite of a sight for sore eyes. Poor Zooble is the one who sees her first, and they make it their mission to spare everyone else from the gore, attempting to shepherd them away while Caine, who has no choice but to look at her, does his best to fix her body.
In this world, wounds take time to heal, just like in the real world. Her ‘code’ has to repair itself—or something like that. Pomni has learned from the Great Gut Debate to just stop trying to bring logic into the Digital Circus’ rules of existence.
It’s been about four days since the mauling took place, and Pomni feels… weird. Her injuries, still very tender and achy, are healing slowly but surely (the scars are still there beneath her clothes, infested with this strange ‘static’ like substance that is mending the skin and tissue), and her foot has been reattached. But something just feels off.
Nobody’s mind comes out of mutilation completely unscathed, but Pomni doesn’t think it’s normal to be this vividly aware of her own body.
After you see your own organs working like they’re meant to, it really makes you notice just how much movement there is inside of you.
She can feel her organs moving. She can feel each individual heartbeat, each pulse of blood as it’s circulated. She can feel each and every motion of every single muscle in her body. She can hear each breath, every intake of air, every exhalation. The movement is so constant, so never-ending. It’s as if there’s a living city inside of her, a vast landscape of ligaments and veins and nerves and organs and bones, and…it’s overwhelming.
To be made of flesh is overwhelming.
It’s not as if Pomni wasn’t aware of these things before. But now she can feel each individual movement inside her. All those things that her mind had once been able to simply disregard, to ignore, because it wasn’t really important to think about, because it was always just happening in the background.
But now they’re in the foreground, and they’re all she can think about. They’re all-consuming.
It’s sensory overload.
It’s almost like she can feel the very fabric of her existence around her, a warm and gentle shroud covering over every inch of her body. She can feel her very atoms as they oscillate and vibrate, her being a collection of trillions of tiny particles. She is a universe unto herself, a cosmos of life.
And she feels her brain. It’s…it’s like a network of neurons and synapses and chemical reactions, all firing and flashing and sending little electrical signals back and forth. It’s so very strange. But…strange doesn’t seem to do it justice.
And all of this— well, let’s just say it’s starting to get to her. Because she can’t help but wonder if she is really herself or if she’s just a means to house what lies within. The shell for the hermit crab, if you will. But not the hermit crab.
She feels herself growing…less certain. She has a terrible, nagging doubt that she’s not real, that she’s just a collection of organs and tissue and nerves that thinks it’s a person, when in reality, it isn’t.
Pomni looks at her arms and hands, her own flesh, and she thinks: Is this really mine? Is this who I am?
Pomni touches her face, stroking her cheek, and she thinks: Where does the flesh end and I begin?
What is flesh anyway?
Is it really different from the clothes I wear or the hair I grow or the cells within my blood?
This isn’t a matter of who she is.
This is a matter of what she is.
She’s not a person. She’s a body. A skin suit. A thing. She is not her brain or her heart or her muscles, she is the thing being controlled by them.
And this terrifies Pomni because it’s not exactly something you can just brush away. It’s not a silly little idea. You can’t just go back to your everyday life after learning that your existence boils down to little more than a walking sack of meat.
How would you even do that? How could Pomni convince herself that her body, her skin, wasn’t just a prison for something else? That she wasn’t just some kind of hollow puppet for her organs to operate?
And now she’s thinking about how other people are just the same—but, like, how do they manage to handle it? How do they manage to keep living after they learn their existence is like a lie? Because, let’s be real, no sane person would be able to learn that and be like, “It’s fine, I’m fine.” People aren’t supposed to know they’re meat suits. They’re not meant to know they’re just bones and fat and muscles and nerves and blood.
All this time, she’d thought of herself as a person, as someone, as alive, but what was it that she thought made her...her? The fact that she had a functioning body? The fact that she could breathe and think and move around and talk? A robot could do that! A robot could do anything that she could.
What does that say about free will? What does that say about being human?
Her heart beats for her. Her lungs breathe for her. Her thoughts only happen on the brain’s whim, only being allowed to exist under its strict supervision. If her brain doesn’t approve of a thought, it won’t exist. Every experience, every memory, every feeling or sensation—they’re not hers.
She is an inanimate object, a shell, a machine, a puppet pulled by strings because those strings are what’s real. They exist beyond the skin, and the skin exists only to preserve these parts.
She feels a bit shaky. Maybe it’s normal to have these types of thoughts and feelings. Maybe it’s normal for the whole “free will vs. determinism” debate to be an active and on-going war within her head.
And she feels hot. All of this pondering and overthinking is making her physically feverish. And maybe it’s also normal for her entire body to be shaking and trembling and breaking out in sweat and feeling on the verge of passing out. She doesn’t know, really, because there’s no baseline for this sort of thing.
And, just like that, Pomni starts to panic. Every rational part of her mind is telling her that no , this isn’t normal. This is NOT normal in the slightest, for the record.
On her bedroom floor, she curls into a small ball, wraps her arms securely around her chest, and closes her eyes tight, trying to ground herself. But no matter how deeply she breathes or how tightly she holds on, the feeling doesn’t fade.
She isn’t her.
She’s not a person at all. She isn’t anybody. She is just a body.
And then, all of a sudden, there’s a knock at her bedroom door. The door is being pushed open. Light bleeds into her dark room. A head peeks inside.
“Pomni?”
It’s Ragatha. The others have been checking in on her periodically, as she’s been mostly bedridden while recovering from her injuries. It seems like it’s Ragatha’s turn to come see how she’s doing.
And how she’s doing is…not very good.
Pomni doesn’t respond. She doesn’t want to. Why should she?
Why should she pretend to be anything or anyone, when she’s just an animated meat husk? She’s just a pile of flesh and bones doing nothing but following the whims and wishes of the real stuff—the innards and bits that make her move. What is the worth or the meaning of anything if all she’ll ever be is controlled? What is the point of being Pomni, if there is no Pomni?
“Pomni?”
Pomni can feel the other presence, that which lives within her, that which moves her, that which decides what she does and says and remembers and feels, and she wants to scream, but she can’t scream because—
Because that isn’t a choice she gets to make.
She’s not her. She’s nothing. She doesn’t have free will, she doesn’t have opinions or preferences or any real sense of self, because everything is done for her by the real thing inside.
“Pomni? Can you hear me, dear?”
Dear. Oh, how Pomni would love to be a deer. Or a dog. Or a fish. Or a rock. Or a piece of lint.
Because it would be better to not be her. To not be a puppet having strings pulled for the whims of its insides. To not have feelings or opinions , to not care about anything.
To be an object.
Footsteps approach.
Ragatha kneels down beside her crumpled form on the floor.
“Oh, Pomni…”
And then, a touch. On her side. A hand resting upon the skin. Gentle. Soothing.
Pomni flinches at the unfamiliar sensation—
…
…no, no, she’s not Pomni. Nobody is called Pomni, because Pomni doesn’t exist.
But the skin can remember…
…it remembers her. And it remembers what it’s like to be called by that name.
Someone—something—is touching the back of her shoulder, rubbing it in circles, trying to console her in some way. There’s something comforting about this.
And she starts to sob.
And it’s so strange.
It’s so bizarrely, strangely human of her to do this, to cry, to be consoled, to want to be consoled. Pomni isn’t real. But the body does it anyway. Her eyes burn, her face scrunches up, her throat tightens, and she gasps, choking on her own feelings.
Why? Why, oh why is she having this reaction?
Because she doesn’t know.
“Are you in pain, honey?” Ragatha asks softly.
Pomni’s lips are dry and chapped, and it physically hurts to talk, but she does so anyway.
“I—” The world sways and swirls and spins as Pomni tries to grasp the reality in which she inhabits, and in the end, she resorts to just pointing to herself, to the “meat suit” as she puts it, when asked who exactly is hurt here.
Ragatha doesn’t seem to get it. “Your chest hurts?” she says.
No… Yes…
“I don’t know.”
Pomni speaks not because she wants to, but because the voice in her head tells her to speak. She’s not an individual, she’s just a shell, a vessel, a thing, something to be used, controlled, and inevitably, discarded.
Because when the heart stops, the machine falls apart. When the brain dies, she dies with it.
She can feel the insides of her throat working, the breath of air rising from her lungs, her vocal cords vibrating slightly with each word.
“I—I don’t know what I think or feel. I don’t know if I even exist— I don’t even… My—my body’s just a thing that houses the…the real things, and what does that make me?” Pomni takes deep, shaky breaths and looks up at Ragatha, desperate for clarity.
To Ragatha’s immense credit, she doesn’t look at Pomni like she’s completely insane. She does look concerned, though. Extremely concerned.
“Sweetie,” Ragatha says softly. “Of course you exist. You’re you. You’re Pomni.”
“But—”
But Pomni only shakes her head, unable to find the words to properly express how thoroughly weird and wrong she feels about this situation. Her brain is a computer, and her body is a suit, and how does any of that make sense?
She is in agony just by thinking about it. She wants to be away from her thoughts. She wants to be away from any thoughts, because those thoughts are wrong. They make her feel awful, and the skin doesn’t like feeling awful.
And it’s not only the words that struggle to come out—Pomni’s form itself tenses, as if it’s the one rejecting the message, as if her own body rejects the idea that this flesh and blood and bone and sinew and organs and everything in between are, or could conceivably be, her.
“Sweetie. Sweetie, look at me.”
Ragatha takes Pomni’s hands in her own and gives them a squeeze.
“Look at me.”
Weakly, Pomni looks up.
“You have a soul. You exist. Your thoughts, your heart—they’re yours, ” Ragatha tells her. “You’re real. I promise you. Don’t let those bad thoughts get to you—you’ll be okay. You’ll be okay. Alright? You’ll be okay.”
Pomni blinks at her slowly. “But— but if I’m real, then— but then…” she trails off, because how can you respond to your entire worldview being shaken up so suddenly and profoundly?
“…I don’t think I’m okay.” Pomni stares at the floor. Then, a small, nervous laugh. “I’m definitely not okay.”
“Oh, I know.”
For just a moment, Pomni breaks free from her existential crisis to give Ragatha an indignant look. Ragatha chuckles softly and gently cups Pomni’s cheek with a tender hand.
“But you will be. You will be okay, Pomni.”
Tears begin to fall down Pomni’s face again. Because she wants to believe it. She wants to believe that she’s a real person, with a soul, with thoughts that are her own.
Because thinking about the alternative is just so awful.
Because thinking about not being a person is so lonely and scary and empty, and it makes her feel awful, and she doesn’t want to feel awful, she hates being in agony. So she tries. She really, really, tries to believe Ragatha.
Pomni sniffles. “Why are you so calm about all this? Why aren’t you freaking out about the terrifying realization our bodies are just host vehicles for the actual people inside us?”
She pauses, blinking up at Ragatha. “Am I the only one that’s bothered by this?”
Ragatha looks almost amused. “No, honey, you’re not,” she says. “Less so the ‘host vehicle’ thing, moreso the existential thing. Lots of people go through it. I’ve gone through it. It’s normal. It’s part of being human.” She then looks down at her doll-like body. “Or, ah…pseudo-human. But anyway, I get it. I do. I just try not to think about the elaborate logistics of our existences—or whatever you want to call it. I just…live.”
“I… I… My head hurts…”
Ragatha chuckles. “These conversations tend to do that to people. Exactly why I don’t think about it if I don’t have to.”
Pomni clutches her head. “Ugh…but that’s such a weird thought process to have!” She sighs. “I’m gonna be honest—I kind of wish I didn’t have thoughts or feelings or anything right now. They’re a pain. I wish I was just a rock or something. It’s much easier than being…whatever I am.”
Ragatha chuckles. “I feel you, sweetie. Life would be easier if I were a cat.”
Pomni manages a small, weak smile. “Well…that makes two of us then.” She then pauses. “…Wait, do you think cats are also flesh mechas? Is every single living being that’s more intelligent than a jellyfish—no, a tardigrade—just a sentient lump of meat holding a brain?”
Ragatha sets a hand on her shoulder. “You’re spiraling again, sweetie.”
Pomni catches herself and sighs. She feels so drained, though she thinks that’s partly because of her panic attack. She leans against Ragatha and closes her eyes. “I don’t like feeling like this…”
Ragatha gives her a warm hug, and it feels so real. “I know, Pomni. But it’s going to be okay, I promise.”
The existential dread is still there, bubbling just beneath the surface. But Pomni tries, she tries so hard to believe Ragatha. She wants to.
Because she doesn’t want to be just skin.