This machine shouldn’t work but it does, and flawlessly. Exactly how it works and what it’s supposed to do I haven’t been able to determine yet. All of its components sync up in perfect accord, and an unknown substance courses continually through all of these veins, intestines, tubes and esophageal passages that make up the circulatory arrangement of this contraption.

Someone must have been collecting parts for this thing for years, the biological segments are in varying states of decay. Though their connections to the inorganic parts are rusted and dripping pus I can’t pull them apart no matter how hard I try. The machine has eyes, hundreds of them, from different types of animals and people still peering out through disembodied portions of their suffering faces.
I recognize parts of a horse’s head grafted to the face of an angelfish near the machine’s constantly chomping mechanical mouth. Further along its systems are four human elbows violently chugging and gyrating in unison outside what closely resembles an old cast iron potbellied stove. A choking baby’s mouth sprouts blades of fresh green grass next to a fin that flaps so fast it vibrates. Beads of spray escape the grate next to this, but never know the world outside the machine because tiny maws at the end of flexible stalks dart out and gulp up every drop before they hit the floor that the thing is bolted to. Identifiable portions of extinct species dating back great spans of time are still living and moving to keep this thing doing whatever it does, this thing it must have always done. It’s been here a billion years if it’s been here a day, and I hate it.
The malleable and fleshy factors are connected internally by a transparent web of sinews, organic tubes and glass-like jointed limbs to iron and copper moving parts protected by stone facades that also hide wooden gears that rotate at blinding speed.
The hum of the whole drowns out the gnashing of its friction and the screams of its own collective agony.
Or maybe these things actually combine to produce the hum.
There is so much noise; it’s so hard to tell.

The exhaust from its labors vomits forth from every human face that has ever drawn breath, polluting our lives with its excesses. Its sole source of sustenance is derived from our own psychological side effects, the mental and emotional waste we produce as a result of the terror that the machine has gifted us with at our deepest layers. Even with such an abysmal link to it there’s no way to know its purpose, or by association our own.

It’s possible that its sole ambition is to simply exist as it does, and that’s what terrifies me. That it might have no real purpose beyond its function implies that all is as it should be and nothing need ever change.

Spicing the skin of our world are the tiny infections that we lovingly culture with our desires and fears, each pustule a safe home for a million hungry nightmares that willfully enter and nurture the machine. The understanding between it and us is one of uncomfortable symbiosis that defines all we can ever know.